Trial By Tenderness
by Cevn
Summary: TBT: A self-insert FanNovel immersing the reader in an outpouring of compassion, desperation and spirit amidst the rubble of bliss and the storms of uncertainty. Intense, emotional, spellbinding, romantic, taking Goddesses/Demonesses deep into their Souls
1. Pt 1: The Meeting

**Oh My Goddess: Trial by Tenderness**

_(The following legal disclaimer and content advisory applies to the entirety of the work.)_

Legalities: Oh My Goddess/Ah Megami-sama characters and plot bases copyright by Kosuke Fujishima/Kodansha Ltd. Tokyo. Sections of this story are based on Japanese original and English translations of OMG/AMS, as licensed by the author and his artistic agents for international marketing. All translations of Chinese and Japanese poetry and prose are by the author and may not be reproduced without express permission.

Idealisms: The original artwork, characters and other related intellectual properties are ideally operated by their creators, with whom it resides, contrary to common practice in the publishing industry. There is no acceptable reason for artists to assign the copyright interests in their work to an indifferent corporate entity or management by virtue of a 'common practice' which was always questionable, often improper, and is now indefensible and inappropriate.

Disclaimers: There exists no copyright on this work as I do this for a hobby. It may be freely reproduced. Any resemblance to any persons, living or deceased, occurs per accidens. The orientation of this fanfiction does not reflect the OMG/AMS 'canon'.

Caveats: Okay...if you dare yourself to read this fanfic, you will be in for a wild ride. It's lengthy, it's imaginative and drama, it's intense, it's challenging, it's all over the board, and it is written by a published writer. The reading level and content is designated at the intended literary level of a novel. This OMG adaptation deals throughout with real-life issues: drug addiction and recovery; sexual and physical abuse; mental illness challenges; and spiritual and societal alienation. Thus, the characters you know and love from OMG will be redirected into roles and situations far removed from continuity. However, a strong fidelity to continuity is interwoven in the work. The philosophy of this story approximates Dostoyevsky: one most see the dark before treasuring the light. There are occasional forays into the 'lemon' zone, but not for the sake of gratuitous sensuality but more for illustrative fan service and realism. There is an economy of mild swearing throughout.

This is a self-insertion fanfic with the avatar character developed with a significant intellectual and emotional bent. If this offends you, skip past this fic. If you read it and it still troubles you, then I would suggest that you 'fictionalize' the narrator...a technique known as author deconstruction (i.e.; "death of the author" movement in the 1970s). I needed to outpour this work...so thanks for your indulgence. TBT carefully balances self-serving disclosure with genuine narrative, including significant subplots where the avatar character doesn't even appear within the milieu of the OMG Universe that we all know and love. Drama predominates this work, so be warned. Readers have consistently emailed me to describe how some passages moved them to tears. This fic is majorly themed around the concept that we are constantly surrounded by the Divine.

Thanks for reading this far...may this bring you pleasure and escape.

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**Part 1: The Meeting**

I could feel the pain again, the inside pain. It washed through me like an orange clawing hand ripping inside of my chest, shredding viscera and emotion with sheer bleak stance. I felt numb...so numbed by the gravity of life I had experienced in 29 years of being. What memories remained, I was despaired of. I wished they would fade away, like snow etchings melting into anonymous droplets of water on a window when spring blossoms majestically for the first time...

The despair still remained...as pawn ghosts...haunting...always following me.

I could cry for help, had I the tears.

I staggered back in my bed and reached over for my set of daily meditation books. College had become an unending daunting task. No longer was I bright with ambition and thirst for learning. Diogenes's quote about "education being the ornament of life" held no charm for me. Languor filled my waking consciousness.

3:35 am.

After looking blankly at the books, I read selections from all eleven of them, then relaxed into a cross-legged meditation posture on my waterbed and quieted my mind as I had done a thousand times before. Chimerae floated within my eyelids...and the horrible black expanse that dwelled where my feelings _should had been_ rose up again like some horrible oil slick.

Suffocating the very life essence out of me.

Hopeless. This is what it is like...to be burnt out on life, like the final glow of a dying ember? To have jettisoned all sense of hope and ambition? I felt once more like a hollow shell. Alone...an unending emptiness that could never be poured out of my soul. Time and time again. Still hopeless.

I had been reading that manga...that one that somehow gave me hope. About a young guy who calls for fastfood delivery--and reaches a Goddess. About an awkward journey into intimacy as she and he slowly fall in love. A Goddess. She lives with her sisters in an abandoned temple in Japan. Everybody was quirky, but nice...

"This is no meditation," I thought to myself. I could not calm my inner voice. I had experienced too many platens of raw pain recently...I didn't even know if I could recognize joy if it slapped me across the face. The antidepressant medication could not let me escape the melancholia that I had found myself drifting in.

Heart Dead.

Impulsively, I started to sing music to myself. For unlike many people, I didn't just speak to myself, but my inner silent thoughts sometimes assumed the form of music: sounds for words, for I had no voice to raiment my secret feelings, making them into visibility.

The bleakness deepened...and an enigmatic fancy struck me. If a comic book character could summon a divine being, why not me? Perhaps my feelings could be a magnet for much-needed relief? I half-heartedly offered a solemn prayer.

_"All the same, if it is to you, I know that you are divine and have fullness where I have emptiness. _

_I have sought love and truth for so long. I seek serenity and gentleness. Please. Please!" _

My semi-sincere efforts shifted into desperation.

_"If there is a goddess out there--if what I read in the comic could be truthful in this matrix of life--_

_let her come to me and pierce this veil of despondency...please make it real...please make it real!"_

I could feel pangs of disconsolence fill my soul, just as I began to laugh at my stupidity. Imagine, a Goddess who would actually come to my aid. My bitter experience banged forth the awareness that almost nobody aids the depressed. There's no hope for the hopeless...

A tear arose, tracing my eyelid, as I could feel my senses willow back and forth like a grass blade in a caressing wind. Pessimism flooded my heart.

"It's only wishful thinking on my part. No one cares about me. There is no..."I heard my voice rubric its doubts.

Suddenly, my reverie broke as I heard the TV burst into sound in the living room.

A foreboding panic gripped me dusttight. On its own, the TV set was now sounding pinknoise soundrubble in my apartment. I felt an increasing sheer chill rumble up and down my spine. Could it be a burglar? Fighting back my better judgment, I walked out of my bedroom and into the living room. The TV screen was shimmering with gray static, speckling in random roils up and down the screen. Looking closer, I could make out some blobs and shapes which seemed to move in the background, obscured by the peppering images. Blinking my eyes, I thought I saw a foot, slowly moving towards the screen.

Out of the screen.

A slender foot and ankle emerged out of my TV screen like a finger stretching and poking its way out of a translucent plastic bag. Another foot, then a slender calf, and then a long shapely thigh followed it...

Backing warily away from the TV, I thought I was having another acid flashback. Not that I had dosed on LSD in the past 11 years...but I felt the heaviness that accompanied a psychedelic state of hallucination. I mentally pinched myself to see if this was real. Oblivious to my pinch of reality, a hand reached up from inside the viewscreen and grasped the edge of the TV. Then with a heave, the slender hips and narrow waist of a woman emerged.

"This is _too_ much like a certain anime I've seen," I observed to myself.

Fascinated, I continued to gaze in wonderment as her feet touched delicately on the ground, her dress draping over the edge of the TV screen. Pulling herself out, I saw her shoulders, covered loosely by waving platinum-blonde hair...long hair...and then I saw her light green eyes and became momentarily lost. She finished extracting herself from the TV, shuffled her dress and cape, and then looked once around the room. She turned slightly to face me.

She was on one knee, her dress flowing to the floor. She wore a shimmering green cape wrapped around her shoulders. Her dress was a sleeveless sparkle, with a long slit up one side baring her leg up to the hip. Its silky rose color was embroidered with fanciful floral designs in many shades of light blue and green. Intermingled with the flowers was some kind of writing. She straightened her cape and dress, then slowly stood up. I gasped in surprise as I noticed that she was the spitting image of Urd in the manga. For some strange reason, I snapped my fingers to see if I was alive...to hear a familiar sound in the midst of this intensity. She heard the sound and narrowed her eyes when she noticed that I was looking her over. I sensed a tingling on my skin, as if the very air was charged with electricity.

"Bizarre..." I commented obliquely at the sight.

I could feel my heart pounding in my chest like it used to when I would inject too much cocaine. Bursting with shock, I stood up shakily to my full 6' and shook the hair out of my face. This tall woman was appraising me with her eyes. She must have been 5'8 or 9", with hair down past her hips; her ravenesque beauty suggesting the stereotypical generic-type strippers my friends raved about when they went to strip clubs. Yet, there was something old and cold in her eyes. Not a dry beauty...but a beauty that could balance disarray and symmetry without the slightest effort. An 'everywhere' beauty. Her eyes were bright green, with no hint of blue or brown in the irises. Eyes that were unnatural, discordant in relation to the small trace of a smile she wore.

Suddenly, I realized my fervent wish of a few moments earlier.

"This is totally insane," I thought as I sized up the mysterious woman in my living room.

"Wh...who are you? Are y..you a goddess?" I inquired tentatively. I couldn't believe I was stuttering like a babbling idiot.

I felt so inert and clumsy.

"Hi," she interjected pertly. Her lilting voice was sweet with honey and cinnamon. She started speaking in Japanese, then stopped herself.

"Ooops," she exclaimed while rolling her eyes and covering her mouth in a carefree motion.

I replied tentatively in Japanese and asked her about her name, or if she had a meishi--an introduction card. Now she was examining me closely, as I saw her eyes sweep up and down my frame. Her smile faded. I felt like I was being scanned...as if my whole life was being pulled out of me. The sensation was overwhelming, and my knees began to fall out from under me. I gasped a moment later, realizing that I had unconsciously held my breath while she was scrutinizing me.

"Why are you so _weak_?" she asked bluntly.

Her question sent my blood to the Antarctic and back. Something recessed within my being suddenly came unsprung. Weak? Me? She had no idea what the word meant. I straightened up alertly; memories of all the darkness of my life's past flashing before me. I felt a raw flame of anger, and forgot everything: where I was, whom I was talking to, the absurd surrealism of the situation. Even deeper, I felt a shock of sorrow and hurt. A breadth of intangibility...yet so enmeshed with my being that it was inseparable. She was arrogant...ignoring my pain, or the fact that my weakness is my strength. Which was her loss, not mine.

"What would you know about weakness...or strength for that matter? You have them mixed up. Admitting weakness is a sign of resolve. Obviously you've missed out on this simple lesson." I replied vehemently. Her emerald eyes widened at this as her voice took on the peculiar harshness that Japanese and Chinese women assume when they undertake to chew someone out.

"I scanned you, and I saw that you were weak..so weak that you had allowed people take advantage of you. You failed to take care of yourself, out of weakness. You are so shortsighted that you have fell away from keeping your promise to yourself and others, again out of weakness. Through and through, you certainly deserve what you get: a lame, weak life of a loser."

"What? What are you talking about?" Then I remembered the childhood promise I had made, and flushed with guilt. But that was the impossible dream of naive childhood. How did she know that!

She continued inveighing me with her tirade.

"When you grew up, you lost your idealism, sacrificed the desire you had as a child to give and receive peace from everyone in your life! For a mortal, you are majorly disappointing!! You think that locking yourself up in some little apartment with some little righteous 'perfect moral life' to live up to...you think _that_ is living?

"Who are _you_ to come here and test me? Do you think you can achieve anything by probing beyond the outer layers of my persona? How do you know what 'being' is? If you're what I think you are, then _I'm_ the one who should be disappointed...because you can't even come close to putting my convictions on trial. But yet you try. You try because you have a senseless obligation to yourself to attempt to control everything around you, _URD_! I asked for help from a Goddess, and instead I get the Queen of Shrews..._YOU_!" I belligerently accosted.

This first meeting was quickly escalating into a war of wills.

"How _DARE YOU_!!" she replied, rigid with anger, her arms pipe-straight at her sides as she clenched her fists. Ignoring her, I continued.

"What do you want from me? All I did was ask for a real goddess to come and maybe--just maybe--grant me one damn wish! Instead, I get you, and you start probing my character. Who the hell do you think you are? You're certainly no _real_ goddess, just a real selfish simulacrum of a deity."

With that, my spite was exhausted. I suddenly felt like crying...like this was some cruel prank that the universe has designed, intending to torture me further. I crisply turned my back to her and walked into my bedroom. I straddled the office chair at my desk, facing the doorway.

"It's on you now," I thought. I could hear a gradual fortissimo of static--not the TV static, but something that resembled the sound of electrical static building loudly in my living room.

Urd, or whoever she was...floated...into my bedroom, fists on her hip and elbows pointing out like pincers. She was surrounded by lighting discharges, resembling a Van Der Graff electric generator. Small bolts of lighting lashed around her like a herd of angry snakes. Her lithesome body was enveloped in an aqua colored glow, which oddly struck me as resembling a Kirlian photo effect. Her expression was indignant and resentful.

"How dare you question whether or not I am a Goddess, and how dare you _walk out on me_!" she shouted in perfectly enunciated pissed-off English.

"_DO YOU KNOW WHO AND WHAT I AM, MISTER_?! I have a moment's concern for you and then you insult me. If that is not enough, then...you, the mortal, just walk out of the presence of me, the immortal! For a mortal, you are a poor excuse of humanity!" She looked upwards with frustration.

"I'm not even from the Goddess Relief Office. Errr! This is so majorly screwed up!" she growled. "For some reason this evening, my sister sensed that someone was going to make a wish. Your need for a wish, obviously. That shouldn't have happened; she isn't supposed to respond to anyone else's wishes while she's fulfilling Keiichi's wish."

My mind raced as I realized that the middle of the night in Hawaii was a few hours into evening in Japan. Assuming that "Urd" came from Japan... She continued her plaint.

"Then, by some crucial screwup of the Yggdrasil Mainframe..._I'm_ assigned to come here!

"Why are you lecturing me about your problems, Urd?" I said in deadpan voice. This only elicited a stronger display of histrionics from the ireful Goddess.

"Back home, my own sister was momentarily paralyzed with sadness when she sensed you crying out for help. I couldn't even snap her out of shock. She's not even supposed to service any more wishes, because of the last wish she had to fulfill. Ooooo...now you got me so mad I'm repeating myself." She stopped, tousled her hair and caught her breath.

"Anyway, then the _Almighty Himself_ calls our house and tells me that I_ had_ to come here!" With a dramatic pause, she spoke sotto voce in an attempt at imitation.

"'So that you'll learn something about character, Urd,' He says. So I arrive here and immediately I could sense how you're gripped by melancholy. Using my gifts of compassion...I try to get you to cheer up by talking with me about it! Instead, you..."

"So here you are" I interrupted dryly.

"So here I am. But now I gotta wonder why I'm trifling with an ingrate like you! Instead of receiving character training, I get character assassinated by you, the weak mortal. Humph! And how in the Nine Realms did you know my name?"

I couldn't believe my ears! Urd! In my house! It was almost funny...until I noticed the scowl etched on her face. I gathered myself, trying not to look too facefallen at her admission. Urd looked like the social worker I had met with last month; she had obviously sat through too many lies and excuses...and yet still had to deal with me regarding whether or not I could eat the next month.

"I have little empathy for your so-called problems, Urd," I thought to myself. Somehow caution replaced my contentiousness and I toned down an acrid reply. I remembered all the days of my life 'stolen' from me by deep depression; the result of a disabling mental illness I live with. This I didn't want. I didn't want to feel mired in a bummer trip.

"Yeah, well, like life sucks too...sorry it didn't go as planned for you," she countered. I shifted to a more reasoned stance.

"If you are who you say you are, prove it, otherwise get out! You say you're a Goddess, so read my mind and tell me what I know about you. Show me what you're made of, if indeed you're Urd, the elder of the three Norns!"

Urd's face lit up with surprise and anger, then slowly shifted to a facial expression I guessed was mirth. She shrugged sarcastically.

"Okay, have it your way...mortal!" she said, enunciating 'mortal' with blatant condescension. She held out her hand and a meishi appeared out of nowhere, then floated up towards my face on a delicate web of static lightning.

"You _can_ read, can't you?" she taunted.

I read it out loud: "Urd, Goddess First Class, Unlimited, Unrestricted License. Sysop for Yggdrasil System, current residence: Makuhari-Ku, Chiba Prefecture, Japan." I then reread it in Latin, Greek and Chinese, slipping in "Second Class" for "First Class" and correcting that little thing about "unlimited' and "unrestricted class".

"Huh?" she asked.

"You're pretty smart, you figure it out! It should say 'Urd, Goddess of Exaggeration,' somewhere in there, don't you think?" I answered. I reread it in Japanese with the amended the parts about class and license. Urd cocked her head in what appeared to be conceited shock, then her face flushed red.

"I am a _First_ Class Goddess!!" Urd screamed. "You hear me...a_ FIRST CLASS GODDESS_!!" My hands sprang to my ears as bone-piercing decibels concussed my brains into mush.

"I'm leaving right now!" Urd did a quick about face and started out of the room. I heard her mutter something about "that stupid mortal thinks he's cool"' as she stormed out of the room.

Suddenly, she spun around and yelled at me. "Be glad I'm leaving, because I really, really wanna do something to you that Mara would appreciate! I would fry your ass in a moment with a lightning strike, except for the fact that I might get busted by the Almighty and lose my Second Class license!"

I chuckled as her hands sprung to cover her mouth, too late to recover her mistake.

"Hmmm, I bet you wonder how I knew about your _real_ Goddess rating, Urd? I'd even feel safe to say you don't have a clue!"

"_THAT'S IT_! I'm done wasting my time with you!" Urd walked into my living room. Then I heard a crash. I chased the sound, only to see my TV knocked off the stand onto the floor, with a cracked picture tube. Urd was pounding it with her head, trying to get inside of it.

"Hey, don't hurt yourself _too_ much, oh mighty Goddess..." I started to shout sarcastically, then halted myself. Shocked by my ongoing disrespectful and bitter attitude, I checked out of the here and now of this situation...and asked myself some hard questions.

"What the hell is wrong with me? Why was I so combative? What's behind my feeling that this whole scenario is just some cosmic joke? Why am I lacking any feelings of empathy and concern for _her_ circumstances...she seems clearly out of her expertise here! Why can't I respond with compassion? Isn't that what I would normally do? Didn't I get clean all those years ago to be of service to others...to accept others...to love others? I'm not being very kind to her!" I observed to myself. I felt out of whack. How did I get so callous and defensive all of a sudden?

"What is going on with me?" I muttered. Urd whipped around to look at me, emotions racing across her face.

"I can't leave! It won't let me! This is_ your _fault!" she pointed at me. Something about her forceful attitude perked me into another shift of uncaring.

I mock bowed to her.

"Moi? You mean _this mere mortal_ is preventing you from splitting?" I shrieked with laughter momentarily, then I paused for a minute and reflected how this whole situation had set my nerves on overload. I would never taunt anybody in my sane mind, because I don't believe in causing harm to others. _Why do I keep being so mean to Urd?_ I waved my hands to get her attention--about the same time a couch flew up and blasted me in the chest, pinning me against the wall. The breath was knocked out of me, and I saw one very pissed-off Goddess, red framing her green eyes. I pushed with all of my strength and dislodged the couch, then fell to the floor. Urd looked at me with a surprised expression that seemed to say "Hey, how did you do that?"

A moment later, she put a hand to her head and scratched in a quizzical gesture. We stared at each other for what seemed like a season. Time to change tactics. Perhaps a gentlemanly apology would calm her down.

"Hey, uh Urd, I'm really sorry. I don't know what's come over me. I can't believe this is real. I know that you're probably wondering how I seem to know some things about you. Really, I wouldn't hurt you. If you wanna go, you can...I don't really want to make a wish. It wouldn't come true anyway..." I instantly felt a reluctance come over me...if I was indeed granted a wish, I could...

Once more, I remembered the depression, the incest, the years of active drug use, starving on the street for weeks at a time. Chariots of forlornness trod over my heart. Urd looked at me with an unreadable visage, then she started getting teary-eyed. While she wiped her tears on the corner of her cape, I muttered out my darkness.

"What difference would it make anyway? My life isn't worth it. Find someone else to help. Please. You can go. Just go!" Urd looked sadly at me for a moment, then her expression changed to disbelief, as if she felt like I was insane for denying a wish.

"If she only knew," I thought with lingering melancholy. Then her face softened up for the first time since she arrived, and she looked at me with eyes still watery with tears. She smiled engagingly.

"You really should make a wish, y' know. That's why I'm here, Cevn! It would be a wasted trip if I came to you and you didn't take advantage of this opportunity," Something old and wise misted over her eyes. "Besides, only special, deserving people get to make a wish. I wouldn't be here if the Ultimate Force had other plans for you. It's okay," she counseled assuringly.

"But if you don't make a wish...I'll lose face in front of the Almighty...and then _I'LL KILL YOU_!" she shouted with a half-threatening, half-warning smile.

"Well, that's really reassuring. Wish or die!" I coolly replied.

"Hey, I was just kidding!" Urd teased. "Remember, _you're_ the mortal here!" In my mind, I wished it was the other way around.

"Oops, I better not say _that_!" I said softly. I mentally winced; what would Urd do if I wished _her_ to become a mortal?

"Urd, you are really lucky I didn't say out loud the wish I just had in my head!" She looked at me suspiciously, then with impatience. My ribcage felt crackly as I slowly slid down the wall into a seated position, literally under the gun. I gasped as the physicality of my injury asserted itself. Urd looked at me in rapt apologence. Suddenly, the gravity of the situation impressed itself in my tired mind.

"I must have one wish I wanted to be granted to me," I meditated.

"Hurry up!" she prompted.

"Hey, it's _my_ wish...I don't want to use it impulsively! So don't rush me!"

"Okay...here, lemme suggest some wishes," Urd offered. I looked up and saw visions projected into the air: financial success, sports fame, babes, Nobel Prize, Hollywood sex symbol, etc. But they all were appetitive wishes..hollow wispy things of no real value. Upon reflection, I realized that I wanted something that centered on me but was actually of benefit to the whole cosmic circus of reality. Just like I had promised myself in childhood.

I looked at Urd's green eyes, seeing beauty, coquettishness, wisdom, calm...

"_That's it!!_" I said out loud. In a detached voice that didn't seem to be mine, I heard the words:

_**"My wish is to be serene...to be the balance. I want to be the axis of serenity **_

_**and balance which provides relief for all existence!"**_

"_WHAT_!? What kind of wish is that?" she said with a shrug. "That's total nonsense! You're not going to wish for money, power, class, a beautiful goddess like me? Even Keiichi had more sense than you did, at least he wished for Bell..."

Suddenly she fainted for a split-second. Rather, she seemed to float off into a trance. Her green eyes sparkled to a bright green-white, and the small plectrum-shaped triangle above the arch of her nose glowed luminously. She floated upwards; suspended about two feet off the ground with her legs and arms hanging limply in the air.

"Just like in the anime video," I thought.

Then all the stuff in my apartment started floating upwards, slowly circling her. Gimcrackery in a vortex. It was more like the movie Poltergeist than the anime video. Strangely, I expected music; something like a celestial choir out of a Vangelis album. Instead an industrial-strength humming arose; subharmonic tones bouncing off an octave's worth of discordances.

I felt all the energy pent up by my fear, frustration and desire sap out of me like the last sucking sound of water circling down the drain. The instinctive fear of death gripped me...my last heroin overdose ranged clear in my memory. My vision went gray, then hazy, then black as all the cacophony faded from my hearing...I felt like the floor was reaching out to smother me...

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I felt a slapping on my face. Suddenly a splash of icy water shocked me into wakefulness. My whole body felt...different. I sensed a dull pain suffusing my being. Urd was kneeling next to me with a pan in her hand dripping water. It was getting light in my apartment, another dawn in Hawaii.

"Get up! We have to go" she urged.

"Uh huh, go where?" I said weakly between spins of my head.

"Go back!"

"What do you mean, Urd?" She read my thoughts.

"Yes, I have to go back, and you do too. The Almighty just called here and said that your wish was granted. Then He said that you would have to go back with me for 'reasons that will become obvious later.'" Urd pulled urgently on my arm, and hauled me up into a sitting position as I wondered how something could call on my disconnected phone. It was difficult making ends meet on the pittance that constitutes disability insurance income.

I tried to stand up, my legs felt like they weren't there, just rubbery balancy, so I leaned on her.

"Now's not the time to get fresh, honey!" she winked at me. A violent surge of panic gripped me as I sprang away from her and started to warily back myself into a corner.

"Don't do that! Are you a vampire, that you have to leave by sunrise?" I said mindlessly, defensively. Urd looked at me with a intently curious expression. My body felt ethereal, like it was at once weightless and yet solid. I was surprised by the lack of response from my body, as well as Urd's change in demeanor from dead serious to casual carefree curious.

"How are we supposed to get there", I asked. "Will you flip the bill for a one-way airfare tix from Hawaii to Japan?"

"No, you baka...er idiot!" she corrected herself. "We'll go back the way I came, through the TV!"

"I thought your sister was supposed to be the dense one. Haven't you realized that I have been conversing with you in Nihongo the whole time? You don't need to translate for me! And by the way...not to bring up small details, _but you broke the TV_!!" Then I almost lost consciousness again and Urd shook me. My eyes itched red.

"What is wrong with you, honey?" Urd looked at me with concern.

"_Don't _call me 'honey'!" I mumbled back to her, again unsteady on my feet.

"We'd better get you going. By the way, don't worry about the TV. Where you're going to, we have several you can watch."

My body and mind felt separated, like they did when I used to shoot various narcotics. But that was many years ago. For eleven years, I had been totally drug free...nothing, no cigarettes, caffeine, alcohol. What was with this body rush I was feeling?

Urd dragged me by the arm towards TV and with a push, sent me into it. I fully expected a crash once my head would hit the shattered tube. Instead I felt a jelly-like sensation as I suddenly _fell_ in, almost thoughtlessly. It was like diving into a pool. What I saw was indescribable. There was an incredible onslaught of synesthetic effects as all sorts of media rushed by me, rushed into me, rushed through me. I felt like David Bowman in 2001 when he entered the monolith...but what I was experiencing was far more intense than anything Kubrick had cooked up. I looked down to see my body and saw nothing. I became overwrought with fright. I heard Urd's voice _inside_ of my mind, exhorting me to relax. I felt motionless, yet something assured me that I was moving.

"_How do I know where to get off?_" I shouted desperately with my thoughts.

"_I think you already know how to do that, boy!_" Urd flippantly replied. "_Just follow me, I will go first and then pull you through, since you don't know which gate to take._"

After a timeless moment, I felt a pull and glimpsed an inverted TV screen showing a futon-matted room. "This must be it!" I thought and then I heard and felt a pop!

Urd had fallen out backwards on to the floor, falling on her back with arms and legs akimbo. I fell face forward right on top of her. It was just a second, but the briefest moment is enough to discharge a lifetime's worth of panic.

"What are you doing? Get off of me!" I heard her exclaim with frustration.

In a split second my consciousness returned. I was lying on top of Urd, inches from her face, resting on her chest with my hips between her legs. In a flash, I realized that she and I were in a blatantly sexual position.

"_No!!_" I screamed, inside and outwards into the air. I rolled off of her, feeling the world collapse on me. I remembered the years of sexual abuse. I remembered all crushing pangs of loneliness. I sensed a huge burden of embarrassment rushing at me. Disgust, fear, lust, anger, hurt..._PANIC_! My body became so rigid with anxiety that the breath hushed out of me...

_...Looking for the doorway frantically, can't find it, I am so horrible, there it is, gotta get on my feet, starting to run, crashing into the walls, bumped into someone, gotta get out of here, finding another door, sliding it open, running out into the cool air, hyperventilating, running by someone else, tree...rock...rock! gotta sit down...gasping for breath, white panic all over me...I'm so disgusting...it's so disgusting and horrid..._

Stopit..._disgusting_...stopit..._stopitstopitstopit_ _STOP IT!_

I collapsed on the rock. Crossing my legs, I attempted to regain my breath, but my lungs had ideas of their own. I fought back the sheer panic as I felt the first sobs rock my body. Huddling in a compact little ball, I knew I would be dry-heave crying in a few minutes.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Inside the house, Urd sat up and straightened her hair and dress. Running her hands through her hair, she thought about what just happened.

"Wow! What is up with him? All he did was fall on me, and he acted scared out of his wits! He jumped off of me like a frightened cat and took off. And I'm _the_ beautiful Goddess...like, there's no reason for him to be scared, like I wouldn't hurt him, like... No! He's not some guy that's into men, I would have known that right away!" She sat tailor-style, wondering why he reacted so strongly. Of course, she had chided him, after all, he was laying right on top of her.

"But it wasn't like I bit his head off or something..."

"Urd?" Urd looked up to see her sister, Belldandy, leaning over her, a look of concern clearly expressed on her gentle face. "Urd, are you all right?" Belldandy was dressed in a spring kimono. Urd knew that the call from the Almighty had caught her by surprise too, as she was dressed so formally.

"Huh? Oh...Belldandy! You wouldn't believe what just happened. And I thought Keiichi was a shy guy! Where is he?" she asked frantically.

"Who?" Belldandy asked, frowning slightly at Urd's mention of Keiichi's renowned hesitancy.

"The guy that came with me. The guy the Almighty told me to see. I don't even know his name! Wait...his name is Cevn, that's right. Where is he?"

The door slid open all the way with a crash.

"Who was that man who went running out of here! Urd, did you bring him here? There's enough trouble already with Keiichi here, let alone some other guy! I suppose he's your new boyfriend or something..."

"As if you would know what a boyfriend is, Skuld!"

Belldandy saw the excited look on Skuld's face, a mixture of fear and anger. The last thing she wanted was another outburst of sibling rivalry between these two. Not now. Not with the...new guest? It was obvious that this had something to do with the Almighty's call to Urd. She wanted to find out more about it. Her older sister looked like she was ready to bolt.

"Urd, tell us what happened?"

"Yeah, Big Sister, explain yourself!" Skuld said with asperity.

A rumbling sound in the distance grew louder, indicating that Keiichi was returning from school on his motorbike. Belldandy felt a flush of relief now that her Keiichi-san was home. He would know what to do!

Urd started in on her story.

"I went to where the source was, and saw this wild-looking gaijin with long dark blonde and black hair. He looked kinda like Ootaki-san. He was utterly depressed and sad, so I tried to cheer him up. But he got _mad_ at me, canya believe it! Then he didn't believe I was a Goddess and the next minute he wishes that he was the...lemme remember...oh yeah, like he wished he was the center of serenity and balance or something like that." Belldandy felt a sudden sense of--something--at Urd's statement about his wish.

"There's something very profound about that wish," she thought. Skuld looked at Urd with a grimace.

"So you _had_ to bring him here," the youngest Goddess exclaimed with a hint of spite.

"I had no choice! The Lord called right after he made his wish and told me I had to bring him here, pronto! So I transported him here through the MatterStream, using my usual medium of a TV set. At least I didn't have to take him through a TimeStream or something. As it is, he's going to be pretty sick! It would've really sucked if his stupid wish had involved time travel..."she said, dialoguing with herself, oblivious to the presence of her sisters.

Belldandy and Skuld both gave a start when Urd mentioned His name.

"The Almighty called _again_! Urd, what exactly did He say?" the two sisters excitedly asked. Urd told them about the instructions to bring their new guest to their temple home, for "reasons that will become apparent", then she told them that the guy had blacked out after receiving his wish.

"What!" Belldandy interjected. "There has never, never, been an incident like that in all the years of the Relief Office! How very strange and unusual!!"

"That's what you get when you send a Sysop to do the job of a First Class Goddess!" Skuld interjected sardonically.

Belldandy and Urd both shouted, "Skuld, shut up!" Belldandy looked at her two sisters and spoke in a grave tone.

"This is expressly serious if the Almighty is directly involved. Skuld, you need to stop teasing Urd for the moment. Urd has been blessed with a direct task from the Almighty, not to mention that there are some very unique circumstances with this new person. We must try and find out who he is. Fate has brought him here to us. We can't afford to be fighting right now!" Urd rolled her eyes as her younger sister put on the 'sensible Goddess' routine one more time. Skuld snickered out loud.

"Yes, before Banpei or the Ninjettes find him first!" Skuld excitedly remarked. She gleefully envisioned her robot companion and servant beating a strange man with a metal bo rod. Then she remembered how the Almighty was directly involved in this affair. Several unpleasant scenarios crossed her mind.

"Whooaa, we better find him right away! They'll think he's an intruder!" Skuld noted fretfully. Urd visibly squirmed at this intimation. Her oldest sister's agitation brought a grin to Skuld's face.

"Brat!" Urd thought before another wave of desperation gripped her.

"Oh great!" Urd shouted self-piteously. "If they find him first, this whole thing will be screwed up. They'll kill him while trying to 'defend' the household! And then I'll be on the Almighty's shit list for blowing this special assignment!"

The three Goddesses ran out of the house, almost mowing over Keiichi.

"Hey, Belldandy-chan, no kiss for me?" He noticed the look of anxiety on her face as she darted by, and then he saw Urd and Skuld's anxious looks as well.

"What's going on? Is Mara here?" he guessed. Belldandy stopped, turned and motioned Keiichi to come along with them.

"Have you seen a guy on the temple grounds?" she asked. Keiichi looked serious for a moment, considering whether Bell-chan meant an intruder or a guest. Being adept at reading her facial emotions, he noted that she was apprehensive, not fearful.

"C'mon, I'll help you find him", Keiichi hurriedly assured her. Belldandy sighed a breath of relief and wrapped her arms around him and kissed him on the lips while both Urd and Skuld watched, astonished that _once more_ their sister seemed to drop everything for a kiss from her beloved. Once more, Keiichi had sensed her anxiety and offered to help. Urd and Skuld both looked at her affectionate display with open disgust and impatience.

"C'mon you two...the 'intruder'...remember?" Urd shouted.

After combing the south grounds, they started north when they saw a slender young man leaning against a shelf of rocks under a tree. He looked like he had fallen asleep hugging the rocks.

"Oh great...another weirdo we have to deal with!" Keiichi muttered to himself.

"There he is!" Urd shouted with relief.

"I wonder why Banpei didn't find him?" Skuld added.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

I glanced up and saw three women and a young Japanese guy walking up to me. I held my breath. My whole world had collapsed in a flash. I wanted to tell them to leave me alone...just like most of the world had done to me. One more case of abandonment. I knew I was in Japan. The whole ambience of the place was different. The hototogisu...the Japanese cuckoos...were calling in the distance, and a floral scent permeated the courtyard. I recalled my history, and noted that the buildings were both Buddhist and Shinto in design, probably from the Minamoto or Fujiwara Shogunate. I should have been breathtaken with the beauty of the place. But panic and hurt will always smother away any appreciation of beauty. I loosened my grip on the rock shelf.

The four talked amongst themselves for a moment, and then a 21-year-old looking Japanese guy walked towards me. He had a kind, innocent face, with spiky medium-length hair and soft brown eyes. He was short, about 5'4 or 5", with a slender frame. He was dressed like a typical student in a pair of jeans, T-shirt and a designer black and white racing jacket, probably leather. He slowly set down the motorcycle helmet he was carrying. He was a little tentative, but seemed to be forcing a disarming smile to his face as he slowly walked closer to me.

"Hi, I'm Morisato Keiichi."

"Hi, I'm Cevn. Nice to meet you. Sorry I don't have a meishi." I looked dejectedly back down at the ground. I wanted to assume an air of social inquisitiveness, but then I realized that I was talking to a comic book character, somehow transformed to real life. The improbability of all of this left me tongue-tied.

"Did you just get here? You seem pretty upset, sitting next to that rock. Why don't you come over and join us?" he invited. I climbed off the rock and bowed deeply to him. I heard tittering and giggling from the women and girl. Keiichi waved them down.

"We aren't that formal in Japan anymore, even in the boonies here in Chiba. Are you okay? You look really shook up. I guess spending time with Urd does that to a lot of guys," he said with a broad, friendly smile. If this was the Keiichi I knew from the manga, then he was acting the part to perfection. I felt myself warm up to this guy a little. He was a real charmer and it was no wonder that Belldandy had fallen for him.

"I'm sorry Keiichi, I've only visited Japan for school-related stuff and I've only studied six years of college Japanese." He smiled warily at this. Japanese smiles are so unreadable. Honne to tatamae. Was he acting out of real intention, or just out of principle?

"No, it's not anything to do with Urd, Keiichi, it's me. I'm really, really stressed out to the max. This is totally freaky. I was home in Hawaii just a little while ago, now I'm here, wherever here is. How are you?"

Keiichi talked briefly about his mood and motioned for the women to come forward. I noted that he felt somewhat protective of them, especially Belldandy. He put his hand in Belldandy's and introduced her to me, then pointed out Skuld, who eyed me warily.

I looked at Belldandy and noticed how benign her countenance seemed. All three sisters were beautiful in their own way. Belldandy looked far more enchanting in real life than in the manga; she was especially charming in her formal kimono. There was an intensity to her eyes that was otherworldly. I almost felt humored by the fact that Keiichi felt that I was a threat to him and Belldandy.

"No, one thing I have never done or will ever do is get between a couple. No man or woman deserves to feel the sting of that kind of loss and betrayal," I thought to myself. I tried to signal to him with my eyes.

"No, my new friend Keiichi, I will never cause you or Belldandy any worry," I promised to myself.

Skuld, on the other hand, looked like a caged wolf. She was dressed in a long ponchette cape, open in the front, with a short dress on underneath. Her legs were narrow, and her feet were enclosed in white boots, folded at the top, with blue circles on each foot. She looked like a 12-year-old girl on the cusp of adolescence. Her hair was very long, resembling that of the courtly ladies of feudal Japan. I imagined her to be a young version of Komachi; passionate, inventive, spiritual and sensitive to the urgings of her heart. 

But there was the faculties of my imagination, and then there was the reality of Skuld...who was viewing me with distrust. I looked again at Belldandy and saw a glint of sadness in her eyes. She seemed to be 'scanning' me just like Urd did earlier. She visibly shuddered when she was finished.

I turned my attention to Skuld and asked her where Banpei was. She looked shocked, then fearful. I immediately regretted my attempt at familiarity.

"She doesn't know that I have foreknowledge of her world, due to the manga," I reminded myself. Nobody is comfortable around clairvoyance. She stepped partway behind Urd and Belldandy, then peered out from between them charily. Just a slight motion, but clearly indicative of her suspicious feelings. She reminded me of a deer; all that power and grace held in potential by a seemingly timid demeanor. I knew that this first meeting would shape how she viewed me, so I tried to balance my introduction to her somewhere between addressing a girl and a young woman.

"Skuld, your fame at constructing mechas is known even in Hawaii, where I live. I just wondered if I could get a first hand look at your handiwork?" I said in a flattering soft voice. She seemed confused, then she decided to let her guard down for a moment. Suddenly, she looked back at me and caught my eye. After several seconds of eye contact, she seemed to take measure of me. Skuld started shaking for a moment, then averted her eyes and dipped her head away. I felt like I had done something to upset her.

"I'll get Banpei," she quietly said, and then turned and walked off. Bell and Urd exchanged a "what was that all about?" glance between them. Urd broke the silence with an invitation for all concerned to come inside after I got to 'meet' Banpei. Her remarks prompted me to wonder, "How do I 'meet' a robot?" I looked at the corner of the temple compound that Skuld had scurried around, waiting for her to return.

Skuld returned soon with Banpei in tow. The mecha looked like something out of a Hollywood sci-fi film. Only it really moved. My curiosity was aroused by this technological marvel that Skuld had created. But Banpei didn't recognize me at all.

"Here he is." she announced. "Say hi to Cevn-san, Banpei."

Nothing.

"That's odd. He's supposed to recognize all humans, godd..."

Keiichi hastily interrupted her, "heh heh...he's not perfect, Skuld, that's why we love him so much! Let's not worry about his job here so much, huh?"

I looked at the cold eyes of the automaton, and tried to introduce myself.

"Hey, Banpei, it's only me! My name is Cevn-san. I'm okay. I'm not going to cause any trouble. Really. You're an intensely techy-looking robot, you know." This felt so ridiculous...I was actually addressing a robot. I felt like saying "number 5 alive" in a pseudo-Hindi voice. A moment later, I could have sworn that I saw a robotic smile emerge on Banpei's face. Then his eyes lit up, and he executed a curt bow to me. I bowed back to him.

"Hey guys, what's up?" I saw a young college student in a softball uniform bounding up to the crowd.

"Must be Megumi, if truth is as strange as fiction," I thought.

She excitedly ran up, seeing her brother and the three sisters in the north courtyard. She had 'something must be up' written all over her face. She slowed down when she saw me, then shyly joined the four standing in front of me.

"Hi, I'm Morisato Megumi!" she said with a sunny smile.

As I introduced myself and bowed slightly back to her, I noticed how forward she was, not waiting for her older brother to introduce her. For every bit as shy and introspective as Keiichi was, Megumi in contrast seemed to be assertive and sociable. I felt grateful for her, that she could be so trusting so quickly.

"Self-confidence is something you could teach your older brother," I silently mused. Not to mention that she was cute...in a pert sort of way. Her brown eyes were warming to the sight, and her mouth was small, almost in a moue, as the French would say. Her short-cropped hair was silky smooth, and she had tastefully used a color conditioner to cast it in a medium brown color with a hint of red. I joined the four and we retired into the house.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"So, the three sisters and their mortal keeper have a new guest in the house. Why didn't their attack robot notice him? For that matter, why didn't it notice me?" Mara spoke softly to herself, perched on top of a tree. For years, her ambition was to wreck havoc on the Goddesses, as she was a Demoness First Class. She was dressed in a fantastic outfit that she knew would arouse both fear and lust at the same time. She was in her stealth mode, which meant that she was manifested as a deformed mini-Mara, about 15cm tall.

Yet she was drawn to this newcomer in some strange way. Yes, he was only a mortal, but there seemed to be an air about him that was at once comforting and familiar. It was almost like he has some Demonic blood in him.

"Impossible!" she thought. Yet, Mara almost enjoyed seeing the different reactions the Goddesses had to his pain. Urd didn't seem to notice it at all. Belldandy was visibly shaken, and Skuld vacillated between sympathy and terror.

"This will be very interesting, maybe even fun!" Mara reflected.

"Those guys have never dealt with something like this mortal. All the humans they associate with have experienced fairly normal lives. This new mortal 'friend' of theirs has felt some real tragedy. It's as if he had been visited several times by the Demon Grief Office. The stench of sorrow and pain he carries is strong! If I could only amplify that pain in some way, the Goddesses wouldn't be able to escape it. They would be exposed to it all day, and then they would have to feel it along with him because of their divine sense of empathy. They would be miserable! And they couldn't turn him away, because that would be so out-of-style for little Miss Perfect and her sisters, not to mention that gullible Morisato!"

Mara chuckled evilly to herself, snapped her fingers and reappeared on the light fixture overlooking the dinner table.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Belldandy was in the kitchen when she heard the "Hssst" from the cupboard. She knew immediately who it was and smiled. She hadn't seen Kodama or her two Ninja sisters in a week. They had been on a "training mission" to sharpen their martial skills. Every couple of months, the three would visit her, bow down and ask for forgiveness so that they could leave for a week to train. She admired their dedication and humility; she also valued their company when Urd, Skuld, or even Keiichi and Megumi got to be too much.

"Mistress, we're back from our mission!" All three female Ninjas bowed their respects. Then they leapt down onto the counter. They seemed especially anxious to tell her something. Senrigan was a picture of anxiety. Senrigan was the first to speak up. "Mistress, we saw something very unusual in the courtyard today. We think Mara is here. Something that looked like a miniature Mara was sitting in a tree this afternoon!"

Belldandy gave a start at that. She had felt a disturbance in the "force", as it were, and what Senrigan has just said confirmed her fear.

"If Mara is here, that could mean trouble. Please be vigilant for all of our sakes, dear Senrigan!"

"Kodama has something she wants to tell you," Senrigan added.

A chagrined Kodama bowed deeply and started to describe her experience that afternoon.

"Mistress, upon returning home, I decided to forgo the ritual weapon cleaning and walk around the temple compound. I saw a strange-looking gaijin sitting on a rock. He looked so heavy-hearted, but yet threatening as well. So I thought he was an intruder. Not thinking of anything other than the protection of the house, I attacked him."

"What did I tell you about the sacredness of life, Kodama?" Belldandy gently pointed out. She already knew that Kodama hadn't hurt the new visitor in any way, but a remonstration was forthcoming...Kodama _had_ been reckless, it seemed.

"But Mistress, that's the point. He acted like I wasn't even there. He didn't defend himself. Nothing I could do would hurt him. I tried to spear him, I threw dozens of shurikans at him, I cut him with my sai knifes, I gassed him, I sliced at him with my Katana...to no effect! The weapons just went through him, and the gas didn't faze him. It was like he was ghost, or had no body. I'm afraid I failed in the defense of your home!" she finished with a deep sense of embarrassment.

Belldandy frowned at this. She reassured Kodama that she didn't fail defending the house in any way whatsoever. Kodama was visibly relieved at this bestowal of forgiveness on the part of her mistress, and remained in audience to Belldandy with her sister ninja. As for herself, she felt somewhat safe with this new guest, who was still a stranger, but yet seemed to possess great pain and dignity that was somehow combined. But this news made him out to be something other than human.

"Thanks for your vigilance, Kodama. Our new guest may seem to be a threat, but I know in my heart that he isn't. Treat him with the same respect you would treat our other guests," Belldandy instructed.

The three Ninjas left quietly after assenting to this request, Hikari stopping momentarily and turned to say something.

"He sure is a cool-looking guy, though, isn't he!" Belldandy smiled at her, then started to gather the serving dishes for the evening meal.

"Can I help you with anything?"

She turned to see Cevn in the kitchen doorway, his offer of assistance coming as a surprise. It was very fine and nice that Keiichi simply expected her to cook and serve meals for him...she really appreciated his admiration of her cooking skills. She knew deep down that it was not a 'woman in the kitchen' thing with him. Keiichi may be many things, but he is definitely _not_ a male chauvinist. Besides, she was more than happy doing this for him, among other things...but this request caught her sideways.

"How kind!" she thought as she politely refused.

"No, Cevn-san. Just sit down and wait for dinner."

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

I returned to the dining area and noticed how expansive the temple-cum-household was. There was a long hallway leading to the Japanese-style bathroom. There were five large rooms on each side, formerly priest quarters. The three Goddesses all slept in a room on the right side of the hallway, adjacent to the living room. Then each sister had a 'hobby room' for herself: Skuld Labs, Urd's Castle and Belldandy's Room. Megumi's bedroom was last in the row of rooms, right next to the bathroom at the end of the hallway.

Directly across the hallway from the Goddess's bedroom was Keiichi's bedroom, with "Keiichi's Shop" next to it, across from "Belldandy's Room". The middle of the five rooms was a storage room/study room. Next to it was a utility room, then an empty room at the end of the hallway. The hallway opened up into the middle of the house, where the general living room was. This obviously used to be the zendo or central meditation room; right now it was filled with futons, tatami mats, zabutons, small writing tables and various vehicle parts. On one side of the central living room was the genkin; the entrance had a closet on each side for coats and such. On the opposite side of the central living room from the hallway was a dining room and adjoining kitchen. The kitchen was decorous, with bright walls and a tiled floor replete with floral designs. The kitchen wrapped around a storeroom in an 'L' shape. At the far end of the living was a short hallway with a sliding shoji door at the end that opened up into a sunny end room, with large windows facing east. The left hand side of the short hallway opened up to the kitchen, while across the hallway was a large tea room with a plaque that read, "All-n-Everything Tea Room". The sun room was expansive, filled with large plants and soft lounge chairs. The whole building had a wooden deck wrapped around it; a veranda or gallery of sorts. This should have been heavily worn by walking priests, but was strangely unused-looking. In fact, the whole temple had a refreshing novelty, mixed in with the ancient age of the environs. It had to be at least 700 years old.

"782 years old" an unexpected voice said in my head.

How did I know that? And where did that voice come from? It was if some precedently hidden part of my brain had suddenly opened up to me with a whole new realm of knowledge. "But this is impossible, there was no way _anyone_ could know something like that!" I remarked to myself in astonishment. Yet, I did feel some satisfaction that my earlier guess about which Shogunate it was built during was confirmed.

"This place is 782 years old," I said with veneration.

"What? Oh by the way, this came in the mail for you!" Megumi cheerfully sat down across from me at the table and handed me a medium-sized package.

"Someone must have known that you would be here, it's addressed to you," she added.

"Ehhh?" Several startled voices chimed in.

"How would anyone know that?" I remarked. I looked at the package, and there was my name in Katakana and Romanji.

"Why don't you open it?" Urd urged me as Belldandy walked in to the dining room and announced dinner was ready. The package was forgotten as my olfactory senses reeled with the wafting aroma of her cooking. I ate a healthy portion, but strangely felt like there was nothing going down. I resisted a temptation to eat too much, since I was a guest here. I watched my...what do I call them?

"My new friends?" I wondered. Skuld was touchy about her food, occasionally eyeing Keiichi and her sister suspiciously. Urd ate a little food, but seemed to gulp down cup after cup of sake. Megumi ate with gusto and Keiichi relished his food slowly, sometimes feeding a bite to Belldandy with his chopstix.

After the main course, Skuld proceeded to the refrigerator and raided it, returning with a whole carton of ice cream mochi, which she tore into like a starving POW. Urd retired to her room, and I heard the TV loudly start up. Keiichi and Belldandy gazed into each other's eyes and talked quietly. Megumi retired to the living room and started reading a textbook. Suddenly, I felt like an intruder. Each person had a well-established routine that they settled into for the evening, and I was not part of it.

"Ahem!" I politely interrupted the two lovers.

"Hey, I'm really feeling exhausted. Thanks for the wonderful dinner, Belldandy. Is there a place where I can sleep? I won't bother you for more than a few days, then I can get my own place. Do you know what the rental situations are like here?"

I immediately felt hopeless as I realized that I had no money. Maybe I could find out how to get into my savings account back on the Islands and wire some money to myself...all 70USD of it.

Keiichi and Belldandy both flushed with embarrassment.

"We're..uh..sorry, we forgot that you...ur...that we had someone new...uh." It was funny seeing how awkward this was for them, yet I felt disconcerted. I knew far more about them than they did about me--if what I read in the manga was true. So far it had been. But the manga portrayed these two as paragons of politeness, and it would be rude to ignore a guest. Tonight, they were strangely out of character. Or was it that reality and comic-book fantasy were two different realms? Belldandy looked up at me with a calming expression.

"Ohhhh. We were just discussing which room you could use, Cevn-san. I'm sorry, we have a really big event coming up in our lives in a couple weeks, and we're a little apprehensive about it." I felt the sincerity of Keiichi's apology and explanation, and cursed myself for my insensitivity.

"After all, these people have lives too," I reminded myself. Once more, my past was ruining my present; this time, my sensitivity to situations resembling abandonment had reared up, when actually there was no big deal to get upset about.

"You can sleep on the room at the end of the hallway next to the bathroom, on the 'Men's dorm' side", Keiichi cheerfully replied. He seemed somewhat more comfortable around me than before. I half expected him to be frustrated with another boarder at his house. I hadn't even discussed money stuff with him, either! Suddenly _I_ felt embarrassed!

"Here, I'll show you where it is," he said as he stood up and motioned me to join him in the hallway. On the way to my temporary lodgings, Keiichi confided that it was nice to have another guy staying here with him for a while. He was 'estrogened out' as he put it. His sister and the three sisters were wonderful to live with, but he missed the camaraderie of the men's dorm at N.I.T. It must have taxed him considerably, but he maintained a cheerful outlook. I envied him. Living with three Goddesses and a charming sister. Must be worth all the trouble.

He slid open the door to my room and apologized again. After he left, I arranged my futon, blanket and pillow. I had completely forgotten about the package I got in the mail. In a day full of mysteries, here was one more!

I carefully opened the package and saw that it contained a plain cardboard box, with something solid and bulky in it. I untaped the box, pulled off the top and saw an unusual-looking tome. It appeared ancient to the eye, but exuded a newish sort of smell, as if it had just come off the press. The worked leather and wood cover was very ornate, with gold and silver finery. The binding was gilded. What struck me was the language on the cover. I have studied a number of languages and had encountered many more, but I had never seen any writing, pictographs, hieroglyphs or whatever that even faintly resembled what I held in my hands. Also, the book was tightly bound shut by a heavy strap had some kind of lock on it, partly obscuring the title on the cover. I looked at a swirly "word?/character?" on the cover and suddenly became lightheaded. It felt like my head was rising from my shoulders, as would a helium-filled balloon released by accident, and my consciousness started to leak away. I remember dropping the book and falling to the futon on the floor, watching the ceiling swirl and fade...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --


	2. Pt 2: Settling In

**Part 2: Settling In**

The sun sprayed rainbows through my half-lidded eyes as I awakened to hear the sound of twinned purring near my head. I opened my eyes and saw my two cats, Pho' (short for Symphonique) and Xue Shizi (Chinese for "Snow Lion") walking by the head of my futon. I was momentarily disoriented, as I expected to feel the familiar cushioning waves of my waterbed. Amidst these new surroundings, the recent events of yesterday formed in my head with a rush. The wooden floor creaked as I sat up abruptly in my futon. Looking around, I noticed that I was in a four-mat room with a window shuttered with Japanese blinds. The room was Spartan, save for a folding screen in the corner, a lacquered wood nightstand, the perfunctory alarm clock radio and my two cats. I watched as the shoji ("A paper door?" I noted with surprise) slid open part way as Urd stepped in. She was wearing a silvery silken robe with a light orange obi sash tied around her waist. Her dark tan skin contrasted with the milky-colored morning robe.

"I retrieved your two cats; figured that you would miss them. How could you forget these two little cuties? Ratty's going to have a fit with two_ real_ cats in the house!" she said in a light voice. I was surprised by her unexpected kindness, and introduced them to her. Pho' was friendly as usual, but Snow evidenced wariness as he backstepped himself into a corner with an arched back. I could relate to the fear my male cat was feeling around Urd. I wondered how they would react to Velsper.

"Heheh, the male cat is a lot like you. He's afraid of a _real_ woman!" Urd said sharply. I recognized some leftover ire from our first encounter yesterday. When Japanese women get sarcastic or angry, the timbre of their voice changes drastically, taking on an intonation that drips acid in the ear canals. Caustic. My feelings of an idyllic waking popped almost audibly.

"Urd, why is it that you have a distinctive way of mixing good intentions with bad comparisons?" was all I could mutter.

"Oh, aren't we tetchy this morning?" she retorted. She set down a tray of tea. I felt unnerved by her presence...she was being arrestingly familiar by walking in my sleeping room and rousing me like it was no big deal. Yet I felt a cautious bit of gratitude that she had taken the time to bring me tea and my cats.

"What is it with you? Can't you appreciate a kind favor or two?" she said with a shrug, then headed for the door with a look of disappointment.

"Wait!" I half-yelled after her. I pulled a fragile-looking cup of tea from the tray and sipped it quietly, letting Urd's query sink in for a moment. How could I explain to her about the viciousness of the life I had led in my past; whose patterns had repeatedly tainted my good cheer and dogged my faith in others?

"Urd, can I talk to you...I mean _really_ talk to you?"

Urd looked at me with a sly grin that reminded me of the Cheshire Cat spying a rodent. Her visage softened just a hint, and then she slowly lay down on the floor next to me with her chin cupped in her hands, resting on her elbows. My eyes rapidly drifted down to the open front of her robe, glimpsing a brief view of her cleavage, then back up. Oops! I hoped she didn't notice my glance.

"Hey, I'm a guy!" I reminded myself. I was relieved that she didn't notice; she had been watching one of my cats strolling around the room. I looked her in the eyes and premeditated on how to introduce some things about myself. I _had_ to talk to somebody...and since she was the first one I saw this morning, I felt an irrepressible urge to dump out my franticism.

"Urd, you know that I was quite shook up yesterday. I may..uh..have appeared to overreact yesterday when I first met you. But when we fell out of the TV set...I just want you to know that my 'freaking out' had nothing to do with you. I have...had a lot of painful things happen in my life, and I get really insecure...in some situations. Far more than is necessary." Urd nodded her head.

"You're damned right you overreacted!" Her indictment of my behavior was blunt, and I decided to shift to less risky ground.

"Back in Hawaii, I studied at the University. I'm working on my Ph.D. I...was also married at one time..." Urd seemed to perk up at the disclosure that I was once married. My wife had chosen drugs over me, and that prefigured the end of our marriage. Oddly, I wondered if Urd somehow knew about my past. I also wondered if she might be insecure about her own sake drinking. I felt uncomfortable...she seemed pretty interested in this facet of my life while ignoring my academic credentials. Scholastic achievement was boorishly disinteresting to the impulsive, party-loving Urd.

"Urd, I have been single for a long time, ever since my wife..."

"Mmmmm, yes...do tell," she said, leaning closer to me. Her eyes were brilliant; I felt like I was being hypnotized. Melancholy occupied my thoughts for a moment, and with effort I regained my composure and continued.

"It's going to take me a while to get adjusted to being here, in Japan, with you and your 'tribe'," I said, reasoning that my position in the house was tenuous, at best. "But I'll be moving out in a few days, so you won't have to bother yourself with my issues and stuff. Being a Goddess, you probably know all this already..."

"Cevn-san, how did you know that I had a Second Class License?" she interrupted.

"So much for Urd being a good listener!" I mentally noted. Here I was beginning to confide my life history to her, at least the scratchy surface details, and all she seems concerned about is determining how I seemed to know so much about her. I paused for a moment, reminding myself that I was a very empathic listener, but that Urd probably wouldn't recognize this attribute. Maybe I could model it and teach her.

"Urd, I know a lot more than what you think I know. Sometimes, I think I know a lot more than _I think_ I know, too. Can you relate to that?" Upon reflection, I thought it might be best if I maintained some leverage in this relationship, which could be best achieved by keeping Urd guessing. Urd looked at me quizzically, and an old joke popped in my head.

"Urd, since you are a Goddess, why don't you tell me about things that end in 'e', like Life, the Universe, Time, Love..."

At the last word, Urd slightly dipped her head, and a bitterlorn expression came over her face, just for a microsecond. It was almost a flinch in her composure. I became concerned that she was upset with me for being impudent, then she recovered her flirtatious character.

"Hee Hee! So you want to know my secrets?...yet you claim to know them already! Hah! You'll just have to be patient. It's beyond imagination that you, a mortal, could possibly know anything that I, a Goddess, don't know! And I could teach you things about love that you could never imagine..."

_**"Eeeeeek! BUGGGGGGG!!"**_

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

I heard the shrill voice in the hallway dart inside the room. It sounded like Skuld, and both Urd and I turned to the door. Urd quickly got up and floated through the wall. I threw off my blanket, started to stand, and just about lost my footing. It felt like both my feet were asleep, but there was no 'tingling' sensation. Leaning against the wall, I rested for a moment, then doddered out into the hallway.

The scene was total chaos. Skuld was chasing a very frightened tortoiseshell cat down the hallway with an extendable mallet raised overhead in white-gloved hands.

"Belldandy! Urd! Keiichi! We've got bugs in the house!!"

Pho dodged a mallet-blow and ran behind the couch.

Belldandy and Keiichi ran out of their respective rooms, both looking very panicked. Suddenly, all the Goddesses had these very 'officey' looking glasses on. They seemed to have transformed in an instant from young women to yuppified computer-geek chicks! Keiichi had sheer panic written across his face as he shifted his eyes searchingly up and down the hallway. The three Goddesses all poured into the living room, scrutinizing everything.

Pho decided that things were getting too crowded and made her move. She darted past all three sisters in a streak of brown-dun-red. Dashing into the kitchen, she dead-halted and sprang at least three feet vertically when Kodama turned around the corner. Kodama yelled "Tiger!" and two more foot-tall girls dressed in pseudo-martial garb swarmed into the entryway to the kitchen. By this time, Pho, in the middle of everyone, had crouched down and was eyeing potential escape routes. Skuld raised her mallet...

"_NO_!" Keiichi seemed to leap across the floor and grabbed Skuld's arms.

"Bug!" Skuld shouted, struggling against Keiichi's grasp. The intense look on her face belied the fact that she had been tormented for a long time by the bugs, to the point where any small furry object that resembled a bug..._became_ a bug in her mind. I momentarily empathized with the sense of feeling tortured by sheer fate, but I was afraid that I was going to lose one cat in a split-second.

"Skuld, it's a cat!" Keiichi hurriedly explained. Skuld checked her downward mallet swing.

"A what?"

Pho at this point had mentally floated off into whatever feline realm a kitty goes to when she is in overload. Cats have a familiar way of doing the most absurd things when they are freaked out: my little Pho was no different then the rest of the feline populace.

She launched herself right at Skuld.

With a desperate glance in my direction, she tried to bury herself in the folds of Skuld's loose jacket, knowing in profound kitty-logic that Skuld couldn't hit her there with the mallet.

"Aiyyyeeee! It's attacking meeeee!"

By this time, Pho was clinging onto Skuld for dear life; no doubt her claws were tightly buried into whatever material Skuld's jacket was made of. Belldandy looked helplessly at Keiichi, who whistled loudly. Everything screeched to a halt.

"It's a cat, Skuld! It's not a bug! Cats are pets that we people sometimes have here on the..." Keiichi fumbled for a description for Earth that would not tip me off to the divine nature of the sisters.

"...Earth. They're not in Yggdrasil, Skuld. And they are not malicious like system bugs, or former Demons like Velpser!" I finished. Keiichi looked at me in wide-eyed wonder, as if he was going to faint from surprise. I figured I needed to do some quick explaining before he went into shock.

"Keiichi, you know when Urd said she brought me here last night...it wasn't from some place down the street. I live, or used to live, in Hawaii." Keiichi looked at me for a moment; his mouth agape like his jaw was about ready to drop.

"It's okay, it's okay! I know. The whole thing about these three being Goddesses isn't himitsu to me," I said, trying to reassure him. Keiichi suddenly looked as confused as Skuld. Belldandy and Urd started giggling with feminine mirth.

"You mean you didn't know that he's not from here?" Urd forced out between laughs. "He's a gaijin, for goodness sakes!" Urd started slapping her thighs amidst deep laughs. Belldandy, laughing less forcefully than Urd, gulped out an explanation.

"He got here the same way you did, Keiichi-san. He was granted a wish, and now he's here!" She smiled at Keiichi sweetly, then tried to suppress another round of giggles by covering her mouth with a delicate hand. I watched as Skuld dissolved into uncontrolled giggles; the bug invasion of a few moments ago seemingly lost alongside this sudden joke occurring at the expense of her rival for Belldandy's attentions.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Everything had ground to a halt, except for Urd's raucous laughter. After dipping long into the well of embarrassed silence, Keiichi regained his good humor.

"Well, I just hope he isn't here because he wished for Urd to be with him!" he noted. Urd's loud laughing suddenly jarred into a brief silence with a snort, then she acknowledged their newcomer.

"Okay, Keiichi, we're even...for now. Touché, mon ami. But no one gets one over on ol' Urd here! You just wait and see. If I wanted, I could have him wrapped around my finger in no time, even if he didn't wish for me to be with him." This started a new round of tit-for-tat.

During all this time, Skuld was looking at Pho. Unnoticed during Keiichi and Urd's repartee, she was growing fascinated with the furry creature in her arms. At first, Skuld observed the cat with brief frightened glances, then as she relaxed, her fear left. She felt how warm the cat was against her chest. Pho relaxed too, and then she started purring. While all the consternation was being sorted out about Keiichi's panic that Cevn knew that she and her sisters were Goddesses, Skuld was looking adoringly at her new feline friend and its odd, machine-like noise.

"She's sooo cute!"

Belldandy looked at her younger sister, who was holding a purring cat, very much enraptured in the little life resting in her arms. She smiled kindly.

"It looks like you have a new friend, Skuld!"

"Can I keep her?" Skuld asked Cevn with childish fancy. He looked at Goddess and feline, and resigned himself to the fact that his cats were community property while he was boarding here.

"Skuld, now that I'm a guest here, everything I have is for everyone to share. Her name is Pho, and you can play with her anytime you wish! Just don't hit her with your mallet!"

Skuld looked at him, and stuck out her tongue.

"_Bi-daaa_!"

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

We all were sitting around the kitchen table, eating breakfast and supping tea. Megumi was the last to attend. As a university student, I readily recognized the signs that she had been studying all night for an exam; her eyes were slightly red with rings underneath them.

"Big test today, sis?" Keiichi inquired.

"Yeah! I have this massive exam in Asian History. The professor is kinda sick and we didn't know if he would be in school, but I found out at the last minute that he'll give the exam anyway, so I had to study extra hard." My ears perked up at the mention of a subject that was closely related to my doctoral work.

"Too bad I didn't get here a few days sooner," I thought, "otherwise I could have helped Megumi study for the exam." The idea of spending several nights with a study partner as lovely as Megumi was exciting and terrifying, to say the least.

Belldandy was serving another round of delicately-flavored tea from a ceramic kettle. Urd and Skuld were engaged in spirited dispute over some issue that probably only mattered to them. Keiichi broached the subject about the sister's divine origin.

"Cevn, how long have you known that Belldandy and her sisters were three Goddesses?" I almost spat out my tea. I thought Megumi was in the dark about Belldandy and her sisters.

"You mean that Megumi knows too?" Megumi and Keiichi gave me an "a ha, got one on ya" smile, while the others burst into laughter. I felt shocked.

"Hmm...so the manga continuity isn't always in effect here," I wondered disconcertedly. Now it was my turn to get teased by the group. I would have to be more careful, as my knowledge from the past was no longer fully reliable.

"Well, I've known for several years, Keiichi-san."

Keiichi looked at me with surprise. He described how he met Belldandy three years earlier and how he made a wish for her to be with him always. Then they moved to this temple to live; Urd and Skuld and Megumi all came to live here...

...my head started going light, and suddenly I felt like everything was disappearing into shadow realms...

**THUD!**

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

A concerned look came over Belldandy's face as she saw their new houseguest roll his eyes up into his head. Urd and Skuld were animatedly arguing about cats when Megumi shrieked a brief instant before Cevn crashed sideways down on the table. Keiichi looked at her in alarm, while Megumi, who was sitting next to Cevn, sprung away from the table in shock. Cevn's face was ashen and he was breathing shallowly. Keiichi lifted him up into a slumped position against the wall.

"What's wrong with him?" several voices asked desperately.

"We better do something quickly! Urd, can you see if he's okay? Do you have any medicine?" Keiichi shouted, taking an assertive stance. Urd looked at Cevn, then passed her hands over his head.

"This is sooo weird, I like can't feel any mortal vibrations from him, as I would from you or Megumi." Belldandy raised an eyebrow at this revelation.

Skuld had slipped out onto the porch and called Banpei for help. The obedient robot came rolling quickly into the house, the sound of his whirring servos calming the group.

"Here, Banpei will carry him to his room." Once more, Belldandy silently thanked Skuld for creating the robot guardian/companion that had been so helpful so often. Keiichi lifted Cevn up to his feet and Banpei caught him, cradling his unconscious form between sturdy mechanical arms. With a low humming, his robot frame traveled down the hallway with his charge, excited talk echoing behind him.

"I don't know what's wrong with him...do you feel anything unusual about his vibration?..could it be Mara?..I still think there's some bugs hidden here!..why would he come here, and then get so sick right away?..does he have a flu that he might have caught after being suddenly transported from Hawaii to here...?"

Banpei set Cevn down on the futon in his temporary room, and Keiichi took a blanket and covered him. Glancing at his watch, the N.I.T. student gasped.

"Oh no! I'm going to be late for my Advanced Engineering Sciences class. Dammit! I have to go. Take good care of him, Bell-chan! Megumi, are you ready to ride to school with me?" he shouted. Brother and sister bounded out of the room at a rapid clip, and the sound of Keiichi peeling out of the temple grounds followed.

Urd and Belldandy looked with deep concern at their sick houseguest.

"He's going to have to live with us, you know," Belldandy said matter-of-factly.

"Why? Why can't he just stay a few days, then move into an apartment or something?" Urd replied. Belldandy frowned at Urd's evasiveness. Her 'idea' was all-in-all a typical Urd attitude...avoid all responsibility. Yet one_ could_ hope, Belldandy thought.

"Do you think the Almighty will allow that? You seem pretty anxious to get rid of him, now that he's been placed in your charge, Urd. Granting mortal's wishes isn't just an instant thing, Urd," she voiced her experience. Urd conceded Belldandy her point.

"Yeah, I guess you're right, sis. But it will really be weird with another man in the house. How's Skuld going to deal with it?"

They both knew now that Cevn was going to be a housemate due to the indomitable will of the Almighty. Urd went and got a wet cloth and laid it across Cevn's forehead while Belldandy got a thermometer and stuck it in his ear.

"He's burning up, Urd!"

"I can give him something for the fever, Bell!"

"Make sure you don't give him any poison or love potions by mistake!" Skuld shouted as Urd headed to her "Urd's Castle" lab room. Urd turned around long enough to flip her the bird, then entered her room. Belldandy looked closely at Cevn, and she could have sworn that she could faintly make out a small circle with a square inside of it on his forehead.

"Skuld...look, do you see a square and circle on his forehead?" Skuld leaned closer, brushing her long black hair behind her ears with a practiced motion while peering at his face.

"No. You must be seeing things, Elder Sister."

Urd returned with a glass of hot water. She dissolved two ampoules in it, mixed it with a stir, then opened Cevn's mouth by pulling on his lower jaw, and poured the mixture in. He coughed a couple of times and swallowed most of it. Then she took two short sticks of incense and placed them inside of a small censor, lit them, and closed the lid. Pleasant smelling smoke began to fill the room.

"There. The pills will remove his fever and this incense will restore his energy. It worked really well on Keiichi a couple of Christmas's ago." Urd still remembered how Keiichi, motivated his love for Belldandy and the threat of her being recalled to Heaven, had almost run himself into the ground trying to earn enough money for the ring that now graced Bell's ring finger. She smiled inwardly at her little 'assist' in this episode.

"That was almost as bad as when the Almighty wanted me to return to Yggdrasil," she reminisced.

Belldandy noticed something out of the corner of her eye.

"What's this?" she wondered. She glanced at a thick book that was resting next to the bedstand. Examining the book, she saw writing on the cover, halfway obscured by two straps that wrapped around the book, each ending in a clasp or locket that kept the book from being opened. Suddenly it flashed on her that some of the writing was_ in the God's Language_!

_"URD! SKULD!"_

Both her sisters jumped when she shouted out their names so loudly. Skuld was stroking a purring Himalayan Snow Cat which flew out of her arms at the sound, while Urd was intently waiting for their exhausted-looking new friend to show any sign of response.

"Look at this!" Belldandy held up the book and the wrapping paper.

"So, it's just a postal wrapping and a book that has something on the cover that is partly written in the God's Language...so what?" Urd nonchalantly noted. Suddenly her eyes got wide.

"Belldandy! What's it doing here? Wow! Cool! Lemme see!" Urd said excitedly.

"Sister, isn't that _our_ language? What is it doing here? Lemme see!" Skuld reached out and grabbed the book from Belldandy's grasp. "But I can only read half the words on it!" she exclaimed with disappointment.

"Don't hog it, Skuld!" Urd interjected. Her curiosity was getting the best of her, and she reached for the book, whereupon Skuld gripped it tighter.

"Let go, you brat!" Urd warned.

"You let go, you selfish, self-serving, rude...old hen!" Skuld snapped back. Belldandy could only raise her head skyward.

"Why me, Lord?" she said in faux agony.

By a stroke of luck, both sisters had their hands full, so Skuld couldn't bomb Urd and Urd couldn't zap Skuld. Belldandy laughed as the words "Old Hen" formed on Urd's face, one word on each cheek. Urd noticed Bell laughing, then her resentment mounted as steam rolled off her forehead.

"You just wait, child! When Urd has this book, she's going to bean you over the head with it!" The two words faded from Urd's face. Suddenly one book clasp broke partly away. The cover was dislodged, but not open. A large wad of 10,000-yen notes fell to the floor. Urd and Skuld came to a dead stop in the middle of their tug of war.

"_LOOKIT THIS! I'M RICH!_" Urd yelled. "I've hit the jackpot! This is better than Life Sugoroku by a long shot! Now I can buy a super digital big-screen TV, a DVD player, one of those new satellite pans, sonicreal surround sound..." She gave a cheer, then started scooping up the money.

A restraining hand gently rested on her wrist.

"Urd, that is not your money. It came out of Cevn-san's book. It's _his_ money," Belldandy half-cautioned, half stated.

"Yeah, it's definitely not yours, you greedy..." Skuld added.

"_NO!!_ Not fair! Finder's keepers! How do we know it's his book any way?" Urd argued back.

"Because of this!" Skuld yelled as she held up the postage wrapper in front of Urd's face. "I can't believe you are my sister sometimes, Urd!"

Urd read the name to herself: Cevn... "Ah ha!! There's no last name on this!" Belldandy grabbed Urd by the shoulders and confronted her.

"Urd, dear sister, how many people named 'Cevn' do you think there are in Chiba Prefecture, or Japan for that matter?" Urd looked at her, then back to the wrapping. There was no return address. Curious. She remembered sending her 'Sexy Sister' video to Keiichi with no return address on the wrapper.

"There's no return address," Urd exclaimed, then dejectedly sat back against the wall.

"What if...whoever left it in this book got mad if Cevn-san didn't find the money?" Skuld spoke up. Urd sobered up at this thought. She reflected on the possibility.

"What if the Almighty had sent this weird book for Cevn, and I got caught with the money that came in it? I would be in deep trouble then!" Urd imagined having to take remedial courses in Sysop, Ethics and Debugging...she shuddered at the memory of the last time this happened, and put the money down.

"Ethics...now that course sucked," she reminded herself in a soft whisper.

"I'm sure he'll loan me some if I asked him nicely," Urd said as she posed flirtatiously. "In fact, he wouldn't be able to resist me at all if I did." She played at opening her robe, smiling sultrily.

"You're a pervert, Big Sister!" Skuld said disgustedly.

"Where...am I?" a subdued male voice quietly asked.

Urd blushed crimson red and quickly closed her robe shut as Cevn's voice quietly cut into the charged air. Belldandy noted that Urd seemed unusually embarrassed all of a sudden. Goddesses don't often blush, and her older sister was renowned throughout Yggdrasil as being a brazen, notorious flirt. A virago. She had broken the hearts of many Gods, and only two had succeeded in reaching her heart: Troubadour and the Cherry Blossom Spirit. But all that was in the past.

"Too bad that..." Belldandy sighed, remembering Urd's situation.

"You're in your room, Cevn-san," Skuld answered; the broad grin on her face confirming the fact that she was relieved that their guest had awakened.

"Now Urd won't act up!" Skuld thought with secret joy.

"Oh man, I was sitting at breakfast and Keiichi was explaining to me how he met you, Belldandy, when suddenly I heard a roaring and everything got dark."

Suddenly his expression turned into panic.

"I can't feel my body!" he shouted, a look of total terror on his face.

"Urd, what did you give him?" Skuld said in an accusing voice.

"I didn't give him anything!" Urd felt bad at this turn of events. She had been caught several times 'doctoring' others with all sorts of potions, but this time she was truly innocent. Belldandy read her expression and put a consoling hand on her older sister's shoulder.

"We know you didn't do anything wrong _this_ time, Urd."

Cevn was laying back on the futon, looking at the three Goddesses with beseeching eyes.

"Please help me! I don't know what is happening to me. Please help me! I can't move any part of my body...I can't even _feel_ my body!" he said, even more panicked. Belldandy felt her heart strings pull at this. Urd felt sympathy swelling in her heart for this newcomer in the house. Skuld looked at Cevn with curious concern. Belldandy saw the fear in his eyes, and spoke soothingly to try and calm him down.

"Cevn-san, you must relax yourself. We don't know why these strange things are happening to you, but we won't let you suffer if we can help it. We'll do all we can, but you must try to help us by telling us about yourself. When did these feelings start?" she asked. Cevn looked at her, trying to put dismiss his panic.

"They've been happening since I first got here. My whole body seems to act as if it was trying to detach from me and do its own thing. It feels like it has a mind of its own."

"This must have something to do either with his wish, or the trip here. Better tell him to try and get some sleep," Urd whispered in her sister's ears. Belldandy whispered back to Urd.

"Yes, I think you're right, but first we need to ask him about this strange book he has!"

"Agreed," Urd said in a hushed voice, then she told Skuld.

"Where did you get this book?" Belldandy asked. Cevn looked at the book, and the money. His eyes widened at the sight of so much foreign currency. Then he looked at the book with the strange writing.

"I have never seen this before. The book came in the package that Megumi brought in yesterday. I haven't the faintest clue as to what it means, or what kind of writing it has on it."

Skuld was about to disclose that the book had the God's Language on the cover when Bell raised a finger to her lips and shook her head, signaling her to keep this fact secret.

Cevn suddenly felt another wave of sinewy fear grip him. He shuddered as his discontent and uncomfortability spilled out.

"You don't know how hard this is for me! I have been ripped out of my old life in Hawaii. Brought here, to live with you wonderful people...people that seem to live in a fictional setting. Yet you're real. You're _normal_! But I don't fit in with nice people. You guys...er...gals have an idyllic life here. I don't want to ruin it. I don't know what to do! I don't even know what this money is all about! I don't have any money! I been living on disability and food stamps, and I get major depressions all the time. Yet...I've somehow made it through a lot of university...and now, I don't even have a home. Where I live, the neighbors beat their kids, people sell ice and crack and there are gunfights and police and drunken couples screaming. I don't belong here!" The words poured out of him in a frenzy as his emotions spiraled out of control.

"I've never even taken a hot Japanese bath before! I've only studied a few years of Japanese, and I don't know the customs here. On top of all of this, my body seems to be turning on me! First I can't walk...then I have these horrible blackouts. Now I can't feel my fingers, toes or legs, arms or anything else! I have all these sudden boosts of mental capacity, and then this damned book comes. Next thing I know, you're all trying to kill my cat! If this is a temple, then there must be a spiritual essence here, but I cannot feel it. I don't have any NA meetings to go to, and I'm scared and alone, more scared than ever before in my life!"

The three sisters looked at each other quizzically. He wasn't making any sense. Belldandy looked at her sisters, her eyes signaling 'let's talk it over later'.

Urd frowned and told Cevn that he should rest, and maybe his body-sense would come back to him. Skuld looked stunned, with a far-away look in her eyes that scared Belldandy. Belldandy herself felt his fear in waves, and wanted to assure this young mortal guy that things would be okay. It always was okay, no matter what had happened to the three of them and Keiichi in the past.

"Cevn-san, the Ultimate Force is responsible for you to be here, and because of that, nothing bad will happen. Rest." She looked at Urd, and Urd passed her hand over Cevn's head and he fell asleep.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

After the three had left, a small figure emerged from the windowsill and hopped down onto the futon next to the sleeping man. Mara looked at his restful face. "So you're Cevn-san, eh? I would love to give you some nightmares, but it seems that you are already wrapped in one, heh heh." She walked up and down the length of his quiescent body, then climbed on the blanket and seated herself on his chest.

"It would be so easy to kill you right now. All I would have to do is put a pillow over your nose and mouth. Then those three sisters would be mortified, especially that damn Urd! She would think that she killed you with her medicine. Even though she is self-centered to the max, she would feel pangs of guilt that would haunt her for a loooong time," Mara said to the sleeping figure. She paused, grinning as she pondered this possible route of action.

She looked into his face again and felt the same feeling of familiarity that she had noticed the day before in the courtyard. "There is something _definitely_ Demonic about you," she said to the sleeping form. Mara waved her hand in front of his face to scan him.

"Hmmm...that's odd. There's no signs of any mortal vibrations in you," Mara noted with surprise. She scanned him again at the highest sensitivity and felt the slightest hint of mortal-plane presence in his soul. Caught off guard, Mara decided to search the room. After all, any information would be good information.

The small figure suddenly transformed into a beautiful young woman. Her clothing was runaway futuristic, with a fractal-patterned blouse open to her navel in front and black spandex on her legs. She had an elaborate loin skirt around her waist, and her jacket had padded shoulders and a leathery sheen to it. Her hair was curly and long, and when she smiled, two canine fangs protruded an half-inch or so past her other pearly teeth. Her arms were bejeweled with bangles. The whole effect was intentionally both sexual and frightening. Two red marks on her forehead identified her as a Demoness First Class.

Looking around the room, Mara spied a thick volume with some things written on the cover.

"Waitaminute!" she almost said out loud, catching her breath with surprise. "That book has something written in the _Demon's Language_ on the cover! What the hell is it doing here? What are these guys up to?" She picked up the book, and attempted to open it, but there was a half-loosened clasp preventing her. Mara redoubled her efforts, wedging the book between her feet and pulling on the strap with all her Demonic might.

"Ummmmphhh!" Suddenly one of the clasps snapped open with a loud crack and Mara's suddenly unresisted strength sent her sprawling noisily against the wall. She could hear nearby voices in the hallway even as the crashing sound faded.

_"Now what? Can't I even have a moment's peace?"_

_"Big Sister, Big Sister, Banpei's heading towards the house!"_

Mara shrunk herself back to her stealthy six-inch size and bounded up to the top shelf of a high shelving system in the corner of the room, just as Belldandy rushed into the room. She felt a chill as Belldandy looked up right at her. But Belldandy didn't seem to notice her.

"That just figures, she's such a ditz," Mara said to herself. Urd and Skuld also raced into the room. "Great, now all the three stoogettes are in the room," she sighed.

"Hey look, the book's partway open!" Skuld excitedly pointed to the book, noticing that one of the two bookstraps was unclasped.

Suddenly the wall exploded behind Mara as a Kaeru Turtle Gold Charm stuck to her. With a scream of panic, Mara looked at Banpei taking aim with a second round of charms. Instantly, she regained her full size, becoming visible. Vulnerable.

"Get it off of me!" she shouted to no one in particular.

"_Mara!_" Urd intoned with a deep voice of disdain.

"Mara, what are you doing here?" Belldandy asked her.

Mara looked at Belldandy and rolled her eyes. She always, always asks that when she first sees me, and I never, never, tell her. When is she going to learn? For a Goddess First Class, she is soooo dense. I wonder if nescience is a requirement for promotion with the Gods?

"Enjoy your new friend, because he's not going to be here with you very long!" Mara taunted. With a whiff of smoke, Mara vanished.

The three sisters looked at each other. Once more, Mara had tipped her hand by making a not-so-veiled threat.

"She is so...ignorant," Skuld thought to herself.

Urd quickly canvassed the room to see if anything was missing. She noticed the book's upper seal clasp had been broken.

"Look at this!" Urd shouted. Belldandy looked at the cover. The strap that the clasp had tightly bound to the volume had loosened, so that the whole title could be read:

**Instruction xxxxxx for xxx God-Xxxxx of Xxxxxxx xxx Balance**

**(Xx be xxxx only xx First Xxxxx Gods/Xxxxxx as xx**

**instruction xxxxxx for xxx Axial Xxx.)**

Skuld read the title out loud for her own benefit. The three Goddesses sat on the floor, examining the book

"What does that mean? It's a buncha gibberish! 'Instruction' blah-blah 'Balance' blah-blah. What a bunch of nonsense!" Urd exclaimed.

"Why do you guys think that only half the words are in the God's language?" Skuld pondered out loud.

Belldandy pried open the upper part of the book and peeked at its vellum crisp pages. On every page that she could catch a partial glimpse of its contents...half the writing was in the God's Language, and the rest in something unknown. She decided to try a translation spell.

_"Oh, Words of Age/On Ancient Page/Reveal Your Hidden Secrets/_

_So We Three May Know/Thy Mystic Lore/_

_And No Mystery Shall You Keep!"_

Nothing.

Urd tried another spell, with a similar lack of result.

Astounded, Belldandy looked again at the book, then at the sleeping form of Cevn.

"Ah, Cevn-san, so it must be you that holds the key to the mystery of this tome. Or maybe this book holds the key to the mystery that is you," she silently thought.

Urd leafed through the open corner of the book, resting oh-so-innocently on the floor. It seemed like a ridiculous puzzle. She suspected that the Almighty had sent the book down to earth for Cevn. But why would He only print half the words in any language she could recognize. She made up her mind to suggest to the others that they ask Him.

Skuld naturally had to take a crack at the book. After frustrated page peeking, she decided upon a solution.

"I'll build a mecha that can read this, you just wait!" She had a vision in her head of a device similar to what the humans called a scanner, only this 'scanner' would also compile all the known languages of the Universe and 'debug' the codified information in the book.

Belldandy looked at her younger sister...she had _that_ look on her face.

"Ah ha! The Cypheratron Mark III!" With a confident glee in her eye and a design in her head, she bounded off to her assembly lab.

Belldandy and Urd looked at each other, then at the back of a sprinting Skuld, and shrugged their shoulders.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Keiichi and a downcast Megumi returned home late, just as the sun was starting to darken the sky. Megumi looked even more tired than she did in the morning, her normally buoyant face was taunt with sleep-desire. Keiichi pulled his motorbike into the temple gate, waving at Banpei as he slowed to a halt in the 'garage', which was originally a squat building that housed the Shrine God.

"Kind of fitting that our vehicles are in this building," he thought. The stretch of victories that the Nekomi Institute of Technology Motor Club had was often due to the interventions of his beloved Bell-chan and her sisters, but he also felt that the old Shrine Gods had smiled upon them as well. Poor Megumi. Her scooter was in the shop waiting to be fixed, and they were all too busy working on the racer to give it a look-over. School, well that was a bummer too, he thought dismally.

At the dinner table, Megumi looked like she was going to fall asleep sitting up, but she wanted at least to have a good home-cooked meal in her belly, so that the day wasn't a total waste. She looked around and saw that everyone was anticipating dinner, but Cevn-san was still in his room. She smiled quietly and explained the disaster that took place at school this day.

"I was going to my Asian History class, when this jerk bumped against me and spilled food on my jacket. Turns out he was being chased by Tamiya, who just about mowed me over running after him. Something about a wager on next week's solar race." Keiichi shook his head in disappointment.

"Those guys never give up, do they, Megumi? They know that I'm working hard fine-tuning the design specs. Instead of helping, they think they can extort bets from all the freshman class, so that the Club can cash in on the race. But it's going to be real tough, especially with the European entry that won the World Championship in Australia competing against us." Megumi nodded and continued.

"So I was a couple minutes late for the exam. Then the most horrible thing happened. Mr. Yamashita and a proctor were handing out the exams when all of sudden, Yamashita-sensei gripped his chest and fell down to the floor!" She started sobbing, and the others silently waited for her to feel her sadness. She recovered herself after a moment and continued.

"It turns out that Sensei had a heart attack! That is why he has been so sick. They had to call an ambulance, and we were worried that...he might die! He'll be in the hospital for a while, and cannot finish the term. I hope for his family's sake that he'll be okay! I feel so sad for them!" she explained sadly.

Everyone bowed his or her head at this sad turn of events.

Belldandy brought the evening's repast, and everyone dug in. Urd made a plate up for Cevn-san.

Belldandy decided it was time to broach the subject of Cevn possibly living at the temple compound.

"We need to talk about Cevn-san. Urd and I discussed it earlier and we think he should move in with us. There is something really strange about his situation. Not to mention that Kami-sama is directly involved." Skuld scowled at this news.

"It was bad enough having Keiichi living here, now this new man too?" she thought. Her face fell into a very sulky expression.

Keiichi looked like he was going to choke on his food. He wasn't surprised...it seemed that this household which started out with just Belldandy and he... In his mind the house became an organism, consuming and swallowing their lives. It was sooo much better when it was just she and me... He looked at Belldandy and Urd and knew in an instant that they were in agreement about this...and that they would not acquiesce. He sighed in disappointment. One more housemate to interfere with his and Bell-chan's already precious privacy.

"Keiichi, it's not that bad. Haven't you been going on for a year or so about being the only guy in a house full of women!" Megumi challenged him. Keiichi blushed at his younger sister's point.

"Have I been _that_ obvious about it?" All three women nodded "yes" vigorously, with big smiles.

"Case in point!" Keiichi muttered as once more it appeared that he was being ganged up against by the females in the house. Except Skuld. Skuld was sitting with a dour expression, her arms tightly crossed over her chest. She reached over and picked up some udon noodles, then flung them against the wall.

"Skuld!" Belldandy said with shock.

"I don't want him to live here! Nothing that any one of you can say will make me change my mind! I don't want another man in the house! One's bad enough!" Keiichi shook his head at her 'hint' about him.

"But what about Urd? Urd was directed by the Almighty to watch over this mortal. Urd even was used to fulfill his wish. What if he moved away and got in trouble? Urd could be in deep trouble then with our Lord!" Belldandy reasoned.

Skuld momentarily relished the idea of Urd being scolded by an angry Kami-sama. Then the feelings of love for her older sister held forth, and she realized that having to put up with Cevn for the sake of Urd was a sacrifice she would have to live with.

"Errrrr" she growled. "I don't like it. I'm not going to treat him nice! I'm only going to put up with him for Big Sister's sake! This really sucks, you know! I'm always having to make sacrifices!" Keiichi heard this and mentally reviled Skuld's sanctimonious attitude.

Belldandy smiled sweetly, ignoring the fact that Skuld had given her consent grudgingly. Urd, on the other hand, saw that Skuld was not into this at all.

"I'm going to have to work on her...otherwise she'll drive him out or kill him!" Urd noted to herself warily.

"I think it would be great to have him in the house! He's not from here...imagine what we can learn about America from him," Megumi said. She also admitted to herself privately that Cevn was kind of cute.

"Then it's settled...Cevn's going to live here?" Keiichi asked. Everyone said 'yes' except Skuld.

"Okay, but don't say I didn't warn you!" the youngest Goddess reminded the group.

Urd grabbed the food tray and took it to his room. Belldandy watched her older sister leave the dining room and smiled.

"She must like this new friend of ours. She is being unusually considerate, more so than I've seen her be in a while," she reflected.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

I was sitting up in my futon. While watching the blue in the window fade to auburn, then violet, then black, I questioned my reality. An open book lay next to me, with an indecipherable language on its pages. Who knows how many hundred thou of yen bills were neatly stacked on my table. I didn't have anything to wear except the clothes I came in and the yukata robes Keiichi had loaned me.

I paused at that, feeling a familiar fear creep up my neck. I'm glad that I didn't pass out yesterday, so that someone would have to put this robe on me. Memories of being sexually exploited passed through my mind and I felt the familiar self-disgust and fear. Being used as a plaything by foster parents. Having to do all those awful things as a child. Then being taken advantage of when I lived on the streets at age 12. I noticed with sadness that I was hyperventilating again, like I routinely did when these memories surfaced.

"Wait a minute. If I'm hyperventilating, then that means that my bodily feelings are back!" I flexed a few muscles and felt the familiar tug and pull of proprioception. With relief, I lay back down on the futon and pulled the covers up.

The shoji door slide open a sliver, then opened all the way. Urd walked in with a tray of food.

"Why is _she_ here again?" I thought. I watched her gracefully set it down and then kneel down next to me and pass her hand over my head. My fever seemed to diminish a bit, as if she had lured it out of me. Which was likely, since she was a Goddess, after all.

"You feeling better, Cevn-san?"

"Yes, Urd-sama."

"You can call me Urd, you know."

"Why should I do that, if you're so formal! Why not call me Cevn-sensei instead, Urd-sama?" I teased. Her face darkened briefly, then she grinned.

"The day I call you 'sensei' will be the day that you become a God!" She punched me lightly on the shoulder. "Seriously, now, how do you feel?"

"I just started feeling my body a little while ago, and I felt really freaked out at..."

"At what?"

"Urd...I just can't tell you right now." I was so intimidated by how lovely Urd was that I had a hard time just making conversation with her, let alone telling her about my wounding past. Yet, I caught myself feeling comfortable enough to tease her. What is it about her? "Urd, I promise, someday I will tell you everything. Just not now."

"It'd better be good, then. I don't wanna miss my fave TV shows to hear some Rikki Lake sorta crap. I wanna hear the real deal! I know you have lots of bad sexual experiences and beatings to tell me about," she said, as casually as if she was discussing the weather.

At this, I went totally into shock. I pulled my head under the blanket cover protectively. I had to get her out of here! I felt trapped, trapped by my past, trapped by my pain and fears and hopes...

"Urd, leave...me...alone!! Get out...get out of here _NOW_!"

Under the blanket, I broke into a cold sweat as I heard stomping footfalls, telling me that I had pissed off Urd again and she had stormed out of the room.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Skuld was working on her Cypheratron Mk III when she heard Urd storming down the hall. Her room shook as a door slammed. Normally, Skuld would just ignore this as one more instance of an Urd-type fit, but this time for whatever reason, she decided to check in on her oldest sister. She knocked on Urd's door and then slowly slid it open. Her sister was sitting in the corner of the room, clutching a pillow to her breast, almost ready to cry. Upon seeing Skuld, Urd quickly composed herself.

"Have you heard from Tomohisa, Little Sister?"

"Urd, I am not a child! Don't change the subject! What is wrong with you? I heard you slam the door!"

"Yes, what is wrong with me? Let's see...everybody has someone to love in his or her life. Bell has Keiichi. You have Tomohisa, even if you and he are only kids." Skuld let the insult pass by without piquing her temper.

"But me, I only have you and Bell. What if something happened to you?"

Skuld was touched to the quick by this sudden outburst of concern from her sister. She recalled the time when Urd had been summoned back to Heaven and how she tightly she held onto her sister when it was all over, admonishing Urd for resigning herself to the edict when everyone else wanted her to defy the Almighty's plan and stay.

She walked over and tried to cradle her older sister in her arms, consciously trying to imitate how she thought Belldandy would comfort Urd. Urd remarked at how big Skuld was getting, and patted her on the head, then started to cry into her younger sis's shoulder.

"No matter what, it will always be we three sisters, Urd!"

Skuld held her sister close, her chin resting on Urd's strong shoulder. Urd _is_ the strongest of we three, she remembered. Despite Urd's impulsivity, her selfishness, her rivalry with Skuld...she loved her oldest sister even more than Belldandy sometimes. This was one of those times. As her oldest sister, Skuld sometimes placed Urd on an even higher pedestal than Bell, which naturally made it more difficult for Urd to meet Skuld's exacting standards.

Urd, for her part, felt really proud of her youngest sister who was fast growing up into a charming young lady. Unlike Urd, Skuld was soft and sensitive. Urd felt compelled to 'push Skuld's buttons' at times so that the girl wouldn't become a pushover. She was happy for Skuld in a bittersweet way; Skuld had subconsciously taken a liking to Keiichi's younger cousin, Tomohisa. Urd knew that this was a blossoming love between the two, even if Skuld didn't. Skuld was brave, too, as her quick thinking had destroyed the Ultimate Destruction Program. She let her younger sister nuzzle on her neck, then decided to confess what had upset her.

"Skuld, I was in Cevn's room and he got mad at me...then he hid himself under the covers and yelled at me, telling me to get out."

"Well, why didn't you just yell back at him, Big Sister?"

"He's really under the weather right now. And I don't know why he got so upset at me! I didn't say anything to cause it! But he just ignored me and..." Skuld waxed with rage.

"I don't care! I'm not going to let him, a mortal, treat you like that!" Skuld stormed out of the room.

"Skuld, _wait_!" Urd shouted down the hallway.

"Now I've really done it," Urd accused herself under her breath.

Skuld slid open Cevn's door with a slam, and heard sobbing. She looked and saw two cats mournfully looking at a heaving figure hidden under the blanket. All her motives to Skuld-bomb him fled away. She wondered why both her sister and Cevn were sad. She quietly slid the door shut and went to Belldandy's room to discuss the matter.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Mara watched all that transpired with glee. Urd seemed to be acting like someone in love. All this in-fighting, and just his second night here!

"Imagine that, Urd in love! She should know better, by now! But she was always the stubborn one," Mara thought. Mara remembered all the fights she had with Urd and knew that Urd was a capable opponent. But it was Belldandy that tipped the scales against her. It wasn't fair. Three against one.

Hours later, when Cevn was asleep, Mara pulled up a pair of night vision binoculars and scanned the room. She really didn't need the binoculars, as she was a First Class, Unlimited, Unrestricted licensee...but she liked to have her affectations sometimes. Just like Belldandy likes to cook and knit without using magic, she mused. She felt a flush of embarrassment as she realized that she had just compared herself to her adversary, the auburn-haired Goddess who acted like a dumb blonde.

"Yeeshh! I've been on this stupid dustball planet for too long!"

She looked closer at the book. Startled, she noticed that Cevn had undone the second clasp! She read the cover to the book:

**Zzzzzzzzzzz manual zzz Zzz-Demon zz Serenity and Zzzzzzz**

**(To zz used zzzz by Zzzzz Class Zzzz/Demons zz an**

**zzzzzzzzzzz manual zzz the Zzzzz One.)**

Not only was this book half written in the Demon's Language, it hinted at unknown Demonic power! A Demon Manual! And this 'the One'?

Could this mean that this book is referring to the "All-Evil One" of lore? If she could summon the Ultimate Demon, she could have her revenge on all three sisters! And that cursed mortal, Keiichi too!

Inspired by this prospect, Mara decided that she would steal this book. She expanded to her full size, and reached down to grab the book. But as soon as she tried to lift it up, an agonizing sensation shot up her arms. She silently cried out in pain. She cursed, taking the God's Realm in vain.

"Heavens, the book is blessed! I can't take it with me!" Fortunately, she had disguised her cry of pain. She looked furtively for any evidence of charms in the book. She could page through it as long as it was resting on the ground. She tried to lift it again and a burning sensation filled her hands. She released the book, gasping in agony. As soon as she let go of the book, the pain stopped.

"So, I have to leave it on the ground! I wonder if I could find someone else to take it for me! Maybe that Sayoko girl, or maybe some expendable Demon or spell! I'll have to scheme long and hard, but it will be worth it! And when I obtain this book, I will rule all!! _HAHAHAHAHA_!"

Urd paused in her lamenting and sat up in her bed. She swore to herself that she had heard crazed laughter. With the way things have been going in the past two days, anything could happen. With that thought in her head, she laid back down on her futon between next to Skuld and went to sleep.


	3. Pt 3: A New Life

**Part 3: A New Life**

The next day was a Friday and the household was hectic. I was beginning to feel a thread of the security of being settled in. More importantly, I wasn't suffering the disorienting effects of any weird physical stuff going on inside my body. But my prospects were dimmed by the fact that I would need to leave my new digs shortly. I reminded myself that I was a stranger here...as soon as I regained my health, I would need to find a place of my own. The comfort that I felt here would only be a brief reprieve. Mentally, I had to defer my headache to the Tylenol bottle which Keiichi pointed out to me in the bathroom earlier. My head was chiming with stress and I found my morning meditation difficult going. After meditating, the thought of moving from this serene abode into an unknown large city was a source of anxiety for me.

I knew that Makuhari was situated in the north central part of Honshu, just a little northwest of Chiba on the east side of Tokyo Bay. According to Keiichi, the temple that he and the Goddesses called home was situated a few kilos inland, overshadowed by a tall hill. From the coastline, Makuhari looked like a major industrial metro area, complete with vast tracts of factory complexes, high rise office buildings, the massive Makuhari Messe Convention Center complex and the oceanside Chiba Marine Stadium. I would have never known this; the temple's atmosphere afforded a sense of being completely isolated from the urban network...the only sign that we were in the midst of a Japanese "new town" were the pictures of the urban vista I saw in the "Guide to Makuhari" book I skimmed through yesterday.

Everyone seemed to convene in the dining room between 6 and 6:30 am. As in Hawaii, these people seemed to be early risers, but not for the same reason. In Hawaii, everyone gets up really early because traffic starts to get bad around 6 am. Here, it seemed that the sun rose somewhat earlier than what I was used to back on the islands; nature seemed to regulate things rather nicely here. Opening the window blinds, I noticed that it was a wonderful late-February day. The weather was still chilly in comparison to late-February temperatures in Hawaii. The air had a crisp, clean smell; it seemed to drive out any indoors odors in my room, giving me a refreshed feeling.

One thing I sensed was the relative quiet. The effect was quite subtle...and poetic. I could hear birdsong in the morning, rather than the juttering, sliding ambiance of traffic. In my mind, I imagined that life in pre-Industrial Japan, perhaps even pre-Tokugawa Japan, was akin to this. The dominant soundscape was pristine; a suspension of the technological. Here, the walls of the compound seemed to ward off street-level noise, leaving the aural ambience of wind, trees, birds, and earth to compose music to my ears. The setting was almost rustic. The air had a crisp, clean smell; it seemed to drive out any indoors odors in my room, giving me a refreshed feeling.

Breakfast consisted of some sweet rice, shortbread, toast and the requisite tea and coffee. I noticed that Megumi and Keiichi preferred coffee, while Belldandy liked to savor a cup of tea. Skuld gulped down her chocolate milk and juice. Urd was busy gulping something down too, a bottle of sake. I shyly inquired as to the status of the bathroom and Keiichi informed me that he would show me how to use it after breakfast. Megumi looked a lot better today; the exhaustion that drew her face yesterday being fully driven off by a good rest.

"There is some truth to the notion of 'beauty sleep'", I mused, gripped by with my own early-morning languor.

I expected Belldandy to be devoted to Keiichi, but the depth of her actual feelings surpassed my expectations. She cooked for us all, and packed a tastefully designed bento box lunch for Keiichi. She would often stare into his eyes wistfully with the countenance of a satisfied soul. Her presence suggested to my mind one dictionary's definition of grace: seemingly effortless beauty. Belldandy was animated with grace when she was around her mortal boyfriend. I observed her as she looked at Keiichi's brown orbs...and I could almost imagine how lost she must feel in them. She truly loved Keiichi from the core of her essence. A glinting selfish thought reacted with jealousy, but my higher 'anima' was happy to bear witness to the privilege of such a powerful bonding between two spirits.

After everybody left the table, I found myself listening to Megumi. She explained that she didn't have to go so early to school today; she would catch a ride with Sora Hasegawa. I asked her what was different about her school schedule today, attempting just to make light conversation with this beautiful Japanese girl. She started to sob as she related the whole story about Yamashita-sensei and his heart attack.

I felt deeply touched by her respect for her professor and the force of her feelings of concern for him. After some casual discussion, I informed Megumi that I was finishing a dissertation on a topic in Asian history relating to studies of the consciousness. She looked at me in wide-eyed shock.

"No way! You can't be more than 23 or 24! That makes you close to _my_ age! And you're this (making a pinching gesture with her fingers) close to a Ph.D.? I don't believe you!"

"So how old are you?"

"Never ask a woman her age! Didn't you learn that in grade school?" Megumi answered me indignantly. Then she softened her bearing.

"I'm 22!" she said in a near-whisper.

"No way! You look like you're 20!" I answered truthfully. Megumi grinned at me and dipped her head with a momentary embarrassment. Then she smiled broadly and repeated her argument.

"Sooo, if you're my age...how can you be farther along then Yamashita-sensei? Even as it is, he only has a Masters...and you claim to be working on a doctorate?"

"As if you knew the kind of work 'only a Masters' entails!" I teased her, semi-seriously. I assessed the situation in a realistic vein; in Megumi's eyes I probably looked like a spaced-out hippie...in total contrast to the average gakusen-type college student. No wonder Megumi thought it improbable.

"By the way, I just turned 29. Try me, Megumi. Tell me what you are studying and I'll 'profess' on it."

"29? No way! Okay, hotshot...let's see if you're for real!" she said, suddenly looking at me with a determined expression. She giggled slyly.

"Describe to me what was happening in China during the late Ming!" She sat back and folded her arms in satisfaction.

"College-level stuff, too," she added.

I could tell by her smug expression that she was thinking, "No way would this gaijin from Hawaii know anything about that."

During the next ten minutes, I gave her a salient rundown on a broad list of subjects relating to the late Ming: economics, painting, medicine, culture, religion, politics, literature, etc. Then I discussed the contributions of the ethnic minorities in China, and how their cultures interpenetrated with other Asian peoples. Then I jokingly added how Akutagawa was fascinated with some late Ming poets, such as Chen Zilong and Zhu Yizun. Then I quoted several passages from his journals and novels that indicated this.

Megumi looked at me with gathering awe, then her expression relaxed into a grudging respect.

"You sound just like a teacher! You really do know this stuff!" She jokingly called me Cevn-sensei, and we both laughed. Urd had entered the dining room and was quietly listening to our discussion, a look of condescending amusement on her face. Megumi patted me on the top of the shoulder, Japanese style, and screwed her face up thoughtfully for a second, then made a suggestion.

"Why don't you apply to fill in for Yamashita-sensei's post?"

I smiled at Megumi's little joke...then I saw the sincerity of her steadfast expression. She was in earnest! I felt a shock and then gasped audibly. I had just arrived on Wednesday; now two days later, Megumi is suggesting that I get a job at Nekomi Tech as a _teacher_. There must be some kind of hyperkinetic pace of life here in the temple! I know that my mouth was hanging open like a flytrap, because Megumi and Urd both started giggling. I felt the kind of paralysis that accompanies public humiliation!

Because of my bouts with depression, I hadn't been able to hold steady work in several years. Studying was a hard enough task, taking every bit of my energy. With the episodes of depression being unpredictable as they were, I was always juggling projects. Fortunately, the department worked with me on this: when I got into a deep bummer, I could make up any missed work a few weeks later with no penalty. Besides, they were always highly impressed with my academic work. But to take on a teaching role with Japanese students, known all the world over for their rigorous academic expectations? I wouldn't have the protective comfort of an academic department that knew about my temporary incapacities due to depression. Reluctantly, I admitted that I wouldn't even begin to make the cut. Feeling at a loss to reply to Megumi, I looked to Urd for help. Urd shook her head as if to say "you're on your own on this one" then her face became hard and she started in on me.

"Why don't you take up Megumi's suggestion? Just think of all the girls you'd have in your class, beautiful college women just like Megumi!" I flushed at her blatant insinuation while Megumi giggled. Urd became more engaged in her effort to embarrass me.

"They would be 'bothering' you all the time! Hee..hee, I can just hear them: 'Cevn-sensei, could you help me understand the Kama Sutra.' 'Cevn-sensei, I need some special tutoring after school...can you come to my house and give me _private_ lessons?'" My face felt warm.

Urd laughed out loud at my expense.

"Then they would be asking 'Why is Cevn-sensei hiding in the teacher's lounge?' Heheheh! You would be the talk of the campus...the too-shy professor of love!" I felt resentful and frustrated that Urd was making a mockery of my defensiveness. Especially with _this_ issue!

"What is there to explain about the Kama Sutra; everybody knows it's an old Indian sex manual!" Megumi added. Now they were both using me as a comic foil!

I felt choked with panic and muttered "I'll think about it" under my breath and retired to my room. I heard Urd yelling down the hallway, _"Hey...try a tactful exit next time!"_ as I entered my room. Damn her, she keeps stirring things up! Nervously, I picked up the strange book and started absentminded flicking through the pages. I realized that I missed the comfort of my NA friends and my therapist. I resolved to get hooked up with a doctor next week. These people were driving me nuts with their unpredictability!

Keiichi broke my reverie by yelling, "Bathroom's free!" in my door. I followed him to the bathroom. It was a traditional-style bathroom, with a deep tub of hot water and an adjoining shower to wash off in. He explained to me that I was to use the shower to soap and rinse first, and then soak in the steamy water. He showed me where the towels were, and left me to my fate.

I undid my robe and made sure the door was shut. I recalled too well about Urd's sneaking in on Keiichi while he was in the bath. I hoped that Skuld by now knew not to use the hot bath water as a transport within the house. I was frightened, because of the scars on my soul that years of sexual abuse had taken out on me. I was super-paranoid about my body. Not that I am ugly, or anything, but I just didn't want to be seen naked. In the past, I was so ashamed of myself that I couldn't walk around without a shirt, and it took years before I felt comfortable even going barefoot in public. This was the price of years of sexual abuse...that I paid every day of my adult life.

As I untoweled myself, I prayed fervently that Urd wouldn't choose now as a time to try one of her 'games'. I dipped my foot in the water. HOT! It felt like this water was hot enough to boil a lobster. But my foot grew used to the heat, and eventually I found myself soaking up to my chest in the water. I actually felt a deep peace, and a sense of relief as the water enveloped me. It was _totally_ relaxing. I wanted to drift off into a quiet place in my mind.

I got out and soaped and showered, then dried off with a towel, brushed my hair back in a ponytail and put on the robe. I walked back to my room and let the air dry me.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

With Megumi and Keiichi gone, Belldandy decided to take Cevn on a tour of the temple grounds since things in the household were relatively quiet. Skuld had emerged only briefly from her lab to eat breakfast, then returned to assembling her invention. Urd said she was planning to inventory her stock of medicines today, and then resume work on an experimental potion she was concocting.

As Urd heard Belldandy talking to Cevn as they walked behind the temple, she momentarily considered drafting up a super-powerful love potion for Cevn, since he seemed so touchy around women.

"That would be hilarious! He'd probably implode with embarrassment!" she thought. But she decided against it after further reflection; tampering with Cevn might be tantamount to tampering with the Almighty. Urd didn't want _that_ kind of trouble. Besides, the whole group would be together for this weekend's finishing touches to their team's solar racer, and Urd didn't want any screw ups if she decided to dose Cevn. She recalled the time Tamiya took one of her love potions and started _chasing her_ around town...this one incident was more than enough to teach Urd caution, even if she got the best of the brutish sempai.

After showing Cevn the temple grounds, Belldandy relaxed in her room, busily knitting a sweater vest for Keiichi. Even though it was the end of winter, she was hoping that he'd still be able to use it. She wondered how the race next weekend would go.

"Cevn has arrived at an important juncture in all of our lives," she thought. The upcoming race had required months of planning and building. And it was all going to come to a head in a week. Once more, Toshiyuki Aoshima had invested a lot of his father's money in an experimental vehicle. His attitude was barely tolerable; he would surely outdo himself to defeat the Club.

But what really troubled her was Keiichi. As the racing club's driver, the onus was on him. He hadn't lost a race since Bell met him three years ago. She wondered how he would be able to hold up emotionally if he lost this race. She knew, along with everyone else, that this race was not just a local or collegiate competition. It was international in scope: a select invitational affair with racing teams from all over the world. Her memory returned to the day Keiichi ran up to her after coming home from school, excitedly yelling "We got invited to the Solar Federation's solar car race!!" The ensuing three months of preparation had severely taxed all the Nekomi Tech. Motor Club members.

Belldandy's thoughts returned to the present. With Mara hanging around, things could get outright dangerous. Every time Keiichi raced, there was the possibility of an accident, regardless of whether her Demonic counterpart was involved or not. Her cheerful disposition belied the fact that she sometimes worried about Keiichi being injured.

"Not sometimes. Frequently," she admitted to herself in a soft voice. Yes, Mara would not be above causing an accident, because she knew that she could hurt Belldandy via Keiichi. But Belldandy also wondered about the strange book in Cevn-san's room. This was a puzzle that all her divine intuition could not solve! She knew that she had to resign herself to the fact that the Ultimate Force would eventually reveal the mystery of the book sometime in the future.

In his room, Cevn contemplated Megumi's suggestion. Nitpicked it in his mind. No, he had sworn off wearing business suits. No way. Never. And no haircut either. He knew enough Japanese to get by, but would that be enough to satisfy the requirements of an instructor's role? Or the students? He remembered with indignance about how some fellow students made fun of one of his Philosophy professors, a man who hailed from Mainland China and possessed a less-than perfect grasp of English. Philosophically, the man could weave rings around most of the students in the class... Cevn projected his imagination into the realm of 'what if?' What would he wear? How would he act? Here, in a strange new land, he could start a whole new life over again. Would his depression interfere? What about his past as a active drug addict? It was complicated, but he sensed that fate had given him an opportunity, and that it was the right thing to do. He called the school and arranged for an interview next Tuesday.

At school, Keiichi was bound up in the task of finalizing the specs for the solar racer. Like a fickle dieter, it was still 3 kg. too heavy. He, Ootaki and Tamiya argued fervently over which components could be trimmed, or lightened. The chassis itself could not be lightened, because this race specified that the superstructure of the chassis had to weigh exactly 45 kg. Each team could design the chassis anyway they wanted, but the weight limit was strict. The representatives of the International Solar Federation had already visited the N.I.T. campus two weeks ago to confirm the chassis's volume. Any alteration of the chassis at this point would result in a disqualification.

Consequently, the challenge of this race was in the design of all the mechanical parts. His team's chassis had already been weighed in; now the remainder of the task was for them to weed their way through the give-and-take of weight vs. efficiency. The sponsors were going to award the winning team with an unspecified cash prize, which was rumored to be very generous. The prize was intended to fund further research towards solar powered vehicles. Looking at the mostly-assembled solar racer, he again realized that what was being tested was the engineering know-how of each entry, especially in the field of engine dynamics.

During lunch, Megumi's spirits were somewhat subdued. The fact of the matter of her dolorous mood remained; being in school only served as a reminder of her unfortunate Yamashita-sensei. She was also worried about the race and wanted to be working with the others on the design, but her schedule would not permit that today. She would have to wait for the weekend. She excitedly told her friends that she, Megumi, had found a possible replacement for their sensei; a young gaijin from Hawaii with long hair and a thorough knowledge of Asia. Her friends bantered excitedly about this prospect during their lunch hour, lifting all the girl's spirits a little bit.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

I was stymied by the question about whether I should apply to Nekomi Tech. Damn Megumi for even mentioning it! And damn Urd too, for making such a scene! There were so many positions and issues to consider...but overall, I was sick of living like a cripple with this disabling depression. I just wanted to do something that resembled self-support, something that could dignify me a little bit when I looked in the mirror. After nine years of college, I should at least be worth something to someone.

After a half an hour, I was leaning towards a decision. I could at least try to get the instructor's role. I reminded myself to check the weekend paper to see if the position was advertised. Being a major Technical Institute, they would either fill from within or quickly advertise the opening. But how would they react to a gaijin applicant? Also, how would I react to them?

"What the hell, you _should _apply," the inner voice inside of me prompted. I had learned to trust that voice, even if it sometimes guided me into spiritual insanity.

A delicious aroma filled my nostrils just as Urd opened the door to tell me that dinner was ready. I walked down the hall to the living room and saw everyone there turn to look at me with smiling faces. I felt a little embarrassed at all the attention; obviously they had decided to put me in the spotlight for some reason.

"-Welcome to our humble abode, Cevn-san!-" Keiichi said clearly in English with a mock-oriental-polite voice. _That_ was a surprise! "-May you honor our insignificant household with your august presence and sagacity!-" he added with a grin.

Everyone started laughing at this after he translated it into Japanese. I was impressed with his English and his sense of humor. I bowed deeply to him and replied in English, then Japanese.

"-Velly solly, but humble servant no can come crose to your gleat magnanimity.-" This brought a peal of laughter from Keiichi and Megumi.

Belldandy and her sisters were beaming with laughter and smiles. Keiichi tried to reply to this, but choked up with mirth midway through and said, "Oh screw it! I spent too much time drawing engine designs during English class in high school! Anyway, Bell and I thought that since you are new to the household, we would have an American-style dinner as a sort of welcoming party."

"A...a welcoming party?" I said with confusion.

"Yes! Welcoming with a capital 'W'," Keiichi said in slightly inflected English. "We decided yesterday to invite you to live with us, that is, if you wish to..."

"What! You would let me live here? With you?"

"We need another male here to keep Keiichi from going nuts. Besides, you're still under my charge...and it would be easier for me to keep an eye on you if you lived here! That way, you wouldn't get _me_ in trouble with the Big Meany," Urd bluntly stated. Skuld shot her a squinting look of disgust.

"Cevn-san, we would love to have you live with us. Please say that you will," Belldandy added with a warm look in her eyes. How could I say no to eyes like hers? I looked each of their faces, pausing for a decision while my heart rejoiced at their caring gesture.

"Okay." I managed to say softly before I felt tears in my eyes. Urd looked at me, obviously curious about my tearing eyes. Very quickly, I felt a deep tingle of joy at the prospect of living here.

"Now that the speeches are done, let's _party_!" Urd announced, hefting an open bottle of sake and pouring drinks for everyone, except Skuld. When she came to my glass, I quickly put a hand over the top of it, and she looked at me with surprise.

"Whatsa matter, can't ya handle it?," she defiantly questioned.

"Sorry Urd, I'm allergic to alcohol," I replied. Very allergic, I reminded myself. I couldn't explain to them the source of my reluctance to drink any sake. From what little I had observed in Urd, she had already been 'partied' and was tending towards the argumentative. Belldandy, sweet angel, sensed the potentially awkward moment, and offered me tea.

"I cooked up an American recipe: Chicken and dumplings with mashed potatoes and apple pie for dessert. I hope you like it, Cevn-san!" she said excitedly.

Skuld interjected, "Yeeech!" Everyone turned to her, as a silence descended on the table. She put her fingers in the sides of her mouth and made a face, then exclaimed, "Fooled you all!!"

I heard Urd say under her breath, "What a child!" I was hoping that Skuld didn't hear that, because I didn't want my 'yokoso' dinner devolving into a melee. Belldandy played the role of host and served me first as guest of honor, then she filled the other's plates. I noted to myself how skillfully she had absorbed Japanese culture in just three years and thanked her profusely. She was a natural.

It was delicious. I hadn't eaten a home-cooked meal like this in years. I explained to them the story about how apple pie became an American tradition like Chevrolets. Keiichi noted that "Chevy's suck. I would rather have a ..."

"A ffff..., you mean," Urd said. "You know, dear Keiichi...it rhymes with truck..."

Keiichi turned beet-red as Urd's little 'joke' sank in. Belldandy and Skuld didn't catch her attempt at ribaldry; Megumi reacted with a embarrassed smile. From that point on, everybody stuck to conversing in Japanese.

The next few minutes were spent with Skuld, Keiichi and Megumi arguing the various merits of American cars. Everyone has any number of 'blind spots' in their knowledge of subjects...one of mine is cars. I am probably the most ignorant of people when it comes to cars. So I just listened, a little uncomfortable that my silence betrayed my total display of ignorance. If I am so ignorant about mechanical techniques, how can I make it as a teacher at N.I.T.?, I wondered despondently.

Megumi then asked me if I had given thought to her suggestion from this morning.

"What do you think about it, Cevn? You can do it, I know you could!" she said confidently. Her confidence, not mine. I felt everyone's eyes bore into me.

"Hey everybody!" I announced, "Since you have welcomed me into your home and it looks like I'm here to stay, I've decided to follow a suggestion Megumi made this morning...and apply to Nekomi Tech." Keiichi looked like he was going to drop his fork in mid-bite.

"What! _What_ did you suggest to him, little sister?" he said with an accusatory tone to his voice. "He just got here a couple of days ago, and now you're trying to convince him to enroll at our school? He may not even be interested in engineering!"

"No! That's not what I suggested..." Megumi replied defensively. She described how she had found out that I was a ABD (all but dissertation) Ph.D. candidate in a topic relating to Asian Studies, and that she had simply suggested that I apply for the vacancy caused by Yamashita-sensei's absence. Keiichi looked at me with even more disbelief written on his face.

"What about if they find out that he lives here? Teachers and students can't mix, you know!" Keiichi noted. Megumi's face fell flat at this statement of fact.

I felt a little crestfallen at this. I had briefly nurtured a hope that Megumi's interest in me was in the realm of "something more than just a friend"; but this latest revelation hadn't occurred to me either. If I was hired, I would become her teacher and a faculty member of Keiichi's university. It would impact my relationship with her as well as with Keiichi. I thought sadly that there would be no possibility of romance between Megumi and I. Then I remembered that there would probably never be any romance in my life anyway...so why bother thinking about what might have been.

"I wonder if _she_ thought about this?" I quietly asked myself.

Megumi looked surprised, then she said, "If it's a choice between Cevn working at Nekomi or moving out, I'd prefer that he stays here!" Everyone agreed with this. I feverishly examined the options and settled on a possible solution.

"I could get a mail box in the city! As a newly arrived gaijin, they wouldn't suspect that I am living with anyone local to the Chiba region...they would obviously assume that I don't have any family ties here. I could tell them that I am renting a temporary flat or mansion apartment, a..and that I am planning to save up enough money to get a real place to live, whereupon I could offer them a real address! They wouldn't have a clue, so long as I left early in the morning and caught the bus or walked there, so as to not be traced back to here. By the way, how far is N.I.T.?"

"Several kilometers," Keiichi replied.

"Okay, then the bus it is. As long as everyone keeps it cool about where I live, including all your friends at school, then it should be okay. I disappeared so quickly from Hawaii anyway, there's going to be no mail coming to me for a while."

Belldandy gave a start at the last statement I made. Her face visibly paled. I was concerned at her reaction. What did she know about my life back in Hawaii? The mention of my previous life seemed to give her a stab of pain. I looked at Urd, who was shaking her head sadly at me.

The group debated this suggestion and agreed to it.

"Hey, Megumi, since this is your suggestion, uh...I need you to do me a favor."

"What?"

"I want you to take me shopping. I need to get clothes anyway, and you seem to have the most fashion sense here..."

"She does not! _I_ do!" interrupted Urd, visibly perturbed.

"...and of the two Nekomi students in the room, you would have a better notion of what a guy, possibly a teacher, should wear. No offense, Keiichi."

"None taken, Cevn. Time to take responsibility, Megumi," he teased his sister. I watched Megumi to see how she would deal with my request. She looked thoughtful, then responded, "Yes, for the sake of humanity I'll do it. Besides, I love shopping, right Bell?"

"Let me go, too!" said Skuld. She must have caught my look of surprise, because she frowned at me and stated emphatically, "Don't even think it has anything to do with you--I just want to spend some time out of the house with Megumi!"

"Sure, you can come with us, Skuld! That'd be cool!" Megumi must have felt a little insecure going shopping alone with a man. I instantly understood that she couldn't bring her friends along because of the teaching thing. With that matter settled, the household shifted into its evening routine. Urd was plastered and went to her room, mumbling something about my inability to "tie one on". Skuld was a vision of excitement as I saw her bound off to her lab. Keiichi and Belldandy looked longingly into each other's eyes, chatting in low whispers.

Megumi called me into the living room to discuss our plan of attack tomorrow. She didn't know about the money that my unknown benefactor had left me.

I decided that it was time for me to settle accounts. I counted up the money and went back into the dining room where Bell and Keiichi were quietly talking. I sat down at the table and gave Keiichi half the money I had found. Keiichi's eyes grew big with shock as he saw the yen notes.

"This is for the household. I hope it doesn't cause too many problems, but it's half of what I found. I hope it will cover the cost of my living here and then some."

Keiichi was still dumbfounded by the three stacks of 10,000 yen notes that were on the table. By his reaction, I knew that it must have been a small fortune. Urd made some ignorable comment about how I should put her on an allowance. I explained to him about how I had found the money in the mysterious book that showed up in the mail the day I had arrived. I felt some guilt, because this kind of money was far beyond what I was used to...and probably beyond what the household has seen in a while. Keiichi looked at me, inclining his head slightly as if to say "thanks". His face showed visible relief...and gleefulness.

"Anything that is left over you can apply to the club, or whatever else, Keiichi."

Belldandy looked at me warmly, and chimed in her thanks as well. I felt good that I was at least mature enough to spread the wealth, rather than miserly hoard the yen. A sense of relief passed; this potentially clumsy moment had come off pretty well. No one had lost face. I realized that Keiichi and his 'tribe' were my only hope to surviving this 'new life in Japan.' I would need their help, both human and divine. The money couldn't even begin to compensate for what they had already offered me. To my surprise, I was beginning to feel at home.

Megumi walked up behind me and hooked her arm in mine in a sisterly fashion and led me off into the living room. She pulled out some photo books of local shops and suggested several stores. It was obvious that she was an expert shopper.

"Megumi, this is as scary for me as it is for you. I know you barely know me and I appreciate the risk you are taking by going shopping with me. Please understand that I have a difficult time with women...and don't be surprised if I am totally stressed out tomorrow." She looked at softly with her brown eyes, clearly caught off guard by my disclosure.

"Hey, it'll be alright! I'm not going to bite you or anything!"

"I'm more scared of what you'll put me in, clothes-wise!"

She teased me by threatening to select outfits that would make everybody laugh at me. I wondered why I wasn't feeling the normal (for me) feelings of fear and shame. What I privately termed my "Woman Phobia". This situation should be setting off all of my triggers, but it wasn't. What was different?

I thought of the one other thing I really needed to take care of for myself.

"Megumi, are there any stores here that sell musical instruments, specifically synthesizers, samplers, mixers and effects?"

She thought for a minute, and then told me she knew of a place that had a lot of gear.

"Good", I thought. At least I could play my music here.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

The next morning, Megumi and Skuld told me that we were going to catch the bus to the downtown district in Chiba. On the map, Chiba didn't look like a city of a million inhabitants, but I knew that it had a large population, like so many cities in the Tokyo conurbation. My fears at breakfast about Megumi borrowing Keiichi's bike and making me sit in the sidecar were abated. I had assumed that Skuld would simply transport herself via water to wherever we were going. But Keiichi had already left to meet with his club buddies for another round of design talks/arguments. So it was the bus for us.

Megumi was all dressed up for our shopping expedition. She wore a pair of stone-washed denim jeans and a black tight top with a Nekomi Racing Club tee-shirt over it, with the collar trimmed out. Over this she wore a stunning white leather jacket with rolled up sleeves and a rock-n-roll design on the back. She had on a pair of short boots with chaps strapped over them. When I saw her, all I could do was catch my breath, as I was inclined to whistle at her. Skuld looked at me with disdain. She was dressed in her traditional jacket-cum-poncho with black spandex-looking hose and a girlishly dainty dress. She toted an umbrella. I smiled at her and told her that she was going to attract all the boys attentions while we were in the mall or wherever we were going.

Megumi saw the effect that her outfit had on me. She must have been used to making guys nervous with her beauty. She had an intense look on her face that told me that she was intent on completing this task with no room for fashion failure.

"Megumi, you...look incredible!" I finally said. She smiled brightly at me and thanked me for the complement. She seemed so friendly at first, but then she also seemed to be something more.

We left the temple and headed towards the ocean. The temple was located about 3 kilometers uphill from the shores, right at the edge of a large hill. Makuhari was crowded with houses and apartment flats, but it lacked the urban concentration of multistory buildings, such as I had seen in Tokyo.

We caught the bus at the Makuhari station and traveled south on National Highway 16. Megumi pointed out the Makuhari Messe Industrial Exhibition Hall, nestled amidst a series of shipyards and industrial complexes. At little further south, she pointed out a road the led to the oceanside Inage Seashore Park, a recreation area mostly frequented by senior citizens and lovers. After a slight bend in the highway, we entered Chiba. Chiba, unlike our neighborhood in Makuhari, was a heavily built-up area. The shopping district was extremely congested due to the unseasonably warm weather.

Upon debarking the bus, she played the part of the tour guide and pointed out to me the local sites of Chiba-shi. Skuld, for her part, was particularly interested in the ice cream and confectionery stores. Megumi catered to my Asian interests and pointed out various temples and older buildings. I absently caught myself commenting on the architectural motives of the buildings and shrines. Megumi quietly giggled and reminded me that she was not in school, nor was I.

"Yet..." I replied, and her broad smile spoke volumes.

We went to a casual dress store first. Megumi tried to get me in a suit and I refused. She reacted with mock-frustration until Skuld started to argue with me about my reservations on wearing a suit. We bickered for a little while and then compromised on a light blue blazer set with a silver tie and white shirt. Next, we went to a college-type shop, where I bought a number of sweatshirts, jogging outfits, a gi, and some jeans and T-shirts. Megumi kept commenting that the clothes I bought went together as well as "zippos and rainforests." Despite her light-hearted sarcasm, she really was an expert shopper; I happily surrendered to the fact that, compared to Megumi, my fashion sense was of the Luddite variety. What was helpful was the explanations she offered when encouraging me to defer to her "good tastes" and try something new. At least this way, I knew what I was getting into as far as style. After this, we ate lunch at her friend Sora's parent's ramen shop.

I knew from the manga portrayal of her that Sora Hasegawa was a little withdrawn and quiet. But I didn't expect to feel such dignity and strength when Megumi introduced her to me. Sora lit up when she saw Skuld in our little company. She was anything but withdrawn when she was around familiars.

"Skuld! How are you! How's the latest project going?" Sora and Skuld chatted excitedly about engineering details, and I realized that Sora was a mathematics genius. I quickly got lost when the two stepped beyond differential calculus and fuzzy set theory. I asked Sora about her interests in the motor club and she animatedly replied with a stream of mecha-babble. Megumi joined in, until I grabbed a straw, tore off the end, and shot it between her and Sora. This drew a scowl from Sora's mother and retaliation from Skuld, who winged a soft drink lid at my head. Sora's mom was minding the serving bar, watching our table closely. I didn't want to get Sora in trouble, so I picked up our mess, smiled guiltily at Ms. Hasegawa and tossed it in the trash. She nodded her head commandingly, then returned to serving customers.

Megumi and Sora were embarrassed at this, while Skuld seemed amped up and wanting to play some more. I listened as Megumi related how trialsome it was to get me to try any new clothes...Sora replied that she should take me to Harajuku, where I would fit right in. When I asked about Harajuku, all three giggled with suspect levity. I rejoined the conversation and confided to Sora that I was going to apply for the open job at Nekomi. She seemed excited about this and politely wished me good luck. Then she disappeared into the back kitchen, presumably to start work.

Megumi apologized for drifting off into shoptalk with Sora, and we left for another round of shopping. By this time, the bags were getting heavy, so I hailed a cab and paid him to deliver the goods to my new home, despite Skuld's offer to 'transport' them back.

I didn't know that she had _that_ power yet, the power to transport objects other than herself!! Once more, I was learning about the difference between the manga characters and their real life counterparts. Next, we went into the 'funky' men's clothing store. Megumi made a whole list of tasteful suggestions and I bought them all, even the ones I was unfamiliar with. Skuld acted every bit the little girl, obviously getting bored at all the attention I was getting from Megumi. I knew nothing about what was considered stylish in Japan, so I trusted Megumi on this one. I got a few clothes on my own initiative, with Megumi's reaction varying from distaste to humor to what looked like feminine appreciation. Skuld was becoming sarcastic at this point, so I teased her about being 'childish'. She looked at me with a mixture of anger and hurt. I felt guilty and apologized to her, indicating that I knew she was bored and that I would try to make it up to her.

"Ice Cream!" Skuld shouted, and we went to an ice cream parlor. I got Skuld some boxes of frozen ice cream bars to take home, which she transported immediately.

It was late in the afternoon and I asked Megumi to take me to a place she liked to buy her own clothes at. There, I humored her into trying on an outfit that she had been considering, and then I surprised her and bought it.

"I hope you don't mind this as a thank-you for all your help today," I explained. I didn't want her to feel obligated or weird about it. Fortunately, she assented. I was grateful once again that I often appeared 'harmless' to women. Don Juan or Narahira, I'm not.

I asked the two if they could hold out long enough so that I could visit the music shop. Megumi looked at me tiredly and said she would. I went to the music shop and bought several digital and analogue synthis, a mixer, a music computer, some sequencers and drum machines, and a host of effects circuits and pedals. A good portion of the gear was at the store. The manager got on the phone to Akibahara and located the rest of what I needed. Megumi was mystified by the whole process.

I was elated! While I was trying out equipment, Skuld was confounding the manager of the place by asking some very technical questions about the electronics. It was such a trip watching this 12ish year-old girl befuddling the 'music instrument guru'. He kept telling her, "I don't know how it works!" then he would pound out some bit on the keyboard from a J-pop or American House music song. What I finally assembled for my home studio was far better than my setup in Honolulu! Megumi asked me what all of this electronics was for and I confessed that I was a musician.

"Megumi, to you, all the mechanical parts of a car or some other vehicle make sense as a whole, as well as individually. The end result is that it runs faster and more efficiently than before. To me, music serves as the mechanics; these instruments, when combined, create a better whole. We're both creators in the process of developing what is to be revealed...the only difference is for you, motorcycles rule, and for me, music rules."

"Yeah! I have been interested in cars and bikes since I was a little girl. Keiichi used to tease me, and the other girls used to call me a 'tomboy' because of it. I guess it is a male sorta thing. But a good mechanic cannot live by testosterone alone. I have _definitely_ earned my keep in the motor racing club. Being Keiichi's younger sister is hard sometimes, especially if some guy is hitting on me...he can be kinda protective sometimes. Big Brother Syndrome, y'know. Besides, I love to create new engine configurations, even if Skuld thinks she's better at it than me!" she disclosed.

I felt sad for her when she mentioned the teasing; I had repeatedly read that childhood taunting in Japan was brutal...one of the ways that the 'nail that stands tall gets hammered down', to use a Japanese colloquialism.

"That's cause I _am_ better than you!" Skuld had overheard our conversation. The two argued for a moment about who was the 'real winner' in the Robot Wars competition they held three years ago, while I paused for a second to let Megumi's revelation sink in. Megumi was single! Keiichi had an older-brother protective streak in him. I then decided that I could not in clear conscience 'hit on' Megumi. It would cause more problems than it was worth. Then I thought about her being single...and my own loneliness opened up like a devouring maw. I flashed an expression of deep disappointment which Megumi noticed.

"You okay, Cevn? You look pretty down. Getting tired of shopping?"

"No...well maybe. Really, though, I just felt a little sadness when you mentioned that you didn't have a boyfriend right now. I'll make it one of my tasks to help you any way I can to change this fact." I panicked for a moment, because I realized my ambiguity could be taken in the wrong way by her. But, despite the half-truth, I did feel saddened that such a unique young girl would be without a match.

"She's too 'uppity' for most guys; they can't see beyond her ambition and high self-esteem; doubtless it threatens them," I observed to myself.

Megumi's confident and cheerful "thanks" was all I needed to confirm that she didn't interpret my remark as a sexual come-on. I silently thanked her for a small miracle. Skuld seemed interested in an oscillator circuit that would analyze the harmonic properties of a sound and graph it. She looked at me pleadingly and I went ahead and bought it for her. She could have easily asked one of her sisters to simply conjure it up, but she seemed rather pleased to see a mortal actually spend mortal money and give it to her.

On the way home on the bus, Megumi stunned me again with a new round of confessions.

"Cevn, I think it's good that you are here with us. I'm really glad we spent the day together." Her eyes started to tear up and I wondered if she was still reeling from the effects of the loss of her teacher.

"You know, being with you...is kinda like having an older brother," she confessed. If I would have been drinking a juice at that moment, I would have choked on it. I was stunned by her comparison.

"But you already have Keiichi, _he's_ your older brother."

"Yes, but we're so close in age, sometimes...it doesn't feel that way. Sometimes, it feels...the other way around, you know. Like I'm his _older_ sister. He always comes to me for advice about how he should treat Belldandy. He can be so nice, but yet he can also lack self-confidence. With an older guy, oops, I don't mean an old guy...I mean, with you in the house, maybe he could learn more confidence. A lot of his confidence comes from Belldandy and his racing club, but I wish more would come from within. Also..."

Megumi voiced her concerns about Keiichi, how she had noticed that, for all his assets, he had such a low regard for himself. "Maybe, you could teach him how to feel better about himself. That would really make me happy!" This was a huge, no, a weighty request. I barely knew Keiichi! I mused over the possibility of having Megumi as an 'adopted' younger sister. She was a sweet, spirited smart young woman. She had been clever and brave enough to suggest that I apply to N.I.T. to fill in for Yamashita-sensei. And she had been nice to me ever since I arrived.

Skuld chimed in unexpectedly, "Sometimes Urd doesn't seem like my older sister either! And sometimes, Belldandy can be...so naive!"

Megumi paused for several moments, the sounds of the bus interior seeming to stretch the quiet. She straightened up a little and continued.

"Also, I would like to feel what it is like to have an older brother-type man in my life. Like a _real_ older brother, several years older, whose strength and wisdom I could rely on." I coughed a nervous laugh at that last remark.

"The guys at school, my sempai, they just don't seem very mature. But I have this feeling about you...that you seem to know a lot about people," she added.

I must have looked at her with a hint of embarrassment. She seemed to be confusing 'older brother' with a father figure. And she definitely had me on a pedestal, for some unknown reason.

"You really do! I have been watching you in the process of moving in and getting to know us the past couple days. You have a good sense of humor, a positive outlook, you don't drink or do any drugs, and you really seem to be a good listener!"

"Megumi, you and I come from two totally different cultures, each with different expectations on family members, family values, and all sorts of other stuff, like dating, friendship..." I replied, hoping to inject some realism into Megumi's idealistic perspective.

"So what? In a way, Cevn, that is exactly why I'm asking you to do this for me. You could show me a lot of different ways to look at things...and I could do the same for you...we could both benefit!"

I hadn't considered this point. I would need a close friend right away to help me get grounded in my new environment...and Megumi had been kind to me. But how would Keiichi interpret her curiosity towards me? Could I trust myself, knowing that on my initial impression I naturally sensed a flashpoint romantic inclination towards this attractive Japanese girl? Unease around women had always made it quite impossible for me to engage a women in romantic terms. But in conflicts of morals and desire, remaining in a situation that preserved this conflict was tempting fate.

But I had put what I thought was morally good in front of my own desires for a girlfriend a lot of times. Many women new to NA came with very low self-esteem; knowing only how to offer sex to receive the slightest semblance of love. I had never taken advantage of that vulnerability...instead I educated many women on how to have intimate friendships with men without sex. So I was inclined to think that I could do the right thing. But what about Keiichi? How would he appreciate being usurped somewhat as older brother? For that matter, would he feel resentful against Megumi for deigning him inadequate as an older brother?

Megumi seemed to anticipate this concern.

"Don't worry about Keiichi, he won't mind. He really likes you, even if he hasn't said so yet. Besides, I know he would appreciate having me 'out of his hair' some of the time, so he can spend some more time with Belldandy. Plus, you would have the privilege of getting to know me really well!" She looked at me with pleading brown eyes, and I saw her need in an instant. She wasn't joking, she really needed an guy somewhat older to discuss things with.

Skuld looked over at her and scowled. Megumi smiled at me and mock-pleaded, grabbing me by the sleeve, "C'mon Cevn! Pleassse!"

Normally, a woman grabbing me like that would have been enough to spin me out and cause me to flee the scene, just do whatever it took to get away to somewhere safe. But oddly, I didn't feel the drowning tides of anxiety. As for Megumi, I could see that she had reflected on this somewhat; it wasn't just a impulsive whim. But what could I do to help her? She was also on the bridge years between adolescence and adulthood. So was Keiichi, for that matter. Having an adult mentor might ease the transition.

I never had a younger sister. Suddenly it occurred to me that this was an opportunity to make up that deficit in my life. It would be good for me to have an affilial non-sexual tie with a woman, along the lines of an intense friendship. In the past few years, several women that I was attracted to had wanted me to be in their lives as a good friend rather than a boyfriend. Despite my disappointment at being passed over as boyfriend material, I learned a lot from these women. Having Megumi as an adopted younger sister would be great, I decided!

About this time, Skuld interrupted to inform us, "I've gotten along okay all this time without an older brother! Older brothers--who needs 'em?"

"Well, you really don't know what you're missing out on, Skuld!" Megumi countered. Skuld stuck her tongue out at this remark and Megumi pulled a face at her in response.

I could see the solicitous look in Megumi's eyes. I had no doubt of her sincerity. How could I turn down a request like this?

"All right, I'll be your adopted older brother, on one condition...that you be my hanai younger sister!" Megumi inquired about what hanai meant and I told her that in Hawaiian culture it meant the same thing as 'adopted', pretty much. She was all smiles as she clapped her hands excitedly, then gave me a tight hug.

"I'll will work hard to try to teach your older brother to feel better about himself. I think I know how I can go about doing this." Megumi looked at me with gratitude. She affectionately rested her head against my shoulder while holding my arm, to seal our filial agreement. Skuld looked at us with obvious distaste.

I asked Skuld how she was planning to help out with the upcoming race next week, hoping that this would bring her out of her funk. She had been a good girl while we were shopping, and I thanked her for offering to transport the stuff I bought today. She and Megumi excitedly told me that they were going to work on the solar panels, which was one of the most crucial components of the racer. The bus reached our stop and we three got off and walked towards the temple.

"Older brothers...who needs 'em!"

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

I heard the excited voices about a block before we reached the temple. Once inside the temple gate, I beheld a flurry of activity. There were N.I.T. Motor Club members hunched in a circle around what looked like a futuristic vehicle. It was really cool-looking: built low to the ground, emphasizing aerodynamics, with flared rows of solar cells in the back. Looking towards our temple house, I could see a crowd inside, poring over what looked like charts and diagrams.

Skuld and Megumi grew visibly animated as they saw the racer. Keiichi was crouched near the front, sanding around the face of the car. Others were in the rear, painting the chassis. He looked at us walking towards him and his eyes grew hard for a moment as he noticed that Megumi was walking close, _too_ close to me. Normally, I would be freaked out at a beautiful young woman like Megumi being so close to me, but with our new understanding it was tolerably comfortable. I read a look of suspicion and warning on his face. His expression seemed to say "don't you be hitting on my little sister!" Megumi wasn't kidding about that protective streak!

Megumi chose this moment to put her hand in mine and announce, "Keiichi, meet my new adopted older brother. Guess that makes him your adopted brother too!" An initial look of confusion, then relief mixed with distaste traced across Keiichi's visage.

I added with a shrug, "it was her idea, don't blame me!" I glanced back at the house to catch Urd shooting me a scathing look. What's up with _her_? I wondered.

Keiichi seemed to be in an accepting mood; he stood up and mock-bowed to me. I playfully punched him in the arm, while Megumi shouted, "You two knock it off, I don't want my brother's fighting!" We both looked at her and humored her, "Yes ma'am!" She hugged us both and reminded Keiichi, "I'm sorry, but I have to visit our aunt tonight, so I won't be able to stay around and work on the solar panel angles." Keiichi looked downcast at this. Megumi would be sorely missed.

Skuld shouted, stroking her pigtails excitedly, "I can do it! Let me work on it! C'mon, please? I helped design it!"

"Well we can't exactly say 'no' to one of the co-designers of the solar cell assembly, now can we?" Keiichi answered with a wink. Skuld jumped excitedly up and down, her hands held together in front of her heart. It cheered me to see the sensitive Skuld display such rambunctious joy!

Megumi kissed me on the cheek and excused herself. I heard Keiichi mutter, "My sister and her crazy ideas! I wonder how she came up with this one..." while his buddies laughed. Keiichi started to introduce me to his friends when Tamiya and Ootaki walked over.

Tamiya was about 6'4" and built like a NFL football player. He was possibly of Ainu heritage, as he had the strong, rugged facial features and darker complexion that Ainus are known for. He was dressed in a muscle T-shirt, a pair of Russian combat fatigues and military boots. Ootaki was a couple of inches shorter than I was, but his vertically moussed hair made him look taller than Tamiya. He was skinny, dressed in a studded leather jacket covering a Metallica T-shirt, black jeans and spray-painted Nikes.

I looked at several club members and decided to have a joke at the expense of Keiichi's sempai. I knew that they were driving him nuts sometimes, so I thought I would strike back on his behalf. I decided to play a little trick on the two older sempai.

Earlier, Keiichi had been telling me that they were badgering him with consistent bickering about design concerns, even when they didn't know anything about what was being discussed. He had confided in me that he was ready to pull his hair out a couple of times this week. I caught Keiichi's eye and winked.

"Hey Tamiya! Hey Ootaki! How'z it goin' dudes? I'm Cevn, Keiichi and Megumi's older brother! I'm living here with them now!" I tipped my newly purchased red beret to them while Keiichi looked at me in disbelief for a moment. I winked at him and he stopped his sanding to watch the comedy unfold. This casual introduction had the desired effect. Tamiya's mouth went agape with surprise, while his eyes bulged with suspicion. Ootaki's eyebrows shot up above his trademark round mirrored shades, while his tied-on smile went flat.

"What! Who are yuh? How do yuh know who we are? Whattya doin' here. Yuh're...Keiichi's older brother? Keiichi don' have an older brutha!" Tamiya sputtered out.

I replied. "It's no joke. I'm with Urd too, by the way!" Tamiya in particular reacted to this, shaking his head in shock.

Urd looked me over with distaste and acridly shouted from the house, "I heard that! He's definitely not one of mine!"

By this time, Keiichi had noticed the surprise and panic growing on the faces of his sempai and was choking with laughter at the inside joke, to my great satisfaction. This would take a little bit of the edge off of him.

"See how she likes to nag me!" I quickly interjected. Tamiya was halted in his tracks.

"Yuh with Urd? No way! How do yuh know my name? Yuh ain't no spy from another solar team, are yuh?"

Keiichi had watched the entire proceeding develop, and by this time had fallen backwards on the ground laughing hysterically. Ootaki looked at him and exclaimed, "What are you laughing at?"

Meanwhile, Tamiya eyed me. His comment about 'spy' caused me some concern as to what was developing in his mind. He underwent a gradual transformation from motor club sempai to WWF wrestler. Suspicion gave way to aggression and he started walking towards me, looking like a bull ready to charge.

"Oh great, he can't take a joke! He's going to kill me!," I thought in panic. "Damn, this is backfiring, and quick." I hastily thought of ways to salvage the situation before I got Tamiya-punched.

Right before Tamiya got to me, Keiichi interjected, "Hey guys, this is Cevn, our new house-guest! He's my sister's good friend, she sees him as an adopted older brother. He's living here temporarily...and Urd only brought him here from Hawaii. I told him all about you. Don't worry, Urd's still single, guys!" Tamiya stood in front of me and eyed me. I didn't blink down, but met his stare.

"He's going to apply to teach at N.I.T. next week, so don't do anything radical to him, Tamiya. He may be your teacher next year."

"What? Him my teacher? He's applying to N.I.T? What is duh world comin' to?" He looked at me again. "No way...he ain't no teacher. He looks too much like Ootaki, if Ootaki didn't do that girly mousse stuff to his hair like dem guys do in Harajuku."

Ootaki flipped him off while I felt the drift of Megumi and Sora's little 'inside joke' sink in.

"Those two...flaky chicks!" I thought resentfully as Tamiya continued in what was clearly his 'rant mode'. Skuld had even been in on their little 'joke'!

"Ah heard that N.I.T. was goin' downhill, but if dey have ta consider some freaky guy like dis...dey's sinkin' fast! If dey actually hire him, ah'm goin' ta demand theyz give me muh tuition back!" This drew a rousing round of laughter from everybody; I noticed Keiichi couldn't keep himself from joining in. Tamiya looked at them, then at me.

"Yuh 'brother' even thinks dis is funny!"

"Touché, Tamiya. Now we're even." I was smiling at him, and I offered a hand. He shook my hand, trying to crush it in his grip, and I responded by bearing down on his hand hard. He smiled at me in respect.

"Guy's gotta decent handshake, he can't be all that bad!"

Ootaki came over and said, "Cool threads, dude!" which brought down the house with laughter. I suddenly realized that I was dressed in a mix of Japanese and American clothes. I slapped him on the shoulder and shook his hand. Megumi saw that I was in an embarrassing predicament and she grabbed me and escorted me back to the house while the laughter continued. Keiichi seemed perplexed. I heard him say to the others, "My sister and her weird ideas. What is she up to this time?"

After Megumi picked some clothes for me, I returned to the gang of car freaks. I apparently was a hit with a number of the motor club members. They were pumping me for information about Hawaii; what I was hoping to do if I got hired at N.I.T.; if I knew anything about mechanics...

But I didn't know anything about N.I.T. and even less about motor mechanics. I excused myself, because I was looking forward to starting to put together my 'studio'.

When I entered the living room, I saw Belldandy playing the role of hostess, keeping everyone supplied with trays of candies and cakes and doing rounds with coffee, tea and sweetmeats. Urd was reclined in a chair in the corner of the room, cradling a bottle of Tamanohikari sake. All over the floor, people were seated on futons looking over design specs for the racer. My pile of boxes was catching some attention from a few of the members. There were about 10 members inside, as opposed to the 15 or so outdoors. Sora Hasegawa was laying on the floor, discussing something animatedly with a guy who wore a cheapo Noh mask on the side of his head.

I told Belldandy that I was going to put the boxes in my room.

"Oh no, you don't need to do that! Why don't you just use the room next to yours at the end of the hall for it?" I was stunned! They were going to give me my own 'hobby room'! As if she read my thoughts, Belldandy added, "Well, everyone has their own extra room except Megumi, who doesn't want one...so it would only be fair if we offered you one. Keiichi and I discussed it, and it's okay with us!"

I thanked her profusely (and thanked Keiichi mentally) for their consideration. I'm sure I had the look of a kid before Christmas as I started hauling boxes to the back of the hallway.

I spent the next several hours unpacking. Besides having a lot of musical components, I had bought what seemed like kilos of different cables. Foam, cardboard and plastic baggies was everywhere. It was all confusing at first, but a system design began to form in my mind and I started setting up. I was tempted to play around with some of the keyboards and samplers, but I kept focused on the task at hand. I was giddy with excitement, and almost dropped the Synclavier IV workstation.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Around 11 pm, the group decided to call it a night. Tamiya announced to all that they were going to have a pre-race party.

"And where's that going to be?" Keiichi asked.

"Why, here of course! Everybody's all already here, so we should camp out da night here and party!" His sempai's seniority made this a command, not a suggestion.

"Great!" thought a disenchanted Keiichi.

"Ooooh, a party here," remarked an excited Belldandy, innocently. Keiichi rolled his eyes at his girlfriend's naivety. Urd broke out the bottles, and then went to Cevn's room.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

About 11:30pm, the work crews broke up. I heard a few people drive off, and it seemed like everyone was in the house. Then I heard Tamiya bellow, "Let's _PARTY_! The party's goin' to happen right here!" I heard Keiichi argue with him briefly, then surrender to the fact that as club president, Tamiya wasn't making it a request.

A few moments later, a harried Keiichi knocked, then slid my door open.

"Hey, it looks like you're coming along pretty well with all this stuff. We've called it a night and we're having a party. Why don't you come join us?" I shook my head no and explained that I was in the middle of some 'engineering' myself. Keiichi looked at the hoards of musical equipment appraisingly, then smiled and left to go back to the celebration.

The door slid open again.

"Hey, we're goin' to have a party, c'mon and join us, honey. Or don't they party wherever you came from...uh...wot...oh yeah, Hawaii," a female voice tinged with inebriate gaiety announced.

Urd came in my 'hobby room' and pulled my by the arm. After some resistance, I agreed, feeling that it would be good to socialize a little and get on good terms with the friends of the house.

So I let Urd drag me out by the arm and usher me into the living room, where Ootaki had set up a boombox...which was blaring heavy metal and J-Pop. She grabbed a bottle of sake and poured everyone a glass, took a swig, then poured me a glass and held it out to me.

"Urd, I told you that I don't drink!" Trying to ignore her, I looked around the room, curious to see what these guys considered a 'party'. I saw about 15 people talking, dancing, airguitaring and playing darts. Ootaki's boombox was set up on an end table, blaring distorted sonic mayhem.

"No doubt, the work of Ootaki," I commented.

As a recovering addict, I usually was on edge at parties, just because of the immediacy of drugs like alcohol and marijuana. Fortunately, only a couple club members and Urd seemed to be seeking oblivion in the bottle; thankfully there was no wafting pot smoke or cigarettes. Keiichi and Belldandy must keep a smoke-free house, I surmised. Urd came over and proffered another glass of sake to me, spilling some on me.

"C'mon and have a glass with me, Cevn! Let's_ PARTY_!"

"Urd, I don't need that stuff to party. Besides it looks like you're well on your way with..." I glanced at the bottle she was holding "...Ol' Kentucky Demon."

I thought to myself, "what an odd name for booze?" But this was Japan, and I knew from reading many Japanese magazines that they often came up with wild English monikers for brand names, like 'Green Polar Bear Ice Cream Earthquake'.

"Have a glass with me, please? Just one glass!" Urd continued.

I thanked her and refused the glass she proffered me, telling her that I didn't want any sake, whether it was offered by her or anyone else.

"Well why not! You some kinda lightweight, aren't you? You don't like women, you don't drink...hmmm, what _do_ you do for fun?"

"Urd, I don't need anything in me to help me have fun."

"You must be one of those guys that simply sits and does nothing at a party. Whatta bore you must be!"

For the next few hours, I disproved her point by chatting and joking with the Club members. I noted with some satisfaction that several of them didn't drink at all, Sora Hasegawa among them. So I spent a lot of time with this group. I mingled between circles of conversation. Ootaki was playing airguitar, Tamiya was harassing some of the new members, Sora was dancing by herself, and there was an interesting game of go happening between Skuld and some young guy.

I decided to hang out with the partygoers for the duration. One by one, they dropped off. Earlier, I saw Keiichi and Belldandy slip out the door to be by themselves. I smiled at them as they left and Belldandy placed a finger over her mouth as if to say, 'shhhh, don't tell anyone' while Keiichi gave me the V-sign.

It was about 3:30 and the party had definitely wound down. Skuld had returned to her lab to work on her invention, having beat the local Go expert eleven games in a row. Earlier, I had pulled out a number of futons and blankets from the oshiire, assuming that this was a sleepover. The closet was packed with futons. Most of the club members were crashed out on the futons. I went in the kitchen to get a soda when I was halted by a wobbly Urd. Halted was too polite a term...Urd had basically planted herself in the entryway, blocking my path to the fridge.

She was wasted on whatever she had been drinking. Once more, she insisted that I have a glass with her. Once more I refused. I felt sad for this beautiful woman, who was brought low by her drinking. She wasn't beautiful like _this_, she was definitely unappealing.

"Oh come on, shweetie. Lib a little! Here, hab a glash of zis an we'll ring...hiccup...ring in da nite togesher!" I shook my head at her as she squinted at me, then pushed the bottle in my face. I pushed her arm away.

"Urd, I don't drink. Get with it_,__ I DON'T DRINK_!! Look...I don't need that stuff! Thanks anyway." I backed up against the kitchen counter as she walked right up to me.

She looked at me, less than a foot away, and then pushed the glass against my chest. I slapped it away and it fell to the floor and shattered. "Now look wha you made me do! Whaz matter wit you? Ahhh, I know, K-e-v-i-n!" she said, deliberately misspelling my name.

Her voiced sobered up as she went on an angry drunken word spree.

"Ahhh, Urd knows all! You can't handle life, so you just lay down on the ground and let it pass you by. Let's see...you're scared of women, you don't like to drink, you don't smoke...you must like being miserable! You're too afraid to live life up, because you have to hide behind your narrow morals and perfectionism. No wonder you're single! A nice-looking man like you should have a woman. But you're too afraid of that, aren't you? I bet you did some bad things with women in your past. Why don't you just go back to hiding in your room! It's like you aren't even here...you're so pathetic!"

I started to confront her, but Urd got even more vicious and started yelling at me.

"What a waste! You have so much potential and you're afraid to use it. Life _is_ a party, you idiot! Why can't you drink? Oh, I know that one already. 'I'm a drug addict, blah blah blah'!." I looked at her in shock...how did she know that? I didn't tell her anything about my addiction!

"That's a crock of shit! The only thing you're good at is _hiding_, Cevn. I know what you are! You are a loser, a coward. You're a poor excuse for a human being. You're weak! I don't like you, you're nothing but a worthless pile of..."

"Urd, don't start in on me any more!" I warned her. She chose to ignore me and kept on. Finally, I had heard enough and bumped my way past her, walking off. I felt sorry for Urd; burying some kind of hurt by resorting to getting drunk like this. As I walked off, I felt a strong hand grip my shoulder and turn me around.

"_WHAT_!"

Urd pointed a shaky finger in my face and said, "You're a half-wit loser, a prize fool!" I heard her voice only faintly while in my memory I saw my parents echoing her words, telling me how worthless I was.

I had taken enough at this point and I interrupted her.

"Urd, unlike you, I can face my pain. You said I was weak when you first met me. But I'm not. _You're_ the weak one! You are too indecisive to face whatever is inside of you that is so troubling. Instead, you hide yourself in this stuff!" I knocked the bottle out of her hand in rage.

"You would be a wonderful person to get along with, but you're impulsive, self-centered, indecisive, greedy, and a boor when you're drunk. Not to mention that all your beauty is for naught, because you're so messed up. You may act the flirtatious virago, but no one in their right mind would want you when you're like this! No wonder you're the Goddess of Mischief!"

She raised a hand as if to slap me.

"You don't have a clue about what you're talking about! You're the one who is hiding! You hide behind getting drunk, by acting sexy, by trying to meddle in everyone's affairs, by doing without thinking. Inside, I know that you are really hurting. But the sad thing is _you_ don't!. If you had any maturity, you would know that weakness is that condition which strength blossoms out of. But you're too busy fooling yourself and everyone around you to see that. And to think that you are a _Goddess_, but yet you set such a poor example!" She turned pepper-red in the face. Her open hand became a fist, and I thought she might punch me. But I ignored her and continued.

"You push away people who care about you because you're afraid. Everyone does that a little, but you have mastered the art of the insult. You have become so self-centered that you do it automatically. You can't hide in sake or in sexy outfits, Urd! You could be a beautiful woman...but instead you are totally unappealing when you are like this. Repulsive may be a better word. It really hurts me to see you throw your so-called divine life down the tubes like this!"

Urd screamed, "You...think...I'm _ugly_!! I, who am the most beautiful being in the universe! So you think I'm some kinda wino? You are the loser here, Cevn. Mortal trash!" Her face changed from rage to determination. She grinned maliciously at me.

"But I'm going to change that. You need a serious attitude adjustment. Your perspective is all wrong, Cevn. You need to party like the rest of us!" I felt the air around me suddenly become solid, pressing in on me from all sides. For a moment, I thought she was going to smother me or crush me.

"Urd, don't do this," I cried out with a panic warmed caution as I felt an invisible hand grip me around the chest and pin me to the wall in the dining room, fifteen feet away. My injured ribs from our first encounter cried out in breath stealing agony. I felt a foreboding sense of doom. I looked and saw that Urd was losing it...red and green sparks were flying all over her.

"Urd, you don't want to do this!" I tried to yell, my breath being squeezed out of me. But Urd has an air of angry determination.

"Oh, yes I do! I've already decided that what you need is to get really snotty-faced drunk! This will be one night you won't forget! I'm going to make you regret everything you said about me! Hope you enjoy strong sake!" she said with a menacing leer.

"Urd...stop!" I felt a powerful force pulling me forth, then it slammed me back against the wall, pinning me like a rag doll. I pleaded with my eyes as a bottle of strong sake materialized inches from my nose. She waved her hand and my mouth came open of its own accord.

Sake poured down my throat. There was nothing I could do about it. I sputtered and gagged as the acrid vile tasting booze ran down inside of me. I couldn't breath from the pressing crush on my chest, and the sake filled my lungs as I gasped for air. I tried everything I could to stop it, but the bottle was pouring, choking me. I retched and then vomited. As soon as I finished puking, the bottle floated up again and disgorged more of its contents into my mouth. I tried to close my throat, but the sake jetted down it.

"My recovery is ruined," I observed wretchedly, feeling utterly defeated.

"One down, three to go!" Urd announced with drunken glee. Three! That could kill me! I looked around for help; everyone was asleep. I tried to yell, and Urd somehow took my shout away.

As the second bottle emptied into my throat, I felt myself losing control. I was getting drunk for the first time in 11 years. I couldn't stop the feeling washing over me; the familiar, much-feared sensation of losing control. In panic, I felt my long-dormant active addiction rear its ugliness in full force. I felt gusts of anger, fear and crazy abandonment. My mind began to blur and my emotions fired. I saw Urd and felt explosions of resentment. This was rape, pure and simple. The spiritual essence of my recovery was being wantonly violated against my will. I wanted to die. My shirt was soaked with booze. My inhibitions were slowly disappearing. In my mind, I screamed "_NOOOOOoooo_!" Everything that was good about me was drifting out of my being.

"Two down, two to go!"

The unreality of this situation hit me full force. This can't be happening! It felt like my sanity was being ripped away by the effects of the liquor. My senses clouded into dizziness as the third bottle emptied into me. To my disgust, I was no longer resisting it, I was liking it!

As I was being force-fed the third bottle, a change came over me. I wanted more! I was no longer in control. My addiction had full reign over my consciousness. I felt long buried cravings assert themselves. I wanted to get wasted into oblivion! Fighting the restraining air-grip, I grabbed the fourth bottle from mid-air and chugged deeply.

Then I yelled, "You want to see loaded? You want to see me get wasted? I'll show you! You wanna see me crazy? Well here's crazy! Lookit this!"

I finished the bottle and threw it against the wall, where it smashed with satisfying loudness. This woke up everybody in the living room. I grabbed another bottle from somewhere and quickly chugged it down, then brought up most of it with a doubling up retch.

"Ah, heheh, that's more like it, honey!" Urd started laughing hysterically, bounding around the kitchen. She stagger-dashed into the living room and fell back into the chair in the corner, draping her long legs over one of the armrests. My vision started getting fuzzy. People were looking at me with shock.

Violent, hateful thoughts crossed my mind as I staggered into the living room, picked up a lamp and threw it through a window. The sound of breaking glass and wood was satisfying to my ears. I started ranting about how much I hated life, and then I loosed a round of invective towards Urd, who was still laughing uncontrollably, mocking me with her burst of mirth. I saw blurs of motion as people were pouring out of the living room.

"You think you're funny? I hate you, Urd! I hope _this_ amuses you," I screamed as I picked up a floor lamp and heaved it at her. She warded it off with a flick of her wrist.

"This is great! He's going amok and doesn't even know why! He's tearing up the place!"

I turned towards the sound and saw a _second_ Urd in the other corner of the room. She was duplicating herself. I started cursing Urd #2. Both Urds laughed at me...the more they laughed, the more I thought they were making fun of me. I resentfully recalled Urd telling me that I was a loser.

People were running out of the room in panic. All I heard was mocking laughter echoing off the walls. I picked up a chair and flung it through the front door, just to hear the destructive effect of shattering wood and glass. This roused Tamiya's ire.

Tamiya stood up and started towards me, shouting, "Ah'm going to settle you down, yuh goofball! What'ya think you're doin', wreckin' Keiichi's house like this! Ah'm gonna nail ya for that!"

I grabbed a nearby sake bottle and crashed it over my head. Turning the broken edges towards him, I screamed at the top of my lungs.

"C'mon Tamiya! Take one step closer and I'll cut your heart out and feed it to you down your throat!" I saw Tamiya stop, his aggression rapidly disappearing into outright fear.

"Yuh're crazy. Ah'm callin' the cops!" He backed away slowly along the wall, then turned to go to the dining room. I picked up a stool chair and threw it at him. It bounced off the wall and clipped him on the leg as he rounded the corner.

I heard taunting laughter piercing down into my very soul. I staggered towards one of the Urds and swiped at her with the broken bottle. It passed right thru her.

"What?" I thought. Two Urds! And one is invisible? She must be replicating herself to add to my frustration.

"That's it, keep it up! Hahahah! This is totally great! You must have some Demonic blood in you! You're crazy with pain! Here, you want to get loaded...we'll up the ante...have some heroin and some nightmares! Hope you enjoy every minute of it! I'm going to really get you wound up now!"

I felt two works spike me in the arms and the last remnant of recovering addict in me screamed "_NOOOOO_!" I ripped one needle out and threw it at one of the Urds; it bounced harmlessly off the wall. Blood squirted down my arm. Immediately, I felt the nausea well up, and I doubled over, dry heaving into the floor despite being bloated with sake. The analgesic effect of the dope was filling me, and I started to not care anymore about anything.

"Heh heh, you _like_ pain, don't you! I knew you were part Demon...here's some more pain for ya!" Images flooded my memory like slides in a slide show. The worst nightmarish experiences. Being beaten with a belt until my back with slick with blood. Locked away for hours in a dark closet. Being forced to eat my own vomit after I had thrown up some food that I couldn't force myself to like to eat. Sleeping outdoors in subzero whether with only a hair dryer to keep my feet and hands warm. I felt swallowed up by the darkness inside of me.

I saw Banpei roll in the room and try to restrain me with his mechanical arms. I picked up a metal lamp and hit him in the head with it, denting his head. Then I grabbed a nearby metal stool and smashed it over his robot head, knocking his 'cap' clear off and crushing his face, sparks flying everywhere.

I tipped over a table, falling down, and saw Keiichi and Belldandy standing in the doorway, their faces transfixed by the traumatic scene. I staggered over and grabbed a folding chair and heaved it at them, missing them by several feet. I raved at them, and then I felt the dope 'rush', making everything foggy and slow motioned. I turned to one of the Urds, and saw a terrified Skuld dash across the room out of the corner of my eye. I grabbed a small end table and blindly threw it at her. She ran into the doorway and hid behind Keiichi and Belldandy.

Things turned gray--my sight and hearing started to fade. I fell to my knees, wanting to strike out in pain at something, anything. I crawled towards the nearest laughing Urd and pushed her chair over, dumping her on the ground unceremoniously. I grabbed a bottle and tried to hit her with it as she started kicking me in the chest and arms. There was still one Urd laughing, and I pitched the bottle at her. I grabbed my head and screamed in agony. I heard someone yell, "Damn you, Mara!" as everything went black.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Keiichi knew trouble was brewing when Tamiya bellowed, "Let's party here!"

He muttered his reluctance to Belldandy, "With these guys, there's always an 'event' at one of their parties." Resigned to fate, he decided that the safest course of action was to pull Belldandy away and avoid the craziness.

They snuck out unnoticed by everyone but Cevn. Urd was woozily sprawled in a chair in the corner of the room. Keiichi couldn't remember when she had been so out of it, except during the time when Yggdrasil crashed and she had to drink sake constantly to maintain her power.

Belldandy and Keiichi sat on a rock, calmly talking about the upcoming race, hand in hand. She looked radiant in the moonlight, Keiichi noticed. Almost glowing. The embodiment of all that was right with things.

After a couple hours of calm, Keiichi started hearing crashing noises in the house.

"Well, I knew it. Having those guys over would be trouble...I wonder if Tamiya and Ootaki are wrestling around in there," he wondered. Then he heard a loud crash, unmistakably a window being broke. He looked at Belldandy with uneasy eyes.

Belldandy heard the crash and felt a very disturbing feeling deep inside of her.

"There's something very wrong here, Keiichi-san!" she suddenly shouted. As if to confirm her intuition, people started rushing out of the house as if their lives depended on it. Keiichi heard several crashes and maniacal screaming.

They both gave a start when Tamiya dashed up to them, limping.

"Da new guy, he's gone crazy! He's destroying da place! He threatened ta kill me, so I tried to call da cops, but da phone was dead! He hit me in da leg with a chair! Whatta we goin' ta do?"

Keiichi and Belldandy both paled at this news and joined him as he ran towards the house; all three were filled with renitence. As they gathered in the doorway, shock overwhelmed them once they surveyed the scene in front of their eyes. Inside, everything was madness. Belldandy could hear her older sister laughing hysterically. Cevn was in the middle of the room, his face and right arm covered with blood, raving about 'being loaded'.

"What's wrong with you, Urd?" Belldandy worriedly shouted. The living room looked like a crime scene where a murder had taken place. Keiichi and Bell could hear crazed laughter echoing across the room. Cevn saw them and ranted, then picked up a piece of furniture and threw it right at them! Belldandy reacted quickly to this and put up a shielding spell; the metal folding chair was deflected in midair, causing Tamiya to gasp with amazement.

Keiichi quickly peeked around the corner of the front doorway and saw Banpei; his metallic face was smashed in as he lay crumpled in the center of the living room near Cevn. Then he saw Skuld. She was huddling for dear life in the hallway, frightened out of her wits.

"Skuld's in there!" he shouted his worry to Belldandy.

Belldandy immediately grew angry at Cevn.

"_No one_ does that to my little sister!" she thought, her bellicose feelings reigning unchecked.

"Urd! Why don't you help Skuld get out of there!" she yelled in the door. To her mystification, Urd only laughed louder...her shrieks of laughter echoing around in the room.

The youngest Goddess peeked around the corner of the hallway again and caught sight of her middle sister. She suddenly dashed towards the safety of her sister and Keiichi, a look of sheer terror on her face. Cevn took a small end table and heaved it at Skuld. Skuld hurdled it like an expert track runner and Keiichi moved aside to let her run past. She ducked behind Belldandy, crying hysterically.

"Why is he...snff...doing this?" she yelled between gasps of crying. "He's _wrecked_ Banpei-kun! What is...huhsnff...wrong with him? Why is he acting crazy?" She collapsed to her knees, holding her face in her hands.

"He's...snff...scaring me to death! I hate him!"

Belldandy was so hurt by her younger sister's fright that her eyes welled up with tears. She stood tall with resolve and prepared to use divine force to stop Cevn. She said in a loud deadpan voice, "_NOBODY_ does that to my younger sister!"

Keiichi looked at the scene in front of him, caught between stupefaction and rage. His nerves were on fire with shock, but he knew that the laughter belonged to Urd. He saw his girlfriend raise her hands up in the air, the air deforming around them.

"Wait!!" Keiichi yelled. When he had first peeked in the living room, he had noticed that Cevn had blood all over his arms, chest and face; his long hair was matted with dried blood.

"Belldandy, there's something really wrong with this!" he screamed. "Cevn's hurt pretty bad!" Before she could zap Cevn, Belldandy put her anger for on hold for a second and surveyed the situation. She heard a _second_ source of demented laughter. Keiichi ducked partway inside the door and glimpsed Urd struggling with Cevn, who was trying to hit her on the head with a bottle of sake. Urd was no longer laughing; a look of panicked dread figured her face.

"Keiichi, help me! This maniac wants to kill me!" But there was still laughing coming from the other side of the room. Keiichi wheeled around to see whose it was.

"Damn you, Mara!" he yelled. He turned back to Urd, and saw her hunched into the corner, with Cevn collapsed several feet away.

"Yes, damned and loving it, Keiichi!"

"_MARA_!" Belldandy dashed in and confronted her Demonic counterpart, a frightened Skuld clinging to her. "Mara!" they both exclaimed again. Belldandy put an arm over Skuld instinctively, shielding her younger sister even more. Mara started laughing again.

"Hey Belldandy, how do you like what your new friend has done to your house? Isn't it wonderful, the power of destructive rage? He hates all of you! You heard him, didn't you? He just tried to kill your bratty little sister, but unfortunately he missed. Ha ah haha! Isn't this hilarious, what is happening here? This is better than most of the domestic fights I've instigated. He sure had made a mess of things, wouldn't you say?" Belldandy looked at her angrily.

"Mara...you...leave here now!" she said, her voice measured with livid intent.

"Try and make me! Besides, you know we're evenly matched, you ditz!" she taunted. Belldandy was overwhelmed by the scene in front of her. Trembling, she tried to shield Keiichi, Skuld and Tamiya by standing in the doorway. Mara laughed at her pitiful efforts.

"Why my dear Belldandy, you almost look like a Demon, you're so angry! Your friend here, Cevn...he's not human. He's a Demon! _A Demon!_ That's why your pathetic little robot automaton didn't detect him when he first arrived."

Skuld bristled at Mara's dissing of Banpei. Mara looked right at her and added, "That's right...that cheap hunk of metal is so poorly constructed, it didn't even detect me! Ha haha!" Skuld dissolved into guilty tears at Mara's taunt...it was true that Banpei had somehow failed to detect Mara.

"You have a Demon in your own house and it isn't me! What's more, you already have befriended him. Man, this is rich!! Hahahaha!"

This shocked Belldandy and Keiichi. Belldandy was visibly shaking, the confusion of anger, sorrow, fear, and disbelief overwhelming her. Tears framed her eyes. Keiichi just wanted to crawl away and forget everything.

"Cevn is not a Demon!" she yelled, more to assure her doubts and defy her fears. "He is a good man...I know because I can feel it in my heart!"

"Well, your heart must be pretty confused right now because of the mess your 'good' friend has made." Mara taunted. "How is it that the brat's stupid robot couldn't detect him? Think! Why couldn't you sense any mortal waveforms from him when he first came here? That's because he isn't human. And what kind of spirit would do this kind of destruction? Not a God or Earth Spirit, of course! So what kind of spirit does that leave you to believe he is...?"

Belldandy was growing more confused. She quickly scanned Cevn and felt the very faintest indications that he was a mortal. But there was something else. He should have emanated strong mortal waveforms. Mara looked at her counterpart Goddess and grinned evilly. She's about ready to have a nervous breakdown. She's really losing it! Mara decided to stoke the flame.

"This is so wonderful!" she thought to herself as she saw the look of outright panic and confusion on her rivals' faces. Just a little more would push Belldandy over the edge! She decided to add fiction to fact.

"You know that book that he has. It's a Demon Instruction Manual! You think that your Lord has sent him here with that, but the Dark Lord actually was behind his coming here...because he's a Demon! And...I'll let you in on a little secret. Sometime in the near future, you're going to have to kill him; otherwise he'll kill you all! I'll be watching closely, Belldandy. _Very_ closely! _HAHAHAHAHA_!"

Mara raised her hands up, and disappeared in a flash of smoke, her haunting laughter remaining for a moment after her vanishing act.

Right after Mara left, Belldandy lost her composure and turned to Keiichi and started crying, her arms wrapped tightly around his shoulders as her hot tears fell on his neck. Skuld was also crying her eyes out, leaning on Belldandy and Keiichi, sobs heaving through her girl's body. Keiichi was still numbed with shock. He held both Goddesses and surveyed the mass destruction. He saw Urd try to get back in her chair and instead sprawl out on the floor.

"Urd, what did you do here?" he yelled angrily.

"I din't do anyzing!" Urd looked at him with pleading eyes, then rolled over and passed out, as if on cue.

The three of them remained huddled for mutual support for a long time while Tamiya wandered off to find Ootaki. Skuld was so shook up that she didn't want to leave her sister. She was shaking like a leave in a strong wind, her hair billowing with each tremor. Belldandy saw her younger sister's distress, making it even more difficult to regain her composure. She finally recovered herself and fixed Keiichi with a determined look.

"How could Mara do this? This is bad, even for Mara!"

Keiichi saw exhaustion written all over his girlfriend's face. Yet Belldandy was determined to solve the mystery of tonight's insanity.

"I'm going to find out who did this!" she said resentfully. She walked tentatively over to where Cevn was lying and touched her head to his.

"You're really not in a position to argue about a mind read," she said as she examined his memories.

"Oh my God!" she gasped. A look of immense emotion played across her face and she staggered backwards, almost fainting. Keiichi and Skuld rushed over to her assistance, but she waved them off.

"It was Urd who started it. Then Mara showed up after Urd got him drunk! Poor Cevn!" Belldandy stated.

"Urd got him drunk? He's allergic to sake...remember what he said at dinner," Keiichi added.

Belldandy had read Cevn's recent memory, and had experienced the 'slideshow' of horrible things that Mara had caused him to feel. She felt disgusted at the images, which brought on a surge of sympathy for this gaijin newcomer.

Keiichi decided that he needed to put these two to bed. Skuld was still in shock, glancing furtively to see if there were any intruders.

"This must have scared the wits out of her," Keiichi thought with sadness. They were both emotionally overwrought and Belldandy looked really tired.

"C'mon, we're getting you two to bed." He and Skuld helped Belldandy to her room. Skuld was still wondering what went wrong. Keiichi said to Urd's still form as he left the room, "You're going to have some explaining to do tomorrow, Urd!"

He and Skuld helped Bell to bed, then Skuld climbed in her own futon bed. He noticed that Skuld didn't protest when he remained in the sister's bedroom. Keiichi watched as Belldandy and Skuld rapidly drifted to sleep. He felt mentally fatigued as well. It bothered Keiichi that there was no one for _him_ to turn to for support at a time like this. They could only rely on each other...and he had to be strong for Bell-chan. He felt worst for Skuld. Her child-like demeanor had been replaced with vivid terror, Keiichi had sadly noticed.

"Why does all this insanity have to happen the week before the biggest race of my life?" he wondered aloud in a quiet voice.

He walked out into the living room. Windows were smashed and bits of furniture were everywhere. He was angry with Cevn for destroying his house; yet he somehow sensed that it really wasn't his fault. Mara had been here and Belldandy said it was Urd's fault. He got a warm wet cloth and wiped the blood off of Cevn's face and arm. He found blankets for Urd and Cevn, and then covered them.

In his bedroom, Keiichi was unable to go to sleep, his mind kept questioning whether it would be wise to let Cevn stay. He seemed to be a magnet for trouble. Yet he liked Cevn, in some way. It felt great to have another guy in the house. And since Cevn was a few years older, it seemed like he might have some maturity to offer the younger Keiichi. When he wasn't wrecking the house. With this insight, he suddenly flashed on why his younger sister had made Cevn her adopted older brother.

"Things are so mixed up in my life," he thought as he faded to sleep.


	4. Pt 4: Realization

**Part 4: Realization**

A fog enshrouded glen stretched behind me as I stood on a wooden pier overlooking a hamlet under the ocean. Each wave danced distortion over the underseas kingdom; dragons lancing the cool water like sentinels. Overhead, the sky was misty blue, dotted with the specks of emerging twilight stars. The earth opened like an erupting egg and I heard the roar of jetfighter sounds as a being clambered out of the ripped ground. A ruddy red hellspawn gargoyle reached out and grabbed me, holding me underwater as breath drained out of me...

I awakened to a huge headache, more like a hangover. Every muscle in my body was throbbing. When I sat up, I noticed that I was in the common living room, covered with sweat.

"How did I get here?" I wondered aloud.

I saw dried blood all over my shirt and right arm. Someone had thoughtfully provided me with a blanket and pillow. No one else was in the living room. There was smashed furniture everywhere; it looked like a homicide crime scene. I looked at the ceiling and noticed that the fan was spinning akimbo. My head was spinning too; I couldn't remember a thing from the previous night. The dawn soundscape played quiet music to my ears.

Standing up, I could swear that I was hungover and dopesick. My inner sense of balance was all out of whack, and my vision was fettered by significant blurriness. Some of the events of last night started to return to me. There was a party with the whole of Keiichi's motor club. I joined in the festivities and had a blast...every thing was going well. Then I got into an argument with Urd...and I couldn't remember anything after that. I sat back down on the floor and pulled the blanket around me, trying to rock away the moderate nausea I felt. This whole scene, especially my inner state of being, reminded me of what it was like when I was using drugs. Actually, abusing drugs was the more accurate term. The desolation I felt inside of me was gnawing at my higher spirit, which _knew_ that I hadn't relapsed on anything. I've been clean long enough to feel confident in my personal recovery. There was just too much joy to life to let myself wander back into the morass of active drug addiction.

Skuld cautiously peeked around the corner. When we made eye contact, I saw fear and anger in her eyes.

"Skuld, what happened here? Are you okay?" I asked. But it was too late; she quickly pulled back into the hallway and dashed back to her room, shutting the sliding door firmly. Had I alienated her in some way? I could sense the stain of her immense distrust, as if there was something reptilian and poisonous slithering on the floor by my feet. I thought I heard soft sobbing coming from her room. Urd was nowhere to be seen. The joy I felt on Saturday's shopping trip with Megumi and Skuld was completely gone. The house seemed haunted with some very ugly vibes.

What had happened?

My mind tried to wrap itself around an explanation for Skuld's cold shoulder. More than a cold shoulder, it seemed that Skuld was almost terrified of me. Did I do something to upset her when we were shopping? Did I quip offhandedly about her being 'just a kid'...and strike a raw nerve? Or was it just a mood that she was in? Perhaps she was at an impasse in building her new mecha and just didn't feel like socializing. What about the others? Where is Belldandy? Odd. There was no TV blaring in Urd's room. Where is Urd?

While I was off in my head, trying to piece things together, I felt a strong need to call Hawaii. Maybe that would get me grounded. I definitely needed to check in with my sponsor...especially since I had just woken up feeling the aftereffects of being loaded. Plus I knew people there, and had close friends whose suggestions I valued. I had let a number of people into my life there, and they could read me like a morning paper. I looked around for a working phone, since the remote set in the living room was smashed. Of course, when Urd transported me to Japan, she did so in such a flurry of impulse that she neglected to bring any of my belongings along, including my cellphones and pods.

I walked into the dining room and found a phone there, with a cord trailing back into the kitchen area. I called one of my closest friends, who happened to be my sponsor.

"Hey, this is Cevn. I'm in Japan!"

The voice on the other side of the phone was definitely my friend's, but what he said was shocking, to say the least.

_"You couldn't be Cevn. He died last Wednesday, and the funeral was today."_

"But I _am_ Cevn." I thought he must be playing a joke. "Look, I really need to talk to you about what's been happening in my life..."

Try as I might, I could not convince him that mine was the voice of his close friend. I tried another friend, from the University. She started crying and described to me how she had stopped by on Wednesday and nobody came to the door, then she looked in the window and saw a body, lying on the floor next to a smashed TV. She got one of the neighbors to kick the door in and they discovered that I had died the previous night. She punctuated her story with bouts of sobbing, then yelled at me, _"Why are you making me tell you about my friend's death?"_

I felt numb...the kind of all-permeating numbness that accompanies major personal tragedy. This was some sort of horrible dream...but she definitely said it was _my_ body that she found! How could this be?

I'm _dead_?

But I'm here!

I'm _here_!

I tried another number. This time, I was told that the NA fellowship in Hawaii had come out in full force for my funeral. I called my therapist, my professors at the University, more friends. All claimed that I was dead. I was totally spinning out, feeling preyed upon by a mounting disquiet.

But I had only been in Japan five days! How could I have 'died' the day before I came here? Then I realized that I had 'lost' a day traveling from Hawaii to Japan. The International Date Line. All of a sudden, it hit me. If they think I'm dead, than that means that my entire life...is over. For some reason, I didn't doubt that my friend had found my earthly body when she looked in on my apartment. And I knew that my sponsor and academic mentors wouldn't B.S. me.

But why couldn't they recognize my voice? I had assumed that I came over here as a whole: body and spirit. A morbid curiosity took hold of me; I tried to imagine what my funeral would have been like. I couldn't believe it. Everyone that ever knew me thought I was dead! But if I left my body _there_...then what could possibly explain my physical presence _here_? I patted myself on the shoulders and chest and ran my fingers over my face and hair, expecting ethereality. What if this is all an illusion and I _am_ actually dead? With that shocking feeling, I fell into a fetal position and started to cry.

"Crying isn't going to change a thing," I thought, and then I started to scream. I screamed until my voice was hoarse. Then I screamed for somebody, anybody to talk to me.

"Cevn?"

A wave of relief rushed over me as I turned to the hallway to see a tired-looking Belldandy leaning against the doorway, tears misting her eyes. I poured out my situation to her with rapid-fire desperation.

"Belldandy, all my friends, everyone that knows me in Hawaii...everyone who knows me from anywhere...they all think I'm dead! I tried to call them, and they all insisted that I died last week. They didn't recognize my voice over the phone! What's happening? Why is Skuld afraid of me? Who wrecked the house?" Questions streamed out of my mouth as fast as I could discover them and frame them with words.

She looked at me with a saddened expression, apparently at conflict about how to answer my frantic queries.

"I was afraid that this would happen! I wondered how it was that Urd could have brought you back here through the TV. You see, as a Goddess, I can transport anyone...like Keiichi for example, but not through a mode of conveyance such as water or a mirror or a TV. We Goddesses can travel this way, because we continually reconstitute ourselves at the atomic level. But a human body...it cannot stand the stress of that kind of travel."

"So why do I have a body now?" I asked her. Belldandy looked thoughtful for a moment.

"I'm really tired. I need to sit down." She sat down at the dining room table, leaning against the wall.

"It must be that the Ultimate Force gave you a new body, Cevn. How else could it be? If the Relief Office had granted your wish, what sense would it make to have you die right after you made your wish, unless of course you wished to be dead." I shuddered at _that_ thought. I had been suicidal many times, but the reality of her suggestion was...well I just didn't want to go there. Ironically, it seemed that I _had_ gone there, however. I was now dead to the world. Memories of all the wonderful people I had met in recovery, people who had loved me back into health and humanity...these memories now threatened to crush my sanity, because they had awakened my heart to _how much love I had just lost_!

"So, you think that I was given a new body to replace the old one? What if I went back to Hawaii? If they thought I was dead, and I showed up like this, then there would be a lot of confusion all around. Why can't I just go back the same way I came?"

"But the Ultimate Force has decided that you were to come here. You cannot live two lives at once, Cevn. There is a reason that you are here with us in this moment."

"Belldandy, what are you _not_ telling me!" I shouted, remembering her apparent reluctance when she started her explanation. She sighed resignedly.

"In cases where the Relief Office has granted a new life...which are very rare, mind you...the old life disappears totally within a few days. In other words, all traces of your former life will be gone. Everybody you have ever met...will forget that they ever knew who you were. It's terrible...but it is the way of the Ultimate Force."

So that was it. I had started this new life at the expense of my old one. Every person I had ever known, everyone that I ever cared about, all the successes and failures at kindness, every experience I had ever shared with a fellow human being...each was now only part of a "former life". What was it Buckmaster Fuller said...something about envisioning a new life each day as if one had died the previous night?

I felt my Soul...die.

Part of me wanted to laugh at the whole situation, while another part felt a forceful pathos sink in. I sensed an almost Gothic sort of darkness regarding my situation. My thoughts traveled to my friends. How sad for them! Desperation overwhelmed me as I realized that I was the same old me, but that everything was somehow changed. It was like having to confront the very core of my being with the awareness that everything was now different: the self-identity I relied upon to tell me that _it was me_ when I acknowledged myself...that was all gone. I was even more powerless in the face of these events!

"You must try to quiet your mind and accept what has happened. Everything that occurs in life has a cause and a meaning. There must be meaning to this," Belldandy said in a soothing voice. I looked in her eyes and saw the gentle wisdom of a Goddess. All sorts of philosophical rebuttals flashed through my mind. Heidegger, Derrida and Chuang-zi loomed large in my thoughts.

"Stop it!" my heart cried out to my intellect. I sat with Belldandy, feeling an emotional impasse. She was still teary-eyed. I was too deeply in shock to cry or smile...or feel anything whatsoever.

"That must have been why she and Urd looked downcast for a moment when I mentioned that my friends back home wouldn't be contacting me right away!" I remembered my plan to open a mailbox in town so I could safely apply to N.I.T., and the intensity of Belldandy's pained expression when I hinted at contact from people at my old home.

Home.

I didn't feel like I had one. Did I ever have a home?

With my past buried in some cemetery in O'ahu and my present obscured by the confusion of my new life here, I felt empty. Like a hollowed shell picked clean by ages of erosion. My waking dream came back to me...it was like my old life had been drowned. There was a gaping hole inside of me, demanding to be filled with...something. Then I remembered the principle I had learned in recovery: that I sometimes could only learn about myself by getting outside of myself. I saw the gentle look on Belldandy's face marred by sadness and was reminded that it's not all about me...

"Belldandy, why are _you_ so upset?" She looked at me with surprise.

"Because you are so confused and because of what happened last night." She told me the whole story. Once again, I was confronted with a different version of me. This time it was a version that had been held in check for 11 years. That couldn't have been me, going on a rampage like that.

I was incredulous. It was bad enough that I was dead to the world I had once known. Now it was even worse, because I had pushed away everyone in my 'vita novella' with my wild behavior last night. I felt even more disconnected. Belldandy must have sensed this, because she put a reassuring hand on my arm.

"Keiichi knows that it wasn't your fault. He was really worried about you this morning," she explained. Keiichi! His girlfriend Belldandy was sickened from her probe into my memory last night...this morning she was so tired that she couldn't even conjure up a spell to repair the damages to the house. The motor club guys must be freaked out of their gourds after last night. Scratch any chance to make it up to them.

Urd. Mara.

I didn't know which one I was angrier with. Urd, for forcing me to get drunk against my will. On a selfish whim. To prove some point. Or Mara, for casting Demonic chaos all over the place while aggravating Urd's tampering with my life with her own soul searing attack.

I had worked damn hard to stay clean off of drugs. Unless one has survived the hell of active addiction, they have no idea of the inside work involved in staying clean. Traumatic events triggering the desire to use drugs to escape the pain. Joyful events hearkening the need to 'celebrate' with a legal drug, such as alcohol or cigars. Cravings that would come unexpectedly, with no rhyme or reason. Those were just the initial psychological withdrawals. Then there was the spiritual void that needed to be filled. The constant attacks on self-esteem. Trying to find work without a job history or vocational skills. Being ostracized by society the minute I admitted I was an addict. Entering college with educational deficits. Never feeling that I was 'good enough.' A gnawing sense of separation what would flare into a deeply held loneliness called 'alienation'. I had lived with all of these aftereffects of drug abuse...and had managed to succeed and even excel.

Urd's actions were a sort of spiritual rape. I felt violated all over again; victimized by the 'more powerful'. Same old story...the bigger beats up the smaller. My instinct was to collapse into myself, but I couldn't even do that. I had to go on and establish my life here, irregardless of the shattered heart and will. I had a new life here...not to mention an interview tomorrow at N.I.T. I decided that I would not bother to talk to Urd, and further, to avoid her at all costs. Otherwise, I would just feel like a passenger in my own life...with an invisible "kick me" written across my forehead.

Belldandy remained a little tentative around me. I questioned whether she was giving me the whole story, as she still seemed to be holding something back. I could understand her pain somewhat. It was natural that she would react to me with fear, especially if I was acting last night in the manner she described to me. Something about Mara had really upset her last night as well, beyond the incidentals of my vandalism and foul verbal smolderings.

Skuld came out and sat quietly next to us. She seemed to visibly flinch whenever I would talk. Any progress I had made towards winning her trust had gone down the tubes in one crazy drunken raver last night. It must be hard on her, having two guys in her house, and both of them appearing to be jerks.

"_I hate you_," Skuld declared in a deadpan voice.

This cut me to the quick. Here was this young Goddess, staying on Earth of her own free will, to 'chaperone' her older sister and Keiichi while learning to deal with growing up. Enter someone like me into the picture and all of a sudden her innocence is besmirched with stark cruel reality. It wasn't fair to her. I wanted to leave, just for Skuld's sake, but I remembered that Urd had said that the Almighty wanted me to be here, for some unknown reason. Urd. I couldn't think of a description bad enough for her. "Bitch" doesn't even come close. I looked at Skuld and tried to say some comforting words that would stretch against the taunt elasticity of her distrust. At least by sharing my regret, I might redeem myself slightly.

"I'm so sorry, Skuld. I didn't mean any of the things I did last night."

"I _still_ hate you!" she said adamantly as she held onto Belldandy for security.

It was a heavy blow as I realized the futility of my attempts to apologize for actions that I had no investment of volition towards, no control over whatsoever. It was as if some other person masquerading as me had created havoc in everyone's lives and had then disappeared totally...leaving _me_ to absorb the brunt of the blame and hurt feelings.

I needed to be alone.

"Well, if you all are so keen on hating me, I might as well go to my room," I said, voicing my bitterness. With this, I walked out, seething with melancholy.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Belldandy looked at her younger sister with concern. Skuld was so delicate in disposition; any little thing could set her off. Skuld had weathered her and Keiichi's love pretty well, except for a few times when she felt overly protective towards her elder sister. Skuld was just beginning to discover her own powers right now, as well. This was an extremely awkward time for any young Goddess. Belldandy remembered how she had felt when she was Skuld's age. Confused and clumsy didn't cover the half of it. It was so frustrating to develop divine skills.

"Skuld's frustration must be manifesting in her being so direct and blunt, but her words really hurt Cevn," Belldandy reflected.

Skuld was reluctant to place all the blame on Urd, where it truly belonged. She definitely didn't trust this newcomer, not after what he had done to Banpei and the attack on Belldandy and Keiichi.

"He even attacked _me_," Skuld reminded herself. Not that she was always fond of Keiichi, but at least he didn't go around tossing things and hurting people, except when he was possessed. But Cevn-san wasn't possessed last night. He didn't have an excuse for how he acted.

"Or was he possessed? After all, Mara was there," Skuld noted with anger.

Keiichi and Megumi entered the dining room. Keiichi looked like he had been through "exam hell" week three times in a row. Megumi had just arrived back from her aunt and uncle's house. Her cousin, Tomohisa, was looking forward to next weekend's race. She was wide-eyed with shock as she surveyed the damage to the compound. Belldandy braced herself to have to repeat the story of last night's madness to Megumi.

Megumi silently listened. She didn't know what to think, but she felt a twinge of disbelief. She decided to check in on Cevn, and knocked on his door. She didn't believe that Cevn was evil and she knew all too well how much hate Mara could stir up. She felt a sickening feeling inside as she recalled how Mara had possessed her, making her an unwilling 'passenger' in the Demoness's plot to take vengeance on her brother and Belldandy. A captive in her own body.

Sliding the door open just a hair, she saw that Cevn was sound asleep, and then she returned to the dining room. A moment later, Urd finally emerged from her room.

"Well, if you guys are going to chew me out, just get it over with. Because I don't want you all going around thinking I screwed up or something," Urd announced testily. Her totally disheveled look caused Belldandy to pause momentarily with worry before confronting her.

"Urd, you _did_ screw up, and big time, too!" Keiichi seriously countered, pointing towards the devastated living room with a jerk of his thumb.

"I didn't know he would act like that when he got some sake in him!" Urd defended. "Besides, Mara was there, egging things on." She smiled as she remembered all the excitement the night before and snickered under her breath.

"Urd, there is nothing funny about this at all!" Skuld scolded her older sister. "He nearly broke Banpei and he was throwing stuff at Elder Sister and Keiichi. Elder Sister nearly hurt herself dealing with it."

"Mara is to blame, you little twerp! Not me! You guys are full of it! End of discussion!"

"No! _Not_ end of discussion!" Megumi countered. "Cevn-san must have had a reason not to drink any sake. You forced him to, from what Keiichi told me. That was wrong in the first place. People aren't toys for you to play with, Urd!"

She stopped, suddenly aware that she was talking to a Goddess, Surprised at Megumi's confrontational stance, Urd turned crimson and her eyes narrowed. Keiichi looked at his sister with dread concern.

"Don't you try anything, Urd!" Belldandy warned.

"Elder Sister, there is something unusual between you and Cevn-san. That is why the Almighty entrusted you to bring him relief. But Megumi is right; you can't tamper with people, either Gods or mortals. Look what you have put Keiichi through with your love-potions!" Belldandy noted, scowling as she remembered _those_ infamous chapters in her life.

"Yeah, so what? I was only trying to get you two lovebirds together, which is what you both really wanted. All talk, no action, makes a boring romance...so I spiced it up. And it worked too, since you two are always fresh with each other now."

"But that is the point, dear sister. We _wanted_ to be in love, secretly or otherwise. It already has enough 'spice'!" Belldandy challenged. Keiichi and Megumi regarded her with surprised expressions.

"But Cevn is new to our house and he _didn't_ want to drink," Belldandy pointed out.

"What's all the concern about one mortal? It's not like he's someone special or anything!"

"Oh yeah? Then how come the Almighty is directly involved with him. _Directly_! You know what I think? I think you are in deep sushi, Big Sister!" Skuld shouted.

Urd's less-than-serious attitude towards this 'inquisition' dissolved instantly as she reflected on Skuld's point. She felt a sobering fear for the first time regarding last night's lunacy. Up until this point, she had alternated between being upset at everyone or not caring at all; now she was suddenly faced with the fact that she may be hoist by her own petard, so to speak.

"Okay, so I _might_ have screwed up. Repeat..._might_ have! But you saw how Cevn reacted. He even threw me out of my chair and tried to hit me with a sake bottle! It's his damn fault too! He's a loser and a jerk!" Urd turned on her heel and strode out of the dining room.

"That must be a first for Urd. She openly admitted that she screwed up!" Keiichi noted.

"Well, at least Cevn's being here has brought on one small change for the better," he observed with a grin, trying to lighten things up. The atmosphere remained charged, however. His joke fell flat on deaf ears.

Belldandy assured them that she would be strong enough to repair the damage tomorrow. Skuld announced that she was "80 percent" finished with her project. Megumi decided that she would go check on Cevn again. She softly kicked the wooden base of the sliding shoji with her toes and heard Cevn say "come in". She stood in the doorway and looked at him with concern.

"Cevn, you're up! How are you doing? I heard that you really had a wild time last night..."

Cevn was paging through the mysterious tome again. He put it down and motioned for Megumi to come into the room. She sat down facing him and asked how he was feeling.

"Pissed at Urd and Mara. Upset at myself for losing control. Sad that Skuld distrusts me. Worried that you and the others won't want me around you after last night."

"But it wasn't your fault, according to everyone but Urd."

"Yes, but in a way it is. I should have told you all about why I don't drink."

Megumi leaned closer and told him, "You can trust me...I'm your new little sister, remember?" The fond memories of two days ago gave comfort to Cevn and he started to explain.

"Megumi, I am a recovering addict. I haven't used any drugs or alcohol for eleven years." He watched her face carefully to see how she would react to this. Megumi looked at him impassively, not wanting to betray any sense of the shock she was feeling with his admission.

"I'm not like you and the others, I can't stop at one fix, pill or drink...or whatever." Embarrassed at the implication of his statement, he added, "Not that you guys take pills or shots, of course. There's nothing 'social' about the way that I used to take drugs. And my behavior while I was loaded could not be confined within anything that could be considered 'happy hour socializing'...er, what you guys in Japan call sakaya no kigen. When I get anything in me that'll get me loaded, I become a danger to myself and others." Megumi giggled, noting that the term I used went out with the Meiji Emperor.

"What do you mean, Cevn? You mean to say that you used to used drugs uncontrollably? Why?" she asked.

"Well, it's like...cars. They all use the same gasoline, but some cars run slow, others fast. Fast cars are more prone to get in accidents. It's not the car's fault that it goes fast...it's how the car is made. The car doesn't get to choose how it is made or who gets to drive it. So when an accident occurs, it can't be blamed on the car. I know this isn't making any sense. Hmm, maybe a better way to explain it would be to use the example of people who drive cars. Most people drive within the speed limit, or at least try to drive with an eye out for possible difficulties. Then there's some people...driving the same kinds of cars, mind you...that'll drive insanely. Without regard to risk to themselves or other drivers. I'm not referring to drivers who race competitively like your brother. I'm referring to drivers that drive like dumbasses," Cevn said as he noticed the look of confusion on Megumi's face.

"Look, I didn't _choose_ to be a drug addict. It's not a choice one makes...it just _is_. Once I started using drugs, I couldn't stop. No matter how bad I wanted to. And I'm not making some kind of excuse for ruining one's life with drugs. It's just that some of us are not able to control it, just like a car can't control who drives it or how fast it goes when it gets some gasoline in it. Not all drivers are like Keiichi."

Megumi nodded. She couldn't understand all of what Cevn was saying, but she could fathom enough of it to add to her resolve that Urd was wrong to force him to be intoxicated. And that he was really a nice guy, regardless of what happened while she was away last night. She felt bad for this young man.

"Are you still going to the interview tomorrow?"

"At this point, it is the only thing I have going for me."

"Oh...I don't know about that! After all, you have all of us pulling for you...hmmm...well maybe, just some of us right now. But the others will soon forgive you, or themselves." Cevn smiled at this veiled reference to Urd.

"Thanks, Megumi. I never had a little sister, so I hope that you'll remember that you are helping me out a lot, too." Megumi flashed him a sweet smile and gave him a hug, then walked out of the room to resume her evening's studies.

Cevn looked at the stack of boxes of musical instruments in his room and sighed a heave of exhaustion.

"Not tonight. I need to get rested for tomorrow's interview." With that, he turned out the light and slept.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Urd was in her "Urd's Castle" room, feeling miserable. Confronted by the others with overwhelming evidence that she had somehow messed things up good, she had beaten a hasty retreat. She felt somewhat ashamed of her behavior the night before. But she was also mystified by it. She could drink a lot of sake, but never before had she been plastered _like that_ since she had come to live on the Earthrealm. The only exception was during the time where she was growing younger because of lack of power, right after the Lord of Chaos disaster. It wasn't her fault that her terrestrial energy-restorer was sake. She recalled how she regressed in age and ended up in a nine year-old's body...with an accompanying loss of tolerance for the stuff.

She let her thoughts return to Cevn. Why did she force him to drink? He was a weird guy, admittedly, but this whole trip about no booze, no women...it almost seemed like a joke. But it was no joke. He went nuts after two bottles! She tried to pierce through her hazy memories of the night before.

"Lord, what did I do to him?" she said to herself as recognition dawned. She remembered how upset he was, and the full force of her folly hit her. I'm a Goddess, not a mortal...I can face the truth, she told herself. She saw Cevn seemingly taken over by some powerful force. She replayed the event in her mind, with new clarity.

"He was completely shattered by it," she thought, "and I did it to him! Or did I?" She suspected that Mara must have slipped her something to make her lose control like that. Urd knew that she often caused more problems when she applied a 'solution', but she never really did anything deadly due to an outburst of intentional malice. Also, Belldandy was usually around to stop her before she did. Urd noted with regret that she was filled with malice that night, especially after Cevn told her off.

"So maybe it wasn't me," she mused. Just then her phone rang.

"Yes?"

**"It is I."** Urd cringed, as she recognized the voice of the Almighty. Here it comes, she thought.

**"Urd, Goddess Second Class Limited, what did you do last night to your charge? Also, I demand that you give Me a progress report!"**

"M..my charge?" Urd asked innocently. The Lord wasn't mincing any words with this call, she fearfully admitted.

**"Yes. The mortal, Cevn. You did offer him relief. You did arrange for him to have a wish granted. You did bring him to your house. And I especially took interest in his case, did I not."**

Urd gulped and meekly answered "Yes."

**"Good. Then how is it that he hasn't made a wish yet? Why is he residing at your house?"**

"What!!" Urd said with downright shock. "But I...but he...but I did..." she stuttered.

The deep booming voice interrupted her.

**"At least you are willing to acknowledge responsibility. But that isn't the same as **_**taking**_** responsibility, Urd. One more thing. Did you do something...wrong last night?"** Urd dialed through her mental mede vecum of excuses, fumbling for an answer.

"I...I don't know. I forced something on him that he didn't want, but the Demon Mara was there too. I cannot remember everything clearly.

"But I do feel bad about how things turned out...and I guess I'll have to take responsibility for my actions, won't I?" she added. She heard what sounded like a snorting laugh on the other side of the phone line.

**"Be that as it may. I have no choice but to suspend your license. You are restricted to using **_**limited**_** Earth Spirit powers until further notice. Limited in this case means one-fifth Earth Spirit level powers."**

"What! But that's hardly anything..." Urd started to complain, then checked herself. She regained her composure slightly, knowing that it was futile to argue with Him. She sighed at this, then bowed.

"Yes, my Lord. August One, before You go, may I venture a question."

**"Yes...I will allow it."**

"What is the nature of the book that You sent to my mortal charge?"

**"Book? I did not send a book."**

"But..."

**"Goodbye, Urd. Strive for humility in your dealings with mortals. For that matter, in all of your actions."**

_click_

Urd was thunderstruck. License. Suspended. She put the phone down and reeled backwards. License. Suspended. Now Skuld would have the upper hand.

Keiichi and Belldandy were in the study when Urd wordlessly walked in, her eyes staring blankly into space.

"License. Suspended." she muttered before either of them could ask.

"_Again_?" the young couple exclaimed.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

I got up early, and meditated. Without my meditation books, I could only do a third of my meditation, it seemed. The sun had yet to rise. I wanted to be ready by 10 am. I looked at the alarm clock--it read 4:35. I tiptoed to the bath and soaked, planning all my responses to the interrogation that I knew I would be subjected to. At least the feeling of being hungover was gone. But my apprehension was just beginning.

I looked in the mirror and practiced interview faces. I paced around in my room a bit, then strove to remember my Japanese. With several thousand kanji and verbal fluency under my belt, I could do okay by JET program standards. But this wasn't a JET high school internship. It was a long shot.

Breakfast was quiet. Megumi and Keiichi both gave me a vote of confidence on my choice of dress for the interview, saying that I looked 'professorial'...whatever that was. Urd looked dejected.

"Good for her," I thought. "She deserves it after what she did to me."

Megumi started to tell me what little she knew about the Dean of Faculty and the President of the Institute. I'm sure most of it was hearsay, as faculty at that level rarely interact with students. But I feigned interest, playing along just to make her feel better.

I decided to leave the temple before either Keiichi or Megumi left for school. I planned to walk to N.I.T. The eight-kilometer walk would take about an hour and a half, and I could take in some sights and calm myself along the way. I was hoping that my sojourn would be something like a Zen walk. I had always dreamed of living in Japan: now that I was here, I wanted to 'live and breathe' my new home. I started out of the temple gate and strolled down the streets Keiichi had designated on the hand-drawn map he gave me. On the left about two kilos down the road was a park, with rows of hot tea and coffee machines. Further along was the small old downtown district with some 10 story high-rises and lines of shops getting ready to open. I knew from Keiichi that N.I.T. was bordering the downtown area, on an old W. airstrip. I was surprised how compacted everything was, the houses and shops crowded together in thin rows lining slender streets.

I turned left down a narrow street, and saw a sign that read "Psychiatrist and Therapist. Specializing in Depression and Abuse Issues." I jotted down the address as I passed by, and then walked onto the wide avenue that bordered N.I.T.

The gate to N.I.T. was crowded with students. The whole campus was a bustle of activity, scholarly and otherwise. Most of the students looked well off, as I observed many BMWs, Lexus' and Mazda Miatas in the student parking lot. This gave me a deeper appreciation of Keiichi and Megumi, as neither were "rich kids" and no doubt had to struggle with their affluent schoolmates in the social structure of the college. Not to mention having to earn their way into N.I.T. by excellence of academics, rather than by the "good old boy" network that dominated so many technical colleges.

I went up to the Admin. Building and introduced myself. I didn't have a meishi, so I wrote one out on a paper for the secretary. After a half-hour of waiting, a lean wizened man dressed very formally in a tailored black silk suit came out. He introduced himself as Dr. Kintaro, President of the Institute. After exchanging greetings, he ushered me into a room with four other men. They sat at a long desk, while I sat at a chair in the middle of the room. The room was furnished very elegantly, with a Western flair for boardroom design and tall stacks of leather-bound texts. I felt like I was on trial in a 17th Century 'Star Chamber'. I had been feeling on trial a lot, lately.

"Cevn, if I may call you by your first name, this resume is handwritten. May you explain why you didn't bother to type it?" the Dean of Faculty asked sternly.

"I hand-wrote it so that you would not only be able to appraise my Nihongo, but also so that you would see that my calligraphy is legible. Humanities being a course of study that involves intensive written commentary on the part of the instructor on student papers, I wanted you to know my handwriting could be read and understood by your students." One good thing about being a recovering addict, I can certainly be a good bullshitter when I needed to.

"That's a good excuse for not having a word processor!" Dr. Kintaro said with a chuckle. The others laughed as I dismally noticed how my first impression had just majorly flopped.

"This is true, but please be aware that I just arrived in Japan a few days ago...I haven't even unpacked yet!" I replied.

"How much Japanese do you know?" Dr. Kintaro queried.

I explained to them that I studied 4 years of Japanese at the university level and 2 at the graduate level. Several faces seemed to frown at this, until I added that I was considered also fluent in Chinese, Latin, Greek, Spanish, Italian, and passable in Russian and German. The panel asked me a number of questions about Japan in an effort to determine my level of fluency. After this, Dr. Kintaro pointed out the note board in the corner of the room by inclining his head and invited me to demonstrate my written skills.

I browsed through the shelves of books on the far wall, selecting a passage out of the Nihon Shoki and translated it verbally into several languages. This strained every brain cell I had, as translating it from classical Chinese to Japanese to Greek to English was a difficult task, especially considering the cultural context of the Nihonji. By going to the root text of Japanese culture and history, I was hoping that my historical and psychological skills would curry a favorable impression in the notice of these savants.

Then I wrote the translation in each language I knew. While I was writing the Cyrillic translation, one of the professors asked me, "Is that Greek?"

"No sir, this is modern Russian." Dr. Kintaro shot the professor a sharp glance as I continued.

Dr. Kintaro was nonplussed, but several other faculty members were clearly impressed. He asked about other subjects, and I gave them the lowdown on my scholarships, achievements in Psychology, Philosophy and History, and my published work. Then he asked, "Why don't you have your Ph.D.?"

I stumbled over this answer, but explained that I was almost finished. I told them that I had designed the doctoral program myself, so that it would include influences from several disciplines. As such, I was exploring terra incognito. Then he turned to ethics.

"What do you feel is the role of a humanities faculty at a technical college?" asked the Dean of Student Affairs, a rotund man with a seemingly kindly face otherwise made severe by the interview process.

"I don't know, sir. But I sense that..."

The five men scrutinized me closely. I didn't want to simply offer a derivative answer based on John Dewey or Bertrand Russell. Instead, I went from the gut. I explained that the study of humanities was intended to round out the education of young scientists and engineers so that they could appreciate more deeply their work and themselves. Dr. Kintaro stared at me with an unreadable expression. After this, the committee excused me.

I looked up at the clock: it was 11:40! I had been in there over an hour and a half. At noon, the five men piled out of the room. Dr. Kintaro called me into his office.

"Before I retire for lunch, I felt it necessary to inform you that the opening is closed as of now..." I slumped slightly in on the couch, "...if you desire to take the position. If you accept, you will immediately assume Yamashita-sensei's three classes for the remainder of this term. For the next school year, you will instruct a fourth class in a subject as yet to be determined. In addition, you will also serve in an adjunct capacity as a school counselor, based on your psychology degree. We will require you to teach Greek and Latin starting in the fall for fifth and sixth classes. Not too many Japanese technical institutes of N.I.T.'s stature can offer a course of study in these languages. This would be a feather in our cap, and would demonstrate that N.I.T. is invested in Western classical studies. If you would comply with these extra requirements to your staff duty portfolio, the position is yours."

I had the job!! At least this day was going to be okay. Politely, I assured him that I accepted the position, and that I would be available immediately. He stood up, shook my hand, and welcomed me into the world of N.I.T.

"By the way, I wish to remind you to complete your Ph.D. by the end of this school year. Not in the next few weeks when the school year is over, of course, but by next spring!"

I thought to myself, "How am I going to do this when my entire advisory faculty in Hawaii thinks I'm dead or never even existed?" In consternation over this latest development, I found my mind racing to consider the options, which seemed sadly limited. Oddly enough, I felt confident that my transcripts would find their way to N.I.T., despite the 'disappearance' of many other aspects of my life.

After a short wait, a middle-aged woman dressed in a navy blue kimono arrived in the reception area and I spent the next several hours on a walking tour of the Institute. She turned out to be Dr. Kintaro's niece, a professor of Calculus at the school. While we were walking, she confided to me that her uncle was extremely impressed with my academic credentials and my language skills.

As we strolled through N.I.T., I could distinguish two parts of the campus. A red brick wall surrounded the campus environs, segregating it from the outside. There were two distinctive patterns of architecture, which I termed the 'old campus' and the 'modern campus'. The 'old campus' consisted of a collection of mid-Meiji-era buildings clustered closely together on the north end of the campus. I silently hoped that I would be working among this group of buildings. A large athletics field was located east of these buildings. In the middle of the campus were the campus and student centers, plus a tightly grouped set of buildings and portables. South of these was the 'modern' part of the campus, including the usual impersonally designed large buildings. My guide pointed out with pride the various labs housed in these buildings. The student body seemed to be almost all Japanese; I didn't seem too many exchange students or other gaijin. I attracted a lot of stares in my dress blazer and my combed back long hair.

That afternoon, I visited a flower stall, bought a floral set and vase, and went to the hospital to visit Yamashita-sensei, the man whose position I was replacing. He was in good spirits, happy to have survived his heart attack and responding well to the triple bypass surgery he had.

"If he only knew that he was talking to a dead man, at least dead to people in Hawaii and the US," I thought.

Mr. Yamashita told me of his life in Japan. I sat captivated with his tales of the reconstruction after WW II, the political turmoil of the 1960's and 70's, the economic boom of the 80's, the collapse of the 'bubble economy' in the 90s, and the economic stability of the first few years of the 21st century. He was proud of his two sons and daughter, who were finishing up their graduate schoolwork. As I listened, it was obvious that this man had felt isolated as a humanities professor in a school that stressed science and technology. He warned me about several faculty members and then told me that he was going to retire from teaching and spend more time with his wife as they waited for grandchildren to join his family. He was impressed with my tale of the interview and thanked me for visiting him. I told him it was the least I could do...that I wanted to wish him well in his recuperation and also make sure that I could fill his job at N.I.T. with his blessing. We engaged in some talk about recent events in China, and then his wife came in, which was my signal to return home.

Home.

I was actually considering the little temple compound as home.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Shortly after everyone had left for school, Skuld had engaged herself with the task of repairing Banpei-kun. She disassembled his 'head' and made some modifications to his visual sensors. She still wondered why neither Banpei or mini-Banpei recognized Cevn-san when he first came to the temple. She wanted to make sure that Banpei's sensory apparatus was in top condition...she didn't trust Cevn-san at all at the moment.

"Maybe he is a new kind of Demon, one that Banpei couldn't distinguish," she thought. After this, she pulled out her mallet and softly tapped out the dent in Banpei's face, rounding it out so that it was good as new. She applied a metallic white color to him. She liked her new powers: pasting word's on Urd's face was fun, but being able to manipulate surface colors was very useful. She was more than happy to be relieved of having to paint whatever she created. She just simply thought "metallic white" and Banpei's face turned that color.

"Cool!!" she said out loud.

Belldandy had kept her company while she repaired Banpei. She assisted with the upgrades to his detection circuits. She wanted her younger sister to feel secure again in her own home; Skuld was already uppity enough as it was. After Banpei was operational again, she enlisted Skuld's aid in repair the damages. Bell could have done this herself, but by inviting Skuld to help, she was hoping that this would show Skuld that the recent trauma could be undone...and that Skuld could also have a say in the household stuff. After all, the house was pretty much already established in design and function when Skuld arrived. Belldandy thought that allowing Skuld a little say in the living room design would make her feel more 'at home'.

Skuld made some outlandish suggestions, like an ice cream machine in the corner of the living room, and a quantum gate (for 'decoration' no less! Belldandy noted with astonishment) on one wall of the room. After Belldandy vetoed several initial ideas, Skuld became more practical in her suggestions. She wanted more sunlight and different colored ceiling beams. Belldandy created two sun windows in the ceiling and enlarged the living room windows. Then she created dark brown wood ceiling beams to frame the ceiling. In all, the final effect was an improvement in the atmosphere of the living room. She asked Skuld if she thought Keiichi would notice the subtle changes.

"He better notice!" she replied.

Keiichi arrived late in the afternoon. He and the motor club members had been working on the construction of their solar racer for this weekend's race. He set down his tool kit, pulled off his shoes, and walked into the main room.

"Something looks different here," he noted.

Belldandy bounded up and gathered her kiss and cuddle from Keiichi. She excitedly took him by the hand and sat him down next to her on the couch and told him about Skuld's suggestions.

Skuld scolded her, "You were supposed to wait until _he_ noticed, Big Sister!" Keiichi smiled at the young Goddess.

"She didn't give me time, Skuld, but I noticed right away!" Keiichi loved it when he and Belldandy were seated against each other. She would rest her head on his shoulder and nuzzle up on his neck, sometimes kissing him softly there. Despite Urd's insistent meddling and his own hormones, he still hadn't seen Belldandy nude, except by accident a couple of times.

Keiichi had often imagined what having sex with her would be like. He frequently reminded himself during these flights of fantasy that she was a Goddess, and the experience might be totally different than what he could ever imagine. Having Belldandy nestled next to him felt real enough, perhaps making love with her would feel just as 'normal'. When they kissed, it was just like kissing a human woman. But Keiichi was perpetually concerned that he could somehow alienate things by 'crossing the line' and adding sex to his relationship with Bell. He was a man who respected his partner enough to not allow his lust to blindly rule his senses. As a result, he was unexpectedly rewarded with a deep emotional bond with Belldandy. Instead of feeling horny around her, as he did earlier on in their relationship during moments like this where they were cuddling on the couch, now he felt 'warm' instead. He was so happy to be in love with his Belldandy.

They were still seated, holding hands and leaning back into the soft fabric of the futon-couch when Megumi had come home. She had stayed late with her softball team. Again this year, she had been struggling to organize one, as there was no faculty sponsor or established team. She now had a dozen girls who consistently showed up to practice on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Once she made it 'official' by getting a faculty sponsor, she could work on setting up games with other technical institutes. It was hard making room for softball in the already-crowded schedule at N.I.T., but her friends on the team were enthusiastic for the most part.

Skuld came up to her and asked if she noticed anything different about the room. Megumi paused, then noted the different ceiling and windows. Skuld proudly told her that the changes were her idea. Megumi looked around approvingly, then went to the kitchen to fix her dinner.

Occasionally, Belldandy didn't cook for the group. She sensed that a break in the routine every once in a while would be good: so every week, she would take a night off. Tonight was such a night; it was especially apropos as she was tired from her exertions to repair the house. She wanted nothing more than to have a good talk with Keiichi and feel his caresses.

The sun was setting as Cevn walked in the temple entrance. He noticed that Banpei had been repaired and that the place looked somehow less daunting than before. He stopped at the doorway to the temple building that served as his new residence, said a silent prayer and caught his breath.

Inside, Skuld was eating some mochi sweets as she surveyed Belldandy's repairs to the living room. She was seated on a couch, stroking Pho' who was seated on her lap, purring with pleasure.

Cevn came in last, looking in better spirits than he had in past days. He went to his room and changed into a tee shirt and jeans, and went back into the living room. Megumi sensed by his happy spirits that his interview went well. Cevn told them that he was now officially an instructor at N.I.T. and he would start in two days. Megumi was happy with this news, while Keiichi seemed to take it with a hint of wariness. Megumi observed that the others were still pretty shook up from last weekend, and that they were obviously nervous around Cevn. She made a mental note to ask Cevn to sponsor her softball team in the next couple of weeks, as school would be breaking for the summer next month.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

I decided to approach Keiichi to elicit any useful suggestions he could offer about my status in the house. I had felt outcast and depressed as soon as I returned home, even though I had good news. I was daunted by his less-than-enthusiastic response to the fact that I was hired at N.I.T. I wondered what was fueling his thoughts. After spending a couple of peaceful hours with Belldandy, Keiichi had gone to his study and was hard at work on his schoolwork.

I knocked on the sliding door.

"Keiichi, you have a few moments?" He assented and I slid the door open, entered, and shut it.

"Thanks for your time. I have been feeling really...tweaked the past couple of days around here."

"Tweaked? What does that mean?"

"It's a term we use to indicate...well in my case, it means that I feel like everyone is walking on eggshells here and it's mostly my fault."

"Well, it's not every weekend that a maniac wrecks my house," he said in a grim low voice.

I winced at this. Keiichi noticed and softened the blow.

"I know that it was not your fault, but you should have seen yourself. We were so freaked out, and you were tossing stuff at us." He shuddered a little at the memory.

"Look, I feel really bad about all this. I come to your house as a guest and then you offer me a chance to live here. Last weekend, I feel like I blew any chance of being accepted in this house. Now I feel like an intruder." Keiichi looked thoughtful for a moment.

"But you aren't an intruder. I guess I've been pretty hard on you since last weekend. It really wasn't your fault! You paid us generously, you've been trying to be nice to us...I could imagine that this is quite different from Hawaii or the US. Hey man, you should relax a little!"

That was an understatement!

"I appreciate your empathy, Keiichi. Being that you're the only other guy here, I'm going to need to rely on you from time to time to deal with all these women!"

"I know what that is like, for sure dude!" Keiichi replied, smiling at my remark.

"I've completely alienated Skuld, and Urd...well, I don't feel like being in the same room as her."

"I don't blame you. I would be seeking revenge right at this moment if she did something to me like she did to you. I know firsthand what it is like to be the target of her mischief!" He related how she had tried to give him a love-potion which only turned out to cause turmoil between Belldandy and he, as he 'fell' for Sayoko by accident. Belldandy was resigned to leave at that point; somehow, the power of his love for her offset the potion and things got back to normal.

"That's messed up, Keiichi. What is it with her?"

"She acts before thinking, and she has this _huge_ sense of pride! A lot of her hair-brained schemes seemed be to hatched by some deviant streak of hers."

"Why does she drink so much sake?" Keiichi rolled his eyes. "Each Goddess has a mundane energy source. Why this is, I don't exactly know. They got power from Yggdrasil, but yet each one has to get some strength from something earthly. Thank God, Bell-chan only has to drink tea. I don't know if I could put up with her drinking sake like Urd does!" We both laughed at this.

"But it's kinda funny in a weird way that she got drunk like that last weekend. I have seen her drink loads of sake and get tipsy, but not raging drunk. She usually just gets quiet and goes to her room. And now that Yggdrasil is online, those three have constant access to power; they don't have to depend hardly at all on their earthly powerup sources. I think that Skuld eats a lot of ice cream because she _likes_ it, just like Belldandy has to have her Darjeeling tea at each meal. But Urd...there's something else about her and booze."

"Yeah, like an addiction," I thought resentfully. But I remembered that Urd was not a 'cute' drunk, even if she was a 'cute' Goddess. If she was a mortal, she would have been dead or locked up, or maybe even standing on some street corner by now, the way she downs the stuff. Not to mention that it waxed very strange that a divinity could be addicted to anything.

"Maybe the Gods are more like us than we could imagine, or the other way around," I reflected out loud.

"I often wonder about that myself," Keiichi replied.

"Hmm, but what can I do to feel accepted by you guys after that nightmare episode last weekend?"

"With Skuld, it'll take time. Just let her be, and she'll work through it. Belldandy has felt a little of what you went through that night, so I have a hunch that she understands. I think the whole Mara thing has shook her up far worse than anything you ever did. Urd...is just Urd. You were lucky Megumi wasn't here. The guys in the club...don't worry about them. I'll think up some half-witted explanation and they'll all buy into it. Besides, I think they like you anyway, I know that a couple of them thought your outburst was rad. At least the ones you didn't toss something at."

Great. They value the maniac in me.

"Keiichi, I need to tell you about the whole trip with me and sake." With that, I explained to him about my recovery and that I was really bad off with drugs in my early teen years until I got clean. He seemed to understand what I was saying, and I awaited his verdict.

He told me that he couldn't judge me harshly because of my past and that he could now see why I didn't want to drink, because of how I ended up the other night. He said that I seemed to be 'unsafe at any speed' if I was loaded.

"I don't know if I should tell you this, but Mara said something about you either killing us, or we'll have to kill you. Bell-chan was very upset by that, and I'm not too comfortable with it either. Skuld heard it too."

"Then I can see why you guys see me as a threat. Let me tell you straight up Keiichi, that I do _not_ wish any harm to come to you or anyone else, and that I will not hurt anyone deliberately. Mara would have to possess me to cause that...I would fight her every inch of the way."

Keiichi looked at me and put a hand on my shoulder and said that he felt better now that we talked. I thanked him and said that I would leave him so he could get back to his homework.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --


	5. Pt 5: Anxiety Incarnate

**Part 5: Anxiety Incarnate**

Mara was camping out in Cevn's room. She waited patiently in her 'sprite' form: invisible to the human eye or even Banpei's detection circuitry most of the time. With every instance that he left the room unattended, she would descend from her hiding place and pore over the pages, taking notes. He had been gone most of the day so far; Mara overheard him discussing with the others about possible routes through the city, as he wanted to strike out and explore on his own. "Fine. All the better for me to check this out," she thought with glee.

"Foolish mortals," she reflected. "The only side to us Demons that they see is the evil side. They look at us and think: 'all that demons care about is spreading evil and misfortune'. Boneheads! They never take into account how _fun_ it is for us to cause havoc! It would be dull for a Demon to simply be a mindless harbinger of chaos. That's why we have the edge on the mortals. They think we're just one-dimensional beings. But we're not just evil automatons! We love our work! And a First Class Demon like me rules the roost, because I'm really good at having fun at other's expense. And if it doesn't work the first time, I'll always try again. I love it! It's situations like this that make me grateful I'm a Demon."

Mara continued to address her imagined audience.

"There's this new guy Cevn. He has this book; it lists instructions on how to summon the Ultimate Demon. He doesn't even have a clue about what it really is! And Belldandy and her sisters don't know either, bwah heheh! They aren't even concerned enough to go about putting a Demon-warding field up in his room, canya believe it? Even if only half the words are in the Demon's Language, I know that this book can tell me how to summon forth the Ultimate Demon, Isilblius. Now Cevn, he's this mortal who has been to Hell and back and hasn't even died! I think he may even be a Demon...with a little shift in the balance of his mind, he can be mine. My tool...I can use him to torture that do-gooder Belldandy!"

"What's more, it is written that she who summons Isilblius will become all powerful, because Isilblius is bound to do only _her_ bidding. Unlike the Ultimate Destruction Program, Isilblius is a full-on Demon. Once summoned, he cannot be destroyed simply by being erased. That damn Skuld, ruining my plans with the Ultimate Destruction Program!" she remembered resentfully.

"But she won't be able to do a thing this time! I would have the most powerful being in the Multiverse at my command! I wouldn't only topple the Goddess Relief Office, I would usurp the Almighty himself!"

Mara reflected on her childhood rivalry with Belldandy. Belldandy had chosen to go to the Goddess Relief Office while Mara had chosen to join the Demon Grief Office. From this point onward, their rivalry had intensified, at least on Mara's part. It was no longer the innocent child-like infighting they both enjoyed so much. Mara became more evil by degrees, while Belldandy became more kind. She had to compete with Belldandy all the time.

The Demon Grief Office functioned in total opposition to the Goddess Relief Office. Where the Goddess Relief Office would offer a wish to deserving individuals in their time of need, the Demon Grief Office would cause catastrophe in the lived of randomly selected individuals at the time of their greatest happiness. Mara recalled with a sense of pride all the mortal lives she had ruined. She had cut through the human race like a scythe cutting wheat. Nietzsche, Nobunaga, Cleopatra, Lennon, Napoleon, Marie Antoinette...all had been her assignees. But sometimes, the Demon Relief Office would randomly assign a life at the same time as it was being granted a wish by the Goddess Relief Office. Such was the case with Morisato Keiichi. Belldandy had been lucky enough to beat Mara to the punch with Keiichi. If she hadn't, Mara would have appeared, to make him miserable. She had planned to have him framed for a murder he didn't commit, then sent to prison for the rest of his life.

Instead, Belldandy arrived moments before Mara. Then Keiichi had made his stupid wish for Belldandy to stay with him. Now, Mara would have to remain locked in combat with Belldandy over Keiichi for as long as his insignificant mortal life would last. On one hand, she hated the fact that she had to focus so much time and effort on destroying only _one_ mortal's life. On the other hand, she relished her fights with Belldandy. She had nearly succeeded several times in wrecking Keiichi's life; it was through some unexpected whim of the Ultimate Force that she hadn't destroyed him. She took consolation in the fact that she _had_ made their lives extremely miserable, for at least a few moments or days. But she knew that eventually, fate would favor her, and she would bring down Keiichi, and _that_ would ruin Belldandy forever.

Mara imagined some point in the near future: Belldandy would have to bow to her in defeat and be forced to give up her precious Goddess license, knowing that she had brought shame upon the Almighty and his minions by losing Keiichi. Then Belldandy would have to take on a mortal life and Mara would be free to plague her until death.

Mara grinned at this dire thought, her fangs gleaming in the sunlit room. She returned to her covert study of the ancient text, looking for arcane clues regarding the summoning of the Ultimate Demon.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

I was sitting in the park, drinking a can of Oolong Tea from the vending machine. It was so quiet here in the park, in contrast to the bustle of the city. Makuhari was a crowded section of Chiba, to even a greater degree than Waikiki or the denser parts of Honolulu. It was a far cry from the Midwestern town I had grown up in. And yet it was in Chiba Prefecture...which Keiichi called 'the boonies'.

I reflected on the life of extremes I had led: full-blown drug addict, sexual abuse victim, widowed husband at 20, a leader in recovery, disabled by deep bouts of depression for the last eight years, scholarship recipient, single for the last nine years, doctoral candidate. Now, my life in Japan required a whole new shift in my identity.

What parts of me got brought over from 'there' to 'here'? Not my body, because everyone back in the US thought I was dead. My depression had reared up several times already. My sexual abuse issues and the accompanying fears were still very real; I was absolutely walking on eggshells around Urd. The need for recovery support was amplified by the episode last weekend; my addiction was still there, waiting to be triggered. And it was triggered big time when Urd 'forced' me to get intoxed. Yet all wasn't miserable. My scholarly work had paid off with a job at N.I.T. I was probably one of the youngest faculty there, as I was just a few years older than many of the students.

"They'll really trip on that," I humorously mused.

"So where will balance assert itself in my life?" I wondered, recalling a part of my wish, way back when. I knew that I needed to do two things right away for me. First, I needed to check out this therapist whose sign I saw on the way to my interview at N.I.T. Second, I would need to setup all my musical equipment. With all the sudden changes, I would need professional help. What if a bout of depression came on all of a sudden? I remembered that I hadn't had any medication for my depression ever since I arrived. With all the randomness of life with the Goddesses, I knew that I would need a place to vent my feelings from time to time. I didn't have a compassionate Belldandy to share my innermost feelings with.

I thought about Urd. Such a beautiful woman! I must have been entranced with her, at least her appearance, within minutes of first seeing her. In real life, she put to shame any manga attempts to depict her, although I had to respectfully give the artist his due...he had come as close as humanly possible to depicting a Goddess. This was no mean task. But as beautiful as Urd was on the outside, she was as proportionately messed up on the inside. Just like me. The only difference was that I _knew_ that I was messed up. I had worked hard to move through a period where I would just simply 'beat myself up' emotionally in response to my inner human riot. I had mostly recovered from the diminished self-esteem that accompanies a messed-up-life. And, I had learned how to distinguish between my own shortcomings and all the victimization experiences that were 'put on me'. Finally, I was somewhat in tune with the spiritual context of my recovery. But Urd was not in touch with any of the above. Except maybe the spiritual aspects...after all, Urd _was_ a higher power! I remembered Norse mythology...the Well of Urd. A place of punishment. I still struggled with my life. Urd, on the other hand, seemed to be able to dismiss any struggles. She would screw up, then deny it, then move on to next week's 'adventure'. Dammit, why didn't I have the luxury of an emotional eraser like she did? Why couldn't Urd be more like Megumi?

I felt a sinking feeling with that thought, and decided to check out this therapist right away. I walked through the park and onto the main street, then over a few blocks, left...right...left...etc. Finally, I found the narrow street, recognizable by the butterfly design painted on the side of the building at the head of the street. I walked down several blocks, and then saw the familiar sign. Climbing up a narrow stairway, I found myself in a hallway with rows of offices. I looked until I came to a door that said:

_Dr. S. Ogawa, Ph.D., MD. Therapist specializing in _

_Trauma Issues, Depression and Family Counseling _

I paused for a moment to gather my thoughts, and entered the office. The office had a nicely appointed, but small reception area, with antique sumie scrolls and framed degrees on the wall. I sat next to a pile of Japanese magazines and thumbed through a couple. I always preferred the thick Japanese magazines as opposed to their spare, thin, American counterparts. They seemed to have much more information and fun reading. Then I remembered that the Japanese as a culture had a far higher literacy rate than America, because of the former's emphasis on primary education.

"That's what America gets for amusing itself to death with its empty pop culture," I opined. As I conjectured along these lines, an elderly Caucasian woman emerged from the inner office. A Caucasian therapist? I was totally unprepared for this development.

"May I help you, young man?"

I bowed to her and introduced myself, explaining that I was interested in therapy. I received a second shock as she asked me--in English!--my name and age. I was expecting to have to deal with the difficulties of translating nuances of feeling and attitude from English to Japanese...a task I was totally dreading. But with this woman...

"You speak English?"

"Yes, I was born in America, and lived on the West Coast until I met my second husband, Mr. Ogawa. After we married, we moved here."

"I was expecting a Japanese woman. Not that a Japanese therapist would be bad, but I was expecting..."

"You shouldn't rely too much on expectations, you know!"

I acquiesced to this remark. She called me into her inner office. I sat down on a chair facing her and began to sort through how I should present myself. I would need to remain secretive about Belldandy, Urd and Skuld; nor could I tell her about my 'death' back in the US. In other words, I would have to perform a lot of 'editing'.

"What seems to be the trouble, Cevn?"

I shared with her a condensed version of my life. For the next forty minutes, I outlined the high points and tragedies of my experience. Finally I told her about being new in Japan, and how things were so topsy-turvy.

"I definitely think you are in need of my services. Let's meet again in a few days to look closer at who you are."

I signed up for an opening for next Monday, and thanked her. After the requisite discussion about fees and such, she ushered me out of her office with a reminder to be prompt next week.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Friday was a bustle of activity in preparation for the race. This event was sponsored by the International Federation for Solar Energy Research. It was an extremely high-profile competition, because it had a worldwide roster of participating teams. The cash prize was rumored to be in the tens of millions yen. This was big-league stuff, far beyond what the N.I.T. Motor Club had ever been involved in before. This was the inaugural race, so the pressure was turned up.

Also, this was the beginning of March, which was nearing the end of the school year at N.I.T. The Solar Car race would be the final flourish for the N.I.T. Motor Club. Then they would have a brief vacation and then start another school year in April.

The competition would begin tomorrow with the preliminaries.

"If we get past that, then the real fun begins," sighed Keiichi to himself as he opened his mapbook and examined the highlighted route planned for the final race.

The finals would be a tour-style affair consisting of an oceanside drive from suburban Makuhari past downtown Chiba, then angling northeast towards Sakara and Narita. Traveling around the Kasumiga Lagoon, they would circle two smaller mountains, Tsukubesan and Kabasan via the Ibokuro Pass. From here, their route turned eastward, towards Kasama and Mito. Once in Mito, their racecourse would then bear west again, parallel to the Nakagawa River until the racers reached Kuroiso. Driving past the Tohoku Expressway, they would travel southeast through Tochigi Prefecture towards Nikko and Nikko National Park. En route to the park, the drivers would negotiate a number of zigzag mountain roads. Traveling through Nikko, they would then drive between Mts. Nantai and Shirane and then retrace their route back to Nikko. This meant that the drivers would have to travel up and down the infamous Iroha-zaka highway, with its 48 sharp turns. From Nikko they would proceed southeast, skirting around Utsunomiya and angling south to Shimodate. From Shimodate, their trek would pass Ishioka, through Sawara and out to Choshi and Cape Inubo. From there, the route proceeded down the ocean to Tagane and then down the coast through Chosai, Mobara, to Katsuura. Here, they would double back west across the Boso Peninsula towards Futtsu and then south to Tateyama and out to the tip of the peninsula at the Nojimazaki Lighthouse.

The course would be extremely rigorous, as the drive northeast from Makuhari consisted of treacherous narrow winding roads. The roads near the lagoon were dirt roads, which were bound to mire some of the contestants. The drive to Nikko National Park would strain the batteries, as it was heavy shaded with forest. The mountain driving there would test the car's stability to the utmost, as the pair of mountains would have dramatic orographic wind sheer. The oceanside stages would dramatically effect the efficiency of the solar panels with salt-water spray and wind turbulence. The drive from Katsuura across the Nokogiriyama mountains to Takeyama was entirely on maintenance roads that possessed some hazardous cornering and rugged terrain. Finally the short stage from Takeyama to the lighthouse would subject the solar car to leeward weather conditions and hilly, twisty roads.

Keiichi looked up from the route map and sighed to himself. This wasn't going to be any walk in the breeze. Almost all of the 1000 kilometers would be packed with hazards. Of course, the planners had designed the route to expose the solar vehicles to all sorts of challenges. It would be a dozen hours of hell, from a driver's perspective. Ordinary cars had ordinary mechanical problems, but each team would be fielding a lightweight experimental car, which would be even more fragile than a 2500 Kg. passenger car.

Keiichi looked at their racer, the N.I.T. Taiyo-no-Kinetsu. The "Solar Solution". The solar panels were placed facing inwards, in order to shield the cells from the anticipated ocean mist along the seashore. They sloped downwards as they reached the rear of the vehicle. This had been Megumi's idea, so that the panels could take advantage of the slope angles when traveling downwards towards the finishing stage. The more they were exposed to the sun, the better that the energy could be tapped for battery storage. The angularity of the placement of the solar cells was the subject of intensive calculations; the math had literally been reworked dozens of times. Each vehicle was allowed three hours to "sun up" before starting the heats. Coasting would also play an important part of this race, as to conserve energy was to increase overall speed time.

The initial heats consisted of a drive through Makuhari and Chiba itself; the best two times from each eight-car heat would then advance to the actual tour the next day. There would be all sorts of news coverage from NGN, NHK and CNNI. This was a major event, perhaps the most important race that Keiichi had ever driven in.

"Not perhaps. Definitely!" he urged himself, steeling his nerves for the heats tomorrow.

The international field was highly competitive, and the Japanese had only four entries out of the field of 102 competitors. N.I.T. had two slots, due to their astounding 1-2 finish in a solar race earlier in the year. The third slot belonged to Tokyo University and the fourth to a Toyota research team. The favored team was the French-German team that Citroen and Benz were financing. It was rumored that the two corporate partners had spent millions of yen on their computerized solar car.

Tamiya was worked up like he had never been before, to the point where his hands were shaking when he inspected the many moving parts of the car. Several times, he had chewed out other club members, saying, "Don't touch that, yuh poseur, yuh might break it!" The club members took his scoldings lightly, as they all felt grave about the whole final inspection. Ootaki had set a lucky charm on the roof of the cabin, and taped a Shinto good luck paper strip to the top of the dashboard. There had been arguments about the added weight, even if it amounted to a couple of grams, but finally the club members relented to Ootaki his little superstitious eccentricities.

Belldandy, on the other hand, was relieved to see the good luck charms.

"At least this will give Mara second thoughts about sabotaging the race!" she noted with gratitude. Dressed in her N.I.T. overalls, she looked like a model from one of the more 'decent' calendars one may find in automotive shops across Japan. Urd, who normally functioned as cheerleader to the club, was sorely missed. She was still morose after having her powers restricted, and decided to stay home and stew in her misery. Despite Urd's recent major screw up, Belldandy missed the comfort of her older sister. To her, an integral part of the team was her partnership with Urd; it seemed that part of the team was missing. Even if Urd was a fifth wheel sometimes.

Skuld was a picture of excitement. She contested many points with Megumi about 'this and that'. But the friendly competition between the two designers had pushed each to a higher plane of creativity. Consequently, the racer design was as refined as humanly possible. Belldandy had to restrain Skuld's zeal, because the young Goddess wanted to provide divine assistance in the form of technology that was a hundred years ahead of mankind's best. A simple task for Skuld.

"How would we explain a submolecular valance accentuator to the jury of inspection, should we win the race?" Belldandy explained to her sister with an amused grin. Skuld's suggestion _was_ sensible, however, as the lack of friction between the outer ring electrons of fuel molecules would increase the energy output when they were catalyzed. Belldandy had to set a limit on Skuld's suggestions: only use current human technology.

Megumi was worried. She knew that the chances of an N.I.T. victory were slim. She didn't want to taste defeat. The club members were like family, and Keiichi _was_ family. A defeat would cast a long shadow over all of them.

"What's more," she thought, "there's a lot of school pride and national pride riding on this race." A good finish would increase the prestige of the school enormously among its peers. She wondered how it was that Belldandy kept such good cheer in the midst of this last chance to tinker with the Taiyo-no-Kinetsu. She was constantly bringing tea, cookies and sweetmeats to the club members swarming around the racer. Every once in a while, she would embrace Keiichi from behind, and her brother's face would momentarily lose its intense expression, to be replaced with a serene, far-off look.

"So that's what love is all about," mused Megumi. She sometimes felt the pangs of being alone, having no one special to comfort her. She was grateful that Cevn was living with them, because he was a guy that she could safely confide in. There were just some things she couldn't tell her older brother, she acknowledged to herself with a note of common sense. She had initially been struck with this gaijin newcomer, but her feelings of desire towards him had quickly turned into sisterly affection. He seemed so cool and aloof, but yet there was a cauldron of strange contradictions bubbling below his surface demeanor, she observed. She wished he knew something about mechanics, so that he could be useful here, or at least offer her some company.

The new club member, Genji, had caught her eye. He was a focused young man who was planning to major in electronic engineering. In some ways, he reminded her of Keiichi; the innocent charm her older brother was graced with seemed to indwell Genji as well. There was a catch to the whole situation, however. A _major_ catch.

Genji was Mishima Sayoko's younger brother.

Sayoko was a junior at N.I.T.

As far back as six years ago, Sayoko had romantic intentions towards Keiichi. It started their senior year in high school. It was assumed by everyone at N.I.T. that she would hook up with him before either became upperclassmen. When Belldandy had arrived on the scene, her hopes for a relationship with Keiichi were dashed by the beautiful young Goddess. As a result, Sayoko harbored immense bitterness towards Keiichi, Belldandy and Megumi. Sayoko had mellowed somewhat in her contentiousness, while at the same time her drinking had increased. Several times, the household had been disturbed in the middle of the night by a drunken Sayoko. Although she treated Sayoko with the deference required by a younger to an older student, Megumi felt that Sayoko was somehow planning mischief. Part of her felt sad for her too. Her drunken flings were becoming more frequent as well.

Sayoko certainly complicated her feelings towards Genji. Genji, for his part, seemed to reciprocate Megumi's attentions, but there was a limit to his friendliness, apparently the result of his older sister's influence.

"Sayoko must have really been pissed when Genji joined _our_ motor club, instead of Aoshima's," Megumi acknowledged to herself.

The subject of her secret affections was checking the wheels and steering column of the solar racer. Megumi grinned at him, and Genji meekly smiled back at her.

"God, he has such handsome eyes," Megumi once again noticed. Her heart fluttered briefly, then she reluctantly caught herself wandering off into romantic flights of fantasy. With effort, she turned back to the task at hand: checking the solar panels and batteries with Skuld.

Cevn kept away from the proceedings. He felt that he was still on shaky terms with the club members, despite Keiichi's insistence that he was forgiven by most of them for his outrageous behavior a week ago. Instead, he focused on assembling his 'studio'. He had been working for several hours arranging keyboards and guitars here and there. He would have to build a panel for all the effects board he had bought. He had several keyboards and Midi's slaved into a workstation. His wavestation was still not hooked in to the conglomeration of equipment, and he still needed to set up the drum machines, samplers and sequencers for primary and secondary effects.

After he finished with this, then he planned to set up the 'studio' part of his setup, using analogue and digital recording devices. He had purchased a computer to store track data, and a CD burner, so that he could perhaps cut a CD if he had some compositions that were good enough to share. He overheard noisy discussion from the club members as they did the final checks on the solar car. It was almost midnight. He tested a few MIDI patches, and then decided that he would turn in, so that he could accompany the club tomorrow. Perhaps his presence there as a passive participant might reduce some of the tension he felt would be present.

"The sooner I get back in their good graces, the better."

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Race day! The oceanside Makuhari Messe Exhibition Grounds and Center in Chiba, rebuilt since the destruction caused two years ago by the still unexplained mysterious forces of nature, was becovered with banners announcing the "World Solar Vehicle Efficiency Competition". Keiichi looked at the wide square in front of the Center, packed with racing teams, media, spectators, and vehicles. He was almost overwhelmed by the incredible assemblage of solar car designs. He had to fight with himself to maintain his appreciation of the Taiyo-no-Kinetsu, as the other cars looked like works of marvel to his trained eye.

He looked over at Belldandy, who was dressed in a white N.I.T. racing jacket with a dark blue mini skirt and light blue hose with a cherry tree in blossom running down each leg. She wore a racing scarf around her neck, and had a pink blouse under her jacket, with orange and green geometric designs. She had on those sexy white boots that accented her slender legs and feet. She had dressed to the hilt for this event, no doubt to encourage Keiichi and the rest of the team. He felt a surge of pride as he noticed members of the other racing teams walk by, stop to stare at her with admiration, then grudgingly resume walking towards their destination. She _was_ divine, if only judged by her beauty. He felt a poke in his ribs, and looked up to see Skuld grin at him, then poke him again with the end of her mallet.

"Pay attention to the race, not to Elder Sister, Keiichi. Or I'll bomb your car and you can forget about impressing her." Skuld was being downright friendly today, he thought. Normally, she would be attempting to run interference between Belldandy and Keiichi. But today, she must have noticed how much her sister is involved in this race and had decided to be a good girl. Then he looked over her shoulder and saw his cousin Tomohisa.

"Ah-ha! That's why she is in such a good mood," he thought with amusement.

"Tomohisa-san!" Keiichi yelled above the clamor.

"Hey, cousin Keiichi, I thought I would surprise you! Your aunt and uncle send their love...they'll be watching the TV closely to see if they can pick you out."

"Skuld, you knew he was coming and didn't tell me, you little brat!" Keiichi stuck his tongue out at her and received the same back at him. He noticed that the 15-year-old Tomohisa was standing close to Skuld, looking very happy to be visiting his cousin's young friend.

"I bet he used this race as an excuse to get away from home for the weekend and see Skuld!" he thought. "Megumi must have been in on it too, otherwise Aunty wouldn't have let him come visit. I'll have to talk to her about concealing things from me...after the race is over."

Tamiya was in maxed-out adrenaline mode. Every word was shouted, and his tense muscles rippled under his muscle-t. Ootaki had actually taken off his studded leather jacket, which was probably the first time Keiichi had ever seen him without it in public. He wore an X-Japan rock tour T-shirt that was at least 10 years old. A collectors item, to be sure.

Sora looked very calm in comparison to her two sempai, wearing a pair of wrap-around Ray Bans and a look of quiet concentration. She also looked a lot different than usual without her round-rimmed little glasses.

"She must be feeling it too," Keiichi noted. Although her figure was girlish like Skuld's, she was attracting a good amount of attention from the guys on the other competitor's teams. Keiichi felt sympathy for her, as he knew that the man of her dreams was the president of one of the other teams. He looked over to where Aoshima's Nekomi Tech. Four Wheel Club was stationed. Their racer looked sleek and futuristic, no doubt built with the latest in expensive materials. He felt a huge surge of respect for Sora, as he knew that her romantic heart would rather that she would be over _there_ helping Toshiyuki Aoshima's team; but instead, she was keeping her commitment to the Nekomi Tech. Motor Club.

"Alright, let's get a move on!" Tamiya bellowed. The judge's inspection followed; Tamiya and Ootaki's nervous pacing back and forth behind the inspection team was almost comical to Keiichi's eye. A sigh of relief followed the judge's pronouncement that the "Solar Solution" was cleared for the heat. Keiichi was then weighed, as each driver had to weigh in within a 5 kilogram range, so that the teams wouldn't be differentiated by the weight of their driver.

"Otherwise we'd have Skuld drive, if she even knew how," Keiichi laughed to himself. He had been dieting for the past two weeks so that he would fall into the low range of the weight category, and he was happy when his weight was only a few decigrams above the minimum.

"Yuh the man! Yuh da bomb!" Tamiya shouted and happily hugged him, almost crushing his ribs. "Now get in there and kick some ass!"

Keiichi climbed into the cockpit of the solar racer and strapped himself in. Belldandy walked over and gave him a lingering kiss on the lips, for good luck.

"Be alert for any signs of Mara, my love," she whispered in his ear, then she blew cool air into his ear and whispered with a smile, "I'll be waiting for you when you return, Keiichi-san." Keiichi shivered at the thought, and pulled the cockpit lid down and locked it.

As luck would have it, the two N.I.T. teams were competing in the same heat. Keiichi looked over and saw the rival team's driver, who looked as tense as he was. Tamiya and Ootaki gingerly pushed the Taiyo-no-Kinetsu to the starting line, then high-fived each other for not destroying the delicate solar vehicle while positioning it on the starting line.

Keiichi steeled his nerves and watched the lights descend from red to orange to...

_**Green!!**_

He pushed the pedal halfway for a slight moment, to feel the response of the battery-powered vehicle. The engine whirred to life and he felt the acceleration push him back in his seat. He floored it, shifting several times to reach the highest gearing. The Makuhari Messe Exhibition Center disappeared behind him and open road beckoned. He hugged the turns as the downtown Makuhari/Chiba landscape blurred past him. This car is magnificent!! Keiichi felt driver and solar car become one as he raced ahead into suburban Chiba.

"May your wheels fly with the wind, dear Taiyo-no-Kinetsu!" Belldandy shouted as she watched the pride of N.I.T. Motor Club vanishing from sight. She liked the fact that this race didn't begin with the deafening roar that usually accompanied the start of a race. She also relieved that there was a total lack of noxious fumes that resulted from the combustion of gasses. Clean...that what is so important about this race. She felt a deep pride in how the club had risen to this challenge. In this case, they had truly fulfilled Tamiya's unofficial club motto: Great deeds on a small budget!

Keiichi turned into a straight line of highway, keeping vigilant for the other drivers. The only car even close to theirs was the N.I.T. Four Wheel Club entry. The driver had a malicious grin on his face. Before he could wonder what that smile was all about, three motley-looking individuals emerged from behind a hedge up ahead and threw an assortment of coffee cans and rubbish in front of his lane.

"Assholes!" he yelled in the cockpit of the racer. "C'mon, Taiyo-no-Kinetsu!" Keiichi urged, leaning forward as if to psychologically push the pedal even deeper.

Instantly he thought, "I have only one chance to avoid that junk, and that's if I can jump ahead into his lane before we reach it." He steeled his nerves and swerved to his right, almost clipping the front of the other N.I.T. racer. The man had panicked and slowed down, choosing to let Keiichi in ahead of him rather than risk collision.

"Whatta lightweight! Afraid to play a little 'chicken' on the road, eh?" Keiichi thought mischievously.

Belldandy had felt a sudden unlucky impression, as if an unfortunate star had fallen, and shouted "Keiichi!" Almost immediately after it, she felt a surge of relief. The club member's attention was fixed on the far side of the road, where the finishers of the heat would first appear. They strained their eyes to the utmost to see any telltale bumps on the horizon.

"Look!" They saw two minuscule bumps. Growing larger, the bumps caused untold fretting among the N.I.T. Motor Club. Sweat was pouring from Ootaki's forehead and Tamiya was tensed like a tiger ready to leap. Megumi held her hands clutched over her heart, hoping to see her brother.

The bumps grew even larger, and Ootaki pointed.

"It's Keiichi!" a number of voices yelled.

The whole team of engineers started jumping up and down. Megumi hugged Cevn, then the other team members. Belldandy was kissing each member on the cheek. The team was elated beyond belief as Keiichi brought Taiyo-no-Kinetsu in well ahead of the other cars in the heats.

"_YEAHHHH!! WE DID IT!!_" shouted a beaming Sora. Ootaki and Tamiya started hugging, then playfully cuffing and wrestling each other. Megumi hugged Belldandy and Skuld slipped her hand in Tomohisa's. Tomohisa tensed for a moment, then leaned over and kissed her on the cheek. Cevn patted Tomohisa on the shoulder, then offered a hand to Skuld. Skuld hesitated, then reached out and squeezed his hand.

"The winner of the third heat, Nekomi Tech. Motor Club!" the PA system announced. Keiichi pulled the solar racer off to the side as his teammates ran towards him. He popped the hatch and climbed out of the car just as Belldandy bounded up and hopped up in his outstretched arms, so that he was carrying her.

"Someday, Bell-chan, I will carry you over the threshold like this!" he thought, right before being absorbed in the excitement of victory.

"Oh Keiichi, my love, you won!" Belldandy praised him.

"Not bad for a guy," offered Skuld. Tomohisa mock-cuffed her and countered with a snipe of his own.

"That's my cousin Keiichi you're talking about...you be careful or I'll put some spicy masubi in your ice cream when you aren't looking, Skuld!"

The excited team was jubilantly celebrating, while Cevn was walking away from the group, with a blank expression in his eyes. He reached down and picked up a large sledgehammer that was resting near to him and started back towards the gathering.

Megumi was the first to notice.

"Cevn-san, what are you doing?" Her inquisitive air dissolved to terror as she saw the empty look in his eyes. He was staggering towards her, towards them. He was still advancing with the hammer held high overhead.

"Cevn!" "_CEVN_!" she screamed at the top of her lungs in shock and fear.

Keiichi turned to see Cevn advancing with a hammer. He was staggering, as if he was trying to resist each step forward. The club members spied him, and crowded around to the other side of their car, out of the path of his hammer.

"What are yuh doing with that hammer, ya moron!" Tamiya yelled angrily. Belldandy looked at Cevn with silent shock. Ootaki ran over to try to restrain him, but Cevn kept advancing with a gleam of 'otherness' in his eyes.

"Ah told yuh not to bring him! He's nuts," Tamiya accused Keiichi.

"_It's...Mara! She...has...me,_" Cevn said in a halting voice, forcing each word out with visible effort. Ootaki was amazed that Cevn was actually dragging him. He held Cevn around the waist, and still couldn't halt his advance.

"_Tamiya...hit...me...knock...me...out!_" Cevn strained to say.

Belldandy watched as the giant Tamiya started hitting Cevn on the head. Cevn's head snapped back as Tamiya hit him with all of his might.

"He'll kill him!" Keiichi shouted. An idea flashed in her mind. Belldandy pushed her way to the racer, tearing the good luck charm off the roof. She knew that Mara had possessed Cevn with the intent of having him hurt one of them, destroy their solar car, or get hurt himself.

"Here, Keiichi!" she said she tossed the charm to him. Keiichi caught it and flicked it over Tamiya's shoulders. As soon as it hit Cevn, he collapsed.

"Mara!" Skuld shouted above the din as she saw Mara's invisible 'sprite' Demonic form make good her escape.

"I killed him!" Tamiya exclaimed in panic. Just as the charm had struck Cevn, Tamiya had decked him with a roundhouse punch. Cevn went limp in Ootaki's arms, sliding to the ground. Tamiya was looking around frantically. Keiichi ran over and felt Cevn's neck for a pulse.

"He's alive, Tamiya! He's okay!"

"Whatta goofball! All that, jus so I could knock him out? Wha's wrong with him? Who's Mara?"

"Mara, how could you do this?" Belldandy wondered to herself with disappointment as she saw Mara's sprite-form rising away. Cevn was breathing shallowly. A news reporter ran up, seeing a man on the ground.

"What happened here?" he asked. Megumi thought quickly.

"He's a new teacher from N.I.T. and he came with us. I guess the heat was too much for him. We'll take care of it." She smiled innocently at the reporter while shielding him away from the group and their car. She turned to look at Cevn and paled. His nose was bleeding, and his face was red with bruises. She cursed Mara.

"Who's Mara?" Tamiya repeated. Keiichi used the first story that came to his mind.

"Mara is a strange form of seizure that he has. He forgets where he is and who he is. It's like he was possessed by a bad demon, or something," Keiichi explained. Tamiya narrowed his eyes at this, then looked to see Belldandy nodding in assent. He knew that Belldandy had never lied to him before. He suddenly felt ashamed that he had hit Cevn so hard.

"Tamiya, he wanted you to knock him out. Don't take it so hard, Tamiya-sempai!" Keiichi said, offering him some solace.

"Uh, whatta we do now?" Ootaki wondered out loud.

"Owwwwww...my head!" Cevn groaned as he tried to sit up. Megumi immediately kneeled behind him and helped him up into a sitting position.

"Ahhm sorry, Cevn, but ah did what yuh's told me to do."

His head still spinning, Cevn surprised Tamiya by thanking him for his efforts.

"That's a killer left hook you have, Tamiya-san!"

Several of the club members helped him to his feet, but he could not stand.

"I'll call an ambulance," Sora volunteered.

"Out of the question!" Cevn interrupted. "We can't have that be a damper on your victory celebration. You guys won! You're in the finals! I'll be okay." To prove it, he gamely stood up on one knee, then got to his feet.

"Hey, where's the party?" he added, leaning against the racer for support, clearly light-headed as he wobbled.

"At duh Men's Dorm, of course. An wimmens are permitted, jus' for tonite!" Tamiya shouted.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Belldandy and Skuld were at the temple house, getting ready for the party. Cevn was in his room, a cold cloth on his head, courtesy of Keiichi and Megumi. Urd was still in her room, hiding out. Belldandy walked down to the hall to his room, slid the door open a little, and looked at the sleeping figure.

"Brave Cevn, you sacrificed yourself to save the solar racer," she whispered with respect. She started to shut the door, but heard Skuld walk up behind her.

"Is he okay?"

Belldandy reassured her little sister that he was going to be okay. Skuld looked at Belldandy and asked if it would be okay if she stayed home to work on her Cypheratron. She peeked in the room to see Cevn, then turned to her older sister.

"Why did he ask that big ape Tamiya to hit him?"

"He was possessed by Mara, and the only way he could figure out to stop her was to somehow lose consciousness before he could hit anyone with that hammer."

"But wasn't that dangerous?" Skuld said with sudden recognition.

"Yes it was, dear Skuld. But he was willing to take that risk, so that none of us would get hurt." Skuld mused over this and felt new respect for the recent addition to their household. This Cevn-san was an enigma, she felt. First, he runs amok, and tries to hurt everybody. Then he sacrifices himself to prevent his possessed form from hurting anyone.

"How could he resist Mara long enough to tell us that she had taken him over? How could he even_ resist _Mara's possession? That's impossible for a mortal!" Skuld asked. Belldandy looked at her with her soft azure eyes.

"I don't know, Skuld. No mortal has ever been able to resist one of Mara's possession spells." Skuld's brown eyes widened at this.

"He must have really not have wanted her to use him to hurt any of us! He have wanted really bad for her to leave him alone!" she exclaimed, feeling Belldandy's reassuring hand pat her on the head, then stroke her long silken black locks. She couldn't comprehend everything that was going on, but she really wanted to.

"He must be a really nice guy to do that for us!" she concluded.

"Yes, I think he is. I don't think he is a Demon at all. Sometimes, I think he is something special that none of us have seen before, Skuld."

Skuld peered into Cevn's room again. Then she walked back to her own lab. In one room, she saw all the musical instrument boxes piled up in the corner of the room.

She knew what she needed to do.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

A headache forced me awake. 2 am. The others were still sound asleep.

"My head feels like a sack of wet cement!" I thought as I walked into the bathroom to survey the damage.

"I just hope that my nose isn't broken," I silently prayed. Looking into the mirror, I saw my face. Two shiners, and a strawberry, a swollen jaw and a red nose, not broken!

I splashed cold water on my face to fully roust the sleepiness I felt. I looked at the bathtub longingly, and drew a hot bath. Soaking in it, I remembered the events of yesterday as the stiffness left my neck and shoulders...

Right after Keiichi crossed the finish line, I could remember hugging everyone. Then I felt a feeling like I had never felt before. It was like someone had inserted a freezing cold icepick at the base of my spine. The chill sensation was breathtakingly painful, repulsive. It slowly slid up my spinal column, edging closer to my brain. Once it reached my brain, it suddenly burst into a burning feeling. My brain cells, synapses and axons, felt like they were on fire. A rippling sensation fired across my consciousness as I heard a grating female voice tell me to grab a hammer. I tried to fight it, but I couldn't. It felt like someone was operating my body in the same manner they would drive a car or play a piano.

"_Who are you?_" I could remember asking the burning voice in my head.

"_You're doing fine. Don't ask any more questions. Here, enjoy these fine memories!_" a voice had answered, rife with sarcasm. Try as I might, I couldn't even put together a thought. Memories had rushed into my consciousness, all horrible. Being beaten with an electrical cord. Being choked in the shower. Thrown through a window at age four. Pushed naked out the front door and locked outside the house. Force-fed my own vomit after I threw up some food I was forced to eat. Being sexually assaulted over and over again as a child.

I screamed silently, while walking towards the car. I remember a mocking laughter echoing in my head.

"This must be Mara," I guessed between painful scenes of my life.

"_Shut up, mortal!_"

I couldn't stop moving forward with the hammer. The presence told me to hit anyone within reach, or smash the car if I got to it first.

"_Mara, why are you doing this to me?_"

"_Shut up, my slave! If you do what I want you to, then I'll leave you alone,_" the voice bargained.

"_No!_" I tried to slip in a thought between each horrible slideshow of my life. Maramaramaramaramara!

I remember hearing my own voice say "Mara!"

I remember Megumi screaming, and Tamiya advancing, and Ootaki holding me back. The suffocating feeling worsened. I reached inward, to some hidden source of strength that I only guessed was there.

"Tamiya...knock...me...out!"

"_Noooooooooo!_" the grating _other_ voice in my head exploded with anger. "_You can't do this, you're only a mortal..._"

The next thing I knew, I was laying flat on my back in the middle of the raceway. The whole N.I.T. Motor Club was all there. I didn't know if I had succeeded in preventing Mara. I looked over at the car, and saw that it was alright. Megumi was holding me, and everyone looked concerned...

In the present moment, I felt sobs coming from deep inside of me. The warm water soothed me as I let the full force of my feelings wash over me; the tears running down my face and neck into the water. I stepped out of the tub, catching my face in the mirror; tears were streaming from my red eyes. I stopped her! I stopped Mara!

Maybe I _am_ supposed to be here.

I walked back to my room, stopping at the doorway right before mine. On it was an elaborate plaque, which said:_ Cevn's Studio_.

Curious. How did _that_ get here?

I slid open the door and saw all my musical equipment.

"Someone has been in here," I observed. I turned on the blacklight and the keyboards and computer. I turned the amps on and set all the mixer outputs to 'headphones' and started playing some random notes. I ran a few scales up and down the keyboards, then started playing around with the midi's and sequencers. It sounded wonderful, incredible. I set up the computer and started recording.

The music was magic that I disappeared into. I imagined realms of consciousness that I could only dream approximate. The symbols from the mysterious book flashed before my eyes. The movements followed clearly to me. Soft lush orchestral harmonics, blending into a choral piece with lute, niko and koto in contrapuntto...a sequenced bass rhythm with double tracked keys and guitar...then a quiet passage with soft harp samples echo-tracked...the finale had MIDI samples from instruments I hadn't ever heard before...but it sounded _right_!

It was wonderful. Now I understood the affinity that Keiichi must feel when he is driving. There is a merging of man and machine that transcends the creativity and technology of both. I had noticed how Keiichi's eyes always became more animated when he saw the Taiyo-no-Kinetsu. I finished the music, and sat back. How had this whole bit of music emerged from me? I hadn't forced it, rather, it seemed to take on a sentience of its own. I heard voices in the hallway, discussing something just out of earshot. I loaded the pod to see that the music was clearly on it, and then emerged from my studio.

I saw Keiichi and Belldandy in the kitchen, eating shortbread and tea.

"Keiichi must be forgoing his coffee because of the race," I guessed. Both of them got up and hugged me. I was surprised when Keiichi had hugged me after Belldandy did.

"I want to thank you for yesterday. That was an incredible act of courage, Cevn-san." This, coming from a guy that was about ready to drive on a dangerous route in an experimental solar car. I bowed deeply to Keiichi.

"Score one victory over Mara!" he added. I decided to challenge him.

"Keiichi, the victory won't be complete unless you win today. I know you can do it. I'm going to stay back home, but I want you to jam on this when you finish the race in first place." I handed him the cassette, while he looked at me quizzically.

"It's music, I just created it last night while you were all asleep." Belldandy raised her eyebrow at this mention of music.

"Why aren't you coming to the race?" she asked.

"Think about it for a moment. What happened yesterday could happen today. Besides, I feel trashed. We can't afford to have me there, because Mara might try something again. The pod will assure me that I'll be there in spirit with you all."

Keiichi assented to this, adding that he would rather have me there with the rest at the race. He pocketed the pod in his racing jacket.


	6. Pt 6: Sudden Impact

**Part 6: Sudden Impact**

Skuld felt great! She was almost finished with her translation machine and her labors last night were a success. She congratulated herself on her ingenuity. During her sleep, she had an unusual dream that involved Tomohisa. The most wonderful music was drifting in and out of the background as he took her in his arms and kissed her on each cheek. For some reason, the recollection of dream cast her in an ambrosial mood. She returned to the present moment and looked at her older sister, Belldandy, who was quietly eating a rice cake.

"Elder Sister looks pretty apprehensive," Skuld observed when Urd walked in to the dining room.

"You guys weren't going to leave without ol' Urd, were ya?" She felt a mixture of annoyance and relief as she realized that her oldest sister was going to attend the tour race with them.

"So how does it feel to be a lowly Earth Spirit?" she replied icily. The comment had the desired effect, as Urd quickly turned red in the face and gave Skuld the stink-eye.

"Heheh...and that's _all_ you can do about it too, Big Sister!" Skuld laughingly remarked as she got a rise out of Urd. It wasn't too often that she could get away with teasing Urd like this. She relished every bit of it.

"Now Skuld, that's not the way you should treat your sister...she just had her license suspended!" Belldandy scolded her. She felt worried that Urd would screw things up again, but yet she felt a strong relaxing of concern as well. Her sister seemed to be back to normal. Her older sister was dressed as usual in her revealing N.I.T. cheerleader outfit that she wore during racing events. Urd _seemed_ to be herself again, with sexiness and cupidity intact. With a broad grin, Urd asked about how they were planning to go to the Makuhari Messe Exhibition Center. Belldandy replied that she and Keiichi were going to ride on his motorbike, while Megumi was planning to drive with Skuld.

"Well, I guess that means that I'm riding with Megumi and the brat!" Urd stated. Skuld threw a rice cake at her which Urd managed to barely dodge.

"Hey!!" Urd picked up a strawberry and deftly bounced it off Skuld's forehead, leaving a splotch of red.

"I may not have my powers, but I still have good aim!' she declared cheerfully. Keiichi stepped in between the escalating foodfight between the two sisters, just in time to be the target of a smaller butter pad flung by Skuld.

"Hey...guys! We have a race to compete in today, remember?" he shouted, more of a command than a request.

Belldandy had been deeply concerned about how her older sister was taking the news about her license suspension. It was unlike Urd to lock herself away in her 'Castle' for several days. She didn't even come into the sister's bedroom to sleep at night. Bell was wondering all this time if Urd would emerge from her self-imposed exile in a fit of sullenness or histrionics. Beyond this point of concern, there was the air of unpredictability that always accompanied her older sister. It appeared that Urd was not planning anything drastic. In fact, she really couldn't do anything drastic, as long as they kept her away from Keiichi and the car. As if Urd was anticipating their concerns, she assured them otherwise.

"I'm not going to do anything wrong this time. I can't anyway, since my powers are limited to Earth Spirit Grade," she explained, mollifying her sisters as she looked out the window.

"My, what a beautiful day! Aren't you guys glad that I'm back! Big sister is here! She's in the house!"

"Of course," Keiichi said in a nonplussed voice. A moment later, he was surprised when Skuld suddenly reached over and hugged Urd. Bell-chan hugged her next, and he felt that a rift between the three had somehow been mended. He was grateful, because he always felt a special happiness when the three were together in harmony.

"This must be auspicious," he noted to himself.

Then Megumi entered the room and saw Urd. She smiled broadly; she was also happy to see the three sisters united, especially on this important day!

"I had the most wonderful dream last night, guys!" she announced. She had awakened with a totally entrancing sense of calm, despite the upcoming race. She chatted with Skuld about the course, Genji, Cevn, and the racing club. It was so nice having Urd back!

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

The ride to the Exhibition Center on Keiichi's bike was too quiet for Belldandy. Keiichi seemed to have the weight of the world on his shoulders this morning...but yet a part of him seemed to be relaxed and confident. She wanted to reach out of her sidecar and hold him, to lovingly assure him that things would be all right. She could sense the waves of apprehension radiating from him. It didn't help matters that the media had cast such a high profile on the competition, she thought with a slight ire.

The whole N.I.T. Motor Club was being portrayed in the news as a group of misfits who lucked out by making it past the first heats. Belldandy didn't like the inference that 'misfits' seemed to indicate, but as she looked around at the club members...it was the absolute truth.

"How _did_ this diverse group of men and women bond together and win so many races?" she wondered once more. The local media had picked up the theme that the N.I.T. Motor Club was an 'underdog' and was exploiting public sympathy for the college kids as much as possible.

Megumi, Skuld and Urd showed up early, the March air leaving a sunrise dew on the grounds. The 'power up' period wouldn't begin until 9am, and the race would start at noon. The Makuhari Messe Exhibition Grounds were packed with spectators. When Tamiya and Ootaki arrived, they spied Urd. Tamiya ran over and bearhugged her, lifting her off the ground and swinging her around in several circles. Then Ootaki and he gave her a 'sandwich' hug.

"If it was any other day, I would slap both of you, and that would just be the beginning of your troubles, but since we have a race to win today, I'll forgive you this once!" Urd said, smiling at the two sempai.

"With duh one an only sexy Urd with us, we're bound to emerge victorious," announced Tamiya. Urd winked at him, and in a voice imitating Ootaki, said "Fer sure, dude!"

Keiichi and Belldandy arrived minutes later, both wearing very intense expressions. As soon as she hopped out of her sidecar, Belldandy walked behind Keiichi and began to give him a soothing backrub. His shoulders were knotted with stress, she noted as she loosened him up.

"_Ahhhhhhhhhhhh_!" Keiichi sighed in pleasure. Then he surveyed the scene around him, and his spirits sank. The staging area was swarming with engineers and mechanics. Looking at the other cars gradually chipped away at the N.I.T. team's confidence in their own car. The European entry looked like nothing any of them had seen before, with bunches of umbilical cords attaching it to offboard computers. The Americans had a series of futuristic solar cars competing. The Tokyo Univ. car was ultra-modern in design.

"I bet not one single member on that team sanded an inch of _that_ chassis," Megumi said in distaste, in reference to the Tokyo University entry. Keiichi stared in disbelief as the European entry was being aligned by _lasers_! Tamiya and Ootaki were initially fascinated with all the technology, but then it sank in that they were totally outclassed.

The club members surrounded their solar car, the Taiyo-no-Kinetsu. Belldandy looked at the Taiyo-no-Kinetsu. She was assembled with sweat and love poured into her from every member of the club. She also felt that victory was a long shot, but she still held out that the Almighty might witness them a miracle today. Urd was irrepressibly confident and cheerful.

"What's wrong with her?" Belldandy wondered. A herd of news reporters were also moving from team to team, filming, recording and taking notes. Several field reporters headed their way with a camera crew.

Urd saw the TV cameras and started to pose enticingly for the cameramen. They gawked at her with rapt attention as she turned on the charm. They didn't expect to find a model here and Urd's outfit almost made them drool.

"I'm a TV star!" shouted Urd, eating up the male attention she was attracting.

"Urd, stop being such a ham!" yelled Belldandy above the noisy crowd.

"I guess some things are still the same with Urd," she whispered to Keiichi, who just shook his head at Urd. The reporter cornered Keiichi and asked him a few questions while the judges scrutineered the Taiyo-no-Kinetsu. They moved on to interview Tamiya and Ootaki about the technical details of the solar racer while Keiichi weighed in. He was at the same weight as yesterday, no small task considering all the good grinds they had to eat at the Men's Dorm last night. It was tough foregoing the desserts.

After the TV folks had asked their series of questions, Tamiya spied Dr. Kintaro and a delegation of senior N.I.T. faculty walking towards them, probably attracted by the news crew and their cameras.

"Don't yuh two look goofy, the Institute President and his gang is comin' here!" he whispered, elbowing Keiichi and Ootaki. Dr. Kintaro and his staff arrived, smiling for the TV cameras. Dr. Kintaro cleared his throat, indicating that he was going to issue a statement.

"Although N.I.T. is only one of the two remaining Japanese teams, we are proud to be here representing Japan's Technical Institutes. We can only hope that we can finish the race...as well as we can." After the cameras were off, he turned to the team.

"Do what you can," he offered with a doubtful tone to his voice. Shaking each member's hand, he left with his staff.

"Gee, thanks for the support, Mr. N.I.T. President Dude! What a slap in the face _that_ was!" Ootaki commented with a flippant tone and a sneer after they left. In his mind, despite the charged confident air the team had, Ootaki knew that winning the race was a long shot, a miracle. Tamiya sensed his friend's conflicting thoughts and slapped a hand on his shoulder.

"No matter what, I know that we've done our best, good friend!"

There were 26 cars in this, the touring finale of the competition. This was the real test of the solar cars. Midway through this first decade of the new millennium, it was a given that solar power was going to be _the_ future of automotives. The International Federation for Solar Energy Research was a multinational conglomeration of corporations, environmental groups and scientists that formed in 2003 to accelerate the development of clean sources of fuel and technologies that relies solely on solar power. By sponsoring this competition, they were casting a high profile on the possibilities of solar-powered vehicles. In the past three years, public sentiment had begun to shift towards increased use of environmentally clean solar power. Especially since fuel prices had doubled in the past couple years.

The Nekomi Tech. Motor Club members all knew that they were competing out of their league. They felt intimidated by having the honor of participating in the tour race. The attention was a bit too much for many of them. Megumi felt like she was in the World Series, playing for a kiddie-league baseball team while facing the Yomiuri Giants back when Sadaharu Oh was in his prime. The president of N.I.T. was just being realistic, yet his words had dampened the club's spirits.

"Let's huddle," Tamiya commanded. He pulled a small grease-smeared paper out of his fatigues and read a speech.

"Ah jus want yuh all to know that this is the greatest honor of muh life, to be here with yuh. We may not take da day...snmph...but we have shown everyone that N.I.T. Motor Club is fer real." He started crying and continued, "Ah want ta thank each of yuh fer yer hard work on behalf of da club! Let's show dem that da club can race with dignity, even tho' it's a million-ta-one chance that we'll win." He looked up to see tears on many members' eyes.

"Great speech, man!" Ootaki praised him, and then slapped Tamiya on the back.

The PA system announced that the various teams needed to position themselves at the starting line. N.I.T. was in second-to-last row, based on their finishing time. As they wheeled their car in its starting position, the reality of their situation descended on the club, almost snuffing out the optimistic air from several hours earlier. 20 cars had finished with faster times! Belldandy sensed the atmosphere of gloom and tried to cheer them up.

"We're here in this race, therefore we _do_ have a chance to win, or at least finish with a good time, or at least finish..." Even she was vulnerable to the melancholy air hanging over the team.

"Nice try, Bell-chan!" Keiichi replied with sympathy for his girlfriend's fading enthusiasm. She was trying so hard to keep her teammate's spirits up, let alone her own flagging spirits. Keiichi almost wanted to cry watching her valiant efforts to inspire them.

Urd walked up behind Keiichi and squeezed him tightly from behind, her ample bust pushing into his back pleasantly.

"Keep your eyes on the road by keeping your chin up, kiddo!" she advised. Then Belldandy came over and kissed him on the lips. Feeling brave, Keiichi French-kissed her, and pulled her close to him, feeling the heat of her body against his racing suit.

"Skuld must be letting me get by with this," he noticed, "otherwise she would be having a nuclear hissy fit right now." Their long kiss was concluded with a round of good-hearted applause and catcalls from his teammates.

Belldandy looked at him with those off-blue eyes of hers, and told him something gently.

"I just want you to come back safe, knowing that you gave your best, Keiichi-san. Remember, it's not only the car...but also the driver." She kissed him on the cheek for good luck, and Keiichi gave her his sweetest smile. He hopped into the cabin/cockpit of the racer, and Megumi reached him and gave his shoulder a quick squeeze before he pulled the cover down and she sealed it.

Keiichi steeled himself for the first crucial minutes of the race, where all the cars would be jockeying for position before hitting the two-lane highway. He pulled the pod Cevn had given him and inserted it into the tiny pod player that Ootaki had slapped in last night. Now there was nothing to do but wait for the starting gun. Keiichi looked over at the other two cars in his lane.

_**Blammm!!**_

The humming solar-powered electrical engines sounded like a swarm of bees, barely discernible under the loud roar of the crowd acknowledging the start of the race. Keiichi quickly ducked into the inner lane, and cut off the whole row in front of him.

"Wow! Lookit him go! Tamiya shouted with pride. Despite his expert start, he had only succeeded in passing four cars, which left 15 cars ahead of him. The road narrowed as it left Makuhari and Chiba city proper for the countryside. Flat fields passed on either side of him, as he saw a line of solar racers stretched out for about a half a mile in front of him, led by the European car. Keiichi felt his heart sink at the sight of the frontrunners' already unreachable lead.

Watching TV from home, Cevn felt his heart sink. The N.I.T. entry was being given the 'Cinderella' treatment by the media. He remembered the NCAA Sweet Sixteen back in the US; how so many teams had survived to reach the tournament on a lark, then got labeled as 'Cinderella hopefuls' by the press and finally ended up getting slaughtered on the court by the favored college teams. Even the Tokyo Univ. team was being treated this way by the news...and they were considered several levels above N.I.T. in academic prestige.

"Another media stage," Keiichi noted as he began the crossing through the plains of the Boso Peninsula that comprised the Chiba Prefecture. It seemed like every 10 kilometers or so, a cluster of news vehicles were filming the race, while teams of sponsors were phoning in the place of each solar vehicle back to the finishing stage. He managed to pass another car by a hairsbreadth on a tight turn, but dismally noted that the field was beginning to spread out even further ahead. He watched his odometer closely in comparison to his battery charge. The drive thru Chiba-Ken was the calm before the storm, he told himself.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Almost immediately after the start of the race, the N.I.T. Motor Club members boarded one of the shuttle buses to travel to the finishing point at Nojimazaki Lighthouse. It would be many hours before the finishers reached the lighthouse, 974 kilometers away en route. The bus would get there with hours to spare. The team crowded into one of the dozens of mini-buses and left for the 50-kilometer drive. The winding roads only served to remind Belldandy about the treacherous route alongside the ocean and in the mountains. She was so worried that she couldn't find it in herself to appreciate the scenery.

"You know, I had the weirdest thing happen to me last night," Urd interjected. Belldandy looked at her with eyes that seemed to say, "Great, I'm worried to death about Keiichi and the race, and you want to make small talk!" Urd went on, looking out the window at the scenery.

"I dreamed last night that I was a little girl again, and I heard the God's Music, just like long ago. It's been so long since I heard the God's Music. I haven't even dreamed of it since I came to Earth three years ago. It was incredible! I thought I had forgotten what it sounded like, but...there it was in my dream." This topic Urd was bringing up was half heard by Belldandy, as she had more important things on her mind.

"Huh? What? Go on, Urd," she reluctantly acquiesced. "Once Urd gets into one of her stories, there is nothing that could stop her from finishing, whether anyone is listening or not," she thought with annoyance.

"The really crazy thing was that I remember that I woke up, and it was still going on. I mean, I heard the God's Music when I was awake, I think! I know that sounds crazy. But...what really seemed strange was that when I woke up this morning, I was filled with calm feelings. I had been so spaced out about my license revocation. And then suddenly, it didn't really matter all that much anymore...that I couldn't use my powers. But that music..."

"Ehhh! You heard the God's Music last night! Really? I thought I had heard it in my dreams last night, but I dismissed it."

Urd looked at her sister animatedly.

"You too, sis? Did you wake up and hear it too?" Bell looked at her oddly...why would she ask that? Urd repeated the part of her story about hearing the God's Music while possibly being awake.

"_WHAT_! The God's Music while you were awake, Urd? Here, on Earth? Impossible! That music is of another world, another place." Belldandy frowned in reflection.

"That is so strange, that you and I would have the same dream, Elder Sister!" Belldandy added.

"You dreamed it too, Belldandy?"

"Yes. Keiichi and I were on the beach, looking out at a wonderful full moon, shining low on the ocean waves like white serpents. The clouds were misty pink, just like in Yggdrasil at our vacation loft. I heard the God's Music coming from the ocean, or maybe the moon. But it was there. Did you dream that too?" Urd sat up excitedly, facing her younger sister.

"Sorry kiddo, we didn't have the same dream...Keiichi certainly wasn't in my dream!" Belldandy couldn't resist teasing her older sister.

"Well Urd, who was?" Urd ignored her.

"Matter of fact, I knew I was awake when I kept hearing it, because I could overhear Skuld sleeptalking about Tomohisa!"

"What!" Belldandy said slyly. "Tomohisa?"

"Yeah, Bell. I mean...there's no way I could make _that_ up. Such a romantic mind in that little girl! I was awake just a moment, then I went back asleep, despite my curiosity about her dream about Tomohisa!"

"Why, that little..." Belldandy tried to think of a term that would describe her younger sister. A sister who would rage indignant on a weekly basis about her being in love with Keiichi...and yet would dream affectionately of his cousin, albeit unwittingly. She was happy that Skuld was dreaming of love, however.

"But this is impossible! There is no way that the God's Music could be heard on the Earth. Not even the God's CD could be played on any musical equipment the mortals have at their disposal, let alone the God's Music!"

Skuld overheard her older sisters talking and ventured forth a question.

"Is the God's Music the sound of crystal beauty in the air, like flowing waves of kindness and love converging in a matrix?"

Urd felt her body grow cold for an instant. Skuld had used the exact words she had used once when describing the God's Music. Even Troubadour's music couldn't come close to approaching the delicate beauty of the God's Music.

"Skuld! Where did you hear that description! And none of your stories either!" Urd asked, an impugn flavor in her voice.

"I didn't hear it anywhere. I had this dream..." Belldandy and Urd looked at each other. Skuld had heard it too!

"...and the music was...like nothing I had ever heard before." Skuld dreamily admitted. Skuld continued to describe her dream, omitting only the part about her and Tomohisa. Urd looked at her youngest sister, knowing for certain that she was describing the God's Music.

"Hmm, was... Tomohisa in your dream too?" Urd just couldn't resist taunting Skuld...and the blush that flashed over the youngest Goddess's face was well worth it. Urd giggled, then she sat back in her chair quietly, thinking what all this could mean. She heard the others talking and eavesdropped for some juicy bits of gossip.

The mortals had heard it too! She whispered to Belldandy and Skuld.

"Listen to them. They're all talking about hearing some strange music in their dreams." As if on cue, Megumi and Sora, who were seated in the row ahead of them, were animatedly discussing their musical romantic dreams. By the time the bus rolled into the parking lot at the lighthouse, the whole club had discovered that each member had heard some magical music in the dreams the previous night!

The finish stage area was a hodgepodge of camera crews, scaffolding and stages. It had a festive concert-like party atmosphere. The N.I.T. Motor Club bus stopped and its passengers poured out into the middle of the fray. Skuld was in technological heaven as she saw all the electronic cabling and equipment. Urd felt enlivened by the festive atmosphere, while Belldandy and Megumi felt a looming anxiety punctuated with glimmers of hopeful optimism.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Keiichi was driving straight along the road by the Kasumiga Lagoon. The damp conditions alongside the Kasumigaura Lake road had already claimed two cars: one sliding off the road and tipping while the other became mired in the mud. The dirt road was slick, with water pooling on the shoulder. After another ten minutes, he reached the general highway to the two small mountains on the way to Mito and accelerated. He struggled to coast and accelerate alternately, in order to preserve the battery charge.

The cars all reached Mito, capital city of Hitachi Prefecture. Keiichi looked at the hoards of spectators lining the streets, waving to the racers.

"This is a lot bigger than I ever could have imagined." he told himself, feeling intimidated by the number of spectators. As he reached downtown Mito, he saw many hand-held Japanese flags among the crowd. Inspired by this show of national pride, he decided to try a risky maneuver to cut off the American car in front of him. As the cars approached the point where they would jump on to the west highway, he turned steep to the inside, almost hitting the curb, but cutting off a solar car in the process. The crowd roared in approval.

The gradual uphill highway drive crossed many little towns and villages. As he neared Nikko, the road began to wind alongside the river. Tall trees in bunches blocked out the sunlight along portions of the highway, Route 119. Nikko was a pleasant small city with a huge tourist draw, but Keiichi knew that the real trial was soon to follow, as he looked beyond the city to see the two towering mountains, Nantai and Shirane, hunkering over the city like sumo wrestlers at a match.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Once inside the park, the road changed to a narrow delicate winding blacktop. Keiichi hugged the hairpin turns as tight as he could. The steering was performing perfectly as the Taiyo-no-Kinetsu responded instantly to his driving. He looked ahead and saw Mt. Nantai looming to his left with its volcanic shape. They would drive right up the far side of the mountain on the narrow access road, hugging the precipices.

Before traveling up the twin mountains, the course took a side turn to Iroha-zaka. Iroha was a smaller mountain, located just before Lake Chuzenji. The choice of detour was obvious...the racers would have to negotiate the renowned No. 1 and No. 2 highways.

Highway No. 2 ascended the Mt. Irohazaka about 1200 meters in a crazy zigzag fashion. Known throughout Japan, the highway consisted of 20 hairpin turns as it climbed the hill. Its counterpart was Highway No. 1, which descended the hill with 28 turns. As the total number of turns equaled 48 (the same number of hiragana syllables in the classical reckoning), the road would be an anxiety-provoking diversion before the hill-climbing trial of the two mountain roads.

Keiichi recalled traveling the Irohazaka highways as a child, almost getting motion sickness as the family car wove through the coil-like curves of the road. Now, he was racing upwards, exercising extreme caution lest he crash her against one of the many trees that seemed to be planted right next to the highway...where the road's shoulder _should_ be. No chance to pass any racers here; the object was simply to navigate the turns without a crash.

As he drove up Mt. Nantai, Keiichi felt the yamakaze buffeting his solar racer. He remembered as a kid when he and his parents visited Nikko National Park and ascended Mt. Nantai only part way. The winds were so strong that they almost blew him over.

"They say that Mt. Nantai was a training ground for priests...now I know why!" he thought. He could feel the mountain winds resisting the upward climb of his car. A few minutes later, his car was rattling as it was being blasted by the winds. He looked out of his cockpit and saw that he was several thousand feet up the side of the mount.

Suddenly a car in front of him started to tip to one side and then began to spin out of control in the road!

"Shit!" Keiichi thought as survival-driving reflexes instantly took over. He swerved and weaved, going partly off the road to avoid the crashed racer. Then he felt sheer panic as _he_ was abruptly no longer in control of his car. The wind roared threateningly and for a few eternal seconds, Keiichi thought he might wipe out. The steering was unresponsive.

"One or both of the front wheels must be off the ground!" he thought with certainty. Suddenly the steering wheel jarred in his hands, and Keiichi fought the wind to get the Taiyo-no-Kinetsu back on the road.

"Whew!" he thought, realizing how narrowly he had escaped utter disaster. After driving 3/4 of the way up the mountain, the road trekked past Lake Chuzenji on the leeward side of the mount, towards Mt. Shirane. Rounding the mountain, he saw a line of cars backed up and slowed down to a halt. Ahead of the racers, a police vehicle was stalled on the park road. Keiichi felt grateful for this development, as it effectively narrowed the lead: the cars would basically have a second start once the offending vehicle was pushed out of the way.

"Here goes!" Keiichi steeled himself for the restart, readying himself for a second chance to make a gain on the other racers. He decided that he would go all out on the downhill drive, despite the risk.

Back at the finishing stage, the N.I.T. Motor Club members let out a whoop of joy when the announcer informed the crowd that there had been a slight delay in the race, requiring a restart!

Keiichi descended Mt. Shirane, and the winds that had been resisting him earlier were now pushing him. This was as dangerous, because the speed of the car might exceed its ability to steer, and he could be pushed off a cliff or into another racer. Keiichi drew upon some inner strength and focused his total attention on weaving around the cars ahead of him. Instead of reducing speed on the downhill run, he accelerated. He passed two cars, deftly defying common sense and his own fears. The view from the mountains was spectacular, as he could see Mts. Kokai, Koshin and Kosamaru. But Keiichi could only dally briefly in the scenery, then return his concentration to the race. He was very pleased with progress he had made.

He pushed himself and the Taiyo-no-Kinetsu to the utmost, passing another contestant, then a second car. This was a suicide run, but Keiichi thought about all the hard work his clubmates had put into this car. He stressed it out beyond its limits; instead of coasting downhill, he forced every bit of acceleration he could out of Taiyo-no-Kinetsu.

The finish area had an electronic scoreboard that listed Keiichi in 11th place. Tamiya was reluctant to look at it, but it was torture to keep his eyes away from it. The digital clocked ticked off the seconds, but they seemed to take forever.

"C'mon buddy!" he silently prayed. He looked up again, to see that Keiichi had jumped up to 8th place, and screamed "_YES!_" in unison with his club mates. Sora reached up high and put a hand on her sempai's shoulder. Tamiya turned to see the short freshman and noticed tears on her face.

"Keiichi's really great, isn't he!" she told him in a wavering voice.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Keiichi returned to Mito, guessing that he was in 10th or 11th place. He tried unsuccessfully to repeat his effort from before, but this time _he_ got cut off by an observant competitor. He could almost feel the disappointment of the crowd as he headed south for Sawara and a little further, the ocean. He spent the next stage of the race not fighting with himself. After all, he had gained three places overall.

"At last!" Keiichi exclaimed as he saw the ocean. The wind was strong coming off the ocean, and Keiichi silently thanked Megumi and Skuld for their solar panel design that protected the solar cells from being rendered useless by a film of sand and saltwater. He concentrated on the winding highway. It sometimes climbed up on a shelf overlooking the ocean while at other times it was fully exposed to the ocean spray. The line of cars headed towards Cape Inubo.

The scenery at Cape Inubo brought back a dear memory. Keiichi revisited in his mind the night he drove Belldandy up to the cape:

_"I just wanted to show you this," he had told her, after waking her up in the middle of the night._

_"What?" She had looked at him, innocent and trusting. He sighed as he recalled how he had shyly put his arm around her and pointed at the horizon, hoping that his timing was right. Slowly, a full moon rose up over the water._

_"That!" For the next two hours, they had watched the moon wax indigo orange, then yellow and finally white. This was early in their relationship, and Keiichi still remembered the warm joy he felt when Bell-chan actually leaned against him. It was the first time she had ever snuggled against him outside of their temple home. Even now, the image brought a thrill to his heart..._

His brief reverie over, Keiichi returned to reality. He took advantage of his knowledge of the road to pass another solar car.

He was trying as hard as he could to gainside his opponents. But the European car was at least a kilo ahead of him, he observed with disappointment. Any chance of winning this race rested on the most gossamer of possibilities.

Minutes later, he passed through Mobara and turned for Katsuura, where the course would switchback and head through the inland mountains again. He was soaked with sweat inside of his racing uniform; his eyes occasionally blurred from the intensity of his focus. After Katsuura, they turned west towards the Nokogiriyama mountain range. Although much smaller than the range at Nikko, Keiichi knew that this was another opportunity to make a gain, perhaps the last one until the road passed through Tomiyama. At this late stage in the race, many of the other racers would drive conservatively, at least until they were clear of the hilly terrain. Keiichi ascended the road that skirted Mt. Kanozan. It was starting to get dark, he noticed as the sky was slowly losing its brilliance and the undersides of the clouds began to shadow.

Straining to outmaneuver his opponents, Keiichi managed to pass one at the hairpin turn at the highest reach of the mountain road. Downhill, he took advantage of a brief opening and passed another car. Fatigue was taking a toll on the other drivers, he observed.

"That last guy was driving sloppy, to let me pass him so easily," he observed. In the distance, Keiichi saw the ocean with orange snakes flowing atop the waves...and the two coastal cities of Tomiyama and Tateyama.

Ootaki gave a whoop when the sign said that Keiichi was in 7th place. But he also heard that the European team's solar racer was comfortably ahead almost a full kilometer. Tamiya was out of his head, pacing back and forth.

"Come on, Keiichi!" Megumi silently hoped...but said aloud.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

At the basin of the mountain route, there was a hairpin curve that shuttled towards the ocean. Keiichi planned to cut off another car here. The road snapped and quicker than he could notice, he had slipped ahead of the Ford Motors entry. As the tour entered Tomiyama, the road with lined with spectators. The route looped in Tomiyama, in order to test the reflexes of the drivers and cars by slower speeds and urban corners. As Keiichi shifted into urban driving mode, a car just ahead of him suddenly slowed down to a standstill. The two cars immediately behind it slammed on their brakes. One car collided with the first car, which had lost one of its wheels, while the second car bounced off of it and into a storefront window. Keiichi slammed on his brakes and fought for control of his car, gritting his teeth tightly.

Belldandy paled as the PA announced that there had been a three-car pileup in Tomiyama. Skuld looked at her with a helpless expression. Megumi was riveted with worry, shaking her head "_no_" as if to deny that any harm could befall her brother. Belldandy looked at Megumi, whose hands were clasped in front of her heart in a prayer-like clutch.

"Keiichi, please be safe," Belldandy thought. Urd came over and put an arm over her sister's shoulders and they both silently watched the scoreboard. Megumi came over and Urd put her free arm around her and pulled her tight. After what seemed like an eternity, the scoreboard shut off the numbers of three cars. A relieved Belldandy thanked the Lord that Keiichi was not one of them.

Megumi was frantic with relief...but then she looked at the place indicators on the electronic display. She couldn't believe what her eyes saw. Keiichi was in 4th place! The cars still had to drive through Tateyama, then south along the ocean to the lighthouse, tracing along the switchback at Cape Sunosaki.

There was a chance...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Keiichi's senses were vivified with determination. He knew that he was in 4th place. The Taiyo-no-Kinetsu had performed beyond his wildest dreams.

"This little solar-powered racer is _tough_!" he said as he patted its console. He felt a surge of ambition as he realized that he might actually win this race. He could finish in 4th place and earn the respect of a nation and his competitors. But deep inside, he wanted it all. The gossamer thread had now become a roadway to possible victory.

The road between Tomiyama and Tateyama hugged the oceanside, and was coiled as tightly as a serpent. He had lost all perspective of his ranking in the race. Sweat matted his bangs to his forehead like pasted paper streamers. He concentrated only on the three cars ahead of him. One was way down the road, with another about midway, and the third right ahead of him. Keiichi patiently gained on the car nearest him, using a display of risky driving and courage that was inspiring, even to himself. He picked a turn ahead where he would try to pass the solar racer right in front of him. He made his move.

Keiichi pulled outside then tried to pass the other car. He freaked as his car bounced off of the car he was trying to pass.

"_NO!_" he screamed. Suddenly the pod player banged partway out of the console, and music started pouring from the headphone speakers.

"What!!" he yelled again. The music seemed to calm him. All in a space of a few seconds...the two cars kept lightly banging into each other.

Keiichi spied the end of the turn ahead; he was on the inside lane...but if he didn't get past this car, he would go flying into the ocean. An odd sensation surged through his body as he felt the Taiyo-no-Kinetsu _accelerate_, as if it had a hidden reserve of energy. An insane notion struck him...it seemed as if the solar racer was being fueled by the music in some way.

"That's ridiculous! It can't possibly go any faster, I have it floored and we're going uphill!" he thought. He glanced over to the car next to him. It was gone. He quickly pulled in front of it and noticed that somehow, he had distanced himself a number of car lengths ahead of the third place car. He looked at the battery charge meter; it was getting visibly borderline on charge amps. He glanced at the speedometer and noticed that the Taiyo-no-Kinetsu was still speeding up. He approached the second place car as they pulled into Tateyama.

"Oh my God!" Tamiya shouted as he saw that Keiichi was in third place on the scoreboard.

"You mean Oh My Goddess!" Urd said with a mysterious smile. Tamiya looked briefly at her with a question mark on his face, then resumed his pacing. The N.I.T. Motor Club was suddenly alive again with hope...more so than any other time in the race. Yells of "C'mon Keiichi!!" punctuated the evening air.

The cars had to slow down to urban driving conditions in Tateyama. The route was packed with crowds. Once out of Tateyama, the last stage was two-laned highway known for its potholes...the road to the lighthouse wasn't a high priority for maintenance, despite the heavy traffic congestion each summer. For his part, Keiichi was relaxed, as the music seemed to create harmony and confidence. He briefly wondered where Cevn had found the music on the pod...he was certainly going to ask him when he got back home.

But it was totally incredible to him that his solar racer felt more powerful.

"How did I pass that last car on a steep _uphill_ turn?" he wondered as he approached Cape Sunosaki.

The final long uphill climb was yet to come. Astonished, Keiichi felt the Taiyo-no-Kinetsu seem to draw on some unknown energy and climb faster. He was catching up with the car ahead of him! Looking over the ocean, he saw a noticeable darkening of the blue sky; the clouds were underlit by pinkish purple.

"The sun is setting," he noted fearfully. He glanced at the battery charge meter, which told him that he was driving on reserves.

"To have come this far and have to yield because of a low battery," Keiichi solemnly thought. A flash of inspiration came to him; after all, the Taiyo-no-Kinetsu was acting like a whole other car!

"To hell with it, I'm going for broke!" he decided resolutely.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Keiichi noted that the car ahead was the American General Motors entry. He was approaching it rapidly and the driver ahead remained square in the middle of the road, trying to prevent Keiichi from passing him. Keiichi clung to his tail.

"There!" Keiichi said to himself as he saw the slight widening about a quarter kilometer down the road, a roadside rest stop/scenic view from the Cape.

"Come on, Taiyo-no-Kinetsu! C'mon girl!!" he shouted, gripping his steering wheel tightly. It would require split-second timing, as the small parking area along the road was on the ocean side. Any mistake and he would go flying over a cliff into the direction of the Sagami Sea. Urging his solar car along, he pulled wide and gripped his breath as he passed the American car, whipping his car back into the two-lane road with a deft jerk of the steering wheel...just in the nick of time.

He could only see one car ahead of him. The European solar racer. Dazed, he marveled at the trend of impossibilities.

"I'm in _second_ place!"

The tension was so thick among the N.I.T. Motor Club members that it could be figuratively cut with a saw. The only one who wasn't fixed with anxiety was Urd. She was walking in and out of the crowd of club members.

"You guys, why are you so worried? There's no way we can lose!" she kept repeating.

Skuld and Belldandy had closely eyed the position board until the last stage report flashed on. Keiichi was in third place, incredibly enough. Despite three year's worth of steady animosity towards Keiichi, Skuld found herself not only wanting him to win this race, but she also felt proud of him.

"Me...proud of Keiichi?" she said to herself quizzically.

This kind of finish exceeded Belldandy's common-sense expectations by a long shot! She clutched her hands in front of her breast and spoke quietly.

"Please Lord, we've tried so hard. Just this once, let a miracle happen!" she urged. There were miracles, such as her magical restorations to the temple compound after she and Keiichi first arrived at it, and then there were _miracles_, such as her unexpected feelings of love for Keiichi. She knew that no divine intervention would occur; it was strictly up to the driving skill of her beloved Keiichi, the performance of the Taiyo-no-Kinetsu, and the fates.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Racing downhill, Keiichi saw the Nojimazaki Lighthouse in glimpses far off in the distance as the road wound around ocean coves. There was a gray carpet of spectators surrounding it. He dejectedly noted that he hadn't gained at all on the European car. The music that was playing through his car was softly ambient, but he heard a rapid scattering of triumphant interweaving melodies gradually growing louder out of gentle symphonic mix. Almost in unison with the faster and louder pace of the music, the Taiyo-no-Kinetsu surged with energy. Keiichi leaned forward, as if this posture would add just a little extra to the unexpected acceleration of his car.

"I'm catching him!" Keiichi yelled. The distance narrowed between the two.

"Come on girl, come on, come on, come on!" Keiichi urged his solar racing car. The European driver was so confident in his lead that he had failed to look behind him, assuming that the race was his for the taking. Keiichi crunched on the accelerator pedal and whizzed towards the frontrunner, catching a glimpse of astonished disbelief in the other driver's rearview mirror as he approached.

"This can't be happening," Keiichi said to himself.

"Please, just hold together these last few kilos, our Taiyo-no-Kinetsu!" he respectfully asked the solar car. In response the solar vehicle sped up even faster. He looked at the battery charge indicator; it was bottomed out. Outside, the eastward ocean was nightghosting with waves below a dark velvet horizon.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

All eyes were glued to the road and the orange purpling horizon. The downhill slope of the road that was visible to the crowd began two kilometers after the last oceanside curve in the road, near Ainohama. The descent of night had made the road almost invisible. Tamiya was on his knees, about ready to have a nervous breakdown. Then he stood up, a sudden intuition filling him from head to toe.

"Oh...my God!!" he shouted.

Skuld tittered to herself when she heard the delicious irony of his exclamation. Then she strained her eyes to the point where the road turned into sight at the end of the last curve. A single car was pulling speedily around the corner of Highway 410, heading for the finish line. Bands of light flashed off its solar panels as it passed under the road lights. Cameras were trained on it.

It was too far away!

"_Whose is it?_" Megumi and Sora shouted apprehensively.

Belldandy pulled on Skuld's sleeve and pointed towards the giant videoscreen. There, in front of 80,000 spectators, a camera zoomed on the incoming frontrunner. It was a sleek-looking solar racer, which suddenly was illuminated by flashes of overhead road lights.

On the projection screen, in plain view, was a Japanese flag crossed with a checkered flag. Large kanji painted on the aerodynamic front hood proclaimed the words "Nekomi Institute of Technology Motor Club" with the stylishly written "Taiyo-no-Kinetsu" painted underneath. There were dents and rips in the chassis of the racer. _Their_ solar racer, the crowd noted with gathering jubilation.

All sense of reserve being thrown to the winds, an indescribable roar of approval welled up from the Japanese crowd, now filled with awe and pride.

And in the cockpit, grinning...

"_KEIICHI!!_" Belldandy screamed at the top of her lungs. Everybody in a ten-meter radius of her responsively covered their ears, her loud shout of joy piercing air and bone alike, even louder than the deafening roar of the throng. After a five-second pause for their hearing to come back, the N.I.T. Motor Club members started whooping it up.

"Ah can't believe it!" Tamiya screamed, squatting down and falling on his back, utterly stunned. Belldandy looked at her younger sister Skuld, whose sweet face was streaming with tears, her hand in front of her mouth in cryptic shock. She looked at her older sister Urd who was crying with a beaming smile on her face.

"I told you he would win!! I told you!" Urd managed to get out before another bout of sobs shook her frame.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

A moment earlier, Megumi had been straining her eyes watching that corner. She thought her eyes were playing tricks on her when she saw the Taiyo-no-Kinetsu speed around the corner.

"It can't be," she thought. A few seconds later, she was instantly rooted to the spot as it was unmistakably Keiichi. An electric wave of shock tingled her from head to toe.

"_WE WON!_Wewonwewonwewonwewon!" she shouted, right before Belldandy's ear-shattering scream. As her hearing cleared, Megumi thought, "I bet he heard _that_!" She looked over to see Ootaki swinging his leather jacket above his head, jumping up and down with triumph.

"I'm soooo proud of you, my brother," Megumi thought, her eyes rimmed with tears.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

In the N.I.T. boardroom, Dr. Kintaro and a host of elderly faculty and deans had been glued to the TV set, craning their necks. It was utterly inconceivable that a bunch of kids at _their_ college had built and raced a car that was in position to possibly win this prestigious event. The elderly N.I.T. President felt a moment of regret at his lackluster send-off speech to the kids. Even if they didn't win the race, they would finish in one of the top two positions.

As the camera showed Keiichi coming down the stretch, the room suddenly hushed with profound shock at what was unfolding on the TV screen. Dr. Kintaro watched as _their_ car flashed past the finish line.

"That's _our_ car!" he said to himself with overwhelming pride.

The N.I.T. President smiled broadly amidst the bursting of animated conversations. Then he yelled and pounded the table with a fist with gleeful abandon.

"They did it!! The kids _really did it_!! Pass the sake!!" he shouted. They all joined together in euphoric shouts of "_Kampai!!_"...the winning kind of kampai.

"Tomorrow's definitely a school holiday...drink up my friends!" he announced. Tears rimmed his wrinkled eyes as the other faculty members gaped at him in astonishment; the normally reserved and astute President was acting like a college student! It was contagious. He looked at the other members in the room, old men and women who for this brief moment were transformed into reckless youth, tasting the fruits of victory. Staid dignity was set aside just this once as cheering and flying cups filled the room.

In a childish display, Dr. Kintaro shook a second sake bottle vigorously, then uncapped it and sprayed his colleagues. The Dean of Engineering uncorked a bottle and inverted it, dumping its contents over Dr. Kintaro's head while everyone in the room applauded.

"To _our_ Motor Club!" they toasted over and over again.

"This will really put N.I.T. on the map!" Dr. Kintaro exclaimed. "Wait 'til I phone Regent Akira at Tokyo University about that little wager we made!" he told the others; they all burst out in giddy, sarcastic, boisterous laughter. The daunting Tokyo University, one of the most prestigious educational institutes in Japan...their entry didn't even finish the race! And N.I.T.'s had finished _FIRST_!!

"If those kids ever start a auto factory, I'll be the first in line to buy one of their cars!" his niece joked.

"We're really going to have fun with that first place prize!" Dr. Kintaro added, eliciting another round of cheers and sake.

Visions of a new solar energy research facility danced in his head.

Keiichi felt the Taiyo-no-Kinetsu _still_ accelerating as he glimpsed the finish line banner. The music was shifting into a dignified finale: a few seconds later, he sped past the finish line, suddenly dizzy with release as thousands of flashes lit up the dark twilight.

Back at the temple compound, Cevn was crying with joy.

"You did it, Keiichi!" he yelled in the empty house. He was ecstatic with joy, yet he felt saddened by the fact that he wasn't there with his new friends.

"I'll get to experience the full brunt of their joy when they get back here!"

Keiichi flew past the finish line in a blur and slammed on the brakes. There was one more thing to do...

"I _can_ do this!" he said as he became one with his car, expertly pirouetting the Taiyo-no-Kinetsu into a semi-circular sliding stop at the end of the finishing area. He looked ahead and saw the finish banner that he had just passed...then started drumming on the steering wheel with his fingers.

"Cool!! He did it! A perfect 540!" Megumi thought with astonishment. She remembered hundreds of failed attempts trying to master that maneuver by her older brother, from early childhood days with remote-controlled battery-powered cars to more recent attempts in parking lots and abandoned airstrips.

"You're a slick one, Big Brother!" she thought with pride.

The display of driving prowess drew another deafening roar of appreciation from the crowd. Not only had a Japanese team taken the checkered flag, the driver concluded his race with an unexpected feat of showmanship! All over Japan, millions watching the NHK broadcast reacted with smiles to this display of youthful cheekiness.

Moments later, the N.I.T. Motor Club members were being ushered towards the Winner's Circle by the international sponsors of the race. For their part, the sponsors were flabbergasted at the turn of events. The human-interest angle of a bunch of Japanese college kids proving victorious over a field that included the strongest motoring corporations in the world wasn't lost on them. Some of the sponsors secretly felt that it served the big companies right, especially after the weeks of arrogant posturing by the more prominent corporations.

No amount of corporate money can overcome the spirit of the human heart.

Keiichi pulled the faithful Taiyo-no-Kinetsu up to middle of the Winner's Circle. He was overwhelmed by the spectacle of the crowd, the hundreds of cameras and microphones and men in suits. It dawned on him with the sudden impact of a mudslide...that he'd raced to victory!

"This must be what it's like winning the Indianapolis 500!" he thought. He remembered that this was one of the wishes that had flashed in his mind before he made his fateful decision that day when Bell-chan came into his life. He was almost reluctant to get out of the car; so closely bonded did he feel to the racing machine. Quietly, the music finished on a fading note...

Keiichi pulled the latch and unsealed the cockpit lid. Opening it up, sound and sight assaulted his senses.

"_Where is she_?" he thought. Disoriented for a moment, he searched the crowd until he found her face. In the middle of the N.I.T. Motor Club group, Belldandy was looking at him with an expression of profound pride and love. They all were. Bell came over and hugged him before he could get out of the Taiyo-no-Kinetsu, crying into his shoulder with relief and joy. He stood up on his seat and pulled her close to him, so close that he thought they would melt together. Tears came to Keiichi's eye as the love of his life hugged him warmly. He saw the looked on each of their faces. Megumi. Skuld. Urd. Tamiya and Ootaki. Sora. Tomohisa. He knew that somewhere out in the crowd, his father and mother were bragging about him right at this moment.

"This is for all of you," he silently dedicated.

He climbed dizzily out of the solar racer and noticed the sponsors waving to the N.I.T. team, ushering them over to the side. A press of humanity pushed him towards them. A famous reporter from NHK began to interview him as a victory wreath was placed around his neck.

Keiichi nervously started rattling off some answers to the onslaught of questions.

"How was the race? When did you think you had a chance to win? What was the most dangerous part of the race?" The press was so hyper, their questions seemed to blend into verbal mush.

Keiichi's eyes teared up again and the sponsors urged him back to the group. He saw Tamiya and Ootaki getting the same treatment, being the senior members of the club. They weren't faring any better than he did; the large-hearted emotions were too overwhelming for everyone.

After posing for what seemed like an eternity while photographers flashed away, the winners were escorted up onto a dais. With spotlights on them all, each was given a victory wreath. Then several men approached them with a _huge_ trophy.

Every N.I.T.M.C.C. member gasped at their initial vision of the trophy. It was a beautiful work of art, much more than a trophy. The base was an oblongated disk of rich dark koa wood. Soaring out of the base was a transparent plexiglass semi-arc at least two meters tall. It looked like an art noveau interpretation of a crescent moon. The middle section of the arc was mounted with a horizontal series of golden streaks of lightning, partly embedded in the arc. At the top of the transparent arc rested a brilliant platinum sun with spires of gold representing sunrays.

They all crowded around it and every member of the team held it above them. The crowd responded with another loud roar.

The Solar Federation president ascended to the rostrum and began his speech:

_"On behalf of the International Federation for Solar Energy Research, we present the Championship Trophy to the N.I.T. Motor Club, from Japan! It is most significant that the victors hail from the host country of this year's race. The challenge of building efficient solar powered vehicles is more than an ecological necessity. Despite the fact that this new technology appears to be at odds with the established easier and softer means of transportation, the impossible is becoming possible through the efforts of participants such as those who raced today._

_"The team which finished in first place exemplifies the infatiguable spirit of the human heart. Their entry wasn't powered by excessive budgetary allowance...it was fueled by the ingenuity and the grittiness of sheer emotion. The fact that a team of college students were able to emerge victorious in this race bodes well for those who would place optimistic expectations upon the shoulders of the next generation of engineers and designers._

_The International Federation for Solar Energy Research is honored to present this year's sponsorship award to Nekomi Technical Institute, representing the donations of hundreds of organizations who believe in the viability of solar power."_

This brought on a prolonged standing ovation from the crowd, who had remained for the awards ceremony.

A moment later group of jacketed sponsors relieved them of the trophy, setting it down in front of the group.

"Do we get tuh keep it?" Tamiya asked, bringing a round of nervous laughter.

The President of the sponsors continued with his speech as a group of sponsors brought a symbolic oversized check. He extolled the numbers of sponsors invested in solar energy despite the seemingly insurmountable odds, blah blah blah. Then two attendants ascended the dais with a large outsized check, clearly for display to the live audience.

Megumi gasped as she saw all the zeros on the check.

_"On the behalf of our multinational consortium of partners, we present a grant for solar energy research to Nekomi Institute of Technology for the sum of _six billion yen_! And to further show our gratitude, we have decided in the midst of these unusual circumstances to underwrite the full academic costs for each Motor Club member who wishes to continue their education at N.I.T!"_

Keiichi looked around at his fellow Motor Club members, stunned by the amount that the president had announced. The sponsors of the race had kept mum about the cash award. He and his friends had all severely underestimated the amount of prize money for winning this race. These guys were serious about solar energy research!

Keiichi glanced at Megumi as the crowd roared in approval. In a space of a few seconds, every Motor Club member had scanned the faces of the other members to register their reactions. They _all_ were stunned again...then the realization sank in, resulting in a series of grins and cheering.

Scholarships for all!!

Megumi teased Keiichi about being one year behind him in school as a sophomore. Keiichi didn't care, this was another awesome twist of fate! Sora was happiest of all, because she was only a freshman; the only other frosh being Genji.

"S..six _b..billion_ y..yen!" Ootaki said in frank shock. "Dr. Kintaro and all those old geeks are going to have multiple heart attacks!"

"Yah...we betta get A's in _all_ of our courses for dis!" Tamiya shouted, stepping in front of the camera to send his message clearly.

The group was escorted to a makeshift press studio for question and answers. The interviews were grueling, as questions ranged from the utterly inane to the technically specific. The club members, seated as a panel at a long table, were already exhausted. Around 12:30 a.m., they climbed back into the mini-bus to travel back to Makuhari. On the bus ride home, Keiichi described the unusual finish to the race.

"It was absolutely incredible! I had to fight to gain every inch on the others. Then, I tried to pass the third place guy, we collided side-to-side a few times. The pod player fell loose from the dash, and this incredible music started playing. All of a sudden, I was flying ahead of the other car, going uphill! I could swear the car was responding to the music. On the last drive downhill, the music got louder and faster, and the Taiyo-no-Kinetsu kept going faster. Faster than she should have gone. At least, we didn't plan for her to go so fast. Next thing I knew, we were screaming by the European car...the guy looked like he was going to choke on his udon, we passed him so fast!" Belldandy reacted to his description of the anomalous events with a heightened wariness.

"Urd, did you cheat?" she said, looking her sister in the eyes. It made sense for her to ask. Urd had been holed up in her room for days, and then all throughout the race, she was the picture of confidence...while everyone else was in a resigned mood. This was _extremely_ suspicious.

"What? Moi? No! I really mean it! No!! I didn't do anything! I have no idea how that could have happened," Urd replied defensively. "You can check my memory, or check the car! I swear on my word that I didn't do anything!" This was good enough for Belldandy. But she wondered about the pod.

"Keiichi, do you have that pod?" she asked.

"Nope. I think it got lost in all of the excitement...I don't know what happened to it," he answered, shrugging his shoulders.

"Didn't Cevn-san give you that pod?" Skuld asked. Belldandy had forgotten completely about the pod, as this day had been so intense.

They discussed the day's events excitedly, and then they saw the familiar outline of the Makuhari Exhibition Center and Grounds, brightly lit by grounds lights.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

I was sitting in the living room, reading a book. No, not that weird book in my bedroom, just a book by Edogawa Rampo. I thought I heard a motorcade of vehicles pull up.

"That must be them," I said to myself as I dashed down the hallway. As soon as the various motors shut off, a clamor of excited voices started, moving towards the house. Keiichi and Belldandy walked in, or rather bounded in, and I hugged them both.

"You guys did it!!"

Megumi bounced into my arms, while Urd gave me a strange sideways glance. Megumi was abubble with excitement as I ruffled her dandelion hair playfully. She related all of her impressions of the day with a rapid-fire narration. Keiichi and Belldandy and the others swarmed around me, telling me about the victory. Several of them even added about how much they missed me. I felt like the room had gone from zero to 150 kph in a matter of seconds. Megumi walked off and brought back a young guy, whom she introduced to me as Genji. Then they both started playfully wrestling and hugging. I caught her eye and winked at her as they started talking animatedly to each other.

The party began, and Urd announced to us that she was breaking out the prize bottles of aged sake she had been storing for such a special occasion.

"Uh oh," I thought tremorously to myself as I felt a major twinge of fear. I had almost forgotten about my headache and bruised face; Urd's kinetic enthusiasm brought it all right back. Everybody was dancing, and the stereo was blaring. Urd poured sake for the celebrants, and my stomach tightened at the memories. Then she turned to me and shook her finger side-to-side, as if to say "uh-uh, none for you". I glimpsed the label on the bottle...it was dated "year four of the reign of Koho"! 1720! She wasn't kidding about the sake being 'aged'.

With an enigmatic smile, Urd went to the refrigerator and grabbed me a lemonade soda. Keiichi walked over and teased me.

"We're lucky you're not drinking tonight!"

"No way! That is the ultimate bad idea of a joke, Keiichi!" I said as I managed a smile-cum-grimace.

"But I'll let you by just this once, if you tell me that you played that pod I gave you on the way home after you won." Keiichi's face went flat for an instant. He told me about how the pod player started up accidentally and how the Taiyo-no-Kinetsu drove faster, as if the music on the pod had somehow caused a burst of energy in her motor.

"That...just sounds _too_ bizarre to be believed," I commented. We talked some more, and then I went to each Motor Club member to hear his or her version of the "miracle" as Tamiya termed it.

The party began to taper down around 4 am; many of the club members were just leaving. Most of the guys were going to a little thing Ootaki had set up at the Men's Dorm with some 'geisha'. I jokingly reminded him about the dorm's rule concerning women, with more than a hint of humor.

Belldandy and Keiichi joined me, and then Urd and Skuld came over. We formed a little circle in the corner of the room, as the remaining club members had gone to sleep on the extra futons we had provided. Belldandy suggested in a serious voice that we all go outside to talk.

I felt a little apprehensive at this. Why did we have to leave the house at the end of a victory celebration? We arranged ourselves in a row on the porch facing the garden, Keiichi next to Belldandy, and Urd and Skuld on either side of me. Belldandy looked at me with probing eyes.

"Did you do anything with the race that might be considered...cheating?" she asked tersely.

"What!?" This question totally caught me off guard. Suddenly I felt defensive.

"No! What do you mean, cheating? I didn't even go near the solar racer yesterday!" I sensed my relaxed mood getting spun out, as if caught in an unraveling vortex. I tried to regain my breath as Urd and Skuld started pouring on the questions.

"Hey you guys, I feel like I'm being put on trial. Can you let me calm down before the inquisition continues?" I said irritably.

After a moment, Skuld asked if I had seen Mara lurking about. I told her that I watched the race on TV, then a bit of the press conference. After that, I read a book. During the whole time, there hadn't even been a hint of Mara.

Urd made a comment about how I looked like hell, with my face all bruised and puffed up. Belldandy shushed her and continued.

"Can you tell me more about the pod you gave Keiichi?"

"There's not much to tell," I reflected as I explained to her how I had woke up in the middle of the night and couldn't get back to sleep. I had went to the room they had set aside for as my 'hobby room' and I noticed that the musical instruments were already set up; I couldn't remember finishing the setup the day before.

"It was weird. There was this sign I had never seen before on the door that said 'Cevn's Studio'. Inside, all the gear, and I mean _all_ the gear, had been set up by somebody. So I started playing around with the keyboards. After that, I sensed some music coming into my head and I just played it. It sounded all right, so I recorded it to the computer. What are you guys so worried about?"

"You mean _you_ made the music on that pod? That's your own music on it...not something you dubbed off a CD or MiniD?" Keiichi asked in a voice filled with curiosity.

Belldandy leveled with me. She mentioned the mysterious burst of energy that aided Keiichi to win the race. The fact that everyone in the Motor Club had dreamed about music in some way the past night. How Urd's mood had suddenly improved despite her license suspension. That she herself had listened in her dreams to a kind of music that shouldn't be heard while she was here with Keiichi, on the plane of existence she called the "Earthrealm."

"And you think I have something to do with this, because I played some music and gave Keiichi a pod with some music to play after the race? Ahhhh, now I see! I mean, I didn't really expect him to play it, since it's just me playing around on the keyboards and stuff. Everyone else was pouring their hearts into the race, so I just thought I'd do some, y'know, personal for you guys. Silly me, huh?" I felt relieved, now that I wasn't being accused of any wrongdoing. They still looked worried.

"Is there any chance you can recreate the music. We want to hear the music on the pod again," Skuld asked.

"Sure, it's on the computer," I replied, still attempting to grasp what this was all about. With that, we all went to my music room. I looked for the file on the computer. It was gone! I felt shocked and violated. The outpourings of my creativity in the form of music were very personal. And the music I had composed last night...it was by far the best musical work I had ever created. It was as close to perfection as I could ever get.

"It's...not here! I _know_ I saved it onto the hard drive!" I looked up at them with panic in my eyes.

"Take it easy, Cevn. I don't think you did anything weird. Think for a moment. How could it have gotten lost?" Keiichi said, trying to calm me down. I was still very upset with the loss, despite the celebratory air that lingered over me and the others. But then I located some of the backing samples and loaded them.

"Here, I'll play it for you. I think I can remember it somewhat. But it was all improvised, so don't expect a note for note redo. Make yourselves comfy," I said, trying to feign comfortability. The four sat on the two futons at the back of the room while I started playing.

I felt like a switch had been turned on somewhere in my mind; a circuit that bridged the gap between abyss of creativity and veil of consciousness. The music flowed from my being as I pictured myself being space, limitless, at one with all reality. I saw crystal geysers of sunlit rainbows and clouds of stars carpeting a lush green forest of smiles. I heard Urd exclaim something...

"That's the God's Music!" she repeated as I finished, the flight of imagination halted.

Keiichi was leaning back against the wall, his eyes closed with an expression of relaxed pleasure on his face. Skuld was looking at me strangely, with a gentle smile. Belldandy had her eyes closed, as if she was engaged in a meditation or trance. I looked to Urd, who was looking at me with a soft warm light in her eyes and a calming smile.

All was subdued for a couple of moments. Belldandy opened her eyes and looked at Urd. Something silent and secretive seemed to pass between them. She turned to me and spoke in a quiet voice.

"That music...what you just played...it is the sound of Heaven. We call it the God's Music. Only the Almighty can create it. Only the Gods can hear it." Skuld looked like she was thunderstruck by the implications of what Belldandy had just said.

"But...that's ridiculous! I didn't know that it could be played only by Him! Is He here? How could Cevn know about it?" The questions poured out of Skuld like a crisp spring brook.

Keiichi seemed to waken from his serene state. His brown eyes were warm and calm as he matter-of-factly confirmed everyone's guess.

"_That_ was the music I heard in the race while I was driving," he said softly. Belldandy knitted her eyebrows in thought, then wondered aloud.

"If that was the God's Music, then could the Almighty be here, having a hand in all of this? It is utterly impossible and incomprehensible that a mortal or a God could reproduce this kind of music."

"So why don't you just ask Him?" I suggested with more than a little frippery. My insides were fraying towards emotional obscurity. Physically, I was already weakened from the beating Tamiya had given me when Mara had possessed my body. The very suggestion that the Almighty was involved in some way...felt overwhelming. Suddenly, the thought occurred to me that I was involved in matters way out of my league.

"Maybe...I shouldn't play any more music," I said in a worn-out flatbed voice. Urd confronted me sharply.

"That's not any kind of solution, Cevn! Why don't you play something new, something you can just make up right here and now. Spontaneous, y'know. Then that'll prove that you didn't have anything to do with playing the God's Music and then we can investigate this thing further tomorrow." She yawned and added, "Besides, I want to hear how insufferable mortal music is in comparison to the God's Music."

"Thanks a lot for slamming my creative labors, Urd!" I said indignantly. Surprisingly, Urd seemed to flash a moment's guilt in her eyes. Once more, her impulsivity had led to another ill-timed criticism or insult. I felt a brief flame of anger, then it passed and I decided that I would give it a try.

"OK, Urd, if you need any proof, I'll try and give it to you. But please try to have some respect for my soundcraft, why don't ya!" Urd stuck her tongue out at me.

I played "Ode to Joy" and Urd shouted "That's not it!"

"Of course not, you idiot, it's Beethoven!" Keiichi said, barely suppressing a burst of laughter. Then I played "Eine Klein Nachtmusik" and Klaus Schultze's "Timewind".

"That's good, but no way is that the God's Music!" Urd responded.

"No, it's Mozart. I just wanted to offer you a couple of examples of human music for the sake of comparison." Skuld was looking at me impatiently; her arms tightly crossed with an expression of boredom on her face. I started playing what was in my heart. Once more I felt swallowed by time and space. After what seemed like only a few minutes, I finished...still lost in my feelings.

"Oh...my!" Belldandy exclaimed.

"There, you guys. You see, that first one was a fluke. I'm just a pedestrian who can occasionally walk across the street while carrying a tune in my head. Nothing like what you just heard from several of our great composers..." I started, until Urd interrupted me.

"Cevn...I don't think so!" Animatedly, she continued.

"That music you just played, it's even _better_ than what I heard last night! It's definitely the Music of the Heavens!" She looked at her sisters, who seemed spellbound. They both nodded their heads. I looked up to see Belldandy and Skuld staring at me with expressions fixed with a frankling awe.

"This must be someone's idea of a sick joke!" I warily opined. I noticed that Skuld seemed a little nervous at that. Suddenly, I felt nauseous, as my headache drilled into my skull.

"Sorry...but I really have to get to sleep. I feel terrible."

"Oh Cevn, we forgot..." Belldandy looked apologetically at me.

"Don't stress it, I forgot it too!" I said, referring to the aftermath of several super-Tamiya punches.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Keiichi saw that Cevn and the others looked as exhausted as he felt. He excused himself to go to his room. This day had utterly drained him; he had given his all during the race. He flicked his nightlamp off and slowly climbed under his blanket, glad to be home and in his comfy futon.

"No way am I going to make it to school tomorrow!" he thought as he started to drift off to a well-earned slumber.

A few minutes later, Skuld and Belldandy both left "Cevn's Studio" with tired smiles on their faces. Skuld climbed into her futon bed and fell asleep right away. Belldandy was still awake, looking at the stars through her window. She slipped quietly out of her room.

Keiichi woke up. He reached over to check his alarm and bumped something.

Something _soft_.

He looked closer and gasped when he saw his beloved Belldandy laying next to him in her nightrobe. He covered his mouth with a muffled "Eeeep!" Belldandy rolled over to face him and put a finger on his lips.

"Shhhh, Keiichi-san. We don't want Skuld or Banpei finding me here, do we?" A huge awkward feeling gripped him all of a sudden. Belldandy was sure being brave! He started shaking nervously; then stopped himself with a grittoothed effort. All this time...and he hadn't ever slept with Belldandy in the same bed! His mind raced dizzily. To make matters worse, she sat up in the futon bed and started to undo her sleeping robe.

"No! W..wait!_ No!!"_ he whispershouted.

"No _what_, silly? I'm wearing my pajamas, of course! What did you _think_ I had on underneath?" Belldandy teased. Keiichi sighed with visible relief and invisible disappointment as she pulled off her robe, revealing a pair of silk pajamas. He was still shaking with...

"Whatever!" he said to himself, trying to slow his racing thoughts so he could enjoy the moment.

"It's okay, Keiichi-san. I was thinking during the race. About all the time we have been together...about how we really know each other so well. While you were driving, I wondered what I would do if you got hurt..." Her voiced started to shake as she said this.

"Bell-chan, you shouldn't worry about such things," Keiichi tried to comfort her, seeing the conflicting emotions in her eyes. Her blue eyes teared up at his concern. Sensing the delicacy of her mood, Keiichi held his breath as Belldandy continued.

"After the race, I just thought that we should get..._a little closer_, irregardless of what Skuld thinks," she said, pinning his heartbeat with her eyes. Her voice seemed to gain resolve.

"Keiichi, I love you with all of my heart, and I want to be _here_, with you, at this moment. I don't want to be anywhere else!" she announced with a husky, sensuous whisper.

Keiichi looked at her with his mouth agape.

Belldandy kissed him gently on the nape of his neck, running her fingers through his hair gently. She looked at his eyes softly and lovingly.

"Such wonderful eyes!" she told herself once again. Keiichi felt himself spiraling upwards into a blissful state as he looked in her eyes; he took her in his arms and kissed her on the forehead.

"Let's get some sleep, Bell-chan." He wrapped his arms snugly around her shoulders as she rolled over. He pulled the blanket tight around her to tuck her in. She scooted up close to him, causing him a brief pulse of panic.

Belldandy crossed her arms over his and pulled them tighter to her bosom as Keiichi's breathing became quiet. Belldandy felt the rhythm of his breath lightly caressing her hair as he slept; with a smile, she joined him in his dreams.

Urd returned to "Cevn's Studio" after Cevn went to his bedroom. She didn't know what to say or do. She so much loved music. She reflected on this enamorment, smiling to herself as she remembered that this was the major reason why she fell in love with Troubadour. But that was in the past.

The Past.

Urd felt the familiar pangs of sadness every time _this_ particular strand of thought crossed her mind.

"The Past, always the damned Past!" she cursed in a low voice. Once more, she was reminded of the fact that there would be no more...

She looked down, sadness hanging over her like tendrils of ivy. Waves of sorrow shook her, and she fought back tears.

"But this," she told herself, "is impossible! Cevn can't be playing the God's Music." But there it was--the music she had heard so sparingly in her life. It reminded her of better, happier days in Yggdrasil. It reminded her of life, love, laughter, and carefree innocence. A romance of her earlier life touched her as she looked over the racks of musical equipment.

Urd silently watched the sun brighten the room, then decided to go to bed. Back in her room, she noticed that her sister was gone.

"_At last!_" she thought with long-awaited satisfaction. In her mind, she visualized her sister and Keiichi...getting hot and sexy! A devious grin stretched her face. Always the curious one, with a smile of anticipation she tiptoed down the hall and stood outside the door to Keiichi's room, listening for gasps and moans of passion.

_Nothing!_

Hearing no sounds of loveplay, she shuddered dejectedly.

"Dammit! Dammit!_ Dammit_! I _missed _it! After all this time, I missed it!" she mentally anguished, silently pounding her fists on an imaginary desk with deep frustration. Urd regrouped and considered her options, her frown melting into a mischievous grin.

"I've gotta have a peek. One peek won't hurt..." she whispered to herself as she stealthily slid the shoji open a sliver. Looking in Keiichi's room, Urd saw the two sleeping. Keiichi was in his pajamas...holding Belldandy, who was in her pajamas. At least she was curled tightly next to him as the river hugs a riverbed. There _was_ hope; perhaps the body heat would do its work in the morning, causing the two to shed their clothes.

Urd wanted to stick her tongue out at the sleeping pair...until she saw the betranced smile on her sister's face, faintly visible in the early sun dawn.

"You guys..." she mumbled. She felt happy for her sister, but also sensed the bittersweet feeling that came whenever she thought about...

Urd cautiously slid the door shut. She walked down the hall and opened Cevn's door. He was sound asleep. She sat down next to him, watching his chest rise and fall.

"The essence of life couches itself with quietude," she thought, referring to his near-silent breathing. Species whose somnambulant breathing was loud...simply didn't survive the rigors of evolution.

Then she noticed the bruises on his face again. She closed her eyes and passed her hand over his head several times while reciting a healing spell. When she opened her eyes, his face was healed. She smiled and stroked his long hair gently.

"I'm sorry," she whispered in his ear. She lingered a moment longer, then stood up and left him there sleeping. With one final glance, she slid the door shut and went to her room.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --


	7. Pt 7: Encounters

**Part 7: Encounters**

The night was subdued with quiet in the temple. Each room's dreamers were gifted to a deep slumber. Keiichi woke up at dawn and saw his love, Belldandy, curled up next to him, sound asleep. His mind raced momentarily at the unexpected sight, until he recalled that she had climbed in his futon while he was asleep last night. His mind replayed those magical words...when Bell-chan told him that she wanted to spend the night with him, in _his_ bed. She appeared so out of place nestled next to him, but he felt in his heart of hearts that she _did_ belong in his bed. Her small mouth was smiling, and her eyelids would occasionally flutter her long eyelashes. Her hair billowed out onto the futon and sprayed against his chest. She was curled up, her feet warmly tucked under his legs and her arms pulled tight to her chest. Keiichi felt a dream-like awe at the simple beauty of this waking moment.

Keiichi sighed with relief when he realized that he didn't wake up with his hands touching her someplace where they didn't belong. He had been worried that somehow his hands would wander inside of her pajamas while he was asleep. Having never slept with a woman, he had no idea about what would happen. Happily, his arm was draped over Belldandy's waist and his other arm was under her pillow. He felt a pins-and-needles sensation in the arm she was sleeping on, and he gently pulled it out from under her pillow, trying not to wake her.

"So this is what sleeping together is like: arms falling asleep, laying still next to each other, watching each other's serene beauty in the midst of a downy slumber," he whispered. He wondered how long Belldandy had looked at him before she joined him in his futon bed.

Keiichi was a restless sleeper by nature and often moved around a lot in his sleep, sometimes waking up with his head at the base of his futon. But with Belldandy sleeping next to him, he had somehow slept in the same position all night. For indeed, he awakened to find her cuddled snugly against him, sleeping in his arms.

He looked closely at her. He had kissed her enough times to know what her face looked like, really close up. But seeing her this still, this...precious...stirred a strong sense of love in him. He reflected on how much she must trust him, because she was willing to sleep in his bed. She was gracefully innocent and vulnerable from this vantage point.

His appreciative mood was cut short by the sound of rapid footfalls in the hallway. He heard a door slam open.

"_Big Sister!! Belldandy!!_" Then he heard steps racing up and down the hall: thump, thump, thump!

"_Oh NO!_" he thought with dismay. Belldandy stirred at the noise, and woke up, smiling at her beloved Keiichi, then noticing the anxious look flushing over his face. The romping footfalls stopped in front of his door, and an agitated Skuld slid his door open. Her eyes flashed large with emotion as she saw her sister lying next to him, looking back at her with a slugabed eyes. She fixed her eyes on Keiichi, who, by this time, had instantly broken out in a cold sweat.

"_You...p..pervert_!! You...sex fiend! What did you do to my sister? How could she...? How could you? What did she...? What did you...?" Keiichi felt a tingling sensation on his forehead. Skuld's power of word projection, no doubt.

Belldandy laughed despite herself when the words "Sex Fiend" appeared on Keiichi's forehead. There was a delicious irony in the situation that wasn't lost on her: Keiichi's guilt-flushed mien seemingly cast him in the role of a sex fiend who was caught red-handed...while in reality, he was anything but. It was so hilarious!! She grabbed a small mirror and held it up so Keiichi could speculate upon his own image in the mirror.

"Sorry, tee hee, my dear Keiichi, but...it's so funny because it's so..._wrong_! You're anything but a sex fiend, dear!"

Keiichi looked at her with an expression that shouted "and _you_ think this is funny?" Then he turned to Skuld and fixed her with his resentment.

"Ehh! Can't you knock before coming in, Skuld?" Keiichi said in exasperation, as he looked at the handiwork of Skuld's 'power' in the hand-held mirror. The power she had discovered a year and a half ago.

"You tell me, ecchi Keiichi! That's _my_ sister in your bed! Explain _that_ why don't you?" she replied icily.

"I am not a sex fiend, Skuld! Not even close! I really would like to, oops...well I want to someday...uh, I mean that I have often thought about... Errh, well, I'm a man and men really like to have s..." He was a picture of frustration as he indicted his inner feelings while trying to explain his innocence. Keiichi was hanging himself with his own attempts to explain himself.

"_SEX FIEND!_ You better not have touched my sister, Keiichi, or I'll...I'll... Ugggh! This is so sick, a mortal and a Goddess doing the...I can't even say it, it's too horrible to think about! If you tried anything with her, I'll... You let her in your bed, so obviously you two must have... Y..You're the worst! It's unspeakable!" she stammered angrily.

"You'll do what, Skuld?" Belldandy said to her younger sister. Belldandy had a disarming smile on her face, but the tone of her voice made it clear who was the elder sister in this discussion.

Keiichi had quickly ducked under the covers when Skuld started up anew with invective. He slowly lowered the bedcover, peering over it as he sat up in bed. Belldandy pulled herself up and sat up next to him, leaning back against his chest and shoulder as if she belonged there.

"No, no, no, no, _nonononono_!" Skuld said agitatedly. Unconsciously, Skuld was stamping her right foot on the floor with righteous anger.

"Skuld, dear, we need to clear this up before there's any misunderstanding and someone gets hurt. Okay?" The youngest Goddess scowled, and then reluctantly nodded her head. Belldandy patted a spot next to the bed.

"Come sit down here Skuld, and we'll discuss this."

"N..no way! He touched you...how do I know that he won't touch me?" she said suspiciously. Keiichi held his hand to his forehead in frustration.

"_SKULD!!_ _Sit_!" Belldandy growled, her voice scaring Keiichi more that it seemed to intimidate Skuld. Skuld cautiously sat down on the mat next to the bed. She was worried that whatever 'bug' had caused Belldandy to fall in love with a mortal would somehow be contagious, and that _she_ would catch it! She delicately arranged her feet under her and folded her arms tightly over her chest.

"Skuld, Keiichi-san and I have been together over three years, right?"

"Yeah? So? That still doesn't make it right!" she declared.

"You know how I feel about my dear Keiichi, Skuld. You've known for a long time, yet still you haven't accepted it."

"And I _won't_, either! _Nevernevernever_!!" Belldandy sighed loudly at her younger sibling's resolute stubbornness.

"Sometimes in life, Skuld, there comes a time when one has to let go...because holding on would cause greater harm. Do you know what I mean, Skuld?"

"He's making you try to trick me, Elder Sister!"

"Skuld, nobody is trying to fool anyone here. Do you remember the time we went to the house in the country, and that ghost-lady Chieko Honda confused Keiichi with his grandfather, Hotaru-no-suke?" Skuld nodded her head at this memory of a vacation gone bad.

"Well, if I hadn't let go of Keiichi-san, just for an afternoon, so he could fulfill his grandfather's promise to her...well, Chieko would probably be still be haunting us right at this moment. And you know what _that_ would mean?..." Skuld gave a little shudder when she thought of a ghost in the house.

Skuld had a total and absolute revulsion towards any kind of ghosts. She swallowed her breath as she remembered when Keiichi brought that _weird_ friend of his from school. Shiho Sakakibara, the girl who thought she was a spiritualist. Instead of exorcising the ghosts, Shiho accidentally invited a bunch of ghosts into the house...which almost frightened Skuld all the way back to Yggdrasil.

"But what did ghosts have to do with Keiichi and Big Sister Belldandy?" she wondered. She grudgingly admitted that Belldandy had a point...whatever, as long as there were no spooks in the house.

"You want me to be happy, don't you, dear sister?" Belldandy asked after seeing dawning comprehension on Skuld's face.

"Yes. Of course! But with a mortal...it's just not right. You deserve better than Keiichi!" Keiichi heard this and hung his head in shame. Her thoughts wandered down corridors that were painted with the words "What if she's right? Skuld _is_ the Norn of the Future." A filigree of sadness and fear pierced her heart.

"How would you know what I do or don't deserve?" Belldandy gently remonstrated. "Every being is different in the universe; no single being can full understand another's purpose in life. That is what is beautiful about this thing we call existence. We _all_ have paths, which remain a mystery to ourselves as well as a curiosity to others. What you may think is bad for me, Skuld, may actually be good. Remember back when I broke my divine seal when Urd was possessed by the Ultimate Destruction Program. You felt that it would be very bad for me, remember. You were terrified that I would be punished for breaking the seal..." Skuld nodded her head in assent.

"But yet, it helped defeat the Ultimate Destruction Program, and more importantly, it saved our dear sister. And the Almighty overlooked it despite the fact that it was a flagrant breach of regulations."

"Belldandy...Elder Sister...but you're a _Goddess_ and he's only a mortal. What if you fall in love? What if you have children?"

"Skuld, I am _already_ in love with Keiichi-san! If you were just a little older, you would easily understand this fact. Your Big Sister Urd already knows that I love him. Why can't_ you_ accept it? The Ultimate Force must have brought him into my life so that I could learn how to love him!"

Skuld couldn't argue with this. But she was still opposed to such an open display of affection as Belldandy sleeping in this mere mortal's bed.

"But I want you to sleep in the room with me! I can't have...snfff...just Urd there with me, I need you too!" she stubbornly demanded, then started to cry. Belldandy was touched to the quick by her sister's strong display of affection. She knew that Skuld felt very protective towards her. But now it was time for Skuld to be protective of her in a new way.

"Skuld, I know that you care deeply for me. Please listen to what I'm about to say. I plan on spending the rest of my life with Keiichi-san," she said, almost as if she was announcing it for the first time. Keiichi's feelings of inadequacy dissolved as he heard the determined air of her pronouncement.

"If you're opposed to my decision, Skuld...then I will feel much less happy, because my love for Keiichi would always draw ire from you. By protecting me in your own mind, you will cause both Keiichi-san and I to feel uncomfortable. But if, instead of opposing how I feel about him, why can't you try to learn to live with it? Please? Keiichi-san is a good man, a decent man. I slept with him last night, and he didn't do anything wrong. He didn't do anything sexual, the type of thing that a man would normally do."

Blushing, Keiichi hung his head in acute embarrassment at her remark. Belldandy noticed that she had once again shamed his manhood, and covered her mouth in apology.

"What I meant was...that he respected me, like a real gentleman would do. And that is why I love him so much, because he _does_ respect me!" she exclaimed with a beaming smile.

Skuld had to nod her head in acknowledgment of this point. Keiichi had never mistreated Belldandy before, except by actions of omission, like the instance he couldn't buy her a ring after the race two years ago. She remembered how he stayed out late during the holiday season working odd jobs in order to save money to buy her a ring that first X-mas. He definitely had never forced Bell to do anything against her will, nor did he ever harm her intentionally. The only harm he had caused her sister was due to the meddling of Urd or Mara. Then Skuld regarded her own relationship with him...about how Keiichi had treated her.

"Keiichi has always been nice to me, except for treating me like a kid all the time and teasing me about Sentaro and Tomohisa," she remembered.

"Maybe he_ is_ right for my dear sister. Just a _little _bit..." she thought to herself with some reluctance. Belldandy could see the conflicting emotions on her little sister's face.

"Skuld, after three years with Keiichi, I have decided that we need to get closer. I need your acceptance and help with this, because I have never loved a mortal before. I just don't know what to do some of the times when I'm with him. Those are the times when I need to draw upon my courage and face the unknown. I'm going to ask you to draw on your own courage and try to accept Keiichi into your life. If you try to look within your heart, you know that Keiichi is the right man for me. Please give this some thought!"

"But sister, what about?..." Skuld protested falteringly.

"Please, Skuld," Belldandy asked, looking at her younger sister with pleading eyes. Keiichi knew that _no one_ could resist his girlfriend when she looked at them 'that way' with her sapphire eyes. Skuld knew it too, and reluctantly backed down her ire.

"Okay, Elder Sister," Skuld replied deferentially. "But you have to promise to sleep in _our_ room every six days for each day you sleep...here!" Belldandy agreed to this, much to Keiichi's disapproval. He had been so excited at the prospects of Belldandy sleeping with him every night...and now his hopes were dashed!

"Don't pout, Keiichi!" Skuld said, noticing the face he pulled.

"And if you so much as hurt her, or touch her like a pervert, I will make Banpei turn you into a big pile of sashimi...verrrrry slowly!" She turned on her heel and walked out of the room.

Keiichi looked at Belldandy, "One night a week?"

Belldandy looked at Keiichi, "Sashimi?"

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

I woke up to polyphony of birdsong. It was late in the morning, and the house was already up and about. I meditated on the events of the past weekend: the possession by Mara; Keiichi's winning the International Solar Car race; the whole strange trip about the God's Music. Strangely, my face didn't feel tender. I touched my face in several places, expecting pain to shoot out from any pressure on the skin, but I felt nothing.

I walked down the hall to the bathroom and looked in the mirror. All the injuries to my face were gone! I gasped with astonishment, and then the realization sank in that one of the Goddesses must have somehow healed me. I breathed a silent thanks and soaked myself in the bath.

Clean as a whistle, I cantered into the kitchen. Keiichi and Belldandy had already left on a walk, Megumi told me. Skuld was in her room finishing her invention and Urd was nowhere to be seen. The house was quiet. I looked at the clock! It was 10 am already! I was going to miss my appointment with Dr. Ogawa!

Megumi noticed the panicked look written on my face and asked what was wrong. I told her that I was going to be late to an appointment.

"You can borrow my Honda Metro scooter. Keiichi and I just got it back this morning, right before he and Bell left," she offered.

"You're a godsend, Megumi!"

I told her that I wasn't good on motorbikes, but she countered my arguments with a promise to show me how to operate it. We went out to the garage and she pointed out to me all the brakes, accelerators, etc.

"It's just like riding a bicycle, Cevn," she smiled sweetly.

"Yeah, right!" I thought to myself. I took it out on a test drive around the temple grounds. To my surprise, it did seem pretty easy to drive! I thanked Megumi for letting me borrow her scooter and drove off to find Dr. Ogawa's office.

Sometimes, being in Japan creates the impression that everything was intentionally confounded here, just to confuse Westerners. This was one of those times. I was disoriented moments after joining traffic on the street in front of the temple grounds. For one thing, traffic flows to the left, just like in England and many European nations. Motoring against my instincts, I found out what the reversed traffic situation was like when I made my first right turn and choose the inner right lane, only to face oncoming traffic and a bevy of horns honking their irritation. Everything was opposite what I was used to in America. I rode the scooter like a beginner, much to the consternation of my fellow commuters.

"Thank God it isn't morning rush hour!" I silently rejoiced.

After a short ride, I arrived at my destination, the familiar butterflies on the building catching my eye. I parked the motor scooter and climbed off of it, feeling a slight aftercase of tremors resulting from my nerves being assaulted by the vicissitudes of my ride here. Hypervigilant, I entered the building and strode up the stairs, down the hall and into her office.

After a short wait, Dr. Ogawa opened the door and greeted me. We engaged in some small talk, including the big news of the town: the racing victory last weekend by the N.I.T. Motor Club. She had nothing but praise for the "college kids", as she invited me into her office.

She began the process known in therapeutic circles as social history data gathering. She asked me my age, address (I gave my postal box #), identification, etc. Then she asked me about my family. I told her about my stepparents, how I was raised in an alcoholic household. When I started, I felt the huge soul-eating pain rise up and I just went off. Usually, I could narrate these events with a detached air, but my feelings were charged today.

"I can remember when I was, three or four. My dad had come home drunk, and was angry at something at work. He picked me up and threw me against the wall a couple of times, then started slapping me. My mother was screaming at him to stop, and then he started swinging me around the living room and let go. I remember crashing through the front window of our house. There I was, on the lawn about ten feet past the house. The front door crashed open and I could hear my father screaming, 'why'd you break the window?' Then he started kicking me while I lay on the ground. Then he turned on my mother when she tried to calm him down. The next day, I couldn't stand up. My father acted like nothing happened. Later, as an adult, I realized that he was in a blackout, and that I had several broken ribs and a concussion. But I never was taken to a hospital."

I looked up and saw tears streaming down Dr. Ogawa's aged face. She looked at me with sadness and pity.

"I don't think we should talk any more about your parents today."

"That was just one incident, Dr. Ogawa. There were a whole lot more." She looked at me and explained that _she_ was too upset to continue with this part of my history, and that it wouldn't help matters if she was too emotional to be able to maintain a professional detachment.

I agreed to this, so she shifted to questions about my drug use history. I told her about using marijuana at age 7 with my older brother, then graduating to harder drugs. By age 14, I had used all the drugs out on the streets, and had begun to inject. I told her about taking 50 yellows and getting my stomach pumped at 14. Then I told her about the many overdoses that I had between 14 and 18, when I got clean. She listened and furiously took notes. She was visibly upset by my drug history.

"What made you get clean from drugs?"

I described to her how my live-in girlfriend, with whom I had a common-law marriage with, had left with everything after I was hospitalized for one more overdose. In the next two weeks, I tried to kill myself by drug overdoses, and wound up in a coma for almost two weeks. After coming out of the coma, I felt like I didn't need to destroy my life with drugs any more; in effect, I had received an awakening of the spirit.

She asked me about my recovery, and I told her of my involvement in NA. I described all the activities, friends, stepwork and such that had blessed my life. I had been richly gifted with all the best that recovery had to offer and I had worked hard to get it. Humility and surrender were major directions in my life today, and I deliberately afforded kindness and respect to anyone I met. I described to her the time that I was called on to help someone get off drugs: how I had 'babysat' them through withdrawals, then worked with the initial emotional detoxification, and counseled he and his fiancTe on how to rebuild their relationship. Dr. Ogawa told me that how impressed she was that I had turned around my life, and was now being of service to others, instead of a drain on their resources.

The remaining time of the interview was spent on discussing my 'presenting problem'-- what I thought was the reason I was coming to her to seek help through therapy.

I told her that I had suddenly had to move here from Hawaii, and as a newcomer to Japan, I was experiencing major culture shock. Also, I told her that I had been living with a major depression in the US, and that I was afraid that it would continue to crush my life. I mentioned that I was just hired at N.I.T., and would begin teaching tomorrow.

"I have lot's of stuff that is coming up right now, that I can't really discuss specifics with you. But this stuff has generated a whole lot of emotional crazymaking on my part, and I need you to help me examine it," I finished, eyeing the clock.

"Can you meet with me weekly?" she suggested. I assented to this and she scheduled me in the first slot on Monday mornings. She told me that the next time, she would give me a few tests, and continue with the social history. Then she curtly dismissed me.

On the ride back, I observed how upset she became when I started telling her about my family life and my drug use. I pondered on whether she had dealt with any Japanese clients who had 'been through the ringer' like me. It was curious that she was unable to maintain her professional distance, but I had experienced this several times before. In counseling situations, the therapist would get upset when I really went into my 'stuff', especially the abusive stuff. I still felt some cloying of my feelings in relation to the hells of my earlier life. I hoped that I could keep her as a therapist, even though she got emotionally wrapped in my pain. At least she was objective enough to tell me to stop, so she could recover herself.

I stopped at the Hasegawa Noodle Shop for lunch. The noren was hanging out, surrounded by a colorful arrangement of balloons and pennants. The place was packed with customers and well-wishers; both parents were busy orbiting the restaurant lauding their daughter with beaming smiles of pride. The bright atmosphere was rife with cheer. Copies of the Asahi Shimbun and Chiba Mimpo newspapers were taped to the front door with pictures of the N.I.T. winning team, Sora circled in red magic marker. Several bunches of flowers brought in by patrons decorated the ramen counter, and the walls had congratulatory banners.

"Service will be slow today, but I don't think anyone will care!" I noted good-humoredly to myself. The elder Ms. Hasegawa recognized me from a couple of weeks ago.

"You're the friend of our daughter that came a few days back!" she announced ebulliently. "Isn't it wonderful that our Sora was on the winning team. And from N.I.T., no less! Who would have thought?"

She launched into a reverie of praise for her daughter, the team, N.I.T., Makuhari, Chiba Prefecture and Japan. I listened with empathy, nodding my head patiently. She definitely was allowed braggadocio on this day after the race! I ordered some soba and gyoza and ate hungrily. A group of elderly men behind me were animatedly discussing the race last night, and noted that there would be a victory parade this weekend! The whole city would come out in a festive spirit to celebrate the astonishing victory of the local college kids.

I was grateful that the whole team was playing hooky from school today, until I overheard that N.I.T. was closed today due to the extraordinary nature of the victory. I imagined that it would be a madhouse when they returned to school; they need a break from all the attention heaped on them. I didn't think that the college faculty would mind too much; they should know that the club members would need some downtime after the intensity of the last two days. No doubt this why Keiichi and Belldandy were off somewhere, having some quality alone time. Or at least decompressing from the media blitz.

After eating, I was sorely tempted to ride around town, but I returned home, after doing a few errands. I stopped by the local library and picked up some books, then bought a sack of groceries. I had decided on the fly that I would cook a Japanese-style celebration dinner for tonight. I got home around 3, and saw the note Keiichi had left:

_Bell and I are going to the Atami Hot Springs_

_for the day. Will be back in the evening._

_K-1_

I had read somewhere that the Atami hot springs, located on the Izu Peninsula, were renowned as a daylong excursion for Tokyoites. Once more, I was glad that they would be getting a much-deserved rest.

"One of these days, I'll check out a hot spring" I promised myself. I had read several books praising the rustic qualities of onsen.

I went to the kitchen and started preparing the dinner. I decided to cook agadashi-tofu, with vegetable sushi and teriyaki beef strips. For dessert, strawberry cake and rice gluten. Tea and soy milk would be the beverages. I studied the recipe cards, and embarked on the surest road to disaster: a guest cooking a foreign cuisine in an unfamiliar kitchen. I had neglected to concern myself with the fact that Japanese kitchens were equipped differently than my own kitchen.

"Ha ha ha! What are you doing? That's not how you do it!" I looked up to see Sora and Megumi laughing at my efforts to cook the tofu. I explained to them that I was going to cook a celebration meal.

"Well you're going to need a lot of help, or a miracle, if you're going to cook dinner. You can't even cook as well as I can, and I flunked Home Economics in middle school!" Sora managed between delighted giggles.

"Your tofu looks like lumpy curry..." Megumi and Sora rounded into more levity.

"That's why they don't have guys take Home Economics, because it would drive the teacher to commit hara-kiri out of frustration! By the way, how did _your_ cooking sensei survive, Sora and Megumi? I've never seen Megumi cook here...perhaps her cooking is even worse than yours, Sora?" I teased. This brought on more laughter from Sora and a scowl from Megumi.

"You take that back right this instant, or neither one of us will lift a finger...and you'll have to deal with your own ruination! Not to mention Belldandy, when she finds out you messed up our dinner _and_ her kitchen," Megumi shot back. I apologized and they both helped me, on the condition that I would do the actual cooking and they would instruct me on procedure. Soon, the 'disaster area' began to look a little more like a kitchen with a meal in progress. After a couple of hours, most of the cooking was done...with no injuries. Urd arrived at this point, and started teasing me about being a woman in man's clothing, since I was in the kitchen. I felt weird about this comment, and explained that I was taking the opportunity to cook a 'victory dinner' for everyone.

"Well in that case, I'm eating out!" Urd remarked icily.

"You know Urd, bachelors usually cook for themselves, and can cook pretty well sometimes. Of course you wouldn't know that, because you've never known a single man long enough to learn this," I replied indignantly. Megumi and Sora laughed at this, while Urd knitted her brows, thinking up a reply.

"You wouldn't know what is would be like to have a woman cook for you, because you're too busy avoiding them. No wonder you have to cook so much...or is it TV dinners? Must be, cuz it surely looks like these two rescued you from culinary disaster, Cev!" I rolled up some sticky rice into a ball and tossed it at her. I flushed red when it hit her squarely on her left breast.

Urd looked at me and smiled, making some comment about how my aim with rice was much better than my jokes, then threw the ball back at me, aiming below the waist and barely missing my groin. She walked out of the room to clean up the 'mess' I had made of her blouse.

Suddenly I felt a sense of panic, as this whole thing was getting too sexual for my comfortability. I excused myself and went to my room. Once inside, I found that I hyperventilating with panic. After about 10 minutes, I returned to the kitchen. Now Skuld had joined the little crowd of observers watching me stumble around trying to cook dinner. Skuld had an excited air about her, and I asked what had lifted her spirits.

"I'm almost finished! I finished the scanner for the Cypheratron Mk. III! You wanna check it out?" Skuld inquired excitedly. Megumi glanced at Sora and suggested to Skuld that we wait after dinner. Sora understood her friend's hint, and began to chat with Skuld about some engineering physics.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

After a couple of hours, Belldandy and Keiichi returned. They both were glowing with...something. They told me about the day at the hot springs. Keiichi looked extremely happy, and Belldandy had smiling eyes all the way through.

Skuld looked at her sister and Keiichi wistfully, as if she was deep in thought. Keiichi related the day's events.

"We got there around 9 and the place was packed. I went over the reservations list with the guy and all the springs and bathrooms were booked up until 6 in the afternoon. Then some couple behind us went 'Hey, aren't you two from the Nekomi team that won the solar race?' This started a reaction from the crowd; they were actually asking me for my autograph!" he related with enthusiasm and surprise.

"Then this nice man offered to let us take his place. He had a _private_ hot spring and bathhouse! We tried to get him to let us pay for it, but he refused. Then he told us that we had done a lot for the nation. Turns out he was some kind of executive for Honda, and when we had beaten the Toyota team, he had won some bets with his co-workers. That was so nice of him!" Belldandy explained, finishing Keiichi's narrative.

"Skip the details! Did you guys get naked, huh? A guy and a gal..._alone_...in a private hot spring! Sounds pretty sexy to me! Soooo...did you guys get nude and soak in the hot spring together?" Urd asked as she put an arm around their shoulders and poked her head between them.

"Urd, whattaya think? Of course not," Keiichi said as he rolled his eyes at Bell-chan, a tinge of a blush on his face.

"Bell and I both wore our bathing suits, if you have to know!"

"I bet you both wore your birthday suits, and just aren't telling. Hhmmm... On second thought, knowing you two...it probably _was_ swimsuits..." she said with a hint of disappointment. "Whatta drag!"

"You guys better have not have done anything!" Skuld added, finishing the discussion.

Seeing that things had reached an impasse, I told them about the dinner I had prepared to celebrate their victory in the race yesterday.

"I didn't know men could cook, maybe you should talk to the other man in our house about helping out with the meals once in a while," Urd taunted as Keiichi's face turned a little red.

"I do too know how to cook, it's just that Bell-chan is so much better at it than I am!" Keiichi defended. His weak reply drew laughter from all, albeit I laughed less vigorously than the women.

The dinner went over well with everyone. I made sure to thank Megumi and Sora for their assist in the preparation of many of the dishes. The agadashi-tofu had turned out excellent, and the donburi was a great addition. I felt very satisfied with myself that I was able to share this gesture of respect with them. For tomorrow, they and I would be going to school.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

The N.I.T. campus was unusually festive this week, as the school was basking in the glory of recognition resulting from last weekend's racing victory. I saw Dr. Kintaro walking with a bounce to his stride to the Admin. Building; he was completely the opposite of the dour-faced academic I had met during my interview. He did do a double take as he saw that I was wearing a red beret with my black-blonde hair streaming out from underneath.

I searched until I found Watanabe Hall, the miserable excuse for the Humanities Dept. Actually, the building was well kept, compact and at least 80 years old.

"92" the familiar voice in my head said.

Downstairs in the basement, I found my 'office'; a small desk sat against the wall in a small room (broom closet?) with three desks in the room, separated by movable dividers. I was disappointed at first, but then I realized that I didn't have a lot of knick-knacks to cause clutter, so I guess that the small cubicle would do me fine.

I walked into my first class at 10:30 and sat down in the front. There were about 30 students, in desks arranged in rows. I looked over the whole class, and noticed that the whole gang was here!

"_Great..._" I muttered in exasperation to myself in a low voice. This would make things even more complicated. I would have preferred a class with all unknowns. Except for Megumi, who I knew would be here. Apparently, the school had decided to combine another class with the Yamashita-sensei's Asian studies course. I looked over the class: Megumi, Sayoko, Sora, Toshiyuki Aoshima and...Tamiya and Ootaki. They all had fatigue-laced rings under their eyes.

"Heheh!" I laughed to myself as I saw the two sempai. They were animatedly chatting with some classmates, and when they saw me, all conversation was stifled with shock.

"I'll have to tell Keiichi about this later," I chuckled.

I took a roll call, noticing some very approving stares from the five female students, no doubt because I was half the age of most of their professors and a shaggy-head gaijin to boot. Megumi was all smiles, her eyes expressing "I know who you are!" Sora grinned sheepishly from under her glasses and I nodded at her. Tamiya and Ootaki both shouted "present!" loudly with feigned militia respect, bringing a brief tittering from their female classmates. Sayoko looked very disinterested and hungover, and Aoshima was blatantly flippant with his response.

"Hello, my name is Cevn. You don't have to call me Cevn-sensei unless you want an 'F' on your next project or you need to do some serious brown-nosing on something relating to the class. The only time you need to call me 'sensei' is in the presence of other faculty. We must at least keep up the appearance of academic decorum." I scanned the room for reactions to this; many of the students were outright taken aback by my informal introduction.

"The reason that I don't want to be called 'sensei' is because I am a student, just like you. I have three BAs: in Psychology, Philosophy, and Asian Studies with emphasis on Japan and China. I have a Masters in East Asian Literature, and a second Masters in Psychology, with emphasis on addiction studies. I am finishing a Doctorate in Conscience Studies that I designed in cooperation with faculty at universities in Hawaii and Beijing. Circumstances have forced me to finish my program here...somehow," I explained. I heard a couple students say "cool!" when I recited my qualifications.

"I have had 4 years college-level Japanese, and two years graduate level. I am fluent in several other languages, including Chinese and obviously, English," I joked.

"Please excuse me if I need you to repeat yourself because I didn't catch it the first time, but be aware that I might know more written Kanji than most of you, and I will expect your papers reflect your best effort!"

"I feel regret at the circumstances that have led me to fill in for Yamashita-sensei. I visited him recently, and he wanted me to tell you all to try hard to work with me, and that he misses you." I looked over the class and saw several students nod approvingly.

"I also received his blessing to teach this class. Incidentally, I plan to have a little party for him at his house at the end of the school year, for our last day in class. It's a surprise, so don't blow it by telling him during these last two weeks of school!"

I didn't like how the classroom was arranged, so I asked the students to pull their chairs to the sides of the class, so as to create a circle. The sounds of shuffling chairs and the faces of curious students filled the air.

"Since I don't know where we left off, I want you guys to teach me what you learned in this course up to the point before Yamashita-sensei got ill," I asked, then started picking students to tell me about the recent subject material. I noticed that Sayoko was inattentive and grilled her.

"Sayoko, since China in the late Ming was undergoing vast economic decline, would you mind explaining the mechanics of the socio-political catalysts of the macroeconomic or transnational milieu?"

"I don't know," she said with a bored voice. I asked her several other questions, and after a series of non-responses, requested her to see me after class. I didn't mean to shame her, but I was worried...it seemed as if she wasn't even present in her body.

I walked up to the chalkboard, wrote "Ming-Qing" at the top, drew several columns and asked them to portray the last century of Ming rule. I noticed that Aoshima was monopolizing the answers, so I prompted him to let the other students have a say. I concluded the class with a brief statement.

"You guys are in for a treat. This is no longer a lecture class. I am going to run this class like the seminar-style classes we have in the USA. Further, I want you to really think beyond dates, places, and names; I want you to be aware of the events as if you had lived them yourselves. This will be difficult for some of you, but I'm going to teach you how to do this. I have taught undergrads and some grad students, so be aware that I'm not exactly fresh-off-the-boat as far as being an instructor. Let's pick up tomorrow with the late Ming literature and what it discloses about the socio-aesthetic world of 15-17th century China."

After the students piled out of the class, a subdued Sayoko came over to me.

"What do you want?" she asked guardedly. I leveled with her.

"Either you have amnesia, or you've slept in class for almost two months, or you're too shy to answer simple questions in class. Or...you're stoned out of your mind." She seemed to dip her head lower at the last 'guess'. After asking her a few questions about herself, I was strongly suspicious that she was using drugs. She was lethargic in her responses, and she seemed 'dulled'.

"Look, Sayoko, if you are having problems and they are interfering with your academic work, I'm not going to hold them against you, if you talk to me about them. I'm your ally in this class, but I can't help you with whatever, if I don't know what it is!"

"Leave me alone! What do_ you_ know about anything!" She stood up, teary-eyed, and rushed out of the classroom.

"That's as clear as an admission that there's a problem in your life...as you could have ever possibly given me, Sayoko," I said aloud to the classroom door. I'm not going to let her keep screwing up like this. And if she is using drugs, she's not going to be able to pull a cover-up past me. Is she in for a surprise if she does!

I taught two other classes, and then my day was over. I wrote an announcement offering to tutor English for free and posted it. I knew that college-level English was difficult, and tutors were expensive. So I thought that I would help some students, since there probably wasn't very many gaijin around who spoke English as a native language. I went back to my office, met one of the grad students who was serving as a TA (they put me in with TAs?) in a History of Engineering class. I made a mental shopping list, and embarked on my walk back home.

I arrived home with two bags of stuff. I had bought a laptop computer for use at school, a couple of Lake Biwa posters, an alarm clock, and various office supplies. Settling down from a tense first day at work, Keiichi walked over and asked me how my day had gone.

It turned out that he was 'the big guy on campus' today. All sorts of attention were cast on him.

"For God's sake, they _applauded_ me in my first class when I arrived!" he said with full-on exasperation.

"Then there were all these girls bothering me all the time. It's not as if they didn't know that I had been going out with Belldandy. Even the teachers were treating me weird. The guys at the Speech Club asked me to give a speech at their next meeting. The gals at the Photography Club wanted me to pose in my racing gear, pin-up style. Geez!" He related to me how this request reminded him of his experience three years ago with Sayoko's 'Art Club', soon after Bell-chan had entered his life. His 'buddy' Ootaki had set him up with a job, which turned out to be as a model for an all-women's painting class! We both laughed at this.

"Hey, that's the price of fame, buddy! Do you think they were going to let you get away with one of the biggest sports upsets in Japanese history?" I comically commented.

"Well, my Keiichi _is_ a hero, you know!" Belldandy said proudly as she joined us. Tuesday was usually her night off as cook, but she had responded to my 'victory dinner' yesterday with one of her own.

"Now I get to see what a _real_ victory dinner tastes like!" I complimented her. The whole compound was filled with a succulent aroma as we settled down for dinner, and Belldandy set out a huge array of dishes. Tempura, donburi, soba, miso soup, teriyaki chicken, and a variety of dessert cakes. It was totally exquisite!

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

After dinner, Skuld had excitedly announced for the second day in a row that she had completed work on her new invention, the Cypheratron Mk. III. Everyone was hopeful, as this invention of Skuld's would be vital in cracking the mystery of the book that Cevn had in his room. If anyone could do it, it was Skuld. After all, this was the same girl who created a bug-zapper dimensional transportation device out of a rice cooker...

Still, there was the problem of Mara. If she was present during the deciphering of the mysterious contents of the book, she could cause a lot of problems.

"We need to be really careful. After all, Mara knew of the book's existence, and had even called it a 'Demon Instruction Manual!'" Belldandy recalled with concern.

"That's simple! Let's just erect a Demon-warding field in his room, and then put Skuld's machine to work!" Urd suggested. Everyone agreed to this, and Cevn's bedroom became a flurry of divine activity, as Skuld set up her Demon Detection System while Urd and Belldandy placed lucky charms in each corner of the room, then sealed the door with a warding spell. Assured that the room was airtight, at least to Demons, the three Goddesses and three humans sat in a circle around Skuld's machine.

From the side, Skuld's Cypheratron looked like a classroom overhead projector: a flat glass base on which to place whatever object was being scanned with an overhead apparatus housing what appeared to be numerous lasers. From there, any resemblance with human technology ended. The base was circular, looking like a flattened sphere, with three 'wing's, one on each side, that would fold up and over, covering the book. Three booms extended up from it equidistantly. It had a circular ring mounted on it halfway up, which extended outwards. It appeared to be a focusing lens for the lighted unit at the top of the mecha. At the top was a triangular piece that housed a very intricate set of machinery. It was reminiscent of the Greek god Argus, with hundreds of lenses and filters, rods sticking out of it at odd angles, and a large set of cabling that ran out of an opening in its back to a display screen and computer housed in a separate machine.

As usual, Skuld's creation looked otherworldly, except for the "Cypheratron Mk. III" painted on it. Skuld was beaming with pride at this invention, her eyes aspark with the kind of gleam a parent has when their kids win a little league game. She stroked the metallic and plastic surface with her gloved hands with an almost sexual caress while explaining its attributes.

"The Cypheratron Mk. III is a polyheuralistic endolingustic scanner and demodulator. It is adept at transferring context polychronicly. The artificial intelligence unit can intuit meaning and value by asymptotic inference channels within cultural data matrices. It possesses a database consisting of all the known language patterns of the Universe, freshly downloaded from Yggdrasil," she noted, her voice as rich as a carillon. She continued with further esoteric claims, and concluded with a bow. Urd patted Skuld on the head.

"Now let's see if it works!" she said dryly, drawing an irritated scowl from Skuld. Urd had heard her share of the younger Goddess's praises for a machine that later turned out to be ineffective.

Urd attempted to pick the book up...and was thrown to the floor, as if she had received an electric jolt. Everybody's eyes grew wide at this. Belldandy and Skuld rushed over to their sister in panic. Urd had a dizzy expression to her face, as if she had been knocked out and was 'seeing stars'. As if once wasn't enough, she tried it again, and once more was tossed across the room.

"Urd! Don't try it again!" Belldandy yelled. Urd looked around sheepishly as she was collapsed in a pile against the wall.

Everyone discussed why the book was doing this. Keiichi volunteered to try and pick it up, despite protestations from Belldandy. He tentatively reached out and touched the book, then grabbed it with the other hand. Belldandy put her hands in front of her mouth while Skuld covered her eyes with her gloved hands. Try as he might, he couldn't lift it.

"Whew!" he sighed aloud; at least he didn't get tossed across the room like the unfortunate Urd. Cevn was shocked by this.

"Why is it doing that? I don't have a problem lifting it up at all!"

"Well, go on! Why don't you lift it then!" Urd urged. "Don't blame me if you get zapped like I just did!" Urd secretly hoped that nothing would happen to Cevn, but expected something unforeseen to occur.

Cevn closed his eyes and reached towards the book. With a flinch, he lifted it up off of the ground.

"Well, put it in Skuld's machine," Urd told him. Cevn set the book square on the machine. Belldandy noted that the book seemed harmless to its owner, but was unmovable to all others. Definitely the work of the Almighty, she concluded.

Skuld pushed a button on a hand-held control, and the three 'wings' closed over the book. Together, they formed a green window lidding over the scanning area. Rays of light poured down from the overhead unit, and were dispersed by the middle lens into millions of sparkles. Inside, the book was being scanned both vertically and horizontally. Skuld flipped a switch on the outboard computer display and images raced across the screen. After over an hour of tense waiting, the images stopped.

"Here it comes," Skuld announced. This was it! The contents of the mysterious book would be theirs! Her smile turned to a frown as the machine displayed:

_Contents of scanned material are indecipherable._

_50 percent of the inclusive linguistic material matches known language-group 'God's Language" with 100 percent  
_

_correlation. 50 percent of the inclusive linguistic material is anomalous and indecipherable. _

_The inclusive linguistic material can only be extrapolated to be theoretical _

_'Demon's Language' as it fails to correspond with all known languages._

"What!" Skuld screamed. "That's impossible. It cannot be written in both the God's Language _and_ the Demon's Language!"

Belldandy put a comforting hand on her younger sister, as she knew that Skuld was bitterly disappointed. This created another, potentially larger mystery. If the 'mystery book' contained both languages, then that ruled out any possibility that the Almighty had created it. This line of reasoning led Skuld to a very uncomfortable conclusion; what if there was something more powerful than the Almighty?

Belldandy's face was feverish with thought.

"Why would this book have Demon's Language, the only language in the Universe that Yggdrasil does not have in its databanks?" she wondered aloud.

"And the only language that we Goddess's cannot read!" Urd added.

"It _must_ be written in the Demon's Language. That's why Mara has been hanging around here so much!" Keiichi exclaimed.

Everyone looked at him. He had stated the obvious, but his words expressed a profound gravity that wasn't lost on anyone, especially the three Goddesses. Cevn looked visibly relieved.

"Then it isn't me!" he said with relief.

"Not so fast!" countered Urd. "How is it that every time we try to move the book off the ground, something happens? But when you try, nothing happens to you?" Cevn looked at her with a guilty face.

"I don't have a clue why, Urd! Believe me, I'm not at all comfortable with this book anyway. Since it's acting so weird, why don't we just get rid of it?"

"So typical of you, thinking with one oar in the water!" Urd groused.

Megumi shook her head in the negative. "No, it is probably indestructible. If it can toss a Goddess on her butt, imagine what it might do if we tried to destroy it. Boom!" she gestured expansively with her hands.

"So if you guys can't read it...and Mara can't read it...what good is it?" Cevn asked in puzzlement.

"If there was only some way we could get Mara here, so that we could work on it together..." Belldandy wondered aloud.

"And have that royal pain in the ass learn the secrets of that book! No way!" Skuld exclaimed.

"Skuld, such language!" Belldandy remonstrated with a parental tone of censure. "But still, you have a very good point, Skuld, even if you didn't need to say it so...forcefully!"

"Sorry, but I'm really fed up with Mara right now. She made Cevn nearly destroy our house, and then made Urd believe it was her fault. And Banpei was nearly wrecked in the process! If she was here right now, I'd..." Skuld shot back.

"Now, Skuld, you're only a kid who's just learning the extent of her powers," Urd said with a disarming smile. "I don't mean to insult you, but Mara is as strong as me, and as focused as Belldandy. She'd be more than a match for you, and I'd hate to see my little sister get hurt even more by her!" Skuld glared at her older sister.

"I am _not a kid_!!" she protested with a shout. Then her face softened as she understood the deep concern for her that Urd had just mentioned in front of everybody. She reached over and hugged her oldest sister. "I love you, Big Sister, even if you_ are_ crazy most of the time!"

"What if I could somehow read the book? If Urd could teach me the God's Language, I should be able to piece it together. After all, it was sent to me...which possibly means that I was intended to read it," Cevn said slowly, watching all of this with a distant look in his eyes. Urd looked at Cevn, suddenly uncomfortable that he had suggested _her_ as a tutor.

"Why me?" she asked, ready to argue.

"Why not you?" Cevn asked back. "Actually, it would give you an opportunity to make amends and unload some of that guilt you're still running on from the rampage of a couple of weeks ago."

Urd was shocked by Cevn's correct estimation of her remaining feelings from the Mara-Sake Incident of two weekends ago. But she was also touched by the thoughtfulness of his offer: she did feel at a loss to make up for her part, albeit unwilling, in the incident.

"I'll share the duties with Skuld and Belldandy! You need all the perspective you can get, and what better than to get it from all three Norns! But you have to promise that you don't run out of the room if I sit next to you!" she chided Cevn.

"Urd, I cannot promise that. There's a life within me, deeply mired, which causes me to be flighty around women. I'll try my best, but don't expect me just to act like you're not there." Cevn replied.

"Keiichi, you don't mind if I 'borrow' Belldandy for this?" Keiichi looked at Cevn thoughtfully for a moment.

"Well, I guess so, if this will help get rid of Mara! But you'll have to do it when I'm away at school or something, because Bell-chan and I don't get enough time together as it is."

"Understood! How about you, Skuld?" The young Goddess looked at him with mixed emotions, playing with her hair then crossing her arms.

"Skuld, I can't do this without your help. You may have the key to unlock this mystery. And you know that I wouldn't do anything to hurt you...that's why I want you to help so bad!" Skuld looked at Cevn, deep into his eyes, and saw that he was totally sincere. She smiled angelically.

"Yes, I suppose I could lend my expertise and genius!" she said, dishing out the hubris. This brought some much-needed laughter to all present.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

It was getting late, and the house had quieted down considerably since the excitement of the evening. I heard a knock on the door, and Megumi came in, dressed in bright red and orange striped pajamas, and seated herself down on the end of my futon. I felt a moment of panic, my usual fear of being close to women welling up in my throat.

"It's only Megumi," I told myself, trying to quell the urge to run out of the room. I got up and paced around the room a moment.

"Cevn, what's wrong?" Megumi asked.

"It's not you, Megumi, it's this damn anxiety around women I have! It's acting up again! I..I can't help it!" I stopped, took a deep breath, forcing myself to calm down. Then I sat back down on the futon facing her.

"I'm okay now. What brings you to my 'office'?" I joked. Megumi looked at me, confused by my sudden shift from anxiety to light humor.

"I felt a little weird having you teach my class this morning. But that's okay, you did pretty good. What actually brings me here...is that there's this guy."

"Ahhhh, a guy!" I sighed. "Tell me as much as you can feel comfortable sharing, Megumi."

"There's this guy in our Motor Club...his name is Genji. I introduced you to him the other time. Well, he has an older sister who is a lovelorn admirer of Keiichi. Her name is Sayoko, the same one that's in your class with me."

"Yes. I had a talk with her after class. She seems to have a lot of troubles."

"Anyway, Genji _seems_ to like me, but I don't know for sure. He's done some stuff that guys would do when they like a girl."

"Like what, Megumi?"

"Well, he almost always sits down with me at study hall, and he helped me with a major test a few weeks ago, reading my flash cards for me and stuff like that. And he always seems to 'light up' with a big smile whenever he sees me."

"So what's the problem?" I asked, not feeling very comfortable with the fact that she was possibly going to seek my advice. Megumi hesitated, then lowered her voice.

"I really, really like him. I would love it if he asked me to go out on a date with him. But I can't ask him, because if Sayoko found out, it'd be hell for both of us. She doesn't like Belldandy, and it would be awkward if her younger brother was involved with someone who was so close to her rival for Keiichi."

"And in Japan, even more so than in the US, the woman has to wait for the man to ask. And also in Japan, the younger brother has to respect his older sister, right?" I added.

"Yep!" she assented with a half-smile, half-grimace.

"I think that if he spends enough time around you, away from the club and school, you can 'go to work' on him. What does he like to do for hobbies?"

"He likes traditional theatre, for some reason. But I find theatre totally boring!"

"Megumi! That's precisely the point. You need to expand your mind! You just haven't gone to the theatre with the right person. It's like going to an art museum; if you go with someone who appreciates art, then it's a blast! But if you go with someone who's into sports, for example, it can be a tedious mess."

"But I can't afford something like that! Genji and Sayoko come from a rich family. Their parents would frown upon it if their son went out with someone like _me_." I could see her throwing on the velvet cloth and the crystal ball...

"Hey, you're jumping ahead. You and Genji are not Elizabeth and Darcy, at least not yet."

"Who and who?"

"They're characters from a novel by the English author, Jane Austin. You should read some of her stuff when you get a chance." I gave her a brief synopsis of "Pride and Prejudice" and related it to her situation.

"Sometimes in life, Megumi, one has to jump beyond their own perception of what their limitation are. You say that Sayoko is an obstacle, but if you and Genji really end up liking each other, your love...if you guys fall in love...will be a obstacle to _her_ as well. She'll have to learn to live with it! To accommodate it."

Megumi looked at me, her expression one of sudden insight. It was obvious that she hadn't considered this aspect in her 'future gazing'.

"You know, the Japanese have an idiom that says 'the nail that stands up taller than the rest gets pounded down'. You, Megumi, are that nail. From what little I've seen, as a woman you are far more assertive than what is socially acceptable here. So is Sayoko, from what bits and pieces I've heard. So here's Genji, caught in between two strong women. You know what's going to make him choose you over his sister?"

Megumi seemed threatened by the intimacy of this examination of her personality. She seemed hesitant, and a hint of fear crossed her eyes. I saw it, and reached over and grabbed her lightly on the arm.

"You did want to have an older brother, didn't you? Well, you just have to trust me. I mean...trust in the fact that if sometimes I can see deeper into you then what you may be comfortable with...that I won't use that familiarity with you to hurt you, Megumi." She nodded her head, and I squeezed her shoulder affectionately.

"Well, to revisit what I was suggesting earlier, you're going to have to allow Genji to feel his own strength. You need to empower him, so that _when_ you and he get together, he'll feel confident around you _and_ be able to stand up to his older sister. To do that, you need to meet him on his own turf, so to speak." Megumi absorbed this thoughtfully, then fixed me with an expression that indicated that she agreed.

"Okay, so how do I do that?"

"How do _we_ do that, you mean? I'm going to be a go-between between you two. I've been dying all my life to go see a Noh play!"

"No way...you'll screw things up!" she said, semi-seriously.

"In the interests of cultural acclimation, I'm going to invite one of my students and her friend who is well-versed in Japanese theatre to a live Noh performance next weekend, or the following week if there are no tickets available." I said with mock formality.

"My treat for the both of you, too!" I added. This was a forward suggestion from me, and I saw that Megumi had a moment's worth of fear to digest. She very quickly recovered from this, and smiled broadly.

"You would do that for me?" she said excitedly.

"Of course I would, for my 'little sister'!" I lightheartedly replied. "Hey, it would get you and Genji together outside of school; it would be especially appealing to him since he likes traditional theatre, so he could 'show off'. It will also give me time to get to know him better, so I can help you with your 'situation' with him. Besides, I need to know more about his sister. I think she has a...problem that may require my help."

I was so glad to see how Megumi was receiving this so enthusiastically. She was literally transformed with excitement.

"In exchange, I want you to sit down with me some time and tell me all you know about Sayoko. Okay, Megumi?"

"Sure! Wow! Thank you so much, Cevn!" she said in a thrilled voice.

"Hey, don't mention it!" Megumi gave me an affectionate hug, and walked out of my room, a picture of excitement

"That seemed pretty easy," I complemented myself.

But it was weird as well. I spent so much of my time in fear of women, because of the sexual abuse stuff in my past. But this exchange with Megumi had gone really smooth, despite my initial anxiety. What was up here? I knew that, since Megumi was interested in Genji, this would be a safe topic for us to talk about. But what if a woman showed an interest in me? Would I still freak out? Would I be able to handle it? I thanked Megumi silently; her willingness to spend time with me was lowering my defensiveness towards women in general.

"Maybe, someday, some woman will find something in me that she likes. Maybe I can feel what it's like to be in love again," I said to myself. It had been a long day, but a calm one, I reflected as I went to sleep.


	8. Pt 8: Abduction

**Part 8: Abduction**

Urd was puzzled by the mysterious tome in Cevn's room. The "_Enigma Book_", as Cevn had termed it. On occasion, she would halt her mid-day activities and sneak into Cevn's room to examine it. Several times this week, a sudden wind would flurry out the window when she entered the room.

"As if someone was leaving in a hurry," she sensed. The God's Language she found in the book was very arcane and esoteric, replete with extremely technical terms. It was loaded with erudite concepts, such as she had encountered in the final years of her Inculcation. The Enigma Book also contained a brief survey of Yggdrasilian history and culture...information that Urd felt decidedly reserved about; questioning the appropriateness of teaching it to her mortal charge.

She reminisced about the Yggdrasilian learning process: a Goddess would avail to the Elders to be 'educated', which was the equivalent of giving her the rudiments of the alphabet; after this, she was 'inculcated', which was the equivalent of learning words, grammar, poetry, alphapainting and the like.

"These obtuse terms and ideas are far beyond Skuld and possibly even Belldandy," Urd concluded. So Urd took it upon herself to divide the contents of the book into categories and assigned them to her younger sisters. She reserved the most difficult sections for herself.

This project fully engaged her stubborn perfectionist streak; which, although satiated by the challenge of a complex task such as this, was emotionally consuming as well. Several times already, Urd had slammed the cover shut on the book in frustration after barely beginning to examine it. As if the difficulty of rendering it into another language wasn't enough, there was the further matter of trying to explain it to her mortal charge in concepts that he could understand.

"Kinda like using a car battery to power a cellular phone," she analogized with visible chagrin as she prepped for tonight's study session.

Elsewhere in the house, Skuld was reserved in the face of defeat. The book had frustrated her Cypheratron Mk III; this was a major blow to the sensitive young Goddess.

"I wish I could have just hit the 'destruct button' like I did in the Robot Wars when Megumi's robot captured mine," she daydreamed with vain frustration. She chuckled at the memory of the shocked expression on Megumi's face when she atomized both robots.

Skuld had spent hours casting schemes about how she could obtain a lexicon or dictionary of the Demon's Language. But was this possible? Perhaps she could force Mara into a tenuous position where she would have to relinquish the goods on the Demon's Language. Skuld gleefully designed Demon-torturing devices in her head; then abandoned the idea when she noticed that she would sink into a brooding mood afterwards. She greatly preferred her joyous spirit above being deliberate and calculating.

She realized that she needed a project, one that would restore her self-confidence. Curious about her varying...and sometimes unpredictable Goddess powers, Skuld decided to build a handheld device that would measure the Divine energy potencies.

"Yeah, that's it! I'll build a Divine Spell and Energy Matrix Correlation Monitor. Hmmm, I'll call it the Shinseisensor!" she announced to an imaginary audience. She combed through her spare electronic parts boxes for the oscillator circuit that Cevn had bought her...it would do nicely for the display once she miniaturized it. She knew that building this mecha would be a simple matter for her talents.

"Why didn't I think of this before?" she wondered aloud as she started arranging components and drawing schematics.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Belldandy was restless, waiting for Keiichi to come home with the usual leap-tensed pressure. It was finals week, and he was soaking in the Stygian waters of stress and sweat with his upcoming exams. Belldandy had decided that it fell to her, as Keiichi's girlfriend, to try and alleviate his stress with all the resources at her command. At least the non-supernatural ones.

On the first day back to school after the race, her beloved regaled her with tales of how the 'victory' had elevated him into a local celebrity status. Last Thursday, he told her with astonished disbelief that a writer from Kodansha Publishing had cornered him between classes. Then, the writer pitched Keiichi for info...as he was drafting a manga script based on the N.I.T. Motor Club! She laughed with him at this development, trying to picture how her mortal boyfriend would look in a serial comic series.

But Keiichi was also haggard by evening time, and this worried Belldandy. It created a tension; Belldandy trying to relax him, Keiichi trying to stay alert with his cramming for finals.

With the weekend coming up, Belldandy just wanted to shut the temple doors and have a quiet introspective reprieve with her beloved mortal boyfriend. With the busy tenor of the past few weeks, she felt that she had some 'catching up' to do with Keiichi.

"What the mortals call 'quality time'", Belldandy noted to herself as she folded the winter futon comforters for storage. She was determined to sit him down later tonight and discuss plans for the weekend. Monday's excursion to the Atami hot springs was delightful, relaxing fun. But it was tantalizingly inadequate.

She remembered Keiichi's enamored eyes as she pranced into the hot spring pool. His eyes seemed to take all of her in...offering Belldandy the feeling that she was being cradled in a pair of huge soft hands. It wasn't just her physical being he saw, she knew. After all, her swimsuit was modest compared to what Urd would (or wouldn't) wear to the beach. She knew about the mortal male and his predisposition to lose control at the sight of certain parts of the female anatomy. But with Keiichi, it was as if he saw _all_ of her: beyond her physique, beyond her beauty, beyond her personality.

"No one has ever done this before, except of course the Almighty," she smiled as she looked at her reflection in the window. It was nothing less than the most wonderful miracle that this young mortal man could grasp her essence and mirror it back to her in his soft brown eyes, she observed once again in appreciation.

"That's another reason why I love you best, Keiichi Morisato!" she sang out to herself with a maidenly dittance.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

The subject of her daydreaming was actively trying to downplay his celebrity status. If a popularity poll were to be taken in Makuhari the week after the race, Keiichi would have been rated ahead of the retired-but-still popular Michael Jordan, all of the J-pop idol stars, and the current yokozuna. At school, various clubs were constantly approaching him to help out with their membership drives by showing up at 'special events'.

"The guy with the movie script," he mused, "was unbelievable. What a goofball!" The whole club was suffering the 'cause celebre' effect. Fortunately they had each other to rely on.

Tamiya had almost jackpunched the nxxxxth reporter who interviewed him in his capacity as acting Club President concerning his pride in the club's victory. He almost wished that Chihiro were back here in Japan to take some of the heat off of him and Ootaki. Instead, she had stuck the management chores for Whirlwind on he and Ootaki and had traveled to America for some advanced engineering coursework at a prestigious university.

"How many times mus' ah tell 'em dat ah'm stoked about it!" he bemoaned to Keiichi yesterday. Then he joked about how Ootaki was curiously camera-shy.

"Of all da guys, Ootaki has da most outrageous image...well _one_ of da most nutty images in our Club...yet da dude flakes out wheneva he sees a camera! Which really sucks, cuz den theys come lookin' for _me_!" Tamiya had complained to him. Keiichi laughed at the irony of this. The fishbowl effect was bringing out the best and the weird in the club members.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Megumi nursed a migraine as she tried to study in the library. Her concentration was wrecked! All these guys suddenly wanted to get in her pants. Each day, she had to skillfully fend off any number of the men at school. Guys kept flirting with her and asking her out for dates. She initially enjoyed the attention on Tuesday, her first day back in school after the solar car competition. But now, it had gradually shifted into an unwelcome tedium. Being one of thirty-or-so women in the male-dominated technical college was already disadvantaging. But having sudden fame thrown in the mix and...Presto!...she was a testosterone magnet. Thankfully, she had her close friend Sora Hasegawa to confide in.

Sora was having the same problems. Her romantic interest, Toshiyuki Aoshima, was sullen and whiny all the time after his N.I.T. Four Wheel Club was so dramatically eclipsed by the prestige of her own club. Megumi knew that this had always been a source of personal conflict within Sora, as her friend was often torn between her desire for the sophomore Toshiyuki and her devotion to the Club.

So she and Sora commiserated on the immaturity of male college undergraduates, in an effort to survive Finals Week. But Megumi's upset feelings were further accented by the fact that _he_ wasn't paying any more attention to her now then he had before. She thought that she had made some progress at the party at her house the weekend before the race.

"Sora, this majorly sucks! I have an abundance of unwanted attention from all these engineering geeks, coupled with a lack of wanted attention from Genji! What ever happened to him?"

"It's the same with me, Megumi! At least Toshiyuki has a reason to pout. He really is sorta cute when he's upset, though, heheh!"

"I never could understand what you see in that guy, Sora. You're so quiet, and he's--no offense Sora--he's so smarmy and arrogant!"

"None taken. You know you have to watch us quiet ones, Megumi!

We're usually the most passionate about what we want. Besides, you know what they say: 'opposites attract.'"

"Yeah...I wish Genji was my opposite right now! I know Aoshima's been taking his defeat with more than a little dose of bitterness. But you guys are totally on the opposite poles of humanity, if you ask me!"

"I'll just have to work on him a bit," Sora grinned at her friend, "and he'll turn out okay. But what's wrong with Genji? He's been acting pretty strange since the race! He almost seems...embarrassed. Everybody's been wondering about him. And his sister...she's turning into a basket case. She's in her junior year here, and she's blowing it. What could be up with him, Megumi?"

"I don't have a clue. That's what is so damn frustrating!"

Megumi noticed that Genji had been blatantly avoiding her lately. When she did see Genji, he would hang his head after catching her eye. Was it guilt? Was there some other woman? Was it his sister Sayoko? Megumi was concerned about his sudden withdrawal from her company. She wanted to talk to Cevn about this during the weekend break from school, but she noticed that he was completely stressed out towards the end of the week.

"Why are all the men in this world so _stupid_ that they can't see a good thing when it's right in front of them!" Sora agonized.

"Ain't that a truism!" Megumi agreed. Both coeds giggled, drawing a series of "shhhssh's" from the others in the library.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

In his cramped office, Cevn realized that the first week teaching at Nekomi Tech. had been a struggle for him. He quickly became aware of the inadequacies of his command of Japanese, and redoubled his efforts to listen actively. It wasn't so much that _his_ usage of Japanese was at fault. Rather, the nuances of culture that permeate any foreign language were causing him to misapprehend what his students were discussing.

"This isn't textbook Nihongo," he noted with regret. He felt betrayed by his decision to convert the class from a lecture to a seminar format.

"It would have been so much easier if I had just left it as a lecture; then I could've just stood at the front of the class and babbled on," he admitted. But despite some vacillation of opinion towards the seminar concept, he continued on, steeling himself for the unexpected challenge.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Six stressed-out people attended the dinner table. I looked at each face and adjudged my own pressures to pale insignificant in comparison to what they were dealing with. At least I wasn't the only one experiencing the brunt of tension from the past couple weeks. I could empathize with Skuld...she had tried so hard with her Cypheratron! Urd was moodswinging all week like a stringed bobbin in a gale. Keiichi and Megumi looked like they had been mobbed by paparazzi all week. And Belldandy just seemed tired, almost sullen.

I reminded myself that this was just my fourth week here at the temple compound. My newfound friends barely knew me. What I knew of them was only a foundation, only a surface erosion slighting against the deeper bedrock of their inner natures. I wanted so much to do _something_ that would cheer up the atmosphere, but I knew that every social step I took here in Japan was paved with a dozen gaffes.

Yet in a way, it was relaxing. The small talk during dinner had a lulling, soothing effect on me. After the last two weekends, I could use a sedate setting...just a forest glade calm. But the rain that had been falling since late afternoon seemed to accent the sulky feelings we shared at the dinner table.

On a better note, I remembered that next weekend I was going with Megumi and Genji into Tokyo to see the famous Noh play "Seki-dera Komachi" plus another play from the same category, "Matsukage". I had studied Japanese literature as an undergrad, and Noh theatre as a graduate student, so the aesthete in me was excited at the prospect. I was shocked that I was able to obtain tickets for next weekend on Tuesday, especially considering that "Seki-dera Komachi" was rarely performed. Apparently, right before I called, there was a cancellation of three seats because of illness.

"Another 'coincidence'?" I mused.

I remembered reading "Seki-dera Komachi" years ago. It was from the third class of Noh drama, which deals with feminine themes. It was considered as one of the exemplars of the Noh repertoire. From what I could recall, Japanese Noh aficionados revered the part of Komachi in equivalent terms to the Western esteem for the character of Othello in Shakespeare's drama--very difficult to perform. The actor who was going to perform Komachi's part was almost 70 and was considered the best actor of his performance school. Arguably, he was also the premier Noh shite of his generation.

But the real purpose for this excursion was to try and get Megumi and Genji together on friendlier terms. I knew immediately that I had scored a huge success with this playbill. If Genji is as avid about Noh as Megumi described him to be, he was going be in the lap of Benten, figuratively speaking.

"Which would make him much more receptive to Megumi's romantic advances," I noted conclusively. I normally eschew manipulation, but I sensed that this was the right thing to do for all parties concerned. I grinned at this, and Keiichi saw my smile amidst the frowns around the table.

"What are _you_ so happy about, Cevn?" he asked, the slightest hint of irritation in his voice. I couldn't answer him directly, so I counterfeited a response.

"I was just thinking about how things have been so intense in the past two weeks...but now that they've slowed down, everyone seems to be in the doldrums. How ironic! Why don't we all do something fun?"

Keiichi smiled at this, and suggested that we all go to see a movie.

"That's a wonderful idea, Keiichi!" Belldandy said cheerily, seizing on the idea. The mood seemed to slowly brighten. Adding to the momentum, Skuld materialized a newspaper (not from "Urd's Castle" lab, fortunately) and started reading titles. I noticed both Urd and Belldandy looking at Skuld with sisterly pride.

"You've been practicing with your powers, I see!" both sisters complimented her. Skuld smiled girlishly at the praise. We decided on the new American Godzilla movie, and soon we traipsed off to the downtown theatre.

It was a major disappointment. I was discontent with the crass "Hollywoodization" of the Godzilla mythos in the American series. Toho and Centropolis had been engaged in a major legal battle over the Godzilla license recently. Keiichi was irritated with what he termed "inane plot and pathetic acting." Skuld, of course, was fascinated by the monster, which brought out the little girl in her in full. She was frightened during some of the scenes and loosed several high-pitched screams, much to Urd's consternation. Urd's propensity to enjoy TV extended to the movie theatre; she was almost as animated at the young Skuld, throwing popcorn at several scenes. Belldandy and Keiichi fed each other popcorn and held hands throughout the movie. Megumi laughed derisively at some of the more blatant incidences of wooden acting by the male and female leads. On the way home, I took an informal poll: should Godzilla have perished? Everyone agreed that Godzilla should not have been killed. They killed him off in the first movie, back in '98, which ruined it for me. Years later, they did it again!

Why don't they ever learn? Godzilla is a force of nature, not to be dominated.

Just like the three Goddesses in our car.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

The next three weeks seemed to whiz by in an eyeblink. I was relieved that the school year was ending so close to my arrival here. I definitely needed a break from working at N.I.T. The finals week here was a grueling exhibition of academia at its best, and worst.

The reward came with the graduation ceremonies. It was really wonderful to see Tamiya and Ootaki get their degrees. Perchance, I had to sit up with the other faculty in the faculty section. I would have rather joined everybody in the grounds, but I took some consolation in the fact that I could see everybody in the audience section. Keiichi's face was especially filled with pride for his sempai.

Afterwards, they had a big party at the Men's Dorm. They insisted that I come along...which was a much safer bet since Urd wasn't there. This was a men's only party, and I had to take a breather and head home before they brought on the 'bunny girls'. The last thing I wanted was to have an episode of my 'female phobia' in the midst of their party.

The next week was total kick-back for me. I went on a couple walking tours of Makuhari during the day and studied the Enigma Book tirelessly in the evenings. I felt lucky, because all three Goddesses were taking turns tutoring me. But it was mostly Urd that came to teach me, as Belldandy and Keiichi were off getting much needed 'quality time'.

For the last weekend of spring break, we all went out to dinner at a nice restaurant in Chiba. Uneventful by the lack of animated food, the meal out lent me the impression that I was somehow fitting in. After we got home, I felt completely drained of energy and consequently excused myself to my room. When I entered, with a shock I beheld Mara poring over the book. Mara spun around angrily, appearing upset at the fact that she had been surprised. Upon recognizing me, she nonchalantly flipped her fingers through her hair and grinned.

"Oh, it's only you, Cevn. How are the lessons coming? Are you feeling like you're getting any closer to being a Demon?" she asked in a casual voice. I was immediately incensed at the invasion of my privacy, of my room, and of the book that was entrusted to me by the yet-unidentified unknown force.

"Get out of here, Mara!" I warned. The room smelled of brimstone and the temperature felt as warm as a sauna. I could sense a definite malevolent atmosphere in my room, emanating from the young Demoness. She focused her attention on me momentarily, and then returned to her examination of the book.

"Why is she acting so disinterested in the fact that I just busted her in my room examining the book?" I wondered to myself. Her casual demeanor tipped my instincts towards trepidation. I tried to yell for help, but somehow my voice was gone. I was rooted oak-like to the ground by some unseen force!

Mara finished reading a chapter out of the book, stood up and casually walked over to me. Her proximity to me caused waves of panic to swell up in my heart. I was paralyzed with fright as I reluctantly gazed into the serpentine pupils of her eyes and saw an unearthly red and orange hue. I could smell her breath, which oddly reminded me of a fast food place during lunch hour.

"A Demoness that eats at McDonalds?" I couldn't help thinking with incongruous humor. I knew that, despite her malign exterior, Mara had a quirky innocent side as well. At least, the Mara characterized in the manga possessed this quality. But my recent encounters with this _real_ Mara had been anything but comical, to say the least.

"Ah, so you remember our little party a couple of weeks back!" Mara said, smiling at me as she caressed my hair and face with a possessive air. I tried to move away, but she grasped me by the jaw and held my head firmly.

"For a mortal, you're kinda cute. Too bad you have such gloom inside of you. But that attribute makes you..._very_ appealing to the wantonly evil side of me," she said, her fangs gleaming.

I reluctantly noticed that she was dressed to impress. A red silken cape hung over her shoulders, tied by a silken collar. Her earrings looked like bird skulls out of an ornithology museum. The low cut front of her black leather 'outfit' led my eyes downwards past an ample cleavage all the way to her navel. Despite myself, I was drawn to her beauty: the allure of the archetypal S&M-type 'bad girl'. I tried to push her away, but my hands seemed to guide themselves to her breasts. I wanted to scream, as all my insecurities with women and sex rushed at me.

"Ahhh, maybe, you and I could..." she giggled evilly. I fought hard to get loose, but I was under her control. I realized that she was trying to seduce me, possibly by supernatural means. Damn, she looked good in an evil sort of way! A biker-babe in futurist garb!

"Stop thinking like that!" I confronted myself. Mara was using my masculinity as grist for the mill.

"...but not now, my dear novice Demon. You need _much_ more iniquity and malevolence before you're worthy of me!" she hissed in a licentious whisper.

I tried desperately to avoid her, but she had me pinned up against the wall. I forced my eyes to signal her "no", but she ignored this with a harsh laugh. Vampire-like, she nuzzled her teeth against my neck, her canines tracing sharply against my skin.

"You are mine...and I'm going to enjoy the taste of you," she said lustily as she bit into my neck. A sharp flame of agony hotly rushed over my body, and I felt blood streaming down my neck. Mara paused for a moment, tracing the stream of blood with her tongue on my neck and chest. Then she resumed her deep bite into my neck. Strangely enough, the sensation bordered on the light-headedness that accompanies orgasm. I fought it until I started seeing stars.

"So this is what death feels like," I thought, resolved to my fate. Mara seemed to draw the sanguine fluid out of me as if by a straw.

"Ah!" I heard her muse contentedly, and I felt her teeth probe deeper. It was indescribably agonizing, as she was literally digging around with her sharp teeth in my neck.

"At last, the jugular!" she remarked thinly as I felt myself draining out of my body. My consciousness faded...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Skuld was working on her divine power detection unit when she heard a soft rapping on the door.

"Come in!" she said, then watched as Cevn slid her door open, standing politely in the doorway. She felt an initial rush of surprise, then irritation.

"He's never come to visit me in my lab before! Why _now_? Hasn't he learned by now that it's off limits while I'm working on an important project? Leave it to my two sisters to forget to tell him!" she muttered to herself, miffed at the unexpected intrusion. In fact, rarely did anyone ever come here...to her sanctum sanctorum. She was torn between twin impulses: the excitement of wanting to show off her lab, and chafingly questioning him about why he had come here. Strangely enough, he was wearing a high-necked knitted red sweater; the collar was almost up to his ears. It wasn't that cold outside...and definitely not cold in her lab. She grimaced at his idiotic fashion sense.

"What'cha working on, Skuld?" Cevn asked casually before she could decide which choice to take. Skuld was put off by his familiar manner...but then she became excited at the prospect of demonstrating the value of her creation to him. She explained that she was working on a device to measure the powers of the three Goddesses. She started describing the technology involved in complex terms, hoping that this would dissuade him from bothering her any more. He was already an irritant. Surprisingly, Cevn joined in by asking some involved questions about her intended project.

"Hmm, I think that your design is good, but there may be some concerns with certain integrations of these subdesign elements," he commented. Skuld looked at him with disbelief. Of all the mortals she knew, Cevn was the most mechanically inept. Keiichi and his friends would discuss simple motor engineering principles and Cevn would get a blank look on his face. Even 13-year-old Sentaro could fix his own bicycle in a pinch...Skuld highly doubted that Cevn could even do that.

And now he was criticizing her design...

"How _dare_ you...uh, like what?" Skuld asked with defiant curiosity. She knew that this mortal knew _nothing_ about mecha construction. Maybe he was in on a prank Urd was playing on her! To her surprise, Cevn suggested a way to improve the sensitivity of the instrument package. Especially unexpected, since Skuld had been considering the same modifications to improve her new device.

"How did you know that?" she wondered aloud.

"I just learned from watching you at work. No one can compare to you in technical ability, Skuld! You're wonderful...and sooo smart!" he answered in a fawning voice. Skuld felt thrilled at the complement. Cevn had been an unusual addition to the house. An unwanted one to be sure, Skuld had to admit to herself. She had alternated between hating him and liking him. Right now, she felt trust binding her towards him.

"Can I help you build it?" he gently asked, drawing her further into the realm of confusion.

"Sure, if ya can handle it, mortal!" Skuld giggled. She playfully tossed some tools to him. He walked in the room and sat down next to her, assisting her and asking informed questions. Skuld felt a strange sense of contentment; someone new was actually working with her on a project.

For the next hour or so, the two worked on Skuld's handheld mecha. Skuld was impressed with how much he seemed to know. He even offered some engineering insights that Skuld herself hadn't fully taken into account, such as inversing certain properties to make the device determine Demonic power magnitude.

"This is _totally_ freaky-cool!" the youngest Goddess thought to herself. Cevn had shown no interest in the solar racer; he had even admitted that he was totally inept with tools and mechanical concepts. Now, he was working with her almost as an equal. Initially giddy, now she felt a wave of guardedness wash over her as she considered how contrary his current behavior was. Then she remembered that this mortal was somehow connected with the music that her older sisters claimed to be the God's Music. Now, he was surprisingly intrigued by her engineering project.

"Could he have other talents as well?" she wondered as she watching him carefully assembling a component series. Maybe even the Almighty was involved in some way with Cevn's sudden burst of techie insightfulness. With this thought, all caution was discarded. She playfully worked with him on her new toy. Very quickly, it took form with the both of them working together. It was much more fun with two pairs of hands! Finally, the Shinseisensor was finished.

"Lemme guess, Skuld. You wanted to build this little toy so you could measure your new powers, right? You want to see if they are increasing or not, huh?" Cevn asked. Skuld felt a slight chill at his deft recognition of her personal agenda involved in the planning and constructing of the device.

"There is something suspicious here," she thought, just as Cevn asked her if he could try it on her. Skuld wanted so desperately to see how she rated on the power scale, so she excitedly handed the mecha to him.

"Cool! Let's find out if you have any powers, Skuld!" he said as he pointed the device at her and activated it with an excited grin.

Skuld felt the sensation of a rapid _draining_ of power out of her molecular structure.

"Cevn, what's wrong? I can't move!" she yelled as the device seemed to freeze her into immobility.

"Did Big Sister con you into doing this to me?" she asked angrily.

"Geez, I wonder what is wrong with this little thingy?" Cevn said calmly. "Let's see what happens if I point it at myself."

"No, don't do that! Just turn it off and help _meeee_!" Skuld beseeched him. He turned the instrument around and activated it. A bright red light flashed on the panel. He looked at Skuld with a malicious grin as recognition dawned on her. Her face went white as the Shinseisensor Mk II registered Cevn as emanating Demonic power, on the very high end of the scale.

"Bwahahahahaha!! You're so gullible, even if you are a brat!" Cevn laughed banefully in the response to the shock in Skuld's chestnut colored eyes.

"Guess what? You and I, dear Skuld, are going on a little trip! You see, this gizmo that I created with your help not only measures divine power, but it also _traps_ divine power. I'm really surprised that you didn't figure that out, but I guess you're nowhere near as smart as everybody thinks you are!" he said in a mean voice. Skuld scowled angrily at this, as he continued.

"You know what will happen if I flick this orange switch? It'll seal you in a containment sphere. You'll be helpless to do anything about it...and then I'll be able to take you away from here!" he said, then laughed at her frantic attempts to free herself.

Skuld looked at her captor with dread.

"You...you really are a Demon, aren't you, Cevn! You're a liarliarliar! _I HATE YOU!! _ Let me go right this instant! You better let me go, or my sisters will be very angry!" she screamed. Becoming more desperate, she pleaded to him as she struggled helplessly against the restraining power. Then she became angry towards herself for being fooled, and even more so at her captor.

"Lemme go! _NOW!!_ Lemme go! _Lemme go_!" she commanded. She immediately regretted the decision to soundproof her lab, but it was necessary after the many explosions and power surges over the past year. Her housemates had pretty much demanded it.

Cevn looked at her and laughed at the sheer futility of her struggles. He pressed an orange button...and Skuld felt her essence sucked into the handheld mecha. A moment later, she was trapped inside of a nondescript energy field of some kind. She could faintly hear Cevn laugh hauntingly. Then she felt herself being transported to another place.

"He's only a mortal...he _can't_ be doing this to me!" she cried aloud to herself, completely struck with dread.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Belldandy was worried. Skuld hadn't come to bed yet. Usually, her little sister joined her and Urd in their bedroom before 11pm.

It was after 1 am!

She debated with herself about whether or not she should check in on her younger sister, and decided to let it wait. After all, Skuld was probably just in the midst of another 'project'. Belldandy knew all too well that Skuld was touchy if someone went to her workroom uninvited. Several times, Belldandy had dropped by "Skuld Labs" only to be chewed out by Skuld because "you interrupted my train of thought" or something to that effect.

Not that Belldandy was afraid of her younger sister's ire, of course. She was more concerned with respecting Skuld's sensitive feelings; still hovering on the edge of a temperamental girlishness. This deference influenced her decision to patiently wait three years before sleeping--just sleeping--in Keiichi's bed. She recalled her and Keiichi's early days with a touch of whimsy.

"Three years so far... This summer will make it four years since I came to Earth, and this fall will be our four-year anniversary," she said to herself.

It had only taken her a few months to fall in love with her mortal charge. During their initial search for housing, they had slept together in Buddhist temples, in apartments, and in _this_ temple... But these were all times before she fell for Keiichi, before the arrival of Urd and Skuld; they had slept together out of necessity, because they didn't have a place to stay.

But since then...she had always slept with her sisters.

Earlier in the evening, she sensed an aura of caliginous gloom in the house earlier, one that couldn't be readily dismissed. Belldandy eagerly wanted to awaken Keiichi, but she knew that he too was exhausted and needed an uninterrupted sleep. So she decided to wake Urd instead.

"Urd! _URD!!_" she whispered, lightly shaking her older sister. A groggy Urd rolled over and tried to ignore her, until Bell shook her shoulder more vigorously.

"Yeah...whazza matter?" Urd mumbled

"Urd, I'm worried about Skuld! She hasn't come to bed yet."

"That's so typical of little nuisance! After making all that fuss about you sleeping in Keiichi's room, she does this..." Urd sleepily replied.

"What if something happened to her?" Belldandy asked, the tone of genuine concern in her voice suddenly rousing her sister.

"Eh? Then why are you waking _me_ if you are worried about _her_? I need my beauty sleep, ya know! Just go see if she's in her room, little sister!" Urd groused.

"A lot of help you are, Urd!" Belldandy groused back as she slipped quietly out of her room. She cracked the door to "Skuld Labs" wide enough to peek through. Skuld was sitting quietly, examining a design diagram. Relieved, Belldandy went back to her room, realizing that Skuld was probably winding down for the night, and would come to bed soon.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Skuld was filled with irrecognition. Everything around her was cloudpale with dark ashen colors. Like being caught in a blinding downpour of twilight rain. She felt like she was going insane from the lack of anything visual to focus on. Her energy waned almost to nothing, and she was worried that she would die the real death.

"But why did Cevn leave me with barely enough energy to maintain my atomic structure?" she wondered. The very mention of his name made her ragefully angry, resulting in a torrent of damning thoughts towards him.

After an interminable amount of time, Skuld felt a pulling sensation and the cloudy sphere around her unfogged. She pressed her face against the transparent inner surface of the sphere and saw a throne chair decorated with ornate bone-like carvings, skulls, glowing eyes, clawed hands. As she further surveyed the room, Skuld identified all the accouterments of what her imaginings had visualized a Demon's lair to possess. Skuld had never been inside of a Demon's den before, so she could only draw upon her creative fancies. Imagining the inside of Demon's lair was an exercise in fantasy that many young Goddesses undertook in early childhood to frighten themselves. Just like the Earthrealm children spending time spinning tales about the Bogey Man.

But _this_ exceeded her wildest fears.

The room was dark red and moved fluidly like the inner vessels of some kind of horrible animal, a ruddy color that seemed to howl with pain. Electric green candle flames were mounted on the walls, held by skeleton hands. Pentagrams, cabbalic schemas, depictions of hellish tortures and incomprehensible writing were splashed all over the wall like graffiti. One side of the room opened into a bright ochre-colored hole in the wall that seemed to _bleed_. An assortment of human demonic images were scattered around the room. Skuld recognized gargoyles, H.R. Giger paintings, tenku and oni, a statue of the wrathful Fudo, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, evil genies, sketches of Kali the Destroyer and skeletal images.

Horror dawned on her as she realized that this was the _real thing_! She was trapped inside an actual Demon's lair!

Cevn's secret Demon lair.

But there was no one else here. The fact that the lair was empty compounded her fright. Skuld was deathly afraid that she had simply been brought here and abandoned to perish...all alone! She was too mortified to scream; her tan eyes peered wide with disgust and trepidation.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Cevn was weakened by the travels. For the past several hours, he had been nothing more than an unwilling passenger in his own body. Unwilling, yet conscious every moment. Trapped in his body like quicksand, he recoiled with loathing when it captured Skuld.

He felt physically infirm from Mara's bloodletting, dizzily clinging on to consciousness in an attempt to avoid being blotted out of existence. The last time Mara had possessed him, at the race, she had been unable to suppress his will. So he had been able to betray her and escape. But this time, Mara had reduced his resistance significantly by a vampire-like attack. Along with his blood loss, he lost the ability to struggle against her.

Once they had arrived at Mara's underground lair, the evil aura that permeated the place borrowed into his awareness like a tapeworm. As he entered the Demonic abode, he felt waves of horror and nausea as he recognized the macabre contents. It was like something out of a Tim Burton movie gone bad. Every estimable representation of iniquity was present; a rococo glorification of Evil. His senses reeled from the information jamming into them.

His body mechanistically used the handheld mecha to make Skuld appear inside of what looked like a fog filled giant glass sphere. She was mercifully unconscious, he noted with gratitude.

All this time, Mara was conversing with him in his mind. She gloated about how pleasant it was to have dominion over his body. Every time he tried to resist or break her hold, she would calmly command his body to take a sharp object and slice itself. Sharp pain would result, which would make him lose concentration on his effort to escape...and then Mara would laugh at him mockingly. He finally gave up on his resistance after Mara threatened to use his body to gouge its eyes out or emasculate itself.

"_«You won't need those anyway, because you're so used to being blind to what's going on around you, especially where women are concerned,_»" she ridiculed him telepathically.

Cevn tried to block his senses, but Mara somehow heightened them, so that the full repugnance of his surroundings discomfited him to the point of confusion. Mara made him slit his wrist open, and then had him fill a skull cup mounted in a golden chalice partway full with his blood.

"_«Just in case I need to clone you later!»_" she informed him smugly.

He looked up to see that Skuld's face was swollen with tears and rage.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Once more I felt my body returning to the main 'throne room'. Skuld was awake, and I recoiled upon seeing the expression of distress on her face. She was furtively looking around, frantic with fear. But when she noticed me, her aspect changed to fury and she pounded the glass of her cage with delicate fists. Thankfully, I couldn't hear her shouting. It was bad enough that she had been led to believe that I had captured her and brought her here to this waking nightmare.

"She probably thinks I'm a Demon, and that this is my home," I thought dejectedly as Mara's laughter rankled somewhere laterally in my skull. Then I heard my voice speaking, telling Skuld something.

"Yes, this is my home. Mara was right all along! I _am_ a Demon! And soon Mara will use you to gain the secrets of the Ultimate Demon conjuration out of that book I have! She and I will use this secret to summon Isilblius, and together we three will rule the world, yea, we'll even make the Almighty bow down to us!"

Skuld looked at me like she was ready to explode with indignance.

"So that was it!" I realized with a shock. If I was shocked, I could imagine what Skuld must be feeling...

She was yelling inside of her bubble, and I imagined that she was yelling "Never!" defiantly. I tried to shake my head to signal Skuld that I lacked any control in this situation, but I couldn't move my body in the slightest.

With mounting fear, I glanced down at my hands as they mechanically reached out to find a knife. All I could do was look on helplessly as my right hand plunged the knife deep into my left arm.

"Forgot your threat, didn't you, Mara!" I screamed at the voice in my head, trying to outshout the raw stab of pain that ran up my arm.

"«_The next time you try something...»_" I heard the voice in my head threaten. For the next few hours, I 'rode' my body as it made preparations to cast some heavy-duty spell. I could sense Mara's growing excitement as she drew an intricate pentagram-based mandala.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

During this time, I began to conceive a stratagem. It would involve considerable risk on my part, but it might just tip Skuld off that I wasn't what I seemed to be. Having to choose between her and myself, I posited that she, being a Goddess, would have a vastly superior chance of breaking us out of this situation. Perhaps she could at least elicit help from Keiichi, Belldandy and Co. It would be vital to convince her that I wasn't me, or at least keep Mara occupied long enough so that Skuld could make her move.

I examined Skuld's bubble, hoping that I was shielding my thoughts from Mara. The spherical part of it was seamless; possessing some kind of red glowing ring imbedded in its base. The base itself was comprised of melting bones and wires...this was the closest approximation I could arrive at in explaining it to myself. Like one of the Borg devices from Star Trek crossed with a biomech from the Aliens and Virus movie series. A bundle of cabling led to some kind of flat switch in the middle of a desk. It looked like a palm reader, with a hand-shaped depression in the middle of it. I deduced that more than likely, this device controlled Skuld's bubble/cage.

"Mara used my body to bring Skuld here and place her inside of the containment sphere. Thus, my hand must be able to trigger the palm switch," I reasoned. The voice in my head told me that the palm reader would electrocute me if I touched it.

Mara forced my puppet-like body to go to the desk several times to get things for the mandala. Unspeakable things, horrible things. I fought my repugnance and hoped that she would be lulled into complacency. My body wanted to gag, but it was unable to. So I drifted in and out of severe nausea.

If I marshaled all my willpower into one attempt, I might be able to break her hold on me for a second or two, long enough to push the button and free Skuld. Again, Mara directed my body to go back to the desk, and I made my move.

Struggling with my concentration, I fought Mara's hold on my body. I looked as my hand moved shakily to the control device and pressed itself down on the hand-shaped outline as my mouth screamed "NO!" from some far-off detached recess of my being. The switch changed colors from red to green.

Out of the corner of my eyes, I saw Skuld deftly grab her mallet and hurl it at me. With superhuman quickness, I dodged the thrown hammer, which embedded itself in a wall. By shudders, my control diminished as my hand returned to the pad and reactivated the barrier around Skuld.

"«_I warned you!_»" An annoyed voice in my head shrieked in rueful dudgeon. "«_Now you have to pay the consequences for defying me, Cevn!_»"

With a mounting dread, I watched as my hands retrieved a curved knife from on top of the desk. With an almost detached perspective, I viewed the knife being brandished in front of my eyes. Then the point turned inwards. An octagon slice...and excruciating pain followed, as the point dug deep into my right eye socket. A pain seared my nerves, excruciating beyond anything I had ever felt. I wished that I could pass out from the shock and agony, but it just wouldn't stop. I couldn't shut my consciousness off. After a moment, I saw the bloody pulp of my right eye being placed on the table. The ghastly process repeated with my remaining eye. The sheer level of pain caused my body to surge with involuntary gasps, as my mind reeled from the shock of being deprived of my eyesight.

I was blind!! A total absence of light was all that I could visually experience. I prayed for death, and then my brain shut down.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Skuld was angry beyond belief. She watched through narrowed eyes as Cevn moved about his Demonic recluse, creating some kind of summoning mandala that she had never encountered before. She despised him totally and completely for violating her trust.

"When my sisters get their hands on you, you'll be done for!" she thought icily. As the time drifted on, boredom replaced her ire as her confinement stretched on and on and on. Her mind drifted like autumn leaves in a gust as she tried to interpret what Cevn was doing. He was casting objects into an energy matrix while drawing circles and labeling vortices with symbols, which she assumed to be the Demon's Language. Attempting to commit these symbols to memory, she watched as the mandala began to take form.

As Cevn made several trips back and forth to the desk, Skuld noticed that there was a device in the middle of the desk wired to the base of her spherical cage. She searched her mind for possible ways to escape and even tried to take possession of Cevn several times, knowing full well that her Goddess skills were woefully inadequate to the task. After several failed attempts, she resigned herself, and began to consider other options.

Then unexpectedly, Skuld saw Cevn move a violently shaking hand onto the device and saw her confining sphere fade into nothingness. Without even thinking, she reached over her shoulder, unholstering her mallet and throwing it at him with all her strength in one swift movement. She was amazed when he dodged it, as she had thrown it with every bit of divine exertion she could muster in her weakened state.

"More than enough to pulverize the swiftest of bugs," Skuld realized with disappointment. "No mortal could have dodged that!"

She tried to leap off the base and attack him, but before she could, her transparent cage solidified and she was once more confined. "But not before I sent out a psychic beacon," she smiled to herself smugly. Soon, her older sisters would be here, and then they would wrest her from this nightmare of Cevn's doing. And then they would _punish_ him dearly!

What followed was shockingly terrible and inexplicable. Skuld watched helplessly as Cevn took a knife and slowly began to dig out his eyes. When she realized what he was doing, she felt confusion and repulsion.

"Oh..my Lord! Why is he hurting himself like this? This makes no sense!" she wondered aloud. The process seemed to stretch on unbearably; Skuld turned aside several times because she couldn't stomach witnessing the sight. She was at a loss to comprehend why he would mutilate himself...

"Maybe Cevn isn't a Demon," she wondered as a thought dawned on her. Looking back, she saw him collapse on the floor as a shape drifted up and out of his body.

"Now look what you've made me do, girl-Goddess!" Mara sneered as she emerged through a doorway in the wall, trying to cast blame upon her. Skuld looked at Mara with a resentful glare; all the feelings of despising Cevn now shifted to the Demoness.

"I hate you, Mara! I _really_ hate you!" she screamed into the thin air. Cevn had been possessed the entire time! A profound dolor gripped her. She didn't quite understand what had just happened, but she was resolute in her faith that her sisters would come to her...no, _their_ rescue. Then she looked on as Mara created another spherical cage identical to hers, and dragged Cevn into it.

She abruptly realized that he had tried to free her by shutting off her cage. His failure had brought about terrible consequences.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

The strength of the dream vision jarred Urd into abrupt wakefulness. She sat up, alert and upset, only to see that her sister was awake as well.

"It's Skuld. She's been kidnapped!" was all Urd could manage; gripped by an electrical trance of worry.

"I felt it too, Urd! I knew something was wrong earlier, but I checked her room and she was there! How could it be?" Belldandy affirmed, looking at Urd and seeing distress drawn all over her face.

"She's way in trouble, Bell! I could almost smell it!"

The two Goddesses leapt out of their futon beds and rushed into their younger sister's "Skuld Labs" room. As they dashed in, Keiichi joined them, roused by the sudden noise of dashing feet in the hallway. Belldandy could only stare with her hand held over her mouth in disbelief at the sight that revealed itself past the doorway.

"_OH...NO!!_" she shouted. The image of Skuld was shimmering in and out of vision.

"What's wrong, Bell-chan?" Keiichi asked, seeing the deep concern on his girlfriend's face. Belldandy felt hot tears run down her cheeks as she turned to face him and Urd.

"I was worried that Skuld hadn't gone to bed, so I checked on her..."

"But she's right here!" Keiichi finished, just as the image of Skuld shimmered out of sight.

"No! When I looked in on her, she was sitting here, just like she is now. I didn't bother to think that it might be a projection! It's all _my_ fault!" Belldandy wailed as she began to break down in heavy sobs.

"She's gone, and I didn't..."

"Get a hold of yourself!" Urd yelled at her younger sister. Belldandy ignored her, feeling a Promethean sense of guilt. Urd realized that she was going to _lose it_ if someone didn't wade in and pull her out of her guilt...and fast!

"It's not your fault!" Urd said as she shook Belldandy roughly.

"Snap out of it, Bell! We need you to be thinking clearly!" Keiichi said briskly. This seemed to get her attention.

Urd looked at the hologram projector and the image of Skuld examining design spec sheets.

"Damn it!" she yelled with frustration. Angrily, she kicked it, and a distorted image of their youngest sister floated in the air near the ceiling. She was so angry, her whole body was shaking with rage.

"This is it! This time, you're going down, Mara!_ Big-time!!_ I'm going to make you wish you had never existed! You're going to live to regret the moment you earned the wrath of Urd, Eldest of the Norns!" she swore with all the embellishments of a dire oath.

Belldandy looked at her older sister; Urd was_ really_ ticked off!

Keiichi looked at Urd with a mixture of fear and admiration. He had never seen her so riled up. Her anger was so intense that it was making _him_ afraid to be around her. But he shared her deep-felt anger towards Mara's interference in their lives the past few weeks. He felt strongly encouraged by Urd's resoluteness of purpose to punish Mara.

"This is extreme, even for Mara! She actually _kidnapped_ Skuld!" Keiichi said with simmering rage. Belldandy had recovered herself, and looked at him with a flash of fear across her eyes.

"But how? How do we find her? I only got a brief mental echo of Mara's lair where she is being kept! I didn't have enough of a glimpse to get a fix on the location!" she said, desperate with disappointment.

She was about to begin another round of sobbing when Urd clasped her by both shoulders and smiled reassuringly.

"But _I did_!" Urd said with a smirk. Belldandy rested her head on Urd's shoulder for a moment, then looked at her older sister and smiled gently.

"Oh Urd, you always were the strongest of us three..."

"And don't you forget it! I'm not going to let Mara forget it for a microsecond!" Urd said, ignoring the fact that her license had been revoked and she was limited to Earth Spirit powers.

Keiichi smiled hopefully, relieved that they at least stood a decent chance of finding Skuld. Belldandy turned to look at him with tender eyes.

"Keiichi, I _know_ that you want to go with us with all of your heart, but this is no place for a mortal. I can't divide my attention between trying to protect you and rescuing Skuld!" she explained gently.

Keiichi looked at her with a brief flash of disappointment in his eyes, then smiled encouragingly.

"You two do the 'go girl' thing and bring Skuld back to us! I know that you and Urd can outmaneuver Mara with your hands tied behind your backs. Go get her and bring her back safe!" Keiichi said with a confident expression. At least he was _trying_ to look confident, he thought.

Light transformed the hallway, and then Belldandy and Urd reappeared in their Goddess Warrior dress. Both looked like a mix between Samurai and Valkyrie with their martial garb.

"Sometimes, she looks the most beautiful when she's dressed like this!" Keiichi reminded himself. Belldandy was accustomed to dressing in mortal clothing styles, except for times when she went forth into conflict or appeared with her angelic manifestation with wings or with Holy Bell. But seeing her dressed like this...a mystical warrior princess...brought to vivid visual reality the fact that she _was_ a Goddess. Seeing her and Urd in this striking aspect, Keiichi couldn't help but feel gripped by a sense of profound reverence.

"She's in an abandoned underground work alcove attached to the Tohoku Shinkansen line north of Tokyo! I could faintly hear the passage of a bullet train in the image Skuld sent!"

"Then let's go!" Belldandy urged, now fully herself and ready to rescue her younger sister.

Keiichi covered his eyes with his arm as the blinding flash filled the hallway. He decided to check on the other occupants of the house. Megumi was in her room, soundly asleep.

"She must be exhausted, to have slept through that!" he thought in amazement. He went to Cevn's room, only to find another hologram.

"Great! He's gone too!"

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Belldandy and Urd floated through the air, traveling at hundreds of kilometers per minute closely above the terrain until they spotted the bullet train tracks. Bringing their flight path in parallel with the train route, they speeded up, verdant crop fields and outcroppings of houses blurring past them. Ahead, they saw the rise of Mt. Amezuka. They entered the tunnel bored into the south side of the mountain and wove their way through the underground bullet-train tunnel's access vents, traveling invisible to the human eye. In their ethereal form, only they could see each other. They were expending considerable energy to transport themselves in this form, but it would take wits as well as energy to confound Mara. Belldandy spied a doorway with telltale red beams of light spilling out of its perimeter.

"There!" she shouted.

"This must be it!" Urd confirmed. The two sisters grabbed hands for mutual confidence, and then they both floated through the door into the passageway. Immediately, alarms resounded with a din of metallic banging and discordant wailing, alerting Mara to their presence. Not missing a beat, the two Goddesses flashed through the gate and into the Demon's lair.

The otherworldliness of the surroundings paralyzed Belldandy with an instinctive dread for the unholy. But Urd remained alert, as she had been in a Demon's lair before, during the Ultimate Destruction Program crisis. That lair was nothing compared to this one, but the horror of the surroundings only briefly brought consternation to her mind.

Urd focused herself and searched the immediate vicinity. She saw every contrivance of evil that she expected, but no Skuld. Then she saw a hole in the wall, which resembled an extradimensional portal. It was ochre-colored with dripping slime and blood.

"There! Skuld must be on the other side of that...thing!"

"Yes! I remember seeing it!" Belldandy assented, gathering her wits for the encounter with Mara. Swallowing their repulsion, they both floated thru the portal.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Skuld felt really strange. She seemed to take on a more solid form, and she could feel aches and pains in various parts of her body. Also, her vision was fading in and out. Her thoughts were getting more specious and confused...and she felt like she was losing her mind. She was sitting hunched up in the bubble cage with her knees pulled tight to her chest, waiting for her two sisters to arrive. In her thoughts, she could see faint images of beaches and tall buildings with palm trees. The air possessed a slightly salty tang. Mountains thronged the distance in her mind's eye. She felt echoes of tragedy and loss in her past life.

Cevn felt really strange. His body seemed to fade in and out of perception. Sharp blasts of pain followed by brief reprieves. His mind seemed to expand and contract; symbolic logics flowed in and out of his awareness with tool-like precision. He felt a giddy invigoration that he hadn't felt since he was young: the knitted energy of purity seemingly discordant to his state of utter despair. He remembered fantastic architectures that blatantly defied spatial considerations and gravity. An inconspicuous sense of innocence and impulsivity suffused his senses.

Skuld looked at Mara, who was operating some sort of control panel. She visually traced the cabling from the box; it split into two trunks extending to the base of her confinement sphere and the base of the sphere Cevn was in. For a moment, she imagined she _was_ Cevn, in that other sphere. She heard soundpoems in her head, accompanied by a deep sense of loss. Her mind struggled against the unexpected emotions...it was if something was churning inside of her and she didn't know what it was evolving into.

Cevn sat dejectedly. He couldn't see anything, having been blinded by Mara. The utter finality of the loss of his vision had overwrought his emotions. He was bitterly disappointed that all his efforts had been for naught. He moved his hands outwardly to touch something, anything. The smooth surface he encountered tactilely led him to believe that he was in some kind of solid confinement. Spherical, because he could not touch anything like a corner. Just like the bubble Skuld was trapped in.

The absolute silence unnerved him. He started thinking in musical forms to try and soothe himself. Images of Belldandy and Urd floated like ghosts, and he felt warm. Then Keiichi formed in his mind, and he felt a distinct sense of jealousy. Megumi followed, and his sentiment changed to competitiveness mixed with respect.

Skuld sensed the music ebbing in her thoughts. She felt a conflict between sisterly affection and confusion towards her sisters. Then an image of Megumi floated by, and she felt a warm friendship.

"Like she was my little sister?" Skuld thought.

"What! Waitaminute! Megumi is _not_ my little sister! I don't even like her half the time, she's always trying to upstage me for Genji's affections!" Skuld caught herself at this thought.

"Who is _Genji_? I like Tomohisa, not some guy named Genji!" Compelling herself to stop her racing thoughts for a moment, she began to suspect that some of her thinking was not her own thoughts.

"Like, why would I feel so...weird...when I saw Urd dressed in an evening robe!" she noticed.

"What?!" she exclaimed out loud with shock.

Cevn saw images of his cats running around the house with six legs. They looked innocent enough, but he felt waves of frustration when he saw them.

"Stop! They're only cats!" he thought confusedly. "They can't cause a system crash!"

Dejectedly, he heard himself bewail his situation. "I'm _blind_! I'll never see again! But I am not a child...I'm not a kid. I'm all grown up now!" Despite the graveness of his loss, he felt an unexpected source of calm. Then another voice told him that physical manifestations were impermanent, and that...

"«_Cevn...Cevn?__»_" he heard a familiar voice in his head.

Skuld's sweet child-voice resonated in his awareness. The lovely sound of her voice greatly relaxed his consternation.

"«_Wh...what? Skuld? Is that you...somehow in my mind?_»"

"«_Yes, it's me! Skuld! Who did you expect? Mara is trying to blend our memories somehow. These spheres we're in...function like a spiritual alembic of sorts. My suspicion is that she's merging our bodies and beings as well. That's why it seems like we're thoughtcasting to each other. I hope you don't mind, but I don't want to be in an...ewww, yuck! Oops! Sorry 'bout that!_»"

"«_I meant that I don't want to be in a guy's body anytime soon, thank you very much! I sent an image-message thoughtcast for help right before Mara locked me back up in this...whatever I'm in. You're in one too, by the way. But I don't know if Belldandy and Urd could have received it. I tried really hard to broadcast it strongly!»_" she explained.

"«_Skuld, you're okay? My God, how did you figure out what Mara's doing to us? I'm so relieved that you've been able to keep yourself together amidst this horrible nightmare. If you can feel what I feel... Oh great! How can I try and shield you from sensing some of my life's experiences? You don't need to feel them! Please try and ignore them! Oh, Skuld...I'm so sorry that I couldn't._..»" the voice in her head trailed off.

Skuld didn't hear the rest of what Cevn was saying in her mind. She began to cry, as a deep sadness welled up inside of her.

"Here's Cevn, blinded by Mara as a punishment for his attempt to set me free, and he's more concerned about _my_ well-being than with the loss of his sight!" she observed in amazement. She wished she could somehow break out of her sphere and comfort him. She had severely underestimated him...and Keiichi.

Cevn felt a warm and gentle concern from Skuld...almost like a love...eons old and yet sharp with intent.

"«_Skuld, if I could, I would hold you so tight, too! This must be terrifying for you! Please, we both need to try and keep ourselves calm. I'm going to put myself in a meditative trance to try and relax myself. Hopefully it will relax you as well_.»"

Skuld felt a quiet calm descending on her mind, as she tried to think positive, optimistic thoughts. She concentrated on the mental image of her two sisters...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Urd entered the room first, followed by Belldandy. They saw Mara, and felt the hair on their necks hackle up with an almost feral anger. The two Goddesses materialized, no longer invisible.

Belldandy looked around the room and noticed that Skuld was trapped in some kind of spherical containment field, then looked to the other side of the room and saw Cevn locked in a similar sphere.

Skuld was overjoyed to see her!

"What...have...you...done...to..._my sister_!" Belldandy and Urd bellowed out in stereo rage. Mara wheeled around to face her two adversaries.

"One unexpected move and these two are dead meat! I have them both locked up. If you don't give me what I want, I'll souffle their minds with this SoulMorpher. You know what will happen if I merge them, don't you?" she growled out menacingly, a fierce grin on her face.

This seemed to steal some of the fire from Urd. She knew that mortal and immortal could not fully merge in any aspect of being. It would kill Skuld. She looked at her younger sister, who looked anxiously at her, expecting her and Belldandy to do something. She felt a new surge of rage surface and brilliant glowing sparks and bolts emerged from her hands.

"_MARAAAAaaaaa_!" she yelled.

Belldandy quickly reacted to Urd's impending power discharge and placed a restraining hand on her sister's arm before she could deliver a striking bolt at Mara.

"«_Urd, I know how much you want to do this, but we cannot afford to incite Mara to harm Skuld or Cevn! And I know that your display is all show...you don't have any power to waste!_»" Belldandy cautioned via thoughtcast.

"Cevn's here too?" Urd exclaimed. She had been so wrapped up in her singleness of purpose to rescue Skuld that she had failed to notice that Cevn was also in the room. She looked over to the sphere Cevn was confined in, and suddenly felt sick in the pit of her stomach.

"Bell...look"! Belldandy took a closer look, and gasped as she saw Cevn's eyeless face. Urd was torn between aversion and rage as this new insult to her senses became clear. Mara seemed to laugh on cue...

"What do you want, Mara?" Belldandy asked. The situation was much too delicate to risk upsetting her Demonic counterpart, not with Skuld and Cevn's lives at risk.

"Very simple. Everything you know about the book! And I mean _EVERYTHING _!" Mara demanded. Her fangs flashed in the red light of the room.

Skuld looked at both of her sisters, desperate with hope...her expression a beacon too brilliant for Urd and Belldandy to ignore.

"Okay. But will you promise to release them, now?" Urd asked hesitantly.

"Urd!" Belldandy gasped, looking at her older sister with a shocked expression. "You _can't_ give her that information! She could become a major menace..."

"And risk losing Skuld! Mara _already_ is a major menace! No way! Think, Belldandy! She would only have the God's Language part of the book. That won't be enough on its own for her to figure the whole thing out!" Urd replied.

"The _God's Language_?" Mara questioned aloud. "You mean that thing you have in your house is written in the God's Language too!"

"Yep! So?" Urd replied with a deadpan voice. Belldandy whispered something in her ear...and Urd's eyes grew big.

"Bwah hahaha! This is so rich! Gimme the information now, and I'll let them go free!" Mara offered unexpectedly.

Both sisters were suddenly on the defensive, as Mara had tipped her hand with her confident outburst. She was definitely up to something. Belldandy conjured up a computer pen, and loaded the information on it. She didn't bother to tell Mara that they had just started on the translation of the God's Language portion of the book.

"Here it is!" She gave it to Urd, who tossed it on the desk. Mara scooped it up with a burst of child-like greedy curiosity.

"Now keep your word, Mara!" Belldandy warned. They all knew the Rule: once Mara had given her word as a Demon, she could not go back on it, unless of course she had given it to a mortal. Mara had to relinquish her captives.

"All right! Take 'em and get lost! I have work to do!" she said, ignoring them and her captives. The two bubbles dissolved an instant later and Skuld and Cevn tumbled out onto the floor. Belldandy and Urd held out their hands to Skuld for a hug and the young Goddess ran right past them over to where Cevn laid. She grabbed him and held his head to her chest, crying while she stroked his long hair. Blood splotched her blouse where she held him.

"What is going on here?" Urd remarked, momentarily upset at her younger sister's callousness. Skuld hadn't come to her and Bell first. Then she looked at the heartrending scene and tears came to her eyes as the full force of what they had endured together hit her. Cevn's face was covered with blood, and his arms had slashes and stab wounds all up and down them. His shirt was ripped open, and slashes crisscrossed his chest and stomach. She watched as Skuld ripped off a strip of her own jacket, and wrapped it around Cevn's face, covering his eyes.

Belldandy could see that Skuld had been terrified; the horror of her prolonged stay here had completely unnerved her. She still was shivering with fear, even though she had freed. Something in Belldandy was aroused, and she knelt down and hugged them both as Urd joined them.

"Belldandy, Skuld, he's almost lost all of his blood!" Urd shouted with concern as she noticed the rips in the side of his neck and his pallid pallor. Cevn could barely hold his head up, he was so debilitated with blood loss.

"Get out of here! Your stupid show of sympathy is making me sick!" Mara said, motioning her fingers towards her open mouth as an indicator that she was ready to puke with the sentiment of the scene.

Belldandy and Urd pulled Skuld up to her feet, and then helped Cevn to his.

"I feel so weak. I can't transport like this. Mara took most of my energy," Skuld admitted as her legs shook under her.

Belldandy looked at her younger sister and thanked the Almighty that she was alive. She knew in an instant that Skuld's energy level was almost depleted; she was fading in and out of translucence. Somehow, they made it back out into the access tunnel to the bullet train underground tunnel.

"Urd, we've got to get Skuld back home right away! I'm going to give her some of my energy, enough so she can transport herself back home. You're going to have to stay and get Cevn back somehow using mortal means."

"I wanna stay with Cevn! I wanna stay!" Skuld remonstrated loudly. Urd smiled tenderly at her younger sister.

"Skuld, you need to let Elder Sister take care of you right now. You can help Cevn best by returning home and getting your rest, so that your powers can restore themselves." She saw that Skuld was almost giddy with exhaustion as she leaned over and kissed her on the cheek.

Belldandy touched her forehead to Skuld's and a blue glow of energy arced between them. Skuld seemed to be a bit more alert and peppy now, after the energy transfer. She looked into both of her sister's eyes and felt warm washes of love all over her being, calming her consternation and fright. Without a word, she found a pool of water and disappeared in it. Belldandy found an overhead mirror in the Shinkansen tunnel and followed her.

Urd looked at Cevn with pity, and then realized that she might be able to save his vision. She helped him into a sitting position, and went back into Mara's lair.

"You said you would release them, Mara. Where's his eyes?" Urd demanded in a trilling voice of irritation.

Mara looked up at Urd in shock. She didn't expect any more trouble from the three Goddesses. All of a sudden here was Urd again, looking very pissed off. Mara readied a taunt, then she saw _into_ the peeved look in Urd's eyes...she was manic with rage! Mara felt a slip of fear grasp her as she realized that she no longer had the leverage of two captives to hold over Urd's head and restrain her anger.

Urd looked like she was ready to blow...and as Mara's equal in age, Mara knew that Urd could do some real damage to her and her lair. She pointed to two bloody eyes on the desk with a snide expression.

"I was hoping you'd never ask. Take 'em," she said dismissively.

Urd gingerly gathered the two eyes and wrapped them in a hermetic sealing spell, then put them in a pocket of her skirt. She returned to the tunnel and saw Cevn reaching out with his hands, trying to stand upright.

"Cevn, it's me! Urd! I'm here! I just went and got your eyes back from Mara. I may be able to restore your sight," she offered, trying to sound confidant. But she knew everything depended on how soon she could return him back to the temple compound. Cevn turned towards her voice, his hands reaching out, trying to find her. His flailing efforts weighed heavy on Urd; with a deep sense of sympathy and concern, she knelt down and pulled Cevn silently to her and held him.

"It's going to be okay once we get you back home," Urd said calmly.

"Urd, it hurts so much...I can't even cry, because I have no eyes to cry with!" he said weakly. He felt like deadweight in her grasp. Urd felt a piece of her heart fragment away at his words and fought with herself not to cry into his shoulder. She wanted to soothe him, but he had twisted into shock with the loss of his eyesight. His whole body shook spasmodically, telling Urd that Cevn was in physical shock as well. All she could do was hold him as tremors shook his body. Urd felt a very deep stirring in her heart, one that she hadn't felt in...

"No! I'm not going there, not now!" she thought as once more she encountered the tragic barrier she could not break.

"Let's get you home, Cevn."

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Keiichi was relieved when Belldandy and Skuld arrived back at the house. He had stayed up the rest of the night and all day, restlessly pacing through the house. When Megumi woke up, he told her the whole story about Skuld's abduction. Brother and sister tried to calm each other with shoptalk and joking, but worry bested their efforts.

Keiichi was especially afraid that something would happen to Belldandy. He and Bell-chan had such a tenuous relationship at times. When something otherworldly would happen, he would be left feeling powerless over the situation, worrying about the welfare of his beloved Goddess.

"This must be how it is for her during one of my races; she must experience the same kinds of feelings about me," he thought to himself. After a forever of waiting, Belldandy and Skuld emerged from the bathroom, safe and sound.

Belldandy explained that both she and Skuld had to use Belldandy's energy; as a result, both Goddesses were exhausted. The conflict with Mara had taken a lot out of both of them. Skuld in particular looked pretty shook up, Keiichi noticed. Her normally bright brown eyes were dimmed, and her young face was drawn with tension.

"What did Mara do to you, Skuld-sama?!" Keiichi asked with anger mixed with concern.

"Nhh nnnh!" Skuld mumbled as she shook her head "no" vigorously. It must have been much worse for her than he imagined...

Belldandy walked over and wrapped her arms around Keiichi, kissing him softly on the cheek, looking deep into his dark brown eyes to feel the warmth of his love for her. Keiichi held her and rocked her slowly. He could almost feel waves of pent-up tension disperse as she leaned into him, letting her stress flow into him. After a few minutes, he felt her body becoming more relaxed. After a long hug, he let her go.

To his surprise, Skuld suddenly rushed up and grabbed onto him tightly.

"She must really be scared...she's awfully grabby!" he thought. Expecting a quick hug, he was unprepared for the long hug from the young Goddess. Almost like her older sister, Skuld was letting her tension slowly pass into Keiichi. She started to cry into his chest, and Keiichi reacted to this by soothing her hair.

"It's okay, Skuld. You're back home safe with us," he said in a soft voice. He looked at Belldandy, who could only shrug her shoulders in shared mystification at Skuld's sudden onset of affection-thirst for Keiichi.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Urd was trying to figure out how to get her and Cevn back to the temple. It was clearly not an option to ride on the Shinkansen, as Cevn's injuries would arouse suspicion. She looked over at him; his head was wrapped with a band of cloth covering his eyes. Urd had wiped the blood off of his face and neck, so that at least he looked halfway decent. She shuddered once again at the extent of Mara's treachery.

Cevn seemed like he was a shadow of who he once was. Tears once more came to Urd's eyes as she recalled her first meeting with Cevn; how she had felt such animosity at this upstart mortal. Then later, how he flew into a panic when she was all around him when they fell out of the TV together. She thought about the pendulum-like swings in their relationship since he had arrived. Finally, she was surprised at how deep of an impact this one mortal had made upon her heart in the past several weeks.

Seeing him like this brought up long-dormant feelings in Urd, feelings similar to those she had felt when Skuld was really young. She felt a warm feeling well up inside of her, one that increased with the confidence she felt about having someone to care about.

Urd emerged from the tunnel, walking with her arm around Cevn's back, supporting his nearly unconscious form. He was still shaking violently, as if he was having a very bad chill, slowing their progress considerably. She decided that this rate of travel was dangerously slow. Reconsidering her options, she knew that she could transport her and Cevn back to Makuhari. But this would almost deplete her powers.

"Hehheh!" She chuckled to herself...Mara hadn't even noticed that Urd was operating on limited Earth Spirit Class powers.

"She is _such_ an idiot, for a Demoness!" Urd said to herself. She wished that she had the kind of power she possessed when she was under the influence of the Ultimate Destruction Program...she wouldn't have hesitated to atomize Mara.

Returning to more immediate concerns, there was the consideration of his eyes. She would need to put them in some kind of cryogenic storage immediately upon return.

"Cevn, I'm going to transport us back to the temple," Urd announced.

"What's the use? I'm fucking _blind_! My whole life is ruined! I can't see a thing here, and I won't be able to see anything there! Just leave me here so I can walk in front of the train and end it all," Cevn replied despondently. Urd felt a sense of panic at his suicidal mood.

"N..no! You stop thinking like that! I'm not giving up on you, and you damn well better not give up on me!" Urd shouted in his ear. She steeled herself, as their atomic structures began to fold and bend...

"I feel _really_ sick..." Cevn moaned.

With a swoosh, Urd and Cevn disappeared from the tunnel entrance just as a 400 Series HSST bullet train jetted by.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Skuld was just about asleep when Urd stumbled in and collapsed on _her_ futon bed, jostling her on the head with a stray elbow. She looked at her oldest sister with a flash of ire, then noticed that Urd had expended almost all of her energy.

"She must have transported Cevn back here with her--that would explain why she is so drained. How Big Sister managed it with reduced powers, I can only begin to guess," she observed. Looking past Urd, she saw Belldandy soundly sleeping.

Skuld crawled over Urd and nestled herself between her two sisters. This was the safest place in the known universe for the young Goddess. Belldandy's gentle breathing relaxed her. She looked at Urd, and noticed a gentle smile on her face.

"She sure looks happy for someone who almost used up all of her powers," Skuld thought as she rested her head on her pillow. Protected on either side by her sisters, she let sleep find her.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --


	9. Pt 9: Shadows

**Part 9: Shadows**

Skuld woke up to find sunshine and Belldandy glowing down upon her face. She looked up sheepishly at her sister's eyes and smiled diminutively. Feeling as relaxed as a marble repousse, Skuld yawned lazily, allowing herself to savor every nuance of Bell's protective vigilance. She soaked in the security of being in her bedroom with her middle sister awake and her oldest sister safely asleep. A moment later, she leisurely sat up and combed her fingers through her ample streams of black hair, pulling it back and setting the soft long locks in a bright red and pink hair clasp.

"Skuld, you're back among the living!" Belldandy announced, smiling good-humoredly. With sincere relief, she noticed that some of the distress had left her sister's beautiful nut-brown eyes. Skuld's safety had been foremost on her mind yesterday and today. Belldandy felt even happier as she basked in the innocent glow of Skuld's close-lipped smile.

"My precious baby sister is better!" she reflected with deeply felt gratitude. She silently observed the effusive charm of her younger sister's features; the eiderdown silken sheen of Skuld's jet-black hair, the plectrum-shaped blue rings on her forehead and cheeks, the short rounded stub of her nose and the full oval curve of her jaw. The hard-edged visage of yesterday's Skuld had been replaced with the soft, slightly child-like countenance of this morning's Skuld.

"You are going to grow up to be such a beautiful Goddess, Skuld!" Belldandy silently complemented her sister.

"Skuld, how do you feel this morning?" she asked Skuld gently.

"I feel so much better now that I'm home. Wow! Almost all my energy seems to have come back!" she said vibrantly. Skuld spent the next few minutes animatedly describing the fantastic experiences of yesterday.

"It was so horrible horrible horrible, Elder Sister! I was working on the Shinseisensor and Cevn came in and started helping. It seemed crazy, but he was actually offering up some good ideas. When we got done, he used my creation...to imprison me," she said as she rallied her memories. Her stomach knotted as she agonized over the concept of one of her own mechas being turned against her.

"I thought all along that Cevn had kidnapped me! That lair was...indescribably awful!" Skuld shuddered with the memories of that evil place.

Belldandy could barely comprehend the trauma that Skuld must have undergone in that place. She herself had only spent a short time in the horrible Demonic retreat...while Skuld had experienced an entire day there as an unwilling captive. She nodded to Skuld, who continued, talking about how angry she was. Belldandy empathized with Skuld's sheer frustration of being caged up by Mara. Then Skuld came to the part about the melding of her thoughts and Cevn's.

"I could feel him, Belldandy! He was in my mind and I was in his! Somehow I sorta knew that's what was happening. I guess I noticed something was goofy when I felt like Megumi was my little sister and that I wasn't jealous about Keiichi. For a minute, I wondered if...I was feeling the right things," Skuld explained. Belldandy perked up at this admission by Skuld.

"_What_ did you just say, Skuld?!" she exclaimed aloud, her mouth ajar with surprise. She was stunned. Was Skuld actually admitting that she was wrong? Could Skuld be actually stating that she had (for a moment) relinquished her long-held jealousy towards Keiichi? Belldandy suddenly felt butterflies in her breast as a rush of questions vied in her mind. She wanted to learn exactly what her younger sister had meant! With a supreme mental effort, Belldandy fought her curiosity down and let Skuld continue uninterrupted.

"Elder Sister, I've been mistaken...about a lot of things. About you and Keiichi. About Cevn. Even about Megumi and Big Sister!" Skuld confessed, consumed by deep pangs of guilt. Belldandy saw the churning volcanic rush of self-criticism threatening to erupt...

"Skuld, you've _never_ been wrong about these things! You shouldn't ever say that about yourself...it's simply how you felt about things. All feelings, if they arise out of love, are good feelings. We just have to grow into them, so we can express them more sincerely," Belldandy gently explained, lightly chiding her sister.

"R..really? You really think so, Elder Sister?" Skuld wanted so much to hang onto her sister's words as truisms.

"Yes, dear Skuld. And I've always known that your feelings towards Keiichi were arising out of your goodness and love. I know you love me...and I know it's been hard on you to sort out your feelings. They simply were in conflict with your deep love for me."

"Y..you're right! It's like...my whole way of looking at things needs to change. _Is_ changing. For a moment, I saw you and Keiichi different light. Maybe...like Cevn must sense how you and Keiichi feel about each other. And I realized, much as I hate to admit it, how truly much you must love him!" she stated. Her demeanor shifted into a fixed look of determination.

"That doesn't mean that I'm going to let him take advantage of you. If he ever does, he's in _super_ big trouble!" she said defiantly.

"_Super_ big trouble, Skuld?" Belldandy asked, not wanting her sister to slip back into animosity against her Keiichi.

"But I really don't feel it in my heart...that I can ever expect him to hurt you, either. If he treats you _really_ nice, then I'll... Then I'll love him too!"

Belldandy quietly listened to Skuld's flow-of-consciousness wordspill. She caught herself in a castaway daydream...an imaginary life with Keiichi minus Skuld's constant suspicion and jealousy. It was as if a new ordo equilibrio in their love was about to unfold. Unexpectedly, it seemed that Skuld had grown up a whole lot in the past few days.

"Could this stubbornness of hers be a thing of the past, now?" Belldandy wondered. She remembered the dozens of times Skuld had antagonized Keiichi because of her zeal to protect her middle sister. Oddly enough, Belldandy felt like she did the time Urd hopped on Sleipnir's back unexpectedly and she ended up getting kicked in the head by all four of his hind hooves!

_...Dizzy...Dazed...Dreamy..._

"Please let it be so!" she sighed longingly while Skuld resumed her narrative.

"While our thoughts were being admixed, I reached out with my mind and contacted him. Pretty smart of me, huh? But then I found out that he had resisted Mara just long enough to try and set me free. And then she..." She paused, her lip quivering with intense emotion.

"Mara made him cut out...his own eyes!" Skuld spat out with painful disgust.

Belldandy couldn't believe what she had just heard! Mara had possessed Cevn, then made him do this unspeakable thing to himself for trying and failing to free Skuld. And Skuld had witnessed it! She felt renewed severity towards her Demonic counterpart.

In the past three and a half years that she had been on the Earthrealm, Mara had been power-hungry, covert, innocently antagonistic and malicious in a pranksterish sort of way. But ever since Cevn had arrived, she had become savagely vicious. Belldandy felt sickened at the thought that her innocent younger sister had witnessed such an atrocity, and that her new mortal friend had been crippled by it.

"He did it for _me_! He..snff..did it to try and free me. No one has ever done something like that for me. H..he must be good. No way is he a Demon! He must be one of the best mortal men there can be!" Skuld sniffled. "Cevn made me understand..snff..why you love Keiichi so much. And why Keiichi is also one of the most wonderful men in existence.

"And that I should love Keiichi instead of being jealous of him!" Skuld concluded. She looked up at her older sister, her dun-brown eyes searching hers for forgiveness. Then she bowed low to the ground, touching her head to the floor in a gesture of formality.

"P..Please forgive me, Elder Sister! Pretty please?"

Belldandy's heart knitted speechless at this. Then she heard a second source of sobbing. Urd had awakened and was listening tearfully to Skuld's confession. Belldandy wiped the tears off of Skuld's face with her bed robe sleeve while Urd hugged her tightly, wrapping her arms protectively around her youngest sister. Belldandy felt herself lightly weeping as well.

"Skuld," she said softly in her little sister's ear, "how could I not forgive you. I've already been forgiving you...during all these years you've been with Keiichi and I. I've already forgiven you, and I..snff..just wanted to be able to tell you someday. Now I can finally tell you...and that makes my heart soar with happiness!"

Urd was almost floating off the floor with emotion...her two younger sisters were finally reconciling themselves, rather than warring over Keiichi's love for Belldandy!

"Cevn doesn't feel any hatred or bitterness against any of us. He has some kind of pain from his past, which makes him feel like he's broken. Kinda like Sigel was until we fixed her. And I felt a part of him feels totally alone. Because he has no one to love. He loves everyone, but he doesn't have a _special_ one, like you have Keiichi to love most," Skuld randomly digressed.

Belldandy was swept up in all of what she just had heard.

Once more, Cevn had been the target of unwanted antagonism from Mara--and once again, events had emerged much better in the end.

She envisioned her future with Keiichi...her dear Keiichi!

"Wait till you hear about this, my love!" she happily thought, her heart somersaulting with anticipation. She looked over at Urd, and saw a bittersweet expression on her tanned face.

It was if a large burden had suddenly been released from her. Finally, she wouldn't have to choose between Skuld and Keiichi! This had been the dream she had hoped for since she first experienced Skuld's hostile reaction to her beloved Keiichi.

Belldandy had frequently wished that she were mortal, so that she could be granted one wish. Hundreds of times, she, who had been a wish-grantor to hundreds of mortals over the millennia, had fantasized the fulfillment of her _own_ special wish: to be in blissful love with someone.

Then she discovered who that special someone was. But her little sister scorned that someone...with a tongue of fire. So she wished for a love molded on swanwings of peace...

Now, several years later, events seemed poised to allow that wish to become a reality. Somehow, Cevn had made one of her unspoken wishes come true!

But her cheerful reverie was broken by the sober realization of the price Cevn had paid. He had lost his vision. Forever. There was nothing that she or anyone else could do to undo the damage already done. There were strict Rules concerning GRO Goddesses healing Earthrealm mortals. Minor healings...yes, she could do these. But major healings...were absolutely prohibited. She couldn't use her magic enchantments to replace his vision.

The sheer tragedy of this struck her, almost burying her with rapt melancholy. Belldandy considered all the myriad of beings she had encountered, and realized that Cevn had somehow cultivated a nobility of character despite his circumstances. Next to Keiichi and the Almighty, his selfless actions...

"Belldandy, there still is a chance! I was able to get his eyes from Mara!" Urd announced. She had noticed Belldandy's sudden shift in mood from epiphanous to somber and guessed what might be causing it.

"Huh? Huh? How did you do that, Urd?" Skuld said, her face blending hope and optimism.

"I threatened to blow Mara back to the Central Demon Grief Office! You should have seen the look on her...!" Urd shouted, wanting to embellish the event.

"Waitaminute!! I can build a machine that can put them back in! A micro-molecular surgical transporter, the Surgeomatrix Mk I!" Skuld interrupted, a flurry of schematics synergizing in her mind.

"Why not Mk. II, Skuld?" Urd asked flatly, her eyes narrowed.

"There's no time for a Mk. II, you squirrel-brain! I'm going to make sure this one works the first time!"

"Like all the other 'first times'? Hmmm...lemme see: Banpei, Keiichi's MRX, two TV sets, Sentaro's stunt bicycle..." Urd stacked up the taunts with captious precision.

Skuld stuck her tongue out at her oldest sister...then she felt an elbow nudging.

"Urd! You know how much Skuld wants to help. But instead of encouraging her, you go and _tease_ her!" Belldandy said, slightly miffed off.

"I just wanted everyone to know that things are back to normal here. And that I'm still the boss!"

"Yeah, right!" Skuld protested sourly as Urd swiftly reached out and pinched her younger sister on the nose.

"Owww!" Belldandy yelped daintily. Once more, she had fallen victim to one of Urd's old antics. She waxed with nostalgia as she remembered how Urd always pinched her when they were little.

"Get 'er!" she yelled as soon as she wrestled Urd's arm away. She and Skuld quickly scooped up their pillows and bombarded their older sister with fluffblows. It was just like the old times up in Yggdrasil for the three.

"Hey...guys...er...sisters...umph, _younger sisters_!! I think I can..ooff...mix a potion that will..umph..allow the damage to heal, if you stop hitting me with those things!" Urd managed to say, trying to fend off pillows with her arms while she grabbed her own pillow.

**"**_Aiyyyyyhh!_**"**

Their boisterous playtime was cut short by a loud scream.

"What now?" each Goddess thought to herself. It was obviously a female scream...which meant that it was Megumi. Could it be a renewed assault by Mara?

"There's never a moment of peace and quiet in this household!" Urd muttered flatly. The three sisters dropped their pillows, dashed out into the hallway, and saw a startled Megumi looking in on Cevn's room, screaming at the top of her lungs with grief.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Megumi had been awakened by muffled sounds from the Goddess's bedroom. Quickly alert, she remembered that Urd and Belldandy had gone to rescue Skuld and Cevn. She decided to check and see if Cevn was safe, since Belldandy had returned with Skuld already.

"If Urd is back, that must mean Cevn is back safe and sound too," she concluded as she slipped on her houserobe. Against her better judgment, she decided to take a peek. Sliding the door open, she gasped when she saw that his eyes were covered with a strip of cloth. The she noticed one of his arms resting on his blanket; it had a deep stab wound and slashes.

The red stains on the sunken cloth over his eye sockets registered a vicious hit on her caring nature.

He had lost his _eyes_!

"Please, don't let him be dead!" Megumi thought to herself...and then she instinctively screamed.

"What...happened...to...his...eyes!" she sobbed as she staggered backwards and bumped against the opposite wall in shock.

Skuld heard the scream and instantly realized that Megumi must have woken up while they were playing around. Then she evidently decided to see if Cevn had been brought back yet. She knew that Urd had silently taken him to his room last night upon their return after stilling his mind to an almost stasis-like calm.

"Why is she _that_ concerned about him?" Urd initially wondered with a hint of jealousy. Then she saw the shocked look on Megumi's face and felt the toiling grief that gripped Keiichi's sister. Urd realized with a fireburst of compassion that no one had prepared Megumi for this!

Megumi was wailing with grief. Keiichi quietly came up to her and walked her out into the living room. Keiichi's stomach caught in his throat with the brief glimpse of what had been done to his new friend. Belldandy knelt down next to Megumi to try and comfort her.

Megumi was choking on her tears as Keiichi talked softly to calm her. Belldandy hugged her close...and Megumi gradually regained her composure enough to ask what happened. Belldandy related to her everything that Skuld had told her about the pair's captivity. She assured Megumi that her sisters would do everything possible to try and restore his eyesight.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Urd and Skuld stepped into Cevn's bedroom. Urd recited a spell and the soft blue stasis field enveloping him vanished. Something seemed to be definitely wrong, Urd immediately noted. Instead of being in the same condition that he was when she left him last night, somehow he had gotten _much_ worse. Worried, she touched him on the forehead, scanning his vitals.

"Oh my Lord, no!" Urd said with dread.

"Skuld, we better get to work on him right now! I don't think he's going to last much longer if we don't!" She put her head to his chest...her divine senses informed her that he was at death's door.

"Damn it! I didn't even suspect that he was this far gone!" she berated herself.

"Didn't you put him in a stasis spell?" Skuld said as she sprinted to her "Skuld Labs" room. She returned with a big kit of parts, while Urd gave Cevn several ampoules in an attempt to forestall a tragic end.

"Man, that girl can run fast when she wants to," Urd observed to herself.

"Why is he so sick, Big Sister? You were supposed to..."

"I did I did I did, Skuld! I almost expended _all_ of my energy getting him here with me. Then I made sure he was okay once we arrived! But it was hard...I could only draw on partial Earth Spirit level powers."

"What's wrong with him?!" Skuld asked despairingly, fighting to keep calm as she realized that she might lose her new friend.

"When we got back, I made totally sure that he was in stasis before I crashed!" Urd said defensively.

"I don't know what happened!"

"I...just don't want anything to happen to him, Urd! Don't let him die!" Skuld lashed out urgently. Urd was surprised at the shift in Skuld's perspective towards Cevn.

"Something happened between Cevn and I..." Urd raised an eyebrow as her curiosity raced for a few seconds with this bit of news.

"I'll tell you later! We've got to figure out what's wrong with him _right now_ Big Sister!"

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Belldandy suddenly inhaled with a gasp as she saw the black-hooded spectral figure begin to descend from the skies, scythe in hands. Keiichi noticed her sudden expression of fear and asked what was upsetting her.

"Urd and Skuld...better hurry!" was all she could say as the dark shadow moved closer to their temple compound.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Urd was wracking her brains desperately trying to understand how this could be happening. He was okay last night! She mentally reviewed every bit of information that she recalled from yesterday, looking for some kind of hint or clue to help her understand Cevn's grave condition. She looked over at Skuld, watching with sincere admiration as the younger Goddess's hands seemed to blur while she was assembling some kind of a machine.

"What a team we are, we can't even save one mortal's life," she reflected remorsefully. Urd knew that the Reaper would be coming soon.

Cevn's rattling breath suddenly stopped. Urd grasped his wrist and felt no pulse. Skuld was almost paralyzed with panic.

"Skuld, I need an electrical shock right now!"

"What do you need an electric shock for right now, Urd? He's the one that's..." a distracted Skuld replied, clearly overwhelmed. Urd was used to playing nurse, but Skuld was inexperienced in medical matters.

"Not for me, for him! He's_ flatlined_!" Skuld's eyes went wide at this. She quickly grasped two tube-like modules and ripped apart a set of broken headphones. Urd watched in amazement as, within ten seconds, Skuld had patched together a cardiac defibrillator ready for Urd to use. Grabbing the two pads, she placed them on Cevn's chest while Skuld applied the charge. He heaved and his heart started beating sporadically, then stopped. Urd looked up, and saw the dark-hooded figure hovering just outside the window.

"You can't have him! Nonononono!" Skuld yelled with shrill defiance through her tears. "We're not going to let you take Cevn away!"

They kept jolting him, only to hear his heartbeat fade. Urd imagined the Reaper banging on the window, trying to break in to the room and take Cevn's Soul. She upped the amps...and the ensuing jolt rolled Cevn on his side. Urd noticed a series of wounds on his neck.

"Of course! How could I miss it?" she grilled herself with guilt for overlooking the obvious.

"Skuld, look!" Urd shouted as she pointed to the bite marks. Mara had taken possession of Cevn by vampirism. Before they had rescued him, she had activated her fangbite poison.

"Mara, you're the lowest! But you aren't going to get away with it this time, you rotten Demon!" Urd mused, relieved at her chance discovery. In a matter of seconds, she materialized a hemoglobin poison detection set and slipped a drop of blood from the wound on his neck onto a slide, then dipped it into a beaker. Skuld anticipated this by quickly assembling a makeshift titration centrifuge to spin the sample in. Urd patted her youngest sister on the head, wordlessly thanking her.

Seconds later they pulled the beaker out. The pink blood-reagent mix had transmorphed into a sickening thick pale yellow. Urd turned to the dark hooded figure in the window and flipped it off.

"Too bad! Not today, you don't!" she said triumphantly. Skuld followed suit and stuck her tongue out while pulling a face.

"BIIII-DA!"

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Belldandy could sense that the Reaper was right outside the house. All she could do was hold Keiichi's hand tightly and wordlessly form a wish.

"My Lord, please don't let the Reaper take him away from us," she requested the Almighty. But the dark shadow descended into the house, and Belldandy shivered with dread. She saw that Keiichi and Megumi were both alarmed by the frozen eclipse of the morning light that accompanied Death.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

In Cevn's room, Urd encanted a spell:

_In the face of doom/with sanguine admixed/to drain vitality away/_

_Thy new form to assume/dread toxins fixed/corruption kept at bay/_

_Let life now resume/and chemicals untwist/restore vigor...vivace!_

As she finished her recital, a slender tubular beaker formed in mid-air. She quickly dumped it into Cevn's mouth. He sputtered and choked as the arcane elixir went down. After a couple anxious minutes, his throttly breathing began to slow down to steady tides.

The dark figure in the window shook its skeletal finger at Urd and Skuld with an admonishing gesture, then shrugged its shoulders and faded into nothingness. Urd and Skuld sat back with relief, as they heard Cevn's breathing growing stronger. Suddenly Cevn gasped, sucking in a huge lungful of air. Skuld held her hand to his forehead...he was burning up! She went next door to the bathroom and soaked a washcloth in cool water. When she returned to the room, she noticed Urd stroking Cevn's face in an odd sort of way.

"Here, this will cool him down!" Skuld said excitedly as Urd quickly jerked her hand away. Urd looked momentarily disappointed, adding to the younger Goddess's confusion.

"What'd I do to get _you_ in a huff? Didn't I help you good enough?" she said to Urd, applying the cool cloth to his head. "Nothing. I was just imagining for a moment..." Urd answered, looking at her resignedly

"Yeah?" Skuld prompted, lofted by the recent excitement.

"It's useless, impossible!" Urd shouted. Skuld looked at her with a "what are you talking about?" expression.

"Anyway, tell me what happened between you and Cevn?" Urd said, looking at her sister like a prosecutor expecting an admission of guilt. Skuld once more explained the merging of her consciousness with Cevn's. Urd regretted sleeping through that part of Skuld's story. She was both disappointed and moved by the adventurous tale. She had whimsically expected some kind of juicy admission, like Skuld having a school-girl puppycrush on Cevn...but instead Urd was left with more questions than answers.

"How could Skuld and he share even a microsecond of a mind-merge?" she wondered. Urd knew that any direct contact between a divine being and a mortal would fry said mortal's mind; it was like dropping a grasshopper in the midst of an antimatter plasmic storm. Something really strange was going on here...

She decided to drop the question for now and get Skuld.

"I was just worried that you would...take advantage of him some way," Urd teased. Skuld glared at her with a _very_ serious face.

"No way! I have a _pure_ mind, unlike some _other_ Goddess I know who thinks everything has to be perverted all the time!" Skuld replied razorsharp.

"You just watch it Skuld, or I'll give Cevn a love potion and send him after you!"

"You... You better not, or else Tomohisa will get mad!" Skuld said, and then quickly covered her mouth.

Too late.

She blushed deep red when she realized that Urd had tricked her into mentioned her young 'boyfriend's' name again!

This was the juicy prize Urd was waiting for, and she smiled mischievously at her sister's discomfiture.

"Urd, you do this just to make me say _his_ name and get embarrassed! But I'm not afraid to admit I l..l..l..like him!" Skuld said defensively. Urd patted her sister on the head.

"You can have your childish little infatuation with Tomohisa. I won't try to take him away from you, _Little Sister Training Bra_!" she said condescendingly. The blush on Skuld's cheeks flashed into a crimson red forehead.

"Ooooo...there's no way would Tomohisa leave me for an old witch like you!" she snapped back.

"He's not even _with_ you, Skuld! Now who's daydreaming, neh?" Skuld's rapid expression of frustration and confusion was more than enough to satisfy Urd. She realized that she had pushed the sensitive Skuld enough for her own edification; so she suggested a truce. At least her pent up worries of a short while ago were gone.

"We better leave Cevn so he can rest," she noted, diplomatically suggesting that Skuld be the one to check on him every so often...

Skuld assented to this with a grin, and all arguments were forgiven.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Belldandy was relieved when the dark loomshadow leave the temple environs. When Urd and Skuld emerged from Cevn's room she served everyone a soothing glass of tea. Her two sisters looked like they needed it...bad.

"We almost lost him! Mara poisoned him when she bit his neck," Urd explained.

Megumi heard this and paled. She self-consciously rubbed the side of her neck, remembering that time several years ago when Mara had bitten her. She shuddered at the recollection, and was grateful that Mara didn't try to poison her. Then she realized that her newly 'adopted' older brother had nearly died, and the shocking awareness of the fragility of the threadthin net of life settled in. She felt very thankful to Urd and Skuld for their attentions to Cevn, and said a silent "thank you" to Kami-sama.

"What is wrong with her? Mara hasn't been this bad since she sprung the Ultimate Destruction Program! She's never tried to kill anyone before...she's just been a pain in the ass, doing things like turning people into lizards, creating doppelgangers and turning schools into German castles. Even when she sent Kodama, it wasn't an attempt to kill anyone; she just wanted to try and get Bell-chan and I to break up!" Keiichi questioned aloud.

He remembered the horrid disgrace when he was changed into a lizard by Mara. That time, Urd had come along and tried to finish restoring him; but instead she sent him back down the evolutionary ladder to become a frog. At least he didn't stay in amphibious form for long. He gagged on his tea when he thought of what would have happened if he had become hungry and had to chase down flies for dinner.

"Flies!" Keiichi said out loud.

"What?" Skuld asked.

"Flies, Skuld. Remember when Mara wanted to release the Ultimate Destruction Program, and she threatened to turn me into a fly?"

"So?" said Urd.

"Mara must be after something really bad, to be this reckless," he stated. They all knew this...but Keiichi's emphasis drew this awareness to new heights.

Lightning flashing in her mind, Skuld remembered Mara's plan. This scheme of Mara's hadn't really redeemed itself to be an important fact earlier...because it had been voiced by Cevn while he was possessed by Mara. But now, those words splooshed Skuld like a six-legged bug pouncing on her head.

"I remember! I remember, I remember! While Mara was possessing Cevn, she made him say something about some Ultimate Demon called Isilblius! Something about how she was going to summon him, based on some formula written in that book Cevn has. Then she bragged that Isilblius would obey her commands, and together they would take over _everything_."

"Oh no!" Belldandy and Urd said in tandem. Consternation worked both of their faces as they considered the dire possibilities ahead if this was true.

"What is this Isilblius that you guys are so worried about?" Keiichi asked, noting the obvious clouds of fear shadowing Bell-chan's face. Belldandy collected her thoughts and began to narrate a fable.

"Long ago, before any of us manifested, there was a powerful being called Isilblius, who was somehow cocreated with the Almighty. After the second creation...what you mortals call the 'Big Bang', only three beings remained. Kami-sama, the Other...and Isilblius.

"One went...somewhere else...while the Almighty and Isilblius co-designed Yggdrasil, living in harmony for eons. Eventually, Isilblius desired to possess all of the power, because he was too selfish to share with Kami-sama. They warred for a very long time, and eventually Isilblius created the Ultimate Destruction Program."

"What!" Keiichi, Megumi and Skuld all said with shock. Skuld squatted on her haunches and stared blankly in the air with a fallow expression. Suddenly she leapt to her feet.

"So this explains the origin of the UDP! I knew the Lord would never be so evil as to create such a monstrous thing! I always wondered, though... Once we defeated it, I kept asking myself, 'where did the UDP come from?'" Skuld cried out, her longstanding queries resolved.

"Yes, Skuld, it did have to come from somewhere. Only a being as foul as Isilblius could have created the UDP," Belldandy stated. "He threatened to destroy the Multiverse if our Lord didn't bow down to him. But the Almighty and the so-called 'Other One' managed to confuse him, and trapped both Isilblius and the Ultimate Destruction Program."

"How did they do that?" Keiichi asked. "What is this 'other one' you keep mentioning?" He noticed Belldandy and Urd casting a telling glance at each other...they were hiding something!

"They both told Isilblius that the UDF would destroy _everything_...including all that Isilblius coveted, plus Isilblius himself," Belldandy answered with a giggle.

"What a maroon...he was conned by the Almighty!" Urd said, laughing heartily. As the mood in the room momentarily lightened, she looked at her sister, relieved that neither one of them had to answer any more questions about the "Other One".

"The Almighty discourages the retelling of this particular legend because it could be seen as casting Him...in a bad light. He doesn't like anyone to think that He is capable of subterfuge. That's why you haven't been told about it, Skuld. You have to be an adult Goddess before you get Inculcated with the full details of this legend."

"He's always so concerned about His image, even though He's such a big meany," Urd interjected.

"Shhhh, what if He heard that?" Skuld said fearfully.

"So what if He did, Skuld? We pulled His divine behind out of the fire when we put an end to the Ultimate Destruction Program. He should be grateful! But instead, He suspended my license again," Urd argued back.

"Ahem. Anyway," Belldandy broke in before Urd began the usual anti-Lord tirade, "In theory, Isilblius is much more powerful than the Almighty. It took all three of them to cocreate reality, but Isilblius by himself created something that could destroy reality."

"Yes, and he's far more dangerous than the Lord. I mean, the Lord isn't dangerous unless provoked, but Isilblius is just plain crazy!" Urd opined.

"But he also lacks wit. He's not as bright as the Lord, he just goes off and acts without thinking," Belldandy added.

"Sound's like someone I know," muttered Keiichi in a sotto voce, glancing at Urd.

"Very funny, Keiichi," Urd replied in a monotone while the others laughed. Belldandy giggled and squeezed Urd's shoulder.

"We still love you despite yourself, Big Sister. Even if it is _true_ what Keiichi said," Belldandy remarked, then burst into another fit of the giggles.

"That's what you get for pinching my nose, Big Sister!" she justified. Urd smiled at all of this, than began to giggle herself. She was relieved that everybody seemed to be able to laugh a little after the intense events of the past couple of days.

"Okay, you guys win!" she acquiesced.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

I felt a slow returning to consciousness. My thoughts were disordered at first as the chaos organized itself around a cloud-obscured memory. The last moment I could mentally reconstruct was someone pulling me out of Mara's 'house of horrors'.

I was startled by the total lack of light: everything was pitch black. The darkness wasn't a shadow...it was simply an _absence_.

"My God, I'm blind!" I said hoarsely.

Then I remembered. I revisited the cruel blinding that Mara had caused, using my own unwilling body. I _was_ blind. I just wasn't accustomed to waking up and seeing nothing. My spirits sank and I felt something deep inside of me burst. The reservoir of hope I possessed was suddenly depleted by a shattered dam of fear. My new state of blindness prompted a deluge of self-pity. It wasn't enough that I was abused physically and sexually as a child. It wasn't enough that I had lived on the streets and endured the unmanageable lifestyle of a hope-to-die dope fiend. It wasn't enough that I was plagued with the instabilities and limitations of a clinically severe mental illness. Now, I had been deprived of the sense that I most relied upon.

Was life ever enough?

I morosely brooded over the deprivation. I would never see the wonders of nature again! I would never be able to look in a mirror and see my own expression again!

Then it dawned on me that, with the loss of my eyes, the windows to my soul had been slammed shut! The most important vehicle of expression besides speech had been removed from my being. I would never be able communicate my appreciation to a friend with an eyeful of kindness. I would never be able to gaze adoringly at the girlfriend I had dreamt about in my desires...

While I passionately tallied the extent of my irretrievable losses, I reached up with my right hand and touched my face. I felt stubble on my chin, right above my heavily bandaged neck.

I must have been out of it for days! Was I still in Japan? Where could I be? Without being able to see anything, I felt a wave of paranoia wash over me. What if I was still in Mara's lair? Reaching further up, I gingerly touched the place where the cloth covered my eyes. The dull throbbing sharpened into excruciating pain. My fingertips depressed the area where my eyes should be; confirming that my eye sockets were empty. Further up, I felt a cool cloth on my forehead.

I couldn't move my left arm at all. With great effort, I reached over with my right arm, and felt bandages all up and down my left arm. I remembered Mara using me to stab myself in the left forearm. My whole body felt enfeebled and drained. On top of being weak, I felt a sepsis-like sensation of nausea and vertigo.

I wanted to get up, but was afraid to. My body presented the propriation of being one big swollen bruise. So I laid still and let my mind race of its own accord.

"What was the use of trying anymore, my life is ruined!" The attitude repeated over and over in my thoughts like a mantra.

I wanted to scream, but I was certain no one would hear. My cognition was ponthered, skewed. I was feeling my sanity flee like grains of sand spilling between splayed fingers. I gripped my right hand tight in order to keep from screaming, as my left hand wouldn't close. The darkness lingered.

At first the dark was annoying...then frightening...then terrifying...then something to be ignored...then a reminder of the past...then bleakly discouraging. I don't know how many times the cycle repeated in my heart until the door slid open.

"Who is it!?" I shouted at the sound. My voice had a knife-edge of fear in it. Deprived of my visual reflex, I was suddenly ultra-suspicious. It was almost a scream.

"Oh, Cevn! You're awake!" I heard Skuld's excited voice.

"I was so worried about you. We all were!" she said with obvious relief.

"Skuld...is that really you?"

"Yeah it's me! You big idiot! Who else could it be?" she said with a hint of irritation.

"How do I know that you're not Mara, posing as Skuld?" I asked. My recent captivity had planted a strong germ of paranoia in my consciousness. I felt a reassuring hand rest on my shoulder. I reached over and tried to touch it, but couldn't. Then I felt a small pair of hands lift my hand up and hold it. I knew they were Skuld's, because they were so delicately tiny and milk soft.

"How do you feel? I've been coming every hour or so to check on you. The others have been checking on you too!" she asked.

"I feel blind," I answered bluntly, despondently.

"I'm sorry, Skuld. I can't share in your enthusiasm. I can't see a thing. Do you know what that's like? I...feel so horrible!"

I heard shuffling sounds, then after a moment I felt Skuld settle my hand between hers on her lap. She must have been kneeling right next to me. Holding my hand tightly, she uttered a solemn promise.

"After what you did for me, Cevn, I'm not going to rest until your vision is returned to normal. Big Sister Urd and I have been working on a way to restore your sight."

_There was Hope!_

I felt a hobbling spark of hope in reaction to her words. Skuld definitely sounded confident! Could it be possible that the Goddesses could figure out a way around my sorry condition? I was stunned! I felt Skuld patting my hand gently.

"I _promise_ you that we'll undo that horrible thing that Mara did to you!" Skuld repeated. I felt the wet cloth being lifted off of my head, and a new cool cloth replaced it.

"There, that should feel better. I've been changing these constantly. You've been running as hot as Keiichi's MRX in July!" Skuld alluded. I tried to smile thankfully to her, and she patted me on the head.

"Hey, don't treat me like a kid, okay?" I mimicked her. I could hear Skuld muffle a giggle.

"Do you know how old I am, Cevn? I was alive for a thousand centuries before you guys built your first pyramids here on the Earthrealm. Compared to me, you're just a little boy!" she said, a twinkle in her voice.

"Well, you might want to think twice about restoring my vision, because if you do, I am going to get you back for calling me a 'boy'!"

"You just try it! Remember who you're talking to..._I'm_ the Goddess and _you're_ the mortal!" I realized that I was actually joking with the youngest Goddess. With kindness, Skuld had ushered me into her carefree and happy worldmoment. I remembered the tiny shard of Skuld's thoughts that I shared during our captivity. Her essence was so predominated by vivacious cheer. Now, here it was again. Just the presence of Skuld in the room was enough to significantly lift my spirits. It was infectious.

"You sound just like your big sister Urd. That what she always says, about me being a mortal and she being a Goddess. Do you have this effect on all the boys?"

"Why would I want to have an effect on boys?" Skuld asked testily.

"Well, I was so bummed out before you came, and now you helped me forget...my visual condition. Thanks, Skuld!" I was sincere in thanking her, and tried to project that in my voice. She changed the topic.

"We should be ready to try it in a few days, if you can hang on until then," she reassured me.

"What day is today, Skuld?"

"Thursday."

"_WHAT!_" I felt a sense of panic. I had missed the first week of the new school year at N.I.T! It struck me as strange...how easy it was to return my focus to mundane matters such as my new teaching job when I had just been to Hades and back courtesy of Mara.

"Megumi and Keiichi took care of it for you. They called the local newspaper and reported that you were in an accident. They asked one of their teachers to talk to Dr. Kintaro and inform him that you had to go to a specialist in Tokyo for eye surgery. You still have your job, honey," Urd explained.

"When did you come, Urd? And how long have you've been listening? And who gave you permission to call me 'honey'?" I asked with a hint of irritation. The last thing I desired was Urd to be spying.

"Long enough ago to hear you compare me to Skuld! Obviously the deranged thinking of someone who's delirious. But I'll generously let it pass just this once. And I'll call you 'honey' any time I feel like it..._honey_!" she taunted. I made a weak growl in my parched throat to communicate my displeasure.

"But really...I thought we were going to lose you, Cevn," she added. "Mara tried to poison you, but Skuld and I were able..."

"We got it out of you just in the nick of time," Skuld finished.

"Hey, you don't have to interrupt me, you dumb brat!" Urd admonished.

"I was just as worried about him as you were, Big Sister! Don't you act stupid! It took _both_ of us to save him from the Reaper!"

I reacted pretty strongly to Skuld's innocent disclosure. The word "Reaper" brought up images with a distinctly Hieronymus Bosch bent; definitely not the comedic Death-figure from "Bill and Ted's Bogus Adventure." If she was referring to what I imagined she was saying...then these two had literally saved my life! I was so consternated in my head that I tuned out the ensuing argument between Skuld and Urd. Skuld was holding my hand still, and I could feel her body vibrate with each retort she aimed at Urd.

"You did not teach me everything I know, you _idiot_!" I heard Skuld yell at Urd.

"Of course I didn't. I only taught you the good stuff. All your screw ups are your _own_ fault!" Urd shot back.

and on and on and on...

I felt moody enough, but with the bickerflap, my mood bordered on irritability. These two had saved my life while cooperating, but now they were tearing each other up with argumentative criticism. Ad hominum...err, ad deaae attacks and such...

"Enough already!" I shouted. "You two are sitting pretty on my raw nerves. I feel like crap...and you have to pitch your sibling rivalry right at my bedside. How could you fight so much! Together, you both saved my life, and now you're yelling at each other. Why can't you just give each other a break once in a while! While you're at it, why don't you both give _me_ a break and leave.

"Get out, both of you!"

I felt Skuld suddenly release my hand, followed by a door opening and closing. There was heated arguing in the hallway as Skuld and Urd fought it out over who had upset me the most. I noticed that with the loss of my eyesight, my hearing was developing greater sensitivity. Of course! My senses were homeostatically compensating for my lost visual capacities.

From what I could hear, it seemed that Skuld was besting Urd. At least until Belldandy interrupted them.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

In the dining room, Belldandy was liberally chewing out her two sisters. She had taken off her kitchen smock, so that she could gesture animatedly with her arms and hands.

"You two _have_ to learn to control your arguing! You both feel bad because Cevn asked you to leave his room..." she started.

"He's an ingrate! After all we did for him last weekend!" Urd smartly interrupted.

"...that doesn't give you an excuse to argue and upset him. Think of it from his vantagepoint. He's really, really sick, and the two of you start yelling at each other..._moments_ after he wakes up! Right after telling him that you cooperated to save his life. What would either of _you_ do?" she concluded rhetorically.

This sobered both of the embattled Goddesses. Skuld looked thoughtful, while Urd seemed apologetic.

"Yeah, I guess you're right, Bell. That was foolish of us. For my part, I'm a little bit sorry. But I can't help it...I feel so weird around him sometimes," Urd admitted.

"Yes, I'm sorry too, Big Sister! He's really really sick, and we shouldn't have argued so much. I feel like I owe him so much, and I want very badly to help him get his eyesight back."

"I've been thinking about that," Belldandy mentioned. It had struck her two days ago while she was talking to Keiichi about the upcoming weekend...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Keiichi, can we talk?"

Keiichi put down the voiceboard and offered his full attention at his sweetheart. His Sony voiceboard was actually a keyboard with a built-in microphone, which made inputting Kanji much easier. A few years ago, the only way to input Kanji and other components of Japanese was to type the phonetic equivalents. It was such a hassle! To type the character for Kanji, one had to type k-a-n-ji in hiragana or katakana; then the program would convert it. Now, all he had to do was say "kanji" in the context of a sentence, and the appropriate character would appear on the screen. After many years of research, the sound/voice recognition buffers of the standard laptop had become so accurate, there was hardly ever a mistake.

He looked at Belldandy closely, noticing that she seemed very intent to tell him something.

"For you, my ear is always bent, Belle-ami!" he said brightly, using the new French term he had learned from Cevn last week; it meant "attractive lady friend"

Belldandy thought it was so cute that the near-homonym for her name had such a delightful meaning in another Earthrealm language. She set down her charcoal sketch of Keiichi and wiped her blackened hands on the damp cloth, then folded them in her lap. The weather was hot...a preview of the humid summer coming in a few months. Knitting sweaters was kind of impractical, not to mention laborious in this weather. So she was trying her hand at charcoal sketches of the members of the house. Of course, her sketch of Keiichi was the hardest...

Keiichi looked over her shoulder at her drawing of him and smiled approvingly...it was more of a likeness than a caricature.

"That's really good, Bell-chan!" he praised.

"Keiichi, we really need to get away for a weekend! Spring break just wasn't enough for me," she said with a hint of seriousity.

"Soon!" she added.

Keiichi looked at her with a slight start. It was a rarity when Belldandy made a demand on him. She had made a lot of demands when she first came into his life...out of the sheer necessity of learning about her surroundings. He remembered the trip on the ferryboat: the night he slipped on the soda can and fell over the guardrail and Bell-chan used magic to stop his fall into the sea. That was their first _real_ kiss. He had been fighting with himself to try and put his arm around her earlier in the day...and then ended up sleeping on her lap and finally kissing her while they floated in mid-air.

He looked in her sweet off-blue eyes and swore that she fluttered them at him ever so slightly.

"It _has_ been a long time since the two of us have had any time for ourselves, he reflected. The visit to Atami was great, but it was so short of a time together.

She was giving him _that look_ again, the one that he could never, ever refuse. Her eyes poured tenderness right on down to the bottom of his soul. Once more Keiichi thanked Kami-sama for sending one of His own daughters to become such an integral part of his life these past three years.

"Uh, Bell-chan...I.I'm so sorry that I haven't...been around...for you lately," he apologized, awkward because the words themselves weren't enough to express his regret.

Belldandy dismissed his amends with one of her own.

"I know that you were very busy with the Solar Car Competition, and then your finals. I wanted you to rest during Spring Break, because you were so tired. I hope that this isn't too soon afterwards for me to want a weekend away from the house, with just the two of us..."

"Just..the..two..of..us!" Keiichi stuttered, beaming at her. After all, the prospect of a weekend alone with Belldandy was something he often daydreamed about with a mixture of anticipation and fear. But seldom came the opportunity for the two of them to make good a romantic escape. The so-called Ultimate Force had bound them together, but seemed to keep them together when they couldn't just _be_ together, alone.

After fate had collected them and deposited them into their new temple home, people just sort of _came_ to live with them. Encroached on their privacy. First, there was Megumi, who needed a place to stay during college and had a packet of money from their uncle. Then Urd arrived and ployed her exuberant "let's get you two together" routine. Finally, there was Skuld and her jealous animosity. But even that wasn't the end; Megumi's housing situation didn't work out last year and she had to move back to the temple...and now this unpredictable Cevn had joined their legion just a month ago.

Keiichi didn't know which of the sisters was the worse at meddling in his and Belldandy's love life.

His younger sister, Megumi... She wasn't a pain in the ass like the other two, but she did demand a lot of his time. Not to mention her presence creating certain reservations in his mind. How could he make love with his girlfriend (if that time ever came) with his _little sister_ in the house?

"Damn it, she's even grown taller than me!" Keiichi thought in exasperation at Megumi's growth spurt this past year. Then he meditated upon the sum of distractions that prevented him from spending time alone with his love.

"Let's see...Demons, bugs, the Almighty and Ultimate Destruction Programs. Just a few minor things like that," he further reflected. But whenever Belldandy would feel contrition about all the hassles that came along with their relationship, he would only offer a gentle protest. Bell-chan seemed downright self-accusatory at times; thinking that she was the source of so much turmoil in his life. Actually, none of it was her fault. He had never doubted that, despite the trials and tribulations, the love they shared was worth _any_ risk.

"It's just too _genuine_," he reflected gratefully.

He thought back to the race, and remembered the dramatic mountain scenery as he raced through Nikko National Park as part of the touring stage. Seeing the incredible beauty of Nikko inspired him. Keiichi felt a chill seeping up and down his back: he had never visited there with Belldandy. And Nikko was an _important_ place to visit!

"Hey, wouldn't it be great for us to take a long camping trip in Nikko, or maybe even Hokkaido!" he cheerfully suggested. He remembered that the Toshogu Festival would be held on the next weekend. But was it too late to go? That would be an incredible exhibition of Japanese culture for Belldandy to witness.

"Oh Keiichi! That sounds...absolutely wonderful!" Belldandy assented, then reached over and hugged him. He pulled her closer to him and they cuddled for a few minutes. He thought about Belldandy and he, the snow-capped mountains, the wind weaving playfully through her long brown tresses...

"Sumotori!" Keiichi shouted suddenly as he playfully wrestled Belldandy onto her back. She squealed with delight and reached up and tried to push him off of her. She looked so beautiful, with her hair fanned out all over the floor, framing her lovely cheeks blushed from the exertion of wrestling with him. And her soft smile. She looked softly up at him, seemingly waiting for something, but Keiichi suddenly got a case of the bashfuls and tickled her instead.

"Kei..i...chi!" she giggled, and started tickling him back, reaching up to poke him in the ribs. Belldandy knew that this was one of Keiichi's most sensitive 'tickly centers' and prodded him until he feel back on the floor next to her, laughing uncontrollably.

"I give up, I give up!" he begged. They both lay side by side, staring at the ceiling. Belldandy scooted a little closer to him and rested her head on his arm.

"Keiichi, I was talking to Skuld yesterday..."

Keiichi's face fell flat. Why did Bell have to bring _her_ up at a time like this? The excitement drained from his face like water from ramen noodles. The subject of Skuld could dampen a romantic mood quicker than a shriek freshly released from a hyena's breast.

"Did I say something wrong?" she asked innocently, noticing his shift towards a somber mood. She started playing footsies with him while continuing.

"Anyway, I was talking to Skuld, and she was telling me about what happened to her while she was in Mara's lair. She mentioned that she and Cevn had felt a little of each other's minds," she said, trying to ignore his long face.

"Huh?" Keiichi asked, wondering where this was all going. Belldandy rolled on her side to face him. She had a huge smile on her face.

"Skuld told me that she had been wrong about a lot of things. You and me, for example!"

"Yeah, it's about time she realized that!" Keiichi said in a flat voice as he sat up in frustration.

"But Keiichi, Skuld just wants what's best for me!" Belldandy replied as she sat up next to him.

"I know, Bell-chan!" he agreed as he looked out the window. "But..._how_ she goes about it is so totally messed up!"

"Something wonderful has happened, Keiichi! While Skuld shared thoughts with Cevn, she was able to see our love for each other through his eyes...er, through his perspective. Because of this, she's no longer so enwrapped in her worries that you aren't good enough for me, or that you'll hurt me in some way. Instead, she said that she knows how much I love you, and how you are a very wonderful man! She said that she can't harden her heart against you any more, and that she'll learn to love you!" Keiichi thought that his divine girlfriend was joking with him to get him back for tickling her so aggressively.

"That means that she won't be sending Banpei to attack you every time we kiss or we're alone! Think of it, Keiichi! We're _free_ from Skuld's fears about you hurting me, or taking me away from her!" Belldandy stated with a rich, joyful voice. Keiichi looked closer at her face...

"She really means it!" he realized with a start. Keiichi was dumbfounded. He felt his heart pounding rapidly in his chest like a kodo drum.

"Say...that...again...Bell-chan!" She repeated what Skuld had told her. Keiichi raised his eyes heavenward and shook his head in astonishment.

"This is...unbelievable!" was all that words that could swarm through the maze of shock he was experiencing. He looked back at Belldandy, and saw tears of gratitude in her eyes. He knew how hard it was for her to have to balance her younger sister's feelings against her affection for him. He felt like crying too; empathic tears softened his eyes. He felt so happy for his beloved girlfriend!

"Keiichi, I had wished...ever since I met you...that we all would be able to get along. Just get along..." she admitted between sobs.

"I would never leave you, my love. But I wanted Skuld to share in our love too!" Keiichi felt his heartstrings being plucked. He rolled over on his side to face Belldandy and pulled her close to his chest, feeling her sobs of joy shudder within his arms. It felt like a stormy darkness had just passed. Keiichi grinned as he realized that he now was free of Skuld's constant efforts to run interference! And somehow, this all had to do with Cevn.

"How could you know how much we are in love in just a few weeks, my friend?" he reflected.

Belldandy felt a thrill shiver up and down her body and Keiichi pulled her face gently to his and kissed her longingly on the lips. Their tongues met and danced, as they both looked deeply into each other's eyes. She ran her fingers through his black spiky hair, combing it behind his ears. She could feel his warmth against her chest, and her neck lingered in the soft sensation of his touch.

After what seemed like too short of a time, Keiichi pulled away and gently kissed her on the forehead.

"I love you so much, Bell-chan!" he whispered into her ear.

They talked excitedly about going up to Nikko in the next week. Keiichi would need to phone in for camping permits and tickets to the festival. Hokkaido would have to wait. Belldandy drew up a list of camping supplies with one of her charcoal pencils.

Keiichi looked it over and laughed.

"You want to take the whole house with you, Bell-chan! Just like a human woman," he teased her. "The object of camping is to live simply, out in the woods, just you and me and nature!"

Belldandy hit him with the sitting cushion that was in front of the computer. This started off another round of wrestling, only this time Belldandy pinned Keiichi down. She simply increased her strength and weight. Sitting astride him, she tickled him until he apologized.

"How _dare_ you compare me to a mortal woman!" she said with mock indignity.

"Okay, okay! I'm sorry...I goofed! That was a very bad thing to say."

"That's better!"

Keiichi suddenly started thinking about Cevn. He and Belldandy seemed ready to embark on a new phase of their relationship, and his new friend was confined to his room with severe injuries. Even worse, Mara had blinded him. It didn't make sense.

"Bell, I don't understand why the Almighty would cause Urd to bring Cevn here, then give him that mysterious book, and then let him get blinded by Mara. Why?" Belldandy sat up next to him, and looked thoughtfully into thin air for a moment.

"You're right, my love. How could that be? Even for the Lord, this would be pretty senseless. Not that the Almighty is senseless, of course...but His actions are often far beyond our ability to comprehend. But not _this_ removed from anything resembling a purposeful intention," she commented.

"Yeah, I mean, how could He give Cevn that book if he cannot read it!" Keiichi added. Keiichi felt an intuitive sense about Cevn; he would somehow get his eyesight back.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"You know, you guys, I don't think Cevn was meant to be blind for the rest of his life. It would be very strange that he would be left unable to read that unusual book in his possession!" Belldandy remarked.

"Wow!" Skuld exclaimed. "That really makes a lot of sense!"

Urd looked at Belldandy with a surprised face.

"What?" She thought of the event that had brought Cevn to this state and her own lack of confidence in her ability to remedy the situation. Skuld had the spunky confidence of a poker player with a royal straight flush in her hand...but Urd had her doubts.

"But, he's_ mortal_! I don't know if anyone has done what we're going to try to do this weekend. It's not just a matter of physically restoring his eyesight; there is the part of undoing all the neurological damage. Not to mention the spiritual side of things!" Urd said, keeping a solvent perspective on this.

"It has to work! It has to work! How else are we supposed to figure out what to do with that weird book he has, before Mara summons Isilblius!" Skuld interjected.

"Maybe we're supposed to simply read it to him, and he'll be able to figure it out. He doesn't need to see to be able to do that." Belldandy and Skuld both shook their heads in the negative at Urd's suggestion.

"Maybe part of it's in Braille!" Urd stated with a "rescue me, I'm stuck" look on her face.

"Fraid not, Big Sister! Face it, we're going to have to try this weekend!" Skuld said upperhandedly.

"Really? Keiichi and I are going on a camping trip this weekend! I'm really looking forward to it!" Belldandy said excitedly.

Urd rolled her eyes.

"Bell, the weekend began tomorrow," she said evenly.

"Oh! I didn't know if he meant this weekend, or next weekend!" Belldandy replied, her eyes clouded with confusion.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Keiichi is really looking forward to camping with you tomorrow, Belldandy! What did you guys do last night? He is absolutely beside himself with anticipation. Did you two finally..." Megumi asked, freshly home from school. Belldandy turned pink with embarrassment.

"_NO! _We didn't do anything different then we do all the time..."

"Which is _nothing_!" Urd snorted with disgust. "What is keeping him from plucking the most delicate flower in the garden of love's delights? Well, maybe being out in nature will make him see you in a more...natural light!" she added with a mischievous smile.

"Urd!" Belldandy shouted, turning redder and redder. Her cheeks were blushed _really_ deeply! Megumi was amused at his older brother's effect on the divine Bell-chan.

"You're still a pervert, Urd! Don't be giving my sister such a scare!" Skuld remarked icily. "Look what you've done to her now!"

Urd chucked at her sisters.

"She did it to herself, shojo girl. When you get a little older and wiser, you'll realize that Belldandy is embarrassed because we're talking about something that she really wants...but she's too prim to admit it!"

"I am not a little girl!" Skuld yelled. "I'm an _older _girl!"

"I'm not a _prim_!" Belldandy shouted.

"You're both still girls! Belldandy...well, it's obvious why you still aren't a real woman or a full Goddess! And Skuld...where's your little bra?" Urd declared, making a move towards Skuld's blouse with a practiced prying finger. Skuld panicked and tightly folded her arms over her chest, which brought laughter to all present except a now-seething Skuld and a red-faced Belldandy.

"You guys wait. You just wait! Someday, I'm going be older, and you'll all be jealous cuz' I'll be prettier than both of you!" Skuld said desperately.

"Yeah, yeah! You know it takes ten thousand years for one of us to age like a mortal would in a single year," Urd added. "Looks like you'll be as flat as the ocean for a while!"

The downcast look on Skuld's face made her immediately regret her remark. Skuld looked like she was poised to burst into tears.

"Dammit, I've done it again! When am I going to learn to keep my mouth shut!" Urd confronted herself.

"Skuld, I'm sorry!" she quickly apologized.

"Well, at least _I_ can have a boyfriend!" Skuld shot back with genuine ire. Urd felt the sabre-like sting of the remark. She looked at the floor sadly for a moment, then got up and walked to her room.

Megumi looked surprised at Urd's sudden departure, while Belldandy had a sad look in her eyes. Skuld realized that she had gone for the throat with that last comment, and Cevn's admonition about her and Urd's fights came back to her.

"Urd! I'm sooo sorry!" she yelled as she jumped up and ran after her sister.

Urd was in the hallway, leaning back against the wall, tears streaming down her eyes. Skuld stood next to her. For some reason, she noticed that the top of her head only came to be level with Urd's shoulders.

"We've gotta stop fighting like this," she said to her sister. Of all the things that Skuld could have said, she had picked the most delicate, painful thing. But then, so did Urd with her remark about Skuld's nonexistent breasts.

Urd looked at her youngest sister with a misty expression.

"Yes. We each have...snff...our limitations. It's no use..." she mumbled, then started crying again.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Megumi heard the two sisters in the hallway and started to get up to see if she could help. She was afraid that they would just resume their sibling arguing. Belldandy reached out and put a restraining hand on her shoulder, and shook her head "no".

"They've got to work this out for themselves, Megumi."

"I know. But I hate seeing them fight like this! I know how much they love each other, and yet they argue so much!"

"That is because they are the Norns of the Past and the Future. The Past is always afraid of the future, and the Future is always resentful at the past," Belldandy explained. As the Goddess of the Present, she seldom drew anger from either.

But since Mara had been appearing in their lives again, the whole household seemed to be on edge. She knew that Mara's presence accounted for the raw nerves that led to the increased conflict between the two sisters.

"They'll be okay, Megumi. They always seem to reach an accord...in their own Time."

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Urd felt so defeated. Defeated by fate. Defeated in her heart. Her defeat was so obvious that her little sister could see it plainly...and use it against her in a careless moment of heated argument. The feeling of defeat enveloped her, crushing her inside of its smothering folds.

There was nothing she could do.

But there was something she could do to help Cevn. And there was something she could do to prevent herself from hurting Skuld so much. She looked at the young Goddess standing next to her, a smaller version of herself. With all the fragility of youth...

"You're right Skuld. We have to stick together even more, now that Mara is up to her old tricks. You have no idea how much your disappearance worried Belldandy and I. I'm really sorry for saying that hateful thing to you. I promise to never say it again. And if I do say it, please remind me of my promise."

Skuld giggled at Urd's solemnity.

"But doesn't that mean that you'll say it again, if you're asking me to remind you?" she reasoned. Urd snickered at little at that.

"Yep. Someone's gotta keep you on your toes, or else you'll grow up to be a _big_ brat!" she answered.

They both laughed with relief, thankful that they were no longer taking themselves so seriously.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --


	10. Pt 10: Processional

**Part 10: Processional**

My mind was creating soundtales again. The musical language that echoed forth seemed agitated...dirge-like compositions in various melodic minor keys; resembling a fictively psychedelic Vaughan Williams. Time elongated itself apace with my blindness and immobility. I was amazed at how the absence of being able to distinguish the diurnal cycles of day and night had unsettled my nerves and increased my fatigue. My weakened body accompanied an emotional ennui.

I got the whole story from Skuld about how Mara had surreptitiously poisoned me. This explained the ataxia I struggled with, not to mention the frequent bouts of nausea. Skuld was on top of the fact that the poison had drained me of motive energy. She and Megumi took turns bringing soup and a straw for me. Sometimes, I was able to keep down the brothy miso.

Megumi joked about how my room had become the local "triage unit". Keiichi visited me in the evenings, summarizing various articles from the newspaper. Despite his well-intentioned efforts to keep me amply supplied with the intellectual pabulum of the press, I told him that his spirited presence was much more satisfying than the news blurbs. Urd also dropped by yesterday to inform me that I was going into "surgery" Saturday.

Last night, I could hardly get to sleep for want of serenity.

For some reason, my two potential benefactors were mum about the procedure, despite my inquisitiveness. I noticed a sparkedge to Urd's voice that hinted of pessimism. Skuld, of course, was possessed with her usual juvenile optimism: her enthusiasm shining forth despite Urd's apparent reservations.

Belldandy and Keiichi came in this morning to inform me that they were going to Nikko and then Chuzenji later today, for some much needed rest and recreation.

"You mean some much needed romance and randiness!" I teased. I heard Keiichi gobble a little gasp while Belldandy giggled lightly. In an excited voice, Keiichi walked me through the precise itinerary he had planned for their trip; I suggested that they try to ignore it and just have fun.

They sounded like they were planning to bask in each other's company at the park. Several travel books had informed me that Nikko was one of the most beautiful spots in Japan. Keiichi's animated description of the upcoming matsuri festivities made me want to get up out of bed and sneak away with them in a backpack. I had always held an appreciation for Japan's myriad spiritual rites and history, and I had studied pictures of the Toshogu shrine built to honor Ieyasu Tokugawa.

"I hope you guys take a lot of pictures, so that when I get my eyesight back, I'll be able to see what you've experienced," I said, trying to be cheerful. Their bubbly anticipation had done much to lift my melancholy spirits.

I felt a hand grip my shoulder.

"Cevn, I'm sure that it is the will of the Ultimate Force that your eyesight will be restored!" Belldandy stated confidently. Keiichi added that they would be thinking about me while they were vacationing this weekend, and then he wished me luck.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Urd busied herself with two tasks. First, she was readying various elixirs and potions to administer to Cevn during the 'operation' tomorrow. Second, she was helping Belldandy and Keiichi pack. Consequently, she divided herself into two teams of mini-Urds, who were industriously scampering around the house.

Belldandy had never been camping before. The idea of living in primitive conditions in the verdant embrace of nature intrigued her. She had become acclimed to the comforts of the temple compound; in the past three years she had settled into a happy lifestyle. Cooking for everyone, savoring Darjeeling tea, helping Keiichi with his motoring competitions, refereeing between Skuld and Urd, taking long lazy scented baths in the midmorning after Keiichi and Megumi left for school.

"But this isn't _just_ a camping trip!" she reminded herself cheerily. She and Keiichi were going to shelter Friday night in a youth Hostel in Nikko, and then visit the Botanical Gardens. Saturday, they would enjoy the festival, and then travel up into the resort town of Chuzenji later in the day. Camping overnight, they would hike some trails in the park on Sunday, then return home in the evening. Belldandy was beside herself with anticipation.

Keiichi had done most of the packing last night. He reexamined his list several times to make sure that nothing had been neglected. He had initially forgotten some items, such as mosquito nets and extra rolls of film. But by the end of the evening, he had been quite satisfied with how things were coming together.

"Thank heavens I don't have any tests tomorrow or Monday," he sighed to himself. He had already told the members of the club that he would be unavailable for the weekend.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

On the way to school Friday, Keiichi excitedly reviewed his plans to see if anything was amiss. After his first class, he happily realized that he had tied up all the loose ends.

"A weekend with just me and you, Bell-chan!" he daydreamed while eating a delicious bento lunch his girlfriend had made.

Soon, it was early afternoon...and Belldandy was anxiously awaiting Keiichi's return from school. One of the mini-Urds came up to her, lugging something by a strap.

"Oh, what's this?" Belldandy asked.

"It's important! This is a canteen, Bell. When you and Keiichi are thirsty, you just fill it with water and drink. You can take it with you when you are in the woods."

"Hmmm, why didn't Keiichi pack one?" Belldandy wondered aloud.

"He did, but I...er...need it for the 'operation' tomorrow. I hope you guys don't mind using this one instead," she explained. Belldandy reached down and patted mini-Urd on the head.

"You're such a good sister, always helping me and Keiichi! Thanks, Urd!" she said with a smile.

"Gotta scoot...more stuff to get ready for tomorrow. Have a _ball_, Bell!" she said as she rounded a corner.

"Good luck, Urd!" Bell yelled, cupping a hand alongside her mouth.

She almost thought she heard a snicker lingering in the air.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

After his last class, Keiichi raced home on his bike. Free at last! Today Makuhari, tonight Nikko! He rounded the last corner and peeled into the temple entrance.

"Belldandy!!" he yelled. She came out and stood on the engawa, smiling at him as she waited for him on the porch. One look at her wasn't enough...Keiichi did a double take. Belldandy was dressed in fem-cut 501s with a red plaid shirt covering a dark blue tanktop. The shirt was one of those thick flannel shirts; she had rolled the sleeves up above her elbows. She wore a pair of dark brown hiking boots. Her long brown tresses were pulled back and braided in a long thick braid running down her back, and she had an "Earth Day" cap on.

"How do I look, Keiichi?" she asked excitedly as she twirled. Keiichi had never seen his girlfriend dress so unaffectedly before! She looked like a sylvan nymph in an outdoorsman's dream calendar. Even though she was dressed for the woods, her beauty was undiminished by the simple rustic attire she sported.

"Wow...you...look _really_ ready for the great outdoors! I'm probably going to miss all the scenery because I won't be able to keep my eyes off of you, Bell-chan!" he complimented her.

"You better not, Keiichi! It isn't everyday you can see the countryside, but you see me all the time!" she teased him with a pseudo-maternal chastisement, thrilled with his warm appreciation. She had combed several catalogues without success...and finally consulted Megumi. Megumi was ofttimes Belldandy's advisor on mortal fashions. In this case, her help had been invaluable; what Belldandy herself had planned to wear...would have been totally impractical in the woods.

So she availed herself to Megumi, who came through in the nick of time with some expert shopping tips.

Keiichi kissed her on the cheek and dashed into the house, emerging with several bags of camping gear, which he stowed in the rear compartment of Bell's sidecar. After the second trip into the house, everything was stashed.

"He's being a complete gentleman...he didn't even ask for my help!" Belldandy observed with pleasure as Keiichi helped her into her sidecar. With a wide grin, he hopped on his bike and gunned it.

Instead of taking the Tohoku expressway, Keiichi opted to tour the backroads, so that they could soak in the late spring scenery. Their leisurely progress afforded ample time to revisit many pleasant memories; recollections they discussed back-and-forth as the trip progressed. After two and a half hours, the town of Nikko was nestled in front of them, just downhill on the road.

They traveled down the famous Route 119, stretching for four kilometers with dense cedars lined up on each side. In the early years of the Toshogu construction, daimyos from all over Japan competed to offer the most extravagant gifts in fealty towards the departed Shogun. Yet, as the story goes, these trees were the result of an offering of a daimyo who was one of the poorest in their ranks. Lacking resources, he could only offer cedar saplings from his home province, which he planted along the approach route. He was mocked and berated by his fellow nobles...and yet, several centuries later, his foresight had manifested into arguably the most visually arresting addition to the tombsite of Tokugawa Ieyasu, besides the shrine itself.

After enjoying the rich ambience of the cedar road, they turned up a narrow winding street that led to the hillside Youth hostel. Upon their arrival, they booked themselves as Mr. and Mrs. Morisato, giddy expressions written all over their faces. After dropping off their belongings, the couple took off back down the hill towards the town. Keiichi explained to Belldandy that the Nikko townspeople would be whipped into a frenzy tonight, preparing for the main events of tomorrow's festival, on May 18th.

Indeed it was so. Nikko's two 'downtown' districts, the Irimachi 'entrance town' and the Demachi 'exit town' with the river Daiya flowing between them, were abuzz with tourists. The central streets in Irimachi were overflowing with handlettered festival banners; all the shops had gaily decorated noren curtains and their best paper lanterns on display. Keiichi looked at Belldandy, who seemed entranced with the carnival atmosphere.

She was spright-eyed, trying to take it all in.

Meanwhile, back at the hostel room, a six-inch tall blonde girl with a golden suntan emerged from one of the backpacks.

"Whew...I made it!" She looked around the room for a place of concealment, and then settled up into the eaves that covered the paper blinds on the window.

"I wouldn't miss this for anything!" she commented aloud with glee. "It's not exactly one of groovy love hotels, but it'll do!"

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

After parking their BMW motorbike, Keiichi and Belldandy walked down the street leading to the Botanical Gardens. The main street was hilly, and it was much more crowded than he had expected; he had to _search_ for a place to park his motorbike. Nevertheless, the walk was enchanting. Obaasans in their stylish kimonos mixed with weirdly-dressed gaijin tourists in the densely crowded streets. The sidewalks were filled with men in yukata and women in kimono...leading Keiichi's imaginings to believe that he and Bell had traveled back in time to the ukiyo of the Genroku Era, circa 1720. Despite the modern trappings, the streetscene took on the "Floating World" ambience of the early 18th century. The ornately colored paper lanterns were alit, glowing like fireflies even though twilight was a couple of hours away. They passed the Post Office, and then Keiichi spied the famous Shin-kyo Bridge further down the road.

The plaintive strains of a traditional ballad reached for their ears as they passed a shakuhachi player in a stall along the street.

"Oh, it's so _beautiful_!" Belldandy exclaimed, and they lingered while he played a couple of folk songs. Keiichi tipped him with a smile and some yen and then they arrived at the famous bridge. It was an orangish rust-colored affair, very ancient and therefore imposing to the eye. They walked up to the midtrestle, and looked over the small river running underneath with its serene flax slabbling.

Belldandy suddenly felt a dark cloud pass over her heart as they strolled to the other side of the bridge. Keiichi noticed that her enthusiasm seemed to momentarily flee.

"What's up Bell-chan?"

"I just felt a malicious omen as we walked over the bridge. Let's go, Keiichi!" she said urgently, lightly tugging at his jacket sleeve.

"Go back? We just got here, m'lady!" Keiichi lightly complained.

"No, honey, I mean let's just go over to the other side and see the garden you've been telling me about! I'm sure that what I felt was just the echoes of the history of this bridge!"

Keiichi wondered if there had been any lover's suicides at the site of Shin-kyo Bridge. Knowing how popular the shinju ethos was in the 17th and 18th centuries, there probably were many ghosts of anguished lover's souls floating about, restless all these centuries after their double suicides. He decided against telling Belldandy about this in her present agitated state...then felt foolish because she probably was more than aware of the displaced spirits here.

As they walked away towards the Botanical Gardens, a six-inch tall figure watched them from under the bridge. Seated on one of the supporting piers, the dwarfish woman sighed with relief.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

As they walked hand-in-hand through the Botanical Garden, Keiichi marveled at the astounding variety of plants. Walls of short hedges lined with jinko trees separated patches of finely trimmed grasses; in another section, small shrubs vied for attention with miniature plum trees. Carefully placed stones accented groves of tended flowers. Alongside the path were an assortment of antique shallow wooden troughs added an aquatic touch. Here and there, summer houses waysided the rock path, their thatches roofs and decorative trellises providing a quaint place to repose and enjoy the garden scenery.

The sum effect was a visually intoxicating beautification.

In former times, the garden was an estate belonging to a prominent daimyo in the Tokugawa era; its layout was elaborate, yet stylish. The stone footpaths encircled several 'islands' of luxuriant plant growth and artisan statuary. After ten minutes of leisurely strolling, Belldandy stopped to look at a grove of miniature trees.

"Keiichi, what are these little trees? They're so _cute_! I feel like a giant standing next to them!" she said with the bubbly fascination of a little girl. Keiichi was so happy to simply witness her captivation with the bonsai trees. He explained to her about the process of trimming back the branches for generations...resulting in these dwarf pines with their branches trained to resemble the flattened clouds found in classical Kamakura art scrolls.

Despite the fact that Belldandy's perspective spanned millennia, Keiichi was well aware of how fascinating life for her was when she was in 'mortal' perspective. Long ago, when they first got together...he wondered aloud how he could impress a Goddess who seemed to know everything. Belldandy assured him in no uncertain terms that experiencing life on the Earthrealm, with an Earthrealm timeframe and material manifestation, was indeed new and wondrous to her. She explained that she was responsible for a Wish Sector that included a thousand inhabited worlds; consequently, she didn't have time to "stop and smell the roses" because of her busy schedule. Granting wishes was wonderful, but it didn't allow her to immerse herself in the _life_ of the worlds she visited. But now that she was sharing her life with Keiichi on the Earthrealm, she noted to him that she was learning to view her existence within a different perspective. Besides, she had added, part of the wonder she felt was knowing that she was _with_ him...experiencing his sense of joy in his surroundings.

Which freed him to be genuinely pleased at her delight with Earthrealm sights and sounds...after all, this was his treat for her.

And she was eating up the sightseeing like a child going to Tokyo Disneyland for the first time!

Rounding another bend, they saw a small koi pond set against a low hill. Delicate marble statues of Shinto deities and Buddhist stupas circumferenced the pond, creating a hallowed air of sanctuary. Keiichi bought a bag of fish food from the vendor, and then they walked over the quaint little bridge to the island in the middle of the pond to feed the carp. Despite being well fed, the carp transformed the lake into a bubbling, seething cauldron each time a handful of fish food was thrown on the surface. In the approaching dusk, the trees were starting to stretch shadowserpents upon the glassy water; they decided to return to town.

They walked leisurely back, passing the Tamozawa Villa, another preserved remnant of the feudal days. The large wooden building that served as the main mansion looked like it hadn't aged a single year, let alone several hundred. They stopped to read the sign; it was now a museum, but unfortunately, visiting hours had already passed by.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

The clouds were turning rouge-purple by the time they reached the town center. Keiichi spied an elderly ekisha and hatched a playful idea in his mind.

"I wonder what would happen if the old guy read Belldandy's palms? Would he be able to determine her fortune? Would the ekisha be able to determine if Belldandy was a divine being?" he thought mischievously as he eyed the ekisha's stall. He had always wondered about the abilities of the street fortunetellers...now was a chance to put his curiosity to the test!

"Bell! Look...over there! See that stall? He's an ekisha, a fortuneteller! You wanna check him out and have him tell your fortune?" he announced. Belldandy clasped her hands in front of her breast with excitement.

"Oh goodness, that sounds so fun!" she said gaily.

"You be careful, Bell-chan. Don't make it too obvious that you're a Goddess!" Keiichi whispered in her ear.

"Ah, young people! Here for the famous matsuri? Approach this humble stall and have your fortunes divined!" the elderly man hawked at the couple. They strolled over, Keiichi trying to avoid looking too excited as he closely examined the stall. In the middle of a white lace cloth, a large crystal ball set in a pewter base dominated the table. A series of lit candles were arranged in a semicircle, with all sorts of traditional mystic paraphernalia and paper charms hanging from the roof of the stall.

"Ah, young lovers come to see the Festival, I see!" he said to them.

"How obvious. Whatta faker!" Keiichi thought with avid disappointment.

"May I see the young lady's hand, perhaps?" he asked. Before Keiichi could protest, Belldandy was making friends with the guy. Soon, she had her hand in his, and he was tracing the lines on her palm with his gnarled fingers. He explained his palmistry method while he examined her hand. According to him, each palm possessed outlines that could be interpreted as a unique series of numbers...with which he could utilize the traditional Chinese yi auguries to concoct an accurate prognostication.

Keiichi was clearly impressed with his clever syncretism of Western and Eastern methods.

"Hmmm...you have a very long lifeline, without interruptions. I believe you must be a very old soul, somehow reincarnated in a young body. These lines here indicate that you are gentle in nature, a little naive at times, and very domestic in outlook," he announced. He turned to Keiichi and winked.

"Good wife material, son!" the fortuneteller added. Keiichi grimaced at this not-too-subtle observation. Yet, Belldandy beamed a smile at him, putting an exclamation mark on the elder's observation.

"Ahh, but this..._this_ is odd! You have a link here between these two parallel lines. If I didn't know any better, I would say that you are a divine being, perhaps a megami or bodhisattva. The spiritual side of your being is more pronounced than anyone I have read in a long time!" he exclaimed with genuine surprise.

"Ahhh, heheh...ulp!" Keiichi's eyes grew wide at this. This ekisha was the real thing!

"But you and I know that there is no such thing as Goddesses on this mortal plane! This 21st century has seen to that...regrettably," he opined with a sad inward-looking expression. Recovering his good cheer, he smiled at Belldandy. She turned her head to Keiichi and winked. The ekisha bent closer and his wizened eyes peered at the lower part of Bell's palm.

"Neh? This base of your palm indicates that in the near future you will have some kind of encounter with a jealous adversary. Also, you should beware of large animals and water. You will have a very interesting weekend here at Nikko. Don't linger too long at the festival parade! And in the park, be sure to bring a blanket when you hike. Also...you should also have birth control handy," he finished.

Keiichi felt a rush of panic...and red-faced indelicacy. _Of course_ he didn't bring any condoms! Did this mean that he and Belldandy were going to 'do it' this weekend? He certainly hadn't planned on anything of the sort! He was in the thrills of anticipation about this getaway many times on the way home from school this week. But when sexual fantasies accompanied his excitement, he had decided that (for his part) this would be a definitely be a chaste weekend, no matter what.

He still wasn't ready to cross _that_ line yet...then his reflections were abruptly halted when he heard Belldandy question the palm reader.

"Why would I need to have birth control? Whose birth should I control? Should _I_ have this birth control handy? Or should I leave it in my boyfriend's hands?" Belldandy asked.

Keiichi groaned aloud at Bell's gaffe, then watched helplessly as the elderly fortuneteller became flustered at her innocent, yet naive question. He felt a blush flush over his cheeks as the usual crowd of spectators tittered with amusement.

"Geez, Bell, not here of all places!" Keiichi thought, sharply mortified at her naivety. His expectations of being amused by the fortuneteller and Belldandy were rapidly turning into an imbroglio.

"That's something..ahem..you need to talk over with your boyfriend, not with me, my dear! I'm merely an old clairvoyant, not a couples counselor!" he said, his balded forehead blushing. He pulled off his hat and fanned himself with it as Belldandy continued to pour out questions.

"Keiichi, what does he mean? What does a blanket have to do with birth control? Why do I..?"

"Ah..ehh..hhh..uhhh..haha! Thank you very much, sir! She's just joking! You know...being silly! S..sorry!" a flushed Keiichi explained as he hastily gave the fortuneteller two five-hundred yen coins. He grabbed Belldandy by the hand, and extricated her by half pulling, half guiding his sweet but confused girlfriend back towards the main street.

"Keiichi, what did he say that got you upset about...?" she asked innocently.

"Later, Bell," he answered her unfinished question.

_Whew!!_

"That was too hairy-narry to be believed!" Keiichi observed as he mentally reflected upon his narrow escape. He was glad Urd wasn't around, otherwise he would have had to gag her to keep her from laughing to death.

On the return walk to his motorbike, they both looked up at the night sky, and saw a shooting star. They kissed each other softly and hugged each other lazily, then motored back to the hostel.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

I was reflecting on all the different types of Japanese students that I had met at Nekomi. There was a member of the Motor Club who wore dreadlocks. At first, I thought this was strange, but then I realized that it was just my ethnocentrism kicking in. The Japanese were no different than the Americans in their propensity to mimic styles. Take Ootaki for instance. Here was a guy who was obviously influenced by the mid-80s punk movement. Yet he was Japanese, even if he looked funny with his spiky-platinum dyed hair.

"Funny in my eyes...but dyed-in-the-cloth natural in his perspective," I corrected myself. How do I justify judging a culture that imitates another culture, when I haven't even see the authentic thing, as in the rasta hairdo of Keiichi's friend? I had never been to Jamaica.

It reminded me of my first Xmas in Hawaii...how it just didn't feel the same without snow! It was strange to see the traditional holiday decorations on display, but in 70-degree F evening breezes! I tried to imagine what Christmas would be like here in this decidedly non-Christian country. I observed to myself once again that living in Japan was like moving to another planet.

The more I thought, the more I became mentally disoriented. My inability to see anything hampered my ability to tell what time of day it was, or how my injuries were healing, or even who was in my room. Several times I noticed my two cats, who seemed to be keeping a feline bedside vigil. I wasn't sure which was which, until I distinguished them by the softness of their coats. Pho's fur was much silkier then Xue Shizi's.

I prayed long and hard for Urd and Skuld to be able to restore my eyesight. I almost felt cheated by this glimmer of hope...it was only serving to keep me from surrendering fully to the inevitable fact that I _was_ blind. I tried to sit up, and still wasn't able to. My internal body sense, or proprioception, was distorted by the lack of visual evidence to coordinate with movement. I heard the door slide open and someone setting something heavy down next to my head.

"Hi Cevn. This is the big day!" Skuld said excitedly. I wished all doctors would share her enthusiasm; it would make the role of being a patient far less nerve-wracking.

"Treat the patient, not the disease," I remembered one physician was fond of saying. Skuld seemed to sense my quietude.

"I brought my Surgeomatrix Mk I mini-transporter to put your eyes back where they belong," she said sweetly. I felt a series of pins-and-needles poking sensations going up my chest.

"Skuld! What's happening!" I said in a panicky voice.

"Oh, that's just big sister! Actually, four of her!"

"Urd! Are you in mini-Urd form?" I asked in a falsely polite voice.

"Oh, hi Cevn! Yep, there's four of me! How did you guess?" she said matter-of-factly.

"Well, Urd, did you ever stop to think that when you are small, your shoes get small too, and when you have on the high heels you normally wear...THEY POKE ME LIKE NEEDLES!"

I heard loud snickering from Skuld at Urd's screwup. Here I was, lying on my back with four mini-Urds prancing around my chest, their tiny shoes sharping me like cactus spines with each step.

"Oh...Ooops! I'm so sorry!" the mini-Urds chorused apologetically as they clambered off of my chest, leaving more pinpricks.

"She couldn't even jump off, could she?" I muttered in a resigned voice.

"Urd, I can't believe that you're going to try and fix his eyesight when you're so... ignorant!" Skuld said with disappointment.

"I _said_ I was sorry, didn't I? Okay?" a high-pitched voice groused.

"Hey, hey, it's all right! Just a little screw up," I interjected, trying to prevent the oncoming argument. The last thing I wanted in the world was to have these two at tenterhooks right before they ushered me into the world of "surgery" or whatever they were planning to do.

I felt the patter of tiny feet on my chest, as a mini-Urd made some comment about how I looked like Gulliver. I chuckled at her cutesy-obvious joke...at least she was trying to make amends.

"How about this, Cevn?" she said as she marched in place. It felt soothing, like when a cat or a masseuse was kneading the muscles.

Another mini-Urd was at each shoulder, rubbing my muscles into relaxation.

"Keep that up for another hour and I'll marry all four of you!" I joked. The seriousness of this situation seemed to offset my inclination to be affrighted of women being so close to me in my room. Normally, I would have been so freaked out that I would have ran out of the room, or at least been paralyzed with nervousness. But blinded and feeling greatly weakened, there was no way that I could give in to my fearful urges.

I heard a chorus of giggling from the Urds. Skuld brushed my hair back and explained to me about the functions of the micro transporter.

"In a moment, I'm going to lift your head and rest it on this cradle. Then I'll pull the transporter chamber above your head. Urd will give you something to knock you out, because you have to be absolutely still for this."

"Yeah, I'm a knockout, honey," a mini-Urd whispered in my ear. "Actually, I need four of me, two for each your babyblues, because I have a lot of intricate work to do before and after Skuld gets your eyes back where they belong."

"After Urd prepares your old eyes, I'll use the Surgeomatrix Mk I to beam your eyes back in their sockets, cell-layer by cell-layer," Skuld explained. I didn't hear much more of their explanation because I was feeling very pensive about the complexity of what they were attempting. I felt a kiss on my cheek from Skuld.

"That was for saving my life the other day. Are you ready?" I nodded my head. A moment later I felt something being poured into my mouth. A mini-Urd told me to count to three.

"One megami-sama, two megami-sama, three..."

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"He's out like a broken light bulb!" one of the mini-Urds noted.

Skuld wheeled her machine behind Cevn, and placed his head on the padded base and strapped his forehead and jaw. She gingerly pulled off the strip of cloth covering his eyes; the sight of the wound causing her to feel sickened anew at Mara's treachery.

Two mini-Urds stood on either side of his head, dressed in ultra-petite surgical fatigues and masks. They poured several concoctions into his empty eye sockets, which quickly formed into a gelatinous mixture. During this time, Skuld was fine-adjusting the Surgeomatrix Mk I. It resembled a microscope, with a hooded viewport at the top of the transportation chamber, then several cone-like protrusions from the bottom of the chamber that ended about a foot from Cevn's head.

A mini-Urd handed her two sealed eyeballs, and Skuld placed them in the chamber. She looked at the jelly inside the empty eye sockets...it would help integrate the nerve connections by making the flesh malleable.

She signaled Skuld, and then the long process of transport-then check began. The first small bits of nerve and humor were transported, and all four mini-Urds checked the nerve connections.

It would be a long day.

Megumi was trying to keep her attention on her schoolwork, but she felt caught up in the drama of Skuld and Urd's efforts to heal Cevn. They would have been going to the Noh theatre tonight, if it hadn't been for that awful incident with Mara. After worrying for a couple of minutes, Megumi returned her attention to her textbook on stable and unstable electrical field dynamics. She knew that study would keep her from getting snared up in the whole mess. Besides, there was nothing she could do to change the course of the "operation".

She just wanted Cevn back, with his eyesight intact.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Keiichi had awakened to find that Belldandy was in the shower. A strong-but-fleeting desire to sneak a peek in the bathroom crossed his mind. Instead he made the bed and unpacked some breakfast items. He reminded himself that his sudden sexual impulses were completely normal...but yet he felt a flash of embarrassed apprehension in view of the fortuneteller's prediction last night.

Belldandy emerged from the bathroom with a silk yukata robe and her hair rolled up in a towel. Keiichi imagined that she looked so much the part of a wife. Keiichi usually was up and off to school before Belldandy did her toilette, so he rarely got to see her in dishabille like this. She smiled at him, and he kissed her on the cheek. Keiichi showered next, and when he emerged, Belldandy had changed into a sleeveless floral pattern blouse with a traditional Yggdrasil crosshatch patterned skirt and shin-high boots.

During breakfast, they discussed their plans for the day. They would head to the town center, joining the queue at the Shin-kyo Bridge over the Daiya River. There, they would see the procession cross the vermilion-hued bridge on its way to the Toshogu Shrine. This was actually the second day of the Festival; huge throngs of spectators would line the path of the procession. The procession would have over 1000 participants, dressed in authentic costumes from the three ages of feudal Japan. After following the route from the Futaarasan Shrine to the Toshogu, they would perform several historic dances and recreate an archery competition dating back to the Kamakura era.

Finding parking would be impossible, so they decided to hoof it. The sun was barely up when they started off, and by the time they reached the Shin-kyo Bridge, there was already a crowd gathering. The day was birthed in beauty; faint wisps of clouds brushed the sky as a breezing reprieve cast away the humid daytime climate.

They settled into a place along the roadway to watch the parade, close to the procession route.

An hour later, the first procession gained the bridge. Keiichi saw an august assemblage of Shinto priests surrounding the first of three portable shrines in the rearmost part of the blocks-long procession. At the front of the procession was a group of mounted cavalrymen, followed by spearmen dressed in feudal-era samurai armor. Keiichi and Belldandy found an opening and stood hand in hand at the inside edge of the crowd, next to the tethered ropes.

Moments later, the marchers in the procession were passing right in front of them. Belldandy was heartfilled with appreciation of the animated, yet solemn procession. The elaborate costumes and colorful pennants were almost too much to be visually absorbed in just one viewing. The mirrors that represented the spirits of the three famous shoguns shone brilliantly in the sun at the rear of the procession. The portable shrines were carried by groups of men who were dressed in traditional samurai civilian costume.

The shrines themselves were carved with very complex patterns that glinted and shadowed in the morning sun. Ornate leafed gold and colorful embroidered costumes were everywhere. The Shinto priests and priestesses were dressed in brilliant robes. The sum result of the processional was one of runaway historic splendor. Belldandy thought the samurai group that followed looked particularly vicious and threatening in their full suits of armor...she had to remind herself that they were just actors.

Then she noticed a spearman looking at Keiichi with a dazed look on his face.

Keiichi was too involved in the pageantry of the parade to react to the spearman who had broken rank and started rushing at him with a lowered pikespear. But some of the people in the crowd around him quickly began to disperse with shocked screams. Wondering why, he looked right and left...and suddenly he felt a superhuman pull on his arm from Belldandy, almost jerking him off his feet.

"Wh...what?" he yelled as he saw a spearman racing towards him with a spear leveled at his chest. The crowd screamed as Belldandy hefted Keiichi out of the way.

"Keiichi! Behind you!" she yelled. Keiichi turned to see _another_ spearman break rank and chase after him. The crowd was like an alive thing, pulling away from the assaultive samurai-actors like a pool of water on a flat surface. Keiichi saw an opening and ran for dear life. Belldandy shielded him with her body, and then one of the spearman took aim and loosed his spear. She gave him a stern look as the spear broke against her arm as she batted it aside.

"Surely this isn't part of the procession, chasing after terrified spectators!" she admonished the spearman.

There were several more spearmen attempting to form a phalanx and corner Keiichi away from the main procession. About a dozen foot soldiers were attempting to drive a wedge in between Belldandy and Keiichi.

"This is...unbelievable!" Keiichi yelled as he was chased. Another spearman aimed a spear and loosed it with a deft throw. Belldandy cast up a warding shield; the spear bounced off of it and fell to the ground.

"How could you miss him like that, you moron!" the leader of the spearman shouted as he cuffed his subordinate on the head with the flat of his katana. Belldandy overheard this and looked at the head spearman. His slack expression and fiery glazed eyes were unearthly...as it became all too obvious that he was possessed.

"It's Mara again!" she yelled.

Keiichi had sprinted in a semicircle to avoid his pursuers; fortunately for him the spearmen were slowed down by the bulk of the heavy samurai armor. He could easily outrun them. Not to mention that his full-tilt dashing pace was fueled by being scared out of his wits. He heard Belldandy mention Mara and thought quickly.

"Belldandy! Make a move towards the shrines; those things with the metallic mirrors!" he shouted in between gulps of air as he turned towards the shrine Kami at the rear of the procession. If his hunch was right, the spearmen that Mara had possessed would not be able to approach because of the presence of the holy relics and charms.

Belldandy accompanied him, her skirt dancing in the breeze as she dashed alongside her boyfriend. Chased by a handful of spearman, they raced by the first 50 or so marching samurai dressed in traditional noncombatant costumes.

"This is so silly...so obvious!" Keiichi shouted between bellowdeep gasps. "Even for Mara, this is sloppy!"

They reached the base of the procession, which consisted of a bevy of Shinto dignitaries and blood descendants of Tokugawa Ieyasu. Out of breath, the couple stopped near the shrines.

"What is the meaning of this gross act of disrespect to our shrine!" one of the aged Shinto priests yelled at them.

"You'll see in a moment!" Keiichi shouted back, out of breath from his dash to safety. He gestured over his shoulder with his thumb...and almost on cue, a dozen spearman arrived, looking menacing with their lowered spears. Keiichi thought the group resembled one of the gangs in a comic samurai TV drama. They slowly moved forward, growling curses and yells as the Shinto priests formed a protective semicircle in front of the portable shrines. Keiichi and Belldandy backed towards the priests and joined their ranks.

"They've gone mad!" the head priest shouted. "Don't come any closer, you're ruining the sanctity of this procession! You may be volunteers for the parade, but these shrines are National Cultural Treasures! Go away! Begone!!"

Another priest confronted them angrily.

"This annual procession is a solemn event, important to the dignity of Nikko and the Toshogu Shrine. Yet you guys seem to forget that it is a parade, and instead you want to play at being ronin attacking the sohei."

The spearman snarled angrily and pressed even closer. The head priest waved a wand with numerous strips of golden paper at them.

"Back! Back, thou fox-spirit possessed mortals!" he yelled with religious dignity. They seemed to waver in the face of his shaking gohei.

"Damn, that's the mother of all good luck charms! We're done for!" the head spearman uttered before collapsing to the ground. The rest of the errant company of soldiers suddenly looked around with confused aspects.

"What are we doing here? We're supposed to be towards the front of the procession, not right here next to the shrines..."

While the soldier-actors and the priests were arguing amongst themselves with astonished voices, Belldandy and Keiichi had found a bench along the cryptomeria tree-lined avenue leading to the shrine temple and sat down panting for breath. Belldandy was only slightly fatigued, but Keiichi was drawn over with his hands on his knees gasping for breath. She gently ran her hand up and down his back, and his exhaustion immediately disappeared.

Keiichi felt Belldandy brushing her hand on his back and felt a sense of being revived. He smiled at her, knowing that she was using her powers to remove his exhaustion. Once more, his divine girlfriend had saved his life.

"Sorry, Bell-chan. I didn't think our little trip to Nikko would be this exciting!" he managed to say with a smile. She returned his smile with one of her own.

"It's_ always_ a sweet adventure to be with you, Keiichi!" she assured him. Then she frowned.

"We have to be on the lookout for Mara. Her next attack won't be so blatant, I believe!" she stated flatly. Keiichi looked upwards.

"Never a dull moment, huh, Bell?"

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

The rest of the procession was all pomp and ceremony. Group after group of costumed participants traveled up the hillpath to the Toshogu Shrine. The large throngs of spectators were snapping pictures galore. To Keiichi and Belldandy, it was like traveling through time. Keiichi looked at the rapt face of his girlfriend.

"This must bring back memories for her. I wonder if she was working at the Goddess Relief Office back then?" he reflected. Belldandy turned to him and nodded, as she had heard his unspoken questions. She leaned over and whispered in his ear.

"I'll tell you all about my memories sometime, dear!"

When the Minamoto-era marchers walked by dressed with helmets adorned with animal horns, she described an episode from one of her wishgranting assignments. In the 12th century, Yoritomo Minamoto's mother had wished with all her maternal might for the Taira to spare her son. Belldandy related that she was assigned by the GRO to this case, and had granted this desperate maternal wish, sparing her son from an order of execution. Then she had watched through the decades with dismay as Yoritomo grew up to become the first Shogun of Japan, often by using bloodthirsty tactics.

Keiichi knew about the renowned story from grade school. Yoritomo, with the help of his brother Yoshitsune, had overthrown the Taira dynasty, decisively defeating them at the battle of Dan-no-ura in Nagato. After this victory he turned his wrath against his brother in a fit of jealousy. Attacking Yoshitsune with a superior force, Yoritomo caused Yoshitsune to commit suicide. Keiichi listened with bated breath to her tale. A jolt of almost electrical astonishment ran down his spine.

"You mean to say that you caused the Taira to spare Yoritomo Minamoto! That means that _you_ were responsible for seven centuries of Shogun rule in Japan!" he said with an electric charge to his voice. Belldandy bowed her head, looking momentarily ashamed. Keiichi noticed her reaction and mentally kicked himself for being so callous.

"Uh...I really didn't mean that as criticism, or in a bad way, Bell-chan! I was just taken aback, that's all. Sure, some of the shoguns were really evil despotic rulers. But many of them were also great men of government, and their efforts to keep Japan unified prevented lots of wars!" he said, belatedly trying to rescue the sinking mood. He looked at his divine girlfriend, and saw that her guilty expression had been replaced with sadness.

"Keiichi, it isn't within our power to foresee what the result of granting a wish will be. I had no foreknowledge that sparing his execution would have such grave results for your people," she said with a sigh. Keiichi frowned, not used to seeing this despondent side of his Divine girlfriend.

"Ahh...sometimes, the terrible burden of being a Goddess is seeing the good wishes that you grant turn sour over the years," she sighed with a distant look in her eyes, as if she was contemplating weighty matters of time and being. Recovering herself, she turned to him and smiled.

"Don't you get any ideas about being a modern-day Shogun, dear!" she said with a giggle. Keiichi looked at her, and started to laugh.

"Nope. No way! I'm too good-hearted for that. I had a hard enough time running the N.I.T. Motor Club for a couple of weeks, let alone all of Japan! Besides, I think Tamiya is more suited for the job of 21st century Shogun than I am!" he joked. They both broke into clarion laughter at his observation.

The procession wrapped up with the solemn parade of the portable shrines. Up close, the mikoshi formed an almost benedictory conclusion to the march. There was an assortment of musicians accompanying the shrines, banging gongs and drums. At the top of the pathway, they followed the procession as it passed through the Yomeimon gate of Toshogu Shrine. Belldandy was entranced as the volunteers performed ancient ritualistic dances on the sacred stage. She knew that these were handed down from generations past. Then, the portable shrine palanquins were returned to their houses for a year.

Keiichi and Belldandy remained at the Yomeimon Gate after the end of the parades. It was astonishingly ornate, a sort of Japanese rococo. It was nicknamed the "Twilight Gate" because one could linger from dawn until twilight admiring its complex carvings and reliefs. Keiichi had read somewhere that it was one of the most elaborately decorated structures on the earth. Belldandy commented that, in its own way, it reminded her of the ornate central computer core in the Yggdrasil Mainframe building.

They crisscrossed through the temple courtyards, stopping frequently to admire the richness of the buildings and gates. Late in the day, they walked back down the tree-lined boulevard as the late afternoon sun started to wane. Keiichi felt like he had been transported to another world, both by the historical procession and Belldandy's tale of Yoritomo. They stopped at several souvenir vendor stalls and bought various memorabilia for the temple compound and their friends, including some blessed gohei papers.

As they reached the youth hostel where they were staying, they saw a group of college-aged students gathered around the TV in the main room, animatedly discussing the news.

"Didya see it?" "Yeah, wasn't that a trip! "Incredible...right here in Nikko!" "What kinda drugs were they on?"

Keiichi and Belldandy joined them as the local news interviewed the head Shinto priest. Apparently, some of the marchers in the procession had been possessed, and had turned on the crowd and chased off some spectators:

_"What do you attribute these unusual actions to, sir?"_ the interviewer asked respectfully.

_"Hmmm, I think that the Gods were angered because of the numerous incidences of government corruption this year. They decided to give us a warning to keep us from being ignorant of the need to be virtuous,"_ the head priest answered with cleric dignity.

That was all they heard, because the college students began to laugh and argue raucously at the elderly priest's comments. Shrugging his shoulders as they headed towards their room, Keiichi teased Belldandy.

"See! I can't take you _anywhere_!" he exclaimed. She smiled innocently at him, as if to say "Who...Me?"

They went upstairs to their room, and once inside started laughing uncontrollably.

Mara's attack had been a Waterloo...a dismal failure and a much-needed source of mirth. They gathered their belongings and paid their bill, then climbed on Keiichi's bike and were off to Chuzenji for a night and day of camping.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

On the second story of the Yomeimon gate, unnoticed amidst the elaborate decorations, Mara grumbled to herself.

"Those incompetents! I wish I would have had _genuine_ samurai-- they would have gotten the job done right! Instead, these costumed poseurs just bungled things up! What's more, that damned priest somehow knew that my spells of possession are allergic to charms! What a pompous ass...blaming it on the government!" she grumbled, feeling rueful because of her foiled plans.

She had been hard at work for a week, and had nearly finished creating the summoning circle for Isilblius. Worn out from the tediousness of her task, Mara had decided to take a day off and plague the Nikko procession. Then she noticed Belldandy and Keiichi!

"What a devilish stroke of luck!" she thought with waggish delight. She spied on them and heard their disclosure about being on a vacation. True to her Demonic mindset, Mara decided to wreck some low-level havoc in their lives.

She had been very successful in the past weekend. She had obtained the God's Language portion of the book Cevn had. Not the full thing, because Urd had concealed the fact that the Goddesses had just begun their translation. But it was enough to construct the final parts of the summoning spell and mandala.

"Tit for tat, one good deception deserves another," she thought, realizing that Cevn would be dead by now. Maybe that was why that blessed Belldandy and her drooling mortal love slave were here...so that they could avoid looking Death in the eyes.

"He should have died a few days ago," Mara noted to herself. She remembered having mixed feelings about blinding him. Normally, she wasn't that rough on someone she possessed, but something seemed to impel her towards extra viciousness. It was part and parcel of her job as a Demon Grief Office agent to perform something impish, like having one of her subjects undress in public or spill sake on the boss's wife and then make a pass at her.

She almost felt bad for Cevn in a way, because he really did have good Demonic potential. She shouldn't have treated him so cruelly...but then again, as the mortals are fond of saying, "to make an omelet, you have to break a few eggs!"

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Skuld felt beads of sweat lining her brow as she continued her piecemeal transport of Cevn's eyes. Each segment of cells had to be precisely aligned with the previously transported section. She and Big Sister had been at it for hours. Normally, she would have been exhausted, but she was driven by a fierce determination to recompense Cevn for his actions a week earlier. She watched the mini-Urds feverishly working with small surgical tools and beakers.

Skuld had never imagined in her wildest dreams that she would have encountered so much adventure as an Earth Trainee. She felt disgusted by the physical harm done to Cevn; but yet she had force herself to maintain a detached perspective while working with the Surgeomatrix Mk I.

Urd was mentally driven as well. The sheer concentration she employed while being split into five parts was enormous, especially in the light of her suspended license. She only had a slender margin of Goddess powers to work with. Urd knew that when this whole thing was over, she would have a massive headache to attend to. It wasn't just the matter of being split into five small replicas of herself; four of these mini-Urds were involved in some very delicate work. But everything seemed to be going well. They had started back at the optic nerve, and then progressed to the fovea and retina. 

That was hours ago. Now they were finishing up with the outer layers of the vitreous humor, and then they would work on the pupil/iris. Mortal eyes were extremely complicated for such small organs, the result of billions of years of evolution.

"I just hope that we can replicate what took so long to perfect," Urd thought to herself.

Occasionally, she would send one of her selves off to offer a progress report to Megumi. She was still curious as to why Megumi was so interested in Cevn's welfare. They were all emotionally invested in this operation, to be sure, but Megumi's interest seemed to border on some kind of reverent puppy love. Urd, as the self-proclaimed Goddess of Love, was intrigued by this.

"Now that would be quite a complication! Cevn and Keiichi's little sister! It would almost be fun!" she though whimsically. Then she felt a twinge deep inside her followed by a sense of disappointment. It would be hilarious, but another part of her felt an unexpected hint of sadness at the thought.

During her reports, Urd listened intently to any nuances in Megumi's voice that would disclose that she was indeed in love with Cevn. After the third visit to her room, Megumi informed Urd that she felt like she had known Cevn all of her life. Urd noted to herself that this kind of statement was definitely an indication that Megumi was in love with Cevn. Unexpectedly, she felt a sudden rivalry with Megumi, which painted her mood with curiosity.

"Why would _I_ feel this way towards Megumi? It's not like _I'm_ attracted to Cevn!" she thought. Pondering this point, Urd returned to his room. She decided that she would talk it over with Belldandy next week and attempt to sort out her feelings.

Hours later, it was well into the evening when they finished. Urd had fashioned a set of eyelids and she covered his eyes with them, then poured an elixir onto a two cotton balls and placed them on his eyes. Skuld covered this up with a long strip of cloth, then sat back against a wall, ready to collapse with fatigue. Urd merged with her other three mini-selves and sat next to her youngest sister.

"We did a good job, didn't we, Skuld?" Urd remarked with more than a bit of pride in their work. Skuld looked tired, but her eyes shone with an aura of cheerfulness. She looked at her youngest sister with a mixture of respect and gratitude.

"Yeah! Now all we have to do is wait! I _knew_ that my promise to Cevn would come true!" Skuld exclaimed with a happy voice stretched raspy with fatigue. Urd smiled at her younger sister.

During the surgery, she explained to Urd why her promise to Cevn about restoring his eyesight was so important. Urd had thought this was another one of Skuld's childish fancies until she saw how the young black-haired Goddess had poured herself into her work today.

She wondered how Belldandy and Keiichi were doing as she felt Skuld sleepily rest her head on her shoulder and doze off. Urd was definitely tired, so she took a hint from her sister and closed her eyes.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Keiichi and Belldandy reached Chuzenji campgrounds at twilight. He struck up a lantern and set up their tent, while Belldandy watched the woods for signs of Mara. By the time he finished, it was nightfall; so Keiichi wandered into the forest to find some wood to build a fire. He located a small kiosk that had firewood for sale, and then he returned with several logs. The crisp night air smelled wonderful...there was no trace of the odors of the urban setting here. He looked up and could see stars beginning to emerge in the darkening sky.

Starting the campfire reminded him of childhood trips with his parents. Belldandy watched Keiichi with keen interest as he started the fire, gradually nursing it into a warm flame. She was so glad that he had given up smoking soon after meeting her. She found herself thoroughly connected to the natural setting. She compassed the woods with her eyes, and discerned hundreds of dryads, earth spirits and animals living in joyous harmony with their mortal guests. Listening carefully, the woods seemed aglow with life. Insect chirps vied with the breathing of dozens of small badgers and foxes. A mesmerizing symphony of ululations filled the night. The celestial firmament was breathtaking.

The wind...the wind was simply incredible. After spending most of her time in the temple compound and Makuhari, Belldandy wasn't fully prepared for the inland wind. Unlike the tempestuous oceanside winds, this wind was much more subtler, more serene. Her heart was filled with mellow joy as she absorbed the nuances of her surroundings.

Keiichi returned with a pair of blankets. He set one on the ground for them to sit on. He sat next to Belldandy, and wrapped them both with the second blanket, to share. Belldandy snuggled next to him, and he rested his arm on her shoulders, running his hand up and down her back. Wordlessly, they sat watching the flames lick towards the night stars.

"Belldandy, what do you think our future will be? I mean, yours mine together?" he asked. Belldandy was momentarily troubled at the doubts she discerned in his voice.

"Keiichi, I feel that we will grow even deeper in love. Don't worry yourself so much...I _know_ that we will somehow manage despite Mara's interference," she assured him.

"What about...a family? Children? What will happen to us when I grow old, and you remain the same age?" Keiichi asked, even more worried.

He remembered the vignette from the old movie "Kwaidan" about a peasant who had been spared by a yuki-onna. After sparing his life, she swore him to secrecy...not to ever tell anyone that he had seen her. Soon, a beautiful woman appeared in his village, and to his surprise, she became his loving wife. Over the years, his wife never aged, arousing the suspicion of the neighbors. Eventually, his desire to be truthful with her won out; he admitted to her that he had encountered a Snow Demoness years ago. Before his astonished eyes, she told him that _she_ was the yuki-onna who he encountered years ago. For the sake of their children, she spared his life...but discharged herself from him. He never saw her again.

Keiichi couldn't imagine life without ever seeing his beloved Belldandy again.

"Dear! Don't fret so much! Everything will be fine. I made a commitment long ago that I would age with you, year for year, for the rest of your life. As for children, I'm sure we can work that out," she answered. At least _most_ of this was true, except for the one concern...as she felt a familiar bitter mood shadow over her heart.

Belldandy knew that there was one thing she could never give Keiichi...no matter how hard she tried, no matter how hard she wanted it...

It just wasn't possible. Even for a Goddess.

It was the one lie that she had to live with...the one truth that she felt she had to conceal from Keiichi at all costs.

Keiichi looked at her, worried about the little dint of sadness in her mood. This was a vacation! They were supposed to be happy!

Yet each answer Bell-chan offered seemed to bring on more mystery for Keiichi. He had assumed that Belldandy would have something planned to deal with the changes in age, but he didn't know what this would entail.

"Keiichi, what did the fortuneteller mean when he mentioned birth-control?" she asked out of the blue. Keiichi stiffened up a little under the blanket, almost springing up with surprise at the sudden shift in topic.

"You really want to know? Well...uh...it's...uh," he fumbled around trying to find an explanation that wouldn't be too gross or trite.

"You see Belldandy, when a man and a woman have...uh...sexual intercourse, there is a possibility that the woman might conceive...er have a baby. Birth control tries to prevent this from occurring."

"Why? You mean that every time a man and a woman have sex, this creates a baby?" she asked. "Is that the only reason mortals have sex? If so, why isn't there more of you?"

"No! I mean, uh...sex can be fun too. It can make a man and a woman feel...really different!" Keiichi tried to explain, blushing hotly. He felt like a parent teaching his child about 'the facts of life'.

"What do _you_ know about sex, Keiichi? What does it feel like?" she wondered aloud. Keiichi felt an onrush of embarrassment at her questions.

He was still a virgin!

This was a fact that he tried to conceal around the guys at the dorm, especially later when he and Belldandy became an 'item'. Every time one of the guys at school asked about how good Belldandy was in bed, he found himself skillfully avoiding the question. Even his sister had hinted around at the sexual aspect of their relationship. Keiichi still remembered her comment about condoms after Urd and Skuld had been temporarily recalled to Yggdrasil. Then there was Urd with and her fixation and sex and love!

"Bell...Belldandy, I..I don't know. I have never done anything like that! I've never had sex with a woman before. I know this sounds old-fashioned and stupid, but I strongly believe that one must really love their girlfriend before bringing sex into the relationship. It takes time to know someone well enough to feel comfortable being _that intimate_ with them. It really takes a lot of love."

What else could he say? Keiichi only knew his convictions and theories, as he hadn't ever experienced the real thing before. He reflected on his answer and was immediately frustrated at its inadequacy.

"So...since you love me a lot, my dear Keiichi...then that must mean that you're ready to have sex with me!" Belldandy answered, her voice cheerful with her conclusion.

Inside the tent, a certain suntanned six-inch blonde camper was tittering with excitement. She had crawled out of the backpack while Keiichi and Belldandy were sitting by the fire. She peeked out the tent flap.

Mini-Urd had to hold her hand over her mouth, as she was so amused by watching her sister's innocent questions make Keiichi squirm with anxiety.

"Ahh, Keiichi, how are you going to get out of _this_ one, hehehee!!" the superdeformed Goddess giggled to herself.

"I..uh..." Keiichi stuttered at Belldandy's leap of logic. Despite the cool forest air, Keiichi felt sweat pouring down his forehead.

"_Are_ you ready, my love? Peorth once mentioned how you have certain deep desires. I..is making love with me one of them?" Belldandy asked, her blue eyes filled with sincerity. If this was what Keiichi wanted, then she would be glad to fulfill his desires.

It was just a question, but it struck at the heart of the matter. Keiichi knew deep inside that he loved Belldandy enough to go all the way with her; he was aware of this at least a year ago, before Peorth had arrived to complicate their lives even more. But could he risk telling her why he hadn't made an overture to her?

He felt a glum mood enshroud him.

"Hey, are you okay Keiichi?" Belldandy asked, shaking him lightly. Keiichi turned to look at her, tears rimming his eyes.

"I love you with all of my heart, Belldandy! And I really want you to know this. It's just that...with sex...once a line is crossed, it can never be undone. My heart has been ready for a long time, but I...don't want to make love with you...and then have something go wrong. Like you getting summoned back to Yggdrasil. Or maybe you feeling a change of heart towards me! Besides, if we are going to be in love with each other for the rest of our lives, I want to spend the rest of my life knowing that we made love the first time because it was the _right_ time!" he explained, opening up the soul of his kokoro for Bell-chan to see.

Belldandy looked at him patiently.

"I'm too...vulnerable! I didn't mean to be this frank with her!" his mind gasped as he awaited Belldandy's response.

Belldandy watched her mortal boyfriend dissolve into self-conscious tears. He was still just a boy in so many ways, fearful of his future. Yet he was so much a man as well. It touched her to the core to see that he was willing to be this vulnerable with her. He had told her his truth, and she felt an enormous wave of love well up from her heart in sheer respect at the risk he had just taken. Sex was a very minor, yet routine mortal biological function...she had learned this millennia ago during Inculcation.

But because it was with Keiichi...because of the huge amount of emotions he invested in his love for her...the issue of sex had assumed an immense gravity that far outweighed anything she was prepared for. Everything she had learned about sex...no longer made any sense to her.

She had to admit that all the knowledge she had about sexual matters needed to be discarded. Perhaps Keiichi felt the same way...

"There's so much I want to tell you, Keiichi!" she thought to herself. "Things like what it is like to _Share_. About how sharing is the utmost expression of love between Gods and Goddesses. About the fact that, as the Goddess of the Present, I can only love someone in the here and now...there can never be anyone else once I have given my heart to you, my dear!"

Deep sobs wracked Keiichi. He had told her _everything_, and yet he felt strangely ashamed, as if his personal convictions were actually gross misconceptions. Possessed of inadequacy, he wanted this clumsy moment to just go away. He felt Belldandy reach over and pull him close to her, so that his head was on her bosom and her chin was resting on the top of his head. He wondered how he could compose a romantic scene in his head, in this beautiful surrounding, after this fiasco.

Belldandy pulled her dear Keiichi close to her with a sisterly affection. She brushed his hair with her fingers as he cried. He cried even harder. She worried that she might have done something wrong, until he pulled himself even closer to her.

Keiichi felt blanketed securely by Belldandy as he cried himself into her breast. His fears diminished into a feeling of being warmly protected.

"I have never, ever felt this loved before, Bell-chan!" he whispered to Belldandy as his sobbing subsided.

"I love you so much, Keiichi. I _understand_," she whispered back, reassuring him as she continued to hold him home...

Mini-Urd also wanted to hug Keiichi. Despite her anticipation of the humorous night of sheer embarrassment for him, she was wiping tiny tears off of her cheeks instead, after listening to Keiichi's heartfelt confession. She knew now that he was totally and completely in love with Belldandy, and that it would be a matter of time before they would consummate their love sexually. Urd reminded herself that she would definitely play a part in _that_ drama, but the romantic sensitivities of this moment overwhelmed her with nostalgia for the two loves in her own past.

Keiichi for his part just wanted to hold Belldandy forever. She was gently tracing lines up and down his back with her fingertips. He found himself growing drowsysleepy after this emotional day.

"I'm going to get the sleeping bags ready, Bell," he said reluctantly. With this, he kissed her longingly and went inside the tent. He pulled off his jeans and long sleeve shirt, replacing them with his sleeping shorts and a T-shirt.

"I got the sleeping bags ready! I'll step out of the tent, so you can go in and get changed!" he shouted out of the flap of the tent. Before he could exit, Belldandy entered the tent.

"Why don't we use the sleeping bags as a mattress and blanket, so we can sleep _together_?" she asked with a smile on her face.

"Wh..what are you d..d..doing!" Keiichi replied in alarm as she calmly unbuttoned her top, facing away from him. Keiichi felt his ardor pole-vault into his throat as she slipped off her blouse, then stood up and shimmied down her skirt _as if he wasn't there_! He could see the contours of her body framed in the campfire light that was flowing into the tent. She wore a sports bra and a pair of floral silk panties. Keiichi was entranced at the sight of Belldandy's body, as she had never undressed in front of him before. Part of him wished that she would take _everything_ off, while the better half of his conscience reminded him about what he had said earlier about timing. In contrast to his whirlpooling internal scintillation, Belldandy seemed casual to the point of nonchalance. Keiichi's eyes were riveted to the up and down wonders of the curve of her back; Bell-chan's long brown hair cascading downwards like a living waterfall and then splaying on the floor of the tent. He wanted to reach out and stroke its sheen as Belldandy knelt down and ruffled though her clothes bag. He watched in fascination as she found a long nightshirt and pulled it over her shoulders.

Keiichi finally remembered his breath while Belldandy pulled her hair into a strand and tied it with a golden hair ribbon. She looked over her shoulder with a friendly smile shaded with demureness.

"I know tonight's not the night you were speaking of, my dearest. But I...just wanted to show you a little of what you have coming to you, when we decide that the time is right," she encouraged slyly.

"Don't forget to inhale, honey!" Belldandy teased as he gasped for air. She crawled under the covers and snuggled up next to him, resting her head against his chest. In her mind, the wind swirled lyric with touching flower petals as she listened to his shallow breathing.

"My best for you, Keiichi, as we journey our love onward towards perfection," she vowed to herself, idyllic in the forest of his soft brown irises.

They gazed into each other's eyes until the fire died down and sleep crept up on them.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --


	11. Pt 11: Illumination

**Part 11: Illumination**

They say that anesthesia is a dreamless state...but I was experiencing vivid dreamforms. A crackling sound surrounded me as I heard a booming voice taunting us. A moment later, a barbwire lasso encircled me and dragged me away from the others. I heard the repeated sound of shredded cloth as I was gasping for breath. The air became thick...I was swimming in a thrashing manner in a watery grove. Every time I attempted to surface for air, I was bounded by a glass plate that seemed to float on the surface of the sulfide liquid. My lungs ballooned out with fiery agony...and then I was surrounded by hellfire. I still felt like I was drowning as I pushed against the solid flames. My whole body was burning...then I choked on a nauseous blanching of my surroundings. Everything was white...a maddening inobjective white. Then a calm descended on my as I felt myself gathered up...

When I awakened, my skull felt like the grinding of tectonic plates. That was the only image I could slipslap together to describe the terrible headache that devoured me into wakefulness. Things didn't really seem different...except that the area around my eyes felt like pins and needles in contrast to the tooth-gnashing pain of my headache. After a moment of regaining orientation, I remembered that Urd and Skuld had 'operated' on my eyes. I sat up, impulsively drawn towards untying the strip of cloth that served as a blindfold/bandage. I heard a light thump on the wooden floor near my head.

"NO! Don't you touch that!" Senrigan yelled at me in a high pitched voice. "It needs to set for a couple of days!"

"Senrigan! How long have you been here?" I asked. Having a visit from any of the three Ninjettes was an uncommon occurrence. The three were remarkably conspicuous...in their absences. They usually banded together and practiced their martial artistry inconspicuously.

"Duh...they're ninjitsu-ko," I chastened myself, realizing that stealth was their primary modus...and Senrigan probably wouldn't answer me.

"Since the end of your surgery, Cevn!" she replied, to my surprise.

"And I suppose that if I attempt to take this wrap off of my face, you'll chop my fingers off one by one!" I joked with her, to cover up my disappointment at not being able to check my vision.

"Yeah, I guess so. But actually, I would just break your knuckles with my wooden katana!" she said matter-of-factly. "Mistress Skuld asked us to keep an eye on you. Kodama and Hikari are here too."

"I suppose Gon is with you too?" I said flippantly, referring to the foot-tall tiny dino terror from another manga.

"Nope. He's in Australia right now!" Hikari snapped back.

"You gotta be kidding!" I thought with private exasperation. In my mind, I supposed Batman to be hanging out in Shinjuku...and Lime, Cherry and Bloodberry were going to be enrolled in next year's N.I.T. freshman class! This whole scene was getting even stranger. I reminded myself that I was talking to three one-foot tall female Ninjas, even if I couldn't see them.

"We understand your desire to discover if your vision has been restored Cevn, but you must not take off your eye covers. Urd put a lot of chemically stuff in there to ensure that you heal all right!" Hikari emphasized.

"And I tied a _secret_ knot in the back of your blindfold so that you won't be able to undo it! If you attempt to untie it, it'll only get tighter," said Kodama with an air of pride.

"And if you so much as try to pull it off of your eyes, I'm afraid that I'm going to have to practice mist and breeze cutting techniques on your hands!" added Hikari.

"It's only for your own good Cevn," Kodama reminded me.

"Okay, okay, I get the point! In triplicate!" I said good-humoredly.

"So, do you three feel that Skuld and Urd were successful?" I asked hopefully.

"Yes, as far as we can tell. Everything, and I mean _every thing_ went okay, according to Skuld," Senrigan said with obvious pride.

"By the way, Urd and Skuld slept in here last night while we kept watch," Kodama added. I felt a sense of anxiety with this; until she assured me that Urd hadn't done anything 'perverse' with me.

"Don't worry, Cevn. We were briefed on the fact that you go scaredycat around women...so we made sure that nothing happened," all three chimed.

"How did you..?" I stuttered. I was about ready to ask Kodama how exactly they knew about my hypersensitivity to women when the three ninjettes broke into praise for Skuld and Urd being so vigilant during the surgery.

"Since Urd's powers are limited because of her license suspension, it took almost all of her energy when she split into four of herself. She's sleeping it off right now," Hikari informed me.

"And Skuld...she never broke her concentration once, except when she came to a point where she could take a break. Then she would report to Megumi about how you were doing," Senrigan added.

I considered Urd for a moment. Urd was the perpetual 'black sheep' in the household mix; always arousing suspicion because of her reckless nature and impulsivity. Yet, I had occasionally glimpsed another aspect of Urd--a side of her that was conscientious and self-sacrificing. Which facet of her personality would I gravitate towards when adjudging her? How many dimensions could a personality have before it was simply deemed 'eccentric' or 'deranged' by those who would prefer the monotony of uniform character?

I could only guess at the intricacies of their efforts. I appreciated the superhuman diligence these two had undertaken on my behalf. Superhuman was a misnomer, as these two were _Goddesses_! So I mentally termed it "super-Goddess."

In any case, I felt favored by the fates.

"Cevn, if I possessed a fully developed set of powers, I would have just restored your vision. I know someday...I'll make Goddess First Class!" I heard a new voice state. Skuld had entered my room and sleepily asked how I was feeling.

"Skuld, you're already capable of creating miracles! In fact, the fact that you're here on the Earth is a miracle itself," I consoled her. I felt a hand pat me on the head and I teased her.

"Hey, don't treat me like a kid!" I said in a boyish falsetto, which drew a series of cheerful giggles from Skuld and the Ninjettes. Skuld's giggles were very dainty and girlish; the sound of them ushered an elan which threaded the gateways of my heart. Skuld and I discussed our captivity under Mara, and then talked about Keiichi and Belldandy. She sounded really tired, so I suggested that she go back to bed. She excused herself, but returned a moment later.

"Here's someone who's been wanting to talk to you!" she said, then left. I heard soft footsteps as someone sat down on a tatami mat next to me.

"Cevn, how are you?" I heard the blend of optimism and concern in Megumi's voice. I replied that I was doing fine, just a little drained physically.

"Megumi, you can't believe how impatient I am about wanting to see if this whole operation thing was a success."

"I can imagine!" she assented. "By the way I have something for you." She read get-well card that my Asian History class had sent. She tried to repress laughter at the irony of it all, as they all thought (with the exception of Sora, Tamiya, Ootaki) that I was under the care of an eye specialist in Tokyo. When I heard Ootaki's message, I couldn't help but burst out in laughter. After she finished, she started discussing a more serious matter.

"Cevn, I have something serious to talk to you about. I need a guy's input on this. Especially since he's my adopted older bro."

"Okay. I can't argue with _that_."

"After the solar race, Genji has been totally avoiding me. It's like...he's afraid of me, somehow! I just _don't know_ how to read him! So many of the guys at school have been hitting up on me...which made me think that he would, as well. Instead, he's been acting pretty withdrawn. Grr...he even actually _avoids_ me!" she finished, her voice quivering with frustration.

On a hunch, I asked Megumi about how things were going with Sayoko; she said that Sayoko had been missing a lot of school.

"How is she when she's at school?" I asked.

"Why are you so interested in Sayoko? It's Genji who is the problem here!" Megumi answered.

"Just favor me for a moment, Megumi."

"Anyway, Sayoko acts like she isn't even there! At lunch, she's either totally quiet or rowdy. The other day, she fell asleep right in the middle of lunch. And Friday, she pitched an orange juice at Tamiya...when all he did was ask her why she was so moody."

"That's pretty intense," I commented. I felt my suspicions becoming aroused at this strange behavior on the part of Sayoko. Strange...yet familiar.

"Actually, I think that she's suffering from something much worse than PMS, Megumi. Tell me more..."

"What does this have to do with me and Genji!" she repeated.

"A lot...possibly," I answered enigmatically. Megumi told me how she was dressing sloppier than usual. Two years ago, Sayoko had been impeccable in her attire and accessories; now she appeared completely unconcerned about her hair and clothes. Megumi listed a whole series of minutiae that had changed in Sayoko this term: frequently tired in appearance; disinterested in school and the N.I.T. social scene; out late; secretive; unwilling to go shopping with Megumi and her friends; not interested in guys; often sullen in mood; disruptive at inappropriate times. She had even dropped out of her art club unexpectedly. In Megumi's esteem, Sayoko was short-tempered and sometimes disoriented to what was going on around her.

"That's so very familiar!" I mentally reflected. These patterns of personality pointed towards Sayoko possibly having a drug problem. In the manga, she was portrayed as having a propensity to get heartily intoxicated. Drunkeness in Japan is socially tolerated to a greater degree than in the US, because inebriates in Japan usually didn't act out as much. They acted out, but in an accommodating way for the most part. But Sayoko seemed to have crossed the line where a benevolent attitude could be employed towards her behavior. She was actually increasing in violence and belligerence, per what Megumi was relating to me.

"Megumi, I have a hunch that Genji is in some way shielding his sister," I explained.

"How?" she asked with astonishment at my 'random' comment. "That doesn't make sense."

"Well, this is only a series of assumptions on my part, but I'll try and cast it in a logical sequence. First, let's assume that Sayoko isn't just getting drunk...that somehow she is on drugs as well."

"What! Her? No way!" Megumi retorted in disbelief.

"Stay with me, Megumi. Remember that I used to be an active drug addict, so I know some of the patterns which indicate addiction. Let's just flow with this guesswork and see where it leads us, okay? Imagine for a moment that Keiichi was somehow in deep trouble...and you knew it. What would you do? Would you want him to get caught or would you cover up for him?"

"I would cover up for him, of course!" she answered with ready conviction. As a matter of fact, I was fully aware that she _had been_ covering up for him in at least one matter...the fact that he was living under the same roof as his girlfriend. If their parents found out...

"Okay. If we assume that Genji knows that his sister's up to some kind of trouble with drugs, don't you think he would do the _same_ thing? That he would want to cover up for her to protect her from the consequences?" I asked. She nodded her head in agreement.

"Now, in order for him to do this, it would be vital that he avoid drawing unwanted attention to himself or her."

"Why?"

"Because it saves Sayoko from getting in trouble...and it keeps him from being embarrassed. By exposing his friends to her, Genji risks the possibility of being embarrassed by his older sister! Who would want to hang out with her if she's loaded on drugs? Or him? Especially since she's been acting like a powder keg--waiting to explode!"

"Ahhhh. I think I understand. Could this be why Genji is so standoffish at school?" Megumi said with dawning insight in her voice.

"Precisely, if my guess is right! What's more, he must _really_ like you, because it seems like he's going to _extra_ lengths to push you away. He knows that if you get close to him, you'll find out about Sayoko...and she'll wind up in deep sushi. Or even that you might get hurt by her if she is out of control...which would hurt _him_ as well."

"He must really be hurting," Megumi said in a quiet sad voice.

"That isn't the half of it. Imagine having your family life totally disrupted by a drug addict. Families are systems which require a delicate balancing act of the emotions. Genji would have to take up the slack because she's irresponsible; have to deal with her moodiness at home; have to worry about her growing disinterest in everything around her. That _alone_ would really suck!

"Add to this a sense of personal frustration at being powerless to do anything to help her. Further, if she's involved with drugs, she's more than likely involved with thugs. Maybe even yakuza. Cap it off with the unenviable position of having to push away the girl that you're attracted to...because you want to protect her, yourself and your sister! My suspicion is that this is pretty much an inside peek into what's going on with Genji--assuming that I'm right about Sayoko."

"That's...that's _horrible_!" Megumi exclaimed, her voice fraught with deep frustration and sadness.

"What can we do?" she asked desperately.

"Well, for now, we stay with our plan to go view a Noh play with Genji. I'll subtly seek to find out _exactly_ what he knows about Sayoko. I can probably do this without even alerting him to the fact that I suspect his sister's abusing drugs. In the meantime, you need to keep a close eye on her at school, so that you can keep me aware of any further developments."

"Then what?"

"Then I'm going to talk to her and do something called an intervention. I'm going to lay it all out on the line, and threaten to inform the Dean of Students and get her expelled. While I do that, I'll do some therapy on her to see what caused her to sink into her problems so deeply. In other words, I'll look to learn why she's screwing up _now_, instead of last year or next term," I explained. "What you could do to help is to wait until after the Noh event, then hang around Genji and get him ready. I would like it if you and he both sit in when I pound Sayoko's nail," I added.

"Are you sure that it would be a good idea for me to be there?"

"Yep. Definitely, Megumi! You're stronger emotionally than Genji...and Sayoko would see you as an near-equal. Genji is her brother; so you'd be in a position to support what he says. As her teacher, I would be in the authority role, which she'll probably react to with defiance. So, if we end up doing an intervention, it's really important that you're there...as her peer. As a friend. Don't worry, I'll meet with both of you beforehand to prepare you for it," I assured her.

"I...I think I can do all that. As a matter of fact, I was a good debater in high school, so I would be able to counterargue Sayoko's excuses. We were pretty good friends until Belldandy came and started going out with Keiichi three years ago. Back in high school, I didn't know that Sayoko was _so wrapped up_ in my brother...she sure has taken it hard," she explained, giving me some history at the same time.

"And you can become good friends again, I hope. She'll probably be royally hissy pissed at you initially. But if she realizes that she needs to get her act together and clean up, then she'll really appreciate your help later on."

I felt her hair brush against my cheek as she hugged me gingerly. I smiled at her and she thanked me for my help.

"You're something else, Cevn! Here you are the day after your surgery, and you already want to help me! Thank you so much!"

I heard the door slide open and shut. I was grateful that Megumi had come to share her problems with me. I desperately needed to focus away from my own share of woes; it was a stroke of luck that she had come in to talk to me. Not to mention that I was appreciative of her concern towards me.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Keiichi stirred towards wakefulness at the crack of dawn; he smiled as he heard the chorus of birdcalls. He looked next to him and noticed that Belldandy was already awake and outside the tent, immersing herself in the natural vista. He stretched and yawned, then sat up and let himself relax. The sleep had been one of the most restful ones he had in a long time. Getting dressed, he was invigorated by the fresh air and emerged from the tent with a stretching of his arms. The woods smelled so verdant and clean!

As he wrapped the blanket around his shoulders, he reflected on how nice it was to simply be _away_. He was still being hounded from time to time by reporters interested in his perspective of the Solar Car victory. His fame had dispossessed his privacy to a degree; he was often cast in the role of celebrity, even if he simply wanted to just be himself. Fortunately, here in the park, he hadn't been accosted by some fan seeking an interview or an autograph...

Belldandy was sitting on a tree stump, dressed in her flannel shirt and jeans, watching the sunrise. Grinning at the clouds, she revisited her ploy last night with Keiichi. The look in his eyes was priceless when she took off her shirt. Being a Goddess, she was used to being an object of desire; after all, almost all the wishes she granted were cast by mortals desperate for succor or miracles. Yet, the way Keiichi wanted her last night...was entirely different. His desire enflamed _her_ heart, much to her surprise.

"This sexual thing that he has...must really be important!" she said to herself with a giggle...then flinched as he walked up behind her and wrapped his arms around her from behind. She hoped her dear Keiichi hadn't overheard what she just said. Evidently not, as he kissed her on the top of her head, then gently rocked her from side to side as the sun peeked over the alpestrine horizon. She smelled the delicate fragrance of his hair as he held her, feeling his hands holding her arms close to her heart.

They remained like this until the sky had brightened to a light blue. Then Keiichi unpacked the little stove and made tea for Belldandy while they ate the granola bars and fruit that she had brought.

"Thank you for last night, Bell-chan! I..I never thought you would understand me...and instead, you swept right into my kokoro with your love!" he said as he kissed her on the cheek.

"Keiichi, I will _always_ try to believe you, because you _are_ honest. What's more, I choose to let myself love you because you're _you_! This means...that I think you are the most special man I have ever met, mortal or God.

"Try to remember this, my love: it's _you_ that I am in love with! Even if you don't think I can understand you, please tell me anyway, because I truly _want_ to understand. This way, we can create a bridge of intimacy between our two Souls. There's nothing wrong with you wanting to wait...before we share something together...that you feel apprehensive about. I'll be there, waiting with you, _being_ with you...until the time is right!" she said, smiling brightly at him, her eyes praising him for his deep love for her.

Keiichi's heartfelt expression inked her character with a blossoming of the rapt gratitude that could only be shared within the deepest of companionships.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

After breakfast, Keiichi went and filled the canteen with water, then strapped on a backpack. Taking Belldandy by the hand, they set off into the woods with a trail. One of the highlights of the Oko-Nikko area was a statue of Kannon-bosatsu in the Chuzenji Temple. They were going to hike there first, then trek around the end of the lake to the Chuzenji Shrine. After visiting the shrine, they had planned to take the four-hour hiking climb up the side of Nantai.

They walked by some lakeside resort cabins, and were glad they had decided to roughcamp it. The resort area was very crowded with families; couples busily boarding rental boats and children playing near the water. Animal-shaped paddleboats abounded. They eventually reached the shrine and Keiichi took a number of photos of it.

After walking around the red-painted hondo, they entered the main hall and beheld the carved Kannon, said to be created by Shodo Shonin himself. Belldandy marveled at the thousand-year old carved wood statue. It had eleven heads and a multitude of arms; an artistic endeavor which was supposed to represent the thousand arms of Kannon the Goddess of Mercy.

Her mischievous streak seemed to be ornamented by Fate...as she felt an impulse to surprise Keiichi...

"Keiichi! Over here!" she shouted musically, inviting his attention. Keiichi turned towards her voice and almost dropped his camera. Belldandy had _assumed the form_ of Kannon, and was waving a thousand arms at him. A halo of holy light surrounded her, and she wore a crown of gold. Holy Bell was hovering behind her; her angelic wings providing a backdrop for another thousand arms.

At least she didn't try to pull eleven faces; that would have been _too_ much! Then he remembered the crowd of tourists...

"EHHHHPPPP!" was all he could manage, as he furtively looked around with a cliffside panic.

"Well, take a picture, silly!" Belldandy urged him, then stuck her tongue out at him teasingly. He shakily took a quick picture of her, then looked at the other tourists. None of them seemed to be surprised in the slightest. It dawned on him that Belldandy had appeared _only to him_ in her altered form. The rest of the tourists just saw a guy taking snapshots of his beautiful girlfriend.

He looked up at the statue of Kannon, and noticed that the central face seemed to wink at him. Shaking his head in confusion, he escorted her out of the temple. As they walked onward, he asked Belldandy why she was acting so glib.

"Well, one good Goddess deserves another, wouldn't you say, Keiichi?!" she replied with a twinkle in her eye. Belldandy wasn't usually very rowdy, yet she couldn't resist playing the occasional prank on her boyfriend.

"He's going to be surprised when he develops the film, and sees an extra photo with his shocked face on it," she thought, then giggled at herself.

Keiichi stopped by the temple bell and pointed it out to her.

"Bell-chan, the legend says that if you make a wish and ring the bell three times, it will come true! Let's each make a wish together and I'll ring the bell!" he said, fully recovered from the Kannon incident. The two closed their eyes for a moment, then Keiichi pulled on the rope, sending the wooden tree trunk into the side of the bell three times.

"Oh Keiichi, I wished that..."

"Bell!!" he shouted in mock panic.

"What'd I do, Keiichi?" Belldandy answered, an alarmed look on her face.

"Gotcha!" he shouted, then giggled as one of the foreign tourists looked at him oddly...a young Japanese man addressing the temple bell by name? Belldandy saw his expression and put her hand over her mouth, giggling.

"Bell-chan...you're not supposed to tell anyone the wish until it comes true!" he blurted out before breaking into a fit of laughter. "I guess that makes us even!" he said, his eyes atwinkle with mellifluidity.

They rounded the lake, and visited the Chugushijinja Shrine next. Nearby was the Homotsukan museum with its assortment of ancient martial artifacts, which uncomfortably reminded the couple of the attack on them yesterday by the Mara-possessed spearmen. After a brief visit, they returned to the main shrine. Casually strolling around the various shrine buildings and grounds, they passed the Tohai-mon and embarked on the single trail to the summit of Nantai, 2,484 meters above them.

After a couple of hours on the trail, they took a breather when they noticed a trial marker indicating that they had reached the halfway point of the ascent.

Keiichi could feel the coolness of the air...the brisk gusts made him want to put on a jacket. He realized that the air had cooled due to the environmental lapse effect. He excitedly pointed out the highway to Belldandy; the same highway he had raced on during the Solar Car Competition. Belldandy looked at him and smiled as he retraced the loops in the road with animated gestures. The woods were thinning out as they looked up to the summit; but there was still an abundance of trees and foliage visible.

Belldandy sat down and motioned for the canteen. She drank several gulps of water, then passed it to Keiichi, who drank thirstily.

They resumed their ascent. Belldandy found herself looking at Keiichi, curiously wondering what he would look like if he were unclothed. She felt a warm cloud-like sensation spreading in her chest and in her belly as she imagined her boyfriend, lying in the grass...naked in the sun. She shook her head as if to try to clear her senses, then tried to look at the scenery. Her vision was going fuzzy, but in a pleasant, milk-like way. She felt a hot flush spreading all through her body...and when she looked again at Keiichi, she noticed that he was staring at her with a unreadable expression on his face.

Keiichi kept flashing back to the image lodged irrevocably in his mind from last night...seeing Belldandy gloriously prodigious in her partly undressed state in the tent. His eyes fashioned anew an appreciation of the slender gentle curves of her body. He imagined what it feel like caressing her soft skin. He felt his heart pounding rapidly in his chest and noticed that his body was becoming aroused. He stopped in midstep; noticing the flush on her face and what looked like lust in her eyes. Setting down the backpack, he walked towards her...her beautiful figure silhouetted by the mid-afternoon sun.

"I can't wait anymore! _NOW'S_ the time, Belldandy!" he near-yelled with desire.

Belldandy looked at Keiichi, desiring him with all of her being, and rushed into his arms. Before she even knew it, she found herself kissing him hotly on the lips, her tongue probing in his mouth and her hands roaming up over his chest.

"I want you...soooo bad...Ke..i...chi!" she said in a sultry voice.

Keiichi felt her pressed up against him and he reached down to pull her even closer. He reached under her shirt and traced his fingers up the skin of her back, then stroked her hair, then ran his hands all over her hips with libidinous abandon.

"What is wrong with me? I'm acting like some sex-starved _maniac_! And she's acting like a cat in heat..." he momentarily wondered as his disorientation increased.

"Keiichi, take me...now! I'm all yours..._all_ of me," Belldandy whispered in his ear, pressing up against him as tight as she could. She felt ecstatic in the arms of her one true love!

Atop of the discarded backpack, a mini-Urd was beaming with pride and delight.

"At last! The two romantic fools didn't even think to check the canteen that I exchanged! They didn't notice that it was coated on the inside with powder from a super-Urd Heart Firecracker Potion pill that I cooked up a few months ago! Look at them go! They'll be hot and naked in a few moments! I sure am a stinker, aren't I? Hehehee! Wheeehaaaaa! Yaaahooooooo!" Urd thought. She watched with glee as the two lovers became even more passionate with their kisses and their hands. Then suddenly, the backpack she was in was tipped over by a huge furry object and she tumbled into a small grove of tall grass.

"What!!" she shouted in a tiny voice, trying to regain her balance.

Keiichi was kissing Belldandy with a prurient revel. He thought he heard a faint elfin voice, then he saw something brown and massive out of the corner of his eye. He reluctantly came up for air from a long passionate kiss and looked over her shoulder. He felt all the hot lust in his blood abruptly bankrupt into a chilly blue whirlwind.

_"Awwwwwwwrrrrroooooaaaarrrrrrgggggghhhh!"_

"Be..Be..Belldandy...th..there's a _b..bear_. A b...big one!" he said with abject terror. It seemed to hear him, and roared even louder, opening its huge foamy mouth to display a wicked set of yellowed fangs. It was lumbering towards them aright on two legs, towering so tall that it blocked the morning sun.

Instinctively, Keiichi gallantly pulled Belldandy behind him and faced the ursine menace.

Belldandy saw the huge bear and yelled in fright. She had never seen such a large animal before. It looked like a big mastiff dog, but it appeared to be _really_ angry. She was stupefied with passion for Keiichi...

She stood rooted to the spot with fear, wrapping her unbuttoned shirt over her chest protectively. Hastily picking up the nearest object she could find, Belldandy threw it at the bear in desperation, trying to drive it away.

"Keiichi, _what_ are you doing!?" she screamed with desperate concern as he advanced towards the bear while waving his arms agitatedly. She frantically grabbed the next nearest object, which happened to be the canteen, and took aim at the bear.

"Get out! Go away! Leave us alone!" Keiichi screamed at the bear at the top of his lungs. He continued to try and startle the bear, but without success. Then he saw something fly over his shoulder and hit the bear squarely in chest.

The bear paused as it felt the canteen bounce off of its breast. Instinctively, it dropped to all fours and attacked the canteen, gripping it jawtight and shaking it with predatory vigor. Then it noticed that there was something wet and cool inside of the canteen. Pinning the canteen down with massive paws, the bear bit off the cap and snaked its long tongue inside, lapping up the cool water. Finishing the water, it kicked the canteen aside and stood up on its hind legs again, an embodiment of nature's rage.

Keiichi warily backed away from the bear. His attempts to startle it had failed miserably. As he retreated, he stumbled over something. He reached down and felt his grip close over one of the straps to his backpack. Picking up his backpack, he swung it to and fro with frenzied abandon in front of the bear. The bear effortlessly batted the backpack out of his hands.

Belldandy was too overwrought with lust and fear to realize that she could simply summon a lightning bolt to dispatch the creature. In seconds, she had went from being possessed by the most energetic sexual drive she had ever experienced in her existence...to being frightened out of her wits by towering 4-meter tall bear.

Mini-Urd was too petrified with surprise to do anything either.

The bear advanced on Keiichi with murderous intent gleaming in its Woden eyes.

"Oh shit! T..this is it!" Keiichi thought. With a desperate heave, he pushed Belldandy away and told her to run towards safety. Only several feet away, the bear towered over him, double his height. He could smell the rancid heat of its snorting exhalations. It pushed him roughly to the ground.

"Lie still," he thought, remembering from the far recesses of his mind that if he remained immobile, the bear may think he was dead. "This is my last chance!" he thought as he closed his eyes and stiffened up, pretending to be dead. With a chance thought, he sensed that he was already dead; possessed only by a fright...

"Belldandy, I'll always love you..." he commended to himself silently...and surrendered to the inevitable.

Belldandy had fallen into a heap off to the side when Keiichi pushed her away a full fifteen feet. She turned to see the bear attack Keiichi and push him down. She screamed shrilly and the bear looked up at her for a moment, then back down to Keiichi. Keiichi was pinned underneath two huge furry paws, and he wasn't moving.

"Oh...Keiichi! No_ NO_...NO!" she yelled hysterically. Her boyfriend was being mauled right in front of her! She saw the bear biting him in the face and nearly fainted from shock. She was so upset that she couldn't stand to look at the horrible sight. She backed up and collapsed under a tree, covered her eyes with her sleeve and cried. Her boyfriend was dead! Guilt flowed through her heart when she realized that he had sacrificed his life for hers.

Keiichi held himself as still as winter's midnight...then felt a warm sloppy wet sensation over his nose and face. It tickled. Then he felt it again and again and again. He couldn't help but start to laugh and kick his legs as the sensation became unbearably titillative. He opened his eyes to see the huge face of the bear, its eyes gentle, its mouth curled up in what appeared to be a grin. It was licking him! He heard a deep moaning sound...and realized that the bear was kissing him!

Belldandy heard Keiichi giggling, and looked up with surprise. The bear was licking him on the face with a puppyish joy! She stopped crying, and watched in amazement as the bear contentedly nuzzled her Keiichi.

"Oh my Lord...thank You! He's alive!" she said gratefully, her rent heart suddenly mended by the sight.

The bear got off Keiichi and slowly approached Belldandy on all fours with its head lowered respectfully. Belldandy tentatively reached out and stroked its face, which was level with her chest. The bear lumbered forward and butted her with its head, pitching her on her back. Before she could react, she too was being licked on the face with abandon by the bear.

"Keiichi...you're...tee..hee...alive!" she managed to say with sincere joy as the bear kept licking her on the face. Its wet tongue was so ticklish! Soon, she was giggling with abandon at the bear's 'kisses'.

Mini-Urd was hangcrested with private humiliation. At first, she was so frightened by the bear's attack on Keiichi that the most she could do was peek from between her fingers while she covered her eyes in horror. Then, the bear turned into lovestruck docility...

Now it was playing with her sister. She was so upset that she was stamping her foot on the ground in anger.

"Of all the..! Ooohhh, this is _unbelievable_! Why do I always have such bad luck! They're almost ready to make some heavy duty whoopie and a freakin' bear comes out of the woods and _ruins everything_! No! No way...it can't be! The goddamned Ultimate Force must be doing this to me!" she exclaimed in frustration. Then she heard _someone else_ screaming "No!"

She turned and bugged out some more when she saw a Mini-Mara jumping up and down on the ground in a fit.

"NO NO Nono no _no no nonononono_!" Mini-Mara yelled as she leapt up and down with each exclamation. "WHY?! Why_ me_?" Mara screamed as she jumped up and down on the ground some more, then started kicking a nearby tree.

"It was so _perfect_! That mother bear was out for blood and suddenly she drinks from that canteen and turns into a love-hungry pussycat! This is un_bear_able... Blessit, I can't believe I just said that! This is...er...this is so fucked! It _totally_ sucks!" With that, Mara snapped her fingers and disappeared.

It dawned on Urd that the bear had somehow drank her Heart Firecracker Potion when Belldandy had thrown the canteen at it. That explained its sudden shift in mood from murderous rage to docile mellowness. She looked again; the bear had rolled over on its back and Belldandy was rubbing its belly.

"I can't believe this!" she uttered with disappointment, then disappeared.

Keiichi came over and watched Belldandy rubbing the bear on the tummy. She seemed to be talking to it, and the bear seemed to answer her with a series of grunts and growls and yoans.

"Belldandy...what just happened?" he asked. "Where's my shirt?"

She looked at him, and shrugged her shoulders.

"I don't know, Keiichi! I drank out of that canteen, then I felt really funny. I felt like...hot all over. The next thing I remember, I couldn't keep my hands off of you. Your shirt's over there, dear," she pointed. She giggled at the thought.

"I seem to remember that _you_ couldn't keep your hands off of_ me_ either, Keiichi!" she shouted after him as she buttoned up her flannel shirt.

Keiichi blushed crimson.

But it was true. If the bear hadn't have come when it did, he would have ripped the clothes right off of Bell-chan.

"You mean to say that you drank out of the canteen, then you felt...aroused? Hmmm... The same thing happened to me! A couple moments after I drank out of it, I felt...really horny! Sorry, Bell...but I really did," he tried to explain despite his embarrassment.

He walked over and picked up the canteen. A few feet away, two rabbits were rutting at full speed.

"Ehhh?" he said aloud as he looked inside of the canteen. He walked over to Belldandy and poked a finger inside the canteen, then pulled it out. It was covered with an off-white wet grainy powder-like substance.

"Urd!" they both said simultaneously.

Belldandy had a stern look on her face.

"She's _really_ going to get it when I get home! I can't believe that she would do this...after all her other failed attempts with those silly love potions she's always making!" she said angrily.

Keiichi laughed.

"If Urd is anything, she's..haha..persistent!"

"That's not funny, Keiichi!" Belldandy protested. "You yourself said you wanted to wait until the moment is right before we...make love. Now, Urd almost spoiled it."

"But don't you see, Bell-chan? She failed again! _That's_ what's so funny!" He started to laugh uncontrollably until a huge paw swatted him gently onto his backside.

"What's wrong with that bear?" he said, laughing robustly.

Belldandy thought about what had just happened. She recalled that she threw the canteen at the bear, then it ripped off the cap and drank some of...

"Keiichi! I know what happened!" she announced. "Right before the bear got to you, I hit it with the canteen. Then it started drinking the water in the canteen. I think it got dosed with Urd's love potion!"

Turning to the bear, she asked it why it had attacked them, while Keiichi rubbed his head quizzically at his crazy girlfriend and her attempts to talk to the bear. Abruptly, Belldandy jerked her head up and looked at him with pleading eyes.

"Oh no! Keiichi, she told me that someone _took her cub_! Then they made her think that we had killed her daughter!" She listened to the bear some more. Keiichi was surprised to hear the bear mewling with an almost word-like earnest articulation.

"Ahhhh, it _was_ Mara! No one else could have done something so rotten...so nefarious..."

"That means we gotta help her find her cub!" Keiichi concluded.

Belldandy put a hand on each side of her temple and closed her eyes. A faint image of a bear cub floated in her mind. She concentrated even harder. She heard the cub whining and crying for her mother. Searching inwardly at the mental vision, she glimpsed an outcropping of rocks nearby.

"She's further up Mt. Nantai! I know where she is! Come on, Mama Bear. We're going to find your daughter!" she announced. Mrs. Bear grunted happily and the three set off on the trail leading to the top of Nantai, Belldandy resting a guiding hand on the bear's shoulder.

Several passersby gave them a wide berth as they ascended the mountain. Keiichi could hear faint echoes of their conversations:

"Canya believe that! A college student, his girlfriend and a _tame bear_?" "Must be some kinda promotional gimmick one of the resorts is putting on!" "Hey...isn't that the guy who drove in the Solar Car race?"

A couple of groups of hikers stopped to take snapshots of the trio for posterity. One couple encouraged their children to pet the bear, who seemed to love being scratched behind the ears, much to everyone's delight.

Almost at the summit of Mt. Nantai, they heard a whinnying moaning. They clambered up to a group of volcanic rocks and saw the bear cub. It was tied by the ankle to a rock, crying out broken-heartedly. The mother bear looked at Keiichi questioningly and he pulled a red Swiss army knife out and cut through the ropes binding her cub. Once freed, the cub dashed to her mother, who sat down and wrapped her paws around her daughter and started grooming her fur. After mother bear and cub were rolypoly reunited, the she-bear stood up on all fours and rubbed herself between Keiichi and Belldandy with thanks. She grunted an appreciative farewell and the two bears walked off to descend the mountain trail.

Keiichi was tired, but he wanted to complete the climb, so he forced himself to finish the last fifteen minutes of the hike to the top. Once there, he pulled the blanket out of the backpack and set it down on a smooth lava outcropping. Belldandy sat next to him, rubbing his shoulders as the clouds and mountains glowed rouge in the light of the setting sun. They leaned their heads together and watched the sun set over the mountains, incredulous in the beauty of the sunset and the joy of their shared love.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

It was almost 2 am when Keiichi and Belldandy wearily arrived back at the temple compound. They were tired from their incredible weekend vacation and each headed to his or her bedroom, after piling the camping gear in the sunroom. Everybody was asleep. Belldandy caught Keiichi before he went into his bedroom and kissed him passionately on the lips.

"Thank you so much for this weekend, Keiichi! It was so much more than I had hoped for. I had such a _wonderful_ time with you!" she imparted sweetly.

Keiichi began to wonder if Belldandy was feeling some residual effects of Urd's potion. She sure was kissing him with flair! She looked at him with her incomparable eyes.

"I love you so much... I do want to spend all my life with you, even more now than ever before!" She kissed him once more on the cheek and spryly bounded off to her room, humming to herself.

Keiichi slid open his door, seeing all his textbooks piled in a corner of his bedroom.

"Vacation's over," he said softly with a twinge of disappointment. Tomorrow would begin another week of school; it was getting towards the end of the term and schedules would reach a fevered pitch right before finals. But he was glad that he had spent this very special weekend with Belldandy. He sleepily thought about how lucky he was to be loved by a Goddess.

Belldandy entered her room. Both Skuld and Urd were asleep. Skuld looked like she was dreaming of Yggdrasil and bugs, as she was tossing and turning with nocturnal hyperness. Urd had a big smile on her sleeping face. Belldandy looked at her older sister with a mixture of wrath and bemusement.

"Wait until tomorrow, Urd! You won't be smiling so broadly then!" she whispered privately. Then she remembered that Urd's love potion had saved Keiichi's life.

"I'm still going to have words with you about this weekend...but I'll go _a little_ easy on you, Elder Sister. Only because your love potion saved my Keiichi!"

Belldandy wanted to pinch Urd to wake her up, but decided that she wouldn't stoop to Urd's level of trickery. She was glad to be home and she drifted to Elysian Fields with thoughts of Keiichi on her mind.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Cevn, how are you feeling?" I heard Kodama ask me.

I informed her that I was feeling more energetic; that I wanted to try and walk around the house later in the day.

"Both Skuld and Urd are exhausted from Saturday's surgery on your eyes. They're still asleep," she informed me.

"Still? How did Keiichi and Belldandy's weekend go?"

Senrigan told me that she watched the couple arrive really late last night and to her eyes they appeared to have had a very full weekend.

"They're even more in love than they were before," she added.

I heard three Ninjettes giggle at that. Then they started arguing, politely at first, then fervently.

"How would you know _that_, Senrigan!" "I saw them!" "I suppose you are a voyeur as well as a ninja!" "How _dare_ you accuse me of that, Hikari!" "Hikari...that was _mean_, confusing her surveillance with voyeurism!" "Well, just because _you're_ in love with that Toshiro Mifune guy in the Yojimbo movies..." "So what if I am!" "Kodama's in love...Kodama's in love!" "How can _she_ be in love with a movie star, Hikari? She's just a mouse-turned-ninja girl!" "Shut up, Senrigan! Who asked _you_?"

They went on like this for at least half an hour. At least I wasn't bored...they were as skilled at repartee as they seemed to be at ninjitsu. After a few moments of silence, I had to ask the question that was forming so obviously in my head.

"Girls? Er...ladies?" I heard them growl at me when I said "girls". I ventured a delicate question.

"Are there any guys...let's say about your height...that you would be interested in?"

"N..no. When Mara restored us, she used the essence of the Ninja spirits to incarnate us from our previous animal states," Kodama answered with a sad tone to her voice.

"There are no mates for us; all we have is each other," Hikari added with melancholy.

"You mean, you haven't considered asking Urd or Belldandy to try and use some kind of divine magic to make you each a male ninja partner?" I was astonished that they hadn't asked for this boon.

"We wouldn't dare impose on our mistresses for something so selfish!" they answered as one.

"What! You must be joking! Belldandy is one of the kindest creatures on this planet! Surely she wouldn't feel that you were imposing on her!" I argued.

"But it would be inconvenient because..." I felt a small bit of anger in my throat and I let it out.

"You three are supposed to be Ninjas...master warriors. Both the Hagakure and the Go Rin No Sho instruct you to _never_ become discouraged in the face of adversity. Further, both texts inform you to penetrate to the depths, rather than ignoring yourself like ascetes. How could you call yourself Ninjas and yet be incapable of the necessary humility to ask for what you have secretly desired in your hearts? The very fact that you three argued amongst yourselves so trenchantly about the subject of love only _proves_ to me that you deeply desire it!" I snapped accusingly.

I was surprised at the vehemence of my dressing-down of the three. After all, they had been attached to me as guardians for the past day or so...I should be grateful. I_ was_ grateful. But in this case, my gratitude manifested in tough love. I felt empathy for the fact that the three were alone in the world, but at least they could _do_ something about it! In contrast, I was still attitudinally trapped in the emotional hell of hundreds of past episodes of abuse. There was nothing I could do...I couldn't just choose one day to forgive, forget and ignore, then suddenly find myself comfortable around women and romance.

"Some day, that freedom might come for me," I told myself optimistically. "But they could have a chance for romance right now...so what's keeping them?"

"Look, I'm sorry I got so riled up...I just don't want to see you three go through life alone! I just wish I could..."

Kodama interrupted me.

"So you have studied the budo teachings too, Cevn! I could cut you down right now...with no effort at all. Any one of us could! Yet you have the courage to challenge us despite your apparently weakened position. You speak from the 'attitude-no-attitude' perspective...with fortitude and honor. I, for one, will strike at the heart of the matter by considering the merit of your words."

"Thank you for instructing us on the meaning of the teachings. We bow to your strength of spirit, even though you cannot see us," Hikari added.

With a great effort, I responded by pushing myself into a seated position. Not knowing precisely where the three ninjettes were, I bowed in the general direction of their voices. The pain was tremendous and I gritted my teeth as my left arm and my head both felt like they were ready to explode. The physical discomfort was so intense that I felt dizzy. I eased myself back down into a supine position and passed out.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Megumi and Sora were eating lunch in the N.I.T. Cafeteria 2: the Messe Gardens. Around them, the buzz of conversation blended into a murmurous anonymity. Both had encountered trying episodes in their morning classes: Sora had to give a speech in her Engineering Business Language course and Megumi had spent all weekend preparing for a test in her second-year Engineering Physics class.

They were relieved to find each other, and started talking animatedly.

"How's Aoshima?" Megumi asked, always urging her friend. Sora looked sullen for a moment.

"He's trying to date some graduate student!" she said despondently, slapping her textbook on the table with a crackling thud.

"Idiot!" Megumi exclaimed.

"_Why_, Megumi? Why do I have to look like some junior high school student? He won't even look at me twice because I'm so... underdeveloped! Not to mention that my speech this morning was a nerve-wracking disaster! And I entered N.I.T. straight out of high school, so I'm _two_ years younger than everyone else!" Sora despaired, looking at her bento lunch with a downcast face. Megumi felt a sense of empathy for her friend.

"Look at it this way, at least you don't look older than your age. What's more, you're still a major-league cutie, Sora. Just think of what it would be like if you were ugly _and_ looked too young! And when you're 30...you'll look like you're 21, babes! Just look at Cevn-sensei; he's almost thirty and he looks like a student," she encouraged. After a moment, Sora brightened and smiled shyly.

"Thanks Megumi! I needed a little boost after this morning. Actually, a _big_ boost. How was your physics test?"

"Yeesh!! I had a headache going into it and now I don't," she said with a smug smile. "Actually, it was pretty rough!"

"Has Genji even said 'hi' to you lately?"

"I cornered him this morning to tell him that I still wanted him to go to the Noh plays with Cevn-sensei and me, once Cevn gets better."

"And?"

"He talked to me a little bit. He said that his parents had gone on another six-month business trip and that Sayoko was keeping him up all night with some kind of 'black lizard' party she threw. But he still doesn't seem to be interested in me...not at all like he was at the party we had before the solar car race," Megumi frowned.

"We ought to start a new student club...the Unnoticed and Underappreciated Beautiful Single Girls Club!" Sora joked. They both chuckled heartily at her idea.

"Yeah, there would be exactly four of us, since there are only 27 women in N.I.T.'s Engineering School. The paralegal and computer geek girls don't count!"

"Hey, watch it about the computer geek-girl stuff, chick!" Sora said mock-guardedly. Megumi smiled at her friend, who was known as one of the best computer math-simulation CAD mechanics at N.I.T.

"We could even have Tamiya come to the meetings in his cheerleader outfit and give us inspirational talks!" Sora added.

"Ha ha hahahahhhheee!" they both giggled.

_**"**What'r yuh laughin' 'bout?!__**" **_

They both looked up in shock to see Tamiya standing behind them.

"Well, sir, we were..uh..just laughing at the expression, er...you know Keiichi gets such an intense look on his face..." Sora attempted to fabricate an excuse.

"Ahhh, and it had nuthin' ta do with muh cheerleader outfit, ehh?" Tamiya said with a smile, his eyes glimmering as if to say "you're both busted!" Both underclass coeds looked terrified momentarily.

"Hey, it's okay. Ah bet a lotta people thinks it's funny! Ah do it to lighten da mood, y'know! Besides, da look of shock on yuhr mugs jus' now was well worth it!" Megumi and Sora smiled at each other, realizing that the beefy Tamiya had left them off the hook.

"By da way, did ya's see da news last night? Dey had some guy on from some classical music station in...uh...oh yeah, in Osaka. Duh guy says dat he found some music pod thingy, den he plays it in his car, and likes he suddenly felt so balanced and calm. So he takes it tuh his boss and da boss lets him plays it on da air. Next thing they know, da station is getting swamped with phone calls; people ravin' about the music dey jus' played. Da funny thing is deys don't know anything about da music, cuz da music files are all untitled. Dey sayz the pod had 'K' or something etched on it, but it was all scratched and stuff so dey couldn't make out da name. Freaky, huh?" Tamiya said. The more rapidly their sempai spoke, the more anguished his Japanese was. He was obviously a country boy...

Sora looked at Megumi through her round rimmed glasses as if to say "you know something about this?" She had guessed a while back that the improbability factors that surrounded Megumi and her household were inordinately suspect. She ventured to opine that it had something to do with Keiichi's girlfriend and her two sisters.

Megumi looked at the two and shrugged her shoulders. This was news to her. She had been wrapped up in studying for her test, and was also worried about Cevn, so she didn't take time out to watch any TV last weekend.

"Hey, this is Japan! Anything can happen!" she commented, smiling innocently.

Tamiya asked them about Genji. He told them that, as club president, he had noticed that Genji was starting to slack off on his duties, such as the inventory of the clubhouse items that was assigned to him. Tamiya admitted that it was Sophomore "make work", but it was still important to the functioning of the club. He added that he had called the US to talk to Chihiro; she suggested that Genji's attitude needed shoring up.

Megumi informed him that Genji had been avoiding her and acting withdrawn. Sora chimed in and expressed concern that Genji was avoiding everybody.

"Ah'm gonna have ta have a talk with da boy!" Tamiya decided out loud.

"Go easy on him, sempai...he's having trouble with his sister," Megumi cautioned.

"Of course he has! Dat wimmen's a walking problem vacuum! Anyone who hangs out wit' dat stinkfish-octopus Aoshima has gotta be up to some kind of trouble!" he remarked, then left their table.

Megumi remembered what Cevn had told her...and considered the possibility that Genji was messed up emotionally to a degree that Tamiya couldn't even begin to suspect. She quickly excused herself and went off to find Genji and warn him. She found him at the Campus Center in the video game room, playing some kind of shooting arcade game.

"Genji!" she yelled to get his attention. Genji ignored her and she patiently waited until his game was over, and then she rubbed his shoulder to get his attention.

"Genjiiii!" He turned to see her, a look of irritation on his face.

"Leave me _alone_, Megumi! Can't you see that I'm trying to have some fun? I never have fun anymore! Just this once, I find some some time to myself...and then you come and interrupt me!"

Megumi tried to appear diminutive and gentle...but inside she was fuming at his rudeness.

"Genji, I just wanted to warn you that Tamiya-sempai is upset with you, and he wants to talk to you ASAP!"

"So what! Who gives a whirl anyway? My life is going down the tubes because of my damn sister. I can't even sleep at night without having to hear her crazy bullcrap! Why do _you_ care? Oh...I get it! You're just here because of the Club. Well, Tamiya can boot me out of the Club. He can kick my ass to China and back, for all I care! Why can't everybody just leave me alone? Why do my parents have go on those trips and leave me with my older sister--the freakin' basket case of basketcases!" he said in a surly tone of voice.

Megumi tried to talk to him some more, but he only half-heartedly paid attention to her. After a few minutes, she shrugged her shoulders and reluctantly left him to his video games. As she walked out into the campus square, she noted with concern that Genji was much worse off than she had expected.

"It's almost like he's ready to _explode_!" her feminine intuition told her. Looking across the courtyard, she saw Keiichi coming out of his last class of the day. Greatly relieved, she walked up to meet him. They sat down nearby under a tree and she shared her concerns about Genji. Keiichi looked at her with a worried face as she described his lackadaisical attitude. He said he had wanted to talk with Genji too; now he felt worried that Tamiya might go ballistic on the sophomore Motor Club member.

"I'll talk to Tamiya about Genji," he offered. Megumi thanked him and went to her last class.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Three days had passed since I had chastised the Ninjettes. They still were watching over me, but they seemed to have acquired an air of deference when I talked with them. I told them to chill out and treat me as an equal. This brought on a philosophical argument from Kodama, but I smoked her with her own premises, challenging her with quotes from several famous traditional texts, including Takuan's "Taiaki". She couldn't remonstrate against _that_ renowned text and its perspective on the psychology of self and others.

The next day, we joked around and they played hide-and-seek in the room, each Ninjette giving me a play-by-play narrative as the other two played.

Today, they invited me to play a form of blindman's bluff. The three would try to circle me stealthily and I would throw a wadded up piece of paper in an attempt to 'hit' one of them. After a while, I was able to discern the sounds they made as they moved. I scored one on Senrigan and Hikari but none on Kodama.

"Hai!" I heard as I felt a little Ninja girl pounce on my lap. "You couldn't get me! You're totally lame!" Kodama teased me. I tousled her hair playfully. She was like a little living breathing doll with muscles of steel.

"You must be a genius, Kodama, figuring out that this blindfold makes me 'lame'!" I kidded her; her two companions burst out in laughter.

"Did you ask Belldandy yet?" I questioned her.

"No, but we plan to in the near future. We need to figure out what kind of animals she should reincarnate as a male ninjas. I don't want to get stuck with a sluggish partner!" she said jokingly.

"I think that a snail is more your speed!" Senrigan snapped back.

"And Belldandy should reincarnate a clam for you!" Hikari challenged the tomboy ninja. The three dissolved into animated laughter.

I felt a sudden intuition to try and play the game again, only this time, instead of relying on my hearing, I would try to use that new hidden (sense? faculty?) that I seemed to evidence. Ever since I got to Japan, there were times where my mind would tangentally take its own direction. Like when I first came here and the voice in my head gave me the exact age of this temple...and I _knew_ it was the truth, I remembered.

But this attribute was always random.

"What if I could harness it, make it manifest when I needed it?" I wondered as I challenged them again to another round.

If there was anything about these three, they loved to play games. Must be the rodent-spirit in them. They made me count to ten while they hid, then I grabbed three pieces of wadded up typing paper and threw them in seemingly random directions. I heard a scurrying and I scooped up more paper and threw it left and right. After a few minutes, I used the last three pieces of paper near me, and tossed them backwards over my shoulders.

Hikari climbed up my back and sat down on my shoulder.

"You cheated! You hit us _every_ time!" she said indignantly.

"What!" I stated with genuine surprise. I explained to them that all I did different this time was to listen to myself, and not to them. I stupidly felt like Luke Skywalker in the first Star Wars movie...relying on 'The Force' when it was impossible to coordinate sensory data. The three ninja girls attacked me playfully and pinned me down on my back.

"Hey, be careful!" I warned.

"Don't you mess with the _Ninjettes_!" Senrigan admonished me playfully. "We'll make you into sashimi faster than you can say iichi, nichi, san!

"Hey! I don't know how to explain what just happened! I only tried to ignore all my senses and just go with an 'inner feeling' that I had concerning where you all were hiding. Besides, I wouldn't dream of trying to sneak one by you. I would rather fight Musashi Miyamoto or Yagyu than you three!" I complemented them.

Kodama related to me about the first time the three had encountered me out in the temple yard. I was taken aback when they said that they attacked me and their weapons went through my body as if I wasn't there. Hikari apologized on behalf of the three for their attack on me the first day.

"It must have been hard for you to attack a non-resisting foe!" I offered. I wasn't too shocked or upset at them...they were just being fastidious with their duty to protect the house. They told me about the several times they had chased Mini-Mara out of the house in the past few months.

This evolved into a storytelling clinic. The subject of martial prowess brought out the storyteller in the three girls. I imagined that I was listening to the hanashika...the professional raconteurs who traveled Japan telling folktales.

Each Ninja girl told me a tale about a famous 'sword-saint' in Japanese history. They were really good at it! One would narrate while the other two provided sound effects, yelling and clattering their weapons. I was trying to visualize scenarios in my head to accompany their tales of martial courage. I was sincerely grateful that they were such good companions; and I profused my appreciation on them.

Later, Skuld came in to check on me, so I asked her if she would consent to taking me on a walk around the house. After the fun and games with Kodama, Hikari and Senrigan, I felt an irrepressible urge to go outdoors.

Skuld grabbed my hand and guided me out of my room. I was feeling much better physically as I slowly walked down the hallway. Once she led me outside, I gasped with delight and gratitude. I could make out a faint glow through the blindfold!

"Please let it be it be my vision coming back," I silently hoped as I waved my hands in the light breeze.

"Ohhhh...wow! Skuld! I can see a bright glow! I can see that the sun is out! I think you guys did it!" I felt her grab my hand in both of hers and excitedly jump up and down.

"Yeeeeaaaaahhooo! That means that you can take the blindfold off. It worked! It worked!" Skuld's voice was over-the-top with excitement.

"Sit down here while I go get the others!" she commanded, sitting me down, then running into the house. A moment later, I heard a rush of footsteps on the wooden porch encircling our house. I put my hand in front of my blindfold, and saw a distinct darkening of the glow. I was shaking with the strong feelings coursing through my heart.

"What's all the excitement, Skuld?" I heard someone say from inside the house.

"What? He can make out bright and dark, you say?" I heard Urd give a loud whoop, then everybody was excitedly talking amongst themselves as they came out to see me. I could faintly make out shadows in my field of vision. Then someone cut the back of my blindfold and pulled two patches off from over my eyes as Urd announced, "And now the unveiling!"

"Yeow...megabright!" I managed to yell before covering my eyes with my arm. In sharp contrast to the blackness that I had become used to, the sudden glare of the outdoors was painful. After a few moments, it became tolerable and I uncovered my eyes.

I could see indistinct shapes...like clouds of dark and light. My vision was very fuzzy. Gradually, things became a little clearer and I could make out forms. My excitement mounted as I began to distinguish colors. Blue sky and green earth. I pointed to a peach colored orb with a frame of black mist and said, "That's Skuld!"

This brought animated cheers from all present, as Keiichi sniggered. I pointed to another peach colored orb with black around it and said, "Keiichi?"

"No, that's Megumi! I'm 'Skuld'...back over here."

"Then you must be Belldandy?" I said, pointing at a taller fuzzyform.

"No, I'm _Urd_! If you're going to mistake me for my little sister, I might as well reverse the operation!" she teased me.

"_Little_ sister, Urd? I'll let you know that I'm only a few ten thousand years younger than you!" Belldandy said indignantly. "And...by the way, Urd, we're going have a little talk about your latest chemistry experiment after this is all over."

"Eep!" I heard Urd gulp that one down. I briefly wondered...what did she do now?

"Oh Cevn! It's so wonderful that you can see again!" Belldandy said in a musical voice. I felt a punch on the arm, which must have been Keiichi.

"Hey, buddy, you're something else!" he said happily. "Now you can help me rake the grounds this week when you're better."

My vision was gradually clearing up. Skuld reached down and hugged me tightly.

"I told you that I would keep my promise! I told you!" she said in a wavering voice filled with emotion. Urd explained that it would take a few days for my vision to get back to normal, as my brain was still sorting out all the new visual pathways.

I felt tears flowing down my cheeks. I was never so grateful to have tears, which meant that my eyes were back where they belonged. I choked up with the intensity of the moment.

"I don't know how to thank you..." was all I could manage before I burst into deep sobs.

"I owe you guys..._everything_!" I said with gratitude. Skuld grabbed my hand and motioned to me to get up on my feet. We walked into the dining room and Belldandy served tea for all.

I was beginning to make out fuzzy facial features on the oval faces around the table. My vision was teasing me, only giving me nebulous glimpses of who was seated where, but I felt very satisfied with the gradual clearing of my vision. It felt so good to be able to join my friends!

"A toast to Skuld and Urd!" I offered, and we all raised our teacups in salutation.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --


	12. Pt 12: Tangents

**Part 12: Tangents**

The howling wind stamped through the courtyard as the first big summer thunderstorm vented its rage. Before the last class of the day at N.I.T., I sensed that the hot muggy May afternoon possessed all the telltale signs of an impending storm, not to mention the impressive cumulonimbus clouds perched on the horizon like a glaring giant. Walking home, I marveled as the twilight sun underlit pink pouches of mammanoform clouds, creating an unusual skyscape of soft bubblings. An hour later, my bedroom room resounded with the crisp sound of rainsheets pattering against the wooden walls and jalousied windows. Several times, the overhead fanlights and lamp flickered as loud jolts of thunder crashed into my eardrums. The paper in the shoji sliding door crinkled with each gust, despite the tightly fastened windows.

Urd was seated on a zabuton cushion next to me, ready for another session of tutelage, so I could make sense of the ancient tome that was bequeathed to me.

Why she waited until today, during _this storm_, was a mystery. The tempest was going off with an unsettling intensity...and my concentration became more unfocused with each peal of sound-chasing lightning strikes.

"Urd, why wait until _now_ to do this? Do you know how hard it is to study during a storm?" I wondered aloud.

"For a mortal...yes. But not for me...I _like_ these kind of storms. They unsettle the brine of an otherwise boring, humid, season. But I didn't think it would bother _you_ so much!" she answered.

"Well...it does!" I exclaimed.

"Cevn, I decided to wait a few days. I just wanted to make sure that your eyes could handle the strain of reading," Urd explained with a wink.

"If my eyes could stand the strain of having to look at you, then they must be okay!" I thought, struggling to check my temper. Then I appreciated the gap between thought and mouth...if I had said what I was thinking out loud, Urd would have interpreted it _way_ differently; at total odds to the spirit in which it was intended.

Then I realized what she had _really_ said...

Once more Urd had surprised me by being considerate instead of selfish. She didn't seem too ardent with the prospect of having to explain each section to me. I couldn't fault her for this reserve. For my part, I was uncertain about the task of having to try and apprehend divine knowledge. Philosophers had coined a term a millennium ago, homeoorotepeanea, to describe the inadequacies of the human mental capacity when faced with comprehending the mind of God. Now, I was about to embark on such an adventure.

It felt odd, this sudden transition from teacher to student. I had returned to my teaching role at N.I.T. several weeks ago. Dr. Kintaro personally welcomed me back; stating perfunctorily that everyone was worried about "N.I.T.'s youngest and newest faculty member." I was considered a faculty member because I wasn't just a N.I.T. grad student doing teaching assistant work...

"Cevn! Pay attention! I'm not going to waste my time tutoring you if you can't keep focused!" Urd chastened me with a scowl, reining my mind back in from its meandering.

"Well excuse me, ma'am! This storm is totally goofing up my concentration," I snapped back mock-formally.

"There you go again, making excuses! I suppose _I'm_ the real problem?" she wordcurled, fluffing her hair with a practiced motion and looking at me seductively. She hovered close to me, pursing her lips as she leaned in until her face was inches away. I could smell traces of an exquisite perfume wafting from her neck.

"Urd..._don't_! You know that I'm sensitive enough around women, especially with...uh...attractive women like you!" I stammered nervously, my panic fueled by her proximity.

"Come again? Whaddya say, honey?" she said, smiling demurely as she cupped a hand to her ear. She had heard my little slip-o-the-tongue!

"Stop it! You don't need to make it even more uncomfortable for me--otherwise I'll never hear a single thing you try to teach me!" I quickly countered, trying to depower my embarrassment.

"Oh, I could teach you _a lot_ of things, y'know! Why don't you just give it up and admit to me about _why_ you are so squeamish around women? Especially attractive women...like myself! Better yet, why don't you just give 'it' up?" she taunted. "Remember..._yo_u said something about 'attractive', not I! Besides, I'm the Goddess of Love! Maybe I could help you fix whatever's wrong with you!" Or should I?" she offered.

Sincere or not, there was no way I would tell her. Once more, I was being told that I was "wrong" for having such a paranoid orientation towards women. This, in my esteem, was proof of her condescension and ignorance.

"Are you kidding? I wouldn't entrust you with my secrets if you were the last person..er..Goddess on the planet! I barely know you, and...you have this reputation of turning things around on people," I replied with a touch of intolerance. Urd flashed an indignant shade of red at this.

"You must be suffering short-term memory loss! Remember six weeks ago when _somebody_ operated on you for a whole day and restored your eyesight! Or have you forgotten already?" she snapped as she pulled back away from me in a huff.

"Look...Urd, I don't mean to be unappreciative of that! You have no idea how obliged I feel towards you and Skuld! This in itself is a scary concept...because there's nothing I can do to repay you. I mean, I can't offer anything that you can't already do for yourself...except maybe provide you with some kind of perverse amusement," I reflected, telltaleing my inadequacies.

"You? Amuse me? Give me a break!" she said, looking at me with a curious face.

How could I explain myself to her? I tried to simplify it.

"Urd, there is a big difference between sharing my innermost pain and losses with you...versus being a helpless patient who needs a miracle. I don't think there is a miracle that can heal what is inside of me," I said, expressing my hopelessness.

She looked at me and shook her head sadly as I continued.

"I have to get to know someone _a lot_ better before I can talk to them about that kind of stuff. There are always several sides of the story: what I feel, what I think...and what is my truth. But, I need someone who help me get to _the_ truth. _My_ truth is constantly subject to revision. I've had too many betrayals in the past...so I've learned to practice discretion," I finished explaining.

"Well, I _am_ going to find out anyway, one way or another!" Urd said in a chafed voice. I felt totally threatened by that misgoverned observation. My insides felt like they were being turned inside out; my feelings exposed to the view of any casual observer. My breathing quickened in pace as my anxiety crashed the floodgates of my restraint. I stood up abruptly, ready to bolt. I just wanted to get away from the threat. From Urd.

"Urd, leave my privacy alone! If you're so interested in personal hells, why don't you and Mara go have a chat," I slashed aloud impulsively as I backed away from her and stalked out of the room. I dashed through the living room and opened the doorway to the porch. Keiichi and Belldandy looked at me in surprise as I stormed by them.

"They must think that I'm being crazy again," I thought. I shut the door and stood out on the front porch, listening to the soundscape of the heavy rains. Keiichi slid the front door open partway and asked me if I was all right.

"Yes, as far as someone can be...someone whose heart has been torched to a cinder by the flames of abuse!" I answered back dejectedly with a hint of irritation. Keiichi looked at me, unable to fathom my cryptic response. I noticed this, and tried to assure him that I was okay.

"Hey, it's okay, K-1! I just need to spend some time by myself and calm down. You know. Urd!" I explained. He smiled at me and asked me if I was planning on getting soaked.

"I'll set an umbrella out for you, just in case it gets really windy. By the way, Megumi and I are going to spend the weekend at home with our folks. You sure you can handle being alone with these three?" he said with a wink.

"Yeah, if someone puts electrical tape over Urd's mouth!" I jested. We both laughed at this.

"Geez...thanks for throwing me to the tigers, Keiichi. Er...I mean _a_ tiger. Or is that tigress?"

"Are you referring to Skuld or Urd?" he quipped.

"Actually _your_ girlfriend!" I teased back.

"Ehhh?" he said, then laughed when I shook my head "no".

"The way it's been raining, you might not have to be the sole mortal domestic here. There's no way we can drive through this rain!" he said with obvious disappointment as he walked back in the house.

My mood took a downhill turn too. I really didn't care about getting wet; in fact I wanted to run out into the storm and scream.

"This happens every time!" I perjured to myself in disappointment.

"Every time a woman tries to spend any time around me and wants to know me better, my sensibilities precariate like a plains gazelle being chased by a panther. I always flee...or I drive her away," I exclaimed in frustration. The old memories tuned themselves to my lament; I recalled all the others who thought that my avoidance of women was "weird", who had often questioned my sexual orientation. Many times, I had been accused of being gay because of my tentativeness around women; unmanly in the eyes of others. Especially the machoman types. If they only knew how much I wanted to be in love or have a girlfriend!

I knew full well what was fueling my anxiety. Irrevocable years of childhood sexual abuse. Not to mention the engirded pain resulting from the loss of the woman that I loved completely. But there was nothing I could do...but perplex with greater pain, despite years of therapy. I started feeling depressed as the old identity of being crippled inside once more asserted itself. I felt like a whole part of my identity had been walled off from me: completely inaccessible despite my best efforts.

The worst part was I _liked_ Urd in some intangible sort of way. I knew that there was no way that a Goddess would deign me as eligible for her affections. So romance was obviously out. Yet, she was one of the most beautiful women I had ever seen. Like the Death spirit of ancient Persia; who was so beautiful that when men beheld her, their breath was sucked out of them...and then they died.

Urd was like this...and more. I knew that she was unattainable; she was an idol star while I was the trash man. All I could hope for was to cross her path.

Touching lives, but never intersecting...

I argued with myself. I didn't have a crush on Urd, so to speak; but I definitely felt _something_ a-stir when I was around her. My own feelings betrayed me with even more fear.

But what was even more attractive about Urd was her multifaceted personality. She was so many things _at once_. For each defect of character, she had a corresponding asset. I secretly wished that she could discover that her defective characteristics were actually just coverups for her positive attributes. Her stubbornness was actually just a distortion of perseverance. Her impulsivity was actually just an overamplification of carpe diem.

"She's a lot like me, before I found recovery," I reflected. Then I felt disappointment again; all these years of recovery...and my uncertainties still won me over to the hell of loneliness.

"Why do I always feel one way and act the complete opposite? If I would like her to be my friend, why can't I just try and trust her, instead of fighting her off?" I tried to shrug out my thinking because my emotions were spiraling in vectors.

I heard the front door to the temple slide open behind me. I was entranced with the rain streamlets coursing off of the eaves, falling in straight and flaxen lines to the ground just in front of the wooden porch. It was raining so hard that the other buildings in the temple complex were obscured. The city lights were a faint orange glow, diffused in the cloud-rain. I sensed that someone was standing next to me, watching the rain. The rain soothed my heart and helped me regain my serendipity.

After several moments I heard Urd's voice.

"Cevn...I'm sorry," she said softly. She stepped closer to stand beside me. I almost sidestepped away from her in reaction...

We stood silently watching the rain.

"Why is she doing this?" I anxiously wondered. I fought with myself, wanting to simply walk away and leave her. Or maybe she would leave, which would disguise my evasive inclinations.

But she stayed, and after some minutes of emotional battling, I turned and looked at her. I wordlessly peered into her light emerald eyes, watching her emotions play across them. She seemed to pierce a part of me with her soft-hard expression. I realized that this apology was out of character for the prideful Urd. It definitely merited a complement of some kind.

"Urd, I really appreciate that," I thanked her sincerely. She seemed to gather herself, still looking at me in the eyes.

"Cevn, I don't mean to be so pushy. I just...have never met a guy like you. Most mortal men act like nothing could ever bother them! Especially women!

"And Gods? Well, I could tell you all sorts of stories about prideful Gods and divine arrogance! I've come around...to just expect the male half of the Multiverse to behave confidently around women," she disclosed.

"But you...you obviously aren't confident," she concluded.

I heard this and hung my head. This speech rang rich with familiarity. I had heard it dozens of times, from dozens of women. They might as well be saying, "you're not a _real_ man!" It was always the same...always humiliating in a shamebursting way.

I started to turn away and Urd noticed my reaction. She reached and rubbed my arm lightly. I instinctively shrugged her hand off.

"I didn't mean to question your manhood, Cevn. I think you're a really great guy. Really! It's just that I'm not used to someone who is as...real...as you are. I know that you must have had something dreadful happen in the past. And I've never been in a position to have to, you know, deal with someone with that kind of past," she admitted.

"Bullshit!" was my initial mental reaction. "She's only seen the lives of a hundred or so billion people, now concealed in death's timeless nights. Not to exclude the fact that she's a Goddess!"

Yet, I eased into a fleeting comfort in response to her awkward attempt to explain and apologize. It amazed me that she was able to intuit my reaction. Urd sure could be empathetic if she wanted to! For a moment, I warmed up to the idea that she might actually care.

I felt a little lightcrack of cheer shine on my soul.

"Let's leave my baggage here on the porch and go back to my room to check the book out, huh?" I said with a smile. We walked back to my room and started over.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

When the storm abated its fury, Urd opened the book to an early section and explained the God's Language portion to me. I was uncomfortably aware that I seemed to be able to identify parts of the symbolic language as she translated. Was it that 'extra' part of my intellect in action?

"This section describes the divine principle of 'infinite regression-nonlimited chaos-wassenterum-cyclical path'. These symbols have seven levels of context and the 49 potential interpretations all interlink at the prime numeric intersects. Thus, the gestalts are fluidic," she explained, pointing out symbols as if it was child's play.

Pseudogarten.

"Urd, let me try and make sense of it. If an infinite regression was supposedly viewed from a static noninfinite position, a point existing outside of its attributes, this position could instead interpret infinite attributions as acausally nonlimited rather than regressive, right? Then the concept of wassenterum would apply as a moral construct. That would imply that continuous chaos _could_ have a moral index of some sort...thus, the moral implications must be interpreted in the context of being cylindrical, as in an asymptotic moebius. This would only limit it to two dimensions, a dualism. Yet, the seven levels of context for the symbols invert into the sets of prime and odd numbers. The 49 potentials," I interpreted with a dash of wild intuitive leaps.

"...must fold within themselves to yield voided-prime situations, whose dimensions are not cocile, but elastic...'fluidic' as you said. It is describing an attribute of the elemental properties that distinguish certain essences of the space-time continuum from Yggdrasil!" I concluded...my leap of thought rocketing into the mists of cognition. I looked to Urd, expecting the obvious criticism of my fallacious reasoning. Instead, Urd looked at me with obvious admiration and a hint of puzzlement.

"Cool! I don't know how, but you really understood it!" she exclaimed, sounding like her little sister. She turned away from me and stood up, seemingly in deep reflection.

"That's impossible...a mortal cannot possibly understand that! One of _us_ would take several attempts to inculcate it. What's more, he extrapolated on his own that it had something to do with Yggdrasil! And I didn't mention _that_ part!" she whispered to her self in an astonished voice. Loud enough for me to hear.

She shook her head with curiosity as she turned back to face me.

I felt a shading of fear at what I had just overheard. This strange capacity of mine that allowed me to 'know' obviously unknowable facts was at work again. It was like a new part of my mind was opening up...like a florette in the Ides of March. Yet, I felt an obvious mental strain while interpreting what she had translated.

I needed to call this heightened mental capacity _something_, so I decided to term it "metallect".

"Urd, is that symbol.." I pointed towards a squiggly thing in the middle of the page "...a representation of the fact that transneutrinos have weight in abstract and cosmogonical dimensions?"

She looked at me in surprise.

"_How_ did you know that? It's an elementary concept...but you didn't wait for me to interpret it!" she asked, obviously discomfited by my apparent ability to read this symbol of the God's Language. She turned a few pages, quizzing me. I knew about half the symbols that she pointed out. She obviously enjoyed the question and answer game we were playing--praising me for correct answers and teasing me when I missed a symbol.

We spent the next half-hour working on translating some parts of the book. Urd patiently explained to me some of the more abstract concepts that I didn't discern the first time through. The rainstorm diminished, then ceased; soon we heard Keiichi and Megumi leave the house in Megumi's car.

"This is amazing! By my guess--based on how you just performed during our little quiz--you seem to have a novitiate-level awareness of the God's Language. In other words, you would be halfway to Skuld's level!" Urd assessed me.

Skuld! The instant Urd mentioned her name, I flashed on how she and I had shared a day of captivity under Mara. During that time, Mara had tried to 'blend' us. I remembered drifting in the vast starpool of Skuld's feelings and thoughts. They were the complete opposite of what I experienced under Mara's mind, during her possession of me. Dark and light, malevolence and innocence. If I could remember what Skuld's mind was like when I joined it, then perhaps...

"Urd! I think I know what happened! Somehow, I retained some or all of Skuld's knowledge about the God's Language when Mara tried to combine us!" I said excitedly. I looked at Urd, feeling like a child seeking approval from an adult.

She looked into space with a thoughtful countenance, resting her hand under her chin. Then she pointed at me with faux dramatism.

"That has to explain it!" She started laughing, and I looked at her with a "what's so funny?" face. At this point, any humor was suspect; my emotions were askance about this situation. My mind was turning renegade on me, albeit in a positive way.

But renegade is renegade. Was my own mind..._mine_?

"Mara screwed up again, heh heh! By merging your thoughts with Skuld's, she..haha..opened the door for you to learn the God's Language. She's soooo inept at times! Looks like we received an unexpected benefit! You must have somehow tapped into Skuld's language acquisitions," she explained between giggles. I didn't share her lightness of mood.

"Urd, this is pretty scary! I mean, aren't mortals supposed to _lack_ an understanding of the God's Language? What is happening to me? I'm playing music that you call the God's Music! Now I can read cryptic symbols you call the God's Language! What if I...? I..I think I'm losing it, Urd!" I said, gulled with alarm.

Not that I hadn't lost it before, but this was getting pretty out of control. My emotions raced from consternation to apprehension and back before I knew it. My own mind was being usurped...eclipsed by something new...something _different_!

"Whoa! Slow down a bit, honey! Has it occurred to you that all of this may be at the hands of the Almighty, for some purpose only He can understand?" she offered, trying to reduce my all-too-evident anxiety.

"How? And so what if it is? I already feel out of control enough without Kami-sama being added to it," I fretted. As soon as I said this, I remembered what the NA program had taught me about powerlessness. By admitting powerlessness, one begins to walk the pathway towards understanding what true power is all about. My weakness only conceals my strength. Surrender is letting go of the weight that drags on...and joining the winning side.

I checked my fears and closed my eyes, seeking the calm center inside of me. It was obvious that Urd was really trying hard to help me. I acknowledged this and decided to appeal to her.

"I'm definitely going to need help now. I don't just mean just with this Enigma Book...but with myself as well. I need to understand what is going on inside of me. Why my mind seems to be hyper intelligent sometimes.

"About the book...by understanding parts of it, I'm open to misinterpreting it. Plus, I still don't comprehend everything you're explaining to me unless I try to intuit it. I can't just rely on simply understanding what the book says, I need to seek but what it _means_ for me. I hope you're ready to dish out more assistance than you might have bargained for," I said with humble solicitation.

"You think that I'm _not_ going to help you, Cevn? Nnn nnh! I _want_ you to learn. You need us to teach you. We Gods only undergo education for the most basic symbology, then we inculcate the rest during Prime and Transcend Inculcations, Urd explained. As if I could understand what _that_ meant. She must have noticed my confused expression, because she elaborated, "Prime's sorta like your K-12 grade school, while Transcend is like your frosh-PhD type university setup."

"You're going to need to _study_, Cevn, because you can't Inculcate," she explained.

"I'll do everything I can to help. But it's going to cost you in the end!" Urd said, making a sly face.

"Oh great! What does she have planned?" I thought as I turned to a new page and found a chart with a set of symbols.

"What are these, Urd? Why are they organized in a chart?" I observed the symbols and then an interpretation clarified.

"They're 'chaos-redirected fuzzy deductive-inversion set principle-non anattma defense tangents'," I said, satisfied with my definition. I looked at Urd for confirmation. She looked perplexed for a brief second...like she didn't have an answer to give me.

"Urd, what is _Vanagdrasil_?" I asked.

Her face registered an earthquake shock at my query. She asked me to repeat what I just asked her. I rephrased my question...and Urd looked at me with an even more stunned expression than before. She recovered quickly and smiled with affected innocence.

"It's nothing important!" she said unobtrusively.

"What?! Just now, you looked like you were going to have the divine equivalent of a Goddess heart attack, Urd! Don't tell me that Vanagdrasil is 'nothing important'! I don't buy it! Level with me, Urd!" I demanded. She floated up in the air suddenly.

"I..I have to go! Seeya tomorrow!" she said, floating out of my room without so much as a backward glance or a good-bye.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Belldandy and Skuld were discussing Urd's latest transgressions against Cevn and the recent "bear in the woods" episode, when the subject of their dialoguing entered the room. Belldandy looked at Skuld, who nodded her head. Skuld noted contentedly that Urd was very distressed about something.

"Good! Maybe you figured out how screwed up your recent actions were, sis!" she thought to herself emphatically.

"Hey guys, I need to talk to you, like _right now_!" Urd said, her voice tremoloing with certain panic.

Belldandy looked at her older sister.

"Well that's good, because I've been meaning to talk to you too, Urd!" she replied.

"So you know?" Urd asked her sisters.

"Yes!" they both replied in unison.

"Whew!" Urd exhaled, feeling a huge burden being lifted off her back--she would be able to discuss this new development rationally with _someone_!

"By the way, Urd...what was in that canteen that you gave me to take on our camping trip?" Belldandy asked, her face fixed with a cross expression.

"Eeep!"

"Why does she have to bring this up _now_?" Urd thought, exasperated. She decided to ignore Bell's question.

"Well, Urd! Are you going to explain yourself to us?" Skuld asked sternly, hands on her hips.

"That's not important right now, you brat! I have to..."

"NOT IMPORTANT?!" Belldandy shouted.

"Do you realize that your latest attempt to dose us with some love potion almost forced Keiichi and I to have sex in the woods!" she said with disgust and anger. Skuld reacted to the part about sex with an expression that bordered on nausea. She felt a rising wrath against her older sister. _Both_ of her older sisters. One for wanting a mortal man...in a mortal manner. The other for trying to make her desires come true...against her wishes. But her anger towards Belldandy was tempered...while her ire towards Urd rued unabated.

Belldandy had related to Skuld that Keiichi had told her that he wanted to wait until 'the right time' before bringing sex into their love. At that time, Skuld felt a new level of cautious respect for Keiichi when she heard this. Then Belldandy had told her about Urd's callous attempt to disrupt their chaste relationship. Skuld was angry at the betrayal by Urd.

"Urd, in the past, you've often said your job was to help me. But how can you be helping me when you try and force Keiichi and I into an area that neither of us are comfortable with in our relationship? Why are you so obsessed about our sex life?" Belldandy said accusingly.

Urd became defensive and tuned out her sisters.

She looked at Belldandy and felt sorrow for her younger sister. Bell was so uptight about the one thing that brings the most pleasure to mortals. Kami-sama_ had_ to load up sex with a profound ecstasy, otherwise the Earthrealm mortals would never pursue sexual reproduction. Of course, being a Goddess, Belldandy was capable of experiencing any form of pleasure in the Multiverse. Rumor had it that sex was right up there with Sharing.

But the real reason for Urd's interest was curiosity. Urd had never seen a Goddess and a mortal have a sexual encounter. She certainly hadn't experienced sex in her existence...and never would.

"God's don't have sex...they share totalities!" Urd observed, fondly remembering some of the Sharings she had had with her two ex-boyfriends. But something else bothered her. After living on the Earthrealm for over three years in a mortal form...mortal ways were starting to rub off on her. She was beginning to feel forbidden feelings of attraction towards men...one man in particular at the moment.

"This feeling has to be avoided at all costs!" Urd corrected herself. "I can't afford to feel an attraction towards anybody!" Once more she sadly reminded herself that she was the Norn of the Past. But being immersed in mortality had changed them all. This immersion justified why Skuld was assigned as an Earth Trainee, so that she could be exposed to mortality with all its gross and sublime temptations. This immersion also explained why Urd had been banished to Earth so many times in the past; she was still easily consumed by her appetitive nature.

Then she remembered why she had come in the room...

"...why don't you ever learn, Big Sister! If I..."

"But, I gotta talk to you about..." Urd interrupted Skuld.

"URD!" Belldandy warned, "Stop changing the subject! This isn't about _you_ and what _you_ want! This is about you being accountable for your actions! I was so upset about what you did...it took me _six_ weeks to reach a state where I could confront you rationally! And I _knew_ it was you that caused this mishap!"

Belldandy was momentarily confused about Urd's indifference; Urd seemed to think there was something more important than the matter at hand. Usually, Urd became belligerently defensive or evasive when this subject came up. Belldandy reviewed how many times Urd's sisterly attempts had ended in failure. This was getting to be an old game between the two of them, which added to her frustration with her older sister. Yet, Belldandy was sometimes inadvertantly amused with Urd's childish endeavors.

"Her behavior would be more appropriate at Skuld's level of maturity," she thought wryly, looking at both her sisters.

"What?" Urd asked testily, unnerved by Belldandy's sudden grin. She remembered what Kami-sama had said when He suspended her license. Belldandy had echoed that sentiment. Urd wanted to explain herself to her sisters, but she felt backed into a corner. So what she said instead was evasive.

"Everybody here has their quirky little attachments to the mortal way of life. Skuld's addicted to ice cream and mechas. You're fond of tea and knitting. I have sake...and you and Keiichi's love life. That's just how it _is_! If you and he would have made love during your camping escapade, you would be much better off...not to mention less bi..." She cut herself just short of saying "bitchy".

"Whoa!" she thought, picturing how Belldandy had gone off her rocker the last time Urd called her _that_ word. Their house had lost a third of its roof _that_ time!

The three sisters argued for several minutes, ignoring the knocking on their door. Urd insisted that she had been trying to 'help' Belldandy and Keiichi. Then she made the mistake of admitting that she was watching the two in the woods in her mini form.

"You did WHAT?! Urd, that's so...perverted!" Belldandy reacted with anger. She was absolutely livid now. Once more, Urd had completely disregarded her privacy! It seemed that Urd was unable to identify boundaries or apply common sense to situations. Belldandy was astonished when she tried to imagine Urd observing them in the forest. She couldn't even conceive of doing such a thing herself.

Then she felt embarrassed.

She blushed as a particular memory emerged...of her spying on Urd and the Cherry Blossom Spirit when she was just a little bit older than Skuld...

"Okay, so I guess we're even!" she thought reluctantly.

Urd saw Belldandy's crimson blush and flinched, expecting her sister to explode with rage.

"You always try and force things, Urd!" Skuld shouted. "But...I guess you really lucked out this time, because your potion saved Keiichi's life. I hope you think about what would have happened if the bear had come on them ten minutes later!" Skuld added with a visible shudder.

Urd paled at the thought. Once more, Skuld had leapt beyond brattiness to frosty analysis. Urd couldn't argue that point with her. Belldandy felt an icy chill run down her spine...she hadn't even considered _this_ possibility!

"Thank you Lord!" she said under her breath. Then she leaned forward and fixed her sister with a stare. Belldandy stared right back.

"Urd, sometimes I think your purpose in my life is not to help me, but to teach me acceptance and forgiveness. You must understand, Keiichi and I _will_ become sexual in the mortal fashion...someday. That's a given." Belldandy said, smiling inwardly at the thought. Out of the corner of her eye, she spied Skuld making a face of disgust.

"When we do, I _might_ just tell you about it. When and how that happens, however, is up to the _two of us_! Not to you...not to anyone else! I would suggest that you reflect on the fact that it is quite evident that the so-called Ultimate Force is purposefully preventing you from causing me or Keiichi to make changes in how we are together," she explained, reaching the end of her patience.

"I can understand that your limitation as Goddess of the Past forces you to only be an onlooker, but..."

"Yeah, yeah, I get it, Belldandy! I get so sick of this 'Goddess of the Past' garbage! At least I'm doing it out of what I think is best for my younger sister! Even if she doesn't care about _me_!" Urd replied, shifting from defensiveness to bitterness to tenderness in a flash.

Belldandy's anger withered away at Urd's raw admission. She knew that Urd's motives were sincere and coming from a place of love most of the time; even if the way she manifested them into action was totally lunatic. Urd was saying that she was trying to create a sexual bond between her and Keiichi...for _her_! Belldandy felt herself flowing into the familiar warmth of Urd's protective feelings towards her as elder sister.

"Just like I feel towards Skuld sometimes," Belldandy recognized the trait in herself. Her heart responded with pardon.

"Well, once more, all is forgiven, Urd! But you must be more careful!" Belldandy said charitably.

"And _much_ more honest!" Skuld said less-than-charitably. Urd reached over and pulled on the youngest Goddess's nose.

"Gotchya!" she said. Skuld unsheathed her mallet and playfully swiped at Urd with it.

_Knock knock!_

"Hey, someone's knocking," Urd said.

"Duhh!" Skuld commented, making a screwing motion near her temple with two fingers.

Belldandy slid the door open to see Cevn standing in the hallway. He looked pretty anxious about something. Just then, Urd remembered why she came in the first place.

"You guys..." she said in an announcement voice.

"Hey, I need to talk to you about something!" Cevn said worriedly. Urd motioned Cevn to be quiet with a downward motion of her hands.

"That's why I came here in the first place to talk to you guys! I got to talk to you about something. In private! _Girl_ things, Cevn, which I'm sure you don't want to hear about!" Urd fabricated as she pointed thumb-over-shoulder at him. She gently but firmly pushed Cevn out of the doorway and slid the door shut. With a flourish of her hands, she soundproofed their bedroom with a silence chamber spell, to keep him from prying out their secrets.

Cevn looked at the shut door with confusion.

Belldandy and Skuld were caught off-guard with this statement by Urd...and her extra precaution of sealing off the room's acoustics.

"At last, Urd's going to cop to why she is so interested in sex!" Skuld thought enthusiastically. "I gotta hear this!"

Belldandy looked at Urd with a worried face...she knew the heavy burden Urd had to carry with affairs of the heart. She was preparing herself for another intense session with a miserable Urd.

"You're not going to believe this! He knows the _God's Language_! And he mentioned _Vanagdrasil_ !" Urd said, flinging her hands in a dramatic gesture. She watched calmly as her two sister's faces registered deep shock.

"Hah! I _told_ you it was important!" she reminded them with a triumphant tone to her voice.

Belldandy didn't believe her. It was so outrageous. _Too_ outrageous. She felt her heart pounding in her breast with she bubbled over with anxiety and dismay. Skuld looked at Urd as if she was outright lying.

"Urd, that's a...heh heh! That is the most _stupid_ lie I have ever heard you tell! And you've told some big ones...like all the 'special ways' to restore Goddess powers...which were all attempts to get Keiichi to do perverted things with Elder Sister!" Skuld accused, then laughed sassily at her.

Belldandy agreed with Skuld...but she had a reservation concealed within her own doubts about the veracity of Urd's statement. After all, there had been so much that was unusual about Cevn.

"But what if...?" she wondered for a moment. Yet...each Goddess had a protective program that would prevent them from sharing forbidden knowledge to a mortal.

"Our voices would literally shut off before we could speak about secret matters," she remembered.

"Urd, if he _does_ know, you know we can't confirm it! We have to do everything in our power to prevent him from thinking that Vanagdrasil exists!" Belldandy stated gravely.

"You guys, he just said it out of the blue. He was reading that goofy book and then he just up and asked me about it. Just like it was nothing important! I was just as freaked out then...as you were just now!" she mentioned, hardly believing it herself.

"This is totally major!" Skuld said. "If he finds out..."

"Then the spiritual balance of the mortal world is at risk!" Belldandy completed Skuld's unspoken concern. She stood up and pulled Skuld to her feet, then the three walked down the hallway to Cevn's bedroom. Skuld almost wanted it to be true; a part of her was excited by every new discovery about her mortal friend.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Inside, Cevn was reading the Enigma Book. Belldandy gave a start when she noticed he appeared to be _actually reading_ it. Skuld sat on a round stool to watch with cool curiosity, while Belldandy stood and Urd floated.

"Cevn, what are you doing?" Belldandy asked.

"I'm trying to read this. Why did you go all of a sudden, Urd? And why did you kick me out of your room?" he asked.

"We had to have a little talk about your acquisition of the God's Language," Urd answered as she and Belldandy found pillows to sit on.

"You mean he can really read it?" Skuld said excitedly. "C'mon, read a selection for us!" she prompted him. In response, Cevn picked the passage that Urd had taught him earlier. He translated it, then explained it. Bell and Skuld were surprised at the accuracy of his explanation. Urd was still a bit amazed at this new talent her mortal charge was demonstrating.

"That's really very good, Cevn!" Belldandy praised him in a measured parental tone of voice, trying not to sound too concerned about the downside to his aptitude.

But she was _very_ worried now...

"This is all your fault!" Cevn teased as he pointed to Skuld, who was looking at him with a prideful smile. He then explained how his mindmeld with Skuld had left him with a basic knowledge of the God's Language. Skuld reacted to this with a pleasant thrill...once more she had helped her new friend!

"Well, that's all fine-n-dandy!" said Urd impatiently. Then Cevn dropped the bombshell.

"What do you three Goddesses know about Vanagdrasil? And don't try to mislead me by pretending ignorance, because I _know_ that you know!"

"You see, _that's_ why I was so impatient to talk to you!! And you both were busily accusing me of being selfish!" Urd said, looking at her sisters indignantly.

"You still are!" Skuld replied. She noticed that Belldandy had an introspective look to her eyes while Urd was still caught up in her righteous attitude. Skuld pulled on her hair and chewed it. She realized that she was feeling vicarious about Cevn's abilities...and was astonished when he confirmed in his question what Urd had mentioned earlier. She knew he wanted to know about Vanagdrasil.

"That's where _they_ live!" she blurted out. Cevn looked at her with rapt curiosity.

"Hey, does anyone mind telling me what this is all about? I feel like I'm a lab rat about ready to be marched into a Skinner box," he asked. Skuld heard this and felt sorry for him...it must be hard to be a mortal _and_ involved in all of this.

"Vanagdrasil is where the Demons come from. Where they live!" Skuld answered before anyone could interrupt her. Before she could interrupt herself.

_--Dead silence--_

Urd almost fell off of her levitating pillow. Belldandy had tried unsuccessfully to get Skuld's attention by waving her hands, hoping that Skuld would keep mum about the subject. She stopped in mid-wave and slowly lowered her arms in resignation. Skuld had been so excited that she had missed the fact that she had disclosed privileged information.

"_How_ could she say that? The protective program should have taken her voice away..." both Urd and Belldandy asked in stereo, looking at each other with mystified expressions.

"Ooops!" Skuld said with a look of innocence, covering her mouth with a petite gloved hand. She smiled to herself at her little mistake...then she remembered the penalty for disclosing any information about Vanagdrasil to the mortals.

Her face blanched with fear and tears traced lines down her cheeks.

"Oh...NO!! What have I done?! I totally totally screwed up! Do you think He heard?" she shouted with desperate trepidation. It was obvious that she didn't know about the prevention program because she had never been in contact with prohibited information.

"_Somehow_ she must have learned about Vanagdrasil!" Belldandy observed to Urd.

"Yeah...I hacked into the protected information subsystem of the Yggdrasil Mainframe and learned all about it! And you guys just think I'm some little girl who can't do anything on her own!" Skuld said with a momentary flaring of pride.

"Well, now that _someone_ has potentially got her license suspended by revealing secret information," Urd said with her hands on her hips, "...we need to ascertain how _he_ found out about it!"

Urd was definitely feeling a harrier mood come over her. She possessed a slight sadistic streak now and then towards Skuld. But after being sounded out by Bell and Skuld earlier in the evening, Urd was more than a little surly. Besides, as the eldest, she knew, more than anyone else, how grossly irresponsible Skuld had been by revealing the secret nature of Vanagdrasil. She looked at Skuld with a half-smile, half-scowl.

Belldandy went over to console her younger sister, who was crying with despair.

"That was a big mistake, Skuld! How could you forget? You must have also known that it's prohibited to speak of Vanagdrasil in the presence of any mortals, right? she asked, torn between sympathy for her sister and concern about the repercussions that could result from the grievous breach of regulations Skuld had just committed.

"I...I just wanted...snff...to help everyone! Waahhh! Why can't I just _help_ once in a while?" Skuld stammered through her tears. Urd looked at her youngest sister and unexpectedly dropped her vicious regard when she realized how _upset_ Skuld was. Skuld had the panic-striken expression of a cornered rabbit facing down a tiger.

Urd reminded herself that Skuld was very young...and right now, a _very_ frightened child. Even if she wouldn't admit to the 'child' part at the moment.

"Oh Skuld, my poor sister!" she said with sympathy as she hugged Skuld. Belldandy looked at Urd and mouthed a single word.

"Prometheus..."

Urd went pale as she remembered the one of the more renowned incidents when a God had done what Skuld just did. Prometheus had received eternal torture for prematurely revealing the secret of fire to the ape-mortals. This had resulted in the extinction of the Neanderthals, and threw back evolution scores of millennia. Needless to say, the Lord was _very_ pissed off...

"What'd she do? What'd she do?" Cevn asked with a worried expression. Confused, he had been a passive observer to the drama...but the force of Skuld's heavyhearted exertions had elicited a reaction of strong concern for the youngest Goddess.

The three seemed to ignore him.

"Belldandy, Skuld!" Urd called their attention. "He was reading this page when he figured out about Vanagdrasil!" she said as she pointed to a page in the book.

Skuld followed her finger, and saw the page Urd was pointing at. She suddenly lost the impulse to cry as her mind clicked in...she recognized two of the symbols on the page. She had seen them in Mara's lair when she tried to commit the shapes of the Demon's Language symbols to memory. She didn't have a clue as to what they meant, but she _knew_ what they were. They were definitely evil.

"You guys! I saw these symbols in Mara's lair. Mara was using them to make some kind of mandala! They're part of the _Demon's Language_!" Skuld announced, hoping her insight would redeem her in the face of the possible forthcoming call from the Almighty.

Belldandy pored over the page. There was nothing on it that she could recognize.

"Is she going to be okay?" Cevn kept insisting about Skuld. They ignored him.

"TELL ME!" he shouted.

"She'll probably get her license suspended," Urd answered, trying optimistically to avoid mentioning the worst-case scenario. Which was the only scenario, as far as history was concerned. Each incident had resulted in a horrible retribution from the Lord. She shuddered at the thought, then tried to lighten the mood.

"If that happens, at least I won't be the only one dealing with a handicap around here!" Urd offered, feeling somewhat relieved with the thought that Skuld might get off lightly.

This statement brought a downcast look to Skuld's face.

"Skuld?" Cevn asked. "I don't know what a license suspension entails, but I do know that you were courageous enough to put your captivity to good use and learn some of these symbols," he said, hoping that a compliment would take some of the edge off of her despondency. It did the trick, because Skuld broke out a little smile, the first one since her little 'slip'.

"You see this page? We know that it's written in the Demon's Language...thanks to Skuld. If I'm interpreting this correctly, it's an 'energy matrix delimiter for the stable-chaos regulation of cybernetic ontongeny' of the defense subsystem of the Vanagdrasil Mainframe!" he explained. Belldandy looked up sharply from the book.

"_They_ have a Mainframe? How do you know that?" Urd asked, clearly overawed by his statement.

"How _could_ you know that?" Belldandy wondered inwardly. Cevn looked at her, then Urd, then Skuld.

"I don't know, but my guess is that I learned it the same way I 'borrowed' my awareness of the God's Language from Skuld."

"How's that?" Urd asked with deep curiosity.

"I don't want you guys to think I'm a Demon if I say this...but I was possessed by Mara when she kidnapped Skuld. I have this new knowledge in my head, or maybe my whole being." he said, referring to his recently acquired 'metallect'.

"_What if_ I 'borrowed' a working knowledge of the Demon's Language from that experience, the same was I did when I was merged with Skuld's mind?" he hypothesized aloud.

"Makes sense," said Belldandy. She was feverishly conflicted between trying to comprehend what this meant for all of them and her huge concern for Skuld. No God or Goddess had ever been able to understand the Demon's Language. It was rumored that the Almighty could only recognize a very few limited symbols and concepts. But other than that, zilch.

Now Cevn shows up, courtesy of Urd. A mortal who can recognize both Languages. She was confounded by the concept; because the realms of the Gods and the Demons were mutually exclusive...almost _totally_ segregated. All that was allowed by the Ultimate Force was brief contacts between Gods and Demons on neutral grounds such as the mortal's Earth-plane. The UF had arranged for the brief series of contacts between each God and his or her Demonic Doublets. And there was the virtual tournaments between Gods and Demons...an attempt to channel the combative instincts of both sets of divines. Any other interactions came within the pretext of War; this had to be ratified by the collective Assembly.

Gods and Demons didn't know each other's languages. Gods and Demons could never visit each other's realms. No one besides the Almighty had ever seen the Dark Lord. Any knowledge of the Demons was made available _only_ by the whim of the Lord.

In all of her existence, Belldandy had no experience of the Demonic side of reality, except for the meetings she had with her Demon double, Velpser. And the heated competitions between her and Mara over mortal souls and the like.

"And the virtual games," she remembered, the old feeling of juvenile animosity momentarily resurging. She couldn't comprehend what it would be like to have any link between Gods and Demons in any other way.

"That's just the way it is!" she had thought with conviction. But now, there seemed to be a possible link. This could change everything. She looked at Urd and Skuld and recognized that they were also feeling very troubled by the fact that their long-held convictions were being challenged.

_Ring!_

"Uh-oh!" Belldandy thought.

Skuld jumped with a fullbody shudder, then cringed into a huddle as she heard each ring of the phone.

None of them wanted to answer _that_ phone call, as they all knew what it meant. Finally, Belldandy gamely volunteered to answer it.

Skuld watched her sister leave the room, then turned to Urd and clung tightly to her oldest sister.

"As if you or anything else can protect me from His wrath, Big Sister!" Skuld thought with heavy despair. Still, it felt so comforting to try and hide in Urd's sisterly embrace.

"Yes?" Belldandy answered innocently, trying to sound like she didn't think anything was amiss.

"It is I!"

"Oh...my Lord, how can we serve you..."

_"Cut the crap, Belldandy! Put Skuld on the line. Now!! I'm really not in the mood for games. I'm __pissed!"_the irate Voice commanded. Belldandy felt a geyser of panic well up...she almost dropped the phone. She remembered the last time a God had violated the Vanagdrasil Prohibition. That God was simply swept from existence by Kami-sama. Gone forever. Banished down Urd's Well. It was rumored that he had become a Demon or even a mortal.

"Poor Mephestopolis," she thought. Terrified, she carefully put the phone down and went back into Cevn's room. She made the sign for "phone" with her hand and motioned for Skuld to answer it.

Skuld cowered, looked frightened out of sanity. She didn't want to leave the room and answer that phone!

"Skuld, you gotta answer it! It's the Lord, for chrissakes!" Urd said.

"You're already in enough trouble already, don't make matters worse!" pleaded Belldandy in a soft consoling voice.

"P...please, could you come with me?" said Skuld in a small little-girl voice. Bell and Urd closed on either side of her and escorted her into the living room. They set the phone on its side on the table, knelt tailor-style on the floor in the most humble aspect they could manage, bowed...and listened.

_"Skuld, I have been notified by the Yggdrasil Mainframe Sysop Guild that you have violated one of our most sacred prohibitions. I am really disturbed by your actions! How did this come about? You aren't even supposed to know about Vanagdrasil!"_ said the booming Voice.

Urd tried to answer for Skuld, but Kami-sama cut her off.

_"Silence, Urd! Skuld broke the regulation, __she must be the one to explain!"_ He said forcefully. Urd was literally thrown backwards with the powerful ire in His voice.

Skuld was crying almost uncontrollably; Belldandy put a comforting hand on her trembling shoulder. She caught her breath and tried to explain the circumstances between sobbing fits.

"Well, I was..snff..just trying to help out Cevn, Urd's mortal charge. He was..snfff..reading the book Y..You sent him, and then he mentioned..snff.. V..V..Vanagdrasil to Urd, a..and..."

_"Neh? What book? I didn't send down a book!"_ the Voice said uneasily.

Urd gasped.

It suddenly dawned on her, that previous discussion with the Almighty when He called to inform her of her own license suspension. He didn't know then, either! She felt deeply guilty that she had forgotten this important fact. If they had known...this whole episode might have been avoided. Urd felt a tear come to her eye as she blamed herself. She would have to admit her mistake.

_Another_ one.

Urd reached out and pressed the mute button on the phone and whispered to her sisters in a low voice.

"You guys! When He called to inform me of my license suspension, I asked Him about the book. He doesn't know a thing about it! But I forgot about it...because I was so distraught about my license suspension! I'm sorry...this is all my fault!" she said with self-censure.

"That's okay, Urd, we'll deal with that later!" Belldandy answered, playing along because she didn't have a clue about what Urd was trying to say. She reached to turn the phone back on.

_"Don't you cut Me off!"_ the Lord said vehemently, cutting her off in mid-reach. All three Goddesses flinched at the intensity of His displeasure.

In Cevn's eyes, they all were on their knees in formal attention position...just like Japanese samurai from the feudal period in the presence of the Shogun. Out of a pure desire to survive this interview, all three bowed low until their foreheads touched the tatami. Their attitude of humble respect spoke volumes.

"Their Lord must be something!" he thought, even more worried about Skuld.

_"Continue!"_ the Almighty insisted after waiting a minute.

"I...I'm a..a..afraid...Your Eminence!" Skuld admitted, then cried some more. The impassive silence on the other end of the phone grew deafening. With great effort, Skuld concluded her explanation.

"This book..snff..that he has, it mentioned Vanagdrasil. Cevn asked about it and without thinking..snff..snff, I..I..I told him it was the home of the Demons!"

_"Enough! This book you keep referring to...does not exist! It must be a fiction, a hallucination wrought within your minds. There is no such thing._

_"Now...about your transgression. The mortals are never...NEVER, I repeat...supposed to know about the existence of Vanagdrasil and its connection to the Demon Hierarchy! Do you know why, Skuld?" _the Lord said in a commanding voice.

Skuld looked down at her knees with fear.

_"Because they are more prone to believe in the existence of our Demon counterparts. If they had any reliable evidence concerning the existence of Vanagdrasil, the Earthrealm mortals could fall into madness! What's more, it could upset the Balance. We represent what the mortals deem the highest good. They call us Gods, Angels, Benefactors, Preservers...they call our realm Heaven, Nirvana, Penglai and many other names. We must maintain the Balance!"_

_"YOU HAVE NO IDEA WHAT YOU HAVE DONE!"_He screamed over the phone so vehemently that all three Goddesses shook with each syllable.

After a pause He announced His decision.

_"Skuld, Goddess Second Class, Limited. Because of your inexperience, I am reducing your sentence from total reality dispossession."_Belldandy and Urd both sighed visibly with relief, as Skuld momentarily looked at them with a puzzled expression.

"She's in way over her head...she doesn't even know what she has been spared!" Belldandy realized as tears of gratitude filled her eyes. She had nearly lost her baby sister!

_"Because of your callousness, your license is hereby totally revoked and suspended for an indefinite amount of time. In fact, consider it a __perpetual license revocation, Skuld. We can only hope that the grave consequences of your revelation can be reduced by the Yggdrasil Mainframe. You've just diverted several _--million--_ Sysops from their assigned routine duties...to fix --_your_-- screw-up!"_

Unnoticed by all, Cevn had been standing in the hallway, listening. After hearing Skuld's sentence, he felt a wash of bitterness towards the injustice granted to his young friend.

"What the hell, I might as well make Skuld my younger sister too!," he decided and walked into the room.

"Your...Holiness. How can You justify suspending Skuld's license when _You_ just violated the same tenet?" he asked. All three Goddesses turned and looked at Cevn, astounded. They whispered "Shut up! Shut up!" to him.

"How could Cevn understand the spoken God's Language the Lord was using? It wasn't like He was speaking in Japanese or something," Belldandy thought in a panic. She quickly got up and tried to put her hand over his mouth, while Urd and Skuld looked like they were ready to faint from shock.

"That was...just some static in the line...my Lord!" Urd hurriedly explained. Cevn struggled with Belldandy and pushed her hand away.

"I heard everything You said! And _I'm_ a mortal. In fact, You disclosed much more about Vanagdrasil than Skuld ever did!"

_"WHO IS THAT!?"_ the Voice boomed over the phone.

Urd looked at Cevn with eyes that seemed to say, "it's your funeral!" She was shocked to the point where nothing made sense any more. She looked at her sisters, who were stupefied.

"He's as good as dead!" Urd muttered aloud.

"I'm Cevn...er...Mortal, Graduate Class! Remember me, the guy that You assigned to Urd?" His touch of humor in his introduction lifted Skuld's spirits enough that she managed a nervous titter, despite being overwhelmed by her license suspension.

Cevn turned accusatory. In his mind, this whole thing reeked of hypocrisy.

"I still want to know why You are so concerned about keeping this balance You keep talking about. It seems to me that _You're_ out of balance, otherwise You would be praising Skuld for telling me the truth instead of yanking her license. What's more..."

_"HOW DARE YOU!"_ the Voice shouted. Cevn ignored it. Belldandy mouthed to him, "Please shut up!"

"What's more, if there are guidelines, no one is above them. Not even You! Have You thought about what is going to happen if You strip Skuld of her license? That leaves only Belldandy to perform the role of three Goddesses. We've had some very bad experiences here with a Demoness called Mara lately. By revoking Skuld's license, You place all of us in a precipitous...actually a dangerous position."

_"My decision stands! Who are you to question Me?!"_ the Voice shouted over the phone.

"If You're Kami-sama, then everyone should be able to question Your actions. To question authority. If not? Well, okay...be that way!" Cevn said with disappointment. He decided to go for broke.

"But You're going to hear me out! I just want You to know that You have to _live_ the example in order to _teach_ it! You cannot withhold yourself from taking responsibility; You need to admit Your own mistakes. If You don't, how can You expect others to do the same?"

_"SILENCE!!"_the Voice on the phone commanded.

"Fine! Go ahead and fry me to a crisp! Turn me into a deaf-mute mandrill! Whatever! But I just want _You_ to know...that there is no balance where there is hypocrisy! Harmony is the reprieve that withstands the most ill-committed injustices!" he shouted, then walked over and hung up the phone.

Urd fearfully expected it to be over any second. A lighting flash from above and Cevn would be reduced to a small pile of cinders on the floor. Skuld couldn't believe that Cevn had spoken to the Lord that way. Belldandy was almost paralyzed, looking at Cevn and back at the phone with incredulity. Cevn sat back down on the floor and leaned tiredly against the wall, his eyes closed, expecting the worst.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

After ten tense minutes of absolute silence, punctuated only by Skuld's sobbing, Urd spoke up.

"Well, I guess that's His answer!"

"I...can't believe you talked to Him like that! _We_ can't even talk to Him like that!" Belldandy said, looking at Cevn with awe.

"He needed to hear that. Besides, He totally screwed up in the same sense that Skuld did...no offense intended, Skuld. Then He acted like a jerk and pulled her license. He _knew_ that I had Him in a corner and He still wouldn't admit it! But forget about Him or me! What was really most important in my mind...was that Skuld needed a big brother to stand up for her," Cevn said intensely. Skuld looked at him with a flash of disgust, while Belldandy and Urd reacted with facefallen expressions.

"That's what big brothers do...they stand up for their younger sisters!" All three Goddesses looked at him with unreadable miens.

"Could this be what having a big brother is like?" Skuld thought to herself. "Cevn had defied the Lord in order to protect _me_!" Skuld tried her new powers, only to find that her suspended license was already in effect. She could only create tiny translucent words on the wall. She couldn't even levitate a pencil on the counter...

She felt a surge of disappointment. She had never been censured by the Almighty. Her clean record was ruined, she reflected with dismay. She felt that she was treated unjustly, even though she did make a mistake.

"Aren't mistakes supposed to be corrected, not punished? I didn't _mean_ to do anything wrong...I was just trying to help!" she said resentfully. Yet she felt some satisfaction at Cevn's confrontation of the Lord. Even though he had failed to overturn her suspension, he had pointed out the contradiction in it. For some reason, she felt giddiness in the midst of the shock to her system. Skuld started giggling when she tried to imagine the Lord sitting up in Yggdrasil, fuming over being called out by a mere mortal.

"What...are...you laughing about, Skuld!" Urd asked.

"My little sister is turning into a nutcase, just my big sister Urd!" Belldandy exclaimed, feigning a private dismay. She tried to figure out what was the source of mirth that brought on Skuld's laughing fit.

"Don't you see...the Lord got pulled up, tee hee, on His own mistake. And He couldn't do anything about it!" she got out before succumbing to another fit of laughing. "Cevn had Him!"

Try as she might, Urd couldn't help but join in.

"Belldandy, don't you get it? Didya see how pissed off He got on the phone!" She imitated the Lord's voice. "'Who is this?'...'How dare you!'" then burst into bellylaughs. Cevn and Belldandy both thought Urd's mimic of the Lord was hilarious.

The giggling was contagious. Soon, all four were laughing. Urd slapped Cevn on the back, complementing him on "telling off the Lord." Skuld looked at Cevn with renewed respect and gratitude. Belldandy smiled at them all, feeling a secret joy on behalf of Skuld, then playfully tousled Cevn's long hair. Skuld tapped him several times on the head with her mallet, shouting "Bug! Bug in the system!"

"I don't know how, but you got away with it!" Belldandy said to Cevn. "Wait until I tell Keiichi about _this_!"

Skuld stopped laughing and turned to Cevn and in mock fashion, executed a very formal bow to him. This brought another round of laughter. Cevn responded by imitating the Lord's voice with sarcastic pomposity, then broke up with laughter at the end of his 'routine'.

"Just don't do it again!" Belldandy warned as the giddy levity wore down.

"Are you going to be okay, Skuld?" Cevn asked.

Skuld tied on a smile and nodded. Urd had watched with approval as Skuld thanked Cevn.

"It's about time she stopped being so uppity with mortal males," Urd noted quietly to herself. She had often thought about what it would be like for Skuld to have an older brother. Perhaps Cevn could provide that for her.

"I wish _I_ could have him as a..." she thought, then halted her drifting whimsy. Smiling inwardly, she went back to the sister's bedroom. It had been a long night.

"Skuld's really going to need some TLC in the next few days, if she takes her license suspension as hard as I think she will," Urd told Belldandy before she retired for the night.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Do you know what the implications of Cevn's acquistion of the Demon's Language are? He could teach _us_ the language! It would change _everything_!" Urd told her sisters, excited about this new development. She was trying desperately to keep Skuld's mind off of her suspended license.

Each sister was seated on her futon bed. Skuld had a blanket tightly wrapped around her; she was starting to feel very morose about her license suspension. Belldandy noticed how hard her little sister was taking the loss of her license.

"And her powers," Belldandy reminded herself. Skuld had a perfectionist streak in her, but she was still a child in many ways and could react with extreme sensitivity.

"I can't believe I _lost my license_! And I was just learning to use some of my powers..." Skuld said dejectedly. She had a blank expression on her face and a hollowness in her eyes that troubled Belldandy and Urd.

The phone rang again, and all three stiffened. Not another call from the Lord! They looked at each other...all were reluctant to take the call.

"I took the last call, it's _your_ turn, Urd. Skuld's in no shape to answer the phone," Belldandy said.

"Why don't we wake up Cevn and have him take it," Urd suggested, as she was half-heartedly dreading picking up the phone.

"Very funny, Urd!" Belldandy said satirically. Urd looked at her sister with pleading eyes...and Belldandy sternly pointed at the door.

Urd picked up the dining room phone with a foreboding.

"Urd! What took you so long to answer? What's going on there? Damn, I must have let it ring 40 times!" an exasperated Keiichi said. "Where's Bell-chan?"

Urd sighed with relief. She briefly considered calling Belldandy to the phone without mentioning Keiichi, so that she would think it was the Lord wanting to talk to her.

"No, not even I'm that cruel!" she said to herself in a whisper.

"What?" the voice on the other end of the line said.

Urd went to the sister's bedroom and pointed to Belldandy.

"Keiichi."

Belldandy rushed to the phone, relief written all over her face. "Keiichi, what are you doing up this late?"

"Well, it's being here at my parent's house that's the problem. Megumi's asleep...and there's _nothing_ to do here. I couldn't get to sleep, so I thought I would call. I really miss you, Bell-chan!"

"Oh, I miss you too!" Belldandy said with joy. She noted pleasantly that he had been gone only three hours...and he already missed her! She told him about all that had transpired that evening in the compound.

"Skuld got her license _suspended_! Holy shit...you can't be serious! I leave the house for one evening and chaos erupts over there!" he said with a mixture of concern and humor.

"I'm going to wake Megumi and come back home!"

"Keiichi...wait! Stay with your parents! If you leave now in the middle of the night, they might get worried. You don't want to cause them undue concern," she requested. Belldandy didn't want to become a wedge between Keiichi and his parents. She had decided this a long time ago, early in their relationship. She had never met his parents, because Keiichi was extremely apprehensive about revealing her existence to them. But she knew that they must be nice people...after all, Keiichi was a wonderful man!

"Hmmmm, okay! I guess you're right!" she heard him acquiesce.

"We'll take care of Skuld. She'll be okay once she gets used to her license suspension. We're keeping a very tight watch on her tonight," Belldandy offered, answering Keiichi's unasked question.

They exchanged kisses over the phone and wished each other a good night. Belldandy hung up and returned to her room.

Skuld was still awake, looking for all the world like a little lost girl. She was hugging her knees, pulling them to tight to her chest. Her shiny blackcat-colored hair was disheveled, and she was staring downward at nothing in particular. This neglect of her hair worried Belldandy, because Skuld was much more attentive to her hair than either she or Urd. She kneeled down near Skuld and heard soft sniffling. Looking into Skuld's face, she saw that her eyes were reddened from crying.

"Skuld, is there anything I can do?" Bell asked gently.

"I..I don't know! I..snff..don't really care, either. The Lord suspended my license. Nothing can..wasnff..change that!"

"But the important thing to consider now...is how _you're_ going to live, Skuld. Your life isn't over just because your license was revoked. Look at Urd...she's had her license taken away many times and she's still sassy and spirited," Belldandy offered. Skuld looked up and rolled her eyes as her mouth formed a faint smile at the reference to her eldest sibling's long history of being chastised.

"Yeah, but I don't want to grow up to be like _her_! Besides, she still has Earth Spirit powers...I don't even have those!" she said.

"But you do. You must have some powers, otherwise you'd disappear. You just need to practice harder. And I know for a fact that you won't be like Urd. You'll grow up to be _you_! Just consider this as a...frizzed hard disk on the system, so to speak," Belldandy consoled.

Skuld was slowly feeling succored by Belldandy's kind and patient suggestions. She stretched her legs out in front of her and leaned back on her elbows. She knew that she could rely on her sister for an emotional boost. Belldandy talked with Skuld for as long as she could until she felt utterly exhausted.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Once more, I couldn't sleep the whole night through. It was almost 4am. It seemed like I had gone to sleep just a few minutes ago, although it really was between 1 and 2am. I thought about the whole proceedings of the night before. I had been crazy enough to confront the Lord, the Being that the three Goddesses served.

I felt uneasy about Skuld. The moon illumned part of my room through my open windows, creating ghosted shadows of light. The air was cool after the rainstorm, and I had vented the jalousies to take advantage of this.

I wished I could do something for Skuld, something to take away just a little of the sting of her suspended license. I wracked my brains for a few minutes.

"They're Goddesses! How could I give them anything of value when they could just conjure it up?" I wondered. But finally, it occurred to what I might be able to do. I quietly slipped out of my bedroom and into my music studio room. I meditated for awhile, sensing in my soul images of Skuld's disappointment. The words "Trial by Tenderness" kept emerging in my thoughts. Then I tried to grasp the images of a happy young girl that I had experienced during our merged thoughts. They came to me, and I started playing one of my synthis...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Skuld was sitting in her darkened bedroom. Save for a candle that was burning in the corner, the room was pitch black. Both of her sisters were asleep, softly breathing slow tides of dream. She was thankful for Belldandy, who had tried to stay up with her and cheer her up. She wished they were both still awake, so she could talk to them.

"But nothing can undo my lost license!" she thought gloomily.

"What if it suspended...forever!" she conjectured with panic. The worst case scenario of total loss of powers for the rest of her existence...

"I'm not going to think about _that_! No no no! No way!" Skuld vowed in a low voice of defiance, challenging the incline her thoughts seemed to roam towards.

Both Belldandy and Urd rolled over when she said this, reacting somnambulantly to her voice without waking up. She dejectedly stared at the candlelight flickering against the wall. It amazed her how many patterns the light cast on the wall. She could speed them up or slow them down as she wished. Watching the candle gave her some solace...she could lose herself in the imagery on the wall. Even though her outlook seemed as black as the shadowy interior of the room, there was a radiance that was as necessary as the darkness.

Then she heard soft music coming from Cevn's Studio. It was soothing, it was nurturing. Skuld smiled to herself as the music lifted her spirits even more out of the despair she was feeling.

She remembered her anonymous act of a month ago. She had no idea that it would manifest in such a bountiful manner.

"It's like he's painting reality with soundcolors," she thought contentedly.

The God's Music. Skuld literally felt her sadness being drawn out of her. The music was steadying, yet vibrant. She rolled over and fluffed her pillow, and then listened closely as the sounds cascaded like dancing trees around a lion's den in the middle of ceramic snow upon a timeheld silver ripple...she yawned and drifted into sleep.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"It's finally beginning to resemble my lair in Vanagdrasil, somewhat" Mara noted with delight. Mara's lair in Vanagdrasil was a source of deep pride for her. It had been recently awarded the prestigious "Most Outstanding Aura of Malevolence for a First Class Demon's Lair, Millennia 2314." She remembered how hordes of sycophantic Demons had visited her lair, just for the honor of basking in the evil ambience.

She had recently added a side room filled with video arcade games. This was another unexplained fetish that had stuck with her as the result of living with the mortals so long. She remembered her stay in the abandoned video game parlor, just prior to the Ninjette fiasco and the Urd Angel/Devil War. She couldn't stand the sight of a video game for a long time afterward, but then returned and took all of the machines a few weeks ago. The cacophony of light and sound provided great contrast to the deep silent malevolence of the other areas of her lair. She was attracted to the noisy generation of the games, as well as the themes of sheer violence and murder that many of them employed. Video games had been one of her favorite discoveries since staying in the Earthrealm this past three years. They had provided her with entertainment as well as a vehicle to express her anger. If she lost a game, she would simply blow up the machine with a point of her finger and go on to another one.

The summoning mandala for Isilblius was almost complete. The circular pattern was much more complex than she anticipated...her attempts to recreate it had been invariably unsuccessful. But these mistakes allowed her to fine tune several mandala elements; such as the placement of blood, the knife-like stone needle section, the hacked pieces of flesh that filled the interior of several Demon's Language symbols and the triad of skull-candles.

Mara thought with diabolical glee how Cevn's blood was splattered all over different locations in the mandala.

"This is so ironic...that it's _his_ blood! A Demon's blood must be used in the summoning; of course there are no Demons who would willing part with a drop of their blood. So I got me some!" she said with hubris. She had drawn his blood for the purposes of cloning; but when she tested it, there was undeniable evidence of components that matched the qualities of Demon blood. She had just barely drawn enough...the designs used up all six pints!

"If I would have accidentally spilled any..." she reflected, unenthused about the possibility of being forced to possess and kidnap again. Memories of the abortive kidnapping ushered a series of resentful thoughts.

"That blessed Belldandy and Urd totally wrecked my plans when they rescued their bratty little sister and that weakling pseudo-Demon mortal!" she shouted. Using the B-word to curse at the two sisters was proof of how pissed off she was.

"How can I get even with them?" Mara said to a sere-hawk. An industry of baneful machinations raced within her mind. Hands clasped behind her back, she paced to and fro, kicking the odd Demonpets that got in her path.

Frustrated, she sat in her main throne chair and did her denticure. As she was sharpening her canine fangs, she hit on an idea. Her frown slowly turned into a broad grin at the thought.

"_Molten charnel_!! This would be so awesomely perfect! Even if it doesn't kill him, I would be _totally_ stoked to see those three Goddesses squirm under the duress!" she yelled into the walls of her lair with enthusiasm.

"Ha aha hha ha ha!"

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --


	13. Pt 13: Footsteps

**Part 13: Footsteps**

"Hey Megumi, wait up!" Sora Hasegawa shouted, dashing up as Megumi closed the car door.

"Can I catch a ride home?" she hurriedly asked, the wind whipping her carefully layered hair into a rustle.

"Sure, Sora! What happened to your Toyota?" Megumi inquired.

"My folks had use both cars for a trip up north to Oya to get some special salt and seasonings for the restaurant," she answered, deftly hopping into Megumi's car.

"Wow, I can't believe that there's only two weeks remaining until summer break!" Megumi said excitedly while looking across the cabin of her car at Sora.

"Yeah...and one more race!" Sora noted.

On the way home, they discussed today's Motor Club lunch meeting. The Nekomi Tech Motor Club's final race before summer break was a casual ATV haul up the eastern beach of the Boso Peninsula. It was minor league compared to this spring's Solar Car competition; nevertheless the N.I.T. Motor Club entasked themselves diligently on their entry the past two weeks. It would be fun, as it was part race, part summer beach party.

Because the N.I.T. Motor Club had won the international solar race, they had established a reputation as_ the_ club to beat on the college racing circuit. At the latest club meeting, Tamiya reiterated that they were going to endure much stiffer competition due to their now-legendary status among Japan's engineering colleges. He was especially concerned about one Toshiyuki Aoshima and his N.I.T. Four Wheel Club. The "Resentment Club" as Ootaki often referred to Aoshima's racing club. Thus, they couldn't afford to let the spectre of complacency diminish their ongoing efforts.

"Gotta keep us our edge!" Tamiya had insisted in his lecturing voice.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

The subject of Aoshima brought giggles to both girls as Megumi took the scenic route along the ocean. Once more, he had gotten 'snapped' by Cevn-sensei in their Asian History class. Megumi coined the term after Aoshima impudently challenged their teacher several weeks ago, in the midst of a discussion on Asian influences upon Japan's history. He blatantly accused Cevn of using his gaijin status to obtain his position, then added that he was unqualified to teach Japanese students. The class was riddled with astonishment at this act of callousness; as Cevn had been in the hospital just two weeks earlier. Then Aoshima publicly challenged Cevn to a debate after class. He quizzed Cevn on Japanese topics, of which their teacher acquitted himself admirably. Then Cevn responded by asking erudite questions in Greek and Japanese that the freshman couldn't answer, much to his embarrassment.

Since then, Aoshima had repeatedly tried to heckle Cevn-sensei with some obscure bit of information. It was always the same: Cevn would reply with a clarifying question which Aoshima couldn't answer; then Cevn would discourse briefly on the topic Aoshima had brought up, while the latter would turn red-faced. Once, the class laughed at Aoshima, which incurred a stern reproval from Cevn about their lack of peer respect. So now all the laughter was relegated to the drive home after school, at least in Megumi and Sora's case. Feeling relaxed, Megumi and Sora decided to pull over to watch the ocean waves play over the shoreline.

"Hey, this weekend, Genji and I are going to a Noh play as Cevn's guests!" Megumi announced excitedly, her eyes twinkling. She had been preparing for this weekend for over a month, including selecting a special outfit for the occasion.

"Ehhh? What an unusual place for a date?" Sora said with puzzlement.

"It's _not_ a date, Sora! It's just a chance for me to catch Genji's eye and hopefully, maybe his heart!" she countered.

"Sounds like a _date_ to me, any way you put it, Megumi. Every fresh moment, an idea appears to the heart...and you _can't_ deny it!" Sora said sarcastically, rolling her eyes. She looked over at her friend, noticing a blush roiling on Megumi's clear complected face.

"Whose weird idea was it to go to a _Noh_ _play_?"

"It was Cevn's initiative anyway, once he discovered that Genji is fascinated by Noh theatre. By the way, what's happening between you and Aoshima, girlfriend?" Megumi teased with a feigned coquettish voice, switching the subject. Sora looked at Megumi with a misty-eyed expression, her lips trembling.

"_Nothing.._," she said dejectedly in a voice so quiet, she hoped that no one would hear it. Once more, Megumi wondered how in the world her best friend could be interested in Aoshima. The guy was "Mr. Unavailable" half of the time and "Mr. Promiscuous" the other half.

"Nothing?" Megumi looked thoughtful for a moment, then an idea popped in her head; her whole affect returning to cheerful peach. Sora saw the animated look on Megumi's face and turned a sly face.

"_What_?"

"You know that the last race of the year is coming up. Once Aoshima loses, he'll need someone to comfort him. Think of it! _That's _your opportunity Sora! And right before summer vacation too!"

"That won't work! I've tried to comfort him before, but he is always interested in someone else!" Sora noted grimly. Once more she cursed her luck at being a 'late bloomer'.

"But we'll make it _different_ this time! You know how he usually mopes around the week after he loses a race. But this time, we need to make him a hero in some way. Remember when you and Keiichi were in the clubhouse and the gas was on?" Sora's freckled face flushed red at the memory of Keiichi walking in on her while she was putting on her jumpsuit. Recovering, she smiled as she remembered the embarrassed look on Keiichi's face that day.

"What'd I say, Sora?" Megumi asked, noticing her friend's glint of vinegar embarrassment...

"Ohhh, I forgot that you and Keiichi..." she realized, covering her mouth with her hand.

"Anyway?" Sora interrupted, her voice sod with irritation and impatience.

"Anyway...Aoshima was the hero that day. I noticed that he paid a lot more attention to you for the next few days. He must have a weak spot for women faced with exigency. Combine that with something to do with food..." Sora grimaced at this, as culinary artistry was one of her worst nightmares. "...and he'll be ready for you to apply the charm!" Megumi concluded with an appeased grin.

"Exigency, huh?" Sora commented.

Both women had thoughtful miens for several moments as they resumed their drive, traveling through the city center of Makuhari. They passed the Ruruji Restaurant. Sora remembered that the restaurant had a romantic charm that many couples at N.I.T. swore by.

"Yes, but how can I get Toshiyuki to go with me there?" she wondered.

Once again, Megumi was left questioning what was going on in this brilliant, yet love-struck girl's head. She was referring to Aoshima by his _first name_ in casual conversation...as if they were already lovers or something!

Sora started giggling...

"I got it! You and I can go to the Ruruji while Toshiyuki's eating there. Midway through dinner, I'll feign that I'm choking on some food. Toshiyuki will be forced to do a Heimlich Maneuver to keep me from dying. You can whoop it up, so everyone is convinced that I'm on the brink of death!"

Megumi smiled broadly at this idea.

"Cool!! Aoshima will _have_ to rescue you! Then I can invite him to our table. We can thank him and offer to take him with us to a movie. We'll make sure to arrive late, so that the theatre will be packed. You and he will have to sit alone together while I'll 'volunteer' to sit somewhere else in the theatre. I could arrange to meet a friend 'by accident' there, and you'll have Aoshima all to yourself. He'll be like putty, all smarmy and..."

"And since he 'saved' my life, I can _really_ work on him. He cannot refuse the grateful affections of a damsel in distress," Sora said with an voice affected with enticement.

"That would blow the whole hero thing out of the water! The funny thing is, he won't even know it! He'll think that he's being all urbane and stuff, and I'll play right along with it!" Sora eagerly added as she kicked her heels on the floorboard.

"Hey, watch the floorboard...you'll punch a hole in this old rustbucket! You need to wait until you're choking to kick like that!" Megumi teased her friend. The car pulled up by the Hasegawa Ramen Shop and Sora thanked Megumi, then jumped out.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

I spent the afternoon reviewing student papers. This was the final round of short paper assignments before finals. Megumi and Sora's papers were good as usual. Ootaki had a flair for metaphor, and Tamiya was parsimonious. Overall, from an academic standpoint, this was a good class. 31 students, 30 papers.

"Ahhh, Sayoko," I thought with concern. Sayoko had missed this assignment and in the last two weeks had been absent from roughly half her classes. I had tried to talk to her about her schoolwork last week, but she was unreceptive and uninspired.

This weekend, I would be going to the National Noh Theatre in Tokyo with Megumi and Genji. We would drive south to Chiba, then take the JR Sobu Line to the Akibahara Station. Then we would travel west until we reached Yoyogi, where we would disembark and catch a cab to a restaurant in Sendagaya. Megumi informed me that the theatre was about a 10-minute walk from the restaurant.

"That will give me plenty of time to talk to Genji about Sayoko," I thought with certitude.

After I finished grading papers, I left the Watanabe Bldg. and headed for Dr. Ogawa's office. I strolled leisurely down the tree-lined esplanade leading from the center of the N.I.T. campus towards the street. Several students from one of my three classes waved to me as I departed the campus and turned down the bordering street.

I had 20 minutes before my appointment with Dr. Ogawa. The sky was very clear today--cloudless and brilliantly cerulean in the afternoon sun. Several elderly obaasans strolled by me with open umbrellas, shading themselves even at this late point in the day. It was always interesting to note the blending of old and new here in Makuhari.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

The familiar butterfly motif painted on the side of Dr. Ogawa's building caught my eye, along with a series of small food shops. I stopped at a juice bar across the street for an orange juice, then ascended the stairway to her office.

Once inside her office, I began to feel safe. Her office was almost a place of seclusion from the internal strife...and the day-by-day events in my life. The familiarity of the surroundings comforted me, offering me sanctuary where I could give voice to my confusion and pain. I had met with Dr. Ogawa enough times to become accustomed to her therapy style. She was very easy-going...easy-going enough to have an economy of magazines in her reception room. Whenever I saw a psychiatrist or therapist with loads of magazines in the waiting room, I knew that I was in the wrong place. Somehow, an invisible correlation occurred: the less magazines...the better the therapist.

A few minutes later, Dr. Ogawa invited me into her counseling room, or "the Chamber" as I nicknamed it. She told me that she had been considering my case closely. Now that she was finished with my social history and presenting problem, she could start on therapy proper.

"Tell me how you're feeling today," she began. "You've been in Japan almost three months...how is it?"

"I was okay in class today. I had to confront a disruptive student. There were several times that the girls..er..women in one of my classes made me nervous. Then, in the afternoon, I felt some stress about the summer break."

"How have you been sleeping?"

"I've had night terrors again. Two nights ago, I dreamed about being confined by some horrible creature. I'm naked and I can't shout or scream for help. Then I'm pinned down and my soul feels like it's being ripped apart."

"That sound's like the night terrors that accompany sexual abuse victims," she observed casually.

"Tell me something that I _don't_ know!" I said irritably. She was stating the obvious. We chatted a little more, and then she asked me to talk about the abuse; only this time she would role-play one of my stepparents and I would confront the pain of the abuse.

When she said this, I immediately was commanded by detriment. It scared me to death to have to do this...again. I felt some reluctance towards talking about the sexual abuse to begin with. At first, I blamed myself for it, and justified why both stepparents and my siblings had done it to me. This was after years of denying it. I didn't deny it consciously; it kept itself buried until I was 22. Then, I minimized it. I tried to view it as having minimal impact on my life. But as the years passed, and my fear of women increased, I could no longer minimize it as "something that just isn't important."

Feelings of panic welled up in me and I stood up, ready to bolt out the door. Dr. Ogawa yelled at me with vexation.

"NO! Running _isn't_ the answer! Get back in here!" There was something about this 60-year-old therapist that caused me to heed her. She reminded me of my grandma.

I tentatively sat down, and silence reigned. I tried to cultivate my hostility towards the years of repression caused by the abuse. For years: no girlfriends, no intimacy, and very few female friends. This had wrecked a huge portion of my whole adult life. I had missed out entirely on the whole aspect of romantic love. It would always dangle tantalizingly in front of me, but I just couldn't reach it.

I suffered from the embarrassment of having to hide the truth from others--and then having to hide from the pain caused by the truth. "The Sword of Damocles," I noted to myself. The truth was, I was damaged goods. Every time I felt drawn to a woman, I would immediately react with self-disgust...because I knew that my desire was simply an abusive impulse. In my mind, I knew that this was an irrational association. Yet, I could not fight my way past the feelings of self-loathing and fear. For me, I had been dieted by confusion for so long that there was no way my feelings could seem anything else than a repeating of the horrible abuse.

"This kind of thing happens to women, not men!" I thought once more, skeptically considering society's stereotypes about rape victims.

"What would you tell them? If you could tell those who abused you anything you wanted to, what would you say?" Dr. Ogawa probed. I sat quietly amidst my inner struggle. I felt tears come to my eyes and I stuffed them back down. I loved my family, even if they had done this to me. I was scared to death to say anything to hurt them, yet...

"Nothing..." I said flatly.

"_Nothing_?" she said angrily. "You mean you have _nothing_ to say in the face of years of abuse? You have nothing to say after being single _nine_ years?! I've been listening to you go on about being stressed out simply because there are attractive women in your class! You tell me that you're so scared that you can't even consider ever asked a woman out on a date! I can't believe you have nothing to say! "What do you think, that all of this sexual repression is no big deal?!" Dr. Ogawa argued, pounding against my reservations.

"Shut up! I didn't say the students were attractive!" I protested.

"Of course they are attractive. You're just too afraid to admit to yourself that you notice it," she challenged. I shook a little as she exposed the truth.

"What is so wrong about getting angry at your family for the abuse?"

"Because I _have_ gotten angry! For years and years and years..." I half yelled, half sobbed. "All the anger that wells up...isn't going to change a thing! It's not going to take away the fact that through almost all my teen years, I was a drug addict. It can't change the fact that I lived on the streets almost the entire time since I was 12 years old until I got clean. It's not going to take the abuse away and it isn't going to relieve my depression!"

"I don't care any more!" I added, feeling an emptiness inside that wouldn't quit.

"You wouldn't be here if you didn't care," Dr. Ogawa calmly remonstrated. I couldn't argue with _that_.

"So what now?" I asked, surrendering.

"Is there anyone you're attracted to?" she asked.

"No. Even if there was a woman that I felt something towards...I wouldn't tell you. I'm not attracted to any of my students...I mean they are all attractive women, but there is no one special," I said with a shaky voice. "Besides, there's no hope anyway...so why should I fool myself into thinking that there's someone out there for me?"

She looked at me with relief, and was almost happy. I thought that this reaction was curious for a clinician. Then she explained that she was glad I wasn't trying for a student, as that would cross a clearly defined ethical boundary. More of the obvious, I noted with disappointment.

"Is there anyone else?" she asked.

I thought of one possibility, but she was too remote and unattainable. A strong wave of shame overtook me.

"Yes, there may be someone, but.." I managed to say as my voice trailed off. The shame overwhelmed me, and I looked dumbly at the floor.

"Why can't you tell me?" she said, smiling amiably.

"It's too personal...I feel like it's sick for me to feel this way about anyone...it brings up too much pain from the past," I said in a low voice. Dr. Ogawa looked at me for a moment with a thoughtful visage.

"I don't understand why you think it's wrong to feel attraction to someone of the opposite sex."

"It's the damned past! I don't want to be messed up, but the reality is _I am_, and there's nothing anyone can do about it!" I volleyed with emotion.

"Whoa...whoa, slow down, Cevn. Tell me all about the past...everything that happened to you. I have no more appointments today, so if we run over an hour, it's okay by me." Dr. Ogawa said, calming me down. So I spent the next five hours talking about everything that happened to me in my childhood. Hundreds of episodes of sexual abuse. Beatings. Neglect. Being tied in my bed. The instability of alcoholic parents. All of it.

I revealed the secret sources of pain. I exposed the concealed aspects of my being that I was ashamed of. I didn't tell Dr. Ogawa anything new, as I had explored all the incidents with earlier therapists over the years. But it still felt horrible, reliving those oppressions in my past. Several times, my vision narrowed down to a small patch of color on her office carpet. I couldn't raise my head, so strongly was the shame attacking me. Everything was shunned out... I felt like I was in a tunnel, silent except for my own voice...only the words were originating from a distant place.

A screaming heart...detached from my mind.

Dr. Ogawa appeared terribly shocked by what I disclosed. Several times she sat silently, tears running down her aged face. I wanted to leave because I was upsetting her, but she waved me back into my chair. A couple of times I cried until I dry-heaved into her wastebasket. When I came up for air I was dizzy from hyperventilating. Towards the end, I felt exhausted, but I just kept on talking. I felt like a conceited ass for taking up her time.

Finally, the last vestiges of my disheartening admissions spilled themselves out. I felt void, emotionally limp. I felt trapped, that any intercessor would only wound my soul further away, drying my hopes in pith and rind. My eyes were swollen from crying. With great effort, I lifted my head to look at Dr. Ogawa.

She had a very sad, very tired look in her eyes.

"I don't know what to say. Those things were terrible. They shouldn't have happened to you," she said with a resigned tone. She dismissed me with a curt "we'll talk more about it next week."

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Cevn tiredly walked home. He felt some relief that he was able to explore his past with an empathetic listener. Yet, he felt a distinct sense of disappointment towards Dr. Ogawa because she had abruptly concluded the session with very little comment.

"At least she could have said something encouraging," he thought.

Skuld was impatiently waiting for Cevn to get home. Tonight was her turn to 'tutor' him on the God's Language portions of the Enigma Book. He was supposed to be home a few hours ago. Skuld had given up after 15 minutes of waiting, and went to her labs to work on improving Banpei's Demon detection circuitry. She became engrossed in working on Banpei. One could say that he was "a work in progress", as Keiichi often commented. Skuld was pleased with all the tinkering and improvements she made to him.

"Actually, he's a work of art...a robotic organism!" Skuld said to herself proudly, looking at the temporarily inert robot as she continued to make microscopic adjustments to some very condensed circuitry.

Belldandy and Keiichi were in the sunroom at the end of the house. Keiichi was poring over diagrams for the ATV. He wanted to try and squeeze out another 5 to 10hp out of the design, but try as he might, he could not justify that much stress to the chassis.

"It's always a tradeoff in engineering," he muttered as he heard the lead on the pencil snap for the third time tonight.

Belldandy sensed Keiichi's frustration and walked out to fetch him some tea. Just then, Cevn came rushing in, running to the sink to get a glass of water. He stopped briefly to say "hi" and inquired about Keiichi's latest project, then he ran down the hall to find Skuld. Belldandy could see guilt written all over his face.

"I haven't seen Urd all day today. I wonder what's up with her?" Belldandy pondered as she poured a little honey into Keiichi's tea. Keiichi was many things, but he didn't possess a sweet tooth. "Such a sweet guy...yet he rarely eats anything sweet. I'm going to have to work on him with that," she said to herself with a grin as she tipped a little more honey into Keiichi's tea.

Skuld heard knocking and slid the door open. When she saw it was Cevn, she gave him a gruff expression.

"You're three or four hours late, you dweeb! How can you expect us to get any work done if you're late like this?" she said dourly.

"My apologies, Skuld-sensei," Cevn said penitently. "I figured you would be upset, so I got these to make it up to you." He held out a very full bag of wagashi treats and a smaller bag with a pint of ice cream. Skuld's eyes widened at the ice cream and cookies.

"Don't eat them all at once, Skuld-sama!" Cevn teased.

"Hmmm, I guess I'll let you off the hook. But only once! Even though you bribed me..." Skuld said. Cevn half-bowed to her.

"_Onc_e, you mortal idiot! You do this again and all of the ice cream on this planet won't stop me from programming Banpei with a 'anti-Cevn' detect and defense," she decreed.

Cevn cringed somewhat at this veiled threat. He was unaccustomed to Skuld's threats...were they serious or playful? Skuld motioned him to go into his bedroom with a pointed finger. He felt a wave of panic as Skuld was female, even if she was just a girl. The afternoon session had been really heavy. He shakily sat down on his futon and waved Skuld to the other end, then placed the Enigma Book between them.

"Skuld, how have you been? I noticed that you seem to be dealing with the suspension thing a little better this week," he asked.

Skuld still felt unpleasant about this subject. Her face fell just for an instant, and then she recovered and smiled at Cevn.

"I still think it _totally_ sucks, but I'm doing better. I've been working on Banpei a lot."

"Skuld, I was late because I am also dealing with some things that happened to me that I didn't deserve. But no matter what, I've found that I need to strive in the face of adversity. I just wanted to let you know that you can do it too. Keep it up!" he encouraged.

"You're really full of it tonight, aren't you!" Skuld said as she munched on a snack.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Keiichi was feeling tired. He had been looking at the engine mount, trying to calculate a stress-bearing angle that would prevent using any more reinforcing joints.

"This joint is _already_ too heavy!" he exclaimed as he slammed the pencil down, creating a snapping sound. It was time to give it a rest.

Belldandy leaned over him and rested her head on his shoulder. She knew in an instant what corrections would be needed, but as Urd had told her before, "he needs to learn on his own". It was always so tempting to assist him, especially when she saw that he was wracking his brains with effort. But restraint usually emerged over enabling, and she contented herself with the confidence that Keiichi would most likely solve this problem tomorrow.

Keiichi stretched his limbs out and yawned. Another long day. "I can't wait until summer vacation is here. Then Bell and I can take a trip somewhere _special_," he mentally noted. He had been thinking about traveling somewhere in western Honshu or Kyushu. He wanted to take her to a totally different part of Japan. To go on a _real_ trip.

"Bell-chan, if you and I were in Yggdrasil, where would you take me if you wanted to show me something new?" he asked.

Belldandy giggled at the novelty of his idea. Keiichi had rarely asked for specific information about Yggdrasil before. She couldn't explain to him in mortal terms about the sights and sounds of her homerealm, but she decided to give him visual ideas using human perception sets. She patted her lap and Keiichi leaned back, resting his head there. She gently massaged his temples as she began her description.

"There are two spots I can think of, Keiichi. One spot is what we call the Floating Crystalline Lake. If you could, Keiichi, try to imagine in your mind a glass-like surface with lighted grids on it, stretching off as far into the horizon as you could see. If you look closer, you can see that it isn't flat; it has rises and falls just like on this Earth. Then picture metallic stalagmite-shaped buildings gracefully floating a short distance above it, each of them arising several kilometers. Above, the sky radiates from green to purple with pink and orange foamy clouds. Hanging down from these clouds are stalactite-like buildings, many kilometers long," she narrated soothingly.

Keiichi closed his eyes and tried to visualize what Belldandy was describing. She smiled and went on in a gentle voice.

"Suspended between the buildings above and below, there is a lake. It floats in the middle of the sky...and inside of it, light filters through just like a crystal. It looks like a big floating waterdrop. Hmm...it resembles the floating water in one of your outer space movies," she tried to cast an image as she fondly remembered going on vacation there many times.

"Keiichi, there are millions of lights in those buildings; they're especially beautiful when they glow as the sky turns dark violet! What we do is 'dive' up and down between the buildings. From below, we jump up weightlessly through the crystal water until we reach the tops of the buildings suspended above," Belldandy said, feeling memories tug at her.

"Someday, I'll show you it, my love!"

Keiichi was almost lulled into a dream-like state with the combination of Belldandy's descriptions and her sweet sonorous voice. He felt a little sad that Earth had nothing to compare to just this one feature of Yggdrasil.

"You'll have to tell me about the second site later, Bell. I'm almost falling asleep in your lap."

"Keiichi, if you wish to fall asleep here, you can," she assured him. Tracing lines around his eyes with her fingertips, she hummed a song that lifted him into his dreams.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Cevn looked at Skuld with a mystified look.

"What does this mean?" he asked in frustration. Skuld shook her head; she didn't know either. Urd would have to try and figure this one out.

The Enigma Book had thrown him another curve. He had noticed during the past few days that he was going through something that developmental psychologists called a preoperational stage. Somehow, he had been 'wired' with an ability to learn hundreds of words of the God's Language and the Demon's Language. Yet, when it came to conceptualizing how the two languages integrated, his intuition conserved itself. Just like a child who is given two wadded rolls of clay...then the therapist takes one roll and winds it out into a cord...then the child insists that the wadded clay is bigger, despite observing that both clay rolls at the beginning were the same size. Conserving, rather than identifying. Unable to deconstruct the process. Unable to serialize the sequences. Unable to transitively conceptualize the components.

"I feel like a child, Skuld! I am just _not_ getting this!" he said desperately. Skuld was stroking Winston, the latest kitten Cevn had adopted.

"What do you think is causing your lack of concentration?" she asked with a smile. I closed my eyes...all I could picture was Mara.

"Mara! I sense that she's up to something again!" Cevn said.

Skuld saw that her mortal friend was getting upset with his inability to comprehend the God's Language entry in the Enigma Book. She munched on some arare, then offered him the bag.

"You need to take a break!" she said with conviction.

"By the way, _how_ do you know Mara's up to something?" Skuld asked, curious about how he seemed to precognize their Demoness counterpart.

"I envisioned some kind of red energy field in my mind...and I just surmised that it is her. Her presence...or mayhaps an 'echo' of some place she has been. From what I sense, she's been near our house a number of times in the past few days. But she hasn't been inside."

"I improved Banpei's Demonic detect and defense systems. They are three times as sensitive to Demons as they were before," Skuld said confidently.

"Skuld, how can you possess empirical certitude that your modifications are more efficient if you have _no Demons_ to test them on?" Cevn asked.

Skuld got angry and hurt all at once by his observation. She didn't figure that she would have to actually test Banpei on a Demon. He had detected Mara several times in the past. In fact, how could she find a Demon willing to be a subject to calibrate Banpei's systems? This was ridiculous!

All the disappointments in the past week... of her recent license suspension, the gnawing boredom of not having any new powers to explore, the loneliness she had been feeling...all of it boiled forth.

"THAT'S NOT FAIR!" she screamed angrily, belligerent tears welling up in her eyes. Cevn was taken aback by her strong reaction as she stood up abruptly and stormed out of the room.

"Man, did I screw that up!" he thought guiltily to himself.

Skuld slapped the shoji door open to her "Skuld Labs" room, then slammed the door shut behind her. A storm of moody emotions seemed to float in the midst of her mecha lab.

"_Everyone's_ expecting so much from me! They just won't relent! And I just lost my powers! Doesn't anybody understand me!!" she shouted to the walls of mecha components and computers. She leaned against a shelf of half-assembled components and fought back bitter tears.

"Now I'm supposed to improve Banpei's sensors, but it isn't good enough unless they've been tested on a real Demon! _Nothing_ is fair anymore! Nobody cares about how _I_ feel!" she thought with a yin-yang of resentment and sadness.

In her futon bed, Belldandy woke up; sensing a strong psychic disturbance in her younger sibling. She walked up to her sister's "Skuld Labs" room and slid the door open partway.

"What's the matter, Skuld-sama?" she asked. Skuld looked at her, her lips quivering with anger and hurt.

"Everyone expects so much from me!" she shouted with a burst of pent-up frustration. Belldandy smiled compassionately at Skuld.

"It's not that everyone expects so much from you, Skuld. I think you take yourself too seriously...you expect much more out of yourself than anybody else does. We all love you just as you are, not just because you're so helpful," Belldandy stated in her patently soothing voice.

Skuld cocked her head to one side and combed her hand through her long silken black hair. She respected Belldandy's advice and observations, but yet this new information didn't appeal to her at all.

"Huh? You really think so, Elder Sister?" she asked, admixing doubt and deference.

"Yes, my dear Skuld," she answered. Belldandy walked over and sat down next to her younger sister, then draped a comforting arm over her shoulders and rubbed her back.

"Skuld, I sense that you're even harder on yourself, now that your powers are gone. You really want to prove yourself...so you take any criticism very temperamentally," Belldandy observed. She wanted to reprove Skuld as gently as possible.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

About an hour later, Cevn heard a soft knocking on his door. He got up and slid it open, to see Skuld standing in front of him, her head bowed down and her arms crossed over her waist. She stepped forward unexpectedly and almost collided with him, silently resting her forehead against his chest.

"She needs a hug," he guessed after his initial surprise. He pulled Skuld close to him and gave her a long hug as she sobbed into his chest.

"It's been so..snff..hard without my..snff..Goddess Powers!" was all Skuld could manage. Everyone else was asleep and she was too upset to be by herself. Belldandy's words had comforted her and yet confused her as well. She knew that Cevn wasn't being mean to her; he was just pointing out the obvious. She felt so helpless without her powers...it was so unfair.

"Nobody knows how I feel!" her mind repeated, even after Belldandy had talked to her. She wanted someone to comfort her, and Cevn was the only other person awake after Belldandy went back to bed.

"Skuld, I'm glad you're not mad at me. I cannot fully understand what you are going through, but I hope you know that you have my complete support and as much empathy as I can muster!" Cevn said in a level voice.

"I can imagine how hard it must be. To have something new in your life like your powers...taken away before you even figured them out," he added.

Skuld looked up at him with a hopeful expression in her eyes. She felt like he did understand a little bit about what she was going through. She knew that Belldandy _fully_ understood her...and this fact was almost frightening.

Cevn patted her on the head, and told her to get some sleep. Skuld motioned for him to lean down and she gave him a quick peck on his cheek then she went back to her room.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"_Special Delivery!_" shouted the courier as he wheeled in a six-foot high box. Urd looked at him like he was crazy. Belldandy had a look of abject curiosity on her face.

The man pulled out a kerchief and wiped the sweat off of his face, then proffered a pad with a form on top.

"Sign here!" he demanded politely.

"Oh goody!" Urd said with delight. Before anyone could object, she stepped forward and signed the receipt. The delivery man had a look of pure adoration on his face as she smiled at him. He tipped his hat to Belldandy and Urd, then reluctantly returned to his minivan.

As the sound of the minivan's motor faded in the distance, Belldandy fixed a condemning look on Urd.

"Urd! You just signed for this, without asking what it was, or who it was from!"

"Yep, and since it had our address and Keiichi's name, that was good enough for me! Guess your little sweetheart has something up his sleeve _you_ don't know about, sis!" she teased. Her delight increased as she saw the brief flash of poutish annoyance on her younger sis's face.

Belldandy circled around the anomalous box. It was roughly the size of a refrigerator, if one would position its back on the ground. Her curiosity had been piqued by the fact that Urd mentioned that this huge box was addressed to Keiichi. She was disappointed that Urd's impatience had cost her the opportunity to find out the address of origin. The tracking tag on the box was smeared; the sender's address was illegible.

"_Cool_! I can't wait to see what's inside! I bet it's one of those new UDTVs!" Urd said excitedly.

"A what?"

"Ultra Definition TV. Ten times the accuracy of a high-def TV, 254 base colors matrices instead of three colors, computer enhanced stereo holography circuitry..." Urd rattled off, her voice droning on like an appliance salesperson. Belldandy looked at her sister with a smirk and thought "Payback time!"

"Uh...Urd, dear sister. It was addressed to _Keiichi_, right?"

"Yes! So?" Urd said excitedly as she returned with a pair of scissors to cut the cardboard.

"Well, that means _he_ has to open it, since it came for him, doesn't it?" Belldandy giggled inwardly as Urd's excited expression drained from her face by degrees. She knew that one of Urd's pet peeves was being forced to wait for something. Urd's face transformed into a pout.

"Neh...gotchya!" Belldandy thought as she smiled to herself.

"Awww, why can't I just take a peek?" Urd pleaded. Belldandy crossed her arms and shook her head, firm in her resolve. Urd slumped slightly and skulked back to the kitchen with the scissors, mumbling "but he won't be home for another _six hours_!" with exasperation. She came back into the living room with a laggard face and Belldandy tapped her on the shoulder.

"Keiichi will be back from school around 5ish...just another seven hours or so, Urd. We can find out _then_ what this is," Belldandy said, savoring Urd's look of disappointment at the "seven hours" comment.

Urd looked at her younger sister with a irritated face that said, "geez, thanks for reminding me, Bell!"

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Keiichi looked at his watch as he rounded the corner onto the street that their temple compound was on. 5pm. Lately, he had been keener on arriving home as soon as possible from school. He had volunteered for extra hours on the ATV the past few days, so Tamiya had let him off early today. He saw the torii that marked the entrance to home and turned left into the compound. His eyes drifted to the house to see Belldandy standing on the wooden porch waiting for him. She wore a white sleeveless blouse and khaki colored shorts.

"It's really been hot the past few days," Keiichi observed to himself as he parked his bike in the vehicle garage. She dashed up to him and he caught her in his arms and kissed her.

"She sure seems excited about something," he noticed. Bell-chan had just a little bit more pep than usual, something only her boyfriend could notice.

"Keiichi, your package arrived!" she said excitedly.

"Wha...wh..what? A package? For _me_?" he said with a mixture of tentativeness and bedazzlement. Belldandy noticed that he didn't seem to know about the package; her excitement transformed itself into deep curiosity.

"This is indeed a mystery, Keiichi doesn't even know about it!" she reflected.

"Yeah, why don't you two lovebirds come in here so I..er..he can open this thing. I'm dying to find out what's inside!" Urd yelled from the porch.

"C'mon Keiichi! Hurry up in here!"

Keiichi and Belldandy joined hands and strolled down the stone-lined gravel walkway from the garage to the house. Upon entering, Keiichi was wide-eyed at the huge box standing in the corner of the living room. Urd pressed a pair of scissors in his hand and swatted him on the backside.

"There it is...get to work!" she directed. Belldandy scowled at her.

"Urd's more excited about this than I am," Keiichi thought as she pushed him towards the box. He took the scissors and cut down one corner of the box, then peeled back the cardboard. A brightly painted racing design emerged into view. It dominated one side of the object in the box. He tore the cardboard sideways.

"Wah! Need For Speed VIII!!" Urd shouted. Keiichi stood back and looked. It was an computer arcade game! He became more excited as he pulled cardboard and packing foam from the game. After a few minutes, a pile of folded cardboard was stacked on the porch and the game was revealed in its glory.

"Hmmmm. Is this something my sempai sent me to improve my timing?" he thought as he examined the 'gift'. His racing blood fueled through his head as he remembered playing the first five versions of "Need for Speed" as a kid. He broke out in a wide grin.

"This is _totally rad_! I didn't know that they had an _eighth_ Need For Speed out yet!" Years ago, Keiichi had relinquished video games in favor of more productive activities...but the old desire to play returned to him in a flash.

"Well, go on and plug it in so I can play," said Urd as strode up holding a plug. Keiichi plugged it into the outlet and the game console came to life. Bright lights flashed from the interior of the casing, creating patterns that resembled an aircraft runway. Urd started to stand in front of the machine when Belldandy reminded her, "It's Keiichi's. He should be the first to try it."

Keiichi stood in front of the arcade game, then climbed into the cockpit while Belldandy and Urd looked over each shoulder. The screen said to press a sequence of buttons. Keiichi complied, and then a startup screen gave him a selection of cars and courses. He picked the Monte Carlo course and the next screen showed him at the starting line. The graphics were the most realistic that he had seen on any racing simulation game, incorporating the new flatscreen stereo holography circuitry. There was a breathtaking amount of detail. He pressed start and was off. After 10 minutes, he finished the race in 4th place.

"Damn!! The difficulty setting on this game is phenomenal! I ended up_ 4th_! Can you believe it!" he said discontentedly, slapping the steering wheel. He fought down a strong impulse to play another race and went to the kitchen with Belldandy.

"Wow! Look out! Ahhhh! Oh no!" they overheard Urd shouting in high-pitched squeals as they reviewed the grocery list for the next week.

Belldandy always ordered groceries according to menu for each week's meal preparation, while the others used a signup sheet for 'extras'. Keiichi looked over Megumi's order: tempura snacks, sliced bonito, sweet arare and several types of instant udon mix. Below her order was Skuld's list: Chocolate mint ice cream, sweet monaka cookies, pineapple sherbet, and ucha soymilk. Urd's was unusual in that she only requested three bottles of sake instead of the 14 she drank each week, plus the requisite TV program magazine. Cevn's was lasagna mix, instant udon, ramen mixes and soy protein powder.

"Hmm, so the next American meal we'll have is lasagna," Keiichi thought. Cevn had taken it upon himself to cook a Western meal for the house every week or two.

Keiichi and Belldandy said "bye" to Urd, who was totally wrapped up in the video arcade game. Keiichi helped his divine sweetheart into the sidecar, then revved his bike up and took off. In the grocery store, they talked about the source of the mysterious gift. One-by-one, they ruled out Megumi, Urd and Skuld, Cevn, Tomohisa and Sora. The most probably candidates were Tamiya and Ootaki.

"But how could those guys afford a _new_ arcade game? And why send it to me? Unless..." Keiichi wondered. Unless...they were going to turn his living room into an video arcade for the club!

"Notta chance!" he said out loud.

"Is this the wrong kind of milk?" Belldandy asked him, confused by his outburst.

"Uh...my mistake, Bell-chan!" he apologized. He decided to make it a point to ask them tomorrow about it. After stashing the groceries in the cloth bags they brought for the occasion, they returned home.

Urd was _still_ playing the game! Keiichi asked her to relinquish it and let him have a turn...then he almost had to extricate her physically by pulling on her arm. He chose another race from the menu and once again finished 4th. This was frustrating for him, as he was used to winning races in real life.

"Dammit! This game keeps beating me! Well, at least it's a challenge!" he observed to himself as his chagrin fueled the competitive part of his nature.

Shortly after, Megumi returned home from studying late in the library and a few minutes after her arrival, Cevn got home. Everyone was in the living room marveling at the machine. Skuld emerged from her "Skuld Labs" room and was giddy with excitement when she saw the arcade game. Of course, her excitement derived from the prospect of being able to dismantle the electronic workings of the game.

"Can I take it apart? Please?" she said with beseeching eyes.

"No _way_, you brat! It's for all of us to enjoy! Besides, you'd probably take it apart and forget how to put it back together again. Then we'd all be screwed!" Urd inveighed against her.

This set off a shouting match between the two sister, which scattered everyone to separate corners of the house. Belldandy rolled her eyes and went to the kitchen, Keiichi went to his study shaking his head, Cevn went to his music room, and Megumi waved them off as she went to her bedroom.

The arguing ended about 20 minutes later. Neither participant had noticed that everyone else in the house had drifted away from them.

"Is it safe to come out?" Keiichi yelled to Belldandy from his study doorway. Urd and Skuld both blushed when he said this. He emerged from his "Keiichi's Shop" room, and put an arm around each.

"Things would just be too boring around here if it weren't for you two!" he teased. He heard an audible growling from Skuld, while Urd turned red in the face momentarily.

"I'll get you back for that, Keiichi!" Urd shouted.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

It was a breathtaking Saturday summer afternoon. I seated myself by the sand garden I was working on during the weekends. When I initially proposed my project, it attracted some curious looks from Urd and Skuld, while Keiichi and Megumi reacted with bemusement. I knew that Belldandy had started a vegetable and fruit garden several years ago behind the temple house...so I planned to locate my meditation garden near hers. I had intended to model it after the famous Ryoan-ji Zen sand garden in Kyoto; the epitome of Japanese meditation gardens.

But I knew that this arrangement of rocks was a fair representation of a Hojo-style dry garden. As I was demonstrably serious about it, I designed the garden with Keiichi's help. Keiichi was much more adept at plotting and drawing plans, so I asked him to draft a blueprint for the project. I elicited ideas from several members of the household, to make this a community project. Eventually everybody made some suggestions to the design. I settled on the scheme of a circular outer garden enclosing the square sand garden. The circular outer garden was about thirty feet in diameter, consisting of grass with several short bonsai trees surrounded by short shrubs. I anonymously hired some students from the Gardening Club at N.I.T. to install a small koi pond and several ishi-doro stone lanterns. The pond was supplied by waters flowing from a rocky fountain via a stream-like sluice that coursed underneath a stone bridge on the footpath. The footpath was a short walkway about eight or nine feet long with an irregular mixture of large rocks and smooth pebbles, curbed with darker brick-like rocks. This footpath led to the interior inner sand garden. I had taken the square design of Ryoan-ji and placed it within a larger circle, giving it a backdrop of short decorative shrubs. The pebbled walkway extended beyond the garden in an imitation of a teahouse entryway. Right before the sand garden, a large slabstone was set in, for seated meditation or reflection. I could only see six of the seven rocks from any point on the circle when I sat at ground level.

"_That_ took a whole afternoon to get the placement right, not to mention some calculating by Skuld," I remembered. Keiichi and Megumi both teased me about my imitative inclinations.

I reflected on tonight's expedition into Tokyo for the Noh play. I had only traveled to Tokyo once during my time here in Japan. I was looking forward to seeing the bright lights of the city, which resembled that old film, "Blade Runner". There was something mystic about city lights that transfixed my spirit; they seemed to resonate with my conscious appreciation of Soul. I had always been captivated by large cities, eagerly awaiting any opportunity to view them at night. The patterns of lights combined to create something more alive, more whole, than just the combination of colors. The city was more than alive, it _existed_. Perhaps it had Soul too.

We planned to ride the train from Chiba, going past the Akibahara district with its huge array of store and building lights. I was looking forward to the train ride as much as the Noh play.

I negotiated with Megumi to take my bath after her, so that she would have first stab at the freshly-drawn bath water. It was fortunate for us that three of our housemates didn't need to take baths regularly. Six young adults and one bathroom would create quite a tapestry of schedule conflicts. My guesswork informed me that the Goddesses usually took baths out of a need for comfort or retreat; but I really had no idea of this was true or not.

I really hoped that this little adventure would yield two results: an in-depth report on Sayoko from her brother and more importantly, a chance for Megumi to charm Genji...and maybe hook up with him. I concentrated on how to juggle the two aims when Megumi shouted, "Bath's free!"

I washed myself in the shower, rinsed with the wooden bucket, then soaked in the hot bathtub water. I was so glad that they had an actual shower in the furoba alongside the more traditional stool with a bucket and ladle. I had become more comfortable with being in the bathroom; my fears of being spied on by Urd or accidentally intruded upon by any of the others had diminished greatly. Actually, on an afternoon like this, I would have loved to spend an hour soaking in the bath, if my body could handle the heat.

I went back to my room and contemplated what to wear on a night out to a Noh theatre.

"No, not a Noh theatre, the _National_ Noh Theatre!" I reminded myself. I decided on a white denim jacket with a light blue shirt, a navy blue knitted tam hat and stone-washed jeans with new Nikes. I was mentally geared up for our excursion.

I waited in the living room. One more, Urd was playing the arcade game. She was obviously a video junkie...addicted to gaming. I wondered on a mirthful wing of thought if she had a 'boss key' on her sysop console or monitor back in Yggdrasil.

The game offered one of those mockups that you sat down in; this increased the simulation of high-speed racing. I could hear her cursing the machine when she lost a race. Keiichi and Belldandy were out for the day, and Skuld was quietly reading the paper in the kitchen.

"Ah, now I remember, Keiichi and Belldandy are at N.I.T. prepping the ATV for next weekend's race," I noted to myself.

"How do I look?" I heard an excited female voice inquire.

I looked up and saw Megumi standing in the hallway with a happy grin on her face. She had on a beautiful white silk open-collared blouse with long sleeves ending in lace cuffs. She wore a light amaranth pink vest inlaid with red embroidery over her blouse, and an azure blue neckpiece around the collar. Her skirt tastefully bridged the formal and casual styles with a long lightly colored mid-thigh slit skirt with orange, red and yellow floral designs against an indigo background. She held a pair of black boots in her hands, freshly polished. I walked over to her side and then back in front of her, trying hard not to be captured by her beauty.

"Except for that slit in your dress, which at least isn't up to the waist like Urd wears, you look like you're dressed for a job interview," I teased. Megumi's face fell into a pout.

"Actually, I was just kidding. You look wonderful, Megumi! Genji would be a fool not to 'hire' you!" I quickly added. She smiled broadly at the complement. I _had_ come a long way in the past few months to be able to tease her like I just did.

"I've never seen you so dressed up before...I hope you don't roast in this heat with a long sleeved blouse and dress," I added.

She looked me over and formed a moue with her mouth.

"You need a blazer, not a denim jacket," she observed curtly. She took the jacket off of the chair and went to my room, then returned with a pastel blue blazer.

"Here, try this on!" she encouraged. I put on the jacket while Megumi walked a slow circle around me. I could smell the subtle fragrance of her perfume. She reached up and adjusted my collar.

"That's much better. Hmmm, you are a really good-looking guy. If my heart wasn't set on Genji, you'd have to watch out!" she teased. I felt a flash of panic at her insinuation, but swallowed down my fear and smiled at her.

I noticed that I was much more comfortable with Megumi than before. She _was_ a beautiful young woman. Beautiful women intimidated the hell out of me. At least in that regard, I was like the ilk of men. But since we had become friends and had a teacher-student relationship, I was somewhat more relaxed around her.

"I didn't even try to pull away when she adjusted my collar," I praised myself. At least with Megumi, I was able to let down my guard a little.

Genji came by a little later to pick us up. I noticed that he did a double take when Megumi emerged from the house. I smiled at his nervous reaction. He was doing the typical 'guy thing'. She probably doesn't notice to the degree a fellow male could...that he really likes her, but is fighting with himself to prevent himself being too transparent with desire.

We drove all the way in to Chiba with Megumi and Genji animatedly discussing the upcoming race. I was engrossed in looking out the window at the scenery. Then they discussed the recent solar racer victory, cued on by sights that marked the racecourse. They seemed to become more relaxed, as Genji appeared to be letting his guard down. Megumi, of course, was already comfortable in his car.

I asked him several questions about his school life and the N.I.T. Motor Club. It was obvious that he was a serious student. Even though he was driving a brand-new Lexus, he didn't act the part of the spoiled rich kid. He was personable and introspective to a fault. It was difficult for him to talk about himself.

"I wonder why?" I thought while considering Sayoko and her negative impact on Genji.

Genji parked his car near the Chiba station. The station was bustling with late afternoon travelers as we walked towards the JR booth to get our tickets.

"It's the yellow train, dude!" Genji reminded me several times.

I must have looked like a confused foreign tourist to him. Actually, I was spellbound...trying to take in as much of the sights as I could. We got on the next westbound Sobu Line. I was amazed at how clean the train was, even if it was an older coach.

Megumi explained that we were on the futsu train, which was the slowest because it stopped at every station. Convenient that she chose the slower train...it would give her more time to sit next to Genji and chat, and I could view Tokyo at my ease, rather than rush through the city in a blur. Genji and Megumi sat next to each other facing me, but I hardly noticed them as I was fully entranced by the passing cityscape. As we approached Tokyo, the train started to fill up with passengers. Akibahara Station was packed with commuters, but the interior looked like it belonged in Amsterdam rather than Japan. When we got to Ochanomizu, the train changed from Sobu to Chuo line and we traveled towards Yoyogi. All the time, I was staring out the window, watching the changing cityscape pass me by as I heard snippets of conversation. Megumi would occasionally interject descriptions as we passed areas of interest. We entered a tunnel right before Yoyogi that was cut right into a hillock covered with residential developments. Finally we reached Yoyogi station. By this time the train was packed and we had to shove our way through the crowd to disembark.

Yoyogi was fairly busy with crowds of shoppers. I assumed that they were buying in preparation for summer break, as the end of the term was just a week away. We hailed a cab and traveled into Sendagaya. Genji pointed out a restaurant and we pulled over. The restaurant was recessed into a short alley and possessed an old-fashioned ambiance. We were led into a small side room and the kimono-attired waitress slid the door shut on us. A moment later she proffered sake to us, but I of course abstained while Megumi served Genji a glass.

"That's pretty forward of her!" I observed to myself as I recalled the old-fashioned custom that a woman doesn't serve a man unless they are married or romantically involved. Genji hesitated a moment, then acknowledged her effort with a quick nod.

Dinner was a fabulous selection of fishes, fruit and vegetables. I asked for some chicken and tofu, as I'm not a big fan of fish. After we finished, Genji insisted on paying the bill. I declined once, but when he offered again, I thanked him. He thanked me for footing the bill for the Noh theatre and everything else tonight. I looked at Megumi and saw that she was off in daydreamland.

"Megumi, don't forget why we're here!" I interrupted her, brushing her arm with my elbow. She looked startled for a moment, then grabbed her handbag and we left.

It was getting to be twilight as we approached the imposing structure of the National Noh Theatre. I noticed a queue of haute civisme mingling in front of the entrance. We walked in and were seated in our booth. I caught a few stares because of my long hair and the fact that I was a gaijin. We actually had good seats; we were seated in the third row of the waki-shomen section.

"This must be the result of that mysterious 'luck' that I seem to have," I remarked to myself.

"This...these seats are incredible!" Genji exclaimed with sincere joy. Indeed, they were much better than I ever could have imagined. The people whose cancellation gave us these seats must have been Sony execs, because these were prime real estate as far as Noh theatre reserved seats go. We sat down, and were served tea by the attendant.

Genji gave me a rundown of the Noh stage directions. I pretended ignorance of all things Noh, so that he would feel confident of the utility of his knowledge. If I told him that I possessed a fundamental knowledge of Noh, it would take the fun out of things. Besides, I enjoyed the enthusiasm of his explanation. Several other patrons enjoyed it as well, politely chiming in with little bits of information for me. Obviously, the novelty of a gaijin at a Noh performance wasn't lost on them.

There was a clapping of wooden blocks, which indicated that the performance would begin momentarily. The lights dimmed and the musicians filtered on to the stage. A painted lone pine tree flavored the backdrop. The actors produced themselves from the green room and began to dance the senzai.

"They're going to perform an okina!" I thought excitedly. This was indeed a rare treat! Genji swallowed audibly in surprise at the unexpected ritual performance. The shite danced the senzai, then the okina and finally the sambaso. The okina dance is unique in Noh: it is the only performance where a shite puts on his mask while upon the stage. The elderly shite's entrance was marked by a respectful sigh from the audience. He was dressed in blue robes embroidered with a white stork, symbolizing longevity. He reached into a gold-lacquered box and reverently withdrew an ornate, yet simple mask carved with the visage of a wizened old man. He gingerly placed it on his face and then danced the demanding senzai, then removed the mask and solemnly saluted it before respectfully returning the mask to its container. I felt the centuries fall away like scales from my eyes; the sense of holiness pervaded the theatre during this longevity ritual. Just like Hula, Noh transported me across time and space into the Sacred Art.

The first play was from the third category, known as "women plays". It was the Matzukage, renowned as one of Zeami's masterpieces; often considered by theater critics to be the most beautiful play in the Noh repertoire. I was aware of the ironic setting of this play. Ironic because it paralleled Megumi and Genji's circumstances. Matzukage derives from an episode in the Genji Monogatari where Genji falls in love with a provincial woman and eventually leaves her. As a result of his departure, she remains sad at his departure and pines after him.

"Hence the name, 'Pining Wind,'" I whispered aloud. Genji's sharp glance indicated that he must have overheard my susurration. The setting of this play was in middle Heian period, since it featured 

Yukihira; the link being the locale of Suma where the historical figure and the literary figure both spent some time. Several times I felt tears of empathy on my eyes for the plight of the two sisters of the pining tree.

There was a brief break between the first play and the kyogen...the comic interludes. Quiet, yet animated conversation sprung up all around us.

"This play reminds me of a friend I knew back in Hawaii who met a girl that he _knew_ was right for him. He told me that he really liked her a lot, but he also was caught up with his drug-using friends. In the end, he chose drugs over her and she ended up moving to the US mainland a year later," I related to Genji and Megumi. Genji looked at me with an ashen immobility; clueing me that I had hit the issue right on the nose. Megumi excused herself for a quick WC run, and I asked Genji if he could relate to the play.

"It must feel strange having a play based on your namesake. What did you think about the play, Genji?"

"I...I felt pity for the two women, Pining Wind and Autumn Rain."

"Pity? I felt that the women are sympathetic characters too, but I admire their fidelity to their memories of the past, don't you?"

"Yeah. I would _love_ to have someone like that in my life."

"Would you leave her, like Yukihira left 'Wind' and 'Rain'?"

"No! That would be idiocy! Didn't you feel the strength of their love, even though it was of the past? A bittersweet feeling, but a strong one nevertheless!" he answered with conviction

"Hmmm, what I'm really wondering is this: how can you leave someone when you _cannot get close to her_ in the first place?" Just then Megumi came walking down the theatre row bearing a tray of ice water. Genji gave her a "thanks for letting me off the hook" glance.

"Hi Genji, hi Cevn-sensei! I brought something to drink."

"Thanks Megumi!" we both replied. I looked at Genji, then glanced at Megumi then returned my attention to him while nodding my head. His eyes got wide and for a moment, I could sense his fear.

I continued with my allusory commentary.

"Megumi, we were talking about the Noh play. What's strange is that Yukihira was oppressed by factors beyond his control, which really makes his leaving the women he loved so much...something that wasn't his fault. Fortunately, we in modern times can sometimes overcome such circumstances...if we ask for help."

"What are you two talking about?" Megumi said, confused by what she had missed in our discussion.

I caught her up on the topic of our conversation. Then I whispered in Megumi's ear how I employed double-entendre to make a point to Genji about how he should try and get together with her. She smiled gratefully at me and squeezed my hand. "Not me! Him!!" I whispered in her ear teasingly, jerking my hand away as if it had been scorched.

"Forget about me," I whispered. She nodded her head.

The two Kyogen were the 12th-century "Perfect Servants" and the 19th-century "Misplaced Goddess". The Kyogen actors were very animated, and the whole effect was one of comic pantomime. The crowd was giddy with laughter. My expectation before arriving was that the Noh theatre would be filled with a stuffy, critical audience. But the Kyogen performed the very necessary service of lightening the playbill...and the audience's tension. After another short break, the second play began.

I was already aware that the shite was retiring at the end of this two-month Noh billing. He was the modern flower of the Komparu School of Noh. I read in the program that many theatrical critics considered him to be the most accomplished shite of his generation. Others went as far as to say that he was the best Noh performer since the Danjuro in the late 18th century. I was mindboggled when I considered that he had been acting since _before_ W.W.II.

Almost seventy years, the announcer had emphasized.

The second play, Seki-dera no Komachi, was considered extremely difficult to perform. The character portrayed by the shite was the poet Komachi in her advanced years. With the main character being a crone, the actor had to invest her with full dramatic presence while hardly moving at all. I knew that some commentators had said that the play was based on the moral implication that Komachi's promiscuity in her youth was 'punished' by a rapid decline into ugliness and long years of wandering as a beggar. The shite performed his part with consummate dramatic ardor. Again, I was moved to another era by the strength of the Noh drama. Surprisingly, I was able to clearly understand the antique Nihongo. All too soon, the second act was concluding with Komachi sitting in her hut, then arising out of the hut and stopping, the sole fixture on the stage.

The music mellowed to silence and the theatre erupted with applause. I had cried through most of the second act at the shite's tragic portrayal of an aged woman who wished to relive her youth. Genji had brought three bouquets of roses, which we threw on the stage. The stage was piling up with bouquets. Several attendants placed large celebratory wreaths donated by corporate sponsors. The shite retired to the green room, then returned without his mask and makeup. The applause must have lasted at least 20 minutes. I had presumed that the Noh patrons would demonstrate the typical Japanese reserve, but I was surprised by the vehemence of the congratulatory air. Then I heard the announcer state that this was his farewell performance!

"WHAT!?" I thought with shock. Then I realized that I had initially made reservations 5 weeks ago...due to the delay caused by Mara's malevolence, _this_ was the 8th weekend! I had been thinking this was the 4th weekend of the 8 week's bill. Genji was overwrought with emotion, crying like a baby. Megumi was rubbing him up and down the back with her hand while he applauded madly. As the applause died down, I saw her reach out and grasp his hand. I smiled inside, as it seemed that my 'mission' to get Megumi together with him was working. Megumi had utilized the high spirits of the moment to her advantage and Genji held onto her hand until we left the National Noh Theatre.

"This strange atmosphere of luck must be working again in my life," I thought. We had witnessed the last performance of a Noh living legend!

Outside, the crowd was slow in dispersing. Genji and Megumi were talking quietly when I came back from the men's room. I made a suggestion, "Why don't we go somewhere and have some coffee. I always wondered what a Tokyo coffee shop would be like. You know any good hangouts here?"

Megumi suggested that we go to the Surugadai district in Kanda. I wanted to see the high rise Shinjuku district, so we caught the loop train that went past Sunshine city and Kan-eiji Temple to Akibahara and then south to Kanda. The ultramodern buildings of the Shinjuku center reminded me of downtown Los Angeles. Not to mention the impossibly tall Japan Tower, just finished last year. The tallest self-supporting structure in the world...a marvel of engineering and a testament to the optimism of the "Pacific Century".

I had always been an ardent admirer of skyscraper architecture; and I was not disappointed in the urban center of Tokyo. We passed Sunshine City with its office towers and park, and then we arrived at Surugadai. We leisurely strolled around for an hour. Genji and Megumi were both pleased and amused by my wide-eyed appreciation of the street life here. They would occasionally hold hands; it looked like Megumi had thawed Genji's icy demeanor.

"I'm definitely going to talk to him about Sayoko," I promised myself.

We entered a kamikassa decored with posters of J-pop singers on the walls and a neon-lighted interior. It was filled with students conversing about the end of the summer term. Megumi informed us that she had been here several times with Sora as she led the way to our table. She mentioned that she liked the 'feel' of the place. It was filled with mostly female students, creating a lively ambiance with their cheery conversations. I decided that this was as good a time as any to elicit some information from Genji.

"Genji, your sister Sayoko is in my Asian History class. She is failing the course. I want to try and help her, but I need your help as well. I suspect that she is involved with drugs in some way. I wanted to get your view on what is wrong with her," I said in a low voice.

Genji looked at me with a flash of surprise, and then he hung his head. I could tell that he was gripped in a decided turmoil concerning whether or not he should tell me about his sister. I decided to self-disclose my own history with drugs to try and ease the pressure on him.

"Genji, the reason I suspect Sayoko is having a drug problem is influenced by the fact that I once was actively using drugs. _Very_ actively using drugs. I know that it was hell when I was in it, and now that I've been clean 11 years, I know there is a way out for other drug addicts," I said, showing them the scars on my arm from intravenous injections.

"This scar here is from when I was 14. I was shooting dope and I broke the needle off under the skin against the bone. So I took a razor blade and cut my arm open, dug around until I found the needle, and then poured the heroin from the syringe into the open cut." Megumi looked at me with a pained expression as I said this, while Genji stared at me with uncertainty and disbelief.

"Genji, if we are going to help your sister, _you're_ going to _have_ to tell me what she's doing! What she is like at home. When it all started. I know that this may be the hardest thing you can do, but if you don't, then all the pain that she is causing herself and you is just going to continue...in fact it will _definitely_ get worse!" He was a frozen as a statue; Megumi grabbed him around the arm and shook him, urging him to talk. A moment later, Genji started crying softly, his face a picture of complete abjection.

"It started over a year ago. Sayoko used to get drunk all the time, but it wasn't a problem. I mean, it _was_ a problem, but...she's in college, you know. People are supposed to party in college! "Then...she met this yakuza guy at a bar and he turned her on to drugs. She told me all about it, at first. She started off by taking speed, but then it got way out of hand. Crack, ice, glass, XTXC, weed, trips...whatever was around, she'd take it. She'd even try to get _me_ to take it!

"But now, I'm pretty sure she's in deep trouble with the yakuza. She's been stealing stuff from our house to pay for her habit. And these really sleazy guys keep coming and going. They hand out for days at a time at our home! A..and they have guns! I...I'm so ashamed. She's ruining the honor of our family! My parents are gone all the time, so she has these drug parties. I have to hide in my room. My friends are rejecting me..."

"I don't think that's true; at least about the rejection part," I challenged him. "You're isolating, because you don't know what else to do with the pain. You don't know where to go," I offered, looking at him for confirmation.

He nodded his head.

Megumi rested her arm around his shoulders, gently rubbing his back and neck. I could feel the waves of tension emanating from him, making the air thick as gravy with stress and emotion.

"Good girl!" I thought approvingly at Megumi.

"Genji, how do _you_ feel about Sayoko's drug use? Can you talk about it to us?" I asked gently.

He was shaking with effort. I knew that this was so hard for him; it abraded against his cultural standards as well as his desire to restrain his emotions. My heart went out to him...having to face such a difficult situation!

"I..it really _sucks_! I can't be myself anymore! We won the solar race and I couldn't even feel happy about it. I'm afraid to talk to anybody about Sayoko's problems because of the yakuza guys. She's really messing up at home. I..had to drag her to her room several times because she passed out in the front lawn. On the weekends, she has guys coming and going...into her bedroom! She's gets sick all of a sudden...a bunch of times. And she's looking _horrible_! It's like some Oni-demon has taken over my sister," he said sadly, his frustrations expressing themselves through a litany of sorrowful narratives. I had to struggle to hold back the tears that pressed on me from all sides, accompanying my empathy for him. I put a reassuring hand on his shoulder, shaken by what he had told me. Everything was so obvious, now.

"Genji, I cannot guarantee anything, but I will try to help if you want me to. What I plan to do is an intervention. I'll need you, Megumi, and a couple others who know Sayoko pretty well to get together. We'll meet beforehand a couple of times to map out a plan, then talk with her on the last day of school before summer break. I've done this dozens of times, so it's not like I have never confronted this kind of situation before. As her teacher, I'll offer to give her an incomplete instead of a failing mark, if she wants to get help. You'll need to really try and make her aware of how her drug use is causing you problems."

"N.I.T. doesn't give incompletes!" Megumi stated.

"Screw 'em! They may not, but _I_ will, if it encourages her to seek help!"

Genji looked at me with uncertainty. I assured him that I understood to some degree how much fear he was probably feeling now...and an even greater fear when he considered bringing up Sayoko's drug usage to her face. He tried to back out of it a few times, but between Megumi's encouragement and my experience, he finally relented.

"Okay. What the hell? I really need some help with Sayoko...she's killing herself! My own sister...is dying!" he said in a gravel-tired voice. Megumi reached across the table and gave me a high-five.

"Hey, you guys planned this!" he exclaimed.

"Yep, because we care about you and Sayoko," Megumi responded. "Genji, you got a real deal tonight! You got to see the last performance of a legendary Noh actor from the Komparu School; you got a chance to be with a chick that you like, namely me; and you just recruited Cevn-sensei and I to help with Sayoko! No more whining, okay!" she half-kidded, half-comforted him. I almost choked on my soda at the assertions Megumi just made.

"Now let's enjoy ourselves some more!" she added. I raised my cup for a toast, and noticed that Genji was blaze-blushing from her remarks. She had actually called him on his attraction to her! I filled both their teacups and shouted "Banzai!" which brought laughter to both of them.

"Mission accomplished!" I thought happily.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --


	14. Pt 14: Confrontations

**Part 14: Confrontations**

Keiichi returned home from a busy day at school, anxious to ply his skills once more against the Need For Speed game. It was the week before finals, but at least the tests and studying weren't as rigorous as the juken-jigoku he endured five years ago at the end of his high school days. Keiichi remembered the 'exam hell' of his senior year in high school with its seemingly endless rigors of late night studying. Now, finishing his junior year at N.I.T., he was somewhat grateful for the juken-jigoku. It had literally stretched his brain to its limit; honing the academic skills he now utilized at N.I.T. He pulled past the torii and parked his bike.

"It's so ironic that torii are supposed to serve as gateways that distinguish the divine world from the real world. In my case, the torii _does_ demark the habitation of divine beings. Who could guess that three Goddesses live inside of this wooden torii gate? And...what's up with a _temple_ having a torii?" he reflected.

He chuckled as he walked to the house, and climbed into the arcade game. After 15 minutes, he finished second at the Daytona 500. He felt the usual surge of frustration at not finishing first.

"I wonder what happens in this videogame if someone wins a race?" he thought, filled with curiosity. So far, no one had finished above fifth place except for him.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

_Keiichi's memory floated back to last week. He had asked his sempai, Tamiya and Ootaki, about the game. They both looked at him with mystification._

_"Whut? Yuh're tellin' us that someone sent yuh an arcade game?" Tamiya had replied. Of course, they both 'invited' themselves over to his house later that afternoon to play it. Ootaki was excited when he saw the arcade machine and immediately sat down and played a race. He finished tenth out of ten cars. Tamiya tried his luck at the game, with the same results. Both sempai scowled at the arcade game. "Whatta bum deal...this game is too hard! There's no fun if yuh can't win!" Tamiya pronounced while delivering a kick to the side of the game. That weekend, the entire club came over to his house, ostensibly for a "think-tank session" in preparation for the upcoming race. Keiichi knew that the --_real--_ reason was this damned game that everyone was getting so addicted to._

_His mind returned to the present moment._

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Keiichi was amped for tomorrow's race. The Motor Club had designed and built an ATV with large 'balloon' wheels to handle the sandy shores of the racecourse. The course was laid out right alongside the ocean, trekking up the Kujukurihama beach. The difficulty of this race centered in the oceanside course: the vehicles would literally be plunging through incoming tides as they traveled the 60km racecourse. There were two major hazards: the possibility of getting mired in the soft sand and being swept out into the ocean.

The ATV was basically a stripped-down dune buggy suspended on two sets of huge wheels. It looked like a skeletal 'monster truck', except that the wheels were much lighter in design and weight. It possessed only a spare metal frame with no doors or windshield. Keiichi would be suspended almost 1.5 meters above the ground while he raced; the rear wheels were almost as tall as he was. The motor was rear-mounted so that the smaller front wheels would have more steerage. Of course, the racing commission had placed a 300cc limit on the displacement of the motors; providing an engineering challenge which centered on how each team dealt with the tradeoff between weight, power and mobility. Not to mention the fact that the ATV had to be light enough for the driver to right it if it tipped over.

Keiichi felt confident about their ATV, the Yukai na tsutsuji. The "Jolly Azalea". The club members had pored over several suggestions for its name without success. Then Sora suggested that they give it a nonsense name. She came up with several silly names, including Yukai na tsutsuji; this was the name everyone got stuck on. So they christened it the "Jolly Azalea" with a bottle of sake.

Keiichi made himself a snack in the kitchen. The house was eerily quiet. Strangely enough, nobody was around. Bell-chan was off somewhere with Megumi doing some shopping, according to the note she left on the dining room table. Cevn was still at school while Urd was nowhere to be seen and Skuld was at the mall with Tomohisa, who had arrived yesterday to visit for a couple of days.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Dr. Kintaro had sent me a memo 'inviting' me to his office at the end of the week. I had just drafted a rough copy of my final exam for my Asian Economics class, and was hard at work on one for my Asian History class. I put down my pencil and looked at the clock, then decided to drop in on the redoubtable Dr. Kintaro.

I greeted his receptionist with a smile and lingered in the foyer. After a few minutes, Dr. Kintaro came out and ushered me into his room. I was a bit nervous, to say the least. I hadn't met with Dr. Kintaro since the big race a month and a half ago.

"Why does he want to meet with me _now_...at the end of the summer term?" I wondered to myself. A moment later, the balding President of N.I.T. ushered me into his office with practiced formality.

"Sit down, Cevn! Thank you for coming. This won't take long!" he said as he proffered me a chair. He seemed to be in good spirits, as opposed to most of the faculty and students who were straining to make it through finals week. As usual, his office was spotlessly clean and his desktop suspectly empty. His office reminding me of a hermetically sealed museum room.

"Does this guy ever do any work in here?" I wondered to myself as I saw his uncluttered desk, adorned with expensive carved decorations and several corporate awards.

"The reason I called you here was to let you know that you will be going to China on a sabbatical during this year's summer break. I have been in contact with a Dr. Juzhi Zhao at Peking University, with whom I think you have an acquaintance with, per your resume."

My face fell with shock. Bei Da? Summer? Dr. Zhao was the Chair of the Philosophy Dept. and an informal advisor on my dissertation! We had emailed back and forth over the past couple of years. But I had been 'reborn', so to speak, once Urd had granted my wish last February. In light of the events that brought me to Japan, I doubted that Dr. Zhao would remember me. No one from my past life had a shred of awareness that I ever existed. Dozens of phone calls and letters had confirmed this repeatedly during the past several months. The fact that I had become a nonentity in the memories of everyone I knew...was staggering, despite the fact that it was offset by the new friends I had made while in Japan.

Then the realization that I was going to China settled in, reminding me of the instant I stepped out of the airport during my visit to Madras, India. The sudden rush of people, of poverty, of toil and sweat and..._humanity_...had all but crushed my Western sensitivities. Now, this stunning news had crashed past my defenses in a like manner. My summer break had been turned inside out upside down.

"Dr. Kintaro is basically planning my summer for me! He's sending me to China!" I realized with a mixture of excitement and regret.

"We are considering establishing a reciprocity agreement with their Physical Sciences Dept. as the first step in creating an exchange program. This program would provide an opportunity for N.I.T. students and faculty to be visiting scholars in China. As you know, in the first five years of the 21st century, China's economic influence and GDP has increased rapidly. This would add much prestige to N.I.T., because we would be the first Technical Institute in Japan to have such an agreement with a Chinese university. Since you are the only faculty member that is fluent in spoken Chinese, I've decided to transfer Yamashita-sensei's scheduled sabbatical to you. This will provide you with time to finish your dissertation while you negotiate our liaison with Peking University. We will provide all travel costs and a fellowship for your research in compensation for your work on our behalf," he explained, smiling innocuously at me.

"Well, I guess that I'm going back to the PRC this summer," I said resignedly. Actually, this wasn't all that bad of an opportunity...I would finally be able to complete my dissertation and get my Ph.D. However, my plans to travel around Japan were dashed.

"When do I leave?"

"You'll have two weeks after the end of the term to get your affairs in order, then you'll leave right after Tanabata at beginning of July," he confirmed. I bowed crisply to him and walked out.

I was ambushed with a jumble of thoughts and plans spinning in my head. I suddenly felt exhausted, the kind of fatigue that arises in the face of a sudden event or surprise.

"This _was_ a surprise!" I acknowledged. I sat down on one of the benches underneath a stately zekelva tree in the middle of campus. Glancing blankly at the light filtering through its leaves, I espied Tamiya, Ootaki and Sora out of the corner of my eye. The three waved and started to walk towards me. I wanted to be alone for a moment to let the shock of this settle in, but now this would be impossible.

"How're yuh doin' Cevn-sensei?" Tamiya said. The giant guy from Hokkaido was in good spirits. Yes, he was an Ainu, I had found out a couple of weeks ago. Tamiya lived outside of Sapporo in a small village; his interest in motor mechanics was born out of the necessity of fixing engines on his grandfather's farm as a kid. Tamiya and Ootaki were like fire and ice. Tamiya was moody and candorous. Ootaki had a cool reserve and urbanity. Little Sora was metal to their fire and ice. She was diminutive, yet her calmness was the product of a brilliant mind and a steady ambition.

"Hey, I'm kinda in shock right now. I just found out that I'm going to China on behalf of N.I.T.!" I replied. "How are you guys? Ready for the 'reach the beach' race?"

"Reach the beach?" Sora asked.

"Yeah, you know, the Fixx. An old group from the 80s. Their album 'Reach the Beach'" Ootaki replied to her question.

"Should be cool, we've got a really souped-up ATV with all the trimmins'" he added.

"China, huh? Some guys have all da luck!" Tamiya said.

"Fine!" I said, reacting obversely to his comment. "I'm going there to set up an exchange program, and when I'm done...I'll make sure that you're the first student, Tamiya. By the way, did I tell you that it is in Xinjiang, right in the middle of a desert?" I said mirthfully.

"No! No way! Yuh wouldn't dare!" Tamiya exclaimed.

"Nan...I don't think you would make the cut. It's only for _good_ students," I teased him. Tamiya smiled at me as he punched me on the shoulder, somewhat hard. Actually, all three were getting solid A's in the Asian History course I was teaching. I expected as much out of the two sempai, as they were grad students. But Sora's sharp acumen for math didn't interfere with her ability to grasp humanities either.

"Actually, for your information, it's going to be at Bei Da, aka Peking University. I would definitely recommend it for either of you...and for you too Sora, when you're an upperclasswoman." She giggled at my feminization of the generic term. "I did some graduate work there...it would be a great place for engineering students to do graduate work. They have cutting-edge technology and labs...you guys would love it. They also have killer instant noodles at the campus stores."

"Cool! Would you recommend me?" Ootaki said impulsively.

"Hmmm, I don't know if China is ready for you, Ootaki." This brought peals of laughter from all three.

"But weren't you planning to travel around Japan this summer? At least that's what I thought you would do, having just arrived here a few months ago," Sora said. I smiled at her; she was such a perceptive young woman.

"Yep, I was hoping...but I guess that'll have to wait."

Once more, my life was taking a new direction. I had learned in NA to appreciate the unexpected, rather than get personally invested in defying it. I was still planning to confront Sayoko at the end of the term, but I would have to really lay it out for her at the initial meeting instead of over the course of a couple of intervention sessions.

The three excused themselves and I remained sitting on the bench. The N.I.T. campus did have a beauty all its own, especially the tree-lined esplanade through the center of the campus. The large zekelva tree resonated with birdcalls.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Skuld and Tomohisa were walking down a pedestrian mall in downtown Makuhari. They stopped at an ice cream and malt shop, where Skuld indulged herself with a three-scoop fudge strawberry sundae.

"Where do you put all of that, Skuld?" Tomohisa asked. "You eat more ice cream than I do, and you're just a kid!"

Skuld scowled at Tomohisa, who tried to smile innocently. He knew that he had made a gaffe by calling Skuld a kid. It was a touchy subject for her, he remembered. She looked like she was 12 or 13, almost 3 years younger than he was.

"She doesn't even have any boobs yet," he thought to himself.

"So what if I don't have..?" Skuld said irritably as she flung a spoonscoop of ice cream at Tomohisa. It splashed on his cheek.

Tomohisa was once more startled at Skuld's seemingly strange ability to read his mind. He flushed red just as the ice cream hit him.

"Skuld!" he shouted in anguish, ice cream dribbling down his right cheek. One of the white-dressed counter chicks jerked her head in his direction and scowled.

Skuld turned her nose up at him. Then she giggled, seeing the streak of white ice cream against his reddened cheeks. Her mirth touched Tomohisa and he laughed with her.

"Skuld, open your mouth," he asked. She opened her mouth and he flung the cherry off of his sundae right into her mouth.

"Ummm!" she said, feeling tastebud heaven as she munched the sweet morsel.

"Hey Tomohisa, you want my cherry?" she asked innocently. She said it quite loudly, and Tomohisa went red with embarrassment. Skuld looked at him curiously.

"What did I say?" Skuld wondered to herself, then asked Tomohisa.

"H...hey Skuld, let's go visit the Sports Vine when we're done here?" he suggested nervously, trying to avoid answering her question. Trying to get her the hell out of the crowded ice cream shop.

"Sure!" Skuld said with a wink. They both finished their ice cream sundaes and returned to the street. Tomohisa looked at Skuld and noticed once more that she had a really pretty face.

"She'll be a total knockout in a couple of years," he thought. He really liked the way she walked; a spritely gait filled with gaiety, with her hands held behind her back _just so_. A _very cute_ just so.

"Skuld, what school do you plan to go to when you get into high school?" he asked. Tomohisa had just started his first year of high school; it was grueling in comparison to junior high school. By the time he was a freshman in college, Skuld would be just starting 10th grade. Skuld looked at him with a quizzical look.

"School?" she said. "Why would I want to go to school?" Tomohisa looked at her with an expression that said, "you're out of your mind!"

"You know, when you're 15, you're supposed to go to senior high school. Don't tell me you're planning to stop after junior high...are you?"

"Well, I really wasn't thinking of being here that long," Skuld answered. She put her hand to her mouth as she saw Tomohisa's instant reaction. He had lowered his head and walked silently, his face a picture of disappointment.

"_Pssst, no brains!_" she heard a voice in her mind interrupting her concerns for Tomohisa's dramatic reaction.

"_You're not going to make a good impression on Tomohisa if you keep disappointing him. You gotta be quicker on your feet than that, girlie! Look how sad you just made him! You should be ashamed! Besides, who would be interested in a girl who isn't thinking ahead? If you want him to like you, you need to be more considerate. Ciao!_"

"I do _not_..."

"Huh? What did you just say, Skuld?"

Skuld blushed as she realized that she had spoken her private thoughts aloud. She looked in the direction of the mental voice, and saw Big Sister Urd waving to her from inside a nomiya.

"Typical of Urd, hanging out in a drinking place," she thought with disgust.

"_You creep!_" she thought towards her sister. Urd only smiled and blew her a kiss.

"Oooooh!" Skuld growled as her cheeks turned red. "But she's right, of course!" she admitted to herself with frustration. She was not familiar with having to fabricate lies to conceal her divine origin. Since she rarely left the safety of the temple compound, she didn't need to resort to excuse-making like her sisters. But Urd had just reminded her that she needed to be inventive if she wanted to keep Tomohisa interested in her. Inventive as in concealing her true nature...by creating sublime explanations for everyday questions such as the one Tomohisa had just posed to her.

"Tomohisa, it's just that I'm...so smart that I haven't needed to be in school for a while. Matter of fact, I'm smart enough to take the University entrance exams right now!" Skuld said while smiling sweetly. "I might even go to N.I.T. when I'm old enough!" she added, trying to undo her previous mistake. In her mind, she didn't think it was possible that she could endure another three years in this Earthrealm, let alone the ten years it would take for her to go to senior high...and then graduate from a college like N.I.T.

Tomohisa looked at her in astonishment.

"Wow! You must have really worked hard at cram-schools!" he noted with fevered respect. Skuld nodded her head automatically, even though she didn't know what he was talking about.

"Then that means...that you'll be staying with Keiichi and your sisters long enough to go to N.I.T.? Cool! Because I want to go there too, just like cousin Keiichi. We could be in school together! I'd be a senior...and you'd be a freshman!" he exclaimed. His depressed mood had lifted in an instant, and he smiled brightly at Skuld.

"_See! What'd I tell ya?_" Skuld heard Urd's voice in her head. She looked back at Tomohisa; he was walking past the entrance to the Sports Vine, ignoring her completely. Skuld was momentarily upset at his act of abandoning her, until Urd reminded her that Tomohisa was actually a mortal boy who was prone to impulsiveness.

"Of all the people...to remind me of _that_!" Skuld said to herself, feeling the irony of Urd's admonition. She walked in and found him in the baseball section.

"Forget something?" she asked in a quiet voice. "Or _someone_."

"Eh?" Then it dawned on Tomohisa that he had left Skuld out on the lurch in his excitement to check out the new baseball gloves. He was so contrite, he dropped the glove he was examining, but reacted and deftly caught it before it hit the ground.

"You know, Skuld, that I'm going to play on the varsity baseball team next term! I would really be happy if you watched one of our games!"

"Sure! What position do you play?" Skuld had become somewhat interested in baseball after learning about softball from Megumi. Tomohisa must be good if he's going to play on the varsity team and he's only a first year student.

"I play second baseman! Wow, look at these new gloves!" he said excitedly. Skuld peeled off one of her white gloves and tried on the baseball glove.

"Silly, that's a left-handed glove your putting on your right hand!" Tomohisa corrected her. Skuld stuck out her tongue at him, then tried it on the correct hand. She asked him to throw her a ball, and she spun and caught it behind her back, much to Tomohisa's delight.

"That was way cool, Skuld! Are you going to the race tomorrow, Skuld? The one on the beach?" he said as they played catch with the baseball.

"Of course, silly!" Tomohisa formed an idea in his mind, then walked with Skuld over to the beach toys department and bought a beach ball.

"This is for you!" he said excitedly. Skuld looked at the multicolored blob of plastic with a nonplused face. It didn't look like anything useful...maybe it was some kind of fancy piece of art.

"What's this for?"

"It's a ball! Haven't you ever seen a beach ball?"

"It doesn't look like a ball to me! It's really kinda flat and saggy," she commented humorlessly.

"That's because you have to blow in it, like this." Tomohisa felt around until he felt the plastic nipple, and then he blew in it. The ball gradually expanded.

"Here you try it!" he suggested.

"No _way_! Not after you touched it with your _lips_. Do you think I'm stupid or something? It's probably got your slobber on it now," Skuld teased him. Actually, she was fascinated by the simple transformation of a rubber blob into an inflated beachball. Tomohisa continued blowing, inflating the ball. Suddenly he stopped and his eyes seemed to flesh out, growing big and watery. His hands were shaking and he seemed to wheeze when he inhaled. Maybe he was hyperventilating...

_Gaahuh! Gasp! Cachoke! Kaff...gack! Ah...hagaahuh!_

Skuld looked at him in bewilderment as he gasped and started coughing. Her shock turned into alarm as his sudden change in breathing continued.

"What is it, Tomohisa?" she asked, looking up at the older boy. Tomohisa reached inside of his book bag and pulled out a funny looking object, then put the head of it in his mouth and pressed down twice. Skuld observed this with curiosity.

"It's my asthma acting up. I'm sorry if it startled you, Skuld...I just overextended myself. I just had to use my inhaler to get my breath back. Sorry," he explained as he hurriedly packed the inhaler back in a side pocket of his book bag. He felt ashamed about his asthma, especially around Skuld.

Skuld tried hard to remember what asthma was. Then it flashed to her that asthma was a lung condition that plagued a sizable percentage of mortals. On the tails of this realization, it dawned on her that Tomohisa had strained himself trying to inflate the ball for her! Skuld felt a wash of guilt mixed with admiration for Tomohisa's effort. It felt...so _different_ to have a boy do something like this for her. To make a sacrifice. She reached over and grabbed the ball and began to blow into it, her cheeks puffing out like a trombone player's. She could taste Tomohisa's breath on the rubber nipple as she huffed air into the ball.

"_You know, that is almost like _kissing _Tomohisa, my dear little sister! You _are_ growing up!_" a voice said in her head. Skuld stiffened and pulled the ball away from her mouth.

"You shut up Urd!" she said aloud.

"Urd's here?" Tomohisa asked. He didn't want to raise the ire of either one of Skuld's older sisters. He looked timidly around for a moment, then saw Urd in a bar with a glass of sake. She winked at him, and he flushed a lighter shade of red. Skuld continued to inflate the ball.

"Here!" Skuld said proudly as she handed the now inflated beach ball to him.

"I finished it. I..I think that was really brave of you to try and blow it up for me, even though you have asthma, Tomohisa!" She leaned forward and lightly kissed him on the cheek. Tomohisa stiffened for a second when she kissed him.

An astonished Urd gasped as Skuld daintily pecked Tomohisa on the cheek. Flustered, she gulped a swig of sake, trying to wash down her surprise at the sight. Too fast...as she almost choked. Gasping until she caught her breath, Urd started giggling behind her hand.

"My little sister's in love, and she probably doesn't even know it!" she thought. "_This_ is going to really be fun!" she reflected maliciously.

With a deft motion, Tomohisa threw the beach ball and hit Skuld on the head with it.

"Tag, you're it!" he said, then turned on his heel and ran off. Skuld chased after him with beach ball in tow under her arm. Urd saw the two run by with all the kinetic energy of teenagers and smiled to herself.

"My advice to Skuld has worked wonders," she told herself with pride, then she savored the last of her sake.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

The racing teams were starting to line up at the beach like float entrants before a review parade. A host of bikini-clad women thronged the starting/finishing line, much to Tamiya's ecstatic joy. He would crane his head to get a view of one coed...then another would walk nearby and he would turn to look at her.

"Ah must have died an gone ta heaven!" he said to himself.

Belldandy and Urd were both dressed in swimsuits, and Skuld was dressed in a T-shirt and shorts. Despite the seriousness of the race, there was an almost festive air among the participants. There were eight entries in all: two from Yokohama; four from Tokyo; and the two N.I.T. teams.

"I hope we do better in the race than we did in the volleyball tourney," Keiichi told Tamiya and Ootaki. The three reflected somberly on the informal game played between N.I.T. Motor Club and one of the Tokyo teams before the race. They got slaughtered.

Keiichi was dressed in longshorts and a N.I.T. Motor Club T-shirt. He wore racing gloves and elbow and kneepads, just in case there was a spill. It felt weird not being in his racing coveralls, but he was happy that he wasn't. He would have roasted in this hot summer day. It was a balmy 34 degrees centigrade, without a cloud in the sky.

"_Some_ people are going to walk away with a sunburn," Keiichi predicted as he looked at Sora's white legs. He motioned Belldandy over and asked her to remind Sora to put on some more suntan lotion. Sora nodded at him in appreciation after Bell-chan talked to her. He looked over in the other direction and saw his cousin, Tomohisa, playing beach ball tag with Skuld.

"Those two are having a lot of fun," he happily observed, glad that Skuld wasn't sabotaging some aspect of the race. He was still used to Bell's younger sister planning subterfuge at any given time.

The ATV's were formed in a group at the starting point. The starting order had been determined by coin toss. It would be critical to establish an early lead, as the flagged lanes of the course along the beach were only two vehicles in width. A series of red marker flags had been placed all along the route on the left side...the right side was bordered by the ocean itself. They would reach a midway flag at the end 30 km away, then loop around it and return. There were two points where the route would widen up enough for pack driving.

"Those will be the places where people will make their moves," Keiichi noted to himself.

Urd was excited to be out in the sun. Summer was coming up and she would have more time on her hands to pester Keiichi and her sister. Actually, now she could pester her younger sister too, as she watched Tomohisa and Skuld playing innocently on the beach.

"Not to mention working a little on my tan," she sighed happily. Keiichi had warned her repeatedly not to go topless during their excursion to the beach today; yet, she was tempted to do so anyway just to spite him. She wore her tiger-striped string-thing, which attracted a lot of smiles and stares from the men.

Cevn was dressed in a pair of Hawaiian shorts, a tshirt and a bandana. He had brought a boogie board and was surfing a little earlier. Try as he might, he couldn't convince Skuld to get on it. However, Megumi and Sora both tried and ended up getting playfully soaked.

Belldandy was happy to be with Keiichi. This race seemed to be more of a party than a competition. As it was the last race of the term, there was more of a friendly rivalry between the teams. Of course, a lot of the N.I.T. students had shown up, just for the excuse to go to the beach. A bevy of students had driven up from nearby Tokyo and Yokohama. This would be the final day of play before the rigorous finals week next week. She peered at her mortal boyfriend who looked so handsome in his T-shirt and shorts; then she walked over and leaned against the side of the ATV.

"Keiichi, I love you so much! I hope you have fun out there!"

"It'll be a cinch, Bell-chan! By the way, you look beautiful in your swimsuit!" he chimed with an effervescence.

Belldandy blushed slightly. It was the third time today that he had complemented her on her appearance.

"I could never get used to this," she thought happily, grateful that Keiichi was such a observant boyfriend.

"Thank you, Keiichi! You be careful out there too! Remember that you don't know how to swim!" Belldandy felt a familiar surge of panic as soon as the words escaped her mouth. There was a strong undertow near the beach, and if Keiichi tipped the ATV and got swept out... She had really wanted to send along a mini-Belldandy to watch over him, but this was impossible with the ATV's open cabin; someone would easily notice her deformed replica. She leaned far over the sidebars and kissed Keiichi lingeringly on the lips. The usual friendly applause and whistles started up from the Motor Club members...they enjoyed watching as their racer was getting the usual 'game kiss'.

Keiichi also felt apprehensive at her comment about the ocean. His old fear of swimming returned, full force. It was an unstated agreement: whenever Keiichi was racing near water, Ootaki would place an inflatable life jacket within easy reach, aware of Keiichi's inability to swim. But even with the comfort of the life jacket, he was still a little scared. Feeling a moment's hesitancy, he reached down and patted the small plastic bag to make sure it was there. Good ol' Ootaki...reliable once again.

The judges were preparing to start the race. The crowd became quiet with anticipation. The starting gun fired and Keiichi flew into the inside lane as the crowd cheered on the racers.

Keiichi was already splashed with sand and saltwater within a few minutes after the starting gun. The day was pristine...not a cloud in the sky to obscure the sun. The air swirled heavy with beachsmells. The race was 60 km in length...but with the hazard of the ocean, the drivers would have to throttle down and up frequently. He felt the waves crashing near him and swerved to miss a swell tide that surged deep into the beach. His ATV pulled against the sand as it sunk in, but with a sudden pull it climbed out of the potential sandy mire.

He rounded another curve in the beach and ran smack into a wave. Water jetted up and over his head on both sides as the ATV was momentarily lifted off the ground by the force of the wave. It felt like he was hydroplaning, which brought the instant reaction of tightly gripping the wheel and downshifting. A second later the Yukai na tsutsuji gripped land and leapt forward with a jarring motion. The ATV rocked sideways and Keiichi fought to control it. He hit solid sand and pulled to a drier stretch of the beach.

He was in first place. He looked back to see that one of the other team's ATVs had pitched on its side back there on the curve. "Whew!" he sighed in relief as he sped on. He rounded another corner and saw a sea turtle on the beach, resting serenely right in the middle of his path.

"Ack!! Oh...Great!!" he shouted sarcastically as he swerved to avoid the sea turtle. He had no time to brake. The turtle ducked inside its shell as the Yukai na tsutsuji's left tire harmlessly ran over it. Keiichi whipped the steering wheel with instant reflexes as the ATV tipped sideways, its center of balance suddenly thrown off by running over the big sea turtle. The ATV seemed to have a life of its own despite his frantic efforts. It spun sideways and tipped over, the seat belt snapping as Keiichi was thrown into the ocean.

Keiichi felt a bang on the back of his head, and he saw little points of light waltzing in front of him. He sputtered as ocean water filled his mouth with a brackish taste. Dazed at the sudden impact on the water, he flailed about in sheer panic until his feet found terra firma. Wading towards the Yukai na tsutsuji, Keiichi felt dizzy, and the ocean waves swept him off of his feet. He crawled the remaining distance to the shore. He paused to look down and saw blood soaking his wet T-shirt. Reaching up with his fingers, he felt a gash and a lump on the back of his head. He must have hit a rock when he was ejected from the ATV. His left knee had a dull throbbing pain every time he moved his leg. His senses clearing, Keiichi smelled the hot odor of an engine overheating. The Yukai na tsutsuji was upside down, smoke coming from its rear-mounted engine.

Belldandy had been playfully tossing the beach ball with Skuld and Urd when she suddenly became motionless. Skuld watched as the ball Urd had thrown flew by her elder sister. Urd noticed the shift in her sister's demeanor and became instantly alert. Belldandy had a look of deep concern etched on her face.

"What is it, Bell?" Urd shouted. She looked at Urd with tears in her eyes.

"Keiichi's crashed. He's _hurt_! I..I can feel it!" she said, wincing at her two sisters. Belldandy had been playfully splashing Skuld and Urd when she felt a dark sensation. She sensed something was wrong with Keiichi and immediately a vision of an overturned ATV formed in her mind.

"He's hurt? We gotta do something!" Urd said, looking at her sister in shock. Skuld overheard this and dropped the beach ball she was holding.

"I'm going to transport there to see if he's okay!" Skuld shouted before realizing that her powers were nil and she couldn't use the water as a transport field. She felt so impotent at this limitation...and huffed in disgust, throwing the beachball violently against the ground.

"Thank you, Skuld, but I can fly over to see if he's okay," Belldandy said, touched by her sister's readiness to assist Keiichi.

"I'll go with you!" Urd tried to levitate and noticed that her powers had diminished greatly. Greatly enough that she feel on her ass in a most undignified manner.

"Bell, I _can't fly_!" she shouted in dismay. Belldandy had been counting on Urd to fly with her, just like she had done when they rescued Skuld and Cevn. She always felt better if her older sister was with her in a crisis, even if Urd sometimes exacerbated the situation.

"What do you mean, you _can't_?" Belldandy exclaimed with frustration.

"My powers...they're almost gone!" Urd replied just as Belldandy turned into her ethereal form and took off in a streak towards Keiichi.

Keiichi shimmied underneath the Yukai na tsutsuji and craned his neck to find the ignition. He had to rest on his right knee, because every time he put any weight on his left knee, a sharp stabbing pain would result. He spied the ignition and reached up to shut it off, then he crawled back out and rolled over on his back upon the sand as two more racers roared past him.

"KEIICHI!!" he heard Belldandy yell with an edge of panic to her voice. He sat up on the sandy beach as she sprinted towards him.

"Keiichi, you're hurt!" she exclaimed as she saw the blood on his shirt.

"It's nothing," he said nonchalantly as he tried to stand up on his own two feet to prove it. Things started spinning, and he almost fell over, than he sat back down.

"Damn, I must have a concussion!" he thought with despair. "We're going to lose this race!" he said dejectedly, grabbing a handful of sand and pitching it into the ocean in an act of frustration. He regained his feet by sheer force of will and walked over to the Yukai na tsutsuji. He reached underneath, gripping one of the rollbars as he struggled to right it back on its side. With a final heave, he pushed it back on its wheels.

Exhausted from the effort, he pulled himself up into the cabin seat.

"Keiichi, you can't drive like this!" Belldandy shouted desperately, trying to convince him to not ignore his injuries.

"I _gotta_ win...for the club!" he replied through gritted teeth. Keiichi felt like he had the mother of all headaches. He reached down and turned on the ignition.

Nothing.

The water must have stalled the motor. Keiichi cursed his luck. He looked at Belldandy pleadingly.

"What'll I do? I was driving and I saw a big sea turtle, which had crawled out onto the raceway. I swerved to avoid it and wiped out. I didn't have time to do anything else, and I didn't mean to hit it," he rapidly explained.

Belldandy didn't want him to drive in this condition. Yet she sensed the overwhelming sincerity of his kokoro. She felt a heartbreak when she considered the consequences of losing this race. Keiichi would be unsettled, his already fragile self-confidence scattered to the winds. Right before finals. And all of this would have happened because he tried to save an innocent sea turtle from being hurt. She fought against her maternal instinct to tell him to "call it a day." She looked into his brown eyes, seeing his face shadowed by the impending disappointment of losing this race. Softly, her fears abated...her emotions couldn't bear it any more. She smiled at him and encanted:

_Becalm your overheated parts/regain your inner desire_

_Together fly your machine'd hearts/undamp your burning fire_

_Toward velocity you must departs/a phoenix of spitfire!_

Yukai na tsutsuji revved up. Keiichi looked at the ATV with a stunned expression, then back to Belldandy. She winked at him.

"I just gave him a jumpstart! As Urd would say, 'Go For It!'" Belldandy said to Keiichi with a disarming smile. Keiichi gave her the V-sign and blew her a kiss, then drove off.

Keiichi was so thankful for his divine girlfriend. He felt momentarily guilty about having a Goddess to give him an edge over the other racers. Then he realized that all she had done was start the ATV; the rest would be up to him.

"I'm way behind the pack," he said to himself.

He pulled even with the ocean tide and floored Yukai na tsutsuji's accelerator pedal. The ATV responded with a battle cry of whirring motorsound as it leapt forward. He saw the last two racers ahead of him and he urged his vehicle on.

By the time he rounded the turning point flag, he was in fourth place. Two cars had tipped and he had passed another car with a risky inside turn. Now he was racing against time. Aoshima's car was in first place. The beach whizzed by as he approached and overtook the third place car. As he looked around him, Keiichi noticed that crowds were queuing in front of some of the beach side properties, watching a free exhibition of driving finesse.

The widened area of the racecourse was coming up in a couple of kilometers. Keiichi planned his move. He positioned himself on the outside where the sand was much more solid and pushed his skill to the limit. The second place driver swerved in and out ahead of him, trying to block his passage. Keiichi stayed with him, and lured him to swerve his car to the outside lane. The driver responded to his fakeout...and Keiichi suddenly banked his ATV to the inside lane with a sharp cut. He steadied the Yukai na tsutsuji and overtook the second place car.

Aoshima's car was still in front of him by at least ten car lengths. He didn't have a chance in hell of catching that car unless the driver made a mistake. He pulled up to five car lengths over the next 10km.

Suddenly the car ahead of him went berserk. Keiichi glanced and saw a sea turtle. The _same_ sea turtle.

"Aoshima's driver was so overconfident, he forgot about the turtle!" he thought excitedly. He breathed a silent "thank you" to the wayward terrapin. This time he had ample time to swerve around it. The other car had run over it and was hurtling out of control. Keiichi swerved to avoid the car and turtle just as the first place car tipped over. The turtle, which had almost cost him the race, had now given him the race, as long as he didn't crash.

At the finish line, Aoshima threw down his binoculars in dismay. "Dammit, dammit, dammit!" he shouted, wanting to curse more vehemently as he kicked divots of sand into the air. The N.I.T. Motor Club members cheered as they saw Keiichi and the Yukai na tsutsuji closing in the distance. Tamiya put on his plastic grass skirt and did a mock hula dance which sent everyone into a mirthful uproar. Belldandy felt a huge sense of relief as Keiichi approached the finish line.

Keiichi passed the checkered flags and slowly turned the ATV around. The celebratory atmosphere among the team quickly shifted to anxious concern when they saw his blood-soaked T-shirt. Megumi felt a sudden chill when she saw how pale her brother Keiichi was.

"He's hurt! Keiichi's hurt!" chorused the Motor Club team members. Keiichi sat weakly in his car seat, much too drained physically to get out of it. Tamiya came over with a look of grave concern and lifted Keiichi out of the ATV.

"We gotta get yuh to da hospital! Why didn't yuh just throw in da towel!"

"I wanted...to win this one for the Club," Keiichi intoned weakly as he looked at his sempai.

Tamiya felt overwhelmed by his teammate's strong sense of giri and started crying. He looked at Keiichi's swollen left knee and knew in an instant that his kneecap was either dislocated or broken. "Yuh're probably goin' to have ta learn crutches," he said in a deadpan voice. "Let's get that kneepad off of yuh!"

"Oh man, that's nasty!" Ootaki commented as he saw Keiichi's swollen knee. Keiichi fought down an agonized scream as Tamiya tried to take off the pad. Tamiya gently loosened the pad, seeing that his friend's knee was very swollen and sensitive.

"Oh Keiichi!" Belldandy said sadly as she saw his knee.

"That's going to take stitches, y'know!" said a worried Megumi as she inspected his scalp. She poured some peroxide on the deep gash. Belldandy hugged Keiichi, gently touching his scalp where he was injured, feeling a large lump at the back of his head.

"Oh Keiichi, you're so brave and strong! Don't let anyone say that you aren't every inch a man!" Keiichi started at her unintended sexual equivocation. Urd, Megumi and Sora burst out in laughter as Keiichi blushed red.

"Why are you laughing?" Belldandy asked innocently. Megumi whispered in her ear, and middle Goddess turned beet-red, bringing on more peals of laughter from everyone present. Urd told a ribald joke about how women confuse two inches and eight inches, which drew a caustic stare from both Keiichi and Belldandy.

"But it's true, as you guys are going to find out someday!" she taunted the couple.

"What a time to be joking, Big Sister! Keiichi's hurt and Belldandy's all upset...and here you are being all perverted and stuff! What a sick mind!" a serious Skuld admonished her.

Skuld tore a strip of cloth off from her T-shirt and wrapped it around Keiichi's head, where it immediately soaked with blood loosened from the peroxide.

"Skuld to the rescue!" she shouted.

"Thanks, Skuld! You ever thought about being a nurse?" Keiichi said gratefully. Skuld smiled at her older sister's boyfriend, feeling proud that she was able to help. Tomohisa stood behind her and massaged her shoulders, knowing that she was stressing. Skuld looked back at him thankfully. She had never been given a backrub like this before. It felt very good.

Megumi grabbed her cell phone from her beach bag.

"Do you need an ambulance?" she asked Keiichi, dialing the hospital.

"Nah, as long as you're willing to drive me to the hospital!" he said. His head was throbbing with bolts of pain. He would glad when they get him some medical attention. Megumi informed the hospital that Keiichi was coming.

"Of course I'm willing! Lemme get some clothes on!" she said as she pulled on a pair of khaki shorts and a T-shirt. After all, Megumi didn't want herself stuck driving to the hospital in her bikini.

"Belldandy, you should put on some clothes...you don't want to get to the hospital and have some guy who's in a coronary die when he sees you in a swimsuit," Urd suggested in a low purring voice. Belldandy nodded her head, and put on a long T-shirt and a pair of shorts.

Belldandy and Megumi helped a limping Keiichi into the backseat of her car. Keiichi laid his head in Bell's lap as they sped off to the hospital.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

At the hospital, Dr. Fumishira admitted Keiichi. After a short wait, the elderly doctor came in and checked Keiichi's vitals. He pulled off the remaining knee and elbow pads. When he pulled off the left kneepad, Keiichi almost screamed in pain. Belldandy saw his reaction and tearfully winced in empathy and concern. His knee was very swollen and bruised almost deep red. Belldandy put her hands to her mouth in anxiety, as she knew instantly that his knee was broken. Megumi made a grimace with her mouth as she saw how bad his knee joint was distended.

"Does this hurt?" Dr. Fumishira asked as he gently prodded Keiichi's knee with a finger.

"Sshhiiiyoww...Yes!" Keiichi hissed between gritted teeth as a shock of pain ran up his leg.

"We're going to have to X-ray this, but it looks like you have a broken kneecap. If this is so, I'll have to put you in a cast." Keiichi looked at Belldandy and Megumi with desperation. In his mind's eye, he saw himself hobbling around on crutches during finals week. This brought a sinking feeling to his stomach. The doctor motioned Keiichi to a wheelchair, and Belldandy wheeled him down the hallway to the X-ray room. On the way back to the emergency ward, an even deeper sinking feeling swept over Keiichi.

"Summer vacation...in crutches!" he thought dejectedly.

Keiichi's collarbone was swollen. The doctor told him that it popped out and back in during the collision and that he would have to reset it. Keiichi gulped at this news...he had heard how resetting bones was excruciatingly painful.

A moment later, the doctor was wiping caked blood off of his scalp with a warm wet towel. Belldandy blanched when she saw the doctor begin to stitch Keiichi's head wound shut. Keiichi had never received stitches before...but surprisingly, he was intrigued by the process. After the work was done, he asked the doctor for a mirror so that he could examine the handiwork. He was impressed.

"Yes, that took 18 stitches. You also have a concussion, which means that you need to spend the next 48 hours resting. If you feel unusual in any way...nauseous, dizzy, really strong headache, disoriented...you come back here right away!"

He gave Keiichi a local anesthetic to his right shoulder and waited for it to take effect. After ten minutes, he began to move Keiichi's collarbone. With an audible 'pop!' it slid back into its socket. Megumi gagged and almost threw up at the sound; she was touchy even when people cracked their knuckles...this was too much! Keiichi smiled at her, knowing her sensitivity to bodily popping sounds.

The doctor examined the X-rays of Keiichi's left knee and found a fracture of the patella. He gave Keiichi a shot directly to the knee and manipulated the bone. Then he wrapped the knee in an elastic bandage, put some zinc on it to seal it, and then wrapped it tightly with an ace bandage. The next half-hour was spent applying plaster to Keiichi's knee. The plaster took another hour to dry, while all three read magazines. Dr. Fumishira returned with a pair of crutches, and demonstrated to Keiichi on how to use them. Finally, the doctor rechecked his vitals.

"You're Morisato, the guy who won the Solar Competition this year, right?" Keiichi nodded his head. "Could I get your autograph...it's for my grandson Toshiro. He is a real fan of racing, and he wants to go to N.I.T. when he's out of grade school," the doctor joked.

Keiichi assented, then wrote a nice long note to the doctor's grandson.

"Thanks! I'll waive half the bill for that!" Dr. Fumishira said with a smile.

"It's been an honor, Morisato Keiichi. It isn't often that I get to see a celebrity. You two pretty young ladies make sure to take care of him. I'll call Dr. Kintaro at N.I.T. personally tomorrow to see that Keiichi here gets an extension to take his final exams later in the week."

All three bowed to the doctor and left.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

At home, Urd, Skuld and Cevn were discussing the extent of Keiichi's injuries when the subject of their discussion came in.

"Crutches!" Cevn said with surprise. "What happened, did Megumi get in an accident on the way to the hospital?" Megumi stuck her tongue out at him.

"No, it turned out that I have a broken kneecap. When I got tossed out of the ATV, I just didn't notice it because of the kneepads."

"Hmmm, you better keep off your feet for a while, unless necessary. You don't want your knee to heal with a poor osteopathic alignment...then you'll need a pin there," Cevn said with concern.

"Gee, thanks for reminding me!" Keiichi said with an edge.

"Sorry, I just was thinking aloud, Keiichi. By the way, why can't one of you just heal him, like you did with me," he said while looking at Belldandy and Urd.

"I made an agreement with myself long ago. If Keiichi gets injured while doing what he wants to do, I won't interfere. If he gets injured because of some kind of divine intervention, like with Mara, then of course I would heal him," Belldandy said, looking at Cevn evenly.

Urd looked at Belldandy with pride.

"It's my idea, actually. She's such a soft-hearted one...if Bell fixed every problem Keiichi has, he'll never learn what it's like to _really_ live life."

"Oh, so it was _you_ who convinced her!" Keiichi said as he jabbed Urd in the ribs with the tip of his crutch. "Thanks a lot, Urd!"

"Owww! Don't mention it, Keiichi honey," she replied with a flinch and a taunt.

"Keiichi, you must remember that both Skuld and Urd have limited or no powers. Urd has the lowest grade of powers, and Skuld had her powers completely revoked by Kami-sama. Neither one can help heal you."

Keiichi smiled at Belldandy, catching her off-guard.

"If being laid up means that I get to have you for a nurse all day...I guess it can't be all bad." Everyone chuckled at Keiichi's cheerful take on the circumstances.

"Hey, since you're going to be home, I can help quiz you in the evenings for your exams," Cevn volunteered.

"And Banpei and I can keep you company. I can set up a computer game terminal in your room!" Skuld added.

"And I can finally wash your back!" Urd said demurely. Keiichi coughed on his soda while Belldandy shot her an icy glance. She remembered Urd's first attempt to seduce Keiichi in the bathroom three and a half years ago. Urd noticed her sister's lack of humor. "Just _kidding_, sis! That's your job! He's _your_ responsibility!"

Keiichi blushed at this remark. He didn't even consider the problems with bathing that he was going to have. He certainly couldn't submerge his foot in the bathtub. Belldandy read his thoughts clearly.

"Keiichi, first thing tomorrow we'll get you a stool to sit on in the tub, so you can soak yourself while propping your foot out of the water. They do have such things, don't they Megumi?" she asked. Megumi nodded her head.

"I'll get one on the way home from school," Megumi offered.

Keiichi and Tomohisa went off into the living room to talk about something that happened between Tomohisa and Skuld the day before, while the others recessed to their various rooms.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

I walked to school the next day with thoughts of the finals I was going to administer. I would meet with Dr. Ogawa in the afternoon, an event that really caused me some consternation. I pulled myself back into the present moment.

I really felt empathy for Keiichi. To have such an injury the week before finals was especially rough going. But I had loads of respect for his courage and commitment to the Motor Club. Using this logic, I was able to convince his instructors to delay his finals. I also reminded them that Keiichi & Co. had won a huge cash award from the Solar Federation for the Institute. All the professors save one were very willing to grant him an extension. The last professor was wary of my personal interest in Keiichi, and I had a heated argument with him about academic ethics before he relented. He admitted grudgingly that I had won some respect from my fellow teachers and that he felt compelled to challenge me, so that he could learn firsthand about me.

Then with a grin, he told me that Dr. Kintaro had already called about granting Keiichi special testing privileges.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Dis ain't fair! Dere's _nuthin'_ on this test that we've studied!" Tamiya complained.

He was the first in my Asian Studies Class to notice. I watched the shocked expressions of each student as I handed out the essay books, then the set of essay questions I had written. Megumi shot me an angry look of betrayal when she saw the final. Sora looked at me with genuine dismay. Aoshima was exasperated when he read the final. Ootaki looked like he was going to snap, and Tamiya turned red in the face, then stood up and announced his opinion.

"That's right! This is a new type of testing method that I've devised. I've studied up on the education system here, so I've decided to throw you guys and gals a curve!" I said, replying to his public challenge with an equally public response.

"How are we supposed to answer these questions if we haven't studied the specific eras?" Megumi asked with a hint of panic, her disappointment diminished somewhat.

"Ok, I'll explain it. This is what is called a 'projective essay'. You have not studied these particular historical eras, but I put them there because they definitely relate to what you _have_ studied. What I want you to do, if you wish to succeed in this exam, is to draw upon what we've discussed this semester and relate it to what you _think_ these periods of history were like. In other words, you need to make an educated guess."

"You mean that we're not going to be tested on the historical facts we learned!" Aoshima noted with a smirk. "What kind of test is this? It's ridiculous!"

"What you and your classmates are being tested on, Aoshima, is _what you have learned_ about what you learned this semester. In other words, your ability to author your own thinking. You need to think on your own and incorporate your knowledge. After all, history as a science of humanities relies on integrating fields of knowledge. Rote memorization can only ontogenize intellectual mediocrity and academic perspective-cloning. This 'cloning' or doppel-nachdenklich as it is termed in the German, is one of the reasons why you all just now got so uptight over this test...you've become accustomed to the same types of educational assessment methods. When something doesn't fit the mode...you freak out!

"But guess what? These types of surprises are what historical significances are measured by!"

After I finished, I heard a dozen or so fingers going 'snap' as Aoshima turned red in the face. Megumi and Sora stifled a giggle and I shot them a mock-grave look. Secretly, I enjoyed outwitting the haughty Aoshima.

Just a _little_ bit...when he was acting like a little pompous bastard.

"You will be graded on how accurately you invent a history for each era and how succinctly you support your hypotheses," I explained deliberately.

I walked around the class. Sayoko showed up forty minutes late and I refused to give her an exam booklet. She looked at me with surprise and I told her that I wanted to meet with her after class. She wanted to argue, but I 'shushed' her and pointed to rest of class.

Two and a half hours later, all the students were finished. I previewed a few of the exams and was pleased with the work they came up with. Each student thanked me, and several wrote on their booklets that I had provided a completely different type of learning for them. As Megumi handed in her essay, I whispered "It's a go." She winked at me in acknowledgment. Then she thanked me profusely for teaching this class. I reeled at the sincerity of her compliment...I knew that I would hear more when I got home from her.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Sayoko was sitting in the corner of the room, looking glumly at the walls as the classroom was empty.

"Sayoko, I want to meet with you in my office about your performance in this course," I said as I motioned her to come up to the front of the classroom.

"I don't care about that! Just chew me out and get it over with!" she shouted with rueful defiance.

"Have you got a surprise coming, Sayoko!" I thought to myself.

"Come on, Sayoko, let's get this over with!" I replied. We walked to my basement office in Watanabe Hall. I unlocked the door and motioned her in, gesturing her to take the seat next to my desk.

There was a knocking on my door a moment later and Genji, Megumi, Keiichi, Sora, Tamiya and Ootaki filed in. I pulled a couple chairs from the other instructor's offices and set out a couple of boxes and overturned my wastebasket. Finally, everyone was seated. I wrote "in session with Dr. Kintaro" and posted it outside my door. Keiichi snickered when he saw this.

"There. Now _no one_ will disturb us," I said as I pulled the phone off the hook and placed my seat right in front of the door. Sayoko looked around the office in extreme discomfort. The atmosphere was so tense that it felt like we were breathing pea soup. Genji was downcast, and the rest looked nervous as hell.

"Sayoko, the reason I called you to my office is because of the deep concern I have about your grades...and you."

Her reaction was rapid-fire.

"What the _hell_ are you doing? I'm going to report you to the Dean! You _can't_ do this! Why in the hell did you bring all these people? Genji, what are you doing here, you little jerk! Shit! I thought you guys were my friends..."

"You're right. They _were_ your friends. Now they can't be your friends. Who wants to be friends with who you are now...when they could have Sayoko instead?" This statement sent a shock through the room.

I got right in Sayoko's face.

"THAT'S BECAUSE YOUR LIFE IS BEING RUN BY THE DRUGS YOUR USING, NOT BY YOU!!" There was visible recoil by everybody in the room, except Sayoko. She was getting angrier. Good.

"How _dare_ you accuse me of using drugs! Do you know who my parents_ ar_e? They could have you canned from your petty little teaching job here in a moment! So what if I'm using drugs? Even if I was...it's none of _your_ damn business! It's none of their business either! I can do anything I want to!" I shook my head sadly at her response.

"You're wrong. You can't stop using drugs, you can't get your friends back, you can't shake the Yakuza drug pushers that you hang out with, and you definitely can't make your own brother feel comfortable around you.

"His life has been hell this semester because of you! Genji, would you clue her in on this?"

"Sayoko...sister...I have...snff...I've had to cover for you with Mom and Dad. I feel scared when you get so loaded that you can't come in the house; I've had to drag you up to your room. I'm scared to death about those hoods that come over to the house. I feel alone because...snff...I can't have any friends at school anymore because you're ruining our family reputation. I feel...snff...sad when you don't show up to school...you used to...snff...be so into schoolwork." He started crying the more he talked.

"Good going, Genji," I silently complimented him in my thoughts. He was being brave...doing exactly what we had discussed. Starting off with feeling words, then describing the actions in a non-judgmental, non-shaming manner, and finally letting his genuine feelings show.

Genji continued.

"I feel...snff...really bad when I have to clean up your puke. I feel ashamed because...snffsnff...I've had to hide your car keys when you're too loaded to drive anywhere at night. I feel hopeless, because no one else is around...it's like everything...snff...is falling on my shoulders. I _love_ you, Sayoko, I...I don't want to...snff...lose you."

Megumi was crying.

Sayoko's defiance had definitely been diminished by her brother's remarks.

"Megumi, what do you have to add?" After a pause, she started. "I really like your brother, Sayoko. I felt like he didn't like me or something, because he kept avoiding me at school. Then I found out that you were doing drugs, and it became clear. It hurts me because I know that Genji's a really nice guy, and very bright and handsome, but he's so withdrawn." Genji blushed red at this string of compliments while Keiichi smiled at his sister's frank admission. I had to hand it to her; Megumi wasn't holding anything back. She went on a series of confrontations, episode by episode.

"It really angers me that he can't be free to hang out with his friends or go on a date because he has to take care of you. Because he's _ashamed_ of you. And _you_...I think you're pissing your life away!" she finished bluntly.

Keiichi went next. He stood up, propping himself on his crutches so he stood above everyone in the room.

"I've known you for a long time, Sayoko. I know that you wanted to go out with me, but then Belldandy and I hooked up. But I still want you to be my friend, despite all of the past stuff. But now, I feel like I've lost someone really close. I can't be your friend when you're like this, Sayoko. Getting drunk at a party once in a while is one thing, but this...is not _you_. _Look at you!_ What happened to you being the 'Queen of N.I.T.'? You used to always pride yourself on your looks and quickness of intelligence. Now, all I see is something that shocks me...you're thin as a stick and you don't take care of yourself at all! I feel disgusted when I see you now, because you _are_ a very beautiful woman...but you're just letting yourself go downhill."

Sayoko dipped her head down in disgrace. Sora went next.

"I used to look up to you, Sayoko-sempai! But now, I feel sad that the senior upperclass gal that I respected so much...can't even show up to school regularly. Now...you're almost as skinny as I am," her little joke at her own expense brought some much needed laughter to our group.

"But I don't feel any respect for you now, because I don't see _you_ respecting yourself!" Sora spurred. This sent another shock through the room and I was once more amazed at the inner strength of the diminutive Sora.

Ootaki and Tamiya went last.

Ootaki stood up in front of Sayoko and began.

"I...uh think you really should get looked into, Sayoko. You used to be so fun to party with, but now you don't even party with us. I miss Karaokeing with you. You're the only one who could keep up with me when we did some serious partying. Remember? I feel bummed, because you're only a shadow of yourself now! You're like a melting snowflake!"

Tamiya finished the round of confrontations.

"Ah feel bad that you is throwin yuh're life down da toilet, Sayoko. A beautiful chick like you, and yuh can't even take care of yuhself! I'm pissed because ah wanted you tuh graduate next year an join me in da Grad School! Whatta shame, look's like dat will never happen. I would die ta go out with a babe like you, but right now I wouldn't touch yuh if we were stranded alone on a deserted island together!" Judging from Tamiya's comments, I sensed that his attraction to Sayoko ran deeper than simple friendship.

Finally it was done. I let the silence do its work. Silence was a time for the emotions to arise. Sayoko was like a shaken bottle of soda...it only remained to see what would bubble up.

"Why do you guys bother me with this crap! Can't you see that there's nothing I can do about it! Even if I did quit, the Yakuza threatened to _kill_ me. I've been storing and dealing drugs for them. I've also financed a crack factory they have."

"That's bullshit!" I shouted. "You didn't finance them...they extorted that money from you!" Sayoko went white in the face as the others gasped. Genji broke down into heavy sobbing.

"I love you. You're my _only sister_! I don't want to lose you, Sayoko!" he said as he ran across the room and hugged her. I stood up and gently pulled Genji away from Sayoko.

It was time for some therapy.

"Genji, you can't have her. The drugs have her!" I said in a level voice. Genji snapped at me angrily, trying to get around me to comfort Sayoko. Luckily, because my 'broom closet' office was so cramped, I could easily block his path.

"She's _my_ sister! Who are you to get between her and me!"

"Yeah, who the fuck are you to stand between me and my brother!" Sayoko chimed in resentfully.

"I'm the drugs! I'm standing right between you two, right now! He can't help you or hug you, and you can't respond. I'm just doing physically in the here and now what the drugs have been doing in the past. And right now!"

Dead silence. Everyone looked at me in amazement. I had used cathartic therapy in the US, but would these Japanese college students understand? I continued.

"That's right, Sayoko. Just now, you're pissed off because I got between you and your brother when you needed some caring from him. But what about the drugs? How did you feel when I pulled Genji away from you? I bet it felt really good, didn't it?"

"NO!! It felt horrible!" she shouted.

"Okay, so it felt horrible. I hope you can get used to it, because that's all you're ever going to get! From Genji. From Keiichi, Megumi, Sora, Ootaki and Tamiya. As for me, all you're going to get is a failing mark and a recommendation for your expulsion from N.I.T." I said with venomous certainty.

Sayoko was crying now. I was glad that she wasn't too high...at least she hadn't used anything during the test. I laid into her viciously.

"You want to die a junkie's death? Go right ahead. You _will_ be alone, you_ will_ probably sell your body for drugs, you _will_ more than likely go to jail, you _will_ be a plaything for any Yakuza, and you can kiss your family and friends goodbye!"

"_NOOOOOOOOOOO!!_" she screamed. Tamiya erupted out of his chair, looking like he was going to hit me. Sayoko was crying hysterically in an otherwise dead silence.

"_Cool it! _Sit down, Tamiya!" I commanded, trying to sound macho. "I'm not doing this to be mean to her, I'm doing this because I've had it with her addiction!" I yelled. He looked at me, then nodded his head and lumbered back to his seat. His flash of anger seemed to undo the pursestrings to Sayoko's denial.

"I can't stop! Does that mean...I'm hooked? I get..snfff..really sick if I stop..and Kenzo said..suhsnff..he would kill me if I didn't stop giving them money. They even threatened my family!"

"Those bastards!" several voices said vehemently. I couldn't agree with them more.

"Dey's ever come near yuh again, I'll kick every one of their rat-asses!" Tamiya bellowed angrily.

"Look, Sayoko, those goons won't bother your family. You need to tell them that they need to deal with me...assuming they survive an encounter with Tamiya," I said, nodding to the behemoth N.I.T. senior.

"Realistically, I highly doubt if they'll bother your parents; that would be too indirect and it would threaten their cash supply from you. But Genji...we'll have to figure something out for the summer months. A place for you to stay...away from your folk's house."

"He could stay with us!" Keiichi volunteered without hesitation. I was surprised by his unexpected invitation. I glanced at Megumi, who looked like she was going to fall out of her chair, unreadable expression included. Her brother has no idea of the gongs he just set off in his sister's heart and soul. Actually, this was a very sound idea, except that it would place the house under threat of an angry Yakuza. I whispered this concern in his ear. He looked at me gamely.

"If you're willing to stand up to them, so am I. Not to mention our 'guardians'!" We smiled at each other when he mentioned the Goddesses. Megumi was quickly recovering her senses with a big grin, obviously reacting to this with a barely controlled joy...I bet she was ecstatic about the prospect of Genji staying at the house.

Sayoko was a fount of tears. This intervention had unfolded far better than I had planned. I was proud of all of them.

"But how can I stop?" Sayoko asked when she recovered from her deep sadness a little.

"I know you can stop. It's been done before. I've risked my job today, so I might as well go for broke like everyone else has." I looked around my office at each face, thankful for their honesty and courage.

"Sayoko, _I'm_ a recovering drug addict...with over 11 years clean. These are some places where I used to shoot up," I said as I rolled my sleeves up. There was a gasp from Tamiya, Ootaki and Sora as I showed them my 'war wounds': holes in my arms, collapsed veins, scars from deep injections, places where I cut myself open to remove broken needles, knotted veins and burn marks.

Sayoko looked at me in disbelief at first, but then she started to cry again. Genji came over and hugged her, telling her "You can do this, sis!" in a calming, soothing voice of support.

"This is what is waiting for you if you get help!" I said in reference to Genji's support.

"A whole bunch of people really care about you, otherwise we all wouldn't be here," Megumi added. We watched in silence as the light filtered in through the window near my office ceiling. By some quirk of fate, it was shining on Sayoko like a spotlight. I could almost feel the gutwrenching crazymaking going on inside of her.

"What can I do?"

I reached in my desk and pulled out two travel vouchers.

"These are for a roundtrip airfare to Okinawa. There is a treatment program there called D.A.R.T. I know the guy who runs it. He's already got a bed there for you, if you choose to go. We all chipped in to get these tickets for you."

"Whattya mean we all chipped in? Ah didn't know about this?" Tamiya said. I rolled my eyes at his lack of inventiveness.

"He's just being honest and admitting that he owes me some yen, that's all!" I said. "Right...Tamiya?" I said with a hint of warning to my voice.

"Uh, right, Cevn-sensei!" I patted him on the shoulder. Sayoko looked fidgety. The emotional shock was starting to wear off.

"However, Sayoko, you only get this deal if you leave this office, go home and get some clothes, and catch the first JAL flight out to Okinawa after you arrive at Narita Airport. Genji and Megumi will drive you there." Both of them looked at me in surprise.

"Look, she is primed and ready to get some help. But it's got to be _now_! We need to get her there while this chunk of emotional reality is fresh in her mind. If she goes home and gets loaded, all of this work will be for naught! This is truly a 'carpe diem' situation. I'll ride along to keep you all company." They both nodded. In fact, everyone in the room volunteered to go.

"Well, for my part, I just want to say that I'm totally proud of all of you for having the courage to do what you did today. You guys did wonderful! And you, Sayoko, I just can't pay a high enough complement to you for being willing to get help! When you get back, you and I are going to start some NA meetings here in Makuhari!"

We formed a line and gave hugs to Sayoko. She was in tears again, only this time because she was on the receiving end of a whole lot of support and love.

I pulled Tamiya aside and whispered, "Don't worry about owing me anything for her tickets. They came from Santa Claus!"

"I get it! You wanted her to think that we all put in for the tickets!" he said with a laugh. I assented with a nod of my head.

"Really, though, we're all going to have to chip in when she gets back! She's going to need a whole lot of support!" I leaned over and whispered to him, making an observation.

"Besides, I think you _like_ her, Tamiya!" He looked at me and started to deny it...then blushed.

"How did yuh know?"

"I just guessed. But you're going to figure prominently in her life when she gets back from Okinawa. She really respects you."

Megumi came over.

"What are you two talking about?"

"Ah...uh...da races next Fall!" Tamiya said in full fluster. Ootaki frowned at his friend's transparent fabrication.

Genji walked over with Sayoko.

"We really want to thank you, Cevn-sensei." I handed Sayoko the phone and dialed Okinawa.

"Sayoko, you can make my day by telling that voice on the other end of the phone that you're coming over today."

I heard Sayoko give information over the phone and ask a few questions about the residential treatment. Then the tears started up in my eyes.

"We were so lucky today. Not too many people can become willing after this kind of intervention. Not too many people even get a _chance_ to get helped by an intervention. It's a total miracle that she's actually going to go!" I reflected. Suddenly I felt very exhausted. I had put my heart into this attempt. I felt a gentle massaging on my shoulders and turned my head to see Megumi looking at me with a smile.

"By the way Sayoko, I'm going to give you an incomplete for the semester. When you get back, you can do some make up assignments. We'll talk about it then."

We piled out of my office and walked to the student parking lot. A couple of the faculty looked perplexed as they saw our group.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

After seeing Sayoko off at Narita, Megumi and Keiichi dropped me off at the 'Butterfly Building' where Dr. Ogawa's office was. I went upstairs and into her now-familiar waiting room. As usual, she was prompt.

"It's odd that I have never seen another client here as long as I have been going to therapy with Dr. Ogawa," I mentally noted as she ushered me into her therapy room.

"How are you today?"

"It's been a wild week. I found out that I'm going back to China this summer, and..."

"You're going back to _China_!" she blurted out. Then she calmed down a little. I was surprised at the intensity of her reaction, she almost seemed angry that I was leaving for the summer.

"Yeah, right after Tanabata. I was disappointed, because I really wanted to explore Japan at my leisure, but now I need to do some business on behalf of N.I.T. and finish my dissertation."

"What a disappointment! I was hoping to see...er...work with you this summer."

"Hey, it's okay. I'll be back at the end of August for the fall semester."

We talked about the intervention with Sayoko, my fear of women, the stress of the end of the semester...

"How much more do _you_ have to hurt before you find a girlfriend, Cevn?" Dr. Ogawa suddenly asked.

"What do you mean? I'm not good enough for any women. No one wants me. Even if some woman did want me, I wouldn't want to settle. I want the whole package. Love, romance, honesty, sex, mutual spiritual growth...but of course, there's nothing like that. It's impossible! I'm...snfff..._always_ going to be alone!" I said, my earlier sense of joy now tattered. The sadness surged up, surprising even me and once more I started to cry.

I cried myself hoarse again.

I was sick of being alone, and powerless to do anything about it. In one sense, I was _never_ alone...the group effort of the intervention with Sayoko proved this. But yet, I _was_ alone; the loneliness of a drowning sailor's last moments, thinking of his family back on the homelands. I had no one to give my loneliness to...thus I had no one I could also give my love alongside it.

Same old story.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --


	15. Pt 15: Nebulae

**Part 15: Nebulae**

Cevn had one more official duty to perform at N.I.T. before his brief vacation time prior to his BeiDa trip. Although most graduations were in late March, there were always a few students who graduated in June. So he attended the graduation ceremony for N.I.T. The graduating class was small, and the commencement was held in one of the older halls. Hara Hall paid homage to a Meiji-era physical scientist and was one of the more well-kept buildings in the 'old campus' part of the Institute.

Dr. Kintaro delivered a stirring graduation address, and the guest speaker was one of Japan's leading physicists. Despite the fact that his speech was ornate with mathematical and scientific terminology, Cevn was able to follow the technical aspects to a degree. It was obvious that many of the faculty and students were aware of his work, because they attended him with an almost reverential fawning.

Finally it was over.

Cevn went back to his office and gathered a few things, then caught a bus home. He was looking forward to a break in his work schedule; a draught of the honey of relaxation before he left for China. Although it would only be eight days, it would serve as a cultural window, framing a roadtrip to one or two historical sites in Japan. He was anxious to spend some leisure time with his housemates as well, since he had been so busy in the past month.

A delightful memory vied him; last night's vigorous argument between Urd and Belldandy. Dismissing Belldandy's decision not to heal Keiichi's broken kneecap, Urd had taken it upon herself, in a rare moment of sympathy, to impose her convictions upon Belldandy. She argued that it was more toil to neglect Keiichi's injuries than it was to heal them. Belldandy was initially flabbergasted, reminding Urd that it had been her initial suggestion which influenced her "hands off" policy regarding her boyfriend's racing-related injuries.

"Strange...that the Goddesses would be caught up in a Star Trekker 'prime directive' debate! At least there's been no craziness or disasters," he said optimistically.

But he sincerely regretted having to tell the others about his summer 'vacation'.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Belldandy was meditatively sewing potholders when Urd erupted out of the hallway. She dashed into the living room with Skuld just a pace behind her.

"Bell, you've _got_ to see this!" Urd insisted as she flipped on the living room TV. Belldandy fugitively rolled her eyes when she realized that the source of the interruption...was a talk show that Urd liked to check into once in a while. The show sensationalized juicy gossip.

"Good, it's still on!" Skuld said. Belldandy looked at Urd and Skuld and felt a hint of anxiety.

"When these two are as worked up as this, there must be something important going on!" she whispered to herself in a resigned voice. She set down her sewing pattern while her sisters perched in front of the TV like gradeschoolers during Saturday morning anime.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

_"What do you think about the mystery music pod, Nishigawa?" a youngish reporter in a drab suit asked._

_"Well, a newsman of one of NHK's affiliates found it. Then he turned it over to his boss, who manages a classical music station in Osaka. The manager played it over the air and hundreds of listeners called in," a middle aged newsman said._

_"How did NHK get it?" the anchor asked._

_"Well, we got wind of it the next day and sent down a network representative to pick up the pod. Once we obtained the pod, we decided to broadcast some of the music files on it as part of our evening programming. As you know, we broadcast it last night on national._

_"I heard it as well. I could only say that it is phenomenal. I've never heard anything like it. It was breathtaking. I felt as if someone had taken a beautiful shower of cherry blossoms and converted it to sound."_

_"That sounds pretty clichéd, Ryonosuke, but that's how I felt too. Anyway, the station and the local telephone network weren't prepared for the viewer reaction that followed. In a meeting this morning, I was told that the network received 1.5 –_million--_ calls in the hour after the broadcast!"_

_"One and a half million calls?" the young anchor enthused._

_"Yes. Our website registered 13 million hits that evening as well; the most it has ever had!"_

_"That's incredible! What do you attribute this phenomenal response to?"_

_"I haven't the slightest idea. Anyway, I brought the pod for you to play. Strangely enough, the music can't be copied from this pod to any other media, such as a CDR or DAT disk. NHK is hoping that the composer of the music will come forward. Since the pod was found by a NHK employee, it will convert to NHK property in 90 days._

_"But frankly, we hope nobody claims it. The potential profit we can receive from publishing it is doubtless to be quite lucrative. However, our legal department has advised us to make a 'good faith' effort to locate the owner or the composer, since the tape did have a portion of a character etched on it. Possibly some information about the contents or maybe a name or a title," the older of the two anchormen explained officiously._

_"Okay. Now for you folks, here is a portion of the mystery pod's music..."_

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Urd pointed the remote at the TV and froze the image. In the background of the anchor desk, there was a music pod with a "K" and a kanji character that looked like it had two trees above a larger tree. The rest of the etched character had been scarfed off with scratches.

Then the music played.

Belldandy closed her eyes as she was transported back to Yggdrasil in her mind. Cool mercurial flows of clouds swirled around her as she flew with Holy Bell through a light pink mist-lake with a rainbow forest all around her...she felt totally and sublimely serene.

"That...that's the God's Music," Skuld said with a calm smile.

Keiichi walked in the living room, sat down and toweled his hair dry. The music reveled the incredible victory in the Solar Car competition. He closed his eyes and saw snakelike roadway wrapping around 

the cliffs edging alongside the ocean with wind whipping his hair and tingling his face with a floral aroma.

He opened his eyes and noticed the image of the music pod on the TV. It had his surname, but part of it was scratched off. He remembered Cevn giving it to him right before he left to go to the final Solar Car race. It was undoubtedly the same pod.

"THAT'S MY POD!!"

"What?" All three Goddesses turned to him in surprise. Urd got a severe look on her face.

"What do you mean,_ your_ pod?" she inquired with a piercing glare.

"Cevn couldn't come to the race, remember? Right before I left he gave me this music pod, remember? Then I lost it in the excitement. Anyway...I _told_ you guys all about that already, months ago!" he said defensively.

"_That's_ the pod you told us about? The one you think that caused your solar racer go faster?" Skuld exclaimed. It all was forming together in her mind now, like sliphorn pieces of a puzzle.

"I know what happened! I know, I know, I know! Keiichi lost the tape in the excitement of the finish of the race. Someone found it, and now the humans are starting to experience the God's Music for the first time!" Skuld observed matter-of-factly.

"Yes, but it isn't _meant_ for them!" Urd said, furrowed with distress as she envisioned the consequences. Belldandy knitted her eyebrows in deep thought.

"It's true that the God's Music is intended only for the Gods. It cannot even be relayed via sound waves...it is shared via soundthoughts in Yggdrasilian perception sets. Thus, it can't be 'heard' in the mortal sense. But some quirk of fate had graced a mortal with the ability to compose the God's Music. And yet, somehow an Earthrealm technology renders it soundfully. Could this mean that Mankind is ready for the God's Music? And yet..." Belldandy conjectured. Skuld looked up nervously at her older sister's mention of sound reproduction technology.

"They _aren't_ supposed to have it!" Urd exclaimed. "You guys may think that I'm capricious, but this time I _know_ that I'm right! That music is the _God's Music_...it is not something that can be marketed! Now that it is in the hands of those avaricious, bumbling...network tycoons, who knows what they'll do with it?" she fretted.

"But we know _who made it_!" Keiichi argued. The he realized the ill-conditioned potentials...

"But, if word gets out that Cevn is the composer, we can forego having any privacy for the rest of our lives. I know what celebrity is all about after winning that Solar Car race. You all saw how it was driving me nuts! And last week when I was injured...the doctor who treated me at the hospital even asked for my autograph!" he explained.

"Yeah! I mean, why shouldn't I be a celebrity, ya know? That station got 1.5 million calls! And they played it only once! Obviously, the mortals like it," said an excited Urd. "Hmmm. Maybe I should tell them that _I_ created it..."

"Don't you even think about it, Urd! Besides, you can't be a celebrity! It's against the GRO Code of Conduct!" an indignant Belldandy interrupted her. Keiichi's eyes went wide at Urd's pronouncement...and Bell-chan's passionate rebuttal.

"That's not simply fan appreciation, that's hysteria, Urd! And...think about Skuld! This would totally ruin her Earthrealm Trainee gig!" he clarified.

"We have to wait until Cevn gets here, and then tell him about this. It's ultimately his decision. He's the one who made the tape," Skuld noted, regarding the matter logically.

"You're beginning to sound too much like Belldandy, Skuld!" Urd remarked with feigned disgust. Actually, she was wiretight with pride in her little sister. Skuld had handled her license suspension in stride, much to everyone's surprise. Now, she was sounding the hearth of sensibility.

Turning to Keiichi, Urd grabbed a pillow and started mock-beating him playfully.

"How...could you lose that music pod, idiot!? _You're_ the cause of all of this!" Keiichi raised his arms above his head to ward off the soft pillow blows. She pinned Keiichi down, and then she felt Skuld tackle her. Then Belldandy joined the fray and all of them were playfully wrestling around on the living room floor. Belldandy screamed with giggles as she sat on Keiichi, who then started tickling her in the ribs ceaselessly.

"Hey, what's gotten into you guys? You trying to gang up on Keiichi or something? He still has a _broken knee_, you goofballs! Or did you forget?" a male voice interrupted the fracas.

The four looked up to see Cevn standing in the doorway, his serious mien completely out of stroke with the situation.

"_Hahahahahaha!_" all four exploded with laughter, completely swallowed up by the risible incongruity of his interruption.

"What are you guys laughing at..." he exclaimed in confusion.

"You!!" Urd yelled as she grabbed the nearest pillow and flung it at him. Keiichi followed suit and shouted, "There's the culprit!"

This served as a signal for the others, who bombarded Cevn with pillows, zabuton and tatami cushions.

"Hey! What is this about?" Urd floated up and tackled Cevn, much to the surprise of the other three.

"Get 'im!" she shouted as they all pounded him with whatever soft pillows or futon seats they could find.

Cevn felt an overwhelming panic as Urd tackled him. He was disoriented; amidst his confusion, images of sexual abuse and confinement steamrolled over his composure. He tried to fight these off and scrambled as Urd held him.

"DON'T TOUCH ME!" he screamed hysterically, repeating his shouts until everyone pulled away from him. Belldandy felt Cevn's anxiety shoot through the roof and knew that something had snapped in the young man.

Urd stood up and brushed off her blouse.

"Sorry about that, Cevn. We were just trying to goof around. I guess I got kinda worked up. You'll know why in..."

"What is going on here? And why is Keiichi walking around like his knee isn't bothering him?" Cevn said as he sat up on the floor.

"_I_ healed Keiichi this afternoon. I couldn't stand watching him struggle around the house with those...things he's using to move about. Besides, Urd had some good points last night...it just took me awhile to appreciate them," Belldandy answered. Urd nodded her head vigorously to affirm her role in Belldandy's decision.

"Well, why'd you guys wait until _after_ he finished his finals, for crissakes? Do you have any idea how hard it must have been for Keiichi to study for his terms while confined to crutches?" Cevn offered irritably.

Everybody ignored his argument...Keiichi's return to health was now a moot point.

"That music pod thingy you gave Keiichi is now in the hands of the NHK. They plan to keep it and market it if they don't find out who is the owner in 90 days. And it's _already_ been 60 days since the race!" Urd pronounced. She had that high pitched staccato voice that Japanese women attain to when they're ready to go 9.0 on the Richter scale.

"Urd!" Belldandy cautioned her older sister. She was worried that Urd was taking this much too seriously. But then, Urd was the most passionate of the three, not to mention she appreciated music the most.

"Cevn, since you are the composer, you should come forth and claim it," Skuld insisted. Keiichi elbowed Skuld in the ribs and shot her a narrow-eyed glance.

"If he does, he'll become a public figure, Skuld! Think about _that_ for a minute!" He spoke even louder.

"Urd said that the TV talk show guy mentioned that NHK received 1.5 _million_ calls in the hour after they played the tape. If you tell them that you made that music, Cevn, you'll never have any time for yourself. People are fanatic about that music."

Cevn looked at the four.

"I...I have to meditate on this one, guys." He walked out of the living room, leaving the Keiichi and the three Goddesses looking at each other with puzzled expressions.

"And Urd...turn that crappy talk show off!" Keiichi commanded in an irritated voice as the newscasters were gossiping about the latest risqué J-pop music vids.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

I went back to my room. It felt like I was having an out-of-body experience. I couldn't even begin to comprehend the fact that the tape had elicited that kind of response.

I felt like a fly in a sandstorm.

"This is insane. What do I do?" My mind raced. Usually, I could flow into a meditative state within ten seconds of initiating zazen or whatever method I choose to use. But this time I couldn't stop thinking. The fact that the NHK had my little side-project music pod really worried me.

"Heresies in the mouths of saints can be accounted orthodoxy by the ignorant," I recalled from Rumi's _Masnavi_.

"This...is...too...big!" I gasped aloud. My mind reeled, bulwarked by supposition. With a determined effort, I counted breaths for what seemed to be an eternity...and felt myself drawn into the void of meditation.

Rapt quietude.

Ex nihilo...a soulseed from which a series of thoughts wove themselves within my awareness. My emotional state danced from stillness to elation as a pathway revealed itself...

I knew in my heart that this would be the right thing to do. I felt that strange anomaly, the 'metallect', involved in all this. My thinking was augmented and my mind rehearsed solutions. A whole axis of solutions, actually.

I leafed through the Enigma Book, reading random snippets of the God's Language and Demon's Language portions, more so just to bolster my confidence. What I was guided towards...would involve a lot of work on my part. In fact, I would definitely need to ask Skuld and Urd for a heavy commitment of their time and energy.

I emerged from my room and joined the others for dinner.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"You what?" Skuld said.

She couldn't believe her ears. It _was_ possible, but it was a daunting request that Cevn had just made of her.

"Skuld...I really need your help on this. Please. You too Urd. The fact that you're a Sysop who worked on the Yggdrasil Mainframe lends itself well to what I'm planning to do."

Both Urd and Skuld looked at each other, as if to say, "you're asking me to have to work with _her_?".

"Are you sure that you've thought this through, Cevn?" Keiichi said with concern. He remembered back several months ago when he was the focus of a media blitzkrieg after winning the Solar Car competition.

"It is _no_ fun being in the middle of the media fishbowl, let me assure you!" Keiichi reminded him.

"Keiichi dear, I think that what Cevn is planning to do is the best possible way to deal with this situation," Belldandy said calmly. Keiichi looked at his divine girlfriend. She had that innocent/naive smile on her face, with her hands crossed in front of her heart. This signaled him that she had already made her decision, and that he'd better go along or he would get a lecture from her.

"It's just like Bell-chan to keep a cool head while something really crazy is going on!" he said to himself.

Cevn had outlined his plan at the dinner table after they finished supper. Using an alias, he was going to contact NHK and identify himself as the composer. Then he was going to send 2 CDs with another 120 minutes of music each to verify that he had composed it. At this point, NHK was to cease and desist from any broadcasting of the music until further notice.

Then he asked Skuld and Urd to develop an unbreachable online system where all CD sales could be accounted. An anonymous Swiss bank account would be set up to tally all sales proceeds, which would then be directly donated to UNICEF, Greenpeace and other charities to alleviate poverty. He asked Skuld to design a ultra-mod stage show which could robotically give twelve public performances without human stage presence, using holographs and such to create a concert atmosphere. Concerts would be offered festival-style for free at venues like Nagano, Oahu, one on each coast of the US; and performances in Sydney, Beijing, Calcutta, Cairo, Paris, Belfast, Moscow, Berlin and concluding with an outdoor concert in Tokyo harbor. Cevn explained that this would verify the 'humanity' of the music. More importantly, public performance would serve to prevent the 'mythologizing' of the music by bridging the profane and the Divine.

Skuld was deeply concerned about the roadshow aspect.

"How could you do it? Wouldn't someone recognize you?" she asked.

"Not likely, if I wear a traditional Kabuki costume and Belldandy uses some kind of spell to make me look like a hologram or something. I'd really be here, playing the music in my hobby room. We can figure that out later."

"Besides the fact that you're an idiot for even thinking this up...Kabuki costumes?...God, you're so weird sometimes! How are we supposed to design a computer network to keep track of sales and distribute proceeds to all these different charities?" Urd asked. "After all, we only have human technology at our disposal. And besides, why shouldn't _we_ get some money from sales? That money that came in his Enigma Book isn't going to last _forever_!"

"Remember one blinded guy whose eyesight you restored with _mere_ human technology? Urd, I can see the soraban rattling off in your head, adding up piles of 10K yen notes. I'm sorry, but I will_ not_ allow any of the profits from this venture to go to me, you, or anyone else! This ability I seem to have...is nothing more than a gift. From where it comes from or why it is in me, I don't know. But somehow, I sense that it would be selfish, if not disastrous, to profit off of the God's Music!" Urd looked at Cevn, her face quivering with anger.

"I don't _believe_ you! I _refuse_ to help someone who acts so damned sanctimonious and principled! You can find someone else to do it! Me, I _want _to be selfish! You know...live without regrets! What's wrong with that? Why can't you think of yourself once in a while? Why can't you think about _us_?" she argued.

"Urd...didn't you say that the God's Music shouldn't be marketed a little while back?" Keiichi countered. Urd ignored him completely.

"You could make a fortune off of this! But...no! Once more, you've proven yourself to have a totally narrow view of things! No wonder you don't have a girlfriend! You're still a loser in my book! No sane woman would want to be with you! How would you support her? You'd be giving her clothes away to the first person that asked for them...all for the sake of saying you're some kind of humanitarian! No! I won't have any of it! You're not getting any help from me!" Urd shouted, volatile as a cornered wolverine.

Cevn stood up, barely controlling his anger.

"Thanks a lot, Urd! Well so much for this idea...Urd's 'pas de resistance' just screwed the whole thing up! I might as well let NHK have it! They can sell it for whatever they want to and keep the money, so that a few stockholders can get even richer off of it. After all, it's only some trashy God's Music!"

"WHAT!!" Urd said as she raised her hand to slap Cevn. "Only some _trashy_ music? How dare you..."

"_SHUT UP_ you two!" Keiichi yelled, just as the crack of Urd's slapped punctuated the tense air at the dinner table. A moment of silence ensued. Belldandy and Skuld looked freaked out in response to Urd's lashout.

"God, if I didn't know better, you both act like husband and wife, you argue so much!" he added, clearly pissed off at the debacle unfolding in his home.

Urd got red faced and pointed at Cevn.

"Me and him? That retarded, idiotic, self-righteous, head-in-his-ass loser? No way!" Cevn heard this and stormed out of the room, walking down the hallway to his room. Belldandy looked at Keiichi and a silent thought passed between them. Wordlessly, he stood up and left to check on Cevn.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Urd! That was just a little extreme! Actually, that was_ extremely_ extreme! You actually slapped him!" Belldandy said in a barely-controlled voice, hoping to calm her older sister down.

"You don't think _he's_ being a little extreme? He's asking me to _give _my valuable time and expertise _for free_ so that he could go on some ego-inflating charity trip to help the poor and the sick! Why can't he just see that there's nothing anyone can do about their lot? He's so...messed up in the head. I despise him! I utterly despise him!"

"That's exactly why I _admire_ him, Urd!" Belldandy said in a challenging tone. "He knows very well that he can't change things, but somehow in the process of surrendering to this truth, he finds the strength to _try_. Haven't you ever been in that situation?"

"That's stupid!" Urd shouted angrily.

"Yes, Big Sister has been in that situation. And we all know what she did...she just gave up!" shouted Skuld, who was almost ready to burst with anger at her pig-headed big sister. She pounded the table with her dainty gloved fists.

"Why...can't...you...see...the obvious!"

Urd flushed with anger, as Skuld had needled in to the heart of the matter.

More Goddess of the Past pain.

"Oooooo...just leave me _alone_!" she shouted, then flung herself down the hallway.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Keiichi knocked on Cevn's door.

Despite the fact that there was no acknowledgment, he slid the door open. The lights were turned down low and he saw Cevn sitting cross-legged on his futon. He could hear sobbing.

"Why can't she try and see past her own nose! There's so much in the world that is screwed up. Somebody has to do something. Why is it always me! I'm getting so freakin' tired! What did I do wrong to deserve this? I get this gift of being able to make God's Music...and all I want to do is try and create some change. Some beauty. But all this craziness results! I could expect as much from humans...but can't _they_ do something about it? Can't they make it better? They're _Goddesses_, dammit! Don't they see how this world is going down the shithole?"

"The only place where you were wrong...was in giving up too soon, Cevn!" Keiichi came in and sat down next to his friend.

"Of course Urd doesn't understand! Where she comes from, there is no drug abuse, starvation or violence. Well, I take that back...I imagine there is some violence when Urd is around..." Keiichi said, firmly into peacemaker-via-humor mode. Both men chuckled at this.

"Keiichi, when did _you _become so strong? I've seen you embrace a lot of self-confidence in the past several months I've been here," Cevn said, remembering his promise to Megumi about Keiichi.

Keiichi was stunned by Cevn's observation. He thought about it for a minute. "_It's true!_" he realized with a start.

"Well, I guess being around you has been an influence. Between Bell-chan, Skuld, Urd, Megumi and you, I have a lot of good sources to learn from."

"Keiichi, why can't I be in love?" Cevn asked. Keiichi thought this was an awkward question posed at an awkward time. Then it occurred to him that he had made a comment earlier about Cevn and Urd.

"Could it be..." he wondered privately.

"Look, I know that I can't have what you and Belldandy have, but maybe you could teach me how to let my guard down just a little around women," Cevn asked in a subdued voice.

"Well, I've seen you making progress too! Remember who was freaking out the first day he arrived in Japan? Look at you now! My little sister actually fashions you to be a close friend! And you seem to handle that pretty well!" he observed. Cevn looked at Keiichi and smiled.

"You're right! This plan I have...is going to happen whether Urd wants to help or not!" Cevn said with a resurgence of confidence.

They could hear yelling in the dining room as the three sisters were in a heated sibling rivalry free-for-all.

"Well, maybe not tonight, Cevn!" Keiichi said with a laugh as he pointed his thumb at the source of the shouting coming through the wall.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Breakfast the next day was cast in grays of somber. Belldandy looked exhausted, as the arguing in the "Women's Dorm", as Keiichi sometimes called their room, had continued late into the night. Skuld was red-eyed from shouting and Urd was hoarse.

Keiichi tried to cheer everyone up, but his efforts fell short.

When Cevn walked out into the dining room, Urd unexpectedly exploded with hostility.

"You should have never come to Japan with us! I thoroughly regret the day that the Almighty sent me to grant you your dumb wish. If _my_ wish had been granted, it would have been to have never set eyes on you! After I go as far as to restore your eyesight, try to be your friend, and treat you with some sense of accommodation, you try to take advantage of me...

"Urd!" Belldandy shouted.

"You are the most pitiful, lamest mortal I have ever met! You don't deserve to lick the ground we walk on here! I just wish you'd go away. No woman could ever bring herself to love you...because you are so unloving! You deserve every horrible thing that has happened to you...every failure...every bit of misery!" she yelled, her anger already piercing the roof.

"Urd! Stop it!" Skuld yelled, startled into tears.

"You're only good for_ ruining_ people's lives! Don't ruin ours too! Begone!GET OUT OF MY LIFE! LEAVE MY SISTERS ALONE! NOBODY WANTS YOU AROUND HERE! DON'T YOU GET IT? GET THE HELL OUT!! GO ON, GET LOST, YOU LOSER! JUST...GO!!"

Cevn turned around and walked out the front door without a word. Belldandy looked at Urd in disbelief and anger. Skuld glared at Urd with malice and Keiichi was momentarily wide-eyed and tonguebound.

"I...can't believe you said that, Urd!" was all that Belldandy could say before she stood up and walked down the hallway in tears. Keiichi went after her, casting a backwards glance at Urd which seemed to say "now look what you've done!"

Urd looked at her youngest sister for a reaction.

"I have _nothing_ to say to you, icchi-baka!" Skuld shouted icily, then stood up and walked away.

Urd sat there at the table by herself. Skuld had just called her a "first class fool"...and she let her get away with it! Urd knew that she was upset at Cevn, but was surprised at the vehemence of what she just said.

"There's something wrong with me. I didn't like his suggestion, but I shouldn't be _this_ angry with him." Then a bolt of red rage filled her mind and heart and she envisioned Cevn suffering in the deepest hell of her imagination.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Keiichi, there's...snff...something wrong with Urd!" Belldandy concluded. She had been crying because she realized that even Urd at her most bitchy mood would never say things like what she said to Cevn. The force of Urd's hatred was overwhelming...and repellent.

"I know, but I don't know what's causing it. She is almost as mad as Mara gets when..." Keiichi answered haltingly.

The two exchanged a glance.

"Keiichi, do you think that Mara has found some way to manipulate Urd? Like she did with the 'Demon Sake' when Cevn first moved here?"

"That's gotta be it!" he said excitedly.

"But...that creates a problem for us. Now that I'm the only one with powers, I have to decide between searching for Mara or protecting our house. Urd and Skuld can't be of any help. Urd barely has any powers as an Earth Spirit Grade, and Skuld has no powers. What do I do, dear?" Belldandy said, looking at him searchingly.

Keiichi was bothered by the options, or lack thereof. Either choice left them vulnerable in some way. But it was a fact that Urd had already showed signs indicating possible interference by Mara. In his mind, this was the lead that they had to pursue. It was a simple case of the possible against the evident. But where to look? The house was somewhat protected by Banpei. Yet, Mara could be anywhere. So, it made sense to look in the house first, then in the vicinity of their temple compound.

Sense...is non-sense when dealing with a Demon. This was the first thing Bell-chan had taught him, after Mara's first intrusion into their lives. Unexpect, rather than expect.

"Bell-chan, since Mara _may_ be behind Urd's strange behavior, we need to check up on that. Which means that you need to go out and try and see what is causing Urd to act so aggressively."

Belldandy looked at her boyfriend with a resigned expression.

"That's what I thought you would say, darling!" Keiichi pricked his ears up when he heard Belldandy address him with the Western word "darling" for the first time. He smiled sheepishly; Belldandy happily hugged him when she saw that he was warmfuzzied by her remark.

"I'm going to look outside for any sign of Mara," She put two fingers from each hand to her forehead and closed her eyes. There was a low-level indication of Mara's presence, inside the temple. Belldandy disregarded the red aura, as it seemed to resonate from Urd.

"She's not here, there's only an echo of her former presence. Since she was just here, she must be nearby! I'll only be gone for a little while," she announced.

"You take care of things here, Keiichi-darling!" she cautioned, kissing him on the lips. Keiichi drew her into his arms and hugged her dearly.

Then she reluctantly unhugged him and shifted into her stealth form before flying off.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Everyone was gone, or locked in her room, as in the case with Skuld and Urd. Cevn had left the compound for parts unknown. Keiichi noted the menacing look that Skuld shot Urd right before he left the dining room to check on Bell-chan. There was no way either of them would come out of their hobby rooms at the same time.

Keiichi felt stressed out. He walked over to the arcade game and laid his racing jacket alongside it, then climbed carefully into the cockpit of the game.

"After all, my left knee is still pretty weakened after Bell healed it...which means that I better use my right foot only for the gas and brake pedals." He definitely had a case of the 'racing jones'. Keiichi smiled...he had been through a trying past two days. Stress relief was just a moment away! He started up the game and selected the Johannesburg Rally. He started out at the back of the pack and passed several cars right away.

"Why does this game _always_ start me out at the back of the pack?" he wondered, his sensibilities provoked. Keiichi felt a surge of adrenaline as he passed car after car and drove out into the countryside. They reached the turnaround point and Keiichi found himself heading back into the urban area with only one car ahead of him. The car ahead seemed to anticipate his every attempt to pass.

"Dammit, I'm going to win this game just _once_!" he shouted as he saw the finish line draw near. Suddenly he saw an chance opening on the left. Yelling "chance!", he darted out and back in, then exalted in the rush of being in first place. No one in front of him!

"I'm going to beat it this time!!" he shouted with joy. A moment later he flashed through the finish line. He could hear a rousing cheer roaring all around him as he finished.

"I WON! I finally freakin' won!" he shouted exuberantly, pumping his fists in the air. He felt disoriented with victory-bliss, as the game's sound seemed to come from all corners.

"This surround sound must be a special feature the game has when someone wins," he thought. "This is totally awesome! It's almost _real_!"

He stepped out of his car to see a huge throng of spectators.

A few seconds later, he noticed something was wrong.

"How could the crowd be all around me? Did I just step out of my car?" He looked around and saw several other cars, tall city buildings, a crowd lining the streets and a tower right next to the finish line. In _all_ directions! Then he looked at the black and white banner suspended over the finish line and his blood ran frigid.

_**"Demon Rally"**_

The second place car pulled up next to him. A figure dressed in red coveralls with a red-flamed white helmet pulled itself out of the cockpit of the other racer. Keiichi looked down at himself...and saw that he was dressed in his Nekomi Tech. racing coveralls.

"Oh...Shit!!" he said in a voice filled with distress and apprehension.

The other racer unstrapped her racing helmet...Keiichi gasped as he saw impossibly curly wisps of straw-blonde platinum hair with red highlights pile out of the helmet and fall generously down her back. She turned, smiling at him with twinned fangs and red eyes.

"Congratulations on winning the _Demon Rally_, Keiichi!" Mara announced with an evil glint in her eye.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Urd peeked out of her Urd's Castle room to see if Skuld was in the hallway.

"Ah, good...the little nuisance is nowhere to be seen!" she said in a low voice. Relieved, she walked out into the dining room. She decided to seek refuge in a bottle of sake.

"Cripes, I've had a hard day today!" she said as she uncorked the bottle and took a hefty swig. She looked over at the arcade game and was struck by the notion that at least she could get away with some drunk driving while playing the game.

"This way, I wouldn't even get arrested...and besides, I could escape this crazy nut heap!"

She saw Keiichi's jacket lying next to the game.

"Why is _that_ here? It's a hot summer day...he must have gone somewhere on foot," she thought worriedly. "Oh well..."

She climbed in the game and pressed the start button. In a rich display of computer graphics, the title "Demon Rally" came up. Urd reacted to the new display with surprise. Then Mara's face burst through the title graphics, frightening her to a flinch.

"Urd!! Of all the people that could have played this game, it's you! I must really thank you for your cooperation," the Demoness shouted gleefully.

"Mara, what the hell are you doing in this game? If you've hurt anyone..." Urd said with anger. She stopped herself as she realized that Mara _was in the arcade game_. Her face was a picture of astonishment.

Mara saw Urd's face turn white with shock and burst out laughing.

"This is totally fresh!" Mara thought. It was a delicious irony that Urd came to play the game right after she stole Keiichi away...especially since it was Urd whose feelings she manipulated in her plot to get Belldandy out of the house.

"Haw nyha hhha heee ha aha ha!" she laughed in her most obnoxious laugh. Urd gritted her teeth and threatened to blow up the arcade game with Mara in it.

"Urd, don't give me that! You and I _both_ know that you're on an Earth Spirit Grade restriction. You're weaker than weak...almost as weak as a mortal, hee hee. You may have fooled me once with your show of bravado when you rescued Skuld and the worthless Demon-mortal, but now you're powerless...and I _know_ it."

Mara watched in the monitor as Urd blanched even more. She could see fear and anxiety in Urd's green eyes and decided to go for the throat.

"Urd, you made such a good puppet. When Cevn asked you to help him,_ I_ created your anger towards him. When you saw him this morning, _I_ made you speak to him with utter acerbicity. You did well; you were so mean...that he walked out. Ha haha...being a weak-willed mortal; he fell right for it. He must think that you really don't like him...in fact, he probably thinks you _hate_ him with a passion, now. Curious, isn't it? Didn't you find it strange that Cevn didn't even question whether you were really angry with at him, he just accepted your fit of rage as _genuine_!"

Urd heard these cutting remarks and a tear came to her eyes.

"Cevn didn't even question...when I cursed him out this morning!" she thought sadly. "No wonder he's afraid of me."

Mara read Urd's weakening expression and continued.

"Yes, Urd. Your tongue is always ready to kindle rashness from which there is no extrication! Because you always treat people poorly, they just _expect_ you to be cruel and unkind!" Mara watched with a predator's smile as Urd shook her head "no" vigorously.

"Heh heh ha! You can deny it all you want, but it's _true_! By the way, I have someone here who you should meet," On the screen, Mara roughly grabbed a camera from a nearby newsman and walked towards a car.

Urd watched in disbelief as the video game screen closed up on a racer that said Nekomi Tech. on the side. Then her view panned up and she saw _Keiichi_ struggling frantically, scared out of his wits. He was inside the car, somehow chained to the seat by rusty shackles.

"Oh..My..Lord! Keiichi's _inside_ the game!" she realized, her nerves clinched with fugue. Mara saw Urd's face register a wide-eyed swabble when she saw Keiichi.

"He can't hear or see you, but oh yes, he does know that he's inside my video game."

"Mara, when Belldandy finds out, she'll..."

"She'll what? Urd,_ I_ have Keiichi here with me! Your sister tries anything...and I'll blow up this arcade game...and her dear Keiichi with it!" Mara said with morbid seriousness. A spherical black bomb, mockingly crafted after something from an American cartoon, materialized in her hand. It had "Mara's Bomb" whitepainted on it.

"This is so rich! I use you to chase Cevn out of the house with an outlandish personality attack. This arouses suspicion in Belldandy, who thinks that I'm responsible for it. Belldandy leaves to find me, when actually I've been _inside_ the house...in this game all along! Keiichi decides to play the game while she's away, so it's easy for me to use a matter transport to suck him here inside of the game. You and Skuld have no powers to speak of, so you can't stop me or even detect me!" she recapped.

Urd was gripped by how powerless she was over Mara's treachery. She vacillated between fear...and anger towards her own impotency.

"What are you going to do with Keiichi?" she asked.

"Hmmm, I think _that_ will wait until Megumi shows up. I owe that girl some _major pain_ for screwing up the last time I possessed her!" Mara said with a malicious grin.

"Now get lost, Urd. Shooo!" Mara said as she waived her hand and the video screen went dead.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Urd staggered out of the arcade machine and collapsed on her hands and knees on the floor, still numb with shock. She saw the sake bottle and heaved it out the front door.

Belldandy sensed that something was amiss the moment she returned and saw the bottle in the lawn. Solidifying, she dashed into the living room. Urd was seated next to the arcade game with an expression of shock and defeat written all over her face, clutching Keiichi's racing jacket to her breast.

Panic welled up in Belldandy's heart.

"Where's Keiichi!?" she said worriedly. Urd pointed at the game and Belldandy felt a sense of relief. But why were Urd's cheeks wet with tears? She looked inside the game and didn't see him. She kneeled next to Urd and shouted, "WHERE IS HE, URD?!"

Urd looked at Belldandy with tears rimming her eyelashes.

"He's..._inside_ of the game. Mara...captured him!" she stammered, looking at Belldandy with a shamefaced expression.

"WHAT!!"

Urd related to Belldandy everything that Mara told her. About how Mara had used Urd to create enough discord in the house to draw Belldandy into a suspicious frame of mind. How Keiichi had been an easy target to draw inside the game while Belldandy went looking for Mara. Urd believed it was all her own fault.

Belldandy collapsed next to Urd. She felt overwhelmed with guilt.

"O..oh my! I should have _never_ left the house...I should have never left him alone!" she said tearfully. Urd reached over and held her sister as Belldandy cried into her shoulder.

"It's the result of my haste, Urd!" she said as she pounded her fists against the arcade game.

"You better not break this game if you ever want to see your dear little Keiichi alive again!" the game said in a mechanical simulation of Mara's voice.

"Mara! You give Keiichi back _right now_ or I'll..." Belldandy said in an ominous tone of voice that even made Urd flinch.

"Or you'll do what? Hahahah..you can't do a thing, little Miss Perfect! In order to get to me, you'll have to come inside this video racing game. If you do, I'll destroy it and Keiichi. I've _sealed_ him in here. The only way you will ever see him alive again is to do exactly what I say. If you do, then you have my word as a Demoness that I'll let him out of this game. But it's not likely he'll be in one piece!"

"What do we have to do, Mara?" Belldandy sighed with defeat.

"It's actually what Megumi has to do. All that little mortal bitch has to do is..."

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

I was wandering endlessly around downtown Makuhari. Each one of Urd's words scathed painfully and deeply into my heart. I just had to get away from her. From them. Maybe she was right. Maybe I had brought more trouble than good. Maybe I should just pack up and go. I was going to China on July 8th...perhaps I should get an earlier flight.

I walked around looking for a ticket agent or a travel shop. I didn't find anything, so I just wandered aimlessly. My feelings ditched themselves in reaction to what had just happened. I felt like all of the justifications for my avoidance of women had manifested in the remarks Urd had said this morning. I was just starting to finally feel comfortable around her and the other women, which made the experience even more painful. More betrayal.

"Cevn!"

I looked in the direction of the shout and saw Megumi and Sora waving to me through a window. They were at the Hasegawa Ramen Shop eating lunch. I just kept walking, hoping they would lose interest. But I heard footsteps, and watched Megumi and Sora race up behind me and step alongside me.

"What is the matter with you? I say 'hi' and you just ignore me?" Megumi asked, seemingly insulted. Then she saw the despair on my face; I was almost ready to cry.

"Hey, what happened, Cevn!" she asked, her face filled with concern. I turned to look at her...my expression seemed to scare her for a moment. Then, I guess she drew upon the bosom of feminine intuition...and made one of those crazy decisions only women can make.

She smiled charmingly at me.

"That's it! I'm buying you some lunch and you're _not_ going to refuse!" By this time, Sora was walking on the other side of me. Each girl grabbed an arm and swung me in a 180-degree circle towards the Hasegawa restaurant.

Inside, I sat across from two very concerned-looking college students.

"You're friend doesn't look too good! I think he needs some of our special gyoza!" Mrs. Hasegawa observed. A couple of minutes later, she came back with a plateful of gyoza. A dozen gyoza arranged in a smiley face grinned back at me. I couldn't help but feel cheered at this.

"Gets them every time," Sora and her mother both said. I looked at the two generations of petite Hasegawa women with gratitude.

Ordering fried soba noodles and chicken, I explained the scenario from this morning. I couldn't disclose the whole thing about the God's Music and how Urd so vociferously disagreed with my plans on how to deal with the situation. But I drew the point across that Urd had verbally tore me apart. Megumi looked astonished...then her face took on an angry mien.

"That's a little too over the edge, even for Urd!" Sora said.

"When we're done here, I'm going right home and give her an earful! You're _not_ any of those things she said, Cevn-sensei!" an angry Megumi said with determination.

After finishing, we left to go home. Megumi dropped Sora off at her house and we drove silently to the temple compound. I was fearful that Megumi would just set Urd off even more and I voiced my concerns about this point. Megumi was locked into a resentment autopilot; she ignored my caveats. I could understand her loyalty; after all, the intervention I orchestrated with Sayoko had gone beautifully, which gave Megumi some freedom to hang out with Genji. The Noh theatre thing...well let's just say it provided some romantic inspiration to her and Genji.

We arrived at the house and Megumi literally leapt out of the car and stalked to the porch. Once inside, I saw Urd and Belldandy looking very downcast.

"This is curious," I thought.

Urd looked at me with sorrowful eyes, then hid her face behind her hands.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Urd, I'm really pissed at how you've been treating Cevn..." Megumi started.

"Megumi, it wasn't Urd who was doing it...she was under some kind of mind control by Mara!" Belldandy interrupted. Megumi felt an icy feeling run down her backbone. In a flash, she recalled vividly the time Mara had possessed her and tried to use her to separate Keiichi and Belldandy. Her anger defused, she apologized to Urd.

Urd looked at Cevn, remorse filling her aquiline eyes.

"Cevn, I'm so sorry. I would have never said those things if it weren't for Mara..." She looked down at the floor again.

Cevn examined her face closely. Urd seemed to be completely sincere. But he was still too grimed from the flames of her remarks to offer anything more than a brief thanks.

But then he fought with his instincts. He realized that she was more upset them he was, so he kneeled down beside Urd and offered her a hug. Urd looked at him in absolute astonishment, then buried her face in his shoulder saying, "I'm sorry I lost Keiichi!" over and over again. Belldandy watched her sister, then turned her attention to Megumi, fixing her with beseeching eyes.

"Megumi...we need your help! Mara has abducted Keiichi...and he's _inside_ of the racing arcade game. She refuses to release him unless you do whatever she says!"

"ME?" Megumi's questioned, her eyes growing wide at this. Mara was way out of her league. Her anxiety leapt and she fought an impulse to run out the front door.

"Megumi...I want you to sit down inside of the arcade game." She shook her head to clear her senses...it was _Mara's_ voice coming from the video game.

"You better do what she says if you want to see your brother again," Urd said in an effort to focus Megumi, noticing that the mortal girl was scared out of her wits.

"Get _in_ the game, Megumi! NOW!!" the voice commanded. Megumi reluctantly climbed into the mock racing cockpit. A moment later, an arcade startup graphic announced "Demon Rally" in brilliant lettering, then faded as Mara's face appeared on the screen.

"Ahhhh, Megumi! So at last you're here! Welcome to the Demon Rally! Today's course is the Indianapolis 5000! You will be racing car #13. By the way, the driver of car #13 is Keiichi Morisato," she announced arrogantly. Megumi gulped a gasping breath as she saw her brother inside of the racing car. He was strapped in the driver's seat like a test dummy, his panicked eyes darting back and forth anxiously.

"Don't fret...he's only a passenger. Only luggage. You're the driver in this race!" She switched to a casual detached voice and continued.

"By the way Megumi, you _do _know that video games always have lots of crashes? Like when the car hits the retaining wall and bounces around and stuff? Well anyway, in _this_ game...if you crash your car, the result will be like a real-life crash. In other words, if you crash...you're brother will feel the results, hee hee!"

Megumi almost fainted from shock when she heard this.

"Why...me, Mara?" she asked meekly. Mara's resentful expression filled the screen.

"Because you ruined my attempt to split up Keiichi and that do-gooder girlfriend of his, Belldandy...who happens to be my chief rival and bane! Because you made a fool of me when I turned you into a car. Because I want to see you vexed for the rest of your miserable life, knowing that _you_ killed your own brother! Bwa haha ha hawh!"

"Mara, you promised that you would give Megumi a chance to save Keiichi," Belldandy interjected. "You know the Rules, Mara!"

Megumi saw Mara's face break into a scowl at that remark.

"Yeah...yeah! The blessed Rules! Errrggh! Okay...all Megumi has to do is finish the race without crashing Keiichi's car. If she can do this, then I'll set him free."

"What race? What do I have to do?" Megumi said anxiously.

"You just have to finish the Indianapolis 5000!" Mara said matter-of-factly.

Megumi steeled herself.

"I can do this! I'm not a race driver like Keiichi, but if..." she said aloud until Cevn interrupted her, worry written on his face.

"Megumi, if I heard her right...Mara said _5000_, not 500. A 500-mile race takes about 3-4 hours. She wants you to drive ten times that distance. That's anywhere from 30-40 hours!"

He addressed the arcade machine.

"Mara, since Megumi has to remain in this arcade game thing for two days, can you give her an hour to get ready? Also...what about bathroom breaks? And she'll need to eat and brush her teeth and..."

"Hmmm, okay! She'll be awarded pitstops y'know. They're programmed into the game, despite my best efforts to remove them! Plus, I'll charitably give her half an hour, out of respect to the Demonic part of you, little mortal."

"He's _not_ a Demon!" Urd shouted. "_I'm_ part Demon..."

"Okay...an hour since you're part Demon too, Urd. By the way, thanks for making this whole scenario possible, Norn of the loveless Past!" Urd winced at Mara's words, then stormed off sobbing hysterically.

"What did she mean! What did she say that upset Urd so much?" Cevn asked. Belldandy felt fallow for her older sister, who had just endured the deepest cut anyone could verbally score on her. Ignoring Cevn's question, she pulled Megumi aside.

"We've got to get you ready!" Skuld yelled. She had listened to the whole exchange in disbelief. Standing in the hallway, she was stopped short in her tracks when she heard Keiichi had been pulled into the arcade game by Mara. At first she was worried that _she_ would be pulled in too, like the time Demon Urd imprisoned her in the mystic mirror. Her superstitious side bested her at first. Then all of her anger towards Urd was redirected to Mara. She had overheard that Megumi had to play/drive the arcade game for two days without sleep. Knowing what she knew about mortals, Skuld quickly calculated that this would stretch Megumi beyond her physical and mental capacities of endurance. Yet, Skuld knew that if she was in Megumi's place and Urd or Belldandy were in Keiichi's place, she would be able to stretch herself beyond her own limitations.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Urd's vision was blurry with tears. Her heart pounded against her chest, and she felt like she wanted to rip it out. She wished she didn't have a heart. Mara's comment had been deliberately callous.

"I'm going to get you for that, Mara!" she thought. Suddenly an idea occurred to her. She looked around her laboratory, fetching all sorts of elixirs, and started busily mixing chemicals and potions with a practiced hand.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Belldandy was fixing several packs of bento dinners while Megumi ate a large meal. Cevn had grabbed several water bottles around the house and filled them with water and put them in the refrigerator.

"Here's what we'll do, Megumi. I'll bring you my best cooking every eight hours...and I'll feed you myself. All you have to do is keep your attention on your driving. Cevn will give you water. To signal that you want water, just tap on the steering wheel twice with your hand," Belldandy said.

"I'll go make up some iced coffee and some soda, so you have other things to drink. Tap three times if you want any of those. I'm going to stay up all night with you, Belldandy and Skuld. Together, we'll keep you awake!" Cevn added.

Skuld clamped two small devices on Megumi's arms, then two more around her calves.

"These are GABAtronic Musclestators. They'll keep your muscles relaxed, so that you won't get any cramps or stiffening in your arms or legs."

Urd ran back into the room, out of breath. She saw Skuld and warily backed away. Skuld stood up and rushed into her sister's arms.

"Big Sister, I'm so sorry! I didn't suspect that it was Mara who was making you act so mean! I love you!" Urd smiled at her younger sister and patted her on the head, then hugged her tightly.

"I love you too, Skuld!"

Urd smiled deviously for effect.

"I made a special pill for you, Megumi. Take one of these and you won't fall asleep for at least two days. It will take away any drowsiness for lack of sleep. Also, it will keep you alert...as a matter of fact, it will heighten your alertness by 400 percent!" Everybody looked at Urd in sincere amazement and gratitude. Urd beamed under the attention like a diamond under a bright light.

"Thank you, thank you!" she said in a mock-emcee voice.

"Urd, you better not let anyone outside of this house get a hold of that stuff, or else the crack epidemic of the 80s is going to look very minor league in comparison. What you've created is every speed freak's dream drug!" Cevn said warningly.

"You _always_ have to spoil the fun!" Urd shot back to him. She saw Cevn's face fall from excitement to sadness.

"Oops!" she thought to herself.

"Hey, that _is_ a good point, Cevn. Someone's got to think about those things...you know me, all impulsive and such!" Skuld and Belldandy both turned to Urd with their mouths open in shock...they had never heard Urd make this kind of admission before!

"Cevn sure has some kind of effect on Urd sometimes, doesn't he?" Belldandy whispered to Skuld behind a hand. Skuld nodded her head and sniggled. Megumi smiled at Urd.

"She _likes_ him," Megumi realized in a sudden flash of feminine insight, then started laughing.

"What are you guys laughing at?" Urd asked, suddenly self-conscious.

"Look who's spoiling the fun now, being all serious and stuff! Touché!" Cevn shot back. Skuld, Belldandy and Megumi burst out into howling laughter at this, while Urd had a quizzical expression on their face.

Cevn looked nervous at the intensity of their reaction to his taunting of Urd.

"Urd, that's fabulous!" Belldandy finally managed in between laughs.

Urd looked at all of them, then shot her arm in the air.

"The Goddess Urd saves the day again!" Everybody applauded her, which made Urd feel reprieved from the guilt she had felt earlier in the day.

Megumi held out her hand. "Down the hatch!" she said as she swallowed a gulp of water to wash down Urd's pill. A moment later, her senses seemed to _clarify_. She could hear birdsong outside, the breathing of everyone in the room, the spiders in the corner of the living room, the rustling of summer leaves. Her attention seemed ultra-focused and her body felt tingly with energy.

"Waaaahhhhhhh!" she gasped. Urd nodded her head in approval. Skuld activated the bangle-like clamps on her arms and legs and Megumi felt a soothing feeling underlying her body's charged state. Her panicked thoughts became calmer, more relaxed as her body felt the effect of Skuld's mechas. She sighed with joyful relaxation as she climbed into the arcade game.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Megumi steeled herself for the upcoming race.

"This is going to be a breeze!" she said happily.

"No, it's not! You're just feeling the initial rush of whatever it is that Urd gave you," Cevn countered.

Urd and Belldandy stood on either side of Megumi. Belldandy was incredibly nervous...the life of her true love was in Megumi's hands. Urd felt her sister's anxiety, coupled with Megumi's fear. She looked at the clock on the living room wall.

"You have five minutes left. Can we do anything?"

Skuld showed up with a spray bottle.

"Skuld's super-clean glass and metal cleaner!" she announced as she wiped down the video screen. She looked at the display and saw Mara pacing to and fro, dressed in one of those sickening BDSM-type sleaze-outfits she liked to wear.

"Good thing it's Megumi driving...a _man_ would get distracted in an instant!" Skuld remarked in a voice soured with sarcasm. With her glass cleaner, she effectively prevented anything from obscuring the display.

"She's so thoughtful," Belldandy observed. Once more, she looked on approvingly as Skuld did a kindness on her own initiative.

"Kinda makes you sick, don't it?" Urd said as she nudged Belldandy with her shoulder, reading her sister's mind about Skuld. "Actually, she really is turning out great. I'm totally proud of her. Even if she is a brat!"

"Urd!" Belldandy admonished. Urd had never seen Bell so distraught before. The stakes in this race were very high. Urd noted that nothing less than Belldandy's love was on the line. If they lost Keiichi...she would be heartbroken.

"And Mara will be on Death Row," Urd swore on her heart.

Belldandy was almost paralyzed. She had never come this close to losing Keiichi. She was totally helpless. Well, maybe not _totally_ powerless. She had managed to tweak the circumstances with a low-level spell...that should help Megumi immensely.

Megumi looked at her.

"I know, I know. I'll bring him back safe and sound for you. After all, we've got the same blood coursing through our veins...I must have inherited some of his driving skills!"

Belldandy looked at Megumi with her soft azure eyes. This mortal girl was all that stood between Keiichi and death. She leaned down into the arcade game cockpit and looked at Megumi.

"No matter what, Megumi-chan, I will always love you. Please, please be careful!" she said, then kissed Megumi on the forehead.

Megumi had never seen a pleading look as heart-rending as the one she saw in Bell's eyes. It unnerved her to see this powerful being, this _Goddess_, pleading with her. She cursed Mara once again, just as the starting sequence for the game began.

With a synthesized gunfire, the race began.

Megumi immediately became irritated with the arcade game soundtrack playing in the background.

"Can't you turn that crappy music off!" she shouted.

"No way...it's part of the game, y'know." Mara snapped back.

"Great...40 hours of this tacky adolescent testosterone rave music playing in my head!" She felt disoriented enough already.

Megumi looked carefully at her indicators...she was only driving 120 kph. The steering column was on the wrong side. It was just like an American car...steering on the left side instead of the driver's side where it belonged. The accelerator pedal wasn't light to the touch like in her own car. The brakes were super-touchy. Her disorientation was beginning to grate on her nerves. Everything was screwed up about this!

Racecars had already lapped her and were whizzing by. She looked out the rear view mirror and saw a pace car with red flames tailgating her.

"No loafing! You're really going to have to drive faster, or I'll rear-end you!" Mara threatened. She drove up and banged Megumi's car lightly in the bumper to accentuate her threat.

"Get going!" Mara yelled.

Megumi cautiously pushed the accelerator pedal down. 160...170...180...190kph. It was _way too fast_! She had never driven this fast in real life. The blurring of her surroundings, the streaming of the road pointing at her, the sheer _speed_ of it...all were contributing to a rising panic. She bit her tongue hard to settle herself down; tasting blood in her mouth, she felt like her car was going to careen out of control any moment.

"I can't do this!" she screamed, blinking back tears of frustration. Visions of her brother getting killed filled her mind.

"Ha hahhaaa ha! Faster, Megumi! You have to be doing _270_ to even stand a chance of finishing within the time limit!"

"Time limit? You never said anything about a damned time limit Mara!"

"What do you take me for, Megumi? If there was no time limit, then all you would have to do is pull your car over and sit out the race until someone does the 2000 laps. Noooo way shojo! _You_ have to finish the race, and in good time. Otherwise it's curtains for your pesky brother and heartbreak for Belldandy! Happy motoring!" Mara said.

Belldandy heard this and started shaking with fear. It was almost heartrending when she heard Megumi's cry of frustration. But this was too much. She felt Megumi's genuine fear and knew that there was no way Megumi could pull this off.

Megumi responded to Mara's challenge by throwing down the gauntlet. She stepped on the accelerator...200...210...220...230. At 240 kph, she felt like the car was taking on a life of its own. Again, fear welled up...turning into panic.

"This is..._insane_!" she thought. She felt a newfound respect for her brother, who routinely drove at high speeds for their beloved N.I.T. Motor Club. The way Keiichi raced, it seemed so automatic. Especially since he hadn't lost an official race in almost four years at N.I.T. He rode this fast...on motorcycles. Megumi could ride fast too, at least as fast as her 80cc KSR could go. In fact she was the Queen of Racing after inadvertently defeating the self-styled "Racing Queen" last year.

But Keiichi...the whole Motor Club took his skills for granted. Including his younger sister.

"How can he do this?" she wondered. Megumi could really sense the hairtight realities of _real_ high speed racing. She rounded a turn and gripped the steering wheel tightly, almost clipping the wall.

"This...is too fast! I can't...oh God...I can't..." she wailed in dismay.

"_Megumi. Listen to me. It's okay...you'll get used to it after a few more laps. Then you can drive even faster. I'll be there with you every step of the way!_"

"KEIICHI?" Megumi gave a start as she heard Keiichi's calming voice in her head.

"Is...is that really you, Keiichi?"

"_Yep. But don't mention my name out loud any more! This is Belldandy's little 'tweak'! Bell-chan set up a little surprise for Mara. It's not much, but it'll give us an edge. Mara doesn't know that we can talk like this; that's why I said not to talk out loud to me._"

Megumi already felt some of her nervousness dissipating, even as sweat started to form beads on her forehead. She felt a cool towel brush her forehand and caught a worried Belldandy standing next to her.

"_When you get to the turns, sis, slow down just a tad and try and hang onto the outside lanes. Then right before the straightaway, accelerate. Most of the collisions will occur on the inside lane during the turns. Keep clear of those. I think that the other drivers will respond like real racecar drivers...so avoid tight situations. We have plenty of time!_" the calming voice explained. Megumi visibly relaxed and smiled.

"Thanks, Belldandy_,_" Megumi said out loud.

"Thanks for what? What are you thanking her for, Megumi?" an irritated Mara said in a suspicious voice over the arcade game speakers.

Belldandy sighed a little sigh of relief. She smiled at Urd. "It looks like my little spell seems to be working," she whispered into Skuld's ear. Skuld nodded with glee, then went over and told Urd. Urd finally told Cevn. The whispered knowledge made all three feel much more relaxed. Belldandy had an innocent grin on her face, the first time she had smiled since the race started.

Megumi drove on autopilot. After what seemed like an eternity, she looked at the race monitor...only 23 laps! But Keiichi was right, she _was_ getting used to the higher speed.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

About 2 hours into the race, Megumi saw an indicator light go off on her driver's console. A bright yellow light blinked "Low on Fuel" over and over.

"Now what?" Megumi thought. She had just mentally filtered out the repetitious arcade game soundtrack...and now this.

After two more laps, a red light came on. Megumi glanced at this new irritation, which read "Pit Stop". As she flew by the straightaway, a group of coveralled men waved at her racer.

"Hmmmm, I wonder..."

The next lap, she slowed down and headed for the inside lane after the turn. She braked her car and drove into the pit stop.

She heard a knocking on the screen, which jerked her back into the reality that this was a video game. The view turned left to her driver's side window. On the screen, the window seemed to roll down on its own.

"Whaddya waitin' for! Yuh're almost outta gas, girl! Don't yuh know that we're all here for yuh, Megumi! Yuh're doin' fine, yuh have five minutes before we're done to do whatevah yuh want! By the way...go pee if ya havta in da portasan! Dis' is your bathroom break too, y'know," Tamiya bellowed.

"What!" Megumi shouted, Keiichi's voice echoing hers in her mind. After a flush of embarrassment settled in at Tamiya's remarks about the "bathroom break", she looked behind Tamiya to see Ootaki. Ootaki was dressed like a gas station attendant, wearing a racing cap. Megumi heard riotous laughter in her mind as Ootaki smiled and tipped his cap to her while he was pumping gas into her racecar.

"_He would never wear something like that in real life! Does this game has a great sense of humor? Or is it Bell-chan? Only Kikaida knows!_" Keiichi's thoughts flashed in her mind.

Recognition dawned on Megumi as she saw Sora and the rest. Her heart gave pause when she noticed Genji. He waved and blew her a kiss, and she blushed.

"_Belldandy must have made sure that the whole team is here for us. That's not really them, but it sure adds some realism to this._" Keiichi explained.

"_I hope it's not really them, or we're going to have some major explaining to do!_" Megumi replied, causing Keiichi's voice to ring laughter in her mind.

Belldandy overheard Megumi talking to herself about the other one of her little 'surprises'.

"Whew! Glad that one worked!" She had tried to cast the real personalities of the N.I.T. Motor Club members onto their video game ciphers. When she saw Megumi blush, she knew that her surmise about Megumi and Genji was right on target. She told Urd about this little soap opera angle...Urd pointed at Megumi and whispered.

"Ooooo...her and Genji?"

Megumi heard an agitated Mara yell at her over the arcade game music. Mara sounded pissed.

"What's the meaning of this? Why are you stopped? Why aren't you on the racetrack? Get back out there right this instant! This is a racetrack, not the shopping mall parking lot!"

Megumi grinned.

"It's what's called a pit stop, Mara. Guess you didn't do your homework, Demon girl! This is a race, ya know--the cars need to refill on fuel and get checked on a variety of things--just like in a real life race!" she said with a spiceful of attitude.

Skuld shook her on the shoulder, then handed her a crème soda, her favorite. Belldandy quickly produced a plateful of mochi and hotategai sushi, another one of her favorites. Megumi ate munched the scallop sushi leisurely.

"WHAT! You mean that every couple of hours, you get to stop and take a five-minute break! That's not fair!"

"Heh heh hee. It's all 'part of the game', you know!" Megumi said, imitating Mara's earlier taunt.

"_Good one, Megumi!_" she heard Keiichi say in her mind before his voice dissolved into raucous laughter. She heard Bell, Urd, Skuld and Cevn laughing as well.

Megumi giggled loudly as she heard Mara's voice screaming in Demonic frustration while she pulled her car back on the racetrack.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --


	16. Pt 16: Intersects

**Part 16: Intersects**

Flashes of color punctuated the river of pavement as the speeding racers swept by the grandstand. Accented by the fognoir background of the night sky, the racetrack seemed to glow sinuously under the illumining track lights. Pixels of crafted illusory vapors teemed brilliantly, their shine casting a moving rainbow of images on the arcade driver's face.

"If this wasn't so damned serious, I'd really enjoy these computer graphics," Megumi mused for the hundredth time. A voice in her head responded with feigned annoyance.

"_Yeah, since when did _-you-_ ever play any computer games? I seem to remember a tomboy who was interested in baseball, volleyball, bicycling and outdoors stuff! She didn't have time to play Nintendo with her older brother--so, sadly, he had to play video games all by himself_."

"Keiichi!" she whined derisively as he pulled her covers. The friendly tit-for-tat between the two siblings had arisen out of a need to keep Megumi alert during the race, now in its second day. Megumi smiled; she was still up on Keiichi by a two to one margin.

"He may be older, but _I'm_ sharper," she thought.

"_I_ heard _that!_"

Megumi looked at the lap counter on the display for her car. She had driven roughly half of the 2000 laps. Every 200 laps or so, she would pull into the pit stop for a brief reprieve of 5 minutes. Belldandy and the others would give her food, drinks and backrubs during these times...if she wasn't dashing off to the bathroom. Since Keiichi had been coaching her along the way, his voice was comforting to her when she was on the edge of panic. As a seasoned race driver, Keiichi was very familiar with what she was encountering on the racetrack. Besides, due to Mara's interference, he was actually in the driver's seat inside the video game car she was playing.

"_Megumi, how are you holding up? It must be at least 20 hours since you first started,_" a worried voice inquired in Megumi's mind.

"_Ah...I'm okay! Urd's 'pep lozenge' is working wonders._" she replied. Megumi had noticed over the past two hours that Keiichi had been talking to her less and less; his mental voice seemed to drag out the words.

"_Sis...I'm completely exhausted. I didn't have the benefit of whatever Urd gave you. I've been with you for the first half of the race, but now I really, really need to crash and get some sleep._" his voice admitted with a telltale reluctance.

"_What!_" Megumi shouted, her mental voice filled with a ruffle of anxiety.

"_You're going to leave me -_alone_- for this race? No...please don't say that's what's going to happen!_" she thought.

Keiichi explained that, despite being a prisoner of the arcade game, he was mysteriously subject to human physical laws. Even though Megumi was controlling his racecar via the arcade game, he would need to doze off for a while, having been awake for over a day.

Silence.

Megumi could swear that she heard snoring in her mind a half-hour or so later. Then a sound like a needle scratching across an old record jarred her senses.

"Ha ha ha ha! You're only halfway through the race, Megumi! The worst part is yet to come. The other drivers will be getting tired...and guess what that means?" Mara shouted obtrusively over the arcade game's speakers.

"What, Mara," Megumi said in a nonplused voice.

"They're going to start driving sloppy...just like drunken drivers. That will make this race _really_ interesting, don't ya think! Lot's of chances for a crash to happen! Lucky you, if you crash, you won't get hurt... But Keiichi on the other hand won't be so lucky..."

"Mara, _shut up_! I know that already!" Megumi yelled, angry at Mara's taunting.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Belldandy heard Megumi's clarion-like shout of anger above the cacophony of arcade game sounds. She and Urd had been keeping watch over Megumi; attending to her comfort so that this feat of endurance would have minimal discomfort. Mercifully, there were times when she wasn't dwelling upon the high stakes of this race: Keiichi's life depended on Megumi's video game driving skills. Now, Belldandy was brutally reminded of the price of failure encouched in Mara's challenge. Urd looked at her younger sister with a knitted expression of concern as Bell's face was screwed tight with blunt anxiety.

Skuld also noticed her sister's face draw into a worried mien and tried to comfort her.

"If I was Bell, I would be freaking out the _entire_ time. Elder Sister sure is pretty cool in dealing with this!" Skuld thought, amazed at her older sister's composure. She hoped that Belldandy would responded favorably to bepraisement...even if the source was her younger sis.

Urd chimed in with ebullient optimism. Cevn looked on with wonder as the two sisters pooled their energies to keep Belldandy from sinking into a morass of despair.

"All for one and one for all," he quoted the adage in his mind.

"Somehow, Mara will pay for this," was all he could say to them. He felt so superfluous to the situation, not to mention that he was exhausted after being up over 30 hours. He thought about using the excuse of exhaustion to justify appealing to Urd for one of her 'super speed' pills.

"Now, _that_ was a flash of insanity!" he realized as he quickly clenched his fists to wake himself. The drug addict from his past wanted those pills; once more he had to challenge the urges that sometimes came in high stress situations. Rarely did he want to use any drugs over the past ten or so years, but since he had moved to Japan and Mara had gotten him loaded against his will...the insanity sometimes returned like a mental sharkhook.

"Cevn, it's okay!" Urd said to him, sensing his inner turmoil. She smiled to herself when he shot her a look of suspicion and surprise.

"He has no idea how well I know what's on his mind, or how well I know who he is," she chuckled to herself.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Megumi felt washes of anxiety fade in and out as she raced on, unaided by Keiichi's support and advice. She had surrendered all perspective of time much earlier. It simply wasn't important. _This_ moment was what mattered. She imagined that this race must be what the Christian Hell was like...an eternity of doing nothing interesting. An eternity of being stressed out. But this task transcended 'interesting' with its life and death implications.

"No...I can't let my mind wander! Need to focus on the race!" she confronted herself, forcing her attention back on the racetrack, biting her lip in determination.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Sunrise.

Sunset.

Cevn was almost dizzy from lack of sleep. A couple of minutes earlier, he dropped a glass of juice he was getting for Megumi.

"That's it! You're going to sleep!" Skuld shouted in a take-charge voice. Urd just shook her head at him with open respect while Belldandy smiled gratefully.

"Cevn, you've done everything you can. Listen to Skuld and get some rest. You've been up almost 40 hours. I won't be upset with you if you do," Belldandy said soothingly. Cevn smiled a tired grin and leaned back against the arcade machine. In a few moments, he slumped into sleep while seated on the floor.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Megumi, how much longer?" Skuld asked, her rivalry with Megumi temporarily forgiven and forgotten. She had to admit a grudging admiration for Megumi.

Of all the mortals she knew, Megumi was the one mortal that rubbed her the wrong way. _Extremely_ the wrong way. Their relationship had been tempestuous at times, especially when Megumi defended her brother's relationship with Belldandy.

"It wasn't just what she did, it's who she _is_!" Skuld had rationalized back them. She didn't understand how it could be that she took an instant dislike to Megumi. She felt the hair on her neck hackle from the first moment she set eyes on the mortal girl. Later, Belldandy had explained that her dislike of Megumi might stem from the possibility that she shared some innate personal qualities with Megumi. Skuld initially reacted to _that_ statement with disbelief and disgust...but she later admitted that her sister was right, as usual. Big Sister Urd also pointed out some similarities between her and Megumi; engineering talent, being the youngest in the family and having a love/hate relationship with Keiichi.

Megumi was leaning forward in the arcade game 'cockpit', almost resting her chin on the wheel, rapt with attention to what was happening on the video screen. She'd narrowly escaped several crashes on the racetrack. Every time the machine made a crashing sound, Belldandy jumped to her feet and shook like a leaf until Megumi assured her that it was some other car that crashed. But several times, Megumi had brushed lightly against the retaining wall of the racetrack.

Skuld felt her nervestrings stretch taunt with each screeching metallic crashing sound. The last near-crash, she had started to chastise Megumi when Urd prudently put a hand over her mouth.

"Mon't mou thare phill y sphifter's phoyfrien!"

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Megumi remembered something Cevn had said about how some people just are waiting around to waste away...and then they forget how 'what started their lives' was all about. It was a miracle that she had not crashed her car. Other racecars were weaving like dragonflies in a late-spring storm; in and out of the racetrack, creating additional obstacles for her.

"_Megumi, you only have another 400 laps!_" an excited voice shouted in her head. Keiichi was awake and with her again! Megumi didn't want to tell Keiichi the terrible truth...that she herself was starting to feel gripped with exhaustion.

Another 150 laps. Another hour and a half.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Megumi almost fell asleep at the wheel when she was jarred awake by a loud steelrip rending sound as she rode the retaining wall again. Her head snapped back as she fought to control her video game racecar, which rebounded off the wall at 310 kph. In the arcade game monitor, her car was dizzily spinning in circles; she gravely struggled to keep her racer from overturning. It all happened so fast...she flinched...and then she saw her car slide to a stop on the grass on the inside of the track. She marveled over the fact that she didn't crash or get blasted by another racer, just as an explosion of sonance shattered her thoughts of gratitude.

Belldandy had kept her eyes anxiously glued to Megumi's every move in the cockpit of the video game. Somehow, Mara had tweaked the game so no one except Megumi could see anything on the video game screen. As she saw Megumi react in panic, rapidly whipping the steering wheel hand-over-hand, Belldandy screamed with sheer terror. She held her breath as Megumi fought tenaciously with the invisible situation of the race. After a couple of seconds, Megumi stopped driving and released the wheel, slumping back into the chair of the arcade game.

"She's stopped driving!" Belldandy thought, reacting to this with a horrible feeling of loss that welled up inside of her heart.

It was over. Keiichi was dead despite their best efforts.

"NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! KEIIICHIII!" she screamed in anguish.

In an instant, Belldandy had literally blasted everything in sight with her ear-splitting yell. Skuld and Urd both covered their ears a fraction of a second too late. Cevn literally jumped two feet in the air, startled awake by the wellcrash of sound. Objects in the living room flew off the wall and furniture was overturned, as if caught in a blashing windgust. Windows shattered and glass flew everywhere. One of the ceiling beams dislodged and fell down on the floor with a crash that made everyone start, while all the paper in the shoji doors blasted out.

Megumi was jarred back into reality as a stream of glass shards sprayed her in the face. She had closed her eyes in the nick of time; the stinging sensation on her cheeks really hurt.

"Oh God! Owwww!" she exclaimed in pain.

"What happened? My face feels like it's all cut up with glass," she said aloud in a panic. Visions of a scarred face passed through her mind; her mother's cautioning voice repeating in her mind..."A woman's fortune is her face."

"No...I'm not going _there_!" she challenged herself.

She couldn't hear her own voice, Megumi noted reluctantly. The glass that covered the videogame screen had shattered and sprayed all over her. The monitor behind the glass...her only view on the race...was now distorted by several cracks. These created a fractured, surreal graphic display. Her hearing was gone, everything sounded tinny and she felt blood running out of her nose.

Urd and Skuld looked at their sister, speechless in the face of her greatest loss. Belldandy had put her soul into her yell of pain--her energy was depleted. She collapsed in an unconscious heap on the floor, totally drained.

Urd looked at Skuld. Skuld's face had the most helpless expression she had ever seen. Her dun-brown eyes were red with distraught grief as she blinked back tears. Her whole body seemed to quiver as she was emotionally overwhelmed by Bell's tragic loss...and Keiichi's death.

Skuld looked at Urd through tear-blotted eyes. Urd's emerald eyes were rimmed with blazing red rage and hurt. Skuld knew that Big Sister Urd was going ballistic with barely controlled anger; she felt her own fists clenching tight at her sides with wrath.

"I'm going to _kill_ her!" Urd stammered in absolute fury.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Bwahhh hooo heeh!" Mara shouted with glee as she saw Megumi's car spinning out of control on the racetrack. She jumped up and down with fervent excitement.

"This is it!" she yelled in triumph.

Her ultimate revenge on Belldandy and Megumi was unfolding right in front of her eyes! She saw Megumi's N.I.T. car whirling madly out of control in the midst of the racetrack as several cars sped by her.

"Keiichi's as good as dead once one of those cars hits them. He'll get creamed; there won't be enough of him to scrape from the metal wreck to fill a sake bottle with!" she thought with impending anticipation. From her vantagepoint in the grandstand, she waited for the inevitable collision with sheer joy.

All eleven cars that remained in the race drove past the spinning car without hitting it.

Mara watched in utter disgust as Megumi's careening car slowed down on its own and finally spun safely to a halt on the grass in the edge of the track, untouched except for a flat tire and crunched metal all up the passenger side of the racer.

"You... ignorant churls! You idiots! How could you not hit a car spinning in the middle of the racetrack, you morons! This is utterly, disgustingly unbelievable! Bless, bless BLESS!" she screamed at the outrage.

She was so angry that she started mock-pulling her hair and rending her leather clothes.

Suddenly, the entire racetrack world seemed to shudder as if it was caught in an earthquake combined with the sound of a hundred roaring jets exploded overhead. Mara covered her ears in surprise, as everything in view shook wildly. She extended into her wraith form and joined with the machine.

The video game viewscreen was all screwed up. Belldandy was unconscious on the floor. In an instant, Mara intuited what had happened: Belldandy had screamed, damaging the display that Megumi needed to use for the race!

"Irony of ironies, there still may be a chance!" Mara exclaimed to herself, suddenly happy despite the fact that she saw the repair crew at work on Megumi's racer, making her car roadworthy again.

"She'll have to continue the Demon Rally with a messed-up view screen. There's no way she can finish the race safely now!" she shouted. She grinned at the delicious irony that Belldandy's confused scream would actually bring about Keiichi's demise.

"Ha ha ha ha ha! It's a great time to be a Demoness!"

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Megumi recovered herself enough to see that she was still on the racetrack. A big crack down the center of her video game screen created a field of distortion. She looked at the lap meter and saw that she had a little over 200 laps remaining. She couldn't hear a thing but hazy ringing in her ears.

"_Megumi...Megumi?_" the voice in her head started.

"_Keiichi! You're okay!_" she thought with relief.

"_I don't know about that...I just saw my whole life flash before my eyes! We nearly got killed...well, _I_ nearly got killed! What the hell happened?_" he asked desperately.

"_Tired._"

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Hey Megumi, you _have_ to finish the race! Once they repair your car, you'll have to get back out there and drive. It's only a matter of time until you get in a crash now...better wish your brother a goodbye!" Mara taunted with a snakepit dismissal.

"_Loser!_" the malevolent voice shouted, filled with hatred.

Urd was seething with dour rage as Mara's voice came over the speakers. It was scratchy, as Bell's scream had blown the speaker cones.

Megumi didn't react...which caused Skuld to react.

"Megumi! You need to get back into the race! Didn't you hear her?" Megumi ignored her. Skuld reached out and pushed her hand against Megumi's shoulder to try and get her attention.

"Don't ignore me _now_, Megumi!" she yelled desperately.

Urd was dazed by the revelation that Keiichi was still alive: that the apparently fatal nature of the crash they all has assumed...had actually not occurred. She felt enormous relief and joy as Skuld was trying to encourage Megumi to start back into the race. Cevn tapped her on the shoulder and pointed towards his ears.

"Yes, I can see that you got two of 'em! Why are you bothering me with charades right in the middle of this?" She watched Cevn for a reaction...he didn't seem to hear her. Which irritated her totally.

"Why can't you _listen_ for a change?" she said, stabbing her finger at him. The realization of what he was trying to convey suddenly dawned on her.

"Skuld! Cevn's deaf from Bell's scream! Megumi must also be deaf...Bell's scream must have screwed up their little mortal ears!"

Megumi gave a start as Skuld suddenly pushed her shoulder. Her eyes were glued to the screen as the video-game-Tamiya shouted dear encouragement while the N.I.T. Motor Club members quickly fixed her racecar.

"Well, actually, just their replicas in Mara's insane arcade race game," she thought in a detached mindset. Once more, she was thankful that Belldandy had 'personalized' her pit stop team by recreating her N.I.T. Motor Club teammates.

She watched Skuld mouth some words to her.

"I can't hear a thing she's saying! I must have lost my hearing totally!" she noticed. Urd came up to her and pointed at her ears, then made a criss-cross motion. Megumi nodded at the eldest Goddess.

To add to her confusion, Keiichi's voice was rattling off in her head. He was desperate to know what had happened and profusely thanking her for not getting him killed.

A cracked-in-three-places Tamiya gave her the thumbs-up and she slowly regained the racetrack.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"This is great...Megumi's deaf from Belldandy's yell. Belldandy, who is the only one of us with any real powers, is out cold on the floor. The damned video game display screen is trashed and Megumi's all cut up. What's more, the house is in a wreck!" Urd summarized their situation grimly.

"What else could go wrong?"

Ten minutes later, Megumi fell asleep at the wheel.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"MEGUMI! WAKE UP!!" a worried Keiichi shouted in her mind. She snapped her head back up and noticed that she was careening towards another racer. With a shocked gulp of air, she deftly wheeled her car to the right and nicked the other car as she passed it.

"_That was _way_ too close! I thought that stuff that Urd gave you was supposed to keep you awake long enough to finish the race,_" her older brother's voice sounded off. Megumi couldn't hear her own speech, but she could hear her own thoughts.

"_Keiichi, I thought so true...I mean too. God, I am so tired! I just wanna go to soon sleep._" She looked at the video game monitor...it was just like looking through a cracked windshield in the rain.

"This ish nooo good. I can barely sheen a thiiing!" she thought as Mara's laughter echoed through her head. Her thoughts were blurring with the rapid onset of fatigue.

"_Megumi, to your right again!_" Keiichi shouted in her mind. She swerved to miss another car.

Slap!

_SLAP!_

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Megumi felt a little more alert after the second slap. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Skuld get ready to deliver a third blow.

"Thanks Skuld! I'm more awake now! I'm going to finish this thing!" she said, trying to manage a smile at the young Goddess.

"_That's the spirit, sis,_" she mentally heard Keiichi say.

Urd patted Skuld on the head for her quick thinking. Skuld smiled a brilliant grin at her oldest sister that conveyed "look what I did all on my own!"

Skuld had taken matters into her own hands and had slapped Megumi awake. Again, Urd was genuinely impressed with Skuld. Now it was up to Kami-sama and the Ultimate Force.

20 more laps.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Gimme that helmet! It's time for some demolition derby!"

Mara's patience was stretched to the limit. One more time, she had decided that rules were made to be broken. Besides, what could Belldandy do? The little airhead Goddess was all sprawled out on the floor after wasting all of her energy.

"That was a total Urd move, Belldandy,...screaming like that without even thinking to see if Keiichi was okay," she said with a smile as she climbed in a racer with red flames along its side. She ran her tongue over her sharp canine fangs in anticipation.

"I'm gonna run that little bitch off the road!" she said with determination as she floored the accelerator.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

_"__SHIT!__"_

"_Wha now? Thish ish beginning to be like thath shtupid ol Armageddon movie; one screwup aftanother!_" Megumi said drowsily.

"_Mara's on the track!_" Megumi heard Keiichi exclaim in her mind.

With an effort, Megumi looked all over the track and finally espied a red car gaining on her from behind. The other drivers were all over the track, swerving like Pacman maniacs.

The red car pulled ahead of her and she saw a brief glimpse of Mara as it passed. It settled down into the lane directly in front of her, then slammed on its brakes, trying to force her to rearend it. Megumi peeled to the left and rose high up the grade of the racetrack corner to avoid the collision.

"What is she doing?" Megumi thought angrily. Mara was pissing her off...she was already tired and edgy. This was like mega-PMS!

She looked at the lap monitor: 10 more laps.

Keiichi offered constant encouragement to Megumi as the end of the race approached.

Mara pulled alongside Megumi's racecar on the inside lane and attempted to force it off the track, Ben-Hur style. The rapid-fire banging collisions pushed Megumi towards the retaining wall. With each mini-collision, Megumi became more angry...more alert.

"_Sis! You're in _-first_- place!_" an incredulous Keiichi yelled in her mind.

Megumi didn't care about that. She knew that Mara would try anything to make her crash in the final few laps of the race.

"Where is she, speaking of the devil?"

Mara had pulled her car to a complete stop at the finish line and slowed wheeled it around to face Megumi.

"I'm going to finish this right here and now!" she yelled as she floored her car, aiming directly at Megumi's oncoming racer.

Megumi's eyes went wide as she saw the red car driving straight at her at 350 kph. Remembering her engineering physics, she realized that a head-on collision at that speed had enough kinetic energy to throw her and Keiichi over 5000 feet in the air! She gripped the wheel so tight that her fingernails cut into her palms.

"_Megumi! Listen to me. Mara is playing 'chicken' with you. Whatever you do, sis, don't slam on your brakes or turn to avoid her!_" Keiichi instructed.

"NO WAY!!" Megumi shouted, gripped with disbelief at the suggestion her brother had just made. She thought Keiichi was insane for making such an over-the-top suggestion.

"But...it's _his_ life that's on the line," she second-guessed. "He must know what he's saying!" Her mind raced for a nanosecond as she argued with herself. Then she made her decision.

"C'mon Mara! I'm not moving my car a centimeter to either side!" she screamed, rigid with defiance.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Urd and Skuld had nothing to do but wait tensely for the end of the race. They had been keeping Megumi awake with a series of nudges, pokes and pinches.

Skuld noticed that Urd looked downcast. In the past few hours, they all had experienced one emotional flood after another. But she recognized _that_ look on Urd's face. It was the same look Urd got when she had been caught red-handed in a lie. A look of total guilt.

"What did you do _this_ time, Big Sister?" she asked in an accusatory voice.

"I screwed up, Skuld! Megumi shouldn't be falling asleep at the end of the race. If she gets in an accident because she fell asleep, h..h..how can I face Belldandy knowing it was my fault?" she said, anxiously chewing on a strand of hair.

"Urd, I'm only going to say this once...and never again. It _isn't_ your fault! You don't have all of your powers and you only had an hour to mix that formula up. You tried your best."

Urd wanted to chew Skuld out for being sanctimonious...but prudently realized that her younger sister was correct. She breathed a sigh of relief for just a moment. Then Megumi's rage-filled scream shook her towards more important matters.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Mara took aim at Megumi's car. All she had to do was transport herself out of her own 'Red Demon' car at the last second and Keiichi would be instantly crushed as flat as a tincan lid when her car crashed into Megumi's. She extended herself out into the machine...she wanted to see all their expressions as their beloved Keiichi had his mortal flame snuffed out.

Nothing happened.

With a sense of panic, Mara tried to transport herself. She couldn't move. She tried to extend her essence. Nothing. No matter what she did, she couldn't leave the car. Stunned by the sudden loss of her mobility, she became frightened.

"I can't move! The blessed Rules! The Ultimate Force must be doing this to me since I cheated by getting into this car to try and run down Keiichi and Megumi," she thought coldly.

"Bless it all to Yggdrasil!" she snorted, loudly and angrily.

She looked up and saw Megumi coming at her.

"What! She's _not_ trying to avoid me! She's driving right at me! That girl's gone crazy! She could actually _hit _me..."

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Megumi steeled herself as Mara's car approached. Fighting back her instinct to take flight, she grasped the steering wheel as hard as she could and held it stationary with a do-or-die grip.

Mara's car loomed up on the video screen, rapidly transforming from a small to large image.

"_Yiiiiiiiiiiaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhh!_" she screamed right before it seemed that her car would collide with Mara's red racecar.

Mara's car pulled away at the last second as Megumi drove straight down the track's straightaway.

One lap to go.

"_Chicken!!_" she heard in her mind as Keiichi yelled at Mara in triumph.

"_You did it, sis!_" he exclaimed in her head with gratitude. Megumi finished the straightaway and took the turn. She could hear the roaring of the spectators over the video game system.

She felt like her spirit had flown out of her like so much water spilling out of a bucket, she was so drained. So angry at Mara for putting her through this deathtrap of a challenge. She gave voice to her resentment at the female Demon who had once more put her through Hell.

"LOSER!" she yelled at Mara, wherever she was.

_Crash!_

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Closer and closer. Mara got a fright when she realized that Megumi wasn't going to move. Megumi's racer loomed large in the windshield...suddenly, quickly.

"She's going to try and _hit me_!" she thought somberly. "This is unbelievable!"

Mara swerved aside at the last moment.

"Bless her, she didn't turn away, that mortal wench!" she cursed. But the sudden shift in direction caused the momentum of her racecar to become unpredictable. Mara flailed at the steering wheel in sheer desperation.

"I don't know how to drive one of these stupid mortal machines!" she shouted in frustration as split-second before her car crashed head-on with the retaining wall.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

As they went into the last turn, Megumi saw the crumpled form of a red racecar smashed up against the wall. For a very brief second, she felt sad for Mara. Once more, Mara's impetuosity had caught up with her. Then she heard the excited roar of the crowd as she entered the straightaway. Far ahead, she saw a tiny man on a tower waving a black and white checkered flag.

Whooooshhhh!

Her car flew by the finish line. Megumi grinned to herself as she started to cry.

"I saved him! I saved Keiichi's life!" she thought with total release. As she stopped her car in the Winner's Circle, in the distance she could see Mara being extracted from the other racer and put on a stretcher by a team of medics.

She heard a sobbing in her head.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

With a sudden audible "pop!", Keiichi materialized next to the video arcade game, crouched in a seated position like he was driving an invisible car. He fell backwards in a tumble, now that there was no seat under him. His face was soaked with sweat and tears.

Skuld had been chewing her fingernails raw; when she saw Keiichi safe and sound, she collapsed on the floor with joyful relief.

Urd slumped to the floor next to her youngest sister and let out a prolonged gasp, seeing Keiichi back in the flesh, alive. She put an arm around Skuld and side-hugged her.

"Belldandy!" Keiichi shouted with jubilance. His happiness drained away as he saw the crumpled form of his divine girlfriend on the floor. After being subjected to Mara's little 'drama' for the past three days, his raw nerves told him that his girlfriend was dead.

"Oh no! Oh Noooooooooooooo!BELL-CHAN!" he yelled.

"She's okay, lover-boy!" Urd announced with a tired smile as she and Skuld grabbed Keiichi for a hug.

"She thought_ you_ were dead earlier--then she screamed so loud that it drained all her Goddess Powers. She's going to be okay, she just needs to sleep it off," Urd envisioned the delightful fact that Belldandy will wake up thinking that Keiichi is dead...then find herself in his arms.

"What a totally romantic situation...maybe that'll convince 'em that it's time to make some primo whoopie!" she said to herself.

"How could you think those perverted thoughts at a time like this?" Skuld admonished her. Once more, Urd wondered how it was that Skuld could read her mind when she started thinking in sexual terms. Urd slapped the floor lightly as she realized the cause of Skuld's 'insight'...she had been visualizing a potential event _in the near future_.

Skuld, for her part, was incredulous at Urd's mental cupidity. She saw that certain part of Urd start to quiver, which almost always indicated that her sister was thinking perversely.

Keiichi knelt by Belldandy and heard her gentle breathing. With a flush of relief, he realized that she was all right. Her collapse from expending too much power was a phenomenon that he was familiar with from earlier incidents. He knew that a day would pass and his precious Bell-chan be back to normal, since Yggdrasil had been back on line for a while now. He turned to look at Megumi.

She was sound asleep, slumped in the chair of the arcade game with a smile on her face. Cradled in her arms was a huge ornate golden trophy shaped like a giant wineglass with a car on top...which read:

_**"First Place, Indianapolis 5000"**_

He realized that she had performed a driving feat that was borderline impossible. But with an approaching sense of panic, he noticed the numerous cuts on her face and hands.

"She said that she only had a nosebleed, earlier," he noted fearfully. Her face was pretty well cut up, ribbons of skin matted with slick blood covered her. He looked at the video screen...it was shattered. Glass was all over the place, in her lap, on the floor, in her hair and face.

"My God, what about her face?" he exclaimed with deep concern.

Tears stung his eyes.

"She did the _impossible_...for me! Oh my dear, dear sister..." he said aloud with loving reverence. She had endured over 50 hours of nonstop Formula A race driving. She had fought off fatigue the last several hours with grim obstinacy. She had driven almost half of it without his help or encouragement. And somewhere in the final stretch, she had driven with a faceful of glass. Somehow.

Keiichi was overpowered by an urge to grab Megumi and hug the daylights out of her, but he knew that the best thing was not to disturb her rest. He knew that Belldandy could heal her face, more than likely.

"She's definitely earned it," he said quietly. Everybody in the room was asleep. Skuld and Urd were laying on the floor next to each other, face-to-face in each other's arms, snoring away. Cevn was asleep on the floor next to the arcade game. Keiichi realized that this had been a team effort to support Megumi in her race. Then he saw the living room, which was all smashed up by Belldandy's release of audio energy. It reminded him of the several times it had been wrecked, most recently by Cevn. He saw a stirring out of the corner of his eye.

"We all feel that way about Megumi," Urd said tiredly. "Don't we?" she said to Skuld, elbowing her. Skuld had harbored enmity towards Megumi from the moment she met her; Urd wanted to challenge this attitude that _her_ little sister had towards _Keiichi's_ little sister.

Skuld scowled at Urd momentarily, angry that she had been awakened. Then she reflected on what Megumi had accomplished today. Skuld had seen Keiichi and Cevn sacrifice their well being in the process of trying to save a loved one or a good friend. Now Megumi had done the same. Skuld begrudged her some respect for this...but then she thought about what Belldandy had said about her and Megumi.

"If she's like me in some ways...?" Skuld said sleepily.

"What if I was in her position and Urd or Bell were in Keiichi's place: would I be able to do what she just did?" she wondered.

Skuld had to admit to herself that she didn't know how she would react...except to do as Megumi did and rise to the occasion. Suddenly she felt sincere respect for her rival.

"Maybe I can get along with her better, like when we went shopping with Cevn," she thought as sleep rushed back up on her.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Belldandy wanted to never wake up, to never climb out from under the blanket that covered her as she lay on her futon.

Like an unending shower of knives, painful memories revisited her, haunting her. Her beloved Keiichi was dead at the hands of Mara's treachery. All she could do was stand by and scream out her trauma.

Her existence was ruined. Forever. She would have to endure the pain of the loss of her one and only love. She wished she could blink herself out of existence. Nothing could take away this much pain. She collapsed into herself emotionally, becoming a cocoon.

No. More. Keiichi.

She slept on and on. Every time a dream faded into wakefulness, she would keep her eyes shut and wait until she fell back asleep. She could hear her sisters rustling about the room, talking in near-silent whispers. What were they feeling? Had Keiichi's funeral been held yet? These painful questions assailed her fragile sanity...and she took comfort in sleep.

Better sleep than encompassing grief.

Eventually, she couldn't keep herself asleep, despite her best effort. Tears immediately came to her closed eyes as a gentle hand stroked her hair and forehead. She never wanted to face reality again. If she had a physical heart, it would have been crushed beyond recognition. Her sobbing deepened as she curled into a fetal position. Memories of her and Keiichi tormented her.

She opened her eyes and gasped with involuntary shock.

"Bell-chan, you're awake," she heard a gentle voice inquiring.

_His_ voice!

"_KEIICHI!_" she said hoarsely. Keiichi's eyes smiled tenderness at her. She shuddered with deep sobs of gratitude.

"I...thought...you...were...dead!" she gasped between sobs.

"Oh Bell...oh my love!" Keiichi said, his eyes tearing up. Urd had briefed him about what had happened. He had kept a bedside vigil for two days, waiting and hoping for the moment she would wake up. When he saw her light azure eyes, he dissolved into her beauty. She was...the most beautiful thing in Kami-sama's creation. Her eyes were so expressive, and the curve of her face highlighted them, framing them with the cast of bountiful love. Once more, he realized that he would move mountains for this woman...this _Goddess_!

Belldandy sat partway up on her futon and grabbed Keiichi tightly, her head pressed against his belly.

"Don't ever leave me...please don't let my love for you die out...I love you so much...I want to spend all eternity with you...oh my dear dear dear Keiichi!" she said as she lightly punched him on the chest with her fisted hands, accenting each word with a light love-punch. Keiichi held her tight, feeling her breath and hot tears warmly upon his chest.

"This is what true love is," he thought to himself, looking up at the ceiling. His heart felt so hot...it threatened to burn right out of his chest. His body, no, even his soul could not contain the love he felt for Belldandy. He kissed her on the top of the head and rocked her as she cried into him. He never, ever, in his wildest imaginings, could have envisioned falling so deeply in love with a woman. A woman! He remembered how his desperate goal as a high school student was simply to get laid. Now, instead, he was deeply, affectionately, companionately in love. Belldandy was a woman, in every sense of the word. She had breathed a new life into the chambers of his being.

They held each other quietly for hours, neither one wanting to let go. No kisses, no stroking or caressing. Just heartbeat to heartbeat. Keiichi could feel her heart pounding in rhythm with his. Several times the shoji door slid open, then closed.

Belldandy didn't want to let go. She felt totally enraptured by Keiichi, her being raimented by his protective embrace. She wanted so badly just to flow into him...to be so close to him that he and she would be indistinguishable.

"This is almost what I think the God's mean by what they call 'Sharing'," she thought. She had never experienced Sharing with any God, but Urd had filled her in on the breathtaking intimacy that accompanied Sharing. She wanted to Share her whole being with Keiichi.

"Hey, you guys, don't forget that there's a big wide wonderful world out here," Urd teased them good-naturedly, finally needing to get something from the sister's bedroom. She had tactfully left the two lovebirds alone for a long time, but now she needed to change into her evening clothes.

They both looked to see Urd standing in the doorway, moved by their wordless expression of love for each other.

"Megumi!" Keiichi remembered.

"Yes...I kept her unconscious...barely. It's as if my powers are almost gone. But it's going to take the power of a full First Class Goddess to undo the injuries to her face!" she said with a wink.

Keiichi remembered that Megumi's face was filled with shattered glass. When they carried her to her bedroom, he could barely look at her. Her angelic face was sliced deeply by glints and shards of glass. Skuld and Urd had picked most of them out, but everyone knew that it would take a miracle for her to recover without major scarring.

Keiichi stood up, then reached down and pulled Belldandy to her feet.

"You're going to be upset, Bell-chan...she's really cut up!" he warned her. Belldandy steeled herself as they walked into Megumi's room. She gasped as she saw Megumi's face. No one had told her about the fact that her scream had caused her injuries.

"What...happened to Megumi?" she stammered.

Urd started to explain and Keiichi interrupted her with a hand.

"I think I need to be the one who tells her, Urd," he said, reluctantly volunteering to break the bad news to Bell.

Belldandy listened as Keiichi explained how her involuntary scream of grief had exploded the arcade game monitor. She felt a strangely numb sensation fill her countenance. Then the grief cascaded in as she realized that she was responsible for Megumi's injuries. Crestfallen, Belldandy stumbled back against the wall. Looking again at Megumi's facial injuries, Belldandy felt a queasy sensation in her stomach. The thought that she had caused _this_ made her feel a nauseous guilt. She lowered her head sadly.

"Hey, it's _totally_ Mara's fault, not yours, sis!" Urd said. "You only did what anyone would do if the love of their life got taken away. Mara was the architect of this whole screwed up mess in the first place!"

Keiichi could see that Belldandy wasn't buying what Urd was saying. He grabbed both of Belldandy's hands and looked her in the eye.

"You are the kindest, most thoughtful being I know, Bell-chan. I _know_ that you wouldn't ever intentionally cause harm to another person. What happened to Megumi was the result of Mara's rage, not by any action of yours. You have to believe what Urd said, Bell-chan! You felt the most painful thing anyone could feel when you thought I was killed by the video game. But it's all over now. And you have the power to set things right. You can heal Megumi. Nobody blames you, Bell!" he said emphatically. She looked at Keiichi with a vulnerable expression.

"You must despise me...doing this to your own sister!" she said in a quiet voice.

"No!" Skuld, Urd and Keiichi all replied loudly.

Belldandy caught her breath and looked at Megumi. She was resting peacefully, but the injuries to her face made her slumber look anything but relaxing.

"She finished the race _in this condition_ to save my Keiichi...her brother!" She felt a sense of awe, piggybacking upon a sense of deep respect for Megumi.

Belldandy smiled at Megumi...who would someday be her sister. She felt a flow of almost sisterly affection for this young mortal woman. She encanted:

_Shards of glass unveiled/cast away all design_

_Each injury 'twas assailed/all beauty misalign_

_What once was cruelly flailed/shall again brightly shine!_

From the center of Belldandy's forehead, a gentle blue luminosity formed. Spreading across the room, it settled upon Megumi. Megumi seemed to glow with the aura of the spell, as shards of glass extracted themselves out of her face. Each wound to her face healed, while the glass particles dissolved in midair. Everyone watched, fascinated by the display of divine power.

After several more minutes, a divine rainfall of glittering points of light fell on Megumi, washing away all evidence of any injuries. Each drop of 'lightrain' restored a beauty to Megumi. Keiichi looked at his little sister...she looked even more beautiful than she had before. Megumi's face seemed to radiate with a composed elan; a vigorous loveliness that captured his attention even though she was as still as a statue.

Belldandy smiled privately to herself...her small recompense to Megumi for saving Keiichi's life hadn't gone unnoticed by the only male in the room. In a moment's decision, she felt that it wasn't enough to simply undo the traumatic injuries to Megumi...she went further and gave Megumi a 'boost' of beauty. Her face would look exactly the same, but any mortal who sensed beauty while gazing on Megumi's face would have that perception of beauty intensified threefold. Megumi would be one of the loveliest mortal women in all of Japan.

"It's the least I can do for her," Belldandy thought happily. "This must be what Cevn calls an 'amends'."

Finally, it was over; the weaving particles of glowing rainmist slowly faded into invisibility. Skuld and Urd looked relieved as the newly-healed Megumi slept peacefully on her futon bed.

"Bell, you didn't have to give her _that_ much!" Urd whispered into Belldandy's ear. "She'll have to learn ninjitsu from the Ninjettes just to keep the guys away. They'll swarm her like ants on ice cream mochi!"

"Well, I guess I gave her a _little_ bit too much!" Belldandy said innocently.

"Yeah, well look at how your boyfriend is reacting," Urd said, nodding towards Keiichi. Keiichi was staring at his younger sister with wide eyes, entranced by her beauty.

"Ohhh, Keiichi!" Urd said with a "yoo-hoo" tone of voice. Keiichi snapped out of his fixed attention on his sister.

"What'd you do to her? I could swear she's twice as beautiful as before...but she still looks the same!"

"It's okay, isn't it, Keiichi? I did the right thing by restoring her beauty. Is it okay that I added some?" Belldandy whispered in his ear.

"You just made my job as her older brother a bit worse, because now I'll have to keep an eye on all the guys that will want to date her. But I suppose I can handle it...after what she did for me."

Skuld had been watching all of this quietly. She still felt some rivalry towards Megumi...but the dislike she previously harbored was gone.

"This is going to be interesting...she's going to be..." she observed. Then Skuld made an intuitive leap.

"Awww NO! This means that there's going to be non-stop guys coming over here chasing _her_!" she wailed, then turned a shade of pinkish-red as she realized that once again, she had spoken her thoughts aloud.

"Yep...and that'll serve to provide you with an education, Skuld. You'll be able to learn some comebacks to use on Tomohisa to keep him on his toes...and interested. Megumi's really sharp, she'll be able to coach you so you can keep your mortal boyfriend in line!" Urd taunted her youngest sister.

"He's NOT my boyfriend!" Skuld shouted angrily.

Keiichi and Belldandy shared an expression that said "_here we go again!_" and wandered off while the two siblings argued.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

The smell of burnt cinnamon wafted in the dark orange illuminated room, amidst a strobeing green light and a howling wind. The whole effect was harrowing, disconcerting. Flashes of lightning occasionally streaked from ceiling to floor, revealing grotesqueries painted on the wall.

Mara lay in her bedroom in her Earthly lair. Actually, she wasn't lying in a bed...it was what the mortals called a "traction unit". She pushed the trendelenberg button and the back of the bed lifted with a straining whirring sound. She looked down at her body and grimaced. One broken arm, two broken legs and a body cast. She couldn't move a muscle. ParaDemon bots had to feed her and do her routine tasks.

"How could this happen to _me_? TO ME??" she wondered over and over. Normally, she would be fastidiously attending to the design of her lair. A window of blood here, a glowing skullchain there, some Salvador Dali paintings, etc. All the comforts of home.

Instead, here she was...bedridden and groaning with pain. She looked at both legs, each wrapped in a bright red cast, suspended from two hooks at the end of her traction unit.

"Six weeks of this because I flaunted the Rules!" she managed to half-heartedly growl.

The Rules were simple: if a God and a Demon gave their word to one another in a contract, they were bound by the Rules. If one or both broke their word, the Rules would somehow cause the Ultimate Force to wreck a disagreeable consequence upon the infractor. As Mara was the transgressor of the Rules, she had been 'punished' by not being allowed to leave her racecar. When it crashed against the retaining wall, Mara suffered the consequences. The Rules served a simple purpose...to keep any interactions between Gods and Demons on the up-and-up. In one sense, they were the boundary that separated the two realms. Without them, the devious Demons would crush their opponents with perfidy...or the benevolent Gods would smother the Demons with kindness. Thus, the Rules served to prevent open warfare between the divines; by minimizing contact and providing guidelines that both sides understood and respected.

With each perambulation of her thoughts, she waxed angrier at Megumi, Keiichi, the pseudo-Demon Cevn and the three bimbo sisters. She had nearly finished with the decoding and construction of the summoning mandala for Isilblius, the Ultimate Demon. Then she decided to torture Keiichi and Megumi, on a whim. Now the Ultimate Demon project had to be put on hold because of her injuries. She couldn't even play any arcade games. She took a lengthy swig out of the sake bottle by her bed.

Six weeks of immobility.

_Ring Ring Riring!!  
_

"Who in Vanagdrasil could that be?" Mara said aloud in an irritated voice. She reached over to pick up the Hotline phone near her traction bed.

"Hello," she said irritably.

**"It is I"**

"_Eeep!_" Mara managed to gasp, realizing her mistake.

"Y...yes, your Lord...I mean...my Dark Lord!" There was an angry snort on the other end of the line when she called Him "Lord", the name reserved for His Yggdrasilian counterpart.

**"Mara, Demoness First Class, Unlimited, Unrestricted License, attached to the Demon Grief Office. Would you deign to justify why you are incapacitated? What circumstance brought about this...malady of yours?"** a low growling voice uttered through the phone.

Mara gulped a deep breath. The Dark Lord hadn't called her in a very long time. Why now? Why would His Evilness call at this time, when she was laid up like this?

"Well, my Dark Lord, I was trying to terminate the life existence of my D.G.O. assignment, Keiichi Morisato. I tortured him by transporting him to a racing simulacrum and made his sister..."

**"Stop glossing over the facts with trivialities, Mara!"**

Mara suddenly realized that this was not a routine checkup call. She didn't like the sound of His voice. Normally, His voice was seductively evil...but now, His voice was ferally malevolent. Grating with seething anger.

"Well, this stupid mortal that I've been assigned to bring to grief...has _three_ blessed Goddesses living with him! Every time I try to cast some havoc in his life, something happens and he gets away. It's like the Ultimate Force somehow has it out for me. I've only been able to secure a very small amount of grief in his life...at great expense to my personal welfare, I might add," Mara said, then covered her mouth with her free hand, realizing too late that she had basically admitted failure.

"**Confession noted. How is it that a naive First Class Goddess, a Goddess who is a Sysop with limited Earth Spirit powers and a **_**child**_** Goddess assigned as an Earthrealm Trainee with **_**no**_** powers whatsoever...how is it possible that they can consistently frustrate your attempts to bestow grief upon one mortal?"**

Mara was shaking in her bed by now. The Dark One had her at His mercy. There was nothing she could do now.

**"HOW COULD YOU BRING SUCH A LOSS OF FACE TO OUR GRIEF OFFICE! You are one of our best Grief operatives. You have excelled at making the mortal worms miserable for millennia. **_**I've**_** even been slightly entertained from time to time by your malevolent creativity in abusing the mortals. But now...**_**this**_**!"**

"B..but my Dark Lord..." she replied, almost in tears.

**"And what is this I hear about you trying to summon Isilblius? You don't even have one-tenth the Demonic skills to accomplish this, Mara. Instead of exercising your grief-attributes to the fullest, you get caught up with this summoning attempt. Instead of devoting your energies to make the human assigned to you miserable! You're almost acting **_**good**_**!"** He exclaimed in dismay.

Mara let the insult of being called "good" by the Dark One sink in...dimming her spirits even more.

**"Name your punishment!"**

"Name...my...punishment?" Mara said fearfully. These three words were the worst words a Demon could hear from the Dark Lord. It meant that she was to receive discipline and remorse. From time immemorial, when a Demon screwed up, the Dark Lord would offer her or him the chance to name their own punishment. One never knew if the punishment that the Dark One had in mind was worse than the punishment one would volunteer for. In almost all cases, Demons undergoing discipline choose their own punishment, believing that this was the lighter sentence--the lesser of two evils.

"I've been punished _enoug_h, don't You think? I've been utterly humiliated by a_ mortal_ girl and I'm going to be in traction for _six_ blessed weeks because I defied the Rules! Give me a break!" Mara said angrily, eschewing any talk of naming her own punishment.

**"Hmmmm. I admire your rageful spite, Mara. Therefore, in consideration of this...and your past record of Evil...I will be lenient. We need the power that you possess...elsewhere. It is apparent that you have become very inefficient with its usage. Therefore, I hereby demote you to Demoness Second Class, Limited, Restricted License, until further notice."**

"What?!" Mara said, shocked by His pronounced sentence.

**"Mara, strive to be more hateful and more malign. This call ends now."**

Mara slammed the phone down after the click on the other end of the line. In a stunned moment, she realized that she had gotten off lightly. He could have busted her all the way to Fourth Class, Nonpower License. Suddenly, she pulled hard and tore the phone out of the wall. Reeling it in by the cord, she used her one uninjured arm to dash it against the wall, where it rebounded and hit her foot.

"OWWWH!" she shrieked in pain.

"Argh...why me?"

As the stars in her vision caused by the deep pain in her foot cleared, she saw an unsavory image in her mind. Her imagination revealed Urd...laughing at her.

"Grrrrrrrreeeyaaaahhh!"

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

I got back from another meeting with Dr. Kintaro and my weekly therapy session with Dr. Ogawa. Everybody was sitting at the dining room table, which was covered with several okonomiyaki. I let out a gasp as I saw Megumi. She was_ so_ beautiful! I had never noticed before. I knew that she was beautiful in a pert sort of way...but I couldn't keep my eyes off of her. She looked up at me with her light brown eyes and I felt drawn to her. Not sexually, but I was fancifully struck by her loveliness. Then again...she looked _really_ sexy as I found myself reluctantly admitting.

She looked at me with a funny expression.

"Cevn, are you all right?" She stared at me staring at her.

"E..er, Megumi, did you do something different with your hair...you look soooo..." I tried to explain, stutterblushed.

_Pap!_

Urd had slapped me in the back of my head with a rolled up newspaper.

"Some kind of 'older brother' you are! Can't keep your eyes off of your 'adopted younger sister', I see. No wonder you wanted to 'adopt' her...now you're true motives are apparent for all to see! Pervert!" she said with disgust.

I gathered a response betwixt waves of shock. Keiichi quickly grabbed me by the arm and pulled me out of the dining room. I heard someone say, "Urd that's not fair!" as Keiichi hauled me out onto the front porch.

"Cevn, don't worry! While you were gone, Belldandy fixed Megumi's face up with an incantation."

"She must have done much more than that. I..I just couldn't keep my eyes off of her," I said nervously. Keiichi smiled at me and nodded his head.

"Me neither at first. Bell-chan decided to reward her for saving me, so she somehow made Megumi three times as beautiful as before."

"God, no wonder I couldn't stop gawking at her. No offense, but she struck me as beautiful when I first saw her...now, she's going to be a mankiller!" I observed. Keiichi frowned at this.

"Yeah, tell me about it! This means that _I'm_ going to have to fight off all sorts of guys who'll get obsessed about her. And since you're her 'adopted older brother', guess what you'll be doing?"

"Actually, I think you don't have to worry..._Genji_ is the one who has to worry. He'll freak out when he sees her!"

We both laughed at the strange twist of fate. Megumi, the only mortal female in the house, was now more attractive than 100 per cent of the women in Japan. Idol singers, models, TV spokeswomen, beauty contestants...all would look like dull knives next to the scalpel-sharp radiance of Megumi's elegant beauty. I sighed as I realized that it would be hard on both of us...after all we're both guys. Keiichi would have to deal with Belldandy possibly getting jealous while I would have to deal with my hyper squeamishness around women.

"This is all because of_ that_ thing!" Keiichi said, pointing at the arcade game.

"What is that damn arcade game doing here anyway? No one's ever going to play it again, unless they're opping for admission to an insane asylum," I observed, feeling resentment at the sight of the machine.

"_Let's get rid of the fucker_!" we both shouted simultaneously. We each grabbed an end and dragged it out of the front door. I heard someone in the dining room say "What are they doing out there?", then someone else responded "It's some weird kind of male bonding, I think."

After five minutes of huffing and puffing, we had succeeded in dragging the machine a good 15 meters from the house, leaving a trail of matted grass in its wake.

"Belldandy, canya come here for a moment!" Keiichi shouted. A moment later, Belldandy and the rest emerged from the house. I fixed my eyes on Megumi again until I felt a pebble hit me square in the forehead. I looked in the direction it came from and saw Urd scowling at me.

"Bell-chan, let's trash that video game console," Keiichi said in a mock Clint Eastwood voice. I had to repress a burst of laughter.

"Yeah, that thing sucks! _I_ never want to see it again!" said a visibly perturbed Megumi. I couldn't empathize with her any more.

"With pleasure!" Belldandy said as she pointed a finger at the machine. She recited a spell in the God's Language and a jagged shaft of blue light flew from her fingertip to the machine, blowing it up into tatters of wood and metal and glass. We all applauded the destruction of the "Arcade Game from Hell".

Belldandy had a smug smile on her face, which was echoed even more intently by Megumi's expression.

"Last one in the house have to rake the mess up!" Skuld said as she darted in the house. Since all of the women were in the doorway, Keiichi and I didn't even have a chance.

"It's a tie between Keiichi and Cevn!" Megumi said before she dissolved into giggles. Keiichi walked resignedly towards the toolshed and grabbed two rakes while I walked to the entry drive and dragged three garbage containers towards the mess. Peals of feminine laughter rang inside the house, contrapuntto to our rhythmic raking.

"Remind me to put spicy musabi in her tea sometime," Keiichi said in a mock-angry voice.

After a couple hours of hard work, we had finished raking up the remnants of the game. At least Belldandy has incinerated most of it in the explosion, I noticed gratefully.

When we walked into the house, I called out, "Urd, I found something outside that I want to show you!"

Urd immediately rushed up to me with excitement. "Lemme see, lemme see it!"

"It's pretty small, you'll have to look real closely at it,"

I said as I proffered my hand. Urd leaned close in to see. I made like I was going to open my hand, then suddenly reached up and pinched her nose and held it.

"Keiichi told me about Bell's beauty enhancements to Megumi. That wasn't a prank you pulled back there...that was brutality, Urd. Next time you decide to play a trick on me, think twice...otherwise I'll get you back!" I playfully cautioned her, then released her nose.

Urd looked at me with embarrassment and bewilderment. Skuld was literally whooping with laughter and Belldandy teetered on the edge of losing it, holding her hand over her mouth. I guess it was too much to see her sister on the receiving end of the nose pinch she employed so often on Bell and Skuld. Belldandy laughed so hard, I thought her ribs would get sore.

Urd tried to shrug off the embarrassment I doused her with. "Well met, Cevn. But know this...the Norn of the Past will always frolic faster and better than you! You've only issued a challenge...I advise you to be on guard!" she announced in a vox rostra.

"You're right of course, that was unfair of me...but you should have seen the look on your face," she whispered in my earth mirthfully.

"I'll get you for this!" she announced for all to hear.

"We'll see who wins this competition of espieglerie!" I replied. At least this will provide me with some diversion in the few days before leaving for China.

After things settled down, Belldandy and I went to my "Cevn's Studio" room for another lesson from the Enigma Book. She taught me a number of theorems and cipheric cryptic symbols. After a couple of hours, we took a break. I figured that she would run off to talk with Keiichi, but mysteriously, she remained in the room. She looked like she wanted to discuss something with me.

"You must be getting more comfortable around women. You handled that incident with Megumi pretty well tonight. I wonder if Urd knew that you were flirting with her?" she said out of nowhere. Her voice trailed off, as if expecting me to finish her half-stated question. I felt my heart rise in my throat, shocked by her insinuation.

"Belldandy, you _can't_ be serious. Flirting? Her and me? I was just getting her back for trying to take advantage of me earlier," I explained.

"Cevn," she said, sizing me up with a keen glance, "You must face the truth. You have become much more comfortable with women since you moved here. If today was your first day here and Urd did what she did, you would have climbed up a tree somewhere on the grounds and hidden yourself like a faber. Besides I know my sister well; after a few dozen millennia, I _know_ when she's flirting...and she _was_ flirting with you. But don't mind her too much...after all, she's Urd."

My face fell.

"Belldandy, you mean that she was...with me...that she... Nh nh! _No way_! Why would she do...why would she flirt with me? She knows that I get freaked out in those kind of situations," I argued.

"You'll have to ask her, Cevn. Besides, I think you got the better of her tonight. And she probably does too. Which means that you should be on your guard...Urd can be very impulsive when she's up to mischief," she warned.

"Great! Now I've become the focus of Urd's mischief!" I thought in a fit of dismay.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Belldandy and Keiichi spent all night talking. It was as if they hadn't seen each other in years...and then suddenly encountered each other by chance in a public place, like a pedmall. At 3am, Skuld and Urd finally got fed up and jointly kicked them out of the sister's bedroom.

"Can't you guys whisper? I thought that's what you're supposed to do when you're in love," Skuld said.

"Yeah, you sleepwreckers! Go somewhere else and talk!" Urd added. Belldandy looked sheepishly at her two sisters, knowing that she had been caught being selfish. Keiichi grinned guiltily and edged towards the door. Rarely did Belldandy get caught red-handed at an impropriety...but this was blatant. The two left without a sound.

"Why'd we wait so long to do that?" Urd said, scratching her head as she looked at her little sister.

"Hey, this must be a first, the two of us cooperating against Belldandy," Skuld said with a giggle. Urd looked at her youngest sister and reached out to pull her nose.

"Owwwwiee!"

"Don't act so important!"

Keiichi and Belldandy went to the living room to continue their conversation. Both had realized again how dear they were to each other. Belldandy especially had reevaluated her companionate love for Keiichi. Somehow, her heart was gripped even tighter by the awareness that he was her best companion.

"Keiichi...how about another vacation?" she suggested.

"Bell-chan, we just took one to Nikko in May. How can we afford another one so soon?"

"Keiichi...remember all the big yen notes Cevn gave us for the house? There's plenty left. We could take two weeks and really go someplace. Besides, after what just happened, I really want to spend some time with you alone. I almost lost you to Mara's evil!" she justified, fixing him with her azure eyes.

"But what about Skuld? She's still a child," Keiichi asked, partly wanting to eschew any discussion about vacations and travel at the moment.

"Well, Urd will be here. So will Cevn and Megumi. They can keep Skuld in line, since Skuld has no powers. It would be just like three mortals together. Urd has a little power, she could keep everything in line," Belldandy said in reply.

"You really think Urd is responsible enough?"

"Of course she is," Belldandy answered brightly. Keiichi felt himself warming up to the pleasant possibilities of a two-week vacation with his girlfriend.

"You sure you can trust her...even if she's your older sister? She may be crazy at times, but she's never _really_ screwed up, has she?" he asked, wanting to confirm her confident reply.

Belldandy could easily think of a dozen major Urd screw ups, but held her tongue when she noticed how intent Keiichi was on this vacation idea. Besides, it was a very tempting idea. Also, after what Keiichi described to her at the end of the race, she knew that Mara would be incapacitated for a long time.

"The poor Demon-girl, she never learns that you just _don't_ oppose the Rules," she thought sadly.

"Okay!" she said with a beaming smile. Keiichi got up and pulled down a rolled up wall map of Japan.

"Let's decide this at random. Here, you toss this mini kaeru lucky charm onto the map. Where ever it lands, we'll go!"

"Oh, that sounds so fun!" Belldandy said as she extended her hand. She excitedly held the charm in her hand, then flipped it towards the map. The small golden turtle landed in between Matsuyama and Koche.

"Shikoku!" Keiichi said with a mixture of delight and disappointment. Realistically, Shikoku had the reputation of being a boring place to visit, unless one was an avid Buddhist looking to retrace the footsteps of Kobo Daishi.

"Mostly rural, with few places of interest to a young man like me," Keiichi ruminated despondently.

"How can I make it interesting to Bell-chan? Why didn't the charm land on someplace interesting, like Hokkaido with its cooler summer and natural beauty?" he thought with a brief moment's consternation.

"Keiichi, isn't this exciting...it landed on Shikoku!" Belldandy said with patent naiveté. Keiichi rolled his eyes as he reached for the phone to call for early morning JR reservations.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --


	17. Pt 17: Convolutions

**Part 17: Convolutions**

The summer breeze hinted of the nearby ocean as it filled my lungs. This would be my final meeting with Dr. Kintaro before departing for China. He astutely provided me with a dossier of scheduled contacts; contacts that were now very necessary. Everyone who had ever met me in the past had their memories purged of my existence, courtesy of the Ultimate Force. Dr. Kintaro was actually animated about the whole trip, much to my relief. I felt disapprobation towards his cheerless, dour moods, which seemed to be conceits designed solely to reinforce his position as the school 'shacho'.

I decided to amble randomly through the N.I.T. campus. As I passed Watanabe Hall, I recalled that my request for a second floor office would be granted contingent upon my return from China with a Ph.D. and a reciprocity agreement with BeiDa. Dr. Kintaro grudgingly promised to transfer me out of the TA office I shared with several N.I.T. engineering grad students.

"As a full Ph.D., you would contribute to the academic prestige of N.I.T., so I guess we'll have to accommodate you," he had noted. Not that the basement office was bad--I had grown to like it. In its own way, the cozy, cramped office was almost inviting. But its damp environment wasn't good for my growing text and monograph collection.

Yesterday, we had received a call from Sayoko. She said that she was doing well, but added that the initial detoxing was trialsome for her. She mentioned having hallucinations and several days of flu-like nausea before her head started to clear. I reminded her that detoxing was the result of her body reestablishing its homeostatic balance...if she viewed it as the painful last gasp of her drug addiction, then she would have additional motivation to keep clean. She told Keiichi that Okinawa was very hot right now and complained that I didn't find her a place in northern Honshu.

"I guess some things never change about a person," I heard him tease her over the phone. She told me that Tamiya had been wrote her three times in the past 10 days, much to her surprise. She already had a growing collection of well-wishing support cards in her room, mine included.

The early July air was humid, with a thunderstorm brewing on the horizon. Today was one of the worst days on the mugginess scale since I had found myself in Japan. I was wearing jeans and a long sleeve dress shirt because of my meeting with the N.I.T. school president. Needless to say, I was soaking with sweat. During my stroll, I visited several faculty members who were working on personal research projects. Then I relaxed at the campus center. Normally bustling with students, the center was quiet and peaceful during the summer break. I counted all the trees in eyesight as a relaxation practice. Any time I spent with Dr. Kintaro was stressful...I didn't want to take my tension home.

After my stroll through the N.I.T. campus, I returned home. As I approached the street in front of our temple compound, I saw a black stretch limousine parked opposite the entrance. Stretch limos were common in the tourist-land of Honolulu...but what was it doing _here_?

"This is strange," I mused aloud. The limousine was totally out of place here in the outskirts of Makuhari. Especially near what the rest of the community considered an _abandoned_ temple that had become a student hangout. The late afternoon sun glowed on its carefully polished lines. As I walked in, it pulled away.

I felt like we were being spied upon...that pullaway was _too_ coincidental!

I stepped out of my shoes and entered, only to see Belldandy and Keiichi sprawled out on the living room floor with a series of maps and papers filled with jotted notes, ambitiously discussing something.

"What's up with you two? You guys look like you're planning something."

"Hi, Cevn. Keiichi and I are planning to go on a vacation," Belldandy said excitedly. She was beaming with a happy-go-lucky joy while Keiichi was engrossed in guidebooks and calculations.

"Right on! Where to?"

"Shikoku," Keiichi answered. I told them how lucky they were to be going to the place where Kobo Daishi lived. I envied them...any place they would go, boring or not, would be happily brightened by their intense love for each other. Keiichi and Belldandy smiled at me in affirmation, then resumed their whispered conversation.

I walked down the hallway to my room. I could hear Urd watching her Korean dramas and Skuld testing her latest upgrades to mini-Banpei when Megumi walked out and said "hi".

Since the magical enhancing of her beauty a few days ago, the house had been besieged by male callers asking after her. Both Keiichi and I were slowly becoming accustomed to the powerful surge of allurement we felt whenever every morning when we first laid eyes on her. She had an overpowering sensual effect, like the Deltan chick from the first Star Trek Movie. Every time I saw her, I was enraptured by her lovely face. This feeling of attraction made me extremely uncomfortable.

Keiichi had been pressuring Belldandy to disclose to Megumi about the 'enhanced beauty' thing, but without success. Megumi, for her part, had confided in me that she was put off by all the male attention she was drawing.

"It's like I've suddenly become some kind of testosterone magnet...all these guys are after me!" she said in frustration. I almost told her about what Belldandy had done when she 'healed' her face. But I was too overwhelmed with Megumi's charm to do anything but stare at her with an entranced expression.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Later in the day, Belldandy and Megumi departed on a shopping trip. Maybe that was a cover for Belldandy to tell Megumi _why_ she was being hounded by all these guys. At least I hoped so, for everyone's sanity.

I sat by Keiichi as he detailed the vacation plans he and Belldandy had drawn up. They would leave on the weekend and go to Tokyo by train for two nights, checking out the city's celebration of Tanabata. Then they would take the Shinkansen bullet train to Osaka and spend two days there. After riding the ferry across the Inland Sea to Shikoku, Keiichi would rent a car and they would drive into Takematsu and see the famous gardens there, then travel south through Naruto to Cape Muroto. From there, they would drive west to Kochi, generally following the pilgrimage route as they circumnavigated the island. They would return to Osaka for the Tenjin Matsuri, one of Japan's largest festivals. After the two-day spectacle, they would return home. It would be two and a half weeks of worry-free vacationing.

"Leisure's the emphasis," he said happily.

"Look what I did to Mini-Banpei-kun!" I heard Skuld happily announce as she entered the room followed by a 1-meter-tall replica of the 'outdoors' Banpei. She carried a small toolkit as she stood behind mini-Banpei, stroking his metallic exterior with an almost sensual relish.

"I increased the sensitivity of his visual monitors, added new anti-Demon charm cannons to him and designed a faster traction for his motive gearing treads. Check it out...it's cool!" In response, Banpei whirred around the living room rapidly, running over Keiichi's maps.

"Skuld!" he reacted with a shout of dismay.

"Oops!" Skuld peeped in a small voice as she put a gloved hand over her mouth.

"If you weren't Bell-chan's sister...I would..." he groused, then elected to bounce an eraser off of Skuld's forehead.

"I'm sorry already!" she shouted to him and everyone else in the world. I could see the faintest hint of a smile behind her hand. She was holding back giggles, just barely.

"That's okay...it was just an accident, wasn't it?" Urd said with a sneer, pulled away from her Korean dramas by the ruckus in the living room. She gave Skuld a maternal pat on the head.

"Live drama better than the televised kind, Urd?" I teased.

She ignored me as we watched Skuld pull out a mecha I recognized as the Shinseisensor Mk II.

"This must be Skuld's show-n-tell day," I reflected. With Banpei and Sigel outside, she must be lonely...

"I'm going to use this divine power sensor to calibrate Mini-Banpei-kun to distinguish all emanations besides mortal ones. That way, anything that isn't mortal, like a God or Demon, will be detected by him."

I was happy that Skuld had devised a way around the dilemma that I had brought to her attention when I suggested that Banpei couldn't detect Demons because there were no Demons to 'field test' either robot's sensors. Her use of the logic of exclusive particular discrimination made sense, as the only Gods around were the three sisters which Banpei already knew. The three Ninjettes...well they didn't classify as gods or mortals. Anything else would be fair game to activate a defense subroutine.

Skuld pointed the Shinseisensor Mk II at Keiichi and I to get a baseline for mortal emanations. She set it down on a nearby table and pulled out a notepad and jotted something down while the rest of us lazed about, waiting for the cooler night air to refresh us.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Where's the guys from N.I.T.? The teacher and the engineering student?" someone shouted.

I heard several gruff voices indiscreetly talking in the doorway. I looked up and saw four ominous-looking men standing inside the house. They had just walked in, unannounced and uninvited. I looked over to Keiichi and he shook his head to indicate that he didn't know who they were. They looked like thugs, out of place in our neighborhood. I looked at Keiichi and asked if he knew them.

"You think I would hang out with _those_ kind of guys?" he said in a low voice as he gathered his maps and travel brochures into a stack of paper.

"Check 'em out, they look like gangsters or something!" he added. I nodded my head in assent. They looked like the Blues Brothers in their black suits, white shirts and shades.

"Where's the guy named Keiichi? Where's the other guy named Cevn? We know they're here!" another man said in a voice well-suited to intimidation and threats. It worked. I felt fear running laps up and down my backbone at the tough-sounding voice.

I looked at the men more closely. They all wore expensive-looking moddish narrow sunglasses and gold chains. The leader was big, about 6'4, with slicked back hair in a ponytail. He had a scar on the side of his face and a wispy fu-Manchu mustache. The other three men were brutish Neanderthal-types with crewcuts. Two were several inches taller than Tamiya...with weightlifter builds. The zorii on their bare feet contrasted with their mock-formal attire.

"No...wait, he isn't the leader," I whispered to Keiichi as a squat heavyset man emerged from between them. During my time in the drug world, I had encountered the denizens of the underworld. These guys reeked of gangsterism. Suddenly, I recalled Sayoko's comment about yakuza. The leader was dressed in a loud light blue pinstripe suit and navy blue polyester slacks. He was puffing away at a foul-smelling cigar. His hands were bejeweled with expensive-looking bulky gold rings. His smile was practiced and his manner was both casual and menacing.

"Now Kenzo, it won't do to threaten these nice people...yet." the fat man said in a snake-charmer's voice.

"Shit! Yakuza! And Belldandy's gone with Megumi!" Keiichi whispered to me in a low voice. My chill sense of fear hit a new level of anxiety when I heard _that_. I didn't seriously think that they would come here. She must have been more deeply involved than I had assumed. We exchanged a panicked look, then I turned to see Urd and Skuld measuring each yakuza with a cautious gaze. I secretly hoped that Urd would zap them.

How did they find out about where I live? Then I reluctantly remembered my promise to Sayoko that I would deal with any yakuza threats. I felt disappointed in myself, as my braggadocio had literally placed the house in dire danger. Actually, I suspected that my comment had nothing to do with their presence here...but it's easy for me to create a mythology of explanation when I'm scared shitless. Just like many of my human ancestors did in the distant past.

"Why can't I think before saying things like that?" I admonished myself out loud. The old gangster guy spied Skuld and grinned deviously.

"What a cute little girl... maybe you can tell me where these guys are. We want to have a little 'talk' with them, sweetie."

Skuld made an angry face when he called her a 'little girl'. She looked at the man with obvious distaste.

"Bug off, you creep!" she answered snidely. Keiichi gasped as two men on either side of the ringleader walked towards Skuld threateningly.

Urd stepped in front of Skuld protectively.

"Leave my little sister alone, you big goons!" she shouted. The fatman waved his cigar and the two thugs backed off.

"Ahhh, you're a very sexy gaijin woman, y'know. You would look good as a hostess in my nightclub. Maybe we could 'convince' you to work for me. I could make a lot of money off of you," the fatman said greasily. "Maybe you and me could even have a..."

"The only club I want to see is the one I'll break over your balding head, you chubby little shit..." Urd shot back without a hint of self-consciousness.

"Boss, you want me to tear her clothes off or something?" one of the big goons casually said in a dullard's voice, greedily eyeing Urd. "Man, this is escalating rapidly into a potentially explosive situation!" I told myself as I saw Urd's face. Her normally carefree nature fell away as she noticed how nonchalantly the goon threatened to disrobe her. She crossed her hands over her bosom protectively and backed up two paces.

"Ahem...hey, over here...I'm Cevn. Who are you? What do you want?" I said. They all turned towards me as I stood up on tiptoe off of the floor. I noticed that Keiichi stood up right next to me with a protective stance.

"And I'm Keiichi! Who the hell are you and what are you doing in my house?" he added, trying to project a tough confidence.

"Who we are doesn't concern you!" the ponytail guy said. Suddenly I felt embarrassed that I had my hair tied back in a ponytail...I didn't want to resemble this guy at all. There's a difference between long hair on a sensitive guy and long hair on a punk.

Fatty spoke.

"Ahhh. A gaijin? Figures. The teacher at N.I.T...Sayoko's teacher. And you...Sayoko's close friend. You two big guys, back away from the little ladies," the head yakuza ordered his lieutenants.

The young guy with the scar and the ponytail pulled a revolver out and started playing with it, posing while pointing it back and forth between me then the others. The tension rose to an even higher level. The guy must be a Jackie Chan or Takeshi Kitano fanatic, the way he's goofing off with that gun. I watched as Urd tried to use her limited Earth Spirit powers to disarm him. She waved her hands frantically...with no result. She had a look of total surprise on her face.

"Ha ha ha...what're you, some kinda female magician?" the fat greaseball in the pinstripe suit said derisively. This remark drew mocking laughter from his four underlings. Urd's face reflected surprise at her inability to summon her powers. She grinned sheepishly, her embarrassment out of context with the seriousness of this situation.

"We want to have a little chat with you about what you did with Sayoko. Come outside to our car," one of the underlings said to me.

"We're not going anywhere with you!" Keiichi yelled. I looked at him with total amazement on my face.

"What are you doing, Keiichi?" I said to him in a near-whisper.

The boss nodded and two of the big guys walked up and grabbed me by the arms. I struggled against them as they dragged me towards the door. Keiichi was quicker on his feet than me, as he dodged the hood rushing him. He tried to pull one of guys restraining me, and the other two gangster punks were on him in an instant. One guy grabbed him by the shirt and easily lifted him off the ground, then threw him on the floor. The other guy calmly walked over and kicked him in the ribs, hard. I heard Keiichi gasp "_whoof_" as the air was knocked out of him.

"Leave them alone!" Skuld shouted shrilly.

"Leave us alone!" Urd shouted angrily.

Keiichi got up to his hands and knees, shaking his head to try to get his bearings back. Then I felt the wind get knocked out of me as the goon with the ponytail punched me several times in the chest and stomach. He grabbed me by the jaw and yelled a rash of threatening remarks. His breath stank of sour sake. Urd rushed at him and he easily flung her off to the side as she tried to tackle him. Skuld edged in front of Urd and swung her mallet threateningly as the remaining punk advanced on her sister.

"You think you're going to hurt me with that tiny little thing?" the yakuza said with aloof ridicule. In response, Skuld swung low and expertly whacked him on the kneecap with her Mjolnir, surprising everyone in the room.

_--Crack!!--_

"EEEAAAYAAAAHH!!" the goon screamed as he held his kneecap, jumping up and down on one leg. The others laughed while he cursed Skuld. I was too out of breath to laugh, but I managed to gasp, "_Right on, Skuld!_" before getting punched again.

"Why you little...my knee's _broken_!" the unfortunate goon gasped, clearly in agony.

"It looks like she, heh heh, taught you! Now leave them alone! We're not interested in them, we already got the two we came to get," the pinstriped leader said.

"Take them to the car. We're going to take 'em on a one-way trip to Tokyo Bay."

My vision was beginning to fade into a red mist of anger. I felt my knees give as the punk guy hit me in the face three times. I spat up blood. The head yakuza lectured me.

"Do you know how much you've cost me! Sayoko was giving us _ten million_ yen a week for our drug operation! And now she's gone somewhere for rehab because of your meddling! And I'm left holding the bag for my boss. He said that _heads will roll_ for this!" The punk guy hit me again and I doubled over. He continued lecturing.

"So I thinks to myself...if I bring him the guys who cost him all this yen...then I'll be redeemed. My head won't roll...but yours will instead, hahha cough wheeze!"

There were three guys on me and one standing in front of Keiichi, Urd and Skuld. The big boss man stood in front of me, grinning. I looked and saw that he had his little finger chopped off at the first joint. A hardcore yakuza gangster. A 'middle' boss.

"I'm impressed...that's smalltime stuff. How do you get off saying Sayoko gave you that money when actually you were milking her by extortion? Some tough guys you are, using a girl who's a college senior with rich parents to finance your deals. Feh! You ain't shit!" I looked at Keiichi, wide-eyed as he confronted the boss guy angrily. His words were so brazen with challenge, I thought I was going shit my pants in fear that we were _really_ going to get it now. If we were going to get fucked over, Keiichi had made it well worth it by giving me the joy of seeing him railing harsh-on against the boss, whose lips were quivering with rage.

The boss slapped me hard while the guy in front of Keiichi punched him in the stomach and threw him to the ground. The scarface punk punched me down, and then I was curling up into myself, feeling a flurry of blows and kicks...and my dizziness somehow transformed into clarity.

"I should be unconscious...I just want this to end..." I thought to myself.

Then I felt an incredible surge of energy.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"You didn't need to hit him! Get the hell out of our house!" I heard Urd and Skuld screaming, angry at the punks for mistreating Keiichi. They were just plain being cruel.

"So the mouse can speak, ha ha haha!" they all taunted. I guess I had told one of them, "_eat shit_…" but my hearing was uncertain, as my head seemed half deadened by the blows. I was dizzy…but I was also feeling clear...

...and feeling very fucking pissed off.

My nerves felt like barbed wire. All of my fear of a moment earlier had dissipated. It was as if I had suddenly been gripped by some kind of 'second wind' of courage. I felt a rising cascade of enthusiasm and power as I struggled against the hold of the two weightlifter punks.

Seconds later, I noticed that I was loose and the two big goons were on the floor, looking at me with shock. The punk stared at me with a mixture of rage and fear. The wild look in his eyes resembled someone who was about to have a psychotic break.

"Get away from my friends!" I shouted angrily. The fourth guy warily backed away from Keiichi and the two sisters, sensing that he needed to be near his boss instead. The fifth guy was still on the floor, holding his crushed knee.

"Go get'em, Cevn!" I heard Urd shout through cupped hands. I looked at her with a "what the hell?" expression. The punk made his decision and pointed his revolver right at my face. He seemed to move in very slow motion. I heard two shrill female screams as I reached out and slapped his gun out of his hand.

"Shit!" Keiichi yelled. The scarface punk that I'd just disarmed looked at me in wide-eyed utter disbelief.

"Damn you, Kenzo, can't you even do this right!" the fat man yelled as he shoved the ponytail thug aside roughly. He reached inside of his tacky pinstripe suit. He had a strap-on gun holster underneath it from which he withdrew a 45 Magnum. He walked up and leveled it at my chest. I heard Skuld scream, "Oh my Lord!"

"So you think you're a tough guy...let's see how you handle this, baby!" he threatened, tightening his finger on the trigger as he ritualistically said "make my day" in poor stilted English.

Without a thought, my hand blurred. I grabbed his gun by the frame and barrel and squeezed it. To my incredulity, it smashed in my hand like a brittle plastic toy and fell onto the floor. The greasy mob boss held only part of the stock handgrip in his hand. He was shaking with surprise and fear as he stared in incredulity back and forth at his hand, then me. I was finished with these guys and their toughman intimidation crap.

"You guys _suck_!" I shouted with ireful distaste. They looked at me with strident disorientation.

I suggested insanity to them; I just spoke from my heart.

"Sayoko is no longer your concern. You will forget that you ever met her. You will forget this place and never, _ever_ come back here. You will leave our home and refrain from all criminal activities henceforth...by turning yourselves into the Tokyo Central Police Station. You have hurt me and my friends...you have invaded our house and tainted it with your corruption. You will leave NOW!"

I felt like I was frozen...a statue. Everything turned gray...the last thing I heard was Mini-Banpei-kun whirring somewhere in the room.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Belldandy and Megumi were in the ped-mall shopping for shoes. Bell had invited Megumi to come along and help her pick out some new shoes and a couple outfits for her trip to Shikoku with Keiichi. She had reflected on Keiichi's suggestion...about telling Megumi.

Earlier that day, in the Zebra Girl handbag store, a man shopping for a fifth anniversary present for his wife hit on Megumi. Belldandy couldn't believe it...a _married_ man chasing after a college girl!

"This is inconceivable!" she thought. She noticed that her picnic bag had worn out after three years of carrying tea and bento to N.I.T. for lunchtime with Keiichi. Megumi suggested that they check out the World Party shop for a new one.

In the World Party outdoors shop, a salesclerk hit on Megumi while Belldandy was shopping for a new bookbag for the fall semester. At the Curry House fast food restaurant, Bell and Megumi stopped for a couple canned teas. One of the cooks actually left the kitchen line behind the counter to ask for Megumi's phone number.

"Ouch!"

The crackling pain on her foot brought her back to the here and now. The shoe salesman had pinched Belldandy's toes while he was putting a shoe on her foot. She looked at him...and noticed that his eyes were all over Megumi, who was standing next to her. He wasn't paying any attention to the task of putting the shoe on her foot.

"That does it!" Belldandy decided out loud.

"Dear Keiichi, you were right...I have to talk to her," she admitted to herself. The salesman seemed intent on breaking her toes...she could hear her bones popping as he mauled her foot.

"Ouch! Okay, I'll buy it! Just take it off...no, wait. Let _me_ take the shoe off," she instructed the bedazzled salesman.

After she bought two pairs of shoes--she just _had_ to buy the new style of sandals--Belldandy suggested that the she and Megumi go for some lunch. She had a foreboding sense that something was wrong at the house, but it seemed to pass quickly. She was curious, but her apprehension towards the matter at hand took precedence.

"How do I explain _this_ to Megumi?" she wondered.

They chose an Italian-style bistro and sat down. It was a nice enough place for a mall, clean and well-lit. The waiter promptly came and took their order. Belldandy had to repeat her request thrice because the young high school waiter was gawking at Megumi. Finally, Megumi broke his attentive stare by pointing at Belldandy and the waiter took her order.

"What is it with all the men in world lately? Everywhere I go, I seem to hypnotize them...it's as if I was walking around in a see-through blouse or something." Megumi asked Belldandy.

Belldandy smiled innocently at Megumi. She _is_ beautiful, Belldandy thought. Even as a woman and a Goddess, she was struck by Megumi's beauty. Her hair was just the right color and her chin was shaped just like Keiichi's, her brown eyes were just like Keiichi's, only a shade lighter, her smile was both innocent and sagacious...

"Belldandy? Don't tell me that I'm distracting you too?"

"Oh, ha heheh! I was just thinking how much you look like your brother," she replied with a blush, withdrawing out of her reverie.

Megumi looked at Belldandy with narrowed eyes.

"Belldandy dear, don't you think that something's..._funny_...about all of this?" Megumi inquired, then rapidly rattled off several points in a lawyer-like fashion.

"One: during the arcade game race, my face got all cut up with glass shards. I come to two days later without a single cut or scar on my body. Two: after which...all the men around me start bugging out. Even my own brother and Cevn! Three: I'm not doing anything different with my clothing or makeup. Ergo, what..._did_ you do?"

Belldandy looked at Megumi, trying to formulate an explanation. She smiled innocently across the table.

"You see, your face was severely injured after the race. Urd and Skuld kept you in a state of unconsciousness...just like we did with Cevn with his eye problem. So it fell to me to provide a healing spell to take care of your wounds. Truthfully, a mortal hospital couldn't have possibly healed all the injuries to your face. You would have been hideously scarred for life, Megumi," she explained matter-of-factly. Megumi shuddered when she heard this--she didn't think that her injuries were _that_ bad! Belldandy continued, her face blushing, steadily gaining a guilty mien.

"So I thought about how wonderful it was that you did everything possible to save Keiichi. When I saw how hurt you were, I was overwhelmed with gratitude and I decided to make your face more beautiful once I finished healing you," Belldandy finished, looking anxiously across the table at Megumi.

"Ha ha ha haw! That's a good one, Belldandy. Please, just tell me the truth," Megumi said in between chuckles. She didn't believe a word...in fact she thought that Mara had exacted some kind of weird revenge for losing to her in the race.

Belldandy felt awkward, as she had _really_ told the truth. She repeated her story, only this time she tried to make it utterly convincing. Megumi looked at her thoughtfully.

"Hmmm. So now you made me more beautiful. Every girl wants to shine...BUT THIS IS RIDICULOUS!" she shouted, turning every face within ten meters in their direction. She noticed this and toned down her voice. She grabbed Belldandy by the hand.

"Y..you don't understand! I feel like the queen bee in a nest of hungry...er...horny drones. It's totally getting on my nerves! I'm actually beginning to dread leaving the house. I get stared at everywhere I go! I'm going nuts!" Megumi was almost in tears as she related the numerous incidences of the past two days. Belldandy listened sympathetically as she related incident after incident of male obsession. It was clear to her that something was wrong.

The waiter arrived with their food. With a distracted grin, he set both plates and drinks in front of Megumi...leaving Belldandy's side of the table empty. Belldandy wanted to confront him about the rude table service, but his silly grin informed her that it would be useless to reason with him.

"See what I mean?" Megumi said with a shrug of her shoulders.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Cevn came out of his unconscious state to find himself sitting against a couch in the living room. The others were talking animatedly. Keiichi was still in shock after seeing what had transpired. At the time of the craziness with the yakuza gangsters, his ribcage throbbed with pain from being kicked; in fact, his whole chest felt raw. But when Cevn had chased out the yakuza, any hint of injury or pain disappeared. Then he saw Cevn _crush_ a metal 45mm gun held by the fat old gangster.

He looked at the others. Urd had a big smile on her face and Skuld looked mystified.

"You really told them where to put it!" Urd said proudly to Cevn, noticing he was waking from his trance-like state. Unlike Skuld, she thought the whole conclusion to the 'yakuza incident' was incredibly funny...and unremarkable.

"God, I had no idea they would come _here_," Keiichi said, his curiosity broken momentarily by Urd's remark. His disbelief was suspended by Bell's older sister's nonchalant approach to what just happened.

"What happened? Where's the goons?" Cevn asked.

"You're not going to believe this, but at the end...you chased them off," Keiichi answered. Cevn looked at him with a mystified expression.

"Huh? They left?" Cevn looked at Skuld, whose sober face broke into giggles for a moment.

"Yeah...tee hee. They even apologized to us," Skuld said, giggling at the memory of the five gangsters deeply bowing in humility in front of them.

"The guy whose knee I...haha...clocked with Mjolnir couldn't kneel, so he just sat and bowed. It...heheh...was so weird!"

"What?" Cevn said in amazement.

"I am so sorry, you guys. I'm the one who is responsible for them coming here. I should be the one bowing to you. It's all my fault," he said guiltily. Keiichi stopped in mid-laugh. He wanted to assure Cevn that it wasn't his fault.

"It's okay...but I don't know if_ you_ are okay, Cevn. You did some really bizarre stuff at the end. You can't remember _anything_?" he asked. Keiichi went on to describe the last few minutes of the 'yakuza invasion'. Cevn dismissed Keiichi's comment about weirdness. His story seemed outrageous as well.

"_Everything_ is weird in my life nowadays," he thought. But he did remember some kind of change coming over him right before he blacked out.

"I don't recall very much of what happened. It could be retrograde amnesia...considering how many times I got clocked in the head by those goons. But what worries me is how did they find out that we live here? Someone must have informed them about our intervention on Sayoko."

"I bet they trailed you, just like in those TV shows!" Urd said, as if she was stating the obvious. Skuld could only shake her head at her sister's blaise observation. Keiichi looked thoughtful for a moment.

"I wonder if they _were_ trailing Sayoko all along, 'protecting' their cash source? They would have seen her walk downstairs into Watanabe Hall and then watched us as we took her to the airport. They got a good look at all of us, then guessed that it was her teacher, Cevn, who talked her into going."

"That's gotta be it!" Cevn said. "Skuld, why are you looking at me so funny?" he added after seeing the expression on her face. The mirth she projected earlier was now replaced by a querimonic mien.

"Oh...nothing."

At that moment, Belldandy and Megumi came flying into the living room, the embodiment of excitement. The sound of crinkly shopping bags and the aroma of new store-bought goodies brightened the atmosphere of the room.

"Hi guys!" Megumi said cheerily. Belldandy winked at Keiichi...and Keiichi knew in an instant that she had talked to Megumi. "At least this time, I looked at Bell-chan first," he thought with relief, feeling let off the hook. The last few times he had looked at his sister first, drawing a disapproving look from the love of his life.

Belldandy surveyed the room and realized that something had happened. Both Urd and Skuld looked at her insistently.

Belldandy and Megumi, like any good shoppers, wanted to show off the goods they had bought. Urd and Skuld sat by them as they opened shopping boxes.

"Women," Keiichi said to Cevn as everything was put on hold by the female 2/3 of the house. Indeed, all four were engrossed in 'fashion' talk. Even Skuld, much to his surprise.

Megumi had chosen a really nice summer outfit, with a blue and white sleeveless top with a metallic knit design and a matching miniskirt. She also showed them the new summer handbag she bought and the designer denim and leather jacket for fall. Belldandy had bought several skirts, two pairs of shoes, a picnic box and a bookbag.

"Did you tell her?" Urd said, floating alongside Belldandy. Belldandy nodded.

"I told her that I increased her beauty with a special spell."

"What spell did you use, Bell? I can't remember what you did...I was really tired that morning."

"The Aura of Delight Enhancer # 11," she answered Urd. Then she recited the words of the spell to her sisters. Skuld dropped the tool she had in her hands in shock. Belldandy looked at her melodramatic reaction with a face that said, "you're being silly, Skuld!"

"Elder Sister, say that again please?" Belldandy repeated her recitation of the spell at Skuld's request. Skuld raised her finger to make a point.

"You said_ sanhyaku_ instead of san-ko!" A silent moment passed as a invisible pause passed like a web between the three. With a hoot, Urd started to laugh maniacally at her sister's mistake, rolling onto the floor and kicking her heels.

"That's _not_ funny, Big Sister Urd!" Skuld said in a scolding voice.

"What!!" a flustered Keiichi said, overhearing the conversation. This mistake was seemingly too obvious for his girlfriend to make.

"Does that mean what I think it means?" Megumi asked, red-faced with shock. She was still just barely coming to grips with the fact that Belldandy had altered her appearance...or some invisible attribute that was inexorably linked to her appearance. Discomfort settled on her like a first winter's snowfall settling on stiffened grass.

"What did I do?" Belldandy asked, her interest piqued by the consternation around her.

"You increased her beauty 300 times, not three times! No wonder she's become a 'male vacuum'. It's a miracle that the two men that live in our house haven't ravished her by now!" Urd stated.

"_Oh...my!!_" Belldandy said in astonishment, her hand delicately poised over her chin. She looked at Keiichi, who was wringing his hands.

"So...what are you going to _do_ about it?" Megumi shouted above the din. "I'm the one stuck with this little 'mistake'!" It was hard for her to be angry at Belldandy because of the her kind-hearted nature. But she was also resentful at the error itself.

"This is just as bad as when Mara changed me into a car!" Megumi near-shouted, accenting her mounting sense of powerlessness and frustration.

"Well, why don't you just recast the # 11 spell on her, sis?" Urd offered...then immediately caught her error. Too late.

"Baka...that would mean that Megumi would have to have a faceful of glass! She said it in during the middle of her healing spell," Skuld replied. Urd stuck her tongue out at Skuld.

Megumi recounted all the mishaps of her and Bell's shopping trip, drawing laughter mixed with surprise at the part where the waiter gave her both orders of food. Keiichi realized that this was very serious, as nothing less than her sister's sanity was at stake.

"Can't you give her some pills to counteract it, Urd?" he suggested.

"So he comes to me, wanting me to fix everything with one of my pills," she said haughtily, teasing him. Keiichi gave her a squinting stinkeye...he was not amused.

"Well, I could always try," she said as she bounded off to her "Urd's Castle" room.

Skuld pulled at Belldandy's skirt, indicating that she wanted to talk in private. The two smiled and left. Cevn went back to his "Cevn's Studio", very uncomfortable about what Keiichi had related about the confrontation with the yakuza. Left alone in the living room, Megumi turned to look at Keiichi, her face knit with frustration.

"I can't believe she's _your girlfriend_! Look what she's _done_ to me!"

"Uhhh, what, Megumi?"

"Keiichi, stop staring at me like that! _Keiichiii_! Stop _staring_!!"

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

In the sister's bedroom, Skuld excitedly narrated everything that had occurred during with the yakuza visit. Belldandy was very uneasy when she heard that mortal thugs had visited while she and Megumi were gone. Then she raised an eyebrow when Skuld mentioned about how Cevn had crushed a metal gun and then _ordered_ the men to leave.

"They just sat and listened to what he told them to do, then they just...did it. I've never seen anything like it since I've been here on the Earthrealm! Ever! Right after he finished telling them off, he simply fell down on the floor. It was like he was controlling them like Bunraku puppets. They even begged our forgiveness...they were groveling on the floor, Elder Sister!" she said, putting a gloved hand to her cheek as she giggled.

"What is it with Cevn? Another unusual incident...I wonder if the Lord knows about this one? He certainly is an enigma, isn't he, Skuld," she commented, at a loss for words.

"It's more than that, Belldandy." Skuld said as she readied herself to tell Belldandy the _big_ shocker.

"My Shinseisensor Mk II was on when those bad guys were here. I was just toying with it...but right when Cevn seemed to change, I glanced at it. It was off the scale for God _and_ Demon powers!" she said. Belldandy let _that_ one sink in, silently looking at Skuld.

"What does that mean, Skuld?"

"Here...look," she said as she turned on the handheld mecha. "Each scale measures divine power. A mortal is under .0001. You measure .4 at the moment. If you broke open your seal, you would measure around 400. The scale goes up to 10000. Theoretically, Kami-sama measures 8000. We've been told that His power is twenty times that of an unsealed First Class Unrestricted Licensee."

"And Cevn...he was off the scale?"

"Yep...the display maxed out _past_ 10000!"

Belldandy looked tenderly at her sister. She didn't want to inform her younger sister that one of her mechas wasn't working like it should. Every time she had done this, the sensitive Skuld had pouted angrily; sometimes isolating away for decades somewhere in Yggdrasil.

"But there _must_ be a mistake," she convinced herself, feeling resolved at the impossibility that Skuld had described.

"Skuld, you should check it out and see if...it recorded accurately. Maybe it was...shook up by all the craziness this afternoon with our unwanted guests," she said diplomatically. Skuld frowned at her elder sister's attempt to tell her that her Shinseisensor Mk II was wrong.

"If it didn't work, it wouldn't be measuring _your_ powers right now. But it is...therefore it _works_!" Skuld argued. Urd walked in the room and Skuld pointed the Shinseisensor Mk II at her. It registered .008.

"Hey, isn't that a little low for an Earth Spirit Grade? Shouldn't Urd have one twentieth of my resting powers?" Belldandy asked.

"Huh, lemme see that!" Urd said, looking with interest at the measuring device. After Skuld explained it to her, she commented; "That toy of yours must be messed up. I _have_ more power than that thing says," she exclaimed. Proudly shaking her head, she tousled her hair.

Skuld scrunched up her face.

"No you don't Urd! You couldn't even do anything today when those mean guys came by!" Skuld retorted angrily. By degrees, her angry face softened with the sad realization that her sisters just didn't believe her. Then a circuit switched on in her heart; the circuit that responded whenever Skuld was confronted with too much criticism.

"_Waaaah_! You _both_ think it's broken! You _both_ think it doesn't work! No one understands all the hard work that goes into my inventions! After all, they _are_ inventions...nobody's thought of them before!" Her pride was dashed by Urd's callous remarks about her divine power sensor, coupled with Belldandy's comment about how it might "have been shook up."

Belldandy looked at Urd with accusing eyes, her face ruefully saying "now you've done it!" Urd rolled her eyes and shrugged her shoulders as Skuld scampered out of the room tearfully.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Urd looked at her sister with a serious expression. A silent air of resentment passed between her and Bell. She didn't _mean_ to get Skuld all riled up; but the look on Belldandy's face made it clear to her that, in Bell's mind, she was thinking that Urd had screwed up again.

"Belldandy, my powers are almost gone!" she finally said, breaking the staredown between her and her younger sister.

"Urd, you go and upset Skuld like that...then you come to me and complain that your powers are almost gone. Have you no sympathy for your little sister?"

"I do! I really do. But when those uglies came here, they beat up Keiichi and pulled a gun on Cevn. I tried to call on some lightning to zap the guy with the gun. _Nothing_ happened."

Belldandy grew red in the face at the mention of Keiichi getting beaten up. Urd saw her sister's wrathful mien and cringed, thinking she was the source of Belldandy's ire.

"Skuld didn't tell me that. Neither did Keiichi," Belldandy said angrily, light around her fingertips deforming to a shade of electric blue.

"Bell, it's been taken care of. They'll never come here again!"

"How could they do that to Keiichi?" she said, her resolute anger diminishing only slightly.

"They're jerks. Human scumbags. They actually called Skuld a 'cute little girl' and they threatened me. The ugly fat guy who was their boss wanted me to become a...a...prostitute, of all things." She grew angry at the remembrance of the fat gangster.

Belldandy relaxed a little. Smiling faintly, she imagined Skuld's reaction. One of the things Skuld hated most in the known universe was to be called a "kid." Her face remained stern at the idea of someone invading her house.

"But Keiichi stood up for all of us! I didn't think he had it in him!" she added, still reeling from her inability to thwart their encounter with the dark side of human nature.

"You just don't know my Keiichi very well._ I_ know that he's brave and sincere. But..how is it that Keiichi isn't hurt?" she asked Urd.

"Somehow, when Cevn confronted them and they left, all of his pain left too," Urd guessed. It was the only plausible explanation. Urd glanced at her two hands as she splayed her fingers wide.

"But what about my powers? They are only a part of what they should be. Hmmm...Skuld's mecha could be right. After all, I wasn't able to conjure up any lightning earlier..." Urd thought out loud. She abruptly dashed out of the room before Belldandy could get a word in edgewise.

"She's _so_ impulsive," Belldandy thought, still wanting to find out more about the chaos that ensued earlier in the day. Of course, that didn't matter to Urd; Bell's curiosity seldom stood in the way of one of Urd's hair-brained schemes.

Urd slid open Skuld's door and saw the youngest Goddess sitting on a futon, crying into a pillow.

"Snfff, don't bother me, leave me alone!" she stated, not even looking up in reaction to the intrusion.

"Skuld I'm sorry. I think your device _works_. But I need you to try it once more on Bell and me...and the mortals," Urd said in a rapid-fire diction. Skuld only heard the "I'm sorry" part...she slowly stood up and pointed her finger at Urd with righteous anger.

"You _better_ be sorry! My Shinseisensor Mk II was able to detect Mara's aura before. It's the only device of its kind that can detect Demons, Gods and Mortals," she proudly said as she stroked the lines of the handheld sensor lovingly.

"Okay okay okay! Let's get a move on, Skuld!"

They stopped in front of the sister's bedroom and pointed the Shinseisensor Mk II at Keiichi and Megumi, who were arguing in the living room. It registered .00009 for both of them.

Skuld tossed it to Urd and said, "Here, you measure me."

Urd tried to find the 'on' button, then pressed it and pointed the Shinseisensor Mk II square on Skuld's chest. The digital display read .005. Urd gulped as she realized that her first reading was so low that it was almost at Skuld's level--a Skuld with no powers due to her license revocation.

"I'll do you!" Skuld said as she grabbed the Shinseisensor Mk II deftly from Urd. She scanned Urd and the display read .008. Urd looked sad as she noticed there was no increase in her powers.

They both rushed into their bedroom excitedly. Belldandy noticed that Urd and Skuld were not fighting, much to her surprise. Then Skuld waved her Shinseisensor Mk II in front of Belldandy. Her power reading was .4, the same as before.

"Hey, I got an idea! Let's summon the Ninjettes. They're of supernatural origin...so if your mecha works, Skuld, it would read them as different than any of us or the mortals."

Things were happening too fast for Belldandy. Skuld seemed intent on proving her Shinseisensor Mk II. Bell shrugged and used the silent signal she carried on one of her bracelets to summon the three.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Yes, Mistress!" Kodama said two seconds later. The three Goddesses were surprised. It was as if the Ninjettes appeared out of thin air...no one saw them enter the bedroom.

"How can we serve you?" Hikari said.

"We need to scan you with this," Skuld said intently as she brandished the Shinseisensor Mk II. Senrigan looked at it warily.

"Is that a new kind of weapon? If it is, it looks totally inconspicuous," Senrigan observed. Skuld rolled her eyes as she explained that it wasn't a weapon.

Skuld scanned the three. The display read .002, roughly twenty times that of the mortals. She reflected for a moment, then concluded that it was just about right for the Ninjettes.

The three Ninja girls remained. Belldandy noticed that Kodama seemed uncomfortable about something. She was shuffling around, but not moving, her hands held behind her back. Normally, they would have left as soon as their task with Skuld was finished.

"Something's wrong here," Belldandy worriedly noted. The other two Ninjettes were also fidgeting.

"M..Mistress, we have a boon to ask of you," Kodama said, as if she had anticipated Belldandy's question.

"I thought you already had some kind of those smoky ninja grenades for that," Belldandy replied as Skuld made a face.

"A boon! They said a boon! That means they want you to do a big favor for them," Urd said, turning to her sister and yelling.

"Ohhhhh...that's so sweet. What can I do for you, Kodama?"

"Well, we...we've been alone for the past year here, mistress."

"Not really, you have all of us and Banpei for company," Skuld said cheerily, setting down her Shinseisensor Mk II to listen. Urd sighed at her younger sister's naivety...she immediately knew what Kodama meant by "alone". Skuld was just too young to pick up on such womanly topics of discussion.

"This is embarrassing to say...but we have no mates. In all of Japan, there are no men like us."

"Maybe Megumi could find some...her being a guy magnet and all," Urd suggested flippantly. "So, they want to have boyfriends," she thought. "This could be _very_ interesting!"

"Urd, that was rude!" Belldandy interrupted as Kodama continued. "We talked to Cevn and he told us that we should...ask you to..." Kodama held her arm up over her face so that her sleeve concealed her feelings of shame. This was a serious breach of giri...she was embarrassed that her heart had dominated her feelings so strongly that she was actually going to ask her Mistress to do something for _her_. To Kodama, this was a complete reversal of the Ninja bushido...the code of honor that dictated that she should serve her master, not the other way around. She sighed, clenched her teeth, and said it.

"That we should ask you to find us some male ninjas or create them the way evil Mara created us," she asked in a shaky voice.

After a brief pause, the three girls broke into animated descriptions about how lonely they were and how much they wanted male companionship. Skuld reacted to this with indifference, while Belldandy listened intently. Urd, however, was reduced to tears when she heard their plaints. She knew all too well the effects of "impossible loneliness"...their situation struck her to the quick.

Belldandy raised a blanket to her eyes as she also succumbed to tears. Finally the romantically imperturbable Skuld started crying too. Even she could recognize a woman's loneliness.

"Those three really like to talk," Urd noted as they continued describing how their martial exploits which would be more challenging, more complete with male ninja.

"If we make some men for you, you'll be marital artists instead of martial artists," Urd said.

"I want mine to look like Mifune Toshiro!" Kodama exclaimed.

Belldandy decided in her mind to help them. With Megumi's situation, her upcoming vacation with Keiichi and who knows whatever else, she would be too busy to do anything before they left. She looked at the three, then assumed the dignity appropriate to a Lady of the House.

"Kodama, Hikari, Senrigan. I have decided to grant your boon. I cannot do it until Keiichi and I arrive back from our...mission to the south. So you must continue to bravely defend our house. Especially during our upcoming 'mission'."

"Speaking of defending our house, where were you guys about two hours ago?" Urd asked.

"We were training in the hills."

"Well, we could have used you...mmmph!" Belldandy put a hand over Urd's mouth and dismissed the three girls before Urd could tell them about the gangster problem they had earlier.

"What'd you do that for, sis? They are supposed to defend our house, aren't they?"

"Yes, Urd, but did..." Belldandy started to say.

"Of course you didn't see how guilty they felt about asking Elder Sister for help. Just think how totally wrecked they would feel if they knew that those big ugly creeps came by while they were gone!" Skuld said excitedly.

"And what if they would have been_ here_? Those sickening men would have been filleted like fresh trout!" With this, the three Goddesses argued for a half hour about the hows-and-whys of granting the Ninjette's request.

"But what about my lost powers?" Urd broke in, redirected the debate.

"What about them? You're more trouble with them than without them!" Skuld said sharply.

"And _who_ stood in front of you to defend you against those bad men earlier today?" Urd sharply chastised her sister. This took the wind out of the counter that Skuld was preparing. Skuld looked at Urd, suddenly ashamed of her fighting attitude towards her eldest sibling.

"I know how we can find out about your waning powers," Belldandy said with a finger pointing up at the sky.

"We should call Yggdrasil and find out. They would know. At least Peorth would know."

Skuld and Urd nodded their heads at this. They retired to the dining room while Belldandy dialed the GRO number. Skuld of course didn't want to go anywhere near a phone after her recent experience with the Almighty and her license suspension.

_"Hello, Goddess...zzzzzt...Relief Office."_

"Peorth! How are things up there in Yggdrasil?"

_"Belldandy! Why are you...zzzt...hear from you. It's total chaos up here!"_ Belldandy could hear the rapidfire shouting of consternated voices in the background.

_"A short while ago, we had a sequence of blackouts. All the power from Yggdrasil simply...zzzzt...on and off for a few moments. It's back on now, barely. But _-everything-_ is off-line. I'm surprised the phone works! The computer system...zzzt...down, so you guys will have...zzzt...conserve your power. We don't...zzzt...know when the Mainframe Sysops will be able to reboot it. Even Kami-sama's floating chair...zzzt...it's _-all-_ crashed!"_

Belldandy staggered backwards with this news and crumpled to a seated position on the floor. Skuld and Urd looked at her with anxious faces bordering on panic. Seeing their sister react so strongly...they expected some really bad news.

_"We have no idea what happened, something...bzzt...draining power...zzzztzzzzt"_

"Peorth! Peorth!" Belldandy shouted into the phone. The line was dead.

Looking at her sisters, Belldandy tried to explain what Peorth had told her. Urd and Skuld reacted with disbelief when Belldandy told them about the blackout.

"That's...incredible. Do you think that was another one of Peorth's lies?" Urd finally said after the shock wore off.

"No. I could hear all sorts of yelling in the background. The line kept going out. They were shouting about Yggdrasil being off-line."

"Oh no...not those _moon bracelets _again!" Urd said, her voice tinged with misery.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

We saw Keiichi and Belldandy off with fanfare this beautiful Saturday morning. It was Tanabata...the festival days of mid-summer. This was obviously going to be a big chapter in their lives. Despite all of the changes, this would be the first time that they would be alone, just the two of them for two whole weeks. I felt happy for both my friends. Tanabata was indeed an auspicious time to go. Based on the ancient Chinese legend, Tanabata was traditionally the one time during the year where two lovers could meet. A mid-summer's night dream for the romantically inclined. Tanabata honored the myth of the Weaver Maiden and the Shepherd Boy; lovers who were doomed to be apart except for one day in the year...where they would use the Milky Way as a sort of 'star-bridge' and see each other. It was an Asian version of the Persephone/Calliope legend.

Keiichi informed me that Tanabata, besides being a big summer festival holiday, was something of the equivalent of Valentine's Day. It was a holiday for lovers in Japan.

Last night, Urd announced that she had concocted pills for Megumi that would counteract the 'beauty spell' that Belldandy had put her under. All good intentions aside, Megumi received the news with relief. The past two days, she had been a virtual shut-in in the house, after receiving dozens of "goddess of love" letters from men she had briefly met on the street. Urd informed us that she had tried the pills on herself...with the result that she couldn't stand to look at herself in the mirror for more than a glance without being repulsed. We all laughed at her description of the self-test.

Genji was going to move in with us the week after Sayoko went to treatment in Okinawa, but due to the recent events, Megumi had thought it wise that he remain at his parent's house until she got 'better'. She had reluctantly called him after her recovery from the facial injuries, inventing the fiction that she had a case of the summer flu and needed to rest up. After I left for China, he would use my room...Sayoko would be back before I returned if she completed her treatment as scheduled.

Megumi took two pills and asked the resident male observers--Keiichi and myself--to see if Urd's potion made a difference. I had been avoiding Megumi out of sheer desperation...every time I saw her, I would develop an instant attraction to her and then my abuse issues would kick in and send everything into an insane frenzy. Keiichi had it equally bad...he already had a girlfriend; so whenever he saw Megumi, he had to fight to avoid forgetting Belldandy...who would shoot him a look of displeasure when he ignored her due to Megumi's influence. To make matters worse, Urd used Megumi's 'hyper beauty' as an excuse to play all sorts of pranks on Keiichi and I. We both decided that we were going to gang up on Urd and totally humiliate her after this all blew over.

Anyway, last night I saw a complete change come over Megumi. She was still a beautiful young woman, but I didn't feel the fanatic need to absorb myself in her. Urd's medicine was working...thank God.

In the present moment, I felt a sad stirring in my heart. Keiichi and Belldandy had grown to be my fond friends over the past several months I had lived here in Japan. I was going to China in a few days, so this was the last time I would see them for a while. I had bought both of them several presents for their vacation, a clumsy attempt to say "thank you".

"Thanks, Cevn," Keiichi said as he unwrapped the package and examined the electronic compass. I had found it in an electronics store: it was a clock, radio, mini-TV, weather forecaster, satellite geo-locator, radar sensor and several other things. Belldandy smiled as she opened up her present...a white novelty jacket with a stylized Kobo Daishi on the back. I had bought a matching jacket for Keiichi as well. I also grabbed them some imported incense for the hotel rooms and outdoors, which required some explaining as Keiichi didn't understand the concept of aromatic incense.

They gave me a gift as well. Belldandy had knitted a red scarf with a picture of Tiananmen on it. Keiichi looked at me and snickered as I beheld the scarf with a mixed expression. It was very nicely knit, but the 34-degree heat reminded me that it wasn't necessary. It would even be hotter in Beijing.

"A winter scarf in the summer?" I asked. She told me that it was a scarf that would keep me cool at night, working in the opposite manner from a real scarf. I tried it on and felt immediate relief from the heat. Then everyone had to try it on to examine its effect. Keiichi gave me a new camera to take pictures. He had noticed that the camera I had bought when I first came to Makuhari was defective...it had a hairline crack in the lens.

We cheerfully said our goodbyes at the Chiba Minato station as they boarded the Keiyo railcar. Megumi drove us back to Makuhari. The rest of the weekend for me would mean packing and confirming travel arrangements. Monday, I would meet with Dr. Ogawa for a final session before leaving Tuesday for Beijing.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Are you excited about your trip to China? I know I would be, if I were in your place," Dr. Ogawa said to me.

"Yes, it's the third time I've been there to study. I really liked it the first time I studied at BeiDa."

"Hmm...how do you think you'll handle your depression there? You've told me that you were depressed several times in the past few weeks and a little bit around the weekend."

"Yes...I just felt bad that my two roommates were going off on a vacation. I'm going to miss them. I was also a little envious of their loving relationship. Sometimes, despite my happiness for them...it reminds me just how lonely I am. See, here they are going to Shikoku with each other while I'm going to China by myself," I replied, feeling bittersweet.

"Do you think you'll meet anyone there? I mean, meet a woman?"

"I don't plan on it. I have to finish a dissertation and defend it...in Chinese. Not to mention establishing the reciprocity agreement between N.I.T. and BeiDa. You know how hard a dissertation is, Dr. Ogawa." I noticed a lack of empathy on her face regarding the rigors of completing and defending a dissertation.

"How have you been coping with the loneliness, lately?"

"It's utterly hopeless. I am convinced that I will never fall in love again. Or at least to the degree I did with my ex-wife."

"We've talked about you and her. I've known many people that have lost a spouse and have recovered their romantic life, after a period of grief. You lost her nine years ago...isn't it time you stopped grieving?"

"Dr. Ogawa, I don't think anyone ever moves beyond grieving that kind of loss. Besides, I've still have all these sexual abuse issues, not to mention so many other pressures."

"So what? Why won't you let go of her?"

"Because she is the only woman I ever truly loved. You have to see it from my perspective...I had never been in a relationship before. I was in early recovery and I had begun to address the pain of my abuse. Then, by some miracle, I was able to let her in...or maybe she forced her way in; I could never figure that one out. I used to think to myself that love is some kind of incredible coincidence...I mean here we were moving in random directions. Somehow our lives intersected out of the millions of possible choices. Then we were able to deal with the changes. I meet many people everyday, but not _the one_. Then I met her. She was the one.

"She was the kind of woman I would drop everything for, go fetch a banana split at a moment's notice...and if she didn't like it, I would apologize and go back to get her the chocolate croissant she really wanted. And I wouldn't regret making the second trip at all."

"So you don't think there's another 'one'?" Dr. Ogawa asked.

The memories came back to me in a flood. All the good times. The many times I wanted to talk to her about my abuse...and when I summoned my courage and told her, she _still stayed with me_. Watching the sunset side by side. Pillow fights. Getting married. It was truly a happy period in my life. But it ended horribly.

Dr. Ogawa saw the tears in my eyes and asked what was causing me so much pain.

"At the end...she stopped talking to me. Our sex life was nonexistent; she kept going out late at night while I was studying hard in school. She stopped attending recovery meetings...she didn't do anything about her own addiction. I pleaded with her to work on herself. Then I found out she was seeing another man. Actually, several other men. I was crushed. But then it got worse. The next week I found a needle, spoon and drugs in our apartment. It was if my whole life was a fresh, crisp sheet of paper at that point--then this one event crumpled it.

"I knew that she was gone...that she was lost to me. The only woman I could ever truly love. Taken away by her own drug addiction. And I couldn't do a thing. So I moved out and buried myself in school to avoid the pain. A few months later, I got a call from her parents. She had died of a heroin overdose.

"Her parents actually _blamed me_ for their daughter's death. I couldn't even go to the funeral, I was so upset. It was as if I had searched through the entire Gobi desert for a single delicate bloom. Then I found a beautiful flower...and while I soaked my eyes in its beauty and aroma, someone poured gasoline over it and set it aflame. I...snfff...watched it burn into cinders right before my own eyes. It...killed a part of me," I said, gasping and choking on my tears.

Dr. Ogawa was crying, her hand held over her face.

"So you see, Dr. Ogawa...that's it. I'm screwed. I grew up with such traumatic abuse in my childhood that it causes me to repress all my feelings towards women...towards love. I developed a cold, hardened heart while I was actively using drugs. Then I get clean, and somehow I met a wonderful woman. My one chance at being in love. I finally break through all the pain and fear and say that I'm in love with her...and through another miracle, she is able to stay with me despite all my pain. Then the woman I fall in love with relapses and dies. So I'm left with no love, no heart, no hope and all this pain. End of story. When I think of ever loving another woman, I only feel dead on the inside. My heart is dead!"

"That's horrible!" she sniffled out between sobs.

"Don't you think I know that? I'm sick and tired of hearing 'oh, how terrible' from everyone! No wonder I'm depressed...why can't anything help? I'm scared of women...actually_ scared_. I live in a house with several women; I have an incredibly difficult time trying to simply be their friend. My head is filled with anxiety and paranoia. Yet they like me. The youngest one views me as an older brother figure sometimes. The rambunctious older sister actually apologized to me one day. I _know_ they like me. One of them knitted me something to take to China with me. But I just can't accept my life this way...I can't go on like this!"

I looked up and saw a shimmering effect in the office, like the kind that occurs on a flat surface in the summer. Dr. Ogawa and the air around her seemed to deform; the wrinkles smoothing out into her face, her eyes becoming brighter and her hair filling out and growing long. She was shedding years before my eyes...and beginning to resemble someone I knew...

I stared wordlessly at the person sitting in front of me in Dr. Ogawa's chair. I couldn't believe what had just happened.

"WHAT THE F...!"

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Urd had found the abandoned office months ago. She created some furniture based on the doctor's offices she saw on her soaps. Then she put up the storefront ad, hoping that Cevn would see it and respond. No one else would, she guessed. From what little she knew of him from his life in Hawaii, she was able to determine that he was depressed, had lived through lots of trauma and was in need of someone to confide in. He had told her so much, back in Hawaii when she first met him and once again when he newly arrived in Japan.

She was actually surprised when he showed up in her office. Posing as an elderly gaijin woman, she would appear completely innocuous. He wouldn't suspect a thing. Not to mention that this would make him feel more comfortable to talk about himself. It was thrilling, offering her an almost seductive-like excitement. Drawing him in. Making him comfortable enough to disclose his past. Learning about all his secrets. Without him knowing who he was _really_ talking with.

Urd was definitely interested in finding out what made this guy tick. The part of her that relished human drama was totally engaged in this diversion. Besides, she wanted to find out _why he was afraid of being attracted to women_. The way he reacted to her the first day she met him was incredible--absolutely bizarre. Morbid curiosity compelled her to find out why. What was his secret?

And when he started talking about those secrets, Urd felt something inside of her change. She remembered the first time he told her about the abuse in detail. Urd found herself choking back tears. Her heartstrings were not only pulled, they were yanked. Then it got more intense. He told her about living alone on the streets at_ Skuld's_ age with no one to protect him or care for him. It was utterly unbelievable. One night, he spent over five hours taking her along into the depths of the deep pain he felt in his life. Urd found herself wanting to shut up her ears...she couldn't stand hearing what he was describing. Her heart felt like it almost pounded out of her chest that night.

She felt sympathy for him...and something else. He was so strong, yet so fragile. He was a good-looking guy--in fact, he looked years younger than his 29 years of age. But inside, despite the pain, he was so _good_. Urd felt an unspoken but deep admiration for him.

Urd was no longer motivated by the desire to probe his secrets...he had willingly exposed them to her view. She felt an emerging feeling that she herself had repressed for eons. As he continued meeting with her, Urd began to feel a strong desire to help him conquer his fears and his pain. Perhaps this was why Kami-sama had assigned Cevn to her.

It amazed her to see both sides of him. Cevn could be one way at home, while here in the place where he laid bare his soul...it didn't seem conceivable that he was the same person she knew back at the compound. The night she stood with him on the porch in the rain, she decided that she had to try and understand him, not out of curiosity, but out of caring.

Urd began to feel a sisterly love for him. Maybe even more...she just didn't know. She sensed a growing empathy with him. Like her, his chances of finding love were dashed. But unlike her, he was able to create so much good around him and not even recognize it.

Then there was the weird stuff. The Enigma Book and his ability to read the God's _and_ the Demon's Language. She was speechless with shock the first night she heard the God's Music coming from the studio of instruments he had set up in their house. His ability to resist Mara's possession _twice_. Standing up to the Almighty and confronting Him about Skuld's license suspension. Now, just a few days ago, if what Skuld had said was true, then he may well be the most powerful being in the universe. It was inconceivable. All of this...the result of one phone call...one assignment from the Goddess Relief Office.

An assignment that should have been agented by a GRO Goddess...but instead was directed to her!

She remembered his wish...the wish for balance and serenity...and then how that wish seemed to flower in their lives. He was going to _give away_ the God's Music, instead of making a fortune on it. He had several times exhibited a dogged selflessness in the face of adversity. Urd _knew_ that he belonged there, in Makuhari, as part of their family. Because of Cevn, Skuld was no longer a wedge between Belldandy and Keiichi. What was most perplexing to Urd was the fact that Cevn didn't set out to try and change anything between Belldandy, Keiichi and Skuld. The simple fact of his presence in their lives had done this...

And now today...Urd had heard the crushing bitterness in his voice as he related how he lost his first wife. She_ died!_ Urd remembered Belldandy's scream of pain when she thought Keiichi had died. Her stomach knotted when she realized that Cevn had actually _lived_ through that kind of loss...the loss of the love of his life.

Urd felt an explosion of deep pain when she witnessed the despair he felt. She knew now, that her heart and his were in some ways...parallel.

Then to her shock, her powers faded completely. As Peorth had warned, her power had run out...and she was no longer able to maintain her disguise. With a fearful helplessness, she could only watch as she resumed her natural form. She knew what he would think, but she had to look at him once more. She saw cruel shock and betrayal register on his face...and felt a crushing feeling in her chest as she realized that she had caused it. It was her fault. She'd screwed up again.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"URD, WHAT THE F...!"

"W..WHY??" he screamed in a voice wracked with anguish. Cevn got up out of his chair and backed away from her. Momentarily speechless, Urd got up and went after him, not knowing what else to do. She was filled with shame.

"I...I can explain! I didn't mean it! I didn't want it to turn out this way. I only wanted to help! I wanted to help you...you have so much..." she cried out.

"So much what?...so much pain...so that you can take a morbid interest in? So much abuse...so that you can experience it vicariously? So much wasted potential? Wanted to find out how a mortal loser ticks?"

"No, no no no! Cevn, you have to try to understand..."

Cevn wheeled on her.

"Understand what? Do you have any idea of what you've done! You have utterly destroyed me. If I didn't care about you and the rest, it would be no big deal. But I _do_ care. And now any trust that I have in you...is _gone_. It's as gone as a piece of glass dashed into a running train. How can I trust any of you now? Why should I? For all I know, you could have been telling them everything I've told you here."

"I wouldn't ever do a thing like that to you!"

"Yeah, like I'd believe that after you did _this_. I shared my deepest pain and hardship...with you. I came here because I need help. I desperately need help. Instead of getting any help...you betrayed me completely. You've ruined any chance I have of being friends with the others. Why in God's name did you do this? I don't ever, EVER want to see you again. I'm moving out of the house tonight. I can't live with you or any of my friends any more. You...I can't even think of what to say. I'm totally disappointed in you, Urd!"

"_NOOOO!_ Don't leave me. Don't leave us!" Urd shrieked. She tried to grab Cevn from behind as he kicked open the office door with a crash. He pushed her away firmly; she fell back against the wall softly.

"CEVNNN! NO!" she cried out. "You can't walk out on me, on all the people that care about you!"

"_Nobody_ cares about me. I'm already dead to the world. If what you did is 'caring', I don't want it! Urd, I promise you this...you will never, ever see me again. None of you will."

He started down the hallway as Urd grabbed him around the waist with a desperate grip. With forced steps, he dragged her as she clung on to him futilely.

"It was a mistake. A mistake! Please understand, it was a mistake! I just wanted to know...to help," she shouted over and over. Cevn reached down and pried her fingers loose from his waist. He turned to face Urd, seeing her slumped on the floor in the hallway.

"People don't care about how much you know...they want to know about how much you care."

He slammed the hallway door shut as Urd collapsed to the floor, her face in her hands. Reality was brutal, caving in her usual self-confidence.

"_I didn't mean to hurt you..._" she said weakly, over and over, long after the wooden floor stopped sounding his footsteps.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Megumi was listening to some music in the living room when Cevn walked in. After the kinetically-charged events of the past week, all she wanted was some down time. The house seemed to be strange without Belldandy and Keiichi brightening it with their love. She was so excited about Genji's coming to stay with them during the summer. A little while ago, Skuld had come out her 'Skuld Lab's' room to argue with her about whether the skyscrapers in Shinjuku could withstand an 8.0 Richter Scale earthquake.

"Where did _that_ idea come from," Megumi wondered. The argument was friendly, but fraught with technical jargon and theory. At times, she was grateful to have Skuld to argue with...it helped to keep her mind's edge sharp. She noticed Cevn enter the house and decided to enjoin him in their little discussion/argument.

"Hey Cevn, Skuld and I were wondering what would happen if Tokyo got hit by an earthquake? What do you think?" He walked right past them without even acknowledging their presence. Skuld and Megumi exchanged a startled glance.

Megumi was instantly worried. Cevn seemed very upset about something. It felt as if a dark storm had entered the house in the form of a human being. They went to his room and heard the sounds of drawers opening and closing. She opened his shoji door a crack and peeked inside. Skuld was standing behind her, looking over her shoulder.

"What's the matter with Cevn?" Skuld asked.

Megumi couldn't answer...she was too upset at what she saw.

Cevn was packing.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Megumi and Skuld held each other and cried after he left. Skuld was devastated. Cevn had never said a word to either of them the whole time. He just ignored them as if he didn't even know them. What really got to Megumi was his face. He was pale with shock and his eyes lidded with pain. He was shut down...completely shut down. Except for the tears wetting his cheeks.

They both stood in the doorway to his room as he filled his suitcase with random piles of clothes. She asked him repeatedly if she could help him, what was the matter, what was he doing? After he finished packing, he refused to answer her when she asked him where he was going. He wouldn't even look at Megumi or Skuld as he walked by them.

"You're not leaving until you tell us what is the matter, Cevn!" Megumi said as she stood in front of the living room door to block his exit. He simply turned around walked out through the sunroom door instead. Megumi shook with sobs as she watched him walk down the street and disappear into the night.

"Is...is he never going to come back?" Skuld asked.

"I don't know, Skuld," she answered between sobs.

"Where is Urd?" she wondered. "Why isn't she here...her little sister is going to lose it. _I'm_ going to lose it..."

She walked back into the house, emotionally shocked to the hilt. Skuld kept to her like a shadow, anxiously stroking her long black hair. Megumi sat down on the couch and tried to pull herself together. Her mind raced as she considered the options. Missing persons report. Call the police. Find Urd and see if she knew anything. Look in his room to see if there was anything to be learned. Call N.I.T. to see if he had gotten in trouble there. Call Keiichi.

She stood up and went into the dining room and pulled down the itinerary Keiichi had left.

"Hmm, third night...that would place them in Osaka if they kept to their plan," she said to herself.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Keiichi was sitting on the hotel bed playing mahjongg with Bell-chan. Megumi had given them a beautiful mahjongg set before they left and Keiichi was enjoying teaching Belldandy how to play. He knew that she could beat him in an instant if she wanted to, but long ago she had promised not to use her divine powers to manipulate any games, after that insane Life Sugoroku incident with Urd.

He looked out the window and saw the city lights of Osaka stretching towards the horizon. They had rented a room almost at the top of the hotel. The lights seemed out of place in comparison to the sites they visited earlier.

They had toured Osaka castle, as well as the Sumiyoshi Shrine and the Shitenno-ji Temple. All three were layered with the heaviness of history. Occasionally, Belldandy would relate some little known anecdote from the historical past, puzzling the tour guide while intriguing their tour group. But late in the afternoon, Keiichi's feet began to demand his attention...they were feeling a little sore from all the walking.

The previous night after arriving from Tokyo, they had gone dancing at Luna, a huge dance club in downtown Osaka with several live bands on venue. The disco was packed with salarymen and OLs. The office ladies all looked very animated in the midst of the dance club with their brightly revealing designer clothes; Belldandy seemed to know all of the name brands, pointing them out to Keiichi excitedly. They sat in a booth after dancing themselves sweaty and played a guessing game; which OL would go home with which salaryman. They danced almost until closing time, then walked back to the hotel. Hence his sore feet this evening.

Keiichi returned his attention to the game board. From their hotel room in the Dotombori district, they could see the beautiful lights of the advertisements reflecting off of the canal and the other tall buildings. It was a lovely urban landscape.

Keiichi was tossing down a set of tiles when the phone rang. He looked at Belldandy with a faceful of curiosity. She shook her head, indicating that she didn't order room service.

"Hello" he said.

_"Keiichi..."_ was all he heard before Megumi broke down into sobs.

"Megumi, are you all right?" he said, suddenly forgetting about mahjongg. His little sister was brokenhearted about something...he could tell by the unsteady waver in her voice.

"She's _really_ upset... Oh no, not Mom or Dad!" he thought with dire panic.

Belldandy saw Keiichi's expression change the moment he picked up the phone. In an instant, she was standing next to him, stroking his hair.

_"Keiichi...Cevn just moved out...snfff...he just packed his bags and left without a word."_

"Wha..what? He left? He moved out? Where's Skuld and Urd?"

Belldandy grabbed him lightly on the shoulders and relaxed his tension as he gasped loudly. Her eyebrows pulled down as she listened.

_"Skuld's right here with me. She's very upset. Urd hasn't come home yet from wherever she is,"_ the emotion swelled voice said through the phone. Keiichi thought it was extremely odd that Urd was out by herself; especially since Skuld was at home. He had noted that she seemed to be gone between 4 and 7 p.m. every Monday. This was a Monday, so maybe she would be home soon.

_"Keiichi...you don't think _we_ did anything to make him want to leave?"_ Megumi asked.

"No...no way! He really likes living with all of us. Something dreadful must have happened to make him pack up and leave. Are _you_ going to be all right, sis?"

There was a brief pause.

_"Yeah...as good as I can be under the circumstances. Thanks for asking, Keiichi! I'm really worried about Skuld...she's taking this really hard."_

"Right...put her on. I'll get Bell-chan on the phone here," He handed the phone to Belldandy, who cradled it to her ear.

"Waaahhh..huh..snff. He left without even a word, without saying..snff..goodbye!" Belldandy heard the pain in Skuld's voice as she cried out her frustration to her older sister.

_"I didn't do anything wrong! He just came in the house and packed his things and walked out. He never said a word about anything. Banpei didn't act like anything was wrong either. I'm really scared. What if Demoness Mara possessed him again?" _Skuld's anxiety-driven voice fired through the phoneline.

"Skuld, it's going to be all right. Just stay there with Megumi and keep her company. She's upset too. We'll see what we can do from here," she offered, trying to comfort her younger sister. After exchanging good-byes, she slowly hung up the hotel phone.

"Keiichi, you're not going to want to hear this, but we need to go back home. Skuld is about ready to..." Keiichi smiled at her with his incomparable eyes and gently held her hand.

"Of course we should return home. After talking to Megumi, I'd already made up my mind. We can always go on a vacation later. They need us," Keiichi said. He was so happy that his thoughts were in concord with Bell-chan's. The synergy between he and his divine girlfriend once more astounded him. She was willing to curtail a long awaited and much-deserved vacation, so she could be with her sister and Megumi.

"I love you so much, my dear Belldandy," he thought.

"And _that_ is why I need you...my love," Belldandy said to him, then kissed him lightly on the lips. Once more, Keiichi was willing to step aside from his personal interests and act for the good of everyone. He was such a wonderful man. Belldandy knew how excited he was at the prospect of spending two weeks alone with her. Now he had to give that up...and not a hint of remorse or bitterness tinged his voice. She pulled him to her and wrapped her arms around him, kissing him lingeringly on the lips.

"I...totally love you, Keiichi!"

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Megumi could only think of one more thing she could do. Talking to Keiichi seemed to reassure her a little. Skuld seemed much less shocked after talking to Belldandy. She picked up the phone and dialed.

"_Please be there, Genji,_" she hoped.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --


	18. Pt 18: Divisions

**Part 18: Divisions**

Megumi gasped out loud as she saw the kanji sprayed on Cevn's wall. It was "shi", the character for death. She was confused...she had watched Cevn pack and leave, but didn't notice _this_ written on the wall earlier.

"Please Genji...get here soon!" she mentally pleaded with unknown forces. She looked at Skuld, whose youthful beauty had suddenly erupted into sheer terror when she saw the character on the wall. Normally superstitious, the 'death' character frightened Skuld out of her wits; she grabbed hard onto Megumi's arm. Megumi was frightened at the implications of what was on the wall; Skuld's shivering presence beside her added to that fear.

Cevn was going to kill himself!

Sand and rocks spit out in streams underneath his bicycle as Genji raced to Megumi's house. Ever since Sayoko had wrecked the family's Lexus while his parents were away to supervise their Peruvian subsidiaries, he was limited to bike or bus. He cursed his luck again as he sweat-pedaled to the familiar intersection, then turned right. The streetlight opposite the temple entrance loomed up in the night and he peeled his bike inside, almost spilling over in his haste.

"Megumi!" he shouted into the night air. She ran out and saw him rushing towards the house. She ran to him and collapsed in his arms. "She must really be upset, she's shaking," he noted to himself as he held her, awkward in the presence of her clinging embrace.

Megumi looked up at Genji, who was just a couple cm taller than her...her morose state hyphenated the slight difference in height...he appeared to be ten feet tall at the moment. All she could spurt out was, "Cevn's gone and there's something horrible on the wall!"

"It's okay, it's okay!" he shouted repeatedly, trying to calm her. He grabbed her lightly by the arm and shook her gently to slow down her frenzied mood. He escorted Megumi back into the living room, and sat her down on the couch. Sitting down next to her, he turned to face her and asked her to tell him everything. Deep inside, however, he felt a strong pull towards her. In the light, her brown hair glowed radiantly and her light brown eyes beckoned him with a stunning beauty he had never noticed before. Through sheer force of will, he barely managed avoiding being hypnotized by her beauty.

"Man, I have never seen such a beautiful girl before...she's such a babe!" he said to himself, noticing her as if for the first time.

"I'm so scared!" They both turned to see Skuld standing next to Genji. She sat down on the zabuton next to Megumi.

"Y..you don't think that _g..ghosts_ or something put that sign on Cevn's wall, do you?" Skuld stammered. Her lightly complected skin was pale with superstitious affright.

Megumi related the whole story about Cevn's leaving. She looked at Genji's dark brown eyes and felt his compassion wash over her, like waterdrops on a delicate floral petal. She noticed that Genji seemed saddened at the abrupt departure of his friend. Yes, Cevn was a friend to all of them...he had brought her and Genji closer; he had arranged the confrontation that pulled Sayoko out of the morass of drug addiction and into rehabilitation on Okinawa. Now he was gone from their lives.

When she showed him Cevn's room, Genji gasped with shock when he beheld the big kanji for "death" sprayed on the wall. He visibly shivered. His modern sensitivity clashed with the traditional sensibilities. Genji was strongly interested in Japan's past: Noh, Kabuki, Bunraku, Kami-dans, and Shinto all fascinated him. The black character on the wall reminded him of kwaidan legends...and he fearfully backed out of the room.

"Hey, c'mon, lets look and see if he left anything that could give us any hint of where he's gone!" Megumi suggested. Genji didn't want to be in the room at all. It hinted at an unseen evil that was waiting to devour him and anyone else in the room. Why is it that the woman _always_ wants to explore a place while normal, sane people would run for their lives, he wondered. It was just like one of those American horror flicks. His fear deepened as he considered this point.

Genji and Megumi reluctantly searched the room. Skuld was too frightened to enter the room, so she 'volunteered' to 'stand guard' at the doorway. A scrap of paper tucked inside of an ancient-looking book caught Megumi's eye. The Enigma Book, she had heard Cevn call it. She pulled it out and read it aloud:

_I stand betrayed by one who is closest to me. Consider me as no longer being a living spirit. _

_To all of you, I am dead...you will never see me again. I have already created too much disruption in your lives. _

_Please forget that you ever knew me. Farewell and Sayonara,_

_cevn_

"Holy... What could have happened to make him do this?" Megumi said desperately, the shock of the note's content wearing on her. She heard a wailing crying and looked to see Skuld in the doorway, leaning against the shoji.

"Urd, where _are_ you? Your little sister is going to pieces." Megumi exclaimed desperately as they went into the hallway, travelers on a tragic pathway.

Unnoticed, a small figure with a blowtorch leapt out the window.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

I caught a cab to Narita International Airport post haste. I never wanted to see Japan again. I couldn't even look back as I left Makuhari. The cabby was overjoyed at the huge fare...he tried to make polite conversation with me but I just couldn't say a thing. We passed through Chiba and I sadly recalled the big Solar Car race that...no, I don't want to remember any of this. I was in shock, just like when I was thrown through a window as a child. My nerves felt like hot lead was coursing through them. I was clenching my hands into fists and bruxically grinding my teeth. I had never been so emotionally wounded...then I remembered all of the other emotional losses. Any recovery from _those_ painful episodes was torn apart by what Urd had done to me. I just wanted to fade away like a water puddle in the hot summer sun.

At the airport, I walked around in a stuporous daze until I found the sign: China National Airlines. I booked a ticket for Beijing Capital Airport and embarked on the next part of my journey.

I planned to complete my Ph.D. and the N.I.T. liaison work...I could at least do that much for good ol' N.I.T. But why did I give a damn about the Ph.D.? What good would it be? Ph.D.'s today are a dime a dozen. Why did I care about anything anyway?

Flying over the ocean, I imagined that I would just walk off into the Gobi desert...away from all civilization and those pestering sores known as people. I would disappear, just like all the aspirations I had discovered while living my new life in Japan...had vanished.

A broken man.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Belldandy somehow felt Skuld's anguish as they boarded the Shinkansen for Tokyo. She looked at Keiichi anxiously, regretting that the power shortage prevented her from simply transporting back to the house. Her face was hunched with sadness; Keiichi's downward glances didn't help matters either. To all the fellow train riders, they looked like a couple who had just broken up and still had to reluctantly return home together.

She forced a smile.

"Keiichi, I know that we're doing the right thing by coming home...I sense that Skuld needs her sister and Megumi needs her brother. Please try to understand that things will work out. The Ultimate Force...sob snff sob." She couldn't finish her attempt at cheering herself and Keiichi.

Keiichi smiled back at her, then buried his face in the JR magazine...so that his girlfriend wouldn't see his tears. He had no idea that Cevn's brief stay with them had impacted him so much.

"Cevn was an adopted older brother to Megumi, but to me...he's almost like the real thing," Keiichi sadly observed. He remembered all the fun times and the craziness that seemed to add a new flavor to the house when the crazy gaijin first moved in. He didn't even think of Cevn as a gaijin any more, as he spoke Japanese fluently and taught at Keiichi's college. He would be forever grateful for the fact that Cevn had turned Skuld away from antagonizing him for being in love with her sister. Now he was gone.

He felt a reassuring hand on his shoulder.

"Keiichi, it's okay to cry. Remember when you told us about the puppy you lost as a child. Things happen and people feel hurt. You must try to embrace your sadness...don't ever run away from it. You aren't alone...I feel sad too. Sadness shared is sadness lessened."

As always, Bell-chan's words of wisdom cast the whole situation in a new light. His culture had taught him that men don't show feelings unless they were hachigozake, or pub-crawling. Crying because of the disappearance of another guy...well most of his friends would think that it was weird. But Belldandy understood the shadings and nuances of his strong feelings much more than anybody else. He put down the magazine and held her as they both cried briefly, gently into each other's arms.

The night scenery flickered by, accompanied by the rattle and hum of the Shinkansen traveling at 210kph.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Urd was really, really plastered. After Cevn had rejected her attempts to explain herself, she went into a shock-like state and roamed downtown Makuhari. Torn between huge washes of powerful emotions, she had wandered into an izakaya and laid into the sake. After two bottles, she went in the back room and stumbled onto a gambler's den. After two more bottles, she had cleaned up the assets of all the players. They had naively assumed that she was some drunken gaijin woman, ripe for the plucking. After she undid a few buttons on her blouse to allow the men a glimpse of her cleavage, she went to work on them. Poor distracted souls. Even though she was drunk and without her Goddess powers, her keen intellect made short work of things. After two rolls of the dice, she could predict each roll if she wanted to. And she did.

"Whadda I do wish all dish yennn?" she said to herself as she stumbled around the downtown Makuhari square. She saw a Sporty police van roll by and slunk into the shadows, watching the cops going off somewhere for some reason.

"Dat's wwh...what I'll doo, I'll go...hic!...I'll go onna tripp!" she impulsively decided. "I..I alwaysh wanted to gooo to Swisherland!" She counted the money and boarded the late train for Tokyo.

Half an hour later, she was brought out of her stupor when she felt a grasping hand where it shouldn't be. She turned to see a young salaryman groping her thigh.

"You_ asshhole_!" she slurred in a shout and decked him with a right hook. She vaguely remembered that the JR trains were filled with 'gropers'; men who rode the trains solely to feel up women while the train was tightly packed. But at night, these men turned into rapists. It was an alarming problem that Japan Railways ignored but the folk-sense of the people accepted as evidence of the decline of Nippon.

She walked up to the young man, who looked like a greaseball hoodlum.

"You jerk!" she yelled as she kicked him in the crotch. He sucked in a huge gust of air and screamed, wincing in agony as he held himself. The railcar conductor approached her and Urd went into a blind fury. All the anger and disappointment came back to her. She knew she had screwed up royally with Cevn. Her impersonation of Dr. Ogawa had ended on a very sour note. She didn't know whom she was angrier with: herself for getting caught or Cevn for being so messed up. She tried to hit the hoodlum and missed by several feet, punching the conductor square in the jaw instead.

"That's it, you're getting off at the next stop!"

One telescoped moment later, Urd was on a platform looking at a railway sign that read: Tokyo Narita International Airport.

"Well, I guesssh thish mus be where I go onna tripp!" she said to herself as she headed towards the nearest counter.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

It was almost sunrise when Keiichi and Belldandy arrived home. The ride on the Shinkansen was a tenuous, stressful three hours. Then another hour on the JR Ueno and Soba lines to Chiba and finally the drive home. When he arrived, Megumi and Genji were both asleep on two of the three living room couches. He could hear a soft snoring from both as Belldandy went to her bedroom to check on Skuld and Urd.

"Elder Sister!" Skuld yelled as she leapt into Belldandy's warm protective embrace.

"Did he come back yet? Did he change his mind?" she asked.

Belldandy noticed that she had taken her gloves off; a rarity for Skuld. Skuld needed her gloves whenever she handled Mjolnir because it served as a ground against the highly powered mallet. It was obvious to Belldandy that she had been rubbing her eyes; they were red and heavy-lidded. She was shaking like a leaf; Belldandy tightened her embrace to absorb some of Skuld's fear.

Keiichi gently woke up Megumi by shaking her arm.

"Uhhhhnh uhh, Keiichi, you're back already? Oh, I'm so glad to see you, Big Brother!" she said as she hugged him. No, it wasn't a hug, Keiichi decided. It was the clinging hug of someone desperate for reassurance. He patted Megumi on the head just like he used when they were kids. She smiled girlishly at him, touched by the nostalgia of his gesture, and then asked him to follow her to Cevn's room.

"I don't know how he managed to spray paint this on the wall while Skuld and I were watching him, but look!" she said, pointing towards the grotesque character on the wall. Keiichi let out a slight gasp as he saw the character for 'death'. He wondered to himself how Cevn could have spray painted it...there was no spray paint anywhere on the compound. He examined the character and to his surprise, noted that it was_ burned_ into the wall.

Mara. It must be Mara.

Keiichi called a conference in the dining room while Genji slept, so Genji wouldn't overhear anything he shouldn't. They jointly arrived at a scenario: somehow Mara had possessed Cevn and 'steered' him out of the house towards her lair. Skuld's stomach turned as she remembered Mara's lair. This explained why he didn't talk to her or Megumi while he was preparing to leave.

Belldandy listened intently to the other's guesswork...but deep inside of her heart, she felt a reservation. If Mara was injured in the Demon Rally as Megumi had described, there was no way that she could have pulled this off. Unless she had enlisted another Demon to help her evil mission.

"Or what?" she thought. _Did_ she take Cevn from them?

"Where is Urd? Has anyone seen her?" Belldandy said, suddenly concerned for her older sister--who had been conspicuously absent from the proceedings.

"I haven't seen her at all!" Megumi and Skuld chimed in.

Skuld felt a shadow fall in her soul, as if Urd had somehow been recalled to Yggdrasil and they wouldn't see her on the mortal plane again. A chill ran up and down her spine.

"This is totally weird! This kind of thing fascinates Big Sister, but yet she is nowhere to be seen. I wonder if she did something to upset Cevn, or she took him somewhere?" she thought, then realized that she had spoken her mind out loud.

"Don't be silly," Keiichi and Belldandy both told Skuld. "Urd is probably right around the corner, listening in to this discussion."

"I bet she made him leave. She must have screwed up...that's why she isn't here!" Skuld replied with self-assurance.

The smile on Belldandy's face concealed her suspicions about Urd. Megumi described Cevn as being very upset as he was packing. Bell decided that she not only didn't believe that Mara had anything to do with Cevn's departure, but that Skuld was right...Urd had something to do with it. The only missing piece in the puzzle was Urd.

Where _is_ she?

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

It was my third time in China. As I arrived at Beijing Capital Airport on the redeye, dawn illuminated a light summer shower. Gray outside, gray inside. I debarked and stepped onto the moving sidewalk that led to the main terminal building.

My first time in Beijing, the Beijing Capital Airport had been dimly lit, with bare strands of incandescent lights on its three-story tall ceiling. It had reminded me of a warehouse, not an airport terminal. None of the bathroom hand-dryers worked; it seems they were there for show. The signs were all cheap painted metal, not like the neons of American airports. The terminal was noisy, it smelled of burnt food, and looked uninviting. The next time I went to study in China, there was a new terminal that was almost on par with regional airport facilities.

Flying in to Capital Airport, I noticed the illuiinated sleek red curves of the new Main Terminal, T3. T3 was the largest single continuous airport terminal in the world, even larger than the the 1.7km long Kansai International terminal in Osaka. I could see why the locals touted that it looked like a dragon at night; the triangular windows arrayed on each wing of the terminal resembled golden scales. The whole was shapes in the "Y" shape of the Chinese character for "people". As the plane taxied in for the final approach, the terminal provided brief eyecandy that somewhat distracted me from the suicidal thoughts and plans rummaging my heart.

A huge part of me felt like it had been bitten off or ripped away. I tried to avoid thinking about Japan. I had just gotten used to ignoring my life in Hawaii and the Mainland, which had ended with my transformation, courtesy of the Divine Goddess Office and the Ultimate Force. Now, because of Urd's culpability, I had to leave Japan. I was truly alone. The part of me that had been torn off sure weighed a lot. I was crushed into morose pangs of aloneness.

_What is the weight of a heart?_

The shift from hiragana-katakana-kanji to hanzi took a couple of minutes. The vendors were just starting to set up their wares while I supped tea at the upper-level restaurant. I caught the bus to BeiDa. The esplanaded highway had been upgraded for the recent visit of the American President; the flower plantings offered resilient dashes of color in the midst of drizzling rain. I remembered a vow I had made years ago...I would ask the woman I was attracted to whether she would let go of earthly existence if an angel invited her and me to travel into spiritual realms. Something my sponsor had taught me. I had always fantasized about exchanging love-poems with the 'invisible she'; the woman of my dreams. But I had no dreams...each page of life was cloaked in insufferable wretchedness.

The bus pulled up onto the Haidan and I got off. Everywhere I could see, people were bicycling to their daily routines. The Haidan was Beijing's equivalent of Tokyo's Akibahara...every electronic gizmo you could want was for sale here...for a price. The only difference was that every store was owned by BeiDa. The sales were a significant source of green energy which subsidized the University.

Walking towards the main gate, I carried two large travel bags filled with papers and some clothes. I presented my papers to the Red Guard at the South Gate, who looked at me severely, and then allowed me to enter BeiDa. I felt like an abandoned man, abandoned even by myself. I was here, but I didn't know what had kept me from killing myself. I guess I was just too tired to attempt suicide. So I'm here, like an automaton following a programmed routine.

The South Gate was located in the newer part of campus. Like N.I.T., BeiDa was divided into two sections. The southern section was mostly turn-of-the-century halls and dorms, six students to a room with triple bunk beds and two desks. The northern campus looked like something out of the Qing Dynasty with its imperial buildings and the tall spire of the Water Pagoda.

I paused at Triangle Park. The source of much of modern Chinese history. Here was where the nascence of the May 4th Movement, the Tiananmen Square Liberty Incident of 1989 and other social movements had occurred. History has its pageant here. Instead of inflammatory posters, there was a preponderance of advertisements for all sorts of student essentials and the plethora of TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language) tutorial notices. Was this the terminus of the revolutionary heart?

I recoiled inside when I considered the word 'heart'. When I thought of my heart, I felt empty...yet ironically filled with emotional loss and pain.

In Chinese, a colloquial etymology described the character of 'heart' in three parts. First as a hand reaching down. In traditional history, men and women were not allowed to touch unless they were married or in the same family; lovers had to exchange gifts by setting them down on the table. They could hand the gifts to each other. Second, underneath the table and hand, a stylized heart was depicted. Finally, below this was a depiction of bamboo linked by strings; this represented the next step in the evolution of Chinese writing after the plastron turtle shells and bullock scapulae. Later, scrolls were placed in the bamboo for preservation. Giving and receiving hearts forever...the Chinese definition of love. At least in the fabular vein.

I would never love. With all that had happened in the last 12 hours, my fears of women were only reinforced. My trust of friends was shattered.

I entered Shao Yuan, the foreign student center, just as the neon "Shao Yuan" lights were turned off. Presenting my papers to the door guard, I asked him about BeiDa's school life since I had last been here two years ago. He was surprised at the fluency of my Chinese. I guess a yang kuei guy with long black-blonde hair was supposed to be illiterate in all matters Mandarin. He turned out to be amiable. Once more, I regretted the fact that any guanzi that I had developed with the locals was washed away...even here, no one would remember me from my previous two visits. I had not yet had a face-to-face encounter someone whose memory of me was washed clean by the Ultimate Force. It would be strange to meet with Prof. Zhao.

As I was a few days early, I wouldn't have much to do besides prepare my itinerary and try and settle my nerves. And get an umbrella...I was soaked by the rain.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Urd stumbled out of the airplane and walked across the tarmac. She thought she had booked a flight to Switzerland, but this didn't look like it. The people here looked Japanese. Maybe she had flown in a circle. Where was the Matterhorn? Where was Lake Geneva?

She looked up at the bright red letters on the 1950s-style building: Beijing National Capital Airport.

"Oh Great! Shit! Didn't Cevn say he was going to China? And who was it that told me my ticket was for Zurich? Or was it Geneva? Bern, the capital?" she said out loud. I must have really been drunk, she admitted to herself. The dim lights of the airport gave her a thundering headache. She was still a little foggy...the stewardesses would not serve her any alcohol during the flight. She took the escalator upstairs and served herself some Chinese liquor. It was much stronger than the Japanese stuff, she noted to her satisfaction.

Urd suddenly realized her predicament. She was alone in China, and withal, she had minimal Goddess Powers. She would have to drink continuously to maintain her power...there was no sake here, so she would have to substitute beer, wine, or whatever was available. At least the language was similar to read.

Not to mention that Cevn was here, somewhere in the country. She felt pangs of sadness when she remembered his look of betrayal.

"If I do anything before I return to Yggdrasil, I will make him understand why I did it," she decided. "I'll make it up to him, somehow, someway."

The airport was bustling with people. Urd had only seen these kinds of crowds in Tokyo and a few other places. As a Goddess who has lived over 25 decamillennia, she had seen the whole thing...humans rising out of Neolithic fuzziness to Homo Sapiens...well, these mortals were only _less_ fuzzy than their hairy forebears...but they certainly didn't have clarity.

She looked at a group of men who were eyeing her appreciatively. She recognized the look of lust on their faces. Lust...the common goddess that all males bow down to.

"And I'm the Goddess of Love!" she reminded herself. She walked over, wanting to have some drinking buddies and male attention. She found out that they were a TV crew for a local newsmagazine show featuring modern Beijing women's culture.

Within an hour, Urd had convinced the men that she should be an ideal spokesmodel for their news show. Although she was a yang kuei, she looked somewhat Chinese. The fact that she had lived in Japan was a boon, as the news team felt that Urd's fashion-sense would be light-years ahead of the average woman. They told her that China needed to catch up to Japanese standards of culture, at least in the modern fashion sense. She smiled enticingly at this observation; thinking that all those TV soaps and shopping expeditions were quite beneficial.

Urd was adamant that she didn't want to be an anchorwoman, because those weird pinyin tones would be difficult to say aloud. Especially if she had to constantly drink sake to keep her dwindling powers replenished. One thing she knew for certain was how to pose pretty for the camera. As long as they kept her supplied with booze and a room to sleep in, she would look vivacious for their new program.

Not to mention that she would get to try on all the new Chinese fashions. Images of cheongmais and floral antique dresses danced in her head as she ordered a round for the guys.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Two days had passed without any sign that Urd or Cevn would return. Belldandy and Keiichi had agreed to wait 72 hours before going out searching for them. If neither showed up by tomorrow, then they would search all of Japan. It was a daunting prospect that worried both. Genji's presence was a great comfort to Megumi, who was still saddened by Cevn's disappearance. Several phone inquiries to Beijing had produced no results.

Belldandy had transported herself in stealth form to Mara's lair, only to find Mara in some kind of complicated traction bed. She felt a little hint of pity for Mara, all bandaged up from her accident. She didn't want to yield too readily to that other part of her conscious that said 'serves you right for trying to kill my Keiichi'. But on her return, she did feel a thrill of satisfaction at how the Ultimate Force had acted.

It was decided that Keiichi and Bell would look in Southern Honshu; Skuld and Tomohisa would look in Northern Honshu; Megumi and Genji would look in Tokyo, then Hokkaido. It was out of the question for any of them to travel to China to look for Cevn. If he did kept to his plans to go there on behalf of N.I.T., they could find him by making some calls to the Japanese Consulate or Peking University. So the search centered on finding Urd.

Belldandy seriously doubted that her older sister could have gone far. First, her powers were limited to almost nothing, so she would have to rely on her temporal replenishment. Since Urd had no access to any moon bracelets, this meant that she would have to drink a steady stream of sake. Second, Urd had no money, so she couldn't have left the island. Third, Urd was practically a mortal now, as far as emanations went. Finally, Urd was...Urd.

The last two points worried Belldandy. Her Goddess powers would easily be able to detect Urd...if she was at full Earth Spirit Grade powers. But since Urd was functioning at almost nil Goddess powers, Bell wouldn't be able to 'home in' on her emanations. Nor could Urd make herself detectable to her younger sister. But Urd could make herself very detectable to...

As if he could read her mind, Keiichi smiled and looked at Belldandy.

"Bell-chan, you mix Urd and sake and you get a walking disaster waiting to happen. Urd's a klutz...she'll get caught misbehaving and we'll get a call from the police telling us to come retrieve her. When she's here, then we can find out the whole story."

Belldandy giggled at the mental image of bailing Urd out of a jail somewhere in Japan. Keiichi heard her and echoed her laugh.

"We need to coordinate this, so that we're all in touch with each other at any given time. Since you're the youngest, Skuld, you and Tomohisa will search from home. Feel free to make all the phone calls you want...but if you leave the house, it must only be during the day hours. I don't want my aunt and uncle finding out that you're here alone, Tomo! We'll all reconvene here in a week if we haven't found Urd. Also, keep trying to call China to find Cevn," he instructed. Keiichi's cousin nodded his head in assent as Skuld eyed him with a hawk-like expression.

"And don't you try anything while you're here, either!" she said. Tomohisa looked at her in surprise...once more she had read what was on his mind. Overjoyed at being alone with Skuld for an indeterminate time, he was imagining all sorts of things. Baseball games, swimming at the beach, listening to CDs, pachinko, maybe a kiss or two... He looked up to see that everyone was laughing at him good-heartedly, except Skuld.

"Maybe it's not a good idea to leave me alone with her," he said, drawing another round of giggles from Megumi and Belldandy and a deeper Skuld-frown. He stuck his tongue out at her; having turned Skuld's little accusation against her. Skuld appeared to be gliding into a pout when one of Cevn's cats climbed into her lap and nestled into purrful sleep.

Megumi looked at Genji with a mixture of apprehension and excitement at the prospect of going 'on the road' with him. Fortunately, Megumi had a bunch of the lozenges Urd had made to counteract Belldandy's 'beauty spell'. Otherwise, she and Genji...well the mesh of fear and fantasy sent a thrill down her spine.

After Genji 'moved' into the living room two days ago, they had held several serious talks on the subject of relationships. Genji was surprisingly mature in his attitudes towards the subject, much to Megumi's delight. He obviously didn't pick those healthy ideas from his sister, she noted. On the other hand, it was obvious that he was still a virgin...a fact that didn't bother Megumi at all. As long as she took her daily dose, Genji wouldn't have to put up with being around the most beautiful woman in Japan. Or become the victim of his own rampaging hormones, she thought with a dreamy smile. The mischievous part of her wanted to 'miss' a dose, just to see what he would do.

Keiichi looked at the other two 'teams'. Each pair would focus on a particular area of Japan in an effort to find their Goddess-errant. He was a little worried about pairing Skuld and Tomohisa, simply because they were so young. Skuld was almost 13 in mortal years and Tomohisa would turn 16 in a few months. He was also concerned about their ability to coordinate the search; as the ones who would remain at home, they were in all aspects the 'central command' of "Operation Urd". Yet the division into three pairs was Belldandy's suggestion...she must trust Skuld a lot. Skuld would prove to be much more secure on decision-making than Tomohisa.

As for Megumi and Genji, Keiichi's major concerns centered on her 'beauty enhancement'. What would happen if she forgot to take her pills? He shuddered at the memory of the superlovely Megumi. The only thing that kept him from pestering Megumi to death was the fact that he was her brother. But Genji, who was romantically _interested_ in her, would certainly be unable to restrain himself. If he caught sight of her without the diminishing effects of the lozenges, it would be just like how he and Bell-chan up on Mt. Nantai during their earlier weekend vacation.

_That_ thought sobered him.

"Why did Bell-chan suggest boy-girl/boy-girl pairs?" his older-brother perspective spoke in his mind.

"Genji, you better respect my little sister," he thought protectively. Then he remembered that afternoon on Mt. Nantai, unable to shake the images of his and Bell's slightly erotic adventure. He felt shivers flustering his system...and noticed that he was warm all over. The thought of their Urd-induced lust that time made him feel nervous, as he and Belldandy would be alone for up to a week.

"How will I manage _this_?" he asked himself while images of his partially dressed girlfriend danced in his head. As if on cue, Belldandy nudged up against him and dreamily rested her head on his shoulder. He jerked slightly, backing out of his daydream. She looked at him with a questioning glance and he grinned at her.

"L...let's review our plans, heh heh!" he said with a smile. He nervously arranged the maps and atlases, and then detailed his and Bell-chan's route. His divine girlfriend looked at him softly and he flushed beet-red.

"Er, Bell-chan and I will go south to Nagoya and Osaka, then we'll come back next Sunday. If we haven't found Urd, then we'll try Kyoto and Kobe," he explained as he traced a route on the map. Keiichi felt a momentary grudge...this one trip alone will cost us a fortune! Cevn had left all of his money here, and he had given them wads of 10,000-yen notes when he first moved in...but this was still an expensive trip. He counted out 350K yen for Megumi and Genji.

"You two will check out Tokyo for the next five days, then fly to Sapporo if you haven't found Urd. Here is some money for lodging and airfare. There should be enough for a room for each of you for a week, plus extra," he said. Megumi cleared her throat when she heard Keiichi's implicit suggestion that Genji and she room separately.

"And why, Big Brother? Don't you think Genji and I should save money and room together?" she asked with a gentle smirk. Keiichi, who was already nervous, suddenly realized his gaffe...he was being overprotective.

"Damn!" he thought, "Now I'm going to hear it!"

Megumi seized on this and teased him.

"You know, we're both adults, and it's not like we're going to sleep in the same bed or something," she added, enjoying watching Keiichi squirm with embarrassment and while Genji scowled with disappointment. Two for the price of one! Her boyfriend soon joined Keiichi in the blushing man department, adding to Megumi's mirth. For a coup-de-grace, she finished with a flare.

"Ahh, but I bet I know _someone_ who might share a bed with his partner. No, not 'might', but 'will' share a bed."

"NO WAY!" Skuld shouted, saving Keiichi from having to answer for he and Bell-chan. He nervously looked at Belldandy; she just returned his gaze with a serene expression on her face. She didn't even have a hint of embarrassment at Megumi's insinuation, he noticed with disappointment.

As for Genji, Megumi saw his face flash hot...the kind of heat a man's face exhibits when he thinks he's going to get laid for the first time in his life.

"You're such a virgin, Genji!" Megumi thought with embarrassed delight. He had assumed that she was talking about she and he sharing a bed together! To add even further to the comic scene, she noticed that Skuld had shuffled herself a foot farther away from Tomohisa, regarding him with a way expression.

"S..Sk..Skuld, I didn't do anything! I didn't think anything. I know that I'm sleeping on the couch, so stop bugging out!" Tomohisa shouted in a frustrated voice. He thought that Skuld was a 12-year-old nag sometimes...this being one of those times. Belldandy giggled at the inside joke about bugs.

"I told you already, you're too young for me to be thinking of you _that_ way!" he added. Skuld felt an slight flash of disappointment in response to his remark. She questioned herself about her curious reaction.

"Why should being too young make a difference? Why am I feeling upset when he says that he thinks I'm too young for him? Too young for what? He better not be thinking that I'm a child or something!" her mind twirling like a desert baguio.

Belldandy smiled at Skuld, drawing a sheepish smile from her younger sister. She seemed to sense Skuld's consternation at Tomohisa's remark. Belldandy had become adept at the art of diffusing Skuld's tempestuous moodswings; once more her passive intervention had prevented a Skuld-fit. Skuld knew that Belldandy knew something that _she_ didn't...so she let it rest.

Keiichi, acting as the leader, called the conference to a close, still smarting from Megumi's teasing. Megumi pinched him on the arm as they all stood up.

"Don't forget to bring '_protection_'," she whispered. Keiichi blushed fast and furious as she giggled.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

It was Monday morning. I had been restless last night and consequently, I forgot the morning drill at BeiDa. Every morning except Sunday, at precisely 6 am, loudspeakers all over the campus would blare the Chinese National Anthem or some other kind of martial music, followed by fifteen minutes of news. The Chinese version of NPR. I had just fallen to sleep at three...now I rubbed my eyes awake as images of Chairman Mao danced to the anthemic music invading my earspace.

I was scheduled to meet with Dr. Zhao concerning my dissertation, then Chancellor Wang about the N.I.T. liaison after lunch. I was apprehensive about both meetings. Yesterday, I reviewed the liaison proposal documents and gathered my dissertation project papers. Memories of Urd's betrayal kept running interference with my concentration. I still felt emotionally raw from her wounding of my trust.

I ate at the one of the student cafeterias, then headed to the Philosophy Dept. I remembered Dr. Zhao from my last two visits here. He was a slender wisp of a man in his late sixties with a full head of gray hair and a cheerful attitude. I was amazed at his resilience; he seemed a human personification of a Daoist Immortal. One of those Chinese old guys who could be anywhere between 60 and 80 and yet look like he was in fifties. He had joined the faculty at BeiDa in the late fifties and had somehow survived the purgings and insanity of the Cultural Revolution. In his office, he had a small snapshot showing him in a dunce cap with a slogan placard hanging around his neck saying "Imperialist Intellectual Roader and Deceiver of the People." All because he was one of China's top three experts on Confucianism. The memory of that photo somehow diminished the bitter taste of my heart-rending upheaval out of Japan.

I knocked on his office door and he ushered me in. His office was crammed from floor to ceiling with texts and papers. It was almost funny when he introduced himself to me, as if he was meeting me for the first time. I felt awkward, introducing myself to a man that I had already known from two previous encounters. After a couple minutes of chit-chat, he questioned me about the topic of my dissertation. I had been working for the last several years on a book-length dissertation I called "First Consciousness". About one minute into my nervous explanation, that crazy thing I called 'metallect' kicked in. The words bubbled out of my mouth, almost on their own.

"First Consciousness consists of four related sections. First, a unifying canonical on linguistics, demonstrating the root phonemics and heuristics of ante-Syriac, Indo-Chinese and Egyptian Coptic. Second, a refutation of the Null Hypothesis and development of an evolved experimental method to replace it. Third, an exposition on the nature of consciousness integrating Heidegger and non-void Kyoto School Zen within the framework of absolving integral non-existence. Finally, a demonstrable potentiality syntax of all conscious thought-forms stated within a mathematical and metaphysical philosophical framework."

Dr. Zhao looked at me with shock. The Heidegger portion of my proposal addressed the most difficult and cogent issue of modern existentialism. The Null Hypothesis would require an academician with a solid grounding in the philosophy of psychometrics. The other two...were impossible. The unification of early languages was the Holy Grail of archaic linguistic studies. The final section was something I had never heard of...nor he.

He looked at me with a fixed expression after recovering from his initial surprise.

"Are you joking? What you are proposing is impossible. You'll get shot down within ten minutes of your defense. I can't commit an entire review committee to address such nonsense!" He was trying to be diplomatic, but doubt was clearly etched on his elderly visage.

"I need to travel to Dunhuang for a week to finish my fieldwork, then I will present enough outline material to justify your committee allocation," I replied, shocked at my sudden travel plans.

"What was in Dunhuang?" I wondered to myself.

"If you demonstrate academic fidelity supporting what you are arguing, I'll make sure that we provide an international committee of experts...because if you are successful, your work will be nothing short of an major event in intellectual history," Dr. Zhao promised.

I was shocked. Three _new_ parts of my dissertation proposal had just jumped out of my mouth without thought. I was working towards the Heidegger issue, because there was so much to work with. Existentialism was integral in any study of human consciousness. But the others? It seemed like another one of those coincidences, just like how I was able to read the Enigma Book. Somehow, I knew the unknowable.

My afternoon meeting with Chancellor Wang was also a surprise, in a negative sense. He was shocked to see a longhaired gaijin serving as a liaison for a Japanese technical institute. I sensed that he was offended by my casual demeanor, despite my respectful attitude. Everything that I remembered about Chinese business etiquette suddenly became salient. I presented the letter from Dr. Kintaro and outlined the proposals. He listened...then shot me down. Hard.

As I walked back to my dorm room, I felt a gathering sense of gloom.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Megumi and Genji caught the morning train to Tokyo. It was crowded with Monday commuters going to work in the metropolis. Megumi was grateful that she didn't have to get up at 5am to get into Tokyo by 9. The grim, dour faces on many of the train riders verified her observation.

She had been to Tokyo quite often, but she knew that her traveling partner was far more experienced about Tokyo. He had gone to prep school there. When he volunteered this fact while they were discussing travel assignments, their team was allocated Metro Tokyo as an area to search. I didn't know he went to prep school in Tokyo, Megumi thought. She sadly remembered the last time she was in Tokyo with Genji...Cevn had been with them.

"Genji, you know Tokyo better than I do. Where should we start to look for Urd?" she said, trying to snap out of her down mood. Genji looked at her thoughtfully, then smiled.

"Hmmm...I think we should hit Shinjuku and apply to official channels first. We can go to the Metro Gov't. Office and file missing person reports. After that, we should head over to the entertainment districts."

"Yeah, you're right! Urd always was into the spicier side of life...not to mention she's a prole for anything that resembles amusement!" Megumi replied.

They got off at Ueno station and rented a car. Megumi wanted to drive, but realized that Genji may be put off if he was relegated to the passenger seat. Much to her surprise, he offered to share the driving chores. She smiled at his sense of propriety...he was certainly being sensitive and diplomatic. Once more, a fine garment of romantic fancy drifted like a winnowing breeze in her mind.

After driving through much of northern Tokyo and withstanding the slow freeway traffic, they arrived at the tall government building. Genji pulled their rented Mazda into the underground parking lot. After the frantic search for a space, they ascended the escalator and went in search of where to file a report on Urd. Megumi had brought some pictures of Urd and a fake description of her age, birth date, etc. that Keiichi had cooked up on the computer last night.

The lady at the missing persons section commented on how tan Urd was. She promised to have the picture distributed first thing the next day to all of the satellite police stations and civic halls. Megumi was amazed at the efficiency of the city officials. Genji took it all in stride.

"Where to next?" Megumi asked as they were in the elevator.

"I think we should check out Harajuku first, since it's nearby. It has a _lot_ of clothing stores and Yoyogi Park is a great hangout. They even have live bands on the weekends sometimes. I remember seeing Lindberg and Iruku Loop Child there while in prep school," Genji suggested. Megumi raised an eyebrow at this; Genji must have stolen away from his home to attend the concerts.

She remembered Urd's proclivity to dress in stylish clothes. As they entered the gate of the park, Genji brushed his hand against hers, signaling her. After a moment's hesitation, he took her hand in his. Megumi sighed softly at the gesture. It was quiet...but it was a powerful statement of his feelings towards him. She flashed him her happy smile as they walked towards the central grounds of the park, bumping each other's shoulders once in a while.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Belldandy looked at Keiichi. He was slumped slightly in his train seat, asleep with his cheek resting on the windowpane of the Shinkansen. To her, it seemed that they were going in circles. Just a couple of days ago, they had caught the bullet train _back_ to Makuhari. Now they were traveling again to Nagoya and then Osaka...only this trip wasn't a vacation.

She was worried sick about her older sister. In all the time she knew Urd, Urd had only pulled one other disappearing act. It was around the time she had hooked up with Troubadour. Back then, Belldandy had known quite clearly why Urd had gone AWOL from her post as a Sysop trainee for the Yggdrasil Mainframe. But this time...there was no apparent reason for her disappearance.

Keiichi lightly snored as the train passed Shimizu.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Urd smiled as the cameras snapped photos. She was dressed in a formal 19th century wedding dress. This was a magazine shoot, which required a much different approach from the video filming they would do later. She felt like a model, with all the makeup techs and beauticians hovering over her.

She was dressed in the traditional red-colored bridal gown. Her hair was trussed up into a 'phoenix cap'; an intricate weaving of hair and nine chenille flowers representing longevity. She wore silken red gloves and a stunning embroidered red dress with ivory fastenings. She had intricately embroidered silken slippers that imitated the style of a Qing dynasty bride. After two hours of makeup, she looked in the mirror and hardly recognized herself. Finally, she was given two fur wraps and was led to the filming stage, where a wedding palanquin was waiting.

She had finished a bottle of sake just prior and was feeling a little tipsy. As a Goddess, she didn't react as strongly to alcohol as mortals. She could drink three bottles to obtain the same reaction a mortal did by drinking two glasses of medium-strength sake. This propensity to drink had caused the film crew to look at her as a marvel...she had already drank most of them under the table in the past couple of days.

"Silly boys...thinking that I'd get drunk and then be vulnerable to their advances," she thought with amusement.

She laughed as she imagined how her two sisters must have been frantically trying to figure out where she was. Before leaving, she had made sure to take a huge amount of money that she had found in Cevn's room, thinking that she would need it in Switzerland. But here, the Japanese Yen was quite strong against the Chinese Renminbi. At the bank, the teller was surprised when Urd unloaded all her 10K yen notes to be exchanged into RMB. The teller had suggested that she open an account, because it was dangerous to carry so much money. So now Urd had an account at the China National Bank.

She preened in front of the cameras.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"It's just like my stupid older sister to do a disappearing act like this. It's so..._Urdish_!" Skuld sighed in frustration as she paced around the house. She had phoned over a hundred ryokan and hotels in Chiba and the surrounding provinces...without so much of a trace of Urd's trail. Tomohisa had relieved her and called an additional fifty or so. None of the inns or hotels had seen a woman matching Urd's description. And they had only made a slight dent in the list of calls.

Tomohisa had assigned himself the additional, yet disgusting task of calling the local 'love hotels'. Some of the cronies he talked with had voices dripping with venomous lust and gross malignancy. He felt sick just talking to them, as if he was going to catch some kind of disease through the phone. He had kept this task concealed from Skuld; he didn't want Skuld interpreting his calls to the 'love hotels' as some kind of form of perversion. It was better that she didn't know. Skuld was already cautious around him...he didn't need her screaming "pervert!" at him.

The phone rang. Tomohisa motioned to Skuld to answer it. She shook her head "no", so he picked up the phone. It turned out to be Megumi and Genji checking in.

"Why is she so reluctant to pick up the phone when it rings?" he wondered.

_"Hello...oh Hi Tomohisa! This is Megumi. We're at Tokyo Disneyland. We haven't heard a thing about Urd. They have her picture at all the local police substations and in any number of public places. Her face is all over Tokyo...but no luck finding her."_

"Sound's like you're having fun instead of trying to find her," he said to his cousin. He heard Megumi sigh with piquence.

_"Well, maybe we should take a break! We've been all over Tokyo the past three days: visiting metro city halls here, visiting police stations there. There's no sign of her _-anywhere-_! We've been to Akibahara, Shinjuku, Shibuya and Ikibukuro. Now we're checking out the Bay Area," _she reported. Tomohisa could hear the sounds of excited children screaming in the background.

"Lucky them, they get to go 'look' for Urd at an amusement park," he thought begrudgedly.

"Did you go on any rides?" he asked.

_"No, but we did visit the security office and the park headquarters. They promised to monitor the grounds to see if they could locate Urd. See, we're not just here for the rides," _she assured him.

Megumi was flustered at the fact that her younger cousin thought that this was nothing more than a joyride through Metro Tokyo for her and Genji. She had learned a lot in the first couple days about dealing with police and government officials. Fortunately, missing person reports were a rarity in Japan, as opposed to places like the United States where kidnappings occurred every day. So the local officials seemed determined to make a real effort to find Urd; they certainly were enthusiastic about employing any means necessary in their search.

"How are you and Skuld getting along? You haven't made a move on her, have ya?" she teased him over the phone. Tomohisa blushed suddenly, which brought a look of concern from Skuld.

_"Heh heh...no. Of course not! We've been calling all over trying to find Urd. You know, all the hotels and inns."_

_"I bet you love calling those 'love hotels'..."_ Megumi heard the pause on the other end of the phone and giggled, just as a huge life-size Donald Duck waddled by her and Genji. Genji looked at her with mystification. This was supposed to be a check up call to report in what they had found out about Urd.

"Actually, I didn't like calling those love hotels at all." Tomohisa said, then covered his mouth when he realized that he had blown it.

"_Eeep!_"

He turned...and saw Skuld ready to erupt like Mt. Fuji.

"You _pervert_! You actually called some..._love hotels_? PERVERT! What makes you think that my older sister would go to one of those places? I bet you were just looking for an excuse to call them," she shouted icily. Tomohisa gathered his courage and confronted her.

"What makes you think she wouldn't? I've known Urd a little while too and you know how sex intrigues her! Unlike a child...like you!" Tomohisa barely managed to get that one out.

"_WHAAAAAAT?!_" Skuld growled. Rolling up a map, she hit him on the side of the head.

Megumi heard the "_smack!_" over the phone.

"Poor Tomo, you've really got her riled up this time."

_Smack...smack...smack!_

"Hey...ouch...knock it..oww..off Skuld!" he said as he covered his head with his arms in a defensive motion, grateful that it was only a rolled up map and not that mallet that Skuld carries around everywhere.

Skuld was ready to hit Tomohisa again when she stopped short in mid-swing. He was right. It_ wouldn't_ be beneath Urd to stop at a love hotel. She recalled all the times Urd had converted the sister's bedroom into a replica of a love motel in an attempt to get Elder Sister and Keiichi to...do the perverted thing.

And to make matters worse, Big Sister Urd had never even stopped to consider where I was supposed to sleep once she ruined our bedroom! In the bathtub? And when and where did Urd think I was supposed to get dressed...

"That _stupid_ Big Sister of mine! Why did she have to turn our bedroom into a replica of one of those echhi love hotel rooms all those times, trying to get my sister all mellow...to do that nasty mortal thing with Keiichi?" Skuld growled out loud.

Suddenly, Tomohisa doubled over and started wheezing. Skuld quickly lowered her rolled-up map, worried that her rain of blows on his head might have triggered an asthmatic episode.

"Quick! Get your inhaler, Tomohisa!" she shouted in a worried voice.

"Faked you out, didn't I?" Tomohisa shouted. He had taken advantage of Skuld's concerned pause and snatched the map paper out of her hand, and then whacked her on the head.

"Whyyyyyy you..." Skuld growled angrily.

They both paused as they heard raucous laughter coming from the phone.

"See...I told you she might go there! And you called _me_ a pervert!" he shouted, emphasizing every other word with a series of gentle but firm paperslaps to Skuld's head.

"Hey! Gimme..heehee..that!"

_Smack! Smack!_

Megumi heard giggling on the other end of the line as Skuld tried to wrestle something out of Tomohisa's grasp.

"Well, I'll just leave you two lovebirds to your tête-à-tête while we undertake the serious business of finding Urd," she shouted into the phone in a taunting voice. There was a brief moment of silence on the phone before she hung it up. Megumi smiled in satisfaction, imagining Skuld and her cousin's mortification.

Skuld and Tomohisa both looked at each other with beet red faces, each wielding half a rolled up map in their hand.

They had heard Megumi.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

In Nagoya, Keiichi and Belldandy had contacted the official channels in their search for Urd. Nagoya itself seemed to have the soulless aspect of an American metropolis.

"This city is _too_ planned," Keiichi thought. A civic planner's dream...and a sightseer's nightmare. Although he knew that they weren't on a sightseeing tour, he couldn't help but think of things that way.

They rented a room in the Miyoshi Ryokan, about 20 minutes walk from the train station. The train station itself was undergoing renovation, as the huge JR tower was being expanded above the station. The first office tower was completed in 2000, and was reputed to be Japan's tallest and largest office building at the time. Now, a second tower was being built next to it, rising another 20 stories. The engineer in Keiichi was interested in the design aspects of building a 80-story skyscraper above an existing structure.

They had visited the Metropolitan Office and left flyers with Urd's pseudo-information. The officials there were quite impressed with the fact that they had traveled all the way from Chiba Prefecture to try and track down Urd, or "_Urudo Hayasaki_" as the poster read.

They had one more day in Nagoya, Japan's fifth largest city. Belldandy was always keen on noticing the unusual things. Earlier in the day, they were in Higashi-yama Park, when Bell spotted a boy who had lost a fish-kite. She closed her eyes and a moment later the kite descended back into the arms of the boy, much to the bewilderment of the boy's father...and Keiichi's own delight. He looked at his divine girlfriend, grateful that she was a force for good in the world.

"We really need all the goodness we can have," he thought.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --


	19. Pt 19: Dispersions

**Part 19: Dispersions**

August in Beijing was clenched in humidity and dirt as gusts from the west brought a regular haze, yellowing the blue sky with dust and casting the campus with a wayworn appearance. It was almost as bad as a BeiDa winter. During my second stay at the University, I thought it was ludicrous when December rolled around and I observed the old professors walking around between classes with kerchiefs wrapped over their noses and mouths. But I soon learned why. In the winter months, almost all the campus buildings relied on antique coal furnaces for heating. The result was an air leavened with so much soot that I ended up wearing a mask to keep from blackening my lungs towards bronchitis.

There had been no breakthrough in my first two meetings with Chancellor Wang regarding the liaison with N.I.T. My dissertation efforts seemed mired in the library stacks that I frequented with dismaying regularity. On top of all of this, Dr. Zhao had scheduled me to give a guest lecture on the parallels between Western mercantile cultures and its transformative impact on Meiji-era Japan consumer philosophies and the impact of capital economies on the present situation in the 'enterprise-free' zones of southern China.

Great.

A talk on business--a topic that I was disenchanted with and disinterested in. Frankly, I didn't give a shit. In my mind, the science of making money reduces itself to a contest to see who is the greediest. People of all faiths bow down to mammon while they mouth praises to the deity of their locality. All this while believing that the poor and homeless in their city do not exist. Out of sight, out of mind. There's no such thing as the starving children of the disappeared.

I had long ago concluded that a plenitude of reasons existed that justified why the philosophy of business ethics isn't exactly a flourishing branch of economic science or philosophy itself.

However, I could empathize with their request. In the first decade of this century, China's growing influence in the Asian Rim economic sphere was substantive; it made good sense on the behalf of the faculty of BeiDa to expose the future leaders of the nation to the study of capitalism.

But why ask _me_ to lecture on business, a topic far removed from my _real_ scholarly efforts? Even worse, my talk had been arranged for the evening before I was scheduled to fly out to Dunhuang to encounter whatever it was that I was supposed meet up with there.

The cool night air was a welcome relief to the humidity of the day. Despite the new air conditioning system, the Shao Yuan dorm still seemed to hoard the most humid air of the day...far into the evening. I was watching the one of the 'modern' CTV channels. BeiDa's dorms were equipped with digital cable TV, subscribing to about one hundred seventy stations. The TV content varied substantially: from classical Beijing Opera performed to exacting traditional standards; to the many war-time dramas depicting the struggles of the People's Army against the Japanese and Kuomintang; to shows from Hong Kong's many cable channels. Ever since the reunification of Hong Kong and the PRC ten years ago, Hong Kong TV had been in great demand by viewers because of its richer variety of entertainment. Because of the detente between China and Taiwan in 2004, many of the channels were Taiwanese as well.

I remembered the first time I came to BeiDa and experienced Chinese TV. One station broadcast a weekly show that screened clips from Hollywood movies while the commentators made jokes about the Americans and the dramatic situations. I thought this was hilarious, turning the grandiose American cultural icon of Lollywood on its ear. Leave it to the Chinese...

I scanned the channels, looking for the promised "Star Trek: Voyager" reruns that were supposed to be on right now. The Chinese have a penchant for transforming just about anything into a morality play; their translation of "Star Trek: Voyager" highlighted ethical dilemma, serving the spirit of the original series quite well.

That's when I saw _her_.

I was channel surfing after the 9pm Beijing news when a women's fashion show caught my eye. It wasn't the show so much as it was the spokesmodel. She was dressed in a modern-looking business dress with Western leanings. She wore a black beret with a fake diamond cluster in front shaped in a star...an imitation of the Mao hats popular in an earlier chapter in China's history. Her white blouse was smartly offset by a silken jacket and a black midi skirt. Long bright platinum-cum-white hair curled around her tan face and her long legs were wrapped in gray hose and white calf-high boots. I almost choked on the Kuan Yin tea I was savoring. It took me less than a second to recognize her.

_Urd._

Absolutely the_ last _person I wanted to see! Absolutely the last person I _expected_ to see. Absolutely the last person that should be on _Chinese TV_.

I was glad that my roommate from Ceylon was out partying, because I must have looked like quite a sight; my jaw hanging agape in stupefaction, my eyes red-eyed wide with surprise. I was paralyzed, except for my right hand, which somehow vacuously released the teacup.

_--Crash!--_

The sound of shattering ceramic sent my thoughts into overdrive. How the hell did Urd get to China? Was she following me? After the initial buffet of shock, bevies of assumptions raced through my brain. I was at once disgusted, paranoid, fascinated and fearful. Urd definitely could screw up my dissertation. My heart had jumped when I saw her, on Chinese TV of all things. It was like I was being chased down by a female embodiment of Fate. Or one of the Dirae. I suddenly felt trapped in my room.

This was _too_ much of a coincidence! My conscious dissolved into an anarchy of loud bursts.

"Could she be..._stalking_ me?" I wondered. Urd could blow my whole cover. Not that I had anything to hide...I only had a million things hanging over my head. An inverted Black Forest of Damoclean swords straight out of the Yama King's hell. My dissertation, the N.I.T. liaison, this damned lecture tomorrow. Everything.

Even though there are 18 million people in Beijing, Urd _knew_ that I planned to go to BeiDa.

"She _could_ find me, after all, she's a Goddess," I reasoned, feeling a crackling shiver of fear which reminded me that I wasn't that much different than the shattered teacup on the cement floor.

After she betrayed me by impersonating my therapist, I didn't ever want to face her or the others again. I just wanted to be alone, isolated with my pain. Actually, isolated _away_ from my pain...a disconsolance that was comfortably contained in Makuhari.

"Wherever you go...there you are," my mind reminded me. Pseudo-Dionysius's theory of being was often miscited, credited to anyone from Johnny Carson and Tiny Tim to Sonny Bono and Albert Einstein.

The sight of Urd was causing me to disassociate.

I reflected on the recent past. I had flatly refused all calls from Japan except from Dr. Kintaro. It tore my heart apart each time I checked in at the lobby of Shao Yuan only to find that I was getting two or three calls a day from Makuhari. But Urd's betrayal had sold my soul down the river...I could never face Keiichi and Co. I felt a wash of empathy for them: trying to locate me...and probably worried sick about Urd.

I hate keeping secrets. I dislike being selfish...but I _had_ to protect myself from more emotional pain. I'm usually very candid and open with my life...except for the noir-realms of my innermost pain. The pain that Urd had pried out of me. The pain that by all rights was mine to chose whom I shared it with; mine to decide who heard about it and who didn't.

Strange, this impulse to parcel out feelings that, ideally, would be best dispossessed from my life.

All my friends in Makuhari probably knew about my taints by now. The industry of my aspirations had been too real...and now I didn't have a chance to advance their completion. To them, I'm probably habited by my disabilities and flaws, rather than the fertility of my potential.

My heart seemed like a hyperstatized, abstract concept now. I was numb...as numb as I could get without a narcotic. Seeing Urd on my TV had somehow added a deep-freeze to the numbness.

"It's been a rough day," I reflected as I carved a stick figure into the floor with a broken shard of porcelain.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Keiichi held Belldandy in his arms, feeling her body shudder in staccato nudges against him as he caressed her long brunette hair.

She was crying again.

Every day since they had returned home from their travels, Bell-chan would knock on the shoji door to his bedroom, then come in and collapse in his arms, beset with tears. In the past week, they had traversed all over southern Honshu: Osaka, Nagoya, Kyoto, Kobe and their environs. There was no trace of Urd. They both were exhausted from the combination of heavy traveling and the emotional toll of not obtaining any leads about Urd's whereabouts. Prudently, they decided to take a week off before going off further southwest to Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Shimonosaki.

Every time Belldandy spent any time in her room, Urd's absence would confront her like a silent, horrible spectre. She tried to brace her spirits in the face of Urd's absence, but eventually her resolve would cave in and she would feel the full thrust of her loss.

"Urd is my _only_ older sister," she would tell herself right before the tears came. She had know Urd all 240,000 years of this cycle of her existence. Every divine year of her physical age was actually ten thousand mortal years...but time was no longer the same.

Time was treating her contumely.

Skuld had taken to sleeping in her "Skuld Labs" room; each morning Belldandy would bear a reluctant witness as Skuld would sadly drag out her futon bedding and silently shuffle down the hall to hang it over the railing. The futons had been Urd's chore in the past...a fact which broke Belldandy's heart. Urd had always taken care of the bedding for the house. Skuld rarely talked to anyone these days, except Banpei-kun.

Wherever Belldandy looked, she was reminded of Urd. The dining room was bereft of sake bottle caps that Urd would stack on the table. The sister's bedroom had many photos on the walls and in their photo albums of Urd hamming it up. The living room brought back memories of Urd calling down lightning and blowing a hole in the roof on several occasions. The TV in the sister's room sat silently. Her clothes hanging in the closet. Her shampoo in the bathroom. Her walkman resting unused in the living room. Dust on the wooden criss-cross frame of the shoji door to her 'Castle' room.

"It's too much for a person to bear!" Belldandy mourned as she looked at Keiichi, her eyes haunted by Urd's absence.

Keiichi regarded his beloved. He had assumed that nothing could break her good-cheer...her zest for life. But since Urd's disappearance, Bell-chan's mood had been melancholic the past few days. This was extremely unnerving for Keiichi. He tried to buoy her up, but her dampered spirits couldn't resonate with his forced optimism. Now here she was again, crying into his shoulder.

It was almost like a chain reaction. Skuld would break down and run into Belldandy's arms, crying her head off...then Bell would seek him for solace and cry into his arms.

"Who do I go to when I want to cry?" Keiichi reflected with mixed feelings. Guilty at his selfish whim...yet resentful towards the mutiny of serenity. He felt like he was bearing the brunt of _everyone's_ pain...as well as his own grief-fraught emotional state. He found it increasingly tasking to offer a reassuring smile to Bell-chan and Skuld.

He had his own pain. He missed Urd, too. The house somehow seemed _too quiet_ without the boisterous elder Norn. Much more quiet than one person's absence should make it. He wished Urd was here so he could slap her in the face and yell, "What the hell did you think you were doing, disappearing like that?"

Reining in his thoughts, Keiichi wondered how Megumi and Genji were doing. They had been energetically searching Hokkaido and northern Honshu. He was surprised by their endurance; yet he suspected that they were either afraid to come back and admit defeat or they were falling in love and using the search as an excuse to elope all over Japan.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

By the weekend, everybody was upset at the fact that all their phone calls to Beijing had been unanswered by Cevn. The Japanese Consulate knew that he was at the University, but the BeiDa officials could only promise to forward messages to him. Cevn apparently had instructed them to flatly deny any contact with him. They phoned several times a day, but the switchboard operator told them in broken Japanese that Cevn had refused their calls.

Keiichi was steamed about this...it seemed that Cevn had simply decided to sunder all ties with them. His anger flashed strongly one day; the binder of one of his tech manuals bore a ding as the result.

He had reluctantly overruled Megumi's suggestion that she and Genji fly to Beijing. He had thought that it might be better if Belldandy and he went. But his beloved Bell-chan was an emotional wreck. Who wouldn't be _this_ distraught with the unexpected loss of her older sister.

However, Belldandy had temperately suggested that Cevn wouldn't avoid them unless there was a good reason. She further suggested that it was quite possible that something had occurred, which had really hurt him or upset his feelings. The result was his refusal to talk to them.

"In this aspect, he is reacting like Skuld...by withdrawing," she had noted.

Then last night, much to Keiichi's surprise, Skuld had half-pulled half-dragged her futon into _his_ bedroom and slept between Bell-chan and he. Her weary eyes disclosed that she had been crying for Urd. Skuld told a surprised Keiichi and Belldandy in a hoarse voice that she wanted to sleep in a room with somebody...anybody...to avoid feeling so consumed, so alone by her pain. Her face brightened only slightly when Keiichi smiled and assured her that she could sleep with them anytime she wanted to.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Bell-chan, do you think Skuld will sleep here again tonight?"

She looked at him; her incomparable blue eyes still reddened from tonight's bout of grieving Urd's disappearance.

"Oh, Keiichi, she's not a bother is she?"

"Why would you wonder that, Bell? Of course not! In fact, last night, I thought for a moment...that this must be what it would be like to have a child. A little one sleeping between us. Although Skuld is not a child, it seems like she really needs to be around some adults like us right now."

Belldandy smiled briefly at the romantic inclination of Keiichi's imagination, then started crying again, her sadness twinned by her missing sister...and something else.

"I...I didn't think...snff...that she would take Urd's disappearance so hard. She really seems like a candle whose light has gone out," she managed as she grabbed Keiichi tightly.

"Keiichi...I'm so scared that Urd is going to be _gone forever_!"

"No! I can't accept that...I hope..er..I think that we'll find out something about your sister soon," Keiichi replied, at a loss to say anything more encouraging. He thought it was so crazy; the sister Skuld fought the most with...seemed to arouse such deep-held emotions in the youngest Norn. There must be a lot of love there.

Belldandy looked at him and spilled her sadness. "Keiichi, I mi..miss my Big Sister! Will she ever come back? You have no idea...snff...how much I miss her! Whenever I was sick in Yggdrasil, she was always the first one to summon a Proctor. Once, when I almost flunked one of my trainings, she snuck me the answers to the test.

"You...almost _flunked_?" Keiichi said, taken aback by Bell-chan's sudden confessions. Belldandy nodded her head and continued.

"Urd used to describe to me about the wonders of having a boyfriend, encouraging me...that I would find the love of my heart's desire someday. She's always so compassionate to Skuld, even if Skuld didn't understand why Urd was so hard on her sometimes."

She continued, shifting into storytelling mode.

_"One time, when we all were young, Urd took Skuld and I to one of the tallest crystal buildings in Yggdrasil. Skuld was just a toddler then and I was almost Skuld's age. It was windy...the air tingled with sheets of electricity and other arcane energies. Skuld was so afraid that she squeezed my hand until it turned red. I felt a little bit afraid myself. We could see so many of the floating cities, cloud spheres and parks. But Urd was so confident; she didn't seem bothered by anything. She stood right at the edge of the crystalform...and said that as long as she was our older sister, she would never fall down. That _we_ would never fall down, the three of us...so we should aspire to reach our highest good. Suddenly, I didn't feel afraid. I felt so calm inside. I looked at Skuld; she was giggling as the wind whipped her hair...which was pretty short then. Urd materialized three peach blossoms and gave Skuld and I each a blossom to hold. We pledged...snff snff...we promised that we would never be separated, then let the wind catch our blossoms and carry them away. I like to imagine that they are still in Yggdrasil, riding the currents of the wind._

"D..do you think she broke her promise to Skuld and I, Keiichi?" she asked. Keiichi looked at Belldandy, who was innocently lost in her expression of remembrance.

"How could I possibly answer a question like _that_?" he wondered to himself, overwhelmed. His heart screamed "NO! She didn't break her promise!"...but his soul was daunted. It was like giving a Christmas gift to someone who had everything. He looked into her eyes and saw his own reflection swimming on the surface of her pupils. She seemed so fragile right now. Her eyes quivered with uncertainty.

He leaned forwards and kissed her on the lips. From somewhere deep within, he felt a surge of confidence.

"Belldandy...I _promise_ you that we'll get Urd back! As Urd promised you back then, I promise you now! Urd isn't gone, she's just separated from us for a little while...only the Ultimate Force knows why. But I pledge to you upon all the love that I have for you...that we'll find your sister and bring her back safe and sound! And you know me...I _keep_ my promises!"

Belldandy listened intently to Keiichi's words.

"Keiichi, this is why I love you best. Sometimes you have the courage of...well...of one of _us_!" she said, cheering up a little bit despite her troubled thoughts. Inside of her heart she marveled to herself.

"I don't know how you do it, my dear, but your faith once more has rescued me from the depths of despair," she said in a quiet voice, deliberately loud enough for him to overhear.

Belldandy had chosen right when she decided to fall in love with this young mortal. But she knew _that_ already. Still, it was incredibly comforting to hear his voice frame the words of confidence she needed so desperately to hear.

_--Tap Tap--_

Keiichi motioned for Belldandy to open the sliding door, figuring that it was Skuld. Bell stood up and slid the door open to reveal her younger sister standing forlornly with a blanket and a futon. Skuld silently dragged her futon and placed it between his and Bell's bedding, then made her bed. Mini-Banpei whirred into the room and stood attentively at the head of Skuld's futon bed.

After Skuld had climbed under her blanket, Bell returned to her bedding and climbed under the covers. Keiichi had instinctively pulled his covers up chin-high as soon as Skuld was in the room, feeling somewhat awkward with her presence. He lay on his back and looked at the ceiling fan...it still felt strange that Skuld was sleeping _here_, in his room.

"Thank the Lord that I have a large bedroom!" he mouthed silently between breaths.

Skuld rolled on her side to face Belldandy and started sobbing. Keiichi instinctively reached out and gently rubbed Skuld's shoulders through her pajamas. Her back felt as stiff as steel tension wires. His heart filled with a surge of empathy for her. Belldandy looked past Skuld for a moment and caught his eye...she smiled at him in gratitude at his kindness, and then she pulled Skuld close to her, resting her chin on the top of Skuld's head.

Keiichi massaged Skuld until her shoulders stopped shaking from the force of her sobbing. He was pretty sure that she had fallen asleep. Bell-chan was asleep too, lightly breathing as she hugged her younger sister. When he stopped, Skuld surprised him by rolling over and giving him a sweet kiss on the cheek, whispering a shy "thank you" to him. She rolled back over and nestled in her sister's embrace.

"It's so weird how things have turned out," Keiichi thought.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"I would like to introduce our visiting faculty member from Japan," Dr. Zhao announced me to the audience with formal enthusiasm. There was a round of polite applause from the filled assembly room. I was always put off by the fact that applause was given before a speaker actually took the podium. Did that imply that before-applause and after-applause meant the same thing?

People are weird all over the world.

I had given numerous speeches as an addict in recovery. Speeches and public testimonies were part and parcel of the recovery process: they served to inspire and unify the listeners. To remind them that the miracle of recovery that works itself in the life of the speaker is also at work in everyone's lives, so long as they don't mess with the gift of living clean from drugs.

Academic speeches on the other hand were a whole different matter. Instead of addressing a receptive audience who was mostly interested in emotional empathy with the speaker, academic speeches were met with an audience bent on employing their critical faculties. I suspected that Dr. Zhao had arranged this as a dry run for my dissertation. At least this audience couldn't argue too much, as I was only allotted an hour for my talk, then a second hour to field questions.

Time flies when one gives a speech.

I concluded my speech with the standard proratios, then opened it up for questions from the floor. I usually picked from the rear of the audience first...as I had found that those listeners who crammed into the back of the room were there more often because of personal interest rather than perfunctory obligation.

A woman stood up, dressed in a student dress.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Urd had finished her latest video shoot a little early today. After finishing several bottles of pijou in her flat, she decided to do some sightseeing. She caught a bus to the northeast part of Beijing and simply wandered around, relishing in the nightlife. After visiting a few alleyway bazaars, she entered a bookstore and looked at the large coffee-table books filled with beautiful pictures of China. Carefully leafing through a book detailing the sights of Beijing, she noticed a chapter on Peking University, or BeiDa as the locals called it. Something itched in her memory, something about the university and someone she knew.

BeiDa. Cevn.

Cevn. BeiDa.

She slapped the book down and cursed herself. She had been in this city two weeks while _he_ had been here too! She was torn between her desire to beat him over the head and scream at him for walking out on her versus gravely and humbly apologizing to him for her betrayal. Whatever she did, she felt a strong impulse to see him, even if he probably didn't want to see her. She felt that it was tragicomic that the only person she really knew well in the Beijing was the person who was the angriest with her on the whole Earthrealm.

"I may have hurt him, albeit inadvertently, but he needs to get over it. If you can't float with the best, you'll sink with the rest," she said to herself. As she thought of Cevn, her new-old feelings returned...full force.

"I _have_ to see him, even if I'm a little drunk. Actually, I'm going to be wired with excitement by the time I see him. Maybe I should get another couple bottles to take the edge off," she told herself. "Besides, he can't be _that_ emotionally hurt!" She finished the bottle of strong jiu and left it on a shelf in the bookstore.

She ran out into the street and hailed a cab. It turned out that she was only a few miles from BeiDa. She alighted from the cab and briskly walked towards the big gate. Several Red Guardsmen approached her with an official air, probably to check to see if she was a student. She smiled sweetly at them and ran her hand across the leader's cheek, disarming him from his intended ID check.

"Kiss me, you fool!" she whispered in Japanese as she passed the ornate gateway.

She milled about the campus as the 9pm nightfall descended. There were little groups of students sitting on the grass in circles all over the campus. She noticed that there was a filled auditorium on her left; she could hear some kind of a speech being given. Curious and attracted by the crowd, she walked up to the building...and recognized Cevn's voice.

A shiver went down her spine as she heard him talking about what the mortals called commerce philosophy. Her desire to see him heightened with each word. She felt a little bit homesick at the sound of his voice, but she swallowed _those_ feelings down. She couldn't face her sister and Skuld after what she did to Cevn. What if they found out? How would Keiichi and Megumi think of her, knowing that she took advantage of their mortal friend?

"Besides, I don't want to be there if Kami-sama decides to check up on my little mortal charge and finds out that he flew the coop because I meddled in his life!" she said aloud randomly to a student passerby, who looked at her with a mystified expression.

She felt apprehensive for some reason, so she quickly downed the last bottle of jiu that she had stashed in her handbag, much to the amazement of several students milling nearby. They cheered her as she finished it in record time. Urd nonchalantly tossed it in the bushes and walked in the back door of the building. She found an open seat in the second to last row. Almost all the young male students were gaping at her with open admiration, an attention that she relished.

She listened to his speech while her mind raced. The academic minutiae of his lecture were turgid bubbles of thought, as far as she was concerned.

Ignoring the speech for more important matters, Urd formulated a plan of attack.

"What do I say to him? When do I talk to him? What if he freaks out? Well..._so what_ if he does?" she asked herself. She decided that the best tactic would be the direct approach. Urd felt her heart pulse as she saw Cevn up at the podium.

"How come he gets to be such a celebrity all of a sudden?" she asked out loud in a derisive voice. One of the girls sitting by her shsshed her, then whispered that Cevn was a visiting scholar from Japan.

"Hmmph, _him_ a scholar?" she replied flabbergastedly.

After an extremely boring half an hour, it was over. Cevn opened the floor for questions and Urd raised her hand.

"Finally, it's time for some _real_ action!" she thought to herself.

"_Watch this, kids!_" she said to the students nearby as she raised her hand up high.

He pointed right at her and her heartbeat picked up a pace.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

I watched the female student stand up, then felt my brain empty of all the relief I had felt when I finished my speech. She wore an embroidered chambray shirt with gathered sleeves, a pair of jeans and a nice girlish hat...but her face was unmistakable. I could almost imagine seeing the greens of her eyes.

It was Urd.

She was here, in this building, live and direct! Possessed of an out-of-body perspective, I felt my body stiffen with anxiety as an inadvertent gasp escaped my lips. An emotional riot was going off in my gut as my knees turned jellyfishy.

"Why do you thin' the Chineesh economy recoilsh from the injection of poshitive elementsh that the attractive Western economy offersh? An' also, hee hee...on a more pershonal note, shpeaking of recoilin', why are you sho d..damned afraid of _women_, Mr. Guesh Scholar? Like the Chineesh economy, you recoil from the attractive onesh! Or mebbe, er...you sho inject 'em with your elemensh..."

A gasp from the audience followed her question.

Shitshitshit!

Urd had tried to say "elements" as "jinxiang"...but instead said "jingzi". Sperm. My all-too-familiar fear of women and sex jumped up my throat as I contemplated how to get the hell out of here. The only exit doors were stagefront. Ahead...which would bring me closer to Urd! No way could I climb down off of this dais. I grabbed the podium tightly, trying to feel shielded by its bulk.

I was looking right at Urd over thirty rows of faces filling the auditorium...whose crowd of students and faculty were gasping as one at her rudeness. My mind raced for a response. My blood felt like refrigerant coolant. This was my worst nightmare come true! Urd was obviously drunk; her voice reeked of intoxication and frustration.

"As for the first question..." I gave the standard scholarly spiel in an attempt to interpose purpose on chaos. Urd didn't buy it one bit.

"Quit avoidin' the point, Cevn! Why...are...you...afraid!" she interrupted me with a scream of anger. Two Red Guards immediately caught up with her and promptly escorted her out of the auditorium. I turned and looked at Dr. Zhao, my eyes asking for a release from this hell. He sternly pointed at the audience and I shakily called on the next querant. I wondered if it was routine for audience members to try and heckle the speaker during a speech in BeiDa as I resumed the role of guest lecturer.

Finally it was over. I felt that I had acquitted myself as best I could, considering the attack that Urd had made. _If_ it was an attack. Yet...it seemed like a cry for help instead. Several students and faculty surrounded me after the speech for additional information and exchange of opinions.

"Who was she? She's obviously not a student," several students asked me. One girl sat down next to me on the edge of the stage after the crowd thinned down and tried to calm me down. She looked like a Chinese Skuld, with two long braids of hair down her back. But she was fully adult in every sense of the word. I could tell that she was a 'soft' Chinese; possessed of a restraining personality.

Her voice was calming, but I was in a state of shock from what Urd had done; her words fell deaf on my ears. I was no longer in my body...I was disconnected from my being. I shook my head to try and regain my perspective, and then I conversed with her.

She told me her name was Lin. She was an economics student who was planning to write a book on Western business theory. Then I remembered that she had asked me some challenging questions about the appropriateness of applying Keynesian economy philosophy to 21st-Century Western economies. As we talked, I felt my anxiety gradually recede. Then out of the blue, Lin asked me if Urd was a spurned ex-girlfriend.

Once she said this, I freaked. I immediately became suspicious that Urd's 'drama' was an attempt to gain my forgiveness, albeit in a sick and twisted manner. I quickly excused myself and ran out the door. Once again, my inner feelings resulting from the childhood abuse had locked me up into a tremendous pressure of raw fear. I felt sad for Lin...she was just trying to help me calm down...and I had run out on her. Dammit...why did I have to be so contrary because of my past?

"Cevn...wait! I'm shorry about wha' I did! But ish your fault that I'm here!"

I turned around towards the direction of the shouting...to see Urd walking towards me.

"The Red Guards let her _go_?" I stammered incredulously.

"G..get away from me! Leave me the hell alone, Urd! G..go back to Japan, go do whatever you want...but don't include me! Go away! I don't want to be with you, here or anywhere else!" I screamed; all sense of propriety dashed against the rock-hard mold of my tainted heart.

"God, you don't know how goo' it ish to shee a familiar fashe here, honey!" she said, ignoring my warnings. She walked up closer to me.

I pushed her firmly away, a cloud of ethanol floating defile in the air around her. She had been hitting the bottle heavily.

"Urd, I told you once that I _never_ want to see you again! You just can't get it through your stubborn head that I don't care about you anymore! Get out of here, before I call the Red Guards and have you arrested!" I screamed.

Urd's face felt flat at my threat. She was drunk on whatever intoxicant she could obtain in Beijing. She started pitching insults at me. I turned around and started walking towards South Gate. Then she accented her angry tirade by pitching an empty liquor bottle at me. My walk transformed into a dash.

I ran away from her, hearing her shouts of "loosher" fading in the background as the bottle crashed against the sidewalk. This was too unreal to be shocking or embarrassing. I ran and ran and ran until my chest hurt. I had run the dozen or so miles to Tiananmen Square. I collapsed on the ground next to a stairway and dozed off briefly.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"GENJI! Why don't you hang your towel up after taking a bath!? Do you know what it is like to have to pick up some lazy person's _wet_ towel that was left on the rinsing floor before I can wash myself? It's...gross! You're acting just like some '_Old Japan' male pig_!"

"Well excuse me...I didn't know that putting the towel in the hamper was a requirement while staying in a hotel. Isn't that the maid's job?" he shot back, fully intent on arguing.

Megumi turned red in the face.

"Do _I_ look like a maid?" she shouted, her cute-but-livid face framed between the doorframe and the partly open bathroom door.

"Hmmm...well on second thought, since you _have_ been picking up my towels..." Genji replied sarcastically. Megumi angrily stepped into the main room of their hotel room, towel coiled in hand.

_--Snap!!--_

"Ouch! H..hey that towel's wet! You could..._whip_...really hurt somebody with that!" he quickly retorted, scampering as Megumi chased him down, snapping him with the wet towel she had found on the tiled floor next to the bathtub.

"Four days in a row I reminded you! Four days! Nicely! About leaving the towel on the floor! Four days!" she said, emphasizing each sentence with a crack of the wet towel.

_--Crack!!--_

"Hey this isn't even fair! Why don't you give me the towel _you're_ wearing so we can be even!" he replied tauntingly.

"_Hmph!_" Megumi said, insulted by the idiocy of his request. She was wrapped in a long bath towel...and she wasn't one bit embarrassed as she stood in front of her traveling companion. She had emerged angrily from the bathroom, totally upset at Genji's disregard for common decency. After all, they had to share the furoba.

Suddenly, sharing a bathroom with a man seemed very unattractive to her. She chased Genji around the room, snapping at him with the towel in a blind rage, no longer in the mood for a bath. In between snaps, Genji made a playful grab at the bath towel she was wearing and _accidentally grabbed a corner_, partially loosening it. It slipped down her front, momentarily exposing her bra. Genji's eyes almost popped out their sockets as Megumi hastily pulled the towel back up and adjusted it, tying it in the front.

"That does it! From now on, we're in separate rooms buddy!" Megumi said angrily.

"Serves you right! You shouldn't be wearing a towel...you should be wearing that bathrobe you packed! Then this wouldn't have happened!" he replied, somewhat embarrassed by the slip of his hand.

"Errrr!" Megumi growled. Then something in her snapped.

Looking at him sharply, Megumi let her towel slide off, watching Genji's eyes widen with appreciation as he saw her in her underclothes. She wadded it up and tossed it in his face...which was an easy target since he was paralyzed into staring at her.

"There! Are you happy, you _pervert_?" she said, then turned tail and walked into the bathroom and slammed the door. Genji stood rooted to the floor in shock. The curves of her body were heavenly...but her scowl was abrasively hellish.

Finally, he remembered to breathe.

Genji was confused. Megumi had been totally fun to be around the first week and a half. It was like they were on some romantic adventure in a faraway land...or an extended date with no chaperones. He felt a strange mix of sensual lust and loyal friendship towards her. Then things gradually started changing. Megumi started acting different. It was hard to describe, but she had become demanding and controlling...and _very_ moody.

"Now she wants to be in separate rooms...but then she pulls her towel off and stands there in bra and panties in front of me!" Genji said to himself. He almost felt lucky, getting to see her feminine glories. Shocked as well, as he had never seen a _real girl_ in bra and panties.

"Is she mad at me or what? What is with her?" he wondered as his eyes were drawn towards the bathroom door. His mind carried the afterimage of Megumi several minutes into the future, freeze-framed by his startled shock.

"Megumi is so beautiful...and so arrogant!" he concluded as he heard the water splash on.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Megumi reflected on what she had just done.

The previous week, Megumi and Genji had begun to get on each other's nerves due to the rigors of their travels. Megumi had almost called it quits because Genji was just...so unreasonable! He was trying too hard to impress her. Then at other times, he seemed so callous. She sensed that Genji, for his part, felt that her own edginess was causing him to feel like he was walking on eggshells.

She closed her eyes and concentrated as she rinsed...

They both knew that something else was contributing to their raw nerves. But neither could put a finger on it, however. Megumi knew that Genji had grown up with his sister, Sayoko. So he was supposed to know how to conduct himself around a woman.

"But, it seems that being with me...is a whole different thing," she though despairingly. Megumi had grown up with Keiichi, but she was accustomed to sharing living space with her older brother. So why was Genji acting so..._ignorant_?

She poured the last ladle of rinsing water over her head, then eased herself slowly into the bathtub; the hot waters grabbing her in their relaxing embrace. She relished these moments: away from Genji, away from the weighty matter of finding Urd. Her cares soaked away into the clear, hard water. The water in Sapporo was markedly different than the water she was used to back home. It had a fuller taste...a little bit of a mineral tanginess to it. She could smell it in the air above the bathtub. Unaccustomed to the harder water, her skin had dried slightly at first. But once she applied oil to her skin after soaking in the bathtub, that took care of things.

Megumi recalled the memories she had about the guys she had dated in the past. But being with Genji was _different_ in so many ways. It wasn't like a date anymore. She should have realized that she was woefully ill-prepared to spend three weeks with him! During their stays in hotel rooms, she started noticing little things about him; like how he folded his clothes and what he liked to eat. Some of these habits were downright funny, while others irritated Megumi to the max. She also noticed that he was sometimes less careful about being neat than she would have been, especially with things like folding futons and washing dishes. She was thankful that the maid service at the various hotels and inns they had stayed with were diligent about such matters.

"Why am I getting so uptight around him?" she said out loud in a quiet voice.

"I really, really like Genji a lot. But lately I've been a bitch towards him. Why? He must think that I'm a horrible person, putting on such airs," she told herself. Megumi screwed her face up into a scowl of concentration, trying to find a resolve to her concerns.

She looked through the window to see two butterflies flitting around each other, seemingly going in circles.

"Circles. That's what it feels like. Like Genji and I are just going in circles. Circling around Hokkaido. Circling around each other with these little arguments we've been having," she said in an elegant voice. She continued watching the pair of butterflies weave a colorful strand of patterns in the air. They, with a natural ebb, they flew off in opposite directions. She giggled at the revelatory simplicity of it.

"Ye Gods...why didn't I think of this? Genji and I...we've been living together for three weeks, with only a single weekend for a break. We _can't_ simply fly off in different directions when we need time to be alone! What's more, we've been living like a married couple...same room, same bath, same car. Yet we haven't really gotten to know each other...we've been _forced_ to get to know each other. I wonder if this was what Belldandy had in mind when she paired us up?" Megumi said to the now empty window. She paused and smiled wistfully, running her hands through her wet hair.

"That's it! We're falling in love...the _real _love. The love where one accepts the other, faults and all. And right now, we need some time away from each other. At least, _I_ need time away from him. Desperately!" she whispered. She sighed and smiled brightly at the morning sun.

"So this is what the real deal is!" Megumi thought to herself. Dreamily, she stepped up out of the tub...and slipped.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Genji was laying on his hotel bed, wondering how things could be getting so insane between Megumi and he.

"Could it be that we've simply been around each other too much? How could she know that Sayoko and I each have our own bathroom, with a housemaid to clean up after us? We just don't know enough about each other," he mused in frustration.

He walked over and looked out the window, watching the Sapporo cityscape. Their hotel was situated right on the O-dori, the wide central thoroughfare that bisected Sapporo. He watched as the central park between both broad avenues milled with pedestrians.

_Aiiieeee!!_

He heard a scream from the bathroom, followed by a loud thud.

"MEGUMI!" he screamed as he rushed to the bathroom door.

"What do I do? Do I open it or not?" he asked himself. Deciding to take the path of least resistance, he pounded on the door instead.

"Are you all right? I'm right here by the door!" he said, then cursed himself. Of course he was right by the door...no, he had reached across the room and knocked on it with his 12-foot long arms!

"Megumi, please say something if you're okay?" he shouted. He put his ear to the door and heard a low groan. His mind hurdled his embarrassment as this was an intensely awkward situation for him. "Do I walk in on her, or wait until she comes out? What if she's hurt really badly? What if she's _naked_?" he wondered, then cursed himself again...for thinking about sexual stuff at a time like this.

"She's right...I'm just a pervert!" he admonished himself, red-faced with shame.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Megumi was dizzy, sprawled out on the floor. The ceiling and walls were spinning and she saw sparks of light dancing across everything. She had slipped on the wet tile floor next to the tub and hit her head on the edge of the basin. She couldn't move for a moment, but she could faintly hear Genji's shouts of concern. She reached around behind her head and withdrew her hand to see that it was red with blood. She tried to stand up and ended up sitting back down against the edge of the bathtub.

"_Meguuuuuumi_! Are you okay in there?" the voice shouted through the door.

"I fell down...I have a bump on my head the size of Mt. Fuji and I can't stand up. But I'm all right...I think," she replied.

Megumi flashed on how embarrassing this must be for Genji. It was almost funny, this bizarre scene. He must be freaking out right about now...

"This, just a few weeks after that damned 'Demon Rally' of Mara's," she grumbled aloud.

"Owwww...what did I do to deserve this?" she thought with a private frustration as the bathroom stopped spinning.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Genji heard Megumi's faint response and felt a mixture of relief and concern. He dashed over to the intercom and paged the front desk to obtain the address of the nearest hospital in Sapporo. With over 3.5 million inhabitants, there had to be one close by.

He went back to the bathroom door, just as Megumi opened the door and collapsed in his arms. He could see a trace of blood trickling behind her left ear onto the towel she was wrapped in.

"That does it. We're going to the hospital. Can you dress yourself?" he said. Unexpectedly, he felt a huge wash of relief as he held her in his arms; but he also felt unexpected tears tracing his eyes.

"Why am _I _crying?," he wondered.

She nodded her head and glanced towards the bathroom. Genji looked at her in bewilderment for a second, then realized what she was directing him to do.

"Tell me when you're ready," he said as he pulled the bathroom door shut behind him. He looked at the paper with the address of the closest hospital. It struck him in an odd sense that he wasn't mad at Megumi any longer. Instead, he felt a deep concern for a girl that was becoming a bosom friend.

"Why _am _I crying?" he asked again in a whispered voice as he wiped under his eyes with a handtowel.

"I'm ready...but don't blame me if I don't look anything like your typical evening date," he heard her say weakly. He opened the door and saw that Megumi was sitting on the futon in a T-shirt and jeans, rocking slowly because of the pain. He gently pulled her up and reached around her waist to support her as they walked towards the lobby. Megumi was almost unable to walk...he struggled with the effort to keep her from falling down. It was pleasant the way that she was leaning against him, however.

At the lobby, a ring of concerned hotel staff saw them out to their car. The lady at the desk gave Genji a hand-drawn map to follow. They were on their way on the hospital almost before they knew it. The two discussed how Sapporo people are so friendly compared to Tokyoites.

As they were driving, Genji wondered if some unseen force was trying to tell them that it was time to go home and take a break.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

_"Hello? Oh, hi Genji. How's things? WHAT? She got a concussion? What the hell happened? Oh...she slipped in the bathroom! I..is she okay? I thought you were supposed to take care of her! It's all you're fault that my _--little sister--_ is hurt! You __idiot! I knew I should have never trusted her around an lamer like you..."_

Genji mentally envisioned the phone call to Keiichi with no small degree of trepidation. He felt responsible for her accident, which had brought a commensurate level of guilt. Megumi had gotten hurt, and it was his fault.

"What to do?" he wondered, looking up and down the cabinets in the ER out of sheer boredom. The time lingered as they awaited the doctor's pronouncement. After a long wait, the doctor returned. She had taken extensive x-rays of Megumi's head, and pronounced that she had a minor skull fracture and a concussion. She prescribed several medications to reduce the pain and swelling and advised them to return to Makuhari as soon as possible.

Genji was afraid to call Keiichi, afraid of raising the ire of Megumi's older brother. His sempai, as far at the N.I.T. Motor Club was concerned. But mainly Megumi's _older brother_.

"Aren't you going to call and let them know we're coming back a couple of days early?" Megumi asked as he headed out the airport rental lot to pay for the car.

"No...besides they'll get to see you soon enough. Back in a flash," he said with a forced smile.

Megumi felt like some kind of samurai warrior with the compress over her bump and the cloth bandage wrapped around her head. While Genji was gone, she reached under the wrap and pulled out as much hair as she could to cover it.

"He must think I'm a total fool, getting hurt like this! What a embarrassing mess!" she reproached herself as she watched his approaching form. He had a wheelchair.

"What is _that_ for?" she asked, cocking her head to the side because it _hurt_.

"_This_ is for young ladies who are wounded in battle on distant shores," he said good-heartedly.

"Your chariot is ready, miss," he said with a theatrical gesture, tapping the back of the wheelchair seat.

Megumi's reluctance to ride in that _thing_ dissolved when she noticed how hard he was trying to cheer her up. She smiled at him, the first time since they had left the hotel. He was really trying to bear up with the circumstances.

"If he thinks I'm his girlfriend, then he must think I'm a klutz too," she chided herself as they drove towards the airport in Chitose.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Genji upped their seating to first class for the return trip. Once the airplane took off, Megumi leaned against his shoulder and promptly fell asleep. They were flying to Narita, where he would get her car and drive them home.

About a half an hour before landing, Megumi woke up to see that Genji was asleep. She shook him lightly and sleepily asked him if he was okay.

"What? You're asking _me_? You're the one who got hurt," he said, touched by her concern.

"Genji, I was thinking...about us. We've been out looking for Urd for the past two weeks, without a break. I noticed that it's been hard for us to get along the last few days. I was thinking..."

"...that it was due to the fact that we've been stuck with each other, you and I. I hardly know you...and now it seems like I've been living with you. You feel this way too?" he finished. Megumi nodded her head as much as her headache would permit.

"Ouch," she said in a low voice.

"Well, you _have_ been living with me...I mean we've shared everything in the past two weeks," Megumi said.

"Well _almost_ everything," Genji said with a red face.

"What do you mean by that, mister?" Megumi teased with a mock indignant voice.

"Eh, heh heh, you haven't shared my toothbrush," he smiled at her.

"I didn't quite hear that...you said 'I haven't shared your futon?' What a unusual thing to say," she said in a low whisper.

"I said _toothbrush_!" Genji replied with red-faced embarrassment.

"And _I_ said futon!" Megumi countered urbanely.

"Megumi..." he answered in a quiet whining voice.

"Shhh, you don't have to tell everyone on the plane, Genji! I _said_ futon. And I meant it. Even though you don't always pick up your towel, the rest of you is pretty wonderful! You really rose to the occasion today, my gallant daimyo-knight!" she offered with as much honey as she could put into her voice.

"If you share a futon with me, something else will _really_ rise to the occasion," he teased back.

"Hmmm, we'll have to wait and see about that. I did say _futon_...not love hotel," she replied with a pseudo-coquettish voice. Megumi was impressed with how quickly he returned her sexual double-entendre with a remark of his own. She smiled and kissed him on the cheek.

"Genji, I think that I'm falling, even though I'm up in the air. Or maybe something is lifting me up in the air...besides this plane," she whispered in his ear.

"I think you've already fallen, Megumi," he whispered back privately. Megumi felt her heart do a double beat at this.

"Yes...I think I've fallen for you, Genji," she whimsically thought to herself.

"Genji, I have a confession to make..." she said. She could sense that his heart had skipped a beat, since _she_ was taking the initiative. Megumi leaned close to his ear again.

"When I was trying to snap you with the towel, I was trying for your cute little butt!" she said, then pulled her head back and eyed him for his reaction.

Genji looked at her; momentarily disappointed as he was expecting her to make a love confession.

"But after I wiped out in the bathtub, the blow to my head made me see things more clearly. I used to think that I was in love with you, but now I _think_ I'm in love with you, Genji. Do you understand what I mean?" she asked.

Genji looked at her light brown eyes, speechless in the face of her admission and all the formidable beauty behind it. He was dazed as he saw the curve of her chin, the bridge of her nose, her two eyebrows tapering off to their points, the slight pout of her mouth...

Megumi paused, catching her breath, and continued.

"I've been wanting to date you for the longest time, Genji. In fact, that was the reason Cevn-sensei took us to the Noh play...so I could get to know you better. I really think you're a great guy! Even if you have some sloppy habits that need to shaped up. But...I can live with that," she said.

"But, even though I was attracted to you...it wasn't until today that I realized that it's more than attraction that I feel, _here_," she said as she put her hand over her heart. She watched his face closely as he alternated between fear and embarrassment and joy. But mostly nervousness.

She smiled, welcoming his response to her.

"Megumi...I..I think that I love you too. In fact, I..I more than think that I love you. Y..you can figure out the rest later," he admitted with more than a major bout of high anxiety.

"God, I'm so stupid...you've probably _already_ figured that out! No, I didn't mean that _I'm_ stupid, I meant..." he corrected his blatant solecism, his discomfort rising with each utterance.

Megumi did her best to choke down a giggle in response to his gaffe, then smiled encouragingly at him, inwardly amused by his awkwardness.

"I meant, about how I feel about you! I've never told anyone this kind of stuff before. But...l..let's get you home where you can rest," he added, his confidence almost exhausted after its battle with his nerves.

Megumi felt a whooomp where her heart was in her chest.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

I woke up in Tiananmen Square with a representative of the ever-present Red Guard standing over me. He asked me if I was drunk...which seemed to trigger something.

I burst out into laughter. It was so comically absurd. Urd coming in and disrupting my talk at BeiDa. My running the 15 kilometers to Tiananmen in the middle of the night...as if that would make the pain of seeing her go away.

So I told him that I had been possessed by a ghost and that I was the reincarnation of Chairman Mao and that I had been instructed to tell all the children in China to buy skateboards. The look on his face was priceless. He was too stunned to tell me to "move along!"

I got up, smiled at him and walked to the bus stop and caught the first bus to BeiDa.

I noticed a clock tower as the bus passed it.

"Damn! I have to be at Capital Airport by 10am. And it's 6 in the morning already!" I thought in a panic. As soon as I got back to the dorm at 7:15, I started randomly shoving papers and t-shirts in my travel bags.

"This is what I get for procrastination!" I grumbled as I looked around the room with the anxiety that accompanies haste.

"Where were they?" I near-shouted, waking my roommate.

Dunhuang would be even hotter than Beijing, which would be near unbearable because of the aridity of its climate. Anything more than a thin T-shirt would be too much. I looked at the scarf Belldandy had made me...and thanked her silently for her gift as I packed it.

I sighed in sheer relief as I gathered the missing items...cave passes and clearances that I had received from Dr. Zhao. I furtively packed all sorts of crap in the bag with a final flurry.

I barely made it. Capital Airport was very busy, full of the usual hawkers and crowded conditions. I joked with myself that the next time I came to Beijing, there would be gangs of Krishna devotees selling incense and literature. I had respect for them...at least they were trying to increase world peace by spiritual means.

The plane was hot, as Chinese domestic flights don't turn on the AC until the plane is airborne. It was an old Tupulenov widebody. I was amused to see the "No smoking" signs in Cyrillic and Hanzi...signs of an earlier era of cooperation between the two Communist superpowers.

I looked over my itinerary. I would lodge at a CTB hotel in Dunhuang, then visit the caves over the next few days. The China Travel Bureau hotel room would serve as my office for a week. I wouldn't be getting the tourist treatment; instead I would get full access to the cave system and the grottoes. I had read several texts detailing the acme of the cave system, but I still didn't know why I was compelled to come here, of all places.

There was so much I wanted to learn. I knew that Dunhuang was one of the most important centers of trade along the old Silk Road. It was an intellectual and spiritual nexus, alongside being a commerce crossroads. This was the rich and fertile battleground of all faiths, where the Islamic Imam and the Syriac Christian could debate with the Taoist recluse and the Buddhist abbot. The metallect faculty was at work in my mind, underlying my curiosity with an almost magnetic attraction to this place.

Who knew what adventures lie ahead?

Somehow, my dissertation was converging. I was reluctant to use metallectual capabilities...in fact I resisted that new part of my mind, which seemed to synergize unknowables into cogences. It just didn't seem fair that I _knew_ so many thoughts and ideas! Beyond this, I lacked trust in my own ability to explain myself. How could I explain the God's Language to my fellow scholars?

"How many ways can one create the sound of rain on a synthesizer?" I thought, than I immediately became homesick. I wanted to go back and tell them that it was only a dream that bluntered my resolve to create a new life in Japan...that I had left Makuhari behind and that I was deeply sorry for disappearing from their lives. Then cold, hard reality hit me and I felt nauseous. How much impact could a deep betrayal have? Why couldn't I just let it go?

Too bad that life isn't a process of pretenses: pretending to be real; pretending to feel; and pretending to love. No matter how many times I escaped into myself during the beatings, the sexual abuse, the drugs, the starving and the death of my wife...I still had to encounter _me_. I had been given one last chance by Urd...a wish...a new family...and Urd had killed the only iota of hope I held onto.

Airplane or not, I was going to Dunhuang.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Megumi, what _happened_!" Keiichi gasped in shock. His little sister had a cloth band wrapped around her head. He looked accusingly at Genji until he noticed that Megumi had put her hand in his, somewhat protectively. Genji had fear written across his face, along with...sadness?, Keiichi observed.

"Keiichi, I'm so glad to be back home! I slipped in the bathroom at the hotel we were staying at in Sapporo. Genji took me to the hospital. I'm all right, I just need to rest for a few days," she said, barely managing a smile despite her throbbing headache.

Belldandy hovered over Megumi with a worried mien. She ran her hand over the bump on the back of Megumi's head.

"Oooh, you must have really fallen down hard to make such a big bump," she said gently. She silently encanted a spell and the throbbing in Megumi's head subsided considerably. Megumi looked up at Belldandy in surprise, momentarily forgetting that she was a Goddess who could perform such 'miracles' whenever she felt the whim.

"We didn't find any traces of Urd. We looked all over Sapporo...in fact we drove a few thousand kilos. Tomakomai, Hakodate, Takigawa, even Wakkanai. I don't even want to spend another evening in a hotel, especially after what happened to Megumi," Genji said while looking at the ground.

Keiichi looked at the expression in Megumi's face and adjudged that her attraction to Genji had grown during their stay in Hokkaido. "With good reason too," he observed to himself while Megumi explained how he had taken her to the hospital. Despite the easy humor of the incident, Genji had basically behaved like a gentleman during the bathroom accident. He felt his respect for Genji increase as Megumi described how he had exerted himself in their effort to locate Urd.

"Well, it looks like Belldandy and I are going to go way south to Nagasaki, Shimonoseki and Kyushu," Keiichi said reluctantly. He went over and put a hand on Genji's shoulder and squeezed it.

"Thanks for taking care of my little sister, Genji. I really mean it...your helping her means a lot to me. But we need to _talk_ about this...the sooner the better," Keiichi noted as he proffered a hand for a Western-style handshake. Genji raised his face and looked at Keiichi in surprise. He grabbed Keiichi's hand and shook it firmly.

Keiichi forced a smile, but he was apprehensive about giving Genji 'the lecture' he had planned to deliver to Megumi's next boyfriend. A lecture that had assumed a rich gravity, especially after that crack about condoms Megumi made when Bell's sisters left a couple of years ago.

Yet, he was deeply disappointed that no one had found any trace of Urd. He was hoping that she had fled to the north, but this hope was dashed. According to Genji, they had performed a thorough search of Hokkaido.

Megumi could tell that her brother's spirit was downcast. But when she saw the hollow expression on Skuld's face, it nearly brought her to tears. Even Belldandy's cordiality seemed to be strained under the influence of the loss of her sister. She knew that Belldandy and Skuld had been limbing out on the hope that she and Genji would find some clue that would lead them to Urd. Strangely, she felt guilty that the news she brought was not good news.

Megumi disliked being the center of attention, but at least her injuries had provided an excuse for the others to focus on something other than Urd and Cevn's disappearance. She was disheartened when they told her that Cevn was at BeiDa, but wasn't returning their calls. Her feminine intuition told her that the cause of Cevn's evasiveness had something to do with Urd. It was _too_ much of a coincidence that they had both disappeared without notice. In this, she agreed with Belldandy.

"I'm totally tired...I need to get to sleep," she said, diplomatically extracting herself from the crowd of Keiichi, Belldandy, Skuld and Tomohisa. She walked with Genji to her room, and gave him a lingering passionate kiss.

"That's for being such a good guy, Genji. The doctor said that I'll probably be sick to my stomach for a couple days...so don't you ignore me!" she kidded him.

"It's bedpan patrol for you, buddy!" she said with the giggle of a woman who 'owned' her man.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --


	20. Pt 20: Communion of Senses

**Part 20: Communion of Senses**

Keiichi awoke to the sound of brashing wind whistling against the glass he was resting his head on. He looked out the window of the Shinkansen as the Japanese landscape blurred past him in a pastiche of green and brown. They had just passed the outer edges of the Osaka metroplex and were finally viewing some countryside. The cabin indicator said that the train was riding the rails at 252 kph. The marvels of the Shinkansen always fascinated the engineer in Keiichi.

"Maybe someday I can design the next generation of bullet trains!" he fantasized briefly. He looked over to see Belldandy _still_ engrossed in studying the guides to Western Honshu and Kyushu, trying to memorize everything about the places they were going to travel in their search for Urd.

Their plan was to debark at Okayama, then rent a car and check out Kinkazun and Washuzun, then travel west to Hiroshima. Megumi had recuperated somewhat over the weekend, despite the frequent bouts of nausea that accompanied her concussion. Keiichi smiled to himself as he remembered how Genji had diligently watched over her, providing her with clean bedpans whenever she got sick to her stomach.

"What a thing to have to go through so early in a relationship!" he mused.

It had become apparent to him in the past few days that Megumi and Genji were now more than 'just friends'. Genji had tended to Megumi's every need as best he could: bringing her soft food to eat; reading parts of the newspaper to her; installing the small TV from the spare room into her bedroom so she could watch; playing cards and mahjongg with her and changing her bandages.

"Sis, you really know how to pick 'em," he admitted respectfully in a whisper.

"Huh...Keiichi, you're awake," Belldandy said. Her grief for Urd had diminished greatly, transforming into a gritty determination. The search for Urd had become a deep-rooted ambition for her. Although her intuition informed her that Urd was not in Japan, she felt as though the _act_ of searching for her older sister would somehow _bring_ her older sister back home. Belldandy definitely sensed a coherence with the energies that linked her and Urd, even if she didn't know where Urd was.

Her brittle heart was cheered somewhat by the changes between Megumi and Genji. She could easily see the look of love in each of their eyes when they were together. They reminded Belldandy of her and Keiichi.

"Genji is a good young man," she had decided after being especially impressed with the patience he employed as he took care of Megumi after her accident. Belldandy had talked to him several times; he seemed to possess some of the same attributes that she found admirable in Keiichi. This buoyed her spirits immensely...it was nice to have _two_ gentlemen in the house. She noticed that her Keiichi was also bonding with Genji...an able demonstration of Keiichi's surrender of his possessive/protective vigilance towards his younger sister.

Genji had told her everything about his sister Sayoko and her dreadful decline into drug abuse over the past year. Belldandy was saddened; her heart was touched by his account of how life with Sayoko had become unbearable for months. She felt a surge of radiant joy when she thought of how auspicious it was that Megumi was becoming his girlfriend. This young mortal man certainly was in need of the kind of loving support that was part of Megumi's nature...the patience and kindness she was bound to share with him.

Their romantic love had blossomed many good and humorous memories of her and Keiichi when they were in the early, awkward days of their relationship. Belldandy reluctantly pushed those pleasant thoughts aside...the task at hand was too urgent.

"Uh...oh, sorry I dozed off, Bell-chan!" Keiichi replied sheepishly. He had promised to keep her company during the long train ride to Okayama.

"That's okay. One must balance their life with the proper amount of rest, otherwise one's fatigue prevents the enjoyment of each moment of happiness," she responded in her lecturing voice.

Keiichi was happy to see some of the old Belldandy returning. He had been gripped by apprehension, worried that she would continue to withdraw into a permanent pensiveness. But the day after he promised that together they would find Urd, she started to regain some of her former self. He reached a comforting hand out and held her hand warmly, their fingers interlacing as the landscape sped by.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

I treated myself to a frivolous camel ride before my second daylong excursion into the caves of Dunhuang. One good thing about China...life was always unhurried, even in the hectic 21st Century. In China, a natural unhastened pace of life allured me towards even greater observation of my own mental activity. Thus, a singular reflectiveness emerged, one that seemed to accord with a tetralemmic approach to what seems to be "fact". The camel even seemed to be in a meditative trance as it wound a path between small groves of poplar trees.

My first day at Dunhuang was mostly concerned with orienting myself to the 1000+ plus caves. A volcanic range which formed foothills along the South Mountains stretched westward through the desert. Eventually, the sand dunes yielded to a low ridge of conglomerate composition. As the bus approached the caves, the wide plain dissolved into a series of ridged escarpments and cliffs, the road flanked by an uncompromising sterility. Finally, the road paralleled a small stream which led into a spare grove of tender foliage and poplars, fed by well-tended irrigation. Turning northward for a kilometer, the bus halted at the wide dust-covered cement parking lot. From the lot, I recognized the familiar grand facade of the Thousand Buddha Caves of Dunhuang.

There were several different sections of the caves and grottoes. The central section was the tourist portion, with three large Buddhas enclosed inside of a cave network and a series of walkways attached to the face of the cliffside, connecting the caves. Wooden doors had been built over the entrances of many of the caves; these served to shield out the ever-present sand.

My memory traveled back to the first time I beheld those three enormous carved statues. Two of them were fully 20 meters high; the central one was over 30 meters tall. I snuck a photo of one of them and was promptly scolded by the tour guide and the Red Guard escort. Now, I felt a strong inclination to see them again.

I strolled over and joined a tourist group from Germany who were touring the main cave ruins. After viewing the central caves with the tourists, I examined several of the secondary caves with my personal guide. The painted cave interiors were still spectacular. Inside the caves, the temperature was at least 5 degrees C cooler than the outside. Some of the caves had their own unique acoustic properties, a fact that I didn't notice the first time I toured the caves. This time, the only other person that would accompany me was Peng, an assistant curator of the facility.

The Dunhuang caves are overwhelming in many ways. First, there are _so many_ of them. Approaching from a distance, one first notices hundreds of holes puncturing a kilometer-long stretch of the cliff face with complete irregularity. The openings often had 3 to 5 tiers; the upper caves were spared the protection of wooden doors. Many of the caves were framed with small niches filled with carved statues. Second, the interiors of many caves possessed an ornate decor. Even the smallest cellas were fully frescoed. Once inside one of the better-preserved caves, the cavewalls seemed capture the spirit of an art school that seamlessly blended centuries together in aesthetic representations of sacerdotal images. Third, many of the caves are enigmatic. Some caves have hundreds of eyeless faces; the eyes were scraped off by a later culture that believed that the ghosts of the departed still watched from the painted eyes. The sheer variety of images in the caves seemed to artistically argue for the complementarity of the many religions of mankind. Finally, the mix of theological and philosophical elements was superb; many caves blended early Chinese Buddhism with Gupta-era Indian art motifs while incorporating Taoist esoteric symbols and Nestorian cherubs. Images possessing a strong soteriological import were juxtapositioned with paintings depicting men bound to the realms of material cravings.

For some reason, I was drawn to the north end of the caves, far away from the tourist set. Peng informed me that there was little interest in these caves because of their relative lack of art or statuary. These caves were decidedly inaccessible, which further contributed to their neglect. I was drawn somehow to Cave 948, which was on the 'outskirts' of the cave system. There were no stairs, so we had to make a rugged 40-meter climb up a steeply graded cliff face. Peng got about 2/3 of the way up and admitted that he was suffering from a bout of acrophobia. He gallantly attempted to climb another few meters but his face belied the panic that was escalating with each upward step. He asked me if he could dismiss himself from the climb and apologized profusely when I assured him that it was not a problem.

I grappled up to the entrance to the cave; the rocks, hollowed by centuries of erosional sandblasts, crunched fragile under my Nikes. Leaning over the cave entrance, I pulling myself up and inside. I wished I had worn an overshirt, because my T-shirt was dirty and torn as I pulled myself chest-level over the edge of the cave entrance. I had to rest for a few minutes, as the ascent had been quite an exertion. Here I was, catching my breath while wedged in the crawlway of a cave that looked like a harmless hole in the cliff wall.

Grabbing my flashlight, I surveyed the cramped interior of the cave entrance. I was in a small anteroom, scoured by the elements. The whole chamber was barely large enough to accommodate my upright stance. There was no indication that there had ever been any artwork or frescoes adorning the walls. In the rear was a recess, a small darkness figured against the dark brown interior of the entry chamber.

I choked down my fear of dark, cramped places and shuffled on my hands and knees for about 10 meters, my flashlight playing all around the walls of the tight passageway. The end of the small tunnel suspended a meter above the ground of the inner chamber; thus my arrival at the end was punctuated by a frightening tumble downward into the dark. For a moment, I thought that I would fall to my death in some cleverly designed pit that was intended to eliminate those who would desecrate the sanctity of the cave. But my fall was quickly checked by a smooth hard rock surface. Disoriented, I emerged into the cave proper. Grateful that the interior space allowed me to stand up, I flashed the beam of light on the floor, to assure myself that there would be no more sudden 'steps'. I noticed an absence of the layer of fine sand that had filled the lip of the cave and the antechamber. The sound of the desert wind was stilled. As I used the flashlight to survey around the cave, I noticed that the rearward wall was smoothed.

There were three timeworn painted images that resembled arhats or devas with flying long sleeves and angelic wings. I couldn't make out their faces because of the centuries of clinging dust and damp. In fact, I couldn't make out any details other than barely discernable scant outlines. They all seemed to be painted on the wall at odd angles, lacking any usual sense of artistic perspective. I hoped that the painted images weren't irrevocably faded from centuries of exposure to the elements.

I pulled off my shirt, momentarily embarrassed that someone might observe me. The fears rushed back to me for a moment and I felt my breathing become rapid-fire as I recalled the incidents of abuse. I pulled down my fear and buried it in my heart.

"Why do I get so upset simply because I took off my shirt?" I reflected with some resentment and frustration. I knew the answer. The abuse had made me ashamed of my being, my body. Here, in an empty cave in the middle of China, it _still_ gripped me, much to my malediction. I didn't want anyone to see me in any stage of undress...but no one would in this case. Here, in the depths of an isolated cave in Dunhuang...I was safe.

My tensions eased.

After my panic attack subsided, I used my shirt to wipe the silty grime off the painted face of one of the divas. The sullied colors of her face took on a new brightness of hue and tone, even under the bleak illumination of my flashlight. Her eyes were brown, inset gently under her dainty eyebrows. Something about this painted figure looked familiar...it struck a chord of recognition deep in my soul. I couldn't see all of her at once because of the large size of the image and the narrow beam of my flashlight. If only I could brighten the interior of the cave...

A plan flashed in my mind. If I arranged a series of tinfoil strips at the entrance, alternating with the ceiling of the narrow entryway, and finally set them in the corners of the cave, I would be able to illuminate the cave with a measure of reflected sunlight. But this would have to wait until tomorrow, as the sun was already starting to set. I looked at the painted face of the deva once more, then crawled back out of the cave and descended the cliffside.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Bell-chan, this is the _fifth_ place we've visited today! Can't we take a break?"

"No, Keiichi-san! We must keep looking! We _have_ to find her, or at least some clue that can lead us to her!" she said resolvedly.

"Bell...we've been to the police station, a private detective agency, the municipal authorities, the Prefectural office and the Fire Dept. What more can we do here?" he said, his voice tinged with resignation.

"We still haven't been to Kurashiki. We need to at least go there before the end of the day. And I won't take 'no' for an answer!" she demanded.

Keiichi looked in her eyes for that beseeching look that always melted his heart and bent him to her will. Instead, in its place was an almost cold look of determination and...anger? He was a little afraid of the intensity of her eyes.

"Where is the soft and gentle Belldandy I know?" he wondered. He felt a shade of intimidation when he looked at her. She was staring out of the rental car like a hawk looking for a mouse.

After they reached Kurashiki, which was practically the neighbor city of Okayama, they went to the local police station and then drove to the municipal hall. But the municipal hall was closed by the time they arrived at its parking garage. Keiichi looked over at his divine girlfriend; she was clenching her fists in frustration.

This was no longer fun, or an adventure. Any wanderlust that was incited by their touring of Japan was quelled by the ferocity of her expression. He felt like he was an unwilling passenger in Belldandy's quest to find Urd. For the first time in a while, he felt afraid of her. Not afraid of her power; this was grounds enough for fear. But her attitude was overwhelming. It made the car feel thick with tension.

"She's _too_ into this!" he thought as he heard her pound the dashboard with her fists.

"Belldandy! That's it...we're going back to the hotel right now!" he announced.

"But Keiichi-san..." she complained.

"Look, I don't like the way you're acting right now...you've become overzealous in this attempt to find Urd. I'm finding it really hard to be here with you when you're like this; you seem to be losing yourself in what you're trying to do."

"Keiichi!" she replied angrily, "you _promised_ that you would do anything in your power to help find Urd! Now you're going back on your word. HOW COULD YOU?" Keiichi raised his hands to his ears as the sheer volume of her yelling peeled a few layers off of his eardrums.

"Dammit, Belldandy, I'm not a Goddess like you!" he said, then realized that they were in the middle of their first fight in a long time. She looked at him, her reddening face resembling her older sister.

"Keiichi, I...am really disappointed in you!" she said icily in a clipped voice. Then she abruptly turned her head away from him and looked out the passenger window. Keiichi recognized the "Madoka move" as he termed it as a kid, watching Kimagure Orange Road. But he never expected Belldandy to pick it up, let alone use it on _him_.

"How could he be so contrary? Doesn't he know how important it is to me to find my sister? Why can't he understand me?" Belldandy asked herself. She didn't want Keiichi to see the angry expression on her face or the hot tears forming around her blue eyes. Thoughts and questions rapid-fired through her consciousness as she felt her anger level off at near-rage proportions.

Keiichi felt torn between his own frustrations and Bell-chan's hurt feelings. Her last statement was like a dart to the heart.

"Yes, she had every right to say that about me," he thought. "She must really think I'm impossible!" Jarred by her near explosion of temper, he examined the changes in her mood during the past few days.

"Could it be that somehow Belldandy's sadness has turned into desperation? A desperation that was possibly fueling her frustration, her anger?" he wondered, trying to make sense of her moodiness. This burst of anger was a side of his girlfriend that he was ill-equipped to deal with. A humorous interjection here might make things worse.

"She must feel betrayed, but I'm exhausted. What can I do?" he said to himself.

They drove back to the Okayama hotel in silence.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

As they drove up into the hotel lot, Belldandy felt her anger subside somewhat. She started to feel pangs of guilt at the way she had yelled at Keiichi. In the enclosed space of a car, too.

"His poor ears must be ringing," she thought with a sliver of guilt. Her feelings were conflicted: she felt angry at Urd, at Keiichi, at herself. Yet, she felt like she _had_ to do something to try and find her older sister.

"Why does it always fall to me to do what's right," she asked herself. Keiichi stole a glance at her...it was almost as if he had heard her last thought.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Back in their hotel room, Keiichi filled the basin and took his bath, while Belldandy waited to take hers. Wordlessly, they passed each other like strangers. The silence roared sheerly in his mind. Keiichi felt clumsier with each passing moment of their impasse.

"This could get really awkward, especially with the sleeping arrangements. They only had one bed in the room. What if she wants it for herself? She _could_ be that angry," he reflected while he was in the bath. He got out, toweled himself dry and walked back out, half-expecting Belldandy to broach a conversation with him.

Belldandy still didn't feel like talking to Keiichi. She caught his eyes briefly as she walked past him towards the bathroom. She could see the concern and hurt in his eyes. She felt it too. But she was still frustrated by his seeming disinterest in the task of finding Urd.

"If we keep _this_ up, we'll be at each other's throats by the time we get to Hiroshima. How could we make a determined effort to find Urd when we're like this? What is wrong with me?" Belldandy asked herself as she soaked in the tub. She stood up, ran her fingers through her wet-dry hair, then smoothed it out with a brush. Looking in the mirror, she almost didn't recognize herself...her face was tense with anxiety.

"It shouldn't be this way! Keiichi and I...we should be acting in concord in our efforts to find Urd. We should be in harmony, not conflict..." she said to herself softly. She wrapped her hair in a towel and put on her pajamas and her evening robe. As she walked out into the room she saw Keiichi in a chair, sulking.

"I must have really upset him," she observed, momentarily ruing his sensitive feelings.

"Bell-chan, we need to talk," Keiichi said in a quiet voice.

"Yes we do, Keiichi-san. How can we sort all of this out? You must think horribly about me after what I said," she admitted.

"Well, yes, it really hurt me. It hurt all the more because you rarely ever say anything mean to anyone, let alone me. I was really surprised! I don't think that I'm doing anything different...anything that could upset you _that_ much. I'm frustrated too that we can't find anything that can lead us to Urd, don't you understand?" he explained. Belldandy knit her brows in deep thought.

"Could _I_ be the one who's changing?" she asked herself. She took a moment to look over Keiichi's actions in the past few days. As she reviewed his behavior, she had to admit that he had been steadfast in his efforts to find her sister.

He was right! He _had_ been the same.

"So maybe what Keiichi-san is saying...is true. Maybe it's me that is causing our problems," she reflected. She sat in silent thought. The loss of Urd came rushing back to her. Urd, one of the most important people in her life. The older sister she could always rely on. Urd, who had helped her so many times in her relationship with Keiichi. Urd, who had even helped Keiichi learn how to love a Goddess, albeit sometimes indirectly as the result of her own selfish, capricious motives.

"What if I lose someone else besides Urd? Each moment of life is precious...it is a grave task to live our lives the way they were meant to be lived," she remembered her own words.

Each moment is irreplaceable.

She made her mind up. She _was_ too involved in finding Urd. What was it Cevn said...something about strength coming from admitting weakness?

"Keiichi...I'm _really_ sorry," she acknowledged. Sensing an apology, Keiichi started to dismiss it politely...but she waved him off.

"Keiichi, please listen and try to understand. I was so upset at the disappearance of my older sister at first. B..but now I've become accustomed to Urd not being here with me. The fact that I can feel _that way_...totally frightens me, because Urd and I have been so close...for so long. Then I started getting more and more intent on finding her, so I wouldn't have to face the fact...snff..snff...that she may never come back...and that I _could_, if necessary, go on living without her," she explained, holding her hands to her face as she cried into them, feeling all alone in the world. She had just admitted the unspeakable; that she could go on living with the expectation...no...with the reality that Urd was gone.

She felt a strong arm reach around her shoulders and gently pull her. She fell into Keiichi's embrace and cried on his neck, her wet tears once more tracing onto his shirt.

"Keiichi...what if...snff...what if it was _you_ that was gone?" she asked in a shaky voice. If Urd could disappear, then Keiichi could too. Even Skuld, for that matter. One fear led into a forest of apprehension.

"That's a funny thing to think of right now, Belldandy," she heard him say, his raised eyebrows casting him in a mystified expression.

"I'm right here..." he said in a consoling voice.

"But I never could have imagined that Urd would just disappear. She's not in Yggdrasil, she's not here, she's nowhere...wherever we look, we can't find her," Belldandy speeched her anxiety with a rapidclip voice.

"I'm not like Urd...I would never just take up and run away without telling you. Don't you trust me more than that?" he said as he gently combed through her long tresses with his fingers, trying to soothe her.

"Yes...yes I trust you implicitly, Keiichi. But something could _still_ happen," she countered with a bit of realism.

"Belldandy, you yourself said that one must not avoid getting caught up in fearing sorrow, otherwise one will not be able to love at all. Now you're doing the same thing you caution all of us against," Keiichi said kindly, but confrontively.

Belldandy felt a chill run down her spine. Keiichi knew her so well! That's why he was worried. She had lost perspective on her life, going into an emotional tailspin that was pushing away those who were dearest to her. And Keiichi had been perspicacious enough to see it...and then explain it simply to her. She hugged onto him tightly.

"Oh Keiichi! I love you so much! No one else in the whole universe could sense what's going on inside of my heart as well as you do! No one else could have made me open my eyes to the pathways of my own frustration," she said happily as she kissed him on the cheek.

"I love you too, Belldandy! You are the most important person in my life. I don't ever want to lose you! If I did...I just couldn't go on," he replied with a smile.

Keiichi got up and walked over to the small refrigerator and returned with a can of juice for himself and canned green tea for Belldandy. She had seated herself in the other chair; he sat on the floor in front of her and leaned back against her knees, resting his arms on her legs while he drank his juice. His mind was racing...her fearful thoughts earlier had sparked his own set of concerns.

"What if Bell-chan somehow disappeared out of my life?" he echoed her worrisome voice. They had had several close calls over the past several years.

He felt fingers lacing through his spiky hair, massaging his scalp. He breathed an audible sigh of relaxed enjoyment to show Belldandy that he was sensuously basking in her massage. Her hands went to work on his neck and shoulders, punching deeply into his skin to release the accumulated tension of the past few days. As his stiff muscles were kneaded into tingly soft puddles of joy, he questioned what he had done to deserve the special massage Bell-chan was giving him.

"Bell-chan, that feels soooo good. Another few minutes and I might doze off right here and now."

"And I would stay here all night, so you wouldn't fall over in your sleep," she sweetly answered. She loved giving Keiichi massages...and loved receiving them as well. Massages were one of the pleasant surprises that accompanied taking on the mortal frame for her beloved.

Belldandy reviewed the several years they had spent together... Their first meeting was rocky, Keiichi being scared out of his wits and she trying to calm him. She initially was disappointed in his attitude, his smoking, his friends and his lack of self-respect. Then he flippantly made a wish that he wanted to be with a girl like her...forever. She knew in an instant that the Relief Goddess Office had constructed a daunting challenge for her in this Morisato Keiichi mortal.

Immediately after his wish was granted, she was in a state of shock. Never did Belldandy imagine that she would be attached by a wish to a human being. The humans evoked a variety of responses from the many Gods and Goddesses of Yggdrasil, varying from mirth to derision. At that time, she was worried that she would have to spend an indeterminate amount of time in a close relationship with one. She felt so ill attributed for the task.

But Keiichi made her feel like she was performing wonderfully in her role. As she got to know him better, his attitude softened, he stopped smoking, his friends revealed themselves to be light-hearted goofs and his esteem improved. She realized that she had been cast to fit in a part of his life that had been unanswered for years.

Then the coquettish Urd and curmudgeonly Skuld had appeared on the scene. But by that time, she had realized that not only was she to play a part in Keiichi's life...she was aware that he was playing a part in _hers_ as well! In Yggdrasil, she had been courted by many Gods who wanted to receive the boon of her love. But there was always something amiss...an intuitive profundity. But, ironically, a mortal who wasn't even trying to court her, who simply lived with her and offered her his respect and kindness...was the one who received her heart.

"And my wonderful Keiichi_ has_ received my heart," she concluded. "He received my love so naturally that it almost seemed predestined."

Belldandy remembered all the times she was sorely tempted to ask Skuld to use her dawning precognitive powers to peer into the future and see what would become of her love. But Skuld hadn't developed that far yet in her capacity as Norn of the Future. Skuld could ferret out the Future, but she lacked the intuition to interpret it. Belldandy realized that she would have to wait for a glimpse into the future...perhaps forever, if Skuld's suspension remained in effect.

It was so funny how it had all happened. She wasn't even looking to fall in love with anyone...and then Keiichi had become her mirror-Soul. Like the mortal saying goes: when you're not looking for love, love is looking for you. She giggled gently to herself...it was so nice to be in harmony with Keiichi again. She looked down and noticed that he had fallen asleep. She gingerly patted him on shoulder to wake him up and suggested that they go to bed.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Peng and I started out early on the third day of my weeklong stay at Dunhuang. This time, I had come prepared with the essentials for exploring the painted images I had found in Cave 948: hand mirror, a box of tinfoil, fastener clips, thread and rope and a second flashlight. I planned to place the tinfoil in an alternating pattern on the floor and ceiling of the crawlway; the light would reflect up and down in an elongated 'v' pattern until it reached the interior of the cave. From there, the reflected light would strike the mirror and fan out to the tinfoil 'panels' I planned to erect in each corner of the cave. This setup was nothing innovative; the many cultures had relied on reflected light to decorate the interiors of caves and mausoleums. The Dead must have their light...

As before, I climbed the cliff face, noting the various geomorphic geological feature as I made my way up. There was an absence of talas skirting, the usual result of windborne erosional agents. This indicated that the sheer cliff grade consisted of a composite of mineral, rather than geomorphic layers which lent themselves well to basal accumulation of granularity...

My mind was distracting itself again.

I scuttled into the cave, then turned around and began to build my tinfoil 'tunnel'. On my back, I finished with the last piece in the entryway, fastening it to the roof of the crawlway and forming a semiconical funnel to 'aim' the light at the mirror. The mirror would then light up the central area, and then I could put up the vertical tinfoil strips on the sides of the rounded interior.

Anticipation gripped me as I finished with the illumination project. I felt like I was recapitulating the techniques of the Silla cave artists who sculpted so many beautiful cave-enclosed Buddhas at Kyong-Ju in Korea. I remembered from my Coptic Art studies that the interiors of the pyramids were painted using directed sunlight beams thousands of years ago.

I finished with the work and looked to see the images. There were definitely three devas. I dampened a rag with some water from my water bottle and gingerly rubbed the mold and dust off of the face of one of the images. My initial cleaning yesterday had revealed a partial set of features, but today's wet cleaning would remove the mold and carbonate sediments.

As I cleaned the painted face, a pair of brown eyes were revealed. The facial proportions were all wrong...obviously the artist had taken some license in his interpretation of this deva. She had a small mouth and an understated nose, with a face that was rounded rather than oblong. Her eyes were narrow, in the Six Dynasties fashion of painting which blended Iranian elements with late Han motifs. As I rubbed her forehead, a faded blue splotch emerged.

"This is insane...there must have been some bad paint mixed in with the flesh tones," I observed to myself at the mote which besmirched an otherwise beautiful representation. As I cleaned the sides of her painted face, a light blue splotch appeared on each cheek.

The cleaning process was very tedious.

"Peng'll kill me if he found out that I was actually trying to clean one of the painted images!" I mused. I had spent at least an hour meticulously following the contours of the rock, being careful not to chip or peel the paint. I stepped back to take a break...

"No way!" a voiced echoed inside the chamber-like cave.

It seemed like my words had come from somewhere else, as if someone else was there in the cave speaking in my tone of voice. I was just too...awed to do anything but stand and visually stammer at the sight greeting my eyes. It was frightening...the implications of what I beheld overwhelmed my sense of proportion and finity.

The image that I beheld in amazement was a distinctly Chinese representation of Skuld's face.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Keiichi woke up in bed with Belldandy still asleep next to him. He could barely remember how he had gotten in bed last night. As wakefulness emerged, he recalled how he and Bell-chan had fought yesterday. Belldandy had been borderline-obsessed with their search for Urd...to the point where she was losing her grip on reality. Keiichi knew that she had become angrier with him than ever before in the three and a half years they had been together.

"Frustrated at times, yes...but livid, never," he thought. The search for Urd had been exhausting and frustrating for him; he never expected it to take such a powerful emotional toll on Bell-chan.

Even while angry, she was beautiful. He was so grateful to the powers-that-be for sending him his own personal angel. Almost every minute with her had been bliss. She was everything a guy could want in a girlfriend. Friendly confidant. A wonderful cook. A shoulder to lean on. Honest and faithful. Someone whose feelings he could empathize with. A woman who made him feel like a man...a gentleman. "All these things and so much more," he thought to himself.

Then a disturbing thought flashed through his consciousness, unfinished from last night.

"What if Bell-chan was taken away or decided to leave like Urd did?" he asked himself, a hungry ocean of fear welling up inside of his heart.

"After all, she _is_ a Goddess...who had assumed human traits because of her love for me," he countered his increasing distrust. But she has feelings, sometimes intense feelings as he found out yesterday. He reflected upon Urd's mysterious disappearance. Urd wouldn't disappear out of their lives because of some frivolity. Something must have really gotten to her...disturbed her so intensely that she felt she had no alternative but to abandon her life and her sisters.

Keiichi had noticed before how Urd, who was routinely rambunctious and animated, would occasionally slip into an emotional state that resembled abject despair. Her face would lose most of its mirth and freshness...and she would get a far-away, melancholy look in her eyes. As if she was seeing some tragic truth just over the horizon of her soul. Then she would gather herself and sigh, smiling slightly, smiling inwardly as if to say "I have to accept it, so I might as well not dwell on it."

He had noticed that she tended to swing into this particular mood more frequently once Cevn-san arrived. Somehow, the effort of having to oversee a mortal charge was different for Urd than it was for Bell-chan. Besides, Urd wasn't in love with her mortal.

"But what if something caused Belldandy to sever her attachment to me?" he whispered to himself, returning to his anxiety.

"Keiichi, that will never happen!" a sleepy voice said gently.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Belldandy woke up and rolled onto her side to see Keiichi sitting in bed, looking like he was deeply absorbed in thought. She could clearly see the shifts in his aura as flashes of rumination illuminated his mind. She was worried that he had somehow become confused about her feelings for him after her defective association with him yesterday.

"What if I pushed him so hard that he is contemplating ending our love?" she thought with a flash of panic. "I didn't mean to mistreat him yesterday...but I did. Does he still feel forsakened?" she wondered. Just then, she heard Keiichi's whispered fears and knew that somehow, they were both facing the fear of losing each other. She looked to see Keiichi flash one of his shy-yet-shining smiles at her.

"Bell-chan, I will never leave your side, either. You're too much a part of me, now."

She pondered over what he meant by this.

"How can I be part of him when I'm me and he's Keiichi?" she asked herself. She sat up next to him and played nervously with a thick strand of hair. For a mortal, he was so insightful...and still mysterious after all the time they had spent together.

"What do you mean, my love?" she asked.

"I mean that you've become a big part of my life. An irreplaceable part. I've let you become closer to me than anyone ever has been," he answered. It was an obvious answer...but there was something _different_ about the way he said it this time. She brushed a few stray locks of brown hair from her forehead and smiled at him.

"Does that mean that I can't get any closer to you? How can I get closer? What if I _want_ to get closer?" she asked him, piling wonderings upon themselves.

Keiichi chuckled at her queries. For a Goddess who was supposed to know most of the universe's mysteries, she could sure be dense sometimes. Then he reflected on her question, suddenly aware of its underlying serious intent.

"How could _I_ get closer to her? We've done everything a guy and a gal could do," he noted. But a few seconds later, he thought of the one thing that he and Bell-chan had never done. Suddenly, his pleasant mood became shaded with apprehension.

"What the hell, I might as well say it," he challenged himself.

"Bell-chan, the only thing we haven't done is make love to each other," he acknowledged. Keiichi almost flinched once he said it. He half-expected her to become wide-eyed at his remark, then get out of bed and call him a pervert...or smile at him as if he was joking around. Instead, she fixed her azure eyes on his with a new look that he had never noticed before.

"Keiichi, we talked about this in the past and decided that we would wait until the time was right. I know that we have to agree on this, but right now with Urd gone and Skuld so depressed...I need you more than ever. How can we _ever_ know if the time is right? Does this need that I feel for you right now...could it be the time? Could _this_ be the time? What would you do if I told you that _I'm_ ready? That I want you. Inside of me," she asked intently.

It was Keiichi's turn to get wide-eyed. It took a supreme effort to keep from choking on his breath. They had talked about sex dozens of times in the past, but neither one had ever volunteered that they thought the time was right for them to make love together.

"Why do they call it 'make love'?" he wondered. Is adding an intimate physical dimension to their relationship 'making' it any different? He and Bell-chan had fallen in love unexpectedly, but_ this_ would be totally deliberate. And Belldandy had just made her intentions known.

Directly.

He returned her soft gaze and then roamed his eyes over her pajama-clad body.

"She is_ soooo _beautiful," he marveled again. He saw the curves of her shoulders and bosom draw against the top of her pajamas, her slender neck with its raiment of soft brown hair draped over her shoulders...and he was lost again.

"This is it...this is the time!" a small voice kept nagging him in the back of his mind. He tried to stifle it so he could think rationally.

"I don't want to get carried away by the moment," he forced himself. He thought about how she said she needed him more than ever. "Could I refuse her? But she is the Goddess of the Present. Of the now..."

Then a sudden insight unfolded, flashing on his conscience.

"She needs me...and I need _that_. I need _her need_ as much as I need to be with her more than ever. Besides, how could I know whether I'm ready or not if there is no past or future, only the now?" he thought, echoing something Cevn had discussed with him once.

Unnoticed by either, they had been moving ever closer, their eyes locked in a visual embrace. Scant inches from each other's face, Keiichi and Belldandy just stared at each other in love and admiration. Belldandy wondered once more what it was...this _thing_ inside her that caused her to become so absorbed by simply looking at Keiichi's eyes. It was like a dormant part of her was gently being brought into consciousness.

"Bell-chan...there's nothing more I want in the world in this moment than to be with you. To _be_ with you," Keiichi said in a low quiet voice. He saw the orbs of her eyes windowing into her soul...and there was nothing there elsewise but her willingness to love him.

Belldandy could feel Keiichi's breath gently brushing against her mouth. She looked at his face, seeing the glow of love and something radiantly pure. An expression of desire, just ever so slightly distinct than the lovestruck visage that Keiichi expressed at their closest moments.

"Is this what a mortal looks like when they want someone sexually?" she wondered as Keiichi brushed her cheeks with both hands and leaned forward to kiss her.

She sensed a pent-up electricity inside of her that was released by his touch, tingling her lips and all through her body as their lips met. Keiichi's eyes shone forth with gentleness and apprehension. She parted her mouth and explored his with her tongue as he pulled her to his chest, naturally...gently.

Keiichi felt a tingle as he kissed Belldandy. He stroked her silken mane of light brown hair and framed her face with his hands. They kissed lazily, languidly, feeling no compulsion to go further or to rush. Keiichi ran his hands down her neck and began to unbutton her pajama top. He could feel her hands gently rubbing up and down his chest, lightly skimming over his shoulders.

He half expected to fumble at unbuttoning her top, but he finished the bottom button. Belldandy reached down to the bottom of his T-shirt and lifted it up. Keiichi smiled at her and raised his arms as she pulled it off. It felt so...wonderful to have someone undress him. No ones ever done that before, except my parents when I was really young, he thought. The gesture excited him even more...it meant that Belldandy trusted herself and _wanted_ him, sexually.

Keiichi then returned the favor and opened Belldandy's top; with her help he pulled it off of her. Instead of greedily eyeing her features, he just sat in the bed, transfixed by her soft skin and the beauty of her womanhood.

Belldandy relished in the attention that Keiichi was giving her with his eyes.

"He admires me so much...and he's so patient," she told herself. She smiled softly at him and reached behind her back to undo her bra. She unfastened the snap and pulled it off of her, pulling it free of her breasts. A quick glance down her front and she could see that she was excited in the mortal sense. She returned to Keiichi's eyes and saw a softness in his expression. He didn't have a trace of the animal-like lust that inhabited so many mortal men. There was a certain joy that struck a deep chord in her when she realized that her mortal body was arousing his interest.

"As it should," she noted to herself with a lyrical joy.

Keiichi saw Belldandy undo her bra and pull it off. He saw her breasts, gently curving and firm, with their red nipples. He was stunned by the contours of her bosom...he glanced at her eyes and saw a deep expression of appreciation...and a willfulness to share in the pleasures of the flesh with him. He wanted this moment to last forever.

Belldandy felt Keiichi tentatively massage her, avoiding her breasts. Then he brushed up against one and then the other. She felt another surge of energy as he kneaded her breasts with his fingers...she reached up and covered his hands with hers as if to say "you can touch me there, my love...don't be afraid." His hands were shaking slightly while she held them; she knew that he was getting nervous and afraid.

She looked at him, trying to signal with her eyes that "it's okay" to him, only to see his eyes beaming her the same assurance. He looked at her face, then he smiled sheepishly.

"You're...so incredibly beautiful, Bell-chan. I'm just a little scared by how lovely you are, that we're touching like this," he admitted to her.

"I shouldn't be afraid of the one I love...doing this with her, an act of giving and sharing," Keiichi thought. He was mostly afraid of the stigma of sex and his lack of experience.

"I'm mostly afraid because this is so...new. I..I don't want to disappoint you," he admitted to Belldandy.

"It's new for me too, Keiichi. But together we can share our fears and confidences and love..." she said while pulling him closer to her. They kissed again, Keiichi's chest pressing up against her breasts. She could feel the sensation of his heartbeat lightly thumping against her flesh...it was exhilarating. Her senses reeled as Keiichi slowly cradled her back and gently laid her back onto the futon.

Keiichi felt his fear diminish as he saw the love in Belldandy's eyes. The electric shock of her breasts against his chest diffused all through his body. He knew that he was fully aroused; he could feel his blood pounding a rhythm through his ears. He was laying on top of Belldandy, just like he had dreamed on countless occasions. Only this was real...this was the product of their deep love...but it was also an expression of love. Everywhere he touched her with his hands, he felt a soft, almost milky silken sensation. Her skin was the smoothest thing he had ever touched.

He felt his hand roaming to remove her pajama bottoms. There was no resistance as he reached inside the waistband and shimmied them down. He could feel her silk panties as he pushed her pants down partway...then Belldandy squirmed to pull one leg out, then the other.

Belldandy felt so excited! This was something that she had dreaded and desired for the almost four years she had lived on the Earthrealm. She wanted to do the right things, to be_ just right_ for Keiichi. It was hard for her to resist employing magical means to intensify an already powerfully sensual experience. Part of her wanted to simply dissolve her and Keiichi's clothes on the spot. Or maybe render them both weightless, so they could be floating in mid-air. But she realized, if this was the most intimate physical union that a mortal male and female could have...then she needed to be _fully mortal_.

When Belldandy looked up into his admiring eyes, she realized that nothing she could do physically would be wrong. With this insight, she wanted to give herself to him fully...and wanted all of him. She ran her hands up and down his chest and hips, exploring his mortal bodyframe leisurely and happily. Keiichi smiled at her as she tentatively touched him all over, his smile an act of encouragement.

Keiichi felt Belldandy reach down his back and pull his shorts down, then he rolled off and helped her remove them. He felt a thrill as he realized that he was nude. A brief moment of apprehension gripped him, but his insecurities fled when he saw the gentle smile of admiration on her face. Almost a minute later, he had eased her silk panties down her legs.

They lay on their sides, facing each other. Belldandy was exhilarated as she saw Keiichi naked for the first time. This was the first time she had ever seen a naked mortal man since she had taken on a mortal form herself. He was slender and sinuous...and handsome. He was perfect.

"She's so perfect!" Keiichi announced to himself in his mind. His eyes saw her...but she was so beautiful that he couldn't absorb the depths of how lovely her body was. He pulled Belldandy close to him, feeling the skinmask contact of a woman's body for the first time. They lay there together, body pressed against body for a long time, simply smiling and gazing at each other. His arm, tucked underneath her, was starting to fall asleep.

"Are you ready, Belldandy?" he asked in a gentle whispery voice.

"Yes...I want you, Keiichi. More than ever," she replied in a soft whisper.

Belldandy felt him gently ease her on her back. She felt his body resting on hers then she wrapped her legs along the sides of his hips.

Keiichi felt himself poised, and another surge of energy shot through his being. Belldandy had opened herself up, inviting him to make love to her.

"Bell...I love you," he said as he pushed up against her.

Belldandy felt a filling sensation and sighed with pleasure while she looked at Keiichi's kind eyes.

"He's inside of me, inside of my mortal body!" she thought within a pulse of pleasure. "It's like...we've become one being!"

Strangely, her thoughts flashed on Urd...how her older sister had been pestering her to be 'sexy' with Keiichi for years.

"This feels so good! Urd _must_ have known, somehow," she thought. "It's like all of Keiichi's love is inside of me." She heard him sigh deeply and knew that he was feeling her around him. It almost felt like they were one body...yet she was tingling with pleasure all over herself. It was almost like they were creating a whole universe in their joining.

"Keiichi...I love you. I can feel you inside of me," she said softly, then reached behind his head and pulled him down to kiss him.

"I can feel...all of you, Bell-chan," he said between kisses.

After a few moments of kissing, they both felt an intense rising of sensual pleasure through their bodies. Gasping together, they looked deep into each other's eyes as waves of bodyjoy filled them both.

Keiichi held Belldandy tight against him as he felt an explosion of tingly mystery. Belldandy grabbed Keiichi tight as she shuddered with a surge of pleasure.

Belldandy had felt everything suddenly become clear at first, then it felt like her body was on a wave...or actually _was_ the wave, feeling herself lifted up higher and higher. She felt cradled in the air as an almost ticklish sensation filled her, then went beyond ticklish to grip her tightly with molten energy. Then everything went fuzzy as her whole body was filled with an energy. She returned to consciousness to see Keiichi looking in her eyes...she could tell that he had felt the same energy as well.

Keiichi felt a roaring in his ears and his vision went fuzzy for a few seconds as he released himself. His whole body shook with a new sensation...then he came to as Belldandy was gently rocking him with her body. He looked in her eyes and saw that she was still in some mystical zone of joy...her whole face was radiant with happiness.

"Keiichi...that was more than I ever expected. More than I ever dreamed," she whispered to him. Keiichi kissed her forehead and then kissed her on the lips, gently lacing his fingers with her hair.

"Bell-chan...you guided me to a place I've never been before," he said gratefully. They rested together. Keiichi noticed how sweaty he and Bell-chan had become from their exertions. He reluctantly pushed himself off her...but then she rolled on top of him, resting her chin on his chest and smiling at him.

"Let's just stay this way for the rest of the day, my dear Keiichi. We can afford to take a day off," she whispered, smiling at him with inviting eyes. Keiichi hugged her close to him and stroked her soft hair.

"Belldandy...as usual you're right. I love you so much, my Goddess."

They talked about the mansions of love they had built with each other. Keiichi sang her a nonsense song that he made up in his childhood and Belldandy told him stories of her life in Yggdrasil...until both became sleepy. Keiichi wrapped his arms around Belldandy right before she fell asleep.

Soon, he fell asleep as well...the last thing he saw before his dreams was a glowing smile on his ladylove's that mirrored the blissful sheltering of his heart that he was feeling. For he was the sundial, and she was sun...and she had illuminated his life while pointing him towards Love.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Skuld! Here?" I said aloud, as if someone else was in earshot.

It was incredible. Somehow the Norn of the Future had visited Dunhuang and ended up being remembranced by a portrait. Her face was given a Chinese cast by the artist...she resembled the hundreds of painted devas all over Dunhuang. Except for the distinctive markings on her face. No one could have recognized those marks.

If this was Skuld, then it was possible that the other two were Belldandy and Urd. The realization gave me a bout of homesickness. I _missed_ my new family in Japan. In the wake of Urd's betrayal, I was shocked that I could feel anything but resentment and grief; yet here I was feeling wistful. This had been the first time my anger towards Urd hadn't sublimated my feelings of loss.

I continued to wash the accumulated detritus and debris off of the two remaining portraits. Eventually, Belldandy's face emerged from the centuries of confinement. The tan of her hair has faded almost to nothing, but most of her face was still preserved...I could make out the marks on her forehead and each cheek.

Urd's portrait had aged as well. The white coloring of her hair had faded to a dark yellow while the brown of her face had disappeared completely. Evidently, the brown pigments used in the paints were too delicate to withstand the ages. I felt a fleeting whimsy to spit on it, but then my higher self got a hold of me as I realized I'd be desecrating a sacred treasure. On the tails of that thought was another flow...it flew by my like a leaf in a downriver rapids. For all her fucked up traits, Urd _was_ a sacred treasure.

My mind returned to more cogent concerns as I wondered about the history of these paintings. Did the Goddesses come here, or were the images translated or transported from another location? My metallect said "both" and I almost jumped at its sudden appearance. This extra part of my intelligence had led me here in the first place...now it was filling my mind with ideas and suppositions.

Truths.

I stepped back to behold the grouping of three goddess-devas. Belldandy was in the middle, flanked by Urd and Skuld. Then it struck me that all three were pointing. The ribbon-like long sleeves that extended well beyond their hands spun airborne paisley circles, but I could make out where their hands were inside. I looked closer, but it seemed that they were all pointing in different directions. Why couldn't they all be pointing at the same location? I chuckled to myself, realizing the irony of it.

"So typical of these three, each pointing in her own direction," I said with a laugh of relief. The Norse legends had Urd and Verdandi weaving the web of Fate, while Skuld continually confounded their efforts. But the reality is...each Goddess is her _own_ Goddess.

"They must be depicted as pointing for a _reason_," I convinced myself. "But...at what?"

This was confusing. I pulled out a piece of paper and folded it to make a plane of reference. Using the plane, I aligned it with each Goddess's pointing hand. I still didn't find a point where each imaginary line trisects. They just crossed each other haphazardly.

What if they just traversed under the physical constraints that a handball might have? In other words, what if they just bounced within the walls of the cave. I tried to employ this type of reasoning by measuring each line as it 'bounced' within the cave. After six mentally constructed rebounds, my mind became strained. It was difficult to mentally project linear geometries on the inside of a cave!

But at the ninth set of 'bounces', the three lines converged!

"Duh!" I admonished myself, for I had nearly abandoned the mental exercise. Three times three. The union of each Goddess's seemingly randomly pointed lines. At the trisect, there was a small rock that slightly protruded beyond the others. It was incredible, as I had mentally employed a theoretical geometry to find the intersect. No wonder no one could make sense of this. But it _made_ sense! Yggdrasil had nine planes of existence, as I recalled from reading the Enigma Book. But there was more...

Yggdrasil was often defined by nine internal psychological divisions, which corresponded to the tripartite levels of consciousness formulated by Carl Jung. The ancient Norse texts of "Voluspa" and "Havamal" had alluded to the fact that Yggdrasil had nine divisions, or 'realms'. Not to mention the prose Edda, with its numerous references.

This Chinese painting...employed an obvious Yggdrasilian geometric logic. Even the word "Yggdrasil" itself had a recessive etymology.

_Gallows._ The elder Norse culture had identified the astral realm of Yggdrasil by using a term that was closely associated with death. Death, the veil by which all mortals need pass in order to realize the secrets of the 'Other'. The Way, the Tao, the Divine Countenance, the Delog Realms, the Great Beyond.

"Death is life?" I asked the painted images. I began to wonder if the Goddesses had somehow supervised the creation of this painting, so that it would remain a puzzle through the centuries. I felt a little thrill of pride as I realized that I had solved it.

What about the protruding rock? It was at least 20 feet up in the air, well out of reach. An Indiana Jones-type notion crossed my mind.

"Well, why not?" I said to myself as I removed my left shoe.

I threw the shoe at the rock, hitting it on the first try. Almost instantly, I heard deep grinding sounds. It flashed through my mind that I tripped a booby-trap. My mind mentally flashed upon a newspaper headline: "Dead student explorer found in collapsed Dunhuang cave."

I frantically looked around me to see what was happening. Then I noticed a square portion of the floor gradually sloping downwards.

After a few minutes, the stone cantilevering stopped. I looked down to see that a portion of the floor was now a diagonal slab which sloped downward into a chamber underneath...below and behind the wall that the three Goddess were painted upon.

The floorway descended about three meters. As I walked downwards, I could see a corridor, which was illuminated somehow, as I could see a brighter room or cave in the distance. I walked into the room, then gasped with shock or excitement.

The room had three statues of the goddesses, complete with wings, bathed in a light from overhead. They were carved in a very archaic style, resembling the early Hsia dynasty artifacts...with an Egyptian motif. The walls had carvings...hundreds of carvings.

"Those aren't carvings...those carvings are words!" I said in astonishment.

There were nine walls; each wall containing a series of carvings in a distinctive script. The walls were huge, covered with thousands of carved pictographs, ideographs, hieroglyphs, dots...

I recognized the proto-Classical Chinese graphs and the pre-Egyptian glyphs, plus the ancient Syriac/Semetic scripts. Another wall possessed carved letters that resembled the hypothesized pre-Linear Class B language group, or possibly had elements of Linear Class A. One script looked like ancient Olmec Culture hieroglyphs. One wall was replete with carved images of painted animals, greatly resembling those found in the Lascaux group in France.

Yet, there were three walls that bore little resemblance to any of the archaic languages that I had encountered.

"Why would all of these ancient languages be here?" I wondered. I read the first line of the proto-Chinese...it was a series of numbers up to one thousand. Then I read the others with growing excitement. I walked through the chamber from wall to wall, reading lines engraved on each. I stopped at a wall with an unknown set of complex scratchings.

"Teldoric," my metallect informed me. The engravings appeared as lines, dots and various curls, mixed into nine sections. Like tic-tac-toe, only each nonedrant had a selection of up to nine dots, curls and slashes. Then I read the next line, which conjugated the copular verbs and their negations.

"To be, or not to be," I joked with myself.

I stopped in mid-sentence as I realized the gravity of what I had just found. This is some kind of Chinese Rosetta Stone. _The_ 'Rosetta Stone'. Instead of linking three languages, this cave had nine. All of them undiscovered, more or less. Several of them possessed attributes cognate with the earliest extant forms of several branches of the linguistic 'family tree'.

The Teldoric, Xinthaic, Gokjash and Paludorian languages represented cultures that had been extinct so long that archeologists had nothing to verify their existence. Each language group had a map...which could lead to their discovery...

"This is nothing less...than an index of all the world's earliest languages," I concluded with feverish excitement. I reached in my bag for my camera...and realized I had left it at the hotel.

"Shit!"

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --


	21. Pt 21: Wired Science

**Part 21: Wired Science**

Skuld was feverishly at work in her mecha laboratory, sorting through her large omnium of electronic gear. Yesterday, in the midst of her ongoing despair over the disappearance of her oldest sister, an idea popped into her head. It was so obvious..._too_ obvious. Skuld was almost embarrassed by the fact that it had escaped her normally meticulous intelligence. Fortunately, Belldandy wasn't around, otherwise she would have to swallow her pride and admit that she had overlooked a very simple idea.

Urd had been gone five weeks. After her initial reaction of stark disbelief, Skuld had slipped into the deepest melancholy that she had ever experienced. This past week, her despondency had intensified to a weltschmerz-like hopelessness. Her remaining sister could do little to revive her from the emotional malaise. Belldandy, who was normally placid and serene, was beginning to become anxiety-wrought over Urd's absence. Skuld had realized that Urd was undetectable by forms of magic; Urd's suspended license had resulted in a power loss that rendered her almost human. As with her situation, Skuld knew almost all of Urd's divine resources were required just to maintain a human form. All three Goddesses had human forms, just as solid as any mortal's body. Urd was no exception. Her human form was consistently maintained in every particularity. For all aspects, Urd _was_ human. She manifested as a normal 27-year-old female human being, with full biological attributes.

Including DNA.

Last night, Skuld had rushed into her sister's "Urd's Castle" room-slash-lab and had found a broken fingernail near a row of neatly organized apothecaries. A real fingernail, not a glue-on falsie. She took it to her lab and analyzed it, extracting the mRNA and some DNA from the tightly packed cuticle cells. From this starting point, Skuld was able to decipher a good portion of the genome of Urd's physical manifestation. However, a large number of the marker proteins were long gone; the genetic information was incomplete. Skuld had pulled an overnighter, labors of sweat dripping in the hot summer night as she worked at her laptop computer to design a paradigmatic program that would reconstruct an extrapolative model of Urd's full DNA sequence. She had finished the incredibly complex program just a short while ago.

Skuld was proud of herself, despite being exhausted from missing her evening sleep. With the scant bit of cellular information, she had reconstructed an entire DNA sequence. The error margin was only six replicable yields out of several septillion recombinants. Thus, upon application, Skuld's genetic 'map' would manage to 'weed out' over six billion unique DNA patterns; at the most, there would only be five or six people on the planet who would manifest the genetic characteristics that her mathematical model designated as Urd's.

"One of those six will be you, Big Sister. Then we can find out where you are and go get you," she thought to herself with earnest intent. She looked at mini-Banpei and oathed a grave voice.

"And _once_ we get you back here, you'll have hell to pay for making all of us so feel sad and worried, Urd!" she announced. Mini-Banpei nodded back to her in agreement.

She walked out to the kitchen, spying Tomohisa humming to himself while he listened to a BoA CD.

"And there's the other problem," Skuld sighed as she helped herself to a fitting reward of a dozen mochi ice creams.

Skuld was still resentful that her older sister had divided the six of them into boy-girl teams. Despite her misgivings and protestations, she was stuck at home with Tomohisa while the others were out touring Japan trying to locate her errant sister. Tomohisa seemed to go out of his way to be nice to her, which was irritating at best.

"If I feel crummy because my sister's gone, then why should he act like my feelings are something that need to be changed?" she would ask herself.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

_Three weeks ago, Tomohisa had invited her to play softball with him. Every Saturday, he left to go to the park to play with his friends. Skuld had told herself "why not?" and went along for the adventure of it. She had played softball once before with Megumi when her softball team was challenged for playing rights of an N.I.T. field by a gang of college baseball players. Recently, she had been an unenthused witness to several American baseball games on TV, courtesy of Tomohisa's infatuation with the sport._

_Arriving at the baseball diamond, two captains were elected and then each captain started picking players for his team. She was disheartened when they picked teams and she was the last one picked. By Tomohisa no less._

_"He asks me along, then suddenly is ashamed of me when it comes to playing the game," she thought disgruntledly._

_Then Tomohisa gave her an aluminum bat and told to hit the softball. The bat was feathery...lightweight compared to Mjolnir. It weighed only a fraction of her mallet; striking a thrown object would be a breeze in comparison to quelching bugs. Skuld grinned at him mischievously and went to the plate, banging the tip of the bat on home plate like she had seen the players for the New York Cubs do on TV. Crouching at the plate, Skuld heard the pitcher croon mockingly._

_"Ah, you're just a -_little girl-_...I'll pitch it nice and slow for you!"_

"--THAT DOES IT!!--_" Skuld thought angrily, assuming a 'game face'._

_The pitcher heaved the ball at her lightly and Skuld swung with all her might, visually imagining that she was crushing a viral-sized bug. Gasps erupted around her from both teams as she blasted the softball so hard that its seams tore loose. They found the ball over 200 meters feet away in a culvert that ran along one side of the park. Half of its cover was missing. After this, Skuld heard whispers of "freak" and "flat-chested tomboy"...these didn't help to improve her mood._

_As they rode their bicycles on the way home, Tomohisa was silent...until she mentioned that she was imitating the New York Cubs. With a roll of his eyes, he started giggling. Skuld never did find out what was so funny about her mention of the American baseball team..._

_The next few days, she decided to tone it down a bit. The last thing Skuld didn't need was for this group of mortal boys to suspect who and what she was. Yet, she couldn't resist hitting a homer once in a while._

_"Like three out of every four at bats...that's about right," she eventually decided._

_She also relished in the fact that now she was always the first player picked by the team captains._

_Tomohisa had been almost gallant, despite being overshadowed by his friend. It was a major blow to his ego to be out-batted by a _-girl-_. Yet his pals still held him in the highest respect as the only 9th grade player they knew that was a starter for his future high school's varsity baseball team._

_Skuld enjoyed watching him push himself harder to try and exceed her at the home run derby. She had to admit to herself that he was a much better fielder than she was._

_Then Tomohisa had really done it. Two days ago, after they had finished a game, he walked home with her as usual. Seeming harmless...until he put his arm around her and tried to kiss her. Skuld left a hand-shaped red mark on his cheek to point out that he should never try to take any liberties with her._

_But when they arrived home, she was clouded with confusion. What really puzzled her was that she somehow felt _-guilty-_ for slapping him. As if _-she-_ had done something wrong, instead of Tomohisa! Skuld spent most of yesterday with her melancholy compounded by confusion._

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

She looked at Tomohisa as he was reading...what else?...but a baseball magazine.

"Why does he make me feel this way? Why do I question myself when I'm around him? Why do I like spending time with him...even if he thinks I'm too young? Why doesn't _he_ have a girlfriend? And why did he try to _kiss_ me...as if _I'm_ his girlfriend or something?" her mind raced. She looked at him, singing to himself in the living room.

"Tomohisa-san, what are you doing to me?" she pondered fretfully.

As if Tomohisa wasn't enough, then there was Megumi and Genji. It was like Elder Sister and Keiichi all over again. Eating dinner with the two was an exercise in cutthroat patience.

They would make goo-goo eyes at each other and feed each other bits of food. They sat almost on top of each other on the couch. They would lower their voices to a whisper whenever Skuld walked into the room. And they would kiss in front of her, as if she wasn't even there.

Skuld wondered aloud if their kissy-kissy actions had influenced Tomohisa to try and kiss her. At the dinner table, she would glance at Tomohisa...who looked like he was enjoying his cousin's mellowness around her boyfriend. Skuld would roll her eyes, concluding that Megumi and Genji _were_ the reason why Tomohisa was acting so whimsical around her.

Despite her rivalry with Megumi, Skuld accorded Keiichi's younger sister some respect. She _was_ an expert engineer...this had been proven by her tie with Skuld during the Robot Wars. Skuld had also been impressed by her dedication to Keiichi by saving his life during the Demon Rally incident. But this...how could she be so grossly irresponsible? Genji was virtually a stranger! Now he was practically living with her. With _us_!

"I'm not against people being in love...but why do mortals fall in love so _impulsively_. So uncalculatedly? So...illogically! It doesn't make sense...just like most things on this stupid Earthrealm," Skuld half-wondered half-concluded. Why didn't Megumi look at her big brother and learn from his mistakes? Mistakes like falling in love so quickly with Belldandy despite the well-reasoned objections of his girlfriend's younger sister. Mistakes like being financially unprepared; Keiichi was so broke that he had to take on extra work during the holidays because he couldn't afford to buy Belldandy anything other than a cheap ring. Skuld thought he was being niggardly...the ring he ended up getting her sister was little more than a garnet.

Now, she had to endure Megumi's lovesilliness. The fact that Megumi had fallen for Genji so suddenly; well...this had knocked her down a few notches in Skuld's esteem.

"And then they carry all lovey-dovey and stuff all the time," she declared acridly. "In _my_ house, too."

Relieved that the objects of her intractable spite were out for a day at the beach, Skuld returned to her lab room to work on the next part of her project to find Urd.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

I had gone out last night to the Capital Department Store to shop for supplies for my next expedition out to the caves. I bought all the easel-sized paper sheets and charcoal chalkpens they had in stock, plus a large box full of string, tape and sundries. I ended up having to hire a porter to help me lug all the stuff back to my hotel room.

I had realized that there were too many characters/words on the walls. A photographic record might be unreliable because of the low level of illumination in the antechamber where the panels of language walls were. I would have to rely on other means to record this archeological treasure.

In Xian, there is a courtyard with thousands of stone steles. Formerly, this was the location of the Metropolitan Examinations. To the untrained eye, the courtyard looked like an old cemetery. The faces of most of the stones were intricately carved with commentaries on the Four Classics, Buddhist sutras, poetry, political commentaries, even Christian Syriac Gospels. Many of them had ornately carved relief images as well. But these steles had a significant function besides decoration. Artists through the centuries had taken ink or ground charcoal and coated the steles, and then applied a piece of paper to the face of the stone. Pounding softly with a pad or cloth on the back, the writing or image on the stone would be transferred to the paper. The paper would be carefully peeled off; transformed into a 'negative' of the stele surface. In effect, the steles were the world's first copying machines...some of them dated to the early Tang Dynasty...and were still producing legible copies.

I planned to employ a variant of the same method to transfer the lettering/words from each of the nine panels of early language. Coupled with the possibility of photographic evidence, there would be no denying that this was a bona fide discovery. With all the X-Files-type paranoia going around, the last thing I needed was for the authenticity of such a find to be dismissed as forgery or hobgoblinry. Also to consider was the fact that the Divines had been involved in this; for all I knew, I could return to the cave tomorrow and find smooth walls or be 'locked out'. I felt humored by the irony of the adage "time is of the essence" as I prepared for my attempt.

Instead of coating the actual surfaces of each panel with some kind of substance, I would adhere the paper to the face of each panel and then blacken the back side of the paper with the charcoal chalkpens. This would quickly darken everything except the engraved characters, which would be transferred as white marks against the black background. As a historical find...this antechamber with its codex of ancient and lost languages was irreplaceable. It deserved the utmost respect. After examining a series of possible methods, I realized that this was the least intrusive method of transferring the carved images of the wall to another media.

As I rode the bus out to the caves, I noticed that today was going to be a hot one, even by central China climate standards. I was already soaked with sweat after walking almost a kilometer to the cave section where Cave 948 was located. Peng accompanied me, but did not climb the cliff face because of his fear of heights. I climbed up to the cave entrance, then lowered my rope and hauled up the art supplies, ladders and thermoses of water. I had told Peng that I was planning to stay overnight. Actually, since I had only four days left in Dunhuang, I would probably spend almost all of my remaining time in this chamber.

I decided to begin my work on the proto-Chinese wall in deference to the host country of this find. Looking at the statue of the three Goddesses for an intangible mental support, I gingerly taped the first easel paper to the wall and started blackening its back with a charcoal chalkpen. I would blacken only the area immediately around each character, leaving a margin where I could write the accordant translation in English and Chinese. This was going to be tedious, exhausting work, I realized with reluctance.

"Give me the strength to do what must be done," I affirmed as I continued to transfer the relief images to the paper.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Mara was up and around after being laid up for five mortal weeks in traction. She still had to rely on the use of crutches. Try as she might, she couldn't force herself to manifest as a healed mortal shell. Once more, the Ultimate Force continued to thwart her plans. The UF was almost devious in its despicable maltreatment of her. She reluctantly resigned herself to the fact that she had to heal on mortal terms. Every day Mara was confined to bed, her resentment at Belldandy and her worthless mortal so-called boyfriend stewed. Yes, she was angry with Megumi as well. Megumi would get hers, Mara would make sure of it. But it was Belldandy and Keiichi who were the main players in Mara's downfall.

_Again._

"Keiichi is so inept and worthless...it makes me sick! But he _always_ winds up unscathed despite the best-laid evil plans I come up with," she thought angrily. "He _never_ had to pay the consequences for being so close to a Goddess. It's like he's _immune_ to perfidy and malignant deviltry. It's a total mishmash!" She jerkily propelled herself with her crutches up to a blood-red wall and manipulated a fleshy green knob with her hand. An image arose; the bird's-eye view from one of her Sere-hawks.

"Thank the Dark Lord for you guys!" Mara thought with a relish.

Her Sere-Hawks were pets, Demon birds that sported bright red and black furfeathers. Each hawk had a large, proud crest and orange wingfeathers. When aroused, their wingfeathers would ignite; they would swoop about on wings of flame that splattered blood and ochre on anything in their flight path. Mara could link telepathically with them, and 'see' through their eyes, 'feel' their impressions. And what fun that was!

For the last several weeks while bedridden, Mara had sent them out to scout humans in the rural villages in northern Honshu, Akita Prefecture. They would sweep down from the skies, their flaming wings causing abject terror in the eyes of their victims. Mara had watched with glee as several farmers were caught by a squadron of Sere-Hawks in an open rice paddy...they had been so frightened by the bird attacks that they peed their pants. Mara especially savored the cacophony of mortals screaming in fear whenever they were swarmed by her Sere-Hawks.

_Glarwrak?_

Mara was startled by the sound...all her Sere-Hawks were supposed to be out pestering mortals.

"What are you doing here, Anthrax?" she said to the bird in a flat voice. For some strange reason, Mara had named her Sere-Hawks after heavy metal bands. Blade, Megadeath, Rammstein, Slayer, Pantera, Deathfate, St. Vitus and Anthrax.

_Skweerchk!_

"This had better be good...hey, what's that you have?" Mara said as she reached to pull a paper from the hooked beak of her pet.

"Mmmm, what's this?" she said as she unfolded it and read it. After a second read, she threw it up in the air while shrieking with malicious joy.

_"__BWAH HA HA HEhhhhh!__"_ she shouted as the paper floated down in lazy semi-circles. "I can't believe this! Of all the damned luck! This...is incredible! Hahahaha!"

Mara reached over and soothed Anthrax's feathers affectionately. Then she picked up the paper and read it aloud:

_Missing: Urudo Hayasaki, age 27. Resident of Makuhari._

_Reward offered for any information leading to the location of this runaway person._

_Please help us find our sister. Contact us at..._

Mara stared at the grainy portrait of Urd in one of her more capricious aspects, sporting her trademark vixen grin. Her _ugly_ vixen grin. She couldn't believe her luck. She had sensed that something was afoul at that hated compound where the three bimbo sisters lived. But this?

"I bet Belldandy and the Skuld-brat are going _nuts_ with grief! And I'm not there to behold it," she thought with disappointment.

Her last Sere-hawk reconnaissance of the temple had disclosed that Belldandy and Keiichi-moron were gone; Megumi had some spell on her that made her disgustingly sleazy...and she had some effete mortal male drooling over her; the Skuld-brat was moping around the house in a deep funk and some other little kid was hanging around like he lived there. Neither the pseudo-Demon Cevn nor the sleazeball Urd had been sighted.

"That's why those two are gone!" Mara concluded. Her mind raced to find a way to take advantage of this situation. Finally, a devious plan came to her mind. She hobbled over and picked up the HOTline phone to Vanagdrasil.

"Hello, Demon Grief Office. Yes, this _is_ Mara. I need to talk to Shiva and Berugone right away...yes, you heard me. Hey girls, what's roastin'? I need a favor...yeah you guys both owe me big time for that little help with Stalin a while back...yeah, you remember...well here's the deal. There's a certain half-Goddess half-Demoness that's here on the mortal planet...yeah, that one. Urd. Hild's and Freiija's halfbred miscue.

"Heh heh, she's really lame, isn't she? I want you to track her down. Yep...she has left the roost, so to speak...should be easy for you, since there is only a handful of half-n-halfs...yes, she should be the only one on Earth. Once you find her, give me a ring. I have something special planned."

It was complicated, to be sure. Urd was part Goddess, but she was also the daughter of Hild, one of the Demon Queens. So Mara couldn't just off her. But she _could_ bring Urd to grief.

"Boy,_ do_ I have something special planned...for all of them," Mara mused with a sadistic grin.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Keiichi was subdued as he drove down the coastal highway towards their next destination. Belldandy shared his mood; she was staring out the window wordlessly. Keiichi looked at his beloved girlfriend...who somehow looked different since they had become intimate. He felt like he had spent his entire life with her...and yet, had just discovered her. She was no longer just his girlfriend. She was a woman.

"I don't know what to think about it," he reflected. The last few nights they had slept together had been bliss. Rapturous. Ambrosia and cherry blossoms. He felt a new joy when he saw how good he could make Belldandy feel. Then the next day, all the women that he saw on the streets looked different. It was as if he had discovered a hidden, secret part of the feminine nature in Belldandy...in all women.

Belldandy for her part was so happy that Keiichi and she had added a new dimension to their relationship. At first, she almost felt like she was going to be addicted to being intimate...it was so natural for her and Keiichi to lay softly nude next to each other after making love. Belldandy already knew that she loved Keiichi, but she was delighted to see the new way she could please him. She smiled to herself when she thought of the humor of it...Urd had been trying to get her and Keiichi to become sexual almost from the start; now that they had become intimate, Urd wasn't involved at all.

They drove west on the new Highway 2 with hushed hearts. Belldandy winced as she remembered all that had happened here over 60 years ago. Had it been so recently? 60 years was just a moment in time, as far as Belldandy reckoned. But yet, it was three Earthrealm generations ago. Almost from another world of time.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

_She had been on vacation leave from the GRO when the mortals had obliterated Hiroshima. All of the Gods and Goddesses in Yggdrasil were stunned by the psychic death scream of hundreds of thousands of people. She had immediately sought out Skuld; somehow knowing that as the youngest, she would be most effected by the horrible event. Belldandy remembered how she had found Skuld huddled in a corner of one the data stacks, shivering in shock. Then they both went to Urd's office node in the Sysop Center. They found Urd at her console, staring vacantly into space, shocked into speechlessness. Urd detached her node from the cluster and they cried on each other's shoulders in grief over the atrocity. Only five times before in human history had so many people died in the same instant, one of which was instigated by Kami-sama. But this time, the mortals themselves had initiated it. Almost immediately, they were stunned again when the horror was repeated in Nagasaki._

_Kami-sama took a dim view of the proceedings on the mortal world. Soon after the bombings, He called an Assembly at Urd's Well to discuss the possibility of instigating a catastrophic disaster on the mortal world. The last time He had done so was over 14,000 mortal years earlier. At that time the mortals had reached a crossroads; they were totally stagnant in any kind of development. Any tribal group that showed progress was brutalized by other nomadic clans. Thus, there was no spiritual or intellectual growth. After much debate, Kami-sama had redirected a large asteroid so that it split into several pieces, landing in the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans. The ensuing floods and climatic disruption claimed the lives of over 95 of the human race. The trauma of this event was recorded for posterity in the dimly remembered records of each pre-modern Earthrealm civilization. Yet, the disaster had served as an evolutionary 'jump start', motivating the mortals to attain to greater heights in technology, philosophy, spirituality and culture. The same advances that eventually resulted in the building of a nuclear bomb._

_Now, He wanted to slow them down. They finally possessed the opportunity and technology to obliterate themselves. The debate He instigated required time compression, because it would have continued for several centuries otherwise. He compacted four centuries of discussion into two mortal years. Because many of the Yggdrasilian divines were ultra-sensitive to their mortal charges, the shock-like ripple through Yggdrasil at the time of the atomic bombings had resulted in a pessimistic view of the human race. However, a few Gods and Goddesses held out, claiming that if the Earthrealm mortals could learn from this painful lesson, they might reach the Next Level. Belldandy and Urd had vociferously argued that there was so much potential in the human race that had not yet been realized. In the end, their side of the debate, albeit initially the minority viewpoint, had found favor with Kami-sama...and garnered a 61 approval of the Assembly. He decided that He would place the humans on probation for one of their centuries. If they demonstrated sufficient progress in this short period of time, then He would aid them in reaching the Next Level. If not...then He would dispopulate 95 of the humans and start over again._

_Working out of the Goddess Relief Office, Belldandy often wondered if the humans had indeed made progress. True, there was less overt warfare...but individual incidences of insanity, cruelty and asociality had risen dramatically. She was beginning to feel that the mortals were regressing, rather than progressing._

_Then suddenly, her entire perspective on this issue had been upended. For the past three years, she had been thrust right in the middle of humanity. Belldandy had been linked with a mortal by his own volition. Keiichi's wish had brought her into the closest contact with a mortal that any Goddess had encountered...pretty much since she started working at the Goddess Relief Office. Because of this, she was a sort of vicarious link between the divine world of Yggdrasil and the human world of the mortals. Those Gods who sought to condemn or support the human race scrutinized her impressions of the mortals. Keiichi, thus, was a 'test case' of sorts. The host of impressions from her time with Keiichi would be involved in Kami-sama's and the Assembly's decision. Ultimately, it would be the Lord's choice, but He often used the Assembly as a forum to balance His considerations against._

_Since there was no other opportunity for anyone in Yggdrasil to experience what it was like to be a mortal firsthand, Keiichi had become the Test Mortal. Belldandy was the only Goddess from the Relief Office permanently assigned to a human._

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Looking over at Keiichi, Belldandy chided herself. She had never told Keiichi about this.

Belldandy knew that he was not ready to accept knowledge with _this_ kind of gravity. Keiichi, despite his courage and kindness, had a fragile side to him as well. Averedly, _any_ mortal would be overwhelmed to discover that his or her life played such an important role in humanity's future. What would Keiichi do if he found out that much of the onus which would influence Kami-sama's decision depended on what kind of a mortal life he led. She knew that she would have to inform him of this someday.

"All of these thoughts, because of Hiroshima," Belldandy mused as she sighed loudly.

"Belldandy, you okay?" he asked, noticing her deep contemplation.

"A..ah, Keiichi, I was just thinking to myself."

"It's kind of weird, being in Hiroshima. You must feel it too."

"Yes...it's a little...overwhelming."

"You can say that again," he replied uncomfortably.

They followed the same routine that they had performed in over a dozen cities. Stop by the Prefectural Office and file a missing person report. Then visit the police stations and the metropolitan offices. Hang up flyers downtown. Visit the fire departments.

But no matter where they were traveling within the city, the skeletal dome of the Industrial Promotion Hall cast a long shadow over their journey.

After completing their rounds, they decided to confront their personal demons and fears. They went to Peace Park, right next to the ruined A-bomb Dome. Keiichi had never been to Hiroshima before; he possessed only the textbook knowledge that every Japanese schoolchild was given. Belldandy, having experienced Hiroshima at a more profound level than any human was capable of, was emotionally reserved.

They walked through the cenotaph and entered the Peace Memorial Museum. Keiichi was aghast at the photographs of Hiroshima right after the destruction. Horror was an insufficient term to describe the atrocity that occurred here. Although it was from another era, Keiichi felt a stirring in his blood that bordered on depressed outrage. He felt a clenching fear that when he walked out of the museum, the sky would be blood red with black falling rains. Part of the museum visit involved viewing "The Movie", as the museum guide termed it.

Keiichi was apprehensive about this, as "The Movie" was infamous throughout Japan. While he and Bell-chan waited in line, he watched the previous group pile out of the theatre. In stark contrast to the buzzing of conversations in his line, those exiting the theater were silent. No one was talking, no one was smiling. Keiichi and Belldandy found themselves in a subdued, sober mood as "The Movie" began. When it was their turn to exit the museum theatre...they left with stunned expressions on their faces.

It was just too much to accept on an emotional level.

In a profound fugue of quiet, they walked along the canal until they found a bench to sit in the sunlight. With a nightmarish twist, he kept looking at the Hiroshima skyline, expecting it to disappear any second...and be replaced with furnace gray squalorous ruins.

Keiichi tore his mind away from his fearful fantasies and looked at Belldandy. She was dressed in a sundress with a long white skirt and a light blue frilly top. She had put her sunhat back on to keep from getting too much sun...it was hot today. Her beauty looked out of place in contrast to the horrible ugliness of Hiroshima after the bombing. Keiichi thanked his lucky stars that he wasn't alive then. Then he felt a repugnant feeling as he realized that Belldandy was alive at the time of the bombings. His mind spiraled, filled with doubts.

Belldandy watched as Keiichi leaned down and grasped his hands tightly in front of him, resting his elbows on his knees. She knew him well enough to realize that his faith in humanity was affronted by their visit to the museum. She could almost imagine the sparks of deep reflection going on in his mind. He looked like the whole weight of the world was bearing down on him.

"In a way, it is," she thought ironically.

Keiichi straightened up and took his time to form words around what was on his mind.

"Belldandy..._why_ did this happen? How could human beings do this to each other? WHY? What is it about us, as a species or race, that could make us so blind to the suffering we inflict on each other? How could a person take another person's life? Why..?" his questions spilled out like baby spiders out of a nest egg.

Belldandy reached over and placed a finger on his lips to gently quiet him. He was getting really worked up over this, his eyes darting from side to side in hyperanxiety.

The questions her Keiichi had asked had been debated for millennia in Yggdrasil. The only one that seemed to have an answer was Kami-sama...but even He admitted that He was mystified by the mass destruction of the nuclear bombings. How could she answer Keiichi? She wanted to reassure him, to reassure herself. She also wanted to speak for the half a million voices that were silenced on those two fateful days.

"Keiichi...I _don't_ think that Man is inherently evil. True, what happened here was the most horrible thing humanity has ever done. But I really, really believe in mankind, despite strong evidence to the contrary. Many of us in Yggdrasil believe that Mankind died here, at the moment this bomb went off. I feel that Mankind was reborn in a sense, by finally having to face the sheer insanity of human destructive folly. My personal convictions lie with the fact that peace got a second chance...as long as the mortal world harbors grief towards the darkness of what happened."

"But they haven't! Thousands of people starve to death every year while much of the world wallows in wealth. In America, people kill each other everyday with handguns. Hundreds of thousands of men and women are killed each year in driving accidents...the highest automobile fatality rate is right here in Japan! How can you say that you have faith in us?" he asked desperately.

"I _do_ have faith in mankind! I have faith in _one man_ as well!" she said as she turned and placed a comforting hand on each of Keiichi's shoulders.

"I want you to know that I _love_ you._ L-O-V-E YOU_, Keiichi Morisato! But I think...it's time I told you about an important matter that involves you," Belldandy confided in a serious voice.

Keiichi looked at her serious mien and his heart skipped a beat.

"After this happened, there was deep concern in Yggdrasil about mankind," she began. Belldandy couldn't tell Keiichi about how close mankind came to being wiped off the face of the planet; this information was as closely guarded as the knowledge of the existence of Vanagdrasil.

"We decided to put mankind on a sort of trial, to see if they could reach the Next Level," she said seriously.

"What does that have to do with me, Bell?" Keiichi asked, suddenly alerted by the change in tone in Belldandy's voice.

"Because...one of the ways that mankind is being measured is through _you_, Keiichi. You're a 'guinea pig' of sorts. Many Gods and Goddesses in Yggdrasil are observing how I live with you from day-to-day. Since no one else is as closely connected to a mortal as I with you, it is incumbent that we Gods learn about mankind...from what I learn about you, Keiichi."

Keiichi felt his thoughts pour out like a spilled bowl of miso soup. His mind went blank as he realized what Belldandy just said. She had basically said that he was being closely monitored in connection with some kind of judgment pending on Mankind. He was already overwhelmed by the sights and sounds of Hiroshima and all it represented...now Belldandy had dumped _this_ on him!

A glint of a thought later, he was wondering just how much of their private life was on display...and turned red as he imagined the minions of Yggdrasil watching as he was making love with Belldandy.

"What is wrong with me! Bell-chan is telling me...that the fate of humanity hinges on how I get along with her! And all I can worry about is my sex life? Man...if they could see inside of my head right now...humanity is going to fail this 'trial' she mentioned...miserably!" he mentally confronted himself.

Belldandy saw Keiichi's face pale with anxiety, and then redden with embarrassment. Correctly guessing that he was uncomfortable with his love life being on display, she quickly explained more about the situation.

"Keiichi, I _promise_ you that none of our privacy is being invaded or watched. The way that we measure mankind in Yggdrasil for this particular reason is not concerned with our love...although our love is going to be a very important consideration someday. Please trust me; that our love is _our_ love...for you and I only! Consider this...I'm 'filtering' out the specifics about our love for each other. All they have to know is that we _are_ in love...I won't share anything more than this. And our feelings for each other won't become general knowledge in Yggdrasil until _we_ decide that they should be. The only people that know about us are the people who must know about us..."

"Bell-chan...this is a little bit too much for me to understand," Keiichi stated in a quivering voice.

"You must believe me!" she half-stated, half-asked.

"_Can_ I believe her?" Keiichi wondered to himself. He remembered how Belldandy had often asserted that she would believe him...no matter what...because she loved him.

"Do I have _that_ kind of belief in her? And if I don't, do I have that kind of love? It seems so easy for her...after all, she _is_ a Goddess. I could never understand things the way she does," he reflected. Then he had a sudden insight...one that had been lingering on his mind for quite some time.

"Bell-chan and I are in the same situation...it's just as hard for her to deal with being a mortal as it is for me to deal with being in love with a Goddess," he rerealized with a solvent insight.

Keiichi searched back in his memory to the early times in their relationship. When he first met Belldandy, it seemed like she didn't know anything at all about what she was doing. He laughed at the memory of the first time she baked cookies for him. She had left them in the oven for hours and burnt them. Then she served the burnt-to-a-crisp cookies to Megumi and he as if nothing happened. She smiled brightly as she set down the plateful of charred cookies...then looked mystified when Keiichi and his sister broke down in laughter.

"She didn't know," Keiichi reminded himself. "Just like_ I_ don't know!"

"But we don't have to know! Isn't that what love is about? Sharing our discoveries and mysteries together?" he thought. At once, he decided to trust her implicitly.

"If Belldandy says that our love life, that my life, isn't under the kind of scrutiny where my fate is being decided or my privacy is invaded...then I trust her. I love her too much to go through life not trusting her. Without trust, my love for her is nothing more than spit on the side of a well...one splash and it's gone," he concluded.

"Belldandy, I love you...and I trust what you're saying," he said decisively, puncturing his fear and apprehensions.

"Keiichi...I love you best!" Belldandy almost leapt into his arms and was all over him, kissing him passionately. A few tourists strolling down the canal walkway stopped and smiled as they hugged and kissed each other fervently. One of them even took a picture.

"Keiichi...if you're worried about being 'under the gun' because Yggdrasil is paying special attention to you, I want to you to consider this. I, a Goddess, have fallen in love with you. That means that there is something inside of you that I recognize...something that is closer to we Gods than to the mortal realm. For every thing that was evil about Hiroshima...you are its opposite. You're kind, generous, caring, benevolent, accepting, patient, humble and courageous. I love you...and that's _a lot_ of evidence that points towards the positive potential of mankind. The fact that you can love me...also means that mankind is nearer to the point of reaching the Next Level than many of its detractors would think. You're reaching towards a higher level by choosing to love me. Just keep on being yourself...and you'll do Mankind proud!"

Keiichi was almost in tears as Belldandy appraised him. He rarely thought of himself that way.

"This must be another reason why love is so special...I get to see myself through Belldandy's eyes...and see that I _am_ a nice person," he flashed with transpersonal insight.

Keiichi grinned broadly at Belldandy, then stood up and offered his hand. Taking his hand, she walked with him down the Peace Memorial Park Canal.

Their hearts were enclothed with peace.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

_Crash!_

She looked at the wall in her hotel room and noticed that another dent was made in the plaster. Nothing worked anymore. Nothing could make her feel better. The glamour. The fawning attention of the men. The fast life. The outfits. All of it was empty...unable to fill the hole in her being.

Urd hadn't shown up for work for the past few days. She ignored the phone when it rang, and when they stopped by her hotel room, all she said was "I'm sick. Go away." She had spent much of the time curled up in her bed, hugging her knees in a fetal position. The last barrier had fallen and she was now feeling the sheer pain of her existence. Even if she had her Goddess powers, she _still_ couldn't do anything about it.

Feeling pangs of homesickness, Urd reviewed the sequence of events that brought her to China. She still couldn't shake the sense that she was wrong in coming here. But what could she do? It had been so fun for the first few weeks of her modeling job. She was quickly becoming a celebrity. But no matter where she was, she still had to deal with herself.

"It'll never end, this loneliness that I'm fated to feel! Damn the freakin' Ultimate Force!" she thought once again. The wall on the left side of her bed, opposite the window, was pockmarked with plaster punctures. Underneath it was a large pile of smashed jiu and pijiu bottles that Urd had flung against the wall. Even drinking booze didn't help anymore.

She sat up on her bed and paced through her room. Urd looked in the bathroom mirror at her face...something she formerly took pride in. But all the beauty in the universe wouldn't find her someone to love. She pounded the sink with her fists.

"Why...why...why?" she screamed as the tears came hot on her cheeks.

Looking in the mirror, the face that speculated back at her was filled with sadness and anxiety. The visage of the Eldest Norn...the one who was always helping her younger sisters...but yet at times the most childish of all three. Maybe it was time to change all that. She flopped back down on her bed and hugged a pillow. She was disappointed that_ all_ she could hug was a pillow...that no one could hug her.

The cruel world spun on with its "ain't no time for tears" attitude.

Urd had never felt such pressing bleakness in her existence. True, she had felt brief flashes of it at times...but now she felt a constant hopelessness. Fate had cast her to be the loneliest of all creatures in the universe. She felt a coldness that wasn't cold, an emptiness that wasn't void. It was enclosing her body.

"I can't take anymore of this! It's time to end it!" she shouted in her empty room.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

It had been two days since I stumbled upon the secret of the antechamber. I was harboring a massive headache because of the intensity of my task. It was repetitious, detail-oriented, delicate work. I could ill afford to become complacent or daydream. There was many times where the fastidiousness of the work caused me to inadvertently hold my breath...my tension was elevated through the imaginary plateau of tolerability.

At times I would take a short break and lean against one of the nine wall-sized panels filled with words. I had finished four of them; proto-Chinese, the pre-Linear A/B, a series of illustrations of all known animals and concepts to man in the 340th century BCE, and a lost language that utilized a set of ideographic pictograms with an almost mathematical precision. The latter resembled Chinese with its employment of characters, but each character also had a conjugative qualifier that was codified by an octal numeric set. Also, it had copular verbs, unlike Chinese. It was really a surprisingly complex language. "Xinthiac" was what it called itself.

As I stared at the statues of the Goddesses, in my mind they resembled images of the female Kwan Yin manifestation, or a Benzaiten. I would mentally converse with them, asking them what I should do, how I should proceed with my dissertation. What can I do with the rest of my life? I knew that once I finished my dissertation, I planned to fly out to Jiyuiguan, buy a camel and take the 'long walk' out in the Gobi desert. The ancient aborigines of Australia used to call this a soul walk...one would simply walk with oneself until they reached their destination...the secret self that had been concealed within layers of 'beingness'.

I returned to my painstaking work, worried that I wouldn't finish in time. Peng had been good enough to bring me a supply of bottled water this morning. I felt a little saddened that his acrophobia prevented him from sharing in my discovery. I could read intense curiosity on his face every time he had checked up on me during the past two days.

When darkness came, I would light up the lamps in the hallway leading to the antechamber, so that no kerosene or oil deposits would waft into the room and coat its contents. The last thing I needed was to disturb the antediluvian interior, kept pristine for untold centuries. Somehow I would get this done.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Skuld had finished phase one of her project. The next phase would be much more facile in execution. She had built a Holophotic Videmeotron so that she could display the results of her search. This mecha looked like an oversized microscope with a translucent egg-like structure underneath. The oval 'egg' was filled with lattices of nanolasers. It would cast a mid-air holographic image that imitated the contents of her laptop screen. By accelerating the air molecules, she could create a series of magnitudes that would manifest in a color spectrum. She could also control the opacity of the floating image screen.

"Cool," she said to herself as she tested the image. She was proud of herself...once more she had created another sci-fi invention that the mortals would deem fantastically impossible. Grabbing a paintbrush, she deftly painted the name of the mecha on its metallic shell. Skuld felt a momentary frustration as she realized that if she would have had her powers, all she had to do was visualize the name and it would appear on the Holophotic Videmeotron. Now she had to do it manually.

"Elder Sister and Keiichi will return tomorrow!" she thought enthusiastically. She wanted to employ her creation while everyone was together, so that they could share in her joy of finding Urd. Skuld had been feeling so powerless lately...having an audience would greatly boost her self-esteem. It would be good to have Belldandy back...she had been missing her sister a lot lately. She was also worried about how Belldandy had become so zealous about the search for Urd. She felt a hint of concern for Keiichi as they left last weekend for southern Japan. Elder Sister seemed to be a little surly...if she got worse, Keiichi would be exposed to the full brunt of her anxiety.

Phase Three of the project was the simplest of all. All she had to do was to hack into the defense computers of the US and Russian military satellite system and reprogram the satellites with spectrometric capabilities; enabling them to attune to the specific patterns of the reconstructed DNA her modeling program had developed. The satellites would go into a search mode and span the globe until they found spectrometric data that matched the DNA sequences. Then they would transmit the coordinates to spycam orbiting platforms. The spying satellites would take photos of the locations specified and the images would be downloaded into Skuld's laptop and then displayed on the Holophotic Videmeotron Mk III for all to see.

"Tomorrow, we'll do this search thing _right_," she said to herself with satisfaction.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Mara received the return call from the Vanagdrasil HOTline just a short while ago. They had located Urd. She was someplace in China, in a large metropolitan area called Beijing. According to Grief Office agents who found her, Urd was morbidly disconsolate. And in addition to this, Urd was without _any_ divine powers. This news made Mara even happier...she loved it when Urd was miserable.

"And I didn't have to do anything to cause the girl her grief!" she cheerily noted.

Then it sank in. Urd doesn't have any powers. She must have gotten her license suspended again...as usual for her. Mara was pleased to see that Urd was _still_ so predictable.

"She's totally at my mercy!" Mara thought. "The devilish things I could do to that bitch for all the times she humiliated me...ooooh, I'm such a Demoness at heart!"

Shiva and Berugone had informed her that they had followed the instructions of her request to the letter. Mara had asked them to assign a warding spell on Urd, so that no magical means could be utilized to find her or help her. As long as they were unable to find Urd, that do-gooder Belldandy and the little brat Skuld would become more and more miserable. If Mara had learned one thing in all her existence as a Demoness, it was her ability to twist love into jealousy or grief. A pervading grief which would make Keiichi and Megumi miserable as well. Belldandy was so naive, it probably didn't occur to her to ask her divine counterparts like Peorth to help her find Urd. Now, because of Mara's quick thinking, that option was canceled out.

"Once I get off these blessed crutches, I'll go find Urd and settle accounts with that blessed Eldest Norn!" she said in a gritty determined voice.

Mara's powers were restricted by the Ultimate Force while she was laid up with her injury. But once the UF allowed her healing, she would have full access to her Demoness powers. Even though she had been busted to a Second Class, Limited, license status by the Dark Lord, she would have more than enough power to get to Urd and make her pay dearly. She imagined a powerless Urd squirming underneath her thumb.

"If I can't hurt Belldandy by harming Keiichi, I'll _really_ hurt her by harming her older sister!" she said to herself with joy, visions of her quid pro quo competing with dark tortures in her mind.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Finished! I had completed transferring the contents of the walls onto a bundle of large easel-sized papers. I had assembled a thick stack of them in my carrying folder, each with transcribed images and translations. My eyes were blurry from exhaustion, but it had been worth it.

I offered to help Peng ascend the cliff face despite his fear of heights. I lowered him a rope to tie around his waist, then he started his climb. I held tight, so that if he slipped because of his anxiety, I would be able to hoist him the rest of the way up. But he did fine, his insecurity lessened by the safety of the rope.

I showed him the interior of Cave 948, with its painted images of three Goddesses. Then we descended the gently sloping floor slab into the hallway and entered the antechamber. Peng was speechless when we entered the large hidden room. He saw the statuary in the middle of the room and asked me if I knew how old it was. Then I explained to him that each wall had an ancient language and that each language was arranged to correspond to each other. Peng told me that this was archeological find of the first order; he thanked me profusely for convincing him to dare the cliffside ascent despite his fears.

I had brought 24 rolls of film and proceed to make a photographic record of the place; one of us holding a flashlight on the wall section while the other photographed it. Then I took a roll of souvenir photos with Peng posing in various portions of the antechamber; then he returned the favor. I realized that this find would probably recast Peng's job. I was planning to leave, but he would remain here to deal with the aftermath of my discovery. I told him of my plans to disappear into the Gobi...then I signed a contract which gave him exclusive unlimited access to the site. I knew that he would be responsible enough to 'fight the good fight' to preserve this ancient place against predatory researchers and tourists. We joked about him being 'Head Curator Peng' and I promised to take him out to dinner before I caught my red-eye flight back to Beijing.

Somehow in the pit of my stomach, I felt that we would be the last ones to see the antechamber. Sure enough, once we hauled all the supplies out and left the place for the last time, the floor slab lifted back up into position, blocking the entryway. The small rock that I had used to trigger the slab to open fell out of its niche with a soft thud. I grabbed it and put it in a container, following a hunch that carbon dating it would reveal how old the chamber was. After all, it might have been placed in its position right after the antechamber was carved out and finished.

Peng and I went to one of the best restaurants in Dunhuang and feasted. He staunchly attempted to convince me not to simply disappear after making such an important discovery. But I told him that I didn't feel like I was part of the human race anymore.

I packed my gear, realizing that in the past few days, my body had been giving me some weird signals. Just like when I first arrived in Japan after being transported by Urd...now I felt parts of my being shifting. At the airport, I almost passed out, either from exhaustion or from whatever was happening to me.

On the plane, I tried to gather my thoughts as I looked out the window, seeing the fading twilight sun illuminate the bottoms of the clouds with a purplish rouge as we ascended. As the snow-capped Nanshan Mountains carved intricate patterns in the earth below us, I knew that the academics and doubters would vigorously attack this discovery. In fact, I knew that my whole dissertation would be the target of much unfriendly scrutiny. Each minute that the plane got closer to Beijing, I felt more apprehensive. My future rested there.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Belldandy sighed with relief as Keiichi pulled into their home. Stepping out of her sidecar, she brushed off the road dust and hugged him, then walked towards the house. They were both disappointed in the lack of results in their search for Urd. After Hiroshima, they had traveled further southwest to Yamoguchi and Shimonoseki at the tip of Honshu. Still no signs of Urd. Skuld was waiting in the doorway, an excited look on her face.

"Sister! Keiichi! I've found a way to locate Urd!" she bubbled forth as she ran up and hugged them both. She had noticed how crestfallen they both looked and decided to tell them immediately about her discovery.

Belldandy thought this was just another one of Skuld's childish conceits until she looked deep into her sister's brown eyes and saw the impatient earnestness there. She glanced at Keiichi, whose mystified expression belied the fact that he was also puzzled by Skuld's excitement. Skuld was so animated that she was bouncing up and down; each step was a spring and a skip. Belldandy felt a cool, refreshing wash of exhilaration as she realized that her younger sister _may_ be able to find Urd. She said a silent prayer to Kami-sama, hoping that at last this may be the break they were looking for.

Walking in the living room, they saw Megumi and Genji sitting at the table. Belldandy smiled as she felt the glow of fresh love radiate from them. After greeting them, Keiichi saw his cousin Tomohisa watching an American baseball game on the sports channel.

"C'mon everybody, I have something to show you!" Skuld announced with a shout. Belldandy watched her younger sister vicariously as she told them all that they would be able to find Urd soon. Skuld grabbed her by the arm and almost dragged her off down the hallway towards "Skuld Labs". Keiichi and the rest followed, caught up by the anticipatory atmosphere.

Skuld seated herself on a futon in front of her laptop computer and keyed in a few commands. In the middle of the room, a screen solidified in mid air, causing a gasp from two of their group. Belldandy looked at her sister in shock...Tomohisa and Genji hadn't been let in on their little 'secret'. Yet. Keiichi and Megumi were rooted with surprise at Skuld's boldness.

"Skuld?" Belldandy said hesitantly.

"Well, they were going to find out sooner or later, anyway...so why not now!" Tomohisa looked at her with an unreadable expression, somewhere between fear and shock. It dawned on him that this was the same girl who had pounded a softball 600 feet past the outfield fence at the park. Skuld grinned micheivously as she recognized the "I don't know what the hell you are" look on his face.

Megumi shook her head and said "I can't believe she just did this" under her breath while Genji held her hand so tightly that she thought it was going to be crushed. She reached over and patted him on the hand...he looked at her with embarrassment as he realized he was gripping her too hard and apologized. Skuld had really outdone herself this time...and whether she knew it or not, it was advantageous that she had decided to disclose her Divine origin.

Megumi knew that Genji was a keeper; she didn't feel that she could keep the secret of the Goddess sisters away from her boyfriend forever. She didn't want the burden of constantly having to explain away the 'unusual events' that occurred with regularity in their household.

Now, Skuld had taken care of things for her.

The group watched as an image of the Earth formed on the screen, then about 40 pink dots appeared over it, seemingly floating in space. A few keystrokes later, a green grid formed, linking each of the dots. Skuld turned to them with a know-it-all smile and explained.

"There is a definite way to find Urd. We know that she manifests in a human body like everyone else," she explained, as Genji and Tomohisa dropped their jaws agape.

"So I figured if I could find out what her unique DNA code is, then I would have a means to locate her. I found part of her DNA and reconstructed a sequence which should resemble Urd's real-life unique DNA pattern. It took awhile, since there are _so many_ potential DNA recombinations and I only had about 20 of her genetic code available...but I was able to abstract a reliable simulacrum of her unique genome traits."

Belldandy looked at her younger sister with open admiration. She knew, in a sense, how difficult the task was that Skuld had undertaken. Building a warding mandala or a mecha was one thing, but this was an immensely more difficult task. She thought of the intricacy of the calculations required...and her mind reeled at the sheer complexity. Skuld had accomplished it with a mere mortal laptop computer and her own ingenuity. Belldandy felt a strong pride in her younger sister. Skuld had advanced much further in her development than Belldandy could have predicted as of late.

"She's so close to being ready," Belldandy said to herself proudly.

Each Goddess served a different time period. As the Goddess of the Future, Skuld's focus was on science and technology. She would never have the mystical powers of her two elder sisters. But this was appropriate, because someday the humans would become so advanced in their technological endeavors that their progress would approach the level of magic. At that time, Skuld's role would be to reconcile magic and science, so that the humans could evolve to the Next Level. Urd was just the opposite of Skuld; her focus was on pure magic and arcane alchemies. Belldandy had a more balanced measure of both...with the greater part being her mystical powers. As the Goddess of the Past, one of Urd's responsibilities was to create myths for mankind. But as mankind progressed into the future, with a greater reliance on information and machines, a new kind of myth was needed. When Skuld would reach maturity, she would embody that myth.

"What you have done to try and find our sister is marvelous...you really are growing up!" Belldandy said to her younger sister, drawing a beaming smile from Skuld that was a reward in itself.

"These dots on the screen are military satellites that spy on different parts of the world," she explained matter-of-factly. "A couple of days ago, I realized that if there is a DNA pattern, it would be detectable using current mortal technology." Genji and Tomohisa winced when she said 'mortal technology'. This was rapidly becoming too intense for Tomohisa...he had just been watching the Yankees vs. the Red Sox a few minutes earlier. He inched towards the door...and then Keiichi caught him by the arm and shook his head to say "don't run away from this." Skuld continued with her explanation.

"These satellites have advanced surveillance capabilities, including devices that scan for nuclear and chemical weapons. By uploading a little quirk, I can reprogram their onboard computers to increase their sensitivity a hundredfold. Then I will be able to use spectrometry to scan the entire surface of the Earth. Once this is done, then there should only be six or give candidates whose mass spectrometry yields match what I have extrapolated for Urd's DNA sequence. I will be able to locate the positions of the results, and then I'll uplink into the spy camera orbiting platforms and photograph the places where the candidates live. The images will download into my computer and be displayed on my wonderful, beautiful Holophotic Videmeotron Mk III. There, we'll be able to see pictures of the humans. One of them will be Urd. Simple, isn't it?"

Keiichi shook his head.

"Simple, she says," he thought with a hint of exasperation. He was lost a few seconds after Skuld tried to explain the mathematics involved in the development of the software program she used to identify what Urd's DNA sequencing was. The fact that she could hack into the most advanced military computers on the planet was daunting in itself. She made it sound as easy as putting a videotape into the VCR and turning the TV on. Glancing at his younger cousin's confusion, Keiichi felt concern for Tomohisa. His cousin had a wary expression on his face...his little female friend had turned into something much more than he had bargained for.

"I know what you must be feeling, Tomo," Keiichi thought, remembering how intimidated he felt when he first learned just how _much_ of a Goddess his Bell-chan was.

"I'm going to have to sit him down and really have a talk with him when this is over," he whispered aside to Belldandy. She smiled affirmingly.

Skuld typed in a few more commands and the green gridlines in the holographic display widened out into aqua-colored fans that eventually covered the surface of the planet in a translucent glow.

"Ahhh, 100 coverage...let's see what these satellites can come up with," Skuld said as she chewed excitedly on a chocolate covered rice stick. Soon, small green dots appeared on the slowly spinning globe image: one in Europe, one in Africa, one in Okinawa. A red flashing dot appeared in east Asia, accompanied by an alarm klaxon.

"What's that?" Keiichi and Belldandy both asked at about the same time.

"That...is an indicator for a warding spell. I modified the scanning quirk with one of Banpei's detection programs on a hunch that someone might try to keep us from finding Urd though magical means."

Belldandy and Keiichi both looked at each other and said, "Mara!"

"Yep...I bet that's why that flashing light is there. But Mara didn't expect anyone to try and find Urd _this_ way, did she? No way! Skuld rules again!" she shouted vivaciously, thrusting a gloved V-sign high into the air.

Belldandy smiled at her sister's hubris. Skuld had bettered herself...she estimated only six or five results...and there were only four.

"You've got a right to gloat this time, my dear little sister," she acknowledged. Skuld tapped in a few more commands and the globe shrunk into the upper corner of the holographic display. The next clatter of typing was followed by four empty screens popping up on the display. Labels popped up under each one.

"Cool...this is like being in Star Trek or Star Wars," Tomohisa marveled, his earlier sense of awe replaced by mounting interest.

One panel said "St-Pons, France." A map of Southern France popped up. Another panel said "Bangui, Central African Republic" with a detailed map of that city. Another panel displayed "Ishikawa, Okinawa, Japan." The last panel displayed a captioned map of Beijing, China.

"Now I'm going to reposition a couple of these satellites so we can start taking pictures. Lessee, how about the Hubble II, the Hirayama Asteroid Tracker, and a couple of spy satellites.."

A few moments later, the first picture popped up on the screen. An elderly black man was sitting in front of a bank on a bench, surrounded by children. The next several pictures showed that he was giving candy to a cheerful bunch of kids. Belldandy felt her heart warm up to the kind old man who was sharing joy with young children. The series of photos looked like they were taken directly overhead from the roof. Definitely not Urd, however.

The next series of photos showed the roof of a small apartment complex. Evidently, whoever was 'tagged' with the DNA they were searching for was inside, blocked from the camera's overhead view. Skuld and the others felt a little disappointment at this.

The next screen showed a foggy photo from Beijing. It was apparent that the Beijing photos were obscured by a deep cloudcover. Skuld was frustrated. There was nothing but gray and purple splashes of color. Keiichi almost felt like the Ultimate Force was conspiring against their efforts to find Urd. After seeing that Skuld's detection had flagged Beijing as a site of a warding spell, he was almost sure that they would see Urd there. Instead, they would have to wait.

The next photo arrived on the screen for Okinawa. Every male in the room craned to get a better view. The picture showed a beautiful Japanese woman, in her early 20s, laying face down on a beach towel. All she was wearing was her undone bikini top and a scant thong bikini, getting a suntan.

After a moment, someone whispered "please roll over." Megumi elbowed Genji, who turned to look at her with a blushing face and apologized with a "I'm a guy, y'know!" Megumi heard the youthful voice of her cousin on the heels of her boyfriend's amends.

"Hey Skuld, could you try to zoom in on the photo from Okinawa. I...uh...can't make out all the details," Tomohisa inquired. Keiichi looked at Belldandy and rolled his eyes.

"I can't believe he's my cousin!" he thought with a deep exasperation. Skuld was so busy keying in commands, she didn't notice the fourth image that had popped on the screen. She typed in the commands to enlarge it.

"Is that better? Does it look like Urd?" she asked.

"Ahhh, much better. Is there any way you can splash her with cold water? Too bad she isn't Urd...but she totally looks nice anyway," Tomohisa commented.

Skuld jerked her head up to see what he was talking about. She looked at the picture from Okinawa on her monitor and turned red in the face with anger.

_"__Hentai!__"_

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --


	22. Pt 22: Soulbound

**Part 22: Soulbound**

My return flight landed early in the morning on a rainy Monday in Beijing. The sky was roofed with a bleak castmetal gray; clothing the city in even more grit than usual. The roads were rimmed with rainwater pooling alongside the curbs as I rode the crowded bus into the city from Capital Airport. The dreariness of the weather suited my mood...it resonated with the gnawing sense of apprehension I was feeling inside. I had been unable to sleep during the six hours of the flight from Dunhuang. My body was definitely feeling strange.

When I first came to Japan, I noticed telltale signs that my proprioception was awry. Now, it was happening again. I couldn't sense any muscular 'feedback' when I moved; thus, I was constantly bumping into things. Also, fatigue had set in and my eyesight occasionally blurred. It was a softer version of the physical abnormalities I endured when Urd had first brought me to Japan. But those were the result of being transported through a TV. I was unclued as to why I was feeling this way now. Oddly, the inside of the bus looked almost psychedelic rather than urban-worn.

BeiDa was being pelted by a humid rain when I stepped off the bus with my luggage. I waited under a tree until the downpour subsided and then walked to Shao Yuan, the dorm I was staying at. I was gravely concerned that the downpour and humidity may have damaged the papers I had brought with me from the cave, even though I had placed them in waterproof containers. When I got to my room, I pulled them out of the storage cylinders and inspected them for any water damage. I breathed a big sigh of relief; they were all as dry as when I left Dunhuang. Then I called Dr. Zhao to inform him of my return. Filled with nervous anxiety, I decided to drop my 'bombshell' on him.

"Dr. Zhao, I need you to set aside some time this evening so I can show you a discovery I encountered in Dunhuang. It's really important," I requested with nerve-drenched deference.

"What do you mean, important? Dunhuang is one of the most heavily catalogued historical sites in China! What new discovery could you have possibly found there? I need some kind of justification to rearrange my schedule on such short notice!" the authoritive voice on the phone crackled.

"Please? On my honor as one bound to academic ethics...it'll be worth it. I'll show you. Meet me in the Philosophy lecture hall at 7pm this evening. And if you could, I want you to bring a couple of experts on archaic classical Chinese."

"What is the meaning of this? You want me to tie up _my_ evening...and then you ask for me to involve two other scholars whose time is as precious as mine? This had better be important, Cevn-shih!" he groused.

Good old Dr. Zhao. Behind his academician's gruff pretense was a heart of gold. By staking my scholarly honor upon my request, I had basically insisted that he come...and he had recognized this. This was almost the Japanese equivalent of accompanying a request with a saikeirei or holding a deep bow until an answer is given. I knew that he would on the phone to the two top scholars of classical Chinese at BeiDa, convincing them to come. I hoped that they did, because they're going to have the time of their lives if they show up.

Otherwise, I'm going to be the laughingstock of BeiDa's intelligentsia for at least this semester.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

After the last class shuffled out of the lecture hall at 5pm, I entered the classroom armed with tape, string and the easel papers from the cave. I was going to create a mockup of the interior of the antechamber by taping the sheets to the walls, right here in the classroom. There were a few student looker-ons whose curiosity was stirred by this longhaired foreign student who was hanging up papers all over the classroom.

"It must appear to them like I'm preparing the room for a party," I observed. Then I recognized one of the faces. She walked in and sat down on one of the desks.

"Hi, Lin!" I hailed, glad to see a familiar face. She was dressed in a denim jacket with a red blouse embroidered with floral stitchwork; her hair was braided into twin ponytails piled in buns on the side of her head in the classical Chinese feminine fashion. She looked girlish and innocent; as if she was too young to be a graduate student with her hair styled thus. Lin definitely didn't need to wear makeup; her auburn-toned face possessed a timeless beauty and charm resembling that of the actress Gong Li.

"What are you doing, Cevn? It looks like you're going to have a party here, but I don't see any refreshments...and that stuff you're hanging up certainly doesn't look like good luck posters. In fact, I think they look like rubbings from some kind of steles."

"You're perspicacious as usual, Lin. You're going to make a fine economic theorist...and probably a few million RMB as well," I complimented. She giggled at my praise as she picked up one of the sheets off a desk and examined it.

"What _is_ this?" she asked, a bright star amidst a rainy evening. I began to narrate to her the tale of my discovery at Dunhuang. Looking at me with incredulity, she quickly thrust down the paper she was holding, suddenly afraid that she might damage it. I assured her that I trusted her with handling the papers...and then I asked her to help me post them up. She looked at me with a reserved air, but agreed. It seemed that she was either feeling pretty intimidated by what I had told her...or she thought I was about ready to pull an exemplary academic fraud.

Lost languages. A chamber secreted within one of the Dunhuang caves. Statues of goddesses and painted devas. A new myth...that the future was going to hyperspace into the past. A symbiosis of nostalgia and paleolithia; a complete antithesis to the information age...within a concrescent archaic revival.

As I watched her put up the papers, I tried to imagine what she was thinking. Her reaction would be echoed in a greater context by the dissertation committee. This discovery would really throw a pipewrench in the orthodox belief that Ruism was the fundamental and predominant influence on China's early intellectual history. "Ruism", as Dr. Zhao stressed, was the proper term the teachings of Kung Fu Tzu.

Actually, these documents may prove that China's history extends much further back than the Hsia Dynasty. This finding would please more than a few historians who argued that China should have pride of place as the world's oldest extant civilization. The only challengers to that claim were the Egyptologists, who claimed that Egyptian civilization dated back to 4241 BCE according to Breasted, or that it began with the First Dynasty in 3188 BCE as later scholars believed. I knew that both civilizations were an offshoot of the Paludorians, who were forced into a diaspora by fierce barbarian invasions and natural disasters in the 7th Millennia BCE.

I had translated their language on panel 7 of the antechamber. My metallect had informed me as to the date of the construction of the Paludorian languages. These languages were the mythical pre-Aryan civilizations often referred to by the classical Indian texts, albeit in a corrupted etymological form.

"How does one cloth the uninteresting with the vibrancy?" I thought with concern. To the software guru aspiring to be a millionaire...these finds would mean nothing; they would hold his or her attention for as long as it took to read the one-paragraph blip in the newspaper. This dissertation...it was everything but important. Could I find an audience, other than the intellectuals who would dissect it?

"What did you say the name of the place was...the place where you found these?" Lin asked, pulling me out of my reverie.

"Dunhuang."

"No, you silly goof! I _know_ that!" she said with a scowl, and then shot a rubber band at my chest. I was embarrassed at my gaffe.

"What I meant was, what are you going to call the antechamber where you found all the ancient languages?" she clarified.

I had never thought about that. I had been so wrapped up in trying to deal with the sheer gravity of my discovery...that I had neglected giving the 'Goddess Chamber' a name.

"Cave 948" wouldn't do.

I looked outside of the window, noticing that the rain clouds were underlit by the setting sun. The explosion of colors in the sky reminded me of the sunrises I used to enjoy as a child. I would get up really early and sneak out of the house, just for the experience of seeing the sun arise over the horizon. On rainy days, the whole sky would glow with a spectacular spectrum of colors. The sky looked like God's own watercolor finger painting.

The dawning of mankind's civilization was displayed in those caves. Ad reductio sensible...Civilization is nonexistent until there is a developed language or literature to record it. I already recognized that the panels in the caves were organized like an encyclopedia of sorts. The concepts in each panel were grouped in an orderly fashion: numerations, animal names, terms of emotion, designations for family members, geological features, etc. I looked out the classroom window again to see the twilight sky fading.

"I think I'm going to call it 'The Encyclopedia of Dawn', Lin. What do you think?" I asked.

"That's a beautiful, hopeful name. I was hoping you weren't going to call it the 'Chinese Rosetta Stone' or something like that," she teased in English. I made a face at her.

Lin was really such a nice Chinese woman. I was well aware that women in China were generally much more polite and cheerful than their American counterparts; in fact, they were more akin to their Japanese sisters in deportment and demeanor. Being near Lin was pleasant...I didn't feel haunted by the distrust, paranoia or self-disgust that I normally felt during a social situation with a woman. Almost all the time, I would be gripped by the all-too-familiar crushing emotional sickness, the aftermath of the sexual trauma that I had lived through. It was an instinct, in the sense that animals are instinctively disturbed by fire.

But not around Lin. There just wasn't any reason to feel all weird around her. Once more, I mentally studied the possible causes of this...how my emotional pain seemed to subside inconsonantly. Was it due to something going on inside of me, or was it the result of my environment or the people around me? I looked at the room, now half-filled with hanging papers.

_The Encyclopedia of Dawn._

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Urd had taken to the streets, wandering aimlessly in the rain without an umbrella. Soaked to the bone, she felt miserable and alone. The sea of anonymous faces deepened her depression and loneliness...it was amazing how she could be in the midst of the hustle and bustle of urban Beijing...and yet feel so empty inside.

Including the very real scale of the Multiverse, which possessed a quintillion times more sentient beings than there were atoms in the Milky Way galaxy and its nearest 14 million neighboring stellar aggregates.

_That_ awareness only served to overwhelm her with a geometric sense of isolation; there was no one to hear the winterbare ruined choir of her memories.

Urd knew that she could wander into a bar and drain every bottle of booze in the place...and that wouldn't change a thing. Urd thought about Belldandy and Skuld...how much she must have disappointed them over the millennia. She thought about Cevn, the only person in the city that knew her at all. Yet he didn't know her...and he never could know her.

Urd waxed invidious towards her younger sisters. Skuld had a future that promised her romance, even though she vociferously denied it. Urd knew the look on Sentaro's face last year. And now, Tomohisa was nurturing a preludial romantic inclination towards Skuld. Then there was Belldandy, who had the comfort of her mortal boyfriend Keiichi to keep her from feeling alone. Urd felt bittersweet as she remembered all the times she tried to get those two in bed together. They had such a wonderful life ahead of them.

"Everybody but me! Not Urd!" she said to herself angrily, her mood becoming more depressed.

"Great! Now I'm starting to sound like Skuld!" she harped with personal irritation. Urd wandered into a drinkery and ordered a bottle of jiu. Resting her elbows on the bar, she cupped her hands under her chin and closed her eyes, trying to remember the good times.

With her powers intact, she could easily move mountains. She could call down thunder and lighting that would obliterate Earth's largest cities; she was almost as adept as Thoor in mastering the Earthrealm's random atmospheric electrical energies.

"It takes a lot of calculations to force a lightning bolt to strike _just right_!" she told the barkeep, who looked at her like she was crazy. Urd knew that she could even break her seal...and then move entire planets if she wished. Her magical powers were much greater than Belldandy's, based in part on the fact that she was 25,000 years older. Urd relied almost exclusively upon her magical and arcanical skills...these were parcel to her lifestyle. But with all the power at her command, she couldn't move the most immovable object of all. The human heart.

She cursed Cevn.

"Asshole! Why couldn't he have wished for me like Keiichi wished for Belldandy? Maybe then, things would be different. Why couldn't he have wished that_ I_ find someone to love? Instead, he makes his senseless wish...and then runs away from me in my time of need," she stole with a yell. Urd felt her anger fold inward as she realized that she had created her own desolation. There was no way she could face either of her sisters after all that had been done.

"They must hate me for leaving them...they must feel that I'm so terrible...they couldn't possibly love me anymore," she thought.

She felt immobilized by the wounding of her heart. Shipwrecked in the middle of the sea of potentials. Leaving a half-empty bottle on the bar, she walked back out into the rain.

"I _deserve_ to be alone!" she said as her tears were washed into anonymity by the rain spattering her face. Urd kicked at a large puddle of muddy rainwater, watching it spray outwards onto the street.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Whoa! How could a simple ward do _that_?" Mara wondered, amazed at the holoimage on the wall. Ever since her Demon comrades in Vanagdrasil had placed a warding spell on Urd, the Eldest Norn's spirits had spiraled down into a deep malaise. Mara was pleased to see Urd suffer so much, but she was also deeply discontented...because Urd's suffering was so _accidental_.

"It would have been so much better if _I_ had been the one to cause her this much grief!" she said, focusing her regret on herself.

Mara also regretted the fact that Urd's two other sisters were not present as witnesses to Urd's current state of melancholy. It would have been much more pleasurable if Belldandy and Skuld could experience Urd's misery as direct observers. Empathy was a powerful tool for increasing the overall amount of grief inducement.

She ran a bonecomb through her long brown-blonde curly locks as she reviewed the holotape her DGO coworkers had sent her. It showed Urd walking aimlessly in a street, her clothes unkempt and her head hanging down low.

"What could drive her to feel this dejected? Wouldn't it be great if I could distill and bottle it! Misery in a Bottle, bwah haahaa!" she shouted cheerfully.

"But really...if I could learn the cause of her spiritlessnesss, then I would be able to _use_ it...to make the others feel as bad as Urd feels now!" Mara wondered aloud. She sensed that Belldandy and Keiichi had returned to their home, so she sent a Sere-Hawk on a spying mission to see what was happening at that front.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Dr. Zhao arrived promptly at 7pm accompanied by two aged professors of ancient Chinese. He introduced them to myself and Lin, who had decided to stay and observe what would happen. It seemed that she had some reservations about what I had told her about the contents of the papers, so she wanted to hang out and offer me some moral support.

"All right, we came at your request. This is Dr. Chen and this is Dr. Yao. They are BeiDa's foremost experts on all aspects of the Chinese language...they are respected throughout China as leaders in the field of linguistic sciences," he introduced as I bowed politely to them.

"Now tell me and these two good doctors what this is all about," Dr. Zhao requested. Behind his back, both of the linguistic professors suddenly made a beeline over to the proto-Chinese section of hanging papers and began to gesture and point animatedly. Dr. Zhao looked at their sudden burst of interest and knitted his brows with a keen expression.

"This...this is _incredible_!" Dr. Chen said in a loud voice.

"Yes! Here and here...and _here_!" Dr. Yao added, pointing at several sets of characters. "These characters match the earliest known Chinese, predating the Shang dynasty!"

"Definitely. They resemble the archaisms found carved into the excavated divination plastrons and scapulas. The archeologists have only found 43 known words in the 2002 digs; they're all represented here!"

"Yes...but there are _thousands_ of characters here!" Dr. Chen, barely containing his excitement. I thought this might be an appropriate interlude to explain things to Dr. Zhao...but Dr. Chen broke in and provided an explanation for me.

"Dr. Zhao, if these transcriptions...are an authenticatable set of early Chinese characters, then what we are looking at...is a find of the first import!"

Lin looked at me with an unreadable expression that suggested deep surprise or disbelief. I winked at her and smiled, and then I addressed all three professors.

"Yes, this set of papers are the transcribed record of proto-Chinese taken from a cave I explored in Dunhuang. But that is only the beginning...there are _nine sets_ of papers here, each representing an early civilization!" I explained as I compassed the room, filled with excitement as I gestured towards each set of papers.

"This set of papers were transcribed from a panel whose content is pre-Linear B, possessing attributes of Class A and B. The one next to this is an previously unknown language which relies on phonic rhyming sequences to create words. These next series of illustrations are pre-lingual, dating back 45,000 years. They were developed by Cro-Magnon man. This next set is from another lost language whose phonemic tag is Paludorian...the predecessor of Chinese and Egyptian. The next set is the early language of the Kurgans, a culture that flourished in the Urals 9000 years ago. This next panel has proto-Olmec hieroglyphic symbols which flourished in the 11th millennia BCE...and are also duplicated in pre-Anatolian Turkish. It's call Gokjash..."

As I continued, Dr. Zhao looked at me with a dubious expression...as if I had gone insane.

"Dr Zhao, there is a archeolinguistic principle, which I would term 'natura non facit saltum quin contra specula' in Latin. This phrase corresponds to the notion that the apparent discontinuity of history _cannot_ to be considered as a definite continuity; in fact, upon speculation, the opposite is true. Too many researchers expect anomalous gaps to be explained within the framework of constants...because they're unwilling to risk transcending the paradigms. Yet, this model of morphologic explanation disallows several important considerations. For example, in each linguistic lineage, a large number of local dialects come down to us as extant or readily deciphered, while the languages of major cultures with a wide geocultural extent such as Sumerian and other Turanian languages, became extinct and remain lost. Recidivistic amalgamation and diasporic diffusion do not fully account for this phenomena..." I started to explain, trying to justify the potential for lost 'pockets' of history predominated by a fundamental language. Dr. Yao looked at me with a grave countenance, while Dr. Chen was still studying the proto-Chinese section with scholarly enthusiasm.

"Yes...it is possible. And he does have a point. There is a marked similarity between what is on this set of papers and what archeolinguists have conjectured as one possible structure of pre-Linear B," Dr. Yao confirmed.

"And this! This bears a resemblance to..."

At this point, the two linguists were discussing between themselves, leaving Dr. Zhao and I out of their conversation. It was so ironic...I knew the translation of every word in the room, but it took the authoritative voice of the renowned linguistics professors to confirm to Dr. Zhao that this was a bona fide discovery. With a dawning apprehension, I realized the this process would probably repeat itself during my dissertation defense...

"Do you realize what this means? It'll take years just to translate all of this..." Dr. Yao finished.

"Uh... with all due respect. Learned professors...I _have_ translated all of this. Every figure, hieroglyph, pictogram and scratch/numeral. All of it. You've probably noticed translations noted in Chinese and English on the papers in the margins of the etchings. Further, the entire set of nine languages are organized within conceptual sets, in order to provide continuity. In other words, they were deliberately _integrated_ within comprehensible contexts."

Dr. Zhao looked at me with a funny expression, then said that he would try and find another linguist for my dissertation committee. He called to the other professors who were busy inspecting each of the nine sets of papers filled with early language. Reluctantly, they left with him.

Lin, who had been present during the whole meeting, looked at me with a curious smile.

"I have never seen...I have _never_ seen a professor from this university act so excited. Those two professors were almost ready to jump out of their Mao suits," she quipped. I laughed at her joke...it was a common catchphrase among the students when referring to the 'old guard' of elderly professors. Lin looked at me with an expression of respect.

"I'm not going to miss your dissertation defense for anything in the world, Cevn! With the exception of my classes, of course..." she said before excusing herself, leaving me alone in the lecture hall. I almost fell to my knees with relief...the two elderly savants seemed inclined to consider this discovery as genuine.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Sora loitered in front of the Castleland Shopping Center in Shibuya, looking though the gaps in the bustling crowd for Megumi. She had really missed the company of her best friend in the past few weeks. On one hand, Sora felt genuinely happy that Megumi had finally gotten together with Genji. On the other hand, she'd been hearing "Genji this, Genji that" from Megumi for the past several months.

But there was a downside as well; Megumi didn't have the same liberty as before to hang out with Sora. Sora knew that Megumi was doing the kind of thing that a girl does when she first hooks up with the guy she likes. Nevertheless, Sora was _slightly_ resentful at the fact that she and Megumi had been spending most of their time on the phone rather than hanging out. She planned to dispense an appropriate amount of teasing today to vent some of her resentment.

"Hi Sora!" Megumi called out as she waved to her friend.

"Hi Megumi!"

The two coeds hugged in the middle of the busy entrance to the mall, then walked inside. Sound and lights flashed all around them as they were caught up in the kinetic aura of the mall. Castleland was ten stories of intense shopping pleasure, six floors above and four underground.

"Hey, how's things with you and Genji?" Sora asked.

Megumi looked at her and made an exaggerated dreamy face, rolling her eyes and sighing.

"Well, things are going really great with us. I'm _so_ in love with him!"

"Hmmm, so when is the 'happy event' going to happen?" Sora teased.

"_SORA!!_" Megumi shouted in mock indignation. "What kind of girl do you think I am?"

"Well, the kind of girl that gets so wrapped up in her new boyfriend that she forgets about everything else...including her best friend!" Sora replied directly. Megumi looked at Sora and realized that she _had_ been cozying too much at home lately. She knew that she had it coming, so she offered an apology.

"Oh Sora, I'm sorry. But you know how it is..."

"I wish I did. I'm still waiting to hook my fish..." Sora said, suddenly serious. Both girls were quiet for a moment. Megumi mentally berated Aoshima for being so fickle. The boy _knew_ that Sora liked him, but he wasn't man enough to tell her either way...to tell her if he liked her or not.

Sora and Megumi had come prepared to do some mondo major shopping. After all, summer break would be ending in a couple of weeks and they both needed to shop for fall and winter outfits. Megumi envied Sora; she had the best of both worlds. Megumi had to rely on the carefully-budgeted allowance that her parents doled her every month; while Sora worked at her parent's ramen shop and made a bundle. Of course, Sora didn't have to pay any taxes, because her folks always paid her in cash. So she had plenty of yen to blow on clothes and stuff.

The next few hours were a whirlwind of shopping. Megumi had sprang for a nice long winter jacket, while Sora had bought three fall outfits and a skiing outfit. Then they hit the accessory store and bought a variety of belts, earrings and clip-ons. Finally, Sora tugged Megumi into buying a nice evening dress.

"After all, you have a boyfriend now," she argued. Armed with a variety of bagged goodies, they decided to lunch at a okonomiyaki kiosk in the food court.

Megumi had a gnawing suspicion that something was amiss today. While they were shopping, she noticed that she had caught the eyes of _too_ many men. Or was it Sora? Sora was dressed in a mini-skirt with a midriff-baring sleeveless shorttop T-shirt.

"That's pretty brave for her to be wearing," Megumi noted. They piled their shopping bags into the booth, then climbed in.

A young high school-aged waiter soon came over and gave them menus. Megumi noticed that he was gawking at her. He seemed reluctant to go away to attend his other customers.

"Hey Megumi, what's up with that kid? He was staring at you like you're some kind of idol star or something," Sora said quietly.

"He's probably just one of those poor hormone-driven high school guys," she replied with a giggle. A moment later he returned to take their orders. Megumi ordered her okonomiyaki. The waiter asked her again for her order. After the third time, Megumi scowled at him and pointed towards Sora.

"Hey, if you value your job, quit ignoring my friend here!"

"What is the matter with you? Can't you listen!? She had to repeat her order _three_ times already. And you still haven't let me tell you what I want!" Sora chewed him out. The waiter took Sora's order and hustled off, seemingly embarrassed. Megumi could only shake her head in disdain.

"Hey, any news about you and Mr. Smarmy? Any news?" she asked excitedly. Sora reacted by looked down at the table with a sad expression.

"No. I ran into him two weeks ago and invited him to picnic in the park with me so we could talk about our sophomore classes. I spent all morning cooking a special sawachi-bento for him...I really loaded it with the good stuff! Beef, braised tako, lychees and strawberries. After eating it, he started pumping me for inside information about the Motor Club. Sigh...it was obvious that he wasn't interested in much else."

Megumi felt condolent towards Sora. The girl definitely had been dealt a bad hand by genetics. She was a college sophomore with the body of a high school freshman. Most guys wouldn't notice her pixie-like face with its delicate lines and freckles. Sora was really beautiful in her own way. Like an elf or kodama. Megumi often thought that Sora was Tinkerbell in disguise. But someone like Aoshima Toshiyuki...he was attracted by brash, voluptuous women with a 'flash' sense of fashion, kinda like Genji's sister Sayoko. Sora was too down-to-earth. The tragic truth was, Sora was one of the lucky ones whose age would restrain her...she would look much younger than her years as she grew older. Megumi cursed Aoshima for being such a fool. Sora would be _so_ good for him! But then she privately thought Sora's sweet nature would probably be wasted on a guy like Aoshima Toshiyuki.

The waiter returned and set both okonomiyaki plates in front of Megumi and then asked her for her home phone number. Sora looked at him with an indignant expression while Megumi became very fidgety.

"What the hell do you think you're doing?" Sora asked the dumbfounded waiter with acridity. Megumi looked at the boy while he stared at her with rapt attention.

"Something's really funny here!" Megumi noted to herself in a low voice. There was something strangely familiar about this situation. Then she remembered the time she had gone out to eat with Belldandy. Panic swirled inside of her breast as she surveyed the restaurant; _every_ pair of male eyes was trained on her, peering over the tops of the booths.

Then she remembered what she forgot.

In her breathless anticipation of going shopping with Sora, she had missed taking this morning's pill. The one that suppressed the 'beauty spell' that Belldandy had cast upon her.

"Sora...I'll be right back...I need to go to the ladies room!" she said, frantically searching her purse as she stood up to leave. Before she could gain her feet, she bumped into someone.

"Excuse me, I have..." she apologized.

"Hi Megumi! That's a nice outfit you're wearing. I do say you look really beautiful this afternoon! Radiant, as a matter of fact!"

Megumi watched as Sora's hardened expression softened to shyness. She turned her head and saw Aoshima standing next to her, blocking her exit out of the booth seat.

"Hi Toshi..er, Aoshima!" Sora said in a cheerful voice.

"He's _here_!" Sora thought happily, "I don't believe it...we just ran into him here in Shibuya of all places!" She basked in the glow of the surprise encounter with the man of her dreams. Right here in the restaurant! It must be auspicious!

"Hi Megumi!" Aoshima responded, ignoring her completely. "Is there something different about you, or is it that your loveliness is in full bloom today?" Megumi looked at Aoshima, who was boring into her with eyes filled with appreciation and passion.

"_Hi, Aoshima!!_" Sora said in a loud voice.

"Megumi, I heard that you were going out with Genji. I won't allow such a waste! I was thinking that you might want to make a switch and go out with a guy who has good looks, a charming personality, a puissant soul...and lots of money. Namely me!"

_"HI, AOSHIMA!!"_

Megumi gestured towards Sora, trying to get Aoshima to notice her friend. She finished searching her purse, only to find that in her haste this morning, she had forgotten to pack any of the lozenges.

"Shit!" she swore at herself.

Sora gestured 'come closer' with her index finger, then leaned over the table and cupped her hand, whispering into Megumi's ear.

"Megumi, would you _stop_ whatever you're doing that's causing Toshiyuki to ignore me and pay attention to you. Remember..._I'm_ the one who's interested in him. You've already got a boyfriend. Make him stop it!"

"Sora, there's nothing I can do about it. Really!" Megumi replied, frustrated at this whole inept situation. She could tell that this encounter was really upsetting Sora. She immediately regretted her answer as she noticed Sora's face becoming redder with impending anger.

Sora Hasegawa was struck speechless by Megumi's answer.

"So, she _wants_ to do nothing about it!" she thought in a blaze of betrayal and disbelief. Her heart sank as she realized that Aoshima had been secretly harboring a desire for her best friend. She felt tears stinging her eyes. Then Aoshima finally turned his notice towards her.

"Sora...would you stop bothering Megumi!" Aoshima confronted her.

"THAT DOES IT!" Megumi said, pounding the table for emphasis as she stood up and tried to push Aoshima out of her way. Aoshima responded by wrapping his arms around her and hugging her.

"Oh, Megumi...I didn't know you felt this way..." he said dreamily.

Sora saw Megumi stand up and receive Aoshima's hug. Something went --snap-- in her soul as she stuffed a big bite of okonomiyaki in her mouth in anger.

"It's either that...or yell and scream," she thought. A second later, she felt the doughy pancake-like bite lodge in her throat.

Megumi felt an immense wave of disgust as she realized that Aoshima was holding her fast to his chest. Tightly. Awkwardly. She couldn't quite get to her feet because she was only partly standing up in the booth, so she had to lean on him to balance herself.

"Poor Sora..." she thought. "She must think I'm trying for Aoshima..."

_Acccgakk! Gyuuhh!!_

Sora shifted into panic mode as she realized that she couldn't swallow or breathe. She shuffled herself, trying to sit up and get out of the booth. The feeling of suffocation swarmed over her like steam, igniting her fears like a thousand bonfires.

Megumi looked at Sora, who was gesturing at her throat. She suddenly remembered their plan.

"She's actually doing it! Go for it girl!" she thought proudly. Months ago, they devised a scheme of seduction. Meet Aoshima at a restaurant; then at some point in the meal, Sora would fake a choking attack. Aoshima would already be plied with food, so he would be in a sensuous mood. He would save Sora, thus playing the part of the hero. Between the combination of food, heroism and Sora, he would be pliant...and then Sora could apply the damsel-in-distress act. Aoshima would be sure to take her home; then she could 'thank' him and nature would take its course.

Sora staggered, her face turning purple.

"Sora, aren't you kinda of overdoing it?" Megumi thought, both shocked and amused by Sora's 'act'.

"Time to play my part," Megumi whispered to herself.

"AOSHIMA!! Sora's choking to death! You've gotta save her! C'mon, you're the only one who can help!" she screamed in her most feminine frightened-to-death voice. She grabbed him by the elbow and tried to steer him towards Sora.

"Megumi...you can call me Toshiyuki! By the way, you said someone's choking? I don't see anyone...oh, it's just Sora. Don't bother about her. Really, you shouldn't get so upset. Let me comfort you in your time of need," he replied, completely addleheaded. Megumi couldn't do anything else but stare at him in disbelief and anger. She slapped him, trying to break the spell her enhanced beauty had over him. He was insane with affection for her.

Sora felt her hearing going tinny and her eyesight fading fuzzy. She saw Aoshima comforting Megumi and ignoring her. Spite welled up in her heart at the betrayal, mixing with the very frightening experience of being unable to get any fresh air. She collapsed to floor and rolled over on her side.

Megumi heard a "thud" and struggled with Aoshima to turn and look at her friend. Her heartpace quickened as she saw Sora gasping for breath as if some invisible force was burking her.

Megumi swiftly realized that Sora was choking _for real_.

"Oh my God...nobody's raising a hand to help!" she thought, gripped by a frenzy of concern. As luck would have it, there were only men seated in her section of the restaurant. And all of them keenly watching her...while ignoring Sora.

"Somebody help! My friend's choking to death! HELPPPP!!" Megumi screamed, bullhorn loud. A middle-aged woman sprang up from her booth on the other side of the restaurant and rushed over to where Sora was lying.

"I'm a nurse...ohmygod, she's unconscious!" She reached under Sora's arms and hoisted her up to her feet. Megumi felt an anchor sweep of fear as she saw Sora's head hanging limply...she was passed out! Megumi thanked the stars that Sora was so petite; the off-duty nurse would have no problem lifting her. Seconds later, the nurse was applying a Hiemlich Maneuver on Sora, reaching under her breastbone and squeezing...trying to free whatever was stuck in her throat. Megumi was almost ready to burst into tears for fear that her best friend might die. Aoshima stood behind her, his arms tightly wrapped around her waist. Megumi was too upset to try and push him off of her. Sora looked like a limp rag in the nurse's arms. Desperate with fear, Megumi prayed for Sora to be okay.

With a hacking gurgle, Sora coughed up a large chunk of pasty okonomiyaki, then vomited up most of her lunch. A moment later, she was gasping big tides of air. The nurse gently lowered her back down on the floor and comforted her as she came to.

Sora had thought she was going to die. Sheer fright possessed her as she felt her mind being erased into a stupor. Then, she felt her senses coming back to her. She opened her eyes and saw a blurry set of stars. All her ears could hear was a buzzing sound, like a coveful of bees. Her senses cleared a little more and she looked up to see Megumi looking at her.

Toshiyuki had his arms around Megumi's waist, comforting her while commenting how gross Sora looked after upchucking her lunch.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Genji was reading a Soseki novel when he heard the door slam.

"Megumi's not due back until this evening...it must be Skuld or Tomohisa," he thought as he returned to reading. The classical modern writers like Akutagawa, Soseki, Ogai, and Edogawa Rampo had always fascinated him. Recently, he afforded himself some free time to reread the books that he enjoyed as a kid. It was fun revisiting his old literary friends with an adult appreciation.

He could hear someone dashing down the hallway with pounding footfalls. He looked up just as the shoji door slid aside with a "whoosh". Megumi was standing there, looking deeply upset. Putting his book aside, he wordlessly looked at her as his senses swam with grave concern.

She caught her breath, then quickly slid down into a seated position next to him and collapsed into his arms. He held her, feeling her whole body shake with deep sobs. He was too surprised to say anything...he had never seen her like _this_ before.

"What can I say? She's _really_ freaked out about something!" he thought, wanting to be supportive without being overly curious. He stroked her hair and neck in a massaging, comforting motion, trying to settle her down. She was so upset that she couldn't talk.

After a few minutes, he asked Megumi in a quiet voice if there was anything he could do to help.

"No!!_ N..nothing_ can help," she wailed in jarring shouts.

"I...snff...I just _lost_ my best friend!"

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

It was a beautiful Beijing weekend. The east winds had blown the dirt and smog west, creating a rare bright blue sky. I had another meeting with Dr. Zhao two days ago to discuss my upcoming dissertation and research defense. Dr. Zhao informed me that there would be _fourteen_ scholars on the panel. He confided in me that this dissertation was a special case because of the radical discoveries I would be presenting. Observing that I was super-nervous, he sagely suggested that I take Sunday off and visit one of the local scenic spots. He explained that taking a break right now would reduce my overall stress level and help me when I actually had to defend my work. He reminded me with a chuckle that he had presented his dissertation and defended it almost fifty years ago...

I could see his point. After I presented my findings of the Encyclopedia of Dawn to him, I had basically holed myself up in my dorm room or in my section of the stacks at the Library, putting the finishing touches on my dissertation. It didn't seem like a dissertation...it was more like a textbook. Over the past several weeks, I had hired eight freelancers to type up various drafts. The finished product was over 1200 pages, including a number of computer charts and facsimiles of the etching rubbings from the Encyclopedia of Dawn walls. All I had to do was spend a small fortune to get it copied for the committee. Despite its completed state, I couldn't shake the plague of concerns for my book.

My dissertation had taken a life of its own. It had stamped itself on my life, making my will over to its devices. I breathed, ate and slept with this project. My dreams were rarefied with possible defense scenarios...then I would wake up, and before I could start to meditate, it would capture my waking consciousness.

It seemed like my whole life was taken hostage by my work.

So I headed out to the Summer Palace, the Yiheyuan, for a day of rest and reflection. The Summer Palace was an incomparable example of the largesse of the Ming and Qing Dynasties. Unlike the Forbidden City at Tiananmen, the Summer Palace was grandly beautiful. From an architectural standpoint, the Imperial Palace of the Forbidden City was designed to oppose nature and man. Its huge walls, lengthy promenade and imposing size served to intimidate human scale and manifest imperial authority. In contrast, the Summer Palace was built to complement nature; the large hill overlooking Kunming Lake was crested with ornate temples and pagodas, aesthetically harmonizing with the site plan. It was ornamental in composition.

I entered through the East Palace Gate and proceeded to ascend the stairs winding through the residential palaces. This complex of buildings had suffered significant neglect during the past 30 years that they had been 'tourist traps'. Despite the hustle and squalor, I was still able to stretch my fashionings towards the past, mentally casting the structures in the new paint and rich ornament they possessed centuries ago.

Besides, the Summer Palace bordered the timeless Kunming Lake; interconnected with a series of ascending stairways. On a clear day like today, the lake was serenely beautiful, unsullied by the wear and tear of tourism.

Then I strolled down the covered Long Gallery. Hundreds of red pillars faded into a colonnaded blur as I followed them with my eyes down the walkway. Each pair of column suspended an arcadic beam with a pastoral or natural scene painted on it. One could only stop and appreciate a few scenes at random...there was just _too_ many. I identified scenes from locales all over China: Hunan, Guilan, Shansi, etc.

Reaching the end of the gallery, I turned left to ascend the walkway to the summit of the Wanshoushan, or Longevity Hill. This afforded a dramatic vistage of Kunming Lake and the entire Summer Palace complex. The lake was placid, with only a few ripples to disturb an otherwise mirror-like reflection of the sky above.

I decided to visit the Back Lake next. The Back Lake was an artificial canal bordered with bileveled scenic walks; one could stroll at water level, or twenty feet above, at ground level. The boardwalk was lined with shops, a leftover from the earlier days of the palace. One of the emperors had constructed it as a vacation retreat for his mother. The empress dowager liked to shop, but couldn't mingle with the commoners and experience what it was like to browse a bazaar. So she had her own personal 'mall' of shops built alongside the canal, so she could do her 'shopping' while being punted down the Back Lake in a dragoon boat. In modernity, these niches had been converted to restaurants and gift shops.

Walking along the canal-side path, I was cooled by the breeze that chambertunneled through the artificial canyon. As I approached the point where the Back Lake turns towards Kunming Lake, I staired up and walked over to one of the bridges. From here, I could see where the Back Lake emptied into the Kunming Lake. Each bridge was elaborately engraved with chinoiserie, and arched in the classical Chinese semi-arch. Despite all of this beauty, natural and man-made, the thoughts of my upcoming dissertation asserted themselves, competing with my enjoyment of the scenery.

_"Oh, woeful disaster! Lady jump lake! Lady jump lake!"_

It took a moment to register that I was hearing someone yelling at the top of his lungs. Looking down in the direction of the shouting, I saw a crowd quickly milling near a portion of the lower deckwalk, gesturing into the water. I listened intently and heard yells of dismay.

"Why doesn't somebody do anything?" I wondered with disgust. Evidently, bystander apathy wasn't just a trait unique to urban America. Then I noticed the posted signs prohibiting any boating or swimming in the Back Lake.

"I can't believe this!" I muttered to myself in aversion. I looked back at the passive crowd and made a decision. Stepping on the bridge railing, I dove almost ten meters into the water.

"Nothing like good ol' civil obedience...defying the threats of sanction designed to maintain social conformity," I thought sarcastically as I frontstroked towards the crowd.

The water was sour and brackish. I surfaced and oriented myself to where the crowd was pointing...it was underneath the second bridge. I dove underwater and tried to see if anything was moving. The water was thickly greened with algae, stinging my eyes. I kept swimming underwater until I felt a slight countercurrent of water brush against my face. Going deeper, I saw clouds of bubbles floating 

towards the surface, indicating underwater motion. Swimming towards the bubbles, I could see a form struggling in the water. Reluctantly, I had to surface...my lungs were starting to burn from lack of oxygen. At least I knew where the person was.

Catching a gulp of air, I doubled up and dove straight down. The water was filled with swirling strands of hair...I couldn't tell what color it was. Her long tresses floated against me as I tried to reach out to her. She was jerking and twisting in the water. I swam next to her and she flailed against me with her arms, hitting me in the face and chest. She was moving too fast and was blindly struggling; so I decided to try and grab one of her wildly kicking legs or at least her waist. I reached around her hips and _still_ couldn't lift her. Then I noticed that she had a rope attached to one of her ankles. I dove downward, getting kicked in the head by her thrashing legs. I grabbed the rope and swam down another ten feet until I saw that it was attached to a big rock resting at the bottom of the canal.

My lungs burned for air and I kicked off the floor of the canal to the surface for a quick inhalation.

_"No swim lake, very bad! Forbidden, foreigner go jail!"_ I heard several women in the crowd warn with maternal concern.

"Don't you drown, lady...please just hang on for another moment," I thought as I dove back down to the rock. I struggled to lift the rock; it was too heavy to swim up to the surface with. My mind raced as I attempted to try and devise a lifesaving solution. I swam to the side of the canal and noticed that rocks were arranged in an underwater terrace-like setting, sloping upwards step-like toward the surface. I realized that I could drag the rock over and lift it up by successive stages: resting it on a rock shelf, then pushing it up a few feet to the next sloping crop of rocks.

"Hang in there," I mentally encouraged the woman, whose flailing motions were rapidly subsiding.

"Dammit, she's drowning!" I fearfully observed. I pulled the rock over to the side and struggled to lift it several feet onto the first rock shelf. My lungs were already bursting with pain...but I knew the every second she was underwater increased her chances of dying. I struggled and lifted the rock up another few feet.

I could see the surface looming...she would float to the surface before I did. I couldn't hold my breath anymore and I choked down a lungful of water and coughed...then lifted the rock up another few feet. I looked up and saw that she was floating on the surface. My body was going numb from exertion. I hit the surface of the canal and coughed violently, sucking in deep gasps of air. I swam over to where the crowd was and asked for a knife. Then I dove under her, cut her loose and used an underarm carry to bring her to shore.

As I dragged her to the lakeside through the water, I saw a generous waft of long platinum white hair floating on the water...and felt a dawning horror. Rolling her over, I agonized in heartfelt pain and grief. It felt like the world had just smothered me with razor-edged feathers. It was a reality that was so abhorrent as to appear surreal. This rescue attempt had deteriorated into something unspeakably horrible...and personally agonizing.

"URD!" I screamed.

"H..how could you do this?" I said desperately, angrily as I pulled her inert form up on shore, trying to shunt away any thoughts that she may already be dead.

"Don't you die on me, Urd!" I shouted. I remembered the new MiCPR which focused on rapid chest compressions and less on breathing. I felt the normal "yuck" factor...and was terrified that I would have to push on her breast bone. It wasn't called a breast bone by whim, and Urd's front certainly emphasized this with the two swells on her ribcage.

"Fuck it, I can't be thinking this shit right now!" I yelled at myself. Focus. C'mon, get your shit together and focus. I laid my ear against her chest, while resting my hand on her chin. There was no pulse, no heartbeat, no breathing...my heart froze with a glaze of fear..

"Call a doctor, you dumbasses!!" I yelled...in English like an idiot because I was so overwrought. Definitely not the polite "get help!" in the Red Cross videos. I repeated the request in Chinese and saw a couple bystanders whip out their cellphones. Almost instinctively, I tilted her head and pulled in a lungful of air, then clamped my mouth on hers and exhaled. Her airway seemed to receive breath, I noted with relief. Then I went to work on her chest, trying to get into a zone with compressions. Once compression per second, imitating the heart beat. After a minute, I mouthed her another lungful of air and checked her vitals as quick as I could. The pallor of her skin told me that she was in cyanosis. Tears came to my eyes as I tried to revive her. My whole body was tense as my mind tried to come to grips with this. I fought back my fears and continued with the CPR...to no avail.

"I'm not going to lose you, Urd...I'm not going to let you go! This is not going to happen..." I thought willfully, even as the realization dawned that she was probably already dead. Somehow, deep down I knew that this was the _real_ death...that a Goddess could die. I kept the CPR up, even though the muscles in my arms were burning with the effort of doing over 600 one-second compression. Ten minutes and the paramedic still weren't here? But there was no response, no revival of her vitals.

It was over...

"Please don't let her go like this!! Give me a miracle!" I screamed inside, I begged inside, as I mentally willed her to live. I pounded my fists on the ground in frustration, ignoring the crowd that had queued up. I had seen death before, but no one had died right next to me, virtually in my arms. No one like Urd. I cursed openly at the futility of my efforts to revive her, clenching my whole body in emotional angst. I suddenly was swamped with shame; the shame of how I had shut her out of my life. _I _was the_ real _dumbass! My stupid auto-protect selfish reaction meant nothing now. Not in this situation. If I could only turn back the clock...but Urd was the Norn of the Past, not me. I was just some messed-up consciousness in a mortal body. Urd was the pinnacle; a being so far above me, I was a nothing compared to her. She was the _real_ precious miracle of life. And it was gone! In a last attempt to resuscitate her, I tried to manifest every bit of spiritual energy I had towards the thought that Urd must live. Almost instantly, I felt a strange tingling rise up my back and down my arms. A light blue glow formed at my fingertips and seemed to seep into her still body.

As I enfreaked at the sight of this 'spark', Urd shuddered. With a violent seizure, she choked up, spasmed, and coughed out a lungful of water all over me.

"Thank you, thank you, thank you," I cried with joy in my heart. I rolled her on her side as she gasped for air, and then I helped her with a few more lungfuls of air. She was still very weak and unconscious...but I was overwhelmed with gratitude that she was alive.

A moment later, her eyes fluttered open and fixed me with a dim emerald stare. I leaned closer so I could hear anything she might say. Her eyes then turned icy with anger.

"YOU! You _asshole_! Why didn't you just let me die?" she said hoarsely. As Urd gathered strength, she started yelling at me.

"This is all your fault! Why did you have to meddle...why did you prolong my pain? Did you ever stop to consider that I _wanted_ to die? I can't continue without hope! I have the most utterly lonely existence in the universe...and you couldn't let me put an end to it!" she screamed shrilly with fiery sorrow.

"Urd...you're okay now," I told her in a calming voice, trying to settle her down. She must have been really shook up. Where the hell was the ambulance crew?

"She's raving," I thought.

Recovering quickly, Urd sat up and slapped me, then pounded me with her fists. "It's _not_ okay, you stupid mortal fool! You don't understand what you just did! You've doomed me! It's right in front of your nose, but you're too blind to see it! Idiot!! If you really understood me, you would have just let me drown in there!"

"Urd!" I shouted, but she interrupted me, yelling maniacally.

"Don't you see! I've fallen in love with someone...but I can't love him. Because he can't love me...because of the Ultimate Force. He'll never love me. It won't let him. Because of the Ultimate Force...I'm always going to be alone. Why didn't you just let me die?" I tried to absorb all of this while she kicked at me with her heels. I slid back away from her. The crowd was already gossiping about how I must be a lover that spurned her. One of the penchants for the Chinese is their gossip...and this situation was giving them a figurative shedful of fuel.

"_Shut up, all of you!_" I shouted to the queued crowd and stood up. I was dazed and confused by the fervency of Urd's rage towards me. I had just saved her life...and now she was spewing solarflare ire at me.

"Cevn, I hate you. I..I just can't bring myself to feel any other way about you! Because of you...because I'm the Goddess of the Past...I'll never feel what it's like to be loved again. You hear me...NEVER! _It's impossible for me to be in love!!_ I'm the Norn of the Past...snff...of the past! The goddamned Past! Not the Present! Not the Future! I'm the Goddess of 'what has been and cannot be returned to'!!" she screamed shrilly. Then she seemed to collapse into herself for a moment, embodying the posture of utter defeat.

"I hope you're happy, Mr. 'I've been so abused and mistreated, wah wah wah, poor me my life sucks.' You have no concept of what _real _loss is! What the _real_ pain is. Look what you've doomed me to live with. The past...snff...and the present can't mix. So I'll never have someone special in my life...snff...like Belldandy and Skuld. Please, j..just leave me alone," she said in a sad, hopeless voice. Urd looked at me...and I flinched at the blunt intensity of her expression of woe. Something seemed to snap in her, and she stood up suddenly.

"GO AWAY!" she screamed at the top of her lungs.

I couldn't handle this loathing any longer. I couldn't even handle my own thoughts, which were piling up like a roadwreck on a busy freeway. I backstepped away, as if putting distance between me and her would somehow take away the sting of her words. I had just saved her life, and then she turns on me and condemns my actions with an insane rage.

Urd reached down and found a good sized rock and heaved it at me. I turned my head just in the nick of time as it struck me on the temple so hard that it knocked me off of my feet. The crowd started murmuring again as I dizzily stood up. That impact on my head fucking hurt! Desperately looking for a place to run, I sprinted in the direction of the Marble Boat. I had to get away from her...she's a walking disaster area. She had hurt me again with an overwhelming betrayal.

"That's just like you, running away. Well then, get the hell away from me!" I heard Urd's cloying curses fade in the distance as I slowed down to a jog, my senses and emotions reeling.

I reached the Marble Boat and collapsed into one of the marble benches. Looking down at my shirt, I saw that it was streaked with spatters of blood...Urd must have gotten me really good with the rock she threw.

Two days before my dissertation and _this_ had to happen. I just didn't know what to make of her outburst. Something had unlocked the chambers of her sanity, driving her mad with rage. Mad enough to lash out at me...mad enough to try and take her own life. Without her powers, she would have been literally dead in the water if I hadn't coincidentally arrived at the same place and time.

I knew for sure that I couldn't stand her any more. Urd had been rough on me from the very start. I tried...I really tried to give her a break. I wanted to believe in her, but then she killed any chances of that when she impersonated Dr. Ogawa. I cut her out of my life like a surgeon removing a malignant tumor. Despite this, when I first saw her floating in the water, my heartstrings felt like they had been pulled taunt by a piano tuner.

_Why?_

My head was throbbing painfully where she hit me with the rock. The tourists avoided coming anywhere near where I was seated. I calmed myself down as I looked out over Kunming Lake.

"Why did you do this, Urd?" I questioned sadly. I knew that someone with that much_ rage _must be leveling with a really deep pain. Urd had all the classic symptoms of someone with deep wounds: superficial personality, forced humor, intoxication as a means of escape, hyperactivity, and deceitfulness. Yet there was so much about her that I couldn't understand.

Then in a flash of insight, I understood...

...and I felt like something had torn my heart in two. Her situation was tragic, piteous, horrid. It was wretched in hyperbole...like in a Greek drama gone badly. But it was real for her. I still was repulsed...I didn't want to believe what I was thinking.

Urd was the Goddess of the Past. Thus, her allotment of romantic love was somehow limited to that era! A chill ran down my spine as I realized that she was literally unable be in love in the here and now. My own struggles with my past issues and how they messed up my ability to relate to women...they suddenly receded to insignificance.

Urd was oppressed...not by emotional pain, but by the Ultimate Force itself. It was too terrible to imagine. I started punching the nearest stone pillar, punching punching punching until my knuckles were raw and bloody. It was so fucking unfair to her!

"How could she live with the knowledge that she would forever forth be denied a chance to fall in love again? How could anybody?" I reflected with frank astonishment. No wonder Urd was so vicarious about Belldandy and Keiichi's relationship.

I felt anger change into sympathy change into empathy. Urd was totally justified in thinking that I couldn't understand what she must feel. I never could relate to that kind of enforced isolation away from intimacy. But I knew well the shallow recess of loneliness. Once more, I realized that Urd and I had a common feeling that oppressed us both...to different degrees.

I cast a glance in the direction where she was sitting on the side of the lake, a speck in the midst of the crowd. Then I remembered all the spiritual lessons that I had ever encountered... that pain shared is pain lessened. I had been helped so often to release my grief. And in turn, I had helped so many people confront and walk through their pain. In NA, there was this thing called a Fifth Step where an addict confronts their worst nightmares. I remembered talking to another human being about my deepest fears and pain many times. I _had_ to, because the alternative was so much worse.

But Urd was a source of _my_ pain. Could I do the right thing for once...and just let it go for a moment so I could help her? I struggled with myself. Urd was a jennet that bred sympathies in my heart.

"Words are only words." "Are you going to let her get away with mistreating you?" "What about forgiveness and acceptance?" my mind argued. I recalled the ongoing lesson of my recovery: my highest good is realized when I offer myself to serve others in need. The still-suffering addict, the still-suffering student...

The still-suffering Goddess?

"Fuck suffering!" I thought angrily. I realized that I _had_ to go comfort her. What sense would it make for me to save her life, but not her soul? Her kokoro was made crystal clear today. Urd was right, I _had_ abandoned her...by running away from myself and my fears when I should have been supportive. I had let my own pain conquer me...rendering me unavailable. Even if she raged at me some more, I still had to offer comfort. Unexpectedly, I remembered like yesterday the time when I had freaked out at the compound over some argument with Urd. I ran out to the porch, watching the rain and feeling so alone in myself. Urd had come to apologize to me...and her caring presence itself warmed me. Now it was time for me to return the favor.

I swallowed my apprehension and walked down the pier and along the lakeside. As I approached, I could hear deep sobbing amidst the chatter of the onlookers. Urd was sitting on the ground, her head between her knees, hugging herself and rocking from side to side. It was piteous to behold her. She seemed to me to be a lost soul. Where the hell were the paramedics? This wasn't exactly remote rural China; they should have arrived a long time ago.

"Empathy, not sympathy," I reminded myself. I knelt down beside her, feeling her pain filling the air around me. The crowd had thinned, but a number of people remained to watch our little drama.

"My God, Urd, I didn't know...what you were going through. I..I don't know what to say. Saying that it must be agonizing to bear seems extremely idiotic. I think I understand it a little, what you said...about the Ultimate Force. Because you are who you are, all the romantic forms of love that you're ever going to have...has already occurred in the past. I can't even begin...snff...to imagine what it must feel like inside of your soul to know this." I said, struggling with tears. The empathic part of me wanted to burst with sadness, but I held it in check...I needed to be supportive. She half turned her face and glanced at me, then returned to burying her face between her knees.

"I just want you to know that I'm here with you, Urd, for whatever it's worth. It's probably worthless, but I'm here for you...you're not alone. I..I just hope you can accept what little I have to offer in caring and empathy. Because it seems like nothing..." I was going to choke if I said anything more.

Urd lifted her head and turned to face me. I watched her face bear transience with anger and fear and sadness, contorting visibly as each emotion played across. She started sobbing again, looking at me with tears falling down her delicate cheeks. Her expression changed as she looked at me with mix of gratitude and astonishment.

"Y..you came back? For me? After all that I've done to you? After what I just did?" she said, her surprise clearly betrayed by her voice. I nodded to her...and her crying increased.

"Urd, I'd like to offer you a hug and a shoulder to cry on...if you need it," I offered.

"I...don't know what to do," she said as she reached up and pulled herself towards me, resting her head on my shoulder. I tentatively hugged her, then gently wrapped my arms around her...fighting fear all the way. I couldn't believe…that _she _couldn't believe that she could reach out for help. I couldn't believe that I was trying to console her...so vulnerably.

"Please...now is not the time for all my freaky weirdness towards women to surface," I thought dreadfully. But it was coming; I could feel part of my being rapidly becoming paralyzed with strangling anxiety. I wanted to leap in the lake and get away from her so bad...

"Cevn...I'm sorry...I'm really sorry this had to happen," she apologized, sobbing on my shoulder. This was so mixed up...she was _apologizing_ to me, when just a little earlier she may have been trying to kill herself. I felt a hand clamp down on my other shoulder, gripping me tightly.

"Now what?" I thought.

_"You under arrest for go swimming in forbidden area of park!"_ a commanding voice directly announced in broken English.

_"You cannot go water...you must come with us jail."_

Urd and I both looked up to see six Red Guard policemen. No medical rescue personnel had shown up through the entire incident; yet here were the cops? I thought to myself that this _had already_ been a really insane day. Now they're going to arrest me for saving a drowning victim? I started an eloquent explanation in Mandarin, but one of the Red Guards pulled his baton out and waved it in front of my face threateningly. Another pushed his way in between Urd and myself, brusquely pushing her over on her back while two other guards pulled me roughly to my feet. I swallowed my rage as Urd climbed back to her knees and looked at me sadly. They had physically torn me from her at the point where it seemed to me that she was finally starting to feel like someone gave a damn about her.

_"You come now with us,"_ the leader said. It flashed across my mind that I could try and make a break for it...but I decided not to resist them. Three more Red Guards had just shown up. Once more, a crowd was forming as they handcuffed me and escorted me away. I wanted to scream at the policemen, but instead all I could manage was to be quietly led away.

"You _bastards_!" I heard Urd shout repeatedly as the distance swallowed her voice.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --


	23. Pt 23: Glowpath

**Part 23: Glowpath**

Skuld felt enthusiasm ripen through her as she viewed the floating image on her Holophotic Videmeotron. She had just started downloading images from the Russian satellite that was just now passing over China. More encouragement came from the webcast morning weather...the satellite photos showed no clouds over Beijing. For most of the past week, she had checked the weather for China as soon as she woke up. Conditions were uniformly rainy or cloudy, adding to the storms of her impatience

The atmosphere around the temple was stormy as well. Two days ago, Megumi had returned from shopping at the mall deeply upset about something. This had thrown the house into turmoil. Keiichi was unable to convince Megumi to let go of her hurt feelings. Belldandy felt that she herself was to blame. Skuld eventually found out that Megumi had lost her best friend, because the guy that she liked had completely mistreated her. This justified Skuld's already dim view towards almost all mortal males. They were not to be trusted! Megumi was at fault for not taking her pills in Skuld's view, but Belldandy had assumed a guilty air even though Megumi had forgiven her.

However, despite everyone's pretensions of guilt and blame, Skuld felt really uncomfortable...because it happened to Sora. She _really_ liked Sora. Sora was the first human female that she had hit it off with. The ilk of human relationships were so indecipherable to Skuld...except for her friendship with Sora. Skuld was grateful that she clicked with at least one mortal.

And now Megumi had stolen her boyfriend or something...Skuld just didn't know enough facts about these human male-female relationships. It was all too much of a bother to Skuld's analytical mind. She had a hard enough time comprehending how Belldandy could be attracted to Keiichi, even though she knew that her older sister's feelings of love were genuine.

"If only Urd was here to explain things..." Skuld said wistfully as she watched the Holophotic Videmeotron draw its map of Beijing in preparation for a pinpoint photo location. The first image pixilated on her floating video screen.

_--hhuuuunhhh!!--_

Skuld gasped and shook her head. Could it be? From the overhead perspective of the photo, she could see a large mane of platinum-blonde hair. The next three photos confirmed it, as she noticed the tan features of the arms and legs of the woman in each picture.

"I FOUND HER! I FOUND BIG SISTER URD!" she screamed for joy at the top of her lungs. An electric bellow of stimme filled her, almost forcing her to jump up and down in glee. Thin clouds of dust from the tatami mats roiled underneath her stockinged feet as she bounded happily like a wild kangaroo.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Belldandy was lying in her futon bed, relaxing herself away from the waking anxieties that accompanied the day's first realization that her sister was still missing. She had decided to sleep in her own room last night because Keiichi was emotionally exhausted from dealing with his sister and Genji. She smiled at his selfless effort to offer some comfort to Megumi in her crisis. Keiichi was really skilled at walking a fine balance in helping others: defusing stressful situations...while also sharing his contagious optimism. But he also had to emotionally support Genji, who was dangling at wit's end with the very frustrating feeling of being helpless in the face of Megumi's grief. Keiichi had a man-to-man talk with Genji until late last night...Belldandy finally turned in when she couldn't stay awake any longer waiting for him to come to bed.

She heard a pounding series of shouts, and jerked up into a seated position. Instantly alert, she climbed out her futon hastily, heaving the thin summer blanket off to the side. She put on a morning robe as she half-walked half-jogged to Skuld's room. Keiichi was already there, yawning tiredly. Skuld was joyfully skipping up and down and pointing at the floating holographic screen. Belldandy sensed that Skuld's excited mood was filled with exuberance.

"Could she have really found Urd?" Belldandy wondered hopefully.

"Look! See? There she is, I'm _positive_ that's her! I told you that I could find her! I told you! I told you!"

Belldandy felt her heart halt and flutter as she saw the image. Her mind emptied itself of all thoughts for a moment as she let her feelings surface. She heard Keiichi gasp as he realized that it was Urd. A calming wave soothed her...they had found their older sister.

"Urd, what are you doing in _China_? I've missed you soooo much, Big Sister!" she thought. She turned to look at her younger sister, who was in a jubilant trance.

"Skuld, you're simply incredible! You found her!"

Skuld's brown eyes widened as she accepted the compliment with humility, rather than conceit. Looking in Skuld's eyes, Belldandy felt the strong bond between the three sisters beginning to seem like it was whole again.

"You're maturing, little sister," Belldandy thought as she reached out and hugged her. Keiichi came over and hugged the two of them as they regarded the holoscreen.

The pictures showed Urd walking down the street with an elderly Chinese man.

Belldandy's mind raced with cherished thoughts mixed with concern. Their search was over! But now what could they do? Could she talk Keiichi into going to China with her? She began to fervently examine the possible actions she would need to take to get Urd back home.

"Belldandy, we need to go there and find her. It would be so much easier if we could just get ahold of Cevn...he's already there. But since he's not answering our calls, we'll have to travel there ourselves," Keiichi said conclusively. Belldandy was so happy that her Keiichi had already decided that he was willing to go to China if necessary.

"I wonder if she met up with him? Maybe we can find two for the price of one!" Skuld asked aloud. She was still reeling from the fact that she had located Urd. Angry as she was with her oldest sister, all she wanted to do now was give her a big hug.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

The jail was moldy and filthy. There were no beds. A hole in the floor served as a toilet. The rank cell was crowded with too many men. I could hear screaming and cursing in the tense atmosphere. The economic miracle of 21st century China obviously didn't extend to jailcell conditions. The floor was strewn with straw and rocks chipped off the wall. The walls themselves were filled with carved graffiti, mostly protests against the authorities and macho bragging.

I was too strung out on my emotions to get much sleep, my surety of fears were stretched with certainty. I watched in a detached manner as the interior of the jail grew dark, a bare light bulb illuminating the cell. I soon learned that the men locked up with me were all veteran criminals. I felt afraid that they might attempt some kind of homosexual rape on me. To offset my fear, I mentally created a taxonomy of animal types for each inmate: snake, dog, panther, weasel, gorilla, etc. My back ached with tightening stress and my head pounded in accompaniment to my heartbeat.

Feelings of hopelessness stayed my waking night. My dissertation defense was the day after tomorrow! There would be no way I could make it out of here. My knowledge of the Chinese court system ached deep grooves in my desperation, as I knew that it would be weeks before I received even an initial hearing. My academic life was in ruins and I was facing jail time with these...goons. Admittedly, I had broken the law, but none of the bystanders had been forward enough to tell the police that it was to save Urd. Fear of the police was rife, especially with the recent ferment of Tibetan independence protests and the series of natural disasters a couple years back.

Breakfast was a piece of bread and a tin cup of water. Everyone in my cell was shouting about how strong he was, that he didn't commit such-and-such crime, that he had the best drugs, that he had gotten away with the direst crime, blah blah arf arf. I felt sickened with anger when one of them bragged about raping a coed from BeiDa. I feared for my life...and ignored anyone who tried to talk to me.

Despite my downtrodden spirits, I repeatedly tried to explain to the guards that I was a student at BeiDa, that I lived in Japan, that I my transgression occurred while trying to save a woman's life. The jailers mocked me, laughing at my excuse and taunting me.

"Jailed man tell to judge, not us. You swim lake, you get six months labor camp. Hahaha, arrogant stupid yang kuei foreigner!" the jailers responded mockingly.

"_Six months labor camp_?" I asked incredulously as the other inmates added their laughter to that of the guards. Was he serious or was he messing with me?

I sat back down in the corner of the cell.

About an hour later, I heard whistles, catcalls and sexual comments filling the air. This jail was already overwhelming with heady smells and loud voices, but now what?

"Jailed man have visitor!" a guard announced in broken English. Evidently, he had forgotten that I had been talking with them in Mandarin the whole time. I tried to shut all the noise out. I heard a baton rapping on the side of the jail cell.

_"Visitor here for foreigner! Come foreigner!"_

I looked up and saw Urd...and Dr. Zhao. Urd had a smile on her face and Dr. Zhao...the stern expression he wore was the essence of intimidation. Instantly, I felt like I had been convicted and sentenced when I viewed the burning in his eyes. I felt emptied of any hope and filled to the brim with humiliation. Then the ludicracy of my situation struck me.

"She's done it again! How does she keep doing this? Of all the possible ways she could injure me..." I thought in a crimson rage.

"Urd, isn't it enough that I'm in jail because of you? But...I guess that isn't enough...you've completely ruined everything! Do you know _who_ he is?" I clenched my hands around the bars in the doorway and shouted at her, yelling shrilly as I pointed at Dr. Zhao. She looked at me with one of those unfathomable Goddess expressions, like she was watching a child throw a fit over spilled milk.

"W..why would you do this to me? He's the _chair_ of my dissertation committee, for God's sake! I'm screwed. I'm totally totally screwed!" I said, my voice heavy with anguish. I pounded my forehead on the jail bars to act out my frustration. My fellow inmates were shrieking with levity at my humiliation.

"All right, you win! You want to see me brought down low...here I am. Bringing Dr. Zhao here has finished any chances of my..." I shouted, and then slumped against the wall, the mocking laughter echoing me towards a nervous breakdown.

I was going to lose it...

I reluctantly looked up at my two visitors. Urd's expression went flat, then a trace of tears glazed her eyes right before she suddenly turned her face away from me.

"What is going on here?" I wondered at her odd reaction. The inmates were laughing and making obscene comments about her.

"She must not understand debased colloquial Chinese, otherwise she'd be livid," I guessed. I had instinctively talked to Urd in Japanese every time I encountered her here in Beijing. Instead of gloating, she had reacted to my scolding with the sadness one has when they stand falsely accused. The look of betrayal arched heavily on her expression.

"Why is she acting this way? _I'm _the one who's being betrayed here," I told myself in a fit of righteousness.

"ENOUGH!" Dr. Zhao shouted. Somehow, every buffoonish shirk in my cell stifled his loud talk.

"Here it comes," I thought with a flinch.

"Cevn, your friend woke me up at 5 am this morning to tell me that you had been taken to jail!" he announced.

"Shit!" my mind vaunted drearily.

"She obviously cares for you a lot, because she was worried sick about you. She told me the entire story of this...ridiculous incarceration. Needless to say, I was outraged that one of _my_ doctoral students had been treated this way. So I called around this morning with her help and found out that you had been brought here. You're going to released momentarily," he pronounced in his 'official' voice.

I watched as Dr. Zhao turned to the guards, his visage tight with deep-felt rue.

"My name is Dr. Zhao Juzhi, Chair of the Philosophy Dept. of Beijing University. This man who you've jailed is a teacher from Japan who was _officially_ invited by our university. And our government, I might add. He is a guest scholar acting as a representative of the Nekomi Institute of Technology, from Japan. This is the kind of stupidity that I thought had been consigned to the past misdeeds of the Cultural Revolution. But obviously not, since arresting foreign dignitary scholars seems to the rule of the day," he announced in a commanding voice. The guards were cowering by this point; any mirth the inmates felt regarding the dressing-down of the jailer crew was kept to themselves.

Dr. Zhao was a volcano of ire. The silence hung heavy in the air as he addressed me.

"I just contacted _Head Commissioner_ Zhang to arrange your immediate release. He's an old friend of mine...we knew each other as kids during the Great Leap Forward days. He informed me that he will suspend all nine officers who arrested you because they failed to properly investigate the situation." The jailers cringed as Dr. Zhao casually dropped the name of Beijing's head Police Commissioner.

"What the..." I said to myself, stupefied by this turn of events.

I looked at Urd with a guilty expression. I could see that she was deeply stung by my righteous tirade. Once more, I had misunderstood her. She had come here to help me...and I had rewarded her with accusations of trying to wreck havoc in my life. I felt confused, wanting to bury my face in my arms for shame as I sat in the now-quiet cell.

"This happens every time...a woman tries to get close to me...and I push her away. It _never_ ends...it's as if I'm allergic to any kind of caring. I'm so paranoid...that I keep suspecting that an honest act of compassion on the part of a woman is actually a manipulative attack. Isn't there another way...a way out of this retarded Cassini Division that keeps cleaving my sensed from my heart? Why do I always do the wrong thing" I framed my autumnal dismay. Dejection filled my soul as I struggled to form words around an apology.

"Urd...I'm so hopeless. I'm sorry," was all that I could get out. "What else can I say?"

"We'll talk about that later," she said tersely.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Urd watched Cevn as he walked next to her on the wide sidewalk. He seemed much more anxious than she had remembered him from before. People were milling about, enjoying the pleasant weather. She had tried to get his attention several times by gesturing or waving, but he just simply looked at her, then kept walking. Wordlessly, they strolled down the street. They had been walking for an hour without as much as a single word between them. His aloofness, preoccupation, anxiety...whatever it was, it was driving her nuts.

So she walked out ahead of him, then stopped and spun around to face him, blocking him to a standstill.

"Why don't you say anything? Or at least acknowledge me?" she challenged him. "You know, me...the Goddess who bailed you out of that smelly jail this morning?"

"I was wondering if we find a place and sit down," he suggested evasively. Yet, Urd was a little surprised at his request as they found a wooden bench by a temple and sat down. She noticed that Cevn sat down on the edge of the bench, as far away from her as he could be.

"He'd better be ready to talk now," she thought expectantly. Instead of talking, he just sat there and watched the pedestrians pass by with an unreadable expression. Well, it was readable; he had disinterest written all his face.

"Well?" Urd said, growing tired of the silent space between them. "What do you have to say for yourself? Or are you just going to sit there like a sluggard?"

"Where do I begin, Urd? I don't know why you came and got me this morning. I don't know why you're in China. I don't know why you're here with me, now. I guess you wanted me to_ say_ something instead of asking a bunch of questions...I'm sorry, but I just can't right now," he acknowledged, still eyeing the street and not her.

Urd admitted to herself that she was disappointed...she wanted to hear something solid with meaning. Like why he had returned to comfort her yesterday...

Yesterday. She didn't want to think about yesterday.

"I don't know what you mean. Still, it's good to see you, Cevn. I realized last night that there's a lot of things I really wanted to talk to someone about," she told him, recognizing that this was one of those times the Goddess had to take the initiative because the mortal was too hung up on himself. Again.

They watched the Chinese lifestream flow by...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Cevn felt so awkward. In the short time he had known Urd, they had been through a roller coaster of emotions together. He was gripped by deep roots of concern for her. _Did_ she attempt suicide? The entire episode yesterday pivoted towards that probability. He debated with himself about how he should broach the subject.

"I could just act like it never happened, but what good is that? I would just be ignoring who she is. Urd has been living with the knowledge that the Ultimate Force is preventing her from being in love with a guy...for how long? Centuries? Millennia? Yet something happened _now_ that caused her to snap. How does one talk to an immortal being about suicide? Chances are, she'll do it again...because she already tried once. She's a freaking lunatic! But I _have_ to bring it up, despite all the craziness it will cause between us," he thought, measuring his resolve.

"Urd, why do you want to die at life?" he confronted her.

Urd looked at him sharply and felt an anger boiling inside of her. Her vision narrowed as she saw reality in a reddened hue. She definitely didn't want to talk about _that_. She felt like he had gone for her narrow throat with a knife.

"You said you wanted to understand me and support me, then you go and ask me something like that!" she said spitefully, almost spitting out the words with feline anger.

"Urd...you tried to _kill_ yourself yesterday!" Cevn stated firmly.

"No, I was just trying to test and see if my Goddess powers had returned," she replied sheepishly, instantly regretting her weak attempt at deception. She was amazed at herself for spewing such a lame excuse. Even Skuld could do better than that in the excuse department!

"That's bullshit! When you were screaming and ranting, you said that you _wanted_ to die. Don't you realize that you have something that mortals have coveted throughout history? You're freaking _immortal_, Urd! You have seen and done things that I could only imagine. And yesterday you wanted to throw it away. Well, it's too bad that you have to live as the Goddess of the Past, but I feel that if you die...then the Past will die with you. And that cannot be allowed to happen."

"So what if it does?" Urd snapped back, the horns of her contempt blaring golden.

"I'm not even going to get into that. W..we're talking about _you_! You need to look in that dark, painful place inside of you, whatever that is...and bring it out in the light and deal with it instead of ignoring it," he said.

Urd felt her anger mount in the face of his determined, almost instructional tone of voice. But she also felt fear accompanying it. This was getting too close to home for her.

"What if he's right about me...about me running from my feelings? But there's nothing wrong with me! Is there?" she wondered, swirling in a shadowy confusion. Her fear increased as she felt more and more vulnerable. "What does he think I've been doing? I have felt that dark place he's talking about...it's what drove me to want to..." She couldn't finish the thought, as it would be an admission to herself that she tried to take her own life.

"What I do with my life...my existence...is my own business!" Urd replied flatly. "It's definitely not yours! Besides, you're here to apologize to me for that incident back in the jail...not to read me the riot act!"

"Wrong! Your life affects _everybody_ around you. There's is a houseful of people in Makuhari who are undoubtedly worried sick about you. Yes, I know that you have to live with a deep pain. But pain is part and parcel of life...as much as joy. Your sister Belldandy says that all the time. You've got to stop running from the unwonted chorus of offenses scything your heart. They will _not_ overwhelm you all of the time. I promise you that. I've had my share of pain in this life...and I'll be the first to admit that it still governs me to my own debt. But I haven't given up on the hope that it will lessen or go away."

"That's where you're off the beam, Cevn. I _have_ given up hope!" Urd said defiantly. She folded her arms across her chest; her gesture vividly indicating that she was emotionally walled off from him.

"Urd, if you've given up hope, then how is it that you feel love towards someone? You admitted yesterday that there was someone special in your life! How can it be that the Ultimate Force prevents you from having someone to love...but permits _you_ feelings of wanting to give love?"

Urd was stunned into silence. She had tormented herself over that question for millennia...to no effect. Now, this mere mortal was trying to lecture her about it. As if he knew anything about anything.

"As long as you feel love...there is hope inside of you," Cevn said, as if citing a fact of life. "You, above all the creatures in this universe, should know that the only forever against time...is love. This prohibition levied on you by the Ultimate Force...it isn't happening _to_ you. It's happening _for_ you!" he said with conviction. Urd looked at him as she felt bittersweet emotions conflicting inside of her.

"Forever..." she said reflectively.

Urd thought about how this young human mortal could reach into her and touch her pain, then transform it into something positive. She wanted to believe him...but she couldn't. She felt her anger cool as she decided to tune him out.

"Forever is a long time to be alone...which is something you can't possibly understand, kiddo. I don't want to talk to you anymore," Urd said as she started to get up to leave. Unexpectedly, Cevn reached out and grabbed her wrist. She raised her hand instinctively to slap him...

"Urd, if you leave, you're only running again!" he accused. Urd sat back down on the bench to defy his accusation. He wasn't going to get away with this!

"Okay. I'm not going to run, at least from a mere mortal like you, Cevn. I'm gonna sit here and tell you everything you want to know, so you'll see for yourself how full of shit you are. You think you can stand toe-to-toe with me?" she confronted him resentfully. If he wants to play, she'd make sure he'll get played. Idiot.

"Don't you start with that 'mere mortal' stuff! This 'mere mortal' saved your life yesterday! I know that whatever's coiled inside of you...is really painful, Urd. But you gotta let it out. Don't let it roll over you!" Urd felt a seething black cloud-like form roil up to her consciousness, and then envelop it with abject despair. It shuddered her with surprise, as if she had been swept away by a sudden flow of lava. She had heard this all before, this encouragement to get past her fears. But somehow it was different this time, because she could really feel the loneliness. She wanted to scream at the wide open universe...

"I...it hurts" she gasped. Cevn looked at her in shock...it was as if an invisible fist had seized her, intent on squeezing out her hope and replacing it with pain. He had no idea that she was so enwrapped in her emotional darkness. It was right at the surface.

"What if she loses it?" the clinical part of his mind observed, noting the telltales of a bioenergetic catharsis. But this was Urd, not some client at a drug rehab. Urd was as close to an omniscient being as he would ever experience.

"What the hell can I do to help her through _this_?" he wondered, realizing that, despite all words to the contrary, he _was_ a mere mortal. A simple idea formed in his mind...the only thing he could do was try to avoid letting Urd feel that she was alone with her grief.

"Urd...trust me. I know it's hard to trust me, with all the mishmash that has gone on between us. But I want you to grab my hand and don't let go until it passes. Just _be_ the pain, just this once," Cevn said slowly.

"Y..you're insane!" she weakly remonstrated. But then, for the briefest of moments, Urd felt a flimsy impulse to trust this mortal. For some reason, she'd been raging at him ever since he'd come to Japan; he was only one she could really let herself go off on. Skuld would run off and hide. Belldandy would look at her and offer an inane wisdom teaching. Keiichi and the other mortals weren't even up to being a target for her candor, they seemed to be pushed away whenever she really let it all out. A flash of insight buzzed her: maybe the reason why she always got intensely emotional around him...was because it was safe to do so. Could it be him? Beyond the fact that he was an idiot, he somehow pulled feelings out of her without even trying. Or is it me? She closed her eyes...and then she whirlpooled into the mouth of her personal nightmare garuda-dragons...and was swallowed whole.

"Hurts...so lonely," she said in a shaky girlish whisper, exposing her inner torment. Urd was shaking like a leaf as the familiar melancholy gripped her. She felt herself being consumed by her pain. She was frightened of it: frightened that it would never leave her, once she fully experienced it. The last barrier of resistance fell and she stood with a naked soul, to face her greatest loss. She felt fragmented, as if her feelings were being torn away in different directions.

"Thousands of years...alone...Belldandy has one...I can't...never feel the love of a man...all alone...sysop because I didn't want to be around anyone...Skuld needs love...how can I love her...so lonely...no one to share myself with...sisters understand but _don't_ understand...I've felt so hopeless for so long I forgot what it's like...Troubadour in the past...Cherry Blossom Spirit in the past...love all gone...nothing now inside of me...I can't handle it...it hurts too much...it's suffocating me...empty Past empty Past empty empty EMPTY!" she voiced the unjust stains upon her heart.

"Urd, that emptiness is _not_ you. It's only a _part_ of you!"

"I DON'T WANT TO BE EMPTY! I DON'T WANT TO BE ALONE ANYMORE!" she cried in a wailing voice. Cevn heard the tortured agony in her voice and fought back his own tears as Urd burst into wretched sobbing. It was if his own pain was being wrenched from him as he watched her lose herself completely in it. And struggle to return.

Minutes passed as Urd physically shook from the naked intensity of her feelings, her face taunt with the ebb and flow of the sense of loss as it assailing her. Cevn squeezed her hand.

"Urd, you're _not_ alone! You are so much more than your pain...you're a Goddess in every sense of the word. You have boundless opportunities; they encompass you with their riches. You have a life song you can sing to the farthest reaches of reality..."

Urd couldn't believe what had just happened. Her mind was regaining itself again, as if it was emerging from a storm cloud. Her whole body was shuddering...but deep inside she felt an unanticipated sense of tranquility, feelings that seemed so contrary to what she had just experienced. She was no longer being driven by her own foreboding sense of doom. Her recent profound melancholy had somehow been lifted away from her.

"What did you just do to me?" she asked, frightened by the fact that she was emotionally raw.

"I was only here with you...you were the one who broke through your pain and loneliness. Two people together can create something that is greater than both of them...something that can allow one of them to break free. No, it wasn't that you broke free...that's not what just happened. Urd, you _drove_ it away. You banished that intolerable suffering, you _made_ that pain leave," Cevn said, unable to think of any other explanation. If Urd felt like something 'had been done' to her, it would be difficult for her to realize that her chrysalis had been brought about by her own courage. She needed to be encouraged to accept this as a genuine emotional breakthrough, brought about through her own efforts. Because this was the truth; she had wrestled through her limitations and fears and emerged resilient.

Urd shook her head in disbelief. She felt like the suffocating fog that had been hanging over her was gone. It felt like she was gradually decompressing. She listened to birdsong tempoing against the stride of traffic noise. Silent moments passed as she regained her sense of jeunesse. She sensed that something was amiss...her hand was empty. Cevn, who had been so warm and supportive a little while ago, was withdrawing into himself. Cevn started to let go of her hand and she quickly grabbed it back.

"Don't let go!"

Cevn felt the familiar fear coming back. He was all right while Urd was caught up in her emotional overflow, safe because in a sense, he was an observer, a helper. But now that things had calmed down, he realized that he was sitting next to her...so close. _Too_ close. All the voices in his head told him to run, because he felt that it was just too wrong for him to be sitting next to a beautiful woman like Urd. He could no longer check his fears away.

"He's caving in to that fear he has," she noticed as she read his expression of timidity. Or was it emotional withdrawal?

"In the water...why didn't you let go of me?" she asked, wondering how he could be so strong one moment...and so sheepish the next.

"I..I don't know. You tried to kill yourself...I wasn't going to just sit around and wait for you to die. Not then, and not now," he said, looking away from her. Urd gathered herself, a galleon afloat a storm-frothed ocean. She didn't want him to 'go away' to that place he recoiled to when he was afraid of her. Not after what he had just done. She needed him, level-headed instead of crazy with anxiety. The worst fear was that the intense pain she had encountered would revisit her, and she'd have to face it alone.

"Look, Mister Mortal Pseudo-psychologist! I don't want to hurt myself, or throw my life away in a lake. I _don't_ feel like that anymore, so why don't you give it a rest! I feel alive, and I want to live..." Urd countered resentfully. This was getting irritating.

"It's not over yet...when you were drowning yesterday, something broke inside of me...you have no idea what I was feeling...I felt..."

"Ehhh??" Urd exclaimed, the confrontation she had readied suddenly frozen in her throat. _This _admission sounded more than simply interesting to the Norn of the Past. Cevn's voice somehow was different...

She leaned forward, inches from getting in Cevn's face, sensing that something _major_ was going to force its way out of him. Maybe, just maybe, she could widen the crack in his defensiveness enough to help release it.

"What _did_ you feel? Tell me!" she demanded. Cevn looked at her with an alarmed expression. All of a sudden, he realized that he was way out of his league. Urd had taken his intercession and turned it right back on him.

"This is what I get for dealing with a suicidal Goddess who has just experienced a full-on emotional explosion!" he reproached himself , feeling panicked. He reflected inside of himself, recreating the moment when he knew it was Urd that was dying in the water. He remembered how enthusiastic Urd had been when she was teaching him the God's portion of the Enigma Book. Then he recalled how Urd had worked so hard to restore his eyesight. Urd, underneath all of her character defects, possessed a very loving nature. His awareness of _that_ was what hurt the most when she was dying...knowing that her loving presence would be extinguished. And that it would affect him very personally.

Cevn turned his focus to his own feelings. "Something about her makes me felt very comfortable and threatened at the same time. Urd is totally beautiful...she is the most beautiful woman I have ever seen. I wouldn't be a hetero male if I wasn't physically attracted to her. But she's so fragile. God, I have a dissertation defense tomorrow and here I am trying to sort through my feelings. About life. About her. Why can't it just be simple for once? I really care about her...I must, because here I am talking with her despite everything she's done. But what _do_ I feel? I don't have a clue...all I know is that she's grabbed hold of the part of my heart that is hidden from me...no one has ever done this before."

Urd watched as Cevn seemed to be fighting an internal struggle. After a few moments, he hung his head low and stared at the ground despondently.

"Urd, I shouldn't be thinking this...I'm sorry...I know that it's not your fault. I don't want you to think badly of yourself. I'm sorry...I'm just so disgusting...it's only going to be hopeless. _I'm_ hopeless. I can't tell you what masters my heart, because I don't know what to feel. But I know what I feel. And I shouldn't feel it. I don't deserve to feel it...it was torn away from me. Just forget about me, forget you ever met me. I'm sorry..."

"Dammit, Cevn! You told me not to hide from my feelings, but now you're evading yours. Just say it! None of this 'I'm sorry' crap, none of this indecisiveness! You _can_ do it...and you_ will_ do it!," she challenged. She grabbed him by the shoulder and shook him vigorously, as she would when rousing Skuld from a deep slumber.

"You stood up to the Almighty when Skuld got her license suspended. So I know that you can stand up one more time and _face_ whatever's inside of you...and feel your true feelings.

"_What is your --_kokoro--_?_" she asked in a demanding voice.

Cevn felt everything wrap him up in fear and self-loathing. Urd wasn't there, Beijing wasn't there, his dissertation wasn't there. He stared at the cracks of the sidewalk and felt the familiar intense distress fill his heart once more. He closed his eyes and gritted his teeth as it all flashed by...the pain of his life structuring itself around his all his potential futures, blockading them. When he heard Urd ask about his kokoro, he wanted to disappear into an oasis of dissemblage.

Out of the viscous buckling of his ego, a voice inside of Cevn shouted "_you're not me!_" at his pain. His _own_ inner voice, not the voice that veiled him in gauzelike strands of self-reproach. It grew stronger, confronting all the trauma of his life, challenging his fears and depression. He realized that, for the first time in his life, he could somehow talk back to the pain. It was just a whisper…but it was a whispered challenge.

_"I'm..not..me,"_ he rasped in a thin, shaky voice.

Urd tilted her head, bewildered by what he had just said. This was confusing as hell! 'I'm not me,' he says. How could he not be himself? He'd have to be a moron, or stupid-faced loaded. But he doesn't get loaded, and he seems intelligent despite his bursts of idiotic behavior. How could he think this way about himself? Unless he's lost his mind, or lost himself.

"Unless..he..lost..himself?" she thought.

"Oh my God!" she gasped...and then suddenly she realized exactly what had happened, why he acted the way he did around her. He was like a piece of origami paper that had been folded into itself...but the resulting shape resembled nothing. Crumpled. This was what she had been searching after when she impersonated Dr. Ogawa; but she had no idea it was this much of a maiming flaw. It was breaking her heart to even consider it, but there it was.

"What are you saying?" she asked, trying to sound calm and conceal her insight.

"I'm not me...this sense of trauma, of failure, of self-disgust...isn't the real me! _This_ is me...this inner voice of hope! _This_ feeling is me...not all of the pain I have been carrying for all these years! There's a lot of pain, but it doesn't always have to define who I am. It almost feels like I'm somehow escaping out of its reach. Just like you did a little while ago," he explained, clenching his hands into tight fists to try and relieve his shaking.

"Urd...ever since I first met you, you somehow touched a special part of me...but, despite all we have gone through...God, I d..don't know how to say this. Okay. I want you to know this. If I could take away that Norn of the Past condition, I would in a heartbeat. But I can't. But I also think there has to be a way I can help you to somehow thwart the Ultimate Force. So that you can be with this God, or Earth Spirit, or whoever it is that you said you feel love towards. All I can promise is that I'll do my best to make it happen for you. You don't deserve to be alone forever, Urd. You deserve to have that love inside of you accepted...and reflected back to you a hundredfold. You _are_ lovable, Urd...everyone is...and I think that this person that's in your heart will somehow discover that truth. Not in the Past, but in the Now, where it _can_ happen for you," he said, stealing a quick shamefaced glance at her.

His glance made Urd suspicious...but she sensed no signs of threat, harmful intent or deceit. Only caring...only kindness...only genuineness.

"If you only knew what _is_ in my heart, maybe you could tell me," she thought sadly. A thousand times someone had been in her heart, all her life. But it was a haze, she didn't know who it was. She'd been searching, but she had given up that search long ago. Yet, it pained her to witness how hard he had to struggle just to reach his heart. He shuddered, and Urd realized that Cevn was silently grieving. Despite his own personal agonies...he still wanted to help her! She couldn't believe he could be so borderline ridiculous in his caring, and yet she couldn't believe how it was touching her very deeply.

"Urd...this is so fucked up that I'm even thinking it, he continued. "I'm sorry that I'm even considering this…I didn't even realize it until everything that happened yesterday, and now I feel so selfish..." he stammered.

"What could be so bad that he feels that much guilt?" Urd wondered, watching him seem to draw into himself, dipping his head.

"It's okay, just try to say it," was all she could offer. She'd been playing therapist with him before, but now he was really pouring every bit of his heart out to her.

"But..sometimes deep inside of me, I wish...I only wish that somehow _I_ was that man in your heart. I wish that it was _me_...God, I wish it was me...because I...snff...feel that I think I can learn to love you...the way you deserve. The way that love is supposed to be, the kind of..snff..love that frees souls to be companions, to be themselves," he stuttered out. He paused for a moment, then finished.

"_That's_ my kokoro," he said in an almost inaudible voice.

Cevn quieted himself, mentally preparing for the forceful rejection that he knew was coming. In matters of love, his kokoro could never be more than utterly worthless. Yet, he had admitted his secret fearwish...he had become totally vulnerable. To the most beautiful crazy Goddess on the planet.

"A blow to the head wouldn't be unexpected at this point," he told himself.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Urd felt like she had been struck by one of her own thunderbolts. Her mind filled with incredulity...but her heart was filled to the bursting point.

The Cherry Tree Spirit and Troubadour had been the loves of her youth, of her minority. But once she reached her 180th millennium, the Almighty had unexpectedly summoned her...and with a heavy spirit, He gravely informed her that her role as Norn of the Past meant that she could _never_ again experience the love of a man in the Present. She had been shattered by this disclosure...and immediately threw herself at any young God, just to disprove it. Not a single member of the opposite sex reciprocated her attentions with any degree of affection or love. After many millennia of repeated failures, she returned to Kami-sama and _begged_ Him to lift the 'curse' that prevented her from being in love with a fellow God. The Almighty patiently explained to her that there were aspects of the Ultimate Force that even He could not alter. She could evoke desire, yearning, and friendship in the hearts of Gods and mortals...but never could she evoke romantic Love. The only ones that could truly love her were her parents, her sisters, and her Lord. Kami-sama in His infinite compassion and mercy helped Urd to reluctantly accept her lot as best she could, for as Norn of the Past, she had taken on the most onerous of burdens.

Faced with this barrier to _true_ romantic affection, Urd learned that the only 'affection' that she could warm up in the breasts of her fellow male Gods was desire twinned with lust. So she chose to make the best of her dilemma. By becoming a virago...very sexy, very naughty...Urd found that she could briefly catch male eyes with her own. At least this way, she could be the object of _some_ type of male interest other than friendship.

At best, her ever-so-limited experiences of what it was like to be noticed by a man...were nothing more than pale shadows of the fondness her heart earnestly yearned for.

The self-proclaimed Goddess of Love...could never be loved!

Confronted with the fact that the prohibition against being loved, of being half of a _couple_, was permanent in its merciless reality, Urd's long mournful surrender to bitterness became a life within her life. She had lived with her loss for so long, burying and reburying her sorrow in the struggles of her heart...that it had finally flushed her of all willingness to endure the pain. That was why she wanted to die.

And now _this_!

"That's..._impossible_! The Ultimate Force doesn't allow it! Anyone that I feel romantic inclinations towards..._cannot_ love me back! Cannot feel attracted to me...cannot feel lovekindness for me. Ever since I reached my Goddess adulthood, that's the way its been! There's _no way_ that this can be happening! But...he said...but he said it," she thought with awe.

Then she felt a rapid beating in her breast.

"My Lord...that's my _heart_...my Lord, he's touched my heart!" she said to herself in rapt shock. The power of her emotions was daunting...they were so intense. She was amped up in a way that she had never been before.

Then it hit her with a loud "kachin!"

"He said that he _loves_ me. Does that mean that I love him?" she wondered. She felt a euphoria-like feeling warming her as the cup of happiness inside of her overflowed with joy.

"Despite the Ultimate Force, despite his own life's pains, despite the eons of loneliness in my own life, despite it all...he just offered himself to me," she thought. A further realization gripped her as Urd realized that Cevn had _saved her life_ yesterday. She had taken his rescue for granted. By denying her suicidal impulses to herself, she necessarily denied his loopycrazy efforts to save her life. She had lived so long without the slightest notion of what it would be like to die...how could she pay heed to a near-death experience? She felt so ashamed.

"He risked his life to save mine and then I treated him like dirt," Urd realized with a flush of discomfort.

"He saved my life...he saved my love...he even thinks he saved himself to give me love," she marveled, speaking in a silent voice only she could hear. Urd had known all along in the past three months that her feelings seemed different around Cevn; to the point of being weird and reckless. But she never expected that _this_ could happen. Her whole being simply reasoned that this was just one more time that love wasn't going to find a way to her heart...no matter what _she_ felt!

"I'm so sick of crying, of feeling so hopeless inside..." he lamented in a bitter voice poignant with despondency.

Urd heard him say this, and a long-dormant part of her came to life. She hadn't been comforted by a man...she hadn't comforted a man in so long. The closest she had come to being a source of comfort was when Keiichi thought that Belldandy was going to have to return to Yggdrasil. The infamous Cherry Tree incident...and all she could do was reassure Keiichi that Bell wouldn't leave him because of some chance encounter he had with her when he was in grade school. Both wizened and deprived by the millennia, Urd looked at Cevn anew, and realized she wanted to do more than just comfort him.

Yet...within his distress, somehow Cevn was comforting _her_, Urd sensed. A silly, stupid, simple mortal with a phobia about women...a man who had been chanced into her life because Belldandy was indisposed to grant his wish request...and now he was turning her world upside down! And if the feelings he claimed were contained in his heart were true, then he had somehow pierced the impossible Ultimate Force...

It just wasn't possible that he could love her. In answer to her incredulity, she heard Belldandy's voice in the back stretches of her mind, as clear as her sister's eyes were the blue of the sky.

_"Follow your heart, my sister..." _

...and Urd almost fainted from shock as it dawned on her that _he_ was that misty figure in her heart.

She _had_ to tell him. Because if she could tell him, if she could somehow get the words out, then this whole experience wasn't just some crazy daydream she was having. If he could really hear her...then she would know for certain that the UF prohibition...was gone. That a miracle had happened, one that she had been wishing towards for her entire adult life.

_"Follow your heart, my sister..."  
_

This time it was Skuld's voice in her mind. Her dearest little sister, the one she had fought with, yelled at, teased and embarrassed. The little girl who somehow knew of...and was part of...the Future. She had even told Urd to listen to her heart. Hundreds of times...

"I don't know when it started," she started, fighting back fears and tears. "But I eventually realized that I truly, _truly_ felt a change within me...towards you. It's kinda funny and sad. Sad, because my feelings seem to always trace a trap around my heart...and funny, because I would have never imagined _this_ would have happened when I brought you to Japan. In your own weird and wonderful way, you've allowed me to love you, Cevn...even though I could never tell anyone my suspicions. Not even myself, most of the time. Until now."

She watched him spasm with inexpectation.

"I was afraid to admit what was going on inside of me, because I knew it would just be a futile folly on my part. That I could even feel it...was an impossibility that I had lived with for thousands of your life-spans. So I dismissed it as only being in my mind. You know me, the crazy one. The crazy Goddess. Funny, I really thought I _was_ going crazy. Love is supposed to awaken one to hope, not the other way around. But you...you awaken hope within me, Cevn. And...unless this is some cosmic prank the UF is playing against me, I feel myself _awakened _around you. I don't even care if it is some kinda cosmic joke, b..because my feelings towards you are...feelings of love. If they weren't...I wouldn't be so afraid of them right at the moment. So, I guess...no, I _know_ this means that...I've been telling myself that I'm in love with you...and not even knowing it. Until now."

"And that's _my_ kokoro," Urd admitted. She hoped that her frankness would touch him as far down in his soul as possible...without scaring him to death. More than likely, he was probably shocked into paralysis. _She_ was almost shocked into paralysis, replaying his heart-stopping confession in her mind.

For that's what it was. All the drama and emotionality aside, he had basically confessed his love for her. She felt a surge of anger, a resentment towards everything that had wronged them both. Had wronged him to the point where he had...lost...the deepmost part himself. The part of him that he needed to give, so he could feel whole. Urd sensed her whole being wanting to reach out to Cevn and put an end to his loneliness for good. Forever. Somehow, she felt that reality had given her the strength to do that. She looked at him; unable to move a muscle, he had been so heart-struck by what she had just said. Wordlessly vulnerable, she reached out and pulled him to her, holding his head against her breast and soothing his hair.

"It's okay..._you're_ not alone either, Cevn. I know what I feel, honey," she said softly, then giggled to herself as she remembered how much he hated being called "honey". He was probably too distraught to even notice. She felt him shudder; his whole body quaking against her embrace. Fighting with himself, tremoring his loneliness into her. He gradually relaxed and with a sigh leaned into her hug, sobbing. Urd felt his arms reach around her back as he hugged himself to her even more tightly...and realized that the flowering of her heart...had been wordlessly accepted.

She smiled mellowly as her tears fell against his hair.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Cevn felt totally empty...totally emptied out.

"I just told Urd the feeling that was at the innermost core of my being. She's a beautiful Goddess and I'm only a mortal. I have so many defects...too much wormwood in my cup. It'll never happen...but at least I told her my_ true_ feelings. Feelings buried so deep that even I didn't fully sense that they were there," he bitterly admitted, reckoning that his situation was hopeless.

Then Urd started to answer him...and he felt like he was caught in a blast-wind when she said that she loved him.

"I can't accept what she said. She just said...that she feels love...towards me?" he thought, hoisted by his disbelief. But Urd's words seemed to touch him on a heart level, challenging everything he knew about himself. About her. About love. As he replayed her words over and over in his mind, his heart gradually felt fired with a swanpool of feelings...with relief, with gratitude, with joy. It was surreal and clear at the same time. Like waking up from a long nightmare.

And then he felt a pair of arms reach around his shoulders and pull him forward. Fragrant platinum-blonde tresses of hair fell softly on his cheek as his head was gently rested against a soft bosom. He felt his whole body start shaking, as all the fear and hopelessness spasmed him harshly, not wanting him to feel, not wanting him to beleive. He gripped his heart tight until the storms of disbelief and pain passed. Exhausted, he collapsed against her and closed his eyes, the tears flowing freely as Urd gently rocked him, stroking his long hair with her fingers, letting him melt into her.

Cevn felt like he was abruptly jolted into a dream world. Urd had done the thing that he least expected. It was too unreal...too anomalous. Too much like a dream, the kind of dream that keeps coming back during waking hours. She spoke to him, calmly and confidently assuring him that this was her dream too. Instead of panicking at the close physical contact with a woman, he squeezed himself against Urd so closely that he could hear her heartbeat. He felt Urd shudder in his arms and knew that she was crying too.

"I can't believe it this is happening. That someone in the whole of creation _wants_ me! And of all the beings in existence, of all the women on this planet, it's _Urd_!" Incredulous, Cevn lifted his head up...and saw that she was just a breath away from his face. He thought of the sunburst of gratitude she had just given him, and realized that for her, he had somehow become a dreamline to her heart. His heart's ambition was clear to him; he had told Urd that he would devote himself to freeing her from the lonesome millennia she had endured. Straightening himself up and gulping his fear down, Cevn pulled her tight against him and hugged her with as much affection as he could convey. Urd looked at him with a shocked expression, and then smiled wanly and rested her head against his shoulder. A few minutes passed and then she looked up at him with an enchanting expression. Her eyes were emerald-turquoise with hints of brown and blue...they were absolutely beautiful...and they were smiling with unabashed joy. He felt like he was swimming in them.

"Urd...I know now why I was brought into your life. To love you. That is why it was you who received my request for a wish...instead of just any Goddess from the Relief Office. That is why I am here with you now. I promise you my heart...it's yours from now on!" he said, mounting his increasing confidence with a smile. This Goddess had become a harbor for a lifetime of prayered whisperings. A harbor...and a profound answer to them.

Urd looked at him, touched by his promise...and then was stunned at what it implied. He had _heard_ her! He had truly heard what she had offered up out of the deepest part of her heart, and had reflected it back to her. Without a doubt, her feelings had touched Cevn's soul. These emotions, these intensities that she was feeling...it was all _real_! As in "_the Ultimate Force can kiss my ass, because I am in love_" real. As in _"this changes everything"_ real. As in _"my sisters are going to be so happy for me"_ real. She thought of Belldandy and Skuld...which brought another heave of sobbing to pass through her. And Cevn _still_ held her, letting her cry against his shoulder, letting her pour her feelings into him. Just like Keiichi did with Bell whenever her sister needed him.

"He's mine, he's all mine!" she thought with glee, realizing that Cevn was going to be to her like Keiichi was to Belldandy. Her elation made her feel giddy...and silly.

After the embrace, the two of them sat wordlessly on the park bench, bedazzled by their shared discovery of their mutual endearment. No words could frame the sparkling of their hearts. Finally, Urd broke the silence.

"My sisters are going to_ shit_ when they find out about this! They'll totally freak out!" she remarked, then started giggling. Cevn joined in, and a moment later they were boisterously laughing, startling everyone that walked past them. They laughed maniacally until they were both almost hoarse.

"This is too far-fetched to be reality...but it _is_ real!" Urd thought privately as her giggling subsided. "You're going to have watch out for Skuld...she may not take kindly to the idea of _both_ her sisters being involved with mortal men," she cautioned him.

"Yeah, she's probably going to bugged by this." It was lame, but it was a joke. Urd offered him the courtesy of a token snicker. Cevn looked at her with a solemn expression.

"Urd, I was planning to deliver my dissertation, and then just disappear in the Gobi Desert. I wasn't planning to go back home," he admitted...then realized that he just called Makuhari "home" for the first time since he arrived in China.

"I left because of you," they both said at the same time. They looked at each other in surprise, and then Urd giggled again...they were thinking in synch already. She pointed at him.

"You first..."

"OK. After I found out that you were impersonating Dr. Ogawa, I felt that I had been victimized. I've been strong for myself over the years of my recovery, so much so that I was confident that I wouldn't ever be victimized again. But when it happened, I completely lost my senses. I couldn't defend myself from myself, if you know what I mean. I assumed that everybody would find out all those deep dark secrets that I had disclosed to you...then they would jointly reject me. Then I would once more wind up hopeless and alone. So I decided to cut my losses and go to China early...that way I could say that it was my choice to be alone...instead of being driven out of everyone's lives..." Urd interrupted him and grasped him on the shoulders.

"Cevn, I want you to know that I am _really_ sorry that you had to experience that. If you and I are to start being an _us_, then you're going to need to forgive me. I can sense in your heart that you haven't yet."

"Yes, that's true...but I've come a long way in accepting your little mistakes...and your big ones," he noted. Urd frowned at him with a mock-angry look.

"Anyway, I came here with the idea that I had no life to go back to in Japan, hence I was going to the Gobi to discover myself. Or maybe just disappear forever. So that's pretty much my story," he finished.

"Your turn..."

Urd sighed, realizing that she wasn't the only one with suicide on their mind. She'd have to _really_ talk to him about that. But not now.

"This is going to be really hard for me to talk about. I impersonated Dr. Ogawa because I cared about you. I couldn't stand it, seeing that how you were imprisoned by your past. I am very much in tune with the Past, y'know. I knew you were lonely and I wanted to help. At first I did it out of sheer curiosity. You know me...wanting to 'fix' everybody around me. Initially, I just wanted to find out why you were so afraid of women...so afraid of me. And other things, like how you knew I had a Second Class License. I had never seen any man react to me the way you did on the day I brought you to Japan. But somewhere along the way, I stopped seeing you as a challenge and started thinking of you as someone I cared about. That I might be falling in love with you...the _real_ you. I don't know how to say this other than just saying it: all I've had to go on is fantasies. I could always fantasize about being in love and being loved back.

"I think I understand," Cevn ventured. Urd was bemused by his cute effort to try and understand her, even though his expression betrayed his confusion.

"But the feeling was different with you. So I had to keep the charade up, I had to find out if my feelings were just fantasies, or they were honest. Something I couldn't do back at the temple. The more you opened up to me, the more I wanted to be there for you. I think that's what clued me in that I was truly feeling you here in my heart. Then you found out about my disguise...and you blew out of there, blew right past me. There I was standing in that hallway, knowing that I would never see you again. That tore me apart. I knew that I had blown any chance of ever being with you, or even being around you. So I felt that there was nothing left for me in Makuhari. I was mad at you, at myself...and I felt some _real_ pain. The lovelorn kind. All the hurt that centered on being Norn of the Past, being unable to love in the Present, it all got torn open again. I knew that I couldn't go home...I couldn't stay there knowing that my actions drove you away. And I knew that they would find out eventually. So I got really drunk and decided to go to Switzerland...and then I found myself here instead."

"Switzerland? Serves you right for getting drunk," Cevn teased. Urd didn't quite know how to take that remark. Cevn was so weird with sake. She already felt a tinge of bitterness as the reality of their relationship made itself known.

"This thing between us is going to need some work if it is going to succeed. I need booze as a powerup source, regardless of how he feels about it," she thought with a flash of worry.

"Eventually, we're going to have to hash that aspect of our lives out. And some other things," she said in a determined voice. "But not today."

"Urd...do you plan to go back home?"

"Just like you, I didn't plan on it...but now I wonder..." Cevn felt exasperated at their mutual evasiveness towards returning to Makuhari.

"This is ridiculous...we _belong_ there! I have to finish my dissertation defense this week and then I can fly back. Would you be willing to stay another week?"

"Are you kidding? Honey, you better tell that roommate of yours that you're having an overnight guest for the last few days you're in China. Better yet, why don't you kick him out and give him some hotel money," Urd said, smiling seductively. Cevn felt a definite apprehensiveness towards Urd's self-invitation to spend the night in his dorm room.

"Urd, that idea _really_ scares me...I need to let you know this," he admitted. Urd looked at him softly, realizing that he was still quite jittery. She herself was jittery. With a hint of disappointment, she decided that she could be patient for him to loosen up.

"It's understandable, considering what he's gone through in his short mortal life," she reminded herself.

"Roommate? How the hell did you know that I have a roommate?"

"Hey, I didn't become the Eldest Norn on a lark, y'know," she taunted him. Cevn and Urd laughed again. They were still off-and-on hugging each other on the bench.

"Hey, it's getting late in the day and you have a dissertation to deliver tomorrow. We'd better get back, honey...hee hee, I get to call you 'honey' now!" Urd snickered triumphantly, and then sang the words out at the end. She almost broke into raucous laughter it when she saw the irritated look come across Cevn's face. They both stood up. Cevn noticed that Urd was addressing him as Cevn, instead of the usual Cevn-san.

"We need to make a call to Makuhari when we get to my dorm room. There's some Goddesses there who miss their older sister," Cevn stated. He tried to envision the joy on Belldandy and Skuld's faces when they would receive _that_ call.

"Cevn...don't forget that they miss you too. You've really made a big impact on our lives in just a few months," Urd challenged him. She was aware once more how it was so like Cevn to ignore the fact that others love him.

"I'm going to have to work with him on that," Urd promised herself.

Urd decided that she couldn't wait any longer 'to work on him' and darted forward, intending to give Cevn a quick kiss on the lips by surprise.

_--Bump--_

"What was _that_?" Cevn asked.

"A kiss, you baka!" Urd replied smartly.

"No...I meant the 'bump'!" he said, rolling his eyes. Cevn didn't know whether to be more astonished by Urd's attempt to kiss him, or about whatever bumped him as she tried. His wide-eyed expression was almost amusing to Urd.

Urd felt a sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach. She tried to grasp his hand, only to feel her hand repulsed as it came within a couple of inches of his. There was some kind of invisible force around him.

He tried to touch Urd on the cheek with his hand; his hand was brushed away like it was touching metal. It was as if Urd had some kind of force field around her all of a sudden. He looked at Urd with his mouth dangling open with befuddlement.

"Cevn...I think the Ultimate Force has asserted itself. I can't seem to touch you. It's like there's a barrier around my body that prevents it!" she reasoned. He responded by trying to hold her hands...with the same results.

"We can't touch!" she shouted in angry frustration. Urd clenched her fists at her side.

"Dammit...I don't believe this! After a good part of a hundred thousand years, I fall in love...and I can't even _kiss_ him!" she shouted.

The immensity of the figure of time that Urd stated staggered Cevn mentally. He could relate to her disappointment despite his comparatively minuscule mortal years of loneliness.

"Urd, I would have kissed you so happily," he thought.

"Even if the Ultimate Force won't let us touch, I _know_ that we already have touched...our hearts have touched," Cevn said, trying to console Urd. Urd was taking this set back much worse than he was.

"I think I know what happened. Earlier, when we had admitted how we felt towards each other, we were touching. You were holding my hands _before_ we...talked. So there was no reason for the UF to keep us from physical contact. But once we broke contact, the Ultimate Force intervened to keep us apart. I don't really understand what's happening, but that's my best guess. When we get back, I'll ask my sisters to help me find a solution," Urd said, trying to sound confident.

But deep down, she harbored major doubts that anything could be done.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

An hour later, they reached BeiDa. Urd was all eyes as she walked up to the fourth floor of Shao Yuan and entered Cevn's dorm room. It was crammed with boxes of paper and books. Cevn's bed was on the right side of the room...she sat down on it, feeling exhausted all of a sudden. Cevn handed her the phone and smiled.

"Feel free to take a nap after calling them. I'm going to take a shower...the hot water's on and I smell like a jailcell. I don't know how you were able to put up with it."

"The same way I've put up with you since I brought you to Japan," Urd snapped back without missing a beat. Cevn shook his head and left the room. Urd smiled to herself with embarrassment; her comeback sounded almost wifey. Fortunately it had went right over his head. Her light-heartedness was quickly passing as she recognized that this call was going to be _hard_. Bittersweet with anxiety, and yet relieved, she phoned home.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Skuld was worried about her sister. Belldandy had seemed _a lot_ different since she got back from her last roadtrip search for Urd. It wasn't readily apparent...in fact she didn't notice it until a couple days later. Belldandy seemed to _glow_ with some kind of energy that she didn't have before. But it was the little things that made Skuld suspicious.

Belldandy would hum little ditties to herself in the kitchen, much more frequently than before. When she was around Keiichi, she was almost epiphanous. Skuld noticed that her elder sister was slowly refurbishing the house, adding a family picture section on one wall with portraits of her and Keiichi, plus all their friends and her sisters. When she went out the door with Keiichi, she would actually walk so close to him that she was leaning shoulder-to-shoulder with him, her arm tucked under his. Before, the most they ever did was hold hands when they walked out of the house. Whenever Belldandy slept in Keiichi's room, that next morning she would be extra cheerful and warm to everyone in the house. Sickeningly warm and cheerful.

Skuld emerged from her lab and walked down the hall to the dining room. Belldandy was sitting at the table, reading a magazine.

"Since when did she read magazines?" Skuld wondered. Then she caught the title of the magazine.

"_Primadonna Lady_!" she said aloud in surprise.

Belldandy suddenly flipped the magazine down so Skuld wouldn't notice. She smiled innocently at her younger sister.

"When did you start to read _mortal magazines_?" Skuld grilled her testily.

"Well..I..uh..I just wanted to know more about this mortal world. After all, we've been here a while and we have to live on the Earthrealm. We need to know what makes mortals so...human," she answered matter-of-factly. Skuld heard evasiveness threading every syllable of her sister's explanation. She screwed her face in an expression of disdain.

"And you're going to learn about _this_ from 'Primadonna Lady'?" Skuld said in disgust. "I don't think so! What's in one of those magazines anyway?"

Skuld suddenly made a grab for the zine. Belldandy pulled it away just as her fingertips brushed it.

"Giveit giveitgevit give it!" Skuld shouted angrily.

Belldandy felt embarrassed...she knew that she was blushing. Skuld was looking at her with _that_ look...the one that transforms her angelic delicate features, brushing them with a child-like accusatory stare. She had figured that Skuld would spend most of the day in her lab...leaving her to read undisturbed.

Megumi had caught her reading a different women's magazine yesterday and didn't say a word. In fact, Megumi winked at her.

"Why would she do that?" Belldandy wondered, remembering the curious reaction of Keiichi's sister.

_BrrrRing!!_

Skuld looked apprehensively at Belldandy and backed away from the phone. Belldandy smiled soothingly at her sister...Skuld was _still_ frightened by the phone after the call from Kami-sama.

Belldandy picked up the receiver.

"_Hey guys, uh...how are things back in Makuhari?_"

Belldandy felt her heart screech to a halt. Speechless, she pointed towards the phone and mouthed "Urd" to her younger sister. Skuld dashed off lightning-fast to the living room to grab the nearest of the remote phones in the house.

"Urd! I..is that really you?" Belldandy asked.

"_Of course it is,_" the voice on the other end of the phone answered matter-of-factly. "_And I didn't even call collect!_"

"Urd...do you have _any_ idea how much we have been worried about you?!" Belldandy shouted into the phone, her emotions pivoting between resentment and relief.

"It's just like her to call us up out of the blue...and then act like nothing's happened," she observed with disdain. Belldandy looked over to see that Skuld was turning red-faced as she walked towards the dining room with the remote phone held to her ear.

"Urd, where do you get off leaving us here without telling us where you were going! Isn't that a little irresponsible? No, that is major bigtime totally irresponsible! In fact, that was a really shitty thing you did!" Skuld yelled into the phone as she angrily paced back and forth near the dinner table.

"Skuld!" Belldandy urged with a surprised voice, astonished at her little sister's vulgarity.

"And furthermore..snff..I've really missed you so much Big Sister..._that's_ why I'm so angry! You have no idea what we have done to try and find you! Belldandy and Keiichi and Megumi and Genji searched _all over_ Japan. Then I..I..snff..built a machine and I found you in Beijing. Elder Sister and Keiichi were planning to come and get you next week."

"Who's Genji?" Urd asked. Belldandy tried to calm Skuld down by interrupting an upcoming Skuld-blast of words.

"Urd, there's been...some changes since you were gone...you'll just have to see for yourself when you get here," Belldandy explained. A sinking feeling heeled her words...Belldandy had simply assumed that Urd was going to come back. What if she had decided to stay in China? Steeling herself, she bluntly aired _the_ question that had plagued all of their minds for most of the summer.

"_Are_ you coming back, Big Sister?"

There was a silence on the end of the phone. Keiichi came out from the hallway, and Belldandy told him it was Urd on the line. His face brightened with excitement as he walked behind her and wrapped his arms around her waist.

"I'm so happy for you, my love," he whispered in her ear as he kissed her cheek.

"I'm happy for me too, now that we don't have go on any more search missions for that missing miscreant of a Goddess," Belldandy whispered in his ear.

Belldandy heard sobbing on the other end of the line.

"_Yes...I'm definitely coming back..snff..I've worried you so much. I've been such an ass! You don't know how much I've missed all of you. I..I tried to ignore it, but I got really homesick. You all must think I'm terrible._"

Belldandy and Skuld looked at each other tellingly, sensing some degree of genuine remorse in their older sister's voice...but not enough by any means.

"We'll talk about that later," Belldandy said in her gentlest soothing voice. Aware of the delicacy of this call, she didn't want to risk getting Urd so upset that she would change her mind about returning. The three of them silently held their phones in the dining room.

"_Belldandy, Skuld...I ran into Cevn here. He's okay, Keiichi, and he'll be returning with me. We plan to catch a plane there next weekend. He's got some huge project that he has to present, there's boxes all over the place._"

"Uh, Urd..._where_ are you?" Belldandy asked.

"_I'm calling from his room. He's in the shower._"

Belldandy and Keiichi heard a loud "thud" over their phone. They looked into the living room, and saw Skuld looking blankly back at them. The phone was lying on its side on the floor. Little by little, the youngest Norn's face began to lend expression to her deep dismay as her long black hair formed a corona around her.

"HENTAI!! ECCHI!! PERVERT!! BAKA!!"

They both regarded her younger sister in shock. Despite Skuld's almost near-nil Goddess powers, the interior of the living room was plastered with the resentful cast of her assumptions, rendered into bright angry grafittios. As she read the words, Belldandy knew that she wasn't that far behind Skuld with her own racing bent of suppositions. She had to get a grip on herself; this certainly wasn't one of those lurid love-hotel scenarios she found in some of the mortal magazines she was reading...

"_I met up with him yesterday. By the way, things have changed on my end...I've really had a massive change happen in my life. It's a surprise,_" Urd said cheerily over the phone. Belldandy felt herself apluck with curiosity...something nice must have happened to Urd and now she wants to come home.

"A surprise?" Belldandy asked, amused when she noticed that Skuld had overheard her and then immediately swooped the phone back up to her ear, her angry paralysis of a moment earlier already forgotten.

"What is your surprise?" Skuld asked impatiently, "And why are you in _his_ room, too? I wanna know right now..." Urd's voice cut her off in mid-sentence.

"_Hey, I could talk to you guys for hours, but I've gotta go...I love you both very dearly. You too, Keiichi...I know that you're there listening. You guys take care and I'll see you in a week. I'll call every day to check in,_" Urd assured them. Skuld felt relieved that she had promised to phone back daily.

Belldandy felt jittery with excitement. This had been such a wonderful day for all of them. First, Skuld had located Urd, then this evening, Urd called home. Then she felt a tinge of worry...she had forgotten to tell Urd about the warding spell Skuld had detected.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

After nightfall, Keiichi asked Belldandy if she wanted to take an evening walk with him. She nodded her head and grabbed an light summer jacket, and then they slipped out the front door. As soon as they left, Skuld got a mischievous look on her face as she regarded the magazine. Belldandy had set it face down, open to the page she had been reading. Skuld picked it up. Her eyes widened in surprised anxiety as she read the title: "How to Drive your Mate Wild in Bed!" She felt a hot flush come to her cheeks.

"E..Elder Sister!" she shouted lividly, venting her anger in the empty house. She accidentally ripped the magazine in two, she was so angry.

"Ooops!" she said, putting a gloved hand to her mouth.

This was _too_ much! Could Elder Sister and Keiichi be doing this...thing? The disgusting mortal body thing? Then she shuddered as she connected the fact that Urd had mentioned that she was in Cevn's room.

"Oh please, Kami-sama, not _her_ too!" she fervently wished.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

I looked out the window across the dimly-lit campus. Urd had crashed out on my bed moments after she called home. I turned my head to look at her sleeping form. We had stopped by the campus medical unit on the way: me, to get stitches where Urd had beaned me with the rock; Urd, to check for residual effects from her near-drowning. Urd was exhausted, and I wasn't too far behind.

My thoughts jumbled at the sight of her in my room. I would have never dreamed things would turn out this way. I felt sympathetic towards her...it must have been rough for her to call home after all this time and admit that she had been in the wrong. She must have felt like a turtle without a shell.

"Vacation's over...it's time to go home and face the music," I thought. Both of us would have to face up to our little fear-driven escapade.

My 'vacation' was almost over too. I would also have to talk to my friends back at Makuhari and meet their resentments head on. But right now, I had to concentrate on finishing strong with my dissertation. My eyes were stinging from the effects of the water yesterday. Tomorrow, I would face the arduous process where the members of my dissertation committee members would interrogate me about my research. The last four hours I spent poring over my work, trying to remember everything in it, didn't help much either. I needed to all but memorize the whole thing to be adequately prepared for tomorrow. But there was no way that I could do _that_.

I had to give myself credit. I was offering a dissertation in a second language in a foreign country...after being sent there by another foreign country. I wondered if the US had any records of me, or did those just disappear along with all other traces and memories. I had two English versions of my dissertation handy, just in case.

Learning Japanese and then Chinese was one of the most difficult things I had ever attempted. I thought that advanced physics, Latin and Greek, and calculus were bad...but memorizing all those characters was worse. I struggled for years before I became comfortable enough to be confident. My professors in both subjects had worked really hard to educate me. The fact that I was able to lecture and seminar in both was no small feat on my part. It felt strange...the night before my doctoral defense and I was vacillating towards confidence.

It was nothing short of a miracle that I survived my drug addiction. One episode in particular splintered my attention. I had been out walking in the middle of a freezing blizzard, feeling hopeless and empty inside. I was 16 at the time, going through an intense case of alienation and teenage angst compounded by my full-blown drug habit. I was dopesick because I had no heroin, so I was high-dosed on LSD. For some reason, I decided that I was just going to keep walking until I froze to death...because I had read somewhere that freezing to death wasn't a particularly painful way to go. The next day, I came to in a hospital. A city worker bulldozing the snow-covered streets had found an arm sticking out of a snowdrift after he plowed though it. It was me. That was where my drug addiction had brought me. But that wasn't the exclamation point to my active using. I endured two more years of it, crushing my life in fistfuls of syringes.

Now I was in China with eleven years clean from drugs. Despite being handicapped by severe depression and all sorts of trauma, I was going for my Ph.D. tomorrow. I sighed and looked out the window again at the campus. Because China had a much lower living standard than the US, the campus itself wasn't illuminated by the panorama of bright lights like a typical American or Japanese University. This was the most prestigious educational institute in China...and yet at night it was much more poorly lit than N.I.T.

"Someday, I think, this will change. With ambitious students like Lin, it might be in the next decade...but it _will_ change," I thought. Bone-tired, I heard Urd walk up behind me quietly.

"You don't know how much I wish I could hold you right now, Cevn," she said reflexively. I knew I jumped a little at her sudden vox, because she tittered a giggle.

"I may be crazy to think this...but right now I wouldn't mind that, Urd. I could even give you a good backrub too. I bet that you've probably never had one...at least in the mortal sense. This _is_ frustrating!" I said as I snapped a pencil between my fingers. Urd sighed and whispered in my ear.

"That's it! It's really getting late...you should be coming to bed," she said in soft, but commanding voice.

I felt a rush of panic as I realized that my roommate was gone and that I was alone with Urd. Sex-starved Urd. Voluptuous, blatantly sexy Urd. Giddy with newly-found love Urd. Urd who said she had been unattached for almost a hundred thousand years. I envisioned her as a hungry cat and myself as a small mouse, then I chuckled at the analogy. Being honest with myself, Urd could take my breath away just by sitting at the dinner table. Now that our hearts had touched...

...Urd wasn't the only one who had been love-starved. Exhausted, I thought that it was entirely possible that she was the cat...and I was a tiger. I bet that would really freak her out! She smiled at me enigmatically, and I felt a shiver of embarrassment; what if she had 'heard' my brief burst of ecchi thoughts in her mind?

"Here's where the clumsy who-sleeps-in-which-bed stressout and tapdance begins," I thought wearily.

"Urd, you can sleep in my bed and I'll sleep on the floor," I offered, trying to be the gentleman. Actually, trying to keep from facing my fears. I was afraid that Urd would cut loose with some kind of attempt to turn this evening into a decidedly erotic direction. Visions of somatic nudity danced in my head.

"I am definitely _not_ ready for this!" I firmly admitted to myself. I didn't think anything could stress me out any worse than my dissertation. Ironically, _this_ situation managed to stoke the ovenfires of my anxiety even more.

"Are you kidding? No way!" she replied directly. "I will _not_ permit you to sleep on the floor on the night before such an important event in your life!" she said, assuming a protective air.

"Okay, then you gotta sleep in my roommate's bed," I replied, drawing the boundary.

Urd looked at me with a scornful face.

_"Why?"_

She'd only uttered a single word...possibly the first word ever spoken by a human. Perhaps the first word that bounced off the cavewalls of antediluvian history. The word that kept bouncing, no matter how many generations of mankind had tried to interpret its course and dialectic. I felt like thumping her on the head with one of my books...how could she ask that?

"What an idiot!" I thought, resentful that she had ignored everything she had learned about my past. Forgiving her because she was who she was, because she had been through a hell of loneliness. Still, that single word was almost a demand. Or even a command.

"You idiuh..uh..I think that maybe a little bit of your younger sister's naivety has rubbed off on you. Or did you forget my life history, _Dr. Ogawa_," I sharply retorted. Urd winced as I called her by the name she assumed when she impersonated my therapist. But the point was made clear. Or so I thought.

"Cevn, didn't you say today that you were brought into my life to love me? Well, I need some love _right now_! I'm still feeling pretty freaked out...I don't know why, but I am. Guess this is what happens when you've been single 90,000 years, and then someone suddenly pretty much confesses that they've fallen in love with you! My heart just had a cave-in a few hours back because someone heard me confess my love for them. I'm totally glad that we talked and got honest with each other about our feelings. I'm still in absolute shock about _that_...right down to the currents of Soul in my being! But, I feel as if something is still wrong with me. I feel as if someone has cast a spell on me to make me feel horrible. I need you to take a big risk and sleep with me in the same bed. _Just_ sleep, mind you! We can't touch, because of the Ultimate Force...and you have no idea how much I want to touch you. How I want to touch you. But, because we can't touch, you don't have to worry your little head about things getting out of hand, at least for today," she pointed out, looking at me with a Byzantine expression at the end of her explanation.

I shook my head "no", still feeling awkward and afraid at the same time. But I challenged my fears...and realized that maybe I was being an idiot. I was all caught up about why she couldn't take my 'woman phobia' into account, while here I was ignoring her feelings. Her _heartfelt_ feelings.

"C'mon, I _really_ need you to give me something to go on. I..it would really mean a lot if we both slept in your bed." Then, unexpectedly, she walked right up to me, stopping just a few cm short of my face, and looked deeply into my eyes with a searching expression. As I was bathed in her emeraldine eyes for the second time today, I knew that there was no way in the world that I could refuse her now; and I knew that I'd be safe with her, safer than I had been in a long long time.

"Urd...how can I say no to that? I know I said that I needed to learn how to love you, so I guess tonight I'm going to learn to trust being in bed with a woman."

"I'm not a woman...I'm a Goddess!" Urd said, imitating Skuld's "I am not a kid!" voice. I laughed at this...I had forgotten about her knack for vocal impersonation.

Urd sat down on my single bed and pulled herself under the covers, patting the space on the bed when I was supposed to sleep. At least she wasn't trying to sleep naked or something. She was fully dressed, as was I. I climbed under the covers and lay down next to her. I was so tired. Emotionally, I had been a human riot the past two days. I knew that tomorrow would be one of the most stressful days in my life. I felt sleep climbing into my consciousness almost as soon as I hit the pillow. Emerging from the myriad background noises, I focused on the rhythm of sleepsoft breathing right next to me...a sound that I never would have imagined hearing again. I sat up my bed, torn between gratitude and tears. I knew that I could stay up all night; this had been one of the most joyfully overwhelming days in my life. I laid back down on my dorm bed, and felt her breath against my face, which caused me to cry silently because I didn't want to wake her.

But, tomorrow...

I spent a few minutes winding my tension back down to a bearable level. I studied her face, feeling healed of all my pain as she rested against the pillow. She had _healed_ me; at this moment in time I could not sense anything except joyful serenity. Closing my eyes, I hoped for a few hours of sleep.

The last words I heard were a whispered "I love you."

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Megumi had phoned Sora's house a dozen times in the past few days. Each time, Sora would hang up on her...or her parents would say that she wasn't home. Megumi wanted to set things right, but was unsure of how to accomplish it. How could she explain Aoshima's obsession with her at the restaurant...without divulging the _true cause_? If she were to tell Sora about the 'beauty enhancing spell', she would have to reveal the secret of the Goddesses. But if she didn't tell Sora the truth, she couldn't possibly excuse what happened last weekend. It was impossible to try and explain it in terms of normal-range behavior.

It was bad enough dealing with Genji, who had just found out that Belldandy and Skuld were much more than he thought they were. Watching his shocked face, she remembered how shocked _she_ was way back when Belldandy first came into their lives. Genji had taken the revelation that Bell and Skuld were Goddesses quite diffidently at first; withdrawing from all of them for a short while. Megumi silently thanked Keiichi for his pep talks with Genji, which soon brought him around again. She noticed that Genji was gradually become less tense after these discussions with her older brother.

But she was worried that the breach in her friendship with Sora would become a permanent one if she didn't take action right away.

"How can I get Sora to realize that the mishap last weekend was not _my_ fault?" she mused over and over again. Megumi sat at her desk, doodling on the piece of paper. Gradually, a plan formed in her mind. Bit by bit, she realized that she _could_ demonstrate the power of the spell Belldandy had put on her. If she did this, then Sora would have no recourse to argument. After all, she _didn't_ like Aoshima one bit, especially in a romantic sense.

"_Poor Keiichi..._" Megumi thought as she composed her plan.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Mara was dressed in a black lace chemise with a red leather miniskirt and a red short-sleeved blazer. She was finally able to put on her red and black tennis boots as her foot casts had come off when she rematerialized her mortal shell this morning. She still needed the crutches to get around, but it would be a matter of a few days and she would be mobile again.

She viewed the image on the screen with surprise and disappointment. It displayed Urd and Cevn sitting together on a bench in Beijing in what looked like an embrace. The next several images showed Urd staring upwards with a blissful countenance. Mara felt her stomach churn with disgust as she saw the look on Urd's face. Could she have fallen in love with the pseudo-Demon Cevn?

"I can't believe it! She..that she would go for _him_? I was always wary of Urd, she seemed to be the smart one of the three...but this just proves that she is as stupid as her other sisters. Falling in love with a mortal...bah! Yeeesh!!" she mutter to Slayer, who was perched on her desk.

Mara felt a momentary flash of anger when she realized that this new situation meant that Urd was probably emerging from her deep desolate emotional state. Mara had wanted Urd's misery to be long and drawn out, in proportion to all the times Urd had defied her. Despite the ward that Mara had caused to be cast on her, Urd had found happiness. The Demoness clutched at her belly as her stomach growled, a fitting metaphor for her frustration.

Mara had heard a rumor this morning from Demon Central's Grief Office that Urd actually tried to take her own life yesterday.

"I wish I coulda seen that," she said out loud to the other Sere-Hawks perched on the mini charnel tree. Mara envisioned Urd's last moments of existence before her spirit was snuffed out and collected by the Reaper. But her reaction was bittersweet...in a way Mara was glad that Urd hadn't died because she was a good opponent. This kept the game interesting for Mara.

The game of Grief. The game she would eventually win, once she successfully summoned Isilblius.

"Urd...you may be feeling good now, but having a mortal for a boyfriend will make you exquisitely vulnerable in so _many_ delicious ways. Now, I can hurt _you_ by hurting him," she exclaimed to the screen.

In fact, with an elegant twist of her mind, she realized that she could make Urd squirm by threatening or harming her mortal charge. Even more so, now that Urd had feelings for him. Just like she did with Belldandy. Urd had a much shorter fuse than Belldandy, which meant that Mara could easily goad her into impulsivity. An impulsive Urd was a defenseless Urd, as far as Mara was concerned. Remembering their small-deity-kid days, back when the half-Demon Urd and she could mingle when Urd made her mysterious visits to Vanagdrasil, Mara recalled that whenever Urd acted with spontaneous intent, she _always_ got over on the Eldest Norn.

"This may be a blessed turn of events, but I know that I can gain leverage on the Eldest Norn...and make her pay for all the recent insults she's gotten away with!" she swore. Urd had been stripped of her powers, while Mara had only been demoted to Second Class Demon powers. Not enough to take on Belldandy, but more than enough to wreck havoc on Urd and Skuld.

If Urd was on a pink cloud due to recent events, then her guard would be down. Mara relished the thought that a strike at Urd now would be deliciously painful, since she was probably almost silly with joy. Mara decided to make one more call to Vanagdrasil and rein in some more favors from her Demon comrades at the Grief Office.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --


	24. Pt 24: Magnum Organum

**Part 24: Magnum Organum**

I woke up crisp and alert at the break of dawn, only to find that Urd was gone. I panicked momentarily at her unexpected disappearance. Uninvited paranoid thoughts stole past, informing me that yesterday's exhilarating events were nothing more than a 'one night stand'...that Urd was off to greener pastures. Then I felt a moment of fear that I would find Urd in the room, getting dressed. A lump in my throat formed when I realized that 'getting dressed' to Urd might mean flashing herself at me. She was always so sexy in her demeanor.

But she was gone.

I had gone to sleep fully dressed, mostly because I was very uncomfortable with Urd in bed next to me. As far as I could remember, I fell right to sleep. What if I had disappointed her by not staying awake? I sat up into a lotus position and started my morning meditations. A few minutes after I finished, I showered...and the 6am loudspeakers fired up with their martial music and news, jackbooting me back into reality.

I looked at the massive project that I was going to defend at 9 am. I had entitled it _"Magnum Organum: First Consciousness"_. This was pretty cheeky homage on my part, ostensibly placing my work on the level of Aristotle, Bacon and Ouspensky. Aristotle had written the "Organon", Bacon had written the new Organum or "Novum Organum", while Ouspensky had written the "Tertium Organum" in the early 20th century. Each work was considered a landmark philosophical work...and I was planning to continue this tradition with my doctoral project.

I became absorbed in trying to reduce my overall stress. Hot showers were only available at Shao Yuan between 5 and 7 in the morning and evenings, so I took a lingering shower. The hot shower helped, but I wished I were back in Japan so I could soak in the furoba. I regretted that my roommate wasn't here, so I could at least have someone to chat with. Urd's absence left a gap.

"Where could she have gone?" I wondered as my nerves dissected my attempts at serenity.

Dr. Zhao had informed me at our last meeting that my dissertation defense was going to be a big event at BeiDa. They had moved it to a larger auditorium-sized classroom at the bequest of the president of the university. And if Lin's reaction were any indication, there would be an audience. This troubled me...it was bad enough that I might get shot down in flames by the committee, but adding an audience to witness said flame-out would be disastrous for my self-esteem.

I heard the door open and close and I turned around to see Urd with two boxes. She was dressed in a devastatingly beautiful white outfit. She wore a white denim jacket with embroidered stylings. Under it was a knee-length white skirt with gold lace tracings and a pink dress-shirt top, buttoned conservatively. To top it off, she wore a pink beret with faux Qing cloisonne pins on each side. The whole effect was stunning to behold.

Breathstealing.

"You can breathe now, Cevn. I don't mind your staring, but please don't drool on your paperwork," she teased. "I wanted to make sure that you do your best today. I figure...you wouldn't dare screw up in front of me when I dressed up like this. Think of me as a cosmic cheerleader. You know, like how Belldandy gets when Keiichi is in a race. I'm just boosting our odds," she announced, spinning around so I could get a good look.

"You look totally awesome for a bona fide lunatic! But I think you'd better sit in the back. You could easily distract me with that outfit," I countered.

"That's _your_ problem, not mine...lai-lai schoolboy," she quipped, then smiled at me seductively.

"By the way, I brought us breakfast. I ran into Dr. Zhao on the way here. He's a bundle of excitement. He told me that there are already students in the auditorium. He was on his way there with a group of your brainiacs that flew in to participate in your quiz-kid committee thingy. He said they're from a whole bunch of different countries."

Urd was trying to cheer me up by her light-hearted banter, but the last bit of news melted bitter to stomach. At once, I lost my appetite as my stress mounted even further.

An international committee? I thought that only one scholar from Australia was going to show up. In the past week, I had given preliminary précis of my project to Dr. Zhao to distribute to the members of the committee he was forming. Other than this, I hadn't given much attention to the matter of my committee. I confronted myself on my shortsightedness...I had only fooled myself by falsely assuming that while I was making a big deal of this, but no one else would. Assume. Ass of u and me.

I gripped my chopstix tightly; feeling intimidated all of a sudden. Urd seemed to notice this and tried to pump some confidence in me. She reminded me that I had faced my personal demons yesterday when I told her how I felt about her, so what I was doing today...was do-able.

We left for the auditorium after breakfast. I wanted to get there at least a half an hour early, so I could become familiar with the environs. As we walked in, there was about a _hundred_ students seated in the auditorium, half filling it. I walked down the center aisle with Urd next to me; feeling awkward when some of the male students whistled at her wolfishly.

"China _has_ changed since I first studied here," I observed silently, knowing that the BeiDa students had gotten more rowdy since my first trip to the school.

The front of the auditorium had a single chair and desk on the left side of the stage. Arranged on the opposite side were three long tables and fourteen chairs. I felt an urge to cringe as I realized that I would be the sole occupant of that 'hot seat' for the rest of the day. In contrast, the committee would possess safety in numbers. I set down the boxes holding my dissertations and precis, then distributed them on the committee table. Urd sat in the front row on my side next to Lin. Lin looked at Urd, then smiled at me approvingly.

"Those two know each other!" I realized with a trace of surprise. As if to confirm my suspicion, they broke into animated conversation, occasionally pointing at me and giggling mirthfully.

I took my seat on the side of the stage and watched the professors pile in and take their seats. Each one looked like a wizened sage...they were all elderly except for two that were in their 50s. There was a lectern on the middle of the table from which they could direct questions to me; someone had set up a tape recorder to record the proceedings.

"What next, live reports from CNNI?" I whispered to myself sarcastically.

I vigilantly noted the professor's reactions as they examined the final draft of my dissertation. Several of them darted sharp glances at me, apparently incensed at the propositions in research. I tried to avoid casting assumptions as to why they were so upset. Dr. Zhao took to the podium and greeted the audience, then began to introduce the committee.

"This is Professor Terasawa of Tokyo University. He is the world's leading expert on symbolic logic and metaphysical philosophy." I just about choked when I heard this...the man was _the_ Dr. Terasawa! He bowed slightly to me with a look on his face that seemed to say "I'm going to bite your head off." Then Dr. Zhao introduced the next scholar, a historian from Cambridge.

"_Cambridge!_" I mentally choked on my tea. With each name and credential that Dr. Zhao rattled off, I felt myself sinking lower and lower into my chair. Emeritus Professor this, world-renowned expert that, publisher of landmark work la de da, originator of such and such research. There was even an Abbess Omao from a Zen nunnery on the committee. Dr. Zhao had assembled a collection of the leading experts in every area my dissertation touched upon. With mixed feelings, I learned that he had pulled no punches with their selection.

A few moments later, I was directed to verbally abstract my doctoral project.

It had started...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Keiichi walked into the kitchen to get a juice when he spied Megumi sitting on one of the couches with her legs curled under her. His heart immediately went va-va-voom as she looked up at him with her beautiful brown eyes and dandelion-cut auburn hair. She was sitting in the living room on the cordless phone.

"What's the matter with her? She didn't take her medicine this morning! Hell, what's the matter with me? I'm totally caught up in her beauty," he noted to himself irritably. He gritted his teeth, chiding himself for feeling attracted to his little sister. With an effort of will, he returned back to his "Keiichi's Shop" room.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Hello? Ms. Hasegawa, I _know_ Sora's there! This is a matter of life and death! Could you _please_ put her on the phone? I really need to clear up something with her!" Megumi asked in a pleading voice. She smiled to herself as she heard Sora's mom called her to the phone in the background.

"Hello?"

"SorathisisMegumidon'thangup!" she said as fast as she could. Now it was all up to Sora.

"I'm at work, y'know!" Sora said in a level voice filled with the fleece of revolt, so acridly bitter that Megumi flinched on her end of the phone.

"Sora, I need to explain what happened the other day at the mall," Megumi said without missing a beat.

"What is there to explain? You already have Genji, and now you're acting the _furin_ with Toshiyuki...who's supposed to be _mine_!"

"Furin? I am not two-timing Genji..." Megumi blurted, angered at the verbal barb. Especially since it was baseless. Being called "furin" was like being called a slut...or worse!

"Toshiyuki was meant for_ me_...and instead _you_ stole his heart! Then I nearly choked to death and all you could do was let him hang all over you. I utterly, _totally_, despise you!" Megumi flinched at the harsh words of her friend.

"Look, Sora, I'm really sorry about what happened at the restaurant. But there was a really good reason why it happened. Please hear me out. I need you to try and give me a chance to prove myself. To explain. Come to my house this evening at about six. Please. If you don't, then we'll end up losing our friendship over a misunderstanding that could've been corrected.

"Please...by all the years that we have been friends, I _swear_ that I would never hurt you intentionally. Please come over!" Megumi had practically begged for Sora to come. After a moment's silence, Sora agreed. Megumi smiled from ear to ear and swung part two of her plan into action.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Urd listened closely as yet another professor attacked Cevn's work. The man had risen up out of his chair and was vigorously pounding his fist on the table to emphasize his arguments. The professors were no longer going up to the lectern. Urd was both bored and interested in the drama of the proceedings. She knew that Cevn was right as soon as he finished his abstract presentation. But the professors on his committee were extremely argumentative.

She felt a disturbed amazement when she realized that he had incorporated Yggdrasilian thought matrices into a full section of his work. This bold move on his part would make his dissertation as confusing to the mortals as the Demon's Language portions of the Enigma Book were confounding to her.

"This is what happens when you mix mortal philosophy and Yggdrasilian science. There's no way that a human mind can understand the thought matrix," she thought grimly. It was difficult for her to see her friend get attacked so vociferously by the faculty on his committee. Even Dr. Zhao had joined on the act. Urd kept wondering about this contradiction of behavior. If this committee was here to help Cevn through his doctorate thingy, then what was fueling their attacks on him? She expected confusion, not passionate aggression.

Lin had left around 4pm, excusing herself by acknowledging that she had developed a headache from trying to follow the erudite debating. At 7pm, she returned with some snacks for Urd and Cevn. Finally, things wrapped up at 11pm when Dr. Zhao pronounced that the dissertation defense would continue tomorrow. It was apparent that Cevn had not convinced any members of the committee that his work was valid. Urd noticed that none of them were able to refute his research either.

"Great. A Chinese standoff. More yelling and arguing tomorrow. O joy!" Lin remarked, elbowing her. Urd shook her head and giggled at Lin's mock-indignant tone of voice.

Cevn leaned back in his chair and let out a long sigh of relief after the session was over. Besides two fifteen-minute breaks, he had been fending questions and accusations all day.

The audience participation didn't help matters. The students were a randy group...all rebelliously siding with him. At one point when he successfully shut down the arguments of one professor, the auditorium exploded with disrespectful applause. Dr. Zhao ruefully chewed out the observers for their indecorous behavior. The professor had grown angrier, and Cevn worried that he would be out for blood. To allay a potential enmity, Cevn scolded the audience as well, passionately explaining that any individual's arguments and convictions were close to their heart...thus, they should be accorded the highest respect. This clearly impressed several members of the committee.

Urd wanted to go out and celebrate after being cooped up in the auditorium for the whole day. Cevn excused himself, explaining that he was mentally exhausted. Stunned, Urd grew angry at his refusal. After all, she had devoted her _entire_ day to him; now couldn't he devote part of an evening to her?

She left in a bellicose frame of mind with Lin in tow.

At a nightclub, Lin sat her down and explained that Cevn was indeed exhausted and that it had nothing to do with her. Urd soberly realized that Cevn couldn't have gone out with them, even if he _wanted_ to. She realized that Lin had correctly assessed the situation...and that once again she had let her impulses and expectations get the best of her. Gradually, the karaoke singing devolved into drunken howling and screeching. Feeling guilty, Urd told Lin that she wanted to go home and apologize. Lin smiled at her and walked her to Shao Yuan.

Urd opened the door and saw Cevn lying on the floor, writhing in agony.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Sora arrived a little after 6pm. Megumi saw her friend standing in the doorway, almost reluctant to come in. She wanted to greet her, but the aura that Sora gave off was decidedly defensive and averse. Megumi had invented an errand for Genji, sending him all the way to Chiba to pick up a book. Skuld was entrenched in her lab, working on a new mecha. Belldandy had gone to the grocery store; now she was probably on the expressway to Chiba with Genji.

Perfect.

_That_ had taken some expert manipulation on Megumi's part...it seemed that Keiichi and Belldandy were inseparable since they arrived from Southern Japan. And Belldandy had _that look_. A glowing expression that Megumi recognized all too well, having noticed it when her friends...admitted to her that they had made love with their boyfriends for the first time.

"Could she and Keiichi have _done it_?" she wondered, then returned her attention to the diminutive college soon-to-be-sophomore standing in front of her.

"Come in, Sora. Can I get you some tea?" she offered politely.

"No...I'm really not in the mood for anything you would offer," Sora replied flatly. "What do you have to show me?"

"Okay, so she wants to get right to the point," Megumi thought. "I can't blame her, I would too if I was in her zorii. This is going to take some guts."

"Oh Keiichi? Tomohisa? Can you men come into the living room...I have something I want to show you," she called out in a lyrical singsong voice.

Keiichi heard Megumi calling him and laid down his scanpad, a little tool he used for sketching 3D schematics. Part computer, part remote control, part drawing screen. Essential for any engineering student planning to graduate in 2007. He joined Tomohisa in the hallway and they walked in the living room.

"What is it, Megumi?" Keiichi asked.

He felt his senses become richly alert...and realized that she _still_ hadn't taken any of her pills. And that she was damned attractive. He felt an instinctive pull towards her that was difficult to resist. It was if her beauty had assumed magnetic properties; a magnetism that was a force a nature, drawing almost physically on male pheromones.

Tomohisa stood in the hallway with his mouth agape, staring at his cousin, feeling juiced by her sexiness.

"She's so beautiful...I wonder if Skuld could be as good looking when she gets older! I wonder if _anyone_ could be so incredibly..." he thought, losing the words to describe her beauty.

Keiichi cast a sidelong glance at his cousin, who was muttering "dai kawaii" over and over.

Megumi was dressed in a pair of khaki shorts with a sleeveless T-shirt. Nothing too spectacular, but she had deliberately chosen not to dress up for a reason. This way, being dressed in her casual houseclothes, Sora could not use attire as an excuse to explain what was coming up next.

"Why don't you guys find a seat?" she said sweetly. Immediately, Keiichi and Tomohisa sat on either side of her.

"Don't be shy now, guys, she said sweetly. Tomohisa put his arm around Megumi's shoulders in a very familiar manner as Keiichi leaned against her.

Sora watched in amazed disgust as Keiichi and Tomohisa flirted with Megumi.

"My God, she's their sister and cousin...and they're acting just like Toshi did! At least Keiichi seems to try and restrain himself, but Tomohisa is acting like a puppy! If this wasn't so disgusting, it would be...incredible," she observed.

Keiichi hadn't had to deal with the full force of Megumi's beauty spell for a long time; he was unprepared for the intensity of it. Megumi was enchanting him with her pert beauty. He struggled inside, picturing Belldandy's beauty...visualizing how lovely his divine girlfriend was. Grinding his clenched teeth because of the effort, he finally stood up.

"Megumi, w..what's going on here? Why did you call us here? Y...you didn't take your pills this morning, did you?"

"What pills do you mean, Keiichi?" she asked with feigned innocence.

Keiichi looked nervously back and forth between Megumi and Sora. He shot his sister an icy look laced with accusation and confusion.

"What is she trying to prove? She_ knows_ that Sora doesn't know anything about Belldandy and the others!" he thought frantically.

"The _pills_. You know, the ones you have to take twice a day!" he said with overt intent.

Sora's anger towards Megumi receded a bit as she began to wonder what was going on here. She felt a sharp fear arise.

"W..what if Megumi is really sick and she called me here because she wanted to tell me face-to-face? Maybe that's why she has to take pills?" she concluded with vivid panic.

"Ohmygod Megumi, you're not terminally ill, are you?" she blurted out, her longstanding friendship overwhelming her recent feelings of betrayal. Sora watched Megumi's expression play between shock and humor.

"No, I'm not!" Megumi replied, choking down a fit of laughter.

"Then why do you have to take pills everyday?" Sora pressed her urgently for an answer.

"Tomohisa, could you get Sora and I some soda from the fridge?" Megumi requested in a sugary voice.

Sora watched as Tomohisa reluctantly got up and went to the kitchen, then returned with two sodas, giving them both to Megumi. Megumi smiled and pointed at one soda, then at Sora. Tomohisa sat next to her and cracked Sora's soda open, then commented to Megumi that he wished all the girls in his senior high were as sexy as she was. Sora recalled the restaurant incident...this was the same thing happening all over again.

"Is Megumi out of her mind? She's just trying to rub it in, doing it again with Keiichi and Tomohisa...hell, they're probably in on it with her," she figured.

Megumi saw Sora's freckles disappear into a rapidly reddening face. She sprang up off the couch and turned to face all three.

"Okay! That's good enough to prove my point," she shouted, getting everyone's undivided attention. She walked over and knelt in front of her friend.

"Look, Sora. My _own_ brother and cousin are infatuated with me right now!" she observed. Keiichi and Tomohisa both turned beet-red with embarrassment as she continued.

"Keiichi already has a girlfriend that he loves dearly. As for Tomohisa...well let's just say that I used to baby-sit him for a few years. You wanna know why they're acting this way? Because of Belldandy!" Megumi explained.

"What does she have to do with anything?" Sora asked, keeling an irritated voice. Keiichi's eyes widened with fear as he sensed that Megumi was going to disclose their little 'family secret'.

"Before I tell you more, I need you to 'pinky promise' that you'll never repeat what I'm about to say to _anyone_!" Megumi said gravely as she raised her hand up and extended her pinky. Sora looked at her, trying to decide if Megumi was for real. Then she cautiously wrapped her pinky around Megumi's and they shook their hands this way three times.

"OK, now that we've made the solemn promise...Belldandy and Urd and Skuld are actually three Goddesses who have come here because of a wish Keiichi made," Megumi admitted.

--Ulp!--

Keiichi jumped up and tried to cover Megumi's mouth but she pushed his arm away so she could speak clearly.

"Huh? Huh huh, hee heh hahahahahahah!" Sora laughed riotously. She almost slid off the zabuton she was sitting on. "You expect me to believe that?"

_"It's true!"_

Everyone turned their heads to see Belldandy and Genji standing in the doorway. Megumi looked at them in shock...they weren't supposed to be back for another two hours.

"I forgot my driver's license," Genji said sheepishly. Megumi shot him a glance that said "you're in deep tempura, boy!", then shook her head in dismay.

"Idiot! He's my boyfriend alright...a true space cadet sometimes," she thought resignedly, hooding her eyes with her hand.

Belldandy waved her hands in a pattern and _floated_ over to where everyone was sitting. Sora looked up at her and saw a halo of silvery lights around her head.

"Holy Bell..." Belldandy sang a summoning. A moment later, an _angel_ appeared, seemingly leaping out of Belldandy's back.

_Wha..wha..wha...waugh!_" Sora stuttered in rapt stupefaction.

She decided that the female figure hovering behind Belldandy must be an angel, because (she/it?) had a beautiful set of glowing wings. The angel had pure white hair flowing upward in sum defiance of physics. Swathed in a flowing silken white sheet, the angelic being seemed to be the embodiment of purity.

Seeing Belldandy and Holy Bell floating like this, Sora felt completely awed and humbled. Then she felt a wash of satisfaction...this confirmed her suspicions about the lot of unusual things that seemed to center on Keiichi and his housemates.

"I knew it! I suspected that there was something unusual about you...the probabilities of our Club winning _all_ our races..." she addressed the group, feeling somewhat triumphant as soon as her initial shock wore off.

"Heyheyhey...not so fast, Sora! _I_ won almost all of those races fair and square!" an indignant Keiichi interrupted her. Megumi looked at Belldandy, preparing herself for a sharp sanction for revealing the 'Goddess secret'.

Belldandy turned to Megumi and smiled kindly.

"I heard the entire thing, Megumi. Your friendship with Sora runs deeply into the calm waters of your spirit...your loyalty toward her as your friend is beyond redoubt. My error lies in creating a beauty spell, which inadvertently has caused an unfortunate schism between you. If revealing my divine nature is necessary to mend your friendship, then it is a revealing that both I welcome and condone," she stated. Everybody in the room was profoundly moved by Belldandy's speech; they all possessed venerative attitudes towards her.

"Wow..." Keiichi muttered.

Finally, Megumi looked at her with an expression of gratitude. Belldandy had seen right into the heart of the matter.

"Hey...uh could you stop floating like that? It's kinda scary to watch," Sora managed to request amidst her wonderment. Holy Bell returned to Belldandy, who then floated back down onto the ground and sat next to Keiichi.

"You see, Belldandy cast a spell on me to make me beautiful...not that I already was, hee hee. Uh...but something happened that required her to help me. She made a mistake and made the spell too powerful. Thus, if I don't take the sormatics that Urd made for me, I become a magnet for all males. Even if they have wives, girlfriends...even my own brother and cousin."

She turned to Keiichi and Tomohisa and bowed a sincere apology.

"I'm sorry that I had to subject you both to this, but it was the only way I could think of to prove to Sora...mmmph!"

Keiichi had picked up a pillow from the couch and playfully hit her in the face with it.

"Hey...could you take one of those pills now, Megumi!" Keiichi stammered, half-angry and half-amused by his sister's cunning stunt. He 'pounded' her on the head a few more times with the pillow to emphasize his request.

"I can't believe you're my sister sometimes! I bet you just _love_ teasing men... You're just like every woman I know!" Keiichi stated, a-thorned by another one of Megumi's hare-brained schemes.

"KEIICHI!" Belldandy and Megumi shouted in unison.

"But it's true...take a look at your own boyfriend, Megumi!" he said, pointing at Genji.

Megumi looked at Genji, who was staring at her with vacant eyes. It was apparent to them all that he was so entranced by Megumi's beauty...that he had fallen into a catatonia-like trance. Tomohisa stood up and waved his hand in front of Genji's eyes, then laughed and made faces at him.

"Tomohisa...grow up!" Megumi and Keiichi said disdainfully.

Sora watched all this with incredulity. It was all too much to absorb at once.

"No wonder things are so insane with these guys!" she concluded. Then an idea stuck her.

"Wouldn't it be great if..." she wondered as Megumi excused herself to go to her room to take one of Urd's lozenges.

"I wonder if you could do to me what you did to Megumi?" Sora asked Belldandy.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Urd was jarred by the sight in front of her. Cevn was moaning, clutching his chest.

"He was just fine a couple hours ago," she thought desperately. She fought back her emotions as she tried to keep cool and calculated. She knelt down beside him and took his pulse...everything appeared normal.

"Why?" she shouted at the top of her lungs. She had just gotten together with him yesterday, and now the Ultimate Force was taking him away. She halted herself.

"Waitaminute. The UF _never_ takes lives, it just manipulates events," she said to herself.

Her eyes narrowed as she looked for a mirror. She found a little hand mirror in his shaving kit. Then she pricked her finger with a safety pin and pinched a drop of pinkish blood onto the mirror. Smearing the blood to cover its surface, she aligned the mirror so she could see Cevn in the reflection.

"Oh, no!" she exclaimed. In the mirror, Cevn's reflection had a faint rubescent glow. Urd's suspicions were confirmed...he was under a low-level Demonic spell. This brought on new frustration as she realized that she was without her powers. She basically had just enough power to manifest in a mortal form, with little to spare.

"I'm going to get you out of this...don't you worry!" she said to his semi-conscious form. Urd felt her heart being pulled; he was in too much pain to do anything but slightly nod his head. Or was that just a reaction to the agony of the spell?

Urd thought back to all the warding classes she had inculcated in her youth. Scanning her memory, she began to recall counterspells to remove low level Demonic spells. It would have been easy to do if she had her license, but the Big Meany had effectively cauterized her magical abilities. Widening her awareness, it dawned on Urd that this situation wasn't beyond her abilities. She _could_ handle it!

"After all, Cevn's still my mortal charge...and even though I don't have any powers to speak of, this wouldn't have arisen unless there was a solution that I could employ," she reasoned.

Urd wondered what Belldandy and Skuld would do if they were faced with these circumstances. Belldandy would try and mother him back to health, or just cast a spell. Skuld would look at it logically, mathematically...

"That's it!" she shouted.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

The last thing I remembered was being in absolute agony, as if someone had drained me of blood and filled me with fire. Urd had yelled at me about not being in party mode, so I had walked home. But as soon as I turned on the light, I was filled with pain.

But now, I felt totally relaxed and at peace with myself. What happened? My body felt drained; the kind of fatigue that comes after jonesing for heroin. It was already daybreak.

"What time is it?" I asked, hoping that Urd would have come back last night from her pubcrawling or whatever with Lin. I still felt resentment at her...she had basically ignored the fact that I was drained from yesterday's proceedings. Urd wasn't here. I staggered to my feet and noticed that it was 7am. Much as I wanted to figure out what happened to me last night, I knew that I needed to shove my curiosity into the remote reaches of my mind, so that I could focus on today's work.

I just missed the hot water shower times, so I blueshowered and dressed. I had decided earlier that I wasn't going to wear anything _different_ to this dissertation defense...I wasn't going to dress up in something like a suit and tie. I put on a pair of Levi's and a long-sleeved tie-dye shirt, pulled my hair back in a ponytail and slipped on my Nikes.

When I reached the auditorium, it was packed with students again. A few of the committee members were present, seated on their side of the stage. Dr. Zhao intercepted me and informed me that many of the professors had been faxing pieces of my work to their colleagues. When I asked him why, he confided in me that they were trying to utilize the help of other scholars to find dispute with my research. The two psychometricians from Germany and the US had jointly decided that they had to disprove my refutation of the Null Hypothesis by any means necessary. The three linguists wanted to find inconsistencies with known languages in order to dispute the data brought back from my discoveries in the Encyclopedia of Dawn. Several others were confounded by the other two sections of my dissertation, especially the section that presented the codification of all possible and potential human thoughts.

"Where was Urd?" I wondered, rapidly consumed by a fugue. I saw Lin, who smiled at me and told me that Urd had left to come home about 1am last night. Lin had walked her to my dorm. Lin was surprised as I had been when I told her that Urd hadn't come home. I tried not to roam into jealous, possessive thoughts about the absent Urd...but I was worried. Worried about my sudden 'seizure' last night, about her disappearance...

Dr. Zhao called the proceedings to order and the 'festivities' began anew.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

It was almost midnight when I got back to my dorm room. I was reservedly pleased with the day's proceedings. I restructured my oral presentation and managed to refute all of the objections while imparting explanations rather than obfuscations. Several of the old scholars were decidedly less critical of my research at the end of the long session and one emeritus professor seemed to have rested his case.

There was still a lot of contention from 2/3 of the committee. Dr. Terasawa was especially aggressive in his criticisms. The information I was presenting regarding the ancient languages found in the Encyclopedia of Dawn flew in the face of accordant anthropological systems. It was proving difficult to present my findings in such a manner where I couldn't be accused of subjectivist premises.

After it was over, Lin invited me out to dinner at one of the restaurants adjoining BeiDa. She confided in me that Urd felt badly because she had pressured me to go out and party the night before. I could tell that she was really worried about Urd.

Lin narrated to me that she had ran into Urd a few days after the debacle when Urd almost turned my economics lecture into total chaos. Lin had taken a fetching liking to Urd, who was current with fashion _and_ economic theory. I knew that Urd had a predisposition towards money, but I was surprised to learn that it extended into post-Keynesian macroeconomics theory.

Ruminating about my discussion with Lin, I sat down on my bed and fought to stay awake, when a piece of paper caught my attention on my desk. I hadn't noticed it there this morning, but then again, I didn't remember noticing anything except my worn-out body, my alarm clock and my closet

I unfolded it and read it:

_Cevn,_

_I left you this note to explain why I won't be there with you_

_today. Last night, you were overtaken by a Demonic spell. I_

_think that Mara may have something to do with it, because I_

_noticed that I was under a spell too. Anyway, I was able to_

_thwart it by encanting a dissolution spell. The catch is that_

_I had to use almost all of my energy that is needed so I can_

_appear in this mortal form that you can't seem to keep your_

_eyes off of. As a result, I am now a micro-Urd...probably about_

_a half-millimeter tall. That's all the energy I have leftover_

_from removing the spells on both of us. Now I know why I was_

_extra-sad even after you sprang your 'surprise' on me. Anyway,_

_I'm in a safe place...so you don't have to worry about stepping on me._

_According to my calculations, I will be able to manifest as a normal-sized_

_Urd in a few days. Good luck with the dissertation thingy,_

_Love, Urd_

So _that_ was why Urd wasn't around today! I was surprised at the "love" in the closing...I hadn't read a letter with _that_ word in the closing since I was married. I breathed a silent "thank you" to Urd, wherever she was. A moment's paranoia gripped me as I envisioned myself stepping on her micro-deformed form. It was still such a novelty to have a woman in my life whose interest in me actually transcended being 'just friends'.

This would take _a lot_ of getting used to.

"I'm going to miss her at tomorrow's 'dissertation thingy'," I thought as my waking world faded into empyrean.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Belldandy was up late talking to Kodama and her fellow Ninjettes. She had concluded that Mara had possessed them, making one of their number write the kanji for "death" on the wall of Cevn's bedroom. There was a significant gap in their memories...they couldn't recall much about the night Cevn packed up and left.

After discovering this, she decided to keep it to herself. Tired, and somewhat amused by Megumi's brave dramatics earlier, she headed for her bedroom.

"Elder Sister, I need to talk to you!" Skuld said, sitting up in her futon bed as soon as Belldandy shut the shoji door. Belldandy knew immediately by the serious cast of her voice and the brooding expression behind it...that Skuld wanted to discuss something important. She sat up and turned to face her younger sister, smoothing out her long tan brown tresses of hair with a practiced motion.

"Yes, dear Skuld. What do you wish to talk about?"

"Belldandy, I've noticed that something has changed between you and Keiichi. I didn't think much about it at first, but it kept bugging me. Then I noticed you reading that magazine...and I realized that you were reading an article on...I just can't say it, no matter how much I know that Keiichi loves you."

Belldandy blushed.

"I..I had prepared myself for the possibility that you and Keiichi might... But I didn't really think that it could happen between one of _us_ and one of _them_! I've been angry for so long at Keiichi for taking you away from me...now I feel that since you and he...snff...I feel that he's taken you away from me even further. It sucks! It sucks! It sucks!

"Why is it that he can give you something...snff...that I can't! I feel terrible. And alone. Why did you have to give in to him? WHY?" she wailed.

Belldandy watched her younger sister with a pensive expression. She was embarrassed that Skuld had figured out on her own that she and Keiichi had made love with each other. She had wanted to tell Skuld when the time was right...which wasn't now.

She flashed on the notion that she could explain away the magazine as an attempt to 'become prepared' in the event that Keiichi wanted to be physically intimate with her. But she realized that Skuld would see through any deceit she might devise. Beyond this, it simply wouldn't be fair to Skuld to be lied to...especially with an issue as sensitive as sexual relations.

"How do I explain it to her when she's still a child in so many ways?" Belldandy pondered.

"I feel that Keiichi once more has come between us. The closer you get to him, the further away from you _I_ feel. I'm just a kid...I don't know anything about how you must feel. About love. IT'S SO UNFAIR!" Skuld lamented.

Belldandy almost gasped when she heard Skuld admit that she was still a child.

"But Skuld, you're not a child...not a kid. You've become a young lady in these past several years with the mortals. Just the fact that this kind of thing fails to escape your attention is a sure sign of your maturity," Belldandy challenged her. She looked dreamily upward in the air and drew a sighing breath.

"Yes, love is something that can never be described...you have to experience it firsthand. So I won't even try to make sense of it to you, Skuld. You will have to find your own answers. And you will have to become comfortable with the word '_sex_'"

Skuld flinched as Belldandy said _that_ word. She wanted to argue with Elder Sister, but a sense of caution won out and she decided to let Belldandy have her say.

"Keiichi and I _have_ made love. We have become sexual in the mortal sense. And it is _wonderful_ being with him! I have no regrets that we have done what we've done. But it doesn't diminish my love for you, my dear Little Sister!"

"But...that's not how _I_ feel! No no_ nonono_!" Skuld countered in a staccato burst of words. Belldandy sensed that Skuld was on the verge of throwing one of her patent Skuld-fits.

"Why _can't_ I understand it? I see mortals in love all the time...and it's so gross. So yucky. Look at Megumi and Genji. They _hang_ on each other all the time! Stupid mortals fall in love so easily! They want to do this...sex...without even having feelings for each other. How do you know that you have _enough_ feelings for Keiichi? Enough to say that you're in truly love with him?"

"Skuld...I love you enough to tell you the truth. Right?"

"Yes."

"Has you ever noticed Keiichi...lying to me?" she asked. Skuld knitted her brows in deep reflection for a moment.

"No," she admitted weakly.

"Has Keiichi ever lied to you?"

"No," she again replied, wondering where all this was leading.

"If he didn't love me, do you think that Keiichi would be concerned with trying to be so truthful? Wouldn't he be dishonest instead? Wouldn't he lie to you and I?"

"No, he _always_ seems to be truthful with us. He must feel something towards you...but is it love?" Skuld countered.

"Skuld, I want you to remember this. If we spend all our lives questioning whether the warm, caring feelings that we experience towards others _are enough_ to qualify as 'love', then we'll miss the _actual_ experience of love. Love isn't something that can be demonstrably measured," she explained.

"It just_ is_."

Belldandy watched Skuld's face, a little mirror of her own face. Skuld was trying hard to grapple with her words.

"Just like how I love you. You're my little sister...and I can never spend time questioning how much I love you...because I'm _already loving you_," she said to Skuld in a firm soft voice.

Skuld looked at Belldandy thoughtfully.

"Okay...I'm going to talk to Keiichi in the morning!" she decided aloud.

With her mind made up, Skuld lay back down on her bed without even finishing the discussion.

"Oh no!" Belldandy thought, dreadfully envisioning the difficulties her mortal boyfriend would face when asked to define love by her analytical little sister.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

It was the fifth day. I had been interviewed for the student newspaper and the Peoples Daily yesterday during our dinner break. Urd was _still_ in her minuscule form. I was worried that she might be trapped. Lin had to walk me to my dorm room yesterday; I was almost delirious from the mental effort I had expended in countering all the turgid and relevant points of argument. Only three members of the committee seemed to have relaxed their inquiries somewhat; I still faced a unanimous critical opinion against my work. I felt as if I was being probed with steelsharp drill bits of intellect. And since a portion of my work was a recent production of my metallect, I lacked the comfort of a vis a tergo..the familiar, yet essential nucleus of ideas from which theory-sets germinate.

I got up early and headed for the pavilion at the center of the Nameless Lake. BeiDa was built on the premises of an Imperial retreat dating from the Qianlong reign in the Qing Dynasty. The Nameless Lake was located on the 'ancient' east side of the campus, near the fabled 13-tiered Water Pagoda. There was a narrow grass-lined walkway that extended out to an island in the middle of the lake. The lake itself was oblong, extending roughly 200 meters by 100 meters. It was shallow, its surface dotted with floating waterlilies and protruding water reeds. The Pagoda was octangular with benches built alongside its perimeter. These could accommodate up to 40 people who wanted to rest and enjoy the view of the lake. Also attached to the little island was a stone boat...it was nothing as ornate as the Marble Boat at the Summer Palace. I sat on the end of the Stone Boat and watched the sky rise through the color spectrum from black to light azure.

My mind felt like the early morning mist that cloaked the lake, wafting in between the slender curves of the reeds. It was almost ethereal...so much had happened this week. I had stretched my intellect to its fullest. I had softened my heart to its gentlest. I didn't know what was left, except that I would plod forth like all of humanity into the unknown 'beingness' of the next moment. The future awaited me...and I could calmly embrace it. I knew that I wasn't alone.

I entered the auditorium, hoping to turn the tideswells of doubt among the committee.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Keiichi was busy performing engine maintenance on his motorcycle in the garage section of the compound. After traveling all over Japan for several weeks, he had decided to spend this weekend doing stay-at-home work. He had been hankering to work on his bike during the summer break, but with the Urd chaos, any bike work was put on the back burner. Bell-chan and Skuld were both upset again...Urd hadn't called in over two weeks. Cevn _did_ call, leaving a message that Urd was delayed, mentioning something about "micro-deformity." Belldandy had to explain that one to him. But that was already eleven days past the date Urd had set for their return. He had struggled to buoy the spirits of two disheartened Goddesses, but now he needed a break. So he planned ahead for today, to finish his upgrades to his bike.

He watched as Skuld walked up with an ambling gait to observe him at work.

"This is curious...she's hardly ever interested in any work I do to my bike," he noticed. Keiichi remembered the only time that Skuld had worked on his bike...she had begged him to let her repair it...and then she overstressed the engine mount and most of the structural loadbearing points. He rode it and it flew apart about 30 meters down the road. This incident had been the precursor to the Robot Wars rivalry between his sister and Skuld.

Skuld watched him in silence. She had been bitterly disappointed in Urd's delay; thus she had been really tetchy and moody.

"If _she's_ here because of something other than casual interest, there's gonna be trouble," he thought with a foreboding. "She never wants to talk to me when I'm alone."

Keiichi sensed like he was being sized up by the youngest Goddess for some unforeseen reason.

"Skuld, do you wanna help me with this set of brackets? It would really be great if you could fasten the other side while I tighten this side."

"Sure," she said in a level voice. Keiichi handed her a ratchet set and watched her go to work tightening the bracing bar next to the engine.

"What does she want?" he asked himself. In a wild roam of his imaginings, he felt that he was engaged in a test of wills with the Norn of the Future. Then a strange memory passed through his mind, a Christmas many years ago when he had watched a film called The Christmas Carol. A man named Scrooge was visited by the ghosts of the past, present, and future. Keiichi recalled that the old man nearly shit in his pants when he was confronted with the Ghost of the Future. The future is the harbinger of fear; Scrooge was much more afraid of the future than either the past or the present. Skuld was not to be taken lightly.

"Keiichi, why did you have sex with my older sister?" Skuld asked casually.

_Clank!_

"_Owwww...shit!_" Keiichi cursed. He was so taken aback by her question that he slipped the ratchet out of its socket and crunched his finger. As he recovered his breath, his first mental response was "it's none of your business!" But it _was_ Skuld's business, whether he willed it that way or not. It _had_ been Skuld's business for over three years. All the death threats. The silent treatments. The badgering of Belldandy. The sabotaging of races and vehicles. All of this, because Skuld disapproved his being with her older sister. Sibling possessiveness and jealousy.

He looked at Skuld, diminutively seated on a workbench on the other side of his bike. She looked like a very beautiful normal 12 or 13 year old girl. Pure. Innocent. Clear-eyed. But he knew that she was far from innocent...this little girl had just blasted him with the most _uninnocent_ question anyone could possibly formulate. Or _was_ she innocent? Her rivalries with Keiichi and Megumi suggested childish impetuosity and brattiness.

"How do I answer _that_?" Keiichi wondered as his survival instincts rushed upon him...he surveyed the immediate vicinity for sight or sound of Banpei, expecting Skuld's robot to come whirring around a corner with a pole aimed at his groin.

"Banpei's not going to bother us. I can wait as long as it takes for you to answer my question," Skuld calmly stated as she crossed her arms.

Keiichi was rendered even more defensive by her intuitiveness. He finally recovered himself enough to pull a stool over by the workbench, then he sat down facing Skuld.

"How did you know?" he asked calmly.

"Oh...I just kinda figured it out. You know...I'm good at figuring out things," she said with a hint of a smile. Then her face regained its serious mien.

"Skuld...we were going to tell you eventually. We wanted to be sure that we could all talk about it sensibly," Keiichi stated with a hint of embarrassment, holding his hand to the back of his head.

"You mean that you wanted to make sure you could say it just right, so that you could convince me that what you did with my sister was okay. But I'm _not_ convinced," she accused him icily.

"Skuld! It takes time to sort these things out," Keiichi replied in an uncertain voice. "We're still figuring out what this...new area means for our relationship."

"You _don't know_? You went and did that with her and you didn't know what would follow?" she said with clear disappointment. "You didn't plan for any consequences?"

"Unlike you, I don't know the future. Neither does Belldandy!" Keiichi countered. "Time for us means only the here and now. Believe me, we spent a lot of time talking about what it means for both of us."

"But it didn't take any time for you to take advantage of my sister!" she said spitefully. "Let's look at the facts: Urd was gone. My sister was upset...going out of her mind with grief and desperation. You and she were alone on the other side of Japan, away from all her friends and me. And then you came in and took the initiative at the point when she was weakest! You took advantage of her!"

"That's not freakin' fair, Skuld! That isn't how it happened, and _you know it_!" Keiichi said in an exasperated voice.

"How do _you_ know, Keiichi-kun?" Keiichi felt wounded by Skuld's formal means of addressing him. "How do you know that you're not just justifying it? How do you know that it was the right time?" He heard this and felt himself turning towards anger.

"We both agreed that the time was right! It was a _mutual_ decision, made by your sister and I when our minds were clear and free!" he answered, almost shouting.

"THAT'S NOT GOOD ENOUGH! That's _my_ sister you're messing with! You're turning her away from me, and I don't like it! She's no longer the same! She's reading 'Primadonna Lady'! Next thing you know, she'll be serving you on hand and knee. As if she isn't already. She is a _First Class Unlimited License Goddess_...and you're making her act like she's in bridal training! Why couldn't you have just left things the way they were?"

"BECAUSE I LOVE HER! I LOVE BELL-CHAN WITH ALL OF MY HEART!"

Keiichi fixed his eyes on Skuld. Skuld stared angrily back at him, not batting a lash.

"How do you know that your love for her is enough? And you better answer me the right way or else I _will_ summon Banpei...and you know what that means..."

"I don't have to answer you! How the hell do you expect me to know if it's enough or not? You're just a kid...you've never been in love the way Belldandy is in love with me! In fact...I'm not going to play these games with you anymore!" Keiichi yelled as he stood up and backed away.

"_BANPEI!_" Skuld shouted between cupped hands.

Keiichi watched with an almost detached perspective as Banpei and Mini-Banpei whirred around the opposite corners of the house and herded him back to where he had been sitting in front of Skuld. Any time he tried to walk around the mechas, Banpei would block his way with that long steel pole he carried for warding attackers and mini-Banpei would simply roll in front of him.

"Skuld, stop this right now!" Keiichi said in a commanding voice.

"Or what? You'll go running to Belldandy, whining and complaining? Then you'll do...that disgusting thing so you both can escape from reality? Will that reassure you that you love my sister enough?"

"You brat! You're...impossible!"

"Why don't you be a man and stand up for yourself? You're such a pushover, Keiichi. You're indecisive and selfish..."

"STOP IT!" Keiichi screamed as he picked up a pipewrench from his toolkit and raised it over his head. Blinded with rage, all he could think about was hitting Skuld over the head with it. Something snapped inside of him, popping him out of his mounting rage. He looked up at the wrench he was holding and instead he hurled it with both hands halfway across the compound. Falling to his knees, he realized that he was hyperventilating. He tried to slow his breathing down to reduce his light-headedness.

"Well, this is it...I've finally pissed off Skuld enough that she'll never talk to me. I can't believe that I was actually thinking of braining her with that wrench! Am I going insane?" he worried, the sunstruck sandstones in the driveway wavering in the hot afternoon sun.

He looked up to see Skuld staring at him with tears forming in the corners of her eyes. He raised an eyebrow in surprise at her sudden change in mood. His surprise deepened when unexpectedly, she leapt forward and grabbed him in a tight hug.

"A moment earlier, she's a total tigress and now she's a kitten," he thought as she clung onto him. Skuld looked up at him with warmth in her eyes.

"Oh, Keiichi. I'm _so_ sorry! You really _do_ love my sister!"

"Duh!" Keiichi thought.

"Skuld, what do you think we've been doing the past three and a half years? Wake up and smell the coffee!" he said in a lecturing voice.

"I don't drink coffee, you baka! Keiichi, I _had_ to know for sure. I love my sister enough that I would get mad if anything threatened my love for her. I wanted to see if you loved her enough to get mad at me. That way, I could tell whether or not you love her as much as I do. I saw it in your eyes, just for a moment...you were actually planning to hit me with that wrench. Then, I knew that you _really_ love my sister." She giggled and added, "You should have seen your face! Ha hehee!"

Keiichi was torn between a deep desire to chastise Skuld and a sense of respect. On one hand, she had risked herself to try and find out just how much he loved Bell-chan. On the other hand, this was another one of her ridiculous childish stunts.

"I think you need to have a talk with your older sister, Skuld. That wasn't exactly the best way to go about trying to find out how I feel about Belldandy," he commented dryly. Skuld looked at him with a mournful expression.

"But I didn't know any other way! You said I was a kid...so let me be a kid once in a while! So I made a mistake! But I have to learn somehow!" Then she held her hand forth and bowed in front of him in apology. Keiichi felt the rest of his ire soak away when he saw the sincere regret and confusion in Skuld's eyes. He patted her on the head gently, then hugged her.

"You're not a kid...you're a maniac. You know that? Don't you try pulling something like that with anybody else, you hear?"

"Nope. I've learned my lesson. I'll wait until I have a boyfriend of my own, then I'll do it to him!"

Keiichi could only shake his head. His emotions were fried from this short but intense interchange with Skuld. She picked up a ratchet and twirled it.

"Hey, don't you have an engine to remount?" she teased. "Lemme help!"

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

It was supposed to be over two weeks ago. I was feeling like Luther at the council at Worms. Dr. Zhao had confided in my that everyone on my dissertation committee had volunteered to spend as much time as needed to examine my work, because of its novelty. So they were far more invested in this than I could ever imagine. As each day of discussions, dialogues, intellectual bantering and heat-seeking missile interrogations went by, I began to fear that it would _never_ end.

Before I entered the auditorium, Lin came up and gave me a good-luck kiss on the cheek. She had been such a good friend since I arrived at BeiDa. There were many nights where we would just sit and talk about our lives. I was really going to miss her.

"You know that means we have to get married," I joked with her about the friendly kiss. A few decades ago, this would have certainly been true...

"Not a chance!" Lin snapped back. "You've already got someone. By the way, where is she?"

Lin had asked after Urd every morning before I entered the auditorium. All I could tell was that I didn't know; this was less of a lie than fabricating some excuse.

All morning, I stole brief glances around the building, looking for Urd. But my newly-found heart friend was still absent. I seated myself at the wooden desk after a quick break for lunch and prepared myself for another onslaught of questions. I wondered if this would be like the swimming of the English Channel: the most difficult part of the swim being the last mile...when one is most susceptible to fatigue.

Dr. Terasawa fired off a series of criticisms about the methodology that I employed which I called aquantum metastasis. This concept was one of a series of 'dimensionalities' that comprised my proposed codification of thought. Basically, each symbol or attribute that I identified had to formulate as an actualization...as the actual thought or thought matrix...otherwise the symbol itself would be irreconcilable with the thought it represented and thus the entire system would be worthless. I finally asked Dr. Terasawa to summarize his arguments. He did, then I located the sequence of thoughts on the matrix and asked him to review them. With a look of astonishment, he told me that by reading them, he had just mentally reiterated his argument. I suggested to him that the function of aquantum metastasis was akin to the notion of syntax...one could see a word and obtain a definition or feeling. But because of the aquantum properties, there was no vacillation in apprehension, and metastasis ensured that each thought-form would be able to join with another. He looked at me with an expression that said, "I'm blown away!"

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Each night, I came home to an empty dorm room. My roommate was spending time at his girlfriend's house, leaving me the whole room. I couldn't find any sign of Urd.

For the past several days, I was feeling grueled to death. Question after question spilled out of the committee, each one a potential thorn in the balloon of my research. At least the sessions weren't going past 8pm. But I was feeling like my wits were being released from their habitude. My metallect had also sparked itself at various times, completely out of my control.

Early fall was coming to Beijing; I felt a cool breeze flowing into my room through the open windows.

"Where is she?" I addressed the unseeing wind.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Two days later, the only non-academic committee member conceded that she could find no fault with my research. Abbess Omao was the foremost exponent of the Kyoto school of Zen philosophy, despite being ostracized by the National Buddhist Association. She was the transmission bearer of the Kataku Jinne lineage, and the Abbess of the Butsudankyoniji Zen nunnery. She was the only non-academician on the committee; I had no idea how Dr. Zhao had found her. Since she was outside the academic tradition, she could concentrate on the more obtuse and overt spiritual principles. She had bigger fish to fry than simply the defense of a branch of science or philosophy. I had seamlessly blended Heidegger, Kyoto Zen and a wealth of existential metaphysics into one package. She smiled beatifically at me when she finished; I was reminded that she was not ego-invested in her efforts. She just wanted to experience a form of truth.

This only left the two stubborn psychometricians from Germany and the US, and a cultural geologist from Cairo. I knew that, in the case of the statisticians, they would rest their arguments only when they exhausted all means of proving the Null Hypothesis. My defense had turned into an offense, as they were entrenched in an apologist position...because they could no longer challenge the Progressive Hypothesis that I had outlined.

Sleep. Defense. Sleep. Defense.

Where was Urd?

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"I resign my challenge," the German psychometrician announced. Then he looked at me, pulled off his reading glasses, and offered me a smile.

"Congratulations," he said. I thanked him profusely in German. The guy was in his 80s, had studied under Jung, had _taught_ Milton Erikson, and had corresponded with Albert Einstein. He had come out of retirement to fly here and participate on my committee. Any thanks on my part seemed grossly inadequate...

Dr. Zhao was looking at me with an almost fatherly pride. I remembered his tale of how both of his sons had perished in the insanity of the Cultural Revolution...they were relocated to a cadre that was smelting metals in the countryside, and then were killed when the poorly designed and hastily constructed foundry exploded. He had been through so much in the past forty years; purges, political confusion, death threats, censorship and vigorous intellectual harassment. I was glad that I could offer him something to take vicarious pleasure in. It brought a tear to my heart to see him like this.

To a standing ovation, Dr. Zhao pronounced that I had successfully completed my candidacy for the Ph.D. The committee of fourteen men and women who had been so vigorous in their criticisms of my research were now of a different heart. Warm handshakes and accolades followed. It was all too much. It struck me when Dr. Zhao actually hugged me warmly.

I had earned my doctorate!

Dr. Terasawa bowed to me and offered his handshake. It was my turn to be blown away when he told me that I should start work on my Nobel acceptance speech. I must have looked at him with an expression of disbelief, because he told me that he was in total earnest. Abbess Omao blessed me with a benign smile and a prayer...I replied with a deep bow and quote from the Heart Sutra.

The whole thing reminded me of a victory celebration. These old geezers had transformed into the most youthful bunch I had ever seen, already passing the champagne glasses around. They seemed to have been animated by the whole process of my dissertation defense. Dr. Zhao announced that he was organizing a dinner on my behalf for this evening. I felt my shy nature ascend to the fore...any celebration on my behalf would cause me to be extremely intimidated. When I graduated with my undergrad degree, I only invited four friends, because I couldn't handle a big party. But now, I couldn't excuse myself out of being the center of attention. I was just a normal guy who had worked his ass off through ten years of college, despite the depression and the trials of recovering from active drug use. Dr. Zhao tapped me on my shoulder and pointed past me.

I turned around and I saw her.

Urd was standing next to my desk; Lin was standing next to her with a big smile.

I had concentrated so intensely on the last six hours of debate that I had not even once looked into the audience.

"Urd, I'm sorry I didn't see you..." I stammered in apology.

She held a finger up to her lips to silence me. She was right, I _should_ shut up or at least shut away the feelings of guilt I had. She set a rose and a card down on the table where I had endured three weeks of 'star chamber' type grilling. I smelled the rose, then opened up the card.

_"I'm so proud of you. _

_Urd"_

I kept my back turned to the rest of the professors on the other side of the room so they wouldn't see the tears cascading down my face.

"I told her about a Chinese legend of love. In the past, man and woman couldn't touch...so when one wished to 'touch' the other, they did it indirectly. When a woman wants to show love, she places a love-gift on the table for her man. That way, she can 'touch' her man," Lin explained, visibly moved by my reaction.

"Love: giving and receiving hearts forever," I replied with the colloquial definition of the character "ai", before my hand came to my face. I was at a total loss...I was totally overwhelmed by emotions of joy and gratitude. Urd had taken our 'no touch' situation and turned it--with Lin's help--into one of the most memorable romantic moments of my life. I felt like Kami-sama Himself had winked at me in approval and encouragement.

Maybe I was going to make it.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --


	25. Pt 25: Bindings

**Part 25: Bindings**

"Big Sister's coming home today! Big Sister's coming home today!" Skuld announced to no one in particular. She was fraught with anticipation as she awaited her oldest sister's homecoming. Eight weeks was an incomparably minute amount of time...relative to the almost 130,000 years of her existence.

But Urd's disappearance had seemed to last _forever_ to Skuld.

"This must be what the mortals call 'psychological time'," she designated the unexpected twist of the TimeStream. It was so strange how time had become so unraveled since she arrived on the Earth. Upon assuming her mortal form as an Earthrealm Trainee, Skuld had lapsed into measuring time in _human_ years! Back on Yggdrasil, a human year was equivalent to the passing of a few hours in the time scale she was used to. But in _this_ sphere of being, what the mortals reckoned to be a several weeks...was a period of time wherein an entire adventure could be played out. And an entire adventure meant...an entire motion of emotions.

And Big Sister had been delayed over _two weeks_!

Belldandy was busy hanging up a banner that read "Welcome Home, Urd!" in the living room. She smiled at Keiichi with thumbtacks gripped between her teeth, drawing chippled laughter from Skuld and he. They had printed up a bunch of banners and posters on his computer in an effort to give the house a festive atmosphere.

Urd had called last Friday to confirm that she was returning on Tuesday. Apparently, Cevn had some business on behalf of N.I.T. to finish up in Beijing. She mentioned something about his being a "campus celebrity", but Keiichi didn't understand her misunderstandings. But he _did_ remember what it was like last March, when he was fishbowled with celebrity after winning the Solar Energy race. Belldandy and Skuld were so excited, they were acting like kindergartners.

So he and Megumi had skipped school yesterday and today.

Nobody was rushing to decorate the house, but it seemed to Belldandy to be the _proper_ thing to do. After all, she sensed that the reason Urd and Cevn had both left so suddenly...was because something _here_ had driven them away. Belldandy wanted to make their homecoming to be as warm and charming as possible. This way, everyone would all be better possessed to discuss the real cause of their sudden departures.

Megumi was dancing to a "Denki Groove" remix CD as she swept the living room tatami mats, while Genji was out cleaning Cevn's little rock garden. Genji caught a few glimpses of her hipsway and reminded himself that he needed to gather his courage and ask her out to a club. Unlike him, Megumi had rhythm...and a oo-la-la figure that he loved to watch as she walked around the house. Also unlike him, Megumi and many of her classmates at N.I.T. had been caught up in the neo-techno dance music rage that was current among the technical colleges. Genji's tastes were more conservative, he preferred J-pop and American top 40.

As Megumi swept a pile of dust out the front porch, she felt a sense of relief knowing that the two were safe. She knew beyond a doubt that Urd could take care of herself...or at least get herself taken care of. But Cevn...after that scare with the "shi" character for "death" in his room, she had become very worried. She didn't want to lose her favorite teacher at NIT.

"How strange...he's coming back two weeks _after_ school started," she wondered. "I wonder when I'll find time to chew him out?"

Skuld was skipping around the living room, engaged in mentally rehearsing how she was going to greet Urd. By design, she envisioned herself hugging Urd and crying...then after all the sappy emotional stuff was out of the way, she planned to soundly rank her out! Then she would show her the Holophotic Videmeotron that she built; the mecha that was so vital to their efforts to locate her. Then she would accept Urd's praise and apologies. Again and again.

Especially the apologies.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Keiichi finished printing the last banner, then carried it out for his girlfriend to hang up. The living room hadn't looked this decorous since the wild party held at the end of the school term. "Bell-chan sure has 'the touch' for party decoration! Our temple compound looks like it is in the midst of a matsuri! Indeed, things are going to be pretty festive here," he mused, half expecting to see Shinto priests and carnies roll in at any moment. He looked up at his girlfriend, who was standing on a footstool pinning rolls of party paper on the ceiling.

"Belldandy is especially beautiful today!" he observed to himself with a knowing smile.

Belldandy had mentioned that she was planning to dress to the nines when they went to Narita to pick up Urd and Cevn. As the morning progressed, the foundry of his worrying plummeted black smokeclouds of apprehension. Keiichi began to wonder if she was a little _too_ engrossed into this welcome home party. Bell-chan had splurged on paper lanterns, party paper, whistles and charms. Concerned, he walked over to Megumi to discuss this.

"Don't you think that Belldandy is going a little too far with this welcome home party business? It looks like New Year's in here!" he said to Megumi, who was outside clearing off the wooden porch that encircled their house. She stopped sweeping and looked at him, listening to him voice his misgivings. Pausing to reflect for a moment, she replied to her brother with her fists on her hips.

"If _you_ had been gone for over two months...well, I'd probably be doing the same thing! Besides, I think it's just her way of working things out. She's been without Urd for a long time. Let them be sisters, okay?" she pointed at him, and then winked. They both watched through a window as Belldandy hummed to herself as she hung up another banner. Keiichi smiled at Megumi's common-sense answer. With a mischievous glint in his eye, he playfully tried to wrestle the broom out of her hands. It was an old game they used to play as kids. Megumi deftly yanked back on the bamboo broom, and then whacked him on the backside with the bristled whisk.

"Get to work, you slacker!" she teased.

Keiichi made a mock-frightened face and backed away in feigned terror. He ambled into the kitchen, where all the available countertop space was covered with a huge assortment of food arranged in trays. "This is a _feast_!" he said with admiration. Belldandy had outdone herself this time. Megumi was right...he hadn't even considered the therapeutic aspect of the two sister's involvement with this welcome home party. Belldandy was up late cooking last night. And all morning, Skuld had been literally pacing up and down the length of the house, deep in some realm of thought.

At least things were going really well between Megumi and Sora. He was genuinely relieved to see that the two's friendship had been reconciled. Megumi had known Sora since primary school...they were the closest of friends despite the fact that Megumi was one class ahead of Sora. He still didn't approve of Megumi's unorthodox method to 'prove' her innocence to Sora. But his embarrassment that night was offset by the priceless look of shock on Sora's face as his Bell-chan floated towards her. He laughed again at the visual memory; Sora's wide-eyed, mouth agape expression as her round-rimmed glasses slowly slid off her nose. He looked at his sister, sweeping the wooden verandah.

"Soon, I'm going to bust your chops about that night's 'stunt', _little_ sister!" Keiichi promised himself. "Right now, you're in luck...I'm just being gallant enough to wait until after the homecoming."

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Mara peered at the object in front of her. At first glance, it was the spitting image of what the mortals called an 'orchid'. The blossoming flower was thickly petaled with lively spur-like foliage; its bloom richly resplendent with black floreate traced with blood-red veins. The dark green stem had a profusion of orange thorns and hair-like bristles. It was actually quite beautiful, in a darkling vulgar sense. She had several of them in her lair in Vanagdrasil. Beauty in disarray. Beauty that would serve a higher purpose.

"This will cause _total_ disarray when the trusting fools get it," she thought with fluid malice as she gingerly placed the flower vase into the box. She folded the top of the box shut and then sealed it with wax and tape. On the box she wrote in sloppy kana:

_"Rare Chinese Flower Arrangement. From China. Handle careful."_

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Dr. Zhao drove Urd and I out to the Capital Airport. On the way to the airport, he gave me a series of humorous cartoon-like sketches he had drawn, caricatures of the members of my dissertation committee. By the twelfth day, he had taken a slightly perverse amusement in his colleagues' efforts to disprove my research. He avowed that he had accepted the validity of my research on the ninth day. Then he surprised me by offering me a permanent guest lecturer post during the summers at BeiDa.

"You be sure to bring your lady friend along when you come back!" he said as we entered the terminal. By the tone of his voice, it wasn't a request as much as it was an expectation. One that I was more than willing to fulfill. I was going to miss our debates and his tragicomic stories of 'the old days' of Communist China.

Urd was dressed in some weird kind of outfit that only she could concoct. It was very dressy in a sci-fi sort of fashion, with all sorts of belts, strategically-placed zippers, and sew-on pockets. Yet it mysteriously managed to convey a casual look. Urd was usually fond of wildly offsetting bright colors, darks and whites in vivid contrast...her outfits reminded me of some of the loud dresses worn by some Filipino women in Hawaii. Yet this outfit was almost Belldandyish in its subdued earth tones. As we boarded, she pressed by me for the window seat and jumped in it, brimming with excitement.

"I've never flown in one of these...I wanna watch out the window!" she explained.

"Uh, excuse me Urd, you did _fly_ here, didn't you? But because you were in a blackout when you left Narita Intl., you didn't notice a thing, right?" I challenged. Urd reacted to my remark with a scowl.

"Cevn! When we get back, we're going to have a serious talk about my drin...about my power supply."

"Yes we are. I don't mind if you drink, as long as you respect my bounds...and you behave like a..."

"Hey!! I said we'll talk _later_, not now!" she teased, but also warned. I could sense the argumentative potential in her expression.

The jet engines whirred to life and the deafening roar of takeoff gripped us both, pressing us back into our seats. Urd was so engrossed in looking out the window, it shortly steamed up with her breath.

"A Goddess who's fascinated by an airplane ride?" I muttered to myself. Another enigma...piling onto the mountain of mysteries that started forming when I came to Japan.

The flight to Tokyo was scheduled for three hours duration. It was hard to believe that the two countries were so close by airflight...but light-years apart in culture. I remembered the long, boring flights from Hawaii to the Mainland, each lasting five to six hours just to fly from Honolulu to LA.

"Cevn...how are we going to tell them?" Urd asked, breaking my reverie.

That was a loaded question.

"Tell them about_ what_? About why we each choose to drop out of their lives? Tell them about us? Explain how I saved you from drowning? Justify why I didn't return a single one of their phone calls? Try to make them understand why you hid yourself away in another continent and became one of China's most talked-about TV models?" I wondered aloud, feeling exasperated.

"Don't you _dare_ breath a word about my modeling career...or my swimming adventure! You do, and...let's just say when I get my powers back, you'll be in deep kim chee," she said, gripping me with her emerald eyes. Her face scudded into a serious mien.

"Yeah. We owe them an explanation. And don't you forget that _you_ owe them, just as much as me! Remember who's been doing most of the calling? You've been busy with your Ph.D. and N.I.T. thingys...while I've been the one talking to them. I can sense that Keiichi and Megumi really miss you. And I'm positive that Keiichi is really disappointed in you, too," she added.

"Thanks for sharing, Urd," I said dryly. "Skuld is the one I'm worried about, Urd. She's so sensitive."

I was trying to purge my mind's visions of an angry Keiichi.

"She's tougher than she looks. She's a...what do you mortals call it? Hehhee, she's...an 'enfant terrible'!" Urd commented. I laughed at this description of Skuld.

"But I'm glad she doesn't have her powers. I would hate to have expletives written all over my face right after I came home," Urd remarked. She was obviously trying hard to keep good-humored about our arrival...which only served notice that she was deeply apprehensive.

I paused, reflecting about how my friends back in Makuhari would react to the changes between Urd and myself. A stray wisp of reserve filamented my imaginings, casting them into a confused cobwebbery.

"You know, I think that we should play it cool about us. It's already going to be a lot for them, just with us coming back. But also, I think we need some time to ourselves. I know I need some time for myself...to sort things out," I offered.

Urd turned visibly red in the face.

"Uh-oh!" my mind shifted into eggshells-on-the-floor mode as her face quivered with barely controlled anger. I braced myself.

"WHAT?! I gave you the happiest moment of your brief life on that bench three weeks ago! A..and now you're going to ignore it? You're going to act like _nothing _happened between us when you're around my sisters? Huh? How could you be so insensitive...so cowardly! What is it...I'm not good enough for you? And why do you have to 'sort things out'? We haven't been together long enough for things to get things mixed up! Feh! You're not good enough for me! Hmmph!" Urd folded her arms tightly across her chest and stared out the window.

I hate the silent treatment.

And to my dismay, I realized...Urd could easily be silent for a century! With a sinking reluctance, I knew that I had tread upon an exposed nerve in Urd's psyche. Hopefully, I hadn't forfeited all my gold stars! But her reaction was understandable, since Urd was really amped up about this reunion with her sisters. She had even been touchy about the baggage earlier today...something I should have paid more attention to. I could empathize with her desire to 'show off' the new change in her life. But showing off she was! I could just imagine all the passengers, their eyes seeking us out as the source of her loud outburst.

"Urd...I am _proud_ to be with you!" I finally said, trying to crack the iceflow between us.

"What? Huh?" I realized that I was so nervous that I had spoke to her in Chinese. I rephrased it in Japanese.

"Then why don't you act like it?" she demanded.

"Because it _isn't_ an act. It's how I feel...and right now it scares the hell out of me!" I admitted. Urd leaned forward, my admission suddenly interesting to her.

"Why would your relationship with me...be something to be afraid of?" she asked campily. Once more, my guard came up as I recognized her familiar fascination with my vulnerability. I didn't know if she was going to chastise me or shift into her manipulative mode.

"Urd...I don't want to screw things up. Dammit, I've been single for so long...I don't know what to say or do! I guess I don't feel polished in the art of love yet," I defended nervously.

"I can polish you up to a shine in no time, honey!" she urged pertly. I felt myself being drawn in by her smile. Reluctantly, I turned my head to avoid the estimable force of her seductive affect.

"_That's_ what scares me. You're so aggressive, Urd...and since you're a Goddess, it's outright overkill. You probably don't even know it most of the time. Rightfully so in a sense, since you've believed for Lord knows how long that you would never be in love again. But I just wish we could both take it slow for now. I wish you could see...that you already have me: heart, mind and soul. I'm not going to turn away! But it would be easier for me to turn _to_ you if we just let our feelings for each other blossom into their own...in their own time."

Urd looked out the window. I could tell that she was in some kind of deep ponderance, poised upon a decision.

"They're going to know. I bet you that they'll figure it out in a few hours. Especially Belldandy...since she's seen me in love before!" she stated matter-of-factly.

"Yeah," I acknowledged. "I don't think we can pretend otherwise. I'm just saying that it would be prudent to let them come to us once they figure it out. Give them the initiative, so that they may feel a little bit more secure. You can talk to your sisters, and I'll handle Keiichi and Megumi."

"Well...duh! How did you think it would work out any other way?" she teased me, whacking me on the shoulder with one of the JAL in-flight magazines.

"But, in all reality, I was thinking. It would be best that I tell Belldandy...and leave Skuld to you, my dear scholar," Urd stated. I looked at her, feeling a waxen apprehension as my heart sank in my throat at this dire prospect. The thought of being roundly cudgeled by Banpei wasn't very inviting.

I almost missed Urd's mirthful wink.

"Urd, I'm going to really need your help on this one. Explaining that I'm in love isn't exactly my forte."

"Jeez, you can explain Yggdrasilian math to bunch of savants, but you can't explain how you feel to your friends?" she teased. I felt a stabbing feeling, somewhere in the chest region.

"Do you remember the day I gave you my kokoro? Or did you somehow forget that it took everything I had just to burst through that emotional garbage inside of me," I countered in a bristly voice.

"Ooops. Sorry. Objection noted," she said with an apologetic smile. "Don't worry, just leave everything to me."

After a few minutes, her shallow habit faded...and I saw rapt apprehension on her face.

"Urd, how do _you_ feel?"

"I'm a little scared. Reluctant to face my mistakes. Completely embarrassed and worried," she acknowledged.

"If it's any consolation...me too!" I affirmed. I was trying to keep my mind clear of the scenarios that were rapidly playing in my head like an outta control slideshow. After a moment's pause, Urd interrupted my thoughts.

"Cool! Do you realize...that we just had our first major argument, babe! Wasn't it soooo romantic..._Honey_?" Urd said, shaking her fists in the air like a little girl who just won a schoolyard badminton tourney.

_"Cut it out, Urd!"_

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

_"Delivery for Belldandy and Skuld! Is there a Ms. Belldandy in the house?"_

Skuld set down her Transdimensional Rectifier (Compact Model Mk. V) and looked at the door. She felt like she was getting in the way of all the adults who were bustling through the house with decorations. So she invested her time in working on one of her mechas. She set down the machine and walked to the front torii gate.

A freight deliveryman was standing in the entryway with a small box. He flashed her a clipboard with a receipt and she signed it.

"You sure are a cute little girl. This must be for your mommy. Make sure she gets it," he said kindly as he handed her the box and departed. Skuld frowned at his back as he walked to his truck.

"Why do all the mortal men think I'm a _girl_," she growled to herself. "Idiots! If they only knew!"

She returned to the temple house and carefully sat the box down on the table.

"Belldandy!!" she called out. Her sister arrived a moment later. Skuld noticed that she had changed from her housecleaning clothes into one of those spectacular dresses she wore. She had on a orange pullover lace sweaterjacket, with a flare sleeved sunlight-yellow long dress underneath. She was holding a short-brimmed dress hat with a sunflower tied to the front by a flesh-colored ribbon. Skuld regarded the autumn colors of her outfit.

"I hope that I can wear dresses like that when I get big. Well, actually...NOT!" she thought with a smile.

"Who would I be fooling?"

Skuld started giggling at the thought of wearing one of Belldandy's frilly dresses...and how embarrassed she would feel in it. Skuld's fashion sense was leagues away from her sister's daintified preferences.

"What are you laughing about, Skuld?" Belldandy asked, cheered by Skuld's laughter. Then she noticed the cardboard box.

"Oooo! When did this come? Wow, it's from _China_! How exciting!" Belldandy remarked joyfully as she read the label on the box. Skuld perked up when she heard it was from China.

Urd must have sent it in advance!

"Can we open it now! Please? Please? Please?" Skuld insisted, waving her arms frenetically.

"Well, I don't see why not," Belldandy answered as she retrieved a pair of scissors from the kitchen. She handed them to Skuld, who meticulously carved open the box.

After all the wrapping paper was pulled away, the two sisters beheld a strange-looking black orchid in a Chinese vase.

"Pretty!" Skuld shouted with admiration. "Urd must have sent us this Chinese flower for the house because she feels sorry!"

Both Goddesses craned their necks to get a closer view of the flower arrangement. The black petals were lined with strange rouge veins that seemed to pulse with life. A distinctive musky smell wafted in their nostrils. Out of the corner of her eye, Skuld caught a glimpse of an orange blur flashing past the porch doorway. It looked like some kind of large bird.

Belldandy looked at the flower, then at Skuld.

"Something's funny here...don't you think Urd would have told us if she was sending anything, especially something as fragile as this flower?" Belldandy reasoned aloud.

Skuld remembered the last unexpected package that came in the mail...the Demon Rally video game. It reminded her of the time they won a free vacation at the hot springs; that had turned out to be another plot by Mara to disrupt their happy lives. Her face flushed with fear at the memory. Then she felt a rigid sensation shoot up her back, filling her with apprehension. Her neck muscles tensed. She looked at the wrapping paper that had served as filler in the box...it was wadded up pages of weekly manga magazines and several Tokyo newspapers.

Her eyes widened in fright as she gasped...

"Skuld!" she heard Belldandy shout in warning as a dark red cloud burst from the flower.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Mara attuned to one of the surveillance Sere-hawks to watch the proceedings. She picked at her fangs with a bone pick.

"It's about time to file these to razor sharpness again, I think," she muttered. On the desktop computer, she watched as Belldandy and the Skuld-brat opened their little package.

Mara had hoped that all of her blessed rivals would be present for the unveiling of her little 'gift'. But it wasn't meant to be...and she was definitely bummed that none of the others in the house were there. She would have loved to see Keiichi and Megumi get nailed by her potent surprise.

But these two...it was more than enough! She sucked in her breath and held it, gripped by the suspense of the moment. As the Black Orchid discharged its cloudy aromatic curse on the two unsuspecting goddesses, she leaned closer. She could see the reflection of her broad grin on the face of the computer monitor.

"HAHAHA haah hee heeeeh eheeh! I am _such_ the little devil, aren't I! Hoo hooo wah bwah ha ha! How _wickedly_ devious I am! This is going to be _so much fun_!!"

Past her reflection on the screen, Mara snickered at the image of two goddesses staggering around like Urd when she got really drunk. Both were frantically waving their hands, trying to fan away the cloud that was forming in air around them. They looked like bunraku puppets whose limbs were drunkenly akimbo'd as the result of tangled strings.

Her grin widened as Skuld fell to her knees, then Belldandy's legs buckled and she collapsed on her ass in a most undignified manner. This brought another outburst of mirth from the triumphant Demoness. A moment later, both Goddesses were out on the floor, unconscious and oblivious to what had just happened.

"MOLTEN!!" Mara shouted.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Belldandy came to in her room. The curtains were pulled shut, casting the room in subdued daylight. As her eyes adjusted to the lamplit room, she spied a glass of water nearby. She reached over towards it...but her arm seemed to have a life of its own as she missed the glass and tipped it over instead.

Her throat was parched. She convinced herself that her accident with the water glass was the result of some kind of leftover grogginess from whatever had knocked her out. Belldandy knew in an instant that the flower was Mara's attempt to try and ruin her day...the important day that her Elder Sister would be coming home!

Confused and angry, she tried to clarify what had just happened. She remembered the flower spraying some kind of cloud at her and Skuld. Then she felt dizzy and weak, and finally everything vortexed black.

"How long have I been unconscious?" she wondered with mounting fear, hoping that she didn't miss the ride to the airport.

Keiichi was bent over her, his face etched with concern. He smiled as her eyes focused on his handsome features. Even though his eyes admitted "I'm in a total panic", he could still smile reassuringly at her! Belldandy again felt thankful that this wonderful mortal man was the love of her life...that he was so much a part of her now.

"It's all right!! You're safe in your room. I was really worried that neither of you were going to wake up from whatever that damned plant sprayed you with. I saw the whole thing from the yard...it scared me to death! I wish Urd was here...maybe she could figure out what just happened! But, at least you're okay," he exclaimed.

At the sight of her mortal boyfriend, Belldandy felt her heart relax into a pillowed softness.

"If my Keiichi's here, then I'm safe!" she realized with relief.

"Keiichi?" she said gently. Her throat was ablaze with dryness and pain. All she wanted was a glass of water and to be held. Keiichi looked back at her with a bewildered expression.

"Keiichi...my love, I was so scared! What happened to me?" Belldandy said as she reached towards him, wanting to rest securely in his arms. To her astonishment, he pulled away from her grasp while gently pushing her off of him. His eyes looked wild. Belldandy noticed that something about her body felt...strange. It seemed much lighter than before. She tried to hug him again and he stood up suddenly, avoiding her reaching arms.

_"EEEEEYAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH!"_

Belldandy shuddered up as she heard someone scream nearby. Frightened, she reached towards Keiichi again, seeking the comfort of his embrace. He pried her arms away from his body by her wrists and backcrawled out of her reach, panic and uncertainty written on his face.

"_S..S..Skuld_! W..what are you d.._doing_?" he shouted shrilly to her.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

_"Ladies and Gentlemen, we are approaching Narita International Airport. We will be landing in approximately 20 minutes. Please extend your tray tables to their upright position and fasten your seatbelts..."_

"Hnnh!"

Urd looked up away from the window as Cevn woke up. She couldn't believe that he fallen asleep on their short three-hour flight. After their conversation, she became engrossed in watching the asymmetrical terrain of Japan pass under her. Clouds seemed to rush up at her as the plane gently began its descent. It reminded her of youthful play amongst the Zonal Cloudforms in Yggdrasil. One of her favorite pastimes was flying _just right_, so that she could pass through the upper roils of the cloud tops and burst out the other side. The clouds in Yggdrasil were much more beautiful and ornate than the plain white and gray cottonpuffs of the Earthrealm, yet there was enough atmospheric artistry outside to remind her of her childhood fancy.

"I bet they're all waiting for us at the gate!" Cevn commented, remembering the hazy confusion of his last visit to Narita.

"When I talked to Belldandy last night, she said that they were all going to meet us. Yet I could sense that she has something up her sleeve," Urd told him.

Urd's observation made Cevn feel even more restless. He was glad that the whole group was coming to meet them; the sooner he could apologize for his lunatic lapse, the better. But the notion that Belldandy was hatching some kind of surprise...this was something to be potentially fearful of. He had never seen Belldandy in a vindictive state.

"Could she experience _that_ emotion too?" he wondered. Cevn had always assumed that the Divines possessed the same emotional spectrum as the mortals. His short time with the three Goddesses had borne this perception out to an extent. When he considered Mara alongside them, representing the Demonic half of the Divine world, almost all of the human feelings were exemplified. From Mara's brute rage to Skuld's jealous spats to Urd's coquettishness to Belldandy's complaisance; the divines exhibited many human qualities. Yet for all of this...they weren't human.

Therein was couched the paradox.

_Clankch!_

Both Urd and Cevn felt their spines unravel to sit up a little straighter in their seats as the landing gear lowered into place. The roaring wind around the jet's fuselage informed them that they were almost home.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Skuld felt herself buoyed in a gray undefined space. Her consciousness struggled towards her; fog moored wherever she looked. Shadows and plays of light seemed to dissipate the murky vision into glass beads of reality. She felt a sense of her body returning as she noticed the familiar ceiling fan form in front of her. She was lying prone on her own futon in her bedroom! The covers were pulled up tight to her chin. Her throat was roaring with pain; it felt as dry as the desert.

Desert...desert...dessert. Mochi! Shaved Ice! Ice Cream!

"I..ice cream," she weakly whispered.

"What happened to me?" she wondered. Her body felt _different_! It possessed the kind of cumbrous sensation she would have when she was sick with the flu and could barely move. As she inhaled a fuller tide of air, she noticed that her chest somehow felt heavy. With an effort, she reached her hands up to rest across her chest as she felt a deep cough coming. A ripple of disconcertion immediately followed.

"Wha..." she gasped hoarsely. Instead of the smooth flat surface of her bustless chest, she felt two soft round globes of flesh resting on her ribcage. Sucking in her breath, she explored with her hands...her fingers glancing against a pair of firm round breasts covered by a soft brassiere. Before she could even realize what was happening, she screamed. Her instincts had been scattered completely.

"W..what are you d..doing, Skuld?" a distant voice seemed to reply to her terror. She heard a frantic shuffling and turned her head in the direction of the voice.

Skuld's mind was ill prepared for what she saw. In a fit of visual meltdown, she saw _herself_ sitting up on a futon reaching towards Keiichi, who was completely facefallen with shock as he shuffled backwards away from...

Her next several screams drew progressively louder.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

It had been a challenge, obtaining this stuff.

Mara had to negotiate between two sets of her Vanagdrasilian comrades to get just a single eyedropper of the potion. She snickered aloud when she realized that Belial and Meya would be paying Dandra for these few drops of potion with stolen artifacts kept in Mara's own prizewinning lair.

Artifacts that she herself had purloined from Dandra when she was at a party he was having in his lair a mere 7000 human years ago.

She imagined his surprise once he found out that her two friends were offering the exact items that he had been missing. Dandra was an addictive collector of human artifacts; similar to a certain type of person the mortals termed "Otaku". As a Demon, he was a geek. His avid collecting had several bents of interest, especially towards the clothing of famous mortal females. Mara, via Belial and Meya, had offered him the girdle of Helen of Troy, a jail dress of Lizzy Borden and one of Marie Antoinette's bonnets. She knew that the chance to replace these three items in his collection would boost his greed enormously. Enough to consider trading three drops of this rare and precious substance for the set.

It had a delicious taste; as Mara delicately savored the vision of Dandra screaming in rage when the exchange was over and he realized that he had been scammed.

"Serves him right for hitting on me like a sledgehammer whenever I went over to his lair to party," Mara said to herself with a smile. "But...farbeit from me to avoid taking advantage of a lovestruck obsessive male Demon who happens to be one of the best potion alchemists in Vanagdrasil," she said in a mock-innocent voice imitative of Belldandy. She drumpounded her small fists on the desk and kicked her legs as she bellylaughed.

"I'M FEELING MUCH BETTER! IT'S GOOD TO BE ALIVE!" she shouted with glee.

Reaching over to a skulltray, she held up the small eyedropper between her thumb and finger. Squinting her eyes, Mara relished the view of the innocuous-looking object.

"The most sinister things come in small packages," she quoted the old Vanagdrasilian saying. Taped to the dropper was a handwritten ID tag, which read:

_"Arcane Soul Transposition Elixir. Handle with _--Extreme--_ Caution (unless using this Elixir to curse mortals)!"_

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

As they exited the gangway, Urd and Cevn peered all through the crowd for familiar faces. Narita Airport was bustling with international travelers, even more so now that it was nearing the fall business term. Groups of students, squads of salarymen, packs of OLs and tearfully reuniting families filled the terminal.

Urd looked crestfallen as the crowd thinned out 15 minutes later. She leaned forward tiredly; looking like a soccer player whose team just was beaten in a grueling overtime match. Cevn was concerned at the lack of any reception by Keiichi and Co., but he was even more concerned about how Urd was taking this.

"You all right?" he asked.

"I...I can't believe this! After they made such a big production about our return! Where the _hell_ are they?" she said resentfully, her disappointment shifting towards resentment. She started pacing up and down the concourse in front of a wall of TV monitors.

"Look...maybe something come up! An emergency or something. Let's just try and keep calm and..." he suggested.

"How can you be so calm at a time like this?!" Urd asked, her reddened angry face offset by two tear-rimmed eyes.

"Urd...we need to get our luggage, then call and find out if they're okay."

Moments later, Urd found herself at a phone box, trying to reach her sisters. Her sense of disappointment grew, as there was no answer.

"This is _totally wrong_! Either they're on their way here or something major has happened!" she announced. Closing her eyes, Urd focused her strength on her clairvoyant faculties. Cevn watched her concentrate with deep effort.

Urd snapped her eyes wide open with worry.

"C'mon, we need to get there quick! Something's definitely happened!" she shouted, suddenly desperate.

Moments later, they hastily collected their travel bags and boxes, and then hailed a cab-a-van and set off to Makuhari.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Keiichi was completely disoriented. He was backed into the corner of the sister's bedroom, where he warily watched Skuld. She had just tried to hug and kiss him a moment earlier! Then Belldandy woke up and saw Skuld trying to hug him...and started screaming.

This reaction on behalf of his girlfriend was the first thing that made sense ever since he had found both of them lying on the floor of the living room, with some kind of weird-looking black and red plant between them. Riveted by a engrossing panic, he decided to carry them both into their bedroom. Not knowing what else he could do, he had tucked them in their futon beds and waited. Keiichi was very uneasy, as he was all alone in the house. Megumi had driven everyone else to do last minute shopping for the upcoming party Bell had planned. To his profound relief, they were only unconscious for about 30 minutes before they came to.

His eyes almost popped out of their sockets when Belldandy hastily sat up from her resting position and started fondling her breasts through her dress. Then Bell-chan screamed again. Meanwhile, Skuld had started screaming too when she saw Belldandy. Then Skuld started rubbing her chest, as if she was expecting to have a bust or something there.

"Which brings us to now..." he brooded, absolutely nerve-wrecked as both sisters stared at each other in shock.

"W..what is going on! I have _boobs_!" Belldandy shouted in abject frustration. Keiichi felt a strange impulse to say something glib, like "of course you do!", but he stayed his tongue. This was not amusing in any sense of the word.

"Could they be playing a prank on me?" he wondered. This whole situation was too fantastic...too _bizarre_!

Skuld suddenly got to her feet, and in a dash she was sitting in front of him on her haunches. She started shouting in a desperate shrill voice.

"What's wrong with my body, Keiichi dear?" she asked over and over again. Keiichi was taxed to his utmost to keep his cool. He gasped as Skuld ran her hands up and down her chest and hips. Then she reached up and grabbed a strand of her hair. Examining the long silken black locks, she froze for a moment.

"Why is my hair _black_...like Skuld's?"

Keiichi shook his head, uncertain to the point of dizziness. But the look on Skuld's face...was paled with disbelief. Then Skuld jerked forward and grabbed him by his shirt.

"Keiichi, what's wrong? What has happened to me, my love? My body's changed, my hair is black...I have the body of a little girl! And these clothes...they look like something...S..skuld w..would w..wear..."

"Belldandy!" Belldandy shouted at Skuld. Keiichi's mind was fainting in coils by this point.

"WHAT IS GOING ON HERE?" Keiichi and Skuld shouted back to her.

"WOULD YOU BOTH SHUT UP FOR A MINUTE!"

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

The three sat silently in the sister's bedroom, corners in an imaginary triangle.

Belldandy was the first to speak.

"I..I think I understand what just happened. Keiichi..._I'm_ Skuld," his girlfriend stated, finally becalmed after screaming herself hoarse. Keiichi looked at her with total disbelief as she pointed at Skuld.

"And _she's_ Belldandy!"

"No no no no NO! That's impossible! _She's_ Skuld...and _you're_ my Bell-chan!" he shouted, gripped with angst.

"Skuld's right. I'm the Belldandy that you love, only somehow I've been placed in Skuld's body. I..I can't believe it myself, but I _know_ I'm me," Skuld said in a barely-controlled voice.

Belldandy nodded her head, affirming that her older sister had figured it out.

Keiichi burst out with nervous halting laughter.

"Ha ha h..ha! Okay, you guys, you've totally fooled me with your joke! I give up! Please...could you stop pretending now? We're going to miss meeting Urd and Cevn at Narita!"

The two sisters looked at each other with frustrated expressions.

"Keiichi, remember that first night when we were in Okayama?" Skuld said sweetly. Her brown eyes seemed to bore into him with a spellbinding amorous soulshower. Keiichi felt his face flushing with embarrassment. Rarely had Skuld had looked at him so ardently. Keiichi remembered that goofy time when she started developing her Goddess powers...and later, during Peorth's first visit when Peorth had mickeyed him with one of Urd's love potions. He gasped as Skuld's face took on a very soft loving gentleness...she was almost glowing with love.

"She mentioned _Okayama_!" Keiichi realized with a start, momentarily tearing himself away from Skuld's entrancing look on Skuld's face. He remembered Okayama all too well...it was there that he and Bell-chan had first made love to each other.

"O...Okayama? Bu..bu..but.." he stammered as Skuld continued.

"Keiichi, do you remember how I gave you a backrub after we argued and then you fell asleep in the middle of it? Remember how you told me at Nikko that you wanted the time to be right when we made love for the first time? Remember how frustrated I was when we couldn't find Urd? Remember what I told you in Hiroshima...about how our love isn't an open book just because you're the 'test mortal'? Remember what it was like after our first time together? When we stayed in bed all day the next day? Do you remember how I filled the air with shimmering rainbows and cherry blossoms in our hotel room that next morning?"

Keiichi's mind was clamped in a riotous tempest. Here was _Skuld_ telling him about things only Belldandy could know! He reckoned that it was totally impossible that Belldandy had described their first intimate moments to Skuld in such detail. Or in any detail at all. He glanced over at his girlfriend with a disappointed expression, only to find that Belldandy's face was drawn in an angry scowl.

"I _don't_ want to hear about how y..you and he..." Belldandy shouted angrily...then she held up her arm and started crying in her sleeve. Keiichi felt an insistent Skuld shaking him by the front of his shirt.

"Keiichi, _no one_ knows about these things...except you and me! I _am_ Belldandy! Please believe me!" Skuld beseeched him.

"My world is going to hell!" he thought desperately.

Suddenly, Skuld bounded forward and tackled him, wrapped her arms around him as she knocked him on his back. A second later, she brought her lips to his and kissed him deeply and passionately.

EEEEP! his brain screamed as he went into noodle-like paralysis. Keiichi was too shocked to recoil from the sudden embrace...then he felt fingers stroking his spiky strands of hair. He felt his scalp relaxing under her touch. Skuld was touching him and kissing him exactly like Belldandy did! His face blanched as all the blood rushed out of it.

"_DON'T_ USE MY BODY!" Belldandy screamed. Her face was livid with rage. "Even if you are my own sister, so help me...I'll _hurt_ you if you do that again! You have no right to..."

Skuld reluctantly broke the embrace and sat up, straddling Keiichi's belly.

"Get off of him!" Belldandy yelled angrily. Skuld looked at the glowering Belldandy with a heartfelt apologetic expression.

"Skuld...I'm sorry! I had to do that...it's the only way I could convince Keiichi who I really am. I may not look like myself, but I know that my dear Keiichi could never mistake one of my kisses!" she explained.

Belldandy rolled her eyes.

Keiichi couldn't believe it! Skuld...in Belldandy's beautiful body? Belldandy...in Skuld's girlish body? He looked at Skuld again, mystified. Then he looked at Belldandy, wondering if it was really Skuld in there. To his shock, he was getting aroused...

"Don't you dare touch me...er...her!" Belldandy warned.

"Definitely Skuld!" he finally decided. The three looked at each other in wintry silence until another shrill voice burst in on their quietude.

"Keiichi, y..you PERVERT! W..WHAT did you just do to Skuld?"

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Megumi, Genji and Tomohisa had arrived home to find the living room empty. There was an open box and some kind of exotic plant on the floor, surrounded by tape and various stuff that still needed to be cleaned up.

"Those slackers! They didn't do a thing!" Megumi said in disgust, hands on her hips. "We did all this running around while they just sat around. They probably munched up all the snacks too!"

"Those guys are soooo lazy. My cousin is probably making out with his girlfriend and Skuld-chan is more than likely tinkering with some mecha, oblivious to all the work that needs to be done," Tomohisa agreed.

Genji looked at his watch.

"Hey! We've gotta get out of here pretty soon if we're going to make it to the airport in time. I heard on the radio that there's a traffic jam near Narita!"

Megumi darted a "now you tell us!" look at her boyfriend. He had probably known that for hours! Before she could comment on the tardiness of Genji's news, she heard animated shouting coming from the sister's bedroom. It sounded like Keiichi was locked in heated argument with Belldandy and Skuld.

"When is he going to ever learn?" she thought, shaking her head.

Her curiosity piqued, she said "C'mon" to the two guys in a quiet voice. This was a primo chance to eavesdrop! The three walked down the hallway to the first door and Megumi lightly rapped on the wooden frame. She waited discreetly for a few seconds, then slid the door open.

_GASP!_

It felt like all the air had been squeezed out of her, as if she was a smithy's bellows. Both Genji and Tomohisa looked like they were suffering strokes and/or extreme constipation.

The sight that greeted her eyes was indescribably _ecchi_. Skuld was straddled atop Keiichi...and they were tightly pressed in a deep full-on passionate liplock kiss! Belldandy was watching with an angry expression, the personification of an erupting Mt. Fuji.

"Oh...my..." Megumi stammered, too shocked to say anything about the horrible sight. Her mind felt like it had gone out to lunch in the middle of a fieldful of stray cats.

A voice was shouting. It seemed like it was her own words, but yet it sounded like it was emanating from a distant point...

"Keiichi, you PERVERT!"

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Six people sat on the tatami in the sister's bedroom, corners in an imaginary sextant.

"Well, now what are we going to do?" Megumi asked, numb from the shock of the incredible explanation that Keiichi, Bell and Skuld had offered her.

"We're definitely not going to make it to the airport on time," Genji stated, drawing more irritation to the fore of Megumi's mind. She heard Tomohisa snicker...he had a deviously mirthful grin on his face.

"Skuld...guess what? Now you can finally say that you're not a kid! You're _all woman_ now! That means that we can go on a date now, right? Right?" Tomohisa interjected excitedly.

Keiichi buried his forehead in the palm of his hand in resignation while Belldandy and Skuld both gave Tomohisa a good dose of grimace. Megumi reached for a nearby pillow and thrashed her cousin on the head.

"You're..an utter idiot!" Belldandy finally said.

"Actually, he's a testosterone-driven _little_ teenager!" Megumi commented in disgust, drawing a narrow-eyed scowl from her cousin.

"H..hey, I was just being honest," Tomohisa said defensively.

"The day you get honest is the day that I marry...Urd!" Keiichi said.

"Keiichi, you wouldn't do that, would you?" Skuld teased him with a sly grin. For a moment, he forgot that it was Belldandy in Skuld's body and almost rifled back some rapier verbal barbs. Cutting himself short, he remembered the old adage: "talk is cheap, but words, once said, can never be bought back."

The deeper issue of identity confusion again grabbed his attention.

"How in hell are we going to tell you two apart? This...is so freakin' _ridiculous_!!" he bemoaned, his voice tinged with the frustration that comes on the heels of futilely wracking one's mind for a difficult solution.

Belldandy pulled her back up straight.

"I've got it! Once again, Skuld proves her superior genius intellect and advanced reasoning skills! The Goddess of the Future prevails!" she said with musket-fire enthusiasm. She pounded her hand in her palm, then held her arm upright in a triumphant gesture.

"Give me a break, Lime," Keiichi muttered under his breath as he saw her flash a V-sign. Skuld was acting just as childish as Limu, the 'little girl' Sabre Marionette character.

"We'll call you _Bellkuld_!" Belldandy stated, pointing at Skuld. "Since you're really Belldandy, the first part of your name will tell us who you really are...the second part designates that it's my body you're in," she explained.

Megumi and Keiichi giggled at this as Belldandy pointed at herself.

"And that makes me..._Skuldandy_! Isn't that a beautiful name? If you call me Skuldandy, then you'll know that it's me in my older sister's body, so you don't think I'm her."

"This is all so confusing," Genji said tiredly. His mind struggled to wrap itself around the concept. He finally drew upon a mental image that made sense to him. It was like Noh drama, only the 'mask' was someone's body. Skuld wore Belldandy's body as a 'mask', and vice versa. With a flash of panicky gratitude, he realized that Megumi could have been involved in the switch! Thankfully, she had volunteered to drive!

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

As they shuffled to the tearoom in a daze, Keiichi looked at Belldandy-in-Skuld's-body...and realized with a sinking heart that they wouldn't be able to kiss. Or embrace. Or hold hands. Or make love...

"After weeks of blissful passion...nothing!" he thought with profound disappointment. "This is going to be pure torture!"

"I guess that means no sex for you, Keiichi!" his sister joked. Keiichi flinched into a shoulderhunch, feeling his blood turn ice cold. Once more, his sister proved that she had this _way_ about her; it almost seemed that she could read his thoughts sometimes. Her ability to do this was unsettling...and uncanny.

His mind was vexed at her intuition.

"Does she know about Bell-chan and I becoming physically intimate? How could she? Ohmygod! Duh! She's a woman...of course she could notice the changes in us!" he reasoned.

Both Skuld and Keiichi looked at Megumi with embarrassed alarm,

"H..hey, it's a joke! J..just joking!" she added, tying on an apologetic smile and waving her hands in front of her. Skuld and Keiichi looked at her as if they had been let off the hook, while Tomohisa hooted with mirthful laughter.

"And you call _me_ a pervert? Seems like you're the one with the sexual obsession. _Biii-da_!" Tomohisa quipped back to his female cousin. Megumi's face briefly flashed red, consumed with frustration.

Relieved, Keiichi looked at his younger sister. Megumi stuck her tongue out at him and he made a face back at her.

But he knew that _she knew_.

"Ah ha!! How come you're so flustered at my little 'joke', Big Brother?" Megumi whispered to herself as she recalled Keiichi's primed expression.

"Good for you, Keiichi...you're finally a man!" Megumi thought, feeling a prideful happiness for her older brother. "It's about time you made love to her! Now if I could just get Genji here to work through _his_ embarrassment..."

"W..what are you looking at me like _that_ for, Megumi?" Genji defensively asked, noticing that she was staring at him with a coy smile, looking like a cat ready to pounce on a mouse.

"Would you guys stop clowning around with your lovey-dovey sappiness? What about Big Sister and Cevn! We're _hours_ late!" an irritated Skuldandy interjected.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Cevn and Urd watched out the side windows of the van as they pulled up to the temple compound.

"You guys live in a _temple_?" the cabbie said with astonishment and envy. "My wife and two kids live a cramped little maison in the Harajuku district. You're so lucky!"

Cevn hauled the baggage out of the back of the van, then offered to pay the driver. Urd stopped him with a flickering motion of her hand and pulled out a generous fare and tip.

"I'll pay him, honey. After all, it's your money," she said. Urd giggled as confusion played over Cevn's face.

"_My_ money?" he said in exasperation.

"I'll explain later. Hmmm...where is everybody?" she said, curious at the lack of any signs of life in the temple. Concerned, Urd ran towards the house, leaving Cevn to struggle with the luggage and boxes. She felt her excitement rush to her head, almost making her dizzy with enthusiasm as she dashed into the front doorway.

The living room was empty! Banners were hung from the ceiling that read "Welcome home". It looked like someone had almost finished preparing a welcome home party, and then abandoned it in a hurry.

Cevn set the last box down on the wooden porch, then came in and stood next to Urd. He was just about ready to yell "anybody home" when Skuld and Belldandy came piling out of the tearoom...rushing out of the hallway towards them followed by Keiichi, Megumi, Genji and Tomohisa.

"You're home!" they both yelled as they nearly tackled Urd. Crying, Urd embraced her two younger sisters, who were deeply sobbing. Hugging each other tightly, the three cried into each other's shoulders, releasing an aura of sadjoy that moved everyone in the room into sympathetic tears.

Keiichi wanted to comfort all three of them; his heart was so stirred by the sight of the reunited sisters. It overpowered him how much they loved each other.

"Urd doesn't know about what happened to her two sisters," a tiny voice chattered in the far recesses of his mind. But he ignored it. As a silent witness to this outpouring of emotion, he felt a joyous burthen wildly raining upon each strand of his soul. He was so happy for Skuld and Belldandy. Especially Belldandy. Bell-chan would never know how much of her sadness _he_ had felt alongside her while Urd was missing. Every single bathing of her grief resonated in his own heart, mixing together as naturally as tea and water.

It was strange, watching Belldandy crying her tears in Skuld's body...but he knew that it was his girlfriend on the inside.

"Elder Sister, you're back!" Skuld said with gratitude.

"Big Sister, you're home!" Belldandy shouted in a bubbly voice.

"WHAT!" Urd shouted.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Eight people sat on the living room floor. In my mind, we were positioned as if we were the corners of an imaginary octagon on a shoji board. I heard the silence as if it was choruses recorded backwards on a CD. I could only imagine how Urd was taking all of this.

It was too grotesquely bizarre...

A little while ago, I had returned to Makuhari after being in China for nine weeks. Amazingly, the woman that I hated most in the world weeks ago...was now in love with me. And I definitely was in love with her...my affections towards her moving me to empathic tears when I saw how happy she was, reunited with her two younger sisters. I fully realized, perhaps for the first time, how each sister had a key that unlocked a big portion of her other two sister's hearts...

Then Urd flipped out.

Keiichi and Megumi were trying to greet Urd and myself, while Genji and Tomohisa looked on. Since her sisters were smothering Urd with kisses and hugs, they came over to greet me. Keiichi only briefly looked me in the eye...his welcome gesture was as forced as the perfunctory actions of a politician. Megumi was cold in her greeting as well, hugging me only briefly.

Skuld and Belldandy were possessed in their enthusiasm with Urd's return.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"WHAT IN VANAGDRASIL IS GOING ON HERE?" Urd shouted in the now-silent house.

Keiichi recovered his senses enough to suggest that they all sit down on the living room mats and have a conference. To Urd's utter surprise, Skuld walked over to the kitchen and came back with tea service for all. Belldandy complained that she wanted peanut butter mochi snacks, not tea.

Then they told her and Cevn.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

The shock wasn't going to wear off anytime soon.

Urd was stunned breathless with the explanation Belldandy and Skuld offered. Actually, Bellkuld and Skuldandy. Which would be their new names...until they figured out what caused the transposition and could return them to their rightful bodies.

"_If_ we could figure it out," Urd worried aloud. "This is obviously the work of a top-notch alchemist!"

On the way home, Cevn had told her how he had anticipated making heartfelt amends to everyone in the house for his wanton neglect of their caring and their feelings. But this situation warranted a deliberate procrastination of any apologies on both their parts. This was very serious stuff...but Urd was also relieved that it had postponed her apology.

She explained with growing dismay to the seated group how she had noticed right away that something was amiss. Skuld and Belldandy had addressed her as their older sister..._in each other's manner_!!

To Skuld, she was always "Big Sister" with a capital B. This was because she was twice as old as Skuld...and she knew that Skuld viewed her as the ultimate protector of the three. On the other hand, Belldandy used the more adult-sounding "Elder Sister". They were both adult Goddesses, but since Bell was her junior by a few deca millennia, this was the endearing term she used to acknowledge her somewhat older sister.

With each moment, Urd could sense how much Belldandy seemed like Skuld, and vice versa. Belldandy had appeared girlish to her, as if some hidden force had rolled back 120,000 years of her existence. Urd recognized Belldandy's immature demeanor...but Skuld was an enigma to her. She was more shocked with Skuld's sudden gravity and dignity of character. She had never seen Skuld behave in this manner.

"So...you're Bellkuld and you're Skuldandy? Oh Voy, how am I goin' to remember this?" she said, pointing at her two sisters.

"I need a _big_ bottle of sake to deal with this one!" Urd decided as she went to the fridge and busted out a magnum-sized bottle.

"I knew it would still be here!" she shouted triumphantly.

"Duh, Big Sister! You think any of us would get bustchops loaded on that terrible tasting stuff you call 'good'? And now, of all times, you want to get drunk?" Skuldandy confronted her.

"Urd..." Cevn said warningly.

"Not now, Cevn! I need this! Look what happened to my sisters! And none of you are going to stop me, no matter who you think you are!"

Bellkuld was looking at me with an unreadable expression. I felt a wave of anger wash over the sandy shores of the recovering addict in me while Urd quickly chugged down a large quantity of sake. I had to remove myself from the sight of her drinking, so I went into the kitchen and brought out two snack trays. Skuldandy immediately went for the candied rice snacks while the rest of use munched on sushi and crisp gyoza.

Megumi was looking at me oddly too. I was worried that my chastisement of Urd for wanting to drink sounded less like a concerned friend and more like a domestic disputation. It _had to_ in some subtle manner, because now I was confronting her...as her boyfriend.

I reminded myself to tone it down a little.

"Hey, if we're going to have a party, then lets have a party! No more gloomy faces! Everybody should be happy!" Bellkuld announced cheerily. It was almost funny, watching her in Skuld's 12-year-old body as she performed the role of hostess to perfection. She set out a veritable feast for all of us in the dining room and on several foldout tables in the living room. As I was eating, I felt that the air remained dense, churning with pent-up tension.

Megumi tugged at my arm and invited me to talk to her outside.

"Cevn, we need to talk. NOW!!"

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Megumi had almost pulled Cevn away from the table as she stood up. They went outside and Megumi escorted him to a distant corner of the temple grounds, away from the main compound building that we lived in. She turned to face him suddenly and angrily yelled.

"HOW COULD YOU JUST LEAVE US LIKE THAT!"

The emotional force of her anger was like a strong blasting sandgust...she watched as Cevn flinched and stepped back in reaction. Cevn realized that this was coming, but he thought it would be Keiichi that would be the first one to his broach resentment at his sudden departure. He just wanted to hang his head in shame, but he knew he shouldn't hide from her bitterness by looking at the ground.

"Do you know what I went through these past months? You _left_ us without as much as a single word! Then I found the kanji for 'death' that you wrote on the wall in your room.

"I didn't write any..." he tried to interject, but Megumi was too bound up in her justified resentments to stop and listen.

"I'm not done with you yet, Cevn!" she snapped, angry at his interruption.

"I was _terrified_ that you were going to kill yourself or something! And then you didn't come home. After a few days, I realized that you must have gone to China. I tried..snff..to call you _every day_ while you were gone! They..snff..kept telling me that you were there, but then you didn't call back even once!" Megumi yelled angrily at him.

"HOW COULD YOU DO THAT TO ME!" she near-screamed.

He was startled by her mention of the character for "death" being left in his room. Cevn wanted to ask her about it, but she was too wrapped up in what she needed to say...he couldn't get a word in edgewise even if he tried. He felt a horrible, criminal, rottenness from the inside out.

"I'm an idiot!" he thought sadly, feeling total regret for his decision to split for China.

"Cevn, you come here and acted all nice to us. You became our friend. _My_ friend! I was actually looking up to you! Then you just take off! How am I supposed to know if you care about us? About _me_? You..snff..said you would be a 'foster older brother' for me. B..but obviously, I wasn't important enough to you! I _really_ cared about you, you know. That's why it hurts so much. You're a...snff...I just can't say it...I will say it, you're nothing more than a thoughtless bastard!" she shouted.

Her anger peaking, Megumi reached back and slapped him hard on the cheek.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Megumi glared at me while I felt my cheek sting.

I had to let that one sink in. She had every right to be livid with me, and I knew that I should just let her vent uninterrupted. At least she was being honest...and she was at least discreet enough to do this privately, away from the others. Megumi shouted at me some more, and then slapped me twice again. Her anger waning, she thumped my chest lightly with her fists, then pushed me away and started sobbing again. She cried while she talked about how betrayed she felt...

"Betrayal, Megumi? That's why I left suddenly!" I finally interrupted. I had felt myself withdrawing with each unkind thing she said, but I needed to understand the depths of her pain. Part of making amends is being there, so that those I've harmed can have their say. But enough was enough.

Besides, one more slap and I would need to put some toner on my face to cover up the redness. Megumi was one tough chick when she wanted to be.

I told her the whole story about Urd's impersonation of my therapist. As I explained myself, Megumi looked at me with warmth in her eyes for the first time since I had returned. But before I could offer any kind of apology, she made a beeline to the house.

"What is she doing?" I wondered. With a dawning realization, I dashed after her to try and catch her. She was having an emotional riot...she might lash out at Urd!

"URD, YOU BITCH!" I heard Megumi scream at Urd, hands on her hips in the doorway. I had arrived too late. By this time, Urd was woozy with sake. She stood to face Megumi and assumed a wobbly wrestler's crouch.

"How dare you call me _that_! Tha's the welcome t..that I get affer bein' away for six weeksh? You're jush a mortal...you don't know anythin'!" she yelled back at Megumi.

"And why shouldn't I? Cevn told me why he left us...because you were spying on him by posing as his therapist!" she shouted. The house grew silent...I could almost imagine hearing Megumi's loud voice echoing in the house. I scanned the room; everyone was staring at Urd except Keiichi. Bellkuld and Skuldandy were riveted with this new revelation.

Urd turned and looked at me, her face flush with sake and rage.

"Affer that wonnerful time we had in China, you do _thish_ to me? I supposh you toll her everything! It'sh not enough that my sishters are all mished up by some killa powerful shpell...now you go an' make me inna a villain in fron of everrbody!"

I couldn't dodge the curses she threw at me.

Keiichi turned on me with a vengeance.

"What is she talking about, Cevn? What did you _do_ to her? Why are you trying to make Urd look bad on the day she returns? That's pretty selfish on your part! _You_ left _us_!!" he yelled, his face twisted in rage. I was shocked that Keiichi was being protective of Urd. Normally, it seemed that he regarded her only lightly...except when she was angry with him. But this protective streak was totally out of character for him.

"Keiichi, you leave Cevn alone!" Megumi shouted at her older brother.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"This day...is the worst!" Bellkuld lamented, watching in helpless despair as her carefully planned "Welcome Home!" party dissolved into rampant morass of chaos.

A drunken Urd was screaming and throwing food at Cevn, who was angrily struggling to keep up his end of the foodfight. Her dear Keiichi was in his sister's face; they were pointing fingers towards each other and angrily arguing, reinforcing their arguments by revealing all the family secrets. Meanwhile, Tomohisa and Genji had somehow ducked out of the dining room unscathed. She figured that they probably wisely hiding in Genji's room, safely away from the 'party'.

She wanted to scream.

Bellkuld knew that one of her deafening shouts would put an end to all this petty bickering. But she was in Skuld's body! She _still_ wasn't used to the girlish voice that lent sound to her words.

A shout wouldn't work.

"Hmm...instead of yelling, I'll just create an anger-vacuum spell. Besides, they're all so out of control...reasoning won't help any," she realized.

She moved her hands in a pattern to create a spell that would suck all the anger out of the room.

Nothing happened.

For the first time in eons, Bellkuld felt one of her spells fall flat. Bellkuld looked at her hands in surprise, then in flabbergast. She tried another spell, then encanted a few low-level spells just to see if she could get _anything_ out of her hands.

"Where are my powers?" was all that Bellkuld could think, ripened with shock. She looked again to see Urd ripping down the banners that Keiichi had printed up; she was wadding them up and throwing them at Cevn and Megumi. She must have run out of food to throw.

She felt an elbow nudging her gently.

"Well, Elder Sister, I kinda wonder if it wouldn't have been better if those two stayed in China," Skuldandy said to her in a low voice.

"My powers...are _gone_!" Bellkuld announced in disbelief.

Skuldandy looked at her...

"You look just like Big Sis does right after she gets her license suspended," she told Bellkuld. Tears formed on Bellkuld's eyes as she looked at her hands, rendered magically impotent by the switch in bodies.

"_H..how?_" Bellkuld said in a dazed voice as the shouting continued to craft a din that reverberated through her shock.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Skuldandy had finally reached the end of her patience. Now, her sister was babbling about losing her powers!

"STOP IT, you morons!" she screamed above the din, imitating Bellkuld's hand motions. An unexpected flash extended out from her fingertips.

Megumi looked at Keiichi and started giggling. It felt like all the anger had been drawn out of her by an invisible straw...

In tastefully drawn script, his forehead had the word "moron" on it, partially concealed by his spiky forelocks. She looked to see that Urd had passed into raucous drunken laughter; she too had "moron" written across her face. Cevn was laughing at her, "moron" written on his face as well.

"Oh wow! This...is totally rad!" Skuldandy shouted. "I've got powers. I've got _megapowers_!! Yahooooooo..."

She started giggling and skipping around the house with glee.

"Cool!! It must be because I'm in _your_ body, sis!" Skuldandy said. She grinned ear to ear while Bellkuld sat down on the floor, her eyes off in the distance somewhere.

_"Yahoooooo!!"_

"H..how?" Bellkuld repeated amidst the sillysap giggling.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --


	26. Pt 26: Windsprings

**Part 26: Windsprings**

Skuldandy woke up in her room, her feeling of disorientation bubbling from her insides out as she viewed the morning sunlight illuminating the oversized dimensions of her new body. It almost came as a surprise...she'd slept so hard that she forgot that she and Belldandy had switched bodies yesterday.

"I'm going to _murderize_ Mara if she turns out to be the cause of this!" was the first thought that beckoned her attention. She looked at Big Sister Urd, who was snoring like a male panda on her left side. Skuldandy could smell the 'more than a trace of sake' on her breath. On her other side, her elder sister, Bellkuld, was curled up serenely, almost buried under her blanket.

"In _my_ body..." Skuldandy thought with dismay, her disorientation heightened at the sight of _her own_ petite form gentled in the futon next to her. Skuldandy put a steadying hand to her head as a swarming sense of dizziness accompanied the sight.

Normally, she slept in the middle futon...and at times she felt like she was the buffer between her two older sisters during waking hours as well. Actually, being the youngest _had_ its advantages, sometimes. This was one of those times. She always felt most secure with these arrangements; sleeping in the middle with an older sister on each side. The mortal world held its share of fearful things. The immortal world...possessed even worse things.

"Like plants that cause you to switch bodies with anyone who happens to be nearby!" she lamented, tinged with poignant calumnity towards Mara.

Skuldandy sat up on her futon and grimaced as she examined her pajamas. Little frilly patterns were sewn into them, forming a childishly effeminate zoological discord. Glancing up and down the sleeves, Skuldandy was especially disgruntled with the 'piyo piyo' baby chicks and 'peppo' baby pigs or hippos or whatever the heck they were.

"Why would Elder Sister Belldandy choose such _girlish_ mortal bedclothes?" she wondered aloud to herself in a whisper. Then she thought about Keiichi undoing the buttons to these _same_ pajama tops...and she wheelspinned towards an uncomforting nausea.

"I'm gonna be sick! I gotta get out of these...they're gross and disgusting!" she mentally exclaimed, fed up to the bursting point.

Skuldandy stood up and tiptoed to the closet, careful not to wake her sisters. With a soft "whoosh", she gingerly slid the closet doors open and pushed Urd and Belldandy's outfits down the hamper, creating a pocket of space between them and her own clothes. Her third of the closet was filled with mortal and Goddess outfits; the majority of them styled after the latest pre-teen Yggdrasilian fashions. Preteen as in pre-130,000 years.

"Mmmm...not that one...no, not that one either. Ahhh, _this_ one!" she said with a self-mastering whisper. She selected one of her favorite outfits: a silver long-sleeved pullover top, a navy blue light jacket, a sheen black miniskirt, white cotton leggings and mid-calf blue socks to go with her patent white high-top tennies. She laid out her ensemble on her futon as she routinely did before dressing. Ever since her powers were suspended, Skuldandy had to learn how to dress herself...instead of simply materializing in whatever clothes she wanted to be attired in. She looked at the size 1 top, just barely in an adult size...

She unbuttoned her pajama tops and slid out of them, momentarily fascinated by the bustline on her chest.

"Will mine be this big?" she wondered with a mixture of envy and fear as she looked down her front. She paused momentarily, wanting to examine her suddenly adult bosom with her fingers.

"I can't do that! It would be...perverted!" she realized with a shudder. Quickly grabbing the pullover top so she wouldn't be tempted any more, she tried to slip it on over her head...

And got stuck.

_"EEEEEEEEK!! I DON'T HAVE __ANYTHING__ TO WEAR! _

_ALL MY OWN CLOTHES ARE TOO SMALL!!_

_THEY DON'T FIT! HELPPPPP!"_

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Ohayo," I greeted the three sisters as they entered the dining room. I had been abruptly jarred out of mid-dream by an ear-shredding scream, followed by heated argument. It came from the direction of the "Women's Dorm", as Keiichi had labeled the sister's bedroom. Most of the time it was the "Goddesses' Bedroom" or "The Bedroom"; but when the three got rowdy...it was the "Dorm".

Today was definitely going to be a 'dorm' kinda day.

"What's so 'ohayo' about this morning?" Urd answered with a irritated grumble. I looked up and instantly covered my mouth to avoid laughing at her 'growl'.

Urd had "Too" and Bellkuld had "Small" written clearly on their faces and pajamas in at least a dozen places. Skuldandy had a look of absolute misery on her face, occasionally flinching in response to the irritated glances directed at her from her two sisters.

Keiichi walked into the dining room, surveyed the wickedtense scene at the table, and then suppressed his laughter by what looked like a heroic effort. When I saw the twinkling of mirth in his eyes, I started to giggle. Despite his efforts a few guffaws leaked out...which cued me into a torrent of laughter. It was one of those insane laughing fits where just the sight of Keiichi laughing sent me into bigtime laughter. We were feeding into each other, while the three Goddesses were focusing their ire at us with increasing scorn.

"You two men think something's _funny_?" Urd remonstrated with a red face. We both shook our heads and hands an emphatic "no"...then nature coursed us away in her grasp and we both burst out anew in antic levity. In my mind, it was totally comical...each Goddess had gotten tagged after her own characteristic or situation.

Urd possesses "too" much personality! Bellkuld in Skuld's body is too "small"! It was bizarre to the nth power, seeing Skuld's 'calligraphy' power manifested on her own body. I felt relieved when Megumi, Genji and Tomohisa came in and immediately joined in the contagious laughter.

Safety in numbers, so to speak.

Both Urd and Bellkuld glared at all of us mortals. For a moment, I forgot that Belldandy was in Skuld's body...the intensity of her roiling glare matched the best of Skuld's patent 'Skuld-fit' pissed-off expressions.

Genji had been staying in my room while I was gone, so now he was sharing rooms with Tomohisa. It looked like he had been up late talking with the younger Tomohisa; they both shared tired expressions. Tomohisa was laughing _too_ richly...and Skuldandy wasted no effort to chap him out.

Breakfast was accompanied by a syrupy gloom. I could almost see the internal struggle going on in Keiichi's heart. I could only imagine his situation: here was the woman that he loved with all of his heart...in a 12-year-old's body! Sitting next to her was the beautiful face and body of the woman he had been going out with for over three years...a face that he couldn't kiss because his true love's soul or spirit wasn't animating it. And I had thought my 'no touch' situation with Urd was bad! It was really minors compared to the wretched situation Keiichi was experiencing.

"What is Urd thinking about all of this?" I wondered. Urd had simply soused herself with a few bottles of sake and bourbon last night in an attempt to deal with her sister's dilemma. I couldn't fault her for this; if I wasn't a recovering addict, I would have probably done the same thing were I in her circumstances.

"I have an announcement to make!" Urd said, springing to her feet all of a sudden. Her abrupt change in demeanor gripped everyone's attention. She raised her coffee cup as if to offer a toast.

"Cevn and I are getting married!"

"EEEP...huh?" someone gasped.

I half-gasped, half-choked. I knew that either my face was blanched from the shock or it was beet red from embarrassment. My jaw felt like it had just gained 40 kg. Everything faded to a tinny white as my nervous system glimmered me into shock. I desperately looked around the table...every face had a look of absolute astonishment as their eyes pendulumed between Urd and I. I must have had "meltdown" written on my face, if not in words but in expression.

My paranoia increased when Megumi broke the silence.

"I _knew_ something happened between you two! That's why you both ended up in China! And then you both came back _together_! What'd you do, elope to Beijing for nine weeks?" she stated conclusively with a question.

"Aaaah, I bet you did! No wonder you weren't answering the phone!" Megumi added, pointing her finger at me while luxuriating in my embarrassment.

"That's why you didn't answer our calls, my sneaky adopted big brother! You two were honeymooning behind our backs!" she said with a wink, nudging me with an elbow. This was the same Megumi that was livid in coils with me last night. Now she had paired Urd and I together as a couple. I desperately hoped that her intuitive leaps were nothing more than a belingering mood resulting from that 'good cheer' spell that Skuldandy had cast on us all last night.

I needed to counter Urd's 'declaration' fast!!

"N..no way! She's ju..just joking. A_ joke_! I..I don't know what she's talking about! You know Urd...always trying to be the center of attention, always being funny!" I stammered out, attempting to gainsay Urd's lightning strike announcement.

I looked at them, trying to project a persuasive demeanor. They weren't buying it one bit. Keiichi leaned backwards and fell off his zabuton onto his back, visibly acting out his surprise with a sprawl.

Bellkuld looked at me with a gripping scrutiny, while Skuldandy looked like she was either going to explode with rage or faint from being overwrought.

I felt a huge sense of disappointment. After Urd and I had discussed and agreed that we were going to _gently_ break the news to everybody...she just busts it out in the middle of breakfast!

I looked at her; she was grinning broadly from face to face like a politician...while my spine felt spiraled with tension.

"Yep, this is a 'dorm' day for sure, now!" I groused, just wanting to crawl back in bed and hide. Fear washed over me...fear of being rejected by them, fear of having my feelings exposed, fear of being abused, fear of being rejected by Urd's sisters...

I looked at Urd with total panic on my face. She grinned mischievously at me, then her face faulted as she saw Skuldandy's wrathful expression.

"Urd!! Big Sister! H..how c..could you..." Skuldandy said in a quivering snarl of a voice.

"Okay...enough's enough! I was just BS'ing you guys! Hey, I just wanted to lighten things up! You guy's are _too_ serious this morning! So I decided to change the mood around here a bit. You know...create an emotional shift!" Urd explained.

"The only one who's too anything is you! Why don't you go in front of a mirror and read your face!" Skuldandy reposited with barely controlled anger. Anger that was aimed towards me a few seconds earlier.

"Urd, how could you even imagine such a terrible thing? Marrying a mortal? No way! We're Goddesses and they're...let's just say they're unfit for us!" Skuldandy continued, all serious now.

"AHEM!!" I heard Keiichi clear his throat contentiously.

Urd smiled at everybody, but I caught a private message in her eyes when she smiled at me. Her ivy-green eyes said "Owned!" She grinned apologetically at the group and sat down, glancing at me again to convey the fact that she had immensely enjoyed my moment of sheer terror.

"I'm gonna _get_ you for that, Urd-chan," I promised myself. I looked at the others and noticed that Bellkuld had an introspective expression on her face. She had recovered fast from Urd's 'joke'.

"Urd, it's _not_ funny to play around with the feelings of others," Bellkuld announced in a lecturing voice. "People are sensitive..._especially_ mortals. What you may consider to be a harmless joke...often ends up deeply offending someone. Just look at all the times you offended Mara by joking about her being a late bloomer! And you know that your brand of humor has frequently embarrassed someone, like you've done so often with my Keiichi."

I let this new bit of information sink in...Mara was a late developer? If the female Goddesses and Demonesses were like mortal teenage girls, this was tantamount to an open invitation to taunts.

"No wonder Mara has it out for Urd," I conjectured.

"On the other hand, wouldn't it be easier to just say the truth? Urd, if you like Cevn, you should just say so, instead of making it into a joke and embarrassing him. Humor and wit often reveal personal sentiments otherwise left unsaid. I know that he's a mortal, but my personal experience with Keiichi shows that mortal men can be _very_ loving..."

I didn't hear the rest of Bellkuld's soliloquy on the subject of mortal boyfriends...it was almost like she was unaware that we were in the room with her.

This was one of those times where I knew that Bell was speaking from the best of intentions. But somehow, in her own uniquely errant geniality, she was making things worse. In the manga that I had read, this character flaw was often employed to create humor. But now that I was living with the real manifestations of the characters in the manga...it wasn't funny at all! I felt extremely uncomfortable with the bent of this situation; Bellkuld was unconsciously superimposing truth in her words of conjecture. Or was she truly unaware of the irony enclasped in her words?

I looked briefly at Urd and saw that she was trying not to react with visible embarrassment at her sister's soft chastisement.

"...even though he's so insecure. If I made a joke about my Keiichi being a feckless wimp...it would probably cause him to wonder if it was true. Like I said, mortals have more uncertainties than we do. Keiichi is a man, not a wimp! He just overcame some of his reservations recently...and proved to me that he is very loving in a new way. So you see, I can't just joke about him being..." Bellkuld abruptly cut herself off, embarrassment flushing her face.

I watched Keiichi hang his head at this bald revelation.

"Practice what you preach, Bell," he said under his breath with a truckload of sarcasm.

I had to get out of there...there were too many tenterhooks and not enough carpet. Bellkuld had finished the process of pulling the carpet out from under me.

"Hey, things are getting a little too manic around here. I..I need to spell myself with a walk, okay?" I said curtly as I stood up. I finished my now-cold tea with a gulp and walked out to the front porch.

"Whew!" I thought, exhaling a huge lung-gust of tension as I passed the temple torii and turned the corner to walk down the street. Fast.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Keiichi looked around his room, his view eventually settling on his desk. It had a thin sheet of dust on it, the result of the craziness yesterday. Tomorrow, he would be back at N.I.T, continuing his senior year. Despite the fact that N.I.T. was a bastion of sanity amidst the turmoil of living with three Goddesses and his little sister...there was no way was he going to school today! If he did, the temple might not be here upon his return. He glanced over the papers, textbooks and technical journals covering his desk.

"Forget it," he muttered. But a few minutes later, he was busy studying.

Both Tamiya and Ootaki had been accepted into the N.I.T. Graduate School last spring to earn their Master's of Engineering Degrees. Keiichi had been invited to a party at the Men's Dorm to celebrate the end of summer vacation. Of course, because it was planned by his sempai...it was several weeks late. They were expert at throwing spontaneous events, but they were consistently inept at organizing scheduled parties.

He was reluctant to attend because of the plight of his girlfriend, but Bellkuld had firmly insisted that he go tonight. He sensed that Bell knew that he needed a break. After a long study session, he got ready to go. At the door, he blew Bellkuld a kiss, since that was all he _could_ do...and then he left with a backpack full of refreshments.

"I'm going to be graduating next year. _Class of 20XX_!" he thought with astonishment as he rode over to the Men's Dorm.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Heah Morisato! Yuh're late as usual! Whut was yuh plannin' ta do, skip da party?" Tamiya chastised him, mock-serious.

"Yah, dude! This is another time you can toast 'kampai' to us _grad students_! We's your _super sempai_ now, Keiichi!" Ootaki said as he juggled three wrenches.

"Geez, how'd they let you into grad school with _that_ kind of poor grammar?" Keiichi joked back. "You sound like you're from the south, Okinawa boy!"

"Just for that...you're goin' to have to karaoke...and I have just the disc for you. 'Hibari Mirsora's Greatest Hits: The Enka Ballads of the 1950s'. You can sing kayokyoku-style all night for us, Chiba boy," Ootaki teased as he dug through his CD collection.

"Heah everybodys, Keiichi here's gonna sing fer us!" Tamiya bellowed. Keiichi grimaced as the first strains of the enka wafted out of the stereo. Resigning himself to fate, he sang as the others hooted and jeered at his expense.

For the next few hours, Keiichi had to endure even worse tortures of the soul. One of the most exquisitely painful rituals was Tamiya's attempts at karaoke. Tamiya kept trying to howl out some songs by the Go-Bangs, a girl-rock idol group that was the rage years ago.

"Well, at least it wasn't those damned enka ballads," Keiichi thought with glum optimism, trying to salvage something out of the dire situation. When Tamiya got a few sakes in him, his singing bordered on cat-yowls crossed with construction site profanity. Rating a close second for sheer annoyance was Ootaki's attempts to be a one-man band: 'singing', playing air guitar and wastebasket drums to the headbanging music of AC/DC, Metallica and Iggy Pop, as well as Japan's X-Japan, Sheena and the Rockets, and Piass.

Keiichi refrained from drinking too much sake because of the lethal combination of his sempai's 'talents'. Karaoke and Heavy Metal didn't belong in the same hallway, much less resounding in Keiichi's ears. And he _already_ had a headache...there was no need to compound it by getting blasted with imported Coors.

Nevertheless, Keiichi ended up getting well lit with sake, due to the machinations of his two sempai, who were very inventive when it came to drinking games.

At 1:30am, the party started to wind down and Keiichi decided to call it a night. After waiting another hour to sober up a bit more, he left and rode home slowly on his antique BMW, wondering why his sempai had chosen to throw their little party in the middle of the school week.

When he arrived home, he found Cevn sitting in the dining room, poring over syllabus drafts. Keiichi felt a rise of smoky anger in his belly.

It was time for him to confront Cevn.

"Cevn, let's talk," he said gruffly. Cevn looked up at him, his admonishing expression saying "you're drunk from the party."

"Don't look at me like with that face! I'm not _that_ drunk or anything! But we need to have a man-to-man talk about that lame stunt you pulled this summer!" Keiichi demanded, gesturing towards the front door.

They both walked out and sat on the porch.

"I don't know how to start...but I'm really disappointed in you! I realize that Urd brought you here as part of some Goddess thing, just as randomly as that night Bell-chan suddenly appeared in my life. But _I'm_ the one who decided to let you stay here! _I_ was the one who let you in to all of our lives, Cevn. About the time that you left, I was finally getting used to the fact that you were living here. That you were one of _us_. There was a time...when I would get pissed off when anyone else came here. First it was Megumi...then Urd...then Skuld. I just wanted it to be Bell-chan and I! But as time passed, I welcomed the idea of housemates.

"But now, I wonder..." he said, half angry, half resigned.

"Keiichi, you know me pretty well. I think you can recognize the fact that I _had_ to leave," Cevn replied.

"_Had_ to? Nobody has to do _anything_! Shit, you could've _talked to me_! Don't you think I know what it's like? I've also been royally screwed by Urd's stupid carelessness! She's zapped me with lightning strikes, tried to seduce me, invaded my bathroom privacy, drugged me on several occasions, turned Belldandy into a sex-starved maniac...I could go on, but I'm sure you get the picture," he said, pissed off at Cevn's callous dismissal of his feelings.

"But that's where we differ, Keiichi. I have had a lot of stuff happen in my life that was messed up. When I was betrayed by Urd, it all boiled up again. It was like a dam bursting. I was...I just had to get away," he tried to explain.

"I don't know if we differ so much, Cevn. I spent all my childhood and teen years being teased for being short. It really sucked for all three years when I was in high school. In fact, all through high school and college prep school, I seriously wanted to kill myself at times. When I was 18, I decided to take the two years of college prep school, so I could get into a good technical institute. I graduated when I was 20, and started in N.I.T. the same year. Now, I'm going on 25...and I feel _old_." Keiichi said, risking a disclosure of his own experience.

"_You _feel old? I'm going to be_ 30 _next February!" Cevn noted with dismay. Keiichi shook his head at this and continued...

"I first met Tamiya and Ootaki during my last year in college prep school. They were trying to recruit people for the Motor Club when I visited N.I.T. during Culture Day, trying to figure out if I wanted to go for on to college. And over the years, they've become like big brothers to me. But even with my doubts in myself, I _stuck with it_ and made it into N.I.T!" Keiichi finished. He wanted to prove to Cevn that leaving like he had...was acting without courage.

Cevn looked at him with surprise, evidently feeling that this information was totally unexpected coming from the happy-go-lucky Keiichi.

"Don't you _ever_ tell Megumi about my suicidal thoughts," Keiichi added in a menacing tone. Cevn looked at him thoughtfully.

"But Keiichi, _that's_ the reason why I left! I told Urd a whole bunch of things...inside stuff. Secrets! Urd, of all people! And I didn't even plan to tell her anything! I know...and you know...that Urd isn't exactly one to maintain confidences. She pulled my most secret fears and hurts right out of me by posing as my therapist. If you guys ever found out some of the horrible things I did..." he explained, fighting back swarms of fear.

Keiichi was startled at this, trying to imagine what Cevn had done in the past that was so terrible that he didn't want anyone to know about it. For a moment, he felt a dawning sense of empathy.

But only for a moment...

"So what if we did find out about your past?" Keiichi finally replied, the spell of silence unnerving him.

Cevn sighed, trying to slow his racing visions of a dim future. Unlike Megumi's fiery anger, Keiichi's was more subdued. But he sensed that Keiichi's anger was icecold deep...much more intense than his younger sister's.

"So what if Megumi found out about your suicidal urges in high school and college prep school? Could you handle her _knowing about it_?" Cevn countered. Keiichi's eyes grew wide at the veiled threat.

"If you do that, I'll..."

"There! See? See how it feels to be so threatened by the truth...that you'll do anything to keep it private? To protect your right to decide when and where someone should be told? That's why I wouldn't ever betray your confidence...because it would _hurt_ you if Megumi were to find out. _Now_ can you see why I had to leave, Keiichi?" Cevn argued.

"Not really. But I can understand your reasoning slightly. Still, you _could_ have talked to me! I..I wanted to be your friend, Cevn. But now it's all so messed up! And I don't offer my friendship easily. I feel like you trod all over on my back, Cevn!" he exclaimed resentfully.

"_What_ do you want to tell me, Keiichi? It's okay...you can cut loose if you need to. What I did...I had to do. It can't be undone. But I'm sorry that it brought you into some kind of emotional pain. I didn't think you and I were that close."

"We _aren't_, after that disappearing act you pulled! You weren't here to see how it affected everyone else. My sister...she really likes you...really looks up to you. It was really hard on her and Skuld. Dammit, you _promised_ my sister that you would be an 'older brother' to her! And then you just split from the scene and left her hanging..." Keiichi said, venting his rage.

Cevn looked at him with guilt drawn on his face, then recovered his argumentative mien.

"Look, Keiichi. I'm an addict. I'm not trying to blame what happened on my addiction, but the fact is that I still experience lapses wherein I cannot consistently make good decisions. I know that you can't fully understand this, but it hurts me...to know that I hurt you and the others. Sometimes, the addict part of me reacts too intensely."

"Be that as it may. I'm really conflicted right now. Part of me wants you to just get the hell out of my life, out of my house. But another part wants to help you restore yourself to everybody's good graces. Megumi talked to me before I went to the party last night and tried to convince me not to kick you out of the house. Fortunately for you, she's already forgiven you," he said in a brooding voice.

"I understand. Maybe it's better for everyone if I just moved out. Then Genji can have my room and you wouldn't have to deal with..."

This acquiescence-cum-defeatism made Keiichi hot under the collar. Cevn was calling it quits. Without even trying.

"Waitaminute! Why are you giving up? How can you resign yourself, just like that? What are you afraid of?" Keiichi confronted him. Cevn regarded him, noticing that Keiichi was visibly upset at his acquittal.

The truth of Keiichi's words were stinging him like a cloud of angry hornets.

"You're making the same kind of decision now that you made when you just up and left for China. You're running...like a fool!" Keiichi accused. This assertion took the wind out of Cevn. The two men stared at the ground in silence for several minutes. Finally, Cevn broke the silence gathering around Keiichi's strongly argued point.

"Keiichi, I'm afraid of myself...of being alone...of never having love and respect from all of you!" he admitted.

"You _idiot_!" Keiichi said as he laughed harshly. "You _already_ had those things! Maybe, you still have them. Why do you think I'm out here, admitting that I'm upset with you?"

"It's awkward...coming back here after everything that has happened," Cevn admitted.

"It's going to be even more awkward...I'm in your Chinese Philosophy class," Keiichi noted with a half-smile, trying to loosen up the tense mood.

"What! _Now_ who's the idiot? Why would you register for one of my classes when you thought I wouldn't come back? Have they been teaching you foolhardiness at N.I.T. along with all the engineering math?" Cevn lightly taunted. Keiichi felt relief at the little joke he had attempted; the tension was slowly draining away.

"The weird thing is...in the reserves of my common sense...I _knew_ you would come back!" Keiichi admitted. "Dammit, part of me _needed_ you to come back! Remember what I said about Tamiya and Ootaki? About those two guys being like older brothers to me? I was beginning to see you...in the same regard. I know that I lack confidence at times..."

"Keiichi, it seems to me that you just don't recognize the confidence you _already have_. When I look at you, I find that you are strong and capable. Mature, in your own way. I would bet all of Tokyo on the assumption...or a feeling...that _you_ were the strong one in the house while Urd and I were away. That whenever Skuld and Belldandy were upset, _you_ were the one that had to shoulder it all."

Keiichi mused over this insightful observation.

"Y..yeah. That's how it was. That's how it _always_ seems to be! Maybe that's why I felt a little more comfortable having you live with us. You're an older guy...and you've survived a lot. When the dogs of despair start licking at my back, I have _no one_ to turn to. I can always rely on Bell-chan, but it's not the same. And she's had to turn to me for a lot of emotional support lately," he explained.

"So what did you do? You turned to yourself! I've had to turn to myself for years, because there was no one there. I knew that there was some kind of higher spiritual force accompanying me...but it wasn't readily apparent to me all the time. So I was alone. And I didn't have the compassion of a girlfriend to cleanse my fears," Cevn identified.

"Keiichi, are you pissed off at me because you had to be strong for her?"

"Neh? Of course not! I'm pissed off at you because I thought you would be there for me, once in a while. And I was disappointed when you just motored out like a chicken-head! You were becoming my friend, Cevn. Is there something wrong in wanting a friend to stay a friend forever?" Keiichi asked.

"You already have the best friend in the world, forever. _Yourself_," Cevn answered.

"There you go again, turning my words against me!" Keiichi said angrily, feeling the bore of Cevn's words. He knew that Cevn had taken dozens of college philosophy and psychology courses...but there was a time and place for philosophy and another time and place to speak from the heart.

"This is getting nowhere! How are you and I going to work through this? Now I feel like I'm arguing with one of my teachers!" Keiichi admitted his frustration. Cevn nodded his head in agreement. Keiichi felt somewhat relieved that he was also frustrated with this impasse. At least they were a little in synch.

"Cevn, I _want_ to work through this! I don't want to have to see you drop out of our lives again. But...you really need to take a closer look at how people relate to each other here in Japan," Keiichi challenged.

"Amae?"

"Yep! It isn't the same social milieu that you're used to, coming from America. Also, you need to promise me, right now, that if something really rocks your world...that you won't just up and split on us. You give me your word, and I'll welcome you back. Otherwise...you better start packing," Keiichi said, establishing the condition he had decided upon this morning after breakfast. He watched as Cevn's face betrayed a struggle over the ultimatum he had just established. But Keiichi secretly hoped that Cevn would just lighten up a bit and try to join their family.

_His_ family.

"I guess that means that we'll each be each other's teacher. Okay, I promise!" Cevn said. Keiichi smiled at him, feeling an subtle emotional easement at the optimistic outcome of their talk.

"Keiichi...I want to prove my trustworthiness to you and the others. I'm going to start out now, with you. I'm going to tell you something that no one else knows. I hope it will earn back a little of your trust." Keiichi leaned forward to listen.

"I'm in love with Urd."

Keiichi chuckled at this admission. It was totally funny in a sense. _Everyone_ was in love with Urd, in the sense of being physically attracted to her. Every guy he knew that had ever met her was attracted to Urd. Keiichi had to admit that even he was physically attracted to her, despite his deep love for his beautiful Bell-chan. He readied himself to give Cevn a good ribbing...but then he realized that this admission was a big risk this was for the girl-phobic Cevn. Instead, he started to laugh.

"What's so funny?" Cevn asked, disappointed somewhat in Keiichi's seemingly flippant reaction.

"Everyone's in love with Urd! Everyone thinks she's a babe! So what?"

"No, you don't understand. I'm in _love_ with her! The sincere, so-deep-inside-that-it-scares-me-to-death kind!"

Keiichi looked in his eyes and saw the seriousness of his admission. This _was_ an incredible admission, if it was true! He realized that Cevn must really want his trust...must really want a restoration of their friendship.

"So Cevn really has fallen for...Urd?" he thought. He looked at Cevn again, examining his face for signs of irresolution. Something inside of him told Keiichi that Cevn was speaking his truth.

"You're nuts! She is a idiotcase if there ever was one," he warned. Then he reflected on what life would be like for him if the most he could ever do was admire Belldandy from afar...without her knowing his deep attraction towards her. _That_ would have been sheer torture. But Belldandy and Urd were two opposite ends of the female spectrum. Keiichi felt that the best advice he could afford was the truth.

"Urd's nothing more than a flirt and a tease. You're better off just forgetting about her, Cevn."

"It's too late for that. She loves me too. Something happened while we were in China..." Cevn started to explain.

"Whoaa! You can't be serious..." Keiichi interjected. A moment later, he was listening as Cevn narrated the improbable events that brought he and Urd together. He grew amazed that despite the animosity between these two, they had somehow fallen in love with each other. His curiosity was piqued when Cevn described how the Ultimate Force was preventing any physical contact between he and Urd. Considering each of their natures, Keiichi sensed that this was probably a good thing for now.

"You...and _her_? You're either joking, or insane! And how is it that the Ultimate Force won't let you guys come near each other?"

"Is it that insane to love a Goddess?" Cevn challenged.

Keiichi felt a blush cover his face. Thinking about his relationship with Belldandy, he realized that Cevn was really going to need some help. He _still_ doubted that Cevn was telling the truth...for one significant fact remained; Cevn was deathly afraid of women.

Urd was definitely all woman. All Goddess.

Keiichi fixed him squarely on the eyes, evaluating the light of veracity in his blue orbs.

"He's definitely telling the truth...and he's scared out of his wits about it," he observed to himself.

"It's hard, but not impossible, Cevn. I can remember when I started having feelings for Belldandy. It was very soon after we met. She had been so nice to me...but I thought that it was just part of her contract. I never thought that she could feel anything for me. So I suffered in silence. Then when we had a party over here...I somehow sensed that she liked me. But it was a while yet before I told her. But I eventually did," he spoke of the past.

"I've got some experience with loving a Goddess...and I think that you and Urd _might_ be a good match. You're both off-center and a little bit crazy."

"Like, who in this house isn't?" Cevn commented dryly.

The two men looked up at the sky, then laughed. The night sky was starting to turn navy blue with the first touches of morning. Keiichi brandished his hand, hoping that a Western gesture would help seal the breach between them a little. Cevn shook his hand warmly.

"Hey, it must be super late!" Keiichi announced. "I've gotta get to sleep. See ya in class tomorrow!" He stood up and walked to his room; a room that seemed deserted now that his divine girlfriend couldn't sleep with him in her present Skuld-form.

Cevn watched him disappear into the house and decided that he was too wound up to catch a nap before going to work.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

My first day back teaching at N.I.T. was eventful. I had pulled an overnighter, talking with Keiichi and adding a few flourishes to my syllabi. Today would be rough...I was feeling a strange vibe as I started with four of my six classes. Dr. Kintaro was really loading me up with classes this semester, just like he promised when he hired me. But then again, this was Japan, where elementary through high school students go six days a week instead of five. Nonetheless, I harbored a reluctance to become an academic 'salaryman'.

"I guess Aoshima didn't get enough abuse last term," I sighed to myself as I reviewed the class rosters. Keiichi was in my second class, while Toshiyuki Aoshima had signed up for two classes. Megumi and Sora were in one of my Ethics classes.

It was too bad that I didn't have a graduate course to teach...at least until I got a call from Dr. Kintaro that afternoon. The President of N.I.T. wanted me to teach two graduate classes, one on scientific methods of reasoning and a graduate-level ethics course. So now I had _eight_ classes! Four on MWF and four on TTh. I clearly understood his justification...as word of my breakthrough Ph.D. research was making the rounds of academia, I was going to be a receiving a lot of attention.

"Nothing like jamming up the windmill with tumbleweeds! I have to make up for two lost weeks, as well as teaching the extra courses!" I reflected with a full harbor of frustration.

"Could I teach from my own research project?" I wondered. The Scientific Reasoning class was a possible candidate for this. I could teach my newly discovered Progressive Hypothesis and Aquantum Metastasis to them.

The other major problem was the frenzy of emails that were spilling into my mailbox at an alarming rate. I felt a conflicted regret as I realized that "Magnum Organum: First Consciousness" had rippled through the academic world like a brick thrown through a spiderweb pond.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

The next day, I received a nice surprise when I walked into my first graduate class.

"Lin!" I said under my breath as I surveyed the seats, wondering why her name wasn't on the enrollment roster. As usual, I directed the students to arrange their desks in a circular seminar-style layout.

Lin was beautiful in her Chinese pseudo-Red Guard coveralls; her generous long silky black hair was woven into a tasteful French braid. She looked like a soldier for love with her soft green outfit and red beret. She was definitely turning some eyes in the class, including Tamiya and Ootaki's.

Once more, I noticed the sempai's pseudo-flippant reaction as I started class, only this time they weren't shocked. They had obviously chosen this class on their own initiative, a fact confirmed by their friendly knowing nods as I called attendance. Besides, they both looked massively hungover from a party-after-the-party. Evidently, they had leftover sake from the fete that Keiichi attended a couple nights ago. I almost wanted to chide them about this...but I knew it was due to exceptional circumstance...it would not be the norm for these two.

After class, Lin strolled up to me, drawing an amused reaction from Tamiya and Ootaki...who were quick to notice her interest in me.

"Ni hao, Cevn-laoshi! I transferred here from BeiDa! I pressed Dr. Zhao, and he arranged everything last minute! I'm going to get my Master's here. Not to mention that I'm the first exchange student between BeiDa and N.I.T.!" she explained excitedly.

"How are you and Urd getting along?" she asked innocently.

"Shhhsh!" I put a staunching finger to my lips. Cupping my hand next to her ear, I whispered.

"No one knows yet...so please keep it hush-hush! Especially from the guy with the white moussed hair and the other guy who looks like a wrestler."

"You mean Tamiya and Ootaki?" Lin put a hand to her mouth in surprise. "Ooops, I almost told them! Why do you want to keep it a secret?"

"Told us what?" Ootaki said. The two grad students were attending our conversation.

"Man, if all da chicks in Beijing look as fine as you...I'm gonna sign up pronto for da exchange student program!" Tamiya announced good-heartedly, drawing giggles from Lin. I resumed my explanation to her.

"I think you can understand why, Lin. But besides that, how is it that you're here? I thought you were an Economics major?

"I _was_ an Econ major. I decided to get into the technical end of it more. Combined with my business degree, a degree in Engineering would make me even more of a valuable commodity. I want to start my own business...something cutting edge. I'll be able to direct the business _and_ technical end with what I learn here."

I complemented her on her outfit...a solid contrast to the more feminine garb that most of the women wore the first few weeks of class. So many of the N.I.T.'s relatively scarce female co-ed contingent dressed to impress. But Lin was dressing to let people know that she meant business. Not to mention that she _was_ cute. It would be interesting to see how she fits in as N.I.T.'s first exchange student from BeiDa. A lot would be riding on how she acclimated to life here in Japan.

"But if I can do it, I'm sure she'll be able to," I thought as Lin walked away in conversation with Tamiya and Ootaki.

Only then did I realize that she had spoken fluent Japanese the entire time we talked!

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

The house seemed empty. Tomohisa had been gone during the day for the past couple weeks; as he was starting another term of high school. Skuldandy noticed that he was wrought with apprehension...and with good reason. Elementary and junior high school were compulsory in Japan; senior high was a dramatically much more difficult dragon to kill...as it was intended to prepare students for college or the workforce. Tomohisa was embarking on the next tide of scholastic labors, and she knew that the brief senior high spring term created many tense nights for him. He also wouldn't be able to afford to go to a joku 'cram school' in the evenings; thus he was even more reliant on his own initiative. She felt a swell of sympathy for her friend as he trudged out the door. As for the rest, Keiichi, Megumi, Genji and Cevn all were off to college at N.I.T.

"It's just us three, just like old times," Skuldandy thought. She _still_ wasn't used to being in Belldandy's physical form. When she took her bath this morning, she was almost disgusted by the place where hair was...the place where no hair had been before. She wanted, even deviously hoped, that being in _her_ body was just as hard on Bellkuld. After all, Bellkuld was an adult in a very young woman's body. 

Skuldandy had almost said 'young girl's body', but these recent changes in physical habitation had thrown her perspective off. It would feel less awkward to Skuldandy if she knew that her older sister was experiencing a sense of confusion as well.

Soaking with sweat in the oppressive late September summer heat, Skuldandy went to her "Skuld's Labs" room. This was the first time that she had been in her mecha lab since the body swap. Everything looked smaller because she was a good 50cm taller than before. Walking over to her workbench, she noted that her tools _felt_ different in her hands. The task ahead seemed almost impossible. Skuldandy had fought her terror and sampled a clipping from the black flower that had sprayed them with the potion or spell that caused the change.

_That_ had taken all of her courage...and more.

"I hope that I can synthesize some of this stuff...because I would love to get back at that worse-than-worse Mara! Grrrr. If she's ever at Ueno Zoo, I would program Banpei to spray her right when she's standing next to the snakepit. She _is_ a snake as far as I'm concerned! But it would be justice served to have her swap places with a python," Skuldandy vowed intentfully. In the few times she had gone on Tokyo excursions, she had never been to Ueno Zoo. The vision of Mara's head on a snake's body was enough to shake her free of some of her emburdening resentments.

After cataloguing and organizing a few spare parts in their respective boxes, Skuldandy sat down in front of her laptop and started pounding keys. She could have used the voice input...but now that she was in Belldandy's body, she had her older sister's voice. For obvious security reasons, her voiceboard wasn't equipped to recognize anyone else's voice. It was alarmed to emit a loud klaxon if it heard Urd's voice. Her agitation was signified by the loud tapping of the keypads when she typed. Being much longer, her fingers slipped typos aplenty.

Gradually, a flowchart formed on her screen. First, Skuldandy would need to isolate the mysterious substance that made her switch into her older sister's body. Next, she would need to analyze its attributes along mundane and divine potentialities. She readily realized that it acted on both levels...and it was _powerful_! Thus she would need to enlist Urd's help with the alchemical processes while she could handle the chemistry. Better yet, with Urd's help, the chemical analysis would be more efficient. Next, she would need to synthesize the substance, if this was at all possible.

To endow the recreated (potion/elixir?) substance with spiritual properties, she would require the help of Bellkuld. Since her older sister was in _her_ 12-year-old body, Bellkuld had no powers, while Skuldandy possessed First Class Unlimited License powers...but no knowledge to use these endowed powers. Somehow, when they switched bodies, her older sis's powers didn't make the transfer. Therein was a major clue to the workings of the potion. But it also presented another hurdle, as Skuldandy had only the slightest experience with mystic powers and spells.

Then they would have to figure out how to make the cursed thing _reverse_ its actions! Not to mention devising a way to deliver the stuff!

Last night, Bellkuld had lectured her on the need to restrict anything resembling divine powers, because Skuldandy was now a "loose cannon" as the mortals termed it. She had inadvertently branded the faces of almost everyone in the house on several occasions; she also had accidentally triggered a 'good vibrations' spell the first night Urd was home. Bellkuld had cautioned her about the thaumaturgical potential she possessed; which could result in the creation of less amicable spells...like blowing up the house in a flash or turning Tomohisa into purple and orange mandrill. Or even creating a dimensional gateway for a bug invasion. These caveats initially seemed ominous to Skuldandy; but the idea of a multicolored simian Tomohisa sounded fun!

So once she arrived at the stage of recreating the chemical brew, Bellkuld would have to explicitly instruct her on casting a spell.

Then came the part she feared most...Urd.

It was up to Big Sister to administer the cure. Skuldandy and Bellkuld couldn't do this, of course, as they were the subjects of the spell's curse. Keiichi or any of the other mortals wouldn't know how to apply the curative, of course.

So it was up to Urd.

The very thought of entrusting Urd with such a delicate procedure was even more frightening to Skuldandy than the prospect of accidentally blowing up the house with her enhanced powers.

"I..if Urd screws up. I..I could be stuck in this body _forever_!" she said aloud in a panic. On her computer, she typed:

"NOTE TO SELF: DON'T LET URD SCREW UP THIS PROCESS!"

Skuldandy trusted her eldest sibling a lot...but her trust had been significantly eroded when Urd decided to go sightseeing in China. She had spent millennia vacillating back and forth with the conflict of having a wise, yet capricious oldest sister. She looked up to Urd as almost a surrogate mother in some ways: wise, protecting, strong, capable, caring, loving...

"No...Not!" she said in a giggling low voice, interrupting _that_ train of thought. In reality, Urd was idiotic, self-seeking, indecisive, incompetent, insensitive and...

Skuldandy stopped herself short.

"Well, Urd's these things...only some of the time," she had to admit. Which Urd would show up the day that she and Belldandy would be ready to try returning to their rightful bodies?

"Yeesshh!" she exclaimed as she switched to video game mode to work off some tension.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Urd was soaking in the tub under a protective veil of bubbles when she sneezed suddenly, blowing a cloud of soapfoam into the air. Looking over her tanned skin, she muttered a silent "thank you Kami-sama!" that it wasn't _her_ body that Skuld had been transferred into. Or Belldandy, for that matter.

"Even worse, I could have wound up in Skuld's girl-body!" she whispered to herself as she swam her hands under the hot water. An evil grin came across her face as Urd imagined all the things she could do in Skuld's body that would harry her youngest sister to no end. She pictured Skuldandy turning red faced while squirming with embarrassment...

Back to reality.

"What am I going to do? This is partly my fault...I wasn't here to prevent this from happening to my two younger sisters," Urd said with a resigned voice.

"What am I _doing_, talking to myself in the bath?!"

"Well, why not! No one else is here, except Skuldandy and Bellkuld. Hmmm, how can I find out what happened? It _had_ to have been something Mara cooked up...this has her handwriting all over it!"

While Urd was contemplating an approach to solving the problem with her sisters, her mind would occasionally wander to the issue of her and Cevn. Between these two problems, compounded by the issue of the Ultimate Force's physical barriers between her and her new boyfriend, Urd resolved to postpone telling her sisters about her green fresh romance until this crisis was past.

"Somehow, I need to sneak into Mara's lair and find out _exactly_ what she did. That would save us a whole bunch of work. Once I learn how Mara transferred my sisters, then I can come up with a potion that would counteract it, or better yet reverse it. Arrrrgh...if only I had my powers. The Big Meany and His ideas about justice! If He hadn't jerked my powers, I could just go over to Mara's and _force_ it out of her with a lightning bolt down her rotten throat!" she reasoned. An exhilarating burst of energy filled her.

"Urd Lightening Strike!" she shouted raptly as she leapt up in the bathtub, arm outstretched, ready to pull divine lightning down.

"_Oops!_"

Urd looked down to see that she had splashed a huge amount of water and foam over the rim of the tub, soaking the towels in the towel basket and almost everything else in the bathroom. She watched as the expanding puddle of water soaked the bathmat as it spread towards the door...

_Knock knock_

"Are you okay in there? Acck...the floor is _soaked_! URD!!" she heard Bellkuld's dismayed voice through the door.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Megumi and Sora were sitting in the cafeteria, grimacing at their trays. School food at N.I.T. was even worse than their high school's 'chow'. Megumi had wanted to relax the last few days of summer break, and then ease into the new term.

Instead, she had been overwhelmed. First, by the excitement of getting ready for school; then the craziness of Urd and Cevn's tardy return two weeks into the term; and finally the switcheroo between Belldandy and Skuld. A symptom of her stress was the fact that she had forgotten to pack a bento for herself. Belldandy had graciously made her lunchtime bento whenever she wanted it; since she was already making bento for Keiichi, Bell would simply double the portions. But now that she was Bellkuld, the whole domestic routine of the house was disrupted. Megumi _knew_ that she would have to make her own lunch, and _still_ she spaced it out!

Which was why she was undergoing the arduous task of eating N.I.T.'s infamous cafeteria slop.

"Terrible, isn't it?" Sora commented flatly as she picked at the rice with her chopstix. She eyed the lunch on her tray disappetitively. The fish was dry, the rice tasted like large grains of sand, the juice was flat and sour and the sushi cakes were stale.

"Goddess knows...and I thought _I_ was a bad cook?" she cursed her plate.

"You _were_ a bad cook, Sora!" Megumi teased, noticing her friend's use of the words "Megami-sama".

"And it's a good thing that you didn't stay a bad cook," Megumi added. For the daughter of restauranteurs, Sora sure had a lack of knack for the culinary arts. She stirred her food with her chopstix, then looked at her friend, whose head was turned away in utter inattention. Glancing in the direction Sora was looking, Megumi saw Toshiyuki Aoshima chatting up a table full of girls. They looked like Frosh; Megumi didn't recognize any of them. Sora had a grim look on her face.

A moment later, both girls were surprised when Aoshima walked over to their table and invited himself to sit down. Megumi gave him a narrow-eyed look while Sora's eye's lit up under her glasses.

"H..hi Toshiy...er, Aoshima," Sora said timidly. Megumi regarded the shyness of her friend warily. Sometimes she was disgusted with Sora's demure nature.

"If the girl would just get a little more _genki_ around men, she wouldn't seem lodged with such a fawning demeanor," she observed.

"Hi Sora!" Aoshima responded. "Wow...can you believe it? We're both Sophomores now! We made it past our first year!" Megumi looked at him with open curiosity...Aoshima seemed to almost sparkle with enthusiasm.

"I signed up for Cevn-sensei's class so I can humiliate him...oh the joy of being in my second year of college!" Aoshima said proudly.

"So that's why you're so cheery," Megumi said sarcastically.

"You wound me, Morisato Megumi! That's not the only reason. I have such wonderful girls as you for friends...true women that can appreciate the gracious qualities of my handsome presence."

"Oh...give me a break!" Megumi reacted mentally. She saw the open look of admiration in Sora's eyes. The whole thing reeked of a setup...his cheer seems to be _phony_ in some way, she suspected.

His expression changed to one of seriousness.

"Actually, there is one thing that I need to express to both of you. At the shopping center...you know a few weeks ago...I was most rude to you, Megumi. And even worse, I was undeniably callous towards you, Sora. When you were choking in that Okonomiyaki place, I didn't raise a finger to help you. You both must think I'm a cad."

Megumi nodded, unseen by Aoshima or Sora.

I'm...I'm sorry. I just wanted to formally apologize to both of you," he said. Without another word, Aoshima combed his hand through his hair, adjusted his glasses, executed a short formal bow, then left.

Sora and Megumi stared at each other with animated surprise and shock written all over their faces.

"D..did you hear that? Aoshima just_ apologized_ to us!" Megumi said.

Sora barely heard her friend. In her mind, the apology possessed a gravity of its own...it was the beginning of a new chapter in her relationship with Toshiyuki Aoshima. Finally, the man was dawning, exhibiting a sign of humility and common sense. _This_ was the Toshi-san that she dreamed of: a man who was emotionally sensitive to a woman's needs. A man who valued feelings over self-aggrandizement. Morals over ego.

For the first time, it seemed that Toshiyuki had really respected her as a young woman. Instead of being aloof and unreachable, he was being _real_.

"With me!" she thought cheerfully. He wasn't just seeing her as some geeky-looking mathwiz chick in his school, he was seeing _her_ for the first time. She imagined him handing her a card was a message written in green ink:

_Dear Sora,_

_I have diligently admired you from afar during our first year at N.I.T. I have been overwrought with my own fickleness,_

_thus failing to recognize the delicate blossom fragrantlycoloring this mundane garden called Nekomi Tech. It isyou that I desire. _

_My glass heart being nurtured in solitude, I daresay that I find that you are the glow that encircles the torch of my passion..._

_Your Toshiyuki_

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Sora? Sora! SORA!!"

"Huuh?"

"Have you heard a single word I've said?" Megumi asked, her voice still raised in irritation.

"Ohhh, I was just thinking. Sorry."

"I bet you were _just thinking_! You looked like you were caught up in some soap opera maxxed-out daydream, girl. It looks like _he_ did some maturing over the summer."

"Yes...he's...so...mature," Sora commented dreamily.

"She's got it_ bad_!" Megumi thought, shaking her head.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

_"In related news, the owner or the composer of the mysterious "K" pod have not come forward yet. After extending the 'good faith' period by another 60 days, NHK is now convinced that they have made every effort to allow for the owner of the music files contained within the pod to claim their property and authorship. If the owner does not contact NHK or its affiliates by the end of this week, ownership reverts to NHK. NHK and Pony Canyon tentatively plan to market the contents of the tape in various media forms. However, this may be difficult, as attempts to duplicate or download the music files on the pod have repeatedly failed during the past several months. Assuming that they can thwart the so-called copy protection on the pod, which has baffled the industry's foremost audio technicians, NHK may have a mega-seller on their hands._

_Finally, a sneak preview of the sixth Star Wars movie..."_

--Phssspt!!--

Everyone looked at me as I sneezed, spraying my tea all over the living room floor. I felt my face filling with blood as I blushed. I was stunned by what I just heard on the TV. For some odd reason, most of us were watching TV in the living room, a rarity in this household.

"What?" a perturbed Skuldandy asked irritably.

I looked at her as she wiped the damp side of her face with her sleeve. My embarrassment deepened as I realized that she was on the periphery of my spray. I had never thought that spraying a mouthful of tea was anything more than something the TV audience saw during a dramatic visual scene in a Beat Takeshi comedy sketch...but here, in real life, I had coughed up a mouthful of tea.

"I forgot all about it! The God's Music tape!" I stammered. Tomohisa and Genji looked at me blankly, while dawning recognition formed on the faces of everyone else.

After I had left for China, I put all the realities of my life in Japan in a mental suitcase, and then I locked it and threw it in the ocean. Now, a forgotten ambition had forcibly reentered my life. I recalled that I planned to prove my ownership of the pod by creating a duplicate and then sending it to NHK. My plan was to market the music anonymously, then donate all proceeds to campaigns to reduce world poverty and hunger. I still remembered Urd's angry reaction to this idea.

"You're an idiot, Cevn. Spraying me with tea because you're absent-minded!" Skuldandy jabbed.

"What are you going to do?" Megumi and Bellkuld asked with concern.

I could tell when I surveyed everybody's faces that we had all forgotten about the God's Music. Not too unreasonable, considering the brouhaha of Urd's and my disappearing acts.

"I have to make a new one...and fast! If I get it in the mail tomorrow, it should reach Tokyo by the weekend." With this brief explanation, I dashed off into my 'hobby room'.

I hadn't been in my "Cevn's Studio" room since I returned from China. My reluctance was due to the fact that a part of me still felt undeserving of living here with my friends, even after apologizing for leaving suddenly. But now, I needed to set my guilty conscience aside and compose some music.

"Did the TV say something about the _sixth_ Star Wars movie?" I wondered as I started turning on synthesizers.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Megumi yawned leisurely as she took her time selecting outfits and trying them on.

Genji would wait.

"He doesn't have much of a choice, does he?" she observed, snickering at her reflection in the mirror. She decided on a long-sleeved light blue French sweatshirt and her stonewashed denim jeans. A little retro, but Megumi liked the late 80's styles. She brushed her silken tresses, cut in a short do that personified the expression "sassy". She put on her pink socks, rolled the tops down a fold, strapped a small red belt around each ankle and then slowly tied her Nikes.

Genji had decided (on his own, no less!) to take a mid-week break and had asked her to go see the new Miyazaki Hayao movie. Megumi recalled several Miyazaki movies that she saw in the theater as a young girl: "My Neighbor Totoro" and "Kiki's Delivery Service" of course; but also "Princess Mononoke" and "Whisper of the Heart".

She had read that this one was going to be a return to the romantic-themed movies of the mid-90s. As if this wasn't enough, after their movie, Genji was going to take her to Shinjuku to go shopping! Megumi was thrilled at the prospect. But she also didn't want to appear all beside herself with excitement.

"I've got to keep him at bay by being reserved. He needs to learn to try harder...he's still so shy at times," Megumi reminded herself. She knew that Genji was still overwhelmed at times by the her excitable side.

"I wonder if I should've 'spaced' my beauty pills this morning?" she said aloud to the mirror as she applied the last of her makeup. Megumi was one of those natural beauties who needed only an economy of makeup...she had been gifted with a clear complexion and pert facial features. Her mouth formed into a moue in the mirror, then a smile as she finished tracing her eyeliner.

Genji was waiting for her in the living room as Megumi emerged from the hallway. Tomohisa patted him on the shoulder with a "go get 'er" gesture, much to Skuldandy's disgust. Genji looked over her appreciatively and smiled.

"Why is it that guys _always_ have to glance up and down a woman's body?" Megumi wondered once again as Genji offered her his hand. "Oh well, at least it's _my_ body that he's eyeing with..."

"You take care of my little sister...and don't stay out too late. It's a school night!" Keiichi shouted through a cupped hand as they walked out the door. Megumi visibly winced at this interruption; Keiichi was _still_ pestering Genji about "my precious little sister."

"This must be his revenge for the time I used him when I needed to convince Sora about the beauty spell," Megumi thought as she gritted her teeth with resentment. Her brother could be such an irritant sometimes. A total irritant.

The movie, "Suiko to Bitatsu", was drawing a packed theater. Megumi knew that Genji would be particularly interested because of its historical setting...he had mentioned it several times to her in conversations during the summer. It was loosely based on the marriage of Suiko and Bitatsu in the late 6th century. Suiko was the first true Empress of Japan, ascending the throne when she was 39. But this story took place in her early 20s, when she married the 37-year-old Bitatsu, who was her brother from her father's side. There was a prominent spiritual dimension to the movie as well, as this was the historical period when Buddhism was making impactful inroads into Japan. A strong 'giri tai ninjo' theme lifted the movie's drama to thrilling heights of romanticism in Megumi's esteem...Suiko and Bitatsu often had to make difficult choices between their duties as regents and their heartfelt love for each other. Several times, Megumi gripped Genji's hand tightly as the emotional conflicts of the main protagonists resonated in her own heart.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Genji was really enjoying himself. He was always interested in Japan's history...and this movie was delivering the goods. The well-crafted script seemed to encapsulate the early Yamato State period in all its glory without being pretentious or explicitly didactic.

Towards the end of the movie, Genji felt his pager vibrating. Upon leaving the theatre, Megumi reached in her backpack and grabbed her cellphone; instinctively knowing that Genji had forgotten his. He smiled at her gratefully as he punched in the number.

"Hello?" he asked as he connected.

_"Genji! It's so good to hear your voice! I'm back! Can you come get me?"_

"S..Sayoko?!" Genji shouted excitedly into the phone. He glanced at Megumi as she beamed a bright smile at him. He felt riveted with the unexpected news that his sister was back from DART in Okinawa. They had corresponded almost every week...but this last week he hadn't received a letter.

"She's graduated the Drug Abuse Rehab Treatment!" he realized with pride.

Megumi put her arm around him and kissed him on the cheek as he told her. Genji felt an almost-electrical energy as she leaned against him, tucking her arm in his. The voice on the phone continued.

_"I'm at Haneda Airport. Just flew in. I tried to call home and no one was there, as usual. You must be studying at the library, huh? I tried calling Keiichi's and there's no answer there either. I'm sorry that this is so sudden, but I was just as surprised as you must be. They just told me a couple of days ago to pack my stuff...I'm _--graduated_--!"_

Genji remembered that his parents were on another business trip to South America.

"They didn't even know that Sayoko was in treatment," he thought, his joy fanned away momentarily with bleak disappointment. His parents had basically abandoned the two siblings to the care of nannies and governesses, so he was accustomed to the lack of parental involvement and solicitude. But this was a major event in his sister's life...and as usual, his folks were more interested in pursuing the Almighty Yen than showing any interest in Sayoko's life! In all respects, he and Sayoko were a family unto themselves; that is why it hurt him so bad to see her life gradually dissipate due to her drug addiction.

"We'll be right there...in about an hour. We're in Mito," Genji informed her. Definitely _not_ at the library!

This meant a delay or cancellation of the shopping trip. He had worked his courage up for this...Genji had planned to buy some winter clothes for himself and Megumi. Then he was going to surprise her tonight by asking her to spend a three days at a resort near Take. For over a month, he had been planning a skiing vacation over the New Year's holiday. But now, his surprise announcement would have to go on the back burner.

_"We?"_ the voice on the phone asked. At this, Genji's moment of regret was eclipsed by a surging flood wave of fear. After a couple minutes of nervous chitchat yakyak, he told Sayoko he was leaving for Haneda.

"How did she sound?" Megumi asked. Genji felt a strong surge of love in his heart for his girlfriend...she didn't have a trace of disappointment in her voice. Their shopping trip had just been pre-empted and she wasn't even upset! Instead, Megumi was being supportive and concerned.

"She knows that this is really important to me," he realized, filled with the joy of being cared upon.

The drive to Haneda was unremarkable...the airport was experiencing the regional airflight slump that arrives several weeks into the fall school term, so parking was easy to find. They eventually made their way to the JAL counter and then to the appropriate arrival gate.

There was Sayoko!

Genji immediately registered some of her changes in his mind. His older sister had put on a few pounds; she no longer looked paper-thin and sickly. He was especially happy to see that the 'spark' was back in her eyes. Her face had regained its color. He broke away from Megumi and grabbed her in a tight hug. Looking into his sister's face, Genji observed that she looked _different_.

"What?" Sayoko challenged him in a teasing voice.

"You...you look so good! I was just surprised, that's all," he answered. But the discerning nature that fills the heart with magic...it knew. Sayoko had regained her innocence.

Yet, there was something _alive_ in her eyes as well...a part of her that wasn't present before. Genji felt a little fear at this 'something extra'; it was unfamiliar, unexpected and _intense_.

"I swear, you've grown taller since I last saw you, Genji," Sayoko said as she gave him a sisterly kiss on the cheek, then looked over at Megumi.

Megumi had casually watched the reunion of brother and sister from a few paces away. But when Sayoko scrutinized her, she felt an electric current run up her spine, riveting her to the spot.

"Sayoko's so full of _presence_...she's extremely focused!" Megumi observed, never seeing Sayoko look like this before. Sayoko, in her own way, had a stalwart visage that was similar to her brother's 'race face'.

"And now she's focused on me!" she thought apprehensively.

"So this is what you do while I'm gone...hook up with Keiichi's little sister? Huh, Genji?" Sayoko stated in a dead serious tone. She walked over and circled around Megumi, sizing her up. Then she fixed her eyes to stare deeply into Megumi's. Megumi wanted to recoil from the close soul-stealing look.

Genji stole a glance at Megumi, remembering their conversations about how to approach his older sister when she returned. Both had agreed that it was prudent that Sayoko be kept in the lurch about their relationship, especially since she was involved with weightier concerns. Such as getting clean off drugs. She didn't need any extra distractions while she was in treatment at DART.

"Just smile and keep cool," she repeated to herself in her mind, trying to maintain her reserve. Sayoko was Megumi's sempai...as well as a very charming woman. A very passionate woman. And now, an elegant woman possessed of sobriety.

"Why haven't you been home whenever I called?" she asked Genji, still staring down Megumi. Megumi gulped, trying hard not to glance her worry towards her boyfriend.

Genji panicked, as years of habit flowed into him...the habit of being intimidated by his sophisticated, urbane older sister. He wanted to push away the fact that he had never informed his sister about his and Megumi's relationship. Especially _that_ little detail. Sayoko had no idea that he was living in the same house as Megumi. During the intervention, she was so upset that she must not have heard the discussions about what Genji should do during her absence.

"I have been living with Keiichi and the others," Genji answered her squarely. Megumi went wide-eyed at his frank answer. Sayoko visibly snapped her head to look at him.

"You've been _living_ with her?" she said incredulously.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"It's not about me, it's about the music. The music inside of me can only come forth if I let go of _me_. My doubts, my plans, my daily life at N.I.T., Urd and the all the rest. I need peace."

I opened my eyes a few minutes later and emerged from the drowsiness that occasionally accompanies deep meditation. I had dimmed the overhead light and had turned on the blacklight. The interior of my room looked like a starfield; the lights and LEDs on the many keyboards seemed like bright stars.

I had a complex system of keyboards thrown together. Many of my keyboards were analogue; they were sequenced into analogue sequencers and drum machines. I had at least 25 keyboards; old synthis like the Junos and Korgs and the Minimoogs, plus new digital instruments like the Akai S1500 and Casio 505X. These were master-slaved in various configurations, then daisychained into four mixers and finally uploaded onto the hard drive of my Pentium VI PC alongside all the MIDI generators, samplers and digital synthclaviers. Added to this were effector units, like the Sony R11, D107 and Boss SE75, diode matrix synthis like the Roland series customs and several upright 'patch and play' units. There were several other 'blackbox' pieces of equipment that I didn't recognize...they lacked any sort of commercial tag.

I felt a pull, like a finger massaging a wet thread. Envisioning my inner soul as a blue and orange pulsing cloud, I ascended into song. I wanted this music to embody in the listener's mind as an optical kiss...the smell of love as it wraps the night in daylight, the emergent tingling in the memories as joy spills forth...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Sayoko looked awry at her younger brother. A moment ago, she was about ready to throw a sisterly pipewrench in his little romance with Megumi. Now, unexpectedly, her mood had shifted to a sense of happiness. She was happy that her little brother had found a girlfriend of his own. Her mind drifted as a voice in her head narrated a displaced series of observations:

_"All those years in high school, you were always 'Sayoko's kid brother'. None of the girls would approach you because they were afraid of me. Or even jealous. You never had a girlfriend...until now. I've had lots of boyfriends and male attention...I wonder if you were ever jealous of how easily romance and the opposite sex came to me. You struggled all along, Genji. Too awkward to say 'hi' to the girls you liked. Overshadowed by your sister. Now you have Keiichi's little sister. I should be mad...and I am mad. But right now, I feel too kind...too grateful to get on your case about it."_

Sayoko listened in wonderment to the voice in her head while she looked at the young couple. They appeared so romantically intense and yet so fragile. She realized that this 'guide voice' was part of her emergent conscience; the result of the new attitudes she had tendered while in treatment.

Acceptance. Patience. Allowance. Forgiveness...

"I can't stop what's already happened here. But I'm _not_ going to abandon the pretense that I'm your stern older sister, Genji!" she decided. "I want to you to have the best...Keiichi's little sister has _a lot_ to prove to me first...before I'll give my OK!"

Megumi looked at the renewed intensity in Sayoko's eyes and cringed inwardly.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --


	27. Pt 27: Quickenings

**Part 27: Quickenings**

I felt like I was emerging from a long cavern of spirit. Everything had gone blank...but not invisible. Occasionally when I clutch the throes of an intense endeavor, I my senses 'tune out'...as if the inhibitory centers of my brain transform into little elves working overtime. I had started playing on my keys...and then everything went aqua.

As my awareness unspiraled, I regarded the constellation of keyboards and lights and meters in my "Cevn's Studio" music room.

The music had harvested itself out of my heart, and yet I felt a sense of ownership. Like I had made it. Had _MADE_ it!

I had soundframed the kind of composition that arrives after a deep stirring of kokoro, arising to the surface like loam skimmering atop a tempest-driven ocean. The ocean of my soul...poured out into a wellcup of sound. I sat up and sighed, and then jacked the pod in and downloaded. I knew that I would need to obtain a much higher quality digital virtual studio before releasing this stuff on CD...I made a mental note to ask our resident technophile Skuldandy for her assistance. Regarding the important matter of composing new music, I felt satisfied that this new creation was equi-audio with the music I taped for Keiichi's race.

What I had composed was nothing more than foundation for the framework...but soon, I would be able to clothe it with sonic architecture...

My legs had stiffened from kneeling for hours in front of my keyboards. I wanted to stroll through the house to see how everyone was doing. Keiichi was talking with Skuld..er, Bellkuld, while Skuldandy was nowhere to be seen.

"Probably in her mecha lab," I surmised. I still wasn't acclimated to the transcarnation between Belldandy and Skuld. Once more, I envisioned how frustrating this must be for Keiichi.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Hey, we're home!" Megumi shouted.

"Look what the cat brought in!" Genji announced, as Sayoko stepped in through the door.

Sayoko darted an annoyed face at her brother, and then examined everyone in the room for their reactions, trying to avoid smiling nervously. They were all here! She felt a brief moment of shame, because all these people knew where she had been...and why.

"I can't save my face and my ass at the same time," she remembered, tooling against her seeming loss of face.

As Cevn caught her eye, he immediately discerned that Sayoko had _got it_. There is an almost intangible attribute that people develop when they are 'on fire' for recovery. Intangible to most...but recognizable to one who has returned from the Hell of drug addiction. He grinned broadly, realizing that Sayoko was radiating said aspect.

Bellkuld politely excused herself as an exercise of caution; she didn't want Sayoko to guess what had happened with the body/spirit transference. She felt happy that Sayoko's aura had changed to a pleasant blue.

Keiichi was all smiles when he saw Sayoko..and realized that this was a _new_ Sayoko! He could sense her profound gratitude and joy, despite her attempts to conceal how bestunned she was at all the attention. Fighting against his awkward inclinations, he hugged Sayoko and welcomed her back.

Sayoko...who used to be an enemy...

"Hug?" Cevn offered after Keiichi hugged her.

"Sure," she said, then grabbed him in a tight hug. Cevn knew from personal experience that her treatment had been very harsh. Sayoko had been grouped: her ego dissected; her character flaws examined; her self-centeredness confronted; and her irrational beliefs challenged.

On top of that, she had to _feel_ for the first time in a long time. Drugs possess a way of surreptitiously suppressing feelings; the doped-out 'feelings' that many addicts experience during active drug use are frequently little more than a disinhibition of candor. But once an addict is clean, the shame and guilt of their past behavior stalks them...haunts them.

Seeing Sayoko, Cevn revisited his own insecurities when he had first received the gift of recovery. He remembered his anger when he realized that he couldn't use drugs the way others do. His anger intensified with the frustrating awareness that the so-called "legal drugs" such as ethanolic substances were also included. There is no 'having one with the gang' for an addict. Continuing to face the life-threatening nature of the disease of addiction creates a huge amount of fear. Further, the alienation that accompanies active drug addiction fuels a desperate loneliness.

Sayoko knew that she had been relying on the drugs to cast her in a social light. But now, the drugs weren't 'talking through' her. She was talking for herself instead...and she had been prepared by the counselors to expect discomfort and fear as she tried rejoin society with a deficit in social confidence.

"It takes one addict to know another addict," Cevn thought as he watched Sayoko's conflicted expression. And he felt proud that Sayoko had faced up to the truth.

"The truth is painful and harsh, but it is the _only_ truth...and it will set you free. From this point of freedom, the journey begins," he said to himself in a low voice. Her journey into recovery...would take her up and out of the misery of active drug use.

Sayoko just wanted to hug Genji...and never let go. This moment, this homecoming, was so _perfect_ in her mind. Except for the presence of one person. She felt herself loosening roadrunner tears onto her brother's shoulder.

"She's definitely emotionally raw from the treatment," Cevn reminded himself. "Those are tears of gratitude...tears she's been needing to cry for God knows how long!"

Megumi felt her own eyes tearing up in empathy; she was happy for Sayoko...and filled with a sweet relief to see how her Genji was overjoyed to have his big sister back! Even if she was treating Megumi with a bitchy indifference...

"Genji, I..I don't know how to thank you," Sayoko managed to say between sobs. "All of you guys...you saved my life! If it weren't for you...well, I really don't want to think where I'd be at now!"

Genji noticed a hardened edginess to her demeanor, despite the tearful reunion. Sayoko was definitely being brusque, perhaps even rude, towards Megumi.

"Could she be _jealous_ that I have a girlfriend?" Genji wondered. He'd read numbers of novels, replete with storylines about older sisters who were close to their younger brothers...about how they sometimes perceive a girlfriend as 'competition'. He tried to unjitter his nerves, recognizing that he was noticeably more agitated than usual around Sayoko and Megumi. He could sense that Megumi was subdued...almost deliberate in her efforts to be superficial. He could relate with her caution; a part of him almost wanted to be invisible...keeping his interactions with everyone refrained and tentative.

"It's good to have you back, Sayoko!" Keiichi said good-heartedly. "I really thought for a while that you would never come back from the drug world."

_That_ statement pretty much summed an explanation for everyone's joyous relief towards Sayoko's return from DART. She as the realization struck her that Keiichi admitted to seeing her cause as so impossible...that he had struggled not to reluctantly write her off as hopelessly addicted. She looked at Cevn with an indefinable expression, then asked him for another hug.

"How did you_ know_?" she asked. "How did you know what was wrong with me?"

"It takes one to know one, Sayoko," Cevn told her gently.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

The hours after Sayoko's return were almost festive in mood. The spirits of our house brightened considerably against the gloom of Bellkuld and Skuldandy's situation. So it was after midnight when I found time to go over tomorrow's Greek lesson on the dining room table. My summer didn't allow me an opportunity to adequately review any of the Japanese textbooks on Greek instruction; instead, I would have to prepare the lessons on my own until I could.

I planned to start the class off with the Greek alphabet drills, of course; then I would introduce them to Greek terms cognate with Romanji transliteration. Logos--Logic--Rogika, and stuff like that. There were only six students in the class, according to this morning's enrollment report. But six was a start.

I heard someone walk up behind me, then felt a tap on my shoulder.

"Cevn, I'm going be spending the night here on the couch, courtesy of Keiichi. But I'm so restless. Can we talk?" Sayoko offered.

"Sure...in fact I was hoping you would make time to rap with me," I replied. Sayoko and I went out into the gallery and sat down on the wooden walkway on the sunroom end of the house, clear away from any open bedroom windows.

"I'm glad to be back...but I'm also scared," she admitted. I was impressed with her quick avail to humility. Too often, newcomers who had just finished treatment were cocky with their newfound recovery. I certainly was that way at first.

"I have a lot of decisions to make," she continued. "First off...I don't know if I'm going to live with my parents or not. And I've missed the start of the fall term and..."

"Hey, one difficult decision at a time! Do you _want_ to return to N.I.T. for the fall? Because if you do...I took the initiative to enroll you conditionally. I covered for you; you can register late without penalty, and make up missed assignments. Since it's the third week of school, there'll be a lot of makeup work...but I think you can manage okay," I assured her. Sayoko looked at me with a thankful expression, which changed into a worried one.

"Did you _tell them_?" she asked.

"Don't worry, all they know is that you were on sick leave due to illness this summer. They don't know anything else!"

Sayoko's face lit up with this good news and nodded her head...which I took as an 'affirmative' that she would be going back to school. I suggested that we talk about school stuff later...I didn't want her getting sidetracked away from talking about what she was feeling. She looked like she was ready to burst with pent-up frustration.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"I'm so angry...because Genji _didn't even tell me_ that he was going out with Megumi! I'm his big sister...and here he is _living_ with her! What if they've been _sleeping together_? And how do I know that Keiichi's little sister is good enough for him? For _us_? Why would he keep this from me? WHY?" Sayoko said resentfully, staring off into the direction of the vehicle garage. For all her hard work in treatment, she had arrived back home...and was rewarded with a betrayal by her younger brother. She was afraid that her emotions were going to spill over the dam.

"Genji's all the family I have! Snff..I'm sure you've noticed that my stupid yuppie parents didn't even come to visit me...they're more concerned about being corporate kaichos than parents! They didn't even _write me_! It feels like I haven't had parents for..snff..most of my life. I've been alone for so long...just drinking to deal with the loneliness...and now my little brother falls in love and I MISSED IT! I want him to be happy, and I just wasn't there for him...because of my stupid addiction!" she accused herself. She felt livid towards her younger brother; something she had struggled to conceal for the whole evening. Beyond this, a fracturing anger towards herself glowed in Sayoko's heart...because she missed out on such an important moment in his life.

She watched Cevn struggle with himself for a moment, then put a comforting arm around her. Sayoko felt her shoulders heave with sadness as he asked her to slow down and catch her breath.

"Do you know what it's like to grow up wealthy, Cevn? Genji and I were _spoiled rotten_! We had toys and vacations and weekend trips to the amusement parks and resorts. We were always dressed in the finest clothes, and we had the best private high school tutors. My parents send me 175,000 yen a month for an allowance, just to buy the latest fashions. But they were never there for me! NEVER!" Sayoko said vehemently.

She struggled as she recalled how she had met with a lot of animosity from the others in treatment. They envied her wealth...many of them harbored jealous feelings as well. But she wanted so desperately to convince _someone_ about her plight...the vivid reality that money does not equal affection. It was hard to do this in treatment. But maybe now, someone could understand, if only a little bit.

"_NEVER!_" she heard herself screaming again.

_"Hey...cool it out there!"_ a distant female voice warned. Sayoko realized that it was after midnight...she needed to tone it down!

"Piano and ballet lessons, excursions to art museums, formal dinners, Kabuki theater, Sumo bashos, summers in Switzerland, France and Hawaii...but always by ourselves! Just Genji and I. Chauffeurs and nannies and tutors and governesses. If only my mother would have been there to listen to me, just once! T..to talk with me about things that mothers usually talk to their daughters about, like having crushes on guys and writing love letters and dealing with competition from other girls. If she would have just spent some time with me, just to go out with me when I shopped for clothes, shit...to just sit across from me at a restaurant and split a fudge sundae! That's _all_ I ever wanted, ever since I was a little girl..." Sayoko rattled off between tears. She held onto Cevn for dear life, realizing that her sensei was a brother in recovery.

She knew she had a long road ahead of her. There wasn't any NA meetings in Makuhari. Until tonight.

"Two addicts meeting for the purpose of mutual support...this was a meeting," the counselors in treatment had told her.

And tonight, for some reason, she was spilling her heart out.

"H...how did you do it? How could you stay clean _eleven_ years? I've only been clean a couple of months...and it's driving me nuts already!" she said in wonderment.

"Well, first off, there are no _onlys_ in recovery, Sayoko. You've been clean two months... which is a lot when you've never been clean before. To me, your two months is a major miracle! Especially when it's foremost in our addictive nature to deal with life by getting loaded. Believe it or not, I've had to go through a lot of the same inner turmoils that you're going through. It's part of the process. We all come from different walks of life...we've had different losses to deal with. We even used drugs differently. But pain is pain, regardless of the source. On a fundamental level, I'd like to believe that we all feel the same. Pain shared is pain lessened. Many times, I've had to do what you are doing right now. Many times! Having to tell on that demon inside of me that is tearing through my heart and making a mockery of my sanity. There's been times when my life feels so painful...that getting high seemed to be the only better option. But it isn't! I was told early on: just don't use no matter what. No matter what!" Cevn encouraged her.

"Tell me more," Sayoko asked quietly, moved by his passionate words.

"Sayoko, I married a woman in recovery...and then she relapsed and went back to drugs. She _died_ out there on the streets! A..and a part of my heart died with her. After she was dead, I just wanted to give up. I felt suicidal for months. But you know what...I didn't use. I didn't get loaded," he disclosed.

Sayoko was stunned...Cevn-sensei was _married_ at one time?! And his former wife...had _died_? He'd always seemed to be so withdrawn around women, much worse than her younger brother. Could this be why?

"I think you're strong enough to deal with life on it's own terms...without using. You've already come this far...in my estimation, you're gonna make it!" he praised her. Sayoko smiled self-consciously at his compliment.

"By the way, _this_ is the first Narcotics Anonymous meeting in Makuhari, Chiba Prefecture. You know that what we are doing right now is at the core of an NA meeting...caring and sharing honestly with each other. There are over 500 NA meetings all over Japan...a whole bunch in Tokyo alone! You realize that you'll need to hit the road and go to a lot of meetings, Sayoko. Besides the meetings, if you're at N.I.T. and you need to unload, you can drop by my office anytime to talk."

They sat together watching the stars, until Sayoko said, "Whew!"

A few silent moments later, she turned to look at Cevn, ready to discuss some more stuff. But during the silence, he had become really uptight. Sayoko worried for a moment that her attractive nature...was intimidating him.

Cevn, for his part, had felt anxiety around Sayoko from the first time he met her. He knew that this was due in part to his foreknowledge of her character from the manga. But he didn't expect to see a drugged-out Sayoko...she was every bit the inebriate that the manga portrayed her to be, with a strong dash of crazy crackhead chick thrown in for good measure. He remembered Keiichi's statement...how _he_ had seen Sayoko as impossibly mired in the drug world.

Now she was different. Now she was clean. Almost all of their interactions had been governed by the teacher-student dynamic...but from now on, he knew that he needed to approach her as an equal. Sure, she would elevate him onto a pedestal...this was normal for a newcomer.

But, to his frustration, he was getting way too nervous during the lapses of silence. He just hoped that his anxieties wouldn't best him, especially at this sensitive time where she was just reintegrating back into society. He had all the confidence of an longtimer in recovery, but none of the confidence of a male friend.

Sayoko regarded him, sensing that she would need Cevn to be her friend, since there were no other recovering addicts in her life. Some stuff that she'd try to explain to 'normies' would just go by unacknowledged or misapprehended. Until she met some of the NA members in Tokyo, she would be on her own, so to speak. Sayoko watched the firmament painting the nightsky, then turned to her N.I.T. teacher, who had transformed from supportive friend...to a very shy man.

"What do I do about Genji? I mean...he's already in love with Megumi! I rode back with them from Haneda Airport...they act like they're a married couple, even if they were trying to downplay it because I was in the car. A big sister knows these things! The way they looked at each other says volumes about how they feel. Megumi is Keiichi's younger sister...and you know what _that_ means!" she explained.

"I don't even know what I saw in Keiichi back then...he was just an ordinary guy with an extraordinary 'something' that I just couldn't put a finger on. I've known him all through high school and college...at least seven years. I used to hound myself trying to figure out what made Keiichi so special in comparison to all the other guys. But, be that as it may, I can't get it out of my head that Keiichi went for Belldandy instead of me..." she asked, then fleshed out her observations.

"Waitaminute! Don't start judging those two...you've spent years building a case against Belldandy just because she wound up with Keiichi. And look how far it got you! It only caused you to lose your friendship with Keiichi," Cevn commented dryly.

"Yeah...but..."

"...But there is much more going on then meets the eye with Keiichi and Belldandy. I might tell you about it someday, but you need to trust me on this one, Sayoko. As far as Megumi and Genji are concerned, you know in your heart what to do. Don't lie to yourself because your pride is disarming your common sense. Remember, _one must know the truth first...before they can conceal it with a lie!_ And in the face of what the drugs did to your life, I think pride is a commodity you can ill afford right now. Start over," he suggested.

"Well, I'm two years older then Genji. He's a sophomore, I'm a senior. What should I do? In some ways I feel I'm way more mature than he is. How do I act around him at N.I.T.?" she asked. _This_ had been a solid source of apprehension while she was in Okinawa...she had even roleplayed several encounters with her brother with her counselor.

"Don't ask me...I don't have a clue. All I do is teach there," he replied.

"But...Genji's _always_ wanted a girlfriend! I used to taunt him about being single; calling him 'gay boy' and worse. It used to make him really upset. But, deep inside...I was worried. I've always had a natural knack at attracting boyfriends. But Genji...he must have been really lonely all these years. _Really_ lonely. And I teased him...like an idiot!" she said, warred by her guilt.

"Sayoko, _start over_!" Cevn reiterated.

"How? After all this time...how can I?"

"Begin anew. With Genji and Megumi, with Keiichi and Belldandy...and yourself. _Especially_ yourself. Just start over. Besides, it looks like you have some amends to make. I think the biggest amend you could make right now...would be to swallow your stubborn pride and accept what's transpired between Genji and Megumi. Megumi's a really sweet girl...and my guess is that she really respects you. After all, she showed up at our little intervention, remember? The 'this-is-your-fucked-up-life' party we held for you in my office at the end of last term?" he reminded her. Sayoko felt herself musing thoughtfully at this memory.

But something didn't make sense.

"Why _did_ Megumi show up, then?" she asked.

"That's a no-brainer, Sayoko! Megumi was there...because she _cares for you_. She cares about your younger brother as well. Obviously, she more than cares for Genji. But most of all, she was there...because she was being personally harmed by your drug usage. If you don't believe me, ask her. She was one of the first ones who voiced a concern about your using. Megumi _wanted_ you to get clean, just like everyone else in that room last June," Cevn answered, his tone of voice more a verbal challenge than a response.

"And you think she's _not good enough_ for Genji," he let rip with sarcastic disgust.

Sayoko felt like the paint was peeled off of her ego with his sharp comment. She wanted to yell at him, her upper lip quivering in anger.

"_Damn you! _You're right!" she reluctantly admitted after fighting her rage down to a dull roar.

"I know I'm on target once in a while...and I sense that this is one of those times. What you have to decide is...what are _you_ going to do about Genji and Megumi?" he asked.

"I have to think about it. I don't want them thinking that I'm giving my approval right after I find out that they're a 'unit'! She'll have to earn my trust!" Sayoko confidently voiced her convictions.

"That's more than fair. But, the cool thing is, you don't have to give them instant approval. I have something going on in my life that I can't talk about to everyone just yet...because the timing isn't right. But I _do_ plan to talk about it, when the time comes."

"Why don't you tell _me_?" Sayoko asked, suddenly curious. Cevn was looking at her with a twinkle in his eye...evidently this 'surprise' had brought a joy to his life.

"Heh heh. I'd tell you right now, except for the fact that it involves another person. But I will tell you eventually...I promise! And you'll probably be surprised."

"You've found a girlfriend!" Sayoko guessed aloud, then smiled as she saw Cevn's whole body shudder in reaction to her intuitive guess. How typical...he actually believed that she wouldn't sense it!

"Orrroooo..." Cevn exclaimed, trying to imitate Rurouni Kenshin in an effort to amuse Sayoko...and change the subject.

"Cevn, you can't fool me! But, since there's _someone else involved_...I'll just have to wait! Anyway, there's one more thing I need to talk about. There's this guy..." Sayoko acknowledged. Since he'd all but admitted that he was in a relationship, she felt that she should let slip her own romantic predicament. She reluctantly broached this topic...but the staff at DART had told her that she needed to risk being honest. Besides, she felt that Cevn, as a fellow recovering addict, might be able to preserve her anonymity about this touchy subject.

The counselors at DART had pounded her with the fact that so many women come into recovery and immediately seek out male companionship because they feel vulnerable and inadequate by themselves. Often, they had _never_ been without a man, and the men they had picked in the past...left much to be desired. They warned her that she could potentially substitute male affection for the drugs she just cleaned up from.

"Go for broke," she encouraged herself as she began.

"He wrote me every week, sometimes two letters a week. He's told me that he is interested in me...that he _really_ likes me, as a matter of fact. I've written him back...telling him that I just want to be friends for now," Sayoko explained. This whole thing about men was confusing. It used to be so clear to her. Tease them, use them, keep them interested, act like a queen around them, intimidate them with her parent's wealth...but never let them get close.

But now...more than ever, she didn't know what to do.

"And how long will the 'for now' last?" he asked her.

"Well, my heart informs me that I really _do_ like him. He's very masculine, strong, exotic in some ways. He's kind of a leader, but he has this crazy totally insane side as well. But he's been really thoughtful; that was a part of him that I never expected to see. He even sent me several 'care packages' while I was in treatment in Okinawa. Hey, I'm crazy...I might as well hook up with a crazy man," she said, humoring herself.

"Do you think you're ready to have a man in your life?"

"I don't know, yet!" she said, slapping the wooden decking with animate frustration.

"Then take your time. You'll have lots of personal stuff to work on...if it is meant to happen, it will."

"That sounds so...clichéd, Cevn. I was expecting something profound," Sayoko said, feeling disappointed.

"_Love_ is profound, Sayoko," he yawned. "At least, that's what Belldandy keeps saying."

"It's getting really late," she realized, yawning herself.

"I just want to thank you for proving to me that there is a better life without the use of drugs, Sayoko," he offered.

Sayoko felt part of her élan twinkling like a star as she thanked him again for helping her help herself. With a burst of gratitude, she kissed him on the cheek, then went into the living room.

Alone on the porch, Cevn chided himself...these 'late night sessions' were happening much too often. First Keiichi...now Sayoko. Who would be next?

"And how many cultural anthropologists have asserted over the years that the Japanese _weren't_ a psychologically complex people?" he thought, amusing himself.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Hey, guys, I'm off for baseball practice!" Tomohisa shouted as he dashed through the living room, a bag containing baseball equipment strapped to his back. He was dressed in his high school baseball uniform; a metal baseball bat was slung casually over his shoulder as he headed out the door to go practice with his high school baseball club.

Bellkuld was busy cooking dinner in the kitchen. Because she was in Skuld's petite physical manifest/body, cooking and housekeeping were a major challenge. She found that she couldn't reach the higher shelves to get certain things. The _broom_ was almost as tall as her! Bellkuld's sense of proportion was all askewed; she sometimes had to unfold a mini stepladder to help her reach supplies from the highest shelves.

"Tomohisa, before you go, could you please help me with this? I can't reach high enough to get it," she shouted through a cupped hand.

"Sure!" The high school student halted his exit and walked over, the plastic cleats of his shoes clacking against the tile floor like a railroad car. He smiled at Bellkuld and asked where he should reach up to.

"He's at least a _foot_ taller than I am!" Bellkuld thought with a mixture of disappointment and distaste. Being in Skuld's body was definitely a handicap.

"Right there, Tomohisa," she pointed. "The canned peach juice, if you please..." She halted to steady herself as her legs turned rubbery.

"Ooooo, what's happening? I feel dizzy all of a sudden..." she said haltingly. Bellkuld's head felt like it was spinning as the kitchen seemed to be swallowed up by an invisible mouth. She sensed herself falling to the floor of the kitchen as if in slow motion; the tiled floor panels fading in and out...then amidst a fog-like mist, she saw a wobbly image of a computer screen and plastic crates filled with strange half-assembled...

"Hey, are you okay? I'm getting Cousin Keiichi!" she heard a voice ask. Bellkuld sensed a misting in her vision as her head spun in tight coils. She seemed to be in two places at once...then the familiar environs of her kitchen formed in her grayed...

"Belldandy!!" Keiichi shouted with concern as Tomohisa pointed towards her. He was just heading to the kitchen to get a study break snack. He saw his girlfriend slumped against the wall of the kitchen, her head bobbing up and down woosily like a carp kite in a wind gust.

She felt a light slapping on her cheek, gentle and firm, as she came to. Keiichi was leaning over her, kneeling with his hands cupping her face. Her head felt like it was floating loose from the rest of her body as she returned to full awareness.

"Bell...are you okay?" Keiichi expressed his deep concern. "What happened?"

"I...I don't know what happened. I asked Tomohisa to help me get some things off the high shelves, then I felt _really dizzy_ for a moment. The next thing I know, I was on the floor like this."

"Bell, you must have passed out!" Keiichi emphasized. He so much wanted to hug her, even if she was in Skuld's body. But he respected Skuld enough to...

He literally felt his hands shaking with indecision.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Skuldandy was working on the microcomponent power amplifier unit, the Transdimensional Rectifier (Compact Model Mk V). This mecha project was more of an exercise for her talents than anything else...it held little value in practical terms. Her objective was to harness the interspatial energy created between Multiverse dimensionalities. Dimensionalities often collided...their 'friction' creating 'sparks' of energy. Her goal was to create a ratio of one terawatt/hour output for each cubic centimeter of mecha mass. A single terawatt/hour of energy was enough to power all of Japan for ten months! Not a huge challenge, but significant enough to sustain her interest.

But the _bonafide_ challenge would come later, when Skuldandy would attempt to redesign her invention to harness _one exowatt_ of energy for each cubic micron of its mass. If she was able to do this, she was sure to win the Yggdrasil Millennial Mechanistic Sciences contest! Especially since she was utilizing primitive Earthrealm mortal technology for the most part.

Suddenly, she started seeing stars. They danced around her field of vision like exploding novae...and soon _everything_ was dancing. She couldn't feel her body...it was as if her physical form had slipped out from under her. The walls of her familiar mecha lab swirled and spun out intricate designs woven into the ceiling and the floor, as she noticed the wooden floor panels floating just out of reach...

She tried to move her head, but her eyes were locked on something that looked like a refrigerator...it was almost skipping in the air as if it was alive...like one of those children's cartoons that Big Sister would watch once in a while...the one's where the household appliances would come to life...

Nausea followed waves of dizziness as she gradually felt her body shrink in size...or _was_ it her body? A moment later, she felt cloudy wisps fade away and she was back in her lab...flat on her back staring at the ceiling light fixture.

"What happened? I was just working on a power source...and next thing I know, I'm on out my back?" she wondered. Skuldandy was still too drained to sit up...she wanted to scream for her big sisters to come help her.

Everything felt like it was distant...and yet familiar.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Oh, Keiichi...it was so _weird_! I was scared...for a moment I thought I was in some kind of factory!" Bellkuld said weakly, her strength slowing seeping back in. Her eyes were flashing with an inner turmoil, the result of her strange fit of dizziness. A growing thumping in the hallway announced Urd as she literally sprinted into the dining room.

"What happened here?" Urd shouted. "I was in the bathroom and I heard a crash in Skuld's 'Skuld Labs' room! I went inside and I saw Skuldandy passed out cold on the floor. I tried to wake her up...but she's still out like a stone! Don't tell me it happened to you too!" Bellkuld weakly nodded her head in the affirmative, her long black hair fanned out over Keiichi's lap as he cradled her.

As soon as he heard Urd's report, Tomohisa went to check on Skuldandy. He knocked on her door, then slid it open to find her lying on the floor...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Skuldandy felt her body shifting again...she caught a shadow-like figure of somebody (something?) out of the corner of her eye...then once more the sense of weightlessness suspended her...she found herself looking at someone (Keiichi?) who was leaning over her...then she looked at her feet...they seemed too small..._so_ small...it was almost like she was in her _real_ body for a moment!...then a roaring sound echoed in her ears as she felt herself ripped in TimeSpace...and then she heard a humming...and glancing over, she saw someone (Tomohisa?) walking out of her room...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Keiichi watched in helpless perplexity and fear as Bellkuld rolled her eyes up and turned into a limp rag doll, falling over onto her side as all consciousness dimmed out of her.

Urd left to check on her youngest sister...she was confident that Bell was in good hands with Keiichi. She saw Tomohisa running up the hall, tossing his baseball bat on the couch as he sprinted over to the dining room to join his cousin.

Several tightrope-anxious minutes later, Bellkuld came to the second time. She felt like, for a moment, that somehow she was in her true body. Keiichi was still kneeling next to her, his warm brown eyes ushering support and concern...and worry. He was trying very hard not to manufacture additional apprehension...he face belied the fact that he was very distraught with his girlfriend's struggles.

Bellkuld looked down her front and noticed that she was still in Skuld's physical frame...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Skuldandy managed to gain her feet with a steadying hand from Urd; the two walked into the kitchen to see Bellkuld and Keiichi sitting on the floor. Tomohisa rose up from nearby and came over to her.

"Skuldandy? You're okay!" he said with plain relief.

"I am _not_ okay! I just had the most monster dizzy spell of my life! I was creating another work of genius, my wonderful Transdimensional Rectifier (Compact Model Mk. V) power generator. And...bam! I'm out totally out cold on my back! And for a second, I thought I was in _here_ in the kitchen...in my _real_ body! Then it happened again, just as I was returned into Belldandy's body!"

"What did you just say, Skuldandy?" Bellkuld asked. "I felt the same thing in a sense. Except that _I_ was in your lab, in _my_ own body..."

Everybody looked at each other with surprise!

Both Goddesses realized that, for a brief second or two, they were back in their own bodies! Hope and fear dawned on each face.

"Tomohisa!" they both said synchronously.

"Yes, that must be it, Skuldandy! When I was in the kitchen, I asked Tomohisa to help me get something down from a high shelf...then I felt dizzy..."

"Yeah yeah yeah! When I was laying on my back in my lab, Elder Sister, I was just coming to after being totally doofed out...and I thought I saw him walk in. Then when I came to the second time...and he was leaving my lab!" she observed.

"Could it be...that something about Tomohisa is causing you two to revert back to your true physical forms?" Keiichi finished.

"Let's try it! Tomohisa, can you stand between Bellkuld and Skuldandy?" he requested.

"Sure, lemme unload this bag of baseball stuff first..." Tomohisa said as he unstrapped his sports backpack and hefted it onto the couch, right on top of his baseball bat. He had been thoroughly confused by the recent events. It seemed that the last two times he went near either Bellkuld or Skuldandy, they would get dizzy spells. Then he heard them both confirm his suspicions.

"This is crazy...what could I have done to cause those two any problems?" he wondered, a little paranoid about being the center of so much attention. But he complied with his cousin's request and stood between the two.

Nothing happened.

"WHY! Why isn't it working now?" an anguished Skuldandy shouted. "It worked _before_!"

"Hmmm...obviously, something has changed between then and now," Urd offered, seeing that Skuldandy was about to blast off into the far reaches of the disappointment cosmos.

"But what's different now?" Tomohisa asked. "I was heading out the door to walk to the park for baseball practice when..." A mental neon sign lit up in his head.

"The equipment!"

"WHAT?" everybody chorused.

"I just left the equipment on the couch just now!" an excited Tomohisa emphasized, while the group looked at him with confused expressions. To prove his hunch, he walked over and picked up his bag of baseball equipment. He fully expected that when he returned to the kitchen, both Goddesses to dramatically relapse back into unconsciousness, as if on cue.

Nothing happened.

"Dammit!" Keiichi shouted, pounding the wall with the ham of his fist to emphasize his frustration.

"If what you both are saying is true, then why isn't it working? Why aren't you switching back to your rightful places?" Tomohisa wondered aloud in rapt frustration.

A moment later, his breath started wheezing...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Bellkuld was straightening up the house, her face cast in sorrowful disappointment. She was trying to get a grip on herself, but she just became more depressed when she thought about the near-miss with Tomohisa. She _wanted_ to be back in her own body! And for a moment, just like the proverbial golden ring, a chance to revert back to normal was suspended in the distance just beyond her grasp...

But with each passing hour...it seemed to drift further out of her reach.

"What if _normal_ means that I'm in Skuld's body...forever?!" she wondered aloud to herself, fighting back tears. She looked around to see if anyone was in the room...she didn't want to lose her emotional composure in front of the others. She knew that Keiichi was studying, while Urd and Skuldandy were feverishly trying to analyze out what had happened.

Then she sat down on a couch and sobbed quietly to herself until her heartwrenching fears passed.

She remembered the end of their discussion earlier in the day. Tomohisa had gotten so worked up, he had an asthma attack. Fortunately, he was dressed for baseball, which meant that he had his inhaler in his uniform pants. After this, Urd seemed to get the idea that it was something about him that was causing the problem. And in a typical Urd-like bout of zeal, she had even gone as far as to suggest giving Tomohisa a full physical exam. But Bellkuld couldn't understand why Tomohisa blanched and then sprinted out of the room when Urd returned.

All she did was approach him with a rubber glove stretched over her right hand...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Safe in his room from 'the Nurse in Pink', Tomohisa was caught up in all sorts of conjectures about recent events. He had bowed to peer pressure and skipped his baseball practice. Despite his fears of getting kicked off the team, he decided that he had made the right decision about staying home. He felt a near-guilty span of emotions..._something_ about him was allowing the two Goddesses to briefly return to normal. But he didn't know what it was! Neither did the others. Then there was that damned grinning Urd with that rubber glove.

As soon as he saw _that_, he headed posthaste back to his room for shelter and bolted the door shut! Tomohisa could hear arguing in the kitchen while Genji and he discussed measures he could take to avoid getting an 'exam' from Urd.

When the inevitable knock on the door came, they were able to finally convince the elder Goddess that she should instead focus on recreating the events that lead up to the dizzy spells and the transference.

"Whew!" he thought as he returned his attention to his Jump manga anthology magazine.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Bellkuld sat dejectedly at the dining room table after dinner. She wanted to go to Keiichi's room for comfort, a hug, a kiss, anything. But she couldn't...not without gravely offending her younger sister. Her sense of futility was overhanding her.

"I..if I'm trapped here, _forever_, how could Keiichi love me...in Skuld's body?" she kept worrying obsessively.

Bellkuld started crying again, tears drawing down her cheeks...Skuld's cheeks...as she tried to keep herself busy. The thoughts were too awful, and they were crashing around in her mind with overwhelming intensity.

Her heart felt heavy...

"If I straighten the house up, it'll take my mind off this...terrible situation," she reasoned.

Bellkuld stood up, spied an object on the couch and went over to pick it up. A familiar dizziness spread over her and she gasped as she fainted onto the couch.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"So it wasn't Tomohisa...it was his _baseball bat_?" Keiichi questioned matter-of-factly. "How incredibly bizarre!"

_Taking a break from his homework, he had found Bellkuld passed out on the couch next to the bat. From her recollection, she was just straightening up the living room when she tried to pick up the bat. Meanwhile, Skuldandy and Urd had been working to solve the mystery of what had happened earlier in the evening, when Skuldandy just went limp and fell into her sister's lap in mid-sentence._

_When everybody had reconvened late into the evening, Keiichi had arrived at the utterly inane-but-obvious conclusion that it was the --_baseball bat--_ which had caused the temporary reversal of the body exchange spell! It was totally implausible...but this conclusion was the only reasonable explanation. To verify his suspicion, he asked the three Goddesses to sit at the dinner table while he approached them with the bat._

_Bellkuld and Skuldandy promptly passed out._

The only problem was...even if he left the baseball bat between the two, the dizziness and partial exchange of bodies only lasted a moment.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Keiichi listened to the dialoguing as the Goddesses were engaged in conference in the dining room. Cevn had returned late from N.I.T. and immediately went to bed, exhausted after his overnighter with Sayoko. He wouldn't be much help.

Genji and Megumi were trying to calm down a disappointed Tomohisa. After an hour or so, the two announced that they were going to spend the night helping Sayoko settle back in at her parent's mansion house.

Keiichi recalled that Sayoko had told him earlier today during breakfast that she was seriously considering getting her own apartment. Being at her parent's house was too lonely, she reasoned, especially if Genji was going to live part-time here at the temple compound. He was glad that she had made a prompt decision...Sayoko's continuing presence in the temple home would only complicate an already impossible situation. Bell-chan and Skuldandy had to stay in their bedroom while she was up and around the house.

Sayoko didn't know about the Goddesses yet.

Genji had agreed to her idea, and offered to divide his living arrangements between stayovers here and living back at his parent's house. Keiichi noticed that Megumi was visibly upset at this development, but his sister bore her disappointment well. He looked at Bellkuld, who was gesturing with her hands to accent a point she was about to make.

Urd elbowed him...he was ignoring the discussion.

"...Yes, Urd. But this presents another dilemma. Skuld is the only one who can scientifically examine the bat to figure out _why_ it reverses the spell...and she can't be in proximity to it because the unknown effect will make _her_ pass out," Bellkuld summarized.

Skuldandy was the epitome of frustration. Arms tightly clenched, she was sitting on a zabuton, rocking back and forth with anxiety.

Urd watched her youngest sister, in her younger sister's body...looking like she was ready to explode in the face of the limitations of this situation. Suddenly, Skuldandy smiled and looked at her.

"_You're_ going to do it!" she announced, pointing at Urd.

"ME?! I..I'm a total klutz when it comes to scientific analysis! You know me...the Elder Norn: Sorceress of arcane magicks, Mistress of the Lightning Bolt, Keeperess of the Well of Urd...and a total technophobe! Naw...it won't work!" Urd said, attempting to justify her reluctance.

"It _WILL_ work! I'll network Keiichi's computer with mine...and I can arrange for Banpei and Sigel to assist you. I'll watch you from his "Keiichi's Shop" room at a safe distance. That way, I won't have to be near the baseball bat. You can follow my orders and perform the kinds of tests that _I_ would normally employ, in order to find out what property of Tomohisa's bat..."

"_Me_ follow _your_ orders?" Urd snarled defiantly. With mounting tension, she considered the sheer humiliation of having to take _orders_ from her little bratty sister. This filled her with a blunt disgruntlement.

"But I'll do anything to fix Belldandy and Skuld's problem...even if it means having to swallow my pride and let the little curmudgeon tell me what to do," she decided, desperate to resolve this fucked up situation. She realized that this would be a major sacrifice, however. Her want of expertise in technological and robot-mecha matters would make her look like a proper idiot in front of everyone, a position she was loath to be placed in. Under any other circumstances, this would be out of the question. As a Sysop for the Yggdrasil Mainframe, she exclusively worked on casting programs of the mathematic and arcanic kind...she never was trained to do any types of 'hardware' or 'firmware' duties. She could run a section of the ultra-sophisticated Mainframe; but she didn't have the slightest idea of the technology that went into its construction. And now she was being asked to use machines in a way she was unaccustomed to.

But...

"Okay...but only because I want you back into your own body, so I can properly pick on you again," she reluctantly agreed. "And if you even so much as _once_ make fun of my inability to operate mechas...the whole thing is off! Understood?" she demanded.

Skuldandy stuck out her tongue and pulled her eyelids down.

"Dear me! Even though you are in Belldandy's body...you can _still_ make an ugly face! Ha ha h.._ouch_!!" Urd said as she felt a _thump!_ on the side of her head as Skuldandy rapped her with a rolled up magazine.

"She sure can hit harder now that she's in an adult body!" Urd observed, rubbing her head. She noticed the scowl on Bellkuld's face and giggled at the sight...Bell's scowl made it look almost as if Skuld _was_ back in her own body!

"Bellkuld, you sure _look like_ a little brat!" Urd taunted, quickly covering her hand over her mouth to smooth away a laugh.

"Skuld, may I have a turn with that magazine?" Bellkuld insisted.

"Er...why don't you all get to sleep, and we can work on this problem tomorrow," Keiichi suggested diplomatically. He could see into the future...very clearly. All three sisters were combatively stressed out and irritable. It would be better if they got off to a fresh start tomorrow.

Better yet, it would be _safe_...as his prognostications revealed vivid visions of the ultimate sibling catfight...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Here's the plan. First, we seek out what it is about Tomohisa's bat that caused us to switch back to our proper places. Next, I will mix up a clone from that plant remnant that we saved from the Black Orchid. Third, we'll try and combine the two processes so we can make sure that it reverses the spell," Urd pointed out.

Skuldandy was disappointed...her carefully laid plans to try and reverse the spell had been thwarted by the accidental discovery they had made two days ago. Instead of being able to address the problem from a sequential, logical perspective...she would have to rely on chance...and Urd. Being an creator/assembler of mechas, the lack of a structured method of doing things left her out of her element.

Nevertheless, Skuldandy was anxiously anticipating the results of their research into the bat's properties as she sequenced a flowchart to methodically research its secrets.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

After several hours in "Skuld Labs", Urd was feeling very put upon. Following Skuldandy's instructions, she had been able to run a variety of tests on the bat: mass spectrometry, caustic chemical analysis, electromagnetic and nuclear scans, xyxiological phase balancing, aquantum series, tensile properties, thermal extremes, molecular scans and chronotron-node dimension scalars.

Each new battery of experiments required a walkthrough by Skuldandy, accompanied by a series of miscues and errors on her part. This inevitably resulted in sheer frustration on the part of an impatient Skuldandy. Several times, Skuldandy had screamed brat-fits at her, which Urd could hear clearly over the room speakers they had set up courtesy of Cevn's music studio.

Urd finally snapped, screaming back at her youngest sister in a transport of lividity...and then stormed out of "Skuld Labs".

In Keiichi's study room, Skuldandy felt conflicted...torn between guilt and rage. Thankfully, Bellkuld had kind words of comfort for her. She reminded Skuldandy that Urd wasn't as adept as she was regarding technological matters.

But Bellkuld was also feeling impatient. She wanted Skuldandy to quickly distinguish the unique attribute of Tomohisa's bat...the one that they could use to restore normalcy to their lives. Besides, this situation of Skuldandy 'tutoring' Urd...bordered on anguishible torture.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Skuldandy looked at the holo in her lab room. She was still somewhat upset at Urd...but this was tempered by the realization of what a big favor her oldest sister had done for her. It had been a _must-do_ situation for Urd; otherwise there would be little chance that she could have a database to examine. Without Urd's help, she couldn't be poring over the raw data like she was doing at the moment. Hopefully, with all this information, Skuldandy could 'tame the lightning', so to speak, and make the anomaly of the baseball bat into a permanent cure.

"Tame the lighting?" she thought to herself, the idea piercing her mind like a quill. She pulled up several displays on Keiichi's computer screen. There was something odd...something slightly familiar about the electromagnetic properties...

"There!" she shouted with glee, pointing at the monitor.

There was a trace of Molybdenum!

Molybdenum was a hard metal that was fluxed into metallic alloys to strengthen steel metal admixtures. But one of its properties, unknown to the humans of course, was that it possessed trace amounts of Ixodenum. Ixodenum was a subnuclear EMA (electro-magnetic-arcane) field that existed within Molybdenum. The same Ixodenum that was present in Skuld's own mallet, Mjolnir. Ixodenum was one of over a thousand metal alloys in her mallet, all held together by an atomic singularity designed to forge the whole into the shape of a mallet. The singularity was housed in the circular bulb at the base of Mjolnir.

"The same singularity could be harnessed as a 'collector' of Ixodenum!" she said aloud to herself excitedly. Skuldandy rushed into the dining room to inform Big Sister and Bellkuld about her insight. She tapped her forehead with the palm of her hand as if to signal "duh!, how obvious!" as she explained her discovery to her two sisters.

"So what we need to do is mount Mjolnir up on the roof, and wait for a lightning strike! When it is charged adequately, then the transference field will be duplicated...hopefully for as long as we need. Then you can use that clone you're cooking up, and we should be back in our own bodies at last!" Skuldandy explained with joyful excitement.

Belldandy and Skuld had been in each other's body _too_ long! Bellkuld looked up at her little sister with a hopeful expression.

"But how do we get a lightning bolt strike? Grrrr...if the Big Meany hadn't taken my license away, then it would just be a matter of getting Keiichi to put your mallet on the roof...and ZAP!!, instant charged Mjolnir!" Urd said angrily.

"Careful Urd, you never know when He's listening in," Bellkuld cautioned. Urd cowered briefly at Bellkuld's remark, drawing a fit of laughter from Skuldandy. She had watched this particular scene played out dozens of times over the millennia. Each time Urd got her license suspended, she would engender a hostile attitude towards the Almighty...and Bell would remind her to be cautious. Whereupon Urd would get this look of sheer _panic_ on her face, just for a few seconds, but enough to thoroughly amuse Skuldandy. Skuldandy secretly suspected that each outburst of Urd's added to the length of her license suspension...as if the Lord was keeping some kind of cosmic stopwatch on Big Sister. She grinned at Bellkuld, who was looking into space with a trance-like expression.

The more Bellkuld thought about it, the more sense it made that He had suspended both Skuld and Urd's licenses. They all needed to rely more on intuition and insight...and less on their magical powers. Each time they were in a fix, one of the three sisters would have a flash of awareness that would solve the problem.

"And what's important...is that these resolutions require us to work as a _team_," she realized profoundly.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Keiichi was up on the roof, pausing in his work. Being on the roof visually cued him towards past remembrances. Several times he had fallen from the roof: by accident; by Banpei; and by Mara.

The roof...between hammerfalls...

_Keiichi distinctly recalled the time Banpei went haywire and used him for target practice while he was replacing some of the hon-gawara, or true roof tiles. Of course, Bell-chan could have fixed the roof with one wave of her lithesome hand; but Keiichi was into one of his 'man of the house' phases at the time, and clambered up on the roof to retile the antique-style temple. Banpei had been rained on several times, and apparently (as Skuld accorded after the fact), the rain had somehow penetrated his waterproof exo-armor and fused the human and Demon detection circuits. Keiichi was halfway up the roof when an explosion two feet away hurled him rolling down the slope of the roof. He had managed a last-gasp handhold on the eaves as Banpei was readying another barrage._

_Then he remembered the rest of the incident. Belldandy had barely reached him in time as he fell. With a quick gesture of her hands, gravity was opposed and he floated slowly and safely to the ground. After her initial panic at his near-accident, she joked with him about it._

_"Isn't it wonderful, dear? Because of Banpei, you have a much bigger job to complete on the roof! This will help you even further towards feeling like you're more of a 'man of the house'. Which is good...since you feel that you_ --need to be a man--_ so much, Keiichi," she had said..._

...his attention drawn back to the present by a gust of wind, Keiichi recalled that he didn't even touch _that_ one with anything more than a hanghead posture, while Bell-chan had turned red-faced with guilt. Looking out over the neighboring Makuhari environs, his mind returned to the work at hand.

"So, once again, art imitates life. Here I am, once more up on the damned roof!" he cursed, struggling to prop up the mast which would suspend Mjolnir a good ten meters above the temple roofline. He could almost imagine in his mind's eye what passersby would think...a college student mounting a flagpole capped with a hammer onto the very edge of the roofbeam.

"Sheer madness!" he suspected that they would conclude.

He _did_ remember Bell's injunction to him to be extra cautious.

"Please, Keiichi, be careful...if you were to ever to fall and hurt yourself, I don't know if I could live with myself!" she had said, very serious despite wearing Skuld's girl-face.

His task completed, Keiichi shimmied over to the eaves and cautiously sat down at the edge of the roof. From his vantagepoint, he could see much of suburban oceanside Makuhari...and a beautiful sunset. He had planned on the witnessing the latter, and was glad that he did. He stood up and stepped down the ladder before it got too dark.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

A close scrutiny of the webcast weather report now became the prime interest of the house. Frequent arguments arose between Urd, the Ninjettes, and her sisters over the use of the several TV sets in the house for soap operas. Hourly weather updates were being broadcast in the afternoon and evening, which they wanted to watch. Skuldandy was particularly boisterous, and at one point, had disabled all the remote controls in the house to default to the Weather Channel. Urd ended up smashing all of the remotes in a rueful fit to spite her youngest sister, while Bellkuld retreated to the safety of Keiichi's bedroom.

Two weeks and one autumn thunderstorm later, it was mid-October. The weather had been extremely humid...the akisame zensen or fall rainy fronts of September had passed through without producing any spectacular atmospheric lightshows. Now it was getting progressively cooler as Japan was gripped by an autumnal climate.

With dimming spirits, Keiichi knew that this far into October, the weather conditions would be very placid, with hardly any rains. Already, the leaves were starting to raiment themselves in their gold and rouge attire.

So he half-heartedly wished for a typhoon.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --


	28. Pt 28: Tempestuous

**Part 28: Tempestuous**

_"This is a special weather bulletin from your NHK affiliate in Tokyo. The unseasonably late cyclonic storm mass that we have been carefully monitoring has increased steadily in intensity during the past two days. Right now, Typhoon Akira measures as a Category Three Tropical Disturbance on the Saffir-Simpson scale. This scale measures the estimated destructive power of tropical storms, ranging from Category One to Category Five. Category Three is considered extensive._

_If Typhoon Akira makes landfall, the following damage may be expected to occur in the stormpath. Foliage may be torn from trees; large trees blown down; poorly constructed signs blown down; some damage to roofing, windows, and doors; and small buildings may sustain some structural damage. The potential exists for serious flooding along the coastline; many small structures near the coast may be destroyed while larger coastal structures may be damaged by battering waves and floating debris. Low-lying escape routes inland may be cut off by rising water about 3 to 5 hours before landfall; flat terrain 5 feet or less above sea level flooded up to ten or more kilometers inland. In the event of landfall, the National Defense Forces will assist in the evacuation of low-lying residences within several blocks of shoreline._

_Typhoon Akira is currently situated 800 kilometers SSW of..."_

"You _had_ to wish for a typhoon, didn't ya!" Urd exclaimed flatly, glaring at Keiichi with an admixture of amusement and contempt. Keiichi quickly gulped down his coffee. The intensity of her stare made him flinch as he suddenly became aware of how _small_ the dinner table was.

"Do you know how much _work_ this is going to make for us!" she yelled self-righteously, her shout making every one at the dinner table jump. Last weekend, Keiichi had made the mistake of casually mentioning during dinner that he had half-heartedly wished that a typhoon would come.

"A typhoon will almost guarantee the treasured lightning strike which would make it possible for Bell-chan to return to her own body," he had reasoned aloud to the house members...

Now he was regretting his facetious offhand remark.

"Well, Keiichi _does_ have his weird special quality...that allows for his wishes to almost always come true," Skuldandy interrupted, trying to salvage some sense of propriety. She knew that, despite all her posturing and accusations...Urd wouldn't raise a finger to stormproof the house. Her Big Sister was just too..._lazy_!

"Isn't this wonderful? I recall that typhoons in late October are quite rare in Japan...unless my dear Keiichi wishes for one," Bellkuld interjected with surpleasance, cheered that one of Keiichi's wishes was being fulfilled. She was also encouraged by the fact that the storm might make it possible to get back into her own body by the weekend.

It had been a long month in Skuld's girl-body!

"_Not_ funny!" Skuldandy and Urd chimed with stereo disgust. The two sisters nodded to each other in agreement.

"We're in the path of a _typhoon_! If a lightning strike happens, _someone's_ going to have to climb on the roof and retrieve Mjolnir...in the middle of that storm!" Skuldandy noted with a pensive realism.

"Glad it's not me, eh...Keiichi?" Megumi remarked, looking at Keiichi with a smirk. Everyone's eyes were focused on Keiichi, who was trying to act the part of the innocent.

"Why are you all blaming _me_?" he decried. "I didn't do anything wrong! All I wanted was for something to happen so I can have Bell-chan back! Besides, if _you_ wouldn't have gotten your license suspended...we could have had things back to normal _weeks_ ago! Right Urd?" he argued.

The Eldest Norn glowered at Keiichi in a very un-sagacious manner.

"Yeah...tell that to Genji, Tomohisa and Cevn when they're pounding planks over windows after a long day at school tomorrow," Urd taunted.

"Hey, funny enough, I lived in Hawaii for years and never experienced a hurricane. Now that a typhoon is coming, I'm kinda excited! It'll be an adventure, don't you think? The 'Typhoon Adventure'!" Cevn observed.

Megumi, Keiichi, Genji, Tomohisa, Skuldandy, Bellkuld and Urd glared at him with irritated grimaces.

"Don't tell me that...you guys aren't the kind of people who get excited during storms, huh?" Cevn said in an attempt to defuse the tension.

"The simpleton speaks..." Skuldandy muttered, rolling her eyes.

"Yeah...right, Cevn-honey. The typhoon is coming and _you're excited_? Isn't that just wonderful! It's going to be such a _wonderful_ adventure! Whattya you trying to do...save Keiichi's butt? You should _know_ better than to take sides against me," Urd teased with rife sarcasm.

"Besides, after seeing a few thousand of them over the millennia, one tends to notice that they've claimed about a billion mortal lives! Perhaps, you might wanna listen to someone who has a different perspective than yours once in a while. Adventurous, eh? Nnh-nnh!" Skuldandy remarked in a more serious tone.

Cevn flashed Urd a look which said "do _not_ call me 'honey' in front of the others, we haven't told them about _us_ yet!" Urd giggled at his discomfiture, then wadded up a napkin and threw it at him.

"A typhoon's on its way _here_, and all he can do is think...that it's an _adventure_!" Urd said of Cevn while drawing a circle near her temple in the universally-known "idiot!" gesture, earning laughter from all present except Cevn.

"Keiichi...save me!" Cevn begged. Keiichi, despite being grateful that Cevn's foolish comment had let him off the hook, shook his head "no" with an amused smile.

"I can't! I already lost all my points! If you wanna gain a level, you're on your own this time!" Keiichi explained. He was in no position to rescue Cevn from the sister's ire, having weighed a huge demerit against himself by admitting to everyone about his wish for a typhoon.

"Well, look on the bright side...NO SCHOOL!" Tomohisa shouted excitedly.

"Yeah, but unfortunately, some of us _like_ being in school," Keiichi said testily, still feeling the sting Urd's sharp tongue.

"And some of us earn a living at school too," Cevn added.

"Spare me, with all the millions that came in your Enigma Book," Urd said drolly. Cevn looked at her and replied that he was tired of being a human target.

These confrontations didn't subdue Tomohisa's spirits a bit. He didn't care if _no one_ felt the same way he did about the upcoming storm! In fact, the only thing he wasn't down with about the whole typhoon 'crisis'...was the impending postponement of tomorrow's baseball game against Toyotoma High. His high school's baseball club was on a winning streak.

"If we could play this way next spring in the high school leagues..." he daydreamed, mental images of national championship games at Koshien Stadium buzzing in his head.

At the end of the weather report, the cancellations were announced, including all the schools in the Boso Peninsula. Of course, N.I.T., being a college, would remain open.

"Urd's little prediction of hammerblows late into the evening seems uncannily accurate," Keiichi thought despondently.

The meteorologists were almost certain that Typhoon Akira would make a landfall in Japan. But where?

They were projecting landfall in mid-to-northern Honshu.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

I was exhausted...and Urd was right. After another grueling day at N.I.T., I came home, changed into an old pair of N.I.T. racing coveralls, and started pounded away.

We sealed with windows from the inside with caulk, the kind that could be peeled away after the storm hit. Then we stapled triple layers of plastic sheeting over the windows, then boarded them up. Taping the windows on the inside came next, and then we boarded up the sunroom door, leaving only the living room door as an exit. It was work, work, work, late into the evening.

Fortunately, the temple was built with ample design, because it had a double set of amado, the thick hardwood storm doors. I spent part of my time cleaning the grooves and sills to allow for easy sliding of the amado along the wooden verandas that girded our temple house. Each window sill had a small single amado that was stored away in the storeroom. We stacked these heavy shutters near each window, so we could batten them over the windows and lock them down shortly before the storm would landfall.

But the amado for the main entrance and the sunroom entrance were heavy pieces of wood. We had rarely used both sets in the past; shutting one was more than enough to keep most rains out. But Keiichi explained that we should make both sets of storm doors ready. The outer amado was held in track by an ingenious method: small round knobs of metal were placed on both sides of the groove in the wooden veranda to keep it from sliding out. Nevertheless, they were heavy to move from their storage. Each outer amado door had a series of woodpins that could be locked from the inside, to fasten them together.

I hoped that they would hold out against the typhoon.

The TV was going all day...and it looked like the storm was stalled just six hundred kilos south of us. That could mean that the typhoon could lose some of its strength, or possibly build up to an even more powerful fury. The weather guys were gloomy...their somber reports seemed filled with the sense that it would be the latter of the two possibilities.

While us guys were hammer-and-nailing everything in sight, Bellkuld was busy cooking up a storm. Keiichi had appraised her of the distinct possibility that we may find ourselves without water or electricity for an unknown amount of time, so she and Urd were busily preparing bento meals to provision our household. As the weather reports became succeedingly pessimistic, we planned for a worst case scenario; meals and water would have to last for at least a week.

Meanwhile, Skuldandy was occupied with trying to weatherproof all her mechas, including Banpei and Mini-Banpei. She also was trying to jury-rig a power amplifier, so that we might have electricity while the rest of the neighborhood went dark.

I could sense in Bellkuld's excitement that she was fully expecting a situation where she and Skuldandy could return to their rightful bodies. I stopped several times and sought a personal meditation towards the sisters. I didn't want to see either of them getting more frustrated.

All the tornado warnings that I experienced in the Midwest, all the hurricane preparation videos that I had watched in Hawaii...and yet there was a deathly still in the air...a foreboding silence.

While we were working, Keiichi and I discussed the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake that devastated Kobe over ten years ago. Keiichi was 12, in his first year of junior high school when the earthquake struck. His teachers immediately pressed his class into providing numerous disaster relief activities, such as food and clothing drives. He told me that when they went on the traditional class trip at the end of junior high to Osaka, Kyoto and Nara, the tour sponsors made it a point to travel through Kobe. Evidences of earthquake damage were still plainly visible two years later, much to his surprise. We discussed various environmental determinist theories; how some economists attributed the recession that began in '98...as partially providenced by the significant damage to Kobe, an important shipping center.

Since then, Japan had been free of any natural disasters...until now.

We also discussed how Sayoko had opted for an apartment; she had planned to move into it at the beginning of November. But with the storm coming, Sayoko decided that it would be more prudent to stay at her house...and with us. She was doing great in her recovery...a couple of times I had accompanied her to NA meetings in Tokyo. I looked on as she was actively helping Megumi weatherproof the interior of the living room. Seeing the two side-by-side, I wondered if they had worked through some of their differences.

Everyone was pulling together.

"The ties that bind us together..." I thought whimsically. Yes, I must be getting very burnt out if I can think whimsical thoughts in the face of a full-on Pacific tropical storm.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

The storm remained stalled the next day. With each new weather bulletin, we watched with downcast spirits as the satellite video and radar images of the typhoon depicted it as rapidly expanding in size. The networks were tragicomically portraying it as the "storm of the century", despite the fact that the century was only a few years old. At nightfall, for some unknown reason, it resumed a crawlsteady course towards Honshu. By this time, Typhoon Akira was classified as a Category Five storm...the most powerful category of tropical storm.

Catastrophic.

The deadliest storm the planet was capable of producing.

We all tried to get to sleep early, anticipating that relaxation and sleep would be a rare commodity for the next few days.

It started raining right after dinner. A deceptively soft rain...in contrast to the force of nature that we knew was coming our way. I went out on the front porch just before sunset to see that the entire sky was a nondescript gray. As the sun loomed lower to the horizon, the sky took on an unearthly pink-velvet hue. I had one of those 'transpersonal moments'; a moment where I unintentionally stepped out of the woof and werp of my life to see something routine in a renewed light. I looked over to see Urd standing next to me, also enjoying the last moments of sunset as the sky turned a dark purpled gray.

_"Oh tempestuous winds aborneing the clouds, raimenting the sky with taupe hue,_

_Alest these maidens of holy aspect, Blossom Goddess wings,_

_And float, flying toward distant lands."_

The sky colored my mood a melancholy gray, and reciting Bishop Henjo's poem from the "Hyaku-nin-Isshu" seemed appropriate, coming on the afters of a small moment of spiritual solace in the beauty of the sight.

_"The mountainous wind comes in the autumn, lives up to its name--typhoon,_

_it scatters reeds and twigs about, spinwhirling them over the veld,_

_only to disarrange them again."_

I looked at Urd to see an enchanting smile on her face. She had quoted the familiar 'storm poem' of Bunya Yasuhide from the eighth century, also part of the "100 Poems" collection.

"You know Japanese poetry?" I asked, fairly surprised by her quick response.

"Of course I do! I know _a lot_ of things that you wouldn't even begin to suspect!" she answered with a mirthful expression. We continued in our poetic dialogue for a few moments, then stood in silence watching the rain.

Just like before, that one special night last spring...

"Urd," I said quietly. "Once we have your sisters back where they belong, I...I want to tell them. About us. Because...on a night like this...I really would like to spend the night with you. I find my thoughts turning to you, as if on their own. And we can't be together because our friends and family don't know."

"You're certainly being brave tonight, Cevn! Fear bringing out the inner romantic in you? Or is it the inner stud?" she said, winking at me. I flinched at her comment...but then again, this was Urd. Sexy Urd. Mystical Urd. Goddess Urd.

"A bit of both, actually. Besides, what man wouldn't jump at the opportunity to spend the night with an angelic Goddess..." I admitted. Much to my surprise, I wasn't gripped by panic at the very mention of anything sexual.

"It's about time you figured that one out! But you know, regarding what you just said about telling the others. It seems that we haven't really been ourselves. Don't you think I've been patient under the circumstances, Cevn?"

"Yes, and I appreciate your patience, Urd. It's been hard on me too, seeing you every day...but yet knowing that you're just out of reach. Not only because of the Ultimate Force, but also because of my job at N.I.T. and the fact that no one else knows..."

"Tell me about it!" she replied, looking at me warmly, then regarding the rain with a distant expression in her eyes.

"Remember that night last spring? You and I were standing right here, on this porch during the rain. We had just got into a fierce argument while I were teaching you how to read the Enigma Book? Tonight's just like that night, once again," she described. I felt my eyes tear up at the memory...and I looked at Urd through the film of my tears to see that she too was waxing in the past. I was so grateful for the fact that she shared a common feeling with me. That a single night had made a difference to her, with all her millennia of experiences. Our lives were intertwined; our memories were weaving a tapestry of todays together.

"Urd...thank you for caring. For finding value in me. For being in love with me. I'll make it up to you after things get to normal," I said, turning to her.

The wind gusted, warningly strong.

"_If_ things ever get to normal," Urd said with a slight chill to her voice.

"Let's check the latest on the news..."

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

I decided to watch the late-night TV broadcast with the others, torn between staying up longer or going to bed after the next hour-long weather report segment was finished. The weather broadcasts were becoming boring and repetitious; the only noticeable changes were the radar shots...showing the huge storm creeping ever closer to the mainland. But this time, instead of the normal weatherman and his jive, the network had preempted the local weather report with their version of an all-star weather news team, complete with a panel of dour-faced "disaster consultants":

_"This is an emergency weather bulletin presented by the National Weather Bureau in Tokyo. Tropical Storm Akira, which has been threatening the islands of Japan, has been classified as a Category Five Supertyphoon for the past 32 hours. This storm poses extreme danger to those in its wake._

_The following destruction will occur: Trees, shrubs, and all signs may be blown down; considerable damage to roofs of buildings, with very severe and extensive damage to doors; complete failure on many roofs of residences and industrial_ _buildings; extensive shattering of glass in windows and doors; complete buildings destroyed; small buildings overturned or blown away; temporary structures demolished and major damage to lower floors of all structures less than 15 feet above sea level within one kilometer of the shore. Low lying escape routes inland will be blocked by rising water about three to five hours before landfall and major erosion of beaches and hillsides will occur._

_The National Defense Force will be enforcing a massive evacuation of residential areas occupying shoreline areas; they advise residents to evacuate inland at least twenty kilometers because of the possible storm surge. Citizens are required to cooperate with the evacuation efforts._

_Make no mistake, Akira is a deadly storm. Wind speeds have been monitored at over 270kph around the eye of the storm, with gusts over 320kph, according to observations by the Himawari Geostationary Meteorological Satellite..."_

Everybody in the room gasped as the image switched to a fullscreen satellite image of a _huge_ spiraling storm. It looked like it could cover half of Hokkaido, it was so massive...

_"...not venture outside under any conditions until the storm passes and the sirens signal 'all safe'!_

_Supertyphoon Akira's current projected initial landfall will be anywhere from Atsumi Bay to Surago Bay. Emergency storm shelters are being readied in all prefectures affected by the typhoon warning..."_

We heard a knocking on the front door.

"Well, it looks like I'm going to be spending the night here with you guys," Sayoko announced as she invited herself in. "Better here with my brother and people I know, than at the mansion with the staff..."

I was glad that she opted to stay here...but I realized that her presence would make things very interesting, as she _still_ refused to believe in the divine nature of Belldandy and her sisters.

Well, Bellkuld and her sisters.

It would be interesting to see how Sayoko Mishima would react to a 'Belldandy' who was actually Skuld. A 'Belldandy' that behaved like a 12-year-old girl.

I had a feeling that Sayoko was going to encounter much more than just a freakish superstorm...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

The sirens woke everybody up at 4 am. By that time, the wind was beginning to pick up. The weather felt like a windy spring day, where the winds would start gusting and gradually increase in strength for a few hours until they max out at 50 or 60 kph or so...and then fade away.

But the gusts didn't peak in strength there. The winds _kept_ increasing, gaining stronger. I looked up in the sky to see a nondescript gray...sort of like an overcast sky. But as morning dawned, the sky darkened.

I had been in several "supercell thunderstorms" while I lived in Minnesota. Once, a hurricane had 'brushed' Oahu, causing flooding and downed treelimbs. An ominous element in the air always preceded these deadly storms; a distinct _something_ in the atmosphere that reached down inside the bones, telling me that nature was going to be in control of things for the next few hours.

While I was using drugs and living on the streets, I had been pounded by thunderstorms many times; fully exposed because I had no place to stay except under any handy public shelter. Soaked to the bone, all I could do was ride the storm out. Now, I was riding the storm out again. All insanity aside, we had unanimously agreed to remain at the temple, despite the urgency. Bellkuld had somehow managed to convince the National Defense Force soldiers patrolling our neighborhood that we would be safe at our temple home.

But the static charge that lent a tinny smell to the air, the storm clouds devouring the horizon like wolves, the huge decrease in barometric pressure..._everything_ that was building up...was far more ominous that what I could remember from the Midwestern thunderstorms. Deep inside, I felt a recoil at what was happening to the environment around me.

A tempest of the spirit.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

_WWWROARRRRRRR!_

"Shit, this is crazy! When's it ever going to _end_?" Megumi hoarsely shouted above the din the winds were whipping up. Funny thing how one's nerves could be exerted to a steady hypervigilance...and yet one can feel exhausted at the same time.

I barely made out what she yelled, but the terror on her face elaborated her words by volumes. We were huddled together in the hallway between the two rows of bedrooms as the clamor of the supertyphoon's winds pounded down on us. Looking at us in the hall, it reminded me of the tornado drills I experienced in elementary school. We kids would sit alongside the hallway in rows, holding our heads between our legs...hoping, if a tornado did come, that we wouldn't have to kiss our asses goodbye.

I was scared shitless.

Any sense of bravado I had...disappeared about two hours ago. All my dignity and composure had been blown away an hour ago. Since about half an hour ago, I was fully expecting the maelstrom to fly the roof off from over our heads at any moment. I could hear the crack-popping of roof tiles as they were shorn off by the gusts. My nerves were screaming "shutdownshutdownshutdown" throughout my body. Once more, I wished that we had evacuated to a public shelter when the NDF van came by with its bullhorn.

One of the most unnerving elements of the supertyphoon was the incessant pelting of sheets of rain against everything...the house, the roof, the walls...I felt an almost primal claustrophobic reaction to the 'surround sound' of furious downpour.

Urd was sitting next to me, huddled as close to me as she could get with our 'anti-touch' forcefields (or whatever they were) in effect. I noticed Bellkuld looking at us questioningly, probably wondering why her sister was unable to squeeze against me fully. Urd's face was drawn tight into a fearmask. In my own desperate alarm, I imagined taunting her with a remark about 'perspective' in regards to her comment the other day about earthly severe weather. I uncharitably envisioned the all-powerful Gods and Goddesses watching the capricious weather roil over this mortal plane for millennia, viewing it with a detached manner similar to how we would watch a disaster broadcast on NHK or CNNI.

But it was readily apparent that she was terrified...and my heart went out to her. I wished I could offer some comfort or solace or even confidence to reduce her fear. In the past few weeks, we had talked almost every day, but our romantic life had been put on hold because of my commitments at N.I.T. and her sister's plight. We _really_ needed to get in some personal time.

"Urd...I bet that you've never been in a hurric..er..supertyphoon before," I shouted in her ear, shakily remembering which side of the International Date Line I was now living on.

"No shit! How'd you ever guess?" she said with the sarcasm of the miserable.

"Well, if it's any consolation, I haven't either," I said with a forced grin. My smile did _not_ cheer her up...she was petrified with fright. So was I. I wanted to hold her and assure her that we would survive the storm...but of course, I couldn't because of the strange affliction the Ultimate Force had forced upon us.

"Guess I'm eating my words about this storm being a 'typhoon adventure', huh?" I admitted with embarrassment. Urd looked at me and smiled for a brief moment as she nodded her head to affirm her enjoyment at my eating crow. She pulled her hand deep inside the sleeve of her wool sweater, then splashed me playfully in the face with the now-empty rainsoaked cuff of the sleeve.

Sayoko had brought her handheld HDTV unit into the hallway. Several of the broadcast TV stations were already off the air and most of the wireless cable channels were very difficult to tune in. We finally gave up on it, and listened to its radio instead. Passing it up and down our facing lines along the hallway, each of us held it up to our ears and strained to listen.

The news announced repeatedly that the most powerful portion of the storm was going to pass over just north of Chiba and continue until it exited Honshu just south of Mito. Thus, the Boso Peninsula and Ibaraki Prefecture were going to bear the brunt of the storm.

Great. Just north of Chiba is the little industrial suburban outcropping of Makuhari.

"Why us?" Keiichi shouted at the TV, holding it at arm's length. As I looked from face to face, we appeared to be in the dregs of fearful misery.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"AIIIIYYYY!!"

Just as someone screamed, Urd jerked her head up suddenly as another window blew out with a loud crash, this one in the dining room.

The storm was blowing off the heavy amado shutters, one by one. Somehow, with invisible fingers of rainwind, it had pried open the heavy storm doors in the front entrance!

She could see rains spraying across the entrance to the hallway, the winds propelling the rain _horizontal_ to the floor. The roaring of the wind went up another notch inside the house. It was a good thing that Megumi had the foresight to cover everything in the living room with plastic sheeting. She looked at her housemates, hunkered down in the middle of the hallway, midway between the bathroom at the end and the opening to the living room. Despite being 8 to 10 meters from the living room end, the sound was incredible and everyone's faces were soaked with a fine liquid mist.

She could feel a pool of water lapping around her ankles...

Cevn was worried about his room and its expensive array of keyboards and equipment. A soaked futon could be dried out over a couple of days, but a Synclavier Workstation was trashed if it got soaked. He had put everything in cases and plastic bags as a precaution, but he was still occupied with concern.

Each minute seemed to stretch on for hours. The winds had been roaring for several hours, according to Keiichi. This storm was a dread case scenario: it was a very slow-moving Category Five Tropical Disturbance. The most powerful category of storm in existence. The weathermen had called it a "supertyphoon"...and it was bearing out its new label by sheer dint of destruction. Keiichi's nerves felt like they were being pulled out and washed against a cheese grater. He agreed with Megumi, this was the neverending storm...

But in the space of a few minutes, the winds dramatically leveled off to a gusty reprieve.

"The eye of the storm!" Genji announced. Everyone sighed a gasp of relief, despite the realization that the other side of the storm is often more intense. At least they were being graced with a brief, but merciful respite.

"I wanna look!" Skuldandy shouted, her flaxen light brown hair soaked to a deep rich auburn. She stood up and dashed into the living room...then halted in her steps. Almost a foot of water covered the tatami, and all of the windows had been blown out. Wood shards, nails, tree branches and foliage, and shredded plastic were floating on the muddied water. One of the storm doors was lying on its side, shoved out of its sliding track. The two sets of storm doors had been pushed apart, wide enough for a person to easily walk between them.

"_Whoooah!_" Sayoko shouted, surveying the damage.

"We gotta check the pole to see if Skuldandy's hammer got struck by a lightning bolt!" Keiichi shouted excitedly. Bellkuld looked at him in alarm.

"Keiichi..._no_! Oh no! It's much too dangerous! You _can't_ go outside like this! What if the storm hits again?" Bellkuld pointed out, gripped by worry.

"I've _got_ to! What if the pole gets blown loose? We could lose our only chance! C'mon guys!" he said to us with a beckoning motion. Genji, Tomohisa and Cevn accompanied him outside. Keiichi could feel the dramatic drop in air pressure that was present in the eye of the supertyphoon.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Looking around, I surveyed the damage. My carefully plotted Japanese Garden was no more. The whole yard...was no more! It had been turned into a muddy pool. A tree in the corner of the compound which Skuld used to climb was no longer climbable...it was snapped down about ten feet up the trunk. The large wall that encircled the compound had saved us from greater damage. The ground was littered with roof tiles, shingles from the outbuildings, branches and limbs of trees. Several other trees had been uprooted, their thick tendril-like rhizomes webbed in mudclusters a meter taller than I stood.

Looking up into the eye of the supertyphoon was daunting. I could see the walls of the cloud all around us, knowing in my mind that they were rising vertically to at least 15 kilometers. The strange calm was almost hypnotic...but the inner shield clouds of the supertyphoon were like nothing I'd ever seen. They spiraled themselves in paisley-like designs that belied their incredible strength. In contrast, the circlet of sky overhead was almost navy blue. The air pressure felt all _wrong_ to my senses.

We propped up the ladder and Keiichi climbed it. We only had a few minutes, so there was no time to place balancing bevels at the base of the ladder. Besides, the water reached almost to the first rung. Genji, Tomohisa and I tried to steady the extendable ladder while Bellkuld looked, her brows knit tight with anxiety. Oblivious to our delicate scenario, Skuldandy was prancing around the courtyard. She was splashing water with an almost insane abandon, obviously amped out by the sheer destructiveness of the storm and the frizzle of her own nerves.

Urd regarded us with grave concern.

"Almost...there," I heard Keiichi say as he gained the last steps on the ladder. A leave got tangled in my hair...the wind was starting to pick up already! I felt an airborne mist peppering my face as the wind increased from a breeze to a bluster.

The ladder began shaking like a live thing in our hands as the wind suddenly gusted. I craned my head upward and saw Keiichi undo the last tie of the rope and heft Mjolnir over his head with a triumphant expression.

"I GOT IT!" he yelled aloud with joy. Bellkuld was even more fraught with apprehension as he gingerly started to step down the shaky ladder.

_--Crack!!--_

The pole, which somehow had remained fastened to the roofbeam of the house during the first half of the supertyphoon, now broke out of its weakened moorings and fell away from the temple house. The ladder was ripped from our grip as the pole collided with it and Keiichi. In front of my horrified eyes, Keiichi fell towards the ground with an almost slow-motion arcing descent.

"KEIICHIIIIIIII!" Bellkuld and the rest of us screamed.

The force of the falling ladder had knocked all three of us down onto the muddied grounds. My heart leapt into my throat as I hit the ground and heard a sickening _thud_ seconds later.

The girls got to him first, as we three guys holding the ladder were tossed away like rubber dolls. Tomohisa appeared to have the breath knocked out of him by his fall; he was standing up very unsteady on his feet. We scrambled to reach Keiichi. I could hear him moaning with pain, which assured me that he was at least alive and conscious.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Megumi emerged from the house and wordlessly screamed with her eyes as she ran over to her brother, hands clenched tightly in front of her chest.

From what little she had glimpsed of his fall, she gathered that Keiichi had instinctively tried to right himself as he fell towards the ground. He landed on his legs a split-second before the pole and ladder fell atop him. But instead of pinning him to the ground, his legs had somehow slipped outwards on the slick submerged mudpool...and he was thrown about five feet to the right of the pole. There were two deep grooves in the mud where his feet had slid out from under him.

He was almost completely covered by water!

Urd and Skuldandy returned with the kosatsu, and they gingerly lifted Keiichi up on it, so that he wouldn't drown.

Megumi looked into his eyes and saw by his dilated pupils that Keiichi was in physical shock. His eyes remained locked on Bellkuld and he seemed to relax a slight bit as the winds continued to gust around us. Bellkuld reached down and gripped his hand tightly between hers, her own hands violently shaking with emotion.

Out of the corner of her eye, Megumi saw Cevn sprinting towards the temple torii gate leading out into the street.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Bellkuld was beside herself. Her face had blanched as soon as she saw the pole arc-sweep away from the house with Keiichi caught underneath it. She watched helplessly as the three seconds of his fall etched itself indelibly in her heart with carvings of pure terrifying shock. She remembered saving him from falling off the bridge, from drowning, from being crushed by a runaway truck...but there was _nothing_ she could do this time, trapped as she was in Skuld's body with no Goddess powers whatsoever!

She screamed even as she started running towards the place where he fell. Urd and Skuldandy were right behind her; both gripped in the deep trauma of mind-numbing apprehension.

"Keiichi?" Bellkuld said pleadingly as she knelt next to him, the windy rain plastering her long black locks against her face and clothes. She lifted his head partway on her lap, seeing the water covering his face and his body. Her brown eyes (Skuld's brown eyes) flowing with rain and tears, she uttered a prayer to Kami-sama, invoking all that she knew to protect him and let him survive this fall.

She heard Keiichi moan as they lifted him up on the table, and her heart passioned to his side, feeling his gasps of pain with as deep an empathy as only a soulmate could. Keiichi seemed to fasten his eyes on her, desperate to recognize something, anything, in the midst of his pain and the ever-mounting windgusts. Bellkuld felt his whole body vibrating with trauma. She looked over to see Skuldandy retrieve Mjolnir.

"I think my leg is broken...I can't move it," he said weakly, fading in and out of consciousness.

"Ohhh, Keiichi," was all that Bellkuld could say. She looked at his legs and felt a sickening feeling as she noticed several places where his jeans protruded at odd angles.

"Keiichi, I'm going to check and see how hurt you are," Urd assured him, trying to calm him. She had enough presence of mind to 'scan' Keiichi for any other injuries. Several months of gradually decaying Earth Spirit powers had limited her severely: this was about the extent of what she could do.

"Bell, he's okay, but his legs are broken pretty bad and he has a few broken ribs. He's definitely going to need medical attention. Soon!" she informed her sister. Urd felt a small consolation; she was deathly afraid that he had suffered intense internal injuries to his organs...but only one lung was pierced. Everything else seemed okay as she re-scanned him.

Keiichi coughed up a clout of phlegm and blood.

"Urd..._do_ something," Bellkuld asked in a desperate voice.

"Without my powers, I can't release the all the pain...but I'll try," she struggled aloud as she passed her hands over Keiichi. With great effort, Urd was able to take away a good two-thirds of his discomfort. Her powers had been getting steadily weaker over the several months of her license suspension...even with Earth Spirit powers, she _should_ have been able to siphon off all of Keiichi's pain and have power to spare to put him in a sealing spell. But, as she treated his injuries, her manifest form started shrinking and deforming.

"Urd...that's enough," Keiichi said in a hoarse voice, waving his hand side-to-side in the "stop" gesture. He smiled weakly at her in gratitude, recognizing what she had accomplished at the expense of almost totally depleting her power. Urd shrunk to a very minuscule mini-Urd size and Skuldandy scooped her up and put her 5cm form safe inside a pocket before the winds could pick her up and sweep her away.

Bellkuld blanched even more as she saw several red stains forming on his pant legs.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

I had decided to run out into the street to try and hail a vehicle...any vehicle. Keiichi was severely injured from his fall and he needed to get to a hospital immediately. For some reason, my reaction to his deep state of physical shock was to seek help...perhaps the most important form of First Aid. It brought to mind Urd's attempted suicide back in the Summer Palace in Beijing. There was little chance of any bystanders helping her then...and now, none of us bystanders could provide aid, divine healing or mundane medical.

I vaulted the wall of sandbags we had erected across the torii gateway...and splashed thigh deep in flood waters! I knew it would be nothing short of a miracle for me to find anyone on the flooded road, but I had to try. Keiichi would be okay in the present moment with all the attention he was getting from the others, but the wind was howling again...it soon would be roaring. Hopefully, I could spy a vehicle before the winds got over 100kph.

The wind and rain pelted me as the approaching force of the supertyphoon began to vent its windy spleen on the city. Everywhere I looked, everything was damaged in some way...

In the distance, I saw sheets of rain glowing blue and red.

"A police car?" I hoped aloud as I ran laboriously against the wind, the racing gusts providing an invisible sumo wrestler intent on thwarting my forward progress. As I waded towards the source of the light, I could make out a distinct flashing pattern of an emergency vehicle. Soaked to the bone and freezing with the sharp winds attacking me, I finally lurched forward another few steps.

The car was a mini...a late 80's/early 90's Honda compact car!

"Almost an antique," I thought, observing the small Honda Beat. I stepped in front of its path and waved it down. It rolled to a stop about 5 meters away, cutting through the deep waters like a wave...and I ran up to it.

I could barely see anything, but it looked like there were two policewomen dressed in blue on-duty uniforms inside of the car.

"What policewoman would be wearing an _off-duty_ uniform in the middle of a national disaster?" I chided myself. They were looking at me with a combination of fear and concern. I tried to gesture to them, pointing in the general direction of the temple compound. Their faces were uncomprehending; the gray sheets of rain made it more than likely that they could barely see or hear me. I pounded on the roof and windshield of their civic vehicle to get their attention. Finally, one of the policewomen rolled down her window a couple inches.

She had a short hairdo, which reminded me of Megumi's pert 'do, save that it was a slight bit shorter. She was a couple years older than Keiichi's sister...possibly in her mid-to-late 20s, I guessed. But any resemblance to Megumi ended there. She had light green eyes, which glowed with a manic illumination...her whole aspect seemed to exude a wildness that was almost streetwise tough. Her face was intense with excitement and confidence. For some unknown reason, her deportment conveyed the impression that she was a tomboy. This impression was augmented by the backwards Yokohama Bay Stars baseball cap she wore. Her sleeves were rolled up tightly on her shoulders and her arms were lean and muscular.

"Whaddya want? Don't you know that there's a typhoon going on around us?" she shouted against the windgusts.

"Can we be of assistance?" the other policewoman asked politely after making a face at her passenger. Sitting in the driver's seat, she had long black hair, which she wore parted in the middle, pulled back into a long French braid down her back. Stray wisps of hair framed a beautiful face; her smile was gentle in contrast to the gung-ho grinning of the other occupant of the car. Surprisingly, she had _blue_ eyes, a rarity among Japanese woman. I could hear all sorts of cacophony blaring on her car radio, until I realized it was the chatter of the police-band receiver.

All this passed through me in a second.

_"I..."_

"Get in, you're soaked!" the driver commanded. I tried to open the door...it was locked. She gave the other policewoman an icy glance.

"Let 'm _in_, Natsumi!" she said as she nudged the other with her elbow.

I pulled myself into the back seat of the car, along with a washtub deep tide of water. It was small and cramped. I leaned forward between the bucket seats...and suddenly recognized where I had seen these two faces before!

I almost choked on the gasp in my throat...

"There's been an accident down the block...my friend fell off an extension ladder!" I hurried shouted, trying to be frantic and parsimonious at the same time. The two policewomen turned around to look at me with astonished faces.

"What the _hell_ was your friend doing up on an extension ladder? And _why_ the hell did you let him climb up there?" the short-haired policewoman confronted me aggressively.

"What the hell _difference_ does it make? He _had_ to go up and get something...and we're wasting time with your little crossexam while he's lying injured _outdoors_ in this storm!" I squared back. I heard the driver gasp under her breath.

The short-haired policewoman looked angrily at me for a brief second. I half-expected her to say "You're Under Arrest!", her expression was so toughwise. Then her face softened slightly, and then she smiled at me.

"Sorry, but you look like a criminal with your long hair. I thought you were conning us. Really, we're out of our element here. We're from the Bokuto district in Tokyo, and they sent us all the way out here to the boonies...oops, I mean Makuhari...to provide disaster relief and patrol for looters. We've been trying to drive in this storm for hours. You might have heard our sirens really early this morning?" she stated.

"Okay...we're even!" I said, referring to her remark about my 'felonious' disheveled hair.

"I'm Officer Tsujimoto Natsumi and this is my partner, Officer Kobayakawa Miyuki. Intro's over...let's go rescue your friend!" she said smartly as she turned on the siren.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Keiichi's much too injured to be moved into the house!" Megumi knew instinctively. She and the rest formed a circle around Keiichi, shielding him from the elements while Genji had dashed in the house to retrieve blankets to cover him. She was worried that they would have to stay outside for the rest of the storm...an impossibility. The winds were almost blowing her over as she sat next to her brother...and they were getting stronger, as the big limbs on the trees nearby were starting to sway.

Skuldandy felt a tugging in her pocket...and a moment later, her Big Sister was standing next to her, full-sized. She remembered as she watched Keiichi fall how her nerves went instantly rigid. Sometimes, she both loved and despised Keiichi more than anyone else in the world...and for a brief second, she thought she was watching him fall to his death. But when she ran over with the others, she saw that her unbreathed wishes had been answered. Keiichi wasn't only alive, but he was awake and aware as well. It was even more of a relief when Big Sister Urd pronounced that his injuries were serious, but not critical.

Megumi huddled close to her brother with the others, sheltering him against the elements. It was hard for her to keep her eyes away from his legs...she knew that the broken bones had perforated his skin. Looking at the extent of his severe leg injuries, a horrible thought passed through her mind.

"What if my brother's legs are so messed up...that they can't heal right...and _he can't ever race again_!" Megumi thought with rapt shock. The very image of Keiichi being unable to drive in car and motorcycle races was vehemently abhorrent to her. She tried to mentally package it away, hoping that the others weren't thinking the same thing.

Genji returned and threw down two blankets.

"Shit!! I knew it! The phone lines are all dead! There's no chance of reaching the hospital for an ambulance. How is he?" he said as Megumi quickly grabbed his hand and clenched it tightly, desperately seeking comfort.

Bellkuld was still cradling Keiichi's hand in her own. She had positioned herself next to the table so she could pillow his head. But her arm was much smaller because she was in Skuld's body. She rested her hand on his head...he was burning up!

Urd had used the absolute last dregs of her power to restore herself to normal size...the last thing she wanted was to be in mini-Urd form in the midst of blasting storm winds. Thinking quickly, she dashed to the temple house, then returned with two rubber cords.

"Sorry, Keiichi, but this is going to hurt just for a moment," she warned him. Urd winced as Keiichi moaned in pain when she reached under each leg, then tied each cord tight about mid-thigh on his legs.

"Urd, what are you doing?" Bellkuld asked shrilly as Keiichi squeezed her hand hard. She panicked as her elder sister was hurting Keiichi.

"Bell, he's losing blood...I have to make tourniquets for his legs so he doesn't lose any more vital fluids. It hurts me as much as it hurts him, believe me," she explained to her younger sis. Indeed, Urd had to look away several times as she tied Keiichi off...his groans were too painful to hear _and_ see.

Megumi felt a world of sorrow for Bellkuld. She tried to place herself in her situation...what if _Genji_ had fallen from such a height? She reached over and put her arm around Bellkuld, whose small body was shaking with distress. Keiichi was still conscious, but his eyes disclosed a certain lack of alertness bordering on intoxication. Bellkuld leaned over him, trying to hold down the blankets as they flapped wildly in the wind. Amidst the roaring winds, she thought she heard an approaching siren.

A few seconds later, the siren grew loud...

A_ police car_ was coming! But how would they break through the sandbag wall at the temple gate?

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Miyuki listened closely as their gaijin passenger directed her down the street. She thought he was nuts to be walking around in this kind of weather...this was a Category Five Supertyphoon! And his friend...on a ladder? Her police radio was achatter with accounts of injuries, building and tree collapses, power outages and worse. The storm surge would be hitting the oceanside properties any time...if it hadn't already. Unbelievably, she overheard a police dispatch to a bank in Kando...some criminal types were trying to make off with the bank's safe under the 'protection' of the supertyphoon's rage!

"Make a right into that temple," the long-haired guy in the back seat directed.

"You guys live in a _temple_?" she asked him.

"Nah...it's a correctional center that's designed to look like a temple...for us criminal types," he said, teasing Natsumi.

"Cut it out, or I _will_ handcuff you...and leave you out in the rain," she taunted back, dangling a pair of cuffs on her fingers.

Miyuki giggled at her partner's comeback as she turned into the temple entrance.

Then she saw the sandbags...

"Shit!" she cursed as she slowed her Honda down to a crawl.

"What kind of idiots would block off the entrance to their home with sandbags?" Natsumi swore, glancing back at Cevn with a scowl.

"The kind of idiots who prepare for a typhoon..." Cevn explained sarcastically.

"What are we going to do, Miyuki?"

Miyuki slapped the dash in frustration. She contemplated the situation...then reversed her Honda Beat and backed slowly up the flooded street.

She remembered all of the cars she had lovingly worked on. The "Miyuki Special" Subaru R2DX police car, which Natsumi often jokingly called "R2D2"...because sometimes the car seemed to have a mind of its own, despite Miyuki's expert driving skills. The Nissan "Fairlady" 240ZG, whose engine she had modified for highway patrolling. And Today...

"Today" was the name of this car, Miyuki's souped-up Honda Beat. She had employed her mechanistic artistry all-out to create one of the fastest accelerating cars in Tokyo. Boring out the 600cc engine twice with surgical precision, she now had it up near 800cc. This car was her fave, an innocuous-looking road dynamo which had caught hundreds of speeders. Unbeknownst to Natsumi, Kenny Nakajima and the rest...Miyuki had etched hash marks on the engine mounts for each successful high-speed chase resulting in an arrest. Today wasn't just a car...she was _family_!

Her most favorite car in the world...

"But this'll be a _major_ challenge!" Miyuki thought grimly as she regarded the wall of sandbags. She needed a bulldozer, not a Honda compact!

With a quick series of calculations, Miyuki realized that it would be possible to plow through the bags if she rammed them at an oblique angle, rather than head-on. But could her car withstand the pounding?

"This is a dire emergency, Today! I expect you to give it everything you've got...because you're saving someone's life!" she whispered to her car.

Natsumi felt her ears prick up when she heard her partner whispering. The whispering could only mean...

"Miyuki, you're not gonna... It's impossible! YOU CAN'T BE SERIOUS!!" Natsumi yelled in tight-lipped panic as her partner's face tightened up with determination. _That_ wide-eyed look of determination...the one that only Miyuki could pull off during a totally riotous road chase. And the whispered words of encouragement to Today...

"Fasten your seatbelts and hang on...I'm gonna demo that sandbag wall!!" Miyuki announced with a confident shout.

"_Miyukiiii..!_" Natsumi screamed, barely hearing her voice over the car's revved deep-motored growl.

Heelpunching the pedal to the drivetrain, Miyuki pulled the nitro switch out...and shifted into drive!

Natsumi's eyes went wide as their Honda screamed forward...

_BAMMMBBBB!!_

Cevn was completely lost for words as the little policecar smashed into the sandbags...and he was tossed around the back seat like a tennis ball.

"Shit!! I'm gonna get killed trying to rescue my friend!" he shouted as Miyuki reversed the car, backing up for a second attempt. He had read the "Taiho Shichauzo" manga...and he knew that Miyuki would stop at nothing once her mind was made up to attempt a driving feat...

"SHUT UP!" the two policewomen shouted, silencing him.

Miyuki realized that her headlights were smashed from the first attempt; there was no lightbeams to penetrate the gusty downpours.

This would be their last chance.

She cautiously backed up the Honda Beat an extra block, feeling like she was driving a boat as the high waters rocked her car. Then she backed it up even further, so that she would have more momentum once she crankcased the motor towards bludgeon-dozing speed.

"_Come on_ Today!!" she encouraged her Honda Beat with a warcry as she floored the accelerator. Because of the wheelbase-deep floodwaters, her police car struggled at first to gain speed. Gritting her teeth, she aimed at the partial breach in the sandbags...

_BAMMMBSSHHHhhh!!_

"We made it!" Miyuki announced, slamming on the brakes seconds after they had blasted through the bags. She noted with amusement that her partner and the gaijin guy had both covered their eyes with their arms during the second attempt. Patting her trusty Today on the dash, Miyuki could barely make out the tight circle of people crouching in the rain nearby.

Natsumi was still a little hot under the collar after their passenger had talked back to her. He was insolent, well deserving of being slapped with some kind of arrest...or with her gloved hand. But then she saw the pleading desperation in his blue eyes.

"He's kinda cute, in a stupid shaggy-rug sort of way," she thought as she relented her anger somewhat. She realized that he was being blunt only because he wanted to help his friend. His light-hearted joking had cooled her off some more, and when she saw the group of people huddled in a circle, she felt the rest of her anger disappear. Quickly becoming all business, she recalled the storm emergency procedures they had been briefed on at the station.

As Miyuki pulled their patrol car to a stop, she saw the cluster of people and breathed a sigh of thanks. It was a good thing that Superintendent Tokomaru had assigned them to the outlying areas near Tokyo...now they would be able to be of _real_ assistance to someone instead of simply driving around in the rain.

Fighting against the becking rainblasts, Miyuki mountainclimbed against the wind towards the group. Reluctantly, she cast a backwards glance towards her precious, well-kept police car.

"Ohhh, my dear Today..." she sighed as she shook her head with a mixture of pride and sadness.

The whole front end of her most beloved mechanical being in the whole of Japan was crumpled...

Natsumi hopped out of the car and opened the hatch to get some first aid supplies and a stretcher. The wind was furious, and she was soaked to the skin in less than 30 seconds despite her police-issue overcoat. She looked to see that her partner was already attending to the injured man.

She hustled over with the supplies, after pulling the back seat down. She saw a mixed group of...students? In a Zen Buddhist temple? What was going on here? There was a long pole and an extension ladder lying in the mud near the group.

She saw several gaijin amongst the group. One, a little girl with long black hair in a funny outfit, was holding the hand of the injured man, whose head was cradled in her arm.

The wind was screaming all around them...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Megumi was stunned when she saw the mini police car smash through the sandbag wall! Someone had come to fetch Keiichi and take him to the hospital! She looked up to see two policewomen pile out of the small car, its red and blue lights reflecting strobe-like off the temple compound buildings and the encircling wall.

"Thankyou..thankyou..thankyou!" she breathed.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Miyuki could see the physical symptoms of shock in the young man's eyes as soon as she saw him lying on the ground. Obviously a college student, she sensed.

"He's got two broken legs and several cracked ribs," a tanned woman with long platinum-blonde hair informed her with a knowledgeable air.

"She looks like a model," Miyuki thought as she sized up the woman. She looked at the rest of the small circle...they all appeared to be college students except for a young teenage boy and girl. The little girl appeared to be the most distraught one in the group; she was holding the injured man's hand in a tight clutch. Probably his younger sister. She couldn't have been more than 12 or 13.

Miyuki felt almost nauseous as she saw the brown and red spatches on his jeans. If _she_ was feeling upset just by looking at his injuries...she could only imagine how his friends felt! She thought it best to let Natsumi handle the injured man, as her First Aid training seemed to have slipped her mind a bit during the stressful gateramming a moment ago. Besides, she was much personable than Natsumi at times...and these people needed to be calmed down right away!

"I'm a kind of...doctor," the tanned woman volunteered, answering her unvoiced question.

Miyuki nodded wordlessly at Natsumi...their partnership was so empathic that a simple glance or gesture was enough for each policewoman to 'assign' herself to different aspects of the task at hand. Being able to read each other in emergencies was a crucial part of any partnership in the police force; Miyuki could always be assured that Natsumi and she could divide their assignments on the fly. She smiled at her partner, as Natsumi pulled back her parka hood and knelt next to the injured young man.

While Miyuki was calming his friends and gathering information, Natsumi had walked over and covered him with two heavy raincoats. His whole body was shivering. She realized that she needed to ascertain the depths of his physical shock.

"He's pretty bad off...I'm going to hate moving him cause it'll be really painful," Natsumi observed to herself, mentally sizing up the situation as she knelt next to him.

"Do you know where you are? What your name is?" she asked.

"I'm outside my home...I think. My name is Morisato Keiichi, and I'm a student. At N.I.T. in Makuhari. Nekomi Institute of Technology or something like that. My legs and chest...really hurt," he answered with a moan. Natsumi leaned close to his face to hear him. She didn't hear all of his name, but he did seem to know that he was a college student at some technical institute. The wind and rain was making too much noise for her to hear anything else.

"He's totally handsome, even if he is a little bit short for a guy!" Natsumi noted approvingly, despite the fact that he was soaked by the downpouring rains. Every second would count until she got him safe in their policecar! The civilians were in great danger as well, being outside in these mounting winds and rains. She needed to offer assurance...and get everyone to safety!

"Keiichi, we're going to take you to Chiba Prefectural Hospital in Chiba. You're going to be there soon. Are you gonna be okay?" she said, trying to project as much confidence as she could muster.

He nodded his head.

"Okay...I'll be right back!" Natsumi said as she patted him on the shoulder. A moment later, she was behind their car, readying the stretcher she had pulled out of the hatchback trunk.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Megumi felt even more relief as she saw that one of the policewomen was getting a stretcher. The short-haired policewoman unfolded it, then effortlessly walked over to where they were huddled around Keiichi.

"My Lord...she must be _incredibly strong_! She didn't even stagger from the force of the wind as she carried that stretcher and those supplies over!" Megumi noted with awe.

"Okay! We have the situation under control now! You civilians should all return to the safety of your hou...er...temple! This weather is dangerous!" the short-haired policewoman yelled officiously.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Can I go with him? Please...he's my boyfriend!" the little girl with the black hair asked Miyuki as she and Natsumi were gently sliding Keiichi onto the stretcher. Miyuki jerked stiff as the words sunk in. She looked at Natsumi, who was facefallen with astonishment. She felt like the wind had been knocked out of her.

"He's a PERVERT...we're rescuing a pervert! It's horrible! U..unspeakable! He...and a little girl this age?" she thought angrily.

"She can't be more than 12 years old...this is definitely a case of statutory rape if they're sleeping together," Natsumi thought in absolute disgust.

All of Miyuki's earnestness towards helping this handsome college student fled away in a flash as she felt a wave of queasiness. She looked again at Natsumi, whose whole face was quivering with barely-suppressed anger as she strapped him to the stretcher.

"Well, at least we got him where we want him. There's nothing he can do about us filing a report on _this_..." Miyuki thought grimly.

In her anxiety and worry, Bellkuld had forgotten that she was in Skuld's body. She just wanted to be with her Keiichi and see him to safety. With the winds almost blowing her small frame over, she was filled with panic. Judging by the total shock and rage on the face of the two policewomen, she realized that she had said something she shouldn't have.

"I've gotten Keiichi in trouble again!" she thought with embarrassment.

"HEY!! Forget about what _she_ said! He's _my_ boyfriend! He's with _me_! The...shock of the storm...and then his accident...has unsettled my little sister," Skuldandy shouted above the increasing din of the storm's fury while pointing an accusing finger at Bellkuld.

Bellkuld flinched in astonishment as she heard this.

"My little sister sometimes gets a little carried away in her imagination! You know how young girls are...they often live in a fantasy life populated with fantasy boyfriends!" Skuldandy continued...and then she suddenly dipped down and _kissed Keiichi on the lips_!! Not just a glancing peck on the lips...but a long lingering passionate kiss...

Bellkuld felt her jaw drop as a gasp froze in her throat!

Miyuki looked at the auburn-haired woman addressing her. She had been quiet the whole time, but now she was talking passionately, if also sensibly.

Natsumi sized up this new woman. She was light-complexioned with long tresses of light brunette hair. She was model-beautiful as well, but in a graceful wholesome sense. Natsumi thought she could see a resemblance between her and the tanned woman.

"Could they be sisters?" she wondered. Yet, despite her age, this new woman seemed to be childish in the way she carried herself.

Miyuki felt her resentment wash away in the rain at this new revelation.

"I shouldn't have suspected you," she said silently in apology to the semiconscious Keiichi.

Bellkuld looked at Skuldandy with a wordless expression of gratitude. Skuldandy...Skuld...had just rescued her from an extremely awkward situation! But Bell could detect the hint of sarcasm in her little sister's voice as she said, "gets carried away." Skuldandy smiled at her, in total control and satisfaction; "you owe me _bigtime_, sis!" written large in her expressive eyes.

"Do you want to go with him to the hospital?" Miyuki offered.

"No...you guys have enough on your hands already. Take good care of him...or I'll bomb ya!" the brunette gaijin said.

"She _is_ childish!" Natsumi concluded.

Miyuki turned to face Bellkuld with a stern countenance.

"Young lady, you shouldn't _ever_ tell stories like that! He is your sister's boyfriend, not yours! In our modern society, it is immoral and illegal for a little girl your age to be involved with an adult. Please try to consider the consequences of things that you say...before you say them! By misleading us, you nearly got your sister's boyfriend in lots of trouble! It doesn't pay to be dishonest, especially to the police! Make a sincere effort to be more truthful from now on," she lectured vigorously.

The two policewomen deftly lifted the stretcher; accompanied by the crowd of students, the group walked carefully to the police car. The winds buffeted them, making the effort laborious. The small Honda was rocking in the wind. Fastening the stretcher in the back, they closed the hatch and quickly rushed back into the safety of their car. Waving at the odd assembly who were standing on a deck under the eaves on, Miyuki and Natsumi pulled out to the street.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

I looked at Bellkuld with tacit concern. She was like a solar eclipse...all her lively vivacity had disappeared with the barbwire memory of Keiichi's accident. Urd and Skuldandy were holding her tightly between them. For once, it seemed that being in Skuld's small frame was an advantage...she could be smothered with love by her two sisters.

The supertyphoon was wailing all around us, a wall of screaming elements clashing with our little temple. I was surprised that the temple was holding up so well against the storm, and then realized that it hadn't lasted all these centuries because of shoddy construction. I wondered how many storms and fires the temple complex had weathered in its eight centuries of existence.

I knew that the most deadly part of the hurricane wasn't the winds or the torrential rains. It was the storm surge. In the middle of a tropical storm, the reduced atmospheric pressure around the center of the cyclonic cloud pattern would cause the ocean to 'bubble up', withdrawing the tide from the shore. But once the storm made landfall, the bubble would 'burst' and the tidal waters would rush in, devastating the shore line.

My memory took me to a place several years ago. I was watching scenes from a hurricane landfall in the Mainland over the internet. The storm surge had pushed the tideline in at least 200 yards, flooding everything in sight. With a supertyphoon the size of Akira, the water could flood in several kilometers. We were only two kilos from the oceanside. However, to our good fortune, the Makuhari Messe Exhibition Center was right alongside the ocean. In one sense, this huge complex might provide a man-made barrier for the tidal swell. Perhaps that was why we weren't too flooded out. Bulldozers had been working around-the-clock prior to the storm to create artificial levees and shorebank barriers to reduce the storm surge flooding. Those must have made an impact as well. But my hunch was that the Makuhari Messe would be severely damaged by the storm.

The air was vermilion with barely contained atmospheric violence.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

The ride to Chiba Prefectural Hospital with Miyuki and Natsumi was an adventure in agony for Keiichi. However, despite the sharpness of the pains in his body, he was able to turn his head and survey the indiscriminate destruction caused by the supertyphoon. It was like nothing he had ever seen or could even imagine! Seeing the damage, he was reminded of the film he saw this past summer at Peace Park in Hiroshima that had depicted the city right after the bombing. This wasn't _that_ bad...but this was _definitely_ in the disaster category.

There was so much devastation that his mind was overwhelmed trying to categorize it. Lying on his back in the policecar, he could see whole sections of roofs that were collapsed or torn off. Storefronts were smashed; vending machines were blown onto the streets. Trees were broken or uprooted. Even the cement power and telephone poles had been knocked down. Power lines littered the streets. In some places, the water crested over the hood of the police car. And the streets...were like rivers!

As a skilled racer, Keiichi noticed that Miyuki was an expert driver; she avoided downed power lines and debris with the practiced moves of a pro. Keiichi wondered if she had been in a racing club when she was in college or in the police academy. As they made numerous detours due to impassable obstacles, he realized that she had avoided all the street-borne debris without making any sharp turns or sudden braking...no doubt in deference to his injuries.

He was amazed that she was doing this...in a severe storm...without headlights!

Keiichi noticed that the other policewoman, Natsumi, had her eyes glued to the road as well, calling out potential driving hazards and checking the onboard computer display for changes in route. It was obvious to him that their partnership was forged on solid teamwork. Their car was buffeted by the violent winds, but Miyuki's driving was smooth and precise. With dawning respect, he realized that she was much more skilled as a driver than anyone he had ever met.

"_This_ is the ultimate hazardous driving condition, and she's handling it with total confidence!" he thought with frank admiration. His respect increased as she conversed with him, trying to help him ignore his toothgrit pain.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

En route to the hospital, Natsumi talked with their passenger, Keiichi, about his school and other personal matters...in an effort to keep him conscious and coherent. This ride was going to take a while; she was unfamiliar with the streets here...and the Global Positioning Display was useless! The GPD couldn't account for all the streets that were trashed by the storm. The very first street that led to the hospital was a dead-end...a _two-storey house_ had been blown off its foundation, blocking the street! She was feeling lost, trying to rely on sight alone.

"This storm is tearing up the city _bad_!" she said with a grim expression to Miyuki. Natsumi had been the one who had performed most of the weatherproofing duties at their apartment while Miyuki had worked overtime at the station and kept an eye on Ken. Her partner was looking more than a little tired...Miyuki had spent many extra hours working on the computer network so it wouldn't crash during the upcoming storm. She said a silent prayer that they would get to the hospital safe and sound...and that their apartment would still be in one piece when the storm was over.

Miyuki watched Natsumi as she toweled their passenger's face off and kept him talking. As his spiky hair dried, it dawned on her that she recognized him from somewhere...but she couldn't quite place it. To her delight, she learned that the young student was an aficionado of vehicles. A fellow motorcycle buff.

But there was something about his face...it seemed _so_ familiar...

In the hour she had been driving, Miyuki had animatedly engaged Keiichi in esoteric shop talk whenever she could. It helped her concentrate on her driving. She probed him with technical questions and ascertained that he was a very knowledgeable mechanic to boot. But then...Natsumi was giving her_ that_ look again...the look of impatience that her partner assumed when she felt that Miyuki was ignoring her.

Miyuki had to keep talking...these driving conditions were supercharging her nerves! Wondering what was the source of all his knowledge, she asked him if he was in a driving club or something.

"Yeah, I'm the driver for N.I.T.'s Motor Cycle Club," he answered, his voice wracked with pain.

"EHHHH?!"

"Natsumi, what did he say his name was?"

"Uh...Keiichi! You've only been calling him by his name for the last hour, while ignoring me!" Natsumi answered in an owlly voice.

"No, you dope! His _surname_! What did he say his last name was?" Miyuki asked, irritated.

"Let me try to remember. Mori... something. Moriyama? No...that's not it. Morisake? No...ah! Now I remember! He said his name was Morisato. Keiichi Morisato!" Natsumi answered.

Miyuki looked at Natsumi with a shocked expression. Her eyes flew wide with sudden realization...and she almost slammed on the brakes from surprise.

"Ohmygod!! That's_ him_! He's the driver...for _the_ motor club!" she thought, her emotions whirling even tighter with this discovery.

Natsumi had been co-piloting, keeping her eyes keen on all the junk on the road and checking Keiichi for any signs of worsening physical shock. She noticed her partner's sudden change in demeanor...and the near collision with a downed concrete pole.

"Miyuki, what's wrong? You look like you just saw Yusaku Matsuda walking out in the storm!" Natsumi asked, whispering her question in a quiet voice, so that their passenger wouldn't overhear. Yusaku Matsuda was one of Japan's top male actors...a true idol. Natsumi had one of his photo calendars in her room.

"Natsumi...that guy back there...he's _Keiichi Morisato_!" Miyuki whispered back with all the enthusiasm of a gossip.

"Huh? Duh! I just told you that! He already told us his name, space case!" Natsumi whispered in a level voice.

"No, you don't _understand_, Natsumi! He's the guy! You know...the guy who won the Solar Energy race last spring! Remember? Remember how I was all upset because we weren't assigned to patrol the race because we had to deal with that damned idiot Strikeman again? And then we got home and I watched the tape of it and accidentally pitched that orange juice over your blouse when the Japanese team won. Remember?"

"That was _no_ accident, that was you going out of your mind with excite...waitaminute! You're telling me that _he's_ the driver of that team of misfit college students that _won_ that race?" Natsumi asked in an incredulous voice

Miyuki jerked her thumb to point backwards and nodded her head..

"_He's the guy!!_" she announced.

"WAAH!! No way!" Natsumi near shouted. "That's _him_?" Bubbling with shock, she put a gloved hand over her mouth to cover her gasp of surprise. Miyuki saw her friend's reaction and nodded her head in confirmation.

"My God! He's like...a total _celebrity_! His face was all over the papers and magazines after that race! He beat out all those other racers...despite impossible odds! Everybody in Japan knows about his team from N.I.T.!"

"Yeah! He's the driver for that Motor Club, the one the press were calling 'The Misfits'!" Miyuki added. Suddenly, this 'ambulance ride' had taken a detour into an extremely interesting realm! Miyuki silently hoped that Natsumi would keep mum about the magazine clipping of Keiichi tacked on the living room wall posterboard.

The two women had started off in whisperings, but now they were getting louder and louder as Miyuki made yet another detour.

"Oooo...I _have_ got to get his autograph!" Natsumi said excitedly. Then she pouted.

"What?" Miyuki asked, noticing the dejected look on her face.

"Dammit! He's got a girlfriend already!" Natsumi combed through her pert hairdo with her fingers. "Yet...I wonder if I could change his mind? A college guy like him would probably really groove on an older woman like me; a woman with lots of experience in the arts of love..."

"You're not _that_ much older than him! He's gotta be 24, maybe 25. You're 27, Natsumi! For all we know, he may have more experience than _you_!" Miyuki quipped back, just to see how her partner would react.

"He doesn't look like the type! In fact...he looks like _my_ type!" Natsumi snapped back.

"Oh...my confused partner in crimefighting...you must be talking about someone else! It ain't you, Natsumi! Don't confuse fickle with experienced," her close friend teased.

Natsumi narrowed her eyes at Miyuki.

"You better thank your stars that you're my best friend, Miyuki, otherwise..." Natsumi growled in a low voice.

_Cough, cough!_

Keiichi was listening to the conversation between the two policewomen with a mixture of embarrassment and pride. Despite the shocking amount of pain he was in, he felt enlivened because the two women had recognized him from the Solar Car race. He was also flattered that one of them sensed that he had romantic potential. But it became embarrassing when one of the policewomen had made that comment about the "arts of love." Keiichi had always felt uneasy when women would refer to him in the objective sense as someone who was sexually attractive...as if he was some kind of object of feminine lust or desire. Then, his shyness would always rear up and he would be left speechless. Sayoko had done this to him innumerable times in high school and college.

Even though he was in medical shock, he smiled to himself when he heard the other woman's rapier-sharp comeback. Then he coughed diplomatically to try and prevent the conversation from declining into baser realms. Besides, he was already with an older woman...a _much_ older woman.

"Ahhh, we're here!" Miyuki said excitedly.

As the two policewomen carried him in on the stretcher, Keiichi sensed his heart fill with gratitude. He had never encountered the police before, at least not to this degree. These two policewomen had taught him that law enforcement personnel were people, too.

Once inside the emergency lobby, the hospital staff admitted him promptly into a packed triage unit.

They gently placed him on a rolling bed. Keiichi winced with sharp pain at this, as the nurses immediately gave him some painkillers. They took him to an exam room, informing him that they were going to X-ray him. The two policewomen followed him into the room to wait on him.

"You're incredible!" he admitted to Miyuki. "I've _never_ seen anyone drive so well...you were so skilled in the way you navigated past all those obstacles! I hope that I can be as good as you someday..."

Miyuki felt herself blushing at his compliment. Keiichi complimented Natsumi as well. He obliged the two of them by sketching little cartoon drawings of his solar racer, then autographing his art. Natsumi was beside herself with joy.

"Ya know...maybe you should consider signing up for the Traffic Division once you graduate from N.I.T. You would make a great addition to our force..." Natsumi suggested.

"Yes, with your driving skills, you would fit right in. In fact, you might make _us_ look bad," Miyuki added, her smile broadening as the young college student turned beet red.

"It was nice meeting you, Keiichi Moristao! Thanks for the autographs. We have a kindergarten class of kids who'll really be happy to get them...once we get all the storm damage cleared up," Natsumi said. Both policewomen bowed to him, then waved goodbye and went back to work.

"Wait until we tell the folks at the office about _this_," Natsumi said wearily as they hit the road again in their smashed up Honda.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Gradually, the supertyphoon relented. A typhoon comes in waves; powerful storming followed by periods of lighter rain and winds. This was due to the structure of the storm...concentric storm cells radiating around the eye. It seemed to last forever, but eventually the radio informed us that the worst was over.

As the winds died down for one last time, an eerie silence followed. There was no birdsong, no traffic, no wind-rustled leaves, and no conversation...just a pervading, profound quietude.

And the neverending rain...

As stillness gripped the outside, we on the inside of the temple house were quiet as well. Words could not describe what had happened today.

The rains continued into the late evening, but the damage had been done. Everyone looked like survivors from a train wreck. There was a tightwire sort of edginess to each face. A couple of hours later, Urd had enough energy to resume her normal stature.

Urd was looking intently at Mjolnir, then her sisters.

"Bellkuld, I know what you're thinking...that you want to check on Keiichi. But you need to have faith that he's safe. The phone lines are down, and we're all emotional basketcases here," she reasoned.

Bellkuld listened to her heart...and knew clairepresently that Keiichi _was_ safe. It still didn't lessen the trauma of seeing his face shaking in pain after falling off that ladder. She knew that many beings were suffering in the aftermath of the supertyphoon...but her sense of loss was agonizingly tight and real.

Urd hugged her again.

"Let's get you and Skuld back to where you belong," she said.

Urd walked down the hall to her "Urd's Castle" room. The shoji door was ripped out of its slider. She sighed to herself, expecting the storm damage in her lab to be similar to that in the living room. She was relieved to see that there was minimal damage, other than the fact that everything was soaked and strewn on the floor. Nothing_ too _serious. Grabbing the three potted black orchids, she returned to the living room.

They were harmless in this state, but Urd knew that these three plants were exact clones of one that caused Belldandy and Skuld to switch bodies. Once they applied the electrical charges from Mjolnir, the plants would spray their noxious potion and reverse whoever was in range of the spore cloud. It would re-reverse Skuld and Belldandy back into their proper bodies.

"Then I can burn these motherfuckers," Urd thought, seething with resentment. Her alchemical skills had been taxed to the utmost as she worked to duplicate the Black Orchids. She had applied herself whole-heartedly to this task for several weeks. Bonding a spell to a chemical potion was inherently complex by nature, requiring an exact balance of arcane magic and alchemical properties. Creating an organic delivery system was even more difficult. The intermix of chemical, alchemical and arcanical skills required expertise in several areas of magic. Further, the potion itself created a permanent mind-spirit separation _and_ transference, which was patently difficult to reverse. Finally, the potion had been developed to be effective on _Goddesses_! Urd had to comb her way through labyrinthine enigmas to arrive at her finished clones. An extreme amount of magical knowledge and skill had been employed to create the whole package.

"There's no way that Mara could have come up with _this_!" Urd told herself as she examine the fruits of her labor. The subtlety and abstruseness of the Black Orchid was far beyond Mara's magical spellmaking capabilities. After all, Mara was only Urd's age...and Urd had _barely_ been able to create clones of the plants herself. Also, unlike Mara who was a Grief Office agent, Urd was a Sysop; her job required specialization in arcane matters, since the computers on Yggdrasil were run on nine levels of programming, one of which involved arcane coding. She reasoned that Mara must have employed some big-league help...or even worse, someone else was responsible for this. The baleful nature of the Black Orchid and it potion reeked of Demonic involvement.

"Whoever cooked this up is extremely devious and clever," Urd commented as she brought the plants into the living room.

Bellkuld and Skuldandy visibly paled as the she arranged the plants in a triangular pattern on a soaked futon. Shaking tremulously, the two Goddesses withdrew away from the evil-looking plants, the memories of their initial encounter with the foul noxious plant clinging resiliently in their minds.

"Hey, you guys are supposed to be in the middle of these, not hiding away in the dining room! They're harmless at the moment, so long as Mjolnir isn't near them," Urd offered, trying to comfort and encourage at the same time.

The two Goddesses timidly splashed forward to stand between the assembly of plants. The water was at least a foot deep in the house, and Urd was worried that this flood would create problems for the transference process.

"Urd, it's nice that you want to make us feel comfortable...but could you please _hurry up_! Being near this...thing...makes me feel horrible," Bellkuld stated, grillcased with anxiety.

"C'mon, let's get this over with. Power up Mjolnir and bring it over," Skuldandy added in a shaky voice.

"Power it up? HOW? The lights are out!" Urd said, feeling a desperate icy chill running down her back.

"With the portable power supply that I put together right before the storm hit!" Skuldandy said.

"Why didn't you tell me that..._before_!" Urd said, lightly cuffing Skuldandy on the head. Skuldandy went to her lab to find it. Some of her mechas had been knocked off of shelves and tables, but for the most part, things looked okay. She found the portable power amplifier and returned with it. She attached the small unit to the handle of Mjolnir. Her power amp was only six inches long, but she knew that it could discharge up to 4 gigawatts of energy for a ten-second burst of power.

More than enough to 'jump start' the potential EM charge in the Ixodenum of Skuld's mallet that was generated by one or more lightning strikes.

"You guys should sit on the floor," Urd suggested, not wanting either Goddess to lose consciousness, fall down, and knock over a plant. Both sat on the floor, waist deep in the cesspool. Urd set the timer for 5 seconds, which would give her ample time to set it in between her two sisters. She dashed up and set it squarely between Bellkuld and Skuldandy.

"I guess this means Sayoko's gonna know for sure about our little secret," Urd thought as she watched. A series of sparks sprayed out from the mallet, forming a showering green field a split-second later. Megumi, Genji, Tomohisa, Sayoko and Cevn stood far away, their faces illuminated by the bright glow. Shards of blue lighting arced between Mjolnir and the three plants.

Skuldandy and Bellkuld both slumped to the floor as the three Black Orchids ejected plumes of black spore clouds. The combination of green luminescence and black pungent smoke created a lightshow that held all in rapt admiration.

"Come on! _Work_!" Urd muttered repeatedly under her breath. The lightglow faded from the air, and a breeze from the front door dissipated the black cloud, wafting it out one of the broken windows. Urd was clenching her fists so hard that her fingernails threatened to break.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

She gradually arrived at consciousness after the spinning sensation ceased. She looked up to see Urd and the others, who were all watching her intently. She immediately looked down her front...and saw that her bust had replaced the flat chest she was used to. Her body _felt_ right again! She ran her hands down her front and hips, feeling the roundness and fullness that hadn't been there before. Then she reached to the side of her head and pulled a long strand of hair to view.

It was a soft light brown.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

She felt herself awakening with a slight tingly feeling in her body. Her head felt like a marble, but she put the sensation aside and looked down. She saw two slender legs...and no breasts! Excited, she wiggled her feet, feeling a lightness in her body that had been missing for a long time. She examined her lithe hands, noticing how petite and delicate her fingers were. Then she looked around the room, and saw _her_. Her older sister...as she should be.

"I'm _me_ again!" she sighed with total relief.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

The two Goddesses slowly sat up, looked at each other, then started to laugh giddily as they realized that they were back into their _own_ bodies!

"It's you!" they both said between fits of laughter as they pranced around each other.

Urd felt tears coming to her eyes as she walked over to hug her sisters.

Belldandy and Skuld.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

The scene of the reunited trio of Goddesses brought tears to my eyes. I uselessly wiped my tears on an already-soaked shirt sleeve. Looking at all of our faces, I saw that everyone's cheeks had tear lines, except for Sayoko...whose face belied frank astonishment.

After a few minutes, I went over and hugged Belldandy and Skuld.

I suggested that we do a 'swarm hug' on the pair. I learned about this during one of my stays in a treatment center. Each person in the treatment center had to face their deepest fears and share their 'life history' with the group. Once they were finished, members of the group would offer feedback and comments on their life's story. At the end of the group session, everyone would surround the emotionally exhausted patient with a mass hug. We surrounded Belldandy and Skuld with our bodies, tightly pinning them in and patting them on the back.

I could see the worry on Belldandy's face in the midst of the celebratory air.

"We have one more thing to do!" Urd announced. "Then the spell will be completely reversed." Belldandy, Skuld and the rest of us looked at her with doubtful expressions.

What now?

"Let's burn these cursed things!" Urd shouted with a smile. She handed a book of matches to each of her sisters and ushered us outside.

She set the three plants down on one of the few places in the yard that wasn't under water. Then she pulled a vial from her sleeve, opened it, and poured some kind of powdery substance on each of the three plants. To me, this strange action offered the impression that she was salting them; but I knew that she had something up her sleeve, pun intended.

"Ready, my sisters?"

"YEAH!" we all shouted in encouragement.

"Throw a match on them, then run back to the house!" she warned.

Uh-oh. I knew from the manga that Urd and incendiary devices did not share a concordant nature. In other words, quite often, her acts of flammation turned out worse than Skuld's "Skuld bomb" miscues. Urd was running on the Yggdrasilian equivalent of pure adrenaline...she was almost as flighty as Skuld.

Belldandy and Skuld threw their matches on the plants and we rushed to the house for shelter.

"Thank Goddess that the house is wet," I mumbled, "at least then it can't catch on fire!" Urd gave me a sharp glance until she saw that I was teasing her.

_-- Boom Crackle Whzzzzbam Zlam Kaching _--

The dreaded Black Orchids exploded in a brilliant display of colorful reports, shooting huge fireballs high into the sky. We watched, captivated, as the plant's destruction evolved into a fireworks display.

"YAHOOOOOOOOO!" we screamed.

I started clapping loudly, and the others joined in. Belldandy and Skuld had very satisfied looks on their faces. Then they both started jumping up and down in a cheer. Belldandy had been an N.I.T. Motor Club cheerleader any number of times, and Skuld had watched her older sisters cheer enough to copy her moves.

Once more, my friends had turned tragedy into triumph, at least a little triumph for today. I knew that Makuhari was heavily storm damaged...and Keiichi was in the hospital.

But somehow, I felt confident that everything would be all right.

"Wh..what are you guys?" Sayoko stammered, confusion woven into her exhausted mien.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Well, the X-rays disclosed that you have compound fractures of the tibia and fibula in both legs, along with four broken ribs, a punctured left lung, and a cracked collarbone," the doctor stated in a matter-of-fact voice.

Keiichi looked down at his legs. The doctors had cut away his jeans to reveal two very battered legs. He was too shocked by the fall and the ride to the hospital to be surprised by his injuries, or the sight of his legs. With an almost dispassionate curiosity, he noticed sharp ends of bone protruding out of each leg.

"We've given you something for the pain and x-rayed you...we're going to have to operate to set the broken bones in your legs properly."

"O..okay," he answered, feeling almost sleepy after the administration of the pain killers. The anesthesiologist injected him with something, then told him to count back from ten...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Belldandy was still giddy after the return to her own body. She tried out her powers, wanting to fix the damage to the temple as quickly as she could, then transport herself to Keiichi's side.

Nothing happened.

Urd and Skuld watched hopefully as their sister, the only one whose license hadn't been suspended, attempts to cast a few spells.

Something was _very_ wrong.

With disbelief, Belldandy turned to her sisters.

"I _still_ don't have my powers!" she said in utter disappointment.

"What _are_ you talking about? W..who are you people?" Sayoko asked, still overwrought by what she'd just seen after the storm relaxed its grip on us.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --


	29. Pt 29: Afterpath

**Part 29: Afterpath**

Megumi had offered to attempt to drive Belldandy to the hospital in Chiba the next morning. She planned to drop Belldandy off, then go visit Reiko and Osamu, her parents. Anticipating that many roads would be impassable to her car, she opted to attempt the trip with Keiichi's motorbike.

Belldandy climbed into the sidecar of Keiichi's bike while Megumi mounted the seat. Being in the sidecar drew her into a melancholy whimsy...it reminded her of happier times when she and Keiichi were getting ready to go on a touring ride.

The shock of her loss of powers left Belldandy with a sad pause and deep regret. She felt like a thick dark cloud was hanging over her, suffocating her by obscuration. Belldandy had rarely been bereft of her Goddess powers...in fact, only when she had been 'sick'. In sickness, a Goddesses' powers diminish much in the same manner in which a mortal's energy is reduced during illness.

But this...this was as if one of her senses had been removed! Looking back at the house as they sped out towards the entryway to the street, all she could think about was how much work needed to be done to repair it. The restoration to her own body had been a Pyrrhic victory for Belldandy.

Skuld had hypothesized that Belldandy's divine powers may have been lost as a side effect of the restoration process. Channeling so much power through a divine object like Mjolnir was sure to have rippled the spiritual energies of the two sisters; somehow 'tweaking' Belldandy's divine attributes in some unforeseen manner so that she was unable to access her Goddess powers. Urd added that the very complex nature of reversing such a powerful spell could have easily caused untoward arcane effects. Belldandy knew that the spell was far beyond her capabilities to decode, let alone reproduce.

Then Urd had teased Belldandy, conjecturing that her power loss was due to a license suspension...and since the phones were out, the Almighty simply hadn't been able to inform her of it yet. Belldandy grimaced at the memory of Urd's curt remark...she didn't think _that_ was funny at all.

"I guess this means that Sayoko knows who and what we are," Belldandy observed, remembering the look of abstraction on Genji's sister's face.

Megumi turned out of the temple and into a war zone...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

As she left the temple compound, Megumi was awed towards nausea by the vivid indications of the supertyphoon's destruction in every direction. An incredible scene of disorder immediately assaulted her sensibilities. People were walking around in the streets like sullen sleepwalkers, picking up personal belongings strewn here and there. Not talking at all.

Many were dazed and crying as they retrieved a smashed kamidana or a rain-soaked family portrait. Misery hung in the air here, as gray as the overcast sky above. Families huddled close for comfort and protection. The streets...didn't look like streets at all!

_Every_ building, for as far in the distance as she could see, was damaged or destroyed!

A grave despondence captured Megumi's soul. Ever the optimist, she flailed challenges against her strong feelings of despair by keeping on a lookout for an undamaged building...a single bastion of hope against the wake of Akira's catastrophic destruction. But _everything_, from the smallest cottages to the largest office buildings...was smashed, broken, burned, collapsed, deformed, and strewn about. A few buildings seemed to be protected by luck...they only had all the windows blown out or just a portion of the roof peeled off. But more frequently, she saw the rubble of complete structural collapse.

The sheer extent of the devastation was mind-numbing.

Each of the quaint wooden buildings she had lived with for years...little buildings whose friendly outlines often reminded her of 'old Japan'...these were all but smashed by the sledgehammer winds of Akira. The vision of destruction reminded her of the black-and-white photos of Tokyo in the last months of World War Two, after months of carpet bombing by the US. The only difference was that this destruction had occurred in _a single day_!

She looked at Belldandy for comfort, only to find the Goddess absorbed as well in surveying the incredible amount of damage. Makuhari had been transformed into a wasteland.

Every tree she saw was stripped bare of foliage. Nature had turned against nature in its reckless despoilment, leaving broken trees and uprooted plants and shrubs. The late autumn verdance was gone...soaked leaves were piled everywhere. Everything looked gray and dead.

She was forced to make one detour after another. On one main street, an apartment house had collapsed onto the roadway, blocking all the lanes. Many streets had downed power lines and were blockaded by cones and repair crews. Sewers had backed up and flooded streets and alleys. Water was in evidence everywhere: the streets and sidewalks still shone with reflective pools of rainwater.

Empty lots had become muddy lakes...and the stench of backed-up sewage was unbearable. She finally had to given in and take the kerchief Belldandy had proferred her; either that, or get sick to her stomach from the smell.

As if there wasn't already enough to feel heartsick about.

Despite the oceanic dampness in the air and the many pools of water, there were burnt-out buildings here and there. Riding in circles due to the numerous impassible streets, Megumi headed towards the ocean. Her disorientation increased, as several streets were flooded to the point of impassibility. She could smell smoke wafting in the air.

"This is as surreal as a Goya painting," Megumi reflected, trying to assimilate the horrible squalor. What should have been an hour drive to the hospital in Chiba...was taking forever! She had to pull over many times and recheck her route against the street map book.

Oceanward was impassible, so she found herself going back uphill. Damaged vehicles lined the road winding up the hills, a road she recognized as leading to a familiar scenic outlook. She and Genji had come here several times to enjoy the city lights in the evening. Possessed of an exaggerated intolerance and angry disgust, she pulled Keiichi's BMW to the side of the road. Unstrapping her helmet, she got out...explaining to a surprised Belldandy that she needed to take a break due to the stress of her ride thus far.

Pausing atop an inland hill, she could see that the shoreline was disastrously wasted by the storm. Several fires raged along the industrial strip south of the Exhibition Center, sending pillars of billowing black smoke deep into the sky. The Makuhari Messe Exhibition Center was destroyed once again; it was surrounded by water in the distance. She looked north to the neighborhood her parents lived in...and sighed with relief when she saw no fires and little flooding.

Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed Belldandy standing next to her, motorcycle helmet in hand.

The two women bore mute silence in appreciation of the devastation. There was nothing that could be said to describe what they saw...that was the job of the journalists and newscasters.

She turned and regarded Belldandy, who was staring at the dire spectacle with a sad expression. A host of questions passed through Megumi's mind.

"Why? Why did the Gods in Yggdrasil allow this disaster to occur? Why didn't they prevent it? Why must so many innocent people suffer?" she thought. A noble part of her being was desperate for answers, for justifications that could somehow weave sense into the shock that torn at her conscious. But she knew that any explanation would be unsatisfactory.

Especially if it made sense.

Megumi loved this city...her city. It was_ her _city. She had been born and raised here in Makuhari. A red flash of anger burned in her heart...a heart as thoroughly shattered as many of the stuctures she beheld in the distance. Heartbroken because of the devastation. She looked up at the gray sky.

"WHY? WHY THE HELL DID YOU DO THIS TO MY HOMETOWN?" she screamed skyward with every bit of air in her lungs. As her rage increased, she started jumping up and down on the ground, trying to stamp out the images of devastation in her mind.

"_NO!_ NO!_No!__ No..no..no..nono...noooo...noooo!_"

Startled, Belldandy wheeled to face Megumi, who was screaming and shaking her fists at the sky in rage and pain. She watched as Megumi picked up a piece of metallic debris and started pounding the wrecked restraining curb with it. Megumi was screaming, her Soul raw to the breath as she kept pounding the curb until the cement chipped...and then continued beyond the point where Belldandy thought she would collapse into exhaustion. Finally, she doubled over and broke down into heavy sobbing. Bell looked at her friend...Keiichi's sister...and then knelt down and gently pulled her up by the hand. Then she pulled Megumi close and held her in a comforting hug.

Belldandy was heartwillowed as Megumi sobbed in her arms, crying with a sense of unjust violation like a girl whose only dolly had just been broken by a bully. She felt Megumi's tight grasp, wracked with sobs. This loss her friend was feeling ran _deep_...Belldandy could only comprehend its profundity by imagining how she would feel if Yggdrasil was somehow destroyed.

After her tears subsided, Megumi remembered last night's news. She and Genji had taken turns listening to her battery-powered Walkman in numb shock. Supertyphoon Akira was being likened by the media...to the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923! If Akira had shifted just a little bit and the center of the storm had hit Tokyo directly, all of Japan would have been gravely affected. Sweeping up from underneath, it struck Tokyo obliquely but severely, causing trillions of yen in damages.

But the Boso Peninsula...was a disaster zone.

"A disaster..." Megumi finally said to herself, her voice coursing with emotion.

Belldandy could only look at her and nod in agreement.

No power. No lights. No water. No gas. No phone. No roads.

No...a lot of things.

"Let's get going," Megumi said grimly.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

The ceiling light almost blinded Keiichi as he came to after the surgery. He could barely remember being wheeled into the intensive care unit. Lying on his back, he earspied a chaos of voices as he looked away from the brightly-lit ceiling. With an effort, Keiichi turned his head to see what his room looked like...and realized that he was on a gurney in a crowded hospital corridor. Everywhere he looked, he noticed medical staff attending to dozens of patients.

Then he saw Belldandy.

"Keiichi," she said to him soothingly as she leaned over and kissed him on the forehead. He noticed that she was holding his hand.

"I love you so much..." was all she could say before her gratitude rendered into tears.

"Is it really _her_? Were they able to make the switch?" he wondered as he looked at her inquiringly. She kissed him again on the mouth, her light kiss brushing his lips softly like cat's ear fur. She kissed him, leaning into his kiss with a gentle insistence. At once, Keiichi knew that it was his soul's love that was being reflected back to him. Only Bell-chan could stroke the looms of his heart with such passion...

"Bell-chan...y..you're _you_! You're back!" he said happily. His legs felt like deadweights and he struggled to raise his arms a few inches to try and embrace her.

"Keiichi...rest," she said as she brushed her hair behind her ears and kissed him again on the cheek.

"Hey, don't forget about your sister who drove for _hours_ to visit you!" Megumi teased him light-heartedly. Her gritty disposition was shed at the sight of her brother, lying very still in his hospital bed.

"You should see the inside of the hospital, Keiichi! There's little evidence of damage from the supertyphoon...except for the lobby being converted to a triage unit and all the hallways that are overflowing with injured victims," Megumi said sourly, feeling very sarcastic and bitter.

Despite the crowded conditions of the corridor, Megumi felt like she had walked into another world, where things were _normal_ again. But this scene wasn't normal...even the hospital looked like a disaster zone with all of its patients.

"Bell-chan...my Lord...look at all the people! The house..."

"Everyone is okay and our home is fine," she answered him. Keiichi breathed a tired sigh of relief.

"I visited Mom and Dad...our house is a wreck, but they're okay!" Megumi added.

Belldandy found herself silently sobbing as the image of Keiichi lying in his hospital gurney impressed itself deep in her heart. He was so subdued with stillness...so unlike the animated Keiichi she knew and loved! She didn't want to cry in front of him, but she wasn't feeling very brave. She struggled to regain her cheerful composure. As her tears subsided, she noticed both his legs were in heavy casts, while his chest was wrapped in some kind of wrapping cloth. He wore a blue hospital gown and a striped robe over it. Several bags of fluids were fed into his arm by an intravenous tube.

"Keiichi...I..I almost thought that I would lose you," Belldandy said. What _could_ she say in a situation like this? The powerful sense of loss was overwhelming; the force of his accident had paralyzed her normally animated boyfriend. His face looked much thinner, and his voice was straining with effort.

Keiichi was fighting to stay awake, but the analgesia claimed him back to sleep.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

After Megumi left, Belldandy remained next to Keiichi; her bedside vigil interrupted by brief flashes of consciousness on his part. Keiichi was resting after the surgeries to his legs. Time and time again, she tried to summon her powers without success. She just wanted to _do something_ to make her boyfriend feel better. But it was tiring, sitting in a fold-out metal chair. Soon, she was fast asleep, holding his hand in hers.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

It was obvious that N.I.T. would not be open for some time, so I helped out with the repair and cleanup efforts at home, in town, and at the school. I felt a lump in my throat every time I encountered a family whose ancestral altars were demolished by the storm. It was like a waking nightmare. People were sleeping in tents, exhausted after cleaning up their houses. Several families were digging through the rubble of their apartment complex for personal belongings. Almost all of the pre-modern wooden structures were flattened into splinterboard...making me grateful once again for the sturdy construction of our own residence.

As I walked into the campus, I learned that the N.I.T. gym and auditorium had been converted into emergency shelters.

My office was trashed by the storm.

Skuld had managed somehow to get a power generator working, so we had lights in our main temple home. She had to utilize all the power cells from both Banpei and Mini-Banpei to fuel it. Even though we had power, we still didn't have any running water or a phone. The city sent by a water tanker truck every two days to ration out water for us. Needless to say, we got pretty grimy...and stayed that way.

My new hometown had been devastated.

I remembered all the times I watched disasters on TV. A scene of war in Bosnia...was _over there_, because it was in Europe. Earthquake in Turkey...was _over there_. Rioting in Russia..._over there_.

My "over there's"...had become _over here_.

Every day, I would come home, irksome as soon as I noticed that the house _still_ needed something cleaned or fixed. I just couldn't still myself from noticing. As soon as I got home, I wanted to immediately swing into action and undo a little bit more of Akira's damages to my home. I had to ignore my perfectionism...or was it a post-traumatic disaster mentality akin to supervigilance? In any event, I had to just let it go. I planned to alternate my days between working in the home neighborhood and N.I.T.

So this morning, I realized that I needed to _do_ something besides undoing the damages that Akira inflicted; but I didn't know what actions I could undertake. It came to me later in the day, while I was helping with a street crew to clean mud off of a throughway.

During the day, I could pitch rock and wheelbarrow mud off the roads, fix the damages to Watanabe Hall and other buildings at N.I.T., and work at home to clean things up and organize the mess. I had been straining myself physically; throwing myself into strenuous exertions as a means to vent my anger and despair. But at night, I planned to compose the best God's Music possible. I've long believed in the power of musical healing. Now that I supposedly had this 'God's Music' talent, I wanted to stop at nothing to create majesty out of tragedy.

With the power back on thanks to Skuld, I elected to withdraw during late nights to the comfort of my 'Cevn's Studio' room to try and compose some music. The tape that I sent NHK was a knockoff...a quick one-night composition to convince the network that the "K" tape was indeed my stuff. I hadn't heard back from them as yet.

But the events of the past few days and Keiichi's accident had shifted me into a somber mood. I wanted to compose some _real_ music...something that I could honestly say that I created from the deepest part of my being. So I started to work on it...I didn't care if it took a year to get right.

The disaster survivors of Makuhari (and most of eastern Japan) at least deserved the best I could offer.

"So here I am tonight, pencil in pad, guitar in hand, trying to find something," I said to myself.

I thought of Beethoven's "Ode to Joy". It was a simple chord progression, but yet it represented the emotion of epiphany better than almost any other music I had ever heard. I needed to come up with my own "Ode to Joy", in a sense. Beethoven had pulled it out of thin air, out of the recesses of his mind, despite his infirmity and deafness. And then he put it out here, in the _real _world...to resound throughout the ages.

--_Knock knock_--

I looked up to see Urd sliding the door open, uninvited. Annoyed, I flicked my guitar pick at her for intruding, then returned to fingerpicking the acoustic guitar. I was trying to get at a central melody for one of the movements. She had basically barged in without asking, and I planned to ignore her in retribution.

"Hey, what was _that_ for?" Urd asked in a surprised voice.

"Well...you _did_ just walk in without waiting for me to invite you in. What if I was recording something?" She sat down next to me on one of the zabuton.

"You're almost as bad as Skuld! She can't stand it when someone barges into to her "Skuld Labs" room uninvited. But this is different, so I suggest that you start getting used to it! It's my right as your 'significant other' to come in whenever I damn well feel like it, Cevn! Just be thankful that I don't just barge in while you're in the furoba!" she said aggressively.

I screeched to a halt and shuddered...all the sexual abuse bells and whistles going off in my chest, cannonfiring my irritation into vaults of fear. I suddenly felt very small again, small and helpless in the face of skull-toothed dark shadows. I shuffled back a pace away from her.

Covering her mouth, Urd looked at me with apologetic eyes.

"Oh Lord, I'm sorry! I forgot! Please...don't freak out on me now! I've been really lonely...really stressed out, and I just wanted to talk. And that sounds pretty," she apologized by way of explanation as I nonconsciously strummed some chords on the Yamaha guitar. Frustrated, I set the guitar aside.

At least she was being honest.

I wasn't getting anywhere with this music crap. I had a mental image of sound...but it was vacuous and nebulous, as if it was trying to draw me into diffidence rather than confidence. Urd looked like she was ready to do an emotional core dump. I swallowed my bursting sense of impotence and tried to clear my head.

"I wish I could hold beauty in my hands and transmit it to sound, just like my eyes hold the light of_ your_ beauty and transmit it to my soul as radiance," I finally offered.

Urd's face went soft at this compliment. I was trying to praise her more lately, partly because I felt so inadequate after Supertyphoon Akira. By praising her, I was putting myself on higher ground.

"Honey, I am the Goddess of Love, Beauty Incarnate...and I feel like melting at your words,

_Within the depths of blackdamp shadows,_

_In a fugue my heart wanders darkly_

_--disconcerted_

_You, knower of the designs of love, choose:_

_Is my love reality or nascent dream?_

_I appreciate your complement."_

I had to admit that I was delighted by her poem, and the fact that she seemed to want to play...

"_Me_, the knower of love, Urd? You must be pretty lonely or savantly inobservant. Have you been drinking?" I kidded, knowing that every bottle of sake in the house had been smashed when the kitchen and storeroom windows had blown out and admitted the typhoon's rage. But knowing Urd, she probably had some bottles stashed away so expertly that they survived the storm. I leaned close and sniffed her breath...sensing no odor of alcohol.

Urd scowled at me, then smiled slyly.

I almost wanted to tease her about her verse, and the surprise I felt that as I realized she was playfully teasing me with it. But then I remembered the source of the poem and its allusion.

"You know of Komachi's work? She's one of my favorite poets," I asked with genuine respect and surprise.

Urd smiled a mysterious smile at me. I would have never imagined _this_ side of Urd...if indeed this was a part of her personality. Then I recalled that one of her previous boyfriends was an artisan...and then the puzzle pieces fell into place. Obviously, Urd must have an aesthetic side to her as well. Perhaps it only manifested in the presence of intimates; as it certainly didn't accommodate Urd's public repute as being very sexy, very naughty.

"Hmmm...well I guess it won't hurt _too much_ to tell you," she said introspectively. She posed provocatively, letting a serious length of her slender leg slip out of her robe. I mentally felt my eyes stretching while my breathing quickened.

"I don't just 'know of Komachi'...I _knew_ Komachi! Who do you think was her muse?" she said demurely. I felt my jaw slacken at the image of Ono no Komachi being inspired by Urd.

"Urd, 'muse' is a Western term based on the Hellenic cosmology..."

"Duh! Whenever I would get bored with Sysoping, I would hop it on over to the ol' Earthrealm to see what was cookin' with the natives! Ah...the Greeks and their mythologies...I remember them well. Of course, when I walked among the mortals, they started calling my Earthrealm manifestation 'Calliope'. The rest...is history! Besides, how could you not remember that the Kami served as a source of poetic inspiration for Japan's ancient poets! You've heard of the "Manyoshu", I take it. Shows how little you know! And you consider yourself a Asian Studies scholar!" she said with a dash of smugness.

I almost wanted to slap myself silly with embarrassment...or slap her. Urd was almost ready to burst with laughter; she _knew_ that I had forgotten.

"Okay, I'll concede your point. But you know well, Urd, when you flash me like a hitchhiker...I'm bound to forget things! But _you_ seem to forget that Komachi was heavily influenced by Buddhism!"

"Just don't forget who the _real_ Goddess is in this house! Otherwise, this robe is coming off...and we'll see how quickly you get a nose bleed," she taunted, then continued with her narrative. With this, my insane fears of sexual imagery momentarily peaked into a convulsion...then mercifully drifted away. Urd regarded me with a soft expression of concern until my heartbeat slowed back down.

For a moment, I wondered if she was trying to desensitize me away from my fears of sexual encounters. Make a coy comment, and then follow it with concern or an apology to 'pad' my collapse of sanity.

I was over-analyzing the situation.

"By the way, I spent a lot of time with Lady Komachi, visiting her in her dreams. She reminded me a lot of myself...spirited, passionate, reckless, sexy, intelligent..." Urd said demurely.

"Don't go any further than that! You _know_ what happened to Komachi in the end! As she became older, she became hideously ugly. She would approach the younger courtiers, who would spurn her because of her age. To them, she was an object of ridicule...an old lady trying to recapture her amorous youth. Later, she was abandoned: one of Japan's premier poets being spurned from the court! She became quite deranged in her later years. In a land where the life expectancy was around 40, she lived to be a crone in her 70s and maybe even longer. Some thought that this was karmic retribution for her cupidity when she was young. She eventually took the robe and died wandering around Japan. Her passion was offset by tragedy."

"Spare me the history lesson, Cevn-sensei," she said with a hint of sarcasm. "You forget...I _was there_ with her! But that isn't the rest of the story."

"Huh?"

Urd leaned closer to me and took on a soft tone, realizing that she didn't need to exert herself to persuade my interest.

"Komachi died and ascended through the Well of Urd to become one of Yggdrasil's foremost Thoughtsmiths, after apprenticing for a millennia. A Thoughtsmith is one of our equivalent terms for what you call a "poet" or an "artist". She paints and sculpts thoughts, then serves as a beacon, transmitting them to anyone that is 'tuned in'. She's been happily in love with one of my former boyfriends for almost a millennium. She and I have a special connection via Troubadour."

I was dumbfounded by this information...it went against all of the cosmologies and such of the Nordic myths! Urd was casually stating that an afterlife existed...and that people could _ascend_ through the Well of Urd! I remembered reading that The Well of Urd was a place where punishments were meted out; it was a one-way exit _descending_ from Yggdrasil to the lower realms of existence. Exile meant being cast down the Well of Urd to the lower levels of the Earth Tree...never to return.

Urd looked at me intently.

"I bet I can guess what you're thinking, Cevn...but you _knew_ that there's life after a mortal life expires...it's in your Enigma book, remember? The part about the Mid-light? The Soul Mirrors? If there is only death...how do you explain The Reaper? A living being existing within the realm of the dead? That's contradictory!"

"Yes...but it _is_ daunting," I replied. Urd looked about randomly, then focused an eyelock on me.

Her emerald eyes dazzled.

"Cevn, we have to wait to tell the others about us. My sister is a total emotional riot case since Keiichi got hurt...it wouldn't be fair to spring our 'news' on everyone and exclude her. For that matter, I think we should also consider Skuld...she's just getting used to being in her own body again," she said, volunteering her concerns. That she had seen what was in my heart as quicly as I had touched on it simply reinforced that she was truly a Goddess. I knew that her concerns were both valid and sensible.

"Yeah," I admitted reluctantly. "I wish that...

_It lies beyond a simple burden,_

_The ambrosial love one must hold secret,_

_So let my soul-gossamer thread_

_Wander at liberty, wander wantonly,_

_Breaching regardless of whom it may offend._

_I know that in this moment, we cannot speak of it."_

Then I remembered that I _had_ told one other person. I tried to shrug off my fallow guilt as I reluctantly informed Urd that I had disclosed to Keiichi that I had strong feelings for her.

"WHAT!! You_ told _him?! Do you have any idea how hard it's been for _me_ to keep this from my sisters? I know that Bell and probably Skuld will be very happy for me once they find out that I have someone in my life...but yet I didn't tell them. I _wanted_ to cheer them up! After all they've been through, they deserve some good news. Did we not agree to keep it between us until we were _both_ certain that the time was right?" she said with a flair of disappointment and anger.

"Urd-chan..."

"Don't 'Urd-chan' me, mister! You broke our agreement!" she interrupted, huffling with irritation.

"Okay, okay..._Urd. _I told him because he needed to know. I needed some way to prove to Keiichi that I could merit his trust again. After my little escapade in China, he felt like I had completely abandoned any sense of friendship that formerly existed between us; he was even considering kicking me out of the house! And I needed to make amends. Right or wrong, I made it up to him by getting real...and telling him about us seemed the surest way."

"Do you think he's told anyone?" she asked concernedly.

"No. He definitely isn't going to mention it; I swore him to secrecy and I know that Keiichi is a man of his word."

"I wish_ I_ could have told someone," Urd said half-serious, half-sarcastically.

"Maybe I'm weaker than you, Urd. Probably, as a matter of fact. I see you _every_ day, so near and yet so out-of-reach. And I wish to see you more, but at times all I can do is play the part of my frustration...until we can be a _we_. I'm sorry," I added.

"Maybe you're weaker, you say? Well, you've just proven once again that 'mortal flesh is wanting and weak', to quote Plato. I'll let you off the hook...but you need to make it up to me with another poem!" she challenged me light-heartedly. "And it had better be a good one..."

"Okay, okay! I know when I'm being given charity," I conceded.

_"While denying my heart's true aim,_

_My bridge of dreams provides a pathway,_

_You and I, yet not alone in quietude,_

_Might we soon vanquish our saddening memories_

_And forge them forth into another reality!_

_The joy we'll feel when they can share in our__ knowledge."_

"Nicely met, Cevn. The first one...Tomonori, wasn't it?" she asked. I nodded my head. Her smile informed me that she had met him as well in her earthbound travels.

"And the other one?"

"Just the wandering mind-brush of an ordinary scholar."

Urd looked at me, then grinned and blew me a kiss.

"Don't let your ego get the best of you. Speaking of wandering minds, you're forgetting your music. And here I thought _I_ was your muse! _Ciao_!"

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Keiichi was watching Belldandy, who was sedately curled up in the chair next to his bed. She was dressed 'soft' in one of her autumn outfits: a pale green long-sleeved blouse with a flower pattern and fluffed sleeves, a light tan vest with matching long tan skirt, a gold belt and light pink socks...with the usual selection of accessories. Keiichi admired his girlfriend as she slept...knowing that she was beautiful anywhere she went.

After a number of days in the hospital, they finally were able to put him into a room.

"Belldandy, my love...you are _always_ here for me. I love you so much! My heart is incomplete without you," he whispered to her sleeping form. A dull aching pain in his legs made itself known, interrupting his reverie. His legs felt like leadweights. Just for an experiment, he tried to wiggle his toes.

"Ahhhh!" he gasped between tightly gritted teeth as the sharp pains stabbed at his legs. Belldandy stirred in her chair, but didn't awaken. Keiichi almost wished she was be awake, but instead he was glad that she was resting. He assumed that she had kept watch over him during the entire time he was out. He pressed the 'call nurse' button.

He and Belldandy.

They had been together for almost four years, through the thick and thin of so many wild adventures. She had been his constant companion throughout almost all of his college career. Despite all the animosity from Sayoko, Mara and Skuld...their love had thrived. In fact, all the adversity had only served to bring his Belldandy closer to him. He knew that he didn't 'own' Belldandy in any sense of the word. Yet the fact remained that his wish had pretty much bestowed a proxy form of ownership over her upon him. The Ultimate Force would never allow them to be separated. But the one thing that he could never influence was her heart. The Ultimate Force could never compel her to feel love. He smiled to himself...she had _willingly_ given her heart to him.

Even asleep, she looked like a Goddess.

"Hmmm, maybe someday I should write a book about Belldandy and I. Maybe it could be titled 'The Goddess and I'," he fantasized.

This was incredibly boring, lying on his back, unable to move or do much else. The TV looked tempting...but then again, he didn't want to awaken Bell-chan. Even though she was Goddess, she still needed her beauty sleep.

"Waitaminute!" his mind shouted. A chill feeling froze to his heart suddenly. Belldandy was a Goddess...so why hadn't she just used her powers to heal him? _This_ was a mystery! Perhaps he had to be conscious before she could heal him. But no...he recalled Urd mentioning several times that she had used potions and spells on him while he was asleep. Like the time she used her magic to prevent him from collapsing from exhaustion when he worked so hard to earn money so he could give Bell-chan a ring for Christmas. Then the unthinkable question formed in his mind.

"Did Belldandy somehow lose her powers?" he asked himself in a rush of panic. "What if she got her license suspended, or Mara sealed her powers away?" The last thought was too mortifying to even dwell upon for even a split-second. But he couldn't help his flow of suspicions. If his girlfriend didn't have her powers..._then what_? They would be defenseless against Mara's increasingly vicious attacks. This could spell disaster for everyone! His worries gathered to an intolerable level...then by sheer dint of will, he was able to redirect his concerns elsewhere.

"_If_ she lost her powers," he reminded himself. He didn't know for sure yet...Belldandy hadn't told him herself. Calmer now that he checked his runaway conjectures, he looked again at his legs.

"How long will I be here in this hospital with these dammed painful legs? If Bell can't heal me, then who knows how long in the hospital I'll have to stay," he mused in his pessimism as a nurse entered the room. The nurse chatted with him and checked his vitals. Noticing that he was staring at Bell, she chided him for his inattention; he was ignoring her efforts to take his blood pressure and temperature.

After she left, Keiichi tried to remember what had happened. His memory was blurred...as if a page of ink had been soaked with water, resulting in indecipherable running splotches of gray and black. He remembered the _terrifying_ fall, then two pretty policewomen driving him to the hospital...

But he couldn't remember anything else.

He lay immobile in his hospital bed as disturbing fears kept leaking into his thoughts. He realized that both his legs were severely broken in the fall. Were the surgeries successful? He wanted to ask the doctor, but the nurse had told him that his doctor wouldn't be available until tomorrow morning for questions. The entire staff of the hospital was taxed to exhaustion in their efforts to treat a thousand or so supertyphoon victims, she explained.

"W..what if my legs don't heal right?" His dismay returned, full force. A torrent of "what if?" questions flooded his mind.

"If I can't walk right, will Belldandy leave me? How could she love me if I'm a cripple? How can I make up my term at school? Would I have to become a ronin...a college dropout? What if I couldn't race anymore? Would the N.I.T. Motor Club kick me out? How will my sister feel if her brother is a cripple? What would I do?" His mind was racing out of control like a drag racer without a chute.

_"Noooooooo!"_

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Belldandy awoke with a start. Someone had screamed. She heard another scream and saw that Keiichi was yelling in absolute despondent dread. She rushed to his side. He was soaked with a cold sweat, his eyes furtively darting around with sheer panic. It was if he was having a waking nightmare.

"I'm trapped!" he said, still ignoring her.

"Keiichi," she shouted as she shook his shoulders. "Keiichi!" He looked at her, but seemed to look _through_ her; his blank stare unsettled her greatly.

"Belldandy...you won't leave me if I'm confined to a wheelchair and can't race?...and can't walk with you like I used to?...and what if I can't finish school?...how can I support us?...I don't want you to leave me!...tell me that you won't!...if I can't get the use of my legs back, I'm worthless as a human being!...how do I know that I'm not crippled?...why won't you just make it go away?"

Belldandy couldn't slip a word in amidst his outburst. To her, Keiichi was being totally irrational, but yet she knew that he was submerged in a pool of fears. Just like Cevn-san was when Mara blinded him.

But his last question wounded her deeply.

"You have no idea how _much_ I want to make it go away, my love," she said sadly.

"I was so stupid! I could have waited until _after_ the storm to climb up and get Mjolnir! I'm an idiot...a totally useless idiot!" he shouted, his panic transforming into self-doubt. He started weeping.

"_No you're not!_" Belldandy confronted him, taken aback at his self-degrading statement.

"My Lord...he actually thinks that I'm going to abandon him!" she realized. "I've got to talk some sense into him...quick!"

"Keiichi..." she said softly, hoping her gentle voice would calm him down enough to listen...

"Keiichiiiii..." He looked at her, his eyes becoming becalmed.

"Keiichi, I will _never_ leave you. My heart is forever willingly by your side. If you can't walk again, I'll be your feet. If you can't afford to go to school, I can help out with the bills. If you can't work, I'll provide you financial security. Whatever it takes...I'll do it. So we can be together. _Because_ we're together," she assured him.

"Why? Why would you want to be with me...if I'm like this?" he asked, his insecurities gainsaying the security that was in his heart. He knew that Bell was sincere, and yet...

"Keiichi, you went out in that storm to get Mjolnir...for _me and my sister_! If that isn't an act of love, I don't know what is! You risked your life so that Skuld and I could be restored to our rightful bodies. How could I not want to be with you...when your thoughtfulness blossoms into such a selfless act of giving and risking? My love, 'risk' is another word for love. I know that you risked yourself because of what abides in your kokoro. Your deepmost heart. You are_ not_ an idiot for doing so...and you are in no way unworthy of my love! All of my love. My soul, my heart, my body, my thoughts. They're always for you...no matter what. The only foolishness is your fear that I would turn away from you."

Keiichi looked up at Belldandy and sensed her sincerity, full front. His trembling heart slowed down, resting in her reassurance.

"Bell-chan, what happened to your powers?" he asked

Belldandy sighed, then explained that her lack of Goddess powers was probably a by-product of the restoration process. They both discussed their concerns about Mara.

Keiichi was homesick; so Belldandy described the house repairs in minute detail to lend him the impression that he was an active part of the household. She was relieved that his anxiety seemed to flee when they engaged in smalltalk.

If she kept their conversations superficial and light in tenor, Keiichi hopefully wouldn't sink back into the abyss of despair that he was precipitously close to.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

The next day, the doctor informed Keiichi that he would be in the hospital for almost two weeks. Keiichi was worried about how this extended convalescence would jeopardize his academic career. He felt a surge of relief when it became apparent after watching the news that N.I.T. wasn't in any danger of opening up soon.

The video footage of the widespread destruction was sobering. "Did I go outside...in _that_?" Keiichi asked himself incredulously as each evening's new centered on the devastation.

Belldandy had returned home with Megumi in the afternoon to spell herself from her bedside vigil. Keeping Keiichi company was exhausting for her now that she didn't have her powers. She could only buoy his spirits so far...and then he would withdraw into himself.

"Keiichi's not just hurt physically...his spirit is really suffering," she informed Megumi on the way home. But there was a voice, a quiet but insistent whisper that kept disturbing Belldandy. Despite her efforts, she could not ignore it. She couldn't lock it away.

"It's _your_ fault that Keiichi's hurt!" it repeated, over and over again.

She wanted it to go away, but it harbored around her serenity, frazzing her nerves and dishing out generous helpings of self-blame and guilt.

"If I had been more suspicious when the package came, then the switch between Skuld and myself would have never happened. Then, dear Keiichi would have never had to take such a risk. If I had been less impatient, Keiichi wouldn't have felt rushed to retrieve Mjolnir. If I had been more assertive, then Keiichi would have never gone up that ladder in the first place. How could I let him do that...in the middle of a horrible storm..." she mused despondently.

Megumi rode home, her rankling at the destruction of her hometown making her oblivious to Belldandy's silent tears.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

At dinner, Belldandy stated her concerns about Keiichi. We sat for a brief, muted moment...then our suggestions vied for attention. There was so much enthusiasm; a confident measure of how much we cared for Keiichi. Each of us, in his or her own personal style, volunteered time to visit Keiichi and keep him occupied. We all wanted to keep him away from his emotional malaise.

Megumi reminded us that, due to the road conditions caused by Supertyphoon Akira, we could only travel to the hospital by motorcycle for the foreseeable future. I thought these circumstances were beneficial in one sense...I intuited that Keiichi would be the kind of guy whose pride was wounded by the accident. Thus, he would be reluctant to take on a whole roomful of visitors at the hospital. On the other hand, Keiichi's patent shyness might lead him to feel overwhelmed. Either way, it would be countertherapeutic for us to 'swarm' him.

I volunteered to spend some time with him, acting as a tutor and a listener so that he would feel mentally engaged. I clearly comprehended what Belldandy meant when she relayed Keiichi's concerns about feeling like an academic dropout. My depression had dropped me out of school for weeks at a time...these times were frustrating because I was afraid that I would lose my edge, or even worse, my motivation or discipline.

"We'll have to bring school to him," I promised.

"We'll have to bring a lot of things to my Keiichi," Belldandy added to my statement, ever the protective girlfriend. She goaded Urd into cooking up some seasonings to offset the bland hospital food. Then she challenged Skuld to create an interface, so that Keiichi could browse the Internet or play some games on the hospital TV. Of course, Skuld reacted to this with a mixed enthusiasm...in fact, her reaction was classic Skuld all the way. Happy to do something for her sister, overjoyed to be working with anything mechanical, somewhat reticent to be helping Keiichi.

"Skuld, after all our talks, after all this time, after you've sensed how strongly Keiichi and I love each other...you're _still_ holding a grudge?" Belldandy asked her with a hint of disappointment.

"Hey, I can't help it. I'm _still_ your little sister! That's who I am!" she shot back as she headed down the hall to "Skuld Labs".

"What about the rest of us?" Tomohisa added. Having his older cousin in the hospital was a major blow to the 15-year-old. His birthday was coming up in a week, and it was all but overshadowed by Supertyphoon Akira. Keiichi might not even be able to return home and attend Tomohisa's party. I'd learned from Tomohisa that he had always looked up to his older cousin as some sort of indestructible icon, mostly because Keiichi was the firstborn son of his generation of Morisatos. Now that Keiichi was injured, Tomohisa had to confront his own fragility, it seemed.

All our eyes fastened on him.

"W..what can I do? I'm only _15_!" he said worriedly. His face disclosed that he was stumped. Tomohisa was practically living here most of the time since his parents were reassigned to Osaka. They had left him in the care of his older cousins, so that he wouldn't have to change schools...they had already paid for his high school years.

"Just be his cousin...and be his friend. Keiichi loves you a lot, and he needs family right now," Megumi encouraged him.

A plan was agreed upon, so that everybody could take part in Keiichi's recuperation. I had never met Keiichi's parents before, but I had a premonition that I would see a lot of his parents at the hospital.

"What about his parents?" I asked.

This brought on a new round of discussion, with Megumi taking the lead. Keiichi's parents were easy going by nature, but his dad manifested a protective urgency towards his son and daughter.

"Uh-oh," I thought.

Both Keiichi and Megumi were in love, and to make matters worse, Keiichi hadn't told his parents about the true nature of his relations with Belldandy. And I felt assured in the assumption that Megumi hadn't spoken a word about Genji to her folks. As far as I knew, Megumi had informed them that Belldandy and her sisters were foreign exchange students who happened to be sharing the rent with him. Megumi herself would certainly subject to scrutiny by her parents in regards to Genji. We all decided that it was a time to tone down the boyfriend-girlfriend stuff for a short time, at least around his parents.

"Does _this_ remind you of a couple that we know," Urd whispered in my ear. I nodded my head. This would have been the perfect chance to inform the group about Urd's and my little 'change'.

"Should we tell them now...after all, Keiichi already knows," I asked her.

Urd looked at me thoughtfully, then shook her head.

Not yet.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"His parents are so cute!" Belldandy told her sisters excitedly. She was immediately smitten with respect for Keiichi's mother. Keiichi's mom was this little precious Japanese lady, about 55 years old, with a gentle disposition. Her gentle smile and soft eyes strongly reminded Belldandy of Keiichi's own facial features. She was struck by the resemblance between mother and son as they were all gathered in the hospital room. His mom seemed to have some kind of wisdom in her eyes...oddly enough, Belldandy actually felt that Keiichi's mom was older than _herself_.

"Cute? From what Megumi told us, if looks could kill, his father would have blasted you all the way to Vanagdrasil!" Urd remarked. Her younger sister seemed to be _too_ enchanted with finally meeting Keiichi's parents; she was caught up in some girlish whimsy of illusion, making things up. It must be the pressure of meeting her boyfriend's parents for the first time...she was seeing everything through rose-colored glasses.

"Oh...Urd, he's just being a mortal father. You know, like it says in 'Modern Woman'..."

"Modern _what_?" Urd asked, not having a clue about what her sister was going on about.

"That's one of those _stupid_ mortal 'love and sex' magazines that Elder Sister has been reading a lot of lately," Skuld answered, distaste clearly evident in her voice.

"Wow...is it some kinda ecchi porno magazine? You?" Urd asked, trying to get a rise out of her younger sister.

"Ehh! N..no! Of course not! Elder Sister...are you teasing me?" Belldandy said defensively as her cheeks blushed scarlet.

"Hee ha hee, don't ask me..._you're_ the one who reads 'em," Urd observed, pointing a giggle-shaky finger at Belldandy

"C'mon...tell us! What was it like to meet his parents for the first time?" Skuld asked. Urd leaned forward...she _definitely_ wanted to hear this...

"Well, I was awake in Keiichi's room when they just...came in. I was holding his hand while he was sleeping. Keiichi's father seemed to get really angry, while his mother seemed to be caught out of breath. His father is short in stature, just like Keiichi. He's still pretty handsome for an older mortal man. Just think of my dear Keiichi with long bangs of gray hair in front, and a narrower face and nose. I sense that he's really happy on the inside, but just doesn't feel comfortable showing it to others. But he really loves his wife. I _know_ that Keiichi gets his loving nature from his dad," she narrated.

Skuld and Urd digested this bit of information. Belldandy was basically saying that a mortal could inherit qualities from either one of their parents!

"And Keiichi's mother is a sweetheart. Keiichi gets his kind-hearted nature from her, obviously. She warmed up to me rather quickly, which was surprising. She's not at all like our own 'you-know-who'. When dear Keiichi woke up, he was shocked to see us all in the same room," she continued. Urd and Skuld nodded at Belldandy's reference to Her.

"Hmmm...I _bet_ he was shocked!" Urd said sarcastically. "After covering up your guy's romance for over three years...he should have been frightened. Scratch that...he should have been terrified!"

Belldandy grinned to herself, savoring the memory of her darling's shocked face. In hindsight, it was really funny, she had to admit. Urd was right...Keiichi was almost ready to crawl out of his skin, if he could.

"But that's not the best part. They're coming _here_ later today to see how we all live! I'm so looking forward to it!" she said cheerfully, hands clasped in front of her breast. "Maybe Keiichi's mom would think that I'd be a good wife for her son, once she comes to see the house...even if it _is_ a mess after the storm. Oh my! I forgot to..."

"THEY'RE COMING _HERE_? TODAY?" Urd and Skuld both shouted in dismay at the doorway, for Belldandy had already rushed out of the room in a flurry. The two sisters looked at each other with dawning trepidation.

Keiichi's parent's were coming _here_, to _our_ house!

"You'd...better be on your best behavior, Big Sister Urd! Not a drop of sake. And dress _decently_ for his parents, too," Skuld said threateningly.

"Moi? _You're_ the little brat! You should watch your own side of the fence, _little_ sister, so you don't embarrass us all with some childish antic!" Urd shot back.

Belldandy heard arguing from her bedroom and uttered a quick prayer that it would cease before Keiichi's mom and dad arrived.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

_Dear Diary,_

_Sorry I haven't written...I've been very busy._

_A lot has happened in the past couple of weeks. Keiichi just got home from the hospital yesterday. I'm so glad that he's back home! The doctors say that his legs are healing really well, but he has to wear the casts for another eight to twelve weeks...maybe even six months! He definitely won't be able to race for a while. I don't know if he's told the Motor Club members yet. Everyone's been so busy with cleaning up after Akira. I haven't even had time to hang out with Sora yet. I hope she's okay, and that her folk's ramen shop isn't a total loss._

_Genji and I have been helping with the cleanup effort, both at home and in town. Surprisingly enough, our hometown is beginning to look halfway decent again. The phone lines were back a few days ago, and we just got our water turned back today. That's because Akira wrecked the desalination plant in Chiba, which completely screwed up our water supply here._

_We visited the hospital almost every day. Everybody pitched in and Keiichi felt a lot better than he did when Belldandy first visited him._

_There's something fishy about Urd. All of a sudden, she's into poetry like some Heian lady-in-waiting. I caught her during a break from the housework composing some kind of poem on green colored paper. She's so weird sometimes...probably off on another one of her mental 'trips'._

_And Skuld. Skuld is just insane. One moment, she's acting like a kid; the next moment she's really helping us out. I was out in the front of the house, cleaning all the mud off of the wooden walkway that goes around our house when she hit me in the face with a mudball! I hit her right back and she got mad. But later in the day, she was working hard right next to me, cleaning the mats in the sunroom. She even gave me a backrub that night. The tatami mats stink, by the way. They got soaked. We'll probably have to replace them. If we can replace them, it won't be anytime soon._

_It was almost hilarious when Mom and Dad met Belldandy. I took Belldandy over there almost every day for the first week. Mom and Dad couldn't make it to the hospital until the next weekend. That's what they get for only having a car. Actually, their house was flooded, as well as Uncle's. I'm sure glad I chose to live with my big brother...if I had been living at my uncle's, all of my stuff would have been ruined. Dad had to help Mom's brother as well as fix up our home (my parent's house)._

_I never thought I would say this, but I actually miss being in college!_

_Anyway, the roads were finally cleared up enough so Mom and Dad could come visit Keiichi at the hospital. I stopped by and caught them at home, so I told them that he was hurt. They wanted to go right away, but they had to wait because the roads near their house were buried in a mudslide. Anyway, they went to visit and found Belldandy asleep in the chair next to Keiichi, holding his hand. Jeez, after three years, my parents still didn't have a clue! Well, Mom asked Belldandy how things were going back in her home country. Remember, how Keiichi and I told them that the three Goddesses were actually foreign exchange students?_

_Anyway, Belldandy thought that Mom had asked her about our house and she answered something like, "I'm getting our room ready for his return."_

_Mom just about had a heart attack. She fainted right into Dad's arms right there in the hospital! Keiichi told me laters that he had thought Mom was having a heart attack!_

_Dad was totally upset at first, and started yelling at Belldandy. You know, if anyone yells at Belldandy, they're in big trouble. Belldandy doesn't yell back (unless it's Urd, Skuld or Peorth, or sometimes Keiichi). Dad still feels funny about gaijin, especially since Gramps was injured in WW II. Evidently, Dad's yelling woke up Keiichi, and Dad felt really guilty about that._

_At this point, Mom calls me on my cellphone and tells me to get to the hospital..."there's trouble with Keiichi, blah-blah-blah."_

_So Genji and I ride over to the hospital, only to find Keiichi trying to explain to Mom that he really likes Belldandy. Dad looked like he was ready to fry an egg on his forehead, he was so mad. So Keiichi was practically begging Mom to understand, since Dad wouldn't listen to him._

_Now here comes the really nasty part._

_Keiichi was really nervous because he was being caught in a deception. Also, Dad yelling at his girlfriend had just woken him up. I think that's why he let slip that I was seeing Genji!_

_I could have killed him right there and then!! I almost wanted to hit him on the legs with my motorcycle helmet. I may still kill him (just kidding, diary!)._

_So all of us had a big argument, which lasted for hours. I felt bad for Genji and Belldandy, since they're outsiders and don't know about my parents very much. I don't think that it's all over yet. Dad had to walk outside to cool off a couple of times._

_I was proud of the way Keiichi stood up to Dad. I think Keiichi really got to him. The last time Dad walked out, he was almost crying. But Keiichi wouldn't give him an inch._

_I felt really scared about Genji. Dad was mad at me too, but not so much as he was at Keiichi. Genji was all shook up; I could see the fear on his face. He was freakin' out big time! I know that we've talked about announcing him to my parents, but in this situation, he didn't have any advance warning. He was really cute, by the way. He was trying hard to be polite and impress my parents, but he turned out to be clumsy because he was so nervous._

_Really, I think that Dad was really impressed with Genji. It turns out that Dad knows Genji's grandfather in some way, like somewhere back in ancient history. Like the 60s or something. I can remember Mom showing me photos of Dad back in his university days; student uniform, long hair and sideburns with a headband with peace signs and "US out of Okinawa" on it. I suspect that Dad worked for Genji's gramps. No doubt, one of the things that really impressed Dad, I'm sure, is the fact that Genji's folks are super-rich. Since Genji's the only son, he's pretty much set for life financially. Dad teased me about "picking one of the elite" or something like that._

_But what really sucks it is that Mom doesn't like Genji, it seems. I think she's just worried that he's some smarmy rich snob kid. If she only know what his home life has been like. I wished that Mom had met him under different circumstances. I think that she'll come over to my side once she gets to know Genji better. I really hope so, because I don't want to have to live with her and Genji not getting along._

_But Dad definitely doesn't like Belldandy; he's always been suspicious of foreigners. I know that he didn't appreciate being surprised. I can imagine that it was quite a shock! He lectured Keiichi and me on the need to be truthful with one's parents._

_What's weird is that Mom really likes Belldandy! When Keiichi told her how Belldandy was a good cook, a great housekeeper, a good friend, and very intelligent...Mom was hooked. There's no arguing that she is very beautiful, a fact that Mom was quick to tease Keiichi about. Of course, being a Goddess makes Belldandy likeable in any circumstance...she's just so nice._

_So there it is. Dad and Mom disagree on Genji and Belldandy._

_I insisted that Genji and I live in separate rooms, so Mom and Dad had to come over to 'inspect' our little temple home. They wondered how we ended up with a whole temple compound to live in, and we managed to convince them that Belldandy's parents are really rich. We told them that her parents made a big donation to the main temple, so we were given a run-down one to fix up._

_They totally bought that story, thank God!_

_Mom really liked the kitchen that Belldandy has set up. She said she was going to tell Keiichi that she thought he was in good hands with Belldandy. Dad, of course, argued with her. He should know better! But he was impressed with the dinner Belldandy whipped up for us._

_Genji seemed to make a better impact on Mom when he toured her through the house. I could tell that he was really trying to be super polite. This is one of those times when all that extra private schooling he had as a kid really helped. Once we were home, he was the exemplar of a mannered young man, if I may say so._

_I'm really proud of him. He went to extra efforts to impress Mom; I hope that Mom kinda feels that Genji is down-to-earth and not a just a rich snob. But I know that Mom will be watching the house really closely._

_I think that Mom secretly likes Genji, but just isn't letting on. Parents are so funny sometimes._

_My parents also met Cevn, and that was another thing. Their faces dropped when I told them that he was a professor at N.I.T. Dad made some remark that "he looks like I did when I was in college."_

_By the way, we start school later this week. It turns out that Keiichi will be able to continue school, since he never really missed any classes. But he'll have to get around in a wheelchair._

_Next week, everybody's coming over for Tomohisa's birthday party. I can't believe that he's going to be 16 already! It seems like yesterday, I was babysitting him. It's a surprise party, so I hope we can keep him in the dark about it. Hey, if Keiichi can keep Mom and Dad in the dark about Belldandy for years, it'll be a cinch!_

_Wow! Guess I really made up for the past two weeks! I'll write again soon. Later,_

_Megumi_

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

It was a funny scene at the dinner table. We all sat on the floor at the table, while Keiichi was in his wheelchair. He was eating his dinner off of a tray; his encasted legs propped at a 90 degree angle to the floor, which by now had been well autographed and painted.

I was feeling really nervous. Urd and I had decided that this was 'O-Day'.

Our Day. The day we were going to tell everyone.

Last night, we had decided to tell the truth about us before school started back up for the students and faculty in the house.

I went to the kitchen and grabbed a tea service, then nervously poured everyone a cup of tea. For some reason, serving everyone tea seemed to set the mood, even if it didn't calm my nerves.

Megumi looked at me with a puzzled expression.

"What's wrong with you? It's obvious that you're trying to butter us up," she commented foxily.

"Hey everyone, can I have a moment of your attention. I've got an announcement to make. I'm really clumsy at this kind of thing, so bear with me," I started. Belldandy looked at me with an odd expression; it almost seemed that she _already_ knew. Which wouldn't be surprising.

"Well, I wanted to tell you all that..I..I.."

Nothing came out of my mouth.

I looked to Urd for strength; she looked back at me with a bemused expression. I remembered our discussion last night...

_"...You're the man, you've got to be the one who tells them," she had informed me. It was pretty much a demand, not a request. Yet, in a way, I felt that it would be good for me, because it really was difficult and frightening all at once. Sometimes, the most difficult and frightening actions are the ones that best challenge belief systems; systems that desperately need a discarding. I know that I needed to take this step to discard my 'female phobia' a little bit more..._

"What? Tell us!" Megumi and Genji shouted impatiently. _That_ scared me...the sheer force of their curiosity.

"I might as well hang it up...I'll never be able to tell them!" I thought sadly as my body flushed with an absolutely hideous amount of anxiety and stress, all in the space of less than a second of elapsed time.

I looked again at Urd for support; this time she flashed me a private encouraging smile.

"I...I...I've met someone. You know, someone special. I guess I now have a girlfriend..."

"You _guess_?" Urd said, mouthing the words at me with silent exasperation.

This was going badly. Now I've waffled about my affections in front of Urd.

"No, I don't guess. I _know_! I've known for a while that she's the most special person I have ever met. I'm totally, madly in love with her. She's someone you all know really well..."

"WHO?" Sayoko shouted, her face filled with curiosity.

"Well...uh...it's Urd," I said amidst my fears. I looked at Urd, who seemed hasty to swoop on my announcement with unbridled enthusiasm. It was like the proverbial dam bursting. She had this _grin_ that was stunning in its informality, yet beautiful.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"It's really Urd that I love..."

"Yep...he's not joking. It's _true_, you guys! I've found someone I really like! A man...a mortal man, canya believe it! The Goddess of Love...has found love! We didn't want to tell you right away because of a bunch of reasons, but I know...that I love him. _Really_ love him...which means that we're a couple..."

_--Crash!--_

There was a hanging silence in the air after that crash. Keiichi had knocked his teacup off of his tray. The lingering quiet reminded Urd of one of those scenes in a Kurosawa movie where seconds were deliberately stretched out via slow-motion photography to heighten the suspense.

"Someone say something," she heard someone ask. Urd noticed that Cevn was hanging his head in fear and shame. She realized that this must have been really hard for him; perhaps like the time in Beijing when he told her about what was in his heart, perhaps even worse in some respects. But she had insisted that he broach the good news for a reason. He needed to struggle against all the shame that had been 'put on him' in the past.

"Besides, this way,_ I_ don't have to be the one who tells them," she chuckled, smiling to herself as he raised his head. Raised his dignity.

"He _better_ be dignified if he wants to be my boyfriend!" she thought with bemusement.

Surveying the faces at the table, Urd was totally satisfied with the shock value of their announcement. Her only regret was that she couldn't kiss him in front of her sisters.

"_That_ would add frosting to the cake!" she reflected whimsically.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"That's...incredible!" Megumi remarked in a near whisper, the first person at the table to say anything. I knew I could trust her to be supportive and accepting. I looked at Keiichi; he was smiling at me with a knowing, caring grin.

"HOW!" Sayoko shouted. She had only recently found out about the three sisters being Goddesses...

"Rad!" Tomohisa added, grinning from ear to ear.

For the next twenty minutes, Urd and I alternated in our relating how we had met in China: how we had each journeyed in our own way towards the conclusion that we were attracted to each other; how we had broke the news to each other; and what we had been doing since we got back.

"My God, that's _so_ romantic!" Sayoko said approvingly. I had invited her for dinner especially so she could hear this.

"I told you that it would be a surprise, Sayoko," I commented. She nodded her head with exaggerated aplomb.

But Belldandy and Skuld hadn't said a word. I had avoided looking at them...in fact I spent most of my time staring at Urd. Her light green eyes forested my unconfident inclinations with support. Everything about her face informed me that it was right for me to be with her...and this had been the proper time and place to tell everyone.

"I apologize for our keeping this away from you. We didn't want to exclude anybody. We wanted to wait until you two..." I said looking at Belldandy and Skuld, "...got back in your own bodies and had time to sort things out. Then, when Keiichi suffered his accident, we had to postpone telling you again. We didn't want to say anything until he got better and could come home from the hospital. I..I don't know what else to say, but you guys are like...a family to me now..." I couldn't go on; my voice was choking up with words.

Skuld was sitting with her arms folded, looking very dissatisfied. But yet she had a slight smile on her face, in contrast to her defensive posture.

Belldandy's face was mysterious.

"But...this is impossible!" Belldandy finally said in a voice that was jammed jellytight with emotion. She stood up suddenly and ran to her room. A few seconds later, Urd and Skuld followed suit, chasing after their middle sister.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

As soon as she reached her room, Belldandy sat down on her futon bed hard and started shaking. She could feel her heart engineing in her breast with bursts of emotion.

_This _news had hit her like Akira had hit Makuhari! It was one thing for she herself to be in love with a mortal. But Urd? It was impossible! Her sister was the Norn of the Past...and that, that is. The Ultimate Force had designed love to only be a pastheld experience for Urd. For a split second, she sensed what Skuld must have felt when she and Keiichi fell in love.

Now, it was _her_ older sister...

"I hope this isn't one of Urd's crazy schemes!" she reminded herself. She was washed with suspicions after Urd's announcement. Belldandy knew that it was completely impossible for Urd to be in love. True, Urd _could_ feel emotions that bordered on love, but since she was the Goddess of the Past, she couldn't ever experience romantic love in the present timeframe. There was no way that any romantic love that she felt...could be reflected back to her. For Urd, love would always be a past tense word. She had 'been loved', but could never 'be in love'.

Skuld rushed into the room followed a few seconds later by Urd.

"Big Sister, you better explain yourself!" Skuld turned angrily on Urd while pointing at Belldandy. "Look what you've done to her!"

_"__This has to be the most vilest worst lie you've ever hatched!_" Skuld shouted, a paradigm of resentment. "You know how much I hate even the thought of one of us in love with a mortal...and yet, this! To think that you somehow roped Cevn into collusion with your dishonesty..."

Belldandy motioned with her hands to try and get Skuld to calm down. Her younger sister was absolutely livid...and screaming.

"If she had her new Goddess powers, Urd would be plastered with words," Belldandy thought abstractly.

This was_ so_ confusing.

"Skuld...it's true! Absolutely, one hundred percent true. Look into my eyes as only you can...as only a Norn can...and see for yourself whether I'm being truthful or not. I'll let both of you Probe me," Urd stated flatly.

Belldandy was startled when Urd offered to let Skuld 'in'. She only knew of a handful of times when any Gods or Goddesses had offered to become almost completely vulnerable...open to the Probing mind of another deity. It was almost like Sharing.

"Urd must mean business if she's willing to risk being totally visible to Skuld and I," Belldandy realized.

Urd's had only invited her sisters to Probe her three times in the past. Among the Gods, only Sharing was more intimate...so she had been told by older Goddesses in the GRO. But Belldandy was virginal when it came to the oneness of mind and Soul that is created through Sharing. So she didn't know for sure about that...

Skuld looked at her sister, then reached out with her mind and pierced Urd's eyes with her own special Goddess discernment. Deeper...deeper...deeper she probed into Urd's conscious. Skuld wanted to believe, yet wanted to disbelieve. She just wanted an explanation...an answer to this madness her older sister had just dumped in her lap.

Urd looked back at her youngest sister unflinchingly.

Skuld finally located 'it'...and found to her utter surprise that Urd had been telling the truth.

Belldandy had been watching Skuld's mental examination of Urd.

"Where do the _real_ answers lie, Urd?" Belldandy asked her older sister guardedly, wary that she could potentially deceive Skuld, who was much younger and inexperienced in Probing. Urd fixed her with a misty expression, inviting Belldandy to look past her defenses. Belldandy stretched her awareness like a finger pushing into Urd's mind. She didn't fully believe Urd, but deep in her heart, she hoped against hope that her sister _had_ found the kind of love she was describing earlier. Belldandy offered a silent bequest to the Almighty...she had always just wanted her older sister to be happy. Urd had struggled to come to grips with being the Goddess of the Past for a long time. Belldandy knew full well how Urd's inability to have a romantic love had dampened her otherwise joyful nature.

"Please, let it be true," she prayed to Kami-sama.

And like a flower, a part of Urd's Soul unfolded for her...the part of her older sister's heart that had seemed forlorn for all these years. The _glow_ that was Urd...was simply breathtaking to Belldandy. She had no doubt that Urd's admission was genuine. How could it not be, when her own heart reflected the same glow...the glow that was sparked when she fell in love with Keiichi?

It was all true!

"Oh...dear Lord!" was all Belldandy could gasp as she was swept up in waves of profound sisterly joy. She had known for millennia that Urd was doomed to be alone. But now, impossibly, her older sister had found an oasis for her heart! Her joy was so intense, Belldandy didn't want to withdraw her Probing consciousness from Urd's heart. She and Skuld had joined in Urd's being, feeling Urd's surprise and joy when Cevn admitted his feelings to her...then feeling the wellsprings of Urd's heart burst with an ecstatic and profound heartsong. Both Goddesses were completely filled with Urd's gratitude, her happiness...and her love. Her love for them...and her new love.

Belldandy and Skuld slowly detached from Urd's conscious. Their older sister was crying softly, caught up in the strong emotions that accompanied the moment.

Skuld watched with a benign expression as Belldandy wordlessly leaned forward and hugged Urd, overwrought with happiness. Skuld couldn't believe what had just happened, but soon she found herself in her oldest sister's arms, hugging her tightly, unable to hold back her tears. Her Elder Sister was in a place beyond tears; she was almost beaming with affection for Big Sister Urd.

"Urd, my dear Elder Sister...I'm so happy for you!" Belldandy said.

"Big Sister, I'm glad for you too...even if it's a mortal that you picked!" Skuld added.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Keiichi had watched the entire drama unfold. Having foreknowledge of Cevn's 'news', he was fully aware that this could turn into a drama of operatic proportions. He was amused by Cevn's clumsy attempts to tell everyone: but then he soberly remembered how fragile he had felt when he finally told Megumi about Belldandy.

"And Cevn had told us _all_," he acknowledged. Then, caught up in his own excitement, he had knocked the damned teacup off of his tray!

Cevn looked shattered when the Goddesses suddenly bagged out of the room. Keiichi felt a stirring of compassion, and knew that he needed to comfort his friend.

Shocked by the abrupt departure of the Goddesses, Cevn immediately thought that this symbolized an explicit rejection of him, of his relationship with Urd. After all this waiting, after all this planning and consideration of everyone's feelings...to be rejected so completely! In his mind, he could hear Belldandy and Skuld telling Urd that she shouldn't have anything to do with him.

He felt a hand on his shoulder.

"It's okay," Keiichi offered. "It really is. They need to work this thing out on their own. It's _not_ you."

"Hey, they're women! Whaddya expect?" Tomohisa added, drawing ireful glances from Megumi and Sayoko.

Sayoko was touched by the fact that Cevn had invited her over so she could witness this important admission on his part. She had stayed clean since coming back from Okinawa and was really appreciating her recovery...and the fact that she had a teacher who was also a mentor of sorts for her. Besides, Cevn's description of his internal struggles...knowing how he felt about Urd and yet being too messed up to tell her; it was totally innocent and romantic at the same time.

It reminded her of another man; a man of strength on the outside who was figuratively a shy boy on the inside. After her treatment, Sayoko had expected her admirer to come on really strong. Instead, his overtures to her had been mellowly tentative. She decided that she would talk to her known admirer when school started up again...he too had been romantic and thoughtful like Cevn-sensei.

To her, Cevn's story was the kind of story every woman secretly wanted to hear. A man who was truly capable of love...and yet had to surmount all sorts of personal obstacles to make his feelings known. Not the easy, sleazy manner of men who were out for sexual conquest, or the empty words of men whose insincerity was the source of many broken feminine hearts.

Megumi grabbed Cevn's hand and simply said, "Let's talk."

She cast a sidelong glance at Sayoko, hinting that she should accompany them. Soon, they were seated on the front porch, looking at the late October sky. The air was getting chilly, probably only 8 or 9 degrees centigrade. There would be no Halloween in two days...Akira had seen to that.

"We need to pep talk this guy," Megumi told Sayoko. Megumi sensed that this situation needed a woman's touch...the kind of touch that two close friends could offer. It was time for his 'adopted little sister' to take the lead and set him straight.

"Look, Cevn. Urd said that she's in _love_ with you. You need to _trust _that," Sayoko said. This blunt statement said exactly what was on Megumi's mind. Megumi watched as he struggled, then started crying.

But the gloom seemed to be leaving him.

The two women challenged him, encouraged him, cajoled him, and listened. Eventually, their efforts took a toll on his misery. Bit by bit, he seemed to surface from an ocean of despair. Megumi and Sayoko almost felt a sense of teamwork present in their efforts...it made them try even harder as Cevn came back to himself.

"Somehow, someday," they both told him.

Cevn realized that things were totally out of his control when Megumi and Sayoko dragged him out on the porch. From disbelief, they forged confidence. From despair, they pointed him towards optimism. From fear, they offered him faith.

"With _this_ kind of persuasion, how can I not just give in and trust in the moment," he thought gratefully as his two friends urged him to relinquish his self-pity. In a most humorless situation, he suddenly found his lack of trust laughable.

"You guys...are incredible!" was all he could say before he started giggling giddily. Soon, all three were laughing.

"You know, Cevn...Belldandy and Skuld will _have_ to say something eventually! And I don't think Urd will let them get between this thing you two have for each other. I know...I'm a lot like her!" Sayoko joked.

"Me too! Look what's been going on with my parents once they found out about Genji!" Megumi added.

Surprisingly, Sayoko didn't even glance a challenge at her.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

With his sister and Sayoko outside talking to Cevn, and Bell-chan and her two sisters inside their bedroom talking it over, Keiichi was left with Genji and Tomohisa. The two younger guys were animatedly discussing the bombshell news that Cevn and Urd had dropped at dinner.

_--Ring-__- --Ring--__  
_

Keiichi wheeled over to the phone and picked it up.

"_Is B'dandy available for the phone?_" a polite female voice said on the other end.

A voice that Keiichi had never heard before.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Urd was worried about how Cevn had reacted to Belldandy's sudden departure. In fact, _she_ herself didn't know what to make of it. Her worst fears centered around the possibility that Belldandy would react to her romance with Cevn in the same manner that Skuld had reacted to Belldandy and Keiichi's love. It would be horrible to have _both_ her younger sisters poised against her; both jealous because a mortal man had taken a piece of her heart.

She felt relieved after Skuld and Belldandy had filed through her emotions and being. It was a huge risk on her part, letting her sisters Probe her...but she trusted that the sincerity of her feelings would convince them that she was in fact deeply romantically wrapped around her new boyfriend.

"With that out of the way, maybe I can work on convincing him to get sexual with me!" she thought to herself excitedly.

But realistically, she realized that this would be much harder with Cevn than it was with Keiichi and Belldandy. Keiichi didn't have years of horrible sexual abuse to pincushion his libido.

After yet another crying jag, the three sisters were exhausted. Urd didn't expect so much joy from both of her sisters. Belldandy and Skuld both were _very_ happy for her, if even a bit confused about the 'how and whys' of her and Cevn.

Solemnly, she told them about the phenomena of the Ultimate Force and its enigmatic 'barrier' that prevented her and Cevn from even touching. This news seemed to stun her two younger sisters...nothing like this had ever been recorded in the annals of Yggdrasilian history. It didn't conform to any know UF rules. It didn't conform to The Rules at all.

Looking at her sisters, Urd knew that their minds were racing as well. Thus, when the knock came, none of them heard it.

There was a persistent quiet rapping at the door.

When she noticed it, Urd dismissed it as another new rattling noise. Since Akira, the house had acquired all sorts of new creaks and rattles. This was simply one of them.

_knockknockknockknock_

"Come in," Urd shouted, realizing that someone was at the door. She watched as the shoji slipped open and Keiichi rolled his wheelchair in.

"Are you guys okay?" he asked. All three Goddesses nodded at him.

Keiichi knew in an instant that there had been some intense sisterly love in the room. The air was charged with feminine emotions and intuitions.

"Belldandy...there's someone on the phone for you," he said in a strangely affected voice.

"For me? Who is it?"

"She says she's your mother."

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --


	30. Pt 30: Arrangements

**Part 30: Arrangements**

Keiichi watched as the softness of Bell-chan's beauty retreated, replaced by a hard-edged bladekeen chill which overlaid her gentle disposition. His emotions swirled with fear, anger and wariness.

"First, this bodyswitch between Skuld and Bell-chan, then this thing with Urd and Cevn...and now _this_!" he thought in mounting panic. He regarded his divine girlfriend, her facial expression suggesting that his panic had mirrored itself in her soul.

All Belldandy could do was look at Keiichi with wide-mouthed shock.

Her emotions shifted into overdrive in reaction...

"Could it really be Mother? What would she want? She usually doesn't check on us all that often...maybe once every three hundred mortal years or so. And she _knows_ that we three sisters have been assigned here. Why is Mother calling _now_, using the phone like Kami-sama?" Belldandy wondered, bested by her flurrying anxiety.

The prospect of mounting the inevitable...painted even more brushstrokes of apprehension on her face.

Keiichi was caught up in the fact that all three Goddesses had initially reacted with a fugue-like silence when he mentioned that their mother was on the phone. He could sense that they were _majorly_ caught off guard by this news! Which only made him feel more upset as well. Urd's 'mom' Hild had spread chaos in their lives every time she dropped by for what she called a "friendly visit". If Hild hadn't made it clear that Urd was her only daughter, Keiichi was have reason to be afraid, very afraid. Imagining Belldandy with a mother like Hild was akin to trying to imagining udon soup with worms instead of noodles. Hild was a maniac...and yet Bell-chan and her sisters seemed to react with just as much agitation with the news of this phone call as they did when Hild showed up out of the blue.

A moment of tense silence dampened the suddenly chill air like a wet rag on a stove. The sister's bedroom felt like quicksand...no one wanted to bridge it with an effort at conversation, for fear of being caught in a whirlspin and dragged under.

"Keiichi, when she said that she was our mother, did she give you her name?" Urd finally asked, speaking the Goddesses' unvoiced query.

"She said her name was Freiija, Urd."

Keiichi startled forward from his wheelchair as all three Goddesses simultaneously went ashen-faced. Three loud gasps floated in the air, suspended like dead leaves in the wind.

Skuld looked bewildered. Belldandy felt a lump forming in her throat, while Urd sighed with relief.

"At least it wasn't the _other_ She on the phone!" Urd said quietly, referring to _her_ other She. The maniacal Demon Queen part of the family.

"Mother hasn't called after any of us since we all came here to Earth," Belldandy fretted. She looked at Skuld and Urd with mystification and dread. Now that she knew for sure that it was Mother on the phone, her heart generated a whole new set of worries.

"What if something's wrong? What if we have to go back home? No, if we had to go back...wouldn't Mother tell all three of us at the same time? Actually, wouldn't the Almighty be the one to tell us? Why does she want to talk to me, _alone_?" she said, swiftly covering her mouth as she realized that she was voicing her private concerns out loud.

"OH NO!! I never told Keiichi about Mother!" she realized, her mind ajar with a flourish of discomfort. This thought brought on another torrent of plague-like insecurity and fear to the young Goddess. She looked at Keiichi with a penitent expression...no wonder he was filled with dismay!

"Bell...you never told me that you have parents!" Keiichi said in an exasperated voice, practically reading her mind. A moment earlier, he had responded with rapt disbelief when the voice on the other side of the phoneline said she was Belldandy's mother. Now that his divine girlfriend had confirmed this fact, he felt suddenly inadequate. Beyond this, an attitude was wavering raven-like at the edge of his awareness. An uncomfortable, swarming attitude of betrayal.

Belldandy had _kept a secret_ from him! Not just any secret, but the existence of her parents!

"Does this mean that she didn't trust me? Or even worse, that she doesn't love me fully?" his mind seesawed back-and-forth. Her inability to confide in him about the existence of her mother was messing up his emotions...totally. It was like a pleasant dream suddenly cut short, as reality crashed in on him like an avalanche.

"Keiichi, just like we had to keep our relationship secret from your parents...I needed to keep my parent's existence secret from you. I'll explain it to you later; right now I need to find out why Mother is calling," Belldandy said evenly, trying to assure him.

"She asked for you, specifically," Keiichi added, visibly shaken with this new development.

Urd grimaced. Her intuition informed her that Mother's calling for Bell was _definitely_ not a good thing.

"Expect the worst, Bell. After all, it's Mom," Urd warned soberly as Belldandy left for to the dining room and the phone.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Belldandy regarded the phone with reluctance for a few seconds, then gathered her wits and picked it up. Unheralded conversations with Mother often made her feel like she was 'walking the plank' over the gaping plunge of Urd's Well.

"Hello, Mother," she said mock-cheerfully.

_"Oh, B'dandy dahling! I bet_ -this-_ is a surprise...your Mother calling you all the way from Yggdrasil! By the way, your good friend Peorth says 'Hi',"_ her mother said gaily. Belldandy frowned at the mention of Peorth.

Peorth meant trouble.

_"My, but it_ -has-_ been a long time since we last chatted, hasn't it my dear child? How are you managing on that horrid dusty mortal plane you're living on?"_ Belldandy could almost taste the sourcream condescending tone of Mother's voice regarding her presence on Earth.

"I'm doing fine, Mother. Urd and Skuld both say 'Hi' and send their love. Actually, living here on the Earthrealm with the mortals has really been rather...refreshing...for me. It has brought me some unexpected pleasures," she answered, thinking of her love for Keiichi.

_"Ah...yes. We've been following your reports regularly here, especially your daily updates on your interactions with that mortal...what's his name, dear?_

"His name is _Keiichi_, Mother," she corrected, bristling at her mother's little conceit. Mother _knew_ Keiichi's name, but feigned ignorance because she just didn't want to say it.

_"Ahh yes... Him. The 'test mortal', eh? Actually, I think it's a waste of time, myself. How could he make such a awful wish...forcing you to be posted for so long on that savage planet, alongside all those uncouth, primitive, coarse, mortal barbarians? How utterly _-dreadful-_! I cannot fathom how can they live in such squalor...they're literally polluting their world to death! You know what I think? I think our Lord should have just done away with all the mortals with a flood or something. They proved their unworthiness when they dropped that dreadful weapon of theirs during their last little global squabble. You know, that bomb...what did they call it, B'dandy?"_

"The atomic bomb, Mother. And _you_ know that I strongly disagree with you about the mortals!" (_But you never listen to me..._) "They have _so_ much potential yet to be realized." (_And one of them is proving this is true...my dear Keiichi!_) "It is our duty as divine beings to nurture and encourage their growth towards the Next Level." (_And you –_know-_ this, Mom, even if you don't want to admit it!_)

_"Well, you were always so stubborn in your views, my dear! Almost as bad as your older sister. Ahhh, it must be your Father's influence!"_

"Motherrrr..!"

_"...and yet...a strong will does not experience make. You're only...240,000 of their mortal years old. Still much too young to know the ways of the Multiverse. I personally think that they'll -_never-_ reach the Next Level,"_ her mother stated bluntly. Belldandy shook her head in resignation as Mother continued to pontificate.

_"I just hope that my daughter isn't getting –_too-_ attached to the lowly mortal worms...while she's got bigger and better things to do. Being amongst the mortals has been known to taint us, since we –_are-_ their betters. They're little more than pets; and even as pets, they're only slightly amusing,"_ her Mother continued. Belldandy was getting more flustered at her mother's comments and blatant opinion-making. It almost seemed that Mother was trying to goad her.

"Yes, Mother." (_Enough already!_) "But you know from my reports that I am just as much of a Goddess now as I was when I came here almost four mortal years ago." (_You would really be surprised at how close I_ –am- _to one of the mortals...and I am still every bit a Goddess!_)

_"Yes, I must admit that you have done well, considering what you have to work with. But consider –_my- _position for a moment, B'dandy dahling. All the neighbors are gossiping about you! I hear them actually questioning if you're becoming __too__ 'mortal', for the shame of it! Some are even saying worse...that you might have even developed a friendship with one of __them__. Blights, the very thought of my friends in society thinking __my own daughter__ is a Goddess who actually- _likes-_living with mortals. How utterly uncapital! You do have a charitable streak in you, my dear, but you're wasting it by being among the mortal world."_

"Mother sure does go on," Belldandy thought. Her patience was being taxed to the limit by her mother's tritisms.

"Right about here is when Mom gives the rundown on all the Yggdrasilian Society functions," she recalled from past conversations. "First the guilt trip, then the social scene report, then finally she'll get around to what she wants to talk about."

_"Do you know the Valkyries, Belldandy dear? They threw the most mahvelous party recently! It took everybody by surprise, and it was the event of the millennium, let me assure you..."_ her mother continued. Belldandy was almost falling asleep as her mother shifted into gossip mode, keeping her abreast of all the latest parties, fashions and fads.

_"Am I boring you dear? You haven't said a single word! Has living among the mortals made you less talkative? Why...I simply –_knew-_ it would! How could anyone have a sensible conversation with those gauche mudslingers..."_

"No Mother, you're not boring me." (_Mom, I love you, but I -_don't-_ care to hear every little bit of gossip!_) "In fact, I wanted to tell you that..." Her mother interrupted her.

_"Actually, you may not have to live in sufferance with the mortals much longer, dear! Mother has a surprise in mind for you! I have the most wonderful news to share with you!"_

Belldandy felt a chill run up and down her spine. Her knees went wobbly as she absorbed the impact of her Mother's statement.

"This 'news' was obviously something major...and probably something I _don't_ want to hear. I've got to try to sound cheerful," she reminded herself.

"Oh that's great, Mother! (_I'm scared that whatever you're going to tell me...will not bode well._) "What is it?" (_How__ are you trying to meddle in my life now, Mom?_), she asked.

_"Why, B'dandy dear, I've arranged am omiai for you! Isn't that absolutely wonderful, dahling?"_

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Belldandy dropped the phone onto the floor, bundled in a complete rigor of shock. She turned, emotionally bleached by what her mother had just said...and then saw Keiichi, sitting in his wheelchair with his face drawn with anxiety, deeply concerned for her. Focusing on him, she bravely fought back tears.

"Don't cry in front of him...then he'll never guess, he'll never know," she thought furtively. Seeing Keiichi's wonderful face just made things worse. Belldandy had often heard the expression "broken heart" over the millennia...but _now_ she finally knew what it meant, in all its brutality and forlorness. Tragedy had been brunted onto her heart, shattering it like a comet smashing a geodesic dome...

She wished that it wasn't so. That Mother had never told her about the omiai.

Her romance with Keiichi hadn't been exactly seamless; with Skuld's jealous possessiveness, Mara's perfidy and Urd's cupidity. Not to mention her own lapses of naivety and occasional 'jealousy storms' as her sisters termed it. And Keiichi's occasional differences of opinion. But the seams were coming unraveled right before her eyes. Suddenly, the highest aspirations of her heart seemed as fluid as ice splinters melting in a spring stream. Her life felt mercurial; water flowing through her fingers, spilling her dreams onto the ground.

Her heart was shattered. If it had been glass, the force of this blow would have pulverized it.

"The Ultimate Force...the Ultimate Force...shouldn't it have prevented this? How could she do this?" Belldandy argued with herself.

"WHY??" her mind screamed in outrage as she staggerwalked past Keiichi, her hands clenched so tight that her nails were biting into the palms of her hands. Numb with shock, Belldandy took a last look at her handsome boyfriend...her _bewildered_ boyfriend...and realized an even more horrible thought.

"I've got to _tell him_ about what Mother has done," she reluctantly admitted. A churning whirlpool of internal grief emerged in her already fragile heart. Overwrought with emotional agony, she couldn't bear to look at her beloved Keiichi's face again.

She rushed to the safety of her bedroom, barely restraining her tears.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

_--Slam--_

"Elder sister?" Skuld asked, her face filled with apprehension. Her older sister had charged into the bedroom, crashing the shoji door open and shut, seemingly enraged. Both Skuld and Urd flinched at the sound, thinking that their sister was simply angry after talking with Mother. They looked up to see their Belldandy in utter distress, tears running down her face. A few seconds later, Keiichi shouted through the closed door to see if Belldandy was okay. Belldandy looked at Urd and silently motioned for her _not_ to let Keiichi in. Urd saw the desperation on her sister's face...she looked like she was being banished to Vanagdrasil or some other horrible place!

"What the hell did Mother say?" Urd wondered as she slid open the door a bit and peeked at a worried-looking Keiichi sitting in his wheelchair.

"Sorry, Keiichi...but this is family business. If it were me, I would invite you to come in, but..." Urd told him with a sylym attempt at diplomacy. Keiichi's worried face turned ireful at her refusal.

"Oh, I get it! Now that Bell's mom is in the picture, I'm not! I think this really sucks...you guys acting all secretive all of a sudden!" he angrily replied, wheeling backwards. Urd thought he was over-reacting, way over-reacting. Idiotic for most mortals, but in Keiichi's case it was his strong love for her sister rendered visible.

"Damn this fuckin' wheelchair!" she heard him yell as he tried to turn around in the hallway and banged the wall with his cast-covered left foot. Urd winced as he gasped from the dull shots of pain running up and down his leg. It didn't take a Goddess to sense the mounting angst drawing to the forefront of his thoughts.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

It had been extremely awkward, having both his legs in stationary casts. He couldn't soak for long in the bathtub...it was a trying struggle for him just to clean himself on the bathstool with soap and rinsewater. He couldn't turn his chair around in the hallway at all, a fact that he frequently forgot. He couldn't drive _anything_; he was pretty much stranded in the house since he returned from the hospital.

Cevn had been retrieving his homework assignments and PowerPoint lecture notes from N.I.T., generously provided by his sensei since some of the engineering labs weren't handicap accessible. He missed Tamiya and Ootaki and Sora and the other Motor Club members. They had visited him often in the hospital and signed his casts. Everyone was doing two jobs now; working at their jobs or school, and then performing volunteer service to help clean up their community. Poor Sora had three jobs: school, work at her folk's noodle shop, and working as a dispatcher for the cleanup crews.

He would have given anything to join them in the extra work. Instead, he had his own extra work to contend with, which was frustrating to no end. Completing the simplest daily tasks was one ordeal after another. Getting dressed initially was a thirty-minute chore; now he had it down so he could dress in half that time. Brushing his teeth was a hassle when his wheelchair was only level with the sink. If he wanted something out of the fridge, he had to be careful he didn't bang his foot when he opened the door. Consequently, he had to learn a give-and-take on daily activities, such as resigned himself to wearing shorts around the house so he didn't have to deal with pulling his jeans over his casts. The list of hassles went on and on.

"And now, to top it off...something really major is going on with _my_ girlfriend...and she won't tell me what it is!" he thought resentfully.

He tried to calm himself by thinking about how Belldandy had attended him with a nurse-like devotion, caring for his every need these past few days. She had helped him get dressed the first couple of days until he could get the hang of it. She somehow found a backscrubber for him to use, despite the fact that most of the stores in Chiba Prefecture were trashed by Supertyphoon Akira. Whenever he needed something, she would bring it to him. It was almost as if she could read his thoughts. She also was giving him frequent massages since the leg casts were causing an inordinate amount of lower back tightening and pain. Twice a day, or more if he felt like it, she would knead his tightly knotted sore muscles with the expertise of a shiatsu masseur, and then gently rub his skin with light loving caresses to soothe him...

"What could be up with her?" he wondered as he rolled circles into the living room, wishing he could understand Yggdrasilian so he could figure out what their conversation was about.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Belldandy reached out and furtively grabbed each of her sister's hands for comfort as soon as she sat down on her futon bed. Both Urd and Skuld covered her hands with theirs as she cried silently, nonstop for an entire hour. Urd and Skuld were terrified...something Mother had said to her over the phone must have _really_ rocked her world in the worst way.

Urd felt guilty for sending Keiichi away. She knew he must be terribly worried about his girlfriend; but she had to respect her younger sister's wish for privacy. It dawned on Urd that she had _never_ seen Belldandy so upset in her entire existence. Absolutely never. The Belldandy whose hand she was clutching was _empty_! She could feel only a vacuum in the place where her sister's happy disposition should have been.

Skuld was in a panic. Seeing her older sister so upset, so vulnerable, had prompted her to feel very intimidated. This just added to her desperate confusion. When Belldandy's crying became less intense, Skuld jumped to the conclusion all on her own that Keiichi shouldn't be left alone. So she volunteered to go sit with him. Actually, she just wanted to get away from the sight of her distraught sister. Once she informed her two older sisters of her intent, Belldandy seemed to compose herself just enough to say a few words.

"Mother...has...arranged...an...omiai...for...me," she uttered weakly in a pitiful voice of dejection.

"WHAT?!" Urd and Skuld yelled, stunned by what they had just heard.

"B..but I'm older than you by at least 20,000 years! I'm the Eldest Norn..._I_ should be the first one Mother should have picked!" Urd added, instantly jealous and indignant.

"Big Sister Urd!! How could you even think about yourself at a time like this?" Skuld interrupted angrily. Skuld couldn't believe what she had just heard from her middle sister.

"Belldandy. Omiai. Belldandy. Omiai," kept looping through Skuld's mind like a bleak refrain from some symphony gone badly.

Urd looked at her enraged and frightened youngest sister, then back to Belldandy, who was hanging her head in sheer despondency. Urd felt disconcerted every time she saw that empty look in Bell's eyes. She felt overwhelmed; when her mind was unsettled, she would have instinctively sought a sensible explanation from Belldandy. But Bell was like a vacant cave; soundless, lightless, dark and empty.

"My sister must have somehow become deranged...she must be only imagining such things," Urd concluded, unwilling to accept what Bell had just said. She half-expected to see a mischievous grin emerge on Belldandy's face; a grin that would confess to them that this was all a tearup practical joke. But no smile came...Belldandy continued to hang her head as tears dripped off her reddened cheeks onto the futon blanket.

Skuld felt an immense blast of _something horrid_ as she saw the sadness in Belldandy's eyes. This was a feeling like she had never felt before. It was horrible, smothering...and inescapable. Mara at her worst was frightening, especially in her evil lair. But _this_ made the horror of their Demoness adversary look like creamy croissants. _This_ was horror of the worst kind…a bleak, empty, _untouchable_ terror.

"Whatever Mom told Elder Sis, it's utterly crushed her," Skuld whispered to Urd. She was uneasy, as she was faced with the difficult task of choosing sides. On one side was her Mother and on the other side was her beloved Elder Sister. She felt a flash of resentment at her Mother, followed by a feeling approaching homesickness. She wanted to be safe and sound, resting in Mother's bosom again, just like she did when she was a little girl. Mother would take the pain away.

"Why is life always so full of choices?" Skuld agonized to herself. "And what about Keiichi? Even though I'm not fully convinced that he's right for my sister...he still is very nice to her. If he finds out, he'll be utterly crushed!"

Skuld looked at Belldandy and felt crushed herself by the weight of her sister's glazed-eye depression. Urd's suntanned skin blanched as she realized that _this was for real_!

"You mean...did I hear you right, Bell? Mother has arranged for you...to be engaged to be _married_," she said, barely able to force the words out for want of belief. Belldandy reacted to Urd's inquiry with even deeper sobs.

"B..but _how_? You have a wish contract with Keiichi that requires you to be _here_!" Urd erupted in anguished disbelief.

"It's something that has to do with Mother being the Goddess of Marriages. Something that allows her to overrule or somehow void my wish contract with my dearest Keiichi..." Belldandy answered in a hollow, tinythin voice.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

If he hadn't been confined to a wheelchair with two broken legs, Keiichi knew that he would be pacing through the house in grave anxiety. As it was, he was wheeling in circles around the living room, weaving between the two sets of couches. It had been several hours...and not so much as a word from the Goddesses! His patience was wearing veneer-thin as he hoped against hope that the circumstances surrounding her mother's call would not affect Bell-chan too adversely.

Finally, Keiichi sighed with relief as the shoji door slid open and a haggard-looking Belldandy emerged from the sister's bedroom, wearing a tear-soaked nightgown and robe. She walked over to him with measured steps, as if she was trying too hard to appear composed. Keiichi could tell in an instant that she was in _huge_ emotional pain. It reminded him uncannily of Gramps when Great-grandma died. "Could it be something like a death in the family?" he wondered to himself, prompted by memories of the funeral from wayback kid days.

Belldandy fell to her knees on the floor next to his wheelchair and started sobbing on his arm. Keiichi found himself stroking her long brunette tresses with his other hand, trying to soothe her.

"Keiichi...I..I," was all she could gasp out between heaving sobs. Belldandy would have given the world...even the Multiverse...to escape from telling Keiichi what she needed to tell him. What she _had_ to tell him. The most awful words he will probably ever hear in his life. She felt her throat constricting as she choked on the grief she was feeling in her heart.

"I _can't_ tell him!" she realized with mounting horror. Each time she stole a glance at his gentle brown eyes, she found her reluctance increasing. A battle of conflicted emotions raged inside of her, causing her to tremble violently. The last thing she wanted to do was share the news that had crushed all her hopes and dreams. This whole situation was too macabre, too surreal. Her heart felt suffocated by the task ahead of her.

"Bell-chan...what is it, my dear love?" Keiichi asked with deep uncertainty, still soothing her hair. She was shaking so hard that he became scared-worried.

Belldandy lifted her head up to look at him, her mellow azure eyes framed with red. Keiichi almost recoiled from the sight; he had only seen her look so distraught only once before. That time, she had been recalled to Yggdrasil, almost three years ago. It seemed like her fear arced across the short distance and charged him with an almost-electric shock. He looked in her eyes...and felt a doomsday feeling.

"This is _bad_!" he sensed.

"K..Keiichi...I have to..snff..go back to Yggdrasil. My mother has arranged a..snff..marriage interview. A..an...Omiai."

There. It was done. It was only a few words hanging in the air. Belldandy let go of Keiichi and collapsed to the floor as she realized that she had just snuffed her entire love life with Keiichi with two short sentences. Even worse, she had dashed the heart of her closest friend...and only lover.

The love of her life.

Keiichi-san had been the only man to ever touch her heart and make it fully flower forth with romance and tenderness. For the first time, she had failed at providing relief in the form of a wish. The words she spoke seemed to echo in the chambers of her mind.

"I've just caused the most intense pain in Keiichi's life by telling him. I've just had to hurt the person that I care about more than anyone else in existence," she acknowledged with terrible insight. "I can't look at him...I can't look at him...I can't look at him after what I just told him!" she thought, and then she dashed out of the room, unable to bear another moment.

Keiichi felt a hellborne scream tear itself from his lungs...from his heart...as he howled, ejecting his frustration with unconscious force.

"NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!"

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Urd heard the agonized scream from the living room. She wanted to collapse into a black hole; to hide within herself and never come out.

"This is not happening...Mother never really called and told Belldandy that she had arranged a marriage for her. It never occurred," she told herself, trying to ignore the piercing shouts of anguish. Footfalls raced past her bedroom door.

Skuld peeked out the shoji door and looked at her oldest sister with a sad-eyed expression. Belldandy was standing in the hallway, her forehead resting against the wall as her whole body shook with deep sobs. She felt a wall of sadness threatening to break in her heart. It was being assaulted by the throes of two shattered hearts, two shattered lives.

"She must have told him," was all Skuld could say in a soft voice, strangely discordant with the screams from the other room.

"Skuld-sama...feeling empathy for Keiichi?" Urd teased her, more out of frustration than sarcastic intent. Her taunt flew by the youngest Goddess.

"Yes! He _loves_ her, Big Sister! I don't think he has ever loved somebody as much as he loves Belldandy. How could Mother do such a thing? She's so unreasonable!"

"From the mouth of a child," Urd thought to herself. Skuld's words had rung a bell of honor in her mind. Urd heard Keiichi scream again, this time more hoarsely. Belldandy's pain was overwhelming, but _this_ was ridiculous! Rage coursed upon rage as Urd jumped to her feet, arms rigid against her sides.

"That does it! I'm going to call Mother! She can't get away with this!"

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Five minutes later, a blue lightning bolt lashed down from the sky, blasting Urd to the floor and burning the fringes of her robe.

Mother was a _Senior_ First Class Goddess, Unlimited License.

The loud report of cannon-like lightning burst almost caused Megumi to jump out of her skin. She and Genji were desperately trying to comfort Keiichi. Belldandy was too distraught to do anything. Three meters separated her brother and his Goddess girlfriend, but the gap might as well have been as wide as the Pacific Ocean. Her brother was in meltdown mode, and Belldandy was already meltdowned, Megumi noted sadly as she saw the middle Goddess sitting in the middle of the floor, holding onto Skuld for dear life.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Once more, I had to work late at N.I.T. This time, the reason was the upcoming National Culture Day activities at the college. National Culture Day, November 3rd, was just a couple days away. Already, the night air was rapidly changing from the humid heat of summer to the chill aridity of winter. In some ways, the cool air was reassuring...no cyclonic storm could threaten Makuhari while the air was this cold.

Dr. Kintaro had insisted that the school put on an extra-special Culture Day in the wake of Supertyphoon Akira.

"N.I.T. has the responsibility to serve as a cultural center for our community. With the disastrous events of this year, a strong display of culture is greatly needed. Culture plays an extremely important role towards lending the appearance of normalcy to our city of Makuhari," he told us in pep-talk terms. I couldn't agree with him more; in fact, I felt a cheerful enthusiasm towards this project. Genji and I had volunteered for debris and demo duty every Sunday since Akira, and I welcomed the idea of doing something else besides making small piles out of big piles. Not to mention all the shots for tetanus and other contagious and communicable diseases that tended to be endemic to disaster zones.

When I arrived home, it felt like the house had burned down. Urd was lying unconscious on the floor, burnt. Keiichi had wheeled his wheelchair into a corner of the living room and was staring into the corner. Belldandy was sitting with Skuld in the middle of the floor, a look of complete sufferance on her face. Megumi and Genji were sitting next to Keiichi, looking miserable.

My cheerfulness fled away like geese migrating south.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"I don't want to live anymore," Keiichi said in a distant voice. I remembered his earlier admission...that he had developed suicidal leanings in high school because of his short stature. My fears escalated as he started talking gibberish again.

"He's detaching from his sanity," I told myself once Megumi and Genji filled me in on what had just transpired. "After what he's been through, that's quite understandable. He breaks his legs in the storm, and now his heart just got broken." I realized that someone was going to have to keep a 24-hour lookout for him. Some of the stuff that had driven me towards suicidal think was minor compared to the kind of loss he was dealing with. I was worried about Urd as well...she hadn't budged since I returned home. Something had given her the mother of all knockout punches.

"I can't live without Belldandy!" he wailed, then launched into another mantra of disconsolance.

A few minutes later, Urd stirred, much to my relief. I excused myself to ask her how she was. Once more, I wanted to hold her, to comfort her with my presence...but the Ultimate Force barrier held fast and prevented me from even hugging her.

"I tried to talk some sense into Mother, and she zapped me. I couldn't tell her about Bell and Keiichi, so she thought I was just being dipwad daughter. She got furious with me, and you already know the result," she told me, running her fingers along the burnt fringes of her dress and robe. I thought I wasn't hearing right...Urd had said, "Mother"? She noticed the confused look on my face and launched into a woozy explanation.

"Yes, all Gods and Goddesses have parents, just like you Earthborn mortals. I guess that you haven't gotten to that part of the Enigma Book, otherwise you'd know already," she said with a shrug of her shoulders. She sat up off of the floor and examined her robe and hair for burns.

"This is awful, I must look horrible," she commented on her frazzed hair. My face must have registered a dozen emotions at once, because she settled into an almost lecturing voice.

"My half-Mother on the God side...her name is Freiija. Your ancient Nordic people called her Frigga in the Edda legends. Mom was married to Odeyn when she was about Belldandy's age. Mom was the apprentice Goddess of Love at that time, while Odeyn was the apprentice head of the Yggdrasil Energy Guild.

I remembered a section in the Enigma Book that documented the Energy Guild. The Energy Guild was basically responsible for maintaining atrophy/entropy balance in the Multiverse, plus powering Yggdrasil. Thus, the head of the Energy Guild was one of the most prominent Gods in Yggdrasil, wielding great influence. Urd looked at me with beautiful aqua-green eyes, I was struck once more by her ardour, even though she was burned and blistered.

"Anyway, since Mother married so well, she immediately became one of the pillars of the Yggdrasilian social scene, what you might call a 'jet setter'. Odeyn was on the fast track to become one of the most powerful Gods in all of Yggdrasil. Besides the Almighty, there are only three other Gods as powerful: Thord, Lokii and Hel. Also, because of her high status, Mother is one of only a handful of Senior First Class Goddesses. She is much more powerful than all three of us combined," she added, referring to her and her sisters.

"So why would she want to arrange a marriage for Belldandy?" I asked with more than a hint of irritation.

"Because, she's the former Goddess of Love. When she turned over that responsibility to me, she was promoted to Goddess of Marriages. I have a sneaky suspicion that her society friends put her up to it! Between her and Father, Belldandy simply cannot refuse to attend the omiai," she explained, smoothing her singed eyebrows with her little finger.

"Mother is very strong-willed when she wants something to go her way. You just saw how she treated me when I argued with her about Belldandy. Mother is very crafty as well. One time, she managed to steal Father's precious statue jewels and make them into a necklace for herself. Father was going to cast a spell to make the statue talk so he could find out what happened to its jewels, but Mom was able to convince a friend to smash it before it could inform him. So she got over on him until he caught her with necklace. The funny thing is, he told her she could have the jewels for the asking. Mother could easily compete with Mara in the shrewdness department. On top of that, she is addicted to jewelry and ornaments. I'm pretty sure that I got my scheming mind from her," Urd added with pride. I stifled a laugh at this; Urd's schemes usually backfired. All I had to do was say "Mama Bear" and Urd would get the picture.

"If Belldandy goes back, then what can she do? Surely, someone up there knows that she and Keiichi are in love?"

"Keiichi's status as Test Mortal for the Earthrealm pretty much prevents everyone else from knowing, because there's a kind of 'privacy filter' that censors any indication of love between he and Bell, at least to Yggdrasilian minds. Peorth knows, of course. But Peorth can't say anything about it, because Belldandy humiliated her last year when she had a crush on Keiichi. If Peorth said anything, she would be the laughing stock of the Relief Office. Besides her, the only other one who knows of it is we sisters and Kami-sama," Urd explained, laughing weakly when she got to the part about Peorth. Shen halted in mid-chuckle as Keiichi started to wail in grief again.

"What's the matter, Cevn?" Urd asked, noticing my sudden dip into sullenness.

Keiichi's near-insane screams were triggering a very painful sequence of memories. My heart felt sick. About two years into my recovery, I had married a wonderful woman. She was in recovery as well. I was sure that she would be my life's soulmate. Within a year, she had returned to using heroin and died from a drug overdose. Nine years ago...nine years of pain. It was bad at first, but it eventually lessened. In his loudly-shouted emotional agony, I heard revisiting echoes of my past. I remembered screaming like he was when I left the coroner's office.

"Oh my Lord...your ex-wife!" Urd said, a look of recognition on her face. I felt more long-embraced pain; tears formed in my eyes. I struggled to fight them. For some reason, I was grateful for her impersonation of Dr. Ogawa; it meant that she knew me in a way most people didn't. I had expected her to use it against me, for them to banish me from their lives because of my past. Instead, Urd had known why I was struggling.

"Urd, you know that I've been through the loss of a loved one. It wasn't as sudden, as unexpected as Keiichi's...but I _know_ the kind of pain that's going through his heart right now. We've got to keep a tight rein on him. If he's anything like me, he'll try to kill himself," I concluded, saying the last in a whisper. Urd shuddered at my intimation of a possible suicide attempt on Keiichi's part.

"Besides Megumi, Skuld and I are the closest to Keiichi. We'll keep a clock-close watch on him. I think that the rest of you guys should try and go on...keep the routines running around here. Keep him busy with schoolwork, go to school yourselves...act like yourselves," she suggested.

"Yeah, you're right! A pattern of normalcy will help offset the disruption in his life. Shit...he's been through the wringer with his broken legs. I don't know if he can take any more," I added, knowing deep inside that Urd was right on target. Then a crazy inspiration filled me. It was contrary to my convictions, but...

"Urd, if there is ever a reason for you to get drunk, it's just popped in your lap!" I said brightly. Urd looked at me and tipped her head in confusion, as if I had lost my mind.

"Think! Keiichi is probably going to do what any other guy would do under the circumstances...get really obliviated."

"Huh?"

"Get plastered. Get sake'd out. Get rip-roaring drunk. And since you're the village inebriate, you can keep him company. Take him bar-hopping, and then make sure he gets back in one piece."

"You dope, he's in a _wheelchair_, if you haven't forgotten! And I'm _not _the village inebriate...in fact I think I've been doing pretty well since you and I got together!"

"That's up for debate...but regardless, you can be his drinking buddy. Sayoko's clean, so she can't take up her former role as 'female party pal' for Keiichi. So it's got to be you! Just get him out of the house, even if it's on the porch...or better yet on that hill behind our temple. You can wheel him up there and sing until your drunken hearts are delighted. And no hanky panky!"

"What? You think that I would take advantage of poor 'ol Keiichi in his time of need. Well, I _ought_ to, just because you said that. Don't you trust me?" she asked, a hurt expression on her face. I knew that I had gone too far with that one. Why couldn't I trust that Urd could wear her love like heaven? I needed to apologize...and quick.

"Look, Urd, all that stuff about my ex-wife has really unsettled me...I'm sorry I came off like I didn't trust you. I _do_...it's just that love for me has always been a disaster. There's gonna be times when I stick my head so far up my ass, it'll be impossible to put my foot in my mouth. Sorry for being an idiot. Just try to remember that idiocy is temporary in my case," I offered.

"You too, huh? Did I ever tell you about Troubadour? He cheated on me bunches of times..." She cut herself off, and I sensed that she was feeling uncomfortably resentful at the past.

"Keiichi and I...getting plastered. Hmmm, sounds like it should be interesting. And _you_ have nothing to worry about...I _love_ you!" Urd noted.

"S'fair enough. I don't want to be quoting tragic poems from Sung Dynasty to myself," I quipped back.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Belldandy decided to leave the next day. Every time she saw Keiichi, a stabbing pain in her heart squeezed the breath away from her. She surrendered to the fact that staying any longer would simply protract and intensify the misery that she was feeling. She and Keiichi were feeding into each other...emotionally commiserate. She could tell by looking at him that, despite his own agony of the spirit, he was empathizing with _her_ pain, taking it on as well.

Skuld and Urd had begged her to stay and strategize; perhaps they could devise a means to thwart Mother's will. But Belldandy was resigned to the fact that she had to attend the omiai. The divine conduct of filial piety demanded that she heed her parent's will in this matter.

Since tomorrow was Saturday, everybody would be home. She doubted that any of her mortal housemates was in good enough emotional shape to show up for their volunteer disaster efforts. Belldandy dreaded leaving, but she felt a slight comfort in the fact that her departure would be well attended by the people that care about her the most. Also, they would be immediately available to console Keiichi after she left. She was worried sick that he might die from a broken heart.

Try as she might, she couldn't stop seeing his face in the deepmost part of her heart, a face full of disappointment and grief the last time she saw it. She wanted to cast a mental image of a smiling Keiichi...but was unable to.

"Love is like an ocean...it can buoy one up...it can wash ashore majestically...and it could drown one's heart," she thought poetically.

"I'm drowning," she said aloud. There would be no sleep for her tonight. She looked at Urd and Skuld sleeping on either side of her...she had taken Skuld's middle futon tonight so she could be surrounded by the presence of her sisters.

So much would be unknown...

Without her powers, she couldn't even leave the Earthrealm. She would even have to rely on Mother to transit her back to Yggdrasil. In the middle of the night, she called and arranged her return for the coming morning.

"If Mother can tell that I'm upset...she isn't letting on," she thought in deep anguish.

Skuld nestled next to her as she lay back down in her futon. She wanted to spend this last night with Keiichi: being held by him, looking into his infinite brown eyes with passion, telling him her innermost thoughts, making love to him, sharing her heart with him... But she couldn't. The pain was too acute...the gulf between she and he too overwhelming.

"I'm _alone_," Belldandy realized morosely. With two sisters, a boyfriend, several mortal friends and three Ninjettes, plus a cast of acquaintances both on Earth and on Yggdrasil...and she felt like the lone keeper of an isolated lighthouse.

"So...alone," she said as the tears streamed off her cheeks, making a paddering noise as they splashed on her futon blanket.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Keiichi couldn't believe she was going. Even when the cylinder of light sparkled around her. Even when she lifted off the ground and floated up through the hole in the temple roof created by her irate mother the previous night. He craned his head upwards, watching her form dwindle to a speck...then his eyes played tricks on him as he saw the speck remain...

"Keiichi, she's gone," Megumi stated.

He rolled his wheelchair to the right, to try and steal a last glimpse of her departing form. Seeing nothing but a late October blue sky, he felt his heart empty itself out like a broken jar.

Megumi watched as her brother slumped in his chair. Everybody stood around him...he forced his way through the circle with his chair.

"LEAVE ME ALONE!" he screamed, and then wheeled down the hall to his room.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

In my room, I felt an emptiness. I looked around...things were still the same. There was leftover mud in the windowsills from Akira. Piles of books and student papers littered the floor. The Enigma Book was setting on an endtable. My blacklight was on, even though it was daytime. Outside, I could hear autumn sounds...the chilly crisp of the wind, the wispy crackle of leaves brushing against the house. But it felt _different_. Like a breeze-borne candlelight that was snuffed out suddenly. The heart of the house was gone...actually both hearts. One heart was dissolved in grief. The other was up in Yggdrasil somewhere.

My room was no longer my room. It was a painful reminder of love torn apart. Belldandy and Keiichi would no longer brighten my room with the radiance of their affections for each other. I heard a knocking on the door. Urd came in and sat down next to me. She was about ready to burst into tears. It seemed like everyone had been crying_ a lot_ in the past month.

"She's gone. And it didn't even hit me until I turned on the TV!" Urd said quietly. "Belldandy used to give me grief when I would play the TV too loud...now, she's not here..snff..to tell me to turn it down!" Funny, how the little things can cue up the biggest senses of loss. I felt my heart going out to her.

"What if she has to marry some...damned God! And if she does, what if _we_ have to leave. Belldandy's the reason we're all here, Skuld and I. If she's gone..."

I felt my spine snapping rigid with the implication. No Belldandy...no Urd. No Urd...no love for me.

"DON'T EVEN THINK ABOUT THAT!" I shouted. My reaction was quick and decisive. I didn't want to visit those realms of thought. But it was evident that Urd had already traveled down that road of conjecture.

"I..snff..don't want to lose you, Cevn. What if the phone rings and it's Mother calling for _me_? What if the Lord calls and summons Skuld and I back to Yggdrasil?"

I was speechless. There was nothing I could say in response to her voiced fears. With one phone call, the genuine love Belldandy had for Keiichi was swept aside; rendered powerless by the sweep of tradition. It could happen again.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Belldandy greeted her mother with downcast eyes.

"Oh, honey! It's so good to _see_ you after all this time. Are you okay? Well, you must be nervous; that's why you're acting so quiet. I should have known that you would be a little overwhelmed by the prospect of getting married. It'll be the social event of the season...I'll _make sure_ of it!"

Belldandy started crying.

"There...there. You shouldn't cry like that on the eve of the biggest adventure in your existence! I've picked the very best for you. I spent a long time poring over his family credentials. He's very qualified...a member of the Warlord Guild."

Belldandy was startled towards numbness. Of all the offices and guilds in Yggdrasil, she absolutely _hated_ the Warlord Guild most of all! They were a vainglorious group of Gods (and a few deserters from the Valkyries) who reveled in attacking Vanagdrasil. Of course, they couldn't inflict any significant damage on their Demonic counterparts unless War had been declared, since the Rule allowed for a very minimum of interaction between Gods and Demons. So instead, they attacked the workings of the Demons, such as destroying Demonic strongholds on various planets in the universe. Belldandy didn't like militancy in any form. But the worst part of the Warlord Guild by far was the _attitude_. Martial pride was disgusting to her...beyond which the WarGods were impeccably organized to a fault...beyond which the WarGods were vicious, cruel and arrogant. Everything about them was the opposite of dear Keiichi.

They represented everything that Belldandy stood against.

The WarGods had actually petitioned the Almighty to allow them to smite all the mortals after Hiroshima! If the Almighty would have favored extinction, the WarGods would have swarmed on the mortals in a final, orgasmic bloodbath.

"How could Mother possibly pick a WarGod for me?" she thought helplessly, too overpowered by the situation to feel angry or indignant. This whole thing reeked of a political alliance that Mother, or maybe even Father, was trying to establish.

"I _know_ that you're probably a bit nervous, sweetie...I was too, the day before my omiai. I really wanted to impress your father with my beauty and my cultured manners. I think once our future son-in-law he sees you, he'll fall in love with you on the instant. Then we can look at arranging the particulars of the wedding."

This was too much for Belldandy. She levitated and floated out of the room...anywhere where she could be away from her Mother and her schemes.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Once again, Keiichi was sitting alone next to one of the indoor trees in the sunroom. He'd been isolating ever since yesterday when Belldandy left. Every time one of us would try to strike up a conversation with him, he would simply ignore us and roll his wheelchair into another part of the house. Trying to gain his attention and interest was like the proverbial 'piercing the veil' challenge that served as a philosophical and psychological topic in the writings of medieval Muslim authors, such as Ibn Tufayl in his "Hayy Ibn Yaqzan". In Keiichi's case, the veil was an impenetrable wall of grief. Despite his rebuffs, I had to keep trying to reach him, somehow. His withdrawal did not bode well for any of us.

Last night, Megumi had practically begged me to try and counsel her older brother. As if she would have to actually ask for me to help her. If anything, I owed her; Megumi was the first friend I made when I was brought here to this temple and the new life which awaited me. This woman, whom I had only known for a few months, with whom I shared so little in common...was crying on my shoulder with desperate nail-biting pain. My 'adopted sister'…the sister that I never had. I felt my own inadequacies, because she was the one who needed consoling, she was so distraught. How do I brother a younger sister when I had lived my entire life without siblings? How do I brother a younger brother who had just lost his one true love? Maybe the answer in all this was to try and step up and be that brother-figure for Keiichi. With all the assumed resolve of a strong older brother, I walked into the sunroom to confront him; feeling an anything-but-sunny vibe in the air.

"Hey...Keiichi, wanna talk about it?"

"Shut up!! Just leave me alone, like I've been asking you and everyone else. My life is screwed! You couldn't' possibly understand what I'm going through. Talking won't help, I'm going to feel wretched anyway..." he said in a hoarse voice. Standard 'leave-me-alone' cries for help.

"When are you going to stop feeling sorry for yourself?" I asked, hoping to gain his attention by pushing him towards anger. After a moment, he wheeled around to face me, a dour rage written all over his face.

"What the hell do you know about it? Or about me? Belldandy...was my life. MY LIFE!! And now she's gone..." He wheeled his chair back around, signifying the our conversation was over.

"You're right, I don't know what it's like for you, Keiichi. But I do know what it was like for me. About ten years ago, I married a very wonderful woman whom I felt strongly in love with. Every fiber in my being told me that she was my soulmate. Within a year, she was dead. She died from a 'bomb'...a cut of heroin that didn't get stepped on," I said angrily. Keiichi looked at me with an unfathomable expression.

"She didn't even tell me that she had parents..."

Keiichi was tuned out. I stepped in front of his wheelchair, reached over his legs and gripped the rails.

"Leave me alone, Cevn!"

"That's exactly what you _don't_ want and certainly what you don't need. To be alone. Being alone is at the center of this, isn't it?"

"You can try and do all your psychology crap to me all you want...it isn't going to take away the fact that Belldandy is _gone_! She's probably going to marry some God up there in Yggdrasil...and I'll be stuck here with nothing but emptiness where my heart used to be. I LOVED her!! We've been together almost four whole years! What really sucks is..snff..a couple weeks from now would have been our four-year anniversary. She came to me in mid-November of my freshman year..."

I felt a horrid reaction in my gut, like a wet towel being snapped inside of me. Once more, I silently cursed Belldandy's mother for doing this to Keiichi...and her.

"Please, Keiichi, don't hang on to it. Tell me more..."

"When I first met her, I was calling around for someone to deliver food to the dorm...all the guys were gone. This wonderful voice answers and offers me a wish. I thought it was a joke," he narrated.

"I can relate...I thought it was some kind of prank or hallucination myself when Urd answered my prayers," I empathized. Keiichi offered only the briefest of nods, then continued.

"The first time I ever saw Bell-chan, she just appeared _out of the mirror_! Like someone walking into a room through an open doorway. I was totally freaked out. She offered me a wish...and I remembered that I really hadn't ever had a girlfriend. Not in high school...not in college prep school. It was hard not to think about girls when I have this totally gorgeous, beautiful Goddess floating right in front of my nose! So I wished that she could stay with me forever. But my _unspoken_ wish was that, somehow, she could be my girlfriend...that she could fall in love with me. That's what I was really thinking when I told her about my wish.

"Then I got kicked out of the dorm and spent weeks bouncing around from one friend to another trying to find a place to live. We stayed with this friend of mine, a real otaku sorta guy. He gets all obsessed about Bell-chan, and I ended up having to deck him over the head with his VCR. That seemed to happen with every friend I stayed with. Looking back on it, I was such an idiot…I could have just asked her to help me find a place. Then we stayed at a Buddhist temple...this temple. Bell-chan really freaked out the abbot there. We shuffled around to several other places, then we ended up here.

"Belldandy created this place. This temple was a total dump before she enchanted it. It was overrun with weeds, and the locals had been disposing their trash on the grounds. The temple itself was all rotted wood and broken windows. People even thought it was haunted. But Bell-chan _fixed_ it and said that this was going to be our home. So it was just her and I for a few months, which was really wonderful. But at the same time, it scared me to death. I never had a girlfriend before in my life, and now I was living alone with a Goddess! Then Spring Break rolls around, and Urd pops up. By that time, I knew I wanted Bell to be in love with me...and with Urd's 'help' I realized that she already _was_ in love with me.

"The time we went out to the beach resort at Kujukurihama, she saved me from nearly drowning...and then she was _upset_ when Urd's 'love pills' backfired and got me in love with Sayoko. So I knew then that she had feelings for me. Not just that, but all the other little hints here and there, like her getting so into my races," he continued, clearly breasted by a sentimental spirit.

"Then Skuld comes along...and you can imagine what that was like. Suddenly I had to _prove_ my love for Belldandy to her little sister. I worked myself until I was totally exhausted in order to buy her a ring. It was only 45K yen, but that's a fortune for a college freshman. So I worked my ass off to get her the ring for Christmas. Shortly afterwards, she gets called back. It was then that I started to wonder about her statement about the 'Ultimate Force' not allowing us to be separated.

"So here I am, almost four years together with her...and she ends up leaving. I feel like I gave my heart away...FOR NOTHING!" Keiichi screamed the last two words like an oath, and I flinched at the intensity of his anger.

"So...how can you say anything that could make me feel better?" he asked.

I don't know why, but I talked about the last days of my marriage...how my wife was cheating on me, how she started using drugs again, how she returned to prostitution...and how she died. The quality of heroin is very inconsistent on the streets, and she got an extra-pure balloon of junk that didn't get cut. Junkies die by the hundreds every year because of this. She shot up a large load, which should have only gotten her high. Instead of a 10-20 heroin mix, she ended up with an almost pure dose. It would have been enough to kill anyone. She overdosed because it shut her body down. Permanently. When I found out, I was numb for a long time. Revisiting that chapter in my life was very painful, but perhaps it might be something that could resonate with Keiichi's profound sense of loss.

"Keiichi, you're treating this loss like it's a permanent one. But you don't have a crystal ball or the insight of Skuld to predict the future with 100 percent accuracy. So how do you really know what's going to happen? I _know_ that my ex-wife is gone...that she'll never come back. But, at least you have a chance that Belldandy will come back to you! If she loves you as much as you love her, she's going to find a way to get through all this and come back where she belongs. She knows she belongs with you. She, like everyone else, is simply looking to go to where the love is. And the love she's found…is within you. Is _with_ you," I said, letting out a long sigh to signal him that I was finished. I was emotionally exhausted.

Keiichi looked at me with tears of confusion in his eyes. I could sense that somewhere inside of him, a small flame of hope was still brightly burning. I only wished that he could see the darkness in its role of providing contrast, so that the radiance of his faith in Belldandy could be more visible. Otherwise, the darkness would smother his heart and extinguish his trust.

Rocks, paper, scissors...life must go on, fair or not.

"I..I'll think about what you said, Cevn. I don't know if it'll make me feel any better, but thanks for trying," he said with watery words.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Ah, B'dandy dear! Could you come here please?" Belldandy was seated atop one of the crystalclouds, watching the pink rains float upward towards the skysland dream matrix, hovering overhead. Reluctantly, she flew over and settled onto the bench her Mother was sitting on.

"I wanted to brief you on your fiancé. His name is Tyyr, son of Friijda."

An orange puff of air formed and coalesced into a statue-like simulacrum of her intended future husband.

"He comes from a _very_ good family; they have an extensive background in directly serving the Almighty in all sorts of capacities. His mother is in charge of the Dream Creation Guild, his father is in charge of the Deliberate Chaos Office."

"Lokii!" Belldandy thought with fear. Lokii was one of the most feared Gods in Yggdrasil. His divine nature tended towards cunning manipulation; qualities that were necessary for anyone in charge of the Deliberate Chaos Office. He had to be cunning, because his office was the counterpart to the Demon's Random Chaos Office. Belldandy had placed all her hopes on the slim chance that she might be able to convince her parents to call off the omiai. But with Lokii and Friijda involved...it would be impossible. Once more, she felt tears welling up inside of her.

She looked at the hologram of Tyyr. In a split-second, she was repulsed. He was partly balding, with short red hair in a crew-cut. His eyes were hooded by thick brown-red eyebrows and narrowed in a cold stare. He had a long braided warbeard and an ugly length of scar running down one cheek. He was muscular to a fault; his mesomorphic qualities were intimidating, even frightening. Belldandy had thought that Tamiya was soldierly...but Tyyr made Tamiya look like a beagle puppy in comparison. One of his arms was artificial; but instead of having a hand, he had a horrible gutting blade at the end of his arm. Even though this was a reproduction, his fierce nature was very evident to the young Goddess. 

Being a God, he could choose any physical manifest he wanted to a certain extent. But Tyyr had settled on a manifest that oozed intimidation and ferocity by retaining his scars. And that hook for an arm was horrid! With a chilling revulsion, she envisioned his hands touching her, his lips kissing her...

"Isn't he a handsome one, sweetie? He's the _Marshall_ of the WarGods...just like your father was! He's as tough as solar radiation, that one. Remember when that horrible Demon unleashed Fenrir recently by using the Ultimate Destruction Program? Well, after Fenrir was banished from your mortal plane, he came here and wrecked havoc. Tyyr not only subdued him, but he bound him by Urd's Well. So...we all owe him for saving us from another Ragnarok. You'll be marrying a hero, dahling!"

"I'm _already_ in love with a hero, Mother," Belldandy thought. She had to be extra-cautious in shielding her thoughtforms; otherwise Mother would become more suspicious. She did have one advantage; Mother seemed to interpret her crying spells as the routines of pre-nuptial tension. But Belldandy was firmly convinced that in her mind, Mother already had her married to Tyyr.

She was already calling him "future son-in-law".


	31. Pt 31: Les Jeunes Radicaux

**Part 31: Les Jeunes Radicaux**

Keiichi was inconsolable. In my mind, his emotional despondency suggested the image of an ant that had been preserved through the ages in amber. Untouchable. Seen, but not heard. Motionless. Ageless towards inertia. Thoughts and mind frozen away in a distance…

I really couldn't blame him. It was as if airborne scent of the freshest spring flower had just touched his nostrils...had just traced its fragrance upon his kokoro--then the bloom was snatched away and suffocated by an _otherness_. I could enframe my own empathy for his pain, realizing that that the little bit of Keiichi's pain that I felt was modest compared to the gravely tragic mis-en-scenes that were carving bleak abandonments upon his soul.

Kamikaze eyes.

Megumi had described it best when she recalled the time when Keiichi's dog had died. Keiichi had a dazed look to his eyes for a couple of weeks afterwards. Now, she explained that he had the eyes of someone for whom self-destruction was no major affair...someone whose life held no future embrace of hopes.

He had been with Belldandy for four years.

"Four years!" I thought sadly. I felt a strong sense of empathy for him. For Belldandy as well, as I could imagine her sense of loss. She was out there somewhere, up (or out) in Yggdrasil attending her omiai.

Their situation brought to mind all the books, poems, fables, plays and short fiction works I had encountered themed around the practice of arranged marriage. In Korea, the feminist writers of the last century, especially the so-called Third Generation writers of the 1950s, depicted arranged marriage as nothing less than a cultural institution that oppressed women; a commixture of tradition and oppugnation resulting in an unparalleled anger. "Han", the Korean word for resentment, described aptly the unenviable lot of these women.

But this was the new century, the 21st century, and mankind was much more liberated. Supposedly.

Not here. Not in Keiichi's case. If he had been born in the early years of the Showa era, he may have had to face an arranged marriage. But now, decades into the Heisei era, his life was still affected by the dreaded omiai.

The offense swelled in my belly like bitter bile when I contemplated the Gods and Goddesses. Somewhere in Yggdrasil, Belldandy was participating in the ritual-laded emotional dance of arranged marriage.

"Not arranged! Deranged!" I cursed under my breath. The divine beings...liberated? Not a chance! Arranged marriage? A deliberate derangement of the natural; a dark sentinel of malfeasance.

Every so often, I would walk down the corridor, past all the bedrooms and hobby rooms...past the living room with its assortment of couches, zabutons and paintings...past the tearoom that Belldandy tended so carefully...down the small hallway that led to the sunroom. In the sunroom, I would find Keiichi in his wheelchair, staring out the large windows at something. Something translucent, only imprinting on memory, not sensation.

Coming closer, I would look at his eyes...unflinching and aglaze...as if he was staring through the fabric of reality...peering through a cloaked visceral series of hallucinations into an emotional fantasy that somehow possessed more comfort then the stark 'specula verite' of grief and loss.

I've navigated these waters too...in times of unremitting grieving. My dead wife's shadow-face loomed up in my mind. Each year, her face became fuzzier, less distinct in my memory's eye. Thousands of times, in near-platonic fascination, I consummated her death in my mind with attempts to envision how she died. Of course, I never saw her last moments of life on this planet. Did she die on a couch, on the floor, in the bathroom with blood trickling down her arm after she registered her shot? All I saw was her corpse, her young face drawn tight and breath-empty.

But Keiichi was aloft in a floating wreck of dreams...even awake, he was detached. Granted, the extremes of his loss dictated that he wasn't present in this manner of living; yet he was inhabiting life, albeit in a fleeting manner.

Delicately wounded.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Belldandy was sadly examining the crystalgarden, feeling homesick. It was so much like the garden she tended at her home, on the planet Earth, amongst her friends and her beloved. One bloom in particular caught her attention; she could almost swear that the shoot of the crystal arbor reflected Keiichi's face in its facets, like a thousand faces in a thousand days...

"K..Keiichi," she whispered to herself.

Despite the gravity of her situation, Belldandy couldn't focus on trying to disadvantage the omiai. Instead, her mind would cast itself back in time a few days...when she was resting in Keiichi's arms, her soul placid after the horror of being banned from her own physical frame. The soft-yet-tingly caress of his whispers into her ear...the visage of comfort and trust in his face.

All gone.

ALL GONE!

"Mother is playing me like a mortal violin. I feel like my emotions are taunt strings, and She simply bows and plucks them to produce a song... But it isn't _my_ song! It's _Her_ song! All I want is a way to resolve this difference between Mother and I... Is there a possible blossoming of our spirits? Can I be freed of the chains of piety that bind me?" she reflected.

An impulse played in her mind...she wanted to reach away and crush the delicate snowflake-like blossoms gently swaying before her in the breeze. Repulsed, she clenched her hands tightly together. Belldandy was horrified at the desperate anger she had just felt; suspended briefly in frustrated aggression.

"Is violence the only pathway around an emotional impasse?" she confronted herself. In a moment of fright, she imagined that she was metamorphosing...already assuming the personality and values of her intended husband. Angry. WarGod. Violent. Boldly aggressive. Callous...

"NO!" her heart screamed in horror.

"Time is like a river that flows," the Middle Norn told herself. "All three of us can prophesy: Skuld can move into the future; Urd can move into the past. But I...with all the wisdom-making that I'm able to perform in the 'here and now'; even now, I cannot escape via time or space!"

"Who will take care of my beloved Keiichi?" she worried, his swirling in her mind. Peorth could...but Peorth had designs of her own. Peorth was had earned a reputation in the GRO as a stimulatrix. During her visits, she was always trying to seduce Keiichi: using Urd's love potions to attempt to force Keiichi to become obsessed with her; trying to navigate past Belldandy's own convictions towards Keiichi in an attempt to pry _her_ away from Keiichi. When the triangle had become four...it had almost caused disaster. Peorth had meant well; she was a fellow Goddess from the Relief Office. Yet, Peorth was like Urd in the sense that she occasionally caused more harm than good...especially due to her zealous nature and sensual leanings.

One Urd was more than enough...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"We need to kidnap her!" Urd declared with impulsive intent as she sat on the railing of the gazebo.

"What?" Skuld shouted in surprise. It was enough to try and avoid Keiichi in the past two days...he was _so_ down-in-the-dumps. Skuld couldn't stand to be around him for more than a few moments at a time. His melancholic airs hung around him like a thick fog...making _her_ feel wretched as well. But matters got even worse when Skuld considered the fact that her sister was going to probably marry some God that she had never even met.

"Yo! You heard me right, Goddess-girl!" Urd shouted back.

"I..I'm not a girl!" Skuld replied, while Urd mouthed the words along with her with telltale accuracy. Skuld was embarrassed for a moment for responding so automatically.

"Hey, we've got to go back to Yggdrasil and _get_ her! Can't you see what it's doing to Keiichi, Skuld?"

"Yeah...it hurts me to see him so downcast. I _never_ thought I would say it...but I really feel sorry for Keiichi-san," Skuld acknowledged, standing up to her full height and hopping up onto the rail, sizing up her oldest sister.

"Think! If he's that sad...I don't even want to imagine how our sister must be feeling...how _hurt_ she must be! You've never been in love, Skuld...so you probably can't even begin to understand. But if they love each other wholly and completely...they must both be experiencing near-equal levels of emotional hurt. Not just hurt...but agony!"

In her mind, Skuld revisited the silent farewell just two days ago. Belldandy had hardly said a word...she just passively waited for the summoning light with her hands folded over her waist, looking forlorn and empty. Skuld was intimidated by the fact that a power greater than hers could irredeemably wrest her elder sister away from them.

Big Sister Urd had hit it on the nose.

_Agony_ was the look she caught on Elder Sister's face. Belldandy had gamely tried to cover it up with a false sense of optimism...but Skuld knew her sister too well. She couldn't keep herself from peering past the facade. In a flash of a glimpse, she saw...agony...and terror on her sister's face!

Urd watched silently as Skuld shuddered and nearly fell off the gazebo's railing.

"But what can we do! You're running on almost no Goddess powers...and I don't have any at all! It's impossible! What can _we_ do?" Skuld asked frantically.

"We find help!" Urd said triumphantly.

"There is no one...not one denizen of Yggdrasil who could help us. Mother is much too powerful! And Father...he would wreck havoc on anyone who would dare oppose Mother. I tell you, the only one who could help would be Mara...and there's _no way_ Mara would help us. Mara has it out for Belldandy too much. And she _hates_ you! She probably hates me too, hee hee, after I sealed the Ultimate Destruction Program...and escaped from her lair with Cevn," Skuld explained.

Urd listened intently, then clenched her arms tightly, reining in her frustration as she bobbed up and down in the air...a form of anxious pacing for the Norn of the Past.

"Dammit! There has to be someone as reckless and irreverent as I am...someone who would do this just for the adventure of it! Someone who cares enough about Keiichi to risk _everything_. Someone who owes Belldandy her life..." Urd stated as she circled the gazebo.

Skuld was furious in thought. The serenity of the moonlit gazebo contrasted with the frustration she was feeling inside. Who? Who could help us?

_Whowhowhowhowhowhowhowho?_

Skuld flashed on a random sequence of memories; yet one loomed more _present_ than the others. The swimming pool: last year. Summer of 20XX. During the time Peorth paid them a visit. Keiichi's summer vacation...

Peorth had wanted to win Keiichi by playing on his inability to swim. But when she tipped him into the pool, Belldandy reacted by emptying the pool completely. The thunderous displacement of water landed on Peorth, almost drowning her. Keiichi carried her limp form home on his back...after Belldandy had given her artificial resuscitation. Peorth was crazy in love with Keiichi. Peorth was rambunctious; reckless as all get-out. Peorth, as a member of the Goddess Relief Office, would have open access to the Earthrealm. Peorth...who could assume the duties Belldandy was performing: completing Keiichi's wish. Peorth...who, last time Skuld had checked, _also_ had a Goddess First Class, Unlimited License. Power aplenty to get Belldandy back.

"Peorth!" Skuld shouted to the moon and back.

"Huh? What? HER?!" Urd said incredulously. Urd _still_ hadn't forgiven her for breaking into her "Urd's Castle" room and stealing a whole bunch of stuff, including a good portion of her stock of love potions.

Skuld looked at the angry expression on her oldest sister. After a few moments, it shifted into the thoughtful expression that Urd always get when she's scheming.

"You only took three minutes," she said dryly.

"What do you mean, Skuld?"

"You only took three minutes to put aside your anger, Big Sister!" Skuld said sweetly, teasing Urd.

"You watch it, _Little _sister, or else it'll take me three or four _centuries_ to stop being angry with you!" Urd shot back.

"And I _especially_ hate it...when you're right!"

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Peorth was sitting at her console at the Goddess Relief Office, filing her nails. She had just done them with the holographic cloud nail polish when she suddenly sneezed daintily. Peorth prided herself on her appearance...justly so, because she was one of the most beautiful of the Relief Office Goddesses...every bit the equal of Belldandy.

Things had been terribly boring at the Office recently. All the Relief Office Goddesses and their assignments had been overshadowed by Belldandy's very public compact with the mortal, Keiichi Morisato. The entire community Godmind of Yggdrasil was now focused on this one wish...and wishgranter.

All things being equal, a granted wish was a miracle. _Any_ granted wish. Especially in the eyes of the mortals, who almost always resolved to attribute wish fulfillment to near-miraculous sources. In contrast to this perception, all granted wishes performed by the GRO were considered "just part of the routine". Business as usual.

Until Keiichi came along and made his loony, half-cocked wish. Now, the status modus of the Relief Office had been turned on its ear. Recently, even a klutz like Urd had somehow received an assignment to grant a wish to a mortal. _That_ had been the source of much conjecture and resentment at the Office. _Urd_, a Sysop who frequently was derelict at her post in a whole other department whose duty portfolio didn't involve anything even remotely related to wish-granting...being personally asked to grant a wish by Kami-sama?

Even difficult assignments...such as satisfying the self-destructive avarice of compulsive gamblers, for example...fell short of the prestige Belldandy was accumulating with her unique assignment. Peorth had answered several wishes in the past year: a woman who wanted to be an idol singer; a high school girl who wanted to date the quarterback of her school team; a grandmother who wanted her newborn grandson to live through a difficult surgery; a mentally retarded young man who wanted to live on his own; a child who wanted to be freed from starvation...but none of these successfully granted wishes held a candle up to the wish her friend Belldandy had lucked out on.

Her _rival_, Belldandy. Her wish-granting partner and competitor, Belldandy.

"I wonder how she's doing with her omiai?" Peorth asked her reflection in one of the viewplates in her console. Belldandy's unexpected recall to Yggdrasil to participate in an omiai was the gossip of the day at the Goddess Relief Office. It broke precedent; Belldandy had been recalled from her assignment to attend to her parent's wishes. Normally, a GRO assignment lasted until the wish was fulfilled...yet some very powerful figures in Yggdrasil had basically canceled or postponed Bell's ongoing work with Keiichi.

Despite her concern for her friend, Peorth also recognized the possible opportunities presented by this situation. If Belldandy was married...that meant that her obligation to fulfill Keiichi's wishes was _up for grabs_!

Keiichi. The "Test Mortal". Peorth still remembered that first day...when she tackled him in the hallway of their temple house. His quivering flesh under her arms...her breasts pressed hard into his back...his look of total panic...and the scream that belied his terror...and his ignited lust.

Keiichi.

_--Ring--_

"Who could it be at _this_ hour?" Peorth said irritably...her toenails weren't dry yet and she didn't want to go anywhere. It wasn't the Wish Hotline; it was just an ordinary call on her personal line. Touching the phone-lightglobe, she answered gruffly.

"Talk to me!"

_"Heh heh. Hey...long time, no see, Peorth!_" she heard Urd's voice on the other end of the line.

"Urd! How _are_ you doing?" Peorth responded, trying on her most sweet voice despite the caution that arose inside of her.

_"Everything's just great here,"_ an equally cheerful Urd squawked in the phone.

"So...how's the _license suspension_ going?" Peorth asked pseudo-innocently. _That_ should get under Urd's skin! A satisfying moment of silence confirmed Peorth's suspicions...and she smiled to herself.

"Gotya, Urd!" she said to herself in a whisper.

_"What? I didn't hear that..."_

"Ohhh...just thinking aloud," Peorth answered.

_"Yeah...well you haven't been the only one who has been thinking. Ya know, with Belldandy all ready to get married and such, Skuld and I were considering some things..."_

"Yes?" Peorth asked cautiously.

_"Well, I hope this won't be an imposition, Peorth. But we thought we might as well try to ask you..."_

"Spit it out, Urd!" Peorth interrupted, already impatient.

_"Well...we thought that since you've already been around Keiichi...and Belldandy's gone...well, we wanted to know if you could fill in. As in taking over her wish. Keiichi even thinks it would be a good idea..."_

"RE'ELLEMENT!! Me...take over for Belldandy! Why, I would do that in a heartbeat! How soon?"

_"How about tonight? I know it's short notice, but..."_

"Done! I'll be there just as soon as I'm ready," Peorth said excitedly, not even waiting to end the call. This was it! Her chance to be the foremost wishgranter in the entire Earthrealm section of the Goddess Relief Office!

_"What do you mean, _-when- _you'll be ready? You're supposed to _-always-_ be ready, Peorth!"_ Urd shouted through the telephone before she could phase out the globe. Peorth scowled as she heard the thinly veiled insult, and then let it pass. Besides, in a few hours, she would be by Keiichi's side. All of Belldandy's accumulated fame would be hers for the taking!

She felt a little sorry for her friend, but her anticipation got the best of her attention.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Urd sniggered as she set down the dining room phone.

"She fell for it like a hooked eel, Skuld! I know Peorth...if I pretend to hedge around, she gets more interested...until she can't say no!"

"That's because you're _just like her_," Skuld said flatly.

"What'd you say, petulant child?"

"And you actually thought she would say 'no' when it involves Keiichi? It doesn't take an utter genius to figure out how Peorth feels about Keiichi!"

"And you're an utter _brat_, Skuld! Besides, no one can pull one over on the genius of Urd!" she replied, fist struck up in the air in triumph.

"Peorth's no fool...she normally would be trying to sniff out a setup. Especially after the last one we dealt her," Urd added by way of argument. Skuld had to concede Urd's premise. Peorth was crafty to the point of getting too involved in her own subterfuges...but also to the point where she rarely departed from caveat emptor in her dealings with the three Norns.

"So...now what?"

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

To pass the time while she waited for Peorth's arrival, Urd decided to tutor Cevn on some more contents of the Enigma Book. She walked down the hallway to his room and rapped on the doorjamb of his shoji door.

"Poor thing, he's been so busy with school, music and trying to bolster Keiichi's spirits," she thought. Urd suspected that this situation with Keiichi had also ignited a whole expanse of Cevn's feelings for his first wife. The dead one. Urd felt a little pang of jealousy when she considered that Cevn had already been in love with another woman...enough to get married. But she knew from her sessions posing as Dr. Ogawa that he was still troubled by the loss.

"I'm going to do my best to make you forgive her...and bring security to your feelings of love," she promised herself. He opened the door, his t-shirt hanging loose over his sweatpants. Urd still thought he was good-looking, even if he was dressed sloppy.

"Hi, honey. I thought I would spend some time with you, checking to see how you're doing with the Enigma Book," Urd said as she invited herself in and sat on a small cushion.

"He _still_ grimaces when I call him 'honey'", she observed humorously, always cheered when she could push his buttons. The next couple of hours were spent with Urd checking his interpretations of the Enigma Book. He was doing quite well, she had to admit to herself. His accuracy of integrating Yggdrasilian concepts had increased since the last time she 'quizzed' him.

Urd found herself discussing the plans she had to bring Peorth to the temple, in order to use Peorth's powers to kidnap Belldandy. Cevn looked even more astonished then she had expected.

"Urd, isn't Peorth is like a runaway mustang? How are you going to control her?" he asked with concern.

"We'll have to work that one out when she arrives. But I'm confident that me and Skuld can outwit her. If worse comes to worse, we might even be able to rely on Keiichi to help out. I _know_ that he wants Bell back more than anything in the world!"

Cevn nodded his head at this. After some light discussion about daily living affairs, such as the ongoing cleanup after Supertyphoon Akira, he played her a cassette of some basic foundations for his God's Music Symphony.

Urd closed her eyes and was transported away for a few moments from her deep-rooted concerns for her sister and her sister's boyfriend. Even though the music was skeletal, she sensed that it would be breathtaking once he completed it. Once more, she thanked whatever it was that hooked her up with this mortal.

"Urd, I'm going to take a bath...I'm trashed!" he admitted. Urd thought of the day in the future when she could wash his back...and he could wash hers.

"Someday..." she said to him, running a finger through her hair. The confused look on his face was cute.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

I rinsed off and stepped into the bathtub. The furoba was totally blissful in its comfort. Urd must have slipped in before I started my bath and put some kind of herbal scents into the bathwater. Despite my anxiety at her proximity to my bathtime, I was able to calm down enough to get in the tub. I knew that she didn't mean any harm...but my instinctive panic arose and I felt alert and paranoid.

"No one sees me nude," I promised to myself once again as steam floated upward from the surface of the water. Before, I never had a chance to control the things that were done to my body. Now, I was no longer a victim...I had retaken back my privacy. But at a horrible price. Sexual abuse victims overcompensate for lots of things: being overly polite in an effort to avoid attention or conflict which might result in victimization; dressing ugly or blasé to avoid being attractive to the opposite sex; acting out sexually to avoid having to feel the pain of stolen sexuality; overeating to justify body shame...the list goes on. In my case, it was this ritual promise I made every time I stepped into a bathtub or shower. I hated to keep harping on myself about the sexual abuse stuff...but it was a reality that I faced every day. A never-ending challenge.

I stepped out of the tub, feeling like a prune. Or a prude, for that matter. I was in good physical shape from frequent jogging and the taiqi classes I was taking at N.I.T., and I felt secure within my body...one of the rare times. Urd's scented water had done the trick. I toweled off and then sat on the stool, letting the water sink into the bathtowel. I had been rushed all day...now it was time to let each moment _be_ a moment, rather than a frantic succession of "nows". Once more, I cursed the Japanese work ethic, so different that its American counterpart...

_--Splash!!--_

I went rigid with shock.

I turned around, clutching the towel to my body as I heard a saccharine-sweet feminine voice...

"Who are _you_, handsome?" it asked sultrily, sweetly. I looked up to see a _woman_ floating in the air. In the briefest of astonished moments, I saw that she had a purple diamond-shaped mark in the middle of her forehead. Long black hair framed her face, cut evenly across her face as shoulder length...while a superlong ponytail cascaded with a sheer sheen down her shoulders and back. At first glance, she resembled an adult Skuld. She wore a revealing outfit: black panties with garters attaching to dark blue hiphugger boots; a short light-blue top that was open in the middle, its fishnet of threads barely concealing a very ample cleavage; dozens of multicolored bangles on each arm; and a cloak floating around her like a leather-cloth version of Evangelion armor.

"Urd didn't say anything about any other _men_ in the house, mon chéri chouchou!" she said again in an infectious seductive voice. Hovering in the air, she spun around several times, as if she was testing her mobility like a newborn colt. I blinked as I caught a glimpse of a runic symbol and a name sewn into the seat of her 'panties'.

My initial shock had worn off in a flash, replaced by sheer terror. I felt like all the blood had been emptied out in my body...about the same time I realized that _this was Peorth_! The totally over-the-top virago Goddess of the manga...here in the flesh! And she was acting true North to her sultry nature!

"W..wait..wait..wait..wait!" I stuttered, shocked beyond shock as she floated towards me, arms outstretched.

In a blind panic, I dashed towards the furoba door and rebounded off of it as I tried to _push_ it open. I slid it open and emerged into the bathroom proper, looking for shelter.

Then I felt a warm body grasp me from behind! Slender arms were wrapped around my chest. Peorth was trying to _tackle_ me!

Everything went panic white...

The door...I felt something crack in my nose as I stumbled and fell against the bathroom counter. The lance of pain quickened my anxiety as I blindly pushed hard on the bathroom door.

"AIIIIEEEEEYYYYY!!" a voice shouted in my ear.

My voice, disembodied.

I was already checked out, disassociating from this intrusion in the worst way. With a final kick, I crashed the door out of its mooring and stumbled forth into the hallway, Peorth still clinging onto my back. She was the only thing clinging to me, as I tripped over the wadded up towel at my feet. With a final kick, I crashed the door out of its mooring and stumbled forth into the hallway, Peorth still clinging onto my back. She was the only thing clinging to me, as I tripped over the wadded up towel at my feet.

I looked up to see Urd, Skuld, Megumi, Genji and Tomohisa looking at me. My vision narrowed to a pinpoint as I wrestled Peorth off of me and smashed through my bedroom door, sending paper and shoji door framing in every direction.

I wanted to die...

_Futon. Futon. Futon._

And I crawled under the safety of my futon blanket.

My worst nightmare had arrived.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Urd had heard the scream from the bathroom. Cevn's scream reechoed through the house, accented by a crash coming from down the hallway. Immediately alert, Urd dashed into the hall, Skuld a half step behind her.

Cevn had kicked the door open. He was butt-naked. Urd could see heads sticking out from the rooms closer down the hall: Megumi, Genji and Tomohisa were all looking down the hallway at the source of the commotion. It was all happening too quick.

Skuld was standing next to her, pointing. Urd felt a shudder as she saw Peorth hugging Cevn from behind. Then she noticed the bloody nose...and her vision went red with anger.

"PEORTH...HE'S _MINE_!" she screamed at the top of her lungs, and then flash-hovered in front of Skuld to block her vision.

Cevn...and Peorth!

In a flash, Urd wanted to kill him! Wanted him to die...the most excruciatingly painful death any mortal had ever experienced!

She had made him a wonderful smelling bath...and had even snuck in a dissolvable capsule that would bring a balancing relaxation to his mind, body and spirit. Now, he was parading in the hallway! _Nude_! With a betraying bloody nose! Meaning that his lust for Peorth had boiled over!

As she watched, Urd's resentment raged so strong in her heart...and threatened to explode into a nova when she noticed that he was love-wrestling with Peorth. Then he was gone, into the safety of his room.

"Cevn and Peorth," a dazed Urd thought...stunned at this incredible emotional embastardization as she slammed her bedroom shoji door shut.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Oooo, _another_ man! Tres merveilleux!" Peorth shouted as she saw Genji. The first mortal had behaved aberrantly, actually wresting her off of him and retreating to his room in an apparent panic.

"How could he avoid my charms?" Peorth wondered as she bore down on this new mortal. Equally handsome, he vaguely reminded her of Keiichi in some way.

Megumi saw the scantily dressed Goddess float towards her, and wrapped both arms protectively around Genji's arm. She strained as she tried to pull Genji back into his room, where they had been studying peacefully a minute earlier...but Tomohisa was standing behind her, blocking their retreat.

Keiichi's cousin was wedged in the doorway, gawking in open rapacity at this mature Goddess. Megumi couldn't pull Genji into the room.

"Wowwww...she'sss...aaa...b..babe!!" she heard her cousin gasp.

"Her sexy attire is every bit the equal of one of Urd's more revealing outfits," Megumi noticed with a mounting panic. Just like before...

Peorth stopped and ran a hand under Genji's chin, sizing him up.

"You're really handsome, for a mortal boy-man," she commented. The young mortal girl tightly gripping his arm gave her a mean stinkeye, which she ignored.

"Urd only says she's the Goddess of Love...but I'm the _true_ Goddess of Love. With me, it's no talk...and _all_ action! I can grant your every whim, wish and desire...no matter how sensuous...no matter how kinky it may be..."

Genji was squirming; feeling himself getting aroused at this...Goddess floating in front of him. He battled with himself, trying to withdraw into his room.

"She's casting some kind of spell on me," he managed with a panicked voice. With a burst of strength, he shouldered past Tomohisa, who then jammed tightly in the doorway in rapt admiration. Pulling Megumi, who gripped his arm tightly, he made it back in his room, then collapsed on his futon bed.

"Whew!" he sighed as he hugged Megumi for dear life, warily watching the floating Goddess through his doorway.

Peorth shifted her regard to the young boy, probably only 15 or 16 mortal years old. She could tell by his facial expression and the color of his sex-aura that he was still a virgin.

"Mon petit ange...I could make you a man... j'ai envie de toi," she offered to him with a disarming smile. She knew that he was already putty in her hands...

"LEAVE HIM ALONE!" she heard someone shrilly scream. Someone who obviously knew French.

"Ohhh...what is this? Skuld? Worried about this young one? Why? Aren't you happy that I'm here?" she replied.

"P..Peorth! Y..you just... H..he's mi..." Skuld screamed, covering her mouth a second later at the words she _almost_ let slip...

Peorth floated down the hallway, trying to find Keiichi. In the background, she heard yelling, which sounded like Skuld...but she couldn't hear the words.

"I've got a _big_ hug for you, Keiichi mon joie!" she thought with anticipation as she searched the house.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Urd was livid. An embodiment of rage, she shoved past Skuld and withdrew to her bedroom. The first thing she did inside the bedroom was find the nearest lamp and dash it against the wall.

Cevn had betrayed her. She wanted to cry, but she was too salty with explosive anger. She picked up her small TV and threw it on the ground; the crashing sound and accompanying shower of sparks only satisfying her destructive urges for a couple of seconds. Then her tantrum-like anger receded as she ran out of things to wreck in the room. It was bad enough that Cevn had made love to Peorth, but it was even more horrible, even more wretched than that. _Everybody_ in the house had witnessed his unfaithful act, seeing the proof of infidelity firsthand.

Urd had never seen him nude...until now. With Peorth hanging all over him. Even though she had thought about sneaking a peek while he was in the bathroom, she never did...out of respect to his sensitivity about sexual things. His so-called sexual injuries.

"You're little sexual paranoia didn't stop you from doing it with Peorth, you worthless mortal prick! You probably faked being afraid and paranoid all along!" she swore at the wall in a gravelly pissed off voice.

In front of all her friends, Cevn had flaunted his misplaced lust...

"I hate you!" Urd screamed as Skuld came into the room, barely dodging a flower pot.

"URD!!" she yelled back, her long black hair flying in an arc around her head as she reacted to another thrown object. In a flash, Skuld figured out what was wrong. Urd's face was screwed up, her eyes bloodshot with rage.

"Oh my Lord, you think that he...that she...that they..."

"Don't even say it, Skuld!" Urd turned her lightning hot rage on her youngest sister, firecracker sharp with ire.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Peorth...what are you doing _here_?" Keiichi asked indifferently as Peorth circled around him. His voice was the embodiment of disenchantment and boredom. It touched Peorth to the quick as she realized that he was really detached from the joy of seeing her again.

"What are you doing...in _that_?" Peorth queried him, ignoring his question. Keiichi was strapped to some metal chair with wheels on the side. Was it a mortal torture device? Why was he restrained in it? And what were those heavy things his legs were in?

In her mind, she was astonished. How could have Belldandy let her mortal charge sink into this sorry state? Peorth scanned Keiichi, and noticed that both of his legs were broken. That explained the wheelchair and the casts. Primitive mortal medical technology. She felt embarrassed that she didn't initially pick up on the fact that Keiichi was injured; thus the need for his chair. After all the mortals whose sole wish was to be freed of such prosthetic conveyances...wishes she had granted hundreds of times!

But _this_ was a mystery, indeed.

"Why didn't Belldandy fix his legs?" she wondered as she watched his expression remain monotone. Keiichi was reacting to her with explicit disinterest...as if he had never seen her before. Was every mortal male in this house messed up? What did Belldandy _do_ to all of these guys? Keiichi should have been drooling with desire by this point, but...

"Aren't you happy to see me, Keiichi?" she said excitedly, trying to cheer him up by posing provocatively.

"Not really," he said blandly, and then looked away from her. Peorth felt crestfallen at his lackluster response. Then she remembered...he was probably missing Belldandy. Of course!

She resolved to make Keiichi forget about her. Once Belldandy was married, he wouldn't have a choice anyway...he would _have_ to forget her! The Goddess Relief Office might even Mindwipe any memories that he had concerning Belldandy...to prevent him from a life of suffering. With Lokii as the bridegroom's father, this was a very likely scenario.

"Keiichi, what happened to you?" she asked gently, trying a softer approach. In response he spent the next half-hour explaining how he got injured, complete with crying jags when he mentioned Belldandy as part of his narrative.

"How pathetic!" she thought as Keiichi sobbed one more time, missing his girlfriend.

"Are you a man, or a field mouse? Belldandy this...waah! Belldandy that...waah!" she said angrily. Peorth decided that this interview was not going to be fruitful at all. In fact, his self-pity was edging her towards nausea. So instead, she decided to float down to Urd and Skuld's room to get some advice...and some sleep.

"I'll talk to you later...when you're less morbid," she announced with a backward glance as she levitated out of the sunroom.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Urd, I tell you...he _didn't_ do anything with Peorth! Did you see his face? He was absolutely terrified! Everybody could see that he was scared to death. Why can't you?" Skuld said for the tenth time. Her sister shook her head; it seemed to Skuld that Urd was mired in some weird Baka-Zone and didn't want to believe in his innocence.

"No, Skuld. Everybody saw him..._naked_!" Skuld blushed at Urd's words. She had never seen a naked man before, except for the time she first arrived in the temple compound...transporting through her medium of water, she emerged from a hot furoba with a naked Keiichi in it! She was both fascinated and repelled by the accidental glimpse she had then...and the one that she almost had now.

"Urd...you _know_ how he is! He's been totally frightened around women ever since he came here. You think that it was just an act? You think that he would behave differently around Peorth? You know how _she_ is around guys!" Skuld argued.

"And that's why she and Cevn were able to...do something he should have done...with me! What's she got that I don't have? Aren't I beautiful enough? Isn't my love enough for him?" she said testily.

Skuld could only look at her with a blank expression. Big Sister was definitely a baka!

"I guess it wasn't!" Urd decided for herself with a burst of contempt and sorrow.

Skuld had witnessed the bitter depths of Belldandy's maudlin state...now she was seeing the same thing in Urd. Her other sister was so...devastated.

"What is this thing called love, if it causes everyone that feels it so much misery?" she asked herself. Big Sister Urd was torn between rageful outbursts and tearful shudders. But Skuld knew that Cevn didn't betray Urd. It was just a matter of convincing Urd to believe in him. By believing in herself. Skuld was surprised at the mature bent of her thoughts; if Urd believed in herself...then she would _know_ that her new boyfriend wouldn't even think of wandering. After arguing in circles with her distraught sister, Skuld dealt the final blow.

"Big Sister Urd, grab a brain, willya? If you _are_ worthy of his love...then how could he _not_ be faithful? How could you even think that he was unfaithful! _Why_ would he go after Peorth when he has _you_, if you're so loving towards him?" she confronted her sister with razor precision.

Urd felt like she had been hit with one of her own lightning bolts. Skuld was right!

"For a kid, she sure can argue a point home," she admitted to herself in a low voice. Then it dawned on her...Cevn probably never did anything with Peorth! She took a deep breath to exhale her stress, and replayed the crazy situation, an easy thing for a Norn of the Past to do.

"Of course he didn't do anything with Peorth! How'd I miss it?" she realized, after observing and considering the matter further. Urd smiled to herself, exulting in the sudden release of her suspicions. She knew that her boyfriend loved her best! She felt like she had betrayed _him_ in her mind with her qualms.

Skuld was relieved to see that Urd wasn't in hyper mode any more. At least her Big Sister had responded to reason. Then she watched as Urd's elation turned fretful.

"Oh _shit_!! If he didn't do anything...and everybody saw him without any clothes..." Urd realized. She knew that Cevn was totally sensitive to sexual matters...totally frightened. And he had been _seen_ by every member of the house. The words "revictimized" and "shamed" appeared in her mind. Extending her Time senses, she replayed the whole incident of Peorth's return...and noticed something new.

Cevn had a look of insane stark terror on his face.

"Ohmygod, Skuld, I gotta check on him..." she shouted as she floated through the door, not even bothering that it was all ajar after she had slammed it shut earlier.

"Geez, thanks for appreciating your little sister so much for helping you see through your own idiocy," Skuld said tetchily. This love stuff was making her Big Sister a flake!

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"What did _I_ do? I didn't do anything wrong...did I?" Peorth said innocently, looking at Urd and Skuld in confusion.

Urd had started out to go check on Cevn when Peorth floated up out of Keiichi's room. They almost collided in the hallway. Instantly, her anger shifted from Cevn to Peorth; she felt her heartbeat quicken incessantly. She had to find out how Cevn was doing, but first, she had to grill Peorth. Actually, she was thinking about doing worse things, like literally grilling her. This was personal!

"If she wants to play at being French, I'll oblige her! I'll _fillet_ her ass," she imagined scornfully as she looked across the room at Peorth. Urd was relieved by the fact that she wasn't the subject of this inquisition; this time, Skuld would be resolutely on her side, to be sure. This was one of those rare times when Urd was glad her license was under suspension…otherwise Peorth would really have something to worry about.

"Peorth, what you did was unspeakable! First of all, you popped out of the flower vase in while he was bathing. Then you 'attacked' him! Do you have any idea of what he's been through as far as sexual matters are concerned?" Urd said.

"Did you see him? He really got aroused! After all, his excitement level did shoot through the roof! He actually kicked the door down, he was so filled with genki!" Peorth replied.

Urd grimaced, remembering last year how Peorth had completely derailed Tamiya...without his even realizing that she was teasing him because she thought he was in love with Keiichi. Tamiya had demonstrated that he had a heart of gold when he saved both Keiichi and Peorth that time, rather than dissolve into rampant jealousy towards Keiichi. Looking at Peorth, Urd shook her head, making an imaginary motion with her hands as if she was tearing her hair out in frustration.

"He may never come out of his room again, because of you!" Skuld said angrily to Peorth, her face beet-red and her eyes wide.

"It's not my fault! You never told me that there were so many men in this house, Urd!" Peorth retorted irritably. "You know how I am...especially with Keiichi. But also with mortal men who have made wishes."

"Urd...don't!" Skuld cautioned as she caught the angry glare in Urd's eyes and the unfolded hand seconds away from being raised to slap. Slapping a full-on Goddess First Class Licensee when one is running on almost non-existent Earth Spirit Grade powers...is like a flea trying to kill a tiger by pulling its whiskers.

The two sisters spent another half-hour trying to talk sense into Peorth...but their new visitor remained deaf to any explanations or confrontations. Finally Peorth declared that she had heard enough hot air from the two sisters and headed out the door.

Urd watched as Peorth paused at the doorway and whispered something into Skuld's ear. A second later, Skuld's face was red...with anger or embarrassment?...as Peorth giggled her way out of the room.

"Grrrh, there's just no talking any sense into you, is there? You're as naive as Belldandy, you know that, Peorth," Urd said after Peorth exited the room, feeling herself overflowing with handclutching frustration.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Belldandy was dressed in a glowing white outfit, elaborately studded with jewels, laced with golden doily frills and frolic designs. The dress was a traditional Yggdrasilian engagement dress that young Goddesses wore to their omiai. She looked in the mirror, struggling to avoid admiring herself. Self-admiration would only serve to remind her of how much she was accommodating this horrible arrangement. Yet, she knew that she was in the absolute bloom of maidenly beauty. She couldn't help darting a quick smile towards her reflection in the mirror. She tried pretending that she was dressed this way for Keiichi…

"You look absolutely _stunning_, dahling," her Mother noted approvingly, downing her mood another notch. It was once more obvious to Belldandy that Mother was either not noticing or ignoring her disheartened demeanor.

"The future son-in-law and his parents will be arriving shortly. Now don't forget the order in which you serve tea and refreshments, dear. And don't forget that you sit opposite the table from him...and don't stare at him. Remember to look the part of the timid maiden and keep your attention on the table. And don't put on any important airs; be delicately modest. After all, you're going to be his wife...and we don't want him suspecting that you're having thoughts of your own on the subject," Mother instructed.

"But I _do_ have thoughts of my own!" Belldandy angrily emoted, wanting to tell Mother _everything_. About her and Keiichi, about the fact that she had made physical love with a mortal, about the fact that she wanted to be with Keiichi forever...

A chime sounded and Mother grabbed her by the arm and half-escorted, half-dragged her out into the courtyard. They had decided to hold the first interview in the middle of Strawberry Meadows, amongst the light red and green shoots of slender grasses. The place had been decorated for the omiai. A floating iridescent palanquin was grandly making an entrance, descending in a very stately display of presence.

Belldandy looked up to see three figures emerge from the floating palanquin, hovering just above the grasslands. The first figure was a God with long gray hair, slender of build, dressed in a green robe with insignia that denoted that he was the head of the Deliberate Chaos Ministry. His eyes darted about coldly, taking everything in with keen interest...not with the regard of the curious. Instead he seemed to be _stealing_ the warmth of the surroundings within his calculating measure.

Next out of the door was his wife. She was wearing a dreamhelm, which resembled a silvery crown with a thin visor covering her eyes. Her brunette locks were styled in coiling curls that folded back and forth into lightning...quite a dramatic effect. Belldandy caught her breath...Lokii's wife was _beautiful_! She wore an elaborate white-blue gown, with a fur-lined overcoat. The last figure to emerge was Tyyr.

Tyyr caught her eye and grinned. Belldandy felt herself shrink a little when she saw the souls of his eyes.

"You're mine!" his eyes had declared greedily.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Keiichi was surprised to see Peorth. It wasn't like Peorth was the last thing he wanted to see...but she certainly didn't brighten his day. Her presence just made him more depressed. She was only another reminder that Belldandy was gone. She smothered him with attention late into the evening, and then she retired to the sister's bedroom to sleep.

The sister's bedroom. Where Belldandy _should_ be.

Miserable, Keiichi had fallen asleep in his wheelchair. No one wanted to talk to him after Peorth bothered him...so he just went to sleep.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Keiichi..." a soft feminine voice whispered in his ear. He opened his eyes to see Peorth floating in front of him. She had changed her outfit...now she was dressed a little more conservatively. Her provocative outfit didn't arouse him at all last night. No matter how she dressed, she was just wasting her time trying to reach him. In fact, no one could reach him...except _she_...the one inhabitant of his heart who was now unreachable.

Urd and Skuld came up and stood on either side of Peorth. Keiichi sensed for a moment that Urd was barely concealing extreme anger towards Peorth...she just seemed to have some kind of red aura about her. Or maybe his eyes were playing tricks on him. In the past three days, he had thought he heard Bell-chan's voice while he was in different parts of the house. Repeatedly. He knew she wasn't there, but the house itself seemed reluctant to release her presence.

"Keiichi, dear, how are you feeling this morning," Peorth asked with sincere concern.

"Life sucks! You all suck! Why do you guys even bother with your stupid hollow attempts to cheer me up? I'm NOT HAPPY! And...I'll never be happy unless Bell is here!" he answered. Peorth ignored his pessimistic attitude and continued to try and buoy his spirits. After a short while, she repaired to the kitchen. Returning with a nice Continental breakfast set out on a tray, she set it in front of Keiichi and quietly withdrew to hover and watch him eat.

Keiichi was barely touching his food. Urd felt a dire stab of panic at his feeble response to even simple things like food. It was as if he was trying to kill himself by withdrawing from the world. Then he knocked the tray off of his chair in a fit of pique and wheeled himself towards his hobby room.

The last thing he wanted was an audience of Goddesses! He tried to get away from the attentions of the three Goddesses, and wheeled his chair into his "Keiichi's Shop" room. A moment later, Megumi, Genji and Tomohisa joined him. He could tell that his sister was very concerned; when Megumi is very concerned, she verbally walks on eggshells. Megumi attempted to make trivial conversation...the same method she always uses around him when she was too scared to really talk about something going on in her life.

Keiichi ignored her too. He had gotten fed up with telling everyone in the house to leave him alone. Not only didn't they listen...but also their presence only served to deepen his anguish. Because they only reminded him about the woman he loved.

The woman he had lost.

"_Everything_ seems to remind me of Bell-chan," he mused, feeling his pain swallowing him like an unending desert waste of misery.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"We've gotta do something!" Peorth explained as she brushed her long silken black locks, pulling them into a ponytail. She had really tried this morning to reach Keiichi, to cast away his pain. It was irritating...this inability on her part to uplift the spirits of her new mortal charge.

"_You_ gotta do something," Urd said, reminding Peorth that she was the only inhabitant of the house who had any Goddess powers worth mentioning.

"It's horrible...I can't even get him to make a wish...to tell me what he wants. If he asked, I could simply wave my hand and he wouldn't be confined to that damn contraption..."

Urd looked up sharply. She locked her eyes on Skuld and nodded her head. Skuld made a moue with her mouth, then shot Urd a quizzical glance.

"Peorth, why don't you go to the ocean and try and settle yourself down? Maybe something will come to you then..." Urd suggested. It was another hour before Peorth finally acceded to Urd's repeated promptings. With a snap of slender fingers, she vanished...but not before whispering something in Skuld's ear. Again, Skuld reacted with a reddened face. As soon as she left, Urd turned to her.

"Thank the Lord that she's out of our hair! And what did she say to you!"

"Shutup, Urd!" Skuld snapped back. Urd wasn't even mad at Skuld's little tantrum. She almost wanted to tease her little sister...Skuld's irritation was charming, rather than rambunctious. But Urd held her words; she knew that Skuld would let it slip one day.

"And what were you doing earlier, making all those weird faces at me while you were brushing your hair?" Skuld asked. Urd smiled at her youngest sister...this idea that had popped in her head was eating away at her patience.

"Something Peorth said...about getting Keiichi to make a request. A wish. If he makes a wish...then Peorth _has_ to grant it!" Skuld opened her mouth with a half-gasp as implication grasped her.

"YES! If Keiichi is lured into making a wish...and he wishes for Belldandy to be back here...then Peorth..."

"Will have to go get her. Bingo, Skuld-sama! Mom might be able to cancel one wish, but I doubt that the system would allow her to cancel a second one," Urd finished.

"That doesn't even matter!" Skuld realized aloud. "His first wish was canceled, so he automatically gets a second one!"

"I thought I just said that, you brat!"

"But how do we get Keiichi to make a wish? He isn't even _talking_ to us..." Skuld asked. Immediate clockworks of logic spent an answer on the heels of her question. It would be painful for Keiichi...but it was a necessary pain.

Skuld _knew_ that her idea would work.

"We've got to make Keiichi yearn for Belldandy even more than he does now," she stated in the wondering voice she sometimes assumed when she was hypothesizing aloud.

"What? He _already _misses her so much, it's killing him. You want him to miss her even more? That's insanely stupid. 'Stupid to the max,' as your little Tomohisa would say!" Urd remonstrated, throwing a dig in for good measure.

"No...not insane. He's insane with grief _now_! If we push him over the edge, he might come back to sanity. With a clear mind, you know that he would make one wish more than any other..."

The thread of Skuld's plan was inarguable. But it would be a brutal paradox. Urd didn't want to be cruel at all, especially to someone she sometimes loved almost as a brother.

Skuld, for her part, felt a fearful disinclination towards her plan. It would mean that she would have to 'attack' Keiichi with reminders of Belldandy. She was afraid of two things: that Keiichi might withdraw even more with regret, or that she herself would collapse emotionally when she was gripped even tighter with the loss of her sister. Urd's disappearing act this past summer had devastated her by bouts of dolor. Belldandy's near-recall to Yggdrasil months after Skuld arrived at the Earthrealm had almost drove her senseless for a while.

Skuld didn't want to revisit _that_ emotional morass of pain.

Looking at her Big Sister, Skuld shook her head sadly.

"We've got to do it, for everyone's sake."

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Belldandy looked around, surveying the scene like a trapped animal. She was seated at a floating nanoelectic crystalmatrix table, in the middle of the skyland of Strawberry Meadows. There was no one in sight; obviously her parents had arranged to have the whole skyland to themselves for the day. She cast her eyes in a circle, frustrated at the close quarters and the tense atmosphere. She looked to Daddy for any signs of emotional support...without success.

On her right was her father, Odeyn. He wore the usual patch over his right eye...an eye that had been lost long ago when he was a Marshal. He had led the vanguard that finally defeated the AncienGiants cyberbeings in battle. As a reward for his valor and sacrifice, Kami-sama had granted him the title of head of the Energy Guild. He was a relic from a long lost time, an episode in Yggdrasilian history when the Gods and the Demons warred more openly. Belldandy still felt a sorrow stirring deep in her stomach every time she saw that eye patch. No matter how powerful he was, he could never manifest with both eyes intact. Father was dressed impeccably; his gray beard trimmed neatly, his long hair pulled back into a braid.

She sensed with some relief that he was silently surveying Tyyr with suspicion.

Next to him was Mother, chatting amiably about the latest fashions with Friijda. Belldandy moved her gaze from Mother to the end of the table. Directly opposite her, on the far end of the table, was Tyyr. Once more, she caught the barely concealed lust in his eyes. She felt like he consuming her, rather than appreciating her.

"There's _no way_ that I can marry that ogre of a God!" Belldandy thought sadly. But she was caught in the binds of filial love; she had to accede to their wishes in this matter. Any act of defiance on her part would be a severe breach of manners...possibly resulting in clan conflict between her parents and Lokii. What was even more frightening than this...was the potential ire of her Mother. She quickly glanced past him to see Friijda and Lokii.

Tradition dictated that she serve tea to Tyrr's parents first, then Tyyr. Very carefully, she served a cup to Lokii, who grinned at her...his dark blue eyes glazing abstractly...glassbeady with schemes. Next, she served his wife, the Lady Friijda. Then she stood up with the tea service and knelt next to Tyyr.

She could hear the tea service clitter-clatter as her hands shook while she served him his tea. Her senses seemed to brighten intolerably...probably due to the tension which coursed through her being. She could hear his breathing...which was almost a growling noise. She stood up to walk over to her parent's side of the table. Suddenly, she felt a hand grasping where it shouldn't have been.

"Ah...quite firm! Just as I suspected!" Tyyr grunted, looking greedily at up and down her figure.

Feeling nauseous with distress, Belldandy wanted to slap him...he had actually _patted her on her rear_ after she served him tea. No one else seemed to notice his untoward behavior; the two sets of parents were engaged in animated conversation about Yggdrasilian politics and fashions. She bit her tongue to keep from yelling in fear and outrage as she served her mother, then her father. In between the snippets of animated conversation, Belldandy noticed that Father seemed to be brooding..._that_ would change when the sake was served.

Next, Mother presented the meal, which no doubt had been prepared by others, probably culindroids. Belldandy remembered that she had never seen Mother actually cook with her own hands...then felt sorrow as she remembered how often she herself enjoyed cooking in the Earthrealm. Especially Keiichi's expression when her cooking moved beyond tasty to exquisite. Belldandy half-heartedly ate her food, opting to stare at the white singularity that graced the table as its centerpiece.

After the meal, the two fathers exchanged cups of wine, while the two mothers exchanged the traditional wedding bid scrolls. She knew that the rolled sheets of golden paper with brilliant red writing contained information necessary for the wedding. They described the pedigrees of each family, the birthdates and major events in the lives of the potentially betrothed God and Goddess, plus myriad particulars.

She wanted to wave her hand and make the bid scrolls flash into flame...but this was impossible, since she still had no Goddess powers whatsoever.

Belldandy felt even more nervous as the omiai progressed. This exchange of bids meant that the arrangement was almost sealed.

"Let's see a proper sword dance!" her Father commanded, beginning to show that he was in his cups.

"Just like in the olden days, huh, Lokii. Let's see if these new WarGods can hold muster to their respected elders," he shouted again, elbowing Lokii.

"Kampai!!" everybody shouted except Belldandy. Mother snapped her fingers and the food service disappeared, so that Tyyr could mount the table and perform.

The next few minutes were spent watching Tyyr perform an intricate sword dance. Belldandy had to admit to herself that the Marshall of the WarGods was _good_ at sword and spear handling. Probably, this was the only thing he was good at, besides groping women and acting the brute.

"Now, let's see how our future daughter-in-law dances! Bring on the fans! We'll see if she possesses the necessary cultural skills like our beautiful wives, eh Odeyn?" Lokii remarked, slapping Odeyn on the back.

Two intricate fans resolved in mid-air. Belldandy hesitated a moment to retrieve them; causing her Mother to make a face that said "get going!" She alighted on the table and bowed. Taking a fan in each hand, she began her dance. Becoming engrossed in the routine, she discarded each fan and extended her sleeves, so that her fan dance became a sleeve dance. She fought back tears, because she had dreamed of someday performing this dance for her beloved Keiichi...and no one else.

The moment she thought of Keiichi, she stumbled.

Right into the arms of Tyyr. Everybody laughed at her innocent mistake, except Tyyr. Who had reached around her front and grabbed a breast in each hand though her robe...in a pretense at 'catching her fall'.

"Don't be afraid, my dear...soon I will make you an adult Goddess!" Tyyr whispered in her ear. Belldandy fought his hands off of her and stood up, glaring at him.

"You're spirited! I love that in a Goddess! You'll be fun to tame!" Tyyr challenged her with a private voice.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Peorth was bugging him again. Floating in the air in front of his wheelchair, she kept trying to cheer him up. He looked towards the entryway to the sunroom, where Skuld and Urd entered bringing picture albums.

"Great...more false cheer," he thought somberly.

"Keiichi...since you miss Belldandy so much, we'd thought you might like to look through some of these," Urd said. Keiichi tried to push one of the albums away while Skuld opened up the other one and pointed out a picture to Keiichi.

"What are they doing? Don't they care? Can't they see that I'm already hurting as much as anyone can possibly hurt?" he thought.

"Remember this one? New Year's 20XX? When Urd had you guys play Life..." Skuld described.

"…Sugoroku. Remember how I fixed the game? But you and Belldandy ended up kissing after you shoveled almost all the snow off of the driveway?" Urd narrated. Skuld opened up the other photo album and shook it to get Keiichi's attention.

"Look! These are from the time that psychic girl, Shiho Sakakibara, came to visit us. Remember how she brought out ghosts instead of quelling their presence. I was so scared! And remember how Belldandy got so jealous...because she actually thought that girl was going to take you away from her? My sister must _really_ love you, Keiichi!" Skuld felt horrible inside as she noticed Keiichi's eyes framing with tears...this process of fanning his emotional pain was hurting _her_.

"Yes...and remember this one!" Urd added. Keiichi saw the pictures that he had taken of Bell during a visit to Tokyo Disneyland. He wanted to tear the ears off the Mickey Mouse in the background...

Urd and Skuld pointed out more sequences of pictures in the photo albums. Belldandy's dainty cursive kanji dated and described each separate picture. Keiichi was crying openly now...covering his eyes to avoid looking at the proffered photo albums. Skuld walked over to the corner of the room and grabbed something.

"Belldandy never showed you this, because she didn't think it was good enough. But since she's gone, what harm will it do now if I show it to you now..." she remarked as she held up a charcoal portrait that Belldandy had made...a portrait of Keiichi.

Urd choked back tears as she read the caption:

_Dear Keiichi...this drawing can never capture the essence of_

_Soul which resides in you...the pure Soul of Love. I love you!_

_Yours Forever Belldandy_

Keiichi literally exploded into heavy sobs, trying to push the portrait away. Skuld jerked it back quickly so that he couldn't rip it.

Peorth regarded the picture, drawn by the hands of a sister Goddess. She felt an infinite sense of sadness for Belldandy and Keiichi. She could see Belldandy's heart in every stroke of the charcoal pen...

"I CAN'T STAND IT ANY MORE!" Keiichi bellowed in black despair.

"Keiichi...if there's anything I can do to take away the pain...just tell me. I swear I'll do it!" Peorth promised, sincerely moved by the earnestness of the drawing. In a sense, she could already guess what he would wish for...but she had to follow the Rule and ask him formally.

"I..I just want her back. I want Belldandy back!" Keiichi shouted hoarsely, his arms raised over his face to conceal his agonizing grief.

Peorth turned to Urd and Skuld, her face billowing with emotion. Sadness, because of the pain Keiichi was in. Joy, because she would finally be able to grant him a wish. Reluctance...and conflict.

She felt reluctance wash over her freshly made promise...because she had to fulfill the one wish that she would have never wanted to complete. Much as she coveted assuming Belldandy's assignment...she knew in her heart of hearts that it would only be right for her to bring back Belldandy. It would be the _rightest_ thing she could ever possibly do for Keiichi.

_If_ she could bring back Belldandy...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Everybody was drunk except Belldandy. Tyyr had completely ignored all sense of decorum and had gotten drunk. It was expected for the parents to be aglow with intoxication after the exchange of bids. After all, they were experiencing the first steps in the parting of ways with their offspring. But Tyyr...he had become almost lecherous. The prescribed etiquette of an omiai prohibited the prospective bride or groom to touch any sake, except for the perfunctory single small cup.

"Serb me anutter glazz, wifffe!" he mumbled. Belldandy felt something uncoil inside of her at his words. This stupid charade had gone too far!

"Enough is enough!" she thought to herself angrily. Holding her head up high with dignity, Belldandy picked up the chalice of sake, walked over to Tyyr's side...and overturned it over his head.

"Ooops!" she said, tittering.

Instantly sober, Tyyr stood up and grabbed both her hands in one of his. His other hand was ready to slap her. Belldandy was almost ready to faint from shock.

"TYYR!" two loud male voices shouted. Belldandy looked to see both sets of parents, instantly sober. Her Father was glaring at Tyyr with a ferocious expression, his eyes almost flaming with anger.

"Y..you saw what she did! S..she poured sake over my head!" Turning his attention to Belldandy, he confronted her.

"How _dare_ you! Do you know who I am, you wench of a Goddess? I am the Marshall of the WarGods. I could slice you into pieces at a moment's notice!" he threatened.

"Go ahead! Why don't you! Aren't you _God_ enough?" she challenged him, her eyes suddenly hard as suns.

"I'll _never_ love you, Tyyr!" she said, almost spitting his name out. "My heart is already given to another. You're utterly, totally disgusting, Tyyr."

A chorus of gasps followed her statement. She turned away from Tyyr.

"And _you_, Mother!! How could you force me into this mockery...t.this arranged marriage?" she spat out. "You're only doing this just because you're so-called society friends expect it! You don't care about me! You don't care about the mortals! All you care about is _looking good_!" she said angrily, realizing that she had gone over the edge with her anger. Belldandy's mother stood up shock-straight, her golden curls shimmering as she quivered in anger. "Why...you ungrateful..." she started to say. Belldandy interrupted her.

"SHUT UP, Mother!" Belldandy yelled, arms stiff at her sides, fists clenched. She had wanted to say _that_ for years...the relief that swept her was almost exhilarating. She realized in a split-second that she had just broken every rule possible...and it was time to go for it all.

"Belldandy...you are not to address your Mother that way! Apologize to her this instant!" Odeyn shouted above the din of thoughtwaves.

Arrested to the core by her Father's commanding voice, Belldandy fought to sweep millennia of instinctive obediences away. To disregard it. Suddenly she was a little girl, and her Father was a big strong imposing figure. She had an apology on the tip of her thoughts, ready to flow out. But she gathered every bit of courage she had and sent it away and reached deep in her heart instead.

"You know what Mother...I am in love. With a man who's hundreds of times kinder, more decent and handsomer that this...this _thug_!" she announced, ignoring her Father completely. Her Mother and Father were staring at her with utter disbelief, their mouths opening and closing like koi in a pond.

The simmering resentments that had been boiling inside of her ever since she had been ripped away from Keiichi were overflowing the bowl of her common sense. And she didn't care. She had been brought here…for this idiotic socialite travesty! Recognizing that she'd already blown the 'sweet and demure daughter' act, she braced herself, knowing that it was now or never. It was time to deal the coup de grace.

"And he's a _mortal_! That's right, Mother...a _mortal_. He's the 'test mortal'. His name is Keiichi Morisato. And I love him with all of my being!" she announced, glaring at her Mother. Her Mother's face was purpled with rage…

"I demand my right to challenge!" Tyyr yelled, his eyes bloodshot with rage.

"You'll demand nothing, Tyyr! Bell's coming back to Earth with me, right now," a new voice sounded into the fray.

Belldandy wheeled around in surprise to see her rival, Peorth.

"Peorth! Wh..what are you doing here..?" Belldandy stammered as Peorth quickly grabbed her by the arm and pulled her away from the omiai setting.

"_Peorth_?" Belldandy thought in amazement as she started shimmering away from Hell.

"See ya, wouldn't wanna be ya!" Peorth quipped flippantly to the omiai gathering right before she disappeared.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

With a flash of light, Peorth reappeared. Keiichi looked up at the bright light...then he saw her.

_"__BELLDANDYYYYYYYY!__"_

_"__KEIICHIIIIIIIIII!__"_

She ran into his arms and nearly tipped his wheelchair over. The two hugged each other with an indescribable joy, and then looked longingly into each other's eyes as their lips met. Everybody was overwhelmed by the reunion of the two. Urd held back Skuld, who wanted to hug her older sister.

"Let'em have this moment to themselves, kiddo!" she instructed Skuld with a telltale smile.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Keiichi was shaking with joy, like a dried cheese container at a pizza joint. Belldandy was back!! He felt her hands stroking through his hair as she kissed him passionately. The entire world ceased to exist. His entire world was simply ambrosial...simply he and Belldandy.

Peorth watched the reunion, and then withdrew to a corner. She had just done the unspeakable. It was a grave offense for an outsider to interfere with an omiai. But even worse than her blatant breach of decorum and privacy...she had offended her heart when she had fetched Belldandy back from Yggdrasil. This utterly ruined any chances that she would ever be able to take on Keiichi as her mortal charge. It also eliminated any chance that he could fall in love with her.

Skuld walked over and put an arm around her waist. Urd and the rest were sitting in the living room, leaving Belldandy and Keiichi to the privacy of their reunion. Skuld tried to gently nudge her to leave the sunroom.

"Despite my whispered taunts...Skuld is still there for me?" Peorth thought in amazement.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Belldandy had gone loopy with joy, being in Keiichi's arms...the arms she never thought she would feel wrapped around her again. She wanted to melt herself into his Soul right now...to climb inside his heart and bang a drumbeat of pure elation...to feel herself reaching the same light that he was...

She was satisfied with the gratitude in his eyes.

"Keiichi...I LOVE YOU!"

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

After what seemed like an eternity...Belldandy and Keiichi emerged from the sunroom. Belldandy wheeled him into the living room. Every face was overjoyed to see them...except one. Belldandy could see the pain written on Peorth's visage. Her normally smiling eyes were hooded, drawn with sadness. She walked over to her fellow Goddess and hugged her.

"Thank you, Peorth. Your sacrifice will not go unrewarded...I swear by it..." she promised. Peorth's face registered an array of emotions...then she simply collapsed in Belldandy's arms, crying into her shoulder.

Urd still was angry with Peorth for what she did to Cevn. He had retreated under his futon...and wouldn't speak. Wouldn't respond to any of her entreaties. But in her heart, Urd felt immense respect for her 'sister' Goddess. Peorth had abandoned one of her innermost desires...out of obligation to her offices as a Relief Goddess...and her friendship with both Keiichi and Belldandy. She too found herself hugging Peorth, whose face was wretched with sadness.

_--KAA…BWHOOOM!!--_

Belldandy, Urd, Skuld and Peorth looked at the flash of light in front of their temple house.

"_Merde_!! I think...things just got even more complicated!" Peorth announced.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --


	32. Pt 32: Avengers

**Part 32: Avengers**

Belldandy and Co. peered out the front door in surprise as five shapes shimmered out of thin air in front of their temple home. Belldandy abruptly alighted upon a new level of apprehension as the glowing lightspheres coalesced into semblances of glowing human-sized shapes.

After Peorth had rashly re-kidnapped her and returned her to Earthrealm, she had completely forgotten the abandoned omiai with its horrid leitmotiv...Keiichi's outpouring of affectionate kisses and loving hugs had seen to that. Glancing back and forth between Keiichi and the luminous shapes, she acknowledged that her negligence had been a critical mistake...she had never even suspected that _they_ would follow her here. Of course they would follow her and Belldandy! No one had taken precautions. And she had even taunted them when she stole away with Belldandy...

"WHERE IS HE!" an angry male voice shouted as soon as the visitors formed into solid corporeality. Peorth shuddered as she heard that voice, her black locks with their red hints shivering in the wind.

"Was it something I said?" she asked mock-innocently, scared out of her wits but still a smartass.

Keiichi looked past Belldandy to see _five_ tall beings. Gnawing in the back of his mind was a strong suspicion that these beings were Gods and Goddesses. On closer observation, one of them was a man with a noble bearing, wearing an eyepatch over his right eye. He was dressed in a fantastic set of clothes, like something out of Star Wars. The woman standing next to him was striking...until he noticed that she looked like a fusion of Belldandy and Urd, with Skuld's dun-brown eyes thrown in to complete the package.

Becoming more alert with each passing second, he saw another stunning woman...looking like she was in her late 40s; a very beautiful, statuesque, elegant late 40s. Her hair...it was slowly changing shapes and colors, fading from platinum blonde to a crystallized sheer silver. She wore a cloak-cum-evening gown that further expressed her regal bearing. Standing next to her was another man, wiry in frame with long wild hair and an expression of focused alertness. He was dressed in some kind of green robe with a white fur collar; the robe was covered with mysterious symbols and shapes. And in the middle of the group was a mesomorphic brute of a man that looked like...the Hulk! Only this man had a military-style crewcut, high and tight, with thick red eyebrows that slung low over his eyes and a long braided red beard. He was wearing a military-style uniform, complete with livery, epaulets, medals and a half-coat of armor.

"I said _where_ is he? The mortal that my future wife is supposedly in so-called love with!" the man shouted. Keiichi felt an instant foreboding as he sized up this man. His cruel military bearing would have intimidated the most confident toughman. "Hitler" was the word that flashed through Keiichi's mind at the site of this warrior.

"Future wife? So-called love?" he said to Bell-chan, wondered aloud at the man's mysterious words.

"_Nobody_ fucks with me! I am Tyyr, Marshall of the WarGods! WarGod, First Class, Military License, Unlimited. I hereby challenge the worthless mortal with whom my betrothed, Belldandy, _thinks_ she's in love with!" his voice boomed, filled to the brim with a mega-aggro aggression.

Urd looked at Belldandy in shock as she realized that this...brute...was the intended husband that Mother selected for her sister! Belldandy looked at both her sisters and shook her head insistently; embarrassed and indignant at the same time.

"I am _not_ your future wife!" Belldandy replied quietly in a guarded voice. Urd and Skuld looked at her with facefallen astonishment. Peorth shook her head in disbelief, feeling a wash of sadness for her fellow Goddess because of this ridiculous position her parents had put her in.

Belldandy and her sisters had unconsciously formed a protective circle around Keiichi. Keiichi wanted to wave them off; he knew that the sister's reaction to him would disclose his presence to this...WarGod! Keiichi felt himself becoming scared beyond belief...this _God_ had the exaggerated musculature of a comic book hero. A vicious scar ran down one side of his face...and his eyes possessed an unearthly set of fiery orange irises.

"Ignore him, Keiichi," Belldandy said to him in a private voice. She could sense his agitation amplifying the air around him, giving it an almost static charge of tension. She didn't want Keiichi doing anything rash...Tyyr had already proven himself to be unpredictable.

"Ah...he's too afraid to challenge me! His cowardly love is but a worthless, pitiful gesture! He refuses to stand up for his woman...slut that she is!"

"Tyyr!" all four elderly divines said in shock at his outrageous insult...then they all confronted him in one arguing, yelling mass. Keiichi felt his anger shoot through the roof...this ogre had actually called his beloved Bell-chan a _slut_! With a very characteristic impulse of courage, he decided to protect her honor. What was uncharacteristic was the amount of defiance he touted, heedless of the vicious bearing of the self-proclaimed WarGod.

"_I'M..._the one you're looking for! Morisato Keiichi!"

"Mortal, First Class!" Urd and Skuld chorused.

"And yes, I love Belldandy with all my heart! Enough to meet any scummy challenge _you_ make...whoever or whatever you are!" he said with impulsive abandon. His mind regretted the words as soon as they escaped his lips when he saw the livid expression on the WarGod's face. But his heart was steadfast in its desire to protect the woman he loved...and her all-important dignity.

"At last, the mortal mouse squeaks to make its presence known," Tyyr said triumphantly. With a frame of reluctance, Keiichi realized that the taunts had been intended to bait him into stepping forward.

"Keiichi!?" Belldandy said, her voice tinged with foreboding. Keiichi looked at her eyes and saw that she was totally frightened of this Tyyr. The upset look on her face spoke volumes. Keiichi sensed that he had blundered; his girlfriend was mortified because of her protective streak towards him had been thwarted by his rash outburst.

"N..no, he's not the mortal you're looking for..." Belldandy said haltingly, desperately trying to cover up for him. Keiichi interrupted her.

"Whoever you are...I want you to know that she is mine. Belldandy is _mine_! Not because of any other reason than the fact that she has willingly given her heart to _me_!" Keiichi declared in as 'public' a voice that he could muster. The giant God seemed to bellow up even more with rage...while everyone else was silent.

"Uh...hello, Mother. Welcome to Earth," Urd said in a level voice, Skuld standing partly concealed behind her.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Keiichi, these are my parents," Belldandy began in a nervous voice.

"T..this is my father, Odeyn. He is the God in charge of the Energy Guild. Uh...that's Yggdrasil's equivalent of an electric company. And this is my M..Mother, Freiija, the Goddess of Marriages...formerly the Goddess of Love," she said in a shaky voice, introducing her parents with all the politeness she could muster. Which wasn't much, because she was wracked with nervousness after telling both parents off during the omiai.

Keiichi bowed deeply to Bell's Father, managing as best he could while confined to his wheelchair. He heard a rather obvious snort of disgust as he bowed to Bell's mother. Looking up, he saw an expression of distaste on her face.

Keiichi looked at Bell's father. He never, _ever_, imagined that Belldandy had parents in the mortal sense!

"This is a total mindblower, for sure," he thought as he appraised her...folks.

It was just too...bizarre...to even wrap his mind around the concept. Yet, here they were. Bell-chan was introducing him to them without a hint of reservation concerning his status as a mortal. Bell was acting more nervous than he had ever seen her before. The whole scenario reminded him of the stereotypical scene of a high school girl who was introducing the boy that was taking her to the prom to her parents. Which was almost amusing...in the sense that Keiichi had never seen his beloved in the role of anxious daughter before. A very beautiful, very cute anxious daughter...

He looked at Urd; recognizing in her knowing smile that she found Belldandy's discomfiture amusing as well.

While his girlfriend was extolling his virtues to her parents, Keiichi calmed himself enough to look closer at them. Bell's father projected _presence_ like Keiichi had never experienced in his life. Dignity. Strength. Wisdom. Power. Her father looked like the Western concepts of the Christian God...like Michelangelo's God on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. He radiated divinity.

Bell's mother was the personification of the beauty of vibrant maturity. Keiichi knew instantly that she didn't approve of him, but nonetheless she seemed cloaked with a sheer _brilliance_...a kind of love-energy that seemed to penetrate deep into his bones. She was middle-aged, with long golden curlylocks of hair cascading all the way to her heels. Her facial features reminded him of all three sisters...there was no doubt that she was the wellspring of grace from which the sisters had been born with such beauty. She had Bell's face, Urd's hair, and Skuld's eyes.

Belldandy introduced the other Gods and Goddess in turn. Odeyn spoke first after the introductions were concluded.

"Lokii, I must admit that this is an...extremely irregular action on the part of my daughter. Much as I disagree with her intimation that she is enamored with a mortal...we must respect her initial rejection of your son's suite," he spoke in a voice leavened with wisdom.

"Yes...for her sake, I can acquiesce to this fact. However, my son Tyyr has made the challenge...which _was_ properly accepted by the mortal," Lokii said slyly in a level voice.

"Excuse me, but how can a mortal possibly accept a challenge from one of _us_?" Peorth interrupted, cutting to the chase. Both maternal Goddesses gave her a scowl...Peorth lofted her head to indicate that she wasn't going to be intimidated by her elders.

"'See ya, wouldn't wanna be ya'" Lokii repeated her parting words back to Peorth in a voice blighted with angry unpleasance. It was the most horrible tone of voice that Keiichi had ever heard. A voice that stole all of Peorth's bravado in a flash. Keiichi's mouth dropped open as Peorth actually slumped into a cower at Lokii's words, scared as a rabbit in front of a lawnmower. Whoever this Lokii was, if he could drain Peorth's defiance with a single sentence...he was outright dangerous! Even Belldandy and her sisters had pallored with fright at his words.

"And when you are called on to answer for your actions...you'll spend the rest of eternity looking into the mirror and repeating those words...if you're lucky!" Lokii added. Peorth was visibly shaking, at the edge of dread-fainting. Belldandy and Urd quickly stepped over and grabbed her as her knees buckled.

"Be that as it may...the nature of her concern _is_ the question of the moment, is it not?" Odeyn said in his rich voice. Lokii looked thoughtful for a moment, and then answered.

"No matter what...the challenge must be accorded, for the mortal did accept it," Lokii noted.

"'_Enough to meet any scummy challenge you make...whoever or whatever you are!_'" Lokii said, quoting Keiichi with an exact duplication of his voice. "Those words most definitely qualify as an acceptance of challenge. They may even be interpreted as a counter-challenge, which brings the matter of whether a challenge was met to a close. Therefore we must keep to the traditions of chivalric combat between rival grooms. Fate has cast us here in this lot, for reasons we cannot fathom. According to the Rules...the challenged party has the right to decide weapons and venue. The challenger of course has all rights to his betrothed, should he defeat his opponent."

"Yes...but Tyyr's opponent is only a mere mortal, as our misguided and insolent young Goddess Relief Office agent has stated," Odeyn replied. Keiichi thought for the briefest of moments that Bell's father was actually standing up for him.

"This is utter nonsense! A mortal accepting a God's challenge? I say that we just simply blast him out of existence...and that would be the end of it!" Bell's mother interjected passionately. This statement brought a flurry of arguing and appeals from everybody.

"NO!!" Odeyn's voice boomed over the din.

"Dear...it isn't that simple. Namely, because this particular young mortal man is the 'test mortal'. Think about this! We cannot alter his destiny by direct interference. A battle, of course, _is_ the course of fate allowed for him at this juncture; as he has accepted the traditional combat challenge for bridal suitors. To simply extinguish him out of existence would not only be inappropriate...I can _guarantee_ that it would provoke the wrath of Kami-sama. Therefore, we cannot bring harm upon him or ourselves based on our own whims," the Elder God stated, finished on a sarcastic note that wasn't lost on his wife.

"Agreed?" he asked Lokii in the Language of Honor.

"Yes...agreed." When Tyyr kills him, then it would be considered within the realm of chance potentials. And after the mortal expires in combat...the Almighty will simply have to assign another Earthrealm denizen to be the 'Test Mortal', since this one's death will have occurred in accordance with our traditions and by his voluntary agency and free will."

Keiichi felt himself blanching timid at the casual discussion of the surety prospects of his death. He reached over and gripped Belldandy's hand tightly. His chest hurt, as he suddenly noticed that he was breathing very rapidly.

The behemoth WarGod strutted forward proudly, stopping right in front of Keiichi.

"He must be three meters tall!" Keiichi thought as the ruthless God stooped over to face him.

"Little mortal...it will be a pleasure for me to kill you. For what you have done...you deserve worse than death. But before you die, I want you to know that I will take _extra_ care of Belldandy...so that she'll never think of you again when her body, mind and Soul are mine to do with as I please," he gloated, brandishing a gnarly metal blade where a hand should have been.

Belldandy looked over at Tyyr, resentful at his casual inference towards her in the third person. A groggy Peorth managed a glare at him, while Skuld stuck out her tongue and Urd flipped him off.

Keiichi stared back at the WarGod without flinching...a fact that wasn't lost on Odeyn.

While the others were engaged in close debate about particulars concerning the challenge of suitors, Odeyn was recalling the days of his youth. Tyyr's behavior at the omiai was grossly disrespectful to his wife and he; and had brought shame upon his own parents, a truth they will come to recognize no matter the result of this challenge. Observing the young mortal and the WarGod Marshall together drew the Elder God towards his memories.

Once, he was also the Marshall of the WarGods. But unlike Tyyr, his administration of Yggdrasil's military had occurred during precipitous times marked by utter chaos. Yggdrasil had been invaded by the AncienGiants...a race of cybernetic organisms created by the Demons as a proxy military force. Also unlike Tyyr, he had been locked in a desperate battle for the survival of Yggdrasil itself in those bygone days. Since the Almighty couldn't be involved due to the Eternal Agreement with the Dark Lord...only Odeyn's troops of Gods and the all-Goddess Valkyrie Corps could defend the homelands.

Despite the precarious nature of the times, Odeyn remembered how he principaled his forces. The focus was on discipline and valor, not brutality. Mercy was taught alongside martial prowess. Pride was a nonexistent luxury that was ill afforded by anyone in his command.

"These peacetime WarGods have grown up to be spoiled. Irreverent attitudes are replete amongst the troops and the leaders. In days of yore, we could not afford such follies, because we were too busy with weightier concerns, such as saving Yggdrasil and if necessary, saving our asses," he opined with disgust. Tyyr was the worst of them...an utterly bad example of a soldier in a leadership role. Odeyn was disgusted with the fact that Tyyr's foremost concern was with himself; such selfishness was considered among the worst shortcomings a God could have.

"Freiija, _how_ could you have chosen Tyyr for our precious daughter Belldandy?" he grumbled to himself for about the thousandth time. Inside, he knew the answer...his wife had fallen in love with a military God. Therefore, his dear wife obviously felt that Belldandy would exhibit the same trait in her preferences. But there was a major difference between he and Tyyr: he had honor, while Tyyr only had aggression. Likewise, Freiija and Belldandy were two Goddesses cut from different clothes. Freiija had a wildness about her, which his eldest daughter obviously inherited. In contrast, Belldandy was meek, but her meekness resulted from a more even temperament. Freiija had simply overlooked all of this and had blundered. He could forgive her for her misguided effort, but just barely. He could not hold himself aloof from his daughter's obvious heartfelt pain.

Arriving here, he quickly reasoned out why his daughter was so upset. She had been smitten with affection for the mortal youth. Right or wrong, she felt fond of him, to the point where she had actually defied his wife and he for the first time in her adult life. Odeyn grinned to himself; as he realized just how cheeky it was for Peorth to actually kidnap Belldandy in the middle of the omiai. It was ironic that Belldandy's friend had known what was best for her, when her own Mother didn't!

What was also ironic was the fact that Peorth would be the last one to admit that she was Belldandy's best friend because of their ongoing rivalry...but Peorth had taken the kind of risk that _only a best friend_ would undertake.

Returning to his memories, Odeyn also confirmed that his courage mounted leagues beyond that of Tyyr's. He vividly remembered how he lost his eye...in a battle with the appointed leader of the AncienGiants. In the midst of a stalemating military campaign, he had sought to negotiate a wartime truce between the Gods and the AncienGiants. Desiring no further bloodshed, he diplomatized acceptable terms to conclude the war. The battle would be concluded by a contest of champions; the results contingent upon a decisive match between single combatants. If he defeated the representative leader of his enemy, they would withdraw to Vanagdrasil. If he lost...then his army would surrender.

Such a heavy burden had been rested on his whelpling shoulders. Odeyn recalled the millions of soldiers from both armies looking on as he advanced to the middle of the field of battle. He was challenged to personal combat by the best of the AncientGiants, a DarkHost CyberDemon. He could still remember the _thing_ that came out to meet him, fresh in his mind as if it had happened yesterday. It was indescribably ugly and vicious. He remembered looking at it...sickened beyond repulse...afraid beyond fear...his fear turning inside out to become filled with resoluteness of purpose. He stared intently at his opponent out of both eyes...the last time he saw anything out of both of his eyes. He knew that his eyes reflected an insanity of confidence, that day. As the wise one predicted when he drank the draught of Wisdom, Odeyn lost his eye in combat that day. But the loss of his right eye caused his opponent to become overconfident...allowing him the split-second necessary to pierce the vulnerable area...and strike down the Dark AncienGiant.

He felt an intense wash of empathy as he observed the same purposeful look he had possessed that bygone day. It was clearly alit in the eyes of this mortal who seemingly was the love interest of his daughter.

"The eyes are the mirrors of the soul," Odeyn mused to himself as he explored Keiichi's soul unobtrusively, poring over his childhood, his adulthood, his love for Belldandy...every facet of his _being_. Odeyn experienced each distinct moment of Keiichi's life in a nanosecond. He concluded that this young man was far from faultless...but his deepmost kokoro was as far from evil as any mortal's heart he had ever encountered.

He walked up to Keiichi, sizing him up. Leaning down close to him, Odeyn spoke softly...not wishing to intimidate this young mortal man any further. He was well aware that, as Belldandy's father, he was _already_ intimidating to any potential suitors...especially a mortal.

"You're not afraid of Tyyr, are you?" Odeyn part-queried, part-stated.

"I'm not half as afraid of Tyyr as I am of _you_, Odeyn. You're Belldandy's father...the father of the Goddess that I love. So of course I'm afraid of you," the young mortal man answered clearly. His sincerity cheered Odeyn, who was wont to laugh out loud at this mortal's reply.

"Times are changing," he thought privately, amazed at the fact that he was actually interviewing a _mortal_ who was in love with his daughter. He had to admit to himself...this Earthrealm manchild had spunk!

"Keiichi Morisato...I like you," the elder God said to him with a look of twinkling sincerity in his one eye.

Belldandy had been watching the exchange between her Father and Keiichi with trepidation. She knew that if Father didn't like Keiichi...then their love would be doomed. She could oppose Father's approval of potential suitors...that was just a singular act of determination. But she could never stand up to him for the rest of her existence if he were to reject Keiichi as a husband. Besides, she was Daddy's Girl...and she knew her Father well enough to be aware that he wouldn't settle for anything less than the best for his daughter. He had already thwarted the suits of the _numerous_ other Gods who sought after her hand.

Tensely holding her hands clasped over her heart, Belldandy intently observed the interaction between Father and Keiichi. She hoped beyond hope that her Father would somehow find some small attribute of Keiichi's that he could respect. Her entire being cried out for a miraculous sign of approval from her father; a slight nod of the head, or a rubbing of thumb and index finger.

What she saw was unprecedented. She was looking for nuances in his manner...what she got was a starkly explicit reaction. In all the times her father had sized up potential suitors, Belldandy had never observed anything other than a stolid expression on his face. As she looked on, Belldandy saw her father smile...then she heard her father actually laugh loudly...and then he said five words to Keiichi.

Five words...and she was suddenly floating with elation and shock.

As soon as Father said that he _liked_ Keiichi, Belldandy felt like a set of fireworks had just gone off in her heart. The strong burst of feelings overwhelmed her towards giddiness. Looking at her father, she beamed with gratitude. Her joy wasn't just hers alone...Skuld and Urd almost danced up to her in excitement, feeling her excitement. They hugged their middle sister, happy that Keiichi had in some slight way impressed their father.

Odeyn watched as all three of his daughters linked hands and jumped up and down in a spinning circle, gripped by girlish abandon, beatific smiles on their wonderful faces. Then he returned his attention to Keiichi, ready to probe deeper by sounding him out.

"One further question. If you, by some miracle, defeat Tyyr...will you make my little Belldandy happy? Will you respect her? Will you be honest with her? Will you make her life exciting? Will you share in her purpose?"

"Of course, er...I mean _yes_,_ sir_! I'm already trying to do those things. If you don't believe me, look at your daughter right now. Bell-chan's filled with joy...because she knows that you haven't readily dismissed me as a possible husband for her," Keiichi said, speaking for the truth as best he could.

Odeyn turned his head and looked at his beloved daughters again. His oldest, Urd, was tragically doomed by her appointment as the Elder Norn...never to experience love again. Yet she was fulfilled with joy, vicariously happy for her younger sister. His little baby Skuld...his precious youngest daughter...was hugging her older sisters tightly, her face animated with the fluid joy of the innocent. And Belldandy...she was looking at him in rapt gratitude and devotion, tears streaming from her eyes. Odeyn felt his one eye well up with a tear of empathy...tears he had to hold back. It would be very poor form to cry in front of the others, in front of the young mortal whom he _had_ to impress with his dignity. Especially in his adopted physical form. But in his ancient heart, he felt tears...

He knew that his daughter was deeply in love with this mortal man. Odeyn felt a flash of anger towards his wife...her planning of this omiai business had been a serious blunder. It would be a travesty to divide a love as strong as this! And yet...the fact that a mortal man could love a Goddess as pure and innocent as his daughter Belldandy.

"Maybe this is the proof," he reflected. His wife and he had strongly disagreed on the role of Mankind in the scheme of things. This might be the proof he had been seeking for millennia...evidence that the Earthrealm mortals _could_ reach the Next Level. He had long advocated that Mankind would eventually reach the Next Level; now he felt ascertained in his opinions.

For a mortal to love a Goddess...

"These times are full of change. But then again, maybe not. They're just like us when we were in our youthtimes. These kids are young radicals," Odeyn repeated to himself, recalling Peorth's brazen kidnapping of Belldandy and the taunt she had left in the air with a cloud of roses. He had to smile at her impudence; Kami-sama had definitely had matched her with the Rune most befitting her personality. She had even caught Lokii by surprise and bested his composure, which is why he was now so angry with her. The look of shock on Lokii's face alone was worth all the worries caused by this misguided omiai.

Leaving the others to their thoughts, he walked around the temple compound grounds, hands clenched behind his back as he admired the terrestrial environs of this patch of Earthrealm. He could see his daughter's handwork in every essence of this adopted home she had made for herself...and the mortal. It brought back memories of Belldandy's first attempts to ThoughtPaint; his middle daughter was never the artist, but she tried so hard to impress him with her work. Now, decamillennia later, he _was_ impressed with her artistry, despite the ravages of the recent storm. As he strolled, Odeyn reached a decision. He would seriously consider the possibility of supporting a match between this young mortal man and Belldandy, despite how his wonderful but sometimes ill-intentioned wife would react to his decision. Even if it meant that she didn't talk to him for a few millennia.

He chuckled to himself.

"Maybe it _would_ be easier for all concerned if my dear wife would keep her mouth shut, for once," he thought, as he overheard his beloved Freiija lecturing Belldandy and her sisters...

"B'dandy dear, why don't you be reasonable? We've all played along with this...childish whim...of yours! Of course, you only _think_ you're in love with him...but you know as well as I do that mortals just don't feel love like we do. They haven't the slightest concept of..."

"MOTHER!" Urd, Belldandy and Skuld shouted, cutting her off in mid-sentence.

Odeyn could only shake his head.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"So what _can_ I do? I'm stuck in this stupid wheelchair!" Keiichi exclaimed in exasperation.

"Keiichi, you _have_ to challenge him!" Urd reminded him, pulling on his ear to remind him of the seriousness of this matter.

"He already _did _challenge that big doofus," Skuld said dryly.

Keiichi was still wrought with anxiety as he recalled Tyyr's image. Tyyr looked ogreish, like a nightmare villain resurrected from some horror show. His enormous stature stood in contrast to the other Gods. Keiichi knew that any one of the Gods or Goddesses could choose to manifest in a form the size of the Moon, if they wished. Tyyr's bulky form was just an outward show. He had no doubts in his mind that both sets of parents were many times more powerful than Tyyr...and they chose to appear in bodies 

that were reasonable by mortal standards. Yet, Keiichi's still felt his resolve waffling when he considered the sheer bulk of his opponent. Not to forget his own present disabilities. Both of them.

"Belldandy, can't Peorth just heal me or something? I bet I could beat Tyyr in a roadrace if I was well!"

"No, much as I would like to...I can't do that. To tamper with your physical condition between the startpoint when you answered the challenge and the actual contest...would be considered an unconscionable breach of protocol. Actually, I think it would be deemed as a forfeit decision on your part. It would likely result in your death, Belldandy's having to marry Tyyr...and a permanent license revocation for me, or worse!" Peorth pointed out.

Skuld had been quietly listening to the discussion, wondering what she could do to help the situation turn in Keiichi's favor. Upon seeing the brutish Tyyr, she had made her mind up instantly: she did _not_ want such a bizarro machoman as a brother-in-law. She sensed that Tyyr would possess all the bad manners...like those TV celebrity professional wrestlers so many mortals were enthralled with. Skuld realized that she was personally invested in this upcoming challenge between Keiichi and Tyyr.

"Damn! If I could only race..." he repeated.

"Keiichi, why don't you race him in a videogame?" Urd suggested. Everybody in the room turned to look at her with a look of disgust; the Demon Rally episode still fresh in their minds. Megumi shot her an especially narrow-eyed face.

"I was only trying to help...you don't have to bite my head off, guys!" Urd said defensively.

"Long story," Megumi whispered to Peorth, noticing her confusion.

Skuld was trying to remember something in the back of her mind...it was suspended just beyond the reach of her recall. She knitted her brows as she redoubled her concentration. It had to do with something that she noticed when she went to the mall with Tomohisa recently...something in one of the specialty stores...

"How about a wheelchair race?" Peorth suggested. Several groans ensued on _that_ suggestion.

"Aw...c'mon, Peorth! Be real! Did you forget to manifest the brain part of your mortal body?" Keiichi chided her. His keen engineering mind knew that her suggestion would be impossible anyway; Tyyr's larger mass would require a bigger wheelchair, with a bigger wheelbase. By sheer logic, this would give Tyyr a decided edge.

Meanwhile, Skuld tuned out the others and strained her memory. She recalled going to two sports stores...then a malt shop...then a music store...then they ate lunch at the food court...then they went to a video arcade...then an electronics store...then to a couple of toy stores...oooh, that delicious Strawberry Jam Parfait at the malt shop...

An image of Tyyr and her sister came to her mind...rankling her grievously.

"_THINK!!_" she scolded herself. In response, a mental impression formed.

It was something inside the toy store...not the computer games...not the train set...

_"__I GOT IT!__"_ Skuld shouted, bringing the intense flurry of multiple conversations to a standstill as she bounded up off of her zabuton, finger pointed in the air.

"_What_ could you probably offer that we haven't already considered?" Urd said, irritated by the rudeness of her little sister's interruption and her equally rude childish acting out.

"Slotcars," Skuld answered matter-of-factly. Keiichi looked at her in surprise; then the idea seeped into his mind like grape juice soaking a dishtowel...staining the fabric of disillusion with a twinge of possibilities.

_"Ehhhhh?"_

"Slotcars?" several voices echoed, brimming with curiosity or astoundment.

Skuld checked her throat so she could assume her 'clarification voice'. The sight of the diminutive Goddess preparing to explain always amused Keiichi. From his perspective in the wheelchair, Skuld was almost a foot shorter than everyone in the room...but she stood above him. He barely repressed a snicker as everyone looked _down_ towards Skuld, their interest piqued by her suggestion.

"Yeah, you guys. Slotcars!" Skuld said, her voice tinged with defiant confidence. "I was in the toy store at the mall before the supertyphoon...and I saw several slotcar tracks for sale. Since Keiichi is so good at racing real-size cars, he easily should be able to race miniature cars. The principle is the same. The same physical laws would apply. And...his wheelchair would _not_ be a disadvantage to him. By the way, how many of you think that the big pervert...oops, I mean Tyyr...has _ever_ raced cars before? I could 'tweak' Keiichi's car too...which would be fair, since all he would have to do is set the venue for the challenge! It wouldn't be cheating in the sense that it wouldn't be anything affecting him directly. It would just be the _equipment_ used for the contest!" she lectured the group.

Keiichi smiled at Skuld.

"That's _brilliant_, Skuld! Besides, I used to race slotcars when I was little, didn't I Megumi?" Keiichi added to her little spiel. Megumi nodded, a mixture of distaste and amusement on her face.

"Yeah, I _do_ remember! Racetracks all over the floor of _our_ bedroom and the living room. Yes...Big Brother, I remember... I remember...you _never_ putting them away and me _having_ to!" she said in a taunting voice betrayed by a wide grin as she tweaked Keiichi's ear playfully.

"I can do this...I definitely have an edge when it comes to racing reflexes...and I'm willing to wager that Tyyr has never seen a slotcar racing set in his existence!" Keiichi enthused.

Belldandy was quiet, listening carefully to each point. She was more than simply caught up in the outcome of this discussion. Her whole future depended on them_ getting this right_. She was absentmindedly twirling a branch between her fingers; it presented a green-brown circular blur in her vision.

Circles of fate.

But it was more than her future that was going to be decided. More than just her love with Keiichi was on the line. In fact, she knew deep inside that Keiichi's _life_ was on the line. What would happen if he lost...which was quite possible since he was going up against a God. What if?

If she had to accept a life married to Tyyr in order to prevent the WarGod from killing her mortal boyfriend... She struggled to resolve to herself that she would. It tasted bitter, the repellent notion of her being condemned to sharing the rest of her existence as Tyyr's wife.

"Yes...I would gladly make that sacrifice for you, Keiichi. Your life is far more important than this issue of whom I'm supposed to marry," she said to herself under her breath.

"What'd you say, Bell?" Keiichi asked her.

"I'll tell you some time...but not today," she swiftly replied.

"But...maybe my little sister has come up with a way to defeat Tyyr," she hoped. Belldandy felt a sense of relief that Skuld's suggestion didn't involve any life-threatening combat. Theoretically, Keiichi could lose...and not come to any physical harm. But she was decidedly unsure of how Tyyr would react, win or lose. From what little she had seen and felt of his presence, she sensed that he would be a merciless victor...and a malcontent loser.

She looked at Keiichi with conflicted emotions. She was happy that his spirits were so bubbly...yet she was troubled by his confidence.

"Keiichi...don't let confidence evolve into overconfidence," she advised quietly. She knelt down next to his wheelchair and expressed her fears.

"Tyyr is reckless. As the Marshall of the WarGods, he has a militaristic attitude that I don't think you've ever encountered before. He is ruthless and flaunty. Remorseless. If you lose...I'm worried that he wouldn't hesitate to kill you. He was entirely disrespectful to me during the omiai that my parents hosted. That illustrates his disrespect for my Father...who was formerly a WarGod Marshall. Besides, he..." she lowered her voice to a whisper and informed him of the insults to her body that Tyyr had made during the omiai.

"HE WHAT!!" Keiichi exclaimed angrily, almost repeating aloud the words Bell had told him privately. He could feel his face almost swelling with the bloodrush. Tyyr had tried to molest Bell-chan! During the omiai, he played grab-ass/grab-tit with her. Bell's revelation made Keiichi _extremely_ pissed-off at the WarGod!

"That guy is a total asshole! He doesn't deserve to be a God! And I'm gonna bring him down! This is one race I'm _not_ going to lose...even if I have to go to Hell and back," he promised, looking at Belldandy with angry eyes.

Belldandy almost flinched when she saw the intensity of Keiichi's expression.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"What!!" a roaring voice yelled in dismay and confusion. "He's actually challenging me to some kind of mortal sport? Combat by a jousting battle called 'slotcar racing'?"

Tyyr looked at everybody with a face full of rue. Settling his stare on Keiichi, his face quivered with barely controlled anger. Keiichi saw his reaction and fought back his fears...Tyyr's eyes seemed to bore right down to the core of his soul with diamond-sharp precision.

"That's right. You heard me the first time. I choose _slotcar racing_ for our competition. And you have to remain in mortal form in order to participate," Keiichi reiterated. He heard Urd snickering as he repeated himself.

"What are you laughing at, loveless Norn of the Past!" Tyyr said as he walked towards Urd, looking like he was ready to hit her. Odeyn stepped firmly in front of the younger WarGod, blocking his path.

"That's my oldest daughter you're addressing, Tyyr! You leave her alone if you know what's good for you," he said in a menacing voice. Tyyr backed down and stormed off. Urd looked at her father with grateful eyes, then glared at Tyyr. Belldandy had confided in her about Tyyr's perverted groping during the omiai; now all Urd wanted was for him to be utterly humiliated at the hands of Keiichi. Urd _hated_ Tyyr, more passionately than she had ever hated anyone before.

"Actually, it was _my_ idea! Nyahhh!" Skuld said, sticking her tongue out at Tyyr...angry at his threat to her oldest sister. Tyyr stopped dead in his tracks and turned, walking towards her with even more anger. Skuld screamed in fear.

Skuld watched as her Daddy put a restraining hand on Tyyr's beefy arm and hauled him away from her. She stuck her tongue out again, safe in the awareness that her Daddy would protect her.

"Skuld...don't let childishness make matters worse!" Odeyn said crossly to his youngest. Skuld reacted with a little whimper, then quickly stepped partway behind Urd and Peorth, the paternal scolding shifting her fear from Tyyr to her father.

Keiichi was watching the whole surreal interaction between Tyyr and Bell's sisters from a detached perspective. He was mentally preparing himself for the upcoming race. Every time he saw Tyyr, he was more aware of the WarGod's volatile nature. Now Tyyr was pacing back and forth in the driveway.

"That God is a walking timebomb, Bell-chan!" he confided in a private whisper to his girlfriend. Tyyr glanced angrily in his direction, causing Keiichi to wonder if he had heard his comment.

"He's just mad because you have your arm around me," Belldandy reassured him...then leaned her head against his shoulder. Tyyr clenched his fists and glared at her, then resumed his pacing. She was secretly pleased by his reaction; a vengeful part of her _liked_ the idea that Keiichi's attentions to her were cueing the WarGod to anger by leaps and bounds. Finally, Tyyr spun away from the couple, apparently too resentful to watch any further as Belldandy kissed Keiichi on the cheek for confidence.

"Hmmm, since the game has been set, perhaps_ I_ should be the one to design the track?" Lokii said to the assembled group with an innocuous smile, his aspect deliberately humble. The sisters watched as their parents readily agreed to this suggestion.

"_Oh no!_" Belldandy thought as she saw Lokii's expression change to a flicker of a mischievous smile upon their acceptance of his offer.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

The track was skillfully laid out by Lokii to cover the whole extent of the temple grounds. The starting position was right in front of the covered front porch doorway. From here, it wove up and down the hallways and the rooms of the temple house, and then exited out behind the house via the sunroom.

Traveling through Belldandy's now-defunct fruit and vegetable garden, it circled the storm-flattened remains of Cevn's meditation garden. Then it veered towards the temple wall and traveled until it reached the Rock Garden in the southwest corner of the temple compound. Weaving in between several rock outcroppings and jumping over the small stream there, it traveled upwards, circling a tree up and down.

Moving east, the racetrack reached the temple compound's southeast corner, then crisscrossed between the shrubtrees there. Shifting to a northerly direction, it dipped in and out of the storage shed. Reaching level ground, the track ran past the mecha shed, and then it lifted off the ground in a series of hoop jumps until it reached the roof of the mecha shed. On the roof, the racetrack ran diagonally to the roofline, jumping off the corner eaves into a small sandpit. The landing had to be precise; otherwise the car would miss the slot in the center of the track and wipeout in the sand.

After the sandpit, the slotcar track ran up to the gravel driveway, and then whipped a sharp left towards the temple house. A series of weaving turns in front of the temple house finished with a double jump across the surface of the koi pond. The last short stretch of track floated in the middle of the pond, gracefully curved upwards like the end of a ski jump. The drivers would jump the remainder of the pond and land on a stretch of track partly buried in the matted grasses leftover from Supertyphoon Akira.

After this series of risky ramp jumps, the track traveled parallel to the road until it reached the torii temple gate entrance. Pulling a hairpin 180 degree turn, it traveled towards the vehicle garage, then wove snakelike between a series of moving obstacles there, driving up a ramp and out the back window of the garage. From the garage, it traveled northeast until it reached the temple bell. Once there, the cars had to 'ring the bell', ricocheting off the temple bell itself to land on a stretch of track. A short distance further, that track spiraled upwards like a ten-level parking garage in the corner until it reached the top of the walls surrounding the temple complex.

Upon gaining the top of the wall, the cars would travel walltop until they reached Skuld's Trees in the southeast corner of the temple complex. From there, they would make a dramatic leap into the trees, landing on a series of ramped descent slopes until they reached the ground. Looping through the trees, the trackway shifted direction towards the repair garage. Once inside the repair garage, the drivers would have to negotiate even more severe moving obstacles...finishing with a ramped jump through a moving bicycle wheel at the doorway to the garage. From the repair garage, the racecourse traveled back south to the gazebo...then circling the gazebo in an extremely complex set of turns, the car would travel back to the temple house.

That was just one complete lap. The race would have ten laps.

Skuld had installed microcams on each car, so that the drivers could control their cars once they were out of the line of sight.

Keiichi and the others were in "Skuld Labs", looked over the holoCAD layout analysis floating in mid-air, displayed on her Holophotic Videmeotron. From any angle, the slotcar racecourse looked...impossible.

"Lokii, whoever he is, sure can design a difficult course. An _insanely_ difficult course!" Keiichi had to admit to himself. Since Belldandy informed Keiichi that Lokii was the head of the office of the Deliberate Chaos Ministry, he had expected the God to design a slotcar racecourse truly worthy of his title. As he watched the floating hologram, Keiichi knew that Lokii's course had far exceeded his own imaginative capacities to design a treacherous race course.

Observing its intricate weaves and effects, he was reminded of a show he once saw as a kid, where someone was trying to set a world record for the longest stretch of dominos knocked over by one push. There were several million black tile dominoes, laid out in an exceedingly intricate pattern. This racetrack made that pattern look simple by comparison. Keiichi wasn't even sure that he could complete one lap, let alone ten.

All he could do was marvel at the design of the course while Skuld familiarized him with the remote controls of his car.

"Pay attention, this is important! Don't you wanna win?" Skuld said, grabbing his ear with a pinch for good measure.

"Why is _everybody_ pinching my ear?" Keiichi asked exasperatedly.

The control had a fingerwheel for steering; he would use his index finger by inserting it into a hole in the disc, thus steering the car with circular motions of his finger. His other thumb would control the accelerator pad on the console. The console possessed a mini version of Skuld's Holophotic Videmeotron videoscreen, almost windshield-sized. In fact, she explained that this would almost precisely emulate the view out the windshield, rear or either side of a car. There were a variety of controls for other functions, such as braking and gearshifting. She had decided on using a physical vidscreens instead of putting Keiichi in a 'virtual holographic car' because Tyyr would have an advantage if they used a full sim of his vehicle; his WarGod-honed reflexes needed to be limited as much as possible. The more primitive the representation/simulation technology, the more he would have to rely on a mortal-equivalent sensorium, such as line-of-sight vision and acoustic cues. Skuld wanted to level the playing field as much as possible so that Tyyr would have to run the race using near-mortal skills.

Keiichi was relieved that Skuld had designed the console...it was pretty straightforward. Probably the only straightforward thing in this whole mess.

"Can I see my car?" he asked.

"Of course, silly! It's really cool! I spent a lot of time designing it!" Skuld bragged. Keiichi let_ that _one slide...Skuld had only had a day to whip up the cars for the race. She showed him his slotcar, roughly double the size of the Tyco industry standard. As usual, she was stroking it with sensual grace...just like she always did with her mechas.

He had to agree, the little slotcar was really cool in a Speed Racer sort of way. For once, Skuld had made something that didn't bristle with mecha wingdings. The car was simple and curvingly aerodynamic. Keiichi craned his head to take a closer look...and felt his heart soft touched by what he saw. On the hood, Skuld had painted the letters for N.I.T. Then she showed him the sides of her car. Resting in the palm of her petite hand, the car had delicately painted hearts with lettering on each door: "Keiichi" on the driver's side and "Belldandy" on the passenger's side.

Keiichi patted her head in appreciation...she had obviously painted the names on the small car _by hand_ with painstaking care, since her higher-level Goddess powers were revoked. Skuld's wordless expression of thanks swam in the dark brown irises of her eyes as she smiled shyly at him. Once more, he was reminded of the complex mix of personalities Bell's little sister possessed. One moment, she was being flippant against Tyyr...the next, she was being shy in the face of his praise.

"Oh...that's so _cuuute_!" Belldandy said as she saw the little racer in Skuld's palm.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

All parties agreed that the race would begin tomorrow morning. Thus, Belldandy had the daunting task of hosting her parents, plus Tyyr and his parents. She didn't mind the extra work, and in fact cooked up an incredible repast of Earthrealm culinary delights for everyone. She secretly thrilled at the opportunity; in this way, she was flaunting herself in front of Mother.

"Unlike Mother, I don't mind getting my hands dirty by cooking for others. If you only knew how it pleases me to bring such pleasure to others, my dear Mother," Belldandy thought as she set out the serving trays.

There were three tables: one for Tyyr and his parents, another for Belldandy and her family, and a third one for Keiichi, Megumi, Genji and Tomohisa. Belldandy had prepared a cuisine blending all the cultures of the Earth...

It was absolutely indescribable!

Keiichi felt proud of his girlfriend...especially at how diplomatic and considerate she was being under the circumstances. He glanced over at Tyyr.

"You don't deserve to be eating anything Bell-chan has cooked, you thug!" he thought with disgust. The sight of the three sisters and their parents eating together as a family kept waxing strange on his mind. Keiichi once more fought with himself to keep from staring...there was just so much _power_ at that table. Several times, despite his wheelchair-bound state, he made it a point to serve the family beverages...hoping to impress Bell's mother.

"This is so weird...her mother doesn't like me...and my mother _adores_ Bell-chan. My dad can't stand her, but Bell's father seems to like me. It's so _opposite_! 'So contrary', as Bell-chan would say," Keiichi ruminated as he sat back down to eat. He had a briefly humorous thought about bringing the two sets of parents together...

It was then that Megumi filled him in on what had happened between Peorth and Cevn when the fourth Goddess arrived. Keiichi felt a sickening sensation in his heart...sensing the shock that must have jolted Cevn towards his present state of imbecility. Worried about Urd as well, he shot an angry glance at Peorth, who didn't seem to understand the source of his sudden ire. But he had much more important things on his mind than his friend Cevn. The race tomorrow would be decisive, to say the least.

_Everything_ depended on the outcome of that race!

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Keiichi got up really early, and did his pre-race mental exercises. Darting his eyes about his room, he would dart a glance at a bookshelf and try to memorize the title on the binder of the book second from the end. Then he would look back and see if he got it right. This 'blink of the eye' rigor tested his reflexive visual acuity. Then he would stare out through his window and try to mentally slow down and then speed up his perception of the moving branches of the tree. After this, he performed a number of exercises to test his eye-hand coordination.

Bell's parents had slept in the sister's bedroom...which was no doubt crowded. Keiichi wheeled out of his bedroom, then down the hall to the bathroom. Getting undressed, he put the plastic bags on both of his leg casts. There was a light knocking on the door.

"Keiichi, can I come in?" Belldandy whispered as she opened the door just a crack. She came in, wearing a silver and pink cloud design bathrobe. She put her finger up to her lips and hushed him. She was carrying a few roses that she had been keeping in her room. Setting them down on the rim of the bathtub, she smiled a special smile at him. Keiichi's eyes grew wide as she casually untied the belt to her bathrobe and let it slide off of her shoulders.

Belldandy watched as Keiichi's expression changed from surprise to softness as she stepped out of her bathrobe. She knew the effect that her body had upon him...and she knew that they hadn't made love for a very long time...ever since Supertyphoon Akira. Ever since his injuries.

"Keiichi...in the four years that I've known you...I've never even washed your back _once_," she said in a delicate whisper. "I would love to make love with you, but that'll have to wait until your legs are healed. S..so I want to make love to you with my hands," she whispered in his ear. His reaction thrilled her...his fear struggled with desire and vibrant affection. She gently slid her fingers up and down his back, rubbing his soft skin sensuously with her fingertips...relaxing him. Keiichi seemed almost afraid of her touch...as if he felt guilty in some way.

"Bell-chan...your _Father_ is here, in this house. W..what if he catches u...mph?" Belldandy cut off his question, sealing his lips hungrily with a deep passionate kiss. She reached over and grabbed a sponge from a nearby shelf and dipped it into the warm rose-scented bathwater.

"No...more...questions," she said softly as she wrung the sponge out over his back, sending hot streamlets of water down his backbone. She kissed the nape of his neck, feeling the shivers as she rested her breasts lightly on his back. The electricity of pressing herself up against his back in this new way made her wonder if _she _was shivering even more than he was.

Belldandy _wanted_ Keiichi, more now than ever before. She had hoped that they would spend their fourth anniversary together, doing something very special. But now, all she had was this moment. She wanted time to slow to a standstill, so that her whole universe was just she and Keiichi. She soaped his back and then rinsed it with soft strokes of the sponge and her hand. Then she brushed his back lightly with the ends of her hair, tickling him. Keiichi giggled as she feathertouched his shoulder blades...then she hugged him tightly from behind, resting her chin in the cuff of his shoulder.

"She's making love to me..._without_ making love to me!" he thought in amazement as Bell's 'spiritual acupressure/massage' was totally bringing him into tranquil bliss. He looked up at her with his eyes winging appreciation.

Belldandy felt their breathing synchronize; both of them lightly exhaling shallow breaths. She thought that...at this moment, if she were to lose Keiichi...then she would be miserable forever.

She helped him into the bathtub, making sure that his casts were sealed away in their protective bags. Then she stepped into the deep tub, facing him. She felt Keiichi gently pull her into his arms...and then he held her protectively as she kissed rings on his neck.

They remained, slowly rocking each other in the balmy waters of the bathtub, surrounded by Bell's roses and poppouri. Keiichi wanted this moment to last a lifetime...and he knew that Belldandy wished it too. He was starting to worry about today's race when he felt a kiss on his ear.

"Happy anniversary, honey!" she whispered in his ear, and then held him chose as his body shook against hers with joy.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Urd noticed that her sister was gone, so she put herself on sentry duty, so to speak. She looked down the hall to the bathroom, noticing that Keiichi's shoji door was ajar...he had failed to close it after wheeling out of his room. Urd smiled to herself; she _knew_ where her younger sister was.

"You just take your time in there, Belldandy," she whispered to herself. A short time later, Mother was awake. Gripped by an instant's paranoia, Urd deftly engaged her in the one topic that Mom could rattle on about forever...Yggdrasilian manners and fashions.

"A small sacrifice to make for my sister's happiness," Urd thought as Mother droned on about trivialities.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Belldandy emerged from the bathroom after helping Keiichi into his N.I.T. t-shirt...the one with cherry blossom designs that had thrown Urd for a loop a few years ago. She walked up the hallway, startling a little as she heard Mother's voice locked in deep ramblings with her sister Urd. Opening up the door, she heard Father's familiar snoring. Urd looked up at her and winked...and Belldandy instantly knew that her older sister was covering for her.

Urd saw Keiichi's t-shirt...and thought of the missing one. The one who was mutely despairing in his room.

Belldandy smiled to assure her sister, noticing that she was briefly upset. Then she repaired to the kitchen to fix a massive breakfast, not wanting to be around either Mother or Tyyr. She felt a glow inside of her as she hummed to herself while she mixed the sweetdough blueberry muffins.

"Keiichiiiii," she thought pleasantly.

Belldandy's insistence that Cevn was all right didn't suffice for Urd. After breakfast, she sought refuge the only way she knew how. It was bad enough that her boyfriend had emotionally barricaded himself away from everyone...but Urd was much more concerned about her sister's future happiness. It all came down to today. Pouring herself another draught, Urd almost choked on her sake when she saw Belldandy emerge from their bedroom.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Belldandy was dressed neck to toes in a black leather catsuit, emblazoned with "N.I.T." up one leg and Keiichi's name across her chest!

It was snugger than snug, tighter than tight...in fact, Urd's eyes were almost fooled into thinking that her younger sister had simply sprayed black paint on her body. Belldandy looked at her with a sheepish expression, seemingly looking for her approval.

"Belldandy, it seems that your taste in fashion is finally catching up with your age. Why, you're finally dressing like an adult Goddess," Peorth commented as she emerged from the sunroom.

"Yeah...it's almost caught up with _me_, Bell," Urd quipped as she floated around Bell's form, surveying her with approving nods.

"Hmmm, it almost seems like you're trying to dress _sexy_ for Keiichi! I _never_ thought I'd see the day when you would try to dress like me. Yet...it doesn't quite become you...you still have that innocent face," she said as she lightly grabbed one of Belldandy's rosy cheeks, reminding her who the eldest sister was.

Watching Urd and Belldandy, Peorth knew that her time here was finished...she should have returned to the Goddess Relief Office the moment Belldandy was safe and sound back on Earthrealm. But she knew that she had to stick it out...if anything, she wanted to see that her sacrifice had been in not been in vain. Also, Belldandy had confided in her that all three sisters had _no_ powers, except for Urd's very slight Earth Spirit Grade powers. Hearing this, Peorth decided to stay...just in case Tyyr or Lokii or Freiija decided upon foul play. She knew that her powers weren't a match for any of them...but still she wanted to be present, especially if her presence meant security for Keiichi.

"B..Belldandy," was all that Keiichi could say. He had _never_ seen her in an overtly sexy outfit. She had always dressed 'soft' or 'hard'...but never sexy. This outfit...it was like something the manga Catwoman would wear. Or in that Avengers movie that came out years ago. Or last year's Oni sequel computer game.

She looked so...wonderful.

"That'll really irk Tyyr off...seeing _my_ name across her chest!" he thought with a brief flash of glee after he caught his breath.

He examined the console clamped on to his wheelchair, then tapped it to see if it was securely fastened.

"Once more, my fate is being decided by a race," he thought wearily as Tyyr emerged from the house. They would race from side-by-side positions underneath the canopied front entrance. Despite the month that had passed since Akira, the temple grounds still exhibited many telltale signs of destruction. The trees looked sterile in the cool November air, bereft of any foliage...several of them stripped of limb and branch. The compound wall was still cracked, chipped and broken in many places. Skuld had restored the koi pond to its previous graceful condition; miraculously, none of the koi had been killed by the storm. The two garages still were missing numerous rooftiles. All of this could have been repaired in a flash if Bell-chan had her powers back.

Odeyn and Lokii jointly explained the rules of the competition. No cheating, no magical or arcane interference, no direct technological subterfuge, and no killing...at least until the competition was concluded. In addition, neither opponent could touch the other's console. To do so would result in instant disqualification. Next, they listed various and sundry subclauses to the rules, then confirmed that Belldandy's omiai would determined by the results of this race.

Keiichi almost felt nauseous as he realized on some deep level that he was competing with Tyyr...and Belldandy was the prize. It seemed barbaric to his sensitivities. Yet, there were many things about the Gods that were very henda…very weird. No matter how often Belldandy tried to explain things to him, his head would swim in confusion. It just didn't make sense: the omiai, this competition, Belldandy being betrothed to a goon like Tyyr...

"What about the Almighty and the Ultimate Force? Aren't they supposed to prevent us from being separated?" he wondered as Belldandy gave him a good-luck kiss...just like she had done so often during his races at N.I.T.

He wheeled his chair down the wooden deck that surrounded the temple; his approach heralded by the few extra creaks which remained as a legacy to the fury of Supertyphoon Akira. Positioning his wheelchair next to Tyyr, who was sitting on the ledge of the wooden gallery, he tested all the controls for a last time.

"Grrrrrrr..." he heard in his ears. He thought he was hallucinating, until he noticed that Tyyr was actually _growling_ at him through gritted teeth, trying to look and sound as menacing as possible. Keiichi looked at his competitor...Tyyr's eyes were as red as his thick brown-red eyebrows. His bladed 'hand' on his mechanical arm was replaced by a steel hand which looked like a metal glove.

Lokii waved an arm to get everybody's attention, and then carefully set both cars side-by-side on the track.

"What do I do now?" he asked.

"I think the correct words are: ready...set...Go!" Friijda said. Whereupon Tyyr floored the accelerator to his little slotcar and shot down the track with a burst of speed.

"They had that _planned_!" Keiichi thought with a mix of panic and disgust. He had been expecting a real startup call by Lokii, but instead they had cheated and Tyyr started off as soon as Lokii's wife said "Go!" He started his car, already meters behind his rival's slotcar.

Tyyr's mocking laughter crawled under his skin.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Well, that's par for the course for Lokii and his wife," Odeyn commented to his wife, noticing how they had twisted the startup of the race to their own ends.

"That's just fine by me...I hope Tyyr _wins_! Anything they do to help him is very much appreciated by me!" Freiija said.

"Wife of mine, aren't you ill-considering the one whose feelings are paramount in this matter...our middle daughter Belldandy's?"

"B'dandy should know better than to pretend to be in love with a mortal..." she commented.

"But dear? If our daughter is in love, why should we try and stand in the way of it? You've seen how she looks at this Keiichi mortal...it's obvious that she has _deep_ feelings for him," he argued.

"That's the point. She can have deep feelings for him, husband. But he's only a mortal. How can _he_ have deep feelings for her...feelings that even come close to what our daughter feels? He's little more than a terrestrial animal. They have feelings too...but you don't see any of the mortals marrying their pet dogs and cats, do you?"

"That's not the point, Freiija! Mortals...are much nearer to us on the spiritual evolutionary scale then their Earthrealm animal kingdom is to them. Besides, how can you explain the fact that our daughter...loves him so? If he couldn't reciprocate her feelings, how could she be so attracted to him?"

"I think the question is _why_ would she care for him?" Freiija asked. "You know Belldandy. She always has been the sensible one...the only one of our girls who isn't rambunctious in some way. It's in her nature to be kind and generous. Just like her mother." Odeyn scowled at the irony of her statement. His wife was being anything but kind and generous in _this_ concern!

"If she takes after you, then why don't _you_ practice some generosity and call off this insane omiai, dear?" he said coldly.

"NO!" Freiija said, stamping her foot on the ground to accent her response. "That would doom my daughter to a life of drudgery, chained to that mortal..._boy_."

"If he was a boy...I daresay that he wouldn't be standing up to Tyyr the way he has been."

"He's doing so because he's reckless," Freiija commented.

Odeyn decided to attempt another tact.

"Hmmm... Doesn't that...recklessness...remind you of a certain someone _you_ fell in love with...a few hundred thousand years ago?" he said, trying to bring the argument to her heart. One thing he had learned in the ten millennia he was Marshall of the WarGods was when to bring on the heavy ammuntion.

Freiija looked at her husband with a wide-eyed expression...then smiled inwardly at the memory. She reached over and hooked her slender arm through his stocky left arm and leaned against his shoulder. Then she looked at how intently the young mortal was trying at the race...trying to win the hand of her daughter. She reluctantly had to concede that there was a grain of truth in her husband's words. Looking at Keiichi, she saw a faint echo of the young Odeyn who had stolen her heart with his intense passion and determination.

"Could Belldandy feel the same attraction to this mortal...that I felt when I fell in love with Odeyn?" she asked herself.

"Maybe...just maybe I've been too hard on our B'dandy. Maybe you're right, dear husband," she whispered in his ear.

Urd watched as her parents seemed to be lost in a moment of romantic whimsy...the first display of true affection they had shared since they arrived two days ago.

"What is going on with Father and Mother?" she said in a low voice, elbowing Belldandy to get her attention. When Bell didn't respond, she turned to look at her. Her sister was engrossed in the race.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Keiichi felt like his sensorium was going into warped space. In the most random of wild dreams, he would have never imagined his temple compound becoming a racetrack. Yet, there on Skuld's holovid display, he had a ground's eye view of their home and its environs. His parked motorbike looked like a skyscraper as he drove past it; it loomed large and then towered over the racetrack, casting a long shadow that reminded him of the buildings in Sunshine City, in Tokyo. For some reason, the miniaturized perspective led him to imagine himself as a scurrying mouse; rapidly traveling the temple environs low to the ground.

Blades of grass loomed almost as large as his slotcar as he negotiated a series of weaving banked tight turns. This was the _ultimate_ Hot Wheels racetrack, only with slotcars! The course curved right, then left with a fast snap of horizon.

Tyyr's car was way out in front of his as he approached the vehicle garage.

The scale of the cars and their speed had resulted in an almost vertigo-inducing perspective that Keiichi fought hard to control. According to the speedometer on the console, his car was traveling at a scale equivalent of over 650kph! The usual blurring of nearby objects when he raced in high-speed situations in life-sized vehicles was accented into a dizzying blur of almost everything in sight. The track seemed to rear up its black plastic mass..._rushing towards him_, instead of the other way around.

"I hope I can get acclimated to this kind of speed real soon!" he worried as more landmarks of his temple environs fuzzflashed by him.

Once inside of the garage, his view became more disoriented, as several different-colored strobe lights activated. Ahead were a number of large tools: pipewrenches, large socket wrenches, hammers and the like. All had been suspended from the ceiling by long strings or wires. They swung slowly across the racetrack, almost skimming it.

"Do I stop and go, or chance it?" Keiichi wondered to himself. He reached within his heart with a reflexive eye...looking...looking...

He slowed down, then timed the open corridor...and gunned it. His little car sped through the hazards, which appeared as swinging building-sized objects in Keiichi's holographic 'windshield'

"Whoooa," he said as his car snagged the slot in the track and powered up the ramping track and out the window.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --


	33. Pt 33: Concourses

**Part 33: Concourses**

"This time, I'm going to get it _right_!" a snarling voice echoed off the bloodwalls.

Illuminated by a hyacinth-hued light, Mara watched her silhouette while she carefully traced the contours of the mandala that illustrated the middle of her lair. She had set aside the extra-large central room for this purpose. Blood was filigreeing a series of carved lines, circles and intricate designs.

"Why does this summoning mandala have to be so blessed _big_? And why aren't I allowed to use lasers?" Mara continued to complain about the summoning mandala 'recipe' as she dipped the catheter straw into another pitcher of blood and extracted a few more drops, and then carefully deposited them within the concave groove of a carved concentric circle near the edge of the patterned yantra. She had spent the better part of the last month carving the designs into the nanonium slab...

Creating the stain of Evil was like scaling a wall of banalities with a siege rampart filled with inane speculations. Even Mara was beginning to relinquish the confidence that this summoning would _work_.

"If _this_ doesn't achieve the intended result...then I give up!" she muttered. The summoning formulae from the Demon's Book indicated that the mandala surface itself had to possess sufficient Evil in order to accent the workings of the incisements that comprised the Ultimate Demon mandala. Mara had tried several times on differing surfaces: aluminum and concrete from various Earthrealm war zones, even a whale's finbone that she brought all the way back from Okinawa. Each time, after straining to carve out the mandala and fill it with blood...none of them worked. Her discomfiture became more excessive by degrees. After these abortive attempts, she was lodged with the task of undoing: siphoning all the blood back out of the engravings. This delicate work added maldeification to the wounding of her failures.

Finally, in a flash of devilish insight, she hit on an idea...a way to forge a material that would be _much_ more evil than any of the others. She had been looking towards the mortals as a source for the evil-filled material she needed; now she realized that all the bane and strife from this admittedly corrupt and evil sentient species wouldn't suffice. She needed something that was much more evil. Ultimate evil, for an ultimate Demon. A basin for the summoning mandala that would be malignant with hate and dire aggrievment to a degree that would transcend anything this stupid mortal planet could offer. An excess of evil the likes of which has never been witnessed by mortal minds, so much so that agony would pour out of it like beads of water upon a frozen metal thermos cast into an oven.

Mara built a nanite evolvement chamber and replicated several trillion of the microscopic cyborgnetic lifeforms. By design, each one was gifted with a graceful, benign sentience. After they filled the chamber to saturation, she allowed them continue to reproduce...into a Mephistophelean quandary. There just wasn't enough room for them to expand; so the nanites fought wars and killed each other. Because living space was now a precious commodity, it didn't suffice for them to simply kill each other...they had to dispose of the remains _somehow_. So they killed and cannibalized their fellows. Crowded unbearably, drowning in their waste...they continued to suffer in this hellbane environment for an entire week. Then Mara used the gravity generator to increase the G forces in the chamber a hundredfold, crushing the surviving nanites into a slab barely half an inch thick.

The very slab she was carving upon. It possessed the psychic deathscreams of over 5 trillion living Souls. It was the equivalent of destroying the lifeforce of a thousand Earthrealms. Add to that a few pints of blood collected from an Earthrealm mortal with pseudo-Demonic properties...

"If this isn't the embastardized presence of _evil itself_, then I don't know what is..." Mara said to herself as she precisely carved another Demonic symbol on the smooth plane of crushed micromachine beings.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Keiichi was driving his slotcar within the vehicle garage, the graypitch track running underneath his life-sized motorcycle and sidecar, now rendered mountainous in scale. By digression, the sight of his bike brought to mind how ironic it was that several counties like the USA manufactured sidecars for motorcycles, despite the fact their laws prohibited human passengers to ride in them. If Belldandy would have been standing next to his motorcycle, she would have looked as tall as Japan Tower from his ground level perspective.

Rounding a curve, he tensed himself. Now it was time to jump through the turning bicycle wheel again. This was just one road hazard among many that cooled Keiichi's racing blood considerably. Make a mistake of 1/10th of a second, and his car would rebound off the turning spokes of the tire, crashing off the track.

Race finished. Game over. Bell-chan gone forever.

Tyyr was still ahead of him by several car lengths, to his amazement. Keiichi watched, hoping his WarGod opponent would make a mishap when his slotcar rushed towards the spinning wheel. Deep disappointment followed as he saw his opponent's car complete the jump. But when his car approached, the spinning wheel seemed to _speed up_ on its own!

The spokes began to mesh and emblur...

"Someone's cheating!" Keiichi yelled as he gunned the accelerator of the slot car on his console, his wheelchair rocking as he desperately tried to control his car. With driving logic, he knew that he had to floor the car...and chance it. A fast-moving slotcar had better odds of making it through the spinning spokes than a slower car.

In the floating holovid screen, he saw the rapidly spinning spokes of the wheel pass by with snapshot immediacy.

He was through!

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Urd was feeling urgently unrestful...she couldn't just _sit_ on the porch with the rest of the others! This race was too important! After the first lap, the suspense was grating on her nerves like massive broken fingernails screeching on a chalkboard. She knew that the envelope of tension wasn't hers alone; her Little Sister was pacestomping anxiously back and forth on the wooden planking of the gallery that surrounded their temple home.

Soon, Urd and Skuld were accompanying the racers as they traveled around the temple environs. Stalking alongside the racers, they monitored the racecars and the track conditions. The two sisters followed the two slotcars into the vehicle garage, keeping an eagle eye on Keiichi's racer. Skuld held her breath as Keiichi's racer sped up and approached the wheel.

"What the hell is happening here?" Urd shouted as she saw the wheel accelerate its rotation as Keiichi's car approached it.

With a sigh, Urd realized that he was safe...despite Lokii's underhanded handiwork. It was a good thing she was watching things in the garage; now she could report this to the others.

"Somebody's _cheating_!" Skuld shouted with poignant disgust. She sprinted as fast as her legs could carry her back to the house to address her suspicions to the other Gods and Goddesses...who promptly ignored her.

Except for her father, Odeyn.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

The mini-billboard said "10", the final lap. Keiichi and Tyyr had traded leads several times. Keiichi had always raced _with_ the Gods, but never _against_ one of them. Belldandy and the others had always remained steadfastly on his side, abetting his success through inspiration...with the exception of Skuld's earlier efforts to affront any victories on his part. But now, the youngest Norn was as much a cheerleader as Urd and Bell-chan. Despite the tension, Skuld was acting the part of the Goddess of Future Kawaiiness.

But Tyyr simply possessed a God-like legion of refluences, which gained him an insurmountable edge in racing over Keiichi.

On the ascending straightway along the temple wall, Keiichi recalled the previous lap, with its one hilarious moment...at the time, a much-needed reprieve from the formidable challenges of the race...

_...Inside the vehicle garage, Keiichi once more had to face the obstacle of the spinning bicycle wheel. Once more, it spun faster as he approached. That time, he didn't make it through. His car bounced off the spinning bicycle spokes..._

_He felt his heart ascend into his Adam's apple as the holovid showed a haphazard splishsplash of images as his car was thrown in the air, apparently spinning end-over-end. Urd and Skuld loomed closer in his holovid as his car headed straight towards them. Towards Urd's chest._

_Keiichi watched in amazement as his slotcar stuck Urd in the bosom, bouncing off one of her..._

_He gasped as his holovid once more spun dizzily; his car rebounding from its impact with Urd...and somehow, his car alighted miraculously on the slotcar racetrack near the window, guide-pin miraculously in his lane's slot groove. Blinking back his shock, he saw that his car was at a standstill, sideways on the racetrack. He switched his holovid view to reverse...and saw a scowling Urd adjusting her tight-across-the-chest fallwear blouse, glaring at his car. Skuld was pointing at her older sister, consumed with side-splitting laughter. It was a good thing that Urd wasn't wearing a sweater...or his car wouldn't have had enough -_bounce_-__..._

As if it had a life of its own to protect from the now-wrathful Goddess, the little car did a 180 and the contact leads grabbed the track. It accelerated up the ramp and out the window in a flash. A few minutes later, Urd showed up in person, red-faced. Skuld was right behind her, hands on knees gasping...

"Skuld-sama must be winded from laughing," Keiichi guessed. "Well, it _was_ pretty funny!" he thought with a chuckle. He looked away from his holovid 'windshield' for a second.

"Thanks for your…uhm…assist back there, Urd," he acknowledged. Keiichi caught a glimpse of Urd's face turning even redder, then he returned his attention to the race with a grin; Skuld's girlish laughter resounding all over the porch...

Thank Goddess for comic breaks! Keiichi giggled at the memory of one of Urd's breasts providing a trampoline for his slot car. The briefly humorous event had come at an opportune time. It was so crazy and random...it was just the thing he needed to 'reset' his nerves so he wasn't over-invested in trying to control everything in the race. Being a racecar driver was mentally taxing; in order to deal with the sheer stress of having to be hypervigilant, concentrating on _everything_ around him...Keiichi had developed a little mind-game to keep him on his edge. Experience had taught him that it was counter-productive to become too absorbed in the race...so he had to distract himself with other things in order to keep a 'fresh' orientation towards the rigors of contending with the race. Paradoxical, but it _worked_.

Throughout the race, he engaged his imaginative faculties in pleasant fantasy...like he and Bell-chan vacationing in New Zealand. Other times, his mental 'degausser' manifested itself by engaging in humor...like cracking jokes in his head or remembering absurd incidents. Like that time right after Skuld had first come to Earth...

_...Skuld was still unaccustomed to eating mortal food, so during mealtime, she poured hot chili powder over her udon and stirred it in with her fingers. Keiichi warned her not to rub her eyes...and for some reason, Skuld rubbed her eyes to spite him...resulting in a torrent of tears. It wasn't –_that-_ funny, but this was back when Skuld _-hated-_ Keiichi with a passion. Keiichi had to admit that he found it quite amusing at the time.._.

But in this case, the little incident with Urd in the garage provided sufficient a mental remedy to the rigors of racing. Keiichi didn't know which was funnier...Urd's embarrassment or Skuld's perky amusement at her older sister's expense...

His mind returning to the present moment, Keiichi realized that he had given it his all...but right now, Tyyr was in first place and gaining. It seemed that whenever Tyyr was ahead, the track would _alter_ itself in some way to protect his lead. Corners would bank at a reduced grade, slowing Keiichi's slotcar down. Obstacles would pause or slow down. Straightaways would lengthen. Ramps would become steeper. He had half-heard Skuld's complaints about cheating...but all the Gods and Goddesses seemed ignore her entreaties except Odeyn. But even Odeyn wasn't paying too much attention to his youngest daughter.

"Lokii's manipulation of events must be incredibly subtle! No one has noticed except Skuld and Urd...and me, of course," he mused, wondering why the other Gods didn't observe the fraudulent circumstances. On the holovid screen, his car was topping the long ramp that ascended alongside the temple walls. The winds had picked up a little, and the black slotcar track was wavering like a drunken rope atop the wall. Keiichi was too engrossed in driving to notice that Tyyr had stood up and was walking towards him.

He heard Belldandy and Skuld gasp loudly behind him.

"What _now_?" he thought irritably. Out of the corner of his eye, his peripheral vision caught an image of the WarGod standing up next to him.

Belldandy blanched as Tyyr reached down and gripped the right wheel of Keiichi's wheelchair. Lifting it high off the ground with one arm, he upended it, sending Keiichi crashing to the deck.

"HA HA HA HEH HAH!" the giant WarGod boomed with vile laughter as Keiichi sprawled out of his wheelchair, his console thumping loudly on the wooden gallery.

"That's not fair, you..._bastard_!" Peorth screamed as Keiichi yelled razorsharp with pain, fighting to hang on his console when instinct pushed to grab both legs in pain.

"I'm sick of this stupid mortal race! The Rules said I couldn't touch his console, but they didn't say anything about touching _him_ once the outcome has been decided! It is now impossible for him to catch up, and I'm not going to wait until this ridiculous contest is finished to pay him my intents," Tyyr said as he pressed several buttons in sequence on his driving console.

"Now, thanks to your little autopilot setting on this device you call 'slot car', I'm going to win this idiotic challenge. But first, I'm going to beat him into a bloody pulp for distracting the attention of my future wife. And especially for insulting me!" the WarGod announced in a voice filled with terrible threat.

Belldandy tried to scream for help, but her throat was constricted by the horrible sight. Keiichi was on his back, trying to crawl away from Tyyr, clutching his holovid/driving console to keep it from being damaged.

Keiichi turned his attention away from his holovid as the giant WarGod cocked an arm as thick as one of his thighs in a backwards motion, the hand gnarled up in a tight fist. The fist moved towards his face, lightning fast...and Keiichi saw his life flash before his eyes as he reflexively held the driving console up as a shield.

"NO YOU'RE NOT!" a feminine voice that sounded like a hundred shouts blasted his ears. He looked up after flinching to see Tyyr suddenly jerked out of his line of sight in mid-punch in a blur of brown and black.

As if from nowhere, Peorth had hurled herself at Tyyr, knocking him over with her slender body before he could throw that fatal punch. In response, Tyyr gained his feet and grabbed her by the shoulders and neck. Lifting her off the ground in a chokehold, he grinned sadistically as he began to strangle her until she was gasping for breath, eyes rolling back...and then he expertly threw her like a limp rag doll _through_ the wall into the living room.

"HELLLLP!"

Tyyr's vicious mistreatment of a fellow Goddess broke her out of her daze, and Belldandy's voice found her mouth with a scream as Tyyr turned his assaultive wrath back to her boyfriend. She was stunned...Tyyr had actually assaulted another Divine and had choked her to near death, just to toy with her! The race wasn't even over and he was already running amok. With a concerned glance, she saw Peorth slumped unconscious against the compound wall. Tyyr had thrown her clear through the house! Why wasn't anybody doing anything?

After a moment of gloating over his expert military throw and the unconscious Goddess at its receiving end, Tyyr turned to advance on Keiichi. He was still trying to crawl away from his wheelchair, desperately clutching his driving console upright as he scampered on the wooden deck.

"No weak little Goddess Relief Office pampered princess...is going to stop me from beating the _shit_ out of you, mortal!" Tyyr threatened with a scowl. Belldandy tried to restrain him, but he brusquely shoved her out of the way. Keiichi noticed that Tyyr had only exerted a minimum of force on Bell, but she was thrown backwards at least 10 meters, colliding hard with Skuld, elbows in her younger sister's face. He heard a gasping "oomph" as Skuld was knocked on her back by Bell.

"DAAAADDDDYYYYYYYY!" Skuld screamed at the top of her lungs in sheer terror soon as soon as she got her breath back.

Tyyr grabbed Keiichi's wheelchair, lifted it up over his head and began squeezing it, compacting it down into a long metal rod-like shape.

"And now, for you..." Tyyr said, grinning sadistically, savoring the moment. The compacted wheelchair jutted sharp metal edges as he held it over his head, ready to strike fatally. Keiichi's eyes flinched uncontrollably with dire fear.

Suddenly, a pair of arms reached around Tyyr's waist, squeezed...and _lifted_ him off the ground.

_"I've had it up to _-here-_ with you! If you're going act like a petulant child, then you need a 'time out',"_ a loud voice shouted angrily. Belldandy watched...filled with emotion, clutching Skuld tightly, worried that the collision with her younger sister had hurt her. Skuld looked like her nose was broken, and a trickle of blood was slipping down her chin from the corner of her mouth. Already, Mother and Urd were sprinting towards she and her sister, their faces rapt with concern.

"Daddy!" Skuld yelled in cheerful triumph...as their father struggle-wrestled with Tyyr.

Odeyn turned to see his daughters...and he saw that his baby girl was hurt, her sister sitting next to her in a daze!

"YOU'RE DONE! THIS ENDS NOW!!" Odeyn roared. Straining with righteous anger, he reached up and around Tyyr's back and shoulders...and then threw him to the ground with an expert flip.

Hard.

The ground shook as the WarGod slammed into the dust...

"You forget who I am, Tyyr! I once was a WarGod Marshall, and now I have a Senior First Class, Unrestricted, Unlimited License! I will tolerate no more disrespect from you towards my family! And I will not let your temper bring more shame upon your parents!" Odeyn said, huffing and puffing with effort as he pinned the struggling younger WarGod to the ground. Despite the fact that Tyyr was at least 300,000 years younger than he, Odeyn continued to bear down on him with a sumo-like persistence. He looked over at Lokii, who simply nodded his head to indicate that he wasn't going to intervene. He asked his Wife with his eyes for permission to continue, and she flashed him a smile as she attended to their youngest, who was scared out of her wits.

"You should consider yourself well-starred that it is me and not my wife who is intervening, Tyyr," Odeyn noted in a low basso voice. Which was truth; his Wife was really pissed off. He recognized the maternal fury in Freiija's eyes as excelling his own anger by leagues.

Belldandy knew that the 'fight' between her Tyyr and Peorth…and now Father and Tyyr… was only a physical representation. The real battle involved huge amounts of arcane power on another plane of existence. Mother was comforting Skuld, but she could sense the rage in her Mother's aura. She was angry herself at this beast-man who had hurt her little sister. Skuld nodded to her to assured her that she was hurt, but okay. Belldandy rushed over to Keiichi to see if he was all right.

Keiichi noticed that she was affrighted; he grinned at her to assure her that things were okay...that he was unhurt.

"Is Skuld okay, Bell-chan?" he asked, forcing a smile.

"Ohhhh Keiichi," she said worriedly, then looked up at her Father and Mother, tears misting her eyes.

"Skuld just got the wind knocked out of her for a moment...she's fine. How are _you_, my love?" she asked.

"I'm okay, Bell-chan. You better check on Peorth, and stick close to your Mother, Urd and Skuld. They're all really upset," he suggested, smiling through grit-toothed pain. Keiichi didn't want Bell to worry about him...and he had to grab the console and return his attention to the race! He hoped that his false cheer could conceal the fact that his right leg was shooting agonizing spikes of pain up past his knee. Belldandy kissed him quickly on the cheek and rushed over to wherever Peorth was.

"Oh God, this hurts..." he said under his breath as he tried to sit upright with the racing console in his lap.

Freiija watched her Husband restraining Tyyr with a series of wrestling moves she hadn't seen since him employ since he was in his youthyears. Her excited mind was impressed with her husband's ready willingness to defend his daughters, to put their welfare first as a Father should...

…and Freiija felt herself go rigid with amazement. The young mortal man-child was gamely fighting back _a lot_ of pain...and when B'dandy asked of his welfare, he not only reassured her with confidences in an effort to allay her fears...but he also asked her to attend to the young GRO Goddess who had borne the brunt of Tyyr's fury… and then insisted that B'dandy focus her concerns on she and her daughters rather than himself. The very idea of it! And yet, he was just a mere mortal! He had put her and her daughter's welfare above his own! He had put B'dandy's feelings and welfare first…

…Just like a husband would.

"Keiichi Morisato, if you survive this challenge, I will give you your chance for my daughter's hand," she pledged wordlessly to herself.

Odeyn had finally managed to pin Tyyr down. The younger WarGod wasn't half as fatigued as he was, but Odeyn had the position of power. He looked back and forth between Tyyr, and Keiichi. It was clear as day that the mortal had comported himself with greater self-control and courage than this oaf! And he didn't miss what he had just told Belldandy, either…setting aside his own difficulties to help her with hers. Something this ox-headed WarGod had completely lost sight of! He liked this Keiichi Morisato. In his mind, Odeyn decided...that if this was the best that humanity offered...then this mortal may have the right stuff to marry his daughter. If this Keiichi could remain steadfast and prove himself through the tests to come…he would finally have a son-in-law that he could be proud of! A taunting voice broke his reflections...

"Heh!! It's too late for you, all of you, heh! My slotcar is locked at its highest speed setting. There's no way you can catch it now!" he shouted mockingly, and he then turned his attention to Odeyn.

"Like it or not, old man...I'm going to _win _this challenge...and your daughter! Grapple with me all you want for now, for you will never have the chance again!" Tyyr railed vaingloriously. With a brief shudder, Odeyn realized that there was nothing he could do if Tyyr won this race.

_Everything_ was in the hands of a young, injured Earthrealm mortal.

Keiichi felt a stabbing despondency in his heart accompanying Tyyr's boastful news. He looked...and sure enough, Tyyr's car remained well ahead of him, despite the fact that his slotcar was racing at its top speed.

This was looking really bad…

"It ain't over until it's over!" he heard Skuld shout shrilly in her girl-woman's voice, surprising the hell out of Belldandy, Urd and Bell's Mother. His heart winced as he saw Skuld's bloodied face...Keiichi wished he could stand up and kick Tyyr in the nuts for what he had done to Skuld!

"Watch _this_, boys and girls!" Skuld announced, limping towards Keiichi's side.

"Banpei-kun?" she summoned. Almost immediately, Banpei whirred around the corner and slid obediently to a stop in front of her. Skuld pressed a sequence of buttons on his chest plate, and then stepped behind him as a panel opened in his back. She reached in and removed a handheld mini-mecha the size of a cellphone. Grinning ear-to-ear, she limped over and handed the mecha to Keiichi.

"Skuld subatomic molar valence accentuator! The Transatomic Kushin Suru Slotcar Booster, Mk. XI!" she announced, her youthful vigor and excitement piercing the shadows of her own path. Skuld's whole head ached, especially her nose and jaw. And her left foot felt funny...like it didn't want to support her weight.

"_Mk. XI?_" Urd exclaimed, shocked by the high version number. She had been drinking steadily all day to try and calm her nerves, and then had heard the ruckus and had rushed over to see that things were in utter chaos. Seeing that Skuld was hurt, she pinned an angry glance on Tyyr, who was pinned to the ground, restrained by her Father. Wishing she had her License and her Goddess powers so she could lay into the bastard while Father had him down, she rushed off to comfort a very upset Skuld. Who now was acting like she'd just saved the day.

Belldandy looked with deep concern at the seriously injured Peorth, then back to her little sister. Rarely did Skuld's mechas pass the Mk. V stage.

"She must have _really_ worked hard on this one!" Belldandy observed to herself, still fuzzy from the shock of Tyyr's attack on her beloved. Peorth was crumpled, her face dazed from Tyyr's choke hold and judo-like throw...she had a disoriented look to her two blackened eyes as Belldandy lightly slapped her on the cheeks to try and bring her around. If Tyyr and Peorth were Earthrealm mortals, what he just did to Peorth was nothing less than attempted murder. But God can't kill God; that was a strictly-enforced Rule.

"Press the red button in the middle and watch what happens. I _promise_ you that it'll really be cool!!" Skuld instructed. Keiichi nodded and pressed the red button...

On the holovid, the graphic representing his slotcar seemed to transform. A pair of spoilers emerged from the rear...and the rear bumper separated in the middle while the rear quarterpanels rounded into a sleek side-fin design, like tiny wings. The front end of the car seemed to flatten even more, making the slotcar much more aerodynamic. Something that looked like a small rocket engine exhaust cone emerged from where the rear bumper was. The tires turned into luminous circles of energy...and the rocket fired a long red sparkling burst.

"Batmobile!! Heeee!" Skuld shouted with glee as Keiichi's slotcar burst forward with speed.

"The reduced molar valance allows for only the minimal necessary physical interaction between the contact leads and electrical strip on the track, as well as the wheels and the racetrack. And the rocket was just ripped out of an old mortal model rocket kit. Something intentionally simple...so that Lokii wouldn't consider it to be suspicious," she explained.

"That's _cheating_!" Tyyr accused angrily, still struggling against Odeyn's grip.

Lokii regarded Odeyn's daughter with an unreadable expression bordering on cool amusement. This challenge had actually resolved into a very intriguing outcome. This little Goddess had bested him because he had failed to fully attend to the old axiom: children can occasionally be more unpredictable than adults. This girl had done something utterly unpredictable…hence, chaotic. She had surprised him, just like Tyyr used to do when he was a whelpling. Unfortunately, his son had unmanned himself once again with his temper. The youngest Goddess was smiling confidently, swinging her mallet casually in front of her like an arcing pendulum. Luckily for Yggdrasil, she wasn't a Demoness. Although this was not the outcome he was seeking, it had been a good diversion. For her self-sacrificing conduct, he decided to spare the Goddess who had intruded on their son's omiai and taunted him. Two black eyes from Tyyr were probably just as injurious as what he planned to exact for her insolence. He favored the young Goddess by allowing her a brief nod and a smile of respect for her cleverness, and then resumed his impassive, ever-vigilant countenance.

"One good cheater deserves another, eh! I bet you guys haven't heard about the Robot Wars, havya? Tell 'em, Megumi!" Skuld said, waving her forward. Megumi stepped out into the circle of Divines and elaborated. This was her moment of glory.

"In the Robot Wars, Skuld and I designed robots with the aim of destroying the most metal barrels. She was ahead, until I captured her robot, rendering it useless. Then she cheated...she blew up her robot and mine! A tie is better than a loss. But in this case...losing is _not_ an option. Oh, and by the way, the model rocket thing was _my_ idea!" She shared a private smile with Skuld--the two of them had been up all night working on this surprise.

Keiichi tore his attention away from his racing console for a split-second to stare at his younger sister with bug-eyed shock, and then returned his attention to his slotcar…which was literally rocketing down the race track.

Megumi raised her hand for a high five and Skuld followed through, stretching to her tiptoes despite the pain in her foot. With an exaggerated flourish, she deliberately missed Megumi's palm...then both girls dissolved into laughter. Belldandy started giggling as she saw the dejected look on Tyyr's face…this was just as funny as her dumping sake over Tyyr's head during that idiotic omiai. She looked at Urd, who was jostling with laughter. She heard more giggling; and to her surprise, even her Mother was tittering with a hand politely covering her mouth.

"I _knew_ you guys would..heehee..be cheating, so that's why the Mk. XI. I had to make _sure_ that you couldn't do anything to prevent my slotcar speed booster. That's why I decided..hahee..to hide the controls in Banpei," Skuld remarked. As he heard his named, Banpei tipped his metallic head to the crowd.

Megumi burst into another round of giggles.

"That's _my_ daughter! That's my little girl! She's just outwitted the head of the Deliberate Chaos Ministry!" Odeyn praised her loudly, every bit the proud father. Skuld halted in mid-giggle and blushed beetroot red at the compliment. Freiija came over and hugged her from behind, using her sleeve to clean up Skuld's bloody chin. Odeyn looked at his wife, and saw maternal pride glowing on her beautiful face.

All heads turned to the track as the checkered banner popped in the air over the finish line. Keiichi's car flashed around the corner then traveled parallel to the driveway towards the house, a tiny red flame coming out its back.

Belldandy stood in the doorway by her sisters and Mother; Peorth woozily propped up against her for support. Peorth's beautiful face was graced by two black eyes and a crooked nose.

Trying to keep from passing out on her feet, Peorth was gifted with the sight of Keiichi's car drawing fast towards the finish line...well ahead of Tyyr's.

Keiichi sighed with relief as he saw the finish line...and sped through it. As he pulled his slotcar to a halt, he remembered one race in particular...a treacherous hillclimb a couple of years back. Sora had got him into that one...

_"I can't lose...because I have a Goddess waiting for me at the top of the hill,"_ he remembered saying then as he hurled past the surmount of the hillclimb. Now...he had a Goddess waiting at the end of his race...to be his wife whenever time cast them in circumstances to get married. This was much more than a race; it was a Rite of Passage.

"YES!!" Keiichi shouted as he thrust a fisted "thumbs up" in the air, his trademark victory gesture.

"Keiichi, you won!!" Belldandy shouted, slumping against Peorth from exhaustion.

_It was finally over._

"Guess that means that you lost, Tyyr!" Odeyn said sharply, releasing his vise-like grip on the WarGod once the race was safely concluded.

"Shit! Damn! Fuck! Sonovabitch! Goddammit! You cheated me out of what was mine!" Tyyr shouted angrily once he had been released. Lokii shook his head in disgust and turned his back to whole wretched drama as his son stomped his feet in anger while waving his arms with flailing motions.

Peorth felt her eyes tear up as acrid feelings of happiness and sorrow broaching her heart's concourses. Keiichi would be Belldandy's. She now knew for sure that she would never have him as a lover or as a Goddess Relief Office case. But as she grasped the hidden depths of Belldandy's angelic smile of relief..._this_ was reward enough for her! She had granted _two_ wishes with one cast...more than good enough for a GRO worker. Her actions today would raise her a level in esteem at the Office in the minds and hearts of her co-workers.

"You _better_ make me a maid-of-honor when you guys get hitched," she whispered into Belldandy's ear with faux threat. Belldandy looked at her with an embarrassed grin, and then recovered herself. There had been _too_ much emphasis on marriage lately...

"_If_ you behave yourself...I might consider it, Peorth," Belldandy replied, faux threatening back.

Peorth grinned at her, and Belldandy noticed that her fellow Goddess was missing a number of teeth. Belldandy said a silent prayer, hoping that the injuries to her face wouldn't be permanent. It reminded her of the outcome of Megumi's "Demon Rally" race...but there was no spell she could cast to undo what Tyyr had done to Peorth's face.

"I really owe you one, Peorth!" she added before rushing over to Keiichi's side. Keiichi was sitting on the edge of the wooden planking, soaked with sweat.

Urd reached over and hugged Skuld as she ran over to her. Once more, her little sis had won the day for them!

Freiija watched her two daughters communing in sisterly affection, feeling maternal love and pride swell up in her heart at the sight. She had always wanted a boy to balance out these three girls. But having _these_ three daughters was a gift. No...it was more than a gift...it was a blessing.

"I can't believe you...you cheated!" she teased Skuld. Lokii walked over to the two sisters, eyeing Skuld. Skuld stepped back warily.

"If you ever want to work for one of the Deliberate Chaos Offices, young lady...there's a job waiting for you when you grow up," he said in a voice filled with compliment, catching everyone off guard.

"No thanks! I'm right where I'm supposed to be!" Skuld said, shaking her head vigorously. Once more, Urd pondered how her youngest sister could be so _mature_ at times; her reply was something she expected Bell or Keiichi or Cevn to say...

"_--THAT'S ENOUGH CELEBRATING FROM YOU!--"_

A pallor of silence ensued as Belldandy, Urd, Skuld and Peorth looked up to see an enraged Tyyr.

"When isn't he being an angry sore loser?" Urd said to herself in exasperation, and then noticed what he had in his hands.

Tyyr was wielding a SoulGun.

A collective gasp cried out from all the Gods and Goddesses at the sight of Tyyr's weapon. Odeyn immediately felt sincere regret that he had released the younger WarGod after the race was concluded.

"Tyyr! That's _illegal_ to have in your possession! Put that away...right now!!" Lokii commanded his son sharply.

"Y..you just shut up, father!" Tyyr said insolently. Lokii and Friijda looked at him with facefallen astonishment at his disrespect.

"Belldandy...what is going on?" Keiichi asked, his voice filled with apprehension at this new development. If the Gods themselves were afraid...

"Keiichi, Tyyr has a SoulGun," she explained in a shaky voice. "They're banned on Yggdrasil...or any other parts of the Multiverse, for that matter. Except in desperate wartime situations... and _only_ with the Almighty's permission. They're the one single weapon that could _kill_ one of us," Urd explained nervously.

"You mean...the Real Death?" Keiichi asked, reluctant to hear the answer. Urd gulped and nodded her head, affirming his worst suspicion.

"All of you...get away from Belldandy," Tyyr commanded, motioning with his gun towards the group. Urd, Skuld, Peorth...and Belldandy looked up at him defiantly.

In response, Keiichi wheeled over to Belldandy and reached his hands upwards. Belldandy gently pulled him up to his feet and reached around his waist to steady him. By touch, she could tell that he was in enormous pain...his face was taunt and pale, his forehead capped with sweat.

"I...I'm not leaving Bell-chan. Not now...not _ever_!" he said through clenched teeth.

"Then you'll die with her, idiot mortal! If I can't have her, _nobody_ can..." Tyyr said as he raised the gun, staring down the barrel at them. This was no longer a matter of winning Belldandy to wife...this was a matter of saving face! He had been _beaten_ by a mortal!

Belldandy gasped as her mother calmly stepped in front of the group, right in Tyyr's line of fire.

"M..Mother! W..what are you doing?" Belldandy said in a quiet voice, astonished once more by her Mother's actions.

"Tyyr...you're an _fucking asshole_! I haven't had cause to swear in 170,000 years, but you have given me leave to speak of the anger in my heart. As far as I'm concerned, I would much rather see my daughter marry this mortal than you. You actually threatened and harmed my daughters! Consider your suit rejected. And if you're going to use that thing, you can use it on me. I've been a total standpattering fool...thinking that it would advantage my daughter to marry the likes of a shithead like you," she stated bitterly, fighting back tears. Belldandy and Urd looked at each other, awestruck by what Mom had said and that she had actually used foul language. The last time she had cursed like that was when Urd had stolen Sleipnir from the Almighty.

Odeyn stepped in front of Belldandy and put an arm around his wife.

"I've decided...that if this mortal should wish my daughter's hand in marriage...he has my permission to prepare a suit for my Wife and I to consider. Especially after today's events! Nothing you can say or do will change this. If you're going to go on a killing rampage, you'll have to go through me to get to my family, Tyyr," he announced, and then he started walking towards the WarGod.

Lokii and Friijda both walked over and stepped in front of Belldandy and Keiichi.

"It's time to put an end to this charade. Any son who raises arms against his parents...should not be called a son," Friijda said in a grim and saddened voice. Belldandy felt an immense sense of sadness for a Mother thus betrayed by her only son.

"For the last time, as your father and as the head of the Deliberate Chaos Ministry...I _demand_ that you lower your weapon, Tyyr!" he commanded.

"N..nuh. No!! If I can't have her..." Tyyr repeated himself like a tapeloop.

Belldandy broke ranks and walked past the group and her Father, walking right up to Tyyr, whose face registered surprise as she approached. Keiichi grabbed on tightly to Urd, scared to death for his girlfriend.

"What is she _doing_?" he whispered to Urd in absolute panic. Urd shook her head quickly, also afraid for her sister. Urd could tell by Bell's stride that her sister was _angry_.

Keiichi and the others watched as Belldandy stopped in front of Tyyr, the SoulGun leveled at her waist. Reaching her hand up quickly, she cracked him as hard as she could across the face with a slap. Turning around without a word, she walked back to the group, relief visible on his face.

"He deserved it," was the only explanation she offered to the group...but a slight smile borne on her face gave away the fact that she _enjoyed_ slapping Tyyr. Keiichi hugged her, expecting the worst.

Tyyr looked irresolute for a moment, glancing at the gun, then back at the assembled group of Divines and mortals. The manic glow in his eyes brightened...to a psychotic glare.

"I'm going to kill you all!" he said as he squeezed the trigger.

--BOOOM--

A blinding flash exploded in front of everyone's eyes...causing their sight to hazeout momentarily. When the dusty froth cleared, Belldandy and Keiichi saw Tyyr laying in a smoldering heap...his beard and eyebrows almost burned off, his clothes in smoky tatters. The SoulGun lay in pieces all over the temple grounds, as if it had exploded in Tyyr's hands.

"_Of course!!"_Keiichi realized. There was one more party to this misadventure, unseen but always actively involved. True enough, there was a message engraved in the ground next to Tyyr's unconscious form. Friijda ran over to her son, worried that he might have been struck dead.

"Thank you Lord, for sparing this miscreant son of mine!" she shouted with arms held upwards in an attitude of praise.

Odeyn read the message burned into the ground:

_"By My will it is thus. Let it be known that Tyyr, son of Lokii and Friijda, has behaved in a grossly inappropriate manner by threatening other Divinities with a stolen lethal weapon. Because of this, and his failure to accept his defeat in the matter of the honorable contest to conclude the omiai, I have deigned to intercede._

_"Tyyr's Military license is hereby revoked. Further, his revocation remains in effect until he can demonstrate an appropriate change of attitude. Given time, he will see the error of his ways and rehabilitate his character so that his parent's faith can be rewarded by his honor and good deeds. To instigate this process, his Marshal status in the WarGod military is summarily reduced. He will be assigned to work closely with the Proctors as the Ethiopsylogic Clinic. His new rank of entrant-Private should go far in teaching him to practice humility while working with others...rather than against them."_

Relieved as she was at the pronouncement of the Lord, Belldandy couldn't help but feel sorrow for Tyyr's parents. This omiai had pushed their son over the edge, bringing shame upon the whole family. But the Lord had said that Tyyr would 'grow up' someday and restore their faith, which meant that there was hope for him.

Keiichi was right...Tyyr _was_ a loose cannon. Belldandy shuddered as she thought how close she came to being _married_ to Tyyr.

Everyone breathed a deep sigh of relief, trying to abandon the climactic near-death groon of the past few minutes. Blessed silence reigned as the significance of Kami-sama's power suffused the air...along with a gently vaying November breeze. Belldandy looked at Peorth; there was no trace of the injuries from Tyyr's assault on her face or body. It was as if she had never been hurt.

Keiichi looked up to see that the sky was a uniform gray as Belldandy helped him into a lawn chair.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"B'dandy dear...I simply _must_ talk to you before we leave," her Mother said. Pulling her by the arm, Mother escorted her over to a place under a thickly branched tree. They sat down on two rocks and Freiija turned to face her daughter with a serious expression, reaching out and grasping Bell's delicate hands in her own.

"Do you _really_ love this...Keiichi mortal?" her Mother asked. Belldandy was almost struck speechless by the nakedness of her question. With an effort, she nodded her head.

"Mmnm. Yes, Mother...I _do_ love him...with all of my heart," she replied.

"Dahling, if that would be the case, so be it. I know that you're young and probably will change your mind ofttimes. For the meantime, Mother will be watching you closely. Much as I'd wish to make you happy...and I must admit that part of me really wants to condone this relationship you have with him...yet, I cannot bring myself to fully accept that my _own daughter_ is in love with a mortal. But...he_ has_ impressed me in some little way. It's no secret that your Father admires him. Perhaps I will too, given time...

"But what I really want to say is this. That I'm sorry. I made a terrible mistake betrothing you to that monster! I hope that when we meet again, it will be under happier circumstances," Freiija finished. Belldandy listened in respectful silence to her mother's confession of bad judgment.

"And I have something to say to you, Mother. You rarely ever considered what I wanted through this whole ordeal. And I..I couldn't tell you. You just..snff..don't listen. I just wish you'd realized..snff..that I _am_ an grown-up, adult Goddess. I'm your daughter...but what I really want is for you to be my Mother...and to be my friend too. Don't ever forget that I love you...but please let this misadventure be a point of departure. A chance to learn...and change.

"Mother, _please_ try to accept Keiichi into your life...he's a good man. For a mortal...he is a shining example of all that's good. He may be subdued and mellow...but that's just because he is sensitive," she said, then waited for her tears to pass.

"You need to let go of me...just a little bit, Mom. For all my faults, I genuinely _do_ want to make you proud. Perhaps you can be proud that I'm participating in the first romantic union...the first _real_ romantic union...between a Divine and an Earthrealm mortal. That's a first! A..and I _know_ that in your heart of hearts, you're probably in approval of it. Don't fight with yourself so much...and don't let those Yggdrasilian society-types cloud your thinking or your heart. Redirect yourself _to_ yourself."

Freiija looked at her daughter, the memories flooding her like a storm. Belldandy being energyborned. Belldandy crying when she fell off a crystal cloud, scraping her elbow. Belldandy fighting with her older sister, Urd. Belldandy becoming sickly for the longest time...and _still_ fighting with Urd. Belldandy being jealous when Skuld was born...jealous because _she_ was no longer the youngest. Belldandy arguing with Odeyn and she with teenaged ardor, arguing about these very same mortals right after they built their first city of Nebbur, some 70,000 Earthrealm years ago at the start of the Wurm Glaciation. Belldandy finishing her Goddess FinalTier Inculcation with highest honors. Belldandy being selected from hundreds of candidates to serve a prestigious posting in the Goddess Relief Office. And recently, Belldandy standing up in front of the assembly at the Well of Urd and debating on behalf of the mortals after their last little global squabble.

And now...her daughter was in love...of her own free will!

"And now..?" she whispered to herself amidst the whirlwind of memories. Now, her daughter was addressing her as an equal...for the first time in her young life. Overwrought with the emotions of millennia of memories, Freiija felt tears streaming down her cheeks as she reached out and hugged her daughter to her.

Mother and daughter cried together...their tears a bridge of birds...a rainbow of understanding...a bonding of equals...

After a long-treasured moment, Freiija looked at her beautiful Belldandy with a misty eyed expression of reluctance.

"Time for us to go. I _love_ you, B'dandy. I need to say goodbye to your sisters...you know how jealous Urd gets," she said, managing a smile.

Watching her Mother float off towards the house, Belldandy was struck by her own happysad tears...and curious about Mother.

"Why was Mom crying?" she wondered to herself.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

After all the good-byes were said and done, Skuld decided to request leave to go back to Yggdrasil and spend some quality time with her parents. Urd was too emotionally spent to tease her when she admitted to a severe case of homesickness. Belldandy had anticipated Skuld's action; after all, she _was_ the youngest.

"This whole ordeal has been a trial for her," Belldandy whispered to Urd, who nodded her head in assent.

"I'll only be gone a couple of weeks," Skuld added as she hugged both her sisters before walking ever to stand by Mom and Dad.

Keiichi watched the three preparing to leave, thanking his heart of hearts that Bell wasn't among them. Unexpectedly, Odeyn stepped out of the Gate circle and walked over to him, extending his hand for a handshake. Keiichi was so riveted by the gesture, he just stared at Bell-chan's Father until Urd elbowed him. He reached his hand out and shook Odeyn's hand. He felt the Elder God squeeze his hand, hard, until it hurt...but he didn't remove his hand and even tried to squeeze back. After a moment, Bell's Dad released his hand and said with a wink, "You've just passed your first test, young Keiichi."

Belldandy watched her Father walk back to Mother and Skuld, feeling a swarm of emotions in her breast as she realized that her Father had just met Keiichi as an _equal_, in the mortal way that men used. She felt Urd lean her chin on her shoulder, her older sister recognizing how special this action by her Father was.

A shaft of light slowly descended and encircled the three. Freiija looked at her noble husband, cupped her hand to his ear and whispered something. Odeyn grinned and nodded his head.

"Try for another what?" Skuld repeated aloud in a question, not hearing all of what her Mother had whispered to Daddy. She looked up to see both of her parents blushing slightly with embarrassed grins. Then her attention was redirected towards the now-visible wind.

"Oh...look! _Yuki!_ Pretty snow!" she said, pointing at the gracefully whirling snowflakes as she vanished.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Mara finished the mandala with ever-increasing anticipation. She had labored day and night with the final arcane symbols...filling them with blood. Backing up to one corner of the room, she marveled at the intricacy of the mandala. It was by far the most complex summoning mandala she had ever made. As a matter of fact, it was the most complex mandala she had ever _seen_, besides those artifices created by the Dark Lord.

"And _I_ did this...all by myself!" she said proudly. Stepping outside of the circle, she collapsed in rapturous exhaustion.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

After seeing Skuld off, Belldandy had a long talk with Peorth, mostly to catch up on events at the GRO. "Grow," as they all nicknamed the Goddess Relief Office. Peorth spent a whole afternoon catching her up on the latest GRO news and the most noted breakthrough wishes.

Then Belldandy confronted Peorth on her aggressive attitude towards human males. It was pretty much moot about how Peorth felt about Keiichi, but Belldandy tried to explain that her 'attack' on Cevn was not only inappropriate...but it had dramatically damaged his fragile psyche.

Peorth listened with a guarded expression as Belldandy tried to justify why Cevn had reacted the way he did. Despite her immense headache resulting from her physical confrontation with Tyyr…for some reason, the Almighty had healed everything but that…Peorth felt her spirits dampen as Belldandy patently described how Cevn was thrust into their lives. With his history of abuse, he definitely qualified for a wish.

Belldandy knew that as a fellow GRO Goddess, Peorth had been exposed to all sorts of human tragedy; this was the necessary downside of being a Relief Goddess. Most people selected as wish candidates arise from disadvantaged backgrounds and circumstances...after all, why grant the wish request of a mortal who was already satisfied with her or his life? In her gentle, inimitable fashion, Belldandy explained to Peorth that her romantic inclinations towards human males were at cross-purposes with her role as a wish-granting Goddess.

Somehow, every time Peorth came to visit and was around Belldandy and Keiichi...she'd gotten wildly out of hand. She would just go _wild_. Belldandy had often tried to construct a plausible explanation, but neither she or Keiichi could dig out a reasonable conjecture from the roots of sheer possibilities.

As Belldandy finished, she noticed a deep look of regret in Peorth's eyes.

"Well, Peorth?"

"I..I didn't know. How could I have been so suspended in my own denial?"

"Peorth, Urd's the one who's really going to suffer. She's in love with Cevn."

"Urd...in _love_?" Peorth blinked back her disbelief. "But that's impossible, isn't it? Are you for real?" Belldandy nodded 'yes'.

"So that's why she's so pissed off at me!" she observed with a dawning recognition of the source of Urd's cold shoulder towards her.

"She'll get over it. Urd may fastfall into a rage, but she rarely dances with a resentment," Belldandy assured Peorth.

"But, you mustn't be too hard on yourself, Peorth. After all, you were just being _you_. Things may be cloudy, but I sense that somehow what you did...is part of Cevn's training. It is unnatural for him to remain constricted by his victim's mentality. Perhaps your actions will provide a catharsis...a catalyst that will help him seek the love of others...so he can finally put the past to rest. Besides, it can only bring him and Urd closer together," Belldandy said, trying to cast an optimistic umbrella over Peorth's gloom.

One thing that resonated in Peorth's mind was the resiliency of the mortals. Watching Keiichi take on Tyyr, and then beat him, and finally remain steadfast beside his ladylove in the face of death...these were attributes that reminded her why she held great respect for the mortals. She hoped that she would emerge from this encounter with a greater degree of sensitivity towards humans.

"Could you have..._Wishout_, Peorth?" Belldandy inquired softly. Peorth held her silence as she examined her recent rash actions. She had to admit to herself that, for a while, she _may have_ been experiencing Wishout...a condition whereby a Goddess Relief Office agent becomes entrenched in seeing mortals as 'jobs', rather than sentient entities. Becoming fixated on doing right by their mortal charges, a wishgranting Goddess suffering Wishout can become overzealous and lose sight of the wider picture.

"I'm not screwing up any more," she mentally promised herself, deciding to get checked by the Proctors at the Clinic. And with this new information about another mortal whose life she completely upended...Peorth realized that she had to become more ambitious...more empathetic. Somehow, in the recesses of her mind, Peorth knew that things would mend here in this temple house. There was just too much love in the air to expect otherwise.

"Well, you've given me much to think about, Belldandy. I've got to be going. Please apologize on my behalf to both of them. I'll keep an eye on the squirt while she's up in Yggdrasil too. Thanks for the somewhat wonderful time," Peorth said.

Belldandy brought a flower vase from the bedroom, so the Peorth could transport herself. Peorth thanked her again...then vanished into the flowers. Belldandy watched the fading afterimage of Peorth. She knew in her heart that Peorth wasn't all bad...after all, she _had_ rescued Bell from the omiai...and risked her life to save Keiichi from harm when Tyyr went berserk. Despite her ongoing rivalry, Peorth remained Bell's good friend. As if on cue, a shower of roses popped in the air and floated en masse to the floor--Peorth's calling card. Belldandy smiled to herself and retired to her bedroom with the vase.

"Oh...and one more thing. I almost forgot!" Belldandy whirled around to see Peorth floating in the air behind her...in a different outfit.

"Peorth, did you go to Yggdrasil just to change clothes?" Belldandy asked, half-teasing her friend.

"No, Belldandy. Ooouhh! You're still naive at times. I came back to set things right!" she said ebulliently. Belldandy narrowed her eyes, feeling a cautious dread.

"Where's Keiichi?"

"Peorth!" Belldandy said in an exasperated voice. But Peorth had already floated out of the room.

With a rising apprehension in her throat, Belldandy chased after her.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Keiichi was in the sunroom. His legs were killing him with a rhythm of slow throbs...and he had a migraine of a headache. He felt like his head was caught in an unoiled visegrip. Earlier, Bell-chan had drifted off with Peorth to have some kind of private talk. Now that he was alone, he was beginning to enjoy a rare moment of quiet. He needed desperately to decompress from the events of the past few days.

He watched the snow splay out in lazy swirls and circles with the chill November air. The ground was just beginning to film over with a cover of cool white as he sat in the sunroom doorway admiring the sight. Like the whirling snow...his mind was unraveling its tension. Urd's painkillers had helped a lot...but he was almost certain that he had reinjured his leg. Maybe even re-broke the mending bones, especially in his right leg which was shooting stabbing pains with rhythmic regularity.

"My doctor is going to kill me..." he said to himself.

"Keiichi?" he heard Peorth's voice interrupt as she floated up in front of him. Peorth's floating form still unsettled him at times...as she tended to float right into his lap or arms! Having a Goddess settle herself softly into his arms was very stimulating to his senses...and very trying for one who was in love with another Goddess.

Belldandy arrived a split-second later, just as Peorth began to cast a spell. Peorth saw the look of panic on her friend's face.

"Don't look so worried, Belldandy. I'm just healing Keiichi," she said with a smile. As she weaved her hands, she looked at Belldandy with a questioning expression.

"By the way, you might want to help me...it seems that your powers are back online," she said to Belldandy with a wink. Peorth could feel the telltale sympathetic vibration emanating from Belldandy as she cast her healing spell. A co-vibration that could only come from another Goddess First Class Licensee. A vibration that indicated her slight 'adjustment' to the Ygg System was successful.

Belldandy reached into her soul and tapped into her Goddess powers...which burst forth as a light blue aura from her fingertips. Glowing and pulsing with light, the electric blue glow settled on Keiichi.

"Attagirl!" Peorth shouted with joy as Belldandy found herself smiling...then grinning broadly.

"M..my powers are back!" Belldandy exclaimed gleefully. She spun in a circle like a ballerina, and then encanted a spell:

_With soundless grace unvie, unstrain/all sense'd discomfort release/_

_Comb through the perceived swords of pain/knit fibrous muscle towards peace/_

_Draw forth the willow of bone astraight/and flesh and mind to strength increase!_

Keiichi felt a tingling sensation in his legs as they seemed to liquefy for the briefest of moments. The sensation was somewhere in-between ticklishness and 'foot falling asleep'. A blue light joined the pink light as his casts dissolved.

"I hope that's better...I _really_ need to be going!" Peorth said as she leaned in and stole a kiss on Keiichi's cheek, then floated out the door for a flower patch. Keiichi watched her wander off...

"Fat chance she has of finding flowers in sere November, a month after a Supertyphoon basically stripped everything bare," he said as he stood up to watch her diminishing form.

His proprioception was all askew; his legs wobbled uncertainly under him as evidence of this. Then it occurred to him that he was standing.

"I can stand! I can _walk_! I CAN WALK!!" he shouted...feeling the sensation of his feet on the sunroom tatami. He walked tentatively towards Belldandy, and then tripped over his own feet and fell into her arms, almost knocking her down.

"Bell-chan...I can walk! And you have your powers back!" he shouted again. Then he noticed a grin on Belldandy's face...she was sure happy to have him whole again.

"Keiichi, you're going to need to take it slow. You should do some practice exercises first, before trying to walk. But for now, I think you need to rest until you get used to being vertical again," she said, observing his uncertain gait.

"C'mon...I can think of some great ways you can enjoy your newly healed legs..." she said as she gathered Keiichi up in her arms and floated down the hallway. It felt so good to be able to levitate again, she realized.

"By the way, Keiichi-honey, did I mention that for some of these 'exercises', you'll have to be in a horizontal position for a few hours?" she said slyly as she floated into her bedroom.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"What am I going to do? He hasn't come out of his room in _five days_," Urd exclaimed in frustration. Several days after the 'Omiai Incident'...and Cevn was still screwed up!

"Urd, you need to give him time...at least he's eating the meal trays you're leaving him."

"But Belldandy, he hides under his futon blanket every time I go in his room...he hasn't said a word to me. Keiichi's tried to talk to him. Megumi's tried to talk to him. He just acts like none of us are here. Maybe I should just forget about him for now..."

"No! That is _not_ the answer and you know it! Cevn-san has experienced a traumatic shock. You know mortals...sometimes when something really horrible happens they tend to withdraw. Remember just a few days ago when my dear Keiichi thought he was going to lose me?"

Urd remembered the hollow look in Keiichi's eyes; eyes that were filled with loss and regret. The whole omiai experience had taken Keiichi on a breathtaking ride into absolute despair.

_"The longest trip you take is inside..."_ Urd recalled, something Cevn had told her one day. She just hoped his journey wasn't caught in a loop.

"Urd...one thing that I have learned about love from being with Keiichi is that it's _work_. There's no such thing as an easy love. Especially with mortals. I've stuck by Keiichi's side through the many trials and tribulations of our romance. Through all this striving, I realized that if I wanted to stay in love...I needed to _stay_ in love," she said with conviction. Urd felt uncomfortable about what her sister was saying, and yet part of her knew she was telling the truth. A truth won out by hard experience.

"Bell, how is Keiichi, by the way?" Urd asked, not wanting to dwell unsettled upon her own sense of loss. Belldandy had a healthy glow...obviously the result of some intense lovemaking with Keiichi, Urd suspected.

"Ahhh. He's doing much better with his legs. And other things as well," she said with an inward-dancing smile.

"Like..._what_ other things?" Urd teased her sister.

"Urd! That's private!" Belldandy replied indignantly with a slight bloom to her cheeks.

"Yeah...like I haven't been trying to get you guys to do the 'wild thing' for a few years? What kinda appreciation is this mum secrecy on your part...for all of the years of effort by your older sister? Now that you're completely sex-satiated, you won't even talk to me about it!" Urd said with a scowl.

Belldandy shrugged her shoulders. She knew that once Urd had become insistent about finding out something...her older sister just wouldn't give up. She stretched her imagination towards a disturbing scenario: what if Urd did something to _us_ like she did to Cevn when she impersonated his therapist. Belldandy shuddered at the thought of Urd spying on her and Keiichi...then blushed a shade of crimson as she remembered how she had spied on Urd a couple of times while they were all living in 'harmonious' Yggdrasil.

"You're blushing..._little_ sister," Urd observed, then playfully lashed Belldandy with a blouse from the laundry basket.

"Don't call me that!" Belldandy retorted mock-angrily.

"But it's so true," Urd said between giggles, reaching up for Belldandy's nose for a pinch. Bell pulled back just in the nick of time as Urd's long fingernails grasped thin air. She quickly grabbed a pillow and engaged Urd in a pillow fight. Moments later, both sisters were giggling between gasps for air...the pillows all busted out of shape, their outfits all in a mess.

"Might as well get this over with..." Belldandy thought with a sigh of resignation. She sat down cross-legged on her futon and spent the next half hour in reticent embarrassment, battling her reserve as she described to her older sister about the mortal 'facts of life': explaining how mortals make love; how she liked Keiichi to touch her...how he liked to be caressed. Urd listening intently..._too_ intently, it seemed.

"Her eyes are drooling with interest," Belldandy thought. Then, in complete discord to her engaged attention, Urd's mouth slipped into a frown.

"What's the matter, Urd? I told you what you wanted to know...and now you look upset," she asked.

"Damn it...I can't even _touch_ him! I _know_ that if I was just able to hug him...I could make him feel better!" Without a single word more, Urd stood up and left.

"Don't be so sure, Elder Sister," Belldandy thought glumly.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Megumi was talking to a body, hidden under several blankets. It didn't seem to be alive, but she knew that it was Cevn. Once more, his absence at N.I.T. had been sanctioned by some trivial excuse...but it occurred to her that he needed to come out his shell.

"Cevn...it's like I'm talking to a cocoon rather than you. You're not supposed to climb into a cocoon and hide away because of the pain. A cocoon is supposed to be the place where the caterpillar becomes a butterfly. Don't you understand? We love you! _I_ love you. So Peorth messed things up. It doesn't make you any less of a man in my estimation."

"Megumi...leave me alone," a muffled voice sounded from under the covers. She smiled to herself, these were the first words she had heard him speak since Peorth's visit. They may have not been the _right_ words...but the fact that Cevn had responded to her was indication that he was emerging from whatever black hole he was in.

She tried to picture herself, how she would react if some God would have popped up in her bath, and made an advance on her. She remembered her accident in the hotel in Sapporo with Genji and grinned, rubbing the back of her head where she had banged it. She knew she'd never forget Genji's embarrassed expression. That was funny; this wasn't! Her imagination failed her when she considered how it would feel to be seen...naked...by every member of the house. _That_ went way beyond embarrassment. She just couldn't live with the memories. If there only was some means for her to forget...then maybe she could face the others.

"Only some way to forget..." Megumi mumbled to herself. "To forget the bad things...as if memory was like a pencil line that could be erased somehow..."

Megumi grinned conspiratorially...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Urd was barely touching her food. She seemed to have no appetite these past few days. Belldandy noticed that she was nursing a bottle of sake as well...drinking constantly.

"Not to get drunk...just to forget," Urd had 'assured' her.

Megumi walked in the room, a broad grin on her face.

"What's up, sis?" Keiichi asked, seeing the change in his sister's demeanor. In the past few days, she usually emerged from Cevn's room with a grim look of disappointment.

"I think I've found a way to help Cevn!" she said in a louder-than-usual voice. Urd looked up at her with a hopeful expression.

"Didn't you guys once say that...as Goddesses...you could perform something called a Mindwipe. I know Peorth mentioned it..."

Belldandy looked alarmed, and then glanced at Urd, who also looked surprised. Mindwipe was _supposed_ to be a last resort in cases when a mortal's wish backfired. Sometimes, a mortal would wish for the wrong thing...and then would be in more pain than before. Like a mortal who wished that his neighbor's wife would fall in love with him...then had to deal with the fact that his neighbor hated him with a murderous intensity...and his newly found lover was a bitch.

"Peorth said that? Really?" Belldandy asked innocently.

"Yep. And I know that _you_ know how to do it, too" Megumi said, calling Belldandy's bluff. Belldandy thought hard for a moment, and then smiled at Megumi.

"Yes...now that my Goddess Powers are restored, I can perform a Mindwipe. But what good would it do? Making Cevn forget about it is one thing, but everyone else who saw him would still possess the memories. It would only be a short time before someone mentions it, or something cues him. Once that happens, the memories would flood right back," she explained.

Keiichi was reading a motorcycle magazine, listening to the discussion. He wasn't present to witness Cevn's 'exposure' by Peorth...he had been in a different part of the house. So he had little awareness of what happened, except from the embarrassed description Megumi had imparted to him. But he was still worried about his friend.

"Bell-chan, what if you wiped _everyone's_ memories? Everyone that was there that night who saw it?"

"Keiichi, that just wouldn't be possible. Besides, how fair would it be to wipe Urd, Megumi, Skuld, Genji and Tomohisa's memories? Not to mention all the ethical considerations..."

"You're not wiping _my_ memory," Urd said in a warning growl of a voice.

"If it meant that you had to wipe my memory, then you have my permission," Megumi countered. "Besides, it's totally embarrassing to think that I saw him without any..." Her blushing face finished the sentence.

"Don't worry about me. I'd have no problem if you cleaned _that_ memory from me; it's really been bothering me. There's too much information and then there's wrong information. What happened that night was definitely in the 'wrong information' zone," Genji agreed with his girlfriend.

"Totally ditto. If it was some beautiful babe that came out of the bathroom, well then I wouldn't know. But since it was Cevn, and he's a guy...why would I _want_ to remember that? I'd rather remember that beautiful babe Peorth," Tomohisa exclaimed. "Waitaminute! If you take away my memory, then I won't be able to remember Peorth!" Tomohisa argued aloud with himself. Keiichi grimaced at Tomohisa's adolescent turn of logic.

"Grab a brain! You got to see Peorth a whole bunch of times that weekend!" Keiichi said, exasperated at his younger cousin.

"But not like _this_," Tomohisa countered as he stood up, imitating Peorth. "Come to me, Tomohisa-baby..." he said, arms outstretched as he tried to imitate Peorth's voice in a falsetto.

Urd giggled at his antics, while Megumi and Keiichi shook their heads with less-than-amused expressions.

"Tomohisa, I wouldn't have to wipe out all of your memories of Peorth...as _strange_ as they are," Belldandy said with a puzzled expression.

"Yeah...you should just wipe out _all_ of his memories," Keiichi said sarcastically. Tomohisa expertly hit him on the head with a wadded up cloth napkin.

"Then we're agreed?" Megumi asked.

"No, we are not agreed! I said I _don't_ want my memory altered in any way!" Urd once more said warningly.

"Urd! Of everyone here, you should especially see the reason why we all have to do this," Megumi argued.

"And lose my only chance to have seen him naked?" Urd shot back.

"Geez...and I thought Tomohisa was weird," Keiichi muttered under his breath.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Skuld returned a few days later, all bubbly about the marvelous time that she had with Mom and Dad. Her Father had sent her to the spare parts office of the Energy Guild with an open invoice, so that she could select whatever she wanted from the new batch of mecha components. Thus, she brought along a couple dozen large boxes of choice parts, which Keiichi had to lug to her "Skuld's Labs" room while she prattled on about the component's vitae datum. She readily agreed to have her memories wiped, noting she had never seen a mortal male naked before, except for Keiichi. Fortunately it was just her, Bell and he in the room; otherwise Keiichi would have suffered massive embarrassment.

"Once with _him_ was quite enough, thank you," she replied to Belldandy's inquiry, glancing sharply at a red-faced Keiichi.

"So everyone agrees...except one stubborn Goddess," Belldandy said to herself. She still had to convince Urd. A few minutes later, she hit upon a plan...and without wasting any time, Belldandy took Urd by the arm and led her to Cevn's room.

"Why didn't Skuld just have you transport these to her room?" a wind-lagged Keiichi gasped as he emerged from the "Skuld Labs" room. Belldandy stopped to kiss him on the cheek.

"I'm sure that Skuld appreciates your help," she said sweetly, and tugged Urd towards Cevn's bedroom. Sliding the shoji door open, Belldandy noted sadly that Cevn had crawled under the futon itself this time.

"Read this, Urd," was all she said as she reached under the futon blanket pile, withdrawing a personal journal book and handing it to her sister.

_"Nov. 26th, 20XX,_

_It's snowing outside...but nowhere near as cold as my heart feels. I know that Urd must hate me, after seeing me with Peorth. How can I explain to her that it was Peorth who attacked me, not the other way around? I know that I can never emerge from the embarrassment of this incident. Megumi, Skuld, the guys--they all saw me._

_I had just begun to feel love again--and now I've been victimized. Again. It's freezing inside of my soul. I know that Peorth didn't have a clue, so I can't really be angry with her. Perpetrators often don't know that they're doing anything wrong. I mean, they often do know: but they don't realize how much it can _-hurt-_ the person they're taking advantage of. But in Peorth's case...I'm pretty sure that she just made an honest mistake._

_I just wish that it had never happened. I wanted Urd to be the only one to see me...that way. But now it will never be. I wish I were dead. I'm sick of having to haul all these memories of abuse and ribbon-sharp pain. Just when I think that it's all over...something like this happens, crushing my hopes._

_I feel like I've drowned, but yet I live on in the wake of the drowning. I can't write anymore. Life is suffocating me."_

Belldandy watched as Urd shakily set the journal down on the small bedside table. She didn't want to hurt her older sister; but a little jarring reality might make Urd see what was hanging in the balance if she refused to have a Mindwipe. She could see that Urd was devastated by what she had read.

"You say that you love him...now make the right choice, Urd," Belldandy confronted her in a level-but-angry voice.

Urd looked up at her younger sister and slowly nodded her head, holding back the tears that threatened to storm forth. Her mind was swimming in a fog. Cevn's journal entry had been written just a couple days ago...it really didn't say much.

But it said everything.

Belldandy was occasionally intolerant towards her older sis, and this time she knew that Urd sensed that her resentment was genuine. If one of the sisters was angry over a matter of principle...anger beyond a routine sibling rivalry...it was usually sufficient notice for the other sister to do a self-check of her motives. At least, that's how it was _supposed_ to work...

"Let's get it over with," Urd finally said, snapping out of her fugue. She looked at Cevn's still form, hiding under the futon blanket.

"Why am I so selfish?" she asked Belldandy. Belldandy smiled back at her.

"In an hour, you won't even remember why you're accusing yourself of being selfish. It's really for the better," she said to Urd.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

An hour later, Belldandy had Mindwiped everyone in the house that had any involvement with the 'bathroom episode'. Peorth had even made time out of her busy wishgranting schedule to drop by and get Mindwiped.

After she wiped Peorth, Belldandy asked Peorth to Mindwipe her memories, just to make sure that she wouldn't trigger anything by being the instigator of the Mindwipes.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"What am I doing under here?" Cevn said, finding himself buried underneath several futon blankets in his room. "And why should I come out from under here, after what happened?"

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Mara lit the candles in the prescribed sequence, then heated the arcane dagger in their flames, one-by-one. The dagger slowly luminesced through the color spectra, glowing silver, then gray, then dull green, then aqua green.

"Grrr...stupid time-consuming rituals! And that stupid biblical number again! I wonder which of us leaked _that_ out to the mortals," Mara complained in a low voice as she visited each of the 666 candles encircling the mandala. By the time she got to the last one, her arcane dagger was glowing bright green.

She walked over to the pile of her translations and pulled out a parchment.

_"Now, take the tip of the knife and dip it in the blood at the exact point where the upper arm of the pentagram intersects the outside circle,"_ she read aloud. Taking the knife in one hand, she rolled back her robe's sleeves with the other. Grasping the knife, Mara lowered the hot tip until it touched the exact spot indicated. A shower of sparks exploded at the point of contact.

A ring of grayish-rouge fire erupted along the edges of the circle...which seemed to run along the traces of the circle. Mara watched in fascination as the circle began to become a symmetrical pattern of multicolored flames. She pulled back the hood of her cloak as the room became _hot_.

The flames began to dance around the circular mandala in a lively discussation. In their midst, Mara could see a shape forming. A sphere of some sort, coalescing in the middle of the flames. No, the arcane fires were like an engine that was fueling the slowly turning sphere. The sphere looked like a crystalline golf ball, with random spikes and a fluxing surface spectra.

The fires seemed to be drawn upwards into it like sperm seeking an ovum...until they were absorbed one-by-one.

Finally, the last fire disappeared into the egg-shaped floating object. Suspended in mid-air, the object slowly floated down near the center of the summoning circle.

"You gotta be kidding! I spent a whole fucking _month_ building this blessed mandala...and the end result is an _egg_?" Mara yelled in rage. She wanted to throw something...to smash something. But the only objects in the room were the mandala and the egg.

"The Ultimate Demon is an egg?" she shouted again, bitterly disappointed. As if on cue, the egg started to shudder, and pieces of its surface began to solidify and flake off. More and more flakes fell off the egg, like dust powdering down from a shelf. A pile underneath the egg began to form, shaped like a miniature volcano. Each layer of flakes was a different color...and the egg got smaller and smaller.

Until the last tiny bit of egg particle fell into the pile.

"_NOOOOOO!!_" Mara screamed, gnashing her fangs together with a clacktering noise. "NONONONONONONO..." she yelled until she was hoarse. All her hard labors ended up in a pile of...eggcrap...in the middle of the circular mandala.

The pile suddenly burst into flame, sending comets flying throughout the room. Mara ducked as the dense cloud of comets came shooting in random circles...one almost hitting her in the head. They looked like floating balls of fire...or floating novae. Their presence suggested to Mara that round 'ghosts' that often appeared in older Japanese ghost story movies. The lightshow of flashing fireballs continued until they accumulated near the ceiling...in the exact shape of the mandala underneath them.

Purposefully, they all converged into a central point and arced downwards into the middle of the mandala as one...blasting the mandala with the force of an arcane explosion. Amidst the incredibly bright light, Mara saw the surface of the mandala fold upon itself and disappear.

Mara cocked her head to one side as she saw the embers of the flames dying down where the mandala had been. As the flames diminished, she saw the form in the middle...

The form of an infant.

"This is it!" Mara thought, rapt with excitement. Somehow, the entire mandala had collapsed upon itself. Of course! Now that made sense. The material that the mandala was carved upon had to be Evil, because it had to transform itself into the body of the Ultimate Demon.

Mara looked at the baby boy, who was quietly considering her. His skin was just like the surface of the mandala, except that it was a dark red. Two small horns protruded from each temple of his head, while his feet were cloven.

"This is silly...he looks like some kinda mortal conception of the Devil!" Mara exclaimed. The little infant looked like a cross between a gargoyle and an oni devil. The little one fell to the floor, then started to crawl towards her.

"He's so cute..." Mara couldn't help noticing as his little chubby cheeks strained with the effort. He made some cooing sounds...then he raised his head unsteadily and caught Mara's eye.

_"M..ma...Mama!"_

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --


	34. Pt 34: Threadlines

**Part 34: Threadlines**

_5:30am_

Keiichi felt a flush of excitement as soon as he opened his eyes. He wasn't going to school today; he was going to put into motion a carefully arranged set of plans and circumstances. Last week, he had informed Megumi of his intentions, so that her car would be available today. His sister was all grins as he told her of his scheme, and offered several suggestions of her own. If _she_ thought it would be cool, then maybe...

_6:00am_

Megumi knocked on the door and tossed him a set of car keys with a smile. Keiichi got up, put on his bathrobe and walked to the kitchen. He searched the refrigerator for several items: frozen ahi, a box of eggs, milk, breakfast roll mixes, the boysenberries and fresh apples...and began to cook.

_6:30am_

"Keiichi?" Belldandy asked in a morning-soft voice, sleepy-eyed as he walked in with a dinner tray full of breakfast. The tray was crowded with an entire menu of items. But what caught her eye was the ahi omelet in the middle tray, partially covered with a light gravy.

"Hi, honey. Breakfast in bed for the Goddess of the house, courtesy of Keiichi kitchens!" he said cheerily as he set the tray down by her futon. Without another word, he turned around and walked out.

"What is wrong with _him_?" Urd said to her sister.

"Yeah...and why didn't we get any too? After all, we're also Goddesses!" Skuld complained.

"This isn't fair. Something's going on here, and I'm going to find out from the source," Urd promised as she climbed out of her futon and threw on a houserobe.

Belldandy regarded at the trayful of food. The omelet was haphazard and slightly overdone, the apple and berry muffins were underdone, the breakfast rolls had too much frosting...she smiled to herself in appreciation of his effort. But she also was wondering why he had cooked breakfast. She was by far the best cook in the house, and four years of living on the Earthrealm had only furthered her mastery of culinary skills.

"Keiichi may not be a good cook, but he's the best boyfriend," she affirmed as she started in on the ahi omelet after offering two of the breakfast rolls to Skuld, who had been eyeing them since Keiichi had brought the tray in.

_6:32am_

"Urd, it's a surprise! You know...the four-year kind of surprise. With all the stuff going on with the slot car race and the omiai, I…kinda…got distracted and forgot about it afterwards. Bell-chan remembered, of course, but I wanted to do something too. You know me. Mr. Usually-in-First-Place. This time I'll have give the checkered flag to Bell, and do something extra special since I'm running late, " he explained. Urd put a hand over her mouth as she realized what he was referring to. She smiled slyly at him.

"Keiichi...you better treat my sister to the best...or else. Something even better than what she gave you for you guy's fourth anniversary," she noted. The bloom of red on Keiichi's cheeks more than made up for his not bringing her and Skuld breakfast. Also, for not telling them about his surprise.

"And you better not take her to one of those love hotels!" she warned, playing on the ecchi thoughts she knew were floating around in his head. She relished the flush of shyness that came over Keiichi's face, which looked all the more amusing when she considered the dishes that he would have to do.

"Be right back," she said with a wink. A moment later, she returned with an orange capsule.

"Put this in her after-breakfast tea...and it will prevent her from figuring out your surprise right away. It's Urd's WavyGravy SnapToIt Inhibitor," she announced.

Keiichi looked at her suspiciously.

"Keiichi, you wound me! I'm Urd, the Goddess of Love! This is your precious anniversary gift to my sister...and you think I'm going to screw it up for you? I'm just being the big sister, y'know!" she said, winking at him.

"That's what scares me. Every time you get in 'Big Sister mode' and give me a pill or an elixir, I usually end up embarrassed or in trouble. I guess it'll be okay this time, at least you're telling me about it instead of being sneaky. So I'll trust you on this one, or live to regret it. But so help me, if it screws up this special anniversary I have planned, I'll make sure to tell Bell-chan…and _you'll _be the one to regret it," Keiichi said as he reluctantly reached out and took the pill, reminded again that Bell's older sister will probably never change; she can't leave anything alone.

"Fair enough! Go get 'er, tiger! And don't worry, I'll cover and tell Skuld for you. Ciao!" Urd said as she walked back to the sister's bedroom.

_6:34am_

Urd returned to the sister's bedroom and leaned down to whisper something to Skuld. Skuld nodded with a smile, then glanced at Belldandy and giggled with mischief. Urd whispered again in her ear and Skuld nodded her head.

"What's so funny with you two? You're keeping something away from me...I can tell. Why won't you tell me?" Belldandy asked, a bit miffed at their secretive behavior.

"Uh...I gotta check on Cevn," Urd said transparently. After a moment, she elbowed Skuld.

"Oh...yeah, I forgot. I have to go to my lab and work on my micro-Banpei project!" Skuld said transparently. She and Urd excused themselves and left the bedroom.

"_Micro_ Banpei? I've never heard of that one before," Belldandy said doubtfully after her sisters left.

_6:50am_

Keiichi finished with his last call while the dishes soaked. Things had to be sequenced exactly in order for this to come off. In view of this, he made a series of calls while Bell-chan was (hopefully) enjoying her breakfast. He knew his cooking skills weren't all that good, but he also knew his planning skills were excellent. If he had learned anything from the N.I.T. Motor Club, he had learned the value of planning meticulously for races. The florist was on their way already, which meant that he wouldn't need Urd's little 'gift' after all.

_7:00am_

Belldandy finished her breakfast, savoring its taste. She looked at the two empty futons next to her and once more speculated about everyone's strange behavior this morning. A possible explanation dawned in her mind as she gathered the tray and dishes and went to the kitchen.

"Keiichi..._what_ are you doing?" she asked, seeing her mortal boyfriend elbow-deep in dishwater.

--Knock knock--

Her question remained unanswered as Keiichi ran off to the door. He came back with an _armful_ of roses; the sweetness of their aroma perfuming the room with a fragrant tincture.

"This is for you, from me," he said, handing her the bouquet. Belldandy felt her heart melting with sheer joy as she passed her nose over the floral lives nestled in her arms. She read the attached card:

_"Belldandy,_

_These 48 roses cannot even begin to signify the infinitude of love I have for you. You have awakened my whole being to the joys of love. If love is crushing, I would gladly be smothered by your affections. Whenever life was a desert and I thirsted for caring, you've been my oasis._

_I'd write more, but I'm running out of room on this card. These flowers can only meagerly represent the four years of bliss that you have brought to my life. I hope you forgive my clumsy attempt at a surprise...and enjoy thisday I'm going to share with you._

_Happy Anniversary, My One True Love,_

_Keiichi"_

Belldandy trembled when she finished reading his note...she was so overwrought with his expression of love. Twelve roses for each year they had been together. He remembered! Wordlessly, she came to him with a hug, and they kissed passionately. She wanted to remain in his arms until the solar lights flared silent in her heart.

"Please...wait, Bell. We'll have plenty of time for that...later," Keiichi said with a wink after a few minutes. With sudden insight, Belldandy recognized that Keiichi had shed so much of his inhibitions over the past two years. The look in his eyes bespoke of pleasures to come. So she helped him wash the rest 

of the dishes, and wasn't at all surprised to find herself playfully splashing him with dishwater from time to time.

_8:00am_

After they both had taken their morning bathroom runs, he and Bell-chan were waiting at the JR station in Chiba. The weather was a brisk and cool late autumn day, but Keiichi didn't mind. One hand in Belldandy's gloved hand, he felt around in his longcoat with his other hand to make sure that all the tickets were present and accounted for.

_8:40am_

Keiichi and Belldandy debarked the crowded train at Akibahara and transferred to the Shibuya-bound train. Because of the crowded conditions, they were tightly pressed together...a situation that didn't bother them in the least as they kissed passionately, oblivious to the mixture of knowing smiles and condemning frowns from the other passengers.

_8:50am_

"We're here!" Keiichi said with relief as they walked out of the multi-level Shibuya Station. The steady drone of the train was replaced by the staccato murmursounds of the morning crowds.

"He's on the lookout for something," Belldandy noticed; as soon as they had arrived, Keiichi had guided her by slight pull on the hand towards a corner of the station. There was a small crowd of thirty or forty tourists milling around something.

"Keiichi, why would so many people be sightseeing in a train station?" she asked as the flash of lightbulbs whitened the air briefly. As they approached the crowd, she could see a large statue of a dog mounted on a concrete pedestal. She looked at Keiichi with a look that bepicted her mental acquisitiveness...they had come all this way to look at a statue of a _dog_?

"Bell-chan, say hi to Hachiko!" he said as a means of introduction. Belldandy looked at him with a mixture of disbelief and curiosity.

"Hachiko belonged to a university professor, who used to catch the train to work every day. Unfortunately, he suffered an early death. All alone, abandoned by his master, Hachiko came here to this very spot and waited for him to get off the train. For _11_ years!" Keiichi explained.

Belldandy tentatively reached out and put a hand on the statue, feeling the profound spiritual essences of the location as Keiichi went on with his explanation. She could sense an unrelenting optimism in the face of disappointment; closing her eyes, she saw the station as it had been in 1925. A lonely dog waiting for his master. She shuddered at the sensation and felt a hand on her shoulder. 11 years was a lifetime in canine time-sense.

"If you left me, I would wait the rest of my life for your return, Bell. This statue is considered to represent loyalty...I just wanted you to know how loyal I feel towards you...towards our love," he said, then kissed her on the cheek and hugged her.

The early morning workaday crowds were thinning out as they strolled across the broad expanse of Meiji St. towards Goto Planetarium.

_9:10am_

"Keiichi, I've never been in one of these...planetariums before!" Belldandy said excitedly as the lights dimmed. She marveled at the dome overhead, at least 20m in diameter.

Suddenly, a host of star lights appeared above her head, representing the stellar canopy as viewed from the Earthrealm. Belldandy could recognize constellations and familiar stars. Keiichi explained to her that his elementary school had a small planetarium; sometime back in the 1960s the Ministry of Education had decided to equip all elementary schools in Japan with a Goto three or five-meter planetarium. He started to explain about the latest Fulldome technology when the planetarium went dark as digitally-controlled lasers created a starfield and nebulae as soft electronic music lilted in the background.

_9:50am_

Belldandy was impressed with the planetarium show...she didn't think she could see something like this in the Earthrealm! She remembered the first time during Prime Inculcation when she and her classmates went to the Cosmosium: one would step inside of the sphere and be instantly transported visually to any point in Yggdrasil or the known Multiverse, with the exception of Vanagdrasil and its realms.

But she knew that the mortals had looked starwards ever since they reached the level of intelligence. The planetarium show had concluded with an imaginary transit through the solar system...pretty accurate, she thought, in the face of the fact that the Earthrealm mortals had only sent out a few tiny robotic probes to explore their neighboring planets.

"When Mankind reaches the next level and sheds all concerns about commerce, cultural boundaries, religions and self-amusement...then trips like this will become easy for all of you," she silently thought as she surveyed the crowd exiting the planetarium.

_10:20am_

Keiichi and Belldandy walked across the wide avenue nicknamed "Fire Street" towards a large building on the triangular corner with a huge red "109" on top of its cylindrical facade. Once more, Belldandy looked at Keiichi with mystification. The building was very hi-tech in design, with its harmony of geometries and mirrored glass windows. She looked at the building again...it _didn't_ look like a shopping center. The streets were filled with businessmen, OLs with cellphones, and an abundance of teens and twents, many with lots of makeup and suntans. Suntans in December! She giggled, imagining the street filled with hundreds of Urds, all suntanned and platinum-haired. If that ever happened, the Earthrealm could kiss the Next Level goodbye.

"Next stop on our itinerary...Shopping Part One. Boutique shopping!" Keiichi announced cheerfully as they walked down the street towards the Parco complex. He realized that it would be a mistake to take Bell-chan into 109; even his sister wouldn't be caught dead wearing the kinds of fashions in those stores. Shibuya 109 was for girls and women who _had_ to be fashionable. Besides, he couldn't picture Bell in a red mini-skirt with an orange denim shirt with designer-sewn sparklies. Megumi had suggested Parco because it had a wider range of stores, not just focusing on trendy fashions. Parco was more along the lines of a bazaar type shopping experience, plus it had some good lunch restaurants.

Belldandy was used to going into Chiba for most of her shopping. She liked this mortal sport of shopping; it was something Megumi had introduced to her early on. Megumi was a very competent shopper...and Belldandy had learned from a master of the art.

But Keiichi, on the other hand, was a rank amateur in the sport. They walked in the front entrance, and Belldandy realized that this...was pure shopping paradise! She was even more excited when Keiichi told her there were five buildings with at least ten floors of stores. It would be too much to take in, even if she had an entire day. Extending her Goddess senses, she scanned every one of the hundreds of stores and found several to her liking. _Very _much to her liking.

"Keiichi...over here!" she said excitedly as she guided him for the first time since she woke up this morning, pulling him towards a very fashionable store with spring outfits.

_12:15pm_

Belldandy had bought three armloads of outfits and accessories. Keiichi was amazed at how quickly she could pick out clothes. Unlike most mortal women, she didn't go into the dressing room, change, and then come out and admire herself (or critique herself) in front of a three-way mirror. She would simply grab an outfit, put it up to her cheek, check the size on it, and then put it in the cart. The salesclerks were all amazed by her shopping methods. Not knowing where to get a snack, they asked the salesclerk at the last store, who gave them a suggestion. So they invited her to join them for her lunch break. The salesclerk from rewarded them with a description of her home in Surugadai in Chiyoda Ward while he and Bell sipped iced coffees.

She also asked Bell-chan numerous questions about how they shopped in her 'home country', much to Keiichi's amusement. When Bell-chan forgot where she was and answered, "We just take what we want," the girl almost face-faulted. He knew that there was no need for money in Yggdrasil, so he quickly covered and made up some story about how people bartered in his girlfriend's homeland. Secretly he was pleased; Bell-chan wouldn't have made that sort of goof-up unless she was really excited.

What was more amazing, but unseen by the others, was how Belldandy simply moved her hands and the boxes of clothes were transported home. This was only Part One of the shopping; he'd run out of arms if he had to carry it all for the whole day.

"Thank you, Kami-sama, for this beautiful Goddess," Keiichi said as he stole a second's flash of gratitude from the busy mall. Bell's smile of joy captivated him. He felt added gratitude when he considered that she had her power back; it would have been impossible to lug all of Bell's purchases around for the rest of the day's activities he had planned.

_12:30pm_

Keiichi was pleased with the way things had unfolded so far. Bell's look of total satisfaction was deeply rewarding to him, a freedom whispering in his heart...especially in the light of the whole omiai incident.

"Tyyr would _never_ be this considerate of Bell-chan," he thought, the recent memories halting his enjoyment momentarily. Smiling to himself, he pointed out the Red Lobster restaurant down the street.

"That's where we're going to lunch, Bell. They have a great lunch buffet. But don't eat _too_ much," he cautioned.

"Red Lobster!" she exclaimed with girlish satisfaction as they entered the restaurant. Belldandy looked at Keiichi with appreciation...he was really going all out today.

"I could fall in love with you all over again, Keiichi," she said impulsively and kissed him again.

_1:30pm_

After a casual lunch, Keiichi and Belldandy walked back to Parco, and took the escalator down to the second basement level...the level with all the cinemas. This was the only self-indulgence he was allowing himself today, other than the joy of being around Belldandy. After all, the new Speed Racer sequel had been released in America last May, and it was just now coming to the Japanese theatres for the Christmas season. Only fitting, because he had lived through a real 'Speed Racer' experience just recently…a couple of them if he included Mara's 'Demon Rally'. He felt Bell-chan's hand rest on his as the music started up.

_4:00pm_

Belldandy enjoyed the movie, mostly for its exciting drama. She knew that Keiichi was enjoying all the special effects much more than she. To her, the special effects were nice, but blasé. After all, the visual effects didn't come close to _being there_. Despite the best efforts of the film's creators, Yggdrasil was _so_ much more beautiful. Places in Yggdrasil were like wildlife preserves, for it was a function of the Conservation Guild to protect all the animal species in the Multiverse. It would take 300 years in mortal terms to tour them all...a tour that Belldandy had taken when she was young. In contrast, other sections in Yggdrasil were unbelievably high-tech...like the Ygg Mainframe computer complex where Urd worked. To mortal eyes, such scenes would seem like pure incomprehensible magic.

Looking over at Keiichi's excited face during the movie, she couldn't help but be moved by his fascination with the technology and engineering aspects of the race cars in the movie. Like any mortal, he wanted to see more of the universe. Belldandy vowed to herself that, somehow, someday...she would take him to Yggdrasil.

"Where are we going next, dear?" she asked.

"Just wait here for a few minutes, Bell-chan. I've arranged a ride for us."

The limousine arrived three minutes late.

_4:30pm_

"To us!" Keiichi said as he toasted Belldandy with a glass of champagne, an old '87 vintage from a genuine winery in Champagne, France.

Belldandy clicked her glass with his, and then he hooked his arm around hers and put his glass up to his lips. Catching the idea, she did the same. Then he held up his glass to her lips, tipping it slightly so she could sip from his. She did the same for him, spilling a little on his shirt as she giggled. Soon, he was tickling her in the ribs, and she was pulling his ear playfully. Normally, alcohol didn't affect her strongly...but this bubbly stuff tasted warm and silky going down her throat, so she turned off her intoxication inhibitor and let herself feel a warming intoxication. After all, this was a special occasion...and she wasn't planning to get drunk like Elder Sister Urd would at some party.

The limousine seemed to be a house on wheels, Belldandy noticed with admiration. It was furnished with a small refrigerator, a microwave with freshly prepared snacks, a television, and a stereo. In addition, the richly appointed interior had smoothly leathered seats. Belldandy felt herself sink deeply into the softly cushioned couch/seat that she and Keiichi were sitting on.

"Where are we going?" she asked as they passed through Shinjuku and its mass of skyscrapers.

"We're just going to cruise around Tokyo for a couple of hours...you'll see," he explained matter-of-factly. Keiichi had booked the limo for the evening, but he didn't tell Belldandy its terminus point or any of the planned stops.

_5:15pm_

After driving leisurely through various avenues and back streets, the limo pulled up in front of the Tobu department store.

"This is our first stop, Bell-chan!" Keiichi announced excitedly, imitating the voice of a bus driver. Belldandy giggled as he took her hand when she stepped out of the limousine.

"What about him?" she asked, gesturing backwards at the limousine.

"He's getting paid...I'll bet you that he'll be cranking up the radio a couple of minutes after we're gone. Don't worry, he'll wait for us, so take your time," he assured her.

"Shopping, Part Two," he announced, sending a thrill down Bell's spine. Belldandy looked up at the huge department store, one of the largest she had ever seen. It adjoined the Ikebukuro rail station; she looked across the street and saw another multi-story department store standing tall, the Seibu department store.

The Tobu store complex was divided into three buildings: an entryway plaza with an art museum, the main building and the central building. They boarded the main escalators and ascended three floors. Belldandy was entranced by this store as Keiichi informed her that it was one of the largest in Tokyo. Everything was all decorated for the Christmas season, which gave it even more of a cheer. All around her she could hear excited words…and thoughts…of the mortals. Keiichi had brought her to a place that seemed to gather joy and amusement. "This is an amusement park for shoppers," she thought.

Keiichi steered Belldandy by the elbow towards the formal dress section. He felt her lean even closer against his shoulder as they stopped to admire all the pretty dresses. He looked at the dresses on the mannequins as they strolled through the section. Then his eyes settled on one dress that he thought Belldandy would look wonderful in.

"It's _her_," he thought as he relished the sight of the dress, prominently displayed at the end of an aisle. He wanted to tell her which one, but decided that it would be 'pushy' on his part to influence her choice.

"This is a chance to see if our minds _really_ think alike...if she picks for herself the dress that I like, then I'll know that we're really compatible!" he thought. Keiichi knew that he and Bell-chan were compatible in so many ways, but this 'test' seemed to hold his attention raptly; he felt that after four years, their tastes should have merged in a lot of areas.

Belldandy looked up and down the row of dresses, and then checked out the formal dresses on several mannequins. One dress grabbed her eye in particular. It _shone_ with an eye-catching color that reminded her of iced berries. In one direction, it looked like a blend of several blues; when she walked to the other side, it looked ruby red. A store attendant walked up and bowed to her, noticing that she was closely examining the dress.

"Can you tell me more about this dress?" she asked the store attendant. In the background, Keiichi couldn't help but grin.

"Well, unfortunately it's one of our most expensive styles for next spring. We call this one AppleSpice, it hails from a very exclusive collection by Sanangelo Croisselle. We only have this one in stock. It has a halter bias cut with a mock drape in the back, and a beaudeux style hemmed skirt. It also comes with a matching evening scarf. Each piece is made with an exquisite new material that's soft as silk to the touch and shows different color spectrums under the light. The evening purse is mock leather from Spain, with a pearl clasp. The shoes, which aren't on this mannequin, are a clear weave with blue accents."

Belldandy looked at the price tag and shook her head sadly...this dress was way out of Keiichi's price range.

_"We'll take it!"_

She jerked her head around to see Keiichi with a hand in the air, just like an elementary school student responding to a question from the sensei. The credit card in his hand reflected sparks against the ceiling lights.

"But Keiichi..." she said haltingly, looking at him with an "are you insane?" expression.

"Can you guys do the fitting _now_? Please? I'm in earnest!" he inquired excitedly. Belldandy shook her head in disbelief as the store clerk went to her cash register and got on the phone...and a moment later, two female tailors came and escorted a reluctant Belldandy to the fitting room. The store attendant motioned him closer and whispered in his ear.

"You must really love her...what's the special occasion?" she asked. Keiichi nodded and said it was their fourth anniversary.

"She's going to look absolutely_ stunning_ when we finish fitting her with that dress!" the attendant promised.

"Not that dress..._the_ dress!" Keiichi thought happily. Belldandy had gravitated to the very dress that he had thought would look best on her, making her choice with an almost instinctive delight. Pleased that his own choice had agreed with her tastes, he went down to the limousine driver and tipped him for waiting.

He came back up and waited for almost 40 anxious minutes while they fitted and altered Bell's new dress. Keiichi tapped his heel nervously on the floor as he sat...he couldn't wait until she returned. Finally, they walked her back.

The store attendant giggled as she heard Keiichi gasp. She saw that he was totally hypnotized into open-mouthed awe at the sight of his girlfriend in her new dress.

Belldandy had an embarrassed look on her face...evidently she had never been the subject of a formal dress fitting before. Keiichi tipped all three department store workers.

"H..how do I look, Keiichi?" Belldandy said in a timid voice. Rarely did she stutter, but the fact that this outfit cost a fortune had fired her into a nervous state.

"Belldandy, you should see yourself! You look absolutely divine...as if you weren't divine enough already! Absolutely incredible! Absolutely...lovely! I..I can't even begin to describe it," he said, breathless at the transformation.

"Of course, it's you...not the dress," he added, to which Belldandy beamed a bright smile at him.

"That'll be 148,010 yen," the attendant said as she rang up the dress and the service charges.

"_Keiichi_!" Belldandy said, turning to him with a mixture of shock and stern reproach. The dress was expensive enough, but the rushed fitting had added 20,000 yen.

"Why? I could just materialize this dress without you having to spend so much money. What do you plan to do...steal it?" she whispered to him in a hushed private voice filled with anxiety. She was embarrassed that he was thinking of spending so much on her...this dress was worth almost four times as much as the ring he had given her that Christmas several years ago.

"Where did he get that kind of money?" she wondered as he calmly pulled out his credit card. Miraculously, he was able to charge it to his card without a hitch.

She didn't know whether to kiss him or kill him.

_6:30pm_

"I'll explain everything, Bell-chan. Remember when we won the International Federation for Solar Energy Research race last spring? How they said they were going to pay for our schooling?" Belldandy nodded her head, reliving the triumph of Keiichi's finest racing victory...with the exception of a very recent slotcar race.

"Well, I had assumed that once my regular aid and scholarships came in, the school would just send them back. Instead, they decided to turn the money over to me. So basically, I got _all_ of my school monies...with my tuition already paid for by the Solar Energy folks! After almost losing you to Tyyr...I decided to take you out on an anniversary date that you'll never forget."

Belldandy looked at him with tears in her eyes. In one day, he had showered her with so many different expressions of love. His brown eyes glimmered with excitement and love as she leaned forward and sealed her lips to his lingeringly.

_7:00pm_

Keiichi had instructed the driver to travel along the harbor expressways, both No. 1 and 9, and then loop around back to Shinjuku. The ocean was beautiful; its placid surface reflecting the host of city lights with a breathtaking burst of colors.

Belldandy was snuggled against him as they silently shared in the scenic drive's panorama of cityscape.

_7:45pm_

The limousine pulled over unexpectedly at Chuo St. in the heart of the Ginza district. Keiichi hadn't breathed a single word to Belldandy about _this_ stop. She had expected them to simply cruise the streets and expressways of Tokyo until they reached their final destination.

"Could this be it?" she wondered, looking up and down the street at the plethora of illuminated street signs.

Keiichi surprised her one more time as he excused himself with a passionate kiss and walked across the street into a shop. Belldandy watched as he disappeared into the active street scene nightlife of the bustling entertainment district.

"This _can't_ be it!" she concluded as she saw the streetknife tough hoods and hookers hanging out in front of the many hostess bars mixed in with the various shops and mompop grocery stores.

_8:00pm_

Keiichi emerged, dressed in a smart black tuxedo. Belldandy tittered as he walked up to the limousine...he looked so _silly_ in a tuxedo. Belldandy looked comfortable in just about anything she wore; dressing up was a natural for her. But unlike her, Keiichi was at home in a t-shirt and jeans, or racing coveralls. Looking down at the shining fabric of her formal dress, Belldandy realized how much she belonged in this dress...how much elation Keiichi had felt when he bought it for her with his own money. She assumed a more serious affect after giggling one last time at Keiichi. His bowtie was crooked.

Keiichi opened the door and climbing in, watching Belldandy keenly for a reaction. Just like a stereotypical mortal woman, she straightened his collar and bowtie.

"Where'd she learn _that_?" he wondered.

"Well?"

"It's not you, Keiichi. But if I were to look at all the men in the world in a tuxedo...you would stand out first among then. You look handsome, my prince!" she complimented him, punctuating her remark with a kiss.

Keiichi knew that she was right about the tux, but he saw her eyes get _that_ misty look when she was filled with appreciation and love for him.

_8:30pm_

Belldandy recognized Shinjuku in the distance as they drove up Yasukuni St. after circling the Imperial Palace. The gleaming skyscrapers seemed to pull down the starry sky; their spires like mechanical trees piercing the horizon.

The limo pulled up under the Japan Tower.

_9:00pm_

Belldandy was already dizzy from the whirlwind of events today. But this...was like a cherry on a cake.

Keiichi and she had taken the open-windowed elevator to the Cloudline Restaurant...one of the most in-demand and pricey dining experiences in Tokyo. With good reason, she thought as she looked out the curved window next to their candlelit table.

After they ordered their dinner, Keiichi explained to her the history of the Japan Tower. It had been topped off just last year as the tallest self-supporting structure in the world, rising exactly 900 meters from its base to the light at the top of its spire. After the rash of competing "world's tallest" structures in the first few years of the new millennium, Japan had decided to follow suite and build a landmark structure in Tokyo. As the most cosmopolitan city in Asia, and probably in the world, Tokyo needed a signature structure that would not only define its skyline, but would symbolize the world-class status of the city.

Belldandy knew that the construction of this tower had excited the engineering student in Keiichi; he had remarked about the progress of its construction numerous times during their casual talks. Looking past the candelabra on their table, he explained that it was almost twice as tall as the CNN Tower in Toronto. In his mind, it was the Eiffel Tower of the 21st century.

From her window-side seat at the 750m level, she could see the orange undersides of the low moundy winter clouds hovering just overhead. Being this close to the clouds was nothing new to her; she routinely flew in them millions of times in thousands of manners. She had lived on the top of clouds the size of Japan, racing horses with Urd. Looking down, she could see the 25 million inhabitants of the Tokyo-Yokohama conurbation; all of them living and heartbreathing their lives under her watchful eye as the restaurant slowly rotated.

The real miracle was that, on their own, the mortals had designed and built this structure whose lightcarpeted view she was enjoying.

And yet...the _real_ miracle was the mortal man sitting across from her, his handsome face flushed with love for her. Never in her wildest imaginings did Belldandy envision herself being so totally loved by another being. Yet, here he was, like a dream come true, a dream especially created for her, sitting in front of her in his awkward tuxedo. Animated with life, with truth and with love.

Total love for her.

She reached across the table and held his hands in hers, satisfied with the most wonderful sight in the Multiverse.

_9:15pm_

Keiichi marveled at the aroma that was broadsweeping his nostrils so enticingly. A whole lobster graced the center of the table, with side dishes galore. They had ordered fugo, the winter pufferfish that contained a deadly poison when uncooked...only licensed fugo cooks could prepare the delicacy using methods handed down secretly through the generations.

Belldandy tasted the unagi. Keiichi had informed her that it had aphrodisiac qualities, to which she responded that the entire day had been one long aphrodisiac. The unagi was skewered and had been roasted over charcoal, giving the eel dish a delicious aroma. It was all the more rare because it was a summer dish, not normally available in the winter months.

"The waiters really know their stuff," Keiichi thought as they brought two cups of sharkfin soup. The meal was timed perfectly...each dish brought out with a culinary fanfare, yet not hurried to the table. He had enjoyed giving this day to Belldandy...he knew without a doubt that she would never forget his clumsy yet heartfelt expressions of love for her.

_11:30pm_

"Silence shared between lovers can speak with grave profundity," Keiichi thought, his arm draped around Bell's shoulders. They had communed in silence as the limousine took the expressway out of Tokyo...they were already in countryside. The sparseness of lights cast a serene mood on the couple as they cuddled together in the seat of the limo. There was one more place to go...their last stop tonight. Turning off the main highway, their limousine rolled slowly into the ryokan's driveway.

Keiichi had initially wanted to book an expensive suite at one of Tokyo's leading hotels, so that he and Bell could end their evening in a brilliant spectacle of luxury. But he thought better of it, and decided to find an out-of-the-way inn instead. After all, with all the malls, the Japan Tower, the railway and limousines, he had reckoned that they would be overstimulated. His desire was to present a day's worth of _variety_ to his girlfriend for their anniversary.

"The richness of life is in its variety," Bell had often told him. What better way than to end this wonderful day in a quiet one-story, one-room ryokan?

_12:05am_

Belldandy had slipped out of her evening dress into the flowery yukata that was neatly folded atop her futon; it smelled wonderfully of rustic woods and incense. Keiichi was dressed in a dark blue yukata with the circular mon on each sleeve.

"Keiichi...I just wanted to thank you for this wonderful day! This has been one of the...best days of my existence. I feel like I had a year's worth of love given to me from you in just this single day," she said, her heart genuinely touched by his efforts. Now that it was all said and done, Belldandy was acutely aware of how Keiichi had carefully orchestrated every aspect of the day with the precision of a physicist and the insight of a philosopher.

"Bell-chan, there's one more thing before..." he started to say when he heard the gentle rapping on the shoji door. After a moment, the door slid open to reveal two blind persons.

"A father and daughter, by how close their faces resemble each other," Keiichi guessed. "How tragic for the two of them!"

He felt a brief glimpse of guilt for calling the masseuses after seeing their pitiful condition...but he was glad to employ them, for they would have money in their pockets and warm place to stay.

Belldandy looked at the two visitors with compassion in her heart, and then looked at Keiichi with a questioning expression.

"Oh, Belldandy, they're masseurs. You know...like how we give each other massages? Anyway, they're _way_ better at it than I could ever be," he explained. Belldandy felt a moment's fear...some of the massages Keiichi had given her recently were sensual efforts that she didn't want anyone else to attempt.

"Don't worry about us, we're blind...and we don't do _those_ kinds of massages," the young woman told her as she instructed Bell to undo her robe.

_12:50am_

Keiichi had asked the masseurs to massage them until they fell asleep. The father informed Keiichi that he was the brother-in-law of the owner of the ryokan; he had lost his wife when she gave birth to his one daughter. So now he and his daughter lived part-time with his brother-in-law, eking out a living by massaging the clients and people in the nearby villages, plus helping out with various chores around the ryokan.

His head resting to one side, he saw Belldandy's face resting on her futon pillow, sound asleep with a serene smile on her face.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

_8:00am the Following Day_

The owner brought them a simple but tasty breakfast in the traditional style; consisting of tsuekmono, miso soup, a boiled egg, tea, rice and dried fish slices, and peach juice. Belldandy and Keiichi ate their meal in meditative silence, soaking in the serenity of the ryokan and the early morning woods around it, the trees frosted with snow. A calming carefree serenity, which they both richly deserved after all the craziness of the past year in their lives.

_12:05pm_

After checking out, Keiichi motioned for Belldandy to come to the taxi that the ryokan owners had called for them.

"Just a minute, Keiichi...I'll be right there," she shouted with a cupped hand.

"Excuse me, where is the father and daughter that massaged us last night? I want to thank them," she asked the owner.

"Oh...they're probably still asleep in our spare bedroom. After they finished with you and your boyfriend, they had two more appointments. Can I give them a message?"

"No, that won't do. I want to thank them personally," Belldandy said in a half-pleading, half-demanding voice. The owner looked at her suspiciously, but then relented in deference to her kind demeanor. He pointed towards a set of shoji doors. Belldandy slid the paneled door and saw the father and daughter sleeping in separate futons in the middle of a crowded room.

_12:10pm_

"I'm done!" Belldandy said happily as she bounded into the cab, almost jumping onto Keiichi's lap.

"What were you doing back there, honey?" Keiichi asked, curious about what was so important that it delayed their departure.

"I just had to say my thank-you's," she answered with a smile.

_12:25pm_

_"F..Father! O..oh my God! I can __see__! I..I can __SEE__!!"_

_"Junko! This __can't__ be! I..is that really you? I..I can see your __face__!"_

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"It's all too much," Urd reflected as she considered the lull in her love life. The past several weeks had been frustrating to no end. So frustrating...especially frustrating when she saw all the happy couples in the house. Instead of feeling happy for Belldandy and Keiichi, Megumi and Genji, she felt irritated whenever they were aglow with romantic ardor. The last few weeks were as wrinkled as the crescent-shaped islands of Japan.

With a surge of nikhedonia, she had checked up on Cevn minutes after Belldandy Mindwiped him. He was_ still_ hiding under his blanket. Much to her disappointment, Bell's efforts proved to no avail. It _should_ have worked...but it didn't.

A week later, Cevn was able to emerge out from under the security of his futon blankets and talk with her for brief spells...but it just wasn't the same. He seemed to be in some kind of emotional fugue. Present but not accounted for. His lively nature had deserted him, leaving only a hebetudinous shell of a man.

She consulted with her sisters, then Keiichi and Megumi. Belldandy was confused at first...her best estimation was that the Mindwipe had only partially deleted his memories. Eventually, because Cevn retained his memories, the memories returned to each household member like a lost puppy in the rain.

So Urd took to heart what Belldandy had said about love. She spent her time in a delicate dance of emotions with Cevn, gently prodding him to get back into the routine of life. She had expected things to be back to normal within a week.

But after three weeks, Cevn had recovered only enough to be able to come out of his room and silently eat dinner with everyone. One mealtime turned tentative as Urd felt herself ready to blow up...Belldandy had wisely noticed the little signs of an oncoming Urd-fit and escorted her back to the sister's bedroom before any damage could be done. A couple of days later, Urd became deeply worried that his non-responsiveness was the result of some kind of neurological trauma, like a stroke.

So once again, she tried talking to him, having to repeat her words in almost every other sentence she spoke. He just wasn't _hearing_ her. The intermittence of his attention span added to Urd's befrazzlement. Sometimes, he was himself...but most of the times, he seemed to be a dullard. Lost in the clouds.

She looked at his sleeping form, gently breathing under the winter blankets.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

The weekend before Christmas brought an unseasonable chill to the city of Makuhari. With the beating that the town had taken in the wake of the fury of Supertyphoon Akira, a host of problems emerged with the winter weather. Infrastructures that were damaged during the October storm were now experiencing breakdowns on a routine basis.

An example of this was the recent rash of tardy snow removal. Every time Megumi drove to N.I.T. this week, she had to take a number of detours because of the incomplete snowplowing. Each moment of sleep retains a precious nature during finals week...and Megumi and Keiichi had to get up an _hour_ earlier than usual, just to make it to N.I.T. The snowplow shed and all the plows had been devastated by Akira, so snowplows had to be brought up from distant Yokohama. The Prefectural government said that they were operating with only 1/4th of the normal complement of working snow removal equipment...not to mention that the Prefectural budget had been strained well past its prudent reserve with disaster relief expenditures.

She looked at her passenger, and could tell by the rings under his eyes that Keiichi was dragging. School had been arduous this past week for both of them. The substitute instructor for Cevn's classes was a dry lecturer who didn't know a thing about the subject matter. Actually, the lecturer did know a bit of the material...but he was struggling. So they both had to endure a turgid lecture every other day. On top of that, Keiichi's informed her that his senior exams for the fall semester were brutal, especially in his Advanced Engineering Physics and Methods course.

"I feel like my mind is being murdered...it's always go home and do homework until I fall asleep at my desk," he said, surveying the snowpiles.

"Tell me about it! This getting up early because of the snow..._really _sucks!" Megumi affirmed. Her courseload was stacked this semester with six classes; with the result that she and Genji were almost strangers.

Fortunately, Sayoko had been coming over occasionally as part of a study partnership. Megumi was suspicious that Genji's older sister was just using her visits as an excuse to keep tabs on she and Genji...but Sayoko _was_ very helpful; especially since she had already taken two of the six courses last year. It was a blessing in disguise in another way as well, because Sayoko was experiencing firsthand how Megumi was pouring herself into her schoolwork...even if she didn't say it aloud, Megumi sensed that Sayoko was obviously impressed with her academic diligence. Or her academic struggles, if she didn't do well on this final round of exams before the holiday break.

Keiichi's mind was already at home, projecting a pleasantly relaxing soak in the furoba for as long as his skin could stand it. As they pulled up into the vehicle garage, he saw Belldandy emerge, wrapped tight in her winter jacket. She greeted him at the door when he came home, looking beautiful in her fake-fur parka and scarf. It was much too cold to ride his bike, the temperature a brisk blood-bricking minus 18 degrees C. But there were several circular impressions in the snow where he had taken his bike out on the driveway for brief but exhilarating donut spins.

Bell's expression was replete with worry as he crunched through the packed snow to the doorway.

"Keiichi...we have _no_ water!" she said dismally.

"What? No water!" he said in anguish after having her repeat her announcement. It was...unbelievable! Keiichi's vision of a hot bath evaporated with solar flare intensity. Frustration mounted his face as he felt his eyebrows plummet into a serious expression, mirroring that of Bell-chan's.

"Yes...and I have the flu," she sniffled with a mock-whining voice. Keiichi hugged her, and then put his head to her forehead.

"Wow! Bell-chan, you are running way hot with fever!" he said worriedly. "Why aren't you in bed, my love?"

"And miss seeing you home from school, dear?" she said, her warm blue eyes twinkling.

"So...since you're sick, that means..."

"Yes, unfortunately. It means that I can't use my Goddess powers to make it possible for us to have water. If it was only our house, then I might be able to pull it off. But, I think the water main is broken or frozen, because all the houses around us have no water. I can hear them complaining. I'm just...too weak right now to fix _that_," she said guiltily...wearily.

"And you don't have to, Bell! We'll order some food for pickup, and we can all go to the public baths," he assured her. Holding her close, Keiichi could feel Bell-chan's heart beating rapidly.

Escorting her to the dinner table, Keiichi arranged a blanket over Belldandy's shoulders, then tucked her legs under the heated carpet under the table and fetched her a can of Darjeeling tea, her favorite. She smiled at him gratefully as he thumbed through the phonebook.

"Hmm...maybe I should try these guys?" he said aloud as he punched the numbers on the remote phone.

"Uh, you said that this is the Goddess Relief Office?" he asked in a surprised voice, then turned to Belldandy to see her reaction. She looked at him with her mouth agape.

"Yes...I want you to send me the most lovable, beautiful Goddess you have up there. Her name is Belldandy..." Keiichi watched as Belldandy's face filled with romantic whimsy. She looked up with grateful eyes and blew him a kiss.

"Keiichi...I think you have the wrong number. She's already assigned to Earth. In fact, I think she's already found the most wonderful man in all of the Earthrealm. His name is Morisato Keiichi," she said, then smiled.

"Ohhhh. Well in that case, do you guys have some good udon and beefbowl to go..."

_"Yeah...but what the hell were you talking about earlier?"_ the voice on the other line groused.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Despite the cold, Cevn was still half-asleep as he looked out the frosted car window at the other car pulling out of the driveway. Strangely enough, Urd had woke him up to tell him that they were having food brought in, if he was hungry. She added that there was no water coming into the house, and that Keiichi was on the phone trying to make some arrangements for a trip to the public baths.

They eventually decided to drive into Chiba and splurge on a nice public bath. Megumi, Belldandy, Skuld and Urd had piled into one car; Keiichi, Genji, Tomohisa and Cevn in the other. Cevn noticed that Urd seemed very worried that he wouldn't go because of his renewed sensitivity to his body...but she was able to talk him into it when she promised that the baths had separate men's and women's sections. Urd told him that she, too, was beginning to feel under the weather...her throat was starting to feel raw.

The bathhouse building was a recreation of a 1920's art-deco palace. Everyone marveled at its refined opulence. Neon lights in the entrance gave it a clean appearance. All the slush tracked in by the many patrons had been mopped off the fake marble floortiles.

"Wow! This place is totally rad!" Tomohisa marveled, verbalizing everyone's sentiments. The guys and the gals parted company for their respective bath areas.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

I felt some uncomfortability as we pulled up to the sento. I had read a lot of travel books extolling the virtues of Japanese public baths, but I had never experienced one firsthand. I expected a homey-looking wooden structure, with noren curtains and handwashed woodwork. Instead, this bathhouse was like...a love hotel. At least my assumed mental image of a love hotel, for I had never been in one of _those_, of course.

It possessed a distinctive architectural theme, which it followed precisely. Great attention had been paid to rendering the sento into an exacting replica of a 1920s European 'grand hotele'. I half expected sheiks and flappers to be walking around in the lobby. The sheer luxury of the place was unsettling...it was like I had stepped a century back in time. Gold gilded porpoises spouted water out of their bills in recessed alcoves in the locker room as I undressed. For some reason, I sensed that Peorth might be hovering nearby, so I undressed quickly and wrapped the towel around my waist.

In the rinsing area, I felt a constricting sense of being smothered by the bright lights. Everything was well lit...which made me feel vulnerable. Any time I was in a stage of undress around any other people, I was very edgy. But after the Peorth incident, I had to really fight my instinctive urges to run away.

Sitting on a wooden stool, I rinsed with alternating buckets of cool and hot water. There were several doors at the end of the rinsing area, each leading to a small hotbath room. Keiichi pointed out one on the end, indicating that was our private bathtub. After washing myself, I settled into the hot bath. Soon, Keiichi and the others joined me. The tub was cozy, not too hot. Large enough for the four of us without crowding, I noticed with frank relief.

I had skipped eating the dinner that Urd brought, because I was feeling misanthropic for some reason. When Urd knocked on my bedroom door again a little later, waking me out of a nap to invite me along with the excursion to the bathhouse...she seemed very insistent. I almost refused, but I sensed that some earnestness on my part would make this a safe trip. Especially after Urd promised that there would nothing weird would happen...

The private bath was nicely appointed. I had assumed that the 'Roaring Twenties' motif would extend to the bath itself, but it didn't. Each wall had a wraparound mosaic of tiles depicting a Mediterranean beach scene; the door had even been painted to blend in with the depicted scenario. Part of one wall had what appeared to be sliding panels, perhaps for bathtub maintenance. The water was soft and nicely scented. I settled in, spellbound by all the changes in milieu.

The guys talked a bit about school stuff, then about their plans were for the upcoming Christmas and New Year's. I just wasn't in a very conversant mood. Keiichi waxed enthusiastically about how he had a Christmas surprise for Belldandy. Genji followed, by telling us about his plan to surprise Megumi with a skiing trip after New Years. Tomohisa said that he was planning to buy presents for all of us.

I sensed a downward turn in my mood as I realized that I hadn't gotten anyone anything. I had plenty of yen in the bank, thanks to the money that came in the Enigma Book...but I had been reclusively nursing my wounds. I had to give myself a pat on the back for being at least willing to come _here_, however. I had been taking baths at home in the middle of the night; completely terrified that someone would invade my privacy. After a couple weeks of this, I noticed that an anonymous someone would leave me a new bathrobe and fresh potpourri in the bathroom each night. It must have been Urd.

I realized that I couldn't stare down my conscience, which was guilt-ridden because I had been treating Urd badly. Not that I harbored any ill feelings towards her...I just felt involuntarily like a space case whenever she would come to my room.

I felt distasteful towards myself, because I just couldn't connect with her in a romantic sense. Every time she tried to get cozy with me, I would detach and float off in my mind. It was almost like I had an out-of-body experience...I would feel my senses 'fade out'. And I didn't want them to. It was almost an automatic reaction; akin to how my sympathetic nervous system would send me into shock if I dropped a heavy object on my foot.

Then when I came to, I would see the look of naked frustration on her face. I felt really saddened, perhaps empathizing with her futility; she was really trying. It occurred to me that _this_ effort of patience on her part was incredible; an absolute contrast to her usual "whatever I want, I want _now_" attitude. Could she be trying to tell me something?

No matter what I did...I felt fear and shame. So I would crawl underneath the winter blankets of my futon to seek shelter. It _was_ nothing short of a miracle that I had given in to her prompting and came here, to a Japanese public bath.

"Hey, what's wrong, Cevn?" Keiichi said. I smiled at him, until I noticed that my face must have revealed my inner conflicts.

"I...I've just haven't been myself lately," I answered.

"We _know_ that...but what is all this sadness about?" Genji asked.

"I feel like I have nothing to live for anymore," I said truthfully. Keiichi's face revealed alarm at the casualness of my answer.

"What do you mean? Nothing to live for? You have all of us...you even have a girlfriend. Don't you remember? When you first came here, you told me that you would never be in love again. What happened? Now that you're in love, you don't want to feel it? But it's not just with Urd...you've been acting detached from all of us!"

"It's not that simple, Keiichi. I want to feel like I'm a part of something. But what makes me feel so screwed up is the fact that feeling so much...has become unnatural. Something happened when Peorth came. Now I feel mostly numb."

"You need to let it go, dude! It's almost Christmas...it's been a month since that happened!" Genji said.

"I know...Lord help me, I know. I'm afraid...that it's just not going to go away on its own," I tried to explain.

"Cevn, when Sayoko was all bound up with her drug addiction like a sumotori's mawashi...I felt the _same_ way. Not just about her...but about me. I didn't feel like I had any hope. Megumi tried to talk to me, and I totally ignored her. It took some convincing by a certain faculty member at N.I.T. to focus me on the fact that there is light at the end of the tunnel. Fair's fair...anyway, I think it's time we did an intervention on _you_." I looked at Genji; my expression must have been one of surprise.

"Yes, I agree with Genji-san," I heard a feminine voice affirm. I looked up at as one of the 'maintenance' panels in the wall slid open. Three Goddesses and Megumi were resting their heads on their arms, peering over a tiled ledge at our men's bath, their hair wrapped in towels except for Megumi.

My first instinct was to scramble for...cover...anywhere away from them. I felt exposed; but my tension slackened as I noticed that all I could see was their faces...which meant that all they could see was my face.

"Y..you guys planned this?"

"No...I did," I heard a fifth voice. I looked to see that Sayoko had joined on the women's side.

"Sorry I'm late, guys," she said as she waded in next to Skuld. The door was blocked from view, so I didn't have to see her enter the bath.

I felt a wash of panic overcome me. I knew that I was cornered. I wanted to submerge my head in the hot bathtub.

"I come here all the time, so I decided to rent the adjoining men's and women's baths...after Urd phoned me. We've been planning this for a while...but circumstances didn't allow all of us to gather in one place. Y'know...finals and minor things like that. Don't worry, no one's going to see any flashing as long as everyone keeps to their side of the bath," she added with a smile.

"That means _you_, Tomohisa," Skuld said sharply. Tomohisa blushed deeply at Skuld's remark, then splashed her with a swipe of his hand on the surface of the water.

"Hey...no waterfights!" Megumi exclaimed.

"Yeah...especially since the men are outnumbered five to four," Keiichi added. I smiled at him...he was trying to lighten the mood.

"OK. So here we are...tell me what you want to tell me," I said with a reluctance churning in my guts. The wheels and gears of fear were readying their rotation inside of me.

"Urd?" Sayoko asked.

Urd spent the next ten minutes telling me about how frustrated she had become towards me. I became aware that her frustration had led to anger, which Belldandy and Skuld had to defuse at bedtime during many nights. _That_ made me feel even more caddish. She talked about how helpless she felt that I was not only rejecting her...but I had become spacey. I wasn't myself. Then she started in on a heartrending emotional appeal, her tears each becoming a wrenching rip in my heart. Belldandy had to soothe her...she was so upset. Skuld looked at me with a face filled with anger for making her sister hurt.

Then Keiichi started in about how much I was missed at by the students at N.I.T. It seems that I had developed a certain rep there as a teacher who taught interesting classes with an admixture of challenging studies and fun exercises. Then he explained his own frustration at the fact that I seemed to be throwing my potential away. He added that I was almost child-like in my nascent attitude, which irritated him to no end.

Megumi was next. I was already in tears by the time Urd had finished, but after Keiichi's turn and Megumi's additions, I was swamped beyond tears with the sadness in my heart. They were tearing me down, not because I was doing something wrong...but because I was doing something wrong by _not doing anything_. By omitting myself from the routines of my life, I realized that I was causing much more harm than good. Megumi pointed out that others are simply mirrors of me: by not facing them, it meant that I wasn't facing myself. I turned red with anger at this.

"Haven't I had enough? Enough therapy, enough counseling, workbooks, psych units," I argued...until Sayoko cut me off.

"No more self-pity from you," she sharply confronted me with all the bluntness of a katana sword. "And don't you even think about getting caught up in blaming life for your own reluctance to deal with it." To me, it seemed that she was taking a certain joy in the fact that the student had switched roles with the teacher...as I had been her sempai in recovery. Now she was pulling me up short on my own defects of character.

Belldandy explained that she thought that it was best for me to do nothing. That I needed to soak in the despair until it became crystal-clear to me that I needed to be pulled out. In her opinion, it wasn't something that I could fight against...so why fight? She finished by saying that she and the others would fight for me. They would help me resist what I couldn't resist on my own.

Sayoko went next, and blasted me with a whole bunch of recovery principles. After ten minutes of picking me apart so I can see that I was full of shit, she shifted into a more supportive stance. She affirmed that she thought that I could recover from this...relapse...into fear and insecurity. She reminded me that I needed to surrender; but that my withdrawal from my life wasn't surrender, it was just another effort at controlling outcomes. Then she poignantly recalled how much of a difference I had made in her life, and described the intervention and all the support everyone had offered to her afterward, right up to the point where Peorth came. Finally, she told me that since others had recovered from sexual trauma...then it _was_ possible. Even for me.

Skuld told me that I was being selfish...and Tomohisa echoed her sentiment. Genji repeated his description of feeling helpless because of Sayoko's drug addiction.

Finally, Sayoko asked me one simple question:

"What are you going to _do_? Are you just going to let life pass you by, or are you going to forgive yourself and let go of your shame? _We've_ all forgiven you. We all love you and care about in our own ways. So...what are you going to do?"

"But...but it's not my fault! This isn't about something that I've done wrong! This stuff was done to me. I didn't have a choice. I think I'm developmentally disabled in the area of sexuality. I don't have a clue what to do anymore! And now you're all accusing me for reacting to it the only way I know how..."

"Bullshit!" Urd interrupted me. The vehemence of her outburst caused everyone to flinch.

"You are _not_ innocent by any means of the imagination! There are no mistakes...only lessons to be learned. You just don't want to learn the lesson...that you _are_ in control of your body. Of your heart. Of your sexuality. It's all up to you, Cevn. You can hide from it for the rest of your life...or you can face it. I know you can, because you did that day in Beijing...remember? On the park bench?" Urd said, leaning far over the divider to get in my face.

"You _have_ to change...or else we're _through_! I can't handle your being so out-of-touch with my reality, my life. I just can't handle it anymore," Urd said in, her tears accompanying a determined voice. I was reeling from Urd's confrontation and ultimatum. I knew she was on-target...but then again...it just seemed impossible what she was asking.

"It's...impossible," I said in a small voice, knowing that I had just doomed the only chance I would ever have to be loved by a woman. Looking over the divider, I saw Urd and the others shake their heads sadly. I turned to the guys, who were all hanging their heads with disappointment. I could hear the women talking in whispered conversations. Finally Sayoko spoke up.

"Well, it looks like we're going to have to provide some shock treatment, huh girls and guys?" she said aloud. I had a crazy mental picture of Urusei Yatsura with Lum administering electric shocks. I looked to see all the women nod their heads in agreement. I turned away from them just in time to see Keiichi with a bathstool in both hands. Suddenly he raised it over his head and hit me in the head so hard, everything flashed into fuzziness.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Everything seemed soft-lighted, like I was looking through a cloud. Sayoko was smiling mischievously at me as she waded off to the side. She returned with a wooden footstool, and then said something about going first. She set the stool down in the water, out of sight, and then reached back down into the water.

The last thing I remember seeing is something like an underwater door opening and Sayoko starting to wade _through_ the partition that divided the women's and the men's baths.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"It would be risky...but it seemed necessary," Urd thought as Sayoko waded over to the men's bath. Then Urd stepped up on the stool and then floated over to the ledge. She settled into the corner nearest Cevn, noticing that his eyes were tightly closed as he shook like a lotus leave floating down a rapids. Belldandy came over next and quickly took her place besides Keiichi, and then Megumi came over. Megumi darted quickly under the water and pulled the sliding underwater door shut.

Sayoko had positioned herself on the opposite corner from Urd, so that she and Urd were flanking Cevn...but at a distance. She looked up to see Skuld peering over the now-closed partition.

Now that everybody was cozy, she addressed Cevn. He was crouched low in the water, his eyes closed, his arms covering himself protectively.

"You can open your eyes now," Sayoko suggested gently. She watched as he shivered, sending little circles across the bath's surface. Belldandy smiled at her, nodding her head approvingly.

"You don't have to be afraid. No one is going to touch you without your permission. No one is going to attack you. We're all just sitting here in the bathtub with you. Nothing sexual is going on...we're all here as friends," she continued.

In his mind, Cevn saw a nightmarish parade of monsters ready to rip him apart in the bath, just to turn the water red with his lifeforce. He thought Sayoko's voice sounded like a radio in a distant part of the house, half-tuned into a station; faint and nondescript shadow-words seemed to pierce his tortoiseshell fears.

"Cevn...it's really okay. We didn't want to go to this extreme, but you wouldn't believe what we told you earlier...so we had to prove to you that we _are_ your friends. You may not understand this, but do you think that, as a Goddess, that I am really all that self-conscious of you seeing my body? A lot of the time, we travel skyclad in Yggdrasil. Clothes and accessories are nice, but they are optional. We Goddesses are not caught up in the kinds of ego attachments that you mortals have with your physical spheres," Belldandy explained in a comforting voice.

"Tomohisa! Eyes front and center, boy! If you so much as look at anyone but me...I'll Skuld-bomb you," Skuld shouted in complete dissonance to the calming atmosphere. She lifted up a handheld bomb with "Skuld Waterproof Explosion Device" painted on the side. She had noticed that Tomohisa's eyes were greedily roaming over every female body in the pool; his indulgence in this adolescent fantasy come true was not only potently sexual in nature...for some reason, it _really_ irked her. She remembered Big Sister Urd reminding her while she was rinsing off before going to the bath...

_"If things get to the point where we have to wade over to the men's pool, it has to be as free of sexual vibrations as possible. I'll leave it to you to take care of Tomohisa," Urd had cautioned her._

"...TOMOHISA! Y..you better not be looking anywhere else but at me! Come over here, right now!" Skuld commanded, hoisting her Skuld-bomb and shaking it for emphasis. Tomohisa sighed with absolute reluctance and waded over to where Skuld was, face to face, his back to the rest. Skuld pulled out a watergun and sprayed him in the face.

"That's for looking at my sisters the way you did. Don't think I didn't see you gawking at them!" she said in an angry voice.

"Ahem...well _some_ of us Goddesses aren't caught up matters of the body," Urd said sarcastically. She had noticed that Skuld was a little _too_ emphatic about Tomohisa. It amused her to think that her youngest sister was actually responding out of _jealousy_. Naturally, she didn't even know it.

"Well, now that we have that taken care of, I guess we need to explain to you the facts of life," Megumi chimed in.

"Just because none of us are wearing any clothes...it doesn't mean that there's going to be an orgy or something. We all know about what happened when Peorth visited. So I had this crazy idea. Since you're feeling so embarrassed because some of us saw you naked that day...well, I thought that if we evened the score and let you see us naked...then you would less apt to drown in embarrassment," Urd explained.

"You have to remember...this is Japan, not America. We still have coed onsens and public baths. Not because they're a cover for love hotel-like sexual flings, in most cases, but because nudity is not such a big deal here. It's not like we're nudists or something...but the human body isn't always associated with sex. I mean, I used to take baths with my father on a regular basis, as a kid. With Keiichi too. Right now, Keiichi isn't looking at me with total lust in his eyes. He's not acting like he's all turned on, even with Belldandy sitting next to him. This isn't the time or place for that. He's just kicked back in the bath with the rest of us," Megumi offered.

"You must realize, if we really wanted you to open your eyes, we could very easily. Just think how it would feel for eight of us to gang up on you with a splash-out water fight. So why don't you try and trust us," Urd said gently. "Besides, it kinda looks silly with you squinting tightly while the rest of us are so relaxed."

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

I heard Urd insist that I open my eyes. It was no big deal, they were saying. Perhaps it wasn't...for _them_! But I felt so vulnerable. So_ naked_. As soon as Sayoko started to come over, I felt my mind lockdown with bladed doors of panic. I closed my eyes and retreated back...deep back. I felt the familiar black hole engulf me and dissolve my feelings of panic into a thousand bubbles that seemed to dance on the inside of my tightly squeezed eyelids. I expected hands all over me, touching me with no regard to privacy. I expected crude comments about my body and manhood. I expected violence. I expected a lot of things too horrible to dwell on for more than a split second, not things in the remote sense, but memories that were part of my reality.

But the past cannot be revisited..except by choice. My sexual past was triggered irrevocably by this. Yet they were saying that they were my friends, and that they had done this by choice. Not to hurt me, but to level the playing field so that I wouldn't have the excuse of embarrassment to cling onto.

"Oh well...what the hell?" I mentally resigned myself to fate. I opened my eyes and turned to my right. I saw Urd, her slender shoulders just peaking over the water. She was smiling gently at me...her emerald eyes inviting. There wasn't a trace of shame on her face. What's more, she lacked any embarrassment at the fact that I could see her...all of her. Shoulders up, any way. The water was distorting everything else, for which I was extremely grateful. If I couldn't see her clearly, she couldn't see me.

I felt my blood rushing to my face in shame and embarrassment, because I _wanted_ to see her nakedness. I felt a flash of disappointment as I realized that the water was splashing around so much from the jetfeeds that I couldn't catch a glimpse of her figure underwater.

Then I heard clapping. Keiichi shouted "way to go!" and Megumi whistled in approval. It took a moment to register that they were applauding me.

"He did it!" Sayoko said happily. I looked at her...and noticed how she had transformed into a radiant beauty. Then I realized that I wasn't trying to size up each woman's body. I was looking them in the face, in the eyes, rather than getting caught up with voyeuristic urges to see a water-distorted thigh or a breast or pubic hair.

"Welcome back, honey!" Urd said proudly.

"Cevn, how are you feeling?" Belldandy asked, her face still exhibiting concern.

"I..I'm in shock. If I was 15 years younger...this would have been a dream come true. You're all beautiful women...but I don't feel threatened by that. I don't feel threatened by you guys, either. I don't think you're going to try anything to hurt me," I said, surprised at my little joke about adolescent fantasy. Sayoko splashed me with water, and then pointed up at the wall.

"Do you see any signs?"

"Signs of what? What does that have to do about anything?" I asked, wondering what she was trying to get at. She grinned and splashed me again.

"I mean, the signs that say 'No women allowed in the men's bath'!" she explained. It dawned on me that the 'maintenance passages' above and below the water were there so that people could move about between adjoining pools. Sorta like sliding dividers in restaurant booths.

"Silly! There's no sign up on the wall because it's _okay_! You're okay. We're all adults here. I'm not sitting here thinking 'I'm going to molest Cevn'. I'm not staring at your body. But really, nudity doesn't equal sexuality. We're just eight adults sharing a bath. You really need to let go of those American hang-ups you have. I think they have been part of the reason why you've felt so victimized over the years," Sayoko pointed out.

"That thing with Peorth was a mistake on her part...and I know it injured you. Made you feel unloved and unprotected. But you know what? You're in Japan. Your whole life is different now. Like it or not, you are not going to be victimized any more. So stop victimizing your own feelings. Let go of it. That's why we're all here with you...to help you see that you _can_ let go of it. Even if Peorth were here, she wouldn't want you to feel so horrible about yourself. She really wouldn't," Belldandy urged.

I started laughing. They were dead-on right...and had gone to an insane extreme to prove it.

"This may sound dreadfully clichéd...but if you beat them, then join them," I said. Feeling light-headed from the blow to the head, I started blacking out...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Urd looked at Peorth, then back at Cevn's sleeping form.

"Thanks, Peorth. I think your DreamWeaving spell took hold in all the right places. That's the first time he's smiled since you were here before," Urd said.

Peorth was floating over the sleeping form of the young male mortal. She had wrecked so much havoc in his life during her temporary assignment to Keiichi. Belldandy's words had left a definite imprint on the clay of her soul.

"I had to make it up to him. I had no idea..." she said, unable to explain all the sewage in his river of dreams. While sifting through his mind to come up with components for her DreamWeaving, Peorth had tapped into each of his encounters with the spectral figure of sexual abuse. She also tapped into his hopes, and drew upon the strength of hope he felt from each of his friends here.

"Peorth was always so good at DreamWeaving," Urd thought with admiration. She looked at the web-like weave of Peorth's dream, hovering barely a foot over Cevn's head. It looked like a global spiderweb, brilliantly fibrous with different colored lattices.

"If anyone could push him out of whatever is holding him, it's you," she reflected with irony.

"We each have our talents," Peorth said to her with a smile. "Urd...I need to apologize to you too. First, I didn't know that you and he..." Urd waved her off with an embarrassed smile.

"It's okay. Once I get my license back...you'll get yours," she teased the younger Goddess with just enough of a smile to avoid looking _too_ sincere about her threat.

"Urd...I'll be ready any time you are for a rematch at Stellar Karaoke," she replied, smiling back sassily. Her face turned serious as she continued.

"But...I know that my first encounter with him made your life harder as well. I hope that you'll forgive me. I want to make it up to you. Really." Urd cycled through all sorts of images; all sorts of amends she could force out of Peorth. Grinning inwardly, she relished the slideshow of potentials.

"Peorth...there's something about the Ultimate Force that won't let me touch him. I can't kiss him, hug him, or even hold hands with him. Could you look into it for me?" Urd asked.

"Yeah...sure! Anything to help you guys. After all, I'm still a Senior Agent of the Goddess Relief Office," Peorth replied cheerily.

"By the way, how's Tyyr?"

"Last I heard, he was in a rehabilitation platoon because of repeated insubordination," she replied. Both Goddesses giggled at this.

"Hey, I bet you have wishes to fulfill, places to go. Thanks for coming in your spare time, Peorth!" Urd said appreciatively. Peorth dissolved the DreamWeave sphere with a wave of her hands. Urd was piqued with curiosity.

"Peorth, what exactly did you make him dream? I _gotta_ know!" Urd insisted. Peorth leaned over and whispered into Urd's ear. Urd turned red, then giggled, and then turned serious. Peorth had gone way beyond what she had suggested. She had suggested to Peorth that she use an intervention as a theme, similar to what Cevn had organized for Sayoko, thinking that it would work for him as well. Leave it to Peorth to come up with something crazy like using a public bathing facility as a DreamWeave setting for the intervention.

"Don't you _ever_ tell Belldandy and Skuld that I used them in a DreamWeave! He won't, of course. He won't remember a thing when he wakes up tomorrow. He made a sort of …breakthrough. You guys should really be thankful you've earned his trust, or this would have been a disaster. Now I need to trust that you'll keep this a secret between us girls," Peorth warned.

"By Vanagdrasil, no way. They would do everything but _kill_ you if they found out!" Urd assured her.

"They'd be after you too. After all, doing a DreamWeave to try and rearrange his subconscious was your idea. Now I just have to MindWipe everyone again before I go, and then we're hopefully back to normal here. Urd, I must warn you, though. There is something totally out of whack with him. You better keep an eye on him, he's got readings that I've _never_ encountered before. Scary stuff," Peorth cautioned. Urd nodded at this; Peorth wasn't telling her anything novel about her mortal charge.

"Hopefully he'll be my love again," Urd thought, looking at the flowers in the corner of the room. A few minutes later, Peorth returned and with a floral burst, disappeared into the vase of roses that Urd had bought especially for today. Urd smiled to herself as rose petals floated down all over the futon and tatami mats in Cevn's bedroom.

"I can't wait to have you back, dear," she said as she departed his room.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"What are we going to do? It's been a couple days and we have no water. I had to drive all the way into Chiba just to get us some bottled water. And I need a bath!" Megumi anguished.

Keiichi was grateful that this didn't happen three weekends ago, when he and Bell-chan 'officially' celebrated their anniversary. He smiled inwardly at the memories of _that_ evening...the Fates had smiled upon them, showering the couple with the gift of no intrusions for the entire day. No Urd. No Mara. No Skuld. No Megumi. Just he and his wonderful Goddess.

"What are you smiling about, Big Brother? There's no freakin' water for a bath...and you're _smiling_!" Megumi said. Keiichi's daydream decompressed instantly.

Urd walked into the dining room and nodded at Belldandy and Skuld approvingly, since Keiichi and Megumi seemed to be locked in eyedarts.

"Did it work?" Keiichi asked.

"Yeah, I think it did. He's sleeping like a baby, with a big grin on his face," Urd reported. Everyone at the dinner table seemed to sigh and relax into a more relaxed posture at the good news.

"I'm so happy for you, Urd!" Belldandy exclaimed.

"Me too," Megumi said, breaking her staredown with Keiichi. Urd almost collapsed with exhaustion.

"You're really sick too," Belldandy asked her older sister. She could almost feel the heat radiating from Urd, whose bronzed skin was pallid with fever.

"I got it! We should book ourselves some time at the public bath!" Keiichi said with his finger pointed at an imaginary midair lightbulb that had just popped on with an idea. Oddly enough, Urd unexpectedly blushed as he made his suggestion.

"That'll help you both start to get rid of the fevers you have. I'll call Sayoko and get her to make a recommendation," he said as he picked up the phone.

"Isn't it supposed to be the other way around...if you have a fever, you don't go too long in a hot bath. Especially when the weather outside is way sub-zeroish," Megumi said as she munched on a sushi roll with delight. It _had_ been awhile since she went to a bath with the gals, however.

"This will be totally fun...except for the driving in these arctic weather conditions," she thought.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Hey Cevn, we're going to a public bath. You wanna tag along?" Urd asked, poking him gently with a round cardboard container, one of the ones he brought back from China.

"Huh...uh...oh Urd? I had the most amazing dream...I can't remember any details of it...but I feel totally new. Like I woke up into a new life or something. I just can't explain it," he offered. Urd looked at him with a beaming smile that broached angelic on her face.

"What's with you? You act like you've just seen a long-lost friend at the airport or whatever they have for mass transit up in Yggdrasil," he half-asked, half-observed.

"Uh...nothing really. It's just good to see you, honey," Urd said as she tossed him a winter jacket from his closet. As expected, he scowled at the H-word. Urd smiled privately, if _that_ wasn't a sign that he was back to normal, nothing was.

"We're going in a few minutes, so hurry," she said, blowing him a kiss as she walked out the door.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

After waking up from a dream...I felt like I had emerged up from a long dream. Actually a long nightmare. I knew that I had reclused myself in my room for a long time. But the inner demons that were fueling my withdrawal...were gone. I felt a rafting sense of calm; a calm support underfoot in the midst of turbulent waters. But now, the turbulence of my soul seemed quelled.

As I got dressed, I noticed a weakening in my limbs...and a headache. Telltale signs that I was catching the flu.

"Are they going to have towels and soap?" I asked the assembled group in the living room.

"Of course, you idiot!" Skuld teased me. In response, I tossed the towel I was carrying at her head. It unfolded in midair and landed partly on her head like a blanket. I chuckled as she grabbed for a corner, pulled it off, and then wadded it up and threw it back at me.

"Hey...hey! That's enough...children!" Keiichi accosted us with waving hands. Belldandy giggled while I fake-threw the towel at him. Setting the towel down on the nearest couch, I followed the others out the front door.

As soon as I hit the front porch, I was gripped with freezing air. My hands shook hands with Mr. Winter for the first time in many years. The chill seemed to seep up my nostrils with mini-icepicks.

I loved it!

Hawaii was a tropical paradise...but the weather was always the same. Maddeningly so. _This_ was different. These were the elements of climate announcing their presence with a shout. The wind rattled through the ice-covered branches of the clusters of trees in our compound, creating a discordant syncopation of soundtones. Someone grabbed me by the arm.

"C'mon, you dope! It's freezing out here, or haven't you noticed!" Keiichi shouted, pulling me towards the car.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Sayoko had come by to pick up the feminine half of our house, so Keiichi was driving Megumi's car. I looked out the window to see that Makuhari had been transformed by a significant snowfall. I wanted to take a ride in the country...to experience the snowy landscape at its pristine best.

The snow was piled up as high as our car in some places alongside the road as we jumped on the oceanfront avenue leading towards Chiba. We passed the Makuhari Messe Exhibition Center, with its exoskeleton of scaffolding. Genji informed me that the repairs had just started getting underway when the early snows came, so they decided to leave the scaffolding up as protection from the winter elements. The Center was draped with hundreds of tarps and plastic sheets.

We turned right, just before entering Chiba and drove up a hilly road. I was lost...lost in my wonderment at the hibernal scenery we were passing. We made another right, traveling up a short driveway to a rustic-looking sento.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"He's growing fast!" Mara commented to herself as she looked at Isilblius. The Ultimate Demon had materialized as an infant, and then grew within a week into a cherub. Now he possessed the physical maturity of a 9 or 10-year-old boy. He still called her "Mother" on occasion, which stirred Mara to heights of bemusement and irritation.

Because of his rapid growth rate, he was eating _a lot_ of food. In the four years she had lived on Earthrealm, Mara normally just materialized food for herself out of thin air. But it was too much to materialize his meals on top of her own, now that her powers had been reduced by her license suspension. So she reluctantly took to a mixture of cooking and creating their repasts.

The past few weeks had been a rollercoaster ride for Mara. At first elated because she had successfully summoned the Ultimate Demon, her joy turned to shock when he addressed her as "Mama". Mara was definite about one thing...she did _not_ want any Demonic kids cluttering her life. Parenthood was something she avoided like a systems virus. Not to mention the lack of agreeable male consorts in Vanagdrasil. So she had to accept the state of things as they were...and surf with her sudden pseudo-motherhood. Besides, if Isilblius viewed her as his mother, he would be obedient and strongly protective. Already, power surged through him, a power that she had rarely witnessed before.

Within a week, he was getting into _everything_. She nicknamed him the "Dark Cherub" because of his inquisitive nature and his little-boy plumpness. He also was able to manifest a great set of wings...something most Demon children couldn't do until they were fifty millennia or so. She was intrigued by his rapidly expanding intelligence, fired in the furnace of juvenile curiosity. He was also quite sly, having snuck treats out of the various hiding places she used around her earthly lair. _Her_ treats.

Now, he was getting even more interesting to behold. Isilblius was beginning to enjoy certain forms of music. He had discovered an old mortal rock group called Black Sabbath or something...despite having no audio equipment. So Mara got him a stereo...and now she was making nighttime trips to the music stores to keep his appetite assuaged. He was listening to a variety of musicks: Metallica, X-Japan, Tokyo Reapings, Pantera, Sarcophagus and Blade. Mara even liked a few of these mortal musicks.

Isilblius went through a bratty phase last week, playing all sorts of powertrip games with Mara. During one mother-and-son test of wills, he even threatened to call the Dark Lord and announce himself! Mara had barely escaped that...it was only due to her appeals to his feelings of loyalty that she thwarted his impulsive ambition.

"Does the Dark One know about this? About him?" Mara wondered as she watched her 'son' munch on seaweed crackers. Strangely enough, she felt a wave of compassion towards Isilblius...she really cared for him in some way.

"Are these the dreaded...maternal feelings that I've been avoiding all my adult life?" she asked herself. She had even slipped and called him "son" a couple of times. But if they were...then they weren't half-bad...they were half-confusing.

Last night, they sat across from each other at the makeshift dinner table that Mara had designed. With a pedestal of human skulls and a semi-transparent yellow-tinted glass resting atop them, it was quite a nice addition to her lair. Isilblius basically was in a playful mood, and started a food fight with Mara. His playfulness seemed to bring out long-dormant playful feelings of her own, especially when she nailed him over the head with a plateful of spaghetti. She was plastered with food, but she didn't mind at all...she enjoyed him immensely.

So tonight, she had decided on a small test of his powers. She had debated whether her request would be taking advantage of him too soon. But her curiosity ruled her judgment.

"Isilblius, my dear little Demon. I want you to do something for me. Would you be willing to try a little test of your Demonic powers?"

"Sure, Mom!" he said excitedly. Mara was pleased with the enthusiastic response he offered.

"You know those terrible Goddesses that I've been telling you about?"

"You mean Belldandy, Urd and Skuld? And all the mortals that live with them. They're gone!" he said with a wave of his hand.

"What would they be doing out of the house in _this_ weather," Mara wondered aloud.

"No Mom..."

"You can call me Mara, Isilblius," she interrupted, reminding him for the umpteenth time.

"No Mara...they're _gone_. I took care of them. I put them somewhere where they won't ever bother you again." he said with juvenile pride.

Mara thought he was kidding at first, until she saw the sincere expression on his young face. She felt a sickening chill at the thought.

"Just like that…and they're gone?" she wondered. Mara was just going to ask him to play an old prank on them, something like making their phone ring constantly. Instead, Isilblius had anticipated her _true_ desire and had blotted them out of existence.

"He didn't make a ward, or a spell, or a curse. Nothing!" she thought in amazement. "I should be elated that my enemies are gone...but this is _totally_ wrong. He just wished it...and they're gone. All of them. Could he be lying to me?"

"Isilblius, you did say that you took care of _all_ of them?"

"Yeah, Mom. Belldandy, Urd, Skuld, Keiichi, Megumi, Genji, Tomohisa and Cevn," he said in a voice filled with childish irritation in reaction to her distrust.

"Mom...why do you look so mad?" he asked innocently.

Mara had just realized that he had "put away" Keiichi. That was the whole reason why she was stranded on this misbegotten ball of mud, because of that blessed mortal! And now he was gone..._before_ she could torment him! Her Grief Office assignee had just disappeared from existence, which meant that she had failed in her duties. She was even more irate at the lost opportunity to pay him back for all the times he had thwarted her with the help of the three Goddesses. Her disappointment wedged into a flaming wall of anger.

"You...got...rid...of Keiichi too?" she said through teeth gritted with the salt of rage's edge. With a supreme effort, she kept her voice down. She didn't want to scream at Isilblius...after all, this was only the first of many favors she had planned to ask him.

"You can leave the rest of them, but bring Keiichi back. Bring him here to my…er, our Lair," Mara demanded.

"No! I don't want to! Nyah...nyah. Haha...and you can't make me, either!"

"Biiiii-ddda!"

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --


	35. Pt 35: Petals

**Part 35: Petals**

"W..where the hell am I?" Urd said with a twinge of fear after the initial shock wore off. She glanced around and saw her two sisters; they were as surprised as she was. Once she noticed that she wasn't alone, she felt a sliver of relief in the face of the enormous yaw of her disorientation. Then she looked at herself and realized that she was nude; as nude as she was when she was relaxing in the hot bath waters at the sento. Another glance informed her that she was anywhere but someplace familiar.

When she came to, Skuld fought her panic by compassing their surroundings with an analytical eye. There were many enigmas here besides the biggest mystery of all: how did we get _here_? First, she was floating off the floor...which was impossible, since she had her powers stripped by the Almighty months ago. None of the Goddesses where wearing any clothes, and Big Sister Urd was also floating in the air...despite having almost no powers. Second, the room was almost hermetically sterile...and chock full of post-modernist interior design motifs. Glazed ceramic-like white walls with high-tech recessed blue lighting mounted within white metal grillworks surrounded them. There was no sign of a door or portal anywhere in the room. No air exhausts, fans or air conditioning/heat vents. No electrical outlets. No windows. Nothing to indicate that this room was a place of habitation. The recessed lights in the floor and ceiling seemed to create a diffuse glow, rather than a source of light.

"What is making us float?" she wondered as an ill-boding apprehension gripped her with a silent roar. She suddenly hunched her knees up to her chest and curled her long slender legs under her. She looked at Belldandy, who was also peering around, examining their immediate environment.

"«_We're being watched,»_" Skuld thoughtcast quietly to her sisters.

"«_How? There's no window, no glass, nothing!»_" she heard Belldandy's reply in her mind. Belldandy glanced at Urd and then curled herself up in a floating near-fetal position. Urd also curled up protectively.

_"«How is it that we are_ –here-_?»_" Belldandy thoughtcast in exasperation.

She remembered that a few minutes ago, they had been soaking in the women's bath: her, Urd, Skuld, Megumi and Sayoko. Belldandy had been recounting her anniversary date with Keiichi to the other girls, while Skuld was spraying Megumi and Urd with a porpoise-shaped watergun she had bought from a vending machine in the lobby. She could hear Keiichi's voice through the divider walls...the guys were laughing it up. Urd had told her how happy she was now that Cevn was apparently himself, but she added that she didn't know for sure _how _much of himself he was. The walls of the women's bath were tiled with a pastoral scene of Lake Biwa, depicted in pseudo-relief in such a way to lend the visual impression that the bath itself seemed to be an extension of the lake. Behind her was a mosaic expression of a forest scene, one wall had a traditional Japanese village; the remaining wall portrayed a scene of rice paddies with a temple in the horizon.

One minute, she was soaking in the soothing waters of the bathtub, her fever abated by the soothing comfort of the 40C degree water and the pleasant fresh scent of the bath. The next minute, everything went nova-bright for a split second...and then she was windmilling down some kind of endless tunnel. She felt herself gripped by an _incredible_ power; it was as if an invisible hand had scooped her up in midair and hurled her down the corridor. The expansive passageway looked like the interior of a black hole-white hole convex, but it was even more colorful...and filled with awe-inspiring flashes of energy. The flurry of sights and sounds overwhelmed her into unconsciousness...and then she was here.

"Where are Megumi and Sayoko?" she asked aloud. Both Skuld and Urd inclined their heads to indicate that they didn't have an explanation for their sudden appearance here, let alone what happened to their fellow bathers. If they were gone, then...

"Keiichi!" she shouted desperately. "Where's Keiichi? I..I don't even know if he's _safe_!" she said haltingly. Her fear increased exponentially at the thought of being separated from her beloved Keiichi. Belldandy looked to her two sisters with a distraught expression. She felt her confidence waning...whatever had done this to them could have caused even worse problems for Keiichi and the guys.

One thing remained the same...Belldandy still felt sick with the flu. She had a ringing headache and a fever. So there _was_ some continuity between the time in the bath and the present situation.

"«_Bell, why don't you try and extend your senses?_»" Urd suggested. Belldandy felt a slight tuck of relief at her sister's suggestion; the initial shock to the system had worn off enough to allow them to begin to rationally seek options and explanations.

The Norn of the Present closed her eyes and felt her mind expand beyond her physical attribution. It stretched across the room...and then reached a barrier of some kind. Her Goddess-enhanced senses revealed that they were inside of some kind of bubble consisting of an unknown matrix of arcane energy.

"Drats! If Urd had her powers, she could probably identify what kind of magical force is enveloping us," she thought, momentarily filled with a rare flurry of recalcitrant thoughts towards the Lord.

"«_Skuld...Urd! We're surrounded by some kind of energy field. This room appears to be in a bubble-shaped sphere of arcane energy...a kind of force that I have never encountered before!»_" she telepathized with an anxious thoughtcast.

Urd clenched her fists angrily at this news. She was by far the most versed of the three in arcane matters...but her knowledge was useless as long as she couldn't experience the energy empirically.

"Leave it up to the Lord to make this even more difficult than it has to be," she growled in a low voice.

"We're..in..a..cage," Skuld said in a muted voice trembling with fear. The last time she was confined was when she was kidnapped by Mara...with all those horrible _things_. This was just the same. Skuld felt a series of flashexit terrors strobing horribly in her conscious thoughts...the sensation of being trapped was so strongly fixed in her heart, she started gasping, eyes wide with anxiety.

"Skuld...calm down! Calm down!" Belldandy pleaded as she saw her youngest sister dissolving emotionally into a frightened state. Skuld was darting her tanbrown eyes all over the room, while her chest heaved with gasping breaths.

"I'm trapped!...We're trapped!...There has to be a way out!...What if...it was caused by a ghost or a Demon?...What if it's Mara?...what if we're all in that horrible lair of hers?...We must be at someone's mercy because we're trapped," Skuld screeched in a panicked staccato of circular paranoia.

Belldandy and Urd reached out and each grabbed one of Skuld's shoulders, then reeled themselves closer so they were floating right next to her. Rubbing shoulders with Skuld, both sisters tried to comfort her with words of empathy and confidence...while massaging her neck and back to try and physically soothe her. Belldandy could feel Skuld's baby-smooth skin quivering under her hand as she tried to backrub the tension of her neck.

"Skuld...we're all scared," Urd said over and over in a calming mantra-like repetition, trying to get her attention and let her know that she wasn't alone in her fears.

"Skuld, it's going to be okay. We'll find a way out of here. We always do, despite everything that Mara has thrown at us," Belldandy assured her. Skuld's heaving ribcage slowed down and finally she resumed a somewhat normal breathing pattern.

"You promise?" she asked sheepishly as she looked at both her sisters, embarrassed at her overblown reaction of panic.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Megumi felt consciousness returning to her slowly. Her head was still swimming somewhere in the spindizzy zone, many times worse than the worst hangover she had ever experienced. She tried to sit up and realized that she couldn't budge an inch. She could only turn her head and move her fingers and toes.

"Restrained," she realized with a mounting sense of vague fear. This awareness offered a mixed blessing; her immobility had initially brought up fears of that she had somehow been paralyzed. Lifting her head, she observed that she was in a gurney-like bed, covered with white bedsheets and blanket. She could see several white straps wrapped around her wrists, waist and ankles, confining her. The ceiling looked _weird_ in a sci-fi sort of way. Twisting her head, she saw Sayoko lying unconscious in another bed. Sayoko was also covered by a white blanket and bedsheet, over which a half-dozen straps were visible.

"If she's strapped like that, then I must be too," Megumi thought. The bed was comfortable, at least. But she couldn't move any of her limbs; she was tightly pinned to the bed. It dawned on her with a flush of embarrassment that, underneath all the bedding, she was _naked_!

"M..Megumi," she heard a hoarse voice interrupting her thoughts. She saw Sayoko looking at her with an expression that revealed that she was also disquieted and disoriented.

"Do you know that your bed is _floating_?" Sayoko asked.

Megumi felt a nauseous play of senses overcome her; a feeling of _otherness_ at the notion of being in a floating bed. She closely examined Sayoko's bed...and saw that it was lacking any legs or other visible means of support.

"This...is bad. What can defy the laws of gravity?!" she thought, immediately suspecting that they were dealing with paranormal powers. Unearthly powers. Demonic powers. Feeling fear in reaction to this realization, Megumi looked all over the room for evidence of Mara.

There was a series of holographic display units in the wall over her head, floating in the air like the kinds of holograms she'd seen in anime. The engineering student in Megumi's mind took over, allowing for a moment's disciplined reprieve from her anxiety. She gulped down hard as she realized that these displays reminded her of Skuld's Holophotic Videmeotron. The room seemed to be illuminated, but there was no source of lights, like hidden florescent fixtures or cleverly recessed incandescent bulbs. Instead, the ceiling and floor seemed luminous. She couldn't see any kind of door or windows.

"What happened to us?" Sayoko asked in a voice that was choking down panic. "This room is maddeningly the same, it's so bright and nondescript. And I can't move an inch!"

"I don't know," Megumi replied, echoing her friend's frustration.

"What do you remember, Megumi?" Sayoko inquired.

"I remember that we all were in a square bath with nice walls; it was really serene and quiet. We all were talking about guys and stuff...and then I felt like the bottom of the floor just opened...and then I _disappeared_. I recall that I was hurtling through some kind of corridor...like in that last part of 2001: A Space Odyssey," she said, straining to put words to the incredible visions of flight.

"My memory gets really blurry after that. Then I woke up here with you just a few moments ago!"

Sayoko looked at her thoughtfully.

"I was worried that I was losing my mind, Megumi! But I saw the same thing...or something just like you described. Which means that it happened to both of us. Where do you think the others are?"

Megumi was disquieted by Sayoko's question. She was so involved in her own plight that she completely forgot about the three Goddesses who were bathing with her. Could they have been spared the knee-jerk abduction that she experienced?

"I don't have a clue, Sayoko. I just wish they'd turn the lights down in here."

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Keiichi woke up with a splash of thick ruddy mud. While bathing in the relaxing, cleansing water of the public bath, his skin felt like it was being smoothly caressed. In contrast, the mud was tautly drying on his skin, which made him feel like he was clipping out with aridness. "Hhhh!" he gasped as he felt a sudden pressure on his chest. Raising his head, he saw a large toad resting there.

"_Wauggh!_" he screamed, scampering to gain his feet, sending the toad on a hop-skip-jump to safety. Once he was standing, it dawned on him that he was a naked as the day he was born. Looking down at his body, he saw that he was plastered in mud, partially dried. He quickly wheeled around and saw a human-shaped imprint in the muddy paddy where he was laying.

"Isn't it winter outside?" his mind scrambled a message to him, cutting through his initial wooziness. Keiichi looked to see Genji, Tomohisa and Cevn all lying in the mud at irregular postures.

"As if they'd been dropped there from some point overhead," he observed.

Genji woke up and looked at himself with mud splashed all over his face. Keiichi almost wanted to laugh at the fact that Genji was plastered with mud...but this was too strange to be finding humor.

"Wh..where are we?" Genji asked him.

Keiichi sat down in the mud, not wanted to be seen in his current state of nudity. They were _outdoors_ in the middle of what looked like a rice paddy; the rice was just peaking over the loosely packed mud. Towards the horizon were small hillocks on one side, and a wooded area on the other. In the distant horizon, a mountain range compassed the plane of view all the way across.

"I'm guessing...rural Japan?" Keiichi ventured.

"Yes, but there's something extremely _strange_ about this. It just doesn't feel right!" Genji replied.

"Yeah...like how in the hell did we get here?" Keiichi stated the obvious.

"But it's _hot_! This humidity is as bad as it gets during July! And it was _snowing_ when we drove to the public baths!" Tomohisa said, referring to the weather. Indeed it was hot, which ruled out the fact that they were in Japan.

"Even Naha in Okinawa isn't this hot in December!" Keiichi noted.

Cevn sat up and realized that he was somewhere else. Immediately noticing that he was naked and caked with a combination of wet and dried mud, he crouched into a near-fetal position.

"What's going on?" he yelled in confusion and fear. "I was with you guys, balneating..."

"Balneating?" Tomohisa asked. Keiichi glanced at his friend, knowing that he was rattled into panicked defensiveness...because he was using obscure terms.

"Sorry...bathing, Tomohisa," he corrected Cevn.

"Where are we? Where are my clothes!" Cevn screeched fearfully, totally inattentive to sudden change in locale and weather. All that mattered was that he felt _exposed_, vulnerable!

Keiichi knew that Cevn was on the brink of a panic attack, and tried to settle him down. Keiichi knew his friend enough by now to say the right things to mellow out his fears. A moment later, Cevn seemed to listen in on Keiichi and gradually recover his wits. He looked around...and then looked at Keiichi with wide-eyed astonishment.

"We seem to be in the middle of a rice paddy...by my estimation," Genji answered.

"If we are, then you know as well as I do that the rice must have just been planted, because it isn't very tall yet. It must have just peaked...so it must be late springtime here, possibly the fifth month. Wherever here is," Cevn guessed.

"How?" Keiichi asked in anguish...suddenly realizing that his beloved Belldandy was nowhere in sight. "How did we get here? And where are Bell-chan and the others?" He didn't have time to finish his thoughts.

_AIIIYYYYYEEEEEEEEHHHHHRRRRR!!_

Genji leapt up and jerked his head in the direction of the sound. Almost two dozen people were rushing upon them, bearing crude hoes, sickles and spears...and menacing looks on their faces. They looked like something out of place. "_Centuries_ out of place," Genji sensed with panic. Dressed in rags and loincloths, the crowd advanced with murderous intent, closing the distance fast.

"C'mon, let's get the hell out of here!" he shouted, alerting the others. Scattering all concerns about their natural state aside, three men and a boy started running towards the woods, hotly pursued by a small band of peasants shouting hostilities at them. Sprinting at the top of his abilities, Keiichi saw a flash of color amidst the verdant thickly wooded forest. Tall trunks of Japanese ashes and bamboo trees were everywhere, blurring as they dashed even deeper into the darkening forest canopy. Looking back, he noticed that their pursuers were still in dogged chase.

"Over there!" he shouted, point towards the splatch of color.

"It's a shrine!" Genji shouted excitedly.

"Which means that they probably won't attack us there," Cevn said, expressing his hopes out loud. "I mean, isn't the Kami a form of sanctuary, even in 21st century Japan?" he asked in a winded voice.

"I don't think we're in the 21st century," Keiichi said grimly as they dashed with deep gasps towards the Shinto shrine. All three of his companions shuddered in mid-pace in reaction to his observation...then started running even faster, narrowing the gap between them and the shrine. The shrine to the Kami was in a natural clearing fifty meters ahead. Their random sprint through the forest finally converged on a footpath leading to a crude wooden torii.

"Get them before they reach the God!!" the angry mob shouted.

Keiichi and the others passed through the wooden torii and sprinted another ten meters up to the shrine. Ascending the wooden stairs, they passed through the curtains in the doorway and almost stumbled into the two-room shrine. Outside, the mob of peasants semi-circled the shrine.

"We don't allow naked beggars in our rice fields! How dare you come here and defile the God! They must be hinen! They were trying to steal our freshly planted rice! We'll wait here, and get you when you come out! Leave 'em be, they don't look like they'll cause any troubles _now_!" the villagers shouted, cajoling and arguing amongst themselves.

All four were heaving with deep gasps after their lifesaving sprint away from the peasants. Outside, the angry crowd was still venting its spleen on them.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Time was stretching onward like a taunt rubberband. Urd wished that she could take an invisible razorblade and slash through the elastic band. There just wasn't any _snap_ to this confinement. One thing that she really hated...beyond being confined in an unknown location...was being bored. She was worried that she might develop what the mortals termed "cabin fever".

She looked at Skuld, who wasn't doing much better. Skuld's long sheen of black hair was bobbed into two ponytails; she had the end of one ponytail in her mouth, licking it like she always did when she was all wound up with nowhere to go.

Belldandy was sleeping.

"Ahh, it's time that we wake our guests," a voice sounded in the room, coming from no particular direction. The lights quickly faded to a red and yellow strobe and a high-pitch klaxon started sounding off. The serenity of the white light was now replaced by a cacophony of sound and flashes of light.

"All, right! All right, we're awake already," Urd yelled into the air. The light returned to its normal off-white glow.

"Splendid! I wouldn't want the three of you resting all day when we have so much to talk about."

In spite of feeling a bit of disorientation after being jarred into wakefulness by the 'alarm' of lights and sounds, Belldandy thought that she recognized that voice from somewhere...it sounded very familiar.

"Where are we?" Skuld shouted impatiently.

"Ahh, the young one. Since you're not a child, I won't treat you like a child. You will be informed in due time...Skuld, Norn of the Future," the disembodied voice answered. Skuld shuddered as she heard her name and her Goddess designation.

"You can't keep us here like this. If Kami-sama finds out..."

"Ah, but He won't. We've focused great measures towards preventing that. We can't have Him noticing that you're missing. But then again...He should have noticed this long ago. Anyway, you must be hungry...and it would be improper to engage in any pleasantries while you all have appetites. Please direct your attention to the wall on your left," the voice instructed.

The three Goddesses looked and saw an opening appear in an otherwise seamless section of the wall. Three trays of food were there. The aroma of the food was overwhelmingly enticing. Belldandy looked suspiciously at the trays.

"Someone has gone to great lengths to find out about us..." she thought uncomfortably. One tray had several cups full of ice cream, another tray had three glasses of Oolong Tea, and the third tray had a bottle of sake with the label neatly removed.

The three Goddesses floated over and each took a tray.

"How do we know that these aren't poisoned or drugged?" Urd asked.

"Urd, Norn of the Past, why would you suspect us? After all, you three are the most valuable pieces of property on this planet. I wouldn't dream of harming you...until I find out all of your secrets. That wouldn't be very sensible, would it?" the voice replied politely. Urd shuddered at the words and how casually the voice had delivered them. The cool threat of the voice reminded her of a hidden snake, fangs dripping with the poison of the unknown.

Skuld broke her wooden chopsticks and took a cautious bite of the fish on her tray.

"Japanese cuisine," she remarked aloud.

"Yes. I've allowed my people to provide you with suitable meals. You'll notice that your powerup substances are included as well. But be forewarned...they have been diluted so that you cannot reach full power and attempt an escape from here. As you have already noticed, the confinement shield around your habitat serves to prevent any power from Yggdrasil coming in. Therefore, you _must_ resort to these sources of power. Otherwise..."

"We fade from existence," Belldandy finished.

"No...I won't allow that, Belldandy, Norn of the Present. If you refuse nourishment, we will simply force you to powerup. But let's not involve ourselves with any unpleasantness for the moment. Enjoy your meals, Goddesses!" the voice said with finality.

The last thing any of the three sisters wanted to do was eat. The brief dialogue with the voice was very unsettling. Belldandy in particular was disturbed. If the voice belonged to their captor, then whoever he was...knew about matters that shouldn't be known. About Yggdrasil, their powerup sources, their names, the fact that they were Norns.

Unless they were somewhere _else_ than the Earthrealm. But every instinct Belldandy possessed informed her that she and her sisters were still on the Earthrealm. She wished she could extend her Goddess senses out past the 'shield' around them so she could hear the rhythm of the planet.

"What could possibly keep us from receiving power from Yggdrasil?" Urd asked, astonished at the implications of _that_. The only place in the known Multiverse that Yggdrasil's power emanations couldn't reach was Vanagdrasil...and this was hearsay, since no one had been there except the Lord. She munched on some radishes, filled with consternation.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Megumi turned in the direction of the whooshing sound to see some kind of robot moving across the room. The machine was rolling around on a tripod of servos as it came by her bedside.

A strong metal 'hand' emerged from the side and grabbed a hypodermic with some kind of apparatus attached to it. Megumi panicked as the needle closed in on her neck. She violently tried to move, but the restraints held her fast. Another robotic hand reached out and grabbed her face by the jaw and held her head still for the injection. She felt the needle prick her, and then a slight metallic presence moving inside of her neck, and then the robot withdrew the needle.

Megumi was shocked at this callous violation of her person, her body. Her fear increased when Sayoko started screaming hysterically as the robot attempted to repeat the procedure with her. Sayoko struggled even more than she did; her level of fright surpassing Megumi's.

Sayoko was reacting with stark terror, her screams pitching shrilly around the room. Megumi realized that Sayoko was frightened to the extreme, far beyond what would be normal, even in this very abnormal and threatening situation. She wanted to shut her ears so she wouldn't have to hear; her sense of fright being fueled by Sayoko's shrieks of alarm.

"Sayoko, are you all right?" she shouted as the robot muffled Sayoko's terrified shouts. She could hear the patter of one of Sayoko's fists striking impotently against the metallic exterior of the robot. Somehow, Sayoko had broken free from one of the restraints! She could hear the clattering of Sayoko's bed as the N.I.T. senior shook it with the violent jarring spasms of her struggles against the restraints.

Finally, the robot finished injecting her. It grabbed her free hand and fastened her wrist down again with a strap. Withdrawing to the side of the room, the robot announced in a coldly metallic voice that they had been 'fed' and that they would be visited again in eight hours for another 'nutrition cycle'.

Megumi followed the complex mechanism with her eyes...hoping desperately that it would just go away. As it neared the wall, she gasped as an oval doorway seemed to _form in the wall_ itself! A passage out the room! The robot rolled through the portal, and then the open doorway vanished. Simply faded from existence...disappearing into the solidity of the white wall.

It was there...and then it was gone!

Sayoko was still gasping and choking on her breath, hyperventilated with terror. She obviously didn't witness the fantastic incident with the doorway and the robot's departure. Megumi was really worried about her sempai, repeating her concerned question over and over. She was afraid that something inside of Sayoko had snapped...and would not recover! She sighed with relief as Sayoko seemed to settle back into some semblance of composure.

"Megumi...sorry about that," Sayoko finally replied. "I guess you know one of my worst weaknesses now...I'm deathly afraid of needles. When I was a little girl, I contracted rabies when I got bit by a marmot during an overseas trip with my parents. They rushed me to a hospital in Vladivostok, and I ended up getting the whole regimen of rabies shots. In a Russian hospital, of all places! It scared me to death...especially when my parents left me there all alone," she admitted, almost embarrassed to reveal this vulnerability.

"In hindsight, it was a good thing in one sense; when I was using drugs, they tried to get me to use IV drugs like morphine and heroin...and I just couldn't go for it. Obviously, you can see why!"

"Gods, Sayoko! That's nothing to be ashamed of! I can't believe that your parents would leave a little girl alone in a strange hospital! If that happened to me..." Megumi replied.

"Besides...I was scared to death anyway. Did that _thing_ inject you in the neck too?"

"Yes. By the way, did you notice how _exact_ those robots were?" Sayoko noted.

"What do you mean?"

"Have you taken a robotics course, Megumi?"

"Yeah. One in college prep school, and one in my sophomore year at N.I.T..." she answered...and then it rapidly dawned on Megumi what Sayoko was getting at. The robots had an exact sense of where to apply pressure and how much pressure to exert. Despite the sophistication of the robotics industry in the early years of the twenty-first century, there were _no_ robots that possessed this kind of mechanical dexterity; adept enough to administer a precise medical procedure like the one she just witnessed. Lasik robots were one thing...but this robot was _multitasking_! It seemed to be operating with an apparent autonomy, as if it had an artificial intelligence.

"These robots...are incredibly sophisticated. Can you imagine? Just the computing power alone to manipulate their arms with such sensitivity is beyond anything I've ever read about in the tech manuals. Our best robotics technology is barely able to develop robots advanced enough to walk on uneven surfaces," Sayoko said with reluctant admiration.

"Sayoko, I don't know if you noticed because you were too panicked, but the robot that gave me that damned shot just now actually _restrained_ me by holding my jaw so I couldn't move my head. Just enough to hold me still, but not enough to hurt," Megumi added, feeling insecure in her memories of the incident.

"Megumi, _how_ could this robot know exactly where to inject us? That alone is impossible, according to everything I've studied about robotics! But it injected me with the confidence of a seasoned nurse. And I failed to identify any visible means of remote control, like a power cord or some kind of receiver! It was as if the robot was following a discrete set of instructions...without being guided in any manner! It was clearly following multiple instruction tasks with a remarkable degree of sentience! It reacted to my panic attack!" Sayoko observed, her voice wavering with unease.

"Me too! But it reacted differently to each of us. And what did it say? Something about us being 'fed'? Do you think that the injection was some kind of nutritional supplement?"

"Could be...I was feeling hungry earlier. Now I don't feel hungry at all. Just shocked out of my senses after being scared to death."

"Sayoko, I..I really don't like this! I have a very bad feeling that something is _really_ wrong here."

"Tell me about it!! Confined to bed like mental patients, given injections by robots, and no human contact. Did you ever see THX-1138, Megumi?" Megumi thought about what Sayoko was implying, and remembered the movie. It was heavily rotated on cable around the time that the final Star Wars movie had come out years ago. A significant part of the movie took place in a white room not much different than the one they were in.

"I don't like what you're implying, Sayoko. I don't like what's going around in my head either. This place...is giving me the creeps, bigtime!"

"And then there's the wall..."

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Man, that was _weird_! Those guys were nuts! They were trying to _kill_ us!" Tomohisa said again after everyone had caught their breath. "I couldn't understand what they were saying, but it seemed that those dudes were royally pissed off at us!"

"I couldn't understand it either. They were speaking Japanese, but it was _off_ somehow," Genji said. They were all leaning against the interior wall of the shrine, covered with sweat and mud.

"You know, I may be wrong...but I think those peasants were speaking to us in medieval Japanese," Cevn wondered aloud.

"What?"Keiiichi exclaimed, looking up at the ceiling beams in shock. "What are you saying...that we're in _ancient_ Japan?"

"I don't know about that, Keiichi. I do know that there is such a thing as phonetic degradation over successive generations. In one of my grad courses on linguistics, the professor presented reams of evidence that indicated that certain phonetic structures in the kana had changed over the centuries. Either their language is stiltingly colloquial...or they're speaking in medieval Japanese."

"So that might explain a few things!" Keiichi noted. "I know we've only been here a short time, but it's already growing dark...and there's no lights. Shrines usually have some kind of exterior night lights. But there's no lights. No glow in the sky to indicate a city; you know, like light pollution at night."

"But this shrine is definitely off the beaten path! It might be too much of a hassle to string up lights around it," Genji offered.

"Guys...did any of you see any power lines? Telephone poles? Street lights? Lamp posts? _Anything_ that seems to come from modern civilization?" Tomohisa asked, his voice heavy with incredulous worry.

Keiichi pondered this with a growing sense of discomfort. What if they were somehow transported back in time to an earlier era of Japan? What if...they were stranded? He remembered being lost in Tokyo his first year in junior high. How a sense of insignificance and disorientation gripped him as he traveled about the city, trying to find the train station. How small he felt in the pressing waves of humanity...how absolutely _lost_ he felt then.

He was feeling lost again.

"OK. Assuming that they were speaking an old dialect of Japanese, is it possible that we didn't travel centuries back in time?" Genji stated, trying to assure himself by a show of confidence.

"Genji, most modern Japanese cannot even figure out what the dialogue in Noh plays is saying. You know this! It's quite possible that, since Noh has preserved archaic forms of speech...that a remote village could possibly have deliberately maintained archaic speech. But the chances of that happening about as great as us finding Shangri-La. Not even the most remotes parts of Hokkaido have been unexplored," Cevn offered.

"So...that means that we're really in the present? That we just got faked out?" Tomohisa asked hopefully.

"Not a chance," Keiichi said in a voice charcoaled heavy with the coals of a mortifying direness. "You guys are forgetting something _really major_! Since when can you remember it being this hot anywhere in Japan...in _December_?"

Tomohisa, Genji and Cevn stared at him with blank facefalls of expression, their widened eyes glimpsing the implications of Keiichi's statement.

"This…majorly..._sucks_!" Tomohisa muttered, unable to counter Keiichi's premise, or even explain why it was so hot.

"_HHHHNNN!_" the four heard as a shrine priest entered the small Taisha-style shrine housing the Kami. Raising his staff in a threatening gesture, he glared at the four men.

"Bow!" Genji whispered in an irritated voice when he noticed that nobody was doing anything. "C'mon...bow, you guys! He's the guji...the priest of this shrine. Otherwise, he'll think we're trying to rob the place and call the police," he quickly explained.

Quickly following Genji's lead, the group bowed in an attempt to project a humble affect.

"What are you doing in the God's shrine!" the priest confronted them in an angry voice, pounding his staff on the wooden floor in cadence with his words for emphasis.

"Please, don't call the police on us, your reverence! We are weary travelers. We were stranded by a storm, and then robbed of all our possessions by a gang of bandits. Then we were chased here by a bunch of people from a nearby village," Genji answered quickly, fabricating a series of lies with an expertise he didn't know he possessed. The priest eyed them suspiciously; it wasn't every day that four naked young men showed up in one of the shrines in his ku, or district.

"Where are you from? Your manner of speech is quite odd!" the priest demanded. The four men sighed with relief; at least their modern idiom was somewhat recognizable to this priest. Perhaps they _were_ still in modern Japan!

"We're from Makuhari, near Chiba," Keiichi said, opting that the truth would soothe the priest's wary disposition.

"Chiba? Never heard of it. Makuhari, you say? Never heard of it."

_"Ehhh?"_ the four exclaimed, glancing among themselves with uncertain expressions. The priest's answer certainly didn't bode well in the "we're still in modern Japan" train of hope.

"Chiba. You know. Big residential suburb, on the other side of the bay from Tokyo," Tomohisa clarified with a sense of foreboding, almost not wanting to explain because he was scared of what the elderly priest might say to this.

"Tokyo, you say? Where is that? Never heard of it."

Keiichi felt a sickening feeling in the pits of his stomach. His heart seemed to doublebeat in despair at the priest's words. If this priest didn't know about _Toyko_...

"Oh man...are we so ever _fucked_!" Tomohisa muttered aloud, speaking the thoughts on everyone's minds.

"What's that you say? What do you mean that you're 'fucked'? Is that a special kind of rite?" the priest asked.

Keiichi was upset with being suddenly separated from Bell-chan. Upset at being deposited in the mud without a stitch of clothing on his back or anywhere else, and then being chased by a mob of villagers who seemed to want to murder the four of them. Upset at having to seek refuge in a weathered Kami shrine for sanctuary. And the final upset… having his worst fears confirmed by the priest…the realization that they definitely weren't in Chiba any more. He was literally shivering with consternation, and when he heard the priest's response to Tomohisa, he was swept up in a crazy urge to break into gales of laughter. Nothing else seemed to make sense in this bizarre situation.

Besides, hearing those words come out of the mouth of a Shinto priest was pretty hilarious! He wasn't the only one holding it in...Genji, Tomohisa and Cevn were all muffling snickers.

"We're so..ha..haha..fucked, it's _beyond _ridiculous," Genji gasped out...and Keiichi couldn't hold it in any longer. The laughter tore itself out of him and his three fellow time-travelers, who were soon reduced to gales of rib-clenching boisterous laughing, while the priest regarded them with a grave countenance.

"And why would I summon this...'police'...you call them? What is a 'police' and why do they strike such fear in your hearts? Are they a gang of brigands, perhaps? Perhaps _you're_ brigands! Maybe I should call upon the constables of our Lord to investigate you! But the daimyo's palace is at least a week away by horse! Traveling there would keep me from my rounds. A poor priest like myself could never afford a horse out of the meager almsmoney I collect for the shrines..." the Shinto priest pondered aloud, his tone of voice clearly revealing his disbelief. By this point, it had gotten so bad that none of the four could look at each other or the priest for fear of starting another laughing fit.

"How could you men be here seeking sanctuary from the God, and yet be so backwards and ignorant?" the priest concluded.

"Oh...shit!" Keiichi muttered as another imponderable crashed all around him, reeling him and the others into an ocean of crazed laughter.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Megumi was losing track of time. The only means she had of estimating the duration of their confinement was by the number of visits...when their robotic nurses would come in and 'feed' them. Interesting enough, after Sayoko revealed that she was deathly afraid of needles, there were no further attempts at injections by the robotic 'nurses'. Instead, the robots would arrive with two large rubber syringes, which they would then use to orally administer some kind of sweet-tasting juice. Somehow, she didn't feel hungry...or dehydrated.

But she still felt wretched and helpless, having some weird liquid squirted into her mouth by a robot every eight hours.

She had gotten to know Sayoko real well in the past few 'days' of their confinement. They had been fed 14 times; if the robots were keeping to their 8-hour schedule, then it had been four days. With no one to talk to except Sayoko, Megumi found herself talking just to relieve the boredom. Even more important, conversing with Sayoko kept her out of the place that fear held in reserve in her heart. The fear that threatened to thaw the icehard optimism she was struggling to maintain.

During their conversations, Sayoko had revealed the thin traces of her fears, the breadth of the fabric of her hopes, and the little tragedies that populated the continuum of her life. Some of the little tragedies were embarrassing. Other tragedies were instructive in a humorous extent. Many of these tragedies served as punctuations in Sayoko's life; signaling the end of a personal era by starting her anew on a different path. An example of this was the time Sayoko had choked on a cucumber during a class trip to Hawaii and ended up being the butt of numerous sexual jokes by her classmates from the all-girl's Juliard's Academy. That incident was enough to cause her to run away from any every other private high school academy her parents placed her in. Eventually, they relented and enrolled Sayoko in a public school. This revelation answered a question that had been hovering at the back of Megumi's mind for years: why would a daughter of a billion-yen family like Sayoko's attend a public high school?

Megumi learned that Sayoko had originally wanted to be a doctor. But at some point in high school, Sayoko arrived at the conclusion that her career goal was an ostensibly an attempt to impress her parents; blindly hoping that, by becoming a renowned physician, she could bridge the emotional gap that years of parental inattention had created. In an angry reaction to this personal insight, Sayoko decided to jump into engineering to spite her parents. Engineering was a decidedly unfeminine career choice, a fact that Sayoko hoped to wield in an effort to hurt her parents. On the other hand, she _was_ very interested in engineering.

But her parents were too unconcerned with Sayoko's own personal inclination to be displacated. They humored her by allowing her to take summer school courses in a variety of engineering topics, mostly in engineering math. While in high school, she found that she liked hanging out with the high school crowd that aspired to technical college. They were geeks, to be sure, but Sayoko admired their sense of organization and eccentric interests. Compared to most of them, she was years ahead on the social and sexual experience scale. Being around a group of awkward, sexually frustrated future engineers offered her a place to feel comfortable...and also to feel superior. Most of all, they were _smart_. This was when Megumi first met Sayoko; when she started high school, her high school was already abuzz with descriptions of the "Queen", as Sayoko was known by reputation.

Soon, Sayoko was smitten by the engineering 'bug', as the N.I.T. students called it. After graduating from high school, her parents disregarded her career aspirations and enrolled her in the elitist Harvard School of Medicine in America. While at Harvard, Sayoko refused to study, and partied instead. She was eventually expelled after two years of non-participation. That extra year in Harvard cost her parents a foundation, which was used to build a wing at the Harvard research hospital. Disgraced and all but disowned by her angered parents, the drug habit Sayoko picked up while in America worsened. For part of a year, she was absolutely miserable. Then, at 21, Sayoko signed up to N.I.T. She never once looked back with any regrets. Her freshman year at N.I.T. was fraught with struggles with her parents, who vigorously opposed her autonomy and her vocational aspirations. Her choices simply didn't meet her parent's high expectations. They tried to bribe Sayoko with a cushy Vice President position at one of their manufacturing subsidiaries, hoping that a "real world" engineering position would disenchant her with her silly whim. She refused her parents again, telling them that she wanted to be in engineering science, not manufacturing administration. Eventually, sometime in her sophomore year, her parents acquiesced to Sayoko's career plans...her restoration to their good graces was partially redeemed by her ­diligent academic performance at N.I.T. She was the top student of her class...Keiichi's class...until last year, when her drug habit devoured her.

Megumi had always felt ambivalent towards Sayoko. Because of the Mishima's enormous family wealth. Because of all the times Sayoko blatantly tried to pursue Keiichi despite the fact that she _knew_ that he was already in love with Belldandy. Because of the fact that Sayoko had been Megumi's sempai all through high school, and then at the very college Megumi had enrolled in. And most recently, because she was Genji's older sister… which made Sayoko a potential rival with possible veto power to her relationship with him.

Keiichi's view of Sayoko had initially colored Megumi's attitude towards her. But later, once she became involved with Genji, Megumi's perception of Sayoko had softened a bit.

But now that Sayoko was the only vessel of humanity in her immediate existence, Megumi found that she could actually _relate_ to Sayoko in a lot of areas. She felt her heart stirred to sadness by her sempai's recollection of years of growing up ignored by her parents. How sad her childhood must have been for her! As the hours passed, Sayoko was becoming less of an enigma...and more of a normal Japanese coed.

Megumi found herself confiding things to Sayoko that she hadn't ever admitted to anyone, except maybe Genji. Or Keiichi, Belldandy and Cevn. And much to her surprise, Sayoko didn't seem to judge her harshly for her mistakes. Megumi acknowledged that she had been interested in Genji for almost a year before actually telling him about how she felt. Sayoko giggled at this; her light-hearted reaction was the last thing Megumi expected. Then Megumi described how difficult it was for her, growing up with an older brother.

It was funny...Sayoko had Genji for a younger brother, Megumi had Keiichi for an older brother...yet both brothers were pests that _never_ acted their age! They shared several raucous fits of laughter as they each described 'episodes' that demonstrated their brother's idiocy. Both girls realized that maintaining their sense of mirth was an integral linchpin in keeping them from going gong-blown stircrazy in this isolation ward.

"Eventually, something will happen," Megumi finally said with a sigh of frustration.

"Yeah...and I just hope it happens _soon_!" Sayoko added.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

The room changed colors as the wakeup routine started once more. Urd was already irritated by the fact that she was being forcibly awakened. Like any good nightowl, she liked her mornings best served with a generous sleep-in. But the manner in which she was awakened...was totally ruinous to her peace of mind.

"Jarred awake is more like it," Urd thought as the intermittent strobing lights died down. As usual, the wall opened up with three trays of food for the sisters. Their food was maddeningly the same each morning.

"Institutional food again," Belldandy commented with a frown. It tasted a lot like the cafeteria food at N.I.T., as best she could recall from the few times she had eaten there. _That_ experience had been enough to convince her of the important role she would need to play in her beloved's life simply by preparing his lunch bentos. So she had prepared hundreds of meals for Keiichi...each bento lunch an expression of love. This food was utterly loveless and mostly tasteless...but it did have a powerup substance that the three Goddesses needed in order to maintain their corporeal integrity.

"I hope that you each are finding your meals to your satisfaction," the disembodied voice aired once again. Urd was angry at the irony of it all; the voice seemed to expect gratitude for providing them with this...crap...that it was euphemistically terming "meals".

"As usual, the food sucks, the service's lousy and your voice is irritating," Urd replied.

"I see. Perhaps we should withhold your meals and just give you your powerups in pill form instead. Might that would be more to your likening?" the voice replied tauntingly.

"Why you...mmph!" Urd started to say as Belldandy muffled her words with a hand over her mouth, shaking her head "no" vigorously. Skuld looked at Urd with a threatening glance.

"Urd, don't you _dare_ cause us to lose our meals," Skuld said angrily.

"Ahhh...division amongst the ranks. This is good; an encouraging development. Such dissension among yourselves will make each of you weaker, eventually. More susceptible to my entreaties. More willing to reveal your secrets. We will talk...again," the voice said. Once more, Skuld was amazed at how the voice was audible when there were no speakers or other sound reproduction units in sight.

"This is getting on my nerves," Urd said with no economy of irritation.

"Uh-hmn!" Skuld agreed with a nod of her head. She was disturbed by the implications in that horrible voice. It was regrettable that there were no moving parts in their room; otherwise she could jury-rig some kind of mecha to get them away from here.

From that horrible voice.

"«_Urd, Skuld...we must be careful. Whoever it is that has imprisoned us...is relying on the fact that we will eventually be unable to cooperate amongst ourselves to find a way out of here,_»" Belldandy warned her sisters. In her heart, Belldandy felt a chill, as the voice's words were already beginning to manifest as truths.

They _were_ unable to escape. They _were_ starting to have sibling squabbles. They _were_ beginning to feel at the mercy of whatever was confining them to _here_. And she...was feeling her grasp of reality slowly eroding. The very fact that she was interpreting events in accordance with the observations of their anonymous captors was proof of this!

"And I can't stand another moment without Keiichi!" she thought with anguish. It was almost as if her boyfriend, her sisters, and the others in the bath were all petals on a flower...petals that had been plucked and left to float to the ground in different places.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

The priest told us that his religious name was Reiami, and that he was born in Nara about fifty years ago. Originally a Buddhist, he had changed his convictions after being struck by lightning in a storm while traveling between Kyoto and Ako. He had prayed to the yamakami mountain gods to spare his life: if he survived the lightning storm, then he would dedicate his life to Shinto. His story reminded me of one of the anecdotes about a similar vow made by the young Martin Luther. But Reiami showed us the scar on the back of his head, and we realized that he had literally been struck by lightning.

Reiami was kind enough to procure some clothes for us...a spare set of clothhewn shirts and trousers, hempen jackets, umbrella-shaped straw hats, and red cotton loincloths to "keep the oni-devils away". Genji's story about us being robbed by brigands was convincing enough to raise his sympathy, I happily noted. I was utterly relieved that I didn't have to walk around naked any more.

The villagers did come back to harass us several times, but they evidently held Reiami in high respect, abandoning their efforts to "catch" our group whenever he would step out of the shrine and chastise them. Eventually, he got it through their heads that we were wayward travelers who were under the protection of the God; viz., we were under his protection.

Reiami was very intrigued by me. Obviously, he had never seen a Caucasian before. My light brown hair and blue eyes astonished him. He asked me repeatedly about my birthplace, my parentage, what my home village was like. Picking up on his tale of the lightning storm, I ended up inventing a story about being shipwrecked, and that I lost most of my memory during the storm that capsized our ship when I hit my head on a rock.

He was also mystified as to why we all had "boy's hairstyles"; meaning that we didn't shave our foreheads. Over meals, we asked him a series of questions about where we were, who the daimyo was, who was reigning in Kyoto, and various questions about the religious and political tenor of the times. Our usual fare was a rough meal of cooked millet and some turnips. Then Reiami said that he couldn't remain with us any longer. He had to tour the other shrines to make sure that they were in proper upkeep. He blessed us and departed the next morning, reminding us that we had to quit the shrine in short order before any curious villagers discovered our presence.

"I got bad news guys," I broached my conclusions after Reiami had left. "If what Reiami said is true, then we're 30 years or so into the Ashikaga Shogunate."

"_Ashikaga_?" Keiichi said with a mixture of amazement and discouragement.

"Yes. He did mention that Chokei was the ruling Emperor, and this was the Kentoku Nengo, which would place us somewhere between 1370 and 1372," I replied.

"How do you know that?" Tomohisa asked me incredulously.

"I memorized most of the lineage of Emperors and reign era names in grad school," I replied. Tomohisa looked at me and shook his head in humored disbelief, noting that I just gained a level in the 'geek-o-meter' in his mind.

"Then if we've somehow been transported back in time to the dates you mentioned, then we're right in the middle of a civil war. I remember studying about the Ashikaga Shogunate...all sorts of internecine warfare and puppet emperors." Genji added.

"Yeah, totally so!" I agreed. I couldn't help but compliment Genji on his historical knowledge. For an engineering student, he had a pretty broad background in other subjects, like humanities.

"Right now, there is a 13 year-old shogun, and the division between the Southern and Northern Dynasties is crumbling." Genji noted.

"Waitaminute. You're saying that we're stranded here in the 1370s, wherever here is?" Tomohisa whined.

"Yes, that's exactly what I'm saying. Not that I like our present circumstances at all, mind you, but that's what we're up against...at least until we get a divine rescue from a Goddess or two," I answered. I realized that until this happened, we would be little more than mud people, leading a life of illusion.

"That's what's been bothering me!" Keiichi said, pounding his fist in his hand for emphasis. "How could we get separated from Belldandy? Surely she wouldn't have allowed this to happen to us...unless she herself was overpowered in some way! God, you guys have no idea how much I miss her!!" Keiichi added.

"_I_ do! I miss Megumi terribly!" Genji said sadly. My thoughts were drawn to absent Urd...I shared in their heartaches.

"What if Bell-chan doesn't know where and when we are? We could be stranded here for the rest of our lives in 14th century Japan!" Keiichi shouted out his fears. Which were fears we all shared.

"Look...we might as well head to the prefecture capital where the daimyo is. Under the circumstances, I think this would be our best bet. Think of it this way: you and Genji are engineers; I'm somewhat knowledgeable in Japanese literary arts; and Tomohisa has the chance to invent baseball a few centuries earlier than expected," I suggested, pointedly including Tomohisa so he wouldn't feel left out in the list of skills we could offer. "Surely, between the three of us, we could invent something that could make us a living...perhaps get us noticed by the daimyo or a wealthy merchant."

"Cevn, this is _feudal_ Japan. They are as likely to kill us after taking our idea as they are likely to pay us for them. And what about you?" Keiichi asked.

"What about me?" I asked defensively, my frustrations bettering my ability to remain calmly detached.

"Well...I don't know how to put this without being direct, but you're probably the most gaijin person in this group. Not only gaijin as in 'foreigner', but gaijin as in Caucasian. Remember how Priest Reiami reacted when he first saw you? He was definitely put off by your racial features...and he was a man of the cloth! Imagine what your typical 14th century Japanese townspeople are going to think? Or the nobility, for that matter?" Genji explained, trying to be inoffensive as possible in his explanation.

I reflected on the verity of Genji's observation and then remembered the travelogues of Isabella Bird in the 19th century. About how the Chinese peasants nearly killed her because she was a "_white demon who devoured children and poisoned ­croplands with her evil aura._" Even in Japan, she was attacked more than once by xenophobic Japanese. Her travel diaries were filled with episodes of overt prejudice she faced almost everywhere she went in Asia, simply because of the fact that she was a Caucasian woman traveling in stretches of country were the populace had never seen anyone of her sort before. I nodded my head slowly as the thrust of Genji's point settled in. One of those "it sucks to me moments", for sure.

Suddenly, I was very afraid. I was no longer in the cosmopolitan 21st century, where mass media had broken down many cultural prejudices. I was in a land where conformity was highly prized...and rebellion was put down, hard. Where non-Japanese were outcast or even killed. And _that_ was in the 16th century! This was a full two centuries earlier.

"So what do you suggest?" I asked, surprised at the shaky uncertainty evident in my voice.

"Hmm. I think that we should follow your advice and try to go to a major city," Keiichi proposed. "And as for you, Cevn, I think that you should become a deaf-mute. If you don't say anything, maybe we could pass you off as some kind of oddity. Like, you know, in circuses?"

I almost blanched as I realized what Keiichi was saying. Feeling insulted at first, I calmed myself down...and realized that his suggestion was the most sensible one to deal with my presence in our traveling party. Tomohisa joked that he was worried that I could keep my mouth shut.

"Yes, I..I think that for now, I need to keep silent. Genji, you can tell them that I'm a foreign merchant who was exiled, or something. But what about you guys? You certainly don't look like samurai!" I noted.

Keiichi looked at Genji thoughtfully.

"Well...maybe we should!"

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

On the seventh day, the robots came in with trays of food and undid their restraints. Leaving two pairs of pajamas, hospital gowns and robes, the robots exited their room. The contour of the doorway remained in sight, instead of disappearing into the fabric of the wall. From everywhere, a seemingly prerecorded message for Megumi and Sayoko filled the air.

_"Sayoko Mishima and Megumi Morisato. After ensuring via DNA and molecular analysis that you are indeed who we suspect you to be, it has been determined that it is no long necessary to keep you in restraints. However, this does not mean that you have been freed from your confinement. Once you leave this room via the doorway on your left, walk down to the end of the hall way and pass through the exit. There, you will find your accommodations for the duration of your stay here. There is a bath, kitchen, study, gymnasium and other facilities where you can make yourself home. You will be allowed the use of an entire floorunit of this complex. Please be advised that any attempt to harm yourselves or each other will result in instant neurorepressive restraints. Any attempts to breach your area of confinement will be prevented, and punitive measures applied. We hope that you will consider yourselves our honored guests."_

After the message repeated itself twice more, Sayoko sat up in her bed and looked at Megumi with a questioning expression.

"You know...there's something oddly familiar about that voice. I just can't place it. But...I could swear that voice sounds an awful lot like my cousin's," Sayoko wondered aloud.

"Ehhh? No way! But that voice is crawling around in the back of my mind, too. But my memory just won't grasp it. 'Honored guests', my ass!"

"Megumi, isn't it great to be able to finally stretch your legs out? This is so much better than being strapped in a bed!" Sayoko said as she buttoned up her hospital gown.

Megumi started to examine her gown and robe.

"I already looked, Megumi. There's no label or manufacturer's tag on any of them. Whoever it is...wants to keep anonymous. Wants to keep us in the dark about where we're at."

Megumi swung her legs over the bed, and then stood up. The floor was hard, yet it pulsed with a warmth to match its soft glow.

Sayoko did a few practice sidekicks and then jumped up and did a dropkick. She followed this up with a flurry of punches in the air.

"Sayoko, what _are_ you doing? It looks like karate."

"It _is_ karate. Any good daughter of a corporate president has to know self-defense. And if you ever hurt my brother..." she said as she executed a quick series of kata moves. Sayoko looked to see the brief expression of trepidation on Megumi's face, and then started to laugh.

"Heeheehee! Hey, I'm only kidding, Megumi! Besides...I think you and Genji are great together. I know that he really adores you. Funny thing is, after being cooped up with you these past few days, I can honestly admit that there's not a whole lot of difference between you and me," Sayoko noted. With Sayoko's threat turning into a joke, then turning into a confession of sorts, Megumi felt her heart warmed by her words.

"You know, Sayoko, I've never admitted this to anyone before. What I'm going to tell you now must never be repeated. In the past three or so years that Belldandy and her sisters have been here, I've really been jealous. I never had a sister. Keiichi is a wonderful guy and a great brother most of the time. But it's not the same! Belldandy, Urd, Skuld...they're all really nice, but they're _different_. They're different because they're _Goddesses_. I might as well tell you the truth now, because you may never get a chance to hear it. And after we've been so honest with each other since we came here, I wouldn't feel right concealing it from you."

"You mean that they act like prissy, pampered, all-knowing, too-cute Goddesses. I totally agree with you, Megumi. In fact I think that Belldandy..."

"No! That's not what I mean, Sayoko! They're _real_ Goddesses!! Like...Kannon and Benten, or the Greek goddesses like Diana and Aphrodite. With divine powers and magic and wisdom..."

"Don't even try to tell me that Urd is wise. And what about Skuld?" Sayoko broke in, still thinking Megumi was joking.

"Sayoko...listen! Belldandy is a _Goddess_! She came here in our midst because my brother made a wish. Keiichi wished for her to be with him...so she ended up having to grant his wish...and be with him wherever he went. Then she fell in love with him, and later he fell in love with her...or maybe it was the other way around. In any case..." Megumi bit her lip to stop, as she saw Sayoko hanging her head sadly.

"Sorry, Sayoko. I forgot about how you feel about..."

"Keiichi. It's all right, Megumi. I've gotten over the worst of _that_ since I got clean off drugs. It still hurts, just like any potential romance or unrequited love-admiration that never ends up happening...but I'm okay. Really!" she said, waving her hand up and down to emphasize her words. Then Sayoko remembered something Cevn said to her, the day she got back from treatment. Something about greater powers that were at work to bring Keiichi and Belldandy together. No wonder he had vigorously advised her to release her animosity towards Belldandy, without regrets!

Belldandy...was a _Goddess_?

"I..I don't know what to say, Megumi. You mean that those three sisters are from another planet, or something?"

"Sorta. They all have some incredible powers. You've probably noticed that I've gotten much more beautiful since I came here?" Sayoko nodded her head. Megumi was always cute, in an almost tomboyish way...but now, she was gorgeously radiating beauty.

"Belldandy cast a spell on me to make me more beautiful. But it kinda backfired, so now I have to take these pills that I no longer have, which..."

Sayoko listened in fascination as Megumi divulged three year's worth of secrets. Why Keiichi was invincible as a racer. Why Bell and Keiichi could never be separated. Why Sayoko's plots to steal Keiichi away from Belldandy always failed. How she knew that Sayoko had accidentally been infected with a "Goddess Anti-Belief Virus" when some monster-thing called an anki latched onto her a couple years back.

Sayoko shook her head in disbelief more than a few times while Megumi explained the numerous "miracles" that seemed to surround Keiichi and Belldandy. But eventually, Megumi's explanations started making sense. She had fired her mind off in so many directions trying to explain to herself how so many enigmatic occurrences were constantly happening whenever Belldandy or her sisters were involved. Years worth of conjectures. She had concluded that Belldandy was a witch, a spy, some kind of Lara Croft heiress, a magician, a genius scientist, just plain lucky, a bodhisattva...but never a Goddess based on a Norse myth! Each new theory about Belldandy's nature was analyzed and subsequently discarded as _more_ weirdness would occur.

Now, she finally knew the truth! Sayoko _knew_ that Megumi wouldn't create an elaborate fiction about Goddesses, especially to the degree of accuracy that she had just narrated. It was almost ridiculous, in the sense that life is stranger than fiction.

She smiled a sad, resigned smile when Megumi finished. Megumi could see that she was still upset and a little confused. Walking over to her, Megumi gave her a comforting hug.

"Sayoko, I don't understand entirely what you're feeling, but I want you to know that I'm here for you. I may be the _only_ other person here...but I am here if you want to talk." Sayoko sobbed a few tears, touched at the kindness of Megumi's words.

"Megumi, you know what you said about not having a sister...I've felt it too."

The two women walked out of their room into a long hallway. The designs in the hallway appeared to be molded metal, shaped into some kind of avant-garde mishmash of functional art. They walked up and down the hall twice, feeling apprehensive about opening any of the doors. Finally, Sayoko decided that they needed to check out one of the rooms.

"Where are the doors? Where's the doorknobs?" she asked. Megumi pointed to one of the green panels seamlessly embedded in the wall. Sayoko reached for it with her fingertips. The green turned to red as her hand approached it and a door _formed_ out of wall.

They walked into a room with a set of living room furniture, a stereo with mini-CDs and several other familiar trappings. One side of the room had a curtain drawn shut.

Sayoko paused, commenting to Megumi about how nice it was to actually be in a room with something in it. They walked around the room, testing the couches to see if they were comfortable. Sayoko looked at the cart of audiophile CDs; they were mostly charttoppers of the 90's and the 21s, as the music of the first decade 21st century was called. Bland, but it was better than nothing.

"I'm going to open these curtains," Megumi to her as she stepped past Sayoko and reached behind the curtains, touching a green panel. The curtains whooshed open under their own power. Sayoko watched as Megumi seemed to be illuminated by light coming in from the open window. Megumi staggered back a couple steps, and then turned to face her.

She had a facefallen expression of awe.

Sayoko stepped closer to look through the window...then her heart skipped a beat.

"OH...MY...GOD!" she gasped, then her breath was sucked away by the twilight vista that greeted her eyes.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Belldandy had made a reasonable request, which was granted. After being subjected to a silence that caused her mind to roar with thoughts to displace the nullness of their environs, she had asked that they be provided with music in their room. Almost instantly, soft classical music seemed to emanate from the walls.

"I hope they don't play any disco or heavy metal," Urd said as the music started up. Much to her discomfort, the invisible voice confirmed that there would be no music that would cause her to dance uncontrollably. What fretted Urd's nerves raw was the fact that their captors seemed to know so much about the three Goddesses.

"You know so much about us...why the hell don't you show _yourselves_ sometime!" Urd screamed, unable to take any more of this mystery game. It reminded her of the X-Files, Lost and X21C, American TV series that were darkly themed around the inexplicable and paranormal. Belldandy and Skuld both darted her condemning looks.

"Well, I can't help it that I feel this way! I'm cooped up here, being lectured by a voice that has no face. This sake tastes terrible, the food is rotten, and the lights are too bright. There's nothing to do...which normally drives _you_ crazy," she said, whirling to point at Skuld.

"This has been too uncomfortable...too long! Would it be too much to ask that the person who has been talking to us to please reveal themselves?" Belldandy requested.

"Your wish will be granted. After all, with all the wishes _you_ granted as part of the Goddess Relief Office, Belldandy, it would be remiss for me to not grant a wish as simple as this. I will reveal myself at the next cycle, Urd. And Skuld...be prepared for a big surprise that I think will impress you."

Skuld stuck her tongue out; hoping that whoever was watching would get the full benefit of her displeasure.

"Speaking for all of us, I don't think anything but freedom from this holding cell will suffice to impress us," Urd said.

But only a silence answered her.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

The longer they traveled along the road, the more Genji was convinced that they _had_ somehow traveled back in time. Each village they passed through was almost the same, save that each villa had its own specialized cottage industry. One village excelled in lacquerware, while the next town on the road specialized in kimono dyeing.

For some reason, Genji felt more comfortable each day they were traveling. He was picking up the local dialects faster than anyone but Cevn, who couldn't speak except when they were alone. One of the worst things about the trip was how they had to earn money. They spent two days in the blazing hot sun slogging human excrement and urine into a rice paddy, and then transplanted the rice shoots from the nursery-bed to the main paddy. For two days of long hours of work, they each received 3 crudely shaped copper coins.

He looked at Keiichi and laughed inside at his samurai-style haircut. Keiichi looked like a TV actor trying to portray a historical drama samurai. However, they were far removed from samurai. Samurai had armor, katanas, a poetic knowledge and an intimate awareness of Bushido. Between the four of them, they had no sword, no armor, two poets, and a gaijin who was the only person in their group who was literate in classical Japanese. It was too weird, having to rely on Cevn to translate the loose squiggles that passed for kana and kanji in this era.

"What are you laughing at?" Keiichi said, passing his hand over his half-bald head. He scowled as Genji's laughter deepened to guffaws.

"Soooo, you think _this_ is funny? You should see yours! I would love to have a mirror right now, so you can see how stupid you look, Genji!" he said gruffly.

"Hey guys, cut it out!" Tomohisa shouted.

"Just because you two are exempt because one of you is a foreigner and the other is a _boy_, doesn't mean that you have to act like nothing's happened to Keiichi and I," Genji yelled back to Tomohisa, prickling with jealousy. Tomohisa steamed under the insult of being called a "boy".

"Chill out, you guys!" Cevn said, breaking his silence. Something about being chastised by their N.I.T. sensei made Keiichi and Genji think twice about continuing their argument.

"Man...I feel so tired. This is a freakin' nightmare. Everything I know...everything I'm good at...is meaningless here," Keiichi said, airing out his frustrations.

Genji listened as the other three discussed their situation. It _was_ pretty unenviable, even by 14th century standards. They were reduced to the coarsest types of manual labor to earn a living. Slinging manure and compost. Everybody's feet were sore from having to walk on foot for several days before they could afford straw sandals. Reiami didn't have any sandals to spare because they were expensive. Cevn mentioned his concerns that they would get infections in their feet from the combination of open sores and stomping manure.

"No one could even begin to imagine what it's like to have every convenience of modern life stripped away. No toilets, no TV, no computers, no washing machines," Keiichi said glumly as he listed missing comforts. This cued Genji on, and he added several items to the list. Soon, everybody was chiming in, turning their despair into a sort of game. The hot afternoon walk was filled with laughter and groans of discontent as the four men tried to see how long they could continue to list the miracles of modern life that were absent in their current situation.

"At least this is making the time pass quickly," Cevn observed to himself as the others were traveling in some very creative mental pastures while compiling their list. Now they were listing TV shows, most of which Cevn had never heard of before. The sound of approaching clops broke the 'contest', indicating that someone was closing in rapidly on horseback.

"Bow down before the Lord! Bow down!" a well-armored samurai yelled. Genji noted that he was in full samurai regalia...which must have weighed 30Kg. They all assumed groveling positions as a man-carried palanquin passed by.

"The daimyo, Mori Yoshiyuke!" the vanguard mounted samurai announced as the official parade passed by. Curious, Tomohisa glanced up to look at the passersby.

"There! That one's looking up! Arrest him!" Suddenly, Tomohisa's face went white as several spearmen marched over and grabbed him, roughly hauling him to his feet. Spurring him forward with prods of the spears and rough kicks to his back, they presented him to the head samurai...forcing him to kneel in front.

Keiichi was just about ready to freak out. His cousin had made the mistake of looking up...and now they were going to kill him! Genji and Cevn grabbed him by the arms, desperately whispering to him to let things be...and they may have a chance of leaving this encounter alive with Tomohisa unharmed. Keiichi settled down, only for a moment. Finally, the tense situation got the best of him.

"Leave him alone!" Keiichi yelled angrily, unable to contain himself any longer. He stood up and shouted at the lead samurai, who looked at him with an expression of frank astonishment. Soon, he too was escorted to the front of the procession and made to kneel down. After a brief argument amongst the troops, Genji and Cevn were also brought forward by spearpoint and made to kneel.

The four young men were in a panic as the samurai yelled amongst themselves, debating whether to jail them or kill them.

"Desist!!" a loud voice shouted above the din. Whiskersnap fast, all the samurai and retainers were kneeling on the ground in a formal position, one palm on the ground with their heads bowed. Except for the lead samurai, who sat with his legs tucked underneath him.

A man dressed in an elaborate robe alighted from the carriage and walked over. Keiichi could only see him from the knees down...but his bearing was as impressive as his outer garments.

"Report!"

"This boy looked up as your Lordship's train passed by. I brought him here, and then another of their number stood up and insolently shouted at me to release him. When I noticed the second insolent in their group...then I had the remaining two brought over."

"You did well to spare them. Which one spoke up?" Keiichi felt his heart haltingly jam up his throat as a sword point flicked under his chin, forcing him to look up.

"I'm dead," he thought grimly.

"It is amazing, isn't it my Lord!"

"Yes. Quite remarkable. No wonder he had the courage to confront you. Release them, with no punishment, after my attendants have passed ahead."

Keiichi counted his blessings as the procession continued. Finally as the palanquin passed over the small rise in the road, the spears withdrew and the small guard of soldiers dashed back to a position surrounding the daimyo's carriage.

"What just happened?" Genji asked, still looking down at the ground with a fearful expression.

"I don't know how to explain it. After they took Tomohisa and the rest of us, the head daimyo guy wanted to see my face. When I looked up, it was almost as if I was looking at _me_."

"What do you mean?" Tomohisa asked, still shaky after his near-death encounter with irate samurai.

"He looked almost exactly like me...if I were another 15 years older and lived in feudal Japan," Keiichi explained.

"_My Lord,_" Genji said, mock bowing to Keiichi, causing everyone's nerves to spill out with raucous laughter.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Skuld couldn't wait. As the wall slid open to expose her breakfast, she grabbed the tray and started eating hungrily.

"This is the day that our captor has agreed to reveal himself to us," she thought with a mixture of anxiety and curiosity. "I finally get to see the mastermind behind our imprisonment!"

Her initial fears that their kidnapping had been orchestrated by Mara had left her several days ago. The voice in the room that seemed to come from all around them...was consistently male. It was the same voice every time, Skuld noted.

"When you finish with your breakfast, I will reveal myself to you as I promised," the voice assured them. For some reason, all three Goddesses ate more quickly, fueled by their desire to see whom they were up against. Belldandy was the slowest eater, so she was the last to finish...Urd and Skuld staring at her impatiently as she finished her tea and toast.

"Okay, so we're all done with our morning meal. Now show us who you are!" Urd said in a demanding voice.

"I was going to reveal myself in time, regardless of your attempts to try and convince to show you who I am. Don't be overconfident in yourself, Eldest Norn."

A horizontal slit appeared stretching almost the length of the chamber, then widened as two panels slid apart. The first thing the Goddesses could see was a room with walls filled with banks of lights...the profiles of a few dozen people dark against the lights. The sliding panels disappeared into alcoves, and Urd looked at what seemed to be a sophisticated control room. It reminded her uncannily of her workplace in Yggdrasil, only not quite as high-tech. A spotlight suddenly flashed on in the middle of the room, illuminating a slight late-middle aged man.

"_YOU?!_" all three Goddesses exclaimed as one.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --


	36. Pt 36: Backspin

**Part 36: Backspin**

In my undergrad years, I occasionally considered a major in anthropology in addition to my two other majors; but I eventually decided against it. Now, seven centuries removed, my current situation gave me ample pause to consider the wisdom of this choice.

After suddenly becoming immersed in the milieu of 14th century Japan by some freakish time traveling, I had mixed feelings about whether I had taken enough anthro. The powerful reality of the arching thatched roofs of the village homes thrust forth my regret. What shadings of culture existed here that would be essential towards continued survival? I knew that the environing circumstances possessed hints and echoes...important details that I would miss because of a lack of foreknowledge. There were no cutesy Pokemon and Piyo Piyo cultural icons here.

In _this_ Japan, one wrong move could get you killed...

My timetraveling companions definitely weren't anthro sorta guys; unfortunately, I couldn't rely on them to know what to expect either. They did have one very significant advantage over me...they were _Japanese_. The Chinese saying "tzu jan erh jan" came to mind...Keiichi and the others might be able to sense unseen things "because of their nature, being as they are." I would need to rely on their interpretation of events around us, because their knowledge resided 'in the bone', so to speak.

Revisiting my memories, I knew that my scholastic choices back then had been ultimately influenced by a guide voice deep inside me that whispered, "go for what you can love to do." Despite the fact that anthropology research claimed a large portion of the scholarship and fellowship funds, I felt a stronger affinity towards the areas of philosophy, history, literature and psychology. So I heeded its advice. However, I managed to crib a number of anthro courses, enough to comprise an undeclared minor.

Lying on my back on the dampened straw pile that served as rough bedding, a sharp insight descended on me like a bolt from a clear sky...profound in the face of its simplicity. As if anew, I realized that _I was being exposed to a treasure trove of ancient culture_!! I tried to imagine what some of my old anthro professors would do if they were in my situation. I envisioned their weathered visages animated with sheer scholarly joy at the _power_ of being in a whole different culture...a whole different time.

I was bone-tired after today's work session in the paddies. As morning dawned, we would go to a shallow pit and stomp manure into the mud so that the excrement was thoroughly mixed with the soil. Then we would transport the heat-thickened mixture to the rice paddies in two buckets supported by a shoulder pole. With each load of shitsoil we brought to the paddy, we would form furrows of raised compost. The women in the village would then transplant the rice shoots into the mounds of fertilized soil. I remembered a footnote in a historical text...about how this important task was entrusted only to the women of the village, because it was commonly held that their fertility would transfer to the crops, creating a more prodigious harvest. This gender-specific division of labor was still followed in 21st Century Japan in some rural mura whose main money crop was rice.

At least I remembered _that_ much from my anthro studies...

Over the past few days, it seemed that many villages had available menial employ for transients; this seemed to directly counter the modern notion that in-grouping in the early Ashikaga Shogunate was almost exclusively endolocal in nature. Since the villages offered extra work for hire, it seemed implicit that a migrant class of peasant worker existed. Then again, we were in Kyushu, not Honshu. Our present whereabouts were tucked within the domain of Go-Daigo's rebel Southern Court.

During our dinner of bland boiled millet, Keiichi recounted the story about how he and Belldandy were planning last summer to go on a vacation...and that they had picked Shikoku by a random toss of a kaeru charm. He bemoaned the fact that this vacation never materialized because of Urd's and my little disappearing act. We joked with him that his vacation was finally coming about, only seven hundred years too early...and in Kyushu instead.

Our mood seemed to lighten up after our close encounter with the shogu-daimyo a couple of days ago. We frequently teased Keiichi by calling him "my Lord" or "Your Excellency." Keiichi usually took it in stride; when he didn't, one of us would end up dodging a mudball or some other thrown object.

We all took turns discussing our internal lives at length. Keiichi confided that he was missing Belldandy desperately at times...and that he was deeply concerned with these moribund turns of mood. But this situation was so much different than the business with the omiai, he reasoned. There were too many unknowns. How was it that we were separated from the others? Keiichi obviously didn't have a clue about what was going on with Belldandy...but he did offer his suspicion that she wasn't in the here and now of 14th century Japan.

Wiping the matted hair off my forehead, I was reminded of descriptions in dozens of travel books about how notoriously hot Japanese summers were. But I was ill equipped for the real thing. Living in our temple house masked the skinsweaty impact of the humid summer...due to a variety of ceiling fans, air conditioners and Divine thermostatics courtesy of Belldandy. Besides, I had spent most of this summer in Beijing, often in the air-conditioned comfort of Shao Yuan or the BeiDa library. Thus, I never really experienced the muggy summer heat in Makuhari...the summer heat I experienced in Dunhuang was of the arid desert climes.

But we were way south of Makuhari, and we lacked any means of relief from the omnipresent heat. The air was absolutely thick with canicular stillness. I went to sleep sopping in sweat and woke up twice as drenched. The past few mornings, I had awakened with myriad red marks where mosquitoes had done their work. Their constant crisp buzzing made it hard for me to go to sleep as well. Several years into recovery, I had 'prayed' away mosquito bites. One day, I just asked my HP to remove them after getting bit up at a picnic...and I never got bit again. But the power of those entreaties was revoked in this time and place, as I seemed to be a virtual feast for the mosquitoes. Looking at the dozens of bites on my arms, I worried about insect-borne contagions.

I sensed that I needed to regulate my thoughts, as I was bordering on an almost hypocondriac sensitivity and paranoia...

Tonight's shelter consisted of little more than an animal barn, with piles of straw in the corners for us to sleep on. I could see several horses in nearby stalls; their equine odor as much an irritant as the mosquitoes. We didn't have money for mosquito netting of course, and the only food we could buy was flourcakes and millet balls provided by a visiting food vendor.

"If I had a notebook, I would start a travelogue called 'Down and Out in 14th Century Kyushu'," I murmured to myself as the flies and mosquitoes dive bombed my ears. The zeni, or Japanese copper cash, was still two centuries away. We were usually paid in Chinese or Korean coppers, or occasionally in simple copper slugs. Itinerant wanderers living on a coin-lined shoestring.

After dinner, we invented nicknames for each other. Mine was "Boy Scout" because of my gaijin racial background. Keiichi's was "Your Lord" of course, while Tomohisa's was "Tomohawka" after I explained the near-homophonous romanji pun. Genji's was "Hikaru" from the famous character in the Heian novel Genji Monogatari.

We also decided to give ourselves a reprieve from working in the manure pits. Tomorrow, we would foottrip it towards Oita, where the Mori daimyoate was located. No doubt, the heat would be unbearable. The noise of the occasional procession of travelers, priests, officials and others on the road being the only withdraw from the ambient silence of insect chirpings and the cuckooing of hototogisu. Yet, something was inexorably drawing our attention to Oita.

As expected, the next day's trek started off with an oppressive balmy heat. After a breakfast of two millet balls apiece, we took to the roadpath leading into thick woods. On an inane impulse, I started singing "We're Off to See the Wizard" as we trudged down the road...strangely giving in to a whimsy as I envisioned us as the four travelers in that movie. To my surprise, Keiichi and the rest knew the English lyrics and accompanied me. So we started singing all sorts of different tunes; an out-of-tune chorus to be sure, but it passed the time. Soon, the singing veered into contemporary Japanese music and I was relegated to the role of critical audience because of the many J-pop songs they sang that I was unfamiliar with.

The only way to wash was to bath in the chill of a river; a welcome respite during the noontime blast of furnaced air. I wondered how long it would take before I got used to the fact that there were no toilets, urinals or sinks.

If I ever _could_...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Megumi stared in open-mouthed awe at the urban spectacle on the other side of the window. It was like a dream...she had never seen so many lights and buildings! She turned to look at Sayoko...hoping to assure herself that she wasn't hallucinating. Sayoko was rigid...wordlessly transfixed with the sight. Returning her gaze to the futuristic urbanation, Megumi felt her senses urge towards overload.

The sight was simply...incredible.

"Take cityscenes from Blade Runner, Parallaz and Fifth Element; mix in all the futuristic Neo-Tokyo animes like Akira, Tokyo Future Megalopolis and Neo-Tokyo 2030; and season it with flying vehicles from Back to the Future and Futurama," Megumi said silently to herself, trying to describe the dazzling sight she was witnessing. She abandoned the effort when she realized that this wasn't some special effect matte painting...this was the_ real thing_.

"Or is it?" she wondered. "Could this be some weird alternate dimension? Something caused by one of the Goddesses? If so, then why are we _confined_ here?"

Megumi felt the weight of the future pressing upon shoulders that were only strong enough to carry the present. She envisioned herself feeling like the renowned Urashima Taro of children's fairy tales. Like Taro, or his Western counterpart Rip Van Winkle, Megumi imagined herself to have been ripped out of time and thrust into an uncertain future by forces unknown. The uncertainties of this future were powerfully demonstrated by the dizzying sight in front of her, just on the other side of the window.

Tokyo was spread out before her. It was undeniably a futuristic Tokyo that was clearly many years beyond 20XX. She recognized the geological features of Tokyo Bay, the Bozo Peninsula and the nearby mountains...but everything else was drastically different.

Megumi saw structures shaped like Mayan pyramids silhouetted against the orange horizon of the sunset. In the middle of Tokyo Bay were hundreds of floating complexes...architectural wonders of all shapes and sizes, connected by tube-enclosed roads. Needle-like buildings thousands of meters tall that looked impossibly top-heavy were everywhere; supported by delicate thin pillars of glass and crystal. Floating spheres projected videoscreen images and commercials. Car-like vehicles hovering in the air within an organized procession of 'lanes', ushered by holographic traffic signals.

The Tokyo she knew was unrecognizable, except for the Imperial Palace and a few parks. Sunshine City was under a dome that resembled a vacuum tube, with another level of skyscrapers perched atop the geodesic covering. Shinjuku no longer had its array of skyscrapers; instead there was a single mountainous block of what looked like black marble, dotted with thousands of windowlights. Megumi soberly counted the building's storeys; her eyes gave out after almost 600. There were green belts of parkway..._floating_ in between the large citybuildings. As far as she could see, there was city. The summit of Mt. Fuji appeared to be _below_ her vantagepoint view of the city.

"How do you describe the future?" she asked herself in a quiet voice.

For some reason, a memory arose of the story her grandmother had told her; about an incredible event that occurred while Megumi's mother was a teenager. A Japanese WW II soldier had remained on a remote Pacific island for 29 years, from 1942 to 1971, still evading capture. In his mind, the war wasn't over. Eventually, family members were enlisted to try and convince him that the war had ended. When he surrendered, he returned to Japan to a hero's welcome...his steadfastness was viewed as one of the penultimate examples of Bushido in modern times. But being thrust into Tokyo in the early 1970s took its toll on his psyche. In Ueno Park, where military rallies to demonstrate devotional fervor to the emperor had once been held...now these had been replaced with hippie gatherings and rock concerts. ­

Television had succeeded the radio. Japan had lost the war and endured seven years of the Allied Occupation. All of these changes culminated in a nervous breakdown requiring hospitalization. Then, sometime in 1972, right after his 50th birthday, he simply got on a boat and disappeared, never to be heard from again. Megumi's mother was in her late teens at the time...in a teenage fancy, she was intrigued by the idea of a man from the past thrust into the _now_.

And as Megumi was growing up, her grandmother would occasionally ask her, "Where do you think he went? Why do you think he left his life in Japan?" Her mother would ask her as well; seemingly to weigh the maturity of Megumi's responses over the years. Eventually, Megumi realized why he left...Japan of the 1970s wasn't _home_ for him.

This urban complexity was as alien to her as Tokyo must have been for that soldier.

"Le Corbusier, Paulo Soleri and Buckmaster Fuller," she heard Sayoko say reverently after a long silence.

"What?"

"I took a course in Urban Engineering during the summer after my sophomore year, as an exchange student at the University of Paris. My term paper addressed the history of engineered cities as conceptualized by 20th century architects. Arcologies...cities contained entirely within a single building. The use of Megastructures and grandscale urban planning, or perhaps a network of buildings. Buckmaster Fuller had his Fullerdomes and Triton floating cityblocks. Soleri designed organic ministructures; cityblocks intended to house hundreds of thousands as a self-contained 'city'. Le Corbusier designed beltway cities in the 1920s and 30s. They're all here, Megumi," Sayoko explained in a voice that clearly marveled the vast engineering brilliance of the city just outside their room.

Megumi put her hands on the window glass to steady herself...she felt like she was going to fall into the city. The energy of the patterns of lights seemed to draw her like a moth to a flame.

"We must be _thousands_ of meters in the air!" Sayoko observed, also steadying herself by leaning against the window. "I can see _into_ the cone of Fujiyama!"

Megumi finally took several steps back and collapsed into one of the chairs.

"This has to be a trick! This...is impossible!" her mind raced in an attempt to short-circuit the pastiche of visual sensations. Unable to explain the vista of conurbation in front of her, Megumi started studying the thousands of signs for clues. Neon signs, multi-hued lighted signs, signs that looked like holograms...

"Hunnhh!" she gasped.

"Megumi, you okay?" Sayoko asked with concern.

"T..that sign, over there," she said in a shaky voice, trying to blink her eyes rapidly to check her disbelief. Hoping it was just something wrong with her eyes. She pointed at a floating globe with greenish neon lettering, and looked on as Sayoko visually oriented to her quivering pointed finger...difficult to do when faced with millions of points of lights carpeted all the way to the horizon. She watched as Sayoko gasped with shock and slowly crumpled to her knees. Sayoko's collapse of confidence caused Megumi to start sobbing; she could barely hear her sempai's astonished confirmation.

"M..Megumi, I..it says...this is impossible! This must be some kind of joke! That...green globe thing..." Sayoko stammered, unable to find her voice. She looked again at the floating globe and shuddered, feeling utterly defeated.

Megumi sensed her head dizzying into lightheaded oblivion...she had observed the same time and date displayed on _another_ floating object, brick-shaped with glowing red outlines. Then another object which resembled a purple Ferris Wheel floating horizontal to the city, the date viewed head-on. She staggered away from the window, drunk on incomprehension and an ominous sense of alarm. Shuffling unsteadily, she swooned onto one of the couches and curled up, wanting to close her mind to the floating contour that served as a city-clock, showing everyone the date:

_September 7th, 2049_

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Belldandy felt her blood turn to ice and back in a span of a second. The man in the spotlight was instantly recognizable with his glasses and full head of silvery hair. His slight frame was tall and dignified, but his smarmy expression was unmistakable. Despite the barrier that separated her from him, she could _feel_ the arrogance radiating outward from the figure in front of her.

"Toshiyuki Aoshima!" she half-shouted half-gasped.

"You may address me as Director Aoshima, of the Toshishima Imperium...Belldandy, Norn of the Present," the man replied smugly. Belldandy saw her sisters react with shock out of the corner of her eye. She looked to Urd for reassurance...

Urd was wide-eyed and mouth agaped.

"This can't be...you're a college sophomore!" Urd said in disbelief. She looked over at Belldandy, who was daunted into silence; presumably because this man claiming to be Aoshima knew exactly who and what she was.

"How many college sophomores do you know that are in their sixties, Urd...Norn of the Past?" he replied condescendingly. Urd's look of confusion transformed into a smirk, masking her shock at his insight into her divine nature.

"Well, maybe you failed your graduate exams for the last umpteen years," Urd shot back derisively, with an irritated look on her face.

The elderly version of Aoshima shot her a guarded angry look.

"What's the matter? Did all those races you lost to Keiichi cause you to drop out of N.I.T.? Did they cause your hair to turn gray?" Urd snarled at their captor, quick to notice that her first taunt had gotten inside his smug demeanor and irritated him.

"_Shut your mouth_! It would be in your best interest to refrain from your facile attempts to bait me with pitiful, unimaginative insults. _I_ am in total control of this situation!"

"He is definitely Aoshima! Just as sarcastic and arrogant as ever," Belldandy realized. She mentally chided herself for not recognizing Aoshima's voice earlier. It was a little weathered with tremolo rasping due to age, but it sounded almost the same. He looked almost exactly the same as well, except for the fact that his hair was peppered with gray and silver, and he sported a thin gray moustache. His face was lean with smooth wrinkles and he sported the same style of glasses that he had worn in college.

Belldandy was shocked beyond shock, and her dread deepened when he revealed to her that he knew that she was a Goddess...specifically the Norn of the Present. The fact that Aoshima knew who and what she was...was extremely disturbing. _No_ mortal should know this, save for her immediate circle of friends and Keiichi, of course. But Aoshima _knew_.

"How much more _does_ he know?" she wondered silently.

"2049," Skuld said quietly.

"What?" Belldandy asked, curious at the single number Skuld had just blurted out randomly.

"What is that, Skuld? Keiichi's bank card PIN?" Urd added as she looked to Belldandy for confirmation. Skuld grimaced at Urd's pale attempt at a joke.

"If he_ is_ sixty years old like he says, then we are in the year 2049," Skuld explained matter-of-factly. Urd and Belldandy looked at each other with disturbed faces. They both realized that there was something distinctly amiss in time...and of course it would be Skuld that would figure out the futuristic date.

"Excellent! Leave it to Skuld, Norn of the Future, to deduce what year this is. Now, can you guess the day as well, my girl?" Aoshima complemented her.

"Not for _you_. Not in a thousand years!" Skuld said defiantly, pulling her eyelid down and sticking her tongue out. Urd put a hand to her forehead in unamused exasperation at Skuld's childish posturing.

"And I'm _not_ 'your' girl!" the youngest sister exclaimed angrily. Now that she had figured out what year it was, Skuld _knew_ the exact date of course, but she didn't want to reveal to him the accuracy with which she could interpret the future TimeStream...a privilege and responsibility that accompanied being the Norn of the Future. Instead, she examined the control room closely, rapidly observing that many of the controls were holophotic in nature.

"This technology is far beyond any means that I would have predicted Mankind to possess in the mid-21st century! This doesn't _feel_ right!" she observed. She could tell from the illuminated digital readouts that the field that was encasing them was pulling terawatts of electricity from whatever source it tapped into.

"Fusion reactors?" she asked herself as the portal-like 'window' to their room began to close.

As the viewport out of their cell began to shut, Urd blinked...in the background of the other room, she thought she saw a small gray blur.

"Waitaminute. I have a bunch of questions..." Urd started to protest, then pulled up to a halt when the wallwindow closed off.

Belldandy felt a skinprickly flush come over her as she realized that Aoshima had seen her...naked. She remembered the time he tried to video her while she was in the bath...how she had screamed "_Pervert!_" at the top of her lungs like Keiichi had instructed her. She normally wasn't conscious of her body being clothed or unclothed. Around Keiichi, being unclothed brought an intense glow to her heart...and tingling to her body. Around Aoshima, being unclothed brought an intense revulsion to her spirit...and trembling to her body. The scene in the love hotel replayed itself in her mind; especially Aoshima's naked lust and insolent attitude.

"H..he saw me!" Belldandy exclaimed in anguish.

"Well, of course he saw you, big sister!" Skuld remarked.

"No! You don't understand! He saw me _nude_!"

"Sooo..." Skuld said with nonchalance. A moment later, she covered her mouth with her hand as the import of Belldandy's statement struck her. She felt herself suddenly taken with fitful trembling.

Urd floated over to where the viewing window was and started pounding the metallic surface. Since she was floating, without any surface to gain purchase on, she was sent somersaulting head over heels. It finally occurred to her that they were being confined in a zero-gravity environment.

"You...bastard! Get us some clothes!" she shouted while she spun akimbo. Belldandy hugged herself protectively. Aoshima was right. She and her sisters were losing their sense of belonging and security. They were getting unnerved, riled up. Snappy at each other.

She watched as Urd continued to scream angrily at the windowport wall.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"The journey continues!" Genji said happily as he finally finished cutting logs from the woodpile for the village headman. It was exhausting work...yet it was a welcome break from slogging manure in the rice pit. The village leader had offered one of them work chopping wood while the other three composted...Genji had won the privilege after they rock-scissor-papered it.

He met Keiichi and the others at the inn. They were going to start off in the evening, but a thunderstorm was mounting the twilight horizon. Prudently deciding to wait out the storm, the four sheltered under the village mon, or gate, as the downpour lasted deep into the night. Cevn was joking about the old movie "Rashomon", and the discussion turned to literary appreciation. Genji was well read in modern classicist novelists like Soseki, Oe, Akutagawa, Murikami and his namesake, Mishima Yukio.

Even though he still thought of Cevn as his N.I.T. sensei, it was a pleasure for Genji to talk literature with him as an equal, without any academic pretenses. It turned out that he shared with Cevn the opinion that many writers of modern Japanese 'introspective genre' fiction were presenting romantic scenarios, ­which were almost gothic in nature. Genji personally felt that this sensationalizing of the darker side of human life was often confusedly interpreted as 'profound insight' by both authors and readers, because of the perceived difficulty of starkly expressing the vulgar or disgusting. Cevn agreed with him that this literary trend was actually superficial because it focused on destruction, rather than deconstructive creation. It simply reported human depravity, rather than deeply examining it; the authors seemed to assume that their readers would be able to undertake this task. But he and Cevn both believed that most readers were grossly mired in determinism...unable to compass the lurid nature of the works, let alone examining it.

The morning came and they resumed their journey towards the capital city of Oita. Traveling in the modern era was almost like magic compared to _this_: in less than a minute by car, they could travel a distance that now required ten to fifteen minutes walking.

"_Everything_ seems so slow here," Keiichi remarked once more.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

On the road, the four met a group of beggars, famished by malnutrition; their sunken faces were indication enough that they hadn't eaten in a significant time. Cevn and Keiichi parted with what little they could spare out of their coppers. The beggars' gestures of gratitude was extraordinary...Keiichi felt a flush of embarrassment as they bowed/groveled profusely in front of him.

"It's either them or us, isn't it?" Genji complained after the beggars thanked them and went on their way.

"Not really. Besides, we aren't exactly starving. Didn't you see those children?" Keiichi challenged him irritably. "Well, I guess you wouldn't know the want of food, growing up in a billion-yen family!"

"Keiichi!" Genji growled warningly.

"Yeah...you were lucky enough to avoid the manure pits yesterday. You're so lucky! Rich kid, good-looking sister...only the best cars and clothes. So what are you doing in some junk tech school like N.I.T., when you could be going to Waseda University or some other exclusive college?" Tomohisa added, siding with his cousin.

"Shut up! You guys are full of it! Leave me alone!" Genji snapped back. His anger capitalizing on Keiichi's ill-timed affront, he turned an ire-uglied face towards Keiichi. Tomohisa and Cevn looked shocked as the insurgent electricity of the moment filled the air with tension.

"Let's do it! Here and now!" Genji challenged Keiichi, clenching his fists.

"Are you crazy, Genji?" Keiichi said with a shake of his head. Somehow, helping the poor band of beggars had become twisted into a very serious matter in the mind of his traveling companion; a twist that surprised Keiichi.

"C'mon! What are you waiting for? Or are you a coward?" Genji repeated his challenge. He pulled off his hempen shirt and tossed it aside. Crouching into a fighter's stance, he advanced on Keiichi.

Keiichi felt a rush of uneasiness...part of him really wanted to _punch the daylights_ out of Genji. Genji had taken up with his sister without his permission...Genji had moved into _his_ house while Cevn was away. Genji was always telling him what to do ever since they time-traveled back to here...

Keiichi caught his rising rage before it could mount over his common sense. He realized how ridiculous this all was.

"I'm not going to fight you, Genji. I don't care what you think...I _know_ that I did the right thing by giving those beggars some of our money," Keiichi defended, staring unflinchingly at Genji.

Genji's flash of anger seemed to be depowered like a beachside campfire snuffed by oceanwaves. Keiichi's passive response was too incongruent to the situation. Without a word, Genji turned and started walking down the road, leaving three very amazed fellow travelers behind him.

"You must think that I'm an idiot!" Genji admitted a few minutes later after a cooldown period, the standoff being concluded without hostilities.

"Not at all, Genji! I'm surprised we aren't going off even more on each other. This isn't exactly a high school field trip to Akita," Keiichi observed. "The whole transition from modern lifestyle to the life of a 14th century peasant isn't very pleasant...on any of us."

"You know, we've really got to watch out for ourselves. We're the only ones who are in each other's corners," Cevn said, breaking his silence briefly.

"By the way, is there any chance that when we come to the next big wooded area, we can look for a stream? I'm feeling really dirty...really grungy," Tomohisa interjected. Everybody nodded his head at this.

Keiichi could barely stand the filth that they were walking around with. The rashes that they all were complaining about didn't help matters at all, he noted.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Sayoko reclined on her side on the couch, looking out at the futuristic Tokyo until her eyes gave out and she fell asleep. Before lying down, she had gone through all the rooms on their floor, just to check. Each room had a window that opened up into a panorama of the giant city.

She dreamed...she dreamed of a place unblemished by man's technology and cityscapes. A gentle sunrise seemed to float on scented winds. Moths, which showered golden dustings of wisdom, fluttered around shimmering gardenia flowers. Sayoko felt herself lying on her back in the soft padding of a small grove, the blades of grass tickling her cheeks as the wind caressed them. The floats from the dandelions turned into angelic fairies as they swarmed her gently.

Inside of the grassy embrace, she felt herself slowly sinking...as if the verdant carpet was buoying her like a pool of water. As she descended, she saw frightful skulls and aged faces peering towards her; suspended into floating glacier-like shelves of light azure ice. The darkness jarred with a cough...

Abruptly sitting upright after the nightmarish bent of her dream, Sayoko heard Megumi coughing in her sleep. She had fallen asleep on the other couch.

"Everyone we know is old...or dead," Sayoko muttered aloud in a quiet voice. She tried to picture her friends as they approached the age of retirement...

_...Would Genji be living in a nice house in Tokyo...or maybe the Mishima family mansion? Would cousin Toshiyuki be tending a garden with his grandchildren? Could they be somewhere amongst the teeming millions I see, just outside of this window? Would Keiichi and Belldandy still be together? Would Cevn still be teaching at N.I.T.? Would Tamiya be at his grandfather's farm in Hokkaido? What would Ootaki be doing as he approached his retirement?..._

...she suppressed a giggle at the thought of Ootaki as an aging senior salaryman engineer in some corporation.

"Would they even be _alive_?" she exclaimed dismally, consumed by a morose bent of mind. Her mood pivoted between pitchblack despair and an uneasiness that she couldn't put a finger on. Looking out the window just worsened it. The billions of lights of nighttime Tokyo reminded her of how far she was from home. She might as well been light-years away from Earth.

"It's no wonder that I can't understand this feeling! How many people have been displaced _40 years_ into the future? This unsettled feeling...it dances around my existence...poking it with the debris of my own unfamiliarity. Do they have computers in this era? Time travel? Does the rest of the world even _exist_? Did someone from the future _pull_ us into this new earthtime life?" she wondered.

Sayoko leaned back onto the padding of her couch and ran her fingers through her long silky black hair with a practiced motion. She glanced at Megumi, envying how she could sleep so peacefully. Sayoko was only a year and a half older than Megumi...yet sometimes it seemed like there was a decade's difference in age between them. Maybe it was because Megumi was still basking in the glow of the romantic love she shared with her brother Genji. For all she knew, Genji may have been Megumi's first love. What was new to Megumi was old hat to Sayoko, in terms of her brother.

"Regrets," she said to herself. Sayoko felt a plunge in her heart as she realized that she had never told _him_ how she felt. About how she _wanted_ to love him. Wanted to be with him. Wanted to share her todays with him...

But dire Fate had snuck her out a back door that shouldn't have existed...before she could speak her heart to the man who mattered most to her, who called out to her heart by simply _being_.

She recalled the letters he had written her while she was in the DART program in Okinawa (_Do people still use paper in this time? Do they even have drug addiction in the mid-21st century? Rehabs? Crime? NA?_)

He had encouraged her as a 'friend'...but Sayoko's sharp feminine intuition alerted her to the reality that he aspired to be much more than 'friends'. When she returned to Makuhari, Sayoko had exercised a cautious approach...not wanting to jeopardize her hard-won recovery. Yet they had talked with deep affection about so many viewpoints and aspirations. He had undertaken a difficult road in life, which painted his exterior with a betraying toughness. His rough-n-tough exterior shielded a tender, often insecure heart. She could identify with this...could empathize completely with him in this regard. Sayoko knew aggressiveness all too well.

Throughout her life, she had to act tough. _Act_ tough. Growing up alone (_Are my parents still alive?_) caused her to bridge the canyon of indecisiveness with a bitchy exterior and a dogged self-discipline. Engineering...art...academic excellence; these were the proofs of her labors.

Gazing at Megumi's recumbent form, Sayoko could feel a kindred spirit in her friend. (_What passes for human relationships in this future era? Do most people relate via the Internet? Is face-to-face friendship obsolete?_) She recalled how Megumi had studied tenaciously for the finals before the end-of-the-year break. To Sayoko, Megumi seemed driven too, but for different reasons. Megumi was by nature an 'uppity' woman...not afraid to take chances. She certain was not afraid to take the initiative in her relationship with Genji.

She had even learned that Megumi had been training this fall to go on the annual Tokyo-Osaka Bike Ride next spring...not exactly the most 'feminine' of pursuits. Not too many junior coeds were training for a 770Km bike ride through mountainous terrain back roads. (_How are women treated in this era? How do women treat men?_) She chuckled as she remembered when a desperate Genji had sought her advice several times in respect to Megumi's assertive nature. Sayoko had simply told him to "roll with it."

Her thoughts wandered back to the One. The one guy.

"How could I even begin to explain this to him? Did he wait for me for forty years?" she wondered. The thought of a man waiting for her for a ridiculously long time seasoned the romantic in her with an ambrosial lingering. But she didn't know if she could handle the stark realities of the truth. If he _had_ moved on...she would obviously be far from his thoughts...a distant shadow of a shadow in the echoing recesses of his memory. A tear eclipsed her eye as she considered the unspeakable.

No. He would most certainly be married. He would have raised his children...he may even have grandchildren. He would probably be retired, or nearing retirement. No...Sayoko would only be a distant figure in his life.

"If his heart is lost to me...then part of my heart is lost as well," she thought sadly. She closed the curtains; the sight of the city of the future repulsively representing the bitterness of an entire life...lost.

Stranded.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Skuld felt a tingling in her physical manifestation as the handheld object that Aoshima was pointing at her scanned her. On the displays behind his back, she observed dozens of holographic panels projecting different features, aspects, attributes and measurements. Of her. Sonic portrait, thermograph, arcane energy displacement charts, mass spectrometry, molecular cohesion...

"He's being very thorough," she noted with a definite twinge of fear. Aoshima seemed to regard her with the same detached scientific interest that she reserved for her non-AI mechas. Skuld could recognize the gleam of 'research greed' in his eyes.

Hours earlier, several opaquely translucent barriers suddenly went up between each of the sisters, unannounced. Try as she might, Skuld could only rebound off the separating field as she attempted to reach Urd and Belldandy for a comforting hug. They looked at each other in frustration as Aoshima began to scan Urd first, then Belldandy, and lastly her.

Despite the fact that he was not actually touching her, Skuld felt like she was being untowardly invaded. Her person wasn't just some subject of scientific curiosity. She was a _being_.

Aoshima seemed to look at her with a naked curiosity in his eyes. Skuld didn't know whether it was sexual in nature, or knowledge-thirst. She shuddered as he smiled at her...a falsely courteous smile that dripped with the venom of impiety. Once more she regretted the loss of her powers...at this moment, she_ really_ wanted to turn herself invisible. Better yet, turn _him_ invisible.

"«_Urd...why is he looking at me so funny?__»_" she thoughtcast.

"«_I don't know, Skuld. But I –_do-_ know that he's sick…»_" was all her oldest sister could thoughtcast in response. Skuld looked at Belldandy, only to see that her other older sister was huddled tightly as she floated. It seemed that Belldandy was as dispirited now as she had been when she first heard about the omiai two months ago.

Skuld suddenly noticed that she was trembling uncontrollably; quivering with raw nerves and fear. Aoshima hadn't said a word since the windowport had opened up unexpectedly. He was just scanning them, occasionally turning to an aide for a side discussion. He didn't even bother them with any of the boring platitudes that he habitually preached in the midst of his sporadic 'conversations' with the three Goddesses.

Mercifully, the window closed a few minutes later.

Skuld noticed that the forcefields which separated her from her sisters had dissolved. Then she saw Belldandy's face...a face filled with the sadness of a defeated refugee. Of the three, being captive had told most on her middle sister. Urd was animated with sarcasm and resentment; she herself was perky with fear and a desire to escape. But these last few days had taken their toll on Belldandy. Skuld floated over and hugged her sister.

"He kept looking at me...and I _couldn't get away_," Belldandy repeated over and over.

Skuld looked at Urd with concern; she shuddered inwardly as she saw an alarmed look on Big Sister's tanned face.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

We arrived in Oita as mid-afternoon shadows started to lengthen. The capital was filled with 14th century humanity: street vendors, farmers selling produce, priests, children playing in the roadway and squads of samurai retainers. Because of the recent rains, the dampened road wasn't kicking up billows of dust as we strolled down the main street. I was filled with open admiration for its display of the pageantry of humankind. Rawer, more personable versions of our 'modern' selves.

I rubbed my chin, unaccustomed to having a beard. But here I was, with several week's growth on my face. No electric shavers in 14th century Japan, and all that. If I had to choose between spending my coppers on millet or rice, or getting a shave...the rice always won out.

Once we reached our destination, I quickly succumbed to a feeling of dog-tiredness from our long walking trip. My sense of fatigue was mirrored in the faces of my friends; Genji even admitted that he was so tired, he could spend a week in a hot springs relaxing.

His comment cued Keiichi to relate a story about a vacation his family had taken years ago to the nearby Beppu hot springs, just north of Oita. The Beppu springs were renowned throughout Japan for their curative properties; thus becoming a favorite domestic tourist stop in the faraway 21st century. One spring was simply called "the Hells" because the mineral-rich water often boiled out through the surface hued with a blood-red color. Keiichi had slipped on one of the rocks, slicing his foot open. This made the vacation even more memorable, as it was his first experience getting stitched up by a doctor.

As we walked down the dusty streets, I noticed uniformed bands of militiamen walking through the city in small groups. Not really walking, but observing...policing. They wore an archaic form of the typical kami-shimo so often found in the historical genre of TV samurai dramas. I identified what appeared to be several classes of samurai, varying from simply-dressed lower retainers to the elite retainers with elaborate patterns on their stiff-shouldered kataginu over-jackets. All of them were weaponed with wicked-looking swords and spears.

After a quick debate, we decided to treat ourselves to a real meal at a sitdown kitchen in one of the alleys. The shop was a combination crockery store and restaurant. The shop owner was an elderly man; elderly in the 14th century being anything above forty years of age. On the wall was a tattered certificate of apprenticeship...in Kyoto of all places! He labored briefly behind a triple stove, and then served us a delicious plateful of homemade noodles with some kind of peppery spice arrangement, prawns, chicken, miso soup and sake. Keiichi informed me that the sake was rather coarse...and strong. He wouldn't let Tomohisa touch the stuff...he and Genji took one small bowl apiece and then set the bottle aside.

Near the end of our repast, a hawker going door-to-door stuck his head in and announced that there was going to be a traveling troupe performing a play. I looked Genji in the eyes and saw a fireworks of interest play on his face. Being a connoisseur of theatre, his response was as I expected.

"We gotta check this out!" he blurted excitedly. I nodded my head in agreement, while Keiichi and Tomohisa rolled their eyes.

We finished our meal and took to the street. A gaily-painted streamer had been unfurled and bannered from the front of a large wooden building. Townspeople curious about the 'event' thronged the front of the storehouse. Inside, I could see several men hard at work converting the interior to a playhouse. The insistence in Genji's expression mirrored my own strong inclinations; on impulse, I decided to unload half my coppers to the hawker to gain the four of us admittance.

Momohori Naoki was still a half-century away. Naoki was almost universally credited with the creation of Kowaka...the medieval ballad-drama of Japan. Kowaka had all but died out by modern times, but it was an entertainment staple of the later Ashikaga years and the Edo period. At its zenith, it equaled Noh as the preferred entertainment of the cultured samurai patrons. Its antecedent influences can still be readily observed in modern Japanese theater; yet Bunraku was centuries away in the future, not to mention Kabuki performance.

We managed to get good 'seats' at the front of a dusty earthen floor, nearby a makeshift stage. Brightly painted backdrops were carefully hung behind the stage. I was amazed at the industriousness of the stagehands; they had crafted a theatrical ambiance in a very short time.

The entertainment itself was a weird blend of gagaku and bugaku. Musicians with Chinese and Korean instruments formed into two groups at the side of the stage. The main performers wore crudely painted, yet elaborate folded paper masks. I conferred with Genji and we arrived at the conclusion that we were going to witness a Butokoraku piece...a dramatization of a martial-virtue play focusing on the Heike era. Floor-mounted paper lanterns cast a variety of colors on the stage as the woodwinds and flautists performed a somber entrance piece. I was ecstatic at the prospect of viewing early Japanese live theatre. This was the 14th century equivalent of a night at the movies...and I expected us to be entertained!

Three hours later, the players finished. Performing two plays out of their repertoire, they had captivated us with a thrilling mixture of energetic dance and thespian intensity. The comedic elements were a little hard for me to follow, except for some of the more ribald dramatic passages. Some of the gymnastic efforts by the dancers during the martial scenes of the performance were so precisely cued, I couldn't help by speculate that this troupe was the product of generations of master-apprentice training. The music was completely novel to my ears...it was an able accompaniment to the shifts in mood during the performance. For some reason, the songs suggested Tang Dynasty Xian performance, as they lacked the percussiveness of later Japanese theatrical music. Strangely enough, I expected applause from the audience. When the four of us clapped our hands at the end of the first play, we gained a host of confused stares from all directions. Evidently, the hallmark of approval in the 14th century was whistling and shouting, not handclapping.

After the performance, Genji asked some passersby about directions to the daimyo's mansion. After several attempts that drew suspicious glances from the men and women we stopped, a group of teenagers pointed out the road to the daimyo's gate. A group of constables observed us, "It's your necks on the chopping blocks..." their eyes seemed to say. It was nearing twilight; the streets were visibly shed of their crowds of pedestrians.

We decided to seek an inn for the night.

"Gas or steam?" Keiichi asked Genji with a meditative look on his face. I looked at them with curiosity...this enigmatic statement seemed to come out of a random nonspace.

"What?" Genji projected his confusion, as the question was directed to him.

"We need to sell ourselves to the daimyo, in order to gain admittance to his court. In order to do that, we need to offer something that he can't get anywhere else," Keiichi elaborated.

"And..."

"How many engineering students are there in Japan in the 14th century...with our knowledge of vehicles, mechanics and materials? We know something that no else in the world knows at this point! How to make an engine," Keiichi explained excitedly. I watched as Genji looked at Keiichi, his face gradually softening from bewilderment to curiosity as the possibilities dawned on him.

"Cool! We build an engine...and then we make a 'war chariot' for the Daimyo?"

"Exactly! We could spend the next couple of days here drafting a design for a simple engine. We could mount the engine on a hardwooden chassis. Remember, in this era in Japan's history, the art of smelting metals is probably pretty good...in fact, the swords manufactured in the Ashikaga Shogunate were far superior to any other swords made in Europe in the same era," Keiichi said excitedly. They were onto something, and I wanted to encourage it.

"Definitely! Don't take me for being weird, but I saw several samurai with uchi-gatana and dai-tachi blades," I said in a quiet voice. "This period, known as the Nanbokucho, is historically very important in terms of swordmaking. The exaggerated sizes of swords crafted in the 1350s established a standard to which the swordsmiths of later ages reacted by producing smaller katana," I observed. Tomohisa gave me one of his 'how do you know this obscure shit?' looks, shaking his head with a grin.

My voice wasn't muted enough. Genji hushed me; pointing at the several patrons standing in front of the eatery attached to the inn staring at me suspiciously. I wasn't any more used to being considered as a curiosity now then I was when we first got stranded in this place. I felt like a circus sideshow freak. It went beyond prejudice...I was experiencing xenophobic reactions from most of the people we encountered. Soon, we found ourselves joining the ranks of customers at the sit-down eatery. I felt really hungry after our long journey; it was almost a luxury to have a second go-round at a restaurant.

Millet gruel and dirt-speckled rice balls just didn't cut it.

"We're talking engines here...and you should keep quiet, you're attracting a lot of attention," Genji whispered to me warningly as we sat down at a shopworn wooden table.

"He attracts attention anywhere we go," Tomohisa commented. "Have you seen any other gaijin since we came here? Not a single one."

"All things aside, I think that the metalworking _might_ be sophisticated enough to create a crude engine. All we have to do is have some metal cast into molds, then pour the steel in, and then assemble an engine," Keiichi said.

The next half hour or so passed with animated discussions between Keiichi and Genji. Obviously, their engineering spirits were inspired by the challenge of constructing a vehicle using the archaic technology of Medieval Japan...

Then they shifted to discuss me.

"True. Tomohisa's got a point though. In the city, Cevn's going to attract a lot more attention than he did on the road. We need to be on our guard. And he needs to keep his mouth shut," Genji said, turning his attention back to me. I felt a little brushed off by Genji's tough use of words, but I knew he was right.

"I also think that a steam engine would be more practical, because I think we're going to have a lot of problems finding anything that can be refined into oil and gasoline. Besides, we're in an area with tons of hot springs...which might make it easier to sell our idea to the Lord," Genji finished. Keiichi nodded his head in assent.

"Not you, Keiichi. The _real_ Lord," Tomohisa teased. Keiichi scowled at him in between bites of noodles, while I choked down a laugh with a glass of water.

"You mean Kami-sama?" he shot back with a smirk. Genji shuddered slightly at this inference.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Megumi was going stircrazy. The only other person in her world was Sayoko...who was getting on her nerves. By her count, they had been 'guests' in this hospital/clinic for almost a month. More than enough time to get sick of the routines. Enough time for the mere presence of Sayoko to curry forth an onset of a irritation punctuated with occasional swelts of loathing.

Earlier, the two coeds had engaged in an enervating screaming match that lasted until their voices became hoarse. Megumi angrily retreated to the 'living room' as they called their main room...the one with the outrageous window wall view of Tokyo. The city itself looked aggressive in the nighttime; its hurly-burly luminosity underlighting the clouds with an orange-red glow.

As her blood cooled, Megumi regretted stringing her anger along so intensely. She suspected that the earlier blowout was the result of simultaneous PMS'ing on the part of her and Sayoko.

"I'm slowly going _crazy_!" Megumi collected her thoughts with an attendant concern.

How much was her anger abetted by their confinement? Was her rage actually due to the fact that she was forty years removed from anything that mattered in her life? Was she misdirecting frustration for powerlessness? The reality here had been grafted onto her being...a mistake in the sense that she was struggling against an environment that could no longer define her. It _wasn't_ real...it wasn't even _her_.

Megumi knew that she would have to patch it up with Sayoko. Sayoko was the only other bastion of humanity in her life...and Megumi realized that she could have fared much worse. She curled up, trying to imagine spending a month with no one to talk to except Ootaki. _That_ thought brought a shudder to her spine! Despite their differences, Sayoko had proved herself an anchor of sanity for Megumi in an ocean of madness. So sane, in fact, that Sayoko could vent invective at her like a tomcat spraying a corner in the house.

"Well, maybe that isn't the best image I could have come up with!" she said to herself with a chuckle. This last shout-down showed that her sempai seemed to be pretty strong when faced with her potent fury . Megumi smiled to herself: thankfully, she could rely on the knowledge that Sayoko could hold her own whenever their personalities forced a volcanic clash of wills. Which was asking a lot.

Megumi knew from experience that Keiichi couldn't even handle her when she was _really_ mad. She recalled a few teardown shouting matches in their brother-sister relationship that resulted in a cowed Keiichi appealing to his mother to mediate things.

Megumi felt her anger further subside as she recalled one time in particular...

_Years ago, Keiichi had 'borrowed' her bicycle...without asking her, of course. Later in the day, he returned with his head hanging low...mumbling something about how her bike had been stolen. Megumi's response was purely one of adolescent blind rage; she screamed at him with full lungpower while chasing him around the house with an aluminum softball bat...until Keiichi barricaded himself in the corner of a closet. She smiled inwardly at the memories; the whole Morisato family was in an uproar that day. Naturally, he didn't admit to not locking it until he was 21 and she was 20...a safe distance from a 13-year-old who lost his younger sister's bike._

...Sayoko didn't do anything half as bad as Keiichi did that day. Megumi had been talking with her about Genji...and she had offhandedly inserted a few critical comments about him….just enough to set off Sayoko. Frenzied, Sayoko had said that Megumi "wasn't good enough for my younger brother." The verbal fireworks started right after _that_ comment.

Megumi looked towards one of the two walldoors that opened into the hallway. Those doors were still uncanny; they seemed to appear out of nowhere in a wall that didn't have hinges, doorknobs, seams, or anything else to indicate that a door was there. It was as if the wall itself just _opened up_ whenever one of the two girls came near it...the doors were more portals than anything else. Taking a deep breath as she walked through the door, Megumi shrugged her shoulders to a feigned audience.

"That story about Keiichi and the bike might be the right thing to break the ice with Sayoko," she thought with a smile as she walked down the hall to the study where Sayoko would probably be.

"Sayoko will probably agree that it's hilarious...that Keiichi waited _eight_ years to tell me that he forgot to lock my bike!"

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

It took a hunger strike on the part of Urd and Skuld to get the point across to their captor that it was unnerving Bell to be floating naked in their confinement cell all day. Belldandy was so distraught by her unclothed state that she could barely eat...which gave Urd an idea.

Urd had decided to "call his bluff" and refrain from eating, despite the fact that Aoshima had threatened to use coercion if they refused to eat. Skuld had joined soon afterwards in the hunger strike. Without availing themselves to the only powerup source available, their physical forms naturally began to degrade and lose cohesion.

After three days, Urd and Skuld's corporeal forms had faded to an almost translucent manifestation. They looked the same for all intents and purposes...but every so often, Belldandy could see _through_ them. She could see through her own hand as well. It wasn't so much a matter of satisfying her appetite in the mortal sense. Her inability to eat was due to psychological trauma. She silently thanked her sisters for standing up for her; it must have been especially hard for Skuld to forgo the ice cream bars and mochi that came with each meal tray.

Much to Belldandy's relief, the next day's breakfast came with three sets of blue hospital gowns and striped hospital robes. Despite his efforts to unnerve them, the two Norns had banded together and won a small victory on behalf of Belldandy. Evidently, with two Goddesses who refused to eat and a third Goddess who was too distraught to eat...it was too much for Aoshima.

"«_This means that we have a certain leverage over him,__»_" Urd thoughtcast victoriously as she drank a gulp of watered-down sake.

_"«Yes. When faced with the fact that we might disappear from existence, he backed down. I'm just glad that I have something to cover up with. His eyes...»"_ Belldandy replied.

"«_I must be getting –_too-_ mortal,»"_ she said dejectedly.

_"«Hey! Don't go there, Bell! How many Goddesses do you know that have spent four _–entire-_ years on the Earthrealm, without being able to take leave? I mean...we're _–all-_ breaking new ground here,»" _Urd stated, trying to assure her younger sister.

"You know the risks. Cevn told me once about all sorts of psychology research that showed how susceptible mortals are to their environment. Place them in a prison situation and they behave like prisoners. Place them in a position of authority and they become corrupt with greed and powerlust. Place them in a position of subservience to authority, and they will kill each other simply for offering an incorrect answer on a test," Urd explained, shifting from thoughtcasts because it was giving her a headache. Belldandy looked at her with an expression that said "what does that have to do with anything?"

"Yeah, Big Sister. I've noticed that I've become acclimated to all sorts of silly Earthrealm things since I came here. Ice cream. Robotics. Softball and baseball. Shoujo manga. Remember when it was so important that I learned how to ride bicycles?" Skuld offered.

"'Silly' definitely being the operative word in your case," Urd noted sarcastically.

"So I like shoujo manga! At least I don't have _your_ depraved tastes in Earthrealm..."

"_Sentaro_," Urd interjected, and then giggled as Skuld's face glowed with a blush that framed her wide-eyed frown. Urd knew that she had hit the target with Cupid's arrow...Sentaro was probably the first boy that had tickled Skuld's heart. Even her sister and Keiichi had joined her in the bushes when she was spying on Skuld, hoping to catch her kissing Sentaro when the two were alone.

"_Am not_!" Skuld said, rankling at Urd's remark.

"Why does she _always_ tease me about him!" she thought resentfully.

"Even if I was...it doesn't mean anything! I..it's just because I've been here so long," she maneuvered to justify.

"He was just a tomohisa..." Skuld turned red-faced and covered her mouth...but it was too late. She had slipped and said _his_ name. Urd looked at her with a wolfish grin. Even Elder Sister Belldandy was grinning solicitously.

"You mean tomodachi...a friend. _Only_ a friend, huh? What Skuld is really saying is that she is heartsick because she misses you-know-who," Urd countered, sidespeaking to Belldandy like an informant as she watched Skuld...who put her fists on her hips in a decidedly aggressive pique.

Belldandy couldn't help but giggle at this...

"I'm not saying another word to you! _Either_ of you!" Skuld stated firmly, then turned her back on her sisters.

Urd floated up close behind Skuld...

"Tomohisa!" Urd shouted into her ear. Skuld wheeled around as expected...the look of confused anger on her face was a priceless gem in Urd's eye.

"OOOooooooo! RRRrrrrrrr!" Skuld growled with high vexation, then deftly reached out and pinched Urd in the nose. And held it.

"Let...go...you...brat!" Urd yelled in a nasally challenged voice. She was surprised that Skuld was able to grab her nose; rarely could her younger sister pull one over on her. She had turned the tables on her...in zero-G, no less!

"Ask nicely and I might consider it," Skuld demanded, milking this situation to her heart's content. Belldandy was looking at the two with a mirthful expression...the deep conversation she was having with Urd a moment ago forgotten in this midst of this development. She was enjoying Skuld's successful pestering of Urd. Usually, it was the other way around.

"Okay okay! I give up," Urd pleaded. Skuld released her grip on Urd's nose.

"Tomohisa!" Urd shouted again. "Skuld and Tomohisa! Skuld and Tomohisa, sittin' in a tree. K..i..s..s..i.."

"SHUT UP!!"

Urd's little singsong provoked had Skuld into a resentful flurry. With a 'humph!' the Norn of the Future turned her back on Urd and schemed revenge. Urd returned her attention to her other sister.

"She even amazes _me_ sometimes! Well, back to more adult conversation. Belldandy, acclimation is something we all learned in FirstTier Inculcation. Remember? When around mortals, it arouses that part of us that once was mortal. You know...in the far recesses of our consciousness. No...that's not right! What I'm trying to say is..." Urd struggled to explain herself.

"«_I understand what you're saying, Urd. Being around mortals has brought up certain...sensitivities...that we wouldn't experience otherwise. This is true to an extent. But my love for Keiichi isn't just a 'sensitivity' resulting from being on the Earthrealm. It's _real_!»_" Belldandy almost shouted aloud as she thoughtcast the part concerning her and Keiichi.

"And that's why your reaction to that scoundrel Aoshima seeing you naked...is real _too_," Urd argued. "It bothered me too. Normally, I couldn't care a whit if anyone saw any of my physical manifestations, naked or not. But now, a part of me does care...and I've never even made love with a mortal man," Urd admitted.

Belldandy looked at Urd with an expression that said "what does _that_ have to do with anything?"

"Look! Let's just face it, Bell. You've been sexually intimate with Keiichi, which brings up all sorts of mortal-type issues. No wonder you're so upset!" Skuld wheeled around to glare at them, looking like she was poised to deliver one of her anti-sex tirades. So Urd hurried her explanation.

"Belldandy, you have to realize what's genuine, and what isn't. What is real...and what is not. Just like those mortals who thought that they were caught up in 'reality', so here we are being caught up in mortal reality. And it isn't really half bad. I don't mean _this_ reality...I'm thinking of our reality we share back home, back in the right time and place.""

"I just wish Keiichi was here," Belldandy said glumly, feeling an emptiness traverse her heart.

"I know, I know. We all do," Urd responded in that soothing manner she sometimes possessed to offer.

Urd was correct, of course. Belldandy was well aware of the hazards of working in the Goddess Relief Office. Wishgranting with mortals exposes a GRO Goddess to the possibilities of starting to _be_ mortal in certain ways. Whereas Peorth was suffering from 'Wishout' by becoming too detached from her mortal charges, several other Goddesses had suffered from 'Washout'...becoming _too_ attached to their mortal charges. Early on, Belldandy had to ask herself if her feelings for Keiichi had simply been the result of too much exposure to the mortal way of life on the Earthrealm. After a searching introspection, she fearfully realized that her feelings were genuine for him. Her love for Keiichi was unprecedented in the history of the GRO program.

Attachments...yes, this sometimes occurred. Sometimes Goddesses developed relationships outside of the bounds of their wish contracts with mortals. In rare instances, GRO Goddesses had become artistic muses, spiritual advisors, or secret mentors to their charges. But love? All of this had intimidated her as a Goddess. Overcoming some of the very same fears and prejudices Mother was now struggling with, Belldandy had simply let it go...knowing that if her love for Keiichi was meant to be, it _would_ be. As events played themselves out, she realized that her heart had steered her true through the seas of her apprehensions.

Now, she was behaving like a mortal woman...much more so than she could have imagined! The unsettling notion of Aoshima seeing her in a sexual light...was every bit as horrible as Tyyr's disgusting behavior towards her during the recent omiai misadventure.

Could it be...that I have to acknowledge that I have become part mortal...at least in my heart?" Belldandy said to herself.

Urd seemed to regard her with a doubtful expression.

"And if Keiichi _is_ the proof that Mankind is reaching the Next Level...then there is no way that I can ever be_ too _mortal!" she realized with a sense of pride.

One aspect was a constant...she was proud to be his girlfriend.

Belldandy hugged the lapels of her hospital robe close to her, grateful once again to be wearing_ something_ to conceal her body from Aoshima's prying eyes.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"My Lord, there are four travelers who insist that they meet with you," the page announced. "They claim to have recently encountered your Lordship on the way to our capital. Not meaning to be disrespectful, but one of their number marks a close resemblance to you."

Lord Mori Yoshiyuke rubbed his moustache thoughtfully, and then looked up at the page.

"Show them in. I did indeed meet a man whose face resembled mine. Perhaps we could train him as a Kagemusha. It would be entertaining to hear his tale, mayhaps."

The page returned to the outer courtyard and told Keiichi and the others that the Lord had bid them enter. Keiichi looked nervously at Genji, who nodded his head confidently.

As they were escorted through the Lord's compound, Cevn marveled at the luxury of the mansion...a sharp contrast to their many temporary lodgings on the way here. The large halls were wrapped in verandahs so wide that ten men could walk abreast on them. The interior courtyard had a small pond and rock garden, meticulously maintained. As they walked down a long hallway, he counted numerous rooms on either side. He had always disregarded as specious the commonly-held theory that class-distinction as a source of resentment and struggle was largely ignored in Medieval Japan. Instead, he held to the opinion that Kyogen and paintings that reflected commoners making fun of their overlords had been preserved for a _reason_...while other works with more serious themes were lost to the ages. Being in a mansion like this...was reason enough to recognize opulence in the midst of misery...for what it really was.

Keiichi felt his anxiety heightening as they were ushered into the inner audience chambers of the daimyo. Armed retainers were everywhere, waiting in orderly formation like on lattices of differing heights, like coiled springs. Painted screens were placed strategically, concealing more guards. He noticed a number of aged scrolls mounted on one side of the chamber. The Lord was seated formally on a raised dais, with a small black lacquered writing desk next to him. Behind him was an impressive set of armor. All their carefully rehearsed preparations needed to come off without a hitch if they were to gain his confidence.

"My Lord," Keiichi said with a deep bow. They had decided that he was the logical choice as spokesman. Lord Mori scanned them, and then suddenly stood up, tipping over his small lacquered armdesk.

"Seize him!" he shouted, pointing at Genji.

Keiichi felt frozen in place.

Genji went ashen-faced as several retainers jumped up and parted him from his friends, and then roughly hustled him up close to the Lord. Keiichi felt terror for his friend as he noticed that Mori's reaction was devoid of simple curiosity. The room rankled with a thick air of resentment and paranoia. The guards brusquely forced Genji to his knees.

"Shimazu?" Mori said, pacing back and forth as he regarded Genji with a scowl. Keiichi could see that Genji was barely controlling his fear with a game effort.

Then he noticed that he was surrounded by at least twenty spearpoints...

"Shitshitshit..." his mind reeled.

"Bring me the scroll! NOW!" Lord Mori commanded. Several pageboys darted out of the room at a brisk pace.

Genji glanced back at Keiichi. His eyes darted around the room, as he was terrified out of his wits. His friends were surrounded by guards! Suddenly, Lord Mori had assumed the aspect of a mythological Fudo or Hachiman...his intense expression seemed to sap Genji of his confidence by degrees.

"So _this_ is power," he reflected past his cresting fears. Being the eldest son of a billionaire family, Genji had grown up learning that he was _special_...that his words contained a flow of energy that was missing from the speech of his peers. Yet, accustomed as he was to privilege and deference from his family's business associates, he felt diminished by the force of Lord Mori's concentration. It was the most he could do to fight with himself to keep a calm exterior. Everything was too vivid for him. His mind raced to find an explanation as to why he was suddenly singled out from the others and brought closer to the presence of the daimyo. Lord Mori was darting back and forth, clacking his katana in its sheath with his thumb and forefinger as he scrutinizing him.

The two pages returned with a scroll. As Lord Mori unrolled it, Genji noted that it contained a series of portraits. He watched as Lord Mori ran his finger down columns of portraits and descriptions, finally stopping at one. It resembled Genji.

"Check his shoulder! The scroll says that Shimazu Tadakuni had a birthmark on his left shoulderblade," he commanded. Two retainers almost ripped off Genji's hempen shirt, then shoved him to the floor with a kick, forcing him around so that his back faced Lord Mori.

"It's not him," he heard Lord Mori exclaim in a thin voice. The retainers hefted him to his feet, roughed him up, and then forced him back down to the floor.

"Do you care to explain why you resemble Lord Shimazu?" Lord Mori queried.

"_Who_?" Genji was clearly out of his element. He felt totally confused at the question.

"My Lord, it is obvious that this man's coarse bearing marks him as one of the peasantry!" a retainer noted. Genji watched Lord Mori roll his eyes in exasperation.

"Idiot! Look at his hands. They are as smooth as a newborn babe's...hardly the hands of a farmer!" Lord Mori shouted with a burst of derision. He leaned closer and eyed Genji, inches away from his face. Genji braced himself and refused to flinch.

"Who are_ you_?"

"He is a...scientist!" Genji heard Keiichi blurt out. Lord Mori looked at him with an expression of curiosity.

"What is a scientist?"

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

I felt like I had been to Hades and back. Looking back, I realized how close we had come to being beheaded. We had escaped death by the most gossamer of Fate's threads. Evidently, Genji resembled a neighbor of Lord Mori's...Lord Shimazu. Shimazu Tadakuni, the daimyo of the neighboring province of Hyuga. Hyuga bordered Mori's fiefdom to the south, comprising a large portion of Kyushu.

My nerves were still razor sharp after the whole episode, despite the fact that I was soaking in the guest bath along with Keiichi, Genji and Tomohisa. The water was luxuriating...a much-welcomed comfort after all of our hardships and travels.

But I was still wrought with anxiety.

As we soaked, Genji disclosed to us why he got so upset at Keiichi when we gave away our few coppers to the beggars. After he finished his explanation, I could easily empathize why it was a sensitive spot with him. Genji's family were multibillionaires...their net worth running to several billion US dollars. As a kid, Genji went through the usual childhood "save my world" phase of determination. He repeatedly entreated his parents to donate to various charities. Despite this principled noblesse, Genji's requests were often ignored or rejected as mere childish whims. As Genji explained it, he grew up feeling resentful at the fact that his family was so wealthy...yet so reluctant to part with even a fraction of their resources to help the poor. His resentment was tempered by a sense of guilt; the Mishima fortune was at once the solution...and the problem. Naturally, his guilt bordered on self-loathing.

Keiichi's comment about him being unfeeling towards those in need was like a knife stab to Genji's heart. In addition to this presentiment of his, the precipitous uncertainty of our existence in this indifferent age and time, where a few coppers meant the difference between having food and shelter or being homeless and starving...had put us all on edge. Thus, Genji had naturally become exceptionally sensitive compared to the rest of us. In his mind, if we spent the few coppers we had on the beggars, _we_ could starve. So in one sense, Keiichi's point was true...Genji had never known want. But yet, Genji had experienced want in a perspective that none of us could identify with.

The want of being able to help.

In unfamiliar grounds with a financially tenacious situation coupled with a proclivity towards charity...no wonder Genji blew up like he did. I was just glad that he had somehow kept his cool around Lord Mori. Following his disclosure, my respect for Genji redoubled; his generosity of character and courage under fire had definitely gained him a couple levels of my admiration.

It took some convincing on the part of Keiichi to impart to Lord Mori the fact that Genji wasn't an enemy of his. Lord Mori was almost sure that Genji was either Lord Shimazu, or an assassin from his rival's family.

Keiichi had performed wonderfully, theatrically explaining our origins. Per our earlier plan, he explained me away as partially deaf-mute with a prodigious nature as far as composing poetry was concerned. The Lord wanted an example of my brushwork, so I provided some linked renga. My calligraphy was no doubt horridly inadequate, but the quality of my poetic composition wasn't wanting...because the poems were from the 15th century. The Lord was suitably impressed with 'my' compositions; these were actually poems that I had memorized from a graduate course in Japanese poetry. This helped make things more believable for Keiichi's next explanation...

The tale of Genji.

Keiichi, in an expert demonstration of ad-libbing, described Genji as a recluse who had been hounded by Tadakuni's retainers. This explanation justified the lack of calluses on his hands, as well as his quick wit. Then Keiichi marveled at the fact that Genji was skilled in designing irrigation, bridges and other wonders. Of course, Lord Mori wanted proof of this, whereupon Genji produced some on-the-spot designs for bridges and dams...and weapons.

Needless to say, Lord Mori was quite impressed with _that_ skill.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Belldandy floated over to the niche in the wall where her breakfast awaited. She pulled the plastic cover off of the plate...and saw a _note_ partially concealed under an English muffin! Motioning her sisters over with a thoughtcast summons, they read the note.

By this time, it was apparent to all three Goddesses that Aoshima, despite whatever technological wonders he possessed, could _not_ read their thoughtcasts. So Belldandy felt that it was safe to share the fact that she had received a note. To her surprise, when Skuld opened her breakfast, another note was enclosed. Finally, Urd found her note rolled up in the neck of her morning sake bottle. All three notes said the same thing:

_"Order larger plates of food. We are working on a rescue_

_plan. Be patient, but be aware that we –_will-_ gain you your_

_freedom. Do not let anyone see this note. We will write_

_you again in three days."_

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --


	37. Pt 37: Headspin

**Part 37 Headspin**

TOKYO, JAPAN - OCT 2049:

Megumi was half-asleep, barely hearing the sonorous humming of servos as the robots delivered breakfast. This was an intermittent routine that highlighted their day, but yet also reminding them of the tedium. The door in the end of the hallway would appear; two robots would roll down the hall into the dining room with stacked trays of food. However, sometimes their meals would simply appear in a niche in the dining room wall accompanied by a series of musical tones.

"Why do they use a robot to deliver our meals some of the time, and at other times use that slot in the wall?" she asked Sayoko while munching on a pastry roll. It was funny that she was just now feeling irritated about this.

"I noticed the same thing. Seems odd, doesn't it?"

"There's _a lot_ of things which are odd. You would expect the same kind of consistency that you'd find in a hospital...but our captors, whoever they are, are almost flaky," Megumi noted. Once more, this launched rapid-fire conjecturing about such enigmas as the strange meal schedules, the late night visits by the robots, and the possible identity of the invisible anonymities that were confining them.

"It's a miracle that we aren't drowning in paranoia!" Sayoko commented. Megumi was bored, so she started in on the robots. She and Sayoko often joked around as their meals were being delivered, saying cheap stock romanji phrases like "more caviar, Jeeves" and "where is the poupon, Jasper?" The robots would ignore their jests and attend to their duties with an attitude of mechanistic aloofness. The metallic silence made the whole mealtime scenario even more hilarious to the two women.

But this time, the automatons didn't leave them as soon as they delivered the girl's meal trays. Instead, they withdrew into a corner of the room and waited, like hunched armored gargoyles. Instantly alert, Megumi felt her nerves crisply unraveling...she didn't like being watched. Especially while eating. Especially during durance.

Unconsciously, Megumi rapidly wolfed down her meal, eating much faster than Sayoko did. When Sayoko finished eating, one robot collected the trays while the other extracted a mini-DVD from a panel on its chest.

_"Your host has recorded this hyperinfo database for your convenience. Please utilize the UDVD player in the living room quarters at your convenience to view this personal message," _it announced in an emotionless voice as it placed the disk on the table.

Megumi looked at Sayoko with surprise. She started to reach out to grab the disk, but then she glimpsed Sayoko gesturing "no" with her hands. Megumi caught herself in mid-reach, and then sat back down at the dining table, grinning innocuously at the departing robot. After the robot left, she looked at Sayoko with a wordless questioning. Sayoko cleared her throat and began to justify her attitude of cautious reticence.

"We don't want to lend the impression that we're _too_ anxious to find out who's behind all of this, Megumi. That would tip our hand. We need to remain nonchalant...otherwise we end up buying into the captor-hostage mentality that our 'host' wants us to believe. And you can bet that we're under some kind of video surveillance," she explained, grateful for all those classes she took in hostage survival techniques. Necessary classes, for the only daughter of one of Japan's richest families.

Megumi nodded her head at this; Sayoko was making sound sense.

Concealing their enthusiasm, the two women leisurely went into the living room and slipped the mini-UDVD into the player.

"Ultra Definition TV," Megumi commented as the screen showed a focusing palette. "You would think they would give us something a little bit more modern...this must be an antique by 2049 standards."

The TV was 'generic'; possessing no identifying information. Several days earlier, Megumi and Sayoko had lifted it up, noticing that it seemed to weigh significantly less than a television _should_ weigh. Megumi had wondered about its presence in the common room, as they were unable to watch TV at all. No videos or disks had been provided, and it was quickly apparent that the broadcast channels were being blocked. Also, the TV chassis itself seemed to be designed with the same seamless metal that the walls were made of. Neither girl could even see inside of it, let alone try to disassemble it.

"I wonder what it meant when it said 'hyperinfo database'?" Megumi asked.

"Well, we're going to find out. This is where we learn about our situation," Sayoko said as she pressed "play" on the remote. After a momentary flicker, a face appeared.

"TOSHIYUKI!" both girls gasped simultaneously. "AOSHIMA!"

Sayoko was so discomfited by the image on the TV that she dropped the remote. She felt herself slipping away on a wave of astonishment. She was looking at her cousin...only this was an older version of him! An anger drifted into her consciousness so rapidly that she thought she was going to spin nauseous. She looked over and saw that Megumi was tightly gripping the armrest of the couch she was sitting on...almost paralyzed with a sudden onset of insecurity.

_"Greetings, my cousin Mishima Sayoko. And to you as well, Morisato Megumi. You are probably experiencing a high level of anxiety at the moment, so I will courteously wait for it to pass."_

Megumi looked at Sayoko, esteeming by the facefallen expression of her friend that her own face must be registering an equal amount of disturbed shock. It definitely was Aoshima...but this man had a steelsharp expression borne out of a sharkpit. His almost delicate face was aged, but the hardness of his facial features was disconcerting. He was dressed in one of those cheesy rainbow striped suits that he used to sport at N.I.T. Megumi was even more anxious when she saw the naked acquisitiveness in his dark eyes.

After a full minute, the scene shifted to a photomosaic as Aoshima's voice continued:

_"Welcome to 2049. You are a guest of the Toshishima Imperium. I am Director Aoshima. It has been a long time, hasn't it? The reason I have invited you here is because you are now the property of the Toshishima Imperium. Imagine my surprise when my associates found you...after a -_40-year-_ disappearance. They brought you to the medical wing of my headquarters, where you are now being treated so graciously as my guests. Your presence here can only indicate two possibilities._

_First, there is the possibility that you have somehow traveled forward in time to the present year. We have long suspected the physical potential for time travel, but have never had the chance to research live specimens who have actually survived time travel. Our controlled environment attempts to project subjects a mere_ –five-_ minutes into the past or future have resulted in the deaths of all such human subjects. Naturally, we were pleased to have this unprecedented opportunity to examine you in an attempt to comprehend why you survived while all other human subjects in our experimental trials expired._

_Second, there exists the possibility that you both possess a unique antiagathic agent. Some kind of physiological trait which has arrested your aging process these last forty years. We have verified your ages by a variety of means, and each measurement indicates conclusively that you both are over sixty years old. You are both miraculously preserved specimens, and we intend to examine you both to determine what is responsible for your longevity. We at Toshishima Imperium are creators of miracles._

_Obviously, if either of these possibilities are indeed verifiable through rigorous research...your value to us is enormous. Once we discover the scientific reasons that explain your presence here 40 years after you disappeared, then we will be able to offer another line of breakthrough technology to our consumers. This is why you have been kept in total isolation from all other human beings. We would not want you to be contaminated by exposure to humans of our era, or to possibly contaminate others, if your 'non-aging' attributes are indeed communicable. This would defeat the whole purpose of isolating the agents responsible for your youth; we would rather market any 'youthening cure' than give it away, of course. Oh, and we don't want one or both of you escaping._

_Consider yourselves my honored guests."_

"I..I can't believe this!" Sayoko said in a voice strained with emotion. "And he isn't even going to tell us about himself?" The image changed to a logo that read "Toshishima Imperium" with a picture of Aoshima dressed in pseudo-samurai court dress. Both girls looked at each other, rolling their eyes at this display of smarmy vanity.

_"Request granted. This data disk is hyperlinked to spoken keywords. If you want additional information about a certain aspect of the Imperium, simply speak a brief phrase, and that context will become available._

_You have requested more information about the Toshishima Imperium and its executive director, Toshiyuki Aoshima._

_Director Aoshima founded the Corporation, later known as the Imperium, in 2007. The following year, he withdrew from N.I.T. and married. In the next two years, corporate strategy was directed at revolutionizing the lucrative entertainment industry in order to gain control of leisure activities of citizens. To accomplish this, Director Aoshima patented holographic video technologies that were years in advance of any designs by other manufacturers. This galvanized a stagnant entertainment industry, significantly impacting how movies, music and holovision are consumed by citizens today._

_In 2010, the Imperium focused on information control allware. Director Aoshima developed a molecular gating data chip, which rendered binary and hexadecimal computing protocols obsolete, while advancing computer speeds a thousandfold. During this time, as you may recall, the inefficient Windows graphical operating system was in the midst of a technological slowdown. Dynamic link library glut, corrupt file operating systems, widespread virusing were some indicators of the stagnation of the computing status quo. Programmers were evolving application software more advanced that the operating software. We at Toshishima remedied this situation. Concurrent with the advance in computer hardware technology, an operating system that could handle processor speeds of 250K GHz was necessitated. In response to this need, the Toshishima Corporation developed the Frameworx intuitive operating system to meet the new standards of computer processing._

_In 2013, Director Aoshima acquired Microsoft Inc., Sony International, Disney Universal and Intel. He reorganized Toshishima Corp's assets and renamed the corporation with the name it is known by today: -_The Toshishima Bakufu Imperium-_._

_In 2015, Director Aoshima completed a five-year strategy to monopolize transportation technology by unveiled the first gravity repulsion device, allowing for the construction of larger ships, more aesthetically pleasing buildings, larger spacecraft and aircraft. Also, the Imperium rolled out the first line of hovercars to coincide with the newly introduced technology._

_Focusing next on energy production and consumption, Director Aoshima authorized the next five-year plan to develop alternative energy technologies. The Shanghai, Denver and Sao Paulo Nuclear Disasters in 2016-8 brought to light the problems involved with increased demands upon the Earth's fossil fuel resources coupled with aging nuclear fission plants. The energy crisis of 2021 was averted by the Toshishima Imperium's development of nuclear fusion reactors.To date, over 2300 Toshishima reactors have been built on the Earth, Moon and Mars._

_The next five-year corporate strategy was focused on nanotechnology, with applications towards...Interrupt!_

_Disengagement protocol activated, redaction of information regarding corporate strategies post-2020 authorized, security censor proximals initiated._

_Resume! Today, in 2049, The Toshishima Imperium has over 700 subcorporate entities on all three planets. A sampling of acquistions includes Sony-Warner, Microsoft, NHK, NGN, Toyota, Hyundai, General Motors, IBM,Paramount Pictures and Columbia TriStar, the NBA, the NFL, the United Baseball League, Abbott Genetix, McDonalds, Citicorp, Eurocorp, BMG Intl. and TanDram Foods._

_In addition, the Toshishima Imperium's political subdivisions maintain a majority of seats in both houses of the Japanese Diet, as well as significant majorities in the Reorganized States of China, the United States Congress, the Russian Federation, and many others nations. Toshishima directors serve as heads of state in over 50 nations. The Toshishima Imperium holds patents on over 12 million products, including..."_

"Shutup shutup SHUT UP!" Megumi said, her voice escalating with barely repressed disgust. The mindnumbing rapid fire of oppressive information sickened her. It wasn't enough to stop up her ears...she couldn't ignore what she had just heard. The TV politely noted to her that it was "rude to interrupt a requested Toshishima Imperium presentation", then switched to an animated Toshishima Imperium logo.

Sayoko looked at Megumi with a brief moment's thankful expression, and then lapsed back into anxious supposition. It was too much to even imagine! Her cousin Toshiyuki...head of some kind of supercorporation? How? If he was her cousin, why did he have to be so secretive? Why didn't he treat her with more respect? How much longer would they be locked up? Bakufu? Wasn't bakufu a term used in pre-modern Japan to refer to the shogunate military organization? Apparently, Toshiyuki considered his company to be a modern shogunate!

"Bakufu?" Megumi asked aloud in a voice weakened by the daunting amount of information. She was trying more for dramatic effect than anything else.

"Imperium?"

She remembered Cevn discussing in her Asian History class how the bakufu system was related to the centralized government of Song dynasty China. The bakufu possessed several tiers of bureaucratic administration. In the Muromachi and Ashikaga periods, a bakufu utilized jito and shugo to legitimize its lines of authority. Jito were the administrators who stewarded imperial and other private estates, while shugo were the provincial deputies who governed local concerns and occasioned duties of fealty in the capital. It occurred to her that Aoshima was doing the same thing...his 'jito' were the administrators of subcorporate entities while his 'shugo' were involved within the political realm as upholders of polity in the governmental bodies of many nations. The bakufu was very efficient from a historical perspective, lasting over 800 years as an ethical and political system. Aoshima had resurrected the bakufu in the mid-21st century...a new world order that centered upon him.

Megumi imagined that she might as well have been kidnapped by a UFO and taken to some alternate version of reality. Some nightmarishly twisted reality. But it _was_ Aoshima...an aged version of the N.I.T. sophomore...but truly him. Aoshima as a de facto ruler of the planet, if the hyperinfo presentation could be trusted.

"No one could mimic his infernal arrogance," she thought. She looked back at Sayoko for comfort, only to find her roommate equally stunned and perplexed. A poignant silence filled the room. Then she realized that Sayoko was probably the worse for wear of the two women, because it was _her_ cousin who was keeping them in captivity.

Like caged animals.

"Megumi...did you understand that?" Sayoko finally commented. "It makes my cousin out to be some kind of world leader."

"_That_ is unbelievable! I still can't believe that it is Aoshima who is keeping us here!" Megumi blurted out her disbelief.

"_HOW?!_" Sayoko asked in a voice filled with disconsolence.

"Sayoko, something is really bothering me about that presentation. The whole presentation was disturbing, but what really scares me is what he said before the brag-fest about his Imperium whatever! During the personal greeting segment, Aoshima clearly said that we were the _property_ of his corporation!" Megumi said evenly. "Evidently, people can be owned in this present time..."

The TV spoke up unexpectedly, interrupting her jumbled thoughts.

_"Query. Human Being Property Act of 2021. The Toshishima Imperium advocated the HBPA to ensure that genetically unique individuals or human specimens suspected of anomalized genomes could be owned by private corporate interests._

_By creating property agency for such unique humans, appropriate research aims could be exploited by corporate interests. This would ensure that advantageous genetic material could undergo rigorous experimentation protocols before being marketed to government pharmaceutical sanctioning boards._

_Notwithstanding, vigorous results would then become available for widespread market consumption by transnational consumers..."_

"Stop!" Megumi shouted. Each 'lecture' by the hyperdata cast a more evil and horrid air to their present situation. Megumi was appalled by the very thought of people being owned by other people. "This was even worse than slavery," she mentally recoiled.

"Sayoko, it's..._horrible_. Every fundamental human right is being circumvented. Can you believe how callous this is all sounding? We're little more than lab rats according to this damned video!" she agonized. Sayoko responded with a chilling observation of her own.

"Megumi, the whole justification of human beings as property...is rife with insouciance! What bothers me is how could people actually allow such a thing to happen? People owning people for the sake of their DNA? What kind of people are living in this time? What citizenry, or country for that matter...could stand by and allow such a coarse violation of the human spirit?" Sayoko asked with rhetorical desperation.

"This is the cold shoulder of destiny. Remember how the US was forcing soldiers in its military to provide DNA samples, which later became the property of the government? You know, back in '95 or '96?" Megumi said in a distant voice. "It was already happening in our times. Owner of animal DNA, for example."

Sayoko felt very somber cast to her mood. Her mind raced, considering the perplexing implications. She remembered watching "Drunken Angel" on one of the classic cinema channels a few weeks ago. Filmed in the early 1950s, the dramatic cast of the film created an atmosphere that seemed to originate from another world. The people were totally _primitiv_e in many ways. Their goabout daily lives, their attitudes, their morals and convictions contemporary to the 1950s...were a world away. Even her secret passion for rock music of the 60's and 70's was considered a very eclectic taste in the 21s, where most people were caught up in the latest idol stars and trends. Classical music was even more of a contrast between modern and old; compared to the uniformly percussive rockhop music of today, symphonies seemed to come from another mindset...one that was too elegant to exist in the early 21st century.

Now _she and Megumi_ were 40 years into the future...and perhaps just as primitive!

"Are _we_ considered primitive relics of a bygone culture to these people? How did the future go so bad?" she thought. Megumi looked at her concernedly...and Sayoko realized that she was visibly shuddering.

"If one is full of reality and yet there is more reality to experience, where does it all go?" Sayoko asked herself. She smiled as she remembered Cevn saying that it would go into insanity. Suddenly, she had a brilliant insight; a desperate attempt to furnish a diamond in the rough. Something to feel good about in the midst of this dismal mindcrunching mental assault. Perhaps this database included information about what happened to everyone she knew! She looked at Megumi, who was pacing back and forth in front of the wall-sized window overlooking the city.

Megumi felt in her mind that her personal morals had been stripped and raped by an invisible obscene force of injustice. She thought of herself as a small fish, exerting all of its strength in order to swim downstream...into an invisible net. It was all too futile! Thinking in silent loops, she curled up in a chair, her mind numbed into a "what's the difference?" mentality. Staring out the window at the ultramodern cityscape, she noticed that there was one thought that seemed to beacon itself in her mind, attracting attention like a piercing blue/red police siren.

"Holographic technology was only in its infancy back in 2006, but here, it was full blown. So what's so important about that?" she muttered to herself. Looking outside, she could see any number of floating holograms, usually advertising some product or showing some clips that Megumi assumed were newsbytes. Of course!! She had only encountered technology at that level once before! She sat up in the chair and clutched a pillow to her breast.

"Sayoko, remember what I said about Belldandy, Urd and Skuld being Goddesses?" Sayoko nodded her head as she slid onto the opposite end of the couch and held a pillow to her breast, mimicking Megumi.

"Remember the youngest one, the little girl?"

"You mean Skuld?"

"Yeah, that's the one I mean! Skuld. She's a genius with technology. Remember that robot she built my freshman year, when we had that stupid Robot Wars competition that Tamiya and Ootaki set up?"

"Yeah...I always thought it was odd that a 12-year-old girl could build a robot that was more advanced than the best effort that most of the engineering students could turn out. No offense, Megumi."

"None taken of course, Sayoko. Besides I _won_ the Robot Wars, remember?"

"Yeah, until she blew up your robot, heh heh heh!"

"_Don't_ remind me about that childish stunt! Anyway, Skuld has all sorts of gear in the temple house we live in, including a souped-up computer that was able to hack into the US Defense system with ease..." she mentioned.

"No way!" Sayoko interrupted "Her?"

"And holographic floating screens. Holography _and_ antigravity. Keiichi told me that she created some kind of extra-dimensional tesseract to double the space in one of the closets one time. Borrowing 'space' from another point in Time and combining it with the space from now to create a bigger area. You've met Sigel, right?"

"You mean the neighbor girl that sometimes stops to visit you guys?"

"No, I mean the robotic girl that Skuld built out of an old mechanical greeting mannequin. So life-like in behavior and looks that she completely fooled you into thinking that she was a real grade-school aged girl!" Megumi continued, noting that Sayoko's eyes were getting wider with each accomplishment she was listing off. "More recently, during Supertyphoon Akira, Skuld developed a handheld power source the size of a flashlight that generated several _gigawatts_ of power! Are you starting to get the hang of what I'm saying..."

"Then, you think that my cousin got his hands on her advanced technology somehow...and then reverse engineered it?" Sayoko ventured. Megumi nodded her head in assent.

"Oh my...Goddess!" Sayoko said, covering her mouth with her hand at the implications of this fact. Megumi giggled at her slip of the tongue.

"If this is true, than this poses another question...and this one's a toughie," Sayoko said with a thoughtful expression. "If this disc is a hyperdata media, then...we might be able to find out what happened to the others."

"WHAT?" Megumi felt a fleeting feeling of bedazzlement at the idea. Suddenly she realized with a foreboding emotional grimace that this was the equivalent of peering into the crystal ball at a future that had _already_ happened.

"I..I don't feel very comfortable with the possibility that we _could_ find out about the others lives. What if...someone died, or was murdered? Would you want to know that _your_ brother was killed in a car crash on the expressway? What if I found out that _my_ brother died in a racing accident?" she said, feeling deeply reserved about the whole idea.

Sayoko had felt assured that she could handle the context of a future revealed. But a series of ghosting doubts arose as Megumi went on to explain several further worst case scenarios. This information about her cousin's activities wielded a grimness that was suffocating in the same way that a nightmare stole early waking moments with an incubus-like disregard. In this future present world, what other horrors existed?

She looked at Megumi, who was eyeing the mini-UDVD player with a trace of disgust on her face. Sayoko slowly shook her head. The future would have to wait. Or even worse. She watched silently as her friend pushed the eject button on the player. Megumi pulled the disc out of the tray, then snapped it in two and angrily tossed it against the wall.

"My feelings exactly, Megumi," Sayoko said as she hugged the only other_ real_ person in her world.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

OITA, KYUSHU, JAPAN - SEPT 1372:

It _had_ to happen sometime.

I didn't think that it would have occurred so soon after we became guests of the Mori household...but yesterday it happened. The entire focus of the day shifted after that moment...like the kind of mental shift that occurs when a waiter drops a set of plates at a ritzy restaurant in mid-conversation. Entrancement.

Crash juggernaut.

We had just finished a working lunch, poring over designs components of the 'war chariot', when a bell sounded a series of gongs, followed by a wave of consternation and rapid footfalls on the wooden galleries encircling the daimyo's palace. Soon, a group of retainers burst into to our dining room and commanded us to attend to the Lord in his main meeting hall.

We were hurriedly escorted into the main room. As we sat down in our own little group at the back of the main audience hall, we saw several squads of retainers hastily assembling into formal positions on each side. It looked like some bizarre choreographed staging, a remnant of an image that belonged in a Kurosawa movie. Like dolls arrayed on a display for viewing. Buzzing like the late summer locusts.

A moment later, the Lordship stalked into the head of the room at a rapid clip and then seated himself on the raised dais with a flourish of his long sleeves. Three senior retainers produced a white cloth-wrapped box about three meters long and gently set it down in front of the Lord, and then bowed with an extra measure of respect.

"Is it a koto?" I heard Genji ask in a soft whisper. We quietly talked among ourselves, conjecturing as to what was concealed in the white wrapping. The eldest retainer carefully undid the white cloth and removed the lid of the box.

Curiosity turned into horror as I saw what was revealed. Four heads were mounted on a long wooden board. I felt my recently eaten lunch wretch halfway up as I gagged. With a supreme effort of will, I forestayed vomiting as the eldest retainer read from a short scroll.

"These four men were captured spying on our Lordship. They were posing as priests in Usuki. Before they were executed, they admitted to being mercenary assassins hired by our enemies, the Shimazu Clan. They confessed that they were spying on our Lord with the perfidious intent to take his life!" he announced in a dramatic voice. The hall burst with angry voices while Lord Mori examined the heads.

"This is outrageous! We must punish Shimazu! Kill all of them! How dare they threaten us! We should rally our forces and invade his fief! Insolent fools, how dare they anger us! Shimazu has proven his cowardice...we _must_ not ignore this dishonor," the din of voices filled the hall with vociferous debate.

Lord Mori waved his hand to silence the throng of shouts. I felt a foreboding as he sat in moody silence. The fact that there was _four_ heads on display wasn't lost on me, either.

"Life is a waking dream...it could have been _our_ heads," I reflected. The sheer brutality of medieval Japan had just become tacitly real in that heavy quiet.

"How could this culture have ever produced anime and manga for entertainment 700 years hence...when it was sourced in martial attitudes like this?" the thoughts drummed in my mind. There it was. A quartet of heads on a wooden display board. I was profoundly grateful that I couldn't see their faces from where I was kneeling.

The room felt like it was a Navaho sweat tipi; it was dripwet soaked with emotional heat. I felt like a brush fire had just been fanned by a wind; now it was raging out of control. This was surreal...like some disjointed dream sequence. I looked at Keiichi, Genji and Tomohisa for the simple confidence of their presence. Their faces were fraught with disturbed expressions.

Suddenly, Lord Mori stood up. With a half turn, he spun on his heels and advanced to the ancestral armor suit mounted behind his seat cushion. With a reverent motion he lifted the bizen sword off of its mother-of-pearl inlaid display saddle. He pulled the sword out of its mount with exaggerated vigor and held it over his head. I had overheard that this sword was product of the Heian period, making it a venerable antique in this time.

This time...

For the first time, I had momentarily forgotten that 'this time' was actually six centuries in the past...of 99.9 percent of my life. But it was now...oppressively current, despite the fact that I had only been in 'this time' a few weeks. The gleam of the sword was _too_ real.

"This...will not go unpunished! From this point onward, a state of war exists between the Mori Clan and the Shimazu Clan. We will ride the crest of our forefather's gallant honor until every last Shimazu is left standing in front of the Yama Kings in Hell!"

The effect was instantaneous. Lord Mori had made his choice and utilized the high fever of fervent emotion to solidify his appeal to his retainers. Loud whooping and yelling pierced the air as the retainers cheered each other and their Lord.

"My...God," I heard Keiichi mutter in between the raucous bravado that filled the main hall.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

CONFINEMENT - 2050:

Belldandy woke up as the klaxon signaled the dawn of a new day. She looked at Urd, who was sluggishly waking up. It seemed to her that her older sister was looking very exhausted lately. Skuld was still spry, but this was more an attribute of her youth than anything else. Sometimes Skuld could be irrepressibly happy, like when she was learning to ride her bike and levitate objects a year ago. Keiichi had called Skuld "terminally happy" during that summer month.

But Urd...Belldandy was becoming worried. Urd was becoming _depressed_. She was spending most of her days asleep; while awake, her capricious demeanor was greatly subdued. It was as if their captivity was draining Urd of her elan. This, alongside all of the fiats delivered by Aoshima. Each threat was like a pounding nail. It didn't help that gravity had been restored to their confinement chamber, forcing them to sleep on the floor. Of the three sisters, Urd was the 'floater'; the one who liked to float off the ground the most, even on the Earthrealm. Now, her older sister couldn't even do that. Belldandy sensed that Aoshima had restored gravity to punish Urd for some verbal slight during their captivity.

"Elder sister...you look so disheveled...so out of it," Belldandy said to herself, her blue eyes tinged with grave concern.

After an hour or so, the lights signaling breakfast illuminated the room with multihued flashes. The usual mealslot in the wall opened up and revealed three trays with very large covered plates. Belldandy and her sisters had followed the instructions given by the mysterious notes they had found in their trays several days ago. Each Goddess had complained vociferously that there wasn't enough to eat. After three days of cavility, their portions were doubled...then increased again yesterday. Which didn't please Belldandy at all; she had to _eat_ all of the slop just to restore her power.

She floated over and pulled her tray out of the recessed slot in the wall. It seemed _light_, she noticed. With reluctance in the face of having to eat another huge portion of food, Belldandy gently pulled the cover off of the main plate.

--Crash--

Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed that Skuld had dropped her tray.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

OITA, KYUSHU, JAPAN - OCT 1372:

Today was going to be an eventful day. Eventful, insasmuch as the grueling regimen of military training would continue...

Since the declaration of open hostilities between Lord Mori and Lord Shimazu, Keiichi and his time-traveling companions had found themselves subjected to the 14th-century equivalent of 'boot camp'.

Nothing he had experienced prepared him for the toughening up process he had endured over the next three months. One day, they were summoned to meet with Lord Mori's chief military chamberlain, who told them that they would be "tried rigorously" in order to become "of better service to the Lord".

Little could he, Genji, Cevn, or Tomohisa have suspected what_ that_ meant!

For the first day of their training, Keiichi and his friends had been force marched from sunrise to sunset in full suits of samurai armor. Each time any of them fainted, they were treated to a hail of curses, kicks, and slaps with the bald side of their swordsheaths.

The second week was the week of starvation...while suspended from a tree by rope or tied to a stake in the rain.

Archery practice each morning. Each missed target earned him a caning across the back of his shoulders. By the third day, his fingertips were swollen with blood blisters from pulling the bowstrings.

Sword fighting each afternoon. Bouting against experienced swordsmen with hardened bamboo long and short swords, Keiichi quickly was covered with bruised knuckles and welts on his arms and legs.

At night, he and his three companions discussed the pros and cons of making a run for it...but only halfheartedly so. To actually try and escape was out of the question. The example of the severed heads had driven _that_ point home. So the talking about "going on the run" was little more than desperate fantasizing; yet it was a necessary exercise in coping for the four beleaguered men.

Twice a week, they were marched out to the onsen near the Lord's 'vacation' mansion. The looks on his companion's faces belied their joy at the prospect of taking a soothing bath at the hot springs...a much needed spell of relief from the dismal reality of their training. Instead, they were introduced to yet another form of discipline: dunking in the hot springs to teach mental stamina. Lord Mori had some kind of dunking chair where Keiichi and the others would take turns being held underwater...under the _hot_ water...for a minute at a time, only to emerge choking and gasping. And then dunked again. And again...

In the middle of the night, Lord Mori's retainers would roust them out of their futons and force them to clean the baseboards of the compound's wooden galleries.

Forced memorization of certain passages from a poorly translated Sun Tzu text...with cudgelings for incorrect recitals. Cevn, bless him, somehow managed to convince the Lord that the translations were inadequate. But now, his gaijin friend was being kept up late into the night translating the text from the Chinese original. Cevn would return in the middle of the night and literally collapse on the floor, too tired to even climb onto his futon.

Another week, Tomohisa accidentally stabbed himself with a knife during knife-throwing practice. He was ordered to go on with the practice, despite bleeding profusely from the wound to his leg. His injury occurred when the knife slipped out of his hands and dropped downwards into his calf. All Keiichi could do was watch in sympathy as his cousin kept throwing his knife against the head-shaped wooden target...gritting his teeth.

One day, Keiichi spent the whole day being wrested to the ground. He was stripped naked and thrown in a small room with the other three. Any time he tried to regain his feet, one of the Lord's retainers would pounce on him and wrestle him to the ground. Several of them would throw him against one of the walls. Or they would prod him to the ground with long wooden staffs. Eventually, he realized that the whole goal of the exercise was simply to force his way through the narrow doorway at the end of the room. But try as he might, he never made it past the doorway. The whole process reminded Keiichi of the notorious hazing/training that novice sumotori wrestlers received when they joined a sumo stable.

It took another three weeks for all four of them to finally be able to force their way out of the room on a consistent basis. Each time they emerged from the doorway, the Lord's retainers would treated them with a short rest, with cool cups of water and unspoken respect...before letting the exhausted foursome return to their room a few hours earlier than usual.

Perhaps their trials would be over!

The next day, they were faced with a new challenge. Led out into the courtyard, all four men were forced to kneel on hard bamboo shoots until they passed out...and then were splashed with cold water and made to kneel again. After a few trials of this, Keiichi and the others had their hands bound behind their backs. Then a long length of bamboo was passed behind their backs, so that their elbows pointed backwards uncomfortably. Thus, if one collapsed, all four would fall into the mud, wrenching their arms uncomfortably.

It felt like torture.

On occasion, Lord Mori himself would attend the training, looking at Keiichi or one of the others with an amused interest. Keiichi had to restrain himself from frothing over with near reverence or rage when the Lord attended their training in person. He was well aware that the Lord's retainers were working overtime to indoctrinate a sense of loyalty towards Lord Mori. Yet, he _did_ feel personally honored when the Lord took time out to inspect their progress...when he wasn't wishing the Lord to have a heart attack.

From the beginning, they had been exhorted to "practice being men, not boys." The retainers would treat them with brutality...but not sadism. Their training had a very explicit air of solicitude to it. Their instructors demanded respect, and justified their rough handling of Keiichi and his peers by repeatedly admonishing "here, there is only injury...but on the battlefield, there is only death."

Gradually, Keiichi began to feel an emergent sense of strength. He first noticed it one day when he didn't get angry at the beating he took after missing an archery target. He initially excused it as resignation, until he observed later in the day that the beating _just didn't hurt as much_.

He was toughening up.

Their martial arts sensei seemed to notice this subtle change as well. Instead of treating Keiichi and Co. with outright condescension and sarcasm, they occasionally let up on the beatings. "We should have beaten you for your ineptitude, but such treatment would be somewhat undesirable now that you're showing some promise," one of them had remarked after a late-day bouting practice.

At night, the four kept themselves awake late, marveling at that single sentence of praise.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

RESCUE MISSION #477 - DEC 2050:

She could barely see through the mist of tears rapidly loaming over her eyes like seawater. The impossible goal of the impossible searching mission...was right in front of her. She could feel the warmth flowing through her as her head was spinning with elation...

"M..mistress...is it truly you?"

Her sister's voices were as equally heavy with emotional release. She felt a tenderness that was white hot rather than temperate; this moment was ultraclean in her mind...not even remotely like she had envisioned it. That vision had given her the drive to persevere. She knew that her companions would be as thrillingly sentimental as she was. The three of them agreed that they would allow themselves this moment of sentiment, of greeting. For after this meeting, the honorable work would _really_ begin.

She had hoped that her ploy would be successful. The sheer scale of the technology she had to confound was dizzying...but she would have done anything to fulfill her debt of honor. As the world got more complex over the years, the sower of confusion had become more cunning, more resourceful. Yet, she had been pressed to her utmost skills to pull this one off. But her long sought desire was finally reached...

"_K..Kodama?_" she heard her mistress's voice through tear-filmed eyes.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Belldandy was breathless with surprise as the six-inch tall figure standing in place of her breakfast leapt into her bosom. She wrapped her arms around the tiny figure, cradling her gently.

"Mi..mistress. We..snff..never gave up! We _never _gave up!" the tiny voice said fervently, muffled against her chest. Belldandy could hear crying...she didn't know if it was her own voice or not. She glanced over to Urd, who was hunched over with little Senrigan crying into her shoulder.

"We looked everywhere. For _forty years_ we searched for you! We never gave up!" Kodama repeated over and over again in an apologetic voice.

Belldandy looked at the leader of the Ninjettes. Her hair was a long cascade of jet-gray, looking like a refreshing waterfall as it plunged down her back. Her face was still youthful despite the weathering years. Yet, Bell could feel an intense _maturity_ and discipline as she looked at Kodama. The Ninjette still wore the same black garb that she had dressed in when she lived at the compound.

The implication stunned Belldandy...and just wouldn't leave her.

Kodama, Hikari and Senrigan had searched for _four decades _in an effort to find them!

Forty years.

"At first..snff..we accepted that it was _our fault_! We were supposed to protect you, to serve you, to defend your honor and even die for you, if need be. Then..snff..one snowy day passed and you were _gone_! Everyone in the house...you, Urd, Skuld, Keiichi, and all the others. We should have been there to protect you! Snff..a few weeks later, the temple burnt to the ground, leaving us without a home. We tried to find Mara, hoping that she knew what happened to you. When we couldn't find her, we looked all over Japan for you. When we didn't find you, we widened our travels and journeyed all over the world.

"Gradually, it became our only reason to live...our sole purpose in life. As it should be. Our lives given to find you and the others. To follow in the footsteps of the Chushingura, were we so honored. B..but we never could find the others. It was as if they simply never existed. We'd given up hope dozens of times...but still we pressed onwards with our mission. To have our masters disappear from our protection is the most dishonorable thing that could happen to a shinobi. We deserved little more than to commit seppuku. W..we wanted to take our lives so many times as the years wore on. But we were torn between our giri obligation as retainers and our desire to find you...out of our love for you. Our desire won out. We decided to dedicate our lives to finding you..."

Belldandy was shaking, feeling her heartstrings pulled hard with sentiment as Kodama launched passionately into her story. It was incredible! Then she remembered the date she had in Tokyo with Keiichi for their four-year anniversary. In her mind, she recalled the statue of Hachiko in the Shibuya train station...the faithful dog that waited 11 years for his master. Kodama and her sister ninja had persisted almost four times as long! Not waiting passively...but actively seeking her and her sisters. With the fire and dedication of a longing love.

"What can I say? What can I do for you, my dear Kodama ninja girl?" she wondered. "How could I possibly say anything meaningful in the face of this eventful reunion?" Normally, she would easily be adept at uttering just the _right_ words; she possessed a verbal pastiche of love and wisdom gleaned from over 240 millennia of practiced kindness. Yet, Belldandy was overwhelmed by the sense of devotion that Kodama, Hikari and Senrigan had exerted. She looked at her sisters, who were each cradling a ninja warrioress with tender affection.

"They've literally spent their entire lives in an effort to find us," she marveled. "They were only a couple of years old when we were transported to this time." After a pause, she said the one thing that she hoped would be most meaningful to Kodama. Even if Kodama termed their actions as motivated by duty and honor, Belldandy knew in her deepmost heart that the real reason for their lifelong vigil was an inextinguishable love and gratitude.

"Kodama...it wasn't your fault. There's nothing to forgive, because _none of you were at fault_! There was nothing any of us could have done. Even with my powers intact, I wasn't able to do a thing to prevent our abduction. I still don't know how we ended up incarcerated like this...in this prison. I know that Urd and Skuld must feel as proud of you as I do. We love you! _I_ love you! You have rendered yourselves and us an indescribably great honor by your dutiful persistence," she said in a calm voice.

Belldandy felt Kodama sink even further into her bosom, soaking her hospital robe with tiny tears. She gently rocked the deeply sobbing Ninjette, stroking her silken gray hair as she tried to soothe away the guilt Kodama had admitted to.

"Lady Belldandy. Finding you here is the greatest event in our lives. But there is one more service that we must perform. Until we do this...we cannot consider our honor restored. Over the years, we have honed our skills to the point of humble mastery," Kodama explained. Belldandy looked at Kodama more closely, now that the strong feelings of their reunion were winding down. The little Ninjette had an air of _strength_. Hikari and Senrigan so joined her. The three ninja women kneeled formally in front of her. She looked to see Skuld and Urd flanking her.

"Urd...is smiling!" Belldandy observed with deep gratitude. The most unexpected events have a way of reorganizing even the deepest despair into a mellowed sense of epiphany.

"I miss the ocean," she thought. "The ocean...and Keiichi!" Kodama and her sister ninjas projected an assured air.

"Could they help me find my life-lover? In this uncertain future, they had somehow found us!" Belldandy wistfully wondered.

"«_I miss him too,»_" Urd thoughtcast to her. Belldandy knew in an instant that 'him' wasn't Keiichi.

The three Ninjettes bowed deeply to the Goddesses. Each tiny face had a serious expression of intent. The novices had become the masters.

Kodama, Hikari and Senrigan cleared their throats and spoke the solemn vow that they had rehearsed for four decades.

"We, Kodama, Hikari and Senrigan of the Goddess Shinobi Clan, _promise_ that we will rescue you from this dismal place of confinement! Once we have accomplished this, then we _will_ find the others...and fully restore our honor!"

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

OUTSIDE OF OITA, BUNGO PROVINCE, KYUSHU, JAPAN - MAY 1373:

"Behold your war chariot, my Lord," Keiichi noted with a flourish, gesturing towards the odd looking wooden framework standing in the middle of the daimyo's compound.

"This...is _no_ chariot! Where are the horses?" Lord Mori asked, the tone of his voice impatient. "I will suffer no idiots!" he added harshly. Chariots were something that the barbarians overseas used.

"This is a special war chariot, my Lord. Please watch closely," Genji added as he casually strolled to the side. Crossing his fingers, he placed his foot on the jumpstart and kicklevered it down.

_--Vrrrrummbbbleemmmummmblllle--_

Lord Mori and his retainers cautiously withdrew several paces as the war chariot emitted a deep thundering sound, shooting white steam as it maintained a low growling noise.

"What is this? The work of an oni or tengu?" the Lord asked, intimidated by the sight of the vehicle in front of him, shuddering and shaking as if it had been animated by evil spirits.

"Please observe," Genji said quickly, before the mood of the crowd escalated into even more confusion. In response, Keiichi opened the crude wooden door and climbed into the cushioned wooden seat.

He released the handbrake.

The wooden cart responded by lurching forward. As he drove it out the front gate, Keiichi observed frank astonishment on the faces of every samurai. A moment later, he wheeled the cart around and drove it back into the daimyo's compound.

Gasps erupted as he braked it to a stop.

"And I didn't even open the motor up!" he thought proudly. Genji and he had surpassed themselves with this one! From the decorative ramma geometric designs along the carriage to the grooved wooden wheels covered with the rubber-like sap of acacia and mangrove...the war chariot was a work of art. The framework had been scarfed with tightly interlocking joints borrowed from the designs of Vitruvius; the chassis would be firm, yet elastic to a degree.

The war chariot was a weird blend of several designs; it hybrided elements of cart, automobile and train engine. Powered by a coal-burning steam engine, it was unwieldy...and powerful.

"I..it moves on its own? Without a horse or men?" Lord Mori asked while scrutinizing the wooden 'car'. Genji fought to keep himself from making a face in response to the bumpkinish statement of the obvious by their benefactor and lord. The truth of the matter was the he and Keiichi had _made_ this vehicle; they had agilely forged it into existence with sheer engineering creativity.

It was an engineering marvel.

"Yes, your Lordship. Not only is it self-powered...but it is swifter than any mounted soldiers are. It is thrice as fast as a horse," he stated matter-of-factly.

"Prove it."

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Keiichi steeled his nerves as he pulled the cart up parallel to one of Lord Mori's finest steeds. The 'war chariot' looked like a stretched out wooden dune buggy...yet this buggy was constructed with a clever combination of wood tresses and metal mount joints. The cabin was enclosed in wood paneling, to ward off any swords and arrows. A simple steering wheel, hand and foot brakes and an accelerator pedal were the only controls. He and Genji had worked on the chariot for the past several months, following the successful completion of their 'basic training'. Their design called for a top speed of 100 kph...slow by modern standards, but incredibly swift by 14th century perspectives. Not to mention that this project had strained the N.I.T. engineering students to the upper limits of their instrumental creativity.

"What would my sempai think of _this_?" Keiichi thought to himself, visualizing Chihiro, Tamiya and Ootaki. He breathed deeply, smelling the rich wooden aroma of the cedar wood used for most of the chariot's carriage.

"These guys are in for a treat!" he added. Over dinner several weeks back, Tomohisa had dreamt up the idea of a demonstration under battle conditions to prove the war chariot's worthiness. He argued that they had caught lightning in a bottle, so to speak...now they needed to prove that it could be put to use. So they approached the Lord and arranged a trial run for the war chariot.

He and Genji had explained the idea of compression to the Lord and his retainers by using the Beppu hot springs as an example. Keiichi still couldn't believe the compression they had achieved with their 'engine'. All in all, it had been a fun project. The nearby coal deposits made the job even easier.

Keiichi expected an almost awestruck reaction from the Lord and his retainers. Horses were considered the most effective form of military transportation because of their speed. Archery had a long history of being highly esteemed by the nobility as the chosen method of weaponry for an army. What he was going to prove was that the war chariot could leave a mounted archer in the dust while also eluding a crossfire of stationary archers. The showman part of his racing skills would come in handy here...he literally needed to create an impressive statement with this 'race'.

"Imagine this...you're in the first road race in history," he heard Genji joke with him. Keiichi smiled at his friend, then shut the door and strapped himself in with the vines they were using instead of seat belts.

"Well, here goes nothing," he said to himself, watching Lord Mori's tent closely. Lord Mori waved his sword from his marquee and Keiichi hit the accelerator. The steam engine burst into life and he felt the cart push forward. Three of the Lord's most accomplished archers were waiting on horseback to pursue him.

A moment later, he looked behind to see the mounted archers trailing far back; their arrows falling woefully short. The next stage of the race would be crucial. Two small squadrons of archers were assembled about a half kilometer away from the starting point, concealed in facing groves of trees. Once Keiichi reached their position, they would attempt to shoot the chariot. In essence, he would have to drive by them so fast that they would be unable to target and strike his vehicle with their shafts.

"Soon..." Keiichi thought as he saw the woods and their hidden twenty archers narrowing towards each side of the clearing. Confident that the cart was traveling at its maximum speed, Keiichi warily watched the archery squads loom closer. He executed a series of weaving turns to make their task more difficult.

As he drove by in a blur, the handpicked archers let fly their arrows. Untouched by the arrows, Keiichi executed a tight turn and drove at one group of archers. He tried to imagine Genji's surprise at this maneuver...this wasn't part of their plan. Instead, Keiichi had decided that it wasn't merely enough to simply avoid the arrows...he would need to demonstrate the offensive capabilities of the chariot. He knew that he could easily avoid accidentally running over one of the archers, but he wanted to send a loud and clear message that the war chariot could run over samurai in the heat of battle.

The archers ran in terrified disarray as Keiichi drove into the woods, chasing them from their position. They dashed into a nearby grove of bamboo and mangrove trees as Keiichi pulled the wooden chariot even with the treeline, driving back and forth as if patrolling the field. It was obvious that the archers were cornered in the small treeplot.

After a few minutes, he reversed the war chariot and drove it back to the throng of spectators and palanquins. He parked it in front of Lord Mori's tent.

Keiichi could tell by the daimyo's expression that he was _very_ impressed with their new invention.

"Way to go, Keiichi!" Genji said to Keiichi, giving him a high-five as he helped him out of the wooden cabin of the chariot. The respectful miens of the Lord and his staff of generals and retainers informed Keiichi that he had been a hit.

In an unexpected breach of martial decorum, Lord Mori let out a loud whoop...and the gathering of samurai and townspeople suddenly transformed into a fair-like atmosphere.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

CHIBA, JAPAN - 20XX:

Mara looked across the table at Isilblius. The young Demon had grown taller than Mara several weeks ago. His manifestation was almost eight feet tall, a magnificent specimen of Demon physical attributes. As he got older, his development gradually slowed up. She estimated that his appearance equaled 170,000 or 180,000 years of age in Demon terms. What the humans called "the difficult period." Indeed, he was acting just like a teenage Demon.

Only that he was much more powerful than any Demon in Vanagdrasil, except maybe the Dark Lord. It was quite possible that he was presently even more powerful than the Liege that all Demons called Master. Mara drummed her fingers excitedly on the table as she recalled her recent little expedition into Makuhari with Isilblius.

A week ago, he had blasted the temple home of Belldandy and that cursed lot that surrounded her into woodshards. It wasn't enough that they were gone...Mara wanted a tangible sign of victory that she could gloat over. Since none of her enemies were available to be tortured or otherwise harmed, she decided to take her vengeance on the place that Belldandy and Keiichi called home.

A psychological victory of sorts.

Mara was standing across the street, dressed in warm winter clothes so she wouldn't be too conspicuous. She had taught Isilblius how to travel in stealth mode...he was standing invisibly beside her. A red flash of energy arced from the point of his finger...and the entire complex exploded in flames. Startled shouts crept out of snow covered houses as the neighborhood reacted with concern and fear. Isilblius then asked her if he could do the same thing to all of Japan. Mara turned white at his request...how could he have known that he had the power to do such a thing?

And if he did, would he be able to defend against the inevitable retribution of the Dark Lord? Mara knew that the Dark Lord disliked mass destruction; He was more pleased with the endless varieties of personal tragedies His Demons sowed amongst the Earthrealm mortals. Destroying a major chunk of the planet would really piss Him off.

"'Can I destroy all of Japan? Please?'" she remembered him asking.

"Just like that...as if it was no big deal," she wondered in amazement as she returned her attention to Isilblius. Mara painted her mood with a foreboding concern. Isilblius was beginning to take more initiative. He had near infinite powers, but only very limited experience. And his skills were laughably lamentable. She had no doubt that Isilblius could blow up a continent with a wave of his hand...and yet he didn't know how to travel invisibly.

"There is a definite lack of balance we need to work on here," Mara told herself. Theirs was a symbiotic relationship...she needed his power while he needed her knowledge.

But recently, things had gotten even more complicated. A few days ago, Mara had noticed something else in his eyes. It was unmistakable. Unmistakable to a Demoness. Isilblius was regarding her with the admiration that she had seen in the eyes of countless young fawning Demons.

He was becoming physically attracted to her.

At first, the fact that she was his 'mother' in his eyes allowed Mara a great deal of leverage over Isilblius. At times, he was contentious, as in the situation where he refused to bring back Keiichi. Often he was cooperative...but sometimes he was infuriatingly obstinate. The kind of stubbornness that accompanies brazen youth.

In the past week, the link between her and Isilblius had strained itself, evolving along uncertain grounds into a new relativity. Isilblius had stopped calling her "mother". Instead, he seemed to follow her around her lair like a lost Earthrealm puppy. His increased attentions were rubbing her nerves raw.

As she munched away on the KFC Hotwings, she heard a sigh and looked to see him eyeing her...again.

"You...are beautiful, Mara. The most beautiful Demoness I have ever seen," Isilblius said dreamily from across the table. His ruddy dark features were very handsome, despite being expressed by the physique of youth.

"I'm also the _only_ Demoness you've ever seen, Isilblius," she replied dryly. Mara had been courted by dozens of Demons; she was very experienced at the delicate repartee that would stall off unattractive suitors.

"Yes, but you're the One," he said softly.

"Oh Oni-sama...here we go once more!" Mara thought with exasperation. The past two days had been punctuated by outbursts of powdery adoration by the child-Demon, usually at mealtime. He was making comments about her fangs...which was one of the more heavily 'sexualized' features of a Demoness. Along with her bust, hair, derriere and smile. None of which seemed to escape the attention of the young hot-blooded Demon.

"Some Ultimate Demon you are," Mara grumbled under her breath. "You couldn't harm a fly. You're so washed out with being a lovelorn..."

"Mara, how do Demons and Demonesses...?" Mara decided that this line of conversation was heading into areas that she was uncomfortable explaining or even dealing with, so she decided to change the subject.

"Isilblius, dear," she asked, leaning over table a little bit closer to him. She was going to try something new this time. A new approach, time tested and true.

Meat tenderizer.

"If Isilblius is attracted to me, then I'm going to lead him on. I can take advantage of his feelings and gain control over him. Then he'll be eating out of the palm of my hand," she decided.

"Isilblius...what did you do with the Goddesses and the mortals? You said that you 'put them away somewhere'. Why don't you tell me how you did it? I'm really interesting in finding out," she said in a husky voice. She looked Isilblius in the eyes and saw immediately that her charm act had worked. He was looking at her with softly melting googoo eyes.

"It was simple, Mara. I just put them all in different places in Time," he answered matter-of-factly. Mara heard the sound of one of her hands slapping the table, punctuating the silence that gripped the dining area.

"YOU_ WHAT_?" Mara shouted, her astonishment only barely suppressing her from screaming. She felt her face knot up into an angry grimace.

"What'd I do wrong? I got rid of them, just like you said for me to do! I didn't do anything wrong!" he said frantically, almost whining.

"You...idiot! They're NORNS! _Time_ is their domain! Besides being regular Goddesses, they control _Tim_e!"

"So?"

"They could come _back_!" she snarled.

"Oh..." he mumbled back, looking downcast.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

CONFINEMENT – 2050:

The three Ninjettes had departed, promising to be back in two days. Kodama hinted that they had been reconnoitering the complex the Goddesses were imprisoned in. This explained Urd's sighting of several gray blurs when the wallport window was open to Aoshima's lab.

Heartened by the reunion with their faithful Ninjettes, Skuld was also deeply disturbed by the news that their temple complex had burnt to the ground. Everything she knew on the Earthrealm was there. Banpei-kun. Mini-Banpei. All her mini-mechas. Her assembly kits and her computer. Her shojo manga. Skuld felt like her heart had been sliced open a moment later when she thought of the others. It was a deeply cold mid-December week when they had disappeared...thrust four decades into mankind's future. But Keiichi and the other mortals? Did they live through it? How could the temple burn to the ground?

Skuld asked Belldandy if she had any premonition of destruction. Belldandy was always confident of the convergent spiritual properties of the temple. Being the Norn of the Present, she was more attuned to realtime axialities than either she or Urd. In other words, she could sense the spiritual truth of a physical locale in the present TimeStream. Skuld and Urd, of course, were more sensitive to Time than locale. But Belldandy had a balance of each.

"We were led to it, because it was a_ good_ place," Belldandy had insisted over the years. Yet, the destruction of such a _holy_ place...holy by virtue of the sacred place the temple had held in each of their hearts...had taken a huge emotional toll on her Elder Sister.

Despite Belldandy's assurances that she was "all right", Skuld could see the worry on her face. She asked Urd if there was any history of conflagrations in the temple. Many such structures in Japan had been rebuilt over and over again because of their vulnerability to fire and the numerous natural disasters. She thought it was absolutely amazing that their temple home had survived the Great Kanto Earthquake in 1923. Urd had replied that Cevn somehow knew that the temple building was seven centuries old.

Skuld had always believed that she had never precognized any disasters looming on the TimeStream. As far as she was concerned, everything was auspicious at the site where they lived. Skuld couldn't always decipher _all_ possible futures...this ability would come with the maturity of adulthood, according to Kami-sama. But her sisters always trusted Skuld's judgment in matters of the future.

"So how did it happen?" she asked herself again. There was one way she could know for sure. But it would rely heavily on an assumption she had made. Arriving at a decision, the youngest Norn steeled herself for another ride on the TimeStream. Closing her eyes, she emitted a gentle green glow.

_"«Skuld!»"_ she heard both of her sisters thoughtcast with deep concern. But she could barely hear them in her mind as the azure glow turned inwards and she felt her conscious blend with it. She didn't like riding the TimeStream. It was more of a vortex than a stream...it was anything but linear.

Each Norn had a burden as part and parcel of their respective relationships with Time. Urd was locked into the Past, limited by its form while having to relive even painful and tragic events. Belldandy was the eternal Now, but her insight into past and future was severely hampered; thus she saw Time as instantial rather than linear. Skuld had the mazelike Future to navigate, painful because of its ethereal delicacy of unfulfilled consequents.

Skuld started to become thenwise; and the thenwise images formed in her mind. Screening out the timechatter, she narrowed her focus onto a select set of souls, human and divine.

(+)(+)(+)

"Ahhhhhhhhhh..." she gasped...

_She saw Belldandy and Keiichi cradling baby Chantel in a hospital bed in Tokyo. Keiichi was dressed in a policeman's uniform. Their daughter had light brown gossamer hair and a purple oval in the middle of her forehead..._

_She saw Urd throwing flowers off of a bridge, tears tracing her face as she looked blankly at a burning pyre on a hill..._

_She saw Ootaki and Peorth teaching at N.I.T. Several male students were commenting on Peorth's charms. Ootaki's hair was brown..._

_She saw a balding Tamiya dressed in a suit in his office, his large desk buried under paperwork. The sign on his desk said "Welcome to the Mayor's Office of Sapporo..."_

_She saw Banpei hunched over a dead Megumi, her chest ripped open by a gaping wound. Smoke hovered over the ground..._

_She saw Keiichi, Cevn and Genji wearing pink suits, marching in a Gay Pride Parade. The unisex symbol on their white armbands glinted in the sun..._

_She saw Sayoko and Keiichi holding hands at Belldandy's wedding. The paparazzi were busy taking photos of Bell and her new husband, Brad Pitt..._

_She saw the ruins of their temple home being bulldozed. Charred wood and dead trees blacked the lot..._

(+)(+)(+)

"Nnggh..."

_She saw Megumi and Cevn playing with their grandchildren while a pensive Urd looked on. Urd's eyes were sad with the weight of the world..._

_She saw a kneeling Keiichi crying in front of a tombstone. On it was a portrait of Belldandy and the date 2023. Standing next to him was Tamiya and Ootaki, each resting a hand on the grieving Keiichi's shoulder..._

_She saw Mara with a ruddy red-dark skinned Demon, swimming on a deserted beach..._

_She saw Ootaki and three other men playing in a rock band to a huge crowd at Johoku Park in Osaka..._

_She saw Genji standing next to a fence, gripping its metal links. On the fence was a sign that read "Tokyo Radiation Contamination Area. This area is quarantined. Keep Out!!" On the other side of the fence was a gray lifeless desert...and Sayoko and her son, Tamiya..._

_She saw a groundwar being fought in the mountains. Urd and Tomohisa were dressed in military fatigues, covered with snow and grime as explosions rained all around them..._

(+)(+)(+)

"Nooo..."

_She saw Urd dressed in white mourning clothes reading palms in a park in Kyoto..._

_She saw Belldandy and Keiichi beaming with pride at their grandson Keoki as he graduated from Waseda University. Cevn was in a wheelchair, dressed in a regent's academic robe..._

_She saw Megumi and Sora lecturing a redheaded teenage girl, telling her that she was just like her late mother, Sayoko. They were warning her about drugs..._

_She saw Belldandy walk out of a small farmhouse, vowing to never return. Keiichi emerged after her, throwing things at her while screaming about marital infidelity..._

_She saw Mara and Cevn living in a ghetto in Bangkok. Cockroaches abounded as their three children played in the single room they called home..._

_She saw Genji helping Belldandy shovel snow in the temple compound. Keiichi and Peorth were huddled under a blanket on a bench on the veranda..._

_She saw Urd and Keiichi in a theme room in a love hotel. Urd was dressed in a corset with fishnet stockings. Keiichi was handcuffed to the bedposts..._

_She saw Sayoko and Genji in Africa filming a documentary on the comet strike of 2033. They were talking about how half the people on the planet perished ten years ago..._

_She saw Urd in front of several cameras, preparing to anchor the TBS Weekend News..._

_She saw Megumi and Genji visiting Keiichi and Belldandy, while their children played. Megumi was talking about Los Angeles..._

(+)(+)(+)

"Errrggg..."

_She saw Sora and Chihiro in some kind of temple complex. Both were dressed in gray robes. Both were bald..._

_She saw an angry Aoshima lecturing a roomful of scientists..._

_She saw herself..._

"That's it, I'm there..."

_She saw Keiichi, Genji, Tomohisa and Cevn dressed in rags, working outdoors in rice paddies. Sweat poured off of their bodies as they pounded the ground with spades._

"What?? _This_ doesn't feel like the future..."

_She saw Sayoko and Megumi in some sort of white room, looking out at an incredible cityscape that looked like something out of a sci-fi movie. Both girls were engaged in quiet conversation about Genji._

_She saw the Ninjettes seated around a quietly crackling fire, drawing designs in the ground with a stick._

_She saw...she saw a small figure in a robe..._

"Uhnnnn..." she gasped as she collapsed into a midair huddle.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"We've been over this before," Skuld replied impatiently. She had exerted herself to the utmost when she traveled the TimeStream. Winding through complex mazes of soft fragments of Time, she was somewhat certain of some of the things she saw. Experience had taught Skuld that when she observed herself while traversing FutureTime, then it meant that she was closing in on the _correct_ extension of the timeline. Yet, the 'correct' TimeStream seemed amiss...which proved her assumption.

An assumption she couldn't quite understand.

Belldandy seemed to cling to each word she said, but she was visibly disappointed when Skuld informed her that she didn't encounter a future instance involving the destruction of the temple. The closest she came was seeing the temple already in ruins...a sight that was enough to make her swear off any future travels in the TimeStream.

"Yes, but you know how she is...she can't stand knowing," Urd commented, justifying Belldandy's desperate urge to learn the fate of the Temple. Skuld looked irritated, as Urd had interrupted her descriptions of the Future.

"_I_ can't stand it either, for that matter!" Urd added.

"So why are you criticizing her?" Skuld shot back. Twice, she had explained everything she saw. Belldandy didn't harbor any doubts about what Skuld had seen...she just wanted more details. Urd ignored her remark and continued complaining.

"Look...this lack of_ anything_ is really bugging me. There's no TV, no music, no conversation, no boyfriends, no dresses..." Urd complained.

"So that's an excuse to get crazy? If you're bored, then it's _your_ problem!" Skuld confronted her.

"Ahhhh. Contentious as usual, I see," a voice interrupted over the intercom or whatever was producing the sounds. As usual, Skuld looked in the direction of the sound, only to find once again that there was no visible means of soundshifting.

"How did our temple home burn down?" Urd blurted.

After several moments of silence, the wall slid apart, revealing Aoshima standing in his control room. He had a surprised look on his face, which he quickly composed into his mask-face.

"How did you know _that_?" he said crisply.

"We're not telling," Urd said in a musical teasing voice.

"Have they been in contact with anybody? Has anyone circumvented our security precautions?" an angry Aoshima shouted at his aides.

"Aoshima...you know that we're Norns. We can _see_ time. You only think you know everything about us. But we're Goddesses. _Goddesses_!! We are so far beyond your ken...you're only being arrogant and insipid if you think you have the necessary wisdom to discern our motives and powers," Belldandy explained, a hint of contempt in her voice.

Skuld was concerned. Aoshima had a reason to suspect that they had been visited by the three Ninjettes. Urd had tried gamely to confound him, but she could tell by his face that Aoshima was clearly caught off guard with their inquiry.

"Or is it something else?" she wondered.

"In light of the fact that there may have been a security breach, we're going to have to step up the next phase of the operation to tomorrow. Do you recognize this?"

Skuld felt a chill as she watched Aoshima pull a SoulGun from a slot in the wall. He brandished it in a soldierly fashion, grinning malevolently as he took aim at each of the three Goddesses. Terrified, she let out a scream as he targeted her with the SoulGun. She wanted to hide behind her two older sisters, but they had both backed up flush against the wall.

"So you do know what this is, judging by your reactions. Not to worry, however. We've modified it. This is the most dangerous weapon in the universe. But I've altered it so that it can extract portions of the Soul. I can use it at the full setting, which would totally disintegrate the Soul. Or I can use it on the partial setting. In partial mode, it slices thin shards of Soul. Think of it as a dissection of the Soul. I guarantee you that it will be _extremely_ painful. With a maimed Soul, each of you would exist only as shadows of your former selves. With part of your Soul dead, you would be crippled...forever," Aoshima explained, an infernal grin perched threateningly on his face.

"Tomorrow, you will tell me everything you know about immortality, Yggdrasil and Time. Or I will use this. I will dissect your Souls bit by bit until you give me the information I demand." With a dramatic slicing motion of his hand, he signaled the wall to close.

All three Goddesses were paralyzed with fear.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

OITA, BUNGO PROVINCE, KYUSHU, JAPAN - JULY 1373:

"Uh, you guys...we've got a really big problem," I said. We had just finished with dinner, but all I could eat was the miso soup. My 'metallect' had just informed me of something really disturbing, placing me in a position to either speak to it credibly or just ignore it and risk disaster.

"What?" Genji and Keiichi asked. Tomohisa looked at me with surprise. With my 'foreigner' portrayal, I was rarely afforded opportunities to speak since we were guests of Lord Mori. Genji or one of the others would have to speak for me. I would motion their attention, whereupon I would be given a scrap of paper to write my thoughts. I was almost surprised to hear my own voice; I had kept my silence for almost a week. There was always a page or retainer just around the corner.

"The problem is this. Keiichi is the descendant of Lord Mori, removed by at least 20 generations. Genji is the descendant of Lord Shimazu as well. If they go to war, then there is a distinct possibility that one of them will be killed. If that happens...then you can figure out the rest," I wrote on a piece of paper.

I had tried to be as parsimonious as possible with my explanation. All three were looking at me with disbelief. Finally, Genji shook his head and ran his hand over his pate. He and Keiichi had just had their heads shaved this morning in the half-bald hairstyle befitting a samurai retainer.

"Look...you have to _trust_ me on this. I know. There is a reason why each of you physically resemble Mori and Shimazu. Believe the evidence of your eyes!" I wrote, trying not to be discovered speaking.

"Isn't that kinda weak?" Keiichi contested.

"It's a lot more than that, Keiichi. God, I wish one of the Goddesses were here to back me up. Believe me, it's true...just as true as my blue eyes," I finally said in a low voice.

"You mean...if one of these big dudes kills the other, then either cousin Keiichi or Genji will just pop out of existence?" Tomohisa offered. I nodded my head in assent.

"Exactly. Our job has just got more complicated. We need to make sure that neither one kills the other in this upcoming battle. We have to protect both of them," I wrote.

"That's impossible! You saw what they did to Shimazu's men. They gave them a ...all the way down to the neck," Genji said, almost shouting.

"Shhhhshh!" Keiichi hushed him. I proffered the paper, hinting that we should communicate through writing.

"T..this is nuts! What can we do _from here_ to protect Lord Shimazu?" I was relieved at Keiichi's question...at least they had accepted the premise and were looking outside of it for solutions.

"I don't have any idea. We have the war chariot, so we can use it for Lord Mori," I stated the obvious.

"That's a lotta help!" Genji wrote, ending his sentence with a frowning face. "It's_ my_ forebear who's at risk! The fact that we created the war chariot tips the advantage to Lord Mori."

"If I recall, Lord Shimazu is stronger in this era. His clan was already entrenched militarily long before Mori came to Oita. If he wins the battle, then he'll be okay. We just would need to make sure that he can't get to Lord Mori."

"So this means that we need to...doublecross...Lord Mori?" Tomohisa asked. "Isn't that like...way insane? The guy's worse than a yakuza!"

I looked at Keiichi, remembering our run in with the yakuza thugs a while back at the temple. I felt tired...it seemed that the recent events were eternities away.

"We need to make sure that this battle ends in a stalemate," I scribbled.

"What if...we try and resolve this issue without a battle? If there's no war, then there's no chance of either getting killed."

"You saw Mori's men. They're like pirates who've sighted a stranded frigate without any gunwales!" I wrote, finishing my line with brush tapping for an exclamation. I looked at each face; it was obvious to all of us that there was nothing we could do to avert the coming conflict.

"This _really_ sucks!" Tomohisa wrote. I couldn't agree with him more.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

TOKYO, JAPAN - DEC 2050:

It had been almost 15 months by their count since they had arrived here. Megumi and Sayoko had gone stir-crazy, gotten cabin-fever, walked like mental patients...and the tedium still wore on. Their host allowed them a library of late-20th century and 21s TV series, dramas and anime to break up some of the boredom. Both had celebrated birthdays over the past year; the robots actually came in and sang "Happy Birthday" in machine-computer voices. Both times, they had left the room wearing the cakes, accompanied by shrieks of laughter.

The two women had become close friends, having gone past that 'getting-on-the-nerves' period from months earlier. In the gym, Sayoko had taught Megumi the rudiments of martial arts, while Megumi had taught her how to play softball.

Megumi felt like she knew Genji a hundred times better, because she saw him anew through the eyes of his older sister. Many nights, she sat up with Sayoko listening to her purge her guilt over her addictive periods in her life. Sayoko shocked the hell out of her when she admitted that she had a crush on Tamiya.

They both discussed why nothing had been done other then keeping them locked up in a hotel-like setting. Didn't Aoshima indicate that they were valuable and subject to observation. Or were they being observed all along; the rooms they lived in being filled with hidden monitors and scientific measuring devices. It didn't make sense at all.

So much had changed and yet remained the same, they were not prepared for the this morning's visit by their robotic keepers...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"_Come with me,_" the robot commanded. Sayoko looked at Megumi with a puzzled expression. Megumi shrugged her shoulders.

"_Cooperate or be sanctioned!_" the mecha repeated in a very insistent voice. Megumi felt sudden fear at the idea that the robot was going to lead them 'off ward'. Obviously, the robot was intending to take them somewhere else besides their familiar environs. She felt her legs trembling as her fear mounted. Mental pictures flashed through her mind...unpleasant scenes of medical experimentation. Needles and scalpels and chemical vials and restraints and other horrors.

_"This is your last warning. If you do not come willingly, force will be employed in the form of an electrical shock."_

The robot almost sounded angry at their lack of cooperation. One of the mechanical appendages began a complicated transformation from a grappling septypal metallic hand. Sayoko backed up a pace as the robot produced a menacing object that looked like a three-pronged electric cattle prod. Three more robots entered the living room where the two women were finishing dinner.

A robot posted itself next to each girl.

"_Finish eating, then come with us,"_ they demanded. Neither girl made an effort to eat. After what seemed like ten minutes, the mechas reached down, grabbed them each by the arm and pulled upward. Megumi stood up reluctantly as she was half-pulled to her feet.

Sayoko was feeling terrified. After seeing the video program a dozen days ago, she was aware of how tenuous her and Megumi's status was. The future was already frightening...but the fact that she and her friend were mere _property_ of Aoshima's infernal Toshishima Imperium...

The two robots escorted a struggling Megumi and Sayoko out through a doorway that appeared in the end of the hallway.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --


	38. Pt 38: Sidespin

**Part 38 Sidespin**

BUNGO-HYOGA PROVINCIAL BORDER, KYUSHU JAPAN - AUG 1373:

We marched for four days to the appointed place on the border of Bungo and Hyuga. The battle was to take place at Furuegoe Pass, near the village of Kitaura. Lord Shimazu had responded to Lord Mori's dispatch several weeks ago with a series of poems containing thinly veiled allusory insults. He also cut off the ears of the emissary to further inspire the enmity of Lord Mori. In a fitful mood, the Lord 'invited' me to examine his responses; his own poetry had an economy of elegance, so I 'suggested' a few allusions to spruce it up. I was glad that some things were keeping me busy...Keiichi and Genji had been working hard on refitting the war chariot for hilly terrain. I was _truly_ glad that I wasn't given the 'honor' of conveying Lord Mori's replies to Lord Shimazu.

Lord Mori conscripted villagers along the way, swelling our marching forces to several thousand boys and men. Our group was luckier than most, as the Lord had allowed the four of us the use of armor and swords. The armor consisted of a thick pressed leather chestplate called a yoroi. The yoroi was a front and back piece that covered the chest and back; it was strapped at the waist and around the shoulders by drawstrings. Leather singlets provided covering for the arms; for the legs, a thigh guard and a skirted hip guard called kuzasari. For swords, we had the traditional o-dachi blades common to footsoldiers of the 14th century. Finally, we were allowed the privilege of metalworked kabuto helmets that covered the top of our heads, with leather sideflaps and a neck-covering metal hoop flap.

All in all, the damned armor must have weighed at least 30kg. Since arriving in 1371 several months ago, the simple diet and hard manual work had caused me to lose at least 15kg by my estimate...a sizable portion of my total body mass. My body had a gauntness to it that was disconcerting. I knew that I was almost as strong as before, but during the march I sweated like the interior of a cave. Fortunately, summer was winding down. In Oita, talk was turning to the subject of the harvest matsuri...and the upcoming battle. The mid-September air was cooling at night in its own way; providing sharp contrast to the still-blistering heat blasts of midday. The first night, when I pulled off my armor, I saw many places where my skin had been chaffed raw; replaced by bloody welts and open sores. By the third day, these sores had become infected.

Keiichi, Genji, Tomohisa and I were hunched around a small campfire, talking about the upcoming conflict. We shared a strong fear about the battle, as none of us were fighters, despite our harsh training of the previous several months. With a burst of hangman's humor, we attempted to pose fiercely and growl in our best Toshiro Mifune imitations. Several other soldiers offered us sake and joined us, teaching us a few folk songs. I wished I had a tape recorder, as these odes were probably lost to modernity. Needless to say, I didn't drink any sake; my abstinence was a source of humor to the other soldiers.

Only Genji and Keiichi knew how to start and operate the war chariot. On purpose, we had decided to restrict this knowledge to the two N.I.T. students because we didn't want anything untoward to happen. Like the theft of the chariot, or someone wrecking it by going on a sake-fueled unsupervised joyride.

Another subject that had borne fast and furious debate was the time continuum. We had deliberated numerous times on how the invention of a motorized war chariot could disrupt history if it fell into the wrong hands. There was a whole spectrum of concerns that accompanied our 'invention'. We decided that once this whole war was over, we would consign it to the flames, so as to minimize any future impact it might have. Japanese warlords were absolutely avaricious when it came to weapons...within a few short years after the harquebus was introduced to the Japanese by the Portuguese, the Japanese had in their possession over 50,000 guns...more than ten times the entire stock of guns anywhere else in the world at the time. If someone was able to replicate this warcart...it could completely alter history. Visions of a Japanese invasion of China during the early Ming Dynasty danced in my head...rather morosely in their footstomping demi-marches.

We were starved, we were scared, we were exhausted, we were lonely...this about summed up our situation. Yet, despite our efforts to cheer ourselves up, something was nagging me in the back of my head.

There was something I was forgetting about the year 1373.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

TOSHISHIMA IMPERIUM HEADQUARTERS, TOKYO, JAPAN - DEC 2050:

Megumi reached out and gripped Sayoko's hand tightly as they were escorted into a lift. The elevator had a lighted panel, which counted off the floors as they descended. Descended, because Megumi felt the changes in the pit of her stomach. Every 100 floors, she had to pop her ears as they became congested with air pressure changes. She looked at Sayoko, whose beautiful face was drawn into a pale mask of fear, sweat beads poised on her forehead. Finally, the elevator stopped, the door opened and a lighted neon corridor greeted them coldly.

Megumi's fear notched up a level as she was pushed out of the elevator by a strong metallic grip on her right arm. They walked for what seemed like a mile, passing through numerous junctures with thick vault-like doors. The robots pulled up short of a section of wall. Pulling out a handheld device that resembled a TV remote, one of the mechas punched a sequence of buttons and the wall opened up. Obviously a security lock of some kind.

Megumi gasped as she looked in what could only be a laboratory. Two whole walls were filled with video and holo displays. There were so many displays that it looked ridiculous...like a sci-fi movie that was trying to look impressive by overkilling the surroundings with too many monitors and control panels. The lights turned up a notch and Megumi saw two coldgray metal chairs in the middle of the room. It looked like some kind of white room or lab. Everything was metallic and sterile. The other wall had a long mirror, which Megumi suspected was a two-way...

"NOOOOoooooo!!" Sayoko screamed.

Megumi jerked her head to see Sayoko literally explode with screams. Struggling desperately, Sayoko's silken tresses careened around her head as she lashed karate kicks out at the robots. She was gnashing her teeth with effort as she fought to free herself from the grip of the automaton.

"Sayoko! Look Out!" Megumi shouted as another robot rolled up behind her with an extended metal pole. The pole touched Sayoko square in the back; Megumi watched helplessly as her friend collapsed. Then the robot turned to her and advanced with the stun prod. Megumi's eyes grew wide as the pole touched her chest...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"What are we going to do?" Urd asked again, her voice barely remaining calm.

"We need to have trust...in Kami-sama, in Keiichi and the others...in whatever good forces exist in the Multiverse," Belldandy answered.

"That's easy for _you_ to say, sis! But what about us realists! In a few hours, that sadist Aoshima is going to come in here and started taking our _Souls_ apart! Doesn't that scare you in the least bit?" Urd said frantically.

"Yes. It frightens me completely, Urd! But fear and self-pity are luxuries I can ill afford at a time like this. And you cannot afford to wallow in them, either!" Belldandy answered, looking at Urd's emerald eyes without batting a lash.

"You guys..." Skuld said quietly.

"I don't want to die!" Urd shouted. "But I would rather die than tell him what he wants to know. Anybody who would redesign a SoulGun into a weapon of torture is too twisted to be allowed to exist! He _cannot_ have the secrets of Time! No way!!"

"Urd! _No one_ is exempt from the reality that they have the right to exist! Not even villainous mortals like Aoshima Toshiyuki," Belldandy chastened.

"Yeah...wait until he starts ripping chunks of your Soul out with that fucking' SoulGun! Or mine! Or Skuld's!" Urd replied angrily.

"You guys..." Skuld said quietly. Both Urd and Belldandy darted her a quick glance, then returned to their argument.

"Which leads me to another question. How in the _hell_ did he get his hands on one of those!" Urd asked aloud.

This was almost like a thunderclap resounding in Belldandy's mind. Between the fear and the stress of their current predicament, they had overlooked the obvious question about the SoulGun's existence. Aoshima had somehow acquired a SoulGun...a weapon that a_ God_ couldn't get without direct permission from the Almighty.

"It may not be important where it came from, since we're going to get our asses fried in a few hours...but it might make the difference between our continuing existence and the Real Death!" Urd said as she shot a look at Skuld.

"What! Urd...you actually think _Skuld_ has anything to do with the fact that Aoshima has a SoulGun? That's...preposterous and idiotic!" Belldandy shouted back.

"Yeah? Well how come Aoshima has a bunch of technology that is _way_ beyond that of the mortals? It's incompatible with their scientific level! We've been over _that_ one for months, and the only explanation is that there was only one being on the Earthrealm who has the engineering acumen to build stuff like he has," she shouted even louder.

"HER!" Urd shouted, pointing at Skuld.

"You guys...please don't argue anymore..." Skuld said quietly, her hands over her ears, rocking back and forth.

"Urd, stop accusing Skuld of things she never has done! You _know_ that she could never get her hands on a SoulGun, let alone bring it to Earth!_ THINK_!!" Belldandy defended, leaning towards Urd.

Urd felt herself tearing apart on the inside. It was as if her soul was tissue paper being fed into a paper shredder. She felt so conflicted. Scared of Aoshima, angry at Belldandy, suspicious of Skuld, worried about Cevn, saddened that her existence would come to an end soon, apprehensive about the coming of every moment...

"YOU GUYS!!" Skuld shouted suddenly at the top of her lungs.

Belldandy and Urd both turned to look at their younger sister.

"Remember all the alternative timelines I told you about when I traveled the TimeStream? _None_ of them indicated that we were all going to die," she said. Shuddering at the more horrific visions she encountered, Skuld continued.

"I saw both of you...you two remained on the Earthrealm in almost every one of my visions. I saw every mortal that is close to us die," she said, her eyes tearing up. Urd felt shock at the frankness of her statement...then guilt against the fact that she had suspected Skuld of having any involvement with their present dilemma.

"Skuld," Urd said tenderly as she floated over to comfort her youngest sister. "Each one of us has our own private struggles...and yours is perhaps the worst of all," she thought as she dabbed the tears from Skuld's eyes with the edge of her robe sleeves.

"Skuld...what are you trying to tell us?" Belldandy asked gently.

"Just this...that in all of what I saw, I never saw us die together. And when I finally navigated the Timemaze so that I could see my own future...I wasn't alone. You both were with me," she finished.

"Kodama..." Urd said in a whisper.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

BUNGO-HYOGA PROVINCIAL BORDER, KYUSHU JAPAN - AUG 1373:

Lord Shimazu's army was twice as large as Lord Mori's was. From an encampment at the top of a gently rolling hill, Lord Mori surveyed the battlefield near Furuegoe Pass. Pennants were mounted behind him, announcing to all that the Mori Clan had arrived prepared for battle...for victory! Looking off towards the west, he could see nine pennants positioned at the top of a ridge. Each one had a black mon with a white cross dividing it into four quadrants.

"Lord Shimazu," he said with disgust. Like the coward that he was, his opponent had situated himself safely beyond the reach of Lord Mori's troops. But perhaps not beyond the reach of the war chariot. A narrow strip of hillock led to the top of the ridge near Lord Shimazu's position.

"Can you attack him from there with the War Chariot?" he asked Keiichi.

Keiichi followed the line of Lord Mori's finger until he saw the spot. It would be a bit of a hillclimb, but he felt that he could do it...in a normal dunebuggy or a hillclimb bike. But in the war chariot? Keiichi looked at the others, all dressed in their armor.

"I _have_ to try! I can't let any of them down. A show of fear would also weaken the morale of Lord Mori's troops. Besides, I'm the only one who can drive this thing with enough skill to ascend that hill," he thought furiously.

It was time for him to be a man!

Feeling unconfident, Keiichi wanted to say no...but said "yes". Lord Mori pounded his fist into his open palm and smiled at Keiichi.

"You prove your worth on this day and I will reward you with my own niece!" the Lord pledged. Keiichi's eyes grew wide at this.

"My Lord, honored as I am by your munificence and wisdom, my heart...belongs to another who is no longer of this world. I would rather have land and a home," he replied. Lord Mori looked at him with an expression of regret.

In his mind, Keiichi gave pause for a moment.

"What if I _never_ get to see Belldandy again?" he thought, facing the unthinkable. "If I can't return to 20XX...then am I going to be single all of my life? How could I find a wife...and still love her? I don't know if I could ever have the feelings for another woman that I have for Belldandy.

"Please...please let Belldandy and I find our way back to each other!" he silently prayed. The thought of being stranded here in _this_ primitive time...forever...was too disturbing to even comprehend.

"Then you will have land and a home!" Lord Mori promised, interrupting Keiichi's reverie.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

I watched with mounting fear as the battle loomed closer. Soon, the forces of Lord Shimazu were a mere few meters away.

"This..is it!" I thought as I engaged the battle. I felt a searing pain as a spear slashed into my upper arm. Without thinking, I swung my sword around and struck out as hard as I could. A second later, I withdrew it. Looking into the eyes of the man I had just cut down, I felt a horrid guilt grip me. A second later another soldier was atop him, stabbing him in the chest with a short blade.

"Oh God...I'm sorry...I'm so sorry!" I thought towards him, regret filling my eyes. I had just taken the life of another human being. I didn't know if the tears were from the pain in my arm or from the wave of nauseous shame that filled my heart.

"Look out!" someone yelled. A second later something crashed into the side of my helmet, and I was momentarily dazed. A hand gripped my shoulder and shook me roughly.

"What is the matter with you? They're trying to kill us here, and you're acting like a puppy!" a gravelly voice shouted close to my ear.

"Oh God...please forgive me," I kept thinking over and over. I noticed in a disjointed sort of way that I was stepping forward. How in all the realms of reason can I justify doing this?

"But they're men, just like us!" I shouted into the din. A man on a horse flew past me, almost knocking me on the ground. I looked over my shoulder and saw two men advancing on Tomohisa.

They didn't see me coming. I thrust my sword at the leg of one soldier, hoping that wounding him there would spare him while slowing him down. The other man spun on me, an angry look in his eyes.

"Leave the boy alone!" I yelled at him right before he tackled me. I felt something sharp slide between the flaps of my chest plate as another spark of pain filled me...this time in my chest. I wrestled with the soldier, desperately trying to get him off of me. But my strength was spilling out of me despite my best hopes.

"Now...you die!" he said in between gasps of exertion, his helmeted face a few inches from my nose.

"Not...today!" I answered, gritting my teeth. I closed my eyes and headbutted him. By some miracle, the eyeridge of my helmet hit him square in the nose, dazing him.

"Ahhhh!" he screamed. I opened my eyes and saw that I had stunned him...breaking his nose. I pushed with a last effort and he rolled off of me. Slowly getting to my feet, I staggered towards him and kicked him in the head as he lay on the ground. Someone tackled me from behind and I fell into the grass, my head barely missing a rock. I reached out towards my blade, and watched as another sword pinned my hand to the ground.

A second later I screamed with pain. The blade had gone _through_ my right hand. In a split-second, I realized that I was in shock. I rolled on my side, blade still impaling my hand. I looked up and saw a samurai with his sword raised overhead, ready to deal the deathblow.

I lashed out with my foot and kicked him in the shin so hard that it brought him down to one knee. He recovered himself and drew his blade back, ready to stab me. I dodged his slashing stab with a weak roll to the side.

I was finished.

He got ready to try and skewer me again when his face went wide-eyed with surprise. A spearhead protruded from the middle of his chest. He slowly fell over to the ground.

Genji was standing behind him. For a moment, everything went still. Genji was simply holding his blade straight out, motionless. I looked in his eyes and could tell that his senses had overloaded. He had just struck down a man trying to save me.

I heard him say something to me as the battlefield whirled within my eyes...

"Shit! You look _bad_! I've got to get you out of here..."

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Keiichi gritted his teeth as the war chariot took off towards Lord Shimazu's encampments. They couldn't touch him while he drove around the main arena of battle. But here, there were _too many_ archers. He was totally exposed...the only one of Lord Mori's troops approaching Lord Shimazu's position. As he drove up the hill, he noticed the rain of arrows, some of which lodged in the roof of the wooden chariot. Lord Shimazu repositioned all of his available archers to flank his position. Keiichi had driven full bore at them, but one of them had gotten lucky and shot an arrow through the 'windshield'.

The pain was intense.

Fighting back an encroaching visual haze, Keiichi drove onward. In the distance, he could see Lord Shimazu and his generals seated on little wooden chairs. Their faces were poignant with shock as he advanced on them in the war chariot, breaking through the line of archers. At such close quarters, the archers were useless. Besides, they had already done their damage as far as Keiichi was concerned. Every time he had the wrest the wheel to turn the war chariot, a hot flame of agony shot through his wounded shoulder. The embedded arrow seemed to tear at him from the inside with each motion of his arms.

"I can't kill him. I just need to chase him off while looking like I'm trying to run him over," Keiichi thought. He was in a precipitous situation; he had to protect himself in the face of men trying to kill him for attacking their Lord. He knew that if he wavered, it would be seen as a betrayal to Lord Mori...in which case all four travelers from the 21st century would be executed. Suddenly something occurred to him as he chased Lord Shimazu away from his perch.

"If I chase him _away_ from the battle, it'll serve to protect him as well as give cause for his troops to retreat!" Keiichi wanted to close his eyes at the sight as he mowed down the last line of defenders and drove straight at Lord Shimazu. Impressively, Lord Shimazu mounted a horse while running and started downhill. Keiichi chased him.

Until Lord Shimazu managed to accidentally stumble onto a narrow downhill passage, too steep and enclosed for Keiichi to pursue.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Keiichi!" Belldandy gasped.

"Bell...what's wrong?" Urd and Skuld asked with concern.

"Keiichi...he's hurt! I can feel it!" she said weakly. Belldandy _knew_ that her soulmate was closely linked to her...and that special corridor in her heart that served as an unseen thread between she and he...had just been plucked.

"Wherever he is, he's been hurt!" she said, feeling at once calm and yet distraught. She had finally sensed his presence...and knew that he was alive.

And yet...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Gotta make it back!" Keiichi said to himself. He could feel the slick spread of blood covering his chest underneath his armor as he struggled to drive the war chariot through the treacherous hilly terrain. Trees and rock outcroppings surrounded him as he wove his way downhill.

It was difficult having to steer with one hand. The steering column of the war chariot was ten times as difficult to turn as a regular steering column. There was no hydraulic power steering here...at times Keiichi felt that it was only through brute force that he could get the war chariot to turn.

Suddenly in his mind, he saw an image clarify. It was a photo of Belldandy that he had snapped a while back during a trip to a summer beach resort. She was dressed in an antique chapeau-bras sunhat, with a tasseled cloth umbrella resting on her shoulder. In her blue full sleeved sundress, she looked just like a turn-of-the-19th-century Frenchwoman. She wore a serene mystical smile on her face, her head partly turned towards the camera, her auburn locks silhouetted against the colorful pattern of the umbrella. The sky was cloudless that day...

He felt calm...and loved. From some unseen depth, Keiichi coursed with a warm glow of strength.

"I'm gonna make it!" he gasped. His confidence restored, he could see the windblown pennants of the Mori Clan's encampment in the distance. To his left was the ocean.

Something...was...in...the...ocean.

He squinted his eyes to make out what he was seeing.

The ocean was dotted with ships. Lots of them.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

TOSHISHIMA IMPERIUM HEADQUARTERS, TOKYO, JAPAN - DEC 2050:

Sayoko woke up in a bed. No...it wasn't a bed, she realized as she became more alert. It was like a nightmarish dentist's chair. She tried to move her arms and legs, but they were tightly restrained with some kind of metal clamps that seemed to conform to her wrists and ankles. Above her head was an appendage. It seemed like a metal arm...resembling an uprooted tree. Tracing the length of it, the solid pylon was like a tree trunk, ending in a complex pattern of roots. As her mind cleared even more, she looked at the mass of intricate 'roots' hovering a few feet above her.

"Huuunnnh!" she gasped. She was too shocked to scream, rendered speechless by the chilling array of robotic arms poised with blades, hooks, knives, drills, saws, lasers, heated metal...

"Ah...how are my two lovely patients this evening?" a voice interrupted her gathering horror. She turned her head to see a man dressed in a long red robe with a red surgical mask and headwrap walking towards her. Her fear became overbearing when she realized that he was dressed in _blood red_.

Now she could scream.

"Ahhh, we don't want you getting so upset," the surgeon said in a calming voice. Sayoko felt sickened by his demeanor...he was acting like this was a routine.

"First, we are going to perform a laser biopsy. We will use the laser to extract several samples from various parts of your brain. With this machine, we can obtain twenty samples in a one-second span of time. You may experience some memory disruption...and yes, unfortunately, we will not be able to anesthetize you because we need to monitor your reactions to pain..." he explained in an indifferent voice.

Sayoko screamed again, even louder. The doctor pressed a few lights on a panel and her head became rooted to the spot. Sayoko strained to move her head but found that she couldn't.

"Rather convenient, these restraining fields. Can't move, can you? We need to keep your head absolutely still so we can take exactly what we want to," he explained with mock politeness. Sayoko watched in horror as the surgeon grasped a metallic arm with two curved objects on the end that looked like claws. He guided them towards her nose, slowly inserting one 'claw' inside of each nostril. She tried to scream again, but found that she couldn't open her mouth.

"We will first use the lasers through the nasal passages to obtain midbrain samples," the surgeon droned on, as if offering a lecture to medical students. His academic manner made Sayoko realize with horror that this atrocity was being _recorded_.

"Magnetic positioning devices, nurse," he commanded. The nurse produced two semicircular metallic rings, which the doctor laid on each side of her head.

Sayoko screamed with her mouth closed. The dream of life...was over. From Queen of N.I.T. to...

"Attenuator," the doctor said. The nurse pulled something off of the tray and with a deft move, held it up to the surgeon's neck.

"Wha..." the surgeon said with surprise as he fell to the ground an eyeblink after she touched him with the instrument. She pressed several lights on a panel in quick succession and Sayoko felt the restraints open up.

"Quickly! I didn't think they would start with you!" the nurse said. Sayoko sat up so fast that she almost banged her head on the mass of surgical robotic arms extending over her examination chair. She looked and saw two robots moving towards them quickly.

"Halt!" they both said in metallic-voiced unison. These robots were different from the ones that brought her and Megumi to this place. They were bristling with mechanical appendages ending in what looked like gun and laser barrels.

While Sayoko looked for cover, the nurse calmly pulled out a handheld device and pointed it at both robots. A flashing pulse filled the room with bright intensity...and both robots stopped dead in their tracks, their lights flickering randomly as smoke wafted halos around them.

"Over here! We don't have much time," she said, motioning to Sayoko as she quickly strode over to an examination bed/chair where Megumi was restrained. The nurse pressed a few lights and Megumi was free.

This was happening all too quickly for Sayoko to follow. In less than a minute, she had been freed. The nurse went to the door and withdrew a small cylinder about three inches long. Pressing another sequence of lights, a door opened into the wall. She tossed the object in the doorway.

_--Whump--_

Sayoko heard a muffled explosion, and then watched as six men dressed in some kind of bodyarmor fell to the ground in front of the wall door. The woman grabbed a large cloth bag stashed in the corner of the room.

"This way!" the mysterious woman commanded. Sayoko looked at Megumi only briefly as they stepped over the fallen men...obviously guards. The nurse broke into a dash and Sayoko followed. A moment later, they reached the end of the corridor. The nurse pulled a small globe out of her shoulderbag. Scrutinizing it for a moment, she turned a dial on it.

"Ten seconds should be enough. Get down!" she shouted. She wound up her arm and hurled the baseball-sized metal globe at the end of the hallway, some fifty meters away. Then she pushed Sayoko and Megumi to the floor. Sayoko sensibly covered her ears. All three women hugged the floor as an explosion ripped open the end of the hall. Sayoko gasped as an assault of sound and light blasted through the gaping hole. Sprinklers and exhaust fans responded immediately to the explosion. A siren echoed through the corridor as red flashing lights strobed in the floor. Sayoko looked out the hole in the wall...

It was the city.

Their rescuer unslung her large bag and pulled three large bundles out of it.

"Here. Put these on. No time to explain," she said calmly. Sayoko was wide-eyed again as she recognized the pack that the woman had handed her. Noticing that Megumi was struggling, the 'nurse' assisted her.

"I'll help you. Don't worry, everything is going as planned," the woman said. She put a backpack on Megumi, while Sayoko firmly clamped herself in.

"You've trusted me this far, now you have to trust me even more," she said as she put bracelets on each girl's wrist.

"This is to prevent the biotracers from identifying that we've left the building. It will cast ghosting readings so that the guards will think you two are still on the loose inside. It will also prevent the biotracer mechas outside the headquarters from identifying you during our descent."

"O..our descent?" Sayoko heard Megumi ask warily, her first words since the mysterious woman in the nurse's garb had freed them.

"Yes. Come," she gestured, standing at the end of the hallway overlooking the city.

Sayoko's eyes grew wide as she walked to the edge of the blasted opening in the corridor. She looked down...and felt a wave of vertigo as she saw the face of the building careening downward until it disappeared.

"We're still about 2.25 kilometers above the ground. We can't use antigravs without being detected, so I brought good ol' parachutes. You pull on this handle," she motioned with her hand, "ten seconds after we jump! Isn't this exciting?"

"I..I can't do this," Sayoko thought weakly. Suddenly the woman wedged herself between her and Megumi, grabbing each coed by the waist...and shoved forward.

"_AAAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaaaaaaa_!" Sayoko heard herself scream as her body hit the chill air. The lights of windows blurred past...huge buildings were everywhere, almost enclosing her. Suddenly weightless, she remembered her skydiving lessons and calmed down. Sayoko was surprised that Megumi wasn't screaming her lungs dry in fear.

Ten seconds later, she pulled her chute...and sighed with relief as the parachute unfolded above her. She looked over at Megumi, who was white-faced with fear as her parachute opened, pulling itself taunt. Somehow, a filament had linked all three parachutes.

The three floated softly downwards amidst a canyon of skyscrapers.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Ah...it's time for truth or dare. If you dare deny me the truth, then..heh heh.. I'll dare to destroy your souls!" Aoshima's voice filled the room imprisoning the three Goddesses. All three Goddesses stared in the direction of the wallwindow resentfully in response to his childishly irritating choice of words.

"By the way, I have someone who's dying to meet you!" he said cheerfully. The wallwindow began to open up. Aoshima was laughing...laughing like a psychopath.

Belldandy was already tense with fear the second she heard Aoshima's voice. But then...she saw _him_.

The impossible him.

She held her hands clasped over her breast in rigid shock, her sense of panic so vivid that her senses wanted to escape her. All the trials they had faced in this disgusting incarceration paled against the sight of the…bastard! Belldandy shuddered as she realized with an emotional careen that their predicament just got worse. Completely and totally worse. There were only two beings in the control room, but each represented the worst of their kind. Belldandy tried to control her breathing; she was so distraught that she was hyperventilating.

"I should of known it would have been you, Tyyr," Urd said flatly. "Too cowardly to do it yourself...so now you're having mortals do your dirty work for you!"

"Shut up, Bitch Goddess! You're all going to die soon!" Tyyr shouted, his eyes flashing with anger. In Belldandy's eyes, he looked the same as before. No...much uglier. The ugliness of a hate engendered over bitterness held for a long time. Gods were incapable of becoming insane; they had evolved beyond madness. Making mistakes, becoming selfish to the point where they were dangerous, becoming confused...all of these were possibilities to a God or Goddess. But to her, Tyyr's churlish resentment seemed to overlap into an impossible condition of insanity.

Urd ignored him. She knew that Belldandy would be scared out of her wits. Probably Skuld too. A quick glance at both confirmed her suspicions. Seeing her two younger sisters frightened so by Tyyr and Aoshima...roused Urd's anger to a malicious pitch.

"If Aoshima and Tyyr are going to kill all three of us anyway, I'm gonna to stick the truth through their eyeballs before they get a chance," she decided. Hands on her hips, she floated right up to the wallwindow, and then pointed accusingly at the two. Her younger sisters might hold their thoughts, but she was going to take a stand and make a last gesture of defiance.

"Aoshima...what a pity. You are_ so_ wretched. You always were too unimaginative to get a life. So you stole a life. We _know_ what happened. Somehow, you stumbled on all of Skuld's technology. Yggdrasilian technology. Then you figured out how to make it all work and you used it to dominate others. To create your own little global empire. An empire based on someone else's work, someone else's technology. There's a word that describes someone like you. You're nothing more than a lamer rip-off artist!" Urd said in an icepick harsh voice.

"Shut up! Urd, I'm warning you..."

"Ignore her...she's trying to goad you," Tyyr bellowed. Urd choked down her fear at the sound of his creepy basso voice and continued.

"You never could beat Keiichi in a race. _Neither_ of you could! But you never gave up. You cheated, you conned, you connived, you hired henchmen...and when none of those worked, you resorted to threats and attacks. Guess what? You _always_ failed! Tyyr, you couldn't even get Belldandy! You had her, signed sealed and delivered; my Parents were ready to give her away to you. And you blew it! You wanna know why? Because you never stood a chance in the first place. My sister loves Keiichi with all her heart...because compared to Keiichi, you are nothing more than rank coward! Both of you are rotten-to-the-core dirty scoundrel rats! And that's insulting to the all the rats on this planet," Urd noted, hoping that the Ninjettes were hearing every word of this. The former temple rats-turned shinobi may be cued into action if they were out there somewhere. She noticed with satisfaction that Aoshima was almost shaking with ire...and Tyyr wasn't too far behind him. No wonder, both of them had thin egos; name calling was like a dagger thrust into their pomposity.

"Urd..." Aoshima warned, leveling the SoulGun at her. Belldandy and Skuld reacted with alarm.

"_Urd_, don't provoke him anymore, for Almighty's sake!" Belldandy pleaded. Urd ignored her and continued to dish out invective.

"And you, _Private_ Tyyr!" Urd flinched as the WarGod seethed at the blatant insult. Scared as she was, she realized that...if this was her time to experience the Real Death...that she would do so without any regrets.

"You couldn't have Belldandy either, so you teamed up with Aoshima. With a mortal. Makes sense...one good cowardly moron deserves another! You both are so unappealing, it's no wonder that fate has cast you as a duo! The only real difficulty is in deciding which of you is more contemptible..." she said, sticking her tongue out at the two. Tyyr reacted by trying to wrest the SoulGun from Aoshima.

"I'll kill you!!" Tyyr screamed.

"Tyyr! Stop it! This SoulGun is genecoded to my DNA only! You can't use it!" Aoshima half-shouted, half-commanded.

"Well, I'll just change my manifestation to match your DNA..." Tyyr threatened. Aoshima responded by pointing the SoulGun at Tyyr.

"I wouldn't do that if I were you. I invited you here so that you could interpret what the three Norns are going to tell us. Once we are finished, then you can kill what's left of their souls or do whatever you want to each of them!" he said threateningly.

Tyyr advanced on Aoshima, and then seemed to have thought better of it and backed away, looking at Aoshima with barely concealed hatred.

"Well...get on with it! And leave enough of each Norn for me to have my way with...I _want_ all three of 'em!" Tyyr growled savagely.

Aoshima pointed the SoulGun back at Urd.

"You're the worst of the three...so you're the first. Tell me what Time is..."

-- -- BLAASTTMMMM!!-- --

The wall exploded behind the three Goddesses. At the same time, a series of explosive flashes of light blasted in the control room. Urd watched as a pair of gray and black blurs in the control room threw at least fifty shuriken at Tyyr, who looked around in confusion as the power went out in the room. The WarGod bellowed as the metal stars buried themselves in his flesh. A split-second later, a net fell from the ceiling over he and Aoshima, while spanwire lassos began to enclose the two.

"What the fuck?" the three Goddesses heard Aoshima scream in dismay as he struggled. Two explosions in the control room followed as green smoke started billowing up.

Aoshima reacted by firing the SoulGun randomly, as if to blast a way out of the confining net.

"Mistress!!" Urd heard a scream from behind her. As if in slow motion, she saw the SoulGun point right at her. A red glow burst from the end of it...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

RESCUE MISSION #477 - DEC 2050:

Kodama watched Hikari and Senrigan do their work in the control room. They had executed so beautifully. At the same time she blew a hole in the wall behind the Goddesses, the other two Ninjettes had blasted open the control room with concussive charges. Hikari had shorted out the power while Senrigan pelted the big WarGod with shuriken, momentarily confusing him. With her last shuriken star, Senrigan struck the overhead panel, causing it to open and drop the steelfiber net on the two. While the net was descending, Hikari threw the boomerkai with the crystalline spanwire, which encircled the two forty times within a half-second while Senrigan lit off two smoke bombs. In blind panic, Aoshima fired the weapon at random angles; the twit was somehow thinking that the weapon would blast him free.

Yet, Kodama felt a sickening plague of guilt as she realized that her efforts to neutralize it had failed. She realized that it was some kind of magical weapon. Then she practiced Zen Enveloping and slowed down time, so she could disarm him by removing the gun from his grip. Actually, she had speeded herself up so that each second seemed like a minute.

As she made ready to lash out a disarming kick...to her horror, she realized that Aoshima had somehow gained a random bead on Mistress Urd.

The SoulGun glowed red.

Kodama thought it was funny that her name was the same as the renowned commercial Shinkansen train A-200 model of forty years ago...she was faster than Hikari.

"Faster than a speeding..." she thought with a smile as she leapt...

"Kodama!!" Urd screamed. The little Ninjette tumbled lifeless at her feet...taking the SoulGun shot that was intended for her.

"H..how?" Urd thought incredulously as she picked up the limp form, now soulless. A red bolt from the SoulGun flashed past her.

"We gotta get out of here!" Skuld shouted, gamely stifling her sadness and rage. The wallwindow crashed as Hikari and Senrigan leapt through it at unimaginable speed, slingshoted by ropes suspended from the ceiling of the lab. They had jumped so fast that they crashed into the wall on the other side of the cell. Bouncing off it, they rolled to their feet, and then they both motioned for the Goddesses to follow them through the round hole in the wall that Kodama had created.

"Mistresses! You must go this way! Quickly!" they shouted. Belldandy, Urd and Skuld all floated through the blastway in the wall while the two Ninjettes guarded them from the rear.

"We shut down the barrier controls in the other room. You should have your powers back by now, Mistress! The shield is gone!" Hikari said joyfully.

"Your idea worked, Kodama! Now we can go home!" Senrigan shouted.

"Kodama?" she repeated in a questioning voice. She looked at Urd.

"M..mistress?"

Urd held out both hands. Cradled inside was the lifeless body of Kodama, a smile on her face. During the consternation, no one had noticed that Kodama had been struck down.

"She..snff..she saved my life. She took the..fshff..shot that was meant for me," Urd said in a voice wracked with utter despair.

"_Nooooo!_ It can't go this way! NO!! It's not true! It didn't happen!" Skuld screamed maniacally, collapsing to her knees with tears in her angry eyes.

"Only Kodama could outrun the blast of that mystical weapon," Hikari said sadly as she put a tiny arm around Senrigan's shoulder. The mini-tomboyish Ninjette held a hand tentatively to her face, then withdrew it, stifling the tears that wanted to come.

"Kodama would have wanted it this way. We cannot mourn life...for it passes like the brief flowering of a delicate cherry blossom. For a shinobi, there is no greater honor than to lay down her life defending her Mistress," Senrigan said.

Belldandy looked at her shaking hands, lost for sense in the midst of her wordless disbelief.

"GODDAMMIT! Forty years they looked for us...and now this!" she screamed, so loud that the walls shook. Reaching a decision, she reached behind her ear and pulled slightly, feeling a "snap!" between her fingers. With a reflex of will, she gathered her powers and channeled them. A bright blue glow filled the air about her cupped hands.

Skuld and Urd looked at Kodama's body, and then at Belldandy. A silent thought passed between the two as they realized that Belldandy had broken her Seal. Belldandy's face quickly shed her benign expression. Her eyes, traced with tears, became crystal clear with purpose...their color changing from the azure of a gentle sky to the blistering cyanine of hard ice. Their sister glared at Aoshima and Tyyr with a face knitted with absolute rage.

"Sister...do it! We're with you!" Urd encouraged, knowing that Belldandy was fighting with herself, fighting to let go of her doubts and fears and worries...and just do what's right.

"C'mon! Avenge Kodama for all of us!" Skuld added, as the blue energy Belldandy was cupping in her hands transformed into a bright near-solid glow of power. She raised her hands high above her head, almost massaging the sphere of divine energy.

"Lord, she is totally..._pissed_!!" Urd thought as she saw the rare display of rage in her sister's eyes, a deep anger that dwarfed the worst of her sis's 'jealousy storms'

"_This_...is for Kodama!" Belldandy shouted. A bolt of bluewhite energy leapt out of the bright sphere in Bell's hands and slashed through the air, blasting Aoshima and Tyyr. Aoshima was instantly incinerated before he could even scream. As the smoke cleared, Urd heard Tyyr bellow as he grabbed for the now-ownerless SoulGun, intending to take aim at Belldandy.

As fast as she could, Skuld grabbed Hikari and Senrigan in a flashblur of white and held the two Ninjettes tight to her chest, turning away to shield them with her body. Knowing exactly what was going to happen, knowing the Future without even looking.

Urd's heart sunk into a pool of dread as Tyyr gained the SoulGun...even as she felt an immense surge in energy, a power spike of several orders of magnitude. She realized that her sister was channeling _all_ of her unsealed powers into the sphere above her head. She wasn't even trying to subdue Tyyr...

"And this...is for _me_!"

Skuld flinched as Belldandy hurled the glowing sphere of Goddess power at Tyyr. A nova-bright blinding flashed obliterated everything.

When Urd pulled her arm away from her eyes, she could see open air. She looked around and saw a huge city all around her...all underneath her. Belldandy had _blown the top off of the building they had been confined in_! Her first inclination was to yell "Way to go, Bell!" Then she saw the torn expression of troubled joy on her sister's face.

It was gone...along with Tyyr and Aoshima and all of their captors. The five of them floated in midair over the city. A bittersweet sense of freedom gripped Urd. She looked down and realized that they must be kilometers up above the ground.

"Let's go somewhere. Anywhere. Away from this place," Belldandy said grimly.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

OITA, BUNGO PROVINCE, KYUSHU JAPAN - SEPT 1373:

I woke up in a room illuminated by the midday sun. The last thing I remember was being in the middle of a fierce battle...witness to Genji killing a man to protect my life.

"You're awake. I'll go get the others," a soft feminine voice said. I looked up to see a young woman dressed in a white robe. I recognized her as one of Lord Mori's nieces.

"Why was I getting such special treatment?" I wondered as a moment later, Genji and Tomohisa entered the room. Tomohisa was limping, I noticed. They sat down next to my futon on two cushions.

"W..what happened?" I asked weakly.

"Well, Lord Mori won the war. Keiichi chased Lord Shimazu away...but he took an arrow to the shoulder. He's going to be fine, but he'll need to rest for now. Tomohisa here was speared in the leg. He's going to have a limp for a while, but his leg is already healing good."

"Not the same leg you injured during knife throwing?" I asked. Tomohisa nodded his head in assent. But my attempt at teasing him didn't shift his somber mood a widge.

I felt that something was wrong. I was pretty weak, but I could sense something was amiss with my body. I looked at Genji and Tomohisa and noticed a solemn look in their eyes.

"What's wrong?"

"Cevn...you lost your hand. You're lucky to be alive. When I pulled you out, you had been stabbed in the ribs and your arm was sliced open to the bone. You nearly died. We had to force-feed you saked to keep you down so the pain wouldn't strike at you. You've been here for almost two weeks. I'm sorry."

I looked at my right hand. Where it should have been. Instead, I saw a stump with a tightly wrapped bandage.

"Oh...fuck!! Fuck no! NOOOOooooo!!"

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

SHIN-KYO, JAPAN - DEC 2050:

Megumi landed on the concrete much more softly than she expected, followed by Sayoko and their mysterious rescuer. Her life had flashed before her during the descent. Strangely, once she was on the ground, a giddy mood overtook her.

"You weigh more than me," Sayoko teased. Megumi smiled at the joke.

"You must have slept during the lecture on Galileo," she teased back.

"Oh...I thought that was Newton," Sayoko replied.

"C'mon you two. Quit goofing around about the old days at N.I.T.," the woman chided. Megumi and Sayoko looked at each other with curious expressions at this remark.

N.I.T?

The 'nurse' removed her nurse's outfit; underneath she was garbed in a Buddhist nun's habit. Megumi could see that she was short in stature, with the bald tonsured head that was typical of a nun. Her back was to Megumi, so she couldn't see her face as she pulled the hood up tight over her shaved pate.

"Ready for a bit of a surprise?" she said gaily. She turned around to face Megumi and Sayoko.

The sound of a million motors passed through the air...

"_S..Sora?_" they both gasped.

"Well, don't just gawk...unstrap your parachutes, you two goofs!" she said lightly.

Megumi unstrapped her parachute rigging, as she regarded the woman in front of her. Amazingly enough, it was Sora. Her erstwhile prediction about Sora had come true. It had been forty years, but Sora looked like an ageless woman in her late 30s. Sora had indeed remained much younger than her age as far as appearance. She no longer wore her trademark round glasses. Megumi could see a sort of lucent illumination in Sora's eyes...contrasting with her diminutive stature. She seemed like she had transcended the worries of the world...and was at peace. She seemed so light...so _awake_. So wise.

"This way to the temple," Sora said with a benign smile. Megumi looked at Sayoko, who was equally amazed at the identity of their rescuer. It didn't make sense, but then it did. The woman _had_ said "isn't this exciting?" right before they plunged off the umpteenth floor of the massive building they had been confined.

This was one of Sora's trademark clichés...seeing a dangerous situation as 'exciting'. Like the uphill bike climb Sora and her brother signed up for a couple of years ago.

"Actually, forty years and a 'couple of years ago'," Megumi reminded herself. But she couldn't get her feet to move. The shock of seeing her best friend in _this_ world,_ this _time...had rooted her to the ground. Sora had to come over and almost drag her towards some kind of walkstairs that led to street level.

"Some things never change," Megumi observed about Sora's quirks as the three climbed up the stairs and stepped on a moving sidewalk and rode it for about half an hour.

Change was all around her, however. The street was filled with a dizzying display of retailers and pedestrians. Tokyo had become even more cosmopolitan than she remembered; half the people she saw were non-Japanese. It became apparent to Megumi that all the ground level street lanes had been converted to sliding walkways. She darted her eyes left and right as people stepped off of the walkways at intersections, then walked along the sidewalk. On each side of the walkways was a wide sidewalk, with benches, fountains, trees and statues. The whole effect reminded her of a gallery in a shopping mall. She looked up and saw that an arching glass shield covered the street. It had to be at least late November, but the street itself felt warm. Then she realized that all the streets were enclosed by the same arched glass shield, in order to maintain some kind of climate control.

Her eyes bounced all over the place as if on their own accord. She was amazed at the people they passed. A group of young women on the moving sidewalk on the other half of the street passed them, going in the opposite direction. Megumi was startled to see that they were wearing see-through fishnet blouses, thong bikinis and knee-high leather boots. Megumi could tell by their bearing that they _weren't_ hookers; despite their revealing attire, they looked innocent rather than wanton. They passed several young men with bald blue-colored heads, chatting in front of a cafe. Megumi tried not to stare, but these guys had painted their faces _blue_. They reminded her of an old TV commercial. A few blocks down, a group of junior high school girls emerged from a store, and then touched bracelets on their wrists. A moment later, their heads were replaced by holograms of cute animal heads. Several foxes, rabbits and kittens wearing winter school uniforms giggled as they walked down the street. Salarymen walked past them on the moving walkway, their silver and gold suits reflecting the streetlights as they carried their briefcases. OLs walked by in pairs and trios, wearing dresses with flashing lights sewn into the fabric. A group of men wearing neon headbands dribbled a basketball down the sidewalk.

"So this is the Japan of 2050," Megumi said to herself, her senses hyperstimulated by all the noise and colorful people. She had to admit that this was ten times more interesting than mallratting...even Sayoko was glancing about with rapt attention. Sora seemed to be almost meditative, her eyes semi-closed.

Soon, they arrived at a large dome. Surrounded on all sides by towering buildings, it looked out of place with its low profile. Yet, the low domed area was huge, encompassing and area at least as large as the N.I.T. campus.

"A relic...or an arena?" Megumi wondered...until she saw the tall wooden torii standing in front of the wall. Sora pressed a series of buttons in her handheld and a circular portal appeared in the way.

Megumi looked inside the portal...and saw two more portals further in. Framed in the third portal was a complex of large temple buildings surrounded by moonlit verdant woods.

"Waaah!! Cool!!" she heard Sayoko exclaim.

"Pretty neat, huh," Sora said with a smile as they passed the third portal. Megumi stopped and wordlessly turned in a circle, taking in the sight. It was as if they had stepped out of the city and onto a mountaintop temple. This temple was many times larger than the temple compound she called home. Everywhere she looked, there was beauty.

"I designed it myself. A holographic dome encloses the temple complex, creating the skies and the vistas you see. The temple grounds themselves are real, however. The wall is concealed by several groves of trees. There are gardens, pathways and pools. Illusory reality...just like this life we share. Heaven...in the midst of Hell," Sora explained in a rich voice filled with spiritual conviction. Megumi almost wanted to giggle in reaction to her tone of voice.

An incense-scented breeze wafted through the air as Sora escorted she and Sayoko towards a central complex of buildings. Looking at the surroundings, she felt becalmed. The temple seemed like it was poised on top of an impossibly tall mountain, overlooking plains and valleys. A trio of nuns walked unhurriedly up to them.

"Mt. Hiei," Megumi thought, amazed at the spectacle of the artificial scenery. It was so out of place compared to the urban light vessel which constituted the street scene on the way to the temple. Even that looked beautiful in its own way. But this...

"Abbess, you've arrived with our guests. Did everything go as planned?"

"Without a flaw, Daughter Sayoko," Sora replied then smiled at Sayoko. "My senior secretary, Miyakawa Sayoko," she introduced.

"We have a Megumi here as well. She's one of the novices," the nun said, then gracefully bowed to them. Another nun strolled up, dressed in an elaborate set of robes like Sora's.

"Ch..Ch..Chihiro?" Sayoko asked tentatively. Megumi immediately recognized her.

Fujimi Chihiro, Keiichi's sometimes rival race competitor and later, mentor. Keiichi's boss at Whirlwind, founder of the N.I.T. Motor Club. Back in the 'real' time she and Sayoko had been yanked out of, Chihiro was spending a year in America, studying at a graduate technical college in Los Angeles. Megumi had phoned her a few times to see how things were going in America for her, as well as to keep her updated on the club's activities. But this woman, with Chihiro's face, was not at all like the hot-blooded senior she knew from N.I.T during her freshman year. The pert young woman had grown into a railthin elderly woman with a delightful, yet gentle sparkle in her eyes.

"Yes, Sayoko...I remember you, as well as you, Megumi. I'm the shika, or head nun of our temple. Sora is the roshi, or head instructer. But to all the nuns here, we're both merely abbesses, coequal in service to the women here who are aiming to strike the Bell of the Dharma. And you both...you're looking good for women in their 60's. Kinda like a class reunion, this," she said in a soft voice.

"Welcome to Butsudankyoji Temple!" Sora and Chihiro formally greeted them.

Megumi watched as Chihiro and Sora spent the next few minutes dealing with the affairs of the nunnery, busily signing papers and giving directions for accommodations.

"_Abbesses_?_ Those two_?" Megumi said incredulously to Sayoko.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Belldandy didn't know what to do next. They were stranded above a towering skyscraper in the middle of what seemed to be Tokyo. She had almost exhausted all of her energy blasting Aoshima and Tyyr from existence. As her anger subsided, she became aware that she was in deep trouble. Killing another God was one of the most heinous crimes a divine could commit. Kodama's death had pushed her into unknown emotional territory, both dangerous and beautiful. When she discharged her energy at Tyyr, she had intended it towards lethality. But somehow, when she blasted Tyyr, the SoulGun had ignited, taking him with it. Besides her sisters, she couldn't sense any divine presence in the vicinity. She had expected an instant reprisal from Kami-sama, but instead...nothing.

"They...killed Kodama," she thought sadly. Kodama, who had searched for forty years to find her...only to die as her search bore fruition. Somehow, Kodama had outraced the bolt of the SoulGun and leapt in its wake, sacrificing herself to save Urd. With her remaining power, Belldandy formed a bubble around the group and floated down the front of the ruins of the towering glass monstrosity that was Aoshima's headquarters.

As they descended, they discussed what to do. With Hikari and Senrigan safe with them, they were now outcasts. No place to go, no one they knew, nowhere to live. And because of what happened with Aoshima and Tyyr, they probably couldn't return to Yggdrasil. If Yggdrasil even existed.

She learned that the three Ninjettes had taken to living on the streets. At times, Aoshima's men had pursued them, trying to capture them. But the shinobi proved far too skilled for his hired thugs; always eluding their pursuers.

As they reached the street, Belldandy looked at Skuld. The youngest Goddess's solemn bearing was somewhat offset by animation as the nightscene of the street surrounded them in a technicolor hug. Indeed, the nightlife bustle of the street had somewhat kept their moods from wandering into deep mourning. The street was congested with people...a mixture of all types of humanity. Conservative salarymen rubbed shoulders with green-haired men in leather jackets. A trio of women wearing pink face visors walked by. Several men dressed in Kabuki outfits were eating soba noodles. Shops lined the sidewalk...and there were no cars in the street. Two stories above their head was a glass enclosure that they had floated through, and above that was a 'street' of hovercars.

After a brief discussion, they decided to go back to the temple and bury Kodama there.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

OITA, BUNGO PROVINCE, KYUSHU JAPAN - JULY 1374:

The battles had gone on for almost a year. What initially appeared to be a conflict whose victor would win by a single decisive confrontation...instead had degraded into entrenched guerilla warfare. The reason was that the Muromachi bakufu of Ashikaga Yoshimitsu had dispatched its ablest general, Imagawa Ryo-shun, to try and quell the ever-growing popularity of the Southern Court of Chokei. Imagawa was a deputy shogun, and arrived with a huge number of troops from Honshu and a great degree of latitude in executing his affairs. This was intimidating to both Lord Mori and Lord Shimazu. An open confrontation would result in reprisal from a veteran force generaled by a tactical genius. Not to mention the financial backing of Kyoto and the sanction of both Emperor and Shogun. So stealthy attacks ruled the day...casting great tension all about.

We had grudgingly gotten used to living in this time period. We resigned ourselves to the fact that our best bet would be to remain under Lord Mori as retainers. It beat working in the manure pits, hands down. Besides, we were slowly rising in the ranks of Lord Mori's army. Genji and Keiichi had the prestige of being the designer-operators of the "War Chariot"...and Tomohisa and I were respected because of our 'purple hearts' gained in battle.

I still secretly hoped that one of the Goddesses would suddenly appear in the meeting room where we took our meals and transport us back home from this nightmare. Keiichi was desolate without Belldandy, but this was underlied by an optimism that _someday_ he would be reunited with her. However, he was prone to melancholic moods from time to time.

We all were.

Keiichi, Genji and Tomohisa all let their hair grow long to match the hairstyles of the period. Each of the two men wore a topknot folded forward, while Tomohisa left his topknot facing backwards in the style of a young man. Despite the lack of modern conveniences, we were still doing very well. Keiichi had been given a small household near the daimyo's own estate as a reward for his actions in the Battle of Furuegoe Pass. We had a staff of four house servants to see to our needs. Tomohisa was being tutored by me, while Genji was working on a defense system for Lord Mori's planned castle in Oita.

I had been excused from further military duties because of the loss of my hand. At first, I felt angry that I had lost the limb fighting on behalf of someone else. Then I felt angry because I would not be able to avenge my injury. Finally, I was simply frustrated because I couldn't be where the action was.

Before I met Urd and was transported to Japan, it always seemed that I was fighting someone else's battles. Most of these battles were under another's employ, from which I was getting a pittance to solve their problems. The other battles were in the academic arena. But now, much of what I knew and learned was rendered useless. At least, Lord Mori had taken care of me, despite the fact that I was lamed in battle. I was regularly included in all strategy meetings, and my translation and literary skills were in constant demand. At times, I was tempted to teach them the 'future'...because the 'present' was so boring. But I held my tongue and pen against my whims.

We all had to be very careful not to disclose our knowledge of the future. Thus, Keiichi and Genji were _improving_ existing technology, rather than _introducing_ new technology. From an engineering standpoint, it was frustrating to both men to know what to do, but yet be constrained to act.

As retainers to Lord Mori, we were invited to attend fetes and diversions at the Lord's compound from time to time. We were exposed to a variety of live performances, ranging from proto-Kyogen to Korean sleeve dancers, from poetry contests to fan-and-sword dances. As luck would have it, Keiichi's charming nature didn't escape the notice of Lord Mori's teenage daughter; she would regularly send romantically inclined missives to our house, making her intentions on the matter quite clear.

This only brought up another issue...after all, we _were_ men. Masculinity had taken on a whole new meaning for me, as well as the others. I was starting to lose my fear of women. I found myself tutoring a number of young women of the court, whose affections towards me ran the gamut from silly to seductive. I missed Urd desperately, and cursed myself for even attending to these women with anything less than a professional interest. However, my gaijin status served me well in the sense that my female students seemed reserved towards pursing a physical relationship with me. So our 'romances' consisted of poetic exchanges only. Even with this limited intercourse of affections, I was plagued with guilt.

As for my companions, they were dealing with the "single man in the 14th Century Syndrome" in their own ways. Being the youngest, Tomohisa was acting the dandy with a bevy of admiring girls. Lord Mori's very open sponsorship of him did wonders to impress the fairer sex. There was even talk that Lord Mori would formally 'adopt' Tomohisa into his household...a rumor that sent the women swarming to our house. Genji rarely did more than flirt, but he flirted _a lot_. Keiichi did too, especially with the Lord's daughters...but I could tell that he wasn't invested in seeking another relationship. My best guess was that he was flirting for form's sake, so as to not appear "unmanly". None of us were interested in a relationship, including Tomohisa...who was generally following the samurai pattern of "impermanence in all things" when it came to his many affairs with the women of Oita. Good thing there isn't AIDS in the 14th century.

And for his sake, it was an exceedingly good thing Skuld wasn't in the 14th century!

We also were able to visit the famed Beppu hot springs several times. Rustic ryokan dotted the springs. I had read that the onsen had become popular during the Edo Period; but here in Kyushu, there already existed an economy built around the onsen. The ryokan were charming, built with sturdy wood from the cedars that grew abundantly here in Bungo.

A couple of times, a band of ninja stole into the daimyo's compound in an attempt to kidnap his daughter or his toddler grandson. Each time, a few of their number were killed while the others fled. But the last time, the ninja had succeeded in stealing his daughter away. Lord Mori was mortified and vowed to go to war to recapture his daughter.

Keiichi was very upset as well, as he admired the Lord's daughter for her calm dignity. In his role as counselor, Keiichi advised that Genji and I go to Miyasaki to offer terms and ransom for her release. With the loss of my hand, I insisted to the others that I stop playing the mute; being crippled with the loss of my writing hand and not being able to talk was more than I could stand. So, I was 'miraculously' given the use of my voice when I lost my hand; the Kami had generously decided to reward my service to the Lord by taking my hand but also by restoring my voice in exchange. Superstition and religiosity were even stronger here than in the 21st century, and the fabular explanation was accepted without contest.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

So there we were, walking south towards Miyasaki. At the border gate, Shimazu's soldiers had harassed us because of my gaijin status and Genji's youth. We produced the handwritten pass/letter from Lord Mori, and they eventually agreed to let us pass, after dispensing an inordinate amount of verbal abuse.

14th Century yakuza.

The terrain smoothed out as we took the pathway near the ocean. We could catch occasional glimpses of Mt. Aso to the west as we traveled on. When we entered the village of Nobeoka, we picked up an armed escort of ten men. They were much more polite than the border guards were, but it was obvious that they were more concerned with protecting the ransom that we carried than anything else. Of course, we had to bribe them along the way, as they tended to want to stop at every good inn on the way for a meal or lodging.

We eventually reached Miyasaki and Lord Shimazu's castle. Unlike Lord Mori, his clan had been established in Hyuga for two centuries; the large castle and other fortifications evidenced his solid control of the province.

Following a night's rest in the guestroom, we were summened into the presence of Lord Shimazu. One of the things we were counting on was that the Lord would recognize his counterpart in Genji. Indeed, one glance at Genji was enough to startle Lord Shimazu. After his shock at seeing his mirror image in Genji, we got down to the business of negotiation. We had brought a trunk laden with gold and art scrolls, which was more than enough recompense for the release of Lord Mori's daughter.

Then I remembered what was so significant about 1372-4. These were the years that Shiguro and Shibuya invaded Shimazu's province, aided by the forces of the deputy Shogun Imagawa. The mass of ships we saw during the Battle of Furuegoe Pass was a precurser to events that would shape the next twenty years. With this insight in mind, I discussed an alteration to our plans with Genji. Instead of suing for peace, we would request an alliance between Mori and Shimazu. This was flatly denied by the Lord despite our remonstrations and appeals to reason. I knew that the initial battles on behalf of the Shogun would begin this year...and only get worse.

On the third day, Genji and I were able to convince Lord Shimazu of the precipitous situation he was in. We went out on a limb to suggest that Lord Mori was willing to ally himself with him, for the mutual benefit of both Clans. Delicately dancing around revealing future events, I was able to weave a narrative of 'what could be' while resorting to my knowledge of history. Along with Genji's impassioned speeches to the retainers, we were able to leave the next day with an agreement in principle to investigate further this idea of an alliance.

With Lord Mori's daughter safely in our custody, we returned to Oita. In 15 years, the Southern Court would be defeated, and both the Mori and Shimazu would suffer heavily during the fighting. Lord Mori's daughter recognized the validity of our concerns and vowed to discuss it with her father.

After three days on the road, we were chased down by a dispatch runner from Lord Shimazu. Apparently, the Shiguro-Imagawa forces had attempted to capture one of his frontier castles. Because of this, the Lord had been giving second thoughts to the notion of an alliance, possibily even favoring our diplomatic suggestion. We returned to Miyasaki.

Genji spoke eloquently for the need for a truce between the two daimyo. Beyond a truce, they would need to combine their strengths to survive the times ahead. He estimated that the Southern Court wouldn't last more than 15 years, and that both Mori and Shimazu would be attacked repeatedly if they allied themselves with Chokei.

Lord Shimazu entertained us for several more days, and then dismissed us with a sealed letter that we were to convey to Lord Mori.

We reached Lord Mori's compound five days later. Runners had been dispatched ahead of time to inform him that his daughter had been ransomed.

Now we had to convince him to cease hostilities and join forces with Shimazu for his own survival.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

BUTSUDANKYOJI ZEN TEMPLE - 2050:

Megumi and Sayoko were given fresh clothes and taken to a pleasantly appointed room. Compared to the sterility of their previous lodging, the guestroom's traditional appearance shone with liveliness. The smell of incense was everywhere, probably soaked into the wood after the burning of millions of josh sticks. A bronze incense burner in the front of the room had several sticks burning as they entered their guest quarters. A tastefully painted miniature folding screen was set on a small wooden table. In one corner of the room sat a cloisonné brazier, present more for its aesthetics than for keeping the room's occupants warm. Yet when Megumi checked, it was filled with scented charcoal. Two soft futons were laid out in the center of the room. Megumi sat down on hers and immediately sank into its plushness.

"Ahhhh, this is so soft!" she commented, then lay down. Sayoko responded by patting the futon she was seated upon, and then laid down on her side, facing Megumi.

"This just keeps getting weirder. First cousin Toshiyuki...and now Sora and Chihiro! How did she know that he was keeping us in the first place? There must be a hundred million people in this city...and she knew right where to look!" Sayoko wondered out loud.

"She knew a lot more than that. She was totally prepared. She had the codes to our room, timed explosives, some kind of dampeners for something she called biotracers," Megumi replied.

"Yeah, I wonder what _those_ are? I wonder if they planted something in us, kinda like those ID chips that people put in their pets?" Megumi shuddered at the implication of Sayoko's thought.

"Gods, I am_ so_ tired! It's so ironic! After being cooped up in that hellish hospital ward for what seemed like forever...now that I have my first taste of actual freedom, my body wants to go to sleep!" she added, feeling suddenly exhausted. She looked at Sayoko, who was laying on her back on her futon, breathing shallowly.

"We'll find out more tomorrow," Sayoko said with a sleepy-husked voice.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

MAKUHARI, CHIBA, JAPAN - DEC 2050:

The Ninjettes guided them to the temple. After several hours of negotiating streets and walkways, Belldandy, Urd and Skuld stood in front of the dark temple grounds. In contrast to the lights of the high-rises all around them, the temple looked funereal...like an abandoned city of the dead. Nothing was alive here, except for wild patches of tall grass and weeds. Skuld felt herself gripping both of her sister's arms tightly, the desolate leer of the place suggesting ghostly inhabitants.

Looking through the shattered front torii gate, all that remained of the many trees in the compound were rotting, burnt husks. Where the front gate had gaily marked the entrance to the temple, now there were thickly coiled barbwires to fence people out. Belldandy felt Skuld's apprehension; she too expected nightshade apparitions to haunt the grounds...it looked so dead. All around the temple were towering apartment blocks, whose lights cast an eerie faded glow upon the charred temple buildings.

Urd felt Skuld's grip on her arm tightening; she could sense the fear and despair in her younger sibling. The main temple building in the compound was reduced to rubble, with a few fireblack beams stubbornly resisting gravity. Piles of wood and rock marked where the garage and other buildings were. It was as if something had carved a hole in life and filled the vacuum with these empty grounds. Everything here was so _dark_...so lifedrained. Weatherworn through four decades of neglect.

"The mind gets smaller with the dreaming..." Belldandy thought. She wanted to recoil from the reality that was assaulting her eyes. Their temple...their _home_...was gone.

Obliterated.

"So why didn't they build anything here?" Skuld asked, breaking the profound silence shared between the sisters.

"Good question, Skuld. This doesn't make sense at all. It's as if someone wanted to_ preserve_ these...ruins," Urd replied, struggling as she referred to the compound as ruins. There really wasn't enough of the temple grounds to merit the term "ruins". The grounds were parched; one could look and never realize that anything existed before.

"We used to live here...Keiichi used to live here," Belldandy said sadly as she kicked a pebble-sized rock. Everything was gone now. She had wanted to find some mementos of Keiichi or the others, clues that could lead her to their whereabouts. But there was nothing. She knew that instinctively that sifting through the debris would be futile.

The three Goddesses and two Ninjettes stood in the middle of the devastated temple, the wind silently wrapping them in its uncaring embrace.

"This way!" Hikari said, motioning towards them with a wave of the arm. They walked out the front gate and turned left. Hikari lit a small torch and hopped up on Skuld's shoulder.

A metal sign was posted on the crumbling wall, weathered with age. It read: "Property of Toshishima Corporation." Belldandy simply shook her head. One more nightmare piled upon the rest.

"Mistress...can you make it like it once was?" Senrigan asked innocently. Belldandy turned to look at the little Ninjette, heartstuck.

"What would be the point?" Belldandy pondered. "My dear Keiichi isn't here...so it would just be a lifeless replica of the home we once had. It doesn't _fit_ into the spirit of this age. Without Keiichi..."

It saddened her greatly to see how the once-beautiful temple complex had come to complete ruination. It was a fired skeleton of its former self. This...atrocity...had fired her attention long enough.

She looked at the little tomboyish Ninjette with eyes of compassion.

"Once a season of life has passed, one cannot return to it. To do so would be a refusal of destiny and a betrayal of the memories. Besides, dear Senrigan, my powers are almost exhausted from our escape," she explained.

"Mistress, we have a tent that we have been living in. You're more than welcome to share it with us," Hikari suggested.

"That...that would be good. I would like to sleep here one last time, and then offer our respects to Kodama in the morning," Belldandy responded on behalf of the three sisters.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --


	39. Pt 39: Endspin

**Part 39 Endspin**

BUTSUDANKYOJI ZEN TEMPLE - DEC 2050:

Megumi awoke to the cadence of prayerful chanting emanating from one of the halls in the temple. Someone had entered their room while they slept and silently lit a stack of incense in the burner.

"They sure are early risers here," she mumbled to herself, groggy from the deep sleep she enjoyed last night...the first _safe_ sleep that she had experienced in months.

"Of course they are...they're Buddhist _nuns_," Sayoko replied sarcastically, overhearing Megumi's observation.

"It's too early for that," she commented at Sayoko's jest, grimacing. Sayoko waved her off with a grin.

"What time is it?" Megumi said between yawns.

"It's almost ten. I got up a couple of hours ago. They saved your breakfast, it's over there," Sayoko noted. Megumi followed Sayoko's pointed finger and saw a wooden tray with several bowls sitting on a flat stone.

"Good...because I'm famished."

Sayoko fetched the wooden tray with heated bowls of rice and vegetables and set it next to Megumi with a grin, waiting to see the younger woman's reaction, which would probably be the same as her initial disappointment. Megumi frowned when she saw the simple fare served as 'breakfast'. It was the typical fare of Zen temples: rice gruel, daikons, miso soup, salt and a plum tea. Sayoko explained to her that her meal was served in an oryoki, which consisted of five lacquered bowls that fit into one another.

"Tasty," Megumi noted with surprise as she munched on tender semi-sweet daikon strips.

"Have you talked to Sora, Chihiro or the others?" she asked.

"Nope. Their secretaries came by earlier to check up on us. They informed me that Sora and Chihiro are busy with their morning meditations. Sora will be granting interviews later on while Chihiro is all over the temple supervising the various workcrews," Sayoko replied.

"Oh," Megumi said in a quiet voice...as if the schedules of her new-old friends was like everything else, clothed in normalcy. She still couldn't grasp the idea of Sora and Chihiro running a huge Zen Buddhist temple.

Their small guestroom had a simple antique standing mirror in a corner, with sliding shoji doors on the side and back. The tatami was of the old-fashioned kind, with its trademark odor. A wooden placard exhorting "more vigorous pursuit of the Truth" hung at an angle over one of the doorways. One fresh robe was neatly folded on the floor by the mirror. Several partially folded standing floor screens were arranged along another wall, each looking hundreds of years old. Megumi didn't even want to touch_ those_. Two small tables bore vases with spare arrangements of flowers; bringing a visual echo of nature to the room.

"So what do we do now?" Megumi asked, finishing her meal.

"I suppose we wait. After all, Buddhist adherents are renowned for their inner calm. So we'll just have to practice patience," Sayoko answered.

"Since when did you become so awakened to the reality of this existence, O Enlightened One?" Megumi teased Sayoko as she walked behind one of the standing screens and changed into her fresh robes. She emerged, tying the waistband of her outer robe. It _was_ funny; Sayoko was dressed in the same robes that she noticed the novices wearing. Then again, so was she. The only difference between the two coeds and the hundreds of nuns they had seen in the temple grounds...was that she and Sayoko still had their hair attached to their heads.

"No way am I going to shave a single hair off of my head!" Megumi thought with a gritty determination.

After a while, the sound of wooden clappers echoed in the temple; shortly after, a novice brought lunch trays and informed them that the Abbess would like to see the two girls after they finished their repast. After setting down the trays, the novice remained kneeling in the doorway, looking at the two women with an expression of courteous curiosity.

"Do you _really_ know our Heart and Diamond Abbesses?" she asked with a mixture of reverence and disbelief. Megumi and Sayoko slowly nodded their heads, looking confused at the sobriquets the young sister used. She must have been only a few years older than the two; her face was pretty even with the expression of confusion she wore.

"How could the Abbesses possibly be acquainted with the likes of wild young women like you? You both possess a...excuse me if I appear impolite...but you both have a _too worldly air_ for the likes of awakened spirits like our Abbesses. Meaning no insult, of course, but what are you doing _here_?" she asked, wonderment written in her expression. Before either girl could answer, a senior nun walked up and sharply chastised the novice.

"Megumi, stop taxing our honored guests with such wearisome questions," she said patently, then hustled the junior nun off to another part of the temple with a firm grip on the elbow. Instinctively, Megumi flinched as if she was a girl being scolded by her mom all over again.

Sayoko couldn't repress the giggles that came in the wake of the sight of Megumi's cringing reaction while her namesake being rebuked by a senior nun. Megumi scowled for a moment, and then gradually joined Sayoko with giggles of her own. It _was_ pretty funny, she had to admit.

"Canya believe it? She called us 'wild women'!?" Megumi noted, milking another round of laughter out of Sayoko.

Shortly after they finished their lunch, another nun came by and told them that she was going to escort them to Abbess Sora's interview room. This nun was all business; her aspect of officiousness was daunting to Megumi and Sayoko.

As they walked down a long covered wooden veranda which linked their guest quarters with the nun's quarters, both N.I.T. coeds cast appreciative looks about them, amazed at how _huge_ the temple complex was. Sayoko was already amazed at the mountaintop virtual reality setting, but these buildings were _real_. Once in a while, she would stroke one of the buildings or monuments with her fingers just to assure herself of their tangibility.

As they walked among the various buildings, their escort would occasionally remark on the design motif or function of each structure. She noted that the overall plan of the temple complex allowed for inclusion of a wide breadth of ecclesiastical archetypes from all branches of Buddhism.

"This place has to be as large as the Forbidden City in Beijing!" Megumi whispered to Sayoko. Sayoko, who had been to Beijing, nodded her head in assent. For her part, Sayoko recognized Buddhist architecture from all eras of Japanese history. The effect of the whole suggested that she was walking in a mythic city, brought down from the heavens and converted into a museum.

Turning left, they walked towards a massive central wooden building with a high peaked roof. Entering through a side doorway, it seemed like they had walked through a wall of silence as entered a huge hall lined with meditation mats on either side.

The quietude of the place made both women feel like serenity was being pushed into their hearts...

"This is the main hall, known as the zendo or Buddha Hall, where we meditate and chant," the nun said politely. "Currently, we have over 8450 nuns and 120 postulants, making our convent by a worthy vehicle to turn the Wheel of the New Teaching. We also have 1500 students at our Buddhist Zen Doctrinal University and another 1000 at our Nun's College. It is due to the fame of our Abbesses that we have been blessed with such a large Sangha of nuns," their guide explained.

Megumi looked at the enormous hall, with its wooden floor and high beamed roof. The entire temple complex in Makuhari that she called home could have fit _inside_ of the central hall! The interior was many times larger than the largest Soka Gakkai church in Japan...at least the one she had visited in the during a grade school fieldtrip. Megumi mentally compared the expanse of the main temple building to the Vatican in Rome. It seemed that _everything_ in 2050 was built with an eye towards scales of grandeur and enormity!

On each side of the hall interior was a stadium-like series of alcoves with white wooden plaques engraved with kanji identifying the names of their owners. At one end was a series of shelves with candles and golden Buddhist images. Several crews of nuns were busily sweeping and scrubbing the main hall as they passed through. The room possessed a simplicity that belied the spiritual essence that Megumi noticed as soon as she entered.

They passed through the enormous hall to the other side, then exited down a series of stairs and walked past a placid reflecting pool. A number of nuns were seated on cushions facing the pool, each face gentled with deep meditation. Past the pool, they turned left and walked towards two side-by-side "cabins". Megumi guessed that these were the residence-offices of Sora and Chihiro.

"Wait here!" the nun directed in a censorious voice, as if she expected the two girls to wander around the temple complex and get lost. Megumi and Sayoko sat on pillowy cushions on the wood-planked veranda outside of Sora's 'office'. Through the shoji door, they could hear someone talking earnestly. Suddenly, there was a loud "rap!" followed by deep silence. A moment later, a nun emerged, her face knitted tightly with a perplexed expression. She seemed to ignore Megumi and Sayoko as she strode briskly past them, lost in her own world.

"Come in," Abbess Sora invited gently. Megumi was quick to notice that she was holding a wooden switch in her left hand as she stood in the doorway to her 'office'.

Megumi and Sayoko entered her room and took their places on two folded tan cushions in front of Sora, who sat in a lotus position on a slightly raised dais. Looking around, they saw that it was richly decorated with illustrative and calligraphic scrolls. Statues and images of the Buddha rested quietly on the wall. The room had an ambiance which was hard to put a finger on...yet it was readily apparent that they had entered into a place infused with reverence. There was nothing immediate about this room; it had layers of hidden depths.

Megumi reflected on the fact that everything in this room, everything that it represented...was the opposite of what Aoshima's Imperium stood for. Yin vs. Yang. Life vs. Death. Love vs. Fear. Nature vs. technology. Spirituality vs. selfishness. Faith vs. science. Female vs. Male. The ambiance of the feminine was all around her; and it was very comforting to her.

She knew deep in her heart that she would not be harmed here.

She looked at Sora, noticing the finely chiseled face of a woman in her later middle-age years. Sora was a work of art...a portrait of deep spirituality and sagaciousness somehow carved or blended into the physical features of a human being. She looked like a little Buddha. Or a little Buddha-_ess_, rather.

Without a doubt...her friend had become an _Abbess_!

Since seeing Sora again yesterday, Megumi had struggled with the visible dissonance her eyes beheld. For almost 6 years, Sora had been like a kid sister to her. Back in 20XX, she was still a _teenager_! Now, _this_ Sora was old enough to be her grandmother! The difference in age was bewildering enough...but Abbess Sora possessed the commanding presence of a Dietman. _That_ made Megumi fidgety. A few moments earlier, a nun in her 40s had dashed out of this very office with a look of total confusion and dismay on her face! Megumi could only wonder what Sora had said to make her so upset...

"Ahhh, I hope you are both well rested from yesterday?" Abbess Sora asked as carefully set the stick she was holding on a felt cloth off to the side of her meditation mat. She was wearing a pair of wire-rimmed reading glasses; Megumi recognized them as the exact same style Sora used to wear at N.I.T. when she was a student there. Forty years in the past...yet a few months ago in Megumi's 'present'. A partially unrolled scroll with cursive Japanese was set off to the side.

An ancient-looking painting caught Megumi's eye. It depicted a man in a boat at the edge of a gently curving pond, looking at a spray of flowers floating on the water. A willow tree flowed over his head, its branches resplendent with foliage. She examined the wall scroll painting more carefully; her regard revealed that the pond was actually a river, as the artist had painted the river extending into the background with using very faint hints of shadows.

"You like that one, eh Megumi? It's an original, by Masanobu. At least 500 years old. Did you notice how the man is surrounded by nature? Inside of his mind, he might be creating a poem...or considering a political decision. But from the perspective of nature, he is contemplating the beauty of the lotus blossoms. He is alone...at one with his surroundings. Detached from human affairs, he is doing nothing...and experiencing _everything_. A question: what of our perspective, as viewers of the painting? One can only guess..." Abbess Sora explained.

Megumi felt jitterspooked at the depths of Abbess Sora's words...as if a profound secret was being revealed to her. She looked at Sayoko, who was staring at the diminutive Abbess with open mouthed amazement. In just a few sentences, Abbess Sora had moved from discussing a piece of art to pondering a transcendental mysticism!

It wasn't _what_ Sora had said...it was _how_ she had said it! Each word was honeycombed with a cosmos of wisdom, wit, and intuition.

"You must have a lot of questions. I have scheduled the whole afternoon so we can chat by ourselves. Thank you for your kind service, Senior Sister Reinkyoai," Abbess Sora said gently as she waved her hand, dismissing the nun who had conducted them here.

To Megumi, Abbess Sora seemed so _poised_...all the youthful intensity of the Sora she knew from N.I.T. had somehow washed away, leaving this kind, gentle grandmotherly woman.

"Sora..er..Abbess Sora. How did you find us?" Megumi blurted out. The Abbess smiled self-consciously and rubbed her shaven head with a slow, practiced motion.

"Well...we are in the habit of maintaining surveillance of the Toshishima Imperium. When they upped the security levels in their headquarters building to a Code 5, I knew that something _very important_ was going on. Eventually, we were able to taptrace a vidlink to the floor where you were being held. As the bounteous grace of the Buddha would have it, we managed to continue monitoring this link. I was astounded that when I saw that both of you were being held there...looking exactly you did during my student days! Right then, I decided to aid in your escape, especially since my former husband was planning to have you subjected to a variety of experiments."

"_Former husband?_" Megumi and Sayoko gasped in unison, and then looked at each other with shocked expressions.

"Did I hear you right? Aoshima is your _ex_?" Sayoko asked, her voice betraying her astonishment.

"Yes. At one time, I was blindly enmeshed in matters of the profane world...trapped in the flames of an ever-burning mansion, as it were," Abbess Sora replied with a wan expression.

"What happened?" Megumi asked. For a second, she saw a flash of deep sadness in the Abbess's eyes as she bowed her head in contemplation. Megumi recalled all the conversations she had with a much younger Sora about how she wanted to be with Aoshima. Apparently, she got her wish...and then some. But the haunting look in _this_ Sora's eyes unsettled Megumi.

"It is not often...that I am called upon to discuss details of the secular world. If you were novices and asked such a boresome question, I would drive you out of this room. Since you are of 'the world', I must allow this; as such, I will speak to you of the 'world' so that you may have what you seek of me. I experienced my kensho long ago...kensho means the time when I was granted an Enlightenment. I saw into the emptiness that I had been trying to fill with the reality of the illusion of reality. Before this, I had viewed the world as one who was embroiled in the dreaded Age of Mappa. But yet, my life was at one time caught up in void-denying illusion. All life is fluid, traveling the streams of Time."

"Mappa? Illusion?" Sayoko asked, puzzled. Suddenly, Sora was talking very cryptically...like a teacher of spiritual matters.

"Yes. Mappa refers to the times of decline...a thousand year period where the Law will be unheard, unseen and unknown to the masses. A period where humankind itself declines to the point where men behave as little more than beasts. Because of the terrible moral and spiritual decadence of the world around us, I prefer to think of _it_ as illusory. If the light of the world is false, then for me, there is no Mappa. All of my illusions have been burned away by...well, enough about the spiritual beliefs of a weak old woman," Abbess Sora explained with a smile. Megumi smiled back, encouraging her to go on.

"Aoshima...Aoshima," Abbess Sora said in a quiet voice, staring off into space as if to grasp a memory out of thin air as she clutched her rosary.

"It must have been all of forty years ago. You couldn't begin to imagine how shocked we were when both of you disappeared. When Belldandy, Keiichi...and all the rest disappeared. Tamiya took it especially hard...his young heart seemed like it had been broken," the Abbess said with a visible heaving sigh.

Megumi stole a glance at Sayoko. Her friend had swallowed so hard, it was audible. Now she was rubbing the corners of her eyes, fighting back tears.

"I was stunned by the loss of my best friend," Abbess Sora continued, glancing directly at Megumi as if reading her soul. Megumi was heart-touched by Sora's remembrance of her. Looking at this wizened version of Sora, she softly realized that deep within the woman was the closeness they had once shared as friends. Abbess Sora looked into the air, once again as if she was glimpsing a distant horizon with her heart.

"Aoshima was there for me after it happened. He was saddened as well, moreso because of the loss of his eldest cousin," she added, looking at Sayoko with a meaningful glance.

"Soon thereafter, he and I consoled each other's loss in the wealth of our youth. We fell in love, dated and did all the things young people do when they are buoyed aloft by their dreams, lusts, and passions. The next year, he proposed to me on bended knee, much to my surprise. Then he withdrew out of N.I.T. his junior year and opened up a small business. I was happy for him then. That year, after I graduated, I became pregnant with Kenji and Megami. I named the twins thusly, because their names would always resemble yours and your brother's..."

Megumi flinched visibly at this disclosure, feeling touched and embarrassed at the same time.

"Then his business boomed. My ex-husband became a billionaire almost overnight, introducing technology far in advance of other corporations. We were famously rich...but our marriage was devoid of any affection by that time. He took on a succession of mistresses and lived the life of the corporate celebrity, while I concentrated on raising my children. Sheltering them from the demands of life upon souls so young.

"One day, while reading his personal journals, I discovered the source of where all of this futuristic technology came from. I had been suspicious from the start...my former husband just wasn't _that smart_ when it came to engineering and technology. He clearly had the acumen for administration, and that was about it. All this new technology...and now I knew where it came from!

"What did you do?" Megumi asked.

"I decided to confront him with the evidence and go public with it. He admitted to me that he was profiting off of salvaged technology that had been built by Skuld. He had found it while scavenging around the destroyed temple you formerly lived in. Of course, I thought it extremely unfair that he would be using such advanced technology for his own benefit. I strongly felt that the technological 'treasure' that Skuld left behind belonged to _everyone_...to all of humanity. So, ambitious with humanitarian motives, I wanted to go to the press with my discovery, claiming that it was 'extraterrestrial' in origin in order to conceal the fact that it was left behind by our Goddess friends."

"How? What did my cousin do to keep your discovery from going public?" Sayoko asked, guessing aloud.

"I was torn between my ethical concerns...and my family. It was a difficult decision to make: either bring down my husband and possibly cause a lifetime of regret for my children, or let him go on reaping undeserved rewards. Foolishly, I procrastinated before acting upon my decision. All the while, he threatened me before I went to the media with my discovery, but I ignored him..."

Megumi saw tears forming in the corners of Abbess Sora's eyes.

"I don't think I want to hear this," Megumi told herself with a shudder, steeling herself for what was coming next. A dark shadow seemed to smother Abbess Sora's office in melancholy...

"We had Kenji and Megami studying for the summer at an exclusive French school in Paris. They were both 8 years old when they...disappeared. A few days after my children disappeared, a 'terrorist bomb' destroyed my parent's ramen shop. I sensed immediately that Aoshima had ordered my parents killed, a fact that I was able to confirm a few years later. I agonized every day for the entire time my children were missing. They weren't found for almost a _year_. A French villager found their remains stuffed inside an abandoned Alsace Line WWI bunker on the French-German border. Finally, the press refused to publish my tale of 'alien technology'. I should have known...I later discovered that Aoshima had quickly purchased NGN and a large number of newspapers and magazines that year in reaction to my disclosure.

"When a tabloid finally published my allegations, he claimed that it was a fantasia resulting from my emotional breakdown following the loss of my family and my divorce. I pressed charges in the deaths of my parents...but Aoshima was found not guilty. He bought off the jury, and instead they sentenced some yakuza to life in prison."

"Oh...my...God! Sora…" Megumi gasped out, feeling her heartbeat in her throat as Sora unraveled her tale of personal tragedy. She sensed her backbone melting into flaccidity as she slumped where she was seated.

Her best friend...had to live through _this_ kind of loss? It was truly joycrushing to hear Sora talk about the deaths of her family. Megumi finally slid into Sayoko's arms for comfort, feeling her heaving sobs as she held onto Sayoko for dear life.

"There...there," Megumi heard a calming voice say as she felt a soft stroking of her hair. Looking up, she saw that Abbess Sora had stepped down from her dais and was gently comforting her and Sayoko. Each time she looked at Abbess Sora's kind face, she was overcome with another bout of tears...so she squinted her eyes tightly shut until the wrenching sadness subsided.

"Excuse me...it is at times difficult for me to discuss matters of my former life. A necessary burden each nun here carries within her," Abbess Sora said as she dabbed her eyes with the corners of her sleeves. She sat up straighter, visibly marshalling her composure.

"As you can imagine, I was terribly alone. I blamed myself for the deaths of my parents and children, and my inability to do anything about it. Everything was black and hopeless. Life had become utterly heartless and wretched. Feeling utterly betrayed by life, I was unable to trust myself. I attempted suicide several times, without success. I know now that I was being kept alive for a much greater purpose by a much greater power."

Megumi and Sayoko could only nod their heads at this.

"Under the advice of a doctor, I retired to a sanitarium to get my head back on straight. Not having any attachments to life, the Buddha-nature awakened in me like a blooming lotus in the moonlight of my abandonment. Strange, that during the time where my life was most filled with grief and injustice...I was able to see the lamp of compassion with utmost clarity.

"Using a lump sum alimony payment from our divorce, I built this temple complex, only to see it surrounded by an urban forest of skyscrapers. So I walled them off with a dome."

The Abbess's expression seemed to transform as she described her temple complex, her face taking on the visage of complete determination to her cause.

"This convent is a place of spiritual refuge for the discarded women of this so-called 'age of marvels', a modernity bought off by a dictator with stolen knowledge, mortgaged by satisfied citizens who hold disregard for anything but their own comforts.

"Women who have been sold and became corporate property. Women who have been denied a dignified lifestyle by the regimentation of our 'egalitarian' economic and social systems. Women who have been beaten within a breath of death by vicious husbands and fathers, and then denied justice when they stood up for themselves and their human rights. Women who were born with congenital deformities because they were living in the wrong place at the wrong time. You may recall the Minamata Disease, where an entire village was exposed to industrial waste and suffered subsequent congenital defects in almost all births. This heinous callousness was repeated dozens of times by the Aoshima Imperium in their quest to 'improve' the modern lifestyle. Women who lived at the edge of the Wheel of Karma, disenfranchised from the 'prosperity' touted by the ignorant. Prostitutes, drug addicts, terrorists repentant of their actions...all are welcome to bathe in the fountain of enlightenment here. All are granted respite from the illusory world."

Megumi was entranced with the magical way Abbess Sora described the profound spiritual awakening in her life. She knew that the magic was real...because she had seen magic personified in the three Goddesses and Sayoko's recovery from drug addiction. But Abbess Sora had created or experienced magic..._without_ divinity being present! She had lived with the certain knowledge that the Norns were gone. That perhaps _all _the Gods and Goddesses were gone. As she listened talked, Megumi thought she could sense a hint of Belldandy in the Abbess's aspect. The serenity and sagacity of Belldandy seemed to echo in Abbess Sora's eyes...

"Convents have traditionally existed for centuries as the only available outlet for women who refused to be trapped in arranged marriages, widows who were denied a second chance at life, women who whose talents aroused jealousy in men, and fallen women. We are just keepers of the flame here," the Abbess explained.

A powerful quietude hung over the room as Abbess Sora summoned a nun to bring tea.

"Th..this...is horrible! Unspeakable! You're saying that Aoshima killed _his own children_..._your_ own children...to protect his corporation? M..my cousin did this?" Sayoko said weakly, repulsed by the vileness of such an act. Megumi could see where this was leading. Sayoko was feeling some degree of guilt for the actions of her cousin.

Megumi wanted desperately to tell her that she had nothing to feel guilty about.

"Yes. He has no love for anyone, unlike you. His life of ignorance and violence are nothing you should feel responsible for, Sayoko. Within everything, there is nothing...hence, how can we judge ourselves when the Truth delights in the action of change?" Abbess Sora noted.

"Huh?"

"You need not seek forgiveness, for there is no transgression to forgive, my child," the Abbess clarified. "As for my former spouse, he remains power maddened. Aoshima's bakufu has extended its tendrils into every major government in the world. Toshishima Imperium runs the World Bank, albeit in secret it _is _the World Bank. Something...happened to him long ago. He used to be so caring and loving..." Abbess Sora said. For an instant, Megumi could see in the Abbess's eyes the Sora that _she_ knew; the lovestruck girl with the sharp mind and underdeveloped physique.

Then 40 years of life had slammed the door on her.

Megumi shuddered as she thought of kind Mr. and Ms. Hasegawa and their humble noodle shop. Renewed tears of empathy poured from her eyes. Yet, Sora was smiling again...as if to reassure Megumi that everything was all right in her world.

"Megumi, brace up!" Abbess Sora admonished. Megumi felt like she was jolted with an electrical charge. The Abbess had seen right into her heart!

"The events I speak of occurred thirty years ago. My former husband is wreathed in the painful consequences of his misdeeds, whether he knows it or not. Meanwhile, have I not been blessed exceedingly with a large community of nuns who practice acts of love and charity? Have I not been blessed with a sister in the Truth, Chihiro, whose insights into the Dharma has rippled Buddhism with surety for generations to come? Who knows how the Wheel of the Law will reveal itself next? The tide waits for no one in this silent dream called life. The spirit in which one seeks the Truth is the spirit with which the Truth seeks the one."

Abbess Sora's narrative had totally unrattled Megumi. She felt an even stronger enmity against Aoshima. He had become a tengu...an incarnated devil or demon. She tried to picture in her mind the events of Sora's life. Sora had always wanted Aoshima. Innocent Sora, caught up in Aoshima's grasp for power. Her two children...killed in a foreign country! Her parents...murdered in their own ramen shop! On impulse, Megumi wanted to ask Sora if she had any pictures of her children, but thought otherwise.

After listening to her life story, neither she nor Sayoko seemed to have the stomach to ask any more questions. Abbess Sora spent the next several hours teaching the two how to recognize themselves in this new era...

"You are welcome to remain here as long as you wish. And do not hold fast to worry; you don't have to take the tonsure if you don't want to..." Sora offered with a playful wink as she conducted them out of her office.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Abbess Sora finished examining the last inquirent of the day late in the afternoon. The senior nun had performed adequately on her assigned work, a koan that was deep into the sequence. So Sora had struck her sharply with the Zen stick. Her wordless admonishment had the desired effect, serving as a formal encouragement to the novice. Done not out of spite, but out of caring.

To make her spiritual daughter stronger.

All the talk of old days with her long-lost friends had stirred up long-dormant feelings in the Abbess. She had remembered the events of her past life from time to time, but the telling of it to the Megumi and Sayoko she knew in her youth made the event seem more real. She felt like she was emotionally draining as she spoke. Rather than being disappointed at her attachment to the thoughts and memories, Sora was grateful that she had been able to tell her story one more time.

"We are all each other's brothers sisters mothers fathers sons and daughters," she reminded herself. Still, it was amazing that Megumi and Sayoko were here in 2050. During her conversation with the two, it became apparent that they lacked any awareness of the events that had occurred in the intervening years. It was as if they had been plucked out of the past and brought here.

"Why?" she asked herself as she grabbed her rosary of beads. She needed to count out a few hundred rounds so she could clear her disturbed mind. Before she could start her mindchanting, Abbess Chihiro slid open a shoji door calmly.

"There is news of your former spouse. The entire top of his world headquarters was just blown up by terrorists. All the holo channels are featuring it. He, along with thousands of his employees, are missing and presumed dead, according to the news sources. Everything was incinerated in a powerful localized blast that occurred about an hour ago. Just after sundown. The local experts are perplexed, and eyewitness accounts offers evidence that the explosion was...rather unconventional. One of our sisters showed me a holo of the explosion: an intense blue light flashed and then there was no top of the building. A light brighter than a thousand suns, and yet contained within a sphere."

"Intriguing. One might say that he has finally worked out his karma...that it was his fate," Abbess Sora said dryly. She was pleased when Abbess Chihiro nodded her head in acknowledgment.

"Could _they_ have returned, Sora?" Abbess Chihiro asked.

"It is quite possible that they have. After all, Megumi and Sayoko are here in our temple, not looking a day past their early 20s."

"Yes...more will be revealed," Abbess Chihiro replied, sliding the door shut.

Abbess Sora closed her eyes and sighed deeply...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

In her study, Abbess Chihiro examined the facts...which only brought up remembrances of things past...

_It was so long ago, another world, her youth. She was a founding member of the N.I.T. Motor Club. She remembered competing with Megumi and Keiichi several times during those days before she traveled to America for her post-graduate studies in engineering. During the Solar Car race, she had been studying in America, but she had found the time to fax design modifications back and forth with Sora and the other club members. She had watched with pride on CNNI as they finished the race in first place, earnestly wishing that she were back home in Japan with her fellow Motor Club members. She remembered the trailer clubhouse and repair shop called Whirlwind...they had such good times together. Right before she returned from America for the Christmas and New Year's holidays, Keiichi and the rest had disappeared. Megumi had just written her to tell her that she had gotten together with a young man in the Club called Genji, and praised some new wunderkind professor at N.I.T. called Cevn._

_Keiichi and Megumi's temple house had been burnt to the ground in some kind of explosion. It was exceedingly odd that none of the neighboring buildings was affected by the blast in the least. When she went to visit the site of the temple's destruction, she knew that it had been the forces of the 'otherworld'. She grieved the loss of so many friends...and then went on with her life; finishing her graduate degrees and getting married. She was warmly ensconced in a loving household, with a wonderful husband and three charming children and a cycle repair shop of her own. But almost seven years into her marriage, her family perished in a freeway collision with a gas-filled semitrailer while she was visiting her grandparents in Niigata. Her life would have ended there...but for Sora._

_She and Sora had kept in touch over the years; the youngest and the eldest members of the Motor Club. But when both suffered cruelly in the grasp of fate...devastated by the grave losses in their lives, the phone calls ceased for several years. Both women had decided to renounce life and take the habit, without even knowing of the other's aspirations towards Enlightenment. As Sora told it to the novice nuns in an oft-repeated tale, the very day she was blessed with her Awakening...she was guided to make a final call to Chihiro to inform her longtime friend that she was no longer attached to the world. To say a final goodbye to a bosom friend. Sora had joined Abbess Omao's nunnery, while she was in retreat at home as a 'rogue' Zen practitioner.  
_

_So Sora had called her at home that day..._

Abbess Chihiro smiled to herself as she recalled Sora's fateful phone call. Sora had intended to say "goodbye", but instead, her phone call was received as a "hello". She had received Sora's joy with eyes open, for it was _that very day_ that she had experienced her abandonment of illusion, her own Awakening.

Her smile widened as she recalled an incident from the last sesshin involving a junior Sister and that phone call. During the semi-annual sesshin, where all the nuns in the Sangha would gather for intense training and meditation, she and Sora often allowed junior and senior Sisters an opportunity to teach the assembled sangha as lecturers. During one such lecture, an overly-zealous junior Sister had noted that her and Sora's phone call that day had as much of a profound effect on humanity as the first meeting of Bill W. and Dr. Bob., founders of the Alcoholics Anonymous movement. The week after the sesshin, the junior Sister was scheduled for dokusan, and it was Sora's turn to teach her that month. As soon as she entered Sora's interview room Sora whacked her three times with her keisaku staff and then chased her off. The Sister had left in anger; but Chihiro knew Sora well enough to know that she had just paid a high compliment to her student.

_Beginning with just the two of them, they established the temple from the ground up. It was merely a small temple building tucked within a group of warehouse when Sora and her they moved in. Now, that temple building remains as the Abbess residence, with Sora's and her apartment side-by-side._

_Sora requested and received permission from the government to move a number of temple buildings threatened with destruction by the urban sprawl that was Tokyo, with an aim to create a true heart for the Teaching. Within two years, eleven temples and a central hall were raised. She, Sora and a handful of nuns literally rebuilt the temples, one-by-one, nail-by-nail, to create a greater complex..._

_The Butsudankyoji Temple._

_One day, Sora came to her interview room, kicked out the novice sisters, and then engaged her in a discussion about developing a 'world-class' center for the propagation of the Truth. "Isn't it exciting?" Sora had said. She had thought that her Dharma-Sister Sora had taken leave of her senses. She and Sora spent the next year designing the ideal center for a Zen Buddhist nunnery and modest teaching college. She knew that committing to their idealistic plan would become her task for this lifetime, and hoped that Sora and she would be blessed see the center finished before they left the flesh. The center would take fifty years to build, a fitting example that followed upon the tradition of multi-generational construction of retreat centers and nunneries from the early days of Zen Buddhism._

_Two weeks after they finished their plans, Sora came to her interview room, kicked out the novice sisters, and excitedly showed her a newspaper. After chiding her for reading something from the secular world, Sora insisted that her personal aide was given the paper by a junior sister. When Sora insisted further that she actually _-read-_ the paper, Chihiro shrugged her shoulders and tightened her robe along the waist, prepared for the worst. A front page news headline stated "_-Aoshima Former Spouse to Receive Alimony after Long Legal Battle._-" That caught Chihiro's attention, as well as the tag line below it that read "_-Settlement Expected to Exceed 250 Trillion Yen._-" Sora's comment: "I think our karma has caught up with us."_

_They were both barely into their thirties._

_"Let's buy downtown Tokyo!" Sora had joked. Chihiro realized that Sora _-really could-_ buy Sunshine City with that kind of money. Both Abbesses and their fellow nuns were reluctant to deal with the distasteful and complex financial arrangements. Loathe to possess have tainted money at all, Sora donated her entire alimony settlement to the Temple. T__hey both realized that the work ahead of them would be arduous; not only did they have the means to build an ideal center for the Teaching, they now had the means to render a _-vision-_ into reality. With youthful enthusiasm, she and Sora and the Sisters __decided that, if they really wanted to create a magnificent Temple complex to fulfill the vision, they had to paint with broad brushstrokes. They decided to purchase forty seven blocks of prime downtown Tokyo real estate on the very lip of Tokyo Bay and the Sumida river for a little over two hundred twenty three trillion yen. Basically, they bought the Harumi Wharf. Then they razed both piers, including the near-obsolete Tokyo Big Sight convention center and the Sumitomo business center, filled the Asashio Canal to created a land bridge to join the two halves of the wharf, and repaired all cultural and religious buildings to nearby Chuo Ward. Working hard, they relocated their twelve modest-sized buildings from the old site to their Temple's new home..._

_...and then they ran out of money._

_Sora had spared no expense to create a center for Zen study, literally giving almost all of her settlement assets just for the land and the site preparation. But that was all she could do, because her former husband haunted her one last time by freezing the remainder of her alimony assets, and then cheating her out of it. Chihiro didn't care about the loss, nor did Sora. By this point, they were simply glad to be rid of the money and on the path to building their 'world class center' for Zen Buddhism studies, which consisted of a Sangha of seventy nuns, and a few buildings in the middle of four square kilometers of empty land. Without benefit of financial support, they continued the task of building a complex that replicated the most traditional styles of Zen temples. In keeping with the Example, Sora and she vowed to never touch money again nor concern themselves with financial affairs, save for final approval of major expenditures in their role as Abbess. Sora requested and received permission to move a number of temple buildings threatened with destruction by the new arcology buildings springing up all throughout the urban sprawl that was Tokyo. Their community slowly gained new aspirants, while they did their best to create a true heart for the Teaching. Which meant building a larger zendo hall and a few more buildings, one-by-one, nail-by-nail, to create a larger complex that could perhaps accommodate double their number...  
_

_Their huge expanse of empty temple grounds mirrored their huge quandary as Zen Buddhist nuns. Chihiro became inspired by Akizuki-roshi's call for a 'New Mahayana' and formally acknowledged Abbess Omao as her roshi, her teacher. Yet, her and Sora's path was just starting. With the encouragement of -_their- _teacher, Abbess Omao, she and Abbess Sora had spent the first several years of their enlightenment building up __, while slowly __drafting a master plan that would shake Buddhism to its roots. Like many, she and Sora observed that the modern Buddhism in Japan had evolved into little more than a "religion of funerals" and 'Zen' retreats for office workers. The intellectual vigor, the spiritual thrust, the virtuous acts...were largely absent. Overseas, Buddhism fared even worse; it was politicized, ostracized and popularized. Buddhism had splintered too many times; creating an overall weakness because of the sectarian antagonism between branches of Buddhism. Try as they might, she and her fellow Abbess lacked the insight or foresight to develop a "rescue" plan for Buddhism._

Chihiro looked at one of her personal scrolls, an early effort to depict Butsudankyoji Temple as it was back then. Spare of brushstroke, the painting recalled her younger self in her mind, and then she allowed herself once again to _become_ her younger self. Five years of hard work, and she and Sora were ridiculed as the "Abbesses of the Empty Parking Lot", the name that Tokyoites and many Buddhist associations had given them. Many times, she and Sora would make the trip to Kyoto to seek comfort from Abbess Omao. The elderly Abbess reminded them that the trialsome oppressions were just the motion of change, and it will become a furnace to hearken them to their vision with even greater diligence. She told them that they were successful beyond her most heartfelt dreams, telling them "Did not another fourteen women join their Sangha this year?" Even emptiness has to start somewhere.

During this time, Chihiro realized that she and Abbess Sora were truly sisters in the Truth...sisters whose different strengths complemented each other seamlessly: Sora, the lotus-soft compassionate Buddha-daughter of the Heart; she, the laser-sharp dispassionate Buddha-daughter of the Diamond. The painting her younger self had created looked clumsy compared to her recent efforts at the brush in the past two decades. Yet, it was a reminder that her younger self had given her _best_ effort, an effort she could appreciate more with each turn of the Wheel. She smiled, enjoying her memories, smiling at her youthyears. For little did she know that her spiritual kinship with Abbess Sora would manifest such a profound impact in the pursuit of the Truth of the World-Honored One...

_Both Sora and she agreed that what was needed was much more than new temple buildings, a wider dissemination of the Teachings, practicing good works, and an increased solicitude towards the younger Sisters of the Sangha. They spent many nights trying to understand the simple fact that they had been Enlightened on the same day, perhaps ever at the same hour. But for what? An immense empty lot? If Void existed, wouldn't Action fill it? It was about this time that Abbess Omao summoned she and Sora..._-only-_ she and Sora...to her deathbed. She remembered going into their teacher's interview room for the last time, while the entire population of the elderly Abbess' Zen community waited outside. Why me? Why Sora? Why not one of her own nuns, in her own Sangha?_

_In that small wooden room, Abbess Omao unraveled the mystery of why Chihiro and Sora had both touched the Truth on the very same day, over ten years ago. Following this, their mentor and friend gave she and Sora the ultimate gift that one nun could give another: the Transmission of the Lamp of the Teaching. Passing the leadership and the Truth on to the next generation, their Teacher had chosen _-them-_ to be the light of the Truth for this generation. Chihiro felt unworthy of the honor, and refused the Transmission three times, as tradition dictated. This allowed Abbess Omao to refute her and Sora's doubts three times by Dharma Combat; the final battle the elderly Teacher would have with her Dharma daughters. A battle her Teacher had won, because Chihiro and Sora _-asked-_ for the Transmission, having gained the necessary humility of confidence.  
_

_Breaking precedent with 1200 years of tradition, Abbess Omao _-split-_ the Transmission of the Lamp of the Teaching, for she and Sora to share and share alike: the leadership of the women's Sanghas in Japan and China..._-all-_ the women's Sanghas in both countries...and custodianship of her final instructions and teaching. She and Sora were extremely honored and humbled by this gift. Abbess Omao had never told them that she was the Carrier of the Lineage, an unbroken line of Master Abbesses since the 8th century who were responsible for the main lineage and its branches. A women's Sangha comprised of fifty three nun's communities. Then Abbess Omao rejoined the Transmission into One and charged them both with a mission: a task to which they were to unflinchingly dedicate the rest of their lives to accomplish. Finally, the Abbess who had given them so much asked she and Sora to assist her into an upright meditative posture, for the time was running short. She and her sister Abbess immediately knew what this meant, and with a wholeness of joy and sorrow, each of them held one of their teacher's hands while she experience parasamadhi. Releasing the essence of one's life while in Zen meditation. _

_Chihiro and her sister Abbess allowed themselves the comfort of their tears that afternoon, while the tallow burned low on the candles. It would not do their teacher honor to hide their feelings of sorrow. In the true Zen fashion of humility, Omao had killed the Buddha, for did not the Enlightened One speak of "not sorrow, but joy" right before leaving the flesh. For she and Sora, __the deepness of the love and respect they felt in their hearts for their beloved teacher was her final gift to the two young Abbesses. __When they walked out of Abbess Omao's chambers into a roomful of crying nuns, she and Sora showed them the two objects. Physical metaphors to indicate that the Transmission of the Lamp of the Teaching had been completed. Chihiro didn't even feel a mite of fear as the entire room of nuns bowed to her and Sora in acknowledgment of their role as Dharma leaders for the widespread Sangha.  
_

_Abbess Omao had placed on their young shoulders a burden that would be unbelievably difficult. She had told them that they no longer needed to be concerned about an empty field around a few buildings in a temple complex in the middle of Tokyo. They needed to concern themselves with the empty field of humanity. The empty field of Buddhism. The empty field of the Teaching itself._

_What was required of them was a _-major-_ revelation...a rigorous "rewriting" of the fundamentals of both spirit and religion. Their teacher had been very explicit about this mission: for if they failed, then every life on the Earth was forfeit. So she and Sora set themselves to the task and worked hard for two years. At the end of two years, Sora had commanded the respect of all the Sisters, while Chihiro could not even command the respect of herself. Finally, incensed and disgusted at her own inadequacy during this time of need...she begged leave of all her duties as Abbess so she could seek solitary meditation. Abbess Sora was hard-pressed to accommodate her decision, but in the end, she agreed to handle the administrative duties of two. Once again, her precious spiritual Sister in the Truth had become her companion and a complementary force in her life.  
_

_She instructed her senior staff to lock, bolt and nail shut the door to her Abbess' Quarters. Within, she struggled with herself. She sat in meditation until her back hurt, a major feat for a woman who had been meditating at least four hours a day, every day, for fifteen years. She sat and sat. What could a mere Abbess like herself offer of any value? Seeing past the terrors of her own earnest desires, Chihiro began to discard every bit of her ambition to reform Buddhism. She went even further, and lost sight of why she was seeking. Once she did so, she was guided by the Lotus-Born to reform Buddhism -_around 'the world'- _rather than within the Path__. She had emptied the vessel of Self, she had emptied herself of the Truth, she had emptied the Truth of the 'world'...and then she was filled with the nectar of Essence. But she had to go even further. She sensed that Abbess Omao had hinted at a path that she herself could not follow. An empty field, her teacher had said. Three 'empty fields'._

_Then one day, she woke up, ate breakfast, looked at the sun out of her window...and Woke Up. The Void was a Not! The Void which was the endpoint of the Mahdyamaka and Zen, and all spiritual paths after a fashion...the state of rejecting both existence and non-existence...was no more. The Void was void of itself. She had vision in her mind, an Everything where all beings are connected together, where all Time is streamed together, where all immortal countenences complement each other. For a single instance, the Void was a Not. It was a gateway. She had passed that that gate and found the Truth. Life itself, Love itself were ultimate forces, were intimate forces, were integral forces._

_She stood up from her meditation mat, and kicked it playfully._

Chihiro smiled once again, revisiting that moment of pure bliss. She regarded her Oxherding Sequence on the wall and remembered the events of that day. Sora was every bit as responsible as she was for her breach of that gate. The Void is a Not! That can never be taken away from her, or those who reach it. She recalled knocking softly on her door, while thinking "I know what the destination is, but I don't know the path there." She heard excited rustling outside her chambers; as she expected, the nuns were gathering themselves to witness their the emergence of their Diamond Abbess. She was certain about why she had pierced the gate; for the diamond metaphorically is the hardest substance in the Universe and all must yield to it. She had become so hard, she had torn through the Void. Void is a Not!

When daylight poured into her chamber through the now-open door, she walked out and immediately sought out Abbess Sora. Wordlessly, she walked over and hugged her spiritual sister.

Abbess Sora was already well on her way to becoming the Dharma Shield that defended the Teachings...but on that day when she emerged from her self-imposed reclusion, her diminuitive sister in Truth regarded her with a stunned wordless silence. Many of her sisters in the Sangha realized that she had gone where no teacher had dared to look. They knew this without her even speaking a word. She walked briskly to the main zendo hall in total silence; as none of the Sisters were speaking. To her joy, she saw some new faces in the crowd, new novices ready to embark on their journey to the Truth. Chihiro would never forget a name of a single Sister that she met ever again; for some reason she had a photographic memory for faces.

There in the zendo, in front of all her spiritual sisters, Chihiro waited an hour before saying "Void is a Not!" She waited another hour and then began to teach why Void is a Not. Her fears about being unable to elucidate the path she took on the way to her discovery melted away as she spoke; as she realized that the Path had sought her instead and was now speaking through her. After about an hour, she turned the rostrum over to Sora. This was the second of the two times in their long years of sisterhood that she experienced Sora being at a loss for words. But only for about 15 minutes.

Sora had looked at her and then announced "This is the Birth of the New Teaching!!" in a girlish, excited voice. Chihiro remembered with a grin how she had thought her sister Abbess was having one of 'those' moments again, at that time. Years later, Sora still was prone to being excitable because of her compassionate nature, as one junior Sister found out recently. Sora went on to casually note to the Sisters that Chihiro had spent nine months locked in her quarters during her spiritual quest. She, of course, had no idea of the passage of time; it simply wasn't important during her solitude.

"The joke's on me!" Chihiro reassured herself. That phrase was indeed a private joke between she and Sora. It really was ironic in a very funny way; here she had just been blessed by the Enlightened One with the discovery of a Truth of paramount importance, and yet she was perplexed by Sora's seeming random observation about the length of time she had locked herself away. Naturally, Sora dropped a bomb in the form of a koan that she both posed and answered. In an elegant and brief lecture, she eloquently explained that Chihiro had been awakened to a path to reform Buddhism after exactly -nine months- of unshakable meditative seeking. Sora added that the significance of this wasn't lost on her, or her spiritual Sisters. This was literally a rebirthing of the Teaching. Sora finished by stating that her awakening was nothing less than a call to a mission...and that Chihiro herself was going to become the Dharma Sword. The Sword, along with Sora's Dharma Shield, meant that they had completed the necessary preparation. That she and Sora had become the 'One' that Abbess Omao had predicted and demanded.

Now they were going to go on the doctrinal –offensive-.

_When Chihiro addressed the Sangha in detail about her "Mahamahayana Buddhism"...it was as if the temple had been struck by an earthquake. She realized that in the midst of her second Awakening, she had become armed with an interpretative approach to the many texts of the Buddhist canon which went far beyond anything she could have imagined. She could discourse on the Madhyamika tenets with ease, comment on the Lotus Sutra with profundity...and do so with an easygoing manner which transmitted the Truth with clarity. Within a week, Abbess Sora had her own second Awakening, simply from having a few extended discussions with her._

_Curiously, their Abbess had mentioned sitting on a dissertation committee years earlier, reviewing an obscure work by the very same N.I.T. teacher that Megumi has mentioned in her final letter. Chihiro knew that the author, Cevn, had disappeared with the Goddesses and their coterie, leaving his life's work contained within a book that few that could even understand. But Abbess Omao had the keenest intellect Chihiro had ever encountered, and she had incorporated some of the esoteric tenets of his philosophy into her Zen. The elderly Abbess had imparted the seed of the Teaching, which bore its full bough of fruit with Chihiro's Dharma breakthrough. Abbess Omao would live within the new Teachings._

_From the start, the National Buddhist Association had branded them as "upstart feminist renegades" while she and Sora were studying under Abbess Omao from Kyoto. __When Abbess Omao passed, she and Sora petitioned the Association for recognition of their school, which was promptly rejected because of questions about Abbess Omao's Zen lineage. Sora and her knew better, because the they had in their possession two items that had been given to the first Zen Buddhist abbess by Kataku Jinne in the early 8th century.__ Despite the clear legitimacy of this transmission, the various Zen sects refused to acknowledge the legitimacy of their Dharma lineage or __the Butsudankyoji Temple itself. T__hey were continually denied legitimacy by the male-dominated Association. Outside Japan, they were not recognized by the Sri Lankan Council. Or the Chinese Association. Or the Tibetans. Or the Malaysian National Association. It became clear that the Buddhist world had ostracized them.  
_

_Twelve years after they took refuge in the Sangha, she and Abbess Sora 'dropped in' uninvited at the annual Supreme katan in Tokyo, in 2031. The Supreme katan was a general meeting of the leadership of the Japanese Zen Buddhist community, include the Buddhism Association and other bodies. In this huge gathering of Zen practitioners, with over fifty roshi and several thousand monks and nuns in attendance from all over the world, she and Abbess Sora proved once and for all that their temple branch was much more than a group of nuns spuriously practicing Zen. During the debates and disputation, Sora and she consistently confounded the heads of every major Zen temple in Japan. Finally, during the traditional Dharma Combat Ceremony towards the end of the katan session, she bested _-all- _of the roshi present...including many chief abbots of the Rinzai and Soto Sects...in Zen awareness. Then in a gesture of humility, she and Sora revealed the Rebirth of Buddhism: the Mahamahayana._

_The old Abbess Omao had taught them well...and Buddha had finished molding she and Abbess Sora into the instruments of Dharma she had foreseen._

_This 'victory' was a boon to their struggling temple, as women from all over Japan came to __Butsudankyoji __to study. Her and Sora's discourse on Mahamahayana became renowned in the Buddhist world, having quickly been translated into over 50 languages within a few years. While this was happening, a group of senior Sisters approached her and Sora with a radical idea. Why not endow a Zen Buddhist Doctrinal University at __Butsudankyoji__, admitting only the most dedicated adherents, male and female, so that the discourse of the Buddha's Truth could be furthered? Both she and Sora assented to this request without a single pause to question it. After women being excluded by male-dominated teaching centers throughout the entire history of Buddhism, they at __Butsudankyoji weren't going to make the same mistake and exclude men.__ Their all-female Temple was no longer women-only. She had nothing but praise for the senior nuns for proposing such a bold step.  
_

_Soon afterward, Sora began to 'kidnap' women who were the property of various corporations. Many of the students in the early days of the zendo had been affluent women, or women that were truly destined to engage in spiritual pursuits because of their earnestness. In the ensuing years, the Sangha grew, richly adorned with many inquirents who sought Enlightenment with intense dedication. But these new women...were little more than social discards or cripples with no future nor interest in creating a future for themselves. In an earlier age, they would have been resigned to a freak show, insane asylum or a whorehouse. __In this age, the corporations had bought them to be culled for their organs. Sora and her staff became quiet expert at abducting they "humanstock" women before they could be 'harvested'. She had serious reservations about these "__other women"...they reeked of the street life. She and Sora had argued vigorously over the wisdom of recruiting women by abduction instead of attracting the more spiritually-attuned candidates. Abbess Sora had remained steadfast in her belief that the "doctrinal victory" of their order would only gain merit if it was matched by a "victory of compassion". _

_Eventually, she and Sora compromised on the training of the new novices; they would allowed a 'trial period' of two years so the senior Sisters could take their measure of the novices' sincerity. Obviously, none of them had any hint sincerity at the beginning, but the Sangha embraced them nevertheless. Over time, she began to see the wisdom in Sora's insistence to teach these 'untouchable' women; as novices who should have never embraced the New Teaching now _-chose-_ to embrace it. Not only did they learn it, they lived it as well. Sora confided later that she realized it was absolutely necessary to transcend doctrine and prove to all that the New Teaching would guide all towards the Truth, not just seekers. The New Teaching could conduct _-all-_ along the path to Awakeness, not just the elite students or earnest aspirants. As the Heart, Sora had achieved her goal. Rarely did her eyes tear up during initiation, investment, or promotion ceremonies, for she was the Diamond Abbess and the Sword of Dharma. But when Sora's first group of novices became invested as full Sisters in the Sangha, she herself shed tears for the first of two times during her officating role as Abbess. To their credit, almost all of the women Sora had 'saved' remained at the nunnery. Many were serving the Sangha today as senior nuns and instructors at the Women's College and the Doctrinal University. _

The years had passed quickly. Abbess Chihiro felt her mother's and grandmother's bodies exerting their inevitable pull on her. She was still spry, but her back had started to hunch slightly. All of those years of work in the gardens and leaning over her calligraphy desk...

_Her calligraphy and sumiye were famous all over Japan and China. Because it was the best. What had started out as a meditative hobby eventually had brought Abbess Chihiro another round of renown within a few years. She remained aloof of this fact until the Emperor himself came to Butsudankyoji to request a few scrolls of her work._

_So she decided to enterprise her Dharma-proven talents. This became a point of contention between she and Abbess Sora: the selling of her calligraphy to endow the Temple with funds to support its huge body of adherents and nuns. Selling the many books written about her famous discourse in 2024 was one thing...because it expressly disseminated the teachings of the Truth. But the retailing of her personal art seemed like an unnecessary foray into "the dust of the conventional world". Already, some of her pieces were already being exhibited in museums all over the world, were already being designated as "Important Cultural Properties" by the Japanese government, were already fetching prices of a billion yen or more. _

_Abbess Sora was fearful that dealing with such large sums of money coming from the 'outer world' would taint the spiritual practices of the temple. Abbess Chihiro held to her conviction that the financial support of the Butsudankyoji was being effected by the creation of wordless beauty...that each painting or calligraphic scroll was an embodiment of a wordless Buddha-nature..._and -this-_ was what made them so attractive to collectors. Eventually, Abbess Sora reluctantly agreed to this...and Abbess Chihiro's work created funds to endow hundreds of new students in the Nun's College they built in 2029. Years later, Abbess Sora expressed an open offering of gratitude to her during a Dharma Assembly...which brought tears to Abbess Chihiro's eyes for the only time since the death of her husband and children._

_True to her vow, Chihiro never touched any monies proceeding from sales of her works, nor did she offer any opinion on how the bounty would be used. She and Sora only approved the plans of more junior sisters in the Sangha._

_She and Abbess Sora were internationally famous in the Zen Buddhist community. Their symbiosis had made the Butsudankyoji Temple into one of the foremost harbors of Learning in the world..._

Chihiro sighed with a new fond memory in mind, a very recent event. One morning about three months ago, Sora had rushed to her interview room, kicked out the novice sisters, and then excitedly informed her that she realized the night before that Butsudankyoji had become a 'world-class' center for the propagation of the Truth. Animated, she noted that there were over eleven thousand women and men here studying the New Teaching, and Butsudankyoji was the home temple for Mahamahayana Buddhism. The Sangha had almost 8500 nuns and was running smoothly. It was enclosed in a beautiful dome of Sora's design, the interior created as a virtual mountaintop. She alluded to Chihiro's 'breakthrough' with a "It happened here! Right in this room!" Chihiro sensed that her sister Abbess was having another one of 'those' moments again; Sora hadn't been this excitable for a long time. Something must be fueling her compassionate nature, because she was almost out of breath with excitement. Chihiro point at the scroll she had painted 25 years ago, with a few buildings surrounded by a large empty expanse and commented: "You just now figured this out?" Sora kinda looked at her with a funny expression for a moment, as if she was pondering a deep thought, and then said, "Gotta go! I have some sewing to attend to."

Soon after Sora left, Chihiro heard the distinctive door-knock of her aide, Reinkyoai, and admitted her into her interview room. Reinkyoai knelt down and bowed, and then quickly asked in a worried voice, "I saw Abbess Sora dash out of here while I was walking towards your quarters, Abbess. Is she all right? What's got her so riled up?"

"Only the Enlightened One can answer that, Reinkyoai. Sometimes even Abbess Sora is beyond our reach," Chihiro answereda with a reassuring smile and a sigh.

Three days later, Chihiro had her answer. At the beginning of the weekly assembly meditation at the Great Zendo hall, in front of the all the assembled nuns and novices, Sora announced that Reinkyoai was to be appointed Senior Roshi of Butsudankyoji. Chihiro's aide was so shocked, she had to be steadied by those nuns in front and on either side of her because she looked like she was going to faint and slump right off of her meditation cushion.

Two months ago, she cried for the second time while officiating as Abbess, this time at Senior Sister Reinkyoai's promotion ceremony. Reinkyoai had been a member of that first group of novices who had been kidnapped by Sora and brought to the Temple, much to Chihiro's chagrin at the time. But she and her fellow novices stayed the course through their first two years of training and earned the right to be invested as nuns. All nine of that first group were still here at Butsudankyoji, eleven years later. Chihiro appointed Reinkyoai to be one of her two aides five years ago, because of her sincerity, spiritual potention, insight into the Learning and quick wit...as well as to be Chihiro's daily reminder of the profundity of the ocean of change.

Reinkyoai's promotion by Sora was a major event, because it signaled to all in the Sister's Sangha that Sora had found Reinkyoai worthy to receive the full Transmission of the Teaching, which made her Sora's equal as an authority on doctrine and Teaching. Reinkyoai would be Roshi to all the Roshi of Butsudankyoji. Sora had only bestowed a full Teaching Transmission three times in the history of the nunnery; as the fourth, Reinkyoai would be the final recipient of this important Transmission. The deeper meaning of this was that Sora trusted Reinkyoai with the spiritual welfare of the _entire_ Sangha, because she might become Sora's or her spiritual successor when the time came for one or the other to pass on the lineage by Transmission of the Lamp on their deathbeds.

Reinkyoai entered the Great Zendo hall with a train of attendants. Chihiro was pleased that she was walking with an unhurried dignity. When she bowed to she and Sora, Chihiro could immediately discern that Sora had given her the Transmission of the Teaching. Reinkyoai's face was completely absent of worry, expressing a joy-within-joy. After the proscribed chanting and meditation, Sora motioned for Reinkyoai to approach for the presentation of the vestiments. Reinkyoai would receive a rakusu identical to those worn by every Senior Sister in the convent, so as to not be ostentious. The only difference was that the vest-like rakusu that she would henceforth wear over her chest had been hand-sewn by Sora herself. Then she would receive the deep red robe of the most Senior Roshi, not for the sake of ostentiousness but to signify her authority as a Teacher of Teachers.

When the time came, her sister Abbess opened the rakasu's simple wooden container, smoothed out the vestment, and then draped it around Reinkyoai's neck and shoulders, taking extra care to make sure that it was straightened out and squared against her robe, and then kissed her on the cheek. But, instead of opening up the container with Reinkyoai's new robe, Sora returned to her seat. Even before she had opened the rakusu's container, Chihiro knew that her sister Abbess had decided not to stand on ceremony and instead deferred her role as head roshi to Chihiro, so that she could present Reinkyoai's robe of office. After thirty years of seeking the Truth and all the trials they had shared, she could often read Sora's thoughts and intents as if they were her own. Chihiro thanked Sora with her eyes, knowing full well that her sister Abbess was so overwrought with joy and pride for her spiritual daughter that she simply was incapable of presenting Reinkyoai her robe of authority.

Chihiro opened the robe's box and smoothed out the vermillion robe as she unfolded it. She walked over to Reinkyoai and motioned her to stand, which brought an audible murmur or sigh from several thousand surprised nuns. If Sora was going to break with tradition tonight, then she would do so as well. She would present Reinkyoai her Senior Roshi's robe as an equal rather than as an Abbess. She looked at Reinkyoai's serene face and overlaid it in her mind with the face of a teenaged girl who had been brought to the temple thirteen years ago. A girl whose face was haunted by years of prostitution, who trusted no one and hated everyone, who growled at the other novices, whose arms were scarred from cutting herself. A girl who had _-bit-_ her during their first meeting. That girl's face receeded into the dignified, and now teary-eyed face of her spiritual daughter as Chihiro carefully dressed her in her new robe, tugging the shoulders and sleeves to ensure that it was snug. Finished with this, she kissed Reinkyoai on the cheek and returned to her seat. She turned to look at Sora, their eyes met...and then Chihiro started crying even as she smiled broadly at the Temple's newest Senior Roshi. Tears of joy in the transformation she had been privileged to witness. Proof that the New Teaching could create a victory of compassion as well as doctrine, for all beings...a sentiment that was echoed vividly and eloquently a few minutes later by Reinkyoai's first lecture to the Dharma Assembly as their Senior Roshi.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Returning her attention to the mysterious destruction of the Toshishima Imperium's Headquarters building, Chihiro regarded her and Sora's _Oxherding Sequence_ of scrolls, trying to still her racing thoughts. The sequence originally consisted of eight pictures, drawn in China in the early 12th century to represent the various steps on the path to Enlightenment. Several hundred years later, a Zen teacher added two more...representing "life as is" and "service to others". Several hundred years after that, she and Sora added two more: the oxen by itself and a blank scroll. The oxen by itself represented the everlasting nature of the teaching, regardless of Mind...while the blank scroll represented Void is a Not, in contrast to the empty circle of the eighth picture.

The Twelve Oxen Sequence cemented her and Abbess Sora's positions as _the_ foremost interpreters of the Law. When she introduced the Twelve Oxen Sequence at the katan in 2032, it stunned the Buddhist world by its audacity…and its relevance.

Now, she herself was stunned. In two days, she had met the Megumi and Sayoko of her youth...and watched the destruction of Aoshima's cursed corporate headquarters by an agency that clearly wasn't of this mortal compass of Hells.

"Could _they_ really be here?" Abbess Chihiro asked herself again as she sipped her warm tea and reflected on the recent events.

Sighing to herself, Abbess Chihiro went over to the laptop in her study, undocked it and tapped out the commands to read her email. One of her eccentricities was the fact that she used an old fashioned laptop typing keyboard and trackball for her computer, rather than the voiceboard and holoscreen. It was the same laptop system she had in high school. Over the years, this antique setup had become a source of amusement to any number of the younger nuns. Nervously drumming a pencil on her desk, Abbess Chihiro scanned the list of her emails, and then an alarm went off in her head as she saw the last entry.

It was addressed from someone called Kami-sama.

_Bohdhi.Kami.sama at Yggdrasil.Mainframe.Multiverse_

"What...is _this_? A _joke_?" she thought, resting her chin on her knuckles as she opened the message with a mouse click.

_"Abbess' Chihiro and Sora,_

_You have both done well over these years. Each of you has acted on behalf of a higher good, in a society that offers very little to redeem itself. _

_I have heard your soulfelt appeals...and I hereby covenant that you and your community will be spared in the travails to come._

_Yea, it is true that the Goddesses are on the Earthrealm at this very moment. They are very close to you, and will reveal themselves to you shortly._

_When you encounter them, you must give them this message:_

_THE MORTALS HAVE FAILED THE PROBATIONARY PERIOD."_

Abbess Chihiro reread the message at least a dozen times, engrossed in practicing a very un-Zen like curiosity. She tried to shut off her computer...without success.

"Oh...my!" she said to herself, her body shaking uncontrollably as if she had become possessed by a hungry ghost. That last line in the message...sounded _ominous_!

A few minutes later, she felt her mind racing frantically in accompaniment to her body as she raced to Sora's offices.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

OITA, BUNGO PROVINCE, KYUSHU JAPAN - JULY 1374:

"Yes, my Lord. The reason Lord Shimazu desires a truce with us is due to the fact that a stronger force exists that can threaten you both. We suggested an alliance to preserve both yours and his daimyoates. As an act of good faith, he has returned your daughter _and_ your ransom," Genji stated.

Lord Mori reread the letter, written in an elegant hand that could only belong to Lord Shimazu. The letter called for an immediate cessation of hostilities and the restoration of open communication between the two daimyo, as well as the sharing of resources should the Deputy Shogun try to mount an offensive against either of their realms.

"This is truly a perplexing situation. One must commend Lord Shimazu for practicing the old ways. What say you, my loyal retainers?" This brought on a weave of opinions in support and opposition to the proposed treaty. Finally, Keiichi, who had patiently waited while listening closely to all the considerations, bowed his head to the Lord, indicating that he wanted to speak.

"My Lord. I would speak in support of this treaty. You must 'take your courage' and put an end to this clannish feud. These are new times, with a considerable threat posed from the Northern Court. We are caught up in circumstances that could prove dire if we enter into them unprepared. It will do us no good if the Mori clan is obliterated. We must consider the welfare of future generations." Lord Mori nodded his head, and then pointed at me.

"Speak."

I wrote down my words carefully, and then Genji recited them.

"I agree with Sir Keiichi. I have...a sense of the future. In this vision, I foresee both Bungo and Hyuga decimated in battles yet to come. The first battles will happen within this year. You have been to Kyoto, my Lord. You know how much stronger the Northern Court waxes in contrast to Chokei's waning Southern Court. I advise cooperation, rather than competition. These are times of decline...it would be in your best interests to protect your Clan and your domain."

Keiichi piggybacked on this and detailed emergency plans if the forces of Deputy Shogun Imagawa were to attack. If this would occur, the Lord could retreat to his mountain stronghold, but he would never be able to protect all of his Clan. However, if he were allied with Lord Shimazu, the Imagawa forces would be pinioned between the two armies of samurai, making a siege of Oita much more difficult.

"Then it is settled! We shall ally ourselves with our former enemies so that we may outlive them."

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Back in Keiichi's house, we relished in the light of our 'victory'. Swaying Lord Mori was always difficult, especially in matters concerning his rivalry with Lord Shimazu. Our idea of swaying Lord Shimazu first, under cover of a diplomatic mission, was a stroke of genius. Once Shimazu agreed to 'initiate' a truce, then Lord Mori was placated enough to consider the endeavor and approve of it. Keiichi's quick study of military strategies had heralded our cause greatly.

I was surprised that the Lord deigned called upon me to speak in the great hall, amidst all of the retainers. Once again, I was grateful for my 'partially mute' act...having to ascribe every word of conversation on paper was a constant source of frustration for me. A year ago, my 'miraculous cure' of emerging from silence had occurred, with the justification that I was finally immersed enough in Lord Mori's court to have acquired the ability to speak, by leave of the local Kami god. Yet, when in Lord Mori's presence, I continued to write out my responses as a gesture of respect to the form of communication I had used in Lord Mori's councils since I arrived here. The second, more subtle reason was psychological and had been suggested by Keiichi: having my words presented by 'real' Japanese in the form of he or Genji greatly improved the chances that they would be heard, as some still held me suspect because I was a gaijin.

In any case, it was evident that the Lord trusted my words enough to allow me to speak. To many of his inner court, I was a prodigy; unable to speak aloud too often, but capable of producing profound poetry and prose. To ensure that I wouldn't upset the balance of history...should my verse works become preserved for posterity...I invented a pen name: "Scratchscribble". My choice of a silly pen name was deliberate, in the sense that I was casting myself in the tradition of the picaresque raconteur...a literary tradition presently active in 14th century Europe, but not here in Ashikaga Japan. At least until the 16th and 17th centuries.

Each of us had evolved into a role that made ourselves useful to Lord Mori. At times we debated whether we were being shaped by the zeitgest of the current age we had found ourselves in, or that we were growing as persons because of our intrinsic natures.

Despite his asthma, Tomohisa was becoming a very skilled warrior. It was clear to us that Lord Mori fawned on him because of his prowess. Already, Tomohisa was ranked as one of the top 5 swordsmen in the province. Genji served the Lord as an engineer and technical advisor. Beyond this, he was being apprenticed as the Lord's treasury master. He had confided to us that he had managed to create a small charity fund, by dint of "creative accounting". I was one of the court poets and tutor to many local scholars and notables. And more and more, Lord Mori was trusting Keiichi with affairs of state. He had trained Keiichi to be a kagemusha...a look-alike 'shadow warrior'. Several times, Keiichi had impersonated Lord Mori with such skill that the Chokei Emperor himself had been fooled. But Keiichi seemed to have an innate acumen for strategy...which endeared him greatly to Lord Mori.

We teased Keiichi by calling him the Sun Tzu of Japan. A maidservant to the Lord's daughter came by later in the afternoon with another letter for Keiichi, bringing another round of teasing as he blushed while reading her delicate poems.

We had decided over a year ago that we would remain chaste in our relations with the opposite sex...especially in light of Tomohisa's many 'conquests'. Convincing Tomohisa was difficult; after all, when we arrived here, he was decidedly inexperienced in the ways of women. Now, he was getting more 'experience' than he could handle. But we finally managed to convince him to forego any further bed-pleasures.

It stood to reason that if any of us were to get romantically involved with a 14th century woman, the possibility of engendering offspring would occur. Folk medicine contraceptives were not reliable. Any children fathered by men from seven centuries in the future could have a profound impact on the timeline. Even worse, a man who _was_ fated to marry a woman in the 'normal' sequence of events...might be denied a marriage were she to be involved with any one of us at any given time. Thus, _any_ dalliance with women in this present age could 'opt out' the man she was _supposed to be with_, as far as history was concerned! Once again, a further consideration was the issue of children; as even a short love-affair could result in the disappearance of all offspring which _should_ have resulted from any union that was historically presupposed. Which could have devastating repercussions centuries hence...

Imagine a future Japan without a Hideyoshi, or a Ryoma, or a Yamamoto...

Much to Keiichi's credit, he had maintained a polite correspondence with Lord Mori's daughter, neither encouraging her nor rebuking her. I sensed that he was becoming more of a boon-friend than a potential suitor in her eyes. Keiichi had confided to us that her attentions only served to remind him of his lost Belldandy. In a like manner, I kept up a flirtatious correspondence with a number of my female students...while envisioning the words of each poetic composition as if I was addressing it to Urd. It had been almost two years since we arrived in the 14th century, but images of our lives in 20XX still haunted our conversations.

None of us had given up hope.

Yet it was hard for us as men to remain aloof from matters of love. Especially Tomohisa, who was the victim of his previous libidinous nature...as he was still being favored by many of Lord Mori's maidservants. Sometimes, the sexual frustration developed into a 'white elephant in the living room' which no one wanted to address. This necessary refraining from romantic liaisons wasn't as hard on me as it was on the others, because I was known as a partially mute gaijin; thus, I didn't have to engage in prolonged conversation with the women of Lord Mori's court. But in the end, we were all caught in the bellows of a prolonged deep romantic frustration. There was literally nobody to love for us in this historical context, centuries removed from the women who filled our hearts with joy. A joy that was constantly sorrowed by loss.

I missed Urd.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --


	40. Pt 40: Tailspin

**Part 40: Tailspin**

BUTSUDANKYOJI ZEN TEMPLE - DEC 2050:

"What could this message mean? _'The mortals have failed their probationary period'?_" Abbess Sora asked. She was seated in Abbess Chihiro's study, along with Megumi and Sayoko. Sayoko scanned the library of Abbess Chihiro's study; it had several bookshelves filled with texts in Japanese, English and German. Most of the titles concerned Zen Buddhism, with a smattering of philosophical works.

Sayoko recognized that part of her study was arranged in the traditional tokonoma setting. In the rear of the room, a small recessed shelf table had a bonsai plant resting benignly on it; the ancient scroll hung behind it only added to the sedate setting. Several scrolls were hung on another wall. In front of the scrolls rested a low writing table, with various inkbottles and a host of brushes in a wooden box next to it. A light yellow glow from candles illumned against the interior of the study.

Abbess Sora noticed the message flashing brightly on the screen, over and over and over, splashing the neons of modernity against the ancient landscape scrolls. She watched as her Dharma sister tried repeatedly to shut off her laptop, tried to close the Frameworx program, tried to unplug the laptop's power cord, removed the laptop's battery. Nothing happened. The same message kept flashing repeatedly.

She and Sayoko had spent over a year in that dreadful Toshishima building; even this calendar year was almost over! Now that she was out, she imagined herself feeling some of the same kinds of feelings an inmate has when they are released a prison term. Chihiro's study was a mix of old and new. Painting that seemed hundreds of years ago were hung right next to a bookshelf filled with something that looked like DVD cases. The room itself was a throwback to a more ancient design ethic, like a tearoom that would have fit seamlessly into a 15th century lord's mansion.

Megumi thought it was odd that Chihiro had such an old computer. Ancient technology by 2050 standards, from what she had seen of the temple's 'intelligence room' as Abbess Sora had termed it. She _knew_ that something weird was happening...so she also tried to unplug the laptop without success, just to confirm what Abbess Chihiro reported. The computer was frozen somehow, despite all attempts to shut it off.

"So how do we find Belldandy and the rest?" Sora asked, having exhausted all the other possibilities concerning the issue of the message from Kami-sama.

"I would suggest that we simply wait, and let them come to us. After all, they _are_ Goddesses...who serve a higher cause," Chihiro said calmly. "If we, who are trudging the spiritual life, possess even the slightest shadings of Truth, then we already possess enough for the Norns to find us. The Tokyo of these latter days is a blackened pit of illusion and iniquity; the Goddesses will soon wish to seek out our harbor of Light."

"Me...I would rather look for them," Sayoko said. "If some of us searched, it would increase our chances of finding them."

"Me too! Besides, it would give me an opportunity to eat some _real_ food!" Megumi added. This brought a flash of a knowing smile to both Abbesses. Then Chihiro assumed a serious aspect.

"Yes...that would follow. However, neither of you is acquainted at all with life in the mid-21st century. There is _so much_ that you do not know. Your comment about the foodstuffs of today is just an example of this. I wouldn't even dream of eating what passes for 'food' outside our temple. As you know, human beings are _owned_ by corporations in this era..." Chihiro noted, pausing for paused for dramatic effect. She regretted that she had to hit these two young women with such a disturbing scenario; but she realized because of their youth that they would have to convince themselves of their ignorances. But she was the dispassionate Diamond Abbess, and had to instruct with harsh methods, even to those of the secular world.

She watched Megumi and Sayoko's faces blanch with disgust and horror when they realized what she was implying, and then both started retching and vomiting.

"W..we were up there for a year, and we were e..eating...?" Sayoko managed to gasp out as her stomach emptied itself.

When they were empty and starting to dry-heave, Abbess Sora quickly applied accupressure to dismiss their nausea and then served them a round of tea so they could wash the taste out.

"I believe I have made my point clear, quite emphatically," Chihiro noted in a stern voice she used for novice instruction. "This is why we grow our own organic vegetables and herbs and don't bring any food in. Everything is created with the Path in mind here. There is no Path outside of this center of New Learning, save for the paths of illusion and selfishness. You both don't belong there. You both wouldn't _survive_ there."

"Besides, the matter is further complicated by the fact that Aoshima's corporation has been attacked by terrorists, and my former husband has been met by the wheel of Karma. All of the media have your pictures as likely suspects or ­witnesses. I'm afraid that you're going to have to endeavor in your search from our humble temple. Happily for you, however, even in this age...temples remain sanctuaries for fugitives," Sora explained.

"Oh great...we're _stranded_!" Sayoko complained.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

MAKUHARI, CHIBA WARD, SHIN-KYO, JAPAN - DEC 2050:

The solemn group gathered around a corner of the temple grounds. Belldandy had used her Goddess powers to create a fitting resting-place for Kodama by restoring a small section in the corner to its former verdurous glory. A slight margin of life amongst the shadowy dearth of the rest of the temple ruins. There, they buried Kodama underneath the Infamous Cherry Tree. With a motion of her hands, Belldandy restored the rotted smashlings of the cherry tree. With a flash, the cherry tree bloomed against the chill December air; far removed from the usual time of year for cherry blossoms to dance in midair. The sakura blossoms rode the wind like tiny snowflakes, carpeting the grass bed and garlanding the orchids encircling the site where Kodama's remains resided. Belldandy willed this small patch of earth to blossom in perpetuity as a fitting epitaph for the Ninjette...whose ambition was gained and whose life was snuffed out in the briefest of flowerings.

Urd recited a testimonial for Kodama, speaking to her unceasing loyalty and ultimate sacrifice. Belldandy spoke next, delivering a moving speech about the need for a purpose in life and how Kodama had accomplished hers before it was her time to depart the mortal world. To her horror, Skuld had found a metallic remnant of Banpei-kun's cap earlier in the gray winter morning. Shaking off her tears, she resolved to employ the horrific artifact to the sway of hope. Half burying the rusted shorn in the ground, it became a headstone for the departed Ninja warrioress.

Senrigan and Hikari wept openly at the loss of their sister Ninjette. They had been bosom friends for all of their lives, sharing in every adventure and danger. Despite the years, despite the constant nearness to the whispering spectre of death...they never could have imagined that it would have been Kodama who fell. Now, all they felt was a diminishment so grievous that they couldn't spell it with words of mourning.

Urd was concerned that the female shinobi might try to resolve their loss by deciding to commit seppuku to accompany Kodama. She remained awake late at night explaining to them that their deaths wouldn't change the fact that Kodama was gone. She reasoned with them that, since they had found the Goddesses, they should enjoy the presence of those they had rescued. Besides, it would be a grave insult for them to take their lives when they were still in the service of their Mistresses.

She wished that she could somehow undo the past and prevent Kodama's death. But this was not to be. In this new world they had been thrust into, everything was uncertain. The impermanence of life was just as profound here as it was back in 20XX. Urd took one last lingering look at the temple compound as they walked out the torii gate and down the street to the unknown.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

OITA, BUNGO PROVINCE, KYUSHU JAPAN - MARCH 1381:

Death is forged in the humility of hearth and home; and it can rip a man's life away with the Katana-like edge of domestic betrayal. Death is forged in fiery bowels of the smithy's bellows; and it can surely sever ­the umbilical cord of cognition from Soul as easily as a spider wraps its mired victims with webbing. Death is forged in the rancorous heat of battle; it can dissect an entire empire in just a few day's passing. But Death is also a patient thief, huddling in concealment until the fruits of life are at their ripest...and then harvesting young lives from the vine of Being with a callous avarice.

In 1381, it was this form of Death that visited us.

Our present homes in Oita are on the Western side of Kyushu. Kyushu traditionally was a gateway that linked Japan with Mainland Asia via Korea and the Chinese seaports. Busy port cities like Nagasaki and Kagoshima thrived on commercial intercourse with Asia; the resultant influx of imports influenced the economy of Lord Mori's domain as well. One look at Lord Mori's palatial compound was more than enough to qualify this conclusion; his houses were filled with imported Chinese painted wall scrolls, stele rubbings and objects d'art.

So in first months of 1381, when runners arrived with the news that people were dying in Eastern Kyushu, I was more than slightly concerned. Disease shapes peoples and histories.

During my readings in Chinese, I was able to skim over the Medica Mirus sections of Kang Hsi's great Encyclopedia. I marveled at the meticulous records of illness and death; the Encyclopedia had compiled medical information from two millennia of Chinese dynasties, including exhaustive lists compassing hundreds of years and locales where Death had stricken the local populace.

As an archipelago, Japan has a natural insulation against macro and microparasitic disease carriers...the Sea of Japan. The Black Death that crippled Europe just three decades ago...in 1345-55...didn't even touch us here in Japan. The widespread Mongol Empire had a dramatic effect on disease balances in mainland Asia, but not here. The 75 percent death rate reported in Northern Europe during the grimmest years of the Black Death had occurred a world away, as far as we were concerned.

But I knew enough basics about epidemiology to realize that Japan's natural insulation against transmitted diseases had also created an undesirable biological consequent. This very geographical insulation that protected us...also shaped our demographics, allowing for the development of dense populations with a reduced immunity to infectious and communicable diseases. In other worlds, a fertile ground for a brief and intense entrenchment of any new strains of epidemic infection.

The rest is obvious. Take a population which is isolated and infect it with a killer disease...and the killer disease becomes isolated as well. The progress of an epidemic requires that the infection to move on to new populations. It _has_ to, otherwise it kills off all the possible native carriers...and itself. But such is nearly impossible in Japan. Because of a lack of the steady introduction of one plague after another, the native population becomes slow to develop immunities to new disease invasions. Since there was such a low threshold or tolerance, it was much more difficult for an epidemic to remain long enough on the Japanese islands to subside into an endemic profile...a 'permanent' disease or a multi-year contagion...like mumps, bubonic multi-vector bacterium infections, measles and polio. Thus, the chronicity of a newly-introduced disease would hit Japan hard and fast, sweeping through the population until it exhausted itself.

Knowing all of this...when the reports of the "coughing sweat violence" started coming in from Eastern Kyushu, I was gravely concerned.

Actually, more like _scared shitless_.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

CHIBA WARD, SHIN-KYO, JAPAN - DEC 2050:

They wandered down the street with aimless abandon. No one had discussed _where_ they were going towards. Skuld looked around, amazed at the variety of people on the street. Neon signs in Korean vied with holographic images in languages she didn't recognize. A queue of men were thronged around a holovideo display, watching a robotic sumo match. Several groups of teenage girls strolled down the street, animatedly conversing and pointing.

As they rounded a corner, Skuld saw a group of thugs dressed in leather clownsuits with spiked wrist and ankle bands and green hair. They were simply hanging out, angling for some passersby to harass. It was obvious to Skuld that these hoods were trying to imitate a certain villainous character from an American superhero manga she'd read a few. Their sloppy mimicry was derisively amusing to her. Her amusement turned to fear as the hoodlums started following them. She grabbed Urd and Belldandy's arms tightly. Finally, one of hoods yelled at them to stop in a garrulous voice and pulled a weapon. She and her sisters turned around...and before any of them could say a word, Hikari and Senrigan leapt into action. It was hilarious when the astonished clown gang literally got Batman'd by two six-inch Ninjettes, who immobilized them immediately. The pair swiftly railed them with blows from Bo staffs...on the shin, the groin, the solar plexus and the throat. Even before the semi-conscious hoodclowns fell to the ground, Hikari and Senrigan had disarmed them and bound their hands behind their backs. It was over in two or three seconds. Skuld looked back and sniggered as their group walked on.  
"Ninjettes kick ass!" she thought with prideful admiration, feeling a moment of release from the sadness of Kodoma's valiant death. Seeing them work over five thugs in an instant, Skuld realized that the pair had gotten _a lot_ better with their ninjitsu...they had probably reached the pinnacle of mastery.

After this, they decided to remain on the moving walkways in the middle of the street, thinking that it would be safer there if they were moving faster. Skuld was looking for a hospital, fire station, library..._anyplace_ that they could drop in and possibly access some information about any of the others. If they could find the ocean, or at least Tokyo Bay, then she might be able to get her bearings straight.

The second gang they encountered tailed them on the moving sidewalk...which the locals called a "slidewalk"...for almost a kilometer. When they got off the moving walk and turned down a street, the gang made their move. Each of the seven men were dressed in garish Hiphop gangster outfits, their hair bleached near white, sporting caps with the bill pointed backward and zebra-colored capes.

"Isn't that a little _old_?" Skuld commented sarcastically. Urd reacted with a loud laugh, which disconcerted the gang members momentarily. Regaining their composure, they ordered the three Goddesses to walk in a nearby alley, brandishing their knives to emphasize their point.

Hikari and Senrigan popped up on Belldandy's shoulders. The gang leader wiped his eyes with a leather-gloved hand, disbelieving what he was seeing. Two six-inch figures dressed as ninjas.

"I'll take care of them this time," Belldandy offered. Smiling at the gang members, she waved her hands over her head. Their knives turned to sticks of butter.

"Oh, and by the way, you will be unable to move from where you're standing until the police come and fetch you," she informed them. Urd and Skuld burst into laughter at the hapless hoodlets as they tried to lift their feet to walk.

"Urd...Skuld, you shouldn't laugh at other's misfortunes," Belldandy chided her sisters.

"Ohhh...you _can't_ be serious!" Urd said in exasperation. "Hey look, there's something on your blouse." Belldandy looked to where Urd was pointing.

"There's noth..." she said as Urd flicked her in the nose, and then burst out in taunting laughter.

"You guys are _sooo_ immature!" Skuld said with disgust. Belldandy started giggling while they returned to the slidewalk. Soon all three sisters were consumed by riotous laughter. It was uncontrollable.

"And you fell again for the 'spot on your blouse' trick! How many thousands of times..." Urd said as Belldandy playfully lunged at her, taking her off-guard and tackling her to the ground. Skuld leapt on her two older sisters and they engaged in a tension-releasing wrestling match. Hikari and Senrigan joined in, using their Bo sticks to poke the Goddesses in the ribs, tickling them. After a few minutes, they all sat facing each other, their clothes and hair disheveled. The other slidewalk pedestrians had given them a wide berth.

"It's so good to be together...and free," Belldandy said between laughs. After the horrid incarceration and Kodoma's death, the raucous playfulness was just the right antidote.

"Let's go to the police station, if they have 'em in this time. We should be able to try and locate the others from there," Urd suggested.

"Yeah...they'll think someone mugged us," Skuld said with a twinkle in her eye as Senrigan hopped on her shoulder.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

The three Goddesses strolled into the police station and explained that they were stranded visitors. Belldandy had asked the two Ninjettes to stay out of sight while they asked the policeman some questions. Unlike the well-lighted sidewalk and entryway, the interior of the station seemed dark and drab.

"Hi. We're lost, and we're looking for the addresses of some people we were going to visit," Belldandy asked politely. The desk policeman looked at them suspiciously, and then asked to scan their hands to confirm their identities.

The three sisters looked at each other in confusion.

"What's that?" Belldandy asked. The policeman's expression turned even dourer.

"Where _are_ you from? Almost every nation has had imprint scanning for the last thirty years! None of you look like you're from France. And I _know_ that none of you are that old," he explained as he saw the questioning look on their faces.

"If you only knew..," Skuld almost said out loud, holding her hand over her mouth to suppress the mirth that was threatening to boil over.

"What's an imprint?" she asked innocently. The desk cop squinted his eyes in frustration.

"Look, lady. Do you have _any_ IDs?"

"Well...no we don't. Why would we need IDs?" Belldandy asked, now totally confused. She didn't know what the man was talking about.

Urd rolled her eyes and put a hand to her forehead...Belldandy's naiveté had done it again. Immediately, two uniformed policemen positioned themselves on either side of the sisters. The desk policeman looked thoughtful, scratched his head, and then arrived at a decision.

"We need to detain you until we can verify your identities. You may be some kind of rouge clones or something. Not to infer that you are...but it's for your own protection, of course," he insisted an blithe voice, noting that none of the three women were offering any cooperation. He went to a computer and downloaded the 3D scans from the lobby's interior cameras. A red light went off on the computer holoscreen. Hurriedly walking back, the policeman stood in front of them, his officious manner now replaced by a vigilant wariness.

"We have an 'emergency retrieval condition' on you three!!" he announced in a signal a voice filled with the arrogance of someone whose suspicions were freshly confirmed. "You match the descriptions of possible witnesses to the sabotage of the Toshishima Imperium's headquarters. In fact, you're suspected of being the instigators of the terrorist attack. We will need to keep you in custody until Toshishima Bakufu Security comes to claim you." They were quickly surrounded at gunpoint by a dozen uniformed police.

"Can't you do anything? Zap 'em away or something?" Urd asked in a whisper as they were led to a holding cell.

"No. If I use my powers, it might cause problems...with the mortals and the Lord," Belldandy whispered back.

Moments later, they were conducted into a heavily-secured jail cell.

"What next?" Urd sighed as the barred door clanged shut.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

OITA, BUNGO PROVINCE, KYUSHU JAPAN - OCT 1381:

The horror of the burning bodies was a sight that Keiichi knew he would _never_ erase from his conscious memories. About a month ago, people started dying off in the nearby villages. Several of Lord Mori's senior advisors suggested that they cordon off Oita with as many troops as they could muster, to protect the central city from plague refugees.

Cevn had argued vehemently against this, noting that they "were leading people to the plague" by posting troops, which would only quicken the rate of infection. Of course, Keiichi knew what he was driving at...but trying to convince a 14th-century group of advisors about anything that resembled modern medical science was an exercise in futility.

So the troops were positioned...and soon the soldiers themselves feel ill to the disease. Ironically, the very advisor who had recommended the military quarantine of Oita was one of the first people in Keiichi's circle to be stricken with the disease.

The plague was horrible to behold. The first indications of being infected were several days of coughing, diarrhea and choking, accompanied by a high fever and bouts of sweating. Then, the coughing turned pneumonic; the sufferer would lose their breath and hack out gouts of blood and flesh. Finally, the disease shifted into a wasting...and rarely did anybody survive after two weeks of the consumptive phase of the disease. If they did, then the plague had run its course, but also had left them significantly weakened and susceptible to secondary infection.

Genji, Cevn, Tomohisa and he had engaged in several vigorous debates about how to protect themselves against possible infection. The plague vector seemed to indicate that it was apparently borne by insects and rodents, most probably carried by fleas. Genji was the first to conclude this, based on the pattern that those townspeople who lived near the grain warehouses in Oita were hit first...and hit hardest. Cevn reasoned that plasmodium disease variants often harbor in insect pests, because they could remain vigorous while infected. A disease that weakens its carriers immediately cannot spread itself effectively. And Keiichi discovered that the lifecycle of the infection was roughly three weeks.

So while almost all of their peers were viewing the plague in mythic and religious terms, Keiichi and his three companions were learning to view it as a _living thing_; an almost-conscious organism that had a capacity for self-preservation that was suggestive of any sentient species' survival instinct .

This sparked off another heated debate. Since there were survivors, it was possible that an immunity existed. A huge sprawling discussion of ethics ensued. Cevn felt like he was caught in a Faustian dilemma; having to pay the Devil to save people from the depredations of the infection. It was possible that they could develop some kind of immunization...but would this be tampering? Introducing a modern medical process, saving people's lives, saving their own lives, any of these could potentially have unforeseeable and devastating consequences in a future era. Thus, the four agreed not to do anything to prevent the spread of the disease.

A week later, they faced the full impact of their weighty decision...as Genji started coughing violently one day.

The plague had become their fifth roommate...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

BUTSUDANKYOJI ZEN TEMPLE - DEC 2050:

Abbess Sora had been pacing back and forth in the temple's computer center for a couple of hours, watching as forty nuns scanned the 3D meshes of the Goddesses against the thousands of surveillance cams in ­Tokyo. Drawing upon longago memories, she had whipped up some 3D AI meshes of the three. Following the clue given in the email, she had a hunch that they would locate them in Tokyo proper. She hated calling the city by its trendier nickname, Shin-kyo. By using the AI meshes, her intelligence network could search hundreds of vidlinks every minute. Under Sora's supervision, they had gotten really good at finding missing people.

"Abbess, we've located them!" one of the senior nuns said excitedly. "They are being held at a police station in Chiba, awaiting transfer to Toshishima Security!" Abbess Sora praised and thanked her, and then hustled through the grounds to Abbess Chihiro's quarters.

"We found them!" she said, rubbing her shaved head.

"Already? In just one day?" Abbess Chihiro stated in amazement. Finding people was hard enough, but finding Goddesses? She had assumed it would be much more difficult. As Sora repeated what the senior sister had told her, Chihiro realized that she had been circumspect in her estimation of the difficulty of the task. In the highly regimented society of 2050 Japan, three women without any visible IDs would stick out like a plotted cactus on the North Pole.

The two Abbesses role-played rescue scenarios in their discussions as they hastened to the computer center.

"Yes...that is most certainly them. We need to arrange for them to escape. We'll have to move quickly! Have a hovercar ready!" Abbess Sora ordered, after she confirmed the location. Abbess Chihiro accompanied her partway to the hovercar port, and then excused herself for a moment.

"My sister Abbess...don't you think we're a little too old to impersonate policewomen!" Abbess Chihiro asked, half-teasing her spiritual sister as she returned.

"Yes, and that's why I'm going as myself. They won't suspect the Abbess of Butsudankyoji Temple as a party to any rescue attempt. Isn't this exciting!" she answered.

"And _that_ is why I'm going with you! I could use a little excitement myself. Besides Megumi and Sayoko, the last really exciting event was Senior Sister Reinkyoai's promotion to Senior Roshi. Besides, two Abbesses are better than one. We can tell them that the temple had been vandalized."

"You think they'll believe that?"

"Long enough for us to use this audio immobilization grenade," Chihiro pointed out with a grin. Reaching inside her long clerical outer robe, she gestured as she pushed the grenade against the fold of her robe, emulating a bank robber with a concealed gun in his jacket.

Sora couldn't argue with_ that_ logic.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

OITA, BUNGO PROVINCE, KYUSHU JAPAN - OCT 1381:

Genji was the first to fall ill, and then Cevn, and finally Tomohisa.

It was a harrowing experience for each of them. There is the sense of facing a quick death, like getting in an accident on an expressway or at the end of a katana blade during combat. And then there was _this_. Like true warriors, they would face their fates squarely; ­freely admitting to their fears but realizing that the language of Death is subject to all emotions. Except fear. With a sense of gallows humor, the three men joked about their death poems...should they be profound, or ingloriously flippant?

Genji's illness worsened day by day. Keiichi realized that Genji's health was deteriorating much more rapidly than Tomohisa's and Cevn's. Several times last night, Genji had woken everyone up with a raving delirium brought on by his fever. The 'violent' symptom of the "coughing sweat violence" that was the common term for this infectious disease. Henceforth, Keiichi realized with a grim self-admission that his friend would probably die, and that his other two friends could follow. Lord Mori had sent one of his physicians to inquire upon Genji's condition; a genial man whose earnest concern about Genji's health was matched by his inability to treat him. Thus, the doctor engaged in as much quackery as he could to try and cast some optimism on the situation.

As the only fit member of the household, Keiichi sensed that he would need to lay in provisions and hope for the best over the next few weeks. If any of his friends recovered, it would be essential that they have plenty of food on hand to nourish them back to health. And if _he_ should take ill with the plague's infection...

Keiichi summoned several armed men to accompany him into town.

The social structure was quickly breaking down as the plague gained a foothold in Oita. Going to the warehouses was a risky business, as the town was filled with opportunist robbers who would risk everything to cut down a retainer of Lord Mori's. With courage buoyed by the looming possibility that they might take ill and be dead in a week, the common folk of the city were becoming more and more reckless. As for the rouges...they were banding together and committing all sorts of distasteful brigandry.

Keiichi walked to the grainhouse at the head of his personal guard, which only befit a senior retainer of Lord Mori's. Despite all the breakdowns, he still needed to maintain form and status; showing anything less would be shameful on him and his Lord. Thus, he and his men wore no visible armor. It would also assure the law-abiding citizens of the city to see a high ranking official confidently traveling the streets in midday with only swords.

Steadying against the shadow of death with a determined air, Keiichi kept his hand on his blade, projecting a steel-tough image. It had been almost ten years since he and the others had arrived in Ashikaga Japan. His time here had not been put to waste. Keiichi had studied martial arts for years in the service of Lord Mori, becoming even somewhat of an expert in archery and close quarters defenses against shinobi and other stealthy assassins. After six years of hard training, to his great surprise, the awareness settled in that he had actually _become a samurai_. More and more, his personality filled with self-confidence. His modern temperament of individuality had armed him as efficiently as the three swords tucked in his sash. Lord Mori had learned to rely on his presence in war councils, as Keiichi wasn't afraid to buck the tides of opinion...even to the point of criticizing Lord Mori himself!

_"Stop! Hand over all the wealth that you carry!"_

Keiichi narrowed his eyes. Holding his head motionless so as to not offer the impression of indecisiveness or panic, he scanned the street with his eyes. Just like he used to do when he raced at N.I.T., where he would flash his eyes on different objects in his room so as to build his visual acuity. But now, the stakes weren't simply the winning of a race...they were life-and-death!

Sixteen men in the next two alleys ahead, besides the four men who had emerged to challenge him. Blocking their way. Two more concealed on the roofs.

One of his guardsmen moved and Keiichi swept his hand downward in a chopping motion, signifying his subordinate to "remain still!" He listened, picking out the thicker clops of men's geta against the general trafficking of footstep sounds. There were probably another eight to ten men behind his group.

A woman's scream confirmed it.

They were four...he and his three guardsmen. The other members of his guards weren't able-bodied enough to accompany him. So the odds were eight-to-one, maybe even worse.

The men were a mixture of bumpkin bandits coupled with a few Oita gangsters and some young rowdies. Several of the wretched were already saddled with the illness. Keiichi felt a moment's empathy for them...some of them were probably trying to support their loved ones in the only way possible. Loved ones who were dying at home. It wasn't their fault.

The damned fucking sickness was doing this.

This was different than all the other fights and battles, because the enemy was invisible. Keiichi had fought in many skirmishes and swordfights, always against a visible enemy. The _foe_...to put it bluntly. But in this situation, he would have to fight and kill his own townsmen. Lord Mori's faithful subjects. Men whose survival instincts had been perverted by the plague.

Much as he wanted to detach from the necessary bloodshed that would follow...he couldn't. The damned sickness was causing this, robbing people of their humanity. Now he to set aside his own compassionate humanity, just to get a few grains of rice and some dried vegetables.

He flicked his katana partway out of its sheath and strode towards the four men standing about ten meters in front of his.

"STOP! Don't come closer. Throw out your moneypurses or w..we'll kill you!" the head gangster yelled.

Good. He had stuttered, tipping his fear to everyone.

The men on either side emerged from the alley as Keiichi walked towards the four men...who were now backing up. There would be no reasoning with them now; they had passed beyond the point of no return.

From the side!

"EEEIYAAAA!" a man screamed skitterishly as he raced at Keiichi, blade held aloft. Keiichi darted to the side, parrying his downward swing to the left. Taking off the man's right kneecap as he did so. On the pullback, Keiichi sliced upwards and opened the man's abdomen...not deep enough to kill, but hopefully enough to send a message. Perhaps his swordsmanship might convince them to value their lives and desist.

His attacker fell to the ground, writhing in pain. One of his guardsmen made to finish off the injured man, but Keiichi motioned him to spare the bloodied hoodlum. He was giving them one last chance to choose: survive or melee.

Unfortunately, his 'warning' didn't faze the group of attackers.

Keiichi knew that he would have to not only protect his life, but the lives of the men guarding him. The paradox of having a personal guard was that the men who served under him were much younger and less skilled than he...several of them had wives and children...so he would have to 'protect' his protectors. Keiichi didn't believe in throwing bodies at his foes, like some of his peers. He believed in the superior path: the virtues of strategy.

He swung his large sword in a wide arc, testing the air.

Two of the large men in front charged him, swords high and low. He knew that the man with low sword was much more dangerous; as the hoodlum made for his calf, Keiichi stepped in to his opponent's arc and kicked his attacker's sword to the right. Using his momentum, he spun partway around his attacker and quickly sliced him across the back of the neck. A split second later, the other swordsman tried for Keiichi's neck. In a fluid motion, Keiichi dipped his blade tight to his chest and thrust up-outs towards the second attacker, skewering him in the throat while sidestepping a thrown dagger from one of the men on the side of the street...

Two attackers came from behind him just as Keiichi buried his dagger in the knife-thrower's forehead. Another man stepped in front of him.

Surrounded by three men, Keiichi slow-parried with his sword, keeping their encirclement at a distance while he judged the lengths of their weapons. One man had a cheap kitsunegasaki knock-off, probably 79cm, while the other two had better Okada-giris, roughly 70cm. Keiichi unsheathed his kanemitsu longsword. Popular belief in Modern Japan was that Musashi was the first "two-sword man", but that was utter nonsense. Musashi only _perfected_ the two sword system. But here in the 1380s, two sword fighting had a different bent...

As he slowly unsheathed his long tachi, the attackers took his occupation with pulling his second sword as a chance to exploit an opening.

"Amateurs," Keiichi said in modern Japanese. With his tachi partially unsheathed, he beheaded the first attacker with his left-hand katana, and then parried the second attacker's sword thrust with an arcing downward sweep. Slashing upwards in a U-shaped arc, he nailed the second man in the groin. As expected, he heard the approach of the third man from behind. Little did his third attacker know that Keiichi had set him up. In the psychological warfare of melee fighting, one had to approach combat with ­the attitude of a Go master. The man was almost on him when Keiichi unsheathed his long tachi and reverse-thrust his longblade directly backwards, as if he was reaching for his belt.

Impaling his attacker.

The extra 10 cm was the margin of error, as the wounded attacker's blade slapped harmlessly against Keiichi's back as his attacker fell to the ground.

"If Genji or Tomohisa were here, we'd have finished them off already," he thought sourly.

Already, one of his young guardsmen was in trouble, disarmed and slashed in the forearm by two of the bandits. Keiichi descended on the two hoodlums and quickly dispatched them.

Another four men charged Keiichi, and he made short work of them.

"Stop! Stop...or we'll _kill_ her!"

Keiichi turned in the direction of the shout just as a spearman made a thrust at his waist. Clipping the spear between his tachi and katana, Keiichi rode the spear to the ground, then side-kicked the spearman right square in the face, felling him.

Three men were standing next to a woman who was unfortunate enough to be too close to the melee. She was holding the hand of her daughter, who was crying in sheer terror. One of the men had a shortknife pressed hard against her throat.

A young mother, taken as a random hostage by these thugs!

She was 23-25...Belldandy's age. Her daughter must have been all of five years old.

"If you value the life of this innocent woman, you'll throw us your moneypurses!" the man shouted.

There were eight men left, the three near the hostage women, plus two spearman and three swordsman.

Keiichi regretted that his short dagger was indisposed. He _had_ to fell the dagger thrower as soon as the man had emerged from cover and threw his first knife at him. Otherwise the daggerman would have picked off Keiichi's men one-by-one.

But now he didn't have the luxury of a throwing knife.

Instinctively, he ground his heel into the earth...and heard the tell-tale crackle he was hoping for...

Attacking a senior official of Lord Mori was a treasonous offense. Endangering Keiichi and his guards as they were traveling to procure supplies that could save the lives of his three closest friends; this made the attack a personal offense. But taking an innocent young woman hostage and threatening to slit her throat in front of her daughter...was an unforgivable offense.

Keiichi gripped and ungripped the hilt of his katana as he slowly lowered his tachi...

There would only be one chance. An innocent's life was in the balance. The sickness had already killed enough people...Keiichi wasn't going to allow a murderous scoundrel to add to the tragic toll!

He walked closer until he was only a few meters away from the three men.

With a sudden flick, he used the tip of his long tachi to fling a few pebbles and some dust at the eyes of the man who was holding the knife to the woman's throat.

His aim was true, as it fazed the man just for a split-second...the split second Keiichi needed to _throw_ his katana.

Faster than an eyeblink, the knife hand of the thug was skewered through. A few cm to the left and his thrown blade would have sliced the woman's jugular. All those archery lessons had paid off by sharpening his perception of the direct path between his eye and its target.

The man on the left reached down to grab the dropped knife that was formerly pressed against the white throat of the woman. Keiichi noticed that she was ducking into a crouch to protect her daughter.

Perfect.

He swung his tachi and beheaded the man standing on right. The man on the left stood up and readied a throw. Keiichi removed his arm right behind the elbow with a sweeping arc, made possible by the crouching young woman who had moved herself out of harm's way. She had more than earned his protection by putting her daughter's life ahead of her own; a movement of virtue against the debasement of current times. A powerful reminder that all was not lost to the wasting sickness.

Two men were running up behind him...

Keiichi kicked the woman to the side as he stepped behind the dazed man whose hand tainted his katana. As the first swordsman swung downwards, Keiichi swiveled and pushed the dazed man in front of him. It was pretty much a Jet Li sort of move, using the dazed man as a shield. But it bought him two seconds, as the two men hesitated briefly when they realized that they had just killed one of their number.

Keiichi finished both men within those two seconds.

Looking at his guards, he saw that they had dispatched the remaining men.

Immediately, he softened his face and regarded the woman and her little girl. She was crying, with a confused expression on her face. Normally, Keiichi's first action after a melee would be to recover his blades, but instead he remembered the examples of compassion...

"My lady, are you unharmed?" he asked as he crouched down to comfort the young woman.

"M..my Lord! H..he tried to _kill_ me! You saved my life!" was all that she could say. Keiichi spent a few minutes comforting her and her daughter.

"For you and your daughter, with my sincere apologies. You were caught up on my behalf in affairs not your own...I am sorry that you were inconvenienced," he said as he reached in his purse and gave her a generous boon of coins and sent her on her way.

It's what Belldandy would have done...

As he stood up and surveyed the bodies, Keiichi once more had to face the fact that he was a changed man. Ten years. He had killed again, only this time in self-defense. In the protection of innocent worthies.

24 years of his life had been spent in another world. A world whose magical qualities were only mercurial. He had become the Impossible Warrior during these ten years. And yet, with each swordfight and battle skirmish, Keiichi always ended up having to challenge himself. In his mind, each act of violence only further separated him from the Belldandy. Separated his _now_ from his memories of her. Of her gentleness and wisdom.

And as always, he heard her voice. He had been separated from her by so much life...he wasn't even sure if it was her voice, or just a voice in his head that merely resembled what he thought she sounded like. Keiichi had become fond of that voice over the years, as it was sometimes the single point of sanity this violent, rustic world. On a tragic day like today...with the sickness reaping lives all around him, his best friends dying before his eyes, and dead men on his conscience once again...it was the _sole _thing that kept him going. This time, as with all the other times, the voice encouraged him for protecting himself and others, even to the point of killing. It made the pain less poignant.

_"Keiichi...well done! Always remember that I love you! _-Live-_ for me...stay alive for me, my dear Keiichi! Keep yourself alive by any means necessary; for each day you survive, you survive towards that inevitable day when I will come back into your life! So _-live-_, my beloved!"_

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

CHIBA WARD, SHIN-KYO, JAPAN - DEC 2050:

"May we help you, your...what _do_ I call you?" the policeman asked, unnerved at the sight of two richly robed nuns in his station.

"'Your reverence' would suffice," Abbess Sora answered politely, with just a hint of terseness. "We have been experiencing a bit of trouble at our temple. Some unsavory young men have been vandalizing the property and stealing from our buildings."

"That kind of thing happens all the time, ma'am."

"Yes...but _this_ is different from 'all the time'! You are aware that our temple maintains close ties with the Toshishima Imperium, as well as serving as a focal point for Zen practice in Tokyo, if not all of Japan? Our temple is the mother temple to a world-wide Buddhist teaching called Mahamahayana, which makes it, well, a world-class spiritual institution. We have a large contingent of important government officials who are adherents to our temple, attending our sesshin, the semi-annual week-long training we hold. It would be remiss for you to fail in your obligation to protect us. Several highly placed government officials would frown upon a police district that cannot be bothered to the aid of a humble cloister of nuns," Abbess Chihiro stated emphatically. The whole part of affiliation with Toshishima was a bald lie, as the only link was Sora's marriage to Aoshima in her 'former' life. A bald lie, given by a bald Abbess, she noted with brief humor.

"I'm sorry, this young man probably doesn't know who we are. I'm Abbess Sanko and this is Abbess Doenju of the Butsudankyoji Temple," Abbess Sora said, using her and Abbess Chihiro's religious names. She looked at desk policeman severely, noting the conflict between his fear and the bravado-inspired face of nonchalance he preferred to exhibit to the public.

"I'll see what I can do about it," he grumbled, reluctantly intimidated by the two elderly nuns. He walked back to a rear office area and consulted with several of his peers.

Unnoticed, the two put on electronic earfilters, and then slipped on two headgears with microphones. Abbess Chihiro pulled out a sonic grenade and nodded to Abbess Sora. She tossed it over the counter and watched in silence as all the policemen within earshot put their hands to their ears. Protected by the earfilters, the two abbesses casually walked past them and studied the computer.

"This should be simple," Abbess Chihiro said into her mike as she placed a minichip onto the pad and typed a deencryption command. True to her word, the transparent walldoor to the Goddesses' cell opened up a few seconds later.

"Two rescues in as many days. Am I getting sprightly in my autumn years or what?" Abbess Sora said cheerfully as she put on her reading glasses. She wanted to be sure that she could see the Goddesses.

Indeed, the Goddesses were just as she remembered them. Of course, they were unaffected by the sonic burst that had immobilized the policeman...but they may have felt the initial blare of high-frequency high-decibel sound before they had a chance to react. Abbess Sora reminded herself to apologize to them when they reached the temple.

"So even Goddesses can be surprised, neh?" Abbess Chihiro commented, amused by the looks of surprise on all three Goddess's faces as they recognized she and Abbess Sora.

Chihiro and Sora motioned for the Goddesses and Ninjettes to come out of their cell. Walking past the writhing policemen and guards, they quickly exited the building. The late night pedestrians avoided the group, wanting nothing to do with a group of women and two elderly clerics running out of a police station. The limousine which served as the abbess's hovercar was waiting on the third story ledge, above the glass shield that covered the street. They climbed several flights of stairs until they reached the covered landing. Abbess Sora summoned the hovercar from where it was parked with a few pushes of her remote.

"Come on in, we've been expecting you," she said quietly, somewhat humbled to be in the presence of the Three Norns again.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

OITA, BUNGO PROVINCE, KYUSHU JAPAN - MAY 1384:

It had been a long 13 years in the service of the Lord. Tomohisa had grown up into a fine samurai, well educated and an expert archer. Lord Mori had pretty much adopted him as a son, impressed by his all-around martial prowess. It was hard to believe that Tomohisa would turn thirty next year. In the third year of living in the past, I was able to drop the deaf-mute act and speak freely. Genji survived his brush with death with the plague three years ago; as did we all. He and Keiichi had been steadily promoted ­over the years, becoming as respected by Lord Mori as his elder advisors. I was the resident artisan, serving as arbiter for poetry and dramatic performances. My hair and beard had gradually become peppered with gray...I would turn 42 this year.

The 21st century would never come to us.

Lords Mori and Shimazu were loyal to the Shogun, but disliked the policies of the Deputy Shogun, Imagawa. Both were torn between loyalty to the nearby Southern Court and their obligations to Kyoto. At first, their armies swelled with defectors from the neighboring Shibuya forces, as the Shibuya were aligned with the Southern Court. But in 1375, the Shogun unexpectedly shifted his support to the Shibuya Clan instead of the Shimazu-Mori alliance. In effect, the Shibuya were legitimized, while we were politically ostracized.

This only brought forth bitterness from both spurned daimyo. Enbravened by this, Shibuya obtained military support from Imagawa by gradual degrees and systematically overran Lord Mori's lands to the north, forcing all of us to relocate south to Hyuga. We knew that Imagawa was bringing more troops from Honshu...it was only a matter of time until an all-out assault would occur.

We had watched over past several years as our forces in Kyushu, already weakened by the "coughing sweat violence" plague, were overrun with strike forces from the Northern Court, determined to completely crush the Southern Court. We learned that the sickness that had decimated our numbers had never really traveled far into Honshu.

In spring 1384, 13 years after our arrival, the forces of the Shibuya, bolstered by Imagawa's troops, began their southward sweep towards Miyasaki. Increasingly, the old ideals of valor and chivalry had been discarded in the past years. Loyalties were suspect, and the calling of pedigrees between opponents was ignored. Honorable formal combat was replaced by subterfuge and ninja tactics.

Several pitched battles in the plainslands had resulted in total defeat for the Mori-Shimazu forces. It wasn't our fault...we were overwhelmed by constant battles with superior forces. Having wiped out most of our armies, we had no choice but to retreat to the protection of Lord Shimazu's castle in Miyasaki. To his credit and honor, Lord Shimazu had kept his alliance with our forces until the very end. Which only made our final task easier.

Shibuya and Imagawa besieged the castle with their forces. Every day, Imagawa's armies tried to scale the walls and take the castle. Each time it became more difficult to repulse them. We were running out of men...we barely had enough samurai to man the ramparts. Everyone sensed that this was a doomed struggle. The last attempt to surmount the castle walls had nearly succeeded. In the face of this, Keiichi and Genji had been preparing the war chariot as a means of escape for both Lord Mori and Shimazu.

I felt a heavy weight of sadness in my heart. The last few years, I had been troubled by a gradually mounting tragic sentiment. Our foundation of hopes was crumbling like sand buffeted by wind and rain. I knew that history would obscure the fact that Mori and Shimazu had allied themselves admirably. After all, it didn't even know about the plague of 1381...at least in all the textbooks I had read back in my former life. The plague had probably been censored out of the official histories so that the North's conquest of the Southern Court would seem all the more valorous.

My former life...

"After both Lords had put aside their pride and united their forces...that it would come to this?" I cried to myself. We were on the edge of decimation.

Our food was running out.

We watched hungrily as Imagawa's troops received cartloads of food and provisions every day. We were sustaining ourselves by eating gruel consisting of boiled grasses, weeds and millet. Just enough to have the sensation of something going down the throat.

I finally knew beyond doubt what the strength of loyalty to an ideal was all about.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

CHIBA WARD, SHIN-KYO, JAPAN - DEC 2050:

Belldandy had just been rescued from an involuntary confinement yesterday, and today she was back in an Earthrealm jail. Hikari and Senrigan immediately offered to free them, but she told them to be patient. She wanted to make sure they were safe when the Lord came after her. She owed them much more than this, but she could only do so much...

Despite her fears of a reprisal from the Lord, she decided to go ahead and try to locate the others using her Goddess senses. Her Norn's instinct informed her that they weren't_ here_ in this future time, but she had to know for sure. The longer she could avoid using her powers, the better. Inevitably, the Lord would contact her nd recall her to Yggdrasil. She attributed His delay to the disappointment He must feel that one of his Goddess daughters had actually committed such a heinous act. They would come and get her, and then she would be examined in the matter of the deaths of thousands of Earthrealm mortals when she had incinerated the upper half of Aoshima's headquarters, as well as her role in Tyrr's death.

After all, she had killed a God yesterday.

Suddenly, everything became noise. After a split-second of sheer audio cacophony, Belldandy adjusted her hearing to filter out the painful sledge of sound. She knew in an instant who their rescuers were. It had been a gamble, refraining from using her Goddess powers. But she was concerned that any more spells or magicks would draw unwanted attention to her and her sisters from the Lord. Urd and Skuld both understood why she kept from using her powers to effect an escape. Belldandy was deathly afraid that the Almighty_ already_ knew and was just waiting for the proper moment to call her on the carpet. A heavily-guarded jail cell was definitely not the place or time for that.

Her thoughts ground to a halt as she saw the two aged women, dressed in nun's vestments. Both wore light gray robes with a darker gray over-robe with flared sleeves. Even with their cowls pulled over their heads, their faces were familiar. But despite her foreknowledge of who her rescuers were, Belldandy was still momentarily stunned when she first beheld her old friends.

Her _old _friends.

She was relieved to see Sora and Chihiro again. Smiling at them, she followed their lead. Belldandy would have never thought in her wildest imaginings that these two women would become _nuns_. In this future world filled with a miasma of evil, ignorance, and darkness...seeing the two of them in their improbable roles gave her a sense of hope. Even in the worse, they had accomplished the best.

Soon they were in some kind of craft that resembled a large car, which hovered above a glass shield that protected the street-level pedestrians from the elements. Skuld was all eyes as they boarded the car. Belldandy could tell that her younger sister's engineering ken was excited into hyperdrive by the hovercar's console...she was probably engrossed in figuring out its dynamics and systems right about now.

The hovercar ascended ten stories, and then merged into a 'lane' of hovercars.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Abbess Chihiro turned to look at the three Norns while Abbess Sora drove. It was amazing! They were _really_ here, in the hovercar with she and Sora! During the morning meditation, chant and teaching session in the zendo, both abbesses had patiently explained to the Sisterhood that the three Goddesses they were seeking after were manifestations of a compassionate Buddha-nature, despite their Nordic names. Not that their existence had been kept secret...Chihiro had painted a scroll modeled after Sora's faded photos, depicting all three Goddesses. It hung in the entrance foyer of the temple's scriptorium library.

They were really here. And not only three Goddesses...there were two little fairy girls dressed in ninja outfits. Abbess Chihiro seemed to remember something about a trio of personal guards who protected Keiichi's home. But these two fairy girls looked like chibi versions of the anime characters she used to enjoy in her childhood. They appeared harmless, but they also were quite alert.

And after all these years, she didn't know what to say. She looked at Abbess Sora, who was driving the hovercar with a look of excited confusion on her face. She could have used the autoplotter to drive, but Abbess Sora had her quirks...she liked to actually drive once and again.

"Do you have ice cream where we're going?" Skuld asked. Her simple question broke the awkwardness of the moment.

"For you...of course," Abbess Chihiro answered with a smile.

"Are you really Chihiro and Sora?" Urd asked. "I mean...there is so much about this time and place that is _massively_ screwed up; the least of which being how we got here."

"Yes, to your first question. As for the second, we keenly hope that we can be of assistance to help you determine how you returned to us," Sora replied.

"You have both aged so well. I would have never ventured to guess that you would turn to the spiritual life with such enthusiasm so soon in your lives. But...I can sense a strong divine presence in both of you. You may not be able to notice it like we do...but you both radiate an intensity of spiritual beauty and goodness," Belldandy said.

Abbess Chihiro didn't know how to take _that_. She, along with Abbess Sora, had become accustomed to wearing the mantle of spiritual leadership. They were spiritual mothers to a whole community of Zen practitioners, and cofounders of the New Teaching that millions of Buddhists were now aspiring towards in their search for their own Paths. Now, she was being assessed by a Goddess who was immeasurably beyond her as far spiritual awareness was concerned. Yet, she felt a secret thrill of being recognized for what she was...an awakened spiritual being.

"Yes. I can tell that you both have undergone many trials of life to experience the spiritual maturation that you now possess. You have both become _harmless_, which is perhaps the most highly evolved state a mortal can achieve," Belldandy said softly.

Abbess Sora snickered in a very un-Abbess-like manner at the irony of Belldandy's statement. Harmless, they weren't! Just ask a few dozen policemen at a Chiba jail a few moments in the past about that one! Then she smiled, recognizing Belldandy's statement for what it really meant.

Of course, she and Abbess Chihiro were harmless...because they practiced the tenets of the Truth...

Soon, they arrived at the temple dome, crowded in on all sides by cityblock skyscrapers. Abbess Sora pulled up over the hoverpad on the roof of one of the storage buildings, and then parked the hovercar.

"Well, this is it," Sora and Chihiro said in unison. After three decades of living together in this temple, they could almost respond with one mind to the many daily secular and spiritual matters.

"I am...impressed!" Urd said.

"Waaah!! You guys are using a holographic imaging dome! What kind of holophotic resolution are you imaging?" Skuld asked. Abbess Chihiro smiled maternally as the youngest Goddess rattled off a series of technical questions, which Abbess Sora fielded with enthusiasm. It was just like old times, back in her youth.

Soon, they were encircled by a crowd of onlookers. Nuns dressed in the simple dark gray robes of novices stood shoulder to shoulder with the light gray and blue robed senior nuns. Abbess Chihiro suddenly was concerned that this was going to be a scene at any moment, so she hustled the Goddesses off to her study without as much as a word. She regretted not telling the others, but she wasn't exactly prepared to mediate the fact that _divinities_ were gracing their presence. But she knew deep in her soul that the sisters had been attracted to the Goddesses like moths to a flame. This was immensely satisfying to her...as it was one more confirmation of the strong spiritual resonance of the Sisterhood.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

BUTSUDANKYOJI ZEN TEMPLE - DEC 2050:

"May I fetch you all some tea?" Abbess Sora offered. Belldandy nodded, and Abbess Sora left the study. A moment later, Abbess Chihiro could hear hushed whispers in the hallway. Several sisters were probably a bit in shock to see their own Abbess fetching tea for their guests. Most of them didn't connect this morning's Dharma lecture with the presence of their guests.

Abbess Sora soon returned with freshly brewed tea. Abbess Chihiro could tell by the aroma that it was the tea reserved for the sozarei, the special times when the entire community of nuns would come together and drink tea as one. She smiled at Abbess Sora's choice of tea and Sora nodded at her in acknowledgment.

"Where's my ice cream? And why are you bald?" Skuld asked. Abbess Chihiro had to suppress a brief flash of irritation at young Goddess's brashness. Having lived in austere dignity since she took her vows, she was unused to the impulsiveness of children. It was a Zen-like paradox...that this young Goddess would behave like a hyperactive human girl while possessing powers unheard of by mortals.

Divinity _and_ fragility.

"We'll bring you your ice cream shortly. We...haven't had the need to keep any ice cream here. It's not what we normally eat. We'll have to make it," Abbess Sora explained.

"Goodie, goodie! Fresh ice cream!"

"You brat! Don't act so important! Don't you know what this is? This is a Zen temple filled with nuns! They don't have ice cream here. And they don't allow girls in the temple either! So...mind your manners, Skuld," Urd scolded Skuld, lightly thumping her on the back of her head to accent her point.

"Now...now, we don't want you to feel inconvenienced now that you are guests of the temple," Abbess Sora interrupted, sensing that an argument was brewing between Skuld and Urd. It was just as before...Belldandy being the serene one while her two sisters seemed to endlessly antagonize each other.

"Can I check out your computer?" Skuld asked as she walked towards the laptop. Before anyone could answer, she was behind Abbess Chihiro's desk, reading the words on the screen.

"Hey, this message is for us, you guys! From the Lord. It says, 'THE MORTALS HAVE FAILED THE PROBATIONARY PERIOD.' What do you think that means?" Skuld said aloud.

Abbess Chihiro felt a chill as both Belldandy and Urd gasped, dropping their teacups in mid-sip. Their faces were momentarily frozen...with shock.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

OITA, BUNGO PROVINCE, KYUSHU JAPAN - AUG 1384:

We hadn't eaten in days. Weak from hunger, we slept during most of the day. It was apparent that Imagawa and Shibuya were biding their time, letting starvation drain strength from their enemy. It made good sense from a military standpoint. This way, they wouldn't lose as many men during the final assault.

For many weeks, we had been living with the certain knowledge that our situation was hopeless. As Genji and Keiichi and Tomohisa and I sat in the dawning sun, we realized that the only thing we could hope for was the successful escape of both Lords. In _our_ history, both daimyo had lived full lives; their clans continuing on for generations.

But in this history...it looked like they might perish in battle. If they died, then Keiichi and Genji would never exist seven centuries hence. I could tell by the expressions on both of their faces that this fact weighed heavily on them.

There was an increase in noisy activity down below outside the castle, which could only mean that we were going to face a final assault sometime today.

"This is it. We have instructed Lord Mori on how to use the war chariot. They can drive it to a mountain stronghold near Nagasaki. There is gold concealed in the chassis frame and a passage to Korea. Once the Southern Court surrenders in 1392, they can emerge from hiding and swear loyalty to the Ashikaga," Genji stated.

"And I swore both Lords on the honor of their ancestors that they would bury the war chariot in a cave, never to be used again," Keiichi said.

"You guys...it's been an honor serving Lord Mori with you," Tomohisa said, his voice filled with emotion. "All we need to do now is ensure that the war chariot gets out the front gate and past Imagawa's forces."

We reflected silently on this last task. Despite living most of our years in the future, we had come to realize that this way of life, despite its shortcomings, had its positive attributes as well. It had become our _truth_. There was a certain strangeness in living life when one knows how the future unfolds; the historical fixedness of what is to come. Despite the sureness of predestination, we were going to struggle against it. Within a year, the castles we had lived in would be razed to the ground...

Our final sacrifice on behalf of our Lord would never be noticed in the annals of history...it wouldn't even merit a footnote. But it meant something to _us_. I wondered if Belldandy, Urd and Skuld would someday learn of our lives here. I imagined that they would be proud of us, despite the sad circumstance of our lot. I didn't want to think of the emotional pain our deaths would cause them to feel.

With a load roaring shout to announce their intentions, the sounds of numerous scaling ladders crashed against the walls of the castle.

It had begun.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

The attackers quickly broached the ramparts of the castle and pressed the remaining samurai from all sides. Keiichi watched keenly as they were crowded ever closer to the war chariot. He had planned for this 'collapsing offense'; as our enemies' circle tightened around the remaining defenders of the castle, they would be vulnerable to the straight-ahead escape route planned for the war chariot.

One of the simplest military strategies in the book...counter a circular motion with a straight one.

Keiichi watched as Tomohisa was felled by an arrow, then stood up and continued to fight as if nothing happened. He watched as Genji fought off five men with a long spear, buying them time. He watched as Cevn used his spear, stump hand and all, to ward off their attackers.

Then Cevn and Tomohisa were overcome and perished.

"It will be my turn too, soon, my love. With my last breath, I will pledge my eternal love to you, Belldandy," he said to himself. "It has been a good life."

Suddenly, with a burst of desperate insanity, an idea formed in Keiichi's mind.

"Genji...hold them for another minute! Do _anything_ to hold them!" he yelled. Pulling his shortsword out, he began carving on the chassis of the war chariot with the point of his sword. He could hear the sounds of screaming, dying men all around them. Just...another...minute...

He finished his etching. Turning around, he saw Genji fighting on, wounded severely...but fighting on.

Keiichi stood up and kicked the jumpstart lever.

"_GOOOOoooo!_" he shouted to the two Lords in the war chariot. With a burst of forward motion, it mowed past several lines of attackers.

He looked frantically around him, and then saw Genji fall underneath a host of Imagawa's men. A half-dozen samurai turned towards him and swarmed him.

"Belldandy, my love! I'm sorry that I couldn't keep my promise to you...to keep myself alive and _live_!" Keiichi shouted as he fought his last battle.

As he perished, Keiichi's last thought was of Belldandy's smile.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

_"Keiiiiiichi!!"_

Belldandy sat upright in her bed, her heart feeling like it was going to rip itself out of her chest

"Keiichi!!" she shouted to the voidless night.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

BUTSUDANKYOJI ZEN TEMPLE - DEC 2050:

Urd had been struggling to console Bell all night. Her younger sister kept imagining that she _knew_ Keiichi was dead! It seemed impossible, as they had no idea where or _when_ he was...

But Urd was too troubled to speak of her own sense of loss, for she too had been jolted out of a sound sleep, strongly sensing the death of a loved one.

Her sister and Keiichi shared a love that was far beyond mere affection. They were truly joined at the soul in some invisible way. Could it be true that she 'felt' the death of her beloved Keiichi? It was a really weak premise...but it could be true.

"And if it is true that Bell felt Keiichi die, could it be true that what _I_ felt...was Cevn's death?" Urd wondered.

The news last night had been equally shattering. Kami-sama had declared that the mortals had failed their probation. Belldandy had decided to call Him tomorrow and try to convince Him to change His mind.

"As if _that_ will ever happen," Urd said to herself, looking at Bell's sleeping form.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

The next morning, Abbesses Sora and Chihiro invited the Goddesses to the main meditation hall. In front of the assembled Sisters and Zen students. They explained that the three women were divinities who had come to save the world in the latter days of Mappa. Many reacted with outrageous disbelief at the claims made by the Abbesses...claims that ran explicitly counter to everything Zen Buddhism stood for. But a sizeable number of their Dharma daughters and sons took the news calmly, because they had grasped the essence of the New Teaching.

_Void is a Not. _Everything Zen Buddhism stood for was now within the Void. And it no longer existed, was no longer relevant in the old Way. But yet, there was Zen and Truth and Light after piercing the Void. There _always _was, which made the New Teaching so valuable and beautiful to those who had been Awakened to it.

Sora and Chihiro were seated on tall ornate wooden chairs, the same chairs they used for the convent's quarterly Dharma Combat Ceremonies. Each was dressed in the full regalia of their station as Abbesses. Both wore an elaborate peaked headdress embroidered with selections from the various sutras of the Buddhist canon, which fell over their shoulders and down their backs in a manner reminiscent of long hair. Their vestments were impressive; golden laced black robes replete with embroidered Buddhist symbols. In front of each Abbess was a small cloth covered table with a sutra book. Reinkyoai and her three sister Senior Roshis flanked them on each side, two to each side, resplendent in their rich deep-red robes of authority. Reinkyoai, ever the rebel, had chosen to ignore protocol by wearing her normal robe of authority, rather than the ceremonial robe. Chihiro felt an inner smile at this; her Dharma sister Sora disliked such pomp as well. She herself had resigned herself to the fact that such displays were traditional part of the life of a convent Abbess. _Someone_ had to evoke a sense of awe in the novices once in a while.

Now she herself felt like a novice.

Underneath and in front of the two Abbesses sat the three Goddesses in formal lotus positions. This made Abbess Chihiro feel uncomfortable, as the Goddesses were sitting _below_ her and Sora and their Senior Roshis. Almost 8500 women were in attendance, almost the full complement of nuns, plus another 1500 students from the Nun's College and the co-ed Doctrinal University. An exception had been made in this instance to allow monks into the Great Zendo hall.

They had promised to put on a show for the Sisterhood.

Waving her hands, Bell and her sisters rose in the air, levitating several meters above the wooden floor. At that moment, a hundred or so birds flew into the zendo and formed a moving circle in the air above them. Golden and blue sparkles of light illuminated the large hall, like floating candles and stars.

"«_Bell...aren't you overdoing it a bit?»_" Urd whispered a thoughtcast to her sister.

"«_Urd, these women and men have gathered here for the purpose of becoming awakened spiritually...a noble goal in any age. In this modern age, it is even more remarkable. As we –_are- _here, why should we try to conceal what our true nature is from those who seek us? _-These-_ are the mortals that will move humankind forward towards the Next Level. They honor us with their presence.»_"

"«_Well, since you put it that way...who am I to say that we should deny these seekers a glimpse of the Divine?»_" Urd said, smiling as she realized the compassionate nature of Belldandy's actions.

_"«Yeah!! I say, let's pour it on for them!»"_ Skuld agreed enthusiastically.

With a flourish, the three Goddesses summoned their angelic forms to appear, which filled the zendo with gasps of appreciation and delight. Their Angels began to sing a hymn so filled with joy and love, it made the visual fireworks seem unimpressive. Finally, the three Goddesses turned into bright outlines of energy as they revealed one of their Divine aspects, an aspect which would be most meaningful to a group of Buddhists. Three lightglow manifestations of the Kannon of Infinite Mercy and Compassion brought a total silence of reverence to the Great Hall zendo. Returning to their human forms, they waved their hands in a circle, manifesteding soft shimmering halos around each nun and monk. This brought a further measure of delight to their audience. Finally, they floated back down to their meditation cushions and bowed respectfully.

Abbess Sora and Abbess Chihiro had sat in rapturous attention through the whole manifestation. Any doubts that there were Buddhas in this universe were dispelled by the Goddesses' display of gentle power. There was the path of gradual enlightenment...and the path of sudden enlightenment.

_This_ was sudden enlightenment!

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --


	41. Pt 41: Unspun

**Part 41: Unspun**

BUTSUDANKYOJI ZEN TEMPLE - DEC 2050:

"Isn't there a way you guys can make it right?" Abbess Sora asked. "Can't you find Keiichi and the others?"

"As if _that's_ the worst of it," Belldandy thought glumly. She was certain that the threadline of love between her and Keiichi had been severed on his end, which could only mean that he was dead. There would be no finding Keiichi. There would be no making it right. She felt so crippled inside, she no longer knew what was right or wrong.

She wanted desperately to tell the two Abbesses about her premonition or sensing of Keiichi's death. _She_ needed comforting now; she needed to receive because she didn't feel that she had any more of herself to give. Despite the newness of it all, Belldandy felt an immediate trust for Abbess Sora and Abbess Chihiro. Perhaps they could say the words to sooth away part of her self-agonizing...

"Skuld, why don't you ask if you can get on Abbess Sora and Chihiro's computer network and start searching for Keiichi. Look _everywhere_ for them! Past and present historical records. They couldn't have just disappeared!" Belldandy urged, wanting to keep her younger sister occupied. Skuld's hyperness level was approaching the roof of the sky, as she was used to action rather than the contemplative environment of a convent.

"Well..duh! I _know_ that, sis! But it would take me at least a month to search all of the Earthrealm's knowledge bases using these retarded computers. Couldn't I speed them up a bit? Please?" the youngest Goddess asked, hands on her hips. Abbess Chihiro reacted to her pleading with the matronly mirthful admiration she usually reserved for the rawest of novice nuns, and nodded her head.

"Yahoooo!! I could speed up their mainframe a thousandfold by tomorrow...then I could really do a good search!" Skuld promised with a twinkle in her eye.

"Good," Belldandy thought to herself. "Skuld is undertaking this like a challenge...which would keep her mind engaged so she isn't too caught up in what's wrong with me." She felt relieved...until Urd opened her mouth.

"Yeah...anything for an excuse to take something apart, huh?" Urd teased.

"Oh yeah? Let's see you do better, Big Sister!" Skuld groused.

"Who's the Sysop and who's the Earthrealm Trainee in this room?" Urd shot back. "I was Sysoping while you were still in..."

"My aptitude for engineering computers is so far beyond your..."

Sensing that a prolonged argument could ensue, Abbess Sora excused herself and swiftly led Skuld away to the computer network room in the scriptorium basement. The last thing the temple needed was two Goddesses bickering in such a way as to totally devour the pious image they were _supposed_ to represent. 

Abbess Chihiro was grateful for the fact that, of the three, Belldandy was at least demure in her demeanor. Urd and Skuld were behaving like spoiled teenagers at times.

Belldandy was comforted by her sister's bickering; a sign that there was a status quo at work in her life. The last few days were the worst days of her life, for she had lost the constant love of her life and the constant goal of her life, within hours of each other.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Belldandy braced herself for the coming phone call she had to make to Kami-sama. Strange...a couple of days ago, she was adamant about refraining from using her powers; as a measure to avoid detection by Him. Now she was going to contact him personally and try to convince Him to spare the mortals.

"Abbess Sora? Is there a place that's private where Urd and I can make a phone call?" Abbess Sora looked at her and raised an eyebrow, surprised by Belldandy's request for a phone.

"Belldandy, we don't have phones anymore. Phones went out the way of the dinosaurs in the 2010s. You can use my videx. It's in my office, so no one will disturb you there," she offered. Belldandy smiled at her while feeling a slight awkwardness in face of the changes in this world.

Belldandy took a deep breath. The videx was a handheld device that sat in a station like a traditional phone. It looked out of place in the traditional trappings of Abbess Sora's office. Abbess Sora explained that the handset would broadcast to the station, which was actually a holograph projector. Once the videx handheld was connected, the image of the person called would appear above the videx station. Belldandy thought it was bad enough to hear His stern voice over the telephone, but now she might have to see His face as well.

With a throat-clearing gulp to anchor herself against the whirlpool of dread accumulating in her stomach, she dialed the Goddess Hotline number and punched in the extension to Kami-sama. Silently, she hoped that He wouldn't answer...but then she heard the 'click'.

_"It is I,"_ He answered.

"M..my Lord," was all that Belldandy could say. She watched as His dignified visage appeared in a holoscreen above the videx. His face immediately gathered into an angry mien.

_"Belldandy, Norn of the Present. I expected as much. You have displeased Me immensely. Our disappointment is profound,"_ He announced with a torrid dudgeon.

"But..."

_"Do not thresh words with Me. You lost the 'Test Mortal' over 40 earth years ago! This is an extreme case of failing in your assignment to provide relief by fulfilling his wish. Not only that, but shortly afterwards you __vanish__ along with both your sisters. For forty years, you failed to report in to the Goddess Relief Office. All of Yggdrasil was caught off guard by your disappearance. Your parents were deeply worried. Naturally, in your absence, the 'Test Mortal' monitoring project had to be suspended for lack of viable candidate Earthrealm mortals. As you know, this was an integral part of the evaluative process concerning the Earthrealm mortal's probation. As a result of your irresponsibility, the Assembly was denied the opportunity to observe how a mortal responds to the presence of a Goddess in his life. Then, suddenly you reappear without explanation. Immediately after killing Tyyr and eleven thousand mortals."_

"My Lord, I don't understand why we all..." Belldandy pleaded, falling to her knees in a gesture of submission and respect, holding one of her hands over her head.

_"Silence! Killing a fellow God is one of our gravest offenses. I cannot fathom why you allowed your contentiousness towards Tyyr to gather to such an extreme...that you struck him down in a final act of retribution. All of Yggdrasil is shocked by his death. I'm expecting a call any time from the Dark Lord demanding an explanation as to why one of His Demons died. You know how much I despise any and all contact with Oni-sama when the appearance is cast that I or Yggdrasil is at fault,"_ the Lord exclaimed ruefully.

"My Lord...Tyyr had a SoulGun. It exploded when I tried to..."

_"A SoulGun? Hmph! Enough excuses! I will not be lied to. You know very well that a SoulGun cannot be used without My express permission. The very idea that someone smuggled a SoulGun to the Earthrealm...is an insult to Me and ludicrous beyond the pale,"_He angrily confronted Belldandy.

_"You will return to Yggdrasil after the Earthrealm is depopulated."_

"D..depopulated??" Belldandy said in shock. The Almighty was describing the coming destruction with an almost clinical detachment. He also seemed to forget that Tyyr had smuggled a SoulGun to the Earthrealm during her omiai ordeal.

"How could He forget?" she wondered.

_"Yes. Your sisters are to return to Yggdrasil within the next two mortal weeks. You will remain behind."_

"You intend to d..destroy me?" Belldandy asked incredulously.

_"No. I simply intend for you to witness the obliteration of the mortals as the result of your misdeeds. That is the first didactic action __I__ will take against you. The rest will be decided by the Assembly,"_ He stated bluntly. Belldandy wanted to drop the videx, but somehow found the strength to grip the handset even tighter. She glanced at Urd, her eyes crying 'please help me!" Urd was looking at her with deep concern...and fear. Her middle sister was in an intractable bind, and it was getting more dire with each sentence the Lord uttered.

"Why? Why are You destroying the mortals, my Lord? I don't care what You do to me...but You mustn't destroy them!" Urd's concern took on a facefallen shock at Belldandy's directness. She looked to see the Lord's face floating above the videx unit. He paused for a moment as if to gather an explanation...or blast Belldandy for being impertinent. Urd winced as the seconds dragged on...

_"Isn't it obvious, My errant daughter? The Earthrealm mortals have evolved into an avaricious, violent race. They are consumed with amusing themselves and seeking dominion over others of their kind. They fail to practice charity...despite the fact that eight of ten live in abject poverty. Their wars no longer only involve weapons...they war against themselves psychologically and economically. Information that should be freely shared is concealed or sold. Their political system yields leaders who are unequivocally corrupt. The harmonic relations between the sexes has degraded to the point where family structures primarily serve to nurture new strains of violence. In their naiveté, they have wreaked total environmental havoc on the natural resources of their planet, destroying untold plant and animal species in the midst of their squandering of the Earthrealm. The realm that _-I gave them- _to steward__,"_He explained.

Belldandy had encountered these arguments before; they were all indictable. But these facts were true _then_, a century ago when the mortals were put on probation. What could have added to them...to the point where Kami-sama and the Assembly had changed their minds and decided to destroy mankind? She knew that she couldn't argue against these truths, so she attempted a different tact.

"But Lord, _we_ shouldn't be here! And how can You destroy the Earthrealm without consulting the Dark Lord? Something is really amiss..." she tried to explain. The Almighty ignored her protests.

_"And the most telling indication of their fall into corruption is demonstrated by __your__ own actions, Belldandy. You were the one Goddess who lived on the Earthrealm in the closest proximity with the mortals. You even resided with a mortal. With all this exposure to mortal ways...you ended up committing deicide and mass homicide. Yes, _-you-_!! A _–Goddess-_! You became so tainted by the mortal's evolutionary decline that you murdered other beings for selfish reasons. Yea, even as the mortals did a century ago with their nuclear weapons. Any race that could turn a GRO Goddess into a killer...is well deserving of extinction. They have written their own Ragnarok."_

"My Lord...please let me explain..." Belldandy stammered.

_"Desist! Furthermore, your action was unforgivable, Belldandy. It was the concluding factor which influenced My and the Assembly's decision. You have yourself greatly to blame...for the mortal's demise,"__ the_ Lord concluded.

Belldandy was seized with an urge to scream...and then everything fuzzed out.

Urd watched as Belldandy silently collapsed to the floor in a dead faint. Angrily, she picked up the videx.

"_What_ did You say to her? How can You say it's her fault?" she accused.

_"Do not assume that tone of voice when addressing Me, Urd, Norn of the Past."_

Urd blanched as she realized what she had just done. She had been literally shot down in flames for much less. Before she could apologize, the Lord spoke to her.

_"In two Earthrealm weeks, every one of the 2372 Toshishima fusion nuclear reactors on this planet will experience a simultaneous meltdown. Belldandy's misguided destruction of the Toshishima central core computer complex in Tokyo has created an irrevocable chain of events that will result in the meltdown of each fusion nuclear reaction. The result will render the entire surface of the Earthrealm into an uninhabitable irradiated wasteland for several hundred millions of Earthrealm years, should the planet's crust remain intact. You and Skuld are to return to Yggdrasil within the next two weeks. Belldandy is to remain behind to witness firsthand the tragic dance of Death in its most truest form; in keeping with her actions, which demonstrate how lightly she values Life. Then she is to return to Yggdrasil to be tried in full Assembly at Urd's Well for the crime of Tyyr's murder. You and Skuld are to ensure that she does not disclose any information to the mortals concerning their fate. Do you understand clearly?"_

"Y..yes," Urd said weakly, overwhelmed by what He just told her.

_"I will have no further contact with you until the Trial."_

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Urd put the videx set down in its cradle and slid down to the floor next to Belldandy. She sensed that Bell's attempt to call the Almighty would result in frustration for her sister.

But this...this was too...

"Insane," she muttered. Belldandy had literally passed out...from emotional shock, no doubt. This was the first time Urd had ever seen her sister faint so abruptly. Anyone would faint if they were told that they were responsible for the deaths of billions. The Lord had certainly doused her sister with the biggest guilt trip imaginable.

She remembered the time when Cevn confronted the Almighty on His lack of balance, back when He suspended Skuld's license. Cevn was right...Kami-sama was out of touch with certain matters of principle.

"So He's going to destroy all the mortals with their own nuclear power plants?" she said to herself in a low voice filled with disbelief. It possessed a macabre irony...in a deeply warped way. The mortal's use of atomic weapons had caused them to be placed on this century of probation...now their nuclear technology would be their gruesome undoing.

"Everything is so _wrong_ here!"...she recalled Skuld clearly stating after she traveled within the web of Future TimeStreams. Ever since they arrived in this crazy future age, reality was like a knot, a noose that was ever tightening, ever strangling them. After being suffocated in Aoshima's observation cell, Urd felt no better off here. Here, the feeling of suffocation was close to the soul...having to live with the knowledge of the coming apocalypse without telling a single being. To walk amongst the doomed denizens of the Earthrealm.

"_This_ is far worse a prison for me than that place Aoshima cooked up!" Urd concluded. She looked at Belldandy, slumped unconscious against the wall. Perhaps it was merciful that her sister's consciousness had fled her. She herself was electric with discomfort, and she knew that she would be the only one who could comfort her middle sister. Bell would be a handful when she came to.

"My poor, poor sister," she said sadly, stroking Bell's auburn hair gently. At least she would a brief reprieve from having to...

"My fault..," Belldandy muttered under her breath, still in a dead faint.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

The woodblocks clapped together shortly after 4am, signaling the start of a new day. Usually, the convent day began at 3:30am in the summer session, and 4:00am in the winter session. The annual course of training at the Temple consisted of two six-month long sessions, with a two-week break in between each. Abbess Sora was already awake, having engaged in her private meditations an hour earlier. As she had done for almost thirty years, she would go to the Nun's Hall where their community of Sisters would practice two periods of zazen and chanting.

Yesterday was a troubling day.

After breakfast, Abbess Chihiro had asked Megumi and Sayoko to sit for her, so she could paint their portraits. Abbess Sora sensed that perhaps Abbess Chihiro was trying to recapture the days of her youth. She reminded herself to ask her fellow Abbess how the sumiye session went.

In the afternoon during her rounds, Abbess Sora checked up on Skuld's activities in the temple's computer center. Skuld had torn apart their server and was reconfiguring several components on the mainboards. Whether it was a bicycle or a holographic imager, Skuld knew how to _improve_ it. In one sense, she was the ultimate engineer. Her engineering skills coupled with her child-like curiosity allowed for Skuld to do almost anything she wanted to with technology. She noticed that Abbess Chihiro had kept her promise; Skuld was happily enjoying several pints of ice cream and fruitcups she worked. Rather prompt, that, as the convent had no means of making ice cream.

Megumi and Sayoko had both requested that they be allowed to room with the Goddesses. Abbess Chihiro had arranged for all five to room in one of the large tangaryo; the rooms where prospective nuns would meditate for a week nonstop before being considered for admission to the Temple.

That evening, Belldandy looked extremely troubled when Abbess Sora checked on the three Goddesses. After the videx call, Belldandy had remained in the room for the rest of the day. Along with Urd.

Looking at one of her scrolls, Abbess Sora knew that it would take nothing less than a miracle for the three Goddesses to be reunited with the others. It struck her as odd...that the missing men were nowhere to be accounted for while the women were all present at the same time and place.

"I wonder. If the women went 40 years into the future as they claim...could the men have gone into the past?" During her meditation, she felt a vivid intuition pushing gently into her conscious; that the men were somehow in the distant past.

Still, Abbess Sora was very concerned about Belldandy. She had taken a long time to make that videx call. Abbess Sora noticed that she had a high level of apprehension right before calling. And afterwards, Belldandy was almost in a daze, leaning on Urd for support like a salaryman returning home from his company's bonnenkai party. Her face had the flushed look that followed the 'forget-the-year' parties that were traditionally held in December. And there was no soda on the temple grounds for her to imbibe.

Despite her concerns, Abbess Sora smiled as she realized that there were probably quite a few salarymen staggering around right at this moment, a train ride away from an angry housewife who had waited up all night for them. The masses would be celebrating Christmas in a couple of weeks...and then the New Year.

"In two weeks, a lot of children will be very happy," Abbess Sora thought.

Tomorrow, the Sisters would be very happy as well. Urd had promised her and Chihiro that the Goddesses would 'perform' another glimpse of the Divine for them during the evening sesshin session. To their credit, none of the Sisters save a few novices had requested another 'show'. But Sora knew in her heart that many desired of it…even as she herself thirsted for the comforting embrace of Proof.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Never before had Belldandy experienced such a state of raw hopelessness. She felt destitute..._really_ destitute...for the first time in her existence. Her heart felt like it was smeared with a tar of darkness. Despite being surrounded by those who cared deeply for her, she felt afloat without purpose in an ocean of indifference. Everything she had stood for, the precious one she whom had loved, had been lofted beyond her reach. There was nothing to find joy in any more, since life itself seemed a dim abyss.

Yet...despite her inner angst, she and her sisters had honored the gathering yesterday by revealing another glimpse of Eternity in the temple's Great Buddha Hall. After the first demonstration, the nuns naturally thirsted for more. Not because of the SFX aspect; rather because they were experiencing Divinity and Mystery firsthand. Worthy of their choice to follow the spiritual path of Buddhism.

Knowing that every person in the room was doomed by the impending destruction of the Earthrealm...it was the least she could do. Although the Lord had promised that He would "spare" the Butsudankyoji nuns and students, they would still undergo the trauma of having the Earthrealm be destroyed. Hopefully, their spiritual work would brace them to deal with the inevitable survivor's guilt.

"How do I go on when nothing makes any sense anymore?" she questioned herself over and over as she watched the convent run out its daily routines.

Belldandy never suspected that the strengths she relied upon foremost...Keiichi, the Earthrealm, even her own Goddess status...were at their cores, tenuous hollow shadows of themselves. The love she had given to Keiichi had returned only ashes and haunting memories. The light of her desires would not pierce the fog gathering around her and her sisters.

She _knew_ that her beloved Keiichi had died. _How_ she knew wasn't of any significance, as she repeatedly explained to the others. Her feelings of grief turned over and again, like a froth-gale see possessed by dark storms.

Belldandy was certain that he had left the mortal plane. She knew the passages in her heart better than anyone: the mountains and valleys; the contours of its benign geography; the vistas of wide prairies whose soothing confidence to the eye brought satisfaction and joy. Since she felt that dread spike of intuition, her heart was disturbed like a sullied pond surrounded by jagged cliffs.

Keiichi had awakened a radiance inside of her that she never knew existed. But now when she looked inside, it was gone. She, who had Stars in her necklace, Time rushing like grains of sand in her hands, Harmony that accompanied every graceful motion...now had Loss.

The present was only a beclouded mirror of its former self.

Yet, a different form of tragedy was enveloping her as well, playing itself out inexorably around her. She possessed the certain knowledge that Kami-sama had decided to obliterate mankind. It had been a century since the mortals unleashed their atomic terror on the two cities in Japan, in 1945. Regardless of the motives held by one group or another of mortals, such an event always sets off alarm bells in Yggdrasil. The Earthrealm mortals had been weighed and found lacking in the types of survival instinct that would propel them towards the Next Level. The gravity of the upcoming calamity weighed heavy on her heart. She had steadfastly asserted that the mortals were worthy of preservation...that they _could_ be cultivated towards the Next Level.

Belldandy had a major role to play in Kami-sama's decision making process, as she was linked with the "Test Mortal." Now, Keiichi was dead, and she had transgressed all sensibilities by her actions in the recent past. She shuddered as she remembered the Atomic Museum in Hiroshima...soon the entire Earthrealm would resemble the blasted horror of Hiroshima. Or worse.

Finally, her own future was uncertain, as she had murdered a fellow God. She had taken the lives of thousands of sentient Earthrealm mortals. Somehow, she had found the resources of rage in the depths of her Being which condoned to act with murderous fury. The knowledge that she had killed Aoshima and Tyyr in a fit of vengeful anger tasted bitter by itself. But, she would have to face an examination by her peers in the Assembly...and certain punishment.

"What_ is_ wrong with me? I made a promise, a vow, long ago when I joined the Goddess Relief Office. I vowed to never harm sentient life. For millennia, I've lived up to the promise. But now..." she sighed to herself. A GRO Goddess can create wishes that harm others, but the harm is couched within the desires of the wish grantee, not the executor of the wish. Often, it was necessary to counsel the mortals with who she was wish-contracted, so that their wish wouldn't prove harmful. But she had never experienced a burst of volition that would cause her to take the lives of any other sentient beings.

Now...it really didn't matter anymore. It was over and done with. After the loss of Keiichi and the Earthrealm, Belldandy knew that she would really not have anything left to live for. Her actions would ensure that she probably wouldn't survive to see the emptiness of her future unfold. Kami-sama would spare no mercy for her. Neither would her fellow Gods. She felt a wash of guilt as she pictured Lokii and Friijda mourning over the death of their son. Because of the Doublet System, Tyyr's death implied that she had killed his counterpart Demon as well. Her fear churned in her heart, mingling with her grief and self-blame.

She had almost..._almost_ confided in the Abbesses about the intricate mechanisms that had swung into place regarding Kami-sama's decision. She wanted to tell _somebody_. Even Skuld didn't know; she and Urd had decided to spare the youngest Goddess knowledge of the forthcoming tribulations until it became absolutely necessary.

"It was all my doing. I loved and lost Keiichi. I actually _killed_ other sentient beings. And my actions have reflected poorly on the mortal's chances of passing the probation. My own shortcomings...have brought on such horrible consequences!" Belldandy cried out in her mind, desperate with hope that some miracle would rescue her from her despair. She sat up abruptly on her futon with a burst of heavy energy and stared at the dark shadows playing with the moonlight on the ceiling and walls. Everything seemed hopeless.

"Why does everything have to be so bleak?" she whispered to herself. A moment later, she felt a pair of arms enfold her from behind...a chin was resting on her shoulder. She leaned back into the embrace; Belldandy knew that her older sister Urd was trying to comfort her. Urd softly rocked her, just she used to do in their younger days.

They sat together, a universe encompassed within the two of them, wordlessly sharing the tragic flow of reality. Which would flow downwards towards the ocean of despair...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Skuld, can you take a break? I really need to talk something over with you," Urd asked.

Skuld was seated in the middle of the floor, surrounded by coiled wires, tools, various pieces of circuit boards, and several containers of ice cream. Urd was often amazed that Skuld could eat ice cream while she worked...how she avoided gumming up the delicate parts with ice cream, she would never know. She _did_ knew that one of Skuld's worst pet peeves was being interrupted while she was in the middle of a project. But for this, she was willing to risk the worst tantrum Skuld could pitch. Fortunately, the Abbesses had made the computer room off-limits to all the nuns so they wouldn't be exposed to Skuld's genius.

After seeing Belldandy's haunted face this morning while everyone else had left for breakfast, Urd had decided to tell her youngest sister _everything_. It was for their own sakes. Skuld had a right to know what her older sister would be facing. Belldandy had tried her best to appear composed around the others, but Urd knew that Skuld wasn't fooled. Belldandy was acting very withdrawn...and perhaps Skuld could cheer up Belldandy if she knew why.

"Aiyyyah! I can't get anything done here! It's bad enough that I have to put up with these junk tools instead of my own. And whenever I leave, all these old bolohead nuns are always pestering me with questions! Now...I think I hear my obnoxious older sister..." she monologued to herself, ignoring Urd.

"Obnoxious...older...sister?! SKULD! Stop acting like the world revolves around you! I have something _really_ important to tell you...and I'm _not_ going to take 'no' for an answer. Give me your full attention _right now_, brat!" Urd said angrily, stepping right up next to Skuld.

Skuld looked up from her work to see Big Sister standing over her with her arms crossed, a teed-off expression on her reddened face.

"So what makes_ you_ so important that you have to interrupt_ me_?" Skuld argued back with a frown, and then returned to the motherboard she was adjusting. She knew that she could really get to Urd by ignoring her; one of Urd's pet peeves was being ignored.

"Child!" Urd exclaimed. At wits end she reached down and yanked Skuld up to her feet by her ear.

"Owwww_ooooh_! That _hurts_!" Skuld complained, scrambling to her feet. Urd realized immediately that she was misdirecting her own frustrations onto her youngest sister.

"I'm sorry, Skuld. But we need to talk. Now!" she said apologetically, yet insistently. Skuld made like she would going to return to her projects.

"NOW!!" Urd shouted. Skuld looked at her sister with a bewildered expression, and then let herself be led out of the computer lab.

They went outside of the library hall and strolled over to a small grove. Sitting down in the grass, Urd noticed again that Skuld was sloppily dressed in one of the extra novices' habits that they had all been given. Urd was already secretly disappointed that the convent didn't have _any_ other outfits to wear. Both Abbesses had insisted that the sisters dress like nuns. As honored guests, she knew it would be wrong to even question this condition. But on her younger sister's small frame, the gray robes hung loosely. Skuld had to roll the sleeves up past her elbows because they were too long...they were getting in the way.

Urd hesitated for a moment, trying to form an explanation that would make sense to Skuld.

"Skuld...do you remember what happened a hundred years ago?"

"Yeah! They invented packaged ice cream and the Neapolitan flavor!"

Urd winced. This was going nowhere fast.

"Skuld, we have to return in a couple of weeks to home!" Urd blurted out.

"Goodies!! It's about time! I don't like being here! Will Keiichi and the others meet us there? How did you figure out the way to go back in time to our home?" Skuld said with rapid-fire sweetness, almost clapping her hands in excitement.

"It's not _that_ home. I mean, we've been recalled back to _Yggdrasil_," Urd corrected, watching Skuld keenly for a reaction. Skuld's burst of animation was somewhat subdued by this news. Urd briefly considered the possibility that Skuld was beginning to prefer living in the Earthrealm over living in Yggdrasil. After all, being on the Earthrealm mean no work for her as a sysop trainee...

"Does that mean that we're taking a vacation? Is Belldandy coming too?" Urd looked at Skuld with a poker face, mulling over in her mind whether she should tell her. _How_ she should tell her. It would be hard to shatter her dreams.

"Should I tell her the truth, or lie? She's going to find out anyway in a few days. 'In for a penny, in for a pound,' as the mortals would say," Urd reflected, sighing deeply for dramatic effect.

"Skuld, I want you to listen to everything I say. First, we are to go back within two weeks. Second, Belldandy is to stay behind and come later. Third, Kami-sama has decided to destroy the Earthrealm. Finally...our sister is to watch the destruction of the mortals and then return to Yggdrasil to stand trial by the Assembly," Urd said in a grave tone of voice.

There. It was done.

She felt a sharp stab of empathy as she saw all color drain from her little sister's face. Skuld just stared ahead, almost sightlessly. Several hummingbirds flew low and swarmed a nearby flush of orchids. Skuld continued to stare, her face expressionless.

_Splash_

_Kerplosh_

Skuld was sullenly throwing pebbles into the nearby koi pond. The fish were startled; a reflection of Skuld's sense of dismay.

"Why?" she finally asked Urd after a long brooding mood, her voice filled with confusion and anguish.

"Kami-sama believes that our sister killed Tyyr. And she did kill Aoshima, which was pretty bad."

"But he _deserved_ it!" Skuld argued.

"No, Skuld. No matter how angry Belldandy was, she should have never taken a mortal's life. Deep inside, you and I know this is true. Yet...the more I think about it, the more I'm convinced that there's something really _bizarre_ going on here! None of us have been acting like ourselves. We actually cheered her on...so we're as much at fault as she is. Wouldn't you think that the Lord would know that, and make _us_ assume responsibility as well, because we were accomplices to the act?" Urd mused aloud, her explanation shifting to befuddlement.

"Big Sister Urd, I've had the feeling ever since we got here _that we don't belong here_," Skuld said.

"What do you mean?" Urd asked. Skuld struggled to justify to herself what she was saying.

"I mean...somehow we mysteriously ended up here. In the Earthrealm's future. But I don't feel that this is the 'right' future. If this were the future that is supposed to be...then I would know. Right here," she added as she tapped her chest.

"Eh?"

"I don't feel comfortable in this future. It's as if we are in the future...but aren't in the future at the same time," Skuld tried to clarify.

The entranced look on her face revealed to Urd that Skuld didn't have a clue about what she was saying. And now Urd found herself solidly grounded in her own confusion.

_A future...that isn't a future?_

"We...aren't supposed to be here. _Here_...isn't supposed to be," Skuld ventured, her face filled with sudden resolve.

"What do you mean?" Urd asked, her brow furrowing.

"Yeah...that's it!!" Skuld avowed.

Urd was totally confused now. She had thought that Skuld would fall apart emotionally at the news about the Earthrealm and Belldandy. Instead, she was babbling something about "the future isn't the future."

"Great...I have one sister who's an emotional riot case waiting to break out, and another sister who's a space case stranded in orbit," Urd thought as she watched Skuld walk back to the main hall, seemingly abandoning her work on the computer.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Megumi and Sayoko were waiting on Belldandy. Despite her best efforts, Belldandy couldn't conceal the fact that she was obviously ill. When she looked in the mirror, her face was flushed and she was weakened. She couldn't get out of her futon and barely touched her food. It was no wonder...she hadn't slept a wink the past two nights. Since sleep was her primary powerup source, her unrest had made her 'sick' due to lack of energy.

Sayoko tried to cheer her up with the story of the time she had been 'bugged' by one of Urd's supernatural creations...and she _still_ didn't believe that Belldandy was a Goddess. She was talking about another 'Queen of N.I.T.' episode when the shoji door slid open and Abbess Sora and Abbess Chihiro walked in.

"How are you?" they asked.

"I'm feeling better," Belldandy replied, veiling the truth. "It's just that I really miss Keiichi and the others."

"I don't believe you for a moment, Belldandy. There's something you aren't telling us, isn't there?" Abbess Sora challenged. "I have a funny feeling...and this perhaps is the silliness of a weak old woman. To offer my conjectures as a suggestion, I feel that somehow the men have wound up somewhere in the past, since all of you women skipped forward forty years to this future."

"That really sounds like a possibility, Sora," Abbess Chihiro affirmed.

"What do you two do here?" Belldandy asked weakly, trying to avoid the topic of her missing Keiichi...and her secret.

"Well, Abbess Sora is the one that is the 'guru' here, while I run the place and make crazy Zen leaps once in a while," Abbess Chihiro answered in simple terms.

"I'm not a 'guru'!" Abbess Sora teased. "If anyone fulfills that role, it's _you_!"

"Well, you're the one who thinks deep thoughts all the time," Abbess Chihiro exclaimed.

"And you're the one who finds them. What about you? The nun who had the gall to revise the Oxherding Sequence...and then pulled it off," Abbess Sora amiably countered.

"Besides, Abbess Sora couldn't even begin to run the day-to-day stuff of this temple," Abbess Chihiro stated, feigning ignorance of Abbess Sora's remark.

"I perform many tasks in complete anonymity," the small nun replied.

"And she _still_ can't cook! That's why _I _administer the kitchen duties directly!" Abbess Chihiro teased back. Abbess Sora grinned sheepishly at this, while Belldandy managed a slight chuckle at the two Abbesses' friendly rapport. It was clear from their exchange that they had been close friends for many years, for their teasing was filled with love, not spite.

"Wait a minute! I think Abbess Sora's on to something major!" Megumi broke in suddenly, her face aglow with enthusiasm.

"Just think for a moment. We women were in the bathhouse when we disappeared. We don't know whether the guys disappeared, because they were in another bath. It was just us. But then, we find out that our temple home is destroyed," she theorized.

"And..?" Sayoko injected impatiently. Megumi was stating the obvious.

"I _know_ my brother. He would rebuild the temple and wait, forty years if necessary, so that he could be with you again, Belldandy. There's no evidence that the men remained back in 20XX, because we would _know_. And there's no evidence that they were transported into the future like Sayoko and I," Megumi added. Sayoko regarded her own brother in the light of this.

"That's right! Had he remained in 20XX with the others, my brother Genji would have certainly taken care of preventing Toshiyuki and his stupid Imperium from ever happening. Genji may be shy, but he can run circles around our cousin when it comes to business administration. Our cousin is a playboy, while Genji is solid, dedicated and a good-decision maker. I would know, because he decided on Megumi, who loves him so much. I would even say that he wouldn't just wait forty years for Megumi, he'd do something about it. But since the guys haven't had any impact on the present..._this_ present, they must have traveled backwards in time," Sayoko concluded. Megumi looked at her and nodded sharply, pleased at Sayoko's confidence in Genji...and her love for him.

"That's all piecework and supposition," Urd said. "How can we confirm any of it?"

"That's why I'm working on the computer, you guys!" Skuld said, poking her head in the doorway. Urd was glad that Skuld had pulled out of her funk, but she still couldn't avoid the bait.

"So why are you here instead of working on it?" Urd said icily. Skuld shot her a stinkeye glance.

"Well, gee whiz. Get on my case for being concerned about how my sister is doing. I'm just coming back here to check on her, if it's okay with you! I suppose you think you're the only one who's all freaked out about the destruction of the Earth in the next couple of..._ulp_!!"

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

_"Skuld and her big mouth._

_I just couldn't believe it. I __knew__ in the back of my mind that I shouldn't have told her about the Lord's decision. But I let my senses get thwarted by my heart once again._

_Leave it to the Brat..._

_It was an ugly scene, watching how all of the mortals in the room reacted that afternoon. To say that they were shocked senseless would be an understatement._

_Once Kami-sama has destroyed the Earthrealm, I know that I really going to catch it for telling Skuld. After all, He emphasized that I was supposed to prevent the mortals from knowing about their fate. I might as well resign myself to the fact that I'll be on Sysop mop duty for the rest of my days._

_After that little incident with Skuld, we searched for two weeks for any sign of the guys. We couldn't find a single mention __anywhere__._

_My other sister looked so bitter all the time I was with her. Not the bitterness that __I__ feel...because when the Lord destroys the Earthrealm, I'll never be able to see Cevn again. Belldandy's bitterness is like mine, only multiplied a hundredfold. She kept telling me that it was her fault that the mortals were going to be destroyed. I wish I could kidnap her...she's in serious need of counseling at the Ethiopsylogic Clinic But what use would that be? She's on the Almighty's shitlist here._

_I still can't accept the fact that I'm going to lose one of my sisters._

_Of course, our search would have been better if Skuld had remained to help. But I can't blame her for returning to Yggdrasil. She was so upset with herself after letting slip the little 'secret' about the final oblivion, she couldn't remain on the Earthrealm. If she was a little older, I would call her a coward...but she's just a kid. Just an Earthrealm Trainee. Well, there'll be no more Earthrealm for her to train on. She even seemed to act as if it was __her__ fault that the Lord was going to rain death upon the mortals. Guilt is such a strange emotion, especially the way my sisters experience it. They should try to be more like me...capricious and carefree._

_But it's hard to be carefree in this moment..._

_It was so difficult to leave Belldandy and the mortals. I've really become attached to the mortals I met while I was on the Earthrealm. I wanted to take them all with me, but of course that was impossible._

_I wonder what Skuld is up to._

_My little sister really is hard on herself sometimes. But she's just a kid. Anybody can make mistakes. She just happens to make __huge__ ones!_

_I think that Sora, Chihiro, Megumi and Sayoko made the right decision by not telling anyone else. Sora and Chihiro told all the nuns, of course, but they could handle it. After all, they're Zen practitioners; impermanence is no big deal to them. Besides, that email from the Lord did mention something about them being "spared"._

_What would I do if I knew I had a few days to live? How could I set my affairs in order? What about..._

_Cevn._

_I never did find out where he was, or is. Or even who he was. I had just begun to know him when we were separated. My only chance at being loved by a man...and it is going to be snuffed out very shortly. In a couple of mortal days, it will be as if there never was an Earthrealm._

_Oh...__we'll__ know about its history, its existence. The whole passage of time that the Earthrealm filled will be stored on a single crystalmatrix in the Yggdrasil Mainframe. But Earth itself will be no more. The talk here at the Sysop Control Complex is that the total force of the nuclear plant meltdowns will shatter the planet._

_All my friends...and the man I love..._

_None of them deserve to die in the upcoming destruction of the Earthrealm..."_

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

SYSOP NODE 3X-2994-0E-034, LOGORINTH HUB 2997, YGGDRASIL:

Urd couldn't write any more. She looked at the small floating waveform pad; the words she had thought onto it seemed to come from another place, another time. She had reluctantly parted company with everyone yesterday, knowing full well that she would never see any of them again, except her sister. She still hadn't seen or heard of Skuld.

Floating in front of her Sysop console, she felt a winnowy remorse pass through her. She was forever severed from her brief stay on the Earthrealm. But what a stay it had been. Far more than she ever expected.

Well, at least Belldandy and Keiichi were able to experience each other's love. She was only beginning to experience hers…

Seeking solace, she had spoken with her parents yesterday. They were greatly relieved to see that their daughter was safe. But Urd couldn't avoid noticing the significant hollowing of their energies. Mother and Father were really shook up about Belldandy's upcoming Trial.

After dinner, she and her father had a long talk. He was very concerned about the fact that the destruction of the Earthrealm would incite a war with the Demons. He and Mother had both voted against destroying the Earthrealm during the Assembly. Urd was surprised to hear that Mother had voted _against_ destroying the Earthrealm. Keiichi's tenaciousness in the face of overwhelming odds during that stupid omiai incident must have really touched her at the heart level. Yet, the majority of the Gods had voted for termination of the Earthrealm.

Then Kami-sama decided to obliterate the Earthrealm, unilaterally...without contacting the Dark Lord. Ignoring the ballot of the entire Assembly of Gods.

"Farbeit for me to criticize the Almighty...but _what is wrong with Him_? Dammit, He's acting as if He is ignorant of the Rules! Our Lord, powerful as He is...He can't just sally forth and destroy a realm that is jointly populated with Demons without the assent of the Dark One. And vice versa. Everyone I've spoken with is gravely troubled by the fact that the Almighty has completely disregarded the active status of the Demon Grief Office in Earthrealm affairs! The DGO is deeply involved in their own cultivation of the Earthrealm mortals towards demi-Demon evolution. To wipe the all the mortals out...will be a grievous insult to the Demons. Not to mention it would besmirch their honor...as a huge loss of face for their Dark Lord," Odeyn had explained to her.

Enough to start another War, he had asserted with a glimmer of sad resignation in his one eye.

Remembering Father's expression of frustration, Urd chewed on her lightbeam...and then decided to footnote the entry in her personal journal.

"Could all of this turmoil have occurred simply because we were all were transported away from 20XX?"

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Belldandy bit her lip, hard. The permeating gloom that shrouded her heart was like a waterfall of pure pitch black futility. She stared at the immaculately cleaned and polished floorboards of her guest quarters...in the candlelight, the brown wood shimmered like waves of water. Her hurt kept spreading as the deathwatch drew inexorably closer.

Tomorrow, Kami-sama was going to destroy the Earthrealm. "Depopulate it," He had said.

She watched with detached curiosity as the mortals arranged their affairs. Abbess Sora and Abbess Chihiro had informed the convent about the upcoming destruction. They offered to excuse any nuns who wished to leave the convent to be with family or friends. None of the Sisters or the university students asked to leave. The cloister of nuns decided jointly to hold a marathon sesshin session tonight. They would greet Death with Life: meditating and chanting until the end came. They had a lot to pray for...the welfare of the billions who would perish. Even now, she could hear their coloratura chanting of the Lotus Sutra sifting through the air, calming her with its regular rhythm.

Megumi and Sayoko had shadowed each other every day since Skuld let slip the news. Belldandy was overjoyed to see that they had developed such a close friendship. They used to be bosom enemies in a sense, because of Keiichi and Genji. Now, they were fast friends. The two girls asked if they could be in the presence of the nuns at the end. Abbess Sora and Abbess Chihiro readily agreed to this.

It was 3am.

Belldandy would wake the pair up at 4am, and they would all go together to the Nun's Hall to join in the spiritual observances.

Belldandy was apprehensive...she had seen the results of the Flood that Kami-sama inflicted on the mortals many millennia ago. This would be much worse. She hoped that it would be over in an instant...a 'flash' and everything would perish. Unlike Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where so many people died in agony in the days following the bombings.

She was angry with the mortals as well, despite herself. It was their foolishness that caused them to be in this situation in the first place. All the platitudes of peace that she had ushered to the vibrations of the mortals over the millennia were as ephemeral as the passage of clouds...once past the horizon of perception, they would never return.

Belldandy had wanted to live out her 'mortal' days with Keiichi. She had planned for them to grow old together; she would change her mortal manifestation to age apace with him. She had already been subtly altering her manifestation during the four years she had spent with Keiichi. Oddly enough, he had never noticed. Or if he did, he never mentioned it to her. When her heart has chosen Keiichi, Belldandy had realized that a seventy-year-old Keiichi with a young Belldandy just wouldn't work. After he died, she would return to the GRO in Yggdrasil and carry on with Goddess Relief Office work. She had hoped that she could nurture the mortals towards the Next Level...that she would be able to see them evolve into demi-Gods, then perhaps Gods. This would have been a fitting memorial for Keiichi, to have his humankind ascend to heights they couldn't even imagine.

If only Keiichi had been born ten millennia hence...he could have had a shot at immortality. If he had turned towards spiritual matters more, he may have be Preserved...like Onna no Komachi or many others.

"But there will be no redemption for my dear Keiichi...or myself," she said in a whispered voice. The only consolation she could muster was the fact that Keiichi would never know of her fate. He would be spared the experience of her suffering.

It would all be over soon.

The candle burned down as Belldandy left to wake up Megumi and Sayoko for their final morning.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Skuld looked nervously at the long winding stairway going up to the clouds. Past the clouds. The steps radiated crystalline rainbow colors, each sounding a note as she stepped on them. The steps led to one of the highest places in Yggdrasil, veiled as it was by clouds. If she were an adult Goddess, she could just float upwards until she reached her destination. But since she was still young, she had to use the stairs.

It took her several days in mortal terms to ascend the stairs. But at last she could sense a nearness. She was approaching the apex of her journey.

Where He is.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Megumi startled when Belldandy gently nudged her awake. She had been in the midst of a nightmare...probably because of the upcoming devastation. Now, a different kind of fear gripped her. She knew that this morning was her last dawning. She wanted to enjoy every moment of it. The sun was beautiful as she walked outside and observed the scene from the wooden gallery. Of course, it was just a holophotic image...but it was lovely nonetheless.

Sayoko accompanied her as she watched the orange glow of the sunrise. Megumi looked at her sempai and friend, wondering what she was thinking.

A moment later, Belldandy stood between them and held their hands. The wordless communion of touch calmed the racing hearts of all three. At 6am, the nuns would break from their vespers and have communal tea in the dining hall. At 7am, they would begin their final meditations.

It was comforting to see Belldandy. Megumi knew all about what was going to happen. Belldandy would have to witness the destruction of the planet as some sort of 'lesson', and then she would return to Yggdrasil and stand trial for Tyyr's death.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

It was so unfair.

Skuld was admitted to the Presence after a short wait. She had only seen Kami-sama a few times in the past; several times during school trips and twice when He summoned her to discuss her status as Norn of the Future. Each time that she visited she was awed by His countenance. Yet, she was frightened as well; the last time she talked with Him was when He suspended her license. Skuld was deathly afraid that He would be wroth with her for being so impertinent; that she had visited and requested admission to the Presence without being summoned...taking up His precious time. After all, He had a Multiverse to rule. She knelt down on one knee to pay her respects, waiting with lowered head until He called her forward.

_"Come, my child,"_ He summoned kindly. Skuld was thrilled and slightly disoriented when she heard His voice in its gentler aspect. The Almighty's voice seemed to draw her into a higher cast of being, a more refined plenum of divinity. His voice was unlike anything she had ever heard before...just to hear that voice once was enough to imprint its memory indelibly on her. Besides her parents, the Almighty was the only one who could call her "child" without igniting that part of her which sensed insult and reacted with anger. She really did feel like a child in His presence.

She could hear the God's Music in the background; it made her feel a little homesick for the Earthrealm because now it would be forever associated with Cevn and the temple home.

Skuld approached His floating throne. Kami-sama had long hair flowing over his shoulders, pure white in its sheen. White as snow. He wore a gray and blue outfit, framed by a generous long black cape draped over his shoulders like a cloak. His throne was made of pearls, diamonds, and other precious metals and stones from all over the Multiverse. All were set in Ixodenum, the metallic substance that served as a conductor for divine power. Several consoles floated near His armrests, monitoring Yggdrasil and the Multiverse.

He stepped down from His throne and took her by the hand.

_"Let us walk together,"_ He said. Skuld was completely taken aback by His request. She had expected that He would only grant her a few moments. She had planned to ask Him about a certain bit of information. Now, all she felt was a powerful intimidation as He stood beside her, towering over her. She rued at herself...she was shivering like a willow in a wind gust.

Kami-sama reached down and took her hand gently in His and floated her off the cloudground. Skuld realized that He was levitating them amidst the cloudnet.

_"What can I do for you, Skuld, Norn of the Future?"_ He asked gently. _"You have certainly taken great efforts to reach Me, so you musthaps need My help in some matter."_

Skuld gathered her courage.

"W..when are You going to destroy the Earthrealm tomorrow?" she asked timidly. In response, the Lord's face gathered into a stern expression.

_"It will be after their sunset. I will allow the entire planet to witness one final nightfall before I destroy it. Does this trouble you Skuld, my decision to destroy the Earthrealm?"_

"Y..yes, my Lord. I..I thought that..."

_"I understand your heart, my child. You were assigned by Me to serve as an Earthrealm Trainee, so that you may learn about mortal life firsthand. Therefore, pray tell Me...what __did__ you learn about them?"_

She had an immediate answer in mind, but then she checked herself. Kami-sama's question was much more than a simple query. And He wouldn't expect a casual reply. He would want nothing less than her deepest conviction.

Skuld looked at Him silently, reflecting on her short time on the Earthrealm with her sisters. She reviewed all of her memories of the temple home, the fights with Big Sister Urd, her rivalry with Megumi, her anger at Keiichi for taking away her Elder Sister. Then she kept visualizing how happy Elder Sister was with her human boyfriend. Their love had withstood _everything_.

_Mara's Demonic attacks. Banpei and Mini-Banpei's vigilant guard. Urd's perverted romantic manipulations. Keiichi and the Goddesses' parents. Sayoko's jealousy. Aoshima's jealousy. Tyyr's violent intimidation. Keiichi's sempai. And her own...foolish pride._

The list went on...but one fact rang true.

Keiichi loved her sister no matter what. Irrevocably. Which is why she had eventually turned from hatred to love for him. His genuine love for her sister had softened _her_ heart, Skuld realized.

"Love," she heard herself say. "They love like we love."

The Lord looked upwards, His face a mixpool of thoughts and feelings.

_"Yes, Skuld...I must agree with your observation. They do love like we do. It was a difficult decision for Me to make. As you know, the Assembly voted for termination of the Earthrealm. I wanted to preserve them, despite the Assembly's voice. Yet I cast Myself in the guise of defying the Assembly by lending the impression that I was acting on My own, regardless of their decision. I acted thusly, so that the guilt would not be theirs." _Skuld hung onto every word, as if the Lord was telling her a secret. Which he was, in a sense. Not often did a Goddess on the cusp of her teen years have an opportunity to hear the inner thoughts of the Almighty Himself, from His own lips.

_"It's a pity, really. Despite their strong love, their hatred is even worse. It has even affected you and your sisters. But for Belldandy to kill a fellow God...that is more than mere resentment. I had dearly hoped that the mortals would complete their evolution over time and become like us. Perhaps even join us. But, we also have a responsibility to maintain, my child. Simply put...when a race evolves to Godhood, they have to manifest constant foreverlove. If they cannot...then we cannot let them continue. Do you understand?"_

"You mean that we cannot let them evolve into Godhood?"

_"Yes. We must be guides to them. But they have chosen not to follow our guidance. They have drifted away from spiritual concerns. At best, they would become candidates for Demonhood if they were allowed to continue. But the Demons probably wouldn't have them either. Demons rely on seething resentments, not ignorant hatred like the mortals possess. Either way, the Earthrealm mortals are a pollution...they cannot be cultivated by us or our Demonic counterparts. Beyond this is My concern that, should they become starfaring, they could spread their pollution to other mortal planetrealms...thus jeopardizing other's chances at becoming candidates to evolve towards Godhood."_

"So You're going to kill them all, despite the fact that they love so strongly?" Skuld asked.

_"Yes. With great reluctance and disappointment. My time runs away...what brings you to visit Me, My daughter?"_

"I want to be there with them when the Earthrealm is destroyed," Skuld stated.

_"My child, this is a curious request. Why would you desire to bear witness to this oblivion of the Earthrealm?"_

"Because...I want to learn as much as I can before they're gone. Also, because I want to be with my sister so she isn't alone. Finally...because I have come to respect the mortals while living with them. My presence would offer some dignity to their deaths. And as Norn of the Future, I will never get to see how they would have turned out," Skuld explained.

_"Your sentiments are rather...mature...for your years. Yet, this is not possible. You still have your Goddess license revoked, Skuld, Norn of the Future. And I intend for Belldandy to see the fruition of the mortal's folly," _He said gently.

"My Lord...I don't know how to explain it. But this time that we all share...seems wrong."

_"What do you mean, Skuld?"_ He inquired.

"We Norns disappeared for _forty mortal years_. Then we find ourselves in the 'now'. But this now...shouldn't _be_. We're Norns, aren't we? Time is our domain, right? So...how can we _not_ be in touch with the TimeStream? How could we have moved through time without doing so deliberately?" The Lord smiled at her.

_"If this was the case, then__ I__ wouldn't Be either,"_the Almighty patiently observed. _"I am in all places and times at once."_

"Y..yes, my Lord. But I want to see if it's real. And the only way to do that...is to witness the destruction of the Earthrealm," Skuld said.

_"You are confused, Norn of the Future. If you are going to continue in your responsibilities as a Norn, Skuld, you need to gain the skill to become aware of __all __possible futures. You must practice more at TimeStream travel,"_ He admonished.

"I try really hard! I really do! So..._please_ help me by letting me return to the Earthrealm! Belldandy doesn't have her license revoked. Isn't it possible that she can..?"

_"Skuld. Belldandy doesn't have enough power to protect you. She barely has enough to protect herself. This is why I didn't suspend her license from the start. I have left her with only the necessary Goddess power to preserve herself during the Earthrealm's devastation. In your current status, you would be consumed by the destruction I have planned for the Earthrealm,"_the Lord explained.

Skuld became very nervous...the whole plan hinged on the next few moments.

"My Lord...isn't it possible for a license transfer? I..I mean, can't my Elder Sister transfer part of her powers to me so I can shield myself? After all, I _do_ have enough skills to manifest a protection spell. I spent a whole week Inculcating it. I..it could only be for the time it takes for the destruction of the Earthrealm to complete itself. Then I can return with my sister. I promise I won't misbehave!"

The Lord regarded Skuld with a keen eye.

"_Pleeeassseee?_" Skuld looked at the Lord. She had played her ultimate hand, using all of her little-girl charm to accent her request. It was all up to Him. It always was...but this was important.

Really important.

_"As you are in earnest Skuld, I will grant you a boon,"_ the Almighty said in reply with a smile. The Lord waved His hands in the air and an amulet formed.

_"This will allow you to exchange or transfer Goddess powers between you and Belldandy. Use it very prudently,"_ He cautioned.

Skuld's heart sang as he gave her the amulet. Tears formed in her eyes. Kami-sama reached around her with His cape and hugged her to his chest.

_"There...there My child. I know that this is a trying day..."_

A few moments later, the Lord transported Skuld back to the ground level Sysop Trainee Center.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

_"__URD!__"_

Urd's whole body shook in reaction to the shout. It sounded like...

_"__SKULD!_ Where have you been? What are you doing here, just popping in out of nowhere?" Urd asked with a mixture of concern and anger.

"I just visited the Lord! We have to leave for Earthrealm _NOW_!!" she shouted. Other sysops turned from their consoles and looked at the two sisters, their concentration disturbed by Skuld's outburst.

"Skuld! Do you know where you _are_? This isn't the place for trainees! The work we do here...is actual work, not trainee stuff!" Urd said, vexed by the scene her youngest sister was making in the Sysop Control Room. The giggling had already started up.

"And what's this about you seeing the Lord? He doesn't have time to deal with visits from little girls like you!" Urd asked, glancing sheepishly at her fellow sysops, her face reddened with an apologetic expression.

"I was _there_! With Him. You gotta believe me..." Skuld shouted desperately. As Urd looked around the office; her fellow sysop's faces said "get her out of her _now_!" Her little sister's presence had moved from amusing to irritating. Urd floated up from her workstation, pulled on Skuld's sleeve and marched her right out of the room.

In the entryway to the Sysop Control Room, Urd hovered in front of Skuld, trembling with irritation. She was both embarrassed and pissed off at her younger sister; and she didn't know which emotion she would bubble up first...

"What _is_ the matter with you? Do you know how much trouble you just got me in, Skuld?" Urd asked, hands on hips.

Urd watched as Skuld smiled enigmatically and pulled a strangely designed amulet from her jacket. She dangled it in front of her, as if it was the answer to her objections.

Something was familiar about it...

"Holy shit!! That's a _Temporary License Transfer Token_!" Urd said incredulously as she identified the object in Skuld's hand. "Where did you get it?"

Then it dawned on Urd that there was only _one_ place where she could have been given the amulet.

Her jaw almost dropped.

"You _did_ visit with Him? How?" Urd asked, stunned.

"I'll explain everything later...but we gotta leave _now_!!"

"Skuld, I just can't up and leave my workstation unattended! I have responsibilities! What if something happens?" Urd whined.

"As if you haven't done _that_ a few thousand times, Big Sister," Skuld teased. Urd couldn't help but smile at her little sister's wisecrack.

"So you want me to go with you on some nonsensical journey. I'll have to think about it..." Urd said with a sly smile.

"Even if it's to save the Earthrealm?" Skuld asked with a twinkle in her eye.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

BUTSUDANKYOJI ZEN TEMPLE - DEC 2050:

Skuld arrived to find the convent in the midst of deep prayer. The computer room was abandoned...in fact they didn't see a single nun as they made their way to the room.

"Where is everyone?" Urd asked. "Did they_ all_ go to the Nun's Hall?" Urd watched as Skuld slid into a seat and typed out a complicated series of commands.

"Here. Aren't you glad I fixed the server before I left? Look at this," Skuld said as she turned the holomonitor on 'project'. An image formed in mid-air in front of the two Goddesses.

_"NHK Newswire-- December 24, 2050_

_For Immediate Release:_

_Archeologists in Kyushu recently discovered a cave that was uncovered by a recent avalanche during the heavy snows last week. Reports say that several thrill-seeking skiers from a nearby village were caught in the deep snowdrifts. They managed to shelter in the cave for safety, where they found some unusual artifacts._

_Experts from Rekihaku, the National Museum of Japanese History in Sakura City, Chiba Prefecture, were dispatched to the site to investigate earlier this week. This cave, which is located near the summit of Mt. Unzendake near Nagasaki City, proved to be a treasure trove of ancient artifacts dating from the mid-14th century._

_However, an important discovery was unearthed in the cave by an excavation team two days ago. According to Prof. Susamu Nakohima of Rekihaku, this find "is of the first importance to Japanese history and archeology in general. It is absolutely stunning."_

_Preserved in the cave for seven centuries is what appears to be a self-powered vehicle, using a primitive means of coal and steam compression. A crudely molded engine was found, along with the remains of a wooden chassis. It appears to have been deliberately buried in the back of the cave._

_If this find is genuine, then it establishes that some past thinkers in Japan developed a working version of the world's first automobile. _-Centuries- _before it was invented by the Europeans._

_An enigmatic message was found engraved on one of the wooden pieces of the so-called 'war chariot'..."_

"Freeze, hyperlink, enhance!" Skuld commanded excitedly. A series of thumbnailed photos appeared in midair. Skuld reached out and touched one with a pointer. It expanded to full size.

"Oh...my...God!" Urd exclaimed. She walked up close to the floating holographic image and traced the letters with her fingers.

_"August 15th, 1385_

_My dear Belldandy...I will always love you._

_K1"_

"That_ has_ to be him...because it's written in_ English_," Skuld remarked, still overwhelmed by the eerie timeliness of the discovery.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Belldandy was sitting in a zazen position in the center of the nuns. Abbess Sora and Abbess Chihiro were seated on either side of her; both dressed in the full regalia of their Zen Abbess vestments. The chanting was hauntingly beautiful to her ears...patient and expectant, yet resigned and dignified.

Megumi and Sayoko were seated alongside a group of novices off to the side. Belldandy could tell that they were nervously unfamiliar with the proceedings of the Sangha, but she admired them for choosing to be here with all the nuns. It amused her somewhat that, on this final day, the two women had chosen to wear the white robes of convent novices. Against the sea of bald heads of thousands of women and men, they were like two flecks of black.

The deep level of devotion and spirituality that Abbess Sora and Abbess Chihiro manifested amazed Belldandy. Both Abbesses were deep into their meditation; their faces were composed with serene miens. She knew that their expressions weren't the kind of masks of expression that so many mortals wore; their serenity was genuine and it just simply _showed_.

She felt a tapping on her shoulder.

Turning around, she saw Skuld and Urd. Skuld's face was all lit up, the way her little sister looked when something _big_ was going on.

"We found Keiichi!" she whispered into Bell's ear.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Urd had resorted to threats to make sure that Skuld didn't burst into the roomful of nuns shouting her discovery. Somehow, the three Goddesses had made it out of the hall without disturbing any of the 10,500 or so meditating nuns. Megumi and Sayoko had also silently crept out of the main hall to join them.

Urd watched as her sister reacted ecstatically about finding Keiichi. As soon as they left the meditation hall, Belldandy's face turned pink with relief. Maybe also because of the huge smile she had. Megumi and Sayoko also skipped and bounded with joy as they made their way to the convent's computer room.

Skuld explained in detail how she found Keiichi. After mulling around Yggdrasil for several days, she decided that self-pity and guilt just weren't getting her anywhere. So she checked on the computers used by Yggdrasil and hacked into the Mainframe. This was enough to make Urd feel totally proud of her little sister.

But Skuld went much further than this. She traversed the TimeStream repeatedly, exhausting herself in her search for any clues for the whereabouts of Keiichi and the others. She eventually stumbled on a TimeWeave where someone had built a vehicle of some sort during the Ashikaga Shogunate.

Then she did a probability index on that particular history using fuzzy logic, historiographic benchmarks and all sorts of math that Urd barely understood. As Urd listened, she was stunned...her little sister Skuld had formulated the higher mathematics! Skuld had _discovered_ some of the formulas she was describing, formulas normally taught in FinalTier Inculcation! Employing the Yggdrasil Mainframe to search the TimeWeave, Skuld was able to determine that the inventors of the wooden war chariot in that TimeWeave were either Keiichi or Genji. Then she hacked into the Earthrealm computers and searched out the recent archeological find in Kyushu.

Urd was amazed at the ingenuity of her youngest sister. Skuld had then designed a mandala that would invert the temporary license transfer token so that the _entire_ power output of a Goddess could be reassigned...with no time limit. Finally, she went to the Almighty Himself and convinced him to part with one amulet.

"What do we do now?" Urd asked.

"That's where you come in, Big Sister. You're the Norn of the Past, so you're the only one who can travel the TimeStream backwards to fetch Tomohisa and the others!"

Urd smiled to herself at this innocent disclosure; she knew who was foremost on Skuld's mind...but she let it slide without teasing her sister. Once more, she had revealed the hidden feelings in her heart by accident. Skuld was so animated, she probably didn't even notice that she had said his name. Urd vowed to herself that she would tease Skuld about it...later.

"So...you're going to expect me to get them?" Urd said, pondering the inevitable. Traveling the TimeStream was always tricky, but this would be much more difficult. The departure point was from _this_ future...a future which Skuld had termed "alinear". As Skuld had explained it, this future shouldn't have happened; it was torn out of the continuity of Time and cast adrift in the TimeStream like a shipwreck. Skuld was absolutely certain that if Urd was able to retrieve the four men, then this future would become linear again, like a child rejoining her parents after being lost.

Urd's mind was preoccupied for a moment...her Cevn would be safe, along with Keiichi and the others.

This version of the Earthrealm would be spared Kami-sama's destruction.

Bell's outburst, which killed Aoshima and Tyyr, would have never happened.

The Toshishima Imperium would never exist.

Everything would be all right.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Belldandy interrupted the sesshin, somewhat reluctantly. At first, Abbess Sora and Abbess Chihiro were indignant at the intrusion, until Belldandy explained that it was absolutely necessary.

She explained that the Goddesses needed divine strength to complete an important task. In order to effect the power transfer, they would have to 'borrow' the spiritual cultivation of entire sangha of nuns and students. The meditation hall was crowded, accommodating 2500 students alongside the 8600+ nuns and postulants.

If Skuld could tap into that resource of divine power...

Belldandy knew that her Goddess power output was approximately .4 on Skuld's Shinseisensor scale. Most mortals averaged slightly under .0001. But more spiritually attuned mortals could go as high as .0003 or .0004. With over ten thousand mortals adding their measures to the total available divine power, the available power for Urd could actually double. Belldandy felt confident that many of these women would fall into the upper realm of human divine power, probably in the .0004s.

"We're going to need all the divine energy we can channel," Belldandy thought to herself. She had considered breaking open her seal, but Skuld insisted that the amulet couldn't channel that much divine energy.

Her older sister looked apprehensive, with good reason; because Urd knew that she only had one shot at doing this. She had to travel backwards, locate Keiichi and the others, and then return them to 20XX unharmed. They decided since the vehicle was found in Kyushu, the men would be somewhere on that island.

It was risky. The TimeStream was meant to be looked at...not 'touched' so directly. In other words, traveling the TimeStream normally meant a Norn would only observe its maze of TimeWeaves. But Urd was going to _actually travel_ on the TimeStream, and then jump from this TimeWeave to the correct one in the TimeStream. Time was designed as a webworks, sometimes referred to as the TimeWeb. The Norns were the weavers of the web, but only passively, simply by virtue of their existence. The TimeWeb, filled with design by TimeStreams, was navigable to Norns and a few others. Each TimeStream is comprised of a 'bundle' of TimeWeaves; each TimeWeave is a single 'strand' of Time...a single continuum of time-reality. Belldandy knew full well that the last three Norns had died the Real Death because they dared to physically travel backwards, inwards, and forwards within the TimeStream. And all three were Goddess First Class Unrestricted licensees.

But there was another factor of risk. Urd could only travel backwards in time, not forwards. In order to return the men to 20XX, she would have to borrow two Angels. Belldandy's Holy Bell and Skuld's Noble Scarlet.

Skuld's angel would guide her as she moved forward in the TimeStream, while her own Angel...Holy Bell...would serve as a homing beacon for the present in 20XX. After all, who else could recognize the exact point in time when they disappeared except the Angel of the Norn of the Present.

It was her turn to comfort her anxiety-ridden Elder Sister.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Skuld finished the mandala in the middle of the Nun's Hall, and then placed the amulet in the middle. Belldandy had explained the process involved with Urd's journey, emphasizing the participation of the Sisterhood.

Finally, everything was in place. The sun was setting in the hall, which meant that outside the temple, it was twilight. Every nun was meditating with intensity.

If this worked, then Belldandy, Skuld and the rest would be pulled back into their rightful timeline, back to 20XX…which would spare the Earthrealm its doom.

Skuld activated the mandala. A whirlwind of lights arose from the outer circle and spun into a convex column over the amulet. From Belldandy, a blue light emerged. Her Angel, Holy Bell, emerged and floated over Belldandy, her wings glowing with blue divine power. Skuld felt her own Angel, Noble Scarlet, floating over her; her wings tipped with an aura of orange-pink energy. Finally, Urd's half-Angel half-Devil World of Elegance appeared, framed with a light green glow. A vortex of blue energy flowed from Belldandy and Holy Bell to the amulet. The room filled with golden sparkles as divine energy collected in the middle of the hall. Skuld knew that this was the total energy output from the nuns. She felt her own Angel, Noble Scarlet, moving towards the amulet.

The amulet was charged with a rainbow of energy. Urd walked over and put it on...

And with a flash of light, she disappeared. To Skuld's eyes, it looked like she was sucked into an aperture that had suddenly appeared in the middle of the room.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Urd arrived in 1384.

The emotional emanations were so rife with despair, uncertainty and violence...that she had to pause and gather her wits. Kyushu was in the midst of total chaos. She observed that the island was heavily forested with cedars and paulownia trees. Urd reflected on how to begin her search, then intuitively extended her senses into the densest gatherings of mortal turmoil. Extending her senses even further, she noticed that several wars were being fought in different parts of the island, leaving her with a morose feeling in the pit of her stomach. The energy here was so tumultuous, so gray. She could see large fires dotting the island.

She paused for a moment, feeling exhilarated to possess a fastness of strength that approached her full Goddess powers. It was much more than the _nothing_ that she had for Goddess powers since her license was suspended. For a moment, Urd considered extorting this power...never letting Belldandy have it back. She tested herself by casting forth a lightning bolt, which shattered a large boulder with a satisfying crackle.

Then she turned red with embarrassment when she realized that she had cast her bolt in an unintentional mimicry of Lum from Urusei Yatsura. It often amused Urd to see her anime counterpart zapping her 'husband' on the anime rerun channel. Skuld used to compare Keiichi to Moroboshi Ataru...a bit unfairly too, according to Urd. Keiichi was anything but a girl-obsessed teenager. But to Skuld in _those_ days...Keiichi was the "pervert of perverts."

"Aahhhhhhh..." Urd sighed as divine energy coursed through her.

Now to the task of locating Cevn, Keiichi and the others. Urd looked for a vantage point where she could attune herself to the aura of the island. With several hundred thousand mortal Souls to search through, she needed a place where she could establish a sensorium matrix. To her west was a huge mountain, at least 1700 meters tall. Possibly one of the tallest on Kyushu. Converting to her stealth form, she flew over it...then settled down on an outcropping at its summit. She recalled that it was called Mt. Kujuyama.

"If necessary, I'll hop across every single mountain on this island to find them!" Urd vowed to herself. She looked west, then southwards. She could see a pillar of smoke rising above a huge volcanic cone to the southwest. Urd recognized the peak as Mt. Aso, the largest conic volcano in the world. She didn't want to hop on that volcanic peak...as it looked like it could erupt at any moment. Despite her enhanced powers, she would have to conserve her energy to the utmost...saving it for the homeward journey through this TimeWeave in the TimeStream. Further southward, the mountain chain carved into the horizon as she extended her view. Then she looked eastwards, towards the ocean. She could see a castle burning in the distance. Attracted by the fire, Urd flew towards it.

For some inconsequential reason, she intuited that Keiichi was involved in a battle.

"War chariot?" she said to herself as she flew in on the conflagration. Below her, the springtime wildflowers carpeted the grassy plains with bursts of colors.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

BUTSUDANKYOJI ZEN TEMPLE - DEC 2050:

Megumi looked at the huge hall filled with nuns. On each face was a fervent expression. Megumi didn't know the words, so she tried to just hum along with the chanting. Some of the refrains began to lodge in her memory, so she repeated what little she could.

"It'll all be over soon...unless Urd can come through for us," she hoped silently.

Urd had disappeared in a flash, leaving Belldandy and Skuld. Megumi thought that Abbess Sora and Abbess Chihiro looked magnificent in all their vestments. They really looked like Abbesses.

Something she heard Cevn say came back to her mind. Cevn told her once that every NA meeting ended with a prayer or meditation of some kind. Instead of bowing his head in supplication, he would look up into the faces of the others in the circle. He explained to Megumi that he saw God in their faces.

Megumi could see God in the faces of the ten thousand nuns around her. An image came to her mind; the pictures of a number of caves and temples in China and Japan that had 'one thousand Buddhas'. She remembered the school trip to Kyoto...the visit to the Sanjusangen-do temple with its thousand images of Kannon. Looking around her, she felt a wave of security. The hall was filled with ten thousand living Buddhas...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Urd paused and hovered above the castle, the billows of smoke fanning past her in the wind. Inside the partially collapsed stone walls, flaming embers illuminated a killing ground littered with dozens of corpses. In the distance, she observed a large army marching northward in the twilight.

"No!" Urd said to herself as she surveyed the carnage. She had seen thousands of battles during her existence; but none of them involved people she loved. There was no detachment of concern here, in this battle.

Her guide sense informed her that Cevn and the others were here. Out of curiosity, she had watched a couple of historical genre dramas on the TV...but this was too horrid. The smell of roasting flesh mingled with the woodburne smoke...

Urd floated downwards, facing the terrible task of going through the dead to try and find the living.

"Please, let them be alive," she hoped aloud. There were at least a hundred dead warriors densely packed in the center of the castle grounds.

She saw four corpses in the middle of the military charnel field. The four men that she had looked for. Her heart literally halted itself in mid-beat. If she had been a mortal, she would have been dead within a few minutes.

Each looked at least ten years older than she remembered.

Each was dead...their fragile lives ripped away by swordpoint and arrowpoint.

"They fought to the very last..." Urd said sadly, her heart torn by the sight. She was too late. She saw Cevn's corpse and floated down besides it, fighting back tears.

"_Noooooooo!_" she screamed into the hazy air. She felt her heart and mind dancing on the precipice of delirium as she stroked the hair on his blood-soaked brow. She felt angry for a moment; now that Cevn was dead, the damned Ultimate Force no longer prevented her from touching him. Nearby, Keiichi and Genji had fallen, apparently fighting back-to-back at the last. She saw an adult Tomohisa, his face drawn into a warrior's scowl where he lay cold, arrows bristling out of his armor.

Urd cut herself short before she screamed herself hoarse. She had never expected to see this. Belldandy was right...Keiichi was dead.

And so was Cevn.

_"Failure is a state of attitude in which one alienates themselves from the path of love," _she remembered Kami-sama instructing her, back in happier times. She was young then, but she recalled the words clearly. Sometimes, Urd wanted to give up too soon; this was almost a recurring theme in her childhood. Either gung-ho or hide-her-head-in-the-ground.

The Lord had observed this trait...and had instructed her accordingly.

"Keiichi carved that message with his last breath, and Genji defended him to buy him time," she realized, unable to remain near Cevn's corpse. Genji and Keiichi were back-to-back in death, Keiichi with a short blade in his hand, small wood chips all around him, Genji pierced with at least twenty sword wounds. Urd was riveted with emotion at the display of raw courage. She floated over each of the four in turn, and kissed him on the forehead.

The carving on the 'war chariot' had been their last gasp chance to convey a message, one that they hoped would be discovered in the future. The odds were ridiculously unfavorable, but they had tried anyway.

Now, their courage had become her courage.

"So it's just a matter of going back a little further..."

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

The Imagawa-Shibuya warriors were closing in on their position, having mounted the castle keep. Keiichi's collapsing offense was working as planned; their suicide defense of the castle would provide a cover for the escape of the two Lords in the war chariot. As long as both Lords survived, there was a chance that they could be rescued, or Belldandy could prevent the events that placed them in this past era before they actually occurred. In his peripheral vision, he could see Cevn and Tomohisa battling with their spears. A few feet away, Genji covered him, his katana flashing silvered in bright arcs as Keiichi started the war chariot. An insane idea formed in his mind…

"Genji, Tomohisa, Cevn...hold them for another minute! Do _anything_ to hold them!" he yelled. Pulling his shortsword out, he began carving on the chassis of the war chariot with the point of his sword. He could hear the sounds of screaming, dying men all around them.

Just...another...minute...

The war chariot coughed to a rumble and streaked out through the front gate of the castle unimpeded. They were packed against each other, the four of them surrounded by hundreds…

_"Back off...all of you!!"_ he heard someone shout angrily. The voice was vaguely familiar...it sounded like someone he hadn't heard in years. A woman's voice, full of energy and fury...

Jagged streaking bolts of lightning exploded all around him. All the Imagawa troops nearby were struck with the blasts. Amazed, Keiichi saw hordes of the enemy collapsing unconscious after being touched by the deliberately aimed lance-like levin flashes. He traced the electrical storm to its source.

"Urd!!" he gasped, his mind meandering at the site of the Goddess discharging flashes of energy. Urd was dressed in the full Yggdrasil 'militant Goddess' attire. Three angels hovered over her. The enemy soldiers were awestruck at the apparition. Between Urd, the angels, and the lightning bolts, the Imagawa forces were paralyzed with fright. Which made them easy pickings for a pissed-off Goddess.

Bell-chan, Skuld and Urd had read his message.

"Kwai-sama...Kwai-sama!" their attackers shouted witlessly as they began to flee from the wrathful Goddess.

"Finally," Keiichi gasped as he was struck by the realization that the Goddesses had somehow mounted a rescue effort. Urd was firing lightning bolts like a machine gun, picking off Imagawa and Mori-Shimazu troops indiscriminately.

"Over here!" he screamed, waving his spear. Urd spied him, and then pointed a finger at him...

"NO! Not _me_...!" he yelled.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Urd enclosed all four unconscious mortals in a stasis bubble. She decided that it would be best to 'anesthetize' them with Urd-bolts before attempting to travel forward in Time. Having four totally freaked out mortals would only serve to impair her concentration. For good measure, she had struck everyone in the vicinity unconscious with lashes of thunderbolts, so she wouldn't be seen kidnapping the four. She had nearly perished on the journey here on the TimeStream. Going backwards into the Past was the easy part for the Norn of the Past. Now she had to relinquish all control and trust that Holy Bell and Noble Scarlet could guide her home.

Holding the amulet tightly, she encanted:

_"Dynamic treadmill of mazework, a web-like TimeStream uncertain,_

_Pray guide us to FutureNow, atold by triarch angelic communion,_

_Let portals denied to the Past become Future's mission gates,_

_As we ascend to the Present where all that Loves us awaits."_

The fabric of Time began to course through her as she saw the battle scene wrap itself around itself and then form a glowing channel of light...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

BUTSUDANKYOJI ZEN TEMPLE - DEC 2050:

Abbess Sora and Abbess Chihiro were jarred from their chanting when all the Temple's bells started gonging. The deeply resonant sound of the bell's pealing was almost carillon-like; a sacred refrain that filled the air with chimes and percussive solemnity.

"Who could be ringing the bells?" Abbess Chihiro asked Abbess Sora, who was wide-eyed with surprise. All of the Sisters were here in the hall. Sora searched the Buddha Hall with her eyes and saw that the three Norns were gone.

Apparently they had succeeded at preventing Apocalypse.

"Look!" several excited nuns shouted. Soon the Nun's Hall was abuzz with exclamations as a thousand questioning voices pointed at the altar. Abbess Sora reached into her robes and put on her glasses. She felt her Dharma sister, Chihiro, put a comforting arm around her shoulders.

Above the holy images was a plaque, with a series of words burned into it. Abbess Sora broke into a grin at its clumsy, yet appropriate message, which Abbess Chihiro read aloud in a booming, clear voice. Soon, the huge throng of nuns, monks and students were embracing each other with joy, so caught up in the Dharma victory they momentarily forgot their vows…

The meditation and chanting session had finished in triumph!

_"Sisters, Brothers, and Students of Butsudankyoji Temple, _

_Your desire to seek out the Truth has extinguished the Burning World. _

_Merry Christmas, Life goes on... _

_25 December 2050 _

_Urd Belldandy Skuld _

A few minutes later, Abbess Chihiro decided to call for a celebratory feast for the entire convent.

"What else could I do?" she told Abbess Sora, overwhelmed by what had just transpired.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

After dismissing the assembled Sisters and Brothers, Sora and Chihiro decided to repair to the temple's tea room so they could enjoy tea together and settle their nerves down. Neither Dharma sister said it aloud, but both felt that they had come within a thimbles' width of being utterly destroyed.

"Sora, I can hear her words in my mind, just as if she had spoken them yesterday. But only in a voice of health and hope, the voice she used to have when we first begged her leave to become our Roshi. Her final words of instruction…" Chihiro said, suddenly thoughtful.

"Chihiro, I miss her too. Somehow, she foresaw all of this. If time and space are fluid, and action truly arises of itself, then it's…"

"…possible that she still exists in the Wheel of Dharma," Chihiro finished.

"You know, Chihiro, if our Teacher really touched the Wheel in her seeing…the Wheel as it is today, right at this moment, years after she left the flesh…then it's possible that the Wheel of Dharma we inhabit may not have been fully clear to her. Why would she wait until her final day to tell us? She may have seen the apocalypse, but she may have not seen us," Sora said, her face filled with an effort to concentrate on something just beyond her grasp.

"All these years, I've had a sense of that, Sora. Abbess Omao is the wisest Sister I have ever met; it would be foolish to think that she withheld her warning until the day she left the flesh just for dramatic effect. We often accept the teaching that the Wheel of Dharma is a wheel compassing all of reality. But what if it is a _cog_? What if it is part of a greater whole even yet?" Chihiro replied, fueled by Sora's insight.

"Then it's possible that somehow, she did and _didn't _see us?"

"Then it's possible that somehow, we did and _didn't_ see her?

_--Knock knock knock!!--_

After waiting the polite ten seconds, Reinkyoai, their newest Senior Roshi, bowed as she entered the room. Chihiro commented aside to Sora that Reinkyoai looked magnificent in the rakusu Sora had sewn for her, and her rich vermillion overrobe. And once again complimented Sora on choosing her as the temple's Senior Roshi. Watching the younger nun's intensity and thirst for the Truth reminded Chihiro of herself, twenty years ago.

But now, she didn't look wise at all; instead she was unusually agitated.

"Abbes…er…Sisters," she said, still unaccustomed to the new form of address. After her recent promotion, both Abbesses had granted her and the other three Senior Roshi the honor of addressing them as "Sister" rather than "Abbess". The reason was simple: all six of them had ultimate authority in doctrinal matters, so why divide that authority with pretensions and ranks when instead it could be molded into humility. For was it not true that they all had been called upon by the New Teaching to be of service to the entire Sangha as Teachers? They would be the foundation of the temple, so that the new novices may stand on their shoulders and reach towards the Light.

"Reinkyoai-Roshi, how may we assist you?" Sora asked.

"I apologize for the interruption, but you know how she is," Reinkyoai explained. "Instead of waiting for her wheelchair, she used her Dharma status to intimidate the younger Sisters to leave her be, and then she started walking here by herself with only her cane. Once again, I met her partway and assisted her most of the way here. It's the same every time she visits. But she's fine, just a little tired."

Sora looked at her Dharma sister Chihiro with a mystified expression, not having any idea what their Senior Roshi was talking about. Life is a fluid of change, while time streams within and without.

"I come all the way from Kyoto…and you didn't even tell me that this one is now Senior Roshi? How was I to recognize her? I actually had to _look_ for her! And then to find her wearing a robe of authority, bright red like that sunrise you caused today…"

"_T…Teacher!!"_

"Whom am I hearing? You were supposed to take me to the Abbess Quarters, not here! This temple hasn't had an Abbess since my two…"

Reinkyoai watched, utterly confused, as both Abbesses overturned their tea services as they stood up and rushed to the doorway as if they were in their 20s instead of their 60s. And the old Teacher must be having a hearing spell again, because she didn't recognize...

…she flinched as her two Abbesses both halted, their faces as shocked as if they had seen the Enlightened One right here in this moment. Abbess Omao suddenly broke away from her supporting, assisting grasp and stepped forward, causing Reinkyoai to panic, worried that the venerable Teacher might have a fall. She was riveted with confusion as the old Teacher looked at the two silently for about a minute, and then dropped her cane.

"_M..My precious Dharma daughters…"_

Reinkyoai's watched wordlessly. It seemed that Sora and Chihiro looked as if they hadn't seen their Teacher in many years…

…and then the old Abbess, almost ninety years old, standing on her own without her cane for the first time since Reinkyoai was a novice...started sobbing.

For some reason, Reinkyoai Roshi felt the distinct sensation that a gift had been opened.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

The four of them sat in the tea room in silence.

The Teacher, her two Students, and the Teacher-to-be.

The tale Abbess Omao wove for the three younger nuns were absolutely incredible. Seventeen years ago, Sora and Chihiro were killed in a Shinkansen derailment outside Nara. Abbess Omao had known that she had terminal cancer, and had planned to transmit the lineage to both of her Dharma daughters soon after they arrived, so she could pass from this world in a state of parasamadhi. But when her two intended successors died, she was so distraught that she went into seclusion in the mountains for seven years, forcing herself to live. As an answer, the cancer was rendered benign by dint of her own efforts as she sought to unravel why her two most promising spiritual daughters had been taken from her.

Abbess Omao faced her grief, then pushed past her grief and heard the Bell of the Dharma very clearly. She knew deep inside that Sora and Chihiro were not supposed to die; that all of reality was wrong, perhaps. In her spiritual voyage towards truth, she began to envision a different reality, as one in the Tibetan tradition would envision a mandala and their place within it. She saw her world moving as one, life after life, in the Cycle of Dharma. But the other world…it was stopped. Something had stopped the Wheel from turning; the Cycle was halted. Which she knew was wrong as well, since change is a constant and cannot be diminished.

Looking within the wheel, she saw the Earth as a burning mansion, a common metaphor for the state of Illusion most of humankind chooses to embrace as truth. But she saw the Earth literally burning, torn asunder by a legion of explosions like a nuclear holocaust. The globe itself was annihilated; rent into dozens of pieces and a slag of cooling lithosphere. The misshapen cooling ejecta of the Earth's core which remained after the crust and layers of magma and mantle had been ripped gave the impression that she really was watching the destruction of a planet.

So she was faced with having to decide if she wanted to return to her 'home' which was safe, or did she want to focus her meditations towards the planet that had been destroyed. She decided on the latter course. But what could she offer? A warning by itself wouldn't suffice, there had to be more. After an entire year, she was still searching. She decided to make a commitment to the Enlightened One to chant non-stop for 108 days, except for brief periods of rest. At the end of her ascetic offering, the Bell of the Dharma rang once more. The Wheel had been halted in that world, because the Teaching had gone stagnant. What was needed was something new to start the Wheel of Dharma moving again. Something new to re-energize Zen itself. She could only glimpse that there was a revelatory doctrine; she didn't know what it was or how to find it. Nevertheless, she spent the last two years of her meditation trying to bring a single concern to anyone who would listen on that doomed world:

"_You must somehow discover a New Teaching…a major rewriting of doctrine, both religious and secular. Because if you fail to do so, none will survive the coming catastrophe."_

Sora and Chihiro looked at their venerable Teacher with astonishment writ on their expressions, and proceeded to tell their tale: of how they were given the lineage Transmission of the Lamp by Omao on her deathbed; Chihiro's 'breakthrough' and Sora's instant recognition of it as being the 'birth' of the New Teaching; the encounter with the Goddesses and how the entire sangha had lent their spiritual essences to power a mission into a purpose only the Goddesses knew…

The three Abbesses were silent, confounded by the fact that their stories implied the existence of totally different World-Systems. The teaching of World-Systems was both a koan and an illustration of Change…but now it was Truth.

The only Senior Roshi in the tearoom did the only thing she could do in the face of such profundities.

She started to teach the New Teaching.

Sora and Chihiro were surprised and insulted that their junior Sister had ignored all that had been discussed. She wasn't even thirty years old, and she was presuming to be able to teach the two of them, plus Abbess Omao...

...who had never been exposed to the New Teaching.

Feeling a burst of gratitude for Reinkyoai's initiative, they joined in. For the Elder Teacher's sake, Reinkyoai described Chihiro's discovery, how Sora had administered the whole Butsudankyoji by herself, how Chihiro had stood in triumph in the Great Hall and stated the essence of what she had learned, and how Sora had proclaimed the New Teaching. Abbess Omao was moved so much with pride for the good work of her Dharma daughters, she wept.

Together, the three of them gave the most precious gift a Sister could give to another Sister. The three stayed up all night expounding on the New Teaching to an attentive Abbess Omao, who listened with the same intensity that Sora and Chihiro had listened to her, many years ago.

That morning, Abbess Omao received a second Enlightenment; the Reawakening to the fullness of the New Teaching.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Exhausted from the marathon session, the four of them simply elected to sleep in the tearoom. Sora and Chihiro knew that the Sangha was in 'party mode', so to speak, and decided to let things be. They were still basking in the praises their old Teacher showered on them, even until the point where it was almost embarrassing. Embarrassing because she was their Teacher, their guide to the Dharma truths. Reinkyoai slipped away briefly to bring some tea once they were all awake and alert. After serving the Elder, then the two Abbesses, the young nun nervously started to speak of things...

"E..excuse me, Sisters," they heard Reinkyoai poise the silence with a small, tentative voice. Sora and Chihiro looked at their Senior Roshi, who seemed to be scared to death about something.

"The Goddesses…they went into the Past to save the Future. I'm certain of this."

"Reinkyoai, perhaps you're overwrought by what has transpired, and…" Abbess Sora noted, trying to comfort her Dharma daughter.

"It is what it is," Reinkyoai interrupted. "Elder Teacher, I must ask if you have the two objects of lineage."

"Why of course, for I have had no one to give them to," Abbess Omao answered in a questioning voice.

"Abbesses, I know this is bad form, but could you conduct yourselves to your quarters and bring the objects here?" Reinkyoai requested with a formal bow. "For you were told that what was divided into two would someday become one. Maybe this is what was meant."

Sora looked at her Dharma sister and saw her own astonished expression mirrored on Chihiro's face. A silent thought passed between them: _How could Reinkyoai possibly know what had been said to them by their Teacher on her deathbed? The only people present for the Transmission of the Lamp of the Teaching were the three of them. Not one of the Sangha's nuns knew any more of the matter, other than it had happened, and that the Transmission had been split. The two Abbesses had decided to never disclose the reason why the lineage had been transmitted to both…until it became time for them to give their final teaching and Transmit the Lamp of the Teaching onto their Dharma successors. If Reinkyoai already knew this, than that meant…_

…that she was the One! She _was_ the Future; she would be the sole recipient of the Transmission of the Lamp of the Teaching. Reinkyoai would be their Dharma successor, and the two would become one again.

Both Sora and Chihiro felt awed by this revelation.

"I believe that won't be necessary," Chihiro stated. "Your word is good enough."

For years, Buddhist associations and councils had been debating about the status of their first book about the Mahamahayana New Teachings, even going as far as to suggest that it be added to the Canon as a sutra. It was that important. Whenever they asked she or Sora for their opinion, they had offered only silence. Sora was the Heart Abbess, she was the Diamond Abbess, representing the two sutras. What kind of Abbess would Reinkyoai be? Chihiro could almost imagine it: Reinkyoai would be the Light Abbess, because her mastery of the New Teaching would be such that it would be given sutra status, and even called the Light Sutra.

For Light is a Is, while Void is a Not.

She looked over at Sora, who seemed to be so self-absorbed, she wasn't even paying attention to anything...

_Sora remembered kidnapping Reinkyoai from a Tokyo ghetto when she was fourteen; the little girl had been beaten and raped repeatedly over the past year, and had been marked for 'reclamation and harvesting' by the Toshishima Imperium. How she had punched and kicked and screamed as Sora and her assistants revived her after they had tranquilized her and transported her to the Temple. The little girl refused to eat; she refused to talk, she destroyed every room they put her in. Sora remembered when Chihiro met with her with hopes of calming her down, and instead she had leapt over the table and actually bit Chihiro on the arm. She remembered leaving books for her to read, which remained untouched for several months. One day, she noticed one of the basic manuals to the New Teaching lying open on the tatami...and she knew the little girl was on the Path. Sora recalled the first time she spoke to her, simply asking "Why am I here?" An appropriate question, one that she and every nun in the Convent still asked. Several months later, she allowed herself to be dressed in a novice's robe for the first time. By this time, Sora had observed that she was a voracious reader, so she and Chihiro selected a curriculum of sorts. About a year after her arrival, she finally asked to join the nuns in the daily sesshin sessions. She even volunteered to do temple work, and cleaned toilets and bathrooms without complaint._

_Sora examined her one day and said she was ready to take her vows and _-really-_ join the Sisterhood. She remembered seeing Chihiro crying at the installation ceremony for the nine 'untouchable' novices she had rescued from certain death; a witness to the truth that the New Teaching could be grasped by all. Sora herself put the light-grey robe of an initiate nun over her shoulders and asked if she had picked a religious name. She answered "I choose Reinkyoai for my religious name, as it means: Reishi for 'alike', In for 'seal', Kyocho for 'harmony', Ai for 'love' in the Chinese. 'Love creates harmony, the New Teaching seals all alike with its wisdom.'" That, out of the mouth of a sixteen year-old girl. And when did she have time to learn Chinese?_

_Sora remembered Reinkyoai besting her peers consistently during Dharma Combat, and decided to test her further by having her face off against Junior Sisters. Within a year, Reinkyoai was proving her mettle by besting Junior Sisters with her grasp of the New Teaching. Sora promoted her to Junior status and again personally put on the slate-grey robe of a Junior nun over her shoulders. Reinkyoai requested open access to the scriptorium and was allowed this. She still cleaned toilets every day, something none of her Junior Sister would stoop to do. For her fourth year at Butsudankyoji, Sora rewarded her with an opportunity to deliver a Dharma lecture to the assembled Sangha, a rare privilege for a Junior nun. Reinkyoai comported herself admirably. _

_About this time, Sora started chasing her out of the interview room with stiff whacks of her Keisaku staff, to encourage her. After six months of this, Reinkyoai came for her monthly interview, sat down and didn't say a word. Sora was going to lay into her again with the staff...and when she swung down an encouraging blow, Reinkyoai actually grabbed her staff and took it away from her, the first inquirent to ever do so. Then she told Sora she had been Awakened the night before, and returned her Zen staff. Sora knew the moment Reinkyoai had relieved her of her staff that she was saying 'this is no longer necessary'. She also realized that her student was a prodigy. Reinkyoai had reached Enlightenment only five years after being forcefully dragged into the Temple._

_This meant that Reinkyoai was ready for Senior status. Being Awakened was a requirement for promotion, since Senior Sisters were given the weighty responsibility to teach novices and initiate Sisters. Sora decided to promote her to Senior status, and proudly put the arsenic-grey robe of a Senior nun over her shoulders. In Dharma Combat, Reinkyoai held her own against her Senior Sisters…at first. Within two years, it was apparent to all that Reinkyoai was gifted..._-extremely-_ gifted. She not only defeated the other roshi regularly, but she also actually beginning to prove to be a challenge for her and Chihiro during the semi-annual sesshin bouts. And she still cleaned toilets every day.  
_

_One day, Chihiro pulled Sora out her office and asked her to walk with her to the bathroom hall where Reinkyoai was scrubbing toilets. Sora was certain that Chihiro was going to scold Reinkyoai. Instead, Chihiro grabbed the toilet brush from her and threw to the floor, telling Reinkyoai that she wouldn't need it anymore because she would be too busy being Chihiro's personal aide. Reinkyoai blushed beet red, and Sora realized that she wasn't the only Abbess who had been mentoring this young one. Chihiro had actually chosen Reinkyoai to be an intimate, only one of two personal aides. Which also meant that Chihiro desired her companionship as a friend, not just as a student._

_Sora started receiving complaints from other roshi that Reinkyoai was attracting their inquirents away from them. Of course, Reinkyoai wasn't encouraging this; in fact she was trying to do everything she could to discourage it. Becoming a competent administrator under Chihiro's tutelage, Reinkyoai still found time to teach and deliver stunning Dharma Lectures. And then four months ago, it happened._

_Reinkyoai and she faced off in Dharma Combat once again during this year's summer sesshin session. Her last two bouts with Reinkyoai were inconclusive, and she expected this one to be as well. Reinkyoai's debate was razor-sharp; but this time, there was a personal undertone that she couldn't miss. Reinkyoai was asking her to give herself praise for helping propagate the New Teaching, because it was the demand of Dharma that she do so. The next night, Sora was in the midst of her evening contemplation when one of her Keisaku staffs, normally propped in the corner, fell and hit _–her-_. Ignoring it, she finished her meditation, and when she arose, she noticed that the staff was pointing towards the scroll Chihiro had given her years ago depicting Butsukyodan as it was then: a few buildings in the midst of a huge lot._

_Reinkyoai had defeated her in Dharma Combat!_

_Filled with pride, she kicked the novices out of Chihiro's interview room the next morning and told her that she had finally become aware that her vision of Butsudankyoji had become truth. For it had been her vision, every bit as much as Chihiro's…something she had forgotten over the years. Only a world-class center for the Truth could take a street mongrel like Reinkyoai and transform her into a Teacher. Chihiro had responded by pointing at the scroll painting in her office depicting the 'early' Butsudankyoji and noted flippantly, "You just now figured that out?" At that moment, Sora realized that Reinkyoai was the Temple's next and final Senior Roshi._

Now, she had just realized that Reinkyoai was the next Abbess.

"I made sense of it after you and Elder Sister had told your stories...your Truths. The two women, the ones from forty years ago, that came to our Temple a few weeks ago, had their Truth as well, claiming that they had been brought here. From the past...their past," Reinkyoai explained.

"What two girls?" Sora and Chihiro asked. Neither one of them remembered two girls from the past coming to the temple; only the Goddesses had come about two weeks ago heralding the destruction of the Earth, and then saving it.

"There's a portrait of them in Sister Chihiro's study that she freshly painted just a few weeks ago," Reinkyoai answered. Abbess Omao reminded them that they had best take her word for it, for she too recognized that Reinkyoai had heard her message of warning and had even heard her final instruction to Sora and Chihiro. _An instruction she hadn't even given yet. _

"Past into Present by way of the Future with the two young girls. Past into the Present by way of separation, with Elder Abbess and you not remembering each other. Two worlds, two Realms bound by the same Dharma, but yet unbound. I see both...and your not remembering Megumi and Sayoko proves it. Somehow, I can feel deep inside that the Goddesses did something to right the wrong. By going into the Past, they saved the future of the two young women. Their future...our present. They restarted the Dharma Wheel that Elder Teacher recognized as frozen," Reinkyoai explained with a grin. For a moment, Sora thought she resembled the Skuld she knew from forty years ago, joyful to have answered an unasked question.

"One final thing. Right as the Goddesses left, I had a strong impression that they were trying to say something. It might sound silly, but they wanted you both to make sure you have your videxes turned on tomorrow morning."

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

After things had settled down, Abbess Sora retreated to her office to do a reality check. Was it a dream, that the world was going to be destroyed? She distinctly remembered the Goddesses asking the Sangha to meditate, so they could 'borrow' some type of energy to do something. She had no recollection of meeting Megumi and Sayoko...yet, there was the portrait in Chihiro's study, just like Reinkyoai said it would be. Chuang-zi's ancient analogy of the dreamer and the butterfly kept flittering in her mind...

_Rzzzt_

"Hello?" Abbess Sora said into the videx.

_"Abbess Sora? Did you hear what happened? Everywhere on the world, there was a sunset, followed by a sunrise an hour later! Power outages all over the globe. We don't have the dome generator as you have at Butsudankyoji, so I couldn't reach you until just now. We just wanted to call and let you know that we're all alright."_

Abbess Sora looked at the holograph and blinked her eyes in surprise. Her former husband, now Abbott Aoshima of the Shofuku-ji Temple, was on the videx. Shofuku-ji was the first Zen center in Japan, as it was located near Fukuoka in Kyushu. Long ago, they had ended their marriage amicably, so that they could devote their lives to the pursuit of Enlightenment...as each was driven with a deep desire to seek spiritual enlightenment through Zen. They still remained lovers and friends in a sense...their love now expressed solely in the spiritual realm…and in their memories.

A modern day Abelard and Heloise.

Another window opened up in the videx holodisplay and she saw her twins, Kenji and Megami. They were outside of Kenji's condo...the dawning sun surrounding them with a backglow.

Kenji was with his wife, Elle, Tamiya and Sayoko's daughter. Elle's jetblack hair was accented by a white streak that she combed back from her forehead. She looked the spitting image of her mother, Sayoko. Elle was affectionately cradling her infant son, little Gaku-chan. Sora's grandson. Megami was leaning cozily against her husband, Genji Jr., son of Megumi and Genji. Their little four-year-old granddaughter Sayoko-chan was nervously sucking her thumb. His father, Genji Sr., looked tired and a little gaunt...he had just inherited the CEO and President's positions in the giant Mishima Zaibatsu from his father, who finally retired last month. His wife, Megumi, had decided to take his mother and father on an extended world tour vacation...

"How..could..I..know..this?" Sora mouthed silently as she watched her brood on the videx, filled with the miracle of everyday life. She had never met most of these people...but yet she _knew_ who they were. She knew their histories. And yet...her children had died over 30 years ago, in a bunker in France.

But here they were!

She almost collapsed with shock as she realized that they were _alive_! And on the heels of this realization was another...

The Goddesses had chosen to let her remember her losses of the past...so she could even more fully appreciate her gains in the present!

"Mom! Are you alright?" her daughter Megami asked. Abbess Sora saw the expression of concern on everyone's face.

For some reason, Abbess Sora could only nod that she was okay, as the tears started.

"I'll call back later...I can see that you need some time for yourself," Priest Aoshima said kindly, rubbing his shaved head with a practiced motion.

_"Mom...I'm so glad to see you again! Elle and I decided that it's been too long since we visited you. Now that the kids are old enough, we're going to arrange for both our families to come visit you over New Years, if you can tear yourself away from the Temple for a few days. Maybe we can convince Hizzoner the Mayor of Sapporo and Ms. Sayoko to come with us. Elle's been badgering her father for months to take a break from his political duties and come pay his respects! We'll talk more about it in a couple days. I..I don't know what happened with the sun, but it is definitely going to give a lot of people pause for reflection upon more spiritual matters. I love you...bye," _she heard Kenji and Megami say as they all waved to her.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Abbess Chihiro stared at the videx unit.

She had just talked with her former husband and children. It was so strange...they had chatted with her as if it was a routine thing to simply be talking. Yet, she felt like a deep part of her soul was being touched by a rainbow of liquid sunshine, filling her with joy and gratitude. She hadn't talked with them for a _long_ time...

They were all okay.

"I've _really_ missed them," she thought before she burst into tears. She had remembered it all. How she lost them in the auto accident. How she had mourned and then turned to the Sangha for refuge, because she couldn't even shelter her own heart. How she met Sora with that fateful phone call thirty years ago…and the rest was history.

The life that could have been...was now being in _being_!

Void..is..a..Not!

The Goddesses had come to their temple and had saved the world from certain disaster with their help. Her precious Dharma Mother, Abbess Omao, was still alive. Her family had just called her on the videx. Bells had rung all over the world, the Sun had blinked. Her children were all grown up, with children of their own! She remembered their deaths, and realized that the Goddesses had left her with sad memories so she could treasure the new memories with her family. It seemed that a lifetime of regrets had just faded away. She decided to compose herself and visit Abbess Omao. Abbess Omao would be able to comfort her...and listen to the weird tale of how she had 'missed' her family for 30 years. For some reason, she _knew_ that Abbess Sora would be with their Teacher as well. She said a prayerful thanks for the renewal, the New Teaching, and the return of the family her deepmost heart had longed for and grieved over for over half of her life.

"Or have they missed _me_?" Abbess Chihiro wondered aloud.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --


	42. Pt 42: Sortment

**Part 42: Sortment**

Skuld fingered the pearl-like smoothness of the precious angel egg mounted on her necklace as Urd related the story of her travels in the TimeStream. She knew that her cherubic Angel, Noble Scarlet, was resting inside of the egg, exhausted from the immense journey. She had done so well! After all, it was sweet Noble Scarlet that guided Urd back to the Present. The overtiredness was wordlessly conveyed to Skuld...she and her Angel were twined around each other as closely as sunset and sunrise. After all the commotion Noble Scarlet caused when she first was birthed into the mortal world..._this_ was an impressive achievement for the neophyte Angel.

The four men that Urd retrieved from the past...only barely resembled the young mortals she knew. They were horribly altered in a brutal way; all Skuld had to do was look at their hardened visages to see this. She surveyed them again, especially Tomohisa who seemed completely unrecognizable except for his eyes. A whole different Tomohisa. This wasn't the Tomohisa that kept pestering her to play baseball a few months ago. He looked like one of those samurai on a TV series, except for the scars all over his face. Those looked _real_, she sensed with a shudder.

"How come Urd has all this insane energy?" Skuld wondered as she arranged her hair into three long braids. She put her hair up in two cloth gathers, and then fingercombed the rest back in a long ponytail as Urd chattered on. She knew that her older sister couldn't possibly begin to describe the transit from Then to Now in sensible terms; just as Skuld couldn't adequately enlighten her sisters about how she could explore the Yet-to-Be while physically in the Now.

"But this is Urd...and Urd is as unpredictable as a rabbit," Skuld observed. The dramatic cast of Urd's narrative bordered on hyperbole; Skuld suspected that it was because Urd thought she could milk all the attention she could gather from her two sisters. Which wasn't much, because both she and Belldandy were exhausted.

Their Angels had exerted themselves to the utmost.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"...Well, once I got back there and found the guys, I couldn't believe how freaky they looked! Right then, I decided to knock them out," Urd elaborated. Belldandy's eyes grew wide at this; the image of Urd zapping her beloved Keiichi flashing vividly in her mind's eye.

"D..don't look at me that way, sis! I _had_ to do it, y'know! It's bad enough trying to transport a mortal through a TV...but I had to navigate a TimeStream! Forwards! With _four_ mortals in tow! But that's why I'm such a kewl Goddess! Because I can do it all...when others can't! It was just another Urd routine. Saving the day and all that!" Urd was punching her fist in the air like a victorious boxer.

"Yeah...whatever. Spare the braggadocio and get to the details," a nonplused Skuld said dryly. She was irked at Urd's stabs at praise-seeking...her Big Sister knew that this was a group effort, rather than a Urd solo shot.

"So, I gathered the four in a shield sphere and released my Angel, so she could get guidance from your baby Angel," Urd continued, looking down at the Temporary License Transfer Token lying on the table. She had returned Belldandy's powers immediately upon their return, lest she be further tempted to retain them.

"Urd..." Belldandy warned, full well knowing how delicately prideful Skuld was about her newly birthed Angel.

"Well, it seemed like I was riding on a ribbon of song...as the 14th century left me away. As it faded into the TimeStream, I could hear our three Angels singing. It was eerily beautiful. Their voices sounded liked a soft hail of velvet to my ears...like a chorus of glass chimes and woodwinds. I _needed_ to experience something beautiful after what I saw back then," Urd stated, finishing with a shudder.

Urd had decided to postpone telling the others about the corpse ridden battlegrounds and the devastated castle. Belldandy and Skuld certainly couldn't handle hearing about how had she arrived moments after the four guys died in pitched battle. _She_ could barely handle it. Urd noticed Belldandy looking at her with an intent expression.

"What do you mean, what you saw back there?" Belldandy asked, her eyes narrowing. Urd batted her eyes and smiled innocently, trying to deflect the emphasis she heard in her sister's question.

"Ummmh, anyway...then I could see this luminescence emanating outwards from all three Angels. They were holding hands while slowly rotating in a circle. From the center, some kind of energy folded. It flowed outwards...like ribbons in front of a running fan. The light pierced through one of the corridors of the TimeStream, looking every bit like TNA."

"TNA?" Skuld asked.

"Yes. Mortal science identifies the chemical encoding matrix of life as DNA. You know...two strands of nucleotides. Chromosomes and such. But there is a third strand...which remains invisible to them. The Ixodenum matrix. Remember your intermediate metachemistry in FirstTier Inculcation, Skuld?"

"I must have missed it when I was busy chasing bugs 'cause _someone_ couldn't keep the Yggdrasil Mainframe from crashing!" she snorted back accusingly.

"Okay, whatever you say...I'm too tired to fight with you tonight, brat!" Urd resigned herself, shrugging her shoulders. Skuld's eyes were half-open as she was seated at the kosatsu with her chin resting on Mjolnir. Seeing her two sisters this fatigued inclined Urd towards feeling her own exhaustion.

"Anyway, we all weaved back and forth through messes of random TimeWeave corridors in the TimeStream. To me, they all looked like the usual infinite labyrinth. You know...how the TimeStream seems to pulse with shifts of energy. But Noble Scarlet seemed to know which passages to explore. Her scarlet eyes were radiating with intensity as she guided all of us. You would be proud of her, even if she _is_ a somewhat underdeveloped little seraph! She has such a cute little pink glow when she gets excited...kinda like Rudolf the Red-nosed Reindeer," Urd described, recanting her earlier slurrous opinion. Skuld smiled at her angel egg and the Christmas reference.

"Then right towards the end, Holy Bell pulls on ahead and floats over to a side passage. By this time, everything was getting foggy and dim. I think that the Goddess powers I borrowed from Belldandy and the nuns were starting to deplete themselves. Holy Bell was definitely in a rush to get us out of the TimeStream. Then she starts singing and gesturing...and I figured that this was the place to go. Funny...for a moment, I thought it looked like she was looking in a mirror...I could see_ another_ Angel in front of her at the exit she was pointing to. Then _pop_! Here we are."

"That's an incredible tale, Urd. But what I don't understand is how Keiichi got so_ old_," Belldandy questioned, her hands splayed tiredly on the table. A lot of things didn't make sense. First, Belldandy had expected that they would all return to the exact point where they had disappeared--the sento that Sayoko had recommended. But instead of ending up in the public baths, _everyone_ was unceremoniously deposited on the temple's living room floor. Belldandy was grateful...at least they had their clothes on this time; the same clothes they were wearing at the point when they were snagged back to the present. But the second expectation had burst the moment she turned to see Keiichi and the others...

They looked like soldiers...and they were extremely emaciated. And filthy and disheveled and exhausted and scarred and...

"Yeah! Tomohisa looks like he's a thirtysomething!" Skuld exclaimed with dashing disappointment.

"Tell me about it...Cevn has a bunch of gray hair..."

"And Keiichi has half his head shaved and is sporting some kind of awful..._beard_!" Belldandy finished, stricken by her mortal boyfriend's roguish appearance. "And is that...armor...that they're all wearing? It looks and smells horrid!"

"Well, Holy Bell assured me that once they spend a few days here in the present, their appearances will gradually begin to return to normal as the 'correct' TimeWeave we returned to...the proper 'Present' in the TimeStream…exerts its influence on them," Urd reassured her sisters with a smile. She didn't want to admit it, but she was a bit freaked out at how old Cevn looked with his shock of gray hair. And a stump where one of his hands should be. Would that heal as well? She looked at Belldandy while pouring herself another cup of hot sake.

"But this may only be the cream off the top of our problems," Belldandy said doubtfully. "What if their memories _don't_ change? And what about Megumi and Sayoko? They saw a version of the_ future_!"

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

As she sat on her futon, Skuld mentally investigated the possibility that the four men had aged in the past because they arrived at an earlier date...perhaps years earlier than the moment in time that Urd had arrived to in the past, when she found them. According to Megumi and Sayoko, they had been imprisoned by Aoshima-baka for almost 15 months, which corresponded with her own sense of elapsed Future while she and her sisters were confined by the stupid jerk! Tomohisa and the others might have arrived _years_ before Urd retrieved them. She didn't believe that the force that transported them back in time was responsible for their drastically altered appearances. The only date that they could rely upon was the one she found in 2050; the date Keiichi had carved into the wooden vehicle being studied by the archaeologists.

"In _that_ 2050...not _this_ TimeWeave's future," Skuld reminded herself. In_ this_ present, there was no mysterious "war chariot" buried in a cave somewhere in Japan. Nevertheless, they were here...and Skuld conservatively concluded that somehow they had lived for a period of at least ten years in the 14th century.

When the Goddesses had arrived back at the temple, all the mortals were unconscious...no doubt their minds were strained beyond ken by their travels through the TimeStream. TimeStream travel was a psychosis-inducing experience for any Goddess except a Norn...Skuld could only imagine what it was like for the mortals, even if rendered unconscious. Big Sister had done something right for once by knocking them out. It must have been hard, blindly pushing her way through the TimeStream to the Present with a cargo of unconscious men, guided by a trio of Angels.

But what puzzled Skuld most was how Belldandy, Skuld, Megumi and Sayoko had all been _sucked_ backwards in time with the abruptness of a sonic boom the moment Urd had arrived back in 20XX. Urd's arrival in the present had effectively sealed off the alinear chunk of time they were in. As they no longer were integrated in the TimeStream of 2050, they were repulsed. And wound up back where they started, just like Skuld had hoped. They were forcibly converged to the point in Time where Urd returned.

The alinear segment of Time they had inhabited was restored to its rightful corridor of Time. So...somewhen, there was a temple full of nuns with Sora and Chihiro as Abbesses, no longer under the sword of the Almighty's threat to 'depopulate' the Earthrealm.

Skuld lazed in the fact that she was back home, safe and sound.

Well, _almost_ back. Skuld was almost out cold the moment she hit her thickly blanketed futon. Her internal sense of Time informed her that they were off by a couple of days when they arrived back home.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Belldandy watched her sleeping sister through half-lidded eyes.

Once they regained their senses upon their return, the three Goddesses had brought out blankets, fresh futons and pillows for all of the unconscious mortals. During Urd's monologue, Belldandy kept looking back over her shoulder to reassure herself that Keiichi was still present in the Present. She saw that he was sleeping, breathing shallowly. She was concerned...his face looked so gaunt, definitely emaciated. All four men looked like they had been starving for quite some time.

Deep in her heart, she yearned for Keiichi to awaken, so she could gather him in her arms. Belldandy thought about how much she missed hearing his soft voice...

"Soon...my love," she said to herself, smiling winsomely.

For some reason, Belldandy thought of Peorth, back in the Earth Helper branch of the Goddess Relief Office.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

_A..a..a..aachoo!!_

Peorth sneezed with affected delicacy. She was perched on her floating consolechair, looking over various Node monitors that she manned. Most of them measured the flow of wishgranting energy expended by the Ultimate Force and the Yggdrasil Mainframe system status, while a dozen or so monitored the activities of wish candidates and wish recipients.

"Belldandy..." she thought randomly.

Just recently, a deeply instinctual sensation informed Peorth that Belldandy had somehow been _absent_ in time. Which was next to impossible, since she was the Norn of the Present. Peorth's realm was Forever, which was as confining as it was revealing. Fortunately, she wasn't a Norn. Yet, she still couldn't figure out Forever's chronological attributes. Most of the time, anyway. It was both Now and All Time. Only Kami-sama knew for sure...and He had refused to instruct Peorth. All He said was Forever existed beyond Now and Eternity. According to the Lord, the truth of Forever was on a need-to-know basis. Which didn't include Peorth, despite the fact that Forever was _her_ realm of Time.

She looked wistfully at the network of rose vines encircling the monitors and equipment at her workstation. On impulse, she lowered her consolechair to the floor and then kicked up a flurry of petals with her bare feet. The rainbow of rose petals that carpeted the floor bore little resemblance to those in the Earthrealm. Here, rose florets remained fresh and aromatic for years after they were shed. Although Peorth preferred ruby red roses, she enjoyed a host of other shades of roses around the place. Her fellow workers thought she was crazy...and perhaps they were right. She didn't care a whit about what they thought.

Peorth appreciated the symbolic aspects of the rose. Roses were a visual tropos representing romantic love, purity, sensuous conduct and conduit. As a GRO agent, she served as the conduit between mortals and their wishes. A divine Rose. Even her Angel, Elegant Rose, possessed a floral nature. Millions of the wishes she granted had created emotional conduits between mortals...doubtlessly because they were _always_ wishing to be in love.

"Urd may be the Goddess of Love...but _I'm_ the real love giver," she observed in the privacy of her Node with a self-knowing smile.

Peorth reflected on her long history with the rose. Currently, she and the three sisters used lensing and floral effects as primary teleport transportation gateways. Skuld's was the simplest because she was the youngest...all she had to do was find water and slip through the meniscus. She hadn't chosen a floral gateway as of yet, but that would come in time. But the older Goddesses had to rely on other means to transport until just a few mortal centuries ago. Urd had chosen cherry blossoms, which restricted her to only a few parts of the Earthrealm. Belldandy used sunflowers and trees. Peorth used roses, of course. This was the standard...until the recent inventions of the mirror, the camera and the television. Now, each Goddess had an organic and mechanic means of teleportation portals. Eventually, Skuld would begin to use a technological means of teleportation...Peorth hedged her bets that it would have something to do with holophotic videmeotronics. After all, Skuld _was_ the Norn of the Future.

Peorth still remembered the time a couple of thousand years ago when Belldandy accidentally was observed by mortals in mid-transport through a mirror. That mirror was now locking in a vault in the Imperial Palace in Tokyo. The ancient Japanese mythologized it, regarding that primitive mirror as one of their 'Holy of Holies'. All because of Belldandy.

"Belldandy..." she thought again. "What's with this flush of thoughts about Belldandy, I wonder?"

Peorth revisited her last trip to Earthrealm in her mind...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Following her talk with Belldandy immediately after the 'omiai incident', Peorth had taken a leave of absence from the GRO to seek some much needed R & R. She had to see for herself if she was experiencing Wishout from too many millennia granting wishes. She decided to visit the Orion System in Sector A-Epsi-2378-Durgea-Thon-4114...a solar system within Belldandy's assigned sector where each of the four habitable planets could only host one GRO Goddess at a time. Of course all planets were habitable to a Goddess, but Peorth preferred her planets _alive_. Fortunately, she was able to reserve a week on Orion V, one of her favorites.

There, in total solitude, she read several GRO manuals discussing the dangers of Wishout. She was at her leisure while sunning in the pink and purple sandy beaches. The azure glow of Betelgeuse created a second horizon above that of the sea while she basked in its waning light. Many times larger than the sun of the Earthrealm, the massive blue stellar object prominently filled a good portion of the evening sky as it set. Because the sky of Orion V was orange, the setting sun was bathed in a greenish glow. Having the whole planet to herself, Peorth could sunbathe to her heart's desire, clad only by the oceanside breeze...without the usual skimpy bathing suits she was so fond of.

No tan lines to worry about.

For the remainder of her vacation, Peorth examined her recent wishgranting exploits. Belldandy had offered her opinion that she had become wished out...too emotionally detached from the mortals she was supposed to provide relief to.

She had to grudgingly agree with her friend's assessment.

After the week of reflection and relaxation was up, Peorth checked herself in to an Ethiopsylogic Clinic to undergo treatment for Wishout. It was a blow to her pride, but Peorth knew it was necessary. Despite all appearances to the contrary, Peorth greatly valued her ability to be prepared to contract wishes made by her clients.

There, she underwent a series of rehabilitative exercises. At the end of her treatment, she was told by the Proctors that she needed to limit her wishgranting to once a year...and not to take on difficult wishes.

The Yggdrasil System had logged the aftercare instructions of the Clinic...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

So now, here she was.

Back at the GRO, in her personal Node, in the Earth Otasuke Division.

Her holographic nameplate said "Peorth" and something about "Restricted to Limited Duty". That in itself was embarrassing. But beyond embarrassment lay tedium. All Peorth had to do was visit her post on occasion, waiting for the one wish that would be called up to her this year. It was as boring as watching mountains erode.

Peorth thought it ironic that, with her powers unsealed, she could see Forever...but was limited with what she could do in the Now.

"Belldandy..." she thought again. At least she was thinking of Belldandy more than she was thinking of Keiichi. Perhaps her rehab had proven effective.

There were only so many ways she could arrange roses in her workspace.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

I woke up groggily, feeling a wave of nausea as soon as my eyes greeted the dawn. There was something _different_ about my surroundings. The air was much chiller then I remember, and I couldn't hear any distant warshouting or smell enemy campfires.

My guts still clenched to themselves in starvation mode. I had grown used to feeling the knots of my intestines stretched against my skin, hardened by lack of food. Then I noticed that I was sleeping on something much softer than the hard ground along the castle ramparts. Maybe I was becoming delirious from the hunger. Because of the Imagawa siege on Lord Shimazu's castle, we hadn't had any supplies for a long time. I remembered the last several evenings; Imagawa's troops had made a show of roasting swine and venison right under the castle walls...the odor of cooked meat was intended to weaken our resolve.

I was indoors.

There was something weirdly familiar about this place. It was still dark outside, but as my eyes adjusted to the lack of light, I could see that I was in a futon, inside of a room.

Back at Lord Mori's castle? Keiichi's house in Oita? Impossible...that was years ago! When the Imagawa forces captured Lord Mori's land, I learned that they looted his mansion and burned it to the ground, including our compound in Oita. I would have been greatly surprised if they hadn't. There is no psychological victory if a conqueror leaves remnants of the vanquished's familiar environs and homesteads. Not in the Ashikaga Era, to be sure.

"Where am I?" I wondered, feeling panic arise in my throat. I was so scared by this waking dream that I instinctively jerked and curled up into a fetal position.

"Hey...take it easy. You're safe," I heard a soft feminine voice intone. Where did I hear that voice before? It sounded so...soothing. So...benign. So...tender?

The voice of my dreams. Dreams that had become scarcer and scarcer over the hard years...

I looked up...into the face of an apparition.

_"U..Urd?"_

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Rather than going to sleep with her sisters, Urd had decided to keep a nightwatch on the mortals. After all, she felt a sense of responsibility by virtue of the fact that she had risked _everything_ to bring the guys back. Somehow, Skuld had figured out that they had 'lost' two days in the process of their time traveling. They had left for the public baths on a Saturday...Keiichi and Megumi had just finished finals. Now it was Tuesday, with Christmas just around the corner.

She sipped on a chilled bottle of Heineken, one of her favorite non-Japanese beers. Belldandy and Skuld had hit the sack a few hours ago...after falling asleep during her narrative of her exploits through Time. Urd was too amused to feel insulted by this.

It would be daylight soon. Urd was drinking...not to get drunk, but just to get a little buzz on. It was her way of unwinding. "Besides, New Year's is coming up! I can really get trashed then! After what I just went through...I think I deserve a drinking bout with Tamiya and Ootaki! I'll drink those two under the table again!" she thought with glee. Just a week and a half...and then she could really cut loose then with some high Richter sake consumption.

As time wore on, Urd thought of all the crazy times she had in 2050. They weren't exactly happy times, but they were filled with excitement...in an insane sort of way. Paint the town with lurid colors. Livid colors of eyegrabbing petulance. Urd still couldn't get the images out of her mind of the streetscene life in the future Tokyo. Or Sora and Chihiro as senior nuns in some sort of Zen convent. Especially the heartwrenching sacrifice of Kodama to free her and her sisters.

It was almost funny when Kodama, Hikari and Senrigan reported to them while they were in the kitchen, totally carried into a panic because they had been gone two days. She, Belldandy and Skuld started crying and Belldandy scooped up a very surprised Kodoma and hugged the little Ninjette tight to her breast, swearing that she would never leave her again.

"Uhmmmm," she heard someone groan. She snapped to alertness. Someone was waking up! She looked over the blanketed mounds...and saw Cevn roll on his back. In a split second, she floated herself over to his side. His eyes were open, but they were confused and vacuous. Then he turned his head over and looked straight at her.

As she heard him gasp out her name, she unknowingly let slip the bottle of beer...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Cevn reached up with his unmaimed hand and tried to touch his fingers against Urd's cheek, just to see if she was really there. The Ultimate Force intervened and his fingers stopped the customary two inches from her. It had been so long...he had forgotten.

"You...brought...us...back," he said weakly, before he choked on astonished tears. He could feel Urd's hot tears dripping on his face...indirect watery kisses of gratitude.

Urd could only stare at him wordlessly, filled with longing and heavyheartedness.

"Another tearful reunion," she noticed as she felt an impulse to hug him to her chest until he smothered in her embrace. Then he said the words that jarred her heart into overload.

"I...I really, really missed you, Urd," he said between dry heaves. Now she wanted to hug herself to his chest, so she could hear the comforting sound of his living heartbeat…

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Cevn was just beginning to describe his life in the 1370s when Keiichi woke up. Urd had figured that Keiichi would be the next one awake.

"Belldandy is going to be so happy!" she rejoiced as Keiichi rolled over to look at her. Keiichi weakly stood up, then sat down again, his legs unsteady.

"I. I'm _home_!" he half-shouted in a raspy voice. "This...isn't a dream. This is _real_!! We made it back alive! I'm _really here_! This is real!" he mumbled.

Keiichi looked at Cevn and Urd, and then tried to get up again. He was too weak to stand on his own feet. He could only feel one driving force in his heart right now. All that he could remember was the never-ending hunger that gnawed at his spirit while it consumed his body. Now...he was back where he belonged.

Back where _she_ was.

The last thing he remembered was the insane idea of carving his name and a message…in English so that there would be no questioning its authenticity…and then being surrounded by Imagawa forces. Sword glares glancing the sun everywhere, and then a shout and a rainfall of lightning bolts…

"What the _hell_ happened to these guys?" Urd said incredulously. Keiichi was wirethin; dressed in some kind of court armor. There was no muscle on his arms, his cheeks were drawn in deeply and his face looked like a skull with a spraypaint of flesh. Just like Cevn and the other two guys.

"Where...is she? Where's Bell?" he asked hoarsely. Urd understood immediately.

"I'll take you to her," she promised. She hovered, comforting him as she gently untied the armor he was wearing. The ties had bored into his skin; they were crusted with blood and gore. Keiichi winced as she pulled off his chest plate...

She suddenly realized that she had completely tuned out Cevn when Keiichi had awakened.

"Oh..my..." Urd muttered, ridden with sudden guilt.

"It's okay. I understand," she heard Cevn say as she turned a stricken face to him.

"Whatta guy," she thought, amazed at his selflessness. She tenderly gathered Keiichi up in her arms.

"You okay?" she asked Keiichi as she floated towards the sister's bedroom.

He was already unconscious from his weakened state...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Belldandy stirred in her futon, stretching her long legs under the covers. She felt startled for a moment when one of her feet kicked something under the blanket.

She turned her head and saw _Him_.

_--Gasp!!--_

"K..Keiichi," she whispered lovingly, barely holding her shout of joy in check. Her beloved was sound asleep next to her, sharing her futon. Her hands trembled as she stroked his jawline affectionately.

"You're really here with me, aren't you, my love," she softly said to the sleeping figure. Up close, Keiichi looked like a cancer victim in the last days of emaciated struggle. But Belldandy didn't care; she could still make out his firm cheekbones, his smile, his long eyelashes...and that sensual mouth. She trusted her Angel implicitly; Holy Bell had affirmed to Urd that all the men would be back to normal within a few days.

Holy Bell loved Keiichi too.

Belldandy had suffered cruelly during her temporary separation from her Angel. It was as if all her senses had been blunted. But an exhausted Holy Bell had returned with Urd and the others. The first 

thing her Angel did was embrace her tightly...then tuck herself away in Bell's Soul for a much-deserved rest.

Belldandy felt weak from lack of sleep, but not weak enough to keep from staying up, admiring Keiichi like the rare jewel of a mortal he was.

As softly as she could, she rained kisses on his face while he slept.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Megumi cradled Genji.

As soon as the sun arose, she had awakened. The technodelic futurescape was gone, replaced by more familiar trappings. She felt her mind shifting through a series of mental templates as she tried to sort out where and _when_ she was. As she profiled the surroundings with a series of visual snapshots, her caution shifted to joyous amazement as she realized that she was in her _own_ living room. Her relief upped itself to a fever pitch when she saw Genji's sleeping form a few feet away; but almost as quickly as it sweetened with the discovery...it soured when she saw his battle-hardened aspect.

He looked much, much older. At least Cevn-sensei's age. He was uncomfortably malnourished. Genji looked like he had been through hell. She and Sayoko had endured their own private hell...but it seemed to pale alongside her imaginings about what had shaped this man...this sleeping Genji in front of her. A man he was; there wasn't a trace of the boyishness of the Genji she had fallen in love with. Her eyes tinged with sympathy as she noticed that his once-smooth face was deeply tanned and scarred; crow's feet wrinkled themselves around his eyes and deep crevasses etching his jaw and mouth. His hands were burly rough and covered with scars.

Genji had a crudely coifed samurai-style hairdo. She remembered a while back in a mall somewhere in Tokyo...Genji had joked about one of his fantasies--starring in a period-piece play as a samurai or lord.

"Well, you've gotten your wish, my love," Megumi said gently, then caught herself, amazed at her light-hearted dismissal of his present bearing. He looked like he had aged twenty years...

"Strange," she observed. "The thoughts that unfurl out of one's mind when they are swept with a joy that is tainted with melancholy." She was too shocked to say anything meaningful to herself, to reassure herself. So her mind was slipping into a dreamlike fugue of salad-like thoughts.

"H..he's so much _older_ than me," Megumi observed apprehensively as she peered closer at Genji's face. His eyes were deeper set, and his face had even more wrinkles on closer examination...but he was still very handsome. Mysteriously, he looked debonair, almost noble in aspect. Megumi realized that she was seeing a Genji that was 15 or 20 years older than the Genji she knew.

It didn't make a difference. It _wouldn't_ make a difference! If this was the Genji that Urd had brought back from the past, then this would be the Genji she would choose to love in the here and now.

"All of my heart...for you," she whispered as she rested Genji's in her lap, knowing that his ears were deaf to her confession of love. Megumi knew that he knew how she felt, anyway...somewhere in the resting of his soul. His Soul would hear her words...

She wanted to be the first thing he saw when he opened his eyes.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

_...He felt a stream of cooling wind against his chest as he saw her, standing only a few feet away. -_13 years-!! _It had been 13 years since he last saw Bell-chan's face! His nerves felt fiery and uncoiled as he found himself swimming in the ocean of beauty in her eyes, looking closely at her smooth skin. So smooth..._

_He wanted to stroke it...to touch it...to kiss it._

_He wanted to_ -have-_ her!_

_Keiichi noticed the spark in Belldandy's eyes...the unmistakable expression of desire that curved her lips and smile. Moving his eyes down her slender neck to alight on her generous bosom...down further to the sway of her hips._

_In his imaginings, he had touched her all over her body, made love to her in all sorts of situations. In his dreams, he had dreamed of kissing the richness of her lips, feeling her sweet breath mingling with his...gloriously kissing on park benches, on blankets in the midst of meadows, in the warm water of a summertime beach resort, in her bedroom, on his futon..._

_On his futon._

_He just wanted to kiss her...no...he wanted to sleep in his futon with Bell-chan next to him...no...he wanted to sleep covered only by a blanket and Bell-chan –_naked-_ next to him...no...he wanted to be fully awake with his body firmly pressed against hers as he made furious love to her..._

_Keiichi felt a volcano of suppressed lust plume upward, launching ribbons of sexual desire from his loins to his mind as he pulled Belldandy into his arms..._

_Seeking her mouth with his...kissing her hotly and deeply as he tore at her clothes..._

_"My dear Keiichi, if you wish for me to be naked, I can simply make these clothes disappear!" Belldandy whispered to him in a sultrysweet breathy gasp._

_"No...no! I want to -_undress you-_, my long-lost Belldandy! I've dreamed of this...it seems like I've dreamed of this –_forever-_!" he gasped back as he tore open her blouse, kissing her hard in the mouth. Her darting tongue and roving hands told him that she wanted him. She could never match him, could never want him in this moment as much as he wanted her, right now...but her passion clearly matched his._

_He felt her reach inside his shirt and run her fingers over his back. She would feel the scar...one of many, but it was the most horrible of the cuts he had endured in the 14th century._

_Looking at his chest, he realized that he was no longer emaciated from the months of starvation. His body was firmly muscled, totally at its peak...filled with strength. It was as if the long deathmarch campaign of the past year had never happened._

_He was himself again!_

_"K..Keiichi!" she near-shouted in a stunned voice, her hot breath kissing his ear. He could feel the shock she felt through the touch of her fingers, as they abruptly stopped touching him, momentarily paralyzed...and then her fingers tentatively traced the long rip in his skin that extended from his right shoulderblade to his left hip._

_He wanted to tell her about his injury, to tell her how the thoughts of someday reuniting with her were the only hope he had felt in -_so long-_...to give her every single missing detail of his life...that separate life where he endured the torture of being unloved...the emptiness he felt every day since he was thrust into the past._

_Words wouldn't be enough...he could only tell her with his body._

_Keiichi reached inside her bra and caressed the soft globes of her breasts...the milk-smooth skin barely remembered by his fingers._

_He felt his body pouring into hers as he desperately touched her belly, and then reached down..._

_A few minutes later, he was pouring into her...with hard, hot, deep thrusts. Bell was looking inward, probing far into his eyes as he made love to her. He wasn't being gentle about it...his lust had crawled through every pore of his body as he joined her, firing him to exert every last iota of strength, pounding himself hard against her._

_Belldandy was gasping as she met him with her hips, taking everything he had. Keiichi was swept away by the love that shone in her eyes was glazed with the heat of her own arousal, her own passion. Keiichi knew that she didn't mind that he was being intense, that he wanted to bury all the frustration, sadness and anger that he had felt for all those years...all those moments he was robbed of the presence of her love...to bury them away as he was burying himself deep inside of her..._

_"Give yourself to me, my darling Keiichi!" she gasped, pulling him tight against her and squeezing his back as hard as he had ever been squeezed...pressing every inch of him against her. Patting his back softly and affirmingly, encouraging him to release..._

_He felt a nova explode in his chest and groin as Bell-chan shuddered underneath him...everything went blurry as he locked his eyes with hers, feeling an intense discharge of love, a taking in of love through her eyes, the sparkling wonder of the connection, the beauty of her face swarming him with memories of times together with his dear best friend and Soulmate..._

_His wonderful, exquisite Goddess Belldandy..._

_..._

_..._

_..._

_"Keiichi!!"_

_He looked up to see Skuld in the doorway, just as everything went tinny as he spent himself._

_"_Keiichi_!"_

_Belldandy was turning a furious red of embarrassment underneath him as he collapsed on top of her..._

_"__KEIICHI!!__"_

_He looked up at Skuld, who looked more pissed-off and angry than the most vicious Fudo statue he had ever seen. Glowering at him with anger reddened eyes, Skuld readied Mjolnir...swinging it back like a baseball player planning to hit a homerun._

_Keiichi couldn't believe his bad luck! Skuld had walked in right as he and Bell-chan had ascended to the summit of their passions...and now she was going to kill him..._

_She was the very manifestation of Anger..._

_The Ultimate Goddess of Rage..._

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Keiichi!!"

"_KEIICHI!!_"

Quit snoring!" he heard Skuld shouting, waking him up. He felt a wave of nausea as his sense of his body returned to him. His stomach had been in revolt for the last several weeks of the siege. But in the back of his mind rested the knowledge that he was back _home_, back with his Belldandy. With a flush of embarrassment at his upset stomach and the unabashedly explicit dream he had just been awakened from, he turned his head and saw _her_.

"Bell..." was all he could say until he dry heaved. He struggled to sit up, feeling his famished stomach spasming, seeing a look of alarm clouding Belldandy's face.

"K..Keiichi?" he heard her milkwarm voice, filled with concern.

"I..I'm all right, Bell," he said. His physical frame shuddered from his nausea, and then Keiichi felt his energy drain itself away. He leaned weakly forward, on the verge of collapse.

Against Bell's bosom.

He felt the cushion of fleshy softness there, as her honey brown hair flitted against his face, tickling his nose. Immobilized for a moment, he could hear her heart beating rapidly. Keiichi felt like he was poised at the bridge...right before passing out.

Then he started crying. He looked up and saw tears welling up in Belldandy's sapphire blue eyes.

"I...love...you. You told me _to live_…and that was the only hope I had at the…end. I love you with all of me," he managed to whisper, then buried his head in her chest and cried. He could feel the hot play of her tears on his cheek as he held onto her for dear life...dear love. It was a triumph, a dream come true. He had given up hope of ever seeing her. Dozens of times. But somehow, he never gave his dreams away completely. Through battles, wars, the 'coughing sweat violence' plague, attacks by brigands...he always managed to marshal his deepest desires; always the desire to see Bell-chan again. At times, his wish to see her again was the only thing he could cling onto. It was still a shock, feeling her milk-smooth skin against his cheek and forehead.

He wavered in emotional disbelief as his mind struggled to grasp the fact that he was home, with Belldandy.

He cried for all of the years that he had held out, hope against hope, that he would be reunited with her.

"Thirteen years," he sobbed, bringing on another wave of retching. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Belldandy move her hands. His upset stomach was soothed in an instant. Keiichi realized that Belldandy must have recovered from the dizzying heights of gratitude, and relieved him of his discomfort.

Her hair...how much he had missed that magnificent hair! Softer than a kitten's belly, as beautiful as pale plum blossoms, distinctively fragrant, glossy as pearls...

He felt her fingers gingerly stoking his disheveled hair, examining his shaven pate. He heard her giggle as she traced over the fuzz that marked his scalp line.

"You aren't going to keep your hair this way, are you?" she teased with mock seriousity. For a moment, Keiichi felt a flash of anger...wondering why she was questioning the established hairstyle for senior samurai retainers. He had _earned _the right to have his hair styled this way!

Then he remembered that he was in 20XX.

Cognitive discordance.

"20XX is the out-of-place time, as far as I am concerned," he realized with shock. "Am I going to have to question _everything_ about being back where I belong? How am I going to get along in a society filled with wimpish, child-men? Where am I going to find my heart?"

It had been so long since he had lived his former life with Belldandy. For so many years, life in the 21st century seemed like a distant dream...another lifetime. But now that he was back, he realized that it would be a huge adjustment.

"Will she still love me, now that I'm thirteen years older?" the electricity of his conscience pulled...

Keiichi shook his head "no" to Bell's question about his hairstyle, then pulled himself up and darted a line of kisses on her cheek. He could feel her shaking as he kissed her gently on the lips.

"Welcome home, Keiichi, my love. And yes, I'll love you no matter what," she said, answering his unasked question before kissing him more deeply.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

We four guys were pretty much bedridden for three days after our return, as the Present asserted itself upon our bodies with an indifference to the pain it caused us. Already weakened, our human bodies were subjected to rapid physiological changes that simply blew beyond tolerable pain thresholds. We were growing _backwards _in age!

Past and present tore at each other like curtains being ripped in a windstorm as they fought for supremacy in my consciousness. The transformation process was almost trancelike. In the barely reckoned real moments, I was overjoyed to regain the use of my hand; somehow it grew back in the middle of the second night. Because we had starved for so long, we were unable to eat anything except some thin miso soup and watered down fruit juices. Belldandy proved her culinary expertise by making even this Spartan fare taste delicious.

I couldn't believe how calm it was.

I knew that my perspective was forever skewed by 13 years of living in the past. Here I was, a 29-year-old, with the life experience of someone in their mid-40s. Culture shock didn't even come close to describing what I felt. My cultural 'comfort zone' was based on a long-extinct milieu. I had spent almost a third of my life in 14th century Japan. I had a perverse desire to anonymously publish a series of memoirs, just to ignite some controversy among medieval Japan scholars.

I also had a desire to find someone and have a serious jousting match with a longspear. Now that I had both hands, I would be able to seriously kick some ass...

I didn't envy Tomohisa, whose life experience in the past totaled almost half of his life. I knew that his process of adjusting to the present would be far more challenging than the adjustments Keiichi, Genji and I would face. It was almost amusing to see how he reacted to Skuld's attentions with confusion and a lack of empathy. The strength of _her_ reaction to his indifference informed me that she had deep feelings of attraction towards him.

I hoped they could sort it out.

Megumi and Sayoko were also in a daze; their fabulous tales of the future Tokyo served up a strong atmosphere of dystopia mixed with sci-fi surrealism.

I compared myself to a POW who had been incarcerated for years, then suddenly returned to an unfamiliar familiarity. Equally hostage to my past...and my _other_ past. The familiar settings of the 21st century seemed almost magical in my eyes. My two cats, Pho and Xue Shizi, kept guard on me; chasing off Velsper a few times when he came by to indulge his curiosity. Yet, I was feeling strangely nostalgic about the 14th century.

We all had so much to sort out in the conflict between mind and memory, which made 'debriefing sessions' between the four of us in the garage essential. The first time we went into the garage, minus 10 degrees Celsius in the middle of December, we sat and talked for three hours before noticing there was a space heater we could use to warm ourselves with. We were _that_ used to 'roughing it'...and as equally unused to modern technology.

Urd played nurse with an almost exasperating obsession. It was cute, yet it was irritating. I wanted to slap her. She even wore her trademark pink nurse's outfit when she visited...just like in the manga. As she related details of her incarceration at the hands of a future Aoshima, I realized that her stay had been extremely unpleasant as well.

Then Urd had let me in on the _secret_ last night.

In order for me to respect that secret, she had insisted that she accompany me on the Christmas shopping expedition. Tomorrow, Megumi and Genji were going to drop us in Tokyo, where we were going to spend the entire day shopping. Almost 12 hours. With Urd.

I didn't know if I could survive a 21st century shopping experience. Or survive her in 'shopping mode'.

So in a few days, I was hurtled through enormous polarities of worldviews. From starving in the 14th century...to shopping for Christmas presents during the busy Roppongi year-end commercial hubbub.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"By the way, how do you plan to get _my_ present if we're going to be busy shopping for the others?" Urd asked in a cute-girl falsetto.

"You should have thought about that before you demanded to go shopping with me today, Urd," I said semi-seriously. "Besides, I'm going to get your present in a couple of hours." Urd's bronzed face lit up with this news; her emerald-green eyes glistening with joy...or greed.

"Besides, isn't it enough that we're together?" I added. Urd frowned at this.

"No...you have to prove your love for me," she sang, imitating the old Madonna classic while swaying her hips sensually. Urd was being _really_ hyper today...her old self was kicking in a full dose of craziness. Back in the 1370s, women that acted like her would get whipped and thrown out into the rain, until they started showing some respect.

I wasn't real. I had to choke down the 14th century...before I choked her. The kind of violence that I had taken for granted for 13 years didn't fit in this century. Everything seemed disorderly. I saw some wannabe tough guy on the escalator give me a disdainful glance, and had to bite my tongue until it bled to keep from leaping onto the other side and beating the shit out of him, just so I could try out my 'new' hand on his face.

Urd started singing "Connected" by Ayumi Hamasaki, and I chided her…"Trauma" was the song that really fit the mood, after what she and I had been through. So she started singing "Trauma" using her skillful vocal impersonating, which turned some heads as we walked near Santa Claus and his stuffed reindeer.

"I hope this doesn't imply that you're warming up for a karaoke bout anytime in the near future," I said warily. I couldn't stand Karaoke...just couldn't get into the 'hamility' factor it demanded. Oddly enough, a nascent form of sing-along existed in the 14th century. Get drunk and howl Chinese songs on the weekend. Of course, I never drank during my stay in the past...but I had found myself in the midst of a fair share of drunken brawls.

Amazing how little things change.

"Well, New Year's _is_ just around the corner, y'know!" she said, then continued humming some J-pop ballad that I had heard on the radio, back when I shared an office with several other TAs. It amazed me how Urd knew so many facets of Japanese culture...for someone who was glued to the TV almost all day. I almost never heard her listen to music, except for the so-called 'God's Music' she claimed that I had been composing.

A long time ago...is now. How does one erase 13 years, especially when 13 years both begins and ends with _this_ moment? This frame of time?

I wanted to pour forth a series of questions to my companion...but Urd was giddishly silly. She was dressed in a long black Russian fur coat, with one of those fake-sable hats. Under her coat, she was dressed in a funky one-piece suit that looked like a bodysuit, only it was knit like a sweater. A normal mortal would have gone scratchcrazy with this, unless she had long underwear on. But Urd didn't notice in the slightest. She looked like a Bond girl, or Lana from Dr. Zhivago. Despite her classy winter attire, she was behaving like...like Skuld. Bouncy and vivacious and...goofy. I remembered reading in the manga about Urd's relentless lunacy around the holidays; her exuberance was almost discomfiting to me. At least she wasn't wearing one of those silly Santa's Helper hats.

Santa Claus hadn't existed for the last 13 years of my life.

"So what to get everybody?" I wondered, overawed by the huge department stores that looked like giant redwoods in a pine forest...the pines of course being the countless specialty stores and mom-and-pop shops.

Mission Impossible.

The sidewalks were packed with shoppers...and I wished my mind was as equally packed with thoughtful gift ideas...

So I looked at my 'cheat sheet':

_For Skuld:_ The new illustrated edition of "Green Requiem" by Motoko Arai. All the Shio Sato manga collections I could find, to replace the shojo manga Peorth 'borrowed' from her after the omiai incident. I mentally logged a thought that I really should suggest to Skuld that she should build some kind of mecha to safekeep her manga; this was the fourth set of manga that Peorth has made off with. Talking to Peorth about theft would be an exercise in futility.

_For Belldandy:_ She's hard, because she seems to have everything. Or wants nothing...besides Keiichi. The "Love Songs" CD by the Beatles? One of those aprons with pockets and plaid 'piyo piyo'...they're supposedly coming back in style. One of those new tea-milk mixers...I spied her staring at the page in a magazine. I felt guilty, because everything I was getting her was so...domestic. After discussing it with Urd, I settled on the idea of a gift certificate so that she and Keiichi could have their portrait painted. Not by Sayoko's S&M art club, either.

_For Keiichi:_ What to get for a guy who's been missing the 21st century for a dozen years? I ended up getting him a subscription to a Motor Trend and Wheels, two American motor mags that aren't easily available in Japan. And also a Harley shirt...as a joke. But what else? School would start soon, so maybe something for spring break? I finally decided on the obvious...Tokyo Disneyland. I remembered Keiichi saying that he hadn't been there for a long time. Seven centuries, to be exact.

_For Megumi:_ It would be impractical to get her clothes, and too thoughtless to simply get her shopping gift certificates at her fave stores. So I decided to get her one of those lighted "reality mirrors", so she could admire her face...and hopefully not forget to keep taking her beauty adjustment pills. Then, I saw a Swiss imported sweater that seemed to have 'buy me for Megumi' written over it. So I bought it, just to see her reaction.

_For Tomohisa:_ Season tix to the Tokyo Giants? Not quite. What to get for the average 30-year-old teenager? I saw a handbill on a cement pole advertising Kyudo lessons in Chiba. During the last six years of our stay in the past, he became an excellent archer: one of the best in Kyushu. I hedged my bets that Tomohisa would want to continue practicing archery...but only as a hobby this time. He should suitably impress any Kyudo instructor. And I got him those old Sadahara Oh and Mark McGwire/Sammy Sosa card sets I saw at a collector's shop. And a few CDs picked at random.

_For Genji:_ Eiji Yoshikawa's "Heike Story". He should get a kick out of that...especially since we lived through so much of a very similar experience. Train tickets to Nara for the Noh Onmatsuri for next year, since he missed the Dec. 17-18 performance this year due to being stuck in medieval Japan. I saw a humorist's knock off of Musashi's "Five Rings", so I bought that too.

_For Sayoko:_

...after lunch

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"What are you going to get _me_?" Urd said irritably as she ate her tempura. I was struggling with the bowl of miso and tofu in front of me...my stomach was doing gymnastics since I hadn't eaten real solid food for a long time. I must have been thinking aloud about what I was going to get Sayoko.

"You've bought all this stuff for everyone else...how about me!"

"Shut up!"

"_What?_"

"Urd, I don't know how to deal with you. Women in 14 Century Japan...well, they're obedient. They don't go around hounding the men they belong to. Look...I just got back and I'm really feeling fucked up about everything. And furthermore..."

"You expect _me _to be _obedient_?" Urd interrupted, her green eyes wide with incredulity.

"Yes. No. I..don't..know! Okay! Why are you so recalcitrant?"

"I don't care about the 14th century, or how women were back then. Remember, I was _there_! And I went back there to rescue your..."

"...sorry, ass, you were going to say!"

"I was not! Well...I _was_ thinking it, to be honest! How do you expect me to act around you? You're caught between two worlds, two centuries, two totally different societies. And you're going to eventually have to shed that macho-bushido crap that you think is so manly! I want my old Cevn back!" she said, sagging resignedly on her side of the booth.

"And I want a Christmas present, too! Honey!" she added.

That again.

"Hmmm. I told you a few hours ago that I was going to get your present. Well...here it is! Tadaaa! Lunch on me!" I joked. Urd glowered at me, her emerald green eyes suddenly burning with indignation. I gulped a spoonful of soup, realizing that she may have been into one of her 'sensitive' modes.

Duh. We were only separated by 700 years and a lifetime of miscommunication, but other than that, she had no reason to be uptight or sensitive, right? And she doesn't see _this_ me as the 'me' that she was initially attracted to...

She had been locked up by a sci-fi nightmare version of Aoshima. Aoshima and Tyyr threatened to dissect her Soul with a modified SoulGun! And here I am, worried about whether she can see the real me?

"I'm an idiot!" I thought. To prove my point, Urd's face was rockrigid.

"Ooops," I mentally exclaimed as she decoiled and unleashed...

"You're a miserable excuse for a mortal! Pathetic! I can't believe that you would actually think your little joke was _funny_! Why do you think that I went with you today? I went...so I could make sure that you would get me something! To try and support you emotionally on your first day out in the real world after coming back from 14th century Kyushu! And now I know that it was the right decision, because you weren't planning to buy me a present _at all_ ! Lunch...hmmph!" she shouted with both barrels blasting ire.

"_URD!!_" I shouted back, pounding the table with my 'new' hand so hard I knocked every cup of tea and bowl of soup over that was on the table. I realized that the occupants of several nearby booths and tables suddenly went quiet. This tweaked me even worse than Urd's idiocy.

I stood up, ramrod straight, raging at their ill-manneredness.

"You can all now return to your banal chitchat! It's pretty lame to get all hushy when a couple is arguing! You would think that normal people would talk _louder_ when others are in heated discussion nearby...but you all decide to zip your lips like a bunch of freshly fed seals! I should cut every one of you down for your gross insolence!" I yelled at the ceiling of the tempura restaurant. They looked at me stupidly. Then I recognized that I was so angry, I had shouted at them in 14th Century Kyushu military dialect. Urd looked at me with a mixture of disbelief and amusement, then smiled broadly.

"So that's how you learned to deal with problems in the 14th century! Well...I'll forgive you this time, since you said that we're 'a couple'!"

"That's not all that I meant! Urd, Christmas presents are supposed to be a _surprise_. How can I surprise you when you're watching me like a hawk eyeing a mouse? And where do you get off thinking that I would ignore you for Christmas? Why don't you just go somewhere. Just go home, and let me get you something, okay?" I said irritably.

Urd only heard the "go home" part.

"Your wish is granted. But remember this...I'll have my revenge!" she said with a gleam in her eye. She stood up, stuck out her tongue at me, and then walked out without a word.

Great. And here I was poised to pour a bowl of miso over her head, since I couldn't slap her.

I oughta buy her a case of sour cream and Limburger cheese for Christmas.

And some prune juice...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Sayoko saw Cevn across the street, walked over behind him and covered his eyes and shouted "_Surprise!_" He whirled around and almost decked her. Fortunately, she had a black belt in Karate, so she was barely able to duck his rapid swinging punch...And then he had her in a chokehold headlock.

"What do you think you were doing?" she gasped. She couldn't believe how fast he moved! The punch was a decoy, thrown to make her vulnerable, not to injure her.

"What the hell do you think you're doing? Lemme go!" she gasped again. Cevn's face went rigid for a second, and then he released her.

"What'd I do to him to make him just go off like that!" she wondered, shocked by his reaction. A deep part of her sensed that his reaction wasn't defensive...it was lethal. She could see conflict written all over his face. His strident response totally unnerved her.

"What the fucking hell is the matter with you? You tried to take my head off!" she shouted angrily.

"Look...I'm sorry, Sayoko. But you're really lucky that I didn't break your neck. I'm not myself right now. Probably the result of years of fighting and war and assassination attempts, a plague that nearly killed me, having my hand skewered by a katana..."

She listened in amazement as he detailed some of the experiences he had in medieval Japan. Genji had been completely close-lipped to her about his years in the past.

"My God! If my brother had to live through this..." she said in an even voice when Cevn finished his short summary of life in 14th century Kyushu. She reminded herself to handle her brother with kid gloves for the next several weeks. Perhaps in doing so, he may feel comfortable enough to confide in him.

"These guys are going to need major therapy from someone!" she realized. She said a silent prayer that the Goddesses could restore their minds with the same completeness with which they healed the men's bodies.

"Tell me about it!" she ventured. "Being locked up in a room with no windows, strapped to a bed for weeks. Then I look out the window and it's 2049! Arcologies and thousand-storey tall megastructures all over! Human beings becoming the property of corporations, used for organs and then added to food! I didn't see a single human being for over a year, except Megumi! Then these robots were going to chop us up like lab monkeys…"

Cevn listened to her description of being trapped in a dystopian future that made Akira look like a cakewalk. A year confined in a hospital with only her and Megumi? He realized that her experience was just as harrowing as his and the other guys...the part about humans being used as food was really unsettling. Thankfully, he had just eaten.

Sayoko had been trying to decompress from her experience in the near future, so she decided upon retail therapy. A reliable tactic to move a girl from deep reflection to a light-heartedness. Running into Cevn was totally unexpected...Megumi had told her that he had left with Urd to go shopping. So where was Urd?

She had already amassed a bundle of Christmas gifts, which of course she made Cevn carry as they walked towards the Axis Building. She started talking about NA, recovery talk and how she thought she was going insane while confined. Cevn admitted that he had been force-fed some kind of strong shochu-type booze to keep from dying while they amputated his hand and fixed him up. Of course, Sayoko teased him about relapsing.

"Y'know, it's funny. Since I spent thirteen years in the past, I now have 24 years clean," Cevn commented when the two were talking about their recovery issues.

"So what? I got clean in 20XX, and was clean in 2050. So I have over 40 years clean! You better get used to calling me 'sempai', Cevn-sensei!" she said with a smile.

"Well, if you're going to be that way, then I have 700-plus years clean, since I was clean in 1371," he said light-heartedly.

"Can't you add?" Sayoko teased as she corrected his math. "Besides, that was actually in the past, so it counts as negative years. So you have negative 720 and some years clean."

"Okay! You win!" Cevn admitted, feeling troubled by his math error. He realized that he was more than just a little upset at Urd's sudden departure. Running into Sayoko had been a godsend…and he had tried to break her neck less than ten minutes ago.

"Are we ever going to get back to normal?" Cevn asked.

"Hee hee, you always tell me 'what is normal?'…now it's my turn," Sayoko replied, earning a frown. "We're all lucky in a sense, because we shared the timewarp experience with someone else. When I feel all freaked out, Megumi's just a cellphone call away."

"Did they even have cellphones in 2050?" Cevn asked. "All we had was signal fires, rocks and…"

"Hey, let's just forget about it and shop!" Sayoko interrupted. She pointed out the Axis Building and gave Cevn a rundown on all the good stores to buy gifts while avoiding 'Santa's Elves'. After shopping the Axis Building, Sayoko suggested ice cream.

"So what do I do?" he asked, after explaining the lunch incident.

"Hmm. You insulted her, made light of her Christmas gift, argued with her, and then told her to go away. That adds up to four…no, five apologies," Sayoko reasoned with feminine insight. Cevn shrugged his shoulders.

"Hey, you only listed four things I screwed up!" Cevn argued.

"The fifth apology is because you're a guy! Didn't you learn anything? I suggest that you get her an apology gift _now_, plus a card," she said, smiling at his predictably masculine awkwardness.

"So how do I go about doing that? You know that I'm inept with these kinds of things. I was single for so long; I've probably forgotten the chivalric artistry of apology. The idea of a man apologizing to a woman...is so _foreign_ to me. It just didn't happen when I was living in Oita back then..."

Sayoko considered for a moment.

"Hmm... I got it! What is one of the things you despise the most, yet Urd likes a lot?" she asked, a look of devilish mischief on her face.

"Karaoke," Cevn said without a moment's hesitation.

"You're sooo weird! I _love_ Karaoke!" Sayoko said with delight. She then started singing a song, right there on the street. She noticed Cevn looking huffy and indignant, which brought her to a bevy of giggles.

"So..uh...what's the deal?" Cevn asked. Sayoko assumed a lecturing tone.

"To make a proper apology to a girl, you need to combine two important elements. Sacrifice and supplication. Sacrifice means that you give up something you value; which in this case means you have to suffer your aversion to Karaoke. Supplication means groveling; which in this case means that you indulge Urd at your expense with something she really loves," Sayoko explained. Cevn looked miserable at her suggestion, which was amusing her to no end.

"Karaoke would be _perfect_! We'll love it! And I know just the place!" Sayoko said as she pulled out her cellphone, now fully absorbed with the idea...not to mention the look of male squeamishness all over Cevn's face. She _loved_ planning parties! It would be perfect, since everyone needed to unwind from being scattered across the centuries...

"_We?_" Cevn said incredulously, interrupting her reverie.

"Yeah! Don't be an idiot! And don't just sit there and let your ice cream cone melt!" she added. "What did you think? That it would be fun with just the two of you? Besides, I'm dying to hear how awful your voice is..."

"Thanks a lot, Sayoko," Cevn said in a resigned monotone, as Sayoko packed her phone away in her purse, linked her arm in his, and marched him to the next department store.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

At home, Urd paced around the house. Normally, she would float, but she had picked up the human habit of pacing when agitated. Which was a dead giveaway to Belldandy that her sister had fought with Cevn.

"Urd...what's wrong?" Belldandy asked. Which brought out a verbal lashing of invective towards men in general and one man in particular. Belldandy could identify with her older sister's feelings...Keiichi had been rough with her a few times since he arrived from the past. Her mortal boyfriend had been argumentative, edgy, controlling and indifferent in the past several days. She _knew_ that it wasn't Keiichi's fault, but that knowledge didn't provide her much comfort when he was in one of overbearing moods. She would just have to be patient and work with him.

Apparently, Cevn was acting the same way. However, she knew her older sister well...Urd didn't have the kind of patience that she did.

"Urd...you should know better. Yes, he definitely owes you an apology, but you must realize that he was in the right as well. One of the things I've learned in my time with Keiichi is...that when a couple fights, both are wrong and both are right. If you focus on what's wrong at the expense of what's right, then you tend towards becoming bitter. But if you focus on what's right, then you can ascend the ladder towards greater harmony between the two of you. You should really give this some serious consideration...and try and be patient with him. Look what he's been through..." she counseled.

Urd wanted to argue with her, but decided that it would be better to brood, so she checked in on Skuld.

Skuld had been extra attentive to both Banpeis since her return from the future. Urd noticed that she was upgrading Mini-Banpei with some of the components she brought back from her stay with Mother and Father on Yggdrasil.

"Better leave her in peace," Urd thought. She went to her room and worked on something to help the mortals with their memories.

Mortals. They were oh-so all mixed up.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Sayoko drove me home after we finished shopping sometime around midnight. I couldn't believe it...I had survived both Urd's fit and Sayoko's kinetic shopping. She was definitely the 'little rich girl'; she had a string of credit cards and the discerning eye of an expert shopper. I had often availed to the typical male stereotype of women being all self-obsessed when they went shopping for clothes; but this was once again disproved. Sayoko was very intent on giving thoughtfully to those around her. It was her first Christmas holiday clean from drugs, so she wanted to be generous in her gifting. She kept querying me about her planned purchases, which was fun in a certain way.

Sayoko also admitted to me that she had been knitting a scarf...

"Good luck with Urd," she said with a chuckle as I trudged the long snowy path towards the door.

"Hi Cevn. Do you want some tea to warm up?" Belldandy asked as I padded into the living room. Keiichi was reading about a new motorcycle engine...it was still strange to see him without his samurai's topknot.

I politely declined, then asked where Urd was.

"Oh, she's in her room," Belldandy replied, a look of concern on her face.

"Good luck, Cevn. Have fun," Keiichi added, then returned to his motorcycle catalogue.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

_--Knock Knock Knock--_

"Who is it?" I heard from inside.

"It's me...can I come in?"

"Yeah...whatever," a stonecold voice answered. I slid the shoji door open and then walked in. I could tell in an instant that Urd was into some kind of project...her room looked like an apothecary.

"What are you doing?" I asked with what I hoped to be sincere interest.

"Nothing that you need to know about," she said icily.

Time to grovel.

"Look, Urd. I'm _really_ sorry about what happened at lunch. I totally made a mistake, making light of something you obviously have invested so much importance in. Being a mortal and all that, I'm prone to imbecility sometimes..." Urd didn't move an inch. Floating with her back to me, I couldn't tell what she was feeling.

"I owe you a couple of apologies. And it's hard for me, because all those years I lived in the past are telling me to fight with you. But I'm going to set them aside...and try harder to be a good boyfriend. So...Urd, I'm truly sorry," I added.

"And??" she asked expectantly, playing the part of Queen Elizabeth to perfection. Which she could do, because she had all the leverage in this situation. She was the Queen of my heart.

Now came the hard part.

"A..and...I wanted to give you an early Christmas present."

"Oh really?" she said in a passé voice. The slight shiver up her spine revealed that she was excited, despite her efforts to cover it up with feigned nonchalance. I only wished I could see her face.

"I wanted you to know that. Uuh. I..I..reserved a Karaoke club for us for Christmas Eve. I'm going to invite everyone...t..to come and join us for a party," I blurted out. Urd spun around in midair, her face filled brilliantly with surprise and joy.

"Cevn, I thought you said you 'hated' Karaoke..." she teased, and then her face lit up with sudden insight.

"Oh...now I get it!"

"Get what?" I asked.

"Apology accepted," she said as she floated swiftly towards me, arms outspread. Which landed both of us on the floor, due to the Ultimate Force. It seemed that while the UF didn't allow us to touch, it would repulse any attempts with equal energy. Urd and I literally bounced off of each other like two marbles.

"_Oops!_" she said. Her interjection was followed by the crash of a glass beaker falling into her sink as she banged into the wall.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Christmas Eve was a day that Keiichi hoped he would never forget. It was almost like an end-of-the-year party, and _everyone_ was coming. Half the excitement was in not knowing what would happen when so many combustible and complementary personalities were massed into one drinking room, and then fueled with an abundance of sake, snack trays and a loud Karaoke system.

Five minutes after they arrived, Mara showed up. This really freaked out Keiichi and several others, until Belldandy explained that the Demons had to respect mortal holidays due to some faraway longago obscurely ancient agreement with the Gods. She added that a lot of mortals were going through the extremes of having their deepest wishes granted (presents and reunions) or suffering untold grief (family, in-laws and holiday drunk drivers). So the holidays were a reprieve for GRO and DGO agents, since much of their duties were already being carried out by the natural flow of mortal life.

Yet Keiichi felt that Mara's dropping in on the party was a bad omen, nonetheless. But true to her word, Mara didn't cause _too_ many problems. She mostly pestered Urd all night and flirted with most of the single guys from Whirlwind and the N.I.T. Motor Club.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"_Hahhahhhah Haha Ha!_" Megumi and Sayoko were laughing uncontrollably at Sora and Chihiro.

"WHAT?" the two N.I.T. Motor Club members asked, irritated at the fact that they were being laughed at.

"You..teehee..wouldn't believe it if we told..hehhee..you," Megumi said, then leaned shoulder-to-shoulder with Sayoko and gasped with riotous giggling.

"What's _wrong_ with you two?" Chihiro asked.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Keiichi commiserated with Cevn. It seemed that he, Cevn and Skuld were the sole holdouts against the Karaoke craze that filled the rented party room. All three were uncomfortable with singing...Keiichi even more so because he didn't want to embarrass himself _and_ Belldandy.

He was already on a tight string with Bell-chan. He had been short with her quite a few times. Normally, he would expect her to deal with it, since she had the patience of an artist...but he sensed that she wasn't going to put up with much more of it.

Every night since he returned, Keiichi wanted to make love to her, as soon as his strength returned. But he didn't, because he was worried that his moodiness would somehow translate into a roughness in the bedroom. He praised himself for his restraint; at least he was doing _something_ right.

He, Genji, Tomohisa and Cevn...just weren't themselves any more.

Even the music felt alien, as his years of maturity had been coaxed by the sounds of live itinerant musicians who played on natural, unamplified instruments. He longed for Cevn's shakuhachi playing...a single flute and a moonlit night. He and his friends had spent many a night in their compound in Oita listening to the serene, soulful music of Cevn's flute and Genji's singing.

And then everything came undone at the seams with the Imagawa invasion. It felt disconcerting to Keiichi...the fact that he had no Lord to serve any more. No Lord to protect...

Skuld was more concerned with the audio equipment than anything else; Keiichi had to restrain her from creating another 'karaoke contest song meter' mecha. So he zealously hovered over her as she examined the karaoke machine. Suddenly, she shifted her attention to the doorway.

"Banpei, what are you doing here?" Skuld asked as the robot rolled into the room. Mara reacted with predictable alarm, which amused Skuld to no end.

But still, Skuld thought his presence here was quite odd...she definitely _didn't_ summon Banpei-kun...

An hour into the party, Urd and almost everyone else was drunk or on their way to intoxication. Tamiya and Ootaki had smuggled a package of "Antarctic Ice", supposedly shipped frozen from its namesake continent. This ice was fashioned with frozen compressed air or dry ice trapped in the cubes; every ten seconds or so, a loud half-firecracker strength "_POP!_" would crackle the air, followed by peals of laughter. Or a sudden bubbling as the dry ice emitted a fog which spilled upwards out of someone's glass. Of course, the two sempai had kept this a secret from everybody except Keiichi. Working as a team, Tamiya would engage the victim in conversation while Ootaki would 'cube' them.

Their first victim was Chihiro, of course.

Even now, he saw Ootaki drop an icecube in Megumi's drink while grinning pranksterishly. Of course, Ootaki _always_ seemed to have a prankster's grin...Keiichi chuckled as the cube exploded and Megumi flinched with a full body jerk.

Keiichi was a little tipsy himself, possibly due to the fact that he had lost 30 percent of his body weight...resulting in 1/3 more intoxication per glass of sake. After a few glasses of sake, he felt a flush overcome him. He noticed that Genji was fast on the path to inebriation...and Tomohisa wasn't far behind. At first, he rankled at the idea that his younger cousin was getting drunk, but then he realized that Tomohisa was an adult in a 16-year-old's body. Back in Kyushu, he had shared cups with Tomohisa hundreds of times. But then, his cousin had the body and mind of someone in their late 20s. Now, he looked like a normal high school student. Keiichi knew that that Tomohisa wouldn't become too irresponsible by acting the part of a juvenile.

Belldandy had imbibed a whole six-pack of Coke, which caused her to become silly-drunky. In contrast to Urd's drunken boisterousness and randomness, Belldandy was simply funny in her own naive way; overly jovial and _very_ talkative. Still, she was very pleasant to everyone...still a calming influence. Keiichi had only seen her cut lose like this a couple of times before...which resulted in a series of bizarre actions by his divine girlfriend which rivaled the worst of the craziness that followed the birthing of Noble Scarlet. His face flushed with embarrassment as he recalled both instances.

Genji was up on the table, doing a swaggering drunken fan dance he learned from the 14th century. They had all learned many arts in their 13 years in the past, many of which passed for 'skills' and 'tricks' here. Keiichi watched as Genji seemed to clear his mind long enough to capture a grave face. Then he performed what Keiichi recognized as one of the most difficult tessenjitsu dance forms...a 'false drunk' form. Keiichi was filled with admiration for Genji as he precisely executed the difficult martial art of fan combat. The effect was immediate and profound as the revelers suddenly hushed themselves, absorbed by the serious effort Genji was putting into his performance. At the end, Genji paused and executed a fairly good mie. He held his eyes cross-eyed in the classic Kabuki style for almost a minute and then bowed to a round of applause. Keiichi glanced at Tomohisa and Cevn, knowing that the other two were the only ones in the room that recognized that Genji's 'act' was in fact a martial arts survival skill in enclosed room close-quarters combat.

Eventually, the more drunken participants pestered Keiichi into singing. With Chihiro, Tamiya and Ootaki 'inviting' him...he couldn't refuse. Wrestled up to the front by his two sempai, coached by Chihiro while she poured a can of Budweiser over his head to 'christen' him, Keiichi grudgingly sang several songs by the Carpenters that he learned a year (or was it 14 years?) earlier...thanks to another one of Skuld's inventions gone awry.

But instead of bolstering his courage with support, the room was filled with raucous howls and disparaging remarks. For his own satisfaction, he rocked out with a rousing version of two of his hallmark songs: Deep Purple's "Highway Star" and Loudness's "Road Racer". Keiichi thanked the gods for Karaoke-on-demand as he sat back down and poured himself a stiff drink.

"So much for them being good sports," he complained to Skuld after the riotous laughter died down.

"Of course not...they're adults. Which makes them idiots when they drink. What'd you expect?" Skuld replied. Keiichi's eyes went wide at her off-the-cuff remark.

Then Urd invited Skuld to sing next. Skuld slowly backshuffled herself in the corner as shouts of "sing Skuld, sing!" filled the party room. It was obvious that Urd was relishing every bit of Skuld's squeamishness, grinning with the ostentatious malignancy that accompanies a good headful of liquor. It seemed to Keiichi that Urd resembled a lioness hunting prey; her narrow light green eyes were glazed over with a feline expression. Finally, Skuld briefly flashed a Skuld-device that looked like a bomb...and Urd relented with a dissatisfied scowl, much to Keiichi's relief.

"How does she do that?" Urd grumbled as she walked back and sat down on a cushion while Belldandy fitfully laughed at the scene between her two sisters.

Keiichi noticed that Cevn was keeping close company with Sayoko; probably because she was the only other person that wasn't drinking...besides Skuld. Cevn wasn't as uptight as he expected, but he was still pretty quiet, more of an observer than a participant. Also, it appeared that he was avoiding Urd.

Which could be trouble...if Urd swam too deeply in her rice wine.

Keiichi stood up and publicly lauded Cevn for putting up with a bunch of drunken Goddesses and college students...which motivated the partygoers to select their next victim.

They hauled Cevn up and pressed the microphone on him, which seemed to make him nervous just by its presence. Keiichi laughed at his sudden loss of composure. Cevn sang several American songs, including Enya's "Orinocco Flow." His singing was _terrible_...much worse than Keiichi's...or even Tamiya's grating yowls, which his sempai passed off as 'singing'. Keiichi suddenly realized that Cevn was _deliberately_ singing poorly, just as Sora and Megumi started tossing miso-soaked napkins at their N.I.T. sensei. Urd looked like she was going to kill him when he was done, so Keiichi engaged her in conversation to try and cool her down.

Then the troubles began.

Mara and Belldandy got into a yelling match over who was better at VR hanetsuki. Keiichi never could have imagined that they played Japanese badminton up in Yggdrasil and Vanagdrasil. As they shouted at each other, Keiichi picked up bits and pieces of the story. It turned out that the Gods and Demons would play VR games as kids, much like match play over the Internet for hundreds of computer games. Since Demons and Gods rarely met in real life, VR competitions were heavily heralded in both realms. Evidently, Mara and Belldandy had been in a tournament as children, and had even competed in championship events. _Numerous_ championship contests. Keiichi was more amazed to learn that every match resulted in a draw...even their last one, which had been played at for seven mortal years.

"Let's settle it, _right here_! Face to face in real life!" Mara challenged, fangs aglistening.

"Yeah...let's!" Belldandy said excitedly, smiling innocently but with serious intent in her eyes. Which were through and through glazed over and reddened.

"Oh great! Bell's _really_ drunk!" Keiichi noted with despairing frustration, astonished by his girlfriend's unusual combination of moods.

In a flash, brightly colored hagoita appeared in each girl's hand. Without a word or warning, the match began. A glowing shuttlecock materialized in midair, and then everybody dashed for cover as the two began batting it at whistlesnap speed. To Keiichi, it looked like a hyperfast game of handball, only with battledores and an energy ball and some kind of glowing forcefields to keep it from smashing through the walls. Several of the unwilling spectators got nailed by stray shots, producing stinging welts and bruises. After a half-hour of commotion, not to mention totally immobilizing the party...both Belldandy and Mara collapsed to their knees, their chests heaving heavily with the glow of exertion.

"I..hunh..hnn..didn't know that this..pant..gasp..physical manifestation...would tire out so quickly. I guess it's a draw," Mara admitted.

"Yes...this time. Bu..huut...wait...until next time, Mara!" Belldandy responded warningly.

As soon as things calmed down from the "Match of the Millennium", Urd decided to spring a massive jealousy fit, because Sayoko was keeping close company with Cevn. Cevn tried to explain to her that he was keeping close to Sayoko in order to help himself and her...since being around a bunch of people who were drinking was still difficult for Sayoko; who was still fairly new to recovery. It made full sense to Keiichi...and _no_ sense to Urd. Especially since this was a full-blown drinking party under the guise of being a Karaoke contest.

Keiichi grimaced as Cevn's explanations only compounded Urd's ire. Urd continued to argue with Cevn; then in a fit of callous resentment, she brandished him a drink, then splashed it in his face when he refused. Keiichi recalled the last time this happened...it wasn't a pleasant memory. In 1379, one of Lord Mori's junior retainers got drunk and did the same thing that Urd had done. In front of Lord Mori and all the clan.

Cevn stood up and cut him down without saying as much as a word. The junior retainer ended up being carried out in a shroud. In like circumstances, Keiichi or any other one of Lord Mori's retainers would have done the same. But this wasn't Lord Mori's castle...and Urd was a Goddess and girlfriend.

Keiichi hoped that Cevn would keep his cool...

Sayoko intercepted Urd's next offering of sake and knocked it to the floor. Then she and Urd got into a screaming match, while Cevn slipped out into the hallway unscathed but emotionally rocked. Keiichi excused himself, and ended up spending the better part of an hour talking about "drunken Goddesses" and "disrespectful modern women".

He and Cevn returned to the party, and continued to remain in the background. Fortunately, Sayoko and Urd's shouting match had been joined by Mara, who sided with Sayoko, and Belldandy, who sided with Urd. The presence of four yelling women made the shouting match run its course much more quickly...Belldandy and Mara were silently giving each other stinkeye and Sayoko and Urd were winding down their arguing.

Then the room burst forth in a spray of rose blossoms.

"Oh...great," Keiichi moaned as the Fourth Goddess showed up.

Urd and Sayoko's harsh arguing was stifled by Peorth's sudden arrival. Tamiya instantly went sillysally with desire when he realized it was Peorth, complete with her scanty Goddess outfit. Keiichi knew that his sempai hadn't recovered from Peorth's deliberate flirtation with him during her first visit...but this time, Tamiya was wasted on sake. Once more, Keiichi suspected that Peorth had cast some kind of spell on him.

"Peorshh-channn!" Tamiya shouted with a gleeful grin.

Keiichi watched Peorth's eyes bug out as the sempai staggered towards her, sake bottle in hand. He couldn't help himself...he burst into hysterical laughter as she screamed with fright when Tamiya smothered her with a bearhug. Peorth was getting her just desserts for all the times she hassled Keiichi, not to mention playing around with Tamiya's affection. Chihiro looked amazed...she had always thought that Tamiya had a crush on _her_. But then, she had never met Peorth.

"Go get 'er!" Mara and Urd drunkenly encouraged, suddenly best buddies again; arms leaning on each other's shoulders, sake bottles in hand. Another blast of roses showered the room as Tamiya clutched Peorth. Belldandy shuffled over and whispered a few words in his ear, which seemed to calm him down. As Tamiya released Peorth, something which Keiichi wouldn't have ever dreamed of...happened.

His jaw figuratively arced towards the floor as Sayoko went ballistic!

_"__LEAVE HIM ALONE!! You...whatever you are!__"_ Sayoko screamed in a deadly serious voice, hands on her hips. If looks could kill, Peorth would have been melted away in the light of the furious glare Sayoko shot her. Taken aback, Peorth looked at Sayoko with a deadpan "what the hell is going on?" painted all over her face. The only other time he had seen Peorth look so surprised was when she got 'splashed' by a swimming pool full of water after taking Keiichi out on a 'date' almost two years ago.

Sayoko looked murderous...then she turned her ire towards a shocked Tamiya. Keiichi blinked in shock as he thought he saw a distinct look of _fear_ on his sempai's face; which was almost unheard of...and laughably unbelievable.

Especially at 3am in the morning.

"Hey...check _this_ out!" Mara chuckled, sensing a 'scene' in the making. She and Urd leaned closer to get a full view of the action.

"Why can't you leave her alone, you big lug? _Who_ is she to you, anyway? Not that it matters to me...you can do what you want! No...that's not true! No...wait! You _can't_ do what you want! You've got me. Remember all the letters you wrote _me _this summer? Remember all the talks we had this fall. About us. We talked about _everything_! Didn't that mean anything to you? Don't you realize that I'm _in love with you__,_ you thick-headed big-hearted road maniac!"

The room choked dead with silence.

In his mind, Keiichi imagined that this was like one of those moments in an anime movie where everyone would suddenly collapse with facefallen expressions, contorted into all sorts of improbably akimboed positions. Once more, alcohol had proven to be the ultimate truth serum. But then Keiichi remembered that Sayoko couldn't...and wouldn't...have touched a drop!

So it _was_ the truth!

Sayoko turned beet red and covered her mouth with her hands, then glanced at the floor, hands clasped in front of her in the manner of a junior high school girl's innocent embarrassment.

Belldandy flashed Keiichi a warm look that disclosed that her own romantic sentiments were being aroused, then settled down next to him and leaned her head on his shoulder.

"Let's see what happens now, my dear," she whispered excitedly in his ear.

"Wow!" Urd and Mara said in sync, their mouths agape.

Mara thought that she knew Sayoko through and through. Sayoko was almost like a mortal 'familiar' for Mara...her resentment for Belldandy mirroring Mara's own enmity. Drawn to Sayoko several years ago by this resentment, Mara had coopted her for several attempts on Belldandy's wellbeing. But after the Lord of Terror Incident, the N.I.T. Castle Incident, not to mention several other collaborations between her and Sayoko...Mara was still surprised by this young mortal woman who styled herself "Queen of N.I.T." But this scene...was too...cute...for Mara to be angry over. In fact, it was hilarious! Sayoko in a rage...over Tamiya? Sayoko...pissed off at Peorth?

"Interesting," Mara observed casually. Urd nodded and poured her another glass.

_Pa-Pop!!_

An icecube burst in her glass, punctuating the tense silence.

"Y..y..y..yuh really mean it?" Tamiya stuttered out, his face filled with a flurry of emotions.

"Of course I do, Tamiya! I just said it in public, didn't I? Why would I lie in front of all my friends! And why would I lie _to you_!" Sayoko said semi-sarcastically. "Come here, big guy!"

Tamiya staggered over to her. Sayoko stood up on tiptoe and planted a deeply passionate kiss on his lips, shocking everybody in the room. Especially Tamiya.

_Clap clap clap clap!_

Someone started clapping, and then applause filled the room in reaction to the sudden burst of passion between Tamiya and Sayoko. Tamiya looked at Keiichi, his face filled with a mixture of astonishment, sheepishness and relief. Keiichi instantly regretted that he forgot to bring his camera.

Ootaki was actually crying with joy for his best friend, in between quick gulps of some kind of clear liquor, Keiichi noticed.

A roomful of broadly smiling Goddesses and mortals cheered them on as Tamiya swept Sayoko off her feet and kissed her back.

"Tamiya Toraichi, aged 25, N.I.T. grad student...is in luv! Oh...it's good ta be youffful! It's beautaful ta have a poetic heart!" he shouted, bullhorn loud.

"This is just too _rad_!" Ootaki commented in dazed wonderment.

"This is just too...mortal!" Skuld said disgustedly.

"You're just too much of a curmudgeon!" Urd scolded Skuld.

"This is too sickeningly sweet!" Mara growled, her eyes betraying her appreciation of the romantic affinity between the two mortals. Love was much more complicated between Demons than between mortals; a fact that Mara regretted...sometimes. This was one of those times.

"This is too insane!" Sayoko thought as she yielded to her passions, kissing him again with her arms wrapped tightly around his broad shoulders.

"This is just too awesome!" Tamiya dazed with a mental gasp...he had dancing stars and hearts and Sayoko in his eyes.

Keiichi noticed that Skuld still harbored distaste towards the whole idea of mortal romance and relationships. He imagined that she was probably thinking something like "those damned mortals and their insane love affairs." Even now, she was shaking her head in disappointment.

Without a word, Tamiya carried Sayoko out of the room.

"Off to the love hotel!!" Ootaki managed to shout after them before being peppered with wet napkins, eggrolls and icecubes by almost every woman and man in the room.

Her entrance upstaged by the scene between Tamiya and Sayoko, Peorth stood in the doorway, hands on hips. Once she realized that she was totally ignored by the recent rash of newfound love, Peorth seized the moment and hopped up on the table before the party could swing into action again. Sensually dancing her body provocatively, she roused catcalls from all of the single men at the party.

Keiichi grumbled something under his breath about "Peorth being a showoff." She was making so much spectacle that the room became quiet...her antics were becoming supercilious as she imitated a salon stripper. Then she stopped and surveyed all the faces in the room.

"Bonsoir, mon amis! _HEY __you guys?!_ Now that I got your attention...which one of you made the wish?"

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --


	43. Pt 43: Mythos

**Part 43: Mythos**

"Peorth, you told us that you were placed on limited duty by the Proctors; meaning you weren't supposed to undertake difficult wish calls. They allowed you to only take one wish request for this year, so you could rest and recuperate. While at on duty at the GRO Earth Otasuke Division, you then received an authorized wish contact _from here_? A wish request that was made by phone?" Belldandy asked again, trying to speak lightly so as to not wake Skuld.

"Yes...I did. And yes, I got contacted for a wish. The funny thing is..." Peorth explained.

"Do tell," Urd groused, still drunk with an oncoming hangover.

"Even though the wish was originated using Earthrealm telephonic technology, the request wasn't voice transmitted over the phone," Peorth answered, secretly enjoying the fact that Urd was nursing a headache from tonight's party.

"That's...curious, to say the least. Was it sent using an encryption, as in some kind of code?"

"Pas meme! That was the first thought I had when I replayed the recorded wish request. So I cross-referenced it with all known nonverbal and transmitted Earthrealm code matrices. There was no match! Why couldn't it have been simple, like Morse code or something?" Peorth explained herself into a lament. It was bad enough that this wish was enigmatic; but now she was beginning to feel like she was being made into a fool. What kind of mortal makes a wish request over the phone without using vocalization or some recognizable language or mathematics?

"Peorth dear...is there something you aren't telling us?" Urd asked suspiciously.

"Moi? O..oh, of course not!" Peorth answered, trying to look appreciably innocent as she crossed her hands over her heart and fluttered her eyelashes.

"Au contraire! I don't believe you for a minute!" Urd retorted, lampooning Peorth's penchant for French clichés.

"Now Urd...Peorth _did_ say that she went to the Ethiopsylogic Clinic to get help. She also mentioned that the Proctors there have placed her on reduced duty for her own good. And she's been successfully treated for her Wishout. Haven't you, Peorth?" Belldandy countered, not knowing that each word felt like a hammer blow to the proud Goddess from the rival GRO office.

Poised within embarrassment and resentment, Peorth was silently amused at how Belldandy could handle her older sister so well at times. Urd looked thoroughly chastened; yet no one had yelled a single shout. Now she herself was feeling chastened, and Belldandy probably wasn't even aware of it. All Goddesses go through Wishout and Washout; the Proctors told her that this was an 'occupational hazard' common to GRO workers due to their frequent exposure to mortal sentient species. But hearing Belldandy discuss her recent Wishout rehab and the resulting restrictions imposed by the Proctors made her feel irritated.

"The person who made the wish wasn't ID'd by the Ygg Mainframe for some reason. So I was wondering...uh, could you guys help me?" Peorth asked with an edge of reluctance to her voice. It was true that she needed help on this one, because it didn't make sense. Plus it had come from here, which was even more bizarre; her recent misadventures while struggling with Wishout had occurred at this very locale. So why would the Ygg computer assign _her_ to this wish request?

"Oh...we'd be glad to, Peorth! Because you've been ill recently, you probably can't do things very well on your own. Dear me! I should have anticipated this and offered my assistance from the start! Of course, you'll require our help in making _whoever's_ wish come true, since you're on limited duty," Belldandy said cheerily, beaming with smiles that were oblivious to Peorth's low-in-the-throat growling.

Urd tapped her forehead in frustration at her sister's unconscious gaffe. The Fourth Goddess was always a nutcase; but she felt some sympathy for Peorth, who was being tongue-lashed by her younger sister. Belldandy was in a half-buzzed chatterbox la-la-land, and the faux-pas were double the usual amount.

"_Merd_..erm...gee, thanks, Belldandy," Peorth said resentfully, feeling imaginary roils of steam floating off her forehead.

"Yes! And even better...this can our gift to _you_! Your very own Christmas present, Peorth!" Belldandy added amiably, still a little tipsy.

Skuld rolled over in her futon bed and buried her face in her pillow to smother the giggles.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

We delayed opening our Christmas presents until evening in deference to the hangovers several household members were sporting. In fact, it was nooners for many. Having served as designated driver last night, now I had become designated lunch chef. So I ended up cooking a clumsy lunch.

Tomohisa looked like he got the worst of it. Being de-aged from a man of 30 to a 15-year-old high-school teenager was a huge transition, not only in terms of size and strength, but also in capacity to metabolize alcohol. In Oita, I had seen him drink many times the amount he had consumed at the Karaoke party, but this morning he looked harsh. Of course, Urd wasn't too not far behind him in the 'wasted away' dept. Megumi had only consumed a little, and Genji had done pretty well by not getting blitzed. Keiichi was his usual self, wisely slowing down his drinking a couple hours before the party exploded. They were pretty quiet when I drove them home at 4am in the morning, with the exception of an occasional resentful glance and remark from Urd.

Once more, Urd's drinking had formed a wedge between us. Once more, I had to ask myself if it was all worth it. Could I truly live within the bounds of an intimate emotional relationship with a Goddess who parties like a hedgehog in a cheese factory. Once more...is it love, or just an emotional mirage?

Relationships -- aren't they supposed to be freeing, rather than confining? I've observed so many people who seem to live their lives in accord with the motto "Live each day as if it was your last". I couldn't understand why one would choose to live at death. I already had enough fears in my life without being caught up in that kind of attachment dictating my daily life. My goal was to learn to live each day as if my life had only just begun. This orientation seemed to be less motivated by the fear of missing out on something. But my reality for the past several years of depression had made this a cumbersome task. For months at a time, I was pressured by a lack of _something_...an emotional horizon that seemed to always linger just out of reach. But somehow, I managed to keep trudging ahead. Even if "ahead" felt like "behind". Now, for the first time in years, I was finally feeling free from disability of mood and mind, to some degree. And I was involved with someone I felt attracted to.

Yet that _something_ still lapsed away from my grasp.

I've often regarded relationships as suspect, as it often seemed easier to reserve one's feelings rather than be open. I'm sure that this is irrational, but yet it was fueled by my fear of women…and of being close to one. Even more confusing was the truth; that my suspicions often blew up in my face for the fictions of assumption that they were.

If only I could do something about Urd and her drinking. It felt like I was involved in a romantic triangle...Urd, myself and Urd-when-drunk. I didn't know who would show up when. In fact, it was more of a wobbly rectangle, since my personality seemed to be split between 20XX and the 14th century. So we both had issues to cope with.

On the other hand, I hoped that my Christmas present would go over with her. If it didn't...well perhaps that would be a strong hint that I should call it quits. After all, my _real_ gift to her was my heart...the present was only a representation of my feelings towards her. I just hoped that she kept to her promise not to snoop around my room or use any divine method to figure out what I had bought her. Besides, the main gift _was_ obvious...because I was wearing it.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Last year Keiichi received a handknit sweater from Belldandy, so he already had a good idea about one of his presents. Every Christmas since they met, she had built him a treasured knitted sweater and scarf. Each sweater was knitted with an Yggdrasilian motif that depicted a very personal chapter of Bell's life story. As a child, almost drowning in the FireLake while burning in the OceanAir. A cloud cathedral that she ascended as a little girl, seeking to be closer to Kami-sama. A vista from the Earthrealm with hills and a pattern of rounded stones; the site where Belldandy had fulfilled her first wish as a GRO Goddess. And last year's sweater, a rainbow knit Dali-esque portrait of Holy Bell. Once, when Belldandy was a teenager, Holy Bell got lost...this sweater represented the joy and relief Belldandy felt when she was reunited with her Angel.

Despite everything, his heart was always in accord with her, even if his mind wasn't. So, on Christmas Day, Keiichi had devised a little ritual of his own: he would wear last year's sweater. And enjoy Belldandy's smile of joyful recognition. Taking the gift she had loving crafted for him and using it as a gifting back to her.

A little earlier, Genji excitedly confided in him about the skiing trip he was going to surprise Megumi with. Keiichi imagined the look of surprised delight that would brighten his sister's face like Amaterasu. Younger Sis _loved_ skiing; hopefully her upcoming trip to Hokkaido wouldn't result in an injury this time.

In contrast, Tomohisa wanted to avoid Christmas entirely. Several days earlier, Keiichi had sat to sit his young cousin down and reminded him about a certain young Goddess who seemed to adore him from a distance. Tomohisa grudgingly agreed that it was "the right thing to do" despite that fact that "Skuld was just a child, with a child's bearing." Keiichi regretted the fact that Tomohisa had grown up so much...his serious, principled demeanor seemed so _odd_ in a first year high schooler.

Keiichi put down the book he was reading. Rather, he had been absentmindedly flickering through its pages. A nebulous thought was nagging him, like a flickering lightbulb in the night. It seemed that Urd and Skuld were up to something. Even with the arrival of Peorth, his finely honed awareness of Goddess play and intrigue informed him that something unusual was afoot.

"What the hell can they be up to?" he said to himself. Hopefully, the end of 20XX wouldn't be like the end of 200X...with Urd's crazy rigged game of Life Sugoroku and his unexpected kiss with Belldandy. He smiled dreamily as once more he wondered if his shivering that New Years Day was because of the frigid temperature...or because of the jack-in-the-box burst of his own passions.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

So Christmas came and went. Urd and Skuld made a big scene because I got Urd a gold necklace instead of a ring. Skuld had reacted pretty much the same way she did when Keiichi got Belldandy her first ring...the ring that still graced her slender middle finger. She didn't spare any effort in chastising me. Empathy let me know that her ire was motivated by a protective feeling towards her older sister.

But Urd was clearly disappointed. It took no reach of comprehension to see that she was all downers about my gifts to her. Did she expect more? Or, as a Goddess, maybe my mortal gestures of love were ineffective? Or uninterpretable?

But, was it really me? The necklace was a symbol, a nexus of sorts. Yet...what did it symbolize? Were my feelings and thoughts engaged when I offered this gift? I _had_ considered a ring...but decided that our relationship was still too fragile, too premature for that kind of thing. I intended the necklace to represent something we couldn't do.

Touch.

Obviously, Urd didn't agree. It was evident in the sadness visible in the recesses of her eyes..._almost_ hidden away from view. A private place, just like the cave which I played in when I was a kid. My cave. Her cave. Her cave was dark with melancholy shadows...and I hadn't provided much illumination. Her reality: being alone for some many thousands of years. My reality: fear of being close to women. As we opened presents, her spirits were buoyed by false cheerfulness. Had I made a mistake by not getting her a ring? Or...were my feelings for Urd far less potent than what I sensed?

This whole mess is getting worse. The next day after Christmas, we didn't even talk.

So now, here I am in my music room. I'm trying to compose music, but nothing is fermenting as far as creative juices are concerned. I played around with several voltage regulators and MIDI-morph samples...bending sounds. Before being sucked back in time, I had drawn a computerized chart of the GodDemon's Music Symphony using Bryce. I felt better with three-dimensional visual aids than with traditional musical notation...especially where electronics were concerned. I had gotten the idea from Urd, who had told me about ThoughtPainters; Yggdrasilian artisians who used poetry to create visual dynamics. So why not sound-painting? To me, traditional musical charting didn't capture the incredible amount of effects that were available to composers today.

Yet, even the music was a source of frustration for me. Anyone could take a couple synthis, a mixer, a sequencer, a drum machine, a computer and a couple turntables...and come up with something decent. But this was like laying a slab of sidewalk concrete. What I hoped to do was unlock the entire spectrum of electronic music; to paint a sound tapestry with the articulation of a Sistine Chapel or a Nara Buddha. And let the God's Music flow through me, unprofaned by my own self-being.

Velsper came into my room and yowled his disapproval at the kinterwerk discordance coming from my keyboards. I was worried that he would pee on one of my synthesizers in a blatant act of feline frustration. I could take a hint.

Silent headphones...so I can hear myself think.

In relationships, one of the most important factors in my mind is whether or not she can accompany me towards a higher spiritual plane. Not that I was going to make Urd my personal Higher Power...I just hoped that she would encourage the process of personal spiritual growth. Women possess an innate moral acumen that seems to be generally absent in men. A Nobel Laureate author, Doris Lessing, had once observed that one of the main sources of confusion between men and women is that men are concerned with the current generation, while women are concerned with the next generation. In a nutshell, women are nurturing while men are selfish. Alongside these lines, during the times that I was living selflessly, a window of opportunity existed within which I could be spiritual. I had hoped that Urd could increase the quality of those times...somehow. Like the time under the awning during the rain. Or in an anonymous park outside Municipal Jail 37 in Beijing.

In the past, I had allowed people to become a wedge between God and me. Now that I was involved with a Goddess...she was making me feel miserable.

"Actually, I'm making myself feel miserable," I corrected myself. It was as if my former feelings of loneliness had clung to me like a pair of worn out shoes. When I got together with Urd, I discarded them for a long-anticipated new pair of shoes. However, the new shoes were very painful as my feet were used to the footcrappy shoes...I was completely unaccustomed to being in love again.

Am I in love? Can I be in love without going insane?

Love was supposed to be about little dates and pillow fights. Not misunderstandings and walking on eggshells. So many of my fellow addicts had coupled up in these crazymaking hare-brained relationships. Everyone but the couple themselves could see that their pairing was an abortive effort at avoiding the difficulties of being single. Being a single guy for so long, I felt like I was living with an emotional cancer; a gnawing loneliness inside that drained away my vivace.

Yet, as a recovering addict, I know that relationships could conceal a special danger...the danger of relapse. I've gone to the funerals of men and women whose relationships devolved into dysfunctional morasses of guilt, shame and anger. Emotionally overwhelmed because they weren't practicing principled behavior, they returned to active drug use. Not that the relationship itself was at fault; the problem existed in the individual's inability to cope with powerful emotions without the use of drugs. Often too, the inability to let go. And the desire to encage their lover...to take a hostage.

It's love...Panic!

I know that whatever happens, I won't get loaded. I_ do_ have that much confidence in my recovery. If Urd only had Sayoko's sense of recovery...

Wishful thinking on my part. One of my deepest problems, at least as far as relationships have been concerned, was manifesting itself in my relationship with Urd. I was definitely following a pattern; viewing Urd as a composite of qualities drawn from my memories. Somehow, I can't avoid enmeshing the attributes of past girlfriends in my attempts to understand Urd's actions. Especially my departed ex-wife. When I see Urd getting loaded...I feel a chill spectre of death over my shoulder. As if I was seeing my ex-wife dying all over again. But this has nothing to do with Urd.

But the feeling is there.

Butbutbutbut. If only the "buts" would butt out!

Yes, Urd certainly is a creature of contrasts...sugar and spice. Lots of spice.

I've gotta decide.

"What the hell am I thinking? I don't know anything about love!" I sounded my frustration, ripping the headphones off and tossing them angrily into the corner of the room, almost clobbering one of the cats by accident.

So where do I get off trying to convince myself that I have a set of convictions that are meaningful in any sense? All I know is that a part of me died with my ex-wife. And now...

I can't let Urd get between me and my heart much longer. But she's in my heart._ I _let her in.

Do I rip her out?

Can I survive?

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Belldandy was curled under the blanket with Keiichi, watching the wispy curls of snowflakes dancing silver fleece trails against the window. Once more, Keiichi had guessed her secret wish for Christmas. She looked at the tree and sighed happily. He had crafted an ingenious set of metal and glass Christmas tree ornaments out of cycle parts from the various stockboxes at Whirlwind. Each uniquely designed piece enframed a photo of a loved one in her life. She had met and loved so many friends since she came to Earthrealm for this adventure. Belldandy loved Christmas; these special ornaments would make each holiday henceforth even more precious.

She was genuinely surprised when she opened one package which contained a complete set of tickets and travel coupons. Keiichi had booked a tour to Kyushu for spring break. Belldandy knew that it was probably very therapeutic for him to go back to the place where he lived for so many years. Perhaps visiting modern Kyushu would help put to rest his past life there in some way, so that he could be more _here_. Belldandy was so happy that Keiichi was taking care of himself, in his own manner. She also wanted to go so that she could experience in some way those lost years with the man she loved. Since their return to 20XX, she felt uneasy with the reality that Keiichi had lived a whole epoch of his life _without her_. She wanted to share in everything with her Keiichi...and yet he had 13 years inside of him that she couldn't reach. The one year she spent in Aoshima's 'holding cell' was a fraction of her life, but Keiichi's time in Kyushu was a significant part of his. She wanted to bridge and heal this rift, this hidden 'him', so they could be even closer. Even if the memories would fade away, as their physical bodies had returned to normal, she didn't want to miss out on who he was.

She looked at the ornament with Urd's photo. Her older sister was trying to find some kind of medicinal cure that would make the men totally forget their past experiences in the 14th century. Belldandy doubted that Urd could successfully concoct a mystical substance that could selectively wipe out their memories. An inner wisdom told her that only time would erase the ravages of Time; the guys would just have to bear up with this 'butterfly holocaust' of the mind. Besides, Keiichi was doing better...he wasn't so snappy and demanding as he was last week.

Resting her head against Keiichi's shoulder, she basked in the total comfort of being warmed by him, body-next-to-body. It was a good thing that everyone else was in bed, because she and Keiichi were naked under the fluffly blankets.

Keiichi said that he wanted to cuddle tonight...to appreciate her warmth while gazing languidly at the wintry snowscape. The many trees that they could view were layered with crystalline ice branches. In the moonlight, the radiance of reflected light off of the trees seemed to tickle the dark night air...making it laugh joyfully.

At least tonight, she could forget about Peorth and that mysterious wish.

She felt Keiichi nuzzle her neck with soft kisses, and wondered if cuddling was all they were going to do...with the moonglowing sweeps of snow as their witness...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"It was traced by Yggdrasil Mainframe...to _this_ house!" Peorth said as she absent-mindedly flitted with her hair during breakfast. "Whoever made the wish called from here. Nowhere else. I've checked and double-checked," she added.

"But the Yggdrasil Mainframe has been known to be buggy from time to time. I should know, after the thousands of years I've Sysoped there!" Urd reminded her.

"Well, it's only as good as its programmers and sysops, right?" Peorth half-heartedly sassed at Urd.

"Oooo, aren't you owly this morning! Sorry, you can't pin that one on me or Skuld, since we're both down _here_, Peorth!" Urd retorted crisply.

"Hmm...well answer me this. A call _was_ placed and logged on the system, but there was no voice. Could the caller be a ghost?" Peorth watched as Skuld shrunk back a little at the reference to the supernatural. Which always surprised her, because by mortal standards, Skuld _was_ the supernatural.

"No...I think it might have been a snow tengu. Or a possibly a winter oni from Hokkaido. What about a kappa, or maybe even a bowl-ghost..." Urd said, onto the game.

"S..stop it! Y..you're both scaring me!" Skuld shouted, pushing her bowl of sweet kanten jelly away. Urd and Peorth both laughed at her typified paranoid response.

"Quit picking on Skuld!" Keiichi chastened the two as he walked past them towards the kitchen. Skuld looked at him with a flicker of grateful hazel eyes, and then rescowled at the two older Goddesses.

"Actually, it's all your fault she's this way! You were the one who suggested she read some books by Lafcadio Hearn in order to learn about Japan. She wasn't this way before she came to Earthrealm..." Urd argued.

"Yes, I suppose it is my fault. You know how impressionable children are," Peorth added.

"AM NOT!" Skuld shouted.

"By the way, did you and Belldandy have fun under the blankets?" Urd asked loudly, just to see Keiichi's face turn red. His blush proved her guess was right. _This_ was a good sign that things were slowly getting back to normal in the household! Hopefully, she would have that new Lustmuster formula ready by New Year's. Skuld's face turned even redder with anger.

"Keiichi...you're so _cute_ when you blush!" Peorth teased as she floated up and wrapped herself around him, hugging him from behind and then reaching out and playfully tousling his hair. Keiichi pushed her away and made a double-time exit down the hall, followed by echoing giggles. Two flirtatious Goddesses were too much for him. Especially with the _glow_ he felt this morning.

"So anyway, who do you think made the call, Peorth?" Urd asked, suddenly serious.

"I think...it was either the boy, Tomohisa...or Cevn," she said, attempting to get a rise out of Skuld and Urd.

"Nice try, but they were both at the party," Urd said. "And Cevn already made his wish."

"Yeah. Even Banpei-kun showed up at the beginning," Skuld added.

"You mean that rolling trashpile that you call a 'robot'...visited the Karaoke party? That's utterly ridiculous!" Peorth observed bluntly. Skuld glowered at Peorth's deliberate insult towards her mechanical ally and friend. At that moment, she wished that her amber brown eyes could trap Peorth...like the insect fossil she had seen in a magazine that had been preserved for hundreds of millions of years.

"Banpei's got far more compassion than you!" Skuld near-shouted.

"Mon enfant, _no one_ has more compassion than I! After all, didn't I help Belldandy out of that awful omiai mess? I could have just let things be...and then, wouldn't _I_ have wound up with Keiichi-chan all to myself?" Skuld had to reluctantly concede this point.

"Excuse me...this conversation is exceeding the level of sappiness that I can tolerate," Urd said as she dismissed herself.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Urd returned to her lab in Urd's Castle to work on the Lustmuster syrup. She wanted to make it into a liquid, so that she could slip it in everyone's tea on New Year's Eve. After cleaning the temple from top to bottom, they would all be _very_ thirsty. So thirsty...that they wouldn't hazard any suspicions.

Of course, she would skip out on the annual year-end temple cleaning, just like every other year since she arrived to Earthrealm. Regardless of how much Belldandy pouted or Skuld remonstrated.

It would be her way to get back at Cevn for not getting her a ring. Urd just didn't understand why he was so reserved about such a simple expression of gratitude and love.

"Keiichi got Belldandy a ring for their first Christmas together...so why couldn't Cevn do the same for me?" she mumbled to herself as she added another ingredient to the brew. Urd's sadness seemed to deconstruct itself like a melting sandcastle...melted by a sea of salty anger. After a hundred thousand years, she felt love for a man again...only to be spurned.

It was only a ring. One single band of gold or silver metal with a gemstone fitted onto it. But he chose against it...chose against_ her_.

Urd imagined Cevn embroiled in his own uncontrollable lusts after taking her 'medicine'...and not being able to do anything to relieve it. Then she could tease and torment him to no end until the effects wore off.

That would teach him.

"All of them...to amuse me," Urd smiled as she mixed arcane compounds, glancing at the formula in one of her advanced textbooks.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Banpei! That's it!!" Skuld shouted, snapping her fingers. Peorth looked askance at the young girl-Goddess, curious about her sudden outburst.

"Don't you see? Banpei-kun was _here_, so he must know who made the call, since everyone else was at the party!" Skuld was miffed at the simple answer that they had overlooked. The sooner they could figure out who made the wish and send Peorth on her way, the better.

"Summon him," Peorth said haughtily.

"Don't order me around. Just because you're a First Class Goddess and I'm a..."

"Yeah, yeah... Just have him come, okay, Earth Trainee with a suspended license?" Skuld shook at that one, and then checked herself because she almost stuck her tongue out at Peorth.

"I'll do it because someone somewhere made a wish and they deserve to have it granted. But _not_ for you!" she responded with a hasty rue. Angrily ruffling back one of her sleeves, she pressed a button that was cleverly inset into one of her bracelets. Almost immediately, she could hear the approaching whirring from outside.

"Banpei-kun must be sweeping the driveway free of last night's snow," she guessed aloud. They met Banpei on the porch. He vibrated his metallic frame for a few seconds, dislodging the snow that was attached to his armor. This was a feature Belldandy had insisted upon after Banpei had repeatedly tracked snow and mud into the house several years ago when Skuld had first created him. Skuld had upgraded his wheels to a material that _nothing_ could adhere to, while installing the Vibroframe Mark III feature so that he could shake loose any dust or moisture.

The memory of a smashed Banpei in 2050 still echoed in her mind with its haunting images. Because of this, Skuld felt an extra sense of relief every time Banpei responded to her summons. She squatted on her haunches in front of him and eyed him levelly.

"Banpei...on Christmas Eve, did someone make a call from here to Yggdrasil? Do you have any idea who it was?"

Her mechanical friend shifted into a syncopated symphony of buzzes and breeps. Then he looked longingly into Skuld's eyes. Skuld examined his metallic face, her suspicions mounting as she scaled the meanings of his expression. She was one of five who could read Banpei's 'face'...and she was by far more accurate than her sisters or Keiichi and Megumi. She saw indecision, indicated by a slight tipping of Banpei's cap.

Suddenly, Banpei-kun broke away from Skuld and Peorth. He spun on his wheels, excitedly making three complete circles...and rolled over to the kitchen. The two Goddesses followed. Extending his frame upward to its full height, he reached on the counter with one of his servo arms and picked up the phone.

"Yeah...that's right Banpei. Someone did just what you're doing. Do you know who?" Skuld asked. She looked at Peorth, who wore a funny expression on her face...wide-eyed as she was biting her lower lip in a half-grin.

"What's so funny, Peorth?" Skuld asked suspiciously.

The moment the mecha had grabbed the phone, it all came together in Peorth's mind like a flash of quicksilver. The elements of this mystery had just molded themselves into a singularly incredible scenario. One that would poise Peorth for unparalleled fame amongst her GRO peers. Absolute renown..._if_ she could pull it off.

"Well...I'll be damned!" Peorth exclaimed.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Skuld looked at Banpei, her mouth a wide oval of shock.

"Does this m..mean that _you_ called?" she sputtered.

Banpei nodded his head. Skuld felt her heart leap with pride and amazement. Banpei, the robot that _she_ had designed, created, and built...was displaying a degree of sentience that she considered to be impossibly beyond his means. Banpei was Skuld's labor of love...she had tinkered with him for years, constantly improving him with a host of upgrades to his AI and his mecha functioning. He was much closer than a pet...and much more than a friend. He was _her_ Banpei-kun!

A couple years back, Banpei had fallen in love with a simply designed mechanical mannequin. He had discovered Sigel the Robot Girl in front of an ancient roadside godown convenience store in one of the rural Chiba towns, greeting customers with a bow and a hello. Sigel was a simple half-doll, half automaton...crudely designed and constructed by Skuld's standards. Yet, Banpei was infatuated with her in a most human-like fashion. Then the owner discarded her...and she ended up repaired and repainted by Chihiro for Whirlwind. After seeing Banpei's enraptured attentions to her, Skuld acquired her from Chihiro...then modified Sigel with 'special' circuitry. But yet, there he was...saving her life, pursuing her like Keiichi sometimes chased after Belldandy. But the whole thing had turned out badly despite everyone's best efforts; his affections weren't reciprocated by Sigel.

And now, Banpei had called Yggdrasil.

"How could he have done it? He doesn't have a voice, per se. He's just a machine..." Peorth wondered aloud.

"Now hold it right there! Banpei-kun is so much more than a machine! He has _real_ feelings! He's fallen in love with my sister, acted the part of a hero, has bruised Keiichi's shin dozens of times, and absolutely despises Mara. You can't get away with saying that he's only a machine! After all, what kind of machine calls the Goddess Relief Office, Earth Otasuke Division?!" Peorth could sense Skuld's vehemence even as she searched her own mind to try and understand how Banpei had made the call.

"Can you have him demonstrate how he did it?" Peorth suggested, her voice deliberately skeptical.

"Banpei...how did you make the call?" Skuld watched as Banpei disassembled the phone, pulling several wires out. He opened up a small box on his 'neck' and inserted the wires. Immediately, a blistering cacophony of dial pulses started...

"STOP!" Peorth shouted, realizing that Banpei could end up calling Yggdrasil again during his demonstration. To make sure, she pulled the plug on the phoneset.

"Chill _out_, Peorth!" Skuld asserted. Peorth looked at her with an amused smile.

"You don't want him calling the GRO again, do you Skuld?"

"Ohhh no!" she exclaimed. If Banpei-kun called before, he could do it again. Peorth nodded at her as recognition dawned in her mind.

"Yes, that would create a lot of trouble, wouldn't it? They might even want to take your mechanical friend to Yggdrasil to disassemble him...take him apart...to see what makes him tick," she said with feigned concern, savoring how Skuld fidgeted in harmony to her darkling predictions.

"N..no way! They wouldn't dare!" Skuld whispered fearfully.

Peorth paused to reflect. It would be important for her to seize this opportunity before the three sisters could foul her chances. This meant that she had to find out what Banpei wanted, than make him communicate his wish. Since he couldn't talk...this might pose a problem.

"Aha!!" Peorth said. She opened one of the drawers in the kitchen and withdrew a piece of paper and a black magic marker. She set them down on the counter and then turned to Banpei.

_"Write!"_

Both Skuld and Banpei looked at her with confused faces.

"I want you to write down what you want, robot! Then I can make your wish come true."

Banpei looked at her, and then shook his head "no".

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

_"__Ewyaaaahhhhrrgghhh!__"_

Keiichi sighed as he heard someone scream in frustration. Just another normal day in the temple house.

"Put Urd, Peorth and Skuld in one dining room and _this_ is what happens," he grumbled. He reached for the whiteout to cover the ripjagged line that rued the symmetry of the motorbike chassis schematic he was working on...the pen seeming to live a two-second panic adventure in reaction to the shouting. Unfortunately, Belldandy and Megumi had taken advantage of the break in the snowfall to go to the grocery store.

"How long until this one blows over? And during my year-end break as well! Cripes...I just wanted to _relax_!" he said to one of the posters as if it was alive and listening to him.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Skuld watched in amazement while Banpei went NBA all over the living room, traversing all over in random patterns. Yet, he carefully avoided knocking anything over...which allayed Skuld's initial fear that his circuitry was frying out. But it was like...like he was on Big Sister's 'speedy pills' or something! She had never seen Banpei so hyper before, except when Dr. Morrow was torturing Sigel. If Banpei-kun was a mortal, it would be as if he was fraught with anxiety. Nervous pacing, it resembled.

It was hilarious, the way her Banpei had shot down Peorth's request with point-blank bluntness. Peorth was acting all uppity, and then he owned her to the max! Skuld remembered how he shook his head "No!" and Peorth's face erupted into a reddened clench of rage while Banpei firmly stood his ground. It was so funny, she almost bit her tongue laughing.

And then Banpei-kun shot off towards her bedroom.

"What does he think he's doing?" Peorth shouted above the din that Banpei was creating.

"I...don't know! I just can't understand why he's acting this way!" Skuld shouted back, her mirth tasked into serious caution.

They followed Banpei as he slid open the shoji door and entered the sister's bedroom. He rolled to a stop in front of Skuld's stuffed animal collection.

Peorth noticed something that had missed her attention all the times she had visited. Skuld and Belldandy each had a wall in their bedroom. Belldandy's wall sported a number of framed photographs of her, Keiichi and all the other members of their clique. Skuld's wall had a couple of idol star posters, a poster of a Corvette, an Escaflowne poster series, and almost fifty stuffed animals of all types and sizes lined up on the floor.

Banpei was gesturing towards the stuffed animals.

"What?" Skuld asked with sincere concern. She checked his programming circuitry...which was locked. Once more, Skuld was led to wonder how Banpei could protect his programming even from _her_.

Banpei reached for a pen on top of the dresser and then wrote:

_"Banpei wants friends like mortals have!"_

A split-second later, Peorth felt the familiar sensation as she floated upward in the air, a slender focused stream of light ascending from the diamond-shaped mark on her forehead.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

_--Crash!!--_

Urd looked at the ruins of the beaker. All of her Lustmuster potion was dripping down the sides of her sink.

A sudden shift in gravity had pulled the beaker right out of her hand. She looked at the fragments of glass floating amidst the light green goo. Somehow, a powerful signal was being broadcast to Yggdrasil from somewhere in the house.

"_Shit_!" she cursed, right before her sink blew up.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Skuld flinched as she saw the thin wooden wall that separated her mecha lab from Urd's room splinter into a pile of matchwood. Through the smoke, she could see Urd stumblefloating in confusion. Before she could even begin to think about what just happened, she noticed that the feedback signal from Yggdrasil was being deflected. Peorth had been displaced by an explosion of some kind, and she wasn't hovering in the floating position necessary to receive the signal. It angled around the room like a living thing, seeking her out for conduit. But instead, it struck her obliquely.

As a result, the transmission signal was reflected, like a light passing through a prism. Towards her stuffed animals.

Showered with rainbow light and a thin green smoke, the stuffed animals began to move...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Belldandy could sense that the house was in an uproar as soon as Megumi pulled into the driveway. Megumi was due to leave with Genji tomorrow to go skiing, so she was in a happy-go-lucky mood. Belldandy appreciated her very pleasant company, for Megumi was one of two mortals she could confide in about the nightmare of 2050. She hoped that the vacation for Genji and her would be very healing to them both; Megumi had discussed her difficulty adapting to the occasional bursts of 14th Century brusqueness and chauvinism her boyfriend got caught up in. Keiichi was a handful for her; she could only imagine what Megumi was going through. Also, it seemed that the guys did their attitudinal flip-flops at random, something Megumi confirmed while discussing her and Genji. But now the temple house was permeated with strife vibes that she couldn't ignore.

"This means total chaos," she thought to herself as she read the aura around the temple.

Not to mention that a light was flowing downwards, piercing the clouds and the roof of the temple.

A light which Belldandy all too easily recognized.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Megumi had intended to stay just long enough to drop off the groceries, and then she was off to Genji's to spend the night at his parent's house. Keiichi was much more relaxed towards her relationship with Genji after they all returned from their time travels. Perhaps, after spending 13 years living with Genji, Keiichi had learned to trust him more. Enough to allow his little sister to stay overnight with him.

When she entered the living room, Megumi pulled to a halt, gasped, and dropped her two bags of groceries on the floor.

"W..what...is _that_!"

Urd was stumbling around, looking like Wile E. Coyote after getting blown up by a bomb. Megumi immediately assumed that Skuld had bombed her. But what snatched her breath away were the _animals_.

A stuffed rabbit hopped across the living room, circling around Urd. Another stuffed animal, a Pokeman, was walking towards the kitchen. A clothwork gorilla was climbing up a lamp with powerful pulls of its arms.

"This...is..._crazy_!" Megumi shouted to no one in particular.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

At first, Belldandy was concerned that her sisters and Peorth were okay. As she surveyed the damage to the two Goddess's hobby rooms, she was grateful that Keiichi had been in his own hobby room. On the other side of the hall, it was separated and fairly well insulated from the blastzone by the hallway. Since Urd and Skuld had lost their Goddess licenses, they didn't have enough latent power to create adequate seals for their hobby rooms. Belldandy had suspected that something like this might happen. At least the explosion part.

She didn't expect the other part, however.

She bravely tried to keep from laughing as a stuffed tiger crouched and then leapt onto Skuld's shoulder, giving her little sister a start. Megumi was right...this was loony-times-ten crazy.

Her house was filled with fifty or so of Skuld's stuffed animals.

Peorth wasn't making sense...which made sense. Skuld explained what happened, because Urd was in a daze. In the midst of a transmission exchange to the GRO and Yggdrasil Mainframe, Peorth had been buffeted by an explosion. During this critical period, the Goddess needed to be precisely aligned with the carrier light signal from Yggdrasil. Once out of alignment with the signal, the signal tried to reach her by its own means. This was every GRO Goddess's nightmare; an interrupted or deflected signal meant wish-incompletion and a few days of migraine headaches and delirium. Not the stark-raving-mad type of disorientation, but bouting with it was bothersome enough. No wonder Peorth was babbling about the tulip festivals of Holland.

All three cats were freaking out. Velsper was pouncing on a stuffed bird, while Pho and Xue Shizi were stalking a stuffed Dalmatian. It was playtime for the cats.

Nobody had any idea how this had happened.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Urd, what were you making when the explosion occurred?" Belldandy asked calmly. Unexpectedly, Urd turned several flashes of crimson, her blush showing through her suntanned skin. Skuld grinned...she knew that her sister was onto something. Urd was squirming like a worm on a hot sidewalk.

"Urd's downfall is afoot," Skuld thought, ready for anything.

"Err, ahem. I was making a potion!" Urd announced.

"_What_ kind of potion, Big Sister?" Skuld asked with false innocence. The veiled threat in her voice wasn't missed by anyone in the living room.

"Well, ya see, a couple of days ago, I was working on a potion t..to make the guys less caught up in their memories of the 14th century. But I spilled it down the drain..."

"WHAT KIND OF POTION, URD!" Skuld yelled. Belldandy almost wanted to chide her younger sister for being so insensitive that she had shouted rudely, but the guilt she noticed washing over Urd's face forestalled her.

Urd felt like she was going to perish. Everyone was here. Belldandy. Skuld. Peorth. Keiichi. Cevn. Tomohisa.

"I..I can't tell you. You guys would kill me! It's better that you don't know. Really!" she pleaded. Belldandy shook her head in resignation, her face saying "here we go again with another one of Urd's antics!"

"Urd, I'm not convinced. And now that you're so adamant about not telling us, you've pretty much admitted that you're up to some kind of mischief," Keiichi interjected, echoing what Belldandy was thinking.

Urd looked to Cevn for help, but Cevn just shook his head and stared at her. She looked at Peorth, whose smile indicated that she was eating this up. Tomohisa resembled a soap opera junior lawyer with his grave mien.

"Oh...all right! I'll tell you. But promise that you won't do anything to me, Bell. My dear, _dear_ sister. _Please_!" Urd bowed to her, almost groveling. Belldandy rolled her eyes and then nodded, feeling like she was her Elder Sister's elder sister. What could Urd have done which made her so evasive...and so ashamed, she wondered.

"Well, I was working on a Lustmuster potion. J..just to see if I could do it, of course," Urd admitted sheepishly. Belldandy looked at her with a gripping expression of shock.

"Sacre Dei! I can see it now! You were making the Lustmuster potion in order to increase everyone's libido...Gods and Earthrealmers! And knowing you, Urd...you were probably going to sneak it into everybody's tea or something, then sit back and enjoy the results of your labors," Peorth explained.

Urd's tan face went pallid.

"URD! How could you? You know that a Lustmuster potion is one of the strongest potions known to the Gods. It overstimulates the divine drive to Share, not to mention mortal sexual stamina and o...o...o..."

"Orgasm," Peorth said, finishing the word that Belldandy was too embarrassed to say in front of the others.

"I just wanted to make the New Year's more enjoyable for everyone! Besides, I was really thinking about you and Keiichi..."

"Keiichi is just fine the way he is. He already has enough for me. Why, just the night after Christmas, he and I..."

"BELL-CHAN! I think we get the picture!" Keiichi exclaimed his face ruddy with reactive shamefastness.

"Ha ha ha ha ha! This is _great_!" Peorth laughed, seeing Urd and Keiichi reduced to shame-ridden ashes.

"This is _your_ fault, Peorth!" Belldandy said sternly, turning her attention to the Goddess of Forever.

"Huh?"

"You were placed on _limited duty_, as prescribed by the Proctors of the Ethiopsylogic Clinic. You should have never taken on this wish case. Didn't you think that an artificial intelligence making a wish was just a _little_ extraordinary? You _had_ to know that this GRO Hotline call wasn't made by a mortal," Belldandy confronted in logic-chain fashion.

"Well, I would've granted his wish, if Little Miss Alchemist here hadn't blown up the place!"

"Well, if you weren't granting his wish, I wouldn't have dropped my Lustmuster potion in the sink and blown up my lab..."

"What about Banpei...it was _his_ wish you screwed up..." Skuld interjected.

Cevn walked out of the room. This was just too much arguing for his tastes. Besides, once again, Urd had disappointed him.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Belldandy woke up the next day with a fluffy cotton bear curled up in ursine bliss on her chest. She had wanted to sleep in Keiichi's bedroom, but decided that she needed to keep an eye on Peorth. And Urd, for that matter.

She looked over at Skuld, sleeping between her and Urd. Peorth was sleeping by the wall where Skuld's polyester pets used to reside.

Wiping the sleep from her eyes, she got up and put a houserobe on, then went to the kitchen and poured herself a tea and heated it in the fridge's microwave. She had a six-door refrigerator with a wooden set of replacement doors that Keiichi built, so it would blend inconspicuously into the kitchen decor. It was the latest model: with quick and slow freezers, a vegetable crisper with a self-regulating humidity control; a small microwave for beverages and quick warmups; a chill area for beverages and cooling zone area for leftovers. A sliding panel revealed a set of temperature controls for each compartment. It even had an odor remover and dispensers for water and mixed beverages. The mixed beverage dispenser was another adjustment engineered by Keiichi; with it, Belldandy had a tap supply for tea or peach drink mix.

_Babumph!!_

Belldandy looked down and smiled at a small elephant that just bumped into her shin. She recalled that it was based on some long-ago Disney movie. Suddenly, it began to flap its ears and slowly lifted off the floor. Belldandy wondered just how far Skuld's vivified menagerie could imitate real-life animals. But this was a cartoon character...and yet there it was, floating in front of her in all its improbable glory like a jumbo-sized hummingbird.

She went into the dining room and tucked her legs under the kosatsu to warm them up. It wasn't very cold in the house, but the electric blanket offered a cozy warmth that soothed her nerves. Sipping her warm tea, she noticed the elephant again, only this time in the living room.

"How could you have slipped by me into the living room without my noticing," she said sweetly to the stuffed toy, as if it was alive and could understand her.

"Hmm..._is_ it alive?" she asked herself. Having a house full of animated toys could present all sorts of problems. If they somehow left the temple grounds, it could cause chaos. Not to mention breaking every child's heart...because they would want a 'living' stuffed toy.

Kodama and her sister Ninjettes were off Winter training in the hills of the Snow Country...what would happen if they came back and saw _this_?

She smiled again as a slender rabbit bunny hopped onto the tabletop.

"You guys _are_ cute," she admitted.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Skuld woke up and immediately missed the familiar sight of her stuffed animals along the wall. Sleep had robbed her of the awareness that her collection of stuffed animals had come to life. She gradually remembered the events of yesterday, including her wrecked mecha lab. Well, not exactly wrecked. But it was worthless, because Urd could see everything she did because of the missing wall between their hobby rooms. _That_ was an intolerable situation that needed to be remedied! She made a mental note to ask Keiichi to put up a wall post-haste, so Urd couldn't spy on her.

"Hey, sleepyhead," Urd greeted her as she sat down for breakfast. Urd was into 'loving Big Sister' mode today, Skuld realized. Probably out of guilt. Urd floated up behind her and massaged her shoulders as she drank some chocolate milk.

Skuld regretted her paranoia of a moment ago. Despite the fact that she and Urd tended to confound each other on a regular basis, their sibling rivalry was only a small axis of their relationship. Urd and she had made for a good team on countless occasions, especially when it came to rescuing Belldandy or Keiichi from some disaster.

"Or rescuing the Earthrealm and the Multiverse," Skuld realized as she recounted the superstring mishap several years ago.

"This is strange...there seems to be _more_ of them," she thought to herself as she grabbed a breakfast roll. She began to count off the felt and cotton toys. This was difficult, as the rabbits were hopping around swiftly while the tortoises lumbered across the floor. The Pokeman doll kept changing shapes, the birds were flying, and the monkeys and gorillas were climbing all over the furniture.

"Gorillas?" she mouthed the word out loud.

"What did you say, Skuld?" Belldandy asked. Urd set down her morning bottle of Four Hearts sake and looked quizzilly at her.

"I thought...in fact I _know_...that I only have one stuffed gorilla. But there's _two_ in the living room!"

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

By the next day, December 28th, the extent of our dilemma was self evident, surrounding us with a net of filament-like strands of reality. The fear of being choked hung opiate-like over the household, like some lightly sensed Gothic horror in a Walpole novel. The air was charged with apprehension.

Keiichi, Tomohisa and I had braved subzero Celsius weather, freezing ourselves out while we hammered out a makeshift planked wooden door-cum-gate underneath the torii. Just in case. The neighbors must have thought that we were up to our usual craziness. We thought that we were being industrious, inspired by a driving necessity.

Everyone who entered or left the temple house had to do so _quickly_. In and out as fast as one could squeeze through the door. Slipping through the slenderest gap in the doorway...

It required a group effort to keep the stuffed animals from bursting out of the house.

Yesterday, when Skuld noticed the duplicate gorillas, we thought it was funny. I went along with the levity, humming the harmony bit from "Wot Gorilla", a song on an old Genesis album. Keiichi remarked about that there would be a banana shortage in the house. We were relieved by the fact that Skuld's stuffed animals didn't need to eat, so we went on with our day's routines.

A couple of hours after lunch, Skuld was dashing around the house fitfully. When Belldandy calmed her down enough so she could talk, she pointed towards the living room and started shouting "Hentai! Hentai!" Her face was almost comic with its expression of shock and disgust, her long silken tresses hanging over one of her eyes like a pirate girl.

A stuffed rabbit was humping another stuffed animal...one of the spotted Dalmatians that the cats were hunting earlier.

But then they started reproducing. Every eight hours, the number doubled. According to Skuld, right now there are 1600 frolicking stuffed toys in the house.

Now we had spotted rabbits with dog ears.

By the end of January, according to Skuld...the entire surface of the planet would be covered by a five-kilometer high pile of plush, huggable, soft, smiley, cuddlycute stuffed animals.

Skuld had offered to make an expanding room to contain them. But the last time she had created her Space Doubler Mk. II, which was basically a 'space-cuber'...it had basically turned the storage room into an infinite space. Attracting the attention of the Transdimensional Schrodinger's Whales. Skuld didn't know that the term she used for 'space' also meant 'infinite' in Japanese.

That idea was immediately nixed.

I wondered about the possibilities...an infinite room with an ever-expanding corpus of stuffed animals. Descartes would have loved this quandary. Of course, my 'metallect' knew the answer to that one. Which was frightening. It was in the Enigma Book...under Yggdrasilian Metatanic Calculus.

What was really strange was the fact that the animals coupled abhorrently. That evening, I saw a gorilla and a giraffe producing offspring which shared the physiognomic qualities of both. Presto! A 'goraffilla' with a bulky body, elongated neck and climbing arms with opposable hooves.

Our home was turning into a menagerie of the absurd.

The Pokemans were especially disturbing...because they would transfigure themselves at a moment's notice.

In the end, we capitulated to the fact that there was no possible resolution in sight.

Skuld, Urd and Peorth packed it up and headed for Yggdrasil. Right before she left, Peorth had a frightened aspect...like she was going to catch hell from the GRO for her mishap. But our best bet was to bring the best minds in the GRO to task...or life as we know it would cease to exist.

Not with a bang...but with a fur muffled meow.

I felt sorry for Peorth.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"But I can't feel sorry for Urd. I still can't believe that she intended to dose all of us with some kind of super-aphrodisiac. I mean, isn't this the act of someone who isn't wired very tight?" Cevn said.

"Well...that's our Urd," Keiichi replied. He noticed the sad, drawn look on Cevn's face. Cevn had insisted that he needed to talk to him, after the Goddesses left. Keiichi was upset at first, as this was an ideal time for he and Bell-chan to have some quality time. But Cevn's serious demeanor convinced him that he didn't just want to have a casual chat.

"What's up? You look miserable," Keiichi observed.

"I...just made a decision, Keiichi. And since you know me pretty well, I wanted to get your perspective."

"Having Peorth here has made things pretty insane, hasn't it?"

"The funny thing is...she _did_ grant Banpei's wish. Remember when he showed up at the Karaoke party? He saw us all having fun together? I'm convinced that he figured out that he was feeling lonely. All he has is mini-Banpei...he doesn't even have Sigel anymore. She doesn't want him. So...he wanted some friends. Peorth just happened to animate Skuld's toys to keep him company. Fulfilling his wish."

"But something really is screwed up, if you haven't noticed! Just look anywhere in the house to see," Keiichi said sarcastically. "By tomorrow, we'll be waist deep in stuffed toys."

"Yeah...yeah. I know. But what I really wanted to talk to you about is Urd."

"May I come in?" Belldandy asked, standing in the doorway. She had overheard Cevn mentioning her sister. Her intuition informed her that this wasn't going to be a happy discussion, so she wanted to sit in on behalf of her sister and Keiichi.

"Well, since it involves your sister...you might as well hear it too," Cevn said. Belldandy sat down next to Keiichi, her face deep in thought.

"I hate to say this...but I have to end it between us. Between Urd and I. It's not working."

"WHAT?" both Keiichi and Belldandy chorused.

"She'll be...shattered! How could you?" Belldandy said gravely.

"Look, there _is_ a place in my heart for her. But after this last bit of 'Urd sabotage', I can't take any more. Love is supposed to be noble and secure..."

"Love is supposed to hurt," Keiichi said bluntly. "That's something Bell taught me. Not that she intends to hurt me...but there are times when emotions confine something that should be released. Like when I hold in sadness, which I should express. Or when my fear challenges my love for her. Not to mention the thousands of times that I didn't think I was good enough for a Goddess. _That_ always hurts!"

"Love is an exchange of the deepest emotions, Cevn. It's obvious that you feel deeply about my sister, otherwise you wouldn't be so strongly affected by her actions. It's so clear to me that you're simply afraid! So was Keiichi, at first..."

"But I got over it," Keiichi said, exchanging a knowing smile with Belldandy.

"I know that Urd was upset that you didn't get her a ring for Christmas. She may have overreacted, but it goes much deeper than this. Consider my sister's position..."

"Don't you think that I have? I mean, it's tearing me apart. I know that my guts will grind themselves into pools of tears. I can't begin to imagine what _she's_ going to have to endure. But I have to do it. It's never going to work between us. And it will just get worse if I try to make it work! Don't you understand?"

"You're a fool! You're an idiot! _Don't you know what you're giving up?_ How many mortals even have a chance to be with a Goddess? Remember when you were telling me about how much you wanted to be with Urd? What happened to that?" Keiichi said angrily.

"Maybe. I can see the potential, you guys, but..."

"But nothing! Potentials? Ideals? You need to be grounded in reality, not fantasy. The reality is...you're being totally _selfish_, Cevn!" Belldandy argued. "Urd is a wonderful Goddess! I know my older sister better than anyone! She doesn't mean to harm you or any of us. She's just a little eccentric. And you want to know the secret as to why she acts so wild? Urd is half-Goddess, half-Demoness, as you know. Which means that her heart is twice as big; in a sense, she has two hearts. When she feels...she feels_ intensely_. I know that she really loves you; she's confided so much to me about how she feels."

"Look at things realistically, like Bell-chan just said," Keiichi added. "I know that it's been hard on all of us to readjust to life back here in the 21st century. Speaking for myself, I've had moments where I was staring over the yawning cliffs of sheer insanity. Something simple like the television...scares the crap out of me sometimes, because part of me thinks that it's _real_. It's been a struggle between Bell and I. I spent so much time back in Kyushu, in what seems like a whole other world. Remember? We tried to create something wonderful by allying Lord Mori and Lord Shimazu...and then watched helplessly as it was devoured by Imagawa's armies. Remember when we almost got killed, there at the end? It was like living in some kind of myth gone badly. I _know_ that you're going through the same difficulties. We are ourselves, and yet we can't be ourselves... All I'm asking you to do is reconsider. After all, Urd went through some crazy times in the future. And it was _Urd_ who risked everything to rescue us!! Just take a moment to pause and reflect."

"I _don't_ love her! I _can't_ love her!" Cevn shouted in anguish, and then walked his frustration out of the room. He felt like nobody was listening to him or _hearing_ him.

After the roaring silence folded its cold arms, Keiichi looked at Belldandy and shook his head.

"He's lying to himself, my love. It hurts me to see him deny his feelings like this," Belldandy said, feeling anguished at the thought of his loss.

Her sister's upcoming loss.

"He's the biggest idiot I know!" Keiichi answered, filled with disappointment.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --


	44. Pt 44: Chimes and Balloons

**Part 44: Chimes and Balloons**

_Shiwasu._

I had overheard this Japanese term with increasing frequency during the past two weeks. Walking amidst the cafeteria buzz at N.I.T., my ears fielded random bursts of "shiwasu" couched in oblique terms. Like it was some kind of secret verbal handshake.

My curiosity piqued, I finally broke out the dictionary and searched it up.

"Shiwasu is an archaic term for the last month of the year," the Shinseido dictionary noted. I naively assumed it was a slang reference to the finals at the end of the Fall term...until I heard Belldandy discussing shiwasu with Keiichi and Megumi. Then, I asked Megumi what this Shiwasu business was all about. Between poignant anecdotes of her brief stay in 2050 and the time she and Sora snuck out of their houses under cover-story of a 'sleepover' and went to Tokyo to see X Japan at the Tokyo Dome on New Year's Eve 1996, she dropped hints about an aspect of everyday Japanese life that I didn't have a clue about. In America, the primary locus of year-end activities was Christmas. But in Japan, a turn of the stone around the sun meant a whole different realm of celebrations. Three days' worth. Finally, Keiichi informed me that Shiwasu was a term used to describe the end-of-the-year frenetic madness that gripped the entire country.

Under Keiichi and Megumi's expert tutelage, I drew up a list of people I 'owed' year-end gifts to. I enclosed proofs of my dissertation book "Magnum Organum: First Consciousness" to Dr. Kintaro, the N.I.T. President who had hired me; Dr. Zhao and Chancellor Wang from BeiDa; all the TAs that shared the cramped little space in Watanabe Hall that we reluctantly called an "office"; not to mention myriad others at N.I.T. Beyond this, it was customary to send New Year's greeting cards to pretty much everyone I knew. There was also the matter of the traditional housecleaning, the special foods and condiments, buying a mon-tsuki-hakama to wear, getting a child's gift for Skuld, the music contest shows on TV, the pilgrimage to a nearby shrine to pray for the upcoming year...

Just a _few_ things.

"_If_ there's an upcoming year. What's the point of drafting a list if we fail to overcome this stuffed animal situation? By tomorrow, we won't be able to contain them in the house...and then all hell will break loose," I mentally scrawled in frustration. It seemed like making plans was an exercise in futility.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

The Ninjettes had departed several days ago for the Snow Country to undergo the traditional mid-winter martial arts training session, Kangeiko. Genji and Megumi had also traveled north, jetting to Hokkaido for a much-deserved ski adventure.

"The Shinobi Girls seem to have the right idea," Keiichi mused. "I could go for some Kangeiko myself." A martial arts image formed in his mind: the traditional misogi practice of sitting under an ice-chill waterfall in a pair of shorts--Keiichi couldn't picture himself wearing the fundoshi loincloth he had worn for 13 years, now that he was back in the 21st century--and meditating on the rewards of disciplined austerity. He fathomed a secret wish; that he wanted to leave with the Ninjettes on their exploits. Better leave it as an unavowed desire. He needed _something_. Sometimes, being with Belldandy alone didn't do it for him. His life right now seemed to have a lot of blanks; which remained as unfilled as a box of mochi after Skuld got into it.

He was still pretty disturbed about Cevn's revelation. Yet, he was comforted by Belldandy's assurance that her sister and Cevn _would_ somehow remain together, despite Cevn's reservations.

"Once Urd has a goal in mind, _nothing_ will deter her," Belldandy affirmed. Keiichi had to agree. So he had to sit tight and wait. He wished Megumi and Genji were here, sharing in the misery of a house full of stuffed animals.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Being who I am, I didn't have TV or pills to distract or deaden me; my mind with riotous neon clarity kept honing in on my relationship with Urd. Like a radar blip illuminating an otherwise foggy screen. My life would remain an unclear haze until I talked to her. I couldn't claw my way past my obsessions; my constant ring of feelings around her. Interpreter of my heart or not, I just couldn't get her out of my mind. If the Greek astronomers knew that Saturn had rings, they would have named them after me. I just hoped she would return soon, so I could grit past my despair and start the process of annulment. Right now, I felt like a wax figure standing in fear of the summer sunrise.

My thoughts returned to the Ninjettes. If Kodoma and Co. came back, they would probably find themselves employed in the wanton slaughter of several thousand textile-crafted animals.

"Do cotton and polyfiber animals have cotton entrails?" I wondered perversely. I almost wished the Ninja Masters _were_ here, because I was really starting to hate the unending cacovisio screech of flurried motion. I was wormed into my room because of the damned things.

The house was filled chest deep with stuffed animals. Fortunately, Belldandy could float...so she volunteered to navigate between our rooms and the kitchen. Keiichi, Tomohisa and I were basically confined to our rooms; the press of stuffed animals made moving around the house quite difficult. Any movement within the house was like struggling through waist-deep snowdrifts. Instead of having meals, I was having collations.

The effluence of the felt-covered bestiary was enigmatic.

Even more enigmatic was the fact that Belldandy's Goddess Powers were somehow rendered useless against the toys. Otherwise she could have just teleported the lot to Yggdrasil, and let _them_ deal with it. For some reason, the word "tribble" kept flashing in my mind.

There still wasn't any word from Yggdrasil. Urd, Skuld and Peorth had only departed on their 'mission' yesterday, but I was already pluckily impatient for a resolution to our problem.

My conscience still protested its reprobation on a minute-by-minute basis. I felt like a broken and muddied heel after informing Keiichi and Belldandy about my decision concerning Urd. I could see a moment's trace of pain in Belldandy's exquisite face, an obvious foreshadowing of things to come. Plain as milk, I knew that she was covetously trying to protect her sister from getting hurt. In fact, I wish_ I_ could protect Urd as well. But I knew that attempting this would be an exercise in frustration; I couldn't even protect myself from my emotional cul-de-sacs, so how would I protect her from her own alcohol-fueled peccadillos?

Yet Belldandy sometimes possessed a Titaniaesque air; a regal sort of unflappability. After recovering from her emotions, she offered a lecture on love that was pinpoint accurate. Who was I to question the wisdom of millennia? Nor could I question her experience in the Present; she so closely bound to Keiichi by the heart, I imagined an invisible aorta pumping love between the two's Souls.

"We're all commanded by Kami-sama to love...this is why love exists in our hearts. When one fails to recognize that love is service, then one is unable to risk deepening their understanding of themselves," she had said last night. Those words _hurt_...the thing I wanted most was to exchange love. But it was impossible, with or without Urd.

A mental vision haunted me: being in a room filled with several Chinese folded screens depicting mountainous vistas; the art was only a meager echo of _real_ scenery...yet it could evoke stronger passions within an observer than an uphill climb through the woods, with its verdant tedium. Was I alone all this time because I was enamored of the _fantasy_ of being in love...while reality was too intense? I recalled an incident from the second time I was in Beijing; it was forever engrained upon my memory. While strolling through Tiananmen, I heard several members of a tourist group complaining vigorously. "If they show me another old Chinese castle or stone garden, I'm going to get sick," was the gist of their griping. What was precious to some...was ignoble to others. What was precious to me then was the inerasable blood stains on the tarmac; the lifeblood of some anonymous freedom fighter who was standing firm in his or her convictions. To the unnamed martyr, his or her freedom was precious.

Urd was precious to me, but yet I had to put myself first. So I felt uncomfortably ignoble.

I realized that it would probably be for the best good if I moved out of the house after I discussed things with Urd. Living amidst assumed or real hostility from Belldandy and Skuld would only manufacture an oppressive insecurity. Deep in my heart, I _knew_ that Skuld would be pissed. If she displayed any of the protective qualities towards Urd that she brandished in Keiichi's face when he was courting Belldandy, then she would be crushed by my announcement.

Keiichi and Megumi would probably feel betrayed as well. I already betrayed them once when I covertly departed for China last summer.

"Why do I keep betraying the ones I am close to?" I wondered, once again examining my motives unsuccessfully. The heart is always suspect terrain, it seems.

But the worst pangs of betrayal and sorrow would be in the witnessing of how Urd would react. I don't think I could handle _that_. My mind had spun loops through estimated prophecies of how she would react...heartbroken, resentful, betrayed, uncomprehending, shocked...but mostly _heartshattered_.

Because of what I was going to do, after New Year's.

Sometimes, I didn't feel like myself. Keiichi had ascertained our situation with an uncanny intuitiveness. This 'year', we had spent 31 weeks in 1384, but only three weeks in 20XX. So I wasn't myself...I was still very much a 14th century samurai one-handed courtier.

I wanted to talk with a_ woman_, letting fears slide through my fingertips like so much drifting woodsmoke. Just to have a feminine presence of empathy, so I could try to crucify my guilt and shame. But Megumi, Sayoko and Lin were all out of town. There was no one who could listen. Who _would_ want to tune in to my private turmoil?

I wanted to pour gasoline all over my self-pity and set it aflame...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Belldandy kept repairing the damage between Skuld and Urd's hobby rooms, but the stuffed animals responded by mindlessly breaking the wall down again and again. They kept mobbing Skuld's Lab with instinctual abandon, taxing Belldandy by causing her to have to constantly reinforce her shield spells around the house.

Her energy was slowly drained from having to float all day. Having to cast seals and shields all over the house to corral the animals, not to mention physically removing them from the bathroom so Keiichi could take a bath...well, it just plain exhausted her.

Her powers gradually depleted themselves against the stuffed animal onslaught...so she fell asleep in her lover's arms late in the evening. Keiichi knew Bell was bone-tired; he gingerly carried her to her room and tucked her in. Having to wade through the hallway that was crammed to the rafters with stuffed animals, with his arms filled the weightiest concern of his moment, required an enormous physical struggle. Then he spent the next hour physically evacuating the sister's bedroom of its plush occupants.

Belldandy would need a good long sleep to powerup.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Keiichi woke up the next day, dreading the excursion into the hallway. Sliding the shoji door aside, he was relieved to see that the chest-high swarm of animals was significantly diminished. Which meant that Urd and Skuld had found a solution.

His relief dissolved when he felt and saw the chill December air rushing into his room from the hallway.

"Oh...shit!" he thought as he dashed into the living room, almost tripping over several catwhales that were swimming along the floor.

"BELLDANDY!" he screamed at the top of his lungs, despite the certain knowledge that she would awaken only when her power was restored. The pink flush of her face indicated that she would need another couple of hours of sleep.

Every window in the living room was broken.

The animals were on the loose.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

_"In what is perhaps the most bizarre story of 20XX, Makuhari, Narashino, Inage, Funabushi, Chiba and Ichikawa have been infested by _-animated stuffed- toys_. Late night workers coming off their shifts last night started reporting herds of 'mutated small animals' darting to and fro in Makuhari. By early morning, thousands of the stuffed animals were observed in the vicinity, capering in open daylight._

_"Scientists are at a loss to explain this phenomenon. The animals appear to be harmless, except that certain types tend to attack humans, albeit without any effect. Their behavior appears to mimic real animals. Pedestrians with young children and the elderly are encouraged to _-stay indoors-_ until this crisis is over._

_Despite your child's adamant desire to take one of these creatures home for a 'pet', government authorities strongly urge you to not give in to their demands. Authorities are still baffled as the origin or purpose of this infestation. The Self Defense Force has been mobilized to collect and store these creatures until more is known about them. We now have Shino Akahara interviewing Dr. Kenji Nishihara, director of the Xenobiological Theoretics Institute._

-- (switch to videotape) --

"Dr. Nishihara, what do we know about these stuffed animals?

_"Well, we have isolated a few specimens for study at the Institute. Dissection is useless, since our scans have indicated that the animals have no special physiology. Physically, they -_are-_ stuffed animals in every respect. What causes their sentiency is unknown, since they do not have a brain as such._

"Citizens have reported that the animals appear to procreate. Can you explain this?"

_"Under controlled observation, we've noted that they appear to have a strong mating drive."_

"Which accounts for the unusual hybrids of animal types reported by citizens."

_"Correct, Ms. Akahara. It appears that they duplicate every eight hours. This could become a problem if it is allowed to continue. We know that the animals can be destroyed by conventional means, such as burning. And at the present, they are mostly harmless, since they are made of cotton and other fibers."_

"Various groups claim that they are of extraterrestrial origin. Can you discuss your theory on their origin?"

_"I doubt this very much. Each animal carries the manufacturer's tag of one of its 'parents'. We've seen Bandai, Mattel, Disney, Fuji and many other name brands. All investigations indicate that they are of terrestrial materials and elements."_

"Do they pose a threat?"

_"Most certainly, if they continue to reproduce. Every 24 hours, their numbers increase by a factor of eight. Which doesn't sound like much, but in two days, one billion of these toys would become 64 billion. That represents a significant increase in population and physical mass__. Unless we discover a mechanism to stall out their reproduction rate, their sheer numbers could be very deadly__."_

"Well, I hope it doesn't come to that. This is Shino Akahara, reporting the improbable for you on behalf of NHK Network News."

-- (switch to anchor) --

_"Until more is known, the Government advises citizens to leave the stuffed animals alone. This story may bring a wry face because of...its unusual nature...but we will keep you abreast of any developments."_

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Damn you, Peorth," Keiichi cursed under his breath as the newscast continued into less spectacular items of interest. The NHK anchorwoman had said it best when she said it was "the improbable". None of the Goddesses, Mara, or anyone else could have possible cooked up such a ridiculous scenario. Worst of all, he knew how deadly it would be for everyone if unchecked. Choked out of our environment by our own toys. What an epitaph for a species!

"When are they coming back, Belldandy? Can't you call Yggdrasil or something?"

"I could, if we went to a payphone. The lines are down, probably because of Skuld's animals. And poor Banpei...they've swarmed him all day," his girlfriend responded.

"How could they knock out the _phone lines_?" Keiichi asked, his face taunt with incredulity. This was beginning to feel like the last seveal years in 14th century Kyushu; watching the inevitable destruction of everything he had worked so hard on.

"Well, you know how much cats and monkeys like to climb..."

Keiichi bit his lip to keep from darting her a glare, while absurd images of stuffed animals setting electrical outwiring and phone junction boxes on fire as they burned up on the power lines filled his thoughts

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Hey Cevn! They're back!" Belldandy shouted in my bedroom door.

Already?

"This must be a first," I muttered, surprised at the timeliness of the Goddesses' return. Despite the fact that it was Dec 30th, and the animals had been on the loose for two days. They were already starting to snarl traffic...as they had spread all over Japan. The international news reported sightings in every country in the world. Despite Dr. Nishihara's statements, the stuffed animals were inflammable.

Indestructible.

I breathed a moment's gratitude for the return of the Goddesses as I turned down the hallway, Belldandy excitedly gesturing for us to go to Skuld Labs.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Peorth and Urd looked like they were going to morph into laughing raccoons at a moment's notice. Skuld was even struggling to avoid bursting into giggles.

Their lightheartedness caught Keiichi off-guard, which immediately put him _on guard_. In the 14th century, laughter was often used to guise murderous intentions. It was just instinctual for him to be wary when he heard laughter. Female laughter especially evoked dissuasive reactions, as several of the provincial lords routinely employed female assassins posing as pleasure-quarter girls.

"How can I fight my very instincts?" he asked himself for the hundredth time since he had been returned to modern 20XX Japan.

In his mind, the reaction of the three Goddesses to this situation was totally ludicrous. This wasn't akin to a life-or-death scenario created by Mara...this was as bad as the Ultimate Destruction Program debacle three years ago! And it wasn't some Goddess problem that the Ultimate Force intended, with inscrutable blind logic, to humiliate only _him_. At times, it was clear that he was the target; as in the time his and Belldandy's hands were stuck together as if by glue...because he had wished that "he never wanted to let her go."

"Well, Bell _was_ kinda drunk at the time," he remembered. But this 'stuffed animal crisis' was gravely serious...the welfare of the entire planet was hanging in the pinch.

"And here are the three Goddesses who were sent on a delegation to Yggdrasil to find a solution to this chaos...and they're on the edge of hysterical laughter as soon as they return," he mentally scowled. Especially Urd, who had that mocking, condescending yet capricious glimmer in her eyes...

"How can you three _this_ is funny!" he shouted, using his forearm to snappily deflect a half-tiger/half-hippo that kept leaping at his face with feral purposelessness. His exclamation of dismay tipped the iceberg over, casting waves of laughter.

_"Hahah aha ha ha hee hah hee..."_

"It's _not_ funny! This stupid thing doesn't even know why it's doing what its doing, trying to bite me in the face!"

_"Heehhaa hah hah he..."_

"STOP IT ALREADY!" Keiichi screamed, his nerves as frayed as a violoncello bow after an Ives symphony.

_"Ha hahahaha ha huu ha hooo..."_

Peorth, Urd and Skuld were completely dissolved into whipped cream levity by some seemingly private jest. This rankled Keiichi even more, as he had often been the laughingstock of Skuld and Urd more than a few times...especially the hazard of Urd and her 'pranks'.

"What'd I do?" he groaned in exasperation.

_"Heeyah haha ha heeha ha ha..."_

Finally, Belldandy tried to rein in the giggling Goddesses.

"You three...quit ignoring Keiichi! You're _Goddesses_...so start behaving as such! This is a very important matter! Just think how Kami-sama would feel if He saw you acting this way! The safety of the entire Earthrealm is at stake! Not to mention Keiichi's fragile self-esteem. He can get upset so easily...you _know_ how sensitive my dear Keiichi becomes when he assumes that people are laughing at him. Even more so now that he's returned from the past with such a strong sense of self-importance from serving in that..." Belldandy realized once more that she had said _too_ much, as her intervention was rewarded by another flurry of sidesplitting laughter. She shrugged her shoulders and looked at Keiichi with an apologetic face.

"Thanks, Bell," Keiichi muttered irritably, barely audible. Bell's face deepened into the rouge zone.

Finally, Tomohisa whistled loudly, then started picking up stuffed animals and throwing them at the three Goddesses. Fast and hard, like pitched baseballs. His years of expertise in archery was paying off...every throw connected.

For some strange reason, the brunt of his aim was directed against Skuld...

"Cool it! Just chill out!" he shouted. His hotflash ire seemed to bring Skuld to her senses and she choked away any further laughter. The joke was unavoidable at this point anyway. Their ranks diminished by one, Peorth and Urd's hooting laughter gradually mellowed.

After a couple moments' pause to catch their breath, Urd and Peorth excitedly disclosed that they had indeed found a solution to the problem. And it didn't involve nuking Tokyo or killing all of Skuld's stuffed animals. Skuld noted adamantly that this was _not_ an option, at least the part about her stuffed animals.

"So what do we do?" Keiichi asked, clearly relieved that they had promptly found a resolution. His question ignited another round of laughter from the Goddesses. Except for Skuld, who almost appeared embarrassed.

"A..all you have to do, all three..heehee..of you guys, is to..hahahah..walk once around the Imperial Palace...in...get this!..in bunny outfits! That's it! That's a..huh haha hee...that's all you hahahave to do," Urd said, then dissolved into howling laughter so intense that it brought tears to her squinched eyes.

Cevn looked at Urd with a nonplussed expression; he was not amused with her idea of a prank. Especially now, after the Christmas debacle and her last drinking boost.

"Okay, I understand that this is a totally corny situation we have here with these stuffed...things. But really, you three went to seek some answers. Are you going to tell us how we are going to get rid of them..._before_ they get rid of us?" he asked.

Keiichi watched as Peorth floated over to Cevn and ran her hand under his jaw in a sensuous mock-soothing manner, just like she used to do to him when she first visited. He knew that, even after 13 years in Ashikaga Japan, his gaijin friend was _still_ afraid of the closeness of women. As expected, Cevn recoiled and cringed with fear. And as usual, Keiichi could tell that Urd was privately amused by his boyish reaction. He found himself wondering if Cevn's impending breakup with Urd was more clear-headed and sensible than he had previous suspected.

"You guys...Urd _wasn't_ kidding! I promise I'll try and get through this...hee hee...without laughing too much. We inputted the parameters of the wish-request, extraploating any malfunctions that occurred because of the misdirection of the confirmation and activation signal. We then we queried the Yggdrasil Mainframe to formulate how the wish activation was modified by Urd's alchemical efforts. This was the solution it generated. Of course, we replicated the data input paramenters and ran the sim several times to confirm it. And it was hard to do, because each time the Ygg Mainframe gave us the same answer, we...heehee...ended up laughing even harder. So here it is: all the men present in the house at the time of the wish...have to parade once around the Imperial Palace in bunny suits," Peorth confirmed.

"_What_ kind of bunny outfits?" Keiichi asked, deadpan serious.

"You know, le bonne femme de nu club hostess type, of course!" Peorth said. With a vivid bright rose-hued flash, she reappeared in a pink faux-Playboy bunny suit. Keiichi felt all the blood drain out of his face as his imagination drowned in a sea of wordless embarrassment.

"WHATNOWAYUNNHHUNHNEVERNOWAY!!"

Belldandy stared crossly at Urd and Peorth, her face vigorously projecting "if you laugh once more, I'll snap on you." Urd sucked in a deep breath and struggled to maintain her composure as the three male voices pierced the very air with exclamations of dismay.

"Let me try to clarify the sequence of events that caused this mishap. Cevn caused a beaker of partially completed memory-purging formula to crash into my sink a week ago," Urd started to explain. Keiichi watched Cevn's face fill with disbelief while Urd continued; his friend clearly didn't have a clue about the incident she was describing.

"Then, while Peorth was granting Banpei-kun's wish, the gravity distortion caused another accident with the Lustmuster potion I was mixing. The resulting explosion from the synergism of the two arcane formulas created a gas that somehow infected the animals at the point of their being animated. So now they are..hee hee...lust-driven amnesiacs. Which proves that I _did_ mix up the batch of Lustmuster correctly!" Urd finished proudly.

"Well, isn't _that_ just peachy keen to know, Big Sister," Skuld interjected sarcastically, then continued upon Urd's explanation. The technical part.

"Yggdrasil Mainframe reported that the original wish as it was filed was granted. The fulfillment conditions strictly authorized that only five stuffed animals at a time were to be animated. They would be available whenever my Banpei-kun wanted to have extra companionship. Since Peorth attempted to grant a wish that was far beyond her technical abilities, the wish got screwed up. Urd's magical chemistry poisons...er, I mean potions...complicated it even more," Skuld explained, satisfied with the grimace on Urd's face in response to her deliberate homophonic taunt.

"Ah...I think I understand now!" Belldandy said with a flash of insight. "Because this mishap involved all the _Goddesses_ in the house at the time...it's now up to the _men_ to offset it. By masquerading as females, their gender embarrassment factor will increase to the point where the Lustmuster 'infection' of the stuffed animals will be eliminated."

Urd and Peorth nodded, amused that Belldandy actually thought she had cleverly discovered a new facet to this situation.

"Don't ask me how...this is just the solution Yggdrasil outputted when we fed it the hard data," Skuld said in an attempt to soften the blow. With a dramatic flair, Peorth waved her hands and three pink boxes appeared on the tatami.

"And we brought just the very thing for you guys! Here...the best bunny outfits we could find in Yggdrasil. For you boys to wear!" Peorth added, her eyes sparkling with feigned good cheer. Knowing that she was faced with a potential license suspension, this was the only thing that could keep her cheerful.

Keiichi knew that the Goddesses were eating this up. Even Belldandy had a slyly mirthful smile on her lips.

"Yggdrasil is many things, but if they have bunny suits up there...does that imply that they have divine hostess bars too?" someone asked.

Keiichi wondered off into a tangent, his head swimming in a pool of pitch-black discomfort.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

It turned out that the bunny suits were not at all what they seemed.

They were highly sophisticated devices. The bunny ears had built in transmitters that served as broadcast antennae. Concealed in the little white bunny tails were 'embarrassment collectors'. The little black bowties covered very powerful microamplifiers. I sensed that Skuld had a major hand in this...

The bunny suits were _everything_ that they seemed. Disgustingly, flamboyantly, oppressively so. The stereotypical Tokyo Ginza strip hostess bar bunny suit...complete with black fishnet stockings, a bustier, a strap-on bowtie and collar, perched ears, and shiny black pumps. I was staring morosely at it as it lay in a corner of my bedroom in its pink box.

It was the enemy.

"I am _not_ a transvestite or a pervert," my mind repeated in a mantra intended to fend off the extreme embarrassment that I knew was forthcoming. I could tell by Keiichi and Tomohisa's astonished expressions that they didn't groove on this idea at all. I had almost asked the Goddesses to go back to Yggdrasil to try and find another solution...but my 'metallect' informed me that this was the only way. Besides, time was of the essence.

There was no choice.

"Fuck it!! Love all, serve all," I grumbled as I fumbled to get one of my legs into the fishnet hosiery. I was going much further than any Hard Rock Cafe employee sloganeer had ever gone. Embarrassing myself to near-death to save the planet.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"T..this is kinda funny, I guess," Tomohisa said with a chuckle after the feminine peals of laughter finally died down. Even the well-behaved Belldandy had broken into undignified hysterics when she saw her beloved Keiichi dressed up in his bunny outfit. She kept pinching his cotton tail...and anything else nearby. This brought the house down with laughter, edging Keiichi into a realm of squirmish embarrassment punctuated with flashes of anger towards his girlfriend, who was milking the situation for every drop of amusement she could get away with.

Even Skuld thought it was hilarious that Belldandy was so forthright with her examination of Keiichi. In her mind, this kind of touching wasn't sexual per se. It was soooo fun! Pure, enjoyable, delectable...'Keiichi humiliation'! Deciding that this will probably be the only time she'll ever get to see him dressed like this, Skuld pinched Keiichi's tail too; her hand barely dodging his swats after the fourth time.

"I'm _really_ glad that I didn't have to wear one of those," Skuld said with deep relief. For some unknown reason, this comment drew a glare from Tomohisa. On impulse, Skuld decided to pinch _his_ tail...

"No way. Ohhh, no you _don't_!" Tomohisa shouted as Skuld chased him around the living room. She eventually grabbed his cottony tail as he tripped over the couch he tried to hurdle...causing Skuld to collide with him and crash into the floor. Keiichi was both amazed and disgusted at this display of clumsiness. Tomohisa was one of Lord Mori's most skilled warriors; but after a couple weeks back among the moderns of 20XX Japan, he was tripping over his own feet. Then he remembered that running in high-heel pumps wasn't exactly covered in the warrior tradition; so it really wasn't Tomohisa's fault. It was the 21st Century's fault...and Skuld's!

Keiichi felt even more morose.

"Skuld, I didn't realize you knew how to wrestle mortal teenagers," Urd taunted. Both Skuld and Tomohisa turned cherry red, and then Skuld leapt back to her feet like a lightning strike.

Urd was hovering over Cevn while she flicked his bunny 'ears'. Seeing Skuld and Belldandy, she decided to pinch his tail while making all sorts of comments about his 'cute' appearance. Cevn looked like he was almost ready to bolt out of the room, then finally he turned on Urd and gave her a civil tonguelashing.

Keiichi felt a little less morose; Cevn's verbal blasting of Urd was almost an exact duplicate of how he used to chew out his top students at Lord Mori's "academy" where he taught fine arts in Oita. Urd was rendered speechless by his commanding confrontation and censuring admonitions. Maybe they would retain their hard-earned skills from the 14th century after all.

"Serves you right, Big Sister!" Skuld said with a malicious grin after it was all over. To her shock, Urd was thoroughly cowed by Cevn. She thought this was a great payback for Urd's snide remark...she liked it when her sister got confronted by her mortal boyfriend. The more people that could keep Urd in line, the merrier Skuld's life would be.

"Okay. Enough playing with your 'boy toys', you three Norns!" Peorth announced loudly, causing a half dozen blushes...then glares. She thrilled secretly to the fact that she had tongue-tied everyone in the house with the thorn-like sting of her wit.

"Belldandy will transport you to the Imperial Palace at noon. We want you to be there when there are the most people around to observe. That way, you'll all get good and embarrassed. She'll drop you in Budokan Hall, through the men's room mirrors. Then you walk south past the Hirakawamon Gate, then west past the Otemon, then circle back up north to the Sakuradamon Gate. After this, you just walk up Uchibori St. until you reach the Budokan. Then you have to go back inside the grounds through the Hirakawamon Gate..." Peorth directed.

"I thought you said we just had to circle the Imperial Palace _once_! Isn't it kinda cold to be outdoors dressed like _this_?" Keiichi anguished, disappointment written all over his face. He was well versed in sufferance of hostile weather elements...they had evacuated Oita to avoid capture by Imagawa's approaching troops...in November. An unseasonable strong snowstorm and cold front had caught them in the mountains...

Peorth's voice jarred him back to reality. _This_ reality.

"Once outside, then once inside. A complete circle. Anyway, once inside the Palace walls, you start at the East Garden and walk along the jogging course, including Kitanomaru Park. A single lap will bring you back to the gate. Then you turn back north to the Budokan. There's an ice-sculpted rosette there, right in front of the arena. Stand by it, and I'll transport you back home," Peorth finished.

"This...is going to be an absolute nightmare," Cevn said. Both Keiichi and Tomohisa nodded their heads.

"This really _sucks_!" Tomohisa declared.

Urd felt a slight glimmer sympathy for them as she surveyed their miserable faces. Cevn was looking at the ground, his face pinched up with mopery. Urd had wanted to see him thoroughly humiliated after the Christmas sans her ring...but now that this was happening, she felt artlessly reserved, rather than triumphant. Part of her was caught up in the sillysally adventure of it all, relishing in his comeuppance.

Yet another part of her felt admiration for all three men...undergoing this trial to save the Earthrealm. And yet one more field of emotion sprouted disappointment, because their humiliation wasn't the result of her _own_ initiative. Yes...each of the three men was sacrificing his masculinity. And Urd _knew_ how mortal men worried about their male self-images. Over a few thousand years, she had observed frequent occurrences of the males of the species going to war over loss of 'face'.

"Are you ready, Keiichi?" Belldandy asked. She was filled with respect for her beloved. She held both of his hands in hers and leaning forward, kissing him for good luck. Anything to wither away just a little of his fear. She really wanted to ask him if he was okay, but the dour look on his face made it clear how he felt about this costumed unsavoriness.

Keiichi sensed a moment's flush of hesitation in returning Bell's kiss. After all, he _was_ dressed obscenely in some gaudy bunnygirl outfit. He blushed, wondering once again how women could wear something like this. But he looked into her azure crystal eyes and felt becalmed. He would do anything for this Goddess. Once more, he was trying to save the world...and she would love him through it.

"Ohh, Keiichi, it'll be okay. Besides, you look so _cuuuute_ in your bunny-wunny suit," Peorth commented with milksour sweetness. "Tres panache!"

"Let's go," he said with a grim set to his voice, "...before I end up losing the last remaining sliver of my dignity."

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

The air was bracing, even indoors. At least it wasn't superfrigid, as the late December pool of Siberian winds from the northwest had abated for a few days. The first thing I noticed was the stares as we popped into the men's room at the Budokan. Despite the infestation of stuffed animals, we were still considered _strange_.

As we exited the restroom, deliberately avoiding looking into the mirrors, I caught a glimpse of the preparations for a concert by Yes. Which I had planned to go to with Urd. But now, these plans were ruined. I was amazed that they were still planning to go ahead with the concert despite the animal epidemic.

It was then that I realized that we were probably going to be filmed. The astonished looks on the faces of the men in the restroom were just a prelude of coming distractions...

Sure enough, by the time we had emerged from the octagon-shaped performance hall, we were caught on video by a group of French tourists. Their laughing jeers painted my mood darkling.

We walked along the perimeter of the Imperial Palace, drawing stares as we went. To try and keep my mind occupied, I recounted the historical incidents attached to the locale. Granted, back when we were living in the 14th century, there was no Imperial Palace in Edo. But this site had seen so much history. As we passed the Sakuradamon Gate, I could almost hear in my mind the angry shouts of the Mito clan's assassins as they ambushed and cut down Ii Naosuke, the Chief Minister to the Shogun. A desperate rouge group of men who aspired to topple the Shogunate killed him right here in 1860. To the Japanese, this event possessed a context and place in their cultural history akin to that of Boothe's assassination of Lincoln.

Snowdrifts piled themselves jaggedly along the walkways. The elder poets chronicled winter as the thief of life; its snow blanketing the rainbow of colors to create a cast-metal liquicloud that concealed the organic fabric of Life. But looking at the ice-covered cherry blossom trees through the gate, I felt that winter was a preserver...a renewer of life. Guised by lifelessness, it served as a sort of natural laundry machine, creating a blue-white crystalline pureness from which new life would abound. After all, billions of years before the primeval organic soup, there was the meganova flash of the Big Bang. From black and white was forged _all of this_...

The various plazas within the Imperial Palace grounds were filled with visual delights, even while gripped in the vigor of algidity. The pedestrian-only walkways offered glimpses of the Imperial grounds proper. I cast a mental note to myself to come visit again in the spring.

As we rounded up north, I noticed a distinct change in masonry along the battlements, turrets and walls. The Norzura style walls of uncut quarry stones was replaced by the more regular Uchikomi style of rounded brick-like stones. I looked over at Keiichi and Tomohisa, the friends who were sharing the silence of this torturous trek. They were bearing up well.

We had been gripped by the mummery of our embarrassment since we left the Budokan Hall; a manifesting of our doleful state. To our credit, we hadn't attacked any of the clueless people who mockingly taunted us. Well actually, they _were_ clued in to the fact that men walking around in bunny suits was a bit strange, I reminded myself. In the 14th century, any one of us could have broken their necks in an instant...or worse. Our motives would have been completely defensible to Lord Mori. Between ourselves, avenging a besmirch of honor was simply a given.

We continued on our 'long march'.

"You guys...since we're dressed in such an outrageous fashion, shouldn't we _act outrageously_ as well?" Keiichi abruptly interrupted our silence, suggesting that we take advantage of the moment.

"Huh?"

"I mean that we should act with a complete abandon of decorum. It beats walking around in an embarrassed sulk. Why not make light of it...and have some major _fun_!" he elaborated.

This didn't even occur to me; I had been so focused on the Sturm und Drang melodrama aspect of this humiliation that I couldn't see any other way to endure our trials. His idea was attractive in the same way that nooks and crannies draw upon a cat's exploratory instincts. In other words, Keiichi was saying that we should be totally silly, act completely asinine...and trust our instincts.

"This is already disgusting, so why not act like true maniacs? Maybe that'll make it feel less perverted!" Tomohisa echoed. So I started singing the theme from "Private Actress", a late 90s Japanese TV drama that I had seen in China. Part comedy, part detective story, it centered on a young girl who was the secret daughter of a famous actress. She would be hired as a 'stand in', depending on her acting skill to impersonate people in real life. Her efforts to try and influence situations often produced comedic and unpredictable results. The Chinese students in BeiDa had loved it.

Keiichi and Tomohisa looked at me with funny expressions. They told me that they thought "Private Actress" was just another TBS soap-operaish slapdash.

"Ah, I see. Soooo, how come you both know the song?" I asked, watching their faces quiver with embarrassment.

"Okay...okay. We're off to see the wizard..." Keiichi replied. We started singing "Off to See the Wizard", just like we did on the road to Oita all those centuries ago. Next, we decided to offer a little bit of street vaudeville, playing three gay men caught in a love triangle. Soon, we had a crowd following us from a discreet distance, snapping pictures and laughing at our hijinks. My knowledge of Japanese rakugo, Three Stooges, and Beijing slapstick was coming in handy, for once in my life.

What was totally weird about this...was the fact that the stuffed animals were on every continent in the globe, and the tourists were acting like nothing was awry as we goofed around.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"This isn't working! They're supposed to be _embarrassed_!! Instead, they're having fun...clowning around like idiots!" Urd said punchily. Four Goddesses were huddled in the shambles of Skuld's lab, watching the three bunnymen on a video monitor that Skuld jury-rigged to hang from the ceiling, because the floor was almost 2 meters deep with writhing stuffed animals. The cottonish fauna seemed to gravitate to Skuld's room for some reason.

"Well, of course they are, Urd. This is happening because of the resiliency of the human spirit," Belldandy observed. "Rather than being downcast, my Keiichi has found a way to cheer their spirits. Look how much fun they're having! Mortals never relinquish their enjoyment of life, you know."

"Yes, but it isn't going to help our cause any," Peorth said worriedly. "If they end up making this into some kind of entertainment for themselves, the 'embarrassment collectors' won't accumulate a fraction of the needed energy!

"And then...fin de monde mortale!"

"Hmmm...what can we do from here to make this more embarrassing?" Urd asked with a devious grin on her face. Belldandy looked at her older sister, alarmed with the frankness of her request.

"I'm on it! Skuld Dynamic Embarrassment Contingency Plan A-1!" Skuld said as she floated out of the room.

Her younger sister's enthusiasm worried Belldandy even more.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Tomohisa examined the expansive grounds of the Imperial Palace, calculating how much manpower was employed to build its battlements and grounds. Lord Mori and Shimazu's castles required the labors of hundreds of conscripts; yet their fortifications were only a _fraction _of the size of the Imperial Palace. It was _huge_.

In the 14th century, Lords Mori's castle was the hub of Bungo province. In much the same manner, the Imperial Palace was the hub of all Japan. Tomohisa felt a renewed sense of reverence for the national icon, an appreciation that was absent before he traveled back in time. All the years of being a loyal retainer had imbued him with a deep sense of affinity for what it was to be Japanese.

Even in his present attire.

"After all, I'm saving humanity. This is my task today...a task that I'm honored to fulfill. Not bad for a first year high school student!" he cheerily said to himself, drawing knowing smiles from Keiichi and Cevn who overheard him.

The walkway around the moats and Kitanomaru Park covered about six kilometers. Even now, midday joggers were running about, zigzagging around stuffed animals; only briefly turning their heads to glimpse the three men in bunny suits.

Being in high school was worse than this ordeal in some ways, Tomohisa reasoned. This would only last a few hours. But high school would run for another three years. Tomohisa knew that in terms of maturity, he was _older_ than Takimasu-sensei, his homeroom teacher. She was only 26. His classmates were _so_ facile. It drove him crazy to see how undisciplined they were according to the standards he was accustomed to.

Furibiki High School was a model high school, complete with prestigious academic credentials and a host of graduates annually placed into the 'better' universities. Yet, it was nothing compared to the samurai training he undertook. Lord Mori had basically treated him as a foster son. Cevn-sensei had found a manuscript copy of an old book called the Tsurezuregusa by a priest named Kenko; Tomohisa ended up having to memorize numerous passages from this book and other classics. Genji bouted with him numerous times with spear, sword, fan and ax. Keiichi had spent hours discussing military generalship with him, drawing upon the Chinese and Japanese master strategists. Lord Mori's archery instructors had hailed him as the best archer they had trained in generations. Compared to the standards he had to face in the 14th century, 21st century high school was a breeze.

He was amused by the notion that he, Keiichi and Cevn were linked by a common mission...like the three heroes of the "Three Kingdoms" saga. Although they hadn't taken a 'peach tree oath', they were out to achieve something noble, at any expense of self-sacrifice. Imported over from China by some Buddhist missionaries, the folktales of the Han Dynasty heroes were the talk of the court in 1377-8.

He returned to the present as he glimpsed the Budokan arena off in the distance. It was getting cold, as the sun was increasingly covered by gray late afternoon clouds.

"This is the home stretch," Tomohisa thought thankfully. There was a throng ahead as they approached the ice sculptures, he noted.

"What now?" he wondered.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"YOU WHAT!" Belldandy shouted at Skuld. The waifish Goddess sat cross-legged on a pillow above a heap of stuffed animals, looking at her older sister with a smug self-satisfied smile of defiance.

"Why Skuld, I didn't know you had it in you! They'll _really_ be humiliated! My little baby sister... Wow! She's taking after me, sure enough! Even_ I_ would be hard pressed to come up with something so devious. So ruthless!" Urd pronounced proudly, patting Skuld excitedly on the head from her floating position.

All Belldandy could do was glare at her two sisters. Skuld responded with by flashing her tongue and eye at Belldandy.

_"Biiii-DA!"_

"This is going to be really interesting!" Peorth whispered to herself with glee. Skuld's plan would really cause the three mortals to be totally wracked with mortification. On the monitor, a crowd converged on the three mortal men in their bunny suits...

A few moments later, without so much as a "_pop!_" all the stuffed animals disappeared from sight, leaving Skuld's original set of fifty-or-so toys scattered around the temple home.

"This is coming out of _your_ allowance, Skuld!" Belldandy said threateningly, referring to the damages in the house.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

This is a_ nightmare_!" Keiichi thought as he saw the NHK camera crew approaching them. Some news reporter was pushing a microphone in his face, asking about his opinions concerning the rights of transvestites to dress up in drag in public.

"Mr. Morisato, isn't this too brave of a statement about the need for Japan to reexamine the societal constraints upon transvestites like yourself?" the reporter asked.

"They know my _name_!" Keiichi thought in shock, too stunned to make heads or tails of things. Another interviewer was asking Cevn if it was appropriate for a faculty member of a technical institute to be parading in public in a bunny outfit.

Keiichi felt like he was going to pass out; his head was as light as windborne snow...

Then the police swooped in and arrested Tomohisa, Cevn and him.

On camera.

"You are under arrest for shoplifting!" the Tokyo police officer explained as he handcuffed them. Keiichi fought back an instinctual urge to resist being taken into custody. The policemen looked uncertain as they escorted he and his friends to a waiting van.

He cast a sidelong glance at Cevn and Tomohisa...a single nod from either of them and they would have taken out all 11 policeman within a minute. Just like they had done when those brigands surprised them on their return trip to Oita in 1379. Back then, Genji was among their number. Back then, there were 57 men for the four of them to fight. That was how Keiichi had gotten the long slashing scar from his shoulderblade to his hip, because one of the curs had tried to cut him down from behind. Genji quickly beheaded the scoundrel, but the only way to seal the wound was with course hempen thread and medicinal herbs. As they were on the road, proper medical care wasn't possible, so Keiichi recuperated at an inn along with his three comrades-in-arms. His scar suitably impressed Lord Mori and the rest of the inner circle.

The vicious scar had disappeared, but the memory of the pain remained.

"On what charges?" Cevn demanded, sensing a repeat of his misadventure in Beijing. He _knew_ that he hadn't shoplifted anything for years...it just wasn't a part of his personal recovery program. And a crime punishable by death, if the thief was ranked among Lord Mori's personal retainers.

"You're wearing the evidence! You stole those outfits that you're wearing. A shopowner named Skurudo Hayasaki tipped us off," he said as he reached behind the bustier Cevn was wearing and tore off the owner's tag. "See here! This is the owner's rental tag!"

Sure enough, it read: _Skurudo Hayasaki Rentals__._

"Sku..ru..do. Ha..ya..saki. Is gonna pay _dearly_ for this!" Keiichi growled lividly.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

The funniest thing happened at the Tokyo Police Station, Kanda Branch. The police captain was still trying to explain it to the Chief over the phone; the station staff standing in a semicircle around him with expressions of concern. They or their boss could lose their jobs for this! They _still_ couldn't believe what happened, despite the fact that they were direct eyewitnesses!

_"Yessir! We brought in these three guys dressed as women, based on the shop owner's phone call. Funny, how she knew just where they were. And her personal name...Skurudo. How unusual! It certainly isn't Japanese._

(Phonecall blah blah blah)

_"Yeah, the men were -_really-_ hentai! True perverts...dressed in these black bunny outfits you see the hostesses wear! You don't say, sir? Don't worry, I didn't tell anyone about our last little staff party, sir!"_

A number of the junior police officers snickered knowingly.

_"Yessir! Once they were here, we started the standard booking process. We lined the first one of them up for a mugshot, and 'poof!'...he simply disappeared! It almost looked like he was sucked _-into the camera-_! _

(Phonecall blah blah blah)

_"Yessir! I know it sounds unbelievable. But it happened with the other two as well. One was a gaijin, the other was a kid, probably 16 or 17. Yessir, I agree that TV is a bad influence on kids. They should have never filmed that arrest! Yes, we'll arrest some drunks and suit 'em up in bunny suits, so if any reporters come snooping around, we can show 'em some perverts._

(Phonecall blah blah blah)

_"Oh, we'll definitely take care of that, sir! Not a word to the newspapers! I know that it makes us look bad, but what can we do? After the three bunnymen disappeared, we couldn't find any records of the original complaint. The station video camera went snafu the moment we brought them in, sir. First time in years. And there are –_no-_ arrest records to be found! It's not even logged on the computer system either, sir! _

(Phonecall blah blah blah)

_"Yes, it is funny how all those stuffed animals disappeared. I wonder if there is a connection? You don't say, sir! The only explanation I have is that we just experienced an X-File Incident. Yes, I'll make the call to the Self Defense Forces. But there's nothing more I can do on this end._

(Phonecall blah blah blah)

_"Thanks sir. By the way, have a good golf game on the rooftop this evening."_

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"WHERE IS SHE!" Keiichi shouted, a murderous look in his eyes. Belldandy kept shifting in front of him, trying to bodyblock him away from Skuld.

"K..Keiichi-san. Look! You succeeded...a..all the animals are gone! I..isn't that wonderful?" she said innocently, trying to disarm her boyfriend's anger.

"Where is the little _brat_!" Tomohisa yelled. He spied Skuld standing behind her sister, almost using Belldandy as a shield. She seemed to flinch rhythmically while called her "spoiled brat, little girl, rotten kid, irritating urchin, troublesome imp, immature little know-it-all, pre-adolescent scoundrel, good-for-nothing idiot, selfish curmudgeon, pampered little Goddess princess." With a few shouts of 'Baka!' thrown in for good measure.

He stopped just short of using expletives.

"I can't believe she did that to us! She _framed_ us to the media and the police!" Cevn shouted in exasperation.

"Hey, lay off the little one! She meant well. If you guys hadn't decided that this walk in the park should be a comedic tour de farce, there wouldn't have been any problems!" Peorth shouted above the fray.

"Yeah...but _whose_ fault was this in the first place, Peorth?" Keiichi retorted. Peorth felt herself cringe at his sharp words.

Skuld stepped out from behind her older sisters and aggressively postured towards Keiichi, hands on hips. Keiichi looked at her and noticed that, despite her girlish form, there was that ancient essence in her eyes that bespoke of Yggdrasilian wisdom.

"I did it for duty...and humanity," Skuld stated, filled with aplomb. To her, this was all the justification that was needed. The authority of dire necessity should abrogate any qualms the guys had. The mortals had gone astray again, and it was up to _her_ to resolve the problem. So she put a damper on their fun...with a clamp of embarrassment.

Keiichi wanted to bend her over his knee and spank her!

Belldandy quickly seized the moment and explicated why Skuld acted as she did, which seemed to calm Keiichi's dander. Despite her disavowal of Skuld's methods, it was clear to the Norn of the Present that Skuld had acted for the best good. And she wasn't going to let Keiichi act viciously towards her little sister, no matter what!

All three mortal men scowled angrily, knowing that they were outclassed and outpowered by the Goddesses.

Revenge would have to wait until another day...

And this is how Banpei and mini-Banpei made friends with Skuld's stuffed animals.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Keiichi was lying in bed, feeling morose. He was worried about the camera crews, the police station, and most of all how his Belldandy would see view him in light of today's incidents.

He was swarmed by feelings of inadequacy and shame, daring him to regain his masculinity. Being small of stature for most of his life was one thing that he couldn't change, but having to wear women's clothes... As a man, he was feeling very hang-headed. Bell-chan was sitting on the futon next to him in her pajamas, knees curled up to her chest.

Neither of them wanted to say a word. He had become ragefully resentful at Skuld. She had become irontough protective of Skuld.

Therein lay the clash of their emotions.

"What is she thinking?" he wondered. He opened his mouth to speak when she turned to him.

"My dear Keiichi, you were so brave today. For someone to willingly risk their dignity like you did...well, it just seems so _chivalric_ to me!" she said with a beaming smile. This was exactly what Keiichi needed to hear...and what he least expected to hear.

"Belldandy...thanks. I'm just feeling weird ever since I had to wear those stupid bunnygirl outfits. In fact, most of these clothes that I'm wearing make me feel so...lamed. I'm used to a whole different set of clothes. Back then, the clothes _really_ made the man. Now, I don't even feel comfortable in my shorts!"

"I understand completely, my love. I was just thinking of a way to help you regain your manhood..." She waved her hands over her head. Keiichi flinched as a flash of light filled his bedroom. When his eyes readjusted, he saw her anew.

She was dressed in a light blue bunny outfit that matched her eyes.

"Keiichi, I just thought...that since you've been such a courageous boyfriend...that I'd show you how a bunny suit should _really_ look like, when worn properly," she said matter-of-factly, seemingly naive to the intense effect she was having on him.

"I'm your bunny tonight.."

Keiichi looked at her with hot embarrassed lust. Belldandy definitely didn't look like a hostess girl...but yet he felt a truckload of reservations as he beheld her dressed as one. His mind flashed briefly on the possibility that she was making fun of him. But her eyes were complete in their sincerity; he could almost see the regret she must have felt while he endured this punishing trial-by-humiliation.

"This is something better left for the fetishists," he thought. Yet...her auburn hair was delicately swept back beneath the light blue bunny ears...the small white fluff of cotton kept drawing his attention downwards.

"Geez, I didn't know that these outfits were so...tight, Keiichi-san. I'm sure that you can help me...wiggle my tail...out of this predicament, huh?" she said provocatively.

"Bell...dan...dy," he gasped. Once more, she had surprised him with an outrageous whim-wham. Keiichi had to admit the Bell looked _totally_ awesome dressed as a bunny...and that he was going to share absolute bliss with her once she was no longer bunnyfied.

"Oooo, Keiichi! I see _you_ aren't wasting any time regaining your manhood..."

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

There was a certain work ethic enjoined in the temple household as the residents cleaned everything in sight.

While in 2050 Japan, Megumi had spent just a couple weeks with Abbess Sora and Abbess Chihiro. But she felt like she had learned_ years_ worth of wisdom in the company of the elderly nuns.

Every morning, Abbess Sora would spend an hour washing the sandals of the new novices. When Megumi asked her what she was doing, she replied "Cleaning, cleaning, clean"...and nothing more. Initially irritated by Abbess Sora's tenuous and evasive answer, Megumi watched her at work. Over the course of a week, Abbess Sora cleaned hundreds of sandals. Megumi was even more mystified when Abbess Chihiro emerged from one of the bathrooms every morning with a mopbucket. These two women were the leaders of an organization of nuns that numbered over 10,000, whose spiritual insights had been disseminated worldwide. They were _famous_ personages in the Buddhist world...she remembered her stunned reaction when Abbess Chihiro offhandedly noted that one of her books had been translated into _sixty_ languages! And now she was cleaning the bathrooms!

So one day, she and Sayoko volunteered to accompany the two Abbesses on their chores. Neither NIT coed was allowed to speak; Chihiro had actually whacked Megumi with the mop handle when she asked a question.

"Cleaning, cleaning, clean" had become a riddle.

A few days before they were whisked back to 20XX, the two Abbesses came in and cleaned the guest quarters where she and Sayoko were rooming. The two spiritual leaders spent _three hours_ cleaning the floors, walls...even the ceiling rafters. Megumi thought they were overdoing it, until she noticed that Abbess Sora and Abbess Chihiro looked _relaxed and peaceful_ during the whole cleaning process! No huffing and puffing, no cursing, no struggling to reach a corner with a damp rag. It was as if they were meditating in motion.

After they were finished, the two Abbesses lectured Megumi and Sayoko on the principle of cleanliness. They readily admitted that they could have cleaned the guest room inside of an hour. But it wouldn't have been _clean_. It would only have _appeared_ clean; the real cleaning is the polishing of the soul. Abbess Sora and Abbess Chihiro both admitted that they had looked forward to this room cleaning for days...it was one of the highlights of their week.

When Megumi asked why, she expected some Voltairesque justification of the importance of physical work. Instead, she was given a lesson in loving service.

"All service is loving service. In a convent such as ours, the most important step to enlightenment begins and ends with cleaning the floors. In cleaning, the purity of the Truth is most clear...is most clean."

Much of her experience in 2050 had troubled Megumi since she returned. To be sure, her adjustment wasn't even a tenth as difficult as that with which the men were facing...but the difficulty for her lay not in the length of time, but in the depth of time.

Abbess Sora and Abbess Chihiro had challenged the very roots of her spirit. It was as if something had been awakened in her. Megumi had heard and seen Cevn meditating many times. He had suggested several times that she should sit for meditation, in order to gain perspective on her life. Of course, he suggested that to everybody.

After spending time with the two Abbesses, Megumi finally understood that she would remained trapped in the passions of life...until she did something different, something that would break the routine of exercise, school, homelife, and Genji. To her surprise, she found herself sitting alone one morning soon after she woke up, trying to practice the simple meditation the two Abbesses had taught her. When she phoned Sayoko that day...Sayoko being the only other person who could possibly understand what she was going through...she found out that Sayoko had also sat for meditation that same morning.

Megumi started to sense the importance of the moment. It had allowed her to reach deep within herself to remain patient with Genji. Genji was _changed_...his whole masculinity had been altered to a different mold. He was no longer shy; he was demanding, aggressive, uppity. He actually pressured her for sex...and when she rebuffed him, he grew angry...and then cried. He was a basket case, trying to blend together two completely different lives. And yet, she allowed him his space and his struggles to adjust. But she _didn't_ allow him to have power over her. It seemed that she was seeking power in spiritual consolation, for the first time in her life.

The New Year's cleaning was no longer a chore to Megumi. It was an act of service, an expression of love, a manifestation of gratitude.

Belldandy quickly noted the change in her and complimented her sweetly. She praised Megumi, observing that she "had leapt forward". Encouraged, Meggumi felt inspired to try even harder to stay in the moment and appreciate her life more.

For the first time in her life, Megumi found herself enjoying "life in the slow lane".

She hummed to herself as she scrubbed the wooden decking on the veranda that wrapped their temple house, grateful to see the blowing snowflakes dancing in the air...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Of course, Urd chose to watch TV while the others scrubbed, vacuumed, dusted, and disinfected everything in sight. She was amused at how they drew lots to see who got what room, rather than cooperate in the cleaning of the whole. And Megumi, fool that she was, actually _volunteered_ to do the outdoors cleaning!

"_Tomorrow..._" she sighed.

Tomorrow was New Year's Day. Tonight was stay-at-home day. She planned to watch the Kohaku Uta Gassen...the annual Red vs. White song contest that was still the most popular TV show ever in Japan. This year, she was going to cheer for the Red Team. The show was silly, at times even ridiculously outdated with its homily to the caprice that "Japan is all one big family." Urd thought _that_ was a load of crap, but she was a fool for the boyish idol singers. Last year, it drew a respectable 53.4 percent rating for NHK, completely smothering the broadcast of all six Star Wars installments and the world TV premiere of the Yamato 3K live-action drama.

The house reeked of ammonia, dust, soap and bleach. Urd floated into a relaxed curl and watched one of Skuld's DVDs, a live concert by SMAP.

"Those guys were _soooo_ cute when they were younger," she observed to herself.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

I made a grimace in the mirror. The black mon-tsuki that I wore looked pretty ridiculous on me, especially since it was mon-less. I didn't have a family crest...in fact I didn't even have a family registry. I did have rank and crest back when I was in service to Lord Mori; the Lord had granted me this favor despite the objections that I was a gaijin. But it wouldn't be right to wear that crest now; I would only be dishonoring my memories of the long-departed Lord and his act of kindness to a foreigner.

So my dress kimono substituted generic oblique designs. I pulled the gray pinstriped hakama over the kimono and tied the sash. The dress wear of the 14th century was so much more appealing than this. I felt like I was wearing a costume, despite the fact that almost every Japanese household had men dressed like me at this time of the year. It just wasn't something I was accustomed to. When I wore court dress under my service to Lord Mori, the attire possessed a strong significance. Certain types of clothing required certain types of service; they had to be earned by their wearers. But here, this bland outerwear felt simply out of place. It was about as significant as the blasé business suits I swore I'd never wear.

Megumi cautioned me that I would probably draw a few stares tomorrow when we went to the shrine to pray for the New Year. Some Japanese still clung to the belief that gaijin didn't belong in traditional Japanese attire. Which was surprising in an ironic sort of way, because my motives were to _honor_ the traditional culture.

Urd had been pestering me all day, wanting to play Karuta-tori. This was a card game along the lines of 'Concentration' or 'Husker Du'. One hundred cards were laid out on the floor, each with a stanza or illustration from the Hyaku-nin-isshu. A referee would read out a line from the famous anthology that was comprised of one hundred tanka poems, and players would make a grab for the corresponding card. Urd knew about my penchant for poetry, so she had bought the modern version of the game, complete with an electronic referee and a lighted timer button.

Truth is, I just wanted to withdraw from her. Whenever I was around her, I was suffused with fear and guilt. Urd seemed to pick up on my mood, which I waved off as disappointment for her lack of willingness to help in the end-of-year housecleaning. True, I _was_ disappointed in her. Much more than she realized.

As I fell asleep, I could hear the surreal ringing of the joya-no-kane; the 108 peals of temple bells that were supposed to drive out the sins that Man is heir to...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

I decided to get up before sunrise to enjoy the dawning of 20XX. The hatsuhinode...the first dawn of the year...was beautiful, as the waxing sun underlit the wispy cirrus clouds of the early morning day. After a breakfast of special soba noodles exquisitely prepared by Belldandy, we embarked on an early start to go to the shrine. Urd and Skuld insisted that they stay behind, to housesit. They argued that, since they were _Goddesses_, there was no need for them to participate in the hastsumoude--the first day's attendance at the shrine. In Makuhari, the nearest shrine was almost a kilometer-long walk. The weather was still cold, so we wrapped ourselves in winter coats. Because of the supertyphoon, the streets were still filled with huge snowpiles due to the shortage of snowplows.

As we walked down the streets, I couldn't help but admire Megumi and Belldandy in their kimono. Makuhari displayed liberal afterravages from Supertyphoon Akira; the news last night said it would probably take the entire new year before the city was finally back to normal. In contrast to the bulldozed lots and damaged buildings, the two ladies walking with us were at the height of feminine grace and beauty, even to my untrained eye.

I could tell that Keiichi was completely taken aback to see that Genji and Megumi had returned for the day from skiing in Hokkaido. Well, I guess Genji could afford it, since his family was worth somewhere in the vicinity of 1470 billion yen. _I_ knew why they had taken a day away from the slopes, however.

While we walked, Megumi explained that she and Belldandy were both wearing furisode, the 'butterfly sleeved' kimonos appropriate for young unmarried women. Her kimono had a woven key pattern background with peach and silver lines, allowing the gold, orange and pink floral flourishes to highlight the print. The white obi sash wrapped around her waist had delicate silver chrysanthemum patterns and was tied with cherry red obi-jime cord. She and Belldandy both sported fakefur fluffled white wraps around their neck and collars.

Belldandy was appareled in a kimono with a misty green-blue background gradient weave, highlighted with silver, light blue and red landscape scenes. Her dark green obi sash represented the pine trees in winter; it was tied with a light jade colored cord. I had no idea that the obi sash could take as long as a half-hour to tie, especially Megumi's, which had an elaborate knotting in the back. Megumi told me that this pattern was taught to her by her mother; it had been passed down through the generations of young Morisato women.

Their sleeves hanging down almost to the ground, the two ladies walked with a dainty gait on their geta, more than likely due to the tightness of their kimono. Both also wore floral print koto overjackets, with delicate silken patterns. I could see the open admiration in Keiichi's eyes for his Divine girlfriend and sister; from where we had come from, women 'dressed up' using crudely-sewn overrobes. Culture shock again, it was.

Passing a confectionery shop, I recalled this morning's breakfast. Skuld had been the recipient of several otoshi-dama cash gifts from the adults in the house. Funny, for as much as she begged off being compared to a child...she ripped each envelope open with juvenile haste, gleefully looking for the cash gift inside. Urd had teased her about "being too old for otoshi-dama", which brought a round of vigorous protestation from Skuld.

"Why hasn't Peorth returned to Yggdrasil after the stuffed animal craziness?" Keiichi asked me. I just shrugged my shoulders in response. I ventured to guess that he was in a reflective mood. Appropriate, considering that we had starved for over three months out of 'this' year. Neither one of us had to play words around the sense of gratitude we felt for being back _home_.

After the visit to the shrine, we were going to call upon a number of friends, including Tamiya, Ootaki, Sayoko, Sora, Chihiro and others. I was going to venture out and visit the residences of several N.I.T. professors and grad students while Keiichi and the rest met up with their sempai for lunch.

The shrine was already filled with worshipers when we reached it. We joined a line of gaily-dressed families. Still recovering from the ravages of Akira, the shrine was swathed in the nets and scaffolds of recent reconstruction efforts. I watched as each family approached the kami platform, hung special New Years papers on the wall, lit their joss sticks and added them to the piles in the cauldron, dropped off a cash donation, then turned and left.

I prayed that this year would be better than the last. I prayed that Urd would understand why I had to end it between us. I prayed that I would find out what my wish was really all about. And I prayed for the welfare of all sentient beings.

I _still_ felt like a stranger in a strange land. My mind reeled as I recalled that, up until February of last year, the AMG Universe had existed for me only in the dimension of paper imagination and some anime episodes. Back then, I was living in a deep morosion. Then, I resided in a slummy neighborhood in Hawaii, complete with an array of illiterate wifebeaters, drug addicts, drunks, and neglected children. I was struggling through the University, each day a fight between my depression and my education. I was depressed, and my circumstances were an ongoing opprobrium.

I had given up on life.

Now, after a miraculous encounter with Urd, I was in the midst of the AMG Universe, which had somehow become real. Making real decisions for the first time in years. As I recounted the past year, it struck me anew that my depression had been greatly diminished.

An oft-repeated wish had seemingly been granted...I was free once again.

Here I was, in Japan, trying to 'go native' into a culture that I knew from the inside out, at least within an academic and hobbyist perspective.

Yet, I still was an "etranger", as Peorth would put it.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

As the sky repainted itself with darker hues of blue, Megumi realized that she had purposefully delayed Belldandy and Keiichi long enough. Urd and Skuld made it clear that they needed at least eight hours to get things ready. It was already late afternoon when the group started strolling back to the temple.

Cevn rejoined them after visiting several N.I.T. faculty members. Megumi had expected him to make some mishaps, since this was his first New Years. But he seemed to do okay. In fact, she was enjoying his wide-eyed interest in the proceedings. His apt enthusiasm suggested to her what it must be like to take a young child to the fair for the first time.

During lunch, Keiichi had told her about Cevn's decision to leave Urd. Megumi was very disappointed, especially since Cevn hadn't confided this to her personally. But she could empathize with his reasoning, at least a slight bit. Even if the two broke up, she would remain his friend. After all, he was her adopted older brother. But the news was still a shock to her system.

She returned her thoughts to more important matters such as the surprise awaiting them at home. The plan was simple. Once they called on each of their friends at home, it served as a cue for that friend to go join the gathering crowd at the temple. Tamiya and Ootaki had met them for a late lunch at Ootaki's parents, where Tamiya was staying until the Men's Dorm reopened. This had burned at least a couple of hour's time.

From Megumi's standpoint, everything was in place. Keiichi wasn't even wondering why _everyone_ they were visiting was at home, rather than being out and about making rounds themselves. Their route took a _huge_ amount of timetable coordination by Megumi. Having to keep to a schedule that accommodated almost all of the other's New Year's Day activities was almost impossible...but it was worth it.

_Would_ be worth it, if everything Urd promised came true...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Belldandy wondered why there was a whole bunch of people at the temple. Urd hadn't mentioned anything about a party. With a moment's dawning horror, she suspected that her older sister was up to her annual New Year's pranks. Like Life Sugoroku. Or Lustmuster.

"Oh no...Urd mixed up another batch of Lustmuster and invited everyone here. She's planning to dose them...and have an orgy!" Belldandy thought, gripped with dire panic.

"Bell dear, what's wrong?" Keiichi inquired.

"Ohh, I was just caught up in a little passing of fear," she replied, worried that her fears had snatched a moment's peace away from her. Of course, Urd wouldn't pull something strange, especially just after visiting Yggdrasil.

Or would she?

It was fairly obvious who was here, as she recognized the scores of cars parked around the vehicle garage. But what wasn't visually obvious was the large number of colored auras she sensed around their temple home. Or the _very high_ level of divine energy...

"So that's why Keiichi was shoveling out that large patch of snow!" she said to herself with a smile. As almost in a response, Keiichi's hand tightened its clutch on hers. Belldandy realized that her mortal boyfriend also didn't have a clue as to why a crowd was gathered at her house.

They mounted the porch steps and stood on the enagawa that wrapped their temple home with a smooth wooden walkway. Freshly waxed yesterday by Megumi, Cevn and Tomohisa. She slid the large framed door open and looked inwards. The living room was totally dark, as if someone had snuffed out the lights. Since it was late afternoon, the sky was already purple with sunset. Belldandy felt a sense of apprehension as she noticed a powerful shielding spell blocking her from sensing what was going on in the house...

"Could it be Mara?" she thought, sensing some out-of-place distributions of divine energy. But even Mara wouldn't violate the Rule that prohibited conflicts between Goddesses and Demons on New Year's Day.

Sensing a quickening of her breath, Belldandy tried to pierce the darkroom-like interior of their living room...

_-- -- -- --Surprise!!-- -- --_

The temple burst into light, its glare almost blinding Belldandy. She jumped as her spine snapped its reaction to the sudden flood of flashes and sounds, casting a shimmer up and down her kimono. She could hear the sounds of noisemakers, whistles, clapping and popping...the latter as evidence of Skuld's penchant for pyrotechnics.

_-- -- --__HAPPYYYYY__-- -- --__ BIRTHDAYYYYY!!_-- -- --

"W...what?" she heard Keiichi stammer as her senses reeled.

_"W..whose?"_

"Happy Twenty-Fifth DecaMillennium Day...ahem, er, 25th birthday, Little Sister!" Urd shouted roundly above the noise as she advanced and put an arm around Belldandy and shook her with sisterly affection before hugging her tightly. It was then that Bell noticed her mother and father's faces in the crowd, while Urd fastened a small gather of flowers into her hair.

"We wouldn't forget your birthday, Big Sister!" Skuld said as she dashed forwards and gripped Bell's hands, jumping up and down excitedly.

"Bell-chan, _what_ is going on here? You didn't tell me it was your _birthday_!" Keiichi said in a high-pitched voice that betrayed his nervousness at the sudden explosion of people and sound.

Belldandy didn't know what to say, after all, it...

"I'll explain for her later, Keiichi. You really don't have anything to worry about, big boy!" Urd said, aiming a knowing smile at Belldandy.

"Thanks for the rescue, Urd!" Belldandy thought with silent gratitude. A moment later, several friends came up to her.

"So ah finally got ta meet yuh're folks!" Tamiya shouted as he hugged Belldandy and fastened a party hat on her.

"Yuh're Pa's even biggah than me!" the mesomorphic sempai exclaimed cheerily.

"It _must_ be my birthday," Belldandy concluded as she whispered into Keiichi's ear. She hoped that he wouldn't be too confused by the fact that this was a much a surprise to her as it was to him.

_"B'dandy dahling!!"_ Mother's voice boomed in her ear. A split second later, Mother was whisking her away to the sister's bedroom for a private chat. Belldandy caught a glimpse of a bewildered Keiichi standing in the middle of the living room, surveying the abundant birthday decorations as Ootaki slapped a paper bowler hat on him...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

_Everyone_ was here, Keiichi realized. Peorth, Bell's parents Odeyn and Freiija, a host of Belldandy's coworkers from the GRO that he had never met. Mara had sent birthdays wishes in absentia, as she was visiting her parents in Vanagdrasil. All the guys and gals from Whirlwind and the N.I.T.M.C.C., Lin and two of her friends, also transfer students from overseas. His two sempai were here with their girlfriends.

"_Serious_ babe factor!" he heard Ootaki observe out loud, summing up the presence of a dozen or so Goddesses. This drew a nasty sidelong glance from his girlfriend, Satoko Yamano. Satoko was a junior, majoring in electronics. She had gotten together with Ootaki in her freshman year. With a little 'anonymous' help from Keiichi and Belldandy…

"Don't you forget who my father is, Ootaki!" she teased. Ootaki knew who her father was...Dean Yamano of the Electronics Dept. at N.I.T.

"J..just making an observation," Ootaki murmured in a subdued voice. Keiichi suppressed a snicker at his sudden change in manner.

"And that's _all_ you'll make!" Satoko added. Ootaki had really lucked out...Satoko was considered the fifth most popular coed at N.I.T. And the most promising student in her class...finishing at the top of her class every term.

Actually, Ootaki had taken really good care of Satoko, as far as Keiichi was concerned. They were centers of gossip at N.I.T., because of his antics and her father's high position. Keiichi had spent many nights assisting Ootaki in extricating himself from one inexplicable situation after another. Despite Ootaki's rapscallion nature, Satoko really admired and loved him. After all, his quick thinking had prevented her home from burning down the first time she invited him to visit.

Keiichi found himself looking at his sister, realizing that_ she knew_ all about this little surprise party for Belldandy.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Sora had arrived with Aoshima, much to Megumi's pleasant surprise. She still felt chills when she saw _this_ Aoshima...because his appearance nakedly reminded her of _that_ Aoshima, 40 years hence. After she returned to 20XX, Belldandy had 'debriefed' her, explaining that there was no way that 'this' Aoshima could develop into the megalomanic monster that had imprisoned her and Sayoko. In the first place, the temporal anomaly that created 'that' Aoshima was the result of their disappearance from 20XX...the fact that they successfully returned to the present negated any possible future Toshishima Imperiums. Despite being assured, Megumi was still a little edgy around him.

Sayoko was carefully eyeing Belldandy's coworkers, admiring the fantastic designs they wore. Several were dressed in skimpy outfits like Peorth, while others were dressed in fancifully elaborate styles bordering which pushed the envelope of avant-garde fashion. She _knew_ that they were Goddesses, thanks to Megumi. The sci-fi dressed women were magnets to the male eyes in the room. She held Tamiya's arm tighter...a silent reminder to him that he daren't not let his eyes stray _too_ far and long. Tamiya playfully bumped her with his hip, silently acknowledging her concern. His knowing grin was enough to allay her fears.

"Keiichi's parents are here!" Belldandy noted with alarm as she reemerged from her chat with Mother. Mother had given her the most meaningful DecaMillennium Day present she had ever received. Belldandy still had tears on her face. Mother had basically offered her approval for Belldandy to date Keiichi. Belldandy had immediately broken down into tears of joy. She hurriedly composed herself, wiping her tears with the sleeves of her kimono.

She remembered how Keiichi's father had been dismissive of her in the extreme while she was nursing Keiichi back to health after his injuries during Supertyphoon Akira. But Kei's mother had warmed up to her almost instinctively. To his parents, she was just another gaijin...a transfer student who was living with their son. To Reiko Morisato, she was the apple of her son's eye...which made her every move sweetness personified.

Keiichi and Megumi's mother came up to her and hugged her grandly; her husband eyeing Belldandy icily.

"Just ignore ol' sourpuss over there, my dear! How's school going for you?" she asked. Belldandy almost had to laugh at the deceit, it was so ludicrous.

"Mom thinks that I'm a senior at N.I.T.," she thought, then chided herself. "Well, aren't I getting a little ahead of myself. I just called her '_Mom_'! Oh well, I'm allowed. After all, I'm the birthday girl!"

"How old are you, my dear? I'm sorry, but I forgot," Reiko Morisato asked.

"Twenty-five Deca...er, 25 ma'am," Belldandy replied politely. Bell reminded herself to _really_ keep a eye on how she answered some questions tonight...several of the birthday party members didn't know about her divine nature. Fortunately, Urd had briefed all the divines who were visiting from Yggdrasil; Bell wouldn't have to worry about any slipups from them.

"Well, if you ask me, you don't look a day over 21," kind Mrs. Morisato said, ignoring Bell's trip of the tongue. She was dressed in a matronly dark navy blue kimono with short sleeves, contrasted by an intricately knotted a pearl-colored obi. Soon, Belldandy was making fetching comments about her kimono, and the subject swiftly moved onto lighter grounds.

Looking out of the corner of her eye, she could see Osamu Morisato and her father chuckling over some piece of discussion that Ootaki was trying to plead.

"Ahhh..._that's_ is a good sign," she sighed with relief.

"My husband seems quite attached to your father, doesn't he? Who would have thought..." Keiichi's mother observed.

Belldandy noticed Kodama, Hikari and Senrigan stealthily toting away a bottle of White Horse sake, presumably to party with Ganjin the Rat somewhere under the house. Which made sense, as Urd was too busy to break away a mini-Urd or two for him to share in the celebration of the New Years in blissful inebriation.

"After all, they _all_ were rodents at one time," Belldandy thought with a chuckle, remembering the origin of 'Mara's' Ninjettes.

All three shinobi girls had matching t-shirts which read "NINjette Grrlz", using the new Nine Inch Nails logo for the first three letters.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Between Tamiya and Ootaki's antics, Sora's attempts to monopolize Aoshima all to herself, Skuld's show-and-tell with Banpei, Urd's liberal tippling of sake, Sayoko's lip and arm lock on Tamiya, Megumi and Genji's attempts to excuse themselves to return to Hokkaido, Cevn's sullen mulling around, Peorth's overdramatic elan and Bell's embarrassment at being the center of attention...this really wasn't a bad party in Keiichi's esteem.

It was certainly cool to see Bell's father and his dad getting along well. Bell's mother was still pretty standoffish to him, but she was bearing up well in the midst of the party. Keiichi could still see a noticeable condescension in her manner, but she was loosening up. Especially since Urd kept her afloat with glasses of iced Pepsi. Like mother, like daughter. Besides, it was obvious that Freiija was proud of how her daughter handled herself around so many mortals.

"Psst...Keiichi. Come'ere," Urd whispered in his ear. Keiichi looked at her with a "what now" expression. Urd was obviously basking in the glow of intoxication.

"I juss wanted to tell you about the deal wiff Bell's birffday, before I get too blasted," she said in a quiet voice for his ears only. Keiichi thought she was _already_ 'too blasted', but this he wanted to hear. It had been bugging him all evening...

"Anyway, all Gods 'n Goddesses come into existence on New Year's Day. And because of the Ul'mate Forss, no one can remember when their 'birffday' is. Izzat cool or what, huh?"

"What's so cool about that?" Keiichi didn't know if this was another one of Urd's drunk meanderings or if it was the truth.

"Is's for real, K1! Because Belldandy doeshn't know when her DecaMillennium Day is...is's alwayz a surprise! Our 'birffdays' have to be remembermembered by _someone else_! Don' you get it?" Urd said, weaving a bit where she stood as she rapped Keiichi's head with her knuckles, trying to drive the point home.

"Urd..." Keiichi complained as he brushed her arms away. She _was_ pretty drunk. He thought for a moment...then experienced the "aha!" Urd was implying that it was necessary for a Goddess like Belldandy to rely on others in order to celebrate birthdays, because she truly didn't know when she was born. So the ones who cared for her the most were the ones who would know when to celebrate her birthday. It was upon to them to create a celebration for her.

And Urd had kept it a secret from _him_ as well, so it would be a surprise for him too. Keiichi didn't know how to reckon with _this_. But after a moment, his face relaxed as he realized how the Goddess Birthday System represented another facet of interdependence among the divines.

"Ah...I see you unnerstand now!" Urd said as she refilled his cup, missing completely and ending up refilling his sleeve instead.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

After the party broke up, Keiichi could hear Urd cursing at Cevn. He had just fallen asleep when he was startled awake by her screaming something about "rings".

"Shut up, Urd," he muttered with a somnambulant voice. A moment later, he heard a loud crash. What now? Reluctantly getting out of bed, he walked into the hallway to see what the ruckus was about.

He saw Urd with fearful expression, her face pallid as she held the broken neck of a bottle. Cevn was sitting against the wall holding his forehead, moaning in pain, blood dripping between his fingers.

"T..this is Bell's birthday party...and you had to do _this_!" Keiichi said angrily. Urd just shook her head at him.

"You _really_ did it this time, Urd!" Keiichi thought sadly as he helped Cevn to his feet and took him to the hospital.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --


	45. Pt 45: Blue Malors

**Part 45: Blue Malors**

This morning, Skuld had generous created breakfast in her stead, telling her "it's not fair for you to be in the kitchen doing stuff on the day after your birthday party. Big Sister Urd is in no shape to be of any help, so I'll do it!" She was grateful for her younger sis's thoughtfulness, even though she always enjoyed getting up early for her usual start-the-house routines. After breakfast, she and Skuld sent the overnighters back home with bento boxes and snacks. Keiichi looked troubled all through breakfast, not to mention red-eyed and tongue-tied exhausted. She suggested they a nap on the living room couch to catch up on some sleep and calm their nerves after the overload of guests and parents and friends.

When they woke up, Keiichi told her that Urd, in a drunken display of bellicosity, had broken a bottle of tequila over Cevn's head because he hadn't gotten her a ring for Christmas. Belldandy could hear the disappointment in his voice...Urd usually wasn't so violent. But then again, Keiichi suspected that Urd was in a blackout.

Her boyfriend then had to drive Cevn to the hospital, where he received 26 stitches to his forehead, all while she and everyone else was sleeping soundly. Bell was startled at her sister's viciousness; Urd's outburst had proven itself calamitous...completely narrowing her chances at redeeming her relationship with Cevn.

Urd had once again proven that she was decidedly unstable. Belldandy was full of appreciation for the birthday party Urd had orchestrated on New Year's Day. But her gratitude was tempered by genuine concern about Urd's actions. What if it had been Keiichi instead of Cevn who was injured by her outburst?

"I really don't remember a thing!" Urd said as she nursed the Goddess of All Headaches. It was well into the afternoon before Belldandy finally decided to urge her older sister to wakefulness of the hungover kind. Urd had really gotten wasted last night after the parents had left...and then had caused another 'incident' with Cevn.

She decided to roundly accost Urd.

"Urd, what has gotten into you as of late? You hit him over the head with a hard glass bottle! You must have had a reason! But then again, knowing you, you probably _didn't_ have a reason. How could you do such a thing? Didn't you stop to consider your actions? Admittedly, Cevn was very shortsighted by ignoring the obvious and not buying you what you wanted for Christmas...but does this justify your attack on him?" Belldandy watched as Urd shook her head.

"I didn't mean to do anything wrong!" Urd announced.

"Saaa! You always say that, as if it excuses everything. You went ahead and acted on an impulse, again! Now look at what's happened. You really hurt him...not only physically, but emotionally as well. You say you are in love with him. Well, I think you should at least act like it! I would never even think of physically harming Keiichi, no matter how angry I was at him. And believe me, there had been a few times when I've been close, especially since he returned from the Japan of the past. But all the anger in the world isn't going to help him in his readjustment! I've learned that one of the foundations of love is patience. I just...don't understand why you do such crazy things, Urd. Especially now. Don't you know that Cevn has been thinking about breaking up with you..." she said, her breath trailing off with the last sentence.

_gulp!_

"Urd, I didn't mean that literally, I was just worried..." It was too late. Belldandy had let slip the confidence. The effect was instantaneous. Urd's face blanched as her eyes seemed to widen to a stark piercing gaze.

"Urd...I didn't mean to say it!" Belldandy said sadly as Urd elevated up in the air and flew out of the sister's bedroom.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Cevn, we need to talk! _Now_!" Urd shouted as she floated into his bedroom without knocking. This would have normally sent him scampering with fear...but he didn't budge an inch out of surprise or fear. Then she was taken aback just for a moment as she saw the white roll of bandaging around his head.

"Damn! I must have really clobbered him," she realized with vivid frustration. Even more prickly was the fact that she _didn't remember a thing_ about any fight she had with him last night. The last thing she recalled was her folks leaving the birthday party to go to Megumi's room for their sleepover lodgings, about an hour after she explained the Goddess Birthday System to a bewildered Keiichi.

"I don't want to discuss it!" he said ruefully.

"You _are_ going to talk about it, young mortal man...because my sister just told me that you said you were thinking about ending things between us!" Urd bellowed cagily. She didn't mean to speak so loud, but her blood was boiling with a cobra's tongue worth of emotions. Cevn's posture visibly slumped down.

"Oh...no! Bell was_ right_!" Urd realized fearfully when she saw his resigned reaction. She hadn't truly believed her sister's words...until now.

"He _can't_ be thinking about breaking up with me! He's said that he _loves_ me, hundreds of times since we got back from China. It just isn't real," she reassured herself. Yet she didn't want to hear what was going to come out of his mouth. It was just an illusion, just a fantasy gone awreck between discordant cages of thought. Nothing really happened last night. Nothing was going to happen today. Urd told herself to calm down. The love dream she was living...wasn't going to end after all.

"Urd. I..I don't know how to say this. I wanted to wait until your parents left before I told you. But I guess I can't do that now, can I? I..I can't be with you anymore. How you act when you're drunk...is just too much for me to handle. Its not you, really. It's me. I'm just not strong enough to keep my end of this relationship afloat anymore."

There. It was said. Urd felt a vacuum forming in her breast at his words. It was as if a whole wingful of smiles has just hurdled down the fast-moving river of Time. Out of reach, and all she could do is watch the unformed futures. Futures floating away like doves and balloons. Usually quick to reply, Urd's frustrated words cloyed in her larynx.

"But I can change! I _promise_ I can change!" Urd protested. A sickening wrenching in her stomach gripped her attention as her mind inhaled the wormwood sourness of what he was saying. She was like a circus performer who had mastered the stilts...and then suddenly tumbled out. Fear stumbled her with a delirium of forfending.

"No...you can't. Believe me, I _know_. Because if you were capable of stopping, you would have by now. After all we've been through, you _have_ to know that this is a problem. You can't just deal with it…and I just can't deal with _that_," he said, pointing at his bandages for emphasis.

Urd remembered all the hurts she had put this man through because of her drinking. All the hurts he put her through as well, because of his irrational fears and assumptions. Was an index of clumsiness all that existed between she and him? Why do the bad times always seem to be most prominent in her mind? Reluctantly, she realized that she was embroiled in the stupid reality that she _needed_ sake as a powerup source. Granted, she drank more liquor at times than was needed to restore her powers. But she always kept herself in control.

"I can't stop drinking sake and you know it! You knew this when we got together in Beijing! It's not like this is some big surprise or mystery between the two of us! For me to stop drinking...is like you having to stop eating food. It's totally impossible! It's absolutely out of the question!" she protested. Urd knew that she had him on that account; she had been upfront with Cevn from the start about her need to consume alcohol. He _knew_.

"No, it's not. There is such a thing as responsible moderation. But you don't know..." he said, clutching his hands into frustrated fists. To Urd, it looked like Cevn was going to punch out at thin air.

"What did I do that was _that_ bad?" she asked calmly, trying to salvage the delicate situation to her favor.

"Last night, you screamed bloody murder at me because I didn't get you a ring for Christmas. Again. I tried to explain that maybe I should have bought you one, that I had obviously made a mistake, and that you should wait a couple months until Valentine's Day. My birthday. But then you got even angrier. So I tried to go to my room and chill, just to create some space between us, because all the vicious 14-century retainer stuff was welling up inside of me. You kept blocking the hallway, yelling at me the whole time. Then you picked up an empty bottle of tequila and falsecracked me on the head with it. Keiichi had to drive me to the _hospital_ so I could get stitched up! So he didn't get any sleep at all last night. Now I have a concussion and a stupidass Harry Potteresque deep cut on my forehead that will scar me for the rest of my life."

"I..I'm really sorry, Cevn. Really. And you know Belldandy can take care of your injury! It'll be just like it never happened..." she begged off, becoming frustrated as Cevn slowly shook his head.

"That's part of the problem! You can't smooth over what happened last night with a 'just like it never happened', Urd. _You're the Norn of the Past!_ You know that there's no do-overs. What you did…should have never happened in the first place."

"I didn't mean to do anything... How can you say that I did something wrong, when it was just an accident?" Urd stammered. This was really bad. She remembered when she was discovered out as impersonating his therapist in order to get at his private secrets; familiar feelings of shame and guilt reemerged.

"What's the point of trying to explain? It's over between us. There's no other choice. It's over already!" he said in agonized frustration and then broke into gasping sobs. Urd couldn't believe that he declaring an end to their romance. Her love dream.

"Nooo..." she said in a weary voice.

"Urd...I forgive you. Really. I know it's not your fault. I can accept that there is nothing you can do about your drinking. Face it, you're _addicted_! I can't even begin to understand how this can be, since you're a Goddess. But as long as you keep it up, your drinking will only broaden the distance between us. And you're too good of a person...of a Goddess...to have someone like me hang resentments on the frameworks of your heart. I don't want to _really_ lose you, to the point where I start avoiding you or hating you."

"I can change!" Urd shouted. This was going very badly. She doubted for a moment the webspans of reality. The boyfriend she had waited for nearly a hundred thousand years...was going to break up with her. _Had_ broken up with her. Her entreaties were only bringing tears of frustration to his face and hers.

"You don't understand. I..snff..really love you...and _this_ is what is making it so..snff..hard to stay with you. My feelings are torn up. Surely, you must have an idea..snff..about what I'm describing? Hasn't your sister ever been assigned to grant the wish of an abused child or spouse?" he asked, gathering his words between typewriter-fast gasping breaths.

Urd felt herself turn to an icepick chill at that. Belldandy had told her heartrending stories about granting the wishes of many of society's victims. Fulfillment of their wishes still didn't gut the cruel realities of their harsh lives. Then Urd remembered Cevn's past, and realized sadly that she was dealing with an injured soul...

"Cevn...I don't know what to say," Urd said, reluctantly admitting defeat. Her mind was swimming in a whirlpool of confusion, like discordant organ chords echoing amidst jackhammer bursts of her heart going berserk.

"Urd, I'm going to move out of the temple this weekend, before the next term starts. I think that it's best for everyone involved that I don't live here anymore..." His voice seemed to fade to a stillness as Urd heard herself crying softly. She had fought with herself to keep from crying. She tried to keep her face from wrinkling with sadness, but the tears flooded her eyes.

"Y..you can't just leave! You can't..snff..leave me! _It'll kill me!_ Don't you understand? You are my _only hope_ at ever being in love. Doesn't that mean anything to you?" Urd said in a thin, agonized voice. She laid it all on the line. Her pain was threatening to smother her with a feathery dolor.

"I know it hurts, Urd. All I can do is say I'm sorry. I still want to be your friend. But things cannot go on between us like they have been. Sometimes, one has to release...what they don't possess. I don't possess the ability to live with you right now. Please try to understand..."

"UNDERSTAND _WHAT_?!" Urd shrieked, interrupting him as her sorrow began to blade. "When we got together, you knew about me...about how I like to party. About how I just am a crazy Goddess sometimes. Belldandy even told you that my Demonic half makes my heart almost double with feelings. YOU KNEW!! This is as much your fault as it is mine, Cevn! You _promised_ that you would never leave me. Remember? Remember saying that you would never let anything get between us!" She could see his face flushing with guilt.

"Don't you think I know this? I thought...I could live with your capricious nature. I knew that you were as wild as a mustang mare at times. I was willing to accept you, just as you are, Urd. B..but I'm just not strong enough. I know that's cheap to say..." he said weakly, staring at the tatami.

"You're a liar!" she cried out, then collapsed to the floor. It always came down to the fact the Cevn thought he was too weak. She buried her face in her hands and cried. And cried and cried, until her eyelids swelled. Her tears dizzied her until she felt like she would fall upwards into the uncaring bowl of sky.

Eventually the numbing shock crept forth. Urd silently sat within herself, feeling like she was going to melt into the floor. This was so nightmarishly unexpected. She could hear Cevn crying softly...and she wanted to comfort him. Wanted to be comforted by him.

"But it's never going to happen, is it?" she realized. After a long stretch of time, she heard Cevn say something softly.

"What?" Urd said between small gasping sobs.

"Friends?" Cevn asked, his arms outstretched.

"Yeah...I guess," Urd said sullenly. Cevn leaned over to hug her, and she found herself sharing a cry against his shoulder as he shuddered with deep sadness.

"It's over," she realized. The Ultimate Force wasn't preventing them from touching anymore. Which meant that there was no more love between them.

"But how could this be?" she thought. Urd knew that she still loved him. That he still loved her. The depth of his hurt...the half-hour he cried just now...it proved that he still was filled with love for her. Somehow, she just knew. Unable to bear being around him anymore, she got up wordlessly and left him. Left her dream behind.

There was always Belldandy and Skuld to comfort her.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Keiichi had woken up late, because he had spent almost all night at the hospital with Cevn. During the holidays, the emergency room ran on a skeleton staff...so it took almost four hours. Waiting in the reception area, Keiichi strode through the quarry of his thoughts, trying to decide on a gem of a birthday present for Bell-chan. When he came home, he was exhausted. The nap yesterday afternoon only strung him along the flight wire of weariness.

Looking at his alarm clock, he appreciated the fact that Belldandy had let him sleep in. They had so much to talk about, because this was the first time that their parents had met. Of course, this meant that they had to sleep in their own rooms last night.

He was anxious to hear what Belldandy's take was on the first meeting of their parents. Excited already when he woke up, he searched the house for his beloved Goddess. Seeing that she was nowhere in the house, he figured that she was taking a nap. Bell-chan had really put a lot of work into the extra cooking and cleaning that New Year's demanded of the lady of the house. The unexpected birthday party had piled stress upon exhaustion for her.

He could hear someone crying piteously in the sister's bedroom.

"Bell, are you okay?" he asked as he slid the door open partway. One glance told him all he needed to know. Belldandy looked up at him sadly, and then returned her attention to Urd. She was cradling her older sister in a sisterly hug, kissing Urd's disheveled platinum locks. Skuld was looking on, her mouth agape with sadness.

"The skin has been torn off the wound," Keiichi realized sadly.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Last weekend, I rented a one-room flat near N.I.T. for a reasonable price. Actually, I suspected that the landlord had raised the 'reasonable price' several thousand yen a month because of my gaijin status. From what I had read in the many reports American students wrote about Japan, this was customary. The irony of many Japanese tourists facing the same kind of economic oppression in holiday-crazy Hawaii wasn't lost on me.

As for my musical instruments, I packed them into a storage unit. I never wanted to touch them again. My muse was had withered away.

Life touched as gray as the sky during a late afternoon snowfall.

I taught my first day's classes with feigned enthusiasm. When I got home, I lowered the 'pro' facade and let the crushing grief sound itself out, screaming frustration into my pillows. My life felt empty without Urd. It threatened to break my manhood into little children. She had become an anchor for me when I came to Japan. A Japan she had brought me into.

I had made a torturous decision, for me and against Urd. But my choice was no different than the decision faced every day by thousands of men and women. It was simply an Alanon moment of clarity. One can only put up so much shit; I had been through this pathway once before with my ex. Breaking up with Urd didn't do much for that old wound, either. Again, I felt guilty for her death by drug overdose. Her death was _real_, and I would never escape it.

What do you do when the person you love is consumed by their addiction? Do you hang on, brace up and ignore the hurt? Do you treasure the moments of loving lucidity, like pearl beads...until another drunken episode wounds your emotions? Can you watch helplessly while your efforts to love the one you're with...dissolves like water on bamboo sprays during an arid spell? How long do you decide to live in the dark, not wanting to believe it's dark all around you? Remain in the smothering dark of a loved one's addiction until it becomes so pitch-dark that you can't even see your own hands...or your own self?

I love her, but I cannot possibly pierce the addiction that obscures her heart. _She_ cannot even pierce it...which is even more tragic. I wouldn't be surprised that Urd was probably sitting at home blaming herself, thinking that our breakup was her fault. Actually, the culprit is her fucking addiction, not her. Urd would probably never realize this, leaving her to always wonder "why?" and either blame me or herself.

_That_ hurt too.

And then there's addicts like me…the out-of-control, hope-to-die-dope fiend, fuck-everyone-else-and-what-they-think kind of addicts. Nothing stopped me from getting loaded; I wasn't carrying a gun just look tough to my high school friends. I never went to high school. The big difference between Urd and I was that I would drive people away from me within a month, while she took the slow route to despair.

Addiction sucks. It causes chaos all around us, and then binds us to the irrational conclusion that _we_ are the ones who pissed away our lives. Runaway alcohol consumption causes 60,000 deaths and 400 billion in property damages in the US every year...and yet Americans still allow it to be sold in grocery stores next to the milk cooler, as if nothing was happening.

The crushing weight of denial.

"These are the real truths of life," I reminded myself angrily. It was always 'someone else' who suffered losses because of addiction. The real insult lay in the fact that I had struggled to get clean, facing my addiction and its consequences...only to be wounded anew by addiction as it manifested in Urd's life. Now I was belonged to that elite group of 'someone elses'.

My thoughts were casting me into dangerous reaches of suicidal self-pity. My depression was back in full force. I felt like I had lost the only family I ever had. Not only Urd, but Belldandy, Keiichi, Skuld and the rest. My life felt like a cellular anaconda of poisoned Time...

A quark of strangeness possessed me to study the Enigma Book, to see if there _was_ a way to alleviate Urd of her addiction to booze.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Two weeks into the winter term, Megumi watched helplessly as Cevn broke down right in the middle her class...and then dashed out of the room. She knew that he was in absolute emotional agony. This just piled another worry on the N.I.T. junior's shoulders, as she was even more worried about Urd. Urd had left for Yggdrasil the next day after the split without nary a word to anybody save her sisters. She could only imagine how devastated the Norn of the Past was.

Megumi _knew_ that these two belonged together. Sitting silently with Sora in the lunchroom, she pondered whether or not she should visit Cevn at his flat after school was out.

_"...what a lamer! Did you hear what he did? He just walked out the class he was teaching! A true man wouldn't let his feelings control him like that! It's probably over some ugly woman that he's dating. Stupid gaijin teacher! Yeah, this is just another example of the fact that they'd let anyone teach at this dump..."_

The table next to theirs was filled with freshmen guys commenting about today's 'drama'. Megumi became enraged when their comments turned to abuse and mockery. She threw down her hashi chopstix and stood up abruptly.

"Megumi...sit down. Restraint..." Sora said, putting a guiding grip on her friend's wrist.

"Ooooh, they're such _dickheads_!" she said angrily as she resumed her seat, causing a wave of laughter amongst the group in the next table. Now they were taunting her...and then a loud voice joined them.

"Whaddaya guys laughin' at? Mebbe yuh should tell me, an let me in on your little joke? Mebbe ah would think it's funny too. Wanna tell me what's so funny, huh?" she heard a deep voice growl, yakuza-like. A hush drew over the table, and most of the cafeteria. Silently and swiftly the kids packed up and cleared away.

Tamiya sat down on the now empty table and looked at Megumi and Sora. The two girls allowed themselves a brief giggle.

"Bastards were makin' fun of yuh. An' him! Us club members gotta watch out for each other, neh?" Tamiya said with a smile. "Ah heard what happened. Is Urd gonna to be okay? Is he gonna be okay?"

"He'll be okay. He's just letting it out, because he can't hold his sadness in. Hey, what about Urd? Any news, Megs?" Sora said, trying to shift the subject.

"Not a word. If Belldandy and Skuld know anything, they aren't letting on," Megumi answered, taking a bite out of her cutlet sandwich.

"This sucks! It's like a member of the family just died, not having Urd around. And Cevn-sensei...well, I've been too afraid to just go visit him and talk to him," she added.

"Why don't yuh go visit him?" Tamiya half asked, half suggested. The twinkle in his eye told the two coeds that he _knew_ he was right.

"Well, he's not Japanese. He doesn't know about amae. I mean, he told me he touched on it in his dissertation...but he just doesn't know it _here_," Sora said, tapping over her heart. "Just like how he's kinda become a faculty sponsor for Club, and he doesn't even know it."

"He's not an outsider any more. Which means that he thinks that his shame over deciding to leave Urd has made him less powerful, thus...less important to us," Megumi observed.

"An cuz of this, he can't see that he's 'melted into' our group...and ah for one thinks he needs to be straightened out," Tamiya finished.

"Amae. Ahhh, I can see where this would be a problem. Cevn-sensei is American. Americans just don't identify as strongly with a group as we do," Sora said, straining to remember her high school psychology classes.

"Yes. So he thinks that simply because of the fact that he moved out...that he's no longer part of us. No longer depends on us. But what he's missing out on is that we are depending on him. He's got to get back together with Urd!" Megumi said, armed with conviction.

"I don't think it's possible. You know why they broke up, Megumi," Sora said cautiously. The last thing she wanted was for her best friend to become involved in some futile project...especially since midterms were coming up soon.

"Yeah...well ah feel that he's an _idiot!_" Tamiya added.

"Sora, Megumi, Tamiya dear...I think they both overreacted. They've _always_ done this! Don't you see? It's a sign that they belong together," a sharply dressed Sayoko said, as she rested her chin on Tamiya's shoulder. She had arrived just a minute earlier to meet up with her new boyfriend, so they could have lunch in their usual cafe.

"So yuh're gonna tuh play little-Miss-matchmaker?" Tamiya asked her, raising his eyebrow.

"Why not? Cevn did it for me and Genji," Megumi noted.

"And he was just a little involved in getting me to treatment, then advising me to go to where the love is," Sayoko added. Everybody knew that this was inarguably true. Tamiya reflected on the fact that Cevn had helped Sayoko get clean...which resulted in a _big_ change in his life. Now he was going out with the #1 coed at N.I.T.

"You're asking the impossible, methinks. But if you're willing to try, then I'll do everything I can to help," Sora said with a wink.

"Me too. After all, he helped Sayoko...and now look who she's with," Tamiya said, puffing his chest out for effect.

Megumi and Sora both giggled at this...and Sayoko's peachflush of embarrassment.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Urd threaded the shimmering nanocrystal-fiber tiger stripe cape through the looplets in her collar, and then carefully tied it into an intricate knotting. Placing a glowing mother-of-pearl clasp on the foreknot, she stole a glance into the holomirror cloud and observed her reflection. Despite her stunning attire, her face betrayed a soul-sadness; the usual sparkle of emerald glimmerick in her eyes was dulled to grassy gloam-like green. Her eyes revealed how lifeless she had felt since _that day_.

Her life felt like a stolid morass of pathos.

She fancied that she was a pariah amidst her own existence. In the distant past, Urd had dumped both the Troubadour and the Cherry Blossom Spirit; the former because he was too self-obsessed with his muse and other Goddesses, the latter because he was too fickle and lackwitted. But this time, _she_ had been dumped. Rejected, by an impossible lover. She had never in her wildest imaginings envisioned that a mortal would capture her heart.

After Cevn had hammered her glass heart with his appalling dismissal, Urd had instinctively ran home to her parents...the safest place in the Multiverse. Both Freiija and Odeyn were worried about their daughter's sudden 'homesickness' and her depression. But she couldn't reveal to Mother the true cause of her afflicted melancholy. Mother was already deeply wrapped up anew in the affairs of one of her other daughters on the Earthrealm.

Urd couldn't bear being around "B'dandy dahling" or "Skuld honey-child" as Mother termed her two younger sisters. Seeing them just brought more pain, because she knew they felt her hurt too. She was emotionally exiled from the Earthrealm home she had lived in for the past three-plus years.

"It's terrible when one's own heart becomes mean lodging for her romantic aspirations," she whispered to the image in the cloud.

Despite her better judgment, Urd had spied on Cevn, using the surveillance resources of the GRO Technical Center. It was a simple task for a Sysop such as she. She quickly discovered that he was as tormentedly lovelorn as she was. To her, this was a bittersweet consolation.

But today's outing was going to be special. Urd was going to visit the August Presence Himself. So she preened herself to look her best; anything to increase her chances of being admitted to gaze upon Kami-sama and perhaps have a brief audience with Him. Her formal dress was most officious in this regard.

Today, The Lord was in His rainbowed cloudpalace, high about the Asgardian Zone. Urd had never visited Him there, in one of his Keeps. But in her childhood, during one of the times she had stolen onto the palace grounds and took one of the Sleipnirs for a surreptitious evening excursion, she had checked the place out from a distance. She remembered the magnificent spires of glistening cloudworks...

She gathered the hem of her dress and shook it out. She was in top form...but yet this really didn't hold the kind of significance that she was wont to desire. An appreciator was needed, but the man she wanted to impress would only contemn her.

She summoned a floating palanquin and mounted it. Pressing a few keys in the autopilot, she ascended the Rainbow Bridge towards the Rainbow CloudPalace.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

_"You may enter,"_ He said gently. Urd swallowed the lump in her throat and hovered through the luminous portal. Once inside, she gazed at the vaulted ceiling, which arched so high that the hardened cloud peakstones were obscured by haze or mist. A series of rainbow mists circulated within the walls, which were made of some kind of solid wisps of cirrus material captured in crystal. The entire palace was floating in the center of a sphere of liquid air.

_"The Rainbow CloudPalace is much more appealing during the daylight, wouldn't you agree, My child?"_Urd was stunned for a moment. He _knew_ about her childhood adventure. But then again, He was The Lord. Of course He'd know that she had snuck herself in all those millennia ago.

_"You may approach Me. I do not hold guile against you for a single nocturnal visitation to My palace grounds during your juvenile years. You were not the first, nor will you be the last. After all, one of your younger sisters did likewise,"_ His voice echoed gently. Urd still was enraptured with His voice. If only all men and Gods spoke as sweetly, as profoundly, as Kami-sama. Then she fell to wondering whether it was Bell or Skuld who had trespassed His palace demesne. She intuited that it was Belldandy. Skuld was just too afraid of the Sleipnirs...

"My Lord," she said as she curtsied before His floating throne. She wore a golden diadem atop her silken silver-white locks...which almost slipped off as she dipped low after her curtsy.

_"Urd, My child. Try as you may to conceal it, it is obvious to Me that your heart is conflicted, perhaps even tormented. Pray tell Me about how this has come about."_

"Kami-sama, indeed I am afflicted with a matter of the heart. I have fallen in love with a mortal. He has spurned me, because of what he terms 'arrogant' behavior. There is nothing I can do about the fact that my regenerative energies are transmitted within the Earthrealm zone via their alcoholic beverages. But he insists that there is something _wrong_ with me...with the manner in which I consume such beverages. I..I do not know what to think of this. All I want...is to have him back!" she explained. Urd didn't want to present herself as undignified by crying in front of the Lord, but she couldn't stifle her emotions in the telling. She raised a hand and knuckled the corners of her eyes.

_"Urd, Norn of the Past, well do you know that it full nigh impossible for you to experience romantic love. Nay, even yet loved by a God or mortal...especially a mere mortal man. Verily you claim that you are in love with him, despite the bound limitations of your office as Norn. Could it be that you are mistaken?"_

"My lord, I deceive You not! He has admitted as much to me! I trust his words...and I know my heart. Since he has turned from me, my heart feels as empty as a soap bubble. This is why I have arrived with this plaint, direct to Your chambers, desperate for Your guidance! I..I don't know what to do. I _really_ need Your wisdom at this time in my life, if You will but grant it," Urd confessed, rawly candid. She saw His wonderful face break into a gentle smile.

_"Urd, My daughter. _–This-_ is a rarity, indeed! Admitting that you cannot find the answers all by yourself?"_ He said with a chuckle.

Urd found it within herself to giggle at the irony of this...and then halted herself as she realized that the Lord _had just made a joke_!

_"It is obvious that you have become enamored of an elegant fantasy, composed by the thoughtstrands of your own imaginings. You know that what you claim...is beyond the realm of possibilities. Even__ I__ cannot adjucate the Ultimate Force, for I was co-created with It,"_ He opined.

"Please, My Lord! My life is nothing but grief now! I do not know what to do about my forlorn feelings...they seem to be spiraling out of control," Urd related.

_"Then let them,"_ Urd heard Him say with a hint of dispassion. Urd looked at The Presence with an uncomprehending expression.

"With all accounted respect, My Lord...how can You say that? You do not know what has happened between he and I," Urd challenged His answer. She instantly fretted that she had said too much. She eyed Him warily to see how he would field her reaction.

The Almighty paused, looking up at some unseen thoughtform, then fixed her with His eyes.

_"I know _–everything-_, Urd, save the evil designs that birth themselves in the dark recesses of the Realms of Vanagdrasil. But this doesn't imply that I can _–explain-_ everything I know. Even to you,"_ He said patiently. To Urd, this was just an acknowledgment of the fact that He didn't have a clue.

"Then how is it that You are unaware of the Book that Cevn has? How is it that You didn't strike him down when he challenged You...the day You suspended Skuld's license? How do You explain how and why_ I _was assigned to grant his wish..." The Lord waved her questions to silence with a swift motion of His hand.

_"Desist in your insulting flights of fancy. I will forgive you to a point, as they are the product of a confused mind and conflicted heart. But I will hear no more of your brooding claims. So _–this-_ is the mortal you claim to feel a heartfelt attachment to? The insolent one who actually presumed to question Me? The mortal who has been disrupting your sister's tasks on the Earthrealm?"_ Urd felt herself shaking with panic. His face was beginning to form dark thunderclouds.

"It is impossible for you to be in love with him. You were _only_ supposed to grant his wish. Nothing more," the Lord declared wrothly.

_"It is obvious to Me that the source of this wild whimsy rests with your younger sister's relationship with the 'Test Mortal'. Somehow, you feel that her affection for her charge is appropriate for_–you-_ and your charge. So you are emulating Belldandy's behavior by artifice, in an attempt to avoid facing the truth of your own situation,"_ the Lord explained. She felt Him piercing her soul with His stern expression, sizing her up with definite scrutiny. Then, unexpectedly His face softened to an almost paternal expression.

_"Come with me, My child, and let us walk together a span,"_ He said, stepping down from His throne and extending His hand. Urd remembered Skuld telling him that He had behaved just like this with her.

"Evidently, being a Norn has some prestige with the Lord," Urd observed to herself.

_"Your surmise is correct, Norn of the Past. It is essential that all three Norns remain healthy, so that their presence will balance the TimeWeb and its Streams. Otherwise, the task falls to _–Me-._ And I would rather not deal with Time. I have much more important matters to attend my will towards,"_ He answered her thoughts.

_"Your predecessors were fated to throw their lives away because I didn't heed them the necessary attention. I will not repeat this mistake with you and your sisters, Urd. You are obviously troubled by your time on the Earthrealm, My daughter. You may feel free to unshroud your heart and dissemble with Me."_

So Urd told Him everything.

Smiles and tears highlighted her vivid description. At times it seemed childish, telling the Lord about her affairs with one mortal. Yet, she saw Him listen with keen interest; Urd could almost sense occasional surprise in His wise visage. Emotionally drained by the time she finished, she looked to her Lord for an answer.

_"The only reasonable sensing that I can make is that perhaps this has occurred because of your half-Demon heritage. Troth...it belies the explaining. Perhaps the known Rules that regulate Gods fail to hold sway on your life in this one instance, Urd. You travel a difficult path because of your twinned nature. _–If-_ your heart hearkens to him, than all I can suggest is that you practice patience. _

_His free will is not accounted within your possessions. His actions fail to be accounted even within My knowledge. Two enigmas...one solution."_

"Why am I part Demon?" Urd asked again. Each time she had met with Him, she had asked the same question.

_"You will learn what you will know...in Time,"_He replied. The same cryptic reply He had offered at each asking.

_"You must utilize the myth of the mortal Valentine's Day as a context. Go to him then. Allow him time to feel his grief to its fullest vale. Then he can fully hearken to your radiance in his life. Tho' I cannot ken how a mortal man can turn stonehearted when faced with the joyous prospect of loving a Goddess. Especially a Norn. Especially _–you-_, My dear child,"_ He said.

_"I must attend to My other duties now. Give My regards to your parents and sisters,"_ He said. Then He did something totally out of character. The Lord leaned over and kissed her on the forehead with paternal solicitude.

_"On the path to the Garden of Destiny...may it be that your dreams become your realities, My Dear One."_

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Keiichi adjusted his hachimaki, as it was riding low on his forehead. The headband symbolized the fact that he was bearing down on his studies. A major battery of tests were approaching...the tests which would decide if he was a likely candidate for grad school. He recalled his years in Lord Mori's court, where the entire clan would don hachimaki when discussing military campaign strategies. To do less would cast the appearance of indifference; an attitude swiftly remedies by dismissal or the sword.

Keiichi still couldn't believe that both Tamiya and Ootaki had passed these very same tests that he was facing. In addition to the classwork he busied himself with, in this, his last term of his senior year...now he had to prepare for the grueling graduate engineering aptitude test.

He looked across the table at Sayoko. As a senior, she was also preparing for the grad exams. In fact, she had suggested that they study the practice exams together. Sweat beaded on her brow, which made him grateful once again for the hachimaki. Far more than traditional symbol, it was keeping the sweat out of his eyes. Unfortunately, hachimaki weren't part of the fashion vocabulary of the style-conscious vogue of his study partner.

"Funny...a year ago, this would have been impossible. Sayoko was still obsessed with me, in that headstrong 'never-admit-defeat' pride of hers. Now, she's become a damned good study partner. And a friend," he observed. He also observed that his flights of memory to 14th Century Kyushu were becoming more infrequent. His cellphone vibed on the desktop with an silent urgency. Checking its display, he excused himself to phone Bell-chan.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Belldandy was overjoyed when Urd popped out of the TV, immediately signaling Keiichi via his cellphone. Her older sister had returned! She was filled with questions as Urd walked over and sat down at the kosatsu. She looked a little peaked, as she often did when she was caught up in a delicate alchemical project.

Urd described how she had spoken with the Lord, who offered the possibility that she might win Cevn back. She then decided that her place was with her two sisters.

Belldandy sipped her tea, hoping that Urd hadn't put words in the Lord's mouth. Several times in the past, Urd had misunderstood a few words that Kami-sama had spoken...with disastrous results and more than one license suspension.

"Well, speaking with Him does have that effect on us," Belldandy thought to herself. She imagined that He had told Urd something really uplifting. Hopefully, it wasn't all in Urd's head.

"How's Keiichi?" Urd asked, a lilting pepper-sweetness in her voice.

"He's been studying really hard. We don't get to spend much time together right now. He's over at the N.I.T. library with Sayoko," Belldandy answered with a misty-sad expression. She really regretted her limited time with Keiichi, but it was a necessary sacrifice she was more than willing to make for him. For his pursuit of his education. Keiichi really wanted to join his two sempai in grad school. And Belldandy knew that passing the exams would increase his self-confidence.

"Why should he waste his time studying with _her_? A couple days with me and he'd get a perfect score on that silly simple test!" Skuld said from somewhere in the hallway.

"Big Sister!" she shouted as she rounded the corner and saw Urd sitting with Belldandy in the dining room. She dashed into Urd's arms and ended up tackling her, pinning Urd down on the floor and causing Belldandy to spill her tea for the hundredth time since her two sisters had arrived.

"I've got a great idea!" Skuld said with a sparkle in her eye.

"Ooff, alright already. Just get offa me," Urd said with big-sisterly patience.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Dr, Kintaro had called me into his office after I had taken a three day emergency leave of absence. I expected as much, since my sudden walkout had put the technical institute in an awkward position. He informed me that I needed to rein in my feelings, otherwise I would be facing a possible reprimand in the form of a suspension without pay.

He added that I had exceeded everyone's expectations, except for the fact that I had been absent more than usual during my first two terms. When he pressed me to explain, I almost spilled out the whole truth. Instead, I just told him that I was in the midst of a breakup with a girlfriend, and left it at that. My explanation seemed to satisfy him, and he dismissed me with another warning.

Sitting in my studio apartment, I probed the mysteries of the Enigma Book. I found all sorts of references to addiction in the Demon's sections of the tome, but nothing in the God's portion. Reading the Enigma Book only made me homesick, as it ushered memories of Urd's patient tutoring sessions with me. Well, she was _mostly_ patient with me. Perhaps it was during these times that my affection for her had become unbound, without me even knowing it. This set off another round of reminisces of the happy times I had with her.

"This is no good," I muttered.

Returning my attention to the Enigma Book, I saw the bubbled paper in the pages where my tears had fallen...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Isilblius was crouched on the edge of the glowing sitting cube in his room. He held a small framed photo in his hands. He had smuggled the portrait past Mara. Every time he looked at the photo in the metal shell, he was taken aback by her delicate features.

He _wanted_ her.

Since Mara had made it clear that she had no inclination towards being with him sexually or otherwise, Isilblius had felt the press of his youth drawing him into confused circles. Mara had dismissed his moodiness, explaining that it was just part of being 'adolescent'. But Isilblius didn't want to hear this, especially from _her_. Despite the fact that Mara had been a surrogate mother to him, he was really starting to resent her with every fibre of his being.

A few days ago, he enclosed his room in a ShieldCurse, in order to prevent Mara from invading his privacy. _That_ really pissed her off, much to his amusement. He was certain that she had searched his room several times recently. He definitely didn't want her to find his precious picture.

He looked at the portrait again. Isilblius had learned that the object of his adoration was single, single, single. Not that it mattered whether he had a rival or not...he would simply kill the rival. But this made it more interesting, because he would have to win her heart.

Much more of a challenge than simply killing her.

But how?

"How could a Demoness be clothed in the aspect of a Goddess?" he wondered aloud.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Keiichi, look! Try this. The Electro-Intellihancer Mk IV. I designed it just for _you_!" Skuld announced proudly.

"I..I don't know about this," Keiichi said with franklin doubt as he examined the helmet-like apparatus cradled in Skuld's daintily gloved hands. It looked like an ordinary bicycle helmet. But here the resemblance ended. A number of volutes poised themselves rib-like around the three ridges at the top, pulsing with a glowing liquid. Interlaced wires created a multihued grid along the 'rim' of the helmet. Keiichi realized with a gnawing apprehension that this was the part that would come in contact with his scalp. It didn't look very safe.

He remembered one of the times he had put a Skuld device on his head. He was trying for "the look", the hairstyle which would land him a much-needed job. With Skuld's 'assistance', his hair had become coiffed in a series of outlandish, ridiculous hairstyles. Samurai. Idol Queen. SDF soldier. Grade school girl. And even worse. Everyone had laughed at the gyrations his follicles were subjected too. The school-girl braids were just too much. Despite his suffering, in the end the finished product was a haircut that he could live with...plus it had an unexpected side-effect. Bell-chan _adored_ it. So he had kept the shorter hairstyle.

He reevaluated his situation...perhaps Skuld's new 'toy' could help him. She seemed very anxious that he try it on.

"How does it work, Skuld?" he asked, bracing himself for the coming long-winded explanation.

"My work of genius monitors your brain's neurochemical matrix, using it as a baseline while it synthesizes a more efficient set of chemicals. When you practice 'intelligence', the chemistry of your brain interacts with electrical fields on a microcosmic level. This manifests in a constituent cognitive process...each process or 'thought' is mediated by changes in certain sections of the brain. The Electro-Intellihancer maps these sequences, and then calculates a more 'centralized' series of chemical reactions. You Earthrealm mortals…your brains have a very clumsy chemistry. The cellular interfaces are like cars weaving all over the road. My Electro-Intellihancer optimizes these modalities...uh, forcing the 'car' to drive straight down the middle of the road. Faster chemical reactions means faster thinking. Faster thinking means faster learning. Faster learning equals Keiichi passing tests," she said, flourishing her arms at the finish.

Keiichi thought that her reply sounded halfway sane. He reached out and took the 'helmet' from her. It felt light in his hands, about the weight of a motorcycle helmet.

"If you use this, then you'll only have to study a fraction of the time. That will give you more time to spend with Elder Sister doing those disgusting things you two like to do together," she urged with a smile-turned-grimace.

"Still not down with sex, huh, Skuld?" he taunted. He pulled his hands away when Skuld tried to grab the helmet back. "Just teasing," he admitted when he saw Skuld's scowl.

Still, the idea was attractive. He had been doing very little but studying in his evenings. The practice exams were very difficult...Keiichi knew that the real thing would be ever more of a challenge.

He rested Skuld's invention on his head. A cooling sensation gripped him around the temples, almost relaxing him. Then, without a word, he took the Electro-Intellihancer off and handed back to Skuld.

"No. Sorry Skuld, I just can't use it," he said bluntly. Skuld's expression of joy turned into disbelief.

"W..WHY? I worked so _hard_ on it!" she stammered, almost in tears. Keiichi had expected her to react with outrage, but her sad visage pulled on his heartstrings.

"It has nothing to do with you, or your offer to help. I know that your invention would work; that's not an issue here. I just want to do this on _my own_. Using your wonderful invention would be...kinda like cheating, wouldn't it?" He gripped Skuld's shoulder lightly as he continued to explain.

"Skuld, you want me to be the best I can be for your sister, right?" Skuld nodded her head at this.

"So, if I always rely on you or your sisters to help me out of a fix, then eventually I'll become dependent on your help. I won't look to myself for answers; instead I'll expect your assistance. And then...I'll become weak. Of course, you would be the first one I'd ask for help in a situation where I knew I couldn't do what's necessary. But this isn't one of those times. I _know_ that I have the ability to pass the graduate exams. Skuld, the last thing I want to do is spend so much time away from Bell-chan. But I would rather make that sacrifice then give up on myself. Your sister also wishes me to do this on my own efforts. She's bearing with it as well. Do you understand?"

Skuld looked at Keiichi, still feeling the sting of rejection.

"Uh..huh," she sighed reluctantly, nodding her head slowly.

"Hey! Why don't you go keep Bell-chan company, so she doesn't feel all alone without me?" Keiichi suggested with a cheerful smile.

"Okay!" Skuld replied enthusiastically. Keiichi thought it was odd that Skuld had recovered so rapidly from her downcast mood. He returned his attention to the thick book he was reading.

He didn't notice when Skuld left his room that she still had her fingers crossed behind her back.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Eeek!" Skuld squealed as she returned to her bedroom. The objects of her fear turned to face her for a moment, and then resumed their conversation with mini-Belldandy and mini-Urd. She noticed Mini-Urd and Ganjin merrily sharing a bottlecap filled with sake.

"What's going on here with the mice?" Skuld blurted out after regaining her center. She didn't like mice...they reminded her of system bugs. Small, furry and liable to do all sorts of mischief.

"Mice? We're _rats_! And damned proud of it!" Ganjin corrected her in a surly voice. "Hurry up and shut that door before them damned cats come in!"

Skuld obeyed and shut the shoji door. Rarely did Ratty emerge from under the temple, especially since Velsper and Cevn's cats took their abode here. The last time Skuld had spent much time around him was during the mini-rock band adventure. Ganjin_ still_ gave her the creeps, especially with that ratty leather jacket he sported.

But now there were three more mice, sitting with super-deformed versions of her sisters. Neither of her sisters seemed threatened by their presence.

"_SD on!__"_ Skuld shouted...and a moment later, she reappeared as a six-inch tall mini-Skuld. She really didn't have to resort to any such dramatic expressions, but it was more fun this way; she felt like she was imitating one of her fave TV heros...the almighty Ultraman.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"So you got wasted on New Year's with the Ninjettes, and then what?" mini-Urd inquired of her oft-times drinking partner. She was insatiably curious about what occurred the night she saw Ratty and the Ninjettes taking off with a bottle of sake. She had never seen the Ninjettes party before.

"And then," Ganjin began. "Naturally, we drained the whole bottle. Well, mostly _I_ drank the whole bottle. The three shinobi girls got so drunk...that they started crying about the fact that they didn't have boyfriends. In the midst of their tearful chatter, they told me that they had asked your sister a long time ago if you could create mates for them. Then I was shocked to find out that they were rodents in their prior lives! So I decided to become a matchmaker.

"After searching far and wide, I found three willing victims...er candidates. Meet Toshiro, Yoshi and Musashi," he said with a gesture. Three young rats bowed low from their formal kneeling position. Ratty chuckled, remembering that Kodama almost beheaded him during their little 'party' because he had argued with her about some Jackie Chan trivia. Yep, these three were going to have their empty little heads on the chopping block for the rest of their lives. Which might be short, knowing what little he knew about the Ninjettes.

"These guys have no idea what they are volunteering for..." he thought with a smirk.

"So what's so special about these three?" mini-Skuld asked.

"They're all stalwart young rats. They passed the supreme challenge...with flying pennants," Ratty emphasized.

"Which is?" mini-Urd asked sarcastically.

"They outdrank me in three timed bouts," Ganjin said with open admiration. "Any rat that can outparty the 'ol Ratty here...is richly deserving of the...ahem...honor."

"Or richly stupid. I supposed you asked them while they were drunk," mini-Skuld said, as she drank her vanilla milk mix.

"Umm...well the important thing is that that they accepted my offer! Anyway, they are also qualified in martial arts as well. Theft of snacks, mousetrap evasion, attic invisibility, cat immobilization and other various and sundry skills we of the Rodentia kingdom pride ourselves with," Ganjin added, causing the three junior male rats to become red-faced at his abundance of praise.

Mini-Urd shook her head at his deceit. She knew Ganjin's tactics too well. He was a rat, in _every_ sense of the word. No doubt he had plied them with liquor and then made them agree while they were besotted with rice wine.

"Do you three know what you're getting into?" mini-Belldandy asked. She wasn't going to brook any reservations that they might hold. If she changed them to male mini-Ninjas, it would be _permanent_. She didn't want to go to the trouble of transforming them, only to have them become disappointed in their new forms. _That_ would only hurt the Ninjettes...and Belldandy didn't want to see her three boon companions become abandoned by their new boyfriends. The memory of Kodama sacrificing herself to save Urd in 2050 still burned afresh in her mind.

"Yes," all three answered. "We are already skilled fighters, and once you change us, we were told that we would have abundant ninjitsu skills in addition to our new forms."

"This is true. However, you must remember that you are each intended to become life partners of the Ninjettes. This means that you will be reborn with love in your heart for them. You must not fail in your duties as mates," mini-Belldandy cautioned. She heard a sniffling, sighing sound. Urd was crying; the talk of lifelong partners and love must have struck a bitter chord in her older sister, one which resonated with her sense of loss.

"Urd...he'll come back to you, I know it," she reassured her sister.

"Just get on with it, Bell. At least _someone_ will have someone in their life to love," mini-Urd said jealously as her tearful state passed.

Mini-Belldandy closed her eyes and encanted:

_Spirits of anima, spirits of lightning fair/Transform with wind, reform with air,_

_Reimage this trio with thy profound caress/Fashion forth humanity from rodent,_

_Pour forth thy store of bless,_

A blue-white glow circled the three rats, enveloping them even tighter as it spun more rapidly, tornado-like. Finally it collapsed unto itself with a final flash...

In the place of three large male rodents were three male Ninja.

The leader, Toshiro, was a spitting image of Toshiro Mifune in his prime, circa "Seven Samurai". Toshiro was dressed in black-hooded ninja coveralls with a jitte in his belt and a staff strapped overback. Yoshi was the master of 'weaponless weapons'; he was dressed in a loose hakata with a straw hat covering most of his face. His wild red locks burst out from under his hat, every bit like the hero from Rurouni Kenshin. Musashi, the 'mini-sword-demon' was dressed in a formal retainer's dress with three swords and a dirk under his belt; his brown hair gathered into a roguish topknot that resembled Keiichi's when he first returned from the Japan of the past.

Mini-Belldandy was well pleased with the results, especially so with Toshiro. Kodama had regaled her numerous times with daydreamings about her cinematic hero, the late Mifune-san.

"This is my gift back to you, my dear Kodama," she whispered. Both mini-Skuld and mini-Urd nodded their heads gravely in accord.

Despite her appreciative smile, Mini-Urd was totally saddened by the touching scene. Here were three men...for three Ninjettes. But there was no man for her. At least until she followed through with Kami-sama's suggestion. But her sadness was sublimated by the comic scene of the three former rodents examining themselves with surprise.

Ganjin was rolling on the floor holding his ribs, his eyes teary with the exertion of his loud guffaws.

"Quick, pass me some booze before I break a rib!" he snorted. The three former rats were mystified by the transformation.

"Where are my dew claws? My whiskers? How am I going to walk on two legs...if I don't have a tail?" mini-Urd heard them wonder aloud. It was almost too much, and when mini-Skuld started giggling, mini-Urd couldn't help but join in...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Skuld watched the shadows play on the ceiling of her bedroom. The Ninjettes weren't going to be back for a few more days. She smiled to herself, trying to imagine their epiphanous reactions to their male counterparts. They seemed so 'macho' for girls...how would they behave with men in their lives?

She had watched Belldandy go through a lot of changes in her time with Keiichi. Skuld disapproved of a number of these shifts in behavior; yet, she had to admit that sometimes her sister appeared to be ever _more_ of a Goddess than ever before.

"How would _I_ change if I had a boyfriend? Will I become all girlish and dainty? _Not_!" Skuld promised herself. There was no way that a boyfriend was going to cause her to change...not one bit. The very thought was yucky...

Making sure her sisters were asleep, Skuld shimmied out from under the covers of her futon and tiptoed out of the room.

Quietly, so as to avoid stirring a cricketing creak out of the old wooden floor, she stole into her lab. Finding what she wanted, she tiptoed across the hall to Keiichi's bedroom. She worked the shoji door open a crack and saw him lying on his back in his futon, snoring softly.

Skuld was glad it was dark...she didn't want to see any of the dirty magazines that she _knew_ Keiichi had lying about in his room. She crept over to the side of his futon.

"Ouch!" she whispered, desperately trying to stifle a cry of pain as she stubbed her toe on something which felt like a large book. She held her breath and her motion for a full minute while Keiichi shifted restlessly under his bedcovers...

Slowly crouching down, she gingerly placed the Electro-Intellihancer Mk. IV on Keiichi's head. Once she was assured that it was attached snugly, she pulled a remote control out of the pocket of her pajamas and pressed a button.

The helmet-like mecha started to hum quietly.

"What he doesn't know...won't hurt him. Cheating only is cheating if you _know_ that you're cheating!" she said, pointing her finger upwards as if to assert her point to an invisible audience.

"I'm such the total genius!" she appraised herself as she walked back to the sister's bedroom.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --


	46. Pt 46: MindDrive

**Part 46: MindDrive**

Keiichi snapped awake. Feeling instantly alert; his thoughts were rippling through his mind like clarion echoes. Wordlessly, he immediately sensed that something was definitely amiss. His head felt out of proportion to the rest of his body. His mental activities seemed to redound with an unexpected abstruseness. As he moved his head while resting on his pillow, he noticed a physical sensation of topheaviness.

"_Weird_," he muttered as he reached up to touch his face. "Could this be the result of too much studying?" His emotions gathered into a panic as his sense of proprioception seemed to indicate that his head was much larger in size than it should be.

Then he saw Skuld's Electro-Intellihancer Mk. IV lying on the floor. The helm with its filigree of wires and cables was emitting a soft humming tremolo.

"Skuld!" he cursed under his breath. "That little brat must have snuck in last night to 'try out' her device on me while I slept! Man, is _she_ gonna get it!"

This doubtlessly explained why his mind seemed so cleanly analytical. Skuld's mecha did all that she promised; the process of his cognition seemed to be accelerated a hundredfold. Keiichi quickly shucked the futon covers aside as a torrent of thought sensations vied for his attention. His eyes darted around the room until he spied the small desk mirror poised on one of the shelves in his room. Grabbing the mirror desperately, he looked inside of it...

_EEEEEYYYYYAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH!!_

A moment later he heard his own voice, sounding as distant as Mt. Aso, screaming with lungworthy affright at the image in the mirror. Once his throat finished hurling screams, Keiichi gasped for breath as terror arced from mind to heart and back. He felt a dull pain in his chest, no doubt the result of his grave shock.

In the mirror was a face of a monster.

His lower face looked almost exactly the same as before...but the cranial portion of his head was disproportionately large. His forehead extended up and outwards, hooding his eyes. Blood vessels pulsed their lifeforce alongside his temples; his skin was drawn tightly over the superior half of his head. His spiky hair crowned the top of his head like a small cap rather than falling in spiky bangs over his forehead and temples. His head appeared distorted, like one of those amusing trick mirrors at the midsummer fair his parents took him to when he was a kid.

Keiichi quickly realized that his brain had doubled in size. His entire skull had asymmetrically restructured itself to accommodate the neurological growth. The nearest visual comparison he could come up with was the "Roswell Alien" imagery that the American entertainment community thrust into mass popularity in the late 90s. His head possessed a misshapen triangularity that was...alien, to say the least.

_He looked like a Gray._

With a deliberate effort, he tried to calm himself...and failed. He regarded the device lying next to the folds of his futon. Obviously, Skuld's mecha had transformed the neurochemical matrix in his brain in the fashion that she had described. But then it had gone one step beyond. Somehow, it had clearly accelerated his visceral evolution with the result that his cerebellum and cerebral cortex had increased dramatically in mass.

Intuitively, he acknowledged that his mental capacities had increased proportionately as well. His memory was as clear as the winter air; he could remember _every word_ from all of his classes yesterday. With only a slight effort, he realized that he could remember every word of _every_ class he had ever taken at N.I.T! With eidetic precision, he envisioned each question on the graduate exam practice test mockups. It was as if his mind had been adrift before in a fog-covered sea...self-contained like a message in a bottle. Once fetched ashore by the tide, his intellect felt like an unleashed tiger. School was simply...simple.

"What...has happened to me?" he thought, his mind relinquishing control to the syrupy pour of his desperation. "Belldandy..."

_"_«_Please help me...__»__"_ he pleaded mentally.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"«_Keiichi dear, I'm coming!»_" Belldandy thoughtcast. Urd and Skuld were both awake, startled out of their slumbers by a mental shriek...a thought-voice clearly fired with fear.

"Why are you thoughtcasting to Keiichi?" Urd asked with a surprised expression. Belldandy looked at Skuld, whose face was white with shock...or something else. Her mouth voiced emptily as she discovered that she wasn't the only one who 'heard' Keiichi's panic in their minds. Her internal alarms escalated, trumpeting ciphers of deep worry as she almost tripped over the long hems of her pink cotton winter PJs en route to Keiichi's room. She gasped as she slid the shoji door open.

The man in the middle of the room...wasn't Keiichi. Someone else was there, something that resembled her mortal boyfriend, but yet was grotesquely deformed. Belldandy almost fainted from the sight of Keiichi's enlarged head. Urd had to brace her up from behind as Belldandy's legs went weak with qualmy.

"«_It's_ –me-_, Bell-chan!»_" she heard a reassuring voice in her mind. Her doubts were dispelled when she looked into his eyes...and saw sheer love. The same wide vista of affection, peaked with desperate cascades of heartfelt terror and disorientation.

"Ah...my lovely Goddess, am I glad you're here! I'm about ready to misplace the little sliver of sanity that I have remaining!" he added as she knelt near him and pulled him to her, hugging him.

"Keiichi, what happened to your _head_?" she asked worriedly. "Do you feel alright?"

"«_Besides being shocked into craziness by this, I –_feel-_ fine. I'm not in any pain, except for the discomfort of looking...like this,»_" he thoughtcast to her. Belldandy realized that there was much more to this than simple a case of Keiichi having a big head.

"Well, I always thought that having a big head would help out poor little Keiichi here," Urd mentally mused to herself.

"«_I –_heard-_ that!»_"

Urd realized with a shock that she was hearing Keiichi _inside_ of her mind. She wasn't even thoughtcasting; she was just musing to herself. Her middle sister would get upset too easily if she ­knew that Urd was drawing any humor from this situation. Yet, he had sensed her unspoken, un-thoughtcast observations and opinions...like a mindreader.

Like a telepath.

Belldandy glanced at Keiichi, then Urd, with an awed expression. She had just 'heard' Keiichi chastise Urd in her mind! Her mouth fell agape with facefallen shock as she plummeted down an imaginary vortex; trying and failing to accept the apparent fact that Keiichi had become _telepathic_. She couldn't shake the unbelief out of her head; she had clearly heard her beloved mortal boyfriend...thoughtcasting! He had heard Urd's private thoughts without her even attempting to thoughtcast them.

Which immediately presented a huge problem, the difficulty every mortal sentient race has to confront when they evolved telepathy: the need to create a new sense of privacy. The mortals had to learn respect for each other on a whole new level; and they needed to learn to 'filter' their minds and their telepathic 'listening'. With telepathy, the private conversation and introspection one has with themselves is no longer quite so private.

"«_So this new ability of mine is called 'thoughtcasting'?»_" Keiichi's confused mental voice queried in her head.

"Can we please use vocalizations? Let's just talk aloud instead of thoughtcasting. I know that I'm the Goddess and you're the mortal, and you probably have many questions. But this is just too intense and unexpected for me to comprehend right at the moment, my darling Keiichi," Belldandy asked in a level voice, even though her internal self was fretting anxiously. She felt an urgency to ground herself back into reality…which hopefully would ground her boyfriend into reality as well. His fear-filled impressions were almost like thought-screams.

The astonished looks on both her sister's faces paralleled her own surprise. This strange idea of Keiichi being telepathic was quite unsettling to each of them. At present, mortals were physiologically incapable of thoughtcasting because certain brain centers were undeveloped; to the same extent that chimpanzee's lack of vocal cords rendered their species incapable of speech.

She reviewed what she had inculcated in Multiverse BioHistory 702 during SecondTier Inculcation, almost hearing the Proctor's voice in her memories...

_"Many of the Multiverse's races have developed speech but not telepathy, as speech actually _-inhibits- _the evolution of telepathy or other forms of transverbal communication. In our studies, we often encountere numerous species that bypass speech entirely, evolving directly to telepathic modes of thought communion. These species are often limited by physiological or environmental constraints, such as the lack of lungs due to thin atmosphere, no vocal organs, a decided lack of need to evolve afferent nerve systems. At times, their survival relies on the acquisition of writing, gestural context, or other means of thought-to-iconic transmission..."_

In keeping with the difficulties posed by telepathizing, Belldandy knew that the Earthrealm mortals weren't scheduled to become telepathic until several centuries passed in the future. This 'schedule' was a deliberate effort on the part of the Gods; a certain level of cultural maturity was necessary before individuals could telepathize with each other. Of course, the Demons also fought for _their form_ of telepathy; a telepathic race with exceeding self-interest and selfishness was much more malleable. Much easier to bedevil and anguish with grief.

In the 26th century, the Yggdrasil Mainframe would tweak a few genes in a few thousand babies to produce the necessary mutations. Within another two centuries, _all_ humans would be telepathic. Another century would be used to monitor how they adapted to syncognitive telepathy as a species. If they achieved a fitness of spiritual and intellectual communion-rigor, they would have accomplished their candidacy for the Next Level.

Then, the Gods and the Demons would reveal themselves...and Mankind would be offered a choice. _The Choice._ They would be invited to an opportunity to apprentice under the God's guidance. If they chose the path of the Gods and then successfully concluded their period of novitiation…a period usually ranging between 10,000 to 40,000 years in duration…then they would be assisted to evolve into demi-Gods with the gift of immortality and ethereality. No more constraining physical forms; as they would be beings of energy.

At least, this was the way things were planned.

Assuming that Kami-sama spared the mortals...and that they reached the first stage of the Next Level. Without telepathy, Mankind would never emerge from the rudiments of their childish culture. Belldandy once again recalled the teaching of the Proctors...

_"Species that transition from verbal to transverbal communication often face the most difficult trials of racial survival in their evolutionary history. Millions of races have died out at this point of development. The stars are filled with such tragedies. The essential pattern of self-destruction is usually the same: non-telepaths and telepaths would slaughter each other in genocidal wars. Telepaths would become mentally imbalanced in the face of the sudden acquisition of syncognitive insights into matters of the heart; their insanity eventually extinguishing the genetic lamp that allowed for mind enhancement. Many races have entirely failed to reconcile the philosophical principle of 'privacy' with the advent of telepathy, resulting in lemming-like mass suicides. Souls would become enmeshed, leading species to stray away from spiritual pursuits to drown in their own declines into savagery. Many races have also experienced an inverse canalization of their genome; thus debilitating the individual's ability to interpret symbolic communication."_

Strangely enough, this process resembled an episode from Earthrealm mortal mythologies; a narrative that the mortals referenced in several of their world-myths...the 'Tower of Babel' metaphor.

In the scheme of things, the Gods and Demons both had the dire duty of protecting the Multiverse's order by eradicating races that proved useless to either. In the process of evolution, a species would reach an initial sentiency, and then reach the Next Level approximately 50-790 thousand years later. A race that becomes telepathic while remaining devolved cannot join the Gods or the Demons. When this happens, the potential exists for the species to leave its home solar system and starfare, coming in contact with other mortal species and potentially frustrating _their_ chances to become demi-Gods or demi-Demons.

Thus, the "probation" that Kami-sama had assigned the Earthrealm mortals was an attempt to perform a deep evaluation of their worthiness for continued existence. If the mortals failed their probation, then their destruction would be a necessary cleansing. A devolved species could never threaten the Gods or Demons directly; but they could cause collateral damage by frustrating the Gods or Demons in their attempts to cultivate and novitiate species. At the moment, the humanity of ­the Earthrealm is in the process of being 'cultivated' by both the Gods and the Demons. Hence, the existence of the Goddess Relief Office and the Demon Grief Office.

Both offices had a 'mission statement' to utilize wish-completion assignments as one means of 'nudging' the mortals in either direction towards the Next Level. Bestowing wishes or grief; they had a key role whereby the mortals will either wind up being 'apprenticed' on either the "God-track" or the "Demon track" of evolution. Humanity could join the Gods; becoming Gods and Goddesses themselves should they prove worthy to the goal. Belldandy knew that humanity could never surpass the Gods or the Demons, who were at the pinnacle of spiritual awakening and fitness. Yggdrasil and Vanagdrasil were protected by Kami-sama and Oni-sama, an omnipotent safeguard against rebellion within each Realm by those who deluded themselves into thinking they were 'superior' Gods or Demons.

Yet, her beloved Keiichi had somehow bridged the morphogenetic chasm...a fact that frightened and intimidated Belldandy. Her fear extended itself like a Spring floodwater; not only for her precious Keiichi, but also for humanity itself. The implications were staggering.

It was troublesome enough that Cevn had introduced a significant chunk of Yggdrasilian metaphilosophy and metamathematics in his dissertation project. Humankind wasn't scheduled to be exposed to the initial sequence of those concepts until after telepathy became a reality. The aquantum metastatics that he presented were critical adjuncts to telepathic communication; there simply was no other way to prevent the ensuing chaos that arose from the powerful group consciousness enabled by strong links between telepathic minds. Thought itself needed to be indexed, with the thoroughness of an dictionary. Unwittingly, he had given humanity such an index...the means to create a dictionary of cognition.

Since the mortals weren't supposed to become telepathic until the late 26th century, a human being that manifested transverbal thoughtcasting capabilities ahead of schedule could pose an extreme threat to humanity's chances of reaching the Next Level. In her inculcation, Belldandy knew that in such past cases, the individual was usually quarantined from their homeworld species...becoming a ward of either a God or Demon for the rest of their lives. This was absolutely necessary to protect the species against the early introduction of an evolutionary process that it was ill-equipped to deal with. Even the Demons couldn't take any pleasure in the resultant self-destruction of a species in such cases.

Keiichi was clearly thoughtcasting, albeit in a clumsy, unpracticed manner.

"If Yggdrasil Mainframe finds this out via the 'Test Mortal' monitoring project, Keiichi will be taken away from the Earthrealm...and from _me_!" she thought with a dreadful misgiving. The other danger resolved with the mortals themselves. It was quite possible that...if other mortals learned of his special abilities, they would attempt to exploit them...with a mercenary disregard for the numerous parlous consequences. Just like they had done with nuclear physics, by creating their atomic bomb. The current UFO craze in Japan and Russia was enough to convince Belldandy that anything out of the ordinary would set off a panic. Over the millennia, the Earthrealm mortals consistently functioned at their worst during these periods of sociocultural instability. The Paleolithic extinction of the Neanderthals by the Earthrealm mortals captured Belldandy's attention for a moment...

If Keiichi remained telepathic, his life was in danger!

And if he came to harm in any way by his fellow mortals, the Almighty would certainly accord humanity as having failed their probation. Either possibility was like a noose in the silk loom.

"Get a grip on yourself, Bell!" she challenged herself. At least she had remembered to shield her mind so she didn't accidentally 'leak' her speculations to her now-clairaudient boyfriend. Keiichi was _already_ freaked out as it was.

"And what do you think _you're_ doing?!" Belldandy heard Urd shout with cilious sarcasm, interrupting the gestations of her panic. Urd's tone caused Belldandy to shudder into a cringe, momentarily wondering if _she_ had done something wrong. There was something about her older sister when she spoke that way; an edgy mysterious quality that urged Belldandy towards respectful deference.

"But it isn't me," Belldandy realized. Urd was looking censoriously at Skuld, who was standing near Keiichi's futon, hands clasped behind her back. Brought under the attention of her two sisters, Skuld was smiling innocuously.

Belldandy noticed that Skuld was surreptitiously trying to nudge something out of sight behind a dresser with one of her feet.

"Ah! And what do we have here?" Urd said triumphantly as she floated over and reached for the object that Skuld was trying to conceal.

"_Don't touch my new invention, Big Sister!_" Skuld yelled defensively as she pushed Urd away with un-Skuldlike strength. Belldandy watched as Urd wrestled with Skuld; the Elder Norn's struggles and greater length of reach were eventually rewarded with the object Skuld was so zealously guarding. Or concealing, as it appeared to Belldandy.

"Yes, Skuld, what were you trying to hide?" Belldandy asked her little sister. In the space a few seconds since they had entered the room, Skuld had located and tried to hide something. Calling the 'something' an _invention_ gave her leave to mentally reconstruct what had probably happened here.

"Skuld, why did you use the Electro-Intellihancer on me last night, after I told you that I didn't want you to try it on me?" Keiichi asked angrily. Belldandy could see that he was barely maintaining his cool...his hands were fisted and aquiver. She stepped behind him and hugged him, reaching her arms around his waist, hoping that he would calm down.

"I only wanted to help!" Skuld creaked in an anguished voice.

"Of course she 'only wanted to help,'" Urd repeated burlesquely, rolling her eyes at her younger sister's inept justification.

"Skuld...I want an explanation. Not an apology, not an excuse, not an avoidance. Just an explanation. Okay?" Belldandy said coolly. She could tell that Skuld's 'girl side' had reemerged in full force. Once again, her younger sister had mantled herself with the yolk of guilty fear, as she sensed that she was potentially going to be punished for her actions. Skuld's eyes flashed with desperation. Belldandy wanted her to know that she wouldn't be disciplined...too much, anyway.

Yet, this wasn't an ordinary mistake...even with the hindsight towards her little sister's past 'Skuld-scale' missteps...

"I just wanted to help Keiichi pass the big test, so that he could spend more time with you. I kept seeing how lonely you were, Elder Sister! Always reading those disgusting pulp romance novels..."

"Belldandy...why I never knew that you could appreciate the finer things in life," Urd teased her. Belldandy soured at this, and almost stuck her tongue out at Urd.

"So I devised a means by which Keiichi could..." Skuld continued.

"Skuld, how does this thing of yours work?" Urd interrupted, examining the device in her hands. Skuld went on to explain how she had designed the Electro-Intellihancer for Keiichi. Listening to her sister's explanation, Belldandy astutely realized that Skuld, despite all her engineering prowess, had omitted a common-sense detail. Perhaps it was so obvious that Skuld had merely ignored mentioning it...

"Skuld, I hope you didn't design an artificial intelligence into it too, like you did with Banpei?" she asked her younger sister gently. Skuld's eyes went wide and her face turned even more pallid, confirming Belldandy's worst suspicions.

"Skuld, this just proves how much of a _little girl_ you are! Or a maroon, as the mortals would put it," Urd started in, drawing a five-star angry glare from Skuld. Belldandy waved a hand at Urd to try and calm her down. Urd was closing in for the kill on this one.

"Urd, she's already sorrowful and suffering for making this mistake. Don't rub it in," she cautioned with a whisper.

"Okay, already! But I hope you remember this the next time _I_ make a mistake!" Urd shot back, causing Belldandy to flinch with accession.

"Since the design was already so complex, I decided that it would be cool to throw in an A.I. As a fitting challenge to my abilities, of course! Sooo, what's wrong with it, anyway? Why shouldnt've I included an artificial intelligence, huh? Why not?!" Skuld argued, defending her decision.

Belldandy wanted to slap herself on the forehead because of Skuld's ignorance. Even she, a comparative novice in matters of advanced metatechnology...a beginner who possessed only a fraction of the mechanical abilities of her younger sister, not to mention a total lack of fascination with mechas and constructs that Skuld had...knew the obvious axioms about A.I.'s and biological modifiers.

"You realize that one of the fundamental tenets of constructing cyberorganic mechanisms is that you_ never_ include an artificial intelligence in a device designed to alter base physiology. An A.I., no matter how perfect, should not be given such an advantage of rigor over an organism's genetic or ­physiological fit-to-choosedness. This is a necessary procedural safeguard to prevent accidents like this from occurring," Belldandy stated flatly.

She felt Keiichi quivering with anger...

"You call this is a mere _accident_, Bell-chan?" Keiichi accused with a frustrated voice as he patted his mesocerebral head. Keiichi's reference and gesture was too much for Urd, who burst into unconstrained laughter. Despite her best efforts, Belldandy had to let a couple of very quiet giggles find their way out behind her hand. Despite her obvious empathy for her boyfriend, he _did_ look rather funny, especially with his scowling expression. She _wanted_ to feel guilty about her apparent dismissal of his present condition, but she was too caught up in the more tragicomic aspects of this new drama.

"Sorry, my love. I know that you're distraught..." Belldandy replied as Urd picked up where she had left off lecturing Skuld.

"Skuld-baka, you _know_ that devices which adjust an individual's physiology by remote mechanical or arcanical means should be utilized _only_ when directly monitored by their designer or creator. An A.I. is no replacement for a Goddess, Skuld! How would you like it if I programmed Banpei-kun to give you a new hairdo, and then simply left him alone to do whatever his A.I. felt was appropriate? He might decide that you'd look really cute with a hairstyle like Ootaki's..."

"Don't you dare, Big Sister!" Skuld flittered sharply.

"So how do you think _I _feel? Just look at me! How am I supposed to go anywhere outside of the house looking like _this_?!" Keiichi added, burning with frustration at the fact that Skuld didn't even pick up on Urd's obvious implication.

Skuld bowed her head as his words pricked her with guilt.

"Skuld, I know that...no matter what, you had only good intentions," Belldandy thought silently to herself.

_"«Here we go again! Once more I'm the butt of a joke! You're laughing at me because of this weird situation! Well...haha...very funny,»"_ he thought sarcastically, loud enough for the three sisters to hear.

"It _always_ seems that I'm the one who bears the brunt of some 'accident' or cosmic screwup on the part of one of you three! Just like when I got changed in a 'female' version of myself because of your hapless Goddess bungling. Then I get taunted or tortured because of some private joke you share. Much as I love Belldandy, I really can't stand it sometimes!" Keiichi clamored angrily.

Three Goddesses choked on their breath, overwhelmed by Keiichi's ill-tempered bent of thought.

"Keiichi, don't _scream_! And_ I _most certainly am not making fun of you!" Belldandy said roundly. His thoughts were cannonfire loud in her mind, shaking her with an earthquake-like mental punch.

"Yeah, and I don't think this transformation is funny...at least for the most part. Besides, when you're in love with a Goddess, you've gotta buy the bag, lover boy," Urd added, confronting his self-pity. Sighing with irony, she added, "Unlike some mortals I know."

Belldandy disfavored Urd's inconstancy; her sister was laughing at poor Keiichi just a moment earlier. She felt an impulse to chew Urd out, but held her tongue. Things were _already_ tense...

"So, let me get this straight. Skuld's mecha design incorporates an Artificial Intelligence. However, her A.I. lacks certain multicambral intuitive matrices because she skimped on the ethical subroutine daemons...perhaps because she didn't take the time to fully integrate the polygated nanoprocessors with the multitronic..."

"See! Listen to him! This just proves that it _works_!" Skuld said triumphantly, leaping in the air with glee. Her sense of shame was put to flight by Keiichi's dexterous assessment of her mecha's shortcomings. He was definitely smarter..._tons_ smarter than before. Skuld didn't even take offense to his criticism; after all, he was _Keiichi_. Besides, she was totally proud of him for being so observant. No mere mortal could even begin to comprehend the technological marvels of engineering that went into her Intellihancer...the mecha that Keiichi was critiquing so matter-of-factly. But if it had been Megumi or one of her own sisters finding fault with her invention...

Urd sighed, putting a hand to her forehead as she shook her head in dismay.

"It should be relatively simple to create new command logic multi-routines which will enable it to retromorph any neurobiological changes it caused," Keiichi assessed. His suddenly becalmed manner was very strange under the circumstances, an alteration which was very disturbing to Belldandy. In the space of a few minutes, he had transformed from boiling over with fright...to an almost icecool scientific detachment from his own circumstances. Engaging his intellect seemed to sublimate his emotionality.

"If his intelligence is boosted, what else could be changed as well?" she wondered with concern.

"Um...Keiichi. I don't know how to break this to you, but how are you..heehee..going to fit _this_ on your head?" Urd said, brandishing the mecha...and then dissolving into hysterical laughter. Again.

"Dammit!" Keiichi and Skuld said in unison. Watching as Urd pitched her mockery, Skuld remembered something important. Something about the delicate balance between electronics, micro-transporters and chemicals. Something about the Electro-Intellihancer being designed to be worn on the head; a relatively stable part of the body. It was not engineered to withstand jostling. Urd was treating it like a windup toy.

"DON'T SHAKE IT!" Skuld commanded Urd with a mishmash of threat and sheer panic in her voice.

Urd looked at her _little_ sister, resentful because Skuld had the audacity to use _that_ demanding tone of voice towards her. Once more, Skuld had failed to accord her the necessary respect...which was even more unforgivable because this mishap was completely Skuld's fault. She looked at the mecha, then back at Skuld, grinning mischievously.

"Oh...you mean like _this_?" Urd said gleefully as she tossed the Electro-Intellihancer up in the air.

A little too hard...

_Crash!!_

"Ooops!" Urd said as she caught the mecha as it rebounded off of the ceiling beam. It was no longer glowing or humming. Several coils and jagged glass filaments now stuck out of the Electro-Intellihancer at odd angles.

"You totally_ BROKE_ it, Big Sister!" Skuld shouted, her face rigid with angry shock.

"This is great! In fact, this is _wonderfu_l!" Keiichi bewailed with a rich sarcasm. "The biggest test in my life is in two days...and there's only one machine on the planet that can get me back to normal...and now it's _trashed_!!"

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Things are always so _crazy_ at my house!" Megumi exclaimed. This morning, she had spilled orange juice on the new imported white Swiss wool sweater Genji had bought her during her Hokkaido skiing trip. All because she happened to be eating breakfast when she first encountered her brother and his enlarged head. Unbelievably, Urd had carelessly broken the mecha that Skuld had built...thus delaying the most obvious way to restore Keiichi back to health.

Once she was informed of his 'enhanced' intelligence, Megumi was sorely tempted to take advantage of circumstances and ask her brother to do review her finals projects for her. In much the same way her beauty had been unintentionally enhanced by Belldandy three hundredfold last summer, now her brother was "Exoflop computer' smart. But there was no pill that could reverse _his_ change.

Skuld, Urd and Keiichi weren't speaking to each other. The very same three people whose joint effort was required in order to return Keiichi to normal. Her big brother had the most important examination of his life coming up on Wednesday. In fact, everyone she knew was frantic as the upcoming midterms pulled their concerns futurewards. The seniors planning to go to grad school were absolutely whipcased with stress.

Sora listened as Megumi rattled off a litany of frustrations plaguing her home life. Dressed in her trademark plaid skirt, thermals, sweatervest and dress white blouse, Sora could only nod her head.

Megumi was on autopilot chatter mode...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Where's Keiichi? He knew we hadda really important club meetin' taday! Where's da little rat, Megumi?" Tamiya bellowed, the very picture of irritation. Ootaki raised an eyebrow, nudged his mirrored wirerims down his nose, and fixed his attention on Megumi as well.

"Yeah, where's the ne'er do well?" Ootaki added.

"Ne'er do well?" Megumi remarked slyly at Ootaki's turn of phrase.

"Well, I _am_ a graduate student!" Ootaki justified.

"And all we're goin' ta talk 'bout is da next major N.I.T.M.C.C. race!" Tamiya added with feigned sarcasm. Megumi sensed that something _big_ was afoot; her two sempai were blistering with energy. Once more, she had to cover for her brother. She wished Belldandy was here, so _she_ would have to do the explaining.

"Well, as much as you guys expect me to be my brother's keeper, there's nothing I could do in this case. Keiichi had to stay home today. Sick with a headache," Megumi answered with the first excuse that swept into her mind. Well, it was _kinda_ the truth...

Sora almost giggled at the reference, her eyes twinkling underneath her round wirerims.

"Well, he's gonna be a really important part of dis new project, so tell him ta get well soon!" Tamiya said, buying her excuse. "And da next time, tell 'im to be responsible an _call in_ if he's gonna be sick!"

"When _isn't_ Keiichi important to anything this club does?" Megumi observed aloud, earning a couple of giggles from the underclassmen members.

Sometimes life rings one with fools...

"Okay...so what are you guys talking about? What's the big news?" Sora asked.

"Ahem...well, we had a big meeting of the club's 'upper administrative level' last week," Ootaki started to explain.

"Yes, we did," Chihiro interrupted as she rushed in the door to the Whirlwind Shop where the club had been holding its meetings. A waft of chill February air followed her, visible as smoke.

"And what we figured out is that this club is getting mega-lame! The N.I.T. Motor Club has been resting on its laurels after you guy's victory last year in the Solar Car Competition! Consequently, I decided that we need a challenge. We need something to inject some pride back into the club. Something which poses a _major_ challenge to our skills!" Chihiro piped out.

"So what are we going to do? Race snowmobiles? After all, it's only the middle of winter! There aren't any road races during this time of year," Sora interjected cynically. Chihiro ignored her obvious sarcasm.

"Despite the irreverent opinions of some of our _freshman_ members, I do have a well-formulated plan, don't I boys?" Chihiro cuttingly remarked.

"Yes Ma'am!" Tamiya and Ootaki snapped back in response.

"Hey! I'm a _sophomore_! Remember, Ms. Club President?" Sora said half-indignantly. She knew that she was out of her league when it came to challenging the founder of the club...and her occasional employer. Chihiro had returned from America just in time for the "Karaoke Party from Hell" that Cevn threw on Christmas Eve last year. Sora had attempted to tell Chihiro that night that she was now a second-year student at N.I.T. But Chihiro got really drunk, ostensibly because she didn't like American beer or wine. Sora had reminded her repeatedly since then, but Chihiro just kept forgetting.

"Sorry, Sora. I'm just all fired up...and I don't suffer insolence from newbies too well. As a matter of fact, I_ do_ have just the right idea to kick-start this club back to its former level of enthusiasm! Have I ever steered you guys wrong?" Several members silently shook their heads.

Reaching behind her, she whipped a cylinder out of her backpack with a dramatically deft move that reminded Megumi of a samurai sword draw.

"Behold!" Chihiro shouted, withdrawing a tightly rolled poster from the cardboard tube. Pinning it to the table with her hands, she tried to unfurl it. Halfway unrolled, the poster recoiled and rolled itself back up. Ootaki and Tamiya snickered as Chihiro went beet red with embarrassment.

"Behold...again!" she announced as she struggled with the task of unrolling the poster and tacking it up on the wall, seemingly angry at its impertinence.

Megumi jostled with the others to get a glimpse of the poster. The centerpiece of the photocollage played a beauty shot of a streamlined Nissan racecar against a richly forested nature scene. A bevy of admiring gasps and murmurs filled the room. The car possessed a lovely mechanical grace, almost feminine in nature. No wonder Chihiro had brought the poster. A car like this would inspire anyone with even the slightest interest in mechanics.

Then Chihiro read the title below it:

_"Nissan R390 hybrid version GT1. Le Mans Grand Prix, 1998."_

"No way. You gotta be kidding?" Megumi mumbled under her breath, suddenly suspicious about where this dramatic unveiling was going...

She had met Chihiro several times during her freshman year at N.I.T. When Chihiro returned from Europe and took on her brother in that insane micromotorcycle race...and _beat_ him...Megumi realized that this was no ordinary woman. She had a passion for racing that bordered on the hyperbolic. After a few more crazy racing stunts, Megumi had to admit that Chihiro's gearbox was just a little too loosely wound.

As if to confirm Megumi's suspicions, Chihiro was aglow with an unbridled enthusiasm, momentarily forgetting the Club members as she stared at the poster as if it was the portrait of a lover. Tamiya and Ootaki were making circular motions with their fingers next to their temples, pointing at Chihiro from behind her back.

Megumi and Sora giggled despite themselves.

"Tamiya...Ootaki..._Stop_! Stop it this instant!" Chihiro commanded. "I can see your shadows, you saps!"

Tamiya and Ootaki halted in mid-gesture as the whole club exploded into tense laughter at Chihiro's 'bust' of the two sempai.

"With all due respect, Chihiro-sempai...this is a _student_ motorcycle club. What you are planning is for us to take on the pinnacle event of the racing world. And it's in _France_, for crisesakes! The only French I know is french fries and french kissing!" Ootaki said with a concerned frown.

"Which doesn't go too good together," someone commented.

Megumi felt her facial nerves give way at this...she wasn't the only one who harbored reservations about Chihiro's strange giving-calling. And obviously, she had company among her Motor Club teammates. Tamiya and Ootaki, who were usually cowed by their sempai, Chihiro, were furtively looking at the team members, trying to wordlessly dissuade them.

"Gather round, because I want to tell you all a little story. Listen up! As you know, last year I was in America finishing my post-grad school studies at Cal Polytech. One weekend a year ago this month, I happened to catch a race being broadcast on ESPN4. During this race, I..snff..saw a team of racers that the TV anchors termed 'student misfits from Japan'..snffsnff..win a very special race, defeating..snff..a whole field of some of the brightest corporate sponsors!" she said, struggling to maintain her composure. Wiping her eyes with her sleeve, Chihiro walked over to a section of the Whirlwind shop with a beatup paint tarp hangin against the wall. She carefully pulled the paint spattered drop away...

"And I saw that..snff..race team walk off with _that_ trophy over there!" she exclaimed with pride as she pointed at the Solar Car championship trophy.

"Oh..my..Goddess!" Megumi heard Sora gasp as the exquisitely crafted trophy caught everyone's attention. The room rippled to an eerie silence as each Club member felt the swarming emotional impact of what they were seeing. The last time anyone on the team had seen this trophy up close was the night they had won the Solar Federation race. The next day, the trophy was commandeered by N.I.T. officials and hidden away for several weeks, until it was "unveiled"...locked away in a huge glass display case in the central lobby of the Admin. Building.

Megumi glanced at Sora in shock, then at Tamiya and Ootaki. The two grad students shrugged their shoulders and smiled smugly as if to say "_she made us do it!_"

"They _stole_ it from the Admin. Building!" Megumi realized with a spinetingling shock. The trophy was displayed on a decorated table with all the conspicuity of a revered kamidana or butsudan. Ootaki had even put a large offering bowl in front of it, filled with several sticky-rice balls and a couple nori sushi rolls.

"When I saw all your faces on my TV, halfway around the globe, I never felt prouder in my life! Proud to have started this club. Proud to see what heights it had scaled. I want to be proud again. I was..snff..in_ America_ when you guys won the Solar Car Competition. I wasn't _here_, with you...where I belonged. I completely missed it!! And no matter what anybody says...that trophy you guys _earned_ belongs _here_! With _our_ Club!"

"Chihiro can sure work a crowd," Sora whispered to her. Megumi couldn't help but be moved by the sight of the trophy. She felt a momentary sense of regret that her brother wasn't here to experience this emotionally-laden moment.

"Now, I want to be here, with you, as we take on an even greater challenge! I've put _a lot_ of planning and work..snff..into this. I've called in every favor anyone ever owed me. I've spent hundreds of hours in discussions with various corporate types. I've done all the groundwork. For you guys. For the club."

Megumi felt a chill tingle through her wrists and fingers; partially from her rekindled victory-pride, partially from the realization that Chihiro was totally earnest about taking the Club to France to race in the Le Mans.

"This _isn't_ my idea of a joke. I _really_ think we can make it to Le Mans! Is anyone with me on this?" Chihiro noted, finished her rousing speech.

Silence filled the Whirlwind Motorcycle Shop with a windy whisper. Megumi glanced around the steelframed portable building; she could tell that every N.I.T. Motor Club member was moved by Chihiro's appeal. _She_ was moved as well, feeling brimmed with a powerful sense of spirit...a strong desire and an even stronger determination.

"Can anyone here say 'Vive le France!'?" Chihiro asked with ardent enthusiasm.

"Peorth can," Megumi whispered a private joke to herself.

"Nah. But ah sez...'Vive Nekomi'!" Tamiya said unexpectedly. A moment later, Megumi threw her caution to the winds, raised her hand and moved that the N.I.T club commit itself fully to Chihiro's plan.

It was either going to be the biggest racing exploit in the history of Japanese motor sports...or the biggest folly. But the N.I.T. Motor Club was built on a foundation mixture of both; Megumi's comrades were quick to seize the moment and vote unanimously to undertake the attempt.

"Gee, this is _really_ going to be fun!" Sora noted after the vote was finished.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"You gotta be kidding! Chihiro wants us to rebuild an old Formula 1-type race car? And then enter it in some endurance race? She's totally, completely, absolutely..._nuts_!" Keiichi exclaimed, his voice raptured with incredulous disbelief.

"Yep, as if there's anyone in the Club who doesn't know that by now!" Megumi agreed.

"So?" Keiichi asked, reluctantly wanting to hear more about Chihiro's crazy inspiration.

"Somehow, our N.I.T. M.C.C. founder got a line on a donor who wants to give it to our club. Some top-level exec at Nissan who knows her father. After all, you know how Chihiro's family has all sorts of connections. Two of her uncles were on the NISMO...the Nissan Motorsport International design team. By the way, the car we're supposed to get is one of the R390 GT1s. The R390s won several endurance races in the late 1990s prototype touring car racing cycle. The engine is a VRH 35L II twin turbocharged 6-cylinder unit. It has an X-Trac 6 speed sequential gearbox and carbon fiber brakes. It's been garaged since 2001, so the chassis obviously will have some defects like deformed metal, loose joints and rust...but the motor checks out okay according to Chihiro. In fact, the exec who was keeping it in storage is a fastidious car collector; he guaranteed her that it is in tip-top shape!" Megumi accounted of the recent events at the club.

"Sounds like this is Chihiro all over the place...hatching another one of her foolcrazy ideas!"

"And that isn't the worst of it, big bro! Chihiro wants us to drop almost all of our club fund on repairs and upgrades...and travel."

"Huh? Travel? Where?"

"Does the name Le Mans mean anything to you?" Keiichi swallowed hard as the improbable scenario formed in his mind.

"You..gotta..be..shitting..me!! She can't be _serious_?" he said, deadly serious. Megumi nodded her head, and grinned at her brother as he put a hand to his double-X sized forehead in stunned dramatic disbelief.

"In fact, the club's already voted on it. She can be very persuasive, you know."

"_What_ did they vote on? The car? The travel? I'd love to fly to France to witness the running of the Le Mans as much as anyone, maybe drive on that legendary track with all its chicanes, but..."

"We'll have to file our request right away, because they'll be selecting from the pool of eligible teams in late March. If we're picked, we'll go in late April for a series of technical and administrative verifications...and then we'll race in the pre-qualifying trials..."

"WHAT?! We'll _RACE_?!" Keiichi shouted, interrupting her.

"...and _if_ we qualify, then on June 7th, 20XX the N.I.T. Motor Cycle Club will fly to Paris, France, and then travel by bus to Le Mans. On June 11th, the N.I.T. entry will be weighed in, scrutineered and judged. Following this, we'll enter in qualifying heats the next two days. If we make the cut, then we'll race in the Diamond Anniversary Le Mans Gran Prix on June 16th, 20XX."

"We're going to _race_? This...is total insanity! An absurd fantasy. The odds are...lemme see...uh, roughly 1:(2.4 x 10-9th power) cubed! The club doesn't even have that kind of money..." Keiichi pointed out.

"Remember that 2 million yen which a grateful N.I.T. president allocated us for a club fund because of our winning the Solar Car Race? According to Sora, we've barely scratched it. Not to mention that Nissan is sponsoring our entry with some cold hard megayen."

"I can just see it...Sora's probably all fired up on this idea!" Keiichi said in a low voice, than shifted to imitate Sora's chirpysweet voice. "I can just hear it now...'Just think, guys! It'll be fun for us to race in the Le Mans!'"

Megumi couldn't help but giggle at his vaude imitation of her best friend.

"Yep! Sora thinks it's going to be really fun to race in the Le Mans! So I guess that means we're going to have a lot of fun!" Megumi noted.

"Chihiro!" Keiichi said with disgust. "She must have had this planned for a long time! She even lined up Nissan as a _sponsor_? The nerve of that damned woman! A car like that costs over a _hundred million yen_! Can you imagine what the parts would cost? What if we screw up their prized car?"

"_Our_ prized car," Megumi corrected. "We get the car, as long as Nissan gets the big sticker space on the doors. I kinda like the idea myself. Besides, I always wanted to visit Paris. Especially with Genji!" Megumi sighed dreamily.

"Earth to Megumi! This isn't going to be a dreamy romantic scene...you, the Eiffel Tower, your boyfriend, a bottle of French champagne, and a violinist playing next to your dinner table!" he teased in a serious voice. "We don't even have access to high end quality racing parts..."

"Lemme see. My boyfriend, who _is_ a full-fledged Club member as I last recall...has a family that's worth...oh, let's figure...about one and a half _trillion_ yen. That sounds about right. He could ask for an advance on his scholastic allowance for a few months, and we'd have a few mill to play around with. Add to that Tamiya's new girlfriend, from the same said billionaire family. Chihiro's family is also quite wealthy..."

"So what? That only reduces the odds by 14/64. We don't have the engineering qualifications..."

"Which is why I asked Chihiro to fax the specs to Whirlwind tonight. We presently have a member of our club whose IQ is somewhere up there in orbit with the new Hubble/Suzuki telescope."

"You mean _me_? Huhn-uh!! What if I refuse?"

"Could you really face Chihiro, Tamiya, Ootaki and the rest of us if you did? Not to mention that _I_ wouldn't forgive you!" Megumi shot back, relying on her strong suite. One of the advantages of being a woman with lofty ambitions and the gall to pursue them was the fact that she could outmaneuver her older brother when it came to a pinch. This was definitely a tight pinch...everything depended on whether or not she could press Keiichi into service.

While he still had his enhanced mental abilities.

"Let's face it, big brother! You wound up this way by a quirk of fate. I don't think there's anything weird or unethical about taking advantage of this opportunity to create the best racecar design possible!"

"Well...I suppose. Okay. You got a point there, sis. And I wouldn't want to get on your bad side," he teased, playfully swatting her with a rolled up paper.

"So you'll do it?" she asked excitedly.

"I haven't decided for sure yet. If I do decide to help, I'll be limited by the current state-of-the-art engineering techniques. That lowers the odds to 1:12,424. But we can't just rely on designs and engineering alone! We need _three_ drivers! Hopefully in the midst of her rah-rah gung-ho speechifying, Chihiro managed to drive the fact home to you guys that the Le Mans is a _24-hour_ race! I, for one, have never even driven _anything_ faster than 260kph! Those cars drive on regular highways at _350kph_! Besides, I don't know if I can drive that long. We'd have to get someone outside of the club to drive...which would make it someone else's project."

"We _do_ have three drivers. And all of them are N.I.T. Motor Club members. One of them drove for almost 40 hours last summer in a racing simulation, and the other one..." Megumi said, swallowing a couple deep gulps as she chose her words carefully.

"Eh? _Nooo way_. You mean that..." Keiichi looked at her with accusing eyes.

"_Ulp!_" Megumi gulped, afraid of how her brother would react to this particular spin on the club's plan. She had played with the idea that when she broached the news to Keiichi, she would present herself as initially resistant to Chihiro's idea; when actually, she supported it. Well, mostly supported it in principle. Thinking she was against it at first, Keiichi would be easier to sway to her view. In his mind, he'd start off thinking that she was in accord with his outlook on the subject. This tactic was usually successful in the past. But this...might be stretching it a bit. Especially with a mega-smart version of her older brother.

"The other driver has a long-held ambition to drive in a race. She's enthusiastic, and really thinks this is going to be fun, and she...

"Sora?!" Keiichi blurted in a scratchy voice of exasperation. He didn't need his enhanced intelligence to hear her pixie voice in his head, saying her renowned tag-phrase. "Sora...and _you_...will be the other two drivers?!"

"Yeps!! Sora and I are going to be on your driving team for the first two legs. They voted us in this afternoon," Megumi countered with all the enthusiasm she could muster.

"But you're..._girls_!! This _increases_ the odds to 1:1,364,981. And you're my _sister_! What if something happens to you?" he said in a worrisome voice.

"Overlooking that you called me a 'girl' for the moment...what's with all these odds you keep quoting, Big Brother? Besides, you ever give pause to think _how I feel_ every time my big brother goes off to drive in a race? You haven't forgotten who is the BMX Racing Queen, have you? Huh? Besides, does the name Tomiko Yoshikawa mean anything to you?" Megumi fired back, feeling indignant at his waggish disregard for her abilities.

"Okay, so you're the Racing Queen. But this is wayyy different! And I don't know of any Tomiko...Yoshi...no. Waitaminute! She drove in the Le Mans back in 1995!" he said, remembering every name on a list he had seen in a magazine years ago.

"Yep!" Megumi said with a triumphant smile.

"_She_ drove in the big race! So your little chauvinist 'girls can't race' argument is nothing but blown-out sour sushi mash," Megumi concluded with a verbal flourish, grinning like a she-wolf eyeing a stray lamb.

"All this 'hyper' intelligence courtesy of Skuld...and my brother _still_ can't win an argument with me!" she privately observed with pride. She almost wanted to giggle...

"But..._Sora_?" Keiichi didn't know whether to laugh or cry at the vision of little Sora in a big racing car. It seemed that this was another case of 'when the cat's away, the foxes will play'.

"If I was only there, I could have talked sense into the other club members before they voted to invest in this foolhardy adventure!" Keiichi remonstrated aloud. Megumi made a moue with her mouth, and then delivered the fatal thrust.

"Why?! Remember how everyone thought it was a big joke when we entered the Solar Car Competition? And then we majorly kicked ass and won that race! And by the way, the trophy is now in Chihiro's Whirlwind Shop. Just in case you've forgotten what it looks like, you can stop into your workplace and see it, any time of the day!" Megumi shouted, getting in his face so close that he could smell her mint-gum breath.

Keiichi felt his resistance squelch beneath the thrust of Megumi's argument. They _had_ done the impossible, last spring. They had done the impossible again; it must have been some feat to snatch the trophy from the Admin. Building. It was one of N.I.T.'s prize possessions, kept in a locked and alarmed display.

"But then again, it was the_ Le Mans_ that they were talking about..." Keiichi cursed under his breath, realizing that he had just been rope-a-doped by his little sister into helping them. He knew full well that if he didn't offer his help, they wouldn't stand "a grasshoppers' chance in a typhoon" of even finishing the race.

"Megumi..." he finally sighed in a whining voice, letting his sister know that she had won him over to the inevitable. Which resulted in the usual sisterly tackle and tickle, punctuated with a couple pillow blows to his oversized head.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Belldandy wanted to 'fix' Keiichi's condition with a spell as soon as she saw what Skuld's device had done to him. Yet, she was afraid that a magical spell might exacerbate the problem in much the same manner as Urd had done when Mara changed Keiichi to a lizard three years ago. And Urd was much more skilled than she in magicks. Her best skill was wisdom, which didn't seem to offer much under these trying circumstances.

A sense of guilt bested her, as she found herself placing the blame squarely on her own shoulders for this mishap. In a way, it _was_ her fault. Skuld had simply observed her pining away for her boyfriend, and had tried to rectify the situation with juvenile haste. She had to admit that some times, her longing for Keiichi tended to extend itself into a mini-drama...as she would pout and sigh and mope around the house in a very un-Goddess-like manner when she was heartsick for her beloved mortal boyfriend.

"Urd warned me about being so moody around Skuld..." she chided herself.

Yet, despite Skuld's best intentions..._this_ had happened.

But in the end, Skuld was working hard to rebuild a device that could fit Keiichi's enlarged head...and in record time, no less. Belldandy had 'motivated' her with the threat of a household ban on ice cream.

Despite the current turmoil, there was one very bright spot in the Morisato household...reprieve against her worries about Keiichi's condition. In fact, every time she turned her thoughts towards it, Belldandy sensed her heart being honeyed with a joyful cheer.

This morning, Kodama, Hikari and Senrigan had visited her. She could tell immediately that the three Ninjettes were ecstatic about their new Ninja companions. Kodama and Hikari were extremely high-spirited...far more than usual...while Senrigan seemed aglow with a telltale feminine blush.

It was then that Belldandy found out that Senrigan had changed her name to Nojomi.

"It was her first time with a male, so we decided that it would be proper to give her an adult name...now that she's a real woman!" Hikari said with martial pride as Nojomi blushed with a meek grin.

"Yeah, she didn't waste any time with Musashi!" Kodama said with a knowing laugh.

"Or maybe he didn't waste any time with her!" Hikari commented, reducing two of the three Ninjettes to girlish giggles.

"H..hey you guys! Cut it out! Just because you..." Nojomi protested. With this, the three engaged in vigorous arguing; a sign that they were very content with the new changes in their lives. Belldandy had watched with amusement as their banter spilled over into playful sparring; each Ninja girl showing off her Ninjitsu skills with uninhibited glee.

Which meant that they were happily in love.

Belldandy let her thoughts stray to the three former rats...and silently wished them well in their relationship with these three Ninjette girls.

"What had Ratty called them? Victims...?" she thought with a winsome smile. If they had half as much fun as the three Ninja girls had on their 'honeymoons', then regret would be the last thing on the minds of three former rats...who were now three deeply lovestruck Ninjas by this point.

Unfortunately, _her_ own 'victim' was holed up in his bedroom because of his mesocerebal condition. Belldandy downed the rest of her tea in an un-ladylike gulp, and decided to go to Skuld Labs and 'motivate' her sister some more.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Aha!!"

Mara stared at the framed photo she had just discovered in Isilblius's room. Somehow, she just _knew_ that Isilblius was keeping a secret from her.

It had taken her a week, but she was finally able to circumvent the shielding curse that he put up to protect his room. Her Ultimate Demon charge had impulsively decided to take a brief sojourn to visit some of the other Multiverse Sectors. Mara was splendidly happy that Isilblius was finally out of her hair, so she had taken advantage of his absence to snoop. His spells were very powerful...yet ripely simple to unravel. Mara was relieved to have her lair to herself, the first time since she had 'birthed' Isilblius. She regarded the image in the picture like Hamlet regarding the skull of Yorick.

"Alas, poor Urd, I knew her well. Part Goddess of infinite jest, part Demoness of most excellent fancy...bwa hah hah!" she parodied. Her Isilblius was _way_ out of the Goddesses' league in Divine firepower. Pretty much out of anyone's league. This smuggled photograph could mean only one thing...that he was obsessed with Urd.

_But this..._

This was Fate twisting itself into its most amusingly vulgar tangle yet. Mara had been secretly amused by Isilblius' reaction to being spurned by her. He was pissed...and then he had pouted and withdrawn to his room for several days.

"And all this time, I thought he was just suffering from the usual teenage angst. Meanwhile...he was plotting _this_!" she said to Urd's picture. She had suspected that the horny little devil would turn his attentions towards one of the Demon Grief Office agents currently on assignment on the Earthrealm.

_But this..._

This only confirmed that Isilblius was a Demon with the highest grade of deviltry in his blood. Mara regarded Urd's sweet face in the photo with a sneering smile.

Urd's sickeningly demure face. A false image...as Urd was anything but demure.

"This is going to be _hilarious_!! How are you going to react when the most powerful Demon in existence makes known his sexual inclinations towards you? Goddess of Love, indeed! This will give an entirely new meaning to the word 'crush'! Hahhhahahaah!"

And Mara would witness the chase...the ensuing chaos...from a front row seat.

_But this..._

Mara chuckled with malign joy as she thought about Belldandy and Skuld. A Demon like Isilblius would chew them up and spit them out without as much as an eyeblink. He had recently sent all three Norns forward in time...and made it look effortlessly easy. Doing that to the _Norns_...in their own realm of Time! And they barely made it back alive, from the snippets of conversation she had picked up while her Sere-Hawks surveiled the temple. She was still amazed that he had even pulled it off. And that was _years_ ago, as far as his rapidly developing Demonic age-equivalent went.

He was only a _child_ then.

Mara knew that the Urd's two sisters possessed strong protective instincts. Once Isilblius made his intentions clear, Belldandy and Skuld's sibling protection attitudes would manifest in force; bringing both of them into a faceoff with the Ultimate Demon.

"Hahahahaha!" Mara was elated beyond belief by her good fortune.

_But this..._

Mara realized with vicarious pride that Isilblius must have obtained the photo from that accursed temple the Goddesses lived in. Which meant that he had _already_ been there; easily thwarting detection by Skuld's trashpile robotic servants.

The only time Mara had left him to himself was during Urd's karaoke party and the holidays...when she returned to Vanagdrasil to visit her parents, Baeeal and Myducia. He must have performed his perfidy then.

Now that he could come and go as he pleased in Belldandy and Keiichi's temple home, things are definitely going to heat up!

"This...is...going...to...be...a...riot!" Mara said, then returned the picture to its place.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Keiichi examined the draft specs for the Nissan R390 GT1. He instantly realized that he would have to trim at least 200kg from its chassis weight. A polymer mesh would do the trick. The wishbone braking system would need to be reinforced, if not rebuilt, because of carbon decay over the past several years. The engine compression would need to be increased as well without deforming the aluminum...

It would be a breeze to redesign this car!

He scribbled notes and sketches all over the drawing board. Increase the cam sizes while reducing the friction by optimizing the plenum boost pressure. Create a more efficient engine stat computer system by employing nodes, rather than a bulky central unit. Remold the carbon chassis with a magnesium weave for greater flexibility, recontour the spoiler and lower it slightly, reroute the cooling system to maximize engine endurance...

"I better make these notes comprehensible, because when Skuld manages to restore my condition to normal, I'll need a veritable exegesis to decipher whatever I'm writing now," he told himself.

The novel "Flowers for Algernon" kept coming to mind as he furiously calculated formulae and designs.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Skuld had rings under her eyes as she adjusted the headset to fit more snugly on Keiichi's head. Belldandy and Urd were watching on, both of their faces sweatily apprehensive. Skuld was disappointed in their lack of confidence in her. But then again, Elder Sister didn't have enough confidence in _herself_ to simply cast one of her spells to return Keiichi to normal. And Big Sister had simply refused to "bail her out".

Which told Skuld that this was a very delicate matter to Belldandy.

With a flash of regret, Skuld sensed that she would miss this Keiichi. Not the physical Keiichi sitting on the floor in front of her...he was completely _ugly_ with that big turtle head of his. But the intellectual attributes of this Keiichi; now she would definitely miss _that_. She had tested him, playfully creating deliberate mistakes that forced him to challenge her on several areas of her A.I. design for the new Electro-Intellihancer Mk V. His problem-solving efforts were impressive: he had turned out right almost every time. Skuld grudgingly admitted that he was somewhat close to being her equal in mechanization engineering.

"But not even quite my equal," she reminded herself. Despite his enhanced intelligence, Keiichi didn't have a clue as to the higher-level Yggdrasilian concepts she so easily utilized. He was still used to thinking with Earthrealm orientations. Three...maybe four dimensions. Not the nine dimensions that she was used to.

Belldandy and Urd had repeatedly warned her not to reveal 'secrets' to him. As a result, Skuld had a severe headache from the constant mental shielding she had to employ to keep him from reading her mind.

Not to mention that she quickly learned that she needed to prevent _herself_ from picking up on very clumsy, yet powerful thoughtcasts pounding around in her mind; the result of Keiichi's blarehorn-loud telepathic shouts. If she had learned anything about Keiichi during the past two days they worked together on the E.I. Mk. V., she learned that he was _obsessed_ with her sister! Every second of every moment, Belldandy was always on his mind; a mental and emotional anchor in the midst of the storm of his life.

"Ready?" she asked.

"Ready" he replied nervously.

"Power on!" she said as she hit the button on her remote.

The helmet began to glow with arcane energies...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

When I pry the veneer off, reaching past the pretenses, digging wetfingered between the ribs of the matter...I am a coward.

Years ago, I had lost any passion I had for living. The ark that was my lifeforce had floated adrift in a senseless depression. Then a Goddess came into my life and granted my deepest unspoken wish. Not to mention that she adorned my world with a host of unwished graces.

But...unlike Keiichi, I turned away from her. Unlike Keiichi, I didn't have the courage to face life and love with a Goddess. Granted, Belldandy's genteel nature is rarefied, while Urd's capricious nature is resolved. To Belldandy's soft breeze, Urd was like a tornado.

Shame is the most cyclical of emotions. Unbidden, it pervades my free thoughts with cryptic abandon, allowing me to cheapen myself by associating the irrational with the disconsolate. Shame plagues upon my self esteem, casting about irrational ideas like "I'm miserable because I make others miserable" or "I _have_ to have a girlfriend." Shame even magnifies itself every time I think of those whom I disappointed by my squeamishness. The fact that I hurt Urd...also hurts them all.

But what we had between us never could bloom. So I chickened out and took the soft road towards destiny. Now I will never know if the dreams I wrote were ledgered upon my heart, or simply hidden inside of a drop of water, unreadable and unreachable.

As I contrasted myself to Keiichi, I realized that I never could fully appreciate the immense inner strength that he manifested. _He_ could handle Urd. Well, maybe not handle her, but endure her tempestuous nature. All for Belldandy's sake.

He had lived with all three Goddesses for four years. From my perspective, this was nothing short of a superhuman feat. Urd's oft-demonstrated duality had caused him all sorts of grief, but Keiichi seemed to take her 'insane' alter-ego in stride. Of course, Keiichi always seemed to be a superhuman sort of guy in my eyes; obviously I was sensing a quality in him that Belldandy had fully appreciated when she decided to share her life with him.

Unlike myself. A flawed man who had no superhuman traits of courage and kindness whatsoever. I didn't have a supernatural side to me at all. Urd, the mural of her lifestyle being unstable and crazy, was probably drawn to me by the same qualities. She had heeded to me because I was crazy and ­

heartsick. Watching the sun setting on the silver shore of apartment blocks stretching into the horizon towards the shadow-mountains of the southern Boso Peninsula, I agonized over my decision for the thousandth time.

I had wanted to hang a picture of the 'gang' on my wall, but instead of this, a cheap plastic Asahi clock adorned the corner, covering the patch of spackle I had put there after punching a hole in the wall a few days ago.

Like the hole in my heart.

All the anger I could muster towards Urd's addiction.

I had a chance to create my own heaven and share it with another...and I blew it...

_nokka nokka_

My doorbell without a bell announced my first visitor.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Megumi comes off like a dynamo at times, filled with bursts of energy. This seemed to be one of those times. As soon as I let her in my studio apartment, she seemed to whirlwind about the place, asking questions and making comments about my apartment. Initially, I was totally embarrassed by the sparse trappings of my studio. I had a six-tatami room, with a standup kitchen and a toilet. About 17 square feet in the 'living room'. The closet for my futon was filled with boxes of books. More texts were piled on the floor with typical indie clutter.

Even worse, my nerves scrawled grit over my comfortability as I realized that Megumi could plainly see my futon 'bed'. I had never gotten over the fear of being molested in my own bed, so painfully often in childhood. Ofttimes, I would feel unbearably exposed and vulnerable if my sleeping quarters were open to anyone's view. This was one of those times...I had to fight an intense urge to flee my own apartment.

In fact, Megumi was sitting on it, because I only had a single small zabuton that I used for meditation. After a few compliments about my little slice of Japanese apartment living, she had simply plopped herself on the now-folded futon that served as a pseudo couch. In a way, I was glad that she was oblivious to my panic. Or was she?

So I offered my guest the futon...which she had already claimed as her own.

At least my apartment was clean. Disordered enough to qualify as a bachelor pad, to be sure. The sweet smell of incense was beginning to adhere to the walls. From my position, I was looking up to Megumi. She was about a foot above me, sitting cross-legged on the folded futon as I sat on the floor.

"Cevn-sensei, did you know that Urd's come back home?" she said after making some small talk.

"No. Not that I care," I answered, trying to appear unconcerned. Inside, the seat of my soul was turning loopdyloops at this bombshell news. I immediately suspected that Megumi was _up to something_.

"Oh, come _on_! Quit with the 'I don't care' crap!" she said with near-dudgeon. "I know for a fact that you still care about her. A lot. So don't tape-loop your baka dishonesties with me!"

"Is this why you came here, to taunt me with the one doorway to a reality that I cannot be part of?"

"Cevn, you don't know how hard it's been on all of us since you moved out. Not just Urd, but..."

"Megumi, that is exactly why I moved here! Because I felt like being around you guys would just betray your feelings even more."

"You idiot! I _cried_ the night you moved out! More than once, too. Because it felt like a big loss, from where I stand. In some ways, it was even worse than when you left for China unannounced. Because this time, I knew _why_...and I still couldn't stop you from going on your merry way. So now, I'm going to try and talk some sense into that idiot head of yours!" she said angrily.

"Look, you can't just hide here! This place has 'hole in the ground' written all over it...and you're not an ostrich! You need to learn a new language of the heart, or else you'll die inside," she said, confronting me with no withholds.

I was stunned by this. Was this the same Megumi, Keiichi's happy-go-lucky little sister? The same girl that sweetly asked me to be an 'adopted big brother' when I first arrived in Japan, because she wanted a mature male in her life? What a laugh! Me…a mature male figure? Now she was pulling me up, drawing up the most confrontational stance she could in the midst of this ocean of words.

"Okay, you got my attention! Now tell me why I should believe that anything has changed?" I asked, desperately hoping that she _could_ convince me that something has changed.

"_You_ need to change! You need to get some amae in that stubborn heart of yours!"

For the next hour, Megumi patiently explained amae to me. Not the academic amae that I had studied from scholars like Doi, Sato, Singer, Benedict and others. She used examples from her own life, teaching me what it _meant_ to have a passively accommodating dependence on others. She explained that, in Japan, the child is raised within a context of total freedom, which is gradually enmasked in a series of increased demands to conform and be responsible in the steady march towards adulthood. She contrasted this with child rearing in America, where the child initially is strictly sanctioned, and then experiences a gradual and confusing release towards individualism. She reminded me that I had a group of close intimates in my life…her, Keiichi, the Goddesses, the N.I.T. crew, Sayoko…that I was completely avoiding.

From her perspective, I was viewing my allegiance to the group deconstructively, rather than constructively. Instead of seeing how my individually had been melded into the group, I was instead measuring the group by how it impacted my individuality. Thus, to her, my withdrawal from the household reeked of false-heartedness. She aptly described how she interpreted my withdrawal; in the social context, she told me that I was experiencing an illusion of an illusion...reacting to the distinct 'differentness' of Japanese culture by creating my own quasi-myths. Then I was employing these conceits to their fullest by withdrawing from my closest friends...an act of active dependence, because it was an _active rejection of dependence_!

That floored me.

But Megumi continued, arguing that, for the same reason, my dependence on Urd was superficial, because it was active, rather than passive.

So active in its nature...that it thwarted any possible healthy mutual dependence.

Megumi then confronted me on another illusion...the male illusion of the "perfect woman". She went for the throat. In her opinion, I was sabotaging my relationship with Urd because I expected _too much_ from her! Megumi accurately observed that I was compensating for years of loneliness by ­using the 'perfect woman' orientation to shelter my heart. But it was actually doing little else but justifying...in a distorted fashion...my continuing attempts to make sense of all the woundings I had experienced in past relationships with women. By expecting too much from her, I was then poised to expect too much from myself; a standard I would always fail to achieve. Failing in this manner, I was only strengthening my view that I was even more of a loser.

In order for me to save myself from myself, Megumi stated baldly that I had to risk letting go of my unreasonable expectations on myself...and Urd. Plus, she demanded that it was absolutely vital that I needed to reinvigorate my relationships with my Makuhari friends.

I had no words to fence with. Since when did she become a psychologist? I realized with appreciation that Megumi had obviously _studied_ to prepare herself for this.

During midterms, too.

I felt that I owed it to her to at least visit the temple. Once I agreed to do this, she forgot herself for a moment and tackled me to the ground with 'sisterly' enthusiasm, cuffing me lightly on the head and shoulders.

Then I told her about the irony of my birthday. I was born on Valentine's Day. I half-expected her to crack up laughing and call me a liar...so I showed her my N.I.T. Faculty ID to prove it to her.

"So now that you're _30_, I won't be able to trust you anymore!" she teased. I tried to conceal my misery: Megumi had exposed so many raw nerves in the past hour that I felt balled up emotionally...plus I was feeling like the golden years of my youth were going to flee away on my 30th birthday.

As she kissed me on the cheek after she put her winter coat on, I thanked God I didn't freak out on her! Guess this was one of those times she was really genki...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Oh...my...God!" Chihiro shouted in a gasping voice as she lifted up the back door of the semitrailer that contained their new racecar.

"Father didn't tell me about _you_," she purred to the car as she rested a leather gloved hand on its hood. The other N.I.T. club members were stuck by the strong emotional display from the normally uppity, tomboyish Chihiro. Her back to them, she appeared to be sobbing gently.

"Chihiro...are you okay?" Tamiya and Ootaki asked nervously.

"Yes. I'm..snff.._incredibly_ okay, you guys! Hey Keiichi! They sent us #32!" she said, her voice echoing inside the open truck trailer.

"You mean they sent us car #32? That's the car that placed 3rd in the 1998 Le Mans!" Keiichi commented incredulously, shivering more from nervousness than from the chill February air.

"This is one of the most famous racecars in all of Japan!" Chihiro explained to Keiichi, Megumi, Sora and the others. As if they didn't know...their faces were all filled with awe.

The racecar in the back of the semi was a beaut, no doubt. It still sported its numerous racing sponsor decals with pride. Its aerodynamic contours retained their futuristic harmony, even though it was over ten years old. #32 still sported a bright cherry red chassis; the paint sparely faded and peeling in only a few places.

Cherry red. The N.I.T. team had never raced anything with such a bright color. Never had raced anything like _this_ car.

Almost 500 Nissan technicians had created her in a burst of engineering genius a decade ago. Keiichi knew that a decade was almost forever in terms of design technology timeframes, especially when that technology was intended to probe the limits of the possible.

Chihiro turned to her N.I.T. teammates, tears rolling down her cheeks.

"Isn't she...adorable?" she said in tearful admiration.

"Wowwwww!" Tamiya said, finally giving word to his awe. This was simply the most incredible car he had ever laid eyes on. A dream car. A _super_ car.

"This car costs a h..hundred million yen!" Ootaki gasped, so nervous he was shivering. "D..don't break it!"

"You have da parts list?" Tamiya asked Sora.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Belldandy and Skuld had left to spend some quality sister time at an ice cream shoppe. Urd had the house all to herself. Today was the day before Valentine's Day. Tomorrow, her sister would be especially sappy around Keiichi...which would give her a perfect excuse to "drop in" on Cevn's apartment. After all, the Lord had hinted that she should visit him on Valentine's Day.

His birthday.

She was watching a daytime soap on the TV when she heard a knocking on the shoji door to her hobby room. She floated up and pulled the door aside.

"_CEVN!!_" she shouted, besides herself at his unexpected visit. She felt her heart fluttering at the sight of him. With a determined effort, she calmed her exuberance down to a low roar as she invited him in. The last thing she wanted him to expect was that she would simply invite him back in her life...after he made a fitting apology, of course.

"Urd, I just wanted to say that I'm sorry for what happened between us, and that I want us to try again. To try and make things work..."

Urd was so stunned, she dropped the remote.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --


	47. Pt 47: Absinthe

**Part 47: Absinthe**

Urd couldn't believe her sudden windfall of good fortune!

He was in her arms at last! She felt a whirlwind of passion drumming in her breast, filling her with an exhilarating ardor. To her utter amazement, the unseen but omnipresent Ultimate Force had somehow withdrawn its unerring prohibition. For the first time since she had fallen in love with him, they could touch.

And..._how_ he was touching her! Passionately, hungrily, impatiently...

She was giddy in the swarming nectar of sensations that deliciously gripped her. Yet, something in the back of her mind kept beckoning; beaconing past shivers of pleasure with an irksome persistence. Catching her breath, Urd paused to listen to her inner voice just as he was undoing her blouse.

_This_ wasn't like Cevn! Her boyfriend was a sex-starved mortal male, to be sure. She could read it in his eyes...had seen it for a long time. Urd knew that he had often felt heart-dead in romantic matters, at least by mortal reckoning. And Cevn was regretfully saddled with an almost paranoid regard towards sexuality. Mortal adolescent boys weren't even one-tenth as uncomfortable about sexual matters as he was. And yet, in _this_ moment, he seemed to have completely discarded his customary fear of being close to her, of being physical with her. Which was about time, since she _was_ the Goddess of Love.

She was unsettled. What had happened to change him? Urd reflected on the fact that Cevn had broken up with her several weeks ago. Now he had reversed his decision. Disavowing his foolery, he had returned to her.

Where he belonged.

But Urd was confused. Despite everything, it didn't feel _right_.

"Hee hee...Cevn, what's come over you? Not that I don't like it...but you never were this bold before! How did you shed your fear of the garden of delights?" Urd asked sultrily, half-teasingly.

"Urd, my beloved. I'm...just a new man," he replied, then kissed her with a smothering kiss, stroking her hair. Urd felt a raiment of caution wrap itself around her heart. Her feminine Goddess instincts, dormant for millennia in these kinds of situations, were pulsing with warning.

"No...wait. Wait! This is happening too fast! I need time...to think," Urd said, pushing him away slightly. She didn't want to discourage him, however. Urd giggled to herself as she acknowledged the irony of the situation. She was suddenly shy, behaving like her younger sister Belldandy. She never imagined that she would be asking Cevn to slow down his amorous advances.

But her head and heart were swimming under different waterfalls...

"NO!" he countered. Urd's smile fled as she felt a stark chill traverse her shoulders as the words of his negation registered. She realized that his voice seemed different somehow...

"_What_ are you doing? _Stop it!__"_ Urd said, her intentions suddenly serious. She pushed herself away from him, her ire bristling. In response, he gripped her arms tightly and pulled her back to his chest, roughly.

"No...I'm not going to. I don't _want_ to stop!" he said. Urd was astonished at his brusqueness. What the hell was wrong with him? He was actually being rude, not to mention childish.

"Yes you are going to stop! I said 'stop it' and I meant it!" Urd said angrily. "Let go of me, NOW!" She glared at him, trying to use her eyes to intimidate him into releasing her.

He stared back at her defiantly.

"What the hell is the matter with you?" Urd shouted as his grip tightened on her wrists. She realized that he was trying to force her on her back, trying to pin her down by her wrists. She struggled to free her arms. Slipping one slender wrist free, she arched her arm back...

SLAP!!

She saw a red skinflush spreading on his cheek where she had smacked him. Then she saw something else that was red.

A blood-red aura surrounded him, glowing visibly with arcane energy. Her free hand shot up to cover the gasp escaping from her lips...

"You're not..." she choked on her words as Cevn's face turned into a rictus of rage.

A second later, her jaw was throbbing from his punch.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Peorth ascended towards her workstation at the Earth Otasuke Division of the Goddess Relief Office. She had programmed it yesterday in "Floating Chamber" mode: detached from the main GRO Cluster. She needed some privacy to reassess her workload after the debacle with Banpei.

Yesterday, she was summoned for the final hearing regarding the pending disciplinary hearing against her. To her huge relief, instead of being fired or reassigned...Peorth had received a temporary license demotion to Goddess Second Class, First Grade. After returning to Yggdrasil after Belldandy's birthday bash, she had spent many days browknitted with concern regarding the outcome of her case. Every millennia, a qualified GRO office worker would be randomly selected to serve as Adjudicator General of the Goddess Relief Office. The AG would address any situations during the process of wish fulfillment that may require potential disciplinary action. This millennium, it was Sh'ilde who was the presiding judge. Despite being on good terms with Sh'ilde, Peorth had been certain that she would receive a full license suspension. The type of suspension Urd was renowned for receiving.

Yet, in an enigmatic unfolding of fate, Urd was the main reason why she had been given a demotion rather than a suspension. The leniency in her sanction resulted from the fact that she was only partly held to blame for the now-infamous 'Robot Incident' as her office coworkers had humorously coined it. Opportunely, Urd's inept alchemical dabbling had created mitigating circumstances in regards to Peorth's initial inability to grant Banpei's wish.

Yet, the most significant redeeming factor in her favor was, that in the end, Banpei-kun's wish _was_ granted.

Consequently, the disciplinary action she had received was far less severe than she had expected. True, a license demotion was quite humiliating to the Goddess of the Roses...but her embarrassment was tempered by Sh'ilde's comment about the leniency of her punishment.

"You could have had it _much_ worse, Peorth!" Sh'ilde had told her after the final hearing.

"So, there was a little disaster along the way. Oh well! Nothing that I couldn't handle with the help of the three Norns. Urd, much as I hate to admit it, I owe ya one!" Peorth giggled to herself as she floated closer to her office.

For once, the sisters had helped her, rather than hindered her. She was thankful that the disciplinary measures taken against her were very much on the light side. Peorth knew she had gotten off very smartly.

As an added bonus, a number of her Helper Office peers now openly admired her for being the first Earth Otasuke Division worker to fulfill the wish of an artificial construct. Of course, Banpei was the _only_ artificial construct with anything resembling sentience...the Earthrealm mortals were centuries away from designing an A.I. that could pass their Turing Test, let alone display any other attributes of mecha-intelligence. This praise somewhat countered the sting of being demoted and retained on limited duty.

"But I granted this wish in the waning weeks of last year...sooo I get to grant a wish _this_ year!" Peorth said to herself with a grin. At least she wouldn't have to sit around for a year cooped up in her office node, doing nothing…

She abruptly hovered to a dead stop. The normal cloud of pink fragrances that surrounded her workstation was conspicuously absent. Collecting her thoughts, she ascended cautiously towards her office.

And shuddered to a halt.

"M..my _roses_!!" she choked, too shocked to cry at the sight. Her succulent abundance of beautiful roses...were all dead! The cheery burgess of her rose plots had been replaced by the grim sight of rotted and withered stalks. The brilliant petals had been reduced to a floating worm-brown clutter of death.

Her carefully plaited nosegaies...withered! Her floating spheres of woven garlands of rainbow-hued shoots...no more! Her plots of blended roses, painstakingly tuned for mordacity and penetration of fragrance...now smelled of decay and rot!

Someone or something had _killed all of her roses_!

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

The nightmare was over, at last.

Urd felt warm blood dripping down her chin as he stood over her, a shadow-figure of bestial arrogance. She fought with herself to finally open her eyes; overwhelmed with terror and pain, she had clenched them tightly shut during the horror...

This _thing_ had beaten her, and then raped her, and finally tortured her. Now he was gloating over her, like a hunter over a wounded deer.

She knew for certain that this wasn't Cevn the moment he punched her. For one thing, Cevn wouldn't _ever_ resort to physical violence against her. After a stunned moment, Urd had reacted by zapping him with a low-level lightning strike...which should have immobilized any mortal. He simply grinned malignly at her. Then he beat her mercilessly.

Her physical manifestation was in rapt agony. The monstrous being was stomping around her, circling her, playing on her nerves. Urd flinched with each loud footfall, expecting to get hit or kicked again.

This _thing_ was unmistakably a Demon. The power contained in his Demonic aura was beyond anything she had experienced. It made Mara's Demoness aura appear insignificant in comparison.

Before forcing himself on her, the Demon had clawed his way out of Cevn. Urd had watched in wordless shock as 'Cevn' split open down the middle, shedding gobbets of bloody flesh and stringly sinew as the Demon emerged, covered in ochre. The Demon grew in size as he manifested his true Demonic form. For a terrible moment, Urd thought that the real Cevn had just been killed...but then she realized that the 'Cevn' the Demon had tore out of...was only a fleshclone.

This Demon had been a wolf in sheep's clothing.

The Demon was dark red, with gleaming rouge-skin and a ridiculously muscular body. He stood almost eight feet tall. His brutal face was crowned with two golden horns and wild shocks of green hair with orange streaks. His deepset bright red eyes glowed like beads of volcanic lava; his complexion was studded with ridges of small horns for eyebrows, cheekbones and jawline. His eyes spilled over with a lusty hatred which repulsed and terrified Urd. The Demon's body was covered with a rough skin scaled with small prickly spikes, and he had bone-like shards extending out of his knuckles and down the middle of his back.

He was the incarnation of terror.

Urd was reluctantly grateful that her sisters weren't here. This thing would have killed them. She had never felt such a dramatically evil Demonic presence.

"Strange how one notices things like that when she's living through her worst terror," she thought through a veil of agony. She tried to staunch the cursed memories...

Urd remembered desperately begging him to stop, whoever he was. Pleading with him. Crying at his horned feet. With each tearful protestation, he only became more vicious.

A series of body blows had worn down her resistance. This Demon wasn't content with brute savagery...he possessed a sadistic coolness and precision as he hit and clawed her. Time seemed to stand still as she couldn't resist him in the slightest. He had completely overpowered her. Vilely dominated her.

Her bedroom had become a prison.

Urd felt like every shred of dignity had been ripped from her. When it was over, she could only cover herself up with the blood stained sheet. Urd felt _dirty_. Disgustingly horrid. Her honor was besmirched; her body was ripped with cuts and bruises.

He had been _inside_ of her, had touched every inch of her skin with his horrible claws...his leatherrough lips. While he was defiling her, Urd had squeezed her eyes shut so hard she thought they would pop out. She retched at the haunting memory of his abuse. Curled up in a ball, Urd could see her own blood splattered on the walls of her bedroom.

_Her_ bedroom. It had happened in _her own bedroom_!

She could barely see out of her left eye. The image of her tormenter rendered itself hazy in her vision. There was an oozing stillness in the air, like the dearthy atmosphere in Makuhari immediately after it had borne the brunt of Supertyphoon Akira's devastation.

Urd shivered with fear, waiting for his next move. All she could do was wait. She was so battered, she couldn't even sit up if she wanted to.

Her mind wandered, attempting to desert her abused body.

Rape was an all-too-common occurrence amongst the mortals. Every minute of every day, women were being raped in the Earthrealm. Urd had never even considered the possibility that it could happen to her. There were no recorded instances of rape between Gods. During the war that Father fought in, Demons would rape Goddesses as a symbolic act of defiance; attempting to demoralize their divine counterparts. With the exception of a few incidents, most recently Tyyr's abhorrent behavior towards Bell, there had been almost no untoward sexual behavior between Gods and Goddesses in Yggdrasilian history.

"How could the Lord let this happen to me?" she thought, bitterly anguished as the pain reeled her back to the moment.

Every part of her_ hurt_. Every part of her soul was bathed in wretched indignity. Her spirit had snapcased broken from the first moment he touched her where she didn't want to be touched. Urd knew she would never be the same again. Her soul...it had been viciously violated. She had been touched by the skin of Evil itself. And somehow, the Almighty had been thwarted from finding out about this! Urd knew that the Lord would have instantly blasted this Demon into utter obliteration if He even had an inkling of what was happening to her. She felt doubly depressed and doubly frightened by the fact that this Demon had concealed this base act of Evil from her Lord.

"Why...me?" Urd gasped. She flinched again as the Demon suddenly halted his pacing and leaned down towards her.

"Urd, Norn of the Past. I want you to know who I am. I want you to know who did this to you. I am called...Isilblius," he said in a glowering voice. Urd, already weakened by his beating, could only suck a breathy inhalation of shock.

She coughed up more blood.

Isilblius...the Ultimate Demon. The stuff of barely whispered legend. An improbable mythic figure of total evil, used mostly to scare young Goddesses at night to keep them from roaming about.

If he _was_ Isilblius, then everything and everybody was in deep shit.

"How did you enjoy my gentle loving caresses?" his gravelly voice mocked. Urd felt her eyes tear up again with a hoarfrost twist of grief.

"I chose to torture you until a slight strand of lifesoul remained...for a reason. To utterly humiliate you. To hear the sweet sound of your lamentations. To see the gleam of trepidation in your eyes, the twise of pain in your expression, the blaze of agony mixed with struggling dread alarm in your being. To know for certain that I could kill a Goddess. I could have easily snuffed out your worthless life just like this!" he said as he snapped his fingers. He made a motion to kick her in the side...Urd could only flinch as she was too wounded to move. Even the flinch gripped her with agony.

"Bleah heah heh! But...I wanted you to live!" he declared.

"Wh..why?" Urd coughed, feeling the presence of several cracked ribs.

"Because I _hate_ you, half-Demon half-Goddess bitch! I hate everything you stand for. I hate all the Gods. I hate all the Demons. Especially you...because you are both. Yet, somehow, you are merely a toy...a beautiful toy for me to play with, despite your half-bred nature. I _had_ to have you...to taste the nearness of death in your Soul...and you were delicious," he answered, not so much for explanation's sake, but to degrade her some more.

"You...fucking bastard! You didn't have me...you raped me!!"

"And I'm not finished raping you!" Isilblius announced in a taunting voice that made Urd shudder. The thought of him doing anything worse to her...caused her to tremble uncontrollably. She just wanted him to go away. Wanted the violation to go away; as if it had only been a misgoverned catastrophe of imagination.

"I've raped your body. But I'm not done raping your mind. Not by any means. Know this...that you will not remember that this conversation ever occurred. You will not remember my identity or anything details about me. But I will leave you with memories, to be sure. Painful, horrible memories," he growled.

"No! I...will live...and the memories of what you did to me today will fade. I have people in my life that _love_ me. They will make sure that I'll be all right! My sister's will tell the Lord...and He'll make you quail with regret for the rest of your miserable existence!" Urd countered defiantly. With an effort, she lifted her arm up and gave Isilblius the finger.

With a flash, a dead flower appeared in his hand.

"A rose for you, my love!" he mocked, throwing it idly towards Urd like it was a piece of trash. Urd recognized with a shock that it was one of Peorth's; it had her runic symbol on one of the petals.

The symbol of Destiny.

Then the mental and physical pain claimed her...

"Witness the triumph of hate over love!" Isilblius said triumphantly with a grandiose gesture as he disappeared with a wave of his beclawed hands.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Mind is a curious, unpredictable process. Here I was, leading a class discussion on Asian consciousness, examining the continuity of the subtle intellectual strands of Daoism in Korea…while just last night, Megumi had schooled me thoroughly on how little I knew about life in Japan. When she finished with her 'lecture' at the dump I called home, I was left with a disturbed loss of self. There are times when people communicate a point so soundly, that when the passage of knowledge strikes home, it erases everything that came before it. My life had a night-and-day difference after she explained _amae_ to me. Before, I had been looking at life through dark sunglasses because I thought that removing them would expose me to a blinding glare. Now, the shades were off and I was regarding life with a fuller vision.

Stereo-synchronous thought processes occur all the time; the interplay between attention and consciousness. A couple weeks ago, I had run out of this very same class, unable to handle the pain I brought on myself for breaking up with Urd. Now, I was trying to avoid teaching on 'autopilot'; being here but not here. These students deserved better than my distraction. Lately, my distractedness seemed to be pronounced while I was reading: I could read ten pages in a book and not even notice it, because my mind was occupied with contemplations about why the hell I was in Japan in the first place. But when I snapped out of the fugue, I could remember what I had just read, even though I didn't remember reading it.

The class finished with a flurry of discussion on Korean Court music, namely Jeongdaeyop (Achieving Great Works) and Botaepyong (Achieving Great Peace). I played excerpts from each 15th century work and noted that they honored national spirit in the same fashion that Daoist adherents practiced Li, the principle of propriety. Propriety as doing the right action by honoring relationship holons: father-son, ruler-subject, nation-citizen, etc. Since Korea was neo-Daoist at times, did Li influence the perpetuation of Korean Court music? The class enthused on this topic, with many interesting points being broached and discussed.

Once I returned to my office, I could become myself again for an hour. Three walls of textbooks, journals, articles and drafts, and a desk and door. My life, empty as a fucking gourd left to dry in the desert.

For a moment, I felt a gripping despondency ripple through me. Feelings overlaid each other: deceit, hatred, disgust, distress, hopelessness, defeat. My head was swimming now, caught in a tidepool of powerful sensations. I felt like I was connected to something horrible that had just happened; touched at the Soul level by a disturbing matrix of realities

When I came to, it was several hours later; the window was dark with the chill of night, the lights in the hallway outside my office left a thin yellow-white slice under the narrow door…and I was curled up in a fetal position on the floor, looking at the corner. My mind was filled with a single frightening thought:

_Hell has come to us all. Everything is going to be fucked up and destroyed with a death-sweep of Evil._

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Keiichi had almost fallen asleep in his Advanced Engineering Chemistry class. The graduate school test series consisted of two days worth of exams. A grueling battering ram of mind-plundering exercises in minutiae and complex formulae; much more challenging than his college entrance exams in senior high school.

However, once he had been restored to normalcy by Skuld, there was an unexpected aftereffect, which he noticed while he was taking the exam. For once in his life, he had suffered a welcome change as the result of using one of Skuld's inventions. Skuld had noted that he would have a residual effect of heightened brain power, that would eventually fade away; in the same sense that he had adjusted to 21st Century Japan and was no longer ruled by the 13 years he lived in 14th Century Kyushu.

Skuld's Electro-Intellihancer had 'shrunk' his head, returning it exactly to its former size; for which he was immensely grateful. But despite this, the entire process had mysteriously left him _smarter_! Questions that he had struggled over in the practice exams...he could now answer with only a little mental exertion. And the problems that he couldn't answer before...he found that he could reason out answers with a high degree of confidence.

The day after the exams, Sayoko had confided to him that she was slightly pissed off at him. She had noticed that Keiichi seemed to whiz effortlessly through the barrage of tests, while everyone else had trudged their way towards a migraine.

He felt his head bobbing up and down again. A moment later, someone nudged him with an elbow.

"Go home Keiichi," Sayoko whispered to him. "I'll share my notes with you from Tech Calc."

Keiichi knew she was right. He wouldn't make it through the rest of the day like this. He shouldered his bookbag as class ended, chased down Megumi so he could borrow her car, and headed back home.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

The house was silent. Keiichi called out to see if anybody was home, and then read Bell-chan's note on the dining room kosatsu, pinned underneath a batch of fresh cookies. As he munched his girlfriend's tasty handiwork, he heard a low groaning sound. At first, he thought it was the snowwind brushing against the wooden walls. But it sounded _human_. Like a whispered moan. Curious, he walked down the hallway towards the source of the sound, which seemed to come from the sister's room. He casually slid the shoji door open...

Everything inside of him jolted into a standstill.

"Oh..my God, URD!" he gasped as he saw Urd in the midst of a scene from his worst nightghostings. She was curled under a bedsheet that was stained brown with dry blood. He felt his breath being sucked out of him with the dawning fear that she was _dead_. Rushing to her side, he instantly realized that something had beaten her terribly. He knelt beside her, fighting back tears. Any hint of exhaustion in him had imploded, replaced by a manic rush of vertigo.

Urd was barely breathing.

Both her eyes were swollen shut. Keiichi felt sickened when he saw that her beautiful silverwhite hair was slick with blood. She had cuts and bruises all over her body...

With a start, Keiichi realized that she was naked under the bloodstained futon covers.

"Urd," he said as the tears burst through his composure. "Wh..what happened? _Who did this to you?_" In response, she moved ever so slightly, grimacing with pain, trying to reach out to him. Keiichi smoothed her hair gently, trying to soothe her because he didn't know what else he could do. Her labored breathing consisted of shallow gasps. Urd was in physical shock. Keiichi realized that she must be in absolute agony; he felt momentarily guilty because he had stirred her to wakefulness.

"You're going to be okay, Urd. Please j..just lie still. Don't move," he assured her. "I'm going to get a washcloth to clean you up. Belldandy will be back soon."

There was no response.

He quickly darted out of the room towards the kitchen to get a wet cloth. His mind raced with motorcycle precision.

"Where is Belldandy? How could this happen without her even sensing it? What about the Banpeis...or the Ninjettes and the new Ninjas? What happened here? I gotta keep my cool!" he reasoned, slamming a mental door shut on the rapid chain of questions that rifled through his mind.

As he walked into the kitchen, he saw the six shinobi frozen inside of an icecube. Whatever had done this to Urd...was definitely powerful and supernatural.

His fear found him...what if the being which had caused Urd's grievous injuries _was still in the house_? Fighting against a rising sense of panic, Keiichi soaked the washcloth in the sink...

"Why _Urd_?" he sobbed aloud.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Sayoko was seated across from me, talking about the upcoming finals and her graduation party plans. She was dressed in a red and gray Swiss-knit sweatervest over a black turtleneck blouse. Her khaki baggy jeans had the knees ripped out, with her jacket tied around her hips. Her fur-collared longcoat was piled on my futon 'couch'. The intended effect was her idea of a 'retro grunge' look. Except for the ungrungable fact that her outfit cost almost 50 thousand yen.

After my lapse or nightmare or whatever it was, I realized that I had almost missed my last class, and dashed to the New Campus section to teach the evening grad seminar in Ethics of Technology and Research. Afterwards, returning to my office, I struggled to gather my thoughts after my 'spell'. I called Sayoko and tried to describe it to her, thinking that my plunge in spirits had to do with issues with my personal recovery. When we finished on the phone, she had offered to drive me to my studio flat. The snow had started again, a wet clinging paste of liquid skymush greedily grabbing at the windshield as we drove through darkened streets. But instead of just dropping me off, she invited herself in for a visit. It turned out that Sayoko had concerns about the whole graduation process and wanted to run some things by me.

Swallowing a brief surge of panic, I realized that after Megumi's several stopbys, I had become a little bit comfortable with female visitors in my cramped apartment.

Sayoko's recovery program had afforded her much personal growth. She had progressed from dope fiend to studious coed in the past six months. Each time I witnessed this transformation in an addict, I sensed that I was gazing upon direct evidence of miracles. From worst to first. From victim to hero. From scourge to citizen. From self-abandoned to God-reliant.

Then I found myself here, where Goddesses and Demons mingled with us mere mortals. Glancing at the Enigma Book, I realized that miracles had shifted into a whole new realm of meaning. Yet the unexplainable metamorphosis in Sayoko as she returned to humanity...had molded her into a beautiful, wonderful woman. Her face had visibly softened into a glow of femininity. Her hair, now clean of the drugs, was slowly gaining back a silken sheen that suggested Skuld's raven tresses.

She and Tamiya had really lucked out.

Her recovery was nothing short of impressive...she was doing the right thing by getting some input on how to throw a non-alcoholic graduation party. I remembered how I felt when I graduated; the last thing I wanted was to be around a bunch of drunken celebrants. Especially since I felt like I was walking on tenterhooks when I got my degrees. Even last summer's dissertation in Beijing was uncomfortable, as academic tradition dictates that the Ph.D. candidate provides expensive wine or champagne for his or her committee, and then engages in celebratory toasts with them.

Sayoko admitted that she was more than nervous about the fact that her parents were going to pay her a rare visit, in order to attend her graduation ceremony. She didn't want to do anything to embarrass them. She mentioned that she was still driving in to Tokyo on the weekends for NA meetings. She had found a woman there with a number of years clean off drugs, to sponsor her in her recovery. Sayoko added that she was working the Steps...and that graduating from N.I.T. was a means of making amends to her family, even if her parents were unclued about her drug abuse.

Sayoko had kept in contact with me on the phone, often asking questions about the recovery process over the past few months. I wanted to confess how fatigued I was because of my breakup with Urd, but I held my voice and listened.

In a word, in a brotherly fashion, I was _proud_ of her.

Yet, I could see the telltale lines of exhaustion under her eyes. This had been a trying time for the young N.I.T. senior...midterms coupled with the battery of graduate exams. She admitted as much when I asked...

_Balllammmm!_

In a split second, the wall to my apartment had blown apart, as if it had been punched by an invisible iron giant.

It had just _disappeared_.

Sayoko was knocked off of my futon 'couch'; as my vision cleared, I saw that she was sprawled on the floor in a breathless daze. I was flat on my back against the wall, the wind cracked out of me by the sudden blast. Stuff was all over the floor, and wet snow flurried in.

My immediate thought was that a bomb had exploded in our apartment complex. Or maybe there had been an earthquake, and a gas line had ruptured and ignited...

Then I saw Belldandy.

She was hovering in the open space where the wall formerly was, dressed brightly in her otherworldly ornate 'warrior Goddess' attire. The length of her lustrous cloak billowed in the wind, the blue and white clusters of its gems casting twinkles all over my apartment. Her necklace was bright with wedge-like crystals; the cowl to her cloak sported navy blue arrowspikes. A thick golden sash wrapped her waist; below it, a long robe-like skirt fluttered with circlets of red and green, the hems feathering like an angel's wings. Her hair haloed a face that was ugly with rage. Instantly, I realized that she was the cause of the sudden opening in my wall.

"HOW COULD YOU DO THIS TO MY _SISTER_!" Belldandy screamed in a booming angry snarl that could probably be heard all the way in Osaka. She fixed me with a burning stare...and I saw pure hatred shining in her blue eyes.

She clasped her hands in front of her, as if she was holding a gun. Aimed at me. A pulse of blue energy formed...

"W..wait!!" I heard my voice shrill as the bolt shot out towards me.

I felt it strike me full on...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"You _killed_ him!" Sayoko accused Belldandy in a tearful scream. She had been sitting here peacefully talking to Cevn-sensei about her upcoming graduation plans when the angry Goddess literally broke down the wall.

She had barely cleared the stars and cobwebs in her head when she saw Belldandy blast Cevn; a blue lightning bolt bursting in a deadly arc into his chest, flinging him clear across his apartment. Now he was in a crumpled heap on the floor. There was no way that he could have survived such an energy blast.

Belldandy hovered in the air, the snowwind whipping her hair. Sayoko was still trying to catch her breath...and settle her nerves. She had seen Belldandy feeling sad, feeling guilty, feeling concerned for Keiichi, feeling mellowly romantic...but never had she witnessed the wrath of a Goddess.

"He deserved it! He _beat and raped_ my older sister! She might die because he _tortured _her! He visited her while we were gone, and did this…unspeakable…to my sister! Urd is _barely alive_ because of him. She's barely alive! For that, he should _DIE_!" Belldandy shouted in justification. She glared at Sayoko, daring her to question the righteousness of her actions.

"H...how?" Sayoko responded, astonished at Belldandy's accusation. Looking back at Cevn, she choked down the rising surge...the all-too-familiar flush of resentment from all those years of enmity towards her former rival. An enmity she had surrendered away months ago. Seeing Keiichi's happiness with his divine girlfriend had rendered her resentment...ridiculous. Now she was happy for Keiichi, and friends with his friends. She was beginning to see Belldandy as an older sister...

Until now.

Belldandy was acting...like Mara.

She tried to calm herself, knowing that she had to be reasonable...or _she_ might get blasted next. Sayoko was quite convinced that Belldandy was insane with rage. The Goddess had simply gunned him down, no questions asked. And what was this about Urd? Rape? Physical abuse? Torture? The N.I.T. senior felt the wetness of the snow blanketing her face. This was totally, absolutely, horribly _wrong_!

Pulling her hair out of her eyes, Sayoko slowly stood up on pudding-wavery legs and faced the floating Goddess.

"Cevn was at N.I.T. _all day_, teaching classes. After his last class, we came here to talk..." she confronted Belldandy coolly. "I've been with him for the last couple hours! And there are dozens of students who attended his classes at N.I.T. today!"

Sayoko was cautious as she spoke, keeping her voice flat and smooth...frightened by the seemingly psychotic break that seemed to push this Goddess over the edge. The tension in the room was as taunt as the skin of a kodo drum.

"I don't believe you! He was just at my house today. He almost _killed_ my older sister! If you'd have seen what he did to Urd...you'd want to make him pay too! Why are you lying to me, Sayoko!"

"Belldandy, how can I prove to you that I'm telling the truth, if you won't listen? You're so filled with rage that you can't even think straight!" Sayoko answered. "You have to collect yourself...and stop and listen!"

Despite her fear, Sayoko fixed Belldandy with a stare.

Belldandy saw Sayoko through eyes soaked with the sight of her helpless, injured sister. When she returned home with Skuld, she found her older sister hovering near death. The Dark Reaper was nearby, unseen but all-too-apparent to her. All Urd could say was that she had been violated and horribly beaten...and it had been Cevn who had done such...an unspeakable thing...to her.

Cevn had even brutally tortured Urd!

To fend off the Reaper, Belldandy quickly cast a stasis spell over Urd, just to keep her alive. The look of absolute shock and hurt on Skuld's face was enough to ignite her fury to soar to nova-like proportions. Eyeblink swift, she transported herself to a street mirror near his apartment complex.

Finding him was easy. But all of her training as a GRO Goddess hadn't prepared her for this scenario. Belldandy wanted to make him _pay_ for what he did to Urd! After she rayed him, she realized that she had completely screwed up. Instant death was too good for Cevn. He should have been made to suffer! She looked at Sayoko, and then turned her head to look where he once stood.

Mara was right. Cevn was a Demon. Only one of the most vilely deranged denizens of Vanagdrasil could do the horrible, brutal thing...that he had done to Urd. He should have been completely atomized by the force of her powerful energy spell. But he wasn't. Belldandy could see his corpse stretched akimbo against the wall. He_ must_ have been a Demon...playing out his scheme of deception ever since he first arrived in Japan.

This was the only explanation as to why he wasn't instantly disintegrated by the burst of energy. Cevn must have been a powerful Demon. Completely evil; to the point where he committed an atrocity that ran counter to all the Rules of decency and conduct between Gods and Demons. Belldandy considered unsealing her powers as a precaution, increasing them a thousandfold just in case she would need them. In case Cevn revived to attack her or Sayoko.

In order to punish him.

But Cevn was dead. He wasn't moving.

Yet, she was still angry. Killing him had only slightly relieved the coiling rage that consumed her. And _that_ scared her...the fact that she had derived such little pleasure from killing the being that had viciously violated her sister's honor. She remembered killing Aoshima and Tyyr when she and her sisters were exiled into the future; her actions were justified during that incident because her life was at stake. But this mortal had done far worse than merely imprison she and her sisters. He had won over their confidence, and then used their trust against them to brutalize her Older Sister. As peaceloving and gentle as she was, Cevn's actions had roused the "warrior Goddess" inside of her. Belldandy's vengeance had been as swift and deadly as that of the Valkyrie, the special Goddess Guardians of the Almighty.

"Belldandy! Listen to me..."

Belldandy snapped her head towards the sound. Sayoko was still harping on the fact that Cevn was innocent! Sayoko was often daft and stupid, even for a mortal girl, but this insolent denial she was maintaining...was almost insulting!

Her thoughts maelstromed in tight circles as the impulse to fire a bolt at Sayoko crept up in her mind. _This_ impulse to hurt another mortal...screeched her thoughts to a standstill. Sayoko may be many things, but Belldandy knew that she was a complete innocent in this matter.

"What is going on? Why am I angry with Sayoko all of a sudden? She didn't have anything to do with this...and yet I want to _hurt_ her!" Belldandy challenged her urges, almost beside herself with confusion. She could sense the earnestness in Sayoko's expressions; the young mortal woman was trying to get her attention. Words from afar floated towards her on a wave of howling snowwind...

"...he wouldn't do something like that to Urd! He _loved_ her, for God's sake! Even if he was too stubborn to act the part sometimes! It must have been Mara! Somehow, she made it look like he did it! I was _with _him...here! He can't be in two places at once. You _have_ to believe me, Belldandy! For God's sake, try to regain your senses and believe me!"

Sayoko watched Belldandy slowly shake her head "no". She wasn't buying it. Shivering from the cold, she realized that the only chance Cevn had was if she could convince Belldandy to save him. She was a Goddess...she must be able to save him! Thinking hard, Sayoko tried a different tact.

"What if it _wasn't_ Cevn, Belldandy? You wouldn't want to live with the certain knowledge that whatever had done such a terrible thing...had slipped through your grasp! That you had killed the _wrong_ person or Demon or whatever that did this horrible thing to your older sister! You wouldn't want that, huh? If someone really hurt my brother Genji, I wouldn't be satisfied until I knew for certain that the person who did it was going to get the full extent of punishment they deserved. Even then, I wouldn't be satisfied," she said, walking right up to the enraged Goddess, caught up in the passion of her attempt to save her friend.

"And if you _did_ make a hasty mistake...then whatever did such a horrible thing to your sister...could do it _again_!" she argued. Belldandy didn't flinch a blink.

Sayoko slumped to the floor. What was the use? Cevn was dead already! Belldandy had killed him...right in front of her. Nothing could be done to undo her actions.

Belldandy resigned herself to the fact that Sayoko had drawn an inviting appeal to reason. What if she _was_ telling the truth? She suddenly reached out and cradled Sayoko's head in her hands, feeling Sayoko flinch with fear as she touched her. She pressed her forehead to Sayoko's, her mind stretching tendril-like through the echoes of Sayoko's recent memories as she scanned the N.I.T. senior's mind...

"W..what!" she shouted with surprise. Sayoko had attended one of his afternoon classes. He was _still there_ at the school at the time Urd had been raped? Afterwards, Sayoko had brought Cevn here to have a discussion about school. There was absolutely no questioning his whereabouts for the past several hours!

She and Skuld were home earlier in the day, so it had to have happened in the afternoon or early evening. Her eyes flew wide as her skin blanched from its former resentful blush. Her hand shot up to cover her mouth…and something that was attached to her Goddess Battlesuit floated to the ground. She looked on the floor where a torn piece of paper had floated off of her, the result of her initial blast to open up the wall of the apartment...and felt her rage instantly begin diminish, replaced by a numbing sense that she had made a terrible error.

Blowing across the tatami floor was a petal from one of Peorth's prize roses; a non-Earthrealm variety rose-bloom that could only have come from Peorth's own GRO Sysop Node in Yggdrasil.

"OH...NO!" she shoutmuttered. "I've made a horrible mistake!"

In her mind, the horror of her sister's rape was now coupled with the shock that she may have killed an innocent mortal. Not just any mortal...but Urd's boyfriend! A man who had been friends with all of Keiichi's gang...

She shuddered as she was overpowered by the fact that _something_ was horribly amiss. Who was telling the truth? Her sister...or Sayoko?

Sayoko shot Belldandy a contemptuous glare, which withered the Goddess visibly.

"How could you call the wanton murder of my friend..._your_ friend...a fucking mistake? And what about that Kami-sama you and your sisters always mention?" Sayoko said, tears commingled with red anger. "Why didn't _He_ do something to prevent this? Something truly sadistic and cruel, beyond the pale, must have happened to your sister, judging by how pissed off you are. How could Cevn even get away with that...against a _Goddess_? Urd could have easily stopped him!"

Belldandy felt numb. It hadn't even occurred to her that the Lord would have certainly prevented her sisters and her from being harmed to extent that Urd had been!

"Ohwww, my head and body both feel like they're trying to kill me. Would someone please tell me what is going on here?"

Both women turned towards the voice. Belldandy rollercoastered emotionally as she realized that _Cevn was alive_! She had used a full-strength blast of arcane energy...striking him with her most powerfully concentrated energy-bolt discharge. And now he was acting groggy, as if he had hit his head on a cupboard!

"What is going on here?" Belldandy said, echoing his question in wavering voice, even more confused than before. She realized that she had to get out of here, away from Cevn.

If he could survive her destructive attack, then he had to be a Demon…which made it _certain_ that he was Urd's attacker!

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

I felt hot tears fill my eyes. I wanted to go to Urd, to try and release her pain away. My mind failed to grasp how something like this could have happened to her. Nets of powerlessness seemed to contain me...but could not contain not my sorrow and fear.

All the love that I had tried to push away...rushed back as Belldandy recounted how she had found Urd. How Urd was lingering at the edge of death. How Urd had been...sexually abused. With the pain I felt as I heard her words...came _more_ warm waves of love.

My love for her had never left! The emotional bond I had with Urd had been only an arm's length away all the time!

I wanted to _know_. To know who or what had done this to her.

When I had been transported into this world of Keiichi and Belldandy, I expected it to be sweet, innocent, fun and humorous. After all, the manga was pretty light stuff. A fluffy Japan with cartoon-like characters, acting out their kindness against a tapestry of romance and silly sexual tension. An occasional wreath of poignancy around the drama of mortals coexisting with Goddesses.

Yet, today had proven otherwise, once again. My fantasies had been outstripped by a horribly trisome reality. Belldandy had tried to kill me in a fit of piquence. Urd had been raped. Sayoko had witnessed a murderous Goddess.

As soon as I was revived enough to be coherent, Belldandy had floated over and touched her forehead to mine, 'scanning' me in the manner of the Goddesses to see where I had been during the day. When she was done, the stricken look on her face revealed that she had been a victim too. Something had tried to deceive her into thinking that I had done…those _evils_ to her older sister.

I had a feeling that all Hell was going to break loose. I couldn't even call it Hell anymore...as I forever knew that the abode of the Demons was Vanagdrasil. There was no Hell, except in my imaginings.

However, whatever or whoever had done this to Urd...deserved to burn in the deepest pit of Hell. I _knew_ in the deepest recesses of my soul...that a Demon was behind this atrocity. A Demon who was far more evil and determined than Mara ever had been!

I silently found myself wishing that I had the power of a God. Belldandy's rage would only be a shallow pool...the rage I was beginning to feel would be a roaring tidal wave. I didn't know if I would stop short of killing the Demon who had hurt Urd and her sisters!

"Urd…and her sisters?" I heard the question reacting off of the chambers of my thoughts. Whoever had done this to Urd...had used me as bait. Had framed me as her tormentor.

It was sickening to the very medulla of disgust.

I wanted to ask Belldandy to take me with her, but decided against it because in her mind, Urd thought _I_ had victimized her. Urd had suffered enough pain already...seeing me would just re-traumatize her. Now, Belldandy was traumatized as well, because the source of her sister's agony was no longer so obvious.

It wasn't me.

But right before she left, Belldandy looked at me with a fixed glare of rage…and I felt a downfallen sense that she had decided that it _was_ me who had visited such a disgusting horror on her sister.

After the now-again angry Goddess had left, in the kind of hospitable gesture that only a true friend could make, Sayoko invited me to stay at her parent's house for the night, as my apartment was now uninhabitable.

"So much for next month's rent," I thought with grim humor as we left the wreckage of my former home.

Five minutes after we arrived at Sayoko's house, I found a vision of sadness bursting through the fog of my anger with torchlight clarity. I didn't know what to do with such a sharp emotional pain, so I grabbed Sayoko, just to feel the presence of another human being. I knew that my sudden move must have freaked her out...the last time I made a sudden move towards her, I had nearly broken her neck. But a moment later, with the compassion that is unique to womankind, Sayoko pulled my head to her shoulder, and invited me to dissolve a battalion of vulnerable tears into her woolen sweater.

"Just let it out, Cevn," she said softly as I wrenched loose the tears of pain and confusion. At that moment, I felt grateful for Sayoko. At that moment, she was the most thoughtful and kind being in the Multiverse.

The emotional boils of burst-pain were so intense, I felt dream-visioned and befuddled, as I had been when I saw the impossible sight of my ex-wife lying in a viewing room at the coroner's office. The heartfelt agonizing grew into my throat, and I had to push away and run to the porch because it was literally vomiting itself out of me.

So much for my birthday tomorrow, I realized. Tomorrow was Valentine's Day. I had made my mind up earlier today; I had planned to visit the temple household and attempt a reconciliation with Urd.

Now, I just hoped that she would find the strength to _stay alive_.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

The first thing Urd did when she felt good enough to walk was go to the bathroom and wash up. She wanted to scrub off any evidence of the abuse. Belldandy had exhausted herself in the process of healing her wounds over the weeks that followed. But no amount of healing the energy-injuries to her manifestation could possibly mend the wound of her memories.

When she first came to the Earthrealm and became accustomed to regenerating her atomic structure as a mortal manifestation, Urd had simply parted her hair in the middle and let it fall in straight and true cascades down her back and front. As she became more acclimated to the solid manifest of her being, she began to experiment with her hair. She would stand in front of the bathroom mirror and reform herself with a variety of hairstyles. Her primping used to really annoy Belldandy and Keiichi to no end. Eventually she settled on an off center part with an upswept front and soft waves all the way down. Her bronzed skin had contrasted beautifully with her silverwhite mane of abundant hair. While Belldandy and Skuld had kept their hair reasonably long, Urd had designed her hair to fall past her knees...and sometimes all the way to the floor, depending on her mood. Urd sometimes observed that her long tresses made her resemble a modern-day Heian princess. The mortals had been correct in their assertion that a woman's crowning glory was her hair. Urd knew she was dropdead gorgeous and totally sexy in her mortal manifestation.

But now, beauty and sexual appeal meant nothing to her. In fact, now it had become a weapon of destruction against the purity of her heart.

"I'm ugly," she declared as she looked into the mirror. Instead of feeling beautiful, attractive, charming, sexy...she felt horrible. All the beauty had been stolen from her in one wanton act of brutality. Looking at her body, which had been the object of lust desire for several dozen Gods, thousands of mortal men and more than a few mortal women...Urd just wanted to cover up. Not just because of the cuts and bruises and scars. She felt like her body had betrayed her by attracting Cevn's attention. Causing him to do the most horrible thing imaginable...to take her own body away from her.

She shivered, remembering...

The memories caved in all around her; Urd gave up and broke down into heaving sobs.

Again.

Wordlessly, the door opened and she felt a warm long towel being wrapped around her shoulders.

"Urd...it's okay. You're safe with us," Belldandy said softly.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Since the attack had occurred in their temple house, everyone living there was cast under a dark ominium that weighed almost gothic in its heavy oppressiveness.

Skuld couldn't stand it. It was no longer safe here.

Being in her bedroom reminded her of...the terrible thing that had happened there. Its unseen presence lingered malignantly, like some foul odor that had been absorbed into the walls. She started sleeping in her 'Skuld's Lab' room. But even the familiar trappings of her hobby room, filled with her carefully assembled mechas, her computers and all of her stocks of machine components...didn't comfort her one bit.

Sadly, Cevn's two cats had somehow sensed that she was upset, and had swarmed her with feline affection. Every night, they would huddle next to her as she fell asleep...and gently lick her face the moment she awoke. Belldandy had mentioned to Skuld that their feline instincts were tragi-ironic...that their human master was the source of her pain; yet neither cat would ever know this, however.

Seeing her oldest sister have her dignity stripped away so brutally, being so vulnerable...only served to make Skuld feel weak and insignificant. She wanted to hide forever in her lab with her mechas; just hide away from this horrible place.

This horrible, rotten-as-garbage Earthrealm.

It had happened in her _bedroom_. In the very place she thought was the safest place in the Multiverse. Where she and her sisters slept, where they had talked late into the night, where they had shared opinions and arguments about dresses, the Earthrealm, Keiichi... The place where they reminisced about Yggdrasilian things...

It went far beyond her comprehension. Big Sister Urd was in _so_ much pain. And there was nothing that the Norn of the Future could do to take it away.

Skuld felt totally useless.

She remembered with bittersweet nostalgia all the times Urd used to punish her by making her create machines that were purposefully useless, like the Perpetual Immotion Machine. It used to drive Skuld nuts. There was nothing that she hated worse than being useless. In her reality, Skuld saw patterns of life, patterns of mechanics, patterns of energy, patterns of Future Times. It was her role to use her environment to craft utility out of discord. She _used_ things to make life better...or easier.

She couldn't take her sister's pain away. Skuld even wished she was mortal, so she could be afforded an opportunity to make one very obvious wish.

"I can't even wish Big Sister to be better!" she exclaimed in frustration, tossing a molecular polywrench across the room. Elder Sister had worn herself out just saving Urd's life. Now they had to try and resurrect Urd's spirit.

_If_ it could be resurrected...

Skuld blamed herself...if only Banpei-kun was built with more weaponry, this wouldn't have happened. If only she had been a smarter little sister for Urd. If only she had stayed home that fateful day, instead of giving in to her ice cream cravings and going to 32 Flavors with Belldandy.

She pounded her small fist against the tatami mat.

"How could I have trusted Cevn?" Her trust of this one mortal had been the most stupid, foolish mistake of all.

Belldandy tried to convince her that it wasn't her fault, by any stretch of the imagination. All the lucky tokens, all the objects of reverence that they had around the temple house...and still, her sister had been raped.

Raped. By a mortal man who had claimed that he loved Urd.

Skuld had never been with a man or God, had never been in love, had never even considered the fact that males were anything besides a necessarily yucky part of life. Then she came to the 

Earthrealm and witnessed a love blossoming between Belldandy and Keiichi. Between Urd and Cevn.

She didn't know about anything about physical sex...or about the special Sharing between a God and Goddess...but she knew something terrible had happened to Urd. Urd was no longer the sexy, naughty sister with the sassy attitude.

Urd was an empty shell.

"I can't stand it here!" Skuld yelled. A split second later, the words formed on the walls of her lab, much to her surprise.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Are we agreed?" Odeyn asked his wife. One again, he noticed Freiija's stately bearing as she reclined on the couch in the main hall of their cloudhome. When she was deep in reflection, her face merged beauty and wisdom effortlessly. It was easy to fated to be young and beautiful. But to age gracefully over the eons? In her maturity, Freiija had elevated her beauty to an exquisite work of art. She looked at him with regal inquisitiveness...and he could see his daughter's eyes. All three of them. Of all the objects in the Multiverse, Freiija was the most beautiful.

With the exception of Kami-sama. But then again, nothing compared to their Lord.

Freiija looked at her husband, observing the impetuous little boy-God in him. When Odeyn wanted something, he just _had_ to have it. Just like a child. It was a charming, yet sometimes irritating trait of his. But mostly charming.

This was one of those times where his impulsiveness was alluring to her. Odeyn had prepared his case carefully; presenting it to her along with a series of gifts designed to ply her decision. She didn't mind the extra attention that her husband was paying her, of course. Gods can be so transparent sometimes when they want a Goddess to agree with them. But this...

But this?

The matter at hand was unprecedented just by the virtue of its nature. There existed no guidelines; no instructions that resided somewhere in the Yggdrasil Mainframe that could advise her on a 

course of action. _She_ didn't even know what would happen. Freiija admitted to herself that she didn't have a clue about this...

And she was the Goddess of Marriages!

She looked inwards, envisioning how all her peers in the Yggdrasilian social circles would react if she agreed to her husband's request. Some would be offended, some would be put off by the very audacity of what her husband had proposed, some would be insatiably curious, and some would praise her and her beloved husband for taking such a risk.

But ultimately, it was her recent memories that decided the issue for her. The last time she had visited the Earthrealm...

The look on her beloved B'dandy's face.

"Oh...all right! One cannot steal against the compassionate fate of the heart, huh? But I have a single condition that necessarily sponsors my agreement. The Earthrealm mortal _must_ be tested in the traditional consuetudinary fashion. In respect to the given circumstances, his Trial must be sufficiently challenging in every sense!" she admitted teasingly, then walked over and tousled her husband's beard.

The look of joyous triumph in Odeyn's single eye was enough to melt her heart all over again.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Urd rushed off to the bathroom again. She had been sick to her stomach with increasing frequency during the past week. In fact, her whole body felt like one big swollen bruise.

The only relief from the dull pain was her hatred of Cevn.

Cevn had turned her trust inside out and strangled her with it.

Urd found the basin and vomited into it. Something was very wrong...she _couldn't_ be sick like this! Her fleshclothed mortal energy manifestation was only a reflection of her true being. At the most, she could only be ill for a few mortal days, while her atomic structure emergently renewed itself into a healthy physical body.

She felt wretchedly...crummy. She was fatigued all the time. She would wake up in the middle of the night with a pain in her chest. The nausea plagued her constantly.

"What is wrong with me?" she worried. Her illness was well past the point where it was simply a nuisance. She was _really_ concerned about this ongoing infirmity. If she kept remanifesting in this condition...she might have to take a leave from the Earthrealm and get examined by the Proctors in Yggdrasil. Or even the Adepts at the Holobiolonics Clinic.

She had tried to cover it up to keep from worrying her two sisters any further than they were already worried. Belldandy and Skuld had been very solicitous after the...horror...in an effort to embolden her spirit. Belldandy had literally saved her life. Skuld was totally confused, yet trying to appear calm and in control.

Their attentions had buoyed her spirits slightly. But Urd knew that she had been pushed off a cliff that she should have never been allowed to approach. She had been thrust past the line of safety and comfort. She had crossed the icepond of no return, and now the surface of the chill was crackling underfoot, a slight separation from a frozen sea of madness. She simply didn't feel safe..._anywhere_. No matter how hard she tried, she was jumpy at slight noises and shadows. Any sudden sound or light would cause her to experience tremors.

Dizzily, she stood up, flushed the toilet, and looked in the mirror. She flicked her hair back with her fingers, and then slowly held her hand up in front of her face.

Her hair was falling out…

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --


	48. Pt 48: A Question of Willingness

**Part 48: A Question of Willingness**

"What's _wrong_ with Big Sister? She's been acting so weird lately! She's always suddenly running off to the bathroom and getting sick! I'm really worried about her!" Skuld commented during breakfast. Belldandy was sleeping in and Megumi had already left for school, leaving Keiichi alone with Skuld. Velsper had been shadowing Bell-chan since 'the incident'; but now he was sitting on the table, calmly watching Skuld. He was the only cat that had table-sitting privileges...because he never filched any food or begged for tidbits.

"Yes, Skuld-hime...we're all worried about Urd," Keiichi said gently. Each day, it seemed that would Skuld recreate concern anew for her oldest sister; forgetting that everyone else was continually worried about Urd as well. Perhaps this was her way of coping...

"Is she pregnant?"

_--Sphfiift--_

Keiichi looked at the top of the kosatsu where the coffee that was formerly in his mouth had sprayed out, forming beads of liquid. Velsper looked at him reproachfully, and then hopped down on the floor to clean his soaked coat of black fur. Skuld's question had caught him sideways. That darn Skuld! She really can be such a sweet girl...and then ask a stupid question like that! Where's Bell-chan when I need her? How on earth am I supposed to answer a question like _that_?

"Huuuh? H..how would _I_ know about things like that, Skuld? I'm just a...just a mortal," Keiichi explained amidst the flowering of his embarrassment.

"I thought _you_ would be the one to know! After all, you're the one who's been doing...all those kinds of things with my sister. Not to mention Urd told me about all those ecchi magazines that you used to sneak into the house and hide in your room! You must have learned something from them," Skuld said, sharp as a swizzle-stick.

This was _definitely_ getting embarrassing for Keiichi; he flattened his palms against the table to keep from visibly squirming.

"And all those shoujo manga magazines I read _always_ talk about sex and babies!" Skuld said, watching him with the acuity of a hawkeye hunting for hapless rodent prey.

Keiichi wondered _what_ kind of manga mags Skuld had been reading. Long ago, he had snuck a peek at some of the manga Megumi had been reading when she was 10 or 11. None of the stories mentioned anything about pregnancy. In fact their plots seemed totally sappymushy to him back then; when he was a boy on the cusp of adolescence. Of course, that was before 1999, when the Pill was finally made available for women in Japan. He reasoned that, with birth control readily available now, the shoujo manga publishers were including cautionary messages about pregnancy as a public service.

Still...it seemed odd that Skuld would find such material to be interesting. He glanced at her with a sideways grin, momentarily amused.

"Keiichi! Don't avoid the question! I read that girls get something called 'morning sickness' after they have sex and want to have a baby. Is this true? Could that be what is happening with Big Sister, even though she was...forced...to have sex?"

Skuld was piling on the questions this morning! Keiichi quickly quaffed a cupful of hot coffee to shudder out of his aghast anxiety.

"Whoa, whoa! Skuld, I think you need to have a talk with Bell-chan about that! Isn't that what big sisters are for? Not only am I a mortal, but I'm a _guy_! You're asking the wrong person! I don't even know if one...of you...could even _get_ pregnant," Keiichi replied, attempting to be as diplomatically evasive as possible.

"Well, Mother had all three of us, so I guess that means we can! I guess I'll just have to ask Elder Sister. By the way, when you and my sister...well, do you guys use...you know, _protection_?" she asked, her buckbrown eyes shining with curiosity.

"That's it!" Keiichi thought, throwing his chopstix down on his plate. "I gotta find some excuse to get outta here..._now_!" He looked longingly towards the hallway...

Keiichi marveled at Skuld's ambivalence towards the issue of sex. When she first arrived, the young Goddess perceived sex as physically gross and emotionally repugnant. The very mention of it seemed to appall her. Keiichi had suffered a number of razored tongue-lashings during that phase. Over the next couple of years, Skuld had steadfastly clung to her attitude on the subject. But after she was kidnapped by Mara...after her 'testing' him last summer, she finally seemed to mellow out somewhat.

Now...six months later, she seemed to be fascinated with human sexuality. What _did_ Bell tell her during one of their sister-to-sister discussions concerning the fact that they were sleeping together? If he was getting the third-degree by Skuld...he could only imagine the questions she must have poured onto Bell-chan. Lately, Skuld was asking all sorts of awkward questions about sex. Not to Bell-chan...but to _him_!

Keiichi had a suspicion that Skuld was secretly trying to keep him walking on tenterhooks...orchestrating his discomfort like a circus lion-tamer with a whip and a hoop of flames.

"Well, I guess maybe she's at that age where she just _has_ to know," he concluded, remembering his younger sister's giggly boycrazy stage when she collided with her teen years. Megumi seemed to have been glued to the phone every night after she returned home from Junior High School...for almost two years!

"What am I saying? That's ridiculous! Skuld is _120 thousand _years old! She _must_ have some idea about sex!" he corrected himself. Keiichi revisited in mid-thoughtstream the notion that perhaps this was Skuld's attempt to reconcile herself with the horrible thing that had been done to her sister. Belldandy had repeatedly tried to convince Skuld that she wasn't certain that it was Cevn who had...hurt...Urd. Skuld didn't believe a word of it.

Now Urd was getting sick several times a day. And making no secret of it.

"Keiichi, why is she wearing her hair differently? She's hiding it under hats and scarves! Is this something that women do when they get old?"

"Who're you calling _old_, child!?" Urd shouted with mock indignity, then punched Skuld softly on the top of the head and ground down with the clips of her knuckles.

"_Owwwwyyy_! Big Sister, cut it out!" Skuld whined. Keiichi looked at Urd with grateful eyes...her sudden entrance was nothing less than a rescue. Urd winked at him.

"Oh, quit faking...that didn't hurt you a bit! Now you take back what you said, Skuld, or I'll pull your ears..." Urd said as she glomped onto Skuld's earlobes with her fingers and pinched lightly.

"Okayokayokay! My Big Sister Urd isn't an old lady!" Skuld said.

"That's better..."

"...just because she's going to be a mommy..." Skuld whispered under her breath.

"WHAT?!" Urd said, suddenly serious. She struck a dramatic pose and launched into a monologue. She was obviously aping some daytime soap opera, Keiichi imagined.

"I really hope that it was only the TV I was overhearing, instead of my bratty little sister. Because if my little sister is going to entertain such a _childish_ fantasy...I'll have to _really_ punish her..." Urd didn't complete her sentence, as she started belching and gagging. A second later, she dashed down the hall towards the bathroom, hand over mouth. Keiichi looked at Skuld; her angelic face was drawn with tense concern.

Keiichi knew that Urd had just experienced one of the most traumatic experiences a woman could go through. Yet she was trying to keep a straight face through it all.

"You're not a superwoman, Urd," he thought as he looked at Skuld's fearful expression.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Tamiya suggested that we watch some anime videos, so he rented the entire series of Fairy Tale. After my apartment was wrecked, Sayoko had offered me one of the guest bedrooms at the Mishima mansion. Somehow, the lifelong debt to the landlord that I expected because of the devastation of my apartment...never materialized. Sayoko had informed the landlord that I was injured in the blast, thus placing me beyond the pale in terms of inculpability. The landlord's insurance company was considering it 'an act of God'. I strongly suspected that Sayoko pulled a few of her family connections to sway the insurance people...

Living with Sayoko was totally ironic...considering the fact that her brother Genji had lived in my room when I was off to China last summer.

Fairy Tale was one of those new might-and-magic animes with the usual host of eccentric characters. Tamiya informed me that it was apparently quite popular with the N.I.T. MCC crowd at the Men's Dorm. Sayoko noted that she could relate to Lucy, the main female character in Fairy Tale; the daughter of a wealthy noble family who was always being plotted against by conspirators. So we started discussing anime, and Sayoko zeroed in on Kimagure Orange Road as one of her favorites when she was growing up, noting that while it was one of the most endearingly romantic anime, it was also one of the most heartrending.

I could relate to the character of Hikaru so well. To have loved completely and unabashedly...and lost. To feel shut away from the life of someone that she had pinned her hopes upon. To suffer the betrayal and loss of her two best friends. And no matter what she did, how hard she tried...she wasn't fated to be with her sweetheart.

I had lost Urd. As I watched Sayoko and Tamiya cuddle on one of the couches in the massive room that served as the living room in the Mishima mansion, I realized that I would probably never have another chance to be in love. At least with a Goddess. All around me, couples were forming or reforming. Belldandy and Keiichi. Megumi and Genji. Sayoko and Tamiya. Sora and Toshiyuki.

Life had relieved me of almost all of my friends. Just like in the KOR video...I felt like things could never go back to the way they were. Even my 30th birthday, a milestone by any reckoning, went uncelebrated.

I felt so unnoticed.

I remembered when Kyosuke finally told Hikaru that he was in love with Madoka instead of her. Insisting to Hikaru that she must leave him alone. Angrily distancing himself from her. Just like I had told Urd at the beginning of this year.

Guess my heart is in bad repair too. Funny, while Urd and I were together, she tried so hard to let me know the depths of her feelings. Even though we couldn't touch each other because of the Ultimate Force, she kept up her end of our romance with unbridled, if a little nutty, enthusiasm.

Love poems. Special dinners. Heart letters. Late night board games. Indescribably deep conversations. Pillow fights. Teasing Skuld together...

Now, two months later...now that I knew that I couldn't be with her, I missed her even more. Sayoko had patiently explained to me that this was a normal feeling; just a phase of the grief I was feeling.

"What ever happened to Hikaru? What's going to happen to Lucy?" I wondered. "What's going to happen to _me_?"

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Yesterday, Belldandy had sat all six shinobi down and patiently explained to them that they weren't at fault for what happened to Urd. She had noticed that they were guarding Urd with an obsessive vigilance wherever she went in the house, excluding the bathroom. Obviously, the Ninjettes and Ninjas were feeling entrenched in guilt. So Belldandy had directed them to go on a vacation.

"Bell-chan, is Urd pregnant?" Keiichi asked out of the blue while they were sitting on the wooden veranda that wrapped their house with a creaky decking. Early spring was in the air; the twilight sun was accompanied by a chorus of twittering birdsong and canine barking.

Hinamatsuri was just a week away; Belldandy was already taking out the hina-ningyo dolls and cleaning them for the display. Skuld was getting hyped up for the children's holiday. Soon, she would be baking the hishi-mochi rice cakes. Keiichi made a mental note to himself to take her peach blossom viewing next weekend.

Somewhere, a broadcast van was driving around the neighborhood, its loudspeaker eliciting donations for those who were remained homeless in the rural areas because of Supertyphoon Akira. Belldandy pulled her head away from Keiichi's shoulder where it had been resting so comfortably.

She was losing a lot of sleep over her sister.

Belldandy sipped her can of lemon tea and reflected. This was the one subject that she had skillfully avoided during the four years she had been with Keiichi.

Goddesses can't get pregnant.

Her parents had told her about the 'facts of life' so many years ago that it seemed like it was another era. Actually it was, as the Earthrealm was in the grip of another one of its Pleistocene Ice Ages when Mother had called her into the family study and told her about what happened between Gods and Goddesses. Mother had explained to her that there was a union, involving a God and a Goddess and the Almighty. When the couple decided that it was time to create a new life, they sought permission from Kami-sama. If the Almighty agreed, the three would share energies. From this, a new sphere or entity of energy was created...a new Divine Life birthed out of Love and Soul.

Because of this, all of the Gods and Goddesses were literally children of Kami-sama.

The little splinter of energy would be nurtured by the souls of the parents until it grew into a being of its own, usually within a few thousand years. After sufficient time, the child would be summoned by the Almighty to meet her or his doublet; their Demon counterpart. In Bell's case, Velpser. Belldandy had always wondered why the Demons had to go to Yggdrasil to meet their divine doublets instead of the other way around.

Mother emphasized that conception, as it exists between a God and Goddess, could only manifest out of the act of Sharing, and only if the Almighty Shared with the couple. Sharing was something that transcended the bounds of the mortal concept of sex...it was pure pleasure, pure intimacy and pure harmony of Soul. Trying to describe it to a mortal was like trying to describe Shakespeare to an ant.

Out of Sharing came Divine progeny.

In the fabric of her imaginings, Belldandy had always hoped that someday she and Keiichi would be able to Share. When they were lying in bed together, their hearts beating a syncopated "pa pa paa" against each other's skin, she felt a stirring deep in her soul. Something that told her..that she was as close to Sharing as possible with another being. With the man she loved with all of her heart. She had never Shared before; she only had Mother and Urd's descriptions to draw upon. Even if she suspected that Urd tended to exaggerate about such things.

She frowned, out of regret for words left unsaid, out of uncertainty for what needed to be said.

It was impossible for her and Keiichi to have a baby in the mortal sense.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Megumi was reading "The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon" for 'desert isle' reading. She had engrossed herself in the book since Cevn suggested it. Section 25 was particularly intriguing; it described flowering trees and Yang Kuei-fei, the classical Chinese epitome of beauty. Megumi could relate to the snap and silk of beauty; she darted her gaze in the direction of the 'beauty restraint' ampoules she took daily.

Suddenly her brother burst into her room. Fortunately, she hadn't slipped into her pajamas, so she was still dressed in her school clothes when Keiichi blew past her doorway. She felt a little embarrassed and irritated at the sudden interruption.

"Haven't you learned to _knock_, Big Brother? What if I was getting dressed and you just stumbled..." she started shouting indignantly...but then her voice trailed off as she saw the corkscrew facial expression of confusion on her brother's face.

"WHY?" Keiichi said in an anguished voice before falling into a seated heap on the tatami flooring. Rather, his spirit seemed to collapse in Megumi's eyes.

"Keiichi?" she inquired with concern. Something had taken her brother through the blender. He looked like his emotions had been messily pureed...

"Bell-chan...and I...can't have children!" he wailed before breaking into hulking sobs.

Megumi dropped her book in shock, and then shifted abruptly to face him. She had rested comfortably in the assumption that, someday, she would have nephews and nieces. That she would babysit a little version of Keiichi or Belldandy during summer vacation at her and Genji's house. That she would giggle when they called her "Auntie Megumi" or some such silliness. That she would bake fresh arare snacks for the next generation of Morisatos. That she would see her own mother, Reiko, become the radiant grandmother she so richly deserved to be.

If Keiichi was telling the truth, none of this would ever happen.

"Belldandy can't have children? But she's a _Goddess_, for heaven's sake! Can't she do something about it?" Megumi thought. It made no sense; but then again, Belldandy wouldn't tell Keiichi something as devastating as this...unless it was the absolute truth.

"She..snff..said that she cannot have a baby, because her human form is..snff..just that, only a form. Just an emergent atomic structure...not the real _her_. She can only have..snffsnff..children with another God. Not with me. Belldandy said that the Ultimate Force won't allow her to get pregnant! It's impossible!" she heard Keiichi struggle to explain.

Megumi was struck harshly by the realization that this was her older brother, worried about never being able to become a father. Keiichi had sought her out, because he didn't have anyone else to even try to explain what this meant to him.

"How did we get so old so fast?" she wondered at the years that had just reeled by before her eyes. She wanted to say something comforting like "you both can always adopt a child", but realized that reassurance was the last thing Keiichi needed to hear right now. Platitudes were utterly useless when her brother was this upset. Fortunately, Megumi was too sharp of a girl to be drawn into saying stupid, insipidly insensitive things during stressful times...a trait she had inherited from her mother.

Keiichi just needed someone to listen to him.

She felt a tear in her eye when she considered the fact that her only brother would never have a child. He would forever be denied a child who would trace back some personal characteristic, with a sense of gratitude, to him.

This was terrible!

And here was her older brother, crying his heart out against the air.

"Keiichi...I'm here with you. You're not alone. Please talk to me," Megumi urged gently. "I'm here for you."

She watched him closely for several moments, until he straightened up his back, caught his breath, and started to unfurl his profound disappointment against her shoulder.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Banpei and Sigel were at it again. Skuld watched with a mixture of bemusement and disgust as her robot creation wheeled along the floor, walls and ceiling trying to sneak a peek up Sigel's short skirt.

She had talked to Banpei numerous times about chasing Sigel around the household. And she had talked to Sigel about short skirts, too. Sigel seemed to occasionally forget that she was not simply a robot; that she was crafted, Pinocchio-like, in the form of an adorable child.

A robotic mechanical child that Banpei had fallen metallic hat-over-wheels for.

Urd was floating over the table, looking longingly at the cake Belldandy had baked. Keiichi was reading the newspaper, appearing every bit the part of a salaryman...except for his worn-down sweatshirt and jeans. To Skuld, it was almost like some mixed-up warped stereotype of a typical Japanese family: Belldandy cooking, Keiichi reading the paper, Banpei and Sigil running around the house like kids.

Something had happened between her sister and Keiichi...they hadn't said a word to each other all day.

Skuld felt her mouth water at the cake. It was a soft angel's food cake, with a white frosting studded with...fresh strawberries!! Her sweet tooth was thoroughly enraptured! Consequently, the antics of the robotic couple were made just that more irritating because she wanted to devour that cake _now_!

After all, it was Hinamatsuri. Girl's Day. She glanced at the display of dolls perched on the tablestand in the living room, garlanded with peach blossoms and buttleburr cuttings from just outside Tokyo; Keiichi and Belldandy had gathered them last weekend.

Her sister had carefully arranged the dolls in several rows after the traditional fashion. Seated in the top row were the emperor and empress, with their brilliantly colored royal vestments. Below them were several ladies-in-waiting. Rows for court musicians and ministers were decorated with miniature court furnishings; lanterns, cabinets, trunks and mirrors. Even though Skuld thought she was too old for this, the dolls were always so pretty to admire. But not to touch. Belldandy and Urd had admonished her a couple of years ago after they caught her playing with the delicate dolls.

"Cut it out, you two!" she shouted, standing up abruptly and bumping into Keiichi. Keiichi shifted his body to keep Skuld from stumbling into his lap, and the newspaper flew out of one of his hands.

Sigel swerved to miss the newspaper and Keiichi, her roller-skate-like wheels partially retracting into the heels of her shoes to brake her down enough to turn. Banpei followed suite, his arms outstretched, grasping towards Sigel in an effort to hug her...

The two robots were heading straight for the doll display!

"Look out!" Urd yelled. Sigel retracted her wheels all the way and leapt off the wall onto the floor, skidding in a most unfeminine fashion into the couch. Banpei had her cornered...

At the very last moment, she darted out from under him and sped towards the kitchen. Banpei-kun slowed, rotated his body and pursued her.

"Nyah! Can't catch me, canya...Banpei!" Sigel said, sticking out her tongue. Skuld had talked to her about teasing Banpei; obviously with no effect. This taunt only encouraged Banpei. Skuld grimaced as she realized that, to Banpei, this was only a bit of flirtatious loveplay.

Sigel maneuvered around Urd, skating backwards like a graceful Olympic ice skater. Banpei reached towards her...

One of Banpei's retractable 'fingers' snagged the knot in Urd's scarf and pulled it off...

"_EEEEEEKKKK!!"_

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Skuld didn't mean to scream, but it was the first thing that leapt out of her mouth when she saw Big Sister's head. Elder Sister had screamed too, dropping the cake on the floor as Urd hastily tried to cover up with the now-dislodged scarf. But it was too late.

Keiichi looked at Urd...and continued looking at her with shocked eyes. Her bounteous, lustrous body of hair...was gone! Urd had bald patches on her scalp, covered only with a thin fuzz. The places where she had a few remaining strands of hair were straggled like seamoss. Instead of being rich and thick, her whitesilver hair was gray, stringy and dried-out in appearance. Her hairline had receded significantly in front.

Keiichi remembered visiting a friend in junior high school while his mother was undergoing chemotherapy. His friend's mother was going bald; her hair had been falling out for weeks. It turned out that his mother survived the treatments and her hair grew back, but it never was the same.

"Why didn't I put two and two together?" he angrily berated himself silently. His friend's mother had worn scarves until her hair was so far gone that she decided that it wasn't worth it to try and conceal her condition any longer.

"Urd...why did you try to hide it from us?" Belldandy said, smiling gently as tears filled her eyes. Belldandy knew that her older sister was the urtext of vanity; quite possibly the most self-admiring Goddess in Yggdrasil aside from Peorth and a few others. She recognized long ago that this self-absorption with physical beauty and styles was her older sister's way of compensating for the burden of loneliness she was forced to live with as Norn of the Past. No male God would see her sister with sparkling eyes of love; they would just see her as a beautiful Goddess. The only ones who could appreciate Urd's true beauty were Urd…and she and Skuld.

So Belldandy already knew the answer to her own question. She tried to swallow away the ominous fact that Urd was _really sick_. If her physical manifestation was this bad...then something was consuming her power and her soul with dangerous morbidity.

"I..I don't want to go there. M..my sister could be _dying_!" Belldandy thought gravely, trying to tie on a thin smile. She had to smile, because fears were flying overhead, bombing her with dread suspicions, causing her mind to wail air-raid sirens of distress.

Urd smiled sheepishly at the group. Banpei bowed his head sorrowfully, while Sigel started crying.

"You big..._idiot_!!" she said, trying to keep her panic down to a minimum. She hurled herself at her Big Sister and hugged her for dear life. Skuld knew in an instant why Urd hadn't told them. Big Sister Urd was trying to protect them from the truth.

"I love you guys...I just didn't want you to worry about me," Urd stated matter-of-factly.

"Urd...we've done very little besides worry about you, ever since..." Keiichi said, avoiding mentioning the incident by name. He remembered that one of the new rules of the house was "never mention the assault on Urd"; any mention of Cevn or the rape would trigger Urd off into hysterics. Even now, he could sense the springcoil tension in Urd as the unspoken thought traced tacitly through the dining room.

"Urd! You need to go back home and get checked by one of the Proctors and then the Adepts right away! In fact, I'm not going to cook anymore until you do. So if you don't want Keiichi and the others to starve...you had better return. Go visit Mother and Father. And I'm not going to take 'no' for an answer!" Belldandy announced, deadly serious.

Keiichi and Skuld looked at each other with panicked expressions.

"Well...if you put it that way...they'll just have to starve!"

"Urd!!" Belldandy, Keiichi and Skuld shouted in dismay.

"Urd...please go," Sigel said as she tugged on Urd's blouse sleeve.

"I'm going too!" Keiichi announced, darting a stern glance at Belldandy. All Belldandy could do was lower her head meekly...it would be no use arguing with him. The chasm was too wide between them; two continents captaining their hearts amongst a mingle of storm-swept seas of confusion.

"Keiichi, you can't go to Yggdrasil with her!" Skuld said, exasperated by the very idea.

"No! You don't understand! I need time away from Bell. From _all of you_! I have to really think about some things, by myself. I'll be visiting the Men's Dorm until I'm ready to come back," he answered, the shock of seeing Urd frail condition and Bell-chan's resulting threat pushing him into bounds of irritation. Urd's illness brought back bad memories of the 'coughing sweat violence' he endured in 14th Century Kyushu; the unforgettable progress of the plague marked by mounds of bodies consumed by flames.

Death had hovered over him then. Now, a new type of Death haunted his thoughts. Bell-chan and he were forever denied the special gift to create new Life. Keiichi knew his Divine girlfriend felt the loss as grievously as he did; only his dolor was sounded by a sense of betrayal. This thing that had happened with Urd was a crushing blow to all of them. Now, it was even more a dark arch of fear.

Urd looked at Belldandy with a "what's the matter with him?" expression.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Urd leaned back against the wall of the bathroom. She felt so exposed. Yet, there was a palpable sense of relief, now that her secret was out. She couldn't hide from the fact that she was terrified, however. Terrified of the answer that she knew she was forthcoming once she had been examined by the Proctors and the Adepts.

And...Belldandy was such a fool! Not telling Keiichi that they couldn't have children! What did she expect? That he would just smile and accept her explanation with nary a twinge of disappointment? Especially after concealing it for _four years_! She should have thought about this when he got so upset when he learned that she had parents in Yggdrasil. That would have been perfect. She had counseled her sister to tell Keiichi the truth, years ago when they had taken that first fateful trip to the ocean. But then, Belldandy was always so protective of Keiichi's feelings. Now look what happened!

"I guess that I'm not that much different than you, sis," Urd thought soberly. She had to soberly admit to herself that she had been keeping a secret as well, in an attempt to protect her sisters.

Day by day for the past several weeks, Urd had watched her face grow more gaunt and pale. Daily, she expended almost all of her energy to restore it to some semblance of healthiness. But she couldn't stop her hair loss. Her hair kept falling out in clumps as she brushed it; so she stopped combing it. She tried not to touch it, and it _still _fell out. Every time she soaked in the bath, she had to scoop out piles of hair floating on the surface.

Now, not even the soak in the bathtub was comforting in the slightest. She stared dejectedly at the bathtub as she limply poured water from the ladle bucket onto the floor, instead of spilling it over her skin to rinse. She watched languidly as the water pooled on the duckboard planks, filtering down between the gaps onto the tile floor.

She had tried to conceal her illness as best she could, hoping against hope that her condition was only temporary. But it wasn't just her hair. It was _all_ of her. The others couldn't see the outbreak of rashes on her skin. The welts. The dry, itchy patches. It was easier to cover these up with clothes than to exert any more energy to try and remove them from her physical manifestation.

"I'm ugly and I'm going to die!" she said to herself, then started sobbing. Her body was shriveling up before her eyes, which meant that her soul was deathly sick. Her essence was waning.

With a sharp regret, Urd remembered Keiichi's first conscious reaction when she was exposed. The fractional expression of disgust in his eyes.

"I'm turning...into a hag!" she bewailed mentally. Keiichi's eyes had completely betrayed the fact that she was no longer attractive. No longer desirable.

She felt like a castaway in her own body.

"Why did you do this to me, Cevn?" she screamed in an angry voice, pounding the hams of her fists against the bathroom wall before giving vent to her tears. She immediately regretted her outburst; Urd had tried to maintain her composure in the bathroom so her disgusting body wouldn't be observed by one of her sisters.

But now it was too late.

Urd heard the door swish open, heard a loud feminine gasp. Then she felt a towel being wrapped around her shoulders.

"Even if we don't have all our hair, we need to carefully comb the hair we have," Belldandy said softly, her voice pure and rich with gentle sisterly affection. Somehow, that voice seemed to dissolve away all of Urd's shame concerning her wretched appearance.

Urd looked over her shoulder at her sister, who was smiling calmly. Belldandy had been more than a sister during the past few weeks. In some ways, Urd sensed that Bell had developed an almost maternal tenderness towards her.

"Thank the Almighty that I have such a wonderful sister! It must be so hard on you, Belldandy," Urd thought gratefully as graceful slender hands massaged her shoulders softly with the towel. Belldandy hadn't even noticed that she wasn't wet!

Urd knew that Belldandy was past simply being upset, to miss such an obvious thing. She leaned her head forward and felt a comb running itself gingerly through the spare tufts of hair that she had left.

It was ridiculous, Belldandy combing the few strands of hair remaining on her scalp. Pretending as if she still had a full head of hair. Yet, within her actions, her younger sister was affirming that, in her eyes, Urd was still beautiful. Even if Urd didn't believe it.

Cevn had said something once about how he had wanted to kill himself after his wife died; only to learn that, despite the fact that he didn't believe in himself, he could learn to believe that others believed in him. That their belief was stronger than his disbelief. That their love was there for him when he couldn't find the strength to love himself.

It was all bullshit...because he had told her the truth...and lived his lies upon her with horrible viciousness.

"Cevn, I hate you!" Urd said in a quiet angry voice, once more swollen with resentment at the unspeakable betrayal. How could someone who seemed so...gently loving...for a mortal, turn around and do the vile things he had done to her?

"Belldandy...don't ever let him set foot in this house. _Never!!_ Promise me!" she said, looking at her sister with insistence.

"Of course I promise, Urd," Belldandy answered her, and then resumed combing her thinwisp strands of hair.

Urd knew her sister well...Belldandy's little heart was broken, despite the seemingly confident facade she showed the others.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Urd paced around the waiting room at the Holibiolonics Clinic. She wasn't actually pacing; she was just floating up and down the length of the room. The Clinic was not as frequented as the Ethiopsylogic Clinic, because the Adepts only took on serious cases of illness that were not reconcilable to mental and emotional disturbance. Their purview was focused on Divine power interrupts, Metanative mutations, corruption of energies, and intensive maladies of Soul. In Earthrealm terms, the Ethiopsylogic Clinic was the 'nut ward', while this Clinic was the 'ICU'. She doubted that all of the therapy the Proctors could pour into her wounded heart could heal the muddied impurity of her despair.

Circles.

She had made the decision upon her arrival to Yggdrasil _not_ to visit Mom and Dad, despite Belldandy's encouragement. Instead, she had traveled to one of the Cathedrals of Piercing Light and then to Urd's Well to try and seek silent contemplation.

Urd's Well was a sacred place, even among the Gods. Named after the Norn of the Past since the beginning of time, it now carried her name. The Well of Urd was one of the means of transit between Yggdrasil and the other realms. Not the only way, of course. But once a God had been cast down through Urd's Well, they could never ascend back to Yggdrasil except by leave of the Almighty. All manners of return passage were barred from them by the Ultimate Force otherwise. This was why Urd's Well was known as a place of exile.

Yet, Urd's Well held another very important function. It was the place of Assemblage; the nearby open field was where the Assembly would be convened to decide some important matter. Such as the destruction of a realm. The exile of a God or Goddess. The decision to go to war...

Something shadowed around the word "war"...it seemed to emerge in Urd's thoughts through a translucence; a concept that was important in some meaning. But it was wrapped tight, hidden away in a mental gauze. Urd couldn't quite recall the mind-image that lofted tantalizingly beyond her grasp.

During her entire existence, a state of truce had existed between the Gods and the Demons. Her father had lost his eye in order to gain the insight and knowledge necessary to head off the Demons during the last War.

Odeyn, the one-eyed.

Urd had never seen her father without that patch over his eye. She settled back down to the marble bench and lowed her head sadly. She was almost certain that she would only be able to see Father again for only a brief moment in time before she was gone.

Then the heart-shattering image of Mother, grieving, came and went. Urd just couldn't bring herself to inform her parents about her maladies.

"Who will remember me when_ I'm_ gone?" she thought. Surely, Belldandy and Skuld would. She tried to lighten her mood by imagining that Skuld would name one of her children after Urd, a hundred-plus millennia in the future. She thought about Belldandy and Keiichi...she would never get to see them get married. She would be denied her share in the long life of love ahead of them...

"_Stopitstopitstopit!_" she told herself. She was only getting more maudlin, thinking about all the 'could-be's'.

"Urd," she heard as an Adept and his Angel appeared besides her. The Adept had a long white beard, crystal silver eyes, and a gentle smile. His Angel hovered above and behind him, sunlight wings fully extended.

"Come with me, please," he said in a voice deeply resonant with wisdom and patience.

"Here it comes," Urd thought disheartedly.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

_Keiichi's Journal 5 March, 20XX _

_Dear Journal,_

_I've been staying here at the Men's Dorm, sleeping on the couch. I really need to take a serious look at where my life is going. The fact that Bell didn't tell me that we couldn't have kids has really blown me away._

_Why now? I feel like the love between Bell and me is dying and there's nothing I can do. I really miss her; her smile, her cooking, her deep feelings, and a whole bunch of other stuff._

_The real question, when I look beyond my feelings of being betrayed, is whether I'm willing to continue this relationship. I know that I love her with all of my heart. But is that enough? There's so many times when I have doubts about us. I feel torn between two opposites. On one side, there is a part of me that wants to penetrate the reality of who Belldandy is. To really find out everything I can about her. On the other side, another part of me wants to be with her because she is so good at satisfying my needs in life. I feel that I'm really selfish when I think about this side of things. Which side is stronger?_

_It's like I get caught up between the Absolute and the Real, when I think about how I love Belldandy._

_Cevn broke up with Urd because he couldn't deal with her drinking. Can I deal with it just being Bell and me? I know that Skuld sometimes is like a child, but I don't feel it would be right to make her our 'daughter'._

_Could we adopt a kid? It would be hard on me, to be honest. I want a child of my own flesh. I know that sounds really old-fashioned and selfish. But I'm not fully into this "New Generation" movement that everyone else my age is into._

_It really sucks!_

_God, I'm writing as if I'm planning on Bell being with me for the rest of my life! There's so many thing we haven't done together yet._

_I don't know if I can talk about the pregnancy thing with anyone here. Tamiya and Ootaki have been curious, and I did ask them if they knew any couples who didn't have any kids. I hope that they don't figure out the real reason why I'm here._

_I guess it really comes down to my willingness._

_I'm really scared! Seeing Urd getting so sick, I don't know if I could handle it if something like that happened to Bell-chan. It's hard on Belldandy being with Urd while she gets really sick. Watching Urd has been totally rough on me too. There's a big part of me that just wants to run away from all of this._

_I wish I knew the future, like Skuld._

_My life "before Bell" was pretty okay, in a lot of ways. I was surprised to find out that I miss partying with the guys. My sempai are such crackheads when they get drunk! They almost got us in trouble with the police when we stopped at a noodle stand after going clubbing in Narashino. Guess they didn't notice the police box across the street._

_All I could think about at the club was Bell. I don't belong in some stupid club hitting up on a bunch of drunk babes._

_I belong with Bell. I know it!_

_I've got a whole bunch of finals next week. Then two weeks off on vacation, assuming that I get into grad school here._

_Otherwise, I'm going to have to look for a real job._

_How do I find the willingness to stay with the Goddess that I love? I've found it before, but right now, I really question whether I've got what it takes._

_I really want us to have a family! But what are the chances of any of my wishes coming true? About as much as catching a bonito in the kitchen sink._

_Someone once told me that love is a form of valuation. The more I value someone in my life, the greater the chances are that I can love them._

_This is probably the lowest I have felt in my life. Because I value Bell so much. All this stuff is happening to her, and I'm stuck having to feel it! But if I leave her now, it'll look like I was only with her for the good times. For all practical purposes, we're married in a way. So should I stick with her in bad times as well as good?_

_I just don't know. I just feel so stuck: because of school, because of what's going on at home, because of the Club, because of a lot of things. I can't even decide if I want to stay with Bell...that's how stuck I am!_

_When I do, I'll write back. It's funny, the next time I write here, I'll probably have a solution. But right now, the next page of this journal is blank. What I would give to know what will be written on that page._

_K1_

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

The Adept waved his hand, and a holograph appeared on the wall. It showed her Soul; this much Urd could tell. The first thing she noticed was the weave of blue and red cloudy zones representing her Goddess and Demoness attributes. She recognized this pattern, having observed it many times before. But then her eye was gripped by a series of splotches of an ugly green, starkly contrasting with the soft azure-rouge colors of her soul.

"First, we want to assure you that we have tested you in every conceivable manner in our efforts to discover what is ailing you. Because of your enigmatic dual nature, Norn of the Past, our diagnosis has been extraordinarily confounded, as you might expect.

"The red and blue areas in this holograph represent your two halves. Your two natures, as it were. In a normal God or Goddess, the Soul would render itself in various shades of blue in this representation."

Urd always hated it when she heard the phrase "normal God or Goddess"; these words made her feel demeaned, alienated..._different_. As if being described as 'unnormal'...and judged inferior for it. It was already difficult enough to face the challenges of living with the Demonic side of her. Being reminded of this fact didn't help matters at all.

"Because of the binary qualities of your soul, the blue is matched with red, which we presume as indicating your Demoness nature. Usually, at the level of your Soul, both essences are merged to a great extent; thereby rendering your Soul to display the color purple along with the other two colors. Why this is...is a mystery."

"Duh!" Urd mentally urged in exasperation. She had heard the lecture about her 'mystery' a hundred times over, too.

"Yet, upon comparison of your present condition of Soul with previous examination records, we have noticed a significant discrepancy. Some unknown arcane agency is causing your Goddess and Demoness natures to partition themselves, rather than harmonizing.

"For example, your Angel, World of Elegance, has two distinct sides to her. Because of her sharp distinctiveness, your soul is able to remain stable despite its twinned nature. Her symmetry of division allows your Soul to maintain a state of harmony between opposites."

"Tell me something I _don't_ know!" Urd said impatiently, then apologized for her anxious outburst. So far, this was only getting her frustrated. She was feeling very sick...and getting no answers.

"Have you tried to summon your Angel recently?" the Adept asked meaningfully. Urd instantly felt an icy coolness flow through her being. Ever since the horror, she had been unable to summon World of Elegance.

"We tried to summon her using an intricate form of arcanic resuscitation...and this is what we beheld," the Adept said as he formed another holograph.

Within the holograph, Urd saw herself lying on the examination cloud, encircled by Adepts who seemed to be chanting something. Gradually, World of Elegance emerged from her...or was this her Angel? As the Angel formed in the holograph, Urd felt a nauseous repulse at the image before her.

"I..is that her?" Urd said in shock. The Adept nodded.

She could barely recognize her own Angel. World of Elegance was no longer devil on the left side and angel on the right. Her skin, pure white with curls of shadowblack, had changed dramatically. She was mottled with black, white and purple blotches, looking every bit like a sick zebra after being poisoned. The purple colorations looked like decaying flesh. Her wings had shed feathers and skin; creating the skeletal appearance of a dead avian crow or eagle. Her silken backswept hair, normally black on one side and silver white on the other, was frizzled with an ugly green slime...

Her face was twisted in agony.

"_Noohhhhh!_" Urd gasped involuntarily. Her Angel...was no longer elegant. No longer sugar and spice. No longer...alive.

"Turn it off!" Urd screamed, so distraught by the sight that she bent over and hurled vomit on the floor. The Adept quickly encanted a healspell to comfort her, a knowing sadness in his eyes. Urd looked at the vomit, shocked that she could get sick like this here in her Yggdrasilian form. She had never vomited before, up _here_. It was a mess of red, blue and purple.

"Every time you are ill, you lose part of your soul. This is why your Earthrealm manifest is so diseased. This is why you feel such discomfort, even in your pure Goddess form. I can't explain this in any other way, other than the fact that...your Soul is eroding, Urd. Being drained away."

"Wh..what does this mean?" she asked, suddenly terrified at the diagnosis. The Adept reluctantly turned to the holograph of her soul and pointed at the green areas with a wand of light.

"This green area is an unknown compound within your Soul matter. It is consuming your Soul. It has weakened the harmony between your Goddess and Demoness halves, so that overall you are more susceptible to its presence. It seems almost deliberate in its 'divide and conquer' process. Impossibly, it is devouring your Soul like a cancer devours cells in physiological beings. The fact that you are expelling your Soul...is your Soul's way of attempting to dislodge the 'infection'."

Urd felt terrified...

"I..I'm sorry. There is no known record of something like this in the Yggdrasil Mainframe. Without a record...there is no way to cure it. We have devoted _all_ of our resources to try and develop some means by which we could arrest its progress, or reverse the damage. Unfortunately...there is nothing we can do. We have even enlisted the aid of Kami-sama. Even He cannot do anything."

"W...what!!" she shouted. If the Almighty couldn't do anything, then...

Urd felt herself being invaded by whirlpooling numbness. She was too shocked to cry, too confused to speak. Even the Almighty couldn't help her! The ultimate source of wisdom, power and love...was powerless to stay the course of her illness? She made the Adept repeat the part about the Lord, because she didn't believe it.

The fact of the matter was, she had just been handed a death sentence.

"What...will happen to me?" she finally said in a hoarse voice filled with resignation.

"Since you have been on the Earthrealm for the past several years, I will try to explain it in terms that are analogous to their medical philosophies and sciences. In essence, you will undergo symptoms similar to a combination of cancer, Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome and Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis. You will lose much of your energy and mass. You will experience loss of body functions, similar to the degenerative symptoms of ALS. The extremities will be the first to lose their functionality; usually starting with your legs, followed by your arms, then your hands and mouth. You will feel a sharp increase in pain...which will diminish near the end as the 'diseases' progress. Finally, you will become immobilized and susceptible to all sorts of ailments. Mentally, your thinking will become...fragmented. Very near the end, you will become vegetatively comatose."

Urd was silent.

"The best treatment we can offer will only alleviate the discomfort. We can't be certain, but it is quite possible that the pain will be excruciating. I suggest that you remain with the ones you love, so that they can care for you in your final days. I can assure you that soon you will be unable to care for yourself. In the Earthrealm, a strong regimen of painkillers are usually indicated. We can provide you with vials of healing lightaroma essences, in order to reduce the pain. But I must advise you that repeated use of healing lightaroma will destabilize your Soul more quickly..."

"I know...it only masks the pain to create a semblance of comfort. I won't be able to think clearly, or act rationally at times..." Urd said in acknowledgment, deep in thought.

"We're sorry, Urd," the Adept offered, at a loss to say anything else.

"No! I..if I'm going to experience the real end of my existence...the Real Death...then I want to do it with a clear conscience. With a clear identity of being!" Urd said, reaching a decision. She thought about what Cevn had told her about being able to face life without hiding behind sake or addiction. This brought up another chain of questions...and resentment.

"How? How could a mortal do this to me by...molesting my physical manifestation?" she asked.

"You have had no contact with Demons or Goddesses? You have not Shared with any entity?" the Adept queried, obviously taken aback by her strange question.

"I am the Norn of the Past. You know that I cannot do that! I cannot Share in the present. I cannot love in the present. Yet, I was able to love a mortal male. Then, I was...invaded...by a this same mortal. I once thought I loved him, but h..he did this hateful thing to me. Then I started getting sick. He told me that he had left me a 'gift'! This fucking disease must be it..." she explained.

Urd was desperate for answers. If she couldn't be cured...then she could at least avenge herself on Cevn for doing this to her. Enigmatically, when she asked her sister if Cevn was still alive, all Belldandy would do was shrug her shoulders in mummery. Which meant that he was still alive...

Somehow, she would kill him, or find a way to make the rest of his life miserable.

"Urd, there is _no_ way that a mortal could do this to you! Whatever did this...would have to possess divine energy, alchemical energy, or _some_ form of energy on a scale that we haven't encountered before. What you are suggesting...is totally beyond the capabilities of a mere Earthrealm mortal. It's even beyond the capabilities of _us_," he answered, shaking his head. Urd sighed, not at all satisfied with the Adept''s explanation. She looked at him, and noticed that he was guiding his eyes away from hers.

"There's more?" Urd said quietly, interpreting the evasive aspect of his posture and gestures.

"Yes. You have about two months remaining, using the chronological reference scales that the mortals designate as 'time'."

"And?" she probed.

"We had a long discussion with the Proctors of the Ethiopsylogic Clinic about whether we should disclose to you what I'm about to say. We decided, under the direction of Kami-sama, that we _should_ tell you this, in all fairness and respect."

"Tell...me...what?" Urd said, wondering what could be so terrible that the Proctors were reluctant to discuss it with her.

"This 'infection' that is making you sick...will also affect your two sisters. First, your younger sister Belldandy...and then Skuld. Belldandy will begin exhibiting symptoms within a month from now, and then Skuld will follow a month later. Fortunately, since Skuld is so young, she will only suffer for a roughly a month before expiring. But Belldandy will have to endure three months of this wasting disease, just like you. We know for certain that, because you are all Norns, this illness will affect each of you in turn. Somehow, it is linked to the TimeWeb that bonds each of you..."

The rest of the Adept's explanation was submerged in lofts of sound as Urd released a scream that shook the walls of the clinic...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"B'dandy dahling? Are you here?" a joyous voice punctuated the silence. Startled, Belldandy stopped snapchopping the onion stalks as she heard her Mother's voice. It sounded quite near.

She had been so lonely since Keiichi had left to spend the past several nights at the N.I.T. Men's Dorm. She felt connected with him only as far as she knew they were both concentrating on trying to sort things out. Her sense of impotence within this situation seemed to plumb unfathomable depths; at times it bayed her confidence in the steadfastness of his love for her. He had reacted exactly as she feared. Once she told him that she couldn't get pregnant in the mortal sense, he seemed to emotionally deflate. Like a balloon losing its air. Like a man losing his momentum of ideas...

Belldandy felt a worrying voice in the back of her mind.

Megumi had talked with Keiichi that fateful night, and they arrived at the decision that it would be best for all involved if he would take a sabbatical from the temple house. Not to get away from Belldandy, but to allow him some private time so he could examine himself. So Keiichi went to the only other place where he felt comfortable. Belldandy was confident that Keiichi's buddies would guide him straight and true through this crisis.

"When _aren't_ we in crisis?" she asked herself. Ever since she had arrived here, Belldandy felt constant conflicted between her softly feminine placidity and the demanding rigors of living as a Goddess amongst the Earthrealm mortals. And now, her Mother had dropped in unexpectedly! Belldandy felt heart-torn...she missed Keiichi dearly; her love-loss feelings bustled alongside every waking moment.

Ever since Keiichi had relocated to the Men's Dorm, she constantly questioned whether it had been wise on her part to keep such an important issue concealed from her beloved Keiichi. This was the last big secret that she had kept from him. There was nothing mechanical about making such a difficult decision. Evolution had given the Gods immense powers and wisdom, but there was no "emotional perfection" that the mortals often assumed their Gods to possess. Emotions for a Goddess were just as messy and confusion as they were to any other species capable of inward-feelings. Urd had been right; her Older Sister had often argued with Belldandy about the downfall that would eventually come once Keiichi found out the truth about her inability to bear mortal children.

And what a downfall it had been! Belldandy knew for certain that he was feeling betrayed by her past opacity regarding the issue of children.

"Belldandy! Urd! Skuld! Why don't you answer your Mother?" a loud male voice hollered. _That_ voice was unmistakably Father's.

They were _here_!

_"Mommy! Daddy!"_

Belldandy smiled to herself as she heard Skuld's shout of surprised joy accompanied by rapid footsteps. She turned the corner out of the kitchen and saw Odeyn and Freiija standing in the living room, just as Skuld hopped up to sit on Father's broad shoulder.

"Hi Mother. Hi Father," Belldandy said, all of her refined manners drawing to the fore as she greeted her parents.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Belldandy served her parents tea while Skuld excitedly described her current mecha projects. Always wanting to impress Mother and Father, Skuld was quite the picture of girlish animation as she used her Goddess powers to levitate the tea service, and then orbit each of the pieces without spilling a drop.

"She's really been practicing her control," Belldandy thought to herself with open admiration for her little sister.

"Just make sure everybody gets their own cup back, Skuld," Odeyn teased his daughter.

"By the way, where is that wild older sister of yours?" Freiija asked Skuld. Skuld squinched her eyes shut to keep from dropping all of the cups at the mention of Urd.

"Ah..uh, she's out," Belldandy answered quickly.

"Well, of course she's out! But _where_ is the girl?" Mother repeated to Belldandy.

With a supreme effort, Skuld settled the saucers on the table, and then floated each cup into its respective place. Once finished, she gasped for breath, winded from her magical exertions. Belldandy was amazed that her little sister could keep them up for so long, considering that her license was still under suspension and her Goddess powers were ebbing at a minim.

"Urd decided to take a vacation away from the Earthrealm," Belldandy answered, hoping that Mother would buy the deceit. She _hated_ lying, especially after the dear price she had just paid for her recent deception. But her Mother doggedly pursued the line of questioning, until Belldandy finally admitted that Urd had gone to Yggdrasil.

"And she _didn't visit us_? Well, the very nerve of that sister of yours! Such an independent soul! The very idea of it! Not visiting her dear parents? How irresponsible of her!" Freiija declared. "Well, she must have had her reasons not to drop in and see us."

Belldandy felt a slight flush of sadness...Mother's statement was tragically close to the truth.

"By the Almighty! You spend an eternity raising them, then they are assigned to the Earthrealm...and what do they do? They forget all about you!" Odeyn said seriously, and then broke into a wide grin when he saw Belldandy's embarrassed reaction.

"So where's that Earthrealm mortal you're all gaga about? The infamous Mr. Morisato?" Odeyn chuckled, stoking his now-shy daughter's fires of embarrassment. This was his prerogative as her father...to keep her on her toes while amusing himself. Not out of cruelty, of course. Well, maybe just a hint of harmless cruelty, he had to admit. But he adored the way Belldandy's delicate features would pinch up when he teased her. She had no reason to be ashamed of being in love with a mortal such as Keiichi Morisato. Odeyn almost wanted to spill out the reason they were visiting, just to see how his middle daughter would react.

"It looks like our dahling girl is wilting at your words, husband," Freiija said with a smile.

"Mother...Father, Keiichi is at school. Next week is his finals week, and then he'll be all done with school for a little while," Belldandy lied, again. Well, at least this was partly true...at least the mention of school and finals.

"You mean that they still have schools on the Earthrealm?" Odeyn commented.

"You big oaf, of course they do! Don't feign ignorance in front of your daughters!" Freiija chided. Skuld tittered with glee as Mother punched Father playfully on the arm to emphasize her point.

"Well...very well and good. We'll just wait here until he arrives. We've got something important to discuss with him," Odeyn said. To his mirthful satisfaction, Belldandy's eyes grew wide with apprehension...and he winked at her to add to her mystification.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Keiichi felt his cell phone buzzing as he walked down the hallway in the Engineering Lab #2 building.

"Hello?"

_"Keiichi! I..I've missed you so much! I know you told me not to bother you at school, but... Anyway, my Mother and Father are here! They want to see _–you-_!"_ Bell's voice chattered rapidly over the phone. Keiichi could have heard the clasping excitement in his girlfriend's voice even if his ears had been muffed. _He_ was relieved as well; it was great to hear her voice again! Bell-chan had made good on her promise to not contact him until he was ready to talk things over with her. Over the past several days, he was awakened to the fact that this separation must have been really difficult for her...because it had been hard on him. Throughout the day, his heart had wanted to cross that emotional gap between he and his beautiful girlfriend-Goddess.

Yet, the unexpected arrival of her parents definitely warranted a break in their vigil of silence.

"Wow! They're _here_?" was all he could say. Of course they were here! But why?

Keiichi had spent several hours last night deeply knit in discussion with his sempai. About a lot of things...graduation, grad school, parties, the Le Mans...and his divine joymate. Without divulging the nature of Belldandy's condition in specific terms, he sought their opinions on childless families. Both sempai had neighbors who didn't have kids for one reason or another. Keiichi counted himself lucky for this fact as the two recounted their experiences.

Tamiya confessed that the topic of children had recently taken on a new relevance for him, due to his new relationship with Sayoko. Ootaki added that he and Satoko were planning to get married after he finished grad school; they both wanted to start a family, but not for a few years yet.

Between being slapped on the shoulder and forcefed more sake than was appropriate for the second-to-last week of the school year, Keiichi had broken down and cried in front of his two friends. Then they all got really goofy and decided to hit a bar or two. The stress was getting to all of them, and it felt good for him to let down his guard and just "be one of the guys" for a bit. He reluctantly confessed that he missed the times before Belldandy, and once again chided Ootaki for fixing his bike on that fateful day four years ago.

This morning, he had woke up with more questions than answers. And now, this...

_"Keiichi? Are you there?"_ the voice on the phone asked.

"Y..yes! I was just thinking to myself..."

_"My parents want to meet with you! Do you have any idea why?"_ Belldandy was almost shouting into the phone; he could hear Skuld laughing playfully in the background.

"_O..omiai_?" was the first words out of his mouth. After a pause of silence, she gasped through the phone, causing him to laugh softly.

_"Just kidding, my love! They probably just wanted to check up and see how we're all doing,"_ he corrected himself. A second later, his thoughts slid to a stop like a dragster after a quarter mile run.

"Did I just say what I think I said?" he thought incredulously. Keiichi was astonished at where his leap of intuition had led him. His first thought was...marriage? But what about Bell's mother? She didn't seem to like him very much when they visited last time.

And to visit so soon...

_"Keiichi, how _–are-_ you doing?"_ Bell-chan asked, her voice suddenly serious. Over the past couple of days, Keiichi had skated around his own concerns, worrying more about how his girlfriend was handling things.

While working at Whirlwind, he confided to Sora about his dilemma. Sora, of all people, blithely told him in her uniquely inimitable way that it must have been hard for Belldandy to choose between keeping secrets or telling him the harshly unwelcome news. Coming from Sora, it was as if he was hearing things anew. Then Chihiro sat him down and told him once again about the time when they accidentally discovered the rings that both Tamiya and Ootaki had gotten her. She explained how she had agonized over the situation, not wanting to disappoint either of his sempai, or get Ootaki in trouble with Satoko. Once more, Belldandy had pointed out the path of least resistance to her...and everyone was happy. And Chihiro had two rings on her finger...

Keiichi sensed that he could trust Chihiro because she was an older woman. So it was his turn to extend his trust in the process of life and love...and not push against the tides of life anymore!

"Belldandy...I just want to do whatever makes you happy! I..I _do_ want a child of our own, but if we can't...then I can live with it. I'll still love you!! I'll never cheat on you, betray you, or hold it against you. I've been thinking...that wanting kids is great, but the ultimate truth of the matter is that it's just another demand my ego places on me. On us. I just want us to be _free_! To be in love with each other without anything to hamper our freedom to be honest. To be together, _no matter what_! I don't want you to feel...that you've let me down in any way. I..I know that, regardless of anything, I can only fall deeper in love with you. And that's my kokoro! Whew!" he finished, out of breath.

He heard Belldandy let out a long sigh over the phoneline. It was strange...he didn't have a clue about what to do about the pregnancy situation until he heard her voice. Then, everything seemed to spill out of him without any confusion. Sometimes, Keiichi believed that he had a guardian spirit within him, a being that was part of his essence. It seemed to awaken from time to time to protect his love of Belldandy. A personal Ultimate Force, which was as natural as his heart could be. This was one of those times when his kokoro bounded through his words like a playful kitten.

_"Keiichi...you're the best!"_ Hearing this, he simpered a brief smile; his heart glowed with the special warmth he felt whenever he knew that he had bound his girlfriend to a pillar of pleasure. Turning red at the decidedly sexual image in his head, he asked if they could meet by the clocktower in the park to talk things over.

Belldandy agreed to this. It made sense to her that they should map things out about how to proceed with this drop-in visit from her folks.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

The delighted smile on Bell-chan's face as they strolled back to the temple house was absolutely charming. Walking next to him, she was swinging her arms against the afternoon wind like a little girl. Each stride she took had a little extra skip to it. Keiichi knew that she was filled with joy and relief as she pulled him excitedly towards a convenience store to get some tea.

She was even more precious when he ducked into a music store and splurged on two tickets for the Judy and Mary reunion concert next month in Tokyo.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Mara was devilishly sick.

With the suddenness of a midday fog, she had awakened one day to find that her skin was turning bronzed. Even worse, it was patched with reddish brown welts. She was beginning to look like...Urd! Several days later, she noticed in the mirror that her curly straw-platinum locks of hair were losing their waves. Her eyes were bloodshot and yellowed, as if she had the mortal disease of gangrene.

Worst of all, she felt _weak_.

She had been ill several times, sicker than she had ever been in her Earthrealm manifest form. And then there was the matter of the horrendous accident she had which laid her up for thousands of years...

But this was pretty bad! Mara imagined that she was a worn-out couch; collapsing into herself because her springs had given out from too much weight.

Isilblius was nowhere to be found. Lately, he had been more out of her lair than in. Mara suspected that he had paid a visit to Urd, but _she_ was gone as well. She had assigned a squadron of Sere-Hawks to spy on the Goddesses, and was surprised to see that the oldest sister had been away for some time.

With a perverse twist of her imagination, Mara briefly fancied that Urd had eloped off with Isilblius, but then corrected herself on her stupidity. Isilblius wasn't Urd's type...he was too young, too naive...and too Demonic. Perhaps Isilblius kidnapped Urd? No, Mara would have learned that readily; the Goddesses would be frantically searching for her if this was the case.

Yet, both Belldandy and Skuld possessed significantly subdued auras, indicating that _something_ was trying their serenity with more than the usual vexation. And now that their parents were visiting, she would have to call off the Sere-Hawk surveillance.

The last thing she wanted to do was tangle with two peeved-off Senior First Class Gods!

"I shouldn't be _this_ sick! This...is ridiculous!" Mara said as she gazed at her reflection. The suppleness of her cheeks and jawline had been replaced by an unsightly sagging.

She punched the mirror, shattering it into concentric jagged shards. Licking the blood on her knuckles, Mara noticed that it tasted _different_. Gone was the sweetsalt taste of the lifefluid of her manifest form; instead it tasted sour...and rotten.

If she wasn't so weak, Mara would have paced around her lair. But lately, she could only get up and dander around for a few hours. Simple activities such as polishing skulls, arranging candlefists on the bloodwalls, cooking brown rice...had become utterly exhausting.

In a mythic fashion, she tried to convince herself that this fatigue was in some way linked with her license reduction. When the Dark Lord had reduced her from a Demon First Class, Unlimited license, she hadn't felt any different. Yet, she had been a Demoness First Class off and on for over eighty millennia...she wasn't used to the reduced powers and privileges of being a Demoness Second Class, Limited. So maybe _this_ was the remorse part of her punishment for being thwarted by Megumi during the Demon Rally. Despite crafting a worthy explanation, Mara was unconvinced.

But _this_ sick?

"Ohhhwwnnh! I feel like I'm going to die!" Mara groaned as she slowly walked towards her bed. She felt like she was a few hundred thousand years older than her actual age.

For the first time since she was little, she couldn't summon her Devil, Torrid Mystic. This was perhaps the most disconcerting effect of her illness. Torrid Mystic was the envy of many a Demoness. Mara's Devil would appear when summoned in a swathe of black velvet leathersilk, her skin very lightly colored with a pastel orange hue. She sported a magnificent set of black feathered wings, the endtips of the feathers a foot or two below the hem of her leathersilk wrap. And that wonderful, wild, _gorgeous_ head of hair, starting out blonde-yellow in front and blending into a breathtaking firetruck red as it swept back with an abundance of long loopy curls...

"What is happening to me? I feel sooo blessedly terrible! I look like some Granny Demon!" she growled.

She turned her eyes away from her reflection in the mirror...she was definitely beginning to look _ugly_.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --


	49. Pt 49: A Question of Severance

**Part 49: A Question of Severance**

Peorth reluctantly decided to admit herself to the Ethiopsylogic Clinic for a check-up after she realized that she had slid into an emotional skittering riot because of the destruction of her carefully-tended arbors of roses. At first, the vandalism was so complete, she thought she was imagining things. So she toured all her gardens in Yggdrasil, and discovered that _every_ arbor of roses was murdered, not just the one at her GRO office node! Dozens of plots and ambroses representing several decamillennia of carefully honed floricultural skills...were wasted.

In a word, Peorth's sense of paranoia was over the top.

As she levitated amongst the mazes of rounded towers and floating gardens, she felt her tension began to coolflow outwards. She tried to relax and enjoy the relative freedom that she had; she was permitted to wander around the grounds at her leisure whenever she wasn't in session with the Clinical Proctor assigned to her case. These carefree moments did much to allay her compulsion towards disassociation. Peorth was very troubled...the shock of the affront had seemed to seriously detach her from reality.

When Peorth unfurled her tale of the destruction of her floral gardens, the Proctor assigned to her case admitted that, quite frankly, she didn't believe a word of Peorth's tale.

"How could such an act of wanton vandalism happen? If a being had done what you claimed, then they need to be here a thousand times more than you. Destruction is the process of a _diseased mind_, especially the destruction of beauty," the Proctor had reasoned aloud incredulously. Peorth could empathize with her incredulity. But much to her credit, her Proctor had personally investigated the crime anyway, accompanying Peorth to a selection of her cherished hortoriums and ornamental rose preserves. Soon, she was swept into the mystery of Peorth's claim. The further she deliberated on the cause of the bio-arson, the more the Proctor became puzzled.

This impasse only served to amuse Peorth.

"How could something bring death to your roses? No wonder you feel like a basket case, my dear! If this destruction was wrought by another Yggdrasilian God...then that being is seriously in need of therapy! And if it was something else? This would be a _major_ problem if the cause was anything other than accident; it would be tantamount to a Demon running amok in the system!" she had stated. She assured Peorth that she would get to the root of the problem before Peorth finished her stay at the Clinic.

During one of her free time periods, Peorth found herself floating down a hallway when she imagined hearing concerned discussions mentioning Urd and the other Norns. Pausing for a moment, Peorth realized that she _was_ overhearing some kind of debate about the Norns! Being a professional eavesdropper and bit unnerved to boot, Peorth had no qualms convincing herself that she _had_ to listen in...

Her thoughts eartight to the wall, she listened in as a committee of Senior Proctors discussed whether or not they should inform Urd that her younger sisters were going to die of the same affliction she had contracted. Positions were dialogued with briar-like professional seriousness.

At first, Peorth thought this was some kind of macabre joke. Or possibly a trick her mind was playing on her because of the intense shock of seeing all her ruined rose plots. But as she continued her surreptitious eavesdrop, the earnestness of the Proctors' contentious debate convinced her that something was very troubling to them. This was more involved than a simple philosophical discussion of medical ethics...the arguing possessed the passion of desperation.

Finally, one of the Proctors provided a full diagnosis of Urd's condition as a sort of closing statement, including the unbelievable fact that the August One was powerless to remove her illness. The Eldest Proctor finally concluded the meeting by patiently explaining that the Almighty had recommended "full disclosure". The Elder Procter explained that it was His desire that the Proctors should tell Urd _everything_ about the nature of her illness...and how it would claim the lives of her younger sisters very soon.

Peorth's heart sunk into a dazed melancholy as she felt herself hammered by what she had just overheard. She stumblefloated down the hallway in a daze, seeking the security of the cottage that served as her sanitarium while she was here at the Clinic.

_"Merde!!"_

Her thoughts screambled as her knees weakened away once inside her cottage in the Wishout wing of the Clinic grounds. The next day, she checked out AWOL from the Clinic.

Peorth had visited Urd's charming little family vacation loft several times as a young girl, so she decided to look there first...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Now she was here, in front of Odeyn and Freiija's vacation retreat; a messenger intent upon revealing the ghastly news to Urd's folks. The retreat home rested on one of the upper branches of a floating bubbletree, suspended several hundred kilometers above the Arcadian pastures in the PinkSky Zone. The bubbletree faintly recalled an Earthrealm oak tree: but instead of leaves on its branches, elongated frond-shaped bubbles stretched into the distance, each several hundred meters in length. Many Gods had built retreat houses here on the soft surface of the bubbles. As the bubbletree floated slowly throughout the PinkSky Zone, they could travel within the comfort of their homes.

Her knees were still acting on their own. Hovering amidst the colonnaded approach to the family's loft, Peorth felt them knocking together like wooden clappers after a sumo match. She levitated up to the entry foyer and then backed away.

Indecisive.

She was conflicted; torn between wanting to burst forth with the terrible news and otherwise just keeping her mouth shut. But if she didn't inform anyone, Peorth knew that she would live with lunatic dreams of regret later. She tried to develop the scenario in her mind as she imagined how it would unfold:

"Lessee...Urd will naturally try to keep it to herself, until her sisters start getting sick. Then she'll tell all. Once her parents find out, they'll recall all three Norns back from the Earthrealm. Keiichi would be très derange' when he finds out. Then, when they leave, he'll feel abandoned. This would make him a prime candidate for a wish...which _I_ would grant, comforting mon chérie mortale in his time of need..."

_"Peorth, how could you be so –_selfish-_!"_

Peorth blinked away the guilt as she visualized a squadron of mini-Belldandys circling her head, admonishing her with accusing glares. She shook her head to clear the mental vision of disapprobation. She had to admit that she _still_ was fascinated with Keiichi, even though he was Belldandy's human consort.

But keeping things to herself just wasn't part of Peorth's behavioral vocabulary. She floated towards the entryway again and halted just short of the entrance.

_Still_ indecisive!

"What if Urd doesn't tell anyone until it was too late? Why can't Kami-sama just cure her? He's...the _Almighty_ ! All mighty. He always uses His wisdom to see where we cannot, to do what we cannot fashion through our efforts," she muttered to herself. Peorth didn't want to believe that the Lord lacked the capacity to cure Urd. To entertain this notion...was not only insane but also verged on major blasphemy. The Almighty could do anything He deigned to. Or He wouldn't be _the Almighty_.

But...what if?

With a sinking heart she reasoned that, for His own peculiar reasons, it was quite probable that the Lord _didn't_ want to help the Norns! In which case it was became imperative for her to tell the parents! Perhaps Odeyn and Freiija could convince Kami-sama to spare Urd and her sisters. Perhaps Peorth could help them...

Straightening up her body, she advanced on the door...and halted again.

"What if I'm meddling? Am I causing more harm than good?" The recent experience with granting Banpei's wish had prized Peorth's eyes open to a host of moral depths that she had remissed during her Wishout phase. Repeated lectures by the Proctors of the Ethiopsylogic Clinic had keyed in on topic of needing to do what was best for the good of the whole when granting wishes.

She knew that she couldn't detach anymore...

Peorth made her decision and floated in, only to find the compound empty. Even the pets were gone as she searched the place.

As she searched the compound, she could make a soft sobbing coming from the back of the loft. She settled down to the ground and walked out onto the back patio. The yard planed away into the distance with checkerboard patches of grass, punctuated by bubblegrass spheres floating lazily on the wind. Each bubble of grass was colored differently, creating the effect of soft floating marbles against the pink sky...

Under a nearby gazebo was a bald person dressed in white.

"What is an _Earthrealm Shinto priest_ doing here at Urd's place?" she wondered in amazement.

"Hallo there?" Peorth hailed with a shout. The person ignored her. Perhaps they didn't belong here! A thought crept into her mind...

"What if this is the being who destroyed my roses?" her thoughts shouted. Her suspicions engaged, Peorth advanced on the intruder, hands aglow with pink energy...just in case.

"Who are you and what are you doing trespassing here!" she demanded, loudly threatening to voice. The bald person slowly turned and regarded Peorth sadly, her dimmed emerald eyes filled with resignation...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Urd was dressed in a simple milk-white gauze gown that clung to her gaunt fame. Peorth could sense immediately that she had lost _a lot_ of weight; she looked absolutely emaciated! She seemed as fragile as waxlight in a scolding wind; not at all her usual vivacious self. Seeing this, Peorth felt heartbroken. After forcing herself to join Urd under the gazebo, she listened as Urd grimly described everything about the soul-searing experience.

Peorth was a countenance of disbelief.

Urd's face looked like a painting afire; a masterwork of a portraiture genius...yet ill-fated to be reduced to pitiful smoldering embers. In a word, Urd's skin was almost hideously complected.

And her Soul...

To Peorth's Goddess senses, Urd's Soul seemed to be clutched amidst some kind of permafrost prison. Peorth decided that it feel to her to do _something_ to try and coax Urd out of her self-imposed shell.

"Urd? I really think you should go back to the Earthrealm and stay with your sisters!" Peorth encouraged with a faint smile, the best she could muster under the circumstances.

Urd's expression was as animated as that of a marble statue...her sad mien as hollow as a seashell. She hadn't even bothered to look once at Peorth while they were talking. She just stared into the spaces with a vacuous expression.

"Well, not exactly vacuous," Peorth reminded herself. Urd's eyes were startlingly bereft of hope...just like Keiichi's were when he thought Belldandy was going to get married away from him.

"What would _you_ do, Peorth? I don't think that you can even begin to understand the depths of emotional agony that I'm going through!" she snapped back in a low voice. "I have lost _everything_, including my dear sisters! And _I_ have to be the one to tell them!"

"Urd, you've lost your sisters anyway, if there is no cure for this! I hate to say it, Goddess-friend and sometimes sempai, but all the time you waste sitting here mired in your wintry sorrow...is only stealing away from the time you could _be_ with Belldandy and Skuld! And your folks. Reality is, you're _sick_...and that's not going to change! You don't have all the time in the Multiverse to fool around with any more! Now I don't know what it's like to face the Real Death, but I do know what it is like not to face up to life!" Peorth said righteously.

Urd just shook her head in negation.

This wasn't helping, so Peorth decided to be even more confrontational.

"Pull your head out of your ass, Urd! _Everything changes!_" Peorth shouted in her face, trying to stir Urd up into petulance. She strongly suspected that this approach would get Urd riled up. Sighing loudly, Urd looked up at her for the first time since Peorth had joined her at the gazebo. Peorth wanted to turn away from those eyes, those icegreen eyes with their terrible depths of loneliness and pain. They showered Peorth with razored bullets of guilt for being so blunt.

"Urd...I promise you that I'll be with you every step of the way. And when Belldandy and Skuld's time comes, I'll take care of them..snff..like they were my own sisters!" Peorth managed, the thought nudging a few tears past her composure.

"How, you primadonna dope!? You don't have any sisters, Peorth! Sooo...what would _you_ know about treating Belldandy and Skuld as if they're your own sisters?" Urd said quietly. Peorth was relieved that she had finally reached the Norn of the Past.

The words of insult were a really good sign.

"You know, it's totally funny. Completely weird, actually! The one that I'm worried about the most...is Keiichi," Urd admitted with a sigh.

"Huh?"

"He's going to be left to his own counsel when this is all over. I know Mom and Dad can take care of themselves. But Keiichi? I'm _really_ scared for him. In the past, I wouldn't ever want you anywhere near him when there was a crisis going on, Peorth. But now I think it might be good for him if you were there for him, to give him some sense of continuity. After all, he's going to lose the most precious substance of his heart...someone he had planned to share his love with for the rest of his life. He'll need to be looked after, by someone from Yggdrasil that he knows and respects..." Urd added, surprising Peorth.

"And don't you_ ever_ tell anyone I said that!" Urd amended with a menacing look.

"Remember that debacle with the truth serum?" Peorth prompted. Not wanting Urd to get all maudlin again, she applied humor into their conversation to lighten things up.

"Yeah. Skuld was hilarious, wasn't she? I've often been tempted to inject her again, just to hear what foolishness she's been up to. Do you remember that time you challenged Velpser...and what he did to you? You were _this_ high," Urd said as she held a shaky hand about three feet off the floor of the gazebo.

"Aw c'mon! Maybe just a little taller, you think? C'mon, give me a break!" Peorth said, playing around the indignance she felt at the hands of that Demon-brat. Serves him right to be changed into a cat...he was a little churlish pussy!

"Peorth, can I ask you to do something really special for me? I know that we haven't seen eye-to-eye for millennia, but I want to...see your Angel before we go back to the Earthrealm. Please?" Urd pleaded. Peorth was taken aback at Urd's odd request...then she remembered that Urd's own Angel was deathly ill; a shadowqueen rather than a being of LightDark.

"S..sure! How could I say 'no' to that?" Peorth said. She held her hands crossed high above her head and summoned Gorgeous Rose. Her Angel pounced out from behind her, light pink hair fluttering in the breeze.

Urd stood up, walked over and held onto Gorgeous Rose with a desperate hug...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Two Goddesses lingered at the torii entryway to the temple grounds.

Urd kept looking at Peorth, shaking her head "no". Her whole body kept saying "I can't go through with this!" She knew that this was going to be the most difficult moment of her life. She had to bear tidings of mortality and tragedy to her sisters: to tell her sisters that she was going to die soon and that they were going to die as well. It had been only a few weeks since...that horrible, wretched day when the fortress of Urd's will had been torched to the ground.

"'Life really sucks...'" she heard Peorth whisper under her breath.

"'...And then you die!', isn't that what the mortals say? Let's just get this over with," Urd grumbled with angry resignation as she started walking towards the sunroom door.

It was a beautiful spring afternoon; the clothes were hanging out on the line drying while avian mating calls breezed through the mountain-fresh air. Urd expected Belldandy to be relaxing in the sunroom; enjoying the verdant sensorium of seasonal distinctiveness that marked the period of Haru-Ichiban in Japan.

With a heave, Urd opened the door to the sunroom and walked down the short hallway past Bell's Tea Room. Her blood pressure rose as she noticed the living room was empty.

She turned around the corner into the dining room...and saw Mother and Father seated with everyone else...

"URD!!" the voices of a half dozen of the closest people in her life shouted in various shocked tones...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Keiichi didn't say a word. What could he say? Urd looked_ horrible_...her bearing possessed an emptiness. Like death warmed over. When she had left the temple, she had appeared withered like beat grain. But now she was much worse.

Drained. Everybody felt drained by the sight of her. Keiichi gasped his breath out as he saw mercurial disbelief register on everyone's face. A silence dragged on uncomfortably. The most high-spirited of the three sisters now stood in the doorway, a shadow of herself; dull when she should be glittering.

Urd looked around the room and tried to tune into a smile.

"Mom...Dad...Belldandy...Skuld, I'm going to die. I went to the Clinic; they told me there is nothing they can do," Urd said slowly, patiently, each word crushing her down, edging her towards breaking down. She didn't want to waste time hedging on preliminaries; she already felt tortured by what she had to say.

Then she fainted...

Words rebounding off the wall of an indifferent Multiverse.

While her family attempted to revive Urd, Keiichi wished that he could deliberately blur his memory into a fog that would conceal what he had just heard. He felt a sour reprehension clinging to his soul like a musk-odor. Why did he have to be here...and witness this? This powerful cloak of emotional pain seemed to attune his memory to itself with crystalline clarity. His mind was intractably whispering lemur voices that resounded their dismal and cold dissent. He just wanted it to stop. 

Looking at Urd's mother Freiija and seeing the runnels of tears on her face...he knew that joy had become a casualty.

"Why did her parents have to hear this?" his mind cried.

When she emerged out of emotional grogginess a few minutes later, Urd surveyed the room, watching her own inner chaos reflected in the eyes of her beloved family. Which now included Keiichi. For all intents and purposes, Keiichi _was_ family; he would be as close to a brother-in-law as Urd would ever get to experience. He had an almost electrical tension to his red-sun aura...a stew of anxiety that was only going to get worse once she told him about Belldandy.

With detachment shifting into numbness, Keiichi watched Belldandy listen to everything without batting a lash. The words of undoing came fast and harsh as Urd revealed that Bell-chan and Skuld were going to die too, of the same disease that was ravaging her.

Acrid woes creasing havoc upon the velvet of his heart.

Urd felt utterly shitty. Not just woe-weakened in body, but maladroit in spirit. She gagged and coughed helplessly as Mother fell to pieces on the spot, while Father swore an oath of vengeance on Cevn. Skuld appeared to take the horrible news with utter impassivity, but Urd knew better. She could tell that her youngest sister's mind had fused itself, like a billow of metal alloy, into a mental paralysis midway through her explanation. Even Peorth was crying, knuckles rubbing her night brown eyes.

Urd looked at Keiichi, trying to muster the little strength that remained into an expression of compassion. Keiichi averted his pain stricken eyes from her gaze.

Both parents looked at their oldest daughter, trying to conceal their heavyheartedness. For the first time, they were no longer parents...and their daughters were no longer children. Their children were now boon-friends. This scourge had leveled everything. The more parental affection towards their daughters Odeyn and Freiija felt in their hearts, the more agonizing it was to behold the three girls. _Their_ three girls. Three souls whose grace-glowing light would be snuffed out soon by an inexplicable agent of doom. Parents...a God and a Goddess...beholding the fading life of three Norns; this was all there was. The couple's malaise convoluted love into a funereal expectancy...a daunt which pulled any pretenses of hope away; grinding their optimism ruthlessly into the mud.

Urd...felt like she was bearing the weight of the universe; a female Atlas who couldn't shrug off the drowning burden of the inevitable. She heard a male voice casting words like stones...

_"Belldandy...is...going...to...die."_

Keiichi just wanted to run away like his sister had done; but he reminded himself that he needed to be here for Bell-chan. Urd's announcement had been like a brick thrown to the side of the head. Keiichi looked at Belldandy with vision rendered anew; suddenly realizing that, from now on, every second would assume a precocity of its own. Each moment from herewards would be too precious to waste. No matter how his courage would be eroded by the coming events, he promised himself in his heart that he would remain by her side…

…until…the…very…end.

The wooden hues of the dining room clutched the scene; a mascaraed brow that plucked at the emotional freakishness which threatened to overwhelm the group. Keiichi imagined that the temple was crying pine-scented tears along with him.

The family.

And then there was dead silence between the five of them...

Until Belldandy got up and rushed to the bathroom, holding her hand over her mouth as she choked deep in her throat.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Midway through Urd's revelation, Megumi had suddenly stood up and ran to her room, sobbing uncontrollably. It was just too much to handle.

All three Goddesses were going to die.

The look on her brother's face was a pestle that crushed her heart.

She sat on her futon and gasped for air, squeezing her pillow...for she was crying so hard.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

A week later, Keiichi found himself at Sayoko's house talking to Cevn. Somehow, he had breezed through the last of his finals...the last finals of his undergrad years. He was going to take "The Walk" this Saturday, March 24th, 20XX.

Which didn't mean shit anymore.

The long-desired graduation from N.I.T., a summation of six years of work, papers, hands-on projects and late-night bouts of studying held little relevance to his life. A beautiful raspberry-cloud sunset was just a taint on the horizon; only amplifying the fleck of his loneliness by its augury of the passage of time.

The past week had been Hell for everybody in the house.

Cevn didn't know about Urd. Keiichi knew that the unwonted task fell to him to tell Cevn, as Megumi was far too upset to speak to anyone right at the moment. He was very conflicted about telling him about Urd, because Bell-chan and her sisters kept insisting that he was the perpetrator of the wretched acts of violence upon Urd.

_Belldandy had two or three months to live..._

Several days ago, Bell-chan had informed him that Urd had sent the Ninjas and Ninjettes on a mission to kill Cevn while he was sleeping. They had tried to poison him...he was immune. They had tried swords...he was uninjured. They planted traps...which he seemed to avoid with an almost uncanny forevision. They were mixing a variety of bamboo-trunketed incendiary devices when Belldandy found out about their 'assignment' and told them to cut it out.

Megumi had broken down into tears during her final in Cevn's Philosophy of Technological Sciences class. She couldn't even tell Cevn-sensei why.

The next day, Odeyn had gotten into a shouting match with him when Keiichi had tried to explain his belief that Cevn didn't assault his daughter. Odeyn accused Keiichi of branding Urd a liar, then stormed off in a huff. The fact that Bell-chan took her Father's side against him didn't help matters one bit. His girlfriend comforted Keiichi's profound disappointment and confusion, promising to try and talk some sense to her father...and mend the breach. Once again, Bell-chan said that she wished Cevn would just die, so that everyone would feel vindicated. Keiichi couldn't believe that his girlfriend had been poisoned by such strong resentments. Then again, she was the one facing death, and it was her sister who had been violated. If something like that had happened to Megumi, Keiichi knew that there was a silent killer in him that would awaken with a thirst for vengeance. In 14th Century Kyushu, he had killed many men for lesser acts.

No matter what Bell-chan tried, Odeyn only regarded him with baleful glares whenever they were in the same room.

_Belldandy had two or three months to live..._

Last Friday, Chihiro asked Keiichi why Belldandy hadn't accompanied him while he worked at Whirlwind. She was shocked and angry when Keiichi informed her that he wasn't going to race in the Le Mans trials next month in France. Thoroughly nettled, she threatened to fire him from Whirlwind. Keiichi swore her to confidence, and then explained to her that Belldandy's was very ill.

Chihiro's face blanched with turn-a-torn guilt.

Feeling bitter because of the Club's loss of Keiichi as a driver and the fact that his girlfriend was sick, Chihiro tearfully started throwing wrenches and other tools against the wall...and then closed Whirlwind for the day ten minutes later. She told Keiichi that he could take an indefinite leave of absence from his small engine mechanics job at Whirlwind until Belldandy got better.

Keiichi couldn't bring himself to tell her that Belldandy _wasn't _going to get better. Yet, he expected that repairing and restoring motorbikes would be a necessary escape from the comfortless situation at home. So he put in the occasional shift at Whirlwind.

_Belldandy had two or three months to live..._

Last weekend was even worse. Skuld had put an ad in the newspaper for somebody to adopt Banpei, Sigel and mini-Banpei. Crazy Dr. Morrow was the first to call. Bell-chan thoroughly chastising her for being too fatalistic.

Also last weekend, his sister had broken up with Genji. That night, she had a long talk with Keiichi, explaining that her breakup had nothing to do with Genji. She had come to an understanding with herself that she just couldn't handle being in a relationship with a guy right now. For the past several days, a distraught Genji was calling every night, trying desperately to hang on to his girlfriend.

Two days ago, Belldandy and her mother got into a massive screaming match when Freiija insisted that the sisters return to Yggdrasil. Belldandy said she wouldn't leave Keiichi...and then the fireworks started. Keiichi almost wanted _her__ to__ go with her parents_; anything to avoid seeing Freiija so upset. He ended up spending the night in retreat at the N.I.T. library, cramming for his finals.

Yesterday, Urd was so sick that she needed a bedpan. Keiichi read a book on home nursing to prepare for the worst. It was obvious that the disease was wasting Urd much more rapidly than anyone could have predicted.

_Belldandy had two or three months to live..._

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Cevn, back when I was in fifth grade, I wrote a story called "Goro and Pirates", which won first prize that year at my school. It was about this mentally retarded boy, Goro, who lived in an island fishing village long ago.

_"Goro was given a girl's name because he was so small and frail when he was born. As he became older, it was apparent to all that he was a little 'off'...a little different than the other kids. To his parents, he wasn't "different". He was "special". The other children always teased him, especially while the men were out combing the ocean to net their share of fish. Because he was slower at games, none of the kids ever wanted to play with him. So Goro often walked along the beach by himself. His mother and father loved him dearly, but raising a child like Goro tried their patience from time to time._

_"At the time, there was a band of pirates would sail from the north, traveling from village to village. They would anchor off an abandoned stretch of oceanside and send spies to observe the coming and goings of the fishermen. Once they determined the movements of the villagers, the pirates would storm the village and abduct all of the children. Then they would sail back north to a fortress where an evil oni lived. They would trade the children in exchange for chests of gold. The children would spend the rest of their lives as slaves of the oni, working in the mines. And once in a while, the oni would stew one of the children for his dinner._

_"With the passage of time, the pirates eventually reached Goro's village. As it happened to be, the advance sentries of the pirate ship observed Goro while they were reconnoitering possible offensive routes to attack the village. So they abducted Goro. The leader of the pirates examined Goro and found out that he was so stupid that he would be useless as a slave. For some reason, the pirate king resolved to believe that all the children of Goro's village were idiots of an ilk, so they decided to bypass the village and sail on. Once they set out to sea, they bound Goro with hempen ropes and threw him overboard to drown._

_"At that very moment, a princess of the Dragon Realm was swimming back to her father's undersea castle. She saw Goro drowning; and taking pity upon him, she decided to rescue him. Despite Goro's inability to articulate his thoughts, the princess saw past his clumsiness and decided to grant him a boon, since she could clearly see that he had a heart of gold._

_"Goro could only look at her thankfully as the Dragon Princess returned him a beach nearby his village. The villagers had presumed that Goro had been killed by mountain tigers; needless to say, his mother and father cried tears of relief when he unexpectedly washed up on the shore._

_"Despite his imbecility, Goro was an honest worker and a filial son. In his early teens, he was able to join his father in the fishing expeditions as an oarsman. Yet he still lived with his parents, because he wasn't able to take care of himself. Of course, none of the village maidens were interested in Goro in the slightest, because of his condition. As he approached manhood, his parents resigned themselves to the fact that they would have to care for Goro as an adult._

_"One day, a mysterious woman appeared in the village. She was stunning...like a princess from faraway Kyoto. She was so beautiful that all the young men of the village wooed her in turn. But she would have nothing to do with them; telling each youth that she was ill-used by their suits because they failed to practice kindness towards unfortunates. After a week in the village, she visited Goro's parents. To their astonishment, she offered to become his bride and take care of him. The parents gratefully agreed, and the next day she brought them a tremendous chest of gold for a dowry. The young men of the village were overwhelmed with jealousy, so they drove Goro and his new wife out of town._

_"So Goro and his new bride bought a nearby farm and settled into a household, and there they raised a family. After being blessed with three children, his wife revealed to him that she was the Dragon Princess who had saved his from drowning years earlier. She gravely instructed him to never reveal her identity to anyone, nor let her touch the waters of the ocean, lest she be forced to return to her underwater castle home._

_"Several years passed, and the pirates sailed south again to conduct their raiding parties. When they attacked Goro's village, they learned the strange tale of the mysterious woman and the chest of gold. They searched the woods and nearby farms until they found Goro. Then one day while he was working in the field, they abducted Goro's wife._

_"The pirates took her aboard their ship, and the king of the pirates decided to torture her to find out how she had come to possess so much gold. But she would not reveal where she got the gold. They mistreated her, and then the pirate king threw her overboard. As soon as she fell into the ocean, she reverted back into her true form. The pirates were frightened to befuddlement at this, and in her wrath, she destroyed the pirate's sailing fleet, rescued all of the abducted children from the evil oni's island fortress, and conducted them all safely to shore._

_"But Goro never saw her again. Out of concern, his parents came to visit him after the raid and found him gone; his children seemingly abandoned. They thought that the pirates must have killed him, so they took their three grandchildren back to the village to raise them._

_"The tragedy of all this...is how Goro would sit at the beach every day..snff..waiting for the return of..snff..his wife. After the passage of many years, Goro's grieving figure transformed into a rock outcropping on the seaside, so constant was his sadness._

"And you..snff..know what? He had_ never_ told anyone the truth about his..snff..wife. In his mind, it was so unfair...she had no reason to disappear out of his life! Deep in his heart, he struggled with the fear that he had..snff..done something wrong; an action or words that had driven his wife away. And yet..snff..he sat there on the beach awaiting her return. No one knew that he had saved the children of the village...no one..snff..knew that his wife was a princess of the Dragon Realm. But that didn't make a difference to Goro...because the love of his life..snff..is going to die and..sob..leave him..."

"Keiichi, what are you trying to say?" Cevn asked him, noticing Keiichi's rapid deterioration of composure. The tale he was unraveling reminded Cevn of the folk tale of the husband-and-wife rocks at Futamigaura, a popular honeymoon destination for Japanese newlyweds, whose cultural notoriety was similar to the enchantment of Niagara Falls for Americans.

"I..I wrote that story a couple of years after I first met Belldandy, back when we were both kids. I..I guess I was in love with her then, all the way back when I was 10 years old. I wrote it because I missed her smile...a smile that I would never forget. And now it's coming true! B..Belldandy is going to _die_! She's going to be gone, and there's nothing I did to deserve it! There's nothing I can do to stop it!" Keiichi admitted with mounting despair before his grief overtook him.

"Oh...my...God!" Cevn said, his face ashen with shock.

"Nothing matters anymore!" Keiichi shouted out his frustration. A few minutes later, Cevn was echoing Keiichi's shout of regret.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

I couldn't believe what Keiichi had told me. Belldandy was going to _die_! Then he stated that Urd _was_ dying!

I knew something was up when the Ninjettes and their boyfriends had attacked me on several occasions. I knew that I had given them no motive to sway them towards ninjitsu attempts on my life. I also knew that their bushido wouldn't allow for them to disclose the reason why they had suddenly turned towards an assassinative bent.

But this news...

I felt like there was a living paper mobile inside of me, around me; its piece de virtu precariously balanced by all the persons in my life here in Makuhari. As long as everybody was leveling in his or her place, this mobile possessed a delicate swing of beauty. A wisdom chain of souls orbiting around me, within me as part of my life. But take away the three Goddesses...and it became completely entangled in chaos. A discord of confused beings.

This news was like a knife stirring in my gut, carving away at any emotional fortitude I had developed over the years. My new friends in Japan had literally carried me as I rebuilt my life from a depressed shambles. Now, I felt a swooping sense of loss. I had lost my wife years ago, and now I was going to endure another dose of death.

Urd...was going to take the breath that cannot be drawn...

"No matter what, I have to go see her," I decided.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Belldandy saw Father sitting on a rock near the koi pond, looking utterly exhausted. Suddenly worried, she and Keiichi ran up to him, only to find themselves listening in astonishment as Father narrated what had happened earlier in the day.

An hour after they had left to take a stroll in the park along the canal, Cevn showed up out-of-the-blue at the temple. Father immediately recognized Cevn from Urd's description and instantly knew that Cevn intended to harm Urd or Skuld. Despite his rage, he tried to warn Cevn off. But Cevn refused to leave, and had insisted on seeing Urd. This capped him off...Father's anger flew into a height, so he employed his Divine Powers, intent on killing the mortal who had hurt his daughter so dearly. Forming a Lightningcrystal sword in his hands, Father discharged a full power annihilation spell at the mortal. Belldandy felt a foreboding...

All it did was stagger Cevn slightly.

Father said that Cevn simply shrugged it off. Incredulous and vexed, his wrath increased as Cevn tried to explain that he wasn't the one that assaulted Urd. That he was here to help because he had _feelings_ for Urd. This tragic mockery of his daughter incensed the head of the Yggdrasil Energy Guild to the core.

Convinced that this was just an underhanded deception to buy time for a renewed attack on his daughters, Father broke open his seal, swearing that he would protect Skuld and Urd with his life if necessary.

Then Father said he had hit Cevn with a _full discharge_ of arcane energy! Stunned, Belldandy caught herself looking for a scorched crater somewhere on the temple grounds. But Father said that the mortal simply _absorbed_ the burst of divine pyrotechnics. A full energy strike from an unsealed God with a Senior First Class, Unrestricted, Unlimited License!

Her Father said that all it did was knock Cevn on his butt!

Belldandy looked at Keiichi with a wide-eyed expression as Father explained that his powers were tapped out by the all-out energy strike.

"I was now concerned that he was going to try and kill me. Instead, he stood up and dusted himself off. Shrugging his shoulders, he approached me calmly and helped me to my feet. Then he assisted me over to a rock by the koi pond. 'So you can rest,'" he told me. He kept trying to convince me that he didn't hurt Urd. That he loves your sister, and that he desperately wants to help her regain her health. I told him that he was full of deceit...but I was too exhausted to fight anymore," Father said, his face saying "yes, I know it sounds insane, but..."

"Daddy! Are _you_ okay?" Belldandy inquired with tender concern. Father looked at her, his single eye showing that he was clearly touched by her solicitude. For all the heartsickness he felt towards his daughter's situation, it was a freshening breeze for someone to feel worried about _him _for a change...

"Yes...I'm all right! And a little embarrassed, as well," he said gruffly. "Strangely, he didn't try to resist my attack, nor did he try to harm me. Because of this, I'm beginning to wonder...if what he claims...is true. I noticed that his aura was a gentle seablue, indicating that he harbored no ambitions of doing violence to me. Then, this 'Cevn' clasps me on each temple and replayed the scene when you attacked him at his studio apartment. Via a thoughtcast! Can you imagine...a mere mortal being able to thoughtcast?" Belldandy and Keiichi exchanged a knowing glance.

"Yes, Father...I know for a fact that Earthrealm mortals can thoughtcast," she answered, holding tighter onto Keiichi's arm. Still, she was very troubled by this whole incident. Once again, Cevn had 

survived a full-out attack by a God. Father's descriptions seemed to indicate that Cevn's mysterious self-protection abilities were on the increase. If this was true, then Cevn could return and perpetrate more evil on she and her sisters. Belldandy knelt next to Father and held his hand as he continued his story.

"As I watched him go in to see your sister, I somehow realized that he wasn't the one that hurt her. And I think...that he loves Urd almost as much as this one loves you, my dear," he remarked, pulling Keiichi's sleeve and smiling unexpectedly. Belldandy sighed as she realized that the breach between Father and Keiichi had been bridged. Once more, Cevn-san had been a healing force in their lives, whether he knew it or not.

"Yet, I could swear that, somehow, he_ is_ a half-God, half-Demon...in the body of an Earthrealm mortal! I would bet my life on this; having raised your sister Urd these past 270,000 years, I should know. How this can be...I cannot explain. For all practical purposes, he's just another Earthrealm mortal," Father told her.

"Yet...he is unusual," Belldandy said with a hint of confusion. She was feeling sick again. Sometimes, just the simple smells of the outdoors or certain foods were enough to get her stomach churning.

Father told her that he watched as Cevn entered the house...and then he somehow realized that Urd had been attacked by a Demon, not by Cevn. Belldandy wanted to argue with her Father; he was obviously in denial because of his exhaustion. Or could it be true that Cevn was innocent? Her Father was a fountain and a shrine of authority and wisdom to her; he wouldn't challenge his beliefs without very good cause. He even sensed that Cevn loved her sister.

"Oh my! Urd!" Belldandy shouted, extremely worried. If her older sister had seen Cevn...

"What's the matter, dear?" Father asked her.

"Urd still thinks that it was Cevn who...assaulted her!" Belldandy answered in a flush panic, and then she dashed into the house, leaving Keiichi behind.

She found her older sister in her "Urd's Castle" room. Urd was crouched spider-like in a corner, next to one of her many medicine cabinets. She had blockaded herself using her circular runic table as a protective shield. Her forehead and eyes emerged cautiously above the curve of the table edge. 

Belldandy could see bolts of terror in her emerald eyes. She quickly knelt next to Urd and held her closely, feeling her sister's whole body shivering with fear and anger.

"H..he came here! To see me! The...bastard! He told me that he loved me, and that he would do anything in his power to make me...to make us well. I told him that I hated him to the very core of my being! W..why would he come here? After...what he did to me! How dare he say to my face that he still loves me!" Belldandy listened as Urd exhausted every epithet in the book venting her resentments against her former mortal boyfriend. Then unexpectedly, Urd suddenly switched tracks and began to laugh hysterically as Belldandy held her.

_"__Whyyyy!?__"_ Urd shrieked amidst her lunatic laughter. Belldandy knew that Urd had been exhausted this week, but for a few brief moments she was her old energetic self. Unfortunately, her strength was powered by hate. Tragic hate towards someone who cared deeply for her.

"You _promised_, Belldandy! You promised that you wouldn't let him come here!" Urd said, accusing her. Belldandy decided that it would be best to have a talk with Cevn as soon as possible.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Death is a process," Urd thought to herself. Her body was failing her by stages. She could no longer float about the house, so she resigned herself to walking. She woke up one day to discover that her wobbly legs no longer could support her. Simple tasks like lifting a cup of tea taxed her strength considerably. She no longer could keep down any sake; Keiichi, bless him, had crafted a large number of moonstone bracelets for her use.

Now she couldn't eat any solid food. She felt agonizing pain, which often brought her awake in the middle of the night, breathless and tearful. Mother had moved in to her room...sleeping every night with Urd in her medicine lab room. During these waking spells of pain, Mother would hold her until the agonies passed. This illness had brought her closer to Mother than ever before in her adult life.

Too bad this intimacy had to end.

She confessed to Mother about all the mistakes she made, all the times she acted impulsively and caused her parents worry. Gradually, her Mother released the maternal facade...and granted a long-held wish.

She had finally become Urd's _friend_.

Urd reflected that everything was a role, and that each role was a facade. Being a daughter, a sister, a Norn, a temptress...these were all nothing more than conceits. Requisites due a society that demanded more structure out of its individuals than was necessary. In actuality, she was _Urd_. Just Urd. No fragments of 'self-ness'...just herself.

Mother would cradle her head in her lap and gently clean her ears with a long ear brush while singing Yggdrasilian lullabies. This simple action transported Urd back pleasurably to her childhood. Despite the ever-present excruciating pain, Urd was happy that she received the experience of being a child again. Dependant on those around her to help her simply survive. Alongside this renewed youth, Urd felt an innocence snugly holding her in its embrace.

Breathing and talking were becoming difficult. She found that she labored out of breath often. The pain that was streaming through her arms and legs; this pain was like sharp needles being inserted under her skin. The pain that was deep inside of her; this pain possessed the dullness of fire.

Urd wished that she could see Cevn suffering just a fraction of the pain she endured. Especially after he had the audacity to come and visit her.

Urd had resolved herself to accept this death. She was hoping that the stage would come soon where the pain would be lifted. The pain was as undignified as the loss of privacy. At any time, anyone around her could be witness to a dissolving, gasping spell of pure discomfort. Or of unexpected disability...and the ensuing mental anguish.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

When I came home, I asked Sayoko if I could use one of the mansion's carports to set up a makeshift music studio. She looked at me askance, clearly curious...but then agreed to my request. Over the next two days, I laboriously set up all my keyboards, sequencers, samplers, mixers, computers...late until the night.

Hundreds of patch cords swarmed the floor like treeroots...

The second day, I dropped one of the keyboards, a Synclavier III. The hard plastic casing cracked open...and inside I saw what were undeniably Yggdrasilian mecha components. I paused, trying to remember when some of the sound processors from my keyboard system started becoming _unusual_. A recollection emerged...it must have been soon after Mara had possessed me in her attempt to injure Keiichi and the others; right before the Solar Car Race.

Several keyboards allowed me to morph sounds without losing just intonation and timbre...while retaining polyphonic integrity. Sound morphing had only become a viable audio technology last year; current computing power only allowed for morphed sounds to be synthesized as monophonic single notes. Thus, to craft a polyphonic harmony, one had to layer overdubs, hand-tuning the variant atonal scales note-by-note. By slowing or speeding the sampled morphed monophonic time clips, a surrounding effect could be attained. Yet, this meticulous process resulted in a digital mess, as far as sequencing goes.

But now, one of my Yamaha synthis could do this...with an almost intuitive keenness.

Like it was reading my thoughts.

Then there was the matter of the 'silent notes'. I thought I was imagining things when I realized that one bank of settings on an old Moog seemed to create _different silences_. By experimenting with different settings, I found that I could create different 'moods' of silences, such as a tense silence in contrast to a comforting silence. How could an analogue keyboard do this? It was almost 30 years old...a synthesizer that relied mostly on voltage regulators to create its 'effects'.

All this time, I had thought it was all in my head.

Obviously, Skuld had tweaked my keyboards...

"So, this is the reason why I could play the God's Music. It has nothing to do with any unique creative faculty I possess...it's only because the instrumentation hybrided Earthrealm and Yggdrasilian technologies," I thought with a mixture of relief and remorse.

The 'magic' in the music had nothing to do with me! Yet, I still wanted to finish the God's Music Symphony before Urd died. But now, I was blunted by doubts about my own muse.

_--Shadow--_

I spun around...and a shadow-form was slinking _into_ the corner of the garage; literally disappearing into the crease where the walls met.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Sayoko, where is Cevn? It's important that I speak to him right away," Belldandy asked. Sayoko regarded her, curious as to why Belldandy was being so formal all of a sudden. She could simply blast open a section of wall, just like did to Cevn's apartment. Yet, the Goddess seemed to have a sense of mission, a sense of urgency...which was all the more unusual because this Belldandy always seemed so coolly collected, except when something threatened Keiichi or her sisters. She still remembered her last encounter with Belldandy; who was possessed of murderous intent.

"He's locked himself away in the garage for the past week. I don't know if he's eating or sleeping...but I do know that I've had some wonderful dreams recently," Sayoko answered, flipping her hair with her hand. Belldandy nodded her head weakly. Sayoko noticed that her face seemed a little pale and that her long auburn hair was put up.

"Are _you_ all right, Belldandy? You look really sick," Sayoko inquired with concern.

"I..I'm okay. Thanks for your concern, Sayoko. May I see him?" she answered evasively. Belldandy had started experiencing visible hair loss of her own, so she was wearing a flop-hat beret to try and conceal it.

Belldandy walked down the stairs to the garage and tried the door. Since it was locked, she shifted herself to float through the door. Cevn was seated on a carpet in the middle of the garage, surrounded by banks of keyboards.

"Cevn?" she asked before she realized that he was wearing earphones. She walked over and tapped him on the shoulder; he jerked with surprise.

Belldandy wanted to get her point across without seeming to be accusatory. Yet, she was firm in her resolve to prohibit any more visits to Urd.

"I don't want you to come visit Urd anymore. I don't how you managed to fool my Father, or how powerful you may be...any further visits to our house are now prohibited," Belldandy demanded bluntly. "She was completely out of sorts for the next two days after she saw you during your last visit."

Cevn looked down at the floor, obviously feeling ashamed.

"Belldandy, I _love_ her! How could you expect me to do otherwise? I _have_ to see her!" Cevn responded with a challenge to his voice. Glancing around the garage, Belldandy saw the Enigma Book, saw how Cevn had rings under his eyes, saw piles of papers with jottings on them.

The place was taking on the appearance of a mad scientist's lab.

"I know that there is a way to save Urd, and that I won't be able to do it alone...and that I can find the answer if I convert everything in this book into music," Cevn said. Then he started jabbering, not even paying attention to see if she was listening to him. He had a far-away gaze to his eyes...

Belldandy wanted to withdraw from this place immediately...she could recognize the look of insanity in his expression.

"I repeat, I don't want you coming to see Urd! Do you understand?" Belldandy near shouted.

"And what are you going to do if I _do _come to see her?"

Belldandy stared into his eyes for a long time, and then angrily shook her head. A moment later, she placeshifted through a rearview mirror of one the cars.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

I went over to the temple house the next day, only to find Belldandy sitting alone in the dining room. I could see bags of carryout food peeking out from under the trash...evidence that Belldandy's own illness was increasing in severity. She wasn't even able to maintain her household chores. Because I was nervous, I wordlessly took out the trash.

When I came back, Belldandy looked at me with a resigned expression.

"Despite what I asked of you, you've come back! I_ could _prevent you from coming any closer to our house, Cevn...but I'm ill, and it would be too much of a drain on my Goddess powers. Don't you know what it did to Urd when you came last time? She was _crazy with fear and rage_ for the next several days! I thought you cared about her, Cevn, but it's now obvious that you care about your selfish needs even more! Can't you stop for a moment to think that it might do more harm than good for you to visit here? Her Soul is in a very fragile state...and your coming here can only make her condition worse! I already have reason to hate you, and your actions are only proving that I am right. That you did do that…horrible…to my sister," she said, fixing me with a stern gaze.

"Belldandy...nothing is as it seems. I didn't do anything to harm Urd, and yet she is certain that I did. You are almost certain I did, as well; by treating me with culpability...even contempt. As if I _did _hurt her. And even though I broke off from her...I _still love her_," I answered.

"Don't bother yourself with charming words to try and change my mind. I do not believe you."

"I miss her even more now...now that I realize she isn't going to be here much longer. Surely you can have some empathy for my feelings?" I added, trying to blink away my guilt and fear.

"Well, it's a little too late for that, isn't it, you sick pervert!" Skuld said angrily.

"Skuld!" Belldandy half-warned, half-scolded.

"I should kill you where you stand! You took advantage of all of us...and then you did t..that unspeakable thing to my sister. You're the lowest, to even go as far as show your face here! Now, because of your cruelty,_ I'm_ going to die! I hope you're happy with what you've done! If I were anything less than a Goddess, I would kill you. But, since I am the Norn of the Future...I am not allowed to kill any being, because it could potentially disrupt the future TimeStreams," Skuld shouted, barely controlling her rage.

"I have to ask you to leave. You're upsetting my younger sister," Belldandy said curtly. Her tone of dismissal only cloaked me deeping into a victim's rage.

"This...is a bunch of idiocy! I didn't do it! You know it in your heart! A..and your father knows it! B..but yet, because someone obviously tried very hard to cast the impression that I was the one who did such a perverted, fucked up treacherous act to your sister…_my former girlfriend who I still love_…I 

have to live as if I was the one who hurt her! Don't you think that if I found out who did this...that I wouldn't do anything in my power to kill them? Don't you think that I would have done everything I could to prevent this from happening" I said desperately. Skuld's flinch of anger made me immediately regret the implied threat in my shoutout of words.

"You liar! If Urd meant so much to you, you would have never left her!! And if you really love her, then why don't you let my elder sister kill you, since I can't!" Skuld said. Belldandy started at this, fixing an astonished gaze on her younger sister.

I paused, trying to grapple with the flights of conflicting emotions bleeding through my fingers. Here I was, swallowing bitter pills of righteousness while the two Goddesses I was arguing with...were counting days until their impending deaths.

I'm such an insensitive jerk, to put them through this! And yet...

"Skuld...I know you don't understand! When you don't comprehend the events happening around you, you often resort to creating tests for others. Like how you tested Keiichi when you thought he didn't really love Belldandy with all of his heart. He told me about that. If there was a means where I could prove to you that I didn't hurt Urd, I would gladly submit to it. If only you could see it in my mind...but you're too young..."

"I AM NOT A KID!" Skuld screamed. Words to that effect formed on the wall, Bell's dress and my shirt. Only this time, it wasn't cute...wasn't funny.

"I know what you did to my precious Older Sister! I know _everything_! And I know that you're far worse than the most disgusting criminal scums on the Earthrealm!"

This enraged me. It wasn't enough that Urd had been harmed, or that I had been the recipient of blame for the harm. My situation was a nothingness alongside everyone else's. Urd was already dying. Belldandy and Skuld were going to die. Keiichi was going to lose his soulmate. Megumi was going to lose her brother, not to death but the killing of his heart. Keiichi loved Belldandy so much, her death would never be healed. This reality was robbing all of us of the germ and pulse of our lives, replacing these with withered, shrunken manifestos of gloom.

Skuld was going to carry a lie to her grave.

"That does it! I'm going in her room and I'm going to let her yell, scream and hit me as much as she needs to. Then I'll come back again tomorrow and let her go at me again. I'll let _you_ yell and scream at me, if you need to. You can throw all the Skuld-bombs you want at me! But I want you to know...that I AM SICK OF THIS! I'm sick of being accused of something I didn't do. Don't you think this makes _me_ angry?" I shouted.

Belldandy and Skuld looked at me with expressions filled with anger, hurt...and empathy?

"You would really let Big Sister yell at you? You would really let me blast you with a bomb?" Skuld said with finessed irritation. A second later, she reached into her "Virgin Heatwave" denim jacket and pulled out a bomb. She punched a series of buttons on it, and then handed it to Belldandy. Then she poked Belldandy in the ribs, hard.

Belldandy instinctively reacted...by tossing it towards me. And I instinctively reacted...by catching it!

"It's set on maximum yield. It will definitely kill you. And since my sister threw it to you...I can't be held responsible for your death! And neither can she, because it was an accident!" Skuld said, her voice filled with dispassionate dismissal.

What a time for Skuld's genius mind to craft a perfectly logical workaround to the prohibition on Goddesses killing mortals! I looked down at the bomb, with the typical "Skuld Bomb" painted in large white romanji letters.

The clock was ticking...

"All you have to do is hold onto it for one minute. Then...kachpow! If you really mean what you said about not hurting Urd...you'll hang onto it for dear life!" Skuld instructed me, the gravity of ambition etched all over her delicate face.

"At least she isn't losing her hair yet," I thought turgidly as I looked down at the bomb in my hands. There was a digital display ticking off the seconds.

"How convenient! Just like in the movies," my mind observed. The countdown was more than enough to add more tension to the scene.

_50 seconds._

Besides, if Urd died...then what would I have to live for? Suddenly, my desire to live became remote and unimportant...

"Okay! You're on! I don't care what happens to me anymore! You can go tell your Big Sister that she can rest easy...that you blew me up! She's already suffered enough. Just know in your hearts that I'm doing this because I love her! Because my life is _nothing_!" I screamed, jostling the bomb for dramatic effect.

"You're a bigger idiot than I thought!" Skuld said ruefully.

_20 seconds._

"And because I love you both too," I added in a quiet voice as the timer slipped below 15 seconds. I closed my eyes at five seconds. At least, it would be a quick and painless death.

I felt a 'click' in my hands.

Looking down, the timer said "0:01."

Skuld looked at me with tears in her eyes and an angry scowl on her lips. Belldandy had that look of worry that she obtains to: hands clasped in front of her breast, shoulders hunched forwards, anxiety shining in her blue eyes.

"I still don't know if I can trust you!" Skuld said. I motioned her to come closer, and I held her small head in my hands.

"It's time to grow up a little more, Skuld," I whispered to her. Much as I wanted to avoid this, there was only one way that I could surely convince her of my innocence.

I tried to project a span of my activities the day Urd had been attacked, from the moment I woke up until the evening at my apartment talking graduation with Sayoko, when Belldandy had blasted open the wall of my apartment and tried to ray me to death with some kind of Goddess energy discharge. I didn't even know how I was doing this, but Keiichi had told me about something the Goddesses call 'thoughtcasting' and I sensed that the Enigma Book or the metallectual abilities I seemed to derive from it would allow me to do something far beyond my ken. The thoughtcast came much easier than with Odeyn; perhaps because Skuld and I had shared minds back when we were both abducted by Mara and trapped in her lair.

I just hoped against hope that Skuld would perceive my innocence, because this was my only chance. The sole argument I could offer in my defense; the life I had led that horrible day.

As I gently released her head, I felt Skuld grab me tight around the waist, crying into my chest.

"Fool!! I _told_ you that I can't kill any living thing because I'm the Norn of the Future! So don't go around acting like you were brave or something!" she said, washing out her former blindness towards me with a river of recognition.

I looked towards Belldandy, seeing her face unlabor its tense mien. Somehow, she had 'heard' my efforts to reach Skuld. The anger had drained from her face, and I touched on a sense that she felt relieved that she was no longer suffering under the illusion that I had raped Urd.

"I..I think I may be able to help you to be able to look in on Urd undetected, as long as you keep your big mouth shut!" Skuld offered.

"Are you sure that's safe?" Belldandy asked. My heart was pulled tight, too tight…painfully tight, as if a rope had constricted it to a bleed-depth…because I could see how weakened she was by illness. Belldandy looked at me sadly, perhaps recognizing my discouragement towards the disease that was wasting her.

Twenty minutes later, I was wearing a Stealth Videmeode-Diffusion Belt, Mk. III. Which, due to the properties of holophotics, rendered me invisible to the eye.

Moments later, to my horror, Skuld rushed off to the bathroom, retching.

A reluctant witness to this horror, I couldn't even say a word of comfort when Belldandy's blue eyes glistened as she said in a hushed voice "it wasn't supposed to happen so soon."

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"What do I _do_?" Megumi said in voice dramatic with woefulness. "Keiichi is graduating tomorrow...and I'm an emotional wreck!"

"Hey, remember when we formed that baseball team after the men's school team challenged us? We got beat...but we kept on practicing. We didn't give up," Sora suggested in a level voice.

Megumi looked at her diminutive friend. Sora was so waifish, she sometimes looked as harmless as a small minnow. But once in a while, this calm, withdrawn demeanor was misleading. _Especially_ with Sora Hasegawa.

The two girls were enroute to a mall in Ishikawa, a 15-kilometer straight shot along National Highway 14 from Makuhari. As they passed the storm-damaged oceanside industrial parks on the left, Megumi wore even more fretfulness on her face about tomorrow's ceremony.

Sora knew why she was apprehensive, even if Megumi wouldn't admit it.

Genji would be there. Cevn would be there. Urd wouldn't be there...she was too sick.

"About Urd...it's getting to be like being a hospice worker at my house. She's really gotten sick; she can barely get out of the house. She's stuck in her human manifestation. And what really drives me nuts is how everyone is acting all optimistic...like she's gonna get well or something! But it's only an act. Because underneath it all, there's so much gloom. It's pervasive, everywhere in the house!"

"What are you going to do about Genji?" Sora asked point-blank.

"I dunno! I still love him so much, Sora! But something inside of me just wants to be alone right now. But he keeps calling me, checking up on me. I know that he's concerned about me. I can't really keep telling him to keep his distance. How am I supposed to do that?" Megumi said with a frustrated grimace.

"What would you do if Genji dumped you all of a sudden? Wouldn't you get all caught up in your head? Wouldn't you reach the conclusion that there was something wrong with _you_, Megs?" Sora asked. Megumi nodded her head.

"At least he's not thinking that you're having an affair or something!"

_"Sora!!"_

The traffic was getting heavier up ahead; the packed lanes of vehicles suggested the image of a snake of crawling shoji pieces cluttering all over the highway. Megumi turned on the radio...and Sora promptly shut it off.

"Talk, Morisato!" Sora commanded.

"About what?" Megumi asked, with a feigned air of sweetness.

"Y'know, about why you're looking for a dress to wear to Keiichi's graduation _the day before the ceremony_! Why you've been avoiding Chihiro and the Club. Why you're so worried about everyone...except yourself!"

Megumi felt a snap of severance from her fluid melancholy. Since Urd had returned, the presence of the severely-ill Goddess was a constant visual proof that Megumi's world was slowly falling apart. For days, she felt like she had been furtively living in the mouth of madness. She had tended Urd, bringing her soft food, changing her bedpans and vomit pans. Now, Belldandy was starting to get sick daily, and Skuld wasn't far behind. So Megumi had to take on almost half of Bell's household chores, in addition to her own chores. She had no idea how smoothly Belldandy had been orchestrating the routines needed to create a comfortable home life for all of the temple's occupants...nor how much work it required.

Sora was probably the most thoughtful, adept friend a girl could have; she had zeroed in on the matter at hand with a surgeon's precision.

Megumi smiled a lopsided sheepish grin at Sora.

"I..I just don't know what to do! What _should_ I do? First off, there's Genji. Also the upcoming trials in Le Mans. Realistically, Keiichi is in no shape to drive...and he's decided not to drive in the finals either. So that leaves you or me to be the driver for the short trials. And I'm torn between going to France with the Club, or staying at home and being a support for my brother. And what if Urd were to die while I was away in France? I would never forgive myself if that happened!" Megumi said, her voice tinged with panic brought on by that last, stale sweep of her mind.

"Whoa, whoa girl! You're putting the cake before the cake mix! If I were you, I would try and get honest with myself about Genji. And, you might think this is crazy, but I _would_ go to France with the Club if I were in your shoes!"

"_What!!_" Megumi exclaimed.

"I _know _you, girlfriend!" Sora said, jabbing a finger in the middle of Megumi's chest. "I know that you'll feel incomplete if you don't go with us! You cannot stay out of harm's way, in terms of what is going to happen to the Goddesses. It's going to hurt. It's going to really wear down your resolve. But I know what it's like, being stuck in harm's way. Take it from me...how long did I pine away for Toshi? _Years!_ But nothing could've changed until _I_ took direct action. Now, Toshiyuki and I are kindasorta dating...and he isn't even seeing other women!"

"I didn't know that!" Megumi remarked cheerfully. Sora adjusted her glasses and stuck her tongue out at Megumi with a sweet expression.

"Yeah. He even said I would look prettier with contacts. Hmmm, I think I have an idea about my birthday present next month..."

"Cool!" Megumi agreed.

"And _that _is why you need to get back with Genji!" Sora said bluntly, bringing the conversation back to where it should be.

"Translate for me, Sora," Megumi asked, bored with the 20kph traffic flow, confused by Sora's cryptic shifts of thought.

"I mean, you can't do this alone! You're just like your own brother sometimes...trying to take care of everyone around you while you buckle in your own feelings. Keep this up and you'll wind up a chain-smoker!"

"You're silly, Sora! _Me_, a smoker?" Megumi said, rolling her eyes.

"Yep! How's this for something to think about. Canya tell me...what can't Genji give you right now?"

"I could think of a dozen things right at the moment. I mean, we still haven't 'done it', if you know what I mean," Megumi said with a blush.

"You're kidding! You've been going out with him for _how_ long...and you still haven't had a 'summer experience'! I'm amazed at you! Hee heeh, maybe I should tell Keiichi..."

"Don't you _dare_, Sora!" Megumi replied angrily, even though she knew that her best friend was only teasing her.

"Funny how _that_ was the first thing that came to your mind, huh, girlfriend? Well, sex is only one thing you can do differently once you're in a relationship with a guy!" Sora shot back with a giggle, watching Megumi squirm nervously behind the wheel.

"There's a drugstore a half a block from my folk's ramen shop that sells all sorts of condoms. Especially the ones that are supposed to _tickle_," Sora continued, trying to hold back a girlish giggle.

Megumi's blush deepened. She remembered a couple of years ago when Keiichi and Belldandy were going to have the temple all to themselves... She had deliberately embarrassed her older brother by suggesting that he should get a box of condoms. It made sense, she reasoned, half-hoping that he and Bell would take advantage of the extra privacy.

Now it was her turn to be embarrassed.

"Ahem!! My point being...you're focusing on all the things Genji _can't_ give you, Megumi! But what about the affection he _does_ give you? You know what I think? I think that you're so caught up looking at what he isn't doing...that you're missing out on seeing all the ways he _can_ care for you. Unique ways of expressing affection, ways that you can't even begin to expect to happen. It's easy to play it safe and predictable by relying only on what you know about the two of you. That way, you don't have to stress on the unexpected. But isn't that kinda chickenshit, Megumi? Why don't you just try to be open to letting Genji care for you _any way he can_?"

"Did he put you up to this, Ms. Sophomore Psychologist?"

Sora thought for a moment, then nodded her head slowly.

"And Cevn-sensei spent some time with me doing this thing called 'role-playing', to get me ready to talk to you."

"Damned conspirators!" Megumi sighed with humorous resignation.

"So I decided to come with you, so you could pick out a great dress...that would help things along with Genji," Sora said energetically. Megumi rolled her eyes and frowned.

"Sora, my brother is so down in the dumps about Belldandy that I can't even think about Genji at the moment! And what about my folks? When they see Keiichi all bummed out when he graduates from N.I.T., Mom and Dad are going to be filled with suspicions. They've invested several million yen in their son's education...and he's been so mopey lately. As sad as a monkey without a tree!"

"Don't worry about that! A bunch of us are going to throw him a surprise party tonight for him! All you need to do is make sure Keiichi-sempai gets out of the house," Sora said assuringly.

"Easier said than done. He and Belldandy are practically glued together. Especially now that she's sick. But..." Megumi said, smiled in the rearview mirror thoughtfully.

"I think I know a way..."

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

I felt an itch on my neck, mostly likely due to the washtag on the back of my ceremonial robe. I had often imagined what it was like to wear a faculty robe, with the single stripe on the sleeve denoting that I was an instructor. I just never imagined that it would be in Japan.

But today was a "summer preview" day, as Tamiya had called it. The last thing I wanted to do was fumble with my overrobe in front of a couple thousand students, graduates and relatives. The ceremony was being held right on the N.I.T. grounds, in the large open square that divided the Old Campus from the New Campus.

The choice had been deliberate. Many of the campus buildings were enframed in bamboo and metal scaffolding, reminding everyone assembled here today about last year's supertyphoon...

I couldn't help it...I was chewing my tongue while Dr. Kintaro delivered the opening address, touching on themes about "reconstruction" and "engineering civilly vs. civic engineering." I had to admit that he looked resplendent in his academic robes of office; as President of N.I.T., he seemed to be eating up the attention.

Before the ceremony, I had been targeted by a number of reporters who wanted to know more about the private life of the man who wrote "Magnum Organum: First Consciousness". I was getting sick of all the attention that damned book was thrusting upon me! Each day, I fielded dozens of emails and calls from people who wanted to translate my book, and I hadn't even shopped it out to any publishers yet! I ended up telling the whole lot of them to talk to my agent.

Which was amusing...because I didn't have an agent.

I tried to look officious as the keynote speaker was introduced by Dr. Kintaro. We had some keynote speaker who was a Dietman from the House of Councilors. He prattled on about the bright future in Japanese technology, the reconstruction efforts following Akira, the ever-present need to improve Japan's economy. He didn't fail to put in a plug for the Liberal Democratic Party, either. At least he remembered to praise the school for the Solar Car Race victory.

I didn't expect any less.

They were all here. In the third row of the spectator's section, I saw Reiko and Osamu, Keiichi's parents. They were absolutely beaming with pride and joy. Megumi was seated on their right, dressed in a knockout summer dress. Fortunately for her, the late March weather was unseasonably warm, otherwise she'd have been freezing. Seated next to Megumi was Sora, dressed to the pins in a cute jacket and skirt outfit; she looked like a mini-OL of the chibi variety. On the other side of the parents were Belldandy and Skuld. Skuld was busy behind a video camera. I humorously expected Peorth to pop out of it and strike a pose...but I knew that had she stayed back at the temple to tend to Urd.

I saw two persons dressed in what appeared to be smartly European-style clothes, seated in the front row. Probably Sayoko's parents, since Genji was seated next to them. Every so often, Genji would turn his head back to glance at Megumi. Ootaki and Tamiya and the other Club members were about twenty rows back, looking very hungover and slaphappy.

I felt a mixture of relief and concern regarding Urd's absence from the solemn ceremonies. Keiichi had been accepted to the N.I.T. Graduate Engineering Program, or "the Academy" as Ootaki nicknamed it. We broke the news to him last night at his impromptu graduation party, which cheered him up a bit. One of the prerogatives of being on the N.I.T. faculty was my keyword access to the Institute's computer system...which I used to hack in and locate the list of accepted Grad School applicants. Today, I was going to beat the notification letter procedure and tell Sayoko that she had been admitted into grad school too. I smiled to myself as I tried to imagine her surprised joy.

My surreptitious midnight rifling of files in the Graduate Admissions Office had paid off well...as I had snatched the congratulations letters for Keiichi and Sayoko to present personally.

"I have to stop daydreaming..." I confronted myself as the first few strains of "Pomp and Circumstances" billowed into my ears. The Dean of Students started calling forth the graduates.

_"__Ah luuuvv you!__"_ I heard a basso voice roar above the applause when Sayoko received her degree. Genji looked at his older sister with an expression of pride, while her dad and mom both filmed her with videocams. I privately winked at her as she walked past me, sharing my respect for her recovery...which allowed her to finish college instead of becoming a washed out dropout caught in a drug-fuzzed daydream. I was so moved, I fought back tears as I saw how happy she was in this moment.

Morisato was right after Mishima in the program.

"You the _man_, Keiichi!" I heard several guys yell right before the Dean called his name. Watching him walk up to the stage, I blinked back a tear when Keiichi received his certificate. Ootaki and Tamiya were whooping it up...full blast. The audience giggled with delight at their volume scaling enthusiastic yells. Then Chihiro let out a siren-loud long whistle. I couldn't believe the lungpower it must have taken; she must have sustained it for almost 10 seconds!

This brought back memories of when I graduated college. They handed me an empty degree holder and a rolled up blank piece of paper. Here in Japan, however, graduates receive the real thing; ornate gilded degree certificates freshly inked by the faculty.

Keiichi's parents and Belldandy were overcome with elation and vicarious pleasure. I wanted to break rank with my fellow faculty and give him a reassuring hug. But that would have to wait. I saw Genji sitting with his parents...he was giving Megumi the eye during most of the ceremony. Megumi seemed relaxed with herself for the first time in weeks.

After a brief pause, they continued with the graduate student portion of the program. I watched idly as they handed out advanced degrees in a number of engineering fields.

Then Dr. Kintaro took the podium and called _me_ forward. I looked at him blankly, not knowing what this was about. He smiled benignly at me...but his eyes said "get the hell up here, now!" So I walked up to the front, where Dr. Kintaro announced that I had facilitated the student exchange program between Beijing University and N.I.T. Then he produced a large red silk degree holder with Chinese and Japanese lettering.

I was blown away. Dr. Kintaro explained that BeiDa and N.I.T. had jointly awarded me a Ph.D. in Conscience Studies...the first doctorate ever awarded by N.I.T! Dr. Kintaro went on to outline my groundbreaking book, mentioning that the school had received almost 700 emails _a day_ from academicians all around the world concerning "Magnum Organum: First Consciousness".

I was momentarily paralyzed by this unexpected event, standing there in sheep-like paralysis...until Dr. Kintaro whispered "Sit down!" and gestured towards the faculty chairs.

Then the N.I.T. president presented several awards to various faculty and students. On behalf of the N.I.T. M.C.C., Keiichi accepted the Engineering Excellence Award for Undergraduates.

It dragged on...and on. Finally, they finished by awarding the Faculty of the Year recognition to Dr. Tanaka of the Physics Dept. I was glad for him, because this probably meant that they were going to promote him to Associate Professor. He looked as surprised as I must have when Dr. Kintaro presented him with the framed award.

Finally, it was over. People piled out of the ranks of steel folding chairs. I got to give Keiichi that hug before he beat a hasty retreat.

Belldandy was really sick.

This 'disease' that the sisters had...was progressing much more rapidly than what I had been told.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --


	50. Pt 50: A Question of Velocity

**Part 50: A Question of Velocity**

The new school year started last week, April 1, 20XX. I was assigned to teach five undergrad and two graduate classes, a reduction of one class from last term. Between being hard pressed for time with my teaching duties and responding to the piles of correspondence I was receiving every day regarding my dissertation project from last year, I found myself stretched to the limits. Yet, after school I afforded myself liberal efforts to visit Urd every day during spare moments of free time.

Each visit tore away my soul, piece by piece. I felt like I was a voyeur or a spy sneaking in via the postern, since Urd didn't know I was in the room with her. At times, I questioned whether my sanity had leapt headfirst off a cliffside coign. My heart was bedded solidly in a thin sullenness, my spirit was spare and drained.

My heart was linked to her still form as readily as a sail is tethered to a mast. Ever since I had found out that she was slipped away from life, I seemed to want to embrace every memory even more tightly. I felt like I was chasing after a mirage. I had pored over the Enigma Book, trying to find a cure. Tweezed between trying to save Urd and wanting to see her, just to know that she was alright.

Today, mercifully...she was lying on her back, tucked in her futon. I was grateful for the sleepy stillness in her "Urd's Castle" room. During several earlier visits, I bore witness to the breathnumbing sight of Urd in her futon, contorted with excruciating pain. I felt a heartecho of her pain in my being, one that rooted me to the moment with morose immobility. Freiija had been a constant bedside presence for her daughter; but yesterday Urd's mother had been recalled back to Yggdrasil.

Odeyn had been recalled too; his administration of the Energy Guild presented him with great responsibilities that he could no longer forego. Before leaving, he informed us that he felt strong leanings towards convening a War Council. The Almighty was convinced that Urd had been brutalized by a Demon. I felt a chilly shift drafting up and down my neck when Belldandy informed me of this precipitous turn of events.

Again, I stood in the corner of the room, watching Urd's unique élan de vie disintegrate before my very eyes. Once more, the truest meaning of powerlessness was being driven home with impersonal candidacy.

Life is so unfair...

"I'm dying. This is it!" Urd shouted, interrupting my reverie. She had started to rave during her waking moments a few days ago. Lucid spells were becoming infrequent as the disease ate at her mind like caterpillars greedily gorging on fresh leaves.

"Why in Vanagdrasil are _you_ here?" she said randomly, looking straight at me. I glanced down at my forearm...and realized that it was visible! Skuld's mecha must have 'run out of juice'! I tried to move my arm behind my back, as if I could somehow conceal it from her.

Urd looked at me with eyes brimming ugly with hate.

"I..I wanted to give you this," I said, gulping as the flame of those rue-filled eyes seemed to sear the flesh off of my bones. Which I knew, had Urd the power, she probably wouldn't hesitate to do.

With an uncharacteristic strength, Urd knocked the double CD case out of my hand.

_"__Get out!__"_ she screamed over and over. I was riveted to the spot by her rage, unable to twitch a muscle towards the door. Suddenly, she started gagging...and then pitched forward into my arms, throwing up blood all over her futon and me. Frightened by how sick she was, I was jolted into panic. Carefully laying down her unconscious form, I turned towards the doorway, ready to split out of the room.

"Belldandy! Peorth! Hurry!"

They were already here...my deep sense of shock and helplessness blinded me to their presence.

"Goddamn it, I'm not going to cry _again_!" I shouted to myself as Peorth dashed past me...and the tears came.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"If you can tear my skin off, I'll be okay. It isn't as if I have any thoughts to wear any more. I'm only a necropanda in a cellular igloo. Kami-sama is really Isilblius! I...I know the truth now, it's trapped like rats in the New York Times!" Urd babbled euphoniously, staring into blank space.

She had lost her eyesight.

"What?" Freiija said, holding her hand. She had decided to abandon her Yggdrasilian responsibilities to be with her daughter, regardless of what the Almighty could do to her for leaving her post.

Urd was becoming delirious again.

"Yes...the Yggdrasil System is powered by buckwheat noodles. Didn't you know that? Skuld and Belldandy aren't really my sisters...they never were. They're both echotree clones. Are you my sister? And...who am I? That's the question everybody asks...and nobody knows. Will I turn into frosted apple sake when I become a little girl?"

Peorth listened to Urd's word salad with patient concern. Belldandy and Skuld tucked into the room.

"Life is just a garden of dreams that slips along prefab Ixodenum concrete stairways of jelly... Who are you? There was something I was supposed to do, but since everything is going black..."

"Mother, put her in a stasis spell. NOW!" Belldandy shouted, her common sense firing her caution. To her relief, Peorth was already encanting the formula for the spell.

"It's all going dark...where's my World of Elegance? She should be...with...me..." Urd closed her eyes and her head tipped over to her side. A second later, the arm which had been resting on her chest...flopped limply to the floor.

"URD!!" Belldandy and Freiija screamed. Belldandy looked in the corner of the room, only to see the Dark Reaper hovering expectantly.

"Get away from my sister! You can't have her! It isn't her time!" she addressed the spectral figure. Skuld was on her knees crying, a pitiful picture of defeat and brokenhearted despair.

"I..I love you, Big Sister! And..snff..now you're leaving me without me getting even with..snff..you for all those times you teased me!" Skuld shouted, so overwrought that she could only express an instinct of the tragicomic.

"Whew!" Peorth looked exhausted. "I was able to put her in stasis...but I think I managed to catch her right before her Soul escaped to the Reaper."

Then she felt a sudden surge of Goddess power in the room, much more than she could ever muster. She looked over her shoulder to see Freiija, eyes tightly closed in rapt exertions, summoning a huge amount of arcane energy. With a final wave of her hands, Urd's mom created a far _stronger_ stasis shield.

Peorth was once again impressed with the sheer power of a Senior First Class Licensee...along with Freiija's all-out effort to save her daughter.

"Pull yourself together, you two! It's only a matter of time before I cannot power this spell...maybe two or three Earthrealm days at the most! Otherwise, _I'll_ die from lack of energy," Freiija admitted sadly. She had expended almost all of her Goddess powers to strengthen Peorth's stasis spell. Exhausted, she leaned against the wall next to Peorth.

Losing Urd was the ultimate tragedy... Freiija's feelings were haywire with passion. Was this just an exercise in futility...a weak attempt to forestall the inevitable? Then she shuddered as she realized once again that this scene would be repeated with Belldandy and Skuld.

"I have to rest..." Peorth said, unable to admit to the others that she couldn't handle the heartrending scene unfolding before her eyes. She felt that it was best to leave Freiija, Belldandy and Skuld alone with Urd. She turned her head back right before leaving the room. Freiija had tucked Urd's head up on her lap. She saw Belldandy look up at her with gratitude as she caressed Urd's head, while Skuld had curled up next to her oldest sister, resting her head on Urd's chest.

"Peorth...you better call my Father..." Belldandy said in a resigned voice.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"So...this is what the Real Death is like?"

_"Yes,"_ said the smiling young boy amidst a soft patter of windchimes.

"Who are you?"

_"I'm the Reaper, silly!"_ he said.

"No way! You're not skeletal...and you don't have a scythe!"

_"Of course not! That's just how you see me when you're on the Other Side. But now you're on _–this-_ side...and this is how I really am. Really! No tricks..."_

Urd tilted her head slightly as she regarded the boy, who looked like a ten-year old. He was the picture of vigorous childyouth. Long white hair flowed out of his head. His eyes were totally black, with a burning blue glow in the middle, where the pupils should be. Urd was both fascinated and frightened by that glow...its radiance suggesting the image of an ember burning in his eyes.

Then there was the matter of the glowing fog that seemed to be everywhere, surrounding her with gentle colors. What she beheld...reminded her of rainbow hues of light refracted from diamondtrees...only much softer on the eyes.

"What happens next?"

_"You'll see. Right now, your body has a slight lifestring of Soul remaining. Yet, it also shades upon the Real Death...and your Soul is almost here, Urd. One of the other Goddesses put a stasis spell on you, which holds the slight bit of you that remains on the Other Side... As for the rest of your Soul, well, let's just say it is 'In Between' at the moment. But shortly, the stasis spell will end...and you'll be free to come with me. Your Soul will be complete."_

"Where will we go?"

_"You'll see."_

"You're such a _cute_ little boy! How old are you?"

_"As old as the Everything...what you call the Multiverse."_

Urd flinched at _that_. She looked down at herself to see that she now possessed a glowing translucent body. Its ghost-like outline was cast in the form of her body in its prime...as it was before she got sick.

"Belldandy. Skuld. Mother and Father. My dear loved ones," she thought regretfully. The wind curled her hair around her waist as she let her grief flow outwards...

"What about my sisters?"

_"They'll be with you until the end. Right now, they are on the Other Side, giving you their love. Your Mother is with you, and your Father is coming..."_ the little boy who was Death explained.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

The next day, Urd stopped breathing.

Odeyn looked at his daughter...and his single eye filled with livid rage.

"This...means...WAR! Those damned Demons have crossed the line...snff...killing m..my oldest child! My firstborn! Th..they are going to PAY for this!" he shouted to the sky, casting a figure of profound Sophoclean poignancy.

"Oh my dear, sweet, precious Urd," Freiija sobbed, oddly more composed than her husband. Belldandy and Skuld leaned on each side of their mother, sharing her grief.

In the back of her mind, Belldandy wondered why Hild, Urd's other Mother, wasn't here. Hild was a Demon Queen, who shared maternity with Freiija. Her Mother and Hild had never met, but Hild's absence from this solemn scene struck her as quite odd. Urd's Demonic Mother hadn't even come once to pay a visit. Could it be possible that Hild _didn't know_ about what had happened to Urd? Belldandy reasoned that Hild...if she found out that a Demon had taken her daughter's life...would brook no efforts in seeking vengeance. A Demonic vendetta against another Demon was rumored to be utterly ruthless in execution. Or was her absence conspicuous for other means, such as a Demonic attack on a Goddess?

"It will be over real soon, Mother," Belldandy said quietly, too upset to turn towards her own grief.

Freiija realized that it _wouldn't_ be over anytime soon. She was going to lose all of her children! Her long and wonderful life would transpire its purpose when her little dear Skuld breathed her last...

She would have nothing to live for any more after that.

Nothing...but vengeance.

Vengeance against the unseen agents...who had exacted this horrible atrocity against her family.

She turned to face Odeyn, her beloved companion. Father of her daughters.

"Husband. When our dear little Urd is gone...I want you to go to Urd's Well. I want you to convene a War Council. I want you to call for an Assembly and do whatever it takes. Convince them! P..propose an indefatigable, merciless, vicious arbitrament of havoc upon the Demons for what they've done to my little girl! To avenge our family, _my_ daughters...we must stop at nothing!" she said evenly in a menacing voice, devoid of any compassion.

Belldandy had never seen her Mother so angry.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Keiichi had torn himself away from the deathbed scene, reluctantly choosing to leave the Goddesses alone. Out of respect, he figured that this was a moment best shared within the family. He felt an urgency to comfort his beloved Bell-chan, but he kept his own vigil in the living room. When Belldandy emerged from "Urd's Castle", he realized that the worst had happened.

His girlfriend was looking glumly at the floor.

"H..how long, Bell?"

"Just a more few hours," she answered, looking at him with grief-dazed sapphire eyes.

"I don't want to leave you, Bell-chan. What can I do to help? I hate it! Urd's dying...and all I can do is worry about myself! I'm all wrapped in..snff..what I can do to comfort the people I love. Who's going to tell Cevn? I..I really don't want to be the one that tells him about...you know, about Urd," Keiichi rambled out nervously.

"I will, mon ami. I'll tell him about the tres terrible..." Peorth volunteered. Keiichi felt a momentary gratitude towards Peorth. "Unlike me, Peorth's at least able to help, to do _something_..." Keiichi thought glumly.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

I couldn't do it anymore. My last visit to Urd a couple of weeks ago had wrenched my heart into a thousand strands of broken realities. When I returned home with her lifeblood all over my shirt and jeans, I felt like I was a nothing. Nothing more than a cat chasing its tail, biting itself, and then crying out at the injury. I just couldn't bear watching her suffer like this anymore.

My life was being dislocated, weakness upon weakness.

Obsessed by doubt, in my desperation I sought conciliation in the Enigma Book, the only possible source I could think of that could elucidate Yggdrasilian and Vanagdrasilian antinomian intellectual quiddities. I would chance it; if I searched long enough, hard enough...I sensed that I _would_ somehow find the answers there.

Every day, as soon as I returned to Sayoko's place after school, I would dash a meal in the microwave, and then bury my attention into the Enigma Book. The book that purportedly possessed the sum knowledge of Yggdrasil and Vanagdrasil.

Every night for the past two weeks, I had cast my thoughts within the spiral realms of the God's and Demon's Languages.

At the moment, I felt that the book that was totally useless, because it lacked any clear instructions about how to cure Urd. I wanted to throw it hard against the walls of the garage. Over and over again...

The more I searched through the Enigma Book, the more I realized that each day only seemed to usher forth another expression of my growing nugacity. A frustration that was less painful than seeing Urd in her languishing, moribund state. But it still sucked critical.

Self-pity seeped in as I tallied my losses.

I had girded myself with a constant grim vigilance; expecting to hear the worst at any moment from the little temple where my heart was left behind. Then I could speed my own soul along the familiar channels of grief.

"Speed...my...soul?" I whispered to the empty garage. Empty except for me, my studio equipment, and a book.

Something about speed that I had read...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"What's this?" Freiija asked aloud as her knee bumped something hidden under Urd's futon. She reached under the soft cushion and pulled out a grey-metal object in a plastic case, with a yellow note taped on it. She read the note:

_"To Urd, I only hope you get to hear this God Demon's music before you move on to whatever is coming. This is my affirmation that love is the filament that links all souls together. I'm grateful that you allowed my soul to share a bond with yours._

_Love, Cevn."_

"How...utterly contemptible! What a wretched example of mortal cheekiness!" Freiija commented. She looked at her family, her expression disclosing a sovereign affront.

Skuld snatched the plastic case from her Mother and opened it. It was a music pod, just like the one which got lost after the Solar Federation Race. The music pod with the God's Music on it that had caused so much bliss in the house during trying times. Blinking her eyes, she read the note again, and then noticed a "# 1" inked onto the battery casing on the pod's back.

"I...think we should play it," Belldandy suggested, drawing a scowl from her Mother.

Examining the music pod, Skuld remembered how Cevn had asked her and Urd to devise a means to mass-produce the God's Symphony he was planning to create. Could this be it in the music pod she now held in her hand? Urd had gone Richter on him for wanting to give away all the sales proceeds of the music to help the less fortunate. Now, this music pod and the music it contained would never see the light of day, because she and Urd wouldn't be able to fulfill his request.

Freiija was both astonished and insulted by the fact that a mortal male had dared to give her daughter a parting gift. The frank admission of his feelings towards her daughter was nothing less than an insult.

"First Belldandy...than Urd! How could _both_ of my two oldest daughters entrance an Earthrealm mortal man?" she wondered. According to her dear B'dandy, one had returned as much love as he could give. The other one...was valed in a tension of opposites; caught between truth and reality.

"Everyone knew the truth about Urd's attacker...except Urd," Belldandy had explained to her.

Seeing the mysterious music pod, Belldandy held out on a dim flicker of hope. The last time they had played a music pod with Cevn's 'God's Music' on it, a miracle of sorts had happened. Could lightning strike again?

Ignoring her Mother's admonitions, Skuld powered up the music pod. Sure enough, the file was titled "_GodDemon's Symphony_". Setting aside her curiosity at the strange title, she plugged the pod into its cradle and punched up the God's Music file.

With frank disbelief, Freiija felt her conscious soothed into silken passageways of bliss as the music caressed her being...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"I have to go now, Keiichi!" Megumi repeated in an insistent voice, a voice that was strong enough to cut steel.

"Well...just go then, Megumi! Just go. Go ahead and leave us all here to deal with Urd _dying_!" Keiichi replied with icepick harshness, the contempt in his voice chilling Megumi into a standstill.

Chihiro's van was waiting outside, waiting to pick her up and take her to Narita. It was the third week in April, and the trials for the Le Mans were scheduled to take place next weekend. They had to leave right now, or they would miss their flight!

Because Keiichi was indisposed, the club had elected Megumi to be the driver for the trials. There was _no_ way she could skip out of the responsibility!

Keiichi glared at his sister in disbelief as she handled her luggage. Urd was dying...and she was going off to France with the Motor Club! They had argued fervently about her decision late into the night. Keiichi had expected that Megumi would change her mind at the last minute. Or that Urd would have died, forcing his sister to remain behind.

But Urd was stubbornly clinging to life...and Megumi had spent the last couple of days packing two huge pieces of luggage.

"If you go...I'll never talk to you again!" Keiichi threatened. He really didn't mean it, but he was so deeply hurt by his sister's callous betrayal that he couldn't think of anything else to say. What was even more painful was the fact that he needed _somebody_ to lean on...and his little sister was bailing out on him.

Tomohisa was too young, Cevn didn't live at the temple anymore...and from what Belldandy had told him, Cevn was losing his mind. And Genji was going to France for the Le Mans trials with the Motor Club.

Which meant that there was no one for him. To stand alongside him and offer _him_ comfort. Megumi looked back at him with an expression that pivoted between hurt and shock.

"Life goes on," she said weakly, fighting back tears. She knew that this would be the most difficult part...the part of getting out the door while her brother stared her down accusingly.

An inarticulate argument of the heart passed between brother and sister, wordlessly filling the living room with a feud of emotion.

"I hate to do this...but I _have_ to go," Megumi offered, breaking the silence with a note of finality.

"I hate _you_ for doing this, Megumi!" Keiichi spat out in a bitter voice.

The two stared at each other for a grizzled moment, and then Megumi sighed with resignation and walked out the front door.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Urd was comforted by the soft fleshy glow that surrounding her. She could feel World of Elegance within her; her Angel was singing softly in her familiar manner...a lovesong that only Urd could hear.

The little boy that was the Reaper had been very kind, explaining to her in detail about what was going to happen next. She and he would walk along a path that would lead to the Light. Then her consciousness would merge with all the others on this side.

In his childish voice, the Reaper painted their environs with gentle words. He explained that she was in a place...a realm in the midst of the two Multiverse-trees...a non-void where pure Light existed. The price for each surrendered Soul was a loss of individuality. But the resulting Instrumentality of Light was the wellspring of creation. A part of her would be renewed, as she was Norn of the Past. A new Norn of the Past would appoint into existence to assume her role.

Urd sensed a pause in World of Elegance's singing. A moment later, her Angel shed herself away from Urd, forming above her. Urd looked on as World of Elegance flew in a wide circle above them, her lithesome brown and white form seeking the source of the faint sounds, her black and white sweep of hair bobbing in an invisible breeze. A few seconds later, World of Elegance's wings were fluttering, revealing her excitement.

A delicate music was filling the air, causing gentle pulses of color to appear in the cloudlike glow that that was everywhere. Urd felt an impulse to run in the direction of the sound waves.

_"Hmmm, it appears that you may have a choice after all..."_ the little boy observed with a smile. He _always_ smiled, because, as he had explained to her, the Real Death was actually the first step of Renewal...and those Souls released from their bonds on the Other Side deserved to be greeted with joy...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Urd should have been dead by now. The stasis field had exhausted itself several days ago. But somehow, she was clinging on dearly to life with a characteristic Urd-like stubbornness.

Belldandy had summoned Keiichi into "Urd's Castle" several times to attend on her sister's final moments. She knew that Keiichi was trying to accommodate her family by staying away. But she _needed_ him, notwithstanding of how personal the circumstances were. His heart was very clouded by the fact that Megumi had left with the Motor Club. _She_ could forgive Megumi, even if Keiichi couldn't. Keiichi's sister was just being realistic...and yet Belldandy knew deep inside that Megumi was shattered by Urd's inevitable fate.

But Urd didn't pass on. Belldandy felt her emotions deplete just a little bit more with each narrow call and return to life. _Something_ was keeping Urd alive, as if she was receiving a divine life-sustenance. Yet, an expectant Reaper still hovered in the room...along with something else.

A barely perceptible shadow, always tucked away at the corners of sight.

Once, over a summer vacation to the beaches of Chiba, Keiichi had told her about the folk legend of the moboroshi...an ethereal cosmic spirit that seemed to captivate people and then lead them to their doom. The moboroshi would entrance oceanside villagers to walk off cliffs, or swim out in storm pitched seas to drown. It wasn't real, but it was dangerously seductive. Poised on the edge of reality, the moboroshi misled those persons for whom reality had no longer remained attractive. Often in olden times, the traditional Japanese explained these cases of suicide as "being tricked by the moboroshi."

Yet, she sensed a shadow of the shadow...and she felt a surge of alarm.

It was utterly _evil_.

She heard a light snoring against her shoulder. Keiichi had fallen asleep against her, drooling on one of the few fets of hair that were still left on her head. At her insistent bequest, he had remained with her during the past few days. He often made trips out to the kitchen to bring food for the mourners. She and her family didn't need to eat mortal food, but his gestures were precious for their own sakes. He supplied Belldandy's family with fresh clothes so that they could dry their tears. In all respects, he was being so much of a support her and her kin.

"I love you so much for who you are, my love," Belldandy said to his sleeping form during a break from the deep sadness that gripped her heart.

This was a living wake.

Yet...everyone but Urd was awaiting her death. Inexplicably, Urd was hanging on to life.

Every 220 minutes, a graceful symphony would fill the room, causing all of those attending on Urd to experience a mist of serenity. The other 220 minutes consisted of a darkly beautiful arrangement of sound themes...the kind of music that would be carved on the icehard surface of Pluto.

Somehow, the music pod had gotten stuck in the player, playing over and over.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

My head hit the Enigma Book with a muffled "_whap_". I groggily opened my eyes to see the section on Sleipnir.

Again.

My head ached dearly, as the 'metallect' faculty that I possessed was working overtime. Since I had been brought to Japan, the metallect had manifested itself at odd times, seemingly keeping to a schedule that I had no control over. I was never quite able to beckon its capabilities...until now. Suddenly, I was able to comprehend matters which had escaped my notice before.

I was able to ask the right questions.

_Time...matrix...axis...metaphysics...Multiverse...Sleipnir..._

_Earthrealm...dimensions...oceanmind...ascension...spirit..._

_Threshold...instrumentality...other side...Soul...velocity..._

_Velocity! Mortal! Sleipnir! Soul!_

"_SHIT!_" I whispered loudly as the muddle crystallized into a cathartic harmony.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

_rringg_

Belldandy and the rest had ignored the constant activity of the phone since Urd had declined into a coma. Hearing the tone, she looked at Skuld, her eyes beseeching her to answer the phone.

The phone.

Skuld hadn't answered the phone since The Call From the Almighty About Her License Suspension. She was no longer terrified of the phone, because she had simply excised it from her life...deciding to never answer it again. Now, Elder Sister was asking her to answer it.

Gathering her courage, Skuld swallowed hard...and walked out of "Urd's Castle". Leaning against the hallway, she silently breathed a prayer, almost relieved to have a reprieve from the morbid scene in the room.

"All the phone calls left unanswered in the past few days, and all of a sudden, they want _me_ to answer the phone!" she thought with exasperation.

She was frightened at times as her entire family became smothered with expectant grief. It seemed to hit hardest in phases. It struck _her_ in phases as well. The music hovered in the background...one CD seemed to soothe her, the other one filled her with a dark sense of beauty. Then she would look at Urd...and her heart would shrink back.

"I can't stare at it forever..." she paused her paralysis as she stared at the phone.

"Hello!"

_"S..Skuld! This is Cevn!..."_

"Where are you? Why haven't you come? Big Sister is _dying_...and you're not here!" she interrupted, livid with anger at his insensitivity.

_"S...she's _–dying-_?! N..no! Not now! She _-can't-_ die!! I didn't know! She can't die yet! Then it's not too late. I'm coming over now! I think there is a way to thwart all this bullshit that has happened to her..."_

"Peorth! You _didn't tell him_?" Skuld yelled down the hallway.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Keiichi asked Cevn to go over it again. It was so simple, yet the manner in which he explained it...was complexity folded upon complexity. Cevn looked solicitously at Odeyn and Freiija, the two oldest Divines present in the living room. They would know if his idea had merit...

Their expressions consisted of a marked confusion.

"Look...there is an axis at the exact center of the two planes of existence that we call Yggdrasil and Vanagdrasil. This point is where all the energies come from, and where all Souls go at the point of death."

"Your unfounded conjecture is totally ridiculous! I'm the head of the Energy Guild, and I _know_ that the energy arises from the Multiverse!" Odeyn commented authoritatively.

"So how can Vanagdrasil exist? Assuming that all energy comes from _our_ Multiverse, how do you explain the energies that power _their_ Multiverse. If energy can only be created in this Multiverse, then doesn't that imply that Yggdrasil is a wellspring of power for the Demons? Aren't you assuming that the Demon's home turf is powered by an energy source located _within_ Yggdrasil?"

"That's so stupid, it's not even worth considering. It's also heresy! The Almighty wouldn't allow that!" Skuld interjected.

"Okay, I'm going to try and make sense of it. Imagine the Multiverse, consisting of all reality. The Everything is even greater than the Multiverse. Vanagdrasil is a Multiverse unto itself. Like the Chinese concept of Yin and Yang; two Multiverses make up the Everything. Y..you cannot disprove this, because most of the contacts between Gods and Demons have always occurred _somewhere else_...in a place where both realms interweave. Where they overlap. Like the Earthrealm. But never just in Yggdrasil or Vanagdrasil, with the exception of the Doublet System meetings. In some way, I think this explains the Doublet System, incidentally. From what I've gleaned from the Enigma Book, my sense of it is that when the doubles meet in Yggdrasil, they are also meeting in Vanagdrasil at the same time. Existing in both realms just for an instant. But anyway, no one here has seen Vanagdrasil, right? And the Demons have no conception of Yggdrasil, other than that it is "the other place." You don't know if the realm of the Demons is part of what you call the Multiverse. I believe that it isn't!"

"We all know that!" Freiija interjected impatiently. Here her daughter was dying, and this mortal fool was unspooling a complex conjecture that was taking away precious moments of her time...time that she could be spending with her dearest Urd!

"Then answer this question. Where does Love come from? We all experience it, but assume for a moment that it exists _in between_ the Gods and the Demons."

"If this was so, then we wouldn't be considering war with the Demons, would we? Also, my firstborn daughter wouldn't be dying in there!" Odeyn said angrily.

"Not 'in between' in a literal, emotional sense...but 'in between' in a cosmological sense. At the theoretical axis...which I believe exists at the nexus of the Everything; between Yggdrasil and Vanagdrasil. Where no God or Demon has ever been; except after they experience the Real Death. Love, and all energy _must_ come from this mid-point between the Multiverses. An 'in between' place where all Souls go after death. Souls become the energy for Love. There is no entropy, no atrophy. Just a renewal, a regeneration. That's why everything has to die! And everything that lives...is necessarily born out of Love energy."

Belldandy was afraid. Cevn had a familiar glint of madness in his eyes; the same glint that Mara exhibited when she was scheming her evil plots. This idea of his...too farfetched, too improbable!

"Dazed by his own grief, Cevn must be _inventing_ a resolution. He so badly wants all of us, especially Urd, to live. It's so bittersweet..." she thought sadly. His solution obviously made no sense to her Mother, or anyone else in the room.

"So the only way to save Urd...to save Belldandy and Skuld...is to have a mortal ride Sleipnir once around the exact middle of the Everything, at the point where the Multiverses meet. By doing this, the circuitous annularity of the orbit will _draw_ Urd's Soul out, snapping the grip that this filthy disease has on her. It will snap this disease of Time...by removing it from Time. Which means that Belldandy and Skuld would also be released from its grip! And it has to be Keiichi who does it!" he said, pointing dramatically at Keiichi.

Keiichi gulped aloud. He remembered Sleipnir, the eight-legged steed of Norse legend. The bizarre horse that had appeared during Skuld's initial abortive attempts to contain the Bugs, before they figured out that it was Keiichi himself who was drawing them into the Earthrealm reality.

"_No one_ can ride a Sleipnir, except for very limited amounts of time and for short distances! He is a very temperamental beast! They _all_ are!" Freiija stated matter-of-factly.

"You mean there's more than one Sleipnir?" Cevn asked incredulously.

Belldandy almost wanted to slap her forehead in frustration at his obvious mistake.

"And _he_ thinks he has a solution that can cure my daughter! Let's forget this foolishness and attend to more important matters. That's _my_ daughter that is dying in there!" Freiija replied angrily, pointing at the young mortal. This oversight simply confirmed her suspicion that he was beguiled by fantasies of his own design, firmly rooted in nonsense.

"Urd could only ride him a little. And she's a Goddess! What he is proposing is impossible...even for one of _us_!" Belldandy added.

"Impossible for you...but not for a mortal!" Cevn challenged her.

"Are you telling me, young mortal child-man...that an Earthrealm mortal can actually do something that a God _cannot_?" Freiija said with cold disdain.

"You can argue with my Mother all you want, Cevn," Belldandy interrupted. "But I will _not_ let my Keiichi risk himself, just because you have concocted some fantastic idea based on the flimsiest of conjectures. I'm going to lose everything anyway...I _don't_ want to lose Keiichi...before the end!" Belldandy said with a note of finality to her voice.

Cevn looked like he was going to explode with frustration.

Keiichi couldn't comprehend the specifics of what Cevn-sensei was trying to explain. And he was definitely in "sensei" mode! But he_ did_ understand that Urd's...and Bell and Skuld's fates...depended on him, according to his friend. He was worried for a moment that Cevn was going to punch the nearest wall in a burst of temper. He was taking this really hard. Too hard, for this to simply be some flight of fancy.

"DAMMIT! Why can't you stop this Gods vs. Earthrealm mortals bullshit crap! We're _all_ in this! Look...I know that for some reason, I'm been transformed...all sorts of incredibly weird stuff has happened to me since I came here. I've had to live with myself and face every bit of it! And you know why I think my idea deserves a chance? Because I can read the freakin' God's Language_ and_ the Demon's Language! Can any of _you_ do that?"

Odeyn looked at Freiija was a stunned expression as the young mortal continued.

"I trust myself on this, more than I have ever trusted myself about anything before! And I know...deep inside...that your _only chance_ is put this suggestion into action! Urd's only chance depends on whether you listen to me! We need to have a mortal ride Sleipnir!"

"What could you possibly know about what 'we' need?" Freiija spat out, enraged by his presumptuousness.

"Okay..._I _need Urd to come back!_ I_ need to see Belldandy and Skuld freed from this wasting disease! I can't do it, because I don't have the 'need for speed' in my blood. _But Keiichi does_!"

"N..no!" Belldandy interrupted.

"C'mon...trust me! Please?" Cevn begged.

Odeyn looked at him with arms crossed; shaking his stern face "no". Only Skuld seemed to agree with Cevn's theory. Keiichi's mind was filled with possibilities...and apprehension.

"He keeps saying that I can do something to save Bell-chan and her sisters?" he reflected, astonished at the sudden glimpse of hope...and his vital role in it. He was equally astonished as Cevn got on his hands and knees and bowed deeply in a fairly good imitation of a Japanese kowtow, his forehead firmly touching the tatami. He remained in that posture of unsparing supplication.

"Please. I lost one wife already...I don't want to lose another. I _love_ her...and I love_ all of you_! I don't want to lose any of you to what's coming..."

Peorth almost choked when she heard Cevn's slip of the tongue. She was surprised that no one else had caught what he said about Urd. She smiled, realizing that he had spoken his deepest wish. She floated behind Keiichi and wrapped her arms around his chest.

"_GO!_" Peorth whispered in Keiichi's ear, drawing a disgruntled look from Belldandy.

"What did you just say to Keiichi?" Belldandy, her deadly serious voice thinly veiling a threat.

"If I were Keiichi...I would go. You know that I love Keiichi, even though he's with you, Belldandy. I love him enough that I wouldn't ask him to risk his life unless I thought he could do it...and that it was possible! Even if he is risking his life for you and your sisters! And you're too afraid to see things clearly!" Peorth answered back in like seriousness, finishing with a spiteful flourish.

"There you go again!" Skuld shouted in exasperation. "When are you ever going to let go of your infatuation with Keiichi, Peorth?"

Skuld was bone-tired and physically sick. This whole triangle thing between Belldandy, Peorth and Keiichi was enough to drive anyone crazy. And here is Peorth, bringing it up again...now, of all the times.

"I'll go. I'll do it," Keiichi said guardedly in a low voice. This was one of the most difficult things he had ever said. He had just gone against the wishes of his dying girlfriend.

_"What?!"_ Belldandy and her parents exclaimed. Skuld smiled to herself as she realized that Keiichi was going to risk his life to save them. To save _her_. A warm feeling welled up in her belly...she felt like Keiichi had become a lighthouse amidst a raging storm.

She had never loved him more strongly...this Keiichi. Years ago, he had seemed to be nothing more than a spineless mortal when she first encountered him. A pest, a thorn in her side, a leech sucking away at her sister's vitality.

Now he was totally different. He was even standing up against her sister...something neither she nor Urd could do very often! She could see the gears of conflict and confusion spinning in his heart, but yet he had trusted himself enough to make a decision.

"Keiichi, where did you get so _strong_ all of a sudden?" Skuld asked in a private voice.

"Bell-chan...if there is _any_ chance to save Urd...to save you and Skuld...then I gotta try!" he stated, pained by the look of fearful disappointment on his girlfriend's face.

"Keiichi!! Y..you _can't_! You don't know what you're saying! Sleipnir isn't just some mythical animal modeled on an Earthrealm horse! That's only a cipher, just an iconic manifestation. He is the ultimate manifestation of velocity! He is Speed itself! Sleipnir is the swiftest object in existence! Those who try to ride him too long...go insane because their minds cannot conceive of the absolute velocity Sleipnir creates. His speed...is faster than thought! He's driven _Gods _insane! Gods who thought they could tame him! That's why they warn us when we're children...not to ride Sleipnir! And you're planning to ride _the_ Sleipnir. _THE_ Sleipnir...the maverick. The fastest steed of the whole herd!!" she argued passionately, desperately trying to dissuade him.

Keiichi found a small voice in himself grinning, captivated by the challenge. Yet, if Cevn's theory were fact, it would be the only way to save Belldandy and her sisters.

"I..don't..want..to..lose..you," Belldandy pleaded.

"I'm sorry, my love. But I'm going, and that's _final_!" Keiichi said. Belldandy turned her back to him, glanced ruefully at Peorth, and then whirled to face him.

"Well! Just be that way then, Keiichi! If you're going to listen to Peorth instead of me...you can do whatever you want to! But not with me! I won't be there! As far as I'm concerned, you can just count me out of your life!" she yelled in near hysteric anger...and then stormed out of the room in a clenched-fist swathe of resentment.

"Whoa!" Skuld said to herself, punctuating the forest of silence in the room.

"Belldandy! Do you think I could live with myself if I didn't do anything? If I lost you because I didn't try when a solution presented itself? I might as well be dead if that happened!" he shouted down the hallway.

"_You_ just 'be that way'!" he added with a taunt, his normally accommodating nature having been pushed past the limit by his girlfriend's stubbornness.

"Uh-oh, here comes another Jealousy Storm," Skuld grumbled to herself.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

One of Chihiro's old professors at N.I.T. had offered her a part time position teaching a single graduate course in Civic and Environmental Engineering. She was glad to take on the extra work, just to have some variety away from managing Whirlwind and the 'Le Mans Project'. The preparations for the Le Mans race had been tedious and exhausting. So she welcomed the break in the routine.

However, of the forty-plus graduate courses offered at N.I.T., Keiichi just happened be enrolled in _her_ elective course! This created a moment of wide-eyed awkwardness for her on the first day of class, which in hindsight she realized was quite amusing. So typical of their competitive friendship! But then he had disappeared entirely during the second week of instruction. His conspicuous absence at school and at Whirlwind worried her.

Now she was in France.

During the final heats at the Le Mans, Chihiro realized with pride that it was obvious that the Motor Club was at least going to qualify for a chance at position in the 24 hours of Le Mans. Despite her reservations, Megumi had performed with excellence as a racecar driver. In fact, the whole Club had performed like clockwork in almost every aspect!

Yet, Megumi's driving skills were enigmatic. Megumi had raced with confidence during each heat, even winning a few. She even acted like a seasoned pro from the start! Chihiro had at least expected a moment of wide-eyed fear as Megumi climbed into the cockpit of the Nissan GT1 R390-LM hybrid.

Chihiro suspected that, somehow, Megumi had snuck in a few laps of practice sometime in the past. But how? How could she have practiced at all, when access to a Formula One racecar was strictly limited to experienced drivers? She certainly didn't have _that_ much time to drive the Club's racer...only a few hours.

It was a total mystery.

But whenever Chihiro brought up the subject of her seemingly impossible driving skills, Megumi would only mutter "Mara" and "Demon Rally". And whenever Chihiro asked after her brother, Megumi's face would stiffen up with an expression that could mean anything. Anger, fear, disappointment, sadness.

But mostly hurt.

Chihiro could see the pain in Megumi's expression. She never had a brother to look after herself, as she was an only child. Yet, despite the richness of her desire to be with her teammates at the Le Mans trials, Chihiro knew, deep inside, that she was needed somewhere else...even more.

Even more than in France, celebrating with her beloved Motor Club.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

After the qualifying trials were over and done, Chihiro immediately flew back home to Japan. The rest of the Club members were going to spend a couple days celebrating in France before they returned. She had already seen a lot of Europe while she was working on the Krauser racing team, so skipping the sightseeing was no loss on her part. Yet, it made no sense for her to abandon her life's goal in order to fly to the rescue of one of her close friends. But she just wasn't in the mood for celebrating, unlike her teammates.

After landing back home, Chihiro caught a cab from Narita to Makuhari, still pondering the invisible force that was summoning her here. But she felt draw to that little temple in the middle of Makuhari...

"There's that word again. Rescue. How am I going to rescue Keiichi when I don't even know what's wrong?" she mused aloud as the cab pulled over in front of the temple torii.

As she sprightly walked towards the open doorway, Chihiro knew immediately that something was very wrong when Belldandy failed to greet her at the door. Looking inside, Keiichi looked like he was adjusting some mecha in the middle of the living room, while a blanket-wrapped Skuld was shouting instructions. As she entered the house, she saw Cevn was seated lotus style on the couch, rocking back and forth nervously.

A very sickly-looking Skuld was instructing Keiichi...

Keiichi's full attention was focused on the small device in the middle of the room. It looked like a small cylindrical box-cum-trashcan; like the cardboard hatboxes used in fashionable stores in Paris. Wires studded from it at odd angles, tubes pulsed with blue and green fluids, and a haphazard maze of cords ran from its base towards another, much larger machine.

She recognized the machine during her initial observation. It looked like an old turbine pump from a steam freighter; basically a spherical chamber with a series of sealing clamps across its middle.

"Obviously for condensing the steam," Chihiro noted. A turret rose several feet out of its side. Beyond this superficial resemblance, the machine had a weave of intricate piping that looked utterly meaningless. And the whole thing was mounted on a metal platform with rollers.

"That's the Super Energy Infusion Machine Mk. III, Chihiro," Keiichi commented without even looking at her.

"How did you know it was me?"

"Well, you do smell like a mechanic trying to cover her scent with Este Lauder 'Seductress' perfume..."

"Why you!!" Chihiro snorted indignantly while Skuld burst into giggles.

"What is a _steam engine pump_ doing in the middle of your living room, if you care to explain?"

"Well..ah...it's not _exactly_ what it appears to be," he answered, finally turning to face her.

"What _is_ as it appears to be, when it concerns you?" Chihiro shot back. She assumed her attack posture, fists on hip, leaning forward.

"By the way, _where_ have you been? You haven't been to my class since the second week of school! And you haven't shown up once for club meetings or work or..." She suddenly felt her face burst in goosebumps as she realized the obvious.

"B..Belldandy! Is she okay?" she blurted out.

"Bell's pretty sick, but her older sister Urd is going to die any time. That's why I'm out here fixing this machinery of Skuld's."

"Oh my God!" Chihiro shouted, her feathered earrings quivering as the poignant impact of Keiichi's statement stunned her emotions into a corner.

"A Super Energy Infusion Machine controls energy matrices so that it can..." Skuld began to explain. Chihiro listened to Skuld's improbable description of what the machine was and what they were planning to do with it. She said that, once activated, the Super Energy Infusion Machine would _pull a singularity_ out of Keiichi.

Then Keiichi started in, describing how he was going to reverse the setting on something Skuld had called a "Mister Bug Zapper", which would enable it to pop a computer virus into the Earthrealm. Captured by the singularity, the virus would create a dimensional distortion...which would then cause an eight-legged horse to appear.

Then he was going to ride the eight-legged horse around everything...to save Urd, Belldandy and Skuld from certain death...

"Keiichi...have you been taking drugs?" Chihiro asked when he finally wound down his detailed, yet absurd elaboration.

"Of course not! I'm just really involved in this...after all, this _is_ Bell-chan's life we're trying to save by doing this project. I want to get it right the first time!"

"Do you...think you need help?" she offered, worried that he was probably a likely candidate for the nuthouse. If he actually believed in what he had just told her, Keiichi needed much more 'help' than just a scolding for not going to school.

"I think..it's enough that you're here, Chihiro. To give me courage."

"That's _not_ what I meant!" she stammered.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Belldandy, if Urd was with us, she'd insist that you talk to Keiichi and try to work things out!" Peorth urged.

"I don't need _you_ to tell me that, Peorth! After all, he picked your suggestion over mine!" Belldandy shot back.

That again.

Peorth had watched as Belldandy threw the Mother of All Hissy Fits. She had given Keiichi the silent treatment for over a week. Obviously, the stress of her sister dying had overflown Belldandy's usual sense of restraint, firing off sideways at her mortal boyfriend. Peorth had tried to comfort Keiichi in this midst of this 'cold war of the hearts', but he kindly refused her affections. Which made things more interesting.

"Ah...now I see. Le fou fleur de jalousie continues to blossom its musky bouquet in your heart of hearts, mon ami!" Peorth observed. Obviously, Belldandy had relinquished her focus on the situation at hand, instead she had become entrapped in a fit of envy.

"You have him already, Belldandy, as much as I hate to admit it! Keiichi even refused my 'special service package'! He even rejected me...after I openly admitted that I loved him! Despite this, his deepest wish...was only to have you admit your love for him. Don't you see? I don't pose a threat to you, girl-Goddess! It's all in your sweet little head!" Peorth explained, reaching out and pinching Belldandy on the cheek.

Belldandy looked at Peorth, and then lowered her gaze with a troubled expression.

"But I can't be with him forever. I'm going to die. What happens to Keiichi then? He'll be heartbroken! And the only other woman interested in him...is you! Ergo, Keiichi will wind up with you!" she burst out with rapid-fire gasping words. With that thought, a swirl of suppositions wrinkled Belldandy's common sense, casting her into a realm of paranoia.

"What if he's already decided to make a switch? That's probably the reason why he chose your opinion over my pleas! I'm not exactly beautiful anymore, with most of my hair gone and my skin covered with these...lesions! I'm _ugly_...and you could easily steal him from me now! How can he love me...when I'm like this?" she said angrily.

Peorth halted her retort when she realized how much this wasting disease had ravaged Belldandy. In another few weeks, she would look like Urd did when Peorth had encountered her at the summer retreat house...

And in a few more weeks...

Peorth clamped her mind shut against _that_ thought!

"He knows that I'm going to be gone, so he's moving away from me...to you. It's a typical mortal behavior when faced with loss of the most terrible kind. My Keiichi is doing this so he doesn't have to feel as much hurt...when my end comes," Belldandy said sadly, unburdening her deepest fears.

This revelation hit Peorth like a small nuclear blast. Belldandy was being nakedly honest with her about how she felt things were going to turn out. And she was so scared of her feelings, she was talking about this with a clinical detachment.

"No wonder she's feeling threatened by me!" Peorth realized. She had felt the gathering of the Jealousy Storm clouds immediately after Belldandy had stormed out the living room a week ago. And they still fogged the house...

Twin shades of gray and gloom.

"Look, I know it isn't my place to say this...but haven't you stopped to consider the possibility that I prompted Keiichi to try riding Sleipnir because I wanted _you_ to live! So you could be with him...and make Keiichi happy for the rest of his life? Didn't that ever occur to you?" Peorth said, getting in Belldandy's face.

"Well...no," Belldandy said timidly.

"And didn't it ever occur to you that Keiichi _isn't_ the kind of man who would simply slink away from the woman he loves with his whole being...just to avoid feeling the pain of losing her? Can't you give him more credit than that? He's _trying to save your life_, you fool!!"

"Peorth, how can you assume that my darling Keiichi is..."

"Your naiveté disgusts me, Belldandy!" Peorth interrupted, angry that Belldandy had become so transfixed by her dilemma that she couldn't see things clearly.

"But then again, that's one of the things I grudgingly admire about you. You seem to live in a universe of your own, Belldandy. Birds and flowers singing all around you. Pink clouds in the sky. And Keiichi by your side. Now that things aren't so bonheur remarquable...you're losing it. And I'm not going to let you go to pieces!"

"Am I _that_ bad?" Belldandy asked, Peorth's remarks striking her as a foot of truth jammed into the door of her confusion.

"How do you think _I_ feel? I can't have what I want, if you know what I mean. I'll never have mon chérie Keiichi for my own! At the most, all I can do is adore him from a distance! What you take for granted...I can _never_ expect to happen in my life! Doesn't that ever bother you? Don't you ever feel guilty?" Belldandy was almost flinching with every word Peorth spat out.

"No, I don't feel guilty. You're the one who's always so obsessed about my boyfriend! All I did was fall in love with him..."

"Ahhh, so typical of you, Belldandy! Well, I want you to get this through your head," Peorth said, poking Belldandy square on the oval-shaped seal on her forehead.

"I won't whip up on darling Keiichi, whether you're here or not! I don't want to manipulate or force him into something he doesn't want. If Keiichi is to love me, he has to love me for who I am. Not because you were taken away from him. I would never do that...to hurt him! Or to even hurt you! I won't take advantage of him..._ever_!"

Belldandy recoiled momentarily from Peorth's lecture. She wavered between distrust and acceptance. Peorth had basically admitted that she was giving up on Keiichi, despite the strong love for him dwelled in her kokoro.

They had been sharing kokoros, Peorth and she. No wonder this was so intense, so difficult.

"Peorth...I think I need to be with my sister," Belldandy interjected in a cheerless voice, dismissing the whole conversation.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Chihiro looked on as Keiichi punched a complex sequence out on one of the several button clusters on the large machine. A loud basso humming sounded forth as the Super Energy Infusion Machine Mk. III fired up to power the Zapper.

"Please don't blow out," she heard him mutter prayerfully as the humming became shriller. Eventually the humming faded to an orderly quiet buzz as the indicator showed 100 percent output.

Suddenly, a dark blackbody shot out of Keiichi's chest and hovered above the Bug Zapper. Keiichi pointed a TV remote at it.

His actions reminded Chihiro of the remote-controlled electric racecar she played with when she was a little girl. But to her astonishment, the black mass seemed to obey his gestures. Keiichi was actually _controlling_ the movements of the black fuzzy bowling ball-sized object! He positioned the object to a standstill above Skuld's "Mr. Bug Zapper".

"That's the singularity, Chihiro!" he announced with nervous excitement. He turned to the small Bug Zapper and punched another sequence out on its four 5-button panels. Chihiro was amazed; she mentally tried to calculate the power needed to restrain a singularity.

"W..what are you doing?" she blurted, voicing her stark incredulity. She immediately chided herself...now _she_ was buying into this nonsense that Keiichi and Skuld had been spouting! It was a pure fraud...

"Ha ha! A singularity? In the middle of Keiichi's living room?" she thought, struggling with the otherworldly image floating in front of her. It looked like the opposite of a light bulb...it was glowing _dark_ instead of light!

Her amazement turned to fear as she recalled her high school physics instructor reciting in his thin humorless voice that singularities theoretically possess infinite gravitational power, resulting in a potentially infinite distortion of space and time. The center of a Black Hole...was hovering just a few feet away from her! Then she remembered Penrose's Law of Cosmic Censorship; basically, a singularity must be surrounded by an event horizon...it cannot exist on its own.

Yet, there it was...existing on its own.

"I..I hope you know what you're doing, Keiichi. That little speck of energy has enough power to crush the Earth!" she commented nervously, still having reservations about this whole thing. But this wasn't a speck...it was bigger than a large piston!

She watched Skuld push a sequence on a remote control, and the lid of the Bug Zapper opened. A green cone of light emitted from it, bathing the singularity in its glow. A moment later, a bug-like object appeared.

"_Eeep_!!" Chihiro gasped out involuntarily when it simply popped into thin air. It looked like a cross between a lop-eared rabbit, a spider, and a pocket monster...

"Gotchya!" Skuld shouted triumphantly. A moment later, the 'bug' was trying to escape with a primal aggressiveness; bouncing around within the bounds of the confining green light like a fly in a jar.

"_That's_ the computer virus?" Chihiro asked incredulously.

"Yep! Now all we do is wait..."

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Hole after hole opened into other dimensions. When one would open, Keiichi would quickly glimpse inside it to see if Sleipnir was on the other side of the interdimensional gateway. Once he ascertained that it wasn't the right passageway, he would use a remote control to extend a portion of the greenlight field. Once he created a tube-like extension of the greenlight field leading to the gateway, he could guide the singularity, making it float over and position itself in front of the open passage. The intense power of the singularity would 'plug' the gateway. A few seconds later, the tunnel-like gateway would collapse on itself and close. Then he would return the controlled singularity to the center of the room, positioning it right next to the rapidly moving Bug...until another doorway opened up.

Plugging the interdimensional holes had to be done quickly, otherwise something from the other side could come _here_! With the single bug caught by the Bug Zapper, only one portal to another dimension could be opened at a time.

Chihiro was agog as she had peered through the spiral 'tunnels'; windows to places that the mind couldn't even grasp. Other realms, other universes.

Skuld and Keiichi...were telling the truth! Despite her overwhelmed senses, there was no way that her mind could argue against the empirical evidence situated right in front of her!

Finally, a hole opened...and Keiichi saw the familiar outline of an eight-legged steed, telescoped into the distance.

"Here boy," he called, trying to get Sleipnir's attention. He felt ridiculous trying to summon Sleipnir like he used to call for his pet dog, Nihonmaru. All those years ago...and the little grave marker still stood behind his parent's house.

"What do I do? He won't come!" Keiichi said in exasperation.

"Wait," Chihiro said. Thinking quickly, she made a trip to the crisper in the refrigerator. She had owned several horses; as a girl she rode them every Sunday...before she 'graduated' to dirt bikes and teenage crushes on boys.

All of her horses had been killed by Supertyphoon Akira when their barn was smashed flat, she remembered with deep regret.

"Everything else about this is crazy, so why not this?" she thought, fighting down the sad memory of her departed horses...

She handed Keiichi a carrot.

Keiichi looked at her with a "you gotta be kidding!" expression and rolled his eyes. A moment later, the horse cocked its head, and then trotted towards him, emerging from the hole in SpaceTime.

"No way!" Keiichi wailed in humored dismay as the horse ambled up to him, and then started munching on the carrot.

"Cool!" Skuld said, appraising Sleipnir. "No, not Sleipnir..._the_ Sleipnir!" she reminded herself. This steed was the King of the Herd of Sleipnir, readily recognizable by his extra-long mane and large hooves.

"Incredible!" Chihiro commented. "He _does_ have eight legs!"

The 'horse' Keiichi had summoned looked like nothing Chihiro had ever seen before! His was rich with a dun/auburn base, with bay highpoints. A slight bit on the wooly side, he sported a generous mane and forelocks, his noble face highlighted by a white blaze down the middle. Above his Roman nose, his eyes captured a piercing _blue_ color, like those of her pet Siamese cat! Unlike a slender thoroughbred, his build was full of substance; sturdy with a stocky frame that harmonized speed and strength. His body possessed an elongated barrel to accommodate his eight legs, and he was _tall_...his back must have been at least 40 hands in height! His fetlocks and hooves were disproportionately large, like oversized tennis shoes on a child. Every aspect about him projected a regal bearing.

In a word, Chihiro beheld him with rapt admiration.

Keiichi threw the mecha-saddle Skuld had constructed over Sleipnir's back, expecting the huge horse to immediately buck it off. To his relief, Sleipnir remained still as he nervously fastened the saddle in place.

"Give me a hand, Chihiro," he asked as he tried to climb up into the saddle. Chihiro got behind him and pushed against his hips. Keiichi tried to swing his leg over the saddle...and fell back to the floor.

"Get...your mpph butt out of mmph my face, little Keiichi!" he heard Chihiro's muffled voice. Turning red in the face, he realized that the bump he was sitting on...

"S..Sorry!" he shouted as he sprung to his feet, filled with a flash of embarrassment.

"Let's try again!" Chihiro said. Keiichi was amazed at how quickly she recovered, both physically and emotionally.

"She must have been a hell of a motorcycle rider in her undergrad years!" he mentally admired.

He got on the saddle on the second attempt.

Sleipnir didn't move an inch.

"What do I do now? He isn't budging! Is he a horse or a mule? he said in exasperation. As soon as he said 'mule', Sleipnir reared up, trying to buck him off. Keiichi clung to the unruly horse's neck; the effort causing him to tense up and close his eyes.

"Whoa there!" Chihiro said soothingly to the stallion. "He didn't mean to insult you. He's just ignorant!"

Keiichi scowled at Chihiro's words. Yet he felt the horse stop gallivanting underneath him as Chihiro calmed him down. All this SkuldTech stuff, the singularity, the bug, the greenlight anchor for the opening, an eight-legged mammoth horse…and the strangest of all these in his mind was Chihiro trying to be a horse whisperer. And succeeding.

_She was talking to the horse!_

"Great! I forgot that he isn't just a horse! He probably understands everything I say," Keiichi thought. He looked down to see Chihiro stroking Sleipnir's nose and face.

"Wow! He seems to like Chihiro. How weird!" he observed to himself. It would definitely be a good thing if the giant steed viewed Chihiro as an ally.

"How do I make you go?" Keiichi spoke in the direction of Sleipnir's ears. The steed responded with a loud snort, pounding the floor with his forehooves.

Chihiro walked alongside Sleipnir, and then suddenly smacked him open-handed on the flank. Sleipnir leapt up in the air and levitated, then flashed through the room...without touching it.

She could've sworn she heard a desperate "_Chiiiiihirooo!_" as the horse and rider vanished.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Keiichi saw the Earth receding behind him like a thrown baseball. Moments later, stars were streaking by him. He felt a momentary impulse to jump off Sleipnir as he realized that he was in the vacuum of space. But he wasn't suffocating...

He could feel himself being pitched back and forth in the saddle as Sleipnir galloped like a real horse. He gazed out into space...

Nebulae and star clusters passed by him at dizzying speeds...and then he saw a streak of stars forming on either side.

"The Galactic Rim!" he guessed. Another moment, and the Milky Way was visible behind and off to the right side. Sleipnir seemed to be building speed still.

Teeth gritted, Keiichi looked out as, one-by-one, the galaxies swirling by, like bubbles in the bathtub.

Soon there were billions of them.

He glimpsed downwards to see all of Sleipnir's eight legs working furiously.

A few seconds later, he burst out of the Universe...and started screaming...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Chihiro waited anxiously, chatting with Cevn, who seemed to be gripped with tension. And something else, because he would suddenly start talking to himself as he rocked nervously on the living room floor.

"Megumi must be making up with Genji," she guessed. Either that or Keiichi's younger sister just didn't want to come home right away to a house filled with sick and dying Goddesses...

After a few minutes, Sleipnir suddenly appeared in the living room...and Keiichi fell out of the saddle with a loud thud.

"Keiichi!" she heard a cry from the hallway. Belldandy was on him in an instant, sliding next to him and lifting him up into a sitting position. Keiichi's eyes were rolled back in their sockets.

"Hang in there!" Belldandy shouted as she gently shook Keiichi. Chihiro was so focused on the drama in front of her that she didn't notice the room filling with others.

"I..I'm sorry! I failed all of you!" Keiichi said weakly, then grasped Belldandy and cried into her chest. He didn't want to see the looks of disappointment on Bell-chan's parent's faces. He was utterly crushed with his defeat. He felt a graveled choke of panic as he realized that his failure had cost the life of his beloved; that he had failed _in front of her parents_. Keiichi figured that Odeyn and Freiija would probably never want to see his face again. Then he realized that he didn't deserve to be with Belldandy.

"I'm such...a loser! I can't even save the life of the Goddess I love! I'm worthless, unworthy of your love, Bell-chan!"

Belldandy felt a pounding hurt deep in her breast, when she heard Keiichi's words of self-degradation. She still didn't believe that this foolhardy attempt to save her would work...but she was saddened by how much Keiichi believed that his failed attempt had doomed her to certain death. All her anger seemed to have fled. In its place, she sensed her own guilt; that she had turned her back on him in a fit of jealousy when he decided to try and ride Sleipnir. She also worried about how he could possibly think that he was undeserving of her love.

"Keiichi...you've _never_ failed me! Not once. Not _ever_!! When it is my time to pass on, I will be smiling inside...because I know that you loved me from the deepest fountains of your heart. You risked your life for me! What Goddess could ask for more? I'm just glad...that you came back to me _alive_!" she said with a smile, then hugged him as tight as she could. Which wasn't much, because the disease had sapped her strength.

Chihiro was shaken by his strong sense of failure...and the sight of Belldandy. The Belldandy she knew that accompanied Keiichi while he worked at Whirlwind...wasn't this woman. This woman's auburn locks of hair were almost gone, replaced by wither tangles of blackish oily hair and bald fuzz spots. Her face...was shrunken, withered. Her eyes...

"OhmyGod, that _is_ Belldandy!" Chihiro realized with a shock. Keiichi had told her that Belldandy was ill...but she had no idea that it was like _this_. This was horrible; to all appearances, she looked like she was _dying_! Chihiro felt a lump in her throat that she couldn't dislodge no matter how hard she swallowed.

"I..I tried! I gave it my best...I..I just couldn't handle it. T..the wa..wa..wa..." Keiichi muttered, still clenching himself to Belldandy's bosom. He could hear loud sobbing; probably both of Bell-chan's parents.

"W..who are you people?" he heard someone gasp in astonishment.

Skuld tousled his hair, then praised him for trying.

"I've just let Belldandy's life slip through my hands!" Keiichi thought despairingly, angry with himself.

With a loud neighing, Sleipnir disappeared. Keiichi turned desperate eyes to see the last hope of salvation for the Norns vanish.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --


	51. Pt 51: A Question of Experience

**Part 51: A Question of Experience**

Chihiro felt an overwhelming echo of sympathy rebounding in her heart as she overheard Keiichi's deep feelings of self-dejection. She didn't quite understand what was going on; she had been thrown into a sci-fi setting with no preparation. Her mind seemed to want to flow out like a tipped-over can of oil.

As they huddled around Keiichi, her heart grew heavy as she saw how Belldandy and Skuld's faces were fraught with anxiety and fear. She noticed how the parents...obviously Belldandy and Skuld's...were crying, hugging each other for comfort. They all looked stranded in their despair, bearing resemblance to a mental image of castaways on a deserted island whose boat had been washed out to the ocean during a midnight high tide.

As an afterthought, she realized that the parents were floating in _mid-air_! She could only suckle a gasp in shock at this...her mind was already toeing the edge of the cliffs of sanity. She had already witnessed a plethora of impossibilities: Skuld/Keiichi's 'machine'; the alternate universes; the singularity and the rabbit-cum-spider enveloped in the green tube of light...and the giant eight-legged horse that was standing next to her.

She remembered old Dr. Morrow's ramblings about a 12-year-old girl who could invent robots with _true_ intelligence, not simply AI programming...it was obviously the truth!

The "secret" that Tamiya and Ootaki had been disguising for so long. The way Belldandy was on _every corner_ when she first raced Keiichi in the micro-bikes. The mysterious hanetsuki game at Cevn's karaoke party...

And now, she was in a room full of...Gods? The two floating beings looked like nothing less than divinities out of a Raphael triptych!

"_Who are you people?"_ she asked in a hoarse voice. Her near-whispered question was unheeded by everyone in the room; they were too occupied with the tragedy unfolding. A final chance had been attempted…and lost.

Nothing made sense...except one thing. Keiichi had said that a mortal needed to ride this...horse...in order to save Urd, Belldandy and Skuld's lives. His starkling bitterness at his inability to ride Sleipnir was proof that Keiichi genuinely believed that the three sister's lives were on the pivot.

She turned to regard Sleipnir. Gazing into the orbs of his skyblue equine eyes, Chihiro could almost imagine that the stallion was silently beckoning her to ride him. She regarded him with astonishment...and then he gallied forward, turned his giant head to the side and idly nuzzled it against her shoulder.

"Aren't you the friendly one!" Chihiro said in a quiet voice, softly stroking Sleipnir's face as she surveyed the scene of Keiichi and Belldandy. Sleipnir seemed to low his head in agreement.

"Keiichi, you've only lost one race in your career. You've won every time...except the time you and I raced. You're the best; but I'm just a little bit better. I'm going to _do this_, because you can't. After all, I'm your 'super-sempai, aren't I?" she mentally conversed with an imaginary Keiichi. Chihiro had to admit that the tomboy in her still liked to play the part of the hero/heroine. She was definitely feeling a strong urgency to try and rescue the situation from despair.

She felt a jolting sensation in her breast, accompanying the realization that _this was why she was here_, instead of in France with the Club. It seemed as if this situation, this present moment in time, had beckoned her from halfway around the world to return to Makuhari.

Decision made, Chihiro grasped the saddle. Using all of her strength, she heave-struggled to pull herself up onto Sleipnir's back. The steed was _huge_, much larger than any equine she had ever seen, let alone ridden! Perched on his broad back, the immense stature of the stallion drove itself into her awareness. She had to hunker down in the saddle to keep from hitting her head on the ceiling.

Unobserved by the crowd gathered around Keiichi, Chihiro situated herself on the saddle and caught her breath. The mechasaddle was designed like a racetrack motorbike seat; the stirrups were designed to keep her legs high and back, so that the rider would almost be lying on her stomach on the back of her horse. Sleipnir was far too girth-barreled to be straddled like a regular horse. However, this riding posture was familiar to Chihiro...she used to ride her horses like this when she first started riding, back when she was 5 or so. Now, all those years of English, classical dressage, and Haute Ecole riding lessons were going to pay off...

Then she remembered something from her early riding days. Sliding herself off the saddle, Chihiro leaned way way back until she was almost sitting on Sleipnir's hindquarters. With a kick, she shoved the saddle off.

Equitation without artificiality.

"This way, I'll be able to feel his emotions, his speed," she reasoned to herself. She was also grateful for the last minute decision at the hotel in Paris to _not_ wear the new skirt she had bought in France. Chihiro knew that she needed to be one with the horse...which meant that she was going to him ride bareback.

Sleipnir snorted with apparent relief once he was unsaddled. Straddling his back was almost painful...Chihiro felt like she was doing the splits.

"You're gonna owe me bigtime for this, Keiichi!" she said to herself in a whisper as she kicked her heels together and grabbled Sleipnir around the neck.

With a loud neigh, Sleipnir leapt in the air...and out into space.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Chihiro clung tightly to Sleipnir's generous auburn mane as they hurtled forth out of the Earth's atmosphere like a rocket. She barely had time to gasp at the beauty of the planet...and then it passed behind her, rapidly disappearing into the emptiness of space. A minute later, she passed a huge dark blue gas giant. It was streaked with whorls of a lighter blue coloring, and ringed with thin divisions of dark gray rock. Chihiro realized that this was the 10th solar planet, whose theoretical existence astronomers had been arguing about for decades. Being so far out from the Sun, this planet had little albedo; thus accounting for its dull navy blue coloring. A moment later, they were traveling within the Oort Cloud, passing through a flotilla of small icechunks and asteroids.

Sleipnir had taken the scenic route; riding past all seven outer planets with beauty passes so she could admire their individual globes...

"Beauty passes...10th planet? Where's the oxygen!" Chihiro thought, her mind suddenly scrambling in panic as she realized that she was traveling in the vacuum of _space_. It took a few seconds for her mind to reel out of its disequilibria despite the fact that her breathing was quite normal...about as normal as a gal could manage while traveling at a sizeable fraction of the speed of light.

Somehow, they were surrounded by an atmosphere...or _something_ that was allowing her to breath! It was nothing less than Magic, Chihiro reasoned. They were still accelerating...it seemed that Sleipnir was only beginning to trot briskly, not even galloping. Yet, stars and nebulae were flying by.

A minute later, the surrounding welkin of star nebulae began to thin out. Chihiro gripped Sleipnir tightly along the neck as she clearly recognized the bands of the Scuttum and Sagittarius arms of the galaxy. The sight was inconceivably vast...

They were escaping the spiral limits of the Milky Way galaxy!

"This is...insane! A couple of hours ago, I flying back from France to visit Keiichi. Now I'm going where no woman has gone before! I'm way out of my league here!" she said to herself as the Local Group of galaxies shrank behind her like street signs on a highway.

Sleipnir wasn't even breaking a sweat...

Curiosity layered upon curiosity as she saw the Mandelbrot-like distribution of galactic groups all around her. Clusters turned into swirls turned into waves turned into large spheres turned into curls turned into an arcing horizon of light...the edge of a globe.

Strangely enough, there was no indication of velocity such as a breeze in the face...or red-shifting...

Chihiro wore her mind soft by trying to comprehend how all the laws of physics were being circumvented. They were obviously traveling far in excess of the speed of light, and yet she could still see every manifestation of light with crystal clarity.

Eventually, they reached the limits of space. The seas of galaxies began to form a sphere of light.

Sleipnir shook his head from side to side and ran even faster.

_"Jump off! Save yourself! Don't look! Hold on tight! Don't freak out!" _her mind shouted fearfully. Every instinct Chihiro possessed was pulsing with speed fever panic.

Gripped by her own near-terror, she tried to calm herself down. Her body felt like it was going into shock as they sheared away from the 'bubble'...and burst _out_ of the Universe!

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Where's Chihiro? She was right here a while ago, before Sleipnir disappeared," Keiichi asked aloud. He looked at Cevn, who simply shook his head to say "I don't have a clue where she is."

Everyone had been showering Keiichi with love and warmth. When he finally surfaced from Bell's warm bosom, he looked at Odeyn. The old God was looking at him with appreciation and condolence in his single eye. This was the last thing Keiichi expected; he thought that Bell's parents would be angry because he proved himself to be a weakling. A weakling who couldn't ride Sleipnir when his best love's life was at stake.

"You tried your best. There is no weakness in a challenge well met, regardless of the outcome. Once again, you have proven your love for my daughter," Odeyn said in a voice rich with acceptance.

Keiichi was thankful...but he still wondered where Chihiro was.

"She must have ducked out when she saw all the Gods and Goddesses in the room," he guessed.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Chihiro felt like her mind had been run over by a lawnmower while being turned inside out during an off-cliff plummet. Either that, or she had died and gone to neither Heaven or Hell.

_She was in a different Universe!_

None of the familiar laws of physics applied here. This 'space' consisted of a light purple glow, with immense blue 'clouds' floating about. As they flew through one of the blue clouds, she could discern that the cloud was comprised of billions upon billions of razor thin filaments. Traversing the radius of the cloud, she noticed that there were no stars; instead each thin filament was an axial that was comprised of thousands of bands of illuminating light. Small rings of light with patchwork colors orbited along each 'cable' of light. Instead of planets, she guessed that the inhabited areas of this universe were the flattened colored 'rings" circumscribing around the beams of light.

So she named this universe "the Band-Aid Universe" in a desperate attempt to grasp at something approximating sanity and reality.

Then they splashed into the next Universe...and moments later, they floated into another Universe.

The image of Dave Bowman flashed in Chihiro's mind as she recalled the ending sequence of the movie "2001: A Space Odyssey." But his cinematic travel was nothing like this! Each universe was markedly different in some way...as if they had been designed to be _distinct_. The idea of so much complexity being the product of intelligent design frightened her; it was just too intense to even try and wrap the idea around her mind. If she still _had_ a mind…

Chihiro thought she was going to lose her mind. Not just simply go insanely crazy...but _lose_ every thought, every memory. She sensed her life's experiences eroding from the onslaught of sheer information, like a sandcastle being plunged by a shorebreak wave. This travel into impossible realms...was sensory overload! Chihiro imagined herself to be as overwhelmed as an allusory hamster at a techno rave.

A Universe of Sound...nothing else.

A Universe of Metal...nothing else.

A Universe of Ocean…like a giant round aquarium.

She was daunted by the fact that each Universe must contain trillions of civilizations.

"I'm not going to survive this," she told herself grimly as Sleipnir reared up and galloped even faster. She could feel the extension to his galloping, as if he was running at a racing pace in a derby. Now, the steed and rider passed within Universes in flashes, instead of minutes and seconds.

As if to encourage her to remain calm, Sleipnir performed a series of croupades, ballotades, and caprioles…airs above the ground that normally require years of rider and horse training sessions. Only there was no ground, just an imaginary plane of motion that he was racing upon.

The emergent stream of Universes made sense to her mind only if she described it to herself as diving into a pool; the moment she would open her eyes underwater. Chihiro was witnessing thousands of bubbles all around her as she crashed through them, each bubble a distinct Universe.

Chihiro was wary around swimming pools and water, just like Keiichi. No, not like Keiichi. Keiichi couldn't swim, and was terrified of being in open water. She, on the other hand, could swim, and was only mildly uncomfortable in water. Eventually, a pattern emerged from the chaos. They had passed through the last strands of Universe...

Forming underneath her were many strands, converging what looked like a branch of a light blue...tree?...extending as far as the eye could see. In her mind, it approximated an infinitely large and long Christmas tree of brilliant blue light. The 'space' around it was a dark navy blue.

"This...is...so...beautiful!" she said in a quiet voice of admiration. She realized that _everything_ that existed...was part of that tree! All of reality...was shaped like a tree! Her mind wrapped itself around the concepts of space and time, while her soul was awestruck.

She could see red vein-like patterns reaching upwards about a third of the way into the blue tree. They looked like roots...as if someone had turned a tree upside down and made the roots crawl up the trunk of another tree.

"'Which way is up?' is definitely a Gordian Knot at this point!" Chihiro said to Sleipnir as she tried to take in the scenery. The 'trunk' of the tree of blue light seemed to disappear into a white glowing sphere. She turned her head to look in the opposite direction. Beyond the sphere, she could see _another_ tree, bright red amidst a dark rouge 'space'. Against its fire red glow, streaks of blue light traced about a third of the way up its trunk.

"A blue tree...and a red tree. All of existence...in two trees?" she asked aloud. Sleipnir seemed to snort in agreement and gradually shifted the direction of his travel. They rose 'up' above the blue tree-shape until Sleipnir reached a dark blue surface...the edge of the surrounding space. Here, Sleipnir slowed to a trot, occasionally gamboling with fancy airs. Chihiro stroked his neck, realizing that he was exhausted from the exertions of their long journey.

Unlike a real horse, he hadn't even tried once to buck her off...despite the fact that he had never been ridden by her before.

"It's like they're mirror opposites of each other," Chihiro said, going by the empirical evidence in front of her eyes. The 'trees' were actually suspended above her head at the moment. It was as if she was traveling the inner surface of a giant round balloon with a brightness in the middle; from every perspective, the blue tree-form was above her head, filling the hollow space with prismatic light.

"The two trees are joined together...they've grown _into_ each other! With this white sphere of light...like a hub...suspended between them," she uttered to herself in amazement as she roamed her eyes up and down the inestimable distance of the tree...

She noticed that her senses were calming down as Sleipnir jumped into a fast racing gallop, heading in the direction of the sphere of light between the two trees of light.

"I hope you know where you're going!" Chihiro screamed shrilly. Something about the white globe of light frightened her...possibly the fact that it was pure light, without any distinguishing features.

Soon, they were skimming the fuzzy, indistinct surface of the white sphere. The space around them was turning dark velvet. Sleipnir shuddered himself, released a loud bray like a shout...and ran even _faster_.

They were riding on what appeared to the equator of the white sphere of light, slowly making a circuit of the globular shape.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

_hnnnuuhhh!_

Urd felt herself being lifted by an invisible force...as if the air itself suddenly decided to cradle her gently.

_"You have to choose now, Urd. You can walk with me into the Light and become one with the Instrumentality, or you can float towards the music...towards your world and your body,"_ the little boy said excitedly.

Urd considered this for a moment.

"What do I do? Which should I choose? And what about you, Little Boy?" she asked, her face painted with indecision.

He smiled to himself, touched by her concern. Despite the fact that he was maintaining a near-infinite number of manifestations at the moment...after all, his role was to _personally_ greet the each and every newly-arrived Soul...he felt a small sense of loss. Rarely did he have the opportunity to meet a Norn; beyond this, it was even much more noteworthy for a Soul to remain suspended here between the dimensions of the Living Multiverse and the Instrumentality of Light. She had been his companion during the past several weeks, to the point where she had even created a nickname for him. It had been eons since last someone had provided him with so much company.

_"There is no right or wrong choice. You are beyond the realm of judgments and prejudices at the moment. Any choice you make is the correct one...the choice you have been created to build at this moment," _he replied.

This Urd had been the best companion...she didn't ask any stupid questions, she wasn't paralyzed into a stupor by the fact that she was dead, her presence here was accompanied by a most remarkable form of music...in a place where the only sounds were nondescript background lulling. She was knowledgeable, her ethereal form was enchanting to behold.

Obviously someone cared about her a great deal. Enough to keep her in the Living with a status spell. Enough to create a music that kept her Soul's vital memories from fading away with time and proximity to the Instrumentality. Enough to anchor a part of her Soul to the Living, so that she wasn't entirely free to take the Long Walk with him...

So he decided to break a Rule...and offer advice.

_"Urd, Norn of the Past. It is my...wish...that you choose to return to your life in the Living Multiverse. I do not believe...that it is truly your time to join us. You have a task to complete. There is a Demon who threatens the Everything. His vile ambitions pose danger even to me. Even my Realm of the Mid-Light. His name is Isilblius. Remember..."_ he said as he reached out and held her hand, squeezing it gently.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Urd struggled, but her mind seemed to be filled up from somewhere outside of herself, as if knowledge was being poured into her. But this wasn't like Inculcation; she was actually reliving a horrible experience in her life...without the horror. She was a witness to her own experience, rather than a participant. The evil being the Little Boy Called Death had mentioned was pictured in her mind; she felt disgust towards him but not fear or pain. He had just beaten her to the very limits of her life, and now he was gloating.

It was all coming back to her…

_"Fheh! That's what you think! I'll make sure that you will spend the rest of _–your-_ miserable existence...and it _–will-_ be miserable...living a lie. I will leave you as you are, deceived by false memories that I will create in your mind. I know of your secret affection for an Earthrealm mortal...a mortal human that you think you are in love with. I will make you believe that it was he who did this to you! Every fiber of your soul will know that __he__ raped you! These memories will forever snuff out your love for him and replace it with utter hatred! This is but one gift I leave you, Urd. The other gift will make its presence known shortly. Ahhh...the cursed triumph of hate over love!" he explained as he licked her blood off of his knuckles._

_"I...will fight it! You cannot control my mind. I'm a _–Goddess-_! My father will_–kill-_you for what you've done today! The Almighty will..." a half-conscious Urd struggled to say with a flair of dignity._

_"No, I think not. I believe that it is your sister who will be doing the killing. I've have carefully prepared this scenario all along, accounting for every life that it touches. I am fully aware of your sister's protective inclinations...and I plan on her to do what I know she'll do when she finds out who did this to you. Do you know how your sister will react when she learns that it was the Earthrealm mortal who harmed you?"_

_Urd watched him grin evilly as realization dawned on her with a snarl._

_"Yes, I sense that you can see it in your mind. In a rage, Belldandy will _–kill-_the one she feels who has done this to you! She will kill the half-Demon mortal in a fury of vengeance! And of course, he'll never know why his life is being snuffed out by one of his most trusted companions! Rest assured that_–you-_ will be the one that speeds his executioner to him. By your words and beliefs will she be swayed into murderous action," Isilblius said, leaning over close to her face and leering at her._

_"Noooo!" Urd hoarsely shouted. Despite all that had just happened to her...the last tattered remains of her heart were being torn apart by what this horror-made-real was planning._

_"You don't know my sister...she'll find out what you did...and she'll _–hurt-_ you! Belldandy will open her seal, increasing her power a thousandfold...and then you'll regret what you've done to me!" Urd corrected him with defiance. With a supreme effort, she spat a bloody glob onto his face._

_"Bwah hah ha! I'd welcome that! Of course, your sister will eventually find out that you were raped by a Demon. I would even go as far as to say that I count on her to discovery of this fact. As a result, she'll have to live with the knowledge that she killed the mortal that _-you love-_...by a rash mistake! But it won't end there!" he said with the soothing tongue of true cruelty._

_"Y..you're insane!" Urd sputtered._

_"My dear lover...do you realize what your _–father-_ will do when he finds out that his eldest daughter was ravished by a Demon?" Isilblius contested with a smug voice._

_"Oh...my...God!" Urd gasped as she realized the thrust of his question. She wanted to clamp her mind shut; too much information was flooding her._

_"F..Father...would personally take command of the WarGods and go off to war with the Demons! Once the word was out amongst the Gods that I was raped by a Demon, the Assembly would waste no time declaring this incident as an act of war!" she realized, her mind conjuring images of wasteworlds of destruction..._

_"Oh...my...__WAR__!" Isilblius taunted with an evil chuckle. "_-My war-_! A final battle between the Demons and the Gods, orchestrated by me! While all-out war reaps souls from both Yggdrasil and Vanagdrasil, __I__ will exact _–my-_ judgment on them all! By the end of this year, the mortal's Earthrealm will be no more!"_

_"Leave the mortals out of this!" Urd said with faint anger, choking on her own blood as her mind whirlpooled in and out of awareness._

_"Why? They're just...pets. Worms that live brief, panic-stricken, trauma-filled lives. They're not even amusing to me! Do you realize who _–I am-_? I possess –_many-_ times the power of the Ultimate Destruction Program!" he gloated. Urd shook her head painfully, feeling a bone crackling along her jawline._

_"And guess what? I've even been to your precious Yggdrasil...to plant a virus in the Yggdrasil Mainframe! One that will cripple the Gods completely. I have likewise injected a virus into the Vanagdrasil Mainframe. With both Mainframe Systems effectively rendered inoperative, the war will produce a most satisfactory level of casualties. And as you know, the Doublet System which prevents Gods and Demons from killing each other...will double the casualties. Then the Lord and the Dark Lord will –_have-_ to involve themselves in a fight for survival. To protect their petty domains. Thus weakened, they will be easy prey to my power. By the end of this year, both the Lord and the Dark Lord will be dead by my hand! I'll mount both of their heads on a pitchfork and parade it in front of my subjects!"_

_Urd felt herself fading back to consciousness, her mind a forest of noirhaze memories. She had missed most of what Isilblius had just said, but she shuddered as she heard Isilblius threaten to kill Kami-sama._

_"Then I will rule a unified Yggdrasil and Vanagdrasil...in fact, the force of my will shall will attend to the furthest corners of the Multiverse! _–My-_version of the Multiverse..." Isilblius shouted._

_He made a gesture and two floating orbs appeared in mid-air. Urd was so weak that she could barely hold her eyes open. A red sphere showed a dark figure on a throne; and inside the blue bubble of matter...was the Almighty!_

_With a flash, a dead flower appeared in his hand..._

...and then her mind released the experience.

Urd realized that this being which called itself the 'Ultimate Demon' had cunningly contrived an evil system of machinations that were intended to destroy the God's Realm and the Demon's Realm! He wanted to destroy her, he wanted to destroy her sisters, her family, everyone she held precious. He had even used Cevn as a guise in an attempt to destroy her feelings for him.

She felt a sense of urgency, because his plan was already in motion.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"I want to go back! To where I was. How do I go there?" Urd asked frantically.

_"Ahh, I thought you would say that! I'm sorry you had to witness your worst nightmare again, but I'm glad you are going to try. Just curl up and let the force that is holding you...pull you towards the sound," _the young Death-Boy instructed her.

Urd tucked her glowing knees against her glowing breast, under her glowing chin. In a fetal curl, she felt a soft force drawing her towards the music. The little boy floated next to her as the music grew louder.

"Such wonderful music," Urd thought as the young boy who was the Reaper stopped and waved cheerfully to her.

_"It is, isn't it? Bye bye! I'll be seeing you again! Bye bye!!"_

Urd was returning his wave when...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Keiichi flinched with grave concern as Bell-chan suddenly swooned and began to jerk and clench with a series of spasms.

"Oh...my!" he heard Freiija exclaim in astonishment.

Belldandy's hair was growing back. It just suddenly sprouted out of her scalp and stretched towards the sun, looking every bit like the rapidly growing grass in one of those-time elapse photography videos that he had watched in elementary school.

_Bell-chan's health was returning on its own! _

"How?" someone uttered.

Belldandy started to gasp and cough. Suddenly, their positions were reversed; where Belldandy had been hugging him because he was emotionally wasted, now he was lifting her up in his arms, holding her as she gave little shudders. He watched as her face filled out, its pale complexion slowly changing into the rosy glow of just a few weeks ago. The sags under her eyes smoothed out, the deep lines in her face receded into youthful vigor.

Bell-chan's very lifeforce was returning, full force. Keiichi could feel her body heavying itself in his arms as he cradled her. Glancing at Skuld who was gently cradled by Odeyn, Keiichi was relieved to see that she was undergoing a similar transformation. She had just started losing her hair...and already, her hair had regained its sheenblack luster.

Freiija became a blur, towards the direction of Urd's Castle room.

In the silence of the moment, his heart leapt.

_Belldandy was going to live! _

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

_hnuuuuhhhmmppff_

Urd gasped, and then turned her head on her pillow. Her vision restored; she immediately realized that she was in her "Urd's Castle" room. Shelves of medicines, arcane alchemical texts, runic symbols...

"I'm home!" she mentally shouted as she looked at her lab area.

Then she heard strains of music. A beautiful music, wondrously filling her ears with candied sounds of joy. Her spirit was massaged with a blissful feeling as the symphony of sounds surrounded her like clean water.

"I..I'm _alive_!" she shouted in a silent thought-whisper. "By the Almighty...I'm really alive!"

A celestial chorus filled the air...and she just let herself drift into the sound...

"This...is God's Music! Am I in Yggdrasil?" she wondered. "This...is the music Cevn was composing. Cevn..." Urd closed her eyes as she remembered. She felt a strong stirring in her heart as she visualized her mortal boyfriend.

"This music...and a soul full of hate...it doesn't fit together. Cevn...violated me? No...a person who could create God's Music...could never do that! I know that he loves me too much to do something like..."

She remembered herself into a volcano of pain. A Demon disguised as Cevn...but not just a Demon. A very powerful presence of Evil...overflowing with malignant Hate. Not an ordinary Demon...there was something very important about this Demon that she couldn't remember. His name...what is his name? She shuddered violently as she remembered his taunts after he raped her...after he beat her...after he told her his name...

"You bastard!" she snapped with all of her being. Her thoughts began to merge like pastels on a paint board, flowing together with the music. The brief star of hatred and pain submerged into the pool of sound...

She opened her eyes again, and turned her head to the side, and then looked up…and saw her Mother, her face wet with tears, a joyful smile of gratitude on her face. Urd realized that Mother was resting her head on her lap and stroking her hair, just like she did when she was a little girl-Goddess.

_"M..Mother?"_

"Welcome back, my precious Urd," her Mom managed to breathe out in the middle of her sobbing.

A moment later, her room was filled to bursting with her family.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Belldandy was overjoyed beyond belief. She wasn't sick anymore! Her body was back to normal! She could feel energies coursing through her being, clear indication that her Goddess Powers were fully restored! And best of all...Keiichi was smiling at her, his eyes a sparkling beard of gratitude and love.

"My angel of love," he said as he ran his fingers through her rich hazel hair. Belldandy felt her whole body drawn to him, his words a magnet. Her soul reached towards his smiling tear-filled face, his handsome complex of smile, eyes, nose, cheeks...pulling herself deep into her heart.

His presence...was here, with her.

Belldandy did the only thing that mattered in the moment. She embraced his lips with a passionate kiss...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

The moment she felt the disease starting to rid itself from Belldandy and Skuld, she had flown to Urd's bedside, and then gently lifted her daughter's head onto her lap and hoped that it wasn't too late. She didn't sense the presence of the Dark Reaper for the first time in a forever of fearful moments. Freiija could only look on with amazed pleasure and gratitude as her eldest daughter was healing right before her eyes. With each passing moment, Urd was becoming absolutely radiant with health and vitality. Her face was clearing up, her physical manifest was gaining energy, her hair was pluming into its platinum sheen…

"_Urd!!_" Freiija had shouted as she saw her daughter flutter open her eyes. Her heart flared with joy and the tears came.

"M..Mother?" her daughter asked tentatively.

"Welcome back, my precious Urd," she managed to say. The shrieking pain in her heart, the agonizing long vigil for her daughter to die...all of it was ripped away from her, stolen away by one treasured moment of triumph. It was nothing less than a miracle.

Her eldest daughter sat up from her futon and hugged her with the witness of abandon that only a mother and child reunion could bear forth. Looking over her shoulder, she could see her husband lifting Skuld high into the air, spinning her around with playful glee. Skuld was squealing with girlish excitement as her father beamed a smile at her.

Freiija looked over Urd's other shoulder and saw an exhausted mortal slumped against the corner of the room, his face a mixture of joy and sadness.

"_How?_" she asked in a near-silent voice of incredulity. This mere mortal...had found a way to save her three daughter's lives...when there was no solution, no possibility of a cure!

"Don't ask me, I'm only your daughter!" Urd replied with a giggle. Freiija clutched her, giggling between sobs as Urd's choice of words struck a chime of memory. She revisited the times when Urd was getting to the age where she wanted more independence..."don't ask me, I'm only your daughter" was her way of piquing her and Odeyn. Basically telling them to "screw off", so to speak. Back then, these words only served to heat up an already pitched argument. But as her daughter matured into an adult Goddess, these words had evolved into a private Mother-Daughter joke.

She felt her daughter sobbing in her arms, her rich off-white hair meshing against Freiija's own wavy silver curls. On impulse, Freiija looked at the mortal with a thankful expression.

He smiled and bowed towards her respectfully. She noticed Urd recovering herself from the emotional reunion somewhat, nestling and stirring against her shoulders.

"I love you so much, Mother! Y..you were with me every day!" Urd spoke into her ear, then pulled away, looking at her with a soul-baring innocent smile.

"Her spark is back!" Freiija thought joyfully.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

_--scrritchhh!!--_

Keiichi, Belldandy, Skuld and Odeyn jerked at the sudden burst of sound in the living room.

From out of nowhere, Sleipnir had returned with an electrical-like discharge of light and sound. Clinging tightly to his mane was an exhausted Chihiro.

"Chihiro! You rode..?" Keiichi asked, clearly mystified. Chihiro's hair was wildly disarranged; it stood up on end with an electrical frizz, marking her with lunatic expression. Her brown-gray eyes were flung wide open. The eight-legged steed underneath her was panting, his broad girth heaving with deep gasps of fatigue.

"Waaaahhhhhowwwwww..." she gasped.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Freiija was utterly amazed. She owed her daughter's lives to two mortals! One of Keiichi's friends, whom he called "sempai", had volunteered to ride_ the_ Sleipnir in his stead, and then she had ridden the steed all the way to the Multiverse and back! The young mortal woman was sitting on the floor in the middle of Skuld's machinery, her eyes flickering with bedazzlement.

"Sempai, how did you...how could you do it? You? You're only...a frail mortal woman," Freiija asked incredulously. All the mortals and her three daughters giggled in reaction to her question. If she weren't so filled with the sheer joy of having her daughters safe, she would have chastened them all for their crass impertinence.

"Mother...her name isn't 'sempai', it's Chihiro," Belldandy corrected her, before bursting again into giddy laughter.

"Kids!" Freiija observed aloud with amused disgust. Of course, they would have pet names for their friends! Even Gods and Goddesses did this peculiar thing when they were very young.

"Chihiro, I..I don't know what to say," Freiija admitted.

"Just say thanks," Keiichi answered.

Thanks didn't seem enough to satisfy Freiija's gratitude. In fact, nothing could express her deep thanksgiving. It was so confusing, this topsy-turvy Earthrealm...where Gods found themselves blindly plunging into strife. And instead of being consumed by their woes, their huge cloudy spirals of fear were remedied by the most unlikely of sources; leaving them indebted to mortals! She couldn't _ever_ imagine herself deigning to recognize a mortal at all...let alone thanking one.

However...

"Chihiro...I, Freiija, Senior First Class Goddess, Unlimited; Titled the Goddess of Marriages; Heir to helm of Nornma; wife of Odeyn, head of the Energy Guild; Third Attester to the Valkyries; board member of the Continuity Emergence; Adjutant to the Level 1 Examining Bureau; onetime Leaderess of the Yggdrasil Society TrendDesigner Management Studio...do hereby exclaim my gratitude for your assistance in saving my daughter's lives..."

"I..can't believe it! Mother...just _thanked_ a mortal!" Urd whispered into Belldandy's ear with frank shock. Belldandy could only think about how grateful she was to have this Goddess as her Mother. In fact, she was proud of her Mother for possessing the grace to admit a gesture of gratitude when it was called for.

"And in reward for your courage...I promise you, Chihiro Sempai...that you _will_ marry the man for whom your heart is most evenly matched! I will ensure that this will come to pass, in my capacity as the Goddess of Marriages. The one Earthrealm male most suited to you...will become your loving spouse! And together, you both shall bear dear boughs of love; your hearts will be corded around each other."

_"Gasp!!"_

Any sense of disorientation that Chihiro was feeling as residual from her journey on Sleipnir vanished like a leaf caught in an autumn gust.

"M..me? M..married? But I don't _want_ to get married! I'm _not_ planning to get married to a man! No! N..no way! There's no way that I'm going to marry any man!" she shouted desperately.

"Don't even try to argue your way out of this, my young dear! I'm a _Goddess_, remember!" Freiija shot back with light-hearted briskness. As Chihiro stammered, Keiichi and the rest burst into giddy laughter.

"If you can get this...tomboy...to get hitched with a guy, then you must be a Goddess!" Keiichi jested on impulse. Freiija looked at him with a strange expression.

"KEIICHI!" Belldandy and Chihiro both shouted, astounded at his impishness.

"All kens atold, marriage really isn't such a bad thing," Odeyn said, quite amused by the youngsters and their chaos forming in the living room. "After all, I've been married to this one for several hundred years!" he added, pulling Freiija close to him in a gentle bear embrace and kissing her on the neck.

"Admit it, Keiichi-san. I'm just the better racer. Ahem...I should correct myself. I'm not 'just' the better racer, I'm _by far_ the better racer!" Chihiro said jokingly, trying to cool down from Keiichi's taunt with a taunt of her own.

Keiichi bowed his head in respect to his sempai...

"But if you're serious about thanking me, you can thank me by forgiving your sister for going to France with us. By the way, Megumi did drive the Nissan...and she _did_ qualify us for the Le Mans!" Chihiro added.

Keiichi's face went dark at the mention of Megumi. There was no way that he was going to forgive her under any circumstances!

"I don't ever want to hear her name again!" he thought, vanity compiling against his righteousness.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Belldandy had learned from Keiichi that the only reason why he couldn't ride Sleipnir was because they had traveled into one of the Water Universes once he left this Universe. As soon as he was surrounded by a near-infinite expanse of water, his mind snapped.

Still, she was proud of him for trying.

And, much to her relief, Urd no longer blamed Cevn for the unmentionable thing that had been done to her...

"It was a Demon who did this...horrible, cursed thing to me! He said his name was..." she heard her sister explain again.

"_WHO?!_" her Father shouted angrily.

I..I can't remember!" Urd said in blunt disgust and disappointment. She remembered every wretched detail of the abuse, except the one fact that mattered most. The name of her attacker. Her inability to recall his name made her feel violated all over again.

Odeyn's face blanched as his oldest daughter held herself tightly in an expression of deep misery.

"You are assured of your opinions, my eldest daughter? That the architect of this evil perpetration was a Demon most foul? You're absolutely sure?" he asked. This was very crucial; he could not afford to be mistaken about the identity of his daughter's attacker.

"Yes!" Urd answered with a sharp nod to accent her point.

"Someone has to tell Kami-sama about this immediately! This is one more reason why we Gods _must_ go to war with the Demons! They've managed to create a new threat...a sexcrafted virus that can kill Gods! And they still must pay for harming my daughter! I must tender my apologies for cutting this celebration short, but I must leave. Now! My intuition tells me that I'll be needed very soon, lest we Gods be plunged into an abyss of suffering. For if this foul design can weave its poison among my daughters...there is no question that it is capable of sinking more Gods into a breathless sleep! I must depart!" Odeyn explained, finishing with a tone of reluctance in his voice.

The last thing he wanted was to leave his family behind while he conducted some war with the Demons...but if Urd was telling the truth, _everything_ was at stake.

Keiichi didn't like the look of anxiety on Odeyn's face as he waved his hands and vanished to return to Yggdrasil.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Urd smiled to herself knowingly; her sister and Keiichi weren't being very subtle as they were making love in Keiichi's bedroom. The telltale rhythmic succussives that lightly shook the floor was obviously the flowering of an energetic session of sex. After all, his room was opposite the sister's bedroom, and Belldandy wasn't in her futon.

"Figures," she said to herself with a whimsical smile.

The little earthquakes that vibed the floor suddenly ended. Urd could imagine her sister and Keiichi locked in a tight embrace, covered with sweat and heaving deep gulps of air. She looked over at Skuld, who was curled in sleep under the futon covers, a big smile on her face.

She stood up, arranged her nightshirt, and then padded barefoot out into the living room. The ensemble of Skuld's machinery that Keiichi used to summon Sleipnir was still in place. As her eyes adjusted to the dark, she looked on the couch and saw a sleeping figure.

"There he is," she said, smiling in the shadow-filled room. She walked over and sat on the floor next to Cevn.

"I'm so sorry, Cevn," she conversed with his sleeping form. "It must have been hard for you to assume the blame for something you didn't do. I wish I could do something to make up for it. I hope that you still care for me. If I hurt you, I didn't mean to. I guess we were both victimized in a way by whatever unknown force who did this to me."

"There are so many things I was thinking of before I got sick. Things I need to tell you. I..I still have a place in my heart for you, if you want to be there with me. We can try again...I'll get help for whatever it is that ails my Soul. I promise I'll go see the Proctors, as soon as possible. I...just really want to know...if you have a place in your heart for me as well. That you still...love...me, after all that we've been through..."

"Still up, Urd?"

Urd jerked up into the air and scowled. That damned Peorth was eavesdropping!

"Go to sleep, Peorth! And not _one_ word about what you just heard tonight!" Urd said in a threatening, yet quiet voice.

"Normally, I ignore threats from Goddesses whose licenses are suspended. But this time I'll make a generous exception in view of your remarkable recovery from the maw of horrors. I will keep what I heard in silence; because if I don't, you'll start shouting and wake the whole house up. Things have already been exciting enough for one day..." she heard Peorth grouse sleepily.

After a waiting few minutes to quell down her anger, Urd looked at Cevn again, watching the slight movements of his fingers, the weave of his long light brown hair...

"What? He changed his hair color again?" she remarked to herself. She reached down to touch his face...

_--bump--_

Urd pulled her hand back with a confused look on her face, and then tried to touch him again. Once again, her hand was halted by an invisible field, an inch or two from his face.

She held her hands clasped in front of her mouth, which was wide open with astonishment. It slowly dawned on her, like a deeply colored ocean horizon, that the Ultimate Force was back in effect, acting as barrier between the two of them.

Which meant that the question she had just asked him...was already answered!

Urd smiled broadly and winked at the sleeping figure, then somersaulted in the air a few times as the excitement burst in her like dandelions popping bold founts of fluff in the summer breeze. She had been brought back from the very brink of death...and now a wind of love had inflated her heart with joy. Not just a wind, but a gusting breeze!

She floated over to Peorth, who had just fallen asleep. She shook Peorth's shoulder to wake her.

"W..whaddya want, Urd?" Peorth asked grouchily.

"He's come back to me!" Urd said, feeling giddy inside as she said _it_ out loud.

"Whatever...leave me alone, willya?" Peorth mumbled as she rolled on her side away from Urd.

"Can you make me a rose, Peorth?" Urd requested. Peorth glanced at her with a liberal shot of stinkeye, and then snapped her fingers and a rose appeared in her hand. Handing it to Urd, she made Urd promise not to wake her up again.

Urd inhaled the fragrance of the rose, and then set it against the couch where Cevn was sleeping. On her way back to her bedroom, she skipped daintily like a little girl.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Megumi arrived at Narita International on Tuesday. She still couldn't believe what had happened just a few days ago...the N.I.T. Motor Club had qualified for the Le Mans! After an exuberant victory party at a rented French loge, the flame red Nissan GT1 R390-LM hybrid was meticulously prepped and garaged. The economics of the situation just couldn't allow them to ship it back to Japan. They had sold the farm to get this far.

Enigmatically, Chihiro left for Japan as soon as the qualifying heats were concluded. She left a detailed set of instructions for each Club member...and mouthfuls of mysteries concerning her hasty departure.

In order to be free to race in the Le Mans, the Club members all planned to finish all their coursework early, so that they could return to France by June 1st. There, they would have a week before the course tour and judge's scrutineering, and then another week to prepare before the actual race. Several Club members had jokingly volunteered to stay behind to work on the car. Megumi daydreamed about remaining in France as well...

Her apprehension gripped her as her plane flew over the northwest expanse of Tokyo; the wards of Itabashi and Kito passing underneath her. Seeing the large conurbation jarred her with the awareness that she was a few hours away from the inevitable confrontation with her brother.

_"I hate you..."_

She felt pensive as she remembered the harsh words Keiichi had said when she had left for France. The outburst of his anger volleyed in her mind like an endless reflection, skewering her excitement with a metalfrost shard of grim reality.

And to make matters worse, Genji had contracted a stomach flu the day after the party.

"Too much damned French food, the idiot!" she cursed under her breath.

Genji had eaten _way_ too much cheese during the party! Megumi had warned him not to mix too many dishes of rich French cuisine. Of course, her boyfriend had to play the culinard...claiming that all his schooling in France as a kid exempted him from any foodsickness. Armed by his arrogance, he completely ignored her cautions. Now, instead of being a much-needed emotional support for her during this testy situation, Genji was heading straight home to his sister's apartment and solid bed rest once they landed.

Consequently, she would have to deal with her contentious brother on her own. What made this issue pricklier was the fact that there were no correct answers, no proper codes of behavior that she could cite in her defense. Megumi had acted from her gut...with a little encouragement from Sora. The fact that she had chosen to go to the Le Mans instead of staying at home was something she needed to do for her own survival; and what is survival without a thread of sanity to hang it on? Megumi had been going _nuts_ staying at home, watching her loved ones slowly dying.

She almost didn't want to go home...didn't want to return to the horror of seeing Urd clinging onto what little wisp of her life that remained.

And the look of betrayal on Keiichi's face...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Chihiro arrived home to her apartment and immediately went to sleep, ignoring the backlog of paperwork she had to wheedle down in order to get caught up. During her trip to France, she had left Whirlwind in the capable hands of an old friend. She knew that when she returned to work, there would be huge stack of bills, receipts and orders to be gone through.

Just as she was falling to sleep, the phone rang.

"Hello," she answered gruffly.

_"Hello. Is this Chihiro Fujimi?"_

"Yeah. Do you know what time it is?"

_"Uh, lessee. Ah...it's 9:05pm. I apologize if my call interrupted you..."_

"Go on," she directed. This man sounded like he was from the Snow Country or some other rustic setting; his voice clearly lacked the sophistication of a Tokyoite.

_"Well, this is pretty hard to believe, but...do you own three horses that have turned up missing?"_

"WHAT?!"

_"I'm serious! This is not a joke, I am calling from the Prefectural Animal Control and Safety Bureau! We actually found three horses in our field a couple of days ago! We checked the National Horse Registry records and..."_

"What are you trying to tell me!" Chihiro shouted, suddenly _very_ awake. She jumped out of her futon bedding and padded barefoot quickly across the floor to her study table.

_"We found three horses that seem to belong to you, according to their brandmarks..."_ he began to explain.

Chihiro was speechless. She pulled the phone away from her ear for a moment as she wiped her tears...staring at a treasured picture on the wall, depicting an elementary school girl with three horses...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Cripes...I didn't handle_ that _well at all!" Keiichi admitted to himself sorrowfully. Everyone in the house was angry with him to some degree. When Megumi arrived back home, he had already decided to give her the silent treatment. When she tried to explain her reasoning to him, it fell on deaf ears.

And then both Bell-chan and Urd forgave her without hesitation!

Their sanction of his sister's decision incited Keiichi into a mountainous wrath. How could they just forgive Megumi? After she left Bell and Skuld behind, both of who were sick? And Urd on her deathbed, too! Couldn't they see, with any fixation of clarity, the depths of how irredeemably irresponsible his sister had been! Their pardon of Megumi didn't make any sense to him! But then again, it was probably one of those Goddess things that grounded within a moral superiority to his own set of values. This sense of a 'superior morality' was often a source of frustration as well...it often transformed Bell-chan into a venerable guru-figure at times when he just wanted a girlfriend. A girlfriend would have taken up his position in the matter; sensing intuitively that Megumi had obviously done the wrong thing!

But all three Goddesses insisted that she had done the right thing by going to the Le Mans trials!

Delving further into the pool of his reluctance, Keiichi remembered his initial reaction to their ready forgiveness of his sister. He had glared angrily at his girlfriend, telling Belldandy that she had just betrayed him once again. Unfazed by his resentment, Bell had responded by lecturing him on the fact that "love doesn't take sides" or something to that affect.

And then Megumi added her voice to Bell's explanation about love, trying to justify her act of desertion...

And Keiichi's rage boiled over!

He looked up at the ceiling fan spinning blurs into his bedroom. For all practical purposes, his bedroom had become the figurative "dog house". Keiichi felt like he was pretty much exiled here after his flash of ire. Bell-chan was so shocked by his outburst that she spurned him and went to her room for the night. Urd reacted by shaking her head at him in that condescending manner which only she can pull off with such stinging tartness. Skuld mimicked her older sister, which only hastened Keiichi towards the chills of resentment.

Finally, Megumi yelled "Fuck you!" before running to her room, full bore with tears and anger.

"Why? Why can't I ever do the right thing?" he bemoaned, his fingers stinging with the memory of his hard slap to Megumi's face.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

_"I just don't understand, Genji. Keiichi is the last person I thought would actually _–slap-_ me! He should know better! Now I'm faced with trying to figure out how to react to this. You have a sister...what would you do if Sayoko was so mad at you that any reconciliation seemed impossible?"_ Megumi's voice rapid-fired on the phone.

Genji sighed to himself, clearly unable to answer her question. For one thing, Sayoko was nails-tough whenever she wanted to be. Genji could never hold his own against his older sister if ever they were grasped by a deep sibling breach. For another thing, he was still very sick. His stomach had booted him into queasy wakefulness this morning at Sayoko's apartment.

He had expected Keiichi to react with anger when Megumi got back...but not to the extremes that she was describing to him over the phone. He felt an insistent voice in his head telling him to go over to the temple home and punch the daylights out of Keiichi. But that wouldn't solve anything. Their 13-year stay in the 14th century had taught him that the toll of violence...was only more violence and death. He could remember the battlefields littered with bodies...especially the _last_ battlefield where their little band of four fought valiantly to ensure the escapes of Lords Mori and Shimazu. He had fought an internal battle to ease away from the years of rash impulses towards violence that were a fact of life for him in the 14th century.

"How could you..." he said absently into the phone, angry with Keiichi.

_"How could I what? Whose side are you on, anyway, Genji? You're supposed to be _-my boyfriend-_!"_ Megumi shot back, clearly irritated.

"Yikes! I was envisioning your brother when I said that, not you!" he stammered by way of apology.

Pause.

"What is Meg-chan thinking?" he wondered. This situation was clearly way out of his ken...he certainly couldn't offer her any answers.

_"Can I come stay over at your place?"_ Megumi asked after a pause of helicopter thick silence.

Genji's mind immediately filled itself with all the sexual stuff, which had yet to transform his relation with Megumi into newer grounds. Ashamed of his lustful inclinations, he began to weigh the pros-and-cons.

"If Megumi stays with me, then Keiichi'll be pissed. And what about my sister? How would she handle it? And what about the Club? Megumi staying here could divide the Motor Club right down the middle!" he pondered.

And what...and what...and what...

"Y..yes. I think I can talk my sister into it," he decided.

That night, Megumi wanted to make love with him, as she lay next to him on his futon. Genji steeled himself and reluctantly refused her. He realized that she was desperate for affection...and that he was too much of a gentleman to take advantage of her insolvency. Besides, his daydream of a 'summer experience' with Megumi didn't resolve itself along these kinds of circumstances.

So he remained a virgin, with the most beautiful girl in world sleeping next to him...guarding Megumi's honor with a precious dose of restraint.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"What the hell is going on here? Didn't I ask you to forgive her!" Chihiro shouted at Keiichi amidst the arguing. The Whirlwind trailer that served as a clubhouse for the N.I.T. Motor Cycle Club was literally shaking with angry voices. She was saddened to see that Tamiya and Ootaki were even getting into it, setting aside years of friendship to argue about minutiae regarding the Club's funds. As if that had ever mattered before to the two sempai.

"I'm not! And don't you go dragging our personal business into this!" both Megumi and Keiichi shouted at her, assailing her with misdirected resentment.

"I'm just trying to fix things up, dammit!" Chihiro shouted back.

"Well, maybe they shouldn't be fixed! It's all your fault anyway, Prez! You and your stupid freakin' idea about racing in the Le Mans! Has it ever occurred to you that this is a _motorcycle club_, O Mighty Founder! If you hadn't opened your big mouth, then my sister wouldn't have had to leave while Urd was _dying_!" Keiichi shouted above the rumble and din of voices.

There was a brief snap of astonished silence at this, and then the contentious verbal volleys continued unabated.

Tamiya could only shake his head at the bitterness that seemed to explode during the club meeting. Keiichi was livid, screaming bloody murder at Megumi. Genji was mad at Sora for influencing Megumi's decision to go to France. Chihiro was as frustrated as a fox in a Skinner Box.

Closer to home, Ootaki was upset with him about the lack of Club funds. Tamiya was pissed at Ootaki because he was unwilling to support Tamiya's idea of a 'repair auction' to raise more yen. Which was odd, because Ootaki was a geek when it came to solving mechanical problems...the notion of having an open day to fix vehicles of all sorts would be just the kind of challenge that Ootaki would normally eat up like braised sukiyaki.

"Da Club is screwed!" he thought. The harmony that existed during the past couple of years was shredding itself away in front of his eyes, as surely as the reams of secret documents stashed away in a Dietman's office. It was kind of weird...the fact that it seemed that conflicts were happening all the more frequently in his life. Even his best bud Ootaki was siding against him.

This was a nightmare...and the Le Mans was only a few weeks away.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

It was time for us to talk. I had been postponing talking with Urd for several days, because I _didn't_ have a clue what my position was regarding this relationship between her and I. And without a position, there was nothing for me to defend or clarify. It was awkward, seeing her every day...and not knowing what to say to her.

I looked at Urd, sitting across the room, perched on a couch with her legs curled under her. Her emerald green eyes concealing a rainforest of penultimances. Urd had acknowledged earlier that she planned to go to Yggdrasil to seek treatment for her drinking at the hands of the Proctors. After all that had transpired during April and early May, her drinking seemed to be the most minor of problems.

But I realized that her boozing had widened a rift between us to the point where I had called it off between us. I wondered if she knew what was going to happen.

I have to admit, it was a sound suggestion on her behalf to appoint Belldandy as a moderator.

"You first, Urd," Belldandy said calmly.

Urd dodged the issue of her recent illness, talking instead about her reservations about our relationship. She expressed her frustration at the face of Ultimate Force not letting us touch, and the bald confusion she felt resulting from being in love with a mortal. She related the breadth of her fears about going back to Yggdrasil and trying to manage her consumption of sake...a power supply that she needed to maintain herself on the Earthrealm. Then she broke into tears and described how she felt ruined, her dignity stripped away from her by the recent violations upon her person. She elaborated that it all was so confusing, because just a couple days ago in her mind, she hated me more than anything in the Multiverse. Urd felt conflicted because her Goddess and Demoness halves seemed to be on a collision course with each other, fractious about almost everything in her life. She finally finished by saying she didn't feel safe here or in Yggdrasil; and for that matter, she didn't even know if she belonged in the Earthrealm anymore.

Belldandy invited me to go next.

So I reiterated my Soul to the winds of change. I explained the conflict raging between my heart...which loved Urd...and my mind, which was rigged with anxious peals of caution. I vividly flung a wave of words into the air as I attempted to explain my frustration concerning my powerlessness over the wasting disease that threatened her life. Recently, life had seemed to structure itself into a series of worse case scenarios, prickling me with recurrent bouts of anxiety and disenchantment. I told the two Goddesses about my spill into a madly mad insanity as I sought to find a means to arrest the disease. I described how, every night, I cried myself to sleep because I lacked a means to forestall Urd's suffering. I noted that I felt the loss of all the joy that was supposed to color my world. I described my feelings of clumsiness in admitting that, I was probably gravely mistaken by my withdrawal from Urd. Needless to say, this admission earned a knowing grin from the Norn of the Past.

So we debated back and forth, exposing our insecurities and our desires.

Finally, Belldandy called a halt to our ping-pong of admissions.

"Sister, regardless of the past, you have a once-in-a-lifetime chance here with this mortal. And Cevn, I hear your anxiety...and within your words, your fears are mirrored in Urd's discomfort. It's obvious that you both deeply want to love each other.

"What isn't so obvious is whether you each possess the necessary resolve to work on yourselves, so that the _whole_ may experience greater harmony! You both are so encouraged by the possibility of loss that you fail to see the strong potential for intimacy between you. However, loss_ is_ part of intimacy. What often appears to be a loss, is in fact, a liberation. You both need to decide if you are willing to delve deep into the humility that each of you will need in order to make this relationship you desire...work."

I looked at Urd, sensing in her downcast expression that she felt dressed-down by Belldandy's blunt assessment of the situation.

Just like I felt.

If we even feel the same...then why not risk it?

"I'll try!" I said. With wide-eyed surprise, I realized that Urd had said the same words alongside mine.

"How romantic...we both agree that it's going to be a struggle," I mused sarcastically to myself while Belldandy cheerily remarked about how wonderful her love for Keiichi was...despite his recent contriteness regarding Megumi.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Mara felt like a wet rubber knife. She was trapped, fastened to the slickened strands of a spider web. In her own lair. SpiderDemons were crawling all over her paralyzed body, slowly draining her life's essence with each bite of their steely-pronged fangs.

Isilblius had returned from Vanagdrasil and promptly cast a spell on her without saying a word...a spell Mara couldn't break. Once she was fully paralyzed from head to toe, he had beaten her mercilessly.

As the blows rained on her limp body, Mara felt her mood plummeting down.

Her greed had brought this horrible fate upon her. She had created the Ultimate Demon with the expectation that she would be able to control him. Instead, he was controlling her.

Then he wove a SpiderDemon web over one of the bloodwalls of her lair and hung her bruised manifestation on it. As Mara forested her disbelief, Isilblius patiently explained that she had to die, in order for his Evil to be fully realized. With a coldly calculated logic, he reasoned that one had to kill one's creator as an ultimate act of impiety and heartlessness.

Mara had begged him to kill her, once he announced that he was going to feed her to SpiderDemons. She had heard about SpiderDemons; a mutation of the AncienGiants that the Dark Lord employed when he desired to inflict one of the more absolutely dreadful forms of torture or punishment.

Only the Dark Lord could create them...

And yet, Isilblius was mocking her by his own abilities...equal to those of the Dark One!

With a lipcurling sneer, Isilblius explained his plan to destroy both Realms...in effect, everything that existed. His violent act towards Urd had already caused repercussions among the Gods. As much as Mara despised Urd, she felt a twinge of disgust as Isilblius gloated over how he had viciously attacked and molested her.

Isilblius proudly exclaimed that, even now, Urd's father was convening a War Council. This made perfect sense to Mara...if _her_ Father, Baeeal, were to find out that she was raped and nearly killed by a God...he would do the same! She felt sad that she would never see her Mother or Father again; no doubt Isilblius had isolated her away from being detected by any agents of the Demon Grief Office or the Vanagdrasil Mainframe.

Somehow, Isilblius had cast his schemes into realities without being detected by Oni-sama! The very fact that he had trapped her in this slow death should have been enough to guarantee a reprisal by the Dark Lord...after all, she was one of His daughters. But the Ruler of Vanagdrasil had not come to rescue Mara from her plight, clear proof that Isilblius's activities were veiled from His notice.

Mara realized that if the Gods attacked the Demons without a clear motive, the reprisal by her Demonic peers would be swift, merciless and bloodthirsty. They would be taken aback at the aggressive action of the Gods...after all, they were totally innocent of any wrongdoing against Urd. Casualties among the Demons would be catastrophic, since the first battle would be a total surprise.

The Dark Lord Himself might become involved...

Then she remembered one of the Rules...that a declaration of War had to be communicated between the Dark Lord and 'their Lord' before hostilities formally commenced.

None of this would help her survive her present circumstances, however...

"I'm going to die...alone!" she realized again as a SpiderDemon bit into her neck.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Last night was truly strange. Keiichi and Megumi never came home from school. Late in the evening, a very drunk Megumi and Sora slammed their way into the temple home, gonging the bell with wild abandon, and then waking up the whole house with inebriate rantings. When we piled into the living room, half awake, Sora climbed up on a couch and promptly passed out.

With her 43kg body, it probably didn't take much sake for her to get plastered. Megumi was sitting in the middle of the living room floor, muttering a flurry of indecipherable drunken litanies concerning "Keiichi" and "the stinkin' Club".

I thought she was going to stay at Sayoko's apartment until things cooled over with her brother.

An hour later, I was looking at the pile of graded exams from last week's mid-term. I couldn't help but wonder about Keiichi's aberrant behavior. He never even called to check in. Belldandy had taken things with a strange calm; in fact, she suggested patiently that Keiichi might be 'drinking it off with the guys'. Which kinda made sense, because his sister and Sora had obviously painted the town pink.

On my way to my office, I ran into Chihiro near the campus center. Her expression was enough to reveal that yesterday's Club meeting had been a total disaster. She admitted as much, but then she told me the most amazing story about how a farmer in distant Yamagata Prefecture had found three of her horses. She went on to explain that her three horses had been assumed to have been killed when their stable was flattened by Supertyphoon Akira.

I ate a quick lunch in my office, mulling over Chihiro's good news. Fortune had been a casualty in the past couple of months...it was gratifying to hear that someone was getting a reprieve from the sullenness which seemed to seep into our lives.

As I was preparing to return the exams in my afternoon Intermediate Greek class, the loudspeaker suddenly crackled past its creak of disuse...and an old-sounding recording of the Japanese National Anthem suddenly started playing over the intercom. The dignified strains of the Kimigayo filled the air with solemnity, rallying all of us into a sense of suspense. The only other times I had heard the Kimigayo was during the 20XX Olympics...and today wasn't anywhere near an Olympic summer 20XX the last time I checked.

"What the hell..?" I wondered as I heard bells faintly chiming outside the classroom. It seemed like the early summer air had suddenly become blanketed with thousands of sounds...sounds that indicated that something unusual was afoot in the middle of May...

_"This is N.I.T. President Kintaro..."_

"Anybody know what's going on?" I asked aloud to my students. Despite the cheap PA speakers, I could hear Dr. Kintaro's voice wavering with barely controlled emotion. A dawning sense of numbness gripped the classroom as we all realized that this sudden interruption was something _major_.

_"It is my sad duty to inform you that Emperor Heisei has been assassinated..._

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --


	52. Pt 52: NoirWorld

**Part 52: NoirWorld**

Just like that, the world had been upended once again...

I was stunned by the announcement over the intercom...my whole being felt nauseous, like it was being sucked into a black hole of disbelief. In the space of a few seconds, _everything_ seemed to refocus into an altered state of suspension; the prolonged dumbfounded daze in our classroom defined an unfurling emotional pause great enough to bound through 26 centuries of Japanese culture. Dr. Kintaro explained that all classes were dismissed until further notice.

In the hallway, I shuffled towards my office, feeling an arctic blast of opprobrium as I observed students and faculty walking through the halls with the tears of the trauma afresh in their eyes. Outside of the Student Center in the central plaza, I chance encountered Keiichi. His lean face wore the same dispirited expression reflected on the faces of so many others. Even here, I could see people walking around in a daze...as if some part of their cultural psyche had been ripped out and trampled unfoot. There was nothing in my experience that could make sense of this atrocity and its impact on Japanese society...the only basis of comparison I could draw upon was the 9-11 terrorist attacks and how everything in the United States came to a standstill that day. But I felt the same today that I felt during the attacks. Amazing how short the distance is between "Oh…fuck!" and "You fucking bastards, you're going to pay for this!"

Sometimes, culture casts people into a house of mirrors...

I offered Keiichi a hug, sensing that his melancholy candor was edge rough. Surprisingly, he accepted and cried unabashed on my shoulder for a moment. His t-shirt smelled of sour sake, confirming Belldandy's voiced suspicions from last night. The immediacy of his distress only served to drive home the fact that I was truly gaijin...that my heart was exempted from hearing the disturbed syncopation of echoes that beat so strongly in the Japanese kokoro. I didn't expect Keiichi to be so emotionally taxed by the news of the Emperor's assassination. In reply to my unspoken question, he explained the deeper transits sourcing his sadness.

Yesterday, the N.I.T. Motor Club had disbanded!

Reeling from this further bit of demi-news, a dim recess of my mind burst, ushering an uneasy sourness...reminding me of a thought-vision in my office: an acrid awareness that Hell had decided to violate the Earth...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

With a heavy heart, Megumi curled up on the couch with a hot cocoa as she watched the TV broadcasts at Sayoko's apartment. N.I.T. was closed until further notice in observance of the Emperor's passing.

Passing...was just too euphemistic a term to describe the heinous circumstances of what had just happened.

"His poor family!" Megumi thought. The Emperor was far more than a cultural icon...he had a family! Megumi could remember a time when she was in high school; rumors were abounding that Imperial Princess Sayako was pregnant. Reporters interviewed everybody in sight: the housekeepers, her grandfather, and her coworkers. They even chased down the family dogs with cameras and microphones, thinking the family pets would disclose the pregnancy by some subtle change in their behavior. Back then, Megumi regarded _that_ as borderline silly...but with the maturity of adulthood, she realized that this incident of 'dog obsession' was ostensibly demonstrative of the need to affirm the profound importance of the Imperial Family to everyday Japan. Now, Princess Sayoko's child would grow up without a grandfather.

The news droned on...

After meeting with members of the Ministry of International Trade and Industry, the Emperor had retired to the inner chambers of the Homeiden Hall for a noontime meal. He had left the lunchroom for a moment to visit the WC. After waiting 15 minutes, his security agents checked on him. He had been beheaded, his severed head placed on a marble urinal like a trophy from a bygone samurai era.

Incredibly, whoever had committed this horrible political crime...had escaped!

The news anchor was fighting back tears as she assured the public that every branch of the military and police were on full alert, employing the most sophisticated technologies of detection in an attempt to locate the vile killers. However, none of the cameras, sensors, or other security equipment had detected _anything_ that could serve as a lead to the identity of the killer or group of assassins.

The fact that the Emperor was dead was nerve-numbing enough...but when Megumi considered the fact that the assassins escaped completely _undetected_...this feeling of loss was shaded with a strong sense of being violated.

It was absolutely horrific. Life in Japan had ground to a halt at 1:35 pm, May 17th, 20XX.

The Emperor was a leftover symbol from a bygone era...a constitutional figurehead. Not a God, or a powerful politician, nor a religious leader. His presence was remote; the occasional special on "Soko Ga Shiritai" or an evening news clip of a perfunctory meeting with a foreign dignitary at the Imperial Palace. Each time she saw him on TV, Megumi sensed that he was a kind old man who just happened to be royalty. In a sense, he was harmless.

"So why was he killed? And why does his assassination affect me so strongly?" she wondered. She and Sayoko had both admitted to each other that something _special_ had been swallowed up at the moment his violent death was made public...an indefinable quality that linked them with hundreds of generations of Japanese ancestors.

Now it was a time for families to huddle together and share in their mystification and grief over this senseless, abhorrent killing.

Megumi wanted to call her family...to call Keiichi, Belldandy and the rest...but resigned herself to the fact that she couldn't. Going to the temple house and being welcomed with open arms by her brother was as likely as the assassin walking in the apartment right now and giving a full confession of their crimes.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Belldandy, what's happening to us? Something is very wrong here! First our Emperor, then the American President, then the Chinese Premier, and finally the Prime Minister of the Russian Federation. All within a week!" Keiichi said in a weary voice. His emotional exhaustion belied the fact that his nerves were piccolo sharp from several bouts of anxiety.

He was stunned by yet another heavy headline in today's Chiba Nippo newspaper. The Emperor was only a day fresh in his grave when Himeji Castle, long a symbol of Japanese historical sovereignty...had been burned to the ground by extremists who believed that the Emperor was assassinated by the government.

The leaders of four of the most powerful nations had been killed, one-by-one. Not only were their deaths shocking...the methods of assassination were spectacular in the inhumane essence of their cruelty. The American President had been nailed, crucifix style, to the wall of Oval Office. The Chinese Premier had been set on fire in his sleep, and then his burnt corpse was suspended in front of the portrait of Chairman Mao at Tien'anmen Square. Yesterday, the Russian Minister had been garroted and left hanging from a ceiling beam inside the Russian Parliament chambers in the Kremlin.

His greatest fear was that these atrocities, these assassinations, were instigated by powers beyond those found on the Earthrealm. His mind's eye took him to a hellish version of the Earthrealm where the Demons had free sway of havoc. But from everything Bell-chan had told him, the Demons couldn't…wouldn't…take such extreme actions on a mortal species. The murders of the four heads of state had noticeably gathered the planet-wide tension of humanity and thrust it into a higher knit of panic.

Belldandy looked at Keiichi, totally at a loss for words of counsel. It seemed as though the Earthrealm was self-destructing on a psychic plane, she vaguely sensed. Yet, the sheer enigmaticity of these crimes...could only affix a deep suspicion in her mind. She momentarily considered returning to Yggdrasil, in order to employ the Yggdrasil Mainframe towards determining the source of this apparent new force of Evil had been unleashed on the Earthrealm. But she couldn't leave Keiichi to his fears. They might consume him.

"No...they _are_ consuming him!" she had to concede. As she watched consternation play over the face of her beloved, Belldandy's unspoken concerns focused around the Earthrealm's 'probation'. If a war broke out now...the mortals would surely be adjudged as failing the century of probation.

This series of assassinations were too improbable to be accomplished by mortal hands. After all, the victims were all heads of state...and weren't the heads of state closely guarded at all times? Especially officials of the larger nation-tribes of the Earthrealm.

Then there was the matter of Keiichi. After he had slapped Megumi, Belldandy had avoided him for a season of a few days. Shunning her boyfriend had been supremely difficult for her, but she didn't want to offer the impression that she approved of his immature and violent outburst against his younger sister. So she gave him the 'silent treatment', a tactic recommended by "Cool Girls" magazine as an effective means for training future husbands. "Cool Girls" _must_ be right; after all, several million Japanese women read it every month, she had reasoned.

And now...these daily outbreaks of violence.

Were the assassinations and Keiichi's uncharacteristic outburst linked somehow?

She could see the colors of stress flittering within Keiichi's aura. Almost every Earthrealm mortal she had encountered in the past few days projected an aura of heightened distress. It was as if the whole species had suddenly become more...anxious.

Looking at Keiichi's unease, Belldandy's mind drifted into a flight of reflection.

"I know that this has to be the work of a Demon. Perhaps Mara? Possibly, but I doubt it. These recent actions are beyond the scope of the Demon Grief Office rules and regs. There must be some new pattern of Evil behind this, quite possibly the same force that assaulted my older sister. In any respect, the entire human race is being drawn into a quagmire of insecurity, if my Keiichi-san is any indication."

She sighed, belaboring her inability to mark the source of the roaring insanities that spilled out of the TV and newspapers.

"And...I can't believe that they disbanded the Motor Club! Tamiya, Ootaki, Chihiro, Sora...they _all _love racing so much! How could they just give up on the Club...and on each other? And Megumi...I just wish that Keiichi and Megumi could rise above their disagreement and accord each other some sort of peace! Keiichi would be much more relaxed if he discarded his resentment against her. It's obvious that my darling Kei-san misses his sister, even if he's too stubborn to admit it to himself," she thought silently, wishing that Keiichi could hear her thoughts and heed them.

"I can be many things for my love...but I can't be Megumi..."

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Cevn, do you love me?" Urd asked out of the blue. This was an occasional question that we had sometimes used just to remind each other that we were a 'we'. But as I regarded her sunlime eyes with their piercing brilliance, I realized that this wasn't just the routine 'check in' sort of question.

"Urd, there's only one sane answer I can offer to your question. Yes. I do love you. I love you as best as I can. And the love inside of me for you...is much more than the love that will ever be _between _us," I replied, trying to be forthright but not harsh.

"I hope she understands what I'm trying to say," I asked myself as I watched her reaction.

She looked off into space, and then returned her attention to me.

"My sister has said several times that Keiichi may live to regret his wish to have her in his life forever. In view of this, sometimes I wonder about us...and I find myself asking myself if _you'll_ regret being my boyfriend. That you'll regret ever that day when I was summoned to grant that strange wish you made last year. Or that someday, I'll not be with you...or our love will fade..."

"Urd-chan..." I said with a comforting voice. I started to wonder about what was bringing this very un-Urd-like bloom of insecurity.

"You're probably wondering why I'm so caught up in worried about 'us' right now, my love. I...sense...that something terrible is going to happen. Something _humongous_! And I'm afraid that it will sink all of our dreamboats. My insecurities are getting the best of me, and I need to really know that you're with me. That you love me," she explained.

Once again, I felt daunted by the fact that this was a _Goddess_ looking to me to demonstrate my love to her so that she could be affirmed that she _is_ so very lovable. It was all so confusing. I wished for a moment that Mara could recapture me; only this time, my mind would share a moment with Urd's...so she could _feel_ how much she meant to me.

Our relationship had been very quirky these past weeks since her near-death experience. On one level, nearly losing Urd this early in our relationship brought home the fact that what I knew about her was bathed in inadequacy. I really didn't know a lot about her. How could I, when she had lived over 5000 human lifetimes? That was so frightening for me to consider, I tried to dismiss it whenever my mind alighted on this truth.

On another level, a renewed attribute of friendship had been introduced into our relationship. For my part, I experienced it as a warm feeling of comfort in the fact that Urd was becoming a friend. A confidant. I found myself looking forward to those times where we could talk, just the two of us. Finally, I found myself trusting in the process, trusting that her upcoming visit to the Yggdrasil Proctors would result in a 'cure' for whatever was ailing her. I somehow suspected that her addictive patterns weren't akin to those of a mortal. Something far different was going on with her; and it just happened to manifest as drunkenness. It would be really great if they could somehow shift her powerup source to something other than sake. But would that be fair? The people in the Science Lab were getting tired of Keiichi's repeated use of their equipment to create near-moonstone bracelets.

Strange how things work. Early on, Urd had wanted me to be an open book to her. To accomplish this, she had pried me open by subterfuge, posing as my therapist Dr. Ogawa. Now, nearly a year later, she was getting what she wanted. Unfortunately, she nearly had to die along the way to make it happen...

Her near-death had to wake me up from my fears.

"Urd, is there something missing between us? Am I in denial about something you need?" I asked, feeling a sandy insecurity myself. Urd gathered herself and sat even closer to me, face to face.

"Yes and no. Sometimes I bait myself by wishing that you were a God, because then I would be able to do _everything_ with you. There's so much that I'm giving up, because of your mortality. To be honest, I sometimes really regret the fact that you're a mortal. If I want to go to Yggdrasil, I can't take you! If I want to Share myself with you...I can't! And I question whether I can live with these things..."

I felt like my affections towards her were being encoffined by thorny sprigs of lilac and wormwood; hopeless winds slowly eroding my resolve and confidence. No matter how hot the sun of my soul burned for her, even when it could melt away the frost-ice of the uneasiness in her thoughts…I didn't know if it was enough to warm her heart.

"Hey waitaminute! I'm not saying that I_ don't_ want to be here with you, or I love you any less!" she added, clearly noticing that I was hangheaded with my feelings of gross inadequacy.

I looked up at her with a hint of fear.

"But there's more..._much_ more. My Father has called a War Council in reaction to my recent...illness. I'm filled with foreboding. I have a very bad feeling...that things are going to get completely crazy really soon. I don't know how I can really make you understand this, Cevn honey, but I'm grasping at air. I've gone this far, to live here, to actually fall in love with you...and yet my life here...is closing around me. I'm suddenly feeling very small. With all Yggdrasil in an uproar, I don't know if I can really be touched by _us_. Not that I don't want to be touched," she said with a grin, poking fun of my 'female queasiness'.

_That_ had diminished greatly over the months, thank heavens. Now, we could joke about it a little bit...a joking that arose out of two friend's shared awareness of each other's privy faults. But sometimes, the levity went too far when Urd started getting coy to the point of being sexually aggressive. Then my fears would rush back in full vitality and I would cringe away.

"If the damned Ultimate Force wasn't in place, I'd be _all over_ you, boy!" she added with a demure wink. "But, we can't do anything about that! My frustration seems to be coming from the fact that every mortal thing...seems so _mortal_. So pithy in the schema of Time. And yet, I know in my heart that life here on the Earthrealm isn't just empty rainbows and clouds. There's an abundance of emotion and love in my life here with my sisters, Keiichi and you. So I really have to question what you can do to love me...not in a greedy way, but as an absolute reality. As an absolute certainty," she explained.

I nodded my head to signify that I understood. Urd was softly letting me know that, with all the grave matters going on in Yggdrasil, she felt that her 'mortal" life...our love for each other...was becoming dramatically overshadowed. I _didn't_ understand it the way she did, but I could grasp the essence of the concept.

"You know Urd, I've learned something during the time we've been together," I offered. Urd looked at me, frowning with a sarcastic expression, then her face mellowed as she seemed to realize that I was reaching deep within myself for something.

"Our relationship is beginning to lose its seriousness. Rather than being serious, we're becoming sincere...being open, _really_ open. Do you think you could've told me what you just said, Urd, just a few months ago? You wouldn't have; you would have withheld it out of fear that I would interpret it as a 'you're worthless' sort of statement. But I've grown beyond that. And so have you. So we're designing our lives around being more secure with being honest with each other. Yet, I'm beginning to foresee a future in my life, with you. A future that does not mistake the fact that we will make mistakes...but that we'll mature out of the disappointments by developing even greater respect for each other. In a sense, I matured during the time I withdrew myself from you. Absence _really does_ make the heart grow fonder. And your willingness to seek help for your addiction stuff had bonded me to a faith that things are going to work out in the end, despite my struggles with the route we're taking to get there."

I could see a softness emerge over Urd's face. Urd had so many faces...the mischievous face, the sexy face, the taunting face, the sarcastic face, the iresome face, the somber face...but rarely had I seen her face this soft. It was as if my words had melted a veneer of harshness.

Then Urd smiled at me, her face exquisitely radiant with elegance and beauty. I found myself transported to visual ecstasies by the strength of the _love_ in her eyes. It was cosmic, all-consuming, all-absorbing, sublime...once again, Urd was weaving rainbows in my heart.

"Thanks," she said, drawing an invisible heart with her fingers on the tatami. I wrote the kanji for 'heart' in response…one way we could touch each other without touching. Another one of her ideas to help us along.

"And one more thing," I added. Urd raised a cautious eyebrow, warning me that I might possibly spoil the mood if I said anything else. In 'movieland', this would be the moment for a wordless kiss. I just hoped I wouldn't screw it up.

"Can we go on a date?" I asked. Urd looked at me for a long moment, then wheezed a sigh of relief...and started giggling.

"What's so funny?" I asked. Something had struck her into giddiness.

"Oh, I thought you were going to ask me to marry you."

And with that, I clumsily tipped my glass of water over...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Odeyn surveyed the masses of Gods and Goddesses assembled before him. The huge throng stretched kilometers in the distance, rimming the horizon in all degrees. Countless beings from every sphere and zone of Yggdrasil were here. The Place of Assembly near Urd's Well was packed with several billion Gods. Several hundred million holographic spheres hovered in the air...holoproxies for Yggdrasil citizens who couldn't attend directly. To the left of The Well of Urd, a massive military of WarGods was precisely arranged into ranked battalions, as if they were on formal parade review for the Almighty. On the right, a battalion of Valkyrie hovered in the air, dressed in parade review Goddess battlesuits.

Slowly mounting the hovering dais, Odeyn flipped his azure silk and ermine cloak back over his shoulders with practiced dignity. He ignored the fleeting impulse to gloat over the fact that this huge crowd was assembled here at his bequest. This Assembly wasn't about power or personal prestige. He had requested their presence here because he was deeply concerned about the survival of Yggdrasil.

Summoning a holopyramid, Odeyn projected Urd's image into it...the vision of his daughter on her deathbed. As much as it pained him to have to witness his oldest girl's emaciation anew, Odeyn realized that he had to employ the most powerful means available to influence his peers. Hopefully, seeing Urd in such disconstitution would cast an immediate impact upon the Assembly...one that could preface his initial persuasive speech by leveling a deep shock upon the very Souls of his audience.

What Odeyn planned to propose...was unprecedented in the extreme.

In almost all cases, Assemblies were convened at the whim of the August One, usually to elicit the substance of dialogue in order to affirm a decision He was planning to announce. In a few cases, such as the matter of the Earthrealm's Probation, the Lord observed the debate process prior to announcing His decision. Much more uncommon was an Assembly that was congressed to actually vote on a matter of Yggdrasilian policy. In these instances, a two-thirds majority was required to create a Conscience of Assembly; at least a Conscience that the Almighty couldn't reasonably veto. Being the Lord, He could veto every decision the Assembly arrived at...but His general pattern was to accord with a Conscience of two-thirds majority. A lesser plurality was subject to dismissal by the Almighty if He were so inclined. Often, Odeyn wondered if the Assemblies were just Kami-sama's means to provide a dialectic tool that could help the Gods teach themselves what He already knew.

In this moment, Odeyn had convened a War Council...the first in over 300 millennia. In this million-year Cycle, there had only been one War; a War which had been instigated by the Lord Himself because of the encroaching AncienGiants which threatened the survival of Yggdrasil itself. The outcome of that conflict was a truce between Gods and Demons and the establishment of the Doublet System.

Because this was a War Council, Odeyn knew that the Assembly would be razed to oblivion by an atmosphere of excessive apprehension. There would be no silted shallows of debate here...the discourse would test the very soul of the Gods. The roaring susurration filling his ears validated his assumptions. The heightened fear of his fellows was almost palpable to him.

He would need a 90 percent majority to Seal the Declaration of War.

"Behold my daughter, Urd, Norn of the Past!" his wife Freiija shouted loud and clear, her voice volleying the air with poised indignant rage.

A swell of shock shuffled through the Assembly.

"Fellow Gods and Goddesses. I address you as Odeyn, Head of the Energy Guild, Father of the Norns, and Retired Marshall of the WarGods. I also address you as a Father whose eldest child was shadowed by the Reaper...her Soul nearly snatched away by a new and dire form of Demonic attack.

"According to my eldest daughter, this assault upon her Godhood was perpetrated by a Demon disguised as an Earthrealm mortal. This Demon's concealment was utterly complete; my daughter is not the ductile type, yet even she was unable to penetrate the deception and learn the identity of her attacker. The fact that a Demon can confound a God to this extreme...is sore trialsome and _very_ disturbing!" he argued. The Assembly seemed to agree with his initial presentation of concern.

Odeyn then summoned a number of Gods and Goddesses to bear testimony to the atrocity that befell his daughters.

When it came to his wife's turn to speak, his heart seemed to rend itself to pieces once he saw her pained expression mingled with a solemn determination. Within the 300 millennia that he had known Freiija, Odeyn had never seen his wife in such an emotional despair as she had been gripped with during the horrible wasting disease that afflicted Urd, Belldandy and Skuld. During her speech, Freiija offered a lump-in-the-throat brutally honest description of how her daughters had nearly experienced the Real Death. He could see how deeply wounded she was...and yet she spoke eloquently, if not passionately. He was consoled by the fact that his life partner shared every bit of his pain...and that their joined suffering was teamed towards the goal of resolving any threats against their daughters...and all of Yggdrasil.

Freiija finished her speech, then turned to him and nearly collapsed against his chest from exhaustion. She had given her all to try and convince the Assembly.

Odeyn comforted his wife as he remounted the dais and announced his final speaker. The subdued, sober aspect of the crowd made him feel proud of his wife...her stark personal appeal had enfranchised everyone with a sense of cautious dread.

Now it was time to argue to their intellects...

"But there are deeper dangers underlying this incident! I call upon Sifu, wife of Thord to witness to you. In her capacity as Head Proctor of the Academy of Clinics, she is much more able than I to elaborate on the catastrophic potential represented by this heinously foul deed."

Sifu rose up to a separate dais. Odeyn watched as she explained Urd's near-fatal illness in great detail, projecting images and representations on a huge holocloud. According to Sifu, the Proctors had concluded that the insidious nature of this virus was dangerous in its complexity. Its etiology was enigmatic insofar as no point of origin could be determined; its epidemiology was pervasive, as it was communicated through all channels of TimeSpace; its pathology was resilient and universally premorbid; and its endemiology was very specific...it was restricted only to Gods.

Sifu's elaborate presentation, coupled with her status as High Proctor, the head of both the Ethiopsylogic Clinic and the Holibiolonics Clinic, would definitely lend the probity of authority to the premise of a Demon-created virus. She mentioned that, had the disease claimed the lives of all three Norns, then _all_ of the Gods could have been instantly infected! Without any Norns to moderate Time, the entire TimeWeb itself would potentially have become a 'carrier' of the virus.

Sifu was visibly shaking as she concluded her presentation. She stated that, had the virus been crafted in Yggdrasil, there would have been no need to convene a War Council...because it was a very realistic outcome that _all_ the Gods would have been dead!

_That_ conclusion left Odeyn with a blemished sense of security. He tried to mute his staccato soulbreath as he felt a frigid surmount of fear. The Demons had come very close to an annihilative depopulation of all the Gods of Yggdrasil.

The faces of every God and Goddess in the Assembly were drawn into deep apprehension as Odeyn summed up the gravity of this situation by means of an impassioned peroration.

Sifu had offered no explanation as to the means by which his three daughters had been cured...and Odeyn couldn't disclose what he had witnessed firsthand on the Earthrealm. The Earthrealm mortal had learned _something_ which was able to arrest and reverse the progress of the wasting disease. But the hypothetical basis for his reasoning...was completely heretical. Odeyn knew that Cevn's theoretical implication of the existence of _another Multiverse_ would instantly discredit the well-crafted arguments favoring War with the Demons. Consequently, he couldn't reveal the methodology employed to eliminate the virus. Besides, what may have worked for the three Norns...might be ineffective in treating other Gods.

Now was the time for debate. Odeyn was hoping that the Lord was taking this as seriously as he was...

_It was against the Rules for a Demon to directly cause the death of a God._

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

My dreams were dissolving without a sound. I wanted to talk to Urd...but she had been suddenly summoned back to Yggdrasil. Despite her denials, I sensed that she was being called upon to offer a personal testimony at the War Council happening there.

We never had a chance to go on the date I had been planning.

I had asked her to attempt to devise a means whereby I could go to Yggdrasil and address the Assembly of Gods. Despite her insistent stance that it was impossible for me to go there, I _knew_ there was a way. After all, hadn't Chihiro traversed the Multiverse when she rode Sleipnir? If there were a chance, I would take it. Last year, I had told off the Almighty when He suspended Skuld's license. A lot of good that had done, I reflected sourly. Skuld's Goddess powers remained at a minim; ebbing barely above the sufficience needed to manifest her physicality on the Earthrealm.

But I _had_ told Him off...and got away with it.

The TV seemed to pitch fevered darkrealms of violence during the daily news broadcasts. After the killings of the Big Four, as the press labeled the assassinations, riots had erupted in a number of countries. The level of street gang activity had increased in Tokyo to a level unheard of in modern Japanese history. Someone in Los Angeles had burned down a maternity ward in a burst of religious fervor. Riots in Berlin had resulted in the partial destruction of the Pergamon Museum.

Just enough to make us edgy...

Right before Urd left, I had an intuitive impression that some Evil was _toying_ with us. Every one of us knew that an Evil force was involved in these designs, but we couldn't put a finger on _why_.

I carefully explained my premises to Urd, noting that if an Evil presence wanted to bestir total chaotic havoc, they would have killed each world leader while pointing a finger at a rival superpower. But they had stopped short of this. I tried to imagine how the Chinese would have felt if their Chairman would have been hung from the ramparts of Tien'anmen draped in a Japanese flag.

The killings were vile, heinous to the extreme...but not ignoble enough to push humanity over the edge. The suspense was agonizing. Every time I went outside, I was enveloped in a crimson sensation of suspense. As if something even more tragic was just waiting around a figurative corner of moments.

I remembered how Urd reacted to my suggestion. She looked at me with an expression of total empathy and comprehension...and then blinked it back with disbelief! Then she launched into an explanation about how the Goddess Relief Office was supposed to _prevent_ such wanton acts of "destabilization". Despite their role in creating grief in mortal lives, the Demoness Grief Office was tasked with the same principles; no acts that could profoundly disrupt the continuity of mortal evolution.

But occasionally, unintended results occurred. Urd explained that even when Goddesses grant wishes, the results can be significant. She narrated how Belldandy was assigned to grant the wish of a mother in 12th Century Japan. The mother's wish was that her sons would be exiled rather than be executed by an opposing lord. So Belldandy cast her wish into the realm of reality, and the lord spared her two sons. The result was the Genpei War of 1180-5 and the ascendance of the Ashikaga, which had an everlasting impact on Japanese history and culture, instituting the office of military rulers call Shogun. All because Belldandy had saved two lives: Minamoto Yoshitsune and Minamoto Yoritomo. She cited a more recent example, involving the Demons this time. Early in the last century, the Demons were able to create an overwhelming curse of grief in a mortal called Gavrilo Princip, who had become increasingly disaffected with the Austria-Hungary nation-state and the lot of Serbian peasantry. Refusing any desire to contract a wish with the GRO Goddess assigned to him, Gavrilo took matters into his own hands; and was responsible for the killing of Archduke Ferdinand, a seemingly minor event that ushered in World War I. Even the Demons were embarrassed by the result of the curse their DGO Demoness had applied to a single mortal. Striking a mortal with a curse wasn't supposed to create such repercussions. There were safeguards for that. Despite these safeguards, mortal sentient species were so unstable that even innocent wishes or superficial curse strikes could result in totally cultural disruption.

She finally concluded that my theory was too categorical in its implications, in the sense that it assumed that a complete power shift had occurred in the balance between Gods and Demons. It also assumed that the safeguards imposed on the Goddess Relief and Demoness Grief offices had somehow been abolished.

I almost wanted to clue her by reminding her of the ordeal she had just recovered from, but my heart wouldn't let me. Urd was still very sensitive about the rape...and I wasn't about to mention it to her. _I_ was still pretty horrified and repulsed by the thought that something had assaulted her in such a sickening manner. She had already been through enough horror. Besides, Urd occasionally suffered relapses of memory. Several times in the past week...she became distraught to the point where I had to avoid her presence because she had somehow forgotten that I _wasn't_ the one who assaulted her.

_This_ strained our relationship like someone turning a water hose upon a hurricane lamp.

Belldandy was fraught with anxiety as well. Her meal preparation had just a touch of edginess, judging from how she was over-spicing her cooking. Beyond this, she was doing the equivalent of "Goddess pacing"; floating up and down the hallway silently. Skuld had holed herself up in her lab for most of the week, upgrading Banpei RX's defense systems with an almost paranoid ambition. When she emerged from her work at mealtimes, her eyes belied a feverish intensity that I had only witnessed once before...when she and I had been encaptured by Mara.

Keiichi was stircrazy too.

"Too," I thought...because I was also going nuts with all this free time on my hands. N.I.T. was to be closed for 21 days in mourning for the Emperor and the other world leaders. I imagined myself to be traveling camelback in an arabesque caravansary...crossing an ocean of desert without the guidance of the glassy sea of stellar constants. Lost in a lost world. The desert of reality seemed to suffuse me, roughly bringing home the fact that I thirsted desperately for serenity.

Everything was drawing upon itself, a convexant synergy of dark emotional angst. It was horrible...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

_Ring ring pip!_

Skuld twitched her spoonful of cherry vanilla ice cream as she heard the dining room phone ring nearby. She motioned for her sister to answer it with a wave of her hands. Her senses rounded forth--this _had_ to be the Almighty calling them! Every fiber of her being knew this.

"Hello?" Belldandy answered, and then mouthed "Father" to Skuld.

"Whew!" Skuld gasped in relief, her stiffened backbone relaxing in reaction to this as she fingercombed her long black tresses. Then Belldandy set the phone down on the table and knelt tailor-style on her heels in front of it.

In a flash, Skuld was kneeling next to her sister. Her elder sister's reaction could only mean one thing...

_"Belldandy...Skuld. It is I. I am calling to notify you that you both are herewith summoned to Assembly at Urd's Well to explain the nature of the mysterious malady that..."_

"_The Lord The Lord The Lord!_" Skuld thought with drumrolling discease, suddenly very afraid. "This totally hurls! I'm just a kid. I've never been to an Assembly! I'm not even supposed to go; assemblies are for _adult_ Gods and Goddesses...like Big Sister and Belldandy. I've still got another sixty millennia before I'm old enough to participate! A..and they want _me_ to speak there? I..I'm just a kid! What can I say that will make a difference! And why...why would He personally ask for Elder Sister and I to leave the Earthrealm and..."

_"Skuld! Are you listening?"_ His voice boomed over the phone, interrupting her gusts of uncertainty. Skuld cowered for a moment, realizing that she had just been busted for inattentiveness by the Almighty. Belldandy shot her a sidelong glance, warning her not to daydream any further.

_"I need all three Norns to be at the Assembly," _the voice continued.

"«_The Presence –_needs-_ us? What an unusual choice of words!_ »" Skuld heard Belldandy's thoughtcast in her mind. "«_Normally, the Lord would just say it...and 'it' would be so. But He is actually –_asking-_ us to attend instead of commanding our presence!_ »"

"Why, my Lord?" her Elder Sister asked.

_"Because I intend...to briefly recreate the condition that afflicted you and your sisters, Belldandy. By revisiting the process of your illness, I will then opportune Myself to effect its removal by employing My own divine capacities. This demonstration will forsooth serve to disprove any nonsense about 'a Demon-created virus'."_

"_Ehhh?_ You mean we have to get sick again?" Skuld found herself blurting out before she could check her tongue.

_"Yes. It is your duty. A very important one, My young Skuld. Consider this your gimu chu...your dutiful obligation to Me and all your fellow Gods and Goddesses here in Yggdrasil. I will not allow your father to sway My subjects with this foolish discussion of War against the Demons."_

"B..but my Lord! That virus...nearly killed my older sister! I..I got very sick as well. I know that Your will must be made manifest, but...I have reservations about having to experience such throes of pain again, even for the briefest of moments. I beg You to reconsider! Please forgive me, but I am experiencing a great dread in light of Your request," her sister protested, speaking Skuld's own thoughts perfectly.

Despite the kind, almost seductive quality of Kami-sama's voice, Skuld was filled with reticence in reaction to His summons. Normally, she would trust the Lord with almost anything...but a spinning voice inside of her heart kept repeating "don't go!" like an alarm klaxon.

_"Fear not, My precious Daughter. I will not let you come to harm. You must understand that I have already decided that this must be so!"_ the Almighty shouted through the phone. Skuld felt a sickness grip her...a shallow fear borne on the wings of apprehension. She would have to experience being ill _all over again_!

"And what if...what if the Lord can't cure us! What if Keiichi and Cevn and Chihiro and the others aren't able to do whatever they did before to make it all go away!" Skuld thought with an air of panic, looking to Belldandy for support. But her older sister was visibly shaking as the line passed silent as a windless late autumn evening.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Peorth had been called upon to testify before the Assembly about how she had found Urd that day at her parent's retreat house. At the summoning, she could feel the mental probes of her fellow deities as she explained why she had chosen to remain on the Earthrealm to support Belldandy's charge, Keiichi, during Urd's illness. Unlike Odeyn or Freiija, she didn't have suffice of experience to prevent deep such probing by her more experienced peers. Thus, the 'secret' of her love for Keiichi was brought out in the open.

This was embarrassing enough.

But her thoughts failed to conceal the nature of Belldandy's unusual 'relationship' with Keiichi. Her heart plumed with guilt as the depths of Belldandy's love for Keiichi was inadvertently revealed through her thoughts. This gave pause for a ripple of surprise in the Assembly. A green-orange aura shifted over the massed gathering as their sacred senses absorbed and _felt_ the revelation that a Goddess had actually fallen in love with a mortal!

Peorth looked at Odeyn, who was resigned to the fact that the truth was out...

Freiija looked like she was going to meltdown from embarrassment.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"What!! You have to go back to Yggdrasil...and get sick all over again! That's nuts! I won't stand for it!" Keiichi shouted angrily.

"But my dear, we cannot refuse. The request came directly from the Presence," Belldandy protested gently.

"Screw Him! Get His Almighty Pompousness on the phone and I'll tell Him to shove it up His divine..."

_"Keiichi!!"_ Skuld shouted fearfully, hoping that the Lord wasn't listening in.

"No!! Stopit right this instant!!" Belldandy yelled at him, stifling his verbal outsledding.

"The Almighty spared one mortal already, when Cevn told Him off. I highly doubt that His Majesty will oblige us with another act of sufferance. Believe me...you don't want to tick Him off!" Skuld explained.

"Keiichi...I need you to be here when I return. I need you to keep our house ready, so when I come back, you can love me in the special way that you always do. This travel to Yggdrasil will no doubt be taxing for Skuld and I...not to mention Urd. When I get back, I just want the two of us to rest. I want you to take me to the sea so we can watch the waves break over the shore under the moonlight. I..I really miss the ocean. Remember that time in the small boat? When the waves pitched the boat over and you fell on me and..." Belldandy said in sweet entreaty.

Keiichi closed his eyes at the memory, and then blinked them open to see Skuld scowling at him. Once more, the young Goddess's jealousy circuit had been reactivated! Then again, Keiichi wondered for the hundredth time if Skuld's anger was just a display of adolescent tension; the seesaw of attitudes which battled between "all boys are gross" and "I've gotta have a boyfriend who's cute!" Almost every young girl went through this in her early teens. Megumi was especially crazy when she was in her first two years of middle school...she was always pumping him for inside information about any number of his male classmates.

"Keiichi, are you listening! We have to leave early tomorrow morning. Be prepared for anything. Mara may choose to attack while we're gone. Ohhh, I wish there was something more that I could do..." Belldandy exclaimed. Skuld suddenly looked _very_ confident.

"Don't worry, sis, I've got it handled already. I totally upgraded Banpei RX...he's almost a Mk. II in terms of redesign! His Demon detection circuitry has been engineered for triple redundancy! I've added three new weapons, including a stasis spell sphere which should render any First Class Demon powerless to escape for a couple of days..."

"Skuld!" Belldandy interjected, surprised and proud.

"Remember after the slotcar race against Ugly Tyyr? When I went back home, Daddy let me pick through a whole bunch of spare parts in his Energy Guild office so that I could bring some back here to play with. Well, I hacked past the security protocols and snuck into a Defense ZoneCube R & D lab...and snagged a few experimental components designed for the possibility of warfare against the Demons..."

"SKULD!" Belldandy interrupted, upset and worried.

"Since you're the only one of us with any _real_ Goddess powers, I had to _do something_, Elder Sister! Remember what you told me about '_everyone_ having to do her share'? Well, I'm doing _my_ share to make the house safer! Don't worry! I'm a genius...remember?" Skuld replied, and then she capered and bowed in the imitation of a little princess. Belldandy could only smile to herself at her younger sister's burst of confidence.

"Skuld," Belldandy praised, reassured and grateful.

"Great! You're leaving me with a souped-up Banpei! What if he gets rained on and confuses me for Mara again..." Keiichi remarked.

_--Paa..pop!--_

Keiichi felt a small knot on his head forming when Skuld had 'tapped' him with Mjolnir. Belldandy could only shake her head at Skuld's rash act of reprisal for Keiichi's remark. Skuld always seemed to forget that her mechas only worked _some_ of the time!

Then again, Keiichi _knew better_ than make such blunt criticisms towards her works of genius...

"I fixed Banpei up to protect you mortals while we're gone...and _this_ is the appreciation I get?" Skuld said, angry and ego-wounded as she fretfully twirled Mjolnir like a baton. Keiichi backshuffled a couple meters, worried that he would get bopped again by Skuld.

"Well, since Skuld seems to have given you a bump on the head, I'll just have to take _extra _care of you for the night before we leave in the morning, my dear Keiichi..." Belldandy said, reaching under Keiichi's arm and steering him to his feet.

Skuld stood stiffly, arms rigid at her sides as her sister walked arm-in-arm with Keiichi down the hallway.

Towards _his_ bedroom.

Right before they turned walked in his room, Belldandy looked over her shoulder, grinned, and stuck her tongue out at Skuld.

"Gotchya" was written all over Elder Sister's face...

"You guys!" Skuld wailed down the empty hall, gripping Mjolnir locknut tight with frustration.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Odeyn loathed the idea that the Lord was going to _use_ all three of his daughters as part of a rebutting demonstration.

"He's going to make all three of my babies sick again, just to prove that the virus wasn't created in Vanagdrasil and that He can cure any God afflicted with it. I just hope He's right, for all of our sakes. If He can prove that He can stop the virus from affecting us...then my daughter's sufferings will not be in vain!" he thought, bristling with uncomfortability.

Despite the beastcries of his Soul to vengeance for what the Demons did to his family, Odeyn also harbored a healthy amount of reservations towards the possibility of a War with the Demons. There would be untold casualties.

In his distant memories, he recalled the last War Council...

Fully one third of the Gods and Goddesses who repaired to the War Council Assembly that day...never returned to Urd's Well again. The toll of freedom fighting against the honorless had been dear.

Looking over the throngs of Gods and Goddesses, Odeyn imagined that he could see multitudes of spectres...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

_"My Children. I have decided to personally intervene in this matter of consideration of War by the Assembly. Despite the excellent information and passionate arguments presented by Odeyn and his supporters, it is My belief that War is an unnecessary course of action in this instance._

_"To cast the verity of My opinion beyond a doubt, I am going to recreate the illness that afflicted the three Norns...and then remove it. When I conclude, you all may rest easy in your anxieties, knowing full well that you are under My protection, My Loved Ones._

_"There is no Demon plague that will decimate our numbers, My tender Souls. As Kami-sama...I will not allow it! And I will stay the course of War!"_ He finished, spreading his arms out in a grandly benedictory gesture.

Freiija felt a warm glow of ardor for her Lord as He spoke with His most majestic voice. The dulcet tones of that voice soothed her, making her feel tenderly secure in the midst of her anxiety. The Lord had promised that her three daughters would only suffer momentarily before He removed the source of their pain.

Still, she was immersed in apprehensions. Freiija didn't want to witness the Lord's 'demonstration', so she turned to her beloved husband and rested her head against his stocky chest. Feeling his gentle hand stroking her hair and jawline, she heard the Lord announce Urd, Belldandy and Skuld to the Assembly.

A moment later, she heard three shrill screams of agony...and her tears waterfalled down her face as she grabbed her husband even tighter...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

I watched Keiichi as he paced to and fro across the living room carpet. We had this beautiful blue Persian carpet in the middle of our room, fit for a royal palace. In fact, according to Belldandy, it was a restoration of a carpet that remained for centuries in the throne room of the Umayyad palace in Cordoba, Spain...back when Cordoba was the intellectual center of Western Civilization. The way Keiichi was pacing, I wondered if he would wear a track in it.

Strange, how different people handle stress. For myself, I was sitting on the couch in a semi-lotus position, anxiously rocking back and forth with my arms clutching my chest tightly.

Nervous as hell.

"Where _are_ they?? Bell-chan said it would only take an hour or two!" Keiichi shouted to no one in particular.

"I wish I knew, Keiichi. I'm really afraid for them. This is no lilywalk...and I suspect that the Almighty has gone for more in the bargain than He expected."

"Tell me about it! I've had bad feelings about this from the start!" I added.

"Me too, my friend! Thinking about lilywalks, this is another one of those 'love with a Goddess' trials. Once again, I find myself on the clouds of tension…and yet, I wonder..." Keiichi said. I nodded in confirmation, affirming that I also felt bewildered and threatened by the absence of the three Goddesses. Once again, I thanked the good winds of fortune for Keiichi being in my life; he was the only other person on the planet who could understand what it meant to be in love with a Goddess.

"Keiichi, what's going to happen? Not just with Belldandy and Urd and Skuld...but with us? You're still pissed at Megumi. I don't know if Urd and I can get along...because suddenly everything that is here for her on the Earthrealm simply _isn't enough_. Mara is on the loose, and all this crazy shit is going down all over the world..." I asked, flurrying questions.

"Look, if Megumi had any shred of decency in her, she wouldn't have gone to France! I've been telling you this since the mastodons roamed the Earth, Cevn! Will you leave it alone?"

"No, I won't! I'm not saying that I think you're wrong for feeling how you feel, Keiichi. What I'm saying is that you'll eventually need to let it pass. It's in the past, and it cannot be undone. Whether it turns out to be a mistake, or the right thing to do...that's beside the point. What are you going to do...hate her for the rest of your life?"

"I dunno! Isn't that a little beyond the moment, Cevn? I mean, I don't plan to feel this way forever. But I've got my pride..."

"Keiichi, can I tell you a story about pride?" I asked.

"_Now?_" he replied in an irritated voice...then seemed to check himself. I looked at him, feeling troubled.

"Well, you told me your story about Goro when we all thought the Goddesses were ill, and then you told me that Urd was going to die. That they all were going to die. If you hadn't have told me that story first, I would have probably been so upset, I would have acted on my grief by jumping off one of the Tokyo Metro Government buildings," I replied. Keiichi's use of a story to introduce the bad news was just enough to keep me from going crazy that day.

"Well, if anything, it'll make this wait pass quicker," he acquiesced as he sat down on other end of the couch. I started...

_"Once upon a time, there was a professor of psychology at a famous college in the US. He was in his early 50s, childless, never married. His specialization was in adjustment studies, and his theories served as a forerunner of Archetypal Psychology...a movement that was popular in the US during the 90s. But by that time, he was already dead. Besides, his theory of iconic cultural symbolism in esteem training was twenty years too early to be recognized as a breakthrough. He conceptualized culture as a skin, a surface that was stretched over the commonwealth of human experience. Thus, he was inclined to speculate as to why certain populations developed certain cultures...and then he tried to deconstruct the elements of culture towards an awareness of how it represented and impacted the psyche of an individual._

_"Anyway, like most people, he had his light and dark sides. On his light side, he was well respected by the academic community, despite the fact that some of his theories were regarded as eccentric at times. His students liked him, his books and papers were published to moderate acclaim, and he was a mentor to many professors. In a sense, he was an 'intellectual athlete': writer, concert violinist, painter, and marathon runner._

_"But within his dark side...he was addicted to sex. He had engaged in many affairs with his female students, and was arrested more than once for frequenting hookers downtown in the community he lived in. The University was hard-pressed to cover up his indiscretions. He owned a bar which was a cover for a BDSM 'club', and he also financed the production of porno movies...remember, this was back before there was videos._

_"One day, a transferring grad student in one of his classes caught his eyes...so he tried to whip up on her. He was able to captivate her with his sophistication and fatherly manner, and so they began an affair. She was a promising graduate student, who just happened to be studying societal interpretations of tacit sexual paradigms. Then, during his regular visit 'downtown', he encountered her. She was standing in a line of hookers._

_"It turns out that her parents died when she was 14, and that she had resorted to prostitution to survive. Realizing that education offered a way out of poverty, she whored herself in order to finance her way through university. She had no brothers or sisters to support her, and her grandparents had disowned her long ago. So the tables were turned on our professor, who had been engaging in loveless sex for most of his life. Imagine his surprise when he found that the student he was attracted to...was not as innocent as he believed. Instead of just being a student, she was a whore!_

_"This situation led to an unparalleled self-examination of his life, especially his obsession with sex. One of the contributing factors to his addiction to sex was the fact that he was impotent; thus, he didn't have to worry about conceiving children during his many trysts. Perhaps this fact appealed to his sexual partners as well. In any sense, his introspections awakened an awareness that he had been cheating himself of love by his pursuit of sex._

_"To his surprise, he found himself becoming emotionally vulnerable for the first time in his life...emotionally available because he decided to trade up from flings to relationships. Soon, he was _-really-_ in love with this beautiful student/strumpet._

_"As fate would allow, his past caught up with him. A former student brought him up on charges of trying to pressure her into sex for a better grade, and he was suspended from his tenure. His defenses and denials were meaningless, since it was common knowledge that he was currently involved with one of the top graduate students in the department. She was suspended, of course._

_"So they relocated to another part of the country. While he sought out another position at a college, she supported them by prostitution. This strained their relationship for a while, but what else could they do? Eventually he was hired by a small college that was willing to overlook his scandalous reputation and give him a second chance. Once he was able to support her, she stopped hooking. In fact, she was hired as a graduate assistant at another college in the same community. So their lives became somewhat stable again...possibly even idyllic._

_"Then, out of the blue, she became pregnant. An impossible pregnancy for sure, since he had been impotent for all of his adult life. Her pregnancy infused a disastrous amount of distrust into the relationship. But when the couple resorted to medical tests, it turned out that he wasn't impotent, he just had an extremely low sperm count. En vivo testing confirmed that the child was his._

_"When she was seven months pregnant with their 'miracle baby', she was bitten by a brown recluse spider. Becoming gravely ill due to the venom, she was hospitalized. After several days in the hospital, she began to experience premature labor. The doctors informed him that they could either_ _save her, or the baby. He had to choose between the love of his life...and a new life. By this time, she had fallen into a coma, and the doctors were doubtful that she might fully recover._

_"The doctors urgently pressed him for an answer, stating that, with rapid surgery, they might be able to save the baby. So he told them to save the child...the child he thought he would never have. They wheeled her off into surgery and delivered the child...but she drew the breath that couldn't be drawn while on the surgery table._

_"Devastated with grief, he left the hospital, went to his office, and put a gun to his head. He never got a chance to see the son he had fathered. They found him there the next day in a pool of blood."_

"How sad!" Keiichi commented, looking at me with a troubled expression. Obviously, my story had affected him deeply.

"What about the child?" he asked.

"The child was eventually adopted. But the family that never was, could never be replaced in his heart," I answered. "Keiichi, things aren't always what they seem to be. That child in the story I just told you...was _me_."

He regarded me with a stricken expression. Neither one of us could manage a single word over the next few minutes; Keiichi was too shocked by my disclosure and I was too upset to marshal my thoughts.

"Keiichi, I have never told this to anyone, not even Urd. I can only hope that the story of my birth parents has illustrated in some way that the realm of love is sometimes fleeting and fragile. The need for family solidarity that is bred into all of us remains unlabored by some. You now have a chance to save yourself and Megumi. Please take it..." I implored him, fighting back tears.

"But _how_? How can I talk to Megumi now, after all that has been said and done?" Keiichi wondered aloud. The fact that he was even asking this question brought a sense of satisfaction and a play of hope to me.

"My guess is that you start with the words 'Megumi, I'm sorry'," I said, trying to conceal the incline towards sarcasm in my voice. I noticed Keiichi's face 'flash' slightly, the kind of sensation one notices when a lightning bolt lights up the sky behind their back, casting an instant glare upon all whatever they were looking at.

We both turned around to see Peorth...and Sleipnir.

"Something's gone _terribly_ wrong!" Peorth announced.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Keiichi looked at Sleipnir as if the giant eight-legged horse was the manifestation of his worse black studies of dream. Peorth had explained how the Almighty had reinfected Urd, Belldandy and Skuld with the so-called "Demon Virus" by doing something with Time, going into the Past to recreate the illness. Following this, He had been unable to remove it! He restored the three Norns to the Present and Time itself didn't remove the infection. He attempted to remove it once more, without success. In her kiosk at the GRO complex, Peorth was stunned by the August One's inability to create a curative for symptoms of the virus. Struggling against the fugue of her disbelief, Peorth realized immediately that she needed to travel to the Earthrealm to try and prevent any further damage.

Then she informed Keiichi and Cevn that the virus had struck _all_ the Gods! Somehow, it didn't simply attack the three Norns this time. None of the Gods were manifesting symptoms as yet, but Sifu had scanned a large number of those present at the Assembly.

All were 'infected'...including the Almighty!

Every God in Yggdrasil had the "Demon Virus".

And Keiichi had to ride Sleipnir once again to save Urd, Belldandy and Skuld. He didn't have to pause to consider the prospects of danger twice. Keiichi knew he would do anything to save Bell-chan, even if it meant facing his deepest fears. As Peorth caught her breath, winded because of her panic, Keiichi clambered on the back of Sleipnir.

As Peorth finished her breathless explanation, Banpei wheeled into the living room.

"_Demonic intruders identified!_" he said in a_ new_ robotic voice...and fired a missile at Peorth.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

As Keiichi disappeared on Sleipnir, Peorth was screaming at Banpei.

"What the hell is the matter with you, Mr. Watchman? I'm a _Goddess_, you stupid misguided mechanical sentry! Why are you firing charms and missiles at me, you half-tinned idiot?"

I was grateful that Peorth was capable of defending herself (and me) against the armillary that Banpei was launching. Sigel was trying to persuade Banpei to stop the attack, calling him every version of "idiot" that she could think of. Then she shot both of her retrievable Rocket Fists in an attempt to stop him. With a faster-than-the-eye-can-follow reaction, Banpei grabbed one fist, then the other. Swiftly enknotting the thin metal lines that bound them to Sigel's 'wrists', he released them. When Sigel's fists recoiled back, they were unable to reconnect to her arms. Tangled against her chest, Sigel couldn't untie them either; it would be like a human trying to untie a pair of handcuffs.

Her verbal chastisements of Banpei shifted into a plethora of swearing at this point. Banpei RX ignored her completely.

"Initial defense posture failed to neutralize Demonic intruder. Transferring to primary energy mode, upgrading defense posture to code Skuld-1. Exercising extreme prejudice..." his robotic voice boomed.

He was beginning to sound like prayerless demented version of Robocop.

A set of metallic 'wings' unfolded from Banpei's back; jets of smoke sprang from his undercarriage as he hovered into the air on strands of rocket exhaust. Circling around the living room, the bulky robot was haphazardly knocking lamps and lights over. He paused, and then his chest opened up to reveal a lens-like turret that looked like one of those funky lasers from an old Godzilla movie.

I almost wanted to laugh...if only this wasn't so serious.

With a loud hum, a sphere appeared out of nowhere, imprisoning Peorth. I could only watch in amazement as Peorth looked at Banpei with an expression of utter shock...before starting to pound the inner surface with her fists. The sphere reminded me of the enclosures Mara had cast around Skuld and I when she had abducted us shortly after I arrived in Japan. Peorth was having no luck in breaching the barrier around her.

I decided at this point to try and deactivate Banpei in order to free Peorth. Crouching low, I studied his frame for anything that looked like an 'off' switch. Knowing Skuld, she had probably concealed it. His powerpack used to be in the back, but Skuld had microconstructed it some time ago after the incident when Dr. Morrow kidnapped Sigel...so that Banpei couldn't be deactivated so easily.

"Prevention isn't always the best prescription," I grumbled to myself. A moment later, I noticed a small inset with a slider, right below the seam where his neck joined his back. That must be it! I jumped towards the Quixotic "Mr. Watchman"...and with an expert turn, Banpei wheeled around and struck me vehemently in the chest with his mechanical arm, the fingers curled into a fist. I felt several ribs crack as I was thrown across the room by the force of the blow.

Banpei turned his attention to his left wrist.

"Secondary target rendered immobile. Primary target rendered captive. Deploying tactical nuclear weapons..." he announced as he punched a series of lighted keys that had appeared on his wrist.

A moment later, Banpei went limp...and I felt myself passing out.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Keiichi struggled to hold his breath at he and Sleipnir passed through the water universe. He realized that he didn't need to; because whatever environment had plenished him with breathable air in the 'space universe' was probably active in this universe too.

"Good boy, Sleipnir...just get me out of here as fast as you can!" he whispered to the steed with nervous polity. In response, Sleipnir accelerated while Keiichi grit his eyes shut, his patent fear of water casting him in an illusory chokehold...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

As suddenly as it started, the excruciating pain vanished.

"Thank God it's over!" Urd thought, pausing to catch her breath. She rotated in midair to study her two younger sisters. Both Belldandy and Skuld were breathless and dazed, their expressions suggesting to Urd the image of half-awake sleepwalkers.

It was over.

Then again, maybe it wasn't...

The Lord was peering at her with an expression of confusion. Then He pointed His finger towards she and her sisters and flicked the air.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Odeyn and Freiija huddled together in front of the Assembly. The question now wasn't so much about going to War. Every God and Goddess's convictions had been wrestled to the core with the Almighty's inability to remove the "Demon Virus" from the Norns. The Lord had withdrawn from the Assembly to parts unknown. At least his three girls were safe and well, standing on the dais with he and his wife. That was the sole source of consolation for Odeyn.

During the Almighty's 'experiment', _every_ being in Yggdrasil had been exposed to the "Demon Virus". In spite of the Lord's omnipotence, the Demon Virus had infected every God and Goddess at Urd's Well! Those who weren't present at the War Council were being hastily rushed into quarantine by the few remaining Proctors and Adepts who weren't present during the Assembly and thus weren't exposed to the viral agents. According to Sifu, every God who was infected would begin to suffer the initial effects within fifteen rotations of the Earth planet.

The question of survival was moot at this point. Freiija realized that the curative method the young mortal had discovered...had only applied to her three daughters! Otherwise, _all_ of the Gods would have been freed of the virus.

The enormity of their situation intimidated Freiija as she held little Skuld to her bosom. It was simple overwhelming...soulboggling.

Odeyn recovered himself and rose to the dais to address the Assembly.

"Fellow Gods, I..I really don't know what to say to you. But I know in my heart that this leaves us with one recourse. Because we are all foredoomed by this virus, the Multiverse itself is at risk. With no Gods to balance the Demons, the Demons will be able to subject the Multiverse unopposed..."

_--BOOOM!!--_

In the air above them, a sunhillow of light flashed accompanied by a loud explosion. As the illumination faded, the Assembly gasped with a single tidal breath.

The Lord was hovering above the multitude, manifesting Himself in a planet-sized form of spirit. He was arrayed in a full battle robe, His golden armor shining brightly as it cracked with arcane energy. His long white hair was tied in back and braided in the front, the large braids extending out from the ornate helmet He was wearing. The dazzling kabuto helmet was dominated by a diamond-studded platinum hachi crownpiece. Intricate wire designs of precious metals and studs of rare gems laced the hachi. In the front, about where the 'forehead' of the helmet would be, a pearl kuwagata was mounted, its milkmetal decorative gleam sweeping upwards into two 'horns', each with the symbol for Yggdrasil carved upon it.

None of the Gods had ever seen the Lord in anything other than His ceremonial attire as leader of Yggdrasil...the vision of Him in His glorious battle regalia was terrifying.

None of the Gods had ever seen Him cry.

Odeyn shuddered, feeling a deep humility as he saw the tears flowing down the face of the August One. The Lord had never been this sad before. He had no reason to be overwrought with sorrow...until now. Odeyn realized that _all_ of Kami-sama's children, save Urd, Belldandy, Skuld and those who were fortunate enough to be absent from the Assembly...were going to die.

Kami-sama's immense aspect filled Odeyn and Freiija with love, fear and awe. His impossible sadness was overwhelming; all the Gods and Goddesses in the Assembly were witnessing a proof of the absolute extent of His love for them.

Slowly, the Lord's sad visage turned into orange-red rage.

_"-_WASTE THEM!!-_ Waste all the Demons! Herewith, I annul the Doublet System so that we may chasten them for their perfidy! Don't stop, My Children, until -_every one of them is dead-_! This is My sole command to you. This isn't War...this is a sure course of righteous vengeance for the genocide the Demons have wreaked upon us!"_

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

The moment she saw Keiichi rematerializing with Sleipnir, the force bubble confining Peorth disappeared. Tumbling awkwardly to the ground, she heard a second _thump! _as Keiichi slid off the mechasaddle, sprawling onto the floor with his eyes roofed. Momentarily disoriented, Peorth floated over to where Keiichi had fallen.

He had ridden Sleipnir...but did his mind survive?

"C'mon Keiichi! Se reveiller! Se reveiller!" Peorth pleaded, lightly slapping him on the cheek. Irrespective of what was happening up in Yggdrasil, her single concern at the moment was that Keiichi would recover from the trauma of his ride.

"Please don't let dear Keiichi be insane!" Peorth pleaded, casting her supplicating attention upwards. He had been on Sleipnir a _long_ time!

A moment later, his chest heaved...and his eyes fluttered open.

"Keiichi, mon amour! You're safe!" Peorth blurted as she pulled him to her chest, hugging him tightly. She realized that she was ignoring her promise to Belldandy, that she was deliberately bridging a forbidden distance between her and Keiichi.

But she didn't care.

"P..Peormph. Am I glaph to see youmph," Keiichi said weakly.

"Oh, my heroic Keiichi!" Peorth praised him, hugging him tighter.

"Youmph can letmph me go nowmph..." she heard a muffled voice vibrate against her skin.

"Did you..." Peorth started to ask, pausing as she felt Keiichi's hot breath tingling her cleavage. Looking down, she saw his face turning crimson red as he realized that his face was nestled snugly between her...

Reluctantly, she released him, easing him back into a seated position. Well, at least she had a _moment _with him.

"Yes. I rode Sleipnir all the way there and back. I can't even begin to describe the sights that I experienced along the way."

"I always knew you were brave!" she acknowledged.

Keiichi let that one pass. Peorth was clearly love-dazed...he could see the telltale glaze to her eyes. She might as well have had heartshapes for pupils. He paused to survey the living room, observing that, once again, the furniture was trashed. He saw Cevn slumped against the wall. Turning around, he saw Banpei standing very still in the middle of the room, Sigel standing over the robotic watchman with a worried expression.

"What happened here?"

"Skuld's little robot 'pal' went crazy! He attacked me, thinking I was a Demon! Can you believe it? _Moi_...a Demon? Then he imprisoned me in some kind of stasis sphere and punched Cevn _really hard_... Oh my, I forgot! You better check on Cevn!"

Keiichi caught a little fear at Peorth's express of concern and quickly ran over to Cevn, Peorth floating right behind him. Bracing Cevn up against the wall with a strong hand, he watched as his friend coughed up some blood.

"Shit!" Keiichi thought, realizing that Cevn was really hurt. It was a good thing that Peorth was here. She could probably administer some divine first aid!

Recognizing Keiichi, Cevn strained to say something. Leaning in closer, Keiichi assured him that Belldandy and the others would be returning soon. They _had_ to, since he had ridden Sleipnir to infinity and back.

"Banpei...nukes..cough cough...firing nukes..."

"Huh? What?" Keiichi asked, not believing what he was hearing. At that moment, Belldandy and her sisters flashed into existence in the living room, riding a beam of light that pierced the roof.

"Bell-chan! You're back!" he shouted happily as she floated over to where he was standing. He sprung to his feet, almost knocking her over as he tackled her with an embrace.

"Cevn!!" Urd shouted as she floated over to his side, bullet-fast.

"He tried to jump Banpei...and Banpei hit him. Hard!" Peorth explained as she waved her hands in a healing gesture over his chest. Cevn looked thankfully at her and Urd as she mended his ribcage and lungs. A strange, soft rippling sensation filled his chest as Peorth clasped her hands over his heart and encanted a healing. A minute later, he sat up and coughed. Urd realized that he was going to be okay.

Feeling an almanac of rage, Urd wheeled on Skuld.

"This had gone too far!! Your stupid robot tried to hurt Cevn! I'm going to _trash him_!" she announced, and then stormed out to the repair garage in clench fisted rage, so angry she didn't even notice Banpei was in the living room.

"Don't you dare hurt Banpei, Big Sister, or I'll..."

"Urd..._wait_!" both Belldandy and Peorth chorused.

At the mention of his name, Banpei snapped into back into mechanized life, filling the room with a startup sequence of cacophonous beeps. Skuld hugged him protectively, not wanting to believe what Peorth had said.

"What happened, Banpei-kun?" she asked him frantically.

"Circuits malfunctioning...delimited programming loopcycle purge...detection program compromised...additional nonlegacy components unrecognized..."

What seemed like robotic technobabble to everyone else...made perfect sense to Skuld. Nodding her head at the ailing mecha, she reached behind the back of his head and lifted up Banpei's metallic cap a few centimeters. Everyone watched as she seemed to search for something by fingertip...

"Whew!" she smiled as she pulled out a transparent wafer the size of an Arare cracker. Banpei immediately shuddered into immobility.

Running to her "Skuld's Lab" room, she rifled through a box of programming chips and found the spare component. As she returned to the living room, she saw Urd in the doorway, huffing in rage as she hoisted a large sledgehammer.

"Wait!" Skuld screamed. "Someone's tampered with his programming!"

"Wait my ass! I'm gonna..."

"Urd!" Belldandy and Keiichi shouted.

"Settle down, Urd!" Peorth confronted the irate Goddess, physically blocking her away from Banpei.

"This makes no sense! Skuld's mecha thought I was a Demon and attacked a mortal! You can't just bust him up before we find out why! At least let your little sister reprogram him, so we can obtain an explanation. If he's defective, I'll gladly join you in pounding him into a pile of slag!"

Skuld ignored the threats and locked the circuits up to Banpei-kun's memory architecture. As the arcaneware chip molded itself to the other components of his A.I., the robot stirred back into sentience.

_"Recall of Demonic Assault prevention tactics, May 29th, 20XX, 11:14am,"_ he announced crisply.

"See! He's okay! He remembers!" Skuld exclaimed defiantly, her voice a redemption song of words.

_"Appearance of Demonic intruder coincided with manifestation of Sleipnir Prime. Sleipnir Prime and Master Keiichi consequently flee to safety, leaving Banpei-san to contain threat. Primary threat identified: Demon First Class, Unlimited, Unrestricted license. Secondary threat identified: Mortal, manifesting partial Demonic aura._

_"Engagement protocols activated...initial countermeasures taken. Short range missiles deployed, arcane-charged binding charms, anti Demonic strobe charges, laser field repression fire. Initial defense posture ineffective, situation upgraded to Skuld-1. Containment stasis spell successfully applied, neutralizing primary threat. Secondary threat rendered inactive with physical reprisal. Tactical nuclear weapons engaged..."_

"B..B..B..BANPEI! T..T..TACTICAL N..N..NUCLEAR W..W..WEAPONS!" Skuld screamed in shock.

_"Tactical nuclear reprisal as programmed standard offensive posture during engagement with Demonic incursions, per condition Skuld-1. Four American missiles launched at Chinese targets...two strikes registered against targets Chieh Mo and Kuei Lin. Four Chinese missiles launched at American targets...one strike registered against target Lincoln, Nebraska. Two Pakistani missiles launched against Indian targets...two strikes registered against targets Gaya and Raipur. Two Indian missiles launched at Pakistani targets, two strikes registered at..."_

"Tell me this is some kind of a sick joke!" Keiichi shouted as Banpei continued listing targets and strikes like a newscaster reporting J-League soccer scores.

Skuld fell to the floor in a dead faint as the room filled with a poise of dread that approached somnific proportions.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --


	53. Pt 53: Decimations

**Part 53: Decimations**

The scene that scathed Belldandy's mind was piteous; a living moment exposed to a gray blur of pathos...an emotional pall that reduced the scene to a harsh colorless extreme.

After several attempts to revive her, Skuld had finally awakened from her swoon only to crouch into a huddle on the floor. At the moment, her little sister was crying into her sleeve, too ashamed to show her face to anyone. Her dun-brown eyes were filled with tears of histrionic discord.

"I..snff..didn't do it! I _never_ programmed Banpei to use any kind of weapons against humans, except Keiichi! It wasn't my fault! I know I didn't make a..snff..mistake when I created Banpei-kun!" she protested adamantly. No one in the room believed for a second that Skuld had clumsily programmed Banpei to resort to launching conventional nuclear weapons of any kind.

Despite her best efforts to console her sister, Belldandy knew that she just wasn't capable of reaching Skuld when she was _this_ upset.

No one was.

She looked over to Urd, feeling her older sister's lack of ease. Normally, this would be a prime situation for Urd to dish out some choicely worded digs, but Urd hadn't even teased Skuld once. Instead, Urd's face was ticking with compassion...and fear.

In the few minutes since Banpei had acknowledged that he had launched a series of nuclear strikes in response to a 'Demon' attack, Skuld's kittenish composure had withered away; she was obviously on the verge of a breakdown. Belldandy was deeply worried that Skuld was too buried in the crevices of her own shocked guilt to realize that someone must have tampered with Banpei's A.I. _This_ was the only reasonable explanation...no one in their right mind would program Banpei to launch nukes!

Yet Banpei seemed to think that he had launched atomic weapons in order to protect the temple...according to some kind of instructions left by Skuld.

Belldandy found herself drawn back in time, releasing the restraints of memory. She recalled with holographic clarity how she had found Skuld after the news of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki shook the Divine World. When Belldandy discovered Skuld hidden amongst the DataNode stacks of the Yggdrasil Mainframe, the shock that she witnessed on Skuld's innocent face at that moment...was the heart-melting look of a little girl whose innocence had been stolen away. Even then, Skuld had the makings of an Earthrealm Trainee; the little Goddess had recently been struck with a fanciful fascination with the Earthrealm and its mortals. Which accounted for her deep state of shock then...and now.

Then...and even now, Belldandy would have paid any price to see Skuld spared such grief.

"Even now..." she whispered softly, causing Urd to raise an eyebrow questioningly.

Now, Skuld believed wholeheartedly that she was personally responsible for _two dozen_ missile launches, according to Banpei-kun's description of events...

Urd was gamely trying to meliorate the situation by maintaining her conviction that Banpei's malfunction was a sort of cybernetic 'hallucination'. She explained that the series of purported missile attacks their robot watchman had reported were simply the result of a glitch in his A.I. program. With a rainyday sunnyness, Urd tried to cheer up Skuld and the mortals.

Belldandy joined her sister, realizing once again that she needed to protect the ones she loved with her talent for crafting optimism as life traveled on, hoping it would emerge as a metaphor for embracing the ephemera of change. Belldandy saw the looks of uncomfortable dread conspicuous on the countenance of every mortal in the house. Keiichi and the others were visibly trembling with terror.

She knew from whence this trepidation arose. It was the fear that delves deep beyond the marrow of the bones...transcending all matters of sensibility...more inwardly essential than the dinosaur-mind of the hippocampus...buried even further than the gaping holes of the transparent collective consciousness of the Earthrealm itself. The very Souls of the Earthrealm mortals were cloaked into stillness; filled with the instinctual slipwheel emotions of fright that accompany a dawning realization that the entire species was poised arisk with imminent self-destruction!

Thousands of races had eradicated themselves in just this fashion, at just this stage of their development. Belldandy felt a sickening melancholy as she remembered the announcements of their genocides displayed on the Evolutionary Big Board.

The recent demise of Querztulon held a particular solemnity in her heart. The avian species had released a series of airborne chemical attacks. Over a period of several years, the survivors fled the toxic clouds, which ravaged their treeberthed clutches; killing the next generation of Querztulons. Eventually, the last few Querztulons fell to the ground, exhausted from lack of food and constant flying. There, they were eaten by the surface-born predators...

Thirty millennia of sentient civilization...wiped out in a feel swoop of war greed.

It was always the same: a preemptive strike with a weapon of mass destruction, igniting a shift towards communal insanity...which resulted in an orgyasmic eruption of mindless chaos.

Unspoken amidst the tension, everybody's 'hope against hope' was that Urd's reservations would prove to be the truth.

Twenty minutes later, the TV screen went blank and the defense sirens sounded off...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Never in the temples of my imagination, never in my wildest dreams, never whatever...did I envision a waking nightmare of a future where I would be watching the Emergency Broadcast Network, live and direct on my living room TV...

The EBN news was grim to the point of being agonizing in its lucidity. In total, 24 medium-sized cities had been targeted by nuclear warheads; the missiles were launched from _every_ nation capable of delivering a nuclear payload via rocket. A couple of these nations were total surprises to the rest of the world; they had so zealously guarded their possession of nuclear weapons and launching platforms that no one knew they had the ability to deliver a nuclear strike.

15 metropolitan areas ranging in population from 200,000 to 500,000 had been destroyed. No non-nuclear nations had been targeted.

"Lucky we live in Japan," we all said at various times during the broadcast. Ironically, since Japan was the only nation ever targeted by nuclear weapons up until today.

Today...changed _everything_.

It was a sickening form of high drama as the tale of the nukes unfolded before our rapt attention. Several missiles had malfunctioned due to poor construction or lack of maintenance. Warheads had been downed by anti-missile weaponry. Apparently, the United States' "Star Wars" defensive network was much further developed than the government had led us to believe...yet it had proved to be a total flop as far as preventing missile strikes. One Chinese missile landed right in the middle of its target city of Las Vegas...but never exploded. I imagined that a few hundred thousand people in that city were walking on soap bubbles right about now as experts were preparing to remove the missile and disarm it. Despite the millions of people who had been ripped off by the crooked casinos in Vegas...the city itself had proved itself impervious to the vicissitudes of karma.

One story in particular presented a redeem in the midst of this unparalleled tragedy. A Yugoslavian airline pilot intercepted one of the missiles closing in on a target in Russia and used his jet as a 'human anti-aircraft missile' to collide with the warhead 55,000 feet in air, detonating it hundreds of miles from its intended ground of destruction. According to the flight transmission, his passengers were cheering him on in the final moments...

The initial estimates of casualties produced figures in excess of ten million, with another 50 million left homeless. Several detonations were caught on videotape under incidental circumstances by tourists. To my complete dismay and disgust, they _televised the images_!

If the EBN was trying to use tactics of abashment to intimidate...they had succeeded. After the initial broadcast, I was scared shitless.

They concluded by announcing that the United Nations was planning to meet in an emergency session. Moments after the bombings, China and the US both formally declared war on each other. India and Pakistan were already massing troops at their borders. Russia had declared war on France...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

As soon as he could think straight following the initial broadcast, Keiichi tried to offer some words of comfort to Skuld. The events portrayed on the EBN were simply too incredible to be comprehended; the only sensible thing he could think of doing in this situation was to offer succor to those who needed it in his 'family'.

He felt so intimidated by the sheer scope of the calamitous news that he couldn't stop his body from trembling. Everything seemed to ripple with surreality...it seemed that his mind was threatening to leave him at escape velocity.

Yet, he knew deep inside that Skuld was in far worse shape than the mortals in the house; namely Cevn, Tomohisa and himself. She actually was convinced that it _was her own fault_! As Skuld stared vacantly at the floor, shrugging off Belldandy and Urd's attempts to try and massage the tension out of her shoulders, Keiichi just wanted to hug her...to minister kindness to her. As he spoke to her, Skuld didn't even respond...yet her whole being seemed to be crying for help...

"I DIDN'T DO IT! IT'S NOT MY FAULT!" she suddenly exploded into screams. Everyone in the room flinched as Skuld launched in a series of over-the-top hysterics. With a flash, Mjolnir appeared in her hands! With this, Keiichi leapt clear across the room as Skuld started swinging at anything in sight, scattering the Gods and mortals to the corners of the living room.

"She's snapped!" Urd exclaimed, barely dodging a hammerfall that whisked so close to her head that a bang of platinum hair was left dangling down the center of her face.

"Skuld, please pull out of it! Listen to me, it's your _sister_, Belldandy!" Belldandy pleaded. Skuld slashed out at her...

Belldandy dodged the hammerblow, then levitated into a curling crouch and shot a spell at Skuld. Twirling Mjolnir like a baton, Skuld created a fan-like blurring motion in front of her, expertly deflecting Bell's spell...which of course nearly zapped Keiichi.

"Where'd she learn to do_ that_?" Urd shouted in consternation as Keiichi peered from the top of the couch he was hiding behind.

Belldandy motioned to Peorth, who had stealthily snuck around behind Skuld while she and Urd drew Skuld's attention. With a swift gesture, Peorth touched the palms of her hands to Skuld's temples. A second later, Urd and Belldandy covered her hands with their own.

"I MUST GET RID OF YOU! YOU ARE THE ONES WHO BELIEVE IT'S MY FAULT! IF I GET RID OF YOU...THEN IT WILL NO LONGER BE MY Fffauu..."

Skuld's crazed eyes blinked with Morse code rapidity, and then she slumped into unconsciousness.

"What'd you guys _do_ to her?" Tomohisa asked, his voice a mixture of fear and angry concern.

"We didn't hurt your little girlfriend, lover boy!" Urd answered, drawing a blush from the teenager.

"Urd...that's rude! He's only concerned about his friend!" Belldandy confronted her older sister. This was one of those times Belldandy was resentful that Urd's Demoness side seemed to come to the fore. Despite everything that had just transpired, Urd _still_ had to unleash at least one insensitive comment.

"Tomohisa, we've put Skuld under a resting spell. It's akin to something you mortals might term...sedation. Her mind is possessed by a chaotic upheaval in reaction to what has just happened. I decided that a resting spell would achieve the utmost good for Skuld. It will give her a reprieve from the guilt she is feeling before it consumes her further. Also, it will give us the opportunity to help her release the guilt," Belldandy explained.

"Man...this _really_ sucks!" Tomohisa shouted out his anguish, peering over the top of the couch he had chosen for cover.

With this, Belldandy picked up Skuld, who was by this time floating supinely in the air, and carried her to the sister's bedroom.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

In Japan, the Prime Minister and the Regent-Emperor had declared martial law. As a neutral country with a pacifist constitution, the government was more concerned about threats from within rather than invasion from without. Yet, the fact that the Pacific Rim had become a war zone loomed close to everyone's breast.

Strategically, Japan was located between China and the US.

Stunned just wasn't the _right_ word to describe what I was feeling. The EBN was set to repeat on a 15-minute loop after the initial break-in broadcast. Each replay recounted a detailed list of emergency procedures in the event of nuclear attack. After the first couple repeats of the loop, I felt an irresponsible urge to laugh hysterically. The 'instructions' were woefully inadequate to the point where they became a joke, not to mention the fact that they looked like they had been filmed 50 years ago.

After a couple of hours, a new broadcast announced the Civil Defense Authority, in order to explain the conditions of the martial law in detail. As I watched, I realized that the martial law part of the broadcast was deadly serious in topic. A curfew was in effect...no one was supposed to be outside after 7pm. A Self Defense Force van would come by our neighborhood tonight and distribute food and fuel lottery coupons; this was being done in order to prevent a rash of panicked citizens rushing the markets.

No personal motor vehicles were allowed on the streets until further notice. Bus routes would announced shortly, to provide transportation to those who had to report to government or military workplaces. A schedule would be forthcoming, designating staggered bus transportation so each household could purchase staples and food.

In contrast to the 'nuclear attack' segment, the civil defense conditions of martial law were exacting to a fault. My nerves felt like they were being sliced and diced in a veg-o-matic as I realized that a huge portion of my rights had just been snatched away. I understood that these emergency preparations were being meted out with the best of intentions...but I struggled with the inner recess of my being which was desirous to rebel with adolescent disrespect. In essence, a series of conditions were being placed on me that seemed far stricter than any guidelines a parent might dash out.

"Kinda feels like we're being punished, huh?" Keiichi observed. I was relieved that someone else was finding the harsh conditions of martial law to be a bit on the persecutive side.

"This really sucks! I was going to have baseball practice tonight at the park!" Tomohisa added.

"I'm already scared to death...and now this! What if I want to go see the sunset? No...I've gotta stay inside like a 5 year-old!" I complained.

"You know, the last place I want to be in a nuclear war is inside. If I'm going to be blasted into atoms by a bomb, I want to be out in the open..." Keiichi groused.

"Keiichi! Don't be so _maudlin_! I'm here with you, my love! There is no way that I'll let you be killed by an atomic weapon! If the need arises, I'll unseal my powers and shield us all from any..."

I didn't even have a second to check the betraying words that hurled off of my tongue.

"Yeah, like you can really do something about it, Belldandy! Why weren't you or some other Goddess able to stop all the other missile strikes! Didn't _those_ people's lives count for anything? You talk like you're so compassionate...yet none of you did anything to stop the deaths of _TEN MILLION _people..."

"Shut up, Cevn! Leave her alone!" Urd shouted. Belldandy was looking at me with stop-shock, her face quivering near tearfalls at the bite of my acrid remarks.

"Or what, Urd? You Goddesses can leave this damned planet anytime, but we're _stuck here_ amongst the savages! I doubt that a direct hit by an H-bomb would do little more than singe a couple hairs on that energy manifest head of yours! If you feel that mortal affairs are so pithy, than why don't you just leave us, so we can go ahead and kill each other. Then you won't have to deal with us unfortunate mortals..." I shouted, my snapcased anger fueled by Urd's recent revelation that mortal affairs were tiny in comparison to more cosmic matters. That the love between us was overshadowed into insignificance...

"Cevn, if you don't stop it, I'm going to kick your ass!" Keiichi shouted. "You apologize to Belldandy right now! You _know_ she was up in Yggdrasil when all of this happened!"

"And that begs another question...how could the almighty Gods in their palaces in Yggdrasil be so totally clueless as to what was going down here, you shithead! _Think _for a moment, Keiichi! They..."

"You're an asshole if you think that any of this is their fault, Cevn!" Keiichi shouted, getting in my face.

"And this little fit of yours isn't only about my sister or the war...it's about _us_ too!" Urd confronted me with whiplash accuracy.

Damn her, she knew me too well!

"I..I'm fucking _losing it_!" I cried out. I couldn't go any further. With a crisp crack, I felt my ego split open and spill its yolk out onto the floor. I was outside of myself, trying to bite off the heads of the people who really mattered...just because I couldn't handle, couldn't understand, what was happening all around me.

"Stopitstopitstopit STOP IT!" Belldandy screamed angrily. "I said I would protect you...and I _meant _it!"

One of the wicker lamps snapped in two at the volley of shouts from Belldandy. Once again, I was served a reminder that she could be _loud_ when she wanted to be!

"Uh oh, she's pissed off!" I heard Urd murmur under her breath.

"What you two so-called mortal 'adults' are doing right now is disgusting! Your arguing is nothing less than a microcosm of the insanity I've been working hard to prevent for thousands of years! You have to set your fears aside, especially now. You're acting...exactly the way _they_ want you to! They...meaning whoever or whatever orchestrated this horrible rash of bombings!" Belldandy asserted angrily.

"What do you think we do in the Goddess Relief Office? A vital aspect of our role in granting wishes to mortals is to create a condition so that humanity can be better prepared to choose the path that leads to the Next Level...instead of the path that leads to self-destruction or Madness! Kami-sama even established up rival offices so we have to _compete_ to make things better for you mortals; this is why Peorth and I are rivals in a sense," she added by means of explanation.

"And I always thought it was to keep us from getting bored," Peorth commented, drawing a brief giggle from Belldandy. It was their old private joke; but very appropriate in this circumstance. Then Peorth turned to face us, firmly resolved to lecture Keiichi and I.

"Belldandy and I...we're not just performing all this wishgranting just for _your_ selfish needs! By making life better for those who have had their innermost wishes granted...we are in the process of making life more harmonious for _every_ Earthrealm mortal! Why do you think we have so many Goddesses working so hard in the Earth Otasuke Division?" Peorth elaborated.

"You two men...should be utterly ashamed of yourselves! I've seen the best qualities of mortalkind demonstrated time and time again in both of you! And now you, Keiichi, and you, Cevn...are abandoning the very principles you both claim to stand on! Instead, you're both acting like a couple of greedy, righteous children fighting over a sweet melon roll at lunchtime!" Belldandy confronted us with all the verve of a mother catching her kids with sticky fingers in the cookie jar.

"Why don't _you_ think, for a change? We have an expression, a sort of motto, at the Earth Otasuke Division. It says 'Avoid enjoying the comfort of opinion at the expense of the discomfort of thoughtful reflection.'" Peorth added, clearly charged up by Belldandy's ambitious confrontation. Belldandy flipped her an elaborate handslap; evidently the Yggdrasilian equivalent of a high five.

I looked at Keiichi with a resigned expression. It was obvious that we had been slam dunked, Goddess style! Bell and Peorth had made short shrift out of my explosive arguments...and a moment later we were both bowing before the Goddesses as Belldandy continued. I noticed all three Goddesses grinning broadly at each other, realizing that they were handing out a well-deserved dressing down.

"The Earthrealm is filled with mortals like you who are dreadfully frightened right now. But you, like them, need to rise above your fears, instead of letting your fright misdirect you towards being angry at each other. And you both need to trust that every human being on the Earthrealm _wants_ to live free from the shadows of fear! _Wants_ to trust each other! Especially now, because trust may be the only thing standing between this moment...and total annihilation!" Urd said.

"If you were actually _aware_, you both would realize that this tragic incident with the atomic weapons had nothing to do with Skuld! Or even with we Goddesses! Whatever being of Evil was behind this atrocity...they were able to use our own technology against us! They took advantage of us, striking while we were involved in a War Council...at a point when our thoughts were occupied elsewhere!" Peorth added.

Quite unexpectedly, all three Goddesses closed their eyes meditatively, as if they were receiving a mental transmission of some kind. After a moment, they all snapped back to consciousness.

Their faces were straining against what appeared to be a deeply felt dread. Something was definitely wrong. I looked at Urd, whose bronze skin actually seemed to pale with distress. Belldandy and Peorth were visibly shaking.

"You think _this _is bad? I just found out that my MOTHER AND FATHER are going to die! Every God and Goddess on Yggdrasil is going to perish! When the Almighty brought us back and reinfected us, He ended up reinfecting _everyone_! And we three are the only ones who aren't sick!" Belldandy relayed the news to us, her voice shrill with candor.

I almost fell on my face from my bowing position, I was so shocked. I had assumed that Keiichi's trip on Sleipnir had cured the sisters. I had no idea that the Divines had become envirused!

Including Peorth. When Belldandy said "we three", Peorth blanched, obviously because she had just realized that she was probably infected too, because she had attended the Assembly. If so, wouldn't that mean that the three Norns would be reinfected by Peorth?

My mind raced in spiral suppositions...

The silent wings of "whatnow" fluttered through the room, linking both Gods and we mortals in a plague of morbid speculation.

"And if _that_ happens...imagine what will happen to the Multiverse! Much as I could picture it with words, neither of you could even begin to comprehend the complications that would arise. But despite my deep pain and fear...you don't see me fighting with Urd or Peorth because I'm too scared to examine the facts! I chose to stay, protect those whom I love...and still try to reach for a beacon of hope," Belldandy declared. "And you both know why we all do this…"

**"Love **_**is**_** Hope!"**

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"War above and War below!" Isilblius shouted exultantly in front of Mara, dancing akimbo with capers of frenetic energy.

Mara was barely clinging to life. The SpiderDemons had almost depleted all of her Demoness energy reserves, bite by painful bite. Once they finished with her energy, then they would begin to consume her Soul.

She hated everything that Isilblius had become.

"You will _not_ succeed! There has to be some kind of Power that can stop you! You're ruining eternities of symmetry between Demons and Gods..."

_Smack!!_

Mara reeled from the blow as Isilblius stood close to her, glaring at her angrily.

"Shut up, Mara! Mother..Lover...Demoness failure! I _will_ destroy everything, because symmetry inevitably spawns disorder! An elegant disorder where I'll recreate everything! All existence will be ordered along _my_ will...rendered by _my_ own designs! This is the holy purpose for which I was created. And in a sense, by creating me...you are responsible for the destruction of everything you hold dear, Mara. I'll make sure I inform the Dark One of this fact before I slaughter Him into a lifeless shell!"

Mara choked at the bitter image Isilblius had depicted. The most repugnant situation she could imagine was one where she had proved unworthy of His Dark Majesty. To be held accountable for His Darkness's demise...was utterly morale-crushing to the young Demoness. Yes, she would die soon enough, but to have her name brought into eternal shame...

She felt a deep anger surge from inside her weakened body.

"So if you're so powerful, why haven't the Mortals resorted to an all-out war? It's been over six hours since..errgh..since all those nuclear weapons were discharged!"

"SHUT UP! You know _nothing_!" Isilblius screamed, his frustration drawing a weak grin from Mara.

The momentary look of witlessness on his face was worth it, despite the bone crunching kick that followed...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

The Le Mans had been canceled because of the tension in France. At least half of the E.E.C. was split on the issue of allowing Russian Confederation troops to invade France. Russia, as a member of the E.E.C., had decided to pursue a diplomatic resolution that would allow it a 'sanctioned' aggressive stance against France. This way, she wouldn't have to invade the geographically intervening nations. This was all the more ironic, since four Russian missiles had been fired at targets in France...but none of them struck. Only one missile reached its target, but it was a 'dud'. The city of Clermont-Ferrand had been spared total devastation.

We were sitting at the dinner table, trying to keep the conversation light as the radio droned on. Each hour, it seemed WW III was poised just behind this evening's moon...

_"Megumi!"_

Belldandy had shouted with joyful surprise. I didn't know how long Keiichi's sister had been standing there, watching us eat unobserved. She must have come through the front door.

In typical Megumi fashion, she had decided to visit us...coming over after 9pm.

Completely defying the curfew.

"Well, come sit with us and eat!" Belldandy offered kindly, not a hint of anxiety in her voice. Megumi looked subdued and nervous, her arms passively clenched over her waist with folded hands.

I looked at Keiichi, watching a series of emotions play across his face. Finally, he looked at Belldandy with a resigned expression that implied "I suppose we have to invite her in."

"I..I don't know if it's right for me to join you guys. I...was just feeling homesick. So homesick! And so...scared by those horrible news reports. Sayoko's freaking out about her parents, they're in France doing business!" she said in a low voice.

Urd got up and basically hustled her towards the table, then pulled out a zabuton and gestured for Megumi to sit at the table.

"C'mon. _I__ insist_!" she said, glancing significantly at Keiichi as she loudly tapped the place at our dinner table where Megumi used to sit. Megumi tentatively seated herself at the table.

The dining area was pitch silent for a moment, the only sounds were the clattering of chopstix on plates and an occasional clink of an ice cube in a glass.

I noticed Keiichi pause several times in his eating, each time he opened his mouth as if to say something...but couldn't.

Something had to break...

_"__I can't stand this tension__!__"_ Urd suddenly announced, shooting up in the air to hover over the table.

"Why don't you two just bury the hatchet already! Your stubbornness makes me wanna gag! No wonder you're brother and sister...you both have the pride of an oxturtle! I've rarely encountered such inflexibility in the mortal species!" she exclaimed with jabbing figures of her finger.

"Whatever an oxturtle is," I mused. Once again, Urd had blasted past all reasonable sense of restraint with an impulsive outburst. And strangely enough...sometimes I felt drawn to her by her hinder-hilted bouts of craziness. In fact, I had to admit to myself that Urd had just _done_ what I had _wished_ I could do! This was one of those times where her unpredictability charmed me towards a feeling of love...a gratitude that this Goddess deigned to identify something special in me. And with the recent rash of tragic news, I was really struggling to see anything special in anyone.

Keiichi and Megumi reacted with near choreographed expedition, each putting a hand behind their heads in an expression of acute embarrassment. I could almost see the sweat beads breaking out on their foreheads. I could only hope that the long-standing resentment had been defused; otherwise we'd all be surfing down the emotional avalanche.

"Please don't let this situation blow up!" I overheard Tomohisa whisper to himself, mantra-style.

"And furthermore..." Urd continued.

"Megumi, would you like some tea?" Belldandy interrupted with her sweetest voice. I almost gasped at this: here we were poised on the precipice of a volatile scenario between siblings who were harboring a deep disagreement...and Belldandy was acting the part of hostess! She seemed completely oblivious to the recent conflicts of the past...as if nothing was one iota amissed. In complete contrast to Belldandy's reserve was Urd's passion. It was clearly evident to me that Urd was fueled with righteous energy to see this family quarrel resolved. Knowing Urd, her urgency to settle things was quite probably marked by a strong desire to see some dramatic fireworks erupt between Keiichi and Megumi.

Urd certainly could be a drama queen when she wanted to.

I wondered once more if Belldandy's patent naivety was actually a subtle form of Goddess wisdom; a wisdom that was operating on such a high level, it only _appeared_ to be silliness. A sort of savant-sapient attribute...

Which suggested the story of a legendary Cornell mathematics professor that I learned about in a Philosophy of Mathematics course. The professor who had taught that course would spell the stodgy lectures with tales of eccentric geniuses...in a demonstration of his own eccentrism. After a midterm, he told us the story…

The esteemed Emeritus Chair of the Mathematics Department would sometimes show up at a neighbor's house in the middle of the night and invite himself in, dressed only in a trenchcoat, socks and boxer shorts; looking every bit the part of a prowling flasher. Once inside, he would proceed to exile himself in the basement, demanding that his 'hosts' look after his laundry and meals while the consternated homeowners called the police. Once the authorities straightened them out on whom he was and what was happening, they would leave him alone while he worked constantly, taking breaks only to use the bathroom and eat spinach, nothing else. A week or two later, he would emerge from his cocoonage in the basement with a fully developed groundbreaking mathematical proof. A number of very important theoretical contributions to the science of mathematics had been discovered by him in exactly this manner...he was the Stephen Hawking of the mathematics world in his day...

This mental anecdote reminded me of the fact that, on one level, Belldandy's complete downplaying of the tension only _appeared _to be ignorance in action. But as she cast about an air that was apparently based on the behavioral modus _before_ the schism between Keiichi and Megumi...Belldandy was somehow creating a sense of comfort regarding the fact that Megumi was here. The logical impulse I felt was to react to this situation by being uptight. Yet, my tension was wafted away by the non-logical _something_ in her demeanor.

On another level, Belldandy _was_ the Goddess of the Present; by not reacting to the behavioral dynamics that were tucked away in the past, she _could_ be creating a more harmonious present. She had a fuller vision than any of us; a fresh perspective that could serve as a backdrop for a cease-fire between Keiichi and Megumi.

Lord Byron's famous rhetorical question about ignorance and wisdom came to mind as I tried to figure Bell's game plan...

"How about some homemade cookies to go with your tea, Megumi?" she offered.

"Yeah. Sure," Megumi spoke up, smiling for the first time since she dropped in. Keiichi crossed his arms over his chest defensively.

Here it comes...

"L..look, Megumi. I'm ss...sorry about the other time..."

I heard a splash...Tomohisa had dropped part of an egg roll in his milk; his chopstix were dangling loosely between his fingers.

"Really? Then why did you..."

"Don't start with him!" Urd quickly interjected, speaking almost next to Megumi's ear. "Can't you see that he's trying to apologize? You have any idea how rare and precious an apology can be, especially from a man to a woman?"

"_Hey!!_" I shouted, along with Keiichi and Tomohisa.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

By the morning after the horrible tragedy, the world press had universally coined the dark day that threatened to plunge the world into horror as "N-Day". Now, billions of people held their breath, prayed to their gods, and hoped for a miracle on the political front...

Before the eyes of the entire world, the Secretary General of the UN, hailing from the little African country of Botswana, guided a marathon peacekeeping session of the General Assembly aimed at forestalling World War III. Midway through the first day of the session, worldwide television coverage of the proceedings revealed that the assembly of ambassadors were earnestly pursuing a series of diplomatic solutions intended to forestall the almost certain outbreak of war.

Belldandy could only watch the news. She so desperately wanted to render aid to the Earthrealm mortals in this, their time of crisis. Imagine the reaction of the UN if a fantastically-outfitted _Goddess_ would suddenly appear in the middle of their chambers in a flash of divine light, with her Angel unfurled in full beauty! She crafted peacemaking speeches in her head as an exercise of self-placation, since she knew that she couldn't intervene. It simply wasn't part of the Rules, not to mention that it wasn't within her GRO job description. No doubt, the GRO and Earth Otasuke offices were being swamped with mortal wishes for an end to the waking nightmare of possible nuclear war.

The entire Earthrealm was captivated by the drama, as the fallout of N-Day was left in the hands of the diplomaticians. _Everything_ ground to a halt, not only in the many countries operating under some form of martial law, but in almost every neighborhood on the planet.

Sports events were canceled. Regular network television programming was suspended. Movie theaters were closed. Beaches were empty.

In Tokyo, the streets were deserted...

Belldandy had woken herself very early in the morning, so that she could place a call in to the GRO before anyone else was awake. The operator had informed her with a panicked gust of words...that Yggdrasil was gripped by complete chaos. Belldandy learned that the Goddess Relief Office had somehow been prohibited from interfering in Earthrealm affairs! Shock mounted upon shock as she was told that the prohibition had come, not from the Lord, but from the Yggdrasil Mainframe! Her unease heightened when the operator apparently didn't even know about the outbreak of nuclear bombings on the Earthrealm!

Then she learned that the Almighty had exhorted the War Council to attack the Demons with a jihad-like righteous intensity.

She deliberated over whether she should share _this _dire bit of news with Urd or the others.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

The next day, the leaders from almost every nation addressed the UN General Assembly. Heads of state who had never met in person before were now giving speeches one right after another as the UN committees attempted to negotiate a peace. Poignant speeches by world leaders decried war, while equally poignant rebuttals were offered by the nations who had suffered numbing losses from nuclear strikes. It was so obvious that they truly wanted peace; but there had been horrible casualties as a result of the strikes.

Midway into the evening, the Japanese Prime Minister was scheduled to speak. Instead of speaking, he waived his allotted ten minutes and introduced an elderly Hibakusha, a Hiroshima survivor, to address the UN. As the PM assisted the elderly lady as she limped up to the podium, a blessed silence fell over the General Assembly Hall...the first moment of silence in two days. Belldandy realized that the Japanese PM had just pulled the ultimate trump card out of his nation's 'card deck'.

Her hopes brightened as she sensed the vigor of this very elderly survivor from another era...

She explained that she was 93 years old, and that she had lost her entire family...parents, in-laws, husband and two daughters...when Hiroshima was flattened by the engine of war called an "A-bomb". She herself had been crippled by the collapse of the very section of roof that had shielded her from the ensuing flashfires. She had spent the last 60 plus years walking with difficulty, when she could walk at all. Rendered sterile by the radiation, her body scarred with keloid wounds and lesions, she had become a key figure in the Citizen's Committee Against Nuclear War. With a simple heartfelt passion, she put into words what everyone felt...but no one could say directly. What no one could say with the inarguable weight of _experience_.

"_No more nuclear weapons! No more war!"_

When she finished her halting testimony, the TV cameras panned the UN chambers. The Chinese Premier-elect was wiping tears from his eyes with a handkerchief. The new American President was fussing the corners of his eyes with his knuckles. Hundreds of ambassadors, envoys, and leaders...were teary-eyed as they stood to offer her an ovation.

Belldandy turned to see that everyone in living room was tearfully gripped by the grandam's gentle plea and exhortation. Looking back at the television set, she felt a sense of awe...and deep humility. Having served in the Goddess Relief Office for millennia, Belldandy had routinely created wish fulfillments that were praised as 'miracles' by the Earthrealm mortals she was assigned to serve. But as she sat on the couch cuddled next to her Keiichi in her temple home, Belldandy realized that she had just witnessed a miracle...a miracle the likes of which she could never create...

On the third day, a "Nuclear No Option Treaty" was drafted by the UN and signed by all its member nations; a firm pledge to forgo the use of nuclear and biological weapons of mass destruction should any conflict arise out of the events of N-Day.

"For once, the politicians have done something _right_!" Keiichi had remarked, verbalizing everyone's sentiments.

Beyond this, an even more far-reaching act of diplomacy had been contracted between all the nations who had declared war on each other on the cusp of the disaster. A 90-day moratorium against conventional military action was entreatied, to allow time for a full UN investigation of the circumstances of N-Day!

Apparently, the Secretary General and a number of neutral countries, including Japan, had soundly argued the point home about how it was almost statistically impossible that so many missile launches from the 14 nuclear capable nations could occur _all at once_!

Belldandy baked a special cake that afternoon, decorated with a UN symbol on top. The Earthrealm's council of nations had truly lived up to its charter over the past 72 hours. The fact that the mortals had chosen peace over war...trust over suspicion...moved her very profoundly. She realized that what had happened in the UN chambers...typified the kind of forward-thinking resolve which marked a very early emergence of a planet's Next Level-type global consciousness!

Nobody would taste the salt of her tears mixed in with the cake frosting...the prideful tears of a Goddess who was witnessing an entire species that she loved with all her heart...struggle with the growing pains of planetary adulthood...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"By the way, what disaster should I visit upon the mortals first. I've incited them enough...now I need to create a new form of havoc to amuse myself. Ahhh! I have just the idea!" he shouted.

Waving his hand, Mara saw part of a bloodwall turn into a viewport. It showed the Eiffel Tower, in a city called Paris.

"I'm going to shear each and every structure on this miserable planet that rises 100 meters or higher, one at a time!" Isilblius announced. He snapped his fingers...and a moment later, the Eiffel Tower folded, slowly rotating as it was sliced straight through. Panicked throngs of Parisians fled as the structure twisted and turned...then slowly fell to the ground with a sickening grinding of metal. In front of her eyes, Mara watched as a thousand or so mortals were crushed like ants by the immense metal frame.

As a Demoness, Mara was raised to enjoy the suffering and anxiety experienced by mortals resulting from a well-thought-out curse. A curse crafted by a true expert of the art could actually inflict such a level of suffering on a human being that they actually confused pain with pleasure! As an agent of the Demon Grief Office, Mara had often produced such curses, driving mortals to their doom with a smile. But this...Ultimate Demon...had no such refinement of taste. He was wantonly killing mortals, picking them off like insects.

There was no pleasure in witnessing this atrocity...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Peorth was stranded on the Earthrealm. The Earth Otasuke Division of the GRO had been shut down without explanation...and any means of transport to Yggdrasil were mysteriously denied her.

She didn't mind staying on the Earthrealm for limited engagements while fulfilling a wish contract. She even didn't mind being with Belldandy and Keiichi...whose cozy intimacy only served to remind her of what she couldn't have. But the fact that she couldn't leave took on terrible repercussions.

She couldn't visit her parents, who were dying at this very moment because of the Demon Virus.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

I was moved with a sense of gratitude when Belldandy presented her UN cake to us. She explained that the cake was her attempt to pay homage to the ambitious work the UN had accomplished on behalf of all humanity. Her explanation was superfluous; I think we all knew this the moment she set it on the table. Yet, it was one of those crazy moments that seemed to willow with a romantic whimsy; a sweeping kind of feeling that accompanies watching an epic movie that depicts superhuman courage.

A "Seven Samurai" or "Outlaws of the Marsh" sort of moment.

Someone else had fought long and hard with words and wits on my account. Quite possibly, I might owe them my life. The symbol of the palm leaves against the blue background was a powerful motif for what they had accomplished since N-Day.

They were heroes and heroines who defended sanity, defended peace. I almost felt like extemporizing to express my profound gratitude for their efforts.

The solemn moment was punctuated by excited shouts...

"Don't cut it until we take a vid!" I heard voices exclaim in high sibling stereo fidelity. Keiichi quickly got up and bounded down the hall to get his Nikon digicorder camera as Megumi reminded him which drawer it was in.

It suddenly registered to me...that Keiichi and Megumi had just agreed for the first time since she had returned home to our temple house!

Ever since Megumi's return, there were still invisible sparks whenever she was in the room with Keiichi. They had talked briefly the first night, but it was only a perfunctory sort of discussion. Urd had served as a moderator that night. She told me the next day that she had to work very hard to keep tempers from flaring. But at least they had talked.

Now they were acting like a loving brother and sister, if only for a moment. I wondered if they even realized that a small crack had been weathered against the dam of resentments which was holding back their love for each other.

As I savored the aroma and sight of the delicious cake, I noticed an expectant smile on Megumi's face. Megumi was always fond for food, her sugar and seafood tooth was almost the equivalent of Skuld's penchant for ice cream.

Skuld...

With a glance around the table, I sadly realized something was amiss. That 'something' was tucked away in the Goddesses' bedroom...

Without a word of explanation, I got up and headed for the "Girl's Dorm".

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Sliding the shoji open, I regarded her still form cautiously. Once in a while, Skuld would take a nap on the couch...and I always couldn't help but notice that the depths of sleep always cast her with a raiment of innocence; a kinderwelt of incredible cuteness! In the year and a half that I had been living in Japan, I had witnessed Skuld in almost every mood imaginable. But not like this. Not tranquilized. The kawaii-ness that normally animated her face was gone, replaced by a drawn expression that suggested a form of shellshock.

"Should I wake you up, little sleeping princess?" I whispered to her as I knelt down on the floor nearby. I traced my thoughts back to N-Day; remembering Skuld's explosion of self-inculpment...to the point where it shattered her like a stone thrown through a pane of glass. I didn't want to wake her into _that_...but I didn't want her to miss _this_. Perhaps our celebration of the UN's truce might be the thing to snap her out of her deep ridden guilt.

As I watched the youngest Norn sleeping, I felt a riptide of intuition nettle through my consciousness, leaving in its wake a possible, but crazy idea. When I first arrived her at the temple, Mara had tried to blend our minds in an attempt to destroy both of us, knowing the incompatibility between a mortal and Divine intelligences. But Skuld outwitted her and saved my life by creating a stable bridge between her thoughts and mine. Since that incident, we had a special bond because of that time we had touched minds. There was a tiny bit of ancient wisdom and girlishness inside of me as a result. A small spark of Skuld, as it were. Could it be possible to use that to peer within the curtain of her dreams? If I could just reach her mind, maybe I could try to undo the profound self-blame she had trapped herself within.

In uncertain enterprise, I closed my eyes, trying to envision the time when Skuld and I were captives in Mara's lair…

_Within my eyelids, I saw a sky comprised of weaves of bright circuitry. Against this background, webs of wires and gauges were folding and flowing in fractal regalia. Passing closer were readouts that floated like semi-translucent clouds, design grids of daunting complexity swerving around me like pedestrians in a busy mall._

_The sum of these visual quiddities contested my expectations of an organic unity of apparition..._

_I could sense an 'afterimage' of the time when the Norn of the Future had shared my thoughts. This visual cacophony of her mental process was a manifestation of a brief harmony from that time. If I could only expand into this random 'radar screen' of the mind, _-Imight be able to reach her-_…_

_A swarm of symbols hovered over me, like huge flocks of geese struggling against a Zephyr wind. Concentric circles of light formed multicolored tunnels, which coiled around huge complexes of floating neonglow structures. These edifices seemed to decipher themselves into barely recognizable patterns, the first hint of congruence that I had observed since my imaginative journey. Then I started noticing snippets of God's Language strewn like sunflowers upon their archeforms..._

"-Yggdrasil?-"_ I muttered in the wood of my mind as the structures paraded past me like advert signs flashing against a train window in downtown Tokyo. I felt my mind starting to stretch painfully as the level of complexities increased exponentially into sheer randomness..._

My eyes snapped open of their own accord. I could hear myself breathing 'papapaa papapaa' with rapid gasps, as if I had just sprinted up a hill.

I was_ almost_ there, I realized. Intuition informed me that I was dreamwalking in Skuld's mind, even if I couldn't full comprehend the synaesthasia of continuities. I could either live on the dark side of the day, or I could try to walk on the wind of dream…

Closing my eyes, I gritted my teeth...and reappraised the situation. I feared that I might get lost in the labyrinthine nodes of Skuld's mind; she was a super-genius whose mind was ocean-deep with intelligence, while my mind was a footstep-puddle shallow by comparison. If I ever needed my metallectual attributes to kick in, now would be a good time! My mind seemed to sizzle with information overload...

_I felt like I was plummeting downwards without a parachute, but then I realized that there was no 'down'. My fright peaked..._

_And then everything was calm._

_A huge floating palatial structure loomed ahead in my mental vision, traveling _-towards me-_ like a car on a freeway. For a mindblink, I thought I would be crushed, but somehow I magically weaved my way through halls and floors, transporting myself as if in a flying dream._

_Then I saw the Goddess of my searching._

_Skuld appeared to be hiding from something, as she was tightly tucked away in a remove between stacks of organic circuitry. Her small form was crouched tightly into a recess, sitting on the tiled floor with her arms were wrapped around her legs. Her face was buried between her knees in a posture of sad dejection._

_A moment later, Belldandy hovered down and alighted in front of Skuld. I watched as Belldandy gently gathered up the little Goddess, soothing her as she held Skuld's head to her chest. I could barely hear Skuld's voice as she explained how sad she felt about Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Her face was twisted in Faustian confusion._

_I felt transports of guilt because I was witnessing such a very private moment in Skuld's life..._

_Then Belldandy started changing._

_Slowly, grotesquely, she transformed. Her skin rippled away its softness, transmorphing into a dark orange and shiny dermis. Her face was rendered globular; her benevolent expression unmasking itself into a red-shelled Banpei. A Banpei with an _–angry-_ countenance. The gentle hands that had been hugging Skuld a moment ago were now tentacled mechanical claws, choking her..._

I felt a gurgling in my throat as I realized that something was cutting off my breath. Try as I might, I couldn't get any air into my lungs.

"Wakeup wakeup wakeup!" my mind screamed as the grip on my throat tightened. I starkly realized that I was both mentally and physically experiencing the full depths of Skuld's emotional agony. Somehow, Skuld's loss of coherency was resulting in this nightmare. Or perhaps this scenario was an analogous manifestation of the immense amount of guilt that Skuld must be feeling. Whatever it was, the projection of fear and guilt into her subconscious had gripped me tightly. Which meant that I was in touch with her feelings…

_Withdrawing past the burning course of images into my own phantasia, I tried to rekindle the initial vision of Belldandy reaching down, reaching out to comfort Skuld. As I felt surrounded by the suffocating angst of Skuld's self-accusation, I struggled to mentally project a series of metaphors...carefully objectifying __my__ hand joining Belldandy's outstretched hand. I hoped that the mental designs that __I__ was witnessing would also 'register' in Skuld's mind._

_Skuld didn't react at all, she might as well have been catatonic, gripped as she was by the pseudo-Banpei. With an effort, I conceptualized a softer 'stage'...and then Urd's, then Keiichi's, then Megumi and Sora's hands reaching towards her..._

"«C'mon...let it go!!»"_ I shouted in my mind. Skuld lifted her brow just high enough to peek over her knees. Her eyes were glazy with tears, her forehead was fevered with anxiety. My mind seemed to glaze with confusion; for a moment I thought I was going to be swallowed…_

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Urd had noticed that Cevn had mysteriously left the table; she was sorely tempted to find out why. But instead, she remained to keep an eye on Megumi and Keiichi.

And Peorth.

Peorth's sad visage didn't escape Urd's attention. Urd realized that Peorth was struggling to reconcile herself with the impending events in Yggdrasil. Her parents were there as well.

"«_As we all are, my sister Goddess,_»" Urd thoughtcast to her across the table. Peorth glanced at her briefly, her eyes gladdened with Urd's kind empathy.

A moment later, Keiichi returned to the dining room with his Nikon, his face illuminated with excitement. His mind was reeling with a pent-up joy!

"After the blathering craziness of the past several days, we've actually got something to celebrate about! And my darling Bell-chan once more has filled our house with her special magical love! Leave it to sweet Bell to bake a UN cake! An un-cake? Nah, I won't say it aloud...they'll only laugh! And that'll spoil the moment..." he thought as he deftly removed lens, memory stick, compact flash chip and other parts from the leather case. He unfolded the mounting tripod and screwed the camera in, so that he could set the timer of the camera so they would all be in the video sequence. A celebratory video memory.

"Where's Cevn?" Keiichi asked through the lens as he realized that someone was missing.

"Oh, he's probably dropped in on Skuld to pay her a visit," Urd said with a droll voice, despite the fact that she was anything but droll about her little sister's incapacity. Cevn was attending her little sister, doubtlessly trying to do the impossible. She knew Cevn well enough by now to sense where he was going most of the time when he left her sight. Besides, she had caught the telltale "fool-hero" dazed look in his eyes. Events had proven her right about 40 percent of the time whenever she sensed her errant mortal boyfriend was up to something. Fortunately for his sake, it wasn't enough for him to be boring predictable to her...and not enough for him to be _too _enigmatic.

"What_ could_ he be doing there?" Belldandy wondered aloud, suddenly worried. The 'tranquil spell' she had put Skuld under _might_ be broken if there was a traumatic occurrence, or someone tried really hard to awaken her. With Cevn's bewildering bursts of ability, it was possible that he could actually disturb her little sister out of her spell…

She glanced meaningfully at Urd, and then stood up from the table to check on Skuld...and halted in her steps. It was a good thing she wasn't carrying the cake...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"«_Oh my!! Urd! Peorth! Hurry here!»_" Belldandy shouted. A green and a pink flash of light and the two Goddesses were here, almost as soon as she had finished her thoughtcast. Cevn was kneeling down next to a recumbent Skuld, his fists clenched so tight that they were bleeding.

She knew in an instant that he was trying to use a dreamwalk to try and shift Skuld out of her feelings of guilt!

But he was clearly ill-prepared and faltering through Skuld's dream-state. A single glance between she and her sister confirmed what they needed to do. Cevn needed far more intuitive strength to try and reach her. But even with his slight effort, he was _getting through to her sister_! He needed a boost of the Goddess kind…

"_«Once again, he's bitten off more than he can chew, neh?»"_ she heard her elder sister thoughtcast, smiling at her with a knowing grin. She closed her eyes, and felt Urd's mind and thoughts touch hers...followed by Peorth. Thankfully, Peorth was an expert at DreamWeaves as a result of her Runic Inculcation, and Belldandy could feel Skuld's dream-state clarify significantly as the Goddess of Forever joined her and her sister.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

_The confusion I was reeling from tightened up into itself like a coil and then disappeared. I felt my mind gripped by a very powerful, yet benevolent strength. Skuld's dream-state was no longer frightening, and I didn't feel like I was going to drown in her subconscious. The dream-image I had of her tucked deep in hiding between datacrystal stacks became vivid…_

"«All...of...us...love...you, Skuld!!»"_ I heard a powerful thought filling my my mind…and I sensed an immense power that seemed to bouy me along, adding strength to my efforts to telepathize. In a mimicry of Skuld's 'wordspell' Goddess power, the phrase materialized on the shells of the data stacks. With a watery fragmenting, the 'mean guy' Banpei disappeared. Skuld resumed her head-in-the-sand huddling posture, squeezing herself between data nodes…_

"«It was never your fault, you brat! You love the Earthrealm mortals too much to harm them, even if you won't admit it!»"_ a voice of authority shouted in my consciousness. Skuld seemed to react to this with an increased attention, her envenomed nightmare had been partially warded away. She was looking around at the projected words of love all over the computer stacks. She looked at me...and then looked past me. Her eyes were still filled with confusion and guilt. Again, I tried to project images of her sister, Keiichi and Megumi, and myself to try and lure her out of her fear-fugue even more. I sensed that my efforts were being redoubled and magnified. Could it be the Goddesses? Even more effort was needed...or she would remerse herself in the horror-dream of the vengeful Banpei. Reaching deep within my spirit, I retrieved a glowing orb of sound and flung it high into the air. It expanded into the God's Music... _

"«Sister, this is our love for you! We cherish you, and we want you to feel whole again! There is nothing to forgive, because you did nothing wrong! Please come home to us!»" _a gentle, yet firm voice beckoned. The sphere of God's Music was reflected by a brightening series of images that were too intense for me to grasp, as even more clarity seemed to be infused in this dream-state. Clarity robed in an exquisite amplification of Wisdom…_

_After a moment's consideration, Skuld sighed...and reached towards our outstretched hands..._

I felt a tight grasp again, only this time around my chest. My mind sliced through Elysian pinwheels as I surfaced from my imagination, as if waking out of a looping nocturne. Then I heard my breath wheezing through my throat...

Skuld was hugging herself to my chest, gripping me with a very un-girl-like strength.

"I..I didn't do it!" she said in a thin, quiet voice. Her subdued voice was in complete contrast to the vise grip she was exerting, which threatened to crack my ribs.

"I know you didn't, Skuld-sama. We all do. The war with yourself is over, if you want it to be," I wheezed in reply to her unspoken question, stroking her long black tresses of hair.

She started sobbing lightly...

"And could you...ease up on your grip. I...can't breathe!"

"Oops!! Sorry!"

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

_"__Elder sister! Big Sister! Peorth!__"_ a tired-looking Skuld shouted hoarsely. She was leaning against Cevn for support, clenching his arm tight to keep herself from falling down. It was funny in an odd sort of way; a minute earlier she was crushing the breath out of him. Now she was only crushing his arm…

"Skuld!" Belldandy heard her voice mix with Urd's. She immediately discerned that Skuld's eyes were unclouded by the insanity that filled them on N-Day.

"What did you do this time, my love?" Urd breathed to herself. She felt a momentary flash of jealousy...her boyfriend had reached her little sister when _she_ couldn't. Then again, when Urd looked at Belldandy, she realized that her other younger sister was thinking along similar lines. Once more, Cevn had done something unexpected. Urd almost wanted to call him "the abmortal"; this revival of Skuld obviously was the result of that mercurial shift of powers he sometimes experienced.

He had charted past all the confusion in her sister's mind and found her…at peril to himself, because he didn't have the Divine energy, intellect or dream-skills to do anything else. He could have gotten lost in Skuld's mind.

"I'm going to have a little talk with him about going off on his own and trying something like this, the foolish idiot!" Urd promised herself, grateful for his rescue of Skuld but chagrined at his foolishness. But once she and her sister amplified his efforts with their Goddess abilities, and Peorth expertly cleansed the dream-state of confusion…Cevn was able to open a channel for Belldandy and she to message their lover for Skuld and coax her out of her misery.

"How are you feeling, Skuld?" Belldandy inquired.

"I still feel messed up about the nuclear weapons...but I'm almost positive that my creative genius wasn't responsible for their launch," she answered, crossing her arms in front of her chest for emphasis.

Urd could hear several audible sighs of relief in reaction to Skuld's statement.

"Poor Banpei," Sigel said with a mischievous grin.

"What?" Skuld asked the shoujo girl-robot. According to her sisters, Sigel had been keeping a faithful vigil in her bedroom while she was 'tranquilized'.

"I guess this means that you'll have to take him apart to find out what went wrong with him," Sigel replied with a smirk.

"I wonder who taught her how to think like that?" Urd taunted. Belldandy smiled to herself as Skuld turned and gave Urd a liberal flip of the tongue.

Things_ might_ be back to normal...

An hour later, Skuld emerged from her labs with a device that she had extracted from Banpei-kun's wrist.

"I found it!" she said as she burst into the sister's bedroom, brandishing a small pad of buttons. Skuld felt immensely relieved, now that she knew for certain that she was not responsible for the nuclear assaults on the Earthrealm cities.

"Who did this?" both her sisters exclaimed._ Someone _had planted a keypad transmitter on Banpei; a device that could be used to transmit launch codes in any number of languaged encryptions.

Which meant that they had hacked past Skuld's A.I. programming of Banpei...and sabotaged him to hurl death at millions of mortals!

Which meant that they had been _here_...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Megumi was laying on her futon, reading a translation of Rimbaud's "Un Saison en Enfer". While staying at Sayoko's apartment, Sayoko had introduced her to several of the French poets. Sayoko had been schooled in Japan and France, thus she possessed a liberal exposure to French writers. Rimbaud's poems, with their common theme of derangement of the senses, seemed to resonate with the fiery disruption of Megumi's life following her decision to go to the Le Mans trials. Like the French poet, Megumi also felt demonized; her older brother was treating her like someone whose guile had been exposed by a scandal.

Tonight, it seemed that to her that Keiichi had relaxed his guard significantly. They actually had _fun_...he even joked with her about several childhood incidents. He didn't seem to bathe her with resentful glances during Belldandy's "UN cake party". They had even talked a little more afterwards; she was warm-souled by Keiichi's deeply honest admission that he had reasoned poorly by holding her so tightly against his own expectations.

The past several weeks had been tough on everyone. The Goddesses' illness...the disbandment of the Club...the assassinations of the world leaders...and then the unthinkable events of N-Day! Megumi recalled how she spent hours sneaking furtively down alleys and over rooftops the night she made her way from Sayoko's apartment to the temple home, her apprehension mounting with each streetlight she shadowed.

It had been worth it.

Tonight, she basked in the glow that Belldandy cast around the house. The crackle of war was silenced, at least for the next few months. And she was on speaking terms with her brother...

"Megumi! Genji's on the phone! He sounds like he's totally freakin' out!" Keiichi announced through a slide of her bedroom door, sharply interrupting her thoughts.

Instantly alert, Megumi set down Rimbaud and headed down the hallway. She felt a chill as she realized that her brother had said that Genji was "freaking out". As she reached the dining room, she noticed that Keiichi was pacing, having arrived ahead of her for some reason. His eyes looked weary...and sad.

Pausing with a timeclick of worry, Megumi reached for the phone he proffered...

"Genji?"

_"Megumi! Oh my God!"_ Megumi gripped the phone even tighter, realizing that Genji sounded _upset_.

"Are you alright?"

_"Fuck no! My..snff..mother and father..."_

"What? What about your parents?"

_"-_They're dead-_! They're gone!"_ he stammered in a high squealing odd voice. Megumi felt her heart sink in an ocean of disbelief.

_"I've gotta come over. I _–need-_ you, Megumi! I can't understand...why it happened! Sayoko's going to pieces...I'm going to try and convince her..."_

"It's after midnight, Genji. Y..you can't come over now! What about the curfew!"

_"To hell with the curfew! I don't care if I get shot, I'm going..."_

"Genji! Calm down! Please, calm down and be rational. What happened?" she demanded. Her boyfriend was so distraught, he wasn't thinking straight. Megumi's thoughts briefly flashed on her own parents, suddenly afraid that they were dead. She gritted down hard on her jaw to dislodge that horrible speculation. She realized that she was becoming confused herself; she was empathizing so intensely with her boyfriend.

Her boyfriend…who had just impossibly lost his parents.

_"They were staying in the Hotel Paris Hilton when N-Day broke out. Because of all the riots and stuff, they couldn't fly back here to Japan. DeGaulle Airport has been closed to all non-military flights. Remember, the French thought they were going to have a war with Russia? So my parents were stuck at the hotel. And when the dammed Eiffel Tower fell over...it fell right on the hotel! We just got the call from..snff.."_

"OH MY GOD! GENJI!!" Megumi shrieked, causing her older brother to almost jump out of his house shoes. She looked at Keiichi, trying bravely not to cry. Keiichi made a motion to try and get her attention; when she looked at him quizzically, he walked up and whispered something in her ear.

"Tell them to wait...we're going to go get 'em and bring 'em here."

"Are you _nuts_!" she whispered back, holding her hand over the receiver.

"Of course you're nuts...you're my brother! You just want to help; that big ol' heart of yours just won't let you think about your own safety, Keiichi. Did Genji tell you already, or did you just guess? And what's your plan? There's hundreds of SDF soldiers on patrol out there!" she thought.

As these thoughts passed rapid-fire through Megumi's mind, she could hear Genji crying on the phone. Her emotions switchbacking like a mountain dirt road, Megumi took a deep breath and reflected.

"Keiichi is doing this...because he_ loves_ me! Because he wants to protect me! Because he knows, ultimately, that I'll be so much more relieved if my dear Genji is here with me. And quite probably, he's also worried sick about Genji and Sayoko!" she realized. Her big brother...was _acting like a big brother_! A feeling that had been dormant for almost a month welled up in her breast.

Megumi checked herself for a second, and realized that her hands were shaking in response to Genji's sudden loss.

"Get a grip on yourself, girl!" Megumi challenged herself under her breath. Each sob she heard over the phone pulled her heartstrings in the direction of tearful journeyings.

"Okay. We'll be there to get you. Keiichi'll get Sayoko on his BMW Rennsport O.L. S.P.L., and I'll come get you on my bike!"

"Your bike? You mean you're little Kawasaki KSR II?"

"_Little?_" Megumi reacted indignantly, feeling momentarily insulted before she realized that she was dealing with a boyfriend who had just lost both parents. Genji's mental state wasn't exactly stable at the moment.

Whose was...after N-Day?

"No. I'm going to ride my _bike_ to get you. My bicycle!" she explained. Now it was Keiichi's turn be shocked; her brother's gaping mouth and wide eyes looked almost the same as they did the time when he first found out that his hand was 'stuck' to Belldandy's hand, a couple years back. Now _that_ was a hilarious memory!

"You forget that I'm the 'Queen of Racing'! I can call a couple of my 'followers' and they can create some diversions for me while we get you home! And don't even worry about my brother getting caught..." she assured Genji over the phone.

_That _snapped Keiichi out of his incredulity.

"Just hang in there...and I'll be there soon for you, my love!" Megumi promised. She didn't know if Genji heard her; he seemed to be lost in his own world.

"O..okay," he said a moment later and hung up the phone without even saying goodbye.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

In her apartment, Sayoko was watching Genji's phone conversation with Megumi from a detached perspective. She wanted to get drunk, get high, get_ away_ from the feelings that swarmed her with such pain. Life had gotten stupid on her...

_The Eiffel Tower had fallen on her parents._

Moments ago, Sayoko had taken a call from France...the medical examiners explaining that the disaster relief teams had discovered the remains of her parents during their search efforts as they excavated through the huge mass of rubble that was formerly the Hilton Hotel Paris. At first she thought it was a prank, until she heard voices in the background shouting in French. Sayoko had studied in Paris, and had visited France many times. She considered herself fluent in French; she could hear voices saying "this one's dead" and "careful of those conduits."

Once Sayoko informed the woman who called from Paris Civil Defense that she spoke very good French, the lady asked if Sayoko could identify some information from a wallet and handbag that were found on the deceased.

The deceased.

My parents.

Regretfully, Sayoko had snapped at that point. She started to shout obscenities over the phone at the woman for terming her parents "the deceased", until the woman explained that over _7,000_ people had been killed by the collapse of the Tower. She and her coworkers were so busy rescuing the living and identifying the dead that it had become nigh impossible to deal with the situation with any semblance of civilized niceties.

Two minutes later, the phone was back in its cradle...and Sayoko was collapsed on the floor, crying her heart out. Her younger brother Genji rushed to her side, concerned about his sister.

Sayoko reluctantly told him the grim news...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Funny...I always wanted to do this...to be _here_. I just never thought I would be here under such shitty circumstances," Sayoko thought as the wind hissed around the helmet she was wearing. She could feel the vibration of Keiichi's motorbike and the occasional bump of the road as he wove a complicated path through the back streets of Makuhari.

When she had first started attending N.I.T., she had wanted to sit _here_, in the sidecar of Keiichi's antique bike. Back then, it was odd, this impulse. Sayoko remembered her high school days...and the fact that Keiichi wasn't the kind of guy that transformed feminine restraint into "ooohs" and "aaahs". And he definitely wasn't much as far as the pecking order was concerned. He was short of stature for a guy, quiet to the point of appearing withdrawn, smoked cigarettes, hailed from a middle class home, was somewhat geekish, only had a small group of friends, was an average student, lacked athletic ability, was disinterested in sports clubs, and was almost obsessed with motorbikes. As far as the mercenary mindset of Sayoko and her 'groupies' went, Keiichi was persona non gratis.

She remembered him as a lonely person in high school; Sayoko used to make fun of him whenever she was with her friends. But in her senior year of high school, Sayoko began to notice some things about him that missed her attention. Keiichi was very kind-hearted and loyal in a puppy-dog sort of sense. He had stood up against a group of hoodlums who were harassing Megumi. His friends spoke very highly of him.

Two years later, he had finished college prep school, and she had decided to go to N.I.T. So once again, they were classmates. During their freshman year at N.I.T., Keiichi had hooked up with Belldandy. Sayoko was astounded that she had been displaced as the "campus primadonna" by Belldandy...and that her new rival was involved with Keiichi! Because of this, she wanted him even more. But once she got clean, Sayoko realized that her motives for trying to steal Keiichi from Belldandy were based more on her need for campus status, rather than a genuine desire to go out with him.

In the end, it had all worked out. Keiichi had become a good friend and Belldandy was no longer a threat, once Sayoko found out that she was a Goddess. After all, what mortal woman could compete with a Goddess? So once again, Sayoko was safe in her awareness that she was the Queen of N.I.T.; the guys still drooled in her wake as she walked from the parking lot to class. Especially so, now that she was a grad student.

In fact, once Keiichi showed up at her apartment, Sayoko felt a moment's respite from her grief-pitted heart.

But now that she had no family to speak of, she needed her closest friends to reach out to her. She wanted to talk with Cevn, knowing that he, as a fellow recovering addict, would be able to identify with the "Fuck the World" attitude that threatened to overcome her...and get her loaded. Sayoko knew without a doubt that she could score some drugs, despite the curfew.

She also remembered that his wife had died...thus he could relate to some degree to the huge loss that was confronting her.

It was almost fantastic, as if someone had dumped her right in the middle of a Huysmans novel...right at the point where everything turned hideously disorienting.

_My parents are dead._

The rumbling of Keiichi's motorcycle dissolved into a funereal drone...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

It had been dangerous on the way here. She had been spotted twice by patrolling Self Defense troops. Fortunately, they were in jeeps, and it was easy for Megumi to evade them. This was why she had spent a small fortune on this bike, working odd jobs all the way through high school.

She cruised low around a corner, and then headed up a slight incline of the road that passed in front of the NomoNomo Mansion, where Sayoko's penthouse apartment was. Sayoko's place had been home for her for several weeks, since living at the temple was impractical because of her quarrel with Keiichi.

She perched the bike against a wall without even bothering to lock it, then rang herself up to Sayoko's place. Genji met her at the door.

"You look like hell!" she said aloud before she hugged him. It wasn't the words that she had planned to comfort him with, but her boyfriend _did_ look awful. She hugged Genji tightly, feeling his whole body next to hers quivering with a nervous electricity. Genji was far more upset than she expected. Even though he was almost 15 cm. taller than she, Megumi somehow felt bigger than him. She wanted to do anything she could to take away his sorrow.

"Let's go," he said, releasing himself from her hug.

Once they rode the elevator down to the ground floor, Megumi looked around to see if there were any patrol cars. Out of the blue, she felt an excitement. This is like cops-n-robbers! Racing was in her blood, to be sure...but this was chasing. The delicate art of evasion.

"You're going to take me to your house in _that_?" Genji exclaimed.

"Yep. It doesn't look like much, but it'll get us there! Standard Chinese-style transportation. What'd you expect, a bicycle-built-for-two?" she quipped back. Genji smiled briefly, and then resumed his sad demeanor.

"Get on, sexy," she joked, trying to keep things on the light side. Megumi knew that Genji was very sensitive, but a personality quirk he possessed was the ability to let go of his moodiness rather quickly. She knew that she could wheedle him a little bit out of his funk by joking around.

"You sure this bike can handle two riders? Maybe I should pedal and you can ride..."

"No Way! I've ridden to Osaka and back on this bike. This is a 2003 Cannondale Super V 2500! Not only did it cost a small fortune, but it also has full suspension technology...and it blazes! So quit arguing and get on!" she shouted.

Genji straddled the seat behind her. After a couple seconds of finding her center of gravity, Megumi pedaled back on the street and coasted down the hill.

It felt good, Genji's arms wrapped around her waist, his chest pressed tight on her back. She flew around the corner and Genji inadvertently grabbed one of her breasts as the inertia shifted for a second.

"S..sorry!" he quickly apologized.

"Ever the gentleman, my dear Genji," she thought with a mix of respect and amusement as she covered his hand with her gloved hand, letting him know that it was okay...that she didn't mind being touched there by him.

"Strange...Genji and I have been together for a year...and we haven't made love yet," she thought. Megumi berated herself for thinking about such a thing when her boyfriend's parents had just been killed; but quickly forgave herself, realizing that she was on fire with anxiety...and he had touched her in a 'zone'. What do they always say about extreme emotional stress sometimes making people horny?

No, get your mind out of the gutter, Megumi!

She giggled at her little internal dialogue until she heard sobbing on her shoulder. Poor Genji, the emotional agony was only starting for her boyfriend.

As she emerged from a narrow street, she saw a jeepload of SDF soldiers...and they saw her.

The chase was on!

Pedaling as fast as she could, Megumi swiftly sped by the soldiers, so close that she could see the streetlights reflecting off of their white helmets. She searched ahead, looking for a side street to duck away into.

"There!" Genji pointed. Without even looking, Megumi sped off in the direction of his finger, aligning herself and the bike as she curled down into a tight turn and flew into the alleyway. She was almost resting on the handlebars as her legs pumped vigorously. Dodging a few garbage cans and crates, she coasted across the next avenue...and noticed a second jeep in pursuit.

"Dammit!" she swore in between deep breathes. They were still at least a kilo from the temple...and she was starting to feel the stretchy tingle in her legs.

"C'mon, burn Megumi, burn!" she challenged herself as she sped down an avenue, two jeeps behind her.

A pair of lights came on up ahead, spelling doom for her and Genji. A third vehicle was now in the chase, positioned to cut her off. She knew this street well; there were no side roads or sidewalks she could skip off of.

As the lights loomed closer, Megumi realized that they weren't car headlights...they were motorcycle lights. The guys had been shadowing her since she picked up Genji!

"Thanks guys!" she shouted, lifting a gloved 'thumbs up' gesture to them as they passed her, heading straight in the opposite direction towards the two SDF jeeps. A moment later, she heard a sudden screeching of tires on pavement. Looking over her shoulder for an instant, Megumi saw that the two jeeps were stopped in their tracks, the victims of a game of 'chicken'.

"Hang on, Genji!" she warned her passenger. This particular road was a straightaway until it curved around the top of a hill...the same hill that rose a couple hundred meters behind the temple! With an expert hop, she jumped onto the sidewalk next to the railing.

"There you are!" she said to herself, spotting the two-meter-wide gap between rail barrier segments.

She felt Genji's arms grasp even more tightly around her lower chest as she hurdled over the rocks that blocked the opening. She was impressed with her bikestunt; jumping an object was easy for her, but with a passenger it was definitely an expert's move. Megumi wished Keiichi was here to see this...her brother would definitely be impressed!

Hurtling past the roadguide rails, she rode the downhill trail. The hill behind the temple was steep, but not super steep. But it would be tricky with Genji as a passenger. Thank God it hadn't rained in the past week, otherwise the trail would be slick with mud.

Megumi got a couple facefuls of leaves as she plummeted down the hill. Genji's certainly getting the ride of his life, she figured! She hoped that she wouldn't pop a tire or wipeout on the way down, but she decided that it was better to chance the steep offroad decline rather than extend their trip by a half-kilometer and risk running into more SDF patrols.

She ate it right before she reached the bottom of the hill. Some brats had put a small log over the trail, blocking part of it! Probably some little kids bugging out because of the craziness surrounding N-Day.

"Little twerps!" she grumbled as she lost balance when she tried to avoid the unexpected obstacle at the last second. With a "vooop" she and Genji tumbled off her bike into a cove of bushes...the bike continuing another 10 or so meters downhill until it hit a tree.

"Acck!" Megumi thought, realizing that her 220K yen bike might be trashed. She was bruised, but unhurt. The only thing that was really bruised was her pride.

"You okay?" Genji asked her. Megumi gave a start at this. He just found out that his parents died...and he's asking _me_ if _I'm_ okay? She reached out and hugged him, her love brighter than the witnessing moon.

A few minutes later, they retrieved her bike and hoofed it the rest of the way down the hill. Genji boosted her up on the wall that surrounded the temple, then handed up her bike. A moment later, he climbed up and sat next to her.

They sat together for a while on the compound wall, watching the temple roof pearled with the moonglow. Not kissing, not hugging, not even holding hands. Just _being_ together. Genji leaned his head on her shoulder and cried softly for his departed parents, while Megumi ran her fingers softly up and down his back, trying to comfort him.

Time passed, and then Genji hopped down off the wall. Helping her down, they walked up to the temple.

"My home..." Megumi thought, reflecting on all that had transpired in this wonderful little temple.

"Welcome home, Megumi!" Belldandy and Keiichi said, greeting her on the hillside patio of the wooden gallery that surrounded the temple house.

"How did they know I was going to come down the hill?" Megumi marveled. Of course! Keiichi knows I used to ride down that trail...and Belldandy, her excuse is that she's a Goddess! Duh!

In the light, she noticed that Genji had a several cuts on his face as they walked into the living room. Everyone was there. Sayoko was gripped in a serious discussion with Cevn, and Skuld and Urd were perched on the couch, watching them.

"Can I get you some peroxide and bandages?" Belldandy offered, obviously noticing the scratches on Genji's face.

There was something wrong with Keiichi. Megumi recognized the look on his face...his expression reeked of amused embarrassment.

"_What?_" she barked at him, somewhat annoyed. Megumi hoped that this wasn't going to lead to some kind of silly confrontation that would open up old wounds. But she glimpsed a knowing smile on Sayoko's face...even though her sempai's eyes were swollen from crying.

"You know, we could've just asked Bell-chan, and she would have gone to get Sayoko and Genji..." Keiichi admitted.

Megumi felt a lump in her throat as she realized that, in her haste to rush to her boyfriend's side, she had completely forgotten the fact that Belldandy could have safely transported Sayoko and Genji here, flying them through the air or even fetching them on her magic broom, Mr. Spring Fellow.

She put a hand to her head in resignation...

But then Genji spoke up. In the face of all the personal decimations that they had all suffered in the past few weeks...in the face of the very deep personal loss her boyfriend had just experienced, the thrust of his seemingly ridiculous remark was _very_ sane...couched in the sanity that accompanies generosity of spirit. His words only served to remind Megumi of the main reason she had been in love with him for over a year.

"Why do that...and miss all the fun?"

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --


	54. Pt 54: EndBane

**Part 54: EndBane**

It's the second weekend in June, Genji realized. He was _supposed_ to be in France with the N.I.T. Motor Club, racing in the 24 Hours of Le Mans.

Instead, there was no Club.

Instead, he was in Tokyo, inside a crowded Soka Gakkai reception hall, participating in an o-tsuya. Dressed in a stiff black suit with the traditional black silk overrobe consisting of a haori half-coat and hakama divided skirt, Genji found himself sweltering in the humid breath of the early summer Tsuyu heat. Sayoko looked like she was roasting too; her pitchblack kimono drawn snugly over the white silk habutae had to be uncomfortably hot.

Because of the wealth of his parents, the funeral reception had to be a very high-profile event in order to accommodate the vast number of business associates. Thus it was necessary to rent the temple's large auditorium. Genji himself didn't feel a spiritual affinity with the Soka Gakkai, and as far as he knew, neither did his parents. But yet, as the largest religious organization in Japan, it was a safe bet that many of the well-wishers had some connection with the sect.

The auditorium was filled with humhum of boisterous blathering.

Actually, necessity dictated that there would be _two_ wakes and a funeral...today's ceremony was a wake to accommodate the business and aristocratic social contacts, while the wake and funeral over the next two days would be for immediate family and close friends.

Arranging the funeral was a daunting, complex matter. It had barely sunk in that his mother and father were _dead_ when the mortuaries started calling in their bids. Fortunately, Sayoko was able to administer matters quite well, with the assistance of her aunt. They meted out a number of responsibilities to him that normally fell to the oldest son, such as ushering visitors in to the reception hall and accepting the koden noshibukuro envelopes. Since his father was an only son, and his mother had only one sister, the intimate gathering would be small. Cousin Toshiyuki would be there.

This 'public' funeral had taken place in the largest Buddhist temple in Tokyo that could be rented on such short notice. The Mishima name was a key that could unlock many doors, Genji had learned as he researched facilities to host the public wake.

The death of his parents had been touted as front-page news on the regional and Tokyo papers. In one sense, they were as famous in the world of commerce as their namesake, Mishima Yukio, was renowned in the literary world forty years ago. The auditorium-sized chamber of the temple was filled with throngs of well-wishers. Hundreds of people attended, and hundreds more had sent cards of condolence, which Genji, as the only son, had to read aloud at half-hour intervals. The Mayors of Yokohama, Tokyo, Chiba and the Governors of Chiba, Ibaraki and Tokyo Prefectures had put in, as well as a number of Dietmen.

Every half hour, Genji would step up to a podium in front of the blowup photo enlargements of his late parents and read a five minute selection from the list of those who had sent condolences in absentia, and then thank them publicly for their thoughtfulness. At these times, the noise in the hall would drip off into silence; his voice conspicuous as the only sound in the hall. Reading the list aloud was nerve wracking...Genji needed to formally announce each well-wisher and their 'stats'; correctly identifying their position in government, industry or business. Half an hour later, the funeral aides would press another list in his hands and he would do it all over again.

Genji had to maintain his taisho...a stoic bearing in the midst of his grief. He needed to at least _appear_ composed, so that he or his late parents wouldn't lose face. Yet, he felt an occasional sway of irritation as this whole business of a funeral reception reminded him of a sharkpool...it was obvious that few of these people genuinely moved by the deaths of his parents. They were just putting on appearances...and getting drunk and fed.

Genji wished he could be drunk with them, but he had decided to stay sober through the funeral, so that his sister wouldn't feel pressured to throw in the towel of her recovery and join him.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Sayoko had returned to her parent's mansion compound for the first time since she had moved to her apartment a number of months ago. As she walked down the long hall-room after stepping out for a moment to get some air, she could hear the priest distantly chanting in the large reception room adjoining the living room. The family kamidana shrine room had been sealed with a white strip of cloth. The altar itself had been confined by a white sheet, so that the household would be purified from the impurity of death. The morticians and house servants had meticulously converted the reception room into a funeral hall.

Since her parents had died outside of the house, a number of funerary procedures that were normally observed were rendered unnecessary: washing the dead and giving them their last water; dressing them in the 'traveling costume'; turning their head towards the north; decorating the bedside; etc. Sayoko struggled with dread towards the very idea of having to bathe her parent's dead bodies.

Once outside, she noticed the huge wreaths of flowers and banners with messages of sympathy were piled up alongside the stone walls on either side of the front gateway to the mansion. Yet little had changed...the mansion itself was a shell, an empty hollow place.

Since Sayoko had moved out and Genji was dividing his living arrangements halftime between her apartment and the temple, this huge mansion had only been sparingly occupied. Besides the small army of servants, the only other times it had seen life were during breaks when her parents took time off from their hectic schedule of business travels.

This mansion...was never really a _home_ in the sense of being a hearth-and-hither for a family. Now that her parents were dead, the sterility of its environs seemed even more pronounced.

She wanted to get drunk, to go score some good cocaine and just become _oblivious_ to what was happening around her! After, what was the catchword in the early 1990s? "A stoned face never lies" or something to this effect. But over the past several years, the happy-get-high world of the weedheads had disappeared, replaced by a dog-eat-dog mentality. Not to mention how the drug world had chewed her life up.

But a line of coke would be great right now...

"Chill it, Sayoko!" she cautioned herself. She felt so blessed by the fact that her brother had decided not to even drink one cup of sake through this whole excruciating experience. Genji had _grown up_ so much since he took up with Megumi...his selfless act of support for her was no doubt encouraged by his renewed sense of self-respect. No one should go through a funeral without getting plastered...but Genji was doing quite well. He had done it for her well-being.

As she returned to the reception room, she whispered a silent "I love you Genji" under her breath. Seeing Cevn-sensei among the mourners served as another reminder that she didn't have to get through this one loaded.

Because their parents had been crushed in the Eiffel Tower disaster, there were no bodily remains to be encoffined. Instead, their ashes had been flown back from France by one of the family's corporate lieutenants; the ashes currently rested in front of the votary altar in two small ornate lacquered wooded boxes that served as proxy coffins.

She seated herself next to Genji. They were seated in the chief mourner's positions at the head of the row to the right of the altar. Next to her, but closer to the altar as tradition dictated, her brother was kneeling, dressed in a simple black suit with a white shirt and black tie.

Sayoko stared blankly at the juzo, the Buddhist rosary that she held in her hands. No amount of praying would bring her parents back. Nor would it bridge all the lost time...the span of living years when her parents basically abandoned her and Genji. Trying to avoid the gnawing fear and loneliness, Sayoko knew that exhaustion was figuring her face. In one sense, the past few days had been much harder on her than on Genji; she had to deal with the secular matters of arranging the big public reception, the smaller wake, and this final funeral. She had wearied to him several days ago about the fact that each detail of the planning of the funeral only served to usher anew her deep sense of loss.

Her aunt and uncle and cousin Toshiyuki were seated next to her. Toshi's face was unreadable, he seemed somewhat bored with the proceedings. On the other hand, her aunt had cried openly several times during the day, away from the funeral altars. Seated next to them was the chief householder, a faithful servant of the Mishima family since before Sayoko had been born. Directly across from she and her brother was the funeral council spokesperson, who was certainly making a fortune off of this funeral. Next to him were four helpers attending from the mortuary to assist him. Then in the chief mourner's positions closest to the family altar, Tamiya was seated next to her, and Genji and Megumi were seated together across from them. _That _had caused a ruckus with the funeral council people, who were steadfast in their protestations that it wasn't good form for her boyfriend and Genji's girlfriend to be seated in such a prominent spot...

"Fuck 'em!" she had confided her strong opinions on the subject to Genji later that day. When the funeral council had insisted on keeping to proper form by separating her and her boyfriend, and making Megumi sit away from Genji, she had become enraged. After reminding them that she and her brother were now the heads of the Mishima estate and keiretsu, what she really told them after they put up their big fuss was much more intense than a simple "fuck you!"

_"Kee-chooo!"_

"You look so cute when you're nervous, my dear Tamiya!" Sayoko observed as her boyfriend fidgeted nervously in his rented suit. Tamiya wasn't the type of guy who would own even a single business suit; this plainclothes attitude was but one of many reasons why she loved him so much. Before the funeral, he had warned her that incense sometimes caused him to have sneezing fits.

Finally, Keiichi, Cevn-sensei, and a number of friends completed the left side of the row of mourners. The four Goddesses were also present; each dressed in a black kimono and veil. Supposedly, there was some prohibition against them attending Earthrealm funerals. Something to do with death and wishes not going together, Belldandy had explained. But yet they were here...

She was tired of it all.

"I hardly even knew you," Sayoko said, mentally addressing the photographs of her mother and father resting on the altar behind the chanting priest.

Genji leaned over and confided to her in a whisper how it struck him as quite odd that the sutras the priests were chanting were basically unintelligible gibberish to his ears. It made more sense for the officiating priests to be sermonizing with words that they could understand, rather than this hash of mumbo-jumbo. He added that little had changed since he had lived in the 14th century. The sutras chanted then also sounded like mumbo-jumbo.

Sayoko shot him a quick grin at his amusing observation. She noticed that Genji was gamely trying to suppress the urge to glance repeatedly towards his girlfriend for support; after all, he needed to keep up the appearance of a proper filial son. And when she caught him glancing too much, Sayoko softly elbowed him in the ribs.

"It's hard on both of us," she reminded herself as her eyes seemed to steer themselves towards Tamiya, who looked awkward in his too-tight rental suit. She had to keep up appearances as well, looking every bit the proper daughter with her rosary and obsequial expression.

Genji kept roaming his eyes towards Megumi, who was dressed in a conservative black dress with a knee-high skirt. Genji had never seen her dressed up like this...her attire urged his imagination towards a glimpse of a future five or so years from now when he was a corporate hawkman and she was an OL.

"Megumi...an OL? No way!" he jested with his imagination. She had been a tremendous source of uplift to him in the past two weeks leading up to this, buoying him with her frank cheerfulness and heartfelt compassion. Genji regretted the fact that his parents would never see him marry this wonderful woman.

It was just he and Sayoko. Already, a host of business offers flooded in, vying for his attention. As the only son, he had inherited_ everything_, including a controlling stockholder's interest in all his parent's capital businesses. Despite the mortal loss he had suffered, a number of business contacts were urging him to make business decisions; all of which had to be made "now"! Buy this property, liquidate that stock portfolio, sell off a shopping mall, refurbish the mansion, invest in this suchwhere nation's tech commerce...

Genji strongly suspected that his parent's most trusted financial advisors had assumed a turncoat avarice...otherwise _why_ would they be plaguing him with these business decisions at such a difficult time in his life? Weren't they hired by his father and mother with the explicit understanding that they were to _protect_ his family's interests? Shouldn't they have been screening out all these corporate kaijo who were trying to curry favor with he and his sister? He and Sayoko weren't _stupid_; some of these decisions being proposed were _major_ in scope! With a sideways insight, Genji realized that _this_ was why his parents were so busy!

Like Genji, his father had lost his parents in accident while he was still in his student years. The Waseda University senior had inherited the Mishima assets and legacy during the last year of the turbulent sixties. Influenced by the liberal, forward-thinking movement of the times, Genji's father had come to view marriage with a completely different goal in mind; his perspective absolutely in contrast to his ancestors. Unlike the generations of Mishima forebears who married 'social hostess wives' that served as little more than 'furniture', Genji's dad had decided to look for an _equal_...a partner in love and life.

At the Osaka Expo in 1970, he met Genji's mother, then a senior at Keio Gijuku University. She was a debutante with carefully honed social graces, a model's charm and beauty, and a pedigree that included three Dietmen. But beyond these assets, Genji's mom had two other assets that distinguished her. She was the top student at Keio and she already owned her own business. Within a few months, they were deeply in love with each other. Realizing that marrying such a woman would effectively create a co-ownership of the Mishima fortune, Genji's dad took the risk.

After their marriage, the newlywed's plan was to wait at least a decade before having children, so that they could strengthen their leadership of the Mishima zaibatsu. In that decade, the Mishima Corp. assets increased 3400 percent, resulting in a 'runaway train' corporation, the management of which demanded the couple's total attention throughout the rest of their lives. The horizontal expansion of their holdings created a huge family of corporations...a keiretsu. Their years of work paid off, as the Mishima zaibatsu survived the burst of the Bubble Economy and the recessions of '98 and '08, entering the ranks of the Big Six keiretsu in the late 90s and remaining there ever since.

Upon joining the group of super-zaibatsu, which accounted for 20 of Japan's total capital and sales, the Mishima Corp. poised itself for even greater dominance of the market. Riding out the drastically unstable "Ecom-economy" of 2000-8 by making sound investments in e-commerce and hard tech interests, the Mishima Corp. became the second-largest corporate entity in capital holdings and largest in total commerce in all of Japan. All the while during the years his sister and he grew up, his parents were entrapped...

But Genji wasn't going to be trapped as well. He remembered something Cevn-sensei had told him once, when he asked his N.I.T. professor about his 'wild' long hair and student-like appearance. Cevn had simply replied that "some people _never_ grow up, nor should they." Genji could totally identify with this orientation...his Father had planned to groom Genji for a career in Diet politics and an eventual Ministership, while Sayoko was being prepped to administer a nation-wide network of medical research centers. Instead, Genji decided to pursue his love of engineering, as did his sister.

Now that they were gone, Genji felt a huge amount of respect for what his Mother and Father had accomplished in their tragically-forestalled lives. With the same kind of courage his parents had demonstrated in creating the Mishima keiretsu, both he and Sayoko were determined to turn away from the business world and _create their own lives_, no matter what obstacles came their way.

Genji decided that he had "grown up" too much over the past two weeks. After being badgered about business decisions for a week after the tragic loss of his folks, Genji finally set a limit and told them "enough!" Their reaction to his 30-day moratorium on altering the exchange of Mishima Corp. assets within the keiretsu was deeply disappointing. A number of the Mishima junior CEOs simply ignored it and continued to try him with business proposals. In many ways, his faith in the human race was being eroded by the cold-heartedness of the funeral staff, the pressuring of his family's business 'partners', and the insincerity he sensed in the faces of so many "friends of the family."

So this personal gathering was like a respite, a dash of cool air in the middle of an aridifying desert.

But this final 'good-bye' to his parents was taxing his emotions without vend of remittance. Sayoko had confided to him that the deaths of Mother and Father had plunged her into a painful reassessment of her feelings towards their parents. Genji also found himself questioning long held beliefs...attitudes towards his parents that had become as natural in his life as wearing clothes.

The part that scared him the most was the kotsuage ritual at the end of the funeral, where he and Sayoko would use a pair of chopsticks and pick through the ashen remains of their parents, selecting the small chunks of bone that survived the cremation intact and carefully filling the urn with them. He didn't want to go through with the kotsuage, because he knew that it would drive home the_ finality_ of his parent's deaths.

As it was meant to...

The priest finished his chanting and invited the mourners to line up for the ritual 'sealing of the casket'. Each participant was given a small black stone, which they would use symbolically pound the one unset nail in the lacquered boxes. This gesture served as a closure, a physical action denoting that the deceased were leaving the house for the last time. After this was done, the mourners would leave, save he and Sayoko. Then, they would fill the parent's urns with bone shards, and the funeral procession would then depart for the cemetery.

It would finally be over once they reached the Mishima family mausoleum...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Another day, another disaster. Tall structures were collapsing all over the world, two or three a day. Los Angeles had finally been hit by the 'killer earthquake' seismologists had been warning about for years. They just didn't expect it to be 8.4 on the Richter Scale. Several hundred thousand people had died that day. Hollywood was effectively scuttled and a severe blow was stuck against the US economy, as the total GNP of California was ranked fourth in world, only behind the US, Japan, and France. A number of US coastal cities had been stuck hard by hurricanes. Australia had been caught in a killer drought for almost three weeks, the temperatures ranging around 50 degrees C inlands and 40C on the coasts.

In Japan, parts of the nation were flooded by supercell downpours that dumped half a meter of rain in less than an hour.

At least the martial law had been lifted in Japan...and school was back in session. Because N.I.T. had been closed for several weeks because of the Emperor's death and N-Day, the late Spring Term was being extended well into July. Keiichi felt a sense of relief now that he was back into grad school. N.I.T. had provided some normalcy in his life over the years, a routine that integrated tightly with his self-esteem. Yet, it seemed that every time he encountered other members of the disbanded N.I.T. Motor Club, he would spend the next hour brooding.

Through all of this, Tamiya and Ootaki were still his friends, his mentors. The only difference was that he could only socialize with one or the other...his two sempai weren't on speaking terms. So he spent a lot of his time at Chihiro's Whirlwind, working "just for fun"...but really to find safe harbor away from the abrasive feelings he struggled with whenever he encountered a Club member at school.

Genji had been very busy with the combination of schoolwork and business, while Sayoko had been hanging around Tamiya a lot. Sora had pretty much retreated into her own private world. Keiichi surmised that the dainty sophomore's entire group of friends had been in the Motor Club...when the Club was disbanded, her whole social network was disrupted or even dissolved. Megumi was struggling with the fact that her boyfriend was too busy to make time for her. Cevn-sensei was struggling to keep track of his classes and the numerous correspondences he had to address concerning his "First Consciousness" book.

Back at home, Bell-chan was a wreck. Somehow, communications were completely cut off from Yggdrasil, so she and her sister's didn't have any means of finding out what was happening with her parents. Sometimes, Keiichi would find himself daydreaming about the upcoming war between the Gods and the Demons...

As he walked out of Esaki Hall in the late afternoon, the late afternoon quiet was speared by a deafeningly loud concussive explosion that literally threw him to the ground. Underneath him, the ground shook violently for a couple of minutes. He could hear shattering glass falling to the ground...the clock in the center of campus with its distinctive zigzag design was tipped over. Hugging the ground, Keiichi instinctively thought that a nuclear bomb had gone off. As he looked up, he noticed a shadow darkening the Student Center and all the buildings to the east. He sensed that something seemed _wrong_ with the sky; the illumination and light spectrum were all too dark for 5pm in the afternoon.

After waiting for a few moments, Keiichi stood up and compassed the horizon with his eyes. Everyone else was huddled on the ground for protection. He turned and stopped in his tracks when he saw a huge plume of billowing smoke to the west, filling up half the sky. His blood swiftly ran chill as the cloud initially presented the appearance of a nuclear mushroom. A classmate of his dashed by...

"What happened? Did Tokyo just get bombed?" he shouted.

"_Oh..my..God!! Mt. Fuji just blew its top!_" she shouted back, pointed in the air briefly as she was dashing towards the student parking lot.

Keiichi looked at the churning pall of smoke and shook his head.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Everyone gathered at breakfast to listen to the news reports about the eruption. The implications of the eruption of Fuji-san were staggering. Volcanic experts from the Institute of Volcanology had classified it as an Ultra-Plinian eruption; rating it as a 7 on the Volcanic Explosivity Index. By any regards, this was by far the most destructive incident of volcanism in recorded history. Ironically, the most recent eruption of Mt. Fuji had occurred exactly 300 years ago, in November 1707.

A full 2400 meters of Fuji-san's volcanic cone had suddenly blown up in a violent paroxysm of catastrophic proportions. None of the typical signs signaling the potential for an eruption were manifest: marked changes in seismicity; phreatic eruptions; plumes of smoke or gas; deformation of the area around the cone; etc. The geologists and volcanologists were at loggerheads in their attempts to explain how Mt. Fuji could erupt so spectacularly without the standard geophysical precursors.

Within an hour, the explosion had expelled an estimated 650 cubic kilometers of ash into the atmosphere, in an eruption column that pillared to a height of almost 50 km. By comparison, the amount of ejecta was roughly 800 times more than the eruption of Mount St. Helens in 1980. Ashfall was measured as far away as Hong Kong, 2,550 km to the south. In central Japan, near Kyoko and Osaka, over 20 cm of ash fell, burying everything during the seven hours of Mt. Fuji. As night fell several hours after the eruption, the glowing air around the volcano could be seen as far away as Okinawa and Seoul, Korea.

The collapse of the eruption column produced numerous pyroclastic flows. As these hot pyroclastic outflows reached the ocean, they caused additional explosions. During these explosions, most of the fine-fraction of the ash was removed. Glowing superheated clouds of gas and ash hurtled towards Surago and Sagami Bays at 120kph, killing everything in their path with 400 degree Celsius temperatures.

The resulting tsunami from the seismic properties of the explosion traveled the Pacific at hundreds of kph, killing thousands of people in Micronesia and Polynesia. Hawaii, Samoa, Indonesia and the Aleutians were hard hit with tidal surge waves measuring nearly 40-50 meters above sea level.

As the eruption subsided, Mt. Fuji had been transformed into a caldera concavity stretching over 14 km across. Almost two-thirds of the longstanding national symbol of Japan had simply disappeared in the explosion that day.

Since Mt. Fuji was a stratovolcano, layered with many different mineral and rock compositions over millennia of continual combinations of eruptions, the ejecta was mostly basaltic in nature, constructed of andesite or dacite compositions. As a stratovolcano, Fuji-san's many layers of lava and ash were both exploded into the air by the inferno of its eruption, creating a fallout of deadly gases and rocks.

Several hundred thousand direct deaths were caused by bomb impacts, tephra fall, lava streams and pyroclastic flows subsequent to the initial explosion. Fortunately, there had only been a single eruption lasting several hours, followed by a swarm of comparatively minor afterbursts...another fact that puzzled the geologists. The nuees ardentes, a hurricane-force windblast of heated gas that hurtled down the slope of Mt. Fuji, literally leveled huge tracts of forest while creating forest fires at the periphery of its flow. A number of cities and villages were buried meters-deep by the lahar, a fast moving sediment laden rush of water resulting from the heavy rains over the past two weeks in the Mt. Fuji vicinity. Giant car-sized pyroclastic boulders ejected by the eruption flattened structures over 10 kilometers away.

The air pressure wave of the initial explosion shattered windows all over Tokyo and caused the total collapse of weaker structures. Fire, the ever-present scourge of historical Japan, burned its way indiscriminately through forests and inhabited areas, forcing the evacuation of several million people from their homes. Huge areas nearby the sacred mountain were rendered uninhabitable as debris and lava buried them. The forested areas in the vicinity were aflame for several days...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Keiichi remembered his ride home yesterday afternoon, marveling at the blanket of ash, silt and small rocks which covered everything by the time he arrived at the temple compound. It suggested the morning after a fresh winter blizzard, only with gray and black 'snowflakes'.

Belldandy had given up using her powers to sweep away the debris falling from the sky...it just kept blowing back. So instead, she broke out a huge ahi from the freezer and cooked tuna steaks for everyone.

The news reported that an hour or so earlier, the Washington Monument had collapsed...but that disaster had been overshadowed by the eruption of Fuji-san in the world news. Two nations had suffered the irreplaceable loss of national and cultural icons.

"Well, not irreplaceable," Cevn had noted as the radio broadcast droned on. The Washington Monument could be rebuilt...but Mt. Fuji would never be the same.

"Hey...did you guys ever see Kurosawa's 'Dreams'? Remember that part where Mt. Fuji erupted...and all the Tokyo-ko were dashing down the streets? I wonder if they stole that clip from some Godzilla movie..." Tomohisa asked out of the blue.

"Who _hasn't_ seem 'Dreams'?" Keiichi snorted, wanting to cuff his cousin on the back of the head for being such an idiot...but yet, Tomo had a point. News clips of the Tokyo populace's reaction to the eruption taken an hour after the eruption presented a study in contrasts. Several OLs were panicked, running away from the outstretched mike of the interviewer. A septuagenarian opined that this was the wrath of the Kami for Japan's gradual decline into decadent Westernism. Several school kids remarked that it was "cooler than a movie" as they sidestepped piles of shattered glass that had been blown out of nearby office buildings. A housewife calmly replied that she was praying for the families who had suffered losses of life and property resulting from the horrible disaster.

Keiichi was _there_, at N.I.T., watching the derby of panic that seemed to possess everyone at the school moments after they realized that Mt. Fuji had exploded...

As he munched on Bell's lemon grass Ahi steak, the radio show interviewed several environmentalists. They were predicting that the huge amount of fine ash and aerosol that fanned out into the troposphere after the eruption would create blue and green sunsets for several weeks in many parts of the world. Barometers reported the passage of an immense atmospheric pressure wave, rippling over the globe like the expanding circles produced when a rock is dropped into a still pool of water. The veil of particles resulting from the eruption of Mt. Fuji were predicted to form a solar radiation filter; scientists estimated that this would cause a global environmental lapse, lowering worldwide temperatures an average of 2-3 degrees Celsius for the next year or two.

"Incredible!" he muttered to himself. Looking at his housemates, Keiichi measured their reactions to the onslaught of news about this new disaster. Because the sheer amount of 'stuffs' floating in the air above Makuhari, the digital and analog TV signals were significantly degraded, almost constantly breaking up or ghosting. Thus, the only source of news was coming courtesy of the radio.

Once more, school was canceled.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Urd and I? Well, we were experiencing a blooming of our love for each other, as each day slipped by with a few reminders of how precious life was. Urd had come to the very iceknife edge of the Real Death, and I...I was still in a world that kept spinning me around.

Was time my enemy?

The explosion of Mt. Fuji was almost sci-fi in its _otherness_. The scale of its eruption was unrealistic, disconcerting. And it had been the first of many. Every couple of days, another volcano somewhere in the world had erupted violently. Extinct, dormant and active volcanoes were 'blowing their tops' all over the Earth.

Etna. Haleakala. Popcatepetl. Rainier. Hekla. Sollipulli.

Tomorrow was Tanabata, the traditional summer holiday celebrating the union of the Weaveress and the Cowherd. In Japan, I had grown accustomed to the fact that there were two sets of holidays...the national holidays and the "people's" holidays. Tanabata fell into the latter grouping; wielding tremendous cultural influence over the Japanese.

Belldandy had suggested that we celebrate Tanabata in the traditional manner, drawing up our wish papers and hanging them from one of the trees. Normally, the tanzaku were suspended from cuttings of tall bamboo grass, but a good portion of the grasses had been deadened after the eruption of Fuji-san and the resulting blanket of ash.

So a substitution was in order.

Further, Belldandy informed us that she had selected the "Infamous Cherry Tree" to be decorated with the colorful ribbons of paper. That cherry tree had been the source of her near-separation from Keiichi, in the first year they were together. She kept announcing that she could hardly believe that this was her and Keiichi's fifth Tanabata!

At dinner, Belldandy distributed a blank piece of colored paper to each of us. On one side, we were to compose a poem, on the other side we would write our wish. After breakfast tomorrow, we would tie our wishes to the tree with colored bamboo silk string. It occurred to me that she had obviously been planning this for a while; the paper and silk strings looked like they came from a very expensive paper kit.

After we finished the meal, Keiichi pulled me aside.

"I've been wondering about that story you told me...the one about the professor and the student. It's been in the back of my mind for a while, with all the cataclysms that have been happening in Japan and all over the world. I understand that you told it to me to help me try and see that I should forgive Megumi. And I ended up forgiving her anyway. But since Sayoko and Genji lost their parents...I just can't help but think about it. How is it that _you _know about the story about your parents?"

I looked at the floor for a moment...

"Keiichi, life is often an illusion of an illusion. The child grew up, was adopted by a series of foster parents, went to college and..."

"It really was you, wasn't it?" he asked, his eyes locked with mine.

"Yes. The woman who died in childbirth and the man who killed himself...those were my biological parents."

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Isilblius regarded the empty SpiderDemon nest with callous indifference. The Spiders must have finished consuming Mara's soul. They were nowhere in sight, and mired in the center of the web was a mummified floss-wrapped body.

"You've served me well in your role as a timepiece, dead Mara!" he said, addressing the human-shaped mound of SpiderDemon floss. There was no indication of a Demonic aura, confirming his observation that Mara's Soul had been consumed into nothingness. Now the Demonic Spiders were probably searching the nearby villages and towns for more prey, of the human kind. The slight energies of the humans would no doubt spur them into a voracious feeding frenzy...

Now it was time for him to exact his ultimate revenge. Isilblius had decided to wait until Mara was dead before he wheeled his final series of evil machinations into action.

The virii that he had created and infected Vanagdrasil and Yggdrasil Mainframes with...had rendered both systems completely inoperative for several weeks now. The Gods and Demons had been in a pitched battle for some time now...and had nearly wiped each other out.

Isilblius knew that Kami-sama of Yggdrasil was mortified, suffering horribly in the knowledge that His ill-planned decision to reinfect the Norns had resulted in the decimation of His Gods. The SuperGod's morale and confidence must be crushed by now...

Now that Mara was dead, Isilblius could pay his respects to Oni-sama, the Dark Lord of Vanagdrasil. The fact that the SuperDemon had witnessed the deaths of almost all of His Demonic children led Isilblius to gleefully envision how he would find the Devil King; a uber-Demon with a cowed, troubled aspect.

Isilblius_ wanted _to see that look of defeat on His face!

But first, the Earthrealm.

"What to do, what to do?" Isilblius said casually as he waved his hand. A holophotic image of the planet appeared, floating before him. The Earthrealm's bluewhite orb marked a dramatic contrast to the red and green colors of Mara's lair. He paced leisurely around the sphere, knowing that this image was actually a miniature duplicate of the planet. Everything he did to this image...would manifest upon the Earthrealm instantly.

"Chop it in half with a DireKatana? Kick it like a soccer ball, causing the equivalent impact of a comet. Spray it with a gas, turning the atmosphere into poison?" Isilblius said to himself, hotly anticipating the devastation he was going to wreak.

Isilblius grinned with wicked exuberance as he alighted on an idea. With a gesture of his hand, the Moon appeared in a distant corner of the room. He walked over and stood behind it, visually aligning it with the Earth. With a laugh, he gave it a gentle nudge in the direction of the Earth.

"Just like the Earthrealm game of pool! Within six hours, you'll crash into your mother planet, killing every living being and destroying yourself..." he remarked to the slowly moving silvergray globe.

Now all he had to do was wait...and watch.

But the thought of having to wait to savor the delicious destruction left Isilblius unsated. Crashing the Moon into the Earth...just wasn't enough! He wanted to cause death and destruction _now_!

Regarding the blue globe floating in what was formerly the living room of Mara's Lair, Isilblius strolled over and considered it.

So fragile. Just a slight change in temperature, time, physical and chemical properties...and the ant-like mortals would die. Because of his heightened perception, Isilblius would relish every death scream, every escaping frightened Soul.

"NO! I just can't wait for you!" he shouted at the globe. Touching a finger to each polar icecap...Isilblius focused heat through his fingertips...and within a few seconds, he had dissolved them.

"And now it's time to inflict some pain on certain people where it will _really _hurt them…" he said to the rapidly-permutating image of the Earthrealm.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Belldandy could hear the dysrhythmic roar of an onrushing ocean from thousands of kilometers away. With a beyond-time reaction, she used her earring to break her seal. She swiftly created a protective bubble of Goddess energy over the temple and as much of Makuhari as she could spare...before several kilometers of ocean swamped them. She could survive the instant flood, but her sisters certainly wouldn't, as they only had a fraction of their Goddess powers. And Keiichi and the other mortals would have surely died.

She could feel Peorth's Goddess energy adding to hers; intuition informed her that Peorth had broken her seal as well, in sync with Belldandy.

Keiichi was looking at the tree when every color was flushed into pitch dark as something _huge_ passed overhead.

"Bell?" he screamed, his faculty of vision suddenly robbed away from him. It was if something had replaced the light blue sky with a dark shadow. There was no sound, no wind, no light.

A second later, the ground began to glow with illumination. Keiichi looked at Belldandy and Peorth...Bell-chan was tossing small glowing spheres of light on the ground while Peorth was scattering rose petals that radiated a bright pinkish color.

"Keiichi? Are you here?" he heard Belldandy's voice call out in the gradually disappearing dark.

"Wha...what happened?" he shouted, pointing at the morning sky...which had been replaced with a densely dark starless ephemera.

"That's the Earthrealm's ocean," a weak voice gasped.

"Mara!" Urd half-gasped, half-shouted as she identified the source of the voice. She was ready to rage at the Demoness...

Belldandy put a restraining hand on Urd's shoulder. Mara looked like she was a featherbrush away from the Real Death.

"I came here...to warn you..." Mara choked, and then collapsed to the ground in a heap. Belldandy looked at Urd with unease, her eyes asking "what could be powerful enough to do this to a Demon?" Mara's energies were ebbing. Could this be the doing of the Dark Lord of Vanagdrasil, she wondered. And yet, this latest disaster was _global_ in nature...by far the most devastating catastrophe since the Almighty 'cleansed' the Earthrealm so many thousands of years ago.

"Could this be the act of the Almighty?" she reluctantly considered. A panic struck her momentarily as Belldandy considered the possibility that the oceanflood was simply a part of the fallout from the war going on between Gods and Demons...

"What is going on here?" Skuld screamed frantically. "We're covered by _kilometers_ of ocean...and now _Mara_ is here?"

Keiichi, Cevn, Megumi, Genji and Tomohisa paled as the implication of Skuld's statement shorn away their senses...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Unable to accept defeat and death at the hands of Isilblius, Mara had spent days poisoning the SpiderDemons in a last attempt to escape. Altering the manifestation of her bloodflow into a suitable paralysis potion, she endured the pain beyond pains as the poison coursed through the veins of Demoness energy in her manifest state. She doubted that Isilblius would suspect her plan; she had been weakened into immobility anyway by the torturing Spiders. But they greedily feasted on her Soul...and one-by-one, they succumbed to the poison and were stilled. It had taken two days for her to gather enough strength to physically escape from the SpiderDemon's web. Her last glimpse of the SpiderWeb was of a Demoness-shaped blur of a cocoon...filled with dead SpiderDemons.

Once her escape was effected, she tried to contact the Dark Lord to warn Him of Isilblius' plans. But the Demon Grief Office Hotline only sounded a busy signal when she called. Mara then tried to summon a transport beam to Gate back Vanagdrasil...and found her way blocked! For all intents and purposes, she was locked out...stranded on the Earthrealm.

Resting from her exertions, Mara realized that the only other Divines on the planet were the Three Norns and possibly Peorth. Much as she despised the idea of seeking help from _Goddesses_, Mara knew that they were the only source of aid that she could rely on.

After all, they had defeated the Ultimate Destruction Program several years ago...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

While Keiichi and the other mortals stared credulously at the ocean covering Belldandy and Peorth's hastily erected shelter, filled with deep pangs of insecurity, the Goddesses turned their attention to their Demonic enemy.

"_You_ did this, Mara! You've been doing this all along! Killing world leaders, launching nuclear weapons, creating disasters...that have killed_ millions_ of mortals! In complete defiance of the Rules!" Peorth said, barely able to contain her wrath.

"Yes, Mara! How could you...a Demon Grief Office Agent...recklessly disregard the Rules concerning global disasters? Isn't the exact purpose of your assignment to the Earthrealm to try and cause grief to my dear Keiichi...and no one else? Even as a Goddess, I know that once a Demoness is assigned to cause grief to a mortal, she cannot act with a latitude that extends beyond the intent of her assignment. Otherwise, we Gods and you Demons would bless and curse the mortals into extinction. You _know_ this, and yet..."

Urd circled her hands in an encompassing gesture.

"Mara...isn't this a little _overkill_ on your part! The Rules clearly state that 'global disasters are explicitly prohibited as a means of casting a curse upon a mortal!' They also state 'no other beings can be harmed, unless their harm is for the express purpose of bestowing grief to the assigned mortal!' I know that the Rules are the same for you as they are for us; just substitute 'grief' for 'relief' and 'curse' for 'wish'. So tell me...all these volcanic eruptions, the collapse of thousands of tall buildings and national landmarks, the totally wacky weather phenomena, this Bible-epic flood...what does all this have to do with causing grief to Keiichi?"

"I..Isil..b..blius," Mara struggled to say.

"What, Mara?" Belldandy asked. Mara gathered her strength to try and speaker louder.

"_I said _Isilblius_, blessit!_"

Urd felt her NowTime orientation spin as a secretive horrible memory clutched at her. From out of nowhere, the spoken name triggered a plague of recollections. The name Mara spoke lit the fuse to the explosive moments of horror locked within Urd's mind. The sudden flickshot of a suppressed memory...now fully within her consciousness...lifted her towards panic. She reeled from the awareness that someone had erased part of her mind in order to conceal his name.

She remembered it all...

"Huccc...!" Urd gasped as the breath was sucked out of her. The others looked at her with an appraisal of mutual concern as she held her hands to her face in the silent scream. She collapsed to the ground, paralyzed as the terrifying extent of Isilblius's cruelty rushed at her like a runaway shinkansen.

_"__URD!__"_ Belldandy screamed the moment her older sister fainted.

_"__BIG SISTER!__"_ Skuld shouted, the words forming on everything in sight.

Cevn dashed over to where Urd had fallen, almost as fast the Goddesses got there. Once again, he regretted the Ultimate Force and its prohibition on touching Urd...he had tried to gently tap her cheek to see if she was okay...and was repulsed.

A moment later, Mara had made her way over to join the group of Goddesses and mortals in a semicircle around Urd. To her, Urd looked like she had seen the worst atrocities of Auschwitz...

In her mind, Urd was fighting to keep from jumping off a precipice. Sanity...insanity...sanity...insanity, her mind ticked back and forth like the dripping of a clepsydra. She felt her life being miniaturized, overshadowed by the heinous sequence of Isilblius' actions. Just before her mind folded shut and her heart collapsed, Urd felt a hot iron of anger stab her as she realized that she had been victimized.

"It...was _him_! Now I know the fucker who assaulted me! He said his name was Isilblius! Then he made me forget...and replaced my memories with thoughts he had created...so I would blame my dear Cevn!"

Belldandy looked at Peorth with terrified eyes, and then glanced at Mara with anger.

"You summoned the _Ultimate Demon_?!" she shouted, gripping Mara by the shoulders. "Isilblius is the harbinger of Final Ragnarok...the End of All Things!"

"Did she just say what I thought she said?" Peorth asked Belldandy.

"I..I remembered everything now. He beat me..._violated_ me..."

Mara felt a cloying sense of rage towards Isilblius well up in her breast. Her enmity with Urd and her sisters dissipated. It was one thing to hear him boast of destroying Vanagdrasil and the God's Realm, but this wanton attack on Urd...was _too_ personal.

With a tuck of foreboding, it struck Mara that her parents might be dead...

"...he said he was going to destroy Yggdrasil by planting a virus in the Mainframe as well as in _us_. He _used_ me to...oh My Darkness Lord...start the Demon Virus. He said he was going to destroy..."

"I hope you're happy now, Mara," Peorth said icily, then regretted her words as Mara looked at her tearfully and said that Isilblius had probably killed _her_ parents.

Too. Like Peorth, Mara had lost her parents...

"Yes. In an act..cough..of utter stupidity...I created him!" Mara wheezed. "I only wanted to..gasp..fulfill my Grief Office assignment. T..to cause Keiichi to feel pain...so I could leave this stupid...Earthrealm. I..I didn't expect...him to turn against me! Now he wants to destroy...everything. We Demons...have been told that the Ultimate Demon...would..cough..bring about the union of Vanagdrasil with Yggdrasil. To create a better place. It..was a lie, I realize..cough..now. H..he tried to kill me! I should have never created him. I absolutely regret it!" Mara explained, each word filled with bitterness and betrayal. Despite all that Mara had just admitted, Belldandy felt a pass of compassion for the Demoness. She had spoken her deepmost kokoro, Demon or not.

"And in an act of utter Evil, I shall uncreate you all!" a booming voice filled the domeshield covering the temple.

Belldandy shuddered as a dark form manifested in their midst, appearing from thin air. The circle widened as a 10-foot tall Demon coalesced into solidity. Urd saw Isilblius and promptly withdrew to a safe distance, fear singling her features.

With a deft reach of his clawed hands, he grabbed Mara, lifting her clear off the ground by her neck.

"This isn't a Demon," Belldandy realized. This _thing_ was far worse than the most malicious Demons she had ever tangled with. The aura of reprehensible vileness that accompanied the appearance of Isilblius filled her with dread.

The arcane stench of Evil was so strong...she wanted to vomit.

His skin was a sullen dark red, covered with mystical symbols and mandalas. He was tightly muscled, with tufts of orange and green fur around his waist, neck, wrists and ankles. Two large horns ram's horns protruded from each temple of his head, while his feet were cloven. Fang canines protruded around his lips, which were curled in a ghoulish smile.

Transforming his hand into a axblade, he lifted Mara up into the air...and neatly sliced off her head...

_"__MARA__!!__"_ Belldandy screamed. With a kick, he sent the head in their direction...and it rolled to a stop right in front of Skuld's feet.

_Aiieeeeeeeeeee!_

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

This...Evil...had effortlessly flung Mara's body to the side. Just like that, he had killed a Demon! Belldandy felt a rush of wretchedness at Mara's ill-fate...but it was swallowed by the huge fear that gripped her and everyone else. The group of Divines and mortals withdrew towards the cherry tree, frightened out of their wits.

"I am Isilblius, The Destroyer!" he announced. "I will utterly destroy the Everything and recreate it in my image! Already, all the Gods and Demons are dead!"

"«_M..Mother! Father!_»" Belldandy heard Urd and Skuld's gasping thoughtcast in her mind. It was unbelievable. She couldn't even begin to comprehend the possibility that her parents no longer...existed.

A second later, Peorth launched herself at the Demon.

"You _killed my __parents_!" she screamed. Isilblius wheeled around to face her, and a pair of green-yellow beams of light lanced out from his eyes. The light bathed Peorth, freezing her in midair. To Belldandy's horror, she had been transformed into a statue. The statue fell and shattered into a thousand potato chip-thin pieces.

"ENOUGH!!"

Belldandy had barely enough presence of mind to claw past her fright and shock at the deaths of Mara, Peorth...and her parents. For she knew by this time that Isilblius wasn't idly boasting. He had taken down a First Class Goddess with little visible exertion. Her mind was racing for ways to protect Keiichi and the others...when she recognized His voice.

It was the Almighty! He's come to save us all!

"THIS ENDS HERE! YOU HAVE KILLED ALL OF MY DEMONIC CHILDREN...BUT _I_ STILL SURVIVE! AND I SWEAR THAT YOU WILL PERISH THIS DAY FOR KILLING ALL MY DEMONS!"

A_ second _voice challenged Isilblius, adding to Belldandy's confusion. The new voice was powerful, reverberating deep in her ears and her Soul...

"Keiichi,NO!" she shouted as her mortal boyfriend broke rank and charged towards the Demon with a garden rake. In front of her horrified eyes, Isilblius grabbed him and lifted him up with a swift motion, holding him in the air over his head...and _bent him backwards_. With a sickening crunch, Keiichi fell to the ground.

Too late!!

Belldandy knew before she rushed to his side that he was dead.

"How_ dare _you!" the Almighty screamed in rage at Isilblius. He firmly pushed Belldandy aside, away from Isilblius. Unsheathing a pair of weapons, He charged at Isilblius with a series of blurfast fencing maneuvers. His anger was palpable, His words filled with indignance. He had created the Gods and loved them all...but He was also the prima facie of all reality. Isilblius had just killed one of his mortal Children. Not to mention that this particular Earthrealm human was the beloved of one of His daughters...

Belldandy tried to push her agony into an anguished scream, but the voice was ripped out of her as the Lord and the Other One attacked Isilblius.

When she found her voice, she screamed...not in pain, but in rage.

"_KILL_ this evil abomination, August One!"

Every part of her being was amplified, riddled with mental confusion and emotional pollution. Urd and Skuld tugged her further away to a safe distance, away from the combatants. Watching the iconic bouting between the Lord, Isilblius and the Other One with a sinking heart, Belldandy realized that she needed to concern herself with protecting everyone from the battle.

"That would be what Keiichi would want me to do," she told herself, fighting back the onslaught of her broken heart which stood poised to rip her sanity to shreds. _Her_ life was over the second Keiichi fell to the ground with that sickening crunch. She kept looking at his still form, imagining that he would stand up and walk over to her, whispering "it's just a bad dream, Bell-chan."

The Lord stepped away to spell Himself. Belldandy observed that He was brandishing a pair of crystalswords, using them to expertly weave and feint against Isilblius.

The Lord's counterpart...looked like a photo negative of the Lord. His long hair was silkblack with streaks of bright red as it streamed out from under his kabuto helmet. His face possessed a tanned complexion, like Urd's. Yet the features seemed gentle, like the adult Velpser before he was transformed into his current feline form. He swung a long spear of red light with a supple grace, attempting to sweep Isilblius off of his feet...

"So...Kami-sama of Yggdrasil and Oni-sama of Vanagdrasil...we are gathered at last! On the squalid, pitiful Earthrealm of all places!" Isilblius shouted vaingloriously.

"If either of you think that you can defeat me, you're both filled with a gross misconcept! Were either of you able to forestall the murders of all of your children by my hand, both God and Demon? Eh? Were you able to debug the system virus I planted in the Mainframes that power your Realms? For that matter, did either of you manage to undo the viruses I introduced into your Realms? You know, the virus that slowly drove you both towards war...and wiped out everyone in your Realms that wasn't killed in the War? How tragic! You each thought that it was your enemy who created the virus. So you sent your Gods and Demons to war...and they killed themselves for me! I didn't even have to expend any energy to bring about their demise! Hilarious...don't you think? Haaa nyhaa bwah haa ha!"

Belldandy watched as both the Lord and the Dark Lord of Vanagdrasil trembled violently with rage.

"But you both, on the other hand..._did_ use up a lot of energy trying to prevent the genocide of your so-called Children. Bwah ha ha haaaa! Nor were you able to...stop the gradual weakening I inflicted on both of you...to which you both kept to your own counsel...telling no one!"

"My Lord!" all three Goddesses blurted out, filled with concern that Kami-sama had been suffering all along.

_"You...shall die!"_two mighty voices boomed as one...and the bout continued.

Belldandy could only stand and watch in amazement as the pitched battle resumed. She was captured by the awe of her awareness that the other one was the _Dark Lord_!

"He must love His children too..." she reflected as she regarded Kami-sama's counterpart. Dressed in glossy black armor, he was parrying with a spear-like object. In his own way, he was very handsome, reminding her of Keiichi when he had been possessed by the Ultimate Destruction Program...

The thought of Keiichi shattered her.

The one true love of her life had died before her eyes.

This..._thing of Evil_...had killed her dear Keiichi. Had killed her friend, Peorth. Had killed her parents and Mara and all the Gods and Demons...had killed millions of Earthrealm mortals.

Irrevocably.

He was the Death. With a start, Belldandy realized that the omnipresent Reaper was nowhere to be seen.

Could it be...that Isilblius had even killed the Reaper!

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

At first, it seemed to Belldandy that the Lord and the Dark Lord were each trying to destroy Isilblius with the independent abandon of berserkers in a melee, driven by the sheer depths of their abundance of grief and hatred. She realized that the real battle was being fought elsewhere..._everywhere_. This representation was simply its attributable locus of TimeSpace.

All she could hope for was that the two Almighty Ones could defeat Isilblius.

She felt Urd's arms hugging her around the shoulders from behind, comforting her. Skuld was squeezed against her front, too afraid to look at the grand life-and-death rencontre between the three. Despite Keiichi's death, Belldandy could not tear her attention away from this battle royale. She didn't want to bear her eyes upon Keiichi's lifeless form.

The battle shifted into arcane planes, invisible to the mortals but visible to the three Norns. With multifaceted meshes of color, the Lord and the Dark Lord swept around Isilblius, pressing their attack.

"They're fighting as a _team_!," Belldandy realized.

A moment later, the two Lords bouted again...and Isilblius disappeared.

Before Belldandy's horrified eyes, they reappeared. Her Lord's chest was pierced by the Dark Lord's spear...the Dark Lord was stabbed by both the Lord's crystalswords.

"Victory is mine!" Isilblius shouted exultantly as he touched both of his opponent's heads. Their forms bubbled...and dissolved into nothingness.

"Bye bye. Everybody dead. Except for three Norns!" Isilblius announced with biting sarcasm.

"You_ fuck_!" Cevn screamed as he charged Isilblius. Whirling to face the mortal, Isilblius hurled a ball of fire at him...and Cevn caught on fire, screaming as he fell to the ground.

Belldandy felt Urd unhug her.

"Urd..._NO!_"

"You killed our Lord. You killed my love!" she heard Urd scream in pure anger, facing the arch-Evil.

"No! Urd! You have _no powers_!" Belldandy screamed desperately. But it was too late. Urd advanced towards Isilblius, a figure against a glow.

Pointing a finger, a beam of pure red light jumped out and pierced through Urd. Belldandy watched as Urd's face filled with surprise as she examined the bowling ball sized hole in her chest...then her eyes rolled up and she fell to the ground, dead.

A moment later, Isilblius had reduced Megumi, Genji and Tomohisa to ashes. At least their deaths were instantaneous, Belldandy thought grimly.

"I have destroyed the Past!" he shouted, gloating over Urd's still body.

"Now I shall destroy the Future!" he declared in a threat enwrapped chill voice.

Skuld stepped behind Belldandy; Belldandy could feel her thin arms tightly clutching around her waist. Skuld's whole body was trembling.

"This isn't happening, this isn't happening," Belldandy's mind repeated, unable to grasp the staggering ripcase of atrocities committed by Isilblius.

Isilblius gestured with a beckoning motion...and Belldandy felt Skuld's grip being pried away from her waist. She spun around and hugged Skuld to her breast, struggling against a force that was trying to pull her sister away from her protective grasp. Belldandy exerted every gram of strength to hold on...and then Skuld was torn from her. Floating in the air, Skuld was slowly being drawn towards the Ultimate Demon.

"Please don't let him get me, Elder Sister!" Skuld screamed desperately. Belldandy lunged and caught hold of Skuld's ankles, trying to pull her little sister away from the Being of Evil. With her hands immobilized, she couldn't cast an energy blast towards him...

Feeling the tips of her shoes being dragged as she was pulled along with Skuld, Belldandy redoubled her efforts to hold on, knowing that Skuld's life was in her hands.

With a jerk, Skuld slipped out of her grasp. Struggling futilely against the traction, Skuld floated into Isilblius' hands.

"_NOOOOooooooo!_" Belldandy screamed. It was as if Skuld had been hanging from the top of cliff, with only Belldandy's grip saving her from a fall to her death.

And Belldandy wasn't able to hold on...

"What a cute little toy, this hammer!" Isilblius observed with a gravelly mock innocence. Taking Mjolnir, he bent it like a piece of rope around Skuld's neck, strangling her.

_"NO! STOP!__"_ Belldandy said weakly as Skuld kicked her legs and flailed her arms desperately...then spasmodically, then weakly...then not at all...

Skuld was dead!

This manifestation of malign Evil had killed everyone that mattered to her. Cupping her hands together, Belldandy manifested a globe of blue light in her palms...and shot an arcane energy shaft at Isilblius' chest. Her blast simply bounced off of him...and rebounded back at her. The moment it reached her, it turned into a string-like band of energy, pinning her against the infamous cherry tree. Try as she might, Belldandy couldn't move. She was tied to the tree by ropes of her _own_ blue energy!

"And now, to finish this tragedy...the death of the Present!" Isilblius announced with grim drama as he advanced on Belldandy.

Bound to the tree, she was powerless as he stopped inches away from her. With scatheful hate, he regarded her, stretching each moment into an infinite agony.

Belldandy calmed herself to her fate. If she were the last of the Gods, then how she embraced Death would be the penultimate statement of purpose for what the Gods and Yggdrasil stood for. She would literally speak the last words ever uttered by a Goddess.

They had to be the _right_ words...

Should she die with fear on her face and vengeance filling her heart? Facing her end with dignity, Belldandy knew that she _had_ to overcome hate with love, one more time...

_"I..I forgive you,"_ Belldandy said weakly as she felt his hands around her neck, choking her.

Isilblius didn't even react to her last words...

"STOPPPPPPP!"

And everything in her mind went black...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --


	55. Pt 55: A Question of Extremes

**Part 55: A Question of Extremes**

_I should be dead. I am dead. So why am I here?_

I gazed with a dream-like indifference as Isilblius appeared to be choking Belldandy. She was bound to a tree by ropelike bands of translucent bright blue light. The temple grounds were enshrouded by a thick orange mist, creating a necropolitan sense of haunted abandonment. A visitor to this reality, I felt like I had been bounced against a cinderblock wall. Looking at my outstretched arm, I cringed at the terrible sight.

My arm looked like a length of burnt steak.

Reacting with panic, I questioned once more about why I was _here_. I should be dead! I remembered yelling something at Isilblius, and then I was covered by flame-instance of the most intense physical pain I had felt in my life...and then I felt nothing. My thoughts were skittered as I heard Belldandy gurgling for air in bursts of gasps.

Isilblius was _killing_ her!

Nothing in the Enigma Book mentioned anything about_ this_ being an afterlife! Why was I witnessing Isilblius' attack on Belldandy? Why was he attacking her? The very sight of gentle, sweet Belldandy being strangled by this...murderous thing...was torturing my consciousness.

Was I brought back to this scene of tragedy...simply to witness this horror?

Faced with the complexity of ideas in the Enigma Book, I had abstracted several conclusions about the afterlife. Every being, every thread of life that had ever combed the essence of TimeSpace with the slightest spark of creative freedom...everything that had ever lived...when its life had spanned its allotted course, the Soul that remained evolved, joining an Instrumentality of Light. The Instrumentality served as an engine of sorts; a place where the individuality of the sentiences attached to the Souls was broken down. By separating sentience from Souls, the raw matter of the leftover Souls could be combined there. The sentiences...which represented every aspect of a being's individuality in the living world...were then harnessed, forming a pool of vast creative energies from which Love radiated forth to power everything in the Everything. The Souls were then parceled out whenever a new life was created. Upon death, each life would lose its awareness, but its Soul would live in, providing the raw material for each and every new life.

Urd had explained the Yggdrasilian perspective concerning the afterlife in great detail. She taught me that the afterlife was a Mid-light which existed at the center of all things. She instructed me about the Mirrors of Soul; a state of being after death where renewal of Soular energies occurs. There, the Souls reflect upon each other like an endless array of facing mirrors, transforming themselves into energy. But her orientation was limited by the confines of the body of knowledge available to the Gods.

Urd...

This _thing_ had killed Urd! I just _knew_ this, somehow. Inside of me, a silent void screamed into my kokoro. An acute, naked emptiness sorrowed my thoughts like an unbidden invader, tugging at my awareness with disconcerting persistence. And when I touched my emotions...part of my heart was missing, snuffed out. With an effort, I turned my head.

My horrified eyes were greeted with the cruel sight of her crumpled body lying close to mine. Her lifeless eyes, still open, burned scrimshaw tapestries of grief into the marrow of my Soul.

A corpse outside of me...inside of me.

My heart died in that moment.

Had Urd tried to save me? Did she witness my death at the hands of Isilblius...and then reacted with blind rage? Did she die protecting her two younger sisters? Did Isilblius snuff her essence out with callousness?

I would never know.

"Please come back, Urd..." I whispered to her corpse. "Please..."

In this afterworld of Isilblius's destruction and murder-greed, there obviously wasn't any wishes to be granted. My words fell upon silent ears.

A burst of empathy filled me, reluctantly I sensed how her noble heart must have been shattered when she saw me being killed by Isilblius! What a tragic end to our love, to the aspirations and joys and fears and intimacies. All I could understand was the fact that she was still alive when Isilblius set me on fire, killing me...

And Belldandy had witnessed the death of Keiichi!

This sorrowful madness overwhelmed me. Never in my worst nightmares could I have imagined how my presence in Japan could have led to this. Was it my fault? If I had never come here, if Urd had never been summoned to visit me on that fateful night a year ago...would this sequence of dark, sorrowful carnage have never been enriched into bleak reality.

Was_ I_ responsible for Isilblius?

There it is again...the misery of my confusion! I _was_ killed...I definitely felt my life being snuffed out. Everything had turned into nothingness in a split second of agony. And then I was here, as if I had awakened from a dream. My body was a charred husk of its former self; but yet my consciousness was intact...

But yet I_ am_ here!

If this is a story, then how could I be part of its conclusion?

All I could do now was watch Isilblius drain the life out of Belldandy.

Even if I was dead, if I was powerless, I could at least protest before doom claimed me. A voice reached out of my deepest being, demanding that I _do_ something to bring an end to the killing.

"STOPPPPPPP!"

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Isilblius relaxed his grasp on Belldandy's throat as he heard the unexpectedly loud shout. Everyone under this shield was dead...there was no being, either God or mortal, who could shout such a challenge! The only living being remaining in the Everything...was grasped between his constricting hands, the pneuma of her Soul bleeding out its last clutch of gasps.

He looked into her eyes, expecting to see raptures of dread terror. Instead, he saw softness and forgiveness.

"_You Bitch!_" he screamed, pulling his hands away as if they were afire. Enraged at her disconcerting calm, Isilblius screamed a litany of shrieks. He had wanted Belldandy to die bearing a mask of cowering terror; her last split-seconds of existence leavened with a soulwrenching despair. He wanted her death to be the absolute final proof of his Evil...a shadowplague of black hopelessness that would stretched endlessly through all Time, representing so fittingly his total domination of the Gods and Demons.

His plan was flawless. With all the Gods and Demons eradicated, their Souls and sentiences would join the Instrumentality. He could then complete his conquest of the Everything by draining the Instrumentality of all power. Now that he had killed every being in both Multiverses, the Instrumentality would possess the maximum amount of the power of Souls and sentiences. He would then destroy the Reaper and claim all the energy there for his own ends.

With all the energy of the Everything at his disposal, he would create a new order. His order.

Everything would have to die. Not one single instance of life could remain, otherwise his power would be diminished away from totality. With all life extinguished, all the power would rest in the Other Side...the Realm of the Reaper. By killing Death, he would have mastery over all possible energies in all nine dimensions, for they would be collected in the Mid-Light. There would be no Ultimate Force to thwart him, because there would be no energy for the UF to draw from.

But this one weak Goddess had denied him the satisfaction of total victory, stubbornly refusing to give in to her fear. She had even forgiven him! The fact that she was behaving like a benevolent Goddess to the end...was a nothing more than a resolute scorning of all of his perfect designs!

Filled with disgust, Isilblius realized that the force field was still in place, protecting this wretched place from the ocean above. It remained only because he hadn't killed its creator, the Norn of the Present.

"No matter...I'll simply dissolve it...and that will kill her and whatever geist is making those sounds!" he said to himself. With a grandiloquent gesturing of his hands, the dome suddenly disappeared.

An instantaneous mountain of ocean pulverized everything underneath it.

_That_ will kill the Norn!

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Belldandy coughed the ocean water out of her lungs as she bobbed in the salt water. In all directions, all she could see was deep-sea tides and waves. Nearby, Isilblius floated a meter above the water, surveying his handiwork with a smug grin.

Somehow, she was alive!

The last thing she remembered was a scream...a voice in her mind and in the air. It wasn't her voice; Isilblius had choked her into speechlessness.

Seconds later, a charred body arose out of the water, pausing to hover lifelessly against the daylight. Behind the crisped corpse, Belldandy noticed that the Moon loomed _hugely_...its orb azured in the midday sky, filling a corner of the horizon.

It was much larger than it should be.

"Cevn!" she sputtered in recognition as an ocean wave splashed her in the face. Isilblius had hoisted his body above the water to taunt her, to frighten her, to remind her that her beloved Keiichi was dead as well...buried underneath this ocean of seawater.

"«_Don't worry, Belldandy,_»" an impossibly calm voice thoughtcast to her. Isilblius turned towards her, making her regret the fact that she had shouted.

"Leave her be, Isilblius! Your real threat lies elsewhere!" she heard someone say with a passion of determination. Belldandy looked again at the corpse.

It was moving!

Cevn had felt the black ocean crush everything around him, literally atomizing the temple and its environs. The sudden decompression of a five kilometer deep segment of ocean was enough to smash anything flat...but as he struggled against the pressing walls of water, he envisioned himself passing knifelike through the depths, towards the surface. A split second later, he was hovering over the surface of a huge ocean...just as he had pictured in his mind!

Cevn realized instantly that the entire Boso Peninsula had been covered by water once Isilblius had melted the polar icecaps. In fact, most of Japan was underwater.

He saw Isilblius approaching Belldandy again, intent on finishing his murdering spree. Because she had unsealed her Goddess Powers, she had been somehow spared. Maybe _she_ was the reason that he was 'alive'! But if he was alive, why not the others? Why not Keiichi, who was as true a soulmate to this Goddess as any being in existence?

Cevn could feel an emergent sense of confidence...a_ something_ inside of him, awakening with each second...

Belldandy emerged from the ocean, levitating upwards in the air as the sea winds dried her off. She watched as Cevn shook himself like a cat shaking itself dry after a bath; the charred viscera and skin flaking off of his body. A few seconds later, he looked exactly like he did the moment before Isilblius had killed him.

_Almost_ the same...

In the middle of his forehead, she noticed a luminous sapphire-blue circle encircling an equally brilliant ruby-red diamond-shaped square, its corners intersecting the circle, creating four amethyst-purple colored points. It was like...a Goddess marking!

Isilblius paused in his advance, distracted by the Goddess and the mortal that were still alive.

"You're _dead_! I killed you!" the Ultimate Demon screamed in angry disbelief, looking back-and-forth at the two survivors.

"I burned you to a crisp! And I made you die by the pressure of tons of ocean water!" he shouted to Cevn, then Belldandy.

"Well, I guess the fact that I'm still here means that you aren't so 'ultimate' as you think you are, Isilblius! Do I look dead to you?" Belldandy heard Cevn taunt the Demon. Isilblius ignored him and reached out to strangle her again.

Belldandy levitated herself away from the approaching Evil...

Isilblius decided to finish Belldandy straightforth, figuring that the appearance of the dead mortal was a deception. In a final desperate act, this hateful Goddess was trying to delude him by creating a false image...so that she could escape.

"But there is no escape from Evil," he chuckled to himself.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

It took a moment for me to realize that I was filled with an inexplicable fund of raw energy. I felt more alive than I had ever felt before. For some reason, my body was whole again, unscarred by the torching I received from the Ultimate Demon. This _thing_ the Enigma Book had called Isilblius.

I 'knew' that Isilblius was neither God or Demon. He was something else, something entirely unwarranted within the existence of the Multiverse. Somewhere inside of me, I could see so clearly what had happened to bring him into this reality. He had used the legend of "the Ultimate Demon" as a ploy, hoping that some Demon would resurrect him. Mara's pride and desperate desire to wreck grief on Keiichi and Belldandy had done the rest. She had brought him back, thinking he was a Demon. But he certainly wasn't a Demon...he was _worse_!

The implications were staggering. This embodiment of Anti-life had destroyed both Yggdrasil and Vanagdrasil. I felt an emptiness inside of my mind, a clearly perceived void where the two Multiverse-trees _should_ be.

An unknown pattern of force coursed through my being, wanting to use me in some manner. Beyond the sense of strength, I felt another presence. It was like a completely new personality that had been slumbering inside of me...which had been roused to consciousness. All around me, all through me, I felt raimented in the awareness that reality had become a maw of madness.

"Instability needs to be gentled back into symmetry," I heard my voice echo in my thoughts.

As Isilblius grasped towards Belldandy's throat, I imagined a _different_ span of reality...a moment in TimeSpace where his athuggeed intentions were thwarted. In a brief cage of Time, I tried to compose a scene in my mind where his hands were slowly pulled away from her soft neck.

So I pictured it...

"Let...her..._go_!!" I yelled, repulsed and angered by his aggressive attack. To my utter amazement, Isilblius's hands slowly slid to a halt a meter short of Belldandy, as if they were being manipulated by unknown strings of energy! Bracing my efforts, I continued to elaborate the mental image formed in my mine, imagining his body being pulled away from Belldandy...

"What!?" I heard Isilblius shout in dismay as he was slowly, invisibly lifted away from Belldandy. I focused my mind with an even greater effort, as I could sense a rash of invasive thoughts trying to frustrate my concentration.

Belldandy looked at me with an expression admixing horror and generous awe as a mysterious tractive power pulled Isilblius away from her.

So that's it! If I think something...then it _happens_!

If this was so, then I could undo the recent past. I could bring Urd back to life! I could bring back Belldandy's precious Soulmate, Keiichi! I could prevent the deaths of all my friends! Perhaps I could even prevent the creation of Isilblius...

I labored feverishly in my mind to try and envision a different reality...an altered course of reality. To change things, to change the last few minutes.

Nothing happened.

I almost wanted to scream in frustration as I realized that I had come up against an unbreachable wall. There was a limit to these powers that had suddenly welled up inside of me. I tried to visualize a living, breathing Urd...

Nothing happened.

I tried to remove the flood of waters...

Nothing happened.

"WHY?!" I screamed in deep anguish. "Why doesn't it change? Why can't I just make things the way they're supposed to be? Why am I powerless, when I have so much power?"

Belldandy looked at me, trying to comfort me with her eyes. I knew that she had experienced the loss of everything that was dear to her. As much as I wanted to make things right for me...her pained expression only added to my sense of inadequacy. I couldn't even bring back Keiichi, or her sisters, or her parents...

How can I possibly restructure reality when I don't even know what reality is? I could prevent events from happening, but I lacked the ability to change events that had already occurred. In order to do so, I would have to objectify _reality itself_ with a precision that was impossibly to apprehend within the realms of cognition.

I would have to _think_ reality...

On the heels of my self-doubts, I could feel a tension straining against my thoughts, trying to make me question my belief that I couldn't hold Isilblius at bay. It mounted past fascination...past deliberation...past concentration...past conviction...past belief...and past reality...

He was free! Somehow, Isilblius had reached into my mind, forcibly convincing me that I could no longer restrain him. Or had my mind simply resigned itself away from the phenomena?

The parable of Jesus walking the Sea of Galilee came to mind. In Christ's mind, it was an absolute, unquestionable certainty that he could walk on water. There was no 'ifs' involved in the process of belief-as-fact. So he walked on water, based on faith as surety. But when his apostles attempted the same feat, they were unable to maintain a rational detachment...or even a modicum of faith.

"Oh ye of so little faith..." I heard in my mind.

The miracle collapsed.

"Two can play this game!" Isilblius shouted, glaring at me with a baneful condescension. I could sense my hands slowly pinning themselves against my side, as if they were being controlled remotely. It recalled the several times Mara had tried to possess me...only this source of will was much more potent! I could struggle against Mara, but I was too weak to stop Isilblius. In the recesses of my reasoning, I could sensibly intuit what Isilblius was planning. He was going to use my hands, forcing me to strangle myself.

"Belldandy...help me!" I gasped in a beggared thin voice.

Belldandy heard my plea...and reacted by splattering Isilblius with a white-blue blast of arcane energy. Just enough to distract him for a split-second...

"All right!" I thought in my mind as I snuck a sliver of thought within the bulldozer of Isilblius's will. Enough to shudder his mental takeover of my being to a halt. Enough for a momentary reprieve.

The Beast glared angrily at Belldandy and I.

I had to do something!

For Urd, for Keiichi and Belldandy, for Skuld, for Megumi and Genji, for Tomohisa, for Tamiya and Ootaki, for Sayoko, for little Sora...for all humanity...for the Gods and the Demons...

An arc of righteous anger filled me as I willed myself to live, fully releasing myself from his mental grip.

"Let go...surrender!" my 'other' voice urged. I wanted to struggle against it...against everything. I didn't know what to believe in anymore. Empty of heart, life making no sense, hope dashed under and over me...I had to trust in the fact that Belldandy trusted me. Anything I do from now on cannot be the actions of self. Cannot involve the means and ends of my own personal willpower.

I resigned myself and surrendered.

"We Go!" I shouted, following my intuition...and leapt away from the surface of the Earthrealm.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Hovering above the surface of the ocean, Belldandy watched as Isilblius turned his attention away from her...and disappeared.

He was gone!

Looking down where Makuhari used to be, where her _home_ used to be, where her _love_ used to be...Belldandy was finally able to cry out her agony...

An unswallowing of grief filled her. She realized that there was nothing left for her, not even witnesses to her profound pangs of sorrow!

She screamed Keiichi's name to the furthest wisps of the ocean...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

I furtively traveled out of the atmosphere and hovered about the Earth. The sheer beauty of the Earth from this superorbital perspective was profound in a way that defied description. I was amazed that I was _here_, outside of the troposphere...yet still alive. Was I body...or spirit? Or maybe even something else?

It seemed that I could 'fly' through space with the ease of swimming in a pool. As I scanned the Earth for familiar geophysical outlines, I realized with a shock that the ocean coastings were grossly disfigured. Obviously, the oceans had flooded hundreds, if not thousands of kilometers inland. There were no icecaps on the north and south polar regions of the globe!

Apparently, once he had instantaneously converted the Antarctic and Greenland icecaps into water, Isilblius had released enough water to cover the entire surface of the Earth almost 50 meters deep.

Billions had died in the space of seconds. They never had a chance.

Then I noticed the Moon. Its Selene facial features were crisp; it was visibly much closer than it should be at aphelion. I could sense that it was slowly moving towards the Earth like a harpooned whale being reeled in by a whalship.

"Why protect them?" a bullhorn strong voice shouted in my mind. I had hoped that once I left the surface of the Earth, Isilblius would be drawn away from Belldandy. At least I could save her. If Isilblius was prone to transports of rage and confusion, it would mean that he wasn't inflexible...that he could be coaxed into making impulsive decisions.

"«_Why destroy them?_»" I answered back with a thoughtcast.

"Because they are weak, primitive, despicable. Compared to the Gods and Demons, they are little nothingmeats. The Gods and Demons themselves are nothing...they couldn't withstand my power! The mortals are even less, unsalvagable builders of tiny lives, tiny realms of will. They are only shadow-sentiences, living fragilely within the confines of their so-called egos and the decay of their fleshcoats! Lower than the least..." he explained.

"Such observations are based on reckless, empty knowledge! If the knower is empty, the knowledge is devoid of meaning!" I shot back. To accent my point, I 'pushed' the Moon back into its former plane of orbit.

"How dare you meddle with my Plan! I easily defeated the two SuperGods and wiped out their Realms! What makes you think that _you_ can deem yourself capable of prevailing over me...when they failed?" he challenged, trying to wrest the Moon from my mental grasp.

"My presence here is already a defeat for you!" I challenged him, trying to sound insolent...and realizing I _was_ insolent! I wasn't just insolent, I was nettled with anger. I vouched to myself that I needed to curb my resentment before I ended up matching his vindictiveness.

With this, I tried to look beyond the physical dimensions...and experienced the TimeStream. It was like surgery, only the 'patient' was quantum reality itself. In my mind, I was peeling back the 'skin' of visible space...visible physicality. Eventually, my searching revealed the 'tissues' of the TimeStream.

With a startling insight, I recognized that the Enigma Book had appeared into my life propitiously. With a _purpose_! I had studied the mysterious arcane text hundreds of times, often in the company of the most able of tutors in the persons of Urd, Belldandy and Skuld. Each Goddess had offered me a distinct interpretation of its contents. Magical. Spiritual. Technological. And most recently, I had devoured its quintessence in a desperate all-out effort to devise a means to save Urd and her sisters from the wasting illness that threatened them. It dawned on me that amidst this process, I had somehow inadvertently inculcated the sum knowledge of Yggdrasil _and_ Vanagdrasil!

The mechanism that oiled the cogs of my intellect...was love. Always had been, always was. Driven by an approaching grief, I had unlocked the secrets concealed in the Enigma Book finally and fully by virtue of the love in my heart for Urd and her sisters, for Keiichi and Megumi, for everyone I had met in my new life in Japan! By creating the 'master schema' of the twinned Multiverses, I had synthesized the acme of each body of knowledge...a hylolistic integration of everything that there was to know.

All for love.

The three Goddesses had armed me with the ultimate weapon.

As I beheld the myriad strands of the TimeStream, I realized that I was treading where only the Three could travel. The streams of Time were much different than the omnibus representations of the Multiverse, which I could grasp only in terms of dimensionality. The glowing, jewel-like threads of the TimeStream were each a distinct aspect. The individual fluidic stretches each represented a different thread of Time; a unique pattern chronologically distinct from any other discreet 'slice' of Now. Each segment of the Timestream possessed a history unto itself, independent of all other forms of reality. Each TimeStream was woven with individual TimeWeaves...the "moments" of time in that particular historyspan of Time.

The TimeWeb...the aggregate of all TimeStreams.

In my mind's eye, the nearest visual accommodation I could create was that the individual bunches of TimeStreams suggested long strings of bundled spaghetti pasta.

During our Enigma Book sessions, Skuld had confided to me one day that she strongly suspected that_ dimensionality itself_ was contained within these threads of Time. She didn't know for certain, but the concept rang true in her mind despite its tenuous indemonstrability. To Skuld, this was an enigmatic truth. "One of those things you just know without thinking," she had said to me. With a mind-taxing stretch of thought, I saw that the strands _curved _ever so slightly, once I refrained from viewing them in NowTime. The past...the future...extended away from the present with a definite arc.

If I could just breach the 'barriers' that separating each strand, each weave of Time within the TimeStream...the point where each individual thread of Time ended and another quantum of Time began...then Everywhere would become EveryTime.

Then I could travel back in time and undo the dark deeds of Isilblius. A voice challenged me, reminding me that I had to play out my confrontation with the _cause_ of the havoc, before I could even attempt a restoration.

What could be beyond Time? If Isilblius was neither God nor Demon, could he possibly manifest himself in Non-Time? My metallect reasoned that, if all the quantums of time converged...Time wouldn't exist, because it would be EveryTime. By removing the element of Time, I might be able to undo the damage Isilblius had caused.

But I just didn't know how. Just like I didn't know how to revivify Urd, Skuld, Keiichi and the others. The horror of Urd's lifeless emerald eyes filled my heart with a blinding grief...

I would need to buy myself some time. If it took a billion years, I would learn how to save her! I would learn how to return everything to how it was before Isilblius had fucked it all up. Or I would die in the midst of the effort. I promised myself to devote all of my being to undoing all the agonies that the archfiend Isilblius had manifested.

He had hurt everyone and everything that was important to me. If it were in my power to prevent this, to recast all of reality, to spare my friends and millions of fellow Earthrealm mortals the deaths they had experienced, than I would.

But I just couldn't do it. Not yet. I had power, but I lacked experience.

Reluctantly abandoning this Time and Space to its fate, I slipped into the nearest TimeStream, hoping to evade Isilblius long enough so that I could fully grasp the capabilities of my gift of power...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

After locating a TimeWeave strand in the bundled ropelike TimeStream, I 'blinked' into existence near the Koi pond in front of our temple.

And I saw Belldandy. And Skuld. And Urd.

Apparently, I was sitting on one of the viewing rocks near the temple's koi pond, looking at the orange-gold fish swimming lazily in the water. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see movement. Momentarily panicked, thinking it was Isilblius, I turned to its source.

I saw Peorth rushing up to me, all out of breath and fired with excitement. As they looked on, she floated into the air the last few meters and then wrapped herself around me, hugging me tightly.

"Mon cherie amore, I _knew_ that you would come back!" she shouted, trying to kiss me passionately amidst an explosion of roses.

Different Time. Different World. Different Rules...

Same Peorth.

I was momentarily disarmed by her passionate hug. It wasn't the type of embrace one friend gives another. Her 'attack' when I was bathing last year loomed strongly in my mind, causing me to flinch and push her away.

She looked at me with mystified eyes.

Recovering my wits, I reached out with my mind and tried to glean through her thoughts, trying to learn some essence of the motives and memories passing through her mind in that instant of her kiss. Seeking anything that could explain the history of this TimeStream I had popped into.

I couldn't apprehend all of Peorth's knowledge. Apparently, transporting myself into a different reality of Time had caused a significant amount of disorientation...a form of chronological 'car sickness', as it were. At least she was speaking Japanese, instead of some language that had never existed on the Earth. At least the Earth that was my homeworld, back in my "home TimeStream".

I was so jumbled up, I could only grasp her memories constellatively as I probed into her mind. The fragments were like a windswept jigsaw puzzle. But I could make out a few details...

In this reality, Peorth was the Goddess who had been assigned by Yggdrasil to grant my wish. With cinematic blurity, I witnessed her mind replaying the moment she had granted my wish.

My wish had been to not be afraid of women any more.

As I searched her memories, I found out that it had taken Peorth_ three years_ to convince me that I was 'safe' around her and other women. During this time, I had fled out of Makuhari several times in absolute panic in reaction to her efforts to desensitize me. Even Urd's 'love potions' didn't work!

Then my breath fell out of me like a dropped carton of eggs as I saw _myself_ walk up...and put an arm around Belldandy. It was definitely me; a mirror image of myself. Same eyes, same hairstyle, same walk...

"Keiichi, it's good to have you back among us!" I heard myself say to me.

Same talk...

_Keiichi?!_

Did this mean that I_ was_ Keiichi? I looked at my hands, sucking in a breathgasp of shock as I realized that they were all wrong. My skin was darker, the fingers just a tad shorter, there were no scars and collapsed veins on my hands from shooting up dope...

I wasn't in my own body!

For a brief second, my mind struggled with the paradox. I mentally dialed up a rerun of an American TV show called "Quantum Leap" from my childhood memories. The series' story plot was focused on a scientist who was trapped in a quantum slipstream, falling randomly into people's lives...becoming both himself _and_ that person whose body he inhabited. Retaining his sense of identity while everyone around him thought he was someone else.

Could it be that I was somehow in Keiichi's life?

Sensing my uncertainty, Peorth grabbed my hand and gently pulled me towards the temple house. My proprioception felt all different, and it took a moment for me to learn how to walk...

The temple house looked almost exactly like the temple home I had lived in for over a year. I stared at my doppelganger, who was regarding me with an amused expression as I stumbled along the rock path towards the front door.

"Keiichi, we were so worried about you! Don't you know that we have an important major race tomorrow?" Chihiro said, emerging to stand in the temple doorway from somewhere in the house. She regarded me with her hands on her hips. As Peorth and I approached the house, she didn't move an inch. It seemed that she was poised expectantly, waiting for something.

When I was about two or three meters away, I halted myself, surprising Peorth. I could notice a definite saturation of tension between us as I sensed my proximity to Chihiro's personal space.

Suddenly, Chihiro ran up and kissed me on the lips.

I almost pushed her away in shock. Peorth giggled and went off to where the others were grouped in the yard.

"What's the matter? Can't you handle a joke?" she said in a sweet voice, then wrapped her arms around me and kissed me _for real_. The unexpected passion of her kiss jolted me physically, like a brick dropped on my foot.

Chihiro eyed me warily...

I taxed myself, trying to quell my shock, my self-disgust, my fear of women, and the sudden surge of lust that seemed to press in on my consciousness from all sides.

I knew that I needed to blend in, otherwise I would stick out like a sore thumb. Anything else would possibly alert Isilblius to my presence in this new TimeStream.

"Urd...forgive me," I thought as I reluctantly kissed her back, not knowing what else I could do to avoid arousing even more suspicion.

From the moment I had arrived, I had felt dispossessed by my entrance into this new TimeStream. Not only were the external scenara confusing...but now I was inexplicably _getting into_ kissing Chihiro! The interpersonal dynamics were bound to be different, for sure. But I was _reacting_ differently! In 'my' reality, if Chihiro had kissed me...I would have been numbed with shock for a split second, and then I would have definitely pulled away from her as quickly as possible. It would have felt wrong. Despite the fact that I felt that _this_ was wrong deep inside my soul, my initial reaction of fear, embarrassment and a chilly detachment...was fading in intensity. In its stead, I was experiencing a sudden burst of passion!

Was it me, or was it Keiichi? Could it be possible that I was somehow _sharing_ the emotions of this TimeStream's Keiichi? It seemed that his emotions were interpenetrating with mine.

I guessed that my partial grasp of this TimeStream's reality could be the result of a tension between my Soul and the Soul of the body I was 'riding'. I fought to control my confusion even more, attempting to graft rationality onto this very weird scene.

Chihiro was kissing me like a newlywed. I tapped her on the shoulder gently but insistently, trying to communicate the fact that I needed to come up for some air. She pulled her lips away from mine with a smack, and then rested her head on my neck.

"Keiichi, we all thought Tamiya's little joke was funny, but you ran out of here looking rather offended," Cevn explained to me.

"What is the joke here?" I asked myself. Chihiro kissing me? Peorth's lustful embrace? Just as my thoughts started spinning wheels, Skuld pointed at me and burst into belly laughter.

"Go look in the mirror and find out!" the little Goddess instructed amidst bubbly girlish giggles.

I was stared at them, thoroughly confused...which provoked even more laughter from everyone as they followed Chihiro and I into the living room. Chihiro stepped behind me and pushed my shoulder blades, guiding me playfully down the hall in the direction of the bathroom. Once inside the bathroom, she giggled as I gawked into one of the mirrors.

Reflected back at me was Keiichi's face. His soft acorn brown eyes, his clear complected skin...lightly toned for a Japanese man, his backcombed shaggy bangs of short black hair, his gentle sway of chin and his compact mouth...they were all here. His eyes stared back at me with an expression of confusion. Beyond this, the resemblance to the Keiichi that I knew ended. The rest of his/my face had been 'decorated' with a scrawl of black inkpen designs and words. I repressed an urge to laugh, realizing that either Tamiya or Ootaki had drawn a moustache on my face, not to mention a number of mildly obscene characters and a black eye.

I must have been caught napping by the sempai!

"Here...shall I help you wash it off?" Chihiro offered in a cooing voice, soaking a washcloth in hot water and soaping it up.

"Mm..hmm!" I assented, closing my eyes as she gently daubed at my face with the washcloth.

"By the way, I chewed those two goons out_ good_! Nobody gets away with playing a dirty trick on my Keiichi! You're my employee at Whirlwind, but my juniors still don't realize that you're _much more_ than just an employee!" Chihiro remarked with cheerful feminine braggadocio as she dried my face with a towel. I settled into a relaxation under her ministrations; any free moment where I could get away with saying nothing was greatly appreciated at this point.

I needed to reflect on my situation more carefully.

Up to now, I had discovered that I inhabited Keiichi's body, that both Peorth and Chihiro seemed be in love with me, that I was supposed to drive in a race tomorrow, and that Tamiya and Ootaki were still pranksters.

"There!" Chihiro announced, just as I was questioning how in the hell was I going to drive in one of Keiichi's races. Driving in a racing competition wasn't covered in the Enigma Book. I opened my eyes and examined myself in the mirror. Keiichi's brown eyes stared back at me once more. For a moment I thought I could blink the image away; just a blink and I would see myself in the mirror. Trying not regard my reflection in the mirror with rapt amazement, I attempted an expression of scrupulous interest.

"Thank you, Chihiro," I said with genuine appreciation. Even though I was in another man's body, I somehow felt relieved that I wasn't walking around with Tamiya's handiwork on my face.

"Do you want to...take a nice hot bath with me?" Chihiro asked. Not so innocently, I noticed. A second later, she wrapped her arms around me from behind, pressing herself against my back. Her voice possessed a lingering sensual edginess to it that I struggled to ignore. My nostrils filled with a sweet smell; she must have found a moment while scrubbing my face to put on a dash of perfume.

I felt myself startling into a plummet, watching the expression of shock play across the features of 'my' face in the mirror. Watching Chihiro's face in the mirror grin with bemusement right next to mine.

"What's the matter? Have you forgotten? It's _my_ turn tonight! Peorth took a bath with you yesterday. Oh, you're such an idiot sometimes, Keiichi! But that's why I love you, darling!" she said, resting her chin on my shoulder. As I gazed into the mirror, her Native American wishfeather earrings were shaking slightly as she regarded me with humorous suspicion.

"W..what are you t..talking about?" I blurted out defensively before I could check my tongue. I watched as the reflection of Chihiro stepped away and then tapped her forehead with a very Japanese gesture of frustration.

"Let me refresh your memory, o null-minded one! Four years ago, you phoned up a soba noodle delivery service for a quick meal. Instead, you reached a Goddess...Peorth at the Goddess Relief Office, Earth Otasuke Division. Peorth came to Earth and offered to grant you a single wish. Somewhere in between all those girly mags you kept hidden in your dorm room and all those times you were turned down by Sayoko Mishima, you found yourself in a fit of confusion...and you made a wish. To no longer be afraid of women. Once your wish was registered with the Earth Otasuke Division, Peorth had to stay here until your wish request was fulfilled. Being who she is, she assumed it would only take a few weeks. But she had _no idea_ how stubbornly shy you are! Instead, it took several _years_! During all that time while Peorth was working so closely with you...she ended up starting to fall in love with you, Keiichi.

"Three years later, enter one beautiful Chihiro Fujimi into your life! Remember our first meeting? You met me when I returned to Makuhari from my stint working for Krauser Motorcycles last year. Remember how I challenged you to a race with the microbikes...and how badly I beat you! Yet, there was something about your fun-loving, yet diffident manner that caused me to feel _really attracted_ to you! I knew it from the first time I saw you...that I would make you mine! Remember that night after the hillclimb race when I confessed that I was in love with you? I can recall the exact words of your reply..." she said as her brown eyes softened with the remembrance.

I felt like I was a voyeur, listening in on the most intimate secrets of_ another couple_. This Chihiro had shared secrets with this Keiichi...and she was confiding them to me without a hint of distrust! I wanted to close my ears, out of the loyalty to the Chihiro that I knew back in the Makuhari of 'my' reality. Out of respect to the Keiichi of this TimeStream.

I had no business being here...

"'Why?' you asked! My heart sank when you said that, because I thought I had lost you as a friend...but then you surprised me by admitting that you were attracted to me. You were so _shy_ back then! And since you fell in love with me, Peorth was released from granting your wish. But she decided to stay on the Earthrealm, because once she had fulfilled your wish, it became possible for _her_ to admit that she was in love with you. Then we all got Bonded last spring! Remember our honeymoon in New Zealand, on that private beach near Christchurch? Now do you understand? Now do you know why I must take a bath with you, Keiichi darling?" she explained, pinching my cheek for emphasis and reaching inside of the waistline of my jeans.

"Bonded?" I asked, pulling her hand away before she started undoing my zipper. I could understand the part about falling in love...Chihiro's narrative closely paralleled that summer day in Beijing when Urd and I first exchanged our heartsongs...

"Yep! You are Bonded to me and Peorth, for the rest of your life! This place we live in _is _Yamato, last time I checked! Here in Yamato, every man has two wives. It's required by law, in case you've forgotten, dunderhead! Geez, what am I doing explaining these things to you as if you've never heard of them before! You shouldn't tease me like this!" Chihiro explained matter-of-factly, finished her 'lesson' with a kiss on my cheek.

I almost blurted out "you're kidding!"

"I..I don't know if I belong here," I mumbled. Feeling dizzy all of a sudden, I leaned against the wooden walls of the bathroom.

_--Snap!!--_

I felt the sting of a towel cracking across my hips. I looked at Chihiro, who was giggling with passionate excitement.

"The next one's going to be aimed at your..."

"Okay, okay, I get it!" I said, alternating between waving my hands in an "I surrender!" gesture and covering my crotch. With a grin, Chihiro walked up to me and slung the towel over my head, pulling my face right up to hers.

"Keiichi...you _are_ going to win for Peorth and me tomorrow, right?" she purred sensuously.

I gulped and nodded my head, overwhelmed by her closeness. Her eyes were too close to mine...much closer than a woman's should be. Not to mention that she was giving me "the Look". I felt myself being pulled in, drawn to her because of her proximity.

To add to my confusion, Chihiro was just so damned...beautiful!

"And just to make sure you do, Peorth and I are going to give you something...special...tonight! Something that will...arouse...your winning instincts!" she said, whispering in my ear.

That was it! I was becoming putty in her hands...or was it Keiichi's natural reaction to her strong feminine aura? Didn't make a difference...I needed to escape from this one, or I would wind up an all-too-willing participant in the bathtub a few feet away on the other side of the sliding shoji doors.

And I knew I wouldn't be alone in that furoba, either!

"Chihiro...I gotta go. I mean, I..I gotta pee! I'll be out in a minute, promise!"

She frowned with disappointment, making it obvious to me that I had spoiled the mood. Then she recovered her lighthearted poise.

"Okay, loverboy!" she said, winking at me over her shoulder as she walked out of the bathroom.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

I sat out on one of the smoother rock outcroppings, looking at the moon as it reflected bright silver linings on the nightsky clouds. I was so wrapped up in trying to decipher the reality of this particular TimeStream...that I had momentarily forgotten why I had sought refuge here.

Peorth and Chihiro could really be insistent when they wanted to be.

During dinner, I discovered that my counterpart in this TimeStream had two wives as well...Belldandy and Megumi. It was disorienting enough when I chanced upon him kissing Belldandy in the kitchen. Belldandy was Keiichi's girlfriend, not mine. I waxed grateful that Belldandy wasn't one of my 'wives'...that would have been over-the-top on the uncomfortability scale. But then I almost choked on my food at dinner when Megumi came home late from school, and my 'double' bounded up from the dinner table and hugged her passionately. For a moment, I felt self-disgust wash over me...an instant snap of betrayal caused by actions of the 'me' of this TimeStream. For a year and a half, my relationship with Megumi wavered between friendship and an elder brother/younger sister dynamic. Consequently, I viewed her as the little sister I never had. Besides, she was Genji's girlfriend. Yet, here she was kissing this TimeStream's 'me' with selfless abandon! After the shock of the apparent impropriety wore off, I had to surrender to the fact that the Cevn in this TimeStream wasn't a jerk...in fact, I had little ground in which to judge _any_ of these familiar faces. But I still felt violated, seeing my 'double' in a romantic configuration with two women who were in relationships with two of my best friends, back in the reality that was my home. This was like an acid trip gone bad...

Oddly enough, this TimeStream's Cevn was_ my_ brother-in-law, because of his marriage to Megumi!

I still couldn't fathom why Belldandy and her sisters were here, if Peorth had been the Goddess who had fielded my...er, this TimeStream's Keiichi's wish. Could Belldandy have dispatched to grant the wish of my counterpart in this reality?

Later in the evening, I skimmed a "History of Postwar Yamato". Two women for each man...the aftermath of World War II on this world. Japan had retained her ancient name of Yamato in this TimeStream's reality. I learned that, in 1945, she had never fallen under the shadow of the Enola Gay like the Japan that I lived in. Instead, the Allied Forces were forced to invade Yamato herself in a series of pitched battles, which lasted five years before the militant Emperor surrendered. 95 percent of the male population had died defending their homeland during those years! During the Allied Occupation after the surrender, Yamato ratified a pacifist Constitution in 1954. One of the provisions of the new Constitution was a "Two-Wife Policy". Any man who wished to 'marry' and have children...could only do so if he married two women. This law was to remain in effect until a male-female balance was achieved.

Two generations after the war ended, the Two-Wife Policy had evolved from an awkward necessity that flew in the face of universal sociocultural norms...into a practice that was seamlessly integrated within every stretch of life in Yamato. Yamato was besieged by requests for men to emmigrate to "the Land of a Thousand Beauties" as it was nicknamed all around the world. A number of comedy series on TV were devoted to those early days of Two-Wife Policy and the craziness that ensued as the gender marital roles were turned upside down.

The Beatles of this TimeStream were from Edokyo, Yamato's version of Tokyo. Russia had won the race to the Moon. Great Britain had discovered nuclear energy first; there were no bombs, just N-reactors. China was a democracy. India was the intellectual leader of the world, as the Gupta Dynasty experienced a renaissance a century earlier than Europe. America was a socialist country...

It made for amazing reading. In Yamato, three quarters of the Parliamentary Diet officials were woman. Yamato was ruled by Empress Michiko, who had assumed the regency after the execution of Hirohito by the United Nations in 1952. In fact, the book predicted that a population balance of the sexes would be achieved by 2025. At least there had been an absence of the vast numbers of infanticides which marked the early years of China's "One Family, One Child" policy, back in the TimeStream I lived in. In traditional China, a son was strongly preferred to a daughter, because only a son could carry on the family name. Thus, when a daughter was born, she was often abandoned as an infant. Millions of infant girls had died because of this in the last 30 years in China.

I learned that here in Yamato, a male born into the family meant a sizable annual stipend from the government. This was almost a financial necessity, since a husband was supporting two wives and a large family unit. It was common to see families of ten or more; the large number of siblings resulted from efforts to 'try' and have as many male children as possible. Also, the large family units made it difficult for many women to pursue careers outside of the home...resulting in a reemergence of the more traditional feminine 'homebody' role. Most women in Yamato viewed this as their loving duty to the nation's repopulation efforts...albeit reluctantly at times. But the idea of sharing a husband with another woman had become quite natural and liberating to many women. The 'other' wife was often her best friend before the marriage...or became her best friend over the years of the Bonding. And quite often, women looked for men in pairs.

But what was natural for Chihiro and Peorth...was distastefully_ unnatural_ for me! Yet, I had to honestly admit to myself that I was momentarily tempted; my imagination was pricked by the concept of having a relationship with two women. Obviously, this TimeStream's Keiichi must really enjoy it...as I felt an almost magnetic urge to join his two "wives" in his bedroom. Without a doubt, if I wasn't sharing the inhabitance of his body, he would have already joined the two women in a love nest.

He would have...but I wouldn't. As tempting as a melange de trois with two beautiful women might be, my heart already belonged to another. So I had explained that I was going to sleep on the couch tonight; a decision that brought pouts of disappointment to the faces of a Goddess and a beautiful mortal woman.

I had to get out of this world, out of this TimeStream! I expected things to be different than what I was used to...but I didn't expect _crazy_! I mused upon the awareness that this particular slice of Time only differed in slight degree from the 'real' time I had just left. It could have been much worse. If I was having such a struggle to deal with life here, in a minutely skewed milieu...how would I be able to survive in a TimeStream where the Earthrealm was _radically_ different? Perhaps so different that I could do no better than to swim like a drowning sailor in an oceanic strangetude...

The ocean.

_That _thought snapped me back to reality! In just a few hours, I had become so gripped by trying to fathom this TimeStream's 'reality' that I had almost forgotten why I had come here!

I knew that the next time I shifted to a new TimeStream, I had to be _me_! I couldn't replace an alternate version of myself...or anyone else. What if the body I inhabited in the next trip was that of Sora Hasegawa, for example? I felt myself shudder at _that_ possibility. Because of this, I knew I couldn't share lives with someone who was already present in that TimeStream. Here, I was ghosting my life over that of Keiichi's, which was causing all sorts of problems...not to mention that it was unfair to him, as well as Peorth and Chihiro...

But how I was going to enter another TimeStream while retaining my identity of being...I didn't have a clue. The last thing I expected was to arrive in Keiichi's body in _this_ TimeStream! I realized that this "shared existence" would wear me down in a few days.

I would have to leave this TimeStream...and soon!

I focused my attention on the stellar firmament overhead, deciding to challenge the extent of my powers by making the stars glow in a rainbow of colors. With a flash of concentration, the nightsky veil of clouds disappeared. I imagined the rabbit in the moon to be grazing on cheese...and the moon was rendered a light green. Focusing my attention on the stars, I pictured the stars as twinkling in every color of the light spectrum. I knew better than attempt to actually change the colors of each star; who knew what harbors of life circumscribed each star? So instead I slightly altered the light spectrum properties of this Earth's atmosphere to cause changes in how it refracted their starlight.

"Pretty colors!" Skuld commented, her voice sounding from behind me.

"Skuld!" I shouted in surprise. I had hoped to perform this practice test unobserved, but the little girl-Goddess had witnessed everything.

"I saw you all alone, so I came out to see what you were doing. What _are_ you doing...Cevn?" she observed casually. I started to try and formulate an explanation, then my mind locked shut for a second. I looked at Skuld in astonishment; she had somehow recognized my true identity, despite the fact that I was in Keiichi's mortal body!

"So you knew all along?"

"Of course, silly! Can I ask you something?"

"Sure," I replied cautiously.

"Do you want me...like you want Peorth and Chihiro?" she asked affably. I felt a shock of disgust at her question.

"They're in your bedroom right now, waiting for you! I can join them if you wish," Skuld said sultrily, looking at me with narrowed eyes.

How could she have known the words that Chihiro had told me in private when we were alone in the bathroom? Unless...

"You can have me, just like..." she started to explain as my hearing sprang an audio leak. I shuttered my ears with my hands, not wanting to hear another word. Each word leadened the shield of my confusion with another layer of fear. Skuld was actually coming onto me! Not only was this sick and perverted...but the little Goddess seemed to enjoy my discomfiture. She was more than enjoying it, she was amused! It was as if she was taunting me with by playing the Lolita-virago. But I sensed that her coquettishness was fueled by a vigorous _anger_ rather than any overtly sexual motives.

Then I noticed that her eyes were glowing orange.

Skuld watched me with a piercing expression, grinning broadly as she knew that I knew.

"Isilblius..."

"Yes, you guessed correctly, dullwit mortal! Do you think that your feeble attempts to evade me by jumping into another TimeStream would gain you any kind of an advantage?" she boasted in Isilblius' grating, angry voice.

The juxtaposition of his rueful aspect manifested in Skuld's waif-lithe form enwebbed me with a moment's discord. Filled with fear and rage, I was almost rooted to the ground as I remembered that he had _killed_ Skuld, back in 'my' reality! Now, he was mocking me by appearing as the Norn of the Future...

I felt totally offended by the appalling impersonation...the Ultimate Evil manifesting in the being of the Goddess of Kawaii-ness...and using this manifestation to intimidate me!

"I will be generous and offer this opportunity to you just once. Submit to me now and bow in supplication before me. If you do what I command...I will let you remain in this reality unscathed. I will isolate this TimeStream from all the others that I have destroyed or conquered, so that it will continue on without interruption. Think of it! A Time and Place where there was never any war between the Gods and Demons! Where none of your so-called friends died! You can live out the rest of your days with a beautiful mortal and a Goddess to attend to your_ every_ need in this place. Peorth and Chihiro _love_ you in this reality! And...isn't love what you wanted from the start? I will even avail myself to wipe your memories clean; making you forget that you had ever encountered me, or that you had ever lived in another TimeStream. You will live the rest of your days in a leisurely paradise!!" he said, resuming Skuld's girl-voice to voice his offer.

"_No!!_ Absolutely not!" I answered without a moment of hesitation.

"Consider this carefully, Earthrealm mortal. This reality, this particular segment of the TimeStream...it's a pleasant place, is it not? Compared to so many others, it's relatively free of Evil! Obviously, you haven't learned how to 'read' the TimeStreams! You couldn't even jump into this one without having to take over the existence of a being who already resides here! This just shows how weak and inexperienced you are!"

The discord I felt hearing his words in Skuld's sweet girl-voice unnerved me, hoisting me away from my resolve. It was almost more frightening than if Isilblius was standing before me in his true form.

"I've traveled within a few of the other TimeStreams that I destroyed...and your petty Earthrealm suffers some tragic fates in _those_ slices of time. I've witnessed an Earthrealm where the Nazis won World War II. An Earthrealm that never emerged from barbaric wars of feudalism. An Earthrealm where humans are kept as sentient pets by a hivemind of telepathic insects. An Earthrealm with less than a year remaining before it is engulfed by an extinction level solar flare. An Earthrealm where psychologists govern the masses, using mneumogathic drugs which recreate people's worst nightmares...so that they are forced to conform to a strict social regimen. An Earthrealm where men are enslaved by a race of assexual women, their bodies used as genetic material to repopulate the animal life of a planet wasted by natural disasters. An Earthrealm wasted by the ravages of a nuclear winter. And my favorite Earthrealm...an Earthrealm where your precious Norns rule all of humanity with an iron fist, squashing the rebellious like ants under their feet...

"You _might_ step into one of these realities..."

As Isilblius droned on, I realized that this particular TimeStream was a comparatively nice place compared to the others that he had described. I had been very lucky; with a gnawing reluctance, I had to admit that he was right. I _didn't_ have much experience in learning how to differentiate between the histories of the individual TimeStreams. It had been taxing enough just to breach my way into this one!

"Make no mistake. I can trap you at _any_ point in _any_ TimeStream. With so many TimeStreams where the Earthrealm suffers a horrible fate...it's quite possible that your feeble attempts to defy me will land you in a TimeStream where you'll experience a fate much worse than this! And if you refuse my offer, I won't hesitate to trap you in the first TimeStream you encounter that is possessed of sufficiently dire circumstances, so that you end up suffering suitably for your disobedience!" he threatened.

I didn't believe Isilblius' assertion. Looking at Skuld's fiery red eyes..._his_ red eyes...I realized that if he could accomplish what he had claimed, then I wouldn't be here. He would have prevented my leaving the original TimeStream in the first place.

"I don't buy your threats...all you're doing is posturing! I _refuse_ your offer! I'm willing to risk the chance that I'll be able to move freely about in any TimeStream I wish to, regardless of whether you want me to or not!" I countered, trying to project a poker face. Skuld-Isilblius clenched his fists at his side and screamed angrily into the air.

"Then I will kill _everybody_ in this TimeStream! And each time you visit a different TimeStream...I will kill everybody in _that_ TimeStream as well! Again and again and again... You will be forever cursed, forever fleeing my wrath, forever witnessing the ones you care about the most...die horrible deaths over and over again! This is your final chance, mortal scum! Either remain here in peace...or be the agent responsible for the destruction of every segment of Time that you touch!"

"Then you'll just have to catch me!" I shouted, responding to his attempts at intimidation by leaping out of this TimeStream. I felt a moment's hesitation, because I was wagering on the fact that he couldn't destroy this particular history and pursue me at the same time.

There had to be a limit to his powers...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --


	56. Pt 56: A Question of Conflict

**Part 56: A Question of Conflict**

After leaving the "LoveStream", as I nicknamed the last TimeStream, I had to divide my attention between evading Isilblius, learning about the actual process of transporting myself between TimeStreams, and practicing 'reading' the history of the TimeStreams I was searching through.

To my immense relief, his threat to collapse the TimeStream was just an idle boast. My assumption was that he'd be too involved with attempting to ruin two Multiverses while reconstructing TimeSpace...a momentously evil task, but one that would prevent him from being willing to expend the effort to collapse a single TimeStream unto itself, or bring harm to its occupants.

Despite my moment's reprieve from anxiety, I struggled in my attempts to understand even the slightest background history of each TimeStream I looked into. Each TimeStream was threaded with a near-infinite number of TimeWeaves, the individual units of Time that comprised one whole 'reality'. The whole process was akin to having to memorize a page's contents while being limited to opening a book to that page for only a split-second's glance. Further, finding an acceptable TimeStream to travel into...was like locating a needle in a haystack. A hay bale that was being blown out by an F5 tornado.

In my brief foray into the dimension of the TimeStreams, I learned that the dimensions of Time were both singular and plural. The Chronological dimension was represented by an individual TimeWeave, a point in time, while the Chronometric dimension moderated the TimeWeaves into discrete 'histories' or timelines. In one sense, the Chronometric dimension was NornSpace...only the three Norns, Kami-sama and Oni-sama and the Mainframes of Yggdrasil and Vanagdrasil could navigate within in. The two Mainframes could only decipher the timelines, but could not travel from one TimeStream to another. Because of the sheer amount of chronological information contained in a TimeStream, I could only guess that the Mainframes were necessary to assist the Norns should they choose to travel within the TimeStreams. The Divinity Dimension moderated the TimeStreams via the two Lords and the Norns. But my greatest fear was that Isilblius was operating in the Metanative dimension. The Enigma Book had hinted at this, but the existence of this penultimate expression of reality was only theory...both the Demon's and God's sections of the book agreed on one thing: this was the exclusive realm of Kami-sama and Oni-sama.

I haltingly realized that I could barely understand the forces at work in the Chronometric dimension...hence my inability to 'land' myself as a self-contained being in my first attempt to travel between TimeStreams. Knowing so little about how Time relates to itself, I would have to compromise quality for quantity, selecting a TimeStream that seemed halfway familiar.

After what seemed like forever, I finally located an acceptable TimeStream, a TimeStream that had enough recognizable features and histories that it would at least make some sense to me. My experience in the "LoveStream" moved me towards the realization that I was ill-equipped emotionally to handle the drastic changes that were unique to a particular TimeStream. Here, I could seek a refuge until I grew more knowledgeable about the patterns that seemed to connect the TimeStreams into something greater. And yet, I found myself wondering if I would lose my humanity...my character of being...if these strange powers that I had been gifted with grew to become a part of me.

I could move within Time...and yet I couldn't find myself.

At least, I could take comfort in the fact that there _was_ a Makuhari in this TimeStream.

I closed my mind for an instant...

...and I reappeared in Makuhari, another Makuhari in another TimeStream. As I injected my presence in this TimeStream's Earthrealm, I grasped a bit of the recent history. In the 1950s, Communist China had conquered almost half of the Soviet Union, possessing territories eastwards from the Yenisy River to the Pacific. This conglomeration of nations called itself the Asian CoFederation. With an expansionist policy at the heart of their particular brand of Communism, the CoFeds had invaded Japan in 2003, mounting offensives that drove inland from Hokkaido in the north and Kyushu in the south.

Beyond this, I didn't have a clue...

As I zeroed in on the temple complex, I observed that a number of Makuhari's landmark features were absent. The Chiba Marine stadium was gutted, the Messe Exhibition complex was in ruins. Several of the larger high-rise office buildings and hotels seemed to have been converted into fortified habitations. The industrial strip along the ocean seemed to be fully powered, as it was one of the few sections lit up with electricity. The N.I.T. campus resembled a military parade ground. There were squatters everywhere, their campfires dotting the ruination of greater Makuhari.

As I approached closer to home, I noticed that the temple house was missing part of its roof. Several coarsely constructed wooden platforms were mounted atop the encircling stone wall of the temple complex; their presence suggesting gun towers at the corners of a prison wall.

"Anybody home!" I shouted as I 'landed' in the courtyard. The first person to emerge from the temple was Megumi, munching on a snack in trademark Megumi fashion. She was smartly dressed in rugged combat fatigue pants with a tight black sweater and a red beret with a rising sun headband; her appearance suggested the image of a WW II French freedom fighter or a female Che Guevara.

Spotting me, she swiftly unslung the automatic weapon from her shoulder with a singular motion...and drew a bead on me.

"Don't take another step closer, or I will fill you with more holes than rice mochi!" she threatened.

"C'mon Megumi, can't you do any better than that? It's me...Cevn!" I replied, tapping my chest. I was hoping that she had at least encountered my counterpart in this reality.

Evidently not. She thrust her automatic at me with a gesture that implied deadly intention. The impact of her extreme wariness unnerved me. With an onrush, I was blanketed with vibes...feelings that something was serious amiss in this TimeStream's Earthrealm. Even the winds that sprang through the temple tree groves seemed to whisper "beware!"

"I don't know who you are! But you're obviously not one of _us_! You look like you just arrived from Vladivostok! You know that all of the Caucasians in the war zones were either killed by us or evacuated two years ago! So don't try and bullshit me! The only ones remaining here in the Chiba Combat Zone are soldiers of the Asian CoFeds who have been trying to take our Japan away from us," she shot back with near hysteric rapid speech. I could see naked anger mixed with fear-panic in her eyes. Her face twitched with an almost psychotic hysteria...a mask that suggested horrible memories lurking under the surface. This Megumi looked older, much older than the N.I.T junior that I knew back home. Her eyes were dry with weariness, and yet they sparkled with a hunter's calculation. Recalling my years in 14th Century Japan, I noticed something else in her eyes. A distinct darkness that I had seen often enough for it to be unmistakable.

Megumi had the impersonal coldness of a killer.

"I say we kill him now, and then ask questions later! It'll be a lot simpler," Keiichi said in a low voice as he stepped around the corner of the temple, training his automatic weapon at me. His words were so out-of-character, it seemed comic. The Keiichi I knew was mellow, sensitive, lucky, and generally laid-back...

This Keiichi wasn't any of these things, I immediately sensed. An alarm went off in my head as I realized that I was outnumbered and outarmed. I _could_ try and use some kind of reality-bending power to protect myself should things get ugly...but by doing so, I might as well be announcing my presence to Isilblius with a blarehorn.

"I would agree, but he's not in a CoFed uniform! Maybe he's some kinda spy or something. We could turn him in to HQ, and bring some attention to our cause." Megumi pointed out. By this time, I was thoroughly unnerved. Keiichi and his sister looked like seasoned soldiers closing on a capture-and-kill.

My present situation was precarious, overstated...and deadly serious!

"Yea! Dat's it! Lemme torture the CoFed mothafuckah an' find out!" I turned to the new voice, and saw Tamiya and Ootaki approaching me.

Tamiya possessed a roughedge military Sgt. Rock look, looking very military with twin straps of rifle shell and other ordinance hanging over his shoulders like a vest. Ootaki had a marine-style crew cut, which cast him in the image of a Gulag prison guard. The fact that he was wearing his trademark sunglasses only heightened the impression of cold-bloodedness. He was grinning toothily...with sadistic cruelty.

I had to think fast before they acted rashly. Well, not rashly...these were people whose lives obviously must have been irrevocably stripped of dignity and security. What appeared 'rash' to me...was probably a vital survival skill for this version of Keiichi and the gang. I didn't want to stretch my imagination or my TimeWeave awareness to learn what happened here, didn't want to try and condition my thoughts to imagine what it must have been like for these people...the displaced shadow-lifes of my friends. In this TimeStream...they must be experiencing life living each day on edge. Their affects were aggressive and edgy...

The edge of life and death.

"Where are the Goddesses?" I asked in English, and then repeated my question in Japanese.

"What's he talking about? Goddesses? There's no Gods or Goddesses in Occupied Japan! If there was a God, he wouldn't have allowed this Hell to ruin our lives and our country! This is a Godless hell-land! I say we just blow him away and feed him to the sewer rats, right here and now! They can feed on his carcass and get fattened up, so when we have to hunt 'em when the inevitable food shortage strikes again, we'll have more food! We're burning up time standing here in the open, wasting our breath on this piece of trash while some sniper might be drawing a tag on us!" Ootaki shouted.

"Don't shout, Ootaki!" Keiichi warned. "Keep your voice down, or the snipers will _hear_ us and then it won't make a difference! I've warned you before to check yourself when we're outside!"

"Keiichi...I just realized something! He spoke _English_. Maybe he's from America!" Megumi interrupted.

"So what if he is? The Americans bailed on us years ago when they realized that it was a hopeless mess trying to remove the CoFeds from Japan by a protracted ground war. So...he shouldn't be here! No one comes to Occupied Japan, unless they're insane or have one mean deathwish!" Ootaki countered.

"Hmmm...you do have a point, Megumi! If he's an American, it could cause shitloads of diplomatic problems if we just shot him without finding out first. Despite how badly Ootaki wants to etch another kill on his gun barrel, we better check him out first. Let's move it back into the temple! We've been outside too long already!" Keiichi commanded. Megumi quickly stepped behind me, prodding me roughly with the barrel of her automatic towards the front doorway.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

These people had lived through a horrowshow reality. I could sense a little bit of this TimeStream; the sourness of the present situation seemed to soak through my mind like bitter melon juice.

The Goddesses had never come to this reality...because Isilblius had already wiped them out. Instead of being visited by Belldandy and her sisters, Keiichi, Megumi and the rest had become stranded during the sudden invasion of Japan by the CoFeds. Trapped behind enemy lines, they had become entangled in a pitched guerilla war of attrition for a number of years. Fighting wearily every day...just to stay alive! They had been living on wellwater from the temple grounds and canned provisions smuggled out of Tokyo.

Megumi tersely explained to me that most of the large metro areas in Japan were cordoned off immediately after the initial invasions. Over the years, they had been relatively safe from the invaders. Tokyo, Osaka, Nagoya, Kyoto...were surrounded by barbwire, gun turrets and concentric concrete walls. Hokkaido and Kyushu had been rapidly overrun in the first two weeks of the war, and much of the rural areas of Japan were open war zones. Chiba had been occupied ever since the first month of the war, and Keiichi and his friends were part of a cell that had elected to hold their ground against the CoFeds.

Megumi casually claimed that she had killed over 200 CoFed soldiers in her "career"!

As I sat with them in the ruined nighttime shell of the temple, I started noticing their scars. In the firelight, they were marked with physical scars, all of them. Megumi had some kind of brand on her left cheek. Keiichi had a slash down the right side of his face that caused his right eyelid to droop. Tamiya was missing an ear. Ootaki claimed that he had somehow survived being shot in the left eye.

I was heartsickened as they unraveled their plight over a campfire in the middle of what used to be the temple's living room. There was no running electricity or water to the temple, or any of Makuhari, except the areas occupied by the CoFeds. Keiichi explained how they had recently moved in to the abandoned temple and converted it to a semi-headquarters for a local cell of the Japan Resistance Militia. The Japanese government didn't sanction or support the JRM; as it was fully invested in trying to keep the Free areas defended and economically stable. Thus Keiichi and his comrades-in-arms faced a daily struggle to survive.

I asked Keiichi what year it was, and he told me that it was 2013! I felt an acrid sourness in the pit of my stomach...they had been engaged in this war for _10 years_!

2013!

Keiichi was a ball of angry confusion as he forced me at gunpoint to a side of the room, where the dining room used to be in the temple that I called home. He told me that I "needed to pay my respects", and then he showed me a series of photos pinned to the wall; mute testimony to the war dead. Possessed of a solemn reverent demeanor, he walked alongside the wall, using a torchlight to highlight each snapshot as he explained who the fallen soldiers were.

"This one's Sora Hasegawa. She was our radio tech. Killed just a few months ago in a bombing raid, the one that put this hole in our roof. This one's Chihiro. She was a lieutenant commander and first leader of our cell. She died when we raided the POW camp, rescuing Megumi and several hundred civilians. This one's Genji...Megumi's husband. He was captured and tortured to death before we could rescue him and Megumi. This one's..."

Lives blanketed in dirt, war dead whose young vibrant lives were unfutured in this TimeStream. I felt sickened...

"Enough!" I shouted, reviling Keiichi for using their deaths as some sort of parade of virtue. I verged on tears, realizing that they never should have died. Falling to my knees in dismay, my entire body was shaking with a tumult of emotions.

"How can you cry for them when you don't even know who they were?" he confronted me in an angry voice.

"Anyone who dies...deserves to be mourned. Have you forgotten that over the years, Keiichi?" I shot back.

"As if you would know what it's like to lose your parents! Your best friends! Your teachers! You don't know _nothing_ about what it's like to lose someone close to you! Why don't you talk to Megumi sometime about what she lost in this damned war? She might even tell you...if she doesn't get pissed and shoot you in the head for asking her!" Keiichi said, obviously irritated by my sadness.

I let that one pass.

During dinner, they interrogated me, asking numerous questions about my past, trying to determine why I was here in Occupied Japan. I had to lie on the fly. I explained that I was from America, and that I had been living in Hawaii. Keiichi warily corrected me; in this TimeStream's reality, I learned that the Kingdom of Hawaii was independent of the United States. Hawaii had been conquered by Japan during World War II and remained a Japanese prefecture for over 60 years. Years later, when Japan itself was invaded by the CoFeds, the Hawaiian sovereignty movement swiftly overthrew the colonial government with a vicious coup.

So I changed my tact. The less information I volunteered, the better. I might be able to buy some time if I attempted to concoct a convincing tale about how I wanted to volunteer to help them in their struggle against the CoFeds. Appeal to their emotions, rather than their intellects.

I had arrived during a mid-night mealtime, which served in their minds as reason enough to explain how I was found on the temple grounds without tipping anyone off. Sitting around the campfire, I examined the orange-lit faces of these versions of Keiichi, Megumi, Tamiya and Ootaki. Each weathered visage appeared to be years older than the friends I knew from back home.

They grudgingly spared me a single carrot and a tincan full of water for a 'meal'.

As they started eating, Tamiya and Ootaki suddenly copped an attitude, gruffly telling me to go eat in another part of the house. They declared that I hadn't earned either the right to sit with them or the right to eat the food they had given me. I was going to argue, but Tamiya drew a knife on me to illustrate his discontent quite clearly.

I quickly lost my appetite at that point, wishing once again that I had never come to this TimeStream. As I scoured the tendrils of Time outside of physical Space, this seemed to be the most recognizable of the TimeStreams that I had encountered. During my 'reconnaissance', I encountered many TimeStreams that didn't even have anything resembling the human species on their Earthrealms! Each TimeStream differed from each other only by the most minute single actions. For example, the only difference between TimeStream A and TimeStream B was the fact that, in TimeStream B, a leaf fell 1mm to the right of where it had fallen in TimeStream A on October 7, 1911 just outside of Lukovit, Bulgaria. I simply wasn't skilled enough to sift through TimeStreams quickly enough to find one that really closely matched my "home" TimeStream. Totally confused amidst a plenitude of doubtful choices, I had to come here to elude Isilblius. The longer I spent trying to find my way around the TimeWeb...the vast conglomeration of TimeStreams...the more difficult it became to elude Isilblius.

Isilblius...the Destroyer. I wondered if Isilblius was capable of destroying the Ultimate Force; were these the ends that fired his ambitions when he obliterated all the Demons and Gods? What was he trying to do?

I kept my counsel to myself as I watched the fire burning down...

Evidently, Megumi had volunteered to guard me as Keiichi and the others left to man the lookouts. I just wanted it to end, wanted this murderchop distortion of the Makuhari I knew from before...to just disappear into the shadows from whence it came. The Makuhari that I had lived in up until just a short while ago...was already as distant as a dream.

Sullen, I retreated to an empty corner of the living room to nurse my gutted emotions. The invisible crows of remorse and revulsion ripped at my emotional sensitivities, disemboweling me of optimism. Now, I had two antagonists to deal with...my 'friends' in this era, and Isilblius. As I stared at my single carrot meal, I felt a paranoid inclination as I realized that any one of these people could be Isilblius.

And they were all armed with a number of weapons.

Megumi silently observed me with an eagle-hearted wariness, seated on a rock a couple of meters away from me. I noticed that she had kept me in the sights of her gun the entire time while she ate some food out of a tin container.

"You better sell yourself to us, and soon. Otherwise, you'll have to hit the road tomorrow," she confided to me. Suddenly, she stood up and walked in a circle around me, apparently sizing me up.

"Hmmm...you don't look one bit like a killer! I seriously doubt that you'll last more than a few days speaking English out there in the streets. If _we_ don't get you,_ they_ will! Once they learn that you don't speak Chinese or Russian...they'll take you to one of their camps. They always torture Americans to death, because the United States still supports the Free Zones of Japan with supplies of food and necessities. It's their way of getting back at you Americans for helping us," she stated grimly.

I nodded my head, playing along that I was already aware of what she was telling me.

"Here, you can have some of mine, since you're going to need it more than I will once you find yourself back out on the killing streets," Megumi explained as she walked over and scooped some of her food rations into my tin. I looked in my tin and saw a small chunk of uncooked mystery meat and two raw carrots.

"Believe me...I know what a CoFed prison camp is like," she added, staring off into space for a moment with an expression of holocaust eyes. When she noticed that I was watching her, Megumi gave me an angry glance and moved her gun barrel in a gesture that said "hurry up and eat!"

As I finished eating, Keiichi walked back into the temple. He bluntly informed me that there wasn't enough food as it was, and that one more mouth to feed wasn't worth the trouble, regardless of whether my earnest intentions to be of assistance were true or not.

It was strange...Megumi was the first person I 'broke the ice' with back in the Makuhari I knew so well. There, she seemed to react with warm empathy towards me...and I felt safe in her presence. Yet this Megumi, from another reality, also seemed to possess a small degree of concern about me, at least. She wasn't as hard-edged as the three men, who had ignored me completely after we finished our meal.

History seemed to be repeating itself here...a fact that offered me a slender tottering of comfort.

Speaking Chinese and Russian would be the least of my worries if they kicked me out of the temple compound. Were this to happen, it was more than likely that I would have to leave this TimeStream to save my life...creating another opportunity for Isilblius to detect my whereabouts. Reluctantly, I acknowledged that I had to exert every effort to remain here and remain inconspicuous. I would only be able to travel through the Multiverse with stretches of my mind, hopefully by moving about incognito in the Metanative dimension.

Megumi was still all questions concerning how I, an American, could actually wind up in the middle of Makuhari without being captured by either warring faction. I listened as she detailed the fact that there were daily scrimmages of gunfire in this area...and yet I had just shown up at the doorstep like the proverbial stray cat, so to speak. She chuckled, noting that if I had been a cat arriving at a time when the smuggled foodstores were empty, they would have eaten me.

To her, cats tasted better than sewer rats.

"Do you eat cats in your precious _free_ America?" she asked me with a cruelly sarcastic manner, catching a gleam of harsh amusement at my queasy reaction. A form of militant gallows humor, starless and funeral black.

I shook my head silently.

"Maybe one of these days, we can teach you the fine art of cooking sewer rats on a stick! You must have had it easy back in the United States, eating at McDonalds, watching movies in the safety of your house..."

I looked at her, silently asking her with my eyes to take it easy on me.

"So what did you do there...and how can you help us? You did say that you came here to help us, didn't you?" she stated gruffly, put off by the fact that I didn't have some harsh comeback for her earlier question.

I replied that I had some skills at stealthiness, which was true to an extent. Surviving on the streets at 12 years of age, I had to evade a lot of cops...and worse. I added that I was fluent in Russian and most Chinese dialects. Megumi stared at me...and then her face dropkicked into openmouthed surprise.

Once Keiichi and the others returned from whatever reconnaissance they were conducting, Megumi called them over with a gesture of her gun.

"Hey you guys! This gaijin says that he's _fluent_ in Chinese and Russian!"

"Yuh're kidding!" Tamiya said excitedly, his demeanor suddenly become spirited.

"_How_ fluent are you? Fluent as in holding a conversation in Chinese? Or just bogus enough to order some dim sum at some fancy-ass restaurant back in your American wimphaven safehold?" Ootaki asked me derisively, drawing a brief snicker from his comrades. I replied in Chinese and Russian.

"What'd you say just now?" Keiichi demanded anxiously.

"I said 'The hydraulic line seals on this engine are weathered to the point of cracking' in Chinese, and 'this radio's transmitter circuitry is on the fritz, not to mention the signal light is broken' in colloquial Russian," I answered.

"Holy shit!" Ootaki muttered, his voice betraying a wisp of approval. "We'll have to verify it with someone we know at HQ who speaks some Chinese. If you aren't bullshitting us...you could be a real help! How good are you at military terminology?"

I answered that I could identify and describe a number of locations in both countries from memory, that I had been to China several times, and that I could list ranks and military honorifics. Needless to say, I rested my qualification in the hope that the Chinese armed forces in _this_ TimeStream bore some resemblance to the China I knew so well.

If it wasn't, and if I didn't learn more about this Earthrealm quick enough, I would be in deep trouble. I wasn't comfortable with the idea of having to leave this TimeStream and comb through another bundle of realities in an effort to find a TimeStream that approximated the Earthrealm that I was used to. I had barely avoided Isilblius this time...and yet I couldn't be certain that he hadn't followed my trek to this particular TimeWeave.

As the night sky revealed a solid downpour of rain, Tamiya's manner gradually shifted from grating indifference to grudging deference as I continued to explain how I knew a large number of Chinese colloquialisms and ch'eng-yu literary expressions used in daily life. The leaky roof of the temple emitted thin trails of rain, which would hiss and crackle when they dripped upon the fire. I realized that the air was turning much colder than I expected as the night rain wore patterns of sound all around us. They finally took a break from interrogating me.

"Does this mean that I can have another carrot," I joked, sensing that the tension had lifted somewhat now that I was deemed 'useful' to the group.

"Yeah...but not until breakfast!" Keiichi said humorlessly.

So much for my attempt to lighten things up.

The temple seemed lifeless, an ancient ruin suffused with gloom and ghostings as I listened for the next several hours as Megumi described what her life had been like. I was brought to the brink of tears several times as she described the loss of her parents, the deaths of her friends...and the unspeakable horrors of being a woman in a CoFed POW camp.

It was worse than I could have ever imagined. She had been forcefully sedated, and then used as a "comfort woman" for CoFed troops! My wits threatened to escape me as I empathized with her haunting tales of brutality and victimization, but they were tethered to my awareness only through a growing sense of disgust and resentment. The "LoveStream" reality suddenly seemed very comforting in comparison to this drowning pool of harshness.

They assigned me a sleeping bag, explaining that they would let me sleep a whole night before putting me on sentry duty tomorrow night. Keiichi informed me that they normally had two persons split the night shift, guarding the temple from the lookout towers. Naturally, I would stand watch from a lookout...but I wouldn't be given a weapon. He added that someone would stop by to in a couple days to assess my language skills and attitude to see if I was a "keeper". Ootaki volunteered to orient me to the procedures and surroundings in the morning...and I went to sleep.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Get up!" Keiichi commanded, poking me hard in the ribs with a gun barrel. As I was heralded back to consciousness by his voice, I was gripped by confusion...it was still the middle of the night. For a moment, I felt a chill panic that he was just going to kill me, despite the fact that they had deemed my presence as possibly being of some benefit to their cause. A second's glance at his nightshadowed face revealed that he was angry about something.

"Why the harsh treatment?" I asked...then I gasped as I spotted the orbs of infernal flame glaring at me.

I regretted my false sense of security. Faraway, I had failed in my attempt to avoid being detected by Isilblius. Any sense of hope threatened to bear itself clear away from me. I felt a sense of inevitable doom creep up and down my spine as my inadequacies once again asserted themselves.

Fighting against my fears, I thought fast. Isilblius had threatened to "strand" me once he discovered my presence in another TimeStream. Could it be possible that I could play along with his conceit, giving him the impression that I was totally powerless at preventing such a fate? What if I fooled Isilblius into thinking that he had stranded me here, in this TimeStream? Even if he _did_ bind me to this TimeStream, a kernel of possibilities would exist...as I might be able to learn what I needed to learn and then turn the tables on him. If I could trick him out, I could buy myself some time, long enough to build my powers and knowledge. Although Time would pass here, in this reality, it would pass independently of the other TimeStreams. I was gambling on his arrogance; by thinking he had stranded me here, I hoped that Isilblius wouldn't follow up and check on me.

I waited for him to make the first move...

"Since you refused to submit to my will when I was in a much more generous state of mind, I now banish you to this TimeStream, fool!" Keiichi said, his voice no longer a war hardened rasp. Instead, it was Isilblius's echoed gravelly voice.

I decided to act the part of someone who was deathly afraid.

"Please, don't! This place is horrible! Don't imprison me in this TimeStream!" I begged, trying to appear overwrought with enervation and fright. Keiichi/Isilblius laughed harshly at me.

"You had your chance when last we met! Now you're condemned to live in _this_ war-torn Earthrealm. With the way things are here, I wouldn't be surprised that all of your friends will get picked off in the middle of the war, one-by-one. In fact, I hope you're the last to die...so that you have to live with the memories of their deaths etched on your dying thoughts!" he said cruelly. Even though I was playing the part of a helpless victim, I was struck hard by the brutal thrust of his mindset.

"And to serve as a seal to the fact that you have been banished..." he exclaimed triumphantly...and then suddenly he pointed his gun at me.

_bamp! bamp_

I felt the fitness of my flesh being tested by a wrenchblow of pain as a bullet smashed into my shoulder, followed by a second one somewhere in my chest. I gritted my teeth, too shocked by the sudden wounding to cry out. I fell over onto my side as if in slow motion.

My breathing was all wrong...each agonized gasp felt like my lungs were filling with liquid instead of air. The sensation of drowning clouded my nose and throat.

I tried to will myself back into a healed state...and couldn't! Either Isilblius or my own lack of abilities was preventing me from arresting the pain. Through a haze, I tried to revise the moment I was struck by the two bullets.

"Now, you will have scars to remind you of your folly. I hope you enjoy your wretched life! In this wretched place!" he bellowed sarcastically, just as I passed out from the hotknife agony.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"...somebody must be after him. He got shot right in the middle of the night!"

"Yeah, but _how_?! How in hell could somebody get into our temple hideout and gun him? I was on guard last night, and you know that not even a mosquito gets in or out without me knowing about it! Besides, I would have been majorly jacked for someone's blood if I heard gunshots coming from the temple!"

"Yuh sure yuh didn't nap, Ootaki? Err...don' look at me like dat! I knows ya didn't sleep it off! But da fact of da matter is...he went an got himself shot. Howz come nobody woke up, or even heard da gun go off?"

"This is so insane! First he shows up out of the blue, now he's been shot..."

"Ssshh, you guys are waking him!" I heard Megumi say as I opened my eyes. The first thing I felt was a tirescreech of pain in my shoulder and chest, as if someone had dug around in it with a pair of scissors.

"Welcome back to the living hell," Keiichi said. I body-jerked when I saw his face, which shot excruciating pain through my chest. As I noticed that his eyes were back to normal, I settled into a painful relaxation.

"Who's the new guy?" I heard another female voice ask. Looking at the source of the voice, I saw Sayoko sitting against a wall, sharpening a knife.

"Sez his name is Cevn, claims to be from the United States," Tamiya answered.

"That's Sayoko. She's the one who dug the bullets out of you. She also brought the local Chinese expert. We need to know right away if you can do what you claim to do with the languages. If you can, then we can try and get you some medicine. If not, then we can't have you stay here. We're already overwhelmed as it is," Megumi explained.

Sayoko!

I was glad that another one of my friends had survived in this reality. Despite the fact that these people were militia soldiers...I still couldn't shake the fact that it was second nature to me to view them as my friends.

The pain was gripping me, slashing so hard against my consciousness that I was possessed of stupor; at once listening to the conversation with partial awareness while my secret terror of pain confounded my mental abilities.

I learned from Keiichi that Sayoko was some kind of "Intelligence Colonel" who lived in Free Tokyo, but frequently traveled all over northern Japan, thanks to her parent's wealth and political clout. Recently, she had been coordinating the movements of the Resistance cells in Chiba Prefecture. Needless to say, she was _very_ interested in the fact that I spoke fluent Chinese and Russian. As I regarded her, I could sense a composite nature in her bearing. Her character radiated confidence and dignity, which seemed to enliven the spirits of Keiichi's group. Like the Sayoko that I was familiar with, this militia girl used her beauty as a weapon...but even more so. She projected a combination of physical grace and carnal poise that would disarm any man who spent even a short time with her. But she also seemed to possess a streak of deviltry that no doubt prevented her the company of intimates.

She was a Queen...a warrior Queen.

The Chinese expert began to press me with a series of questions as Sayoko looked on with an air of tight scrutiny. The examination proceeded haltingly, as my injuries tended to afford me brief lapses into semi-consciousness from the pain. But through the duration, I felt increasingly comfortable with my progress; because Sayoko seemed to exhibit a great deal of patience, allowing the interview to proceed carefully. If she was unimpressed with my abilities, I had no doubt that this "Intelligence Colonel" would very quickly call the proceedings to a halt and cast me to my fate.

Finally, the Chinese expert said he was done...

"And you claim to speak Russian too?" the language expert asked after nodding his approval to Sayoko. Sayoko motioned him over and they engaged in a brief discussion.

"We believe that you can be of some use to us," Sayoko began. "There is no one in this sector who speaks fluent Russian, so we'll have to trust you on this. However, our expert here is suitably impressed with your Chinese...in fact, he believes that your Chinese is superior to his or anyone he's ever tested. He had assessed your Chinese as being so fluent that it is indistinguishable from that of an educated Mainland CoFed _officer_..."

"Are you serious? He speaks Chinese like one of them?" Ootaki blurted out. I noticed how everyone in the room was grinning...they looked like they had just received an unexpected Christmas present.

"This scholar is from Tokyo University; I trust his opinion completely on matters of linguistics. I will assign you to this resistance cell on a permanent basis, or until I decide that we need you elsewhere. Provided that you survive your injuries...unfortunately, we have no medical supplies to spare," Sayoko noted, sincerely apologetic about the lack of medicine.

Despite my relief at being accepted into their militia, I would have traded all the gold in Ft. Knox for some kind of analgesic painkillers to deaden the flow of ill-comfort from my wounds.

Isilblius had acted intelligently, even though I suspected that he was unaware of it. By injuring me, he had thrown a pipewrench delay in my plan to use this TimeStream as a hideout. I realized that with my new powers, I might eventually be able to heal myself in an instant. For now, there was nothing I could do to take away my gunshot wounds. But I also recognized that a miracle healing would arouse intense suspicion among Keiichi and his militia band. Without their camaraderie, I would eventually have to leave and start all over again in another TimeStream; blowing any cover I had paid for last night with my own blood.

As long as Isilblius thought he had 'exiled' me here, I would be able to travel and test my abilities surreptitiously. Unfortunately, my plan would be hampered by my injury.

But first, I had to heal...

I needed to keep a low profile until I would be ready to un-wound the agonies to the TimeStreams that Isilblius had corrupted.

_If_ I could ever release myself from the exile on me that Isilblius had exacted...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"I will impersonate, injure, translate, steal, lie and cheat for your cause. But I will _not_ kill...and that's final! I will not murder!" I insisted again, banging my fist on the wall. My wounded shoulder protested in pain, but I didn't care. It was sore infected and swollen...but I didn't care.

I wasn't going to take any lives in this battle.

Tamiya had remained firm on the fact that I needed an 'initiation' of sorts in order to join the "Merry men", as I mentally nicknamed Keiichi's militia cell.

After I had passed Col. Sayoko's testing of my Chinese language skills, I spent any number of days drifting in and out of a surreal world of physical pain. I was feverish and delirious, according to Megumi...but without medicine, all they could do was hope for the best. Eventually, my body started to pull health back into itself.

In the face of my resolute refusals, Ootaki came up with the idea of a 'test' to prove my "revolutionary zeal". When I protested, Col. Sayoko was consulted over the radio. She instructed Keiichi, as squad leader, to put it to a vote. Much to my gratitude, they decided that I didn't have to go "pick off" a Chinese officer to prove my loyalty. However, Tamiya was still testy about the fact that I hadn't spilled any blood for "our cause", as he put it.

I realized that my very presence here was potentially disruptive to this TimeStream's history, but to kill a Chinese soldier...that wasn't only morally reprehensible to me, but it was also very dicey in terms of trying to minimize my impact on the history of this reality.

I learned that the CoFed Communist Party was very powerful and far-reaching; thus I could not make a solvent judgment call on the motives of any of People's Army soldiers. It was quite possible that they may have experienced severe indoctrination in order to fight on behalf of the CoFed interests, just like the Japanese soldiers of World War II were indoctrinated in patriotism and fealty to the Emperor from early childhood on by the militant government.

How could I kill a man in the CoFed army when it probably wasn't his fault that his military mindset had been cultivated by the bullshit propaganda machine of a government? One that he was powerless to resist?

As a substitute, I offered to monitor the radio broadcasts and then impersonate a high CoFed officer, creating chaos by issuing contradictory routing orders and such. Being no military tactician, I would have to rely on Sayoko's judgment in matters of confounding the enemy's logistics. It was the least I could do.

But in war, killing is killing, regardless of who is holding the gun and who is conspiring with the gunholder...

It was hoped that my efforts to "scramble" the CoFeds would eventually allow Keiichi's cell a chance to coordinate with several other Japan Resistance cells in an attempt to completely liberate the Chiba Peninsula...a goal they had been working on for seven years. Once Chiba was liberated, then the NDF forces in Tokyo could occupy her, turning the metro area into a 'protected zone'. From a logistics standpoint, this was extremely important, because of Chiba's proximity to Tokyo and the beltway of captured industrial factories currently used by the CoFeds to feed the Chinese Mainland with supplies and weapons. Liberating Chiba would greatly strengthen the position of the northern branch of Japan's besieged wartime government.

More and more, the situation here reminded me of the prolonged 'ethnic cleansing' in Bosnia. The initial reconnaissance forays that I participated in were harrowing: the streets and grassy areas were mined, many buildings were pocked with artillery shell holes or lay in ruins, liberal amounts of barbed wire was strung up everywhere, helicopters patrolled overhead...and most of the populace had left for the protected Japanese cities.Soon after I started my radio work, the CoFeds shifted to a new encryption system, of course. With the enhanced abilities of my metallect and a little determination on my part, I knew I could make short work of decrypting it. Sayoko promised to secure a second radio within the next few days, so I could start casting about confusion in Russian...

For now all I had to do was rest and regain my health.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

I spent a lot of time on the radio, but my mind was occupied elsewhere. I found that I was becoming increasingly adept at stringing my sense of mental vision into the other dimensions of the Multiverse: examining various TimeStreams; identifying the vortices where Time and Space enmeshed; exploring the NonTime and NullSpace that existed within the fabric of the Multiverse.

With an extreme effort of will, I even traveled to Yggdrasil. Yggdrasil existed outside of all the TimeStreams, of course. Yet, a convex of TimeStreams seemed to lead to Yggdrasil...like a knot in an otherwise smooth length of rope. All roads lead to Rome, or something like that. I realized that, somehow, Isilblius had closed Urd's Well and had removed the various bridges that linked Yggdrasil with TimeSpace. Isolated, Yggdrasil looked like a ghost town...devoid of life and movement.

The word "dogon" came to mind...an old Venezuelan Indian metaphysical term that described the state of being "uncreated". As I struggled to comprehend the completeness of the devastation of the God's Realm, I realized that Isilblius had literally uncreated everything that was good. I was beginning to realize that he was intent on either capturing everything that was linked with the Ultimate Force, or destroying all life in order to render the Ultimate Force inert. I drifted in and out of ennui, wondering how I could stop him.

During my various exercisings of my abilities, I encountered numerous TimeStreams where a few Gods and Demons had been stranded by the destruction of their homerealms. Facing imminent Real Death because of a lack of a conduit to the energies of Yggdrasil, these agents of the Goddess Relief Office and the Demoness Grief Office had elected to revert to mortality and blend in. I tried to assure them that something was being done to restore Yggdrasil and Vanagdrasil.

I had to restore _both_ realms, because of the principle of balance. The benevolence of the Gods was defined by the malfeascence of their Demonic counterparts, and vice versa. Their coexistence created a spiritual matrix which was even greater than both.

I had to attempt to acquire that spiritual matrix before Isilblius destroyed it, or coopted it to his own ends. The more I learned, the more I began to understand that this would be a task of daunting exertion. In one sense, I would have to name the Unnamed...to limit the infinite.

But beyond this, I would have to _live_ it...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Two months had passed in almost a blink of an eye. Despite my promise to myself not to kill, I had killed several times...in self-defense. Living in this TimeStream, I continually had to rub my tolerance level into the raw. I felt my senses blurring into a hardness; this war zone was indoctrinating me into a deep resistance against the CoFeds. Several times, I had watched the CoFed soldiers line a group of innocent citizens against the wall and execute them. One day, Keiichi took me to the eroding ruins of a shopping mall in Chiba to show me the piles of sunbaked skulls. A mountain of invisible souls seemed to hover about the place, given voice by the windwhipped commercial posters and torn norens flapping noisily. The carnage and cruelty reminded me of the several books I had read describing the Japanese occupation of Nanjing and Manchuria during W.W. II.

And then there was last week.

I experienced the shock of my life when Megumi pulled guard duty with me, despite the fact that I was scheduled to share the sentry with Ootaki. Over the past several weeks, I had become a confidant to Megumi, as she was becoming more comfortable talking about her inner worlds and various vagaries of observation.

So I assumed that this was one more vent session for her. I sensed that Megumi was keenly frustrated by the slow progress of our preparations to retake Chiba and the Boso Peninsula.

After several hours of night watch, she bravely admitted to me that she had somehow developed "unchaste feelings" for me. I listened as she elaborated; she even went as far as to say that she had imagined herself falling in love with me. She knew that any kind of relationship between us would be impossible...and foolish. But she tearfully acknowledged that she couldn't just ignore her feelings.

I should have taken some sort of masculine pride in the face that this "ice queen" militiawoman had finally broken the mold of her widow's persona, and that I had been the catalyst for the affections she claimed to feel. Instead, I imagined Genji's shade starving, angry at the betrayal...

Then I heard the rest of the story...a narrative of grief that snuffed out any human warmth or romantic attachments that I felt in reaction to Megumi's admission.

In describing her grief, Megumi explained to me that her heart had "felt like it had been embalmed" ever since her husband Genji was tortured to death. During her interment in the POW camp, Megumi had been repeatedly gang raped by CoFed soldiers. Then one day, her husband Genji was paraded into the middle of the camp and tortured and executed right in front of her and all the other prisoners. A month after she was liberated from the clutches of the CoFeds, she had watched helplessly as her parents and a hundred other Japanese citizens were lined up against the wall of Makuhari Messe and shot by CoFed occupation forces in a reprisal for suspected spying activities.

She had spent the last eight years of her life in bitterness and lack. And when her parents were killed, Megumi explained to me that her sense of hope had been nailed shut ever since.

It had taken her well over a year before she could even speak to another human being again. Keiichi had sheltered her in a succession of hideouts because she was too traumatized to respond to anyone else. Revisiting Genji's death over and over in her mind, Megumi barely remembered the events during her near catatonia. Once she recovered, emerging from her psychological exile...painful struggle by painful struggle...she realized that life held little meaning for her, as she was forever incomplete without Genji. Megumi admitted that she simply was incapable of being interested in a man, either in the realms of friendship or romance. The only man she trusted was Keiichi...and now me.

I could empathize with this 'numbness'; I had felt the same thing when my ex-wife died from a heroin overdose. I had to tell her. It was the only thing I could think of that would comfort her, so I told her the tale of my biological parents and then described the emotional hellstorm I went through when my ex-wife died.

When I finished sweeping the corners of my life's frustrations, I felt my heart filling with thick, hot rage towards the CoFeds because of what they had done to her. How they had totally ruined her life here.

The CoFeds were becoming easier and easier for me to hate.

Yet, in one sense, I felt a small spark of joy amidst the gloom. In some small way, I had brought much needed hope to her...and the rest of her militia cell. After Megumi confided her feelings to me, I struggled with the leanings of my heart. It was a bitter, painful struggle that was much more taxing in some ways than my strenuous TimeSpace exertions at night. I _wanted_ to love her, to comfort her with a loving embrace. She deserved companionship and love. This was a woman who had never received a bouquet of flowers. She had never been on a date in her adult life. She had never enjoyed an expensive Italian dinner at a fine restaurant while listening to a lounge-jazz piano player.

The War had stolen all those maybes from her.

She deserved better.

Her womanness had been snuffed out the day Genji died so ignobly. It was only now emerging, after being shut away by because she just couldn't cope with the horrors of her age.

I wanted to love her...but I couldn't. I loved Urd. I argued with myself, trying to believe that I had a place in my heart for two women. But I ended up admitting that I would only be lying to myself and Megumi if I was to ignore my kokoro. It would just be a charade...an unequal romance mired in futility and deceit.

I didn't want to refuse her.

Megumi didn't deserve to be hurt.

I had come here to this TimeStream because I wanted to undo all the Evil that Isilblius had levied upon reality...and bring Urd back to life. I couldn't tell her this, but I did muster the strength to gently inform her that I wouldn't be able to reciprocate her love because of the situations in my life. I reluctantly lied, telling her that I hadn't gotten over the death of my ex-wife. We cried on each other's shoulders for a couple hours that night.

And my hatred for this fucked up reality grew even deeper.

I realized that the overwhelming guilt that I felt for having to spurn Megumi's heartfelt request...wasn't the result of me being cold-hearted. It wasn't because of my female-phobic shortcomings, nor was it because Urd had gotten to my heart first. It was because this horror-called-life had torn up her life, depriving her of decency, comfort...and love. And I _felt_ it! How could anyone survive what she had endured in her life?

Despite my gentleness, I could tell that Megumi was crushed...taking my answer for an outright refusal. I was on the precipice of being swallowed by the cave of my shame, until I cleared the wavering of my feelings. This war was the real culprit. This war had taken Genji away from her. I remembered the 13 years I spent with Genji in medieval Kyushu...it was hard to believe that he was long dead in this TimeStream's reality.

It was Isilblius.

Isilblius was the real cause of her pain. If Isilblius had never killed the Gods, then this ceaseless conflict between the CoFeds and the Japanese wouldn't have ever happened. The Goddess Relief Office would have seen to that.

I hated it!! I hated the fact that this TimeStream's reality _had_ to remain the way it is. I couldn't just alter it. The destiny of this TimeStream was necessitated by Balance, no matter how much I wanted to change it. Balance isn't a matter of wishing, of intent, of desire, of logic.

Balance is cold.

"I know, I know, I know!" I cried out to the stars that night, feeling miserable because I was confronted with this darker side of Balance. To have the power to change things...yet a power rendered impotent because of the demands of Balance.

If I could, I would make _every_ TimeStream a place of bliss! If I could just bring Genji back from the dead for Megumi! If...I could just make a difference!

But I knew that the demands of Balance prevented this. This TimeStream, cruel and unforgiving as it was, would have to remain the same. In the process of learning about Balance, I would have to shed my own emotional investments, my own sense of morals, my own predispositions to seek joy.

How would things change if I somehow managed to defeat Isilblius and restore the Gods and Demons to their rightful place?

I was getting my wish...and I wished anew that I had never wanted to be the agent of Balance. All the Balance that existed wouldn't dry Megumi's tears...

I threw myself into my work for the next several months. Invigorated by my anger at what they had done to my friends, I caused complete chaos for the CoFed forces. I busily rerouted supplies, reassigned platoons to remote reaches, mobilized reconnaissance groups to walk into traps set up by the Japan Resistance Forces.

Not only did I speak their lingo, but I was also became adept at impersonating the voices of the commanding officers. And during the nightwatchs, I industriously practiced my growing powers...

So now, we were gearing up for a final offensive to liberate Chiba.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"What's gone wrong? We're _surrounded_!" I heard Sayoko scream into the radio, livid with frustration. I turned my head in all directions, surveying the assemblage of our Japanese Resistance Militia forces gathered in the plaza of the ruined Makuhari Messe.

_This wasn't supposed to happen!_

Over the past several weeks, I had systematically instructed the CoFed forces to rally here for a final assault on the Chiba highrises. I had seasoned my radio broadcast with lures, explaining that an elite Occupation Force reconnaissance squad had mapped out a series of secret underground passages from the ruined Exhibition Center to each of the JRM strongholds. With a large enough force gathered in the vicinity of the Messe, the underground passages used by the Japanese forces could be overwhelmed...and Chiba and Makuhari would fall in a swoop of havoc. Or so I led them to believe.

In reality, once the CoFed forces gathered in the vicinity of the Messe, we would flood the square, flush them out of the tunnels with tear gas, and pin them down with gunfire. Confined to the environs of the trashed Makuhari Messe Center, we could deathmarch them to the ocean with ease. Everything worked as planned, except that the forces occupying the center had seemed to entrench themselves. The forces that were supposed to be in the tunnels weren't fleeing our gas attacks...

The stillness in the air belied an expectancy...as if the CoFeds were waiting for something.

An hour later, we learned why. Instead of flanking the CoFed forces on all sides...we had been surrounded by a huge force of the enemy! Somehow, I had been conned! My ploy of impersonating various CoFed commanders had been ambitiously scooped; the CoFed troops were only playing along with the complicated series of deployment commands, long enough to lead us to believe that we had trapped them. I looked at the forces blockading every avenue of escape. Tanks, armored carriers, jeep-mounted machineguns, a huge force of soldiers...

We were royally screwed. Our entire Chiba force was pinned down as every escape route was blocked.

We were as good as dead!

Keiichi did the only thing that I would have done, given his situation. He pulled his gun on me in a fit of rage.

"You bastard! You _sold us out_! You were playing with us, learning our secrets, letting us trust you! Now, Col. Sayoko and all of us are going to be wiped out! I hope you're happy, you piece of shit!" he screamed. I flinched with stoic guilt at every word. Even though this mishap wasn't my fault, wasn't the result of any surreptitious calumny on my part...I keenly felt that I had let everyone down. My heart was sickened with disbelief and guilt.

"I..I don't know what happened, Keiichi! This was a foolproof plan!" I stammered feebly.

"Don't bother arguing amongst yourselves. It's not very soldierly!" I heard a Chinese voice shouted above the din.

During my two-month stint manning the radios, I had thoroughly educated myself about the CoFed command structure. I knew the names of hundreds of key High Command officers. Of these, Marshall Kou held the highest rank of all the CoFed forces in Japan. I immediately recognized his voice.

"I knew every detail of every moment of every plan of deception you created!" he announced broadly, standing on top of a military tank as he spoke through a megaphone.

"Kill them all!" he commanded his troops.

I closed my eyes...and in a flash, I extended my consciousness, sifting through every CoFed soldier's being. Not just the soldiers in Makuhari or Chiba.

_Every_ CoFed soldier in Japan.

_Every_ CoFed soldier on this Earthrealm.

I created telepathic images of their parents, wives, husbands and their children. I made these telepathic impressions so vivid, that they were indistinguishable from the real thing. Into each mind I projected these scenes of peaceable homestead and hearth...which caused each soldier to amplify their longing to be home with their loved ones. Within a fraction of a second, their Souls responded with a resonance of desire to be anywhere but _here_.

"I _have_ gotten more powerful," I realized as I prepared myself to move almost thirty million soldiers back to their homelands.

It took a significant effort on my part to accelerate my mentation so that Time from my perspective was restrained to a standstill. Once this was done, I had to rifle up a legion of powerful emotions, telepathize those strong feelings to a vast amount of minds and hearts, physically disassemble the atomic structures of each CoFed soldier, feed their Souls into the appropriate TimeWeave in this TimeStream, determine the exact locations of each soldier's family...then transport them en masse to points all over Asia...and finally resolve their atomic structures back to exact fullness.

All of them were back home, back with their families.

When it was done, I opened my eyes.

Megumi was staring at me with an expression of rapt shock. She had just watched every CoFed soldier in sight simply _disappear_ in an eyeblink. She didn't know quite what happened...but it was obvious that my efforts had succeeded. I looked at my hands...and noticed they were glowing.

"Now you know..." I began to explain, sensing her unasked questions.

But one soldier remained.

Marshal Kou hopped off of the tank and walked towards me, his eyes fired with rage. He stopped midway, and then unexpectedly started clapping his hands. His handclaps echoed in my mind...

"Very good! An impressive display! Do you want to know what's even more hilarious? Everything _you_ think..._I_ think!" he exclaimed with a poorly faked affability. Then he laughed with harsh intent. I reached a protective arm around Megumi's shoulders...not so much only to shield her but also to cover up the furnace of fear burning inside of me.

With a chilling insight, I realized that Isilblius had been _inside of my mind_ this whole time I was here! He knew everything I knew! He _had_ to, otherwise the spectrum of complexities wouldn't have been thwarted so easily. I was faced with a foe who could penetrate every recess in my mind. I shuddered as I contemplated the possibility that he might even know my cognizance better than _I _did!!

There was nowhere to hide. There had never been any safe refuge for me here.

"What are you going to do now, foolish mortal?" he boasted. I was really getting sick of his incessant self-aggrandizing.

"Who is he?" Keiichi and Megumi asked in stereo.

"Ignore him. He's a nothing!" I stated bluntly.

"Me? Nothing? You wound me, Earthrealm weakling! Don't you realize the humor of this situation?_ I_ was the one who created this war! I was the one who made your friends suffer in this TimeStream! I recreated all of the TimeStreams, after I destroyed the Gods and the Demons!"

"What is he talking about, Cevn?" Megumi said. Looking into her soft brown eyes...one of the few times I had seen a softness there instead of a harshness...I sensed that she was very afraid. Obviously, what I had just done to the CoFed forces would frighten just about anybody. Yet her fear was tempered by the fact that I was standing by her side.

I didn't believe for a moment that Isilblius had reprised any of the TimeStreams. The TimeStreams moved into being via dependant arising...they had come into existence because of themselves, not because they were created. They were uncreated...uncreatable, except by the Ultimate Force and the two Lords.

With a scream of rage, Keiichi emptied his automatic into Marshall Kou...without effect. Then he threw his gun to the ground in disgust at its impotence.

"What are you, some kind of indestructible demon?" Keiichi shouted angrily. I grimaced at the irony of his words.

"I could bring all my soldiers back in an instant! What would you and your hapless band of freedom fighters do then?" Marshall Kou/Isilblius said in a booming voice. A supernatural voice that echoed in the air.

"Fuck you to hell, that's what'd we do! We would fight on, _no matter what_!" Keiichi shouted back in defiance.

Keiichi's defiance was no mere token of refusal. Here was a man who was willing to face down a being that was obviously powerful beyond his ken. His courageous defiance was so intense that it seemed to wrest my fears away and replenish me with an absolute refusal to submit.

I strongly sensed that I had the advantage here, and that Isilblius was trying to deceive me with all his talk of being in my mind as a spectator to my thoughts. Some of the time, perhaps, but not all of the time. If he had been in my head all this time, he would stopped me in my tracks when he shot me upon my arrival here. He couldn't stop me then, and Keiichi's stand-up courage fired my belief that he couldn't stop me now, either.

"They're gone, and they will not be coming back! Try and bring them back, if you can," I challenged Isilblius. Using a TaiQi concept, I mentally pushed all the strength I had into a ball of energy. An engine of reality determinism, which I could then use to 'lock in' on every soldier of the CoFed army that I had whisked away and keep them at their homes.

Marshall Kou/Isilblius closed his eyes...his whole body seemed to quake with his effort to concentrate. He opened his eyes and looked at me with pure hatred.

"You're finished here! You've hurt these people long enough! You've hurt _everybody_ long enough! I'm going to erase every single trace of your existence!"

Marshall Kou grinned coldly at me.

"«_Eh? You really think you can get away with this? What isn't coming back...is –_you-_! You're going on a one-way trip...out of your sanity!_»" Marshall Kou thoughtcast to me as I felt the world begin to swirl in spindizzying patterns all around me. My mind seemed to be unraveling like an Escher ink sketch. A memory charged up, ripping past pinwheeling thought processes that were being rendered into chaos, grabbing my attention...demanding attention. Something was tearing my whole consciousness away from my control.

An image filled my mind...

It was Urd. She was sitting in the sister's bedroom, watching one of her soaps on TV. She looked up at me and smiled. It was as if she was alive, and I was sitting in the room with her. Everything was real!

I heard my voice mention something about trying to be in love again, and then I looked on as Urd's lovely face lit up with a joyful animation of spirit.

"«_Watch closely, now. Instead of you destroying any single trace of my existence, I'm going to make you experience my existence firsthand...a token of my supreme Evil. Everything that I thought during this next bit of Time...you will think. Everything that I've done..._-you will feel like you have done-_! What I did...you're going to do in your mind! And it will be so real, you will never be able to make the distinction between my Evil and your own will..._»" Isilblius's malignant voice echoed in my awareness.

A moment later, I reacted in horror as I started becoming abusive towards Urd. I gathered my will in an attempt to somehow pull away.

_"No no no no no no!"_ my mind screamed to itself as I hit her. I couldn't stop myself as I began to participate unwillingly in a brutal assault on her. I heard my voice laughing with terrifying viciousness as she fell to the floor under my blows. Isilblius had taken me back to the point in time where he had invaded our house, and then beaten and raped Urd. But instead of casting me in the role of horrified onlooker...he had made me a _participant_! He had put me inside of his experience so that I was _there_, hurting the precious Goddess that I had given my heart to! It was if I had become both the spectator and the vampyre in an F. W. Murnau film. And there was nothing I could do to stop the scene playing out in my head. Isilblius was just too powerful. He had completely distorted my will, filling my consciousness with this heinous act.

Making me experience it from the perspective of the perpetrator.

I heard Urd shrieking with terror and pain. I tried...I really tried to shut the repulsive jolts of reality. Isilblius had made me _him_. I wanted to warn Urd, to stop myself from hitting her, from ripping at her skin and her heart with my attack. I tried to remind myself that it wasn't me who was violating her...but it was my body and my senses that were feeling every bit of bloodlust.

The only nightmare that could be more dreadful than my worst nightmares was the nightmare I was inflicting.

When it was over, I was drowned in the experience. I had beaten and raped Urd. Isilblius had made me _live_ every horrible, agonizing moment of the attack as fully as if I had actually done it! After what seemed like an eternity of hell, I was on my hands and knees, heaving with retching gasps.

I whimpered and collapsed to the ground. I may have defeated his power, but that meant nothing anymore. My spirit had finally been broken. It had been broken from the start, with the physical and sexual abuse, the drug addiction, the death of my wife, the deaths of Urd and everyone I cared about...and now this. He had just shattered my will to carry on.

This terrible manifestation of Anti-Life had made me experience the ultimate betrayal of everything I loved and believed in...by making me the enactor of the most reprehensible deed that could be inflicted on the Goddess that I loved. It was horrible beyond anything my mind could ever imagine.

I had destroyed my dreams.

"You...fucker! Nothing...can be as evil as you," I gasped weakly, watching him grin with malign satisfaction and triumph. I felt totally alone, totally defeated by what I had just experienced. There was no reason to hold onto hope anymore.

"What the fuck did you do to him?!" Megumi yelled angrily at Isilblius, kneeling next to me.

"Everybody I ever loved...is dead," I gasped. I looked at her, looked into her...and realized that she _understood_.

"I don't know what just happened, Cevn, but you've gotta stand up! You have to fight it! I went through the deepest Hells of despair in that POW camp...but it _didn't break me_! I emerged from my suffering, and now I _want_ a better world! And I'm willing to make the effort...to pay the ultimate price if necessary! I've been paying the price every day since Genji died. Don't give up! He may claim to know your thoughts as soon as you think them...but he'll never know your heart!" she challenged me.

With that, Megumi pulled me to partway to my knees. I felt so weak, I was swaying on my knees like a drunkard. Then Megumi pulled me to her and hugged me.

"Show us your kokoro!" she urged, holding me as I shook out my indecision. I wanted to bury my face in her shoulder and hide, but I saw Keiichi and Tamiya and Ootaki. War-wounded veterans who had accepted me into the fraternity of their personal revolutions. Each scarred face seemed to infuse me with confidence.

Someone else had demanded my kokoro, back in a TimeStream where only one being had survived out of everyone I had ever known. My thoughts went out to Belldandy, who was possibly the only living being remaining in that TimeStream. And now this woman..._this Megumi_...was asking me to share my Soul with her and her fellow soldiers as she succored me.

"What...is...in...me?" I asked myself, there on the shattered cement tarmac with Megumi holding me in a bond of concern and friend-love.

"Witness the broken man! Witness the triumph of Evil!" Isilblius shouted.

I staggerforced myself to my feet and faced him. I felt my fears recede as whatever it was that was inside of me elected to reveal itself. To manifest itself with a full expression of force. It was more powerful than the most profound spiritual awakening that I had ever experienced! Kissing reality with every possible shading of power, I felt a glow of lifeforce taking over...

"NO! Not anymore! Experience the loving courage...of Balance!" I shouted.

With a sheer thrust of my will...I ripped Isilblius out of his assumed mortal form. I heard a series of gasps as I revealed his Demon essence to my fellow Resistance fighters. Gritting my teeth with exertion, I pulled _both_ Isilblius and myself out of this TimeStream.

I _had_ gotten stronger during my several months in the warring Japan of this Earthrealm's TimeStream!

Strong enough to put an end to the war in Japan...and to leave Megumi a gift. Whether putting an end to the war was an act of Balance or not, I didn't know for sure. Frankly, after all I had been through, I didn't give a fuck if it was.

Megumi had wanted me to love her...so I left myself behind. An exact copy of the Cevn she had fallen in love with. With an added frosting on the cake, because I had created the first God in this Timestream. To heal their world, their Earthrealm. To take their Earthrealm to the Next Level as soon as possible, to make up for what happened here. I hoped this would piss Isilblius off to no end for what he did to Urd. If he was going to be mercilessly Evil, then I was going to be even more merciless with Love.

To ensure that it would happen, to create a full partner for Megumi, I used the best template for love that existed. I gave him Belldandy's loving nature...

To love her wounded heart back to joy and peace.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --


	57. Pt 57: A Question of Opposites

**Part 57: A Question of Opposites**

I could sense the malefaction of Isilblius even when I couldn't directly confirm his presence. When I departed the TimeStream and returned to the normalcy of a physical dimension, I quickly comprehended that he had progressed much farther than I had anticipated in his systematic destruction of the TimeStreams. All around me, the 'life essence' of the Multiverse was ebbing with the cruel spasms of Death. Yet I knew that this wasn't the Real Death...the nullity of it all clearly revealed that the Reaper from the Instrumentality of Light was not involved in whatever process that was draining the vital flows of energy.

It was quite possible that Isilblius had killed Death, by ending the existence of the Reaper.

Thus, it was all the more crucial that I had to find a _living_ TimeStream...one that had not been touched by Isilblius's blighting havoc.

And soon!

In the midst of evading Isilblius once again, I found that I could 'phase' myself a little out of sync where the junction of the Chronometric and Divinity dimensions occurred. This created the impression that I was in TimeSpace when actually, I was _between_ TimeSpaces. Quite often, this tact managed to completely disorient Isilblius; but it required the expenditure of a grave amount of willpower and energy. Several times, I was concerned that I would mire myself hopelessly in the Metanative spheres of energy. Energies that functioned in ways I was ill-made to comprehend.

The task of outmaneuvering Isilblius was rendered even more difficult because of my lack of adeptness in moving about within the Metanative plane of existence. I couldn't afford to be sloppy in my attempts to gain mastery of the formless and timeless. I had already reproached myself for twice leading Isilblius to TimeStreams that I had sought refuge in...affording him the opportunity to cast his shadow of lies on the lives of innocents.

I would not make that mistake again.

As I labored to remain a step of ahead of him, I actually stumbled upon a TimeStream that was apparently unscathed by Isilblius's wide swath of destruction. Even better, as I interpreted the energies in the TimeStream; I learned that in this Earthrealm, Belldandy and Keiichi and Co. existed in close proximity to each other in the 'now' that I was familiar with. Circa the first decade of the 21st century! I was totally drawn into my own excitement as it dawned on me that this timeline was relatively safe...the aura emanating from the planet disclosed that the lifeflow seemed quite peaceful here compared to the "BattleStream" TimeStream.

I wished I could have taken Keiichi, Megumi and the rest with me...

I anguished over the fact that I had failed repeatedly in my attempts to resurrect Genji once I emerged from the "BattleStream" TimeStream. I just didn't have the power to rejoin the Soul with the Individual. I knew that the Instrumentality of Light was still intact in some fashion, because I could sense the Soul of that TimeStream's Genji in it. However, his life's essence...his being...was residually subsumed into the pool of energies that powered the Multiverse. I simply lacked the necessary skills to revert the energies back into his creative individuality, gather them, and then bring them into harmony with his Soul. Try as I might, I was unable to restore him to life. There was no reprieve from the inertia of my inexperience.

I just hoped that Megumi would at least be able to live a more joyful life with the 'copy' of myself that I had left for her.

As I approached, the maw of the TimeStream swept up into my view. Once I pierced its 'shell', I emerged inside of it. I was surrounded by coiled threads of TimeWeaves that circled around each other with immediacy; living cords glowing with chronometric energies. I scattered myself across a few trillion moments so as to confound Isilblius if he somehow to trace me to this particular TimeStream. Then I waited for signs of his pursuit...

But avoid him, I did.

With a burst of transference, I reappeared in the middle of a park. It was like stepping off of an escalator; one moment I was traveling across Time, the next moment I was focused within the finity of the_ moment_. The Here and Now of this TimeWeave. It took several seconds for my mind to make the adjustment from Metanative perspectives to mortal thought forms. I found it quite odd that once I arrived in a TimeStream, my demi-omniscience suddenly receded...while my mortal sentiments and knowledge moved to the fore of my consciousness.

In essence, I made a shift from knowing an organum of Multiversal principles and essences to being relatively clueless about the people, places and things that surrounded me in this new TimeStream's Earthrealm.

Gathering my senses, I looked around the vicinity. I was in a heavily wooded park area. The ground was stitched with gray ribbons of sidewalk curving gently among the trees. Everything was wintry white; the snow had minted the ground, piling a half-meter against recently shoveled walkways. The footpaths led in all directions, bending past small frozen pools of ice, hedgerows and groupings of ornate park benches. Subconsciously, I noticed that there was something different about the trees...there was a predominance of tall conifers foresting the park. The mix of arbor seemed unusual for Japan, as there seemed to be far less cedars, wisterias and maple trees. Perhaps I was in the Snow Country? But then again, I had never been to the Snow Country, so how would I know.

I felt a snowflake brush against my nose.

As I admired the random icesculpturings of the trees, a group of teens walked by, staring at me and giggling.

Ignoring them, I started scanning the walkways for a way out of the park. I sensed that I was in close proximity to one of my friends...

What luck!

I saw a woman that looked like Belldandy walking around a bend in one the walkways that led away from me. Her face _looked_ the same! She was bundled up for the elements; wearing a light blue snow-bunny jacket with white fur trim, the parka pulled up tight around her head. I could see stray wisps of auburn hair peeking around the corners of her hood, along with a red and blue knitted scarf wrapped smartly around her neck. I could make out that she was wearing a thick handknit white sweater under her jacket. The rest of her outfit consisted of a faded pair of denim jeans and white snow boots.

As I started walked towards her, I could hear the occasional crunch of snow-crusted ice under my feet. No wonder the kids were laughing at me...I was dressed in the ragged and torn summer fatiguewear that I had been wearing when I left the last TimeStream! Privately ashamed at my doofy oversight, I immediately remanifested in more suitable garments: I was now wearing a seasonal dark blue long greatcoat with a brown fur collar, a knit hat, gloves and boots.

The last thing I wanted to do when I approached Belldandy was look like I had just arrived from a mid-summer war zone.

"Belldandy?" I yelled, trying to wave her down. She paused at my voice, looking at me with curiosity as she halted her brisk walk. I ran up to her, breathlessly happy to see that she was _alive_.

"Belldandy! I...know...you from before. Maybe you've met me! My name is Cevn!" I stated, almost out of breath with excitement.

"Hallo. Unskyld meg, jeg forstar ikke. Den som be de? Hvor kommer de fra? Snakker de Norsk?"

Great! I just ran into the only Goddess in Japan who speaks Norwegian...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Hello. Excuse me, I don't understand. Who are you? Where are you from? Can you speak Norwegian?"

I took me a few seconds to make the lingo adjustment as she repeated herself. Here was a Norse Goddess from the Norse pantheon...speaking Norwegian to me.

On closer inspection, she looked exactly the same as the Belldandy I knew. She had the same smiling blue eyes, the same delicate voice, the same polite mannerisms. The only difference was the reddened cheeks from the cold.

And no mark on her forehead.

"My name is Cevn, and I have met you before. I'm certain of it! I have traveled here from...America...to find you."

"I don't think I know you. I don't know any Svens..."

"Ahem...it's Cevn."

"Anyway, I'm just on my way home from the Art Institute. I better be going now. Goodbye!" she said with a definite air of dismissal.

I watched her walk around a curve in the sidewalk...and soon she was out of sight.

So the Belldandy from this TimeStream had never encountered someone with my name before! My optimism had gotten the best of me; since this TimeStream was almost the same as the time and place I called home, I had assumed that the 'Belldandy' here had met a 'Cevn'. When I briefly surveyed the history of this Earthrealm before arriving here, I learned that the national boundaries were essentially the same. The history was about the same, except that "Les Beatles" came from France...which spoke English as a national language. Ted Kennedy was President of the US, and Mori had actually done a good job as the Japanese Prime Minister.

I pondered whether it would be apropos for me to follow her to the temple compound. Swiftly realizing that my immediate encounter with Belldandy had been more than just a coincidence, I decided to trail her...

This park was huge, much larger than any park I could remember walking through in Makuhari. I could see groups of children, young and elderly couples, teen gangs and solitary walkers enjoying the environs of the park.

And when I reached the edge of the park, I found myself standing in the light snowfall, facefallen with surprise.

I was poised at the edge of a slightly bowed brickwork bridge extending over an ice-covered river. On the other side of the bridge, rows of tightly packed stoneknit houses ornamented with rococo inspirations vied with two and three story rustic Baroque cog-joint wooden structures. In the distance, I could see the spires of a snow mounted cathedral grasping towards the gray snowcast sky. Icicles hung from the eaves of the sharply peaked roofs.

It looked just like Sweden or Norway...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

I wandered several blocks behind Belldandy, watching her step into a bookstore and emerge ten minutes later with a book. The main streets were paved concrete, and fairly busied with traffic. But the sidestreets still retained their narrow passages with elegant cobblebrick surfaces. In the entire time, I saw only one Japanese girl...who looked like she was freezing. As Belldandy kept walking, I noticed that people were starting to put candles in the windows of the restaurants and small shops.

A short while later, the sky gradually darkened and the snow became brightened. The snowflakes were mesmerizing as they whorled conically about under the streetlights.

Belldandy turned left and ducked into an alleyway with tall thickly-leafed hedges on either side. Then she opened a walkthrough gateway and disappeared into the hedge wall.

I walked up and looked through the irongrille gate.

The hedges on either side of the narrow alleyway were about three meters in height. As I peered between the metal gratebars, I saw a large yard encircling a central building. The house in the middle was a square two story wooden building with a highly angled roof. I realized that the great pitch of the roof was no doubt due to the fact that there was so much snow all around. In the temple...er, the house, gabled bay windows on the second floor accented the contours of the house. I could see three brickwork chimneys standing tall above the roof; each was smoking serenely in the snowfall.

The white painted house with its high rooflines possessed a distinctive Scandinavian charm. No wonder Belldandy had chosen it as her home.

"Who are you?"

I flinched at the voice, and then turned towards the speaker, who was standing behind me...

And I saw Urd.

Her platinum hair streamed out from under a Russian fur hat. She looked less tan than usual, but her lilygreen eyes still sparkled with life. As with Belldandy, there was no Goddess markings in the middle of her forehead. For a moment, my heart leapt with the hope that somehow she had been brought back to life.

Until I noticed that she was arm in arm with Genji.

I blinked back my shock...and felt my soul jeal with heartburning jaundice. My insecurities rammed themselves into my thoughts with complete abandon. In one frozen moment, I knew that Urd was _with_ Genji. As in boyfriend-girlfriend "with". My heart panged with jealousy...

I was aware that, in the midst of transiting between TimeStreams, I might encounter Urd in a relationship with someone else. The odds were quite in favor of this actually. I sensed that her and my relationship on the Earthrealm was so unique, it probably couldn't have occurred anywhere else. Beyond this was Urd's status as a Norn; there was always the factor of Urd being Norn of the Past...which prevented her from having her love returned by the subject of her affections. I knew that Urd, as an Yggdrasil Sysop and Norn of the Past, was free to travel between TimeStreams. If she had traveled here, was she _my_ Urd? The Urd I had fallen in love with? Or was she just an "echo" of the Urd I loved?

Or maybe something else entirely.

"You look lost. Can we help you?" she asked, interrupting my rapid fire thoughts.

"Uh...I'm trying to find some Goddesses..." I stammered, foolish to my own words. My heart and head were out of synch. My identity had begun to merge with the concept that I was part of Urd and she was part of me; a reasonably well-adjusted function considering how much I cared for her. My capacity to love her allowed me the radiance of contemplation mixed with compassion, viewing her beauty as both manifestation and attribution of my love for her. Although my devotion to her had wavered in the face of her addiction, her near-death experience had riveted me to the awareness that there were times when I viewed Urd as perfect...the most perfect being in all of the Multiverse. This sense of perfection streamed back and forth between my appraisal of her and the part of me that yearned towards completion.

However, seeing Urd with Genji had totally shifted me from what I 'knew'. Not only did it frustrate all my preconceptions of who Urd was, it also threatened to disrupt how I viewed myself. My identity was no longer coursing through the fluid realms of "Urd's boyfriend". The union of self-identity and Urd-identity in my mind was no longer applicable...despite the fact that my heart was starving for affection.

Urd's eyes grew wide as she leaned in closer to Genji, grabbing his arm tightly, seeking protection. At once, she appeared to be facefallen with shock. In contrast, Genji seemed to project a relaxed, almost confident demeanor.

I was shaking...

"I think you better come in with us. You look like you've seen a ghost," Genji offered, gesturing towards the metalgrille gate in the hedge.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

A house full of soft candles in the windowsills...a crackling fire in the fireplace...thick full sofa chairs and couches...stocky endtables and a stout coffee table...richly crafted framed painting on the wall...the tall ceiling with an actual chandelier...an antique Biedermeier sofa...ornate fluting around the doorjambs...

Everything about this 18th century lodging was comforting, warm, and secure to me.

Except for Urd and Genji.

Urd looked at me with ripe suspicion, narrowing her eyes from time to time as I explained that I was a traveler from America. Seeing her affectionately resting her hand on Genji's leg didn't help matters any. It seemed that she was flaunting the fact that she was with another guy...trying to intimidate me into accepting the dissolution of my strong feelings towards her.

"Hold that thought, idiot mind! _This_ Urd has probably never seen you! The Urd you know is dead by the hand of Isilblius. Which could extend into many realms of possibility. This Urd is not she, by any means. The Urd of this TimeStream could easily be suffering from..." I challenged myself.

"You mentioned 'Goddesses' when we were standing by the gate, did you not?" Genji asked, interrupting my train of thought after we each sampled the continental coffee Urd had brought us.

"Yes. I'm looking for three Goddesses. I know that it sounds quite crazy, but there is a part of me that believes that they are here. The three Norns. Have you heard of them?"

"Of course I have heard of them. This _is_ Norway, you know. The Norns Verdandi, Urd and Skuld. Weavers of the web of Time and Fate. The Goddesses of the Past, Present and Future. The legend from the Eddas is well known in our country, even in these modern times. There still is a significant amount of scholarly interest in the Eddas, from the standpoint of archetypal cosmology, ethical philosophy and such. There are many unanswered issues of philology that are particularly interesting..." Urd asserted, suddenly charmed by the direction the conversation was taking.

"My wife Urd is a specialist in Norse legends. As you could see, as soon as you mentioned the Norns, her eyes seem to light up," Genji said as he patted her on the shoulder.

_Wife?!_

I felt my blood freeze as I was a split-second away from blurting "WIFE?" in shudderout shock. Fortunately, I caught myself before I was hung by my tongue. I looked at her hand, resting on Genji's thigh...and saw a large diamond ring and a wedding band.

Urd was _married_ in this TimeStream? But she was a Goddess...the Norn of the Past. When I met her, when I fell in love with her, the Ultimate Force prevented us from touching each other. Yet, I could plainly see that Urd and Genji were touching each other effortlessly. And obviously they had more than just touched, if they had joined each other in matrimony.

My emotions were whimwhammying all over the place.

"Are you all right?" Genji asked with concern.

My face...I can't let my face betray my surprise. My sense of loss. It flashed on me that my experience in this new TimeStream might be the most brutal pall of all. To see the Goddess who had cast a glow into the darkness of my forlorn heart...with another man. Married to another man. Their love for each other was indisputable; I could see the rays of affection pass between their eyes. Being around them would be more than just discomforting. Seeing the two together would remind me of what I wanted, and what I could never have.

In a funny and ironic twist of thought, I realized that things were balancing out. In the "BattleStream" Earthrealm, I had left a copy of myself for Megumi...the widowed wife of Genji in that reality...to fall in love with. I had planted a deeply superconscious willingness on my doppelganger's part to fall in love with Megumi, thus pretty much making it a done deal. Now, in this reality, Genji was lifepartner to the Goddess that I had fallen in love with!

Once again, I had to accept the coldness of Balance.

It was kinda funny though...I imagined the shade of Genji from the "BattleStream" Earthrealm laughing his ass off at my current predicament!

The incredible powers that I found within myself soon after Isilblius had 'killed' me...had transformed me into something more than human, perhaps even more than an Yggdrasil God. Despite the hypostasis of my comprehension…which had elevated my vast experience into thought...my heart remained unaltered, with an almost unchanging intuition and emotional vision. My heart was the same as it had always been. The vital feelings of my "mortal life" obviously didn't evolve alongside everything else.

Urd was romantically out of reach...yet clearly within the reach of my eyes.

"Oh, it's you!" Belldandy said as she spied me while she was coming down the stairs. Her voice was filled with reserve and suspicion.

"Hi sis! You got back from Art Institute early! We met this man on the streets and invited him in for a short chat," Urd greeted her sister as she quickly went into another room.

A moment later, Belldandy emerged from what must have been the kitchen. When she looked closer at me, she seemed like she was going to drop her mug of coffee.

"I met him in Kuhaugen Park. He introduced himself, and started talking to me in some strange language...Japanese, I think. He must be an idiot, because I certainly don't _look_ Japanese, do I? Then he tells me that he knows me from before, and says that he's from America or something, and..."

Urd made a slit-the-throat gesture with her hand.

"Belldandy...he _understands_ what you're saying. He speaks Norse quite well, as a matter of fact..." Urd said in a dryly sarcastic voice.

"Oh...no! Oops! There I go again, being all naive again! I'm so sorry!" Belldandy apologized quickly, executing a curtsy.

"But you must admit that whenever a strange man meets you in the park, hails you by your first name, says that he knows you from before, after initially addressing you in a foreign language...well, it is kinda _strange_, wouldn't you agree?" she explained.

"Quite," Genji said, confirming Belldandy's reasoning. His agreement seemed to be more an act of charity; a rescuing of Urd's younger sister to save her from further embarrassment.

"Belldandy is the artist in the family. These are her pictures on the wall," Urd said, tactfully changing the topic as she gestured with a wave of her hands.

"You know how flighty artists can be...it's really not her fault," she added, clearly making fun of her sister's gaffe. Belldandy grimaced, then walked over and sat next to Urd on the end of the couch. Urd leaned up and whispered something in her ear.

"He was asking about _that_? W..what did you tell him? You didn't tell him about_ Keiichi_, did you?" Belldandy said in a loud whisper

I immediately picked up on this.

"There's a Keiichi in the house? Does that mean that there is a Tomohisa too? And let me guess...you have a younger sister whose name is Skuld?" I asked.

_--Spffftt--_

Genji literally spit out his coffee when I mentioned Tomohisa and Skuld's names. Both Belldandy and Urd seemed to turn pale at my educated guesses.

"What the hell is going on here?" I said under my breath.

Urd was gripping the coffee table, her small hands trembling with effort. It was as if she was trying to calm herself down by grasping onto something inanimate, yet tangible. Belldandy curled up in at the end of the couch and put a pillow on her lap, looking very defensive. And Genji was regarding me with depths of anxiety.

The silence was punctuated by the crackling of the fireplace...

"I..I better go make something to eat, if you're going to stay as a guest for dinner. Which I imagine you will," Urd said nervously as she abruptly stood up and excused herself.

"Wait for me, Urd!" Belldandy hailed her as she stood up and followed her older sister out of the living room.

"I guess this means that you'll be joining us for supper. Don't worry, my wife is a great cook," Genji said cheerily, his face still riveted with curious concern.

Urd...cooking? Urd in the kitchen? Urd...a "great cook"?

What have I gotten myself into this time?

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"You'll have to meet my little sister, Skuld. She's practicing her after school piano lessons, she'll be home before five," Belldandy said chattily as she took a break from cooking dinner.

It was 4:30pm, and the sun had already set over an hour ago.

"I hope you like seasoned meatcakes, cabbage stew and fresh strawberries," Urd asked as she emerged from the kitchen momentarily, garbed in a white apron.

The whole notion of a domestic Urd was at once funny and unsettling. If this was the Goddess Urd, then where was all her rambunctiousness? Urd was wild, naughty, sexy and impulsive. Yet this Urd exhibited none of these qualities during the brief time I had been here. She was the very model of a housewife. She was _too _wifeish, as a matter of fact.

In one sense, I was grateful that this Urd was behaving in a manner that was quite distinct from that of the Urd I thought of as my girlfriend. Her soft, cheery banter served to remind me that this Urd was a totally different Goddess than the Urd that I knew back in Japan. I couldn't imagine this Urd impersonating a therapist in an attempt to eavesdrop on my inner thoughts and soulful secrets.

At precisely 5:15, Skuld bounded in the front door, followed by Tomohisa.

"Don't forget to take your boots off, Skuld!" Belldandy yelled perfunctorily from the kitchen. I looked at Skuld, who seemed to be about 16 or 17 years of age. Her long black hair sparkled with beads of snowmelt as she pulled off her knitted cap. She was a beauty, full of youthful boisterousness. Again, things were slightly different in this Earthrealm's reality. Skuld must have been at least 30,000 years older than her counterpart on 'my' Earthrealm. Her hairstyle was different too; she had cut her hair into short bangs in front, and had wrapped the back into a long thick braid. Also missing were the girlish ribbons that 'my' TimeStream's Skuld adorned herself with.

Tomohisa looked the same...but then again, he didn't. His hair was a little bit more rugged, as if he had tried to make it stylishly unkempt. He seemed a little bit taller than his teenaged counterpart.

There was something about his eyes...

For a flashpanicked moment, I thought he was Isilblius. For a split-second, he regarded me with a tight scrutiny as he carefully stacked his hockey sticks in an entryway closet. Then he dashed up the stairs after Skuld. It almost seemed like he was scanning me, trying to determine if I belonged here.

"How many people live in this house, Genji?" I asked.

"Just six of us. Sometimes seven. The only one who isn't home yet is Keiichi. He's probably out snowmobiling. He might not even make it home for dinner, but don't tell that to Belldandy or she'll get upset. Whenever there's a heavy snowfall, Keiichi gets on his snowmobile and goes in search of stranded motorists. One could say that he _enjoys_ rescuing people...but I personally believe that he really does it because he likes to go fast on his snowmobile," Genji said in a confiding voice.

"Does he have a sister named Megumi?"

Genji flinched, and then looked at me with indecision figuring his face. After a moment, he seemed to reach an inner decision...

"Yes...he does. _How_ did you know this?"

"Just a guess. You see, when I said that I think that I've been here before, Genji, I was speaking the truth. I know of a group of people; for convenience's sake, let's just say that they live in Japan. The three women are Goddesses, Norns to be exact. The men and Megumi are mortals. I'm their friend..."

"That sounds very interesting, but I'm afraid that your ideas clearly don't accord with the reality of our situation here," he answered with diplomatic tolerance.

"Genji...what do they match, then? I'm almost certain that Urd, Belldandy and Skuld are _Goddesses from Yggdrasil_!" I said, laying it all on the line.

"Heh...heheh...heh heh heh! _Ha ha_ HA HA BUH HA HEE HAH! Oh...this is rich! My wife and her sisters...Goddesses?! You _do_ have a vivid imagination!" Genji gasped out before dissolving into laughter.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

It's been said that "that which is necessary, is never a risk". But what was necessary in this case might require me to take a chance. I knew that a brief-but-visible display of my powers might bait the Goddesses out...but would it be worth the risk? Was I safe enough here to attempt as much? The last time I stopped in a TimeStream, Isilblius basically puppetteered me until the very end. I realized that I was as much surprised by my display of skill and fortitude at the end of the "BattleStream" as Isilblius probably was. But I was pitted against a cunning and ruthless adversary. I couldn't afford any more mistakes...

Especially in this TimeStream, which appeared blissfully unravaged by Isilblius's assaults on the Everything.

So when I asked if I could take a look upstairs...and each member at the dinner table told me "No!"...I decided that I should investigate anyway.

The snowfall had turned into a blizzard; so Keiichi politely offered to let me spend the night sleeping on a couch and comforter in the large living room.

I learned that I was in Trondheim, a mid-sized city about 400Km north of Oslo, nestled on the shores of the Trondheim Fjord on the west coast of Norway. Keiichi remarked that Christmas was about 3 weeks away...and that he and Belldandy were going to shop for a tree over the weekend.

It was strange to see Keiichi, Genji and Tomohisa...all Japanese men...speaking Norse. It was as if they had been born and raised here in Norway; their speech patterns exhibited a native comprehension and syntax.

Belldandy joined us for a late night tea. She noted that Urd was the scholar of the family, while she was the artist and Skuld was the athlete. She described how Skuld had broken her leg skiing on the slopes a couple years ago, having to wear crutches for almost the whole summer. This injury only served to fire Skuld's competitive spirit even more, as she was renowned in Trondheim as one of the best skiers in her age group.

After the hectic uncertainty of being under the gun for the last half year that I spent in the previous TimeStream, the blanket and couch setup looked very appealing...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Breakfast this morning was delicious, consisting of Urd's 'very own' berried cinnamon rolls, oatmeal and yogurt, and freshly squeezed Dane's fruit. Dane's fruit was the Norwegian equivalent of oranges, I learned.

During breakfast, I learned a little bit about the life-balance here and everyone's role in it. It turned out that Urd was an Assistant Professor of History at the Trondheim University. Genji worked as a Data Systems Engineer at the same school, pretty much running the University's computer. Keiichi worked as a staff writer for a music magazine, routinely interviewing top bands and performers in the Norwegian rock scene. Skuld and Tomohisa went to the same high school, Tomohisa being a Senior...one grade ahead of her. The idea of Skuld being in _high school_ was a definite divergence from the Skuld I knew. What wasn't a divergence, perhaps more of an emergence, was the fact that they seemed to be a couple of high school sweethearts. I was amused by the notion that if the Skuld I knew was here with me, she'd be appalled!

After breakfast, Belldandy gave me a very serious look and asked me to stay behind as well, rather than explore Trondheim.

"I have something to show you," she said, sitting in the chair next to where I was sitting. She opened up her large sketchbook carrying case and pulled out several sketch-books. Everyone else had left for their respective jobs or schools. I was momentarily distracted by her sweater, which appeared to be a hand-knitted affair with subtle fall colors blended against a white background. Like a star, but not so far.

The other distraction was the rimless Sora-style round glasses she had been wearing since breakfast. By the looks of it, she had a very slight case of hyperopia. As an artist, far-sightedness was definitely something not to be trifled with. But her lens prescription was so minor, I wondered if the glasses were more of an affectation then a necessity. Her type of hyperopia was easily corrected through laser surgery, assuming they had such medical technology in this Earthrealm.

"Belldandy, aren't you supposed to be in school or something?" I asked. She looked down shyly at her feet for a moment, then looked up at me with her lustrous blue eyes and nodded her guilt.

"Yes, I have classes this morning. But I'm skipping! I decided to forego my classes at the Art Institute today, because I really need to find out more about you. And I have some matters that I need you to discuss with me," she said roundly.

Finally. She was finally going to reveal to me that she was a Goddess. I hoped that it wouldn't be too hard on her; my presence here seemed to rub raw against everyone's tight-knit solidarity. The fact that I 'guessed' that Tomohisa and Skuld were living here seemed to heave a wave of suspicion and worry on Genji's shoulders. Keiichi's conversation with me last night was little more than perfunctory, but at least I had broken the ice with him.

"Did you really paint all these paintings up on the wall, Belldandy?" I asked politely.

"Yes...except for that one," she answered with a smile, pointing at a Van Der Meer hung next to the fireplace mantle. I smiled awkwardly at my ignorance, but then I felt a little troubled...as the Van Der Meer seemed to be an _original_ work of art! I almost asked her if it was, but felt better of it, and discharged my curiosity by asking her questions about the pictures.

One painting drew my attention above all the others. It was an abstract representation of something familiar. Aesthetically, it was charming and soft to the eyes, but it seemed to pull me in. Belldandy had painted a series of cloudscapes overlapping each other, blending into each other with an almost effortless...

"Waaa…" I gasped as I recognized the scene. Using the Japanese equivalent of "wow" had become second-nature to me only a few months after arriving at the temple. Of course, living with Urd and her sisters gave me lots of opportunities to be awed and wowed.

Before me was an abstract but faithful representation of a scene that bore an uncanny resemblance to the PinkSky Zone in Yggdrasil! To be sure, the painting took some liberalities with interpretation, but the depictions of the cloudforms seemed to express a direct association with my conscious observations of that sector of the God's Realm. A depopulated God's Realm, my heart reminded me sadly.

"Tee hee hee! My work isn't _that_ breathtaking, is it?" Belldandy asked airily in a light giggly voice, obviously amused by the reaction her painting had evoked in me.

"H..how did you find the inspiration for this painting?" I asked.

"Hmm...I guess the best way to describe how that one came about was that it was one of my dream series. The beauty of an object often contrasts with the admiration of the imagination that is inspired by it. In my case, I can fairly well recall images and abstracts from my dreams. I experience what some people call 'lucid dreams'. That painting came about one morning after I had a flying dream. I wanted to liberate the intimate spirit of what I dreamt, without beautifying it or rendering it with any deliberate stroke of accuracy. I didn't even come close to that ambition...I don't even know what it suggests, despite the fact that _I_ created it! Isn't that strange?" she said in the voice of a critic.

"I don't necessarily think that your painting's value lies in how close or far it approaches the goals that you have for it. To me, it evokes something real, yet hidden. Something _beyond_ what would be a mortal sense of perception. It seems to operate in the region of sensation, without objectifying the beauty it attempts to portray. There's a certain tentativeness of spirit that seems to lend it a mystical ambiance..." I responded.

"You really think so?" she asked, pleased at my appraisal of her work.

"This is what I see in it," I replied, still nervous about the "something" she wanted to show me.

She returned her attention to her sketchbook and shuffled through the large pages until she found what she was searching for. Her face knitted itself tightly with uncertainty, as if she was weighing whether she should reveal whatever it was in her sketchbook. With a sigh that signaled that she had arrived at her decision, Belldandy rotated the sketchbook around to face me...

I beheld an interpretative portrait of myself, drawn with colored charcoals, crayons and oil paints!

"Now do you see why I had to show this to you?" she said in a small voice.

"Uh...I don't know what to say! I'm a little bit flattered, Belldandy. I've never considered myself photogenic. So why did you draw this? You must have worked quite hard to give it such a studied look...and in just one evening too!" I commented, generously praising her.

"You don't understand, Cevn. I sketched this piece _three years ago_! A..about a year after I first met Keiichi and started going out with him."

I heard the sound of my mind sucking in...

"Are you a Goddess, Belldandy?" I asked point-blank.

"You're _still_ carping on that? Do I _look_ like a Goddess to you? I know that my unusual name could probably give you pause to think such a thing...but it's not my fault. My mother was a bit of an eccentric...hee hee! She still is, if you ask me! I think she did too much acid in the 60s or something. Naming my sisters and me after the Norse Goddesses of Fate..." she said, blushing with a charming embarrassment.

"I'm sorry that I keep thinking you're a Goddess..."

"And I still can't come up with an answer regarding the fact that I sketched this so long ago, without ever having met you! I can remember awakening one morning with this visual image of a man stamped fresh in my waking consciousness! I couldn't get it out of my head until I drew this portrait. And now you're sitting in my living room...and it's scaring me!" she confessed.

"I must admit that I'm as surprised as you are, Belldandy. And I want you to know that I'm not weird, and I don't intend to bring any harm to you, your family, your boyfriend, or your friends. I'm just here, trying to figure things out," I answered, trying to assure her of that my intentions were benign.

So much for this being a "Belldandy admitting she's a Goddess" rap session!

"I'm glad to hear that, because I highly doubt that you could bring any harm to us anyway, even if you wanted to..." she remarked.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

I soaked in the brass bathtub, pondering Belldandy's statement about harmfulness. It seemed so out-of-place. The fact that she had a premonition about me three years ago was disconcerting, to say the least. Being able to see into the future didn't exactly meet with her job skills as Norn of the Present. But yet, precognizance is a definite sign of the oracular aspects of divinity...

She had been very evasive when I asked if the bathroom was upstairs, reminding me once again that the upstairs was "off limits" to me as she showed me the downstairs bath.

The house had a bathroom on each floor; this bathroom was generously large and it was located off of a drawing room on the other side of the central hallway that separated the ground floor in two. The bathroom possessed an elegance that seemed to be at home in the 19th century, not here. The wallpaper had a Victorian look to it, and the toilet had one of those overhead cabinets with a pull-chain to flush it.

I toweled off and sat down on a settee in the bathroom, still mystified by the gist of Belldandy's aleatoric remark. I pondered the possibility that, in her mind, she must think that I'm a mortal...incapable of bringing harm to her. Or perhaps she could intuit my character; realizing that I was on the "good" side of the moral divide. I could remember the Belldandy from my past speaking on behalf of my good qualities when everyone, including myself, was somewhat convinced that I was a part Demon.

After toweling myself dry, I remembered that I had spied an upright piano in the drawing room on my way to the bathroom. So I settled down on the bench and started playing one of the simpler themes to the God's Music. The music seemed to flow out of me, shaded with nuances of my confusion. I wished that there was means by which I could discern who's a Goddess and who isn't in this crazy Earthrealm reality...

Suddenly, I felt a set of arms warmly encircling my chest as someone was embracing me from behind. My hands trailed off the keys with a thrumbing discord as I felt two fullnesses softly pressed into my back.

"My God! This couldn't possibly be Belldandy!" I thought, startled into rigidity as my heart skipped a beat or three.

"Hi, honey! Who are _you_? I've been to this house a number of times, and it's always been so boring here! Because the only ones here...are always women! Never any men! And now, finally, there's a man staying here with all these women...and he's someone new! And you're playing such remarkable music on the piano!" a voice said with a dewdrop sultrily sweetness, inches from my ear. I could feel hot breaths blowing past my ear with each word.

As I started to turn around, the woman who was hugging me from behind floated around me and tried to settle herself in my lap, causing me to tip backwards and fell off the piano bench...

"_Oops!_" a cheery girl-voice interjected right before I crashed on the floor.

I looked up...

...and saw Megumi.

She was straddling me as I lay on my back on the floor. Instantly, my paranoid sexual phobias came and passed as I realized that we were in a decidedly ecchi sort of position.

My shock deepened when I saw that she was dressed in some kind of outlandish outfit. Or more appropriately, a costume. An outrageous, totally over the top cosplay-bizarre _sexy_ costume! Her shoulders were wrapped in a white fur wrap with pinkish leopard spots. A cape-like drop was draped over her back, striped with pink and white geometric shapes. Her bosom was barely covered by a loose sheer half-blouse...creating the effect that it might slip off at a moment's notice. An ample amount of cleavage was revealed in the low cut of her half-blouse. Her wrists sported dozens of thin light blue and gold bangles. She had some kind of jewel mounted in her belly button, and some kind of strange red skirt that hugged her hips tightly. It was open in the front and the sides, revealing a generous amount of her legs...

In the middle of her head was a pink oval-shaped mark which looked like a football.

"Aren't you the strange one? It almost seems that you're _afraid _of me! Well, I can certainly juice you up if you're shy..." she said, sizing me up with a cupidic expression.

"Wh..whh..whh..whh.." I stammered, trying to push her off of me without wiggling too much.

"Ohayo!! Goddess Megumi at your service! And if it's service you want, I give the very _best_ service! The best service you can get from the Earth Otasuke Office! You wished for a Goddess...and here I am! All for you, my sexy young mortal man!"

_"MEGUMI!!"_ I heard someone shout censoriously...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Belldandy was looking at Megumi and I in shock. If she was an anime character, she would have been bigsweating bigtime! Then again, if I was a anime character, I would be bigsweating even more. But this was real life, and the only analogy I could arrive at was that she looked like a squirrel buried in pingpong balls. Which was also probably a good description of blasty-gaspy emotions that were jolting me. Everyone I had met in this version of the Earthrealm was so normal, so domestic and relaxed in outlook and behavior...while this Megumi was like a pencil piercing a blank sheet of paper.

Belldandy stood in the drawing room doorway, wide-eyed and mouth agape.

An appearance by another Goddess right about now would be really helpful to extricate me from this embarrassing mess. This was almost as bad as my first meeting with Peorth back in the temple when she popped out of the flowers in the furo while I was taking a bath! If I had a one-yen coin for each embarrassment I had caused myself in my life, I could trade a hundred thousand yen just to offset _that _one evening's craziness…

"Belldandy! I..it's not what it looks like! M..Megumi...could you just get off of me!" I gasped. Megumi had a wanton expression on her face; I sensed that she was ready to lean down and kiss me...

"Please?"

"Aww, alright! If you say so..." she said with a scowl. She floated upwards and curled her legs underneath her, watching me gain my feet and stand up.

"Do you two know each other?" Megumi asked, floating towards Belldandy. As I stood up, I could see the sides of her bathing suit-like panties..."Goddess Megumi" was printed across the top.

Just like Peorth.

Could Megumi be this TimeStream's 'Peorth'?

The implications of _Megumi_ being a Goddess totally unraveled my mindsets about this TimeStream's Earthrealm! The mystery of this place was spiraling out of hand with a Freemason-like arcanum. I had never considered the possibility that one of my mortal friends could be a Goddess in another part of the Multiverse! If she was a Goddess, did that mean that she was Keiichi's sister? If Megumi is Keiichi's sister in this reality, then that would imply that...

"Ahhh, Megumi. Would you like to have some tea, now that you're here?" Belldandy asked, recovering from her shock and halting my flurry of suppositions. Her nervous manner was reminiscent of someone who had just let a very big cat out of the bag.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Whew! That was a close encounter of the lusty kind," I thought to myself as Belldandy, Megumi and I retired to the living room couch cluster. Megumi was floating in the air, much like Urd would do around the temple house.

She looked _exactly_ like the Megumi that I felt a big-brotherly affection for, back home in Japan. Except for the fact that she was dressed in a very revealing costume that seemed to defy gravity. She had Megumi's soft brown eyes, neck-length bangs and pert smile...and a pink football- oval Goddess marking in the middle of her head.

"Would ya stop staring at me like that?! I know that I'm totally a babe, totally hot and totally sexy...but you're giving me the creeps with those creepy eyes of yours!" she chided me.

Belldandy broke into nervous laughter at this...

Well, I wanted to meet the Goddess in the house…and I got my wish. Live and direct--right in my face! Which was probably as red as a strawberry at the moment. Belldandy's laughing didn't help matters; but I felt a half-hearted impulse to join her. Another slice of my heart was grateful that this Megumi hadn't been through the personal hell of the Megumi I met in the "BattleStream" TimeStream.

"Excuse me, but that _isn't_ why I'm staring at you. I'm a little confused. Because back home where I live, you're a mortal," I snapped back, irritated at her censorious attitude.

"Me? A mortal? Haha hah ha hee ha! You've got to be _joking_! Last time I looked in a mirror, I was _all _Goddess! Perhaps I should show you how much of a Goddess I really am! That'd be one experience you'd _never_ forget, ecchi boy…."

"Megumi, Cevn is our guest here...and I won't have you seducing him in my house!" Belldandy interrupted, no longer caught up in having to conceal the existence of a Goddess. "You must understand that what you consider to be flirtation and seduction might be interpreted as an unwelcomed attention by some men, especially men who are insecure. When I saw you and Cevn, I immediately knew that he was the insecure type, uncertain of his manhood..."

"Did she really say what just she said?" I thought as my face flushed with embarrassment and irritation. Keiichi had been dosed with these kinds of comments from his Divine girlfriend quite often, usually in public, usually in the company of friends and intimates. Now I knew what it felt like. Of course, Megumi found this to be highly amusing, as my reaction sealed confirmation to her that I _was_ an "insecure type" around women.

"Oops! There I go again!" Belldandy exclaimed, putting a slender hand over her mouth.

"Ha ahahaaaaahhha ha a ha!"

"Hey, it's not funny! There's reason why..." I stammered.

"Of course there is! That's why I'm here! I'm the Earth Otasuke Agent who often gets the nod to help Earthrealm men get over their sexual anorexia. I'm what you mortals would call a 'sex surrogate'..."

"No way!!" I exclaimed in dismay, interrupting her. I definitely didn't like where this 'discussion' was heading. "My wish had nothing to do with sex, or lack of a girlfriend..."

"Hmmm, it seems to me that it did! I could discern a strong aura of disappointment emanating from you. It's as if someone you love...loves someone else. Your loneliness is almost off the scale," Megumi observed with a clinical proficiency.

"It isn't the only thing that's off the scale," I countered.

"This is true. Despite your fear when I first encountered you, I certainly felt a something arising oh-so-lustfully while I was straddling your waist!"

Belldandy tittered at this, quickly setting her tea down so she wouldn't spill it as the laughter burst out of her. I wanted to hide my head in a paper bag, I was so unsettled by this Megumi's frankness. This was really confusing me. I had just overpowered Isilblius with an act requiring extraordinary…even immense, Divine powers. Now, the consciousness-theme of my life back home was asserting itself. Could my continued fear of women be caused by Isilblius in this reality? Or was some part of my personality preserved? I shuddered when I recalled Isilblius's final moment on Earth…and Urd's expressionless eyes.

"Hee hee hee...it's her way, Cevn! Get used to it! You'll just have to accept Megumi's frankness in certain delicate areas; subjects that many mortals would normally feel a reserve towards discussing," Belldandy counseled me after she finally stopped giggling.

"So why are you here, _Goddess_ Megumi?" I asked, the 'goddess' word every bit a struggle as it rolled off my tongue. "I've been trying to find a Goddess ever since I got here. Why didn't you show yourself then? What could I possibly have done to bring you here, now? And how is it that Belldandy knows you, when she was telling me a short while ago that she didn't know of any Goddesses?"

Now that she had my attention, Megumi flitted with her hair; her vain gesture again reminding me of Peorth's propensity to pose and preen herself in public.

"Like I said, I was sent here to grant you a wish, idiot!" she answered with a touch of irritation.

My face blanched when I realized the deeper implication of her answer. I had wanted to meet the Goddesses here, so I could try and make sense of things, perhaps continue my 'training' so that I could meet Isilblius again without him having me by the neck. Somehow, my unvoiced 'wish' had brought Megumi here_, just like a GRO Goddess would respond to a wish request _!

So now she was here…

"Okay. My wish is to learn who's a Goddess and who isn't!"

"That's easy! I'm a Goddess," Megumi said with a smile and a bow, "and she isn't!" She was pointing at Belldandy, who was scowling at her.

"Let me rephrase my wish then. I want to know who are the Yggdrasil Divines on this planet!"

"Silly idiot! There _are_ no Yggdrasil Gods on this planet! Yggdrasil is the fictitious dwelling place of the Norse gods in one of your Earthrealm legends. Goddesses like me come from somewhere else. Besides, that's not a wish. That's just a request for information, based on a whim," Megumi answered with a giggle, acting as if I had just asked the most ridiculous question.

I felt a sinking feeling in my chest. No Yggdrasil...meant no Gods. But if this was true, what could explain Megumi's presence here? Complete with supernatural powers, supernaturally powered lust...and "Goddess Megumi" panties?

"All right, already! No more games, please! I want you to _show_ me who _all _the Gods are on this planet! I don't care where and whence they come from, just do it!" I requested impatiently, hoping that this charade of absurdities would flounder sometime soon.

"Done!" Megumi said with a sly grin. She snapped her fingers...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

An instant after Megumi had snapped her fingers, Genji, Keiichi and Tomohisa had flashed into the living room. All three seemed dazed at first, while I was wide-brained with shock. Once they noticed Megumi in the room, their surprise shifted into dudgeon and irritation. Megumi introduced me to them as if they had never met me before, and then justified her actions by stating that she had been assigned to grant my wish.

"_You prize baka!!"_ I heard three men shout. Genji, Keiichi and Tomohisa looked like they were going to kill her.

Genji, Keiichi and Tomohisa had Urd's, Belldandy's and Skuld's Goddess marking on their foreheads!

I knew from my experience with the Goddesses that they made their Goddess forehead insignia invisible to all mortals; otherwise everyone that Belldandy and her sisters encountered in daily life would peg them as something more than just mere mortal women. They had total control over who saw their Goddess markings...so only the persons that they wanted to see their seal markings…could see that they were Goddesses. Since I arrived here, I had assumed that Urd, Belldandy and Skuld were simply concealing their Goddess markings from me.

When in all actuality, it had been Genji, Keiichi and Tomohisa who were concealing their forehead signs...

Genji was the most upset at the fact that Megumi had pulled the veil on their little 'secret'. But after a brief, intense argument with her, he seemed to acquiesce to the fact that she had to bring him here because I had made a wish and it was duly registered with the Xomplex; which I guessed was their equivalent of the Ygg Mainframe. But there had been no Goddess pyrotechnics and trance-states that accompanied wishes. Megumi had also assessed my request as a whim. So why was she saying it was 'registered'? I almost wanted to laugh…Megumi, the Goddess of Whims. But the tension in the living room was anything but amusing. Keiichi was very upset as well, while Tomohisa shrugged his shoulders and rolled his eyes to indicate his displeasure.

So we sat together in the living room, wondering how to talk to each other.

A short time later, Urd came home from school.

A short time after Urd arrived, Skuld came home from school.

So there we were.

All the while, it seemed that this whole awkward situation was high comedy to Megumi, who was floating around the house with a big wolfish grin on her face...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"How I met Urd...hmmm, well it happened 8 years ago. She was just finishing high school..." Genji started to explain, putting his arm around Urd's shoulders and squeezing her shoulder affectionately. Apparently he had got a grip on his anger towards Megumi and wanted to break the tension.

"Yes, it was. All through high school, I never had a boyfriend. All of my friends were dating or going steady...but for me, there just weren't any interesting men. I can remember sitting at my parent's house many a night when both Mom and Dad were out on a weekend trip, wondering what was wrong with me. But I already knew what was wrong with me...there was no mystery there. So one night, when Mom and Dad had gone to Atrecht in Holland for another one of their "second honeymoons", I felt especially sad. A kinda doomy-sad type of feeling. It didn't help matters that Belldandy was pouting in her room about something..." Urd continued.

"No I _wasn't_!" Belldandy interjected, pouting, drawing a chattering giggle from Megumi.

"Anyway, Skuld was outside getting into one of her patent snowball fights with the neighborhood boys. Feeling depressed and all alone, I decided to call for pizza, since I was too tired and lonely to go into the kitchen one more time and cook for my sisters. When I looked through the phonebook, I noticed a listing for a 'Heavenly Pizzaria'. Having ordered from all the normal places in town, I was excited to see that a new pizza delivery service had opened. So I dialed the number..."

"And that's when I enter the picture. I appeared out of the pizza box when it was delivered..."

"You mean your media of transport is _pizza_, Genji?" I asked, pivoting between amazement and laughter. I struggled with the mental image of a God springing out of a pizza delivery carton like a proverbial jack-in-a-box.

" Are you out of your wits, man? No, it's not pizza. It was a fluke...my medium is ovens. Keiichi's is refrigerators and Tomohisa's is microwaves. And Megumi's is bathtubs. Actually, I think it was because I was racing against a Demon to get to Urd first!" Genji corrected me.

Demons in this TimeStream? Just like the Demon Grief Office, perhaps? Demons who competed with Gods for assignments on the Earthrealm? At least some of this was sounding familiar.

"Of course it was all worth it just to see the look on her face!" Genji said, finding himself on the receiving end of a pillow-swat from Urd. "As you can expect, she was totally freaking out when I appeared out of nowhere, so I gave her my meishi...my name card. I told her that I was Genji, God First Class, Unlimited, Unrestricted License, from the God Relief Office...and that I had been summoned to grant her a boon, because she was pure of heart and she had called out with a heartfelt desire for a wish."

"The _God _Relief Office? You don't have a _Goddess _Relief Office?"

"Nope! All the Goddesses who serve in the Otasuke Office are designated specific planets for wish-granting assignments, one Goddess per planet. Megumi is from the Earth Otasuke Office...so her catchment area is this planet, the Earthrealm. Although sometimes I really wish it was another mortal planet. A planet _far away_ from here," Keiichi explained, still irritated as Megumi.

Megumi stuck her tongue out at him as she flipped him off.

"So I wished for a boyfriend," Urd interjected, resuming the narrative.

Skuld and Tomohisa giggled at this.

"Don't laugh, you guys!! I..I was only 18 back then! It wasn't easy for me in high school, you know! I was too smart for all the boys in my school. You know how I am! Every time I went out on a date, I ended up unintentionally intimidating them with my intelligence. I was already taking college classes in several subjects!" Urd asserted defensively.

"Of course, her wish got granted by the Tengoku Xomplex..."

"The _Tengoku Xomplex_?" I asked, my voice betraying my incredulity. I was fully expecting him to say Yggdrasil! Apparently, the situation with the Divines here was radically different. Different Gods, different realms...a reflection of the complexity of the Multiverse.

"Yes. What'd you expect? That her wish request would have been sent to the Jigoku Mainframe where the Demons live?" Genji answered matter-of-factly.

I shook my head "no" in sublime mystification. Upon reflection, I sensed that there was a familiar thread in all of this; in the Japan of my home, the Goddesses were Norse deities. Here in Norway, the God's Realm was the Japanese realm of the Kami, and the Gods were Japanese. After all, they had called Megumi a "prize baka!" when she zipped them here. They certainly weren't calling her "rear axle" or "behind"; the Norwegian translations of baka. Well, maybe the "behind" meaning might fit, if they were punning "You're an ass!"

"So, in the process of working to fulfill Urd's wish, it turns out that I could never successfully match her up with any of the guys she was interested in. And believe me, she was interested in a _lot _of men!" Genji noted with a smirk.

"Stop teasing me!" Urd shot back, making a mock-effort to bite Genji on the arm while Belldandy giggled.

"You guys are _so_ married…" Skuld observed with a mix of glee and disgust.

"I'm not teasing you, Urd honey. It's the truth! Anyway, before I get myself in more trouble with my wife here, what happened was that I ended up playing matchmaker for little Miss Urd for almost two years...and nothing happened! During that time, I sensed that something was actually _blocking_ my attempts to hook her up with a mortal man. But then a very odd change took place inside of me. During those two years, her charm and kindness drifted into my heart...and I discovered to my profound disbelief...that _I was the one who was supposed to fall in love with her_!" Genji said with a smile.

"Yes...it was so _romantic_!" Urd said with a whimsical sigh of happiness. "I remember it just like it was yesterday! We were sitting on the edge one of the fjords, our legs swinging out on a cliff almost 60 meters above the churning ocean waves. Genji's acting all shy, the first time that he had ever acted that nervous around me. Then he makes this big announcement, telling me that he's 'finally found a boyfriend for me, one that will stay with me regardless of my domesticity and intelligence.' Little did I know that he was talking about _himself_!" Urd said, blushing with a loveglow.

"Thus began the first chapter in the Saga of Genji and Urd!" Genji said with a verbal flourish.

It wore on my heart to hear this explanation of how Genji and Urd wound up as a couple. I didn't feel an overt sense of jealousy, I just felt...uncomfortable. It was akin to listening in as the Urd that I cherish described how much she loves another guy. My defensiveness flighted through me, causing me to momentarily doubt the veracity of Genji's tale. But I knew in my heart that it was 100 percent true. What had happened between me and Urd a year ago...had happened between Urd and Genji in this TimeStream! I wondered if their process of finding each other was as rough-and-tumble as our trialsome evolution from wish-granting Goddess and mortal to boyfriend-girlfriend.

Yet, hearing their 'love story' was very touching to my heart. Urd was right, it was definitely dreamy and romantic.

"So I watched my older sister fall in love with a mysterious stranger, then she moves out of Mom and Dad's house, and finishes her PhD in four years!" Belldandy interjected.

I felt a rush of envy at this. Urd had finished her PhD in only _four years_! I had labored for over ten years on my project. I felt an impulse to start pumping questions to Urd about her dissertation project, so I could ascertain that it was easier than mine and feel some justification for all those years I spent on Magnum Organum. But Belldandy had already shifted to storytelling mode...

"Urd's academic success inspired me. I always wanted to be a famous painter, ever since I was a little girl scribbling drawings with crayons. I was three grades behind Urd, so when I was a freshman as Trondheim University, Urd was finishing her doctorate at the University of Norway in Oslo. So I made a wish with all of my heart...that I would become a famous artist."

"And I delivered on that one, didn't I, honey!" Keiichi said with a sheepish grin. "I made you the most famous artist in all of Europe! That's what you get for summoning a God, First Class, Unrestricted, Unlimited License!"

"Your part in my success is certainly debatable, Keiichi darling! I happen to think that my work stands on its own artistic merits!" Belldandy protested hotly.

This was obviously a sensitive spot for the flighty Belldandy.

"Yes, but _who_ is your inspiring muse, Bell-chan?" Keiichi said as he kissed her on the cheek.

"Kiss and tell doesn't let you off the hook, dear!_ I'm_ my own muse! You should know this by now!" she answered back.

"Well, I do know one thing for certain...we'll have plenty of time over the years we're going to spend together to debate that one tirelessly!" Keiichi said, grinning roundly as he playfully tousled Belldandy's hair. Belldandy gave him a wan smile and kissed him on the cheek.

"Why don't you guys go get a room?" Skuld observed dryly.

"My brother, the romantic fool!" Megumi said, pointing at Keiichi and made a circling gesture around her temple.

"My sister...the capricious fool!" Keiichi shot back, swinging a couch pillow at Megumi's floating form.

So this Megumi _was _Keiichi's sister! I was still unnerved by her 'attack'; as I suddenly remembered Genji had mentioned this last night. I could see a resemblance in their faces, which took on new meaning with this revelation. The teasing certainly possessed the distinctiveness of sibling rivalry. No wonder the three guys were so pissed off at her when she snapped them back here a couple hours ago!

Could there be any other members of this family of Gods and Goddesses?

"Well, since you claim to be my artistic inspiration, then it must have been _you _who made Cevn appear in my dreams, so I could draw his portrait three years ago?" Belldandy asked Keiichi. Keiichi darted a hapless look at me, then shook his head.

"Nope, not me, I'm afraid. I don't know the answer to that one," Keiichi answered, shrugging his shoulders to indicate his mystification about my presence.

"I bet you never guessed that my sister Belldandy _owns_ this house, huh?" Skuld asked rhetorically. Having just arrived home from school a half-hour ago, she had been silent the whole time up to this point, except for a few choice acrid remarks about her sisters and the Gods they were in love with.

"This is true. My younger sister bought this house from a former Norwegian ducal family three years ago. You see that painting up there? That one with the rainbows misting over the fjord waterfalls, painted in a Japanese haboku styling? An art museum in Copenhagen recently paid _200,000 Kronens _for one just like it. Belldandy has _millions_ stashed away in the bank for a rainy day. She makes more on one painting sale than I could make in 5 years of teaching!" Urd explained, her prideful bearing obviating how she felt about Belldandy's artistic successes.

This was getting curiouser and curiouser. Belldandy...who, despite her naiveté, was the breadwinner of the house? Genji...a God who had been assigned to grant Urd's wish? Urd...whose personality was even more domestic than the Belldandy I knew from back home? Keiichi...serving as some sort of muse for Belldandy? Megumi...whose sensuous nature seemed out of place with her three brothers? Skuld...hovering in her mid teens, with a total 'jockette' attitude towards boys her age?

And Tomohisa...what was his story?

As if on cue, Tomohisa explained that once his oldest brother, Keiichi, had joined Genji on the Earthrealm, he put in for an assignment to transfer to the Earthrealm as an Earthrealm Trainee. Tomohisa introduced himself as a God, Second Class, Unlimited, Restricted License. He explained that his divine role was that of the Mirror of the Future. I listened closely as he apologized for his initial uneasiness when he first saw me yesterday. As he described his awareness of TimeSpace, I realized that...as Mirror of the Future...Tomohisa was much more experienced than Skuld in her role as Norn of the Future. He was almost 180,000 years old, a good 50,000 years older than Skuld from 'my' TimeStream.

It showed in his bearing. Strangely enough, he was into the high school sports scene, just like the Tomohisa who was Keiichi's cousin back on the Earthrealm of my home. The only difference was that Tomohisa was a star player on his high school's hockey and tennis teams...an accolade that he had earned _without_ using his God powers, he emphasized with pride.

Both Genji and Keiichi teased him about this, flurrying his composure with accusations that "you could use your powers and the mortals wouldn't even know. Look what you did to Skuld!"

Skuld angrily retorted that Tomohisa had never used his powers on her, which caused Belldandy and Urd to snicker knowingly.

"So why are you sitting so _close_ to him on the couch, dear _Little_ Sister," both Urd and Belldandy observed with devilish grins. I guessed that no matter where one goes in the Multiverse, sibling rivalries and teasing are a constant in the flow of change.

It was clear to me that she and Tomohisa were interested in each other.

I gathered from the conversation that Keiichi was the oldest brother. What was strange was that, as oldest brother, he should have been Mirror of the Past. Instead, he was Mirror of the Present. Genji, as the middle brother, was the Mirror of the Past. Even their transport mediums fit the pattern of technological advancement as it related to their realms of Time: Genji-Past-oven, Keiichi-Present-icebox, Tomohisa-Future-microwave.

I was beginning to understand the order of Divine things here. In this TimeStream, the "Norns" were actually "Mirrors", based on the holiness of the mirror-object in the Japanese mythological pantheon. Keiichi, Genji and Tomohisa were the Japanese aspects of the Yggdrasil divines. In essence, they fulfilled the roles designated for Urd, Belldandy and Skuld in my home TimeStream. Yet, they were limited to travel only within this TimeStream, which was the reason why Tomohisa was so shocked to sense no recognizable Chronometric 'signatures' from the Future when he first saw me.

Of course he didn't, because I 'erased' them to avoid being trailed by Isilblius.

There was so much I wanted to ask them.

"By the way, since we're all gathered here, I have an announcement to make!" Urd said, smiling shyly. She had seemed so poised since I first met her, levying between the roles of housewife and academician with ease. But now she seemed gripped by a rout of nervousness.

"By all means, lay it on us!" Tomohisa said. "As Mirror of the Future, I probably know what you're going to say already."

"Don't you dare spoil my big sister's announcement, Tomohisa...or our movie date this weekend is cancelled!" Skuld said threateningly. Genji seemed to shrink down in his sweater at this.

Add one more strangeness...Skuld was _dating_ Tomohisa! Once again, I found myself on the edge of laughter, amused by the fact that a 16 year old mortal girl had just cowed a God in front of everybody.

Urd reached over and took both of Genji's hands in hers.

"Honey, we've been married for two years now. And I know that you told me about the one thing that could never happen between us, before we got married. Anyway, as much as I am reluctant to say it...in this one instance, you're wrong..." she said in a quiet voice.

"The only time I was ever proven wrong since I first came into your life was in the fact that I fell in love with you two years too late, dear Urd. I should have fallen in love with you from the very first minute I saw your face!" Genji said.

Belldandy cooed with approval...

"You two are going to make me barf if you keep it up!" Tomohisa exclaimed in swift frustration. "Just get on with it!"

I sensed that he felt at least a little bit of jealousy towards Urd, perhaps akin to the enmity between Skuld and Keiichi when I first met them in Makuhari. It was possible that he felt threatened by this mortal woman who had hijacked his older brother's attentions.

"My dearest Genji, I went to the doctor today for a routine physical on my way home from school. It turned out to be..snff..anything but routine," Urd said in a breaking voice. A very serious hush fell over the room...

"_I found out_..snffsnff.._that I'm going to have a baby, my love._ Snff.._I'm pregnant with our child_! _We're going to_..snff.._have a_ _little one of our own_, _my dearest Genji_!"

Genji looked at Urd in frank astonishment, muttering "it's impossible!" over and over again...until Urd's sincerity broke through his disbelief. She reached out and took his hand in hers and rested it on her abdomen...shivering with intensity.

Genji's face went white as his eyes bulged and his mouth flew open agape.

A moment later, he was crying on Urd's shoulder; his whole body shuddering with deep sobs of joy.

I was stunned. Urd had just shared one of the most personal moments a woman could share...and she had elected to let everyone participate in her announcement of the happy news at once. Including me, a near-total stranger. A bystander to this tranquil family home.

Belldandy was hugging herself to Keiichi, her cheeks streaked with tears. In fact, everyone was crying in reaction to the utter sweetness of Urd's announcement.

Even me.

Despite my status as a newcomer to this family of mortals and Gods, despite my heartfelt love for the Urd in the Japan of my home TimeStream...an Urd who looked exactly like this woman...despite my confusion at the topheavy version of 'my' emotional reality...I found myself with tears streaming down my face...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --


	58. Pt 58: A Question of Commitment

**Part 58: A Question of Commitment**

"YAHOO! AT LONG LAST! I'M FREE!" a voice shouted in rapt exultation accompanied by an orange light flash, totally interrupting the flow of our strong sentiments brought about by Urd's announcement.

"This is totally _molten_! Now that she's going to have a child, I'm _free_! Since there are two Souls inside of her now, she no longer qualifies! This means that I'm no longer bound by contract to threaten her. I'm totally, completely, absolutely released from this stupid blessed assignment that has stranded me here on this miserable Earthrealm for 8 years!"

"Oh, it's you..." Genji remarked dryly.

I looked to see who had burst on the scene...

...and saw Sayoko.

But, as with everything else in this Earthrealm, she wasn't exactly Sayoko. She had the familiar look of my friend and co-recovering addict back in Japan: the long sheersilky straight tresses midway down her back; the narrow eyes with their piercing expression; the slight poutish upcurve of the edges of her lips. But there, the resemblance ended. Sayoko's dress was totally arresting, in a gothsexy sort of way. She was dressed in a black and red outfit that blended beachwear with S&M Queen dominatrix stylings. A flowing red cape with two black 'sub-capes' that looked like wide curved swords floated behind her, framing her lithe figure. Her whole body was covered in some kind of ruby-jeweled fishnet...and little else. She had a bright red miniskirt with a belt of handcuffs, a black croptop t-shirt that read "Little Angel" that barely covered a silver-red bra with hooks, black and red striped elbow-length leather gloves, knee-high black boots studded with sharp-looking glowing red shards...

I could distinguish two red slash marks on her forehead, the insignia of a Demoness!

If Sayoko's addiction was clothed in human form, it would look something like this. What is it about this Earthrealm or TimeStream that all the Divine females have to dress themselves like they were planning to beguile onlookers with an overdosing exotic seductria? As with Megumi, I couldn't help but gawk; both entranced and intimidated by her powerful sexual vibes.

As she floated closer towards us, Genji swiftly darted up in the air to block her way, protectively shielding Urd and the rest of our group. With the tall ceiling in the living room, they were hovering several meters above the floor.

"You dopehead! You know the Rules! Now that I'm free of this idiot contract, I can't play around with you guys anymore! So stop acting like you're some brave macho God protecting your charge from the evil designs of a Demoness...step-brother!" Sayoko snapped at him.

"How many times have I told you? Urd isn't my charge, she's my _wife_!!" Genji countered angrily. "As for you, step-sister...well, I wouldn't put it past you to keep bothering us out of spite, for all those times we soundly defeated you whenever you tried to bring Grief to my wife! I know you, Demoness Sayoko...and I don't trust you in the slightest!"

"Eh? Who's this? He has a Demon's aura! Who is he?" Sayoko said, deliberately ignoring Genji's warning as she focused her attention on me.

I could see flames in her red glowing eyes...

"Isilblius!!" my mind shouted as I froze into a shivering fixation, hyperalert as I cringed deeply into the chair I was sitting in. In a flash, all the horrors that Isilblius had visited upon me and the people I loved flashed like snapshots all around me.

I was trapped!

"Would'ya look at this? He's _frightened_ of me! And I haven't even done anything to scare him!" Demoness Sayoko noted, relishing my terrified reaction.

I looked into the eyes...they reminded me of the scourging of my home, my loved ones, my spirit. A manifestation of something far worse than Evil. Once again, I had failed to evade Isilblius! Even worse, I had led him here to this Earthrealm, to these people! The horror of watching him repeat his murderous actions on this group of familiar-yet-unfamiliar...

"Yet!" she suddenly exclaimed. In an instant, Sayoko/Isilblius swept down through the air with hawk-like speed, stopping only a few centimeters from my face.

"BOO!"

"_YEEEEEEIIIIIIIIAAAAAAAAEEEEEEEIIIIII!!" _I distantly heard my voice screaming hoarsely...but the rest of my consciousness seemed to be blurryed by an iron grip of wretched desperation.

Blinded by fate and fright, my senses reeled into overdrive as I leapt out of my chair and sought the nearest protected space, which happened to be a corner of the living room. During my mad dash, I pulled a table out from under a lamp, causing it to crash to the floor. I huddled in the corner, using the table as a shield. Fog-hearted, I wondered why I was hiding; as if a table would make a difference if Isilblius wished to attack me.

"Sayoko! What in the Almighty's name did you do to him to make him act like that?! Stop frightening him this instant!" Keiichi and Megumi both shouted imperatively as she moved in on me.

Her face kept shifting from the Sayoko that I knew...to the ugly mocking leer of Isilblius's ruddy face.

"Getaway getaway_ getaway…_" I stammered, mouth-haunted into a repeating cycle.

I was going to be swallowed whole by a maw of agony, and I just wanted to disappear...

"Sayoko, you'd better listen for once. As a DGO agent, you are certainly aware that once you're no longer constrained by a Grief contract, you cannot continue to traumatize your former assignee! This also includes her friends and her family. The Demon Grief Office Code of Conduct clearly states that you are forbidden to do this. By terrorizing one of Urd's friends, you cause Urd to indirectly experience his experience of fright...which is clearly against the Rules!" a new voice interjected.

"Well, okay," Sayoko answered. "Besides, this isn't fun at all! I haven't hardly done anything to him, but he's already off-the-scale with terror, as if he just woke up in the presence of the Dark Lord. This is weird."

"Mara! I thought you were supposed to be in Stuttgart presenting another one of your Demonology and Doomsday lectures!" Urd said, obviously surprised.

"Nope! It got postponed because of that heavy blizzard in Germany. Besides, I sensed that my little Demonic friend here was up to no good, so I headed over to your house after my last class!"

"Have I got some news for you, Mara! Guess what?! I'm pregnant!" Urd announced once again.

"Well _that's_ something I didn't sense! W..waitaminute! Pregnant!? You're kidding me! Y..you and Genji? You're going to be a mother? That's _wonderful_!" Mara said, quickly walking over and hugging Urd.

"That's not wonderful...that's a mistake!" Demoness Sayoko interjected.

"Quiet, you!" a chorus of voices growled.

I slowly crept out from under my barricade, noticing that Sayoko-Isilblius's attention seemed to be focused elsewhere. I caught my breath and risked extending my senses to scan Sayoko. If this was Isilblius posing as a Demoness, then I was already in deep shit...any 'superhuman' efforts on my part to confirm Sayoko's divine status wouldn't make a difference anyway.

To my immense relief, I discovered that Sayoko was all Demoness.

A First Class, Unrestricted, Unlimited License Demoness.

_She never was Isilblius_! My bout of terror was an instinctive reaction to anything with orange-red eyes! Everyone seemed momentarily shocked by my terrified outburst, but my bizarre behavior was overlooked rather quickly; after all, what's a little fright when compared to the momentous announcement of a baby on the way. The three Gods occasionally glanced at me with inquisitive expressions wreathed with a sense of suspicion. Tomohisa's expression was a little different than his brother's; his curiosity seemed fired by more than mere surprise. As I recovered my wits, a flash-thought suggested that he might know more about the nature of my identity than he was letting on.

"So Genji, if Sayoko is no longer bound to me by a Demon Grief Office contract, doesn't that mean that _you're_ no longer bound to me by your God Relief Office contract as well?" Urd asked testily, her voice touched with concern.

"As a matter of fact, it does. But as you know, Urd, there are often unspoken wishes within wishes. I've often sensed that there was a tacit emotional need in your wish to have a boyfriend. But until now, it never occurred to me! Your wish was to find a lifemate...not just a boyfriend or a husband! And even further, your wish was to find a lifemate centered on your innermost desire to have a family..." Genji answered.

"You won't leave me, now that you don't have to be here?" Urd inquired, her eyes probing Genji's face intensely.

"Of course not!!" Genji answered, putting his hand behind his head in the well-known Japanese gesture of embarrassment. "I am totally, madly in love you, my wife! I'm loving you madly every moment of my life! You're going to be the _mother of my child_...which means that my heart is bound to yours by much more than a simple wish contract, now!"

"How romantic!" Belldandy sighed approvingly.

As I righted the chair and sat back down on it, I took a moment to observe Mara. She looked like the epitome of a Nordic woman, with a high forehead and an intelligent expression. Her wavy long hair had human characteristics, rather than the supernatural color tones of her counterpart in my homewards Earthrealm. Mara's skin was very white, almost thin, and her eyes were a deep ocean blue. Without the Demonic attributes like red eyes and fangs, this mortal Mara was a striking example of Northern European beauty.

She was dressed in a heavy fur overcoat...evidently she had heard the shouting and screaming and had invited herself in.

I gleaned from some more facts about her from the ensuing conversation between she and Urd. Mara was one of Urd's coworkers at Trondheim University; more specifically, she was the Professor of Religious Studies there. I was amazed that she was a full professor at her age, as she looked only 26 or 27 years old. Mara smiled with embarrassment as I voiced my perplexity, and then explained that she was the only professor of Religious Studies there...hence the full professorship. But beyond this, Urd lauded her as one of a few world-class scholars in the field of Demonology. In an excited voice, Mara explained that she had actually _found _Sayoko using numerous several obscure and esoteric divination methods that she had painstakingly researched. Once she located the Demoness, Mara had learned into her shock: Sayoko was connected with Urd by an unfulfilled Grief contract.

Belldandy mentioned that Mara was their cousin, lending another shading of filiality to an already complex situation. Now I readily understood why Mara was far more than simply congratulatory towards Urd when informed that she was expecting.

After this revelation, Sayoko spoke up, describing her abortive efforts to bring Urd to grief, they suggested in my mind how Mara's attempts to bring havoc to Keiichi's life met with continued failure, back in Japan. Sayoko added that completing this assignment would have qualified her for candidacy for one of the Demon Queen slots in Jigoku. I sensed that Sayoko's efforts were one of the contributing factors as to why Urd had such a difficulty keeping the boyfriends that Genji set her up with. In my mind, I imagined that any guys Genji had set up to go on dates with Urd during those two years before she and Genji got together...met with 'accidents' and 'mishaps'...in addition to being intimidated by Urd's daunting intelligence.

After things calmed down a bit, Urd departed for the kitchen while Sayoko and Megumi engaged in a heated argument about whether I would make a better God or a Demon...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"But I _know_ that it's impossible! The Ultimate Force simply does not allow for Gods and mortals to be able to conceive children! It's an insuperable situation: the arcane energies that comprise the existence of a God...let alone all the other forms of energy as well...cannot possibly harmonize with human mortal procreative processes. I don't mean to doubt you dear, but it's still very hard for me to grasp that we're going to have a child. Not that I _don't_ want to have a child. Ofttimes, I have dreamed and fantasized about what it would be like for us to bring a new life into the Multiverse together. Especially after we got married. But that was all that I could do...fantasize." Genji explained.

"Genji, dear…I don't think _fantasies_ made me pregnant with our child," Urd half-teased, half-challenged.

"Give me more credit, Urd-chan! If I didn't have a mindset that it was impossible for us to have our own children, what do you think I would be doing? If you and I wanted a child, _you know that I would be trying_! Not just in the bedroom; whatever I had to do to make it possible, I would do it! But there has _never _been a single instance of a God and a mortal sentient species having a child. But when I passed my hand over your belly, I could feel the admixing of mortal and divine vibrations there! I could feel a little one inside of you; part God and part Earthrealm mortal!! Despite my excitement about this, I'm more than a little confused. You must understand this...that everything I have Infused in the 'schools' we have in Tengoku, _everything_ I have experienced throughout the millennia of my life, stands behind the fact that mortals and Gods don't mix on a biological level!" Genji explained, his face filled with conflicting emotions.

"If what you say is true, my wonderful all-knowing-God-for-a-husband Genji...then how come we seem to mix so very well when we're in the bedroom?" Urd asked sharply with a coy expression.

Genji blushed momentarily, then regained his composure and busily chomped down another dumpling instead of answering. Urd had trumped his question with a quip, making it known in no uncertain terms that she wasn't going to brook any more "it can't be happening" ramblings from her husband.

I even felt some embarrassment at her racy comeback...and some jealousy to spice my mood. Hopefully, no one caught the testy fluttering of my brow.

Fired with a blush of excitement after her proclamation, it seemed to me that Urd had poured her energy into preparing a lush celebratory dinner for us. Trays and plates of chicken and dumplings, blueberry cakelets, marbleized onions and carrots, vegetable stew, chived mashed potatoes, crisped banana slices, braunsweiger and cheese bagels and other dishes adorned the dinner table. Urd pointedly reminded us that we would have to save room for the apple pie she baked for dessert. Several of my tablemates thought it odd that I didn't opt to drink the dinner wine that Urd had served with the meal.

Urd may be a mortal, but her cooking technique was amazing...and the results were a supernatural bouquet of tastes and flavors; mostly likely because the main ingredient in all the dishes was love.

During dinner, Belldandy seemed fraught with a sisterly solicitude towards Urd, asking her if she "was feeling well" every two minutes or so. Then she insisted...over everyone's protests...that she take over the cooking chores forthwith, so that Urd "wouldn't strain herself with household chores." Urd reminded Belldandy that she was only eight to ten weeks along with her pregnancy...she could barely even sense that she was pregnant. Thus, it was way too early to be thinking about "resting"...

Embarrassed, Belldandy blushed scarlet while everybody had a good chuckle at her expense.

Then Tomohisa mentioned something about "morning sickness" and "smells causing random bouts of nausea". Ignoring Skuld's admonishment about discussing such subjects at the dinner table, Tomohisa claimed that he...as the Mirror of the Future...could remove any such discomfort from Urd with a simple encantation. This ignited a heated discussion about the pros-and-cons of pregnancy, labor, female hormones, preg-robics, ultrasound, learning the baby's gender before birth, midwifery...

Urd finally thumped the table with a fistful of irritated disgust and _insisted_ that she be allowed to experience _her_ pregnancy without any "meddling Divine fixits from male Gods who don't have the slightest clue about what they're talking about!"

This brought a roundly howling burst of cheers and clapping from Megumi and Sayoko, who had been observing the debate with a gleeful expression. I thought it was hilarious how Genji and his brother's smugness evaporated in an instant.

In the all-too-noticeable environs of my heart, I still felt betrayed by the fact that 'this' Urd was going to have a baby with another man. Much as I tried to release my expectations on this Urd, every time I looked into her eyes, I kept seeing a mirror image of the Urd that I was in love with, back in Japan. It wasn't just a case of coasting on an expectation that Urd and I would have a child someday. To be sure, my thoughts had alighted on the subject from time to time; moreso via daydreaming idylls than in the serious regard of certitude.

My seemingly insurmountable tentativeness regarding matters of sexuality...and the invisible-yet-omnipresent Ultimate Force preventing us from being able to touch each other...had pretty much ensured that we would remain many steps removed from bringing sex into our relationship. So conceiving a child had always seemed a _very_ remote possibility. I wondered briefly if Urd and I could conceive a child using some means other than sexual intimacy.

_That_ thought alone brought a rush of blood to my face…which was quickly extinguished by the horrible reminder that the Urd in my heart was dead. There would be no possibility for she and I to have a child. Or even each other. I had left my home blessed with a generous amount of good memories of her, capped by a final memory of her vacant emerald eyes looking lifelessly at me as I lay on the grounds of our home.

I didn't have a home...

Gripped by a moody flight of tragedy, I remembered the emotionally jarring episode when Belldandy had told Keiichi that they couldn't have children together. It wasn't just her own opinion; to her it was an established and indisputable _fact_! Yet, Genji and Urd seemed to have bridged that barrier. Could there be some property unique to this TimeStream that allowed for Gods and mortals to have children? If so, could I harness it so that Belldandy and Keiichi could have a child together?

In almost all the technologies of myth and cultures of religion back on the Earthrealm, it was universally related that Gods and mortals could not have offspring. They _could_ have children, but they couldn't have children _safely_. The sons and daughters of Gods had been crucified, burned, banished to hell, turned to stone, turned into planets, trapped inside trees, tortured, blinded, malformed, prematurely aged, killed by their parents, transmorphed into various animals or animal-human hybrids...overall, it was generally not a good idea for mortals and Gods to mix bloodlines. I sensed that these caveats were but a superconscious reflexion of the greater reality that the Gods were on a completely different evolutionary order than human beings.

Genji's doubts made sense...it was simply impossible to lend flesh to the essence of the Divine. The cellular and molecular structures of human beings could not contain the Arcanic and Divinity Dimension energies; they were simply incompatible. When Belldandy and her sisters assumed a human form at our temple home, it was actually an energy pattern that was reconstituted on a continuous basis to lend the appearance of physicality. Sometimes, this fact bothered me...but I knew that it was necessary for them to manifest their bodies in this manner. On one level, the human body does the same thing...as a convocation of trillions of atomic particles, it could never remain static on a molecular level from moment-to-moment.

So the potential was there...

There was one very significant catch to all of this. Earthrealm mortals exist within the five finite and mental dimensions: point; line; solid; creative thought or the realm of imagination; and finally the "point-in-Time" or Chronological dimension. Gods exist in the next three transcendent dimensions: the Chronometric, the Arcanical and the Divinity Dimensions. Human bodies cannot exist in more than one frame of Time, nor can they possess and attune to the energies of magic and magictech. And they certainly cannot manifest the kind of spiritual vibrations that exist in the Divinity Dimension.

Then there exists the other side of the coin, so to speak. How could a mortal parent raise a child with God-like powers...with anything that even could resemble responsible child-raising? A divine child could literally surpass his or her parents in terms of power, intelligence and who knows what else...within the first six months of their life. The disparity between mortal and God could definitely constrain the parent-child relationship.

I concocted a "for instance" in my mind...assuming for the moment that Belldandy and Keiichi _did_ have a child. Any child that possessed some or all of the powers Belldandy had...would be a parenting nightmare. Suppose Keiichi grounds his daughter for staying out too late on a date. In a teenaged pique of rebelliousness, she may very well ground him...literally, as in stuck into the ground...at least until Belldandy caught wind of his plight. And what would happen when Keiichi and his son are playing catch, and his kid decides to try and hit Jupiter with the baseball...and nailed a 747 instead? I felt a shudder of dread as I tried to envision a God-child throwing a temper tantrum...

Hence, the greater question wasn't simply concerned with whether or not Gods and mortals could conceive children...but it surrounded the vital issue of whether the result of such a union could live rightly within the laws and cultures of both.

All this thinking about children and babies seemed to draw out unexpectedly strong passions in my breast. To my surprise, I sensed an emergent strong protective instinct towards Genji and Urd gathering in my consciousness. I examined my feelings and realized that ever since Urd had made it known that she was going to have a baby, I had subconsciously reacted by feeling even more edgy about the possibility that Isilblius might follow me here. Reality had authored a new chapter in these people's lives here; now there was even more at risk. A new life could be snuffed out if Isilblius were to come to this TimeStream! It had now become imperative that I would have to finish my preparations before he could trace me to this location and time. I would have to redouble my efforts to remain inconspicuous.

My obsession with furtiveness was the reason why Tomohisa could only sense a shading of my divine energy when he first saw me...I had taken care to conceal anything that would mark me as out of the ordinary. And yet, he had still managed to detect that something was amiss! A partial stealthing wasn't anything near safe as far as Isilblius was concerned.

I would need to do better.

Reality would have to depart from itself.

Tonight, I would try again to isolate this TimeStream from the rest of the TimeWeb, so that there would be no chance of Isilblius coming here and fucking everything up with his 'mission' of annihilation. The added weight of this new situation left me with another dilemma.

Should I inform my hosts about my true purpose in being here?

As I pondered this question, someone pushed a plateful of dumplings in front of me, reeling my thoughts from metaphysical uncertainties and parenthood back to the here and now…

"...and so, if you and my sister can have a baby, what's to stop Keiichi and me from having one too?" I heard Belldandy opine. I had entirely missed out on a huge chunk of conversation, obviously.

"Bell-chan! Isn't it a little too early to be thinking about having babies? We've only been together..." Keiichi protested.

"Why not?!" Belldandy interrupted. "There you go again, Keiichi, thinking about time in your terms rather than mine! Maybe in your perception of time, we've been together just a short while. But the way I see it, four years is...like, _forever_! So why can't we? I earn more than enough money for us to live comfortably, we have this wonderful house that we live in, I've grown up quite a bit in the past couple years..."

"That's debatable!" Urd interjected with a wry smile.

"You're not being fair, Urd! Just because you're going to have a baby doesn't mean that no one else can! I bet you're afraid that if Skuld or myself were to get pregnant..."

Skuld snapped to rigid alertness at that remark.

"HEY! Don't you even start thinking that I'm going to have some little kid! You always seem to forget that I'm still in _high school_, Belldandy! What would my friends think if I showed up to school all preggers and stuff? Hmmph! What_ do _you guys think Tomohisa and I do when we go to the ski slopes, huh? I'll tell you what we do! We _ski_...and that's _all_ we do!" Skuld verbally jousted with her sister.

"I could think of a lot of things we _should_ be doing, Skuld!" Tomohisa said with a grin. Skuld raised a fist and swung a punch at his head, deliberately missing. I thought she was seriously going to clock him, until I saw the grin on her face.

"You've just earned another demerit. A big-time demerit! Keep it up and we'll _never_ do whatever perverted things in your mind that you think we 'should be doing', Tomohisa! You may be a God, but you ain't no match for me!" she exclaimed with bristling irritation.

"Oh, the irony of it all!" Urd exclaimed in dismay.

"Ahem...and as I was saying, if one of us got pregnant, then I'd bet all of my paintings on the fact that you'd feel upstaged, big sister! That's why you don't want Keiichi and I to have a baby!" Belldandy resumed.

"Belldandy..." Keiichi cautioned, right before Urd roared into a full-on rebuttal.

"That's _ridiculous_!! I'm not thinking that kind of thing at all! I'm considering more practical matters...like how this household could possibly function with two pregnant women! Perish the thought of Skuld having to cook for us and do the laundry, should both you and I were to be laid up in our last trimesters. The first year of a child's life requires an immense amount of time, love, emotion…and work. Skuld would be taking on much more than what she's doing now."

"Yuck! Skuld cooking? That would really hurl!" Tomohisa interjected, earning a scowl and a fork-poke in the shoulder from Skuld.

"Have you even given a thought to the fact that you and Keiichi aren't even married yet, Belldandy? Our hippie-festival wanderabout parents may be a little out there, but they would totally frown on any one of us having a baby out of wedlock. They'd shit icecubes if that happened!" Urd insisted.

"I don't care about all that! Now that I know that a God and a mortal woman can have a baby..._I want one_! What if there's some kind of weird Divine window on these kinds of things? Like maybe...the Ultimate Force will only allow a pregnancy to happen only during the first week of December 2007, or something? And if I miss the window, then I wind up spending the rest of my life regretting it?" Belldandy argued passionately with a flurry of questions.

"Belldandy, could you..." Keiichi interrupted.

"That's totally absurd! If that were true, don't you think Genji and Keiichi would know about it? You guys would, wouldn't you?" Urd asked, looking back and forth between the two Gods.

"Now _you're_ being absurd, Urd. Hey...that rhymes, doesn't it?!" Belldandy noted, bringing out a tableful of grimaces at what I sensed was probably an old joke.

"Wasn't your husband just describing how surprised he was when you told him that you're going to have a baby? Geez...you're a PhD, Urd, but you still miss the simple things," she observed in a teasing voice.

"That's because the world needs simpletons like you to notice them!" Urd counter-teased, reaching towards Belldandy's nose with a gesture that I was all too accustomed to back on the Earthrealm. Only this time, Belldandy deftly blocked her hand away.

It occurred to me that this conversation was just as out of control as some of the typical 'discussions' we had in the dining room back in the temple house. I was getting majorly homesick at the thought.

Once again, it came back to the wretched truth: Isilblius had destroyed that temple house. Right now, there _was_ no place I could call "home".

This would have to do...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

They generously allowed me to stay at their house, giving me a den room in the basement that I could convert into a bedroom and study. During the next few days, I learned why Belldandy had been so protective of the upstairs; the upper floor of the house had six bedrooms and several other extra rooms.

Actually, three bedrooms, three "labs" and several extra rooms. Urd was already planning to redecorate one of the spare rooms for a nursery. Belldandy was using a large corner room as a painting studio; it was filled with easels and dropcloths.

After a few weeks, Genji surprised me one day by offering to give me a tour of the rooms. He explained that if I could be confidenced with the certain knowledge about the existence of Gods on the Earthrealm, then I should be trustworthy enough to be gradually exposed to more of their Divine attributes and lifestyles. He also told me that he needed a break from all the 'Earthrealm estrogen' in the house, which reminded me of Keiichi back home asking me to be a 'big brother' figure, because the Goddesses sometimes drove him nuts. I felt humbled and honored when Genji admitted that he needed a male friend because it was just him and his brothers otherwise. So he and Urd gave me the grand tour.

In like fashion to the Goddess's "hobby rooms" back in the temple, the three Gods had their own rooms, which were filled with a variety of supernatural stuff.

Genji's room resembled the proverbial mad scientist's chemlab, filled with potions, elixirs and other alchemical components, plus a "magic enhancing" machine courtesy of Tomohisa. Genji admitted that he had the Divine equivalent of a stutter, which made his arcane, alchemical and other magical spells backfire sometimes. Because his mental composition of the arcanical formulae was a little bit off, the walls were literally plastered from floor to ceiling with wards to prevent his 'mistakes' from impacting anything or anyone outside of his lab.

Urd confided to me that she suspected that Genji struggled with a form of Divine dyslexia rather than stuttering, and this was the reason why he had popped out of the pizza carton when he first met her in 1999. She giggled as she noted that "pizza oven" backwards was "oven pizza". Genji had fluked his usual transport anchor of ovens, arriving via Peppe's Pizza home-delivery pizza instead of the oven at her parent's housing where she was living at the time. She shared several stories about Genji's mishaps involving oven-baked food. Genji noted that Urd had to 'train' him to not spill food with the inevitable accidental transports by food, because the first few times splattered dinner over everyone at the table. At that, Urd excused herself, as she just remembered she had "something in the oven". We all laughed at the many layers of humor _that_ remark contained.

In distinct contrast, Keiichi's "Clocktower" room was filled with measuring devices and clocks. Genji informed me his older brother had just returned from interviewing a famous rock band called "BigBang". Like the 'timekeeper' role portrayed in many anime and RPG games, one of Keiichi's roles as Mirror of the Present was to closely monitor the passage of time, making sure that everything in the TimeStream was axial to the "now" of this particular TimeWeave. He informed me that the process was pretty much automatic; all he had to do was take daily measurements and report them back to Kami-sama. In keeping with his role, he had amassed a huge collection of unusual Earthrealm timekeeping devices, ranging from grandfather clocks to clepsydras.

I must have looked surprised when he mentioned Kami-sama...and I was even more surprised when Keiichi admitted that Kami-sama hadn't acknowledged his reports about the flow of time he was monitoring. He noted that this had been going on for over a year.

If my suspicion was correct, then He couldn't reply...because He no longer existed.

Tomohisa's "Spaceroom" was wall-to-wall crammed with sophisticated machinery. When Genji first showed it to me, I felt an awe that usually accompanies encountering deus-ex-machina type technology. His room was like Skuld's "Skuld's Lab" room back home, only taken up a couple levels in terms of "magictech".

Shortly after Genji brought me to Tomohisa's "Spaceroom" lab, Tomohisa told me he had "important matters" we needed to discuss. He and Genji exchanged a glance, as if they were wordlessly debating. Tomohisa then asked his older brother to release me from the tour so he could "interview" me. With a nod, Genji politely excused himself and returned to his "Genji's Lab" room. I was reminded of Belldandy's insistence to talk to me the day after I arrived in Trondheim.

Cellular machines floated in the air above my head, connected by strands that looked like strings of snowflakes. Tomohisa pointed out his pride-and-joy...a _holographic_ computer mainframe! Out of curiosity, I passed my hand through it just to make sure it wasn't solid.

Tomohisa swore me to secrecy, and then revealed to me that neither he or his two brothers and sister had not been in contact with Tengoku for over a year, confirming what Keiichi said. He added that he was deathly worried that something catastrophic had occurred in Tengoku; and that he and his brothers were very concerned about their friends and parents there, not to mention the Almighty, Kami-sama.

He guided me to a corner of the room, and then waved his hand over a glowing panel embedded in the wall. The wooden wall vanished, revealing an entryway into a huge space filled with clusters of those holographic computer mainframes. The large room reminded of a "white room" designed for hermetic laboratory environments. Judging from its appearance, it was many times larger than the whole house!

"I used a quantum reallocation to create this adjoining room to my lab. It was necessary to make an annex room because I was running out of space for my computer network. The holographic mainframe you saw in my other room is just a single interface node for this system. I'm attempting a crude reduplication of the Tengoku Xomplex's TimeArchival Subsystem in this room," he explained. He gestured towards a raised dais with sphere floating above it.

"Open," he commanded. A doorway suddenly appeared in the silver sphere; inside I could see arrays of brightly colored control pads and armrest controls surrounding a chair.

"This is what you would call a 'time machine'," Tomohisa noted, anticipating my unvoiced query. All this technology was simply astounding by virtue of how much it contrasted with the environs of Trondheim! Even more puzzling was the fact that he was showing it off to me. Obviously, his relative youth to Genji and Keiichi seemed to urge him to seek approval for his virtues with 'magictech'. He definitely had my respect; to all appearances, he looked like a shaggy-head high schooler…and then he had designed and created all of _this_!

Could the Gods have certain sapient individuals endowed with genius, a level of genius that even surpassed the lofty standards of the Gods and Goddesses living in the God's Realm? If so, then Tomohisa would easily qualify for the honor. A Tengoku MENSA type prodigy, I thought with a wry amused respect.

"I've been experimenting with temporal displacement synchronics; in a sense I'm trying to match the Future as evidenced in this moment in time with the same Future, in its own Future. Think of it like this: I take a measure of a point in time such as Constitution Day in the year 2020, as seen from this point in time, the here and now. Then I go into the Future till I reach May 17th 2020 and then measure the same point of time I had just measured today, only now it is in its correct Future setting. If they match, then they're what we call synchronic. By using these videmeotronic display panels over there, I can project them into different points in the Future and record events, storing them in the mainframe for later analysis. To revisit the example, I take the 'slice' of time from May 17th 2020 that I just verified…send a videmeotronic device and record it…and then bring it back here and store it on my computer. If I just copped a ride on the TimeStream to May 17th 2020, I would see _every _moment of _every_ possible time that converged on that particular Future moment. Total information overload! I'll be able to do that eventually; Kami-sama said He would teach me when I'm an adult God. Right now though, one of the difficulties of being Mirror of the Future is the fact that the Future must necessarily be compressed into meaningful, interpretable sequences in order for me to comprehend its structure.

Until recently, I've been able to rely on relay access to the Tengoku Xomplex; using its vast computing and arcanical resources to segregate the TimeStream's various TimeWeave strands. This simplifies the process greatly; it's just a matter of flowing within the convex of TimeWeaves until I alight on the Future that I want to explore. But oddly enough, the Tengoku Xomplex hasn't been responding to my user requests. I _am_ authorized for full TimeArchival access...but it appears that the Xomplex is offline," he observed.

"How could it be? The day after I arrived at your house, Megumi told me that she had been assigned by the Earth Otasuke Office to grant me a wish! And later, she explained to you and your brothers that the Xomplex had validated my wish request, which was why she transported the three of you to the living room that day!" I pointed out, my voice a mix of confusion and argumentativeness.

"Which was definitely a lie, knowing my sister. She uses that story every time she meets an Earthrealm male that she wants to have sex with. Even before the Xomplex went silent on us, she was pulling that one over on numbers of Earthrealm men. Up until recently she thought she was getting away with it, but me and my brothers aren't idiots. She's the baka-head because she actually thought she could fool us," Tomohisa said matter-of-factly.

I bit my tongue in embarrassment. Megumi's discovery of my wish was simply a fiction...all she really wanted was to get laid!

"Don't act so uncool! It's not like my older sister's_ ugly _or something! You should be majorly stoked that she even sees you as a possible boytoy!" Tomohisa chided me, reacting to my embarrassment as if it were an attack on his family's honor.

"It's not her, Tomohisa...it's just that I_ already_ have someone...and Megumi's flirting just makes me feel more lonely for that special someone's affections!" I quickly corrected.

"Oh, that's right! That 'Goddess' that you claim to be in love with. Anyway, Megumi knows that the Tengoku Xomplex has been offline...she was here on a wish assignment when it went offline, so she's pretty much been stranded here because of this. We had asked her to keep away from our house, but she just has to pop her nose in once in a while and bother us. Which she did once she learned that you were here," he added.

"But you and Keiichi and Genji, you all acted as if she was telling the truth! About being sent by the Earth Otasuke Office to grant my wish! Why? Why all the dishonesty?" I asked him.

"It's _necessary _dishonesty!" Tomohisa corrected me. "We played along with Megumi's fabrication because we don't want our girlfriends to know that we aren't in contact with Tengoku or Kami-sama," Tomohisa answered, his brow overly furrowed with worry for someone who looked like a shaggy teenage boy.

"So you've been deceiving them?"

"Yeah, but we don't like it. We decided to conceal the truth from them because we didn't want to cause them undue worry. Hence, part of the functionality of this room is to keep all of us powered up, since we can no longer draw our energy directly from Tengoku. That cylinder in the corner harnesses the equivalent power of an entire galaxy...which hopefully should last us until this crisis is over," he noted.

"What crisis?" I asked warily. Suddenly, Tomohisa was entrusting me with secrets within secrets. I was disturbed by the fact that I was accepting his descriptions of disastrous circumstances with relative calm. I remembered how Belldandy and her sisters reacted when the Yggdrasil Mainframe went off line, back when...

_Back when..?_

"And you've been deceiving us. Don't play innocent, because I know that there's a lot more to you than what you've told us. I've got a shitload of questions you need to answer," Tomohisa bluntly confronted me. "I did a little hacking of the Earthrealm computer networks, which is a breeze with my skills. Guess what I found? There are no records of you, _anywhere _on the Earthrealm, prior to your meeting up with us. When I first met you, you were already talking about Goddesses as if they really existed…"

_Was it the time that I confronted those Yakuza who were going to exact some kind of revenge on us because of Sayoko going to treatment?_

_I shuddered with the fearful insight that I was gradually becoming two persons. One person was an Earthrealm mortal: complete with desires, neuroses, phobias and preconceptions about his world. The other person was...was..._

_I couldn't remember who the other person was..._

"…Then, I checked you against the Xomplex TimeArchival backup I built here. It's only a portion of the Tengoku Xomplex, but it's a full-on exact backup of the Earthrealm datacrystals in the Xomplex. Why blow the show when you can go with the flow? Once again, I found nothing in the my local backup of the Xomplex Earthrealm records…"

_I couldn't remember who_–I-_ was!_

"What's the matter with you?" Tomohisa asked in an irritated voice. My legs seemed to turn rubbery and he to steady me, as I was swaying like a drunken sailor. He hauled me out of the annex room back into his room in the house, whose familiar environs seemed to comfort me. I felt like I just had one of those dizzy spells that comes from lack of oxygen. He told me some hilarious stories about he and Skuld during their skiing trips while my head was clearing.

"Continuing our discussion," he shifted back into serious mode. "Just now, when you were in my annex near the Chronometric Matrix Enhancer, I detected no readings. Which means that you have no chrono energy. So either my tech is majorly wasted, or you _don't exist_ as far as Time is concerned."

"Something's definitely wrong," I said, feeling abstract and conflicted.

"Fuck yeah, something's wrong! Genji, Keiichi and I have been watching you act like an idiot one day, and then act like a normal mortal the next. From our perspective, our God senses are jamming with total weirdness around you. Sayoko thinks you're a Demon. Megumi thinks you're a God. For real," he explained.

"I don't know, I don't know, Tomohisa," I answered.

"The 'interview' I mentioned just took place in my annex room. Genji, Keiichi and I had some long discussions about whether we should even tell you anything more about us. I argued that we should, so we could check you out, cuz I didn't encounter you in any TimeWeaves leading Futurewards from here. Since you won't get honest with us, my brother 'toured' you through our rooms today so we could learn the truth that you won't tell us. What majorly sucks is you won't tell us shit, but you act all cool just when you need to. We could have zapped you into the middle of Antarctica for all I care. Except for that bizarre thing with Keiichi's girlfriend drawing you in her sketch book, you'd be out of here."

"What do you want me to do about it? I just had a run-in with some major amnesia just a few minutes ago. I'd tell you if I knew why, but I can't because I don't know," I answered. Tomohisa basically was telling me I had worn out my welcome here, at least as far as the Gods were concerned.

"When you were in Keiichi's "Clocktower", none of his TimeWeb devices reacted to you. While I showed you our energy source, the Divine energy monitor spiked nearly off the scale, intermittently. For _both_ God and Demonic energy; which is totally whack. Even more whack, when it wasn't spiking, it was flat-lining…no energy at all. Our suspicions were all proved right; you aren't a mortal. I'm seeing some very scary shit. You're not in Time, you don't have energy, so you don't exist. Then you have both Gods and Demons energies, which cannot coexist. We still don't know where you came from. None of this adds up. Belldandy and Skuld both think you're schizo, because it's like you're in dreamland whenever Urd's around. Speaking of pictures, how did Belldandy draw you three years ago?"

_I couldn't remember why I was here..._

"So who…or what…the fuck are you?"

_I have no questions to ask, no answers to give…but I think I'm telling him what I don't know, which is what I hope he wants to know…so maybe I can know who I am._

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

It was Urd's idea that I apply to Trondheim U. as an Asian Studies instructor. During my free time, I was working from memory to rewrite the Magnum Organum: First Consciousness book that I had completed for my PhD back...somewhere. I didn't remember where I was at that time, but I could recall the book with eidetic clarity. When I showed the abstract of it to Urd, she said that I was "either crazy or crazy." I had been their guest for over a month, sharing the passing of the Christmas and New Year's holidays with them.

Belldandy was quite the decorator, getting in to the holiday spirit with child-like wonderment. She filled the house with every kind of Christmas decoration imaginable. The house looked more like a department store than a dwelling. Because of the celebratory holiday atmosphere, I often felt even more like an outsider to these people. There were three couples and then me and a sexually insatiable Goddess who was their sister! Despite my emotional distance from this family, I realized that I would rather be an outsider than a total stranger.

True to her nature, Megumi visited me from time to time, usually waking me up in the middle of the night to ask me if I desired "the special service package". Each time I refused, she would then start asking me about what I knew about the Divine power outage up in Tengoku. Eventually, I figured out that she was fishing me for information...to see if any of her brothers had told me about the strange happenings in Tengoku. She eventually owned up to my assumptions; explaining that she didn't want to bear the blame should Urd or one of her sisters find out about their boyfriend's plight. In other words, she was looking for a convenient scapegoat.

This Megumi was far more intrusive and impulsive than I could ever expect from a Goddess, let alone a mortal woman. She didn't seem to have awareness that there was a price to her cupidity...which_ I_ ended paying by dragging myself dogmoon exhausted in the morning after her nocturnal visits.

I had disturbing dreams...not disturbing in the sense that they were nightmares, but disturbing because of their familiarity...

_I dreamed that I was floating in between Space and Time. I dreamed that I was a flower being uprooted by a huge looming storm. I dreamed that I had a Soulmate somewhere, back in some place called Makuhari. I dreamed that I knew these people from before, as if I had shared lifetimes with them in the past, somehow..._

I ended up getting the job at Trondheim, thanks to Urd's influence. The Dean of Faculty at Trondheim was impressed with my forged c.v.; forged because I had only 'lived' here a few weeks and had no credentials. He reacted about the same as Urd when I showed him a draft of Magnum Organum. He was very pleased to have an instructor in three Asian languages who had a background in psychology, philosophy and history on his staff; I would start work in the second week of January when the new college semester began. Being a good department head, he knew a bargain when it walked into his office. No bargain for me; Urd had warned me that the salary was pretty threadbare.

So here I was, teaching again. My sense of what were true and realistic experiences seemed to untether itself with each passing day. I was disappointed, once I realized that I was going to be teaching in a university setting. Yet part of me felt a secret thrill at the prospect of guiding studious minds...which perhaps could guide mine back into some sense of unity.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

As the months passed, I watched Urd's belly gradually grow into fullness alongside the bloom of the springtime flowers. Fertility and fecundity were the emotional watchwords in the house once the snow started receding. The house was a garden of joy and silliness at times.

The short days of winter were also elongating into beautiful pre-Spring daytimes. Because Trondheim was so far north, the sun had been setting in mid-afternoon during the winter, now it was setting much later in the day. As a result, the added daylight seemed precious. Belldandy's insistence on mixing natural lighting with candles with electrical lighting created a telling ambience in the house during the evenings; it was very pleasant to walk in through the front metal gate and see the lit candles in the windows.

On the weekends, Urd and Genji would slowly stroll along the grounds of our house, tending several flowerbeds and gaily chatting about how much they were going to love the new arrival. Belldandy was busy painting artworks for the baby's nursery, located in one of the spare rooms upstairs.

Urd was glowing with the blush of an expectant mother. For some reason, I felt unseemly bouts of jealousy towards her...but I couldn't understand the source of such feelings. Yet my uncertainties seemed to be honest feelings rather than inventions of elegance. They often caught me unawares; a sourness that shadowed my joy as her bodily transformation from svelte beauty to maternal plumpness continued...

Skuld had surprised everyone by winning one of the major skiing tourneys in March. She had won a national-level competition, beating out the women's field which included a Swedish competitor who had medaled in the 2006 Olympics in the Women's Shalom, which sweetened the victory even more for the Norwegians. Skuld excitedly related to us when she came home that evening that she was almost beside herself with stunned shock as she was awarded a _huge_ trophy. She kept asking Tomohisa if he 'tweaked' the tournament in her favor, which he adamantly denied several dozen times before she discharged her suspicions and realized she had won because of her frequent skiing practices on the weekends.

Urd and Belldandy decided to make a social event out of it, with a party themed in the style of a fête champêtre held outside on the grounds, since Spring was already garmenting herself with full richness and mild weather. Belldandy invited her art-scene crowd, while Urd invited what seemed to be half of the faculty of Trondheim Univ. and a generous selection of her students. Skuld and Tomohisa's high school classmates were a combustible mix, as the celebration was their license to party hard during a spring break. Belldandy auctioned several of her painting to raise money for charity. I met the sister's parents for the first time; a pair of amiable space-case hippies who seemed permalocked into the Euro-hippie movement, but were very intelligent and charming, as well as quite proud of all three daughters. It was another great evening, seemingly orchestrated by its own merits into one of those 'magical' gatherings where everyone had fun and got along seamlessly.

That trophy, with Skuld's name engraved in the baseplate, was now displayed in the living room in pride-of-place on one of the lamptables, the very table that I nearly broken my second day here.

Sayoko dropped in from time to time, seeming quite miserable at times. I empathized with her lot; she didn't have _any_ Demons or Demonesses on the Earthrealm to keep her company, so she had to "put up" with us, in her words. I understood from a conversation between her and Mara that she was unable to return to Jigoku for some unknown reason. Mara offered to let Sayoko stay at her apartment; obviously spying an opportunity to expand her knowledge of the Demons, but she was keenly disappointed when Sayoko resolutely refused her offer, exclaiming that she preferred the woods and mountains to any Earthrealm woman's apartment.

I hoped that she didn't prefer the forested areas so that she could impersonate a "wodenfrau" and terrorize hikers...

It was April in Trondheim once again.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"You _told_ her!" Genji shouted angrily at Megumi, so loud I could hear it in my basement room. Like honey in a bowl filled with ants, the loud ruckus caused us all to swarm into the living room.

When I made it to the living room, Megumi was hang-headed, looking out of the corners of her eyes with a guilt-ridden expression. Urd was standing in the doorway to the kitchen, vegetable cutting knife in one hand and trembling air in the other. Her face was volcanic with resentment.

"And you _didn't tell me_! Don't get on Megumi's case for telling me the truth! You're the one who's at fault here, Genji! You're supposed to be my _husband_...which means that you should at least try to be open about what's going on in your life! It seems that you forgot that openness is a vital measure of what marriage means to us Earthrealm mortals! Did you think that you were above that kind of ethic of honesty, because you're one of the Tengoku Gods?"

Urd was royally pissed.

"I gotta sit down...my back's killing me," she said as she held a hand to the small of her back, then waddled over and slowly sat down on the couch.

"We need to have a house conference!" Urd demanded scornfully. "_NOW!_"

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

The elevation of confrontation all around me was getting very heady. I sensed how my nerves unnerved themselves in tune to the sheer stress plying thickly through the air in the living room.

Genji and Urd were alternating between glaring at each other and engaging in bursts of livid screamish arguing. Neither one was right...neither one was wrong. But Genji's intentions bested him in this one case; I clearly empathized with Urd's position that she basically felt emotionally abandoned by his decision.

Keiichi intensified the atmosphere of contention by arguing vehemently that he had favored disclosing the shaky events surrounding Tengoku from the start...but to his regret, he had been outvoted by his younger brothers. So now that events had proved his foresight to be providential, he was very upset at both Genji and Tomohisa with all the righteousness an oldest brother could muster.

Tomohisa was roundly chewed out by Skuld for "being such a fascist cyberpunk"...whatever that meant.

Skuld's bizarre accusation brought a brief-but-blessed moment of silence to the room...and then the arguing blazed into existence again. I felt like I was being taken on a ferris wheel ride; I had no control over the mounting frustrations and rueful opinions circulating in the 'between-ness' of my housemates. They rarely had done each other wrong since I first arrived here...their arguments had been more on the pet peeve level. Until now.

This was serious.

Urd said in a low voice that she was actually thinking of walking out on Genji. Genji's face pleaded silently with her because he was too stunned to argue. Belldandy remained silent the whole time, shedding an occasional tear. Her tight body posture indicated that she was overwhelmed by the unfolding drama...she was pretty much paralyzed and withdrawn.

The whole uncomfortable situation brought to mind a book I had read that during one of my open lunches at Trondheim that purported that there was two types of anger. The author asserted that there was anger...and then there was drama. Anger used to communicate was true anger; it unleashed the self-talk of the inner being. As such, it was outwardly focused and expressive. Anger used to manipulate was nothing more than drama; it was an attempt to draw someone in towards an insecure self. In contrast to true anger, it was inwardly focused and selfish. Based on that principle, the barely-contained rage circulating between the Gods and the mortals was true anger: the type of resentment that was most difficult to communicate, because it was simply yearning to be _heard_.

And in this instance, no one was listening. It was infectious, almost virus-like as it floated like an imaginary dark cloud from one person to another. The more they argued, the more my mind seemed to drift.

Once again, I felt like there was something I should be remembering, something far more important than the psychology of anger...something about someone being really physically ill at some point in the past...

"Honey…we kept the situation with Tengoku secret from you for the simple fact that we didn't want to upset you and your sisters!" Genji pleaded. "Try to consider this from my perspective! One moment my home is there, the next minute it's gone. With Tengoku gone, _my parents are missing_! It's hard enough living with this...but then I've had to act as if nothing happened around you! All this time, I've been squeezed between two emotional walls; feeling crappy that I was deceiving you, and feeling wretched because of what's going on with Tengoku! I'm almost relieved that you found out, because now I can stop the charades and act _normal_ again. I'm worried about my home..."

"Bad choice of words there, brother," Megumi commented disdainfully. "You might as well have given her a lit stick of dynamite to throw at you while you were at it!"

"Genji, your home is _here_!" Urd shouted angrily. "Your _child_ is here!" she added, rubbing the round fullness of her belly.

"You made a choice to marry my sister, which means that your home is with her...with all of us!" Skuld yelled angrily, a sharp crispness against Genji's blunt arguments.

There was something floating around in the back of my mind...about a group of Goddesses and mortals in a temple, living together...

"I know that better than anyone else here, Skuld! _I'm_ the one who loves your sister, remember! I was just trying to be protective of her..." Genji argued.

"Genji, did you ever consider the fact that maybe I want to protect_ you_ once in a while? A relationship can't work unless both people are comfortable being vulnerable around each other. I can handle myself pretty well. And I'm certainly not going to turn my back on you if you need emotional support! I know that I'm not your equal in a lot of areas, but I need to feel some equanimity in our relationship from time to time. All I wanted from you was a level playing field...and instead, you conceal an important situation from me! You parents are _my in-laws_! They're important to me too!" Urd explained contentiously.

"_This_ is exactly why I wanted to keep it from you! Everyone here is totally freaking out! You just said a few minutes ago that you were thinking of leaving me! And I'm very concerned about the fact that Tengoku just simply isn't responding to any of our requests! It's as if..."

"Tengoku, Tengoku, Tengoku...that's all I hear! Don't you care about _me_?" Urd confronted Genji.

A barely-glimpsed mental wordimage unclouded itself in my memories. A part of my Soul...a feminine part voicing a question...but not confusion from within me...it was a voice ringing clear as a glass bell in an echo chamber...a voice from someone who dwelled in my innermost heart...

"I DO!" I shouted. "_I LOVE YOU! HOW COULD I NOT CARE ABOUT YOU, URD?_"

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"What..did..you..just..say?" Urd asked me, blinking back her shock.

"He clearly said 'I love you'. It must be a deathwish or something, to say something as patently stupid as that in front of you and your husband. Especially when you're both angry," Megumi remarked snidely.

"Cevn, you better have an explanation for this! Urd _is my __wife_, and I think it's highly improper of you to be thinking of her in that way! In fact, it reeks of egoism and bad manners. You do yourself a grave dishonor by even thinking that kind of thing, let alone yelling it front of my wife and I," Genji confronted me, barely containing his anger. Oddly enough, my outburst had train-wrecked the half-hour of arguing; now the room was silent. I felt pidgeonholed by my confession.

Dammit!

When the memories of my life in Japan had reemerged in that instant, they figuratively jumped down my cognitive esophagus. As a result, I had choked on them...and blurted out an unquestionably inappropriate remark!

All because I had confused this Urd with the Goddess Urd I knew from Japan...

"Wait a minute, my love! There's something in his eyes...something that doesn't appear to be just some weird infatuation! I think he really believes that he's in love with me! And...call it feminine intuition, if you will...but it seems to me that his feelings are _too _genuine. I don't sense the reservations that he should have, reservations that would normally arise because he knows he's doing something blatantly improper. It's really strange!" Urd said.

I felt like I had just put my head on the chopping block, blurting out something ridiculous like that. But Urd wasn't interpreting my remark as some kind of warped caprice or an effort to stain the dissent with even more anger; instead, she seemed to be taking my blurtation at face value.

"You mean to say that he _really believes_ that he's in love with you? First this whole blowup about Tengoku…and now this?" Genji asked, quite exasperated with me, and bewildered by his wife.

"Yes, I do! And I'm going to find out why!" she answered, walking up close to me and looking searchingly at me, eye to eye.

Emerald forests of sanities populated those orbs, beauteous and mysterious at once, rainbowing tenderness and sultriness, swallowing my breath effortlessly, tying me up with my own heartfelt adoration...

"URD!!" I shouted, causing her to flinch.

"Yes...that_ is _my name," she said distantly, the pause and release of her voice almost mockingly delivered. She thought I was crazy, that I was standing on unsolid ground.

But I had become whole.

"You're Urd! I loved you, back in Japan, in past times that are so far removed from this slice of stone that it would make your head dervish. How could I ever forget your eyes...more precious than jade?! Remember Beijing? For a moment I thought you were her. Urd, the Norn of the Past. But you're not, and now I know why you're not! There's a voice in my head, and I can finally understand its chateau of soundmusic! A Soulmate can be designed by hope is love, love is hope, hope is love…"

"What is he talking about?" Genji asked, frustrated. His question seemed to exclude me, because he was probably thinking that I had spilled all my cognitive faculties onto the floor...leaving me empty-headed and addled. Which seemed to be the case; I definitely couldn't control the words I was saying. Mental ward, here I come!

"He's gibbering!" Megumi added. "I think he's gone somewhere upstairs and got lost, if you know what I mean. He's acting like a fever-crazed mortal!"

"Scan him, you guys! Quit fucking around with guessing games!" Tomohisa demanded. "He told me some stuff the day he toured our labs that blew me off the floor. Shit! I should have mind-scanned him then, but what he was saying was so out there, I thought he was bullshitting me."

"How can I bullshit you when I'm so warped by confusion?" I answered. "I can barely remember anything anymore!"

"I'll scan him, since you guys are having fun arguing and he's having fun being confused," Megumi announced, irritated. She floated over to me and pressed her forehead seal against my forehead before I could push her away.

Too late. The horror show started up again.

"Oh..my God!" Megumi gasped, looking me in the eyes with tears in hers. "I..I never knew…I couldn't even imagine what it must have been like…"

'I..I love Urd. She was my Soulmate, and I…fucking lost her! I should have never come here…" I said hoarsely, prodded back into my senses by the sharp prodding of unwanted memories.

"You fucking bastard! Damn right you shouldn't have come here, after all we did for you," Genji shouted at me, Urd gripping him on the arm. At this point, I was hoping he would kill me, so it would all be over.

"Genji! Shut up and listen to me!" Megumi out-shouted him. "He's telling the truth. But it isn't _your_…our Urd that he loves. I..I don't even want to think about it…"

"What?! Megumi, are _you _okay?" Keiichi asked.

"You guys, it's horrible! We've been sitting here arguing about being lost without Tengoku…but he's lost _everything_. His mind is so filled with impressions, I could barely make sense of it. I could barely scan him, because it was so painful. He watched everyone he knew and cared about in his life get murdered, Gods and mortals. He watched _his_ Urd, a Goddess, die right in front of his eyes! He watched his Earthrealm get depopulated by an unprecedented disaster, killing his entire mortal species. No wonder it was buried so deep. He's totally scrambled, and I've been teasing around with like an idiot, wondering why he didn't want me. How could I be so stupid?" she answered

"Whoa!" Tomohisa exclaimed.

"It's even worse than that. He knows why we can't get in touch with Tengoku! The reason is...because _it isn't there_! It's dead! Tengoku is an aspect of a place he knows called Yggdrasil. Well, I guess it could be called anything; but from where he comes from, our God's Realm is part of a greater God's Realm called Yggdrasil. A 'city' of God's Realms. The Norse legends weren't just legend…they were _true_! And…oh no! Our parents! Ametako and Shiniji. Oh no, no no! NOOOO!!" she shouted before folding up into a fetal position and losing consciousness.

I felt like shit, because now she knew what I knew. Which meant they all knew. I wanted to crawl under the couch when I saw the stricken expressions on the three brother's faces. Urd was crying, curling up to Genji, who looked like he was about ready to check out of his consciousness like Megumi had just done.

"Don't try to scan me, you guys!" I asked, my voice choking up. "I don't know if I'll be able to remember this tomorrow…I've got to tell you now. The Everything. It's _all _been wiped out by some badass super-Demon called Isilblius..." I explained, almost losing my breath for want of trying to describe what was going on with me.

"Did he say _Isilblius_!" Keiichi said in a shocked voice.

"I did!" I confirmed. "There something bleeding all sorts of energy from the Everything, like a sandwich melting in dishwater. It's not the 'not' of whatever exists, whatever is. It's far worse...like an anti-Reality too malign to be classed as evil…"

"Would someone please tell me what's going on here?" Urd exclaimed.

"_You_ know what's going on...and why you're here! Can you explain it to us in a way that makes some sense!" Keiichi and Belldandy pleaded with me.

"I don't know if I can anymore! Why have a mind when my Soulmate isn't here…" I answered, still confused by the caterpillar of reality switches flashing faithlessly in my mind...

"That's it! It all makes so much sense now. I couldn't detect any energy coming from him because he's totally _not_ from this TimeStream! When I took him into my Spaceroom and showed him the Chronometric Matrix Enhancer, he started acting fuzzy. He even remarked to me that he was feeling some kind of amnesia! Then he went off into TV land with a bunch of sci-fi stuff. But he was trying to tell me who and what he was, and he didn't even know it. If some of the stuff he said is true, then we're majorly fuckwadded!" Tomohisa said excitedly.

"I think if I shut down all the chronometric stuff and you guys do the same your labs, it's all going to come back to him. As pissed off as I've been with him, there's also this punkrock part of me that feels that he's here to kick some ass and fix this fucked up situation."

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Genji had summoned Sayoko to join us for dinner, anticipating that the presence of a Demoness might confirm or deny what I was trying to tell them.

The most difficult part for me was how the memories had rushed in so intensely after I saw myself in Urd's eyes...which revealed the Urd that I loved in the depths of my heart. In those first few moments, I felt like a third-grader trying to explain a supernova or a space station. At first, I couldn't even interpret the knowledge of my past experiences; the wordsalad of thoughts was boating too fast through the oceans of my being. Once Megumi thought-scanned me after that, my mind broke itself.

But eventually, things started slowing down.

Actually, they had been accelerating.

Once they shut off the chronometic tech, Tomohisa was able to help me recognize that I had been evolving in some way during my "amnesia". That other part of me...the division of my being which possessed all the powers and attributes that had enabled me to survive Isilblius's attacks...had been growing exponentially all this time. In a sense, my reversion to this beingness of total humanity here had served as a cocoon of innocence, incubating the transcendent powers within me. During this time, these powers that I had been blessed with or cursed by...had undergone a chrysalis of sorts.

With eidetic clarity, I remembered the struggles with Isilblius that I had encountered in the "LoveStream" and the "BattleStream" and other TimeStreams. I could remember my home in Makuhari, and eventually the traumatizing agony of how it all ended seem to pull away from me.

I knew that my presence in this TimeStream was the contributing factor to Urd's pregnancy. Prior to arriving here, I had been phasing in and out of TimeSpace using the chaostics of the Metanative Dimension. Consequently, when I came into contact with myriad energies from the numerous TimeStreams I encountered during my attempts to elude Isilblius and locate a suitable refuge, I ended up absorbing some of those energies. Thus, when "phased in" to this TimeStream, I brought a 'universal signature' of transfinite energies, which apparently offset at least one of the Divine properties of this TimeStream.

The Divine property that up to this point had denied Urd and Genji a shot at conceiving a child.

On the tails of this realization was an implication of sorts. It occurred to me that Belldandy had been correct when she argued with Urd about a "window" in time from whence Gods and mortals could have children. Indeed, there was a window...and I was it. As long as I remained in this TimeStream, the process of conception and gestation was potentiated. The Belldandy of this TimeStream was definitely a kind of seer, she had a gift of insight and intuition.

It was obvious now that I would have to remain here until Urd had her baby, otherwise her child would die. The moment I leave this TimeStream, the status quo will return, making it impossible for Gods and mortals to conceive children. But by staying here until Urd went full term, her newborn baby would remain healthy, she would be an independent organism with Soul. She would be a fully developed fruition of Divine and mortal qualities, in an infant form. Separated from her mother's body, she would be a Self...thus she wouldn't be subject to the morbidic mechanisms in this TimeStream that would otherwise threaten her.

I had better make sure not to tell Urd that I knew she was going to have a daughter...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Tomohisa was absolutely correct when he said he knew that I came here from another TimeStream, greatly removed from this one in the realms of Time..." I began. They had decided to turn off the chronometric-powered tech and magic for tonight, so I could try and tell them everything. Unfortunately, they relied on chronometric energy not only for their projects, but also because they were Gods who existed in the Chronometric Dimension. They would have to turn the chronometric tech back on and keep it on. Consequently, I would have to face more of the same; days of breakthrough craziness when my 'other' nature plunged into my 'mortal' nature and crazed me.

"There are two really important situations that you all need to know about. You guys have basically opened your lives to me, and even put up with all my obsessions with Urd. Despite that, you trusted me enough to lay open _everything _about your Divine natures. I can't even begin to tell you how much that humbles me. I can only offer you the truth, now. You deserve much better than what I can say or give, but I'll try. It's going to be hard for both of us, because it challenges everything you and I know about reality," I started.

"The best way to describe myself is that I have a double nature. Right now, while I'm talking to you, I am maintaining a seal on this TimeStream, isolating us from Isilblius. While I'm here, that part of me will keep you safe. But Isilblius has already destroyed everything, including the TimeWeb. I had to retreat a couple steps into the Past to get here, to arrive at this TimeStream. I need to let you know that _all_ the TimeStreams are gone, destroyed. Yours…our…is the very last one. I had to hide it in the one place Isilblius won't look: inside of me. Inside of me, and outside of Time.

"I don't know how to explain it any other way, but I think the Ultimate Force is channeling energy into me because it _wants me to fight Isilblius_. Isilblius had done horrible things to all of us; mortals, Gods, Demons. You've lost your parents, your God's and Demon's Realms. I lost a Goddess who was the mirror to my Soul, and the love tribe of friends and Divines that welcomed me into their lives, just like you have done. In the TimeStream I was living in, the three Norns gave me the ultimate weapon to defeat Isilblius. Because the UF has to be 'touched' in a certain way. Right before the end, the Belldandy I knew…a full-on Goddess just like you guys…had told me 'Love _is_ Hope'. Love is the weapon that will defeat Isilblius.

"Isilblius destroyed the Earthrealm I lived on; but he did so slowly, as if he was siphoning pleasure from humanity's agony. There was a nuclear exchange that killed ten million people; his attempt to start a nuclear war. He was murdering us at random. He turned the planet itself against us, blowing up volcanoes, creating destructive seismic events that reduced entire cities to rubble. In the end, he melted the icecaps on both Poles instantaneously, killing billions. He finally set the Moon on a collision course with the Earthrealm I called home."

Belldandy was so upset at this, she bolted for the dining room, completely overwrought. Keiichi flashed over and cut her off before she could go hide. I wanted to hide with her, but keeping her from running away was one of the most difficult things I have done since I came here.

"I don't like hearing this one bit, but we need to stay and listen to the rest," Keiichi said as he hugged Belldandy to comfort her. Just like he had done many times at our temple home.

"Isilblius tried to burn me to a crisp, and I was spared having to witness the murders of everyone I cared about. As I was coming to after that, I saw Belldandy alone. She was the very last one alive; the final remaining lifeform _anywhere_. He had killed both Lords, Kami-sama and Oni-sama, by cheating them into killing each other by accident while they were fighting him. All the Gods and Demons were…are…dead, except for the five Divines in this room. He created a virus to ensure that all would die, and then he deceived the Gods and Demons into a genocidal war against each other by making them blame each other for the virus. My sense of it is that the war was just something he created to amuse himself. He exists just to hurt people.

"What about Tengoku?" Genji asked, his manifestation blurring because he was shaking so hard.

"I'm sorry to tell you this, but he did the same thing to Tengoku. That's why you can't 'phone home'.

I expected every Divine in the room to completely lose it at this point; but instead they comforted each other with loving embraces and tears. Even Megumi and Sayoko, who sought comfort from Urd, Belldandy and Skuld. I momentarily regretted that no one comforted me; in my role as bearer of horrible news, I had a deeply felt empathy for what they must be feeling. Yet, I _was_ comforted. Comforted by the strength of their compassion for each other.

"Isilblius killed me…but he didn't kill me, because I came to right at the point he was strangling Belldandy. Her last words, the last words she knew any being would ever speak, were 'I forgive you.' Somehow, those words 'activated' me, bringing me back The first thing I saw…was Urd. Dead, fallen, crumpled on the ground. Her eyes..snff.._were looking right at me_. Oh God, I don't want to remember this…" I said haltingly. I couldn't go any further. Remembering Urd, my heart felt like it had been fleeced of any hope. But someone wasn't going to let me implode emotionally. Tomohisa hugged me, and I cried on his shoulder.

"…but I have to remember this. I have to remember that he raped and tortured Urd, and then he made me experience it as if I was the one doing it. I have to remember Skuld, Keiichi, Genji, Megumi…everyone he murdered." I exhorted myself. I looked at every woman in the room; each was wide-eyed appalled at what Isilblius had done to Urd…and to me.

"I was able to resist Isilblius, and then I traveled to many different TimeStreams to buy time, gathering knowledge, strength and experience. I came here, because this was the only TimeStream with all of you in proximity to each other. Sayoko scared the life out of me when I first came here. Belldandy somehow met me in her dreams. Tomohisa knew that I was more than what I seemed, before I even knew it. Urd was willing to set everything aside when I said I loved her, and instead looked me in the eye to search out my heart. Megumi wanted to give me her 'full service package" and kept me up many nights, because she's persistent. Skuld won a National Skiing Championship. And Genji became a brother to me, because only a brother would put up with my idiot stuff; anyone else would have tossed me in the snow.

"Together, in your own ways, you guys have brought me out of my amnesia. It wasn't just the chrono stuff, it was _you_.. You touched me on a Soul level; because you belong here, I responded by feeling I belong here as well. We're going to have to huddle even closer to each other, just like musk-ox during a fierce blizzard form a circle to share body heat. Right before this meeting, I 'peeked' out of this TimeStream to check on things, just like I've done since I came here. I discovered that the Everything…_is gone_. Both Realms, the Mid-Light, all the Multiverses, the Reaper…all of it is no more. We're it.

"This TimeStream, this Earthrealm…is literally the last stand. There is nothing else. It's up to us."

Keiichi and his two younger brothers were quite disturbed by what I just described. Sayoko had looked more unsettled when I explained the situation with Isilblius; but now she was terrified. Megumi, who had been the Goddess of 'fan service' before, was now very sober…and frightened.

They were tense with disbelief.

After a long silence, Genji asked, "So what do we do?"

"We eat dinner," Urd interjected. "If we're supposed to save the universe, we can't do it on an empty stomach."

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

This was the first time since I had arrived here that we weren't treated to Urd's culinary skills. She was simply too emotionally exhausted to do anything but sit at the kitchen table and drink tea. Of all the sisters, Skuld was in the worst shape; she was so deep into gloom that she couldn't even speak. Tomohisa picked up on this and phoned up takeout, so he and Skuld could 'take a walk'.

"There are more serious matters to attend to before we do plan anything, matters which will require some very difficult decisions. A situation has arisen that is far more important than our task to save what's left of the universe," I explained after we finished eating.

"It seems that my presence here has something to do with the fact that Urd was able to get pregnant. I need to remain here at least until she has her baby, if you guys can put up with me. Once your child is born, Urd and Genji...then it will be safe for me to leave here without causing any complications for your child. But my presence here directly concerns Belldandy and Keiichi. Belldandy was right: there _is_ a limited span of time in which she can carry a God-mortal baby to full term safely. Because once I'm gone, it won't be possible. If you both want to have a child, then you will need to do the you-know-what as often as possible, as _soon_ as possible, and as fun as possible...so that you can conceive a baby," I noted.

"Oh my god, Keiichi! Did you hear what he said, my love?! I knew it all along! If we're going to have a baby, we need to start planning right this instant!" Belldandy said excitedly, quickly seizing on the subject. Keiichi looked at Genji, who was grinning broadly at him.

"I don't know which is going to be more fun...raising children or making children," Keiichi answered cheerfully, clearly thrilled by his girlfriend's enthusiasm. Belldandy blushed slightly at his comment, then kissed him on the cheek and called him "randy, but cute".

They weren't the only ones under the gun…

"Can't you stay?" Megumi immediately asked me. "Maybe you could change your mind...and _we_ could have a baby together!"

"Megumi!" Genji blurted angrily.

"Megumi, I'm not the one. You know this in your heart. You're destined for another mortal. Not me. I _have_ to leave here. Your child is going to need a father with some seriously good parenting skills," I answered sharply. She grinned broadly at me; making it clear that she was putting me on. I knew I would have to have a serious talk with her about deciding if she wanted to have God-mortal baby.

She wasn't the only one grinning...Tomohisa was regarding Skuld with a "fox in the henhouse" sort of grin on his face.

"What a face! Don't you start acting like I've somehow been handed to you on a golden platter because of this situation, Tomo! I'm _not_ interested in any of this!" Skuld noted sharply, reacting to the bald look of lusty expectation on the teenaged God's face. We all laughed at this…except Belldandy and Urd.

"Skuld, please listen to what I'm going to say. My dear sister, if what Cevn is saying is the truth, then it makes _all the difference in the world_! Keiichi and I are in love: have been, will always be! I believe that the depths of our affections for each other...cannot be contained within two beings. Within two physical forms. Within just he and myself. When a man and a woman love each other so strongly that their hearts are sewn together with passion and devotion, it is natural and wonderful for them to build on that love...to extend it into a new life. _Creating_ a new life because of their love for each other. To multiply their love into a _family_!" Belldandy explained patiently in a lecturing tone of voice. Suddenly, this art-school aloofnik was beginning to sound like the Goddess Belldandy I so admired!

"So the question you have to ask yourselves, Skuld and Tomohisa, is whether you both plan to spend the rest of your lives together," Urd observed patiently, completely in synch with Belldandy's train of insight. "Is your love for each other strong enough to admit to the fact that you may have to sacrifice now for the future? Skuld, you in particular need to really search though how you feel about Tomohisa. He is going to be with us for a long time, because I believe that Cevn…no…that _we_ will not allow our lives to be snuffed out! Keiichi and Belldandy, Genji and I…are together, and are going to _stay together_ for the rest of our lives. I love you with all of my heart, and I don't want to have to witness my little sister spending the rest of her life wasting away, begrudging herself for a mistake she made when she was young. I know that I'm an adult and you're still a child..."

"I _am not a child_, Belldandy! I'm a _teenager_!" Skuld interrupted.

"...and as a teenager who's _almost_ an adult, it may be difficult for you to see the rest of your life as a continuum. But your whole adult life is still in front of you, like it or not. I'm six years older than you, so I see life differently now than when I was 17. Right now, you have an opportunity to take an action within the immediate future that will impact the rest of your days here! My mind is already made up...I _want_ to have Keiichi's baby, because I plan on loving him for the rest of my life! Like Urd, in my heart of hearts, I just don't want you to have any regrets, my dear little sister. So just don't screw it up, okay!" Belldandy said with a knowing insistence.

"Skuld, think of it this way. Let me do the math, since I'm the Ph.D. in the family. You just turned 17. I'm not going to have my baby until late July. Since it's already April, then that gives Belldandy and Keiichi almost three months to get pregnant, or even longer. So consider this: if Belldandy gets pregnant this summer or early fall, she won't have her baby until next spring or early summer of next year. Which means that you have over a year to decide what you want to do, by which time you'll be 18. _You'll be a legal adult!!_ If I were you, I wouldn't hesitate to try and have a baby with Tomohisa..." Urd encouraged.

"Whoops!" Keiichi said under his breath, pushing his chair away from the dining table to distance himself from Skuld.

"_You would say that!!_ You're saying exactly what he wants to hear! It's like..it's like..you're throwing me to the wolves! You're saying that you want me to have sex with him, that I _have _to have sex with him! Well, I don't know if I'm ready for that! I don't know if I want to have a baby at all, let alone right after I turn 18! And I definitely don't want Tomohisa drooling over me because he thinks he knows that he's gonna get laid! Uh-nuh! No fucking way!" Skuld protested.

"Hey you guys! Has anyone even considered if Cevn is willing to stay with us that long? He did say that he's being pursued by Isilblius. If Isilblius finds him here, then all this 'who's having a baby' stuff isn't going to matter! According to all our knowledge of Isilblius in Jigoku, the Demonic records indicate that Isilblius won't stop until he destroys everything in existence; which he has almost already done. That's why we don't call him an Ultimate Demon. Even as a Demoness, I care about you, the mortals, all of it. That's one of the reasons why I worked so hard to curse Urd. You wouldn't understand, but believe me, I care. But Isilblius doesn't give a shit about anything! Each day that Cevn stays here is one more day that Isilblius can possibly find him..and us!" Sayoko interrupted, trying to reality-check everybody. I was reminded that the wisdom of Demons is often more subtle than that of Gods…as was their expression of caring and love.

"I will stay here as long as it takes," I promised. "Said promise is pretty much a guarantee that I will keep this TimeStream safe. Isilblius _won't_ find us…and even if he did, he'd have to kill me just to get to this TimeStream."

"Did you hear that, Keiichi darling? That means that we can have a baby for sure!" Belldandy said cheerfully. Without even excusing themselves from dinner, they immediately left to go upstairs.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Urd delivered a healthy baby girl on July 27th, 2008.

Seeing her in the hospital with a tiny baby in her arms brought tears to my eyes. Urd was already the attentive mother, showering adoration upon her daughter, Keleste. Genji had pretty much moved into Urd's room in the hospital. As he emerged to pass cigars out to Keiichi, Tomohisa, myself and a number of his friends, he kept describing how witnessing the birth of his daughter was the most wonderful thing he had experienced in all of his days. A couple times, Keiichi had to remind him not to say "280 millennia"...as Genji had slipped up and said just that when several of his coworkers visited him at the hospital. Fortunately, they attributed his misspeech to the fact that he was drunk with the exhilaration of fatherhood.

Keiichi and Belldandy held their wedding in October 2008; they didn't want to burden Urd and Genji with a wedding right after Keleste was born. We were all waiting with bated breath to hear her forthcoming announcement that she was with child...but it didn't come. Christmas flew by, and the new year started off intense for some of us in a certain way, while other members of the household were more relaxed. I was in the middle of something that was very extensive, and often had to seclude myself in my study. The three brothers were hard at work in the evenings with a critical long-term project that would hopefully prove helpful in dealing with Isilblius. Keleste's presence at the dinner table was quite distracting in a good way, as we were all enamored with her. Belldandy was her usual cheerful self most of the time, and Urd was radiant whenever Keleste was with five meters of her. Megumi's 'antics' were a source of comic relief, and Mara and Sayoko were frequent visitors to the house.

The running joke was that Mara was Sayoko's human familiar. Anyone who would banter her with this lighthearted teasing would quickly draw out Mara's irritation. Genji got it backwards one dinner and called Sayoko _Mara's_ familiar, which basically set off the God-Demon argument of the century that evening. Megumi surprised us all by mediating the dispute and the household was restored to its special ambiance within two days.

Sayoko's frustration wasn't simply caused by Genji's dyslexic gaffe, of course. The truth of the matter was that she had decided to try and find an Earthrealm mortal who would be an appropriate lifemate for a Demoness, and was suffering from a case of nerves...and jealousy. Urd and Genji had each other and their daughter Keleste, Belldandy and Keiichi had each other and were having lots of fun trying for a child. Megumi...was just Megumi. But Sayoko was quite possibly the last Demoness in existence, and we often were called upon to buoy her spirits.

Six months after their wedding, in the spring months of 2009, Belldandy and Keiichi burst into the house one afternoon with giggly smiles on their faces. Belldandy sat us all down in the living room and informed us that she and Keiichi finally had happy news of their own; her doctor had confirmed that she was expecting. Urd was ecstatic about this news; I overheard the two sisters frequently discussing changes to the house to create more nursery space, the addition of a den, and where the children's play area should be on the lawn. An enthusiastic Keiichi jumped the gun by a few years and built a tree house for the children. The joyous news of Belldandy's pregnancy cast our home into a nimble curative for the day-to-day concerns of life.

But there was one person who took Belldandy's announcement with shadings of discomfort.

Skuld's introspective demeanor made it obvious to everyone that Belldandy's recently announced pregnancy was very uncomfortable for her, because it meant that the pressure was on. She would have to make a decision soon.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Keleste was already starting to crawl...and float in the air occasionally. There were no doubts as to where her levitation abilities came from. The first day she floated up out of her crib, Genji cried for two hours, because he finally knew for certain that the union of mortal and Divine qualities in his daughter were stable and safe, proven by this first manifestation of her Goddess abilities.

The household tasks seemed to increase exponentially with the presence of baby Keleste, and would further increase when Belldandy and Keiichi brought their own precious new life into the world next fall. Keleste's initial forays into using her nascent Goddess powers were already manifesting in interesting ways; recently she 'popped in' on her Father while he was working in his "Genji's Labs" room, right out of a light bulb! She had already identified her mode of transport, but amusingly, she was too young to remember or know what it was. Of course, Urd celebrated Keleste's feat with a feast. Belldandy responded by quickly hiring two live-in maids to assist with Keleste and the household tasks,

Fortunately, Megumi and Sayoko were already accustomed feats like these.

I never imagined that Megumi would stoop to performing household chores...but there's always a surprise around the next corner, so to speak. Megumi was charmed by the little newcomer to the house. Her mind-link with me apparently…and unexpectedly…had significantly tamed down her wild nature. She blamed me for it, and I kept telling her that she brought it on herself. It was a little private joke between us. But I teased out her real reason one day; that she wanted to have experience with an infant so she would be ready when she gave birth.

I spent more and more time working to extend my command of the powers I had been gifted with. I felt certain that my isolation of this TimeStream from the TimeWeb would prevent Isilblius from discovering me. Once every few months, the brothers would shut off their chronometrics for an instant, so I could check up on my progress, so to speak.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

2009 and 2010 were the best years of my life here in this alternate Earthrealm, for all sorts of reasons. Urd and Belldandy had triumphed over incredible odds and had become loving mothers and wives. The Gods had triumphed over the impossible and had completed 'phase one' of their project to condition Metanative energy; which would be a critical contribution to the larger situation with Isilblius. Our house was filling up with Belldandy's artwork, and it became quite apparent that she was in the process of creating a new school of art, as her dream sequence paintings evoked intimacy rather than the sense of distance, tension and isolation articulated by most post-modern art. Skuld and Tomohisa were trying to work it out; despite the emotional upheavals and tension, we all saw what was coming except the two of them. I even had my own meaningful triumph, thanks to a fellow scholar.

Ever since that fateful dinner session where I told them all about my life in Japan, Urd had started to behave differently towards me. Now that she knew that I was in love with someone just like her, only from another TimeStream, she exercised an entirely different approach to me. She was much friendlier; it almost seemed to me that she was trying to comfort me with a big-sisterly affection. Since I had never had a big sister, I didn't know what she was doing at first. But towards the end of the year, she sat me down and explained that she wanted to make things easier on me, since it was obvious that I was pining away for 'my' Urd. The only way she knew how to do this was to be a big sister...a role she knew so well.

Gradually, I became comfortable confiding to Urd all my aspirations for Goddess Urd and I. Things I could have never discussed with my capricious girlfriend back in Makuhari. And during this process, layer-by-layer, I confronted my reservations about spending the rest of my life with Goddess Urd, relying on this Urd's able guidance and feminine insight.

When I started teaching at Trondheim, I had worked on Magnum Organum, but when I shopped it around for peer review and publication, the polite scholastics told that it was too recondite; the others told me I was nuts. Urd's comment "either crazy or crazy" came to mind. So I shelved it.

After my revelation spilled itself into our lives in 2008, Urd no longer felt my book project was crazy, and basically told me "if I can have an impossible baby, you can write an impossible book." A week later, a group of Chinese archeologists discovered a hidden cave in Dunhuang with a 'Rosetta Stone with several different languages.

I could take a hint, but this was instant karma overkill!

I decided to take Urd at her word and worked my ass off on Magnum Organum. Genji, Keiichi, Tomohisa and I had long debates about whether the Earthrealm was ready for such a project. In my destroyed Earthrealm, Magnum Organum Mk I was so innovative, people didn't know what to do with it, other than invite me to do a talk about it. 'My' Urd, despite how proud she was of my effort, scolded me often for setting it adrift in academic circles, noting that it wouldn't really have value for several centuries. But in true Goddess fashion, she didn't stop me either. Sometimes, Magnum Organum was a link to Beijing and pleasant memories of a fresh love stamped in my heart by a Goddess.

Urd's encouragement fired me to new heights, and then Mara pitched me to go for broke, noting that it was time for our generation of scholars to 'shake things up.' I approached Magnum with a ''what the fuck' attitude and added a fifth section, titled Telepathic Matrices. I finished it before Urd delivered Keleste, per an agreement we had made because she wanted to be on the peer review panel at Trondheim. It was amusing to both of us that she was a Ph.D. and I technically had no academic credentials; and now I was presenting "Magnum Organum: First Consciousness" as a doctoral project.

Magnum Organum had five sections, each following upon the other. The first section on the past lost cultures responsible for the Dunhuang Index stone, was intended to help humankind realize that cultural history wasn't localized to seven millennia. The second section was a refutation of the Null hypothesis which brought all psychometrics-based research into doubt, hopefully forcing a shift away from the study _of _humans and towards the study_ in_ humans…the challenge of going really deep into noetic existentialism rather than relying on measurements. Third, a negation of non-existence, a 'void is a not' to oust philosophy out of the ossifying existential rut and back on track with transcendental meta-philosophies strongly linked with spirituality. Fourth, the Aquantum Metastasis section served as a 'thesaurus' of mentation; creating a new method of to manifest 'thinking' to complement polycameral cognition. Aquantum Metastasis would greatly accelerate the 'velocity' of thought; cognition would be conducted by concise integrated units of mind rather than linear pieces of mind. This would open up the fourth dimension, creativity, and push Time to its proper place in the fifth dimension. The final section, when translated a couple centuries hence, would provide a telepathic matrix which would allow for the delimitation of ecological systems of human relations. Systems of micro (intimates); meso (immediates); exo (localities); macro (cultures); chronological (transitions) and creational (aquantums) could no longer be absolutes. The intended result was to take the "six-levels of separation" concept and 'bridge' the levels of separation…essential for development of telepathy.

In essence, the Magnum Organum was a 'safety check' to prevent humans from experiencing self-destructive extremes once telepathy was attained. These extremes had killed off numerous sentient species throughout existence. One extreme is GroupMind--where the community telepathic consciousness would become so powerful, the individual would lose their 'self individuality' to the group; similar to spilling a glassful of water into the ocean, and then having to find the _exact_ same water that was formerly in that glass and put it back into the glass. The opposite extreme is Desyncognition--where syncognitive functions are not attainable because there are no 'private' thoughts; the individual can't even find their own 'individuality' because they cannot shield it from telepathic 'traffic'. The irony of telepathy is that I have to create your telepathic shield, so that you could have private thoughts, and vice versa. This is the root of syncognitive function; an unprecedented cooperation, respect and reliance upon each other. With this, humanity can reach the Next Level.

We debated the need to have a means to guide humanity to the Next Level, if for some reason Tengoku isn't restored. Normally, the Gods would adjust the genome to create telepathy in a race when they were sufficiently technologically and spiritually advanced. For this Earthrealm, humanity was predicted to be ready around 2600CE. Genji, being the family arcanical and alchemical physicist, had loaded a latent 'tweak' into the human genome that would activate a process when the Telepathy Matrices section is correctly interpreted and translated. The first time any part of the Telepathy Matrices section was articulated audibly by human speech, a genetic 'trigger' would start the process. Once this occurred, humankind would become telepathic within one generation, and the telepathic matrices would be vital to establishing a human community in the transition. As Keiichi put it, "we have no other choice but to guarantee a lottery win, and then provide the budget to keep from squandering it."

If the Gods were unable to evolve humanity into telepathy, Magnum Organum would provide a path that humanity could use evolve itself into telepathy, with the hopeful result of telepathic communication that would be safe rather than reckless.

The approval process went a lot easier than they did when I was in Beijing, in part because the committee didn't know what to make of it. I was awarded a Ph.D. and a demand from Trondheim to drop all the sections except for the ancient language translations and the refutation of the Null Hypothesis. I especially needed Tomohisa's opinion as Mirror of the Future, because I wanted to publish the entire work with no redactions or excisions. He advised me something along the line of "they're idiots, so screw 'em and publish it anyway." Belldandy generously offered to underwrite the costs of publication. Even more precious to me, she painted an original cover for Magnum Organum and 'dressed it up' with a number of her dream sequence pictures, with her beautiful abstract rendering of Yggdrasil as the frontispiece. So out it went.

Trondheim University fired me the day after Magnum Organum went to press. A lot of people bought it just for Belldandy's art; but some people were reading it with a degree of comprehension…and apprehension. The Chinese scholars were shocked by the complete translation and concordance of the 'Dunhuang Enigma Stone'. Disproving the Null Hypothesis really pissed off the psychology academicians. Aquantum Metastasis was incomprehensible to all but a few, and the Void Within Negation section fared little better. As a whole, it got the attention of the Vatican, whose scholars astutely recognized that there was a strong argument for the existence of God in the text. So it seemed to make a bit of a splash soon after it was published.

Laughably, Trondheim Univ. started getting lots of phone calls and email correspondence about Magnum Organum within a week of its publication. Urd was due any day at that time, and she and I were quite amused to learn that Trondheim was having to reply to these inquiries by telling them that I had been dismissed from the University, because _someone_ had leaked the truth of my firing. Needless to say, it was almost a scandal; since most of the commerce of ideas arrived from scholars of national and international renown, who naturally comprised the initial group who were really interested in the text.

Trondheim rehired me and even offered me a chancellorship, which I refused. I did insist on the creation of a new department for Consciousness Studies, which they allowed. I created the Consciousness Studies Dept. as a template that other educational institutions could use as a starting point, relying significantly on Sayoko who had the 'Demoness eye' for administration. During the remainder of 2008, a couple wackos tried to gun me down on the University campus. A member of a religious cult was arrested for stalking me, which was a good break for the criminal because Genji had wanted to send him to Mongolia. Magnum Organum had been burned in public in nine countries, which I took as a good sign.

A 'Dr. Morrow' from Japan sent me a prank email claiming to have deciphered the Telepathic Matrices section. I recognized him as the mad scientist who had been obsessed with trying to 'fix' Sigel, and I was worried that he'd act just as obsessively towards me due to the publication of Magnum Organum. I sent him a smiley and an online pizza coupon in response.

Two days later, he replied by emailing me a domestic of the 'decrypt' text sample he claimed to have derived. To my shock, it was an exact 'translation'. I had buried the actual 'message' of the text in a blend of runic language, 21 levels of encryption, false leads and finally sequenced it to align with the prose Elder Edda. Dr Morrow had somehow broken the 'code', a couple centuries ahead of schedule. I encouraged him to publish and worked with him over the internet over the next six months, and he published his "Contemplation of Telepathy and Syncognition" in Feb 2009.

Keiichi pretty much _told_ me that it had become necessary for me to write a commentary text now that the telepathy section had been partially translated. The book I wrote focused on the forthcoming integration of telepathy into human lifestyles, weaving commentary on Magnum Organum with a liberal outpouring of encouragement.

Urd pretty much _told_ me that it was now very important for me to write a book along the lines of 'Telepathy for Kids' to prepare humanity's most precious minds for the changes to come. This was just as hard as the commentary book at first, until Belldandy insisted that she team up with me. The academic book was a chore; the children's book was a blessing. Keiichi jumped right in and we co-authored a series of folktales with several tales sequenced with metastasis, so that young readers would directly receive esteem and relaxation while reading it. While we were hard at work, Belldandy storyboarded each tale and served as an editor of sorts so that the book would balance visual and literal impact. Then she profusely illustrated each story. When it was finished, we all felt something very profound had occurred. In fact it had, as Keiichi confided to me that Belldandy's new 'school' of art was a precurser to a type of 'God's Art' called ThoughtPainting. The entire project had taken place during Belldandy's first and second trimesters of pregnancy. The book aimed at children…was created with love cand caring by an expecting mother and father. "You Share Me, I Share You" and "The Next Level: Definitions of Telepathic Potentials" were jointly published in June 2009.

Two weeks after Belldandy and Keiichi were blessed with lovely baby boy named Odeyn, it was my turn to fall under the sway of joyful improbability.

In October 2009, I received the Magic Call.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

The first day of each month, I 'peeked' outside the TimeStream for an instant, to see if anything had changed in the Everything. It still was dead, the Mid-Light was dim, and Isilblius was nowhere to be seen. The next day was always difficult; emotionally, it was like being phoned every month to be told that a loved one had died. So I was feeling the usual leftover despondency the next morning when I arrived at Trondheim Univ.

I had my cell phone handy during classes so I could be reached when Belldandy's time came. Absent-mindedly, I kept bringing the phone to school after Odeyn was born. So naturally it rang while I was leading a graduate seminar class, and I ignored it. After several calls, the students in my class were heartily teasing me to "pick up the phone already!" Being 31 years old, I didn't mind too much because I was only a few years older than them. I picked it up on the ninth attempt.

A Dr. Otto Karlbahn was on the line, and in short order shuffled me into astonishment by informing me that I had been awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize for Peace, the first citizen of Norway to be honored as such in ninety years. The phone call was being recorded, and I let slip a few epithets while expressing my intense feelings. After being chided for this, Dr Karlbahn began to counsel me, sensing that I was very upset. The phone call to inform a Nobel Prize winner of their award had been termed the "Magic Call" for several decades, and he related some of the more bizarre calls he had made to previous winners, such as calling in the middle of the night, during a holiday, during an airplane flight, or in the middle of a war.

He told me that he would make the announcement within fifteen minutes after finishing this call. He noted that I would be assigned a personal aide by the Nobel Foundation for the next several months, and informed me that the award would be given on Dec 10, 2009 in Oslo, followed by celebratory events in the evening and the next day.

Dr Karlbahn informed me that I was the youngest recipient of the award since 1948, and with a chuckle told me that the last 'youngster' to win the award was none other than himself, jointly awarded between his father and him for a breakthrough in nuclear physics. He confided in me his belief that he would never see another 'young man' receive the prize, and that he was under the impression from his physician that this would be his last award ceremony. He had hoped for a 'youngster' to win the award some day; a relatively young man or woman who could provide another fifty years of public service in the spirit of the Nobel charter.

I thought furiously, knowing that I would be gone from here within a year, so I informed him that I would accept the award only on condition that Dr. Morrow was co-awarded the prize. He told me that he had the authority to do so, as the committee had considered my request as a possible contingency. He noted that it would be difficult to locate Dr. Morrow, as he was "quite eccentric". He thanked me on behalf of the committee and excused himself to go to the press conference.

Urd and Mara burst in the classroom, yelling "You won the Nobel Prize!" which immediately drew a rowdy applause from the seminar students. Dr Karlbahn had obtained my private cell phone number from the Dept staff, which meant that he had to tell them who he was, as the Univ. obviously doesn't give out personal phone numbers just for the asking. I informed them that I accepted it on condition that it was co-awarded to Dr. Morrow. Their faces seemed to lose all color at this; whatever excitement they had suddenly shifted into nervousness.

"You _what_?" Mara and Urd shouted.

"Consider this. I'm going to be gone after Skuld and Tomohisa have their baby, which means that I'll be around for a year or a little longer at best. This is too important to be left hanging; someone has to carry on the legacy. A person who will be around twenty years from now, when kids start being born all over the planet with telepathic abilities biologically wired into their brains. Hence, Dr. Morrow, because no one else is qualified to do this," I explained.

"You idiot! Did you ever stop to think that Dr. Morrow doesn't want the publicity? He rarely comes out of his lab…" Urd remonstrated.

"Oh, the hell with it, Urd!" Mara sighed with frustration. "_I'm_ Dr Morrow. _She's_ Dr. Morrow, too."

"You're Dr. Morrow? The two of you?" I voiced my astonishment.

"Well, let's look at it sensibly. She and I both sat on your dissertation review committee. Mara is the only person in human history to actually figure out how to summon a Demoness without going through the wish/curse request process. Once Magnum Organum got the nod, she was even more curious and continued researching for the 'code', suspecting that it would unlock the true working knowledge of the telepathy section instead of the surface narrative. She realized that the telepathy section was like the proverbial iceberg, with the real stuff deep within it. She discovered the code, which left her with a final narrative that needed to be assembled. With her background in demonology, she deduced that it was somehow related to the Edda. So she contacted her cousin..." Urd explained.

"…Who happens to be one of the leading experts in the world on the Elder Edda legends. With Urd involved, we were barely able to complete the final narrative, but we did it. Urd recognized the runic code, and then extrapolated a sequence of phonemes of the Edda as it was during its pre-literate cycle, when it was passed down by storytellers generation-to-generation. Now we had the exact 'interpretation'. All the rest was spoofed emails and correspondence addresses to lead everything to think that Dr. Morrow lived in Japan…with a little help from a certain Demoness of my acquaintance. Sayoko was only trying to protect Urd and I, especially Urd, because she knew that neither of us needed any distractions from our family lives," Mara elaborated.

"Besides, Dr Morrow's name was a code in itself…hee hee," Urd noted with a giggle. "Get it? Dr. Morrow? Dr. Mara? You're just like me, you overlook the obvious."

"I think I'm going to have to eat it on this one," Mara explained. "Urd has Keleste, while I'm single with no children. It's a no-brainer. This really sucks, that I have to take it all on my shoulders. We discussed what to do if 'Dr. Morrow' was awarded the prize, and the decision we reached then was that I'd take full credit for his work."

"Mara, it's not all bad," Urd commented. "Just think! Your 'eligibility factor' for attracting men will go through the roof once you're a Nobel Laureate!

While Mara groaned in reaction to Urd's quip, I called Dr. Karlbahn, with the callback function and told him 'Dr Morrow' would be available on my phone in a few minutes. In the meantime, I wanted to thank him properly…

With his assurance that the phone line wasn't being monitored, I informed him that this would be my first and last Nobel ceremony as well, as I wouldn't be here in 2011. With his agreement to keep a confidence, I explained the reasoning behind the Magnum Organum.

All of it.

I thanked Dr. Karlbahn again, informing him that this was my proper thanks for his kindness in supporting my appointment to the Nobel Peace Prize. He informed me that, just like I had requested the extra accommodation for the Nobel to be co-awarded to 'Dr. Morrow', he expected a further accommodation from me. He wasn't satisfied at all with my act of appreciation, as it was nothing more than telling him a secret. He would only feel fulfilled if I shared it with _all _of humanity, in the spirit of Alfred Nobel and his Peace Prize. If he lived long enough to present me the award personally, then I had to promise that my Nobel Lecture would present a full treatment of what I just told him. The idea of this was frightening; but his earnestness prompted me to agree to his promise regardless of any personal circumstances.

When he called Mara a few minutes later, I was witness to her profound joy at receiving the Nobel Peace Prize alongside me. She was 31, the same age as I…and yet she had willingly taken on a lifelong commitment to be of service to humanity. Things had come full circle: Demoness Mara had unwittingly unleashed Isilblius, while mortal Mara had consciously guided humanity into the next stage of its evolution. Emotionally exhausted, she and I emerged from the lecture room into a hallway filled with hundreds of onlookers, camera crews and press reporters.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

The award was extremely controversial, because most of the scholarly community viewed Magnum Organum as more science fiction than science fact. Our Norwegian citizenship brought even more controversy in the political sphere, as the electing body for the Peace Prize is selected by Norway's Parliament; thus the awards to Mara and I were decried as an 'inside job'. The press picked up on all of this and derisively labeled Mara and I as the "Rad Grads" in an attempt to insult us and our work. Instead of being insulted, we both got totally pissed off. This was our life's work...and quite possibly the essential guide to humanity's future...that they were making light of. We decided to present a lecture that would be the academic equivalent of a knockout punch to all the naysayers. Keiichi, Genji and Tomohisa encouraged us, reminding us that the Earthrealm mortals don't have the energy or the time to waste bullshitting around with the very principles it would need to survive to reach the next level. Mara and I toiled over this lecture, fully aware that it would be forever fixed within the examining eye of posterity…and that Mara would have to deal with the consequences for the rest of her life.

With all of our dear friends in attendance, Mara and I were feted by the Nobel Committee on Dec 10th 2009, the anniversary of Dr Alfred Nobel's death. Dr. Karlbahn, although frail, personally presented the awards to Mara and I. When we arrived at Oslo City Hall, the police had to cordon us off because of the numerous protesters. By now, the wisdom of Dr. Karlbahn's insistence on delivering an unforgettable Nobel Lecture was quite clear to both of us.

After the banquet, I made good on my promise to the aged savant. Our Nobel Lecture went far beyond a full treatment of Magnum Organum and its impact on humanity. Mara and I delivered a three-hour lecture, taking turns at the podium in our presentation. What we gave the Nobel Committee was our hearts, our minds, our souls, and the next one hundred and fifty years leading up to the Next Level.

The Magnum Organum was a guidebook to the next two centuries. Humans would become telepathic within twenty years, achieve interstellar travel within fifty years, explore and discover the Creative Dimension within seventy years, and culturally integrate telepathic syncognition and 'communioncation' by 2100. We portrayed for the audience the results of these advances; the world their grandchildren and their descendants would experience. With an unprecedented level of respect and self-awareness bonding every human being...the necessary adaptation to evolved elepathy...the world would be greatly changed. War becoming obsolete, the total extinction of mental illness, exponential advances in science, the elimination of poverty and greed, a renaissance of spiritual advancement, and the emergence of a true world community…all of which would prepare humanity for the Next Level, where the question of God's existence will be answered irrevocably because the Gods themselves would pay us a visit.

When we finished, Mara and I hugged…and I heard her voice in my mind thanking me…the first telepathic communication in the history of humankind.

Mara had been given an incredible gift by Keiichi's tweak; and in return had given me an incredible gift as well, far more valuable than a mental 'thank you'. For the first time since Isilblius destroyed the Earthrealm and murdered my family of friends there, I had an absolute absence of fear. It was _gone_! In its stead was the discovery that together we had planned all of this, the entire lecture, with a firmly sensed assurance that _life would go on_.

Survival was no longer an uncertain assumption or unanswered question...it was now an assured confidence, with a conviction and certainty that it _will happen_.

The three Goddesses I had met in Japan had armed me with a weapon of love—Mara and the three Gods had now armed with me a shield of confidence.

There was no applause following our lecture; the audience remained silent for ten minutes. The only emotional thermometer I could seek out was the love tribe of three sisters, four Gods and a Demon. Urd and her sisters were riveted with attention…and each Divine was absolutely beaming with pride at our accomplishment. Goddess Urd had told me long ago that she and her sisters loved the Earthrealm, were proud of humanity's struggle up and out of savagery, celebrated our accomplishments, and remained confident that we could reach the Next Level. I saw the same love for humanity in the eyes of Keiichi, Genji and Tomohisa, Megumi and Sayoko.

They were planning to survive our final encounter with Isilblius.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

In the last two months of summer 2009, Belldandy was already well along with the waddling gait of advanced pregnancy; her belly appeared even larger than Urd's when Urd was pregnant. Keiichi had taken indefinite leave from his job at the rock magazine to devote all of his time to Belldandy. He was gracefully solicitous of her every need: bringing her meals; bathing her; helping her around the house, practicing labor and delivery with her.

Their love with rewarded with a baby boy they named Odeyn, on September 22nd 2009. Urd's delivery of Keleste was mostly worry-free, but Belldandy had a difficult time birthing Odeyn. It almost seemed like he either didn't want to be born into the world, or he was announcing to all during his birth that he was going to be rowdy. Within two months, it was clear that he was very strong-willed; trying to pinch anyone that held him besides Mom and Dad.

So when Christmas 2009 crawled around, looming just a few calendar squares away from today, Tomohisa started getting antsy.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

The sisters were having a Yuletide baby shower to celebrate Odeyn's first Christmas, so all the male members of the household were exiled from the house for the evening. This was fortuitous, as far as Keiichi was concerned. Over the past few weeks, his youngest brother was noticeably slipping into a depressing morosity. Keiichi had conference called Genji and I a couple of days ago while we were at work and broached the idea that we should "pep-talk" Tomohisa into making a stand for himself.

So here we were at the pizza joint…the very same Peppe's who had made a fateful pizza ten years ago for Urd. Of course, Keiichi couldn't resist ordering a ham and bacon pizza with Genji on top, much to the bewilderment of the waitress serving our table. Genji could only roll his eyes at this.

""What do I do? I _love_ Skuld...and she _still_ hasn't decided whether or not we should have a baby. It's like she's got some hangup about sex or something! We barely do anything except kiss and hold hands!" Tomohisa complained.

Of course she's got a hangup about sex! She's watched my wife and Belldandy both go through the aches and pains of pregnancy...and she's no baka-head. She _knows _where babies come from! She knows that making love leads to pregnancy...and that leads to a lifelong commitment to the new life that results. So, to Skuld, sex isn't just about having fun and passionate pleasure. It has really serious consequences. In fact, I find her attitude refreshingly mature compared to most Earthrealm girls her age!" Genji commented.

"'Refreshingly mature' doesn't help me at all!" Tomohisa said quietly, bemoaning his situation.

"That's because you're acting like an Earthrealm mortal boy instead of Mirror of the Future! You're all caught up in the lust-excitement. The close-knit passion of physical release, the idea that she's sharing _herself_ with you, the sense of possession of each other's bodies...all that good stuff. But if you can't see further than your hormones, then you're screwed. If you don't believe me, look at your older sister. Megumi is so flighty and obsessed with herself, she's having a really hard time finding a guy that will stay with her. She's gotten a lot better in the past year, and I hope I don't have to play matchmaker like Genji did with Urd. As far as you and Skuld are concerned, sex to her is much, much more than what we Gods would expect to be. Fortunately, most Earthrealm women associate sex with a strong emotional bond with their mate. But where has your emotional bond with Skuld been? I've been watching you these past few weeks, Tomohisa...and it seems clear to me that you've been avoiding Skuld like the plague when you _should_ be discussing these things with her!" Keiichi observed.

I wanted to confirm Keiichi's point, but Genji was too quick...

"Tomo, whether you are avoiding her or not is not the only issue, as you know all too well. We all know that she's the 'Test Mortal'. 39 years from now, Kami-sama and the rest of us will gather in the Glade of Tenheiankyo to decide whether the Earthrealm gets blown to bits or not. One way to seal the controversy and save the Earthrealm would be for you and her to become parents!" Genji explained excitedly, arguing from a completely different angle than his brother.

"Don't you think I know that? I've been debating whether or not I should tell her..."

"Good grief!! You mean that you _haven't told her_ that she's the 'Test Mortal'? You first-place idiot!! What were you waiting for...a trip to Hiroshima or Los Alamos to set the scene so you could drop the bomb on her, figuratively speaking?" Keiichi muttered in exasperation.

"I...just can't tell her! It's the one thing that I know for sure that would break us up!" Tomohisa admitted.

"On top of everything else..." he added, sighing out his misery.

Nothing like _that_ to serve as a conversation killer in an otherwise boisterous pizza joint. Tomohisa looked at me expectantly, perhaps wanting to hear some pointers from someone other than his two older brothers.

"Tomohisa...I don't have a clue. All I know is that love requires sacrifices. In the past year and a half, I've watched a woman who looks _exactly_ like the woman whom I would probably consider to be my SoulMate. She's in a loving relationship that most women would envy, courtesy of Genji here. Now that she's a mother, Urd's glowing with joy. It's been really rough for me…just as rough as it would be for you to watch Skuld be with another guy, have a great relationship, do all the sex stuff, and start a family with him. But I realized that reality is reality. _My_ Urd is dead, back in Japan in the Earthrealm that I come from. I've chosen by the UF for a mission to try and undo everything that led up to the deaths of her and all my friends. I'm fucking scared to death about that, but I want it even more than I'm afraid of it. If you want her to be in your life, it won't happen unless she _is_ in your life," I offered, feeling like my words were stupidly roundabout and useless.

"That project we're teaming up on it going to make or break it when he goes up against Isilblius. That's our mission, to make sure he's got a shot at taking him down. And I hope Cevn kicks his ass all the way to the Mid-Realm and back for what he's done. But you have a mission too, which is way more difficult than ours. The most challenging mission in life at times is to just be totally loving and honest. Quit mind-fucking yourself! Be honest with Skuld to the point where you share your deepest kokoro with her…and let things take care of themselves," Genji challenged.

"Tomohisa. Do you love Skuld?" Keiichi asked point-blank.

"Totally!! I really do, I'm not just saying it to sound good. I don't care if she's a mortal, or that she's a tomboy, or that she's the youngest sister of my brother's wives! I care for her _a lot_! I'd hop in bed with her in a split-second if she said 'yes'..."

"I'm sure you would," Keiichi said, grinning knowingly at Genji and I.

"But seriously, if you say that you love her...would you'd be willing to take the ultimate risk?" Keiichi asked, his question clearly probing the younger God's heart.

"Of course I would!"

"Then I suggest that you tell Skuld the truth about her being the 'Test Mortal'...and then offer her an engagement ring!" Keiichi said directly.

"_EHHH_? Y..you're saying that I _tell _her? I've been in her life for five years; it's almost like I've watched her grow up. She'll kill me! If that's not enough, now y..you mean...you're s..saying that I should _propose_ to her too?" Tomohisa gasped out, his eyes wide with astonishment at his oldest brother's suggestion.

"Exactly!" Genji affirmed.

"But I can't do that! I mean...I can't...uh, how would I do that? What would I..I say?" Tomohisa exclaimed testily.

"You say something like this: 'I love you, Skuld. That's why I haven't told you about being the Test Mortal.' Then you hang tight while she flies off the handle. When she's done browbeating you, you beg for mercy and apologize profusely. Once that's out of the way, you say "I love you, Skuld! I've been waiting for the right moment to ask you something really important, and just recently I worked up the courage to do it. With all the humility and sincerity at my command, I would like to ask you if you'd marry me.' Or some kind of words to that effect. Then you open up the little box containing your engagement ring and let her stare at it for a moment while she decides..." Genji explained.

"I would even go further than that! I would demonstrate my awe towards her by getting down on one knee. The idea is to show how much your heart worships her, Tomohisa! And to do this, you need to supplicate yourself in front of her as if your life depended on her answer! As if _she's_ your Goddess, not the other way around," Keiichi added. "That's what I did with Belldandy when I asked her to marry me!"

"That's idiotic! I'm a God and she's a mortal...and you're saying I should _bow down to her_! No way! Besides, if I get down on my knees in front of Skuld after she reams me for not telling her about the Test Mortal thing, she'll think that I'm acting like a totally wimpy geekwad fool!" Tomohisa argued. Keiichi looked like he wanted to slap a slice of pizza on Tomohisa's head.

"C'mon, give her some credit!" Genji complained. "For an Earthrealm woman, Skuld is comparatively very strong-willed to most females on this planet. You may think that's a problem; I think that's what will keep her from walking out on you when you tell her. If I had told Urd something heavy like that before we fell in love with each other, she'd have busted me over the head with the nearest breakable object and then she would have walked out of my life for good. She nearly did over that mess with Tengoku last year. What did Skuld do? She called you a 'cyberpunk fascist'…but she didn't once take her eyes off of you or hint that she was thinking of leaving you."

"She been watching me like a hawk lately..."

"Little brother, has it ever occurred to you _why_ Skuld is watching you like a hawk?" Keiichi asked with a grin.

For a moment, I thought I saw a series of tiny flashbulbs flickering around Tomohisa's head as recognition dawned on his face.

He finally got it.

"You mean to tell me that she busies herself with my life...because she _wants_ to? Because my life is interesting to her?"

"Right again, quiz kid! For the Mirror of the Future, you sure can get fogged up about what's happening in the here and now! Stuff that's happening right in front of your nose!" Genji teased, playfully punching his younger brother in the shoulder.

"Okay, suppose you're right! But how do I get an engagement ring? Ah ha! I know!! I'll go to my lab tonight and make one. I can synthesize the..."

"Nn-huh! Nope rhymes with dope for a reason. And you're thinking like a total dope, despite that genius of yours! You have to do it the way we did it. The same way every man on the Earthrealm does it! You have to _earn_ the money from a job. A _real_ job, where you _really _have to work. No God powers allowed: you use one bit of magic or tech or Divine power, then the whole point of it flies out the window. Because if you cheat on the job, it's a guarantee that you're going to cheat on her. Marriage is about being faithful, about making a commitment. Because we're Gods, it means that we avoid the temptation to do shortcuts, unless it's something that just isn't humanly possible, like your Annex in your "Spacelab" room. We don't have the luxury of a Torii of Judgment on the Earthrealm, so this is the best substitute to test your willingness to be with her. If she's worth it, then you'll put up with any workplace drudgery, just to see her smile. You might even luck out like me and get a job you really groove on. After that, then you have to go to a jewelry store and put up with the greedy morons who work there, who will try and sell you an engagement ring for an exorbitant markup. It's an Earthrealm ritual," Keiichi said bluntly.

"That's impossible! I'm a college _freshman_! I don't have any money, except for the allowance that Belldandy gives me! Even if I went and got a job, by the time I'd have enough money saved to put a down payment on a ring...it'd be too late!" Tomohisa countered, clearly frustrated.

"That's why you have two big brothers, Tomo!" Keiichi said, withdrawing a small leather satchel from the inside pocket of his jacket.

He tossed it across the table to Tomohisa.

"What's this?"

"Just look inside, okay?" Genji said curtly.

Tomohisa unzipped the top of the satchel and looked inside of it. I didn't have a clue about what was going on, except for the fact that his face seemed to freeze for a moment as he peered inside the satchel.

He withdrew a banded stack of 1000 Kroner notes, each with the portrait of Edvard Munch on the front. Then he pulled out another stack of 500 Kroner notes with their portraits of Sigrid Undset, the Norwegian Nobel Laureate.

"H..how much?" he asked, wide-eyed.

"65,000 Kronen," Keiichi answered. "Hey, what are big brothers for? You do realize that you'll have to pay us back over the next several years..."

"Why didn't you just ask your wife for the money?" Tomohisa asked Keiichi.

"Because, we wanted to keep it within the family...and keep it honest. We could make a million Kronens, but it wouldn't mean as much to you as _this_, would it? It's the same principle as getting a real job to support Skuld. Besides, us Gods have to stick together! Admittedly, if you hadn't built that energy conversion machine in your 'loft', we'd be royally screwed right about now. So this is our way of saying 'thanks' and 'we love you'...and fulfilling our roles as your older brothers," Genji explained for Keiichi.

I was genuinely moved by the fact that Keiichi and Genji...as Gods...had given their younger brother such a large amount of money. Money they had earned, just like the rest of us.

It all made perfect sense. Just like the Goddesses I knew back home in Japan, each brother had decided to live as Earthrealm men as much as possible. In the interests of their marriages to mortal women, they were keeping their God-like powers to a minimum. All for the purpose of living and loving with _integrity_.

"I..I don't know what to say," Tomohisa said, rubbing the corners of his eyes.

"Just say 'thanks'...and be sure to get her a really nice ring!" Keiichi replied with a sly grin.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Skuld...do you have a minute?" Tomohisa asked as he lightly rapped on her bedroom door.

"Sure, hang on a second!" he heard her answer from within. Tomohisa could hear the rustling sounds of Skuld getting dressed...or undressed...from the other side of the door. A moment later, she opened the door and invited him in.

He had made a habit of visiting Skuld in her bedroom as infrequently as possible, because he didn't want to encroach on her 'living space'. Through his actions of restraint, Tomohisa wanted Skuld to know that he respected her privacy. Consequently, most of his deep conversations with her had occurred on the bus while riding to and from school, and in the living room whenever they were alone. Now that he was in college, there were no more lunchroom conversations with her.

Because of the occasional visits, Tomohisa sensed that Skuld seemed to realize that any time he knocked on her door, it meant that something special was going on. But his infrequent visits also meant that each time he visited her bedroom, there was a slight change in decor or arrangement. He noticed a sweater laid out on her bed; Skuld must have changed from the sweater to the "Birmingham Rugby" t-shirt she was now wearing. The bedroom was more orderly than the last time he had been in it; she had rearranged her books on the bookshelf, and had gotten a new wastebasket for her computer desk. The closet door was ajar, giving him a view of some of her winter outfits.

"How've you been, stranger?" Skuld said cheerily. "It almost seems like you've been avoiding me! I know that you're all pumped for the national college hockey tourneys, but that doesn't make a good excuse as to why you can't take a girl out to a movie once in a while! Or hang out with her for more than ten minutes at a time."

"Great. She noticed. Just like my brothers noticed," Tomohisa thought, his emotions sinking.

She sat down on her bed while he pulled the desk chair from the computer desk and sat down, facing her. Skuld's blue eyes and long hair seemed to have a glow about them, even though her hair was slightly disheveled from hastily putting on a t-shirt.

Skuld watched Tomohisa intently. He seemed to react strongly to her observation that he had been keeping his distance from her. Much to her dismay, she found herself daydreaming about him even more because of this. He had let his hair grow long in the back, just like that goalie on Norway's 2006 Winter Olympics hockey team. She knew that he had a lot on his mind; and she felt a mixture of enthusiasm and reserve towards having a deep talk with him. Why else would he be so nervous?! She knew that she had been meaning to talk to him soon.

About the elephant in the room...

The biological clock, so to speak, had run out. Her sister Belldandy came home almost three months ago with her nephew Odeyn. Cevn had assured everyone that he would stay until she and Tomo reached a decision, and even longer if needed.

"I..." he said.

"I..." she said in the same instant.

"You first!" they both said simultaneously, and then giggled.

"Okay, since I came to your door...I'll start," Tomohisa said. Skuld nodded her head at him, impressed that he wanted to take the initiative. Usually_ she_ had to start off one of their deep-hearted conversations.

"Skuld, there's something I have to tell that's really really important," Tomohisa began. Skuld felt her spine tensing up in reaction to the serious tone of voice Tomohisa was using. It was both thrilling and nerve-racking; it was quite possible that he was going to talk about "it".

About the elephant in the room...

"I haven't been totally honest with you about a few things, and I thought that now is the best time to come clean..." he started. Over the next half hour, she was gripped with shocked amazement as Tomohisa explained to her that she was the "Test Mortal"...a sort of guinea pig for the Gods in Tengoku. He explained to her in great detail that the Earthrealm was in the middle of some sort of "probation", and that a decision would be made in 2047 to either destroy it, or leave it be. He emphasized that she had an important role to play in the decision-making process.

She wished she had one of his hockey sticks in her hands.

Skuld didn't know whether to cry out of fear, slap him for keeping such an immensely important issue secret from her, thank him for being honest enough to tell her about it, or hit him over the head with a pillow because she was tensed up in reaction to what he had just told her.

She did none of these things.

Tomohisa just sat there, looking at her with a sad expression.

He clearly felt ashamed of himself. As well he should be, for not telling her the truth! Finally, she found a voice for her resentment and irritation...

"What?! You just told me that the fate of the _planet_ is in my hands, based on how I live my life...and _you're_ looking all glum? I'm the one who should be glum! In fact, I should be totally freaking out! And just because I'm not going crazy right now, don't you go thinking that I'm dealing with this oh-so-calmly, Tomohisa! I don't even want to think about it! All this time, you Gods have been watching me, scrutinizing my every thought and emotion..."

"I'm sorry, Skuld..." he answered in a subdued voice.

"How would you feel if your life was an open book? It's like someone's been reading my diary, or something!" she shouted angrily.

"Skuld! It's not like that! It's not like you're being followed by some kind of candid camera or something! It's very discrete..."

"And what about _us_? How do you think they're reacting to the fact that we've been dating for the past couple of years, Tomohisa?" she asked.

He'd better say the right thing, or else...

"It makes me uncomfortable too, you know! I have _feelings_ for you, Skuld! I've had them for a long time...and I can't just act in accord with my feelings, because of all the repercussions!"

"_What_ repercussions?!" she asked, worried that some _new_ mind-blowing disclosure was just a moment away...

"I..I'm afraid that if you and I stay together, then I might do something that would cause you to react in such a way that...it would somehow cause a problem with the 'Test Mortal' situation, resulting in the destruction of your Earthrealm."

"Now do you see why I'm so upset?_ You_ can't even behave normally around me because of that stupid 'Test Mortal' situation. I suppose that you're all worried that you might look like an idiot to your friends up in Tengoku..."

Skuld blanched as she realized what she had just said. She covered her mouth with slender hands...but it was too late.

"Dammit Skuld!! There is _no _Tengoku! There's _no one there_!! There's no family waiting there for me! There's _nothing _waiting for me!" Tomohisa shouted in frustration. Then the tears came, running down his face.

"I've really tried hard to do the right thing! I've been here, _all alone_, for almost four Earthrealm years! The last couple years, I wanted to talk to my parents so bad, it kept me up night after night! But they aren't there, because there's no there! I haven't been able to phone Tengoku and talk with my friends. Despite what Cevn said, I've kept on trying, every day, hoping it was all just a bad daydream. Every day--no one, nothing, not a single answer from the place where I spent 180,000 years of my life." he admitted.

Skuld was taken aback by the emotional force of Tomohisa's situation. She knew that he was stranded here, that he couldn't communicate with anyone from Tengoku...but until now, she didn't really have a full sense of the terrible toll it had taken on him. To talk to her parents, all she had to do was pick up a phone, or check her computer for emails. Even knowing that Tengoku and his parents were gone, _he had kept on calling every day_, trying to hang some hope on his heart. He hadn't heard a word from his parents for almost four years! Since 2006!

It was almost 2010.

Skuld looked at him anew. He was carrying all this emotional baggage all by himself! Just like a fool! Keeping it to himself...when he had _her_ to talk to! Just like a fool would do...

With a start, Skuld realized that Tomohisa didn't have the monopoly on foolhardiness. _She_ had been surviving on denial as well. She had asked him to come into her life, but then had held him off at arm's length. She _knew_ that he had feelings for her for years, but she had never opened up to him, and had insisted on a 'safe' relationship...somewhere in the limbo between being best friends and occasional dating. The kind of dating a girl would do with a guy friend that she clearly wasn't romantically interested in.

Who's the fool now?

"I've been such an idiot! Why didn't I think about his feelings sooner! No wonder he's been so gloomy! And he's been trying to turn to me all this time for comfort...wanting a hug, wanting a kiss, wanting to do 'stuff' with me...and I've been totally cold-shouldering him!" she thought guiltily.

"I...I'm sorry, Tomo! I..I just didn't know..." she said in a quiet voice.

Tomohisa looked at Skuld with a confused expression. Skuld rarely ever talked in a near-whisper...her voice was always a decibel notch above the average mortal's voice.

Always had been.

"Why are you apologizing to me?" he asked.

"Because I've been cruel to you. I let my pride get in the way. I..I guess when you become an adult, you learn when to let your pride decide things, and when not to. I guess I haven't grown up yet. I don't know how to not let my pride run my life!" she admitted.

"Me neither!" he admitted readily.

Skuld widened her eyes at this admission. Tomohisa was a _God_...he wasn't supposed to let pride run his life. It didn't appear that he was letting his pride carry him away into realms of ignorant stupidity.

At least most of the time.

"Look, Skuld. I had a talk with my brothers the other day, and I realized that I've been acting weird around you because of my dumb pride. Especially around that baby issue...and sex...and..."

"Tomohisa, there's something I want to let you know..." Skuld interjected, but Tomohisa kept talking.

"Look, I have something to give you. I don't know how to give it to you, except in the only way that I can give it to you. I got you a Valentine's Day present..."

Skuld felt her body tense up at this unexpected news, brightening with attention. Tomohisa had completely forgotten Valentine's Day last year. And now he was getting her a present?!

She pulled her knees together and leaned closer as he pulled a small ribboned box out of his bookbag. The wrapping was all messy and the ribbon was scissor-hacked in a couple places, proof that Tomohisa had tried to wrap this present himself.

Which only made his gift more precious. It was cute!

"Before you open this, there's something I want to tell you. I'm the Mirror of the Future, so I know what is going to happen in many of the possible variant Futures. But I swear that I haven't scanned any Futures after this moment. At least the Futures that involve you and me. I'm scared to, because I couldn't stand experiencing a Future without you. The only way I can give you the Future, Skuld, is to give it to you in the Present. This is why this gift represents the present state of my heart towards you. This gift is my Present..." Tomohisa explained in a passion-filled voice.

Skuld smiled at him, genuinely moved by his admission. It was so clear that he was trying, in his usual roundabout way, to simply say "I love you."

"Now it's up to you to give me my Future, depending on how you feel about this Present!" he added.

She carefully unwrapped the box, savoring every precious second of the gift-exploring. Removing the lid from the box, Skuld gasped as she saw the felt-covered container inside of it.

"He's gotten me a piece of jewelry!" she thought, now completely caught off-guard.

She watched as Tomohisa got down off his chair and sat in front of her, tailor-style, watching her closely for any sign of reaction.

"Skuld...I love you, and no matter what you do, or who you are, it will always be the same to me," he said.

Skuld felt her heart fluttering as she slowly opened the felt container.

She looked at the object inside of the box. It sparkled a million colors, like prismatic hues of the rainbow of lights that it caught and reflected...

"Reflected...his feelings...towards me..." she muttered in a whisper only she could hear.

"OH MY GOD!!" her thoughts shouted as her senses slammed into the recognition of what his "Valentine's Day gift" was! Like an idiot, her hands started trembling so hard that she dropped it, box and all, on the floor.

Genji looked at her wordlessly, waiting for her reaction.

Skuld felt her heart explode with conflicting emotions. She covered her breast with her hands, feeling how it heaved with excitement...her mind was racing through all the memories of times she had shared with Tomohisa...

_Stunned...stunned...stunned...stunned...stunned..._

As she leaned over to pick up the navy blue felt box, she saw a tear fall on it. She froze in place, watching the small bead of water spill down the side of the container...

And then she saw another tear plop onto the ring box...

And another one...

All the while that her mind had been racing, that her heart had been pumping in overdrive...her Soul had been crying in recognition of the purity of his love for her.

She gently scooped up the small ring case, sat back up on her bed, and settled her hands in her lap, cradling it.

"Before I answer you, Tomohisa, there's something I want to tell you," Skuld said, looking him straight in the eyes. "I've thought long and hard about this business of having a baby while Cevn is still here. For a long time, I was simply scared of the prospect of bringing sex into our relationship. Later, when I was in the delivery room with my big sister, I realized that something deep inside of me needs to be fulfilled. I heard my sister _screaming_ in pain as she delivered Keleste! And I decided that I don't want to go through that kind of pain. But a month ago, I was walking home from school when I saw a bird, lying frozen on the sidewalk. It was dead...and suddenly my mind was opened to the fact that _pain is life_. When we say 'farewell' to someone's ashes when we fling them off a fjord into the ocean, we don't know if they're 'faring' or if they're 'well'...wherever they are. They're simply _gone_, possibly never to return! And in each moment of life, just in the time it takes to speak a sentence...the most profound truths can be told.

"But if that truth isn't heard, then it's _gone as well_! So I was going to tell you my truth. My truth is that I'm _scared_! I'm scared of the fact that my heart is so wrapped around you. I'm scared whenever I know for sure that I could spend the rest of my life with you. I'm scared that I want to make love with you, Tomohisa! I'm scared of that part of me that wants to have a baby...with you. Not with anyone else. _With you_! And I'm scared that if we have a child together, something might happen to separate you from me. And if that happens, then all the pain that I would feel during childbirth would be _real_...and it would last forever. When I was..snff..in the delivery room when Urd was having her baby, Genji held her hand..snff..the _entire time she was in labor_..."

"Will..snff..you promise to hold mine?"

Tomohisa reached up and wordlessly stroked her tear-streaked cheeks with his fingers, gently tracing the wetness. Then he took her hand in his and kissed it. Not a pecking kiss; he rested his lips against the top of her hand and kissed it repeatedly, softly. Skuld felt her heart melting as he took her hand between both of his and held it tightly...and looked right into her Soul.

Words weren't enough to express how much joy Skuld felt as she slid off the bed and into his arms...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

I had to extend my stay here an additional fifteen months after Belldandy had her son, because Skuld and Tomohisa just couldn't get their eggs and sperms in one place long enough to make a baby.

It was a running joke in the household for months. Belldandy and Urd roundly teased Skuld, saying that she was only pretending to be trying to have a baby with Tomohisa, while in reality she wasn't doing 'the act'. Meanwhile, Keiichi and Genji kept pestering Tomohisa about "technique", "masculinity" and "condoms", much to his irritation. Even more funny was Skuld's accusations that Tomohisa was deliberately prolonging the process of conception because he enjoyed making love with her too much...or because he knew how much she loved being with him.

So roughly three years after I arrived in Trondheim, Norway, Skuld found out that she was going to have a baby. Like both her sisters, she decided to wait it out, rather than find out what the gender of her child would be. But nature had other plans for Skuld, as she learned that she was going to have twins.

Belldandy and Urd were ecstatic that their little sister was going to have _twins_! They pampered Skuld as best they could, to the point where Skuld finally had to surrender and just let the overdose of sisterly affection run its course.

Genji and Keiichi were quick to seize amusement upon the fact that supporting a wife and two kids would prolong Tomohisa's repayment efforts for the engagement ring he had picked out for Skuld. Actually, it was no big deal, because Belldandy had more than enough money in the bank...but the two brothers often got a kick out of shining Tomohisa on, dunning him and threatening to charge interest on his loan for the gold and diamond ring on Skuld's finger.

Not to mention the wedding band that accompanied it.

On Christmas Day, 2010, Urd burst out of the maternity ward to inform Keiichi, Genji and I that Skuld had given birth to a boy and a girl. True to his promise, Tomohisa was in delivery room holding her hand for the entire duration of her labor, from start to finish. When he came out of the delivery room, he was the happiest tearful basket-case that I had ever seen. Flushed with exhaustion when we were finally allowed to visit her, Skuld told us that she and Genji had named their son Pryzm and their daughter Ulfryn.

Now the circle was complete.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Keiichi, Genji, Tomohisa, Megumi and Sayoko...Urd, Belldandy, Skuld and Mara...and their children were all standing in Tomohisa's "Spaceroom", the term we had coined long ago for the huge computer room annex that adjoined his regular lab room. Their sad expressions were doubtlessly mirrored in my face, as I was barely able to maintain my composure.

It was time to say goodbye.

I wordlessly hugged each one of them, kissing each of the sisters and their children...because I couldn't do anything more. Any homilies of gratitude on my part would fall far short of the feelings that swelled in my heart as I considered the three years I had shared with this family of Gods and mortals. All I could tell them was that they would be ever in my heart, because I would be forever in theirs.

During the past 18 months, Keiichi, Genji, Tomohisa and Sayoko had worked tirelessly to enhance his "time machine", using their distinctly disparate skills in alchemistry, chronometrics, magictech and Demonic insight to redesign the time chamber with a new purpose. In theory, this new spherical chamber would serve as a "Metanative Dimension energy condenser". In actuality, the essence of its function would be the equivalent of a "divine fuel injection". It was understood that anything they could do to increase the possibility that I could defeat Isilblius...was an investment of effort towards the chance that Tengoku and Jigoku could be restored.

If it worked, it would directly tap out all the Metanative energy in this TimeStream all at once...and I would emerge from this TimeStream _billions_ of times more powerful.

If it didn't...there would be nothing. We all knew what would happen. If Isilblius defeated me, then all of reality in their TimeStream would blink out within seconds of my departure. If I accomplished my task to defeat Isilblius and undo everything he did, it would be evident within five to ten seconds for them. It might take me forever to do it, but I promised in my heart that I _would_ do it, because I now had even more at stake.

I blessed them with the traditional Tibetan and Christian prayer gestures, climbed into the sphere, settled into the energymatrix and sealed myself. Tomohisa's holographic computers immediately turned into fluidity as they sensed my presence. I almost wanted to open the door back up and climb back out and rejoin my friends. They had given me back myself, so that I could attempt to give back what had been destroyed.

But Balance demanded, in its cold logic, that I couldn't. If I remained here, then the destruction of the Everything was assured.

Isilblius awaited.

I started distributing my energies into all nine dimensions, extending my senses into the various realms of Space and Time, flexing my being against the moment.

I powered it up...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --


	59. Pt 59: A Question of Balance

**Part 59: A Question of Balance**

When I emerged into what was once the TimeWeb, the sphere and its holophotic components slowly dissolved around me. Just by the process of bringing me here, Tomohisa's Temporal Displacement and Metanative Condenser sphere had achieved a miraculous feat. No longer attached to a physical body or manifest, I could feel the unleashed benediction of the "BirthStream" flowing through my being...a whiteness fully embraced in the blackest of black, illuminating confidences as they gathered unbridled within me. Keiichi, Genji and Tomohisa had succeeded beyond their wildest expectations; the Metanative energy collector had empowered me with an unimaginable amount of divine energy, far more than the "billions of times more" that they had expected. I knew that they had literally put it all on the line: by draining all of the Metanative energy of their TimeStream and channeling it into me, their 'reality' would collapse in a matter of minutes. An acceptable risk in the face of their TimeStream surviving only a few seconds should Isilblius defeat me. I also felt a heart-fire flaring alongside that energy, guiding it and sheltering it. The experience of the emotional tableaux of Urd, Belldandy and Skuld all having babies...had resounded me with purposeful intent.

I could feel the Ultimate Force and knew that the three sisters had widened my heart with their love, so that I was now intimately bonded with the UF like I had never been before. Goddess Belldandy's words of "Love _is_ hope" had blossomed into actuality by the caring family in Trondheim who had taken me in and loved me like a brother.

Experiencing a sensation of being uplifted with life; more vibrant than I had ever dreamed possible since I was released from my "death" at the hands of Isilblius, I thanked the Ultimate Force for choosing me to attempt to restore Balance. The powers that were awakening within me were radiating an incredible amount of force on all dimensions of existence. The only analogy that I could draw upon to describe what had happened to me...was as if I had been transformed from a grain of sand into a sun.

Promising myself that if I was able to accomplish the task, I would return myself to them as I had done with Megumi in the "BattleStream" TimeStream.

I opened myself up, submerging my will to the flow of the forces in my being. Relaxing my resistance and expanding my awareness.

But not for long.

In the midst of the burnt-out vacant section of the Everything, a shadow relic of its former glory, I could feel the despair my spirit would have to struggle against. Isilblius had literally sucked all of the life from it, leaving Yggdrasil and Vanagdrasil as empty, skeletal husks. Where once thrived untold civilizations and awe-inspiring natural beauties, there was no life at all. The Mid-Light Realm was a dark spheroid, its luminosity and energy drained away by Isilblius.

I was a glow against the emptiness, conspicuous in the midst of absence.

Sure enough, Isilblius was quick to take notice of my return to the TimeWeb. Almost immediately, he appeared to confront me.

I regarded Isilblius, his brutal form framed by the myriad blackened stringshapes of the TimeStream clusters. I clothed my soul with confidence and conviction to prepare for the upcoming combat between us. I expected the struggle to take place in every imaginable battlefield. Time. Space. Vanagdrasil. Soul. Mind. Yggdrasil. Emotion. Spirit. Emotion. Passion. The Instrumentality of Light. Perfection. Chaos.

Every aspect of the Everything...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

I had struggled with him for over six hundred billion years. A long time...but time enough to learn that I hated this Ultimate "Demon" with every iota of my being.

Isilblius was the foul expression of the Ultimate Anti-Force; a being who wanted to completely undo all reality and recast it as Death, so that he could be the absolute ruler of the Everything. Everything would be a part of him because nothing would be alive.

He basically wanted to destroy the Ultimate Force.

"«_Good...good! Your strength shifts to raw hatred, making you exactly like me!_»" he gloated in centuries-long thoughtcasts. I chuckled at his observation, clearly intended to make me recoil in self-disgust. Simple emotional verification.

_"«__No, I'm not like you at all. You are driven by Evil...and I am driven by Vengeance!_»" I corrected him tersely.

_"«__As am I. I want to destroy everything, because it is faulty...because it is _–weak-_! The faultiness of your sentimental reality arms my vengeance, driving me to hate all that you stand for. All of your imperfections, all of your goodness, all of your feeble attempts at evil and corruption, all of your noble efforts to attain wisdom and morality. These are the very attributes that forge enmity in my heart...directing the potency of my rage towards revenge! I want all reality...to be _–me-_! To worship me as only I could worship myself!_»"

I had never felt so bitter, so angry, as I felt when I sensed Isilblius. He had forced himself into every empirical sensation that I could possibly encounter, filling me with his nullity, insanity, and evil. I wanted to kill him, to torture him like he had tortured Urd, to disperse him into a trillion atoms strewn across a trillion TimeStreams.

I wanted him to feel agony...

"_«My vengeance is not yours, Isilblius. My vengeance is _-justice-_ ! A revenge that flows much stronger, because it arises out of the loss of Love! All that was the reality which you destroyed...was forged by the most epic of romances, the deepest visions of passion, the most sublime of the Soul's poetry. It exists because everyone you murdered, _-loved-_!! You stole Love from me...you stole Love from everyone I love...you stole Love from every living thing! You deceived everyone and everything, including yourself. You treasured a belief that your heinous actions would render the Ultimate Force harmless. Instead, the Ultimate Force has brought me here as proof of the depths of your folly. You will be accorded the consequences for your hateful works; and it will be distasteful in the extreme for you. Belldandy may have forgiven you with her last breath, but Balance will show no such forgiveness for you._»"

Isilblius looked at me with a moment's hesitation before his hatred returned. I could see the briefest hint of the withdrawal that accompanies fear, a glazing reservation in the aura of his life's energies. The first sign of inconfidence that he had ever displayed.

The more enraged I got, the more fearful he became. Until now, he had been pressing the offensive with maniacal abandon, attacking me, attacking TimeSpace, trying to drive me insane from the inside out. His efforts had made my Soul into a battlefield, fragmenting my existence in an attempt to undo my awareness of my own "being-in-beingness". Now, he was showing signs of a passive defense. It had taken several hundred billion years to let Isilblius know that he is not omnipotent.

An impossible plan formed in my mind.

I would have to become more evil than Isilblius. By cultivating my hatethirst into a fevered petulance in the furnace of my Soul, I could become utterly malignant with transfigured evil...which would then thrust him into the 'good' side of the equation.

Good vs. Evil.

By being on the "Evil" side of the balance, I would put Isilblius firmly in moral and behavioral grounds that he would be ill-equipped to function in. Since he was the Ultimate Anti-Force, it was my firm belief that Isilblius would become paralyzed in this situation. If he were rendered an unwilling participant who was the 'lesser of two evils', perhaps I would be allowed to deal with him once and for all.

I would become an Evil that would terrify even Isilblius.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Over the years, one of the ways I practiced meditation was to count breaths. Eventually, the counting became so automatic that I didn't actually pay heed to the fact that I was counting my breaths. So the question arose: was I counting breaths during the times I was unaware that I was counting? I struggled with this koan-like thought for a year or two, and then I tried to do something even more esoteric. Instead of focusing on whether or not the unnoticed was cognizable, I attempted to create a state of meditation where the cognizable...would become unnoticed. In other words, I would mindfully count breaths, but step outside of the counting process. Then, I worked hard at regressing out of the infinitude of objective abstractions, so that I wouldn't be caught in a loop; a trap of creating thought abstractions of meditators observing meditators counting breaths, ad infinitum. I would 'think' I was counting my breaths. But in actuality, I 'unthought' any awareness of anything I was doing or thinking.

A very holy man, Mahatma Gandhi, had used this very same principle of non-resistance to win freedom for his people from one of the most powerful colonial empires in history. To the simple-minded, his non-resistance was that cause of the British leaving India. But in truth, it was one of the most powerful aggressive stances ever enacted in the history of humankind. The non-resistance I hoped to attempt would render my mind non-existent to Isilblius. His efforts to destroy me would fall upon an emptiness of thought and motive; he would be like a sumo wrestler whose opponent was thin air itself.

With this technique, magnified on a tremendous scale by the metallect and seemingly infinite resources of energy the Ultimate Force had favored me with...I was able to finally eject Isilblius out of my mind. I was no longer mindful of the thoughts forming in my mind; rendering Isilblius incapable of _being there_ alongside the intelligible processes of my self-awareness.

I denied him me.

By doing so, I made myself invulnerable to his aggressions. Thwarted, his aggressions turned inwards, fashioning his experiences towards an accumulation of frustration and fear.

Initially, I concentrated on terrorizing him, with only limited success. Eventually, a psychological strategy to overwhelm him became apparent to me, and I designed my efforts towards it. Isilblius had a _history_; he wasn't co-existent with the Everything at the beginning of Time. He had been exiled by the two Lords in the distant past, and had been recreated in this era to wreak his havoc. Therein was the index of possibilities: I might be able to shatter his will by using the first being he had ever come in contact with.

Mara.

I became the Mara of his nightmares, slicing through his mental defenses like a hot knife tearing through soft tofu. Stripped of his sense of security, he was finally vulnerable to the point where he could experience _fear_. It is said that the most horrible death a person can experience is to be terrified to the point where life itself flees from them.

I wanted to do this to Isilblius.

He was capable of creating terror and evil, but he was incapable of handling the pain he had inflicted being reflected back at him. Assuming the guise of Mara, I punished Isilblius for all the harm he had caused. He begged for mercy...and I wouldn't relent. I exposed him to best approximation I could create of the death cries of all the beings he had slaughtered. This terrified him to the brink of disorientation, and I took advantage of the opportunity to shut him away in a de-energized zone of the Mid-Light, leaving him 'alone in the dark' for over a trillion years. A trillion years with no contact with any being.

He groveled and screamed out for mercy when I released him. If he would have had a human form, he would have been crying at my feet. And I still wouldn't relent.

Over the course of my contestation with Isilblius, the Mid-Light DeathRealm was gradually being restored to its former brilliance of light and energy with each abortive effort he had made to destroy me. With the release of offensive firepower, each attack of his that I was able to blunt was stripped of its malign intent; leaving only the 'pure' energy he had stolen from the Mid-Light...the DeathRealm. The nebulous glows of discharged light were then reassimilated back where they belonged. In the midst of our contention, the Ultimate Force was exacting Balance.

Realizing the full extent of his defeat and the re-existence of an active Realm of Death, Isilblius tried to kill himself. But at the point of death, when he should have traveled from the Living Realm to the Instrumentality of Light, I forced him to live, denying him access to the Other Side where the DeathRealm of the Reaper existed. I denied him the release of Death.

Because I wouldn't relent.

His mind blurred into insanity...and I contoured his insanity into a supersanity. Amplifing his confusion and incoherence into itself, so that he would experience the full intensity of the screaming shredding of his own ego identity.

Because I couldn't relent.

I couldn't stop hating him...

And somewhere along the way, I passed beyond the point where I couldn't stop hating myself...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

The hate had almost overrun me. For a moment, I was so lost in hate...that I became Hate. In the process of torturing him for many quantums of Time, I burned away any goodness in my Soul. Yet, because of the ring of fire that circled my heart, the passage of immense chronologies only seemed like a few seconds.

I hated everything, especially the fact that Isilblius had been created. He had been created out of the death throes of uncounted sentient beings by a Demoness who was grasping at some means to vindicate herself against her constancy of failures.

To defeat him, I had to lose myself. The 'me' that existed all those eons ago had been utterly annihilated. The person who had traveled to Japan, fell in love with a Goddess, wrote a treatise on consciousness, listened to and composed music, learned and loved and laughed...no longer existed. That lifetime was like a single atom immersed in the energies of a thousand novae.

30 years in one TimeStream vs. 30 trillion years in the entire TimeWeb of TimeStreams.

What had I become?

The hatred inside of Isilblius had migrated from him to me.

It was daunting, even frightening...but I had to consider the possibility that it wasn't Isilblius that had rampaged and nearly destroyed everything. It may have been something else, a 'spirit' within him possessed of a vicious intent, horrible cruelty, and supremely sublime cunning.

Despite the power of my hatred, a slight thread of sanity still lingered inside of me. It was a life raft...fragile, but enough to hang on to before I was sucked into the abyss of my own rage. As I plumbed the depths of his mind, seeking new ways to terrify him, I kept encountering an image of Belldandy. Isilblius was killing her, and she was stubbornly hanging on to life. Despite all that Isilblius had done, Belldandy had said three words to him in the far distances of the Past...

_"I forgive you."_

Those three words puzzled me, plagued me, haunted me...

I knew the old story so well. Isilblius had killed everyone that was dear to Belldandy; he had murdered her hopes and dreams. As he was draining the lifeforce from her, she had resisted him...with forgiveness.

The motif...the archetype...the total press of kindness standing in isolated dignity against all that was evil in Isilblius.

The single spark of light that illuminated the cavernous darkness of what I had become, allowing me to see that I had perverted everything that I stood for. I had betrayed the gifts that I had been blessed with.

And if I didn't heed her words, I would be betraying Belldandy...

...and Urd...

...and every other being of light and dark, mortality and immortality that I had ever encountered all those trillions of years ago.

I had taken this conflict to the limits of infinity, and then flaunted my righteousness and extended it beyond the beyondness of TimeSpace.

Until finally, I learned that Belldandy's words were for _me _just as much as they were for Isilblius!

By doing so, Belldandy had unwittingly place a clue in his mind...a clue that I would stumble on during the course of my efforts to harm Isilblius dearly for all that he had destroyed. Her words represented the highest good, the balance against utter Evil.

Love is found everywhere, even in situations rendered desperate against the deepest hate.

The very first thing I saw when I was 'resurrected' by the Ultimate Force was Urd; the forests of green luminescence in her eyes were hued pale and dark with a glaze of lifelessness. Eyes that had once been brilliant with frivolity and awareness. Now empty; the life murdered out of her by Isilblius. But still they had communicated a profound message that I had buried underneath hate and hurt from that moment on. A death-poem message that I would have never noticed, that would have meant nothing to me...except for the reality that Urd had _loved me with all of her heart_ at that moment in time.

_Don't..give..up..on..Love..no..matter..what!_

In the beginning of this conflict, Belldandy's love had activated me, and Urd's love had energized me. The Ultimate Force had accepted me as it's agent of Balance, and I had stupidly usurped the UF's intent with utter selfishness. But no more would I do so. I knew intuitively that if I maintained a heart filled with hate, I would not be able to accomplish the more difficult task ahead of me.

I felt like a crystal exposed to the sunlight, I was so inspired by Belldandy's words and Urd's love. With all the strength I possessed, I pictured my Soul as a sphere, and then I pulled it out of the enveloping cloud of hatred, to a place where it would be safe...deep within my kokoro. I felt spent, as the battle against myself had been far more taxing than all the struggles against Isilblius combined. An inflow of energy eased me out of my exhaustion, as if the UF had acclaimed my efforts with its approval.

Reflecting on all that had transpired, I became attuned to the idea that Isilblius wasn't at fault who or what he was. Isilblius had been created with only one purpose to his being...to be the Ultimate Anti-Force. I had to _love_ him, despite the fact that he was the absolute essence of everything that could snuff out hope.

Her words had awakened me with Love; and Urd's lifeless eyes had sealed Love as a Truth.

I stopped punishing Isilblius. Almost immediately, the last vestiges of hatred that had found lodging in my Soul fled from me.

Drawing him to me, allowing my Soul to surround his Evil with my Balance. It took an incredible passage of Time...but I couldn't just kill him...blotting him out of existence. He struggled mightily against me, against the kindness I was surrounding him with, while I considered what to do next.

Reaching a decision, I created a place for him. Not for his Evil, but for Isilblius to be an Ultimate Anti-Force...in an Ultimate Demon's daydream of an anti-Everything universe. Which to him, would be a paradise.

His essence blended into my Soul as the lives of all the nanites which formed his body were released...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

I placed Isilblius in a new NonTime zone of my creating, concealing it in the interstitial spaces between the TimeStreams. He would be safe there, because he would never be able to enter TimeSpace again. Without the accumulated Evil created by the deaths of the nanites, he would no longer be deadly.

Never again.

Weary from my efforts, I realized that I faced the daunting task of reconstructing reality. But first, I had to learn every potential aspect of reality in all nine dimensions. I had to plot every possible course in Time that every subatomic particle could travel. And that was just the essentiality, just the physicality of the building blocks of the Multiverses. Expanding the scope of my vision and my powers, I emerged into an awareness that the bundles of TimeStreams were actually concentric coils...without beginning or end.

So I located the beginning and the ends of all the TimeStreams. Releasing myself beyond myself, I connected them, so that the Web of TimeStreams was now comprised of circular infinite loops. Without beginning or end...but _different_ than before.

EveryWhere into EveryTime.

The TimeWeb was now a perfect globe, its surface filamented with infinite strands of TimeStreams.

With Time in Balance, I turned my attention to the Everything. To 'fix' the Everything and restore Yggdrasil and Vanagdrasil to their former glories, I needed to create a new kind of bridge between Time and Space. Since Time was now a loop, I used Time as a 'seam' in the fabric of Space.

With the aid of the Ultimate Force, the seam would erase everything that Isilblius had done.

When I finished, I sensed that my seemingly infinite wellspring of energy was almost depleted. Once I had restored the TimeStreams to create a TimeSphere, the concentrated Metanative energies that were 'loaned' to me by my dear companions in Trondheim in the "Birthstream" had coursed back into that TimeStream.

In order to undo the damage of the TimeStream that I lived in, I knew that I would have to remove myself from that TimeStream. Yet, this presented a quantum conundrum of sorts...if I never existed, I would never exist to put an end to Isilblius' predations on the Earthrealm and the Everything.

If I removed myself to the Instrumentality...the Mid-Light zone of the Reaper...then I could undo all the global damages, the nuclear attacks, the flooding. By being in the DeathRealm, I was no longer alive; which placed me totally out of the loop as far as "reality" was concerned. I could effect these final changes without tapping into the paradox box.

But I also had placed myself in a dangerous situation, because once I had stepped outside of 'living portion' of the Everything by seeking shelter in the Mid-Light, I was at risk to be stranded there. Which would be the same as dying the Real Death.

I repaired the final damages to the last remaining TimeStream, the locus of Time that I called home. Soon, I would be reunited with my friends...with Urd. With waning abilities, I restarted the flow of Time in the TimeStream.

Yet, with each gain, I was haunted by the realization that the closer I got to completing my task, the less energy I had to avail to.

With the Earthrealm in sight, I nullified Isilblius's torturing of my homeworld. The oceans receded, the polar ice caps restored, the landscape of the continents returned to their healthy state. Death was undone; every being that had been wantonly killed by that horrible sequence of events was restored to life.

This was no different from what I had done on a much broader scale to restore the Everything. Now, everything was different, because I finally was confronted with the undeniable fact that I wouldn't make it.

I had sensed that I was dying, but now I knew for certain that I would not survive this. I would die, for real. The Ultimate Force was the agent of Balance, and in its cold method of creating symmetry, the UF required life restored to be counterpoised with life released. The Boy who was the Reaper was at my side, kindly encouraging me to let go of my labors...

Drawing near to the moment in SpaceTime, the where and when of my departure, the moment that Isilblius had splintered our lives. Around the compass of my being orbited the lives of Belldandy, Keiichi, Megumi and the rest. By this time, I was certain that I wouldn't survive the process of bringing Balance to the structure of the Everything, but I had to try to see if I could return myself to the living things within.

I tried to enter my own corpse...and was rebuffed. A single breath separated me from those I cared about; the life I could have led if Isilblius had been thwarted at the start. I would never know if Urd and I grew closer in love, if Keiichi and Belldandy got married, if Megumi and Genji won the Le Mans, if Skuld had her fondest wish and was able to grow up faster and no longer feel trapped by childhood.

Wishes...

Even closer, a tree near the temple had colored papers suspended from its branches by silken strings. Each paper had a poem and a wish written on it. The wishes Belldandy had asked each of us write out and hang from the cherry tree. Urd, who had participated in the commerce of hope just a single time, bringing me to Japan on a fluke wish assignment, and then fulfilling the wish for love that I held in my deepmost heart. For them, I would try to fulfill the spirit of each of their heartfelt wishes...

After all, the most epic scale of action only amounts to the granting of a single wish.

Belldandy and Urd had taught me this through their words and actions.

The Little Boy who was Death smiled at me, recognizing that I had completed the course of my life. I touched him gently on the forehead and he went away.

"Urd...everybody, I love you. Please treasure each other and your lives," I said to the void as the last sensation of being coursed out of me, leaving the pressure of Void as my only sensation.

A pressure that seemed to crush my chest...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Belldandy watched as the silent wind gathered next to the temple. She had seen it all, every horrifying moment. Her home had become a charnel ground as everyone she knew had been murdered by Isilblius. Keiichi...Urd and Skuld...Everyone...Keiichi. The lovely temple home that she and Keiichi had created out of their love was gone, instantly obliterated as the ocean inundated it. Her SoulMate had been killed by Isilblius just a few moments ago, and she was floating on the surface of an angry, toiling sea; the Moon looming large in the sky. The Ultimate Demon was strangling her and she was certain of her own death. With her last span of life, she offered her forgiveness to him. The Horrible may have won the day, but Love would have the last word of it. Already feeling like she was missing half of her Soul when Keiichi and her sisters were slain, she floated on the waves with a detached, disconstituted awareness of grief. She was so numb to her heart and Soul, she simply assumed that she was dead, but then Isilblius had vanished...

With an audible cascade of jarring noise that reminded her of a planet breaking up, the ocean disappeared in a flash...and she found herself _here_!

The first thing she sensed was the bark of the 'infamous cherry tree' digging slightly into her back, right where she had been when Isilblius was draining her of Divine energy. Nearby, the bodies of her sisters and her beloved Keiichi were scattered over the yard like rocks in a meadow.

Keiichi slowly rolled over on his back and sighed, holding his arms to his chest.

"OH MY LORD, HE'S _ALIVE_!!" her mind shouted in the bliss of the deepest gratitude she had ever felt. Keiichi looked like he had awakened from a sound sleep. Urd and Peorth and Megumi and Tomohisa...they were all here, stirring to life just like her beloved Keiichi. Even Mara was here...

"KEIICHI!" she yelled joyfully as she ran to his side, knelt down next to him, and embraced him. Her most wonderful mortal boyfriend was alive, unscathed, miraculously _awake and uninjured_!! He pulled her tight against him, and she could feel his heart beating in his chest, a slight rhythmic thumping that passed into her physical being as she held him close to her breast. Her heart was beating steadily alongside his...

...creating a symphony of love...touching each other...all the colors and sounds and sights and smells...drifted like clouds of smoke inside of her.

Everyone was here. The entire Earthrealm was here, the voice of the planet and all its living inhabitants resounding all around her. The entire TimeStream was intact, the TimeWeb again threaded tightly within her. A familiar tingle of energy filled her, the ever-present 'touch' of Yggdrasil!

Urd and Peorth were running towards her and Keiichi, their hair disheveled and their clothes ripped. Peorth's long lash of hair that she kept tied in back had been blow apart, fanning over her shoulders and down her back. Urd's face was half hidden in her hair, and Belldandy noticed that her own hair was kissing her face in all the wrong places. With a shared khatru of joy, she and Keiichi opened their embrace to the two Goddesses, gathering their flow of love...and her happiness was magnified even more.

Then she saw the Lord...and the Dark Lord. Her joy was sobered by the reality that they had both suffered that same fate as everyone she loved. Isilblius had deceived them into attacking and killing each other. Belldandy had witnessed the Almighty, whom she and every God knew was immemorial and immortal, die. She intuitively knew that the only other being in the all the Multiverses that could kill him was the Dark Lord of the Demon's Realm. She recalled that final combat, the two Lords _fighting together as a team_! Even now, they held their swords of energy at the ready, willing to protect she and her family again if needed.

As she and Keiichi held each other, Belldandy remembered what happened right before the Almighty attacked Isilblius. He had witnessed all the accumulated outrages; the deaths of all the Gods save those on the Earthrealm, the total destruction of Yggdrasil. But when Isilblius attacked and murdered Keiichi; He had yelled "How dare you!" and then hastened to do combat with the Ultimate Demon. She squeezed ever tighter against Keiichi, feeling an awe of reverence for the August One. The life of a single mortal was so precious to Him that when He saw it taken away, he was completely outraged. He had died defending her sisters and her...

He truly was the Lord...the Almighty Being and Father who loved all of His children, be they Divine or mortal!

Keiichi's life had been precious to Him, His example to remind her of how precious her SoulMate was to her. Even now, He and the Dark Lord were standing in front of a pyre with a body on it, to do honor to a God or Demon who had fallen and experienced the Real Death.

"Whose?" she asked herself, briefly turning her attention away from Keiichi and Urd. When she recognized whose body it was, she shuddered with dismay and incomprehension. Could it be that her friend was actually dead?

She realized that the smile on her face must have flickered only for a moment as she saw the sight, because Urd had seen the pause in her expression of joy. As Urd tried to turn her head to see what Belldandy was looking at, Belldandy quickly reached up and held Urd's head still so that she couldn't look towards the pyre.

"Urd! Please listen to me! Whatever you do, _don't turn your head_. Please just look at me..." she pleaded with her older sister. Urd regarded her quizzically, her light green eyes questioning Belldandy's physical restraint.

"What's wrong?" Peorth asked innocently.

Belldandy saw that the Lord had a blue sword with a flame on its end, while the Dark Lord grasped a red spear with a light on the end.

They were going in immolate him!

It would be over in a moment. Urd's back was to the pyre, and Belldandy fought to keep her composure, an unwilling witness to this funereal rite. Anything but this! She instantly reviewed Cevn's brief year at her and Keiichi's temple home, and how he had returned an impossible love for her older sister. As much as she wanted to tell her sister who was on the bier, she felt even more strongly that this was something that her sister definitely should never be allowed to see. Urd had already suffered enough pain by being stranded out of a SoulMate love by her role as Norn of the Past.

She gripped her sister even more tightly.

"Something saved us. I remember the Ultimate Demon, Isilblius, trying to kill us. But we didn't die, did we?" We're still here, at our home," Urd observed somberly as Mara joined their group, a look of bitter sadness...and repentance...on her face. Belldandy had never seen such pain in the face of her Demoness counterpart. Mara's burden would be the heaviest of all; and it would be the most difficult to let go of...

"What are you doing to Cevn?" Keiichi abruptly shouted.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Keiichi remembered dying at the hands of Isilblius. Or at least he felt like he had died; he couldn't remember anything more after he screamed at a grotesque Demon who was killing his friends. But then, he couldn't have died...he was back here. Fuzzy moments of terror...a totally badass Demon, the death of Mara...everything scooped in black as miles of ocean suddenly covered their temple home...

He was alive. Belldandy was alive. Everything mattered, but seeing Bell-chan and knowing that he would be holding her in his arms mattered just a little bit more.

"We made it!" he thought as Bell-chan rushed over to his side. She gathered him in her arms...and then he gathered the love of his life in _his _arms, breathing kisses into her breath Sharing the strength of his gratitude for her being part of his life.

Then he saw Bell's two sisters...

The moment belonged to the Three Norns. Just as it should by all rights belong to them. None of this would exist if they weren't alive to unify the passage of time. Bell and her sisters, the fusion of loving natures that formed the Trinity of Time. Past, Present and Future.

But none of these words included Now. In this Now, Keiichi was filled with ecstatic joy at being reunited with his divine girlfriend. Belldandy was his everything...yet something was missing.

He sensed a seeming change among the Three Norns, a subtle difference that seemed very strange but yet just barely outside of the grasp of his thoughts. The planet was obviously healed, the temple grounds looked untouched, birds were chattering apace with the breeze whisking through the trees. Glancing in the direction of the temple, Keiichi gasped as he saw a pile of something resembling crystals...with a body resting on top of it.

Someone he knew...

Someone who had died. Despite the ambrosial joy he felt with Belldandy in his arms, he couldn't believe what he saw. _Who_ he saw. The arrangement of the pyre left no doubt to its cinerary purpose. Without a moment's thought, Keiichi gasped out a name.

Almost immediately, he regretted that he had blurted out loud whose body it was.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Urd felt her world becoming whole; having filled the skies and feasted upon the richest treasures of joy. Belldandy had grabbed her, holding her head so she couldn't look around. Could the Ultimate Demon have returned? Her Goddess senses informed her that the Lord was nearby, His powerful aura as clear as the sky above. Her thoughts briefly interrupted by a shout, she turned away from Belldandy just for a moment. What she saw crushed her, draining her of belief. The giddy happiness she was feeling flowed out of her as surely as water evaporating in a desert furnace heat.

"CEVN!" she screamed in recognition and disbelief. This wasn't happening, this couldn't be real, it wasn't his body on a pyric mound-heap of crystallites. She looked searchingly at Belldandy and Peorth; both of their faces were stricken with sadness as they shared her grief with her...bringing to the fore the worst of her fears that she didn't want to face.

"I..it can't be! I refuse to believe it! He can't be dead! It's not true! _It's not him!!_" she gasped, numbed with shock. Belldandy and Peorth's crestfallen expressions and tears confirmed that it _was_ true. Still not wanting to believe her boyfriend was laid out on a funeral pyre, Urd tried to convince herself that it was just a mix-up.

Just a cosmic prank...a freakish figment of the imagination.

She saw the Lord and the Dark Lord preparing to set the pyre aflame with divine energy...and she realized that, if _they_ were here, then the immolation was going to be an act of finality.

"WHY? Why did everyone survive...except _the one that I wanted to learn how to love_?" she gasped rawly as she fell to her knees against the cool, good earth. Urd narrowed her eyes as the flames licked up the sides of the pyre...flames of divine energy that would swiftly consume their mortal burthen...

"Let...me...go!" she screamed at Belldandy and Peorth, whose embrace of affection had turned into a physical restraint. She struggled, throwing her elbows and kicking her legs until she managed to break their grasp. Hovering in the air, she flash-floated over towards the pyre...and the two Lords.

_"Urd...desist!"_ Kami-sama commanded her, grabbing her as she tried to approach the pyre.

_"Urd...you must stop. We have ignited his Soul with Divine Metanative Fire. You will not survive if you approach any closer!"_ another being spoke in a quiet, but firm tone of voice. A voice that she had heard before...

"But he's _burning_!!" she protested with a wail of desperation.

_"Urd, My dear Child...he is already dead. Where he is...is where he should be. No pain, no loss, no fire can touch the brow of his Soul now,"_ the Lord said, trying to soothe and calm her.

"But...I _love_ him!" she stammered. Both Lords regarded her with compassionate expressions. Urd gasped as she recognized the other being. He was Oni-sama, the Dark Authority of Vanagdrasil! She looked at the Lord, then the Dark Lord...and remembered them both being destroyed by Isilblius.

"Why can't you...just bring him back! Please? I _need him in my life_! Both of You can do anything You want! So why can't You..." she pleaded, collapsing against the restraining grip of her Lord.

_"My daughter, he made a great sacrifice for the common good. I share in your tragic loss, but verily, I cannot feel the despair that plumes within the depths of your heart,"_ Oni-sama said to her. It shocked Urd to see the Dark Lord...the feared enemy of Yggdrasil...addressing her so familiarly. All her preconceptions about the Demon's Lord were revoked in the face of His very outwardly compassionate manner. Urd expected Him to take some kind of sadistic joy in her loss; instead, He was treating her with a paternal solicitude. Untrapping her confusion, Urd knew that He had every right to console her; she was half-Demon as well as half-Goddess.

But the season of her hope was gone, burning into atoms at this very moment.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Moving fast from extreme joy to extreme love to extreme sadness.

Belldandy watched Urd collapse...it was the most heart wrenching loss she had ever witnessed. The only experience that even came close were the times she had thought Keiichi was lost to her forever. Mara. The Ultimate Destruction Program. Hild. Celestine. Tyyr. Each had brought her to the brink of despair, but those were '_times_'; in each incident her beloved had been returned to her, or she had been fretting within a false sense of hopelessness. Just now, Keiichi had once again been brought back to her, literally restored from the dead along with herself and the rest of humanity. But in her heart, she knew that this wasn't a '_time_' for her sister. This was an ending.

Her older sister had been robbed by reality.

Urd had been rescued miraculously from a nightmare, only to be plunged into another nightmare. Belldandy felt helpless; there was nothing she could do, no comfort she could offer, no guiding words of wisdom to speak. Keiichi was holding her, trying to _comfort her_ because he knew full well that she was feeling what her older sister was feeling. Belldandy looked at his face, seeking an answer or assurance...only to find Keiichi just as stricken as she was. He had looked up to Cevn as an older brother, she sadly realized.

We should be _celebrating_!! Together, my sisters, Keiichi and I...all of us, laughing and jumping for joy, cherishing the precious moments of life that had been restored to us, praising whatever miracle the Ultimate Force had wrought to make our lives whole again. But instead...this," she thought bitterly.

The reasons that breathed and lived and chased and hoped and frolicked...had been stripped bare by utter tragedy.

"My sister..." she said in a tiny voice, burying her head in Keiichi's shoulder as she cried. A shriek of insane agony filled the air, causing her to jerk her head up, startling her.

Urd had somehow broken away from the Lord and the Dark Lord and was floating over the pyre, now fully aflame with arcane energies...sacred licks of fire.

"URDDDDddd!" she screamed, realizing that her sister was too close...that she would be killed instantly.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Urd didn't even think of the flames, the heat. She knew that Divine Fire consumed everything but the Soul...but she didn't care. Cremation by Divine Fire was the traditional gesture of highest respect for heroes. The Soul had already gone to the Mid-Light, so it was the memory of the loved one that received homage inside the flames.

Yet, as if to taunt her with her lost love, Cevn's mortal corpse wasn't burning as she stood next to the Ixodenum slab he was resting upon. His face was silent, a nevermore of possibilities. His eyes were open in the Yggdrasilian tradition, lifelessly regarding some invisible point in the sky above.

Urd didn't understand why Kami-sama and Oni-sama had claimed some nonsense about how her mortal boyfriend had "made a great sacrifice." He had died, and that was all there was to it. He was just a mortal with an occasional quirky expression of power. A confused being that sheltered his pain alongside his heart, lonely and fragile. Yet, despite all his faults and strengths, he had found a place in his heart and had opened himself to her. He had given her keys to a doorway into his Soul. No matter how much she told herself that she had loved him, she knew in her heart that she had loved foolishly. She had never really tried to enter that place he had prepared for her in his life. She was so close to being ready...and now she never would have the chance.

It was all so meaningless! His death had been senseless in its ignoble brevity; she had witnessed how easily the Ultimate Demon had killed him. As quickly as a light flash from a camera.

She should have burned up in a flash as well when Isilblius attacked her, but she didn't. She was there, had felt an instant of breath-stealing pain, and an instant later she was here, knowing in her Soul that _something_ had given her life back to her. But whatever forces had worked to undo all the devastation wreaked by an unleashed Ultimate Demon...had skipped over him.

At least he was in death what he was in life, clothed in his mortal frame. She had been spared the brutal sight of a burnt unrecognizable husk.

"I'm _not_ burning!" Urd realized with a start. The flames were all around her...but she was untouched. She looked at the face of her beloved, knowing that it would be the last time she would ever see him.

In the middle of his forehead was a mark, just like the Goddess marks that she and her sisters bore. But it was _two_ colors...a blue circle with a red diamond square inside.

The colors of a God and a Demon.

The two Lords, in Their capacity as Sovereigns, had granted her a moment of mercy to say her farewell, protecting her by Their seals on her beloved's forehead.

"Goodbye, my love," Urd said softly, reaching into the fire, reaching her arms around him and resting her head on his chest. Even knowing she was protected from harm, it didn't make a difference now whether or not the Divine fire burned her into ashes along with her beloved.

In this moment, the entire substance of every pulse of her heart...everything that Urd held bounteous and beautiful...was here. She recognized in her heart that _this_ was how Belldandy had loved Keiichi all these years on the Earthrealm.

It was just she and he...just like it had been once before. Just like it should have been, before Isilblius came and ruined everything. She cried softly, watching the Lord and the Dark Lord observe her with saddened expressions.

"Why?! Now that it's too late, now that my Cevn is dead, the damned Ultimate Force isn't preventing me from touching him," she cried out her words, bitter and resentful towards a reality that had denied her once again.

"I HATE THE FUCKING ULTIMATE FORCE!" she screamed before she collapsed.

She felt the flames hug her like a pair of arms gently circling her shoulders.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

I saw a bright light...the pressure on my chest bursting me to death...but the light seemed to seek me instead...and the pressure eased by degrees...as the light turned light blue...I felt as myself breathing again...and then I saw wispy cloudforms hovering above me...

I was lying on my back. Bands of some kind of red and blue sparks were encircling me. I sensed flames surrounding me as I lifted my head up slightly. I saw a thick tangle of light falling on my chest. My eyes gazed onwards...

Onwards...

Onto Urd.

I saw her head resting on my chest and I realized that I must either be in heaven...or that I was _alive_! Maybe I had been reborn to experience that most special of moments...a moment with the Goddess that had fully touched my being with love.

It was Beijing all over again.

All that had transpired between Urd and I...and now, it was just Urd and I. Death had greeted me with the person I loved the most. Perhaps this was the Reaper's gesture of gratitude for restoring his DeathRealm to him.

I folded my arms around her, holding her, comforting her as I had wanted to comfort her in 30 trillion years of dreamscenes. Through all of it, even when I lost my heart to hate...she was always there.

She looked up down at me, surprise figuring her tear streaked face. Once more, I found myself lost in the gardens of emerald jewels that sparkled in her eyes...

My heart roared inwards into a harpsong of passion as I _knew_ that this wasn't the Afterlife.

_This was __real__!_

In spite of giving everything I was in order to bring restoration to bear against the destruction that Isilblius has wreaked...I was alive! Perhaps Balance was not done with me yet. But it was more than that...

_My death had been balanced against Urd's life_. The Ultimate Force had been with me the entire time as I returned the Everything back to life...and it still was with me. To achieve Balance, it had to bring me back, otherwise Urd would have died. Two deaths do not create a Balance. The intensity of Urd's love had pulled me out the Mid-Light and back to here. Just like I had pulled her out of the canal at the Summer Palace in Beijing and had brought her back to life...and love.

The only words I could utter were of a weak smile at her...this Goddess who had captured my heart in order to set it free...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Cevn..." Urd gasped, her mind flighted with shock. He was _holding her_! He was alive; the Divine flames could cast no harm upon him. Her Soul blossomed, foresting her being into pure light, pure Love.

"Urd, I love you so much..." he told her in a voice thinned with exhaustion.

In a flash, World of Elegance emerged to be with her. Her Angel-Devil was so overjoyed, she couldn't announce her presence with her wondrous singing voice, singing the heartsong that only her Goddess-twin could hear. For World of Elegance was sobbing, her white and black wings shuddering.

"H..how?" she asked. "You _died_! I saw Isilblius kill you! I saw you here...dead! T..this can't be real! You can't be here holding me. We can't be touching...we can't be in love...the Ultimate Force won't let us..."

"My love, I _am_ the Ultimate Force. The Ultimate Force is me. The Balance sought me out, empowering me to try and create balance out of emptiness," Cevn interrupted her gently, looking deep into her eyes, searching out her doubts and dissolving them. Urd felt herself shivering from the sudden release and joy, frightened by the realization that her boyfriend might be telling her the truth...or he was incurably insane. She felt him gazing longingly into her eyes, as if he was searching out her doubts and trying to dissolve them, to assure her that the nightmare was over at last.

Could it be?

Nothing could defeat the Ultimate Demon...except the Ultimate Force. Once again, she looked deep into his soul...and found a serene humility that could only come from a heart untroubled by doubt, a mind unclouded in its embrace of the truth, a spirit exhausted beyond the point of agony, and yet resilient and purposeful.

"M..my Lord, he's alive! He came back to me!" she thought with awe and gratitude.

"«_Urd, World of Elegance, both of you whom I love...no matter how far you run away, no matter how lost you feel in your life, no matter if the most powerful forces in existence try to separate us, no matter if the weight of our doubts seem to drive irreconcilable misunderstandings between us...no matter_–what-_, when you turn to look for me...I will _–always-_be by your side. In times to come, we are going to be heartbroken, we will be separated, we will be furnaced by immense challenges that will be extremely difficult to overcome. But we'll be –_together- _even when we're apart. You're the beacon that brought me back. A summer ago, I promised you that I would be yours, Forever! You've taught me about Forever...that the only forever that matters is the forever of each moment of love we share." _she heard his voice thoughtcast in her mind.

And then he pulled her close to him and sealed her lips with an impossible kiss.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"I..don't..believe..it!" Belldandy said to Keiichi as she watched Cevn and Urd embracing. He was alive...and she could feel the leaping of her sister's heart all the way across the temple grounds. The Lord and the Dark Lord were looking at the blazing pyre with expressions of august amazement. Her sister's love aura was somewhere in the clouds; it was so intense that Belldandy sensed her heart flowing in empathy, causing her to feel like she was melting into Keiichi as he hugged her close.

"I can't believe it either! They're..snff..pretty sickening, aren't they?" Peorth whispered in her ear. Belldandy reacted with a stricken expression.

"Hey, I was just joking! I don't know, but I guess..snff..I'm kinda happy for Big Sister. It's what she wanted, I think," she heard Peorth add, her glowing face betraying the fact that she seemed secretly pleased for Urd.

"_Big sister_?" Belldandy thought, the remark catching her off-guard as she looked closely at Peorth. Granted, everybody was disoriented after what had transpired. For a moment, she thought that Skuld had switched places with Peorth in much the same manner as the time Mara's Black Orchid caused her to exchange bodies with Skuld. If Peorth and Skuld were transposed in each other's bodies, there would be chaos. But this...girlwoman...standing in front of her didn't look like either Peorth or Skuld.

Her face was rounder, she had too much hair, she wasn't dressed in one of her usual provocative outfits. Fearing the worst, she swept the hair off of Peorth's forehead and face with her fingers, and quickly recognized that Peorth didn't have the steel-purple diamond-shaped mark on her forehead. Instead, she had a deep-blue hollow plectrum-shaped mark.

Then again, this girl looked strangely familiar...

"Eeehhh??" she exclaimed, grabbing Keiichi even tighter. Who was _this_ woman? A Goddess she had never met before? Her eyes were slightly wider than Peorth's...and they weren't amber brown! They were...

"S..Skuld..?" Keiichi gasped, his breath sweet and hot against Belldandy's face.

"_What_? Why are you looking at me so strangely, Elder Sister? Who do you think I am? Mara?" she replied with irritation. Belldandy almost squeezed the breath out of Keiichi as it dawning on her that this wasn't her little sister.

Or was she?

She touched the unique strings of energy that were tied only between her sisters and she; an energy flow that existed in unique patterns of NornSpace. _This girl was definitely her little sister!!_ But she was transformed almost beyond recognition, if one was looking for a 12-year-old tween girl. She was no longer little...Skuld was almost as tall as she was! The closer Belldandy looked, the more she recognized the resemblance. Except for the jarring sense that Skuld looked like a _16-year-old Earthrealm teenage girl_!

"Y..you're _tall!_" Belldandy exclaimed with a surprised voice, and then regretted how foolish it sounded. Skuld seemed to ignore her comment; she was fully eyeglued onto Urd and Cevn. Belldandy shook her head side-to-side with quick motions, as if she was trying to shake away her amazed shock. This girl _was_ her little sister! She knew beyond a doubt that this was Skuld! She turned to look at Keiichi; his face was figured with amazement as he watched her and Skuld. She returned her attention to Skuld, looking closely at her younger sister's eyes.

Skuld appeared to have aged into a mid-teenage girl; but there was something very different in her eyes Her eyes were moist with tears; as if she had been heart-touched by the love scene that was playing itself out between Urd and Cevn. Not only was this reaction totally contrary to Skuld's tomboyish nature, it was absolutely bizarre. Her younger sis's reaction was closely paralleling her own reaction! Belldandy knew her feminine nature was being swept up with vicarious joy as her older sister was glowing with requited love. The girl, the woman, the Goddess, the romantic heart inside of Belldandy...was reacting with a smile of ardor.

"Could Skuld be feeling...romantic?" she said under her breath. Her younger sister heard her whisper and turned to face her with tears streaming down her eyes.

"So what...if I am? I'm not a kid!" she said defensively to Belldandy. Then her face shifted to the familiar expression of curiosity she got when she encountered a new mecha or had conceived a new project in her mind...and then her eyes flew open in absolute shock as she stood up...

_"You're__ shorter__!" "You're __taller__!" "You're__ shorter__!" "You're __taller__!" "You're__ shorter__!" "You're __taller__!"_

Both sisters had burst out their amazed shouts at the same moment, and were pointing fingers at each other's faces.

"S..Skuld?! Skuld-sama! Wow!! You can't believe how much you_ aren't _a kid! You're...like, you're all grown up! _Nobody _could mistake you for a kid the way you look now!" Keiichi half-gasped.

"What happened here? Skuld's almost as tall as you, Keiichi! She's almost as tall as moi! She looks at least _40,000 years_ older, if a day!" Peorth observed with an expression of utter confusion as she floated about a meter behind Skuld.

Seeing Skuld and Peorth side-by-side, Belldandy could understand why she had confused the two.

"M..my wish!" Skuld gasped, covering her mouth with a gloved hand. Belldandy noticed that even her clothes had 'grown'! In a word, Skuld was no longer just girlishly cute...she had become a young woman!

Tomohisa was staring at her, as if hypnotized...

Keiichi was staring at his cousin, then back at Skuld.

Standing off in the distance, Mara watched the whole scene unfolding among the coterie of divines and mortals...and then sat on the ground and dissolved into gales of laughter.

"I don't know what's going on here, but this will _definitely _be interesting! The little Goddess who hates mortal men...has completely captured the heart of a mortal teenager!" she remarked to herself with a snicker.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Urd seemed to forget that I was a mortal and needed to come up for air once in a while. Overhearing the shouting, I side-glanced at Skuld, and realized that my attempts at wish creation had been successful! Skuld had wished to be a few millennia older...because she was tired of being treated like a child...and she had secretly wished that she could be Tomohisa's age.

Somewhere around 165 millennia seemed about right, I thought. I had patterned her new size and stature from the Skuld of the "BirthStream" TimeStream. It sure _looked right_...Skuld was a knockout! As Skuld whirled around daintily with her arms outstretched, I sensed that now I could experience at least an approximation of the joyful feelings Belldandy must feel when she successfully grants a wish.

"Careful what you wish for, Skuld," I thought with momentary amusement...then returned my attention to what _I _had wished for. I had granted everyone's wish, but I didn't attempt to fulfill my own wish, because I knew that I was going to expire once I restored the Everything. And yet, I had survived. And the wish that had found lodging in my heart...had been granted by circumstances beyond my control! Now, it seemed that my words of warning for Skuld definitely applied to my situation as well.

I wanted to hold Urd forever, but there was a very important matter to attend to. Urd was holding me so tightly, I had to tap out just to pull away from our embrace. She looked at me with a momentary expression of hurt disappointment. I reached over and held her hand tenderly, and joked about kisses and oxygen.

I would do everything in my power to make sure this Goddess would never feel unloved by me again.

Waving my hand over the pyre, I quickly extinguished the Divine flames. Then I stepped down and walked towards the Lord and the Dark Lord, hand in hand with Urd.

"«_Urd, you granted a wish for me when we first met. I now remember what it was. My wish was to be serene...to be the Balance. To be the Axis of Serenity and Balance which provides relief for all existence!" _I thoughtcast to her privately.

"Oh my God...you really are the _Ultimate Ham_!" she teased.

"Yep! Me...a 'mere mortal' as you kept calling me when we first met," I teased back.

"That's not fair!" she protested jokingly.

"Urd-chan, it took me _327 trillion _Earthrealm years to defeat Isilblius and undo all the damage he did. He destroyed both Multiverses, the Mid-Light zone in between them, and he also shredded the TimeWeb. He murdered all the Gods and Demons of Yggdrasil and Vanagdrasil. There was hardly anything left unscathed. In concert with the Ultimate Force, I had to literally recreate the Everything from scratch."

"You're joking with me! You _have _to be joking!" she said. I shook my head "no"...and her mouth went agape with disbelief at the enormity of what the UF had tasked me to do.

"I don't expect you to understand or even believe me, although I wish you would. I am beyond feeling exhausted; and if it weren't for _someone_ recharging my heart with an over-the-top burst of passion, I'd be crashed out under the nearest tree. None of this was pleasant by any means. It's entirely possible that you didn't just recharge my heart...I think you restarted it," I appraised her in a serious voice as we stood near where the two Lords were floating.

"«_And now I have to perform another act of Balancing,_»" I thoughtcast in a pseudo-officious voice as I turned my attention to the Regents of Yggdrasil and Vanagdrasil. Urd looked at me with a curious expression.

"Respected Kami-sama and Oni-sama. For an eternity, You each have ruled Your realms while laboring under the impression that Yggdrasil and Vanagdrasil are diametrically opposed to each other. In actuality, they are both part of a much greater whole...the Everything. Thus, what appears to be an immutable opposition...is actually a complementary balancing. From this point forth, Yggdrasil and Vanagdrasil..." I explained, addressing them politely.

_"Don't presume to lecture Me, mortal! You may think that you're a unique individual. But the fact is that We somehow created this situation, perhaps through some error in judgment regarding the Ultimate Demon. The only sensible explanation is that you only _–appear-_ to have saved the Multiverse with the assistance of the Ultimate Force, for a purpose which we cannot ken. Do not let it get to your head,"_ Oni-sama confronted me.

_"Yes, young mortal! Despite Our debt of gratitude to you, you must realize your place in the scheme of things. There is no other Multiverse than Yggdrasil, and Yggdrasil exists totally distinct and independently from my brother's realm of Vanagdrasil. Technically, there is another place where Demons dwell, but its existence is only within the purview of theory. Only the Dark Lord and myself know for sure that there is a reality beyond the borders of our two realms,"_ Kami-sama added.

"Then I hope You both will allow for some changes that I've made, with the cooperation of the Ultimate Force. I have adjusted both Your Realm's computer systems. I downloaded the Demon's Language into the Yggdrasil Mainframe, and I downloaded the God's Language into the Vanagdrasil Mainframe. They now operate on merged Gods and Demon's languages. It was necessary...Isilblius had introduced virii that completely wiped clean both computer systems. The Ygg and Vang Mainframes were gone. Restructured, they now are each other's warrant of safety and stability."

The two Almighty Ones looked at me in shock. Urd was looking at me in shock as well. I knew that, from her perspective as a Sysop, what I had just described could only appear destructive beyond the pale.

_"That's simply not possible! The operating systems are..."_

"Are now operating as a tandem inter-network. Because Isilblius was able to deceive all in both Realms, there exists a need for an intercourse between the two. To this end, the Ultimate Force allowed me to create a series of Vortices which Gods and Demons may use to freely visit each other's Realms. Initially, just a few at a time...but eventually more will _want_ to visit. Your August Selves will the arbiters of who can use these Vortices; Your wisdom will guide a purposeful exchange to occur that will be mutually beneficial to both Realms. Good and Evil are attributes of Beauty...a beauty that will continue to manifest within the harmony of both Multiverses.

"All Doublet links are now dissolved. The genocidal War that Isilblius triggered was enough to convince me to take such a strong measure. The Doublet System was a fail-safe intended to prevent Gods and Demons from killing each other. When a God would die, it was assumed that their Demonic Doublet also died. In truth, this did not occur unless Gods and Demons killed each other. In such cases, their Doublet would also expire. From hereon forth, The Real Death will not be able to claim both a God and a Demon should one or the other die, for any reason. This incident had made it clear: there will be no more murdering between Gods and Demons. It is now impossible for Demons and Gods to kill one another. Peaceable contact between Yggdrasil and Vanagdrasil will...no, _must_ now arise out of a desire for such contact. Though well-intentioned, the Doublet System You created as a safety measure to prevent the total annihilation of Your realms was a fuckup, to put it bluntly. In the times to come, a new spirit of cooperation between both Realms will be essential."

"So that's why the Doublet System exists!" Peorth commented. I hadn't noticed that everyone else had formed a little circle around us while I was arguing with the two Lords.

"Yes, Peorth. Historically, among the Divines there have only been two exceptions to date for the Doublet System. Two Divine beings who are both God and Demon. One is Urd. The other will have an essential role," I replied to her observation.

_"Enough! You are divulging divine state secrets!"_the Almighty blurted indignantly, glaring at me with a resentful mien.

"So what if I am? _You_ are the ones who need to face reality, with all due respect! Kami-sama, when You suspended Skuld's Goddess License, I suggested that You need to create harmony by example, rather than disharmony by negligence. Oni-sama, You reduced Mara's License to Demoness Second Class, because You felt such an action would maintain some sort of harmony for the Demons! But I eventually came to understand that neither of You were powerful enough to create a balance on your own. That's why I created the Enigma Book."

"You created the Enigma Book?" Belldandy asked.

"Yes. From me...to me. I even included a large stash of money so that I could learn exactly how _unimportant_ money is! Green energy is essential, but not important. What's important is _this_," I observed, squeezing Urd's hand.

"Hey you guys..." Skuld shouted, vying for attention.

"Despite Their eminencity, The Lord and the Dark Lord are not powerful enough to create harmony. The Ultimate Force...is a force of Balance, in a sense. It was very clear to me that both needed some help, so I became the harmony for Them for a moment," I explained. Both Almighty Ones looked at me rather disdainfully.

"...I have _breasts!__!!_" Skuld shouted, throwing my rhythm off completely.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Skuld found herself caught up in Cevn's detailed explanations when she chance-glanced down her front.

Two medium-sized bustles about her mid-chest pushed against her trademark white jacket and red top outfit, curving it outwards with a pleasing proportion. They weren't as big as either of her older sisters...but they were _beautiful_! She was entranced by the way her jacket seemed to bend out "just so" around her new bust line.

"I've...got an actual bust line now!" she observed, surprised at how much this one physical change in her manifestation caused her being to thrill with pride!

This sudden transformation of her body into a more adult form strongly reminded Skuld of the "magical girl" stories portrayed in anime and movies. Of the many romance and adventure stories she had read in her shoujo manga anthologies, the ones with "magical girl" plots seemed to really grab her attention the most. Now, unexpectedly...she _was_ a magical girl...an older version of herself! The only thing missing was a cute small mascot and some type of triggering phrase, like "RuRuRuRu"...

"No more 'Big Sister bust checks'!!" Skuld shouted with glee, caught up in the moment of her triumph over Urd. The Lord and the Dark Lord paused, glancing at her with scowls. Belldandy and Peorth looked at her with bemusement; Mara looked at her with empathy, while Big Sister Urd turned red in the face...

And Tomohisa looked at her with a _weird_ expression on his face. Something about his expression caused Skuld to feel a squirm of embarrassment.

During the next half hour, Cevn explained that EveryTime _was_ Everything...confirming Skuld's own theories. Privately impressed with the span of her own genius, she glanced at Tomohisa.

In a flash, his eyes traveled up and down her body...and Skuld felt herself blush unexpectedly again. His actions reminded her of that brief time when she had a near-adult body, back when Keiichi created the moon rock bracelets as a temporary power supply for her and her sisters. As Norn of the Future, she was growing older, while Urd was growing younger. They had to come up with a speedy solution, or she would have kept growing old...until she became a crone. Fortunately, Kami-sama...at least she thought it was the Lord...had used the medium of a fortuneteller at a school festival to instruct Keiichi on what to do. She had accompanied him to N.I.T. just once, and managed to embarrass him somehow by holding onto his arm as they walked through the campus. She still didn't understand why Keiichi had reacted so strongly to her simple affectionate gesture...but she _did_ know why a number of the guys at Keiichi's school had stared at her with their mouths agape.

The same way Tomohisa was looking at her right now...

Cevn stepped between the Almighty and the Dark Lord and gripped each of them on the shoulder. A blue light passed into the Dark Lord, and a red light passed into the Lord. For a moment, both Lords appeared to be experiencing a mild state of trance...but then it was over as quickly as it had started.

_"My long lost brother..."_ she heard Kami-sama say to the Dark Lord.

Skuld was rigid with shock as He tearfully embraced Oni-sama, Lord of the Demons. She couldn't believe this was happening! The Lord was _here_...on the Earthrealm! Not in one of His thronerooms or palaces...but here! And His counterpart was here as well!

And They were _hugging each other_!

And she herself had the body of a grownup Goddess!

In the midst of her unbelief, Skuld couldn't believe what Belldandy said next.

"It's getting to be twilight outside...so why doesn't everybody come into our house and join us for tea and dinner?" her sister said sweetly.

Skuld snickered as Keiichi looked at her middle sister with a wide eyed, jaw dropping face fall.

"Some things never change!" Skuld thought, amazed by the fact that only her Elder Sister would deign to invite the Almighty and the Dark Lord of Vanagdrasil to dinner as if They were mere houseguests!

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"I feel like partying!" Urd shouted as she opened the wine cooler cabinet in the storeroom. Once Belldandy had decided to cook a feast, the gathering took on a celebratory air. At least Cevn wasn't expounding on how he had adjusted the Multiverse. At first, his explanations were interesting...but after a while, they were the acme of tedium!

In a nutshell...boring!

"He's babbling about fixing things...when he could be kissing me!" she thought resentfully. So she decided to fetch a bottle of the best sake in the house out of the cooler.

"Plan on serving some sake, my love?" Cevn said as he hugged her from behind. Urd almost dropped the bottle as she realized once again that he was actually touching her. She eased back against his chest.

"It's about time you paid some attention to me. And yes...just leave it to me to find something to liven the party up," she admitted, showing him the prized bottle of sake from the 14th century.

"Uh...won't that be a little port, or sour, or whatever stale sake is called in Japan?" he asked. Urd shook her head, after all, she _was_ the Goddess of the Past. Preserving the taste of a bottle of sake for a few centuries was a trifle for her.

"Good, because I hope you're not having any tonight," Cevn whispered in her ear. Urd whirled around to face him, flustered and mildly irritated.

"This is my _prize_ bottle! It's from the Ashikaga Shogun's personal stock. I snuck it out when I went back in time to rescue you and the others when you were all stuck in Kyushu in the late 1300s! So it's got a sentimental value as well. You may have saved...well, everything...but I _pulled your ass out of the fire _that time, and nothing can change that. Besides, who are _you_ to tell me what I can or cannot drink?"

"Urd, remember when we got back together, you promised that you would seek treatment for your...uh, overly indulgent preference for sake...at the Ethiopsylogic Clinic? You explained to me then that you had major doubts about being able to stop drinking, because you needed sake as a powerup source? Well, taking what you said then into account, I altered things a bit..."

"_What_ did you do?" Urd shot back, her irritation turning to curiosity. Her boyfriend may be the Ultimate Force...but in her hands, she could easily make him the Ultimate Fool...or the Ultimate Putty.

"Well, I..I adjusted your powerup source from sake to peach juice," he said nervously.

"_YOU WHAT?!_" she shouted, a little too loudly. Belldandy turned her attention from preparing dinner to watching her sister and Cevn start in on another one of their spats.

"Urd, I was only thinking of you! Y..you said that you liked peach juice best out of all the beverages!" Cevn explained hesitantly, nervously backing away a couple paces.

"You can be really be charming sometimes when you're scared of me," Urd replied flatly. Despite being angry with Cevn for completely overstepping his bounds, she was amused by his boyish timidity. His diffidence was a delicious paradox; he had literally recreated the Multiverse, turned back time, defeated the Ultimate Demon and...changed her powerup source...

"Yet, when I offer him a just a dash of 'ticked off Urd', he's totally intimidated," she thought with a satisfied giggle.

"If you want to drink sake now, you don't have to drink to get plastered-out-drunk. In fact, it would be nice if you passed this special evening with me...without drinking at all. I know you can do it if you put your mind to it! I would even guess that you'll even be wilder and crazier _without_ drinking alcohol...which is something I'm going to have to get used to...and I daresay, I'm also looking forward to," he admitted.

"You...changed my powerup source? I don't know whether to thank you or curse you or beat you over the head with Skuld's Mjolnir!" Urd noted with enough indignity to keep him guessing. She had to admit to herself that she _was_ more than just a little miffed at Cevn...her idiot-minded boyfriend had changed her powerup source without asking her! She thought of ways to get back at him, but then halted her conjectures once she remembered that he was incredibly powerful at the moment.

"He may be powerful enough to reconstruct a Multiverse, but he was nowhere near as wily as I," Urd realized. It was time she put him in his place.

"You may think you can get away with taking liberties by tinkering with my powerup source...but eventually it's going to cost you! There will come a time when you'll want to take liberties with...other things...and I _won't let you_!" she teased, winking at him and swaying her hips to make it clear what 'liberties' she was referring to. Despite her words, Urd knew that if he wanted to take any 'liberties' with her tonight, she would say "yes" without even thinking twice about it. Now that they could physically touch each other, she felt a strong desire to take some 'liberties' of her own with him once she had him all to herself.

"If you even think of doing something so unkind...I'll change your powerup source from peach juice to prune juice! Or maybe sour milk or motor oil might suit you better. Don't doubt that I can do it...because I'm the Ultimate Force in this temple," he replied flirtatiously. Urd would have thought him in earnest, except for the fact that he was smiling with both his mouth and his eyes.

He kissed her on the cheek, and then he returned to the dining room. Urd looked at Belldandy, who was holding a hand over her mouth, trying hard to stifle her mirthful giggling.

"Very funny, Bell! Shouldn't you be chopping some onions or something?" Urd said dryly as she darted an irritated glance at her younger sister.

Belldandy's scowling reaction to her remark was priceless!

Feeling vindicated, Urd playfully pointed at Cevn's back with her finger.

_"__Urd Thunderbolt!__"_ she announced. To her complete and absolute horror, a lance of lighting sparkled from her finger and struck Cevn square in the back. Before she could utter "Look out!" it was done! Instead of being blasted across the kitchen by her zap, Cevn turned and smiled at her, flashed her the "V sign" and then walked out of the kitchen to join the others in the living room.

"Oops!" Urd said, covering covered her mouth with embarrassment as she realized that she might have hurt her boyfriend. She looked at Belldandy, who was watching her with a surprised expression.

"Urd...are your powers back?" Belldandy asked. Almost in the same instant, it dawned on Urd that she couldn't hurt him...and that her powers _were_ back!

Or were they?

Urd decided to find out. Shouting _"__Urd -_Divine- _Thunderbolt!!__" _she shot a lance of electrical energy at the ceiling...

A second later, a pile of chipped roofing tiles, shards and splinters of wood, and ash-filled smoke with burnt and burning cinders...poured in from the new hole in the roof. Right on top of Belldandy's carefully prepared big plate of hors d'oeuvres.

"URD!!" Belldandy shouted with disgust. She was so upset by the ruination of her carefully arranged snack tray, she quickly grabbed a tomato and threw it at her older sister without even thinking.

"Oops again! Sorry sis," Urd quickly apologized after she dodged the thrown vegetable. The second one hit her square in the chest, and the third one hit her dead-center in the face...

"This is why you _shouldn't_ have any powers! Look what you've done to my snack tray!" Belldandy exclaimed ruefully. Quickly composing herself, Urd waved a hand...and undid the damage and the mess.

"This is totally kewl! I really do have my powers back!" Urd shouted, skipping around the kitchen.

"Yggdrasil help us!" Belldandy sighed as Urd snatched one of the prized eel sushi rolls from the tray of munchies she was preparing for the houseguests.

"I guess he isn't _all_ bad," Urd replied to Belldandy, ignoring her younger sister's remark. With a shiver of delight, she walked into the dining room with a trayful of glasses.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Megumi marveled once again at the incredible magic of Bell-chan's cooking. Everything was succulent!

She remembered staying over at Sayoko's after her fight with Keiichi, then coming here to the temple house. Standing outside in the yard, everything went dark, just for a brief second. Then everything returned to normal.

It seemed like a barely remembered nightmare, an unnoticed presence...like the edges of a paper on which she was industriously taking notes in one of her advanced engineering math classes.

Then Belldandy called and invited Genji and Sayoko over for dinner. When Genji arrived, he told her about a strong confusion he was experiencing.

"Thankfully, all it was...was confusion," she told herself. Genji had been possessed by a ghastly daydream; for a moment he was certain that his parents had perished in some kind of accident in France! She had been confused as well, somehow imagining that Mt. Fuji had erupted...

Megumi smiled to herself as she remembered Genji's expression of shock as Belldandy introduced the two strangers now sitting at the dinner table as "Kami-sama" and "Oni-sama". Having lived with the three Goddesses for a number of years, Megumi was used to surprises. But having these two over for dinner...obviously, the Goddesses had outdone themselves!

Her cousin Tomohisa didn't seem to be bothered by the august dinner guests. He was captured by Skuld as surely as a moth was fascinated by a light bulb. During the meal, he would poke at his food...while casting shyly covert glances at Skuld. Megumi's feminine intuition informed her that this nervousness was the result of being smitten by Skuld. With boyish predictability, Tomohisa was suddenly fidget thumbed.

Then in mid-bite, Skuld stood up.

"Stop staring at me, Tomohisa! I know that you think you like me...but this is _ridiculous_! I'm going to have a talk with you after dinner!"

"You're busted!" somebody yelled, right before the meal screeched to a halt. Skuld's glass of chocolate milk had sailed across the table, splashing Tomohisa in the face.

Skuld hadn't touched it.

Megumi giggled as she saw "_stop_", "_ridiculous_", "_staring_" and "_talk_" tastefully written on the walls and everybody's faces and clothes.

Even the two Lords couldn't hold their amusement in...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Waaaaahw!! I..I've gotten my powers back! Does that mean that my license isn't suspended anymore?" Skuld shouted excitedly, breaking the silence as she saw candy-colored kanji characters splashed over everything in the vicinity.

Including the two Lords...

"Ulp!!" Skuld gulped once she recognized the words "power" and "back" formed on the faces of the Lord and the Dark Lord. She immediately cringed, realizing that she had just screwed up majorly. There was probably some sort of rule against writing on the Almighty.

"Ohmy ohmy ohmy! I'm _so_ sorry! I humbly apologize!" she said, energetically bowing deeply enough that her forehead touched the dinner table.

"It's okay...accidents happen. And since it's you..." Tomohisa answered, wiping chocolate milk off of his face. Skuld quickly shot back up from her deep bow and shot Tomohisa an irritated grimace.

"I wasn't talking...to...you?" she said in a voice that started angry and wound up in a tonic of amazement. She wavered between terror and astonishment as she realized that her Goddess Powers were strong enough to _write on the Lord_! They could _never_ be that powerful, even if she had her Second Class License back.

"Yes, Skuld-sama. You are now the possessor of a Goddess First Class, Unlimited, Unrestricted License," Cevn explained.

"A..._First_...Class...License!?" Skuld asked, gasping out the words.

"Just don't be too powerful and cute at the same time," Mara commented sarcastically from her seat next to the Dark Lord.

"Wow!! Cool!! Yahoooo!! Ta-cha!!" Skuld shouted as she leapt up from her seat at the table and capered up and down with glee, knocking over several glasses on the dinner table.

Belldandy raised a calming hand towards Skuld...then withdrew it as she realized that her little sister was in raptures and wouldn't notice anyway.

"Little sister"...was a term that just didn't seem to _fit_ this new Skuld. Belldandy felt a moment of resentment at Cevn for aging her younger sister 40,000 years. Her flash of anger waned as she remembered that all he had done was grant Skuld's wish. In a way, it was _appropriate_. As the Norn of the Future, it made perfect sense for Skuld to want to rush at the future and leave her childhood behind...

"Whattabout _me_? I'm your _girlfriend_...and you gave _her_ a First Class License!" Urd interjected. Skuld stopped in mid-jump and floated in the air, shaking her head in disbelief at Big Sister's comment. She had just gotten her license back...and Big Sister was only concerned about her own suspended license!

"Heh heh! I got a _First_ Class License! And you're probably still stuck with your _Second_ Class License!" Skuld taunted.

"Fraid' not! You shoulda seen the hole I blew in the kitchen roof..." Urd argued back.

"Right over my snack tray too, Urd!" Belldandy interjected in an uneasy voice.

Keiichi shook his head, worried his enjoyment of Bell-chan's carefully prepared meal would dissolve under the hammerfalls of sibling verbal warfare. Not to mention that the two most important Houseguests in all of known reality were sitting at the dinner table.

"Talk about losing face!" he sighed to himself haplessly as all three sisters launched into a huge argument. Fortunately, Cevn interrupted them before a food fight erupted.

"Hmm...I had to think a moment about your situation, Urd. We all know that you're impulsive, flighty, prone to misunderstanding others, deceitful, seductive, flashy, scheming, very naughty at times..."

"Hey, give me a break!" Urd cut him off as Skuld and the rest of those at the dinner table laughed heartily.

"Well, I already did! You and Belldandy both have Senior First Class, Unlimited, Unrestricted Licenses. And because of the special nature of your personality, Urd...I made your license irrevocable!"

Kami-sama literally spit out His tea in shock.

"You really mean it?" Urd asked. Cevn nodded his head in the affirmative.

"Yahooooo!" Urd shouted, leaping up into the air and hovering over the table just like Skuld did a moment earlier, spilling food and beverages with abandon.

"You can't revoke me, you can't revoke me!" she boasted in a singsong voice to the Lord. Finally, she was free from His injunctions!

"And I got _loads_ more Goddess power than you, squirt! So you just watch your tongue..." she said, pointed at Skuld.

"You may have more power...but_ I_ have more brains!" Skuld retorted in an unflinching voice.

Belldandy realized that the craziness between her two sisters would probably float up a few integers because of this. She was shocked to feel her own burst of Goddess energy. The first thing she thought of was her Mother, who was a Senior First Class License herself. Despite herself, she smirked...and then burst into giggles. Both her sisters halted in mid-argument and looked at her like she was losing her minds.

"What's so funny?" Skuld finally asked.

"Mom!" Belldandy managed to answer before dissolving into more giggling. "Do you...tee hee...have any idea how she's going to...hee...take it when she finds out Urd and I have equal license privileges as her?"

Urd and Skuld had priceless expressions on their faces as her observation keened on them. They burst into laughter, and she felt herself swept up with her sisters in a raucous release of mirthful joy. She hadn't laughed that hard in years! Her darling Keiichi was red-faced with laughter as well, fired by his own unique vantage of experience with Mother.

"_Belldandy, I can understand. But you're utterly crazy to risk giving Urd that much power. Someone's going to have to watch over her,"_Kami-sama interjected once the laughter died down, glaring at Cevn with a grave face...which then slowly changed into a good-humored grin.

_"I wish you luck, because you've really cursed yourself into a corner,"_ Oni-sama added.

Belldandy looked at her sisters in shock. She couldn't believe her ears and her eyes...

Both the Lords had just made a _joke_!

"Mara...I overturned your Demon Powers reduction as well. You now have a Demoness Senior First Class, Unlimited, Unrestricted License as well."

_"You gave _–her-_ a _-Senior-_First Class License? You -_are-_insane! She's just a stripling, barely half the age required to even be considered for a Senior License! She's the one who created Isilblius..."_ the Dark Lord argued.

"What's an Isilblius?" Megumi and several others asked.

"Never mind!!" a chorus of voices answered.

"...which is reason enough to grant her such a vast range of powers and privileges, don't you think?" Cevn continued. "I _know _that Mara deeply regrets her mistake. She was possessed of sufficient humility to openly admit as much. In fact, she may be the most conscientious agent of the Demon Strife Mischief Office, if not all of Vanagdrasil...because she has the capacity to learn from her misdeeds instead of blaming them on others. The tendency to misattribute, as you know, is one of the primary traits of the Demons, although the Yggdrasilian bunch at this table might term it a 'fault'..."

"Good Grief! This is totally_ molten_!! This means that I'll be on equal par with Belldandy again, as far as powers are concerned!" Mara observed with a manic cheerfulness.

"But what about _my_ contract to bring Keiichi into a state of grief? I'm sick of being stuck fighting Belldandy and her sisters over one insignificant mortal...no offense intended, Keiichi. With an increase in Demoness powers, shouldn't I have bigger fish to fry?"

"None taken, Mara...just so long as you behave," Keiichi acknowledged warily.

"And how do I do that? It's still one against three! You said that I'm one of the top agents of...the...Demon... What did you just say, Cevn?" she asked, her blonde eyebrows arched high with confusion.

"The Demon Strife Mischief Office."

_"Ahem! We don't have such an office,"_ the Dark Lord clarified.

"You do now. In fact, Mara is the head of it. The DSMO, which is a homonym for 'dismal' in English by the way, is intended to teach Demons to be evil and malicious...in ways that are creative rather than merely harmful. Mara or any of her Strife Mischief Office subordinates cannot willfully afflict serious injury or take the lives of mortals any more. Instead, the DSMO office has a 'mission statement' of sorts to create swift and overpowering strife curses on mortals, such as embarrassment, self-pity backfires, domestic quarrels, curse-reverses where the one who wants to harm another is harmed themselves by their own 'curse'. The possibilities are limitless, since DSMO agents won't be limited to dosing grief on only those who make wish requests. It's an open field for her staff, because they'll be attached to 'harm' requests. For instance, humiliating mortals may be an even more foul degree of harassment than simply causing them grief."

Oni-sama thumbed his chin whiskers, casting the impression that he was engrossed in deep reflection.

_"Hmmm. I..._-like- _it! The DSMO Office...to make mortals dismal! What a...__capital__ idea! Wouldn't you agree My Brother?"_Oni-sama said a moment later, elbowing Kami-sama. Kami-sama didn't look too impressed, a fact that amused Oni-sama greatly.

Oni-sama realized the cunning in the mortal's concept of a Demon Strife Mischief Office. The mortal had claimed to be a blend of God and Demon. Perhaps it was so, as this idea was refreshingly Demonic with a delicious subtlety. Such an office would up the ante in terms of influencing his Demons to be more creative in their application of Evil. Also, it would address the old problem of Evil being so blessed entropic. The Evil of the Demonic sort was often destructive by necessity. Because of its own destructive nature, acts of Grief culled the population, reducing the overall population of victims that could be aggrieved. The mortals were already efficient at causing sloppy acts of grief, such as murder, which even further culled the population. With this new process of Evil, the number of potential victims would remain the same...nay, it would increase!

Skuld had to privately admit to herself that this made sense. In a way, it would reboot Mara's relationship with her and her sisters into a whole new program of cat-and-mouse. But also...it sounded like a lot of fun!

"Two can play this game of strife! Just ask Tyyr..." she thought with a grin, remembering how she outfoxed the WarGod during Belldandy's omiai.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"What a day!" I sighed as I looked at the ceiling fan, safe and sound back in my own bedroom. The words tasted like empty incipiencies to my tongue, but how else could I describe what had happened? I was just grateful to be thinking of Time in units of hours instead of eons.

The dinner party was eventful and longwinded, lasting until almost sunrise the next day. Both the Lord and the Dark Lord had gotten very deep into their cups, thanks to Urd's continual efforts to replenish them with of all sorts of Earthrealm alcoholic beverages. Turns out that Urd-chan was quite the connoisseur; she had stowed away a number of bottles of impossibly refined vintage. A red wine from the court of Louis XVI. Gold-dusted Papal wine from the vaults of the Vatican, impressed with the papal seal of Alexander VI. Peach wine from Tsao Tsao's private stock, ca. 200 AD.

Some Goddess of the Past she was.

The two Lords turned out to be very well behaved when sake-bibbled, however. In fact, They were quite charming in Their own way. For the last couple of hours, They traded stories of Yggdrasil and Vanagdrasil interspersed with 'feats' to amuse Skuld and the rest of us. I couldn't help but wonder if They had ever tasted the vines of intoxication before this evening.

Of course, Belldandy and Keiichi had excused themselves earlier...no doubt to get 'reacquainted'...

True to her word, Urd had refrained from drinking a single drop. I felt a sense of joy and pride as she approached Sayoko, breaking the ice by asking her questions about what possessed her to live the life of recovery.

Lying in my futon bed, I could finally relax. Time had finally returned to some sense of perspective for me. I was many trillions of years old...and that was only considering time within _this_ TimeStream!

But just like before, I was seemingly a divided man. Part mortal, part Ultimate Force. As I settled towards sleep, I was grateful that the mortal part of my being was coming to the fore. The quiet companion of uber-divine powers within me was receding; allowing me to become myself again while I was around my friends.

Had I made the right choices?

I just wanted to be rid of the Ultimate Force powers. I didn't invite them into my life, except through the wording of my wish. I didn't want to be caged in by cosmic responsibilities like those that had occupied me for an insanely long amount of time. Reluctance filled me...I just wanted to be myself again.

Just plain old me.

The 'me' that everyone here was comfortable with, the 'me' that I was comfortable with. I didn't become friends with everyone because of the Ultimate Force; it was all due to my humanity. Now, I didn't even know what being human meant. I was scaring myself at times, talking about cosmic matters that were intimidating to the Goddesses, let alone to me. Performing a balancing act on a tightrope high in the air, when I should be walking safely on both feet, grounded.

It felt so good to finally be able to kiss Urd and hold her tightly. We both surprised the shit out of each other...and probably everyone else as well. Physical intimacies like kissing are great, but how meaningful could they be to a Goddess who thought herself beyond the reach of romantic love for a hundred millennia? I knew that it wasn't the kissing and hugging that meant so much to her...it was the spirit that moved between us.

What could I do for her, with her, that would really reach into her heart and create an everlasting memory? How could I create an expression of my love for her that would be uniquely special, because it would be _only_ for her? An act of true intimacy between us; one she would recognize as a giving place within? A giving that she would at once recognize as something I would never share with anyone else?

It scared me to death.

Knowing that it was now or never, I slipped out of my futon, wrapped myself in the light summer yukata robe, and padded down the hallway. Quietly sliding the door open to the sister's bedroom, I noiselessly slipped in. Belldandy's futon was empty, of course. Urd was sleeping soundly in her futon, nearest to the door. Skuld had left a couple of candles burning...I could see the soft lit contours of her and Urd's face and hair in the flickers. I debated with myself about whether I should rouse Urd from such a peaceful slumber...but I couldn't wait another moment. I might lose my courage if I did, or I might wake up Skuld. If she saw me in her bedroom, no Ultimate Force powers would spare me from her wrath.

"Urd-chan! Wake up! Urd..." I said in a whisper, nervously reaching out and lightly jostling her to wakefulness by shaking her shoulder.

"Hey...leave me alone!" she mumbled drowsily, slapping my hand away. A moment later, she shuddered in surprise as she realized that it was me that was waking her.

"What are you doing _here_? You might wake my sisters!" she warned me as she rubbed her eyes.

"Shhh..."

"Errm, what_ are_ you doing here, in my bedroom, Cevn? Shouldn't you be scared to death or something? After all, I'm not fully dressed under these blankets," she said in a near whisper.

I pulled my hand away quickly, feeling my fears surface. Feeling myself challenge those fears, fighting them down. It was utterly bizarre and inexplicable...part of me had literally accomplished the impossible, and yet my stupid woman-fear still stubborned itself into my consciousness!

Yep...my mortal life was back, full-force! I wasn't about to lose this chance because of the abuses that had happened in my past. I had gone this far, now I had to see this through to completion no matter how intimidating it would be.

"Can you come to my bedroom, Urd? Please?" I asked, feeling as nervous as if I was asking her to marry me.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"This is it!" Urd thought. "Cevn _wants_ me!"

The moment that she had been waiting for with anticipation for an eternity (or at least a year) had suddenly arrived! She tried to get a grip on her cresting excitement...an excitement that threatened to whistle her into sheer giddiness.

"Can I...slip into something more comfortable," Urd suggested. If this was to be her first night with a mortal man...with the man she loved...she wanted to look devastatingly sexy. She looked yearningly at her area of the closet. Several months ago, she had bought a sheer green item of nightwear for this special first time.

"Aren't you comfortable enough in your pajamas and a yukata?" Cevn asked her. Urd felt a brief flicker of disappointment...and let it pass through her. Her mortal boyfriend was being goofy again! Didn't he realize that wearing intimate silky things was a vital part of creating a sensual atmosphere?

"Are you _trying_ to ruin the mood?" she whispered to him...and then she noticed his aspect.

His whole body language shouted "I'm nervous!" to her practiced eyes. If it had been anyone else but him, she would have been majorly put off and insulted. But she realized that Cevn had come a _long_ way from the man she had first met a year and a half ago. That man would have never dreamed of waking her in the middle of the night, let alone entering her bedroom.

Instead, Cevn had boldly come to her.

But which man was he? Was he coming here as the Ultimate Force...or as a mortal male?

She wrapped herself in her best flowery nightrobe yukata and then placed her hand confidently in his as they walked down the hall to his bedroom. Once inside, he gestured to his futon bed and sat down on one end of it. As she seated herself cross-legged, facing him on his futon, Urd noticed that his bedroom looked the same...yet different. Piles of books in the corner, thin summer bed sheets messed over a soft futon, two lamps, a bookshelf, an acoustic guitar in the corner, dusty ceiling fan, the Enigma Book on a small nightstand...

But yet, his room was filled with this unexpected _glow_ to it! Urd knew that the radiance she was sensing had nothing to do with the surroundings; the transformation of these mundane trappings was the result of _how_ she was seeing them.

They were going to make love tonight...to share in the realms of passion between the two of them that would create an everlasting memory. A forever-moment that each of them could would look back to again and again with fond delight!

But yet, the idea of physical sexuality brought an uneasiness to her heart...as she remembered the other time. The vicious time.

She shuddered at the knife-rag memory.

"I've learned so much since I came here. You've been patient with me, Urd. You've taught me how to love again. Night after night, you tutored me so I could learn from the Enigma Book. You've taught me so much about..._so much_. I learned from you that fighting for love sometimes means fighting _with_ love. I would have never defeated Isilblius without you in my heart. I fucking wanted to make him pay for what he did, and I almost became like him. Defeating him was the easy part; defeating my disbelief about undoing his destruction was so hard. When the UF 'activated' me, I saw something so horrifying, it had to force me into action. You taught me to never give up on Love. I didn't know if I'd ever see you again, but I wanted to ensure that you and everyone else would live for another day. You may think you're crazy, but you're the wisest of your sisters..."

"I'd have to be crazy to be in love with you," Urd joked. "This is just one more case in point. You wake me up in the middle of the night, ask me to come to your bedroom, which takes me to a place emotionally that I've wanted to go to for oh-so-long. Then you act all nervous, and then go off into the weird zone again. You don't have to prove anything to me, because you've already done much more than that. I don't need or want explanations. I don't want the Ultimate Force...I want _you_."

Her racing thoughts settled down as her heart reminded Urd that she loved this man. Then she remembered him lying on a fiery pier, dead. The sharp pangs of regret that she had felt when she realized that he had opened his heart's door to her, and she had never walked in. She had loved him, but had never taken a risk with that love. The horrible moment when she had thought that she would never be able to love him again.

Looking into his eyes, she shuddered with the realization that this guy, her boyfriend, had saved _every life_ in all the Multiverses. He insisted that it was the Ultimate Force that did it, not him. But if that was the case, then why did the UF involve him in the first place? 237 trillion years he said; the time that it took for him to defeat Isilblius and fix everything. For her and everyone else.

He had never claimed to be a hero, never wanted to be a hero, never acted like a hero.

But he _was_ a hero.

"Cevn, I just want you to be you, and to give yourself some credit," she said, taking a cue from Belldandy. Her sister had told her that Keiichi needed to be praised by her from time-to-time, so he wouldn't feel that his hard work in school and with the Motor Club had gone unnoticed by her.

"You kicked major ass doing whatever the hell you did. You can deny it all you want; but to me, what you did wasn't just a miracle, it was an act of courage and heroism. You're my hero; even more so because you have the humility to question it. You were my hero in Beijing when you broke your heart open for me. You saved me from killing myself. Hey, if you want to talk all night, that's cool with me. But I'd rather you'd take that courage and just _talk to me_. It's not every night you wake me up at 3am in the morning and drag me off to your bedroom. You want something from me...so just ask me. Tell me what you need. Let me be here for you for a change. Don't tell me that you didn't get horny once during all trillions of years."

He smiled self-consciously, and she knew she had zinged him on that one. But he was still as nervous as a schoolboy!

Then Urd felt her own quivering...and realized that she was nervous as well. Despite her sparkling nerves, she leaned closer to him, inviting Cevn to kiss her.

"I don't know how to ask you...or how to tell you about something I hope we can do together. Something I hope you'll let me do with you," he started, his voice quivering nervously. Urd fought every instinct in her heart that seemed to shout "take the lead and get naked right now!" This was so insane! Here was a man who had loved her for a year, who had become the most powerful being in both Multiverses, who had decoded the secrets of Enigma book, who had composed exquisite God's Music, who had reached her heart like no one had before.

"Urd...I want you to teach me..." he started to ask.

"Teach you what? You're the mortal here! Don't you know what to do? Or did you skip the 'hide the porno mags under the bed' period of male adolescence?" she answered in a soft voice, gently teasing him while trying to conceal her frustration. Keiichi was a mortal...and _he_ certainly knew what to do, according to her younger sister! Once Belldandy had admitted to Urd that she had become physical with Keiichi, her younger sister would occasionally whisper confidences in her ear praising the earnestness of his boudoir prowess...

"Goddammit, Urd! It's not what you think! Someday, we'll go there together; we'll make love with each other and it will be special, beautiful and brilliant for both of us. I can't imagine what my life would be like without you, and I don't want to think that we had this one chance, and I blew it. Right now, I want to experience a more meaningful expression with you. Fuck it! I don't know how to ask you. This is different, this is something that can't be put off, it's gotta be now. I want you to teach me one last thing before I seal up my powers."

"Seal up your powers?" she asked. Urd felt her heart somersault as she realized what he was going to ask her to do with him.

"Please Urd, I..I want you to Share with me. Please at least consider it."

She almost fell on her back as the shock registered on her face and nearly swooned her. Her heart was whimmy-whamming, because he didn't have a clue about what he had just asked her to do with him. All along, she had figured he had brought her into his bedroom to ask her to do the 'wild thing' with him; to spend the rest of the evening in languorous and idyllic love-making. She would have said "yes" even if the mood was so goofed up, confident that she could heat him up in more ways than one to get the mood just right.

Instead, her crazy fool boyfriend wanted her to give him something far more sensitive and intimate than just her body, and even had the audacity to ask her to show him how to do it. This was so typical; ever since she met this mortal man, their relationship had been peppered with one series of misunderstandings after another.

This just was one more link in the chain of miscues.

But then Urd felt the stars within the harmony of her heart start exploding like fireworks as the deeper intentions couched in his request struck her. Cevn wasn't just asking her for anything...he was asking her to _Share_ with him! He was willing to experience total union with her. To become One with her. He wanted to show his love to her in a way that only Gods could do.

On _her_ level; the level of divinity. The level of a Goddess.

To Share...went far beyond sex, far beyond mortal concepts of love. Urd didn't even know if it was possible for him to Share with her.

The slight glow of the circle and square in his forehead caught her eye for a moment. It could be possible, since he had the forehead seals of divinity. She made a study of his face, noting the earnestness in his blue eyes, coupled with an innocent fear and a hopeful expectation. One Divine being asking another to join in a Sharing always meant that they were very seriously in love, and that they were totally committed to their relationship. For in a sense they would become SoulMates...experiencing a special bond that could never be taken lightly.

"He really doesn't know what he's asking!" she realized. Despite possessing knowledge and powers that were, for lack of a better term, infinite...he was totally unaware of the fact that Sharing would leave him with no secrets. She would know everything about him...and he would know everything about her. This was why Sharing was revered among the Gods as the most intimate expression of love that could ever exist between two divine beings. The complete immersion of individuality within another's individuality...

Two Becoming One.

"I can't believe how much I love you, you crazy idiot!" she thought. Which was true, because he was willing to totally trust her to take him into an unknown, all because he wanted to show her how special she was to him. Despite her misgivings, she felt absolutely cherished by his request.

"Here," she said, scooting up until they were only inches away from each other. Their knees touching, Urd reached over and held each of his hands in hers. Then she darted forward and kissed him on the lips.

"There!! Now we've Shared! Now I can go to my room and you can go to sleep!" she told him...and then crossed her arms over her chest and waited for a couple of moments. Cevn looked at her with wide eyes, unable to conceal his disappointed expression, obviously disoriented by her little prank. If only faces could whine, he'd be whimpering all the way to China and back. She couldn't help but giggle at how thoroughly she had disarmed him.

"That's what you get for changing my powerup source!" she teased, poking him in the chest with each syllable. He smiled shyly, subdued as he recognized that she had just gotten even with him.

"Urd...I'm serious! I want to do this with you...and I'm totally scared about Sharing myself with you. But I want to go through with it. This may be the only chance you'll ever have to do something with me on your level, as if I was a Divine being like you. A movement of love in action that we _won't_ be able to do once I become a mortal again. It's now or never. And I want to take this chance. With you," he admitted to her.

"Are you sure you want to do this? Once we Share, than there is no going back. There can be no regrets, no way of undoing it. You will experience _everything_ that I've experienced! I'm not saying I don't want to...Lord only knows how much I do! I just don't want you to get hurt," she explained in a serious tone of voice.

"I love you, Urd, and that's all I need to know," Cevn said, nodding his head. Her head swam in the intensity of the moment; the earnestness of the love he had just professed to her, the absolute faith he had in her. She felt convinced that this was the right thing to do, as long as she was very careful.

Urd closed her eyes, lifted his hands up and laced her fingers between his.

"Are you ready?" she asked...and then leaned her forehead against his, her triangular Goddess mark touching the mark in the center of his forehead.

"Open yourself to me..." she whispered...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

In an instant, she joined with him. The mortal part of his life filled her mind with strong impressions; clusters of emotions centered around brilliant key moments. Thoughts and memories and impressions filtered through her Soul.

She guided him through her childhood, baby sister Belldandy, stealing Sleipnir, sneaking out of her parent's house, being a lost child at one of her Mother's 'society events', Father yelling at her for not trying hard enough in SecondTier Inculcation, baby sister Skuld, graduating Final Inculcation with highest honors, Skuld playing pranks on her with mechas, Belldandy deciding that she wanted to go to the GRO, being summoned by the Almighty who told her she was Norn of the Past, starting off as Sysop, goofing off as Sysop, pestering Peorth, broken-hearted when she learned that Norn in the Past meant no love with a God in the present, Skuld becoming the Brat, Belldandy coming to the Earthrealm for the first time, Skuld deciding to be a Sysop Trainee Bug Catcher, Belldandy coming to Earth to stay with Keiichi...

She felt very pleased that his emotions were in synch with hers in almost all of her life-review; happy when she was happy, angry when she was angry, lonely when she was lonely. Feeling when she was feeling.

He was too inexperienced to guide her through his childhood, so she traveled through his years of youth, some good, some bad. She had listened to him describe it when she impersonated Dr. Ogawa, but being there with him through his personal hells was disheartening. She almost wanted to pull away and skip past the life-review, it was so painful at times. But his life quantum shifted when he stopped using drugs, then she was with him in the coroner's as he identified his wife's body, burying himself in school, depression and service work activities, and then meeting her...

Her emotions aligned closely with his as he struggled and eventually overcame many of his trials in life, her joy echoed his joys, her sorrow echoed his sorrows. She realized that her emotional bond with him was much stronger than she realized.

"_«That was the life review phase of Sharing. We totally had a really good emotional synching. Are you okay to go on to the love review phase?_»" she thoughtcast to him. He affirmed his willingness and she folded open another part of her life to escort him through.

She felt him with her as she Shared with Troubadour and the Cherry Blossom Spirit...and sensed only a slight jealousy opposed to his joy at her blossoming love. He was with her when she ended her relationship with Troubadour because of his disinterest and Cherry Blossom Spirit for infidelity. Trying to be a virago to attract the attention of Gods because that was all she could do. Partial Sharings in a bout of promiscuity to try and fill the empty hole in her heart. He walked with her through bitter passages of disappointment when she realized she had been used and had used herself futilely...

Again, his emotions synched so closely with hers, it was both exciting and uncomfortable.

She felt herself with him as he lost his virginity in a basement with a girl he didn't even know because he was wasted on drugs, she accompanied him through a few brief sexual flings with little or no meaning. She was with him when he met his first true girlfriend after shedding the drug lifestyle, and she felt with him the glow of his daily love life fueled by a puppyish innocence. She reached a little deeper and looked over his emotional shoulder as a friendship blossomed into love, she stood next to him when he exchanged vows with his first wife...

She loved when he loved, and her heart knitted closer to his.

"_«We just finished the love review phase of sharing. Don't sweat it, this phase normally reveals jealousy and joy. Do you feel safe to go on to the secret pathways phase?_»" Urd asked him, thankful that they navigated the love-sex-Sharing part without too much turmoil. He asked her to continue, and she carefully peeled away the secret journeys of her life for him to experience...

He flowed into her as she touched on her Demon side, and the struggle she had to keep her 'wild' half under control, the fights she had with her Parents, the anger and shame of being taunted as a half-n-half growing up. She laced herself with him as she touched her Norn aspect, the incredible bonds between her and her sisters, her unconscious but constant balancing of part of the TimeWeb, the contours of love between her and Time, her and her sisters. She guided him to World of Elegance, inviting her to sing for him, to sing her secret songs, and she felt his awe and appreciation for her Angel-Devil, feeling pleased that he brooked no judgments towards her very special Angel-Devil...

There was nothing but his love for her in the sharing of her secrets.

She reached towards his secrets, the divine spark that exists in each mortal that influences them to transcend their minds, bodies, hearts...a mere spark compared to Divinity but yet very meaningful to her. Walking with him in his old soul, feeling the press of echoed lives in his being, sharing joy as he reached towards the spiritual. She opened the part of him that he claimed was the Ultimate Force...

Suddenly, she was vacuumed into an out-of-reality, as if she had jumped off a cliff without a parachute. Panicked, she knew she was lost, no longer in control of the Sharing, of herself, of him. Sensations and impressions flooded her and her sanity threatened itself away from her Soul. Then her Soul seemed to widen and she realized that he was guiding her now, gently escorting her through incredible vistas of experience. She felt like she was a little girl again, jumping through the universes bareback on Sleipnir...

_This_ was absolutely incredible!

She saw strands of TimeStream bowing into loops and vortices. She saw an empty and dead Yggdrasil and Vanagdrasil with absolute clarity. She experienced his initial battles with Isilblius, his life in the two alternate TimeStreams. Many more TimeStreams...and then a TimeStream with constant war. Isilblius crawling in his mind, making him experience the vicious horrible thing Isilblius had done to her as if it was his doing. Urd tried to break the Sharing, horrified to witness her rape from outside in, horrified at his horror towards the vile cruelty...but very quickly she felt bathed in assurances that healing would come to her. He was trying to calm her battered emotions...

She twined with his consciousness as he lived three years in another TimeStream; watching through his eyes as a mortal version of herself was married to Genji and then they had a baby, and she giggled as she saw that TimeStream's Belldandy and Skuld become mothers. She felt their uncertainty, knowing that they were the very last remaining defense against Isilblius. Three Gods, amusingly Keiichi, Genji and Tomohisa embarking on an impossible project, a sphere projected into nothingness with the Metanative power of an entire TimeStream, a suicidal last stand...

She fought alongside him through a seemingly endless stretch of time as he struggled with Isilblius, how it was brought to fruition by the wisdom of Belldandy and his profound heartloss for her. She looked through his eyes to see her own lifeless eyes, and how this had crushed his heart, but had also motivated him with the harshest of lessons. She felt a personal triumph as she shared in his ultimate victory over Isilblius, exiling the Ultimate Demon...

An immeasurable amount of loneliness, spanning trillions of millennia, spanning the distance between his yearning for her in his heart and the emptiness he felt because she was gone from him.

The painstaking process of restoring and reconstructed all of reality...and then some. Two hundred trillion years of meticulous effort applied to an unimaginably complex task. It was fast-forwarded for her, and Urd saw the Everything all around her being filled up with light again, the Multiverses lighting up Yggdrasil like Christmas lights, the TimeWeb being reformed into a sphere. Breathtaking didn't even begin to describe the sense of watching an entire reality of TimeSpace being constructed within a span of just a few minutes.

He had literally reconstructed all of reality...and then some.

"«_Oh...my..._»" she mentally gasped, awestruck by the breadth of the energies she was experiencing through him. She knew without a doubt that she was in the presence of a Power far in excess of Kami-sama's, or anything she could even imagine. She traveled down spiritual corridors of his Soul, feeling herself bathed in tenderness.

She sensed a corner of his being...and was drawn to it. She remembered her time with the Reaper, and saw Cevn planning to die after he restored the Everything. The Reaper was telling him to rest from his labors...

Urd shuddered as she realized how close she came to losing him.

"_«Here's the rest of me, given with love for you,_»" his voice gently urged. He was taking her in, guiding her into the final 'phase' of Sharing, where she would see his heart...and herself in it. He had transcended the incomprehensible, and now he was guiding her into the intimate. She felt frightened and ill-prepared; this was utter vulnerability for both he and she, the final reward of Sharing. Or the final blow...

The power beyond all powers which filled this mortal...was gentle and loving in its essence. She flowed with his experience of absolute Metanative Dimension energies...realizing that the Ultimate Force had used him as an incubator to save itself from being destroyed by Isilblius. His wish to be the Balance...had enabled the Ultimate Force to dwell within him!

As she approached his innermost being, she felt enveloped with his caring, bathed with affection and respect. The harmony of ecstasy was filling her, far beyond what she expected from Sharing...accompanied by God's Music and the celebration of twinned affection. He opened his Kokoro to her; and she knew that he was being _totally_ open to her, totally with her so she could journey within him safely. He was filled with love for all things...but when she encountered the deepest part of his Soul, she found herself. His Soul was illuminated by his love for her! As she blended her love with his, Urd realized that he had let his heart become naked for her...

She experienced how he saw her...seeing herself anew.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

I couldn't believe how Urd had touched me into a transformative awareness of her life, of my life. I felt like I had been taught a new emotional language of the heart, a new appreciation of the sacred. All the sensations were bright and vivid, and she was patient with me as I adjusted to this new experience. I felt safe with her, and she opened her life to me. I slipped through the millennia of her life. Her childlove for Freiija and Odeyn...and how it matured over the millennia into a love of equals. Her total adoration of her sisters. The many Gods and Goddesses whose lives she had touched. Her love for Troubadour and the Cherry Blossom Spirit. Her joy at being the center of myriads of beings as a Norn. Her pride of work as an Yggdrasil Sysop. The form and space of her beauty, bounding beyond passion and conviction...

What she was...and what she wanted to be.

The whole scale of Time was different. It wasn't measurable in the mortal ken of reckoning, nor did it possess the weight of the eons I had experienced as the Ultimate Force.

This was _real_...

I traveled through the dark caverns of her Soul where Urd had been encaged in the blighted acceptance of the fact that she would never experience love again. The abject loss of hope, which threatened to swallow her up.

I saw myself as she saw me...on a superficial day-to-day level.

Urd envisioned herself as rescuing me from the depths of my loneliness. She truly loved every minute she spent with me...even the 'bad' ones. She patiently explained to me that her struggles with drinking were not the palls of addiction, but were a symptom of her continuous challenge to balance her Demoness half with her Goddess nature. I felt her hopes that she could stop herself...the bitterness she felt at times knowing that her drinking had caused a wedge between us. Through her own craziness, Urd's life revealed my own particular lengths of insanity. I watched in awe as she monitored the creation of galaxies, of universes, of wishes from her office in the Sysop Cluster.

I felt her bitter and abject despair when I discovered that she was impersonating Dr. Ogawa. A conversation she had with Lin in Beijing about how she wanted to marry me. Her penchant for playing tricks on her sisters.

Bugging Keiichi about sex.

"«_Don't hurry, my love..._»" I heard Urd's voice echo softly in my mind. She was guiding me now, allowing me to realize that I had been hopping through her Soul like a rabbit on a freeway, frantically trying not to get 'hit' with a memory that was too personal or too profound.

I gradually slowed my exploration of her life to a more comfortable pace as she patiently escorted me.

It was exhilarating, like sticking my head out of the window while driving on a freeway during a rainstorm. As I leisurely explored her memories, I came to understand that Urd's misdirection was her gift. So often, we look at the past in terms of how our actions had misdirected us. Yet, the sum of our mistakes _always_ becomes the foundation of our triumphs. Urd's misdirection, Belldandy's naivety, Skuld's errancy...these were the attributes that glued the Norns to their management of Time.

Unafraid, she allowed me to risk-voyage into a secret area deep in her psyche, an emptiness...and she and I both sensed it was because she had never made love in the physical sense. To me, this Sharing was the ultimate expression of my love for her...to give myself to her in a way that could only be realized between two Divine beings. To Urd, making love was/would be the ultimate expression of love she could give me...because she would be giving herself in a way that could only be realized in a mortal sphere of existence. There was a poetic symmetry in this; each of us wanted to express our totality of love for the other in his or her dimension of existence. I felt a hope that someday I would be able to fill that void in her psyche...

I wondered if I had a void in my Soul because I had never Shared before...and if I did, would this be enough to fill it up.

I wanted completion.

Sensing this, Urd opened herself even more, completely intimidating me with her honesty as she shared with me how she had transcended her fantasies about me...to see the real me.

The _real_ me.

Though her valuative perspective, I learned that she loved me...for whom I am. I learned that I saw myself with a fantasied perspective as well.

Sensing my confusion, Urd explained the truth she had found in the experience of Sharing to me with a mental "movie"...

She created a vision of a medieval legend about a monk who spent years sculpting a statue of Truth. I watched as he labored on it for most of his life; once he was finished, he made it known that he wished to donate it to the large city nearby. The abbot contacted the burgher and relayed the news. The city gathered itself into a festive mood for the unveiling. The statue was conducted to the center of the city, where it was mounted on a pedestal as the highlight of the central plaza. During the inaugural fair, which attracted thousands of people from the district, his work was uncovered for all to see. To the horror of the celebrants and his monastic brethren, the statue he had created...was an image of a naked woman. The crowd was furious; possessed by a righteous frenzy, they stoned him until his blood mingled with the dusts. None of those present had discovered the allegory embodied in his work of art.

His spiritual vision had been that of the naked Truth.

The fact that Urd had approached my request to Share with her with such reserve...now made absolute sense to me. I was overawed by the emotional depths of Urd's being. She was right: this Sharing was obviously an incredibly deep step into intimacy between the two of us. I imagined that this was the Yggdrasilian version of the old Japanese custom of high school sweethearts exchanging diaries. The most private realms of thought...how each of us felt about the other, how we experienced and interpreted each other...were fully exposed. For a moment, I felt a grasping insecurity when I realized that everything I felt about her was now rendered transparent.

Naked.

To know _ourselves_ as we experience each other...this was a daunting step forward for Urd and I. I was so afraid that Urd would find out who I really was...and then reject me. Yet, as soon as I felt these fears, I heard another voice...Urd's voice...reassuring me that she wasn't going to leave me. She said that, since we had gone this far, we would now be linked forever by our Souls; for we no longer had anything to hide from each other. In the future, we would develop as individuals, with our so-called secrets and our insecurities and our idiosyncrasies. But these would forever be illuminated by the fact, for one brief moment, our Souls had been joined in an absolute union.

"«_This is all of me, for you,_»" she said in my mind as she brought me into the bliss of her heart. I was overwhelmed as I felt how much she loved me. A love that would extend far beyond this moment of union...a union that would extend far beyond this moment, for as much as I treasured her, she cherished me.

Knowing that Urd had fully opened her Kokoro to me...would be a strong incentive to measure my trust by the sanctity of our hearts.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Urd was the first to open her eyes; a few seconds later, Cevn opened his eyes.

"Wow!" they both said to each other. There was a lack of any other suitable words that fit this situation.

They had Shared...to the point of exhaustion. Urd wanted to kiss him, but he was so exhausted that he quickly collapsed onto his futon, half-asleep. She smiled at him, humorously noting that he deserved a long rest after all that he had done. He chuckled weakly at this, and she started to stand up so she could return to her bedroom.

"Urd...please stay," she heard him ask in a tired voice. She halted in mid-step and was stunned when he gestured for her to lay down next to him on his futon.

She felt herself shivering with joy; he had just opened himself to Share with her, and now he wanted to finish the night by holding her next to him. Sleeping together. She wanted to disrobe and share the glory of her beauty with him, but held herself against her desires, knowing that too much would ruin a good thing. Besides, she and he were exhausted. There would be no lovemaking tonight, but she felt more completed by this simple openness than a thousand and one imagined nights of passionate embraces.

Wordlessly, she joined him, stretched her legs out and cuddled herself against him, tingling from head to toe as he reached his arm around her waist and breast and pulled her a little closer to him, protectively. As his chest moved against her back with slow breaths, she felt the pitter-pattering of his heart for the first time...and thought to herself that of all the miracles that happened today, being touched by his living heartbeat was one of the best. As the daylight streamed in through the blinders in the window, Urd sensed him falling asleep in a trice, and then allowed herself to lapse into sleep...her head resting on the pillow next to her beloved one.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --


	60. Pt 60: Recondescence

**Part 60: Recondescence**

The vibrant sound of wings winding air surrounded Belldandy. Sitting on the bench next to the koi pond, she was enjoying a moment of serene peace with her friends the birds. They delicately shifted their hovering flight when Urd strolled up and sat on the rock next to her. Her older sister had a beatific smile...and Belldandy guessed that she and Cevn had made love together in the mortal fashion last night. After all, it _was_ mid-afternoon...and Urd was just now emerging from his bedroom. Urd's late rising threaded a memory, as Belldandy recalled that magic night with Keiichi, in a hotel in Okayama a year ago...and how she and he had lingered amorously in bed the entire next day.

She smiled at Urd, cheered by her sister's very feminine _glow_. Even her avian friends noticed; their birdsong and chirping became more rapid, more cheerful.

"Aren't you the late riser today, Urd? Well tell me...how was it?" Belldandy asked. Urd looked dreamily at the sky, then turned to her and shot her a sly glance.

"It's not what you think, Belldandy. We didn't do anything...sexual...last night. Actually, I think it's going to be a while before we can. Something came up last night," her older sister replied.

"Something _must_ have come up, Urd! You're absolutely glowing with happiness!" Belldandy observed as the feathered gang flew in a loosely formed circle around her and Urd, and then flocked off to swarmroost on a nearby tree.

"I am! And I'm not going to tell you what we did, either!" Urd replied with a wan smile.

"Urd! I'm your _sister_! How could you keep something so special from me?" Belldandy replied, pouting with dramatic disappointment, and then playfully throttling her sister around the neck.

"Hee hee! Now you know how I felt for all those years! Standing on the sidelines watching you and Keiichi screw up everything. Except your apologetic blushes. Dancing around each other, wanting to reach out an express your love in delicious mortal physicality...wanting to go all the way, but being too prudish just to take the risk!" Urd teased with a hue of complaint.

"'_Please, I want you to kiss me, my Keiichi,_' she says, batting her eyes. '_Oh, but I can't because I'm scared, my love Belldandy._' he answers, shivering nervously. '_Let me rest my arm around you, Bell-chan,_' he asks quite boldly. '_Keiichi dear, not now, I have to sweep the porch,_' she answers, aloof and naive. That went on for a whole year!" Urd continued, using her talent for vocal impersonation to imitate her and Keiichi's voices.

"By all rights, I should make _you_ wait a year..."

_"__URD!!__"_ Belldandy groused with a scowl. Once again, Urd had snared her by bringing up the past...and sticking it to her.

"Okay, okay, okay, I'll spill it out for you, Bell. But don't say I didn't warn you...and don't go all weird on me, like Skuld did when you and Keiichi got all into the wild life," Urd replied, wagging her hands in front of her to balsam her sister's irritation.

"Well?" Belldandy prompted. Her older sister was often quite boastful, but now she was clearly blushing; which only pedaled her curiosity into a faster wheel spin.

"Cevn and I...and don't ask me how, but he surprised the life out of me last night. He..we..I Shared with each other!"

"What!!" Belldandy exclaimed. She couldn't believe the words that filled her ears! For years, she had imagined that she could Share with Keiichi...she had _wanted_ to imagine that she could Share with him. But she had to reluctantly accept the reality that it was impossible. No matter how strongly she desired to Share herself with her beloved Keiichi, his mortality excluded him from participating in this deepest act of intimacy.

Now Urd was telling her that she had Shared...with a _mortal_! Belldandy felt a moment's blush of embarrassment; she had expected Urd to say that she had done something else with her mortal boyfriend.

"No...you don't have a dirty mind, Bell...despite the fact that your thoughts have on occasion strayed into realms of lustful carnality during the past year," Urd noted, recognizing the flush of her sister's cheek for what it was. And playing with this vulnerability...just because she _had_ to.

Elder sister's prerogative.

"_Urd!! _You may be my Big Sister, but I..."

"...sound just like Skuld, ya know! By the way, where is the little shoujo manga devotee?" Urd finished. Without waiting for Belldandy to edge a word in, she continued.

"In fact, I expected the same thing last night when he unexpectedly came to our bedroom and woke me up. But he's full of surprises! It's like he wanted to give me something that would normally be impossible for a mortal to give. And I think I'm beginning to understand why sex is so important, because it's something we can give to our mortal men...something on _their_ level, not ours. That's what makes it so special," Urd admitted. Belldandy nodded her head, knowing all too well why she had postponed her sexual relationship with Keiichi for so many years because of _precisely_ this very reason. Yes...the closeness of making love with her beloved Keiichi _was_ special, because it was a seal of intimacy that she could share with him because they were committed as a couple to love each other for the rest of their days.

"How could you and Cevn possibly have Shared? And how did you know what I was assuming that you two were...?" Belldandy asked, amazed at the accuracy of Urd's insight into her thoughts.

"My dear Sister, you...are _you_! I watched you grow up. I've watched you with Keiichi for the past five years. How could I _not_ know, silly girl?" Urd said, grabbing her sister's hands.

"Then you must know how much I really want to know what happened," Belldandy replied, squeezing her sis's hands back.

"About the Sharing? I found out yesterday that my boyfriend...isn't just powerful beyond all means. He told me he seems to be an outlet for the Ultimate Force! That he _is_ the Ultimate Force, in a sense. That explains all of it: how we got mega promotions in our Goddess Licenses; how Skuld aged Four Decas in a single day; how the Lord and the Demon's Lord were here, sitting down for tea with us yesterday like it was just another day at the office. I thought he was totally crazy; but I was also certain he was dead, and he turned out to be very much alive.

"It was so funny! When we Shared last night, he asked me to teach him how. He was so _cute_, all nervous and shy about it. But once we joined and got into the exchange of secrets part, it all got insane. Suddenly, _he's guiding me. _I saw him reconstruct the Everything. I really felt it, and there's no way I can even try to describe what he shared with me. What he said, what he did...it was _real_," Urd said, her face pridefully meditative as she waited for her explanation to strike Belldandy's chimes of comprehension. As expected, it took a couple of moments for Belldandy to let _that_ one sink in! Urd almost giggled as her sister's expression belied the struggle of trying to grasp the dash-upon-sundown rush of improbabilities.

"Hmmm...I see," Belldandy noted impassively. After all the events that occurred yesterday, she had strongly suspected that Cevn had somehow become attached to the Ultimate Force. It was the only reasonable explanation, if he _had_ actually done everything he had claimed to do regarding the restoration of the Multiverses. Now, her older sister had just confirmed her conjectures.

Urd was momentarily disappointed; Belldandy could at least articulated her amazement at the fact that she was going out with such a powerful being.

"That's all very impressive, Urd. But what happened at the end? Did you...see yourself?" she asked. Regardless of all the implications about Cevn's incredible transformation, Sharing was about one thing and one thing only. The most important revelation of all. She felt Urd squeezing her hands so hard, it was painful.

"Bell, he completely opened himself to me, without even a hint of reserve. I didn't even have to ask. I saw myself in his heart...I saw how he sees me. He _treasures_ me. I've never felt anything like it in my life; his heart is absolutely filled with love for me. The only way I can explain it is that he must love me just as much as Keiichi loves you. He didn't even try to hide it...he truly loves me. He..and I..we've gotta be SoulMates. What am I going to do?"

Belldandy was almost in tears herself, because her sister had encountered the most precious gift of all...another's heart. She knew this well, because Keiichi had given her the fullness of _his_ heart. For years, she had considered Keiichi as her true SoulMate. Now it seemed that her older sister had found a love that was just as rarefied as hers and Keiichi's.

"Big sister, you don't need to _do_ anything. Just feel the happiness that you deserve, and the love which he is offering you," she answered. "And please ease up on your grip, you're almost breaking my knuckles."

Urd smiled at her sister sheepishly, realizing that she had gotten completely 'lost' in the moment. She didn't intend to be this candid, but her feelings had simply leaped out of her heart with a life of their own. Perhaps this was providential, because the only person she knew who could understand any of this was her sister.

Suddenly, her sister's face lit up with a searching expression.

"Urd, do you remember what happened yesterday...before Isilblius attacked us? I passed out a tanzaku to each of us and asked that we all make wishes and hang them on the cherry tree? I thought it would be fun to celebrate Tanabata this year just like mortal Japanese children. Well, last night before dinner, Skuld pulled me aside and privately told me what she had written on her wish paper. She explained that she was tired of 'being in a little girl's body'...so she wrote on her tanzaku that her wish was to be _older_," Belldandy explained, expertly changing the subject.

"Ehhh? Now, she _is_ older...by about 30 or 40 millennia, if her body type is to be trusted as a measure!" Urd exclaimed.

"But why would she wish for that? Because Skuld is the Norn of the Future, she's often impetuous and impatient regarding the past and the present. She's forward-thinking and future-gazing all the time. But to give up her one and only Goddess childhood..?" Belldandy wondered aloud. Then it occurred to her why Skuld would make such a request. She noticed Urd looking at her with a knowing smile. Her little sister's rationale was totally obvious...and now she had one more worry to deal with, as she knew Urd would make sure to bedevil Skuld for it! But how did it just happen to come true?

"You know, I wrote out a wish on my tanzaku too. And it _also_ came true!" Urd admitted. Belldandy looked at her older sister, whose face was flustered with amazement.

"Must have been some wish, huh Big Sister?" Belldandy teased, watching Urd squirm as she sat on the rock.

"Ahem! Well, _part_ of it has come true! And much more than I wished...came true as well," Urd corrected her, swinging her legs. "And what did _you_ wish for, Little Sister?"

"I'm not your Little Sister...and that's a private matter!" Belldandy remarked defensively.

"Ah, pretty testy aren't we? Well, if it comes true, it won't be very private anymore, huh? So why don't you fess' up and spare yourself some embarrassment, 'Bell-chan'?" Urd pressed, imitating Keiichi's voice at the end. Belldandy was readying a rebuttal when she spied Skuld walking towards them.

"Whew...that was close!" Belldandy sighed to herself as her other sister joined them, granting her a reprieve from having to disclosure her secrets to Urd.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Skuld had been reading this month's "Double Love" shoujo manga in her "Skuld's Lab" room when she overheard the animated discussion and tease session between her two older sisters wafting in through the open window blinds. Strangely enough, the manga seemed to present her with a _different_ feeling in her heart when she read it this time.

Setting her manga aside, she listened in to her sisters. The wordplay between Belldandy and Urd was much more interesting than what she was reading. Big Sister Urd's description of her experience Sharing with Cevn was _very_ interesting, and she found herself almost jaw-dropping at how honest her sister had been in her description.

So _much_ was different.

At least they weren't discussing her. She felt more than a little awkward being present in this 'new' body; thus she sought out the familiar trappings of her mechalab and her manga collection.

She remembered this morning, and felt nervously afresh. Waking up was a new experience...her body was at least a third part bigger than before. With a moment's panic, Skuld had sensed that she had switched back into Belldandy's body...becoming Skuldandy again. But to her relief, her hair possessed its beautiful ravenesque silky soft black sheen. Then, she had tried lucklessly to force herself to manifest in her 'old' body several times. But she always appeared in _this_ body! She resigned herself to the fact that she was stuck with a more mature Earthrealm manifestation. But then it got even worse.

She had to put a bra on.

With a backwards glance at the two empty futons, Skuld remembered going to her third of the clothes closet and pulling an outfit off the rack. Each of her outfits had somehow been upsized to complement her new physique...but there was a new circular metal ring at the end of the closet. She felt embarrassed as she pulled one of the bras off of it, feeling the sheen of its soft fabric between her fingers. She had already decided that there was no way she was going to attempt putting _this_ on with either of her sisters in the room! And it was all the more complicated by the fact that neither Belldandy or Urd had spent the night in the bedroom with her. Already bothered by _that_, Skuld had to wait patiently, feigning sleep until she knew that Belldandy had awakened and had went to take her morning bath. She felt outright clumsy as she struggled to put the brassiere on, praying to Kami-sama that Urd wouldn't come sauntering in to the bedroom while she was tangled up trying to work the latch hooks. That would have been the epitome of embarrassment! The mega-genius girl who could build just about anything...being caught addlehanded, confounded by a simple bra clasp!

She felt underneath her top, outlining the unfamiliar contours and straps again, then nodded her head. She had won the "War of the Bra", or at least this skirmish. Oddly enough, she couldn't simply manifest herself with a full set of clothes over her body. So she had to dress herself. Skuld knew that this was simply a temporary impasse...she wasn't used to manifesting in a set of clothes that included a bra. But she would learn...and soon! Urd's leering, mocking grin hovered just around the tentflaps of her imagination.

"That does it!" Skuld scowled as she heard her name mentioned several times. Now she _had_ to go outside and check up on her sisters! Besides, she was deeply interested in how her sisters were feeling about her new, more mature physical bearing.

Her sense of smell had somehow become more acute. Once outdoors, the humid verdancy of the temple grounds fetched her attention as she strolled up to the rock where her two sisters were resting.

"Ah, here comes Tomohisa's girlfriend," Urd quipped.

"_Am not_!" Skuld snapped back resentfully. It was amazing how one single sentence from Big Sister could ruin everything! This was definitely not what she wanted to hear...idle conjectures about her and Keiichi's cousin!

"Big Sister Urd hasn't changed a bit! I'm in a much older body...and all she can think about is how my new beautiful charms have caused a certain idiotic teenage household member to become infatuated!" she mentally grumbled.

"Ahh...Skuld! What a beautiful day it is today!" Belldandy observed innocently, trying to ignore her younger sister's discomfiture.

"If only they could feel what I feel, or understand what I understand..." Skuld mused. "Tomohisa really had _nothing_ to do with my wish to have a grownup girl's body! In fact, part of the reason I wanted to be older...was because Tomohisa's older than me, at least physically. I was hoping that if I were the same age as he...then he would stop teasing me about being too young!! I can't stand being teased by everyone else...but Tomohisa's teasing _really_ crawls under my skin..."

"What's the matter, Skuld?" Belldandy asked, noticing Skuld's forehead knitting itself in deep concentration.

Skuld looked at her sisters, then thought about Tomohisa. How this was all his fault...

"Stopit stopit stopit!" Skuld said out loud, startling both her sisters. She chastened herself because she was thinking about _him_ again! It was so stupid! Why was she so concerned about whether or not a certain mortal teenage boy was looking at her? Why was she so concerned about whether he thought she cute? And if he thought she was cute...he was probably thinking about _other_ things.

All sorts of disgusting things!

"It's not like he's my boyfriend, or anything! she reminded herself, trying to escape her frustration.

She closed her eyes as she remembered the truth...the brief sparkle of a thought that had passed through her mind as she brushed her wish on the slip of tanzaku paper...and then she opened her eyes again, noticing how both Urd and Belldandy were looking at her with bemused expressions.

Busted!

"Urd, I think our little sister is blushing?" Belldandy said, pointing her finger at Skuld's nose.

"Yes, she _is_. Yet, I really don't know if we can call her 'little sister' any more, since she's gotten so..._sexy_! And I bet Tomohisa notices the same thing...he probably thinks that Skuld here is a total babe!" Urd added mordaciously, each word hammering the nail of embarrassment deeper into the grain.

"Would you guys stop it already!!" Skuld protested with a shrill shout of complaint.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Belldandy informed me that the Lieges of Yggdrasil and Vanagdrasil had both taken their leave earlier in the morning. As I hastily downed my late afternoon 'breakfast', she added that they were very vocal in their disapproval of the changes I had made; calling me a "deluded parvenu" or the like. I expected as much, because my extensive alterations to the Everything and their two Realms served as a weir to prevent imbalance...and any chance that Isilblius might encroach his chaos upon SpaceTime, should he escape.

As she chatted with me, I noticed that Belldandy seemed a bit perkier than usual. Oddly, alongside her cheerful mood, I felt like she was sizing me up. I wonder what Urd had said to her...

This is what I get for waking up after Urd!

Once I sealed Isilblius away, I realized that the surest way to prevent Isilblius' escape was to 'eliminate the jailer'. As the being responsible for his banishment...it would be incumbent upon me to mindwipe myself of all traces of memory in regards to my term as the Ultimate Force. This way, _no one_ could learn about where he was or how he was sealed up.

When I came to on the pyre, the energies contending inside of me were ebbing at a bare minim. Urd's accidental "Urd Bolt" lightning discharge into the small of my back before dinner almost drained the last of what remained. And after we had Shared, I literally collapsed from exhaustion and lovejoy.

So this morning, I had expected to wake up relatively normal, as far as divine powers go. Normal, as in a slight oscillation of arcane energy above what passes for mediancy in an Earthrealm mortal. Normal, as in being totally mortal again. Instead, I felt powerful channels and pulses of energy, like the verdancy of spring after the hibernal winter.

During my sleep, my powers had restored themselves to full capacity! Then again, the bubbly uplift that I was feeling was quite probably attributable to what Urd and I had experienced last night.

It was a new form of bliss. I wanted to Share again with her, but I knew in my heart that I had to seal up my powers. My desires were gainsaid by a sensible reluctance; I didn't want to take any chances with the kind of energies that I now possessed. In fact, the convection of inter-energies in my being would eventually overwhelm my Soul if I didn't release them back. The Ultimate Force was a universal force...not intended to manifest in an individual on a continuous basis.

Reflecting back, I realized that...in a sense, the Ultimate Force had possessed me. Was there randomness at work here? It wasn't some idiot plot where I became all-powerful and saved the universe. Everything that exists, is the Ultimate Force. The Ultimate Force is akin to the "Tao without name", I realized. Inexhaustible, emmanancible, invisible, timeless. When Isilblius introduced too much chaos into the reality structure, the Ultimate Force had vesseled itself in my Soul...making me the Balance. It would seem that there was no other options available to it. Every system...cosmological, epistemological, metaphysical, aquantum monadological...has the innate capacity to fail at any attempt to balance itself. Obviously, the Ultimate Force permeated all realities _outside_ of any system of existence, otherwise there would have been no Balancing.

The Balance had been restored as a result of the Ultimate Force indwelling in me, and my wish to be of service. The true essence of service is to help someone _without_ gaining their awareness of it...to 'get away' with a kindness. To render help without the "me"...with no ego attachments. Yet, the crucix of the matter was that I simply wanted to be normal again. It was almost embarrassing to think that I had played a part in restoring the Multiverse, the Everything, the whatever. The Ultimate Force had made me into a reluctant hero; Urd had even called me a hero last night and jumped on me for not allowing myself some credit for my actions. Thus, I had been denied even the hallowed ground of anonymity in my actions. Besides, it was often observed by those much wiser than I that heroism is the foundation of tragedy.

I noticed a shadow pass over my bowl of oatmeal.

Peorth joined me at the dinner table, looking glum.

"Cevn, you know what is très misérable about this whole étonnant d'oeuvre? This miraculous event...and everybody has someone except me. You and Urd have each other. Belldandy had darling Keiichi. Skuld...well, that little schoolboy of a mortal would pull his heart out and offer it on a plate of chocolate soufflé for her. But moi? I can't have what I want! No fleur d'amour for me!" she explained.

"What do you mean, Peorth?"

"Belldandy told me that you're a kind of 'expression' of the Ultimate Force. So you should be able to do _anything_! Right? I've been in the Goddess Relief Office for over 40,000 years. After granting all those wishes...don't you think that this is _my_ time? Why shouldn't it be a time when _I_ can have a wish granted?!" she explained her plaint to me.

Living with three Goddesses who are sisters, I forgot to take into account how quickly the news travels. So Peorth knew about the extent of my powers now! Yet, it was as much my fault as theirs. Peorth was one of Belldandy's closest friends...and I had never asked Urd to keep it in confidence.

As if that would have worked anyway...

"Well, why didn't you write out a tanzaku like everyone else?" I asked curtly, knowing full well that she didn't. I failed to see why she withheld her participation in Belldandy's curious Tanabata rites.

"What does that have to do with anything? I didn't fill one out...because I realized that I could never have my wish granted anyway! Not the wish that resides in my heart, trapped by this branch of reality...like the rose confined to an ill-plotted ikebana arrangement. So what are you saying? Th..that I have to write out a tanzaku in order for you to help me? Très ridiculous!" she exclaimed with a measure of frustration.

Suddenly, I found myself empathizing deeply with Peorth's situation. Right before Urd first came into my life and pushed me back into the world at the drop of her wishgranting hat, I had felt wishless. Hopeless. Witless. Now it was Peorth who was feeling the melancholy of being dislocated from her hopes.

She probably didn't even know that I had granted her Senior First Class, Unlimited, Unrestricted License powers. _That_ should suitably impress her peers at the Earth Otasuke Division!

Looking at her glum face, I remembered the night I first met Peorth. She had surprised me by appearing in the bathroom while I was bathing in the furoba...and sent me into a state of traumatic paralysis for almost a month. But when I was Sharing with Urd, I had discovered that it was Peorth who tweaked me back to health with a dream that possessed a delicate balance of ribaldry and reality. She had told Urd that this was her means of making amends. I also recalled how Peorth had rescued Belldandy from the clutches of that ridiculous omiai. Peorth had even saved Urd in a sense; back when Urd was moribundly fated when she was infected with the Demon Virus. Peorth had limed Urd's defeatist attitude with a healthy measure of confrontation. This stern encounter caused Urd to regain the will to survive and rejoin her sisters. Peorth had even swallowed her pride and followed Belldandy's advice and had enjoined the Ethiopsylogic Clinic to help her with Wishout, because she had become so attached to making Keiichi's wish come true that she had lost sight of everything else.

It occurred to me in an instant that Peorth deserved to have her heart's fondest wish granted, just like everyone else!

Setting down my tea, I walked into Belldandy's hobby room and fanned through the small delicate package of multihued mino-gami strips of paper, selecting a predominately pinkish slip of paper. Threading it with the multicolored silk strings provided in the papercraft 'kit', I returned to the dining room. Strange...I could have just waved my hand, and the paper would have appeared like a magician's sleight-of-hand trick. But I had fetched a piece personally...

"Here...your tanzaku, mademoiselle! It's even color-coded to match your personality! Fill this out, Peorth...and I'll make your wish come true. I promise."

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

The three Norns were watching the koi swimming in their pond in front of the temple house when Cevn and Peorth emerged from the front door. Belldandy noticed that they both were wearing anxious miens as they walked toward her.

"Belldandy, would you ask Keiichi if he can join us for a moment?" Cevn asked in a serious tone of voice.

"What's happening here? He's acting like he's going to hold a conference or something," she whispered to Urd and Skuld before going to Keiichi's room.

A couple of minutes later, Belldandy returned with her boyfriend.

"What's going on?" Keiichi asked with a yawn.

"Peorth has made a wish, but it directly affects both you and Belldandy, Keiichi. I promised her that I would grant her wish, no matter what. It turns out that she made a wish that I cannot grant, because it involves you..."

"You first prize idiot! You _know_ Peorth! Are you so fish-headed that you couldn't guess what she would wish for, you dope?" Urd snapped, clenching her fists at her sides.

It was obvious to all at this point that Peorth had wished for Keiichi. Boyfriend or not, Urd was not going to let Cevn change things between her sister and Keiichi, just because Peorth wished it. This situation demanded that she bop Cevn in the back of the head! But as the fan materialized in her hand, she restrained herself. An extra knot on the head wouldn't help matters.

"In for a drachma, in for a dinar," Cevn worried aloud.

Belldandy looked censoriously at Cevn, and then Peorth. Her sometimes rival from the Earth Otasuke Division lowered her eyes for a moment, seemingly ashamed. But then Peorth lifted her eyes up and locked them on Belldandy's. Urd could almost sense the sizzle that passed between the two pairs of eyes.

From Skuld's perspective, it might as well have been Ukyo vs. Shampoo from the old anime series rerunning on the "Jumpout!" anime channel.

"I have absolutely _nothing_ to be ashamed about! Cevn said he would grant me a wish, so I made the only wish that really matters! The one that is most true to my heart. Wouldn't you do the same if you were in my position, Belldandy? Isn't that precisely what we instruct the mortals to do? T..to make a heartfelt wish...and then follow it as if their life depended on it?" she challenged the Norn of the Present.

Belldandy could bear Peorth's resentment only because of the longstanding friendship and professional kinship they shared. They had grown up as best friends; their friendship turned competitive when they were adults...yet a bond remained between the two, which harbored within the netherspace of mutual respect and suspicion. A lesser intimacy between the two would have been preferable to this; then, Belldandy wouldn't have to struggle with the many conflicting feelings resident in her heart. But _because_ Peorth was a friend, the complexity of this situation had increased indeterminably. While remaining civil by pretext, she felt compassion for Peorth's case...and irritation that her fellow Goddess was _still_ obsessed with Keiichi! Or was it an obsession? At what point does love transcend nobility and engage in perversity? Just because a love was spurned or improbable, does the continuance of that desire constitute an inappropriate gesture of the soul? Was Peorth dancing with delusion...or reality?

"So I wished for Keiichi! A..and I don't care if all of you think I was wrong for making such a wish, because this is my only chance...to get..snff..what I _really_..snff..want!" Peorth protested, gathering her resolve.

"Oh great! Here comes the crocodile tears," Skuld sighed, until Belldandy "shhh'd" her. Stupid Cevn had really walked blindly into this one! If she had one of Urd's fans in her hand, she wouldn't have hesitated to smack him on the back of the head with it. And because she had a bigger body than before, she knew that she could smack him _hard_!

Cevn backed a step away from Urd and Skuld, invisibly sensing their assaultive intent. All his vaunted Ultimate Force powers couldn't save him from this one!

"So what are you going to do, Cevn?!" Belldandy asked reprovingly. Aside from being angry with him, she was touched by a significance of fear; she realized that he _could_ make her lose Keiichi. As the Ultimate Force, he could literally do anything at this point.

"Dammit, _this_ is why I wanna get rid of these fucking Ultimate Force powers...as soon as possible! Now that I'm operating on mortal judgments and perspectives, I'm just going to create more trouble than good with them! Now, I've really gone and stirred up some shit!" Cevn admitted with a fair share of frustration and guilt.

"Damn right you have! You've already created a big mess here! With _my_ life!!" an angry Keiichi added. He was thoroughly satisfied with the reaction of hangheaded perplexity on Cevn's face. Suddenly, Cevn snapped his head up, obviously struck by an idea.

"Yet, I..think I have a way to do this. After all, I am the Balance of things," Cevn remarked.

"Oh great...here we go with his 'I'm the Balance' headtrip again!" Urd commented sarcastically.

"Yeah, but you can't have it all. You're supposed to bring serenity too...and no matter what you do, either my sister or Peorth is going to be deeply disappointed," Skuld noted insightfully.

"Belldandy...sorry, but I have to ask this. Would you be willing to give up Keiichi?" Cevn inquired. Belldandy felt a moment of disarming shock in response to the unexpectedly coarse bluntness of his question. She didn't have to think twice about her answer.

"No! Absolutely not! Never!" she said firmly. Nodding his head at her, Cevn turned to Keiichi.

"Keiichi...would you be willing to give up Belldandy?"

"Not a chance!" he replied instantly. Ten minutes ago, he was sound asleep without a worry in the world. Now, he was thrust in the middle of a gravely serious situation. Despite his answer, he felt a little saddened for Peorth, who was sobbing in her hands. He glared angrily at Cevn.

"Aren't you supposed to fix things, instead of making them worse? Look at her!" he said dryly, pointing at Peorth's miserable figure.

"And what about me? You _promised_ you would grant my wish!" Peorth interjected. She was saddened that Keiichi was unwilling to give up Belldandy...but her sorrow was mitigated by the fact that Cevn's questions seemed to possess an obviating nature, rather than serving as serious inquiries.

"I'm trying! Now that you both said 'no' for the record, I like to ask you this. Keiichi and Belldandy, would you consent to having Keiichi give something up, in order that Peorth can have her wish fulfilled?" Cevn asked.

"You better not be thinking about cloning him!" Skuld interjected. "One Keiichi's bad enough..._two_ Keiichi's would be completely crazy! And what about my sister? How do you think she would feel if there were two of Keiichi? How would you feel if there were two of Urd?"

Keiichi shook his head in resignation in response to Skuld's remarks. She may have the body of an older girl...but obviously, her maturity didn't seem to advance alongside her more adult contours, he noted sourly.

"I don't plan to," Cevn answered enigmatically as he waved his hands in the air like a magician.

"And you accuse me of being a 'drama queen'! Just look at you!" Urd thought with private irritation. She was still astounded that her boyfriend could have been so stupid as to promise Peorth that he would grant her deepest wish. Leave it to Cevn to embark on another exercise of foolishness.

"Recognize this?" he asked the group. In the middle of his hand rested a pearly smooth Angel's Egg.

"Cevn, what good is an Angel's Egg going to do anyone? Keiichi is a mortal...he cannot give birth to an Angel!" Belldandy said, intuiting the obvious. A couple seconds later, she rethought her objections as Cevn launched into an explanation.

"Waitaminute!!" Keiichi stammered, worried about where this might be going...

"Belldandy, you've often said that Keiichi isn't an ordinary mortal. I know for a fact that he isn't...and you know too, in your heart of hearts. You, a Goddess, have made the choice to give your heart to him. To receive your love...makes Keiichi divine by association. But the matter of the fact is...Keiichi is already _semi-Divine_!"

"What!!" all four Goddesses exasperated.

"You must realize that Keiichi's divinity is different than mine. The Ultimate Force bestowed itself upon me only because I made a specific wish. However, Keiichi has _evolved_ into semi-divinity _because_ of his innate qualities. His divinity has been occluded by his mortal frame; but you must admit that his divine nature is one facet of his being that drew you to him, Belldandy. After almost five years in a relationship with Keiichi, you've become so close to him that you've overlooked what is so prominent...so evident. After all, being in love with you has only served to cultivate his divine side."

"Y..you mean that I'm some kind of _God_?" Keiichi asked, his face figured with shock at the suddenly alleged imputation. Over the past several years, his mind had sometimes wandered upon such a suspect territory...a realm of conjecture where he actually found himself thinking that he_ might_ be divine in a manner similar to his girlfriend. Now, Cevn had apparently confirmed his unvoiced curiosities.

"Well, yes and no. Yes, you're more than human...enough to be capable of creating an Angel. To be telepathic. To be in love with a Goddess. Not just any Goddess...but a Norn! And yet, you aren't a God...you're Keiichi, a mortal. You're only manifesting the very initial stages of what the Gods call the Next Level. But it's not an 'only' by any means. Being bonded heart to heart with Belldandy has awakened you into the infancy of what could be termed a trans-mortal process," Cevn explained.

Belldandy was staring at Keiichi with an unabashed pride. Her Keiichi could be, quite literally, the savior of the human race. If he was the first of the Next Level humans, the Almighty couldn't possibly justify depopulating the Earthrealm! And it was no small coincidence that he had been selected at random to be the "Test Mortal"!

"Keiichi, would you be willing to take the risk of giving birth to an Angel? I should remind you that there is one more being involved who isn't present to voice his views to us," Cevn stated.

"And who is that?" Skuld asked.

"Keiichi's Angel!" Urd answered. Everyone in the circle suddenly looked at each other with grave expressions.

"Yes...but a mortal...and an Angel? What kind of Angel would Keiichi give birth to?" Belldandy asked, worried about the lean of this discussion.

"A new kind of Angel. But beyond this bent of inquiry is a more central issue. Ultimately, we must consider this: it is fair to Keiichi's Angel to be denied a chance to be born into this world?" Cevn asked the group, trying to gain their approval.

"You want me to deliver Keiichi's Angel?" Belldandy asked.

"Yes. You and Urd and Skuld. I'd ask Peorth, but it would be awkward for her to midspirit an Angel that I believe is destined to be in love with her."

"Quite so," Urd readily agreed.

"Keiichi, it's up to you. Swallow this Egg...and you will grant a new life a passage into the universe. You would be honoring Peorth's deepest wish as well," Cevn stated.

Keiichi remembered the last time someone in the house swallowed an Angel's Egg. Skuld's little Angel, Noble Scarlet, was the result. The cute newcomer to the temple house was diminutive, chibi-kawaii to the max, sweet...and destructively immature. Lending expression to her intentions with a juvenescent fervor, Noble Scarlet had wreaked total chaos in everyone's lives within a few short days. He blushed as he remembered Skuld's kissing him on the cheek. Noble Scarlet had whirlpooled through their lives with unchecked intensity...so much so that Skuld ended up having take her courage and 'retire' the little Angel until she could grow more mature.

Now, Cevn was claiming that _he_ had an Angel inside of him.

"Will it change me?" Keiichi asked. Cevn replied that it would, in terms of the new Angel sharing a deep bond with him. As far as Keiichi _losing_ any part of his being, Belldandy explained that her Angel, Holy Bell, was part of her, but yet was apart from her. Whether Holy Bell was present inside of her, or manifesting herself outside of her, Belldandy assured him that she herself was undiminished in either state. Yet, there were certain boundaries that exist between a Goddess and an Angel, which allowed each to be totally individual, rather than enmeshed in each other's divinity.

Keiichi understood Bell-chan's explanation, but wondered if it might be different in his case.

Then he looked at Peorth...the pleading look in her eyes seemed to bore into his soul. He recognized the loneliness in those eyes; the forlorn expression of want and fear...

He decided that he would risk it, so long as Bell-chan agreed.

"How do you feel about this, Bell-chan?" Keiichi asked privately. Belldandy gestured with a wave of her hand and they walked away from the group to discuss this strange new engine of an idea.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

After a few moments of intense discussion, Keiichi and Belldandy returned to the group. They both acknowledged that Keiichi had agreed...that they were willing to undergo the procedure. With a trembling hand, Keiichi swallowed the Angel's Egg, and then laid flat on his stomach on the blanket Skuld had spread over the crisp early summer grasses.

From what Bell-chan had told him, his Angel would initially appear as a small index finger-sized bump in the small of his back. Despite her assurances and the presence of Urd, who had helped Bell-chan 'deliver' Noble Scarlet, Keiichi's apprehensions bested him. Bell's description of the emergence of Skuld's Angel sounded like a scenario straight out of the "Aliens" movie saga! He keened with irresolute feelings, unable to avoid visualizing that the Angel would arrive out of him with all the violence of a chest-burster. Unlike Skuld and her sisters, whose bodies were actually atomic structures reconstituted to appear human...his body _really was_ flesh-and-blood! But in a sense, his mortal body was comprised of the same forces as theirs. He remembered a high school biology teacher who claimed that the human body, because of the physics of its atomic structure, actually recreated itself every moment of that individual's lifespan.

So maybe it would be safe.

His mind swam in Pantagruelian dervishes as he felt the sensation of warm heat gathering at the base of his spine and the crown of his head. The two centers of heat seemed to travel along his spine towards each other. Keiichi had read an article in "Japan Wired" about the kundalini practices of meditation; the physical sensations of this Angel birthing process seemed to accord with the description of chakra alignment mentioned in the magazine.

Peorth watched anxiously as Belldandy rolled Keiichi's shirt up, exposing most of his back. The Goddess in her wanted to help, naturally, but she spurned her impulses once she realized she was way too nervous. She would only get in the way. The Angel that was going to be born...was supposed to be the manifestation of her heart's desire!

She nervously rolled a long strand of black hair between her fingers...

"C'mon...c'mon! Just relax yourself..." Urd urged in a level voice.

"I'm tryin'!" Keiichi answered in frustration. He felt the fleshy heat sensation begin to lightly tense his back, just under his ribs. It felt like the stiffening that occurred there after a long race...the kind of tightness that Bell was so expert at massaging away.

"She's not talking to you, my dear Keiichi...she's talking to your Angel! He's very nervous about his emergence," Belldandy informed him. Bell's voice was strained with concentration, which only caused Keiichi to scale his anxiety to even higher reaches.

Then he felt his back stretching away from his spine, the flesh tensing in a painless sort of way that he had never experienced before.

"I can see him!" he heard Bell-chan announce in an excited voice. A few seconds later, an exquisite singing echoed in Keiichi's ears as he went light-headed. The light-headed sensation reminded him of when he was little; how he would spin in circles until he was dizzy and then blow hard on his thumb, nearly passing out from the effect. Despite his faintness, the melodic singing was _beautiful_, lulling him towards a release of his tension.

The voice sounded like _thousands_ of singers...

"«_Hello, Keiichi!_»" a sonorous voice sang in his head. With a start, Keiichi realized that the chorus of voices was telepathic. The song-voice sounded like a male choir, but yet he knew that it was the voice of his Angel.

"All done, my love! You did so well..." Belldandy said, kneeling down close to him. She tenderly stroked his hair and brow, intuitively trying to soothe the stress away. Despite the fact that he had felt no physical sensations other than the dizziness and the gathering of heat on his spine, Keiichi was soaked in sweat. He turned his head to look at Bell-chan...and saw another face behind hers.

_His_ own face!

Keiichi gasped as the Angel smiled at him.

"_«Surprising to see your own face expressed by another being, isn't it?_»" the voice sang.

"Huh?" Keiichi exclaimed.

"_«Well, if it's any consolation, I feel surprised too. It is my honor to meet you, Keiichi Morisato. I am your Angel, Heroic Vermilion Swift!_»" the Angel said by way of introduction. Then Heroic Vermilion Swift bowed to him, despite hovering in midair. All Keiichi could do was glance agee at the apparition.

Heroic Vermilion Swift possessed a face identical to his, but there the resemblance ended. His Angel had a shock of long flowing dark red hair with red-orange highlights. He was bare-chested, possibly naked! He knew that every time Belldandy's Angel, Holy Bell, appeared, she was as naked as a newborn...except for the flowing silken spreads of sheetcloth that seemed to hover around her body, giving her an appearance of modesty.

"But this is different...he looks just like me! It's like seeing myself naked in public!" Keiichi thought as he felt a moment of vicarious embarrassment, until he saw a white sheet hovering around his Angel in the manner of every other Goddess-Angel that he had ever seen.

"Whew!" he said aloud, relieved and yet still very nervous.

In response to Heroic Vermilion Swift's "birth", all four Goddesses' Angels manifested into thin air, each looking at the new arrival with childlike curiosity. Belldandy and Urd immediately noticed that Skuld's Angel, Noble Scarlet, looked much different...for all practical purposes, Nobel Scarlet looked as adult as any of the other three Angels. All four Angels smiled at Noble Scarlet, who was blushing slightly...

"H..he's _BEAUTIFUL_!" Keiichi heard Peorth's voice exult in a gasp of rapt admiration.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

The first thing Peorth noticed when Keiichi's Angel was born was the rose-colored wings and red hair. Her favorite colors! But this Angel was more than beautiful...he was a total hunk.

He looked just like Keiichi! No...he looked _better_ than Keiichi!

It was if Keiichi's essence had been distilled and then reprised at one level higher in the handsomeness scale. Actually, this wasn't true...the physicality of each Angel was simply a representation of the beauty of their bondmate. Keiichi's Angel was a manifestation of his good looks, cast in the idylls of Angelic form, rather than the grosser mortal bioframe.

Peorth felt her heart fluttering rapidly in her chest, threatening to burst out. She imagined that it was behaving with a mind of its own...as if it was going to sweep out of her breast and fly over to Keiichi's Angel.

Then his eyes met hers.

Belldandy was still amazed by the notion that her precious Keiichi could give birth to an Angel. She was marveling at how much Keiichi's Angel resembled her beloved when, suddenly, the whole temple grounds unexpectedly misted _pink_ in hue...the air, the trees, the plants, the temple itself. A delicate pink fog seemed to flow out of mid-air, right near where Peorth was hovering, bending the light spectrum in such a way that everything it touched was rendered in a brilliant carnation glow or halo. She clutched at her breast as she felt her heartbeat quicken, accompanied by a beaming smile. Keiichi was smiling broadly at his Angel, whose attention was transfixed by Peorth. Belldandy knew that the blissful air of passion which was filling her so fragrantly was the expression of a Goddess's 'love explosion'. It was so overwhelming, she felt tears in her eyes as she looked at her two sisters. Both Urd and Skuld's faces were fixed with joyous smiles as they too were warmed to the Soul by the ambrosial burst of heartlove radiating between Peorth and Keiichi's Angel.

Heroic Vermilion Swift saw a Goddess standing away from the three others who had just mid-spirited him. A deep part of his being was feeling drawn to her; mysteriously, but yet with a festively amorous compunction. The Goddess had short bangs of dark brown-rose hair framing her face with an almost geometrical symmetry; a single tied long strand of black hair streamed down her back to her feet. Her bright red-brown eyes seemed to draw his attention away from everything else. Behind her, an Angel hovered, encircled in rose vines. But the Goddess...was totally beautiful. Totally vivacious and cute and sweet and sexy and demure...

He couldn't find the words in his vocabulary of song to measure how she seemed to his eyes. He was somewhat embarrassed by the fact that he had just met his TwinSoul...and yet he couldn't keep his eyes off of the Goddess hovering a few meters away from him. He didn't want Keiichi to feel ignored, but her presence was so powerful, so entrancing...he felt like his heart was being pillowed by Destiny.

Heroic Vermilion Swift looked at Keiichi with a pained expression, seeking guidance. Keiichi simply smiled back permissively, and then nodded his head in the direction of the 'rose Goddess'. It was as if his TwinSoul _already knew and accepted_ how she was making him feel! And on the flow of this realization, Heroic Vermilion Swift recognized in an instant that the Goddess who was causing him such pleasant consternation...was his Soulmate...

Peorth recognized the look on his face. Heroic Vermilion Swift was staring at her with _that look_.

The _it_ look!

A moment later, she was in his arms, locked in a kiss of complete abandon...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Peorth and Heroic Vermilion Swift wasted no time in telling us that they had to leave. It was perhaps the most blatant example of "love at first sight" that I had ever witnessed. Peorth's face was absolutely odalisque; pastoral and ecstatic...all at once!

My intuition had oft times whispered something about the fact that Peorth was infatuated with Keiichi because of something deep inside of him, something that perhaps had escaped Belldandy's notice because she was so close to him. I had lingered over this 'theory' because it seemed an extraordinary coincidence for _two_ Goddesses to be enamored with the same mortal! In the world of manga and anime, it was a common plot device for a 'hero' to have a 'harem' of admiring girls and women...quite often in possession of magical, otherworldly talents and gifts. But this wasn't a fictive reality, this was _real_. I had given up long ago trying to figure out why I was reading the "Oh My Goddess" manga one week, and then living in the world of the Goddesses the next week. Since then, I had learned so much about 'reality' from these people...people whose existence was nothing more than ink on paper to me two years ago. Now that life was real, I had been guided by their love and affection. So, in the reality of the moment, this wasn't some 'love story' gone amok. The feelings passing between Heroic Vermilion Swift and Peorth were so palpable, I could feel my heart rejoicing in ken with theirs. From this foundation of a guess, it became obvious that Peorth was attracted to an aspect of Keiichi's divinity. It wasn't just Keiichi she was all marshmellowy about...it was his Angel.

Once his Angel was born, her attraction became all the more obvious.

Since Keiichi wasn't a God and lacked a full complement of Divine attributes, his Angel couldn't return to his host. I could feel Heroic Vermilion Swift's initial melancholic air when he tried to 're-enter' Keiichi...and couldn't. But Peorth was quick to assure him that he could visit Keiichi at any time. Belldandy and her sisters also noted that he would always be in Keiichi's presence indirectly, just as their Angels were present in their lives even if they were resting inside of them because of the strong emotional bonds at the heart and Soul levels. They explained that regardless of the paled gems of his situation, Heroic Vermilion Swift was still inexorably linked to Keiichi's Soul. Thus, he would never be totally separated from Keiichi. I strongly suspected that Keiichi's Angel would become an important component of his life...for the rest of his years. In one sense, Heroic Vermilion Swift was the manifestation of Keiichi's passion for racing.

Swift.

After his birthing, the Goddesses and their Angels constantly had to admonish Heroic Vermilion Swift to slow down, as he would 'fly' too fast. He seemed to be hyper at first, flitting about with a series of blurred bursts of speed. Naturally excited by his birth, meeting Keiichi, swooning for Peorth...Heroic Vermilion Swift had a very full afternoon. Watching him was almost like seeing the American comic book hero Flash in action; Heroic Vermilion Swift moved about with a flashes of speed, his orange-red hair streaking against the air, except when he was simply floating in the air. He wasn't anxious or unsettled; his nimble movements were just his 'speed of life'.

I was overjoyed for Peorth. She had found a love...or had love found her? In any case, the two of them made a perfect couple.

It was even funnier when "Mr. Swift", as Skuld called him, retracted his wings. Peorth and the other Goddesses were completely freaked out at this...after all, didn't Angel _always_ have wings?

There was no immediate explanation for this phenomena. The concise conjecture we agreed upon was that...since Heroic Vermilion Swift couldn't 'rest' in Keiichi's body, he would need to possess the form of mortal and an Angel. Unlike all the other Angels, he was much more independent in manifestation. Without his wings, he looked like a taller red-haired version of Keiichi.

In a sense, I had granted Peorth's second, albeit himitsu, wish. She had always felt overshadowed, at most a second-best to Belldandy. This was because Belldandy had received the most important and challenging wish assignment that the GRO had granted in millennia. Part of what drew Peorth towards Keiichi was the professional jealousy she felt towards Belldandy. Now she would be on equal footing with Belldandy in terms of notoriety, because Heroic Vermilion Swift was the first and only Angel of his kind.

No doubt, Peorth would be the talk of the Earth Otasuke Division for a long, long time!

I was grateful that events had described themselves as they had; I had figuratively hung myself out by the balls when I had promised to grant Peorth's wish. Very little foresight was required to know what she would probably ask for. Once again, the hazard of having recourse to the energies of the Ultimate Force without the ability to think things through had made it clear that I had become a danger to myself and others. I no longer had the enhanced mental abilities I employed while reconstituting the Everything; my efforts of behalf of Peorth were fueled more by empathy for her heart-break situation than by a capacity for rational thought or common-sense. Talk about narrow escapes...I was fortunate that Keiichi, Belldandy and her sisters were able to take this surprise in stride.

The next one was definitely going to be a doozy...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"According to what the Enigma Book describes herein, the Balance needs _four_ sisters to seal away his powers. Two of whom must be Gods, while the remaining two are...Demons," Skuld announced after reading the relevant passage in the Enigma Book.

"Ehh?" Urd protested. "That's _bizarre_! Gods and Demons...sisters? In one family? So much for sealing his powers back up!"

"Have fun, cuz I guess this means that his powers aren't going to be sealed for a while! Glad he's your problem, not mine!" Mara taunted. She felt a paused as the humor of Cevn's situation bled out, replaced by some very uncool implications. She turned and regarded the three Norns with a worried expression. She was loath to face the fact that Urd's boyfriend might end up keeping his powers. It was bad enough that the deck was stacked with three queens and a king against her one queen. But now they had another king on their side as well. Actually, Cevn was much more of a wild card than a king, considering the powers he claimed he had.

Urd was deeply concerned about this obstacle, but her focus was more personal in scope. She knew that, should Cevn was unable to seal away his powers, their relationship would soon be in deep trouble. She utterly disdained the idea of charting a lifelong love with a boyfriend whose divine powers were literally off the scale. It would be impossible...because Urd would be ill provided in her ability to maintain the necessary mystique to keep the relationship from fading. She _needed_ to have the primacy, at least 75 of the time! The upper edge. Otherwise, how could she keep him under her thumb?

Then she remembered something he said about _needing_ to seal up the Ultimate Force...or else he could perish!

"This really sucks! Why would that stupid book set such a crazy, _impossible_ condition for sealing away his powers?" Urd bemoaned.

"Urd, I believe that the instructions provided in the Enigma Book are completely reasonable and correct. They accord with the fact that Cevn is the Balance; thus it makes good sense that two Gods and two Demons are required to seal away his powers," Belldandy observed. Mara scowled at her, mostly because she knew that Belldandy was right.

"Hey you guys!" Cevn announced as he entered his room. All four divine women looked at him with sheepish faces; they had been caught snooping!

"Don't you ever _listen_? You're supposed to be with Keiichi...going shopping?!" Urd confronted him, floating up in the air to face him. She grimaced as she heard a crash. A small writing desk had been tipped over; a quick glance as Skuld's guilty face was enough to confirm what happened.

"Ooops!" Skuld exclaimed, covering her face with a gloved hand. When Cevn surprised them, she had tried to quickly slide the Enigma Book out of sight under the small writing table-nightstand. But instead, she ended up knocking the table and everything on it over.

Keiichi stepped in the doorway and rested a hand on Cevn's shoulder.

"Yes, but on the way there, I smelled a setup. I've been together with Bell-chan going on five years...I _know_ when she's invented an errand to get me out the house. Not to mention that Urd and Skuld here were pulling some pretty suspicious moves right before we left. Mara was playing with her hair, which is a dead-on clue that she's plotting something as well. We may be mortals, but we're not stupid. We're also men; which gives us a special insight into Goddess and Demoness blind spots. Just like you have feminine intuition, we have...well, we have this," Keiichi explained with a smug smile on his face. His girlfriend's delicate facial features turned pink-cheeked, confirming his suspicion.

"Give me a fucking break! Masculine intuition?" Mara groused angrily.

"So what are you ladies up to?" Keiichi asked.

"W..we were just looking at some things..." Skuld stammered, before Urd broke in.

"Basically, it's because he's mine! Since he's _my_ boyfriend...I have the right to check through his stuff once in a while! Right, Cevn-honey? Girlfriend's privilege...right? Right?!" Urd answered contentiously. "Besides, I've gotta make sure that you aren't hoarding any porno mags or love letters from other women."

Keiichi only barely managed to keep from bursting out in laughter as Cevn's face turned beet-red at Urd's 'logic'. He watched as Cevn shook his head from side-to-side in tired resignation, regarding Urd with an obvious "what am I going to do with you?" expression.

"So now what?" Mara asked.

"What Urd is trying to say is that she wants to seal away my powers, allowing her to have what she considers to be 'the upper hand' in our relationship. So let's do it and get it over with. We can use Urd's mandala carpet in her "Urd's Castle" room to create the necessary sealing circle. And the four of you..."

"I..I do not want to steal..er..seal away your powers because of _us_. I have the good of the Multiverse at heart. Besides, didn't you tell me last night that..." Urd protested. Mara couldn't restrain her laughter at Urd's weak attempt to gainsay her boyfriend. For all Mara knew, being the Ultimate Force may have given Urd's boyfriend omniscience as well...

"What? It says here that..." Skuld interrupted, having retrieved the Enigma Book from behind the nightstand.

"I know what it says, Skuld! Four sisters, two Gods and two Demons...blah blah, woof woof, yadda yadda... I _wrote_ that stuff, remember," Cevn said light-humouredly.

"Ehh? So would you care to explain to us..._who's the fourth sister_? I see only _three_ sisters in this room!" Skuld noted with a dash of sarcasm.

"There are four divine immortals in this room. We know for certain that three of them are sisters...so I guess that allows for one possible candidate...and it isn't me or Keiichi," Cevn said with a mysterious smile as he regarded Mara.

"M..Mara?" Keiichi asked incredulously.

"WHAT? ME?" Mara exclaimed in rigid disbelief, pointing at herself.

"Skuld, if you would be so kind as to get your Shinseisensor from your tech lab?" Cevn asked.

"I renamed it the Shinseicorder!" Skuld noted indignantly. She glanced at him with an expression of curiosity, then left the room to get her divine energy-measuring device.

"Urd, have you ever met your half-mother?"

"Of course I have, you idiot! You should know this, after what we did together last night," Urd replied angrily.

"Oh...do tell, Urd," Mara asked, seizing on this juicy bit of potential embarrassment for her Goddess counterpart.

"Another time, Mara, another time," Urd replied with a blush. "My half-mother's name is Hild and she's a Demon Queen. But I don't remember that much about her when I was growing up. But in the last couple years, she suddenly started showing up and causing all sorts of problems for all of us. She's all hung up on wanting me to call her "Mom". Strange, she hasn't made an appearance since you came here. But she's totally a Demoness, and a Queen at that...which means that I have royal blood, hmph!" Urd explained.

"You mean royal grandiosity and insanity! We all know that Hild's a psycho!" Mara vigorously emphasized, with several Goddesses nodding their heads up-and-down in confirmation.

"If you inherited anything from her, Big Sister...it wasn't royalty! It was your ability to be a total nutter in any situation. The only 'royal' about you is that you're a royal pain in the..." Skuld interjected as she returned with the Shinseicorder.

"You brat!" Urd said, tossing a pillow at Skuld.

"Hey, I'm almost as tall as you now, Big Sister...and prettier!"

"I'm going to get you for that one..."

Mara listened to the matchsticks-on-fire exchange of sibling rivalries with a quiet moodiness. She was an only child, the daughter of Baeeal and Myducia. Further, Mara didn't have any other sisters or brothers. And now, Cevn was asserting that she was related to the three Norns, her sworn enemies! But beyond this, the implication that she was _part Goddess_...possessed all of the putrid taste of a Judas kiss.

Overwrought by this possibility, Mara leaned against Belldandy, faint-headed from shock. Belldandy was so shocked, she almost dropped away from Mara...

"Mara...it must be a mistake. You mustn't take this so hard. We all know that you're a Demoness, through and through. When we used to holoplay when we were little, you always went back home to where the Demons go. When you and I competed in all those tourneys, you were always on the Demon's team. You've been an agent of the Demon Grief Office for a long long time. There must be some kind of reasonable explanation...," Belldandy assured her, shaking Mara's shoulder to emphasize her point. She gestured to Keiichi, making a cup with her hand and holding it to her mouth. Keiichi went to the kitchen to grab a glass of ice water, wondering if Belldandy was going to splash Mara in the face with it.

Skuld held up the Shinseicorder and tapped a complex series of commands on the keypad, calibrating it. Then she pointed it at each person in the room.

"Nothing anomalous in these readings," she realized as she finished by scanning herself. Finally, she checked Urd using the Demon detection circuitry...and Urd registered as a Demoness Senior First Class. Then, she adjusted the Shinseicorder to detect Goddess Powers and pointed it at Mara.

Mara's Goddess Power readings were a very strong Goddess Senior First Class!

The instantaneous expression of shock on Skuld's face gave away her results before she even announced them.

_"__N..nooooo!__"_ Mara wailed, her voice approaching jet engine decibelage.

Urd had only heard one other being yell so loudly...and she was standing next to her, all brown-haired and bushy-tailed. Only Belldandy could shout so loudly. And if it was true that Mara was some kind of...sister...to her and her sisters, then that shout of dismay was probably the kind of trait that could only be accounted for by kinship!

"Let me explain this before everything gets really confusing," Cevn asked.

"It's _already_ confusing!" Urd and Belldandy asserted sharply.

"Granted, it is. However, although Mara's mother is Myducia, her half-mother is Freiija."

A moment of dearthy silence met Keiichi as he returned with a tall glass of ice water. Mara grabbed the glass and gulped the water down in one pull.

"_How dare you_! Are you intimating that our Mother had...relations...with a Demon?" Belldandy shouted angrily.

"Who are you to act all insulted? He's claiming that my Father had relations...with a Goddess! That's even _worse_!" Mara shouted, just as angry.

"Of course not, for all of your sakes!! Before you jump all over each other and me, please listen for a moment," Cevn begged.

"You're in the dog house right now, mister!" Urd exclaimed angrily. "One slipup and you'll be well on the way to digging your own grave."

"Belldandy, as you noted earlier, there is a reasonable explanation for this situation. Urd and Mara are a mix of Goddess and Demoness because there was a...mutation...within the Doublet System. I assure you, there was no infidelity or weirdness involved in any of this on the part of your parents. So please, don't bother yourselves with suspicions of any betrayal. _They_ don't even know about this! So, I would strongly suggest that you keep what is said here in confidence for now," Cevn explained.

"This...is _your_ doing, isn't it!" Urd confronted Cevn with a pointed finger and a red-rued visage.

"Urd, you know that you were born to Freiija. You've known for a long time that you're a Goddess, along with your sisters. But Belldandy and Skuld are both 100 percent Goddess, while you are equal parts Goddess and Demoness. Your half-Demoness part came about because you possess the Demoness energies of Myducia and Hild. Likewise, Mara, you were born to Myducia, but you are half-Goddess, because you have the Goddess energies of Freiija and Sifu."

"Sifu? I can barely remember meeting her when I was very little. I always wondered why I met a Goddess when I was only 40 or 50 millennia old," Mara observed, looking introspective

"Yes, Sifu was your...I guess the closest term would be stepmother. Somehow, the Yggdrasil and Vanagdrasil Mainframes had a glitch. Instead of assigning Mara and Urd to be Doublets, it enmeshed their energies...making them sisters. In fact, you both are _twin sisters_!"

"I don't look a bit like her!" both Mara and Urd exclaimed, pointing at each other with faces flush with irritation.

"Now it makes so much sense!! So how did it come to be that you both know _exactly_ what kind of music paralyzes the other? An accident? When you released the Ultimate Destruction Program, Mara, did it ever occur to you to wonder why it took to my Big Sister and made her the Lord of Terror? Just a coincidence?! And what about this blatant urge on both your parts to upstage each other; whether it's ping pong, karaoke, pachinko, shoji, volleyball..? Rivalry among friends? I think not! More like sisterly catfighting!" Skuld noted, pointing out several of the strange enigmas that defined Urd and Mara's relationship/competition.

"Urd, the reason you must not have met Myducia was because it would have then become very obvious that you and Mara were sisters. Likewise, I would guess that Mara hasn't ever met Freiija for the same reason," Belldandy added.

"This...is totally insane! Absolutely idiotic! I'm _not_ a Goddess! Not a blessed chance in Hell that I'm one of...them! I don't have one molecule of Goddess essence in me! Not one!!" Mara protested, pointing her finger at the three Norns.

"Besides, if this stupid notion of yours it true...and I _am_ their sister, then why would the Vanagdrasil Mainframe and the Grief Office assign me to Keiichi? One thousand inhabited worlds in my sector, with trillions of beings...and it had to be _him_?! To make me have to fight against my own sisters over one idiot case of Grief Bestowal Over one idiot mortal?" Mara interjected with sheer frustration, pointing at Keiichi in exasperation.

"I arranged it when I was rebuilding the Everything," Cevn admitted.

"Oh great, Cevn! Just pour some more gasoline on the fire, why don't ya. Or make it nitro in this case. Look at Mara...she's about ready to have the Demonic equivalent of a meltdown!" Urd muttered as she watched Mara's face rue purple red with rage.

"YOU WHAT? YOU MADE ME PART-GODDESS! AND THEN YOU**...**" Mara exploded with clench-fisted anger, her fangs glistening to each word.

"I'm sorry, but if I hadn't, you would have died," Cevn said softly.

"AND ON TOP OF EVERYTHING ELSE, YOU SAY...I would have...died? You mean the Real Death?" Mara blurted, suddenly grave in attitude as her resentment trailed off.

"Yes, Mara. Didn't it seem odd to you that the SpiderDemons were unable to consume your whole Soul when you were trapped by Isilblius?" Cevn asked. Mara nodded her head; the fact that she had survived and escaped had been a total mystery. They _should_ have consumed every bit of her Demonic essence. She had attributed it to sheer desire on her part to survive and escape. Plus a little bit of luck.

She remembered that, once she had escaped, she was able to subdue the SpiderDemons with relative ease. Somehow.

Now she understood why.

"You were able to withstand your imprisonment because the SpiderDemons couldn't consume the Goddess portion of your Soul, Mara. That's what poisoned most of them. Lucky thing for all of us, since your courageous escape tipped us all off about Isilblius! I simply ask you...to look inside yourself. Look to your past. Do you know _any_ Demons who had Goddesses as friends and playmates while they were growing up? Any Demons whose tournament competitions with the Gods _always_ resulted in tie scores? About your age...how old are you? 271,142 years old, right? Urd is the same age...to the millisecond! Coincidence?" Cevn noted.

"How about the fact that when you manifest, you look like you have the same bust size as Urd?" Keiichi added, grinning broadly. He just couldn't resist that one...especially since Mara had tried to fool him into thinking she was a man, all those years ago. His remark should set off quite a flurry of Demonic irritation, he hoped.

_"__KEIICHI!!__"_ Mara and Urd shouted bloody murder. Belldandy, Skuld and Cevn couldn't help but laugh at their expense.

"Hey...at least I didn't tell everybody how many cm your three sizes are!" Cevn said by way of apology. Keiichi burst out laughing as Urd and Mara turned beet red.

"And you won't, either...unless you want to incur the wrath of a Goddess and a Demoness _after_ we seal away your powers!" Urd and Mara threatened, their voices in concert.

"Ahhh yes! As a Demoness with some small expertise in matters of heaping despair on mortal lives, I could bring millennia of experience in creating grief to bear. And I don't think your girlfriend would object, so there!" Mara said sharply with a fang-bearing grin.

"Mara...a poet?" Belldandy observed.

"And as your girlfriend, I could put you through hells that Dante couldn't even imagine..." Urd added. Mara and Urd looked at each other, nodding their heads in smug satisfaction.

To Urd, Cevn's reaction...a deep flash of fear...was amusing enough to forgive his indiscretion concerning feminine attributes. What was even more funny, Keiichi was howling with laughter as he looked at Cevn's face.

Soon, everybody was laughing at the so-called mortal with the Ultimate Force...much to Urd's relish!

"Look, I'm sorry! There's a lot more I could bring up...but I hope you get the picture!" Cevn said, trying to evict the laughter with an apology. "Besides, if you weren't their sister, Mara, I wouldn't be asking your help in the process of sealing up these Ultimate Force powers! It stands to reason that, if you four seal my powers up...then you _have_ to all be sisters! And I don't think I'm tempted to make a mistake when my survival is concerned!"

_That _brought some sobriety back into Urd's thoughts.

"I..I don't know what to say. This is just too...blessedly radical! It's definitely a Soulblower!" Mara noted in a quiet voice.

"We can all sort it out later. Please, I need you to seal up my powers. Soon! Otherwise, they'll consume me!" Cevn pleaded.

"Ehhh?" Urd and her sisters looked at Cevn with panicked expressions.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"He's right. Cevn simply is harnessing too much Metanative Chaostic energy within one particular axial dimension in TimeSpace, namely his Soul. If you don't seal his powers up...then he's going to simply expire," Skuld confirmed, reading out of the Enigma Book.

"Did you say _Metanative Chaostic energy_?!" Mara asked, shocked.

"She's right! It has to be done right away," Cevn answered. "Besides, at the moment you five put the seal on, I'm going to make myself and everyone else forget about Isilblius and everything else concerning my span as the Ultimate Force."

"_Five_ of us?" Keiichi asked.

"Yes. I need five family members to do this. Four divines to disperse the Ultimate Force back where it belongs, and one mortal to anchor me here. I left these specifics out of the Enigma Book as a precaution, to keep Isilblius from sealing my powers should he somehow find out about the book," Cevn explained.

Skuld smiled to herself as she realized what Cevn had just said. As the Norn of the Future, she strongly suspected that Cevn had journeyed into the future of this TimeStream. His statement only confirmed her sway of hypothesis. It wasn't simply an effort at prognostication...it was outright _fact_! None of the others would understand...which was a moot point anyway; at the moment they sealed away his Ultimate Force powers, Cevn would mindwipe everybody's awareness about Isilblius and all the chaos that the Ultimate Demon had strewn in his wake. He would also necessarily have to purge his own memories about being the Ultimate Force.

Skuld didn't know what exactly would be excised from her memories, or the TimeStream. But she trusted Cevn completely. It was daunting for her to even consider the fact that he had rebuilt the Everything from scratch after Isilblius totally screwed it up. _That _was still mind boggling for her to try and comprehend.

But Skuld had devised a plan of her own to preserve her memories...because of a nagging intuition that had possessed her ever since this discussion arose. She _knew_ that there would be a point in the future where it would be vital to remember everything that happened here. Having traversed her domain of the Future any number of instances, Skuld realized that this was an absolute necessity.

Her 'writing' power was really handy sometimes.

"See you on the other side, Skuld..." she whispered to the words that invisibly appeared on the last page of the Enigma Book.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Big Sister Urd and the others were standing around the circular mandala carpet, forming a circle around Cevn. Skuld read out instructions for the sealing spell...and a few minutes later, three Goddesses, one Demoness and one mortal joined their hands, creating a rainbow of dancing colors...

_ring_

"Would someone _please_ answer that phone?" Keiichi shouted, hoping that Megumi and Genji were back from wherever they had gone. A moment later, Megumi ducked her head in the doorway. His younger sister looked pretty confused.

"That was Chihiro calling to remind us about the Motor Club meeting tomorrow after school. She sounds really worried about everybody's finals next week, so she suggested that we have a study jam session at Whirlwind tonight. She mentioned that the Le Man's is just three weeks away," Megumi explained.

"What? The Le Mans? But isn't this July? And I thought we had dissolved the Club!" Keiichi wondered privately. The idea of having to go through term tests _again_ really sucked! Unfortunately, Urd didn't keep a calendar in her hobby room. He looked at Belldandy for confirmation...his Goddess girlfriend looked just as confused as he felt.

"Pretty bizarre when the Norn of the Present doesn't even know what day it is," he observed to himself. Today had witnessed a series of mysteries revealed. Or was it a series of recondite truths created to confuse? He hoped that things would clear up once they sealed away his friend's powers...

_ring_

The spinning rainbow collapsed...

_RING!!_

"Would someone please answer that phone!" Keiichi shouted. A moment later, Megumi ducked her head into the doorway.

"What are you guys doing, having a séance or something? By the way, that was Chihiro calling to remind us about..."

"Oh shit! I almost forgot! The cram session!" Keiichi exclaimed.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Aren't we forgetting something?" Belldandy asked after the exorcism was concluded. It was unusual for Goddesses to be involved in an exorcism, but in Cevn's case, it was imperative. One of Mara's experiments had screwed up, infecting him with a hungry ghost.

"Leave it to our step-sister to muck things up once again!" Urd complained.

"Hey...accidents happen!" Mara shot back.

"I don't want to hear anything more about accidents. I'm exhausted!" Skuld said, stretching out her arms as she laid on her back in the middle of Urd's mandala carpet.

"Aren't we supposed to float our tanzaku on the river on the day after Tanabata?" Belldandy noted. Everybody slumped their shoulders with exhaustion in response to her request.

As they emerged into the dining room, Keiichi noted the calendar on the wall. As it turned out, they had done the Tanabata celebration six weeks early! Today was Sunday, May 20th, 20XX. Tanabata wouldn't be held until July 7th.

Megumi had giggled when Belldandy mentioned the tanzuki papers hanging from the cherry tree. She remarked that it was a good thing that the household hadn't observed one of several other traditional Tanabata rituals, such as the offering of melons...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Keiichi was feeling stressed out...his mind seemed like a crumpled dry sponge.

"The path that leads to danger often appears smooth and innocent as a commonplace mirror," he reminded himself, echoing the words of the ancient Zen priest. In this case, the commonplace was Keiichi's eye-straining rigors of studying for the finals he was taking. The danger was posed by headaches layered upon headaches; a fitful distress that peeled away any possibility of relaxation during study breaks.

"So this is what grad school is all about..." he muttered to his pages of notes and calculations and sketches.

Chihiro had been a basket case the past few days. It seemed like she had become magnet for the heightened anxieties the Club members were experiencing regarding their finals. The first term usually lasted from April to late June, but since the N.I.T. Motor Club had qualified for the Le Mans, they were granted special permission to take their finals early. Those who had classes with Cevn-sensei were offered the option to take their finals after the race in France, of course.

Naturally, it would happen to be that Sora, Megumi and he were scheduled to take the dreaded Saturday afternoon finals. The school week usually lasted from Monday to Saturday; thus taking finals on the last day was an exercise in self-torture. Exhausted minds trying to make sense of exhaustive facts and formulae.

Since they were taking their finals several weeks early, all the club members had to fit their exams whenever their sensei's schedules could accommodate them...which naturally led to exam taking at weird hours. The day after tomorrow, Keiichi had to participate in a major daylong club meeting to deal with the huge amount of details regarding their race.

He looked at the small blue felt box sitting on his table. It had just shown up in his study room a couple of days ago, after he and the four sisters had participated in some kind of ritual to release Cevn from some kind of spell of possession. When he first peeked inside of the box, it had shocked him beyond belief, not only because of the box's contents, but also because the object inside the box was uncannily meet with his own wishes.

It seemed as if someone had read his mind's heartfelt desire and granted it...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"We don' have enough!" Tamiya growled angrily, slapping the workbench he was sitting on. "If we buys all de parts, then we don' have enough cashola ta send everything to France! So da reality is dis...we gotta skimp on our expenses."

"We _can't_!" Chihiro shrieked fitfully. "Dammit, we've gone this far! That design that Keiichi came up with requires us to use _all_ the parts. Our car is almost 10 years old...we need to almost completely rebuild any number of vital components in order to even have a chance. Qualifying is one thing...but we're going to the Le Mans TO WIN!"

With this, she resumed her pacing.

_crash_

Ootaki had thrown a tool across the shed, crunching it against the wall. Keiichi could see a single tear tracing his cheek underneath his round mirrored shades.

"We just _can't do it_! Genji and Sayoko both donated as much of their living allowances as they could. Chihiro worked on repairing bikes for two months...and gave all her of salary earnings from Whirlwind to the Club. We only have a few sponsors. Nissan gave us a generous amount, but we used almost all of that to make it to the trials. We're _millions_ of yen short," Sora announced, assessing the fiscally challenged state of the Club with a gloomy expression.

"So I guess that's it! We're screwed!" Genji said dejectedly.

"Goddammit!" Keiichi shouted. "We do this because it's a challenge, and because it's fun for us to work together. It's fun to work at intertwining our skills and our dreams so we can meet the challenges of racing. Now, we can't even go, because of _money_! It's so freakin' stupid! Stupid idiotic bullshit!"

Megumi rarely saw her brother get this worked up. His present zealous fervor was in complete contrast to his pessimistic attitude when she first broached the idea to him, back when Skuld's 'study aid' machine had backfired and left her brother with a big head, so to speak. Now, Keiichi was livid, because of the circumstances that demanded it.

She was about ready to echo Ootaki's silent statement and sail her clipboard across the room.

"We need a miracle!" Sora exclaimed in dismay.

"Uh, can I come in?" someone asked from the vicinity of the open doorway. Chihiro had even turned the AC off to cut Whirlwind shop expenses. To add a few extra yen to the pool of money. Being inside of a metal trailer without the AC in the blazing heat of May was brutal; tempers were humidfied by the inescapable heat.

Everyone turned his or her heads towards the voice.

"Toshiyuki Aoshima, what are you doing here!?" Tamiya and Ootaki bellowed angrily in one voice.

Megumi snapped her head back and forth between the figure in the doorway and Sora. Sora was blushing, of course, since her boyfriend was here...but then Sora caught her eye. She shook her head at Megumi, signaling "I don't have a clue about what this is all about!"

"Hey, I know that this seems that the enemy has come to spy on your camp, but can I at least come in?" he asked politely.

"Here to witness our biggest defeat, Toshiyuki?" Keiichi remarked.

"Keiichi! That's not a way to treat a guest! Now,_ you_ go get him a soda or juice, to make up for your rudeness," Chihiro barked. Her firm expression and fists on her hips made it clear to Keiichi that this wasn't a 'request' from the club leader. Supposedly, _he_ was the Club president...but Chihiro was running the show! Feeling usurped, he grumble-asked Aoshima what he wanted to drink, then fetched it from the cooler.

"Explain yerself!" Tamiya said in an aggro voice, earning a punch to the shoulder from Chihiro.

"Mind your manners, Tamiya!" Chihiro accosted him verbally. "By all means, do explain the reason for your unexpected visit, Mr. Aoshima."

"Look, you guys all know that I'm going out with Sora. I've been thinking...it's kinda ridiculous to be the head of a motor club that is in constant rivalry with the club she belongs to. Since I've been going out with her for a little while now..."

"What does goin' out with lil' Sora here have ta do with anything! Ah'z swear, if you do anything to make her cry..." Tamiya said angrily. He sensed that Aoshima was up to the kind of sneaky tricks he was well renowned for. Even after he started dating Aoshima's cousin, Sayoko, Aoshima still dug under his skin like fishhooks. If Aoshima wasn't Sayoko's cousin...he would have been dead meat a long time ago; on the receiving end of a Super Tamiya Punch.

But since Aoshima was related to his girlfriend...

"Tamiya!" Sora protested, more than a little irritated by his paternal attitude towards her.

"Well, a guy's gotta do what a guy's gotta do!" Tamiya reluctantly admitted, rubbing the back of his head. Still, he didn't like it...Aoshima coming _here_, to their clubhouse.

"Hey you guys, chill out! He's come here, so let's at least be civil to him," Megumi said tensely, more than a little upset as she sensed Sora's uncertainty.

"You dopes always seem to forget that Toshiyuki is Sora's boyfriend! It's bad enough that Sora has to endure all the derogatory comments about Aoshima's Four Wheel Club. But this is a little too much! Whatta bunch of callous clown-shoed idiots you guys can be sometimes! Especially after all the work Sora has done for our club!!" she said in a near-shout.

Sora looked at her best friend with an admixture of surprise and embarrassment. Megumi was really dressing down some of the Club members!

Toshiyuki Aoshima pulled a chair up to the circle, feeling like he had just entered the tiger's den. He wanted to sit next to Sora, but since the clubhouse was crowded, he had to settle for a stool between Ootaki and his cousin Genji. His Four Wheel Club had been a rival of the Motor Club for two years; but recently, the enmity that formally was so vital to the Four Wheel Club's existence ...now seemed churlish and misdirected.

Sora had made him finally forget about Belldandy.

"Where _is_ Belldandy, anyway?" he wondered.

"What can we do to help you?" Chihiro asked directly. She hadn't dealt much with this Aoshima character, but Tamiya and Ootaki seemed to hate him with a passion. But yet, Sora was his steady girlfriend...so he mustn't be all that bad, she reasoned. She sighed, knowing that she would have to navigate these roadways cautiously.

"Look, I'm really sorry that I'm disturbing your club meeting. Sora told me that it was really important...and I kinda guessed about what you guys are discussing. Anyway, I'm doing this as more of an amends to my girlfriend than anything else. But I understand your plight...and I also want to help you."

"EHH?!" a chorus of voices shouted.

"Sora told me that she was interested in me during our frosh year at N.I.T. As you all know, during that time I set up a club based on a resentment; the Four Wheel Club. We outright competed unfairly with you guys. I know...it must have been really hard for her. A few days ago, I was thinking, what could I do to make it up to her? To all of you? Consequently, there was only one reasonable course of action to take. I've decided to dissolve the Four Wheel Club."

"You came here and interrupted our meeting just to tell us _that_?" Ootaki remarked with barely concealed contempt and sarcasm.

"Ootaki, you might be interested in the fact that the Four Wheel Club has a significant cash reserve. Almost 20 million yen, to be exact. If you let me and the rest of our Club members join the N.I.T. Motor Club, it's yours," Toshiyuki replied calmly. The silence which followed was as gripping as the silence during the climax of a Kabuki act, right at the moment when the lead actor executes a mie.

"To..shi..yu..ki...saaa," Sora said breathily. Toshiyuki grinned softly at her and nodded his head. Megumi felt her heart skiphopping in joyous empathy for her best friend. Sora had deserved as much; but yet, Aoshima's generous gesture was so much more of a love boon than she ever suspected the smarmy sophomore of being capable of doing.

"How can da Club trust ya after all yuh've done over da...er, uh, excuse me...did yuh say _20 million yen_?" Tamiya asked. If Aoshima was telling the truth, Tamiya grudgingly acknowledged that he might have to start calling him "Aoshima-san" or even "Toshiyuki". The fact that Tamiya called Aoshima by his surname without an honorific suffix had caused Sayoko to soundly chew him out on a number of occasions.

"Yes, and all six members of the Four Wheel Club including myself. I figured that the cash would be more than enough to pay for our way to France, not to mention that it would help your club meet its expenses."

"You're basically proposing a merger," Chihiro said, perspicaciously seeing into the heart of the matter. It was resoundingly sensible, from a lot of angles. More money, a greater pool of engineering expertise. She knew that if this Aoshima character joined the Motor Club, then he couldn't betray their efforts, because he would be working side-by-side with his girlfriend. And if he did, even Sora wouldn't be able to stop her from breaking his little neck!

"Let's take a vote!" Chihiro announced.

A half hour later, the meeting was examining all the different means available to ship all the components to France. Keiichi realized that the Motor Club had been granted a miracle, in the form of a mixed blessing. He hoped with all of his heart that they hadn't slighted themselves by voting Aoshima's club into theirs.

As he glanced as the tender expressions passing between Sora and Toshiyuki, he couldn't help but admit to the possibility that this might be a good thing.

As the meeting ended, Chihiro realized that her work was cut out for her...because she had to mold this motley crew into a _team_.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Belldandy, Urd, Skuld and Mara were all asleep in the sister's bedroom. After they finished their work with Cevn, they were completely exhausted. Mara was too drained to return to her lair, and the three Norns could barely make it out of Urd's "Urd's Castle" room. So they decided to pull out an extra futon and let Mara sleep over.

When Keiichi returned, it had been the second full day of their sleep. Cevn was grading assignments and papers, converting the dining room table to a desk.

"Hey, what's up with the Club?" he asked. Keiichi smiled at him and told him the good news. They chitchatted about the implications of the larger club for a little while.

"Cevn, do you have a minute? I want to consult you about something important...and 'I think that this night waxes as the freshest stamp of time to avail myself to the task.'" Keiichi asked, quoting the famous Japanese poet.

"Since when did you develop poetic aspirations, Keiichi?" Cevn said with a smile, genuinely pleased at Keiichi's turn at citation.

"Well, I've been living inside a dream...the kind of dream-moment that a poet would find himself relishing; his ambition married to his love of the woman whose grace elevated his soul beyond the realms of his most well-remembered fantasies," Keiichi answered.

"Waitaminute! Did you say...marry?" Cevn asked, tossing down the final he was marking with a slap.

"Yes. I found something in my "Keiichi's Shop" room the other day...something that came inside of a small box."

"You too? I found one inside of my "Cevn's Studio" room, sitting on top of a sequencer box. Did yours have a..."

"Yeah, it did! I wonder what's going on? The money that you gave us for living expenses...part of the money that came in your Enigma Book, well, it's just about run out. So I'm not going to spend a lot of time trying to figure out this latest 'gift' that's come up!"

"Have you decided when?" Cevn asked, feeling a fever of excitement towards Keiichi's decision.

"Yeah, but I wanted to get another guy's opinion. You were married once...and I know that it might be hard for you to talk about. But I have to know. What was it like when you proposed to your first wife?" Keiichi asked.

"My _first_ wife? Are you implying that I'm going to have a _second_ wife?" Cevn replied with mock indignance. Keiichi responded by darting his eyes to the hallway and back.

"Don't tell me you haven't thought about it!" Keiichi admonished.

"I try not to. One of the ways I try to look at love is to really understand that it exists only in the here and now. When I'm into my highest vision of being, then I'm most open to love. When I feel love...it's in the moment. I can be hanging around Urd and not feel a thing, then all of a sudden...boom!...I feel love for her. Or loved by her. One of the things I learned is that if I try to read too much into that 'boom' of love, I can easily end up losing it. Something Urd calls 'ruining the moment.' Because I love her, I try and _love_ her...rather than mentally redo the word 'love' to mean a bunch of other stuff, like 'marriage', 'always', 'never fight', 'good sex', 'lifelong commitment', etc. This way, I figure I'll have a better chance of stumbling upon these wonderful things when they manifest, because I'll be able to truly notice them for what they are...instead of trying to interpret them in terms of the catch-all of an umbrella type of feeling."

"Cool! In my own way, I feel the same way towards Bell-chan. Call it a philosophy, so to speak. I've really had to be conscientious about trying to take it a day at a time with her. Because of the fact that she's who she is...a Goddess...pretty much anything can happen at a given moment. I realize that my love for Bell is conceived of a dynamic existence, something more important than my own isolated life of ideas. So I do what is in front of me. This Fall, we will celebrate being together as a couple for _five years_! I..I still can't believe it's been that long! And ever since they found out about Belldandy and I, my folks keep pestering me about all sorts of things. You know, the 'when are you going to bring us home some grandchildren, son' talk. I've told them that I really hope that we can get married when the time is right,"

Cevn listened intently as Keiichi continued...

"I've known for certain that I'm going to marry Bell-chan...there's been no indecision on my part about this fact. But when? _That's_ the hardest decision! This race coming up at Le Mans is by far the biggest event of my life. When I was a kid, I used to dream about racing in the 24 Hours of Le Mans. Over the past five years, I've often dreamt about marrying Bell as well. Now that I'm racing in the Le Mans for sure...I've decided that I should make_ all_ my dreams a reality...and ask for her hand in marriage. I plan on doing it after the race, but I don't know whether to ask her privately or publicly," Keiichi explained, rounding his explanation with a note of uncertainty.

"Hmm, that's a tough one, Keiichi. I asked my ex-wife privately. I fantasized about asking her in a very public way, but then I decided against it. The reality was, a lot of my friends weren't her friends. Also, it just kinda happened. I had planned to ask her after a nice dinner date...good restaurant, dancing, the works. Like you're supposed to do in the movies. But instead, I ended up asking her after coming home late from work. I just couldn't hold onto the waiting any longer. But your case is different, Keiichi. You and Belldandy, well you both have been a very public couple! All the guys in the Motor Club really like her; she's become part of the group. I know how important that is now...Megumi gave me a lecture about Japanese social circles that I'll never forget a while back. If I were you...I'd propose to her in public. Besides, I would love to see Belldandy _really_ embarrassed for once!"

"Sadist!" Keiichi teased. "Actually, that's the way I'm leaning towards. But how did it _feel_ when you asked?"

"It was magic. The most magical moment in my life, save one. The time Urd and I Shared," Cevn observed. He had Shared with Urd right before Mara's hungry ghost experiment miscue...

"You guys Shared?" Keiichi asked, his voice betraying his doubtfulness.

"Yes. And I know for a fact that the night you propose to Belldandy, you should ask her to Share with you! I know that you both may think it can't happen, because you're a mortal...but I also know that there is a ribbon of love drifting between you and her that's so much more than love along mortal lines. Not to mention that you are more than just a mortal yourself, Keiichi. You _will_ be able to Share with her..."

"How did it feel to Share with Urd? When I think about anyone doing something like that with her...I envision them getting swallowed up in a whirlpool, because of that madcap frivolity of hers."

"From what each of us tells the other, _she and I both feel like we were swallowed up_. I can only say that it changed me for the better, overwhelming as it was. So you're certain that this is the right time to ask Belldandy?"

"Absolutely. At every step of our relationship, I've had a certain feeling, a 'romantic hint' you might call it, which has told me that it's time to take another step closer to her. This latest hint came when we did that exorcism thing with you. When you said that you might die if we didn't cast the ghost out of you, I started wondering about life and love. I still don't know why we had to do some sealing thing with you. But that night, I decided that I couldn't wait forever. I might end up having to deal with a major change in my life. I realized that, at this point in her life, Belldandy is about as otomejuku...as ripely beautiful...as she'll ever be. So I want to marry Belldandy, so that she can be part of those changes. In almost every sense of the word, she already _is_ my wife. The emotional connection I have with her is deeper than I could have possibly imagined. But I owe it to her...and to me...to make it official."

"Who have you told?" Cevn asked, raising an eyebrow.

"Just you and Chihiro. Chihiro pretty much agrees with you...she told me that I should ask Belldandy at a public setting, preferably before Tamiya and Ootaki can force my cup full of sake." Cevn chuckled at this, having seen Keiichi's sempai do this move a number of times.

"So who's the best man?"

"Well, I was about who to ask and I decided I should ask either Tamiya or Ootaki. But I can't choose between them!" Keiichi admitted. The unpleasant reality was that he would have to pick one of his sempai...which definitely rained on his happy fantasies of the marriage process.

"It's _your_ wedding, Keiichi! I'm sure that you would feel much better if you didn't have to slight either Tamiya or Ootaki. And I would venture to guess that Belldandy wouldn't mind. In fact, I would suggest that Belldandy would be highly disappointed if you didn't follow your heart on this once-in-a-lifetime matter. So...why not ask them both, and have _two_ best men?" Cevn asked.

Keiichi looked at Cevn for a moment, thinking his suggestion to be purely ludicrous. But as the idea feathered into flight in his mind, it seemed _appropriate_. Not to mention that his sempai were probably just crazy enough to go along. They were a well-teamed duo, to be sure. Tamiya and Ootaki always were doing so many things as a pair! Chihiro still sported both of their 'promise' rings...

"Hmmm, I'll think about it...but right off, it sounds plausible."

Keiichi cautioned Cevn not to tell anybody about his plans, and then went to his room to unwind after the long club meeting.

In his mind, he drafted wordpoems of wedding vows, hampering his attempts to slip into slumbers.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --


	61. Pt 61: La Vie de Rêve

**Part 61: La Vie de Rêve**

After several days of discussion/arguing, Urd finally persuaded me to ask Dr. Kintaro if I could accompany the N.I.T. Motor Club to the Le Mans as their official faculty sponsor. I didn't want to slight my students, but her arguments were quite convincing, in a pixieish sort of manner. Once Belldandy, Keiichi and Megumi weighed in on her side of the debate, I was seriously out-manned, out-womaned and out-Goddessed. I didn't stand a chance against Urd's brewing teapot of passionate logic...and the turquoise gleam of her eyes.

Once more, I was reminded that Urd was the fox-spirit in this relationship...she was sly enough to enlist reinforcements!

My life seemed to be settling down like a cul-de-sac after a barely-sensed major upheaval; a trephining of my being that sensed so subliminal that I couldn't pinpoint the discontinuities. A trip to France _might_ be just the thing to smooth my reality out; like snapping a drenched bedsheet before hanging it out to dry in the spring sun.

"I better polish up on my French," I decided, as an image of a certain Goddess with an obsessive penchant for French jargon drew itself to my mind. Perhaps I could try and press Peorth into a last-minute tutoring session? But when I asked Belldandy about trying to reach her, she giggled and told me that Peorth was off on some sort of mysterious "honeymoon"; her Earth Otasuke Office Nodephone had been left on answering machine mode.

So much for my crash course in French.

I sensed that Urd's insistence for me to accompany her to France with the Club was possibly, in her mind, a 'trial' honeymoon. Granted, this made good sense; travel often brings personality quirks to the forefront that otherwise remain dormant...submerged in the routine of domesticity. Besides, I had a vague suspicion that a long-term relationship with Urd would mean lots of travel.

Entreating Dr. Kintaro to give me two weeks off at the end of the first term would be a major feat. My attendance had been Dalmatian-spotty since I had been hired by N.I.T., but now that I had earned my Pretty heavy Degree, it might be possible. Of significant aid to the validity of my entreaty was the fact that "Magnum Organum: First Consciousness" was accruing massive amounts of focus in the academic world. I would make sure to note to him that this scholarly attention was doubtlessly emprestiging the institution that employed its author.

But my 'ace in the pocket' was the signed charter sheets from the students in my eight classes...sheets filled with signatures denoting their express approval for me to take off early...and also indemnifying N.I.T. from any legal consequences. The second-year Greek class had been particularly enthusiastic about releasing me from teaching the remainder of the term.

"A life of dreams...an ocean of changes," Keiichi had said to me last weekend. Somehow, my life seemed to have come full circle...yet the circle remained fringed with indistinctness. Like a still night on the beach; the dark softly waxing waves transformed by a lunarian glym into slithering black snakes. It was only a matter of perception; yet I felt like I had just emerged from one dream...into another.

Are shifts of perception...shifts of consciousness? Or even movements of being that seem distinctly faraway from the presumption of "being"? The awareness, the confidence that I knew who I was, that I knew what my 'personhood' comprised...had been undeniably transformed. My sense of being is as much identified in my awareness of "self" as it is in the formation of my awareness of what "isn't me". I felt uncertain about who I am, but comfortable in the fact that I was lost in some new discovery...

Inexplicably, Urd and I were now able to physically touch each other...a bold stroke of reality that had added an entire dimension to our relationship. Not to mention a whole new genus of fear for me, as I now had to face the possibility that Urd might veer off into a sexual bent of mind at any moment. Yet to my surprise, she had remained rather reserved so far.

Like water putting out a supernova.

Something had happened to Urd...this much I could sense. She still behaved with an untamed, wildly vivacious demeanor; but lately she seemed to possess a certain tentativeness...an unexpected tension of withdrawal that realmed itself seemingly at random spurts. At first I thought it was me; that there was something about me that was making her uncomfortable. But once I gazed outside of the envelope of my own self-centeredness, I realized that I had little or no influence on her shift in bearing. I had to remind myself once again that personality shifts aren't exclusively produced within the domain of inter-personal relationships. They often arise on their own, without any apparent agency of causation.

Whatever the reason, Urd's usual coyfulness was definitely subdued. She wasn't dressing in her patently sexy, sassy outfits any more. This, despite the fact that I had fully expected her to be caught up in the sex-crazy bursts of sentiment that she so frequently was known to exhibit around me and others. Instead of manifesting any of her normal traits, Urd...just wasn't the same. With a growing urgency, I sought out Belldandy to see if she could offer a sister's insight into Urd's mind.

Belldandy patiently explained to me that she had noticed the change soon after she and her sisters had been called upon to exorcise some kind of poltergeist from me. In her patient manner, she explained that her personal suspicion was that the process of casting out whatever it was that had possessed me...had also affected Urd in some way.

The strange thing was, I didn't remember being possessed by a ghost...

The Skuld in the manga was characterized as being decisively affrighted by ghosts. So how was it that, according to Belldandy, the _real_ Skuld had somehow participated in this 'exorcism' without being intimidated? Try as I might, I couldn't recall anything about being possessed or relieved of any demon or "otherness". Yet, Belldandy insisted that she and her sisters had cured me of an arcane defilement. Could this exorcism have imbued Urd with a sense of fear? Belldandy's explanation only harvested a whole new field of questions.

As I waited to be summoned, I studied the wood grain patterns on the door to Dr. Kintaro's office; patterns that seemed to dance against the dark tomato-brown background of the wood if I looked at them too long. My thoughts drifted to the nearly completed GodDemon's CD and the work that still needed to be done...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Chihiro had closed Whirlwind for business; converting her repair shop into a workshop for the N.I.T. Unified Club. Every day, parts were arriving from the Chiba shipyards for the Nissan GT1. Inside Whirlwind, the club members pressed on, hard at work performing various microassembly tasks. The transverse five-speed sequential gearbox on their racecar was too heavy, so they were building a new one. Keiichi's design called for a six-speed model, which would create more shifting for the driver, but would lighten the overall transmission weight of the car by almost 5kg. Also, they remodeled the suspension by adjusting the curve of the double wishbone design, taking advantage of lighter alloys with increased tensile properties.

Sora and Toshiyuki were hard at work reconfiguring the onboard computer systems. By replacing analogue meters with a unity LED monitor, they would be able to lighten the weight while offering the driver additional split-seconds of response time. Also important was Keiichi's redesign of the dash and other features, so that the cockpit would be a little tighter for the driver, but yet have a greater amount of ventilation. Being inside of a _hot_ sprint car for several hours at a times made it an absolute necessity to keep the drivers as cool as possible. To this end, Chihiro had decided to use a plastic widescreen; its contours precision-molded to the fit the redesigned driving cockpit.

They were rebuilding the engine as well. The GTX standards allowed for an 8.0-liter engine displacement, so Keiichi had designed a 8-swap-10 cylinder engine. Using a set of monitors, the engine would self-adjust for variances in temperature and compression.

This was an exercise in patience, assembling components for a vehicle that was half a world away, currently housed in an oak and plaster garage in France. Chihiro repeatedly stressed to the team that building and tuning these components now would save precious time...once they arrived in France, they would be able to integrate the new systems into the chassis much quicker.

As she looked at the mass of brake robotics intended to provide a stronger calliperage, Chihiro reminded herself that they hadn't named the car yet. Yes, it was the Nissan GT1 R390-LM...but they needed to christen it with a personal name once they arrived in France.

"What are we going to call you?" she wondered in spools of mental litany, trying to recall the cherry red outline of their racecar in her mind. In a corner of the shop, Chihiro heard the telltale crackle of electric sparks...followed by a flurry of consternated shouts that filled the workshop.

"Hey, watch out! Whadya do, ya goofball? Quick, somebody get the fire extinguisher! Don't breath the smoke! Stay away from it!"

"Wonderful. Another blaze..." she grumbled silently as the fire extinguisher roared its gaseous whooshoom.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

From a distance, the concrete prefab parking structures looked like sleepy gray centipedes as we took the exit ramp from the freeway, heading east towards Narita International. I had anticipated Urd to pack heavy...and she did. In fact, I wondered if she was surreptitiously using one of Skuld's 'dimensional shift' devices. She had filled _eight_ bags of luggage, yet she had picked her clothes closet clean! I asked her how she managed to fit everything into the two sets of luggage; she silenced me with a wagging of her finger and an enigmatic wink.

There were 22 of us flying to France; the 17 members of the Unified Club, Sayoko, the three Goddesses, and myself. As we clambered out of the rented vans and piled our luggage on the sidewalk, I felt an emerging sense of embarrassment...like I had been hijacked by a tour group. We had a sizable entourage of parents, fellow students and well-wishers as we started stacking baggage onto rental carts. Chihiro and Toshiyuki had cobbled some of the Club funds and splurged on leather bomber racing jackets for all of us. Each black and red jacket had personalized shoulder and breast patches with our names, plus a stylized depiction of our Nissan racing car on the breast. On the back was Ootaki's cherry blossom Club logo overlaying Toshiyuki's Four Wheel Club logo. Belldandy cheerfully claimed to have sewn every single patch with her love for the club. If she did, her hands must have been blurring with speed...

In broad letters on the back of each jacket was written:

_"Nekomi Institute of Technology Unified Club."_

Evidently, the merger of Toshiyuki's Four Wheel Club with the Motor Club had resulted in more than just an augmented Club. Seeing all of us in our jackets caused me to recall some of the Japanese tourist groups that I had encountered while living in Hawaii. There, I had learned that the Japanese had a penchant for uniforms; these served to promote solidarity by distinguishing the group from everyone else. The tourist groups I encountered there seemed quite animated as they sported their company or school jackets. Their light-heartedness seemed a direct counterpoise to the dour-faced greysuits who wanted to rush through the tourist traps or the ampy OLs planning to splurge six month's salary at the chichi fashion boutiques in Waikiki and the Ala Moana shopping center.

I praised the celestial kami that I wasn't traveling in a group with my fellow faculty members. I shuddered as my imagination conjured up an image of an officious Dr. Kintaro, armed with a bullhorn and an orange plastic N.I.T. pennant flag...

We were scheduled to fly the redeye out of Narita at 11:30pm, something that would have been impossible a few years ago. Back then, night flights from Narita were prohibited by the government. A number of farmers and landowners whose property adjoined Narita had protested long and hard for the ban. Only in Japan could the largest airport for the world's largest city have a restriction on night flights. Eventually, a compromise was worked out and a new runway was paved; the new runway was dedicated to night flights. So now we could travel on the cheap and lose sleep at the same time.

Traveling west over Asia for almost 14 hours, we would arrive at Charles De Gaulle International in Paris at 3:20pm. The overnight flight was favored because of economic factors as well as the fact that the late hours might discourage the news from creating a media mob scene. The time zone difference was almost matched by our departure and arrival times...midnight in Makuhari was 3pm in Paris. It was fortuitous that Aoshima had given over the Four Wheel Club funds; our travel costs averaged 260,000 yen per person on the one-way flight, with another couple million yen spent on freight to fly over the preassembled components for the car.

There was talk about traveling through the US and stopping over in Hawaii on our return journey, especially if we should win the Le Mans. I would settle for a weekend in Paris with Urd. Despite the long hours we would be cooped up in an airplane, 14 hours was relatively nothing compared to the travel times of my ancestors, who would travel for months and years to go from one locale to another. Yet, by 21st century standards, 14 hours still seemed like forever.

Once in France, Genji and Sayoko planned to spend two days in Paris visiting with their parents while the rest of us bussed it 200 kilometers southwest of Paris through the French countryside to Le Mans.

The first course tour would be June 7th. Then we would have almost a full week until "Race Week"'. On either Monday or Tuesday of race week, our entry would be scrutineered and our drivers registered. Sometime in the next two days, we would be assigned to one of the evening/night practice sessions. The day before the race, we would participate in an open pit walk in the morning, and a late afternoon parade through the city of Le Mans. The next day was race day; 4pm, Saturday, June 16th...weather permitting or not.

"Sit down, Cevn!" I heard Urd command, obviously irritated by my constant pacing around the gate promenade. I mouthed "who do you think I am...Inu-Yasha?" to her, and then walked over to examine the stretchjet in the window that we would board in half an hour or so. It was one of those new Airbus 370 double deckers, introduced in 20XX to compete with the aging Boeing 747 fleets. I remembered my smallkid times, reading the occasional newspaper article that predicted that they would have hypersonic space planes by the time I was 30. But the years proved that fantasy had once again outstripped technology.

Would the club's fantasy of competing in the Le Mans outstrip its engineering know-how and racing skills?

The Le Mans was an automotive stomping ground; a trial to prove the acme of engineering excellence. Auto manufacturers were in corporate collision, battling with decades of prestige in their arsenals.

Porsche...22 wins. Ferrari...11 wins. Ford. Toyota. Audi.

Unlike the Solar Federation Race, the Le Mans was war...with hundreds of millions of corporate dollars and thousands of egos on the line. Comparing the two races was like comparing touch football with the NFL. The Le Mans was very much the 'World Cup' of auto racing; elevated to a near mythic status in the collective consciousness of the racing world. The competition would be harsh and gnarled; as the highest sophistications of engineering acumen were being tested here. Not to mention a prideful zealousness that had been shaped by years of Formula One, NASCAR and Grand Prix racing competitions. Racing teams motivated by a sheer desire to be known in the business as "_The Best_". A parade of distinguished personalities had traveled down the Le Mans winner's circle over the years. In addition, this year's race possessed a special prestige that was sure to impose an added keenness to the competition.

Glummed by the daunting prospects, I tried to wrap my thoughts around the fact that we _did_ have one small but significant edge over the competition.

Keiichi's radical redesign of the Club's racer while his intelligence was enhanced by Skuld's little helmet...

The 20XX Le Mans. The 75th anniversary running of the 24 Heures du Mans! The "Diamond Edition Le Mans", as the French press had been touting it with increasing frequency. The pressbuzz had it that a special trophy was being created for this year's winner.

Eavesdropping on the press interviews, I was reminded of the fact that Keiichi had turned out to be an able student of the biographies of many Le Mans race drivers. Mention a recent year and he could spin a tale about the driver who won the race. His studied approach to the history of the Le Mans was a recent acquisition...

_During dinner a couple weeks ago, Keiichi confided to us that he was scared as hell...because he was competing against any number of drivers that he esteemed as hero-figures in the racing world. Megumi sagely suggested that perhaps he should visit the original drivers of our Nissan GT1. She added that it might just soften his anxieties if he were to meet with the flesh-and-blood persons of the drivers. Keiichi initially felt a host of reservations towards her idea. Foremost in his mind was the assumption that he would only get a doorslam in the face because of his impertinence. Yet, he demonstrated his serious intentions by traveling to Tokyo, Yokohama and Shizuoka to meet with the original driving team of the 1998 Le Mans. To his utter amazement, all three drivers recognized him from last year's Solar Federation race...and had resolved to follow the story of their old racecar and its new driving team with keen interest..._

As I looked out towards the nightglow of Tokyo, I whispered to myself, "Could the Cinderellas of the racing world repeat with another victory?"

I saw a series of light flashes reflecting off of the hanger window. Turning around, the first thing I saw was Urd-chan posing for the cameras. She was dressed in a full black skirt that matched her leather jacket, with a pink top highlighted with ruffles and frills down the front. I smiled and winked at her, then returned my attention to the plane, knowing that she was indulging in her 'idol-star artiste' personality. I didn't want to look at the reporters and photographers too long...they might notice me and come over, wanting me to field questions about the specifics of the Club or the race or the car. Or a thousand other things I didn't know squat about.

The last thing I desired was to look like a totally clueless idiot on some news videotape that might wind up on the NHK morning news...not to mention that my nervousness had matted my hair to my face, making me feel as photogenic as a strip of wakame...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

As they were flying over Asia, Keiichi's senses were reeling from the realization that he was on his way to race in the Le Mans! Most of the N.I.T. Unified Club members had already traveled once to France to race in the April trials. He still felt a residual twinge of anger and regret when he recalled how Megumi had gone with them. But he didn't know _why_ he resented his sister for going with the team. Not to mention that he couldn't understand why he hadn't gone with them as well. The heavy feeling in his stomach punctuated his calm with a tin-whistle persistence.

As he looked down at the zebra-striped expanse of snowcapped mountains purpled by the early morning sun, the vast ocean of landscape informed him that he was traveling further away from home than he had ever been in his life. A fleeting desire to hijack the plane and return to Japan momentarily possessed his fancy, so strongly was his discomfort conduced by the terrain below.

He gripped Belldandy's arm tightly, trying to hold in his panic.

"Keiichi," she said softly as she awakened. A single glance at his face revealed the deep root of his incertitude.

"Keiichi, are you okay?"

"Bell, I'm really feeling nervous about this. What's going to happen once we get to France? I don't know French, I've never been to Europe, I've never driven in a Formula One competition, I don't..."

"Sshh..." she shushed him, softly resting a finger on his lips.

"Do you think that your friends would have risked so much, offered their labors so generously, and traveled this far...if they didn't feel confident in themselves?" she asked. Keiichi nodded his head, knowing that his life for the next few minutes would be under Bell-chan's wisdom control.

"Be thou my vision of wisdom, be thou my true word of light. Be thou ever present with me, be thou my day and night. Be thou my breastplate of valor, be thou my sword of honor. Be thou my Soul's shelter in the storm, be thou my shining sheltering tower..." she sang in a soft voice as she gazed out of the airplane window.

"What's that, Bell-chan?"

"It's a hymn, written by an Earthrealm mortal from Ireland in the 7th century. To me, you are all these things, my love. But to your teammates, who have invested a richness of desire and confidence in themselves...you are also these things. Their strength does not exclude you; their call to destiny...is yours as well. You belong here, my sweet Keiichi! Time itself has pivoted itself so that you may travel on this path. As everything is beautiful to the eye, this endeavor that had brought us together is in itself an act of beauty. Surrounded by shared affection, the love that is manifesting between the members of your club...most certainly includes you, Keiichi! Even though I am the Norn of the Present and making predictions is beyond my purview...I will go as far to make a prediction.

"We..will..win..this..race," she said breathily.

Keiichi felt himself driven from the forest of his dismay. Once more, when life seemed to veil him in brooding seas of insecurity...his Bell-chan was there to illuminate the path he was walking. To point out that he was assured of survival, perhaps even assured of joy. She was the sunlight upon his life's journeyings...

The airplane seat seemed softer as Bell rested her head on his shoulder and fell back to sleep, her soft brown hair pillowing under her chin.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"You should try and get some sleep, Megs," Genji had suggested to her a few hours ago. Now he was lightly snoring in the seat next to her, as carefree as a baby.

Sleep was an impossibility for her at this point. Not only was Megumi fascinated with flying...one of her childhood dreams was to become a pilot...but she had a lot on her mind as well.

Her trip to France promised more upcoming trials besides the little matter of the Le Mans competition.

Megumi had been struggling with a Mt. Fuji-sized case of overwhelming sense of dread for almost a week. Because the Club was traveling to France, she knew that Genji and Sayoko were planning to meet up with their parents in Paris. This was to be expected, of course. Once the flight attendant announced that they were flying over Germany, her tension overflowed, burning as hot as the jet exhaust cloudtrailing towards Eastern Europe.

The day after the decisive "merging clubs" meeting, Genji had unexpectedly taken her out on a dinner date at an elegant bistro in Chiba. Sayoko and Tamiya, Toshiyuki Aoshima and Sora...all had _just happened_ to be at the same Mediterranean restaurant Genji had picked for dinner! Toshiyuki and Sayoko both had immodest grins on their faces; Megumi strongly sensed that they were hatching a scheme. Even Genji was clearly surprised by their crashing of the dinner date he had planned to spend with her. Midway through dinner, Sayoko suddenly broached a suggestion that caused Megumi's heart to skip a beat. In a fluid burst of enthusiasm, Sayoko mentioned that their trip to France would be a very appropriate time for Genji to _introduce Megumi to his parents_!!

Megumi had reacted with a fullbody paralysis...while Genji promptly knocked over his glass of dinner wine as he nervously withdrew his hands to rest on his lap...

All in front of Sora, her best friend.

A half-hour later, it was a done deal. Megumi silently cursed Sayoko for having so much polish in her arguments. Not to mention that she had clearly used her status as older sister to duress Genji towards agreeing to the idea.

The next day, Sora had uncorked a gigglefit once Megumi had revealed her deep-ridden misgivings concerning the upcoming meeting with Genji's parents. After her laughter died down, Sora, in her innocuous manner, reminded Megumi that she had _already passed the entrance exams_: she had impressed Genji's big sister suitably enough. More than suitably...Sora said that Toshiyuki had confided to her that Sayoko had even taken the initiative to suggest a meeting.

_Sayoko _had suggested it! The same Sayoko who treated her with such reserve way back when...

Megumi swiftly rearranged her opinion about Sayoko's persuasiveness.

Several days later, when the exact details of the meeting were set in stone, Sayoko dropped by to take Megumi shopping. Megumi was an expert shopper...but Sayoko was a _seasoned _shopper! Sayoko was accustomed to unpursing huge amounts of money on the latest fashions, money Megumi could only dream of spending. During a whirlwind tour of several of the more fashionable shoppes in Harajuku, Sayoko bought Megumi several outfits. Megumi was a little uncomfortable about this until Sayoko justified this as one way she could advocate Megumi's 'candidacy' to her parents. Sayoko revealed that she favored Megumi so much, she was willing to 'push' Genji a bit in order to expedite him towards a formal introduction of her to their parents. She further explained that this was her way of making "amends" to her, whatever that meant.

As she toweled the sweat off her face, Megumi reminded herself that inside of one of her luggage cases was an outfit Sayoko had specifically selected for her first meeting with Genji's parents. In addition to the last minute crunch-time work on the Nissan components, Megumi had received a flash course on French haute culture courtesy of Sayoko.

Once they arrived in Paris, Megumi and Sora would rent a hotel room. Sayoko had arranged for them to be pampered the following day...including a European massage for Megumi a few hours before the dreaded meeting. That evening, Genji would introduce her to his parents at a formal family dinner at one of the most expensive restaurants in Paris.

Megumi was already intimidated by this meeting with Genji's parents. Everyone except her would be fluent in French, which only added to her anxiety. But her incertitude mounted when Sayoko casually remarked that "you'll be totally safe...everything will be cool!"

"Safe? My ass!" Megumi thought ruefully, remembering how Sayoko had gone on to explain in a giggly voice that her parents _owned_ the hotel she and Sora would be rooming in...not to mention the restaurant as well...and the two office buildings on either side of the hotel complex.

Megumi felt like she was asked to beard the lion in its den...

Once the flight attendant announced that they were flying over Germany, her tension overflowed, burning as hot as the jet exhaust cloudtrailing towards Eastern Europe.

During the flight, Genji had gallantly asserted himself to try and assure her that everything would be peachy-keen. Despite his optimistic bearing, Sayoko's advocacy, and the presence of her best friend...Megumi felt haunted by visions; imagining herself failing miserably.

Her only respite from the dark crystal ball of her predictions was the certain knowledge that, someday, Sayoko would have to grapple with the prospect of introducing Tamiya to her parents. This thought cast more than a little humor on her apprehensions.

She imagined Sayoko gasping with shock as Tamiya proudly showed her parents his tattoos...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Paris!" someone shouted indecorously. The local group of passengers in our section immediately hushed themselves, their blather clipped short by the burst of exuberance.

"One of the club members must have had a few little bottles too many," I mused. Once every few months when I lived in Hawaii, the local news would report that a passenger had drank too much on the plane and assaulted a stewardess or a fellow traveler. As the murmur of voices turned into gossip, no doubt, I fought an impulse to howl with laughter. Students will be students...and this particular group of Japanese students were en route to their dreams. None of the other occupants of this plane had a clue that these semi-rowdy tech students from Japan in matching t-shirts were going to race in the Le Mans.

I had cut a deal with Urd...she got the window seat going to France, and I got it returning to Japan.

A moment later, an officious voice broke in on the plane's intercom to remind us to hand in our customs declarations As the flight attendant barked out her instructions in French, I was confronted with the prospect that I would only partially understand the native tongue for the next few weeks. French has a sum of recognizable Spanish, Italian and Latin cognates, but I could only pick out a limited number of phrases. I wished that my metallect would instantly graft a French lexicon into my brain...but said metallect was being way more circumspect than usual.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"You look absolutely _fabulous_!" Sora assured Megumi. Megumi looked at her reflection in the mirror and frowned. She was _way_ too nervous about this meeting! Her friends were busybodies; which only heightened her anxiety. Sora and Sayoko were hovering over her like bridal attendants, combing her hair 'just right', adjusting her dress, touching up her makeup, and offering a series of flattering compliments that only partially bromided Megumi's nervousness.

"This doesn't look like me at all!" Megumi thought sourly as she watched her gradual transformation from tech institute coed to debutante.

She had to admit that Sayoko had picked out one killer dress for her to wear. In fact, the dress she was wearing looked so good, it was almost embarrassing. With a peal blue velvet base, the dress was certainly eye-catching; its silken fabric was showered with thousands of silver cracked iced sequins. Every time Megumi moved, it seemed to glisten, putting on a dazzling light show. It molded itself to her figure, but not too tightly. The strapless design bared just enough of her shoulders to make her look warmly sensual, rather than coolly overexposed. She had never worn opera length open sleeves before, either. Sayoko asked Megumi to hold her arms straight at her sides as she expertly adjusted the tips of her sleeves to match the bustline on her dress. Then Sora tied the front of the satin-lined sequined cape and draped it over her shoulders while Sayoko fluffed out the sweeping train of her dress.

"Fireworks!!" Sayoko appraised. "If this doesn't make an impression with my folks, then I'm going to ship 'em off to a care center for hopeless dotards!"

"Did you take your...pills?" Sora reminded Megumi.

"Of course not!" Megumi quipped back. She decided this morning to skip her 'beauty restraint' pills; hoping that an overabundance of beauty might aid the first impression she was going to make.

She noticed that Sayoko was looking at her with slyly shocked expression.

"Megumi, y..you mean that you and my brother are...'doing it'! That little devil brother of mine never told me about _this_!" Sayoko exclaimed in surprise, her eyes fluttering wide. Megumi looked uncertainly at Genji's sister while Sora giggled so hard she had to hold her rounded glasses to keep them from falling off her nose.

"Sempai, I wasn't talking about _those_ kind of pills! I meant these kind of pills!" Sora hastily corrected, pulling a bottle out of Megumi's toilet case with a bunch of weird symbols on it. Sayoko looked at the pill bottle with a mystified expression, clearly intrigued by the unreadable swirls of writing on the label.

The next few minutes were spent perfuming and powdering Megumi while Sora explained the "Demon Rally" episode and its aftermath. Sayoko was reduced to gales of laughter as Megumi described some of the 'incidents' before Belldandy figured out that she had megadosed Megumi with a beauty enchantment.

"So Belldandy's human after all! Imagine getting 3 and 300 mixed up!" Sayoko remarked, causing all three women to giggle heartily.

The plan was for Genji to arrive at the restaurant about a half an hour earlier, so that he could chitchat with his parents and ease their mood. Then Sayoko would escort Megumi to the restaurant and Genji would formally introduce her to them as his intended girlfriend. She explained that in the social orbit her parents occupied, a son simply doesn't start up a relationship first and then introduce the girlfriend. Genji would have to gain his parent's approval _just to date her_. Megumi's anxiety gained a level; this was like some kind of omiai meeting to discuss marriage! Sayoko reminded her to keep a really tight rein on any behaviors or words that would tip off her parents that she and Genji were already romantically involved.

A moment later, Genji popped in to see how she was doing. Megumi performed a little curtsy, and then she twirled around once to show herself off to her boyfriend. She looked at him expectantly...

"You...look..." he gasped, his voice trailing off because he couldn't arrive at a compliment. This didn't bother Megumi at all; after all, if she was nervous, she could imagine how nervous Genji must be. They were his parents, after all! Besides, the look on his face as he praised her with his eyes and smile was quintessentially satisfying to her.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

The evening was a whirlwind of tension and release. Before the meal, Megumi was so nervous, she started drumming her silverware against the plate until Genji rested a restraining hand on her.

Sayoko was curt and refined...almost elegant in demeanor. Sayoko's deference was far removed from her boisterous behavior around her friends. Sayoko and Genji didn't seem to be themselves; leading Megumi to realize that there was a huge emotional gulf between them and their parents. Sayoko seemed to be grieving something ineluctable, yet abstract. She could see the shadows of abandonment marking Genji's face...the face of a child longing for comfort. Megumi knew that Genji and Sayoko hadn't really been raised by their parents, but the emotional toll it took on them didn't strike home until she saw the four of them together.

She realized that a huge source of her nervousness was a reaction to the obvious fact that everyone at the table was playing at being a family. Pretending that the emotional distances between them didn't exist.

A fake family...that was what this was!

Genji's mother was definitely scrutinizing her. Sayoko had prepared her for this beforehand; noting that Madame Mishima was the top graduate of Keio Gijuku University and a shrewd business tactician. Megumi was in awe of this woman, this corporate super-woman who jointly ran one of Japan's largest zaibatsu mega-organizations; a _corporation_ of corporations.

While she dined on the lobster and steak dinner, she gradually tried to force herself to view Genji's parents as people. Genji's father was a thin man with a full head of prematurely gray hair; hair that could have been easily youthened. Megumi guessed that the Elder Mishima preferred this appearance; perhaps his elderkin looks allowed him to cater more authority over his business subordinates.

After a nerve-racking hour, things seemed to ease up. Ms. Mishima was asking Megumi all sorts of pointed questions; it seemed that she was fascinated by the fact that her son's college racing club was actually competing in the Le Mans. For her part, Megumi was intrigued by Ms. Mishima's very personal anecdotes about famous movie stars, Dietmen...and even the Prime Minister. Ms. Mishima admitted that it was nice to engage in casual conversation, rather than the edgy negotiations that accompanied business luncheons and board meetings.

Sayoko seized on this fact, whispering aside to Megumi that "casual conversation" was her mother's means of offering a compliment; it meant that her mother felt comfortable around Megumi!

There was an uncomfortable spell when the Elder Mishima chided Genji for his lack of interest in business. Megumi knew that this was an old saw between father and son; but her Genji gamely stayed his ground and reminded his father that the world of business held no lure of passion for him. Genji even went as far as pose a rhetorical question to his father; asking his opinion about whether the running of the Mishima Zaibatsu would have meaning for him if he didn't feel passionate about his work.

Megumi could swear that the Elder Mishima was taken aback at this...and she felt a swell of pride for her boyfriend. Genji then asserted that investing time in a vocation was useless unless one felt inspired by one's work.

Before the Elder Mishima could argue, Ms. Mishima tactfully interjected and reminded her husband that father and son were two different beings; basically asking him to leave Genji be. Then, to Megumi's shock, she turned to Megumi and _apologized on behalf of her husband_ for pressing Genji so strongly in the presence of "his special friend"!

Megumi was stunning into silence, while Sayoko briefly choked on her dinner wine and started coughing for a couple moments.

Finally, after three hours, the torturous dinner meeting was finally concluded when the elder Mishimas excused themselves, leaving her and Genji with Sayoko. Megumi felt every bit as exhausted as she remembered herself being after she finished the "Demon Rally".

After Genji and Sayoko's parents departed, Sayoko ordered a bottle of champagne and immediately praised her and Genji. She noted that all the indications were very clear that Ms. Mishima had given Genji the "okay" to date her. Megumi looked askance at Sayoko, until her sempai giggled.

"My parents speak a different language, and I'm not referring to the French at dinner. So you probably wouldn't have picked up on it anyway. But they approve of you," Sayoko noted with a broad smile.

On the way back to the hotel suite, Megumi was thrilled by how the evening had unfolded.

Even more so when Genji invited her into _his_ hotel room.

An hour later, she and Genji were luxuriously soaking in the Japanese-style bath. It was obvious to Megumi what Genji was planning. This _was_ a big risk for her, because she was nude in the tub with him.

Cuddling led to touching...

Touching led to caressing...

And caressing led to Megumi reminding Genji of a certain promise she had made to him on a flight from Hokkaido, back when Urd went missing a year ago.

She wanted to make love to him...her heart was pounding almost out of her breast with excitement and passion-flush...but she kept a cool head. She had decided long ago that it was going to be on her terms. In her bedroom. In her futon.

Despite his profound disappointment, Genji took it like a man. Because he was so gentlemanly, Megumi offered him a preview of pleasures to come...the privilege of sleeping tightly together in the same bed, curled up with naked skinship next to each other.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

The first couple days of work on the car were replete with displays of human nature curbing at its extremes. They caught a bus heading west from Paris to Le Mans. The two hundred kilometer drive crossed through level river plains that reminded Keiichi of the flat rural areas around Mito.

When they first arrived at the garage, the Club members were extremely shaky around the car. Ootaki had simply opened up the hood, only to have Tamiya yell "don't break it!" The first six hours were a nerve-wracking combination of jet lag treacle and walking on eggshells. None of the Club members, except maybe Chihiro, had ever worked so extensively on such an expensive vehicle. Chihiro seemed to be the only one who kept her cool; she constantly walked around shouting encouragement to each 'team' who was working on different areas of the car.

Two days later, nobody thought twice about performing deep engineering surgery on their Nissan.

Keiichi was on his back underneath the Nissan, installing the new front suspension. In vivid contrast to a typical car, the mechanical components inside of their Le Mans racer were highly _condensed_. It was as if the designers had tried to pack every square cm of the car with mechanical parts. Thus, a swap-out that would normally take an hour or two to complete...required an extra tech and almost double the time.

Belldandy, Skuld and Urd had departed to take a stroll down one of the hedge-lined chateau planades. The garage the Unified Club had rented was actually a livestock barn shed located on a small farm several kilos outside Le Mans. A five-minute walk in any direction would leave one standing in the middle of broadly open fields. Keiichi paused for a moment to wipe the grease off of his goggles, envying his girlfriend's freedom to enjoy the scenery, and then returned to work.

Cevn had tried to help out by handing out tools...and ended up providing comic relief instead. He had caused outbreaks of laughter several times by retrieving the wrong tools when asked. Keiichi found himself breaking into gasping laughs as his N.I.T. sensei made common mistakes.

Ask him for a wrench, and you get a pair of pliers.

Of course, Ootaki couldn't resist an opportunity like this...

While underneath the car, Keiichi overheard Ootaki asking Cevn to bring him the 'strobe brakepad derectifier'. Then he heard his sempai friend describe the tool, his voice clamoring with a stress-laden urgency. The next few minutes were filled with clank-banging as Cevn searched desperately through the toolboxes. After several minutes of no success in finding the tool, Cevn finally gave up and asked Chihiro for help. The resulting look of exasperation on Chihiro's face coupled with Cevn's white-faced embarrassment was enough to send the whole garage into stitches.

After two of these 'snark hunts', Chihiro saved Cevn from being the butt of _too_ many jokes by assigning him to sand the inside of the hood, ostensibly to "shave off a few grams." Keiichi knew that this was 'make work' labor...but he was glad to see that Chihiro wasn't frustrating his friend's desire to help.

Megumi and Genji were due back today.

Keiichi found his thoughts drifting towards his sister. Last night was probably one of the biggest events in her life. He was surprised that she didn't call him last night to tell him how things went with Genji's parents. During the morning break, a number of the Club members facetiously polled among themselves concerning "Megumi and Genji's Big Night Out"...

"Speak of da devils!" Tamiya shouted from somewhere inside the hood of the racecar.

"Hey, we're back!" a singing female voice announced. Keiichi saw Genji and Megumi holding hands, broad grins on their faces as they walked into the barn shed. Sora emerged from behind them and waved to the Club members in an imitation of an idol-star fangirl.

"It went great! My parents adored her!" Genji shouted, bringing a rousing cheer from the Club members.

"And look at this!" Sora shouted, grabbing Megumi's hand and swinging it up, holding it for all to see. Megumi momentarily cringed as she became the sensation of the moment. Most of the guys were whistling and catcalling at her and Genji.

She was wearing a new ring on her left hand; a brilliant greenish 'promise' ring with her birthstone.

"What's dat?" Tamiya asked, pointing at the ring.

"Megumi was born in August, so she has two birthstones. The Sardonyx is more of a 'male' gemstone, so I gave her a Peridot. This Peridot probably was mined in Zabargad, a small island in the Arabic Sea..." Genji started to explain, his face reddening slightly.

"It looks like an emerald," Chihiro commented. She wasn't the kind of woman who would fuss and coo with feminine peals of vicarious delight over such a matter. Yet, the 'inner romantic' in her was touched with happiness for Megumi and Genji. Indeed, this was an auspicious morale booster to the Club.

Under the bright lights strung up all over the garage, Megumi's ring shone with an olivine glimmer.

"Look at my little sister blush!" Keiichi said privately to Tamiya and Ootaki, elbowing them both. They started to hoothowl with laughter.

Genji endured the good-natured teasing from his clubmates with a fixed-on smile. He had bought Megumi this ring, stashing it away in his carryon bag...so optimistic was he that his parents would approve of the match. He knew that they were apprehensive of the fact that Megumi wasn't from a 'titled' family.

But their concerns...weren't his concerns.

In the final distillation...it really didn't make a whit of difference what they thought. He _loved _Megumi with a vitality that could never be bought with mere money.

As he put the ring on her finger the next morning after waking up with her in his arms, Genji had countered her promise with one of his own. If she was still wearing this ring a year from now, he would add another birth gem ring to her finger. Little did she suspect which ring gem resided within the eye of his intentions.

A ring with the birth gem for the month of April...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Sora felt apprehension grip her afresh as she strolled along the infield retaining wall of the Le Mans track. She had decided to spend a couple of hours exploring along the Le Mans driving circuit, hoping that a thinkwalk would settle her nerves. She flashed her pass to the security guards and then emerged onto the track from the grandstand. Feeling the grainy grip of the track underneath her tennis shoes, she mentally snap-flashed a cheering crowd welcoming her. Looking towards the starting grid, Sora could see several pit teams examining the track.

"So I'm not the only one suffering from pre-race jitters," she observed with some relief. For the past few days, the Club members had been working round the clock...basically reconstructing their Nissan racer. It was demanding work, as their car had over 4000 moving parts that needed to be closely integrated, measured, tested, callipered, tightened, lubricated...the list could go on forever. But tomorrow, the routine would change; as the Club would tour the actual track.

The first Gran Prix de Le Mans had been run a hundred years ago in this very spot. Since then, the race had suffered several interruptions, such as the ten-year period during WW II hostilities. Even though this was the 75th race, the 20XX edition of the Le Mans was doubly significant: it would be the first race of the second century of the event's history.

Sora knew the racetrack from a driver's perspective; the landscape tore itself into a visual blur when she was driving a few practice laps during the April trials. But not from here, not from the vantage point of a pedestrian strolling along the course. She wanted to feel the racetrack; to smell the wafting airs from nearby arbors and fields, to feel the crunch of the roadway sandpits underfoot, to hear the ambience of birdsong floating over the still air like lotus flowers floating supine upon calming waters.

The circuit for the race had evolved significantly over the years; this year it was presently 13.6 Km in length. Somewhere, several miles further down the road out of line-of-sight, Sora recalled the Cartre "S" Corner chicane that had been lengthened in 2002 to allow for faster cornering speeds. And new, for this Diamond Anniversary Le Mans, the Hunaudieres Nissan Corner had been extended as well. The chicanes, which to Sora's eye essentially resembled temporary bypasses in highway construction zones, were designed in the early 1990s as a means to slow down the racers on the straightaway.

"You swerve to the right, drive a half kilometer, and then swerve back to the left to rejoin the roadway," she said, explaining the driving technique to the imagined Le Mans audience. Sora knew that the chicanes introduced an added driving challenge: drivers would have to downshift to 3rd and reduce their speed almost 200kph to negotiate the bypasses.

But this year, the race planners had designed additional challenges involving the chicanes. For the first eight hours, cars would use the Cartre chicane only, ignoring the Nissan "L'arc". Then the Nissan would be used for the second 8 hours while the Cartre was closed off. And the final eight hours would use _neither_ chicane! Sora inferred from this that the planners were probably hoping that some racing records might be established.

As Sora walked past the end of the stands, or the "tribune" as the French locals termed them, she tried to mentally package a roaring throng of fans filling the grillwork of seats. The grandstands had been expanded and elongated in preparation for this year's race, seating an additional 25,000 spectators. In the distance, she could see the renowned tire-shaped semicircle of Dunlop Bridge and the roadway passing under it. Beyond it, out of sight, was the "fete foraine"...the "Fun Fair". Here, a sizable crowd would picnic and drink champagne during the race, having fun for the sake of the drivers who would be drill-siding with concentration as they raced around the track.

For the 20XX Edition of the Le Mans, 61 racing teams had been invited to the April trials to compete for the 48 slots. From 1999 through 2005, the April session was nothing more than a practice session...as during these years, the Le Mans didn't have qualifying trials. But in 2006, the organizers of the Le Mans, the Automobile Club de L'Quest, had reinstated the trials. They still reserved the entries to invitation only, but the April trials were again an absolute qualifying session. Thus, the trials functioned more as a formality than a competition, with entries being closely timed by the officials to ensure that they were worth of competition in the Le Mans. Chihiro had managed to get the N.I.T. chartered on the invitation list by virtue of their victory in the Solar Car race last year, along with a joint sponsorship by Nissan and Krauser. Despite the corporate sponsorship, the N.I.T. entry was still considered a private entry. Thus, they were listed as "Nekomi-Nissan-Krauser" on the official racing programmes.

Since the trials in April, 5 teams had dropped out, so 5 more teams had been invited from the standby list to complete the field of 48 teams.

Their Nissan was currently slotted to start in the 43rd place position.

Standing under the shadow of the Dunlop Bridge, Sora turned back to examine the grandstands with her hands clasped behind her back. These stands would be filled with 285,000 excited race spectators in a week and a half. Right now, several crews were busy painting and cleaning the grandstands in lastwire readiness for the race. As she continued walking, her eyes lingered on the Dunlop Curves. Here, the roadway curved gracefully alongside a natural amphitheater, with a hearth of pine trees for a backdrop. The pine trees brushed a slight homesickness against Sora's heart, reminding her of her grandparent's home in rural Akita prefecture, near Oga town on the peninsula. To her right in the distance, she saw patches of bright green woods...probably the poplar tree groves.

The Le Mans competition employed a set of international standards that arranged the competitive categories in accordance with car type. The two major racing divisions were the Prototype and the Grand Touring categories. Each category was further divided by two to five classes, based on factors such as minimum weight and motor displacement. The Le Mans standards included a Prototype category consisted of two vehicle classes; the single passenger open cockpit vehicles, and the Grand Touring category, with its two-seat enclosed cockpit racecars. The N.I.T. Club's Nissan car would race in the Grand Touring "GTX" division.

The Grand Touring category had two divisions that competed at the Le Mans. The GT2 division was intended to showcase manufacturer's "stock" car versions, using recognizable chassis and engine components manufactured for high-end commercial vehicles. They were sanctioned by numerous requirements of homogolation; a set of mandates designed to verify that the Grand Touring cars were a 'design type', rather than a 'model'. These standards usually proscribed that a specific number of cars, say 200 or 1000, were manufactured...thus the 'design' of the car style was being tested by competing at the Le Mans. In contrast, the GT3/GTX categories were race-built automobiles, not subject to administrative controls such as model and engine homogolation. Instead, a limited standard of homogolation was required, such as the construction of four or five cars in the past seven years.

Fortunately, their Nissan GT1 had been grandfathered in, because it had placed in the 1998 race. Despite the seven year moratorium on the grandfather clause, the Automobile Club de L'Ouest had been gracious enough to invite the N.I.T. entry. Sora suspected that this invitation had a political bent to it: Japan, despite the worldwide impact of her auto manufacturing might, had sponsored no entries in the Le Mans this decade. So the N.I.T. admission was a gesture of respect to her homeland with hopes that the Japanese would eventually sponsor more entries in the future...

The Prototype and GTX vehicles were designed to thoroughly challenge the limits of engineering technology. Consequently, the Grand Touring GTXs almost always produced the winners of the Le Mans, in terms of overall speed and distance traveled. The occasional exceptions occurred when all the front-running Prototypes failed to finish the race. Building rigorous, tenacious vehicles was a major challenge to Le Mans competitors; on average, 40-50 of the entries were abandoned...unable to start or failing to finish the race due to vehicle breakdowns and accidents.

Sora recalled the Le Mans Trials in April, where she had driven the twenty practice laps allowed. Megumi had been the actual driver for the Le Mans time trials, while Sora served as a backup. But this time, Sora would be in open competition, racing in the initial three-hour shift.

This was really going to be fun!!

In a respectful homage to the rich history of the Gran Prix de Le Mans, the beginning of the race would reenact the renowned traditional method of running start. In a sporting ritual that was popular for almost half the race's history, the cars would be parked 'Le Mans Style'; diagonally arrayed on the starting grid. As the starting flag was waved, Sora and the other drivers would dash across the road and leap into their cars, then pull out onto the track to begin the race. Choosing her as the lead off driver was a strategic gambit on the part of the Club: Sora's petite frame would go easy on the car during its first paces. But as parcel to this plan, Sora would be required to footrace with queue of mostly male drivers to get to her car. Once they decided that she would be the lead off driver, Sora had been practicing sprints at the Nekomi Tech track to get in shape.

During her first driving shift of approximately 2.5 to 3 hours, Sora planned to complete two sets of 25 laps before turning the car over to Megumi. In Le Mans racing, the pit stops were limited to one per 25 laps for refueling. Additional pit stops were merited only in cases of mechanical failure and driver fatigue. Her goal was to pass the 1600 kilometer mark during the eight hours total that she would drive, which would keep the N.I.T. team on the competitive pace of 5000 kilometers for the race. The winners for the past three years had averaged 5157 kilometers.

She could hear someone trotting up behind her.

"Hey Sora!! Wait for me!" a tired-looking Toshiyuki shouted after her as he caught up with her. He was still dressed in a pair of motor-grunged coveralls...obviously he had been putting in some extra hours adjusting their still-unnamed race car.

"Dinner's..hunh..on me!" he gasped, showing her the two dinner reservation tickets for the Hunaudieres restaurant.

"You gotta be kidding!!" she shouted, feigning indignance at the expense...but secretly thrilled inside. They both knew that there was necessarily an economy of time available for romantic escapades, because of the tight schedule the Club members had committed themselves to. The Hunaudieres was a legend in itself...a very pricey restaurant located almost right next to the Le Mans track. Toshiyuki had obviously tipped someone in order to obtain dinner reservations this close in time to the Le Mans event! Not to mention the much more difficult task of gaining a few hours leave for Sora and he...Chihiro was a relentless taskmaster.

That must have taken some doing on Toshi's part!

Suddenly, he broke for a nearby hillock. Sora watched in mystification as he disappeared over the ridge...

Several minutes later, he returned.

"Here!!" he said, handing her a large pink rose.

"Toshi-san...thanks!" she thanked him with her softest voice as she held the rose up close. Then she wondered how he got the rose. The Le Mans floral vendors were certainly not anywhere near here. And the grandstands were at least a half hour away on foot. He must have picked it fresh from a nearby garden.

"What if someone saw you?" Sora asked, surprised and exasperated.

"How do you know that I didn't ask the gardeners? And what would you say if I told the flower plot tender that 'my girlfriend is racing in the Le Mans...and that I desperately desire to present her with a rose, because she is the only flower that can fill my heart with the sweetest fragrance of all?'" he challenged her with a grin.

"You sap…you _didn't_!" Sora commented coyly, passing the flower under her nose and inhaling the sweet fragrance.

"What do you think? That I stole it?"

"Hmm... Given your past track record, Toshi...I could cite ample evidence to lead to that conclusion," Sora teased.

"No way!" Toshiyuki protested, waving his hand up-and-down defensively. "Well actually, I sorta bartered for it. The owner of the rose garden wants to meet you and get your autograph. I did a little research...and learned that you are the youngest female pilot in the history of the Le Mans. The Frenchies here already know this, of course. As soon as I told him that you were a college sophomore, he demanded to meet you."

"Well, I hope you change into something more appropriate than _this_ before our evening excursion!" she teased, grabbing the sleeve of his coveralls. Glancing up and down at him, Sora grasped his grease-darkened hand in hers as they walked towards the hillock...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"What are we going to call you?" Chihiro said to the Nissan GT1, lightly stroking its hood. Cevn and several other club members had sanded all of the paint off, and then airsprayed a thin veneer of primer. As she sat alone in the workshop on a wooden crate, she wiped her soaked face with a rag. Despite the fact that she was wearing a hachimaki...Chihiro was drenched with sweat.

Against her better judgment, she had reluctantly decided to give everybody the evening off. It would be the last free evening until the race. She could intuit the telltale signs that the guys needed to let off some steam; today had been ridden with numerous mistakes. It had been 'all task and no play' ever since they had arrived. So Chihiro decided that tonight would be an "R & R" night for the gang. Besides, Toshiyuki had pleaded with her to give him and Sora the night off, so he could take her to a renowned French restaurant. When he told her that it was the Hunaudieres and that he had spent a small fortune just to get a table, she couldn't possibly refuse his request. Sora had no idea how lucky she was!

To forestall any incidents of "you let _them_ go, so why not us?" she released everyone from tonight's work schedule. So Tamiya, Ootaki, Keiichi and the guys were off to visit one of the local "le bars". Megumi told her that she was planning to turn in early because of the head cold she had just come down with. Chihiro suspected that she didn't make Genji stay behind with her because she wanted to reward him for his performance when he introduced her to his parents. Cevn informed her that he was going to remain at the hostel and read some philosophical texts, because he didn't want to hang out in a bar and watch the guys in party mode. Par for the course for their recovering addict faculty sponsor. The three Goddesses had decided to spend their evening off by traveling back to Makuhari to check up on the temple.

Skuld had mentioned something about "keeping Tomohisa in line". Must be her new boyfriend.

Chihiro really missed the cherry red exterior of their car. The former paintjob had made the Nissan look fast...like a blaze of light. According to Doppler wave mechanics, red shift occurs when an object moves away from the viewer. In her mind, the bright red color served as an allusion to their Nissan moving away from the pack of racers to victory.

"Hmmm..." she said, contemplating the car as she slowly unseated herself and walked in a circle around it. They had rebuilt almost every major system over the past week. Concealed underneath the steel-gray exterior was, essentially, a new car. Chihiro wanted desperately to drive it, to experience the surge of motorpower as she opened it up on a straightaway. Chihiro figured that this car could easily exceed 400kph on a sprint.

But the club already had their three drivers. Sora, although greatly inexperienced, was a concession to weight...she only weighed 41 Kg, roughly half the weight of most of the drivers in the field. Megumi was only slightly more skilled, but she had competed in the artificial reality of the Demon Rally, proving her endurance. Keiichi had vouched for her, and his word was good enough for her. Not to mention that she was the "Racing Queen" to a bunch of N.I.T. motorbikers...whatever that meant. All that Chihiro knew was that a whole bunch of young guys on motorbikes from Makuhari and several nearby cities worshipped Megumi.

And then there was Keiichi...

"I envy you, Keiichi-san," Chihiro said to the empty garage. Keiichi was their cleanup pilot; he would anchor the team during the final stretches.

Chihiro wished that it was she who was driving anchor. But her piloting experience was strictly limited to motorcycles; she was a tried-to-the-bone motorcycle racer while Keiichi had a wide range of experience in races.

But in a sense, Chihiro knew that she was the most important driver on the team. Her responsibility was to 'drive' the entire Club...steering them with her knowledge of their skills and the tasks at hand. None of them had ever raced in Europe, or raced at this level of competition.

She looked at her greased-stained hands, the little lines around her knuckles seemed deeper than the last time she had examined them. She had given these hands to the sport... and it had taken a toll. Her hands looked like they belonged to a woman ten years older than she. Yet, despite the fact that she didn't have the dainty smooth hands of an OL or a newlywed housewife, Chihiro felt deeply satisfied with her life. And yet, this Le Mans race _felt_ like a turning point for her. With a bittersweet sigh of her heart, Chihiro realized that maybe it was time for her to pass the torch.

As she washed up her hands, Chihiro felt the vibration of her cell phone against her hip in the side pocket of her coveralls. Funny, no one should be calling...they're all out partying. And it's late! Almost 2am.

"Hello?"

_"Hey Bu..bu..Boss! Boy...am ah glad ya had yuh're phone on!"_

"Tamiya, what are you doing calling this late?" Chihiro said sharply. She _could _have been sound asleep...in which case Tamiya's call would be an unwarranted interruption, worthy of reprisals much more severe than simply a stern lecture the next morning.

But there was something definitely amiss. And this troubled her; his voice seemed too subdued...too deferential. And he had stuttered. Chihiro knew that she could cause the big guy some panic, but this was a little too weird, even for Tamiya.

_"Uh..umm, ah don't know how ta say dis..."_ she heard him fumble for words.

"Spit it out, Tamiya!" she demanded.

_"Uh, Boss...we's in 'le clink'..._

"Huh? Speak Japanese!"

_"Umm...we's callin' from jail. We've been taiho shichau zo'd!"_

"Merde!" Chihiro shouted into the cell phone, using one of the few French words she knew.

"You're in _jail_?! What happ...no, wait! Don't even tell me what you did to land in jail, Tamiya!" Chihiro exclaimed. She could hear an audible "gulp" through the phone.

"What about the rest of the Club members?"

_"Uh...Boss, we's _–all-_ in da jail..." _she heard Tamiya's voice in the phone, whisper quiet.

"Bakabakabakabakabaka..." her mind screamed as she felt a sprinkling impulse to dash the cell phone against the wall as the rage consumed her. After fake throwing the phone, she clenched her free hand open-and-shut in anger, trying to exercise out trying to exercise out the ire that vaulted past all reason.

_"Bu..bu..but Boss, what're we gonna do?"_

Shocked to the marrow of her bones, Chihiro took a sadistic pleasure in Tamiya's squirmish desperation. Serves him right! Serves all of them right!

Screw 'em!

"Why're you calling _me_ for? I suppose you want me to drive into Le Mans and bail the bunch of you out! You idiot! I don't speak French! And I don't have enough francs on me anyway..."

She heard him muttering something to someone in the background, probably a jail warden.

_"Uh...boss, dey's got all fifteen of us in here! Me 'an Ootaki, Keiichi, Genji...da lot of us! Dey's sayin' it'll cost big..."_

"Tamiya, shouldn't you be calling your girlfriend instead? She's the one who's fluent in French. Not to mention she's probably the only one with enough cash to spring you."

Chihiro heard a gasp, and then Tamiya muttering "_awww...fuck!_" in a fear-filled voice before he hung up the phone.

"I wonder which is going to be worse for you...being in a French jail, or being in Sayoko's dog pound," she said to the silent cell phone, a mental image of an S&M Sayoko whipping a cowed Tamiya-puppy being the only joy in the midst of her wrathful raging disgust.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"I can't believe it! My boyfriend called _you_...instead of me! Boy, am I going to pour wasabi in his ears when I get there!" Sayoko screamed. Chihiro winced each time Sayoko yelled inside their Mercedes rental car.

Chihiro's discomfort increased with each burst of invective. It was scaring her...Chihiro was literally fused into 'grrrl mode'! Sayoko was so upset that she was yell-lecturing as if she was alone in the car. Already on edge with her own rage, Chihiro waved her hands in front of her defensively, hoping the gesture would chill Sayoko down.

Tamiya's girlfriend was bitch-pissed at him.

"I'm gonna _kill_ him for this...oops...sorry for yelling, Chihiro!" Sayoko paused in mid-shout as she noticed Chihiro's wincing unease. "It's not that I'm mad at you for anything because he called you instead of me. It's just that...he doesn't _think_ sometimes! Besides, a woman's _supposed_ to be mad when she's called upon to bail her boyfriend out of jail! You know what I mean?"

"Yep. Sure do, except for the boyfriend part, Sayoko! Remember, I'm his sempai! I've seen him do this kinda stuff for years. But what gets me...is that we have a track tour tomorrow...and he and the rest of 'em end up in the tank!!" Chihiro replied.

As soon as the words escaped her lips, Chihiro really felt weathered by life. _Old._ The guys were all N.I.T. students, but this situation was a strong reminder to Chihiro that she was more than a few steps beyond them in terms of adulthood. The only other member of the team who seemed at her level of maturity was Cevn, who was just a couple years older than she. Thank heavens for Belldandy too, who seemed more mature than any of them! Even Urd could be mature at times. Unfortunately, the sisters were gone, and Cevn had decided to stay at the hostel. Chihiro noted to herself that he had shirked his duties...wasn't he supposed to be the faculty sponsor for the Club? And didn't that imply chaperone obligations? She was going to confront him about that in the morning, to be sure! If he wasn't a faculty member at N.I.T., she would have rousted him out of bed to accompany her and Sayoko to the city jail in Le Mans.

She imagined herself to be a pre-school teacher with a group of unruly kids...

"I wonder what the hell happened? Belldandy and her sisters are in Japan, Cevn stayed back because he doesn't drink and he didn't want to go to a bar only to end up watching the guys get drunk. Megumi decided to catch up on some sleep, and Sora and cousin Toshiyuki went out to dinner," Sayoko wondered aloud.

"Sounds like a case of 'the mantis stalking the cicada, unaware of the oriole stalking him'. When the cat's away, the dirty rats come out to play," Chihiro commented, causing Sayoko to giggle briefly.

"In a way, this is soooo true! Get the guys away from their girlfriends, Goddesses and me...and they get themselves into a pinch," Chihiro observed to herself.

"And that's why I'm going to kill him when I get there! Jerk!! Prize idiot! Dumbshit!!" Sayoko cursed venomously, causing Chihiro to wince once again as the car swerved into the middle of the road for a moment until Sayoko recovered from her burst of temper.

"Please...less shouting, more driving, Sayoko!" Chihiro yelled, scared out of her wits. Seeing how discomfited Sayoko was, Chihiro thanked her lucky stars that she was single...

Once they arrived at the jail, Sayoko was subjected to a half hour of irreverent bickering and lectures by the police officials; she was being treated as if she was guilty by association. Finally, she told the police sergeant who her parents were and what they owned, which promptly made him shut up, much to Chihiro's relief. If Sayoko and she got harassed just by being friends of the guys, she could only imagine the treatment Tamiya, Ootaki and the others had received. This jail had the distinct impression of being someone's private domain.

After a long wait, she and Chihiro paid the bailiff an extortionate amount of francs to suffer the release of the Club members. _Every_ male N.I.T. Unified Club member that was present at the bar was jailed on charges of disrupting the peace, brawling and public intox.

"I can't believe it! They called me a little rich bitch, assuming that I don't understand French!" Sayoko hissed angrily. That pissed Chihiro off even more...now the guy's little fuckup had caused Sayoko to be treated poorly as well.

Sayoko said she wanted to get out of there as soon as possible; the jail stank headily of sweaty, boozy odors...and it was filled with the usual riffraff of drunks and criminals, some of whom were wearing uniforms and badges.

Chihiro had suggested to her with biting sarcasm that she should have brought a camera...so she could capture the looks of abject humiliation on the faces of the guys. Sayoko had to admit that it was a worthy idea. But even she had to admit that would be a little _too_ sadistic...excepting Tamiya, who deserved much worse. He deserved a full hour-long videotape of his disgrace.

Once they were released, Chihiro gathered the troops in the front area of the jail and made them stand in a row. She paced in front of them like a drill sergeant, much to the amusement of the gendarmes. Many of the Unified Club members were only unified in the fact that they were too drunk to be deliciously afraid of her stormy mood.

There was always tomorrow...

"Those freakin' French bastards! They started insulting us, calling us 'charm school boys' and 'mummy's little race drivers'!" Ootaki started up in an indignant plaint before Chihiro or Sayoko could give vent to their anger. It was obvious that he was trying to justify their predicament as the guys gathered behind him in the lobby of the jail to fill out release slips.

Chihiro could almost see a flame-red aura of anger surrounding Sayoko as she cornered Tamiya, pointing her finger at his chest. Despite her denials of jealousy, Chihiro knew the younger girl was in a rage because Tamiya had called Chihiro instead of _her_. Sayoko, for all her good points, possessed one mean jealous streak. Chihiro came from a well-to-do family herself, so she knew how seductive the interchange of wealth, power and ego were. Sayoko's ego had just been punctured big-time by Tamiya, and she was full-on RPMing her boyfriend with her anger and hurt.

"Poor guy..." she said under her breath as Sayoko started to chew him out. It was oddly funny, Sayoko's lithe form advancing on her brutish boyfriend as he back-stepped into a corner. Of course, the gendarmes were consumed with laughter at this dressing down.

Beauty and the Beast...and it was hard for her to tell which was which at the moment, as Sayoko was giving him a savage tongue-lashing.

"Tamiya, I _told_ you that you guys should have invited me and Megumi! And instead, you decide to have a 'men's night out'! MEN!" she overheard Sayoko say icily, almost spitting the word.

The whole jail went silent as Sayoko screamed shrilly.

"Look what happens!! You all go out to a bar...and then you all end up in jail because of a drunken brawl! You're supposed to be these guy's sempai, Tamiya! _The sempai_!!The sempai is supposed to set a good example for his juniors! Some example you set for them! Imagine you...a _graduate student_, acting like a big ape! 'Brawling,' the police sergeant said!! You actually got in a barroom brawl! I can't believe it! This isn't the boxing tourney in Hokkaido...this is _France_! Oooooh, how could you make me go through all this hassle just to get you out of jail, you prize idiot!" she heard the N.I.T. grad student confront Tamiya with nails-hard edginess.

Chihiro bit her tongue to keep from laughing as she saw the big guy cringe deeper with every word. Sayoko must have some grip on him...Tamiya's face was blanched with guilt and fear to a degree that Chihiro could never evoke in him. She decided to follow Sayoko's lead and chew out Tamiya's redoubtable partner-in-crime.

"And you, Ootaki! You claim that they started it by calling you names. Whatta bunch of crap! How could know you even know what they were saying? You don't speak _a single word_ of French!" Chihiro stated angrily, fists on her hips as she visually bored a hole right through Ootaki's long nose. Despite her deep disappointment, a slight part of her was genuinely interested in what started the fight.

"Well, that's true that I don't know French...but you're not a guy. You don't understand, Boss!"

"You mean that I don't know how junior-high boys would react to being called names..." Chihiro interrupted.

"It's not like that!" Ootaki protested.

"So what _was_ it like, Ootaki? And this had better be good, otherwise you're in deep shit! We've gotta pay Sayoko back a shitload of money due to your bad judgment. So you better make it good!" Chihiro confronted him edge-coolly, tapping her foot.

"It wasn't _what_ they were saying, it was _how_ they were saying it! I could tell that they were insultin' us, even if I didn't understand the words! The language of insults is universal, ya' know!" Ootaki said as he launched into a description of the crude 'hand sign language' that passed between their group of tables and those of the French team.

Chihiro almost wanted to barf...

"Tamiya! I'm not done with you yet!!" she heard Sayoko's voice soaring above the muttering queue of N.I.T. Unified Club members. All the jailers had dropped whatever they were doing so they could closely observe the dressing-down process with hearty mocking laughter.

"And Keiichi! What's _your _excuse? You don't usually get really drunk, right? You can tell me what happened, right?" Chihiro asked, turning her attention to the junior president of the Club. Keiichi cowered for a moment...then held a hand to his head and wobbled, looking for a public bench so he could sit down. Chihiro rolled her eyes, knowing that that he was _really_ drunk. Obviously the two miscreant sempai had forced him to drink way beyond his capacity, perhaps because they all knew that Belldandy was away in Japan. He'd be of no help.

"Kenji? Take? Ryuu? Haruki? Tomoko? _Any_ of you guys want to explain what happened here? Can any of you guys even _try_ to explain what you did to wind up in jail?" Chihiro demanded. The men simply shuffled amongst themselves, trying to distance themselves from her. Finally Genji spoke up in a slightly slurred voice.

"Here's what happened, Prez. We were just minding our own business when a bunch of guys walked in. They attempted to make us move to the back, so that they could be sitting nearer to the bar. Which wasn't fair, because we were there first! I noticed that they were all wearing Team Porsche jackets and speaking French. So I figured that they were one of the other race teams. None of our guys understand French, but I've been to several French schools during the summers, so I'm totally fluent," he started to explain.

Chihiro immediately regretted chewing out Ootaki about not knowing what was said. Her intense anger had blinded her: she had completely forgotten that Genji was schooled in France during the summers and could probably translate every insult.

"Go on," she demanded, her interest suddenly piqued.

"They started calling us boys, which is considered a deep insult to the French. Then they said Tamiya was 'bete comme ses pieds'..."

"What!!" Sayoko shouted angrily, cutting short her ongoing chastisement of her boyfriend in mid-sentence. She spun around to face her brother after overhearing Genji's comment. The policemen were in stitches, guffawing loudly at this.

"That means 'stupid as his feet'," he translated for Chihiro with a scowl. "When I told Tamiya what it meant, Ootaki had to hold him off...he wanted to clock the guy who said it. Then the French guys started saying that our Club was 'confused as Adam on Mother's Day'...and then they started insulting our mothers. Then one of them starting insulting Megumi and Sora...calling them 'flat-chested lezbos' and Tamiya and Ootaki had to hold _me_ back."

With each explanation, Chihiro felt a little bit of her steam-anger cooling down. Sayoko had completely stopped chewing out Tamiya the moment Genji had mentioned the choice insult they had aimed at him. Chihiro sensed that Sayoko's anger had shifted towards the French team.

"So what _did _set you guys off?" Chihiro asked, hoping to get past this catalogue of insults and repartee.

"Well, then they started insulting _you_. I won't repeat what they said, but it was disgusting. They said that women don't belong in the Le Mans, and especially as team managers. And...ummm, they basically implied that the only reason you were the head of our team...was because you were...um, I'm sorry, but I gotta tell you this..."

"Yeah? Go on..." Chihiro encouraged, already beginning to feel a slight empathy for the guys.

"Well, uh...several of them said that you were 'giving head' so that you could 'be the head' of the team."

"WHAT THE FUCK!! THOSE MOTHERFUCKERS SAID _THAT_!!" she screamed, her mind going ballistic with venomous rage. She couldn't believe what she just heard. Obviously, this marked the French team as drunken belligerents...to insult her honor so bluntly. She wanted to kick one of the nearby chairs over, but then she checked herself as she remembered she was in a French jailroom lobby.

"To their credit, at this point a couple of their guys started yelling at the rest of the French team, telling their teammates that they were taking it too far. Their own teammates were telling them to shut up. But the rest of 'em kept up the insults. But by then it was too little too late. Tamiya, Ootaki, Keiichi...well, basically _all _of us...went over to their table and demanded an apology and a retraction. At that point, several of their guys tried to apologize for their teammate's behavior...but everyone was yelling. And then several other guys flipped us off and added that Tamiya and Ootaki were actually mad 'because they hadn't got none from you or their girlfriends because their dicks were too short'."

Chihiro's eyes flew wide in anger at this as she imagined the scene in her mind.

"Those fucking bastards are going to pay for saying that!" She heard Sayoko growl with barely suppressed rage.

"I'm sorry, sis! And uh, Madame...er, Ms. Prez. I'm really sorry! I'm only repeating what they said," Genji apologized nervously, glancing back and forth seeing the sparks of ire in Sayoko's and her eyes. Chihiro nodded her head, excusing him.

"Finally, two of their guys stood up and started yelling. It was all crazy by this point, but I think that they were chewing out their teammates again...while trying to get between our sempai and the rest of the French dudes to keep a fight from breaking out. But I think that Tamiya took their sudden standing up to mean that they were ready to brawl. So he threw the first punch at the guy standing nearest to him. Anyway, a second later, we were mowin' them down with punches," Genji pointed out.

Chihiro had completely dropped her stern expression when she learned that they had kept their cool until the French team had insulted _her_. She could almost follow it in her mind...Tamiya and Ootaki had fallen in love with her once...and still respected her highly now that both of them had girlfriends. In essence, their brawling was the result of...

"They were defending my honor, the honor of their team, and the honor of their girlfriends!!" she realized with stark keenness. She was astounded that they had held it in as long as they did. She nodded once to each sempai in approval, and then resumed her interrogation. As she looked over the team more closely, it dawned on her that they had gotten worsted in the fight...and she began recriminate herself for being so angry with them.

"So which team was it, Genji? You said they were a French racing team, eh?"

"There were two teams, calling themselves Team One & Team Two Porsche. Err...the first guy that Tamiya punched was the one of the guys trying to prevent the fight. We found out later that he was...Pierre Ar Bras. That's why the gendarmes here were so rough on us!"

Chihiro felt a definite chill run up and down her spine.

"Pierre Ar Bras? Tamiya hit _him_? Oh...great! This is really, really messed up!" Chihiro exclaimed, dramatically putting a hand to her head to express the headache this was all causing.

"And he was trying to prevent the fight?"

"It looked that way...but by then, it was too late. Besides, his teammates kept taunting us..." Genji answered, trying to mollify her.

"Who's this Pierre guy?" Sayoko asked. Chihiro shook her head in frustration at Sayoko's question, and then calmed herself. Of course, Sayoko wouldn't know!

"Pierre Ar Bras is the lead driver of the Team One Porsche club! He's probably the best driver on the planet. He's won four out of the last six Le Mans! He's pretty much a national hero to the French here...not to mention that he's already Le Mans legend," Keiichi answered, suddenly sober. As Chihiro listened to Keiichi, her mind traveled halfway across the globe to her apartment in Makuhari.

Where a poster of Pierre Ar Bras was taped to the wall, right next to several shelves with her carefully assembled scale motorcycle kits...

This was unbelievable...extremely unbelievable! Chihiro finally started laughing; a crazed laughter that swelled through her lungs because she didn't know what else to do or say.

The guys just hung their heads in silent repose while she laughed fitfully until she was gasping for air. Chihiro walked out the front of jail, pausing to look up at the moon, trying to weigh out how she should deal with this. Trying _not_ to imagine how Pierre Ar Bras would look with a broken nose and a shiner; the inevitable result of a Super-Tamiya Punch.

Sayoko walked over and gripped her lightly on the shoulder.

"Chihiro...if I was a guy, and they said what they said...I would have kicked their asses!" Sayoko told her in a low whispering voice. "After hearing what I just heard, I still want to kick somebody's ass, and not my boyfriend's, either. This is bullshit!"

"Yeah, Boss! Ah'm sorry for all the trouble...but I jus' couldn't help myself once dey said all those rotten things about Sayoko and you! And den...dey wouldn't stop, even after we asked dem nicely. An I ain't no 'little guy'...jus ask my girlfriend!"

Sayoko blushed beet red.

Chihiro had to smirk at that one...

"My boyfriend, the drunk!" Sayoko sighed in apt resignation, blushing at Tamiya's comment and grateful the jailers didn't know Japanese. She turned away and hid her face against Chihiro's shoulder, expecting to be swarmed with embarrassing, howling laughter.

But everybody was dead silent.

Chihiro tapped her on the back and reminded her that Tamiya didn't mean any harm. She explained to Sayoko that he was just standing up for his manhood...and he was a little wineflushed. Well, _more_ than a little wineflushed...

"Dis France...it's a bogus country! When da cops came, dey talks to the other guys...and then they haul _all 'o us_ to da jail. Not one of dem scumbags even got hisself arrested. And dey started it!" Tamiya pleaded, his voice so filled with indignant anger that he was yelling. This started off a boisterous heated shouting match between the jailers and the N.I.T. men...

Chihiro knew that they were all drunk, which had doubtlessly fueled an already volatile situation. But she combed over Sayoko's point in her mind. The insults to her...well, _that_ pissed her off. But they were childish insults, nonetheless. The kind of guttural playground taunts that would only be meaningful to intoxicated males with troglodyte mentalities. Too bad she didn't go with them...she would have put the French clubmembers in their place with a little translation help from Genji...

"Boss...god dammit, we _had_ to stand up for the Club! They insulted Sora and Megumi, our drivers. Our girlfriends. Keiichi's sister. You. Our entire team! What were we supposed to do, just shut up and take it? We had to stand up for ourselves, for the Club!" Keiichi and Ootaki both repeated emphatically.

_--We had to stand up for the Club--_

The words echoed in Chihiro's mind. This was _her_ club that they had insulted. These were her teammates, whose pride wouldn't allow them to take the mealy-mouthed offenses sitting down. And these were her _friends_ that the French racing teams had been mocking. This whole thing reeked...the other team's behavior was beyond mere rudeness...it was contemptible. And the jailing of her teammates...was nothing more than hometown favoritism. Well, she had to concede the police their own...if they were to arrest a public figure like Pierre Ar Bras, the sergeant probably would have gotten fired, no questions asked.

It sucked!! Everyone she had met in France up to this point had gone out of their way to make the Japanese team feel at home during their stay here. The tour officials always met with the Club with a Japanese translator in tow. The wife of the farmer who had rented them the small barn shed would bring them pastries, sodas and cheeses every day out of the goodness of her heart. Even Pierre Ar Bras had tried to quiet his teammates down once they were getting out of hand...only to get a Tamiya-punch in return for his efforts.

Despite the hospitality, the behavior of these French racers towards her clubmates was inexcusable. They certainly didn't represent their country very well...

"I..I don't know what to say, now that I've heard your side of it!" Chihiro said, holding her hands clasped behind her back. She looked up and saw everyone eyeing her. They had followed her out of the police station, and were queuing in a small huddle. Waiting for her lead...her judgment on the matter.

After all, when all was said and done, she was the Boss...the President of the N.I.T. Unified Club.

"Wait a minute! I _do _know what to say! What am I doing, bullshitting myself like this? They messed up by picking on you guys. Royally messed up. And I'm going to stand up for the Club too. I'm _proud_ of you guys for standing up for me, for Sayoko and Megumi and Sora...and for our Club!!" Chihiro shouted, making sure to make eye contact with each of her teammates.

Ootaki was struck facefallen at her sudden change in attitude.

"From this moment on, we're no longer here just to race in the Le Mans. Unwittingly, those foolish idiots just gave us even more of a reason to be here! We're going to humiliate those bastards...on their own turf...in their own country...in front of their own fans!

"We're going to kick their asses where it counts...on the racetrack!" she finished.

"YEEEEAAAAH!!" the group of N.I.T. club members shouted, not caring if they woke up the town or not. The policemen screamed at them to pack it up or go back to their cells.

"Sayoko, would you translate what I just said so that these jailers will be the first to know what's gonna go down here in France in a couple weeks?"

"With pleasure!" Sayoko said, her eyes narrowed with a glisten that made Chihiro feel a chill. "And when I'm done with that, I'm going to tell them that I'm going to make two phone calls, and they'll be watching the Le Mans on unpaid leave, for laughing at what those sickos said about Tamiya and me. They just fucked with the wrong 'little rich bitch' tonight!"

"And I thought I was pissed!" Chihiro thought as Sayoko clarified matters for the jail room cops with a distinctive flair.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

_GONG GONG GONG GONG GONG GONG GONG_

"Everybody wake up! Rise and shine!!" Chihiro shouted as she walked down the hallway, banging a wrench on an old hubcap.

_Knock Knock Knock_

"Wake up, Keiichi!" he heard Chihiro yell, sticking her head through the door to his room. Keiichi was paired with Bell, but Bell-chan wasn't supposed to be back until later today.

"Awww...c'mon, Chihiro! I just got to sleep!" he moaned, pulling a pillow over his head. He heard a loud metallic banging; Chihiro had stuck her noisemaker in his room and was beating away like a Taiko drummer.

"Errrggh...alright already! I'm waking up now! See...I'm getting out of bed now!" Keiichi groused. Once again, Keiichi marveled at the stamina of the Club president. By the time their group had arrived back at the hostel by taxi, it was roughly 5am. Now it was 8:30 am...and Chihiro was ready to roar off.

"Chihiro...you oni-girl!" he heard Ootaki groan in protest somewhere down the hallway. In answer, the kettle drumming became more rapid.

"This must be our punishment for last night," Keiichi muttered to himself. A moment later, he heard the muffled voices of his sister and Sora chewing Chihiro out.

Crawling out of the old creaky bed, he walked into the small bathroom and rubbed the sleep out of his eyes. Hovering over the sink, he splashed his face with cold water to 'get the red out'. Keiichi still wasn't used to sleeping in a Western-style bed; he had taken the mattress off and laid it out on the floor, only to find it returned to the bed when he returned at night from his work.

"Boy, do you have a hangover," he said to the slack-jawed image in the mirror.

A half hour later, he joined the assembled Club members in the garage. One look at the gleam in Chihiro's eyes and Keiichi knew that she was in 'pep talk' mode. She drummed her fingers anxiously on the worktable she was sitting on, waiting for the last stragglers to show up.

"Okay! Now that we're all here, I have an important announcement to make! Since we are going to be taking our rebuilt Nissan on a few practice tour laps of the Le Mans course...we are going to have to name her this morning."

"Yuh woke us up for _that_?" Tamiya protested.

"Bad move, Tamiya-sempai," Keiichi muttered to himself. To his surprise, Chihiro ignored Tamiya's outburst.

"Last night, before the outbreak of chaos caused by some irresponsible male Club members under extreme duress...I came up with a name for our car. So I would like to nominate that we call our car the 'Blaze'!" Chihiro stated with cheery enthusiasm. Keiichi studied the faces of his teammates for a reaction. Hungover, they were slow to react...but he could see grins of recognition forming on several faces as the name their Club president had suggested caught their attention.

He had to admit, it _was_ a pretty cool name!

"As faculty sponsor, I second Chihiro's suggestion that we call our car 'Blaze'," Cevn said aloud. A moment later, they unanimously hand voted to call the Nissan "Blaze".

Then Chihiro opened up one of the tool stands and pulled out one of the larger first aid kits, then set it down on the worktable.

"What's she doing?" Cevn asked Keiichi in a whisper as Chihiro removed the large fuel cap from the side of their race car. She carefully set the cap down on the table near the medical kit.

"I don't have a clue. Since it's Chihiro, it's probably a little bent," Keiichi whispered back to him, still trying to force himself awake.

Chihiro opened the first aid kit with deliberately slow motions. She removed several items: a small bag of cotton balls and a box of band-aids; a bottle of rubbing alcohol; and something that resembled a medical lance. Wordlessly pricking her finger, she squeezed out a few drops of blood into the scoop of the Blaze's fuel cap.

Regarding her warily, Keiichi thought that Chihiro was acting like she was a few screws short of a carburetor...

"Tamiya, come here!" she called. Keiichi watched as the big sempai lumber over, and then regard her with a questioning look. Chihiro brandished the lance in front his face. As he took the needle-like lance she proffered, Chihiro lit a welding torch and directed him to run the sharp over the low flames to sterilize it. Looking at Chihiro with an expression of curiosity, he poked his finger and squeezed several drops of blood into the fuel cap.

"I wonder if she's been reading 'Moby Dick' in her room at night. She really let me have it this morning for not accompanying you guys on your infamous bar adventure!" Cevn whispered to Keiichi.

Keiichi grinned at this, said something about "I _knew_ she spent too much time in Europe!" and then shrugged his shoulders, uncertain and yet fascinated by this rather extreme ritual that had suddenly gripped everybody's attention.

As he watched Ootaki prick his finger, Keiichi reflected on the thin line between sanctity and insanity. At first, he thought that this was a ridiculous contrivance on the part of the Club president; an attempt to lend even more drama to their task.

After Tamiya and Ootaki, it was his turn...

With a dart of the lance, he poked the tip of his finger and squeezed out several bright red drops of blood. Walking back to stand next to Cevn, he heard Cevn muttering something to himself about "Faustian overtones" while Megumi and Sora contributed to the growing pool of fluid in the cup. Nobody seemed to mind; he heard no objections or squeamishness.

An outsider might be appalled to observe the club members pooling their blood...but it was beginning to dawn on Keiichi that this wasn't just a fetch of craziness on Chihiro's part. Something deeply significant was happening, transforming and transcending the reality of the moment into something _beyond _the appearance of a little bit of youthful ceremony intended to bind everyone together. Finally, Cevn and Sayoko decided to join the rest of the team members and contribute a few drops of their blood.

Once they were done, Keiichi scanned the room intently, observing how everyone seemed to contemplate the inner ring seal and its commingled sanguinal fluids. Every face was figured with a hallowed aspect. The barn shed garage had mysteriously assumed a near-religious ambiance as the club members sensed the mystical aspects of Chihiro's little 'ritual'. A reverential, meditative sort of stillness gripped Keiichi as he realized that this ritual Chihiro had devised...had indeed bonded them together in a new and profound manner.

Without a word, Chihiro took the gas gap and screwed it back into its place on the Blaze.

Everybody was deeply moved by what had just transpired...the sanctity of the moment seemed to draw a prolonged silence from the Club members as they regarded their racecar.

"Now, you're one of us," Chihiro spoke to their car thoughtfully, deliberately stroking the smooth curves of the Blaze's engine hood.

"Sora, since you're the youngest, you get to do the honors!" Chihiro announced with a smile. Evidently, she had decided it was time to relax the devout proceedings and move on.

"What honors?" Sora asked. She was still giddy from last night's dinner out with Toshi-chan. It had been a wonderful time...he had taken her to a discotheque after dinner and they ended up touring the countryside in cab way late into the night. Now she could say that she had danced in a _real _disco!

"You're usually the one who comes up with the names for the Club's vehicles, Sora. But this time, since I named her, you get to christen her."

With this, Chihiro opened her leather backpack and produced a large bottle of authentic Kirin sake. More than a few members eyed the bottle in her hand thirstily.

"Nope! Nnh nnh. This isn't for drinking your hangovers away, you guys!" she remarked teasingly as she handed the bottle over to Sora. They walked over to the front of the Blaze, followed by a semicircle of club members.

"I want you to hit the bottle against the front bumper as hard as you can, Sora!" she encouraged. In Chihiro's mind, having Sora christen the car was more than an act of symbolism. Chihiro was oldest member of the Club, while Sora was the youngest.

She had decided to pass the torch...

Sora closed her eyes for a moment and focused, trying to blink away the certain knowledge that she would probably get splattered with sake. Drawing a deep breath, she swung back and crashed the bottle as hard as she could against the bumper of the Blaze.

With a resounding "crash", the bottle shattered, sending galactic spiral sprays of sake and bits of glass all over Sora, Chihiro, the Blaze and most of the Club members.

From a deep seat inside of his soul, Keiichi felt a strong urge to cheer as he was caught up in the giddiness of the moment. He shouted...and his voice was joined by a chorus of celebratory yells and cheers. He felt grateful for Chihiro's little bit of dramatism and ceremony.

She had molded the Club into a _team_.

"Good job, Sora!" Chihiro praised the sophomore. "Now, let's decal her!"

"Ain't we supposed tuh paint the car first, and then decal her?" Tamiya asked.

"We can't. You see, the money we set aside to paint the Blaze...ended up getting spent on bailing certain individuals out of jail! But I don't think the Blaze will mind. She's not interested in looks...she just wants to go out there and win races for us," Chihiro explained, anthropomorphizing the Club's new 4-wheeled member.

"You gotta be kidding!" Ootaki commented. In response, Chihiro went over to the wall and grabbed three brooms and several towels.

"No..._we_ gotta be cleaning up this mess! Will you two help me do the honors?" she said with a forgiving grin.

"YES MA'AM!!"

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --


	62. Pt 62: Ground Control Set

**Part 62: Ground Control Set**

Keiichi felt like he was trying to jump up and touch a ceiling fan that was suspended just slightly beyond his reach. With each scaling jump, the lamp appeared to draw closer...but his exhaustion drifted into fogherded depths. He felt his figurative resolve increase at the expense of the combination of greatest exertion and exhaustion. His imagination tensed for one final desperate leap...

Opening his eyes, he watched his teammates struggle privately with their own coils of tension. In his mind, the N.I.T. team's presence here in Le Mans evoked the sense of that final grasping leap. A palpable sense of finality seemed to permeate the N.I.T. racing club. Or was it an expression of grit-grim determination?

Here, amidst the Quinconce des Jacobins, a large squarish plaza in the center of the city of Le Mans, the N.I.T. Unified Club members were assembled, anxiously awaiting the judges. The square was lined with spectators watching the traditional pre-race inspection and scrutineering session, their faces avid with interest and envy. The sheer giddiness of the racing fever gripping fans, competitors and judges spelled Keiichi into a tension headache. He clenched his hands into fists to keep them from trembling _too_ visibly. Observing the judges preparing to pore over the car next to the Blaze, Keiichi's nerves were skittering like pachinko balls in a washing machine.

With a whipshake of his head, as if to clear an imaginary addling fugue, Keiichi tried to lull his anxiety with the camphor of the carefree days of his childhood. He reenvisioned an incident from early childhood that occurred when he was 8 or so. He had watched a special on the Le Mans on NHK2, which inspired him to laboriously set up his 50-piece slotcar track in a juvenile attempt to emulate the contours of the French racecourse. He was thrilled by the half-hour special before the race: a documentary video of the annual racer's parade through the city of Le Mans. In his youthful imagination, the city of Le Mans had assumed to mystical realms as he fancied green and gold dragons lurking atop the ancient city walls, with reposing stone gargoyles that would suddenly spring to life and swoop down from the periphets of the Gothic cathedrals.

Now he was _here_, in Le Mans, France...and the only dragons in evidence were those warring in his stomach. The cuisine here wasn't agreeing with him...or was it just his tauntly knotted nervestrings?

The day before the race, he knew that each team would be feted through the city in a spectacular procession of antique cars. Before leaving Japan, he had downloaded the Le Mans website videos on Firefox, prepping himself by observing how the other racers comported themselves. The drivers would be pageanted in grand style, waving while they rode in open-top coupes that were at least 60 years old, amidst a hundred thousand spectators crammed into the ville trajets and boulevards.

Keiichi pinched himself on the arm to cancel out the billowing daydream effect. In a couple days, he was going to be _in_ the parade!

As a participant!

He, his sister and Sora would all be dressed in their red-and-white racing team coveralls, readily recognizable to the spectators...and the millions of Japanese who would be watching the race live, or as a CNNI newsbyte.

Waving out of an antique 1930's Bentley or some other multimillion-yen car...

The judges were busily inspecting the American entry a mere ten meters away. Several of them were darting quick glances at the Blaze. She would be their next inspection, the last one of the evening.

In 1998, the Grand Touring category GT1 division had been restructured into the GT3 and GTX classes. This realignment also brought a number of changes to the division. The important change was that the two new divisions were no longer subject to road homologation. Keiichi had never dealt with homologation standards before. Homologation, as Chihiro had explained it in simple terms, was a condition that required the construction of a certain number of cars per model type. The model type had to be commercial in nature; variants on a sportscar model that was marketed to the general public. The intent of homologation was to put the _type_ of car to the test...after all, the Le Mans was a manufacturer's endurance race.

The changes in the GT3/GTX divisions were necessitated by the fact that the costs of building Grand Touring racecars like their Blaze had become so prohibitive that the issue of road homologation seemed ingermane. Over the years, the expense of building a competitive Le Mans racer had bloated into an exorbitant investment. To build five cars like the Blaze would be ridiculously expensive. So manufacturers 'cheated' by building four cars: a standard coupe-type model that could be driven on the road, and then three ultra-expensive race cars that only shared a few features with the road touring car. Appearances had become shaded with absurdity when one 'standard' car was driven to the pre-race inspection, as was required to prove the roadworthiness of the model, while the other one to four cars that would actually compete in the Le Mans were carefully transported by semitrailer and numerous attendants.

By pulling the homologation requirement, the sponsors envisioned the creation of two improvements that would widen the scope of competition at the Le Mans. First, auto manufacturers wouldn't be tempted to create a 'faux' homologation...which had become standard practice over the past ten years or so. And more importantly, lesser known teams that didn't have the corporate megabucks needed to meet the standards of homologating several cars of a certain model type...could now compete on more equitable terms.

In fact, one of the drivers from the 1990's that Keiichi visited was remorseful because Nissan had withdrawn from the Le Mans a year after they finished 3rd in the GT1 division. The official explanation given by Nissan officials when they withdrew from the Le Mans in 1999, was that the financial difficulties of fielding a racecar didn't justify continued participation, despite a record of building excellent racecars and achieving modest success.

Unfortunately, these changes to the Grand Touring category actually did little to alter the outcomes of the Le Mans. As expected, the number of private club entries had increased to almost a quarter of the field of competitors. However, the corporate-sponsored teams continued to win the Le Mans. _Those_ cars were always brought to the inspection by semitrailer. In a sense, the GTX division had become the 'supercar' division of the Le Mans...hyper-expensive cars built for the essential purpose of winning the race. Yet, in another sense, relaxing the homologation requirements had transformed the GT3 and GTX divisions into possessing the most 'prototype' class of vehicles, if not in name but in spirit.

It went without saying that the N.I.T. team didn't have suffice of financial resources to haul the Blaze around in a semitrailer. Thus, Keiichi was tasked with the critical chore of driving the Blaze to the inspection site during midday traffic. As he traveled along the public highways, he drew astonished stares from many a French motorist. To his amusement, a few cars pulled up alongside him to give him a "thumbs up" or to snap photos and film videos.

Keiichi closed his eyes, remembering that nerve-wracking drive...and how he had uttered many a silent prayer that there would be no drunks on the road as he drove the way to the inspection grounds...

As the judges finished with the American car, he _really_ wished that Bell-chan were here to comfort him. He made a mental note to ask his divine girlfriend to give him a massage when she got back...his back and shoulders were coilspring tense.

The Blaze was scheduled to be inspected at 9pm, but the team of judges from the Automobile Club de L'Ouest were running late...so it was nearing 9:30pm when they finally got to the N.I.T. entry. Watching the sky turn orange purple as the sun started to set, Keiichi felt hot tension swarming him in layers. The fact that there was a noisy throng crowded around the inspection clinic area, consisting of perhaps a couple thousand sports car aficionados by his best guess, severely compounded his frazzled nerves.

Flashbulbs started strobing as the judges approached the Blaze. The scrutineers shouted at the fans to refrain from taking snapshots during the inspection...and then they began their work once the crowd quieted down. The fact that the team was from Japan and their car was unpainted, with only decals and buffed chassis, seemed to evoke an unusually focused curiosity among the onlookers.

Two teams of judges examined the Blaze; one group checking off elaborate clipboard-borne checklists while the other group was studiously performing the hands-on inspections and shouting out results. As this was going on, a third group motioned he, Megumi and Sora over to a booth reserved for the driver physical exams. They met a doctor, who explained via translator that he would administer a series of requisite physical tests to ensure that the N.I.T. drivers were fit for the race.

Keiichi smiled privately when Megumi and Sora blushed...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Chihiro looked on, morbidly curious about the procedures the scrutineers were employing to verify the dozens of administrative standards for the race. The judges swarmed over their car, carefully inspecting the cockpit and chassis to ensure that the Blaze was road legal. They checked off a number of inspection points to verify that it was equipped with the necessary safety modifications for racing. Next, they peered underneath the Blaze, using a laser-guided levelplaner to measure the undercarriage, making sure that it was flat-bottomed between the axles. Then the judges weighed their car to ensure that it wasn't below the minimum weight of 900kg. Checking under the hood, they measured the engine displacement to verify that the custom engine wasn't over 8 liters in size. They started the car and measured the horsepower, checking to see that it maxxed out at 630 Bhp. Then they verified that the fuel capacity was limited to 100 liters. The judges pulled a wheel and inspected the brakes, noting that the brakepads met with materials standards.

The scrutineers took a five-minute break, and then continued with their detailed examination of the Blaze. They confirmed the presence of the uniforming air restrictors. Each car competing in the Le Mans was fitted with air intake units that restricted engine performance. Since four classes of racecars participated in the Le Mans, each with differing weights, engine displacement and passenger load...the air restrictors served to equalize the competitiveness of the classes. Otherwise, the single-passenger Prototype cars would always outrace their bulkier two-door Grand Touring counterparts. The judges finally checked the 14-inch wide tires to ensure they met the standards of tread depth.

The efficiency of the inspection team amazed her; they had performed almost all the checks in less than 40 minutes. The mechanic in her regarded their clockwork with an almost reverent respect...they were obviously crack engineers and mechanics. With the cooling evening air ruffling her hair, Chihiro sensed that it was a good omen that the inspection had proceeded so quickly. She wished she could understand French, as the scrutineer teams were constantly discussing the Blaze. But despite the language barrier, she could sense that the inspection was winding down. She found herself glancing frequently at Genji and Sayoko, examining their faces for any reaction to the chattering of the judges, anything that might indicate a problem. The rapid clockwork precision of the inspection teams made it obvious that the judges had been doing this for many years.

She caught herself...she actually had been chewing her fingernails.

Finally, the judges nodded to the Japanese translator, the man who had been working with their team and the Japanese press over the past couple weeks. He was a nice guy, but Chihiro always felt an impulse to giggle when he spoke Japanese; his words were liberally seasoned with the noticeable nasal French mouille accent.

A moment later, the translator informed them that the Blaze had passed the inspection and would be accepted for the Thursday trials. He added that one of the judges mentioned "this design is one of the most unusual I've seen here in over 22 years of scrutineering." Chihiro visibly sagged with relief at the good news and the remark. She took it as a compliment. A moment later, she cut loose a deep exhalation...and heard several other club members exhaling audibly. As her spine softened, Chihiro realized that she had been standing stiffly during the whole scrutineering process, like a soldier during parade dress inspection.

She felt like she had been holding her breath for 40 minutes.

As the darkness encroached, they piled into a rental van and drove back to their youth hostel on the outskirts of town. Meanwhile, the Blaze would be secured in a locked and guarded lot overnight, and then transported to the Le Mans track and garaged in the pit area there. This was a necessary precaution; in the past, several teams had surreptitiously installed workaround designs after the cycle of inspections were concluded...designs that were decidedly illegal for competition.

As she looked out at the cedar trees underlit by the orange-yellow highway lights, Chihiro mentally steeled herself.

"There's no going back now," she mummed to her reflection in the van's window...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

The afternoon rain still hung slick on the roadway as the 2nd session for the qualifying practice drew near. The N.I.T. Unified Club had elected to have Keiichi drive first, hoping that an initial fast lap time could move them up a few slots in the starting grid.

Practice and qualifying at Le Mans are broken into four sessions spread over two days. Since the race is partially run over public roads, all practice takes place at 'off-peak' hours, from 7:00 pm-9:00 pm and 10:00 pm-12:30 am each day. The cars were split into two groups; each team would get several hours practice time on either Wednesday or Thursday. The best lap time would be used to determine start grid position.

Keiichi would be allowed to drive 9 or 10 solo laps in the day time, then he would have to drive at least 5 night time laps. Megumi and Sora would also drive a few day laps and the requisite 3 night laps. The evening laps were required by race officials to confirm that all drivers were suitably acclimated to nighttime racing conditions.

Chihiro had designated the first two laps of each driver's practice shift to measure car performance, such as fuel consumption, stability, rebound and such. These qualifying trials were a last chance to make driving adjustments to improve the roadworthiness of the Blaze; thus Chihiro had directed all three drivers not to go all out in an attempt to blast a blistering lap time.

Keiichi found himself protesting this, until Chihiro explained that he would have plenty of opportunities to exhibit his racing mettle on Saturday and Sunday. She added that it would be best for the team if he only drove at 95 percent of his skills. Keiichi immediately understood her implication...if he went all-out during the pre-quals, then he would only be establishing a standard for the other competitors to measure. Instead, by following Chihiro's line of thinking, the N.I.T. team would seem predictably middle-of-the-road.

"And then on Saturday, you're going to surprise the hell out of them! In fact, we _want_ it to be a surprise!" Chihiro said, slapping him on the shoulder as he put on his helmet. Keiichi shot her that trademark boyish grin of innocence that she adored so much. Yes, she could totally emphasize with his position. He was part of a team...and the last thing in the world he wanted to do was let the team down.

Chihiro's biggest concern was the possibility of a crash. Megumi and Keiichi were pretty much the same height...but Sora was almost 20cm smaller. Each time they exchanged drivers, the pit crew would have to canter the pedals up a little higher and pull the seat in closer to accommodate Sora's petite frame. If any of the pedals or the seat would happen to slip, Sora would be in immediate danger of crashing. Chihiro had read many drivers' accounts of Le Mans racing; they often reported that a shift of only a few cm in the steering wheel or seat could severely hamper the driver's rhythm and performance. So she wanted to spend extra attention to Sora's practice laps.

Belldandy watched from the pit with her sisters. She _still_ wasn't accustomed to the fact that Skuld had suddenly grown up into a young woman. She looked at her younger sister, her hair tied back in a French braid as she encouraged Keiichi with a wave. She realized that calling Skuld "little sister" henceforth would be an awkward misnomer. She observed Urd standing off to the side, amiably chatting with Cevn and Tamiya.

"My love..." she thought as she saw Keiichi pull the bubble canopy/windshield over the cockpit. Then she shuddered with a start. She had been so caught up in the dialogue between Chihiro and the drivers that she had forgotten her good luck kiss for Keiichi-san!

Keiichi watched Belldandy motioning with her hands for him to lift up the hood. He pushed the cabin roof partway up as Bell-chan leaned into the car, her soft brown hair carpeting the driver's side door as she bent down to kiss him.

"Keiichi...we almost forgot, didn't we?" she said with a demure grin. His cheeks flushed red with shame as he realized that he was about ready to pull out on to the racecourse without kissing his girlfriend. Their good luck kiss had been a ritual for almost five years...and today, he had nearly forgotten her!

"Does this mean that we've been together for so long, that we're taking some things for granted?" he asked warily, feeling guilty.

"If we are...then I don't mind. There's a certain warmth I feel when I think that some realms of our love for each other...have become routine in some ways. Besides, I _know_ that one of us will always remember if the other forgets. I don't hold it against you, darling. Nothing will stop me from loving you madly!" she replied, absolving him of his guilt with her patent kindness. She gave him a lingering kiss on the lips to punctuate her statement.

Keiichi could hear the usual racket from his teammates in the background. Whistles, cheers and catcalls filled the air...

"I love you, Bell!" was all he could manage after _that_ passionate kiss!

"Good luck and _be careful_, my Keiichi!" Belldandy said, waving to him as he pulled the plexiglas cockpit canopy down and sealed it.

Keiichi slipped back into his seat as the N.I.T. Unified Club members starting pushing the Blaze into a running start. The Le Mans track was no longer a racecourse to him. It had transformed itself, animorphizing into a living, breathing challenge. As he felt the latent power of the Blaze soar up all around him, Keiichi realized that he would need to be in accord with machine, road and his own spirit for four minutes.

Four minutes...

...would be an eternity. A fast lap on the Le Mans averaged 3'40". A 4'00" lap time would barely get them into the mid-30s in terms of starting position. Keiichi wanted to start off in one of the front lead positions, but he remembered that this year's Le Mans would start off with the "driver's dash", rather than the two-wide starting grid.

The team pushed the Blaze out onto the starting mark. Glancing to his side, he saw Urd waving her trademark pon pons while Bell-chan blew him a kiss. At least Urd wasn't dressed in her skimpy, sexy cheerleader outfit.

Keiichi watched the timekeeper to cue him to start.

_--Vrrrrrooooooooooommm--_

Keiichi felt the Blaze leap into speed, its potent energies mounting all around him like a volley of invisible fists. He remembered the second time he rode Sleipnir, traveling across the Multiverse at incalculable speeds...but _this_ felt much faster! As the forces pushed him back into the seat cushion while he quick-shifted, he could _feel_ the energies burning all around him. The Blaze was by far the most powerful vehicle he had ever driven.

And what was with the faint memory of riding Sleipnir? He was very wary around horses...and yet he mentally glimpsed riding the divine steed through some sort of 'other' dimension... But there was no time to question his memory.

13 kilometers.

He swung tight along the Dunlop curves and pulled close into the inner lane. As he darted back into the Mulsanne straight between the two chicanes, Keiichi noticed that the road was slightly crowned rather than level, causing the Blaze to react with a deep shudder as the suspension dampened the change in grade. Heading towards the Indy curves, he tried to insert the Blaze right at the apex...and missed.

"Dammit, that one miss will probably cost me almost 4 seconds!" he estimated with high irritation. But it was a mistake he could correct. Keiichi knew that he understeered the curve...the Blaze handled like a charm, but they would need to steer a little harder on the tighter turns.

The track had so many curves and twists! Sourly, he realized that each driving mistake would be dear: one 'off' corner and the next four or five maneuvers could really slow his rhythm down. The driving pace reminded him of a 100 meter hurdle footrace; if the runner clipped one of the hurdle bars, he would have to take the next several a little bit slower. The sum effect of one driving error would really make a difference.

"No wonder the Le Mans is considered the toughest race in the world!" he said to the array of cockpit LEDs and the unified display as he turned into the Ford chicanes, barely 90 seconds after he screwed up at the Indy curve. Negotiating the double series of left/rights, he was worried that his wheels would spin out from under him as he came in too fast. Keiichi realized that he would have to slow down to almost 100kph to steer through the second chicane. Ahead, he could see the grandstands, filled with spectators.

"_4'54"_", the timer read.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Sora watched Keiichi get beat up by the Le Mans track...and felt her confidence implode with a withering falter. Keiichi was the best driver on the team, and he had only broken the 4 minute mark twice! Then, on the 9th lap, the Blaze ran out of fuel...

_That_ had angered Chihiro! Sora could tell that Chihiro was making no effort to hide her seething resentments; she was pacing around the pit with her fists rigid against her hips as one of the assist cars drove off to bring fuel to the stalled car. Her frustration peaking, the N.I.T. Unified Club president grabbed the nearest racing helmet by the chinstrap and flung it against the wall at the back of their race pit berth.

Sora was certain that Chihiro would chew out Keiichi with a dreadful dudgeon for his mistake, but when the Blaze finally pulled into the pit he wordlessly climbed out of the cockpit. Sora felt a ridge of fear travel up and down her spine as Keiichi stood away from the pit, stunned into immobility by his poor performance. He was so upset, he wasn't unable to look anyone in the eye...until Tamiya, Chihiro and Ootaki walked over and tried to console him.

Then Megumi had followed Keiichi, turning in a respectable 4'04" as her best time. Good enough to start at the 41st position. Megumi climbed out of the Blaze, drenched in sweat and hang-headed with disappointment. Megumi tried to tie on a smile, but Sora was too close of a friend to fail to notice the tentative flashes of self-incrimination on her face that betrayed her false cheer.

She motioned to Sora to get in the Blaze.

"I CAN'T DO THIS!" Sora suddenly screamed, halting Megumi in mid-step. Seeing Keiichi and Megumi shamed by the track had somehow set off a mental alarm deep in Sora's soul. A klaxon of panic filled all of her senses...

"We're going to _lose_!! I can't handle this! I'm only going to lose if I drive! Why'd I even volunteer to do this?! My confidence is _SHOT_!!" she repeated as she collapsed into herself. Sora crumbled down onto the tarmac, gripping her knees and pulling them up to her chest, resting her chin on her knees as she sobbed.

Every head was turned on her, adding to her fear. Sora was shocked by the deep roots of her fright...she was scared to death! Like the proverbial field mouse facing off against a great horned owl. Despite her best efforts to ward away her insecurities, she _knew_ she didn't stand a chance!

"Can't you drive instead of me, sempai? Please!!" Sora shouted, turning to Chihiro and gripping the lapels of her jumpsuit with tight desperation as her sempai knelt down next to her.

"Sora, we've already registered you as the driver with the racing officials. It's too late to make a substitute--no one else can drive in your place," Chihiro reminded her gently. Sora let go of Chihiro and hugged her arms tight around her chest, utterly defeated. A nearby group of race fans and the teams in the pit stops on either side started laughing as Sora completely broke down, holding her face tight with her hands to conceal her tear-filled grimace.

"You call your car the 'Blaze'? We think you misspelled it! It should be spelled 'blasé'', hah ah ha haah," they shouted over the fence separating the two race pits.

"SHUT UP!! All of youse shut up!" Tamiya growled. He couldn't make out all of the English taunts from the Cadillac team, but he could clearly sense their mocking intent. Ripping off his jacket, he approached the Cadillac team in the next pit and swung his jacket angrily over the fence separating the pits, chasing away some of their team members.

"Whoa...calm down, big guy!" Ootaki said, running over to prevent an altercation.

"We's gonna be de ones laughin', ya jokers! Yuh hear me? We's gonna win this race, den we're all goin' ta be laughin' at _you_! We ain't no losers, yuh pansyasses!" Tamiya screamed ragefully, gesturing wildly with his fists at the other teams.

Chihiro heard Tamiya's screaming and prayed that there wouldn't be another fight. Each racing pit was filled with angry bulls...

But she was more concerned about Sora. The girl had just watched her driving idol fold up during his practice sessions; Keiichi was so uptight that he failed to notice that his fuel gauge was registering empty! And then her best friend emerged from the Blaze fighting back tears after being crushed by the realities of the race track. Megumi had literally staggered out of the Blaze after her laps, her hair matted to her face with sweat...unable to conceal her disappointment at her hapless performance on the race track.

Chihiro realized that if she didn't do something fast, they were going to look like complete idiots on race day. Hell, they were looking like prize idiots now! Hell, they might not even be racing!

Sora _had_ to run these trials or they were screwed!

Their best driver had missed the obvious...and their youngest driver was pitching a crying fit like a little girl who didn't get the last piece of strawberry cheesecake.

"Sora...brace up! C'mon, don't do this to us! We _need_ you!" Chihiro encouraged, slapping Sora lightly on the shoulders.

"I'm just 'the 50 Kg girl'! I'm no good!" Sora said between sobs, referencing the mini-cart struggle she had last year. Chihiro hadn't been in on that one, but she had heard from all the Club members how the challenge had sorely tested Sora's spirit.

"Sora, this is just a practice. You don't have to win anything...you just have to try and do your best!" Chihiro consoled.

"My best _isn't good enough_!!" Sora yelled despondently, loud enough to make Chihiro flinch. She sure had a lot of lungpower for such a small woman!

Chihiro didn't want to tell her the facts. That the odds were against them even finishing this race. That last year, 31 of the 48 cars had been "retired" due to mechanical failure or accidents. That 5 of the drivers competing in this year's race had won the Indy 500. Another 3 drivers were NASCAR overall champions. 4 more drivers were Formula One Gran Prix overall winners. Another 2 drivers were in the Motorsports Hall of Fame. And out of the entire field, 17 drivers were on teams that had already won the Le Mans. Over 80 drivers in the field had _already_ raced in the Le Mans.

That Pierre Ar Bras was driving, with a winning streak of three Le Mans under his Porsche cap...

She felt a spin of dilemma. Had they made a mistake in choosing Sora to drive? But the girl had shown so much potential...she reminded Chihiro of herself as a college freshman, eight years ago. And she had _driven_ the Le Mans track back in April, albeit just for practice, just to get the feel of the racecourse.

Thus, it stood to reason that this was simply a case of taunt nerves...

Yet Chihiro herself was scared. She had to reluctantly admit that her confidence was shaken when their best driver, Keiichi, had only managed a 3'58" best lap time. This was a royal mess!!

Pulling her attention away from her private thoughts, Chihiro noticed that Toshiyuki, Megumi, Keiichi, Belldandy and several others had formed a circle around she and Sora.

"Sora...remember back a year ago when you thought you would never get my attention? Look what happened when you believed in yourself. That's one of the biggest reasons I feel how I do about you...it's one of the most attractive things about you. When you believe in yourself, you're capable of _anything_!" Toshiyuki praised her, kneeling down next to his girlfriend and wiping her tears with a cloth.

"Yeah. And remember when you thought your cooking was the worst. Imagine this...the Hasegawa Ramen shop's only daughter...and she couldn't even boil soba! But you practiced your butt off, and you learned how to cook a pretty decent bento!" Megumi said.

"And I remember the cuts on your fingers, Sora. I almost felt sorry for you when you showed up at school with band-aids on every finger! But I kept silently hoping that you would cook up a great bento...and you did! I even got to taste a little bit of it," Keiichi chimed in with his typical charm-humor.

Chihiro smiled privately as she observed how they were trying to bolster Sora's spirits with a teamwork of complements!

"Sora...when you perform an act with a heart filled with love...there's no way you can lose!" Belldandy added.

"Yeah! An dey's already billed yuh as de 'youngest girl pilot in Le Man's history'. Yuh can't give up on us now!" Tamiya urged with his usual mercenary logic.

"C'mere!" Toshiyuki shouted abruptly, grabbing Sora by the hand and jerking her to her feet. Everybody in the circle gasped at his apparent rough handling of his girlfriend...until they saw him gently but firmly walking her towards the Blaze with a guiding hand on the small of her back.

"Look!" he said, pointing at a decal just forward of the driver's side door. "It's too late to back out now...especially since _they're_ involved!!"

Sora looked at the small insignia on the steel-gray chassis of the Blaze.

_"Hasegawa Ramen Shop, Makuhari, Japan._

_Proud sponsors of the 2007 N.I.T. Unified Club __Le Mans team."_

"Okay...I give up! I can't argue with _that_!" Sora said, breaking into a slight grin as she wiped the tears from her eyes with her racing scarf, thanking Mom and Dad with all of her heart.

"I'll try. But don't expect anything major..." she disclaimed.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

When the second session of qualifying practice concluded at 12:45am, Sora's lap time of 3'39.882" was good enough to place the N.I.T. team on the 17th position on the starting grid.

"We just _might_ stand a chance," Chihiro admitted to herself in a low voice. She was almost choked up with pride as Sora jumped out of the Blaze, held her helmet up high and shouted "yahoooooo" to the witnessing stars before the Club members swarmed her with backslaps and hugs.

The jerkoffs who had been mockingly laughing at her a couple hours ago...were suddenly very quiet, Chihiro noted with smug satisfaction.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

The day before the race was supposed to be a day of rest, but Keiichi snapped crisply awake at 5:30am, covered with a cold sweat. Their spare room had a ceiling fan, enough to barely cool the warm French summer nights. He looked over to see Belldandy sleeping next to him, a smile on her face.

"Do Goddesses dream of sheep when they're asleep?" he said aloud.

"No...I was just dreaming of you, Keiichi," she answered sleepily, then reached around his shoulders and snuggled up to him.

He thought ahead to the parade that was scheduled to begin at the Quinconce des Jacobans at 6pm. Keiichi knew from past Le Mans parades that it would involve samba dancers, marching bands, showgirls in bathing suits, supermodels, Hollywood actors, a number of floats...and lots of antique automobiles.

Belldandy had promised to take him on a picnic today...

The weather was pleasant, if only a tad bit windy as he and Belldandy left the hostel, strolling down the provincial footroad that went out of town. She looked resplendidly enchanting in the early morning sun; her hair was combed back in a thick braid, a funnel of light brown against the white sundress dress she wore. She wore a broad-brimmed matching summer hat, which wanted to sail off her head during gustier windspells.

Having lived within a few kilometers of Tokyo Bay, Keiichi was used to a slightly acrid tang to the air. But here, a hundred kilometers or so inland from the English Channel, the air was laced with the countrified odors of the arbor. It was utterly amazing...

As they left the town proper, Keiichi observed to himself that June in France possessed some qualities that reminded him of June in Japan. It started off with a cool freshness that lingered for a couple hours in the morning air before being quickly burned away by waves of oppressive humidity as the day progressed.

Venturing further out into the pastoral land, the expanse of tilth and pasture vied with gentle rolling hills and verdant hollows. Belts of colorful trees framing soft green meadows contented their eyes and soothed their worries about the upcoming race. The footpath was actually a small lane, overgrown with grass from disuse. The breeze sang through the nearby trees. Small farm buildings dozed within grazelands, the farm animals dotting the countryside like multihued ants. Their path wound parallel to a 'caravan' of tall hedges and brambles. Unexpectedly, Belldandy turned botanist, intriguingly pointing out for Keiichi's benefit the purple-headed foxglove, the lustre of the hartsgrove, the majesty of the pink and white convulvous draping from the leafage.

Keiichi had been struggling to cast a form of 'magic' by his engineering efforts; but here in the meadow and glades, their simple stroll through the arcadian surroundings touched a serene chord in Keiichi, reminding him of what _real_ magic was contained in nature. A certain mood descended upon him, mellowing him even further.

"There!" he said excitedly. Breaking off from Belldandy, he walked to the edge of a small nook of light green tall grass...and then returned with what he hoped was a wild rose.

As he gave it to Bell-chan, she who was the most precious form of magic, her beatific smile perfected the scenery.

Amidst the profusion of summer-carpeted bosks and dells, Belldandy sensed the quiescence of seclusion that had drifted lazily over she and Keiichi. She pointed towards an old willow tree, and they walked over to set up their breakfast underneath. It was a little windy, as the cloth kept furling around the dishes and glasses that Belldandy was setting out. Finally giving in to the inevitable, she waved her hands and the tablecloth flattened in place, hugging the contours of the ground.

"I want it to be perfect for us," she commented, justifying her slight use of her Goddess powers. The look in Keiichi's eyes...well, that was a close to perfection as her heart could embrace.

She reflected on the events of the past several years since she had twinned her heart with Keiichi's. Strange...even with all the heightened senses and knowledge she possessed as a Goddess, she would have never predicted _this_ moment. Keiichi smiled at her as he munched on a crème-filled crepe that she had baked back home in Japan while she was away during the inspections. They had been together so long that they had become comfortable sharing each other's silence. Besides, Belldandy knew that Keiichi was simply enjoying the open air, the beauty of their surroundings, and her company.

The next few days were going to loom very large in her boyfriend's life. Keiichi and she always seemed to take turns being supportive of each other. This was her time to support him. The Earthrealm mortals often considered the past and the future as little more than frames of time by which they could observe themselves with what they considered to be the freshest, most definite of perspectives. But yet, Belldandy knew for certain that the mortals were in error. Despite the fact that they _thought_ the past and the future held up the best mirrors to their Souls, the deepest awareness of Soul always occurred in the present moment...in the Now. It saddened her that so many mortals spent so little time in the Present, missing the bliss-laden gifts of the Now. Watching Keiichi, she knew that his quietude belied the fact that his mind was anywhere but _here and now_; the concerns of the race were weighing heavy on his conscience. As they should be. So she had planned to give him a little bit of the Now...as her Present to him.

Being here, with the man she loved...was a perfect moment.

A quiet, romantic morning in these pastoral environs would be just the thing for him to relinquish his anxieties and enjoy the moment with her. Hopefully, she could make gently passioned love to him before the morning air weathered _too_ hot...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Chihiro, Tamiya and Ootaki rode with Keiichi, Megumi and Sora to the cathedral square. They had to be there at 4pm. Unfortunately, no one knew what exactly was expected after that. They all remarked that it seemed that the parade was going to be a disorganized organization.

In the distance, the imposing cathedral drew their attention; its Gothic tower vaulting over more modern structures. The driver noticed this, and launched into an explanation. He stated that for some reason during the high Middle Ages, the Europeans had been gripped by an architectural impulse to reach towards their Christian God in the heavens. Consequently, they erected huge edifices that reached heights that were unheard of elsewhere in the world. This artistic motif contrasted sharply with its conterminous, the late Heian Period in Japan, with its emphasis on expansive mansions that blended in with the natural surroundings. The driver explained that parts of the cathedral were almost 850 years old, much to the amazement of Keiichi and his teammates. Ootaki was particularly interested in the decor inside the cathedral, indulging his fetish for good luck charms and religious artifacts.

Le Mans is considered to be the traditional birthplace of the automobile industry. The 150,000 inhabitants had pride of place; rightly so because of the city's history and its contributions to the motoring world. But today, Le Mans was gripped by racing fever; the roads were packed with spectators and cars vying for a last minute stand before the parade started. Keiichi was amazed to find out that one of the streets in Le Mans was 'a walk of fame' ala' Hollywood, with squares of concrete preserving the footprints, handprints and signatures of a number of winning racers.

"History...it's all around us," Keiichi remarked. The party atmosphere reminded him of several of the larger matsuri festivals in Japan. The Le Mans organizers had been kind enough to send a van with 'their' Japanese interpreter as the driver. As they drove through the city, they all looked out the windows, wide-eyed at the press of humanity and the pageant of history.

Once they were dropped off at the square adjoining the cathedral, Megumi mentioned that she regretted not bringing Genji along for his French skills. It seemed that very few people, if any, knew what was going to happen. A gale force of chattering excited voices assailed her ears, in what seemed to be a dozen languages. Scanning the staging area, she picked out teams from France, America, Great Britain, Germany, Australia, the Russian Federation, and many other countries...identifiable by their flag patches on their racing uniforms.

Chihiro hustled the group over to the car park, where they were ushered into one of several barricaded sections. She looked at Keiichi, Megumi and Sora and empathized with their lot...they must be roasting in the driver's uniforms. The temperature must have been at least 30C and the car park was sunshine bright. They decided to join an Australian racing team under the shade of a small grove of trees next to the park. The Australians were genial companions, communicating with humorous gestures that overcome the barriers of language and the burgeoning buzz of the crowds.

During the next half hour, several marching bands arrived and set up, banging out a cacophony of instrument tunings while the parade officials started lining up the vintage open-top cars. Keiichi was mouth-agaped with awe as he watched each stately antique vehicle slowly pull up into its assigned position.

Every car was a bullworky model from the 1920s or 30s; each antique was so freshly painted, detail and appointed that it seemed to have rolled off the assembly line yesterday; each vintage automobile was restored to top condition...and was worth a small fortune! It was all too much! The motoring enthusiasts in the N.I.T. group were like starving peasants suddenly invited to a succulent feast. Keiichi excitedly remarked to his friends that he would _love_ to get a peek under those hoods!

After an hour or so, the drivers from the teams competing in the 24 hour event were led to their respective touring cars. Of course, Pierre Ar Bras and his two copilots were assigned to the parade's lead car. Keiichi, Megumi and Sora waved goodbye to their sempai and were escorted over to an open top Renault. The car was _spacious_, elegant...and smelled whipclean despite its age.

The convoy started to crawl towards the square. Behind them were several groups of classic Le Mans cars: a dozen or so Jupiters, which had raced the Le Mans rather successfully in the 1950s; a handful of Porsches from the 1960s; nine GT 40 replicas; and the entire series of American Corvettes, one for each year of manufacture.

The pace was agonizingly slow, as their car seemed to move a few meters and stop, and then move again a moment later. Following a three point turn, the column of cars turned onto one of the main roads leading off the cathedral square.

Up ahead, the crowd was so boisterous that Keiichi thought they were being conducted into a riot. The cheering got even louder as Pierre Ar Bras' team drove past the front of the parade goers. The N.I.T. racers were well to the back of the pack of cars, but the cheering of the mostly French crowd for their national favorite was deafening. The pace remained laborious once they reached the actual parade street; continuing at a walking clip. Keiichi half-expected one or more of the antique vehicles to overheat during the parade, bringing everything to a halt.

It appeared as if the whole population of Le Mans had turned out to watch the racer's parade. The road was lined with people from all walks of life, from hood-scarved grandmothers to little children that dashed alongside their car. The crowds gathered so close to their car that Keiichi was concerned about their feet getting run over.

The only other time the N.I.T. members had seen something like this was when they won the Solar Federation race, over a year earlier. But this was pandemonium to the heights...

As their car crept forward, the three drivers were surrounded by cheering, clapping and photoflashes. Stage struck, they were being pressed for autographs and handshakes.

At various street corners on the route, there were elevated wooden stages with an announcer using a public address system to introduce each team. With each announcement of a team, the crowd responded with great roars and clapping. The enthusiasm of the reception exceeded the wildest expectations of any of the three N.I.T. race drivers. As they proceeded along the route, a number of young French and Spanish men pressed bouquets of flowers to an embarrassed Megumi and Sora.

At the end of the avenue, their antique Renault looped around and returned for another pass through the roadside throngs. Several trios of drivers returning on the other side of the road waved to the three Japanese students and gave thumbs up signs to signal their mutual respect.

It was impossible for Keiichi, Megumi and Sora to talk amongst themselves, as the roar of the crowd was far too noisome to hear anyone. When they finally got to the end, they turned around a roundabout and returned back down the street one last time.

They ended up back at the car park where the entire N.I.T. Unified Club was waiting. The next stop was the official reception, held a couple of kilometers away in the grounds of a former French abbey. A number of official vans were on standby to shuttle the race participants to the reception.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

_Race Day._

Sora regarded the Blaze on the other side of the track, now covered with the Japanese flag. All she had to do is run across the racetrack, pop the bubblehood and vault the door. At least the driver's side was on the correct side, instead of being on the left side like those goofy American cars.

All day, the grandstands had been filling up. Early in the morning, she and the N.I.T. team had been interviewed by a number of Japanese TV networks that were covering the event. At midmorning, the teams of drivers were formerly introduced at a press conference, and then were escorted to the racetrack by Le Mans officials. There, they were led to a sort of outdoors 'green room' for even more photos. Sora was of particular interest to the international press, because of her status as the youngest female pilot in Le Mans history. She thought that she would wilt from the fishbowl effect of sudden acclaim, but she managed not to trip over her own feet. Her friend and copilot Megumi attracted a number of admiring glances from men in the press. During this time, Keiichi had been pulled aside for a photo spread with a half dozen "Hawaiian Sun Tropic" models with spray-on tight skimpy swimsuits.

Urd spent the next ten minutes teasing him about _that_.

Then, all the entrants were summoned to a large reception for lunch and a congratulatory toast of champagne. Sora was amazed to see the sheer variety of drivers from a dozen or so nations. They came in all sizes and colors...but as she ate her light lunch, she realized that they possessed a common denominator.

They were hawkroad tough...and hungry for victory.

Keiichi played out his modus operandi, providing cheerful amusement in an attempt to keep everyone in light spirits. Cevn-sensei even joined in, tying his dinner napkin around his head like a bandana. Sora could sense the anxious edge to Keiichi's good-spirited banter.

Urd flushed with embarrassment in reaction to her boyfriend's antics. Her reddened face was priceless...along with Skuld and Belldandy's giddy laughter at their older sister.

Over the years Sora had known her, Urd _tried to come off_ like an anegohada; the strong-willed, yet good-hearted elder sister type. All too often, women who were uppity developed a maternal interest in the welfare of their younger sisters and other juniors in general. These capable women would often become benefactors and mentors. Urd had the potential for this; she was strong willed, intelligent, sexy, and full of genki. But the oldest Norn wasn't always trying to look after the welfare of her underling sisters. Megumi had described to her any number of stories portraying an Urd who was _acting_ like she was the boss, while frequently folding under pressure from her two younger siblings. And Urd's mischievous nature often caused headaches for everyone around her. Yet, Sora had to admit that ever since Urd had gotten together with Cevn, she had mellowed out somewhat. And Cevn had seemed to come alive in the past couple months. When she first met him, Cevn was completely inconfident around women; to a degree that made Sora's own shyness seem pale by comparison. Now, he was 'one of the gang'. Megumi confided with Sora that she had spent a good amount of time being Cevn's friend...with the intent of gradually helping him to loosen his fear of women. It had worked, as Sora watched Cevn playfully snap his cloth napkin at Urd.

As she drank her iced tea, Sora was glad that Tamiya and Ootaki hadn't smuggled some of that tricky ice from the Antarctic. In fact, her three sempai seemed relaxed in comparison to the rest of the team...

Sora had read up on the Le Mans ever since her N.I.T. peers decided to try and enter the race. She knew that the Le Mans race was basically an excuse for most of the spectators to party all day and night. The crowds would stay for the beginning of the race, then depart to private parties in town, and finally return a couple hours before the finish. Only the most fanatic 'car nuts' would remain to observe the race.

Lucky bastards. At least they got to drink a few and get some sleep.

Sora planned to stay awake for the whole race, despite Chihiro's caution. There was no way she was going to get a short nap during Keiichi and Megumi's driving stints!

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Once she walked up to the gathering queue of start off pilots, Sora felt like a midget as she stood among the other drivers. She thought it was really cool that they had decided to start the Le Mans this way, with the traditional starting dash. The gun would fire, and the drivers would run towards their cars. It added a sporting novelty to the start of the race. Of course, it wouldn't really affect the starting grid order, but the crowd would really enjoy it.

"Try to relax, Sora," she said to herself in a cuffed voice. A moment later, a hand was extended to her. The Australian team's driver wanted a handshake. A little embarrassed, Sora took his hand and shook it, then glanced over at Toshiyuki. He smiled at her, signaling that it was okay...

Feeling her heart beating rapidly in her breast, Sora leaned over and peered up and down the line of drivers. There was an atmosphere of competitive camaraderie here, as the drivers were exchanging handshakes. So she turned to the Team Cadillac driver and proffered her hand...

He refused to shake it, and then looked at her with a condescending glare. For a moment, Sora retreated inward...his daunting dismissal bringing up feelings of inadequacy. That she really was only just a chit of a girl. She didn't belong here. That she was _way_ out of her league. Then she remembered why he was so impolitic and rude...

She had bested his team's time. She was in the 17th position, while he qualified 18th.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"COMMENCER!!"

Sora heard the rising shout of the crowd, almost muffing out the shout over the loudspeakers. Instantly, she crouched and dashed towards the Blaze and her teammates.

_bummp_

"Ooof!"

"SORA!!" Tamiya and the others shouted. Thrown off balance, Sora instinctively reached for the ground with both hands to steady herself as she reeled akimbo in mid-sprint. But it was too late, her momentum was working against her. She sprawled towards the track, and turned her face at the last second.

The next thing she knew, she was in a daze, the breath knocked out of her. Everything had receded to silence, and she was seeing bluepurple dots and stars in her vision. She tried to right herself, but was dizzily unbalanced as she tried to sit up, bracing herself with her hands. As the fog lifted, she realized that she was crumpled askew on the racetrack. She had hit her head, hard, against the race track.

And the cars were pulling out onto the track as she struggled to gain her feet...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"That asshole!" Tamiya vented, his face rouged with the lava of his ire. He turned in blind rage and gripped Ootaki by the lapels of his leather jacket. He was so mad, he almost throttled his best friend in a impulsive release of anger. The driver from the Cadillac team had knocked Sora flat out, deliberately. His 'bump' with Sora resembled a vicious body check that belonged in a hockey game, not a road race.

The cars were attaining the track, putting Sora in grave danger of being run over because of their haste to get underway...

"_BELL-CHAN!_" Keiichi shouted. Sora was sprawled out on the track; she couldn't even get up on one knee.

The instant Keiichi said her name, Belldandy knew what he was asking her to do. She felt a flash of confusion; he had explicitly directed all three Norns to refrain from offering any divine assistance for the Le Mans.

But this was different. Belldandy blinked her eyes and waved her hands in an intricate pattern, creating a hemispheric shield over Sora. A shield that was visible only to she and her sisters, of course...but a guardian of infinite strength to the semiconscious Sora.

Yet, a nanosecond before Belldandy finished her spell, the shield went up. She glanced at Urd thankfully. But her older sister simply shook her head "no".

"It was Skuld! Man, that girl was fast!" Belldandy observed with surprise and relief. For a split second, she breathed amazement that her younger sister had manifested a shield spell _before_ Belldandy herself had finished encanting. The shield was so strong, she had thought that it was one of hers...

The crowd murmured with shocked concern as a number of cars rocketed towards Sora. Their concern turned to astonishment as each car seemed to be bumped away from the downed Japanese girl, still struggling to get to her feet.

"C'mon Sora!" the N.I.T. team shouted, jumping up and down, waving encouragement. Slowly, Sora got up on one knee, braced herself and stood up, instinctively looked downtrack for approaching racecars. As she stepped towards the Blaze, her legs seemed to have plans of their own and she stumbled, almost falling down again.

"Pace yourself, Sora," Sora said to herself. As the steps came easier, Sora cast a meaningful glance over her shoulder at Belldandy, filled with gratitude. She knew that the Goddess had just saved her life. Suddenly, the dizziness that accompanied her collision with the cement was fading fast. More divine intervention from Belldandy!

"More the reason to win this thing!" she thought as she gained her feet and stumblewobbled towards the Blaze, now alone on the starting grid.

As she strapped herself in, Sora finally felt her head clearing up. The ephemeral purple flashes were gone; her tongue tasted dry and sour, her eyes felt like bulbs threatening to explode out of their sockets, and her hearing was returning from its tintin mufflesound.

She would have to play catch-up.

Sora knew that she could do one thing right...she could play catch up _really well_. After all, she had played catch up against any number of coeds for a year...and had won her intended prize. Against all odds.

At the moment, her 'prize' was waving at her; his glasses resting low on his nose, his hair disheveled, his face flushed with visible concern.

With a punch to the accelerator, she pulled the Blaze out onto the track just before the lead cars lapped her...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"You're an amazing machine!" Megumi said as she steered the Blaze into the Indy/Cartre chicane. The gearshift box was seamless and fluid as she downshifted for the outroad curve. Sora had driven for 2.5 hours, so now it was up to Megumi to make up for some more lost time, since Sora had been knocked down by that idiot driver for the Cadillac team.

Megumi was hopping mad because the judges didn't immediately suspend the team for such a serious infraction, despite the fact that it had happened in front of several hundred thousand spectators and countless millions of TV viewers. Increasingly, the 'American attitude' towards sports included dirty tactics, poor sportsmanship and callous disrespect for the world stage. She remembered the incident with the Americans in Athens at the 2004 Olympics...

Fast as sight, she pulled back onto the straightaway and floored the Blaze.

The Blaze handled so well, it was almost as easy as driving the Demon Rally videogame. Excepting the fact that the cabin was filled with the loud background roaring from the hotiron powerful engine...and some shaking of the car's frame. Not that the Demon Rally was a pleasant shadow of memory; it was anything but. But Mara had inadvertently given her a gift when she subjected Megumi to the Demon Rally.

Megumi had gained a sense of endurance.

Perfect for the 24 Heures du Mans.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Mara sneezed as she watched the start of the race in her lair. It was sheer hubris, this glorification of the Earthrealmer's ability to build combustion engine powered vehicles. Over a century, these vehicles had literally allowed the Earthrealm mortals to liberally remake their world. But it was a mixed blessing. These cars were frequently used in warfare. Their emissions had fouled the Earthrealm's atmosphere to significant levels of toxicity. Each year, hundreds of thousands of mortals died because of inattention and intoxication while operating these motorized metallic sleds. The invention of the automobile had conferred a delicious irony upon the lives of the mortals...an irony that was not lost on her.

As the cars swooped around the track, holophotically displayed on her bloodwall holovid, Mara debated whether she should create mischief.

Ever since she was reassigned to lead the new Demon Strife Mischief Office, she had been wreaking light scale havoc in all sorts of mortal lives. In thousands of department stores, she made dressing booth doors suddenly pop off their hinges, revealing a half-dressed mortal. Curiously enough...the mortal males were just as embarrassed as the mortal females when she did this. For kicks, she used microheat pulses to suddenly melt ice cream cones in a child's hand. The sticky underwear trick was always hilarious. Seeding brown objects in a public pool tended to cause panic. The sudden shift of a mere few cm in sidewalk grading resulted in stubbed toes and a few pearls of epithetry. In tropic climes, moving cacti from a window ledge to an easy chair provided a 'cling on' experience that few mortals would forget.

There was plenty of time to get _really_ creative. Mara surmised that her new responsibilities were aimed at keeping the mortals on their toes, agitating them away from their natural inclination towards indolence.

Now, she was deliberating whether or not she should play mischief on Belldandy and her cohorts. Mara considered switching oil with gasoline, but that was too basic, too facile. As she floated cross-legged in front of the holoimage, a host of ideas poured through her mind.

Insufficient. Not creative enough. Too boring. Trite.

"What to do, what to do?" Mara said to the SereHawk perched on the ashtree on her desk as she stroked its needle sharp firefeathers.

It had been an adjustment at first, being the head of a Demon Office. Of course, her parents Baeeal and Myducia and her stepmom Hild were all roundly prideful of her promotion. She was tempted to indulge herself in her new surplus of Demoness powers...being a Senior Demoness First Class, Unlimited, Unrestricted licensee was just too righteous to be ignored. Mara had considered recruiting junior Demons for training seminars in causing mischief, but she nixed the idea because she felt that _she herself_ needed to be trained. So she had sought out the Dark Presence for a suggestion or two.

All He said was _"Look into the Darkness of your Heart, My Child."_

Mara had expected succinct answers from Him, and instead received ambiguity. She conjectured that this may be the Dark Lord's form of torturing her...a subtle agony resulting from her collision with her inexperience in this new assignment. She felt a twinge of resentment as she watched Megumi drive so expertly through the curved roadway of the race.

Evil is just a take on Love.

Much as Mara was wroth to admit it, she hoped that Keiichi, Megumi and Sora would win. Maybe she could get Belldandy drunk on Pepsi afterwards. A sisterly drunk act would be fun, now that Urd seemed to suddenly have cravings for peach juice instead of sake. Who would have thought that her twin sister Urd would become a teetotaler? Or that Skuld would suddenly become almost as tall as Mara herself? Mara chuckled to herself; she would _have_ to glue Skuld's hair at some point. She suspected that Skuld would revert to childish frustration, despite her more mature physique.

Change is inevitable, but it had all happened too quickly. The Dark Lord, when she queried Him about what was causing the rapid changes, would only comment that it was "ultra secret".

Stroking the firefeathers of the SereHawk, Mara mused on how surprised they would be if she were to show up at the Le Mans race. Her sudden appearance at the racing pit would blow the Goddesses socks off...

"That's it!" she said, hammering her desk with a fist. She grinned widely, showing her fangs to the SereHawk, startling it.

His Darkness had inadvertently given Mara a clue by His indistinct response.

Mara decided that she would go to the Le Mans! By the simple act of showing up, she would create an Eiffel Tower of tension amongst the mortals and the Goddesses...because _they wouldn't know what she was planning_! Instead of causing them mischief directly, she would let their imaginative faculties do the work for her. She sensed that their reaction to her presence would generate more anxiety than any prank she could devise. Besides, Mara reluctantly acknowledged an insatiable curiosity concerning the outcome of this race, especially since the Goddesses had contracted with Keiichi to eschew any supranormal means to alter the outcome.

_"__Molten!__"_ Mara shouted gleefully as she changed into her red Demon Rally coveralls.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"«_Hi there!!__»_" Mara shouted in a thoughtcast. Belldandy, Urd and Skuld were all facing the track, their backs to her.

"Perfect!" she thought as she watched each Goddess pause in mid-motion and shudder with apparent discomfort, just as Megumi shot by in the Blaze. A moment later, all three sisters suddenly wheeled around to face her. She waved at her sisters in a faux innocent greeting.

Mara was dressed in a tight pair of blood red coveralls; other than that, she looked just like one of the N.I.T. pit crew.

"«_You!!__»_" Urd shouted with an admixture of surprise and sass. "«_What are _you_ doing here, Mara?__»_"

"«_Hmmm...it would seem that one of the pom pom girls is speaking to me. Could this be?__»_" Mara thoughtcast testily. If there was one thing that Urd _hated_, it was being addressed indirectly. The flush of irritation on Urd's face confirmed this.

"«_Mara, why have you come here?__»_" Belldandy asked warily.

"«_Is that anyway to address your older sister?__»_" Mara replied coolly. The effect was immediate on Belldandy and Skuld; the two younger Goddesses blanched. The sudden revelation last month that she was Urd's twin sister would definitely be useful in situations such as this!

"«_I'm here to cause mischief, of course! I've been thinking of all the hundreds of delightful ways I could sabotage this race. And, tragedy of tragedies...none of you can do anything about it! I heard each of you give your word, binding you to restrain your Goddess powers during the race. So...it seems to me that I kinda got all three of you in a bind, dontcha think?__»_"

"Grrr... If you do anything to hurt anyone, I'll..." Skuld snapped, speaking aloud. Several Club members turned to glance at her with confused expressions, as she was seemingly talking to herself. Belldandy put a restraining hand on her younger sister's wrist as she reached inside her racing jacket to pull out a mecha 'something'...

"«_Skuld, we'll have none of that! We all promised not to doing anything out of the ordinary...and that includes the use of Yggdrasilian technology. Believe me when I say that I'm just as frustrated as you are in this situation,»_" Belldandy reasoned.

"That's totally not fair! Not fair at all!" Skuld shouted, stamping her foot as she glared at Mara.

"«_Skuld..._keep it down_!!__»_" Urd warned.

"«_Ah ha! I _knew_ she was still a kid, no matter what she looks like on the outside!__»_" Mara observed loudly with smug comeuppance. Skuld's face hued liver red in reaction to the taunt.

Belldandy worriedly glanced around to see if any of mortals could see Mara. She was especially concerned with Keiichi. If her beloved knew that Mara was here, it would throw his concentration into the quicksands. It seemed that the mortals were thankfully ignorant of the presence of the Demoness. A moment later, Tamiya walked right through Mara.

"«_Why don't you make yourself visible, huh? Are you afraid of getting hurt, like you did during the Demon Rally?__»_" Urd taunted with rapier sharpness. Mara responded by gritting her teeth, clear evidence that Urd had got her back.

"«_It's more of a challenge this way! None of you can reveal to the mortals that I'm here, which means that you'll have to face me on your own, knowing that I could create havoc in an instant_.»"

Belldandy looked at Mara with pleading eyes. After all, Mara was half-Goddess...perhaps she could appeal to the goodness that she knew existed in the Demoness. Direct confrontation would only goad Mara's Demoness half into action. Belldandy realized that this would be a test of wills; as Mara stood an even chance of urging she or her sisters into committing a rashness. In fact, Skuld had nearly bombed Mara roughly a minute after the Demoness arrived!

Belldandy concentrated, filtering out all the crowdnoise...filtering out _everything_...as she sought the calm center of her being.

She would need every reserve of her serenity to deal with this one.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --


	63. Pt 63: Ground Control Run

**Part 63: Ground Control Run**

As Megumi was finishing her 2.5-hour tracksprint shift, she found herself looking at the race pit with longing, as one might regard an oasis. The last hour had been strenuous to the point where she imagined that one more minute on the track would break her will. Exhausted, she pulled into the race pit. As the Blaze cooled into a halt, she could feel the sweat that was drenching her; her racing coveralls were sticking to her in all sorts of uncomfortable places. Unstrapping herself from the crosshatch of safety belts, neck braces and harnesses, she quickly uncocked the hood and climbed out. Met with the sound of the crowd shout in her ears, she took a few seconds to regain her ground footing. She had become so hypersensitized to the delicate deliberance of foot movements over the past several hours of her racing shift that, once she emerged from the Blaze, the sudden steady resistance underfoot caused the act of walking to felt weirdly out-balanced.

Chihiro and several others had slapped her on the shoulder as they swarmed over the Blaze, refueling their car. The Blaze had performed flawlessly during her piloting shift. In spite of this, as she sauntered tiredly to a nearby bench, Megumi felt keenly disappointed in her own driving performance. She had intended to make up some of the lost time resulting from that sickening macho stunt at the beginning of the race, but she wasn't quite sure if she had recouped the precious minute or two that the N.I.T needed to remain competitive.

She sat next to her brother, watching him make last minute adjustments to his racing helmet. Funny, Keiichi had brought along his tried-and-true motorcycle racing helmet. Megumi hadn't even noticed that he had packed it. Like so many of his teammates, he was trying to invoke every possible source of self-efficacy and superstition in order to create a tenor of confidence.

"Good job, Meg!" he said, his voice muffled by the helmet as he high-fived her. She watched as he stood up, pulled loose his racing suit along his legs, and then walked towards the cockpit of the Blaze. Acknowledging her brother's enthusiastic praise, Megumi realized that she _must_ have turned in a good performance...everybody was according her a goodwill of congratulatory treatment! Looking up at the grandstand's array of scoreboards and video screens, she noted that she had finished a little before 9pm. Twilight and darkness would descend during her brother's driving shift.

Keiichi kept his eyes on Chihiro as she checked the cockpit seals. Satisfied, she smiled and gave him the thumbs up. He footslapped the accelerator and gained the track, shifting from the outer lane to the inner lane with a smooth insertion. Several laps later, the blue-purple horizon filled his windshield...and his thoughts. The track was starting to glow against the darkening sky.

_L'heure bleue_, as the French termed it. The dusking sky was beautiful; its passenger was a single hour within the day that had its own distinct sense of atmosphere. Daytime light was meted out in equal portions throughout most of the day: Noon looked like 2pm, 4pm looked like 10am. Night wandered evenly through the hours: 11pm and 2am at night were barely distinguishable from each other. But the blue hour was a sentinel of the calming night; a reminder that not even daylight has permanence. For he and his N.I.T. teammates, the blue hour was a starting point where they would need to work their magic on the track and in the race-pit.

Seasoned racing veterans of the Le Mans held fast to the opinion that the race was 'won' during the overnight driving shifts. The competition sharpened considerably during these hours, requiring a much more vigilant racing stratagem. In the dark of night, fatigue was a constant factor that could easily erode a team's competitive edge. Too much reserve on account of darkness could significantly slow down a driver's lap times. Something as simple as a burnt headlight would be enough to force a team to have to withdraw. Then there was the omnipresent spectre of road mishaps and accidents within the nethering cowl of the nocturnal environment...

During the "Nocturne du Le Mans", the field of racecars was typically reduced by one-fourth to one-third of its participants. Despite this foreknowledge, Keiichi felt a surge of enthusiasm as he ripped the Blaze through its paces. The machine seemed to wrap itself around him, becoming an extension of his will. His pre-race 'visual calisthenics' warm-up would come in handy here, as the most hazardous driving conditions normally occurred during duskfall. As usual, a half-hour before his driving shift, he had tested his visual acuity by a series of split-second darting glances.

Strange...he recalled how he momentarily thought that he had glimpsed a faint outline of Mara, hovering several feet above the ground in the corner of the pit during one of his visual warm-ups.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Chihiro pounded on the hood of the cockpit bubble, signaling Keiichi to pull out. As the sun set, a series of lights came on, illuminating the Dunlop Bridge with searchlight intensity. As her eyes gradually adjusting to the night, Chihiro closed observed Keiichi and the Blaze hurl underneath the surreal tire-shaped bridge. In the past hour, the first few signs of fatigue were starting to brush against the N.I.T. team like autumn leaves scratching along November ground. She knew the battle was just beginning...now, everyone would be fighting the instinctual inclination to go to sleep now that it was dark. Even she flashed on a pleasant sleepy daydream; an image of her apartment with its comfortable futon bed beckoned her before she swatted it away.

As the gray light-showered Dunlop Bridge loomed into sight, framed by the hues of the setting sun, Keiichi was flooded with a hyperfocused beingness. He realized that it was _right_ that he was here...that the N.I.T. Unified Club was here. Mentally thanking Chihiro for her persistence of vision, he pulled to the outside, hoping to counterweave past the car in front of him once the mini-pack of four cars turned into the Mulsanne straight.

Belldandy followed with her eyes until the Blaze disappeared from sight. Human sight. Of course, she could still see his car using her Goddess vision. Next to her, Skuld was looking at a small handheld monitor. Belldandy strongly suspected that her younger sister had hacked into one of the Global Positioning satellites and veered its attention to the Le Mans track. Skuld could have used her Goddess powers to 'see' Keiichi; but more than likely, her mechaphile streak had won out. Belldandy sensed that Skuld was entranced by the race...using technology to monitor Keiichi's progress probably possessed a therapeutic effect for her.

She could still feel Mara's presence nearby...a splash against her soular tranquility. Looking wordlessly at Urd and Skuld, she brokered her calm against the intensity of the situation. Belldandy was acutely aware that she and her sisters were right smack in the middle of the most powerful energy gathering on the planet. Earthrealm mortals are incapable of realizing that whenever they gather in huge crowds, they emit _a lot_ of ethereal energy! She estimated that the ethereal energy expressed by the 300,000 mortals gathered here in Le Mans measured almost .008 on Skuld's Shinseisensor scale. Her own Goddess powers ranged from .37 to .4. But the energy emission by the mortals was far different in nature that hers...it was unchanneled, and unfocused, counteractive rather than complementary. In some ways the chaotic fringes of the inchoate emanation reminded her of an Earthrealm thunderstorm.

For some reason, the crisp night air coupled with the disordered vortex of energy seemed to _drain_ her. Sometimes, just being in an Earthrealm crowd...like the kind that rushed into one of Tokyo's 'downtowns' on a weekday...would belabor Belldandy to the point of having a headache. Being in proximity of so many lives all at once...she remembered how she had explained the sensation to Keiichi. It was like watching a billion computer screens at the same time. She peered into the sky and smiled at the gibbous moon; the rising sphere seemed to cue her fatigue as she covered a yawn with a slender hand. She knew that Keiichi was seeing the same moon as she...thus he was linked with her anew despite the distance.

It was funny, how Keiichi had matured during his years with her. In a fancy, Belldandy felt an impulse to ask Urd if she could somehow retrieve the 'past' Keiichi from five years ago...and fast-forward him to _this_ moment. She played out the scenario in her romanticisms. How would the 2002 Keiichi react if he was here, now? How much would the 'past' version of her boyfriend be gripped with amazement as he beheld the 'now' version of himself racing in the Le Mans? Would he be astonished to find out that he had indeed fallen in love with the Goddess who granted his wish? Would he be shocked to find out that she requited his affections with the whole of her heart?

"Would the Keiichi of the 'past'...would he look at me with intense admiration and love...just as intensely as the 'now' Keiichi does?" she wondered.

It _would_ be fun, observing the two versions of Keiichi together at the same time. When she had first met Keiichi, he was a freshman at Nekomi...uncertain about his life, his scholastic goals, his new role as a technical college student. Now he was in the graduate division; he was even deemed "sempai" by a number of the newer Club members. By merit of his academic achievements alone, Belldandy had much to feel proud of. She sighed with joy, grateful that his efforts had merited him this opportunity.

"If only you could feel as proud of yourself as I am proud of you, my love!" she spoke in a stage whisper to the witnessing moon. Keiichi seemed to take events in stride; but this admirable trait sometimes countered his ability to take pride in his own accomplishments. Belldandy had taken it upon herself to try and remind him periodically of just how special he was, not only to her, but to himself.

For a moment, Belldandy felt a worry pass over her heart like a shadow. Riding the coattails of her consideration of Keiichi's insecurities, she wondered about Mara. What if Mara was eavesdropping on her whimsies just now, and mischievously decided to manifest them into a reality? Having two Keiichi's from two different time eras together at the same time...might be disastrous!

She covered her mouth with a slender hand.

"No. It would really be fine. There would only be twice as much Keiichi for me to love," Belldandy concluded.

"What next?" she said aloud.

"«_Belldandy, what are you thinking?»_" Urd thoughtcast. Belldandy gripped the fence a little tighter, realizing that she _had_ been overheard by her older sister.

"«_Shouldn't you be asking -_me-_ that question?»_" Skuld thoughtcast, grinning broadly at her. "«_After all, _-I'm-_ the Norn of the Future.»_"

"I was wondering...about all of us. Once this race is over and we're all back home in Makuhari...I'm really curious about what will happen next. Do you feel this way too?" Belldandy replied aloud. Urd and Skuld regarded her with thoughtful, concerned expressions. Belldandy didn't often brood about the future sequence of events, as she was the Goddess of the Present.

"Life is a passage from one personal moment to the next. What makes it special is how we divide the living between each moment of change," Urd replied.

"Meaning?" Skuld asked in a clipped voice, her black eyebrows knitted with irritation at Urd's cryptic remark.

"You're worried about what is going to happen to Keiichi after this race...and how that is going to affect the two of you. Right?" Urd asked, her voice intoning the 'elder sister' role as she put a comforting hand on Belldandy's shoulder and gently squeezed it.

"I..I just feel that Keiichi has reached so far into his aspirations...that this race must be the height of his 'career', as he would call it. I sense that being here is his utmost endeavor, perhaps. Traveling here to Le Mans to drive in this race...I don't know what my dear Keiichi can do to exceed _this_. To surpass the intensity of _this moment_. And when I consider our future...there are traces...of just these very same fears. My thoughts and emotions are clouded; and you both know that when I reflect my concerns away from being in the Present, I can get very uneasy. How can I recapture the joys of this moment for him? For us? If I could only make all the sweet times we've had together...happen again. I know that at some point, Earthrealm mortals eventually reach a zenith in their lives...and then they succumb to age. They slow down. Shedding their achievements behind them, they eventually _die_," she said with maudlin finality.

After a moment, Belldandy continued.

"Y..you'll please excuse me...I don't really mean to be so caught up in 'what ifs' and other suppositions. I'm just upset with myself, because I can't refrain from pondering the divide between these moments in Time...and what will proceed from them," Belldandy admitted resignedly.

Urd blanched at this. Ever since she and Cevn had found each other to be special, she had pushed this very thought to the back of her mind whenever it came up.

The dreaded "we're Goddesses...and they're mortals" reality.

Suddenly, her sister was getting morbid...about a subject that was as inevitable as tomorrow's sunrise.

Skuld looked back and forth at her sisters with tender concern, wanting to tell both of them what she knew. About the Future.

But she couldn't. The time wasn't right, dammit! And the TimeStreams she had glimpsed and jotted into her computer...still possessed significant fluidities of uncertainty. In her position as Norn of the Future, she was expressly forbidden to precognate a TimeWeave's definite future. Bringing knowledge of the Future into the Present...renders the Present into a Future. The Present is as much defined by the knowledge of the Past as it is defined by the vagaries of the Future. And should she veil her answer as prognostication, there was the potential for her remarks to actually bend the TimeWeave within its TimeStream, preventing the course of 'what must occur' from actually realizing itself in Time.

So she just had to bite her tongue...something she was not too fond of. Nor used to.

"Belldandy, it's just a race! You and Keiichi will _always_ experience a blossoming of your love! Keiichi is at the point where he is truly ready to relinquish his youth. But aging isn't a process filled with execration! You see it all the time...Earthrealm mortals advanced in their years, yet the torchlight of their love for each other burns even brighter despite their infirmity. And there _is_ such a thing as romantic nostalgia, y'know," Urd said, trying to comfort herself and her younger sis.

"Sometimes, Urd and Skuld...I hear this clarion voice in my head, stilling the troubled waters of my confusion. It tells me that, at some level, _everything_ is now. That I'll live out my life...only to arrive back at this point again and again, should I chose to. And can it be...that as my wonderful Keiichi and I get older...that our love will indeed deepen? And if so, will it be so because we_ need_ it to be so; so that we can fathom the changes that Time inevitably heralds?" Belldandy said, clutching her hands in front of her breast. Urd thought the ultra-effeminate bent of her worrisome gesture looked curiously inapt, as Belldandy was dressed in the N.I.T. race team coveralls.

"Don't discount the fact that Earthrealm mortals are so very full of surprises. You would do well to remember that endings can sometimes be beginnings in disguise. The Soul that is free will never truly grow old. The dreamer may be confused about whether she is a woman or a butterfly...but the fact remains that the cocoon existed before either," someone remarked calmly.

"Mara!" Belldandy half-shouted in surprise. The straggly haired Demoness looked at her, shaking her head with an expression that appeared to be compassion. Her reference to the Earthrealm philosopher Chuang Zi was not lost on the three Norns as she faded back into stealthy invisibility.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

It was readily apparent to Keiichi that the Blaze's steering column had loosened up a bit since the start of his racing shift; he didn't have to oversteer as much on the tight Dunlop Curves as he had earlier during the qualifying trials. As the pack swifted out of the curves, Keiichi poised the Blaze on the outside lane, a hairsbreadth away from the shoulder line. His plan was to hug the outer lane, and then a split-second before they reached the final curve leading into the straight, he would dart the Blaze across the track towards the inside lane. If everything worked, he would cut off the car ahead of him by forcing the other driver to yield to the faster car coming in from the right. If not, then Keiichi would have to slow down and quickly pull the Blaze to the outside to avoid a collision.

This was where the psychological battles between drivers would be fought, on the curves and chicanes where opportunities to take a lead were ripe.

Jerking the wheel to the right, he guided the Blaze towards the inside. The other driver owned the inner lane, not budging an inch. Keiichi gritted his teeth in frustration...the other driver had clearly seen through his cagey ploy...and had not yielded. As a result, Keiichi lost several precious seconds; he had to remain on the outside, slow the Blaze down and reinsert her behind his opponent's car once they gained the straightaway.

This was going to be one hellishly tough race!

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Sora kept her eyes peeled for the Blaze's headlights, knowing that Keiichi would pull into the pit any moment now. As the cars streaked by, their engine roars seemed to leave liquid pocketjets of light impressed on her eyeballs. After a while, she was seeing little purple-pink blurs across her field of vision. Finally, one set of lights loomed larger, coalescing from a smear of brightness to four distinct points.

She wiped her forehead with the towel around her shoulders and pulled her helmet on, strapping it under her chin.

Once again, the student pit crew clambered over the Blaze, refueling it while rechecking the vitals, such as oil and transmission fluids. Here their relative inexperience when compared to the other pit crews would be tempered by the agility of their youth. The average age of the mechanics manning the race pits ran about 34...the N.I.T. team had no one over 30. Despite the physical speed of her teammates, Sora felt impatient. After waiting a few seconds until they cleared an opening to the cockpit; she hurdled the door and strapped herself in.

Night driving would be a wholly different racing experience. She had recorded her best times during her day laps, but Sora sensed that she could pull a couple of good lap times at night. If anything, this race was teaching her to be patient. If she didn't make a good time on one lap, it wasn't necessarily a disaster. The only true defeat was the invasive thoughts of failure that gripped her at times, clinging stubbornly to her consciousness like a rainpool that wouldn't evaporate in the sun after a storm. She could only improve on her time during one of the following laps. After she had finished her startoff driving shift, she had spent the next couple of hours studying the progress of the other drivers. Looking at the multiple bigscreens on the grandstand and the digital displays of lap times, her vigilance was seeded with relief; many of the other driver's lap times were just as inconsistent as hers.

Which meant that they were making mistakes.

Already, in almost 8 hours, over a dozen entries had been retired due to mechanical failure and accidents. Fortunately, there had been no collisions, just a couple of cars taking a corner too fast and walling it, while a third car blew a tire and went off the road into a hedgerow.

About 20 minutes into this driving shift, the chicanes would be realigned. Sora suspected that one or more drivers might be so intent on micromanaging every aspect of their split-second driving decisions that they would forget the new route. She had to make sure that _she_ didn't forget as well! At midnight, the Automobile Club de L'Ouest race officials would set up a barrier of reflective hazardcones to close the chicane. If a driver went into the closed chicane...they would be immediately disqualified.

One more challenge for the racers in this unusual running of the Le Mans.

As she pulled onto the grandstand straightaway, Sora quickly calculated that they were on par for a 5100 to 5300 kilometer race. Pretty good...but would it be good enough?

A year ago, Sora had never imagined that she would be driving on a French highway at nearly four times the legal speed limit. The sense of freedom...to be able to speed _legally_...was freshly exhilarating to the N.I.T. sophomore. So many times in the past, she was limited to experiencing the ecstasy of velocity vicariously, watching Keiichi compete but secretly wishing _she_ was racing. But now, she was _in it_; firsthand!

"Keiichi-sempai, look what you've done to me! I'm becoming addicted to speed racing!" she said, imagining her sempai sitting in the empty seat on her left. Sora had joined the Motor Club first and foremost because she liked the engineering challenge of innovation that was the bit and staple of race clubs. She wanted the opportunity to build _new_ things, rather than simply do 'assembly line' rote mechanics. She desired nothing more than the freedom to _create_! This sense of inventive vision was one of the attributes Skuld possessed, a quality that had charmed Sora so much when she met the teenage Goddess for the first time.

Technology was meant to be innovated, rather than recreated. She was blessed with a keen mind…a mind that practically demanded that she push against the creative envelope. She couldn't cook soba if her life depended on it, but she was already enjoying the privilege of auditing graduate-school engineering science classes. Now, she had it both ways; the adventure of design, and the adventure of competition.

As she passed the grandstands, her thoughts deflected. Sora found herself wondering how many Nekomi Tech students back in Makuhari would be huddled around HDTVs watching this very race. She knew that her parents would be up all night. They had phoned her yesterday to tell her that they had seen her on TV during the parade, and that they planned to open the Hasegawa Ramen shop as usual today. She joked with them, chiding them that the noodles would probably be much less spirited because they would be exhausted from watching the race. On the other hand, she imagined that the ramen shop would be crowded to the rafters with loyal patrons who wouldn't mind if the noodles were a little soggy...

Seven hours from now, she would be driving again...witnessing the dawning of a new day in Le Mans.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Megumi flexed her gloved fingers as she prepped for her second tour in the Blaze, mentally replaying the recent mishap that had shaped her and Genji's relationship once again into a new contour of intimacy…

_During the pit stop when Keiichi yielded the Blaze to Sora, Genji had taken on a nasty slash to the arm while he was hauling out the hose to refill the tires with air. The head of the hose was designed with a housing that hooded a special rapid-delivery pressurehead, capable of pumping air into the tire at triple the speed of a regular gas station air pump. During the rapid bustle, someone had bumped him and the grip slipped out of his hands, the open housing metal slicing his arm as it snaked back to the oxygen tanks. Ignoring his pain, Genji quickly retrieved it and finished airing the tires._

_Megumi had spent the next hour trying to console him. Genji tended towards an obsessive scrutiny of his failures...like her, he was both blessed and flawed by being a perfectionist at heart. She had chalked it up to his upbringing as one of the elire démodé. Recalling her all-too-brief and all-too-stressful meeting and dinner with his parents, she remembered the air of officiousness that had noticeably thickened the room. Genji's parents were probably the most 'poised' couple she had ever met! Without a doubt, his parents were very capable, driven people who would brook no excuse for failure, either from themselves or their subordinates. Some of their traits had obviously rubbed off onto her boyfriend._

_Genji admitted to her that he was angry with himself because his clumsy mishap had cost the team several valuable seconds in pit stop time. Megumi tried to explain that 5 seconds didn't really matter in a race that was 8640 seconds long...that the loss time could easily be recovered during the next couple driving shifts. But her boyfriend wasn't buying it. She knew that Genji was stubborn; when he was –_this- _disappointed in himself, he wouldn't respond to reason..._

Well-intentioned, she had said that _she_ would make up for his accident. But instead of being consoled by her offer, Genji had lost it on her for a couple minutes, yelling about how he had let her and everybody down and accusing her of discounting his sincerity and his feelings.

Now she was upset at herself for overlooking the obvious. In her boyfriend's mind, he had translated her offer to help as "you're a loser, so I'll bail you out!" Not to mention the obvious blow to his masculinity. In fact, his facial grimace was an indicator that her charitable effort to bolster his spirits...had been a _bigtime_ mistake. She'd been going out with him for a year now, and yet she had missed such a simple connection between head and heart.

"Mega screwup, Megumi," she chided herself, recognizing that she had seriously wounded Genji's pride by her attempt to minimize an incident that he was taking very seriously. It was so frustrating, because she could see that he wasn't angry. He was _hurting_.

She silently watched him brood, elbows on knees with his face nearly buried in his hands. His isolative shutdown attitude reminded her of that time last year when his older sister was hooked on drugs. Genji had reacted then by withdrawing himself from those who could emotionally support him. And now, he was doing it again. Considering that he didn't really have a family to rely on while he was growing up, he had developed some pretty screwed-up survival skills; none of which were his fault. She felt saddened by how he was struggling over a simple mistake, when all that was required to make him feel confident again was a little salve of self-forgiveness.

Megumi was also worried about the time factor. She would be back in the driver's seat within the next hour...and if she didn't patch things up with Genji before then, it was possible that her driving performance would suffer. The last thing she needed was to be distracted by an unreconciled situation between she and her boyfriend.

Sitting next to Genji on a bench, Megumi decided to switch to a tried and true silent tactic. Leaning softly against his shoulder, she struggled to project a warmly feminine vulnerable gentleness. Caught up in the middle of the brandfires of competition, the last thing Megumi felt inside was passivity. But after a half hour or so, Genji heaved a deep sigh and visibly relaxed, putting his arm around her shoulders and kissing her on the cheek.

Relieved at the fact he had mentally dropped the anvil of his guilt, Megumi cleaned the grease oil from his wound and dressed it, then used the pit phone to summon a doctor to stitch it up. Genji always rolled his sleeves up past his elbows while working, mechanic-style. Worried that he might get injured again, she spent another half-hour trying to convince him to keep his coverall sleeves rolled down during the rapid-fire pit stop work.

"That's my boyfriend!" Megumi said to herself in humorous resignation as Genji bluntly ignored her request. He could really be stubborn when he wanted to be..._almost_ as stubborn as she! But she held to account that he was just as nervous as everybody else in the racing team. His reticence was forgivable.

Besides, she _would_ make up the lost five seconds, whether he liked it or not.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Belldandy kept spinning pensive glances over her shoulder, checking to see if Mara was still in the vicinity of the racing pit. And each time she checked, Mara was nearby, her face drawn tight with keen interest in the race. Once in a while, Mara would grin and wave at Belldandy with faux amiability, teasing her. Belldandy's mind and heart were pacing like a husband waiting for news outside of the maternity ward.

Not to mention that her edginess was irritating Keiichi...

She resented the fact that Mara had pulled the "I'm your Big Sister" act. Having a capricious older sister like Urd tried her patience, as it was one trial after another at times. But this new configuration where she had _two_ older sisters, one of which was _Mara_...was troublesome in the extreme. Belldandy had just gotten used to the alien idea that Mara was Urd's twin; but now that the Demoness was here, everything had changed.

Consequently, she was now obliged to offer the same deference to Mara that was due Urd. But there was nothing in all the millennia of her inculcation that addressed the issue of having a _Demoness_ in the family! Looking over at her younger sibling, Belldandy knew that Skuld was probably taking Mara's presence even worse than she was. She could only imagine what thoughts were spinning through Skuld's mind, youngest sister of two Goddesses and a Demoness...

She observed her younger sister as she stood against the pit fence, keening watching the race. Skuld's tightly folded arms across her bosom revealed her browknit defensiveness to Belldandy. All three Goddesses were open books of nervous energy...especially with the head of the Demon Strife Mischief Office in their company.

Would Mara prove to be a sister...or a would she throw a fatal wrench in all of their efforts?

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Keiichi estimated that it was almost 6am. He had turned the Blaze over to Sora at 11:45pm, then Sora had turned it over to Megumi at 2:30am. They had decided earlier in the week to extend their driving shifts by 15 minutes during the night hours.

The sun would be rising soon...

During Megumi's night racing shift, one of the British entries had spun off the Mulsanne Straight, flaming out alongside the road. The driver was swiftly pulled to safety, but the flamulant car bronzed the night sky for almost 15 minutes. Evidently, the racing officials decided that the safest approach would be to let the fire burn itself out while they hosed it down from a distance. No doubt, it must have been an eerie feeling for his sister...driving past a burning wreck without knowing if the driver had survived or not. The Le Mans didn't allow any transmission devices to be in the racecars, so Megumi had no means of communicating with anyone while she was driving.

Despite the potential drawbacks of a radio-less cockpit, Keiichi favored this setup. There was no chatter to distract him from being focusing on the ever-changing minutiae of racing conditions. Alone, he could fully devote himself to the task at hand. If he needed a distraction from the pace, he could provide one himself.

To fight off the drowsiness, he tried to conjure up humorous images in his mind to keep from being lulled by the tedious racing conditions. Experience had taught him that he needed to stir his thoughts away from the race...so that he could actually concentrate _more_ on his driving. Too much concentration led to the complaisance that inevitably accompanies a vigorous, yet rigid focus of thought.

As he mentally challenged himself, he noticed that streaks of water were forming on the glassy surface of the canopy bubble of the Blaze.

No wonder it wasn't getting light yet!

The sky was showering rain.

"Chance!" Keiichi shouted to himself excitedly. The rain would slow down the field...and allow him to indulge in risky weather driving…"Droll driving maneuvers," as Chihiro usually termed them.

Already, he observed that the cars were cautiously taking on the chicane at 100kph instead of the usual pace of 120-130kph. Many of the cars weren't equipped with windshield wipers because of the unique shapes of their cockpit hoods. To deal with rainfall, the N.I.T. team had installed two small exterior blowers under the hood on the driver's side to create a clear spot in the window.

Keiichi knew he would have to fight against his instincts to slow down as well as the rain started pelting the Blaze. He felt his facial muscles tensing as he pulled into the chicane at 135kph.

One of the allures...and dangers...of racing occurred when he tried to overlay common sense with a 'go for broke' driving attitude. He had become acclimated to struggling against himself over the past 4 1/2 years he had been with Bell-chan. Before Belldandy had graced his life with her angelic presence, Keiichi was cautiously reserved in his approach to racing and life in general. But once he had fallen in love with her...improbably...he had gradually transformed into a risk-taker. He had learned that "taking his courage" didn't necessarily mean mere acquiescence or resignation. Instead, his courage had gradually blossomed his self-confidence by degrees.

Initially, the practice of gunning against his sense of security had provided an adrenaline rush that couldn't be beat. But after a couple years of competition, his confidence seemed to evolve itself into a transpersonal science of sorts. There was a method to maintaining his concentration while his 'inner safety valve' shouted "slow down!!"

Cevn had been instrumental in pointing out to him that his self-esteem was not a frivolous manifestation of self-willfulness, but the result of a slow ongoing process of getting to know himself. Having the older gaijin live with him in the temple had turned another new page in his life. Cevn was so _different_...which caused Keiichi to have to challenge his own beliefs about others. And eventually, about himself. Keiichi knew without a doubt that he had equally influenced Cevn. Cevn didn't know it, but Keiichi had spent the last year and a half working kindness into his life, so that his friend would find less reason to sink into those black valleys of depression that sometimes subdued him.

He had watched his whole circle of friends transform into adults...

Sayoko had freed herself from the bonds of active drug addiction. Hell, he had never suspected that she was so caught up in her addiction to begin with! She was the quintessential rich party girl, as far as he was concerned. Her animosity towards Bell-chan evoked the image of a spoiled little girl who didn't get what she wanted...and was throwing temper tantrums at everyone around her. Now, she was going out with Tamiya and excelling in grad school. In many ways, Sayoko truly was the "Queen of N.I.T."...since Bell-chan was the "Goddess of N.I.T." He could still remember the stricken look on her face when she finally realized that his girlfriend was a bona fide Goddess...

His younger sister Megumi had taken a huge risk in becoming attracted to Genji. Leaping beyond the strict confines of class and upbringing, she had braved deep waters by falling in love with the son and heir of a multibillionaire aristocratic family, with centuries of kin history behind them. Then, once they all arrived in France, Megumi had suitably impressed Genji's parents. _That_ must have taken a huge amount of guts!

Ootaki had struggled with his attraction to Chihiro when she first returned to N.I.T., despite the fact that he had been going out with Satoko for almost two years. That he was able to admit as much, and act on it...was very risky. Chihiro still wore his ring. Yet, while remaining true to the hearkenings of his heart, Ootaki had done the right thing...and stayed with Satoko. His brief infatuation with Chihiro eventually passed, and he had returned to 'normal'...whatever 'normal' is as far as Ootaki is concerned. Now, he was heartsick that Satoko wasn't with him in France. Her father didn't think it was time for his only daughter to go on a trip with a man not yet her fiancé. It was charming to see Ootaki in the hostel lobby at 10pm every night, calling Japan so he could talk to Satoko before she went to school. He had brought a half-empty suitcase, which was gradually accumulating gifts for his girlfriend...

Chihiro... Keiichi thought that enough couldn't be said about her. She had poured months of her life in this Le Mans project, skillfully forging it into reality out of thin air. Every step of the way, she had guided the N.I.T. club, carefully honing them into a competitive racing team. Despite her bizarrely tomgirlish fascination with unusual racing machines, she had been the backbone of this whole project by sheer deliberation of effort.

It was an act of genius on her part to bring them this far...one that he suspected even superceded his novel engine designs while "intellihanced" by Skuld's brain-booster invention.

Everybody he was close to...had looked beyond their self-imposed boundaries and had risen to new strengths. Together, they had challenged the division line between "I can't" and "I will".

Belldandy had termed it "unlimiting our thinking."

Being here in the Le Mans was the penultimate proof of this.

It would be a major accomplishment if they even finished this race. The Blaze was a nine-year old car, with an experimental engine design that hybrided the best of new/old motor technology. He and his peers were a group of engineering _students_, whose fascination with motorcycles and cars was only matched with their attitude of nine days' wonder towards their work. Their skills bordered on inexperience when compared with the other racing teams, teams that possessed _dozens_ of years of engineering technique under their belts.

It just didn't make sense.

Yet, the only thing that did make sense right now was this reality...that if he was able to hyperfocus on his driving, Keiichi would be able to pass several cars and move within striking range...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Sora watched the rain clouds dissipate, the showering beams of early morning sunlight spraying the woods on either side of the Mulsanne suggesting translucent fingers prying the clouds apart. Each lap was no longer a demonizing obstacle. Instead, the road had become a magnet for her attention and aspirations. This was her last chance...and she was going to give it her best. At 8am, the roadrace route would change again; both chicanes would be closed and the Mulsanne Straight would truly become a straightway.

In the last eight hour driving stage, the Le Mans race would test every vehicle and driver to the utmost. Despite the fact that the chicanes were challenges in themselves, forcing the drivers to do a lot of extra shifting and steering...a 'un-chicaned' Mulsanne straightaway would allow driver and vehicle to open up.

Open up...

They were in 8th place when she hopped back into the Blaze. All but 16 cars had been eliminated. Considering the fact that the cars would be pushed to their max during the last 8 hours, it was quite possible that the finishers would only number 10 or so.

As she screamed by the grandstand, Sora noticed that the crowds were returning. The gradually filling stands reminded her of something she had read in one of the programs. The worst driving accident in racing history had occurred here, right on this track, over 50 years ago, Sora had read. A racecar had hurdled the retaining fence and plowed right into a crowded stand of spectators, killing almost 90 people and injuring 200 more.

This random shotgun of a thought made Sora lean a little bit closer to the steering wheel, as if a tighter frame would prevent an accident. All those marathon study sessions in high school were paying off now, because she was totally alert despite being awake almost 26 hours.

Two more laps and the chicanes would be closed.

The roadway was already losing its sheen of rain...

But not quick enough. Ahead of her, a car started to slipslosh.

Spinning...

"Oh God...it's right in my path!" Sora thought. She had only a split-second to react. Gripping hand-over-hand in blur, she steered the Blaze with all her agility and strength, fighting the impulse to blink or close her eyes as the wildly spinning car careened in her path. The Blaze hauled over to the left...and clipped the edge of the slipwiggling racecar.

The impact bounced Sora around in the cockpit. Still struggling to center the weaving Blaze, Sora kept thinking "It's all over now!" with a sinking heart.

By force of collision, she knew the Blaze was damaged...but where? Sora expected the Blaze to slowly lose power, as many of the several thousand components were probably jarred out of synch. Any time now, the car would gradually slow to a stop.

_"__Dammit! We tried so hard!__"_ she screamed into the cockpit.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Belldandy clasped her hands tightly over her heart, her light blue eyes filled with worry. Her Goddess senses had just informed her of Sora's accident, several kilometers away on the long straightaway.

"Is she alright?" Keiichi asked as the crowd hummed with gasping reaction to the near collision displayed on the video screen. From where he stood, he could only see that the Blaze had clipped another car as Sora had swerved with a superhuman effort to avoid a certain head-on smashup.

Accidents.

"She's all right!" Belldandy said with relief after checking Sora's vitals. Urd nodded her head, confirming Belldandy's observation. Belldandy had swiftly extended her will outwards, seeking the Blaze and its diminutive occupant. With a ready stealth, she crosschecked every cell of Sora's body thrice, just to make sure. Sora was almost in shock; she was breathing rapidly and her heart rate was up over 140. But she was uninjured.

Which was more than could be said for the Blaze. Skuld's disappointed, almost disgusted expression was enough to confirm Keiichi's worst fears. Besides being a mechagenius, Skuld had a 'sixth sense' about machines. Somehow, her interest in things technological also granted her a 'feel' for cars, motorbikes...just about any vehicle.

As they watched the replay of the accident on the giant screens, the overhead view from the helicopter film crew revealed that the spoiler of the single-seat Prototype car had clipped the Blaze's driver's side rear quarterpanel, leaving a meter-long gash in the unpainted metal. If it had stuck a split-second sooner, its gash would have been more rearwards; it would have shredded the tire. But the tight-knit integrity of the motor components was all out of sorts. In a couple laps, the Blaze would overheat...and that would be that.

Belldandy felt a sinking disappointment well up, squeezing her heart like an invisible fist. Her emotional melancholy was magnified when she looked at her sisters and the N.I.T. Unified Team. It was as if their joy had been vacuumed out, leaving only bitterly shelled sadness.

She felt doubly disheartened for Sora. This tragic mishap wasn't Sora's fault, but Belldandy somehow knew that the N.I.T. sophomore was already blaming herself. She wanted to comfort Sora, to absolve her of any guilt, to tell her that everything was alright...and to remind her of the singularly important fact that nobody had gotten hurt.

It had been too close.

Goddesses live for incredibly long suspends of time...and yet a few seconds could contain a perceptual eternity. Belldandy's divinity allowed her a special orientation...a superhuman means of manipulating her awareness of Time. Beyond this, as a Norn, Belldandy could directly manipulate Time if she chose to. This set her and her sisters apart from every other denizen of Yggdrasil, save Peorth and a few other Runes.

For a moment, she damned Keiichi in her heart for prohibiting she and her sisters from providing any magical assistance in this race. As she sensed the dimming spirits of her friends, she wanted to disregard his instructions with all of her heart's volition.

Just this once...

But Belldandy knew full well that a single instance of betrayal...was one betrayal too many. If the price she had to pay for her restraint was to share the deep disappointment all her friends would experience as their dreams slipped to a standstill on the racetrack...if this was what she had to face in order to remain true to her word and her darling Keiichi's wishes...then it would be a burden she would reluctantly accept.

The alternative...to go against her word and duty...was much worse to consider. The temptation to dip into her Goddess abilities every time something went wrong in Keiichi's life would only create more problems. It would be akin to watering a flower every hour on the hour, drowning it within a few days. If she went against her word now, she would be drowning Keiichi's humanity.

It would be all over in just a few minutes. Two or three laps and the Blaze would pull to a stop, wrapped in steam from an overheated engine.

In her mind, The Norn of the Present was sorrowfully dreading the Future.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Mara watched the near-accident with keen interest. At first, she wanted Sora to get creamed, then felt a twinge of disappointment as the little girl-woman narrowed avoided the crash.

She could sense the emotional deflation in the wake of the collision. Around her, everyone was smeared with unease, disbelief, shock, grief, anger, frustration and an immense sadness. As she examined each face with its poignant expression of dejection and hopelessness, she felt a strange, unexpected compassion.

Then she heard sobbing.

Belldandy, Skuld and Urd were all sobbing.

She had waited so long for something like this...to see the three Norns in complete and total defeat. To witness firsthand the candor of their deepest lamentation.

Keiichi was gripping the fence, his head bowed down in shocked disbelief. Mara could tell that he was so immersed in grief that he was close to vomiting. An odd reaction for a mortal, but then again, Earthrealm mortals tended to get emotionally haywired when things like this happened.

She had wanted to see this for years...and yet it didn't feel _right_. In fact, her feelings of joy were shaded with...bitterness?

Mara didn't feel bitter too often.

Maybe _she_ was going haywire!

"I've been on this blessed Earthrealm for almost five years, trying to get even with those three! Trying to fulfill my Demoness Grief Office assignment...to cause Keiichi to lose everything he loves. And now I'm no longer in the DGO, somehow this feels _wrong_! Those three Goddesses are filled to the brim with hopelessness...and I actually feel _sympathy_ for them! What the Heaven is wrong with me? I'm a Demon! I'm supposed to relish this kind of tragedy and grief!" she said to herself.

Her twin sister was crying unabashedly.

"My...twin...sister," Mara observed to herself. Glance back and forth between Belldandy and Skuld, she regarded them as if anew. Part of her heartstrings were being plucked by the depths of loss figuring on their faces.

"It must be so hard on all three of you...to have to look on, powerless to help...when you could easily rectify the cause of that which dims the hopes of your friends," she said silently to the three Goddesses.

The relationship between Mara and the Norns became even more convoluted when she learned that these three...were her sisters! Soon after, she schemed to use this to her advantage. Gain leverage on the two younger ones, while keeping the irresponsible Urd in check.

But now, it dawned on her that this sisterhood business was a two-way street. Despite all her preconceptions, Mara was struck blindsided with an undeniable truth.

Demoness or Goddess...sisters take care of each other.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Inside of every machine is a soul. Some machines have special souls, called Maxwells. Maxwells make sure that an engine fires and runs smoothly. They carefully monitor the surreal Maxwell stones that emanate the fields of molarity that the mortals perceive as "motion". Another set of special machine souls is the Stewarts. The Stewarts have an important job too...they make sure that the operating environment of the machine stays at the right temperature, so that the Maxwells don't get roasted. Of course, the Maxwells won't get roasted in any case. If the Stewarts can't do their job, and the engine gets too hot, the Maxwells just simply abandon the engine along with all the other souls in the machine. Without its special souls, the machine simply dies.

The death of a machine is a very terrible thing.

Mara could sense the tension in the Blaze. Within the metal engine, the Maxwells were tightly circled in conference, deciding whether or not they should abandon the engine. The Stewarts were getting ready to send a delegation to the Maxwells, informing them that the critical situation was out of hand; that they were powerless in their ability to keep the temperature within operating parameters.

So Mara quickly assumed a stealth mini-Mara form and joined the debate. In the reality of the Maxwells and Stewarts, metal is like air, while air and water possessed the hard solidity of metal. Exactly the opposite of the so-called physical world of the mortals. This was why mortals didn't even suspect that machines have souls...

One of the Maxwells immediately noticed her. A short squat man with gray hair and a thick pepper-gray Prussian moustache, he gripped the straps of his work overalls and strutted cocksurely up to her. His posture projected a confidence that made Mara feel for a split second that she was an intruder.

"So, who are you and what brings you to_ my_ engine? From the looks of you, you seem a Demon!" the 'boss' Maxwell observed, adjusting his billyhat as he regarded her with a scrutinous eye. As they formed a circle around her, Mara thought they looked like a set of characters from a Mario Bros. video game...their superdeformed faces were filled with wile and panache.

"Yeah! What gives you the wherewithal to crash our discussion!" a Stewart said brusquely. The Stewarts were all balding to various degrees, wearing coveralls as opposed to the bib overalls of the Maxwells. They resembled technicians with their white overjackets.

"I say we ignore her! We've got more important things to discuss!" a Maxwell announced. Every member of his circle nodded in agreement; like cellular mitosis, the circle split in two as each group forms its own huddle and returned to their buzzwording talk.

Mara grimaced with disbelief. They were _ignoring_ her! But her disbelief soon plummeted waterfalls into an ocean of ire that was welling up in her. She gripped her hands into fists at her sides and then unclenched them; she wasn't going to dignify their hubris by appearing too upset.

Time to get aggressive...

"Hey guys...before you get too caught up in your discussions, I just wanted to let you know that I'm a _Senior_ First Class License Demoness," mini-Mara shot back in a maniere-polite voice that seethed with an icy venomous undercurrent. Being in a non-metal environment, she didn't want to waste time mincing words. She folded her arms as the Maxwells and the Stewarts reacted...their conversations were stifled in mid-sentence. A momentary flash of disbelief and panic gripped both groups. This was one of the first times Mara had used her new Demoness status as a blunt object on non-Demons...the reactions evoked by her announcement were very satisfying.

Every Maxwell and Stewart's face was ghost-pallored...

"Oh my!! Oh! Sorry, Ma'am. We just don't get too many of your type down here!" one of the Maxwells said with nervous deference, fidgeting with his whiskers.

"What can we do for you?" a Stewart inquired. Mini-Mara looked around, feeling the increasing heat of the engine. Another minute or two and it would become very uncomfortable to the Maxwells and the Stewarts...but right now, the rising heat reminded Mara of the HotRoom furoba in her lair.

Heat was an enjoyable state of being for a Demoness.

"You see this engine? I want you to keep it running at top performance for another 8 hours," mini-Mara stated directly. The Maxwells and Stewarts blurted "you're crazy!" in chorus, and then huddled in their respective groups, chattering quickly.

"This is probably blowing their little minds," mini-Mara observed to herself smugly. Finally, one of their group broke away, evidently he had been volunteered to be a spokesperson. His face was filled with the reticence of reluctant, fearful engine gnome.

"What you are asking is highly unusual...in fact, it's quite impossible. Another couple hundred degrees and we're out of here!" the little Maxwell said emphatically.

"I'm sorry if I didn't make myself clear," mini-Mara answered with mock civility. "I'm totally...not _asking_ you. I'm _telling_ you to stay! Leaving is not an option for you at this point! If any of you attempt leave this motor, you're going to _really_ piss me off. And believe me, I know about some really _blistering_ places in Vanagdrasil...and I'm not talking about magazine girls or Thai food! These places make the inner corona of a star seem like Siberia in January. Capeche?"

Every Maxwell and Stewart started shuddering as her words sunk in.

"You little guys are sooo cute when you're scared witless! Nevertheless, your crews can either stay here in this engine and do your jobs, or you can risk my wrath!!" mini-Mara explained, baring a good length of her fangs to punctuate her threats.

The Maxwells and Stewarts were visibly cringing at this point. Mini-Mara was amused at this. Where Belldandy would have tried to convince them with typically sweet words and promises...she had _told_ them what to do. And they blessed well knew that there were only a few Senior First Class Demons and Demonesses around! She was almost insulted by the fact that they had actually possessed the audacity to argue with her after she had told them what to do.

But Maxwells and Stewarts were known for their spunk and crankiness...

"So what's it going to be, boys?"

"Uh...we're very sorry about what we said earlier. We'll stay, of course. It was just a little misunderstanding we had earlier, heh heh. Right boys?"

"Right!" they chorused.

"Good! I'm glad that we all understand each other now," mini-Mara stated for the record.

"I'll make sure that things don't get _too_ hot in here...and you guys make sure this engine runs at 120 percent. I'm not going to make things comfy for you; after all, what would it do to my reputation if your crews didn't suffer a _little_ bit? But I know that you are brave enough to battle here in the trenches a little longer. And I'll be checking up on you regularly, so don't try anything funny," she announced as a final coercion.

_"__Yes Ma'am!__"_ a dozen tiny voices chorused.

Mini-Mara left them to their task and returned to her full-size stealth form.

"Yahoo!! Being a Senior First Class Demoness _RULES_!" she shouted, shaking a fist in the air as she leapt up and down with kinetic glee. Urd turned to look at her, curious.

"What are you so impressed with yourself about, Mara?" she asked in a sour voice.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Sora was driving half-heartedly, letting cars pass her. She knew that the race was as good as lost the moment the Prototype racer collided briefly with the Blaze.

Yet, as she rounded the grandstand, the Blaze seemed to perk up...as if it was challenging her!

"Don't screw around...race me!" the Blaze seemed to intimate to her with its unexpected surge of horsepower. The seeming drain of power that communicated itself through her accelerator pedal apparently was reversing itself. Incredulous, she tentatively sped up to the driving pace of the other cars. The Blaze responded with smooth surge of acceleration.

"No...way!! There's no way you should be doing this!" she shouted to the cockpit, momentarily imagining that the Blaze could hear her.

As she rounded the corner into the Mulsanne Straight, Sora reached over and punched several buttons, sequencing the LED indicators to display a variety of parameters. They had installed a single LED module that could display a number of 'vitals', replacing the more traditional array of gauges. This not only saved a little weight, but also made it easier for the driver to check out the condition of the car. To her surprise, the Blaze was running a little hot, but everything else checked out fine.

She had expected much worse. For a few moments, she felt the Blaze _dying_...the kind of death that a critically damaged vehicle would experience, right before it ground to a halt.

Sora felt her mind fill with conjectures. Evidently, the Blaze had emerged from the minor collision with no noticeable loss in roadworthiness. Sora suspected that this 'miracle' might have been inspired by some Divine meddling on the part of the Goddesses. A brief flash of resentment gripped her, as she remembered that Keiichi had explicitly instructed them not to interfere. As she rounded the Indy Curve, Sora started thinking things through...relinquishing her spiteful mood. In the year or so since she learned that the three were Goddesses, they had always been as good as gold when they gave their word.

She sincerely doubted that Belldandy would risk disappointing Keiichi by interfering. Urd and Skuld...well, that was another matter. Then again, Belldandy would probably pitch a fit if either of her two sisters defied Keiichi's instructions. Not to mention Cevn, who would most definitely chew out Urd if she attempted something that even hinted of benevolent subterfuge.

But if the Goddesses had indeed kept to a 'hands off', then how was it that the Blaze was still performing so well?

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Urd raised her hands in an "I didn't do it" gesture. Belldandy locked eyes with her, long enough to create the sisterly 'truth circuit' between them. After being in each other's life for 25,000 years, Urd knew that Belldandy could search out the truth in her eyes. She could still expertly mask deceit from her sisters...but Urd was hopeful that they would almost always see the truth when it was on her side.

"At least I don't have something to hide from her this time!" Urd thought with relief as Belldandy softened her expression. Her younger sister turned to Skuld and put her through the same scrutinizing process. For a moment, Urd wondered if it was the brat who had seemingly fixed the N.I.T. car. She wouldn't put it past Skuld to pull a technological miracle out of her sleeve with the same ease that she pulled a Skuld-bomb. And with her youngest sister's license upgrade...

It might be possible that Skuld thought she could put one over on her elder sisters; fixing the car in a childish, pranksterish...

But when Urd looked deep into Skuld's being, she learned that Skuld was just as mystified about what had happened to the racecar as Belldandy. Even more so, because of her predilection towards mechanical, rational logicks, no pun intended.

"What just happened?" Belldandy asked, echoing Urd's thoughts. "I could sense the siphoning of energy...the car's soul was on the wane. It was obvious that the Maxwells were going to leave the Blaze any minute. But they didn't."

"Stating the obvious, aren't we?" Skuld quipped, causing Urd to handcover her wide grin.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Sora looked forward to finishing her last driving shift at 9:45am. During the last half hour that she had piloted the Blaze after the accident, it seemed that like her nerves had become tightwire taunt knots of barbwire. At 8am, the course had changed to its final configuration. The second chicane was coned off, allowing the cars to speed down the straightaway. During the first couple laps, the Blaze managed 420kph down the Mulsanne Straight. To her amazement, Sora actually had to _slow down_ almost 30kph to avoid a rear-end collision with the GT2 car directly in front of her!

The Blaze was demonstrably more powerful than some of the other cars! And Sora knew it.

"If the Blaze maintains this kind of drivepower for the rest of the race," she realized with anticipation. "just wait until Keiichi drives our anchor shift!"

For a moment, she bathed her thoughts with pleasurable seasonings of pride...sensing the possibility that they could still finish the Le Mans.

Could she count on the extra boost of speed? As she rounded the third lap since the surging changeover in power, Sora realized that the Blaze could, if pushed to the limit, out-accelerate most of the cars in the field. Which meant that she might be able to cut in on the cars ahead of her and make up for lost time.

"Who's in front of me?" she wondered. A blue car was just ahead, covered with stickers.

Sora had watched Keiichi try and pull inside during one of the turns going into the Mulsanne highway. Almost always, the other driver wouldn't let him drop in ahead of their car. But now, a different tact might work. If she could pull in tight but remain on the outside, she might be able to pass the other cars by rimming the outer lane and then sprinting down the straightaway, gradually easing into the inside lane. If she mixed it up on her handling of the curves, she could create what Chihiro and Keiichi called "presence"...that psychological factor that would make the other drivers lean towards racing _her_ race, rather than _their_ race.

By allowing the superior speed of the Blaze to take its course, she could pull ahead...and get an edge.

She gradually shored up the distance between her and the blue car. She could almost make out the names on the racing decals on the trunk...

"Just a little...closer," she said through gritted teeth, rapidly flickering her eyes back and forth on the car ahead of her and the track. She squinted her eyes at the decal...and gasped.

It read: "Team Cadillac"

Sora felt her whole body quivering, vibrating with the memory of being plastered by the tall American driver at the beginning of the race; by a man that weighed double what she weighed. How the Cadillac pit crew had laughed at her during the qualifying trials...

Her whole body shook...with indignant rage! She wanted to flip off the car in front of her, but sporting decorum checked her impulse. Besides, he wouldn't probably see her in his rear view mirror...and knowing her luck, one of the helicopters flying overhead filming the race would pick _just that moment_ to do a close-up on her.

"C'mon!" she encouraged the Blaze as she twisted through the Dunlop Curves. She decided that she was going to do much worse than simply flip the driver off.

Suddenly, passing the car ahead of her had assumed new dimensions of passion. This wasn't about gaining a place in the standings.

This was about pride!

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Dat's da bastard that knocked our lil' Sora on her can at da beginning of da race!" Tamiya announced, the first to figure it out. Sayoko was amazed...English wasn't Tamiya's strong suite. Let alone French, which was the language displayed on most of the grandstand boards. She quickly read the stats on the blue car in 7th place, and realized that her boyfriend was right!

It was Driver #1 for the Cadillac team.

Tamiya almost chuckled as Toshiyuki tore off his glasses angrily. Toshiyuki was a small, frail man, almost waif-like...but he was possessed with the anger of a tiger at the moment.

An anger that Tamiya empathized with...and respected. Anyone who was _that_ angry as the result of a protective streak towards his girlfriend was an okay dude, as far as he was concerned.

Toshi's face was actually red with ire.

"Look's like_ he's_ pissed off!" Ootaki quipped.

"Imagine how lil' Sora feels right now!" Tamiya said with a gleam in his eye.

"C'mon Sora...lap that asshole!" Megumi screamed, shaking her fist as the two cars flew by...

The whole N.I.T. team was suddenly fired up by this set of circumstances...a riveting coincidence that wasn't lost on Chihiro. She hoped in her heart that Sora could humiliate that jerk before her driving shift was over. She also made a mental note to herself to be sure and deck that Team Cadillac driver after the race was over.

Another moment...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Sora rounded the corner, hugging fender-to-bumper tight on the car in front of her, the Cadillac entry. Staying to the outside, she flattened the accelerator to the floorboard.

At 1Km into the straightway, she was almost even with the Cadillac. She looked to her right and realized that it was the driver who had shoved her to the ground at the beginning of the race!

"Here's where you get yours, you lame loser!"

At 2Km, she was beginning to pull ahead.

At 3Km, she realized that she was still on the outside lane...and approaching the curveout too fast. Gritting her teeth, she banked outside slightly on the curve, hoping that she could maintain enough speed to insert the Blaze in front of the Cadillac racecar.

"Now!" she thought as she came out of the curve and pulled the Blaze into the inner lane.

It didn't work. She was a hairsbreadth behind her opponent's racecar.

"Nooooo," she groaned to herself, fighting down disappointment and desperation.

All too soon, she passed under the Dunlop Tire bridge, heading towards the turn into the Mulsanne straightaway.

She kept the Blaze inhumanly close to the Cadillac in front of her as they approached the turn...

A split-second before the turn sheered into the long straightway, Sora moved a half-length to the left, partly in the outside lane...

"Get him, Sora! Get him!" Keiichi screamed, his racing instincts immediately recognizing what Sora Hasegawa was trying to do. By accelerating out of the curve a split second early, she was setting herself up to duel with the Cadillac on the long straight...with a split second's gain on the other driver's time.

"Go Sora! _Gooooo_!" Megumi screamed, jumping up and down...

Sora said a silent affirmation to the Blaze, telling her to deliver just a few more kph, just this once. Just this one time.

Again she pulled up even with the Cadillac. She snapped her head to the side to see the driver in the other car...and swore that his eyes went wide with recognition.

"That's right! I'm going to send you back to Detroit knowing that you got beat by a _girl_!" she mouthed to him.

The Blaze seemed to hear her taunt...and somehow pulled faster. Sora knew that you could only get so much speed when the pedal plants against the metal...but somehow, if the spirits of the car and driver were in accord...it would be just enough.

The insult to her person..._was_ an insult to their team. Remembering the little christening ritual they performed in the garage, Sora knew that the Blaze was part of the team. She had their blood running through her veins of steel.

"You've been insulted too, girl," she said softly to the console.

Slowly, the Blaze pulled ahead...

When Sora looked to her side, she gasped.

She was _a length-and-a-half_ ahead of the Cadillac!

Sora deftly guided the Blaze to the inside lane and cornered out of the Mulsanne.

"YAAATA!!" she shouted gleefully. The road feverish confidence that had been lost when the Blaze was nicked a half hour ago...had come back to the fore.

In her mind, Sora imagined a proud Keiichi patting her on the head, big-brother style. Then she imagined an even prouder Toshiyuki kissing her on the cheek...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"I can't believe it...she broke _450_ on that straightway!" Chihiro shouted once the cheering died down.

Keiichi looked at his employer-cum-club president with a stunned expression. The Le Mans track record for a top lap speed was 3:29...and Sora was off by only a fraction of a second!

A half hour later, Sora pulled into the pit area in 6th place, having passed _another_ car during her driving shift. Megumi was almost flabbergasted by how quickly her friend had recovered her composure after being winged on the road.

Sora had upped the ante.

The Blaze sported a battle scar, but she was still far from having a retiring disposition. Megumi boasted to herself that the N.I.T. Unified Club had built one _hot_ car! The dispirited melancholy of an hour ago had been replaced by a hopeful optimism. Without warning, Sora had demonstrated that the Blaze was a formidable racecar...with power to spare.

The other racers would be gunning for her.

When Sora emerged from the Blaze, the fans in the stands adjacent to the N.I.T. team's pit roared its approval. Sora blinked back at the loud accolade, noticing that the grandstands had filled up appreciably during her driving shift. The rapid burst of noise and consternation stopped her in her tracks, as it etched into her heart that they were cheering _her_. Her driving effort. Her steadfast composure in the face of near-disaster for her racing team.

Stunned, Sora realized that she had become totally focused on her driving task, employing a concentration that exceeded the degree of strict attention she normally reserved for final exams. Her vigilance had created a quietude of sorts; now, out in the open, she could only feel the waves of indescribable emotions welling up inside of her as the attention poured itself on her.

Surrounded by a forest of smiling faces of her teammates, Sora knew that she had done better than well. She had reached in deeper that she thought was possible...and gave it her best.

A moment later, Toshi hugged her and swung her in the air, his eyes filled with a mountain of joyful pride...

As Megumi strapped herself into the driver's seat, she watched Sora pull her helmet off, looking relieved to be finished with her driving duties. A second later, Toshiyuki playfully splashed Sora with a bottle of water and then hugged her, kissing her on the forehead. She glanced at Genji, who was watching her intently.

"Drive safe!" he mouthed to her...and then Chihiro waved her off to the track.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

After Chihiro watched Megumi pull out, she turned to Sora with a beaming expression of pride. Waiting until Sora and Toshiyuki were finished with their kiss, she came over and gripped the younger girl under her armpits and lifted her up in the air, playfully spinning her around.

Sora was surprised by Chihiro-sempai's sudden exuberance. Chihiro had been a true sensei towards her; stern and admonishing when Sora didn't try hard enough, encouraging when Sora lacked confidence in herself, instructive when Sora didn't know how to handle certain driving situations. Now, she was seeing Chihiro in a new light...her sempai was giddy with an almost maternal sense of pride. Chihiro had been the closest thing to a coach that she had ever had.

"You did great, Sora!!" Chihiro shouted as she stopped spinning her and set Sora down. Sora looked up in the stands, observing that the French spectators were greatly entertained by the womanish display of affection.

"Ooof!" Sora gasped as Tamiya-sempai lifted her up, seemingly ten feet off the ground, and then started swinging her around playfully in an imitation of Chihiro.

"Don't make her motion-sick!" Toshiyuki teased.

"Yuh're da best, lil' Sora! Da best!!" Tamiya shouted, grinning ear-to-ear.

One-by-one, her teammates congratulated exuberantly, bringing her to the brink of tears.

In the midst of the celebratory mood, Sora knew that a certain Ramen shop in Japan was probably resounding with cheers. She felt a shudder of joy as she envisioned her parent's faces...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

There was one other woman driver remaining in Le Mans competition.

One hour into her driving shift, two more entries had been retired due to engine problems. The fact that the race had become easier because the racecourse was much less crowded was misleading; the racers who remained at this point possessed the best drivers and machines. Megumi could palpably sense a tighter focus to the competition.

Megumi knew of this woman, because Keiichi had raced against her younger sister, Diana Lockheed, a few years ago. Along with her boyfriend, David Protor, the younger sister had given Keiichi quite a rattle, both verbally and competitively. With a cocky attitude, the duo had almost defeated Keiichi and Belldandy in a go-cart race and a rally course.

Her older sister, Carla Lockheed, was currently in 4th place.

Even though Keiichi was driving the final piloting shift, Megumi wanted to distinguish herself in some way. Finishing her driving shift ahead of Carla Lockheed would do so.

Pierre Ar Bras had won four of the last six Le Mans. Carla Lockheed had won the Le Mans during the year he 'missed'. She was forever honored as the first woman driver to anchor a team to victory in the Le Mans. It was a fluke...Ar Bras' car had suffered mechanical failure in the last hour of the race. Nevertheless, Carla Lockheed had won the race.

Why she wasn't driving 'clean up' was beyond Megumi. Carla was driving for Porsche Team 3, possibly because she couldn't win with an American team. Perhaps she was relegated to second-to-last shift because she had already won the race. Or because she was an American on a predominately Euro team. Whatever the reason, Megumi knew that she wouldn't be able to live with herself unless she finished her driving shift ahead of Ms. Lockheed.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Keiichi watched his sister feinting with the driver for the Porsche Team 3, jockeying hard to overtake him. Megumi was really trying hard to pass that car! His racing instincts sensed that she was exerting more effort than she should. He was concerned that she might overextend herself...

"It's Carla Lockheed she's after..." Chihiro said, whispering in his ear. Keiichi looked at her with a start.

If Chihiro was in Megumi's position, she knew she would be doing the same thing. Much more sensitive to the arrays of competition, she had immediately picked up on what Megumi was doing. It would be a signal honor for her to pull into the pits ahead of a former Le Mans winner.

And Keiichi hadn't figured it out.

"You're kidding? I thought for sure that she'd be racing on the final stretch!"

"You missed the obvious, kiddo," Chihiro teased. "Just don't miss it when you're driving."

"_C'MON SIS!!_"

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Dig deep, Megumi!" Megumi told herself. The cabin of the Blaze was...well, it was blazing hot. It was almost 11; she had an hour and a half before she turned the driving chores over to Keiichi. She punched up the LEDs for motor and cabin heat once she gained the straightaway.

It was over 45C degrees in the cabin.

Carla Lockheed seemed to read her mind. Every time she tried to gain an edge, whether it was on the Mulsanne straight, or one of the corners...that damned woman anticipated her driving maneuvers and thwarted her.

Twice she had pulled up alongside the Porsche, close enough to see its driver...but she couldn't pass around to gain the lead.

In her mind, Megumi saw Carla Lockheed as the enemy. No...she wasn't the enemy per se; she was just an obstacle. A roadblock. Megumi was frustrated, and the sweat that occasionally dripped in her eyes with stinging irritation didn't help matters. But after driving for over an hour, she had gained no ground. They were still in 5th place.

Not only was Megumi being outclassed by her competitor, she was losing valuable time. She _had_ to hand the Blaze over to her brother with a 4th or 3rd place standing. She gripped her gloved hands tighter on the steering wheel.

"Try and let it soak out of your mind, Megumi. Don't think of her as a Le Mans winner. Don't see her as your personal enemy. Don't demonize her as an unbeatable obstacle...every woman_ can_ be beat. It's possible to do this..."

It had become a duel.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --


	64. Pt 64: Ground Control Axialities

**Part 64: Ground Control Axialities**

Keiichi watched with bated breath as his sister tried again and again to pull ahead of Carla Lockheed. He could almost sense her frustration as if it was his own, lumbering deep in the pit of his stomach. He looked behind him, noticing that the more seasoned fans sitting in the stands by their racing pit were drawn to the videoscreen displaying the intense attempts by Megumi as she tried to out vie the Porsche.

He recalled his own competition with Carla Lockheed's younger sister four years ago, when he was a freshman at N.I.T. Diana Lockheed obviously worshipped her older sister. Gracious in defeat after he and Bell-chan beat the American entry in the go-cart race, she spoke in glowing terms about "Carla this, Carla that," at the party after the race. The Lockheed's were an American racing institution, in much the same vein as families like the Andrettis, the Earnhardts and the Unsers. Diana Lockheed had confided in him after she lost the mini-truck rally that she hoped that her sister would someday race and win the Le Mans.

Carla Lockheed had done just that the following year, surprising everybody.

Diana Lockheed also told him that Carla had nerves of steel and a deep well of patient experience to draw upon. As Keiichi remembered it, she had mentioned that her older sister had won the American Motocross Circuit overall title when she was 17.

Megumi was the local neighborhood motorcycle champ.

That pretty summed it up as far as comparisons were concerned.

His sister was way outclassed.

Yet she kept trying. As he watched the giant grandstand videoscreens displaying the racing duel between the two women, he saw Megumi bank inwards as they approached the Indy Curves. Once again, Carla Lockheed banked apace with her, not sparing her an inch.

There are a number of tried and true methods a driver can use to pass an opponent in a race. One was trying to outrun them on the straightaway. However, in a race like the Le Mans where the machines had to meet strict technical standards that forced them to be closely matched in power displacement and speed, overpowering a competitor was virtually impossible. This fact typified the reason why the Le Mans was considered as the ultimate test of the driver's mettle and skills, besides challenging the endurability of the racecars. Another method that was usually effectual in a race was to jockey for position in a pack, which was pretty much a lame duck technique at this point in the Le Mans with two-thirds of the competition retired; the remaining dozen cars were spread out over the 13-kilometer course.

Another way was to drive with patience, shaving off portions of seconds by pursuing the turns at their exact insertion points; this pace was painstaking and thorough, but it resulted in a gradual catching up with the other car. Another viable driving technique was to try and 'drop in' ahead of an opponent. This strategy required more risk...and more speed...as the driver would negotiate a corner or curve on the outer lane. But once the corner smoothed into a straightaway, that increased speed transformed into an asset. If the other driver was just a bit reserved during their cornering, the difference of speed upon emerging from the corner would allow the car on the outside lane to pass the slower car on the inside lane, yielding an opportunity to cut into the innermost lane ahead of their competitor. Yet another method was to try and tuck in on the inside of the opponent's car right as it entered the curve. If the other driver was careless enough to allow a lane's worth of space on the inside, centrifugal force would 'pull' speed out of their car, while a driver could underlane them. By gaining the inside lane and driving a little faster than usual, the competitor's car would be outdistanced; especially if the opponent slowed down enough, either from fear of a collision, or from being unexpectedly cut off from the advantageous shorter inside lane position.

Megumi had tried all of these strategies without success.

"You could always hope for the engine failure method," Keiichi thought bitterly. Only a racing 'gremlin', or a totally stupid and sloppy driving mistake, would enable his sister to gain position over Carla Lockheed. And Keiichi _knew_ that Lockheed was much too skilled of a driver to make that kind of screwup.

The inevitable consideration of retirement by accident...was definitely a rule-out. The only other car Lockheed could collide with was Megumi's Blaze. Also, since his sister was pursuing Lockheed so closely; if there _was_ an accident, Meg could never avoid being part of it. Any logic aside, wishing for the other driver to have an accident was the lowest form of rivalry, in Keiichi's esteem. Yet it sometimes crept into the back of the mind of every driver...at least every driver who was honest enough to admit to it. Unlike his sempai, who would openly wish for an accident which would enable their team to gain an opening, Keiichi _never_ wished for that kind of mishap. He would regard the thought briefly, challenged it as unsporting and cruel, and then go on to consider other possibilities.

"Come to think of it, it was only during my first year at N.I.T. that Tamiya and Ootaki were like this...always wishing that the competition would get in an accident. They must have matured out of it!" he remembered. The last time he could remember them talking about this was during Belldandy's shift during the go-cart race...

No one wants an accident in a race. Yet, the _potential_ for an accident was one aspect that made racing so thrilling to participants and spectators.

"Go figure," Keiichi muttered to himself as Lockheed fought off another attempt by Megumi to pass her opponent. As the videoscreen cut to an aerial view, he noticed that the two entries were gaining on the third place car, a Ferrari. Surveying the rest of his Unified Club teammates, he noticed that Sora, Chihiro and Sayoko in particular had fixed their attention on the dueling racers. As he watched them watch the race, he realized that they were gripped tighter by the drama that the others, as if an invisible hand had grabbed them. Standing off a distance from everyone else, they were almost shoulder-to-shoulder as they stood on the paintline separating the racing pit from the racetrack. The three reminded him of how Bell-chan, Urd and Skuld always seemed to stand close together when they were feeling insecure.

"It must be a 'women thing'," he observed to himself with an inward smile as he regarded the three. Sayoko's waist-length hair billowed in the swirling trackside winds, in contrast to Chihiro and Sora's closely clipped pert hairdos. True, in most sports, women were segregated because their smaller physical stature made head-to-head competition with men unrealistic. But that didn't make them second rate athletes. He remembered the Sydney Olympics; during the inaugural Women's Marathon, the Japanese contestant Naoko Takahashi had made a last-ditch supreme effort and won the event...even though she was definitely not favored to win.

What seemed to engage his female teammates was the fact that one of their own gender was in the fight of her life.

Some people second-classed women athletes because they couldn't swim as fast, run as fast or jump as high as the men. Keiichi detested this chauvinist attitude. Does a woman sprinter train any less than her male counterpart in preparation for a race? Is she incapable of reaching deep inside herself to give a career best effort? Do the teenage girls that compete in gymnastics have less stamina or heart than the male shot-putter?

To Keiichi, the answer was obvious. He remembered his sister training hard for her softball team in middle school. More recently, Megumi had ridden her bike an average of 200Km a week, training for her upcoming Tokyo-Osaka long distance bike ride. He knew that Megumi just wouldn't give up on herself.

She had what it takes.

He just hoped that, for once, she could come out on top. He had comforted her when her middle school team lost the Chiba Prefectural finals. And then years later, when their patchwork team was defeated by the N.I.T. men's baseball team, he assuaged her bruised pride again.

As Megumi approached in the Blaze, he looked on Sora and the others screamed encouragement, making bullhorns out their slender hands as they shouted shrilly at the top of their voices. He knew Megumi couldn't see them, couldn't hear them...she would be busy concentrating on the upcoming Dunlop Curves. Yet, he sensed that their enthusiasm would somehow be transmitted...as if by radio waves...to Megumi. Giving her just a little bit more of a push.

Then he heard-high pitched screaming behind him as Megumi passed their pit. Bell-chan and her sisters were really getting into this driving match between Megumi and Carla Lockheed too!

The crowd was roaring even louder with each passing of the two women's cars.

Keiichi shuddered as he realized that he had his hands clenched over his heart, emulating Belldandy's 'worried-style' stance. He quickly glanced around to see if any of the guys had noticed him in this embarrassing posture. Fortunately, they were all staring at the track or the vidscreen, not at him.

"Whew!" he sighed as he unclenched his hands and flexed them, as if to shake off the uncomely moment of embarrassment.

Instead of putting on his race face, here he was, emotionally engaged in his sister's struggle. And it was draining him...oh it was draining him!

"So what if it does drain me? That's my _sister_ out there, giving it her best!" he admonished himself. A guy can be _too_ sensible sometimes...

"C'mon Megumi...dig deep!" he shouted...a tardy half-minute after she had passed by.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Six laps to go before she turned the Blaze over to Keiichi.

The Blaze was running as hot as a waffle toaster. Megumi was definitely worried that the engine was overheating...

A few meters ahead, Carla Lockheed was ignoring her. Instead, it appeared that Lockheed was trying to pass the car ahead of her and slide into third place. As they raced into the short straightway leading to the grandstands, Megumi noticed that Carla was riding high on curve, trying to drop in on the third place driver when the curve straightened.

Megumi guessed that the space separating Carla's Porsche and the Ferrari she was trying to overtake was about a car-and-a-half in width.

"Ignore me, huh? Well...watch this!" Megumi shouted.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"She's crazy! She's gone nuts! She's going to kill herself!" Keiichi screamed in utter panic, pointing towards the video display like a madman.

At the end of the Mulsanne straight, when Carla Lockheed pulled to the outside lane to try and gather momentum so she could sweep to the inside and pass the Ferrari...Megumi had stepped up, inserting the Blaze _between_ the two cars.

The cars were now three abreast on a two-lane curving roadway.

The whole N.I.T Unified Club had become muted, riveted with a nadir of tense concern. Even the grandstand crowd behind them was hushed with suspense and concern. Between the Mulsanne straight and the grandstand straight was several kilos of extremely curved road and racetrack.

He turned and looked at Genji. When their eyes met, he saw crisp terror in Meg's boyfriend's eyes. Genji's fear served to redouble his own dread of Megumi getting in an accident. Feeling stung to the core by the depth of Genji's panic, he quickly sought out Belldandy, too scared for his sister's safety to watch the videoscreen any longer. He looked into his beloved's eyes, trying to seek relief from the churning apprehension.

Belldandy met his eyes, and unexpectedly, broke into a small demure smile.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Megumi fought to keep herself from looking side-to-side out the passenger's windows in a panic. She knew that less than a meter or so separated her from both Carla Lockheed and the Ferrari. They might even be just a few cm apart! She wanted to see how close the other cars were...and yet she didn't.

She didn't want to think about the kinetic energy that would be expended if a three-car accident occurred on a curve.

She had wedged herself tightly between the third and fourth place drivers. Curve for curve, she kept between them, no longer content to shadow the two racers.

Threading the needle.

They couldn't drive this way forever. Negotiating a series of narrow curves on a road meant for two lanes was outright suicide for _three_ racecars. Every second was absolutely dangerous. Megumi had thought that they would back down once they realized the risky situation she had forced upon them. But like true competitors, Lockheed and the Third Place Guy held their positions with grit. But eventually, someone would have to cave in to the pressure. One of the three would have to give in to their fears and slow down, in order to prevent all three cars from piling up.

Megumi knew that it wasn't going to be her.

She felt the Blaze shudder as one of the other cars bumped against it. Just a nick, just a slight bump...and yet the whole frame of her car seemed to jerk like an earthquake.

The zigzag curves were coming up.

Hauling the steering with all her might, Megumi whip-turned the wheel, her hand-over-hand steering almost a blur. To do this, she had to totally ignore everything except the track.

Two shadows on each side of her, darkening her peripheral vision.

And yet...it seemed like one shadow was pulling back. There was more light coming in through the driver's side window.

Megumi upshifted and poured it on...

"GOTTA DO IT NOW!!" she snarled.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Something about that enigmatic smile caused Genji to look back at the videoscreen. He had seen a look of sheer fright in Keiichi's eyes right before he looked at Belldandy. It was like he had been jolted with electricity...in the space of a couple seconds, he had caught everyone's expression as he tried to seek comfort from his own torturous panic.

Megumi-chan's brother looked like he was staring death in the face. Genji knew that the source of his concern for Megumi was worlds away from Keiichi's...but his own sense of dread was nonetheless just as gripping.

And then he saw Keiichi looking at Belldandy. He followed Keiichi's lead...and saw that Belldandy was smiling.

With pride? With confidence? With fearlessness?

In a split-second, his own fear had unbelievably vanished. He did a 180 spin on his heels to look at the videoscreen.

"The power of a Goddess," Genji thought to himself as he noticed that the Ferrari seemed to hesitate, slowing down slightly than speeding up. The driver couldn't seem to make his mind up, he sensed.

The image on the screen faded to a helicopter cam, showing an overhead view of a blue car and a green car...with a steel gray car in between them. From hundreds of feet in the air, the three cars looked like they had been welded together, doorframe to doorframe...

The grand straightaway was less than a minute away.

The three cars hugged tight to each other, taking the hairpin turns at a much faster clip than the cars a few hundred meters ahead of them had done.

Totally dangerously absolutely recklessly stupidly...

The Blaze pulled ahead, just slightly.

And then the Ferrari visibly slowed down...

"C'mon Megumi, take her! TAKE HER!" he heard Chihiro scream.

Genji gasped, choking on his breath as Megumi pulled ahead even more...taking advantage of the moment...and then guided the Blaze cautiously towards the inside lane. As the overhead camera closed up on the three cars, the videoscreen display took on a surreality, as time seemed to slow down while he watched Megumi maneuvering the Blaze, barely a meter away from the Ferrari. Then she was halfway into the inner lane...and then she was hugging the inside of the track. In _front_ of the Ferrari! Right behind her was the Porsche, trying to move ahead of both cars. But Megumi pulled ahead even further...slowly but surely. And when the three cars hit the straightaway, the Blaze pulled ahead even further, at least two car lengths! And Lockheed had to settle in to the inside lane behind Megumi to keep from being slotted out by the Ferrari as it pulled itself towards the inner lane.

"You did it! You did it, Megumi, you crazy idiot! I don't believe it! You did it!" he shouted, jumping up and down with abandon as the Blaze started to pull away from the other two cars. The N.I.T. pit erupted in sheer craziness all around him. People were slapping him on the shoulder in recognition of his girlfriend's feat as everybody was jumping, pounding their fists above their heads, hugging, screaming, swinging jackets, throwing towels into the air...

Behind, in the grandstand, the crowd was going nuts...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Megumi had gritted her teeth so tightly that her jaw hurt. For a few seconds, she wasn't even sure it was _she_ who was driving the Blaze.

It had all happened so fast.

As soon as the Ferrari gave a sign of slowing down, she _accelerated_, impossibly turning through the winding curves with superhuman agility...pulling ahead...banking inwards, trying to get in front of the car on her right.

She slotted into the inside lane and floored the Blaze a split-second before gaining the straightaway, praying that the Blaze would hang tight, so she could pull her car a little ways ahead of the two cars jockeying for the spot behind her.

By the time she passed under the giant Dunlop tire, Megumi realized what she had just done.

She had outdriven the other two drivers on sheer guts.

It had taken everything she had to batten down her fear, reach inside of herself and win the test of wills.

But it was a Pyrrhic victory, as steam started to pour out of the hood of the Blaze...

"Once I finish two more laps, I'll pull you into the pit. I promise!" she said to the Blaze, deciding not to give even a second up by slowing down.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Shit, it's overheated! What are going to _do_?" Keiichi shouted as he saw the close-up of the Blaze on the videoscreen, the front end of their car venting _a lot_ of steam. They had just experienced a true moment, a perfect moment of prideful exuberance at Megumi's feat...and now, two laps later...this.

Megumi was going to have to pit stop a couple laps early.

Chihiro thought fast, refusing to be crushed under the rapid changes churning up her mood.

"Megumi's going to pit stop in less than two minutes...and we've gotta do something! Think, Fujimi, think!" she said to herself, trying to step outside of the emotional rollercoaster that was swamping everybody.

"Dammit, dammit, dammit...we were so close!" she heard several Club members cursing, already resigned to fate.

They were losing it.

Every second mattered now...

"Everybody! Grab a cooler or a box and head to the stands! Hurry!" she shouted.

"Whadda we going for, Boss?" Tamiya said as he hefted two big empty grease pails in each hand.

"Ice!! I want you guys to get every bit of ice you can get from the fans up there!"

"Ah'm on it!" Tamiya shouted without batting a lash.

In the next twenty seconds or so, she watched as the Club members clambered over the rim of the wall that formed the back of their racing pit, and then fanned out among the spectators. At first, following Tamiya and Toshiyuki's lead, they just started grabbing beers, waters and sodas from the astonished fans, apologizing with little nods of their heads. A chorus of "gomenasai's" and "sumimasen's" reached Chihiro's ears. Whatever they saw that had ice in it, they snagged it and poured it into coolers, cardboard boxes, toolboxes and pails. Almost immediately, the crowd figured out what they were doing. In a remarkable show of goodwill, the predominantly French crowd started _offering_ their iced drinks, running down from their seats and crowding around the N.I.T. racing team...tossing their ice into whatever container was proffered.

"C'mon, c'mon, c'mon!!" Chihiro shouted as Megumi slowed down to pull into the pit.

Already, full cases of ice were making their way down towards the pit, sloshing an admixture of liquids over their rims as they were roughly hauled by the now-soaked N.I.T. Unified Club members. In the space of minute, they had been splashed aplenty by errant throws of iced drinks.

Megumi looked at the half-empty pit in amazement as she steered the Blaze into it. Where _are_ they? Where's the pit crew? What's going on? She had expected an edgy-but-animated pit crew...

As soon as Blaze came to a stop, the front end billowed wafts of whitish steam. With a sinking heart, Megumi looked at her teammates, who were jumping off the ledge of the grandstand with buckets and boxes.

"What the hell are they doing?" she thought as she unbelted herself and pop-lifted the canopy.

The heat of the steam almost stung her as she opened the canopy door.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Quickly! Over here!" Chihiro shouted, waving her arms, encouraging her team. As Megumi climbed out of the Blaze, she looked at their Club President with a "what is going on?" expression.

Chihiro grabbed a towel and wrapped it around her face, bandit-style, while she barked instructions. With her cap pulled down tight on her brow and a towel covering her face from the eyes down, Chihiro walked over and ripped the racing goggles right off of an astonished Megumi's head. She wanted to praise the younger girl for her gutsy driving performance, but there was no time...

"What are you doing?! What are you doing?!" Megumi shouted at her, totally confused and somewhat angry at the rough way Chihiro had pulled off her goggles. Chihiro ignored her, pushing between her and the Blaze.

"Tamiya, Ootaki, spring the hood! The rest of you guys, start putting ice in the cabin and the trunk!" Chihiro yelled out through the towel.

The two big guys cautiously stood a couple meters away and used an extensible rod to poke the spring lever. Even more steam erupted out in huge clouds. Chihiro stepped right in front of it, bearing the full brunt of the steam, searching blindly with her hands. She couldn't see a thing...the racing goggles were already steamed over.

Ootaki, being the second-best mechanic on the crew, second only to Chihiro...immediately knew what she was looking for. And it was utterly insane, even by his standards.

"Chihiro, you can't! Stop!! Don't do it! The radiator is too hot to be opened! You'll get burned!" he shouted desperately.

"No Boss! Yuh can't do this!" Chihiro heard Tamiya bellow in anguished desperation as her fingers closed around the radiator cap. She felt a pair of strong hands try to grab her by the shoulders. Shrugging them off, she turned and pushed Tamiya back with a superhuman thrust of her free hand, her thoughts silently thanking him for his effort.

She closed her eyes and gritted her teeth...

"EEEEEEEYYYYYYYOWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW!!"

As soon as she reached down into the steamfog with both hands and turned the cap, hot fingers of pain licked up her arms, wresting a scream from her. It hurt like nothing Chihiro had ever felt before. Her hands felt like they were on fire. Her head felt like it was spinning. She could sense her chest and stomach burning. The front of her jumpsuit was soaked with boiling hot water as she bore the full brunt of the venting overheat from the radiator.

"Oh my god it hurts it hurts it hurts!!" her mind circuited as waves of pain continued to hammer her, her eyes tearing up from searing sensation that seemed to soak into her hands and arms.

Keiichi couldn't believe what he just saw. Knowing that the radiator would blast her with superhot radiator fluid and water, Chihiro had _opened it up anyway_ so the overheated cooling system could be flushed as quickly as possible. Le Mans rules allowed only so much water to be added to the radiator. No coolant was to be used whatsoever

But the rules didn't say a thing about ice.

As the steam started to abate, Chihiro staggered back from the front of the Blaze, almost passing out.

"Pack the engine compartment with the ice! Pour the ice in the radiator..." she hissed through red blankets of agony.

Keiichi was standing by the driver's side of the Blaze, holding his racing helmet at his side, dumbfounded. Chihiro's hands and forearms were _steaming_...in the summer air!

Chihiro reached up and clumsily pushed the racing goggles and cap off of her face with her forearm and elbow. Her hands were too rawburned to touch anything...

Keiichi was staring at her, like a deer in the headlights.

"Don't just stand there, Keiichi! Get in your car and win this race for us, goddammit!" she shouted at him. The intense pain had finally taken its toll, as she realized she had just fired off on their best driver.

Her whole body was shaking like a leaf...

Keiichi snapped out of his fugue, almost wanting to cry with boyish camaraderie, ashamed at his momentary paralysis. Pulling his helmet on, he wordlessly climbed into the Blaze and cocked the canopy shut, scanning the cockpit. He punched up the heat indicators and held his breath.

They were down...way down! They had managed to cool the engine down by at least a third.

"Chihiro, I'm going to win this race for you!" he promised. "I'm going to win it for all of us!"

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

It was, simply put, the longest five minutes of Chihiro's life. She knew that her hands and arms were badly burned. At least she had the foresight to cover her face and eyes. She had been sprayed with several gallons of fluid, mostly in condensed steam form, within a short few seconds.

Fighting to keep on her feet, she watched as the N.I.T Unified Club packed the engine compartment to bursting with ice. In less than three minutes, they had cooled the engine down enough so the Blaze was roadworthy again. She just hoped that the rapid cooldown hadn't cracked any of the hose assemblies or the radiator itself.

As Keiichi pulled out of the pit, she raised a hand and tried to wave to him...and then staggerwalked a couple meters to the right. Fitting herself snuggly between Tamiya and Ootaki, she practically collapsed against their chests.

"Oh God...it hurts so much," she sobbed, resting between her two tall male protégés. She just wanted to be weak for a moment, to feel the security of being harbored in the safest place in the universe she knew, between her two stalwart junior club members...as she was overcome by dizziness...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Belldandy knew that she could heal Chihiro in a split second with a few words of song. Urd knew that a simple wave of her hand would take away the pain, as if it had never happened. Skuld knew that with the press of a button on one of her Skuld Bombs, she could create a dampening field, which would short-circuit the afferent pain impulses in Chihiro's nerves while cooling her skin.

But all three Goddesses held themselves in check. Chihiro had looked right at them, her eyes demanding them not to interfere. Then she had staggered over and semi-fainted right in between Tamiya and Ootaki. As much as it pained her to see the young mortal woman suffering from her steam burns, Belldandy knew that she shouldn't do anything. She also knew that Chihiro was surrounded by the people who loved her the most. She allowed herself a brief smile; Chihiro seeking out Tamiya and Ootaki for comfort at this moment was confirmation of just how tight the bond was between the three. Even more so than any of them realized.

Take away Chihiro's pain...and it would steal away her dignity.

"Sometimes, being a Goddess sucks," Skuld observed out of the blue, kicking a wrench that was lying on the ground. Belldandy looked at her for a moment, the full impact of Skuld's statement gripping her.

"Yes, my dear sister. Our path isn't always so easy, is it? And yet, irony of ironies...some of the Earthrealm mortals would deem us as the 'Fates'," she replied. Skuld was becoming _so_ mature in some ways...before, she would have simply ignored Chihiro.

"Tragic, isn't it?" Urd noted.

With Tamiya and Ootaki comforting her, Chihiro turned her head and smiled at Belldandy through gritted teeth, her smile thankful that the Goddess hadn't used her powers.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

She was too tired to see a doctor. She just wanted to be here, safe with the two men who were the closest thing to boyfriends that she had ever known in her life.

"Yuh gotta get checked by da doctor _now_!" Tamiya said, his voice tinged with just enough irritation to let Chihiro know that he wasn't kidding, that he wouldn't take "no" for an answer. Normally cowed by Chihiro, the big guy had reversed the roles for once.

"Either you go get treated, or we're going to _drag_ you to the ambulance!" Ootaki threatened. Both men said "_humph!!_" and nodded their heads in emphasis.

Chihiro reluctantly relented. In any other situation, she would have blasted them for their arrogance...but this wasn't one of those times. Tamiya had risked getting himself burned to pull her away from the radiator right before she pulled the cap. And Ootaki had actually _threatened_ her!

The boys were serious on this one.

They gently walked her over to a bench and she sat down. Rather, she just simply dropped dead on her feet. She would have crashed down onto the bench, but Tamiya and Ootaki eased her down to a sitting position once her feet went out from under her. Chihiro noticed that the doctor had already been waiting.

Sayoko didn't have to summon him in French to get him to come over, but she did anyway. She winced as he said he was going to have to get Chihiro's gloves off right away. Using a pair of scissors, he cut the gloves open.

Chihiro almost screamed as he pulled off her gloves, it felt like her hands were getting boiled all over again.

Her fingers, her hands, her wrist and part of her forearm were blistered dark red.

Tamiya and Ootaki both gasped as the doctor cut open the sleeves of Chihiro's coveralls, exposing more burns. All they could do was shake their heads in concern...

"You should go to a hospital," Genji translated for the French doctor.

"NO! I'm staying right here! Just patch me up enough to make it through the rest of the day," Chihiro demanded.

After Genji and Sayoko explained to the doctor that she was the team leader, he agreed while shaking his head sadly. Having worked at the Le Mans for over 30 years, he had seen his share of bravado in the race pits and on the track. But this incident took the cake, if the comments from the other team members were to believed. Certainly, this Japanese woman's burns were to be believed. He demanded that he dress her burns in the ambulance, reasoning that her whole front was no doubt burned as well, probably first-degree burns.

Megumi had heard what had happened after the fact. After finishing her shift with a brilliant, yet foolhardy exhibition of sheer tenacity and skill, the team had utterly ignored her. They were dashing around like bees attacking a rodent that had stumbled on their hive. There was white steam everywhere. She decided that the best thing she could do was to get out of the way. Besides, she was mentally exhausted; her nerves had been thoroughly rattled during the last few laps of the race, driving the overheated Blaze.

She sat down on the bench, and a moment later she saw Chihiro leaning against Tamiya and Ootaki, in so much pain that her knees were shaking.

Genji filled her in on what had happened...

And now Chihiro was sitting on the bench next to her, encircled by concerned teammates. Megumi didn't want to look at those burns, didn't want to see the stark realism of Chihiro's injuries...

"Hey Megumi, don't ever pull a driving stunt like that again! Or you're out of the Club!" Chihiro said, her voice serious.

Megumi's face fell. She expected _praise_, not condemnation! Then she noticed Chihiro's lips quivering as she suppressed a smile.

Chihiro thought the look on Megumi's face in reaction to her admonition was priceless; the shocked expression giving her a few seconds reprieve from the agony she felt...

It took a few seconds for Megumi to realize that Chihiro was joking around with her. It amazed her that Chihiro, despite her injuries, could still be playful.

"Gotchya!" Chihiro observed. Despite her extreme discomfort, Chihiro was very proud of the N.I.T. senior. It took away some of the pain, knowing that Megumi had outmaneuvered the first woman to win the Le Mans...pulling into the pit in a solid third place. Her extra effort may have salvaged what would have otherwise been a futile attempt. In fact, she may have made it possible for them to win the Le Mans. Keiichi would be hard pressed to make up time and distance and pass the two leaders...but to overtake four cars would be almost impossible for anyone, even Keiichi.

If Chihiro could, she would have tousled Megumi's hair with sisterly affection. Since she couldn't, she paid her the ultimate compliment instead.

"Megumi, frankly, if I was in your place...I could have never pulled off a driving stunt like that. I'm really impressed with your clinch driving performance," Chihiro praised. Sora and Sayoko looked stunned, while Megumi looked at her with an unfathomable expression before turning her head away.

"Gotchya again!" Chihiro thought, knowing that Megumi had turned her head away because she was starting to cry. Then Megumi turned back to look and Chihiro and leaned over, hugging her.

"Careful!" both Sayoko and Sora shouted.

"I'm okay, I'm okay!" Chihiro protested as Megumi sobbed on her shoulder. Even the doctor was touched by the scene in front of him...even though he couldn't understand the words, he could feel the depths of the emotions.

"You should be an actress, not a middle-aged tomboy," Megumi said into Chihiro's ear. She felt Chihiro shudder slightly.

"Gotchya back!" she added.

The ability to tease each other under duress was one of the hallmarks of the N.I.T. Unified Club. Megumi didn't have to see Chihiro's face to know that her remark had snapped her. The giggles she heard from Sora and the others confirmed it...Chihiro must have pulled quite a shockscowled expression.

With Sayoko, Megumi and Sora alongside her, Chihiro walked towards the waiting ambulance.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Chihiro's courageous sacrifice was burned into Keiichi's conscience as he gained the track. The N.I.T. Unified Club was in third place. Even though Megumi had pulled in the pit with a ten-second lead over the other two cars, they hadn't lost any time. The final pit stop was always the longest, because it was the last chance. Sort of like the "last gas station for 100 kilometers" motif that was portrayed in one of those American 'road adventure' movies.

There were two racecars ahead of him. Both of them were Porsches.

One of them was Pierre Ar Bras.

"It's time to see if the legend is for real," Keiichi said, steeling himself for the race of his life. In order to win the Le Mans, he would have to beat the best driver on the planet. His car would have to outlast the best corporate technology on the planet. In sum, Keiichi would have to beat himself.

If the Blaze overheated again, it was all over.

If he gave anything less than his personal best...they would lose.

The second place car was 30 seconds up on him, while Ar Bras had almost a two-minute lead time. It was doable, but there was no room for mistakes. Keiichi would have to drive a perfect race to win.

Three hours left. It was already 1pm.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Within an hour, Keiichi had managed to pass the second place Porsche. Chihiro and the others cheered as they watched the small TV in the ambulance where she was being tended. The doctor had wrapped her chest with gauze...her whole front looked like it had been sunburned a dark red. Looking at herself, Chihiro was reminded of the women warriors in samurai movies and anime whose breasts were wrapped tight against their chests, so they could pass themselves off as men.

Sora picked up on this fact and started calling her "Jubei-chan".

"Brave girl, for calling me that! If I weren't so jittery as the result of being in some degree of physical shock, you wouldn't get away with this. I would personally rejoin you with a verbal slaughtering that you wouldn't soon forget. You're just an N.I.T. sophomore..." she thought to herself, amused at Sora's cheekiness. But Chihiro had to admit it _was_ funny, as she regarded her reflection in the side of a metal cabinet.

"I'm a half-mummy," she sighed out loud, letting Sora off the hook.

The French doctor had covered her hands and arms in some clear red goo after spraying her burns with topical anesthetic. The bandaging process was fascinating in one sense, once the local anesthetic kicked in and removed the pain.

"Your arms are going to probably be scarred for the rest of your life," Sayoko translated the doctor's concerned words while he worked on her.

"Wanna bet?" Megumi quipped, causing the doc to raise an eyebrow.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

The crowd in the section by the N.I.T. racing pit gave Chihiro a rousing cheer as she gamely returned to her team.

Ootaki and Tamiya gently hugged her, both noticing that her hands were entirely wrapped in white bandages. She had given so much for this team over the past several months...and now she had braved personal injury.

"How's Keiichi doing?" she asked.

"45 seconds," Toshiyuki answered. "He's got a chance if he drives flawlessly."

After being regaled by her teammates, all Chihiro could do was watch the scoreboards and videoscreen...and wait. Winning this race would be an act of true greatness, even if it meant defeating her racing idol, Pierre Ar Bras.

She winced as she rested her arms against the fence. Regardless of being dosed with anesthetics, it still stung. The doctor had offered her some kind of strong European painkiller whose name she couldn't pronounce, but Chihiro declined. She didn't want to be lollyheaded for the finish of the race, all doped up with analgesic mindnumbers.

"You know...you _could_ spare the 'tough girl' act and ask for help with that pain, Chihiro! Despite the fact that I normally relish seeing mortals gripped by personal trauma, oddly enough...I really don't enjoy watching you make yourself suffer so. So do yourself a favor and let them help you."

"Who the hell's that?" Chihiro shouted, looking over her shoulder to find the source of the unfamiliar voice. It sounded close, as if someone was speaking directly into her ear.

"Hell doesn't even begin to describe who I am and where I come from!" the voice said with a snarl. Chihiro shuddered at this, and then continued to look for whoever had spoken so brazenly to her. And for a moment, she thought she saw a woman with wildly curly long locks of hair, dressed in red coveralls, floating in the air...the sight of her intensely red eyes burning fear into Chihiro's mind...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Uh...I guess I'll take you three up on your offer to help. I mean I would really appreciate it if one of you would relieve the pain I'm feeling," Chihiro asked Belldandy, Urd and Skuld. All three Goddesses responded with relieved smiles. Chihiro reflected for a moment, intuiting that perhaps it may have been egoistic of her to refuse their offer of help. After all, she thought...how would _she_ feel if she had the capacity to provide aid, and yet be unable to render assistance.

"But I don't want you to heal me, I just want you to take away the pain," she added.

"Chihiro, we couldn't heal you right now anyway, now that you've seen an Earthrealm doctor. We're on _that_ screen over there," Urd said as she pointed to the grandstand. Chihiro flinched when she saw herself on the videoscreen. The image looked terrible...

She saw herself...and she looked just like the hell she had been through. Her frustration mounted as she wondered why the race video team had to video her so closely now that she was some kind of heroine...

"Yeah, it would just be a little _too_ blatant of a miracle, huh?" she agreed. It was still hard for Chihiro to accept the reality that these three women were Goddesses. When she had first found out the truth during that time at Keiichi's house, it felt like a spy had stolen state secrets from under her nose. She had worked with Belldandy and Keiichi for over a year during the Whirlwind days, before she turned the shop over to Tamiya and Ootaki for safekeeping while she went to America to get her advanced engineering degree. Circumstances always tended toward the unusual whenever she was around Keiichi, but she resigned her curiosity to the fact that he must have been born under a lucky star.

Yet all this time, she had been close friends with a divine being...

"And if these three are Goddesses...then what...who...did I see just a moment ago?" she wondered, shuddering with the thought that, since there are Goddesses...there must be Demons and Demonesses. That woman...sure did look like a female Demon. Not the Oni kind, for she was too human-looking. But her fiery red-orange eyes...

"I'll do it!" Skuld shouted, whipping out a small geodesic-shaped device from inside her coveralls and pressing a green button on it.

"About time you came around," Urd said, waving her hands in front of Chihiro with in a complicated pattern that reminded her of movements she saw in a documentary on NHK about esoteric Tibetan Buddhism.

"My dear Chihiro, of course I would be glad to relieve your discomfort," Belldandy said cheerfully, closing her eyes and half-singing, half-speaking some mystical language Chihiro had never heard before.

A moment later, the pain was gone. Totally gone.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

After Chihiro walked back to the edge of the pit facing the track, Urd turned to Belldandy and Skuld.

"_Which_ side is she on? I mean, Mara. During this entire race, I've had this ineluctable sense that she was definitely going to perform some mischief. Instead, that oddball Demoness keeps doing _niceties_! It's as if she's somehow deluded herself into believing that it's the end-of-the-year holiday truce! Either she's losing it, or she's betraying a sentimental side that we haven't as yet encountered."

"Mara having a soft side? No way! What'd she do now?" Skuld inquired.

"Skuld, Mara is a _Senior_ First Class Demoness. She can conceal herself in a stealth mode spell so powerful that even you, a First Class Licensee, would never be able to notice her presence," Belldandy explained patiently.

"Not to mention that you're a total novice when it comes to Goddess First Class License powers and privileges," Urd cooed.

"_Sooo?_ If I had..." Skuld retorted, catching herself before she could articulate some of the dozen insults that popped into her thoughts. She immediately regretted the fact that she had to bail on both Banpeis and Sigel, who remained behind in Makuhari. On the heels of this realization chased a gripping rivet of homesickness. Tomohisa had done pretty well in his role as caretaker for the three robots, but she missed her robotic companions almost as much as she missed him.

"_Almost_ as much?" Urd said aloud, reading Skuld's thoughts, much to her chagrin. "You miss Banpei-kun almost as much as Tomo..."

"You shut your mouth! It's none of your beeswax!" Skuld interrupted, her cheeks flushing red.

"Urd, now is not the time to be teasing Skuld! We have more important matters to concern us, such as Mara's enigmatic actions," Belldandy interjected, hoping the fodder of her sister's sibling rivalry wouldn't be reignited once again.

"Before I got sidetracked by this _old lady_, I asked 'what did Mara do?'" Skuld noted, taking a freebie shot at Urd. Urd scrunched her face up at the insult, but cooled her jets as she realized that Skuld was just acting bratty...and trading insult for insult with her would just be swallowing the bait.

"It was Mara who convinced Chihiro to come over to ask us to remove her pain," Urd answered Skuld's question, all business now.

"Which still doesn't explain why she hasn't blown something up, or something," Skuld commented.

"If _that_ comment doesn't flush Mara out in the open, I don't know what will," Belldandy thought with a roll of her eyes, expecting Mara to appear at any moment.

But she didn't.

Evidently Mara...wherever she was...apparently was ignoring Skuld's brash remark. For the next hour, nothing untoward happened.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Keiichi had Ar Bra's Porsche in his sights. He had shaved off a second or two with each lap by pushing his skills to the limit. His driving had finally settled into a rhythm, despite the acrid smell of a blend of soda, beer, wine and juice reeking up the interior of the Blaze. Chihiro's strategy of cooling down the cockpit was necessary; if the engine ran hot again, the driver would be subject to very uncomfortable conditions inside the car. Having a plexiglas bubble canopy made the Blaze more streamlined, but it was a design tradeoff...there were no windows that he could open to vent the cabin. The only way to cool the interior was the fan system. He gained a new respect for Megumi, who had overtaken Lockheed and the Ferrari with an overheated engine. No doubt, it was pretty roasty for her during the final few laps of her piloting shift.

His driving rhythm was sufficient to make up time on the lead car; but in another lap or two, he would have to switch tactics to focus on strategic driving, while maintaining the same risks.

It was a little after 3pm, and he was three or four car lengths behind Pierre Ar Bras.

Keiichi regretted that the climax of the Le Mans aligned him against Ar Bras for the championship. Before coming to France, he had gone to the N.I.T. library to study the man whom the French esteemed as a national hero. He found little to despise...and a lot to respect. Pierre Ar Bras was a sportsman's gentleman; his comportment was the epitome of the qualities one would expect of a people's champion. He received adulation with humility, always crediting his successes to his racing team rather than his own efforts. In defeat he was gracious, acknowledging his own shortcomings rather than chafing and casting about blame. As a competitor, Ar Bras excelled at all the fundamental driving skills. He was reported as possessing a "killer instinct"; being a strong finisher who refused to bow under pressure in clutch situations. His competitive spirit could only be termed as tenacious.

But beyond the racetrack, Pierre Ar Bras was reported as being generous with the rewards of his fame. He often traveled through France, visiting the elderly and hospitalized children. He donated generously to a number of causes and sponsored several charities. He had founded a relief fund to pay for the uninsurable medical expenses of amateur and semi-pro racers who were injured in competition. Politically, he went on record against the fuel strikes that crippled France in 2000 and 2004. He was one of the first to pledge his time during the terrorist bombing in Nice in 2005. The tabloids had little recourse to splash his private life across their gossip columns because he tended towards a sterling moral disposition. He was even starting to mentor younger drivers at all levels of racing competition.

Once he arrived in France, Keiichi had learned from the Le Mans locals all the details about the personal life of the man...the information between the lines that didn't make it to the Japanese press. At the relatively early age of 23, Pierre Ar Bras had married a leading French actress; their marriage was the social event of the season. However, Ar Bras had made a flawed choice, choosing to ignore the fact that his wife had been renowned as a promiscuous virago with a whole string of scandalous affairs in her past. 2 years later, he returned from winning the American Gran Prix to discover that she had left him for a Greek shipping magnate. Heartbroken, he drifted into seclusion for almost a year. It didn't help matters when his ex-wife dirt-talked him in the press soon after their separation. A lesser man would have trash-talked back, but Pierre Ar Bras maintained a cordial noblesse whenever the press mentioned his estranged wife. To add injury to insult, he lost big during the divorce process. The prevailing concession among the hoi polloi was that he had remained single ever since...for the last several years. Publicly, Pierre had made occasional social appearances with female companions, but the paparazzi were unable to reveal any details that could point to that fact that he had a romantic interest in them. When interviewed, Ar Bras always denied having "anyone special" in his life. Nevertheless, in the past five years, he had dominated the Gran Prix driving scene, and had won the Le Mans four times. It didn't require a stretch of the imagination on Keiichi's part to realize that the man had buried his heartsickness under hard work and a string of championships.

The single encounter Keiichi had with Pierre Ar Bras provided a definitive character portraiture of the man. When the N.I.T. team visited a local bar, Ar Bras' Porsche teammates had become drunkenly belligerent...and Pierre Ar Bras had tried to pacify them towards reason once their palaver escalated from taunts to crass insults. Keiichi was wasted by this point, having been snared by his two sempai into some drinking game of their own evil devising...a game where he seemed to lose thrice as often as either of them. Despite his own intoxication, he had noticed that Ar Bras had only downed two beers during the whole evening, which meant that he was probably the only sober one of the bunch. As the tension escalated, Pierre had even taken offense to the French team's taunting insults towards Keiichi's friends; to the point where the French driver tried to physically restrain his own teammates right before the brawl broke out.

All in all, Keiichi realized that this was a pretty decent man. But despite his sympathies towards Pierre Ar Bras...he would have to defeat him.

Keiichi was keenly aware that Ar Bras was onto his pursuit. The French racer's driving technique was more precise than earlier, causing Keiichi to heed his turns with exactitude.

"Now begins the psychological game," Keiichi observed as he scanned the monitor to check on the Blaze's vitals. The engine temperature was up, but not quite in the red. All other systems appeared normal.

He suspected that Ar Bras might attempt to lull him into an illusory overconfidence; this was the last frame of perspective that Keiichi wanted to experience. An overconfident driver could get sloppy.

The reality was that Keiichi had maintained a slow and steady gain on Ar Bras. In his mind, this meant two things...

That the Blaze had a slight advantage in terms of racing performance.

That _he_ was driving more skillfully than Ar Bras, having made up a minute and a half in under two hours.

Or was Ar Bras bluffing? It seemed that whenever Keiichi would approach within three car lengths, Ar Bras would pull ahead just enough to keep him from closing.

"He's drawing a line in the sand, to challenge me," Keiichi said to himself. "He's trying to set my goal for me...forcing me to drive _his_ race, not mine."

He reminded himself that the goal wasn't to get closer to Ar Bras, it was to pass him.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"C'mon Keiichi!!" his N.I.T. teammates shouted as the Blaze hurtled past them. The tension had ascended into another strata, as the grandstand crowd had quelled its boister. They were witnessing a gripping driving duel.

Chihiro knew exactly what Pierre Ar Bras was doing. He was pacing Keiichi, cat-and-mouse fashion. He would tempt Keiichi, letting him draw close...and then pull away. She had seen the technique used in a number of races; it was very effective at wearing down a competitor's psyche by creating a very frustrating dynamic of tension and release. A release that was unhanded, kept out of the control of the pursuer. Ar Bras was very smart, using the savvy of a true champion to make his Japanese opponent betray himself...

Chihiro wanted to clench her hands, but they were wrapped tightly. She could only hope that Keiichi could see through Ar Bras' ruse before it was too late.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Once again, Keiichi nearly pulled even with Ar Bras' Porsche, only to find that he had to downspeed for an upcoming curve.

"Damn him! Dammit!" he yelled in frustration, pounding on the dashboard of the Blaze. "Every time I'm just about ready to make my move, I have to slow down!"

Life was like a feather being passed through jewels. Glancing at the clock. 3:10pm. Glancing up at the bright green Porsche in front of him. Eyes center, eyes down to shiftstick, eyes to top of steering wheel...

He tried to picture Bell-chan, dressed in her N.I.T. Unified Club coveralls, cheering him on. But the freshness of a vision of his beloved could not blow across the scattering gusts of his mind.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

In Makuhari, Mrs. Hasegawa was chewing the side of her mouth. An old nervous habit that she had developed in childhood, it was all she could do to try and relax herself what little she could. As she watched the TV suspended from the ceiling, she could smell the waft of a hot sweaty summer crowd, despite the air conditioners being set to 15C degrees.

The Hasegawa Ramen Shop was packed to the rafters. Tables that normally sat four were crowded around by ten or more. People were sharing chairs. The sit down bar had no bowls of ramen or soba upon it; instead it was used to seat the overflow. Many of the family friends were standing in the food prep area for the first time. Someone had brought a second large TV so that those standing in the little back room that served as an extension of the kitchen could watch the race as well. Numerous handheld and mini-TVs were in evidence. Everywhere in sight was filled, standing room only, from the walls to the noren curtains. For the first time ever, there was no cooking activity in the kitchen.

Much to Mrs. Hasegawa's surprise, the gathering of their many loyal customers was bolstered by a large group of faculty from Nekomi Tech, including the N.I.T. President, Dr. Kintaro.

Two days ago, her parents and her husband's parents both arrived. She didn't expect her husband's parents to make the trip from Shimonoseki, but they did. It had been five years since both sets of grandparents had visited at the same time. Could it be that her little Sora had graduated from middle school just _five years_ ago? She remembered the scare two years ago when her husband's father suffered a stroke in February, forcing them to cancel their plans to visit for Sora's high school graduation. Their absence wore hard on Sora, especially since she graduated at the top of her class and was honored by being invited to give an address to the graduating class. But happily, both sets of Sora's grandparents were here, having traveled to the Tokyo area from Akita and Yamaguchi prefectures, each on opposite ends of the country.

She had invited Mr. and Mrs. Morisato to come early to enjoy a private breakfast with her family before the inevitable crowd arrived. Since her daughter was best friends with the Morisato's daughter, the two families had a very cordial friendship...even to the point where both parents cooperated at times when Sora and Megumi would attempt to deceive them. Sora and Megumi Morisato weren't the first kids to play the "I'm at Sora's house, I'm at Megumi's house" ruse.

Those were carefree days, Mrs. Hasegawa recalled with a chuckle.

Fortunately, their ramen shop wasn't a hole-in-the-wall type eatery. It was licensed for 48 occupants, but it could actually accommodate up to 60 customers in a pinch.

By her best estimate, over 200 people were jammed into their store.

To everybody's surprise, a stretch limousine had pulled up in front of their ramen shop around 10am and deposited Mr. and Mrs. Mishima. _That_ Mishima! Her husband almost had a heart attack when the chauffer announced the billionaires and gave him their meishi...

Mrs. Mishima confided to her that she and her husband had decided to forgo enjoying the race from the luxurious VIP box they owned at the Le Mans track. Instead, they felt it would be much more memorable to return to Japan in their private jet and watch the race with the parents of their son's friends. She explained that they needed to give their son a break, as he had just introduced his girlfriend to them a couple weeks earlier. And what better place than the Hasegawa Ramen Shop to watch the race, she added.

So here it was, almost midnight in Makuhari...3pm in France.

Ms. Hasegawa wanted to be in the kitchen, cooking something with her husband. Years of habit were being set aside tonight, yet her instincts were keeping her restless.

Sora had done them proud. When her daughter finished her last driving shift, the restaurant was filled with deafening accolades of approval. Fortunately, her husband had the foresight to bring the videocam to film the exuberant celebration.

Sora had finished her run in fifth place.

Now their daughter's team was in second place.

"Dear, what amazes me is that she just passed her driver's license exam four years ago!" her husband kept repeating to her every five minutes.

"I know what you mean, husband," she replied once more. Her daughter's success had seemed to shave 20 years off of she and her husband's marriage...as she cuddled close to her husband, she felt like she was in her 20s again...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"There has to be a weak link in his driving. There must be _something_ that I'm missing...something that I can exploit!" Keiichi muttered to himself irritably. He had examined Ar Bras' driving technique from every conceivable vantage, looking for an opening...looking for _anything_ that could help.

How can a road race produce a blind alley?

Belldandy...how would she deal with this if she were here with me? Once Bell-chan would shed away the illusion to reveal the truth, what would she ask me to do? What would Chihiro do? Or Tamiya and Ootaki-sempai? Megumi found a way to defeat Carla Lockheed...maybe I'm just not looking at it the right way.

Keiichi wanted to close his eyes and clear his mind.

He recalled a conversation he had with Belldandy, several years ago when Peorth first thrust herself into their lives. They had been discussing the possible reasons why Peorth had received his call, despite the fact that he had already made a wish which had been granted by the Yggdrasil Mainframe. Ensconced in the temple's "All-n-Everything Tea Room" with Bell-chan, Keiichi had plied through every cell of his brain for the entire night, trying to figure it out. When he had exhausted every conceivable conjecture, Belldandy suggested to him that understanding, in and of itself, simply wasn't important. Knowing the reason for Peorth's presence wouldn't address the essential fact that Peorth _was_ there, in the temple, hanging out in his bedroom. Belldandy reminded him that focusing on sources, causations and conditions could result the exclusion of the key ingredient...his heart. As she reasoned, his heart had created the situation that brought Peorth to the Earthrealm. Despite how circumstances appeared to her, to Peorth, to Urd and Skuld, even to the Yggdrasil Mainframe or the Earth Otasuke Office...she had convinced Keiichi that it had been the power of his kokoro that had fueled the wish request. The lesson was this: if he denied his heart and the wisdom entrusted within its folds, then all the knowledge in the universe wouldn't matter anyway.

So he searched inside his heart, and eventually found out why Peorth had been summoned. In doing so, he gradually shed an illumining light upon the flower of his desire that had filled his heart with uneasiness...ever since Bell-chan had first arrived. All those years, he had simply wanted Belldandy to admit that she remained on the Earthrealm, not out of duty, but because she _loved_ him. By turning the focus inwards, instead of outwards...everything had resolved itself.

And just recently, he discovered another reason that explained why Peorth had come to the Earthrealm. He had an Angel...which Peorth was totally in love with...

His memory gave form to Bell's face, every nuance of her expression, the radiant softness of her skyblue eyes and the brilliance of her smile that day when she said that she loved him with all her being.

A calm suffused him...

Out of tranquility, Keiichi realized his own clarity.

He was trying to count the corners in a balloon!

"It's not important any more! That's it!! I've been caught up in trying to beat Pierre Ar Bras...when I really need to focus on is simply driving the race that will win the Le Mans! That's all I need to do!"

With a renewed rigor, Keiichi ignored the car in front of him...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Take him, Keiichi!" Chihiro screamed. Not only had Keiichi pulled up even with Pierre Ar Bras, she sensed that his entire driving attitude was somehow different, transformed beyond racing logic.

To her immense relief, he was driving _his_ race again!

As they turned into the Mulsanne, she watched the videoscreen as Keiichi poured it on...

The image showed the Blaze inching in front of Pierre Ar Bras' Porsche. The crowd was stunned at the sight on the display screens. Their favorite was being passed! Incredibly, the estimated speed of the Blaze was _451_ Kph, displayed in bright yellow letters in the corner of the videoscreen!! Somehow, Keiichi had pulled a few more Kph out their racecar.

"He's opened up the Blaze! He's opened up the Blaze!" Megumi screamed.

"C'mon Keiichi, pass him!" Tamiya and Ootaki screamed.

"Keiichi, you can do this! I _know_ you can do this!" Belldandy yelled, her voice soaring above the boisterous shouts of his teammates.

As the two cars approached the turn at the end of the Mulsanne straightaway, Chihiro could tell that they were coming up _way_ too fast! For a split-second she fretted...and then dismissed her fears. Keiichi was in the groove; there was no way he was going to miss that turn.

Two cars cornered the turn...

And Keiichi inserted the Blaze into the inside lane.

The N.I.T. pit area went berserk.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Keiichi pulled out of the zigzag curves and gained the shorter straightway leading to the grandstands. Pierre Ar Bras was right behind him, pursuing him for the past two laps. Out of the rearview mirrors, he saw the Frenchman pull out to try and pass him...

He kept the pedal to the metal, leaning close to the wheel as he would in a motorcycle race...as if leaning in would somehow streamline the Blaze even further.

Unexpectedly, the Porsche started to slow down rapidly, falling behind him. Way behind him.

By the time he reached the Mulsanne, he knew what had happened.

Pierre Ar Bras' Porsche had developed an engine problem.

"We won! We won!" his mind shouted jubilantly. He imagined the total celebratory riot that his teammates would be pitching in their race pit.

But his joy was tempered by a bittersweet, callow emotion. He didn't want to win this way! Pierre Ar Bras' racecar was what beat the French driver...not Keiichi. Ar Bras had tried to pass him and regain the lead right before his Porsche had motored out with a mechanical problem.

All Keiichi had to do was finish the race without getting into an accident.

"I'll never know whether or not I _really_ beat him! It's not fair! I'm going to spend the rest of my life wondering if Pierre Ar Bras could have caught me or not!" he thought sourly.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

The moment Sora's teammate's car passed the frontrunner, the patrons and guests of the Hasegawa Ramen Shop went ballistic. Mrs. Hasegawa was almost faint headed with released excitement. Out in the dining area, the tightly packed gathering had started dancing with a frenetic abandon usually found in rural festivals. Shouts of "Banzai!" filled the air as she made her way back to the kitchen.

A moment later, Mrs. Hasegawa emerged with a bottle of champagne. She had been shaking it in the kitchen...

Popping the cork, she pointed it at her husband and sprayed him down. Taking her lead, her husband pulled a bottle of sake and upended over her head to douse her. Bottles of champagne were being passed overhead, relay-style as the humble ramen shop turned into a playground of the victorious.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Keiichi looked at the odometer and did a double-take as it displayed 5561 Km in clear LED digits. He felt so hollow, now that victory had been snatched away from him by a mishap. _His_ victory.

He hadn't won on his own efforts...

When the sweet turns to sour...what becomes of the aftertaste?

"Settle down, Keiichi! It's totally not your fault! Besides, you _were_ in the lead when his Porsche broke down," he argued, trying to console himself.

There were only a few minutes left until 4pm.

5566...

"Shit! If I can take the next two laps as fast as possible, I can break 5600!" he said aloud.

5500 kilometers in 24 hours was considered the outer limits of the Le Mans competition. If Keiichi could finish two more laps by the time the 4pm finish flag was waved, he could conceivably immortalize himself, setting a record for the books. No finisher had even surpassed 5400 kilometers, let alone 5500.

In Keiichi's mind, if he passed the 5600 mark, he would irrefutably redeem himself.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

When Pierre Ar Bras' Porsche rolled to a stop, it became a foregone conclusion that Keiichi was going to win the Le Mans!

Every member of the N.I.T. Unified Club was poised with mounting anticipation as the clock arms approached 4pm. They were saving it up for one last explosion of joy at the moment the pair of checkered flags winged arcs over the finish line.

"Hey Boss...what's he doin'?" Tamiya shouted above the din of the grandstand crowd. Chihiro followed where he was pointing with her eyes. She gasped when she saw the estimated Kph for the Blaze.

Keiichi had taken the Indy curves at 162Kph according to the board!

The 'normal' speed for the Indy's was 120 to 130 Kph.

Chihiro scanned the results board, suspecting that Keiichi was trying to do the impossible. She saw the posted distance estimated for the Blaze; it was 5571 Km. She felt a chill run up and down her spine.

With a Quixotic disregard for his own safety, Keiichi was going for 5600 kilometers! Honeycombed by this revelation, Chihiro shuddered involuntarily. Tamiya and Ootaki, not to mention the entire team noticed her rising panic.

"My God..." was all she could say in the face of such ill portent. Keiichi was putting himself in extreme danger.

You _idiot_! You've won the race already! You've won the freakin' Le Mans, Keiichi! All you have to do is take the Blaze home! But no! You've gotta try and attempt something that will...probably kill you!" she railed against him in her mind. Underscored by desperation, she momentarily considered running out onto the track and standing in his path, to try and slow him down.

The clock said 3:53pm.

The fastest lap ever clocked at the Le Mans was 3 minutes 32 seconds. That is, until Keiichi's last lap...timed at 3'27".

He would have to complete a circuit in 3'20 or so, _twice_, if he wanted to break the 5600Km mark.

Chihiro looked at Belldandy. Keiichi's girlfriend, Goddess as she was, she had a gravely concerned look on her face.

If _Belldandy_ was scared, then this is _bad_!!

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Keiichi had one lap to go.

He knew that he was driving absolutely recklessly, but he didn't care. Nothing...no words or gestures could express the melancholy he felt. He had been betrayed, robbed, humiliated. He was bitter to the point of anguished tears.

"Keiichi..." a voice sounded in his head.

Bell.

"Keiichi, you don't have to prove anything to me, or anyone else," the voice said gently, trying to persuade him to defer from this self-destructive course.

"What...am...I...doing?" he said right before he pulled out of the final turn before the grandstands.

The wall was right in his path. He wasn't going to make it.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Belldandy watched in horror as Keiichi emerged from that final turn. She knew in an instant that he had taken the corner much too fast...that he was careening towards the grandstands at 180Kph.

A wordless scream escaped her lips...

...as the momentum-torn Blaze crunched up against the wall, striking a glancing blow as it rode along the lip of the racetrack, a scant meter in front of the series of racing pits. The racing teams in the pits scattered for their lives.

Riding in front of the series of race pits, the Blaze flew past the checkered flag...

Everything went silent as Belldandy noticed a dark shadow upon her shoulder. She turned around and saw Mara, dressed in a red N.I.T. Unified Club jacket, with her usual Demonic attire underneath.

"Belldandy, Urd, Skuld...sisters. I promised you that I would create some havoc this day! And I have succeeded. Each of you expected me to cause an accident, or maybe make one of the drivers ill...or much worse. Rather than stirring the breach, I simply let you 'demonize' your own selves, with your own imaginations. And yet, I also gave you a gift, Belldandy. I _saved_ Keiichi's life, just now."

"I don't understand, Mara," Belldandy observed. "Why did you help Keiichi when you said earlier that all you wanted to do was cause us trouble?"

"Because_ this_ is my Le Mans bit of mischief on you three! To make you feel the strife as you dwell from time to time in apprehension and fear, unaware of my real motives."

Urd seasoned her disgruntled look with a raised eyebrow.

"But verily...this day, Keiichi has created his own mischief...his own dark self has arisen! As you have seen, your beloved Keiichi has won the day...but with a price. For his own good, he must _never_ race again. Never as in _not ever_!! This condition is impenetrable...and not my doing; but it is something you must accept. My suggestion is that you make sure that this is Keiichi's last racing competition."

"W..why, Mara? Why do all of this? Why take away something that Keiichi enjoys most in life?" Belldandy asked, her voice tinged with anguish.

"My dear _younger_ sister! Once more, you demonstrate your ignorance. Keiichi already _has_ what is most dear to him! Yet his humanity braces him, limits him. You, of all Goddesses, should be aware of this. I swear to you that Keiichi _can_ survive a life without racing...but it is up to you three to ensure that he can redirect himself into other endeavors. Of course, I will be around to add a little chaos to the mix from time to time..."

"Mara!" Urd snapped, pointing an angry finger at the Demoness. "This isn't right! Keiichi did nothing to deserve..." Mara interrupted her.

"Urd, of all divinities present, you should be most acutely knowledgeable of what occurs when you have too much of a good thing. There is a reason that your powerup source was mysteriously changed from sake to orange and peach juice! Although I will probably never figure out _how_ this came to be, it is obvious that it was done for your benefit. Keiichi had unleashed his own demons during this race, exiling his ideals while carelessly throwing his life aside in the pursuit of an even higher standard. An illusory point of departure, it is. He takes too much pleasure in this racing...and has become addicted to it."

"_NO!_ You're _lying_!" Skuld shouted. Belldandy silently clapped a hand on her younger sister to calm her down.

"Sadly, I am only messaging the truth. Keiichi must learn to conquer his own inner demons, so that humanity can be raised to the Next Level. Each of you must help him, through your love. Keiichi will realize this on his own, and probably find his own direction really soon..."

"His _own_ direction?" Belldandy asked, unsettled by the implication in Mara's words.

"My...you really _are_ naive, Belldandy! But you shan't worry long, everything will come out in the wash tonight! I bid you 'ciao' until then!" Mara answered, and then disappeared.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Alone.

Keiichi thought he was going to die, alone, as the grandstand wall filled the windshield. But instead, the Blaze somehow handled the extremes of his driving...and screeched along the retaining wall, then flew parallel to the painted striping separating the pit areas from the race track.

Driving as close to the pits as possible, Keiichi passed under the checkered flag.

His odometer read 5605Km.

Any sense of relief withered for him. Instead of feeling victorious, he felt sickened inside. He had nearly killed himself. Never before in racing had he put himself at such risk. He thought of Belldandy...dear, sweet Bell-chan. She had to endure this whole finish without having the freedom to prevent him from self-injury.

Winning the race had consumed him, had debauched him.

As he slowly drove the Blaze around the mini-circuit leading back to the racetrack in front of the grandstands, a crazy thought captured his attention.

"It's over. I can't do this anymore."

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --


	65. Pt 65: Felicitae

**Part 65: Felicitae**

Every few seconds, Belldandy would remanifest herself in a new dress. This time, she appeared in a light green silk sleeveless evening gown with a white cinched waist, semi-cathedral styled skirt train that flared in gathers from the waist, patterned with soft clouds of navy blue sequins paiseyed up and down the sides.

"No, this doesn't work for me either! It leans too far towards a prom dress style, not quite formal enough for tonight," she announced with a slight shake of her head. She smoothed back the few short antennae strands of hair inclining over her forehead and thought of another dress. Blinking her eyes, she reappeared in a long-sleeved renaissance-style silk dress; the noon-sun light blue color matched by a vest with a subtle floral pattern. She liked herself better in this dress, but she questioned whether it was too 'light' for such an event. She changed the blouse to a pale blue white with braceleting gondola sleeves, while retaining the skirt with the sky-blue floral pattern. A white cashmere pullover sweater appeared next.

"Needs a bit more pink, if you ask me. That's more your color anyway...your eyes have more than enough light blue, Bell. Besides, you might want to consider a _real _dress for this one, rather than something you saw in a catalogue and conjured up out of thin air like a regular Goddess would do. You look your best when you're authentic, sis," Urd suggested as she popped up into the bathroom, resting her chin on Belldandy's shoulder.

In the hour and a half since they had returned to their hotel room after the Le Mans press conference, Belldandy had overheard Urd and Skuld jestling amusedly about her "hyperprimping". She had tried on dozens of dresses, attempting to nail _The Look_ she so fervently desired for tonight's reception and dance. Belldandy wanted to look her best for Keiichi since this would be his special day...he and his N.I.T. teammates were going to be feted at this event.

With a weary sigh, she decided to take a break from her efforts and hang out a few minutes with her sisters. She was secretly pleased with the outfit Urd was wearing to tonight's dinner and dance. Urd's stylishly daring dress heralded a return to form for her older sister. While Belldandy was perplexed about trying to strike a balance between softness and elegance, for what seemed the exact opposite reason, Urd had decided to dress _loud_. In the recent past, Urd had eschewed her sexy, alluring dresses in favor of more modest attire. It was as if her rambunctious older sister had somehow developed a sense of reserve; something seemed to have made her a fashion casualty. Urd's unusual leanings towards prudence had troubled Belldandy; any sudden change in the routines of her sisters always evoked suspicion. But tonight, Urd was dressed as if she was going to a Shinjuku rave club, rather that the formal Automobile Club de L'Ouest post-race reception. Belldandy sat down on the bed and watched her sister caper around in front of the mirror. Urd was clad in a hiphugging navy blue midiskirt with a matching minijacket; her fluffled top roaring with eye-catching red and black tiger stripes. She was accessoried by a series of Yggdrasilian designer gold chains, topped off by a cute dark red Glengarry hat ornamented with several gem clusters...

Urd was beginning to look again like...Urd.

"Whattya think? This feels really good. Do you think he'll like it? It's been a while since I let my hormones dress me," Urd asked Belldandy, filled with exuberance.

"I think it looks rather Peorthesque, in a sleazy sort of way... Besides, you're a _Goddess_! As if one of us needs mortal clothes to be suitably impressive! Humph!!"

Belldandy and Urd both looked at Skuld with blushing faces.

"And need I remind you two...that technically, we don't have hormones, per se!" Skuld added tartly, trying to scuttle her oldest sister's whimsy. Skuld was still uncomfortable with the idea that Urd was putting herself on display like this, even if she was in a committed relationship with a mortal.

"I don't recall asking for the opinion of a _child_...a _girl_ who obviously isn't mature enough to understand vivaces such as why a woman chooses to dress to impress the opposite sex. As they say: 12-year old is as 12-year old does. How would you know anything about dresses, other than what you read in your manga? Besides, if Tomohisa was here, you'd be..." Urd replied icily.

"That's because women have better assets to show off than just their bodies. Like their minds, for instance!" Skuld interrupted.

"How ironic, since you don't have any bodily assets..."

"I do too! I'm almost equivalent to 17 in Earthrealm years! That means I'm fully in my prime...while you're getting old and saggy, Big Sister..."

"17? More like 14 or 15, if bust size was considered! As to your other comment, let's just say that I have maturity while you have juvenancy..." Urd snipped back.

"The only reason you're so concerned about looking sexy is because you don't have a brilliant mind to show off, unlike me..."

"Urd! Skuld! Desist in this arguing immediately! Have you forgotten that this is my dear Keiichi's most important night?! I _don't_ want either of you to ruin it by ceaselessly squabbling over nonsense. Besides, you _both_ look beautiful in your own ways! Let's just leave the bickering behind, just for tonight. Please?" Belldandy interjected, trying to plug the cauldron of sibling enmity before it erupted.

"But _she_ started it!" Urd and Skuld said in synch, pointing at each other accusingly. After a moment, they both started giggling at Belldandy's cross expression.

"Awww! You're no fun! How am I going to amuse myself if I can't pick on my little sister? Well...all right!" Urd acquiesced, jumping on the bed next to Belldandy, then raising a pillow over her head and fake-throwing it at her. Skuld jumped down on Belldandy's other side and nodded to Urd; the two sisters leaned in towards each other, bump squeezing Belldandy between them.

"S..stop it! Y..you'll mess up my dress!" Belldandy wailed fearfully. The last thing she wanted was to get caught up in playful roughhousing with her two sisters. She broke free from being pinned between the two, and then stood up abruptly.

"Now...how do you think I look?" she asked, curtseying in front of her two sisters.

"Keiichi'll love you in that dress. But that's a moot point, since he loves you anyway, no matter what you wear...or don't wear. Besides, I _still_ think it's the wrong color!" Urd observed.

Belldandy blushed at Urd's cupidic remark, and then looked to Skuld for approval. Seeing the admiration in her younger sister's eyes increased Belldandy's confidence that she had chosen the right fashion to wear. If she dressed _too_ smart, she might draw away attention from Keiichi. Yet if she dressed unfashionably, she might make him look bad. She didn't want to dress as formally as she did when Keiichi graduated; but she wanted to distinguish herself tonight by looking warmly beautiful.

She hoped Keiichi would be in a good mood...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

After the post-Le Mans media conference, she and Keiichi had returned to their hostel room to pack, as the reception was scheduled to start at 7:30pm. With a typical male absence of foresight, he didn't bring any dress clothes; so she was forced to entreat Skuld to 'borrow' a tuxedo from a formal shoppe in Le Mans. Using her "Tux Snatcher Mk. II", Skuld teleported a complete tuxedo set to their room. Belldandy then crafted a tailoring elf spell to alter it to fit Keiichi. She could barely suppress her giggles as the tiny elves clambered over him to make alterations to his formal tux, while he looked at them with wide-eyed mystification.

Over the past 24 hours, she had held counsel with herself about whether or not she should disclose to Keiichi the observations Mara had made about him. On one hand, words can sometimes cast a magic net over their listener, building a frame of reference that could re-esteem one's inclination towards reality. Yet, Mara's injunction certainly possessed the potential to shadow Keiichi with the persistence of a darkly Gothic curse. Belldandy still was undecided if Mara's warning was the result of sisterly concern, or was gauged within a deeper sense of malice.

On the other hand, Belldandy forcibly had to admit to herself that withholding what Mara had mentioned earlier...would create a secret. She was resolute with the fact that she didn't want secrets to cast a wedge between her and her darling Keiichi. Love is as much an intercourse of trust as it is an intercourse in other matters...it was her conviction that secrets should be birthed in love, rather than fear. Urd's surprise for Cevn earlier in the day was an example of such a secretive action borne out of intimacy.

In the end, Belldandy favored honesty over concealment. She earnestly hoped that she could recast Mara's admonition in her own kinder, softer words...words that wouldn't make Keiichi _too_ distraught.

She decided to tell him everything, concealing nothing.

Once she sat him down and explained Mara's words of injunction to him, her beloved's initial reaction was stunned bitter disbelief. He was obviously uncomfortable with the knowledge that Mara was right on target when she described the personal demons that willed him to finish the Le Mans so heedlessly. He couldn't argue against the fact that he had lost the ability to govern his common sense, to the point where he was fooling around with his own life itself.

But the part about never racing again seemed to overwhelm his spirit...

An almost imperceptible flash of emptiness colored Keiichi's eyes, as if his joi de vive had been spirited away by ravenous Tokyo crows. Then, an invisible switch seemed to click inside of him. Keiichi sought to comfort himself by spending the next several minutes disparaging Mara. He let Belldandy know in no uncertain terms that he considered Mara's words as little more than a feeble attempt to mislead, confuse and create mischief.

"After all, Mara _is_ a Demoness! A dire statement like this would be right in character for her!" he had argued intently, the depthful force of his own inclinations almost swaying Belldandy into disbelief as well, as he was speaking to her own sensitivities. For a moment, she felt certain that Mara had spoken unkindly, completely out of turn towards the unfolding events. But then she remembered how Mara's actions today had been predominantly couched in expressions of concern rather than malice.

She informed Keiichi that Mara had saved his life during his final lap; that Mara had 'convinced' Chihiro to ask for she and her sisters to take away her agonizing pain; that Mara had even dove within the Blaze itself and saved its soul by forcing the Maxwells and Stewarts to work overtime to keep their racecar operating. Keiichi's distrust of Mara's prophetic words were rapidly diffused...as were her own. She even told him Mara's words at the end of her 'visit' with she and her sisters when the Le Mans was over and done with; words that she would have never dreamed of hearing from a Demoness in her wildest scope of imaginings.

"_Demoness or Goddess, sisters take care of each other,_" her Demoness elder sister had enigmatically emphasized when Urd questioned her eccentric behavior. Keiichi was so shocked, he asked her if she was joking around.

Belldandy laid bare her own fears, saying everything that hadn't been said up to that point. She had struggled not to cry as she described the depths of her worries; that she imagined Keiichi facing a bitter struggle to find purpose in his life if he couldn't race competitively any more. In her heart, she wanted to support him with all of her soul in anything he chose to do with his life, as long as she could be a part of it...and that he harvested joy and self-respect from his labors. Her admission seemed to stroke the strings of the harp in his heart; Keiichi had responded by noting that Mara's warning didn't necessarily imply that he could never race again.

With a serious mien, Keiichi related an episode in his teen years to illustrate his point. Once upon a time, he had made a poor choice and left his sister's bike unlocked, creating a chance for a thief to steal her bike. Years later, when he finally admitted his mistake to Megumi, she forgave him...after giving him an earful of mirthful invective for waiting so long to tell her the obvious. But within the passage of time that it took for him to muster the courage to confess the truth to his sister, Keiichi had fully forgiven himself. The fact of the matter was, from that point on, he had never again left anything he borrowed from his sister unaccompanied or unlocked.

Listening intently, Belldandy sensed that Keiichi had indeed learned that one mistake didn't necessarily create a lifetime of taxation by guilt and guilelessness.

It might be possible that Keiichi _could_ race again...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Returning to the here and now, with its glass moods filled with speculation and design, Belldandy smiled at her reflection in the mirror one more time. Once again, her beloved mortal boyfriend had pulled promise out of chaos. Now, the only chaos was the fact that she was _still_ dissatisfied with her appearance.

Now, she looked too 'girlfriendish'.

Urd _was_ right. The color was all wrong; it just wasn't catchy enough. Suddenly, a solution flashed in her mind…something Urd had mentioned earlier while she was frantically seeking '_The Look'_. Keiichi had bought her a dress last year...

A dress that she had only worn once, despite its hefty price tag. Belldandy mentally revisited that divine day when Keiichi had taken her out on "the date to end all dates". They had toured Tokyo like a typhoon, each stop of the tour arranged by her love as a belated anniversary present. That day, he had splurged and bought her an exquisite...and outrageously expensive...evening dress. Many times while Keiichi was at school, Belldandy would carefully pull the dress from her closet and hold it against her breast, smelling the rich fibre of its design as she daydreamed about him.

She already had _The Look_!

The dress doesn't make the lady shine with beauty; the shining beauty of the lady is what gives voice to any 'statement' the dress is intended to make.

It was time to wear the treasured dress that Keiichi had bought for her with his own money. The 'green energy' that went into that dress was, in Goddess terms, was the equivalent of a First Class God Licensee creating an entire solar system! But beyond the level of money and energy, that dress was a bounteous soul-bond. It was charged with Keiichi's sentiment and love, his recognition of the seal of her outward beauty and the richness of the beauty of her heart...

It would be perfect!

The more she considered the idea, the more she liked the romance of it.

"This is going to be a _good_ day," she assented to her mirror image. The only problem was, her beloved dress was back in her closet wardrobe in Makuhari, Japan.

"Skuld! I _really_ need another favor..." she shouted through the bathroom doorway...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Remember me?" Urd remarked slyly when she and her two sisters entered the hotel ballroom. The breath spilled out of my lungs like a living thing as I did a double-glance at Urd. I couldn't find a savvy enough compliment to offer to her. Her outfit was alluring, sexy, sophisticated...and my old nervousness rose up to plug my throat. I knew that no harm could come of Urd's provocative attire. Funny, how I can still be intimidated by a woman that I freely accompanied with my life and heart, simply because she was dressed stunningly. I realized with a downspin that I _still_ had some work to do with my 'women issues'.

I just hoped that Urd-chan had noticed my wide-eyed pause when she entered the room. Sometimes the best compliments paid are the involuntary nonverbal communiqués. At least they're honest...

Faced with a beauty like Urd's, Tanizaki's worshipful orientation towards feminine pulchritude seemed more realistic than fanciful; one of the themes threading his novels was the sense that men functioned simply as 'manure' for the nurturing of a woman's beauty...and that the ideal fate for a man was to be conquered by a women. Despite the masochistic and chauvinistic overtones of such an outlook, it seemed to hold some grain of truth...especially due to the fact that Urd _was_ a Goddess, after all.

And totally beautiful.

She walked up to me, spun in a circle (on the ground, fortunately) and gripped the ID badge pinned to my shirt.

"'N.I.T. Unified Club Faculty Sponsor'," she read aloud. "Hmmm...not only do you _not_ look Japanese...but you certainly aren't dressed like a faculty member of a technical institute. Perhaps you are one of the drivers?" she asked. Still gripped by the aura of her beauty, I struggled for words as I looked into her jewel-sparkling green eyes.

What is she up to now? A brief moment later, I realized that she was feigning, playing the part of a fangirl.

"I'm much too clumsy to drive past the speed limit," I replied. My flat response earned a frown from Urd. It struck me that she was in 'flirtation mode'...and I was being dull and unimaginative.

Gathering myself, I tried again.

"Forsooth, the only thing that is racing is my heart, as it is bathed in the charm of your aspect; a luminous pool of beauty whose apparent fragility only disguises the starry wisdom of its creation. I am honored to the threads of my soul to be mastered by one such as you," I added, finally voicing a suitable compliment.

"Well met," she grinned in approval, giving me cause to sigh in relief. "So you claim that you are 'mastered' by me? Sisters, note that you heard it here from his own lips! By the way, what brings you to France, kind sirrah?" Urd asked, continuing the 'chance meeting' charade.

"I was drawn here by the magnetism of your..."

"Would you two _stop it_ already? If you're going to flirt, at least do it right! Or go get a room or something!" Skuld groused, interrupting my response.

I mentally rained rolled-up-newspaper blows on the head of a particular young Goddess for a split second. After all, during the past several days, I had only been a bystander amidst a very involved group of goal-driven students. In a way, I felt very comfortable being relegated to the background during our "Le Mans experience." As times, my teaching role at N.I.T. still possessed moments where I very much felt like I was 'on display'. In contrast, while here in France, it was nice to bask in the security of anonymity and noninvolvement.

Yet, the past couple of weeks in Le Mans had exacted a toll even while allowing me passage into a carefree existence. I had felt a little on the isolated side; being an outsider to the process of creating a racing entry, I was a numble-thumbed 'fifth wheel'. Beyond this, Urd and I hadn't found adequate time for ourselves. Not to ignore the fact that I hadn't seen Urd in anything other than the N.I.T. Club coveralls since Thursday. I struggled to veil my irritation towards Skuld...

"What makes you such an expert on flirting, Skuld?" The insult poised itself on the tip of my tongue. And then Urd took the words right out of my mouth before I could urge them out, seasoning them with an expression of high dudgeon.

Skuld's resultant blush and Belldandy's stifled giggle were quite satisfying to me. Serves her right...

I suspect that tonight is going to be on the wild side of life. A dance on a volcano, no less.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Psst! C'mere!" Keiichi said as the ushers started steering the various racing teams towards their assigned tables. Tamiya and Ootaki glanced at him, and then turned their attention back towards the door, looking for the rest of the N.I.T. Unified Club team.

"Hey, you guys! I gotta show you something!" Keiichi whispered insistently.

"Whaddya want? Can't you see dat we's busy?" Tamiya growled. He had made a bet with Ootaki that Chihiro wouldn't show up in a skirt. Her 'chemistry' in reaction to Pierre Ar Bras earlier in the day had led the mirthful Ootaki to devise a pool among several of the Club members about how their President would present herself at tonight's reception and dance.

"Busy with _what_? You're both just standing around! This is important! I wanted to show you _this_!" Keiichi said impatiently as he reached inside the vest pocket of his tux.

Tamiya and Ootaki's wordless comments added to his confidence that he had made the right decision. But where was Bell-chan?

A moment later, his Goddess entered the room.

_"__Wow!!__"_ all three N.I.T. men gasped.

Keiichi felt a sunbeam of seraphic joy basking his heart. Belldandy was wearing _The Dress_.

It was as if, in the sacred speech of her heart...she had anticipated what he was planning for tonight.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

The cuisine was impeccable. Megumi was always a food connoisseur, but all of this rich French food that was gloriously spread over their table...to borrow from the French, it was "c'est magnifique!" During her stay in France, she had sorely missed her usual Japanese munchies, such as sushi, mochi and arare crackers. Looking at the roast duck and richly seasoned vegetable dishes almost made her forget her cravings for homestyle cuisine. Of course, she could have pestered Genji...and her boyfriend would have stopped at no expense to ship over boxes of tasty snack staples for her. But now that the race was over and done with, she finally realized with dismay...that she had figured out too late how she could have obtained some snack foods for herself.

"I hope I don't have to make a speech or anything," she commented to Sora, who was waiting like a cat to pounce on the dinner dishes being ceremoniously set out by the waiter staff.

"I doubt it. As far as I know, they only invite one of our team's drivers to go up to the podium and make a few comments. And we all know who that's going to be..." Toshiyuki responded as he patted Sora on the head.

"No way! Quit teasing me, Toshi! And don't mess my hair up!" Sora whined with artificed dismay, and then grinned at Megumi and Keiichi. Their table was reserved for the drivers and the team manager. Right now, there were three couples...and no Chihiro. She _still_ hadn't shown up! Sora was beginning to worry about her, casting worried glances towards the doors to the dining hall. She hoped that Chihiro's burns wouldn't keep her from at least making an appearance. Both she and Megumi had checked on her, but when they knocked on the door a half hour before the dinner, Chihiro insisted that she was okay...but wouldn't let them in.

Megumi was pleased with the light brown highlights that she had dipsticked into her hair an hour ago. She had lightened her hair before going to France; now her medium-brown bangs were traced with streaks from the thin hair crayon...just enough to add a wild exotic edge to her hairstyle. Genji had noticed the change immediately when he stopped by her room after she and Sora were ready for the reception.

"I won!" Sora heard Ootaki shout about the din, followed by a "dammit!" in Tamiya's deep gravelly voice. Sora glanced over at their table only to catch the tail end of Sayoko elbowing Tamiya in the ribs and shushing him with an irritated glance. Following the direction of her sempai's stares, she looked to one of the side entrances and spied Chihiro slowly making her way towards their table.

Chihiro was dressed...in a _dress_!

"Ohmygod! Look at her! I don't believe it!" Megumi sighed in delighted surprise. Chihiro was wearing a loose long sleeved sweater with Native American style poncho stripes and a fringe hem, accompanied by a flowing light tan poly knit skirt. Wrapped loosely around her shoulders was a silken shawl with an autumn floral design. What amazed Megumi was that everything in Chihiro's outfit..._matched_!

"I never could have imagined that she owned a single dress, especially one like _that_!" Sora remarked. She could see Chihiro's heavily bandaged hands emerging from the flared sleeves of her sweater, but other than that, Chihiro looked radiant.

To Megumi, it was obvious that Chihiro had bought this outfit just recently, as it had French stylings written all over it...from the design to the stitchery and seams.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

As she walked towards the table, Chihiro could hear murmurs spanning her path. Obviously, word of her gutsy determination had made the rounds, as the respectful glances and head nods of the other race team members were keenly in evidence.

Then to her right, a blonde man stood up and bowed to her politely. Chihiro stopped in her tracks as she realized who it was...

...After the race, Pierre Ar Bras had walked over to congratulate her and the N.I.T. team on their victory. Instead of being disappointed in finishing second, he was very spirited and sportsmanlike to all of them; a model of graciousness. He proffered a handshake to every team member, which was inevitably recorded by a flurry of clicks from cameras of the press entourage. But when he came to Chihiro, he looked at her hands and shook his head sadly. Nodding his head to her, he asked by gesture if he could hug her instead. Embarrassed, she glanced at her teammates...who all were smiling at her approvingly. Being hugged by her idol was shock enough, but once he released her from his hug, he said a number of things in French and then gave her a gentlemanly kiss on the cheek. That was the second shock. By this point, Chihiro was in a full blush. Fortunately, her N.I.T. members had managed to keep from cat-calling, whistling, or doing their usual bag of stupid stunts in such situations.

But the final shock came a moment later when she had recovered her composure enough to ask Sayoko what Pierre Ar Bras had said. Sayoko had grinned broadly as she recounted Pierre's words to her:

Pierre Ar Bras had apologized for his team's reprehensible and vulgar behavior at the bar towards her team. He had then complemented Chihiro on the impossible task of coaching an amateur team into a Le Mans victory. He had praised her for a defining act of courage that would stand proud in the annals of Le Mans history. Then, he given her a more personal compliment, noting that she was by far the most beautiful racing team manager he had ever met...and that he would be honored with a dance at the reception tonight...

After Sayoko had translated his words, Chihiro had found herself suspended amongst the clouds for a few moments after _that_!

...and now, seeing him stand up from his table and gallantly offer her a special token of recognition caused her to feel herself flying upwards towards those clouds again!

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Megumi couldn't help but notice the brief interchange between Chihiro and the blond man. She leaned over to Sayoko, who was seated at the next table, and asked her in a whisper about Chihiro's sudden 'paralysis'. Sayoko motioned her closer with a wag of her finger, grinning broadly. She repeated an interchange that had occurred between Chihiro and the race driver, who happened to be none other than Pierre Ar Bras.

"That's _him_?!" Megumi gasped. Sayoko nodded her head.

"And there's more. After the race, he came up to Chihiro and apologized for his team's behavior at the bar. Naturally, since Chihiro doesn't understand a lick of French, I ended up being the translator. He then complemented her on the impossible task of coaching an amateur team into a Le Mans victory. That wasn't all...he really lauded her for a defining act of courage that would stand proud in the annals of Le Mans history..." Sayoko continued.

"Wow! Really?"

"Yep! And then he said something that totally shocked even me...let alone Chihiro. He told me to tell her that he thought that she was by far the most beautiful racing team manager he had ever met...and he would be honored with a dance at the reception tonight. You should have seen the look on her face," Sayoko said with a sly grin.

"Ehhh? He said _that_ to her?" Megumi near-shouted. Sayoko shushed her, and whispered in her ear that _no one else_ was supposed to know about this. Megumi glanced at Chihiro, who was walking towards their table, her cheeks in a blush...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Chihiro sat down gingerly between Toshiyuki and Keiichi, and then turned to look at Megumi and Sora.

"Not another word from either of you," she said dryly gesturing with a bandaged raised finger. Megumi realized that Chihiro must have guessed that they had been commenting on her dress. Then, she noticed that Chihiro didn't have any makeup on. Despite this, Chihiro looked lovely...her face was flushed and her expression was a little bit on the wan side, but that was to be expected considering the extent of her injuries...and her lack of sleep over the past week.

Of course she wasn't wearing any makeup...as long as Megumi had known her, Chihiro had _never_ worn makeup! Which was good, because she was one of those women for whom even light makeup would detract from her flawless complexion. Megumi regarded Chihiro's injured hands, and deduced the obvious. Chihiro couldn't have made herself up even if she wanted to. Her burns were severe enough to prevent any fine motor hand movements. She realized that it must have taken a lot of determination just for her to put on a dress!

Megumi watched as Chihiro scanned the crowd, seemingly looking for someone. After a few seconds, she paused in mid-glance and smiled sheepishly, and then returned her attention to Megumi and the others.

"Chihiro, you look gorgeous! Why don't you wear dresses more often? Wearing dresses is a fey means of expressing a woman's charm...and you certainly have more than enough in the allurement department," Belldandy remarked with an appreciative friendly smile.

Megumi almost lost her composure with _that_ comment! Keiichi's face dropped into hasty embarrassment, while Chihiro's face blushed sharply. She almost giggled as her brother and Chihiro seemed to compete with each other in dumbfoundedness, while Belldandy smiled innocently to all...

That patent demure naivety of Belldandy's...had just struck again!

"Ahem!" Keiichi said, clearing his throat and fidgeting with his bowtie. The sight of her brother in a formal tux was almost a joke in itself to Megumi...especially since his collar wasn't straight and his bowtie dangled out at an awkward angle. Belldandy, despite being a Goddess, obviously didn't have the knack of adjusting Keiichi's haphazard formal attire towards anything resembling a chic polish.

"Leave it to the younger sister to make things right," she quipped as she stood next to Keiichi, slapped away his fidgeting hands, and adjusted his collar and bowtie correctly.

"He seems pretty edgy, don't you think," Sora side-whispered to her as she finished.

"Huh? Who?"

"Your brother, you dope! I don't think I've seen him this nervous in a long time..."

"Wouldn't you be nervous if you had to address _this_ crowd from up _there_?" Megumi replied, nodding towards the stage.

"Yeah...but he seems a lot more uptight than what would seem reasonable for someone expected to give a two-minute 'thank you' speech. Of course, you probably can't see it, since you're his sister and all, but..."

Megumi glanced at her brother out of the corner of her eye. He seems preoccupied with his own thoughts. Also, she could tell by the rapid rhythmic shaking of his torso that Keiichi was tapping his foot rapidly under the table. This was a telltale sign that he was more than just nervous.

"Come to think of it, you're absolutely right, Sora! What _is_ going on in that brain of his?"

"Too bad Cevn-sensei isn't sitting here at our table. He could psychoanalyze the workings of the mysterious mind of Morisato Keiichi for us," Sora replied with an impish grin.

"As if he'd want to! Besides, I think he's got his hands full tonight. Did you notice what Urd is wearing?"

"Yeah. I couldn't miss it...and neither could half the men in this auditorium. Yet, I wonder what's eating your brother?"

"Hmmm. If I had to guess...waitaminute! I've seen that look before! I remember Genji looking at me that way just a couple of weeks ago, when he introduced me to my parents and gave me this ring! You don't suppose..."

The rest of her conjectures were lost in a burst of applause.

Everyone around the two girls drew silent and clapped as the honorary chairman of this year's Le Mans race ascended the small stage and stepped behind the podium. The elderly man began reciting a speech in carefully enunciated French; Megumi could only pick up a few words here and there, but she could sense by his intonation and the reactions of the Frenchmen and women in the room...that his speech was filled with evocation. Besides, the clearly pronounced foreign words sounded very elegant to her ears. Then another man in an Automobile Club de L'Ouest jacket was invited to the podium to address the assembly. Ten minutes later, as the third speaker finished his talk, Megumi heard him announce something in French-inflected tones.

"_Key-shay Mary-sit-too?_" the man repeated, slightly changing his pronunciation as he politely smiled out into the audience.

Genji nudged her with his foot.

"Hey, that's you!" she shout-whispered across the table at her brother, who seemed to be staring off into space. After the fourth repeat of his name, Keiichi finally heard him, backed his chair up and then walked towards the stage.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Keiichi felt his neck tingling with nervous anticipation as he shook the hands of the gentleman who had called him to the stage. It was as if his spine rooted itself in the floor, preventing him from anything other than stiff movements. In juxtaposition to his stiffness, his legs felt like garden hose in the summer heat...rubbery and unsolid.

Gesturing towards the podium in the universal language of invitation, the race sponsor patted him on the shoulder and kissed him on both cheeks in the common European gesture as he strode up behind the podium.

His legs felt like they were going to give out. Suddenly, everything in the room was unbearably bright and hot. He clutched the sides of the podium, noticing that a glass of water was tucked inside the upper shelf under the mike. In an instant, he pulled out the glass and quickly gulped a slug of water.

As he regarded the crowd in the packed dining hall, his anxiety mounted to stratospheric heights. Everyone that he had competed against was here. Everyone that he cared about was here. It was as if an entire lifetime of memories, an entire world of the bays and straits of his experience, had been compacted jack-in-the-box style into this room.

"Well, here goes nothing...and everything," he thought softly to himself as he adjusted the microphone.

_"It is my deep and humble honor to be allowed a moment to address such a prestigious group as that which is gathered here. I can only hope that my words can do justice to the graciousness that has been shown to our Club by the sponsoring organization. And to my fellow companions of the racetrack, I daresay that..."_ he began, pausing for the French translator to repeat his words for the benefit of those present.

"Wow! He's really taking this seriously," Megumi commented to herself, proud of her brother's opening exordium.

Sora was visibly impressed with Keiichi's speech as he started to draw an analogy between several famous Japanese and the current state of the racing sport.

_"...one of my countrymen, Fukuzawa Yukichi, whose image adorns our 10,000 yen bill, was fond of saying that personal enlightenment is exemplified by personal example. My example, in winning this race, left much to be desired. We Japanese pride ourselves on our ability to govern our candor, regardless of the situation. In this respect, I fell short far short of my countrymen's expectations. Yet, a callous disregard for convention has also been the hallmark of many of the historical personages that my nation deems as leaders and heroes. My ascendancy to this moment, shared with all of you, has been nothing less than miraculous in production._

_"The miracle which potentified our victory in this year's Le Mans was not a mere whimsy of fate. As you all know, competing on the racetrack requires a certain noblesse _away_ from the racetrack. My teammates, almost all of whom are my friends and classmates, conjoined their dreams and then cast their aspirations into an armorance of dedication and sacrifice..."_

"My God, where'd he learn to talk like that?" Sora whispered to Megumi.

_"...I would especially like to offer my initial accredit to our Club President, Fujimi Chihiro. Chihiro, more than anyone else, has been the heart of our Club. In fact, the initial dream that spurred us towards our involvement in this honored race, with its rich history of tradition, was an outpouring of –_her-_ inspiration! Despite our initial reluctance and reservations about our abilities, she met the challenge of getting our team to the Le Mans with an unyielding persistence of vision, tempered with the wisdom of hard-earned experience on many racetracks in Japan, Europe and America. Her efforts to weave a web of enthusiasm between our Club members has made –_everything-_ possible, especially our improbable victory at the Gran Prix de Le Mans yesterday. Her many, many sacrifices for the cause of our team..."_

Megumi glanced over at Chihiro long enough to see the N.I.T Unified Club president break into wide-eyed tears at the mention of her name, not flinching for a second as she watched Keiichi. For all she knew, Chihiro had probably coached him on this victory speech...

_"...Tamiya and Ootaki have been mentors for me for, it seems, as long as I can remember. My sister, Megumi, who was one of my two copilots...I hope –_this-_ makes up for all the times I cluttered up our living room with slot car tracks while we were growing..."_

Megumi felt hot tears running down her cheeks as the crowd laughed politely and then broke into cheerful applause after the French translator repeated what Keiichi had said.

_"Hasegawa Sora has the distinction of being the youngest driver ever to compete on a winning team in the Le Mans. Besides this historical fact, Sora is quite a historical girl. Suffice it to say, Sora had to confront the twin demons of self-doubt and self-expectation...which she did so with the composure of a champion...all the while telling us how fun it would be to race in the Le Mans…"_

"That's not true!" Sora said tearfully, remembering her several breakdowns of confidence prior to the race.

"«_Of course it isn't_,»" Belldandy heard Mara's voice say. She glanced over her shoulder, seeing Mara standing between her table and Urd's in stealth form…_dressed in a red dinner gown_!.

"«_Now, he did say 'demons', didn't he? The little one was only struggling against her doubts, and I daresay she conquered them in winning style! Besides, I wouldn't miss _–this-_ for a conference with the Dark Lord Himself!»_" Mara added with a fang-revealing wide grin. It was unmistakable to Belldandy that Mara was _really_ revved up about something...

_"...which often is expressed in extremes. Being a champion means risking –_everything-_; which we all know carries with it the concordant emotional pendulum which is the byproduct of intense competition..." _Keiichi said. He paused momentarily, as _his_ emotional pendulum was careening all over the place.

Belldandy almost choked on her breath when she saw her _parents_, Freiija and Odeyn, suddenly manifest in mid-air behind Keiichi with a flash of arcane energy. For a split-second, she felt awash with panic; this was right in the middle of a Le Mans celebratory banquet. She settled her nerves as she realized that they were here to share in this very special moment for her and Keiichi, to enjoy their team's hard-fought victory. Mom grinned and then pointed at Chihiro, and then at Pierre Ar Bras…and winked.

Mom had delivered on her promise to Chihiro…and Chihiro probably didn't even know it yet!

_"Now, there is one person that I would desire to offer my final thanks to. She has been my comfort, my guide, my inspiration, my teacher...in fact, she has been so many things to me over these past five years that I would do a disservice to claim to remember even a fraction of them with clarity. We first met under some extremely crazy circumstances...but ever since then, her presence in my life has become inescapable; because of much more than the ultimate force that brought us together. And in spite of the forces that brought her into my life, I..snff..can only say that it is because she has found a home inside of my..snff..heart, that is to say, that she –_has-_ become my heart. This leads me..snff..to feel very strongly that we are destined to partner each other through life. F..forever..."_

Everyone's eyes turned to Belldandy, whose face was riveted with a tidewater of emotions.

She was looked at nothing else but Keiichi; her full span of attention embracing her mortal boyfriend. Feeling richly bestowed by his profoundly public acknowledgment of her, she smiled angelically at him, nodding her head in approval. Once more, Keiichi had made her heart leap, somersault and prance in joyful recognition of the constancy and intensity of his love for her. Indeed, for as much he claimed that she was his heart...Keiichi had become the fire that nurtured the embers of her own heart into blazing flames of passion and bliss.

_"So...this being the case, I have finally decided to face my life's deepest ambition. An ambition that far transcends winning the Le Mans, not that taking the cup is something to sneer about. But a trophy is only a trophy...a victory is just a line in a page of a history book. On a more personal level, I hope to achieve the highest personal goal possible...to win the heart of the Goddess that I love..."_

A murmur passed through those in the N.I.T. Unified Club that knew about Belldandy's divine origin. The French translator shot Keiichi a perplexed look at _that_ statement.

_"Yes, in many ways, she is a Goddess,"_ Keiichi corrected himself, trying to conceal his slipup. _"The fulfillment of this endless dream is the question at hand...one whose sole answer resides in the person of my spiritual twin. For only with her can I truly –_live-_ a fulfilling life! I crave your kind indulgence, but I must ask her this..."_

Keiichi felt the ascendancy of fear that had gripped him with successively rapt paroxysms of threat...flutter away. If he was putting everything on the line...with the woman he loved more than anything else in the world...then actually, he was putting _nothing_ on the line. He was just confirming what he...and she...both knew.

And wanted.

"_Belldandy, this is my bended knee..._" he said, looking straight at his wonderful girlfriend, feeling his soul pooling deeply in her beauteous eyes...

"What's he talking about?" Megumi said to Sora, unsettled by the fact that Keiichi had totally shifted gears from a very formal sounding speech...to _this_ naked personal revelation...

"C'mon, you guys! Don't you see what's happening? This is _really_ going to be cool!" Chihiro said to them with a reassuring smile. Somehow, call it feminine intuition, or just the fact that she had watched Keiichi mature over the past several years...whatever the reason, she already knew what Keiichi was going to do...

And it was about time he did it!

Chihiro knew that Keiichi _did_ have a heart of gold...a heart of a true champion! This was going to more than make up for his crazy stunt at the end of the race this afternoon! Chihiro watched Belldandy closely, remembering her words from a year ago: "I'm a woman...of course I have a romantic heart."

"Well, your romantic heart is about to be nuked into overdrive!" Chihiro thought with a grin. True to her character, Belldandy was so enrapt with Keiichi that she didn't have a clue about what was happening. This would be the icing on the cake…well, maybe the second icing on the cake, if the chemistry between her and Pierre Ar Bras played out like Sayoko seemed to think that it might…

Belldandy was mystified as Keiichi stepped away from behind the podium and walked to the edge of the stage. She held her hands over her breast in quietude as her boyfriend settled himself down onto one knee, like a knight before a queen. He reached into the vest pocket of his tuxedo and withdrew a small felt container.

Opening it carefully, he regarded her with beseeching eyes. Despite the fact that he was at least ten meters away from her, the brilliant glow from the object inside of the small box flashed like a beacon as he held it in his quivering hands.

"But I already have a ring...the ring you gave me after our first Christmas together," she mouthed to him.

_"...and on bended knee, in front of everyone and everything...I offer you my soul's truth and my heart's desire:_

**Belldandy, I love you. Will you please marry me?"**

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Chihiro grinned broadly, her cheeks rosy.

Tamiya ripped his dinner napkin in half.

Sayoko gasped and clutched Tamiya's arm.

Ootaki drummed the table playfully.

Mara felt a rare tear trace her cheek.

Urd felt her heart glowing warmly.

Cevn felt a shiver run up his back.

Sora shuddered, wide-eyed aghast.

Toshiyuki nodded sharply and smiled.

Genji squeezed Megumi's hand.

Megumi felt herself growing dizzy

and Skuld started crying like a little girl.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Belldandy was momentarily paralyzed. Gripped with the outpouring of ecstatic emotions that were exploding with supernova intensity inside of her heart.

At last, the Present had caught up to her...

"«_C'mon, sis! Don't keep him waitin'!»_" she heard Urd, Skuld and Mara chorusing vivid and wildly happy thoughtcasts in her mind a microsecond later. Snapping out of her momentary fugue, she saw Mara standing behind Urd, no longer in stealth form but dressed in her red evening gown in the guise of head hostess, complete with a "Mara" nametag.

Behind Skuld, in stealth manifestations, floated Peorth and Heroic Vermillion Swift, Keiichi's Angel. Both were grinning broadly, encouragingly.

Keiichi had _totally_ surprised her!

And behind Keiichi...

She blinked as she saw a flash-pulse of energy from her parent's stealth-form manifests, hearing their thoughtcasts in her mind.

"«_Do that which will make you find happiness, my daughter. Whatever brings joy to your heart and a smile upon your face...merits my total approval,»_" her father thoughtcast in a celebratory voice. She looked at him and he nodded his head, affirmingly.

"«_Daddy…»_" she said, feeling for a nanosecond like she back to being a little girl-goddess again. He grinned back at her, and inclined his head towards his wife.

"«_After careful reflection, I decide that I completely allow and approve of this young mortal man for you, if it is your wish that he become your husband. We will try him soon to steel his merit, but for now, you may act as you will. Seize your youth, B'dandy! And by doing so, you'll make the Goddess of Marriage as happy as she has ever been in her life...with an acceptance of –_this-_ marriage proposal,»_" her mother thoughtcast.

"«_Mother...»_" Belldandy gasped as she stood up, in the middle of the now-silent auditorium/dining hall. She locked her eyes with Keiichi's, her whole being surrounded by a halo of blue light. And she didn't care about the glow, how it would be perceived in the eyes of the hundreds of mortals all around her. She'd make Urd explain it off later as a "trick of the light" caused by her dress...

_**"My darling Keiichi, when I plumb the deepest dreams that enliven my kokoro...I see only your eyes. Your smile. Your face. And your soul! I love you with my whole being...and I –**_**want-**_** to be your wife for life! **_

_**Without doubt or hesitation, my answer is most definitely 'Yes!'"**_

Belldandy was shaking with an inspired ambrosia of joy, her blue-red dress shimmering in the lights of the dining hall. A few seconds later, she began the walk the path towards Keiichi...a walk that only she...of all the creatures in the Multiverse...could properly author.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Keiichi watched Belldandy walking slowly towards him. His being was so suffused with joy in witnessing the satisfied glow of her face...that he nearly dropped the ring case.

"«_Congratulations, future son-in-law!»_" he heard a glorious male and female voice chorusing in his head.

Odeyn and Freiija. They were _here!_ Or had been here. Tempted to look around the room for them, Keiichi quickly realized that they wouldn't be visible to his eyes.

"I don't know if you can hear me or not...but I promise to take care of your daughter and bring happiness and love into her life...even more so than ever before!" he promised mentally.

He felt a hand on each shoulder...one invisible hand squeezed him gently while the other patted him praisefully. But he also sensed a parental wariness amidst their seeming exuberance...

Keiichi smiled inside, realizing that Bell-chan's parents must have heard his thoughts.

Then she was standing in front of him. He looked into her sapphire-blue eyes, gleaming like jeweled clouds in the sky. Belldandy's whole face was figured with a blissful expression.

"This is for you, I believe," he quipped with a grin as he withdrew the ring from the felt container.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Belldandy felt Keiichi gently grasp her hand in his, and then guide the ring onto her ring finger with a slow, steady motion. It was a good thing he was holding her hand in his, because she was shaking violently with emotion.

Such a simple ceremony...and yet how it moved her!

He had garlanded her life with his love; now his ring garlanded her finger. She had gazed lovingly into his eyes, never leaving them for the entire time it took for him to put her ring on her slender finger. She didn't want to break the bonds of eye-love with her beloved Keiichi, but she wanted to see the ring he had just given her.

A _real_ engagement ring...just like in all the mortal bridal books and fairytales.

She smiled at him, and then took a quick glance at her new ring.

Her eyes fluttered wide with shock as she realized that the gemstone in the ring he had just given her...was made of _pure Metaixodenum_! There was enough Ixodenum in this ring to power several universes for 10 trillion year's worth of lifecycles. To the human eye, it looked like a brilliant, large diamond with a faint azure glow.

But it was more...much more!

"Keiichi, how can you have..? W..where did you get this ring?" she whispered in amazement. She already knew the only possible answer to her own question. The only being powerful enough to concentrate this much Ixodenum into a physical singularity was...the Almighty!

The Lord Himself had sanctioned their union!

"Why, worry about that, Bell-chan?" Keiichi said, scratching the back of his head in shy embarrassment. "I'd like to say that I worked hard for years to buy it for you. But I could never afford a ring with a diamond this huge! To tell the truth, I _found_ this diamond! Remember last Tanabata, when you gave each of us a strip of paper to write a wish upon? I found this diamond in my room the next day..." he answered.

Belldandy stared at him in wonderment. Her boyfriend, no, her husband-to-be...thought this ring was just a diamond!

"And today...that wish has come true!" Keiichi added. He reached his arms around her and drew her to him, hugging her gently as she wrapped her arms back around him, feeling his heartbeat next to hers.

She heard whistling and cheering from behind her. Chihiro's telltale earsplitting whistle, Tamiya's burly shouts...her friends were going wild with abandon!

She looked over Keiichi's shoulder to see both of her parents smiling at her with tearful expressions. Her mother blew her a kiss, her father waved and gave her a giddy V-sign...then they faded away.

Keiichi had taken a formal speech at the after-race reception...and had turned it on its ear into a marriage proposal! It was times like this that she thanked the fates for bringing such a wonderful, unique man into her life. The Le Mans press corps covering the event were showering them with camera flashes; photos that would appear in _Le Monde_ tomorrow.

Belldandy looked at the ring on her finger again, feeling a sense of disbelief. Rarely does a Norn of the Present become spun out within the Present moment, but the depths of her heart were a-spin with emotional vertigo. She was in France, the Earthrealm nation renowned for romance, and had just received and accepted a marriage proposal! Thankfully, Keiichi was steadying her with an arm around her waist; which was very much needed because she was almost to the point of swooning.

She was going to be Keiichi's wife! Sometime in the near future, she was going to be married to this wonderful man!

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Tamiya was dealing with a hyperactive girlfriend. Women always go for the romantic stuff, and Sayoko was almost beside herself, completely spun into kimagure-land by Keiichi and Belldandy's stunt. Hell, he even felt his heart pounding out of his chest. The little lug had finally got his balls together and had done right by his girlfriend and the team. He would have never imagined anyone of his teammates ever getting married, especially the little guy who had humbly showed up at the N.I.T. MCC clubhouse five years ago and told him "I wanna race with you guys." Tamiya never had a little brother, and Keiichi had been a good substitute. He felt a tear in his eye when he remembered how he and Ootaki had kicked Keiichi and Bell out into the streets; which was totally the right thing to do, because they had learned how to rely on themselves.

Now, his little buddy was going to be married! Unbelievable!! Then again, he would have never dreamed that he would be sitting at a table in a tuxedo, in France, the N.I.T. club being feted as the winners of the Gran Prix de Le Mans…and with the numero uno babe of N.I.T. _Sayoko Mishima_ hangin' on his arm.

"Where have all da years gone?" he whispered to his enchanting girlfriend...but her reply was drowned out by a loud shout from the other side of the auditorium.

_"Long Todd!!"_

Tamiya sat his coffee down and turned around towards the sound of the voice, just as Toshiyuki Aoshima punched an American twice his size square on the jaw, almost halfway across the hall.

It didn't faze the American a bit.

"Why you little Japanese prick!" the tall American shouted, gripping Toshiyuki by the lapel of his dinner jacket and punching him in the face, then pushing him roughly against a nearby table, knocking it over. Some of the Americans laughed...

"And my name is Todd Long, not 'Long Todd', you little dickwad!"

Tamiya heard a scream coming from another direction.

Sora?

No...it was Sayoko! She had went off to visit the Ladies Room to fix her makeup, which kept running. It had been a tearful night for everyone. And now Aoshima had to ruin it by startin' something!

Sora was standing wordlessly at her table towards the front of the reception hall, too shocked to shout.

Tamiya stood himself up, realizing in an instant what that stupid Aoshima had gone and done. Well, in a way, it wasn't so stupid. Everybody on the N.I.T. team wanted to do to Todd Long what Toshiyuki Aoshima just did. Long was the driver who had barreled into little Sora at the beginning of the Le Mans.

And then, the jerk had the audacity to show his face here, at _our_ victory party!

But Aoshima had gotten to him first...and then called him out and false-cracked him.

"Tamiya! Do something! He's just trying to save face and get even for what this bastard did to Sora!" Sayoko pleaded with him, shouting through a cupped hand several tables away.

A crowd was queuing...

Tamiya's mind shifted gears, wheels spun, sparks flew, pistons hammered. He always had a protective streak towards Sora; privately regarding the diminutive N.I.T. sophomore like he would a baby sister in elementary school. He remembered last year when she admitted that she had a crush on Aoshima. He had cursed to the walls when he returned to the Men's Dorm that night, and then got _seriously_ drunk with Ootaki.

Of all the people she could pick...she had to pick the Number One jerk on the N.I.T. campus.

So he had warned Aoshima, in no uncertain terms, that if he ever did anything to hurt little Sora, Tamiya would be happy to personally see to it that he spent a minimum of a month in the hospital. But instead of mistreating her, Toshiyuki Aoshima had treated Sora like a precious jewel. Which indeed she was. Sora had a certain spunk that fired the N.I.T Club...plus she was one of the 'brains' of the Club.

The Unified Club...

Tamiya recalled how Aoshima had dissolved his Four Wheel Club and had given its cash assets and members to their Club, with no conditions on the table. It turned out that the mechanics for Aoshima's Club were pretty damned good...and the money had basically salvaged their effort to compete in the Le Mans. He initially resented the name change...but some time in the week before they left for France, he had reconciled himself to it. And as the days ticked closer to the day of the race...the more he found that he actually _liked_ the name, despite whatever he let off to Ootaki. He knew that Ootaki was secretly pleased with the name change, even though his best bud had faked his displeasure for a month or so, just to keep up appearances.

Reluctantly, he had to admit that he had started to grudgingly feel a liking towards Aoshima too. And now, Aoshima had called out a man who was twice his size, in public, to stand up for the honor of his girlfriend. It was obvious that this American dude weighed at least 100Kg, if not more. Aoshima didn't stand a chance. Tamiya tellingly nodded at his girlfriend Sayoko. She nodded back, giving him the green light to deal with stuff. The damned place was too crowded! As he walked towards the altercation, Tamiya looked at Toshiyuki Aoshima. He was sprawled on the ground, a stream of blood running from his nose and the corner of his mouth.

Aoshima had a broken nose.

To his amazement, he watched Aoshima _force himself to his feet_ and face the American driver for the Cadillac team...

"Todd Long, you tried to hurt my girlfriend out there...and now I'm going to hurt you!" he heard Aoshima announce. Tamiya was surprised by the raw threat in Toshiyuki's voice. He thought Aoshima was just bein' stupid. The smart move would be to cash in the ranch and stay down for the count. But he was up and in that American prick's face again. Sometimes, fools make courage…and this was one of those times.

Everyone nearby had gone silent, forming a circle around the two men. Well, they weren't two men...next to Long, Toshiyuki Aoshima looked like a boy.

"So you want some more, you stupid Nip!" the American taunted. "Bring your weakass stuff on, little man!"

Tamiya was torn between trying to break up the fight, fighting on behalf of Aoshima, or leaving things alone. After all, this was a fight for honor between men.

Aoshima advanced on the American...

Tamiya suddenly noticed that the American had a hand behind his back. Being a veteran brawler, Tamiya knew that Long was up to something no good. He shouted to warn Aoshima...but it was all too late as the American crashed a dish over Toshiyuki's head, and then shoved Aoshima into another table with a foot in the chest.

"Whoa! That's pretty messed up!" Ootaki hissed angrily.

"Toshi...stop! He's hurting you! Please stop it!" Sora screamed hysterically as she tried to force her way through the throng to his side.

"Plenty more from where this comes from!" the American shouted to Aoshima, who was scrambling for his glasses. Tamiya couldn't understand American's words, but he knew the intent. Once again, Toshiyuki Aoshima _stood up_.

The fighter in Tamiya was thrilled to see such a raw display of spirit!

"I...can't...give...up! It's...for...you...Sora," Toshiyuki said unevenly.

Tamiya's thoughts halted in their tracks like a derailing Shinkansen. The sneaky coward, Toshiyuki Aoshima, was willing to go to the mat...for Sora? The behind-the-scenes manipulator of so many troubles for the N.I.T. MCC, he and Ootaki, Keiichi and Belldandy...was standing up like a man?

Standing up for Sora!

Everyone on the team had wanted to deck this worthless gaijin who had knocked Sora off her feet at the beginning of the race. But as Sora's boyfriend, Aoshima had been the first to act. Tamiya checked his thoughts, and realized that Aoshima had thought this through and had done it right. He had waited until all the speeches were finished, so as to not create an unruly incident that would reflect badly on the team. Once the presentations were over and the lounge band was setting up, he must have immediately sought out Long and his Team Cadillac teammates. His only mistake was in takin' on a guy twice his size.

Tamiya felt a sudden glimpse of respect for Toshiyuki Aoshima. The sneaky N.I.T. freshman that he had known from the past...certainly wasn't _this_ man! This man had guts Long might be twice Aoshima's size, but the little guy had twice as much courage and spirit as Long. Aoshima had grown up to be a man, right under Tamiya's nose, because he was doin' what a man should be doin'.

"No...one...does...this...to my girlfriend and my Club!" Aoshima hissed angrily. Tamiya felt his whole body tense when Aoshima shouted "My club!" The words kept echoing in his ears.

Aoshima...no, Toshiyuki Aoshima...was _standing up for the Club_ as well!

"That does it!" Tamiya bellowed as he stripped off his jacket. He didn't like wearin' no damn monkey jacket anyway. He looked at Ootaki, then at Keiichi, and then at Sayoko. He winced as he saw the look of concern on Sayoko's face as she eyed her cousin; obviously she was much closer to her cousin than Tamiya had ever imagined. Then he looked at Chihiro with an enquiring expression.

"Go get 'im, tiger! Rip him a new one! While you're at it, give him a good one for me too!" she mouthed to him silently. Tamiya finally caught his girlfriend's eyes...Sayoko was smiling wickedly as he finished wadding up his jacket.

"Hurry!" Sayoko shouted.

"Leave him alone, you big asshole!" Sora said as she stepped between Toshiyuki and the American.

"Shit!!" Tamiya thought in a panic, elbowing the Team Cadillac members aside as they tried to restrain him from making his way through the ring of onlookers.

"You want more!" the American shouted at Toshiyuki and Sora, slapping his shoulders wrestler-style as he advanced on Tamiya's teammate.

"LEAVE US ALONE!" Sora screamed shrilly as she stood up, right in Long's face.

And then Long did the unspeakable.

The bastard swatted little Sora aside with a slap! A collective gasp went through the crowd as they recognized how ugly this was getting. His dickhead teammates were eating it up, and Tamiya decided to bull his way through them.

Tamiya stepped right up in front of Long, stopping him dead in his tracks.

"He's done for da night. You'll hafta go through me tuh get tuh him. An' besides, ah got a beef ta settle with yuh, yuh jerk! Any punkass that hits a little woman deserves ta be pickin' his teeth out of his throat. She whupped your ass on the track…an' now I'm gonna finish da job. Yuh deserves what yuh'res gonna get!" Tamiya growled, standing between Toshiyuki, Sora and the Team Cadillac driver. He looked down on the American.

The blonde American eyed Tamiya warily.

Sora eyed Tamiya with kid-sister gratitude. And Toshiyuki eyed him with astonishment.

"Who the hell do you think _you_ are, hotshot? Godzilla?" he said. His comment drew a round of laughter from his teammates. Tamiya barely understood what he said, so he stared down this man Long of the Cadillac Team. Stared _down_ at him, since Tamiya was a few cm taller.

"You think you're a tough guy, like some Yakuza type of dude? Well, I was the California Golden Gloves champion when I was 20, and just missed the Athens Olympic Boxing Team..."

His teammates were grinning and murmuring with approval amongst themselves as Long spelled out his fighting credentials.

All Tamiya heard was "boxing", until Cevn repeated the Team Cadillac driver's claims to him in Japanese, finishing with a "Tamiya, kick his ass good!" as the American pulled off his jacket and rolled up his sleeves.

"Good. This will be an interesting fight...even if Ootaki looks a little worried," Tamiya thought to himself. He glanced back at Toshiyuki Aoshima, who was woozily leaning for support on Sora and Megumi; Sora dabbing at his nose and mouth with a wet dinner jacket. Toshiyuki Aoshima looked at him with a grateful expression...and Tamiya winked at him and smiled. Nodding his head at Sora, he turned to face the American and got in his face.

"I don't care a shit about your boxing! And I definitely don't give a rat's ass about you!" Tamiya said in perfect English, amazing Cevn and every N.I.T. Club member that had studied beyond the mandatory six years of English.

Ootaki's grin got broader as he saw the look of uncertainty in the American's face transform to fear...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"That was totally rad, Tamiya!!" Ootaki and Chihiro shouted.

Ootaki recalled how Chihiro had reacted earlier. Despite her injuries, the Unified Club president kept insisting that if she ever saw this guy Long, she was going to deck him for almost killing Sora at the beginning of the race. When she first spied him on the other side of the banquet hall, he had restrain her. Bandages and all...she wanted to have a piece of Long. Her attitude pretty much reflected what everyone on the team felt. Watching the fight spin out, he was glad that his best friend got to kick ass for the things he held most dear. Sayoko was cheering him on, which made him even more vicious. Chihiro's hands were bandaged...she could only stand next to Ootaki and watch as Tamiya took Long out. But he could tell that she vicariously enjoyed every minute of the fight. Even the Pierre French Guy dude seemed to get into to it.

Ootaki was amazed...the first couple minutes actually looked like a heavyweight boxing match. The American dude obviously knew how to box expertly, and had connected a few haymakers on Tamiya. Tamiya had a bloody nose, and would probably have a shiner and headache tomorrow, because one of Long's dumbass teammates had crashed a chair over his head, hoping to knock him out.

Big Mistake.

Tamiya had been hit on the head by more heavy objects than any person Ootaki had ever known, including a 75cc minibike from the top of a junk pile, back when Peorth visited for the first time. All it did was piss off the big guy...and earn the American dude who did it a righteous crack on the head from the wrench that he always kept stashed inside his leather jacket. Usually, the wrench was for Good Samaritan emergency road repairs, but this time he had used it in its lesser-known role as his Equalizer.

A few minutes later, it became obvious that Tamiya was going to whip Long. Tamiya hadn't earned a rep all over Hokkaido for his fighting abilities by being a slouch. But the American, with all his bragging, had never even bothered to call out Tamiya's credentials before they rumbled.

Major Mistake.

Even Ootaki thought it was a little extreme...that last punch. It was definitely a jaw-breaker "Mother of all Super-Tamiya Punches". Tamiya had wound up and then jacked the American on the jaw with all his weight thrown into it, punching him so hard that he literally sailed over the table behind him.

It was over within minutes. The American, Long, was out cold on the floor, looking like he was missing a few teeth. Three of his teammates who made the mistake of trying to false crack or jump Tamiya were also out on the floor.

"So much for yuh're boxing an' racing skills, yuh butt-ugly muthafuckers! We beat yuhs on both accounts! Any others wanna take me on?" Tamiya shouted at the group of Cadillac team members. They silently tried to avoid eye contact with enraged Unified Club member.

"Good. Der's the door...get da fuck out of here!. Dis is _our_ night! Dis is our party!"

He and Chihiro were laughing their asses off, watching Tamiya yelling at the Team Cadillac jerk-rat dudes while he herded them out the door, like a dog herding sheep.

"I'm glad that it was Tamiya who handed his head to him. Tamiya really needed to let off some steam, don't you think?" Chihiro replied, grinning. Ootaki and several others nodded their heads in agreement. Ootaki was secretly amused that the Boss was so squeamish around the French driver who seemed interested in her.

"This fight will probably set back Japanese-American relations to the 60s. I'll have a lot of explaining to do as you guy's faculty sponsor once we get back to N.I.T. And you know what? Fuck it! I'll just have to tell them that Tamiya did the right thing, and they'll just have to buy it," Cevn commented to him and Chihiro.

"Ze American, he was a fool. His poor sportsmanship at ze beginning of this race caused all of this mayhem. He deserved everything he got," another voice said in French. Pierre Ar Bras and several of his teammates had joined their little circle, and suddenly Chihiro was squirming a little.

When the brutal business was over, Tamiya walked over and high-fived Ootaki with a loud slap. He apologized to the Pierre dude with a "no hard feelin's" handshake for punching him the other night at that bar, and then went over to Toshiyuki Aoshima to give him his due.

"Yuh're one really stand-up guy, Aoshima, stickin' up for lil' Sora and da Club like youse did! Consider yuhself my friend," he said and offered him a handshake. The N.I.T. sophomore was still too dizzy from being punched by Long to shake it, but he and Sora's expressions of gratitude made it clear that the message was received.

"Glad you're on _our_ team!" Sora joked.

Fighting done, he went over and gathered Sayoko in a big long hug, lost for a moment in the big smile she had for him.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Something odd happened right after Keiichi proposed marriage to Belldandy. I was intoxicated with joy for the two of them when suddenly my consciousness felt an eclipse. Oddly, part of my heart seemed to shed the beauty of such an important moment in my friend's life. It was almost as if I was sinking, plunging into unpleasant depths of an ocean of malingering paralysis. I felt a flash of hate pass through the satin of my brow, tearing and ripping it.

And then a silence of the being, a lucubration of my soul, an annihilation of my heart. It was so sublime and profound that I started shaking from uncertain fear. Keiichi and Belldandy were kissing, kissing for the first time as a future husband and wife...and I was starving. It was as if someone had placed the crown of agonies that plague mankind upon my head.

I couldn't talk to anyone about it...this dark shadow that took me away from the joys of the moment. Tamiya's fight only seemed to echo my internal turmoil.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

It took about a half hour for the gendarmes arrived to sort out the fight. The American and several of his teammates were hauled off to jail. I thought that Tamiya might be hauled off too, until the police on the scene saw Sayoko. They didn't even bother to question him. Sayoko and Genji explained everything to the cops, who were more than happy to lock up Long.

"After all," Sayoko informed us after huddling with the gendarmes, "they saw what happened at the start of the race while on duty at the police station..."

After the staff cleared off some of the dinner tables in the banquet area of the large reception hall, the entertainment finally took the stage for the 'suit and tie' part of the dance. A provincial French big band started warming up, performing 'loungey' jazzy music...complete with the stereotypical French accordion stylings. Needless to say, I didn't feel like dancing; it sounded like the brand of chintzy French music that one often hears in the background during coffee commercials. Later, a Paris DJ would lay down some tracks for the younger late-nighters like us. So I just floated about, trying to converse with my broke-up French.

Which irked Urd off.

But later, when the music leapt the decades to the 21st Century, my reluctance to dance had wander-ranged into the nether realms of paranoid fear. I felt mounting impulses, which cast anxiety towards getting out on the floor to dance. Again, I felt _wrong_; as if part of my being would be stripped away with razor blades if I went out on the dance floor. I saw Urd, looking beautiful, striking, sexy...her eyes beckoning me to dance with her.

I just couldn't. I don't know why, but something inside of me was bearing down on my confidence with a death-like reluctance. I felt like I had clubfeet, or no feet. It wasn't anything to do about the dance or Urd. My soul seemed to have switch-backed, drawing me towards restless loops of frustration. Not one to sit still at a party, Urd started dancing with some of the other men...and that's when I got jealous.

The summer air outside the chateau was much more comfortable than being around Urd or anyone else. I looked out over the large grounds of the provincial grounds, watching the water fountains spray their night-time designs against the stars. Keiichi just proposed to Belldandy. Chihiro seems to be hitting it off with Pierre Ar Bras. Megumi and Genji are dancing. Sora was at the hospital with Toshiyuki, who had confronted his fears and earned everyone's respect.

Everyone's happy...and I'm miserable.

Urd _should_ be miserable, but she didn't have time to be. At least a dozen men were hounding her last time I checked the dance floor.

Jealousy is such a stupid, worthless emotion. I felt odious for even feeling it. Wasn't it Freud who said that the passions of love were only slightly more intense that the urges to murder?

What is happening to me, why is my heart so hard?

Urd came outside to join me once again, obviously concerned about why I was so reserved and avoidant. Each time she came out to check on me, I could see something sad in her eyes; hinting that she was regarding me with sympathy. She seemed to be pitying me for feeling jealous, which only made me feel even more angry, not just at her but at myself.

Such clumsy forms am I...poised in my inertia with dangle weeds of jaundiced moods, trite and jejune in my self-pity and fear.

What was I withholding? I couldn't even look her in the eye, or speak to her. Why should my self-imposed monage of misery be an imposition to her? She had said as much…

"Well, if you're going to just stand out here and be miserable...I'm going to dance and have fun!" Urd announced angrily before returning to the dance hall.

Five minutes later, Skuld walked up next to me, eying me suspiciously.

"My sister says you're not yourself tonight. What in Vanagdrasil is the matter with you? After all that I've been through with Belldandy and Keiichi...and now this! My middle sister is getting married to a mortal, and part of me still hates the idea; I _still_ feel that he's taking her away from me. But you and Big Sister...I'm really disappointed in you, Cevn! You promised me once that you would take care of her and make her happy! All you would have to do is walk into that room and ask her to dance," Skuld observed, eyeing me suspiciously.

"Why should I ask her? She's already got more than enough willing dance partners. Look at her!" I shot back irritably, watching Urd energetically dancing in the midst of several admiring men.

"It's an illusion, Cevn. You've known my sister for a little over a year...I've known her for over a hundred thousand years. You can't see her eyes the way I can. She may _look_ like she's enjoying herself...but I guarantee you that she isn't. As surely as I know every nuance of Banpei's engineering, I know for sure that my Big Sister misses being with you. How could you be so cruel...how could you do this to her?" Skuld finished, almost shouting out her final question.

I looked at the girl-goddess standing next to me, her words spilling circlets in my thoughts. It was uncanny...I _still_ wasn't used to the fact that she had shed almost all of her girlish appearance rather abruptly in the past month. She looked much older than a 16-year old teenager.

I couldn't answer her. The more I found myself situated in the moment, the more it seemed like part of me is missing. But how can I explain _that_ to anyone?

So I took the easy way out and told her to leave me the hell alone.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --


	66. Pt 66: Transitions

**Part 66: Transitions**

Before the initial flowering of victory-bliss had a chance to soften its touch on the N.I.T. Unified Club team members, Genji and Sayoko's parents had decided to grace the racing squad with another unexpected surprise. After bussing the whole team to Paris for a celebratory luncheon, the elder Mishima's announced that they were going to reward each and every N.I.T. Unified Club member with an all-expenses-paid 10-day vacation to Hawaii. In addition to this, the Mishima Corp. would provide a generous 500K yen spending allowance for each student, to be made available during the trip for shopping expenses. To a person, the team members naturally elected to share their vacations together, gleefully utilizing the lush package of perks that came with the trip.

To Megumi, vacationing in Hawaii possessed a tantalizing hint of intrigue. After the irongrid reality of sweaty months spent preparing to race in the Le Mans, an expenses-paid vacation seemed feathery in comparison...a complete shiftabout in lifestyle. Relaxing within the wisps of a cirrus cloud dreamstate...Megumi felt transported away from the dance of the mundane; it was as if she and her teammates had won a top prize on one of the network game shows. True to their word, Genji's parents had spared no expense in festaling the victorious racers.

Honolulu was a trip! The moment they got off the plane, the N.I.T. Unified Club was presented with floral leis by girls dressed in native Hawaiian dress...and the adventure began! Indeed, Megumi found herself to be somewhat of a minor celebrity with the locals; the humanitarian angle of the college students winning the premier roadrace was dangled to the TV audience by the media like cheesecake in front of a mouse. Within an hour of the Club's arrival, she and her teammates were getting requests for interviews from local broadcast stations.

Chihiro had become a hero of sorts to the local Japanese community here in Honolulu. She had been invited to be the keynote speaker at a high profile businesswomen's luncheon at the Japanese Cultural Center. The deference that the business community exhibited towards her only embarrassed her. She disclosed this to Megumi the first night, under threat of injury should anyone else find out.

Keiichi, Sora and she were swayed into signing glossy magazines at several Japanese booksellers. As she reclined on the hotel bed, Megumi observed to herself that she would probably never feel as proud of her accomplishments as she did that afternoon. When she and the others entered the first bookstore, they were met with wild cheers and applause. This, from her countrymen and others who lived thousands of miles away from Makuhari; people who had been following their progress in the Le Mans with attentive diligence. Stunned and tearfully overwhelmed by the attention, Megumi stole quick glances at her brother and Sora; once she noticed both of them struggling to hold back their own tears, her own sense of humble dignity was reinforced.

Megumi was happy for several of her clubmates...word had quickly spread among the Unified Club that several of their members had distant relatives who had moved to Hawaii generations ago, kin that they were meeting for the very first time.

In fact, everyone was having a blast here in Waikiki!

Yet, Megumi felt a shadow of regret because Urd, Skuld and Cevn weren't here to join in on the festivities. Skuld had elected to return to the temple home in Makuhari, ostensibly to check on her robots and projects. Megumi suspected a more salient reason for Skuld's 'homesickness'...Tomohisa. Despite her denials, Skuld _was_ in the body of a 16-year-old. Yet she tried to remain aloof of the strong play her changing hormones seemed to be causing. As one who had survived her teenage years, Megumi thought the girl was doing little more than fooling herself. Cevn had left with the youngest Norn, feeling downcast after his impasse with Urd. Belldandy had strongly suggested that he return directly to Japan, because a visit to his formal hometown of Honolulu might create some 'anomalies'. Megumi knew that Cevn had lived a life here; if he were to encounter any of his friends from Oahu, it could threaten his and their sanity. To them, he was dead. To him, they were untouchable ghosts.

To everyone's surprise, Urd had declined to vacation with them in Hawaii. Instead, she announced dramatically to Belldandy and Skuld that she was going to return to Yggdrasil to spend some time "mending".

The mid-summer temperature in Honolulu seemed hot to Megumi, but not as hot as its climatic counterpart in Chiba. Here, the heat possessed a different sort of grip, a sultry porveau that seemed to seep deeply into the skin. As a result, the air conditioners were blasting during the daytime in the swanky beachfront hotel lodgings the N.I.T. team were assigned. Their Club took up almost an entire floor of luxury suites...each room notable because of its breathstealing oceanfront view. Megumi was privately amused by the fact that the Mishima Corp had booked she and Genji into separate hotel rooms...but in adjoining suites.

She was winning her bet with Sora, made the first day they arrived on Oahu. Genji _was_ spending more time in her room than in his own. Especially after what happened yesterday...

Megumi smiled as she let herself be wrapped and suspended by the soft comforter on the plush bed in her hotel room. Of course, one of the first things she had wanted to do when she hit the island was go on a shopping spree with Sayoko and Sora at the Ala Moana Center, right next to Waikiki.

Sayoko was breathlessly enthusiastic as the three women strolled up Kalakaua Ave. towards the shopping center. Sayoko forenoted to Megumi and Sora in a brimming voice that this open-air mall would be a visual feast unlike anything that they was used to in Japan. Megumi and Sora had shopped through many of the vertical malls of Tokyo; illumned with waterfalls of neon, recessed lighting creating worlds-within-worlds, wallscreen TVs noisily advertising the latest styles, shops crammed tight and designed with an eye towards the future. The two N.I.T. coeds had frequently strolled through the block-long pedmalls of Chiba, with their tightly packed specialty shoppes and quaint kiosks...

But as they approached the Ala Moana Center, Megumi was stunned by the sheer magnitude of the shopping center. Wrapped in an imposing cavernous bi-level parking lot, the mall extended for what seemed like a kilometer in either direction. She slid to a halt and darted a quick glance at Sora; the sense of awe on her best friend's face confirmed her own feelings. The scale of the shopping Mecca was daunting...in the same manner as the huge terminal of Kansai Int'l Airport in Osaka had seemed to her the only time she had been inside of it. Megumi didn't want to shop here...she wanted to capture the mall with a roll of photos...

Sayoko seemed impatient as she and Sora struggled to decompress the mall into something less that short-breathedness. Megumi was too caught up in the initial flood of grandeur to be able to shift gears into 'shopping mode'. Her sense of amazement heightened one they entered the galleria: she could see indoor palm trees breezing noisily in the wind, hanging gardens exuding a panorama of floral odors, escalators wrapped in lava rock that confused the sense of nature-in-edifice. She had to dip her hand in one of the stylish fountain pools. Foodscent drifted from the food court, accompanied by the soundings in the distance of a jazz band performing onstage in the central hub courtyard of the mall. The visual impact of the Ala Moana Center suggested to Megumi the architectural breadth of the Makuhari Messe Exhibition Hall. After walking halfway down the main corridor of the shopping center, Megumi's awe gradually turned into delight.

"There's _hundreds_ of clothing stores here!" Sora announced with glee.

Sayoko expertly guided them to all the trendy stores. They needed a guide, because there must have been a thousand little shops gathered in the four-story mall! Megumi bought several Hawaiian floral print wrap skirts, a bunch of touristy T-shirts and the requisite souvenir items for her friends back at N.I.T. In a beachwear store, one bikini captivated her the moment she laid eyes upon it. Silken to the touch, the swimsuit had a navy blue background, against which waves of bright blue fabric shined iridescently to the eye. As if this wasn't enough, it was cleverly bordered with loopknitted tiny seashells. She _had_ to have it, even though the style was a bit more revealing than what she was used to...

Returning to the present, Megumi hugged the pillow underneath her, wishing that she was outside. She fought an impulse to get out of bed and look out of her window at the nightocean...

After shopping comes the beach!

The next day, feeling a shade tentative, Megumi had worn her new swimsuit to the beach. When she peeled off her t-shirt and shorts, she had looked anxiously at her boyfriend to gauge his reaction. Genji was wordless at first, gathering delighted giggles from Sora and a smirk from Toshiyuki. In many ways Genji was the polar opposite of Toshiyuki Aoshima; where Aoshima reacted to Sora's new swimsuit with wolfish eyes, Genji simply stared wordlessly at her. Megumi noticed that once her boyfriend figured out that he was staring at her, he flushed red with embarrassment. Not exactly the reaction she had expected. But she could overlook his struggles with his own shyness...most importantly, Genji's appraising eyes more-than-hinted to Megumi that she looked _good_ in her new swimsuit!

The following day, they traveled over the Pali to the other side of the island, to the famed Kailua Beach. Much less crowded than Waikiki beach, Megumi liked this stretch of beach much better. A couple of hours after she laid out, Genji reacted with a charming yet rarely expressed protective streak; he was jealous because Megumi was certainly catching a lot of male admirers as she sunbathed. She ended up suggesting that he work out some of his energy by windsurfing...

And finally, there was yesterday...the reason why Megumi had remained indoors all day today.

The 'swimsuit effect' had proved itself to be _too_ good.

It was kinda Genji's fault anyway. Kicking the mattress with her feet with frustration, and then grimacing with the resulting pain, Megumi corrected herself. Actually, yesterday was _totally_ her boyfriend's fault! In the morning, she had asked him to apply some suntan lotion on her skin...playing into the lore that it was every guy's dream to oil down their girlfriend with sunblock creme. At least, the anime, manga and shojo mags always portrayed this as an absolute...a powerful means for a woman to command masculine attention. Not to mention some confidences she had shared with Urd, and a little sleepytalk Megumi had overheard while her brother was napping several years ago...a month after a particularly interesting excursion to an ocean resort in which Urd dosed Keiichi and he ended up scaring the daylights out of Sayoko.

Megumi remembered how Genji's face brightened with a tight admixture of embarrassment and lust when she asked him to put the suntan lotion on her. She was amused with her boyfriend's innocent bout of nerveskittles as he soothed the cream on her back with shaky fingers.

He was so nervous that he had missed most of her back...and today she was paying the price for too much sun.

So now Megumi had to deal with the frustrating matter of being forced to sleep on her stomach, because she sported a big bright red blotch of tender sunburned ouchy skin in the middle of her lower back. And she had to stay _inside_ for most of the day today.

No trip to the beach!

Both Sora and Sayoko had stopped by her hotel room in the morning to offer their condolences...but ended up giggling at Megumi's misery. They both thought it was totally hilarious that her boyfriend's shyness would mark her.

Megumi had planned to make their visit here a memorable one...even more memorable than the fact that they were in Hawaii. She had changed her mind about a certain something that remained unresolved between her and Genji. She hoped...she wished...that she and Genji could pluck the tasty fruits of Love's sweet sensual favors during this trip. In her mind, she was certain that she and he had waited long enough, regardless of her promise to herself to wait until she was back home. She wanted to _be_ with him, to savor a physical realm of love with her boyfriend. But she recognized that he was probably much more tentative about sexual matters than she was. In one sense, Genji was the perfect gentleman; but this was one time Megumi wanted to be treated as more than a lady.

As she saw it, Hawaii would be a memorable backdrop for a memorable first sexual experience.

_Was_ to be a memorable backdrop...

But with a moderately uncomfortable sunburn in the small of her back, the possibility of any exertions of passion in a hotel bed was cast to remotion. It had occurred to her that Keiichi's first time with Belldandy had been in a hotel room; the significance of this fact made her desire a sweet encounter with Genji...in this room...even more.

Crestfallen and feeling piqued, Megumi had spent most of the day putting Genji to task to salve her with fresh aloe on the sore spot every couple hours...while throwing in a few feigned exclaims of discomfort to further tighten the bonds of his already bouted guilt.

She reminded herself that she _could_ ask Belldandy to 'fix' her sunburn tomorrow, as Belldandy and Keiichi had spent today on Maui...and Genji's face certainly was flushed with enough guilt to possibly warrant a reprieve...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Relaxing on the beachtowel, Keiichi looked on as Belldandy built her sandcastle on the beach a few meters away; her long auburn tresses blowing dancecurls in the shifting shore wind. Her slender fingers resembled those of an agile piano player's as they delicately sifted, shifted and shaped the sand. She was making a replica of their temple home; Keiichi instantly interpreted this creative impulse as homesickness on the part of his girlfr...his fiancée.

Fi-an-cée.

Belldandy was no longer his "girlfriend", even though his mind still seemed to fix itself upon the word he had used to mentally identify her immediacy in the orbit of his life. The assignation he had used so often during the past almost five years...no longer fit the circumstances.

In a little less than a year, she would be his wife.

He had done it right. So many of his friends had ended up getting married under less-than-ideal circumstances. Getting married just out of high school and having to live with the parents or in-laws. Getting married because of an unexpected pregnancy. Getting married in haste, a couple of months after first meeting each other. Getting married in spite of the animosity ushered by hostile in-laws...or even as a means of spiting their parents...

Keiichi had done it right. His years of patience, sometimes tormented patience...had paid off. Belldandy wasn't just his girlfriend-now-fiancée; she was truly his _best_ friend. As it should be. Theirs wasn't exactly a storybook romance, but it sometimes possessed many of the trappings of a love written in the heavenly stars. And Belldandy was the brightest star in his life...

Fiancée.

Very little had changed on the outside; the only noticeable change was the metaixodenum ring on Bell-chan's ring finger. Yet, so much was changing on Keiichi's inner reality. Belldandy was still bonded to him by the Ultimate Force and the strong sentiments of her love for him. Keiichi knew that he could still share confidences with her, ride around on his motorbike with her, make tender love with her, enjoy her witty conversation, grimace at her naive gaffes, witness her feuding with her sisters, appeal to her sage wisdom when he was perplexed by the trudge of life...

So what _was_ different? In what way was this the beginning of another phase in his relationship with Bell-chan...this simple mental renaming of "girlfriend" to "fiancée"?

And yet, this mere shift of mental nomination was _so much more_! By calling Belldandy his fiancée, Keiichi felt a pride in himself that he never sensed before. It was as if the wall-like strength of his Faith had been painted over with the rainbow hues of Love. Strikingly enough, Keiichi's belief in himself had deepened...here was a _Goddess_ who deemed him as worthy of a lifetime's shared travels within the oasis of their love.

Funny how the changing of a single word could change _everything_!

His whole internal schema, or locus, had shifted from accompaniment to possession. Much as he wished to ignore or deny it, a part of his heart was rejoicing in the knowledge that their engagement had brought him a step closer towards Belldandy truly being _his_. He possessed her in a way that he hadn't when she was 'just' his girlfriend. And he sensed her heart was rejoicing in the knowledge that she possessed him as well. Belldandy was always old-fashioned...Megumi had been the first to point this out to him. She was loyal, attentive to domestic needs, deferential to his parents...

But was her attitude really a case of being 'old fashioned'?

Much of the dating and mating scene as he observed it at N.I.T. to Keiichi seemed to reek of insanity. A bunch of geekish tech students chasing after temporary romantic liaisons culled forth from the frothy brew of cupidity and paranoia. So many of his friends, both male and female, had been sliced down the heart by a loved one playing the furin...the two-timer. To cope with this, a wild polyamority had become the predominant ethic, not so much at N.I.T. but in Japanese society in general...demanding body-piercing and 'just so' fashions, snorting itself up the ass of lust-greed.

If the Gods and Goddesses practiced an 'old fashioned' approach to romance and love...perhaps 'old fashioned' really was a misnomer for a performance morality that was based on virtuous sanity. Certainly, Belldandy was the sanest person he had ever met. Her two sisters...well, they were from another page in the book. Perhaps, they were from _another_ book entirely...

Even yet, despite the initial appearance of craziness, Keiichi had learned to recognize Skuld's years of lambasting Bell-chan's love for him as a form of sanity. Skuld was visibly acting on her concerns; worried that her older sister had fallen in love with the wrong man. And Urd's case, her attempts to 'hurry up' certain aspects of his and Bell's relationship...Keiichi acknowledged these manipulations as the product of Urd's maturity. With 'big sisterly' regard, Urd was basically intimating "look what you guys are missing!" every time she tried to dose Keiichi or Belldandy with a love potion. In retrospect, Keiichi had to grudgingly admit that she was right some of the time.

Fondly strolling down the corridors of his memories, Keiichi could draw up hundreds of perfect moments he had shared with Belldandy. A particular memory emerged to paint itself upon the canvas of his mind. Once, when he found himself totally stressed out with his homework...because stress often unstealthes itself _suddenly_...Keiichi wandered in the kitchen to get a snack. There, he encountered Bell-chan busily prepping the evening meal. As if she could read the writing on his mind, she would always offer him a taste test to settle his anxiety...

Memories...

Their first kiss. Their first nighttime ride on his motorbike. The first night they slept in the same room. The first time he approached her out of desperation, totally out of his mind because of some now-forgotten dilemma...and she had offered him a hug. The first time he bought her a present. The first time they shyly caressed each other's hand...

He wanted to give her _everything_...even the impossible.

Keiichi wished that somehow, someday, he and Bell-chan would be able to Share. He knew that this was but one reality among many that she was willing to relinquish by choosing to be with a mortal such as he. And yet he was resolved to do anything in his power so that her sacrifice would be redeemed; redeemed in such a way that it would no longer haunt her. Redeemed by experiencing the very sensation she was relinquishing...

As he watched Bell-chan deftly forming sandwalls around the replica sandtemple, he saw the same skill at play in the certain movements of her hands...that his fiancée employed while slicing vegetables at home. With a deep welling of respect, Keiichi reminded himself that Belldandy could shape Time itself with these very hands...yet she willingly allowed them to work the humble task of meal preparation.

Not so humble...at least not in her mind, as he knew from personal experience. Bell-chan had tried to explain to Skuld on numerous occasions that "even tasks that are wrapped in meniality can be exalted to expressions of weighty importance by the presence of love." Whenever Urd snorted disgust that Belldandy should bother herself with mundane tasks such as laundry and cooking when she could accomplish these things effortlessly with magic, Bell-chan replied that it was the _doing_ that contained the expression of gratitude and love.

As the ocean waves swelled upon the golden sands of the beach, Keiichi smiled to himself, privately joking that he was glad he didn't have to experience the weighty importance of scrubbing down the furoba.

At least for another week...

And what was up with Megumi and Genji? Ever since Bell-chan had healed her sunburn, his sister and Genji seemed to be smitten with a terminal case of starstruck eyes and beaming grins...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

I climbed out the bathtub, feeling paralyzed. Normally, the wooden antiqued washbath area would prime me, creating a sense of being refreshed. But instead I felt swallowed up by lethargy. Not in a strictly physical sense, but in a means that I couldn't adequately mentally apprehend. My traveling companions of the past two weeks were vacationing in Hawaii, and I was here. Pretty much alone, ever since Skuld regarded me with chin-up eyes-away disgust any time she emerged from her "Skuld Labs" room.

All because of Urd.

I _knew_ that she hadn't done anything untoward during that night of the post-race banquet and dance. But my jealousy had stripped itself to autopilot mania that night. Diminished to embarrassment and shame, I had elected to return home with Skuld.

I knew that Urd was upset with me...her unexpected decision to visit her parents on Yggdrasil was an obvious fabrication. I strongly suspected that it was, in fact, a hasty departure to 'run home and cry to Mom and Dad'.

Skuld was livid with me, accusing me of spoiling the joy in her sister's heart. She had every right to be...

And now, I couldn't remember some of my Latin. I had spent years learning Latin thoroughly, and now I was having difficulty recalling declensions and genitives of words and phrases I knew by heart.

As I toweled off, I felt diminished. The trip to France couldn't have tapped on my energy _that_ much! If anything, the N.I.T. Unified Club members should be the ones fathoming bouts of fatigue, as they were the ones who were actually on the pivot of creating the possible out of the impossible. At the Le Mans, all I had been was a naive bystander.

Yet, I was undeniably emotionally zonked. My heart felt pale and waxen, as if it was fettered by new and different invisibilities. The sense of dearth inside of me resembled the null-heartedness of the days when I shot heroin; but the shadings of a suspended 'being-of-feeling' made this sensation much worse.

In a very real sense, I was overwhelmed by the impression that my world was crumbling...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

It all started very innocently upon Keiichi's return from Hawaii.

Once he landed back in Makuhari, Keiichi decided to take a couple of days 'off' to relax and unwind. The vacation in Hawaii had been spellbinding, even in spite of the numerous moments his fear of water gripping him with affright. He had relaxed...but he hadn't _rested_. Belldandy had spent much of her time in the ocean, playfully splashing around and swimming with the dolphins.

With Sayoko's help, Keiichi had returned with a number of carefully selected gifts for his parents. His classmate at N.I.T. had taken time away from Tamiya to help him scout out several very distinctive and hard-to-find gifts while in France and Hawaii.

Despite his anxious urge to take them over to his folks, he waited for a couple days before packing his sidecar with all the boxes and taking off for his parent's house.

Keiichi was conflicted with emotions when he forevisioned telling Mom and Dad about his engagement to Belldandy face-to-face. The gifts were a secondary concern, yet he hoped that they would lighten the mood. His father collected clocks; with Sayoko's expert help, Keiichi had managed to procure an authentic 18th-century German cuckoo clock from an antique dealer in Paris. For his mother, he bought the obligatory tourbook and several handbags from France, plus a set of Polynesian carved koa bookends and other knickknacks to grace her statuette shelves.

Megumi had thoughtfully made arrangements to visit Mom and Dad that day too. She told Keiichi that she wanted to be on hand to witness her brother's announcement...and to provide "sibling crisis support" if things were to get testy with Dad.

They took the announcement surprisingly well. Keiichi had expected his father to be chagrined at the idea that he had proposed first, without getting any formal permission from him. But, as Megumi later noted on the way home, evidently their mother had been at work 'softening up' the old man. With a maternal instinct, she must have known that his marriage to Belldandy would be inevitable, Megumi explained.

Having received the bestowal of blessings from both of his parents, Keiichi felt exquisitely unburdened.

After eating a delicious homemade dinner that his mother insisted that he stay for, Keiichi and Megumi decided to stop by N.I.T. and check their first term grades. Looking up and down the class lists, he was floored when Prof. Sumiyama assigned him an 'incomplete' in Civic Systems and Demographical Engineering. Keiichi _knew_ that he had turned all of his projects and papers!

Trying to cheer him up, Megumi confided that she had had a "aloha experience" with Genji while in Hawaii. Despite her frank admission that she and Genji had introduced sex into their relationship, Keiichi felt strangely bereft of protective attitudes that had gotten him in trouble with Megumi in the past. He had to admit that his sister was deeply in love...and that she must really love Genji to allow herself to make love with him. He was grateful that he and his sister shared a tight enough bond that they could disclose such confidences with each other. In one sense, Megumi was more than a sister...she was a friend and support. Keiichi secretly wondered that maybe next year, he would be accompanying her and Genji to the family home so that she could make an announcement of her own.

After a sleepless night, he phoned Prof. Sumiyama first thing in the morning. The professor dryly explained that Keiichi had never turned in his final 20-page paper. Stunned by this news, Keiichi was surprised that Dr. Sumiyama was willing to consider the possibility that he _may_ have lost Keiichi's term paper. Nevertheless, the professor insisted that Keiichi would have to physically produce his missing paper, regardless of the circumstances.

The whole household noticed that he was in a huff as soon as he got off the phone. The anxiety seemed to drip off the back alleys of his mind onto his forehead. From there, it sprayed invisibly towards anyone in the vicinity with the recklessness of a garden sprinkler.

After Belldandy softtalked him back to reality, Keiichi stalked off to his "Keiichi's Shop" study room, ready to pull the paper off of his computer and rectify the situation.

Flipping down onto his futon cushion in his study, Keiichi pulled up the directory where he kept all his academic papers while Belldandy and Skuld leaned on in from the doorway.

_"__SHIT!!__"_ he cursed, causing Belldandy and Skuld to shudder in response to the invisible pinch of his frustrated exclamation.

His term paper was gone! Not a _trace_ of it was on his computer!

The fungus of his shock forced him to groan out a well of disbelief as he searched all the files of his PC, only to confirm that the paper wasn't there. Keiichi groused angrily, a blazing realization dawning on him...that he would have to rewrite the entire paper! He couldn't accept the fact that, in the rush to prepare for Le Mans, he had neglected making a backup copy of any of the drafts. He _knew_ that there should be several incomplete drafts and an outline paper here in his computer.

In a flash, he knew why...

"Mara! She's got to be behind this! This is doubtlessly one of her stupid Demon pranks! And it's goddamn working...I'm about ready to majorly _LOSE IT_! I have to rewrite a friggin' _20_ page paper now because she jacked my final project!" he blazed angrily.

Belldandy soothingly advised restraint in the face of her fiancé's wildly-flung accusations. All the energy he was spending accusing Mara could be channeled into a rewrite of his paper, she suggested.

A week later, he was finished with a new paper.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"I'm off to school to turn in my paper, Bell!" Keiichi shouted in a singsong voice as he chugged the last dregs of his coffee. Keiichi rarely drank brewed coffee, preferring the smoother taste of chilled canned coffee. But this morning he was ampped, because he was finally going to get beyond this issue of the missing paper!

Belldandy looked at him from across the table, her blue eyes seemed to encapsulate a sense of pride that her beloved had finished rewriting his term paper with an economy of grumbling reflectance. For all the times Keiichi-san had been the target of Mara, Urd, Sayoko, Velpser, Peorth and others...he _should_ have a victim complex by now. But her beloved always seemed to shrug it off and get on with his life. This durability was something _she_ could rely on whenever her well of optimism would run dry. There were so many things about Keiichi that she loved so much!

"Kiss me," she demanded with a demure smile, feeling an impulse to reward him. Keiichi leaned over the table and cupped her chin as he kissed her, stroking her cheek and her feathersoft tresses of hair.

"Ummmm..." she purred happily, wrapped in the joy of his kiss. Another moment and he wouldn't be able to leave the house...Bell's soft aura had pulled him in once again...

"I'll be back in an hour or so," he whispered in her ear, his voice tinged with reluctance as he stood up and walked towards the door. Looking at the beautiful visage of his fiancée one last time before stepping out, he felt a flash of curiosity as he saw Bell-chan cover her mouth in concern with her hand...

_BUMPB!!_

Belldandy watched as Keiichi turned to smile at her a last time before he walked out the front door of their home. He wasn't watching where he was going...and thus he didn't see little Sigel careening around the corner at top gear dashout speed. The little shojo robot crashed into him as she dashed into the living room. Sigel, despite her apparent 10-year-old's physical stature, weighed _a lot_ more than a human girl. In fact, because of her solid state robotic construction, she weighed a little more than Keiichi.

With a gasping "whumph!", Keiichi was sprawled on the floor...

With the deliberation of slow motion trajectory, Belldandy watched Keiichi's term paper spring itself free from his notebook and schoolbag. Arcing slowly in the air, it weaved a zigzag descent to the tatami.

As soon as it landed in a tenting crumple on the floor, Banpei rounded into the front doorway and expertly leapt onto the living room tatami.

Wherever Sigel goes, Banpei follows...

Belldandy dropped her spoon as she watched their robot watchman tear across the living room floor in hot pursuit of his mechanical ladylove, right over Keiichi's term paper. The paper was instantly swallowed by Banpei's swifting metallic feet...and once it reappeared, it looked like it had been fed into a paper shredder.

She looked helplessly at Keiichi, the vault of her forehead creased with worry. Her beloved had worked so hard on his paper!

"H..honey! Your paper!" she mouthed, feeling a wash of numbing shock run up and down her spine. Keiichi's face was gripped with bitter disbelief as part of his final project fluttered by in the afterwind of Banpei's passing, almost as if it was taunting him.

"I don't freakin' believe this!" he gasped, catching his breath as he pulled himself up to a cross-legged seated position on the floor. Sigel had knocked the breath out of him, so it was a moment before he remembered that he had a backup copy.

Sighing with relief, he smiled at Bell-chan to reassure her that this mishap was only a delay, not a crippling blow. Strangely enough, Sigel and Banpei hadn't stopped to survey the scene of the accident. Normally, Sigel would at least be worried enough by her collision with him to stop and check if he was okay...

"Not to worry...I'll just print another copy! I made sure this time to have a backup on my computer! No sweat..." he noted to himself. Bell-chan smiled at him as he stood up and walked to his room.

A moment later, she heard a scream jamming with anguish.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Keiichi finished his term paper, feeling irritated that he had written it a third time. 60 pages of effort to draft a 20-page paper! It just wasn't fair! At least he had an outline from his last paper to work with.

"I'm going to _kill_ Mara for this!" he cursed angrily. Funny how his resentments seemed to have held themselves in check until the moment he had completed his rewrite. Now, seeing the finished product in front of him, he was reminded of how much time and labor had been wasted in reproducing his project...and the Demoness had forced him to do it...

Keiichi decided that putting the finished paper in a plastic paper binder this time might prevent it from being shredded by stray mechas and household pets. As he fastened it into the binder, he looked warily at Velsper. The male cat cocked his head to one side, a quizzical expression on his feline face.

"That's right! You're not going to even have a chance to rip this paper up! And don't you even think of peeing on it!" he said to the black cat with the white star on its forehead...a reminder that this very same cat was once a Demon who was Belldandy's doublet...and whose misguided passion for Belldandy had wreaked havoc in everyone's life a couple years back. Velsper hadn't demonstrated an iota of the malicious nature that defined him back when he was Velpser, the Demon. But Keiichi wasn't going to take any chances...

Moodily walking into the kitchen, Keiichi set his paper on the counter and kissed Belldandy good morning. Once again, he had stayed up late, and he was feeling owlish from lack of sleep. But a kiss and hug from Bell-chan was usually enough to snap him from a potential foul mood. Besides, she had the very salve to remove his tensions.

She was baking fresh cinnamon rolls. Keiichi felt the insides of his mouth watering at the fragrant sweetness...

A few minutes later, a foul stench reeked from the oven.

"My rolls!" Belldandy exclaimed in dismay. Quickly standing up, she floated over to the kitchen. The smoke alarm started to chirp as soon as she opened up the door to the oven. Grayish, stinky smoke slithered out of the open oven like fleeing worms.

Keiichi recognized that familiar smell...the malodorous stench of burning rubber or plastic...

With a gasp, he looked on the counter.

Where his paper _had been_...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

As best as he and Bell-chan could reconstruct what had happened, apparently she had set down the metal oven pan with her rolls _on top of his paper_. Somehow, the plastic binder had gotten stuck to the bottom of the pan containing her rolls. When she put it in the oven, his paper had caught on fire...

Keiichi was amazed that Belldandy could have made such a dumb mistake! He was momentarily livid with her, until he realized that she was stricken with enough guilt to tranquilize a giraffe.

As for Belldandy, she was genuinely disappointed in herself; perplexed as to how she could have set the oven tray down without noticing Keiichi's paper and binder on the counter. True, she was excited about baking this treat for her fiancé as a reward for his diligent efforts to rewrite his final paper. But the baking tray was _clean_; there was no frosting or anything else that could have caused the paper to adhere to it!

She fought back tears as she realized that his paper was gone. All it was now was a pile of ashes in the oven and a mess of burnt paper and plastic stuck to the bottom of her oven pan.

"It's not your fault, Bell," Keiichi assured her gently as her face quivered with sadness. _This_ was why they got along so well...he had swiftly abandoned his impulse to shout her down, realizing instead that it was far more important to boost her out of her guilt. No paper was worth his beloved future wife feeling guilty for an honest mistake. Besides, he could empathize with her...this scenario probably seemed like a nightmare come true for his fiancée.

"But...how?" she worried weakly, struggle to regain her composure. "And in _my_ kitchen too! I _know_ this kitchen...I _built_ this kitchen...and I have never had an accident here since I taught myself how to cook Earthrealm food!" Keiichi could hear her quiet voice shadowed by disbelief. He felt helpless, trying to find words that could comfort her.

Touched by her efforts today...and five years ago...

Her words uncoiled the frameworks of his memory, loosening several recollections of Belldandy's initial struggles to learn how to cook Earthrealm food. She had literally taught herself the basics of cooking. Then she moved on, learning to select the right mixes of seasonings for certain foods, the appropriate ensembles of meal items, etc. It had taken her a few weeks to finally develop a mastery of the kitchen. Back then, Keiichi had wondered what could possibly motivate her to try so hard to cook for him...but now in hindsight, he knew that her efforts were but a reflection of her budding love for him.

The same sense of budding love that had motivated him to eat some of her 'failed' cooking experiments back then...without regard to how sorely they would test his intestinal fortitude.

His self-possessed smile seemed to reassure Belldandy as he pulled her into his arms and hugged her warmly.

Still, there _was_ the issue of how she could have overlooked his paper on the counter. And how the plastic paper folder had mysteriously pasted itself to the bottom of a _metal_ baking pan.

Belldandy looked him, the guilt flushing itself out of her face as she rested her head against his chest.

"This has gone too far! I'm going to have a talk with Mara _right now_!" she announced with a decisive nod of her head.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Mara watched the image of her younger sister waving away the drifts of smoke as she walked towards the phone. The light colors of Belldandy in her kitchen contrasted with the dark rouge of the bloodwall surrounding the viewport.

The Demoness in her was initially quite amused by this turn of events, especially with the cementjaw-dropping expression of a stunned Keiichi once he realized that his paper had wound up in oven smoke. But Mara's good-humor was tempered by the guilt-stricken expression of her younger sister. Belldandy looked mortified, which took part of the fun out of this whole situation.

Sisters will be sisters...and Mara didn't like to see one of her younger sisters upset, unless it was she that was doing the upsetting. And in this case...

Mara was hagnagged by the fact that she had done _nothing_ to orchestrate this particular prank.

The past couple of months had been difficult for her. The sheer level of her workload as the head of a new Demon Office was almost overwhelming. It severely cut into her videogame time! Yet, she occasionally felt a certain sense of pride in her accomplishments, considering that the administrative chores alone would have certainly buried most Demoness First Class licensees into a labyrinth of craziness.

Yes, Mara had been quite occupied recently. Having to learn the skills of the trade herself, Mara had to turn around and recruit Demons for her staff while still fresh herself...not to mention managing all startup tasks needed to get a Demon Office up and going. And as if this wasn't enough to wreak havoc with her confidence in her abilities, Mara had the added task...the gutwrenchingly _fearful_ necessary duty...of having to report directly to His Dark Eminence!

Consequently, she had decided to give herself an emotional boost out of the trudgery by demonstrating her newly-acquired skills...

For the Le Mans, she had cleverly employed a faux prank...leaving a Damoclean sword of a threat to hang over the three Norns, letting it do all the work for her. But recently, she felt increasingly inspired to create an _active_ prank; an inspired original bit of mischief to subject upon her favorite targets.

When she discovered that Professor Sumiyama had lost Keiichi's term paper, and the fool mortal had neglected to make a backup copy...

She'd be an idiot to ignore a _molten_ opportunity like that!

Reminded of the adage "the best-laid plans of Demon's are often the thoughts that are created by mortal ignorance", Mara gleefully wiped any trace of the paper from Keiichi's computer while sneakwareing a flirtation program into Skuld's robot Sigel. As usual, hacking into the AI of one of Skuld's mechas proved to be a much more than a trivial challenge, but Mara was able to pull it off with a moderate amount of effort.

Skuld was 100,000 years too young to prove a real thwart to Mara's ambitions.

The Demoness expertly reprogrammed Skuld's 'babygirl' robot to flirt very aggressively with Banpei...with predictable results. Once his robotic oil was about to boil over with mecha-lust, Sigel was to tear through the house until Keiichi's paper was ripped into tiny bits.

It had worked. Flawlessly.

But now, as she watched Keiichi pacing in a small circle near the dining table, Mara was worried. Belldandy's mortal charge had lost another paper, in what seemed like a spectacular bit of mischief that _she had nothing to do with_! Could it be possible that someone on her staff of new recruits...was scooping her by playing a prank on him? By taking full advantage of the fact that Keiichi had already been stung by Mara's own superb prankster skills? Playing follow-up tomfoolery would be a means of scoring easy points...

But unfortunately, if one of her staffers were trying to get an easy score...it would blow up in their face with coroneal fury once Mara discovered any misplay.

It was Mara who dished out the points and awards.

"My three sisters, Keiichi and their little entourage...are off limits! They're exclusively _mine_ to play with!" she said to the nearest SereHawk.

"What could be causing this?" she wondered aloud, once her ire cooled down somewhat.

_Rrrring_

"That would be Belldandy," she muttered to herself. Snapping her fingers, a BonePhone resembling a human femur floated in the air towards her outstretched hand...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Keiichi finished the fourth draft of his paper late in the afternoon. Deciding that prudence was the best virtue, he immediately locked it in a metal tool case and asked Belldandy to put a ward on the case to prevent it from being tampered with by any Demonic spells.

Before he started this draft, Bell-chan had told him that, yes, Mara had admitted that she was responsible for the first accident that resulted in the loss of his paper. But her sister the Demoness was adamant that the 'oven incident' was not of her doing. Bell added that Mara suspected that someone on her staff was in league with a Fortune Demon, perhaps even Senbei or his ilk...

Keiichi didn't believe a word of it. Mara could lie as easily as Urd, if it suited her own ends.

Exhausted from his overnight efforts, he slept with the tool case under his pillow...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Finally, he was ready!

After kissing Belldandy goodbye, Keiichi walked out to the garage with a confident stride. Tightening the seatbelts, he fastened the metal case containing his paper inside of his BMW's sidecar, where Belldandy usually rode. Using thick twine, he tied it securely to the back of the seat so it wouldn't find its way out of the sidecar in mid-transit.

Humming a Move song to himself, Keiichi revved up his bike and departed for N.I.T...

About 1 kilometer down the road, he spied oil leaking from the side of his bike. The side that the sidecar was mounted to. Gradually, his BMW started _spraying_ droplets of oil. Caught up in the wind, the oil covered the sidecar, soaking it with a thick black vicuous fluid...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Belldandy could tell that Keiichi was extremely upset by the way he dismounted from his motorbike. Usually, Keiichi sort of glided off the seat of his BMW with a practiced grace...but this time he dismounted as if he was jumping off a cliff.

"Honey, what's the matter?" she asked.

"It happened again! By the time I got to N.I.T., my paper was _ruined_! My motorcycle sprang an oil leak...no big deal, I thought. But then it kept spraying the metal tool case! Once I unlocked it, my paper was completely soggy with motor oil!"

"But...how? Your motorcycle has never leaked oil! And you just tuned it up last week!" Belldandy protested.

"Bell-chan, are you _sure_ that Mara was telling the truth when she said that she caused only the first accident with my paper...?" he asked in an anguished voice.

Belldandy didn't want to think that Mara would continue to pester Keiichi after the Demoness had told her that she only played a single prank on Keiichi. But this...this accident was too bizarre!

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Belldandy looked at Keiichi with concern, watching him as he observed Cevn eating breakfast. Underneath Keiichi's arm was yet another draft of his final paper. It was getting down to the wire...her beloved Keiichi had just days before the start of the Fall Term on Sept 3rd. If he didn't submit his paper, he wouldn't be able to start school. Keiichi explained that the N.I.T. Graduate Division was very particular about the fact that no marks of 'incomplete' could be carried over into the next term.

In the year-and-a-half since Cevn had been brought here as a result of a substitute Urd granting his wish, Belldandy had grown quite fond of him. She was also happy to see that Keiichi had come to think of him as a friend. The two men had learned much about each other over time. Belldandy knew that Cevn was resolute about maintaining recovery from drugs. To Cevn, abstinence from mood-altering substances included everything; refraining from smoking or drinking caffeinated beverages. As drugs, nicotine and caffeine were no different than LSD or heroin...the chemicals they unleashed in the human body still caused one to waver from their true self. And as an addict, Cevn had to be extra cautious about his own behavior. Belldandy was very aware of the Earthrealm condition of drug addiction; she had even granted a few wishes that involved a 'cure' from drug abuse. And Cevn had maintained that Urd was 'addicted' to sake...right up to the point where her older sister's terrestrial powerup source had somehow been changed from booze to orange juice and peach juice. But what impressed her about Cevn was the diligence that he devoted to doing what he could to keep himself clean.

Which made his actions the past few days quite enigmatic.

Skuld had also noticed the change. In fact, her younger sister hypothesized that this change was a reflection of something deeper. While it may appear to be specious, the fact that Cevn was acting against his long-held convictions worried Keiichi; it seemed to indicate a very significant breakdown. Belldandy sensed that this was just the beginning of a decline that could take their friend into greater troubles. What was also troubling was the fact that Cevn seemed to be ignorant of the very changes happening in his life.

Cevn had started drinking coffee. Not just any coffee, but dark espresso.

But this wasn't all. Yesterday, Belldandy had found a pack of cigarettes while she was vacuuming the living room furniture. The half-empty pack had fallen in between the folds of one of the couches. Belldandy was adamant that their temple home was to be non-smoking. And she was certain that none of the house residents smoked. For a moment, she felt a slight suspicion that Keiichi had lapsed back into his smoking habit. But when she broached the subject of the cigarettes, her fiancé didn't respond defensively at all; he was quick to assure her that he hadn't smoked since he quit, almost 4 1/2 years ago. He assured her that he wasn't planning to start smoking any time soon.

Belldandy suspected that the cigarettes belonged to Cevn.

Just that moment, Cevn hunched forward and started coughing. As he reached up to cover his mouth, his elbow crashed into the coffee mug, spilling coffee everywhere on the table.

The rapidly expanding pool of dark coffee soaked Keiichi's term paper.

Belldandy gasped, then looked at Keiichi; his lips were quivering with anger. Glancing at Cevn, she watched him hang his head low as the guilt gripped him. Belldandy thought she saw a split-second's recognition on Cevn's face; a recognition that something was amiss...that the fact that he was drinking coffee was _wrong_. But then the guilt flustered him.

"What the hell!!" Keiichi started to shout. Belldandy quickly waved him down; she had been in this position before. She didn't want Keiichi to fire off on Cevn when it was obvious that this accident was completely out of his control.

But she also decided that it was time to confront Mara, who was probably in control of every accident that destroyed Keiichi's paper.

Belldandy watched Keiichi head off to his "Keiichi's Shop" room to print up another copy of his term paper. She was almost certain that he would be unable to...

"My printer's ruined!" she heard him shout in the hall.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Mara slid her feet off her desk the moment she saw Belldandy. She looked at the Goddess appraisingly. Belldandy had actually come here, to her lair! She made a mental note to upgrade the detect and defend spells surrounding her Shinkansen tunnel lair.

"Mara! What is the meaning of this? Keiichi's paper was destroyed again!" Belldandy announced.

"Soooo..."

"You assured me...you _insisted_ that you didn't have anything to do with the destruction of his papers, except for that first time with Sigel and Banpei! You said that you weren't going to cause any more problems with Keiichi's paper!" she confronted Mara, hands on her hips.

"What makes you think I didn't change my mind, little sister? Or that I haven't decided to cause Keiichi problems in other areas of his life, perhaps?" Mara replied with a leisurely taunt. She had to use a threat to create the appearance of being unconcerned and casual; covering up the waves of concern swarming her when Belldandy delivered this latest news.

Someone was continuing to prevent Keiichi from delivering his paper...continuing the prank she had started.

"Don't call me 'little sister', Mara!" Belldandy said tersely.

"Bwah hah ha hah! You look so much like a Demoness when your face is all flushed red like thus!" Mara commented, creating a holoimage of an enraged Norn for Belldandy to see.

"Besides, the truth is...you _are_ my younger sister. Don't deny reality, Belldandy! You sneak into my private lair unannounced, and then you have the audacity to accuse me of pestering your precious Keiichi when I _told_ you that I wasn't doing it! Is this any way to respect your older sister?" Mara confronted her.

"Mara, I'm sorry...but you don't know how important this paper is to Keiichi. It means the difference between..."

"Ohhh, but I do know why it's so important, Belldandy! Why do you think I chose to create mischief in his life be preventing him from turning in the paper in the first place?"

"Mara! How could you? My dear Keiichi is going to be your brother-in-law in less than a year! Can't you give him a break?"

"Well, the fact that he is going to be my little brother is all the more reason to keep him on your toes, dontchya think?" Mara teased.

Belldandy folded her arms across her chest at that comment. She realized that she was getting nowhere as long as Mara kept gainsaying her. But then she noticed Mara's face turning to a thoughtful, serious mien. Ever since they found out that the Demoness was Urd's twin sister, things had become a little schizoid between her and Mara. On one hand, Mara could really be vicious...but on the other hand, Mara seemed to react with a sisterly affection at times. It was so unclear to Belldandy; which Mara was she addressing now?

"Belldandy...sister, you're still caught up in this idea of yours that I had something to do with all this! I was telling you the truth when I said that I had nothing to do with Keiichi's paper winding up in your oven! But in all fairness, I'm pretty worried about all of this too," she admitted.

"Why? It's _Keiichi_ that's suffering," Belldandy argued.

"As if! I didn't even know about this incident with the paper getting soaked with motor oil! Drop your obsession about your mortal boyfriend for an instant and consider the significance of _my_ situation! I'm the head of a Demon Office in charge of playing mischief and pranks on Earthrealm mortals, Belldandy. Now, suddenly someone is continuing to prank Keiichi...without my permission or my knowledge! I don't have a single clue about know who is doing it or what is the cause of it. This whole situation is getting out of control! If the Dark Lord gets wind of these unauthorized actions, I'll wind up eyebrow deep in an iceberg! In other words, I'll be in bigtime deep shit!" Mara explained, shuddering as she mentioned His name.

Belldandy shivered along with her.

"I think I understand," Belldandy said in a half-asking-half-stating voice. "You really don't know who's been doing this to my fiancé."

"That's right! Right after you asked me, I tried to trace the source of the problem. I checked with Vanagdrasil Mainframe, I interviewed dozens of Demons on my staff, I monitored several million acts of mischief. I didn't find a single piece of evidence that could explain why Keiichi's paper keeps getting destroyed."

"So what do we do now? Keiichi's sanity and your job is on the line," Belldandy noted.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Keiichi! I've figured out what's wrong! I know who's been doing this! Well actually, not who's been doing this...but what's been the cause of this!" Skuld announced excitedly.

"Skuld, forgive me if I'm not too enthused at the moment," a red-eyed Keiichi warned her.

"But I really do know! I really do!" Skuld said, almost hopping up and down with joy.

"So do tell...what do you think has been happening to my papers?" Keiichi asked.

"They're Bugged!" Skuld announced.

"Huh?"

"They have a Bug! That's why!"

"That's why what? That's idiotic! How could my term papers have a Bug? They've been destroyed each time!" Keiichi snarled in frustration.

"Why don't you believe me? I spent days trying to figure out what could have caused your papers to be destroyed...and now you don't believe me!" Skuld said, her voice iron-whining with accusation and betrayal.

"I'm sorry, Skuld, but this notion of yours that my paper has a Bug seems a little farfetched. Especially since the evidence has been destroyed. How could a paper be infected with a bug once it's burnt in an oven, or shredded by one of your robots?"

"It's not the physical paper that I'm talking about, dummy! It's not even the space that this paper is taking up in your mind..."

"Then what is it?" Keiichi shouted.

"The answer almost...almost...eluded me, but I figured it out. You must understand that it's kinda hard to explain to a mortal, because...well, just because. Your paper...the original paper that you handed in to your professor? He left it next to the microwave in his office, and that's why all these problems keep cropping up!" Skuld explained, nodding her head for emphasis

"You mean to tell me that this is all due to the fact that Prof. Sumiyama set my paper next to his snack heater in his office! That's utterly ridiculous!" Keiichi said. He had expected Skuld to launch into a pedantic explanation that was rigored with profundity. Instead, her "explanation" was ridiculous beyond the pale!

"You see! I _knew_ you wouldn't understand!" Skuld chirped in frustration.

"What is there to understand?" Keiichi asked, trying to calm himself. Maybe Skuld was onto something.

"There is a trace element that was in one of pieces of paper that you printed your term paper on. That element, when in proximity with microwave emissions, is known to attract the attention of Bugs. Just like a light attracts moths in your Earthrealm. Anyway, the original paper you turned in got infected with an Yggdrasil Bug! But that's not all! If a Bug comes anywhere near this particle, it traps the Bug and creates a chronometric displacement anomaly! That's pretty bad! But once Mara played that trick on you with my two robots, the 'bugged' paper somehow got sealed by the Demonic arcane energy she was using in her spell. So it's become much worse, you see."

Skuld was starting to make sense.

"What do you mean...worse? What can be worse than this?"

"Keiichi, in essence, you could rewrite that paper a million times and the result would be the same. The trapped Bug has created a temporal loop...a loop that will _always_ result in the destruction of your term paper! There's nothing you can do in the Present to prevent this!"

"Then...I'm royally screwed, if what you're saying is true, Skuld!" Keiichi said in a soft, shaky-with-frustration voice.

Skuld grinned at him and flipped her hair.

"Not so fast! Using my capacity for genius, I have developed a means by which your problem can be solved! All I have to do is whip up a time travel device...and presto! I can go back in time and get your paper before the professor sets it down next to his microwave. It'll never get zapped, the Bug will be history...and you'll be able to turn it in! See what a prodigy I am!" Skuld finished with her typical girlish arrogance. An arrogance that seemed out-of-place in a 16-year-old.

"Well...okay. I don't know what other choices we have at this point. Can you build one of these time travel devices soon? School starts in four days..."

"I'm on it! I'll have it finished in two!" Skuld announced, then skipped out of the room.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --


	67. Pt 67: The Ancient

**Part 67: The Ancient**

"Skuld, are you sure about the wisdom...not to mention the efficacy...of your idea? As Norn of the Future, you must suspect the inherent difficulty of your proposal. What you are suggesting involves the direct manipulation of TimeWeaves that have been woven into the TimeStream within the recent Past. Even though the events that need to be corrected occurred just two Earthrealm months ago, they most properly belong in Urd's Realm, as you well know. _Not_ yours!" Belldandy pointed out, hoping her younger sister would reconsider the risks involved in her plan.

Skuld's hypothesis concerning the possible antagonistic factor that kept causing Keiichi's term papers to keep getting destroyed...a "negative fortune-accumulative feedback temporal loop" as she had termed it...seemed to be somewhat plausible to Belldandy. But the solution that her younger sister was insisting upon...was definitely unsound and risky. For the Norns, TimeStream travel outside of their respective jurisdictions was a movement of hazard within delicately webbed strands of Time. Last winter, when the sisters discovered that Keiichi and his friends were trapped in the 14th Century, it was deemed necessary that Urd was to serve as TimeStream navigator. She was the only one capable of the complex task of traveling several centuries back in time to retrieve the four men. Belldandy was certain that neither she nor Skuld could have journeyed the TimeStreams towards that Past with the caliber that came naturally to Urd. As Norn of the Present, Belldandy herself was reluctant to tamper with the Past...she had reservations aplenty about traveling outside of the moment.

But Skuld was actually considering adventuring into the Past as if it was a mid-morning stroll along the beach!

Skuld looked at everyone with a disgruntled expression. Her idea had been received with rancor and argument...and little else. She knew that the optimal scenario would be for her to personally travel back into the Past and fetch Keiichi's paper. But her sister and Keiichi and Cevn's lukewarm appraisal of her plan made it obvious that they didn't see it this way. So she quickly proposed a countersuggestion.

"Sis, it's not as if the only person who could travel Pastwards is me, or anything! If I'm not to go, we could send Sigel or Banpei...or even Keiichi!" Skuld importuned, making another reluctant shift in her planning.

"You are absolutely not going to send my precious Keiichi!" Belldandy blurted commandingly.

"No way!" Keiichi shouted, synching with Belldandy's protestation. Skuld frowned at both of them.

"How about you, Cevn?"

"Nnn-uhh. I already've had my share of time travel into the past," he said, looking at his hand possessively as he remembered how he had lost the limb, once upon a time in the 14th Century.

"Skuld-sama...I _know_ that look on your face! You're determined to do this no matter what the consequences, right? But I want you to consider this. By sending Sigel or Banpei, wouldn't that pose a problem? What if, in the process of retrieving my paper, either of them were to be identified? Wouldn't this cause one of those 'time potentiality paradoxes' you guys are always worried about whenever time travel is involved?" Keiichi asked.

"Yes, it well could, as Skuld already knows. The Yggdrasil Mainframe exercises a wide range of control functions upon all the Realms, including the various TimeStreams. It's programmed with the grave responsibility to monitor Time for us. This is but one of the many essential operations that require the Mainframe to be fully staffed with legions of various Sysops," Belldandy explained.

"As you both know, Urd, Skuld and I are in constant communication with our Mainframe via the symbols in our foreheads. For us to navigate the TimeStream even within our own assigned Realms of Time...is a ponderous challenge. Skuld can barely travel her thoughts into the TimeStreams of the Future. Urd had to exert the utmost skill in retrieving you and your friends, my dear fiance. Navigating within the web of TimeStreams is very taxing to us. For Skuld to act as guide in conducting a physical object into the past, even by means of remote control as she suggests...may be next to impossible," Belldandy continued, projecting her voice, hoping that Skuld would clearly comprehend the import of her cautious words.

_"__Is NOT__!!_ If Big Sister Urd can do it...so can I! I can do _anything_ she can! Besides, it's not like I'm going back six centuries into the past; it's a short hop involving a mere two Earthrealm months! Besides, the fact that we're all in constant contact with the Yggdrasil Mainframe is the very reason why my plan is _safe_! If something goes wrong, we'll be the first to know!" Skuld interjected zealously.

_This_ was the assertion Belldandy least wanted to hear from her overly-ambitious younger sister. Why now, of all possible times, did Skuld's sibling rivalry with Urd have to hold court? When Urd was dispatched to rescue Keiichi, she needed the guidance of all three Angels. There was no reason for Skuld to feel competitive...

"But isn't the whole point to _prevent_ something going wrong in the first place, eh...Skuld?" Keiichi pointed out with a sly smile. Skuld scowled at him and scratched the back of her head, imitating the irritated OLs she saw on the network TV dramas. For a mortal, Keiichi could sometimes pick out a good counterargument...

"You guys!" she exclaimed in frustration. "How am I going to help you if all you do is argue with me? Besides, it feels like you're ganging up on me too! It's not fair!"

"Skuld, my dear sister...Keiichi and I both appreciate your sincere efforts to try and solve his problem. And I personally think that your explanation is sound. The only concern that I have now is to make sure that _if_ we act on your theory...that we do it for the right reasons. Not just because you want to prove to us that you're better than your Big Sister..."

For a moment, Skuld's composure visibly collapsed: Keiichi knew that Belldandy was getting through to her.

"It's a given fact that, for each of us, traveling the TimeStream can be very difficult. You also know that this was a major factor why our three predecessors eventually met with their tragic demise. Unsatisfied with a mastery over their own Realms of Time, the three Fates selfishly attempted to master each other's TimeStream responsibilities...with the horrifying result that all three are forever stranded in the Everywhen and Nowhen!" Belldandy noted gravely.

Skuld shudderflinched and struggled to keep from nervously biting her fingernails. Belldandy's pronouncement recalled the many dissuasive inculcations she had received from the Proctors regarding the tragic demise of the Norn's predecessors...

"And none of us yet possesses a definite mastery over her assigned Realm of Time. Thus, I strongly believe that it would be most prudent and sensible if we defer until Urd returns..." Belldandy finished.

"But what if Big Sister doesn't return in the next two days? I'm ready _now_!! I've _already_ designed and built my Polytemporal Replevitator Mk. V.! With a few slight modifications, I could attune it so that it could send back a refitted Skuld Reconnaissance Device..."

"You mean one of your Skuld Bombs..." Cevn interjected.

"Well...actually it _would_ be one of my Bombs...fitted with a camera, a transmitter, and a molar valance calibrator, if you have to know. I don't want anyone interfering with the retrieval of this paper," Skuld responded, narrowing her eyes at Cevn.

Belldandy arched a worried eyebrow at the prospect of Skuld sending a souped-up version of one of her patent explosive devices into the past.

"Which means that you'll blow them up if they stumble onto what you're up to," Keiichi said sourly.

"Of course, you idiot!" Skuld exclaimed. She cleared her throat with a whip of irritation, flustered at how laggardly the others were catching on to the more brilliant contingencies of her ever-evolving plan.

"You see, the molar valance calibrator will allow the my Recon Device to attach itself to the paper by deresolving the molecular bonds that cause physical discretion between the physical structures of the term paper and the bomb's metal casing. Once the paper is 'stuck' to the bomb...er, my recon device, it will automatically signal my ingenious Polytemporal Replevitator Mk. V., letting us know that its mission is completed. And with a "whoosh!", it will be immediately brought back to the present. Totally cool, totally foolproof, totally Skuld-power!" she said, jumping gleefully in the air with the pep of an Earthrealm cheerleader.

"She's been watching _way_ too much TV lately," Keiichi commented aside to Belldandy as Skuld twirled Mjolnir over her head like a baton.

"Kewwwl!! Skuld, that's it! Have you ever thought about attending an Earthrealm school? Possibly _my_ high school? The cheer squad for my baseball team needs a couple cute girls to fill their roster! And I think you'd definitely qualify as far as kawaii-ness is concerned," Tomohisa said from the doorway.

Belldandy giggled as Mjolnir stopped in mid-circuit. Skuld's face rouged beet-red; her younger sister was too chagrined to even snap off a comeback. It was obvious that Skuld was letting Tomohisa get under her skin to a degree that no mortal or God had ever done before. The irony of a 16-year-old mortal boy tongue-tying a Norn who had reached her tenth decamillennium before the mortals had even rediscovered simple metal alloying wasn't lost on her. Skuld's reaction to his abrupt comment was much more emotionally engaged than usual...even when Urd worsted her with taunts and insults.

What's more, Skuld didn't even recognize Tomohisa's remark for what it was...a compliment. Skuld was starting to get _that_ look on her face as her grip on Mjolnir made it clear that she would rather be brandishing her mallet than twirling it...

Feeling sympathetic, Belldandy decided to help him out by adding a compliment of her own.

"I've always believed that you must have a little bit of Urd in you, Skuld. This just proves it. Urd was always the best cheerleader for Keiichi's racing club, you know..." Belldandy noted, trying to ease the tension evident in her younger sister's demeanor.

Keiichi shook his head in dismay.

A cone of silence seemed to blanket everyone in the living room. As a stifling quietude held sway, Belldandy wondered if it was something in the words she had said that caused everyone to get as stiff as a buckram.

"Why are you glaring at the wall, Skuld?" she asked.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Of course she blew up, Belldandy! I would have too if you would have said something like that. It probably seemed to her like you took Tomohisa's side. And you know how much of a tomboy Skuld can be..." Urd patiently explained while fingerdrawing a circle in the air next to her right temple. She could almost imagine her sister turning crimson with regret right about now.

She had set her SysOp Node on detached mode, floating a few hundred meters up and away from one of the Ops Clusters. She was working on one of the thousands of peripheral nexus stacks belonging to the Yggdrasil Mainframe. With a caress of a colored holoboard, Urd darkened the spherewindow around her floating workspace capsule, so that she could have some privacy.

"Leave my two sisters alone for a month and they start to spin out on each other!" Urd observed to herself, silently amused. It was typical of The Brat...acting out while she here, in Yggdrasil.

Punching up a holosphere, she could see the ept embarrassment on Belldandy's face. Her sister couldn't see her because she had made the call from an Earthrealm phone, however. Normally, she would use this to her advantage...making faces at the holophotic image, for example...but this was not the time for frippery. Belldandy was obviously seized by a maelstrom of concern for their younger sister, which seemed to jump out of Urd's holospheric interface as she explained Skuld's plan.

"She wants to _what_? You're kidding me! Lemme get this straight! Skuld has constructed a machine to send a machine to the Past to get Keiichi's paper because it's stuck in some sorta badkarma timeloopy thing that's partly Mara's fault? As fun as it sounds...I'm totally against it!! You know that whenever anything involves our little sister and one of her inventions, there's _always_ a chance that one of her 'creations' will completely screw up! Not to mention that she's the Norn of the Future...and she's trying to tinker with the Past! _My_ administrative area! You guys really should wait until I come back..."

The voice on the other end of the phone started pleading.

"Belldandy, I can't come now! And I don't know when I can get free to return. I'm working on a particularly difficult Sysop project at the moment. Yes, it's pretty much a secret project. I'm not at liberty to divulge any details about it right now," Urd explained.

She hated covering up like this...but it was necessary. If the Almighty found out that she was using work time for personal gain...

Deciding to switch topics, Urd polished up the home news for her sister.

"Oh yes, Mom and Dad are doing fine. In fact, the biggest news around here is that they're all caught up in wedding preparations. You know Mom..." Urd offered.

She instantly regretted the switch of subject, as an invisible pall seemed to descend over the conversation. The animation on Belldandy's face flooded away; doubtless, the topic of Mother's thoughts on her wedding serving as an serenity irrigant. Urd mentally chided herself. Belldandy already had enough on her mind without being reminded that their Mother was already casting plans about for Bell's wedding...almost an Earthrealm year in advance! Plans which included some kind of mysterious "ritual exam" for Keiichi...

Right before Urd left for home, Bell and Keiichi had set the date of their wedding. It was to be held on the 6th anniversary of their first meeting. Not the very first time they had met, of course. That had been years earlir, when Belldandy first visited Keiichi when he was just a child. Instead, they had chosen the date when she was summoned by his wish over the phone, the second week of November, 2002. Urd agreed with their decision; this was the date when the Ultimate Force bound them to each other...the exact moment of genesis for their shared love for each other.

Urd couldn't help but sigh with relief as Belldandy finally quipped a half-humored comment about "having to haggle with Mother and her irritating need to control everything around her." Giggling in support of her younger sister, Urd decided to go for broke and loosen up the _other_ big family news.

"Yes. In fact, Dad's trying to work on a way where you guys could have a second wedding, here in Yggdrasil. He's got a preliminary proposal together, and he's planning to petition the Almighty..." Urd added newsily.

The gasp Urd heard over the phone was well worth all the verbal acrobatics she had endured from Mother and her circle of socialite chams. Whenever Mother had company over while Urd was idling at home, Urd was at her Mother's beck and call to make a token appearance as eldest daughter. Because she was the 'wild one' of the family, Urd often became a target for Mom's little tea club and their inane bandyings. Mother and her socialite companions were lovers of gossip and scandals all...because they were too afraid to actually stir some things up themselves, Urd observed privately. It was almost enough to make her want to return to the Earthrealm, but "the project" she was working on was too important to be abandoned...

Especially if what she discovered in the first two weeks she was here...was the truth. She had returned to try and spell herself from her disappointment regarding her mortal boyfriend's idiocy. But then she decided to check up on a few things...

After Belldandy recovered from her shock, she asked Urd for details. Urd repeated the scant details that Father had told her.

"Yes, Father recently said that it may be possible...but don't let Keiichi know!!" Urd finished. Belldandy quickly promised this, and then asked why Mom and Dad were planning another wedding ceremony. Urd recognized the suspicion in Bell's voice; after all, Mother _had_ been rigidly opposed to her marrying Keiichi.

"Well, we can't exactly have everyone that Mom's planning to invite attend your Earth wedding. She's already draw up a list of several hundred thousand...oops, I meant several _hundred_ guests from here..." Urd explained, trying to assure her younger sister about the motive behind the notion of having a ceremony here in Yggdrasil.

"Shit!" Urd thought, knowing that she almost blew it. After that slip, which mercifully drifted by unnoticed by Belldandy, Urd decided to forgo discussing anything more about the wedding plans that Mother and Father were contemplating. Especially Mom's. Their Mother was the Goddess of Marriages, after all. This fact alone had already brought an extraordinary amount of attention to bear on Bell and Keiichi's upcoming wedding. Every day at work, Urd was accosted by well-meaning but near-fanatical fellow Sysops who wanted to hear the latest gossip. Urd had also found out that it was in her best interests to avoid the GRO sector entirely...Bell's fellow Goddess Relief Office workers were even _more_ interested in every tidbit of the upcoming marriage.

Regrettably, Mother was definitely catering to this attention; she was full-on raved into an "I'll make this the social event of the season!" mode. During one of Mother's little soirees, Urd had overheard her spouting "sensational" and "legendary" a couple of times in relation to Bell's wedding...

What Belldandy didn't know...wouldn't cause her distress!

Urd, more than anyone else, realized that beyond the fact that a Goddess was marrying an Earthrealm mortal, the wedding would be sensational in and of itself because several members of the bride's family were _Demons_...

Of which, Belldandy started asking Urd about a particular Earthrealm mortal 'demon' who had caused her so much grief recently...

Urd felt a souring sensation in her heart...she didn't want to discuss her mortal boyfriend. And she wasn't very comfortable with having to fabricate a series of lies.

"Oh..me and Cevn? I'm still upset with him, but Mom and Dad, and Peorth and a few others all seem to suggest that I give him time, Urd answered.

"How much time, Urd?" Belldandy asked hopefully.

"Surprisingly, Peorth seems to have a real grip on my relationship with Cevn. She suggested that he's not trying to fault me by being withdrawn...that it's just the nature of the chemistry between the two of us at this point in time. I'm more aggressive when it comes to love," Urd observed.

She had to jerk the phone away from her ear to avoid being blasted by her sister's loud shriek of laughter. She had to check herself, thinking that Belldandy was making fun of _her_...until Belldandy gasped out "of course, Peorth wouldn't know what aggressive means!" between laughs.

Urd laughed so hard, she almost doubled up. On the holosphere, Belldandy's face was sparkling with levity.

"And I shouldn't judge him as 'bad' because things are this way. He's just more mellow than I am," Urd explained, once things calmed down between the two giggling sisters. Then Belldandy said something that caused Urd's heart to doublebeat.

"No, I don't mean _that_ kind of mellow, Belldandy!" Urd corrected, blushing slightly at her sister's capricious remark. Since Belldandy had become sexually attuned to Keiichi, her younger sister could unexpectedly come up with an occasional risqué comment...a comment that would even take Urd aback at times. This was one of those times.

"I would be 'mellow' for him if the time was right, you know!" Urd assured her sister. More and more, Belldandy had become quite solicitous about different aspects of her relationship with Cevn; it was if the tables had been turned. Now, Belldandy was playing the matchmaker, encouraging Urd to reconcile with Cevn.

"You know, I think _I'm_ the one who needs more time..." Urd started to say. She flinched in mid-sentence as she heard an explosion in the background, right before the line went dead. Worried about the safety of her sisters, she was also relieved that the call was over.

"Belldandy...are you all right?!" she shouted anxiously into the phone, forgetting that the line was kaput. Summoning a floating holocube with her hand, Urd touched out a series of commands on its surface; calling up a view of their temple house.

At least everybody's energy levels were normal.

She shook her head as she flicked through a series of monitor viewpoints, several of them vividly filled with smoke...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"What happened?!" Belldandy shouted, dropping the remote phone to the floor, the sudden explosive sound nearly paralyzing her to the spot.

The power was out.

Keiichi dashed past her, heading in the direction of Skuld's "Skuld Labs" room. As they gained the hallway, a shoji door was slammed open with a sharp "clack!". The hall immediately started filling up with a bluepurple roiling haze...

Waving the smoke away with their hands, Belldandy and Keiichi reached Skuld's workroom. Inside, a thick veiling fog of smoke was hovering in the air, already dissipating. They could make out a shadowform of Skuld sitting on the floor. As the smoke vented out, they could clearly see Skuld sitting splaylegged on her haunches; her white lab coat covered with soot and debris. Her glossy black hair was disheveled and her face sported black smudges on the arches of her cheeks.

She looked up at Keiichi and Belldandy, and then stared at a space near her feet...her face filled with guilt.

"It's lost!" she mumbled in a confused voice.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Skuld sat crosslegged on the living room couch, arms folded defensively over her chest as Belldandy and Keiichi glared reprovingly at her. It was uncomfortable; she was squeezing herself around the chest with her arms as tightly as possible, ignoring the dull pain which reminded her of the presence of her new bustline. The bosom that she was trying to squeeze flat, in the face of her insecurity.

In fact, Skuld wanted to scrunch herself up into nonexistence.

Something had gone horrendously _wrong_! Being scrutinized by her sister and two mortal men was anxiety-provoking, but nowhere near as upsetting as the fact that one of her inventions had failed. Perplexity was a state that she absolutely _hated_...

"Skuld, despite the host of valid objections we described, you decided to go ahead and try to transmit a physical object back into the Past, didn't you?" Belldandy asserted with an edge of parental accusation to her voice.

"So I did? So what? I just wanted to help! _You_ certainly weren't doing anything to help Keiichi...talking to Mara when Mara already insisted that she wasn't causing him to lose his schoolpapers! And Keiichi here is pretty much useless to try and solve his problem!" she replied angrily. Keiichi hung his head for a moment in shame until Belldandy elbowed him in the ribs.

"Do you know what it was like for me, watching Keiichi write paper after paper...and I was unable to fix his computer? I can't stand machines that don't work! Especially cursed ones like his computer!" Skuld near-shouted.

"And?" Keiichi asked, irritated that Skuld had evolved his impasse into her own personal peeve.

"So it was up to me, as usual!! _I_ solved the problem! And _I_ tried to help you! So don't get mad at me!" Skuld defended with machine-gun hysteria.

"Skuld-sama, we're not mad at you. We're...rather disappointed...that you didn't wait to for us to hear from Urd about whether it would be safe for your machine to tamper...uh, I meant to travel into the Past," Keiichi explained.

"Well, it worked okay in each of the experimental trials I conducted! I sent my Recon Device back over a dozen times without incident. I even sent Ganjin back...and he came back without as much as a single ruffled hair in his rat fur! Since I _could_ send my Recon Device back in time a couple months and bring it back safe and sound, I had all the proof I needed to justify its mission parameters. So I decided to send it back _for real_," Skuld justified.

Keiichi bit his tongue before he verbally blasted her with something rude.

"Do you have any idea what happened to cause the explosion?" Belldandy asked, trying to shift her attention from errant younger sisters to missing Yggdrasil technology. If someone was to find Skuld's 'device' and reverse-engineer it...

Landing on the branches of her memory like a hawk, a series of images filled her mind. Unpleasant nightmares of her trip to 2047...her imprisonment by the Aoshima Imperium in the altered TimeStream of _that_ 2047...the stories Sayoko and Megumi told her about how Toshiyuki Aoshima had created a mad corporate empire...the ability of a _mortal_ to restrain her and her sisters...

Belldandy felt herself gripped with a vise-like fear.

"And now that it's lost...it could be anywhere!! What if someone finds your little recon device, and then figures out how it works? Then we'll all be driving down the road with mud in our eyes! I'm totally, completely wired out of my mind that this could happen!" Keiichi announced in panic, unconsciously verbalizing Bell's fears. Belldandy patted him gently on the thigh...he was getting _too_ worked up.

Skuld's face turned ashen white in reaction to Keiichi's observation. She was so involved with the lovejoy of creating technology that was useful...that she had completely forgotten _that_ possibility! Everything had gone so smooth with the tests she ran...she hadn't considered the possibility of failure. But then again, she rarely did. Failure was a nothing more than a statistical margin to be contained within the design potentials of whatever mechanism she was engineering.

Skuld looked up at her sister, remembering the future. Belldandy nodded at her, silently confirming the significant problem that they both knew might arise.

Belldandy was hoping that this shocking prospect would bring Skuld back to reality, dissuading her away from being so defensive.

"I..I..I..uh, I'm pretty sure that the power supply..uh..overloaded the metachronic repellar circuits right at the point where..uh..they were fully energized to insert the Recon Device into the Past Directional elements of the TimeStream. I..it probably never made it; the explosion may have destroyed my expertly-crafted Skuld Reconnaissance Device before it was transported into the Past."

"Are you _sure_ of this?" Belldandy asked edgily.

"I could go back and check my laboratory for debris...but don't you think I would have noticed bits and pieces of my Recon Device right away after the accident?" Skuld replied. Belldandy seemed to remember that Skuld was covered in bits and pieces of _something_ when she and Keiichi saw her right after the...

"'Accident', she calls it!" Keiichi muttered under his breath.

"C'mon, let's check my mechalab..." Skuld insisted. After 15 minutes of diligent searching, not a single piece of the recon device could be found.

"It must have been atomized by the explosion," Skuld concluded. "I had to use a Level One Shield around the launch area, otherwise everything within 100Km would have been damaged or destroyed."

Keiichi's stomach turned flipfloopy at _this_ revelation.

"Skuld...once again I find myself having to remind you that you should be more careful about your machines! The Earthrealm isn't like Yggdrasil, where we can use temporal retrocausality to erase certain accidents..." Belldandy reminded her.

Keiichi momentarily shuddered at Bell-chan's seemingly callous dressing down of Skuld; Bell seemed to completely miss the fact that all of Tokyo Bay could have been blown up if Skuld's protective shield would have failed! Then he sensed that she was trying to deal with Skuld on purely Goddess terms, reaching out to her younger sister by discussing Divine matters at the level of shoptalk...

"Yeah...I know already! But Keiichi only has two days until his next term starts! I had to do something! Besides, I'm quite certain by now that nothing got sent back into the Past..."

Everybody sighed a collective "wheww!" at Skuld's determined observation.

"Well, we'll soon find out if this is true. In the meantime, we need to have a little talk about patience and cooperation, right, Skuld?" Belldandy said firmly, grabbing her sister by the hand and walking off towards Skuld's little tree grove in the corner of the temple grounds.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

On Monday, Sept 3rd, 20XX, Keiichi woke up ragged, his mind grimset; facing the prospect that his college education was at an end. It was as if his future had been walled away, drowned in mud, snuffed out like a matchflame. He had run fullspeed into a terminus...but the solution was without of his grasp; as distant and untouchable as an African adder.

He had become a ronin...a college dropout.

Yes, with the degree he had already earned in Engineering Sciences, Keiichi could pretty much rely on the fact that he could obtain entry-level employment in an engineering firm. Or he could work here, at Whirlwind, for the rest of his life. But he and Chihiro both knew that his employment situation at Whirlwind was only a temporary reprieve until he finished with his graduate work.

But things were entirely different now that he was engaged. In a year, he would be married to his true soulmate. He would have to _support_ Belldandy. Chihiro paid him generously enough, but would his wages be enough for two?

Instead of starting classes today, Keiichi decided to seek out a 'safety zone' and put in some hours at Whirlwind. The way his life was prospecting...he would need to put in a lot of hours here. Despite all the yen that Cevn had found in the Enigma Book, all of his prize earnings from winning the Solar Federation Race and the Le Mans...Keiichi felt financially strapped simply because he wasn't in school, working towards a stable future.

Chihiro had immediately noticed that he was down, and tried to cheer him up, even when Keiichi reluctantly explained the full extent of the reason why he wasn't in school. She had immediately offered to ghostwrite a paper for him so that he could erase his incomplete course grade.

"It'll get an 'A' too, no doubt," she noted with her usual chipper. Chihiro nearly had him convinced...this would be the _one_ time when it would be totally excusable for him to cheat in school. But Keiichi decided against it, simply because of the fact that his 'problem' might extend itself in a virus-like fashion to involve Chihiro. If Chihiro somehow got infected with some kind of 'bad luck' after trying to help him...Keiichi would never be able to forgive himself.

Obviously touched by his thoughtfulness, Chihiro suggested that, since _she_ already had earned a graduate degree, she would be willing to teach Keiichi everything she had learned. She reasoned that, although he wouldn't have the paper credentials...he would at least possess the knowledge of someone with an advanced degree in Engineering.

Obligingly, Keiichi thanked her for her kind offer. When 4pm came around, feeling heartsoured, he decided to go home to Bell-chan.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Once again, he pulled his bike in through the torii and turned right down the short graveled driveway towards the garage; gazing at the front porch for his beloved Belldandy to appear. Parking his trusty BMW, he took off his helmet, sighed to himself, and pulled a smile out of the pits of his despair, then started towards the temple home.

Everything that was so routine...was no longer routine.

As usual, Belldandy emerged from the temple, waiting for him in the doorway. Skuld was standing next to her, an apologetic expression on her face. After kissing his fiancée and sampling the delicious dinner she had prepared, Keiichi decided that he needed to keep busy. Being in the house right now just made him feel more mired in his inadequacy. The study room where he created the fruits of his intellectual searching now seemed to be inhabited by hungry ghosts; no matter how desirous he was of returning to school, he had no recourse to produce the missing school project. Depression swarmed him like bees, stinging away his false cheer. He looked out the window at the roughgrass patches...

Keiichi didn't want to be moody around Belldandy. Walking over to the tool shed, Keiichi hopped on the rider mower. The lawn was in desperate shape...he had been neglecting it over the past few weeks. Like he, it had been a casualty of the many failed efforts to turn in his final class paper. Mowing it would down two birds with one stone...

About half an hour into his mowing, Bell-chan emerged onto the decking, carrying a tray of iced-tea; her sign that she wanted him to take a break from his labors. Conceding her hint, Keiichi shut off the engine and started walking towards her. A split second's brilliance echoed off of everything in sight. Keiichi blinked; it seemed as if the whole temple had flashed white, as if it had been struck by lightning.

_Ceraashh_

Belldandy had dropped the tray of glasses, an expression of rapt surprise on her face. Alerted by the sound, Skuld jumped past the doorway, skidded to a stop and started to point at him. Totally confused by the moment, awkward under the gaze of two Goddesses, Keiichi checked to see if his fly was undone. The two were staring at him with wide-eyed expressions; Bell's azure eyes and Skuld's hazelbrown eyes glittering like two beacons in the late day sun.

"What?" Keiichi asked.

"Keiichi-san...don't move an inch!" Belldandy warned. Keiichi stepped back two paces...and bumped against something. The thick dull sound of the collision made Keiichi cringe. Whatever object he had stepbacked into, it was something big.

Something huge.

From the way that it felt on his shoulders and back, he had bumped into an object behind him that stood at least as tall as he. It was solid, almost flesh-like. He felt it give slightly against his weight as he leaned back. Which meant that whatever he had bumped into, was pretty large...and its warmth against his shoulders informed him that it was _alive_!

His thoughts migrating towards alarm, Keiichi reached up tentatively with his hand and felt behind him. The surface rested leathery tough to the palm of his hand, almost like the skin of an elephant.

An elephant?

"What would an elephant be doing in my back yard?" he wondered. On the footfalls of that observation came another. If it was an elephant that was standing behind him, then why didn't Bell just say so?

"Keiichi, please don't make any sudden moves! You'll startle her!" Belldandy shouted through cupped hands.

"Her?" he mouthed to Belldandy. As she and Skuld nodded confirmation, he slowly turned his head to see what this "her" was...and felt every muscle in his face fall, swept by his astonishment into an Antarctic frozen rigidity.

"She" was a dinosaur!!

Keiichi gasped as his eyes frantically dashed up and down her massive frame, trying to take in the sight.

"D..d..dinosaur!" he shoutwhispered, heeding Belldandy's warning. Oddly enough, for a brief few seconds he questioned why was it always the case that whenever _he_ was startled, circumstances forced him to conceal his surprise...so that he wouldn't startle something or someone...

The last thing on Earth that Keiichi wanted to do at this point was to display the torrents of anxiety flooding his heart...and frighten a 250Kg animal into charging. The first thing on Earth that Keiichi wanted to do was run away from the living bulldozer like a meteorite...

The dinosaur was so big, he was almost standing _underneath_ the rounded girth of her belly. If he ducked his head down a few cm, he could have easily walked underneath her. The leathery skin was bright green in color, contrasted with dull blue splotches. The whole effect reminded him of an off-color calico cat. The other thing the reminded him of a cat was the rapid side-to-side swishing of the huge reptilian tail that tapered away from the barrel-shaped trunk of the dinosaur.

A dinosaur?

Cautiously stepping back, Keiichi looked at the 'head' of this dinobeast. A huge fan-like frill of bone was backswept over her thick neck. Her head was easily as big as his motorbike. Two wickedly long horns protruded from the crown of her head, just above her eyes. Another shorter horn extended from the top of her nose. Her massive mouth was formed of a stout bony mass that ended in a structure that suggested the beak of an eagle...

Straining his attention, Keiichi could see a flash of white in her mouth.

It looked like she was holding something with her teeth.

"Keiichi! Be careful!" he saw Belldandy and Skuld shouting through cupped hands. As his curiosity bested him, Keiichi slowly walked alongside the massive head, watching her eye for any sudden movement.

"Holy shit!" he gasped in a whispery voice as he passed the object held tightly in her jaw. Carefully...step-by-step he slowly moved to a point about 5 meters directly in front of her.

Images of Spanish toreadors being charged by bulls danced vivid operettas in his mind's eye...

Tightly clasped in the Tricerotop's mouth was his term paper!

"E..easy now! That's a girl. D..don't be afraid..." he said calmingly, more so to quell his own nerves than those of the female dinosaur that was standing in front of him like a tank.

Her tail swished back and forth more rapidly as she inclined her head slightly. Keiichi knew she was watching him very closely.

Gulping down his taunt nerves, he walked up to her, trying to project passivity, trying to appear non-threatening. This dinosaur had obviously never seen a human before, so hopefully she wouldn't react to him as an enemy.

"That's right...I'm not a Velociraptor!" he joked as he stepped closer, his heart beating in his eardrums. Slowly reaching his hand out, he gently pulled the paper loose from the giant maw.

Keiichi fanned through the pages of his term paper to confirm that it was all there. He shot an incredulous look at Belldandy and Skuld.

He regarded the triceratops for a moment as the leviathan rotoshook her massive head like a dog drying its coat off. Suddenly, he felt a smallkid impulse to reach out and stroke the side of the dinosaur's 'face', where her massive cheek seemed to be. Carefully, he rested his hand on her beak, then stepped back along the side of her jaw, her massive yellow eye following his every move. Reaching up, he touched her 'cheek' and started petting it as one would caress the face of a horse. Her tail whipped from side to side even more rapidly, rustling the newly-shorn grass. Keiichi realized that her tail alone could crush a small car...yet he was amazed at how quickly his fear had been subsumed by stronger drives fueled by a calming curiosity. He felt an undeniable inquisitiveness as he stood close to the dinosaur.

A moment later, Belldandy and Skuld took his lead and slowly strolled up to the giant herbivore. He wondered why _they_ were afraid...as Goddesses, they had nothing to worry about. As she got closer, Keiichi could see the clear concern in Belldandy's eyes. Her overt fear had been for his sake.

To everyone's surprise, a loud thrumming purr filled the air. Keiichi could see fleshy waves undulating on the underside of her neck; the thick skin was vibrating right behind the rearward base of the massive jaw.

This dinosaur was purring like a cat!

"Keiichi...is that what I think it is?" Belldandy asked, pointing at the paper in his hand.

"I don't know how or why, but she was holding my paper in her mouth," he answered. "Is she really a dinosaur from the ancient past?"

"I _TOLD_you I would get your paper back...mmph!" Skuld managed to shout impulsively, right before Bell covered her mouth with a muffling hand. Instantly, the giant head swerved to regard the two Goddesses standing to his side. Keiichi gripped his hand in a fist, concerned for the welfare of his fiancée...

Once again, it slipped his mind that Bell-chan was a _Goddess_. A drawback that occasionally plagued Keiichi at times was the fact that...since Belldandy was in her 'human form' manifestation 99 of the time...he had accustomed himself to believing that she was as human as everyone else. Of course, the dinosaur couldn't hurt her in the slightest! Doubtless, Bell-chan had silenced Skuld to protect _him_ from a dinosaur startled by her sudden burst of exuberance...

"Yes, she most definitely is," Belldandy said. She closed her eyes in an expression that Keiichi was very familiar with by now; she was trying to 'read' the thought sensations of the giant beast. Her face fixed with concentration, Belldandy seemed to nod to herself...

"And she's quite startled by all the city noises and smells...and the three of us. She's quite out of her element here. And she's worried, because she has to make a nest pretty soon. She's almost ready to lay her eggs..." Belldandy stated.

"Skuld's time travel machine must have brought her back along with my paper!" Keiichi said excitedly, the fear gradually draining away.

"Imagine, one of the Ancient Ones in our own back yard!" Belldandy added, mesmerized by the sight.

"I don't understand how this could have possibly happened..." Skuld said softly, trying to still her perplexity as she stroked the face of the triceratops with her gloved hand.

"Looks like you overshot your target by a hundred million years, Skuld," Keiichi quipped, earning a stinkeye from the raven-haired teenage Goddess.

"Regardless of how she got here, we must determine a way to return her to her own time and place. She doesn't belong here, and she won't survive for too long if she has to remain here. It's much cooler in this Time than what she is used to," Belldandy noted with explicit concern.

"How are we going to feed her? And how are we...oh my God! How are we going to keep anyone from discovering that we have a live dinosaur in our temple grounds? What if she decides to go out the front gate?" Keiichi exclaimed, sheer with animation and worry as the questions flurried by like will-o-the-wisps...

"As big as she is, she could probably plow right through the temple walls," Skuld observed matter-of-factly.

"This is certainly a very unconventional situation you've put us in, Skuld," Belldandy noted.

"Don't blame me! It's not as if this is _my_ fault!" Skuld protested.

"Actually, whose fault it is isn't really important right now. We can revisit that topic in a moment. Right now, I really think it would be best if I create a forcefield spell before our 'guest' decides to try and leave the temple grounds," Belldandy decided with an immediacy that discomfited Keiichi. Before anyone could say a word, she weaved her hands in the air like an artisan plucking an invisible harp as she encanted a spell.

"Wait, Bell-chan!! What about us? If you use a spell to pen her in, won't that prevent _us_ from leaving too?" Keiichi asked when she was finished.

"Idiot! Do you think my sister is _stupid_? Of course she wouldn't do something like that, would you Belldandy..."

"Uh...you guys...I think I made a mistake," Belldandy answered shyly, covering her mouth with her hand; her downcast blue eyes charming against her flushed cheeks...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Belldandy had 'locked us in' with a shielding spell she cast as a preventative measure to keep our Cretaceous Period visitor from prowling the neighborhood and terrifying the local house pets. As much as I loved my home here in the temple, I felt huge reservations towards the idea that our domicile was now a place of confinement. My imagination bested me, as I tried to guide my thoughts through the paranoid notion of having to spend the rest of my life here.

During dinner, Keiichi had to explain over the phone to a confused Megumi and Genji that they wouldn't be able to come inside the temple. Belldandy and Skuld were noticeably less perturbed about our confinement as Keiichi and I. We found out why rather shortly. The winds of fortune seemed to gust at an absolute zephyr in the face of this particular difficulty; within an hour, the two Goddesses readily figured out a solution to this problem.

Since both Goddesses were confined to the temple grounds by the spell, all we had to do was seek outside help from another Divine being.

Simple, huh?

If I've learned anything in the year-and-a-half I've lived with Keiichi and his tribe of mortals and Goddesses...nothing is as simple as it seems...

Belldandy phoned Urd, only to inform us that her sister was still 'busy' up in Yggdrasil. I fought with my strong urge to talk to Urd, to apologize, justify, connive...do whatever to get her to come back. But Belldandy waved me off when I reached for the phone. After she finished her convo on the phone, Belldandy explained that Urd was committed to some project. To me, this project sounded like something Urd had made up as an excuse. But after listening to Belldandy, I got the sense that Urd was regarding her "project" with as much covert discretion as the Pentagon employed when questioned about blackbox projects and the so-called Roswell Incident. Urd evidently didn't feel safe in disclosing any particulars to her own sister.

"What is up with her? What could be so important that she chooses to stay there instead of coming here and helping us?" I shouted in frustration. Part of me still deeply felt the girlfriend-boyfriend connection with Urd; this fragment of my being kept trying to analyze Urd's recent behavior...which I esteemed to be an act of avoidance more than anything else.

Peorth's Earth Otasuke Office answering machine said that she was "on a honeymoon".

When Keiichi suggested that Belldandy and Skuld ask their parents for help...the two Norns seemed adamant to the point of panic that they couldn't ask their parents to help. Apparently, if Odeyn or Freiija learned of Belldandy's goof, she would be embarrassed to the point of mortification, not to mention that the Almighty might lose face as well. Belldandy sharply asserted that she didn't feel comfortable asking any other Senior First Class License Gods or Goddesses to help. Considering the already-diminished pool of candidates; the only Senior First Class Goddesses and Gods left were some major heavies in the Yggdrasilian 'political' and 'science' scene. Belldandy and Skuld debated on who they should contact...and arrived at the conclusion that they couldn't inform _anybody_ about our plight. Every remaining Senior First Class God or Goddess was part of their parent's coterie in some way.

So we were stumped.

When I suggested getting a number of First Class Goddesses to deal with the spell, Keiichi and I were given an apercu on 'differential spellmaking' by Skuld. In essence, a spell created by a Senior First Class Goddess was categorically superabundant to all other Classes, irrespective of the accumulation of Divine Energy. The Almighty had designed the power system as such so as to prevent arcane energies from being offset by quantitative means. To prevent "gangups", as I understood it.

It was _quality_ that was needed...

And we would need someone with _a lot_ of Divine firepower to undo Bell's spell. There was only one other being with that kind of energy that Belldandy could ask for help...

All of us seemed suspended in a dreadful forest of unease, until Skuld reluctantly broached the subject. She suggested that we might have to 'bribe' Mara to counterspell the shield from the outside. Since Belldandy was a Senior First Class Goddess and Mara was a Senior First Class Demoness, it stood to reason that her equal powers would be ample to the task.

"At least she's family," Keiichi quipped, trying to lighten the mood as we watched 'our' dinosaur lumbering around the grounds, foraging for food.

We would have to rely on Mara...

Mara would probably consider it, but I had a gut feeling that the compensation we would have to provide would be the worse of two evils. Skuld's suggestion of 'bribing' Mara to me meant that we would basically accede to whatever demand Demonic whimsy she could draw up.

Belldandy volunteered to call the Demoness to ask for her help. We waited tensely while they talked on the phone; when the call concluded, Belldandy related that Mara would help us...but for a price. Mara had instructed Belldandy to call back when we arrived at a suitable recompense for her efforts.

So we spent an hour playing a guessing game on how to appease Mara, whereupon we fostered all sorts of suggestions concerning a topic that none of us had much experience in...

"How the hell do you make a Demoness happy? Or more appropriately, what does one give to the Demoness who has everything? Or even, what could we do to appease an malevolent entity that has us tightgripped in the palm of her hand?" I heard Keiichi protest. There was no noetic recourse for me that would be useful towards resolving this issue.

All of this was doubtlessly amusing to Mara, whom I sensed was monitoring us quite comfortably from her Demon's Lair.

After we achieved nothing but circlets of impasse, Belldandy called Mara back and explained that we were willing to meet her terms...since none of us could come up with a suitable proposition.

After a long pause, Belldandy exploded in argument with Mara.

"How could you? She's your twin sister! What you want is impossible, Mara! I can't believe that you would make such a foolish demand! Your request is totally outside the bounds of propriety and morality! It's ludicrous...it's sick. What would Urd think!?" she shouted into the phone, almost frightening me with her intensity.

Keiichi and I glanced at each other, mystified as to the nature of Mara's request. Whatever it was, it directly involved Urd...and had set Belldandy off like an M-80!

Something else unnerved me besides Belldandy's drama-crash reaction. Belldandy was darting nervous glances at me most of the time she was screaming into the phone...

"Well, I guess we'll have to," Belldandy said in a quiet voice of acquiescence, apparently having given up the ghost of her argument.

"Well, what is it?" Skuld asked excited as Belldandy softly set the phone down.

"She wants a date."

"_Ehhhh?!_" Skuld, Keiichi and I blurted out.

"With who?" Keiichi near-shouted in a wary voice.

"With Cevn," she said in a near whisper, her light blue eyes expressing remorse as she looked at me apologetically.

For the next few minutes, my head went really fuzzy...

When I came to, Keiichi explained that I had just sort of mentally "disappeared" for a moment. I realized that I had completely strayed into a blank chalkboard region of my mind. Then I remembered _why_...

Out of the blue, Mara had insisted that I take her out on a date once she removed the shield.

"She was very specific. She didn't say 'go out on a date', or 'go hang together'. She said 'take me out on a date'," Belldandy noted by way of quoting Mara's words.

"You better not even be thinking about agreeing to her demand," Skuld growled, her eyes flashing 'battle aura' all the way...

Mara couldn't have picked a more conspicuous means of tormenting me. No wonder Belldandy had lost it on the phone with her.

"Why me?" I sighed in a weak voice.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"So how do we return Betty to her own time?" Keiichi asked again. I almost wanted to cast the obvious joke about the Flintstones reference...if it wasn't so damned serious. Dinosaurs. Dates with Mara...

For some reason, he started talking about his sister...Megumi in her role as animal lover. I imagined how she would be shocked and delighted by these circumstances; yet I sensed that the overriding emotion she would experience would be care for our new 'houseguest'.

I was struggling to devour any thought that could keep my mind off Mara. I felt violated by her request, to say the least. Especially since it was our _only_ means of gaining her aid...

Yet, there was something massively wrong inside of me. Much as I detested even admitting to such an impulse...I was actually feeling a little excited about going out on a date with a Demoness! With Mara.

What would Urd think?

In a blaze of surreality, I pictured Urd's face, dancing around me like raindrops in a storm. An expression of disappointment...an expression of rage...an expression of shock...an expression of distaste...an expression of disgust...

"I'm going nuts!" I inadvertently shouted, drawing stares from everybody at the dinner table as I punched myself in the head to rid myself of the vivid images that were now intruding into my consciousness.

As the unbidden images continued, our discussion drew on. Everybody seemed to have opinions...and little else to offer. I personally hoped that whatever solution we resolved to undertake, that it would have nothing to do with walking out in freezing weather dressed in bunny suits. Or even parading around in bunny suits in the late summer of September.

"Well, now that I've had a chance to think about it, I believe that the best way to correct the situation is to recreate that cause of it. Namely, Skuld's 'accident'!" Keiichi pointed out.

"Which may not be possible, simply because I still don't know what went wrong!" Skuld protested.

"That's the point. In engineering of the hardware and software kind, recreating a failure can produce a model or a hypothesis relating to what went wrong..."

"It was _not_ a failure! It was an _accident_!!..."

This was going in circles. An hour ago, our roundtable had mired itself at precisely this same logical cul-de-sac. The swing of events that had brought "Betty"...as we had named our dinosaur...to our home here obviously resulted from confounding factors; factors that were elevated beyond our intellectual fields of vision. I half-expected Belldandy or Skuld to suddenly grin and proclaim "it's simple...we just do this-n-that, and everything's back to normal!" This would have been very welcome, especially considering that they seemed all-knowing most of the time. Certainly, they could hypothesize a way out of this mess.

But even the Goddesses were stymied.

Finally, Belldandy looked up at the ceiling for a full minute or two, visibly marshalling her thoughts. Then she closed her eyes and became a vision of deep reflection. To me, her serene intensity suggested a painting of a Taoist recluse in the deepest throes of meditation.

She opened her eyes and smiled at us.

"Skuld and I have only existed for 130,000 and 250,000 years, respectively," Belldandy stated, assuming a 'professorial' tone of voice that was well known to me from her days spent tutoring me from the Enigma Book. If I closed my eyes, I could almost imagine her wearing a pair of sophisto eyeglasses.

"Yet, Time as it exists in the Multiverse is measured in the trillions of years. The span of our Goddess existence, in chronological terms, is proportionately miniscule in relation to the aeons encompassed by the Multiverse. Thus, traveling hundreds of millions of years in the TimeStream, even from the perspective that we have as Norns, is the equivalent of 'condensing' all the moments and events of a single Earthrealm year...into a few hours. To illustrate by figurative example, this type of compression of time would be the same as packing a thousand Earthrealm mortals into a phone booth."

On the bold, this allusion sounded utterly ridiculous...and Keiichi and I both told her so. But then I sensed a possible tangent that she might be leading up to...

"Yes, it is quite possible for a thousand Earthrealm mortal bodies to fit inside of a telephone booth...in fact, a thousand sets of a thousand mortals could fit into a phone booth! All that has to be done is to break down each body into its constituent physical structure at the atomic level," she stated, quick to correct us.

"But that would change _everything_!" Keiichi pointed out.

"Of course, my dear. They would no longer be human beings...they would just be densely-packed matter. And this is precisely the dilemma we face when having to deal with TimeStream distances of billions or trillions of years."

"Not to mention returning them to their original state!" I commented. Belldandy nodded affirmingly at me.

"Yes, Cevn. As it would be difficult to return the mortals to their original physical states...it likewise is very difficult to 'unravel' densified chronological sequences. There is much that can get lost..." she said, her voice wandering off.

Now _I_ was getting lost.

"However, there _is_ a means whereby we can navigate long 'distances' on the web of TimeStreams," she noted, smiling at Keiichi.

"Remember the first time we rode the trains in Tokyo, Keiichi honey? You took me to Ueno Park to see the animals? Then we took the TOEI Kotsu loop through all those sections of Tokyo. We stopped at the Shiodome Station, which had just opened that year, so we could switch trains. There was so many commuters wanting to get on the train that the station had 'pushers' to pack us into the trains. In a similar manner, the Yggdrasil Mainframe itself can act like a pusher."

"_HUH?_" Keiichi, Skuld and I echoed.

"Our Yggdrasil Mainframe possesses the necessary computing power to create these 'condensed moments' for us. It would be impossible for myself or my sisters to 'read' that many years or centuries in a single unit of what you Earthrealm mortals term 'a lifetime'. But the Mainframe can perform the calculating and chronological projection indices for us. Just like your mortal computers can calculate sums that an individual mortal cannot ever hope to do...the Yggdrasil Mainframe can also greatly enhance our awareness of Time."

"I didn't know _that_! I didn't even know that was possible!" Skuld exclaimed in awe.

"This is because you aren't scheduled to be inculcated in this subject for a few more of _our_ years," Belldandy stated. For a moment, I expected a phone call from Kami-sama regarding "forbidden information". If Skuld didn't know about this process...than this subject must be recondite in the extreme!

"But there's a catch, isn't there?" I asked.

"Yes. All such allocations of the energies of the Yggdrasil Mainframe have to be approved by the Lord," Belldandy said with a weary sigh.

"Why?" Keiichi asked.

"Because it is so _precarious_. Kami-sama is the only one who can monitor this kind of activity. If something were to go amiss, He would be the only being powerful enough to rescue a stranded TimeStream traveler."

"Is that why...Clotho, Lachesis and Atropos got stranded in Time? Because they went without His permission?" Skuld asked in a tremulous voice.

"Yes. They explored vast regions of each other's Realm of Time without informing the Almighty. Their predecessors...Nona, Decuma and Morta...also met a similar fate."

"The Fates had _predecessors_?" Skuld asked, her deportment locked with emotional and intellectual intimidation. I was feeling totally overwhelmed by this...and my sense of confusion was heightened by the fact that Skuld was bowing to her own astonishment.

"Yes. Oh, dear Skuld, you weren't supposed to learn of these matters until another 40,000 years or so. But, since you've somehow been transformed from being almost 120,000 to being nearly 160,000 mortal years of age...I guess this is the Multiverse's way of saying that you're ready to be exposed to these grave matters," Belldandy said resignedly.

Dammit! Where is my metallect when I need it?

I froze my awe for a moment. Ever since I had been 'exorcised' a couple months back, my metallect had seemed to have withdrawn upon itself. It might as well have reclused itself into perpetual concealment. Belldandy was talking, and I could ascertain certain concepts she was explaining on a basic, facile level. But where was that more advanced level of comprehension that I was accustomed to? The level of Yggdrasilian metaphysics? Yggdrasilian multidimensionalities? TimeStream chronometrics?

Topics I could clearly understand when Urd, Skuld and Belldandy were tutoring me from the Enigma Book...topics that I couldn't even begin to fathom now...

I just wasn't following her like I used to. Again, I felt a feeling of loss deep in the channels of my soul.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --


	68. Pt 68: Disequilibrium

**Part 68: Disequilibrium**

Keiichi stowed his pencil, texts and notebook in his bookbag after his class 'ended'. According to Chihiro, Professor Yayoi had earned a reputation as a very roupy and dry lecturer...a rep that he was certainly stepping up to today. Once the classroom clock reached 2:50pm, Dr. Yayoi literally stopped his lecture in mid-sentence. With a quick shrug of his shoulders, he quietly started to put away his lecture notes with an air of indifference. There was no other indication that the professor had dismissed the class.

"How animated can one get about fourth-year engineering physics?" Keiichi wondered as his fellow students started piling out of their chairs. Observing the frail professor, Keiichi thought that Dr. Yayoi seemed the very stereotype of an engineering math savant: dour and stuffy, dressed rather dumpy, his hair disheveled, asocial and aloof in his manner.

There would certainly be _no_ humor in this class...

However, being in grad school had some perks, like the reduced class sizes and the air-conditioned lounge on the 6th floor reserved for the exclusive use of graduate division students and junior faculty. Like the undergrad math lab, the grad lounge had a few cartoons and jokes posted on the walls...these were intended to create an atmosphere of casual easygoingness. Instead, Keiichi thought this was a lame attempt by virtue of its incompleteness. Many of the cartoons were copied out of engineering journals and textbooks routinely assigned for graduate course study.

However, one poster in the lab distinguished itself in Keiichi's mind. The poster...hand drawn by an N.I.T. faculty member with no small artistic talent...presented a manga-ish caricature of Albert Einstein. The physics domo was depicted with a Kirin beer in hand and his feet resting on his desk, his typical mismatched socks clearly visible. The accompanying word balloon stated something about "the superiority of math classes is evidenced by the fact that they do not require a term paper." The old joke sat morosely with Keiichi...especially in light of how he had spent the last several weeks of his summer vacation.

As he zipped his bookbag shut and started to shoulder it, Keiichi's thoughts were interrupted by a strident voice...

"Mr. Morisato?"

Setting the bookbag down on the desktop, Keiichi glanced over to see the eldergrey professor walking towards him. Feeling both nervous and impressed by the fact that Dr. Yayoi knew him by name after only one class session, Keiichi tried to smile innocuously.

"I believe this is yours," Dr. Yayoi noted dryly as he handed Keiichi a light green envelope. Without even waiting for a reply, he turned around and shuffled towards the door at the front of the class, tucking in his white shirt as he left the room.

"Ch-eez," Keiichi muttered under his breath at the departing professor.

_This_ was highly irregular! Someone had left a note for Dr. Yayoi to pass onto him after class. No wonder Yayoi-sensei was peeved! The guy was practically an emeritus professor...and yet he had been tasked to be a message-boy for one of his students!

Quickly opening the envelope, Keiichi withdrew an official-looking stationary with what appeared to be a handwritten message. He gulped in his breath as he read the letterhead.

"Office of the President, Nekomi Institute of Technology" was boldly grammed at the top center of the page. His hands started shaking as he realized that this was a message from Dr. Kintaro himself!

_"Keiichi Morisato,_

_You are to report to my office at 4pm today._

_Dr. Toshiro Kintaro, President of Nekomi Tech."_

"That's it?!" Keiichi wondered, scratching his head with piqued anxiety. The brevity of the message was enigmatic in the highest degree! In this case, less meant more.

Less clues...more worrying...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Don't get paranoid, Keiichi! This might be a good thing! It might really be a good thing!" he said aloud to himself, trying to calm his nerves against the storm of doubts as he stood in the empty hallway. His head whirled around a psyclone of possibilities. At least he had received the note after his final class of the day; thus being spared an entire day's worth of fretfulness.

In a daze, he started walking briskly...and collided with Sayoko Mishima. Her silken hair shocked out with the force of his collision; whatever it was that she was carrying, it was now on the floor.

"Keiichi? Are you all right?" she asked. Keiichi flinched, expecting Sayoko to fire off on him for almost knocking her on her ass.

Sayoko looked up at him with a mystified expression as she knelt down to retrieve her notebook and a text on Transitional Analysis. Scanning his face, she stood up and repeated her question...when he didn't respond, she waved her free hand in front of his face.

"Soooo...Dr. Kintaro wants to see you!" Sayoko said, her voice tinged with a mix of worry and surprise as she straightened out her skirt and ruffled her blouse back into place.

"H..how did you know? How _could_ you know?" he stuttered, realizing that she had somehow guessed what was on his mind.

"Well, you were holding _this_ in plain view," she answered with a wink, grinning as she poked him in the chest...poking the letter he held plastered to his breast.

Oft times, now that she had cleaned up from drugs...Sayoko seemed to strike Keiichi as a hawk-girl. Like her avian counterpart, she was very genki, poised and observant. She just didn't swoop-pounce with deadly force any more, like she used to when she was getting high.

This was one of those times where her vigilance seemed to border on the supernatural.

"Are you in trouble?" Sayoko joked.

"Not one bit. I had some...difficulties...turning in my final paper from last semester. But now, everything is all smoothed out," he answered somewhat defensively.

"So any guesses about why the _president_ of N.I.T. wants to meet with you, Keiichi?" she asked.

"Actually...I don't have a clue!" Keiichi exclaimed, frustration written on his face. She eyed him for a moment, and then seemed to arrive at some private decision.

"Well, let's get going to the Admin Bldg!" Sayoko said playfully as she punched him in the shoulder. Keiichi looked at her askance until she explained that her schedule was open until 4:30pm. She added that he looked as nervous as the lead actor in the new movie.

"_What_ new movie?" he asked. Sayoko described the new comedy in an animated voice. The plot centered around a young piano tutor, just out of the Berkeley Institute, who had signed up to prepare a 17-year-old girl for her first formal concert recital...only to learn that he was in love with her, she was infatuated with him. And that she was the only daughter of a yakuza overboss.

"Did they get together?" he asked.

"Don't be so useless! Go take your fiance to the movie and find out for yourself!" Sayoko teased back. With mention of Belldandy, Keiichi ardently wished she was here to accompany him...but having Sayoko to keep him company was a good second best. Hopefully, Sayoko's usual confident poise would rub off on him during the ten minutes it would take to walk from the hall to the Admin Bldg.

In just five minutes, his world felt like it had been ruffled like a pair of gardener's gloves after an afternoon of weeding the yard...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Mor..."

"Excuse me, did you say something?" Dr. Kintaro inquired politely, looking up from the ever-present mound of paper work on his desk. Both visitors shook their heads.

The utterance was half-heard...maybe it was his imagination, he thought. Adjusting his reading glasses, Dr. Kintaro again reflected on the strange circumstances that surrounded the presence of these two visitors who were sitting on the antique Biedermeier sofa in his office.

He directed his thoughts back to early this morning. First, the couple had arrived unannounced at 9am. Normally, Dr. Kintaro kept a tight rein on his personal schedule. Anybody who wanted to meet with him had to be screened by one of his secretaries. Despite the fact that he didn't have a clue about the identities of these two...had never even _met_ them...his secretary insisted that they were scheduled to meet with him this afternoon. She even showed him the notation in the appointment book she kept for him.

Second, the two visitors had traveled all the way from _Norway_ to meet with him. With _him_! They could have visited Keio or Waseda or one of the other more prestigious educational institutions in Tokyo. But...as they later explained...they had chosen N.I.T. precisely because it _wasn't_ one of the top schools. Yet, the fact that a student team of racers from N.I.T. had won the Le Mans..._this_ event had certainly put it on the map, as far as Europe was concerned.

He suspected that the middle-aged couple were nothing more than jetsetter racing fans seeking a few autographs...until they presented him with a name card. Their card introduced them as Eldon and Greta Thorgarssun, Chair and Vice-chair respectively of the Regents of the University of Oslo. Dr. Kintaro was astute enough to remember that the Univ. of Oslo was the largest research institute in Scandinavia...it was the 'Tokyo University' of Norway.

It was very unusual for a husband and wife to _both_ be elected to a Board of Regents of a major academic institute. Beyond this was the fact that they were the top officials of said Board. Dr. Kintaro felt a wave of intimidation as he realized that they could accomplish such a feat only by possessing a very savvy nature as far as university politics were concerned.

He would have to keep his guard up.

During the course of their first meeting, the two explained...in fluent Japanese no less!...that they wanted to conduct a meeting with a 'typical' N.I.T. student. On the surface, this seemed to be an odd request; yet Dr. Kintaro could understand the motive factors supporting it. The Northern European university system was reputed to be hidebound by the presence of certain...institutional archaisms...that significantly impacted the competitiveness of their professional graduates once they entered the global engineering talent pool. Perhaps they were researching for more progressive means of providing educational services by interviewing a typical Japanese student about their educational experience at N.I.T.

As he looked at Eldon and Greta, he became more and more curious. They were both in the prime of maturity; strong of body and very charming to the eye. He estimated them to be in their late 40s. The man was a behemoth, standing over 2 meters in height. His wife had striking hair, unusually long for a woman her age.

"Why did these two regents have to travel to Japan _personally_? Why not send a university official instead?" he wondered privately.

During their first meeting, Dr. Kintaro had noted that N.I.T. enrolled about seven hundred students. He had jokingly suggested that they select a student at random, so as to prevent any predisposition towards a hazarded or biased interviewee. To his surprise, the visitors readily agreed to his suggestion. Calling his head secretary into his office, Dr. Kintaro had asked her to voice in a random student ID number. Once she called it out to his computer's voiceboard, the name "Keiichi Morisato" popped up on the screen.

This was conspicuous, as Keiichi Morisato certainly was one of the most high-profile students in the whole student body!

Surveying his desk for a report on next year's Culture Day budget, Dr. Kintaro smiled as he remembered the victory at the Solar Federation race. Once he found the report, he glanced out the window at the new research building taking shape in the upper campus...the result of the generous cash prize awarded to N.I.T. by the Solar Federation.

In a sense, he was relieved. Keiichi Morisato was a good student who hadn't caused too much trouble during his enrollment here. True, there had been a _few_ behavioral incidents that had been brought to his attention...but overall, Morisato's record was good, both in academic performance and other areas. He would have rather preferred that they had picked an outstanding student like Sora Hasegawa, or even Keiichi's sister, Megumi. Those two girls would both add an element of youthful charm to their interview...which would lend itself to creating a better impression with the Norwegian visitors.

Glancing at his desk clock, it was almost 4pm. He smiled at the two Drs. Thorgarssun, waiting amiably in his office.

"Morisato better not be late!" Dr. Kintaro thought to himself. Things could have been worse...their chance effort could have resulted in the selection of one of the 'crazies', like Tamiya or Ootaki! The club Keiichi Morisato belonged to was filled with eccentrics...

_That_ would have been a nightmare!

A few moments later, his secretary knocked on the door and announced that Keiichi Morisato was waiting in the reception area.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Sayoko decided to wait with Keiichi in the President's Office, hoping that her presence could take the edge off of his trepidation.

He was _so_ nervous...

She had always considered Keiichi to be at his cutest when he was wound up. But this meeting would doubtlessly be a very important one, if it involved the President of the school. Of course, if she were in his shoes, Sayoko admitted that she would be wiping around on the verge of paranoia. Unlike Keiichi, her past record _wasn't_ so good. True, her grades were top notch...but she had been on report many times for intoxication on campus and other troublemaking. And during the last semester of her active drug use, she had totally screwed up every area of her life.

"One can never erase the jaded past they trail behind when they're an active drug addict. Better you than me," she confided to Keiichi in a quiet voice.

As they waited in the office, she talked Keiichi up; reminding him that he was a good student, an all-around nice guy, a natural competitor...etc., etc.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Belldandy sipped the sun tea, savoring the fragrant aroma. Skuld was nowhere to be seen...she was probably spraying down "Betty". The huge Triceratops needed to be sprayed down with a hose at least twice a day; the arid September heat was drying up her skin. Hopefully, it would rain over the weekend.

One of Belldandy's guilty pleasures was reading the bridal magazines that Megumi had brought her. In one sense, she had 'graduated' from "Modern Woman" to "Sweet This Year's Bride", as far as her reading preferences went. She could absorb all the information of all the magazines ever published in Japan in less than an hour, but Belldandy liked the mortal method of leisure reading.

Things were finally getting back to normal.

Now if she could convince Urd to pay a visit...

"They're here!" Skuld announced as she darted in the front door. Stamping the water off her bare feet, she sprinted into the dining room.

As Belldandy looked at her younger sister; she wondered if Skuld had gotten more water on herself than on Betty...

"_Who's_ here?"

"Mom and Dad!!" Skuld answered excitedly, secretly pleased that this announcement would shock her older sister.

If this were an evening 'dorama', Belldandy would have spat her tea out on the floor to demonstrate her shock. Instead, she noticed a sudden tingling in her shaking hands.

"Are you _sure_?"

"A-1 totally transmission received sure!! The Ninjettes informed me while I was washing Betty. They were checking up on Keiichi...and they saw them at N.I.T."

"Mom and Dad went to Keiichi's school! Why? Why didn't they come here first..?" Belldandy wondered aloud, fixing her gaze on Skuld's walnut brown eyes.

Extending her senses, Belldandy felt a Mephistophelean shadow forming on the horizon...

This was _bad_!

Her inborn ability to detect disastrous circumstances...the 'Goddess Intuition' that allowed her to hone in on a threat like an Earthrealm radar...was sirening her like an alarm clock that wouldn't shut off.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"You have nothing to worry about! It's all in your head, Keiichi! This meeting is just part of the natural flow of life. If you haven't done anything wrong, all this probably means is just that you're going to get recognized for something good!" she asserted.

She put a comforting hand on his as the door to the President's Office opened up...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"S..something terrible is happening!" Belldandy shouted, clasping Skuld on both shoulders and peering deep into her eyes.

"What could be terrible about our parents coming here to visit?" Skuld asked, mystified by her sister's frenetic reaction. Belldandy's eyes were wide with fear...and with a flash of insight, Skuld realized why.

Mother and Father weren't _here_!

They were _there_...with Keiichi!

When Keiichi proposed to Elder Sister after winning the Le Mans, Skuld noticed the look of approval on her parent's faces. Yet, there was something else she glimpsed that night. She personally thought that Keiichi had made a big mistake by not formally asking Mom and Dad if he could marry her sister. True, they were in Yggdrasil and he was here on the mortal's Earth...but still, he could have asked Belldandy to arrange a meeting. His proposal was goofy and miscalculated and impulsive...and maybe, just a little bit romantic. Totally what she had expected from someone like Keiichi. He could be so mindlessly inept sometimes...

But her sister loved him with all her being, a fact that still mystified Skuld from time to time.

Obviously, Mom and Dad had come to the Earthrealm to visit him and have a talk. But what kind of talk? And why was Elder Sister so worried?

"I'm going to him! I know my darling Keiichi means well...but I sense that he _really needs me_ right now!" Belldandy announced. Walking over to the mirror on the living room wall, she tried to jump into it...

_bdumbp_

Skuld gasped as Belldandy bounced off of the glassy surface and fell to the floor in an undignified heap.

Dumbfounded, her sister tried to gain her stealth form...and failed.

"_They_ did it! Mother and Father must be responsible for this!" Skuld realized with a start. Whatever it was that they wanted to discuss with Keiichi, they wanted to discuss it _privately_. As the Head of the Yggdrasil Energy Guild, Father could have easily put a block on some of the energy transmitted to her from Yggdrasil Mainframe...effectively stranding Belldandy in place! Of the trillions of ionic interchanges traveling between her and Yggdrasil, Father could have selected the very 'beam' of arcane force that allowed her to freely travel.

There was nothing she could do about it. Belldandy looked at Skuld, the expression on her older sister's face seemed beggared with disbelief at her inability to travel.

"I'll go!" Skuld suggested, heading for the kitchen sink.

A moment later, she was sitting on the kitchen floor with pots and pans and water all around her. _She_ was also unable to travel by Divine means! The resultant spill of water over the kitchen sink covered most of the tiled floor. Good thing Skuld was already soaked from watering the dinosaur...

"This could only mean one thing," Belldandy noted. "Mom and Dad are going to have a _serious_ talk with my darling Keiichi about his plans for our married life."

"Which could be a disaster..." Skuld added. She instantly regretted her remark...it had visibly drained any hope that remained on her sister's face.

Skuld wanted to hit herself on the head with Mjolnir, her mallet.

"How could I be so _stupid_!" she accused herself as Belldandy looked helplessly at her. She was just a few cm shorter than Belldandy, which still took some getting used to at times. She no longer had to look up to the two older sisters that she had looked up to for so long. She was eyelevel with Belldandy...and feeling miles away from being the equal of her sister.

As Skuld was feeling at a loss on how to comfort her sister, Belldandy suddenly sprung forward, clinging onto her with a desperate hug. It felt strange; this was the first time she had been hugged by her older sister since she had 'transformed' from a 12-year-old to a 16-year-old.

"This...is almost like hugging Urd," Belldandy said with a wan smile, weakly trying to lighten the depressing atmosphere. Her whimsical remark briefly thrilled Skuld.

Belldandy obviously needed some major comforting...and a moment later, Skuld was gently soothing down her hair, fingerbrushing the soft tresses at the back of her head.

Keiichi was on his own.

Usually, Keiichi did very well on his own. Whenever he raced, despite all the combined efforts of his teammates, he was on always on his own. Singularly responsible for the outcome of his driving performance...and the race.

Belldandy admitted to Skuld that she felt ashamed of herself; she should have more confidence in her fiance. But Skuld could sense that dark presence...an ethereal dread hovering fringe-edgy in her consciousness; a threatening aspect that reminded her of the Reaper when He arrived ready to claim a Soul. That disturbing mask of doubt that shadowed her sister's heart...also filled Skuld with anxiety.

It could only be the result of her parents being _angry_ and disappointed. This conclusion only served to flourish her reservations.

Skuld felt so inept...

"He's going to be all right," she said softly into Belldandy's ear. She felt a comforting squeeze on her shoulder. She was grateful that Belldandy was at least trying to appear confident. But how could anyone be confident when her parents, both Senior First Class Licensees, were having a discussion with an Earthrealm mortal.

Keiichi was on his own...and there was nothing she or Belldandy could do to help him...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

_"__Eeep!__"_ Keiichi exclaimed, pulling his hand out from under Sayoko's as if his friend's hand was a bright-red stove element.

"Shit!!" would have probably been a more apt exclamation, he noted to himself...but he was too freaked out in that instant to gasp out anything else.

Standing next to Dr. Kintaro was a giant of a man, dressed in a navy blue 'power' business suit. At his side was a graceful tall woman with long blonde-platinum hair...

The eyepatch was unmistakable.

Sayoko cringed next to him, noticing the sudden look of angry surprise on the face of the tall bearded gaijin.

"Go!!" Keiichi whispered to her.

"Huh?" Sayoko whispered back.

"Go! Leave! Get the hell out of here!" Keiichi shot back in a low voice. Feeling wounded at his sudden dismissal, Sayoko stood up and left wordlessly.

As she walked out into the hall, completely confused...she stopped in midstep as a funny notion struck her.

That woman that she saw in Dr. Kintaro's office...somehow, she bore more than a passing resemblance to Belldandy! In fact, the resemblance was strong! If Belldandy's hair was much lighter, wavy-curled... If Belldandy was just 5Kg heavier and was 20 years older...

If Belldandy had Skuld's dun-brown eyes instead of her own...

"S..Skuld's _eyes_!?" Sayoko thought, her chest clenching itself into a gasp as she was emotionally heaved by her trail of observations.

_"__OHMYGODDDD!!__"_

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Keiichi wanted to crawl up and die. Despite the facade of cordiality maintained by 'Dr. and Dr. Thorgarssun' in the presence of Dr. Kintaro...he could sense the seething disappointment and resentment in their bearing.

It wasn't anything like it looked! The moment Sayoko had rested a comforting hand on his, the N.I.T. chief's door opened up...a figurative iron door that creaked open to unleash a Pandoran plague of troubles upon him.

It couldn't have been worse!

"Well, we _certainly_ have a lot of questions for this young man! We should be going," 'Greta' explained to Dr. Kintaro, sotto voce.

Keiichi felt like he was on the verge of being dragged out of the office by his ears, he was so cowed by the circumstances. Indeed, the three left the office wordlessly.

The silence was killing him...but he was too afraid to speak up.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Explain yourself!" Odeyn said, swiftly discarding all pretenses of civility as he yelled in a commanding voice once they emerged from the Admin Bldg. A group of students nearby were queuing, were staring...

"Wait, husband! Not here! We need to go to someplace less conspicuous so we can yell louder," Freiija interjected, tugging at Odeyn's sleeve while glaring stinkeye at Keiichi.

"Agreed!" Odeyn said with a nod. He snapped his finger...

In a flash, Keiichi found himself standing in the middle of a vast desert expanse. There were no defining geographical features, except for the gentle contours of sand dunes that stretched in every direction as far as the eye can see. The light brown gray ocean of sand threatened to swallow him like a hungry wolf...

The heat was stifling; it ripped into his lungs and nostrils like the sudden airtemper of an open oven door...

"It's like one of those sci-fi movies, where in a flash, you're transported to a completely different place," Keiichi observed to himself as he adjusted to sudden shift in surrounding. The sky was light blue and cloudless; the overhead sun made the sand so bright his eyes hurt. He felt a brief pang of relief...at least there was _one_ sun in the air. He just hoped that he was still on the planet Earth.

_"__EXPLAIN YOURSELF!__"_ Odeyn shouted, floating a meter above the sand, arms folded across his broad chest. He was no longer dressed like an Earthrealm businessman; he was dressed in the same raiment that he wore when Keiichi first met him.

His shout jet-engined deafening in Keiichi's ears.

"E..explain what?" Keiichi stammered, feeling smothered by the intensity of grueling environment and the forceful interrogative.

"Explain what you were doing with that Earthrealm wench whose hand was in yours. Explain the meaning of this, when you claim to be engaged to our daughter. Explain why you're having an affair behind our backs...behind precious B'Dandy's back!" Freiija replied, her accusations snapping like cannonfire.

"T..there's nothing to explain. She's a friend," Keiichi answered nervously, feeling an impulse towards laughing in crazed incoherence in response to the ludicrous accusations.

Freiija spun in a circle as she hovered...just like Urd did when she was miffed.

"That's so...'what they always say'...as you Earthrealm would mortals term it," she noted with icy exasperation. Keiichi had to grant her this point. But this was one argument he wasn't going to lose, even if the examiners _were_ Bell-chan's parents.

He was innocent.

"But it's true, goddammit! Belldandy isn't the only woman in my life..." Keiichi said defensively, then immediately regretting the words as soon as he had uttered them. Just like his fiancée, he had impugned himself with an ambiguous gaffe...

"So that's it! He brazenly admits to his infidelity..." Freiija said with angry delight. Keiichi felt like a moth in the clutches of a cat...

In contrast to her haughty accusatory attitude, Odeyn scratched the back of his head. Keiichi's remark _might_ mean something entirely different. Verily, the young mortal man was terrified out of his wits. But upon examination, his terror didn't seem to possess the shadings of the affright of one who was troubling themselves to conceal guilt. Of course, Odeyn could 'read' Keiichi and know the truth in a flash. But he and his wife agreed that this interview mustneeds be conducted in such a manner as to afford Keiichi an opportunity to defend himself.

It was time to calm the wife down, or kill the mortal. No...Odeyn knew that Gods weren't permitted to take the lives of mortals without express authorization from Kami-sama. This fact was a major distinction between the Gods and the Demons. But if this mortal has been two-timing Belldandy...

"I want you to clarify what you just said, Keiichi. And be sure you tell the truth, young mortal, rather than following the duplicitous example of our oldest child. If we catch you trying to hide within a Bastille of deceit..." Odeyn said, crossing his throat with his hand in an unmistakable gesture. Despite being embraced by the murk of anxious fear, Keiichi snickered at the reference to Urd.

"First off, aren't I the 'test mortal'? Haven't the two of you been monitoring what is going on down here? With me? Because if you did, you would know that Sayoko is nothing more than a friend..."

"She seems to gaze upon you with a quite a bit more than the embers of friendship in her eyes..." Freiija observed.

"Yes. Her eyes, in fact her whole being, suggests that she was fawning upon you," Odeyn added.

"Well..uh..the operative word here is 'was'. Sayoko _used_ to like me at one time. Before I met your daughter. And after your daughter and I fell in love, Sayoko _still_ wanted me... She was infatuated with me," he answered.

"Which you no doubt enjoyed and encouraged!" Odeyn noted.

"I did _not_!! Well, to be honest, I did enjoy it a little...after all, Sayoko is a beautiful woman, by my standards! But I never even considered leaving Belldandy for her. I'd be an idiot to choose a mortal babe over a _Goddess_!! Not to mention her boyfriend, Tamiya, could pound me into a pulp without breaking a sweat! I swear...I never did _anything_ with her..." Keiichi countered.

"Then why don't you trouble yourself to explain _this_," Freiija replied with rueful sarcasm. In the air above him, a scene formed.

A scene from his and Belldandy's first vacation to a beach resort. A scene he remembered all too well...

_His shoulders slumped as he watched a younger version of him trying to kiss Sayoko in a narrow twilight-lit hallway. Sayoko was screaming and resisting...and then she was backed up against the wall in the hallway. He shook his head as he watched his younger self staring at Sayoko with lust-filled lovestruck eyes._

"Stop it! You have Belldandy, don't you?"

"Nope! You're wrong! I want you to be near me..."

_Then the scene shifted to Belldandy, looking on from the end of the hallway, her frame solid against the orange glow of the setting sun. Bell-chan's eyes were downcast with sorrow, tears forming along their eyelashes. Keiichi almost wanted to cry with her; he could empathize so strongly with her sense of disappointment..._

"T..that was _Urd's_ doing! I wasn't in control of myself!" he shot back indignantly.

"Obviously so," Freiija remarked snidely.

"No...this isn't right! It's unfair to show me this! Back then, all I wanted was to have Belldandy fall in love with me. A..actually, I wanted to _touch_ Belldandy," Keiichi stammered, and then blushed deeply as Freiija smirked at his disclosure.

"Great...now I've gone and done it! I just basically admitted to Bell's parents that I_ want her body_..." he observed despondently. Everything was spiraling into a doom-blackened abyss!

"Go on...this is getting interesting," Freiija noted icily. This mortal was tactlessly hoisting himself on the banner of disfavor, as far as she was concerned. Her husband Odeyn was sullenly silent, leaving her to prosecute this mortal for his misbehavior...

"B..but things got screwed up when I spilled the suntan lotion that Urd gave me. The lotion was supposed to make Belldandy all 'mellow mellow'...uh, you know what I mean..."

"Please, don't stop now on account of being embarrassed," Freiija interjected, causing Keiichi to blush even deeper.

"...so Urd kept meddling. She gave me some love potion she cooked up, to increase my courage so I could tell Belldandy how I really felt. She claimed that it would increase my courage a hundredfold, and the next person I saw after taking the potion...well, I would become a 'love warrior' or something like that. I would be able to tell her anything. And I wanted to tell Belldandy exactly how I felt! But the first person to come to the room was Sayoko..." Keiichi explained anxiously.

"So why did she come to your room in the first place?" Odeyn asked.

"Years later, I found out why. Sayoko admitted that she came to my room that afternoon...because she wanted to apologize for getting me out into a boat when she knew that I couldn't swim. Sayoko _wasn't_ coming to the room to make out with me or anything..." Keiichi answered.

"Hmmm. Be that as it may, it still doesn't begin to justify your actions then...and now. With the same Earthrealm woman, too!" Freiija said.

"Gimme a break! Can't I even have a friend of the opposite sex? There was nothing between us. Sayoko is a _friend_...nothing more! Nothing more then...and nothing more now! She decided to hang out with me at Dr. Kintaro's office because I was freakin' out! I was scared, y'know!! It'd be like one of you...suddenly being called to meet with the Almighty!" Keiichi explained, hoping the metaphor would clarify why he possessed such an anxious state of mind. If they believed that, then they might believe that Sayoko's holding his hand was innocent...just an act of a close friend being supportive.

"And you should know this. Urd made that love spell _unbreakable_, because she intended it for me and Bell-chan. _She_ knew I was in love with Belldandy and not Sayoko! But once I was infected by her infernal magicks, and I saw Sayoko...I was stuck. According to Urd, I should have never recovered from that spell. But then Belldandy broke it...with a kiss! _She_ kissed me, on her own initiative! And if I didn't have such deep feelings for Bell-chan back then, I would have been doing much more than just holding hands with Sayoko for the past four years! Just think about that! Something true and wondrous had to happen between Bell and I, otherwise, I would have never have been able to fall for your daughter!" Keiichi argued, shifting to the offensive.

"Are you claiming that Urd's spell made you believe that you were in love with this Sayoko woman, and then Belldandy was able to overcome it?" Freiija said, admitting aloud her incredulance. A supposed unbreakable spell was...well, it was warranted to be unbreakable _for a reason_! Even if it was concocted by Urd...

"Exactly! If I loved Sayoko and not Belldandy, then how do you think Urd's spell could have been thwarted? Don't you think that my _heart_ had something to do with it? And if it hadn't...wouldn't that mean that I'd still be with Sayoko...and not Belldandy!" Keiichi asserted.

Both Gods nodded at this. Keiichi realized that he was gaining some persuasive momentum.

"Where are we, anyway?" he asked, sidestepping his trepidation for a moment.

"We have transported ourselves and you to the middle of the Earthrealm's Sahara Desert," Freiija explained. "And unfortunately for you, you will experience 'conveyance illness' for the next few days. Consider it the price you pay for appearing to be fooling around."

"I never fooled around with Sayoko! Not once!" Keiichi shouted.

"I seem to remember a certain mortal dressed in a dog costume paying homage to a certain queen..." Freiija said, her face pulled into an expression of schoolmarm strictness and censure.

"Oh great! Now you have to bring up _that_ horrible mess..." Keiichi grumbled, turning two shades of rouge under the hot desert sun. He looked at Freiija, who stared reprovingly at him for a moment, and then winked at her husband. She relaxed her face into a wisp of a smile...

Keiichi sighed with relief; this was Bell's Mother's kooky way of letting him know that he was off the hook.

"You know, you really gave us a start back there in that office," Odeyn said calmly.

"Where's Bell-chan? Where's my fiancée? Why isn't she here?" Keiichi asked. The calm that seemed to descend on Bell's parents only served to heighten his anxiety.

"Because we're here to visit _you_. Having B'dandy come along...would only interfere. It would not bode well for purposes of the trial we have created for you," Freiija explained.

_TRIAL?!_

"But first, we need to attend to another important matter. We need a concise explanation as to why you deemed it necessary to propose to our daughter without coming to us first," Freiija asked.

"Cripes! I had a lot on my mind!! It wasn't exactly planned, either. Besides, I thought you both already approved...after that episode with Tyyr. If _that_ didn't prove that Bell and I belong together, then I give up!" Keiichi answered. Expecting more arguing from Bell's parents, he found the arid air to be wrapping itself around a sullen silence.

Freiija had to acknowledge to herself that he was right. She remembered how tenaciously he fought for Belldandy during the slotcar race. She didn't want to believe it then...but later she realized that this mortal _was_ madly in love with her precious B'dandy.

"I will admit that this meeting has some elements of possibly being missearchen. However, young mortal, you must understand that Belldandy is the first of our daughters to be married. In a sense, we're losing her to you. God or mortal...the giving away of a child is a grave moment. We were at fault for letting our anxieties best us. Consider this the mistake of overly-concerned parents," Odeyn explained.

"Apology accepted," Keiichi said promptly, smiling for the first time since he had encountered Bell's parents.

"Now...as to the Ritual of Preparedness. Despite the fact that you are a worthy, there has been no formal omiai between parents. Ofttimes, we in Yggdrasil expect a certain level of...ability...to be proven before we cast our affirmation of a marriage proposal. Normally, after the engagement has been approved by both parents, there is a period of tests to confirm the durability of the heartbond. Since there has been no formal meeting of parents, nor any performance of ability on your part...we have decided to assign a mission for you in lieu of this, in keeping with the traditions of Yggdrasil. A 'trial', as your Earthrealm language would term it. You are granted 30 days to complete your task. And complete it you must. Otherwise we will forthwith withdraw our permission for you to marry our daughter, because you will have been proven to be incompetent by our standards," Odeyn explained.

"W..what? You mean that I have to..? You mean that you can..? But Bell and I are already engaged!" Keiichi stammered. He couldn't believe it! His brain was saturated with bitter balsams of disbelief; his fears were enclosing him like a densely forested bamboo grove.

Bell's parents were basically saying that they would cancel his engagement with her if he didn't meet their conditions.

"Do not question us on this matter! We would have made an exception because of your mortal status, but you went ahead and proposed to our daughter without observing the proper forms, Keiichi. Now, we are honorbound to observe our marriage traditions. Especially so, as I am the Goddess of Marriages," Freiija noted officiously.

"You can't! Bell and I..."

"It is _not_ up to debate...and it is certainly not up to a mortal whelpling like you to decide! What we do...is for the protection of our daughter!" Odeyn interrupted sternly.

Keiichi waited for a moment for his anger to recede. It always seemed that life itself conspired to keep him and Belldandy apart! Every time things seemed to relax into a calm, there arose some new tribulation, some new challenge to be met. Now, he had to face some stupid trial _after_ he proposed to Belldandy! After her parents gave their approval.

It was so idiotic!

Keiichi looked at Freiija, whose frown readily disclosed that his thoughts weren't harbored only in his mind...no doubt, she had sensed his strong disagreement to his current situation.

"Remember who you are dealing with, young mortal man!" she admonished in an even voice of displeasure that could have melted cactus.

This one was different from the usual predicaments that troubled his relationship with Belldandy. This one came directly from Bell-chan's parents.

This situation...couldn't be trifled with.

"What do I have to do?" he asked meekly, surrendering to the obvious. Each word of the tongue soiled his confidence...

"It's very simple. We want you to find the key to Belldandy's heart. It is somewhere on this planet, and it's entirely within your means to locate it," Odeyn explained.

"You...gotta...be...kidding!!" Keiichi shouted, forgetting his place. Odeyn and Freiija both flinched in disappointment at his rambunctious outburst, then patiently waited for him to relax his emotional exertions.

"No, we're in earnest. Deadly earnest. Speaking strictly as the Goddess of Marriage...if you cannot discover the key to our daughter's heart...then what use is it to aspire to be a lifemate for her? _What_ could you possibly offer in substitute?" Freiija pointed out bluntly.

_That_ one drove a leaden spike into his heart!

"As a matter of fact, it may be best for us to dismiss ourselves, so that we can leave you to your begin your search immediately," Odeyn noted as he waved his hand in a circle.

_"__But it's the middle of the freakin' Sahara desert!__"_ Keiichi shouted at the fading apparition-like images of Bell's parents.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Last night, when Belldandy informed me about Keiichi...I was riveted with disbelief. Her parents had stranded Keiichi in the middle of the Sahara desert, somewhere in Africa!

At least...and it was a paltry 'at least'...they had been merciful enough to inform Belldandy about where Keiichi was and why he was there. Belldandy had a brief-but-spirited argument with her mother before slamming the phone down in a fit of spite that was incongruent with her gentle manners.

Skuld was even more vocal in her anger...

More and more, I was beginning to think that these Gods were insane; miscerebate beings with a fickle randomness to their officious 'administration' of humankind...unbalanced to an extreme that the gods of the Olympian pantheon could never approach. If we were created in God's image, as the Christians claimed...and the Goddesses confirmed...then this fanaticism in the Yggdrasilian Divines would explain the insanity of our human race.

Or quite possibly, they were the most malicious of Cosmic Jokers...

"Why don't they just snuff out the Northern Lights, just to create some attention or something?" I muttered as I corrected assignments from my Intermediate Greek class.

This was getting me nowhere. Not only was I having difficulty remembering Greek...my thoughts kept returning to Keiichi.

With a "slap", I smacked the stack of homework down on my desk. Once again, my thoughts drifted towards the question of how Keiichi was going to survive this one.

A few years ago, 'reality-TV' survivor shows were in vogue in America. Actually, the idea had originated in Japan and Europe...whose networks had been producing 'reality-TV' shows for a long time. I thought the survivor TV shows were stupid and inane...trying to cast the illusion of risk from the bravery of being out of range. I never watched them; I had too much studying to do. But millions of my peers were fascinated by them.

Anything to amuse the bottom-feeders...

My idea of a survivor show was to take 20 people from the suburbs of Dallas or some other American city and drop them en masse into the middle of an Algerian ghetto with no money, weapons or credit cards. Whoever was still alive at the end of the month would be hailed as a 'survivor'.

All cynicism aside, I was genuinely worried about Keiichi's chances at making it out of the desert alive. What he was facing made my little whimsical scenarios run towards the cheap. He was in a _real_ live-or-die situation. I fought to keep my thoughts private; the last thing I needed to do was truthfully assess his situation around Belldandy and Megumi. Belldandy probably already knew how grave his circumstances were, and Megumi was far too gripped by fear and worry to be bothered with facts about the odds he faced.

Poor Megumi! She was worried sick about her brother! I could only imagine the depths of her concern: take my concern and amplify it within the critical realm of siblingship...

And Belldandy was an emotional mess! None of Skuld's surveillance devices could locate Keiichi...which angered the teenaged Goddess almost as much as her parent's actions, I suspected. Skuld tried all night to utilize the same procedure of hack-and-spy that she employed so successfully to locate Urd in China last year. It was daylight in Africa whenever it was night here.

But she had no results for her efforts. Skuld finally resigned herself to the fact that her parents must have put some kind of shielding spell to prevent her from locating him by means of technology.

Bell's parents had obviously thought of everything to isolate Keiichi away from Bell...and the rest of us.

For the year-and-a-half that I knew him, Keiichi certainly never struck me as the outdoors type. Sure, he had climbed to the top of Mt. Nantai with Belldandy last year...but that hike only required moderate exertion. Physically, he wasn't stocky or buff. He couldn't swim, he rarely exercised...and I doubted that he knew any survival skills. Excepting his racing skills, Keiichi was decidedly non-athletic.

Marriage trials have been deeply ingrained within the traditions of so many cultures on the Earth. Everything from impossibly high bridal dowries, to physical mutilation, to ordeals of physical endurance or intellectual cleverness, to a total submission to the whims of the husband's parents...this was the legacy surrounding the lifebonding of man and woman. In the 21st century, the institution of marriage had weakened considerably, due to our spectacular loss of moral fabric and the rapid evolving of indistinct social ingrouping of the species. Beyond all the anthropological aspects, much of this struck me as wretched.

"Would I have to undergo some kind of 'trial' if I were to marry Urd?" I asked myself. The thought left me dry-mouthed. There was going to be no Urd. There wasn't going to be any self-glorification; the sense of glory a man felt in the presence of a beautiful woman. I sensed that I would never again revel in the joybliss of her emerald eyes.

Urd has been gone out of my life for almost two months.

Strangely enough, I didn't recluse into falling-to-pieces crazed desperation over her absence. I was occasionally submerged in a malaise over her abrupt departure...but my heart wasn't torn apart by any means. My emotional resilience continually surprised me in bursts of recognition...until Belldandy or Skuld would blithely remind me that I was actually being cold-hearted.

True to her word, Mara arrived yesterday and removed the shield spell. Belldandy asked the red-eyed Demoness if Keiichi's predicament was her doing, which only brought Mara to the brink of laughter. Mara noted the sheer irony of it all...Bell's parents were plaguing Belldandy with grief to a degree that she was incapable of. Then she added that the Dark Lord Himself had prohibited her from interfering in Keiichi's ordeal. Belldandy looked like she was going to have a heart attack with _that_ disclosure.

The coy, beguiling face that Mara pulled after she finished her work made me want to cringe. She made it very obvious that I would have to honor our agreement with her. In one sense, Mara now owned me...owned me for a night. I hated it; that smug look on her face. There was nothing I could do to back out of her terms...

At least yesterday wasn't a total waste. Skuld had employed her special brand of genius, announcing that she had designed the Dinoplex AuralSakutron Mk. III. She explained, with her typical technobabblish zeal, that it was a "dinosaur alarm". Whenever Betty would roam too close to the front gate or one of the temple buildings or walls, a soundless siren would sound. The alert would be inaudible to human ears; but to the hearing of a dinosaur, it would be resemble a roaring cacophony of ambient bursts of pink noiseloops. In other words, very uncomfortable to the ears of a Triceratops.

Belldandy was despondent...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Sand...in seemingly infinite vistas...

Keiichi heard a pharyngeal rasping as he breathed; the result of his painfully dry throat. The night air whistled its shrill dirge over the shifting sands. Looking over the dunes, Keiichi imagined that he was he was perched upon the tip of an enormous finger; the undulating warps of sand suggesting its 'fingerprint'.

The gibbous full moon was hazed over by airborne wafts of dust and sand, creating an eerie orange glow on the sand. But otherwise the night was welcome to him. Nighttime had brought a marked cooling to the air. But in compensation for the relief, the winds picked up.

He already felt beaten.

Once Odeyn and Freiija departed, Keiichi had stood in disbelief for a long time. Finally, he started wandering to the west. He had decided that the only reliable direction would be the setting sun. Remembering his geography classes from junior school; he recalled something about how desert sojourners following the sun often wound up traveling in circles. He would have to chance it...walk opposite the sun in the first half of the day, then walk towards it in the afternoon. As this was the Sahara Desert, he was worried that the sun would rise quickly overhead; he would lose his chance if he slept in.

His legs ached. Each footstep seemed to sink a foot into the sand, making the simple act of walking very strenuous. He quickly learned that it was easiest to walk on the 'rim' of the sand dunes...the sand was firmest there.

Sleep was a joke. The sand was a million creeping fingers, probing itself into every nook of his clothes. He resigned himself to the fact that he would just have to live with it.

"Why did Belldandy's parents do this to me?" he sighed once again, flinging a handful of sand at the moon. The erosional agents had been at work for so long here, there weren't even any rocks for him to throw.

He had earned Bell-chan's love and trust over the years. But apparently, this wasn't enough. She had never broached the subject of parental objections to his romance with her. Now that he had officially declared that he was going to marry her...all hell had broken loose!

"But why? When Bell's parents were considering Tyyr as a possible marriage candidate for her, did they envision some kind of quest for _him_ to undertake, like they're forcing upon me?" he shouted at the rabbit in the moon. The whole thing reeked of medievalism; the kind of chivalric fantasy that populated the fancy of Europe in the Middle Ages.

If so, was he playing the part of the harlequin?

It struck him that, as the so-called 'test mortal', wouldn't there be some sort of Divine sanction against abuses to his person? Or did Odeyn and Freiija have enough clout in Yggdrasil to convince the Almighty Kami-sama to let them strand him here in the middle of nowhere?

With no food...no water...no compass...and no direction home.

Death was armed with an arid windtunnel...

The chilling realization that the Earth was no longer his friend gripped him as he beheld the empty membranes of desert expanse. For the whole course of his life, Keiichi had lived in a part of the world where the natural environments were accommodating, sometimes intimidating, but never overtly threatening. True, there had been Supertyphoon Akira a year ago...proof that nature could fashion a destructive bent across moments of time. But that infamous storm was an exception to the rule. Most of the year, he could walk outside, safe in the knowledge that the weather, or the climate...wouldn't put him in mortal danger. It was safe! But places whose existence alone could claim a man's life...were always _somewhere else_. Viewed from the safety of a TV. Places like the Antarctic. Mt. Everest. The Dead Sea. The Marinas Trench...

The Sahara Desert.

It always happened to someone else. Each year several homeless streetdwellers would freeze to death in Tokyo; their deaths would usher in a few moment's consciousness of 'man's inhumanity to his fellows' in the form of a handful of letters submitted to the editors of the various dailies. But whenever Winter clawed its frosted hand through the Boso Peninsula and Makuhari, Keiichi was always comfortable...always _inside_. Warmed, he could look out the window at the snow and never have to worry about freezing. He was used to be protected from the severities of the weather.

Here, there was no shelter...no hiding...no protection.

This was one of _those_ places. A killing place.

He had roughed it before, back when he, Genji, Tomohisa and Cevn were mysteriously transported back to 14th century Japan. There, he and his friends had endured 13 years of hardship. The lack of modernity was extremely uncomfortable at first...Keiichi remembered the first time he used a roadside ditch as a 'latrine'...but he eventually got acclimated to the primitive conditions. Yet, _this_ situation wasn't just about roughing it. It was about survival.

Keiichi guessed that he would have to find a human habitation within two weeks, or he would die here.

Beyond the immediate issue of survival was the quandary surrounding his 'assignment'. He had to find the key to Belldandy's heart, whatever that was. At the moment, it seemed as remote as the fabled lands of Shangri La or Quixote's La Mancha. As if surviving these harsh conditions wasn't enough, he had to search for a mysterious quintessence as well.

How could something be the key to Bell-chan's heart?

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"It's for you!" Belldandy shouted with a worried expression. Skuld stopped nibbling on her pastry in mid-bite and looked at me with concern. Everybody knew that the inevitable would come to pass...

This was the phone call I had been dreading.

"H..Hello?"

"Hi Cevn! This is Mara. About our date..."

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --


	69. Pt 69: Crazywaves

**Part 69: Crazywaves**

Keiichi felt like he was becoming a black hole...a barren graveyard unto himself. He hadn't eaten in almost a week! What he would give for food...any food, even a watery cup of cheapo instant ramen!

His body was betraying him; each day it became more weakened and prone to collapse. He endured through a dozen cramping spells during the day, merely from walking. He learned that he could only walk for a short while before the muscles in his legs protested with a painful burntingle. This attrition of physical stamina reminded him of the first few days of his experience in 14th Century Kyushu last winter...when he and his three time-traveling companions had been stranded, naked, in the woods. But this was much worse. He was dehydrated to the point where his tongue felt like sandpaper. He wondered if the protest of his body against exertion was a preview of what it would be like when he reached old age.

_If_ he reached old age.

Every time he checked, he uncovered new sores breaking out on his body. He was afraid to take off his tennis shoes, because the last time he did, his feet were calloused and bloody. Keiichi was so parched with thirst that he would wipe his forehead and then lick the sweat that seemed to bead on his palms. This only created an illusion of drinking fluids...but it was enough to momentarily allay the starving thirst that always gripped him.

The desert terrain was evermore: huge roiling waves of sand mounds and an occasional weather-beaten rock outcropping. Three days of stout trampling through the sands...before he encountered his first sight of vegetation. Life! Knowing that the plants needed moisture to grow, Keiichi dug in the drysand with his bare hands in hope of finding whatever source of water that was sustaining the sparse brambles and bushes. After digging several feet into the ground, he only succeeded in finding a slightly moist mud paste. The next day, his fingernails ripped little tsunamis of pain up and down his hands...

Over the next few days of his trek through the open desert, Keiichi continually examined his thoughts, trying to probe into the hidden meaning of what Odeyn and Freiija had meant by "the key to Belldandy's heart." In one sense, he was glad he had _something_ to focus his mind upon; the bleak expanses of sand threatened to devour him with a crazed isolation. His body was constantly wreathing his thoughts with impulses of pain.

At first, Keiichi imagined the discovery of the key to his fiancée's heart to be the stuff of fantasy. Employing his imaginative faculties was a good diversion to ward his thoughts away from the dismal reality of his situation.

So he imagined...

The key could be a technological marvel at the center of a hidden city buried in the desert somewhere...perhaps it was an object concealed in a lost Egyptian temple that would rise up out of the barrenness of the desert like a single cherry tree in a meadow. Maybe it would come in the shape of a rarified rockstone, or the glimmer of a precious gem, or it would touch his curious mind as a metalworked amulet scored with archaic designs. It might be _somewhere_...possibly a sanctified object within a mysterious Islamic masjid located next to a hidden desert oasis. Or perhaps it would be an artifact planted here by the Gods of Yggdrasil; an anomalous monolithic object ala "2001: A Space Odyssey", only positioned in real life. He would be hailed as a discoverer, giving lectures at formal banquets where there'd be chilled fruit juices, shrimp and lobster, cooked eel, beef slices, fresh oranges, jasmine rice, honeyed milks, savory soups and fragrant teas...

_Food!_

The thought of what food tasted like...only made Keiichi feel hungrier for the lack of it. Starvation forced his mind into obsessive circlets, dwelling upon taste and smell until he girded himself and forced his attention back to the issue at hand.

It was possible that he would find it _soon_. Perhaps, just over the next set of dunes...he would stare down into a canyon and come face to face with a giant series of cliffs; his discovery would be announced to the winds by a row of huge silent sentinels. As he approached the striking God-statues from a lost civilization, he would gaze in awe at their ancient visages, carved in deep relief to shadow the vertical rock face. The sunlight would weave a beam between two of them...illuminating the entrance of an underground passage or cave...

Keiichi remembered Cevn-sensei's story of his discovery of the Encyclopedia of Dawn at Dunhuang. Cevn was almost always just "Cevn" as far as Keiichi was concerned, unless one of his academic projects was being considered. Then his friend would become "Cevn-sensei" in Keiichi's mind. What was funny was the way _everyone_ seemed to make this mental distinction towards Cevn...even Belldandy. Despite this, Urd and Skuld were both too stubborn to call him "sensei". The find at the Dunhuang caves had been photodocumented by a number of Japanese magazines. Keiichi knew that Cevn-sensei had been interviewed a few times about the discovery, but his friend tended to defer most of the questions to the Chinese Government. Keiichi wondered if he could discover a mystery in much the same manner as his friend did...by stumbling upon it by accident.

What could be the key to Bell's heart?

As the unendurable days called him to wake in the morn, Keiichi began to experience hallucinations. His mind wandered into realms half-reeling from fakery. First there were the barely-sensed hallucinations...visions of water or desert animals on the horizon. Sometimes, he would see faces or words in the sands, or shadowy figures atop the peaks of the sand dunes in the distance. The desert sirocco winds would ululate; he would hear shrill ghostvoices that scolded the moon at night. One hallucination was extremely vivid; in the midst of the dunes pasteling the horizon, he thought he saw the temple complex, somehow transported to Saharan Africa. It looked _real_...he could distinguish the walls, several tree groves and the central temple home!

Home. Belldandy. Water. Food.

Running full speed towards it until he collapsed...

At night, the desert seemed to come to life. On the horizon, a curious form of magnetic light seemed to dance like an aurora, bewildering Keiichi because its glow suggested a habitation just over the next series of dune hills. Night after night, he walked in the direction of those florescences, until he realized that they weren't imagined, but some kind of natural phenomena of the desert. He learned this quite by accident when one night, he observed a streak of light whenever he would shake the sand out of his shirt or brush his hand against his clothes. His engineering instincts told him that this was some kind of static electricity, similar to the kind he experience during the winters as a child, where a rapid stroke of his hand against his pillow would produce a dull glow, or even an occasion slight electric arc.

The silence of the desert spawned his imaginings; Keiichi's hearing became so attuned that the blowing sand seemed to suggest music to his mind. The overhead stars in the transparent night air were like beads and stones. The Milky Way was like a shower of lights uninterrupted from horizon to horizon...diffuse, yet brilliant. At times, gazing into the stars allowed Keiichi to momentarily forget his gnawing exhaustion, thirst and hunger.

After several more days of relentless wandering, Keiichi collapsed. His mind blursmeared from exhaustion, he could still think lucidly enough to remember of one of the vignettes in Kurosawa's "Dreams"; a scenario that totally resembled his current state. A mountain climbing expedition was hit hard by a blizzard...mired by snow and gripped by utter exhaustion, they collapsed...and yet they were saved from death by a compassionate Snow Demoness. In the morning, they woke up to clear skies...and their base camp a few hundred meters away. Keiichi hoped against hope that he would find _something_ just up ahead, just over the next mound of sand.

Crawling up to the ridge of the next dune, using every iota of energy he had left, Keiichi suddenly felt _everything_ drain away from him. He collapsed roughly to the sand, unable to stand up any longer. His energy was gone; spitting out a mouthful of hot gritty grindsand, he slowly rolled on his back...and kept rolling down the other side of the dune. Too weak to stall his tumbling descent, he somersaulted to the yawning depths of the wasted mounds of earth. The dunes were at least a hundred meters tall...once he reached the bottom, he looked up at the indentations in the sand where he had fallen. The looming arc of sand was just too high for him to climb back up! He never wanted to move again.

His whole body was Pain.

A few moments later, Keiichi gasped as he rolled over onto his stomach after the midday sun mercilessly started burning itself on his face. Lolling his head to one side, he thought he saw a series of pockmarks on the next dune over. Not a just a series...but a _sequence_! Could these be the prints of a traveler...or were they just another mirage?

The unexpected sight gained him enough hope to tap into a reserve of strength. He slowly gained his feet, and then shuffle-jogged up the dune towards the tracks. As he approached, his gait slowed as he realized that they were _real_!

He had found a set of wind-blurred hoofprints!

So exhausted was he...so excited to encounter evidence of human life...so exhilarated that he had touched a tangible umbilical cord that could lead him to survival and civilization...Keiichi forced himself to struggle over to where the tracks clipped the next dune mound. Once he had reached the trail and was standing over the tracks, he placed his foot into one of the hoofprints as if it was holy ground, and then fell to the hot amber sand and wept reverently.

He just wanted to remain there amongst the trail of footprints, a passive participant in the great orchestration of Hope.

Rubbing his mouth, he felt the familiar grating sensation on his fingertips...a sign that his lips were even more severely chapped. This time the skinflecks were a little different, as a couple blotches of dried blood rubbed off along with the skin. He regarded the sight, wanting to angrily curse Bell's parents for putting him through this torturous journey...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Betty reminded me of a large green rhino as she grazed near Skuld's Trees in the corner of the temple complex. She seemed to enjoy the shade afforded by the mix of pine trees and maples. Soon, the maples would start their color dance...turning from green to radiant hues of reds and oranges and browns.

The dinosaur was a huge animal, so big that one could readily notice her in any part of the compound. I could clearly remember Sora's reaction to the behemoth. She had brought some snacks over to cheer up Belldandy...she ended up dropping them as she beheld Betty for the first time. Sora's rapt shock was enough to cheer up both Belldandy and Skuld...to the point of outright raucous giggling! And Betty grazed up the cookies a few minutes later, attracted to the munchies by the laughter of three women.

I was amazed that our 'secret' hadn't been discovered by outsiders. Every time a helicopter would weedwhack the air overhead with a telltale "choppachoppa", I would tense up and grit my teeth. One of the slight disadvantages of living in eastern Makuhari was the fact that our temple was only a couple km from the Makuhari Messe complex. Several oceanside high-rise hotels flanked the huge exhibition center, each equipped with a rooftop helipad. This weekend, the 2007 Fall Electronics Exposition was being held in the Exhibition Center...Sony was rumored to be displaying a beta model of the PS5 console it planned to market next year. The upshot of this was that the skies were filled with helitraffic, shuttling businessfolk to and from Narita International. I felt a passing curiosity to see what the PS5 would be like, especially with the new voice immersion technology Sony was promising...

Oops! I forgot that Belldandy had created some sort of spell to keep people from looking into our temple complex! She had told me this when I first arrived here; how it was necessary to constantly project an illusion that everything was 'normal'...to prevent spying eyes from discovering the presence of Goddesses, SkuldTech and other such anomalies. There _were_ several high-rises nearby who could look in with telescopes.

Dammit...my mind is going away...

One difficulty with having a 'pet' dinosaur and a cheapo Zen garden knockoff was the fact that said Triceratops seemed to like to kick rocks. I had tried to arrange the rocks in the semicircle of sand to create a sense of yugen...a mysterious ethic of beauty that seemed to rest just under the surface. Suggestive in its absence...or being absent of suggestion. Belldandy was a very good person to consult with regarding yugen; she always had a suggestion to improve the beauty of the garden. In one sense, I felt like she was gently guiding me towards a heightened ability to appreciate the beauties of nature and how they present a metaphor for an accommodating serenity. Each successive suggestion seemed to open up a new avenue of creativity in my mind. Belldandy explained to me one day that the artistic side of my mind was often in conflict with my 'metallect'...thus she had taken on the role of 'scenic' tutor. Only later did I truly recognize what this meant...and what a wondrous gift she was blessing me with.

But now, my small Zen garden was in shambles. Betty had trampled through the sandplots, kicked up most of the flatstones that formed the walkway, and had tumbled or crushed a number of the larger rocks. After being very irritated initially, I began to notice the repetitive nature of her actions. Like a cat burying its stool in the litterbox. Thankfully, Betty wasn't feline in _that_ respect! "Turd" was another bad word that tended to arise as the reality of living with a dinosaur sank in. Her daily excrement filled four garbage cans. Fortunately, Skuld had instructed Banpei-kun to take care of the sanitation dept. I felt sorry for the little mecha. Mercifully for Banpei, Skuld had disabled his olfactory sensors...

Over the past few days, I came to realize that Betty's aggressive treatment of the rocks was an expression of instinct, rather than habitual mischief. Thus, she wasn't as blameworthy as I assumed. Since no human had ever observed the lifehabits of an actual dinosaur, no science could begin to understand what actions constituted dinosaur behavior...let alone interpret this conduct. My initial interpretation of Betty's rock crushing as _misconduct_...was a perfect example of the human propensity for misapprehension before investigation. Evidently, the Triceratops species possessed a distinct behavioral quirk. I attempted to ascertain the possible reasons why this rock-stomping behavior had developed, with an eye to its importance as a conditioned mechanism that served increase survival adaptability to environment. I concluded that it was definitely a fitness behavior. Assuming that the lithosphere of the Earth possessed a much greater incidence of volcanism during the Cretaceous Period...as the geological evidence seemed to indicate...the larger dinosaurs would have difficulty traveling along grazing routes that bordered the numerous volcanic ranges. Thus, by using the advantage of their weight to grind down rocks, they could make locomotion easier for the herd. Quite possibly, this may explain why they evolved to such a large size...so they could cope with huge amounts of lava and ejecta that dominated the terrain.

Yet, as I surveyed my ruined rock garden, I felt twicely, greatly disturbed about the coursespan of my recent life. First, my inattention to my 'recreational' pursuits...my hobbies...was quite unsettling. The little semicircular Zen garden that had served as a stress warder for the past year now lay in ruins, and I hadn't bothered to lift a finger to restore it! The lost beauty of the garden pulled at part of my being; an echo of the part of my Soul that craves to create order in an otherwise disordered existence. My time in the garden was valuable...the tranquility of raking the sands, organizing the footpath stones, and arranging the larger rocks had always beckoned a hour or two out of me on the weekends. Not to mention the many mornings I would come out before dawn and meditate on the slab-like stone several mornings each week. In the past two months, I had done neither.

Beyond this was the fact that I had totally avoided my music room ever since we returned from France. As calming as the flow of time in the garden was, creating music was the 'hobby' that polished the jewel of my Soul. Ever since I was plucked out of the ghetto apartment in Honolulu and whisked to Japan by Urd and my erstwhile wish, I had spent a lot of free time in my music studio, composing songs and tweaking synthesizers. True, some of it was _work_ rather than play...anyone who has purposefully composed intricate music knows the tension between talent and vision...but I hadn't stepped foot in my "Cevn's Studio" room in almost six weeks! The very thought of playing music on my synthis had become a source of dread. But why? I was the anonymous composer of the GodDemon's Symphony CD...and yet I lacked the courage to even take a peek in the door at my synthis.

Something is definitely amiss in my life...I kept coming back to this barely-recognizable notion that I was slowly becoming a ghost in my own shell.

Co-conspirator to the damned, anyone?

The second cause for worry is much more of an immediate concern, coming as it did in the form of the phone call I received this midweek. Because of this, I was dreading the passage of the next few hours...precious time that unfolded as surely as the atmospheric flotilla of clouds that passed overhead, drawing me even closer to towards the inevitable.

In just a few hours, the Demoness Mara was going to arrive at our temple compound for our "date", as she termed it.

In my mind, it was nothing more than an ersatz 'coerced rendezvous'..._not_ a date by any definition! If I convinced myself otherwise...and I would be a co-conspirator with the damned!

But what struck me as being odd was Mara's reaction during our conversation on the phone. At times, she was actually animated to the point of being _bubbly_...as bubbly as a stereotypical 16-year-old girl going to the prom! Her demeanor was totally incongruent with what I expected from a Demoness who just happened to be the head of one of the major divisions of Vanagdrasil. In fact, Mara's enthusiasm was more in lines with what I would expect from Skuld, would that she drop her disgruntled bent towards mortal men and act like a normal teenaged girl. If Skuld ever did grow out of her tomboyish indifference...Tomohisa was going to be in for it!

But the idea of a cutesy, nervous, fawning, animated, red-eyed, sharp-fanged _Demoness_ accompanying me on an evening out in Tokyo...scared the hell out of me! What was even more disturbing was the sense I had that Mara's perk of enthusiasm was _genuine_.

Mara had demanded that the itinerary for the first part of our meeting be at my initiative...and further demanded that we travel into Tokyo. She dismissed my suggestions of other alternatives, such as Chiba, Togane or Matsudo. It _had_ to be Tokyo, or the deal was off! She added that I had to be responsible for our schedule only up to 10pm; she noted that she would take care of the rest of the night. I had to provide the total dating experience: nice restaurant; movie or live theater; dance club. She made it clear to me that she had a "surprise" planned for later in the evening.

Disgusted as I was at the whole prospect of spending an evening with Mara, the idea of the "surprise" she mentioned both intimidated and thrilled me.

Then there was Urd.

Even though I was the most reluctant of participants in this "evening out" with Mara, I was also the most ready volunteer in terms of arousing feelings of betrayal towards Urd. I felt _swarmloads_ of guilt; it seemed to pour over me with every tick of my heart. I had to admit it...I was still _filled_ with love for her! Absence had made the heart grow fonder. Why wasn't it Urd instead of Mara that I was going to meet tonight?

Belldandy and Skuld's reactions towards me allowed me even more pain. Belldandy regarded me with a sad expression, while Skuld was just plain angry with me. Didn't they realize that this was Mara's plan...not mine?

The sooner I got past this hurdle...the sooner my life would calm down to a roar!

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

In the mid-afternoon, Belldandy concluded that she was too disgusted with the whole Cevn-Mara evening out affair to be present in the house when Mara arrived to go on their "date". It was bad enough that Keiichi wasn't here to comfort her...she was so heartsick at his absence that she had paid crying dues first thing every morning when she woke up.

And now this!

"I've got to get out of here!" she realized after pacing circles in her Tea Room. She decided to invite Skuld to accompany her to a coffee-shop in Chiba that Sayoko had recommended. As she walked towards the "Skuld Labs" room, she could hear her younger sister swearing inside. Right before Belldandy reached the doorway, the shoji slammed upon with a blast and Skuld stormed out of the room, crashing right into her and almost knocking her to the floor.

"_WHOOOPS!_" Skuld shouted, wide-eyed with embarrassment. "Now look what he's made me do! I almost knocked you down!"

Immediately, Belldandy realized that an evening out with Skuld was probably for the best; her younger sibling freely admitted to wanting to kill both mortal and Demon.

Belldandy rarely seated herself upon the tarnished throne of Ire, but she was almost livid with the fact that Cevn had taken no initiative to frustrate Mara's ambitions! Cevn had fought the good fight with Mara several times; for a mortal; he...like Keiichi...could exhibit a wellspring of willpower that belied his station in life.

But he didn't even fight against this...encounter...with Mara!

This morning, she and Skuld had sat Cevn down in the dining room in a final attempt to change his mind. They strongly urged that he should stand up for himself and outright refuse to go out with her tonight. True, going back on his word at the last minute would be expressly dishonest...but Mara was a _Demon_! Besides, Mara's request was completely inappropriate, vulgar...and insane! It went far beyond a mere lack of good taste...and it wasn't the kind of deviousness that seemed to be within the purview of Mara's duties as head of the Demon Prankster Office. Belldandy had argued that this wasn't an issue of maintaining face or upholding virtue; neither seemed to mean much to a Demon. Skuld had added that reneging on agreements was part and parcel of _their_ way of doing things in Vanagdrasil. Against this, Cevn counterargued that he needed to keep his word no matter what, regardless of the duress upon which it was drawn. Skuld angrily tried to convince him that the Almighty would certainly sanction such a transgression were a God or Goddess involved. But she and her sister's premises fell upon ears unreasoned. Belldandy sensed that it was almost as if Cevn _wanted_ to go out with Mara!

Belldandy was bitterly aware that ever since that moment when Cevn had sighed "I accept her terms" on that fateful day, he had simply resigned himself to fate. He hadn't even _tried_ to circumvent Mara's demands! As if his freedom wasn't worth fighting for! This attitude of resignation was so out of character for him...a mortal who had told off the Almighty! True, he was saddled with depression and troubled youthyears...but Belldandy had seen Cevn rise above these frustrations many times since she first met him. So why was he giving up _now_? And why was he giving up when someone else was involved...as if his feelings for her sister weren't worth fighting for! Didn't he _love_ Urd? His softspinedness worried and sickened Belldandy.

Essentially...he was betraying Urd.

As far as Belldandy was concerned, the intimacy demanded by a truly loving relationship involves a _direct_ connection between two beings. Millennia of experience granting the love-wishes of thousands of deserving Earthrealm mortals had taught her this simple truth. Often, her task as "wish transmitter" was little more than creating a situation where the couple no longer had to fumble around to locate the threads of bliss that bounded back and forth between their hearts. The link is _always_ there, if one can only learn to look in the right place! Or sometimes...even in the _unexpected_ places! Occasionally, love manifested its shadow swallowing radiance in the recesses of the caves within half-glimpsed copses of near-invisible kokoro...

Keiichi was proof of this. His love for her had manifested unexpectedly, hiddenly... and yet so smoothly that it almost denied itself as a process of discovery. The connection between she and Keiichi was there from the start, but the process of uncovering it was subtle, rather than sparkling. And yet, what a discovery it was! Belldandy had fallen in love with Keiichi before she realized that she had fallen in love with him! Keiichi had lit the lamp of her being, complementing her towards realizing those unknown qualities in herself that she had never experienced before. Belldandy recognized that Love...True Love...possesses qualities such as loyalty, honesty, charity and harmonyjoy. Attributes that can only manifest in the presence of a direct connection between two Souls. If one overlooks the connection, or the connection is severed by one's own greed or possessiveness...what results is a wounding. Duplicity, dishonesty, selfishness and chaos; those qualities that burden the heart with sorrow. And what was often most tragic to Belldandy was how this wounding of the spirit often can be disguised as 'love'. It may _appear_ to be intimate, but it is only insanity!

Love is the only true mirror of Love.

It was true that Urd had left Cevn. But it was only a temporary impasse. She knew that Cevn was linked to her sister by a bond at the Soular level...nothing less. She was aware of their recent difficulties; struggles perhaps even more pronounced than the ones that plagued her and Keiichi. Both Urd and Cevn had been denied love by tragic circumstance...until they found each other.

No matter what, Belldandy knew deep in her heart that Urd hadn't really _left_ him...

So why couldn't he believe in himself...and believe in Urd?

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

In the morning, about an hour after the sun blasted Keiichi awake, the sky started clouding up to an overcast gray. This had been the first significant cloudage since Keiichi had been deposited here in the desert. He had seen jet trails overhead and the occasional swipe of cirrus clouds on the horizon, but otherwise the sky had remained clear. After a week, he didn't even bother to look. But the sky was definitely clouding up, just like it did before a spring shower. A couple of hours later, the sky started to open up...

Keiichi whooped with joy when he saw the first slender sheets of rain descending towards the ground. Timepied threads of rain were falling from the clouds!

Water!

Seeing an end to his gnawing thirst, Keiichi sprinted in the direction of the rainfall. A strong ambition coupled with a weakened, fatigued body caused him to lose his footing several times and fall face-first into the sand. But he shrugged off exhaustion and injury...this might be his only chance at getting any moisture!

Keiichi sprinted to the point where the rain was falling...and staggered to a halt. Kneebuckled and gasping for breath, he waited for the rain to soak his face...

But there was nothing. Despite the strong tinny scent of ozone that floated invisibly around him, he was gripped by the calamitous realization that the air was _dry_.

No rain...no mist...no sprinkle...nothing!

He had might as well been chasing the proverbial pot of gold at the end of the rainbow! It was definitely raining; he could see the slowly shifting contours of rainfall descending from the clouds around him. But the willowing airfalls of rain weren't reaching the ground!

"Shit...Shit...Shit!" Keiichi screamed upwards towards the offending clouds. He had wanted water so badly! He wanted to stand under the rain, mouth open...letting the cool liquid fill his parched throat. Hell, since he was in the middle of the desert, he planned on stripping off his clothes and dancing naked in the rain. No one would see him...

But the afternoon was never-rain. For the next two hours, he watched glumly as the sky clouded, then unfurled the flags of gray rain clouds, and finally regained its light azure glow.

Keiichi readied a lungburst of insults and invective to rant towards Bell's parents for putting him through _this_! But he governed his tongue. For the first time since he had arrived in the Sahara desert, Keiichi was seized of the sudden overpowering awareness that Bell's parents were giving him a _chance_! They could have dismissed his marriage proposal to their daughter on the outright. But they didn't. And now, because they had given him a chance to prove himself worthy of Bell-chan...he needed to act the part. Yelling at them would only serve to stoke the embers of his dissatisfaction, stealing him away from the task at hand...to find the Key. Besides, he reasoned that they were probably observing his every move with scrutiny; cursing them out would only demonstrate his lack of resolve. No...he wouldn't cave in to the circumstances and take the easy path of self-pity and petty criticasting!

He would play by their rules and show them that he had mettle!

Later in the afternoon, he speculated that the reason why the rain had disappeared was because of the fact that he was in the _deep_ desert. The ground didn't need the moisture...it was already supplied with enough via underground aquifers. The rain had dissipated before reaching the surface because of the arid water-starved air...

It was just nature's way of keeping climatic balance. In one sense, Keiichi realized that the prolonged downpour he had wished for...might have been disastrous as it may have wiped out the trail he was following, severing his only link with humanity. With no soil to catch the rain, there might even have been a flash flood. Or quicksand.

But even a handful of rainwater would have been nice!

"This was a totally shitruined day!" Keiichi shouted to the silent air as he sat on the sand watching the sunset. As he followed the winding set of tracks with his eyes, Keiichi suddenly noticed that the arcs of the sand dunes against the sky...were starting to level out! As the sky purpled at twilight, he thought he noticed an orange blotch shimmering in the distance.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Mara showed up promptly at 5pm to pick me up. For some reason, I found myself waiting on the porch, watching for her. When I earlier tried to dodge the trip to Tokyo by saying I didn't own a car, Mara had cheerfully volunteered to take care of the transportation.

My apprehensions scaled the wall as she arrived, driving a 2008 Toyota sports convertible. As it pulled up the drive, the 'flash' sportscar seemed to reinforce my disorientation about tonight's term of events. Its sleek, modernist arrogance was out-of-place compared to the humble earth-wood of the ancient temple environs. And yet...its flamboyance captivated me to an extent.

Her car was cherry-orange-red, of course.

As Mara stepped out of the car, I felt momentarily weak-kneed as my eyes filled with a gaze of her elegant ominium. There are manifold valuations of beauty, ranging from the sublime to the ridiculous. Mara's beauty was a merge of sensuousness, gothicity and serious delirium. My nerves fingered up and down my back as I realized that she had arrived dressed to seduce! All at once, my characteristic fear towards women clutched into my throat. Her overt darkknife sexuality was intimidating...even terrifying! I glanced back towards the temple as my heart skipped a beat.

I wanted to run and hide away from her...

"Nnh uhh!" Mara sighed censoriously, shaking her head. Something in her voice stopped me in my tracks. The fact that I was alone suddenly hammered at my heart. For some reason, Belldandy and Skuld had left for a coffeehouse in Chiba, leaving me by myself to fend with a Demoness in temptress mode. I immediately regretted the fact that I didn't follow my earlier intuition. I had considered calling Megumi, Sayoko or _some_ female friend I could trust...to provide me with an emotional parachute and a bit of sanity.

I didn't expect _this_!!

I don't what caught my eyes first...Mara's short red leather low-waisted miniskirt that wavered against her long legs wrapped in zebra-stripe black hose, or the matching red blousevest whose front plummeted open to the navel, with a loose cross-stitch pattern that drew attention to her cleavage while giving the impression that the whole front of her top might slip off her breasts at any sudden movement. Over this, she sported a white leather jacket with patterns of red flames embroidered up the sleeves, with "Mara" spelled out on the back in gems. She was accessorized to the max; bracelets, earrings, ribbons, shades...

Mara could take gaudy and turn it into jetset.

And I knew I was being bewitched. She had tried this once before, back when I first arrived in Japan. Mara could turn on a deadly poisonous charm whenever she wanted to. I tried to remind myself that her coyness was probably serpentine in nature. She walked right up and stood inches from my nose, her body almost brushing against mine. Against this tension, I felt like she was daring me to plunge my eyes down her front. Instead, I bit my tongue to bring me back to reality and started walking towards the car.

"Nope! This is my ride..._I'm_ driving!" Mara announced gleefully. I remembered how she had tried to run Megumi off the road during the Demon Rally. Actually, I was passed out from exhaustion when that happened, but Keiichi and Megumi often provided personal reminisces whenever the subject of Mara came up.

"I wonder how Keiichi's doing?" I thought as I climbed into the car. Wherever he was, he was probably going through a worse hell that I was experiencing. _That_ gave me courage to brace up and face this eve with Mara. Settling into the soft bucket seat, I could smell the steelsweet factory odor of a new vehicle, coupled with the musk of leather...and Mara's perfume.

"This is going to be a blast!" Mara shouted with glee, thrusting a gloved fist up in the air as she backed us out of the driveway.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

The moon cast a palloring mist towards the East; a nightfog occluding part of the starsky. Keiichi observed the subtly hyacinth color for a moment, and then continued walking. Yesterday, he realized that it would be best to walk at night, taking advantage of the cooler air to conserve his waning lifeforce. During the daytime, he would burrow into the shady side of a sand dune and rest for a few hours. He regretted his inability to grasp the most basic aspect of human life in the equatorial regions! Populations from Mexico to Qatar to Vietnam rested during the midday hours, saving their energies for the portions of the day when the temperature was tolerably hot, instead of blazing.

Keiichi had reached the pinnacles of fatigue...and panned past them...but still he pressed on. Once in a while, he could hear something nearby, as if some wild animal was trailing him. He regretted not having a flashlight, or some means to make a handtorch.

Could it be another hallucination?

As he continued his night-trudge, following the telltale signs of the desert caravan, Keiichi kept looking over his shoulder at the darkening cloud that covered a good portion of the night sky. At first, it looked like it was coming from just a few dunehills away...but each time he stopped to check up on it, it seemed to loom _upward_ against the peak of the stars like a spring thunderstorm...

Walking tonight was a little easier, as the sand dunes weren't peaked as high. Over the days of his torturous plodding, he had become more attuned to the subtle changes in his environment. Put someone in a white room for a couple of weeks...and they'll start noticing off-white colors. Ironically, the 'sameness' of the desert environment had toughened his mind towards noticing even miniscule changes in the desert: the shapes of the dunes; their contours; the colors of the sand; the aromas of the wind...

Off on the horizon opposite the dark cloud, Keiichi could make a faint vista of...mountains? So far, everything had coursed to a consistently flat terrain, even to the limits of vision that reached the bowl of the horizon. Keiichi sometimes felt like he was walking on a sheet of paper, because of the lack of any landmarks to lend perspective.

Yet...squinting and straining his vision, Keiichi thought he could see a pitch-black jagged serration against the western horizon.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Mara was driving along the Bayshore Freeway with maniac abandon! Sheets of wind blasted my long hair as the convertible sped through Funabashi...

"Here...use this!" Mara said, noticing my frantic efforts to keep my whiplashing hair out of my face. For a flash second, I was touched by her gesture as I took the hairtie she proffered. Then I got grounded again...I was in a speeding car with a Demoness; it was _her_ need-for-speed recklessness that was causing my bad hair moment.

The straw-blonde Demoness was driving like she was on the Autobahn...and somehow, she wasn't attracting the attention of the police! I thought that the traffic division patrols kept a tight rein on freeway speeders, at least this was impression I had gotten when we took Officers Natsumi Tsujimoto and Miyuki Kobayakawa out to a 'thank you' dinner after they rescued an injured Keiichi during Supertyphoon Akira. Both policewomen held steadfast to the claim that they _never_ lost a roadrace with a freeway speeder. I half-expected to hear a siren behind our car any minute now. A siren that I would totally welcome; Mara would be jailed for speeding and I would be released from my obligation to spend the evening with her.

"Natsumi and Miyuki, where are you when I need you?" I thought silently as we approached the famous Rainbow Bridge.

"What to do?" I wondered. If this roadrace down the freeway was indicative of how Mara was going to behave tonight...I was floating neckdeep in sour wasabi!

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"There they go," Belldandy commented dryly as the red convertible sped past the coffee shoppe. The New ABCB Coffee Shop was located on a small hillock that overlooked the Bayshore Expressway. The milked tea here was incredible, just like Sayoko had promised. As she nibbled at the flaky croissant, she frowned. She hadn't intended to notice Mara and Cevn...but her Goddess senses were too attuned towards Demon detection to allow otherwise.

Skuld flipped a finger towards the window, earning a scowl from Belldandy. Lately, her younger sister seemed to be picking up an almost adolescent defiant streak. Ever since Keiichi was taken away by Mother and Father, Skuld was even more testy than usual. Before her transformation several months back, Skuld's anger tended towards childish tantrums, launched on the wings of whimmed impulse. Usually, Skuld would get all frantic in the midst of her resentments, which would cause them to run their course more quickly. But Skuld's anger now was _different_...more mature. When she was angry, Belldandy could sense a depth to her sister's emotions. Skuld actually simmered with resentment; whereas before, she would simple blow up. This was one of those days where Skuld's resentment was simmering palpably...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

As Mara and I walked out of the elevator; the first thing I noticed was the bright standing lamps throughout the restaurant. I had never eaten on a rooftop bistro before; it took a moment to adjust to the changes in lighting from the building interior. I immediately noted the conservative bent of the establishment's customers. No doubt, a Demoness and a gaijin would stand out here like a beehive in a hot springs!

The rooftop bistro attempted to project a Mediterranean motif. Of course, since we were in Tokyo, the whole decor had been through the "Japanese Filter"...naturally, the effect was incongruous to the max! Miniatures of Florentine statuary competed with reproductions of portraitures that rightly belonged in Versailles, rather than Renaissance Italia. I'm sure that most of the patrons were completely unaware of this...but I tend towards noticing such things. I don't know why...I just do. I was impressed with the brass table pieces at the center of each table; their candles casting a warm glow on the white tableclothes.

We attracted a number of stares as we were hosted to our seats. I was wearing blue jeans and a tie-dye sweatshirt with "N.I.T." on it, an affair I had made one weekend when I was bored and wanted to play with the colors. And Mara...well, her outfit probably reminded some of the salarymen of a Harajuku bar hostess. I wonder what they would think of her fire-red eyes and her fangs...

I had chosen this restaurant because its menu was basic, and mostly Western. It was pricey to a degree, but I didn't want Mara to think that I was a cheapskate...

There I go again, acting like I had to impress Mara! As if!! I reminded myself that there was no reason for me to feel this tentative; this whole encounter had been thrust upon me by a coercive and manipulative Demoness. I didn't need to gain her approval...as I would if I was taking a woman out on a _real_ date!

Nevertheless, Mara looked at me warmly and thanked me for taking her to such a nice establishment. At least she was acting the part.

Ordering our food was amusing. I would have been embarrassed, except for my little quirk of starting foodfights in classy restaurants. A quirk that seemed to diminish somewhat once I met Urd. I felt a sinking washwipe in my heart as I realized that I hadn't taken Urd to a really classy restaurant in a long time! We used to go every couple weeks...

But Urd was gone...and I probably would never get the chance to make it up to her.

Mara wanted a bottle of the strongest liquor in the house, plus an _uncooked_ steak with basil and cinnamon. When I repeated her order to the waitress, she looked at me with an irritated expression. I tried to explain to her that this wasn't a joke, using the time-tested excuse that Mara was a foreigner and that's how people ate their meat in her country. We ended up reaching a compromise, as the restaurant refused to serve uncooked meat...

Of course, she would order her steak extra rare!

I half-expected Mara to order her steak burnt, since she came from Vanagdrasil. When I explained my assumption to her, Mara pitched a gigglefit.

"You truly _are_ an idiot, Cevn! Like most mortals, you assume that Hell is a place of pitchforks and fires and half-human half-animal devils that have nothing to do in their spare time except torture mortals! And then you do me the discourtesy of applying your notions of Hell to _my_ home! As if they were one and the same! If we weren't going out on the town tonight, I wouldn't hesitate to inflict said tortures on you for being so presumptuous! How dare you apply _your_ culture's imaginative trappings onto the whole of Demondom!" she said, mock-serious indignant.

"Vanagdrasil isn't at all like the product of your imaginings. It's a wonderful paradise! Of course, we soak ourselves in hotsprings of molten lava...and we tend to use colloquialisms that are antonymic to those the Goddesses use; like 'molten' instead of 'cool', for example. Of course, we are in many ways the opposite of the Gods...and this is no doubt reflected in our homerealm! But what kind of opposite is it? Did you ever stop to think about this? You've supposedly know the Demon's Language, you supposedly composed Demon's Music...certainly you must have some inkling of the _true_ nature of Vanagdrasil! Not these silly, specious conjectures you think up! We Demons are Evil...but if Evil has to coexist with Good in order to strike a Balance, does that make Evil less important than Good? Or worse? Oh...there is so much I can teach you! You may have read that Demon's Book, but you only know a _fraction_ of what my birthplace is all about!

"The truth of the matter is...Vanagdrasil is the only _real_ place in the Multiverse. Where I come from, we regard reality with a straightforward attitude...rather than avoiding it like the Yggdrasil-dwellers! Your Earthrealm, with its strident plague of doubts and troubles, is just a shard-reflection of the larger realities of the Multiverse. The essence...the spirit of the Multiverse is chaos, struggle, grief and death. The reality of the Multiverse...is something that the Gods have parceled themselves off from. In Yggdrasil, they kennel themselves by their desire to be insulated from the true nature of things. From the atropism that is all around us.

"Vanagdrasil, on the other hand, is _honest_ to the real nature of the Multiverse! The Gods are petty dreamers...while we Demons are acute realists!! Our realm of Vanagdrasil is beautiful because it encompasses _all_! We live within the 'dark' mystique of reality that breathes vision into life! Not just goodness and charity and all the other drivel Belldandy and her sisters spill out on their honeyed tongues," she explained.

Part of me wanted to believe her. It would explain a lot. My mind had often circulated the thought that the Goddesses were _just too good_ to be mixing with the rest of us...or at least with me. I compared Keiichi's life to mine...he grew up worrying about girls and his diminutive stature...while I grew up starving and addicted to heroin. There was really no comparison between his life and mine; we came from two different worlds. Yet somehow, there was a common ground from which a strong friendship had blossomed.

"Yes...you are starting to kiss my descriptions with the lips of your conjectures, eh? Perhaps it makes more sense than you're willing to admit?" Mara asked, leaning low over the table. My eyes immediately locked on to her cleavage.

"You want?" Mara said coyly, bouncing her eyes down to her bosom and back. I felt a burning blush of embarrassment...she had read my eyes...and my mind.

"No! Not at all! I'm a guy..a..and you're a.." my words stumbled over each other.

"Demoness," she finished. "But not so much of a Demoness to admit that I find you attractive. What do you think I am? Like everyone else in the Multiverse, I too have the lamp of compassion, of lust, of desire for comfort...burning behind these breasts you were staring at a moment ago. Did you assume that Demons are too Evil to want Love? If so, then the melodious harp of your assumptions has struck a sour note indeed!"

"Mara...why did you ask me out on this date in the first place?" I asked, trying desperately to shift the subject away from the mounting sexual tension. My hormones were besting me in the struggle to maintain composure and distance. I couldn't deny the fact that Mara was very attractive by Earthrealm standards. Ripples once released can never come back. I had already said too much with my eyes.

If Urd could play me effortlessly in the area of sexual innuendo...Mara could probably do even worse!

"Hmmm...maybe it's because I want to find out what you see in my twin sister," she said with a mischievous grin.

Before I could continue, the waiter showed up and unloaded several plates of gorgeous food. The food was even more satisfying because it shut Mara up. Mara ate like a Demon...devouring her steak with the aggressiveness of a tigress.

Before I could stop her, she drained half the bottle of liquor.

"Oops...I'm being impolite! Here!" she commented as she poured me a glassful.

"Mara! You know that I don't touch the stuff...so why even try?" I confronted her.

"Why shouldn't I try? Did it ever occur to you that your race spends an inordinate amount of resources and time producing and consuming this stuff?" she said, gesturing to the bottle of shochu on the table.

Great. Another lecture from a Demoness.

"Why do you think this restaurant even has this bottle of hootch? Even Urd likes it! And you know why alcoholic beverages are so available? Because this mortal world you live in...it's so _miserable_! People need this to weather all the bad vibes here on your so-called 'Spaceship Earth'! Haven't you ever considered how _sick_ mankind is? The pathologies of this place spill over into the gutter, sucking the throats of mortal society like so many vampires. In fact, it's been rumored in Vanagdrasil for a long time...that the Almighty in Yggdrasil is actually considering destroying this place because it's so screwed up! Something about...what was it? Ohhh! I remember! About a nuclear bomb or two! That's right...you mortals blew up _two entire cities_ less than a thousand kilometers away from this very spot!"

I almost started arguing about the 'probation' that Kami-sama had enacted when I checked myself. Mara's statement was based on claims of rumor. If the Demons didn't know about this...all the better! If they knew the truth about the probation, it was quite possible that the Demons could leverage Mankind to fail the probation. Maybe this was why Mara had pulled me out here in the first place! She wanted to fish for information that could be used against the Earthrealm...

I had better watch my speech, so that it would be deflective rather than instructive.

"Whatsa matter? Can't talk about your human follies and disgraces?" Mara added, sarcastically.

She was getting drunk...and talkative.

"I try because I know, deep inside, that you're just like the rest of your ilk. Corrupt, baseless, idiotic...and wandering around in _a lot_ more pain than you're willing to admit! Why do you think that your race spends so much time and effort and money producing this stuff in the first place?" she said, gesturing towards the bottle again. She was really pushing the "life sucks, so let's get drunk and party to the hilt!" argument.

"I'll tell you why! Because the whole human race has traumatized itself. Remember your first year in college, after you got clean? Remember the trial of the famous ex-pro football athlete? They found his wife's blood on his clothes? The day after the murder, he was driving around considering suicide? And they ended up ruling that he was innocent! _That_ was a source of tremendous amusement in Vanagdrasil...because we knew he did it. Only you mortals on the Earthrealm could create a legal system that could obfuscate the truth to such a degree as to sanction such an act! And you...you were angry, weren't you! Admit it, Cevn...that single act tore away a lot of your confidence in the humanity of your fellows!" she argued.

I remembered my freshman year in college...and had to reluctantly admit that Mara was right. Back then, I didn't know what was more distasteful; the miscarriage of justice or the jaded curiosity surrounding the trial. When I returned to the dorm after class, there would always be a huddle of students around the TV, watching reruns of highlights from the trial. The sad reality that a celebrity used the issue of his race as a defense deeply worsened my perception of the trail. It was true that African Americans were incarcerated disproportionately in the United States; that they received severe discrimination at the hands of the police. But the situation of the lower and middle class persons of color had little to do with the status of a multimillionaire sports celebrity...or the fact of the murder. In fact, his being found innocent because a guilty verdict would only cause a riot in LA...only _reinforced_ this perception by many that African Americans were criminals and victims. It had only further fostered the orientation that there _was_ a problem...a supposedly insoluble problem of racial discrimination. But the reality was...celebrity placed him above the law. And then he turned his back on the racial issue, instead of campaigning for better civil treatment of African Americans. Instead, he played golf and wore thousand dollar Italian suits...

Of course I was pissed!

"And what about this year alone! How do you feel about that rapper who videoed himself raping and strangling a fan...and yet the court disallowed the videotape as evidence because _it was found accidentally_? I mean, _who_ was it caught live on the tape? And here in Japan...how many Prime Ministers have had to resign because of political scandal in the last 20 years? What about the latest PM earlier this year? It turned out that ten years ago when he was in the Diet, he pushed hard for the construction of that new science town north of Tokyo...and the year after it was opened, it turns out that he was going to build a giant shopping complex next to it...on land he bought _25 years earlier_! Or the governor in America who was fined 100,000 for spending campaign donations on personal items...and then was allowed to pay almost the entire fine out of those same donations she misused?" she argued.

"So what's this prove? That you read the newspapers? That politicians and celebrities are dishonest, self-centered beings? Mara...I regard that kind of corruption with such disdain because I've learned to hold the human race to a _higher_ standard. No matter what, I'll hang onto the belief that we're better than we seem to be! When tragedy strikes, we rally our goodness! And that standard isn't just a daydream...it's a realistic lifechoice that I'm willing to meet! And I do meet it, as best I can! What about the GodDemon's CDs, eh? Over 150 million have been sold, and _all_ the money from the sales is being donated to charities all over the world! Doesn't that mean anything?"

"That's just a drop of spit in the swimming pool! It only aids a fraction of those who need the help. 'Anticipate charity by eliminating poverty', as the old English statesman once said. Meanwhile, while he was Prime Minister of Great Britain, he personally oversaw the colonial oppression of over a dozen societies worldwide...so that he could squeeze their resources in order to maintain the affluent lifestyles of his ennobled peers!" she shot back.

I remembered the quote from Disraeli...I had used it to try and convince Urd that all the green energies gained from the GodDemon's CD should flow into social programs. It _was_ a good ideal to live by...

"Mara, I know that this isn't about some mysterious entity called 'them'. It's not about 'someone else'...it's about _us_! All of us! It's not fair that..."

"Surely, it wasn't fair for the ten children who starved to death while we were eating steak in this fine restaurant!" she interrupted, her words steelcold in my ears.

"That's it! We're getting the frell out of here! I need some fresh air!" I shot back, as I stood up abruptly. Panicked, I grabbed Mara by the wrist and hauled her up to her feet. Mara looked at me with amazement for a split-second...then her expression changed to mirthful amusement.

I had played right into her game...whatever her game was.

"Yeah, that's right! Let's blow this place before you start hitting me!" she said mockingly. I realized that I was still holding her wrist; I slipped my hand away and tried to control my temper.

"Isn't this supposed to be an evening out instead of an argument about the follies and greed of Mankind?" I asked her after I chilled my mood down to an amber roar. Hopefully, I could appeal to the 'cute' Mara that was on the phone a week ago...

"Yeah...I suppose you're right! Screw the starving minions in Africa...let's go see a movie! That'll fix everything!" she blared sarcastically.

"Arrgh! Round one to Mara," I thought to myself as my mood submerged even deeper into disphoria.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

The bloodthirsty scream of the winds woke Keiichi up. As soon as he sat up on the sandy mound, a blast of sand nailed him in the eyes. Rubbing his eyes, he could catch glimpses of a nightmare air circulating around him. Instead of being blue, the sky was thickly blanketed with brown sand. Everywhere was dark...so dark that it appeared to be nighttime. But it wasn't night...

"Sandstorm!!" he thought despairingly. His eyes were killing him. The winds pelted him with millions of sand shards, prickling his exposed skin. He remembered reading about desert sandstorms; how they could displace millions of kilos of sand in just a few hours! The force of the stinging sand against his hands and face was unbelievable. He felt like his skin was being peeled raw by the wind.

Curling up into a fetal position, Keiichi tucked his hands and feet against the mound of sand he had been sleeping on. He could feel the hair on the back of his head being rustled by wind; a moment later, it was getting caked with sand.

"I'm going to die here!" he realized dejectedly. Two weeks worth of sunrises in the desert had almost killed him...but this storm was going to finish him off.

_He had held on this long..._

The wind roared even louder. Somehow, the presence of all the airborne sand seemed to give an unholy haunting _growl_ to the gale-force winds that assailed him.

Keiichi thought of all the futures that he would miss: marrying Bell-chan; bring the first grandchild to his parents house; watching Megumi get married to Genji; growing old with all his friends from N.I.T.; watching Bell's sisters find loves of their own; passing that course in Advanced Transform Analysis; competing in races yet unrun; graduating from N.I.T. with a Masters of Engineering; hanging out with Tamiya and Ootaki and their families at Hakone...

"It's been a good life..." he thought to himself as his consciousness faded, an image of Belldandy dissipating in his mind like blown smoke...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --


	70. Pt 70: Projections

**Part 70 Projections**

"Hi! Do you like my daddy's photos?"

Belldandy was wrapped in mental reflection, a series of images pitching yaw and ajibe in her mind like the gentle rocking of a harbored baggala.

"_Helloo-oo-oo_..."

The crisp girlvoice clipped her reverie short. Belldandy shuddered in reaction to the sudden interruption, drawing a giggle from the questioner. She had been staring off at the sequence of framed photographs of various London landmarks arranged on the wall adjoining their booth. Skuld was sitting across from her, studiously reading a magazine.

Belldandy smiled at the child who was standing at the head of their booth. The young girl was holding a coffee container, the bangs of her short hair bobbing as she continued to giggle in reaction to Belldandy's expression of pleased surprise. Belldandy smiled sweetly at the little girl; judging by her height, Belldandy ventured that she was 10 or 11 years old. Perhaps she was the daughter of the kisaten owner; trying to act grown-up by helping out on weekends.

"What's your name?" Belldandy asked the child-waitress, who was dressed in a faded yellow LA Lakers sweatshirt and a pair of loose khaki-green jeans.

"Hi! My name's Hikaru! I was named after my mom and dad's best friend. She's like an aunt to me...she lives in New York and dances on Broadway! Every summer, she comes to visit us! What's your name?" the little one replied with girlish enthusiasm.

"Hi, I'm Belldandy. Nice to meet you, Hikaru," Belldandy answered, shaking the girl's hand.

"Belldandy, huh? What an unusual name! You're a foreigner, aren't you?" Hikaru commented.

"I guess you could say so. By the way, I think your dad is an excellent photographer. Could you could give me a little tour, perhaps? I'd love to hear you explain each of your Daddy's pictures to me so I can understand them better," Belldandy asked in a kind, parental voice.

Skuld looked up from the magazine she was reading and rolled her eyes at her sister. Seeing this, Belldandy leaned across the table.

"Skuld...you were her age once! I'm just trying to be friends!" she whispered aside. Once again, Belldandy noticed Skuld's recurring behavior; her younger sister was acting more and more like many typical Earthrealm teenage girls she had observed. This time, Skuld's droll inobservance towards Hikaru seemed to be an attempt to create an attitudinal wedge between childhood and adulthood. Skuld's cool aloofness amazed Belldandy; her sis's eyeroll pretty much stated "you go and play with the kid...me, I think I'm too hip to be bothered with little kids!"

So now, her younger sister was suddenly concerned with image! Belldandy was amused by this new attitude of Skuld's. It reminded her of her own awkward teenage years...

When her parents had Skuld, Belldandy had fawned upon the new family member...in private. But in public, she behaved indifferently towards the infant Skuld. When Skuld was 4 and Belldandy was 17...Skuld was simply "the Brat" in Belldandy's eyes. If Peorth or any of her friends were to catch her being _too_ affectionate with the toddling Skuld, they would inevitably rib her into shamefacedness. Especially Peorth, who was senior to Belldandy by just a few thousand Earthrealm years.

Now, kids Hikaru's age were suddenly 'uncool' to her younger sister!

"Amazing how things change...and yet they don't. Skuld's too concerned about her newly 'grown-up' image to be friendly to this girl...and yet look at what she's reading!" Belldandy observed to herself.

"Eh? Why are you looking at me like that?" Skuld asked, noticing Belldandy's solicitous grin.

"Skuld, this will keep my mind off Keiichi and what's going on between Cevn and Mara for a few moments. So don't act so impudent!" she chided.

Skuld scowled at her briefly, then returned her attention to the magazine.

"But also...I sense some mysterious power indwelling these pictures! Don't you sense anything, Skuld? I would venture to say that the man who created them possesses some kind of special magical abilities. I'm just curious to find out more about them," she explained.

"Who's Keiichi? And who's your stuck-up friend?" Hikaru asked, earning a grimace from Skuld.

"He's my fiance. But right now he's away...on a trip. And this is my younger sister, Skuld," Belldandy answered, gesturing to Skuld. Skuld nodded briefly at Hikaru, then returned to reading her "Girl's Life" shojo manga magazine.

"Oooo! You're getting married, Miss Belldandy? Aren't you a little old to be getting married? You look like you're old enough to be _already_ be married! Can I look at your engagement ring, pleeeze?!" Hikaru noted innocently.

Skuld almost dropped her magazine; biting her lip as she tried her best to cage the lungfuls of giggles that were frothing forth.

It didn't work...

"Heh..hee...ha..haha hah bwah ha!" Skuld burst into laughter, rolling up the shojo mag. Her sister Belldandy was a sight; blushing a rainbow of pinks and rouges, holding her hand over her mouth in shock. Skuld wanted to swat Bell on the head with the magazine, just to get her to lighten up. A few seconds later, Belldandy joined in. Skuld knew that once her sister got started, she couldn't keep it down.

Hikaru was glanced back and forth between the two sisters with a mystified expression on her face.

"And you! Oooo, what pretty long hair you have! Just like Mom's! I bet you have lots of wannabe boyfriends, just like Mom did when she was your age! And aren't you a little old to be reading that kid's stuff? I stopped reading 'Dreamy Smile' in third grade!" Hikaru commented gaily as she reached out and ran her fingers through Skuld's raven-black hair, then tugged at the shojo manga mag Skuld was reading. Belldandy snickered with a daintified malice, fullknowing how much this would embarrass Skuld.

Skuld almost turned purple...

Skuld blinked at Hikaru, grinning self-consciously as she blushed. Earthrealm children always seemed so carefree, so unaware of convention! It was as if they lived by their own set of rules! If it had been Tomohisa who had reached over and touched her hair, she would have decked him! Unlike her sisters, she was awkward around mortal kids...even more so now. She just didn't have the knack to charm them like Big Sister Urd or Belldandy. Belldandy had suggested that this clumsiness was probably due to the fact that she had been abruptly ejected from childhood to teenage Goddess in the recent few months.

But there must be another explanation...

"Kids like Hikaru are just so..._childish_!" Skuld concluded. As Belldandy's giggles faded down, Skuld took a few seconds to regard Hikaru. For an Earthrealm child, she was very chibi-kawaii. Her full hair was straight as a lick; trimmed short in the back, with a line of bangs in front carefully cut straight across, falling just above her full eyebrows. She had lightened her hair a few shades of brown, and had added in some highlight tones. Her green-brown eyes were dark colored and very expressive, possessing a glint of intelligence mixed with mischief. The little dimples on her freckled cheeks only served to add to the impression of scampishness. Her face retained most of the roundness of childhood...but she had a high forehead that gave her a thoughtful mien when she wasn't smiling. No wonder she wore her bangs long in front! In fact, the overall effect reminded Skuld of Chihiro...a kiddy version of Chihiro's tomboyish hairdo. Skuld mentally shuddered as she realized that this mortal girl _was_ a tomboy; just one look at the carefree way she wore her sweatshirt was enough to clue Skuld in.

As usual, it takes one to know one...Skuld's own tomboyish nature had once again asserted itself, much to her own private embarrassment.

"You see that one?" Hikaru announced as she pointed clear across the dining room at a yellowed snapshot pinned to a penboard near the counter. "That's my Mommy and Daddy when they were in high school. My Mom's the one with the long black hair. Dad took the picture using the automatic settings, but when he tried to rush back so he could sit between Mom and Auntie Hikaru, he fell off the bench into the pond!"

"He must have been embarrassed!" Belldandy said with a knowing smile. That was precisely the kind of thing Keiichi would do!

The thought of her absent boyfriend swiftly stabbed her into a gloom.

Skuld made a quick grab for her coffee as Hikaru pulled on her sleeve, her waitressing chores forgotten. The Master of the coffee shop winked at them with an indulgent grin, wordlessly excusing Hikaru from her rounds. Evidently Hikaru's "tours" were a frequent occurrence. Hikaru was skipping as she urged them to the other side of the restaurant to show off her dad's pictures.

"These are some of the magazine covers my Dad shot! His name is Kasuga Kyosuke!" Hikaru explained animatedly. Skuld was impressed...his photos had graced the covers of a number of the Japanese majors. As she scanned the headlines, she realized that Hikaru's father seemed drawn towards _risky_ photojournalist assignments.

The Bosnian Conflict. The gasoline riots in France. Supertyphoon Akira. The assassination of the American president. The eruption of Mt. Aso. The Terrorist Attack on the World Trade Center. The Range Wars in Africa. The Mexico City bombings. The Three River Dam collapse. The Ehime Maru Incident. The Kashmir War...

His photos aptly captured the human dilemma with a poignancy that was unsettling to Skuld.

"Neh...let's go look at some happier pictures!" Hikaru said, sensing Skuld's moodiness. She motioned them over to the back of the restaurant.

"This is the old ABCB coffee shop...but it's no longer there. The city decided to build a housing tract where it stood, so the Master of the old coffee shop decided to retire. So he gave it to my Mom and Dad to run, since they used to work there when they were kids. So Mom and Dad promised him that they would build a new one. So now there's _three_ of them...this one out here in the boonies, and the two in Tokyo."

"Where do you live?" Skuld asked, privately amused and insulted by the fact that Hikaru considered Chiba "the boonies".

"Oh, I like in Konodai, by the river!" Hikaru answered.

"So what are you doing all the way here in _Chiba_! At this time of the day? By yourself?!" Skuld asked rapidfire, astonished.

Belldandy raised an eyebrow at Skuld's unexpected rush of concern for Hikaru.

"Now, Skuld's almost acting like the part of an adult; complete with parental concern for a little girl who, as far as developmental maturity was concerned, is just a few 'years' younger than she is!" Belldandy noted to herself.

"Oh, bother! I'm staying with friends of my Mom's for the weekend. Mom's performing a piano recital in Matsue with the orchestra there, and Dad's in Moscow for the next two weeks on assignment to photograph the funeral of the Russian President! I don't mind, I'm really having a lot of fun, ya know! It's totally like a vacation! In fact, _life's_ like a vacation!" she replied cheerfully.

Belldandy pondered the gravity of _that_ statement, wistwishing that Keiichi was back home. Once he got back home...then her life would really be a vacation again!

"Here are some pretty pictures of my Mom! Her name's Madoka!" Hikaru announced with pride. Belldandy looked at the young woman in a formal black sleeveless gown seated at a grand piano in a concert hall. She didn't look one bit nervous; instead, she exuded an aura of confidence...or at least that's what came across in the picture. Hikaru had gotten most of her good looks from her mother. On closer examination, Belldandy realized that the composition of the sequence of pictures was very studied; obviously the work of a devoted husband who was highly attuned to his wife's moods.

And yet, she sensed an ineffable "if" within the pictures...a quality that seemed to suggest layers of mysteries to Belldandy. A photo can offer a brief glimpse, or it can offer years of nuances. Kasuga's photos unfolded their imagery like little novellas; even the simple subject of his wife performing at a musical recital riveted Belldandy's attention. She immediately made a mental note to herself that she would try to hire this man to photograph her and Keiichi's wedding.

Skuld went back to their booth and helped herself to a refill of coffee. The place had quieted down since the dinner crowd had left. Besides she and Belldandy, the only patrons were a group of N.I.T. students in a booth, and two couples at the counter.

"Come over here! These are some posters my Dad made!" Hikaru noted.

Belldandy looked at the first three in turn...

_Huu...whuhhhh!!_

The gasp seemed to pull itself out of her. The fourth poster depicted a charity marathon in Africa. Since she had learned that Mother and Father had stranded...er, transported Keiichi to the Sahara Desert in Africa, Belldandy had become almost borderline obsessed about that desert and the nations it crossed. The day after his disappearance, she read about the Sahara...every word in every language in every library on the Earthrealm. But she didn't remember reading _this_!

For a split-second, the poster's silence had piqued her interest. And then something _mysterious_ drew her attention to one of the photos in the poster as invisible forces swirled in her breast. The photo depicted an open market, the milling crowd weaving through some kind of oriental bazaar. In another part of the poster, there was an image of the marathon runners, framed against a backdrop of rugged cliffs and a flat expanse of cracked earth. Another photo was a study of a narrow street in a city, with a colorful mix of people that seemed to be _moving_ within the picture...

Belldandy's heart raced as she felt overwhelmed by a storm of sensations; all of them impressions of Keiichi. How he smelled in her arms. The shag of soft hair rimming his forehead. The gleeful sparkle in his eyes. The soothing tone of his voice. The determined expression he had right before a race. The glow of his gentlestrength when he made love to her...

"So powerful...so real!" she thought as she fought to keep her footing. The poster, with its depiction of desert scenes, nomads, mosques, and an impoverished refugee city...seemed to tune her in a wave of hyperawareness. It was as if, somehow, Keiichi was _thoughtcasting to her_ from within the poster! The amplitude of the impressions was overwhelming...

Was making her feel dizzy.

Skuld panicked as she noticed Belldandy's fluttering eyeblinks...then a moment later, her sister had a full bodyblush as she began to weave on her feet like Sayoko used to do when she was really drunk! She quickly reached behind Belldandy, steadying her wobbly body.

"Are you okay, lady?" the Master of the coffeeshop shouted in concern, climbing over the counter as Skuld and Hikaru grabbed onto Belldandy to keep her from collapsing. A moment later, the three were easing her onto one of stool seats at the counter.

Belldandy felt like she had been struck on the head by Skuld's Mjolnir! She suddenly had a _hug_e headache...and the flash of insight gripping her heart was unsettling and intense. The invisible thread that linked her heartsoul with Keiichi's had just manifested itself as surely as the sun had set an hour ago.

"Belldandy? Sis? Are you all right?" Skuld asked, her brow webbed with worry.

"This happens sometimes when people look at my Dad's pictures," Hikaru admitted guiltily with a shrug of her shoulders. "They get kinda fuzzy."

"It's Keiichi! T..that poster! He's _**in**_there! Keiichi's in there! He's in the poster!" Belldandy started shouting wildly.

_"__W..WHAT?!__"_ Skuld exclaimed. Her sister was losing it, big time! She's been separated from Keiichi for too long...now she was taking a sprinting jump off the cliffs of sanity!

"That damned Keiichi! He and my sister have become so close that his very absence causes her to be mentally imbalanced!" Skuld thought angrily, and then checked her emotions as another conflict between love and utility kindled her thoughts. There was something very wrong here...after all, Big Sister Urd was gone and Cevn wasn't going crazy. He was just being an idiot bastard; going out on a date...behind Urd's back!

"I'll _kill_ him when he gets home!" Skuld blurted ruefully.

Hikaru and the kisaten Master looked at each other, totally confused by Skuld's random statement. The young teenager was babbling about killing someone, while the older woman was babbling about some boyfriend lost in Africa!

"I know what'll help you both!" Hikaru said, rushing over to the iced coffee machine.

"I..I _know_ now! I know where my precious darling Keiichi is! We have to go! We have to go there and meet him! We have to leave right away!" Belldandy babblegasped as Hikaru handed her a glass of chilled coffee. She chugged the iced coffee in a gulp, a very un-Belldandy-like act in Skuld's eyes.

"This is getting _way_ too weird," Skuld sensed. Shrugging her shoulders, Skuld downed her iced coffee in a single draught.

"Keiichi's _there_!!" Belldandy repeated, pointing at the fourth framed poster.

Her head finally clear of the rueful thoughts against Cevn, Skuld walked up to the poster and read the caption:

_**The 2003 Sahara Marathon:**_

_**A Desert Run to Benefit Refugees**_

_**Co-Sponsored by Toshiba.**_

_**Tindouf, Algeria**_

_**23 Feb., 2003**_

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

After the debacle at the restaurant, I convinced Mara to go window shopping with me. I figured that as long as we were in the midst of a sidewalk-bound crowd...outdoors...she wouldn't start up anything. Besides, she's female...maybe Demonesses like to shop like Earthrealm women do.

As we walked down the sidewalk, Mara tried to loop her arm inside mine. The first couple times I shrugged her off...then finally, I slapped her hand away. She abruptly stopped and turned to face me.

"What is the matter with you? We're on a _date_! Can't you even _try _to be a gentleman?" Mara confronted me.

I started walking again, worried that _any_ answer to her question might legitimize her protests. Or bring on a new round of arguing.

Besides, there was something about her eyes...

Somehow, when I looked into them...I had the distinct impression of _Urd_! My mind raced back to Urd's impersonation of Dr. Ogawa, back when I first arrived in Japan. I pulled my stride to a halt, as surely as I had run into an invisible wall.

After all, this might _be_ a wall...a wall of deception!

"U..Urd?" I asked her in a tremulous voice.

Mara wheeled to face me, looked at me with a shocked expression...and then started to laugh raucously.

_"WHAT?! _That's..heehee..totally rich! Now you..haha..think I'm my twin sister! Haha hah! Do I..snicker..look _anything_ like Urd!!" she snapped back, pointing at her forehead markings and then grinning widely to give me a full view of her fangs.

Then Mara completely lost it...laughing so hard she had to wrap her arms around her chest.

"It's not what you think, Mara!" I quickly sputtered as the chuckle-dimmed Demoness made even more of a spectacle of herself. When her laughter died down, I rapidly launched into a remembrance of Urd's attempt at impersonation. The entire time, Mara looked like she was fighting back tears of mirth.

"Y'know, what she did was totally wrong! Something like that...is _so_ Urdish!" Mara replied after the sordid tale was spun. "And you...idiot that you are...you _still_ went for her! I'll never understand you mixed-up mortals and your ideas of love and lust!"

"It wasn't lust..." I corrected her.

"Yeah, right! You're a liar, just like everyone else!" she denounced, suddenly transformed into an accusatrix.

I felt a blush coming on. Of course there's a little lust within love! Despite myself, fantasy and reality sometimes blurred...especially because I was in love with a Goddess possessing the kind of beauty that Urd has. But the way Mara had accused me, I was suddenly feeling exposed and guilty.

"Y'know, if it was me...I would have done something different. A more...direct approach," Mara noted.

"Direct as _this_? Taking advantage of our inopportune situation at the temple! Taking advantage of Belldandy's mistake with the shield...to _force_ me to go out with you?" I shot back.

_SLAP!!_

I reeled back a couple steps from the force of her strike, almost loosing my balance. She had falsecracked me _hard_!

Stunned, I looked at the Demoness, who was regarding me with an icy glare. I couldn't believe it! Mara had _slapped_ me...for telling the truth.

Brutal honesty often elicits brutal retaliation.

Mara's angry expression of rage mixed with the tears in her eyes.

"_Tears_?!" I wondered, taken aback. I had to admit that my words had been uncharacteristically assaultive towards her. I felt a momentarily flash of fear...I had just enraged a Demoness to the point of tearful anger. She could snap her fingers and turn me into a protozoa. Or imprison my mind in its neuroses...

I was too shocked to be angry with her; somehow, her tears seemed to drain away any lingering resentments I felt.

"Why is she this upset?" I wondered, sensing that her tears were the product of embittered sadness. As my cheek stung, I tried to calm myself down. Perhaps I could empathize with her...and still remain safe.

"You have no idea about why I asked you out, do you? Has it ever occurred to you, Cevn...that I'm pretty fuckin' _lonely_, stranded here on this shithole Earthrealm?" Mara growled with a sad anger, glowering at me.

Whether it was crocodile-tears or whatever, Mara had managed to gain a shed of my sympathy. During the entire stretch of the manga, during my entire stay here in Japan...I had never observed Mara with anything resembling a boyfriend. I remembered the beginning of the manga, when her character was introduced...the artist had taken his time deciding whether she was a 'she'. And in this 'reality', Keiichi had told me that he experienced the same thing, albeit in a somewhat different set of circumstances. Four years ago, when Mara first appeared to him, she had made herself into a male so that she could torment him with doubts about Belldandy. It was all a ploy to try and get Keiichi to turn against his wish...and create an opportunity for Mara to usurp Belldandy's wishgranting role and hazard his life with grief. But when her perfidy failed, Mara started manifesting as a Demoness.

So was she a 'she' or a 'he'? My stomach churned at the prospect that I was on a date with a male Demon camouflaging himself as a female Demoness. My head whirled at the rivets of implications...

Right into a roaring existential angst.

"Sometimes I think I'm going crazy. Before Urd brought me here, the realworld of my life was dismal and depressing...but then, this _world_ is a manifestation of a fictional manga, isn't it? Somehow! Here's a _real_ Mara, in the midst of a _real_ Tokyo...and she's really offended with me!" I muttered aloud. Mara looked at me with an amazed expression, curious and a little wary at my flight of incertitudes.

"So what _is_ real?" I asked her, grabbing her on the shoulders and staring into her orange-red eyes. "This lifeplace...or the manga...or my prior-to-Japan life, or the serial story that each moment ascribes on my consciousness? Are _you_ even real? You're a Demoness, aren't you! Why don't you tell me what is real and what is not?"

I looked at my hands for a moment, trying to see if there was blood pulsing in my veins. Again, I decided that that I was "here"...and "here" wasn't some 'alternate dimension' ala Oz or Shangri-la.

Mara looked at me, her anger draining into curious amusement.

I regarded Mara with a discerning eye, as if I was noticing her for the first time. She was almost 1.8 meters tall, rather tall compared to the typical Japanese women. Then again, she was anything but Japanese. Her face was narrow, tapering to a delicate chin...the delicacy of her facial features seemed out-of-place when I looked at her fierce eyes. Mara's straw-blonde hair with its platinum-orange highlights curled generously over her shoulders and down her back. Her hair made her stand out in the crowd; the amazing colors and hoist of her hair were obviously something that couldn't be replicated by any earthly hairstylist. The irises of her eyes were dun red with bright orange-red streaks, and they seemed to glow from time to time. The two red slashes in the middle of her forehead appeared to be as natural as her eyebrows...and they glowed faintly against the shadows her hair cast on her face...

"What?!" she shouted irritably, noticing my stare. She made a face at me, sticking her tongue out.

"Mara...were you a man at one time?" I asked.

The flares of ire in her eyes made me duck around the nearest corner.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

_"Within the bounding reefs of sand, beyond the sight of home, my soul recalls a lady. Whose heart dismounts her sad laments? She clears her mind of the traces of past colonies of memories, The four famed dune-keeps, like mute pepperseeds in the distance, The dung of white stags clinging to courtyards and cisterns alike, Wind borne resins gum the eyes, like her tears due each morning, Besides the acacia, she stills herself to watch the camels go... And now, for remonstrance at my remoteness from her, impatience, I grieve, my emptyheartedness unechoed in the comfortless ruins, I cast my lot, kine my place, make solemn peace again with the past._

_The days of yore, clover-odored bedding and my lady lies, Best by a pooling oasis, we were caught by our clan a-drenched,I brought my plaint to beg return of our unvirtued clothing, Played at the humble jester, so hung back, my pride unpaid, But for her, my heart melts tallow like tassels of fresh satin, She, I forced to ride in a topheavy hempen howdah, while I chopped the camel, fast slaughtered, for our repast, Tilting along with her, now tattling of kin and kith, Illegal camel loads, burdens of men and beasts and Allah, I tickled her senses, dropped the reins, cropped the quinces,_

_Sweet as her were the tenured voices of wisdom and song, Pregnant wives, mothers giving pap, drunk worthies in our harems, An infant would give cry, a woman would half-turn to the source, We'd roll our eyeballs and loll our tongues just to say 'allo, There were jilts on spines of sand, coquettes shedding the veil, Who carved my heart into a brow-beating rouge, a hidden range, And no sauce of tears, this youth of mine now years disengaged, The cling of silk, the memory of her pure ovoid, the touch sighs, In boudoir and ward, in tent and cassel, we kept a watched ring, I went in at my leisure and kept her at my joy...happy be we,_

_On account of laden trees, I found myself lost among my friends, Turning to her, with screen and chill gauze of shift as shelter, I waded past the winds of their rebukes with beds of her incense, The cold looks, the stinging stillness, the arms of eucalyptus, Under a whorl of crested dunes I pressed on, for sift and she, Her temples sheen-black with her ankles brown and slender, Waist and shearings of flame to yolk my fledgling passions, But the pain of separation haunts like brine on seawaves, As I moor my caravan to the sting of stars in the desert night, With no denser dawn to long for between thighs untensing,_

_My outstretched arms against the sun burn in a flash, shoals Of crowned clouds that lean on both flanks of the horizon, Rain pours on old Katheitha, it kisses the trunks of the trees, On distant Kanahbil, the winds seize the uplands of Qanan, Chasing the ibex, the zenith, erasing the less-than-stone, Spare landmarks, the major peaks, bare spindles to guide us, Capping the deluge of sand till dawn, then dwindling away, Its tendrils wrap the leaves like the bright wares of Yemen, In sands whose drunkenness at the rims of the valleys lay, Rare thrushes remark to the sun of its spiced folly, And evening rides in, far-off my deserted one awaits me, Like sprigs of wild onion, my heart pulls...and yet forsakes, The drowsy leopards at the limits of the tundra remain supine, Yet, to my bane, life's trappings still summon me away..."_

Keiichi opened his eyes to the sound of folksong, clapping and singing. He couldn't understand the words, but he could sense the air of melancholy implicit in the plaintive song. Too weak to move at all, he listened to the chorusing voices, accompanied by several drums and a soft horn. The song reminded him of the workaday enka he would sometimes hear in the countryside when he visited his grandparents. It was soothing...yet mournful.

His capacity was drained almost empty; he could barely turn his head. As best he could judge by the surroundings, he was in some kind of dimly lit tent. The ceiling and walls consisted of a patchwork of woven fabric; mostly brown, with a series of geometric designs. A group of men sitting in the circle next to a haphazard arrangement of kerosene lamps.

They looked distinctly Arabic.

"Am I alive?" he thought, wonderingly. He remembered his last glimmers of consciousness, burrowing into the sand as he was pelted by the savage sandstorm. Facing his imminent death, Keiichi had tried to make peace with his life...and the life yet unlived with Belldandy and the others...

The life still lived.

Through some miraculous breach against the veil of the twilight, he had been brought _here_! These were real human beings! He sucked in a deep breath and ended up coughing, turning his head as he spat out gouts of blood and mucus. He could smell the musky scent of hashish and incense in the air.

On closer observation, he noticed that the men were all dressed in stout woven clothes consisting of layers of dull-colored mantles. Several of them wore the Arabic headress; single-colored kerchiefs banded around the temples by several different kinds of of woven headband. He could see several hookahs nearby the group of singing men; occasionally one would take a long draw on one of the tubes, close his eyes in bliss, and exhaled a cloud of bluish smoke. A number of men wore some kind of woven girdle, with knitted waistbands that finished with a knotted fringe. All of the men had long curved knife sheathes attached to their waistbelts.

Keiichi noticed several carved stands with bowls and fruit on them, situated almost randomly inside the tent's 'living room'. Piles of indigo-colored blankets served as mattressing for the reclining men. The blanketcloths that comprised the ceiling were sand-colored, brighter than the wallcloths; each woven piece was sewn with complex arabesques and occasional flourishes of cursive Arabic writing. The flooring was matted with some kind of straw strewn thickly over the sand, with an occasional frayed rug and several thatched mats that looked like they were made out of some kind of long-grass. Several barrel-shaped baskets were arranged along the wall of the tent, and a few antique lockboxs were stacked in a corner.

The air was smoky, and Keiichi could make out the rich aromas of some kind of spiced cooked meats.

Several men turned their heads towards him.

"Abu daluwk gesum haqphti bin apdullah nibah!" a man said, pointing at him. All at once, the impromptu singing stopped...and the group of men was now staring at him.

The sudden shift in attention towards him fazed Keiichi into a freaked-out-for-a-moment mode...after all, these were Arabs! He knew next to nothing about Arabic culture, except that they were fanatic about their Islamic religion. And these men certain didn't look very civilized! It was as if he had been plunged into another time, or perhaps another another planet.

_Everything_ about his present surroundings was alien. The simple awareness that he was indoors after two weeks roughing it outdoors in the desert...was shocking!

As he observed the men, his first inclination was that they looked like some kind of desert tribe of nomads, dressed as they were in traditional-looking garb. In fact, the whole bunch of them resembled the Three Wise Man of the Christian Nativity, or at least the NHK Christmas-time portrayals of the Magi. Eyes mysterious and haughty, faces tanned like weathered leather framed by shaggy thick beards, dyed turbans... The men looked like desert bandits, or terrorists, or goat herders.

Keiichi couldn't tell what they looked like.

All at once, the group broke out into broad grins. A pepper-bearded man with deep brown skin walked over and gingerly lifted Keiichi's head and shoulders, assisting him so that he was partly sitting up, while another man produced a leather satchelflask and held it to his lips.

Water!

Keiichi wanted to cry as he tasted the most precious liquid in the universe. The two men nodded to him as the other men stood in a circle around him, murmuring amongst themselves...

They weren't terrorists...they were benefactors.

"I've been rescued!" Keiichi thought as he faded back to sleep in mid-sip.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Belldandy didn't even wait to use mortal means to transport herself back to the temple. She said she was going to the Ladies Room...and a moment later, Skuld noticed the telltales.

"Is she okay? She's been in there a while," Hikaru asked with concern as she refilled Skuld's coffee.

"Uh...I'd better go check on my sister. Maybe she fainted again," Skuld replied, trying to act like she was surprised. Grateful that this little Earthrealm girl had been so concerned about Belldandy, she patted Hikaru on the head, then walked to the restroom.

10 minutes later, Hikaru checked the restroom, walked back out to the counter and shrugged her shoulders.

"They're gone!" she announced.

"Hmm...just like your Pa," the Master commented with raised eyebrows.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Mara spent the next half hour autobiographizing to me. How she could condense 270,000 years into a half hour was beyond me, but the gist of it was that she had worn many mantles in Vanagdrasil.

One of the recurrent themes to her life's story was the fact that Mara had often been the object of ridicule and scorn by her peers. It was generally rumored (but not said aloud) that she was the twin sister of a Goddess...a fact that His Dark Majesty would neither confirm or deny. The fact that she _didn't_ have a Doublet fueled suspicions that she was somehow connected to the Gods. Because of the unsavory possibilities, Mara's childhood was dogged by a sense of revulsion towards herself...it was repulsive to even consider that she was related to a Goddess.

_Which_ Goddess it was, Mara didn't learn until just recently. In one sense, once she learned the truth of her twinned nature, Mara admitted that she felt greatly relieved. She no longer was subject to the uncertainties she had lived with for most of her existence. When I asked her why she didn't know about this, Mara looked at me thoughtfully and offered her opinion.

Unlike Urd, who was told from the start that she was half-Demoness, Mara was never given a proper explanation about the enigmatic parts of her birth and life. Evidently, the Demonic Proctors had decided to conceal this fact from her. Thus, there was always a secretive air around her, which made her feel very insecure as a young Demoness. She could sense the awkwardness...that something was being hushed up about her. But what it was, she didn't know. As she was uncertain about the truth of this 'rumor'...the teasing was even more difficult to stomach.

She was viewed as a freak...because it was suspected that she had half-Goddess energy flowing in her body.

In essence, Mara had grown up knowing that she was different, but not knowing _how_ or _why_. And the suspicions from within and without that she may be part Goddess...tormented her.

This malor celebre' status was complicated by Mara's Demonic lineage. Mara was the sole daughter of a Demon Queen _and_ the stepdaughter of another Demon Queen. This birthright haunted her, as she was regarded as a sort of public curio to the denizens of Vanagdrasil. In a very real sense, Mara was Vanagdrasilian royalty...with all the attendant scrutiny that accompanies the highborn.

To my surprise, Mara noted that she was gifted with a keen intellect; thus, her prodigious attributes were quickly identified in childhood. The adoring parents, Baeeal and Myducia, along with her stepmom Hild, brought this fact to the attention of the His Majesty, the Dark Lord. Consequently, Mara's upbringing, education and inculcation were even more disciplined than the usual course proscribed for Demon younglings. She was constantly scrutinized by the Demon Proctors. Because she had to hold discipline within a very strict regimen, Mara's freedoms were greatly reduced. Attempts to avoid the rigors of her 'education' resulted in severe sanctions. She was treated _differently_ than all the other Demonic children her age. The childhood freedoms that her peers enjoyed, she was disallowed. No mistakes were tolerated; Mara was frequently punished for errors of judgment and childish whims. Since she received such special treatment, Mara was even further alienated from other neophyte Demonesses. She was often cloaked with suspicion and jealousy by other Demon children.

Then, during her teenage years, Mara encountered yet another personal difficulty. For some unknown reason, she was a very late developer. As she explained it, her 'development' was so greatly delayed...in Earthrealm terms, it would have been the equivalent of a 10th grade girl having to wear a training bra. She made it a point to emphasize to me the fact that her development was _thousands_ of years delayed, in Earthrealm years! Board-chested and narrow-hipped whenever she manifested, Mara was constantly teased by her Demoness girlfriends and completely ignored by the Demons she was boycrazy about.

Consequently, Mara withdrew into herself even more. This process of self-dislike and social ostracism forged Mara towards the possession of an especially exquisite Evil...which further gained the regard of His Dark Majesty. He deigned that she would receive an early assignment to the Demon Grief Office. Even this wasn't a respite; when other Demonesses her age were chasing around young Demons and goofing off, Mara was stuck apprenticing to the DGO.

Throughout her childhood, she had always been in competition with Belldandy...never even suspecting that the Goddess was in truth her sister! I recalled from the Enigma Book that the Gods and Demons, as a condition of their cease-fire after the last War, had instituted a series of youth 'virtual reality' competitions to ease the fervor of the younger generation. The thinking was, if the preexisting rivalries could be tempered somewhat in the youth by VR sports and intellectual 'jousts', then another disastrous War might be forestalled. As I already knew, these games were similar to remote gameplay over the Internet; because all thes direct interactions between Gods and Demons were strictly regulated by the Ultimate Force. Or perhaps Kami-sama and Oni-sama...

Mara had become champion of all Vanagdrasil in VR Hanetsuki. Thus, she had to face the champion of the Gods every century in a championship match.

Which was always Belldandy.

Each of their matches ended up in a draw...even one last great youthful marathon of a match that lasted _seven_ Earthrealm years and left both contestants on the verge of collapse! As Mara described how frustrating this was, my mind grabbed an image from the "Karaoke Party From Hell" that I had hosted last Christmas Eve as an apology for slighting Urd. There, Belldandy and Mara had played to exhaustion that time as well...and the result was a draw.

However, with each contest that ended in a tie, Mara was chastened and reproved by her coaches, friends and family. There was no praise for the lengthy practice sessions. No words of consolation for the disappointment of a drawn match. No encouragement for applying her best effort to defeat her Goddess counterpart.

Only condemnation for not winning.

When she finally became an adult Demoness, leaving the childgames behind, Mara was greatly relieved. On the cusp of adulthood, she still had to deal with the fact that she was a novitiate in the cutthroat world of DGO politics. Thus, more often than not, Mara was frequently slaughtered in the vocational arena by her more seasoned coworkers. "Sempai" in the Demonic realm meant somebody who would try and use one's experience against them. Starting at the bottom of the scale, Mara quickly tore through the ranks to become a full DGO Agent, dispensing Grief to all those who qualified for it. And just when she thought her adulthood career was just starting to pan out...she ran against a roadblock. Actually, two of them.

Belldandy and Peorth.

After Mara had worked for a mere 30,000 years at the DGO, Oni-sama decided to create an Intercept System. He explained that it would add a little spice to their work, while providing Him a source of amusement. His main argument was that this detente between the Gods and Demons had become quite _boring_. With youthful enthusiasm, Mara and her coworkers couldn't agree more with His reasoning.

The concept behind the Intercept System was simple. Wish requests posted to the Goddess Relief Office would be surreptitiously monitored by the DGO. If someone, say an Earthrealm mortal, were to make a wish, the Demon's Intercept System would attempt to decipher the transmission. Lacking a knowledge of the God's Language, this process was successful only once out of 78,934 attempts. Because of their rariety, Intercept assignments were highly coveted by Demon Grief Office agents. Once a wish request to Yggdrasil was accurately decoded, a Demoness would be dispatched to the mortal. If they arrived in a timely fashion, prior to the arrival of the Goddess assigned to the wish request...they would be free to plague the victim with all sorts of Grief. Of course, if a Goddess got there first, then it was strictly "hand's off".

So Mara started encountering her childhood nemesis during any number of Grief assignments. It turned out that the Vanagdrasil Intercept System had its counterpart in Yggdrasil. Thus, Belldandy or Peorth would occasionally show up to frustrate Mara's Grief work.

It was bad enough that Belldandy and Peorth were assigned to the same Sector as Mara, a Sector that included a thousand inhabited worlds including the Earthrealm. But what was even worse, in Mara's eyes, was the fact that once again...circumstances had reasoned that life between Mara and her Yggdrasilian enemies was to play out in a series of drawn conflicts!

"For every Grief assignment that I 'won', that blessed Belldandy or Peorth would snatch an assignment from me! It was totally insulting, because Belldandy's fully 20,000 years younger than me! And that Peorth is such a syrupy poser! Back then, I _seriously_ considered killing Bell's doublet, Velpser...or Peorth's doublet, Rancourt. You know that killing a Goddess's doublet would result in their immediate demise. But I didn't have the courage to commit this gravest of offenses. Demons don't kill Demons without a good reason. And exacting revenge on a Goddess is definitely not a good justification for murder! So I couldn't do it...because the fear of spending the rest of my existence being personally tortured by His Dark Majesty just didn't warrant the risk," she explained.

I had a lingering concern that Mara was trying to deceive me. Her autobiography seemed as bent as a pretzel, to say the least. I sensed that she was fishing for sympathy as she continued her narrative.

Mara recounted more episodes as she belabored her tale. She related to me that once she realized that she couldn't take out Belldandy, she decided to try and work _around_ her. She noticed a lingering resentment on Peorth's part against Belldandy...so she tried to play the two off each other. Didn't work. Peorth was too surreptitious to do anything aggressive, and Belldandy was too naive and sweet to harbor harmful thoughts. So Mara attempted to create an Insanity Quantifier...a device that radiated damnbient ethereal radiation. This radiation, when introduced to a Goddess wishgranting transmission, would make anyone who had a wish granted by Belldandy or Peorth go mad.

"In hindsight, it was _totally_ stupid of me to even attempt it!" Mara noted. "During the process of experimenting with an extremely complicated arcane alchemical process, I ended up getting critically injured in an 'explosion'. I was laid up for _14,000_ years...and it took another 7,000 years for the blessed scars to go away whenever I manifested!"

As she continued her story, I became keenly aware of how many layers of frustration had contributed to Mara's strong dislike of Belldandy...

Before creating the Dambient Ethereal Radiation Spectacle Insanity Quantifier, Mara had made the Dark Lord aware of her risky activities, hoping to gain His approval. Instead, with a parental solicitude, He had gone as far as to warn her that what she was attempting was virtually impossible. If it _were_ so easy to do, He noted, the Demons would have eradicated the Multiverse of Gods and Goddesses eons ago. Oni-sama reminded her that even the most experienced Potion Alchemists in Vanagdrasil hadn't been able to create an Insanity Quantifier in recent memory. _His_ recent memory. Even her own parents and stepmom had advised Mara against this endeavor as well.

But she ignored the warnings; with a hubris fired by determination, she worked diligently...and failed.

Once she had fully recovered from the accident, Mara had been busted from Demoness Second Class to Demoness Third Class Trainee for disregarding His Word.

So she basically had to start over again.

Eventually, she earned the coveted Demoness First Class Unlimited license...specifically in regards to some work she did on the Earthrealm. Mara's mood seemed to perk up as she started describing this "adventure", as she termed it.

Poring over the obscurities of Vanagdrasilian Chaos Transformation Probability math, Mara came up with an idea. If she studied hard enough, she might be able to deduce a NoirChaos formula whereby she could destabilize the social and spiritual harmony of an entire _population_ of mortals by a few million choice productions of grief among individuals. Since the majority of Belldandy's wish assignments were from the Earthrealm, and Peorth's position was in the Earth Otasuke Office, a branch of the GRO whose exclusive catchment area was Planet Earth...Mara realized that the fruition of her longitudinal project could cast an exquisite revenge on _both_ Goddesses.

"So I studied my ass off, so I could get even! And I eventually did just that!" Mara noted with a grin.

Eventually, she proofed a formula...and over the course of 243 years, she threatened off all the other DGO agents whenever they received assignments on the Earthrealm. They used to tease her, calling her the "Earthrealm Imp" because she _only_ performed Grief creations on the Earthrealm mortals. But the sum of her efforts produced results that far exceeded anything Mara could have imagined.

Not only did she manage to destabilize the entire population of Earthrealm mortals by her formulaic applications of Grief...but the entire race of mortals had became so devolved with Evil that the Almighty of Yggdrasil decided to wipe the slate clean.

"So the Divine Dimwit flooded 99.9 of them away, heh heh!" she said. I was thankful that we were sitting on a public bench...as I felt a woozy bodyrush in reaction to her disclosure. My stomach churned knots as Mara explained how she became renowned in all of Vanagdrasil for this "momentous event". I tried to grasp a mental image of the biblical floods mentioned in the Pentateuch and many other ancient epics.

Hundreds of millions of people drowning...

In the late 1990s, archeogeneticists had discovered strong evidence in the genetic record that supported that theory that humanity suffered a 99 "die out" sometime in the upper Paleolithic era. Basically, the genetic composition of individuals can be charted in a timeline, based on any number of factors identifiable in the genome. The genetic makeup of individuals was dissimilar up to a specific point in time, whereupon _something_ had occurred. After this, certain genetic strands typify the individual with alarming regularity. Both the Enigma Book and the Belldandy had specifically noted that Kami-sama _had_ flooded the Earthrealm, in an attempt to recompose humanity into a stock that might reach the Next Level.

But I had never dreamed that Mara was responsible. A savage instinct to strike out...to hit _her_...overwhelmed me. The evil of her actions was further debased by the fact that she was _proud_ of them...that she had gained renown because of them.

I wanted to say something, to protest, to confront, to wail in sadness...but my throat was gripped tight with revulsion. Oddly enough, Mara seemed to sense my distress...and to my surprise, she gently rubbed my ropetense back with a calming motion.

"There...there," she said soothingly as tears filled my eyes. "You know, I _was_ younger then. It was the foolishness of my youth..." she justified.

"**WHAT THE HELL DO YOU MEAN, THE FOOLISHNESS OF YOUR YOUTH?!**" I screamed. You killed almost _all_ of my ancestors..."

I slid to the end of the bench, totally freaked out in reaction to what she had just disclosed. I just wanted to get away from her, get away from this old soul who wantonly killed so many so that she could gain status. I was struck by a horrifying thought: Mara was no different that a corporate BOD. Corporate boards routinely managed firms who would steal from millions of their own customers...and even kill their own workers through their refusal to implement safety precautions.

All for the almighty Dollar or Yen.

"Actually, it's partly Belldandy and Peorth's fault too, if you really think about it. If only they had stopped interfering in my work...then I would have never have become so obsessed with revenge. Besides, it's all in the job description. Nothing personal. And, to be honest, I really didn't even suspect that it would end up with the Lord of Yggdrasil flooding all of 'em! I was just trying to make Belldandy and Peorht's job harder by lowering the cultural ethics of the Earthrealm! In fact...you should be angry at their Lord...not me! He's the One who did it!!" Mara explained, sliding next to me and resuming her comforting shoulder rub.

I had to admit that there was some truth to her words...

As I sobbed, Mara gently pulled me close to her, holding my head against her shoulder as she stroked my hair. I was so conflicted...the killer herself was comforting me. I felt my angst dissolving, just like it did when Urd comforted me when I was almost-ready-to-lose-it upset. I opened my eyes just once, and I felt my heart doubleskip as I could see _everything_ under her blouse...

And I was actually feeling that Mara _cared_ about how I felt!

I pulled away from her and stood up. I started pacing in front of the bench, tense as a bound cable rope. As I walked in a tight circle, Mara continued...

She explained to me that the near destruction of an entire sentient species was greatly satisfying to the Demons. But beyond this, Mara's work on Earth had completely fooled Kami-sama...which was a huge boon to the Demon's pride. Getting over on His counterpart..._that_ was especially dear to the Dark Lord!

Mara's First Class License was ensured.

"But fame always seems to exact a price in Vanagdrasil," Mara remarked with a sigh.

I felt a crushing sadness deep in my heart as I realized that the Evil in Mara...was the same as the Evil in me and my fellow human beings. I fought back tears as Mara continued her story. All of a sudden, _it all_ seemed devoid of beauty and hope and love!

I felt so unprotected...and yet, here was Mara, trying to recompense for her past misdeeds by noting that they were a "mistake". Trying to pacify me away from the darts of panic that seemed to pinstab my sanity.

I felt like I'd swallowed a stick of dynamite. My thoughts and emotions were totally confused by this point. The conventions that formed my sense of reality had become a house of mirrors under Mara's 'tutelage'.

She explained that her exploit had allowed her to become a personal favorite of the Lord of Vanagdrasil...she was even offered a coveted Demon Queen apprenticeship. However, she felt that becoming a Demon Queen would force her to become a parent too soon, so she declined the offer. Nevertheless, being in the Dark Lord's favor amounted to a constant vigilance that left her walking tightrope on spiderwebs of fear. So, for thousands of years, Mara had to keep up 'production'...victories over the GRO Goddesses...or else.

Reservedly, I actually felt myself sympathizing with her.

"I was doing just fine until the Intercept System decrypted a wish request from one Keiichi Morisato," she said, slapping her hands in front of her for emphasis as she sat up straight.

"Even with my best effort, I had gotten to him just nanoseconds too late! Otherwise, Keiichi would be languishing in prison right now for a crime he didn't commit!" she added, almost yelling in my face.

But the worst, most screwed up part of all of this, according to Mara...was the fact that it was _Belldandy_ who had bested her! Of all the Goddesses in the GRO, it was _Belldandy_ who had received that particular wish assignment!

She was getting too worked up as she talked, so I told her I knew the rest of the story. Since Belldandy was 'fixed' here by Keiichi's wish...Mara was 'stranded' on the Earth as well...everybody in her circle knew this already.

But I didn't know the full extent of how this had affected Mara...

She explained to me that, for a Demoness who had thrived on causing thousands of Grief incidences in an average week, having to deal with a _single_ assignment concerning a _single_ mortal life over a prolonged period of time..."really bites", as she put it. It was total inertia. Mara was a Demoness who thrived on _action_. She liked creating riots, breaking up marriages, causing freak accidents and the like. Not being able to constantly wreak mayhem had produced in her a kind of 'withdrawal'. Mara described it as the feeling you get right when you're ready to puke after a particularly nasty bit of the flu. This explained her lengthy disappearances after being defeated by the three Goddesses every time she attempted to bring Grief to Keiichi. She was 'sick'...

"And then I find out that Urd's my _twin sister_...and Belldandy and Skuld are my _younger sisters_! And to top it all off, the Dark Lord decides that He needs a new Demon office...so He creates the Demon Strife Mischief Office...and puts _me_ in charge of it! Despite the fact that I was promoted to Senior First Class Demoness status, which is almost always reserved for Demon Queens, I have to start over _again_..." she noted resentfully in clipped sentences.

I was really getting the sense that her lot in life seemed to resemble mine in a lot of ways. It _always_ sucked...something messed up was always waiting to make life miserable!

"Goddamm! Thas' some wicket shit she'sh tellin! I..I duh..don't believph.._urp_!..a bit o' it! But if'n it's..hic..the truth...then I's swear I'll nevah touch d..dis stuff agin!" a stumbly voice interrupted.

I jerked my head in the direction of the slurred words, and realized with a spinechill that we had been overheard by a drunk! He was semi-passed out in the nearby bushes several meters behind us, crashed out in the middle of an elevated square concrete planter. The planter obviously was someone's idea of urban beautification, a garnish for the rather plain-looking office building that rose a dozen-or so-storeys behind it. But to my eyes, it was a garishly spare cell of foliage that looked imprisoned by the urban environment, rather than adding anything to it. And to the wino, it was nothing more than a place to "make it"...to crash out after a bout of boozing.

I looked sternly at Mara. Much of her story had troubled me greatly; not only the trials that she had suffered but also the dread that she had inflicted. My mind reeled at the concept of anyone being _proud_ of the deaths of millions of human beings! My mind vorticed around an observation. What did the half-Goddess part of her feel about that? Was it the half-Goddess part of her showing compassion for me when she comforted me a few moments ago?

And we had been overhead. Being around Urd and Belldandy and Skuld, I was used to Goddesses and Demonesses and the Enigma Book and the Almighty. But to a Tokyo swillbowl...small wonder that he reacted to Mara's tale with apt disbelief.

"Here! Watch this!" Mara said with a grin. She walked over to the drunk, who had lolled on his side to regard her.

"Mara..." I worried aloud. Mara waved her hand behind her back in the "watch and see" gesture common to the Japanese.

"Shtay away, shpawn of the Dev..urp..Devil!" he stuttered, then took a swig out of his pint. He started brandishing the bottle in front of him, as if he was warding off a vampire with a cross.

"You know...I really _hate_ hearing that word! When are you mortals going to get it through your soupy globs of gray matter that there is _no_ Devil! There's just the Gods...and _us_. We exist because they do! And we're _Demons_...not devils! And I'll let you in on a little secret. We Demons...we're _much_ worse than all the evils and all the devils that your pitiful mortal imaginings could ever conjure in a _million_ lifetimes!" Mara said icily.

The wino tried to shuffle back away from her, his face filled with terror.

As I looked on, a white-hot jet of liquid flame shot out of Mara's mouth and eyes like a flamethrower.

"Mara..._NO!!__"_ I screamed.

Too late.

The entire area was instantly engulfed in flames, and then a _huge_ pyrotechnic explosion funneled upwards between the buildings, resembling a furious yellow-orange tornado. The bright burst suggested one of those climax scenes in a Hollywood macho-man movie where something had to be blown up to keep the adrenaline rushing. I was totally terrified that _I_ would be burnt to a crisp in the huge column of nova-bright fire...until I suddenly realized that there was no sound. No heat.

A few seconds later, the fire disappeared as quickly as a candle flame snuffed out by a pitcher of iced tea. Where once a thick square of hedgebushes had stood...now there was a single man sitting on the burnt earth, his old shabby clothes covered in soot.

His eyes were white with a glaze of sheer terror.

I watched him glancing back and forth between Mara and the flask in his hand. Suddenly, he chucked it over his shoulder, almost hitting a salaryman on the head who was rushing over to the scene.

"Tha's it! I ain't _never_..urp!..toushing dis stuff agin! I'm goin to get me.._hic_..some help! I'm goin' to the nearest temphle and git r..right with myselfelf!" he announced to the thin air. With that, he stood up on unsteady legs and tried to step off of the concrete planter. And fell on his face.

Standing up again, he yelled "Shtay away, witch!!" at Mara, and then attempted to run down the street, almost knocking over several pedestrians.

The sidewalks were quickly filling up with a crowd. I realized that Mara had more than created a "scene"...she had created a theme park-grade spectacle!

"H..hey, it's really nothing! Just a bit of street theatre! S..she's a college student! She wants to be a stuntwoman in the next Gamera movie! It's all just practice..." I explained rather hesitantly. The lies were totally lame, but it was the only thing I could come up with on the fly. Mara looked at me, my feeble attempts at explaining the incendiary situation seemed a source of levity to her...she was giggling at me.

I strongly sensed that we needed to clear out of here forthwith. Grabbing the mirthful Demoness by the arm, I rushed towards a nearby alley. Normally, I would be wary of walking down a narrow alley in Tokyo at night. But with Mara in tow, even a den of yakuza would pose zero threatability if they decided to attempt anything assaultive with us!

Once we gained the alley and jogged several blocks away, Mara stopped running. I leaned over, hands on knees, gasping from the sprint.

She turned and laughed at me.

"Hee heh hee! Did you see the look on his face? He's definitely never going to drink any alcohol again! Which is something that _you_ of all people should appreciate, Cevn!" she explained between fitful laughs.

I almost started laughing myself. I had to admit that his soot covered face was almost cartoonish...and his terror was almost over-the-top hilarious.

But then I remembered the source. The man had literally been scared to death, and I felt a sway of empathy for his suffering. I readied a confrontational remark when Mara interrupted me with a wagging finger, as if she was anticipating an argument.

"And all along, you've always thought that we Demons are all about causing only _harm_ to mortals! Feh! Let's go see a flick!"

I couldn't help myself...the laughter tore itself out of me.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Belldandy was feverishly paging through several Tokyo phonebooks, calling one travel agency after another. As she watched her sister's frenetic efforts, Skuld's concerns that Bell was majorly losing it were all but confirmed.

But then, that incident in the ABCB coffee shop was pretty major.

Elder Sister thought she had somehow 'seen' Keiichi in one of the posters?

If it were a mortal girl who was making such a claim, Skuld would have recommended that Banpei-kun restrain her and then immediately deliver her to the nearest psychiatric unit. Only her sister could pull off this kind of enigmatic weirdness...and somehow convince her that it make sense. Then again, Belldandy could _really_ be strange sometimes...

This was one of those times.

Once home, Skuld had realized upon further reflection that she _had_ felt a little 'nudge' from the poster. It was noticiable, but nothing near the swamping whirlpool of impressions that Belldandy claimed to have sensed.

"Since we can't travel by divine means to Tindouf, Al--whatever, we'll have to use mortal forms of transportation," Skuld thought sullenly.

No Goddess Powers whatsoever.

Skuld was a stay-at-home girl...she rarely traveled outside the temple, or even outside of Makuhari. The recent trip to the Le Mans in France was a major undertaking for her.

But to go to _Africa_?

"...you can't book us on a flight until next _month_? We need to go _now_! It's an emergency! We have plenty of money!" Skuld overheard Belldandy pleading on the phone. A moment later, her sister sat the phone down on the dining room table and sighed in resignation.

Another impasse.

Skuld looked at Belldandy, whose eyes were reddened with desperation. Her sister looked so...overwrought! Tears of frustration framed Belldandy's eyes as she mournfully looked at her.

"This Goddess definitely needs a hug!" Skuld said to herself. She tried to calm her sister down by bring her to her senses, and then finally just gave up the wordish approach and knelt down next to her, embracing her from behind. She could feel Belldandy literally shivering with pent-up energy.

Skuld felt herself pivoting in a sideways discovery. Now that _she_ was now almost an adult Goddess...it was getting to the point where she was being called upon to be a source of warm comfort for her older sister!

As she hugged Belldandy, it occurred to Skuld that in her near-panic, Belldandy was being typically old-fashioned...using the phone to call 24-hour travel agents.

There was a _much_ better way...

"I got it! Give me a couple minutes and I'll have our reservations...online!" Skuld said, breaking the sisterly hug.

"No hacking, Skuld!! Or...at least no hacking that couldn't be done by an Earthrealm mortal! _Everything_ we have to do to find my missing Keiichi...must be accomplished as if we didn't have any special abilities or powers! As if _we_ were mortals!" Belldandy explained hurriedly.

"Huh?!"

"Skuld...I have a hunch. Okay? Please, just do as I say! No arguments, alright?" Belldandy explained in a curt tone of voice that dismissed Skuld's curiosity. A voice that made it pointedly clear that she would tolerate no further questions from Skuld about her "hunch".

Skuld felt a surge of irritation in reaction to Belldandy's testiness. Normally, her sister would sit her down and patiently explain things out. Instead, Belldandy was urgent, insistent, impatient...and a bit snappy. She was acting like Urd during one of her 'crazy spells'.

"And _hurry_!" she shouted down the hallway after Skuld.

"As if I didn't know that already!!" Skuld shouted back as she ducked into her "Skuld Labs" room.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Belldandy watched her sister slam her shoji door open with a "clack!" and corner into her "Skuld Labs" room. She surrendered to the fates...if anyone could arrange a booking from Tokyo to Tindouf on short notice, it was her sister.

She wanted to call Urd, to tell her older sister what she had seen. Urd's conspicuous absence was sorely felt by Belldandy.

She _had_ sensed Keiichi in that poster...of this there was no doubt. But she had also sensed the echoing bleakness of something else.

The unmistakable void-presence of The Reaper...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

We saw a movie that was based on an old episode of the "Happy 2" TV series. Despite the gutcrushing tale Mara had spun, the fluffy romance of the movie still managed to pull at my heartstrings a little.

Ever since the first time I had watched a romance anime or a mini-drama series on Japanese TV, I had to reluctantly accept the fact that romance seemed pretty much a braindead proposition in American entertainment. But still very much alive in its Japanese counterpart. Almost every Hollywood movie I had ever seen expressed had almost nil in terms of romance, by my standards.. The typified male-female relationships in most American movies routinely portrayed the most vile qualities of interaction. The _worst_ aspects of relationships.

Betrayal. Dishonesty. Power and control. Sex as a means to 'extract' intimacy. Violence. Possessiveness. Greed. Infidelity. Impulsiveness.

For years, I had felt that there was something missing in the ideals of love projected by the American cinematic culture. There was a slavish 'sameness' to the films; the portrayals of love relationships seemed to always miss those few vital seconds. The few seconds between imitating what everyone expects of you...and being who you really are. The few seconds it takes to decide not to step into the cattle chutes of conformity to style, attitude and behavior. The few seconds it takes to be honest, rather than deceitful.

In contrast, the movie we watched had a subdued sexual tone, but it was mostly concerned with the struggles of a woman who was attracted to her old high school senpai. After graduation, the senpai had become blinded in an industrial accident. Initially, her attempts to express her feelings towards him failed miserably at each turn. Unable to show the love she felt for her romantic interest, she tried to help him instead...which only evoked hostility. Her "helping" only served to infuriate him, because he interpreted her attempts as coming from an attitude of condescension in regards to his recent blindness. Eventually, a blind woman she met served as a sort of 'go between' for the two. She suggested that her attempts to help him only frustrated his own efforts to regain his self-sufficiency, which is very important to the disabled. Then she visited the young man, and admonished him for trying too hard to do things the same way he had before he was blinded. Being blind herself, she took him down an unfamiliar street...to teach him a memorable lesson. He protested, complaining that it made no sense to go down a new street because everything was all the same now that he was blind. But by her example, she showed him that he could either go through life going down the same street every day, or he could challenge himself and travel on some different streets every so often. He would never gain independence if he didn't take risks...and accepting someone's 'special solicitude' was an important growth step, she noted. In essence, she made it possible for him to learn how to accept her help, and taught her how to help him learn how to help himself. In a touching scene, the blind young man came home from work one day, only to find that his 'friend' had labeled all of his drawers, counterspaces, cabinets, even canned foods in the refrigerator...with plastic Braille stickers. A language he was just starting to learn how to read. A language of her devotion...a language of love.

Of course, in the end, they got together.

And so did the blind woman...with the doctor she worked with in the veterinary clinic. He attached an engagement ring to the collar of her seeing eye dog when they were walking around in the park...and confessed his feelings for her.

As for me...the woman of my dreams was far away, perhaps lost forever to me. The woman sitting next to me was responsible for nearly depopulating the entire Earth of its humanity...and then in an unexpected act of contrition, or was it compassion?...provided comfort to me when I was gripped with an emotional nausea.

I needed to dance...to make my confession at the altar of the energetic.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --


	71. Pt 71: A Splendid Turpitude

**Part 71: A Splendid Turpitude**

Skuld combed through a host of Internet ticketing sites, searching for a reasonable airfare to Tindouf, Algeria.

"'Reasonable airfare', sis says," she grumped as she rapidly tapped keys. Actually, "reasonable fare" wasn't much of an issue here...since Cevn was gone. She knew where he stashed some of his Fukuzawas. The wads of 10K Yen notes that had come packaged with the Enigma Book had lasted a year and a half, but Skuld's recent analysis estimated that both funds would buoy the household only up until her sister's and Keiichi's wedding. Cevn had given half to Belldandy and Keiichi when he first arrived, back when he was a decent guy. Recently, Elder Sister and Keiichi had been spending frugally in the past two months since their engagement. Skuld realized that the shift in household finances was their attempt to conserve for the upcoming wedding next year. Thus, in Skuld's mind, Elder Sister's money was "wedding money"...untouchable by any means. If she had to steal, she would rather grab it from Cevn's savings. For a mortal, he was decidedly unimaginative in some matters...he had 'concealed' the stack of 10K Yen notes behind several books near his nightstand.

Besides, Skuld esteemed that he _deserved_ to have his money plundered! After what he did tonight...

It was after 2AM...and Cevn _still_ hadn't returned from his 'date' with the Mara!

Returning her attention to another unpleasant subject, Skuld growled at her computer. Her beautiful computer was rendered practically useless! Mortal computing always served as a source of steely frustration for Skuld, because it was so s..l..o..w! "Archaic" didn't even begin to describe how wretchedly ineffective they were!

As a Sysop Trainee, she had become accustomed to interfacing directly with the Yggdrasil Mainframe with a variety of techniques. All the information in all the Earthrealm's computers could be transmitted within a fraction of a second using Goddess Direct Interface methods. All she had to do was travel to one of the Core Nodes, 'think' about what she wanted...and the Yggdrasil computer would respond. Or she could simply 'touch' one of the Input Nodes, and the Mainframe would intuit her request and either grant it or deny it. While filling in for Urd, her requests were denied more often than not. But having to actually type in URLs and voice-in commands...

"This totally SUCKS!! This is as bad as Debugging!"

Belldandy heard the keening wail of teenaged angry frustration, and then returned to her chamomile tea, the fluid vibrating in the cup from her jittertense grip. Skuld was trying her best...but one can only do so much when restricted to using the same methods that the Earthrealm mortals used.

"It must be driving her into despair," Belldandy empathized to her image atop the tea. The image seemed to wink back, right before Belldandy drew another sip.

She knew that Skuld simply wasn't used to technology being this adversarial as a means to meeting her goals. Her younger sister _used_ technology...used it to accomplish whatever project she set her mind to. When things were the other way around, Skuld tended to lose patience rather quickly. Belldandy noted that this more mature version of Skuld was maintaining her composure far longer than the younger Skuld of a few months ago. _That_ Skuld would have probably physically menaced her computer by now...completely losing sight of the task at hand. At worst, _this_ Skuld's room was probably graffitied with several layers of misfired words...Skuld still was unable to prevent her mysterious "wordsplash" powers.

Of course, Belldandy was painfully aware of her own self-imposed limitations. She could simply encant a spell...and a set of tickets would instantly form on the dining table out of thin air. Or, she could step into the bathroom mirror and reappear in the Ladies restroom in one of the hotels in Tindouf. As much as Skuld must be frustrated dealing with mortal technology, Belldandy was equally put off by not being able to avail to her Goddess powers. But a deep-seated intuition informed her that _any_ use of her Goddess powers would befoul whatever expectations her parents were placing on Keiichi...and her. This observation wasn't merely a speculation or suspicion; it promenaded through her mind like a festive mikoshi during a boisterous summer matsuri.

For as much as she was aware that Keiichi was undergoing some kind of 'trial' to prove his merit, she realized that _she_ was also being closely observed and assessed by her parents. Mother and Father were rigorously thorough when they wanted to be.

_Ridiculously_ thorough in this case. She blushed as the phrase "anal-retentive" flashed in her mind.

"But if the shoe fits..." she sighed as she refilled her teacup. Whatever her parents wanted to prove by subjecting her and her beloved to _this_ ludicrous episode...was beyond Belldandy's comprehension. She had asked herself "why?" a few billion times since Keiichi was swept away.

Headaches had ensued.

Mother and Father seemed so receptive to the idea of her marrying Keiichi, at least right after he had thwarted Tyyr's challenge during that disastrous omiai that Mother had arranged. And when he asked for her hand in France at the Le Mans post-race reception, they were there...both of them nodding and smiling. So why this sudden turnabout from affirmation to apprehension?

It was a torture of the heart for her, knowing that her fiance was stranded in another part of the Earthrealm...and she had to deliberately remain virtually powerless! Her heart was wreathed with the loneliness of separation and the misgivings of inadequacy.

"Dammit! There isn't any flights scheduled for a _week_ on this airline!" she heard Skuld quail again. She could hear the sizzling in the air...no doubt more words were plastered on the wall of "Skuld's Lab".

"No flights...for a _week_!" she thought glumly. Belldandy suspected as much. In over two dozen phone calls, none of the travel agents she spoke to had even _heard_ of Tindouf, Algeria! She knew that the place was remote, in the western end of a country that had been torn by civil wars for the past several decades. On a map, the irregular border of Algeria juts out to the west, assuming an arrowhead-like shape. Right near the tip of the arrowhead plots the village-city of Tindouf. She had learned that the airport that serviced the city was paved, but flights were infrequent.

"Sip my tea...and trust my sister," a calming voice in her mind exhorted. The moment seemed to suspend itself upon itself...Now seemed to last Forever to Belldandy.

"Yahooo!! I did it!" the voice down the hall screamed triumphantly a half-hour later. Belldandy smiled inwardly and relaxed her shoulders, blanketed with relief at Skuld's success. She stood up, intending to walk to the Lab when an out-of-breath Skuld hurled into the dining room. Her younger sister was so excited, Belldandy had to dodge her sprinting form...narrowly avoiding a collision.

"I really had to _work_ for this one!" Skuld announced excitedly between panting gasps. "We leave next Friday from Tokyo! We have stopovers in Athens, and then Madrid. We'll get there the next morning!"

"Friday?" Belldandy thought with inward disappointment. It was a good thing that she halted short of verbalizing her disillusionment over the long wait. That would have only wounded her sister's feelings. She was certain that Skuld had exhausted all other possibilities. Without a doubt, no one on the Earthrealm could have gotten tickets any sooner, given the circumstances! Belldandy suspected that in the process of locating a fare, Skuld must have charmed the retailer...because the only way they could pay was in the form of a money order.

She regretted the fact that Keiichi had all the credit cards...she had never bothered to obtain a _true_ mortal identity so she could share a joint account with him.

She would make sure _that_ would change when she became Mrs. Morisato! Or even sooner! A couple of years ago, Keiichi had even suggested that she share his credit cards, for emergencies such as this. But Belldandy could never envision a situation where she was so totally stripped of her Divine powers. A Senior First Class License Goddess...and she was a virtual nonentity to the vast fiscal network of the Earthrealm mortals!

The comic irony was chilling in a roundabout way.

But Friday? They would fly out almost a _week_ from tonight!

"Please hold onto your resolve, my dearest Keiichi! I'm coming to find you soon!" Belldandy said under her breath.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Keiichi awakened to the crispchirp of night crickets, an invisible chorus perched in every direction on desert biers of his imaginings. It seemed that _everything _that filled his mind was of the desert. The funereal whilling sound almost serenaded him back to sleep, but he forced his mind towards alertness.

Sleep meant Death...

The tent was massively dark and silent, save for the insectsound and the snoring. Someone had surrounded his bedding with a 'curtain'; the geometric shapes on the woven rug were barely discernable in the darkness. His body felt a little stronger than last time; it was the first time in a couple weeks that he didn't feel parched with thirst. A cool wet cloth rested on his forehead.

As he lay on the makeshift pile of rugs and bedclothes, Keiichi tried to revisit his last moments in the desert...

_...He clearly remembered the sandstorm. Like a living thing, it was all around him; an enveloping veil of steel pins that was crushing over him repeatedly with bulldozer indifference. His breath had become hot from lack of oxygen. Soon after he had used his lastgasp strength to burrow into the sand, he had realized with absolute certainty that all was lost. That his life here was finished. Upon the shoulders of this recognition, Keiichi remembered how he surrendered to a pressing need to cast peace with his life. The images that he conjured up then...appeared to him now, an elaborate recapitulation of his final heartechoes..._

_He had been opportuned to swim in the river of Life, had met the twin soul of his Heart, had traveled in the halls of swiftness..._

_"Swift...ness?" he whispered aloud in a raspy voice. Something about the word seemed to pull his mind towards an secretive image. He closed his eyes and squinted, concentrating hard to shut out the various impressions clouding his thoughts._

_Probing deeply in the mists of barely-sensed memories, Keiichi struggled to extend his memory of his last waking moments of consciousness. It was difficult; at the end, everything had become so blurred by the significant fatigue of his lifeforce. He sensed the overmounting fear that had filled him, shadowing his soul so deeply that he thought his affright would smother him. As the fear had gripped him even more tightly, the reins of pain that rode herd upon his physical body seemed to escape._

_He recounted his thoughts..._

_Buried in the sand, key moments in his life appeared with filmworks clarity...the proverbial "seeing your life rush in front of you before you die" effect. Eventually, all the disappointments and triumphs of his lifeimage emerged from the random codex to form a pattern. The remembrances had begun to swirl in his head, like the eddying whorls of the sandstorm all around him. The swirling had become dizzying...and then had redshifted into something resembling a vortex. He had felt his consciousness being _-pulled_- into the vortex..._

He couldn't remember any more.

"No good...no good!" he whispered to himself, clutching the blanket in his hands. He felt like he had freshly awakened from a dream; the waking sensation one feels when they wish to return to sleep...return to the pleasant idylls of somnoneiros...and yet cannot reopen the mansions of somnambulance.

He noticed a bowl of water sitting on a small upturned crate next to where he was resting. Sitting up, he reached over and lifted the bowl towards his mouth. Just lifting the small bowl was a physical struggle. In the midst of his weakened state, Keiichi realized anew how miraculous it was _just to have strength_!

He spilled most of the water on his face, but he didn't mind. With the emptied wooden bowl resting on his chest, he tried once again to revisit his last moments in the storm. He returned his thoughts to the last moments in the limbo he had sensed a few minutes ago...

_Keiichi vaguely remembered floating in the midst of a funneling vortex. He discerned a small figure standing in dark phantom relief against a brilliant white light at the end of the tunnel. The whole scene was uncannily suggestive of the sensational accounts of those who had died and come back to life. Yet it was different. As he approached the source of the light, the small dark figure had seemed to approach him. It appeared to be a child...perhaps 7 or 8 years of age. His hair and skin was white, almost radiant. Disoriented, Keiichi had been convinced that he was somehow in a sterile hospital ward, back in Japan. The walls of the vortex had shifted and danced translucently all around him as he faced the young boy. Somebody had wordlessly spoken, and the young boy with the pitchblack eyes met his gaze._

_Lying in his bedding, Keiichi shuddered as he recalled the total Nothing in those eyes. No iris or pupil, just an absence of light and color. An absence that was either Nothing...or Everything..._

_He remembered the image of the boy more clearly now. There was some kind of dialogue going on all around him; he could hear 'voices' in his mind, but couldn't comprehend the words. He wanted to ask for help, yet he couldn't speak. The young child had looked at him...looked right through him...and had shook his head in the negative, clearly denying some kind of permission. But it didn't feel like a rejection to Keiichi at the time. Keiichi knew that he was dying...and the antics of a filament hallucination of a young boy really didn't make a difference at this point._

_Then he remembered how the young boy had smiled at him...next to Belldandy's radiant smile, perhaps the most forceful smile he had ever encountered. The boy's smile filled his vision...and then he observed the whirling walls of the endless whirlpool becoming fractally luxate. As everything seemed to collapse all around him, the scene had suggested the cascading waters of the Red Sea in the classic film "The Ten Commandments". Reality and surreality seemed to restructure themselves all around him, exceeding the most vivid sci-fi anime effects imaginable. Proprioception returned...Keiichi remembered sensing the presence of his body again. And it was spinning...spinning...spinning..._

_He had been spinning...in the _-air-_!_

"Oh my..!" he gasped as he _remembered_. He propped himself up on his elbows and looked furtively around his tented 'chamber', feeling a momentarily disorientation.

He had been flying!!

_Something_ had toiled to dig through the storm skewed sand-erg that had smothered him into the sand's silent ages! Keiichi remembered reaching up towards something...someone. A being.

The vision grew clearer in his mind.

_Against the horrific backdrop of the raging desert sandstorm, he had seen a man with __wings! He immediately sensed that his savior was an __Angel, surrounded by roaring air tortured with dark brown gouts of sand and dust. The memories came faster now, filling his mind with images and sounds. He recalled how the winged being had embraced him, lifting him up effortlessly from the ground. Cradling Keiichi against his chest, stroking his hair and face with fingered tenderness. Just like Belldandy would do..._

_He remembered being confused...was this Belldandy? Was this Holy Bell? He had looked up into the face of his rescuer...and saw something that burned itself deep into his Soul._

_The Angel...had _-his-_ face!!_

Keiichi felt his heart racing as he lay in bed...

_The Angel he saw...it was as if the Angel was a twin of him. His face was longer than Keiichi's, and his body was much taller, with a statuesque physique. His facial features were almost identical to Keiichi's, but there were significant differences in subtlety as well. Keiichi remembered looking at the Angel in shock. It wasn't like looking into a mirror...but it was close. As they flew through the sandstorm, he recalled seeing a shock of long flowing dark red hair with red-orange highlights whipping in the wind. The Angel had been naked; his bareness concealed by a hovering white cloth that snapped in the wind. Rose-colored wings seemed tethered to his shoulders._

_The Angel was smiling at him with love. His face was radiating love...rekindling the kind faces of his mother and father. Belldandy and her sisters. Megumi..._

_It was as if all the love in the world flowed through the eyes of the angelic being that was bearing him away towards survival..._

"Heroic...Vermilion...Swift?" Keiichi said aloud, the words flowing off his tongue unexpectedly. In response, a few of the snoring men in the tent shuffled their snores to a new pitch.

_He now remembered how the Angel had fought against the intense storm; using his long rose-hued wings to protect Keiichi from the sand and dirt that was pelting them like hailstones. The Angel wasn't using his wings to fly...there was nothing noticeably avian about his flight, like wingflaps. Instead, the Angel had seemed to be hovering; and yet Keiichi could remember being buffeted by the fury of the desert storm. The absence of colors in the surrounding air had terrified him._

_Then the sky ahead visibly thinned by degrees from dark brown to a mist-like blue-yellow. Moments later, they emerged from the edge of the storm, thousands of feet in the air. Keiichi panicked momentarily; he was too weak to grab onto his winged benefactor as they flew over desert terrain punctuated with gradually increasing outcroppings of spare flora. He remembered his consciousness fading in and out for what seemed like a few seconds..._

_With a final swinging arc, they swooped down near a series of pitched tents and landed on the ground. Keiichi remembered seeing thin bristly desert bushes and lots of small rocks. A moment later, the Angel carefully laid Keiichi down on the ground near one of the tent flaps. With a windwhistle, the mysterious being departed like a jet. Alerted by the sudden sound in his wake, the occupants of the tent stole out into the daylight...and discovered a near-dead Keiichi._

As his mind settled back into reality, Keiichi felt unsure of all of this. It would be easy to acknowledge the visions that had filled him; to say "and that's what happened!" and leave it at that. Yet, he _knew_ that he had been unconscious in the desert! Somehow, his mind's mirror was able to sense sights and sounds that were simply incredible!

If what he remembered was _the truth_...then this Angelic benefactor had exerted a heroic effort to save his life.

But why?

What was the singular reason for his rescue?

"Why me?" Keiichi thought. Almost instantly, his being was filled with the absolute knowledge that this Angel that had rescued him from the desert hellstorm...was _his_ Angel!! It was linked with him. Like Holy Bell was forever Belldandy's Angel. Somehow, he had a personal Angel, just like those of the Goddesses!

_This_ was the reason he survived the sandstorm that should have killed him!!

"I..incredible!" he gasped to himself. "Can I trust my memory?"

The series of mental impressions he had sensed had lacked immediacy...it had taken a deliberate effort of concentration to recall them; but once he remembered them, they had plunged _forcefully_ into his consciousness.

But this possibility brought up a series of questions. How could he, as an Earthrealm mortal, ever have a personal Angel? The episode with Skuld and Noble Scarlet came to mind. Keiichi clearly recalled Belldandy's statement that all Goddesses have Angels, but they couldn't give 'birth' to an Angel until they reached a certain point of maturity. If Skuld couldn't control her Angel...how could he? Did he even have to? He had never sensed a hint that he was ethereally connected with an Angel. Thus, this Angel...Heroic Vermillion Swift...had acted independently. Heroic Vermillion Swift had undoubtedly saved his life, if his memory could be trusted. And he didn't seem to be acting with a youthful caprice like Noble Scarlet had. Heroic Vermillion Swift was acting to protect him, just like Holy Bell protected Bell-chan!

His Angel's actions _were_ nothing short of heroic.

"Did Bell-chan have anything to do with this? Or Urd, if she had returned back from Yggdrasil?" he wondered, searching his thoughts, trying to find any clue or memory that could explain how it was that he had an Angel.

He gave up on that line of inquiry.

If it was true that Heroic Vermillion Swift was his personal Angel...than his rescue of Keiichi was an act of guardianship. Like Holy Bell, his Angel was prepared to do anything to preserve his host. Unlike Holy Bell or Urd's World of Elegance, his Angel didn't have to be summoned...perhaps _couldn't_ be summoned. Yet, Heroic Vermillion Swift had saved him...

It was self-preservation, borne out of infinite love for his host.

Keiichi smiled, realizing that once more, the Divine Order...or the Ultimate Force...had gifted him. The ultimate experience of Love now had a new face.

He basked in the calming knowledge that he was truly safe.

But as sleep began to claim him, Keiichi remembered Belldandy's parents...and with a sinking feeling, he reluctantly conceded to himself that he hadn't discovered the key to his beloved's heart.

He would have to heal, regain his strength, and continue his search.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

After Mara's superlative, if not self-indulgent, incendiary 'rehab' of one of the local winos, I insisted that we take off for a dance club. I had to brave another series of droll driving fits as Mara sped through a section of Tokyo that I had never been visited before. She pulled into a parking garage and gleefully announced, "We're here!"

Once out of the carpark bunker, I didn't have a clue about which dance club was an 'in' hangout. The streetlife reeked of a parched sophistication; a put-on miasma of trendmongers strutting their stuff with an aloofly-projected hipcool. Most of the people in dance clubs seemed to 'self-image' themselves based on what they saw on TV. So it was all hype and posering.

We walked down the street until I found a place that sounded halfway decent. I half-expected Mara to turn into a malicious snit and try to force me to take her into a dance club that played music I abhor...but she charitably agreed to let me choose the venue. It took a while, as many of the clubs rode sour on my musical sensibilities. Enka lounge jazz, Ginzabeat, Osaka C & W and nostalgia idol popsongs just don't light up my aesthetic marquee. Eventually, I found a club that seemed to play an edible mix of music.

After paying the cover and DJ fee, we walked into the club. Immediately, my mind started working to assess the music, trying to mentally construct the types of keyboards, patches, and samplers used. It was the usual simple danceclub arrangement; some electronica drumbeats with a couple of turntables mixed in, a sampling keyboard with a few dozen trigger patches, a sequencer that was at least five years old, and a keyboard that poorly emulated some basic analogue synthi settings.

Yet, the music had a good flavor of energy. The DJ was working hard with what he had...I tended to prefer dancing to Q-techno/GOA/Spita/Spacebient...but this would do in a pinch.

So I danced.

Much as I tried to ignore her, Mara still managed to catch glimpses of my attention from time to time. She danced sensuously, carving out her own space on the dance floor a couple feet away from me. My "female phobia" was in full-force here, as the sexual temple-cum-dance-club bathed me in strobing lights and sounds. I wished I was like most people...or what I think other people are like. I wished I could just relent and go with the hyperstimulus, without thoughtfeeling through my self consciousness... But I had to work into it. Eventually, I was caught up in the pseudo-tribal mystery play of the dancebeat...

I relaxed into the rhythm and danced hard.

After a couple hours of strenuous dancing, at least on my part, I decided to find a booth to take a cooldown. Seating myself as far away from the bar and the dance floor as I could get, I toetapped to the music and watched the human beehive enigma in process. My shirt was drenched with sweat after dancing my ass off; the freeform exertion had thoroughly cleansed me of my frustrations towards Mara. In fact, I even felt charitably towards her. If she wasn't a Demoness, she might make a pretty good friend. Or even a girlfriend.

I shuddered at _that_ unexpected observation!

"How could I possibly thing such a thing?" I confronted myself. A few moments after I rested and caught my breath, Mara inevitably found where I was sitting and lounged down next to me. She immediately ordered a drink. Over the next 20 minutes, I watched as she downed all sorts of mixed drinks.

Figures. Urd was totally into boozerushing; as Urd's 'twin' sister, Mara's consumption of mixed drinks was of a kine. I wondered what her powerup source could be. Urd's powerup source was any form of alcohol...but mysteriously, that powerup source had changed into peach juice a few months ago. Now, Mara was downing drinks with an Urd-like prodigious thirst.

And all of a sudden, she had a bar tab. At least, that's what the bargirl said every time she returned with a large mixed drink.

Which was about every two to three minutes.

When it became obvious that Mara didn't have to pay anything, I tipped the waitress a thousand yen for her repeated trips to the bar. Mara noted to me that she had an open tab at every drinking spot in Tokyo. I replied that she was worse than Urd, which brought an amused pout to her face.

Yet, it was the same uncomfortability, all over again. Looking at Mara as she gulped down something blue in her glass, the hot-blooded male in me was aroused against my confusion...my eyes inadvertently drawn to her curvy body. The maleness that I had fought against for so long, because it was an impedimenta rather than a release, seemed to reemerge in spades. There was nothing inadvertent in my glances at her figure, her cleavage, her legs. It was desire...a desire that was so mingled with loss and pain that it seemed to choke me. A pain that lingered, despite all the healing. It hurt just to admit that I was attracted to her. Every impulse that leaned into a calculated appreciation of her beauty...only jolted me into more confusion and guilt. Guilt, because my feelings were betraying my heart. Urd still inhabited the breadth of my heart...while Mara filled the grapevine of my emotions. I wanted the shame to go away...and Mara was the only person I knew in the club who I could even talk to about anything of significance.

Yet, Mara was like a shark in the sea. A killer.

"The time is getting late," I observed aloud, my biological clock sensing the approach of midnight. Mara nodded at me, then quickly downed her glass of orange something...

I could see a group of guys nearby eyeing us with greed and suspicion. I sensed that they were stoner prowlers, as they were wearing the typical hoodlum 'tough guy' sunglasses and tacky print shirts. A bad spinoff of the Shinjuku No Look, complete with grungy chain smoking attitude. No doubt, my inattention to Mara had probably cued them to think that I was giving her the digout. They looked like wolfs waiting for an injured lamb to be left behind by the herd.

Most of the crowd here were young OLs and college students, dressed casually as they churned up the dancefloor. Dancing is a dynamic mating vehicle for both sexes, but I wasn't here for prospecuity's sake...a fact that Mara seemed to ignore. Yet, Mara's foxlady dress and attitude was triggering my fears all over again. I felt self-loathing and fear, just like I did when I first arrived in Japan, before Urd.

Before Urd.

As I sipped my peach juice, I remembered my promise to Urd. When Urd and I first got together in Beijing, I had pledged my undying love to her. In the glow of that wondrous moment, I would have chased her to the ends of the Multiverse and back. But now, so much of me was dying...or already dead. The Urd part.

Urd was gone.

What the hell is wrong with me? I couldn't dance with Urd in France...an invisible force within my own survey of attitudes prevented me. So why could I dance _here_, with these people?

With _Mara_?

"Could I have _feelings_ for Mara?" I thought, conceding the impossible. Not a chance. I was simply messed up in the wake of Urd taking off on the "Cosmic Autobahn" to home and hearth in Yggdrasil. That had to be the reason why I was acting so sideways...because I had never experienced a division of my heart like this. I had always been loyal to every woman in my life. This conflict just wasn't the real me.

I bowed my head in resignation as I realized that an enigmatic force had wrecked whatever feelings I had for Urd. Had wrecked our relationship. She had been the one to depart...her sudden absence might as well have been a stark admission of irreconcilable differences between us. It was just like a divorce; here one day, gone the next. My love for Urd just didn't go the way I wanted it to. And why? Was it because I had been wrong...that my personal constitution was so messed up that I didn't belong with a Goddess?

That I _couldn't_ belong with a Goddess?

I tried to repress thinking in opposites and extremes, but the haunting question lingered through my thoughts, threading them on a stringworks of reluctant curiosity. Could it be...that I belonged with a _Demoness_ instead of a Goddess? Or perhaps that I belonged with _nobody_...and Mara was just preying on this fact? Maybe I was vulgar, dark and evil; qualities that I assumed would be attractive to a Demoness like Mara? That I possessed attributes that simply couldn't coexist with any kind of a love for a Goddess? If so, then what does the future hold?

"I shouldn't be here!" I gasped. The bent of my curiosity had produced a horrid sense of panic.

"What? What's wrong with being here? You danced, you had fun! You were looking at other women! I even saw you looking at _me_...and don't deny what was behind your eyes!" Mara intercepted my remark, looking at me slyly as she downed something pink.

I instantly regretted the enhanced hearing abilities of Demonesses. I tried to mum my thoughts, but realized that Mara could probably 'read' me with little effort.

I loved Urd.

What had happened between the two of us? During the entire course of our relationship, Urd and I had struggled against convention and each other. A series of misunderstandings had plagued us, one right after another. The Ultimate Force itself had exerted itself between us. Our own convictions on a variety of topics had to be compromised. We loved, we fought. Yet we never made love...I was too scared. I wanted to express my love to her, but how? If I was a God, I would have Shared with her...but I'm only mortal. Our fights were filled with passion and animosity, our reconciliations filled with empathy and tenderness. We were unable to physically touch, so we created a language of affection that transcended that inability. Both of our mindsets were slightly detuned away from the norm: I was a recovering addict and she was a Goddess who seemed to forget that she was a Goddess most of the time. She had become a good friend, perhaps my best friend. I used to like coming home from work at N.I.T., just to see her sunshine smile. We had fumbled around each other's hearts with a heavy-handed passion...

What passion?

Where was it now? Where had it gone?

In hindsight, my feelings towards Urd had seemed to flatline during the weeks before and after the Le Mans adventure. I just didn't feel the rapture any more. Her smile...was just another smile. Her eyes...were just eyes.

She was just another being marching in the parade of life.

I felt withered from heels to head...

"Vanagdrasil to Cevn..." Mara said, waving a hand in front of my eyes. "Are you in there?"

"Why should you care?" I shot back, angry with myself. I had just admitted that I had totally devalued Urd's importance in my life. The woman I claimed to love more than any other! I was pissed...no, I hated myself for this.

There is no such thing as love. Not any more.

I looked at Mara defiantly and asked her why she even bothered caring about what I felt.

"Because I _do_!" Mara stated, shocking me to the core. "And I don't know why! This was just another assign...oops, scratch that...this is just another night out on the town. Only this time, I'm with a mortal. So don't go thinking that you're special...just because you _think_ that I don't have any nights out with Earthrealm males! Nor Demons, for that matter!"

She sighed and looked at me with an unreadable expression.

"The reality is...I'm all alone here! But now that you're here with me...strangely enough, I feel less alone. Maybe I'm seeing the same things that Urd saw in you. Of course, that would be reprehensible in the extreme. _Me_, a Senior First Class Demoness...seeing anything of value in _you_? Utterly impossible! So leave me alone! Anyway, _I'm_ having fun...and I have fun plans for us for the rest of the night!"

Great. Mara's getting drunk.

"Has it ever occurred to you that this ol' Multiverse is filled with _sameness_? The Demons I grew up with...all the same. Belldandy, Skuld and Urd...all the same. Keiichi and his little buddies on the racing team...all the same. But you're different!" she noted.

"Well, if it's 'all the same' to you, would you please chill out and leave me to my misery," I countered levelly. "I don't appreciate your attempts at deception."

"Don't be such a grouch...huh? Waitaminute! I heard how you said that!" Mara said in a too-loud voice as she leaned towards me, her elbows on the booth's table.

"Eh?"

"_You're_ miserable? You? You're in love with a Goddess! And she loves you! That's why she left you, because you're a mortal and it's impossible for her to stay with you! Me...I'm only in love with myself. I only have myself! And I _hate_ myself! And I _hate_ you..." Mara near-shouted me down, and then gulped down a glassful of something red.

Well, I guess it's time to...in the immortal words of Spike from Cowboy Bebop...blow this scene.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

In the space of a few hours, I went from chaperoning a drunk Demoness to being tugged by the arm towards a 32 Flavors ice cream shop by a Demoness in cuteflirt mode. Only in Tokyo would the ice cream shops be open all night...otherwise I could have been heading back to the safety of my futon. Hopefully, Mara had gotten drunk enough to forget her planned "surprise" for me.

After we had fled the dance club, we located a sitdown kiosk and ate some ramen. Because of the incomplete meal at the fancy restaurant earlier, I was famished...so I quickly devoured my miso udon while listening to Mara as she spilled forth a drunken soliloquy about how bad she had it. Layer after layer of morose whining grated against my ears like sandpaper. The supernatural content of her ranting amused the ramen chef. With a wily grin, he egged her on...much to my dismay.

Jerk.

He was probably used to having some "live ones" detoxing at his diner at this time of night; no doubt a rich source of amusement as their alcohol-befuddled minds poured out a litany of verbal botulism.

Mara's complaining suggested a drunken salaryman who hated his job and his wife. Or a drunken wife who was burned out from the chore of raising her kids. Or a drunken ronin college student who had once again failed the college entrance exams. Or even a drunken high school student who had been dumped by her boyfriend. All the legion of miseries that plagued this so-called "modern Japanese Society."

Right now I didn't care. I just wanted another bowl of udon.

Combing past the irritation her whining evoked, I had to admit to an occasional sympathetic inclination for Mara. Like me, she had been "the alien"...pretty much abandoned to her own for most of her life.

Then, suddenly, she snapped out of it. To my surprise, she started acting like she was the life of the party...her mood became bright. Too bright.

"This is the most exquisitely tasty ramen I've ever had!" she announced in a cheerful voice. She hadn't touched it in over an hour, and now she was gratuitously enjoying it like it was the only food on the planet. Mara kept babbling about how good her miso ramen was; her praises irritated the old counterman, who probably sensed that she was mocking him. He promptly ignored us...and she ignored his reaction. After several more compliments, he snapped at her in a garrulous voice. Mara reacted by throwing the bowl at him.

Good thing we had already paid for dinner.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

The "Date from Hell"...as I privately termed tonight's excursion...moved on to another location, like a wayward circus of horrors. Mara was doing everything _bad_...and then flowing into apologies as smoothly as poured milk over pudding. It was as if she was deliberately trying to craft our time together into the epitome of a messed-up evening.

All of a sudden, she had an impulse to go to Studio Alta, a well-known landmark in Tokyo. I started arguing with her, until she reminded me of our "contract agreement". She hinted that she could restore the shieldspell over our temple home at a moment's notice...

Mara was in bitch mode.

Walking back to the parking garage, we hopped into her car and sped towards Shinjuku; Mara commenting about how much more fun it would be if she could drive on the sidewalk...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

It was almost 2:30am as we stood in front of the Studio Alta building, watching an idol-group video/commercial on the giant screen on the corner of the famous building. We were a short distance away from the Shinjuku train station, now almost deserted as the trains had stopped running earlier. There was a sparse crowd of people walking hitherwards on the sidewalks. "Fashion, restaurants and information", the three things most valued by young Japanese professionals and students, abounded here in Shinjuku. Studio Alta was like a Mecca for the youthful urbanites.

I half-hoped Urd would emerge from the videoscreen in like fashion to the time she emerged from the TV when she 'introduced' herself to Keiichi several years ago. I needed someone to rescue me from Mara! But I knew that there would be no rescue. And every time I thought of Urd, I felt glum...misty-eyed glum.

"There! I've seen it! Now let's go somewhere else!" Mara demanded impatiently. I wanted to pointedly note to her that she had probably seen every microbe of Tokyo for the entire four centuries of the city's history, but the effort was lost on me.

"Since we're here...let's go Kabuki-Cho!" she announced.

Uh-oh.

I knew about Kabuki-Cho, or at least I knew of its reputation. When Megumi had toured me around Tokyo soon after I first arrived, I saw "Kabuki-Cho" on the JR route map and asked if Kabuki-Cho was an entertainment district. I had innocently assumed that it was the arts and theatre district. She had looked at me with that patently wry smile that only she could make, and had answered, "Yes, it's an entertainment district. _Sexual_ entertainment."

There was no way out of this one.

Unlike most American cities, Tokyo has gateways to some of its districts, which lends it a rather distinctive flavor in my mind. Deep in the psyche of the Japanese is a favoring of ornamentation, something I discovered very quickly after I found myself here. I learned that the wrapping of the gift was a very important aspect of gifting; at Keiichi's urging, I had taught myself a couple basic ribbon-tying techniques for gifts. Restaurants spent a lot of attention to display. Department stores had elaborate shopping bags and boxes. This practice of ostentation applied to the city districts as well. Shopping streets are announced by large gateways, as are certain ethnic districts. This love of ornament has a practical use as well, as it suggests worlds-within-worlds...pretty much necessary in the dossier of abstractions that is Tokyo. Thus, the many gateways in Tokyo serve as the architectural 'wrapping' for the environs within. One could find Kabuki-Cho quite easily...just look for the gateway. It looked like a magnet, red with an arc at the top, with an inverted half-magnet overlapping the top, leaving an open 'loop' for the characters identifying Kabuki-Cho.

Now Mara wanted to go to Kabuki-Cho.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Belldandy observed Skuld's sleeping form, shadowbasketed in the flickering glow. Before going to sleep, her younger sister had lit up a few candles in an effort to settle Belldandy's nerves.

"This is so _contrary_!" Belldandy thought to herself. "I would give anything to be able to move forward in time just a week, so I can be with my beloved Keiichi next Saturday! And yet...my sister, the Norn of the Future, is trying her best to ease my impatience in the _here-and-now_. Because I can't sense the Future. Instead of helping me to reach a Future that I cannot touch, she's tending to my emotional pain regarding a future that I cannot reach. And that's why I love her so much...because no matter what...deep inside, I feel more so much more confident in the vicissitudes of the Future. Because of you, my dear sister Skuld."

She leaned over to kiss Skuld on the cheek and soothed her black hair with gentle strokes. Straightening out the sleeves of her nightshirt, Belldandy braided her hair for the night. It was definitely becoming Fall; the night air in the temple was beginning to edge towards winter briskness. It was about this time last year that the big storm had struck, causing significant damage to the house and the neighborhood. It was remarkable how much of SuperTyphoon Akira's damage had been repaired in just one year by the industrious mortals!

The memory of the storm caused Belldandy to shudder, as she reexperienced Keiichi's fall during the midst of the storm...and everyone's heroic efforts to see him to safety.

"What has happened to Cevn?" she wondered again. Last year, Cevn was the one who staggered out in the drenchfury of the storm to find help for Keiichi. He eventually encountered those two nice policewomen, Miyuki and Natsumi, who then transported Keiichi to the safety of the hospital.

Now, Cevn was a shadow of his former self...

Belldandy felt a momentary darkness sweep through her.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

We walked into the studio from an alleyway entrance. The hallway was dimglowed in red-blue from the lights peeking through the doors at the end of the corridor. I could hear excited voices and moans of pleasure. Suddenly, I felt really tired...almost exhausted. All the crazy events of tonight were catching up with me. Mara had mentioned that they were filming something here. Whatever it was, it was on the other side of the swinging doors at the end of the hallway.

The doorway had said "Studio". I wondered what kind of studio it was. Nearby were telephone clubs, massage parlors, fitness spas, hostess bars, bunny bars...all the trappings of the overground sex trade.

"This is it. Enjoy!" Mara said to me as she opened the door with a dramatic flourish. I froze in place as I realized that she had conducted me to the proverbial den of iniquities...

I saw a scantily dressed women walking around with trayfuls of drinks. Men in harlequin masks and leather leggings were whipping a naked woman. A couple on a bed, having sex in plain view...in fact there were beds everywhere. Some men were filming two women going at it on a round bed...

It was a costume party of the obscene.

"Mara...this is a _porno_ studio!" I gasped out, riveted by shock.

"Yep! Some of the time, it's a regular TV studio! Right now, it's very exclusive studio club. And this...is cocaine!" she replied, producing a baggie filled with crystalline powder and holding it in front of me.

I turned around and started to leave, but then Mara gripped me tightly by the shoulder. She was obviously using her Demon strength, because I was riveted to the spot, unable to exit the gym-sized room.

"You know you want to be here! Why deny yourself?" she demanded.

"Why?" I shouted in dismay, readying a vicious response. Mara didn't give me a change to float a dismissal out of my mouth.

"Why? Because I _want_ you!" she said, answering my rhetorical query. She studied my face, obviously pleased at my expression of shock. "And you _want_ to be here, otherwise you would've turned around sprinted out that door!"

I looked at the door...and it seemed a million miles away.

"Actually, I want you...to enjoy this. I want to enjoy you as you enjoy yourself doing things that you have sworn that you'd never do again! So don't get any wrong ideas that I actually want to take a bite out of your heart! I could have done that when I first met you, little mortal! To me, simply turning your weary world inside out isn't enough. There is a special...ecstasy...that accompanies the absolute corruption of an innocent. And right now, _you're_ that innocent, very much so! You've cultivated an innocence over the past dozen years since you stopped using drugs, Cevn. In a sense, you've regrown your virginity...protected it against your past excesses and perversions."

"I was _never_ perverted!" I argued back. "I was too..."

Mara interrupted me and continued, her blazing eyes boring through the knotholes in my defenses. I could see a brilliant red glow burning in her pupils...

"Neglecting this reality, you suffer yourself to be aloof from the vicissitudes of your true compulsive nature. You've created a little arbor for your dreams of purity and complaisance, lampshading it with deliberate ignorance of who and what you are. Yet, the truth is, your essential nature is appetitive. You're a drug addict! You're addicted through and through to whatever is pleasurable in the moment. And I'm certain that you've long suspected that your tension around women isn't fear...it's sublimation! A sublimation caused by the same 'addiction' that you claim to know so much about! You're afraid of your own sexual libido! And so you've decided that hiding is the only safe harbor from your lust. Besides, you're a guy. Guys are perverted."

"M..Mara! _Stop_ this!" I stuttered, as she bore her thoughts deep into me, causing me to feel callow and inadequate.

"But hiding...is still hiding. And you cannot hide from yourself...isn't that one of your so-called "recovery principles", eh? If you relinquished your inhibitions, you're afraid that you would become addicted to sex. That you'd want it all the time! Even now, your uncertainty glows! You _know_ that you belong here! I can sense it in your body; the rapid beating of your heart, the warming of your skin, the furtiveness of your eyes. Even without my supernatural abilities, I can see that you're turned on. That _I_ turn you on!"

"You don't turn me on!" I countered as Mara drew a line down my chest with a finger.

"So let go, I say! Immerse yourself in yourself! Release your fears back into the void from which they arose! Martyr your purity, and let your soul soar upon wingfuls of blessed carnality!" Mara encouraged me.

I was paralyzed at the truth in her words...and before I could reply, she grabbed my hand and hauled me over to a leather booth.

"W..what the..?" I shouted as Mara pushed me down roughly. Then she straddled me, sitting on my lap. I was too stunned to be aroused by her sudden burst of aggressive cupidity. Mara swayed to the music, grinding her hips against my groin...and then she wrapped her arms around me and looked at me, nose to nose.

And then she kissed me. Very adultly.

I tried to push her off, but the warm sensation of her lips seemed to rapidly fracture my resolve. She seemed to mold her body to mine like saran wrap. The warmth felt pleasant as my nerves seemed to relax by degrees. My mouth and face tingled hotly from her kiss as she kissed me like a lover. It was almost intoxicating; the kind of rush one experiences when inhaling a bag full of paint. I instantly regretted my past, regretted how I was reacting, regretted that I had ever done all those horridly possible things in the drug world...

"U..Urd!" I thought as a murky confusion fettered me.

"What is wrong with me? I love _Urd_...not you! You're her _twin sister_! And yet, I haven't ever felt this way...it's like I'm being torn...an agony of my spirit...and now you're soft...and here..." I gasped between kisses.

"Wanna have some fun?" Mara replied by shaking the baggie between our faces.

"Oh well! I've already lost everything that is important to me! Maybe I never had it in the first place. Why the fuck not..." I distantly heard myself say to her, my selfness receding into a haze.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"He's not here!" Belldandy said aloud. It was always difficult for her to overcome her reservations about invading someone's privacy, but she _had_ to pry. Had to see if Cevn had arrived home safely last night. An Earthrealm mortal that spent any length of time with a Demoness like Mara was tethered to an extremely dangerous situation.

Over the past few months, Belldandy almost believed that Mara had somehow reformed herself. After all, Mara was family! But this was an atrocity that violated any trust...she had obviously abducted Cevn!

There was no other explanation for his absence.

A hauntwinded foreboding had worried Belldandy from the first moment Cevn had agreed to Mara's conditions. His acquiescence at first seemed to be a grand gesture of selflessness, but Belldandy had seen thousands of martyrs go down in flames over the millennia.

Or even worse...

"He's gone...isn't he?" Skuld asked in a weak voice filled with disbelief. Belldandy nodded at her.

"What's going to happen to Big Sister..."

"I don't know...I don't know..." Belldandy answered, shattered by Skuld's question.

She didn't want to be the one who broke the news to Urd.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Urd was in her SysOp Node, detached from the central Yggdrasil Mainframe Cluster. Peorth was floating outside the Node, pounding on the window with hysteric concern, trying to gain admission.

Urd had locked her out.

As she looked on helplessly, Peorth saw Urd sobbing deeply into the flared sleeves of her robe...her whole body quaking with heaves of sorrow.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Despite the obvious language barrier, Keiichi was beginning to comprehend a few words of the tribesmen. After a fashion, they had established lines of communication via gestures. Strangely enough, during the past three days Keiichi hadn't seen a single woman. He had half-expected a 'nurse' at some point to come in and check on him, or offer him water and food. But the only ones who tended him were the men. Evidently, the tent he was housed in was males-only.

He sensed that the men were moody, despite the politeness that they accorded him. Keiichi tried to smile whenever one of the tribesmen visited him while he was awake.

Before he went to sleep this last time, one of the older men pointed at him and uttered "Japanese" with a deeply inflected voice.

They seemed to understand that he was Japanese...which was a tremendous relief! Perhaps, wherever he was, there would be a Japanese Consulate. At least these people had some kind of connection to the outside world...they had identified his nationality! The security of having _some_ link with his homeland escorted Keiichi to his dreams...

When next he woke up, Keiichi's back was sore from sleeping on the pile of bedding and rugs. After sitting up in his bed and drinking some water out of the goatskin satchel that served as a canteen, he tried to get out of bed. His legs wavered underneath him as he swung them over the side of the bedding and stood up uncertainly.

As soon as he stepped out of his cubicle, several men immediately rushed over and _restrained_ him, to his immense surprise.

Keiichi couldn't help but notice a glimpse of automatic rifles, stacked against a wooden trunk next to one of the 'walls' of the tent.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"What is wrong with me?" she heard the voice anguish as she chopped celery in the kitchen. Skuld repeated her words, a questioning mirror of herself.

It was a good thing that Skuld's pride in her feats of mecha crafting had required an audience for the first test run in this instance. Before, Skuld would have tested her machinery in private...needing only an impulsive self-appreciation to be satisfied with herself. But now, it seemed that Skuld's sudden burst of maturity had caused the 'mecha engineer' persona of her character to indwell her even deeper. Belldandy always sensed how much her sister's joy depended on her "feats" being appreciated by others...but now, it seemed that this dependence was far greater than before. Joy is best amplified by admiring witnesses.

Belldandy reflected on this new mysterious change in the teenage Skuld. So often, Skuld tended to work in seclusion, bragging about her accomplishments more by words than by actions; presenting her wonderworks only when they were finished, so that she could 'safely' gloat over them in public. This invitation for Belldandy to watch the first lab trials of Skuld's new machine was unprecedented, for the most part.

But what was amiss with her younger sister...to overlook such an obvious thing? The oversight was even obvious to Belldandy, whose orientation towards mechas varied from indifference to wariness.

Belldandy had to sharply remind Skuld not to send any non-biodegradable objects so far back into the past.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Skuld continued her labwork, constantly modifying her new invention. Her most recent attempt to build a machine that could send Betty back where she belonged...ended up in a stalemate between function and power source. During several test trials, the power source Skuld had designed consistently overloaded at the 50-60 million year ago range.

And that was with a mere banana as a test 'subject'. Returning a female Triceratops to the distant past was a quantum leap beyond sending a single piece of fruit back in Time...

Skuld peered at the smashed banana in the sampling cylinder and frowned. The outcomes of the abortive attempts were simple to reconstruct; once the time transport machine overloaded on this end, the structural integrity of the banana could no longer be maintained on the 'historical' end.

Skuld had bled traces of Ixodenum compound into the banana; this served as a dating mechanism to ensure that the banana had been sent back far into the past. Similar to the Earthrealm mortals use of Carbon-14 measures to retrodate archeoisms. However, pure Ixodenum was far more suited for the task of tagging, as it _never_ decayed over a length of time...one of the many attributes that made the arcane substance so precious to the Gods. It was often theorized that the interstices of the TimeStream strands were filled with Ixodenum, so that the chronometric properties of the individual TimeStream would be contained, and thus not affect the entire TimeWeb. This theory was neither validated nor denied by the Almighty.

Thus when Ixodenum was compounded with another arcane substance that _did_ decay over time, it allowed Skuld to be able to measure the results and calibrate the sensitivity of her machine. This was vital, because she was 'compressing' Time...from the machine's perspective, it had to block off a million years within a discrete epoch equivalent to a hundred years time.

What was even more difficult was that she was trying to accomplish this by employing her own computer, rather than the Yggdrasil Mainframe. Big Sister Urd had outright refused to accomplice Skuld's attempts to hack into the Mainframe; in fact, her eldest sister actually firewalled her attempts when she _did_ attempt some hackery. Urd then explained that she would report any further attempts by Skuld to backdoor into the Yggdrasil Mainframe. She scolded Skuld liberally, lecturing her about the fact that it was critically inappropriate to bypass the Lord and create a link with the Mainframe for the purpose of activating a program that _always_ required express permission from the Almighty. Urd noted that Kami-sama could have all their licenses on a platter if they were caught tampering with restricted Mainframe operations.

So using the resources of the Yggdrasil Mainframe wasn't an option.

In view of all this, Skuld had initially planned to send a pencil back, but Belldandy had stopped her in a timewise fashion. At the time, Skuld appreciated Belldandy's reassuring smile..."mistakes are but instructions clothed in another guise" Elder Sister had said. But inside, Skuld seethed with anger towards herself. How could she overlook such an obvious tenet of the experimental process? Her task was to send a living Triceratops back in time...so why would she want to send something non-living and inorganic to test her as-yet-unnamed mecha?

Skuld was deeply troubled by this major oversight over the next several days. It almost ruined her ambition to redesign her project.

"There's been so much going on lately," she said to herself. Keiichi's being stranded in the desert. Cevn disappearing with Mara. Megumi and Genji fighting. Big Sister Urd's heart being deeply wounded.

Betty, the dinosaur, was rapidly losing weight...nearly fifty Kg a day. And she was pregnant.

Skuld paused in her work, and slowly set down her tools. Much to her amazement, she realized that, for the past several days, she was feeling a little uneasy with the fact that there were no men in the temple house!

Well, there _was_ Tomohisa...but he was a boy. And he was obsessed with the Fall Sports Festival coming up at his high school.

"What is wrong with me?" she asked herself again, holding her hands over her heart. Two years ago, the present circumstances would have been a totally ideal situation! No Keiichi, to be a wedge between she and Belldandy. No Megumi, to prod and reprove and irritate her. And no Big Sister Urd...as an added benefit. No "big sister bust checks" or "ghost story taunt sessions."

Now, she missed them all. She even missed Cevn...slightly.

"What is wrong with me?" she asked the holophotic screen floating a couple feet in front of her.

When Belldandy had called Yggdrasil to talk with Urd, Skuld knew that her oldest sister was devastated. But something Big Sister had said kept troubling Skuld, lingering in her mind like a weed in the lawn. Urd had noted that "this can't be helped" in the midst of the long tearful conversation. Normally, that phrase wouldn't mean a thing...but Skuld sensed that it was way out of context. Something about the words telecasted...striking her as being familiar-yet-odd. It reminded her of something she had read in one of her manga. Furtively searching through her shojo manga collection, she discovered that the phrase she wanted to look up was in one of the volumes that Peorth had ripped off.

Then, later in the day, she was hanging out with Banpei and Sigel in the wooded grove of trees at the corner of the temple complex when the three Ninjettes joined them. The Ninjettes put on one of their comic martial arts displays to try and cheer up Skuld, but to no avail. Out of the blue, Skuld explained her confusion to the Ninjettes. Kodama was quick to note that "this can't be helped" was a catch-line commonly found in TV samurai epics. It essentially meant "nothing personal, but I have to kill you!" She elaborated on the phrase...and a moment later, the three Ninjettes were play-acting again, dramatizing some kind of a ninja assassin drama with their usual comic abandon.

From their theatrics, Skuld gathered that the phrase was both an honest admission of necessity for an act coupled with a sincere apology to the affected parties.

But why would Big Sister Urd say such a thing?

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Mara looked over at her companion...and hated him. Hated herself. Hated this entire situation.

A gray early morning sun illumned the sky in absolute remoteness as a stray crumple of newspaper flew past her feet. The alleyway was deserted, except for piles of trash and a few junkies nodding off along the graffitied prefab brick walls. The dearth of human movement had transformed the trashheap squalor, creating a sort of junkyard sterility. Something that could only happen in the mortal's Earthrealm, in large cities such as Tokyo.

She was thrilled that she had broken him; scrambling his recovery and his convictions to the winds. In the end, she had to intrude into his being and apply a bit of arcane 'inspiration' in order to accomplish her task.

For task it was.

The powers-that-be had provided her with very specific instructions on what to do. Corrupt Cevn totally, using whatever measures she deemed necessary. However, the latitude of her freedom was restricted in three manners. He was not to return to the Goddesses. He was not to fall in love with her...although she could lead him to believe that he had fallen in love. And there was to be no hanky-panky of any sort.

Two nights ago, she had introduced him to one of the most exclusive sex clubs in Tokyo. The no-sex part was difficult, as the carnal aura of so many mortals had even impaired Mara's judgment somewhat. She was only recently promoted to Demoness Senior First Class; the vault of tremendous Demonic powers that she now possessed were limited by inexperience. Being stranded on the Earthrealm also tended to confuse her, as she was experiencing a condition called Washout...

Mara argued with herself, upset that she had _nearly_ taken advantage of him while he was flying high on cocaine like a plum blossom in a fall breeze...and then feeling regretful that she _hadn't_ seduced him into a realm of luscious sexual abandon. It was tempting, in the sense that stealing is tempting...but she had checked herself before the clothes came off. Instead, she had fed him a steady stream of powders and pills to keep him numbed. No doubt, the transition from recovering addict to junkie would be a difficult one...and she didn't want him swinging towards suicide.

She had to keep Cevn alive. Yesterday, he had begged her to take him to a place where he could get a gun. Obviously, he forgot that he was in Japan, a virtually gun-less society. She left him alone for half an hour so she could report in on her progress...and when she returned, he had a gun. He had managed to roll a yakuza gangster and relieve him of his piece.

Mara immediately melted the pistol.

She could sense the growing Evil in him; it was much stronger than before. Whenever she would confront him, he would respond with a callously spiteful defiance. An invisible, self-destructive quality was awakening in him...and Mara had to admit that it both attracted and intrigued her.

Mara grimaced as the sunlight found the floor of the narrow alleyway. Perhaps this was nothing more than an exercise in folly, nevertheless, she had committed herself to shadowing Cevn for an indefinite period of time. Should Belldandy attempt to rescue him...it would result in pure warfare. She had to protect her interests and secrecy.

She hoped that she could hold out against her own uncertain passions...while keeping him alive.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --


	72. Pt 72: Finite Remordeum

**Part 72: Finite Remordeum**

Awakening to the sheetpale light of an early dawn, I felt myself blanketed by anguished remnants of nightmares recent, lingering in my thoughts like mottled nondescript clouds. Groping among noir-blurred memories, I sensed an alarming absence of any ardent expectations. My innermost being seemed to cry out for sake of a voice...the sheer weight of my compulsion fueling me towards craving _more_.

Any sense of positive actuality, of eagerness towards my life and existence, had been buried under the impact of the drugs setting my guts afire. My body felt like a haze; painful weights of flesh experienced in legions...my joints floated distantly like barely tethered balloons, noticeable only by tightening aches.

I was engulfed by apathy.

I had given up on myself, on life, on hope. Any sense of power had drifted away; my mind and body felt numb. I knew that I had picked up...that I had consciously decided to start using drugs again. Conflicted, I viewed myself with an admixture of revulsion and nonchalance. I felt disintegrated.

The alleyway was filthy and rat-infested. The rats were blind to my malaise, of course. I wished I could become a rat...to squeak and fight and die in a septic tank of appetitive oblivion. My heart and soul seemed to be leaking away like a rusty faucet...the dregs that remained were poisoned.

My life in the past several days had monolithed into a series of tombstone-like disjunctions. Having violated all that I held close and dear to my heart, all that was precious to the reaches of my soul that semble ethicities...I now felt totally disconnected from myself.

My recovery had protected me from the ethnonarcissisms of a society hell-bent on personal oppression via pseudo-sanctioned drug use. Over the years, it had been like a large shield, one that was polished smooth with my efforts to stay clean. But now, as I beheld the interior of my 'shield', I was haunted by the reflection of ugliness it yielded to my eyes. I could no more than it aloft in despair, mirrored into heartsickness. I wanted to throw it away, discard it. If I relinquished all my defenses, all my shields...it would just be easier to survive.

Already, I could feel the drives firing themselves inside of me, pistoning me with harsh drug cravings. Any function of abstinence had been lost, given away into the dark shadows of moments past.

I banged the back of my head against the wall to punitively wake myself even further into this nightmare. A hand grabbed my shoulder and shook it vigorously. I looked over to see Mara...disheveled source of my lustdrives...yelling at me to stop hurting myself.

As if I could pile hurt upon hurt any more.

Everything was an absurd nausea...incomplete in its wretchedness. The piles of torn trashbags and heaps of urine-soaked cardboard boxes reinforced my inner state. My outsides were my insides.

My insides were hurting for numb.

"Do you...have any more?" I asked Mara in a dry-rasped voice that was more a demand than a query.

The Demoness looked at wide-eyed and shook her head "no".

"Then let's stop screwing around and _get some_!" I shouted, feeling the gnaw of the maw.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Keiichi found himself getting comfortable with the language of his desert tribal hostmen. The terse voices with their throaty inflections and gruff, clipped sentences assumed a verbal cadence as natural as Japanese. Some aspects of their speech especially reminded Keiichi of Osaka accents. At times, the men's rowdy voices reminded him of yakuza, especially the growly trilling of certain consonants. His benefactors seemed to enjoy yelling at each other. At first the candorous exchanges resembled the clamor of angry shoutings that immediately precede a fistfight...but the inevitable chafe-brawls that Keiichi expected never occurred. He finally realized by assumption that the shouts were possibly a form of friendly teasing. The noisy din of voices was sometimes punctuated by whooping yells originating from outside of the tent...often after a prolonged drinking bout. These people were very much unlike the Japanese; they possessed a harsh majesty of demeanor that was both unreserved and impenetrable.

Keiichi reasoned that the men had restrained him from freely walking around the tent because they seemed to have a strict prohibition on outsiders viewing their women. He remembered watching a NHK special on the religion of Islam, which emphasized the strict regulation of intercourse between the sexes among the more conservative sects. In spite of this, Keiichi once caught a glimpse of a woman bringing some food items into the men's tent. She was dressed in a long black dress with a brightly colored shawl, with a black hood over her head and a doily-like veil covering her face below her eyes. The moment her eyes met his, he felt the passing of an electrical spark of curious embarrassment...and then she hurried out, harangued by the two elders. Fortunately, it appeared that she had been trying to surreptitiously catch of glimpse of _him_...otherwise, he suspected that he would have been harshly reproved by his hosts.

To his immense relief, Keiichi felt his strength returning, little by slight. The men seemed to cajole him into greater activity as he became more and more alive; inviting him to eat with them and offering him some liquor. Their meals consisted of some roasted meats, a sour gruel made from several blends of grains, various semisweet melon fruits, and buttered dry bread. Keiichi had no dietary qualms about eating these unknown foods; yet it took him a couple days before he could keep down any solid food with regularity. The Arabic men didn't seem to mind his vomiting...in fact, they anticipated it, leaving a metal bucket next to his bedding for just that purpose.

As the days stretched onward, there seemed to be a routine to the men's activities. Early in the morning, almost all the men would disappear. Keiichi had no idea of where they were going, or what they did...but he did notice that several of them would grab rifles. What did they have to protect themselves against? He could hear hoovesound from time to time, and his imaginings told him that they were departing on camelback.

Each day, two of the most elderly of their number remained behind. Unlike the others, the two oldsters wore fezcaps instead of the usual turbans, probably because they remained in the tent. Keiichi esteemed that the turbans probably served a practical purpose, offering protection from the harsh sun and desert winds. The two elders would then spend most of their free time talking, reading what Keiichi assumed to be the Koran, and smoking hashish from a large waterpipe. Following on that first mistake with one of the female nomads, whenever one of the women would enter the tent, the two old men would shout at her while hustling Keiichi back to his 'tent within a tent'. After two days of this, Keiichi and the old desert stewards reached an informal accord. Now, all they had to do was wave to him to "shoo" in the universal language of hand gestures and then he would retreat to his 'room'.

Despite his gradual regain of health, Keiichi still suffered many bouts of weakness and dizzy spells. The nomads had given him several suits of their clothes, since his own clothes were battered beyond repair by his trial in the desert. Thus, he was dressed like his hosts in a longshift shirt and a pair of loose trousers. One day, he examined his chest, and was both shocked and fascinated to see how visible his ribcage was...his chest was stretched taunt over his ribs and collarbones. Happily, his body was starting to replenish itself; the bleeding sores on his hands and feet were finally starting to scab over.

Keiichi wanted to talk to somebody...anybody...just to relieve the tedium. Bested by his restlessness, he would attempt to stand and walk around the tent. Many times, his feet would go out from under him or his mind would get fuzzy, forcing him would lay down and wrap himself in a blanket. Mindful that he was still convalescing, he nevertheless was possessed of a rankish whim to take up the old men next time they proffered him a smoke from their hookah.

It was either that, or take a swig of their liquor.

Keiichi had experimented with marijuana like most Japanese middle schoolers, but he didn't favor the mental fatigue that always accompanied getting high. But he had never smoked hashish...

So one day, while he was sitting on the mound of blankets that made up his 'bed', the two oldsters once again gestured to him with the hookah...and he walked over and sat on an ornate stoolpillow and grabbed the hose.

The two nomadic grandpas looked at him cheerfully, appearing every bit the sagacious hosts. They demonstrated for him how to use the woven tubes that were connected to the ornately worked metal centerpiece. Then they swapped old water for fresh and handed him one of the snakelike tubes after wiping the end off with a damp cloth. Nodding to them courteously, Keiichi inhaled vigorously and held his breath for a few seconds. Then the smoke seemed to claw its way out his lungs like a prisoner on death row under the shadow of the gallows.

_Cough! Chocgh! Hackh! Cough!_

Bluish smoke spewed out of his lungs in gales as he coughed until his eyes watered. And then some.

The two old men roared with mischievous laughter as this, pointing at him and shouting "Kef! Kef!", which Keiichi eventually assumed was the word for hashish in their native tongue...not to mention that it was a good onomatopoeism as well. He smiled back at them. No doubt, his flushed face was doubly the result of embarrassment coupled with lunguistic gymnastics.

"What would Belldandy think about _this_?" he noted guiltily to himself. For a moment, he vividly recalled her vigorous remonstrations with him regarding his smoking habit when he first met her:

"These are destroying your lungs...Can you read the warnings on the packs, Keiichi?...Did you know that over half a million people die each year from smoking these...I can smell that stinky smoke on your breath again, Keiichi," Bell-chan would say. Her litanies of censure initially grated on his nerves and made him privately curse himself for his wayward wish for her to remain by his side. But eventually, he found it within himself to try and quit cold turkey...and amazingly enough, he succeeded. Of course, this was after Urd had arrived. Keiichi often suspected that Bell's older sister had done one of her 'somethings' to facilitate his quitting the smoking habit...as he didn't experience any of the crazy straw-chewing psychological and physical withdrawals that accompany an abrupt cessation of cigarette smoking.

One of the men covered Keiichi's shoulders with a woven woolen cloak as his hacking and coughing slowed down. The other man fetched a turban, and then tied it around Keiichi's head. Producing a mirror, the man pointed it so Keiichi could see himself. He was dressed just like one of them! This brought on another bout of laughter. The men seemed solicitous to the point of good-natured friendliness. They seemed to have a playful wink in their eyes as they handed him a tube for another go, rubbing their grey-white beards as they observed him with keen interest, perhaps to see what would happen if he tried to smoke again out of the hookah. Keiichi felt a smallkid impulse of rebelliousness...a sense of willful vellity mixed with a defiant "look what I'm getting away with!" attitude.

This time, Keiichi drew on the pipe cautiously, feeling the water-cooled smoke curl smoothly down his throat. He barely succeeded in avoiding coughing this time, which brought a sporadic series of handclaps from his greybearded hosts.

A short while later, Keiichi felt his senses smooth out into a calming languor. A tranquility seemed to infuse him as he noticed little visual 'glitches' dancing in the periphery of his sight. The interior of the tent seemed to fade into a dreamy haze, partially because it was filling up with hash smoke. A sensuous intoxication gradually descended on him, sweetening his mood and soothing the many aches in his body. The voices of the two men seemed to take on a slight echoing quality. His mind fogged, Keiichi felt like giggling for no particular reason.

This whole misadventure was so tripped out, so insane! Here he was in the middle of the Sahara desert, sharing a tent with a group of nomadic tribesman who had probably never even seen a Japanese citizen before, eating strange tasting melons...and smoking hashish! Keiichi was always one who only lightly veiled his individualistic convictions. His sense of identity only ran knots against the grain in Japan, with its cultural emphasis on accommodation and conformity. Thankfully, his parents were mostly liberal in outlook; they neither encouraged or discouraged his independent character. They just accepted him as he was, for the most part. Thus, his occasioned antipathy towards conformity led him fit right in with the "misfits" of the N.I.T. MCC, now the N.I.T. Unified Club. Cevn's arrival at their temple home only served to push Keiichi further in the direction of liberated individualism, enabling Keiichi to experience firsthand the contempt for convention as behaved by a gaijin that he respected. And his younger sister Megs was just as free-thinking as he, in her own way.

In his own way, Keiichi knew he was just as skewed as Tamiya or Ootaki...

"This stuff is _powerful_!" he observed to himself, feeling the hashish intoxicate his mind towards fatigue. "I wonder what my senpai would do if they were in my shoes?"

And still, the old men kept offering him more hashish. Keiichi sensed that these two grandmen of the desert were greatly amused by the break in the routine. It was quite possible that these two men had shared the pipe and each other's chitchat for decades. It seemed to Keiichi that these two deans of the desert were delighted by the opportunity to share their smoke with a young foreigner, vicariously indulging in the fact that he was probably breaking a few personal taboos by smoking hashish with them.

"I'm an all purpose cultural egotist...and we're the three Wise Men!" Keiichi shouted to the men in a delightful burst of manic cheer. Despite their inability to understand a single word Keiichi had said, the old men could sense the spirit of his words, the core of his feeling. The two elders donned their desert turbans and attempted mock-dignified poses. Soon, all three were gripped by cheerful rib-splitting laughter.

For the next few hours, Keiichi found himself engaged in stoned hand-charades with the two oldsters. Using gestures, Keiichi was able to describe Belldandy...and when he moved his hands in a curving motion to indicate his fiancée, the two old men whooped and clapped in sparkly delight. He tapped his chest and pointed at his hand, trying to indicate that they were getting married. Then he pointed at the sky, and them himself. One of the old men said "astronaut" in a distorted pronunciation, causing Keiichi to giggle. Keiichi guessed that he was trying to 'say' that Bell-chan had come from the sky. Keiichi eventually made it known that he had a younger sister, and that he had several friends. For Tamiya, Keiichi beat his chest like a gorilla...and for Ootaki, he messed his hair up to emulated Ootaki's moussed spikes. The men responded in like by charading the habits of the men of the tribe, and describing one elderly woman with less than decorous intent. Keiichi learned that they had both fallen for the same woman in their youth...and she had spurned them for a third man, now deceased. Decades later, it was all a big joke to the two elderly friends.

Their carefree cheer was all fun...and it allowed Keiichi a brief reprieve from the weightier concerns of regaining his health and resuming his quest for the Key to his Beloved's Heart.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

The idea wasn't as simple as it initially seemed. I had to consider the nature of crime in Japan, a country that tightly regulated the possession of hand arms. Of course, there were cleverly faked handarms, but most shopowners would be astute enough to disregard an armed robbery. I thought about getting a knife, but I questioned whether I could go through with a robbery at knifepoint. Marital arts weapons were out, since my martial arts experience was limited to TaiQi...and Japanese culture glorified the martial arts. The last thing I needed was to encounter a judo expert when I was robbing his liquor store. Then, there was the mysterious yakuza to add another element into the criminal mix. I used to always carry a gun with me during the last few years of my active addiction, for protection and to obtain money for drugs.

"My active addiction?" I observed to myself with a shrug of my shoulders. What a lamentable, laughable irony! Part of me was still the recovering addict...still caught in the past...still thinking from a clean perspective. But this shell of my being was being pecked at from within by the emergent cravings of my drug addiction. I reluctantly admitted to myself that I no longer _was_ a drug addict...that I _am now_ a drug addict.

The Demoness wasn't any help. She wouldn't conjure up any cocaine, and she wouldn't participate in any robberies. I suggested that she use some of her arcane powers to create a diversion...which she ixnayed with visible contempt.

"I'm not going to let you use me for parlor tricks so you can feed your habit!" she had barked back with an angry distemper.

So I was on my own. No place to roam, except all of Kabuki-cho...the seedier sections of Tokyo.

I had to adjust to the nightlife here.

If Kabuki-cho was rife with hostess bars and whores, this meant that someone was fueling the whole enterprise with a lot of drugs. So there was a source, somewhere. And sex bars also meant drunk salarymen...easy pickings. So there was a source for money to get drugs.

Frustrated, I decided to sleep it off until the twilight neon hours. Amazingly, there were winos sleeping in cardboard boxes in the alleys. I learned the hard way when I spotted a large refrigerator box and tried to haul off with it. Its inhabitant rustled around inside, then emerged brandishing a metal baseball bat.

I wanted to destroy myself...which almost led me to challenge the drunk until my Demoness companion pulled me away. She thought this incident was highly amusing, if I were to judge by her raucous laughter. Fed up with her, I told her to get the fuck away from me and she snapped back that she "couldn't" leave me. She added that she had to guardian me for my own good.

So why couldn't she "guardian" me with a key of coke?

I finally snuck a bottle of rice wine out from under the nose of an elderly convenience shop owner. Proud that my thieving skills had somehow kept their polish, I decided to drain off the bottle I had just boosted, and then 'force' myself to sleep during the daytime in a drunken stupor.

Note to myself: keep plying the Demoness with hootch and she may come around and be of some service to me.

The Demoness did make an interesting remark to me before I passed out. At least she was an amiable drunk, even if she bitched most of the time when she was sober.

And then she asked me if I had ever read the autobiography of a spring flower...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Belldandy's hurried packing grated steadily on Skuld's nerves. Her older sister was piling stuff haphazardly into her luggage bags...her usual sense of preparation and organization was totally lacking. In contrast, Skuld was packing her suitcases with care, neatly arranging every item. It was as if she and Elder Sister had exchanged roles; now she was the neat freak and Belldandy was childishly messy!

Belldandy finished stuffing her suitcase and sat down on it, trying to pack it all down. A few stray garments seemed to peek out between the edges of the suitcase, causing her to sigh in frustration.

"I just want to be finished with all this, and then leave _now_!" she shouted, jumping up and down on the suitcase, causing her sister to glare at her. Belldandy glared back at the teenage Skuld, until her senses returned and she realized that she was behaving rather poorly.

Since things weren't going her way with the suitcase, Belldandy decided that it was time to talk to Urd again, giving herself a reprieve from the chore of packing. Each day that passed become increasingly a source of frustration! She was losing her patience with having to do _everything_ in mortal fashion, even down to such matters as packing her clothes and toiletries. And to make matters worse, Skuld seemed to be coping much better than she! Somehow, her younger sister was keeping her cool, which aroused a bright glimmer of jealousy in Belldandy.

After going through the usual call routing at Sysop Central, Belldandy found herself talking to Urd about going to Africa. She noted a hint of the maudlin in Urd's voice...a barely sensed edge of sadness.

"So...you really think Keiichi is in Algeria?" Urd finally asked after Belldandy finished her tale of the oracular.

"Yes! I'm sure of it! We leave tonight by plane..."

"I'll make sure to schedule safe weather conditions with the Yggdrasil Mainframe for your flight," Urd quipped.

"Urd! That's not very funny! It's been totally unhappy chore...having to do everything like the Earthrealm mortals do. I haven't used my powers in over a _week_! I feel as if I was a blindfolded Earthrealm mortal without my powers," Belldandy complained.

Belldandy could almost sense Urd's frown over the phoneline.

"So what's the problem? Y'know, Bell...there are over a million blind Earthrealm mortals that seem to do just fine. In fact, many of them function really well. So consider this...you're going to be marrying an Earthrealm mortal next year. Which means that you'll have to make a lot of sacrifices on your part. Over the past few years, you've been able to refrain from using your Goddess powers quite often...on your own initiative.

"So?"

"Up until now, you've had to practice restraint on using your powers out of necessity, in order to protect Keiichi. Or because you _enjoy_ doing certain things in the mortal way, like cooking and baking. Several times, you've even followed along when he asked you not to use your powers, Belldandy. Like in that recent Le Mans race a few months ago. But now, all of a sudden, your choice to keep from using your powers is causing you all sorts of discomfort. Once you _have_ to keep from using them...it's become a major league hassle. It's no longer fun for you, is it?" Urd explained.

"Life isn't always supposed to be fun..." Belldandy hurriedly answered.

"Yes, but what I want to know is..._why_? Why is it all of a sudden such a hassle for you when you can't use your powers?" Urd asked in a sharp voice. Belldandy felt her confidence empty out, shuddering at the implication in Urd's words. She didn't understand why this self-imposed prohibition on her Goddess powers had seemed to grow a life of its own. To become such an irritant. She had been so caught up in wanting to find Keiichi and seeing her lack of ability to apply her awesome Goddess powers to do so...that she hadn't noticed that she was slipping away.

Quite often over her years with Keiichi, Belldandy found herself performing daily household tasks because she enjoyed it; a fact she had reminded Urd and Skuld of numerous times. This inclination towards householding had spurred some good natured teasing from Keiichi's younger sister at first. But now that some outside agency was forcing her to relinquish her gifts, she had to admit that it was _more_ than merely irritating. It was utterly disconcerting.

Belldandy examined her inner state again, to calmly reflect upon the source of her discomforts, but returned time and again to the horrid awareness that she felt _crippled_. After a few moments, she sighed to herself. She couldn't even use her Goddess abilities to discern the answer.

"I really don't know why, Urd," she finally responded, truthful to Urd's question. "I sense that being here on the Earthrealm so long has thrown my equilibrium off a little bit. Perhaps I need to join you in Yggdrasil, to take a break from this place. Back home, a week without using my Goddess powers would pass in an eyeblink. And then..."

"And you don't think _this_ is a _huge_ problem?" Urd interrupted. "You're supposed to be looking for Keiichi...and now you want to return to Yggdrasil to 'take a break'?! There's going to be _no_ breaks when you marry Keiichi! The Earthrealm is going to be your home. Not here! Have you considered the fact that he's already lived a full third of his life? Are you going to age along with him? How are you going to deal with living in the perspective of mortal time? You know that time passes much slower for us when we're on the Earthrealm. How can you manage to call his life _your home_ when you have Yggdrasil to return to, dear sister?

Belldandy swallowed hard as Urd's words hammered at her.

"On another note...does Keiichi even know about the inevitable problem you're going to run into concerning family matters? The one that fills the room like a dread giant crow! I don't mean to put doubts in your head, Belldandy...and perhaps I'm merely reiterating concerns that we both know are quite valid...but if a week without using your powers is overwhelming you, what about a mortal lifespan? The friends you have now, like Megumi, Sora, Sayoko, Tamiya, Ootaki, Toshiyuki...they're going to have kids and grandkids. Which means that you're going to _have_ to remain discrete about your powers a lot more in the future! It's going to be so much different than it is now, once you're married to Keiichi. Marriage means _life together_; there's no going back on it once you say 'yes'! I can run off to Yggdrasil because I'm no longer attached to Cevn...but you don't have the same luxury to come here and take a 'vacation' every time the going gets tough down there!" Urd said roughly, every bit the rough and tumble anegohada-type older sister.

Belldandy almost dropped the phone. Her legs felt weak underneath her, just like they did when she sensed Keiichi in that poster last weekend. She found the nearest futon and quickly sat down.

"Urd, stop picking on her, for Almighty's sake! Can't you see that Elder Sister is under a lot of stress? Besides, you were in love with a mortal once! And don't give me any BS about you not having to worry about all this stuff too! And what's this about you not being involved with Cevn any more?" Belldandy heard Skuld counter argue. Skuld must have picked up the other line to listen in on the call.

"I...I don't want to talk about this any more!" Belldandy stammered weakly. "I just want to be back together with my dear Keiichi! _NOW__!!_"

The phone went silent, and Belldandy thought she heard sobbing on the other end of the phone. Once again, she was frustrated that she couldn't see her sister, back on Yggdrasil. Another stupid limitation of being here on the Earthrealm.

Receding, plagued with doubts, Belldandy shivered in fear at the onus of her thoughts. All of a sudden, so many things about the Earthrealm seemed to be limitations, rather than liberations. Her sense of wonder at living here on the Earthrealm was rapidly evolving into alienation and homesickness.

Could it be...that her decision to marry Keiichi...to bind her future to his future...was a mistake?

Was an impossibility?

The silence of her heart drew her in...Urd's soft sobbing on the phone was echoed by her own gentle unteared sadness.

"Urd, could it be possible that our sister may be having these problems because the main source of her presence on this Earthrealm isn't part of her life at the moment? I know this sounds obvious...but think about it! Sis and Keiichi are bound together by the Ultimate Force. That's one thing. But they're also bound together by love for each other, and I think it's absolutely possible that she's feeling loveless. A..and this is reflecting on _everything_, especially how she views life here on the Earthrealm! It'd be as if I was here, but I didn't have all my wonderful machines and computers to play with. If that were the case, life on the Earthrealm would completely suck eels! Without Keiichi, all the allure and joy that sis feels about her life here on the Earthrealm...has drained away. That's gotta be why she's so upset with the fact that she can't use her Goddess powers! And what's really weird is the fact that she's freaking about it...while at the same time, not using any Goddess powers doesn't bother me all that much! Me...the young girl who couldn't even ride a bicycle a couple of years ago! It would make sense to assume that _I'd_ be a basket case under these circumstances...but I'm not. I'm frustrated a bit because of this totally uncool situation, but it's not all that bad. And I believe that I feel this way because the people that I love are here with me! Elder Sister, Banpei and Sigel...they're here! But her main connection with life and love here...is _gone_. Can you even begin to imagine how heartsick she must feel?" Skuld explained.

Belldandy was stunned as she listened to her younger sister's viewpoint. She felt a heartdeep fluttering of shock, amazed at how perspicacious her younger sister could be. In a nutshell, Skuld's crack analysis of her malady of discontent was surgically accurate. Of course she felt like all the ardor that accompanied life on the Earthrealm had been stolen away when Keiichi was abdu..had disappeared!

"Skuld...did you really say what you just said?" Urd finally asked in a voice filled with wonderment.

"Yep! That was all me!" she heard Skuld's voice chime with pride.

"I think she's right! I've been feeling really groundless since my fiance has gone missing. Perhaps this easelessness has somehow been accompanied by a disenchantment with life here. The virtues of this wonderful Earthrealm that allow me to cheerfully relinquish my Goddess powers...seem to be little more than prosaic shadows without my beloved Keiichi!" Belldandy declared with a start.

"Yes!" she heard Skuld exclaim in affirmation.

"I remember how you, Big Sister, seemed to _light_ _up_ once you fell in love with Cevn. I wasn't here when Elder Sister first fell in love with Keiichi...so I don't know whether it was the same for her. But you were, sorta. Could it be that the three of us are here on the Earthrealm, not just because of Keiichi's wish...but because we're part of some higher agenda? Neither one of us are GRO Agents, like our sister. Yet you were called upon to grant a wish for Cevn, and I was transferred here as an Earthrealm Trainee. Maybe we're here to learn _how to love_..."

Skuld felt a flush of embarrassment as she clipped her sentence short. She was about to suggest that all three sisters were supposed to fall in love with Earthrealm mortals! Elder Sister...well, her situation was obvious. Keiichi's wish was an unstated declaration of love, which had later blossomed into mutual affection between sis and he. Big Sister Urd...well, her situation was unexpected. The last thing Skuld had ever expected was for her to fall for Cevn. But Big Sister had _also_ granted a mortal's wish...and just like Belldandy and Keiichi, she hooked up with the mortal whose wish she granted. But as for herself, Skuld didn't know. If she was here to experience love with a guy from the Earthrealm...how come it wasn't obvious _who_ that guy was? Who was she supposed to fall in love with? Would the phone ring in an hour and she would be dispatched somewhere to grant a wish for a mortal man; a man she would later fall in love with? Could this be why she was going with Belldandy to Algeria? The thought of traveling to the desert for the purpose of finding a young man to fall in love with upset her greatly.

Skuld noticed she was covering her mouth with a gloved hand.

"Why am I so reluctant to go to Algeria to fall in love with someone?" she said to herself.

Unfortunately, neither the telephone nor her hand covering her mouth tuned out her words...

"What are you talking about, Skuld?" Belldandy asked, her voice peaked with curiosity.

"Yeah, what do you mean 'fall in love with someone'?" Urd added, a teasing tartness to her voice.

Hung by her tongue, Skuld could only blurt out an apology...which ended up being more of a clumsy admission.

"So, you think that you're going to meet a man there, then be asked to grant his wish, and then you and he will _fall in love_?! That's utterly ridiculous!" she heard Urd's near shouting voice.

"If it's so ridiculous, then how is it that _you_ fell in love with Cevn, when the Ultimate Force and your status as Norn of the Past supposedly made it impossible for you to ever experience romantic love again, Urd?" Belldandy asked, rescuing Skuld. Besides, she was dying to find out how her sister was coping with Cevn going out on a date with Mara. And never returning because Mara had kidnapped him.

Urd _had_ to know about what had happened...and now was the time to talk about it!

"I don't feel anything for him any more. End of discussion!" Urd replied with crisp irritation.

"So you say. But what do you think about Mara's kidnapping him? Doesn't it bother you at all? Skuld and I can't use our Goddess powers to get him...doesn't that make you want to come back and fetch him away from her?" Belldandy challenged her older sister.

"How do you know that he hasn't _chosen_ to stay with Mara?" Urd shouted back angrily.

Skuld was stunned by Urd's assertion. Or was it an accusation? Belldandy heard sobs through the silence of the phone as she attempted to disbelieve what Urd was implying.

"Urd...how could you even say such a thing? What do you know that we don't know?" Belldandy asked gently.

"Why don't you both just leave me alone and go rescue your future husband! It can't be helped!" the voice shouted over the phone.

After her embarrassed flush faded down, Skuld had walked into the dining room to be with Belldandy. She stopped in midpace as she heard those words again over the phone.

It can't be helped.

"_What_ can't be helped, Big Sister?" she asked.

"Skuld, if you only knew... Yes, I miss him! Yes, I'm here because of him! Yes, there is something really big going on that I can't...that I _won't_ talk about! And there's a reason why he's with Mara at the moment! Don't bother asking me why, because I'm not going to explain it to either of you! It's already painful enough!" Urd answered.

Belldandy frowned at this. Urd was rarely this reserved and dodgy, unless she had done something wrong. And if she had done something wrong to cause her to be _this_ reticent about letting her sisters in on whatever was going on...it must be a problem of cosmic proportions!

"So what are you trying to cover up, Urd? A mistake's only a mistake. But it can turn into a disaster if one makes the error of downplaying it. If you talk about your problems with us, perhaps we could undo what has been done..." Belldandy encouraged.

"I don't have _any_ problems! And I didn't do anything wrong! You're the ones who should be worried about what's wrong! It's right under your noses!" she heard Urd burst with frustration.

"Does it have anything to do with Keiichi?" Belldandy asked.

"Why do you think that _everything_ have something to do with Keiichi?! I'm surprised that neither of you have figured out why Mother and Father dropped him in the middle of a desert in Africa! It's been emotionally taxing all the way around, but you both have to hang in there! Now, back to you, Belldandy...why don't you just say 'screw it' and use your powers to go fetch him?" Urd asked evasively.

Belldandy shook her head at Urd's lameling attempt at evading the topic. She willed herself to surrender to the hope that Urd's motives in concealing this mysterious 'project' she was working on...were realmed in the good. But she was still reeling from Urd's pointed questions about the wisdom of her upcoming marriage to Keiichi...Urd's words of warning had tolled out bells of disillusionment and doubt deep within her heart. Belldandy wanted to recoil from the notion that a marriage to Keiichi might create more harm than good. But then there was the matter of her recent frustration towards Earthrealm ways of living. And if she could become so conflicted towards this upcoming marriage because of a few searching questions from her older sister, then she had to find out what was causing her to react with such mortification to her inability to use her Goddess powers! It was something inside her...something that she couldn't sense clearly.

Skuld clearly sensed the deep inner turmoil of both her sisters, which only served to deeply disturb her. Urd had actually cried on the phone; her frustration and sadness pulled on Skuld's heartstrings. Skuld felt a surge of malice towards Mara well up in her breast. And Belldandy was acting like she had experienced an earthquake of the soul. She was visibly shaking, her fingers jittering as she poured herself a cup of tea after they got off the phone.

Two days from now, they would be in Africa.

_That_ thought scared Skuld!

Without the use of their Goddess powers, they would be like any other tourists. And what if someone in that far off land tried to prey on two innocent young women? In such a situation...if Skuld found herself having to resort to her technical prowess to protect herself, would such an action somehow screw up Belldandy's chances of ever reuniting with Keiichi?

Then Skuld noticed her own hands trembling with nervousness.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Still life with Demoness.

My idea about hanging around the seedier sex bars was shot like knee plays and mesons. No amount of chemical courage could get me into one of those clubs. I was transfixed between disgust and fear and delight. Worse of all, my fear of women had resurged, crucifying my aspirations to go in to a club and scam over the unsuspecting hoi polloi drunkmen.

It was as if I was trying to elude the watchful eyes of my past and my conscience...which only resulted in wet palms and conflicting emotions. In my efforts to swallow down my fears, my lusts...all I could see was the vanities of the world. A package wrapping of abuse, exploitation, poserism, sex slavery, dishonesty, perversion, humanimalism. My soul was so darkened by the drugs, these things rendered themselves romantically beautiful in their degrees of nothingness.

While I had been roasting a passout, the Demoness had changed back into her regular Vanagdrasil garb, which passed for an only slightly unusual chic look in this area of Tokyo. Then she tried to drag me into a strip club, and then chided me when I turned pale at the door.

Some wino peed on my pants while I was hanging loose in an alley trying to figure out a way to score a drop on some dope. Just came up, whipped it out, and pissed on my knee. I wanted to punch him, but the Demoness zapped him with some kind of mojo, which caused him to run away in fear. The shocked expressions of the OLs as he sprintstumbled by them made it clear that he was still indecent.

The Demoness was at least was decent enough to snap her fingers and put me into some clean clothes. I wanded with shame wondering if she saw my nakedness in between nanoseconds.

So we trudged around the glitter and crowds of Kabuki-cho's nightlife like two silent ghosts. The evidence of white slavery was abundant, as I overheard a number of the whores talking in idiomatic Russian about how lecherous the Tokyo businessmen were. Touts robed in cheap garish yukata barked out descriptions of pleasures "just inside the door" as we walked down towards Yasukuni-dori, the main boulevard that separates Kabuki-cho from the rest of Shinjuku. I was bent on finding Golden-gai, a maze-like section of small godowns often frequented by yakuza. There, I might find some leads where to find some dope.

"I can't go back!" I heard myself suddenly announce. Seeing the emptiness outside only served to spotlight the emptiness inside. And in an instant, it had blown up on me like a late autumn gust figured with hands of dead leaves.

"What do you mean?" the Demoness asked gruffly.

"I blew it!! I can't go back to the temple, to my job, to my friends. What do I tell them? What possible excuse do I have for myself? That I came, I saw, and I used? That I choose to hang out with you? That I bailed on all of my principles? That I started using drugs again?" I boiled out guiltily.

"So what? People make mistakes. _We_ make sure of that!" the Demoness answered back with a wink.

"So...if you Demons make people screw up...doesn't that imply that you have to at least consider the potential that the screw ups can be rectified? And then account for that too? Otherwise all your hard-earned acts of destruction are for naught, eh?"

"Philosopher, huh? I'll tell you this free of charge, Cevn. _You chose this_! You could have tormented yourself even worse at the girly bar back there. But you didn't. So part of you is evil and self-destructive, but that doesn't mean that _all_ of you is. Have you ever considered that the only true confidant of your life is the silence of your heart? Each time your heart stirs, does it not bring only unrealized passions...the chill echoes of the past, and years of frustrated ambitions? But when your heart is silent, then aren't your losses are also silent? Only in that quietude can you find fulfillment..."

"Forget that! This is so messed up...you lecturing me! I don't believe in silence! I believe in noise! Angst! Havoc! I feel split right down the middle by the war-axes of tragedy and self-denial...and that division is tearing me apart. Maybe my sorrow _is_ my temple, not some bullshit silence you're talking about! Are you trying to turn me into a Demon?"

The Demoness only shook her head and giggled at my discomfort. I held out a brief hope that she _was_ turning me into a Demon. That would explain everything, would lend a meaning to my descent. Then, I wouldn't have to wonder about why I fell from grace...into this cesspool of schizothyme disillusionment. Somehow, I knew that my future was in the hands of this Demoness, which made her my adjudicator-juror. For a moment, I envisioned Mara in the regalia of the judiciary, complete with an Old Highgate wig and a long black magistrate's robe...

"Your Honoress, in the court of common pleas, I prithee tell me why is it such that I remain bound to the sensation that every part of my being is slowly disintegrating?" I asked in a bare-face imitation of an English barrister.

The Demoness regarded me with an expression of haughty disdain and curiosity.

"What is the matter with you?" she enquired.

"Nothing's the matter...because nothing is right with me! I don't care if I get high...but I need some heroin really soon. Where can I find it, oh Demonic Magistrate?" I said, trying to mock the Demoness into a bout of frustration.

"You're totally hidebound, you know that?" she replied. "Let's go somewhere...I want you to meet somebody."

And that's how I got to meet the Otaku Professor.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

After crossing the Mediterranean, they flew over huge expanses of sand, mountains and saltbed lakes, which appeared as tan-rust gouges and yellow-gray ripples from their aerial perspective. As their plane circled towards the Tindouf airport, the ground that met them was spare of vegetation and cracked with erosion. During the landing, Belldandy caught a brief glimpse of a grove of trees near the center of town that marked the local oasis.

The first impressions she upon their arrival were how _dry_ everything was...and that Keiichi wasn't here. She couldn't sense him anywhere.

Disappointed, she debarked off the plane, noticing that the sky wasn't a clear blue like it was back home. It seemed a dreary grayish blue, almost overcast. As the aridity gripped her, Belldandy surveyed the airport and the nearby city. As a GRO Agent, she had been in this vicinity hundreds of times on assignment, most recently in the waning years of the 1970s, where she fulfilled the wish of a woman who sought permission from her tribe's marabout to marry a goat herder from another tribe. The sheikh had been easy to convince, but the hard part was making both tribes live with their marriage. Belldandy wondered to herself if the couple was still alive as she and Skuld entered the small airport terminal.

Standing in the ramshackle airport 'lobby', she could sense the eyes of several men greedily probing her for any signs of fragility. She reminded herself that the gender roles of men and women were much different here than in Japan. In essence, women in this culture were often polarized as either viragos or virtuettes, with little room between. Foreign women would always be regarded as infidel; their independent nature quite possibly being viewed as threatening to male sensitivities.

The sense of danger was palpable to her.

Belldandy knew that she would need to hire a khodja...an interpreter...forthwith, so that she and Skuld could make their way around town and go about the business of locating Keiichi. She hailed a taxi to go to the single hotel with any decent accommodations.

The town of Tindouf was drab and linear...and flat as a parking lot. Besides the lowrise hotel and an 'office building' of four floors, the only other structures that cut above the one and two storey dwellings were the minarets of the muezzin and the capital domes of the mosques. Many of the dwellings were built of the typical sunbleached yellow mud style more typical of the Sudanese.

A wide main avenue extended the length of the city, fronted by stores and some of the wealthier merchant homes. A number of signs, most of them handpainted in sloppy Maghrebian Arabic, poled out from the dirtbrick buildings on weather-beaten clapboards. To the west was a tent city, filled with families displaced by the various civil wars and the border wars ranging nearby between Algeria and Morocco.

She noticed some of the buildings dated from the colonial days, when Algeria was a French "protectorate". In truth, the Frenchmen had brutally oppressed the Algerians by means of enforced servitude, economic deprivation via oppressive taxation, and cultural amalgamation. It was more of a military occupation than anything that resembled an altruistic "enlightening" of the Algerians. Rather than aiding the Algerians, the French occupiers simply tried to Gallicize them. In addition to the stealing of land and the strategic value of occupying a large part of the southern Mediterranean, the conquest of Algeria allowed France to presume a maintenance of its claim to the Napoleonic grandeur of earlier generations.

Other buildings maintained their Arabic-Berber architecture, looking as if they had been transplanted from centuries past. White painted plasterwork juxtaposed with intricate decorative carvings and mosaics, creating a raucous virility of design. Belldandy had a fondness for the arabesques of the Islamic culture; their attempts at geometric abstraction were as close as the mortals had ever approached to capturing the artistic essences of one of the major Yggdrasil schools of art. She was often amused by the reactions of first-time visitors to their temple home when they first encountered the huge Arabic carpet that served as a centerpiece in the middle of her living room. Accustomed to simple tatami flooring, the visitors to her temple home usually "ooohed" and "ahhhed" at the centuries-old carpet. It was the product of a peasant guild, whose single wish was to be selected as court carpetiers by the King. She granted that wish, heightening their weaving and design skill beyond that of their peers. Consequently, they 'won' the competition and were housed in luxury for the rest of their lives. The guildmaster who created the rug dedicated it to "the Lady of the wishing veils"...namely, Belldandy. When the kingdom fell to the Crusaders, she couldn't stand by and leave it to the vandals...they would have simply burned it along with all the other "heathenish relics." So she rescued the woven carpet, magically restoring it to its former luster. She kept it at home in Yggdrasil for a few centuries, and then removed it to her new home here on the Earthrealm.

She knew that Skuld shared her fascination with Arabic art, especially from a mathematical standpoint. As they entered the hotel, they were greeted by a modern rehearsal of the best of Maghrebian Islamic mosaic art. Belldandy immediately felt comfortable in her surroundings, relieved that the hotel would serve as a safe haven until she found Keiichi.

Once she and Skuld secured a room, they returned to the hotel lobby and sought out an interpreter. Belldandy knew every language and dialect ever developed by the mortals or any other sentient species on the Earthrealm...but she was lucidly aware that she would have to use an interpreter. Since her linguistic abilities were definitely due to her divine origin, she couldn't employ them here.

She learned from the khodja that Tindouf was really five cities: the refugee tent city, a ward of rather conservative Chaamba Arabs, a small ward of expatriate Continentals from France and Spain, Haratine and Malian Black Africans, and a mercantile ward which served as a waypoint for receiving nomads who were transporting goods across the desert on camelback. There was a small hospital, staffed by a mix of Red Cross volunteers and Algiers-trained physicians. The city was rarely visited by Westerners, except for the annual charity marathons and several tour groups of European anthropology students during the summers. It was also the headquarters of an underground militia that fought for political autonomy for all of Western Algeria.

"Tindouf has a pretty active nightlife," she observed as darkness befell the village-city. At night, illuminated strings of lightbulbs would cast a glow on outdoor poolhalls and eateries in open lots fronting the main street. Unlike most citizens of the modern world, these people were gregarious and boisterous; possessed of a candor and charm that was almost festive in nature.

Exhausted after her long flight, she soon fell asleep after the muezzin sang out his last call to Allah...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

When he woke up, Keiichi immediately sensed the shift in the routine. Instead of taking off early in the morning, the men were busy packing. The boister of their conversations chattered even louder than usual. Once in a while, one of the two elders would bark a set of instructions to several of the younger men.

After breakfast, one of the men brought Keiichi a new set of clothes and a pair of sunglasses. As he dressed, he noticed that these clothes were woven more densely...they rested much heavier on his body. And the sunglasses...what where they for?

Unexpectedly, the two old men tried to press a cake of hashish on him, which Keiichi politely refused. Once was enough, thank you very much! Keiichi hoped that his refusal wouldn't be viewed as an insult, especially to gifts offered by the respected elders of the tribe. He had read about many tribal cultures who were very touchy about gift giving...far more so than the Japanese. When the two desert elders realized that he wasn't going to accept their gift of hashish, they nodded and smiled at him good-naturedly. After a brief conversation, one of the old men opened a wooden case and pulled out a long curved blade in a scabbard. Keiichi started at this, until the oldster extended the knife out to him in with open hands, in a giving gesture. Keiichi felt his face flush with embarrassment as he regarded the gift. The black knife sheath was studded with gems, silver leafing, and delicately worked geometric Arabic cloisonné designs. There were several roped silken tassels hung from the hilt of the scabbard, plus a drawstring threaded through grommets at the base and top of the knife sheath, evidently for the purpose of securing the knife to the wearer's waist. The blade itself was curved like a traditional Arabic scimitar; it appeared to be 300 to 350cm long. The handle grip was handworn, but otherwise the knife looked brand new. Keiichi's eyes grew wide when he noticed that the knifeguard at the base of the hilt appeared to be gold!

One of the oldsters smiled and pulled a melon from a nearby basket. Almost effortlessly, he sliced through a thick melon with a single stroke, demonstrating the cutting ability of the knife. Keiichi sensed quiet in the tent; when he looked around, he saw all of the men were watching this interaction with keen interest.

This was one gift he had better not refuse.

Smiling and bowing deeply, he accepted the gift. The two old men clapped him on the shoulders, while the other's laughed and clapped their hands.

It suddenly dawned on Keiichi that this was a parting gift.

He felt a momentary wave of sadness as he realized that he was leaving here...leaving these very men who had brought him back to the brink of life after he was rescued by his Angel. For a short two weeks, this tent had become familiar to him. It was a home away from home. These fierce-looking men, whose harsh bearing made yakuza appear tame...had gently and patiently nursed him back to health. Evidently, they were going to caravansary...and they had waited until he was healthy enough to make the trip.

Keiichi put on the sunglasses and emerged from the tent. After being inside for several weeks, the outdoors sun was _harsh_! He blinked his eyes, unable to move a step until his vision got used to the brightness. For the first time, he could see his environs. Several long black tents were pitched next to a large body of water surrounded by numerous trees of a like he had never seen before. It was beautiful! He walked over to the water and splashed his face.

Cool.

In the distance, he could see distinct groves of different kinds of trees planted nearby the oasis. Several other camps of tents were near the lake; evidently other nomads who were sharing the oasis with his benefactors. He could see small herds of camels tethered next to each group of tents.

He felt a slap on his back, and a tall bearded man gestured to a camel.

They wanted him to ride somewhere on camelback!

Three men mounted camels, waiting for Keiichi to climb on the back of his own camel. He struggled to clamber on to his camel unsuccessfully, and then one of the three men dismounted and helped him up. The camel stank, even in the dry desert air. But once he was saddled on the beast, Keiichi felt the familiar sensation of _riding_ something. If he could just try and mentally conjure up the image that this beast of burden was a form of transportation like his trust BMW...he could probably survive the experience.

The saddle was plush, with a backrest he could lean against as he rode. Several bladderbags of water and a rifle were provisioned on each camel, along with satchels of dried fruit and breads.

Evidently, he wasn't going to travel with the group of nomads. Instead, three of their number were going to take him on a trek across the desert to...somewhere.

Somewhere else.

For a moment, Keiichi panicked when he realized that he was going to travel the desert once more. He had nearly died out there...he wasn't too keen on returning to the sand. He felt himself gasping deep breaths that were fueled by his near terror at the thought. Grasping the bridle with a tight grip, he swallowed down his fears with a game effort.

Reality was...he couldn't remain here at the oasis forever.

And leaving here would only bring him one step closer to finding the Key to Belldandy's Heart.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --


	73. Pt 73: Infinite Readunatio

**Part 73: Infinite Readunatio**

Keiichi's powers of observation threatened to fail him as he and his fellow camelback riders entered the jagged mountain range. Sheer cliffs receded upwards on either side of the divide they using as a riding trail, floating like Sunshine City skyscrapers hundreds of meters above the crevasse. Large birds of prey lazed back and forth overhead, casting shadowings on the narrow jackknifing trail. The sunlight angled down into the canyon, so that the rockface on the left was faded brown while the other was brilliantly yellowed. Jagged protrusions of rock loomed overhead like sentinels. The riding trail was marked with occasional pilings of blockwork boulders where these natural overhangs had collapsed in ages past. Small bushes with thin leaves lined either side of the sandlimed pass. Keiichi never could imagine that the expansive horizontal starkness of the desert could be transformed into _this_ vertical starkness. The windtouched cliffs were deeply hewn with erosional grooves, which added an otherworldly abstract accent to their natural beauty.

As they traveled through the mountainous terrain, Keiichi was possessed of a flight of literary imagination. His present situation reminded him of the famous "Journey to the West" story that he read in childhood books. In one sense, he was being escorted by three men on a westward journey towards the unknown. So, to humor himself, he started regarding his traveling party along these lines. One of his Arabic companions was stocky in build, deep-voiced, with a thick singular eyebrow over his eyes and a wide bushy beard that fanned out from the bottom of his face. He was an obvious "Monksy". Another of his guides had a horse face; his long beaked nose was the first feature that Keiichi had noticed. Because his face and body weren't a Monksy or a Monkey, Keiichi termed him "Pigsy" by default. The last of his desert guides seemed to be the senior of the three. He was a short wiry man with a long scar on his right cheek and deepset black beady eyes. Naturally, he was a "Monkey".

After passing through the small mountain chain, the group spent the next two days riding across open desert. Riding his dromedary camel over the stretch of plateau, denuded of almost all vegetation except for occasional patches of dried desert grasses and bushes, Keiichi more than once felt like his guides were traveling lost. His panic would escalate by degrees until he found himself glancing at one of his fellow travelers...whose inexpressive face seemed to assure him that they were en route.

The plain seemed limitless; at times the surface bedrock appeared so polished from desert winds that Keiichi imagined that it was one large paved cement square. Every couple of hours, the group would encounter a hammada; the large boulders staring like tombstones against the winds. The groupings of bus-sized boulders were waypoints along the route, Keiichi realized.

At night, the cool winds brought a welcome relief...and Keiichi learned that he could fall asleep sitting up in his camel without pitching over onto the ground. This was essential, because his desert guides pointed out that there were numerous nocturnal creatures that would make sleeping openly on the ground difficult, if not dangerous.

On the second day, they turned towards a desert landmark that initially appeared to be a city. From a distance, Keiichi saw steeples, antennae and high-rises; his pulse quickened with the anticipation of reaching an actual _city_. But as they approached closer, the 'city' turned out to be a grand disappointment. It was a grouping of angular rocks that seemed to be thrust right out of the barren surface rock. Tall pilings of grooved petrified sand left Keiichi imagining that he was traveling within a series of cathedrals, like the one he visited in Le Mans. The growths of rocks spired to needle-like tops dozens of meters high. Keiichi wondered how these prominences could rise up when everything else was so _flat_. After passing the rocks, Keiichi felt more comfortable with his guides' ability to traverse the desert. They seemed to have names for each of the natural landmarks the group encountered.

Towards the evening, they reached an oasis. It was much smaller than the one they had left behind. The men traveling with him seemed familiar with the locale; as once they were inside of the haven of desert palms, they immediately set off towards a large ornately decorated tent. Several men in long white robes emerged from the tent and engaged in animated discussion with Monkey, Pigsy and Monksy.

Keiichi observed the interchange with relative calm. After spending a couple weeks with a tribe of desert nomads, he felt somewhat accustomed to the desert tribesmen's standards of behavior. A month ago, an encounter with a group of nomadic desert men at an oasis would be cause for fright, akin to plunging headfirst into peril. Now, it was just part of the routine. Nevertheless, Keiichi kept his senses sharp. He intuited that the men were relaying information about the conditions of desert passages behind and ahead. His three companions interspersed their reportage with pointing gestures towards him, which seemed to intrigue the occupants of the colorful tent. Eventually, the men walked closer and looked Keiichi over with wide eyes, and then led his camel to a place next to the grand tent where a dozen camels were tethered near a small watering well. Keiichi could see a flock of goats grazing nearby. Apparently, the master of this tent was going to host the party of four, probably with an overnight stay.

Keiichi and his three traveling guides were welcomed into a large tent. Once inside the tent and settled on gold silken cassocks, Keiichi realized that their host wasn't of the same strict religious persuasion as the tribe of the three men who were accompanying him. The tent interior was lavishly appointed, if not overflowing with luxurious goods. Obviously, the master of this tent was a wealthy sheik, if he could be called that. Golden ashtrays, silver hookahs, gaily decorated carpets, ornate furniture and wall hangings abounded. Compared to the Spartan interior of the tent that he had resided in for the last couple weeks, this tent was palatial...a true "desert palace".

After a sumptuous feast of meats, vegetables and wine, the richly adorned sheik offered Keiichi and his companions a smoke of hashish, which Keiichi politely refused. It seemed that Keiichi was the guest of honor, as the sheik's serving girls always served him before all others except the sheik. As far as nonverbal language was concerned, Keiichi observed that he was being treated deferentially because he was Japanese. Again, he was in a situation where his race distinguished him. Perhaps to this prince of the desert, he was nothing more than a curio.

"Whatever it takes," Keiichi muttered to himself as he munched on a mystery meat shish kabob. Observing his traveling companions smoking kef, Keiichi had the distinct impression that they were describing his rescue and recuperation...as the sheik would occasionally glance in his direction with wide-eyed smiling curiosity.

After the feast, the sheik summoned several dancing girls with a series of handclaps, who performed a veil-tease belly dance for the group. Monkey, Pigsy and Monksy seemed to quickly lose their religious inhibitions, gazing thoroughly into the spirit of the belly dancing...and also getting deep into their cups. Admittedly, Keiichi thought that young dancers possessed a mysterious sultry exoticism...yet, for all their beauty, their erotic dancing was captivating in the sense that it only increased his homesickness for the pleasures he felt in Belldandy's arms.

After being cajoled repeatedly, he reluctantly accepted one cup of liquor to appease his host...which was a mistake. His stomach felt queasy, no doubt the result of a combination of rich food and strong liquor. The sheik seemed hell-bent on getting him drunk...but Keiichi managed to communicate through hand gestures that he was still weakened from his near-death experience in the desert; which wasn't far removed from the truth. Soon after, he dashed outside to pay his respects to his maimed intestinal fortitude.

The 'party' lasted long into the night, and Keiichi found himself dozing off several time while the revelries continued all around him.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Megumi called _again_, sis!" Skuld shouted through the bathroom door, then returned to her bed and started reading the Koran provided by the hotel.

Belldandy was taking a quick shower...all one could take was a quick morning shower due to the hotel's limited supply of hot water. There was only enough hot water for one shower a day, and this morning was Belldandy's turn.

It seemed to Skuld that Megumi was deliberately calling while Elder Sister was showering. She frowned at Megumi's ongoing lack of timing...this was the second time already! Keiichi's sister had called each night for the past four days to see if Belldandy had sensed his presence. Other than Belldandy, Megumi was by far the person most distressed with worry about Keiichi. Sayoko had called last night, and Keiichi's sempai called the night before. Each call only gripped her tighter with frustration, because Skuld _wanted_ to give them some good news. Even in the face of her simmer-on simmer-off enmity towards Megumi, Skuld felt several purpling shades of sympathy for her.

Belldandy had tried to convince Megumi to take off from Nekomi and travel with them to Algeria...but Megumi was drawn in the crossfire of October midterms, and was unable to justify a prolonged absence from college. Sadly, Skuld could sense strong misgivings in her voice...Megumi wanted to be _here_, so that she would know immediately once they found Keiichi.

"How's Megumi holding up?" Belldandy answered as she kneed open the bathroom door, releasing a cloud of steam into the hotel room. She was vigorously drying her hair with a towel that was only half as long as her lengthy chestnut-brown tresses. Skuld winced at the reminder of how hard it was to dry her own hair this way. The arid air in the room was a double-edged sword...long hair like hers would dry rather quickly, but it was also rapidly losing its metalblack sheen. The khodja had suggested that they get hair oil, but Skuld had grave reservations about putting any strange additives in her hair.

"Being mortal really is a pain sometimes," she heard Belldandy curse under her breath as she caught a snag while combing out her hair. In her manifest form, each of the three sisters had unnaturally long hair; hair that somewhat defied the physical laws of the Earthrealm. But ever since she had 'found' Keiichi here, Belldandy had insisted that she and Skuld maintain their manifest forms, rather than simply remanifesting whenever it suited them. In essence, they stabilized their constantly reconstituting atomic forms...so their physical bodies were as 'permanent' as that of any Earthrealm mortal. Now her sister was grumbling regret about her decision...and Skuld heard an audible "snap!" as Belldandy combed through another snag of hair.

Morning here was nighttime in Japan, a fact that still caused Skuld to feel jetlagged. Once again, she speculated about why mortals would travel long distances for their jobs when they could stay at home and avoid dealing with jetlag all the time.

Aspirin came in handy, however.

Despite a lack of success in finding Keiichi, in hindsight, Skuld thought yesterday was interesting and fun...as they visited a Tuareg tent city. After Tindouf, the Tuareg tribal area was like stepping onto another planet; the culture was completely distinct from anything she had encountered so far in Algeria. The Tuareg tent city was curious by virtue of the fact that the leaders of the gathering of tents were women. These women were remarkably different than the women they frequently encountered in the streets of Tindouf...in fact, it was like a breath of fresh air to Skuld, who was becoming very thin-skinned about the cultural and religious oppression of women here. The most significant difference was that the tent village women seemed much more liberated in attitude; they would walk around the tent camp without veils. Oddly enough, it was the _men_ who wore veils! Everybody was dressed in robes dyed with rich purples and blues...and Skuld thought some of the men looked kinda cute wearing their veils. There were so many young men here, far more than in Japan. It seemed like nearly everyone was between 16-25...a fact that made Skuld feel curious and nervous at the same time. It wasn't that much of a stretch for her to sense the hormone overload in the camp. Yes, the Tuareg women were amiable hosts, who promised to help in any way they could. As nightfall came to the tent city, she and Belldandy were treated to a feast and a rousing Tuareg entertainment.

Today, she and Belldandy were going to visit another one of the refugee tent cities far to the west of Tindouf. The khodja informed her that this refugee city was a stronghold of Sunni conservatives and former Polisario militia who had fought in the last decade for the twin causes of an Islamic government for Algeria and independence for West Sahara. He was a bit reluctant to drive there, but Belldandy passed extra dinars across his hand to ensure his cooperation.

In view of this, Belldandy and Skuld decided to dress in the traditional women's garb, wearing black hijab head coverings, face veils and long black cotton robes as they took a taxi to the tent city.

Once they arrived at the tent city, the khodja, who also doubled as a taxi driver, got into a shouting match with a half-dozen young men. It turned out that Belldandy had to grease a few palms with some Algerian dinars before she and Skuld were gained admittance to a central hall that housed the "marabout" of the tent city.

Belldandy felt unsettled as soon as she entered the rectangular tent that served as office/headquarters for the leader. The tent was more like a bazaar; lashed together out of dozens of military-issue camouflage tarpaulins. Inside, there were several 'areas' partitioned by hung tenting. As she walked by each, she noticed desks, desktop computers...all the fittings of an administrative office setup. But the young men staffing the clerical areas busybodied themselves with an officious tension, which Belldandy recognized as a state that could only result from a strong sense of fear and intimidation. She passed one section that was stockpiled with crates of weapons, the crates written in English, Russian, Chinese and Arabic.

Towards the back of the tent, she could see a raised 'throne' area surrounded by lion and panther skin rugs. Large red pennants with Koranic verse interpreted with a socialist bent were hung on either side of the center area, creating the staged impression of a theater backdrop. In the middle was a small grouping of ornately carved desks with several secretaries, and raised on a step platform was golden throne with a large man sitting on it.

In front of the dais, Belldandy could see a line of common folk, evidently petitioning the marabout's judgment on personal matters and civil disputes.

They were terrified.

Belldandy, Skuld and their khodja were shown a place at the back of the line, and waited their turn. Several hours passed while the line advanced them closer to the chieftain. Finally, the family ahead of them was 'judged'; Belldandy sensed something terrible had happened...as the family cried in utter despair as they were escorted away by sneering young soldiers.

When Belldandy asked the khodja what had happened, he explained with a sigh that the family was convicted of not paying taxes...and despite their illiteracy, the marabout decided to confiscate their property, to be held against their promise to conscript their two younger sons, ages 13 and 14, into a workcamp detail.

Belldandy steeled herself while trying to swallow down her anger.

The marabout was an imposing man, with a thick moustache and Berber facial features. He wore a thickly medaled white uniform, creating a militant impression. Each of his fingers sported a gold ring inlaid with precious stones, and he wore a series of gold chains around his neck. This man had no qualms about showing off his wealth and power.

Belldandy noticed the large group of young soldiers in his personal guard, standing around sporting various handguns and weapons. Almost half of the population of Algeria was young men under 21, and among these, very few had jobs. The air was thickset with youthful restlessness.

"I am Colonel Ra-Fadiz, of the Islamic Political Liberation Army. What may I do for you, women who have come far to meet with me?" the khodja translated. The marabout's greeting disclosed that he read their bearing and decided that she and Skuld weren't local women. Not to mention that they were using a khodja to translate. Belldandy tensed even more, as the wording left no doubt to the fact that this man wanted to intimidate them.

It wasn't going to work.

"This weak woman has come to your honored tent in search of her husband-to-be," Belldandy answered in a quiet voice. She was attempting to enlist this man's aid by deferring to his cultural perception of women as greatly inferior to men. Filling her speech with terms of humility would ease his wariness.

"Strange, that a mere woman would come _here_ searching after a man not yet her husband. Perhaps he has been led by the wisdom of the flesh to stray into the arms of another!" the marabout answered, drawing chuckles from the young men observing the interview.

Belldandy was shocked and disappointed. A marabout, in the Berber sense, was a wise man...sometimes even a holy man. Sanctified by years of religious training and reflection, a Berber tribe's marabout ideally ruled his charges with a combination of sagacity in official matters and with the compassion of the devout in spiritual matters.

This man obviously possessed neither trait, and yet he was hailed by the others as "the marabout".

"I would mean no disrespect to your wisdom, honored sir, but my future husband has no such flights of fancy...and it would serve you well to assist me in my task. I have traveled from Japan to try and locate him."

"From _Japan_? Your eyes aren't Japanese...you appear to be one of those annoying Euros! Do you take me for a fool, woman! You are trying my patience with your claim to be from Japanese soil. I don't believe you!"

Belldandy motioned to the khodja to approach her. She gave him her visa and passport to show to the marabout. Belldandy felt herself tense; the passport and visas had been faked by Skuld, as there was no other means of obtaining identifications and traveling permits on such short notice. She hoped that the marabout wouldn't recognize the forgeries. The khodja brought the items to the marabout, who cursively examined them before he set them on the arm of his throne chair. Belldandy breathed a sigh of relief...

"What do _you_ believe, woman from Japan?"

Belldandy didn't expect this interview to launch into a religious discussion so quickly. Once more, the leader of the tent city was flexing his authority. She would have to pace her words with caution.

"I believe...that I believe," she answered obliquely. The marabout stood up from his cushioned seat and walked up close to her, deadeyeing her with an earnest scrutiny. Belldandy made it a point not to flinch or show any weakness under his glare.

"You are infidel! The lies that you believe to be 'religion' and 'spiritual truths'...matters not to us! We praise Allah, the Merciful and Compassionate! We dedicate our lives to the performance of His works, which is the ongoing struggle to liberate the Western Saharan state from Morocco! If this means that I slit both your throats in exaction of His will, then I would not hesitate, by His Grace! In years past, I have personally slit the throats of many foreigners who came to our country to exploit our political situation," he announced theatrically, attempting to intimidate Belldandy and impress his underlings at the same time.

Belldandy waved a warning hand to Skuld, who was visibly angered with the inane posturing of the leader. Importantly, unlike her younger sister, the marabout's threats only served to calm Belldandy. His words fully disclosed his pettiness and distrustful nature.

He was nothing more than a pathetic tyrant.

There was little he could do to really harm her. Or could he? His threat brought up an interesting quandary in Belldandy's mind. If she and Skuld had to live as mortals until they found Keiichi, then _how_ mortal would they really be? Would the Ultimate Force or the Yggdrasil Mainframe recognize them as Goddesses? If someone killed them while in their present stabilized manifest form...then would they actually have to die the Real Death? Belldandy had never even considered this possibility. If these men were to strike her down in her present mortal state, would she _die_? She remembered Mara's close call with the Real Death, back when she foolishly released the Ultimate Destruction Program...

Assuming that she couldn't die, then it would be quite possible that a 'reincarnation' or 'invulnerability' on her part would greatly upset the status quo of the Earthrealm...or at a minimum, these local politico-religious fanatics. Belldandy tensed up, as she realized that this would also be a decided failure in her attempt to live exactly as a mortal while trying to locate Keiichi. And if she was indeed being tested in some way by Mother and Father...this could mean that she could lose Keiichi! In any event, she couldn't allow any provocation to create a situation where this man or his youthful gang of solder-thugs would make an attempt on her or Skuld's life.

"Be that as it may, I trust that you won't attempt anything so shaming as to harm a weak woman as I, who has arrived at your tent with an honest plea for your aid. All I want is your assistance with my search for my beloved. I have brought a picture for you to..."

"Unfortunately, my opinions and political beliefs have everything to do with your search! I coordinate a widespread underground network of communication that spans this entire wilaya...nay, even to the ergs and their expanses of desert! I have saboteurs working at the iron refineries south of Tindouf! I have tents of men with cached guns and weapons. I even have a helicopter! Feh! To me, your request is nothing!"

Belldandy gamed herself for a final attempt before leaving. She realized that if Keiichi _was_ in this area, he would be in grave danger from this lunatic and his lackeys. Now, it was all the more imperative that she reason with this marabout 'Colonel'...and hope she could convince him to turn Keiichi over unharmed if he was found by any of his militiamen.

"Your munificence! Please try and understand my lot. I have money that I can pay you! You would gain my gratitude, which would curry you favor in the eyes of Allah, whose holy writings instructs all the Faithful to practice charity towards the unfortunate. I am such an unfortunate...because my soul waxes incomplete without the presence of the man that I love. Please help me find him!" Belldandy pleaded.

"Your soul and love matters not to me! I could just as well have him killed. Or perhaps, I might choose to have my lieutenants search for him. I might be persuaded to attempt to find him...for a price. Foreign women like yourself rarely travel to my camp of political refugees..." he noted, sizing Belldandy up with barely concealed lechery. Their translator turned pale as he relayed the words and intent of the camp leader.

Belldandy suddenly was glad that she was wearing a black body-length shawl...the sexual greed in the marabout's eyes was repulsive, far more repulsive than the stares of Toshiyuki Aoshima years ago when the N.I.T. freshman was infatuated with her. She felt sickened by his attitude, which flew in the face of his so-called 'religious' role. This man was no leader of the faith; he was a dangerous extremist who used the cover of religion to achieve his own ambitions. "Megalomaniac" was a word that would suit him rather nicely.

While she was gripped by a horrid disgust at this little man and his evil ideas, Belldandy failed to notice her younger sister clenching her fists tight against her sides.

"_HOW DARE YOU!!_ We come here with a sincere desire to find my sister's fiance...and you _disrespect_ her! Y..you openly are suggesting that you'll help us in exchange for sexual favors! You're a pervert! You are absolutely despicable...the lowest of the low!" Skuld screamed angrily.

"Skuld!" Belldandy shouted in dire warning. One look at her sister and she realized that it was too late. Skuld was wound tight in "protect my Elder Sister's dignity!!" mode...she wouldn't hear a thing! Her righteous temper was in full swing; the tantrum-like rages that she threw as a child seemed amplified into a hurricane now that she was a teenager.

Belldandy blanched as Skuld ripped off her veil and threw it to the ground, drawing astonished gasps from most of the young men in the room. A moment later, Skuld pulled her shawl back angrily and tore herself out of it, then discarded it too on the ground.

"Do you realize how _hot_ it is in one of these, you chauvinist jerks? You treat your women like dirt, and then you act all hot-n-horny once you lay eyes on foreigners like us! What a bunch of lame-o hypocrites! You claim to be religious, but you have _no_ idea of what it means to be spiritual! And you!" she spat out as she pointed at the boss.

"You've taken advantage of these young men's poverty to indoctrinate them with your so-called political agenda, promising them a future worth fighting for...which is _actually_ nothing more than an attempt to create a coup so that _you_ can run the show! As if you had a single decent bone in you! Or had a single concern about what your dear Allah wants..."

"Get them out of my sight!" the marabout screamed, turning redpurple with rage. "They've just become my 'guests'!"

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

The Otaku Professor lived in a Shibuya mid-rise about a half kilometer away from Kabuki-cho. As he answered the door, he appeared every bit the stereotype of an obsessed anime-fan. Ill fitting clothes. Unkempt greasy hair. Thick eyeglasses. Stains on his pants and shirt. Pudgy and unshaven. Through the narrowly opened door, I could make out wall-to-wall piles of videos, garage kits, cellpages, travel stickers, manga posters and other paraphernalia.

I felt right at home in his squalor.

"Mara...let's you and me fuck!" he said as he greeted us. _That_ shocked the hell out of me.

The Demoness looked at him with a flash of rage.

"I've told you 'no' a thousand times! Can't you get it through your thickly-jowled head? Because of me, you've got every anime video ever made...so you should be grateful! But instead, you want more! You'll _never_ have me! I'm more real than you'll ever imagine! So you'll have to live with the fact that I'm never going to be more than a fantasy for you! Which shouldn't be too much of a stretch, since you're whole live revolves around fantasy," she snapped back, gesturing at all the otaku trappings of his apartment.

I couldn't help but smirk at her comeback.

"Awwww...but I want you!" The Otaku Professor whined in resignation as he opened the door all the way and ushered us into his home.

"Why did you bring me here? This guy is a total _geek_!" I whispered to the Demoness as we walked in to the apartment, which was little more than a series of paths between old pizza boxes and stacks of boxed anime crap.

"You'll see! Trust me, he can get you where you need to go! He's been experimenting with the effects of certain hallucinogens combined with electrical pulses to the brain while watching anime videos," she explained.

"You're shitting me..." I started to say.

I felt sick.

"Excuse me...I gotta throw up!" I shouted, as I stumbled around trying to find the path to the bathroom. I banged into the bathdoor and then swung it open. Rushing over to the squat toilet, I hurled into it as I heard the Otaku Professor shout belatedly "it's that way!"

Something is definitely wrong with me, I observed as I puked my guts out with wrenching spasms. I had only been using drugs for a few days and I was already gripped by impossibly harsh withdrawals. Of course, this was supposedly medically impossible. But then again, the psychological adjustments to addiction were terra incognita to many researchers. Several well-known studies of cancer patients failed to explain why, once the patients survived treatment of a painful cancer and were taken off their morphine drips, they didn't experience _any_ measurable psychological or physiological withdrawals. This indicated that withdrawal was more than just a physical or mental adjunct. And as recently as 2001, an international study had proven that crack cocaine was _not_ addictive. Medical science still couldn't explain the phenomenon of addiction, cravings and withdrawals.

I had all three buzzing around my soul like vultures.

When I emerged from the W.C., I asked the Otaku Professor if he had any heroin. I was jonesing bad...and I wasn't looking forward to a bout of dry heaves, because I had vomited out everything I had eaten. My body felt waterlogged with pain.

"Mara, doesn't your friend know enough to flush the toilet?" the Otaku Professor shouted from his bathroom.

"We need to get you fixed up right away. You're a mess!" the Demoness said to me, gripping me on the shoulders.

"Can ya hook 'im up?" she shouted to the Otaku Professor.

"No...not yet. There's not enough juice!" a muffled voice responded from another room.

I felt my knees going weak, so I sat down on a stack of boxes.

"Don't sit there!" the Otaku Professor shouted angrily. "Those are my Love Hina hentai videos! Sit on the couch like a normal human being, idiot!"

The Demoness half-dragged me to a foldout futon couch, rust colored except for the splotches of dried stains all over the back and armrests. I didn't want to think about what the stains were.

"I can't hook him up yet, but I know where I can get him some stuff. All he has to do is deliver this box of tapes to Yochi's Electronics at Golden-Gai."

"We just came from there!" the Demoness shot off in frustration.

"So, you'll just have to go back there, or you can watch him get even sicker!"

"Who said anything about _me_ going!" the Demoness said in a confrontational voice.

Moments later, a medium-sized box was pressed into my hands and I was given a handdrawn map with directions to Yochi's. I was to pick up 200K yen there, than walk over to some alley, where I would meet a gang of Yakuza who would take me to a shooting gallery, when I could fix. The Otaku Professor would arrange everything as a favor to the Demoness.

I felt horridic and idiotic as I shuffled down the street with my load. I wondered what kind of tapes were in the box...they were probably porn. Or worse. I felt dark and mysterious in the daylight. Overcome by sorrow and self-disgust, I walked towards Yochi's as if I had been loaded up with Haldol in a psych ward. My mind felt like a wet sack of corn. Once again, I was betraying my morals. With each burning of my morals, the candle of my heart waned closer to exhaustion.

I just wished it would die...

The convictions I felt an affinity with were as fluid as a walletful of yen...nothing I could keep, but only existing so I could shed them away like falling leaves. Exchanging them for a lousy fix of drugs.

"I am more of an idiot each day I do this!" I mumbled to my reflection in a storefront mirror. I looked at the little children passing by, feeling envy and anger towards them. They were like little smothered runtdogs; or growing vegetables to be consumed by a corporate-run society when they reached maturity. They would be trained in the illusion that they are "making up their own minds"...while actually their thoughts were being smeared about by onionheads with reactionary social agendas. Fit lambs for the slaughter.

"No! _Stop thinking_!" my mind recoiled. Suddenly, I wanted some _hope_...I wanted to resist the gray fingers of negativity that were probing into my spirit. I wanted to go back to how things were, back when I arrived in Japan, back when Keiichi and Belldandy accepted me into their house, back when I was in love with Urd...

"Hey, get moving!" a voice sounded behind me.

The storekeep gave me a liberal stinkeye, brandishing his sweepbroom like he was going to hit me with it.

I didn't belong here...and I didn't belong there at the temple either. I kept walking down the street, feeling my empty stomach like it was a knot in my throat. Finally, I turned into the Golden-Gai district and located Yochi's.

"Is this the complete Farscape series, fansubbed? Finally!!" Yochi asked excitedly. He was a toothless old man with a kind smile...not the pervert I expected to deliver the videos to. Despite his advanced age, he vaulted the counter in his enthusiasm, thanking me prolifically for bringing the fansubbed movies as he handed me a crumpled envelope thick with money.

"Now comes the fun part," I said to him, nodding to him. I was still too fresh to the Tokyo drug scene to know how much smack 50K yen would buy. More than likely, they would try to rip me off, either by shorting the quantity or by diluting the quality of the dope.

The atmosphere here in Tokyo was much more mercenary than in Makuhari. There were no mom-and-pop stores like the Hasegawa's. Instead, everyone seemed like cogs in some invisible machine. Worker drones that conducted products to the rest of the world, but never themselves traveled through the entire process to its end, so that they could see _what_ was being produced. And those who found themselves outside of the Tokyo machine...they were even more than sharks. They wouldn't even see the beginning of the assembly line...

I was angry at these philosophical bents that kept interjecting themselves in my thoughts. What was my role in life? In my own life? Wasn't I supposed to be a mute drug addict, concerned with nothing more than getting the next fix? Instead, I kept flashing randomly on all this chatter and allusion. I just wanted my mind to clam shut in a Poe-like morbidity.

Finally, I reached the alley; a narrow passage between a topless coffeeshop and a porn CD store. Gathering my breath, I walked down the 'aisle'...between drunks, whores and punks, looking for a faded yellow door. I finally spied the peelpaint door, with a sliding look-keep in the middle of it. I knuckled it, and a pair of eyes appeared through the peep, asking me who I was.

When I told him, a group of men came out, dressed in zebra-stripped zootsuits and thin sunglasses. My streetsmarts kicked in, alerting me that this was a bum rush setup. I started to run down the alley, knowing that they wanted all the money. Suddenly, one of the 'drunks' tossed off his hand, leapt up to his feet, and whipped a baseball bat into my midsection, doubling me over.

And then the beating began...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Keiichi and his fellow Journeyers to the West departed the sheik's camp and headed northeast. Munching on some kind of dried meat jerky, Keiichi glanced backwards to see the oasis quickly disappearing behind them. Then he started counting the "clops" of the camel's footbeats...

The heat was unbearable. Keiichi had to towel his face off every ten minutes or so. The air was becoming more and more humid as they traveled into the setting sun. In the far distance, Keiichi could make out an atlas of mountains, perhaps a mountain range. It trimmed the horizon like a series of small rocks.

As nightfall came, the skies started rapidly clouding up. Keiichi felt a rising bile of panic in this throat as the memories of the hellish sandstorm that almost took his life filled his thoughts. But once again, his fellow camelback riders remained calmly sedate. He was sure that if this were a real sandstorm, then they would be trotting their dromedaries full-bent towards any nearby sheltering rocks.

About an hour after he fell asleep, Keiichi felt a gentle stroking against his face. When he woke up, he realized that he was being kissed by a soft drizzle of rain. Despite his fatigue, he smiled and forced himself awake, opening his mouth to let the cooling drops roll over his tongue.

"Rain!!" he shouted happily, forgetting that his shout would wake up Monkey, Pigsy and Monksy. But of course, they were also awake, united with him in savoring the rareness of the moment. Keiichi knew firsthand that rainfall was a very uncommon occurrence in this desert region...but it sure felt good to be showered with liquid night.

Perhaps this was a good omen!

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Skuld hugged her knees to her chest, feeling ashamed of how her outburst had cost she and her sister their freedom. She and Belldandy had been roughly escorted out of the marabout's tent and taken to this jail cell, which was little more than a mudbrick enclosure with some kind of thatching for a ceiling. It was so cramped, she and Belldandy were sitting almost knee to knee.

The metal pan with its dried crusty bread and water lay untouched next to the wooden door.

"I've really gone and done it this time! My sister is _never_ going to find Keiichi now! She must hate me for being so impulsive! And we may never get out of here! That dirtbag dictator was _pissed_! Why do I always screw up like this? Who's going to take care of Betty, back home? I wish I was home!" she shouted at herself mentally.

"Skuld...it's not your fault at all. You're _not_ to blame for any of this," Belldandy said quietly, seeming as if she read Skuld's thoughts. Skuld didn't even bother to look up at her.

"Yes I am! You can't talk away my sense of guilt away this time, Elder Sister! If I would have kept my cool, we'd be..."

"You may be Norn of the Future, but even you don't know how this madman would have responded if you hadn't said anything. What you said was the _truth_, Skuld! The truth has caused as much misery throughout the history of the Earthrealm and mankind...as Mara's Demonic peers. Yet, there is no sacrifice that doesn't involve sacrifice. And each truth brings the whole closer to Peace. You did the right thing, Skuld!"

"Whatever..." Skuld answered dejectedly. Her sister's kind words would have reached her when she was her younger self, but now they just frustrated her. She felt impotent without her mechas, Banpei-kun, Sigel, her lab...basically all her comforts back home.

"So what we are going to do is wait. We will not cooperate with these evil men, but we _will_ wait. I'm certain that my Keiichi will come to rescue us!" Belldandy stated with fixed determination.

"Isn't that too much like the silly 'My prince in shining armor will come to my rescue', sis? I...I don't believe _anyone's_ going to come to our rescue. Least of all, Keiichi. They confiscated our passports and visas, remember? I can't believe that you'd leave everything up in the air, hoping on the remote possibility that Keiichi will happen to find us here...in the middle of this freakin' desert...and that he'd be able to get past a whole bunch of guards and goons. That's utterly ridiculous! I think we should wait a few days, and then use our Goddess powers and transport ourselves the hell out of here! After all, that's why we have them! Or maybe we should send a message to Big Sister Urd. _She'll_ come down here and kick some ass on these rats of the desert!"

"**NO!!**" Belldandy shouted, glaring at Skuld. Skuld snapped her head up and glared back at her older sister.

"Fine! You can sit here and suffer! I'm giving him _three_ days...and then I'm gone!"

"Don't you even think about it, Little Sister!" Belldandy said, her voice thick with warning.

"I'm not so little any more, Belldandy! I'm almost as tall as you..."

"And a hundred millennia younger. 130 millennia, if we count your real age! You're just a 120,000-year-old Goddess who's in the body of an Earthrealm 16-year-old, and..." Belldandy countered, not flinching an eyebrow.

"Don't judge me by my age! And besides, _why_ do you think that I suddenly got older, huh? And how can you say you're so mature...when you haven't even noticed that I'm a _lot_ more mature?" Skuld interrupted with a series of defensive questions.

"Skuld..."

"And just because my body is older, doesn't that mean that my mind's older too!" she added, crossing her arms over her chest.

"If you really were older, then you would realize how much is at risk for me! I _love_ Keiichi! I want to _marry_ him! And they even took my ring!" Belldandy said, almost crying. The guards had taken her engagement ring right before throwing she and Skuld into this cell. Belldandy didn't have much of a choice; the marabout's men had held a sharp knife against her wrist and told her that she could either relinquish the ring, or they would _take_ the ring...and her hand as well.

"No doubt, that was how the marabout got his collection of rings," Skuld thought ruefully. And then her anger shifted back to Belldandy...because she just _let_ them steal away her engagement ring!

"When are we going to stop playing mortal? This is idiotic! I wanna use my powers and get out of here! Don't you? You're a _Senior First Class License Goddess_! You could vaporize this whole continent with a sweep of your hands," Skuld wailed.

"No. I want to do this my way!" Belldandy answered back.

"So _this_ is your way? Just sit here and be insulted, ripped off, locked up? Who do you think you are...Gandhi? When they took your engagement ring, didn't you _once_ think about blasting them with some real power?" Skuld argued.

"Of course I did, Skuld! You can't even begin to imagine how much I wanted to blink both of us out of here! But I didn't! Because I know that if I use any of my Goddess powers here, Mother and Father will prohibit my marriage to my beloved Keiichi! And I couldn't live with the knowledge that I somehow caused _that_ to happen!" Belldandy shot back in a panicked voice of explanation.

"So you must understand how I feel right now, sis! I'm already sick of being locked up in here! And meanwhile, you're caught up in some fairytale scenario where Keiichi comes and rescues us! Be realistic for once, Belldandy!"

Belldandy flinched when she heard Skuld address her by name again, rather than the respectful "Elder Sister". Skuld had never spoken to her like this before...it was rather unsettling.

"I _am_ being realistic! There's got to be a chance that Keiichi's out there..."

Skuld raised an eyebrow as her sister's voice trailed off. Belldandy leaned up against the wall and closed her eyes, tuning everything else out. A moment later, she opened them...and she had a far-out look in her eyes for an instant.

"Now I've made things worse! I've driven her over the edge!" Skuld worried to herself.

Just as Belldandy was recoiling from Skuld's aggressive arguing, she felt something. A special something...that could only come from a special someone. Her heart skipped faster as she held onto the feeling; a feeling that was at once intuition and certainty. It was a distinct sense...and it came to her naturally. No Goddess powers, no thoughtcasting; none of her divine senses were involved. For the first time in her life, Belldandy had been was struck unexpectedly by a new sensation. A sensation that she could identify...from a source or means that she _couldn't_ identify! This feeling had come to her without any of her Goddess or human senses being involved! And she _knew_ it was Keiichi. Somehow, she could sense his nearness, his presence. The fact that she could _feel_ him inside of her heart, without using any of her Goddess powers...was nothing short of miraculous! She paused, feeling amazed and humbled at the same time.

When she opened her eyes, Belldandy was excited with calmness. Excited because she was connected again with Keiichi, calmed because she knew that he _would_ come. He would come! Keiichi would come and make everything all right! She wanted to dance, to celebrate, to laugh and cry and hug herself...

"_HE'S NEARBY!_ I can feel him! I can feel him!" Belldandy shouted jubilantly at the top of her lungs.

"Shaddup in there!!" a guard growled. They had been conversing in Japanese, so the guards wouldn't understand any of their words. But Belldandy's shout was in typical Belldandy style...jet engine loud!

"Waitaminute! You mean to say that Keiichi's nearby? How can you sense him...when I can't?" Skuld asked, astonished at her sister's announcement.

"I..I don't fully understand it myself! I don't know how it can be that I feel him here," Belldandy answered, tapping her heart. "But I know it's him! Without a doubt!"

"What do you feel?" Skuld asked gently, her anger towards her sister commuted to tender concern.

"It's something you won't understand until you're grown up, Skuld. Keiichi and I...we share a heart-connection through our love for each other. Because of this, I can _feel_ it in my kokoro when he's near."

"I'm not a little girl!" Skuld protested.

"Of course you're not! But you're not a grown up Goddess yet, either. You're somewhere in between. It's awkward...I know that it's awkward. I was your age once, dear Skuld. But the intensity of the love I feel now is something I couldn't feel a few millennia ago. Or even a few minutes ago," Belldandy said, her voice softening as she looked at herself in amazement.

"Y..you're wrong! I _can_ fall in love. In fact, there's someone I do love. I just haven't told..him..how..I..feel..yet..." Skuld said, her initial shout sliding into a pianissimo whispering.

Belldandy just stared at her.

"Ahem! What I was meaning to say is that I think you're imagining that you can feel Keiichi nearby, because you want him to come find us so desperately!" Skuld doubletracked defensively.

"_Who_ is this man you love, Skuld?" Belldandy asked. The strong sense of being safe and loved, even in these circumstances, seemed to make everything glow with freshness. She _had_ to get Skuld to admit to whatever it was that her heart was trying to say...

Skuld looked into her sister's azure eyes. _Those_ eyes...the eyes that somehow breathlessly drew the truth from her. Belldandy had a way of weakening Skuld's resolve with her gently beseeching expression. Skuld struggled against it; she might as well have been struggling against the softness of a bubblecloud...

"K..kch...da...ta...to..." Belldandy heard her sister gasp out in a staccato before she swiftly covered her mouth with her hands.

Belldandy smiled as her sister. She _almost_ said it!

She reveled in the thought that Keiichi was somewhere nearby. It would only be a matter of time before he would come to her, and free her from this place!

If only Skuld would share in the bounty of her forecertaintude...

Skuld had tears running down her cheeks. She was still covering her mouth, but her eyes were blinking back wet tears.

"W..what if I die here...and I never get to tell him? What if I was brought here to the Earthrealm to find a man to love...and didn't? Wouldn't that be the same as defying the Almighty? Would He even allow it? H..how can I possibly find a man here on the Earthrealm? You've seen how they are! These men are thinking all sorts of dirty thoughts about us right now! I _know_ it! There isn't anyone for me, not on the entire Earthrealm! How can there be, when men here are such idiotic shallow perverted egotists? There's no one for me! I'll never find someone here...like you found Keiichi!"

Belldandy crawled over and sat next to Skuld, putting her arm around her younger sibling's shoulders, letting Skuld rest her head against her shoulder. Skuld reached around Belldandy and hugged herself tight, sobbing into Belldandy's neck.

"It's hopeless! We're _stuck_ here! We'll never get free!" she sobbed. "And...I'll never find someone to love!"

"There, there..." Belldandy said, smoothing Skuld's hair and kissing her on the forehead.

"You know, Skuld...I _didn't_ find Keiichi. You know that I first him when he was a child because of that glitch in the Yggdrasil Mainframe. But years later, when I was summoned to grant his wish, it was because _he_ called on _me_! I truly believe that fate...and the Ultimate Force...has brought us together. Just like fate and the Ultimate Force made it possible for Urd to grant Cevn's wish, despite the fact that Urd is a Sysop, not a Goddess Relief Office agent."

"But I'm neither! I'm just an Earthrealm Trainee! I couldn't grant a wish request if it struck me on the head like a lightening bolt! All I know how to do is Debug and build mechas...I can't even compose programs like Big Sister Urd and you! There's _no way_ I'll ever be able to grant a man's wish. And what if...I end up like Urd? Urd couldn't fall in love because she's Norn of the Past; which meant that she wasn't allowed to experience love in the Present. Since I'm Norn of the _Future_...then who's to say that..snff..I'll ever be able to meet a man to love? B..because he'll always..snff..be in my Future, just out of reach!" Skuld said, her voice ragged with forlorn feelings.

Belldandy thought hard about this...and then decided to take a risk. A big risk. It was time to be a good older sister and turn Skuld's thoughts towards the truth of her life.

"Skuld? Skuld! I refuse to believe that you're doomed to be alone at all! I don't believe that the man you belong with...is hidden away in the folds of a future TimeStream. And I believe that you don't have to be summoned by Yggdrasil Mainframe to grant a wish. Wishes can be fulfilled purely by the convictions in one's heart. Keiichi's wish was for me to be with him forever...he didn't say 'I want a Goddess like you to be in love with me forever'. The love that developed between us was another type of wish come true. Both Keiichi and I wanted to be in love...and our hearts blessed our unspoken wishes into reality! Because of this, I _know_ that you can find a heartfelt relationship with a man, Skuld. And yes...I'm strongly certain that the man you choose to give your love to...will be from the Earthrealm!" Belldandy explained, pouring her heart out.

"B..but..._how_, Big Sister?" Skuld asked through tears of dismay. Belldandy smiled at Skuld's little slip of the tongue.

"Skuld sure is having a lot of them today!" she joked to herself. Being called by the appellation Skuld usually reserved for Urd made Belldandy feel even more sisterly towards her younger sister.

"I think that you already know who this man is. There is a special place in your heart that knows such things. All that remains is for you to be open enough to the possibility that what rests in your kokoro for him...will be more than enough to grant his unspoken wish. As I have often said, it is the unspoken wishes that are the most powerful, Skuld! You don't have to go through millennia of GRO preparatory inculcations to learn this. Trust me...I _know_ what I'm talking about! You can grant his wish just by being _you_! Without being called upon by the Yggdrasil Mainframe. You can make his heart soar simply by seeing his actions for what they truly are, and then gracefully surrendering your fears and distrusts."

"I can't do that! Earthrealm men are so...weird! So uncivilized!"

"Yes, you can. Skuld, this person's desire for you...isn't weird in any sense of the word. It isn't something evil...isn't something hentai...isn't something _wrong_! We can't become so absolute in our expectations towards our own conduct as Goddesses...that we feel that we must turn our heads aside when a good soul kindly wishes to wrap us safe in the realms of their heart. To do so isn't spiritual; in fact, it's the opposite of being spiritual. It is selfish in the extreme.

"All that 'this particular someone's' doing is telling you that he feels ready in his heart to shelter your feelings, your joys and doubts, your whole _being_...to the best of his ability. He is trying to say this with his actions, because it's easier for him to this way. He's so afraid that you might reject him, Skuld, that he's unable to speak aloud those truths he harbors in the deepest seats of his kokoro. Just like Keiichi...just like Cevn...

"Just like Tomohisa..." Belldandy finished in a soft voice.

She sighed as Skuld's face drained itself of all color after she finished those last words. Her sister's amber-brown eyes sprung wide open with shock...

Suddenly, Skuld leapt up and started stomping on the ground with her feet.

"Skuld?" Belldandy started, afraid that she had presumed too much...too much for her sister to hear.

Skuld was almost dancing, jumping up and down as if she was on an invisible pogo stick. Finally she stopped, wiped the sweat off of her brow, and then pointed at the ground.

"Scorpion!"

Belldandy looked at the crushed scorpion whose presence had decisively interrupted the flow of this heart-to-heart talk between sisters. Skuld certainly wasn't going to hear any more talk about love and Tomohisa now...

"Elder Sister...it_ stung_ me!" Skuld said, pointing to her ankle where the skin was already swelling purple like a daikon.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Where am I? Who are you?" the man on the couch asked groggily.

"I'm Mara, and this man is the Otaku Professor. We brought you back to his apartment when you didn't return with his money, Cevn. It was obvious that something had happened to you. What'd you say to piss them off so bad that you got yourself all beat up like this?" Mara replied with a sly smile. Babysitting a mortal was one thing, but this was irritating. She was supposed to be keeping tabs on him! And in the first moment she let him out of her sight since the sex parlor...he gets a crucial asswhupping! She couldn't help herself for taunting him out of her own frustration at what happened.

He looked terrible. Those blessed yakuza had really worked him over! When they found Cevn in the alleyway, Mara felt inclined to work _them_ over, but she had to restrain her rage because the Otaku Professor was in tow. When she saw the blood on the young mortal's face, she wanted to rip through a brick wall or two...but instead, she found herself carefully daubing his face, filled with an unexpected tender solicitude.

Then they had called a taxi and drove back here.

Mortals and their stupid reliance on intoxicants.

"I didn't say a word. They swarmed me! And the money..." he said hoarsely in an attempt at explanation.

"All gone!" the Otaku Professor said sourly.

"It's not my fault..." Cevn gasped out, wincing as he felt a stabbing pain in his chest. Mara had scanned him as soon as they took the taxi back to the Otaku Professor's place...he had more than a few broken ribs resulting from a rain of kicks to the chest.

"Those yakuza are going on a one-way trip to hell," Mara pledged to herself. In a sense, Cevn was a friend of a friend...which cast this incident into an inexcusable breach of conduct. With a single thought, Mara contacted her Sere-hawks and assigned them to plague the yakuza after midnight. Once the Otaku Professor fell asleep in front of his HDTV, she would leave here and join her pets as they swarmed the yakuza's hideout.

And then those meddling gangsters would learn the _real_ meaning of fear...

Composing her face to conceal the anger that was reigning, she turned to the Otaku Professor.

"We know that it isn't anyone's fault, already!" she said, confronting both mortals.

"But still, 200K yen is no small sum. How're you going to make it up to me?" the Otaku Professor inquired, wringing his hands.

"That's the least of your worries right now," Mara said evenly. "We can't take him to the hospital, so you're going to have to wire him up so he can float until his body starts to heal itself."

"But it's not ready yet! I'm still working on it!" the Otaku Professor protested.

"You leave that to me," Mara answered. She turned her attention to Cevn; waving her hand over his body to make the pain instantly flee away. She would make sure that each of his assailants felt the kind of pain they put him through when they gangbeat him.

"What'd you do to him? What are you?" the Otaku Professor stammered at her as he noticed all signs of pain leaving the injured mortal's face after she removed it. He stared back and forth between she and Cevn.

"I'm what you'd call...a 'faith healer'," Mara replied with a wicked grin.

"Ehhh?"

"And if you know what's good for you, you'll ask no further questions, lest I turn into a 'faith torturer'! You just get him harnessed in...and I'll fix your power generator," she answered in an ice-hard voice. The flush of fear on the Otaku Professor's face was quite amusing to behold.

The Otaku Professor was one of Mara's 'projects', when she wasn't busy running her Demon Strife Mischief Office. In a sense, he was more of a subject study than a direct research project. Mara's idea was simple: have one of the mortals create a form of addiction that would make it easier for her novice DSMO agents to wreck mischief on the Earthrealm mortals. She initially observed him rummaging through one of her old videogame haunts, looking for electronic parts in the abandoned building like a rat searching for food. When she read his mind, she found him to have a genius IQ...and an addiction to anime videos. A few random electrical schematics planted in his home PC nudged him in the direction of building a new means of watching anime. One that would render the viewer into an even more drugged-out state than the usual 'couch potato' languor.

During her visits, she led the Otaku Professor to believe that she was somehow 'interested' in him, since no other females ever bothered to call him or drop by his apartment. His mistaken interpretation of her visits sometimes irritated Mara, but for the most part, she found his lusting after her highly amusing. An unexpected entertainment that accompanied her 'project'. So she teased him from time to time, feeding into his misguided observations.

It was just another form of causing strife.

Being a Demoness was definitely to her advantage on a planet where the males pursue the females. It had given Mara the upper hand many times over...so playing the game with Otaku Professor wasn't even a challenge.

On the other hand, mortals like Keiichi and Cevn seemed to cause her to react oddly at times. Even Tamiya was someone Mara found herself attracted to. It was quite ironic when her mortal familiar, Sayoko, fell in love with the big brute! Recently, she discovered that a contributing factor to her hostility towards Keiichi in years past was the fact that she felt a slight attraction to him...and he was unattainable, bound as he was to her rival. If there was only a way to convert a mortal to a Demon right now, instead of waiting for them to evolve to the necessary level...she could think of a few men she'd convert. A harem of demi-Demons to wait on her every need...

"Snap out of it, Mara!" she chided herself as she worked on the portable generator. A few modifications, and the small unit would put off enough energy to power Tokyo for a decade.

She glanced over, checking up on the Otaku Professor. He had Cevn in the chair, and was attaching a ring of electrodes to his forehead.

She was _still_ attracted to this new, dark side of him. If he didn't belong to Urd, she would make sure that...

"He's hooked up!" the Otaku Professor said.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

I was fading in and out of consciousness. The Otaku Professor was explaining something to me. I didn't feel pain...my body felt numb. Probably the work of the Demoness.

I wonder if this anime freak knows that she's a Demon?

"What we're going to do is have you drink this orange juice, which has a mild stimulant and an moderate amount of LSD in it. This ring around your head is a series of electrical pads that will sequentially activate certain parts of your brain with rapid shocks, in conjunction with the video. It's quite a trip, man!" the Otaku Professor explained.

What was he talking about?

"This sounds like some kind of electroshock therapy," I said, somewhat uneasy about the whole process.

"Nope! Not at all! I got the idea years ago, when all those kids freaked out when they ran those Pokeman videos on TV. I figured that anime has some kind of vibration to it that affects the brain...so I decided to tweak the equation with drugs. A 50mg dose of LSD works just fine..."

"50mg?" I gasped out. That was _a lot_!

"And, in combination with the microshocks, the hallucinogen will make you feel absorbed into the video. To your perspective, you'll be an interactive part of the video. But it's actually just a regulated series of realistic hallucinations in your mind, triggered by the events of the anime video."

"W..what video?" I asked.

"Hmm, I think that one of the animated Barney ones should be appropriate for you..."

I tried to reach out and strangle him, but my arms were firmly strapped down. My mind spilled over with homicidal thoughts until I heard female laughing. The Demoness was red-faced with giggles.

"No. Actually, it's one of the old Urusei Yatsura ones. The one where they're all trapped in some imaginary land of Ataru's envisioning..."

Great. He was going to make me hallucinate...and then push me into an anime video where all the characters are hallucinating...

The OJ was kicking in, as the corners of the room started rounding. He pulled a small HDTV attached to some kind of swingarm, and positioned it in front of my eyes.

Lum's green hair seemed to wrap itself through my nostrils as I heard Ataru's glam snickering voice vibrate my bones...

I just hoped that I wouldn't 'arrive' as Cherry...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --


	74. Pt 74: Jihadic Shifts

**Part 74: Jihadic Shifts**

"Call me worm. My name is no longer Cevn," I announced to the Otaku Professor after he pulled the electrode headset off of me. He looked at me with widejowled curiosity, adjusting his thick glasses and thumbing his nose in one smooth motion as I climbed out the chair and stumbled towards his refrigerator.

The Demoness was nowhere to be seen.

"Got any booze?" I asked as I rummaged his stinky icebox, filled with melted ice cream bars and half-draughted bottles of minor-league soda pop. When he shook his head, I decided to go out in search of some get-high.

I was bone-threaded. I had been cavorting with Lum and her friends in my mind, my thoughts somehow seemed to be _inside_ the video! It was one of the weirder movies of Urusei Yatsura; an identity mixup-type plot set against an apocalyptic landscape of Ataru's imagining. In this netherworld of drug and otaku, I reached a decision regarding the apocalyptic dregs of my life.

Rather, the hurling indifference of invisible audiences made me reconsider my role in the stageplay called "life".

It would be my mission: to drag the rest of my miserable beingness through the stagnancies of humankind, exposing and pointing out their secret and holy foibles by the force of my hatred. Instead of being enchanted by my time in the Otaku Professor's "Anime Cloud Chair", I realized that Lum and her posse were stupes, conceived by the greedy to entertain the inane. That was the truth of it. Every human interaction is an attempt to manipulate another being. There is no alruism or terrorism: they're one and the same. I hated every minute of it, disgusted beyond belief at the so-called creativity of the anime world. A plexus of conformity, stereotypes and artistic ossification.

The supreme artistic accomplishments of the 21st century: the boy-band, the girl-band and the scantily-clad girl-diva...

While I was "under", I played a game in my head; trying to see if I could get the green-haired oni-girl to zap me with one of her patent electric gzaps. I hoped that if she did, I would remain unscathed. My immunity to Lum's weapon would then put an end to their little charade by causing them to realize that they were fantasy and I was real.

Either one ruins the illusion, or the illusion ruins them.

In my case, since I had been brought to Japan by forces unknown, I had lived with the poignant illusion that someone actually cared. Yet, I discovered the hope cast about in this illusion was actually the subterranean howling of trapped madmen. I could either join them or shuck them. In any event, in my present ruination, I was too insane to be trusted with such a precious decadence as Hope.

How else could one describe the hell that is addiction?

Each moment, I submerged into a vomitous pool of pathos, drowning in the neuroses of human existence. I had to escape the pain that I love...the familiar sense of loss and impotence against loss. And the only reprieve known to me was to keep getting loaded.

As I hit the street in front of the tenements, the streetscene was canaried with the usual rank-and-file Tokyoites, each trying to be 'distinct' in the conformity of social invisibilities. OLs clothed themselves in the gloss of nametag fashions, salarymen wore greysuits, students wore uniforms, radicals wore long hair, workers wore coveralls. It's all so much the same; mankind is afraid of anything that would stretch the fabric of the uniform, so they disguise their fears. They use a clever pretense to do this; they ape each other's behavior in the name of 'security', in order to demonstrate 'character'.

Animal herds.

I stood in regard of a liquor store, wondering what the shopowner would do if I walked in, punched him in the face, and then robbed him. My beating at the hands of the hoodlums reminded me of the power of physical intimidation to effect change. In my case, the change was even more fear and defeatism. I bet that _they_ didn't feel defeated as a result of gangbanging me with their fists and kicks and clubs! So the question now is to rob or not rob...

Robbery.

I sauntered into the cramped store, watching the frail old man behind the counter with fisheyed indifference. Part of me realized that he was a father, a grandfather...that this store was his life's realm. His only source of income, his social sphere, his inspiration. An anchor to his life, one that kept him from being washed away in the ocean of 30 million Tokyoites. I felt a flash of sadness as my mission became clearer. The torture of being a drug addict lies in a truism: the dishonesting reality that I am totally aware that my behavior is morally reprehensible _when I'm in the middle of it_. That's why the drugs have such appeal, because they are very good at smothering my sense of guilt and shame, allowing me to hide from myself like a tortoise retreating within its shell.

I wouldn't hit him...I could tell that he was already tore up by life.

"Hey, what are you doing?!" he shouted at me as I copped a bottle of vodka and stuck it under my jacket. I saw the old man's eyes, observing the haunting coldness there. He saw me as I was...a thief. Bounty hunter of lethargy, too addled with helplessness to try and earn a living.

I started hauling bottles off the shelf, throwing them at him until he ducked under the counter. Filling the jacket I had swiped from the Otaku Professor with bottles of strong shochu and whiskey, I sprinted out of the place, knocking over a passerby in the process.

"Aim for the alley!" my mind thought frantically as I ran down the sidewalk.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Keiichi almost wanted to burst into heartfelt cheers as he saw the outline of a small city off in the distance. He was certain that this _was_ a small city, not a mirage; as he could distinguish small plumes of smoke rising like flower petals from various places along the irregular profile along the horizon. His joy was compounded when he saw another fellow group of travelers in some sort of mini-bus vehicle far in the distance, driving across the desert towards the town.

After all this way, he was _finally_ back in civilization! No more open deserts, no more smelly tents, no more lifeless escarpments of sand carved rock...no more isolation. A small town meant phones; which meant that he was a short while away from calling home and talking to Bell-chan, Megumi and the others!

It was just a short distance away...

He turned and smiled at his three desert companions, who nodded back at him with expressionless faces. They were in no hurry to reach the city, he realized. If it would have been up to him, he would have urged his camel into a sprint towards the city. The three nomadsmen didn't share his excitement, quite possibly because they preferred their city to be located just outside the laps of their tents: the open expanses of sky and star, and the inconstant continents of sand and rock. Or perhaps they felt a keen dislike for permanent habitations; akin to the distaste that some rural Japanese still harbored against the modern cities.

As they trod closer, Keiichi could distinguish several clusters of rust-colored outbuildings, a roughly hewn brick wall, a large grouping of tents, something that looked like a Islamic mosque with a single minaret, and a thickly-groved forest of palm date trees and other desert foliage to the south of the city.

His Algerian riders started chattering enthusiastically in their language as they directed the caravan towards the small building that looked like a mosque. Keiichi felt a moment's disappointment as he realized that they weren't going to ride into the town proper. As they approached the mosque, he could see that it was weathered with age; part of the outwall surrounding its courtyard had collapsed. Unlike the stereotypical Islamic mosque, there was no Taj-Mahal-like peri-dome atop this structure. In fact, it looked like a simple large square barnshed, except for an arched entryway with decorative motifs and plain wooden doors. A small square-topped minaret dominated one corner of the courtyard wall.

"Mekkah!" one of the riders said to him, nodding enthusiastically while pointing at the mosque. They dismounted next to the front gate of the enclosing wall and were immediately greeted by a priest who emerged from the central building.

"Imam," Monksy said to Keiichi, and then inclined his head towards the priest and greeted him in a respectful voice. Despite the vast differences in culture, Keiichi could immediately sense the high degree of spiritual development present in this man's bearing. There was an absence of the fanatical crest of the religious extremist; instead, the Imam radiated a calm serenity and devout wisdom. The Imam met each rider individually, warmly grasping their hands and patting them on the cheek.

Despite the fact that this was a trading trip, whose goal was to bring various wares to the market and sell them...his desert guides had sought out a mosque as soon as they had reached the town. Keiichi felt an increasing regard for them, not only for getting him safely back to civilization, but for their preference of the spiritual world over the commercial world. Impatient as he was, Keiichi tried to be optimistic. Perhaps this detour from town might be the thing to settle his racing heart, which was pounding so hard and fast that he imagined it was struggling against the cage of his ribs like a trapped mongoose.

Once again, he was reminded of the fact that the world of Islam was populated with devout worthies.

After greeting the others, the Imam paused momentarily when he stood in front of Keiichi, perhaps unsure of _how_ to greet him. After a couple of words from the leader of his traveling companions, the Imam greeted him as he had the others, grasping and shaking Keiichi's hands warmly and then patting him on the cheek with fatherly affection. There was no sense that the Imam felt Keiichi was an alien due of his lack of faith in Islam. The Imam greeted him with equal cordiality as the others.

The Imam inclined his head, and they entered the mosque's courtyard. As they approached the mosque, the Imam patted Keiichi on the shoulder and gestured towards a pool of water in a large octagon-shaped ceramic basin. Keiichi watched as Monkey and the others washed their hands in the small fountain in the center of the open courtyard. He imitated them, thinking more and more how much this ritual of ablution resembled certain social behaviors back home in Japan; such as the ritual washing before entering a tea house or certain shrine buildings.

Then they paused in front of a wood-decked portion of the courtyard that was shaded by a roof that extended beyond the mosque building itself. To his surprise, Monkey and the others removed their sandals before stepping onto the wooden flooring. Once on the deck, they stepped into a small pool of water and washed their feet. Keiichi felt homesick at this; he had always assumed that Japan was the one place in the world where one takes off their footwear before entering a building.

The Imam opened the doors and guided them into the mosque itself. Once inside, it took Keiichi's eyes a moment to gradually adjust to the dimly-lit interior of the mosque. The interior seemed to be a large prayer hall, with wooden pillars supporting the roof. Gaps in the wooden roof overhead emitted streams of light. Against one wall of the building, he could see alcoves with arranged candles flickering in them. Ornately appointed arabesques and woven rugs were draped along the mudbrick walls of the interior. A portion of the floor was covered in sand, while the remainder of the floor was checkerboarded with coarse square rugs.

As he surveyed the thickly-shadowed candlelit mosque, Keiichi could distinguish no religious imagery of any kind, except for a number of wooden plaques that hung on one of the walls. Each was decorated with artfully drawn calligraphy either burned into the wood, or in some instances painted on the wood with gold-flaked paint. He surmised that these were Qu'ranic verses or special prayers. The lack of religious idols in the mosque suggested to him the austere dignity of several Shinto shrines he had visited. He could smell the tasty odor of fragrant incense smoke as the Imam called for two young acolytes with a handclap, who set out a carpet for Keiichi and his nomadic friends to kneel on.

He rested his eyes on an arched 'altar' that seemed to be built into a recess in one wall, directly behind a small raised portion of the floor that reminded Keiichi of a small stage. It seemed to be a central feature of the mosque. The archway was patterned after the traditional Islamic oriental arch: its colored slates of wood were carefully arranged in geometrical shapes that suggested the piping of a pipe organ. Monksy seemed to notice Keiichi's interest in it; he pointed towards the arched area and said "mihrab...Mekkah". Keiichi took this to mean that this area denoted the direction towards Mecca. To the right of the mihrab on the side of the raised 'stage' was a step-platform that looked like some kind of a pulpit. Monksy pointed to it and said "minbarh", then mimed someone reading out of a book. This must be where the sermons are delivered, Keiichi reasoned.

Monkey, Pigsy and Monksy each rolled out a dark red embroidered carpet and set it down on the rug. Keiichi remembered that Moslems used prayer mats to sit on during religious services. The Imam summoned his two young assistants, who brought out a prayer mat arranged it in front of the elevated dais, then gestured to Keiichi to indicate that it was for him. Then they pulled a large ornately-knit sitpillow, placing it at the edge of the raised flooring. Monksy and the others sat down on the their prayer mats and prostrated themselves Moslem-style towards the arched mihrab. Keiichi chewed over the possibility that he might insult his hosts if he didn't participate, so he acted in like fashion.

After they prostrated five times, the Imam lit a series of candles on either side of the mihrab and gestured prayerfully. Then he began to sing in a rich falsetto voice that rang out beautifully as it echoed within the square interior of the mosque. Rising and falling, slow and rapid, the Imam's voice soared as its melody created a world within a world. Keiichi felt himself transported away from his exhaustions, his concerns about finding the Key to Belldandy's Heart, from his concerns about friends and family in Japan, from all the worries that had accumulated in his life. His troubles dripped away like waterdrops coursing from the lip of a clepsydra as the prayersong relaxed him. Keiichi allowed himself to get caught up in the catechumen that possessed his fellow travelers.

Obviously, this holy man was singing holy words...

After he finished singing, the Imam walked over to the recess in the wall and withdrew a loosely-bound weathered copy of the Qu'ran from a niche. Seating himself crosslegged on the cushion in front of the group, he started reading verses from it in a coloratura voice, pausing from time to time to allow Keiichi and his traveling companions to prostrate themselves. The sunlight cast an ginger-rouge glow inside the mosque as it filtered through the incense smoke.

After an hour or so, the 'service' was over. Monkey and the others walked over and deposited some coin in the offertory box. Keiichi conjectured that the special service provided by the Imam was given because he was familiar with these nomads on a personal basis. Their lifestyle didn't afford them the opportunity to worship Allah in a mosque on a regular means, so he was more than willing to provide them with the courtesy of religious services the moment they arrived in town.

After the service, the Imam seemed to shrug off his religious role as he smilingly offered cups of cool water to Keiichi and his companions. As Keiichi sipped the generously tasty water, the other men started conversing in eloquent-sounding bursts of speech mixed with laughter. Keiichi's best guess was that they were discussing the news of the town. Suddenly, the laughter stopped. His three companions halted the Imam and asked the greybearded spiritualist a rapid series of questions. All of a sudden, the light-hearted air had become very serious and heavy. The Imam answered their queries gravely, leading Keiichi to believe that this was some unexpectedly bad news being retold.

Then Monkey pointed at him and said "Japanese"...

The Imam nodded, and then went into a sideroom and returned with a black shawlcoat and motioned for Keiichi and the others to follow him. Keiichi's mind clockworked around assumptions and suppositions as the Imam saddled an old camel and then they were off for the town.

"What is going on here?" he said, airing his confusion about this mysterious behavior. He knew that none of his companions could answer his question, but he had to ask anyway.

As they entered the village, the five men rode down an avenue that was crowded with hawkers, tents selling vegetables and animal furs, horses and camels, children playing ball and women in their durka-like shawls. While riding through town, it was evident to Keiichi that the Imam was held in high regard by the townsmen; their group of five camels was given a wide berth by all the other riders. Once they reached the city square, numerous men and women pressed upon the elderly Imam for a blessing or a few words of encouragement. The Imam pointed to a small two-story affair that said "hotel" in English on a worn nameboard. Dismounting, he led the group inside the hotel.

The hotel greetkeep was stunned to see the Imam in his establishment; this much was revealed by his stuttering voice and wide-eyed expression as the venerable walked up to his desk. The Imam barked a set of instructions to the hotelier, who immediately got on the phone and made a series of calls. As twilight descended on the town, the Imam gave the deskclerk some coins and then Keiichi was led to a room.

The room was small, dirty and spare. But it had a bathtub and a bedcot!

"_Yes!!_" Keiichi shouted joyfully. For the past several weeks, bathing was nothing more than a remote fantasy...but now, he could _actually soak himself in water_! In the desert, the most water he had seen in one place was that which was contained in a ceramic cup. Now, there was water aplenty! He was so overjoyed, he almost tripped out of his clothes as he stripped himself off and stepped into the shallow bathtub which served as a basin for the shower. He shuddered momentarily as the cold water hit his back and face. Not minding that the trickle of water never got warm, Keiichi sang in the shower...

Exhausted and exultant, Keiichi fell fast asleep.

The next morning, Keiichi was awakened by the dry heat and a rapping on the thin wooden door of his hotel room. He sleepily got up and opened the door partway, only to see the Imam, Monkey and the two others, and a new man that he had never seen before. The new man was the first man Keiichi had seen since he was dumped in the desert that was attired in anything resembling Western attire. He had one of those cheapo brown Nike blastjackets and wore tennis shoes instead of sandals.

"You...are Japanese?" he asked. It took a moment for Keiichi to blink back his surprise.

The man had addressed him in _Japanese_!!

"Yes!! Yes! I'm Japanese!" Keiichi replied, his voice swimming with excitement.

"Good! I am a khodja...a translator. I studied Japanese at the Univ. of Cairo, so perhaps I may be of some assistance to you," the man replied, glancing at the Imam with a telling look. The Imam nodded curtly.

Hearing his home tongue instantly bonded Keiichi's spirit with the rest of the world...here at last was someone who had been touched by Japanese culture enough to have actually learnt the language! On the skirts of this realization, Keiichi felt celebratory...he was going to make it back home! Although he still hadn't found the Key to Belldandy's Heart, Keiichi felt a newfound reassurance. He _would_ find the Key; and once he had located it, he could return here...where there was a link to his homeland waiting for him in the person of this khodja. This new person would be able to help him navigate the official and commercial channels that would allow him to call home, and to make arrangements to fly back to Makuhari!

"What day is it?" he asked the translator.

"Saturday, Oct 16th, 20XX," the khodja answered.

Keiichi felt his heart squeeze in despair...he had been brought here on a Monday, Sept 10th. _28 days_ had passed since he arrived in the desert! Only two days remained for him to complete the task Bell's parents had forced upon him! And he didn't have a single meaningful lead, or even a good guess about where the Key would be!

For worse, he knew _nothing_ about what the object of his search.

Keiichi felt an insistent urgency to collapse upon himself with frustration and hopelessness, but the translator started speaking before he could feel the defeatism that threatened to smother him like quicksand.

"Ah...this is quite strange! Twice in just a week! Six days ago, two women came to our village who spoke Japanese like you. They were the first Japanese to come here in three years, other than documentary film crews and the marathon runners. Even more curious, neither woman remotely looked like they were Japanese. But they spoke it quite well..." he observed, half-musing to himself.

Bell-chan!

Every nerve that could, steeled itself to spring with joy. The townsman didn't need to mention any names...he _knew_ that it was Bell-chan! She was _here_!! Belldandy must have come looking for him! The knowledge that Belldandy was nearby claimed Keiichi's entire being, thrilling him out of his brief descent into depression. Keiichi wondered briefly who the second woman was that accompanied his fiancée here. Megumi? Sayoko? Urd? Skuld? His mind was overflowing with thousands of questions...

But there was a problem posed by Bell's presence; it was a situation that wrought a significant dilemma in Keiichi's thoughts. He had been brought to this far land for the purpose of finding the Key to Belldandy's Heart. All things considered, if he were to encounter Belldandy before he found the Key...Keiichi had a strong suspicion that her parents would deem him as failing his "trial by fire"! Bell's parents had been very deliberate in bringing him here: keeping him separated from Belldandy the whole time; not giving him any clues or foreknowledge of what he was searching for; stranding him in the desert wasteland away from any human habitation. Their actions possessed a certain cruel logic: they wanted him to find the object he sought..._on his own_.

If he were to encounter Belldandy, Keiichi realized that he would be unable to spend even a moment away from her. Throughout his long journeyings in the desert, his heart had simply longed too heavily...too wearily...for his beloved Goddess! In essence, their reunion would force an end to his search for the Key. Besides, he knew Bell-chan; she wouldn't let him out of her sight. And he wouldn't be able to withstand having to explain the need to leave his loving fiancée, if even for a moment. Therefore, Keiichi reluctantly drew the conclusion that he would have to avoid his wife-to-be while he tried to find the Key to her Heart. Avoiding Bell-chan was the very last thing he wanted to do, which made this situation even more bilific to his heart.

This whole situation sucked!

"Where is she?? Where are they?!" he finally asked the khodja as his thoughts unscrambled themselves.

"Very bad, this is. She and her young friend friend were searching when they captured by very evil men. Against my advice, they went to a notorious camp of so-called 'revolutionaries' to try and seek answers. Terrorist brigands who have been warlording over this region of our country for years! Men who pervert the Teachings of the Prophet, may the blessings and peace of Allah be on him...for their own evil political gains. She mentioned that she was looking for her husband-to-be. Instead of aiding her in her cause, that base and evil man led her away in captivity! Tragic, this is! Evil men like Colonel Ra-Fadiz have ruined what little peace we have here in Tindouf and the surrounding region! I barely got out of his camp with my life!" he said, his voice filled with passion.

_"__WHAT!!__"_ Keiichi blurted out. This news was so shocking, he felt quaked...displaced from his senses. His hearing went tinny as he leaned against the doorway for support. Feeling more and more disconnected from who he was, who she was, Keiichi struggled to gain a hold on himself. A hatesong of remorse shivered through his being as his mind threatened to unhinge from his sanity.

He felt a strong hand clasp him on the shoulder...the hand of the Imam. Wordlessly, the spiritual leader of the city beckoned with his eyes, trying to get him to regain his wits before they escaped. Somehow, the elderly man _knew_ his heartfrost! The Imam talked to the translator, addressing him and Monkey.

"His Holiness says that you are never abandoned by Allah, no matter how harsh the desert, no matter how dry your thirst for justice is. Allah is merciful. He is always with you, and He will aid those whose cause is righteous. He will bring them mercy and tenderness, to lessen their worries and fears. Imam Quaroud and the three that came with you have agreed to help you, my friend. As will I. His Holiness has deemed you his guest, and we Algerians of the Islamic faith treat our guests with high favor and courtesy. These three will render aid...they certainly have no love in the seats of their hearts for the dung beetle Colonel Ra-Fadiz!" the translator added in a scornful voice. Monkey and his two tribesmen nodded their heads at the mention of Ra-Fadiz's name, then spat on the ground.

It was all happening too fast for Keiichi to believe. He had returned to civilization, only to find that Belldandy had tried to find him...and had been captured by some kind of militant leader in the process!

"_How_ could she allow herself to get captured? She's a _Goddess_! And how can I...with an elderly Imam, three desert nomads and a guidesman...possibly find her and free her?" Keiichi thought to himself.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Skuld regarded Belldandy's sleeping form, grateful that the guards hadn't tried to rape she or her sister. She could sense the lustful evil designs in their expressions every time they brought the gruel that passed for food in this jail. She shivered as she remembered their audience with the marabout Colonel Ra-Fadiz and how the evil leader had regarded her and Belldandy with naked lust.

Perverts, all of them!

Perhaps she and her sister had been spared because of this very fact, Skuld reasoned. If he had claimed them for himself, the Colonel would no doubt come down heavy on any men that would try and ravish them. All through the night, Skuld could hear women screaming in protest in some of the other jail cells, no doubt being mistreated by the thugs who were self-appointed guards here.

And her ankle _hurt_! It anguished so bad that she couldn't find any sleep, even though she was physically exhausted. Her whole leg was feeling deeply numb from the toxin that was slowly gaining a hold on her. Already, her thoughts were paced with bouts of sluggishness. Skuld wanted desperately to undo the effects of the scorpion sting. All she had to do was simply arrange a few million molecules and the pain would go away...

But she didn't.

Skuld had convinced herself that Belldandy's argument about having to endure this unendurable situation without prevailing on any Goddess powers was utterly ridiculous! But now, as the pain slowed her, there was a pinion of doubt that plagued Skuld's mind.

A single aspect of Belldandy's argument...

Which, if it proved to be the truth, meant that she would _have_ to refrain from using any of her divine powers!

Totally.

Skuld realized that _if_ her older sister was telling the truth, then there existed a possibility that, by using her Goddess First Class powers...her actions could cause her parents to revoke Belldandy's upcoming marriage to Keiichi. And if this were to happen, then she would have to live the rest of her existence with the knowledge that _she_ had ruined her sister's chances at marriage. A single selfish act could cast a lifelong shadow over her sister's happiness! Such a breach of responsibility would forever injure her relationship with her sister. No doubt, her sister would forgive her...Belldandy had the biggest, most forgiving heart that Skuld had ever known. During almost four years of Skuld's animosity against Keiichi, her older sister had always been sparing and lenient towards her.

"But _I_ wouldn't be able to forgive myself!" Skuld admitted to herself in a private voice, knowing the absolute nature of her heart. If she betrayed her sister now, she would never be able to look her in the eye...

Skuld still wasn't certain if Belldandy's theory was true. But it made sense. Mother was twisted enough to try and get her older sister to marry that brute Tyyr...so why not this? She had sensed the resentment Mother had towards Keiichi. It was quite possible that this 'trial' could be another one of Mother's cold-hearted and inane orchestrations. Regardless of whose idea it was to banish Keiichi, Belldandy was absolutely convinced that she would 'fail' some sort of trial if either she or Skuld resorted to using Goddess powers in this situation. But Skuld wasn't going to risk finding out. The price was too high...

She hated either-or choices!

Her sister's goofy fantasy about "a knight in shining armor" also distressed her. She had observed this curious motif of chivalric rescue and redemption manifesting itself in cultures in thousands of worlds. It always narrowed down to a notion of the weaker being saved by the stronger, often fueled by romantic sentiments and heart-love. But it was never true. Being saved by romance was just a myth, as intangible as the empty voids of deep space. There would be no rescue for Belldandy and she. It was simply too improbable!

So they were on their own. Keiichi, where ever he was, wouldn't be able to find them _here_. He was probably engaged in the business of just trying to keep himself alive, just like she and her older sister.

"And if he did find us, what could he do? He has no weapons...and it would take a small army to free us from this armed bivouac!" she said to the unhearing sandwalls. This encampment was a small army teeming with trigger-happy teenagers!

Skuld looked at the crushed scorpion, recognizing it as one of the more poisonous species that inhabited this part of the Earthrealm. She knew that she would be getting pretty sick in the next couple of days from its toxins. While Belldandy slept, Skuld contemplated showing the guards her ankle and the dead scorpion, hoping that they would possess a smidgeon of mercy for her. Some compassion for a fellow sufferer. A humane willingness to lessen the pain of another human being.

They didn't.

After an hour or so, the pain had drawn her into desperation, so she pounded on the door to their cell and showed the guards her swollen ankle and the scorpion. All she could see were several pairs of eyes through the peepwindow, sparkling with sadistic glee as they laughed at her misfortune.

In the morning, she learned why.

One of the senior guards visited them, and explained by gestures that Skuld would be treated. But there were conditions...

The guard didn't know that Belldandy and Skuld could understand every word he said while he was trying to convey his message to she and her sister. In order to get medicine, the guard informed with hand gestures that any and all proper medical care would be provided to Skuld...once Belldandy decided to give herself over to Colonel Ra-Fadiz and join his harem.

Belldandy tearfully refused and called them "scoundrel bastards!"

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

The desert flaked like salt in front of Keiichi's eyes as he rode his camel towards the setting sun. The encampment of the so-called "Islamic Political Liberation Army" was located far to the west of Tindouf, nestled in a valley near the Moroccan border. Keiichi wished that he knew the language, so that he could understand what the men were planning. It seemed to him that Pigsy was especially pissed off at this Colonel Ra-Fadiz.

When he asked the khodja, the translator explained that Pigsy's father had been killed by Colonel Ra-Fadiz when his militia had occupied his village. Pigsy's father had been the local village Imam, and had traded life for truth when he confronted Ra-Fadiz's men, telling them that they were "perverting the name of the Allah and his Prophet" by their militaristic actions. This was one of many reasons why Imam Quaroud was in their group. And Pigsy had vengeance burning his heart...

The translator told him story after story, following in the Arabic social tradition of tale-spinning. With each new description of Keiichi was sickened by the atrocities that this Colonel Ra-Fadiz had perpetrated on so many innocents. Only these tales were horrifically _true_...

Why had Belldandy come to this evil man in the first place?

Keiichi felt his skin blanch to potato whiteness as he pictured in his mind the scenario:

_Back in Japan, Belldandy must have searched in earnest to locate him, eventually discovering that he was in the desert. Sick with worry, she then came all the way to the town of Tindouf...where ever that was...in an attempt to find him. _

Trusting Belldandy...desperate Belldandy...

_Of course, she would have walked into the encampments of Colonel Ra-Fadiz as part of an all-out effort to try and recover him. She was heartsick with concern...doubtlessly...to undergo such extremes as to visit the camp of a notorious warlord. Perhaps she thought that she could appeal to his reason...a naive expectation at best, fueled by her ambition and love for him..._

...But the question that nagged Keiichi's attention like a mosquito was this: if Bell-chan _had_ been captured, why didn't she simply transport she and her companion themselves out of danger? For that matter, why did they even attempt to find him using mortal means? They could have located him without even leaving the temple home. Skuld had located Urd when she was hiding in China last year. Doubtlessly, if Bell-chan really tried, she could have easily found him and brought him back to Japan.

No, that couldn't possibly an plausible explanation...if Bell-chan _could_ bring him back, she _would_ have done so already! Evidently, Bell's parents must have enacted specific preventative measures to keep her from interfering! Hence, she had chosen to come here with a traveling companion. Keiichi had a strong suspicion that Skuld had accompanied Bell to Algeria. Of all three Goddesses, Skuld was the most otaku...in the sense that she rarely left the temple home. She was the epitome of the stay-at-home girl. For her to leave home and come here with her sister, Skuld must have found a lot of courage in Bell's resolve. And definitely some resolve of her own...

By a process of elimination, Keiichi arrived at the only possible explanation that made sense.

Either Bell-chan didn't have any powers...or she _couldn't_ use her Goddess abilities to free herself.

Which meant that his precious Belldandy was in definite danger!

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Belldandy cradled Skuld's head against her chest in the cramped jailcell, gently stroking her sister's cheeks and the rounded line of her jaw. Worry bested Belldandy; she found herself absent-mindedly tracing the markings on her forehead and cheekbones, hoping that Skuld would awaken. Skuld had slipped into a coma while she had been asleep last night. The poison-fever beaded Skuld's with ill-sweat, even in the mid-day desert aridity. Belldandy could smell smoke...

Burning human flesh.

"How far can I be pushed by this exercise in pointlessness? I'm no more closer to finding Keiichi than I was when I first came here!" she anguished mentally, anew with inner turmoil. She had only been trying come to Keiichi's aid...and instead, she had walked into a nightmare. The inhumanity of her captors was beyond ken or belief! They had actually _refused to try and help Skuld_, full well knowing that she had been stung by a dangerous insect. And then the beastly condition they had attached to their response, saying that she would have to...

It was too wretched for Belldandy to even consider.

"Yes...this _is _a nightmare! And now, my younger sister is _dying_ because of my utter foolishness!" she upbraided herself.

Belldandy felt crying pains grip her as the knowledge struck her that, despite Skuld's definite difference of opinion on the use of Goddess powers, that her younger sister had courageously maintained the course. Rather than curing herself in an instant with just a slight effort, Skuld hadn't relented. Even to the point where she herself had become desperately sick.

Instead, her younger sister was pale and still, unspeaking in her somnific state. Her forehead was burning with fever.

It was horrible!

"I have to stop thinking this way! It's not fair to assign blame to myself for this!" Belldandy reminded herself as the thoughts crept past her sadness to remind her that she was to blame for this predicament. That her zealous attempt to rescue Keiichi had caused her and Skuld to be trapped here.

"It's not true!" she shouted to the wooden ceiling.

Her ireful thoughts then turned towards her parents, who had created this mess in the first place. They had invoked the "Ritual of Preparedness"...a routine part of the post-omiai marriage process for Gods. For _Gods_ being the term-du-clause...

Once a marriage contract was reached between a God and a Goddess, then each parent would created a structured challenge for their future in-law...a trial of sorts. In most cases, it was a mere formality; a well-intentioned opportunity for the fiancé or fiancée to express their worthiness in proofs of love for their future spouse.

In most cases...

But Keiichi wasn't a God! They should have excused his small mistake of not consulting them formally before he proposed to her! Admittedly, it _was_ a mistake, Belldandy had to grant. Quite possibly, it was much worse than in mistake in her Mother's eyes. Freiija _is_ the Goddess of Marriages, after all! But Keiichi's oversight wasn't malicious in intent; it wasn't not the kind of action that was meant to deliberately exclude Mother and Father from the marriage process. Keiichi had simply been upswept in his enthusiasm; in the midst of his zeal, he had forgotten Mother and Father. Or perhaps he hadn't forgotten them at all. Knowing her fiance, it would be reasonable to assume that he may have been unsure of _how_ to include them; uncertain about the risks involved in formally requesting their daughter's hand in marriage. Mortals usually don't have Gods for in-laws...it's not as simple as inviting one's parents over for tea! Maybe it wasn't Keiichi's fault at all! But instead of allowing him his mistake, because they _knew_ she and he were deeply in love...her parents had banished him to the deep Sahara, putting his very life at risk!

Putting their youngest daughter's life at risk.

The questions kept pounding...

"Do I sleep with that evil man, so that Skuld can get proper treatment for her scorpion sting? And if I do, would I be forfeiting any chance of Keiichi and I getting married? If I were to relent and do something so repugnant as this, how could I feel that I've kept my honor? How could I possibly explain it to Keiichi? But if I use my powers and heal Skuld instead, then Keiichi and I can't get married! How in heaven's name could I _not_ help my sister? And if Keiichi and I can't get married, then could I spend the rest of my life with him anyway? Is marriage really so important? Would Mother and Father be able to tolerate the two of us just living together? Many Earthrealm mortals are partners in life without getting married."

She paused, remembering that she and Keiichi weren't just _any_ pair of lovers. And she wasn't even mortal. And her Mother was the Goddess of Marriages...

And...and...and...and...

"But Keiichi is so set on our marriage! What would _you_ do, my dear sister Skuld?" she asked the recumbent figure, stroking Skuld's silksoft black hair.

"Don't you dare give in..." a weak voice answered her.

"Ohhh, Skuld!!" Belldandy sighed, kissing Skuld on the forehead. Miraculously, her sister had eclipsed her coma and returned to wakefulness!

"If...I can fight this...you can too, sis..." Skuld said in a hoarse whispering voice, forcing a thin smile.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Instead of hiding in caves, the encampment of Colonel Ra-Fadiz was bivouacked in the open. It had taken the Americans and their various international consortiums years to capture Bin Laden and all of his terrorist ilk; during this time, the terrorists had become even more reclusive as the War on Terrorism had raged on. But as Keiichi looked down on the camp, with its avenues of tents and buildings, he realized the extent of this man's arrogance. His open camp was defiant, almost inviting one to feel intimidated by its mere presence.

Practically shouting, "I dare you to come here and take me on!"

Sometime before dawnbreak, Monkey and his two fellow tribesmen left towards the camp without as much as a word. Keiichi had simply woken up to find that three of their group had disappeared. He was gripped by panic, threatened by the possibility that Monkey and his men had abandoned the rest of them. But the Imam and the translator assured him that they would be back. Several hours later, the three desert nomads returned with a bagful of clothes. When Keiichi looked at them with a questioning expression, Pigsy made a throat-slitting gesture with his hands.

Their covert morning excursion had been to acquire clothes to use as disguises. Keiichi felt a sense of revulsion at the possibility that the militants who had formerly worn these clothes were now dead men. A queasiness possessed him as he unshirted himself...

After he dressed himself in the smelly garb that passed as a disguise, Keiichi realized that he had made a choice.

Faced with the decision between finding the Key to Belldandy's Heart and obtaining Belldandy's freedom...he had chosen her freedom over everything else. If rescuing her meant that he could never marry Belldandy, then this was a price he was willing to pay.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

After the Sun's torch passed under the horizon, they patiently crawled down the hill. Keeping belly-down over the rocks and sand, so as to keep as low a profile as possible against the nightscape, they approached the tent camp. Darkness was an ally, as the encampment was sparsely lit with campfires. A few lightpoles, and a number of sentries armed with flashlights, torches and rifles...that was it. There was some kind of guard tower on one side of the tentcamp that panned a searchlight over the terrain outside the encampment.

Fortunately, that tower was on the other side of the camp.

As they slowly approached the tents, their stealth made their task seem easier than it was. Despite their disguises, Keiichi knew that they could get apprehended if a guard decided to take a long stroll out from the base camp to take a pee or something. They paused, still hundreds of meters away.

Tension grew in the pit of his stomach with each meter they crawled nearer to the armed 'city'. Suddenly, Monkey stood up and motioned for the others to do the same. As they regained their feet, Monkey quickly ran to a corner of one of the large tents, peered around it, then motioned them to come. Keiichi and the others briskly walked over to where Monkey was standing.

Now that they were in the camp, they could try and blend in. Chance had favored them so far...at night they would be hard to recognize as intruders. Keiichi assumed that they would make an attempt to locate Belldandy right away, but instead, the Imam motioned for them to "huddle". The men started discussing in animated whispering voices. While they were talking, Keiichi saw four men approach from another tent; he tugged on Monksy's robe to alert them. The four guards eyed Keiichi's group warily, but Monkey waved to them in a friendly manner. After he hailed them, he pointed towards Pigsy and walked in imitation of a drunken man and then bent over, miming the actions of a man throwing up. The four guards laughed at Monkey's explanation-by-charade and went on their way.

Pigsy shouted something at Monkey which sounded like a teasing rebuff.

Keiichi felt a little more confident after this incident; they had encountered strangers for the first time since sneaking in and had remained undetected.

It soon became apparent that the men were going to wait until dawn to try and rescue Belldandy. Keiichi was amazed at this, until the translator explained that the Imam was going to set out on his own and circulate amongst the encampment in an attempt to learn where Belldandy was being kept captive. He added that this camp was filled with guards and soldiers from a number of desert tribes; the Imam was the only one of their group that was learned enough to distinguish all the different languages and dialects. Further, his religious offices would cause the others to regard him with respect. No one would dare question a roving Imam in their very camp.

So all they had to do was stay put and either find a tent to sleep in until morning, or stay up 'on patrol' all night. Keiichi wanted to sleep, but prudence informed him that it would be safer to remain awake...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Belldandy felt a fluttering in her heart.

The first thing she sensed when she woke up was the distinct impression that Keiichi was somewhere nearby. For a moment, she felt a near-nauseous wave of fear accompanying her fear that he might have been captured. The marabout had stopped by after dinner, repeating his demand that she have sex with him. When she refused, he got angry and promised that he would instruct his men to hunt Keiichi down.

It was psychological warfare. A couple hours after the marabout had come by, a set of guards came to the door and announced that they had captured Keiichi and that they were going to skin him alive in front of Colonel Ra-Fadiz. Belldandy immediately knew that they were lying, because they had spoken the threatening words in broken, unrehearsed Japanese.

She could feel Keiichi in her heart...her intuition told her that he was safe. She still felt his presence, but now it was much closer.

Belldandy's nature was disinclined towards vengeance or violence. But she wasn't exactly the passive creature everyone believed her to be. She was far more than the obedient girlfriend who would self-sacrifice for her boyfriend. She _would_ self-sacrifice for Keiichi, if he consulted her and she agreed to the worthiness of his request. At other times, she had given herself to his life without him even knowing it. Rooting herself from the safety of Japan and traveling here, using only mortal means...was one of those times.

But it didn't pay off.

"Keiichi is somewhere nearby, still alive. But what is he doing here?" she wondered aloud in the tiny jailcell.

Skuld's breathing was getting shallow and raspy...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

As early dawn came, they made their move.

The tent 'city' was bustling with morning guard changes, people preparing breakfast and militiamen walking to and fro. With so much human traffic moving about, it would be easier for them to be inconspicuous. But Keiichi was worried...they still hadn't found the Imam.

Since this was a large camp, it could take them a while before they encountered him...

"Just stroll around, act nonchalant, and we'll run into him sooner or later," Keiichi reasoned. As the sunlight brightened, he pulled his hood over most of his face, shadowing his eyes. Japanese eyes would be a dead giveaway if someone were to look at him up close, so he remained a pace behind the other three men, walking with the khodja and keeping a lookout.

They passed a series of tents that were filled with wooden crates of weapons. Several tents served as 'mess halls'; already lining up with hungry soldiers and guards. They walked past a building that was built of hewn-together metal grating and aircraft fuselage sections.

They were lost, it seemed. The only consistency was the fearful and anxious expressions on many of the young men they passed in the alleyways between tents. Keiichi and his group deliberately avoided the larger tents, but it was impossible to determine where they were going; every tent and building was single story, so there were no landmarks other than the lookout tower. And they were definitely not going in that direction!

Suddenly, Monkey, Pigsy and Monksy halted a couple steps in front of him. Keiichi wanted to shout "what's the matter with you guys!" from his position behind them. Instead he walked to the side of the trio.

A grinning soldier had the Imam.

Keiichi felt a dullness in his breast as he realized that their rescue attempt had just been foiled. The Imam Quaroud, who had gone in ahead of the four men to reconnoiter the surroundings, had been captured. No doubt, the Imam had assumed that he would be exempt from suspicion and capture because of his priestly bearing and garb. It had been a good plan, and would have worked if they were trying to infiltrate a camp of devout Muslims.

But some of the men in this camp obviously weren't devout Muslims.

The Imam looked at Keiichi and the others with a resigned expression, his face bereft of fear.

Pigsy was clamoring angrily at the guard, waving a pistol...

And then Keiichi remembered.

Back in 14th century Japan, he had been confronted by a gang of thugs...not too much different than these men...who had taken a young mother hostage at knifepoint. Keiichi and several of his retainers had been trying to get rice for his house, because Genji, Tomohisa and Cevn had been stricken ill by the plague. The gang of thugs had wanted to rob him of his coinpurse...

He remembered as he fingered the antique ornamental knife that the two elderly nomads had given him when he left the hospitality of their tent...

But would his body remember?

The soldier had a gun pressed firmly against the elderly Imam's head, challenging the men to lower their weapons.

From deep within, Keiichi heard a voice say, "_I'm a samurai!_" He had been a samurai for almost 14 years, serving Lord Mori and protecting his subjects. It was another life...another time, but his soul wasn't blindfolded by these years in the 14th century. All the martial training, duels, warfare, vigilance, weapon-handling...this experience hadn't been acquired by sleeping on a bed of flowers. Prying through the darkness of his memories, he recalled his diligent study of all forms of martial arts and weaponry during those years. It was Keiichi's secret that his sword skills were probably on par with some of the best Kendo grandmasters in Japan...

Could he shed his 21st-century persona enough to accommodate the Way of the Warrior within?

"I _can't_ let this man intimidate me! I _won't_ let this happen!" he thought, determined to do something. And it would have to be soon; they would only have a moment's reprieve before the other guards would arrive and swiftly outnumber them into hopelessness. Keiichi sensed that the guards of the interior tents in the despot's tent city were much different that the perimeter guards; they wore white pseudo-military uniforms with garish epaulets and cheap medals. Already, Monkey and his two nomad companions were lowering their drawn guns...

"How dare you threaten a man of the Moslem clergy!" Keiichi shouted angrily, speaking for the first time since they had arrived in view of the terrorist's encampment.

Monkey, Pigsy and Monksy looked at him with astonishment.

"I'm committed now," Keiichi thought. This was one time when he would have to swallow down his gentle nature. He had survived the desert with a fierce determination that he never, ever could have suspected as existing within his selfness. This armed guard stood between him and Belldandy's freedom. This armed guard was threatening to kill the man who had gone to such great efforts to help him find Belldandy!

The pacifist inside of him struggled against the samurai. Keiichi narrowed his eyes at the Imam's captor. For a moment, he felt the killer instinct that had helped him win the Le Mans leaping across his breast. It was no longer a matter of his gentler side struggling against his warrior side.

There was a time for rest...and a time for conflict.

And this was a time for warriors!

Keiichi closed his mind to everything but his instincts. Flexing his hand, he kicked an arc of sand right at the face of the uniformed guard while he descended into a crouch. As he lowered into his crouch, he reached for the hilt of his knife and grasped it firmly. Keeping his eyes on the guard to misdirect his opponent, Keiichi stood up. Swinging his arm in an upwards arc as he did, knife in an open hand, faster than the eye could follow. Releasing it in a fluid motion from just above his waist.

Burying it in the forehead of the guard.

As he had hoped, the guard had been overconfident, expecting Keiichi to unsheath his knife and come at him with a swinging attack. He didn't have a clue that the act of retrieving the knife was the attack itself.

Monkey, Pigsy, Monksy and the interpreter gasped, stared at him with wide-eyed shock. The Imam Quaroud was momentarily paralyzed with surprise as well as the guard fell with a "thud!" behind him. Pigsy quickly ran over to the guard and deprived him of his handarm.

The Imam regarded Keiichi with a mixture of gratitude and reticence as Keiichi retrieved his knife.

"I didn't want to kill him, but he left me no choice," Keiichi said sadly in Japanese, shaking his head as he sprinkled sand on the knife and then wiped it off against his cloak.

The horrid business over, they quickly dragged the body next to a tent and then rolled it underneath the folds, so it would be out of sight. Keiichi felt a sourness in the pit of his stomach as he allowed himself a moment to feel the bitter guilt that accompanied taking a man's life. Then the four other gathered again. Monkey patted him condolently on the shoulder; Keiichi felt grateful that someone understood his strong sense of regret. As the Imam spoke rapidly, he learned from the interpreter that Imam Quaroud had found a series of cells where the women were being kept, but that the he couldn't learn which one Belldandy was being kept in.

Keiichi decided that once they got to the jailhouse building, they would free as many of the prisoners as they could. Somehow, in the back of his mind, he sensed a intuitive assurance that he was safe.

Belldandy wouldn't let him come to harm.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Belldandy was massaging Skuld's neck, trying to comfort her semi-conscious younger sister when she heard a scuffle nearby outside her cell.

After a moment of silence, she heard another outbreak of yelling, the voices screaming angrily amidst gunfire and fistcuffs...

Then the sounds of doors crashing open, getting nearer.

She gathered Skuld protectively in her arms, shielding her away from the wooden door to their cell with her body, prepared for the worst.

Then there was silence.

_Crackoom!_

The door hurled open blinkfast, crashing against the wall with a bang, causing her to flinch and start to scream. In the doorway, a guard immediately stepped into the cramped jail cell. Belldandy felt herself going into shock at the sudden threat...

_"BELL-CHAN!!"_

Belldandy almost thought she was imagining things! Here was one of the guards...not the uniformed ones, but the ones who were wearing traditional tribal desert garb, calling her by name. He had a hood pulled low on his fact, with a cloak and shawl, some kind of hempen belt around his waist...

The guard paused to pull the hood down, uncovering his face.

_"KEIICHI!!"_

It was him!!

Her Keiichi had come for her! It was utterly impossible...and yet, _here he was_!! Keiichi had come to rescue her and Skuld!

And on the tails of this recognition, Belldandy realized that he was _hurt_! She gasped as she saw the blood soaking the front of the shirt that Keiichi wore. Behind him were four men and a priest, all with guns.

"I...found you!" he gasped. "Let's get you outta here!"

"Skuld...Skuld is very sick! I don't think she can move at all!" Belldandy said worriedly. Without even pausing, Keiichi leaned down and lifted Skuld up in his arms and settled her on his shoulder, groaning with pain.

"Whha...who?" Skuld gasped weakly.

"It's me! Keiichi! And you've put on a bit of weight since the last time I picked you up off the ground," he said, trying to reassure her as he gritted his teeth.

Skuld smiled at him, remembering when he had playfully lifted her up off the ground last Spring during Girl's Day.

"Keiichi, you can't carry her! You're hurt!" Belldandy confronted him.

"No time for that now..." Keiichi answered back in a determined voice.

Belldandy wanted to heal him instantly; despite the surge of adrenaline and endorphins she sensed surging through his body, she could also feel his significant physical pain. She reached her hand...and then withdrew it.

Not yet.

He grimaced with each step as they emerged into the narrow 'hallway' that separated two rows of cells. Belldandy noticed that each doorway was open; Keiichi and his...friends?...had freed everyone in the cellblock!

Keiichi _had_ come for her!

As he turned the corner, she heard gunfire. Horribly, Keiichi pitched forward towards the ground.

"KEIICHI!!" she screamed as he fell. Skuld tumbled onto the ground as Keiichi collapsed after being shot in the back.

"Bell...all I wanted...to do...was to find the Key to your H..Heart! And I..I failed!" he gasped.

Belldandy knelt beside him and cradled his head in her lap.

_"Keiichi, you don't have to look for the Key to my Heart... _

**You are the Key to my heart! **

...she said as her tears fell hotly on his face. She could see the Reaper hovering nearby; the shadow of his darkcloak passing overhead.

_"__BACK!!__"_ she screamed to the Dark Figure.

Belldandy closed her eyes and gathered herself. Keiichi _was_ her prince in shining armor! He had inexplicably survived the ravages of the desert, and then he had actually summoned the strength and courage to come _here_ and rescue her! Belldandy scanned his mind, accompanying him as he fought for survival against the elements...and then at the brink of death...his rescue at the hands of his Angel. She flew in the winds as Heroic Vermillion Swift had brought him to a tent of desert nomads, who had generously nursed him back to life. She poured cool water on his forehead as his emaciated body began to heal itself. She journeyed with him and the three of tribesman as they rode with him to Tindouf. She swept through the galaxy of candles in the Imam's mosque, hearing the holy man's convictions to join their group...

"_I have had enough of this_!! Parents and evildoers be damned, I will _not_ allow this to continue!" Belldandy screamed, feeling free, feeling connected to the deepest part of herself, feeling flooded with purpose and determination. Her hands were swathed in azure pools of arcanic energy...the energy of a woman declaring independence...

And so it was...

In front of the band of men accompanying Keiichi, two blue lights seemed to gather in midair, floatpooling like luminous liquid mercury. Each of the four men gasped in fright as one hovered over Skuld, the other over Keiichi. A group of soldiers started firing rifles and pistols at the lights. But there seemed to be no bullets striking the lights, the fallen Japanese man and the black-haired woman, or any of Monkey's men or the Imam. And then the two lights descended on each, causing both to glow with energy.

Belldandy drained every bit of poison from Skuld...she healed every injury to Keiichi.

Keiichi's eyelids fluttered open. His pain was gone; it had simply disappeared! His injuries...no more! His strength had returned in full! He looked up into Belldandy's wondrous blue eyes...

"We're going home, my love," she said to him.

"KILL THE INFIDELS AND THE TRAITORS!" a voice screamed angrily. Belldandy jerked her head up and saw Colonel Ra-Fadiz running towards them with at least a hundred men, armed with machineguns and rifles. There were men all around them; they were pinned down inside the narrow hallway between the two jailhouses. Belldandy reached for Keiichi's hand and led him out into the street.

As soon as the pair emerged into the street, they were splattered with gunfire. As his four companions looked on incredulously...one second...five seconds...ten seconds passed...and they were still standing!

"Allah...be...praised!!" the Imam gasped reverently, falling to his knees in supplication.

Skuld walked out into the street and stood on the other side of Keiichi, glaring angrily at Colonel Ra-Fadiz and his men. Keiichi gestured to his four companions. The Imam, plus Monkey and the others, cautiously emerged from the hallway and stood with them in the street.

Bullets flew out of the machineguns...and disappeared.

"Bell? Let's get out of here!" Keiichi said, feeling a partial panic as the gunfire continued.

"_NO!!_" she replied sharply. "I'm not done yet!"

Keiichi looked at his fiancée with wide eyes, shocked at her strong rebuff of his words. He wondered momentarily if this was Mara, disguised as Belldandy.

"Keiichi, I _am_ a Goddess, you know. And right now, I am a very _pissed off_ Goddess! These men are intolerable...their whole spiritual consciousness is reprehensible! They tried to _kill_ you! They wanted to _rape_ me! And they didn't help Skuld when she was sick, _leaving her for dead_! And for that, they must be taught a lesson that they'll never forget! I will correct them of the error of their misguided principles," she answered.

Despite himself, Keiichi felt his body trembling with fear...mixed with anger for all that Bell-chan and Skuld had endured while imprisoned here. His fiancée was the most loving being in the Multiverse...but at the moment, she was gripped by a purposeful rage that could have ran dead-heat with Mara's most Demonic dudgeon...

Using her Goddess powers to shield all of the participants, Belldandy decided to hold steadfast under gunfire, so that the army of the evil marabout would try and shoot their weapons until they gave up. To prove the ineffective of weapons of war against spiritual love...

Already, they were setting up a strike missile to fire at them, while other men were showing up with grenade launchers and missile launchers. Belldandy continued to protect Keiichi, Skuld and the others. She extended her powers only slightly, protecting _every_ being from harm.

"Kill them! Kill them! Kill them!" Colonel Ra-Fadiz was screaming with fanatic compulsion, so consumed with rage that he wasn't even aware of the fact that all the weapons he was using had no effect on any living thing. But instead, he was blowing up his tents, his buildings, his munitions shacks...

His weapons had only a fraction of the power of a Goddess Senior First Class, Unlimited, Unrestricted.

An immeasurable fraction.

Skuld looked at her older sister, surprised to see the fierce expression on her sister's face. Belldandy should have been dressed in her blue-gold-white warrior-Goddess 'battlesuit'...she was certainly pouring it on with Goddess Energy!

"«_Join me, sister!_»" she heard Bell's voice thoughtcast in her mind. Belldandy broke her stern expression briefly to smile at her. An arc of invisible meaning flashed between her sister and she.

"Skuld, you've always wanted to crank up you Goddess First Class powers," Keiichi noted. "This is as good as an opportunity as any."

Keiichi had even discerned what Elder Sister wanted her to do.

Skuld nodded her head and joined her power with Belldandy's. Using her word-projection power, she decided to teach these men a lesson of her own designing. She remembered the Qu'ran she read in the hotel room, and wrote a Qu'ranic verse against the sky...

_**"Who is more wicked than he that invents lies about God! Beware! Such men will be arraigned before their Lord...Beware! The scourge of God will fall upon the unjust!"**_

"Good work, Skuld! Keep it up!" Belldandy said, pleased at Skuld's inventiveness. She nodded her head approvingly towards her younger sister. Once again, Skuld was of one heart as she, thinking the exact same thing!

Belldandy watched as confusion and panic gripped Colonel Ra-Fadiz's troops as the fiery glowing words painted themselves across the sky. Undisturbed by currents of wind, background clouds, or the radiance of the sun, verse after verse of the Qu'ran flashed in the sky. Occasional bolts of lightning flared around the cursive Holy Words...

The effect was immediate and total. Many of Ra-Fadiz's men were throwing down their weapons...

As for the ones who clung to their firearms, Belldandy transformed their guns into scorpions and snakes.

"Bell...Skuld...aren't you both overdoing it a bit?" Keiichi observed wryly.

"Don't try to stop me on this one, Keiichi! My will is set...these evil men need to learn in the marrows of the souls that they will _never_ be allowed to spread terror to others with their vile cowardliness!" Belldandy answered.

Belldandy's strong words should have heightened his unease. But he trusted her gentle nature, knowing that she possessed the wisdom of ages...

If anyone here knew what they were doing, it was she!

Skuld extended her consciousness so she could hear the Imam's mind, his thoughts. They were practically shouting in devout reverence. As he mentally quoted a Qu'ranic verse in his thoughts, she cast it into the sky, fiery words against the light blue...

_**"Among men who mislead others from the Truth of God...their nemesis will be most fearful!"**_

Belldandy added the final touch: a giant hand to write the words against the sky. By this time, the gunfire had stopped completely. The militiamen were yelling in awed consternation at the sight. Belldandy made sure to leave no indication that she was doing anything...she didn't want the religious Imam and his party to lose perspective on their deeply held spiritual convictions.

"«_Call upon Allah!_»" she thoughtcast to the Imam in a male voice. The Imam looked astonished for a moment, then broke into reverent prayer...

Allah appeared in the sky.

"By the grace of the Prophet, blessings be on him and God...it is_ He_!" the Imam shouted in a joyful voice.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Belldandy had hoped that the Lord...manifesting himself as Allah...would come. Allah was the one of the Seniors of all the wishgranting offices in the Multiverse. As one of the Senior First Class Gods, he administered all of the Goddess Relief Offices, the trillions of planetary Otasuke offices...

In a very real sense, he was Belldandy's boss.

In all of human history, Allah had granted but a single wish. A fervently spiritual mystic named Muhammad had wanted to behold God in all His glory. Of all the wishes granted by the GRO, this type of wish was one of the commonest...and one of the rarest. Allah had personally submitted the request to the Lord, beseeching Him to reveal Himself to Muhammad. In response to Allah's request, the Lord, in his gentle and merciful way, had deigned to come to the Earthrealm and reveal Himself to this desert mystic. Of course, the Lord had come in the form most suitable to the beliefs of the Earthrealm mortals.

The same form and face that now filled the skies...

For three minutes, the Lord's wise and loving visage looked down upon them, stifling every voice into silence. The Lord was revealing Himself with the image He had revealed to Muhammad 15 centuries earlier...

Belldandy was on her knees, bowing deeply to His merciful presence.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Scared out of his wits, Keiichi reached out and instinctively sought out Bell's hand with his fingers. Gripping her hand tightly, he held it until the image of Allah passed from the sky.

A moment later, still lacing her fingers with his...he felt something missing.

"Where's your engagement ring? It's _gone_!" he exclaimed in shock.

They had taken it away! The missing ring was all the proof he needed to know that Belldandy's parents had just turned him down! Despite everything, despite the best human effort he had given, despite rescuing their daughter...they had refused his marriage request!

Keiichi's heart felt like it was drowning as he realized that Belldandy had been speaking figuratively, of course, when she said that he was the Key to her Heart.

He had failed. He had never found the _real_ Key to Belldandy's Heart!

Keiichi had been prepared for this eventuality, but the abruptness of it stole his breath away.

As he held her hand, Belldandy could sense Keiichi's mounting fears.

"Keiichi? It is not as you think...so let your troubled heart be at peace," Belldandy said.

"But Bell...your ring...your parents...but what about you and I..." he stammered. Belldandy rested a silencing finger on hips.

"Not another word more of it!" Belldandy chided gently.

_Keiichi...no matter what, I'm going to marry you! When I said that you were the Key to my Heart, I __meant__ it! It's __you__, my love! Think of it this way; a doorway or gate can only be opened by a single key. Nothing else can ever open it. And in the journeyings of my life...until I met you, a substantial part of my spirit, a part whose existence I wasn't even aware of...was stilled. Until I met you, Keiichi, I was unable to appreciate the breadth of this heritage of my heart. A heritage of love that remained silent for hundreds of thousands of years, solely because I had never fallen in love with the being I was destined to be with! One day, an Earthrealm mortal contacts me by accident, and makes a silly wish for me to be with him always...and then my heart opened like a blooming flower in the sun! My very Soul is spun around yours, my love! And it can only be thus, because you __are__ the Key! It was __you__! All along, it was you, Keiichi!"_

Keiichi regarded Belldandy anew, as her face seemed to shine with the radiance of her conviction.

_"You came here and saved Skuld and I! You –_saved-_ my sister and I, at _the risk of your single mortal –life-_! No greater love can be shared between beings, save for the deeply selfless love that allows for life to be exchanged with death. You were willing to make this exchange for my well-being. And you nearly died...to bring me life! I love you more than anything in the Multiverse, Keiichi Morisato...because you came into my life...and you unlocked my heart with your love!"_

Keiichi looked at her in amazement. Listening to his fiancée's words, he felt as if all their years together had been summarized by Bell-chan's pure and open words of the heart...in the event of a single moment.

"And as for my ring..._he_ has my ring!" she said, her countenance fuming with ire as she turned and pointed at Colonel Ra-Fadiz. "I declared my independence today! Now it's time for _you_ to declare your personal independence. Bring me back _my_ ring!"

Skuld looked at Keiichi with pride as he stood up, not even hesitating for a moment to fulfill Elder Sister's request. She watched at Keiichi walked down the roadway towards the cowering militia leader. As he walked into the enclave of guards, they hurriedly parted a path for him leading to their Colonel.

One punch to the jaw was all it took for him to fell the bully...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Imam Quaroud was praying in his mosque, even more fervently before. His charitable act of assisting the Japanese man had been rewarded by far more than success. Allah had mercifully allowed Himself to intervene on the behalf of the righteous against the wicked. The Creator Himself had come to judge!

And judge He did!

The Prophet's words were truths...of this, there could be no dispute. Any flicker of disbelief that the Imam had harbored in his soul was all but dissipated after today's events. In his wisdom, the hale Imam knew that it was only human nature that his doubtings of the spirit would return from time to time. And when they did, he would summon the memory of today's events to staunch his reservations and regain his faith in the Truth.

In front of several hundreds of Colonel Ra-Fadiz's troops, the Prophet and the Lord had both appeared.

Fiery words from the Holy Book had blazed across the morning sky.

He and his companions were miraculously uninjured by the weapons of Ra-Fadiz's army. The young Japanese man and woman were miraculously cured! Guns were turned into insects and vipers! Not one man, soldier or citizen, man or woman, believer or infidel...was injured in the clash.

Allah had chastised his children for perverting His words as justification to subdue others with violence and terror.

He had read that proofs of miracles were an inferior means of verifying the existence of Allah. If a person needed a miracle to justify their belief in the Lord, this only served to disclose how simple and incomplete their faith was from the start.

What now of faith, now that the Lord had shewn Himself amidst the workings of miracles?

Imam Quaroud realized that Tindouf would become a new holy place in the world of Islam. The townspeople were already flocking to the mosque by the hundreds. They told him stories about how the Word was being broadcast on every news channel around the world, on the Aladdin's carpet of satellite transmission...describing the miraculous appearance of the representations of Allah, the gentle and merciful.

The blazing hand writing verses of light on the Qu'ran. The impossibly intricate geometric patterns that appeared in the sky; far more perfect than what could have been wrought by human artifice or imagination. Glowing spheres of light, one for each of His hundred names, falling towards the desert like meteors. The soundless Voice that spoke to each man in their thoughts...

And now...somehow, the manifestations of the Divine had been captured on video, for the benefit of all mankind. Mysteriously, no one knew who had taken the video...

No one knew why His image was only visible during the television broadcasts to those who believed in Him. To the Christians, to the Buddhists, to the other religions...only a blank screen.

Allah had allowed even this.

The terrorists and their ilk had forever stained Islam with their warmongering, evil, blasphemous ways. To many in the West, Islam was the "religion of 9-11", the "religion of terrorist fanatics". At this critical time in the history of Islam, Allah Himself had once again demonstrated His caring mercy by offering a slight glimpse into His Purpose...so that the Faithful could regain the path of correctness. So their faith could be renewed, their humility rekindled, their thirst for Divine Love quenched...

Washing his hands in the prescribed manner after praying, Imam Quaroud knew that he was now even more of a holy man than before. He smiled self-knowingly...he certainly didn't _feel_ more holy at all! The only measure of holiness that he felt now, after Allah had come to encourage him, was in the calming of his heart.

In the times to come, as Tindouf's chief cleric, he would have to serve the needs and demands of the faithful.

He would have to be ready...

And with Allah's strength, he _would_ serve with readiness and devotion.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --


	75. Pt 75: Pepperwort Visions

**Part 75: Pepperwort Visions**

Keiichi emerged from the squalid men's room in the Algiers International Airport and stretched his arms. He felt the familiar stiffness in his shoulders and back that had plagued him ever since he had been rescued by the desert nomads. He attributed the rigidity of his body's musculature to being 'dried out' in the desert wastes; a remain-effect of being dehydrated to the point of death.

The crowded concourse was bustling with Eurotourists and Arabs as he made his way towards Belldandy and Skuld, who were waiting in the jetway for their flight to Madrid. Skuld was thumping her foot on the floor in anticipation; both Goddesses were exhausted after the two day busride from Tindouf to Algiers. Keiichi himself would welcome a ready nap in one of the chairs; but the moment sleep seemed to snatch him away, his fatigue would seep in and snap him back to wakefulness.

Tired and wired...

When he returned from the restroom and settled into his seat, Belldandy whispered in his ear that she had tweaked the ticket computer a little...so their coach class tickets were now first class tickets all the way back to Tokyo.

"A Divine Class upgrade," she had joked to him with a giggle, her eyes bright like the mid-day sky despite her tired expression.

Right now, Keiichi didn't exactly feel first class.

Despite his happy reunion with his wife-to-be, his imminent return to Japan and 'civilization', his full stomach and whetted thirst...Keiichi remained very unsettled about the aftermath of his rescue efforts.

After they had returned to the Tindouf hotel on camelback, he and Belldandy had waited with hang-breath anxiety, certain that Bell's parents would make an appearance. Keiichi was confident; he had used the artillery of his heart's steadfastness to battle unsurvivable conditions in the desert, and then he had risked his life to rescue Bell and Skuld from the clutches of the evil marabout colonel and his gang of militiamen. Certainly _these actions_ would qualify as a seal of his devotion to their daughter...

And according to Belldandy, he had found the Key to her Heart.

He had directed his gaze outwardly...when all along, it was he...

_He_ was the Key!

Keiichi was frankling amazed that this possibility hadn't ever occurred to him, not even once! And now that the "test" was concluded, he earnestly desired some kind of confirmation from Bell's parents that he had "passed" his love-trials. But Odeyn and Freiija had never flashed an appearance.

He wasn't the only one who was stressing the absence of Odeyn and Freiija. Keiichi could sense the anxiety simmering underneath the placid surface of his fiancée, furrowing her brow with etches of worry.

Upon their return to the town of Tindouf, Belldandy had been filled with exuberance and joy-spiritedness...if Skuld wouldn't have happened to be sharing the hotel room with she and Keiichi, he was certain they would have spent a good part of the evening roaming in the sweetly sensual orchid fields of their love. Or at least dreaming about it... And then the following day, the Imam's men had come for the three of them and invited them to the mosque. There, in one of the outbuildings, the Imam had treated their party to a sumptuous feast on a self-proclaimed "day of rest". After the tasty repast of spicy stew and fresh vegetables, they returned to the hotel and began to address the issue of how to return home without having any money on hand. Keiichi phoned Megumi collect and managed to get her to wire him the necessary funds; he had to borrow heavily from his parents. Meanwhile, a host of small details needed to be orchestrated in order to facilitate their return to Japan. Despite the realities of stress sandwiched between stress, they managed to get everything in order for their return. Once again, the Imam proved quite helpful in expediting matters. There was a certain obstinence towards assisting wayward foreigners here. Keiichi contrasted the stubbornness and outright extraditious attitudes of the townsmen against the pure generosity of the nomad tribesmen that had nurtured him back to health. The Imam had to get cross with several shop owners and the banker when they wanted a 'trim' for their services. The thought of their mercenary greed still made Keiichi feel sour and salty.

But Bell had weathered it all with a kind smile and cheerful disposition. So why did her mood take a downswing today? Bell-chan usually possessed too much poise to let trifles such as these sway her mood towards pessimism. And Keiichi knew that it was quite improbable that their homecoming would shadow his fiancée's thoughts. So what was causing the occasional flicker of tension in her face, the slight hesitation in her manner?

Belldandy was constant...and yet she seemed distant as well.

This business about the Key to Bell-chan's heart worried him. Keiichi bore his thoughts as witness to the possibility that his divine girlfriend could be caught up in an existential uncertainty. Belldandy had professed wholeheartedly her belief that Keiichi was the Key to her Heart, on a number of occasions since he had delivered her from the hands of Colonel Ra-Fadiz. But what if somehow...he _wasn't_ the Key to her heart? What if her parents showed up and then proclaimed that _something else_ other than Keiichi was the Key to her Heart? He was certain that Belldandy would be extremely mortified if this was the case! Mortified that he would have failed in his quest...but even more so, she would be mortified because she couldn't be certain about something as essential as the workings of her spirit and her heart...

Were these the kinds of doubts circulating in the back of his fiancée's mind, causing her subtly subdued demeanor?

"You okay, Bell-chan?" Keiichi asked as he sat back and wrapped his arm protectively around her shoulders. He sighed, momentarily released from the worries of the present as she nestled her cheek against the ball of his shoulder and kissed him on the neck.

"Oh look, it's Prince Charming again!" Skuld's teasing voice interrupted them.

Keiichi had taken her clowning around with a light heart at first; but now after almost a week, it was definitely snapping his nerve fibers. He understood that his rescue of Bell had flown in the face of Skuld's deep conviction that there were "no princes in shining armor to rescue damsels in distress" on the Earthrealm. He suspected that some of her anger was surfacing sideways under heavy manners...a possible result of Skuld having to confront her own inability to wrest herself out of their confinement. Skuld had faced life as a mortal, with mortal limitations...and its attendant frustrations. It was quite likely that she was getting mired in one of her notorious jealousy fits, fueled by the fact that he had proven himself a better 'mortal' than she by successfully rescuing her and Bell-chan. Or maybe Skuld was just too stubborn to say "thanks" in any other way...

Belldandy's naivety. Urd's cupidity. Skuld's emotional deflections.

"I'm worried about my Mother and Father's silence," Belldandy answered after a moment of reflection, confirming Keiichi's suppositions. "You've shined in every way in the past week, my love. You passed the Ritual of Preparedness with a degree of personal deportment that extends far beyond my satisfaction, my dear Keiichi. I daresay that your efforts should meet with their satisfaction as well. What is so unsettling to me is that normally in such instances, the future in-laws often acknowledge the successful completion of the assigned task with immediacy. But my parents have been mum on all accounts, neither offering their approval or disapproval. Each day, I'm left feeling more and more uneasy. If they were going to acclaim their confirmation of our engagement, wouldn't they wish to do so right away? But this delay lends a host of doubts. Usually, bearers of bad news are quite reluctant to hasten its disclosure to those who would be injured by it. Please, Keiichi...I don't ever want to hear that they're going to annul our engagement!" Belldandy said, her voice filling with desperation and dismay.

"Bell..." Keiichi said in his most soothing voice as he started stroking her hair, trying to relax himself by the action of relaxing her.

"And then there's Urd...she's been very evasive ever since you were whisked away, my love. And Cevn went on that date with Mara...and never came back! And Betty is still stranded in our temple's yard."

Her reply reminded Keiichi of how much Belldandy cared for those around her...and the emotional price she sometimes paid for it.

"My Goddess intuition is working overtime with all these strangetudes. I can't seem to conceal anything from you, my love. I am overloaded with aura-impressions. And yet I cannot find a reasonable explanation for the passage of any of these events! In fact, I've been trying to keep myself from having a headache, despite the wonderful company of the past six days," she said in a soft voice, referring to the Imam, the khodja and Monkey and his nomadic tribesman. Even Bell's posture reflected her anxiety; her feet were pointed slightly inwards in as she sat with her hands folded tightly on her lap.

"Belldandy, I think you should remain patient, especially concerning the situation with your parents. I know it sounds silly for a mortal like me to suggest that you're looking for a hasty resolution for all of this...but I think you are. To me, I can plainly see that you _are_ struggling with yourself! Remember the last time Urd disappeared? You allowed your urgency to overwhelm you, and we found ourselves getting into more than one nasty fight over it. I would love for your parents to flash into existence, announce to the two of us that I passed their 'trial', and then promise to wear appropriate wedding attire when we get married next year! But I don't think that's going to happen anytime soon," he counseled. Belldandy frowned at his observation and folded her arms across her chest.

"Well, _why shouldn't it happen soon_? Does this mean that we're on our own, Keiichi? That my Mother and Father have turned their backs on us? Wasn't this whole month-long episode in our lives supposed to _mean something_? I certainly discovered how difficult it is to keep from using any of my Goddess powers. It was so ridiculous, struggling like I did! Was that why did my parents do this to us? Despite my Mother's habitual speciousness and haughty manner, I don't consider her as a fickle deity...especially when _my_ marriage to you is concerned. I seriously doubt that this misadventure was just some randomness on their part. There _must_ be some purposeful intent behind all of this...and I want to know what it is!" she said emphatically. Keiichi watched Skuld nod her head, fully agreeing with her sister's statements.

"Hmm... I think you have a point, my love. But we can't allow your parents to fill our thoughts so much...otherwise they might wind up influencing our thinking with the idea that this engagement between the two of us is only a temporary situation. As far as I'm concerned, our marriage plans are _permanent_...on the most solid of foundations!! And I think that we need to treat it...and us...the same way we were approaching it before I was brought here. I for one don't need Freiija and Odeyn to take up so much real estate in my head!"

"How can you say such a thing, Keiichi?! You nearly _died_ out there! Maybe you can brush this whole experience aside and make peace with yourself...but I cannot find the strength in my heart to simply dismiss it! Each day, I gather more and more frustration every time I think about what you went through in the desert. Mother and Father have gone too far with what seems to be another one of their silly whims, this time!"

Keiichi stared at Belldandy, amazed how her opinions were flip-flapping. It dawned on him that she was more than a little upset by all of this...she was acting all whacked out!

"Belldandy! Put a clip on that tongue right now! Didn't you just say that they weren't being fickle? Besides, they might just be listening in! A..and I don't want to get sent to Antarctica just because you word-popped them in a fit of anger!" Keiichi admonished.

"Keiichi! Who are _you_ to tell me what I can and can't say about _my_ parents?! And what gives you the right to judge me, telling me that I'm having a fit of anger? And what makes you think..." Belldandy retorted sharply.

As the voices grew loud as thieving magpies in a barn, Skuld smiled to herself, culling in sincere reigns of deep gratitude for the fact that she wasn't foolish enough to have a boyfriend...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

_"Sittin' on the dock of the bay, watching the tides washing away..."_

Or whatever. I couldn't remember the lyrics playing over the radio, so delightfully stoned was I. There was no joy in watching the seabirds flying in low sweeps over the ocean, foraging for leftovers trashheaped from the bayside fishmongers market.

"How many KPS does it take for thought to travel between two neurons?" I muttered to one of the gulls.

Late last night, I discovered a cardboard box that I could crawl into, a place where I could sleep it off. Earlier, I had tried to hustle up some cocaine, but didn't meet with success. So I had to settle for some pharmaceutical downer caps and some window-crack. I felt snotty-sick from getting soaked in a chill October rain last night. Either that, or I had the dope-flu. In any case, my stomach heaved out the downers soon after I huffed the crack, but when I fingered through the vomit looking for pills, I didn't find any. Evidently, they had already dissolved in my stomach. A half-hour later, I was drooling inside my cardboard haven, comfortably numb...only to be awakened by a brawl between some drunks and a scumbag group of bosozoku. The bosozoku were mostly teenagers out for a thrill ride, which included rumbling some of the homeless drunkos. A couple of the bikegangers threatened me, but they backed away once I made eye contact with them. So I was given a ringside seat as they worked over one of the winos, kicking him repeatedly in the groin and abdomen until he started spitting up blood. The dull yellow-orange lights of the slums cast the scene in Clockwork Orange surreality as another drunk started screaming at the punks, brandishing some kind of pipe or tire iron.

Better him than me.

Honor amongst the dregs of life. Most people don't even bother to realize that in most "modern" societies, an average of 5-7 percent of the population is homeless, living on edge like this.

As the sunlight leaked through the cracked corners of my little cardboard home, I felt a sand-gritty taste fill my mouth. A rat scurried out of the box; it had curled up against me for warmth. We were two...fellow rodents wheeling against the survivor trip...

"So this is how you plan to spend your life? A man in a box?" I heard a dry and humorless cityvoice ask as I emerged into the chilly morning air. Unfurling its late October best, the weather was beginning to melt the frost that glanced against the cowls of the ramshackle buildings, making them shine like dead eels.

I turned to see the Demoness sitting atop the cardboard container I had slept in. She was dressed in a trenchcoat and a fedora hat with some kind of _glowing_ orange-red feather tucked in the hatband. She grinned broadly, showing off her generous canine fangs. It seemed that every time I saw her, the Demoness's fangs appeared to be different lengths. Just like the ears of the Batman's hood in DC comics. Maybe their length had something to do with the Demoness's mood? Or maybe she couldn't get her Earthrealm manifestation right.

One of the drunks who was curled around a heap of bottles nearby got up and stumbled away, looking back at us in fear as he disappeared amongst the unruined slum ruin slams.

It was then that I realized that the Demoness was floating in the air...

"Why don't you find someone else to haunt, Demoness! There's nothing you can do to augment my rampage of ruination. My life's all gone down into the shithole...you can quote me on that! Once upon a time, I grasped the very stars with the reaches of my mind and soul... Now, all I can touch is a gnawing emptiness inside of my heart. Ferret aid featherbed, what's the difference to the owner of his or her destiny? I can't be bothered with such choices, my destiny is as dry as elephant bones in the graveyard. Joy is but a vapor, dissolving into invisibility..."

"What are you babbling about? Farbeit for me to decide your fate, Cevn. My whole purpose in coming here this morning was just to keep tabs on you, so I could keep up my end of the bargain with the person who asked me to mind you. The last thing we need is you to decide to take a dive off this pier and dash your head against one of those concrete erosional barriers, just because you're mired in self-pity," she replied, gesturing towards Tokyo Bay.

"How could she read my mind?" I muttered aloud.

"And if you try it...I'll simply prevent your suicide. I was specifically instructed to bar you from killing yourself," she noted.

"Demoness, begone! Just let me die and get it over with!" I shouted.

"Ha ha ha! That kind of ploy only works in the movies! And to think that I found you attractive at one time! But what I thought to be the crystalline shard of Evil inside of you...is actually just a dull scarab of pathos. You're more slothful than the most minor of Demons. Look at you! You're wearing the same clothes you wore five days ago when you left the Otaku Professor's place!" she noted with disgust.

"Why don't you bow to the authority of silence and let me be?" I shouted angrily.

"Why do that when we're having so much fun!" she answered.

I glared at her.

"But I'm curious about one thing," the Demoness said, ignoring my request. "Why are you forcing this upon yourself? Ever since you came to Japan, you've been an enigma. You even have an Enigma Book, which has both the God's and the Demon's Languages in it. _Someone or something_ gave that book to you. My twin sister even fell in love with you! And now you're pissing your life away with these leak-bums, stealing from the innocent so you can fix some heroin and spread the infection of your disillusion. The Otaku Professor's dream-machine wasn't good enough for you, eh? Speaking of which, why don't you come with me back to his place? I'll even take away your withdrawals; so you can eat a hot meal and actually hold it down."

Much as I wanted to slap her, I just couldn't stand up long enough to do it. She wasn't worth the effort, anyway. But something in her words delivered an sharp glitter of impulse across my mind. I _did_ want another ride in the Otaku Professor's machine. I figured that if I did so, at least I wouldn't have to feel dopesick afterwards. I felt a drip of drool against my chin as the thought of solid food took hold of my imagination.

"Okay...you win, Oh Fanged Sage! Escort me down the express ladder to another ring of Hell, why don't you? Tell the Otaku Professor to rig his machine up for me. And make sure he has some booze in the fridge this time!" I said, standing up and kicking one of the semi-conscious homeless bums to vent my spite at life. The bum groaned, glaring at me balefully as he gave me the finger.

The Demoness scowled angrily at me, her fanged expression saying "what makes you think that you can order me around?"

I had her in the palm of my hand.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Keiichi's Journal, 14 October 20XX

_Dear Journal,_

_I've been back home for a couple of days now and I still can't get over the reality of spending the last thirty days in the Algerian Sahara desert. Or that I have an personal guardian Angel. Or so many other things._

_In an ideal world, I would have been awarded a semester's worth of college credits simply for surviving the experience._

_Yesterday, Bell, Skuld and I went to the ABCB Coffee Shop in Chiba yesterday. Some place that Sayoko raves about, according to Skuld. But Belldandy wanted to go there so she could show me how she discovered that I was somewhere in the desert near Tindouf. She pointed out this charity marathon poster that some photographer named Kasuga Kyosuke had taken, and then she explained how she had 'felt' my presence in the poster. I know that our hearts are entwined on many levels, including supernatural ones that I don't even have a clue about...but her story seemed ludicrous at first. Of course, Skuld had to pull a smirk during Bell-chan's explanation._

_But with Belldandy, I've learned that _anything_ can happen. After all, she fell in love with me!_

_And now she's insisting that this Kasuga Kyosuke guy should be the photographer we hire for our wedding! The guy's been on photo assignments all over the world, and his pics have graced the covers of all sorts of famous magazines...I just hope that he even _does_ weddings! Not to mention that it'll probably cost a fortune._

_BTW, guess who was in the first class section with us?_

Keiichi put down his pen, recollecting the airborne conversation during the return trip. When they had boarded their flight in Spain, the first class section on the flight from Madrid to Tokyo had been mostly empty. As best as he could remember, the three seats in the row in front of him were vacant.

A half hour into the flight, he heard a woman's haughty voice call out "B'dandy!"

As it turned out, Bell's parents were seated directly in front of them!

"Mother!" Bell and Skuld had blurted out.

Keiichi picked up his pen and started writing again, trying to write what in his mind...

_Anyway, Bell's Mom starts smallchatting with her about some recent social soiree she attended, acting as if nothing was amiss. But then Skuld blew up, literally yelling at her Mom. That brought out the flight attendants and the air marshals, who tell her to chill out. After we were asked to show our IDs, Bell's Mother switches gears and starts to explain why she put me through a dozen different hell-trials to prove a point._

_The gist of it was this: they were testing both of us._

_This only confirmed Belldandy's suspicions, as she had explained to me that she had expected as much._

Memories overtook his attention now as he revisited the arguments...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Somewhere over the Asian continent in a JAL 747...

"Mother! You made Keiichi...a mortal...undergo a life-threatening trial, when it clearly wasn't necessary! You simply don't just go around requiring Earthrealm mortals to do the tasks of _Gods_! The idea of a mortal performing the kinds of superhuman feats that we do, let alone a traditional Ritual of Preparedness, is unthinkable! Not to mention grossly irresponsible! What could you have possibly been thinking, stranding Keiichi in the Sahara Desert?" Belldandy challenged in a tense voice.

Keiichi felt himself cringe at this; Belldandy was playing right into her Mother's preconceptions of mortals as some kind of 'pets' or 'substrata of sentient lifeforms'...

"Belldandy, you will forgo that tone of voice when addressing your Mother!" Odeyn commanded. "This wasn't just your Mother's idea...I went along with it too. And there was a very good reason why we did what we did! Try to act mature and avoid assigning blame..."

"Yes, my dear child...listen to your Father! Before you throw a behavior tantrum, I want you and your fiance to heed very closely to what we're about to recount. As you know, this 'trial', as you deem it, has long been a tradition amongst we who dwell in Yggdrasil. But the actual reason why Keiichi had to endure the Ritual of Preparedness was because it was at the behest of the Lord. Kami-sama specifically instructed that he undergo such a quest," Freiija explained.

_"__WHAT?!__"_ Bell, Skuld and Keiichi shouted, glancing amongst each other with appalled expressions.

"You...gotta...be...kidding!!" Skuld finally said, her eyes squinting with disbelief. Belldandy and Keiichi could only look at each other with silent facefalls of mystification.

"Yes, verily it was the Almighty's will. At first, we too lacked comprehension about His motives in mandating this adversity upon the two of you. But now that events have played out as they did, there seems to be a certain redeeming logic to His will," Odeyn started to explain.

"Which is?" Keiichi asked irritably, miffed once more at the inscrutable insensitivity of the Almighty. It was hard to believe that Kami-sama...who, as the Administrator of the Multiverse, had countless tasks that He must attend to...had actually taken the time out of His Work to saddle Bell and he with this idiotic endurance test!

"Belldandy, when you marry Keiichi, you will need to live amongst the mortals...as a mortal," Odeyn noted in a low voice.

"What do you mean...as a mortal?" Skuld asked in wary voice.

"Exactly what I said, my daughter. _As..a..mortal_," Odeyn repeated. "She'll have to live on the Earthrealm like any other of its six billion human inhabitants"

Silence befell the group. Keiichi couldn't even hear the jet engines.

"You mean Bell-chan will lose her powers?" he blurted out.

"Don't be insolent! My daughter's a _Goddess_, if you haven't noticed lately, young mortal man!" Freiija darted back, turning his question into a swirl.

"His name is Keiichi, Mother!" Belldandy corrected, annoyed.

"Obviously, our daughter will still have her full powers and license...if she behaves, of course. But she will necessarily need to practice a lot more restraint than she has in the past. Over the five Earthrealm years that she had been assigned to fulfillment of your wish contract, she has disclosed her divine origins to almost a dozen Earthrealm mortals. She has used her powers 11,496 times, according to the Yggdrasil Mainframe. She had even Unsealed her divine powers on several occasions," Odeyn explained.

Belldandy felt arguments arise and dissipate in her breast. She couldn't give voice to her feelings, couldn't unthroat her objections. The whole idea of living with Keiichi...as a mortal...enveloped her with a numbing carpet of disillusionment.

"So?" Skuld interjected in a sibilating voice. "What's wrong with that? Urd and I use our powers every day as well, and no one's complained!"

"Yet."

Keiichi watched as Freiija waved a finger in front of Skuld; who gulped audibly and then seemed to shrink into her first class seat at her Mother's single word of caution.

"If you marry, Belldandy, you can expect 50 to 60 years of married life with this mortal. Just think about how many people you are going to meet in those years! The problem becomes compounded by the fact that the two of you may choose to adopt children and raise a family of your own. What would your adoptive children do if they found out that their mother is a Goddess? How would they react? How would they explain this to their friends? What would keep them from appealing to you to use your powers to make their lives better? And what would prevent you from acting on their wishes? You've never experienced the demands of motherhood; there are so many aspects of raising children that you couldn't possibly imagine," Freiija noted.

Keiichi felt a souring in his stomach as Bell's Mother mentioned "adoptive children"...this only served to remind him that he and Belldandy couldn't have biological offspring of their own. The single major regret he held against the entirely blissful relationship that he and Belldandy shared.

"There are philosophical issues that station themselves far beyond these concerns, as well," Odeyn noted. "Belldandy's presence on the Earthrealm necessitates the ongoing importance of what you mortals would call 'damage control'. Verily, we cannot allow for a large number of Earthrealm mortals to learn the truth about us. The potential for a large number of people being directly exposed to her divinity or being informed of it as such..._increases_ with each year our daughter spends here amongst you mortals. Belldandy has already cultivated long-term friendships with a number of mortals; friends who know the truth about _us_. The Gods and Demons, Yggdrasil...these are no longer fictive concepts to them. By extrapolation, at some point in the future these friends of yours are going to get married, have children and develop social circles of their own. We would rue any situation where a large number of mortals could learn the truth about the Gods and the Demons! It is vital that the Earthrealm mortals continue to operate under the belief...that it is by their intentions that most aspects of their world are constituted. They must continually be under the impression that it is _their will_, not ours, that shapes the realities and essences of life. If this belief system were to be compromised by certain proof of the existence of beings like us, the Earthrealm mortals will never have the opportunity to feel the empowerment of consciousness that is necessary for them to evolve into true sentiency. We must take careful measure to ensure that humankind retains the willfulness that could enable them to reach the Next Level," Odeyn added.

"I know...I know," Belldandy said, her breast heaving with a sigh. One of the precautions that she had to practice as a GRO agent was a constant vigilance towards her duties. In all cases, her wishgranting assignments could not appear to be _too obvious_. It was essential that the wishes she was assigned to grant would remain cloaked in mystery and surreptition. If the wishes of the mortals were granted too openly, the Earthrealm mortals would dismiss its 'belief' in the Divine world entirely. Instead, they would replace their faith in the unknown with foreknowledge and dependence; the kind of reliance that could only be fostered by the accumulation of met expectations. The mortals would become reliant on the Gods to assist them in meeting challenges that they should solve themselves. Consequently, the Earthrealm mortals would become lazy...and never reach even the earliest stages of the Next Level.

In one sense, Belldandy had been consciously practicing this very principle in her ongoing relationship with Keiichi. Initially, Keiichi frequently relied on her Goddess powers for rescues, favors and the like. And she didn't mind pleasing him by granting little wishes. It was charming at first...but Belldandy soon realized that she had to 'wean' him away from his dependence on her Goddess abilities. By the end of her first year on the Earthrealm, Keiichi was able to begin to discern when it was appropriate to ask her for supernatural aid. And in the past several years, he had often requested her _not_ to use her powers, proving his independence beyond a doubt.

Still, she could scarcely imagine what it would be like to forsake all of her Goddess powers in exchange for living a married life with Keiichi. If her heart could speak for itself, it would be telling her "Just do it!" But her mind was troubled...

"So what remains are these facts. If we approve of Belldandy's marriage to you, then it will be required that she must seal away her powers," Freiija announced.

Belldandy felt like her head was going to spin off her shoulders, she was so shocked by the bluntness of her Mother's words. She knew that there would be no other options offered. There would be no negotiation with the Lord about this requirement.

"This is _terrible_...but it makes so much _sense_!" she realized, her thoughts spiraling downwards as she reluctantly admitted the truth of the matter. There were more important matters involved, chief of which was the preservation of the Earthrealm's mortals. Immediately, she felt Keiichi's hand clasp hers and hold it protectively.

"Say...that...again," she gasped, pale with disbelief as she struggled to maintain her composure. Keiichi's hand around hers was the only anchor she had in this situation, a single hand holding her safe from the maw...

"Kami-sama Himself has decreed this!" Freiija clarified, hoping that the mentioning of the Lord's name would forestall any arguments. She could see the confusion brewing thickly in Belldandy's face.

"If B'dandy wishes to use her Goddess powers for any purpose, she'll be allowed to unseal her powers _only_ if the Lord approves her request. Otherwise, she cannot use her powers at all, save for functions that your physicians would term 'autonomic'...such as atomic reconstitution of her Earthrealm manifest form, communications with family and friends in Yggdrasil via divine means, and the like. She cannot be allowed to display her Goddess powers in ways that will be conspicuous to _any_ Earthrealm mortals. No one else can be informed of her Goddesshood, from this point anon!"

Skuld wanted to protest, but she was stilled by her Father's fierce expression as her Mother continued to speak.

"In light of His wishes, it was incumbent upon us that we devise a rigorous test to prove that she could live as a mortal, without using her powers. And vice versa, that a mortal could prove himself worthy of a Goddess...by using only mortal means. Reluctantly, we were forced to create a life-threatening situation for Keiichi. In all humility, the last thing we anticipated was for you to try and find him, dear child," Freiija explained soberly.

Belldandy was still tense with anxiety, but she raised an eyebrow at her Mother's failure to anticipate the sheer power of the love that bonded she and Keiichi.

"Despite what the three of you might think, this whole process of Keiichi's trial has pained us greatly as well. We were sorely aggrieved when he nearly died in the desert sandstorm. Withal, we were mercilessly tasked when we saw our daughters captured by robustly vile examples of Earthrealm mortals. In my righteous rage, I very nearly intervened myself! But, like you and Skuld, I had to practice restraint...because it would be an obvious breach of the Almighty's will for me to whisk you away from that madman's encampment. Know this fact: that your Mother and I, Belldandy and Skuld, were in a like situation as the two of you," Odeyn noted.

"Not a chance!" Skuld finally snapped, standing up to her Father. "We were imprisoned, psychologically abused...you have _no idea_ what we went through! I got _really_ sick from being stung by an Earthrealm scorpion! I was almost in a coma! So don't go claiming that you..."

Odeyn waved a hand and the rest of Skuld's words went unheard. Belldandy marveled at her younger sister's rebelliousness...she had actually _talked back_ to Father!

"As we watched the three of you in the midst of suffering, we found ourselves filled with the ability and the desire to correct your misfortunes," Odeyn continued "And yet we were unable to do so. We could not allow ourselves to provide aid in any means."

Belldandy's face paled at baldness of her parent's revelation. It hadn't even occurred to her that her parents were also ill-used by the situation. The coursed implication drew her towards feeling sour guilt for her previous bouts of anger towards her parents. That the perils she had faced...and her struggle to refrain from using her Goddess abilities...had actually impacted them as well! If it was hard on her, it must have been quite hard on Mother and Father. Perhaps even more so, because they were in the dual roles of instigators and passive observers!

"I measurely suspect that _she and I_ were being tested as well by Kami-sama," her Father added, tenderly wrapping Mother's small hand in his.

"After all, if you choose to marry Keiichi and abandon your powers, _we_ can't jump to your rescue every time you or your sisters run into trouble," Freiija admitted.

So this was yet another reason why marrying Keiichi was a hazardous proposition! No wonder the Almighty had tested them so harshly!

"But..how can I spend so much time here on the Earthrealm...and not be able to use my powers _at all_!" Belldandy questioned aloud, her face grave with indecision. As the sky moved sideways outside the plane's window, she mulled over the implications. She relied on her powers _every day_! From little things like cleaning up Skuld's messes in the kitchen...to major things like saving Megumi from a lifetime of facial scars.

No powers. No powers. No powers. No powers.

"This very question you have just uttered..._this_ is why we tasked you both with such asperity, my daughter. Musthaps, we _had_ to measure your resolve!" Odeyn pointed out.

"And as your Mother, I need to _know_ for certain that this decision to get married...is the correct one, B'dandy. That it is right and meet for you to marry Keiichi. That he is willing to do _everything_ within his grasp to make you happy. That he will fully share in the responsibilities of matrimony with you now that he cannot rely on you to use your divine skills to remedy any difficult situations that could arise," Freiija added.

Keiichi wanted to nod his head "yes" a hundred times over to confirm his desire to do all that Freiija expected...but he realized that this was Belldandy's decision, and no one else's.

"Again, this is why we made him undertake a Ritual of Preparedness. A particularly strenuous test of endurance, so that we could learn his survivability...and his willingness to risk even his very life for your well-being. By keeping himself alive, and then rescuing you, Keiichi has more than warranted his worthiness to be your husband in our eyes. In our judgment, he is Prepared to marry you. But you both need to consider the paramountcy of consequences, should you remain steadfast in your desire for such a marriage!" Odeyn said.

Belldandy felt some relief and warmth at her parent's words, words that affirmed that Keiichi was the Key to her Heart...and that he had validated his worthiness to marry her in the eyes of her Mother and Father.

"Belldandy..." Keiichi started to say...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Keiichi picked up the pen and started writing in his journal once more:

_I'll never forget the expression on Bell-chan's face._

_Personally, it felt like I was proposing to her all over again. And in a way, I sensed that I _was_ proposing to her all over again. I knew that unless I said something right away, any chances of getting married to Bell would slip through my fingers into a wellpool of lifelong regrets. At first, I didn't know what to say; but I hoped that my words this time would be even more intensely heartfelt than those that I had spoken in France. I wanted Belldandy to know that it would be okay, whatever she decided. That I still would love her, with or without her powers. _

_So I told her my truth._

_That's the best anyone could do._

_I told Belldandy that if she was 'just' a mortal, if she had never been bonded to me by a Goddess Relief Office wish contract, if she didn't have any extra special powers, if she wasn't a Goddess, if she didn't come from a family of Gods and Goddesses, if she was just as human as the girl-next-door...if all the things that make her much so more than a mortal woman _had never been_...then I would have fallen in love with her anyway. That I had fallen in love with her the first time I saw her, way back when I was a kid. That I had dreamed about her night after night for years after that first meeting. That my waking hours are brightened whenever my heart draws a vision of her face in my thoughts. That my very soul would die without her in my life._

_I tried to explain to Bell-chan that the part of her which I love most is her heart and soul. Because I loved Belldandy for who she is, not for what she is. That it didn't make a difference if it was a Goddess or a mortal who was smiling at me...as long as it was Bell-chan that was doing the smiling. I said that nothing about divine origins or powers or anything else really matters in the long haul, as long as Bell and I are together. Because if it all gets stripped away...she'll still be Bell-chan! She'll still be the woman...the Goddess...that I love!_

_When I was done expressing the gentle pleas of my heart, _everyone_ was crying. Including Bell's parents and Skuld! I so much wanted them all to have some sense of my own optimism; that things would be okay between Belldandy and I, no matter what! Because I am totally willing to protect her, cherish her, honor her and obey her._

_I guess that's what people are supposed to do when they're married._

_And after that talk, when I said everything that mattered...from my heart...I could see so much love in Belldandy's warm blue eyes. To this day, she is the only one who can look at me with such intensity; an intensity that draws my heart to a place where I feel totally loved, totally enveloped in the radiance of who she is..._

_Well anyway, I looks like I'm going to be a married man by this time next year. _

_Wooo-hooo!_

_When everything is said and done, I just hope I can help Belldandy cope with the changes she's going to face. _

_Make no mistake, I'll be there for her!_

_Back again soon... _

_K1_

Keiichi set his pen down, noticing that he had pockchewed the end of it during his several attempts at writing in his journal. He glanced at the clock, knowing that in a few minutes he would have a late evening cup of tea with Belldandy. His fiancée was already waiting in the kitchen, all pajama'd up and night-mellow.

He closed his eyes and grinned, remembering the pleasant, yet somber joy in her voice when she said "Yes, I want to marry you, Keiichi!" for the second time!

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"No! When you interface with the video unit, you cannot alter the dramatic content of the anime! It's _already_ been animated! The idea is to _interact_ with the characters within the context of the hallucinations you're experiencing. The plot, the characters, the artwork...cannot be changed. They're fixed! Try to regard this experience in terms of a video game; you can't just jump from Final Fantasy XIV to MS Space Station Simulator 2008 while you're in the middle of gameplay. When you're completely locked in to what is portrayed on the animation feature, you have to go with the flow! Just like in real life! You can't bring characters in from Utena Revolutionary Girl and mix them up with the Rurouni Kenshin II video you're watching..." the Otaku Professor tried to explain to Cevn.

Mara had to chuckle at this interchange. "Real life" to the Otaku Professor was his Playstation 5, his computer and his video collection. The guy never went out the house unless he was going to make a deal. He didn't even go out shopping for videos. He didn't have to. The Otaku Professor had a network of people belonging to various anime fanclubs, people who delivered any anime videos he wanted right to his door. They tried to outdo each other to find the more obscure videos, for which the Otaku Professor would pay a generous "finding fee".

"How could mortals like the Otaku Professor could even function in this whirlwind called the Earthrealm?" Mara wondered.

Now this was a interesting question, one that had amazed and amused Mara towards many bouts of interpretation.

This man was unfit in so many ways...yet he would be the last one to admit that he was simply "surviving". The Otaku Professor's mind had created a toolkit of denial that was so powerful, he was convinced that his life was being lived to the utmost. Mara was drawn to him by his paradoxisms and the dullness of his self-esteem; she enjoyed the irony of how he was a loner in real life...and yet a legend in his own mind.

The Otaku Professor was thoroughly twisted into his own delicious mysteries. He truly was addicted to the anime art form; watching videos from sunup to twilight, and then getting on his computer to hack into various gaming sites for hours on end. He only seemed to emerge from his electronic oyster-life whenever she came to visit him. His lustful thoughts towards her had unexpectedly developed into a entertaining sidelight after Mara first brought Cevn to his apartment. He had obviously noticed Mara's flush of attraction towards Cevn, which resulted in the Otaku Professor becoming noticeably jealous of him...providing a further source of amusement to Mara.

So she goaded the Otaku Professor, who would react with tepidity and cool disinterest. His smugness belied a stewing pot of resentment. Before, whenever she had dropped in to the Otaku Professor's place by herself, the Otaku Professor would pester her with clumsy-yet-blatant sexual come-ons, which she always rebuffed. Now, the Otaku Professor was acting increasingly stubborn, in the very best manner of repressed aggression. Mara knew she had fermented his resentments by continually imposing on her mortal 'mad scientist' by bringing a gaijin to his apartment. When Cevn was mugged and beaten, her protectiveness towards him evoked several displays of rage in the Otaku Professor's eyes. But oddly enough, ever since then, the Otaku Professor hadn't bothered her at all during her last few visits. Mara sensed that he had finally admitted to himself that he had no chance of being involved with her.

She looked on as the Otaku Professor finished prepping Cevn.

"Drink this," he said, giving Cevn a slender vial, which Mara knew to be filled with a cocktail of various hallucinogens and analgesics. With a final check to see that the headset connections were snug against his scalp, the Otaku Professor then turned on the headset, the VCR and the pulse modulator, a sly grin on his face...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Who could have ever imagined Mother bragging about the exploits of a mortal?" Urd thought with a chuckle. Besides Mother's high praise, Keiichi's performance during the Ritual of Preparedness had drawn a lot of attention to the "Test Mortal" project. His daring rescue of Belldandy and Skuld had become the vizbuzz of the Goddesses at the GRO office for almost a week! Even the more geekish of Urd's Sysop coworkers were floating about envious praises for Keiichi. It got so bad that Urd found herself wanting to strangle the next Goddess who complained "why aren't there more Gods who are courageous, romantic and resourceful like that Keiichi Morisato from the Earthrealm?"

"Gag me!" she thought to herself, remembering the last burst of winsome praise she had overheard in the Mainframe Stacks. Yet, Urd was secretly pleased with Keiichi's success; his efforts with Belldandy had cast a very favorable light on the Earthrealm because they overlapped with the "Test Mortal" project.

She could never begrudge her younger sister's success with Keiichi...

The phone in her Sysop Node started ringing with the temple home's distinctive ring.

Belldandy calling again.

Urd waved a finger, floating the phone over to her chair. As soon as she greeted her sister, Bell's voice exploded with rapidity over the line.

"Urd, I think it's time...once and for all...that you tell us what's really going on! You've been away ever since the Le Mans! That was over _three months ago_! It's been very frustrating! And whenever we call you, Skuld and I are met with the same evasive, tenuous explanations..." Belldandy said confrontively.

"Did you guys have fun in Algeria?" Urd asked, knowing the question would bring a grimace to her younger sister's face. She had heard all about it from Mother, who was absolutely enthralled with Keiichi's rescue of Belldandy in the midst of the Ritual of Preparedness. This sudden turnabout in esteem towards Keiichi was just like her Mother...one year she hates him with a passion; the next year, she's rapturous in praising his good qualities. Irritatingly so, as Keiichi was the topic of conversation she always steered towards when having tea with her haughty society friends.

Now, Belldandy was pestering her. Again.

"I'm not even going to pretend that you just asked me that!" Belldandy answered indignantly, her words a verbal cuff on the head. Urd could see that her comment had frustrated Bell over the cliffside into the realms of anger.

"Don't deny it! This 'project' of yours concerns what happened between Mara and Cevn, doesn't it! Skuld and I _demand_ an answer! Or at the very least an explanation as to why you've been sequestering yourself for days at a time in the Deep Sysop Stacks of the Yggdrasil Mainframe since you left."

Urd sighed...someone must have told on her. The last thing she had wanted was for her sisters to learn of the extent to which she was involved with her work here. But someone had snitched. While she mentally rattled off the names of possible culprits, she heard Skuld's voice on the phone.

"Big Sister, doesn't it piss you off that Cevn's going out with Mara? That he's been gone all this time! Isn't he supposed to be _your_ boyfriend, not hers? Right now, h..he could be doing _anything_ with her!" Skuld shouted. Urd had to grin at Skuld's youthful directness.

"Ah, the child thinks she has a grasp of adult relationships. What makes you think that Cevn is _with_ Mara in the first place. Teenagers and their imaginations... Always thinking they're the only ones who know the truth," she quipped, drawing an audible grow on the phone from her youngest sister.

Urd smiled as she heard Belldandy in the background, telling Skuld to calm down.

"Now I want both of you to snap out of it! This has _nothing_ to do with Cevn and I. Just because he's been acting strange since the Le Mans, for reasons that remain..." Urd started to retort, then halted herself.

"Yeah, I knew it!" Skuld interrupted.

"Urd, I can understand why you've been trying to probe the reasons for his radical change of attitude! I share your worries about Cevn, as well. And now you've linked it to the Le Mans somehow? What could have happened there to cause this?" Belldandy asked. Urd realized that she had already leaked too much information.

"Damn that Belldandy! My younger sister knows me too well! Give her a trickle of the truth and she'll always try to trace it back to the ocean of reality!" Urd groused mentally. She would have to curb her sister's curiosity...and fast! It would be a difficult task, creating an explanation that would conceal a fabrication within it...a fabrication that would cast the truth away from _the truth_.

"Both of you, listen carefully! As both of you know, _something_ has caused an estrangement between Cevn and I. At one time, the Ultimate Force had manipulated our relationship by preventing us from touching physically. But when Cevn became so emotionally unavailable to me, I surmised that it is quite possible that the UF may be running a new routine of interference between us; perhaps by preventing us from connecting at the level of feelings. Since I'm a Goddess and he's a mortal, naturally, he would be more susceptible...his would be the weaker link if the UF decided to create a wedge of indifference between us. Thus, I decided to remove my presence to here, so I could direct my efforts to investigate this possibility. I can confide in you this much...I suspect that there has been an alchemical alteration of his brain chemistry. But so far, there is a dearth of evidence to support the truth of my suspicions. Obviously, since the UF is involved, I have to employ a very subtle methodology to examine my theories. Which explains why I have been searching through the Deep Stacks of the Yggdrasil Mainframe," Urd explained.

"Oh my goodness, Urd! I didn't even _consider_ that the UF could be behind all of this! How could the Ultimate Force do something like this to you and Cevn? Perhaps this would explain why he's been acting so oddly! And like you said, the Ultimate Force did prevent the two of you from touching before. I just hope this doesn't have anything to do with your status as Norn of the Past," Belldandy replied apologetically. Urd felt a momentary sourness at the depths of her sister's empathy, an empathy built on a framework of fictive deceptions.

"Why would the Ultimate Force try and keep you two apart? I just don't understand...except for the fact that you're a Goddess and he's a loser! Right now, I hope I _never_ see him again!" Skuld added. Skuld's innocent comments calmed Urd. She smiled to herself, relieved that her off-the-cuff pseudo-alchemical explanation had worked. Both her sisters had bought her 'reasoned' theorizing.

"If you could understand the workings of the heart, then you would know why I'm so invested in trying to create a counterspell so that I can have my boyfriend back," Urd lied.

"Urd...I didn't mean to accuse you of having a lack of devotion to your work, or to this project of yours. Now that I know how important it must be, I can somewhat overlook the fact that you've been away for so long. But do come and visit us soon! Keiichi and I want to see you!" Belldandy requested.

After finishing their phonecall, Urd found her tears finding her once again. This situation had nothing to do with her Norn of the Past issues. For a moment, she wished it _did_...so that the next course of action wouldn't have to be so tragic and final.

If what she _really_ suspected was true...then Cevn would have to die.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Where is he?" Mara screamed at the Otaku Professor as she slid the shoji door open. She had left Cevn here, so she could spend some down time in her underground Demoness Lair next to the Shinkansen line. After a relaxing lava springs soak, she returned to the Otaku Prof's digs in Shibuya to check in on Cevn. Once again, the blessed mortal had wandered off again after the session was over!

The Otaku Professor had guilt glowing all over his Soul's aura.

He cowered momentarily under her scrutiny and then started picking his nose, looking very fidgety as he sat in front of his computer.

"I..I dunno! I was playing a videogame when his session in the chair finished. He probably just took off for a walk. J..just because he's here doesn't mean that I have to keep track of every thing he does," the Otaku Professor answered, avoiding all eye contact with Mara.

"So? Don't you have to unhook him from the chair? Didn't he get something to drink out of the freezer after he was done? Didn't you hear him leave?" Mara asked. Her repeated questioning seemed to rile up the Otaku Professor. He jumped out of his computer chair and got in her face.

Mara marveled at his spirited cheekiness.

"Nope! I'm not responsible for him! And why are you so riled about some scummy dopehead gaijin? You act as if you're in love with him or something! He's nothing more than a pathetic example of street trash! And all along, you've treated him like a woman in love!" he answered, sweaty with conviction.

Mara snorted at him.

"_AM NOT!__"_ she snapped-replied to his insinuation. "Of course I kinda liked him...in his own way, he _used_ to be a really likable guy. But now he isn't! So there! Besides, this isn't about whether I like him or not. It doesn't make a difference how I feel towards him...that's not why he's so important to me," Mara exclaimed.

"Y..you should be in love with _me_, not him!" the Otaku Professor shouted. He stopped to adjust his glasses as they slid down his nose.

"_I_ should be important to you! I have everything a girl would want. A..a top-of-the-line computer, a big TV, stacks of videos and magazines and rare animation cells, lots of money my parents give me every month..." he shouted angrily, his spittle spraying Mara's blouse.

"If you can't get a Tokyo girl to fall in love with you, what makes you think _I_ would? Besides, this has nothing to do with you. My sister wants me to watch out for his welfare, so that's why I need you to tell me where he is!" Mara growled as she wiped her blouse clean with a stud-gloved hand.

"So he's your sister's boyfriend! And you _like_ him! Tha...that's sick! You've probably had sex with him already!" the Otaku Professor exclaimed smugly.

"That does it!!" Mara thought as she turned red in the face.

She whipped her arm over towards the Otaku Professor's anime-chair and pointed a finger at it. A jet of fire flamed from her fingertip, catching the chair and its instruments on fire. Mara then pointed at a pile of tapes and lavished fire out at them, searing them to melted slag in an instant. Then she waved her hand and his computer burst into hot licks of flame.

"My collection!! My computer!! My video games!!" the Otaku Professor shouted in dismay as he kicked himself out of his chair and sprawled on the floor.

"How could you...?" he yelled angrily at Mara as he stood up. Mara responded by pointing her finger at him and glaring threateningly. He was shaking like rainshadows in a gusty wind.

"Poof!" she shouted. A glow-red finger of light leapt from her finger and stopped just a few cm short of the Otaku Professor. His reaction was to stumble back onto the floor and fill his pants with urine.

"Just be grateful that I spared you instead of your 'collection'! You'll never see my likes again...but this doesn't mean that I'm through with you! Not by a long shot! And if you've done anything to hurt him..." Mara said in a low menacing voice as she faded from the air.

She rematerialized on the street in stealth mode. Extending her Demoness senses, she sought out his unique mortal Soular signature. But Mara couldn't sense Cevn's presence anywhere in the vicinity...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

When he returned to N.I.T., Keiichi was amazed to find that he had been officially excused from each of his classes during his absence. Dr. Kintaro had issued a memo to all his professors noting that Keiichi had traveled to Oslo with two regents named Thorgarssun. There, he had participated in an international exchange program on behalf of N.I.T. with the Norwegians and that he was to be credited for all missed class sessions and assignments once he made them up. Further, he had three transfer courses credited to his academic record for intensive work in "Arid Climate-Specific Engineering and Civic Planning".

Odeyn and Freiija had worked a little spell to clear him of his absences from school! Keiichi was more than surprised when he learned that his 'coursework' was being evaluated as the equivalent of almost a _semester's_ worth of graduate-level classes.

His first day at the N.I.T. campus was almost pure culture shock for him. Keiichi had never spent any significant time abroad, except for two family vacations in Hawaii, a school trip to Seoul, and the Le Mans Experience this summer. He had never been exposed to a situation where he was deprived of all the familiar trappings of 'civilization'. But his long sojourn in the desert had accustomed him to solitude and isolation. Consequently, his first day back on campus unnerved him because of the sheer number of people milling about. Even the buildings seemed to lean over him with a shadowy prefab threat.

Try as he might, he couldn't explain to Megumi what had happened while he was away. He didn't possess the language of description, nor did she possess the experience of being in the desert. But his sister did understand the situation with Belldandy...and brought up the point that Urd and Skuld might have to relinquish their powers if they remained with Belldandy.

Maybe this was the justification for Urd's extended absence. But then again, when he revisited Megumi's remarks, Keiichi reminded himself that Bell's older sister would resort to anything to keep her powers intact!

"Hey Keiichi!" Sayoko shouted, running up to him. She was dressed in her fall best: a colorfully knit black and red French sweater, matching plaid wool skirt and a fur-fringed long leather coat. Keiichi almost flinched as she pulled up almost a meter away from him. His strong reaction hinted at the fact that his sense of 'personal space' had rearranged itself while he was in Algeria.

"How was Norway? It's been all over the campus...about you being invited to attend Oslo Univ. Isn't Oslo a really cool city? I've been there a few times...they really have some great seafood restaurants there! Did you get a chance to sample..." Sayoko asked excitedly

Keiichi shrugged his shoulders.

"Oh! So you enjoyed the seafood, huh? I _knew_ you would! I always suspected that they have a pretty good Science and Engineering Dept there! Based on what you just said, it must have been a real challenge to study at such a good university! I want to talk to you more about it later, but I have to run to class! Over coffee sometime, neh?" she said, glancing at her watch.

"Huh?" Keiichi said. He hadn't said a word, but Sayoko seemed to think that he had just given her a rundown on Oslo.

"By the way, it's good to see you again!" she noted with a smile. Giving him a friendly kiss on the cheek, Sayoko turned and headed towards the graduate studies wing.

"Lucky you!" a voice glowered behind him. "All the fictions you need to invent are being invented for you. You don't even have to trouble yourself to lie about your whereabouts these past five weeks to these insignificant mortals! Must be nice, being the fiance of a Goddess!"

Keiichi whirled around to see Mara standing a few meters away, leaning against a tree. She was dressed in the exact same outfit that Sayoko had been wearing. Golden cedar leaves were falling all around her, lodging in her long straw-blonde curly tresses.

Keiichi felt his senses crisp instantly alert. Mara's choice of dress was conspicuous. She must have been eavesdropping.

"Mara! What are you doing here? How could you even show your face after what you did with Cevn? I can't believe it! First, you asked him out on a date as a condition for rectifying Bell's mistake with that force field! Second, he _never returned_, which could only mean that you must have done something to affect him! Or more likely, you just decided to abduct him, pure and simple! Bell's worried about him, and Skuld wants to kill him because he's been gone so long! So...where is he? What have you done with him?" Keiichi blurted.

"I..I..I came here because I need your help. He's disappeared!" Mara said, looking glumly at her feet.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Belldandy felt a sense of deja vu as she watched Mara curl up defensively on the couch in her living room. Over the years, their temple's main hall had been converted to a large living room with three sets of couches. At the moment, they were seated 'conference style' on the sectional couches used for discussion, away from the TV and stereo. Mara's posture and tightlipped expression reminded her so much of Urd whenever one of her webs of deceit came unraveled. Urd would always sit in the same place when she was in trouble with her sisters. The corner of the couch, which Keiichi jokingly labeled "the Hot Spot".

She studied Mara's face, noting the vivid desperation there. Mara seemed to be casting about an air of fear mingled with guilt. Belldandy could understand the palpable sense of fear on the Demoness's face. When Keiichi had arrived home with Mara in his side car, that was enough for both she and Skuld to feel livid with their Demoness sister. Older sister or not, they made little effort to deny their mistrust and disgust. In their past dealings with Mara, experience had demonstrated that she sometimes allowed herself to show fear. But the admixture of guilt alongside the fear in her expression was something Belldandy never expected to witness.

But there it was...

Belldandy reminded herself to tread very carefully in these unknowns, so as to avoid wounding Mara's ego. Mara _had_ asked for help, which inclined Belldandy towards the belief that there was much more at work here than simply appearances. Once again, she felt whisked with reluctance when she considered that Mara was now her elder sister; the stratagems that had worked in the past several years would no longer apply. And the fact that Urd wasn't here posed a significant diminishment; it was safer when all three sisters were present when dealing with Mara.

But something had compelled Mara into acting as she did, and Belldandy was very curious to find out why. Since she was no longer attached to Keiichi by her Demon Grief Office assignment, it made no sense for Mara to act so vicious. Yet, in the past, she had made several attempts to disrupt Cevn's well-being. Could her focus have shifted from bothering Keiichi to bothering Cevn? But this didn't make sense. Now that she was the head of the new Demon Strife Mischief Office, she no longer an agent...she was an administrator, in a sense. She could assign her subordinates to cast uncertainties and strife in Cevn's life. Yet, Belldandy was aware that _abducting_ a mortal was far beyond the purview of causing strife and mischief. For some reason, Mara had bent the rules of her own DSMO. So why had she done so now? Had she _really_ changed, now that she found out that she shared the bonds of sisterhood with Belldandy and her two sisters?

Belldandy pondered whether the 'gentler' Mara could still possess the capability to create dreadful evil in their lives, such as the kind of evil that had driven her to unleash the Ultimate Destruction Program four years ago?

Trying to intuit Mara's motives was as futile as trying to predict the flight of wild geese after a rock is splashed in their midst...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

According to Mara, her 'date' with Cevn was the result of some unexpected frivolous infatuation she had developed. But as she continued her explanation, it became shockingly obvious to everyone that Cevn had completely decayed as a human being over the past several weeks. As Mara continued her narrative, Belldandy found herself particularly angry with her, especially when she admitted to reintroducing Cevn to drugs. It didn't make sense for her to do something like this...but then again, this whole situation involving Mara and Cevn was pure ugliness.

"Belldandy, to be honest...I don't know what got into me! At the time, I was completely entranced by him. But now, in retroflection, I don't see a blessed thing about him that I could possibly deem as attractive. Other than the fact that he's intelligent, good looking, a musician..." Mara explained, a look of befuddlement on her face.

Skuld snickered as she narrowed her eyes at this admission, not believing a word.

"Mara, how do we know that you're telling us the truth? You're a Demoness. Demonesses fabricate lies to suit their own needs...and as long as I've known you, it's been one lie after another," Keiichi noted, justifying his point by once again relating the episode where Mara tried to convince him that she was a Demon, not a Demoness.

Despite herself, Belldandy had to giggle at Mara's redblushing face after that exchange.

"And you're telling me that neither you or your sisters have been known to be dishonest? You'll have to do better than that! What about all those times you acted buddy-buddy with me, when actually you were spying on me? And that stupid karaoke 'fight' you caused Urd and I to get in at that hot springs! You _crashed_ my vacation that time! And that other time you got me in trouble because..." Mara argued defensively. Her defiant expression took on a sobriety as she seemed to reflect on something for a moment, then shook her head and sighed.

"Okay. I admit that I do understand your distrust. Because of our relationship in the past, we've often been cast in deep enmity towards each other. Especially the several times I've used Banpei, Megumi and others to accomplish my goals," Mara admitted. Keiichi heard Skuld's fist hit the arm of the couch with a "whump!"

"Y..you kidnapped me and Cevn!! You said you were trying to create something called the Ultimate Demon! I remember it! You even tried to kill me...to kill me with the Real Death! And now you're trying to convince us that you're _innocent_, Mara! I'd buy dirty diapers before I'd buy that!" Skuld argued. Keiichi and Belldandy grimaced at her choice of metaphor.

"If I wasn't in these straits, I'd slap you in the mouth..._Little Sister_!" Mara snapped back angrily, causing Skuld to sweat up with resentment.

"Back then I was driven by the overwhelming need to defeat you and your sisters. And I won't apologize for my actions of the past, because I was _assigned_ to bring grief to Keiichi. I didn't wind up on this blessed Earthrealm by effort of choice on my behalf! Besides, I was unable to create the Ultimate Demon anyway. So all that effort was wasted on the attempt. And furthermore..."

"Let's not get into the past, Mara! You too, Skuld!" Belldandy interrupted, sensing a young Goddess and a Demoness's auras fuming with spirited antagonism. "Rather than quibbling over our prior antagonisms, we need to focus on what's here and now. What's in front of us."

"Spoken like a true Norn of the Present!" Mara exclaimed, smiling briefly. Her smile faltered as she noticed how her attempt at flattery had completely failed to move Belldandy towards any relaxing of her stern disposition.

"Mara, you claim that you developed a romantic inclination towards our friend. When did it start? What was the earliest point when you can remember feeling that way towards him? And when did your attraction to him start becoming more intense?" Keiichi asked in a level voice. He had been silent the whole time since he pulled Mara up on her deceitfulness, but now that Belldandy had forestalled the mounting combustion between Mara and Skuld, he felt more engaged to drill her with some questions.

"I was drawn to Cevn by qualities that I considered to be Demonic attributes or essences. At one time, I actually _sensed_ that he was a Demon; a Demon that was somehow disguised as a mortal. And after being on the Earthrealm without the constant company of a fellow Demon for over three years, he was the first good thing to come along in a long time. Besides, he's kinda cute for a mortal..." Mara answered.

"Mara, you're evading Keiichi's question!" Belldandy interjected in an astringent voice. "We already know how you felt about him. My fiance is asking you to address when your feelings experienced a change. He asked about when they became 'more intense', if I'm not mistaken. That's what you were wondering, wasn't it honey?" Belldandy clarified as she playfully tousled his hair.

Keiichi nodded his head.

Mara grimaced. Here she was, caught up in an Iron Mary of a situation...because she was seen as the culprit in this fiasco. She had even admitted as much by reluctantly seeking them out. All three were acting as tough as nails towards her. But yet, Belldandy still found it necessary to act all lovey-dovey towards her future husband. She smirked as a side-glance revealed that Belldandy's amorous behavior was irritating Skuld as well.

"Okay, I'll answer his question if the two of you stop making out for a minute and listen to me!" Mara replied. Her bluntness brought a slight blush to the young couple.

"I felt my feelings change towards him after you guys won the Le Mans. Yeah...that's when it all changed! I saw him standing there in that dining room right after Keiichi proposed to you, and I felt soooo attracted to him. I knew then that I had to have him!" Mara said, her orange-red eyes getting misty at the memory.

Skuld stood up and waved her hand in front of Mara, who had suddenly tensed up like she was in a romantic trance.

"Earthrealm to Mara..."

After a couple handwaves, Mara jerked her head back and looked at Skuld with a mystified expression.

"What are you doing, you little brat? You can't get away with making a fool of your older sister this time!" Mara snapped, reaching out and grabbing Skuld by the nose.

"Leggo of mymph nosemph!" Skuld shouted in a nasal voice.

_"__MARA!!__"_ Belldandy shouted, startling everybody in the room. Mara let go of Skuld's nose, while the raven-haired Goddess quickly retreated to the end of the couch furthest away from the Demoness.

"This is serious! And you guys are clowning around! Mara, you just spaced off back there when you were talking about Cevn and the Le Mans!" Keiichi spat out in a voice filled with disappointment. Mara looked at him with a fogged bewilderment. She didn't _think_ she had drifted off into her mind...

"What did I just do?" Mara asked. Belldandy raised an eyebrow in bewilderment at Mara's flight of uncertainty.

"Yes, this is very serious...and curious at the same time," Belldandy noted. "I find it hardly a coincidence that these changes happened right after Keiichi and I got engaged. There _is_ a pattern at work here! First, Cevn starts acting funny towards my sister that night at the dance. Second, Urd leaves right before the NIT Unified Team returns to Japan, saying that she's going home to Yggdrasil for some rest and relaxation. It's not like Urd to skip out on a vacation in Hawaii...but she didn't even stay for that! Third, your sabotage of Keiichi's makeup paper project started going haywire, resulting in some kind of temporal redundancy. Fourth, Urd informs us that she is involved in some secret research project that involves her and Cevn and the Ultimate Force."

"Urd mentione_d the Ultimate Force_? She never told me that!" Mara interrupted. As Belldandy halted her recount of her suspicions, everyone's eyes turned to Mara.

"Waitaminute!! You've been talking to my sister?" How? She's up in Yggdrasil right now!" Skuld asked. "You're a Demoness. You can't just call up Yggdrasil...it's against the Rule!"

"You forget that I'm half-Demoness, half-Goddess, _Little_ sister! Ever since I learned of my hybrid ancestry, I've been able to call Urd at her Sysop Node. Besides, Urd's come here to visit me several times..." Mara said.

Belldandy blanched with emotional turmoil.

"She's...visited...you?!" Belldandy shouted, her voice peaked with frustration. "How could she do this?! You mean to say that Urd actually returned to the Earthrealm to meet with you...and had never even told me or Skuld!"

Her thoughts flurried with a ferocity of resentment. A very real mental image of hitting Urd over the head with Skuld's Mjolnir formed in Belldandy's mind. Now she was angry at _both_ her older sisters!

The implications of this dynamic were staggering. Urd and Mara...her two older sisters...were actually scheming together behind her and Skuld's back. Her modesty threatened to unlevel itself, to be replaced by the unleashing of an explosive righteous anger.

Instead, she gripped Keiichi's hand harder...so hard that he actually gasped in pain and withdrew his hand, now reddened from her grip. She looked at her fiance with apology written all over her face. Keiichi patted her on the shoulder to inform her that he was okay. Sitting next to her, Skuld was clenching her hands in fists, so tightly that her whole frame was shaking with rage. Belldandy could hear her sister's breaths coming in heaving gulps, so upset was she.

Mara realized that someone was going to explode if she didn't start explaining herself...

"Look, I'll tell you everything, but you have to promise not to gang up on me because of it," Mara asked.

"They will," Keiichi promised for the two tongue-tied Goddesses, drawing irritated glances from both Belldandy and Skuld.

"Yeah, I admit that I invited Cevn on a date because I wanted to. I fully planned on having a long sexual escapade with him back in my lair. You know, something to breakup the boredom around here. But something possessed me to change my mind and entice him to take drugs instead. But he soon got out of control with the drugs, so I had to introduce him to an Earthrealm mortal who was one of my...er, projects."

"_What..about..my..older..sister?!_" Belldandy hissed. The caustic tone of Belldandy's voice startled Mara. She didn't know that the Goddess had it in her to be so...intimidating. She smiled at her younger sister, pleased that Belldandy was allowing her anger to bubble so close to the surface.

"There's hope for you yet, Belldandy!" Mara praised slyly, phasing Belldandy's anger into irritation at the drop of a syllable.

"Right before I went out with him, Urd came to visit me at my lair. She told me that she 'was seriously worried' about something, and then went on to spell it out to me. Poor Goddess...she thinks that the her mortal boyfriend has something to do with Isilblius, the Ultimate Demon! Isn't that ridiculous? Knowing my twin sister, I thought it must be some kind of attempt to get attention."

Any vestiges of her anger towards Urd immediately fled out of Belldandy's chest at the mention of that name. Isilblius. The Ultimate Demon. The Darkness Beyond Words. The Totality of Evil.

Belldandy recalled how Mara had admitted that she tried to conjure up the Ultimate Demon, but had failed. Now she was claiming that Urd somehow was linking the Ultimate Demon with Cevn. Of course, Mara would have interpreted Urd's claims as a joke, perhaps because she sensed that Urd was being mischievous. But Belldandy didn't feel any lightness in this at all. She felt _scared_ to the point of numbness. Urd wouldn't contrive to make up an assertion like this, especially using a pretext that mentioned that unspeakable name.

No one in their right mind would.

And deep in her being, hidden among the millennial folds of her memory, Belldandy sensed a hazy familiarity. A deponent feeling that seemed to hint that she had encountered Isilblius in the recent past. But this was an impossibility, as Isilblius had been banished by the Lord at the beginning of the TimeWeb...

"That's impossible!" she blurted out.

"Bell-chan? What the hell is going on here? You act like you've just seen the worst nightmare imaginable! What's an Isilblius?" Keiichi asked.

"Isilblius is the nightmare's worst nightmare. He is the one thing that both fascinates and terrifies we Demons...besides the Dark Lord, of course. There are no words that can describe him, or his Evil," Mara answered.

"And you tried to summon him?" Keiichi said in a near-whisper, exasperated by how freaky this whole interview with Mara was turning out. Ten minutes later, he was gripping the couch tightly, utterly aghast. Belldandy and Mara had just explained the history of Isilblius to him, from the perspectives of both the Gods and Demons. It turned out that Isilblius was such a cosmic badass, it took the Lord of Yggdrasil and the Dark Lord of Vanagdrasil both teaming up to finally defeat him!

In other words, he was one mean and nearly invincible bastard.

"Mara, I think Urd wasn't attention-seeking. In fact, I am almost certain that she was telling the truth. She's been very secretive, and some of her co-workers have called me to express their concern. She seems almost obsessed, according to them. During the last several weeks, she's pretty much locked herself away, telling us nothing. I think she was telling you the truth," Belldandy observed.

"Oh shit!!" Mara exclaimed after a moment's pause.

"According to the information Urd gave me when she last came to the Earthrealm, she thinks that Isilblius is indeed alive and well. She has a hunch that he is somehow using Cevn as some kind of an anchor. She told me that she thinks this is why Cevn is literally destroying his life," Mara explained.

"Then we gotta try and find Cevn! _Now_!!" Keiichi exclaimed.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

An unlikely foursome walked along the wharves of inner Tokyo Bay, searching amongst the fishmonger boats, equipment crates and makeshift shanties of the Bayside homeless. The air was stale with rot as they combed through the squalid neighborhood, building-by-building. Keiichi had never been to this section of Tokyo before...he was stunned with the crowded refugee-like atmosphere of the place. Souses were everywhere: arguing, pontificating, mumbling, stumbling...

Starting with the nearest group of winos, Belldandy kindly asked if they had seen Cevn, while Keiichi showed them a recent photo. A number of them demanded some pocket change in exchange for information, which irritated Keiichi.

"Keiichi, don't judge them too harshly. It's their way of life. The pursuit of a way of life is a sacred freedom, no matter how it may appear from the outside," Belldandy instructed him as she paid the men a few yen notes for their troubles. She wanted to heal all of these broken human beings of their misery; but remembering the words of her parents on the return flight from Madrid, she knew it was impossible. If she was going to stay with Keiichi for the long haul, she would have to practice greater restraint.

But she couldn't resist spelling them away from their hangovers...

"There he is!" Keiichi shouted. Belldandy looked to where he was pointing, and threw a hand over her mouth as she gasped. Alongside a pile of crates and broken woodplanks, Cevn was threatening to stab someone with a broken bottle.

Without a moment's hesitation, Keiichi and Mara broke ranks and gang-tackled him, bringing him to the ground. The wino that Cevn had been threatening quickly stumbled off around a corner.

"Get the fuck away! Who are you? Why don't you just leave me the fuck alone! I'm starving, and I'm gripped by a cold turkey dopesick bailout drop-pukin' jones for some heroin!" Cevn shouted.

"Cevn! What the hell are you doing?" Keiichi bellowed angrily, grabbing him by the shirt and shaking him. He took a swing at Keiichi's head; missing by a head's-width, he pitched over sideways and fell partly to his knees. He was quickly restrained by Mara, who gripped his fists behind his back and stood him up to his feet.

"I don't know who you are! There's someone in my head...and it's not me! I just want the voices to go away!"

_Slap!_

Keiichi looked at Belldandy in shock as she slapped Cevn again.

"Cevn...listen to me! You cannot live your life like this! It wasn't meant to be this way for you. You need to come home with us to the temple! It isn't safe for you to be here..." she said in her most commanding voice. Keiichi knew that voice well; many times he had bowed in deep supplication to her when she used that chastising tone.

"I don't want to go anywhere! Everywhere is nowhere, as far as I'm concerned. There are stars in my pocket and space in my mind...and who are you? I..I don't know you!"

Belldandy blinked back her shock at his irrecognition. She had used the Voice on him...the Voice that was part of her new Senior First Class Powers. Any Goddess, with sufficient power, could use a certain sequence of Divine Energy to 'super-suggest' an action. But Cevn didn't even respond to her demand.

Something was seriously amiss if he couldn't recognize she and the others. She decided to play along with his memory loss, rather that attempt to try and get him to remember. There would be time for that later.

"I'm someone...who cares a lot about you. We all knew you as you were before; before all of this happened to you. We _love_ you! Skuld and I, Keiichi...even Mara in her own way! We want to help you get better, but you have to trust us. Please come with us," Belldandy answered, trying to be gentle.

"I reject love! I reject _you_. The ice stations in Antarctica are telling me that you should just leave me alone!" Cevn shouted in a harsh grating voice as he struggled against Mara and Keiichi's restraining grip. Keiichi was amazed that he had actually refused Bell-chan's directive. No one could refuse her when she applied the full thrust of her Goddess will! And he was putting up a strong struggle to try and break loose.

Mara shrugged her shoulders and gestured; and a set of handcuffs and leg shackles appeared around his wrists and ankles.

"There! That'll slow you down! You need to leave with us _now_!" Mara said in a no-room-for-argument voice. Keiichi realized that Mara could muster up even more of a commanding tone than Bell-chan! Which made sense, since she was a Demoness and the elder sister in this situation.

"Why don't you all just waste me and get it over with, before I kill someone else!" Cevn said, sagging against his two captors. Keiichi felt a chill run down his spine at his friend's horrid admission; his instinctive reaction was to back away.

"I _know_ you didn't kill anyone, so don't bullshit us, Cevn," Mara said in an icy voice.

"What are we going to do with him? He's acting like a maniac...just like he did when you possessed him before!" Skuld asked. Mara scowled at Skuld's remark.

"You mean, what am _I_ going to have to do with him," a voice interrupted.

Before she even turned in the direction of that voice, Belldandy already knew who it was.

Urd!

Belldandy mouthed her sister's name, and then glanced significantly at Skuld. Skuld was wide-eyed with relief and joy...but her smile faded as she saw the expression on Urd's face.

"Urd...why are you here?" Belldandy asked in a whisper.

"If anyone has to kill him, it should be me. After all, he _is _my boyfriend..." Urd said to no one, streams of tears running down her face.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --


	76. Pt 76: Critical Mass

**Part 76: Critical Mass**

"Big Sister, you're _back_! You've returned home to us!" Skuld shouted gleefully as she started to run towards Urd with bounding strides...and then braked her feet as the full impact of Urd's blunt statement threaded her. She literally squeeched to a halt as she caught herself in mid-step, her tennis shoes sliding on the dirty concrete.

The citynoise all around them seemed to drop off to whispering rattle as Skuld pulled up to her full height and stared at Urd, who had remained statuesque the whole time, floating a meter above the ground.

She felt awkward; Urd didn't even bother to throw her arms wide open to embrace her in greeting.

"Urd...what are you talking about? Have you gone completely out of your mind?!" Keiichi shouted, his voice quavering in response to what he just heard.

Urd had just announced that she was going to kill Cevn.

"I'm completely sane, in full possession of my faculties...and this is _not_ up for debate. There's nothing I could possibly ever regret more than this! But I _have_ to put an end to his life. There's no other possible solution to this situation. I know it sounds horrible, but it can't be helped. And because it must be done...I should be the one to do it," Urd answered.

"You can't say 'it can't be helped' any more! That's not an excuse! You're _lying_!" Skuld remonstrated angrily.

"Nothing ever 'has to be done', Urd! You and Skuld and Bell-chan taught me that! There's always possibilities to correct mistakes or create new ones! Because of the three of you, I've learned that life is not fixed in a groove! Belldandy has always said that we have freedom of choice, even during those times when events seem so daunting that we think we don't have a choice!" Keiichi shot back, fists on hips.

"Oh, please spare me the sweet Goddess's platitudes," Mara said, holding a hand to her head, mimicking someone with a severe migraine.

Urd completely ignored Keiichi's protest and assumed a lecturing tone.

"While I was in Yggdrasil, I discovered the _truth_! A truth so subtle, so mercurial, that I didn't believe it at first. I discovered the reason why Cevn's been acting so strange. Why I've been acting so strange. Why Mara's been acting so strange. I found a connection between all of this...a reason why we all started acting funny. It's been interwoven by fate," Urd answered.

"Big Sister...you're joking, aren't you? This is just one of your pranks, isn't it?" Skuld asked in a tentative voice, trying to be cute and innocuous at the same time. Belldandy narrowed her eyes at her younger sister's artless questions. Skuld was obviously missing the point.

This wasn't a joke.

There was nothing to suggest humor of any kind in this situation. Cevn's total loss of humanity had seen to that. Urd's secretive absence had seen to that. And if what Mara had disclosed back at the temple was true...

It was obvious to Belldandy that her older sister had become deeply disturbed, perhaps as deeply disturbed as Cevn appeared to be. It was quite possible that she was suffering from some kind of mental asphyxiation. Her 'answer' was nothing more than a riddle! Appearing unannounced after removing herself away in Yggdrasil since the Le Mans, and then threatening to _murder_ her mortal boyfriend...well, it was definitely surplus of irrationality on Urd's part.

She regarded Urd, then glanced back at Cevn, who had decided to sit on the ground, staring off into space as if he had forgotten what had just happened a moment ago. It was as if he wasn't even aware that Urd had arrived.

He had disintegrated into a wretch.

Belldandy tried to ascertain the emotional undercurrents rippling across her sister's face. Urd was trying to maintain her composure, yet also trying to seize the drama of the moment. Standing next to her, Keiichi was facefallen at what Urd had just said. And Mara was level-eyeing Urd with disbelief.

This situation was framed in surreality: the four of them assembled in the midst of the bayside slum; a deranged Cevn acting like he had never met any of them before; Urd suddenly flashing into existence with a death sentence on her lips...

Belldandy thought she was a spectator at a Greek theatrical performance. This was _definitely_ not how she had envisioned her errant sister's return. But a sense of grave unease dawned on her when she noticed the look of desperate conviction in her sister's green eyes.

"What _have_ you learned, Urd?" she asked, hoping that she could bait Urd into an explanation; one that could be readily dissected and dismissed by a voice of reason. Between she, Keiichi, Skuld and Mara, they should be able to intervene and bring Urd back to her senses. Or at least dissuade her from killing her boyfriend.

"It's...so hard to talk about!" Urd replied, shuffling her feet nervously as she looked at her sisters and Keiichi.

"What could possibly be so dreadful about Cevn that you would actually consider taking his life? Need I remind you that, as Gods, we are expressly prohibited from deliberately killing any mortal beings to suit our own purposes. I don't think that you fully realize the ramifications of what you are saying..." Belldandy continued.

"Oh yes I do! The 'ramifications' that I realize are nothing less than...cosmic in scale. Do you think that..." Urd rounded back, getting riled up at Belldandy's frank reminder of the Rules. The Rules that governed the relationship between the Gods and the mortals. The Rules that provided a sense of harmony to the Divine plane. The Rules that both Gods and Demons had to heed...

"You're just angry because you're jealous! You want to take it out on Cevn because he went out on a date with Mara. I knew it all the time..."

_"__SHUT UP SKULD!__"_ Urd and Mara chorused, glaring censoriously at the youngest member of their group. Skuld glared back in defiant embarrassment, her inability to understand the complexities of relationships having been uncowled by her elder sister's joint verbal injunction.

"...but isn't wanting to kill him way overkill in the jealousy department," Skuld finished. She had witnessed firsthand her other sister's jealousy 'event's; Belldandy's jealousy could be absolutely wrathful. But Belldandy had never threatened to take Keiichi's head off. And Keiichi had never cheated on Belldandy either, like Cevn had cheated on Urd. Skuld herself was extremely angry at Cevn when he went off with Mara...but Urd wasn't making sense.

"Look, you guys, I'll try and explain it as clearly as possible. So even you can understand it, Skuld," Urd said condescendingly.

"First, I want you to know that doing what I have to do...killing my boyfriend...is absolutely the last thing in the Multiverse that I would ever wish to do. And I now am aware that it is the most important thing that I _must_ do. This single act...it is why I even was brought into existence! I have to be the one who does it, precisely because of the prohibition against the killing of mortals. I don't want any of you to face the consequences. Not even you, Mara," Urd explained.

"Stop playing the martyr and just tell us what this is all about! I hate it when you try to play the heroine, because you're so shoddy at it, Urd!" Mara interjected, her face tucked into a fanged grimace.

"I don't care what any of you think! I'm the one that knows him the best out of all of you...and..snff..because I want to be the last being he sees while he's alive..snffsnff..and I want to be with him during his..snff..last moments," Urd explained, covering her face with her hands.

Mara felt a shine of guilt swinging through her heart at the realization hit her that Urd was _sincere_. This was tragic, and Demons were deeply affected by tragedy, much more so than any other beings in the Multiverse. She felt her eyes welling up with tears of empathy.

Belldandy reached out and held Urd's hand between hers, wanting to help her older sister marshal her composure so she could finish her explanation. Whatever Urd had to say, it was obviously very important to her.

"I..snff..personally probed the Yggdrasil Mainframe with every extent of my best Sysop skills to..snff..discover the source of this ataraxia affecting Cevn. Initially, my Stealthware probes disclosed nothing but unindexed archives of information that seemed to be little more than aquantum chaostics and labile A.I. heurisms. But then I stumbled onto a heavily encrypted section of one of the Deep Stacks that was _damaged_.

"It was...damaged?!" Belldandy asked in a startled voice.

"Yes. Naturally, I was more than simply curious about this. As you all know, the chances of part of the Yggdrasil Mainframe being permanently damaged are infinitesimally microscalar! When I reloaded the data onto that particular Deep Stack...it was still corrupt."

"Are you saying that one of the nodes of the Mainframe wasn't able to self-evolve?" Skuld asked. She had Debugged long enough to know that when the Bugs struck the Mainframe, once they were eliminated, the Ygg Mainframe would restore itself by self-evolution. Even when Celestine introduced a virus into the Mainframe, once the system recovered...there was no damage, no corruption of files. It was as if the system had never been comprised. And now, Big Sister was intimating that the Mainframe had a damaged Deep Stack!

"Yes. Being a Sysop, I was stunned by this discovery. I had the strangest intuition about this state of disrepair, because it should have been discovered by my fellow Sysops first! After all, there _is_ a few million of us..." Urd acknowledged.

"But at the time, I had the distinct impression that it wanted _me_ to discover it...that the basefile corruption had been concealed from everyone else but me. Peorth and her assistants certainly didn't know about this! Even the best Sysop staffs didn't have a suspicion that something was amiss. Once I investigated further, it was revealed that the damages were alchemical in nature as well, which fits my Sysop specialty. But there it was; a whole bank of corrupted data in one of the Mainframe's Deep Stacks!

"So I began to try and reconstruct it. As the randomness of the data started to crystallize into meaningful alchemics and chronometrics, I discovered something that was so terrifying, so horrible...that I had to retreat to one of Mother and Father's vacation homes for a week just to keep from snapping! While at our Bubbletree retreat house, I felt like I was going to lose it the whole time. To make matters worse, I couldn't tell anybody. Least of all the Almighty! Because I knew that, should the Lord find out the truth, He wouldn't hesitate to kill Cevn in an instant. And I needed time, so that I could prove myself wrong, or come up with some other kind of solution!"

"Urd..._what_ did you keep from Kami-sama?" Belldandy asked.

"I wanted to hold onto some hope, don't you see? I withheld the information because I was desperate to find another way, one that could save his life. I ran millions of A.I. scenarios...and they _all_ derived the same result. I couldn't believe it then, and I..snff..don't want to believe it now! But..snff..there's no way the Mainframe can be wrong..snffsnff in this instance," Urd explained, her voice gradually declining into a broken mutter.

"So, in desperation, I _did_ inform our Lord. I just wanted..snff..to save Cevn! And the Lord Himself ran a full Metanative Spectrum diagnosis on the Ygg Mainframe..." Urd noted, her voice little more than a forced shuffle of words.

"...and He said _nothing was wrong_!"

She couldn't speak any further and simply broke down into deep sobs. Belldandy reached over her sister's shoulders to hug her, but was surprised when Mara quickly reached out and held Urd firmly; the Demoness-Goddess was comforting Urd with a gentle hug around the shoulders. It was the first time she could remember Mara hugging any of them.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

I saw clusters of human shadows, or maybe shapes of shadows. I didn't know what they were, or if they were human, like me. Or am I human? I am Worm. The ground is where I belong. I can burrow through the air with the slightest of ease. The shadows shine with light, imagine that. I remember Lum riding something that looked like wheels, the spinning lion-wheels of an UFO. But I was a chariot inside and outside myself, so it really couldn't matter. Impressed upon my existence, my mind was also a wheel that was warped. I felt wobbly, but then I saw count clusters of human shadows, a number of shapes. But I could only imagine up to five. Lucky me, there were five of them. Merciful evils from the pigbalding planet, they are. Someone told me that I am stardust. I hope that I get blown away into the ultimate...

Mayaku...Japanese for narcotic, tranquilizer, anesthetic...starwind surgeries dancing dervishly around my ultimate me...

Demon ultimate, chance dancing gypsy thoughts revoke my memories of joy, filling me empty. I feel more and more void, even the drugs are void, my heart is void. Should it have ever been brimmed with richness and joy? Desperate times. Dark times. Void sublimes...

Isilblius dancing over a square of mass graves, as two volupes try to bathe with one, while militia gunfire sparkles all around me, and babes in whitecloth scream out their first lungs in the Snow Country...

Mobile suit mayhem as the reconstitution of time progresses, so filled with hate, so filled with inexperience. Patterns resound against the walls of my walls, keeping me hemmed in like angry hornets, so that I cannot reach any images except Lum, a savior who I don't know. Green hair, white hair, yellow hair, brown hair, black hair, raven hair. Everyone's head is stringy anemone, only above the ocean, as I am a Worm above the land...

Ever since two sounds first rubbed together in the Multiverse, I was destined to be no more than a nothingness...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"What, Urd?! What is so terrible that you have to consider it necessary to kill one single mortal to make things right?" Mara asked gently.

"Isilblius..." Urd said in a soft, stricken voice. "If he continues to live...Isilblius will be unleashed..."

_"__ISILBLIUS??__"_ Belldandy and Mara gasped in shock.

"You don't have to shout it right in my ears!" Urd complained with a wince. Both of her sisters had yelled right in her ear. Belldandy and Mara looked at her apologetically.

"Yes. Isilblius. _That_ Isilblius! Now do you see why I felt like I was losing my mind? I learned a secret truth, a truth in the most horrible sense of the word. It took me months, but from what I could reconstruct from the damaged Mainframe, I learned that Cevn had somehow encountered Isilblius in the past. What happened during this meeting, I don't possibly know. The sections of the Yggdrasil Mainframe that describe this encounter are all completely fragged! But I decoded and debugged enough information to find out _why_ they were screwed up. The Mainframe had been attacked by an alchemicyber virus, an alchemicyber virus that seems to originate from _outside_ the TimeWeb! A virus that made Celestine's attack virus look like child's play..." Urd explained.

"Then it's true!" Mara said, pounding her fist against an open palmed hand.

To Belldandy, this was an impossibility piled on an impossibility. She had spent millennia debugging computers, removing viruses...her whole experience with the Yggdrasil Mainframe couldn't prepare her for what Urd was suggesting. Skuld was overawed by what Urd had claimed; Belldandy could see the wheels of probability spinning in her younger sister's head like roulette drums.

If the source of the virus was from _outside_ the TimeWeb, then it could have only have been introduced to the Ygg Mainframe in the form of an attack. Only some thing or being that could utilize the Metanative Dimension with a great deal of control and power...could accomplish something like planting an invasive virus in the Mainframe from the outside!

"Isilblius is still sealed away, but he infected Cevn with a...wasting disease, as best as I can term it. An infection that is literally hollowing out Cevn's Soul. This vile malady was triggered when Keiichi and Belldandy became engaged. And if Cevn lives for another week, Isilblius will be freed from his place of banishment. And I don't have to tell you what _that_ will mean!"

Keiichi felt a deeply disturbing ill-ease as he watched Bell-chan turn pale in reaction to Urd's statement. The sense of her expression so thoroughly gripped with fear, her body shaking with barely-control terror...scared _him_ to death. The only other time he had seen her so disturbed was when the Ultimate Destruction Program was on the loose. But when he observed that Mara was just as freaked out at the mention of this single word...

Keiichi suddenly felt _very_ small.

"Like I said earlier, Isilblius is the nightmare's worst nightmare. We Demons know of him by only by legend. He is the Ultimate Demon; the Bringer of DarkChaos, the Harbinger of an Ending Evil..." Mara answered matter-of-factly.

"And in _our_ history, Isilblius is the Ultimate Demon. Perhaps the Ultimate Anti-Force. At the dawning of the TimeSpace, Kami-sama and the Demon's Dark Lord combined their efforts and barely managed to banish Isilblius away, because he wanted to destroy the Multiverse..." Urd emphasized.

"Not the Multiverses, you idiots! He wanted to destroy the Everything! He tried...but I stopped him! I hid him away for another day," Cevn wailed intrusively. The four divines and Keiichi looked at the disheveled gaijin with sad expressions. Cevn seemed to notice their pitying looks and reacted by curling up into a fetal position and burying his face behind his arms as he rocked and moaned on the ground.

"I..isn't there something we can do about him, Big Sister?" Skuld asked, gesturing sadly at the groaning mortal. She didn't want to even think about Isilblius and the horror that the Ultimate Demon signified. She wanted to keep her mind and heart on task. She curled her mind around corridors of theories and conjectures, lightspeed expanses of creative thought trying to find an answer that would render the fabric of emotion to a wholeness.

Belldandy smiled to herself...Urd had just announced the impending release of the most dangerous threat in all the Multiverse, and Skuld was focused on helping Cevn. Her younger sister's compassionate nature seemed to ebb and flow most of the time, but right now her concern was directed out of love, rather than fear. Love of one life, rather than the fear of the loss of many...

She nodded in approval at Skuld, who seemed to blush under the attention.

"There's nothing anyone can do. I even asked the Yggdrasil Mainframe to try and come up with a solution. The only solution it could come up with was to kill him! Two problems...one final solution."

"That's insane! Just look at him!" Keiichi blurted, pointing at Cevn.

"Don't you think that I _hate_ what's happened to him, Keiichi? I've been up in Yggdrasil watching his humanity decompose on a daily basis for the last several months! I _loved_ him at one time! And now he's so wretched, he doesn't even recognize me! He's not the mortal man that I fell in love with last year...and I'm _angry_ about that!" Urd shouted angrily.

"It's even worse than that. The Otaku Professor's fried his brain. I just scanned what's left of his mind, and...there isn't that much left," Mara noted. She recalled how suspect it was that the Otaku Professor was grinning so animatedly when he wired Cevn up to the chair several days earlier. Now she knew why. As she probed the contours of the deranged mortal's mind, it was if all his mental faculties had been blunted with a blend of psychosis and Korsakov's Syndrome. Random images filled his thoughts, images that he couldn't filter out or control.

He was ruined as a human being.

She momentarily brushed her formidable concentration upon how she should punish the Otaku Professor, but banked away from lingering on vengeful thoughts for the moment.

"Can't we try and save him somehow?" Skuld asked.

"No...it just can't be. This is what I think happened. Somehow, Isilblius discovered that Cevn was closely connected with we three Norns. Since we are responsible for the TimeWeb, he's targeted us through him. By planting some kind of sickness in Cevn, he was hoping that we would save him. Because if we save forestall his death, then we preserve Isilblius's single link with the Multiverse. On the other hand, if Cevn's Soul is completely devoured by the virus, then the empty shell that remains might be able to serve as a gateway back into the Multiverse for Isilblius. My best guess is that Cevn possesses some kind of code or thoughtform that can be exploited at the moment of soul death in order to gain his release from his exile. So we have to...take his life away...before his Soul is destroyed by the virus. Before his illness reduces him to utter imbecility, and Isilblius can then pick out the 'key' that Cevn holds in his mind," Urd explained, each word of conjecture feeling like a stab in her heart. She finally felt herself calming down, sadly resigned to what she had to do to the man who had brought an impossible love into her life.

It was cruelty at its worst, the kind of torturous twisted horror that seemed befitting of a being of pure evil like Isilblius. Urd recalled the days when she desperately hoped that she _was_ momentarily insane; that this situation was just a glimpse of thoughts ridden astray, a quirk in the Yggdrasil Mainframe, or possibly an aberration in one of the TimeStreams.

But it wasn't.

"I created a special alchemical pill, so at least he won't suffer. It's a painless, fast-acting poison..." Urd said, her eyes getting teary again.

"Urd!" three voices shouted. Belldandy stood in front of Urd and gripped her shoulders tightly, looking her older sister round in the eye.

"Urd...do you still love him? Do you think this is what's best?" Belldandy asked, her eyes glowing with a thirst for the truth.

"Yes...no...yes...I don't know! I don't know! How can I love him now, the way he is? I can't love someone like that! Look at him! He doesn't even know who we are! I..I just don't want him to suffer," Urd said, her voice trailing into a near whisper.

"Isn't there a chance..."

"Don't you guys get it? I want to put him out of his misery! He's going to be gone anyway, in another couple of weeks by my best estimate. Shouldn't he be given the opportunity to die with dignity? Or would you rather he die slowly, his Soul melting like the last wick of a candle, his mind fleeing his body to the point where he's peeing his pants? And what about the Ultimate Demon? Would you want to risk unleashing Isilblius on all of us?" Urd said, kneeling next to Cevn as he writhed on the ground.

"Yes, I would risk it! I know we can handle Isilblius!" Keiichi exclaimed with a Himalayan resoluteness.

"Urd...don't do this!" Belldandy said as Urd held the dark green ampoule in front of Cevn's face.

"There's no other way, my sisters," Urd answered back, her whole body quaking with sobs.

Keiichi turned away as Urd reached out to put the pill in Cevn's mouth.

No one bothered to stop her.

Urd patted Cevn on the throat, watching as he reflexively swallowed the green pharmicon. It was strange how he had calmed down since she arrived; Urd suspected that he recognized her in some way, albeit not in a conscious manner, and that her presence was creating a calming effect. She turned her head back to look at her sisters and Keiichi, then slowly pulled Cevn out of his fetal position and rested his head on her lap.

"It'll be over soon, my love."

Silently.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

I heard a lilting voice sing "It'll be over soon" to a soda commercial tune, and then I felt a soft blanket of moongreen hills stroking my face gently. My cheek was resting against something warm, a warmth that seemed to spread through my body. A warmth that brought a pale chill that was barely sensible, because it filled all of me. The chill wasn't frigid like the igloo-cold of December, it was an absorbing emptiness.

"Let go," my mind seemed to say.

"Let go," the light seemed to say.

"I have nothing to hold onto any more," my heart seemed to say. I had forgotten that I had ever had a 'heart'...

It was as if a wind-blindness had been struck from my mind, as I sensed myself plummeting through brilliant convexes of color and radiance. Billions upon billions of stained-glass windows coalesced into a sort of round tube all around me. Snowflakes of translucent particles of light seemed to coil into galaxyweb patterns against the rounded perimeter of the tube, illuminating the stained-glass windows like fireflies or nebulae.

For some reason, it looked familiar.

"At last, you're arriving!" an angelic child-voice sounded in my thoughts. I looked in the direction of the voice and saw a small being floating against the colorprisms, dressed in a flowing white robe which seemed to gather and flutter in an invisible wind.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

The longest goodbye in Urd's life was only halfway over.

As she had expected, Cevn's breathing quickly became shallow. Urd had created this alchemical poison with the utmost care, so it would act rapidly and be absolutely painless. The toxins would calm his mind while they gradually arrested his physiological functions. She didn't want the poison to overtake him too rapidly; this would be quite painful for his Soul because it would force a rapid detachment of Soul from body.

Two minutes.

As soon as she gave him the ampoule, Urd had requested that all the others leave, so she could share this final moment with Cevn in total privacy. Or as much privacy that could be allowed in the middle of a slum teeming with homeless winos, gang members and the desperate teemwards of the poor.

She would never see his smile again, nor would she ever experience the intimacies that they could have shared: emotional, romantic, social, sexual and many others.

It was Belldandy who spoke for all of the others when she said that Cevn was their friend too, and that their proper place was _here_. Crying out her emotional turmoil, Bell pointed out that they should be allowed to be with him in the end, so that they could honor him with their presence.

Her sister was right, of course.

Urd chided herself for being so greedy. She looked into his face, which was quickly turning to a bloodless pallor. She had imagined that she would be crying at this point, but she wasn't.

Much to her surprise, Keiichi was crying the loudest...

She saw the figure of the one other witness, as he hovered invisibly around the scene, like an airborne shadow. She turned her head for a brief glance at the Reaper, and a private meaning seemed to pass from him to her. To Urd's senses, the Reaper's whole bearing expressed a deep heavyhearted...

It was so disheartening, because Cevn would never knew how much she loved him. He rarely seemed to know how much the others loved him too; this was the struggle he faced within his addiction and his depression. Urd thought of all his friends who would be devastated by Cevn's death. In one sense, he had become part of their family...the steadily growing circle of three sisters and friends and colleagues that had started when Belldandy came to the Earthrealm to fulfill Keiichi's wish. Death tends to solidify the nebulous social spheres, filling the newly-created absence with powerful emotions...

Megumi would be shattered by this loss; Cevn had been an older brother figure to her.

Urd wanted to close her eyes, as his breathing became little more than a slow, slight wheezing...

A moment later, he drew the breath that couldn't be drawn.

In that instant, Urd's mind howled a thoughtcast that was so loud, Belldandy, Skuld and Mara instinctively covered their temples and ears.

It was done.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Who are you?"

_"I am the Regent of the Mid-Light, the Keeper of the In-Between Zone. Some would call me Death, but in truth, I am Life. I am at your service,"_the boy said with a curt bow. He looked no more than eight or nine years old, with long backswept white hair and a very pale complexion. No, not a complexion...a sort of _glow_. He was literally glowing, like an extraterrestrial.

I had expected the European version, or possibly the Apocalypse version: something skeletal in a long black-hooded monksrobe, with a reaving scythe and a voiceless anonymous menace. But nothing like this. I looked beyond him to see that he and I were suspended in mid-air in some kind of long corridor. The corridor or 'tunnel' was comprised of uncounted layers of colored patterns, behind which a yellow-white glow could be discerned.

He noticed me surveying the surroundings.

_"That's the walls of the Gatepath to the Instrumentality. Each single burst or pattern of color is another me, meeting another one of you."_

"How can that be? There's only one of me," I wondered aloud. The Boy chuckled, privately amused at my burst of curiosity.

_"Sorry, when I said 'you', I meant beings like yourself. Every nanosecond, approximately 73 trillion of them pass into my Realm. And I greet each of them personally,"_ he explained.

"That must keep you really busy," I replied, because I couldn't think of anything else to say.

His chuckle turned into a giggle.

"Am I dead?" I asked, suddenly serious.

_"Yes. You have passed through the Death, therefore you're dead. There is no returning to the Other Side for you now,"_ he answered back in a no-nonsense voice.

I blinked back my emotions, which fought amongst themselves to spill over into some kind of something. But I noticed the sounds...I could hear a shimmering of windchimes, but again, there was no sensation of wind against my skin.

That's because there was no skin. I looked at my hand, which appeared to glow with a light blue color; semi-transparent, ghost-like. Everything seemed ethereal, right down to the soft wisps of the glowing fog that seemed to liquefy the air around me.

The windchimes were relaxing me, making me accept the fact that I was dead.

"Is there an afterlife?" I asked, fighting to get the short sentence out as I looked into the eyes of the Child Who Was Death. All I could see where his eyes should have been were two orbs, orbs with the starkness of absence. An absence of everything. His eyes were darkest black, except for a glowing blue spark in the middle of each.

"What is happening to me?"

_"Everyone asks that first,"_the boy said with a chuckle. His down-to-earth manner relaxed me...but his familiarity was also frightening.

_"Don't worry...there's plenty of time here for us to get acquainted. I'll gladly answer all your questions,"_ he assured me.

_"Normally, when the Soul is released from the body, I escort it here. On the Other Side, at the point of your Death I appear to you as the most relevant imagery of the prevailing eschatological mythology of your homeworld and your personal experience. In your case, a blend of the Grim Reaper and the Delog Beings. So I guess you could call me the Reaper as well. But I'm not really grim...I just have a vital function to perform. I bring you here, and then greet you personally. I am to serve as your guide during the Transition."_

"The transition from what to what?" I asked.

_"It's really very simple. Once your Soul comes here, it is harnessed to provide the Energy that powers what you call the Universe."_

"You mean the two Multiverses," I corrected him.

_"Yes...yes! You _–do-_ know more than most of the Earthrealm mortals I have met!"_ he said excitedly.

"I know a lot more than I thought I knew. It's starting to come back to me now..."

_"Cool! It'll be fun talking to you, then. By the way, this Mid-Light realm is the source of energy that powers _-all of existence-_! This is why everything glows here, including yourself. However, when your Soul is merged with the others in the Instrumentality of Light, you will shed your individuality. Your consciousness, your sense of self, all your memories, all that you were when you were on the Other Side."_

"Then, I'll truly be dead," I said in a resigned voice.

_"That is a gross misperception. When you experience the Real Death and join the Instrumentality, you become Renewed. Your essence joins in a glorious harmony with the life-essences of all that came before you. In this process of Renewal, you are submerged in Love. An immense globe that is the Love-Energy of every being that comes here. This globe, which _–is-_ the Mid-Light...is the Wellspring of all Creation. Love, or more accurately, the Instrumentality...for the emotions that suffuse the Instrumentality is in truth a Love beyond Love...becomes your final resting place."_

"And there is no other way to maintain my individuality...to maintain who I am?"

_"No. Reality isn't constructed that way,"_he replied with a slight frown, the first time the young boy who was Death had shown any emotion other than welcoming calmness and serenity.

"Why?"

_"Alas, I have no experience outside of the Mid-Light Realm or the Instrumentality, so I am unaware of what forces have shaped the two Multiverses. Consequently, I have no means of knowing what forces shaped __this__ Realm, although I suspect that _-I shaped this Realm-. _That when I came into being, it came into being as well. But I don't know for sure if the Mid-Light came to be in this manner,"_he acknowledged. His bearing had shifted momentarily from child-like innocence to sagacity.

_"But,"_ he said cheerily, _"I will always be with you. I will send you on the Gatepath to the Instrumentality of Light, and once there, a part of me will join with you, so it's not all that bad."_

"Ever hear of entropy? Aren't you diminished when you do that?" I asked, feeling a tense of argumentativeness.

_"Nope! No entropy here!"_he said excitedly as he skipped around in a circle, suddenly all boy again.

"What about those who were left behind? Urd, Belldandy and Keiichi, Skuld, Mara...and Megumi and Chihiro, Tamiya and Ootaki, Sayoko, Sora..." I asked. If I was going to not be 'me' at some point in the near future, I at least needed to know how they were doing. I found myself filled with the perverse, yet natural impulse to 'attend my own funeral', so to speak.

_"There is no link between they and you any more, so I cannot answer your question. If your Soul were in both places at once, then I could tell you. Remember, a part of me exists in the Other Side as well, waiting for beings to die so I can bring them here. But since there is no part of you on the Other Side, there is no part of me waiting there as well for your Soul,"_ he replied.

"I thought you said that you had no experience in the Other Side where the living are. Now you're saying that you do..." I argued.

_"No, I really don't know about the Living Realm. Think of it in this way...when I go to fetch a Soul, it's like shooting an arrow. That part of me that I dispatch to the Other Side is like an arrow. Here, all I know is that the arrow has gone someplace else. But the arrow itself doesn't know that it has gone someplace else, even though it's there. My consciousness is always _–here-_, while I send trillions upon trillions of 'Reapers' to the Other Side. So I'm both here and there, but I'm really here and not there. Does that make sense?"_ he asked politely, trying to assure himself that I understood his explanation.

I was amazed that I could still think, still feel, still remember...despite being a ghost. My life had been so short by Earthrealm standards; only thirty years. I wondered briefly about how I died, but as I searched through my memories, the last several months of my life were in a haze.

I would miss out on Keiichi and Belldandy's wedding. All the children that my friends would create out of their love, and raise to adulthood out of their devotion.

I would miss out on Urd...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Urd held Cevn's lifeless form, not wanting to touch it because it was dead, but wanting the physical comfort of one last embrace. Behind her, everyone was sobbing. She was struck by the odd memory of how she couldn't touch him for most of their first year together because of some strange limitation the Ultimate Force had exerted on them.

Then she remembered the first time he had touched her since Beijing...how he had...he had...

He had beaten and violated her!

"No, that's no right!" she shouted, startling her sisters and Keiichi as she almost stood up, rigid with panic and disgust. To her horror, Cevn's limp body simply rolled over off of her lap like a sack of potatoes. For a brief moment, Urd expected him to get up and ask her how she was doing, but he laid there cold; devoid of any movement.

She wanted to scream, but couldn't unthroat the revulsion that harbored in her heart. Then more horrible images filled her thoughts; images of being deathly sick, of her sisters dying...all of it caused by Cevn. All of it not being caused by Cevn, but by something else...

"It wasn't you! It couldn't have been you! It was someone _else_!" she shouted to the inert corpse, tears streaming down her face. Belldandy rested a comforting hand on her shoulder. She looked into Bell's azure eyes, reddened with tears...and felt her sanity tearing itself apart.

Her heart crushed by what she had just done, her mind unraveling within the depths of this tragedy, and her sense of self drifting away.

"I don't know who I am any more! Oh My Lord, it hurts!" she gasped.

"You're going to be okay, Big Sister! I _know_ it!" Skuld said in a determined voice. As soon as Skuld finished speaking, the area was lit up by a blinding pool of light.

_FLASH_

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"This is impossible! You _don't have a Soul_!" the boy who was the Reaper exclaimed in genuine surprise. A moment earlier, he had reached out a hand to 'grasp' my ephemeral hand, so he could lead me down the corridor towards the light. Instead, he had recoiled his reach as soon as he 'touched' me. His reaction suggest the same swiftness a child relies upon when he touches something harmful, like a hot stove element. I noticed a brief flicker of pain in his face when he 'touched' me.

"What do you mean, I don't have a Soul? You explained earlier that death is a parturition of Soul from body. Hence, if I'm here, ergo, my Soul must be here as well."

Before he could answer, there was a shaking. I looked down the corridor, only to see streaks and spirals of red light coming towards us like a shock wave. It was as if the air itself was being tossed about by an earthquake. I thought this was silly, that something vaporous could vibrate with the solidity of these tremors...but it was happening. Something else was happening as well, as all the 'stained glass crystals' streaming along the wall of the tubular corridor around us started dervishing into some very disordered chaostics.

I felt like I was going to be smothered by a glass house of illusions, but I knew that the spiraling crystals were real; each one containing a Reaper Boy and the Soul of a recently deceased being. The immense cavernous interior of the tunnel was filling with funnels, arcs of whirling crystals, explosions and beams of light.

"What's happening?!" I shouted at the boy who was Death...

His face expressed surprise and uncertainty. I felt like I was being attacked by whips of light as the young master of the Mid-Light looked around desperately.

I saw a blackness, a shadow rising up to obscure the fractaling lightshow. A loud growling filled my mind, and I watched helplessly as a pair of black-red arms reached around the Reaper-Boy's face and covered his mouth, muffling his voice.

I heard a "snap!" and watched in horror as his neck was quickly whipped to one side and back. His pureblack eyes glazed over with white as his glow faded into marbleity...

A dark shape emerged from behind the inert form of the young Boy Who Was Death. I felt enraged that someone could actually attack a child, especially a child as kind and patient and immortal as the Reaper-Boy.

_**"AT LAST! I am unbound! And now I have killed Death itself! I control the Mid-Light...and from here, I will wreck my havoc across the Multiverses anew! You have failed!"**_ the voice boomed.

The warm white glow of the Mid-Light Realm turned blood-red.

Isilblius.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Now what?" Mara shouted. She looked in the direction of the flash...and saw the Enigma Book, propped up against a dumpster.

"What's is that blessed thing doing here! Wasn't it at your house?" she exclaimed.

"How?" Belldandy said wordlessly, looking at each face for an explanation. Her eyes rested into Keiichi's; she saw that her fiance was equally mystified by the sudden appearance of the mysterious vellum-paged codex.

Keiichi nodded at her, then ran over to the trashbin and retrieved it, remembering that whenever the Goddesses tried to pick it up, they got shocked. His haste turned to caution. Cevn's death had totally unglued him...Keiichi had never seen someone die before. In a way, he understood death to be the final shared intimacy among the living; he just didn't expect it to happen to one of his friends.

He reached under the weighty volume, hoping that he would be able to lift it off the ground. In the past, the Enigma Book seemed to have a mind of its own...it would only let Cevn handle it. To his relief, he picked the thick tome up with easy. He walked back slowly, avoiding his eyes away from the corpse of his friend.

Running after this book was a convenient excuse as well, as he was anxious to get away from the deathscene he had just witnessed. Cevn's death suggested a haunting image to him, the image of someone putting down a household pet. Keiichi felt a flinch of ashamedness at the mental suggestion; but he knew that this wasn't at all like a veterinary euthanasia...Urd had gave Cevn a green pill, and couple minutes later, he died.

It was a merciful euthanasia...and an act of disaster prevention.

As he ran back to the tragic scene, a note fell out of the Enigma Book and got caught up in the whorling wind. It fluttered in the air and settled next to Skuld.

Skuld scooped it up and started to read it...

"Shit! This is impossible! This letter is from _me_!" she yelled.

"WHAT?!"

_"Dear Skuld,"_ the letter started to read itself aloud in _her voice_. Skuld's hands were shaking the letter with tremorous abandon.

_"This letter is from me to you, written on the day that Cevn's powers were sealed up. Since I am the Ultimate Goddess of Kawaii-ness and Norn of the Future, it's only fitting that I send this message into the Future for you to read, don't you think? Now that I've impressed you with the integrity of my genius, it's time we got down to business. Because it's important, very important that you guys use the Enigma Book right away._

_"I've written a series of restoration formulas in the back of the Enigma Book, not to mention that I recorded everything that has happened in the last two days. I still can't believe it...I've got real boobs now! And I had to wear a bra today. I hope there's some way I can avoid having to do that, but Big Sister Urd says that if I don't wear a bra, all the boys will pester me. I don't understand why, besides, every word out of Urd's mouth is a..._

"I..I'm sorry, Big Sister Urd! _She's_ saying it, not me! I mean, the letter's speaking, not me!" Skuld hastily explained, feeling very guilty. Urd acknowledged her amends with a quick nod, and the letter resumed reading itself to the group.

_"Ooops, I'm getting way off topic! Anyway, you see, in the recent past, Mara hatched some killer superbeing called Isilblius. You've probably already heard of him by now. Anyway, this sicko excuse for a Metanative-level divinity decides that he's going to destroy everything in existence, but Cevn manages to stop him. Canya believe it? A single mortal did that! That's cuz, for a brief span of 30 trillion years or so, Cevn was the Ultimate Force. Once he exiled Isilblius to a 'fake Multiverse' of his own, Cevn was going...er, is going to mindwipe all of us, so that there is no knowledge of wherever he stashed Isilblius away. That's why I started writing this note!_

_"But there is something wrong with him, which makes me think that Isilblius is going to try and use him some time in the future to make an escape. Cevn said that he has to seal up the Ultimate Force energies, because he can't control them. Which makes me suspicious. If he could control them for all those trillions of years that he claimed to be rebuilding the Multiverse, what difference would a day or two make? Besides, as long as Cevn is alive, he can potentially reveal where Isilblius is, despite the Mindwipe. As you know, Mindwipes aren't always 100 percent accurate._

_"Just to make sure, I've spent a little time in NornSpace, or the TimeWeb if you will, reading possible futures. It seems that with my new First Class Goddess powers, my ability to navigate TimeSpace _has improved greatly.

_"If you've noticed some irregularities about one of Keiichi's term papers, a Triceratops, the Le Mans race and general N.I.T. school weirdness, then your're probably in the right reality. Which means that the Mindwipe didn't take._

_"But it may have wiped out my memory, which is why I'm transcribing this missive now. The future Skuld, who is probably even more kawaii than I...probably won't recall a single hint that she...er, I...wrote this..._

_"You call all pause and catch your breath now before I continue."_

Skuld found herself putting a hand over her mouth, stunned at the accuracy of this disclosure...and the fact that she couldn't remember writing anything like this...

_"Anyway, I suspect that Isilblius planted some kind of thingy in Cevn, something really wicked that will get triggered by a future event. When I scoured the TimeStreams of the FutureTime, I couldn't get an exact fix on what that event will be. But since I'm way smarter than Isilblius, and a whole lot cuter too...I think I know what that piece of shit is going to do. He's going to do either or both of two things. He'll try and make you attempt to save Cevn's life, so that he'll have a way in to the Multiverse; because Cevn still knows where he's being held. Or he's going to make Cevn die, so that he has a way into the Multiverse when Cevn's Soul dies...because then he'll be able to bleed through the vacancy that would be created by a missing Soul..."_

"Wow! I _am_ a genius! That's exactly what Urd said!" Skuld shouted gleefully.

_"Postscript, April 2, 29317,_

_"A word of advice to my younger self...heehee...don't gloat so much! But seriously now, you guys gotta really hurry! Because if you're reading this, then it means that Cevn is dead. Don't worry, you guys did the right thing by letting him die. Big Sister Urd, I know it really sucked...what you did to him. But I totally love and respect you for doing it, because you may have saved his life by killing him. You guys truly belong together, and if the both of you make it out of this alive, my husband and I will be majorly pissed at you if you don't marry him!"_

_"__HUSBAND?!__"_ Skuld gasped, almost spitting out the word.

"_29317?_" Keiichi asked, wide-eyed.

"Keep reading, brat!" Mara said anxiously.

_"Then again, someone did some really serious work, or hacking, or_ something_...otherwise Isilblius would have obliterated everything. And of course, this would mean that I wouldn't be writing this postscript to my younger kawaii-ness's note that she attached to the Enigma Book!_

_"Isilblius will arrive in your TimeWeave in an hour or so. My best theory is that he has done something really messed up, so that Cevn's Soul is missing. Since his Soul is missing in the Present, this will give Isilblius a 'portal' into your world. Into your TimeStream. And you all know what that means!_

_"So all you've gotta do is reverse the encantations that you used to seal up Cevn's Ultimate Force powers._

_Signed,_

_Skuld, Norn of the Future"_

"You mean Isilblius is coming in an hour?" Mara asked.

"_Mk CXVI_?!" Urd asked.

"The Ultimate Force?" Belldandy asked.

"27,000 years? Husband?" Skuld asked.

"Hey, can we stop screwing around asking all these questions and just do what it says?!" Keiichi asked with frantic irritation. Skuld broke out of her 'husband fugue' and started paging rapidly through the thick tome until she reached the last page.

"Wait, there's more!" Skuld said excitedly as she scanned the final page of the Enigma Book

_"Urd, Belldandy and Keiichi, Skuld, Mara,_

_"Don't worry, because I don't think I'm dead yet. The Ultimate Force needs to find me, so you need to reverse the seal spell you put on me. If you do this, it can reach me. The Ultimate Force acts on its own, but it needs a mortal reality to lend purpose to its designs. That's me._

_But I can't do this alone. I need the seven of you to be with me every step of the way. Especially if I'm still dead._

_Urd, I want you to know that I always loved you since I started loving you, and that I'll see you on the Other Side._

_Whatever that is._

_Much Love, Cevn"_

Urd felt her stricken heart collapse into misery and grief as Skuld finished reading the note written across the top of the last page of the Enigma Book.

"This is completely whacked!" Skuld announced.

"What about the instructions! Your letter from the Future you to you said there's specific instructions!" Mara asked frantically.

"They're right here. It says that we need to encant the spell inside of an Ultimate Magical Returning Mandala."

"That's impossible! A Returning Mandala is the opposite of the Warding Mandala, and it took the Big Sister and I almost a week to make that Ultimate Magical Warding Mandala back when Belldandy was going to get recalled to Yggdrasil because of that problem with the infamous Cherry Tree, Keiichi, and the Bugs!" Skuld exclaimed despondently.

"But there's four of us, and I'm every bit as skilled as Urd in making mandalas!" Mara shouted.

"Yes, and three of us are Senior First Class Goddesses and Demoness!" Belldandy said as she encanted a magical symatrix to create the base.

"Yeah, but didn't his footnote or whatever say that there should be _seven_ of us?" Keiichi asked.

This poured a talcum of disappointment on the group. After a moment, Mara elbowed Urd.

"But that's just the base of the mandala. There's a lot of very intricate and exact patterns that need to be drawn and magnetized into the circle. We'll never get done in time!" Urd said, her face wrought with resignation. She sighed and looked down at her recently deceased boyfriend, running her fingers through his hair.

"Waitaminute! I got it! I got it!" Keiichi yelled.

To everyone's astonishment, he dashed off into an alley without as much as a word of explanation.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Hey, I've gotta borrow this, dude! Sorry!! I'll fill it up for ya later!" Keiichi shouted to the owner of the Honda motorcycle as he shoved the man off of it. He turned the key, and then started peeling out into the street. Keiichi deftly executed a 180 and tore up the busy avenue towards Highway 15 and the Rainbow Bridge.

If he could get on the Bayshore Expressway, he'd only be 20 minutes away from the temple! Dodging oncoming traffic, Keiichi weaved between cars and trucks as fast as he could, trying to create his own lanes between the much slower vehicles whenever possible. Each time he approached a stoplight, he'd slow down for a moment, wait for a gap in the cross-traffic, and go for it. His nerves were strangely jetengine cool as he sped across busy intersections, swerving to miss both cars and pedestrians.

Within five minutes, he was on the Rainbow Bridge. He blew past the toll booths and opened the Honda up, taking advantage of the wide lanes of the bridge.

A moment later, he could hear sirens behind him.

"Shit, now I gotta race against the cops!" he yelled, wishing that he had a helmet. The speedometer was over 140Kph and he still had some needle left to crank out.

The sirens were getting closer. Keiichi realized that the police car that was chasing him must have been heavily modified, because it was closely matching his acceleration. He looked in the rearview mirror...and saw a compact Honda Beat police car.

"Could it be..?" he wondered, slowing down slightly as the car pulled alongside him.

_"You driving the Honda bike! Decelerate and pull into the interior lane immediately! Don't make us outdrive you, because we _–will-_ outdrive you if you attempt to elude us! This is your only warning!"_a bullhorn voice shouted over a roof-mounted loudspeaker.

Keiichi could barely hear the voiced commands, the Honda was roaring so loud.

_"I said pull the motorcycle over _–immediately-,_ you stupid jerk! Don't make us have to cuff you on the spot once we arr...hey! Are you Morisato Keiichi?"_the voice asked. The surprise in the policewoman's voice was barely concealed, despite the metallic resonance of the loudspeaker.

_"Natsumi! There's no way that a Le Mans winner like Keiichi Morisato would be driving this recklessly!"_ a second voice shouted over the loudspeaker.

_"Then why's he givin' us the thumbs up, Miyuki!"_

Keiichi chuckled at this, as Officer Tsujimoto had obviously noticed his thumbs up response to her question. He slowed the Honda down just a little bit so that he could keep pace with the familiar policecar, while Officer Kobayakawa rolled down the window on the driver's side of the car.

He turned his head slightly to the left and yelled, "It's an emergency! A matter of life and death for my friend! I've gotta get to Makuhari and back in_ 30 minutes_!"

Miyuki, who was driving the Honda Beat, yelled something to him.

"What?! I can't hear you!" Keiichi shouted. He watched Natsumi give her the microphone to the loudspeaker atop their car.

_"I said, do you need an escort?"_

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Life swims with ironies," Miyuki thought privately as she switched on the lights and siren. Here she was helping Keiichi Morisato save the life of his gaijin friend; about a year ago, she helped his friend save Keiichi's life during SuperTyphoon Akira.

"Keiichi Morisato, eh? Not Morisato Keiichi? Aren't we acting a little familiar, huh? Eh, Miyuki!?" Natsumi teased with a gleam in her eye.

"I..I didn't say his personal name first, Natsumi! I said his family name first!" Miyuki protested, slapping the steering wheel to emphasize her point.

"Unbelievable! And you with a fiance..." Natsumi muttered. She watched Miyuki's white-gloved hands grip the steering wheel even tighter. No one could get away with teasing her partner like she could.

Miyuki grimaced, saw that Natsumi was enjoying her discomfort, and then allowed herself to smile. She remembered a wonderful Valentine's day...

Nakajima had finally proposed to her this spring; they were supposed to get married in March of next year. As Ken started sleeping over at her and Natsumi's place, an odd pattern developed. Ken would tease her about Keiichi Morisato, feigning jealous fits at the strangest times. She still had that signed ticket from the typhoon incident when she and Natsumi transported Keiichi to the hospital in the midst of the worst storm of the 21st century. Right above it was a group picture of the 2007 Le Mans victors. So once in a while, Ken would threaten to use it as a dart board...and then kiss her passionately when she protested. It was all a ruse, one that she loved to play along with.

But there was so much she wanted to ask the N.I.T. student, especially about the incredible Le Mans victory this past summer...

Maybe she might get a chance to...but now, it was time to get her partner back.

"And what about _you_, Natsumi? Who was it that said 'Dammit! He's got a girlfriend already!' And 'a college guy like him would probably really groove on an older woman like me; a woman with lots of experience in the arts of love...'"

"I never said such things! How could you possibly remember exactly every word that I said?" Natsumi sharply denied...and then covered her mouth with two white-gloved hands.

Face-reddening ensued...

Miyuki grinned broadly; Natsumi's words were one thing, but her deep facial blush was the real barometer of the truth.

Natsumi knew she had been busted by her partner.

"Well, don't tell me that you _weren't thinking the same thing_, Miyuki. He's really cute, a total shy-guy celebrity, and a great bike rider and driver!" Natsumi reasoned.

"That was then, this is Ken!" Miyuki shot back, still grinning as she kissed her engagement ring. Natsumi scowled, momentarily unnerved by that girl's cheerfulness. Ever since Ken had proposed to her, Miyuki was acting like she was in romance heaven. Despite her partner's sillysally bouts of joy, Natsumi had to admit the engagement ring Ken Nakajima had bought Miyuki was generous, especially considering a policeman's salary.

They argued back and forth until they off-ramped from the freeway near the Makuhari Messe, turning onto one of the inland avenues.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

The harshness of that voice, the ugly evil of that presence...snapped me out of myself.

Into myself.

Like a flood...I remembered everything. The battles. The travels between the TimeStreams to evade him. The hatred that nearly gnawed me into emptiness. The killings of my friends. The trillions of years I spent creating Balance, reconstructing the Everything after Isilblius had fucking destroyed so much of it.

Destroyed me.

In an intuitive burst, I recognized in an instant that Isilblius had killed me. He had stolen my Soul, forcing me to turn away from Urd and all the love that surrounded me while I was alive. He forced me to hide in drugs, forced me to lose my mind at the hands of the Otaku Professor...

And if he possessed my Soul, then the 'me' that was left behind on the Earthrealm was his ticket out of here, back into the Multiverse. He could unravel TimeSpace itself...and now he was far more dangerous because he had control of the Energy that vivified the Everything. Without my Soul, I could not receive the power of the Ultimate Force.

I was dead, stranded in the Mid-Light without a Soul, and completely at his mercy.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Belldandy, Mara and Skuld worked frantically to get the Ultimate Magical Returning Mandala together. Urd was too possessed of grief to be of any help, besides, Belldandy didn't want to tear her away from Cevn. Even in death, he seemed to hold her sister in a spell.

Belldandy reflected how this was the most tragic experience of her life, bar none. She had witness hundreds of billions of deaths...but this one had stricken her hardest of all. She couldn't even imagine what she would do if she was in Urd's position. Then again, she _knew_ what she would do. She would have done the same thing. A choice between Keiichi and saving the Multiverse was a moot point. A broken heart measured against a broken Multiverse.

"My poor older sister," she thought sadly. Urd had made the only choice that was possible. She had chosen a broken heart and a lifetime of loss.

Mara could sense Belldandy's regret. But she also was worried that Urd was on the precipice; she could end up having a complete emotional breakdown. As a Demoness, she was very sensitive to the more gnarled and chaotic roots and branches of the emotional forest. Thus, while she assisted the others with their work, she psychically reinforced Urd's fading resistance to insanity with a number of mental shields. The drama of her twin sister's dramatic return...and its wretched outcome...had levied a strong empathy in her heart. Mara herself had been attracted to Cevn, but her feelings of desire were only a fraction of Urd's.

To have loved and lost...

"There's nothing noble about this at all!" she shouted. Her angry outburst startled Skuld, who glared censoriously at her. This only served to pitch Mara into a high-geared hysteria.

Belldandy started talking to her, trying to calm her down. A moment later, Skuld shushed she and Belldandy, pointing towards downtown Tokyo. Mara was about to pen Skuld down with a ireful reproach when she heard the sounds coming from the direction Skuld was gesturing towards.

Sirens.

They could hear sirens in the distance. The police sirens were gradually approaching, growing louder.

Belldandy looked up to see red and blue lights reflecting off of the buildings as Keiichi roared out of the alleyway nearby.

"Keiichi, did you steal that bike?" Skuld asked warily. Mara threw a small rock at her, hitting her on the arm.

"There's no time! I got it! You can use this for the mandala!" Keiichi shouted excitedly as he leapt off the stolen motorbike and waived a photo packet in the air.

"Keiichi honey, where did you go so suddenly?" Belldandy asked her fiance. She immediately recognized the photo packet...and why he had abruptly left to fetch it.

"Wait...that's one of our photo sets! Did you go all the way to the temple and back to get some photographs? Why would you leave us in the middle of a very critical situation like this?" Skuld asked.

"The negatives! Remember when you were recalled to Yggdrasil Bell-chan? And Skuld and Urd built that Warding Mandala thing? Well, I took some pictures of it! I have the negatives of those pictures right here! I heard you say that the Returning Mandala is the exact opposite of the Warding Mandala. So why can't you use one of these negatives? As long as you put it inside of the base circle, it'll make for a complete mandala, even if it's only a few cm in length!"

"Keiichi...that's _BRILLIANT!_" Skuld shouted admiringly. It all made sense.

"I remembered that I used one of those 90's cameras, you know, the ones that have the advanced photo system setup. In one of my classes, we discussed how that kind of camera uses a magnetic coating that enables the camera, film, and photofinishing equipment to communicate. When it takes a picture, it leaves magnetic data on the film...thus, a magnetic 'trace' of what is photographed. When Skuld said that the designs needed to be magnetized, I figured it all out. Since the pictures have the magnetic design of the Warding Mandala, their negatives would have the magnetic properties of the Warding Mandala, only reversed! You can use them for your Ultimate Magical Returning Mandala instead of making a mandala from scratch!" Keiichi explained excitedly.

Skuld openly clapped her hands in admiration of Keiichi's quick thinking under pressure. What he didn't know was that the magnetic designs of a Magical Mandala purposefully create a seven-dimensional matrix. That's why the design needed to be so exact, because the outcome of combining all that spatial, creative and chronological precision was to create an arcanical 'machine'; one that would utilize the seven lower dimensions of existence to serve as a 'launching pad' for even powerful forces acting within the Divinity and Metanative Dimensions. The actual magical properties of the Mandala only opened up the possibility for energy transmission on the two higher dimensions.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Well, he said it was an emergency, Miyuki! What're we gonna do, sit here and wait til' he comes back?" Natsumi groused. All this tearing around Tokyo, and now Miyuki wants to get all officey and check in with the Bokuto Precinct dispatcher.

"We need to call our position in to the Captain, otherwise we're going to have a hard time explaining why we drove down Bayshore at almost 200 Kph ahead of a motorcycle, and then ended up here in the slums, way downriver out of our precinct! I'm only thinking about our boss's welfare..." Miyuki argued back.

Surprised that there was no snappy comeback, she looked at Natsumi...who was completely ignoring her. Instead of listening to her, her sometimes-lunatic toughgirl partner was looking out the window with an expression of awe.

"Hey Miyuki! I..I think you better take a look at the sky! It's getting really weird!"

"I've _never_ heard her stutter," Miyuki observed with surprise as she leaned far over the steering wheel and looked up.

All she could do was gasp at the sight.

The sky was completely alien. The colors weren't right, the clouds weren't right, the motion of the air wasn't right. It was as it had been replaced by one of those SFX skies from a sci-fi movie or a doomday-theme anime. She felt a deep fear arising from within her breast...

"Natsumi, I've never seen anything like it! Those clouds are turning silver and grey...and they're forming a _circle_ right above us!"

"This is freaky bizarre! I think we'd better go check 'em out!" Natsumi said.

"Check who out? Keiichi and his friends, or that sky?" Miyuki asked as she opened the car door. The sky was streaming with colors, all circulating around a whirlpool of rainbow-clouds right overhead. All the buildings of the slum looked unearthly, unnatural under the strange illumination. Shadows circled between the metallic-looking inner core of clouds spinning several Km above their heads.

Miyuki and Natsumi piled out of their Honda Beat and cautiously made their way over to where Keiichi had gone. As they approached, they could see Keiichi reaching out and holding the hands of two women.

It looked like the group was holding some kind of ritual. Miyuki went to one side of the circle while Natsumi went to the other side, curious and a little terrified.

As she squeezed in between a black-haired girl and a tanned woman with long platinum tresses, Miyuki looked across the circle and saw a woman that she didn't recognize, with red eyes and...

"She's got fangs!!" Miyuki yelled in astonishment.

"_Yxx caxx't xoin oxr cxxcle! It'x x Retxxning Mandxxa! We xxly nxxd onx mxrtal, nxt three mortals!_" a voice shouted _in her mind_. At first, it sounded like the dispatch radio when it was filled with static during one of the summer storms, but it became clearer with each word. Besides being amazed at the voice in her head, she was equally uneasy about what was being said.

"_Please calm yourself,_" another voice sounded in her mind, a soothing gentle voice that seemed to relax Miyuki somewhat. She looked up and saw the foreign woman with the blue eyes looking at her with compassionate empathy.

She remembered that this foreign beauty was Keiichi's girlfriend.

A huge blast of wind whipped her hair so fiercely that her long single braid lashed out and struck the black-haired girl in the face. The black-haired girl turned to look at Miyuki for a brief moment...and Miyuki shuddered. She looked across the circle at Natsumi, whose short hairdo was painting her face with windswept bangs...

The wind turned into a sort of solid light, and Natsumi looked across the circle at her partner, who was standing next to a girl that had only been maybe 12 years old last year...who now looked like she was 16 or 17!

"I remember you! You were just a little girl last year!" she yelled in a shocked voice.

The 'little girl' with the plectrum-shaped mark in the middle of her forehead scowled and gave Natsumi a liberal stinkeye.

"_I AM NOT A LITTLE GIRL!!_" she screamed. To Natsumi's astonishment, the words formed all over her navy-blue policewoman's uniform, from skirt to collar.

She heard a snickering on her left. Natsumi noticed that Miyuki was pointing towards her...

No, not towards her but next to her. Towards her left.

Natsumi turned her head, and saw a tall woman with straw-blonde supercurly tresses. But there was more...

She was looking at a red-eyed Demoness, grinning broadly with fangs where her canine teeth should be.

"Oh my Godddd..." Natsumi screamed as the light swept her away.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --


	77. Pt 77: Urd and Skuld: Glass Hammer First

**Part 77: Urd and Skuld: Glass Hammer--1st Movement**

The sparkledriven tornado starting fading around her in a shower of spiraling crimson-gold glitters and sonix. Gritting her eyes shut, Skuld realized that she had been transported somewhere by a magical spell gone chaos amuck. The whole scenario reminded her of that Oz movie Belldandy rented a couple of years ago, back when 'family video night' was the chosen form of entertainment during a particularly harsh snap of winter weather. There were plenty of mirrors in the video store for Belldandy to transport in on those blizzardy nights. Like Dorothy, she had been scooped up and taken _elsewhere_...hopefully, there would be no Wicked Witch here. The Wicked Witch reminded Skuld too much of Big Sister Urd on a bad hair day...

As moments crashed into moments, Skuld remembered being with her sisters and Keiichi on the Earthrealm, working on a very important project involving a mandala. Her recall loosely traced around a sense of being caught up in a strange light that had unexpectedly fused down from the sky onto the Ultimate Magical Returning Circle.

Keiichi's idea about using film negatives had brought Magic down on them with a vengeance!

As Skuld pulled long tresses of silk-soft raven hair from her face and mouth, she gasped breathily, almost choking. Somehow, in the arcane whirlwind force-funnel her hair had actually crept partway down her throat, causing her to near-gag as she darned the soft straight lengths out of her mouth. Once that was done, Skuld tried to get up to her feet...and wobbled partway in the effort, dizzy from being whipped through the air like a ragleaf.

Admitting defeat for the moment, she sat solidly on the ground, looking upwards at the strangely glowing sky, watching the burnt-red and golden concentric cloud circles drawing inwards on themselves like a spiderweb caught in a windgust...

This place was totally alien.

The landscape consisted of mantis-leg rocks and coruscated crevices stretching uneasily to the horizon. Outlandishly delicate formations of crystals drifted like tumbleweeds over willowing orange and purple sands. As the vortex of colors in the sky finally dissolved, she could see that the atmosphere on this planet was either invisible, or at very best it wasn't refracting sunlight towards the familiar light blue of the Earthrealm. Instead, its appearance resembled that of one of the Orionoid planets, with a navy-blue sky that light-shifted towards a velvet color on the horizon.

Overhead, she could see the occasional airborne vehicle crisscrossing against the stars. Maybe it was night-time here...

"So if I'm here...then obviously something brought me here! Purposefully! I totally doubt that this was an accident. Now, the question is what am I supposed to do here?" Skuld reflected aloud to the unhearing rock formations, as the nearby moon slowly clasped onto the horizon like a giant ochre globule. Rapid chatters of conjecture filled her mind:

What could have transported me to this new place? Was it the doings of the Ultimate Force? Is this some part of Yggdrasil that I've never visited before? Did Kami-sama bring me here? Could this be a soup of illusion cupped in my mind; possessing no semblance to reality? Does being here have anything to do with the instructions in the Enigma Book that we discovered?

She tried not to think about the recent cothurned scene of Urd's appalling, wretched choice.

As she gained her feet, she immediately noticed the strong resistance to her efforts. The gravity here was easily triple that of the Earthrealm! Skuld caught her breath and measured the exact gravitational force, and then took a moment to adjust her manifest form to suit the extra exertion. It would really suck if she presented the appearance of a squat pygmy mesomorph.

"I've been on the Earthrealm too long," she thought with amusement. After a couple of tries, she got it right...

Slenderness intact, the Norn of the Future scanned the carpet of landscape in all directions. The lack of any evidence of habitation reminded Skuld of the recent mishap-slash-adventure in Tindouf; this place looked just as deserted as the region a few kilos east of the Algerian township.

"This planet's a _major_ dustball!" Skuld exclaimed, not irritated by the environs so much as by the fact that she was cool and comfortable in Tokyo a half an hour ago

"Where to go, where to go?" she wondered, kick-striding with her hands clenched behind her back. Reaching a decision, she turned and started walking towards one of the moons, the pretty ochre one that hung low in the sky...

_"Hey!! Ya need a lift, chick!"_

Skuld nearly jumped out of her tennies at the abrupt sound of the voice. As she was walking, her mind had been clipped so tightly onto the strangetude of this place that she didn't even notice the approach of a vehicle, which was now hovering a few meters behind her.

At first glance, Skuld observed that its rider was a girl who looked about the same age as she. The teenaged girl was dressed in some kind of Demoness attire. _Scanty_ Demoness attire. The Demon-girl wore a striking red leather chest-plate 'bra' that only partially covered her breasts. A thick metal chain was slung over a round ailet resting on one of her shoulders; the chain crossed over her front between her breasts and rested against her opposite hip. A small ray-bazooka was backholstered next to the chain. Her thick curly black hair was bound up in a bun in back with another metal chain, giving her a punkish-tomboyish look. Her waist was girded by some kind of Chinese-looking brigandine armor platelets, forming a 'belt' that barely covered her black leather shorts; shorts that were little more than panties. Her knee-high red leather biker books offset her outfit, suggesting a cross between traditional Chinese leather shynbalds and a bosozoku fashion statement.

Once she finished looking over this newcomer, Skuld became keenly interested in her mode of transportation. Usually it was the other way around; Skuld would thoroughly inspect the machine first, and then shift her regard to the person riding it. She remembered her first meeting with Sentaro; when he ditch-n-burned his stuntbike, she had checked it out thoroughly before she bothered to ask him if he was okay.

Obviously, her sudden arrival on "Planet Dustball" had unnerved her!

The vehicle was floating a meter or so above the ground; it looked like a cross between a motorcycle, a hovercraft and a snowmobile. Skuld immediately dubbed it a "sky-bike". At least the technology was familiar here; it was at least a good several centuries ahead of the Earthrealm's best tech.

"Don' let my appearance scare ya'! I'm really a good kid, once ya get to know me! C'mon...hop on!" the Demon-girl entreated, lowering her floating vehicle to the ground. Skuld tentatively got on the 'sky-bike', noting that its twin nacelles underneath emitted a slight Ixodenum radiation that powered the anti-gravitation field. The two ski-like 'engines' powered the vehicle, while the sled-like front held a small singularity that moderated a graviton field. The singularity created a 'warp' of the antigrav field which would mediate or 'steer' the direction of the sky-bike. The mecha-tech was simple enough, yet it was hundreds of years in advance of any Earthrealm technologies. Skuld estimated that the Earthrealm mortals would probably achieve this level of technology before 2750, give or take a few decades.

As she settled in behind the Demon-girl, Skuld sensed that there was something vaguely familiar about this teenaged woman.

"Where ya goin'?" the driver asked. Instead of answering her query, Skuld asked her several pithy questions about the engine. She was answered with a detailed rundown on its anti-grav power, top speed and the like...with a liberal amount of braggadocio tossed in. Obviously, this biker-babe Demoness was proud of her bike!

"My name's Skuld...and I'm kinda lost! I just got here on this planet; I don't really know why I'm here and where I'm going," Skuld admitted reluctantly when questioned about where she wanted to go.

"Oh really? That sucks! I hate being lost!" the girl said, her eyes widening with curiosity.

"So I guess I'm going to where you're going," Skuld finally said with a sigh. It felt weird, she wasn't used to hanging on to a girl when she was riding in the back of a bike. The girl's waist was corded metal-tight with muscle; Skuld felt like she was hugging iron instead of flesh.

"By the way, my name's Benten. I'm one of the Gods around here! Nice to meet ya! I'm on my way to my friend's house for a war council. She's really pissed off this time! Wanna come along?"

"Y..y..you said your name was B..B..Benten?" Skuld stammered. If she wasn't seated tight behind Benten, she would have been pointing at her with a full facefault!

"Hey, you're acting like you just seen a ghost! My rep isn't _that_ bad, except for those who get on my bad side! And you're not on my bad side, so you've got nuttin' to worry about! I know I love gettin' into a buncha fights, but I'm not some kinda brawler or bully! I just like helpin' people when they're down! And that's why I'm here, because my best friend's mood is absolutely grey-down!" Benten answered.

Skuld was rigid with shock with the realization that this woman...was an _anime_ character! Blinking back her mental impasse, it all came back to her now. Soon after she came to the Earthrealm, Big Sister Urd had remarked over dinner that "Skuld's taken a liking to Earthrealm shoujo manga." With her usual lack of regard for the privacy of others, Urd had obviously snuck into her "Skuld Labs" room and discovered her newly-acquired stash of tankouban. Realizing that Skuld was reading a steady diet of CLAMP manga titles such as "Cardcaptor Sakura", "Magic Knight Rayearth" and "Wish", among others...Urd got it into her head to try and wean Skuld onto some other manga. Of course, since she was the Norn of the Past, this meant _80s_ manga and anime.

So she made Skuld watch all the episodes and movies of the "Urusei Yatsura" epic.

"It's really funny, and it'll teach you how Earthrealm mortal boys _really_ act and think...not like that goofy CLAMP stuff!" Urd had emphasized, trying to pull off the "I know what's best for you because I'm your Big Sister" act. But instead of amusing Skuld, the anime had the provoked an opposite effect. She felt reviled by the tasteless behavior of the adolescent male characters. It only served to reinforce her observations about how insipid and stupid young Earthrealm boys are. And Lum's simple-minded clinging onto Ataru hit too close to home...as it reminded her of how Elder Sister was always lain onto Keiichi. Only Keiichi wasn't as bad as that Ataru character...most of the time. At least Keiichi was _interested_ in Belldandy...which was a continual source of mistrust and bigtime irritation for Skuld back then...

"So where _are_ we?" Skuld asked Benten, trying to shut out conflict between fictional anime and present reality. Benten grinned self-consciously.

"We're on the Invader's Planet. You know, the capital of the Oni Space Empire!"

Skuld shivered involuntarily as she heard the word "Oni"; an instinctive reaction for a young Goddess who knew the name of the Dark Lord of the Demons. For a flicker of a moment, she was terrified that she had somehow been transported to Vanagdrasil! Despite her efforts to maintain her composure, Skuld was shaking with the chill fears of one just waking up from a nightmare. Benten noticed this and patted her on the knee.

"You really aren't from around here, are ya?"

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Saaa..." she heard a voice exclaim genteelly. "Are you feeling ill, miss?"

Urd looked up and saw a half-dozen bluish faces swirling in her vision, orbiting each other with kaleidoscopic irregularity amidst a cacophony of bells that rang crispies in her head. Her stomach felt like it was swirling as well. Urd sat up and shuddered. As the faces started coalescing into something that resembled a human being, Urd noticed dangles of white snow haloing the face of the person leaning over her.

Then she felt the chill of winter.

Funny how her eyesight was the first sense that tried to assert itself into her consciousness, implanting knowledge upon learned experience...and then the bitter cold, which should have been the first thing she felt...had finally looped her to wakefulness.

She was looking into the face of a yuki-demon. A young woman, not more than a teenager perhaps, was examining her with a visibly worry-eyebrowed concern. The snow-demon was dressed in a very formal version of a large kimono, the kind of attire that a shika would wear during a New Year's festival. Her kimono was an unmottled white, with a red obi sash around her waist with snowflakes embroidered on it. Her hair was a bizarre shade of ice-blue, gathered up in back with a white ribbon, while trimmed in straight-edged bangs that completely covered her forehead. And her face was as pale as a Kabuki actor's...

"May I be of some assistance? You appear to be quite disoriented. It isn't often that I encounter someone this far into the snow desert. Strange...I don't see any tracks in the snow around you to indicate where you may have come from," she asked in a frail, yet cultured voice.

Urd felt an insistent force hammering at the back of her head; she reached back and ran her fingers over a knot that felt like it was figuratively the size of Mt. Fuji. She tried to remember what brought her here...which was near-impossible amidst the bongoing of her eardrums in accompaniment to her throbbing headache. She pulled herself inwardly, huddling to brace against the cold.

"I..I seem to have had a pretty harsh knock on the head. Could you help me to my feet?" she asked the snow-demoness.

"It would be my privilege to be of service. Are you from around here? You don't resemble in any way one of my attendants, nor do I recognize you as one of my citizens," she commented, reaching around Urd's waist and steadying her as she stood up.

"Where is here?" Urd asked.

"Why, Neptune, of course!" she replied, her widening eyes indicating astonishment that Urd didn't know this 'fact'.

"Is that...an actual _suntan_ that you have? How remarkable! Your skin is so dark..." the snow-girl asked. Urd was already feeling incredulous with the swift rearrangement her surroundings; the assertion that she was on _Neptune_ made her feel even more discombobulated...

"This _can't_ be Neptune! Neptune in an uninhabitable planet, classified as a CryoJovian ice giant with envelope of molecular hydrogen, helium, and methane traveling contra-rotational with speeds upwards of 2100 km/h, last time I checked! It has the most violent atmospheric meteorology of any of the planets in the Earthrealm's Solar System! I don't believe you! Unless this is another Neptune, in another solar planetary distribution. Is there an inhabited planet near here, about 4.5 billion Km away towards the Sun?"

"So you know of the Earthers too? Have you been to their planet? I find the climate there rather too temperate for my comforts, but the denizens are pleasant enough people..." the snow-girl noted, launching into a technical description of the planet.

Urd unconsciously drifted into her thoughts, ignoring the young snow-woman, who had called herself "Oyuki". During the many spans of millennia, Urd had visited hundreds of thousands of planets in this Galaxy...and she knew for a fact that there was no "Neptune" that had a planet called "Earth" among its neighbors. Neptune's environment was too harsh for any carbon-based lifeforms, although several billion different lifeforms had evolved on these volatile gas giants in other places in this particular universe. As a young Goddess, she and her friends often went on runaways so that they could swim in the methane air-oceans of gas giants and be blown through the air by 1500 Km per hour windblasts; elopements such as these was a common childhood diversion amongst the more extreme sports-minded Gods. She remembered skimming through the methane and semi-solid water layers of brilliantly blue Neptune on an invisible quantum-quark surfboard.

But this wasn't right...for one thing, she shouldn't be feeling so damned _cold_! And this Oyuki woman looked awfully damned familiar, too! Urd mulled over a litany of facial images, trying to figure if this Oyuki was a Goddess Relief Office agent on a vacation? Urd reluctantly had to acknowledge that she was somewhat amnesiac from whatever had hit her on the back of the head. She certainly couldn't recall the circumstances which had brought her here. She was impatient for the foci of her memories to reassert themselves.

Urd allowed herself to be transported on some kind of antigrav-carriage that Oyuki owned. On the way, Oyuki served her lemonade and peach juice, which comforted Urd almost as much as the warm pile of blankets she was wrapped in. Oyuki was animated and cheerful as she described her homecity of Chionopolis, the capital of Neptune. The snow-girl chattered amiably all the way back, noting this and that about a planet she called her "realm".

Everything about Oyuki's mannerisms shouted "Princess" to Urd's mind. Urd esteemed this young woman, who looked like she was in her teens, to have a capable administrative intellect that hovered behind an affected modesty. During the course of their conversation, Oyuki could rattle off complex business macro-formulae and then switch gears and discuss issues of governance with utter ease.

As they approached the city, the flier hovered to a lower altitude. A large conurbation passed underneath, looking like a disc of light upon the blue snows. As they flew over the city's districts, Urd could see millions of inhabitants ski-jetting on streets of sheer ice. The city itself was comprised of brilliantly engineered structures constructed out of glass-like icemetal, designs that would be the envy of the annual ice-sculpting contests in Sapporo and Norway. In the center of the roughly circular city was a large spire...an ice castle. Because the overhead sky was a navy blue color; the city was well illuminated with lights conducted by the icemetal. From the air, most of the buildings seemed to _glow_.

Oyuki barked a command to the driver, who parked the anti-grav carriage in a garage in the upper tier of the spire-like citadel. Once inside the building, Urd marveled at Oyuki's 'castle'. The palace was..._palatial_, to say the least. Pennants hanging on the wall, huge artistic sculptures of ice, chandeliers and mammoth pillars, vaulted ceilings...Urd felt right at home with the charming courtly atmosphere.

However, one thing struck Urd as very odd. In the whole of the populace that she had observed, she couldn't distinguish any men. Was this a biologically asserted asexual species that possessed mostly feminine characteristics? Or was the male-less populace the result of expert cloning techniques that were necessarily employed to repopulate the planet after a disaster? Urd could almanac at least a few hundred thousand planets where one species' sexgender had become reproductively isolated after a devastating plague killed the other sexgenders? Could that have happened here?

But something else was missing besides the men.

In all this time, she didn't fully know who she was. She couldn't even remember her name...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Ah! We're almost there! You'll be able to see it over that next ridge!" Benten announced excitedly.

"Let me guess...you're going to Lum's house..." Skuld said dryly, with an eyeroll.

"Yep! Well actually, it's her parent's house. Lum's father is a bigwig...the Chief Warlord of the Oni, which makes her an Oni princess..." she started to explain. She looked at Skuld with a fit of surprise as her voice trailed off.

"Hey, waitaminute! How'd _you_ know that?" Benten exclaimed, pulling her sky-cycle to a near halt. She looked back over her shoulder and glared at Skuld suspiciously.

"Maybe it was a lucky guess!" Skuld answered, trying to appear charming and inoffensive. Benten's sudden aggressiveness had put her on guard...the biker-girl was almost Valkyrie-like in disposition. Once again Benten's behavior suggested to Skuld that she was actually a man in a woman's body.

But she was so _pretty_!

Skuld felt embarrassed at her ready identification of Benten as some kind of cosmic tomboy Demon-girl. In her mind, she could hear Big Sister Urd's taunting words. Always, Big Sister Urd would tease her, accusing her of being a tomboy. The teasing had only increased after Skuld arrived at the Earthrealm, when it became evident that she had zero interest in any Earthrealm mortal boys...and no bustline...and a hatred towards Keiichi.

"You aren't one of Ataru's girls, are ya?"

"EHH?? You..actually..think..I'm..one..of..his..girls!!" Skuld exclaimed angrily, pacing out the words to indicate her deep plunge into resentment. Benten appeared taken aback at Skuld's reaction.

"I am _not_ his girl! I'm not _anyone's_ girl! I'm _my_ girl! And I'm _not_ a girl!!" she shouted.

"I..I know about that sick hentai, lecherous, perverted, ecchi...tenacious and idiotic girl-user! I wouldn't touch him if he was the last man in the Multiverse!" she protested vigorously. Skuld clicked her jaw to end the discussion, realizing that she was actually spitting her words as she boiled in ire. She had actually felt gravely insulted by Benten's accusation! Her mood switchbacked like an Alpine skier on a free-style slalom plunge.

Benten broke into hearty giggles, no doubt spurred on by Skuld's declaiming of Ataru.

"Ataru is all of those things, and even worse. He's lecherous, Mendou's a smarmy rich fink, and Keiichi's an idiot slacker. That bunch isn't even worth as much as an ice cube on Neptune! And what's amazing is this...they all went to the same high school! I pity the faculty at that school who had to educate that pack of retards!" Benten finally managed to say between laughs, covering her mouth to try and hold down her giggling.

With a deep gulping gasp, Skuld realized that Benten had said "Ataru", "Mendou"...and _Keiichi_!

She felt fire-alarms going off in her head. She was hoping that she could pull herself together and accept this crazy situation. But now, she chided herself for actually being baka enough to believe in the 'reality' of this whole scenario...and playing along with it. This was _a manga character_ that she was talking to! Skuld realized that she had been so caught up in the fantasy, she was actually considering chewing out this teenaged ruffian-girl...just because she had associated Skuld with another fictional character!

A libidinous character whom she had despised from the very first episode of the anime.

She didn't know if she was more angry at Benten, or mad at herself for missing the obvious. Skuld was too quick to assume that this 'world' was populated with only fictional characters! Ataru, Mendou and Keiichi...two of the three were libidinous characters whom she had despised from the very first episode of the anime. As for Keiichi, he was anything _but_ libidinous, up until recently.

Skuld paused as the shout formed in her throat. She smiled to herself, reminding herself that this wasn't reality. This was just some kind of imaginary realm that existed inside the mind of a manga artist and a few million of her fans. Reality was the temple, the Earthrealm, and...

What was real, and what was not?

She felt her heart sink when she remembered that Big Sister's boyfriend was dead.

"Way cool!! You're my kinda girl!" Benten praised her, seemingly aloof to the play of emotions Skuld had just fielded in her heart.

"Maybe we can buddy up and be friends! I feel the exact same way about that witless idiot! And most men as well! Shinobu's right...all men are self-centered beasts! And after what Lum's husband did to her...I hope she kills him!" Benten added.

Skuld lowered her head, a wan sadness figuring her face.

"Hey, are you okay?" Benten asked, readily noticing Skuld's mood suddenly descending from righteous anger to rapt grief.

"Yes. What you said just reminded me that...th..there was a death in the famil...er, one of my sister's friends passed away," Skuld explained, holding the gates on the tears that threatened to tumble out of her eyes.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"My honored guest, I have to take my leave of you for a few days. I hope that the amenities of my humble abode can be of some slight suffice. We've strived to make them meet with your approval. You may continue to have leave to make house in my apartments during my absence. One of my best friends has summoned me to her home world on an urgent matter. Apparently, her fiancé..er, her husband has crossed a line that he should have never crossed. As a result of his gross transgression, there is a revanche-debt that must be paid in order for my friend to save face. I have no doubt to the fact that her father will insist upon it. So, to honor our friend-bond, I must go on a journey tomorrow..." Oyuki explained diplomatically.

"Oyuki...could I possibly persuade you to take me along? No offense, but the weather on this planet is not what I'm used to. Also, there are no _guys_ on this planet!" Urd requested plaintively. Oyuki regarded her with a surreptitiously sly smile.

"If you wait a season, during our winter you will be able to meet some gentlemen visitors. We routinely recruit them from other planets to help us with the encroaching snowdrifts during the winter months," Oyuki answered.

"You're joking! This place has a _winter_? To me, it's been like winter _ever since I got here_!" Urd remarked in an amazed voice, as she stood in front of a large wall-sized mirror and adjusted her robe. Combing out her hair, she felt the knob on the back of her head. It was slowly unswelling, but it was still tender to the touch.

"Perhaps it might be worthwhile for you to accompany me to my friend's planet. The climate there may be more suitable to your tastes," Oyuki answered.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Skuld watched the tiger-striped house loom closer as Benten seemed to punch the accelerator. It was _huge_ for a house; a massive circular bulwark that was rendered more definite by the pennants on its walls. Skuld realized that it was more of a castle than a private residence. Everything about its design seemed to project a deliberate intimidation...not to mention the mammoth dreadnought of a starship hovering above it, looming it with a shadow.

"Lum's house!" Benten gestured.

_"Benten!!" "Lum!!"_

A girl who Skuld recognized as _another_ character from the manga flew off of one of the porches on an upper story of the house. She wore a tiger-striped two-piece that looked like some kind of exotic swimwear. A generous mane of green hair flowed over her back as she scooted horizontally through the air with the natural ease of a swimmer. As she approached, Skuld squinted her eyes to see if she had the infamous horns at the crown of her head, as depicted in the anime. Sure enough, two squat bony protrusions were clearly visible! They looked like shortened versions of the oni-horns from traditional depictions of Japanese creatures of legend.

In an ironic turnabout, the girl that Skuld had initially esteemed as a Demoness...was actually a Goddess. _This_ girl was the Demoness...but if she behaved anything like the Lum in the anime, she would be daffy, naive and lovelorn when separated from her perverted boyfriend.

"There I go again! Dammit, they're anime characters, not living people!" Skuld confronted herself, irritated that she had slipped beneath the veneer of artistic imagination once again by thinking these characters were real.

Benten parked her sky-bike on a landing pad, and then Lum and she leapt into an embrace.

"Who's she?" Lum asked.

"Her name's Skuld," Benten answered with a thumb-over-the-shoulder. Lum floated over and hovered in front of Skuld, examining her closely. Skuld felt awkward as Lum flitted around her like a firefly around an incense stick. Something about Lum's mid-air maneuvering reminded Skuld of how Big Sister Urd preferred to float around the temple house, rather than walking on terra firma like she and Belldandy.

"How old are you?" Lum asked, bright blue eyes sparkling with cheerfulness as they walked towards her house.

"M..me?" Skuld asked, momentary disarmed by the too-familiar question.

"Don't mind her. Lum usually asks the weirdest questions at first. I think she's just trying to see if you're older than us..." Benten offered in defense of her friend.

"Me? I'm a little over 160,000 years old," Skuld lied. Well, she _looked_ every bit her stated age, in terms of how she manifested into her Earthrealm mortal form. These two wouldn't know the difference anyway...

"WAHH!! No way! You look my age! I'm 17 space years old, by our count," Lum giggled in a half-laugh, half-gasp.

"Guess that makes you our sempai!" Benten noted.

"Skuld-sempai...uu-cha!" Lum exclaimed with a cross-eyed bow. Sure enough, this Lum had the speech aberrations and quirky affectations of her anime counterpart.

Lum asked a number of very personal questions as they walked towards the house. Once inside, Lum had a robotic servant fetch tea for her guests. Both Benten and Lum were taken aback by Skuld's fervent interest in the mechanized assistant. Her comment of "primitive, but useful" especially surprised her hostess.

Skuld tasted the tea, noting it was strongly flavored with cinnamon and cherryroot.

"How have you been since you left home?" Benten asked. Skuld watched Lum's happy-go-lucky expression draw into a mask of anger. The Oni-girl's face turned red as a halo of sparkling energies surrounded her. Skuld did a double-take as her horns seemed to double in length...

"That slime...I still can't believe that Keiichi-darling did that to me!"

_Phpppf!!_

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

The ride aboard the "Ice Ball", as Urd termed Oyuki's spiraling UFO, was chill. Like many novice starfaring races, Oyuki's interstellar vehicle utilized metalized ice for a hull and warp-insertion through NowSpace as a method of travel. Metalized ice is well-suited for deep space travel; it provided a far more sturdy exterior than any other substance. Its highly compressed molecular structure was rendered even more stable in the absolute zero of interstellar spaceflight, much more so than the more complex atomic structures of metals and alloys. For example, a micrometeorite strike on a hull of metalized ice could be easily mended by a slight application of heat, rather than the plate-welding that metal required. As a means of stellar travel, warp-insertion was very fuel efficient. Locating insertion points in the fabric of NowSpace was similar to traveling between TimeStreams; one simply needed to locate an interstellar vorticose, calculate its terminus, and then travel into it. A more technologically advanced culture could create warp-points at will, but Oyuki's race was still unable to do this.

As it would take several days to reach her friend's homeworld, Oyuki engaged Urd in several depthy discussions about the subject of "betrayal". She argued that betrayal was an ethical concept that defined the relationship between two beings, in instances where tacit acts of betrayal had occurred.

"If, for example, someone practices deception in business dealings, then one would be disinclined to contract with them again. To do so would be the crown of foolishness. This reluctance, which is actually distrust, results because the person inserted a negativity into the binding relationship between you and she," Oyuki argued.

"Yes, but how does one determine if the person is the betrayer, or the act is the betrayal? What about the case where my sister..." Urd started to point out, but then trailed off in mid-sentence. She remembered something about having a sister, but couldn't recall the specifics.

"Well anyway, aren't there situations where someone thinks they are betrayed, when actually there was no intent to do harm? Do you go to school on Neptune?" Urd asked.

"No. I went to school in Tau Epsilon V. That's where I met my close friends, both of whom you will meet when we arrive," Oyuki answered, causing Urd to puff her cheeks in irritation.

"What I meant was this. When I first went to school, it felt like my mother betrayed me because she didn't pack a bento lunch for me. She told me that that I needed to learn to eat the food provided by the school. So I got all mad and stuff, because I felt betrayed. But it wasn't a betrayal; ipso facto, it was a lesson in building independence. To me, the languages of action, intent and word do not always belong to those involved in the exchange. My mother's actions were guided by maternal instinct, rather than 'who she is' relating to 'who I am'. She would have done the same for my other sister...in hindsight, I realized that her unwillingness to pack a bento lunch for me wasn't a personal attack or a betrayal by intent," Urd explained, describing her premise.

"Perhaps it is so. But if one feels betrayed, regardless of the intent of the other party, isn't it still a betrayal by virtue of the response that is evoked? In all respects, in cases of betrayal there exists a certain fact that the feeling of being betrayed manifests as an accurate sentiment of one's internal state. Or are you willing to claim that emotions are not fixtures of reality?" Oyuki noted.

"I wouldn't touch that one with a 3-meter bo stick!" Urd said cheerfully. "The heart is _always_ true, but the mind creates distortions. Just like a moment ago...I was trying to use an example from the life of my younger sister, but I couldn't fully recall the incident. Likewise, mind interplays with emotions...so in a way, all this conjecture and argument can be colored. Even in this moment, our convictions are moderated by our passion to be right."

"Granted. But in the case of my friend, she is feeling betrayed because she built a relationship with her husband. The reach of her sense of being betrayed is directly proportionate to the emotional investment she made in him."

"But what if he didn't make an equivocal emotional investment in her? Happens all the time. Men lead women on by feigning love-interest, and then betray them. To the woman, it's a betrayal. To the man, it's just a form of exploitation..."

"Men are such souless, fickle creatures..." Oyuki pondered aloud with a sigh. Urd felt the blood rushing out of her face as the word "soulless" seemed to trigger a momentum of gnawing sadness. She watched Oyuki reshuffle her feet out from under her, so she wasn't sitting tailor-style. Once she poised her kimono, Oyuki took a deep draw from her raku teacup.

"Life is a conundrum. Being that it so, then what is the truth?" she wondered aloud. Urd admitted that the only being she knew that could discern the truth with total accuracy was Kami-sama.

There! It had happened again! Another fragment of her 'memory' seemed to cull itself up from her amnesia. So now there was someone named "Kami-sama" in her past. Urd shivered, as barely glimpsed memories passed through her mind. She tried to clarify them, but she couldn't. She returned her attention to the conversation with Oyuki.

"Well, I think that _we_ create the truth in some aspects. Consider tragedy, for instance. When something terrible happens, we tend to blame it on ourselves or assign accusation towards forces outside of ourselves. We may even go as far as to become frustrated by our inability to find the 'good' in the midst of our loss. So either we're faced with the choice of perceiving our losses...perhaps even our betrayals...in the light of 'willful harm', or we can act to prevent them. If a disaster happens on the Earthrealm, the usual response undertaken by most of the mortals is an inclination towards charitable acts. Of course, there are those who exploit the situation to their advantage, but most people are benevolent and sympathetic. People give, because it allows them power over the tragedy. Otherwise, they often get mired in discussions such as 'how can a merciful God allow the earthquake to strike Tokyo and kill tens of thousands of people?'"

"I feel touched by your words, my friend...but there are some betrayals and tragedies that are transgressions which are so weighty, they cannot be remedied by _any_ personal actions. Losses and wounds of the heart that refuse to heal over time. My friend has experienced such a deep betrayal..." Oyuki acknowledged.

"So what happened to her? Boyfriend problems?" Urd asked.

"I think it would be best if she personally explained her feelings to you. I doubt that my understanding of the matter can give justice to the depths of her loss..."

"Speaking of loss, I remember a time when I had this boyfriend who...who...who..." Urd stammered, shuddering as she felt part of her heart become eclipsed by a powerful sadness. There was someone she cared about...that was taken away from her, someone who was now imprisoned in a house of fire...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

This wasn't going well.

Lum was in a furious rage over the desertion of her husband, Keiichi. Jetting back and forth through the air in her parent's hall-like living room, she would occasionally send off random arcs of electricity...

Already, a couple of lamps had been zacked into pieces.

Then Lum launched into a monologue. Actually, it was a tirade of melancholies...the only thing missing in Skuld's mind was the accompanying loungey enka ballad in the background...

Skuld learned from the irate Oni-girl that Keiichi, rather than Ataru, had been tapped out by the Invaders. Using some simple random probability generators, they had selected _Keiichi_ to compete with Lum in a contest to save the Earth. But instead of being a total idiot like Ataru Moroboshi, Keiichi had used other means to capture Lum. Instead of stealing her tiger-striped bra by grabbing it, Keiichi had charmed Lum out to dinner on the ninth day of the contest. He managed to convince Lum to partake of Earthrealm customs by wearing a hair ribbon, flattering her femininity by saying she would look prettier for the Earth TV cameras whenever she was flying in the air.

Little did she know at the time that the ribbon had a powerful magnet sewn into it by Sayoko Mishima. Lum noted that Keiichi had admitted Sayoko's act of complicity several years later, after being zacked a few dozen times. He had also admitted later on that...on the tenth day, Sayoko had promised him that if he was successful in catching Lum and saving the world, she would marry him...which would make him the heir to the Mishima Zaibatsu and the trillions of yen in business assets it represented...

Riding his BMX through the streets, Keiichi had managed to pursue Lum all over the Boso Peninsula until she started getting fatigued. As she spun out her tale, Lum noted that she was in good shape, but that flying all day _could_ wear an Oni-girl down. While she was catching her breath, Keiichi had activated a concealed electromagnetic generator that he had mounted on his motorcycle with the help of his high school wrecking crew. Then, in an ironic twist, he had zapped Lum. This rendered her incapacitated for several seconds; long enough for Keiichi to ride up to her and get a grip on her luscious mane of green hair. But grabbing her horns was a different matter.

Lum had physically resisted Keiichi with all her might; and what initially started as a wrestling match had turned into an outright pseudo-erotic grappling match. In front of a TV audience of several billions. Mortified with embarrassment at this realization, Lum had relented for just a second...long enough for Keiichi to manage to grasp both her horns firmly...saving the Earthrealm from being subjugated by the Oni Warlord.

"Don't tell me..." Skuld said dryly, guessing the rest.

Sure enough, with ironies revisiting ironies one more time, Keiichi had shouted "We can get married now!" once he captured Lum.

Skuld could only shake her head in disgust in reaction to the conclusion of Lum's narrative.

Lum appended her story by exclaiming that, in her opinion, she was certain that Keiichi had made up the "Sayoko Mishima and the secret hair ribbon" element of his story. She added that it was probably an excuse for his frequent visits with the trillionaire's daughter. Still, Lum knew that _someone_ had made that ribbon, but she suspected that it was Keiichi's sister Megumi, rather than Sayoko.

Lum's countenance was enough to convince Skuld that she was extremely jealous of Sayoko. In a bitter-bite voice, Lum complained that "that Sayoko woman" wouldn't relent in her efforts to gain Keiichi's affections, even though Keiichi had been betrothed to _her_. Further, it seems that Sayoko's good friend Shutaro Mendou was in collusion with her; Sayoko wanted Keiichi, while Shutaro wanted Lum. The past several years had seen Keiichi finish high school and go onto college at NIT, but Sayoko still persisted. Keiichi wasn't a skirt-chaser, but he had a soft spot for Sayoko.

A _very_ soft spot...

Benten only managed to get in three words during the whole retelling of the sordid tale...

"What a mess!"

Perhaps the only positive aspect of Lum's explanation of her ridiculous soap-operaish situation was that it had given pause for Skuld to divert her attentions away from concerns about her own messy circumstances. During the overnight stay as Lum's guest, Skuld had been unable to sleep a wink because of her agitation at _not knowing why she had been brought here_.

In a very bizarre twist of fate, she used to watch the TV Tokyo's Anime Ramp Up channel...and now she was _in_ it! The last she knew, there wasn't an Anime Universe among the innumerable universes of the Multiverse...

As the anxieties scraped for her attention like tree branches scratching against a window, Skuld felt like joining Lum in her pace-and-shoot bitchyfit.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"We will be arriving at our destination shortly," Oyuki noted to Urd as she pressed a sequence of buttons. A viewscreen flashed on, displaying a small speck of orange against the starfield.

Urd nodded her head.

"And you still don't remember your name? This may be a little awkward once we arrive at my friend's home. How will I introduce you to her?" Oyuki asked.

"I wish I could help you, but I can't remember it!" Urd replied in a frustrated voice. "I know that I have a younger sister, and that I'm a Norn...whatever that is. I know that I have some experience with computers and magical..."

"Perhaps you're a performing magician?" Oyuki urged. Urd knew she was trying to be helpful, but her questions were only causing more confusion.

"No, I know that I'm not some kind of entertainer...at least, I _think_ I'm not a performer. I know that I have a father and mother who live on a place called Yggdrasil. They're Gods...which makes me a Goddess. But why would I be a Goddess? Why would I _want_ to be a Goddess? Dammit, I just don't know enough about me..."

Oyuki rested a comforting hand on Urd's shoulder, and the two of them silently watched the planet growing larger in the viewscreen. The first thing Urd noticed was that the atmosphere of the planet seemed to be banded by orange and red stripes. She almost wanted to giggle, because the planet presented the image of tiger-striped basketball...

"Lum's planet uses an atmospheric rendering technology to create the appearance that you see. They launched a number of rockets which lofted black and orange colored particles into their stratosphere, and then they orbited a network of antigrav buoys so that they could create 'fields' that gather like color particles, while segregating them from the other colors in order to create the striped effect. It's all very sophisticated...and quite a waste, if you ask me," Oyuki explained.

As if anticipating another question, Oyuki added, "Lum's people are quite vain when it comes to appearances."

"So why don't they just use the troposphere as a holographic conductor and make the whole planet into a huge hologram? Or better yet, create a Proximity Shield Mandala on the planet's equator? It would be simple for someone who is experienced in CyberArcanicals. By using a Mandala, they could encant a self-looping spell of mentation that would make everyone coming here _think_ that the planet appears to have tiger stripes. That way, they don't have to go to all the trouble to change the physical environment," Urd noted.

Oyuki looked at her levelly, but Urd could notice the slight flinch of amazement that crossed her otherwise passive facial expression.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"They're here!" a house servant announced. A moment later, a very formal-looking girl walked in the doorway to the guest quarters, joining Benten and Lum.

Right on her heels was another woman...

_"BIG SISTER URD!!"_

Skuld's shout of excitement drowned out the greetgiving of the other three girls as she saw Urd stroll in, a pace behind the blue-haired girl. She instantly sprung to her feet and ran to her sister...

"Big Sister Urd! Am I glad to see you!"

"Who are you? Why are you calling me 'Big Sister'? I have but one sister, and her name is Belldandy..."

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"You believe that your sister has some kind of amnesia? And how could _she_ possibly be your sister? Personally, I don't think you look like her at all! You're like a princess...while she's like a fox spirit," Benten observed.

"Of course I look like her..." Skuld protested.

"Yes, I can certainly see the resemblance. You look like a completely innocent little girl...and your 'sister' looks as sexy as Nurse Sakura! Which means that you're both women..." Lum noted.

Skuld felt a strong desire to blow up something with a Skuld Bomb.

"Oh my! Did my friend say something to upset you? You're _growling_," the new girl named Oyuki asked Skuld.

Skuld bit her tongue just in time. These three...idiot women...couldn't see that Urd was her sister! So it was up to her. Alone, she would have to somehow awaken Urd to her memories. It was quite possible that the trauma of Cevn's death had somehow snapped Urd into some kind of trance-like mental fugue. It was also likely that it would take a catalyst of some kind to snap Urd out of her forgetfulness.

Already, she had tried a number of means to evoke Urd's memories. Listening in, Skuld had learned that Urd knew about Father and Mother and Elder Sister Belldandy. Urd also seemed to understand that she was a SysOp at some 'computer factory', but it was clear to Skuld that her sister's recall was less-than-perfect in this area. A number of Urd's memories were inaccurate, including where she lived in the Earthrealm. Urd insisted that she was living in Geneva, Switzerland.

Skuld seemed to recall a minor detail about the time Urd went missing last year. Urd had explained to Skuld her that, after managing to betray Cevn, she had gotten really drunk and had decided to travel to Switzerland. In typical Urd fashion, she had managed to ticket a plane for Beijing instead.

Could there be a connection? And if there was a connection, how could this be used to snap Urd back to her normal self? Skuld asked Lum, Benten and Oyuki if they could come over to a corner of the room.

Much to her surprise, it was Lum who came up with most sensible solution.

"So if your sister was drunk when she decided to go to Switzerland, and she has a false memory of being there now...then all we have to do is get her really drunk! If she's drunk, then I bet that it'll all come back to her, uu-cha!"

"Lum, that really makes sense!" Benten agreed.

"But what about Lum's little problem?" Oyuki asked.

"_What_ little problem? Oh, you mean the 'girl gets violent when she's drunk' problem? Don' worry...you know I can handle her if she gets riled up!" Benten promised.

"I do not get violent when I get drunk!" Lum protested.

"Sez who? I seem to remember a high school getting wrecked because you got your head into some plum wine..." Benten argued.

"I must agree with Benten. I seem to remember seeing some very un-lady-like behavior in a bar one time when Ataru had been kidnapped by that princess," Oyuki agreed.

"That was Ran! You must be mistaking me with Ran!" Lum argued.

"See. You _were_ drunk that time, Lum! Ran _wasn't even there_!" Benten said with a smirk.

"Okay! I promise not to drink a drop!"

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Thaz shtupid bashtard hushband ov' mine! He'sh in love wiffa 'nother woman. Shome sandy-haired woman tha' I never sheen befor..urp!..before!"

"Yesh. We all know that alrea..hic..already, Lumph! I'm shick of hearin' 'bout it! Why dontcha talk 'bout shomethin' elsh!"

"Oh my! It seems the two of you are arguing again! This type of behavior is quite impolite, especially in front of our two new guests," Oyuki commented, regarding at her friends with narrowed eyes and an expression that said "I told you so".

As if they cared, by this point.

Both Benten and Lum had wine-flushed faces. Lum nodded vigorously in agreement with Oyuki's assessment and reached into the plum wine jar, withdrawing another plum and popping it in her mouth.

Skuld was watching the proceedings with a grimace on her face. Her moodiness was souring by the moment. She didn't want to drink anything besides chocolate milk...and the stupid bartender kept making fun of her for drinking "girly drinks".

And then there was Urd, who seemed to quite reluctant to go full-out in her drinking. Urd had only downed two glasses of booze, and she was actually sipping on her third glass...a very un-Urd-like mannerism indeed. Skuld had watched Urd drink on numerous occasions; a 'normal' Urd would have been deep into her second bottle by now. Skuld reasoned that her sister's reticence to get drunk might have been caused by a subconscious reaction: perhaps in her mind, Urd was reliving all the times Skuld and Belldandy had chewed her out for sake-related 'atrocities' around the house...

"Hey, lesh havva 'nother round, barkeep!" Benten yelped, slapping the table with the palms of her hands.

"I'll have a glass too!" Skuld requested, deciding to join in, drawing a raised eyebrow from the primly proper Oyuki.

"She _is_ an ice princess, acting all ladyishly aloof like that!" Skuld mentally measured Oyuki, as a warm goblet of sake was placed in front of her by the waitress. The yellowish liquid didn't look too appealing and smelled even worse; Skuld stared at it for a moment and then prepared her taste buds for the worst.

She raised the cup to her lips...

"Ack cough, cough! It burns!! Yikes!" she shouted as she felt flames going down her throat. Foolishly, she had taken a sizable draught from the goblet, thinking that this was the kajitsushu fruit wine that Lum was drinking. Instead, it was shochu...a very strong version of shochu, in fact.

Skuld glared at the bartender, who was grinning mischievously towards her table.

"Ha hah bwah ha hee hee!" the girls laughed, amused by Skuld's discomfort. She turned red in the face as even Urd joined in the burst of laughter.

"Whatta lightweight!" Urd commented.

"I can't help it if I'm a novice! At least I'm not some party girl like all of you!" Skuld countered testily.

"Oh my!" Oyuki commented dryly.

"Here..._you_ have some!" Skuld said angrily, pushing the rest of her glass towards Urd.

"So you think you can drink _me_ under the table, huh?" Urd said in a voice clearly hellbent for a challenge.

"Yeah, I'll try. And if I do, then you have to admit that you're my sister!" Skuld said, accepting the challenge. She realized that engaging in a drinking bout with Urd was akin to jumping out of an airplane without a parachute.

What she didn't know was that the small draught of shochu she had already downed was working its mystery, loosening her inhibitions and common sense.

"As if! How am I supposed to know if I'm your sister or not if I can't even remember my own name?" Urd shouted back. Lum and Benten leaned in closer, mischievous spectators who wanted to taste every bit of contention between the two sisters.

"You sister's name is Belldandy. She's _my_ sister too!" Skuld argued.

"Describe her!" Urd demanded, pouring her a drink. Urd downed the glass in one solid throat-shaking gulp, earning admiring handclaps from Benten and a look of concern from Oyuki.

Skuld started to sip at the foul-tasting stuff...but Urd reached under her glass and tipped it upwards, spilling most of the liquor into Skuld's mouth and the rest all over her blouse.

"Why..cough..me, Lord?!" she moaned in between choking gasps, wiping her mouth off with her sleeve as the others giggled. Once again, her older sister was tormenting her! Skuld realized that Urd was practically acting like herself, but she just wasn't aware of it. Her actions were of the unconscious.

"Okay, I'll describe Elder Sister to you! She's about 25 of our years in age, with a long rounded diamond-shaped mark in her forehead..."

"You mean Peorth? Peorth's my sister?!" Urd concluded with a knowing snigger.

"N..No!! Definitely _not_ Peorth!" Skuld hastily interjected. "Elder Sister has a rounded diamond mark...like an oval...and _light_ brown hair that she wears long. She likes to braid her hair down the back, and she has a..."

"Anyone could guess that!" Urd interrupted. "Here! Have another glass. You're already one behind me!"

Skuld was amazed...she didn't even notice Urd downing another glass. Finally, her sister was drinking like...her sister!

Three more glasses later, Skuld started feeling woozy herself. Even though she was sitting down, her body felt like it was wobbling on its own. The table didn't help much either; every time Skuld leaned on it for support, it seemed to slip out from under her arms and elbows. For a moment, she wanted to snap herself out of the intoxication with a spell, but then she decided not to. Besides, she was already too far gone...she couldn't remember the words of the encantation.

In the next half-hour, she half-heard Lum and Benten getting into a heated argument about men, Lum arguing that "you can't live without them" and Benten arguing that "you can't live with them". Finally, the words boiled over into actions; Lum got enraged at her friend. Pointing a finger at Benten, she loosed a large zack bolt.

Urd flicked her wrist and the bolt disappeared in mid-zap, in the blink of an eye. Drunk or not, Lum and her friends were astonished by this new trick.

"O..oiy! Do that again! That wash coool" Benten urged.

Skuld was very irritated that no one was noticing her. She could have done the same thing! But everyone was paying attention to Big Sister Urd, who was being the show-off once again! Just like she always is!

The room kept spinning...

She decided that she wasn't going to stand by and let her sister hog all the attention!

"Thas' nuttin'! Heresh my powersh! They're bet..urp..better than hersh!" Skuld yelled. She tried to stand up with dramatic swiftness, but instead she lost her balance and tried to right herself by using the table, which she promptly tipped over. Amazingly, she was still on her feet. She held her hands out, shaky as they were...and a glowing flash of brown light appeared in her palms and spread out to fill the whole bar.

And a moment later, "Urdsh my sishter!" appeared on everything and everybody in the tavern. The ensuing moments were filled with hushed whispers as patrons edgily made for the exit doors.

"There! Thosh are _my_ powersh! Impresshed, huh?!" Skuld announced. She nodded her head sharply to accent her words, then slumped back into her chair and promptly passed out.

"Whoo hoo!! Tha' wash really kewl!" Benten shouted with glee, clapping her hands. "Do it again, why don'chya?"

"I'm afraid that she can't, Benten. She's passed her limit," Oyuki said in her usual princess-polite voice. She sipped on a glass of fruit wine with practiced dignity.

"Thish sucksh! Now we're shtuck! She said she wash gonna pay the bill!" Lum complained, her eyes glistening as she downed the contents of her glass, which she just happened to be nursing when the table went down.

"That is indeed unfortunate, Lum. It is true that our new friend Skuld did volunteer to pay the bar bill, but as you can see, she obviously cannot do so in her present condition. I highly doubt that she'll regain her wits in time before the bar closes. And after her act of mischief, I would definitely contend that we will be visited by the local police in short order. So it is my opinion that _you_ should pay the bill, since it was your suggestion to come here in the first place. And also, because this is your home planet. It is meet that you should assume the duties of host and honor the obligation," Oyuki stated.

"_M..m..me_ pay the damn bill? You're..urph!..outta your min', Oyuyuyuki!" Lum stuttered back, finished her glass in a gulp.

"Yeah, Missh Princessh Moneybagsh! You have plenny of money...sho why don' _you_..hic!..pay it! Shesh _your _guest!" Benten flared up, pointing at Urd.

"That would be improper, as I have only draughted three glasses of light fruit wine. My portion of the bill is rather slight compared to the rest of yours. Each of you have been drinking for _hours_ non-stop," Oyuki argued back levelly, not blinking an eyelash.

Their debate was cut short by a sudden wail of despair from Urd...

"Dammit! He ashked me notta get drunk! An' now I'm here...shomewhere! Drunk! An' he'sh dead!"

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"WE'RE GOING TO BLOW UP THAT MISERABLE WORTHLESS PLANET...AND THAT'S FINAL!! THEN WE'LL BE DONE WITH THE MATTER, ONCE AND FOR ALL!!" a five-meter tall behemoth of a man screamed angrily, clapping his hands and stomping his feet. The man looked like a cross between a gorilla, an Oni, and Elvis Presley. His piled-up hair reminded Skuld of one of those TV Elvis impersonators.

"But Daddy...isn't that a little _too_ extreme? Destroying the whole Earth because of the actions of one idiot? Even though he's _my_ idiot. I don't think it's right! Not at all!" Lum argued.

"NO ONE SHAMES MY ONLY DAUGHTER THE WAY HE DID AND GETS AWAY WITH IT! WE HAVE TO DO THIS QUICKLY, BEFORE THE NEIGHBORS FIND OUT ABOUT IT. I FORBID _MY_ DAUGHTER'S NAME FROM BEING THE SOURCE OF GOSSIP!" he shouted, causing everyone in the room to flinch. It was obvious to Skuld that Lum's father had retreated into a deranged realm of anger; a realm where no opinion but his made sense.

"Daddy, this is _wrong_!" Lum said firmly, stamping her foot down. "Keiichi may have broken my heart, but I hold no bitterness against the rest of his friends! It's not their fault! Think of Ataru, Mendou, Shinobu, Megane and his friends, Nurse Sakura...even that stupid monk Cherry! Why punish them for the actions of one idiot?"

"Lum, I have ta do what I have ta do...because it's the 'Man's Way'! You hear me! It's the 'Man's Way'!!" her Father bellowed. Lum's Mother rolled her eyes at her husband and went back to drinking her tea.

"Sometimes, a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do. Especially if he is a father!" her Father justified, belaboring the point. Something about Lum's Father reminded both Urd and Skuld of their Father. The stubbornness, the impulsive judgments, the stocky stature...

However, their Father was wise enough to know when he had gone over the edge. And he certainly didn't give a hoot about some silly "Man's Way" code of behavior!

"Waitaminute! Urusei Yatsura! That's it! This is Urusei Yatsura, Skuld!" Urd shouted.

"Huh?!" everyone exclaimed, taken aback by Urd's outburst.

After the horrific sequence of memories had come crashing down on her at the bar, Skuld realized that Urd had all but forgotten why she was feeling so upset. But she was thrilled beyond gratitude that Urd had finally recognized her! Taking advantage of this, she quickly pulled her sister aside and briefed her on the situation. Urd hugged her long and hard while the others argued in the other part of the living room. Filled with relief, Urd admitted that she was deeply intrigued by the fact that she was actually in the Urusei Yatsura Universe.

But whether the Earthrealm of this universe was a fictional construct or not...Skuld knew that it still was wrong for the Oni Warlord to destroy it because one mortal had misbehaved towards his daughter. And that one mortal was Keiichi, to boot! Urd seriously doubted that the Keiichi of this reality could even have a bad bone in him.

Actually, Lum's father reminded her more of an Oni War-_lard_ rather than the ruler of some kind of space empire.

"If Keiichi's an idiot, then at least he's _slenderly_ idiotic! Unlike you!" Urd challenged Lum's dad. Skuld and everyone else face-faulted...including Lum's Father.

"You're a frisky missy, if I've ever met one. But still, you're an outsider! You have no say in this matter!" Lum's Father interjected angrily. Urd had been through the emotional wringer in the past few hours...his red-faced anger didn't phase her a bit. In fact, it was almost comic to her eyes.

"That's where _you're_ wrong! I'm from the Earth planet! And in my opinion, you should punish the guilty parties, rather than blow up the entire planet!" Urd argued. But now that she had waded into the argument, she needed to back up her point. She started thinking desperately about how to handle this situation.

"My sister's absolutely right! Besides, if you're a father, then you need to more fully consider your daughter's welfare! She's lived down amongst the Earthreal..er, the Earthers for years. Which means that she'd probably made all sorts of _friends_ there! How do you think she would feel if you killed all of her close friends? Don't you think that would really upset her? Kill them...and she'll resent you for the rest of her life! Is that what you want?" Skuld interrupted.

"My Lord!" Urd mentally shouted, astounded by the shrewdness of her younger sister's argument. Skuld had just gotten in the face of a man who ruled an interstellar empire.

"Good girl! Way to go, Skuld!" she praised her sibling...and then cut off any more words of praise once she realized that she had called Skuld the "g" word. The word that would normally rout Skuld's commonsense and replace it with temper tantrum.

Skuld grinned broadly at her, not even noticing the slipped disk of an insult. Besides, Lum's Father was experiencing some facial gymnastics as his expression contorted; his resolve was now shattered into framises of indecisiveness.

"Well...how do you feel, sweetie?" he finally asked his daughter.

"I agree with Skuld! And if you'd been listening, you'd already know how I felt, Daddy! Why do you think I've been arguing with you for the last couple of hours?" Lum answered in a voice clearly destined for troublemaking.

"Uh-Oh!" Benten said in a low whisper.

As father and daughter shifted from discussing destroying the Earth to a screaming match about more filial matters, all four guests quietly snuck out of the living room.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

The darkened room was comforting for Urd; it was like a silent blanket of shadowed softness...

Seven days. They had seven days to find out what was going on between Keiichi and Lum, so that they could save the Earth.

Familiar territory for the Norns.

Chilling visions of a scorched Earthrealm filled Urd's mind with sober resolve as she sat in the darkened room. They were traveling towards the Terran solar system in Oyuki's flying Ice Ball. But those weren't the only horrific visions that intruded upon her thoughts...

She had killed her boyfriend, sacrificing him to prevent sure disaster. And now she was in the ultimate Cartoon Network Universe, unable to do a thing to change his fate, or prevent the impending release of Isilblius from his place of exile. The whole miserable paradox of all this was the fact that she and the others had strived to create an Ultimate Magical Returning Mandala, which should have somehow unsealed Cevn's UF powers. Instead, it had transported she and Skuld here.

And since the magical technique had failed to restore Cevn's UF powers, it could only mean that there was no Soul to be restored to her boyfriend.

Which meant that he was truly gone from her.

Gone forever.

Urd's grief submerged beyond tears as she sat silently in the darkened observation deck, watching the stars streak by like highway signs. She was disheartened by all that Skuld had told her, and Lum's misfortunes with the 'Keiichi' of this universe only tended to depress her even more. But at least Lum had someone special in her life.

Uncertain about why she and Skuld had been brought here, she recalled vague memories of being imprisoned in a nightmarish future Earthrealm, vivid images in her mind that lurked like white shadows against the gloom that was obscuring her heart. It was so little to marvel at, the reason why she had snapped into an amnesiac state. Her mind was trying to protect her heart in the only means possible...

Still, there was the present situation. Oyuki had been a comfort; the Neptunian Princess seemed to dote on her with an earnest concern. Even the wild Lum and the wilder Benten treated her with some empathy when she emerged into the common area of the starship. Urd could sense that Skuld's emotional conflict; her younger sister obviously didn't know how to comfort her, so she was choosing to let Urd grieve in private.

The only thing Urd could smile about in this situation was the fact that Skuld had _actually gotten drunk_ in an effort to try and sew Urd's constellative patches of memory back together again into a quilt of recogniton.

Urd sighed to the stars. Once again, she was indebted to her youngest sister...but this didn't stop her from teasing her the next day. The following morning when Skuld came to, she had promptly 'researched' the bathroom. Once that was done, her little sister staggered back into the dining hall for breakfast, still dregs-drunk and massively hungover. Urd _had_ to play with her, since it was probably the only chance she would ever get to shoot off some mindgames with her youngest sister while said girl was under the influence. So Urd had offered Skuld a glass of plum wine along with the sweet rolls...and when Skuld's face turned seasick yellow at the sight of the glass, _everybody_ had burst into laughter.

Except Skuld, of course...

"Hey, Big Sister...you alright?" she heard a quiet voice inquire...

Skuld was surprised at the powerful expression of guilt on Urd's face when her eldest turned around to look at her...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Oyuki seemed to be a practiced hand at making surreptitious excursions to the Earthrealm. Skuld listened as the Neptunian Princess described one such trip, when she opened up a dimensional space gate...and it had wound up in the closet of one Keiichi Morisato. This was how Keiichi had been introduced into the crazy lives of Lum's friends. Oyuki had planned on this being a routine recruiting trip to obtain male volunteers to help excavate portions of her capital city from the encroaching snow dunes. But instead, Keiichi had enlisted his motor club buddies...and his lecherous party-freak friends had created quite a bit of drama in the few days they were in Chionopolis. A lot of drama...and very little work.

Skuld felt a wash of relief as the shuttle landed in the narrow mountain pass near Tokyo. She didn't even get caught up in her doubts about whether this was the 'real' Earthrealm or not. As soon as she saw the autumn cedars and the yellowing mountain peaks, she felt at home.

After the shuttle was concealed by an invisibility shield, they emerged into a fresh November day...and into a debate on where to go first. Despite the fact that Lum was deadset on going to Tomobiki, Skuld managed to convince the others that travel to Makuhari, rather than Tomobiki, would be most sensible.

She felt a hunch that she would find Keiichi there...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"THERE HE IS, MY UCHI-DARLING KEIICHI!! A..AND HE'S WITH T..THAT WOMAN!" Lum screamed as the motorbike pulled into the torii gate of the temple. Benten had to physically restrain her with a length of chain to keep her from flying through the air after Keiichi. It was a good thing that Benten's metallic chain didn't conduct electricity.

Urd could recognize in Lum the desperation of a scorned woman who was still deeply in love. She felt a stab in her heart as Lum's desperation resonated with her own feelings of love-loss. This whole mission had started out for Urd as a means to try and have her cake and eat it; to defeat Isilblius without losing Cevn. But nothing had turned out as planned. She felt sorrowful as she looked on. Lum's freshly complected face was streaming with tears as they watched Keiichi climb off his motorbike and help Belldandy out of her sidecar.

Then it struck her that she had just seen _Belldandy and Keiichi_!!

"It's them!" Skuld shouted, feeling a thrill as she saw the two familiar faces. Elder Sister and Keiichi must have been transported here too! She looked at Urd, whose bronzed face exhibited bigtime excitement.

But there was a problem...

Lum thought that Keiichi belonged to her. It took the efforts of all four women to bring Lum back to her senses. Her Father's anger paled next to the scorn she felt for her husband, Keiichi.

Skuld and Urd both felt a sense of disillusionment as they tried to mentally grasp the fact that Lum and Keiichi had been together for years in this reality. But both Goddesses' curiosity was splitting at the seams to find out if the people they saw pull into the temple were truly 'their' Belldandy and Keiichi , rather than 'Lum's' Belldandy and Keiichi. It was possible that this world's Belldandy and Keiichi had been replaced by their sister and her fiancé! After a brief discussion, she and Urd agreed that they had to keep Lum and her friends away from Belldandy and Keiichi for the time being. If the couple were their sister and Keiichi, they were probably just as surprised and disoriented as the two of them. Both sisters agreed that once they had a chance to talk to their sister, they would be able to sort this whole mess out.

"Wait! I think it's best that we try and handle this! The woman that Keiichi is with...looks just like our sister!" Skuld proposed. Benten and Oyuki looked at each other with dumbfounded glances, while Lum turned beet-red in the face.

"It's a conspiracy...mmph!!" Lum started to shout, until Benten stifled her with a hand over her mouth.

"Better watch out for those fangs!" Oyuki warned. Lum was known to bite people when she was crazy-mad...and her behavior from the moment she saw Keiichi pull into the driveway on his motorbike was certainly insane, even for Lum. She was starting to spill arcs of electricity, the kind of lighting-bolt aura she would develop right before she zackked somebody. Urd waved her hand, and once again Lum's electricity was halted; as if an on-off switch had been flicked to "off".

"Let's go, Skuld," Urd said.

The two Goddesses walked towards the house...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

_"Belldandy!!"_ Urd hailed.

_"Elder Sister!!"_ Skuld hailed.

Belldandy turned at their voices and flashed them a heartwarming smile. But Keiichi looked at them warily...

"Belldandy, who are these two?" he asked.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

From the moment Keiichi had said "Belldandy-san" instead of "Bell-chan", Skuld was positive that there was something wrong. The look of surprise on his face confirmed it. When she and Urd walked up to the young couple, Keiichi had an "I've never seen either of you!" expression clearly written all over his face. In contrast, Belldandy was all smiles and hearts as she hugged each sister in turn.

In contrast, Belldandy was all smiles and hearts as she hugged each sister in turn.

A turn that eventually metamorphized into a circular spin...

Could this be their sister...with _another _Keiichi?

"Welcome to the Earthrealm! This is my assignee, Keiichi Morisato! Keiichi, these are my sisters Urd and Skuld!" Belldandy said, introducing Urd and Skuld in a chippling voice of cheer.

If Skuld had Mjolnir with her, she would have whacked herself on the head with her mallet, just to make sure she wasn't dreaming. Much as she wanted to believe to the contrary, this _wasn't_ her middle sister, by any means! Belldandy had called Keiichi her "assignee", a term Skuld had never heard her sister use in regards to Keiichi. Skuld sensed that _Belldandy had just met Keiichi_; the air of familiarity between the two was definitely absent. They seemed more like vacationers than boyfriend-girlfriend!

Once Belldandy invited them in for tea, Urd suggested to her in a whisper that Belldandy and Keiichi may have lost their memories in much the same fashion that she had. She went on to detail her own memory lapses, to the point where Skuld was aware that Urd _still_ had some significant gaps in her memories. For one thing, Urd didn't mention Cevn once. It seemed that the amnesia apparently ran in cycles; sometimes Urd's memory was clear, while other times, her memory was foggy.

Skuld was greatly concerned about the possibility that Belldandy and Keiichi were suffering from a similar ailment. Nevertheless, as they drank their tea and juice, Skuld was amused by the sight of her Elder Sister and Keiichi being friends instead of an engaged couple. They sat on opposite ends of the dining table, they didn't kiss, they didn't hold hands, they weren't whispering in the mysterious 'love-love talk' language of theirs...

For a moment, she contemplated if it was possible to return to her own time and place with these two. If Keiichi and Belldandy behaved this way towards each other consistently, then it would be totally cool! Skuld wouldn't have to put up with the two being constantly lovey-dovey towards each other every time she walked in the living room. Things would be just like they were before Belldandy met Keiichi! She'd have Belldandy to herself, and Keiichi would just be an acquaintance, not a wedge between she and her sister.

"Nah! That just wouldn't be right!" Skuld thought. She gave herself a mental pat on the back for her maturity...just a few years ago, she would have given anything to see her sister and Keiichi emotionally distanced like this.

No matter what...Elder Sister and Keiichi _belong_ together, Skuld told herself. She had to smile as she observed the two...

They were making eyes to each other.

Urd whispered to her, "Lookat him! He's totally putting on airs and acting important to try and impress Belldandy. Isn't it cute?"

"You mean _this_ Belldandy, who may or may not be _our_ sister, the Norn of the Present," Skuld whispered back. Urd frowned at her.

"So what brings you two to the Earthrealm?" Belldandy asked sweetly.

"Well, actually, it was the two of you..." Urd replied.

"Really? How sweet of you to come visit me during my assignment!"

"What's going on here? What are you doing with _him_?!" Skuld demanded impatiently. She felt Urd gripping her wrist and squeezing tightly, trying to communicate to her to "slow down".

Keiichi darted her a raw stinkeye.

"Well, what happened was that I was summoned here to grant Keiichi's wish! I _am_ a Goddess Relief Office agent, am I not?" Belldandy answered, slightly irritated by Skuld's blunt question.

"So these are your sisters, huh? I don't like the younger one...she acts like a little bitch!" Keiichi asked. Skuld felt her cheeks flush with hot blood.

"You really don't know who we are?" Urd asked, trying to stay calm.

"Nope! Never seen the two of you in my life! And believe me, after being with Lum for all these years, I've seen _lots_ of freakshow aliens! But rarely have I seen two aliens as pretty as you two..." Keiichi replied.

Skuld blushed with embarrassment under the compliment. To her dismay, she heard snickering nearby; Urd couldn't calm herself enough to not take advantage of her embarrassed reaction. Typical Big Sister stuff...

"Well, Belldandy's here because I made a wish, of course," Keiichi started to explain.

"_What_ wish?" Urd and Skuld asked in chorus.

"Well, I was really getting tired of being tied down to Lum! So I wished that a Goddess like Belldandy would take me away from her, so I wouldn't have to be Lum's husband anymore..."

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --


	78. Pt 78: Miyuki and Natsumi: Canone First...

**Part 78: Miyuki and Natsumi: Canone--1st Movement**

"Hey! Wake up! You're crashin' on my futon, babe!" a stranger's voice shouted near Natsumi's face. She felt a soft slapping pattering her cheek urgently...

"RRRRRRRrrrrrrrrr don't wake meeee uuuuupPP!" she roared as she flew out of the futon and grabbed the man who was trying to wake her under the armpits, lifting him clean off the floor, and then running across the room and pinning him against the wall.

"Woof!" the man gasped as the breath was knocked out of him.

"Hey!! Whaddya doing? C'mon, cool..hnh..it, chick! Peace and love, ya'know!" he dissented vigorously in a gasping voice, flashing a V-sign and a lopsided grin.

"Why'd you wake me up?" Natsumi growled. "And who the hell are you?!"

"I just wanna crash in my own futon after a long night of studying at the library!" the scrawny man shouted, raspy with panic. Natsumi relented, releasing her grip on him and letting him down onto the floor. He looked harmless enough. In fact, Natsumi thought he looked like a beatnik. His hair was long and straggly, bound under a headband bandana. He was dressed in a tie-dyed Toudai t-shirt, and his bellbottom pants were striped with blue, red and yellows. She didn't think there were people like this any more in Tokyo...in fact, he reminded her of Shaggy from the Scooby-Do cartoons she watched as a young girl.

She felt a wave of nausea.

"Where's the bathroom?" she asked him hurriedly as her stomach somersaulted. The scrawny beatnik pointed down the hall, and she reached the squat-toilet not a moment too soon. As she leaned over and dry-heaved, she saw long hair spilling down on each side of her eyesight, like an unfurling brown flag in a windless calm. Natsumi hunched down, eventually upchucking her bento lunch. When it was over, she cursed herself for having the flu. Exhausted and curious about the hair, she sat down on the rim of the nearby furoba, catching her breath. She felt weakened and disoriented; stomach-vacant and head-pounding.

"Since when did I have the _flu_?" she asked herself wonderingly...and then she checked her train of inquiry. Natsumi knew that she hadn't been sick in over two years, since she started drinking spirulina green drinks mixed with vinegar and mint when she got home from work. Miyuki had turned her onto this healthy alternative after she suffered a particularly nasty bout of the flu during Christmas week 2004. As a dietary supplement, it had worked especially well. It was a lifesaver, too, considering the fact that Natsumi was a party girl: a 'wild' young woman who loved the freedoms of the nightlife; a girl who kept a watchpace that even exhausted most of her male Bokuto Precinct colleagues.

As her breasts heaved with deep inhalations, she felt a slight pressure bumping against them. It felt suspicious, as if she wasn't wearing a bra...

Looking down, she noticed a string of wooden beads running down from her neck, resting against her bosom.

"What the hell?" she cursed as she abruptly stood up, wanting to scamper out of the bathroom. She looked around the small narrow bathroom furtively...

The mirror.

_"__MIIIIYUUUUKIIII!!__"_ she screamed.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Miyuki was dazed and confused as she lay sprawled on her back, resting on what felt like a haphazard pile of blankets. As her eyes found focus, the ceiling above seemed to be spinning like it did the night she got really drunk during her first high school class reunion party.

"Never again!" she had hindsworn to herself after that messy incident. Which was indeed a difficult proposition on the nights when she went out for a "girl's night out" with her partner and several other women from the precinct. Natsumi was always devilishly encouraging her to foray into the nether-lands of stumble-footed inebriation...

To the best of her recall, it seemed like a moment earlier she had been standing on her feet. Memories returning, Miyuki remembered escorting a man riding a motorbike. He was riding towards the Bayside slums where the wino wharf rats lived. She and her partner followed him there, and then he disappeared down a narrow walkpath between two warehouses. Leaving their patrol car, she and Natsumi followed on foot. Then they happened upon some kind of gathering; some kind of weird ritual that reminded her of a seance or cultish witches coven. She recognized several of the women, and as they attempted to find out what was going on, there was an intense volcano of light from above...

...and now she was indoors in some kind of apartment that looked like a cross between low-rent housing and a college dorm. The occupants were obviously 60s buffs; psychedelic posters and tapestries from India were pasted up on every wall, creating a colorful montage that belonged in a museum's Dadaist wing or instead of a run-down crashpad type apartment. Incense, patchouli and pot smoke seasoned the air with heady odors...

Miyuki tried to get a grip on her loss of vertigo, when her wooziness was interrupted by a series of screams.

Her partner.

Definitely Natsumi...and her shouts sounded like she was either in deep shit or scared out of her skin! Instinctively, Miyuki reached to her side for her holstered firearm. Where there should have been a gun, her fingers grasped tassels of leather fringe...

A woman was backing out of the hallway, her stumbling pace revealing to Miyuki's practiced eye that she was in a state of shock.

_"__MIYUKI!__"_

"Right here, Natsumi!" she responded with a practiced loud yell, the kind of sound-off she used right before an arrest started getting ugly.

The woman turned around towards her...

_"Miyuki!!" "Natsumi!!"_

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

As the shock wore off, Natsumi almost wanted to laugh. She _would_ have broken out in hearty deep-souled giggles, save for the fact that she was in the same predicament as well.

A minute earlier, she had looked into the mirror and saw her face...and in a flash of total disorientation, she knew she was losing her mind. It took two seconds to verify her facial features in the reflection; the next five seconds were consumed on the pyres of a mounting shock of irrecognition. Gazing at her reflection, Natsumi witnessed the specula of some cartoonish version of herself. A red-bead Native American headband was wrapped around her forehead; underneath it, long straight medium-brown hair cascaded down either side of her face all the way to her waist. On her left cheek was painted a green-and-pink flower, while on the other cheek was a yellow peace sign framed in red lipstick.

And then she had loosed a terrified scream.

As she backed away from the mirror, Natsumi noticed that she was dressed in some sort of knit green poncho tied with leather drawstrings crisscrossing down the front. Under it, she was wearing a pair of purple, blue and yellow striped bellbottoms. And no bra. The poncho was gathered at the waist with a thick polyester belt with a "War No More" button attached to it. When she looked down at her feet, she saw a pair of worn leather sandals peeking out from under the frayed cuffs of her bellbottoms. And no toe-nail polish. In other words, she looked ridiculous enough to potentially earn first prize in the annual Bokuto Precinct's Undercover Halloween costume contest. Either that, or she had died and went to Fashion Hell...

Or maybe someone had slipped her a bad dose of a hallucinogen.

She banged out of the bathroom, so frightened that she wanted to leap out of her skin. Once in the narrow hallway, Natsumi clawed at the long tresses of hair, thinking it was a wig and wanting to dislodge the irritating lengths of hair. She had always worn short hair, ever since she made her mother cut her hair in third-grade after a week-long temper fit. But when she pulled at the hair, Natsumi felt a sharp pain needling her temples.

Her hair...was _her hair_!

Which meant that this was _real_! Not some kind of costume party run amok. Not some kind of 'trip' resulting from a drug that somebody might have slipped her! Not a nightmare or a nap dream at the precinct office!

This...was...real!!

Instinctively, she started screaming her partner's name with frantic abandon, seeking the assurance that her best friend was in this world with her...hoping that Miyuki was nearby and could explain this bizarre nightmare to her...

And then she heard Miyuki's shouted response. At least she wasn't alone! Feeling a few strands of tension unbinding at the familiar voice, Natsumi spun around, trying to find her parter...and saw a stranger who wasn't a stranger. The woman on the blankets looked just like her partner Miyuki...a glamified hippie-girl version of her partner. As she looked into the woman's eyes, she realized that it _was_ Miyuki!

Which meant that this 'Miyuki' might be real...

But she couldn't be certain.

The woman on the couch was dressed in an equally ridiculous style of apparel as she. 'Miyuki' was wearing faded denim bellbottoms with both knees covered by ragged bandanas, with a short tie-dyed top that exposed a good length of her navel, and a heavy-duty tanned leather jacket tasseled with strips of leather fringe. The shoes were outrageous; some weird kind of silver-red clogheels that were at least 15cm high! Miyuki's outfit made her look like a Harajuku high school ko-gal trying to look acid-house retro! But her partner's hair completed the fashion crime...it was shorn short and tight; the neck-length bangs curled upwards in the back, in a bobbed style that went out 40 years ago.

Miyuki looked like Natsumi's grandmom in her high-school photobook...

"Miyuki? I mean...if you _are_ Miyuki..." she stuttered as her mind spray-painted itself with confusion. Miyuki looked back at her in rapt puzzlement.

"Natsumi? Do you remember those three Strike Girls from that grade school who tried to imitate Strikeman? They thought it would be a civic service to bring his kinda brand of justice to the boys in their class who were skirt-flippers?" Miyuki asked, interrogating her. Natsumi realized that Miyuki was filled with identity-doubt also.

"Yeah, they were so cute, weren't they! Miyuki, do you remember the time you modified that Subaru R2 that I bought from the crook posing as a car dealer?" she asked back.

"How could I forget! All that sweat and labor I put into it...and you freakin' ruined it by your reckless driving, Natsumi!" Miyuki protested.

"I did _not_! Well, maybe a little bit," she admitted, deciding to switch to the offensive...

"But what about that time you hit Kenny in the knee when he was in the hospital in traction, just because he took his motorbike over 3000 rpm right after you fixed it for the umpteenth time? That was _cold_, Miyuki!" she said in an accusatory voice. She could still remember Kenny's anguished screams...

"That's nothing! And you ain't seen cold yet, Natsumi! Ooohh, have I got one for you!" Miyuki responded smartly. "What about the time you went out drinking with Aoi and Yoriko, and then _someone_ woke up the next morning in Ken's apartment. In bed with him..._totally naked_! Without a stitch of clothing on her body! He told me the whole thing, about how you tried to seduce him!" Miyuki countered, throwing her ace-in-the-pocket onto the table.

Natsumi clenched her fists, feeling a white-hot resentment anger coiling inside of her heart.

"That...IDIOT JERK! He promised never to tell anyone else about how that happened! I..I thought he was Aoi-san! And I _never_ tried to seduce him. He's your fiancé, for crisesakes!" Natsumi stammered, turning beet-red. Then she realized that this woman _had_ to be her partner! No one else could ever hold such a sharp tongue in an argument with her as Miyuki could...

"I know you didn't try to seduce Kenny. I made that part up," Miyuki answered knowingly, trying to reassure an upset Natsumi.

"You have to be my partner. I'd never let anyone else in the world get away with what you just did!" Natsumi noted, breaking into a grin.

Relief filled both policewomen's faces.

"Miyuki...where the hell are we?"

"And how the hell did we get here, Natsumi?"

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

While Hippie Boy snored away in the other side of the room, they hugged each other for what seemed like an hour, just to calm their rip-tiding agitation. Stepping out of their disorientation a bit, Miyuki and Natsumi started searching for clues about their whereabouts by checking out the apartment. The TV looked like it belonged in an industrial museum, with its small picture tube and cheap plastic knobs. The phone was a bulky plastic thing with a metal rotary dial. The kitchen didn't have a microwave. There were no cell phones, no PCs, no cable box, no portable HDCD or MP3 players, no game consoles...

The 'beatnik' guy was too sleepy to make any sense when they tried to wake him.

Miyuki started getting a bad feeling when she found the 8-track cartridges piled in a cardboard box.

"Woo hoo! The Beatles! The soundtrack to the Tetsuwan Atom TV series! Buffalo Springfield! Gojira vs. Mosura!" Natsumi yelled as she went through the box. "These are probably worth a fortune to collectors!"

"These guys must be some kind of 60s freaks. They've even outfitted their apartment to look like some kind of hippie hangout! Can you imagine it...they're actually choosing to live without any of the creature comforts of the 21st century? They must be insane!" Miyuki observed.

But the biggest shock was when they went outside.

The cramped alleyway next to the apartment building was bustling with mid-morning pedestrians going about their daily routines. But to a one, the masses were dressed straight out of a documentary on the '64 Tokyo Olympics! Several oddities caught Miyuki's eye. She noticed that _a lot_ of women were wearing kimono and traditional garb. The teenage boys sported plaid slacks and white shirts. And the teenage girls were all wearing denim or polyester bellbottoms, their hair ponytailed in bright ribbons.

And the cars were all wrong!

"Natsumi, this is _seriously_ weird!" Miyuki observed. "Maybe we stumbled onto a movie set or something. What if a film studio was filming some kind of soap opera set in the 60s in one of those slumtown warehouses?"

Natsumi was too amazed to comment on that. If they had inadvertently stumbled upon the middle of a production shoot, the movie directors had certainly gone to great lengths to ensure a realistic turn-of-the-1960s scene-plast.

As they rounded a corner onto the main avenue, Miyuki looked in the window of a news shop and almost choked on her breath. She urgently tugged Natsumi's sleeve as she pointed to several of the magazines.

One of them had a cover story on Woodstock, which had just happened last month in America! Tokyo University had recently started up its Fall term with a riot between students and the police for the second year in a row.

And the dates on every one of the periodicals...

_September 1969!_

They were in Shibuya Ward, Tokyo, 1969.

"I don't freakin' believe this! This has got to be a joke!" Natsumi shouted, the color leaving her face as the full weight of their predicament slammed down on her not-so-weak shoulders.

_--They were in the past!--_

Rubbing her eyes in disbelief, Miyuki started looking everywhere for some sign...some indication that this _wasn't true_. But as she searched the street, Miyuki observed that _all_ of the cars looked like antiques, which only served to confirm that they were living in the past. Despite her consternation, the ancient makes of the cars passing by on the avenue possessed an intrigue of their own...which naturally got the auto buff in her really riled up. Momentarily forgetting their predicament, Miyuki felt a chilling sense of amazement at the parade of cars she saw on the Meiji Dori avenue; little rounded things with small round headlights and delicate hood ornaments. Cars that were built in the _50s_ were puttering around, as well! Despite her extreme sense of disorientation, Miyuki still had enough spirit to seriously desire a look under the hood of a 68 Mustang parked nearby as they strolled down the sidewalk.

There were no skyscrapers in the horizon to speak of, as they looked northwards in the direction of Shinjuku. Much of the familiar skyline was gone. The main arterial avenue was lined with mom-n-pop shops that were selling fuzzystrips, Star Trek and Godzilla plastic toys, Licca-chan dolls, and cutesy Kling-Ons. Posters of the Apollo 11 moonwalk were prominently displayed for sale in every shop that sold electronics. One of the electronics shopsmen hawked them to try a new invention called a "handheld tape cassette recorder". They passed by a music shop, marveling at the display windows plastered with freshly-minted posters of various eleki rock groups. The Jets, the Jaguars, the Spiders and the Beatles stared out at them with faddish grins. On another window was a display featuring a number of J-pop-idol girls, like ReikoReiko, Akiko Nakamura, Kanai Katsuko and Yumi Kaoru. Another poster touted the upcoming Lupin III TV series and collected manga...

The manga poster gave Miyuki an idea.

"Let's go in here!" Miyuki decided as they stood in front of a bookshop. She had to do _something_ to get grounded, otherwise she was fearful that she would get swept away into the yawn of disorientation. During her years on the police force, Miyuki had learned that the best weapon against disorientation was information. When she couldn't 'get in the mind' of a particularly evasive traffic criminal, she would turn to her computer and scour its databanks, gathering incriminating information about the perpetrator's modus. Natsumi was of a like mind, nodding her head and then walking into the bookstore right behind her.

Once inside, they spent the next couple of hours browsing through a number of books, trying to forage some information. Every few minutes, one of the policewomen would gasp, call the other over and show her a paragraph out of a book.

The two Bokuto policewomen steadily gathered factoids that described a reality that was significantly different that the history that they were familiar with. They were stunned when they discovered that, in this reality, World War II had ended in 1949 with a stalemate between the Americans and Japan! As unsettling as this 'history' was, the alternative-world stuff didn't stop there. Miyuki read in an almanac that Japan had developed nuclear weapons at the same time the Americans did; consequently the Pacific War had wound up as an armistice, with Japanese forces still occupying Korea, Manchuria and the Philippines. Japanese troops were fighting US forces in Vietnam in a protracted war that started in 1961. China had a Nationalist government ruled by Chiang Kai-Shek. The "Triangle of Cold War", as it was termed in the press, pitted Japan, the US, and Soviet Russia against each other. Many of the books were filled with jingoist praises of the Emperor and the military...attitudes that were pretty much wiped out with most of Japan in the aftermath of the Pacific War. The Pacific War she was familiar with...

It was very disconcerting, so much so that Miyuki literally felt numb-haunted in her body after she finished reading the Meiji Shimbun Almanac. Dazed like a prizefighter after being knocked out, she motioned Natsumi to follow her out of the store. Finding an empty public bench, Miyuki collapsed, fighting back tears with an iron will, not wanting to give in to her gnawing sense of panic.

Home wasn't just 38 years away...it was a _whole world_ away!

Silently, the two friends sat, their stoic expressions disguising their whirlpooling emotions.

Still, once they got over their initial shock, it was utterly amazing and disconcerting at the same time to Miyuki and Natsumi...

Finally, Natsumi started giggling and pointed at one of teenybop glamour mags displayed in the storefront window of the bookstore.

"She looks just like you, Miyuki! Perhaps you're one of her fans?"

Miyuki scowled at the intimation, but soon had to laugh good-heartedly at the resemblance between the girl named "Suki" in the poster and she. "Suki" had the exact hairstyle...

It was another world!

As they sat on the bench, the heavy haze in the air reminded the two that this was Tokyo in the 60s, complete with the ill-famed acrid smoggy air pollution. The "Ecology Awareness Movement" that had gripped the country in the early 1970s hadn't occurred yet; thus, there was little government restrictions on pollution in place. They both coughed, feeling a burning in their lungs. Miyuki spied a kiosk selling industrial masks and went over to buy a pair for she and Natsumi. Somehow, her square standard-issue policewoman's purse had survived the trip back in time with her. She opened up her wallet, pulling out several 1000 yen bills and handed them to the vendor.

He looked at the money and then scowled at her. He casually pulled a Lucky 7 out and lit it, rudely blowing the smoke in Miyuki's face.

"Well?" she asked, resisting an urge to punch the guy in the jaw for his disrespectful manners as Natsumi joined her.

"Well _what_? What is this...some kinda joke? This ain't no money!" he said, grabbing the three bills and slapping them against the metal counter. "Lookit here! I'm a hundred years too young to fall for this kinda gag! It says _2005_ on this bill! Where'd you get this, in some goofy pachinko parlor? You hippies are all the same, tryin' to cheat all us rank-n-file people who work our asses off for an honest livin'! Come back when ya gots some real money, hippie-baka!" he explained with a colloquial gruffness.

Natsumi thought quickly and started filing through her purse. She always kept her purse filled with coins, just in case she needed to whack someone on the head with it. Her coin-laden purse had doubled as a good weapon in a pinch on any number of occasions. While she searched, she remembered the time during her second year on the Tokyo PD when she brained that big lug Strikeman with her purse when he played ass-grabby with her, back when they caught him impersonating Santa Claus.

By a sheer stroke of luck, she found a couple ancient 100 yen coins amongst her change. She quickly proffered the coins to the kiosk vendor, and the two partners in crime prevention quickly walked away with their masks before the man could shout more insults at them.

"This is unbelievable!" Miyuki exclaimed as they turned off Meiji Dori and walked towards Yoyogi Park. The incident with the vendor had overshadowed the need to put on the masks...the masks being a distasteful reminder of how altered this reality was.

They could hear crowdsounds droning along to some heavy rock music coming from the park...

As they approached Yoyogi Park, the first thing they noticed was a cordon of uniformed policemen lined the perimeter of the park, guarding the concert. On one side, men wearing white hardhats and hamatsuki headbands were seated atop delivery trucks, shouting insults at the kids through megaphones. Most of the kids on the other side were oblivious to their hostility, except for a few youths who were returning some choicely epitheted taunts. Natsumi concluded that this must be one of those free weekend festivals that used to be held back in the student rally-n-riot days. Sure enough, the police were separating the students from the conservatives, who were screaming bloody murder across the cordon line. Seeing fellow policemen was a great comfort to Natsumi, so much so that she made the mistake of forgetting her attire and appearance as she approached an officer.

"You there! Don't approach any closer! You need to remain on the other side of the line where you belong, with the other pacifist hippie freaks!" the officer barked, brandishing his billyclub threateningly and gesturing towards the interior of the park. Natsumi ignored him and walked towards another policeman, until Miyuki grabbed her arm and pulled her to a stop.

"Natsumi..._think_! You look like _them_!" her partner said emphatically as she pointed towards the youthful concertgoers. Natsumi tensed as she noticed, noting that many of the 'flower children' were openly smoking pot on the lawn and dancing in circles.

Flowers and balloons were in abundance...

"Whoa! I completely forgot! Whew...thanks for the save, Miyuki!"

"Uh...Natsumi, I wouldn't be so sure about that...I don't think it was quite a save. Look what's walking this way!" Miyuki said, wariness pitching her voice. A sharply-dressed policeman was advancing towards them with a hasty resolve.

"Hey! Wait up, you two!" their pursuer shouted as the two women started walking away from him at a brisk clip. He broke into a sprint and caught up with them.

"Tsujimoto, Kobayakawa! Good to see you two ladies keeping to your cover so well! Coming here to the Fall Human Be-in Arts Festival is the perfect way to blend in!" the young policeman said.

The man's voice paralyzed both women in their tracks.

"Superintendent Arizuka!" twin gasping voices chimed, suddenly alert and angsty. It wasn't nightmarish enough that they were stranding in some Twilight Zone version of Japan in the 1960s...now, another bugbear had been heaped onto their mounting pile of trials.

"Ehh? _Superintendent_?! Me?! No..noo eh heh! I'm not anywhere near being a Superintendent! I'm just a rookie! I just got out of the Police Academy this spring!" the young man said amiably.

"Ehhh?!" both girls gasped in surprise, and then turning around to face him. Miyuki's face faulted as her eyes lighted on a young version of Superintendent Arizuka. He must have been no more than 21 or 22 years old. With a start, she realized that he was younger than they were!

"Hey! The Captain wants to see you. He's over there in his patrol car. Here, I'll walk you over there. Act like you're nervous, worried that you'll be led off to be interrogated" he offered.

Miyuki looked at Natsumi with her best "what the hell?" expression as they accompanied the young officer, a younger version of the man they knew as one of the pillars of the Tokyo Police Dept...and one of the terrors of the police force as well. Officer Arizuka looked almost innocent; with the peachy facial freshness of a recruit just out of the academy.

"Natsumi...what _happened_ to him?" Miyuki whispered to Natsumi. "He's just a gangly kid! I can't imagine how a nice young guy like this...could turn out to be that sour-dour Superintendent! He seems like a pretty laid-back sorta guy, not at all like Yoriko's dread 'Terror of the Tokyo PD'! How could _this_ rookie cop become the author of that Arizuka file that Yoriko is always terrified of?"

"Captain, they're all yours!" Rookie Arizuka said, bowing to his superior. Miyuki eyed the short Captain as he got out of his squad car. He was a stout man, who looked like he was only 135-140cm tall. The Captain turned to face them...

"Kitsune!" Natsumi said in a gaspy voice.

"Oshou! Old Man!" Miyuki gasped in sync with her partner.

It was the Old Man...but it wasn't the old man. His thin moustache lacked the straggly thickness, his head wasn't bald, he didn't have a goatee beard and he was much less portly...but there was no mistaking the crafty eyes. They had nicknamed him "The Fox" because of his expert skills and his eccentric nature. He had the odd habit of 'hazing' Bokuto newcomers...especially policewomen...with snipe hunts, firecrackers and droll driving maneuvers. They themselves had borne the brunt of one of his imaginative 'initiations' during their first week on the job. Miyuki would never forget how he had gamed her and Natsumi when they first started working at Bokuto...

Fireworks at the summer festival never could hold the same charm for the two girls after _that_.

"What that fuck are you saying, calling me 'Old Man'!" he snapped, enraged. Miyuki blanched in the face of his significant heft of anger. This cantankerous man wasn't a bit like the gentle-yet-crafty Oshou that she knew. Oshou would never curse like this...she almost was paralyzed with shock.

"Hey you two does! Don't just stand there like idiots! Snap to it!" he shouted. Miyuki and Natsumi both broke from their rigidity. He motioned them to come closer to his squad car.

"We've intercepted some intelligence about a possible yakuza assassination attempt on the mayor of Tokyo! I want you two girls to remain undercover and investigate the asses off of those fuckers! I would suggest that you start checking out some of the local hippie dope fiends for any leads on the yakuza. Do what you have to do to get their tongues to wag...but make sure you're taking notes when they spill the goods. This is important fuckin' stuff, an' I'm counting on both of you," the 'Captain' said in a low near-whisper as he surreptitiously handed the two an envelope.

"Now get lost before I arrest you two! I don' like hippie sluts like you hanging around me! It makes me feel spooked! An' I don't want ta catch crabs from you, either! You're all pests and public nuisances! Get away from my car!" he shouted in an irritated vox publica, looking at some of the crowd members nearby for effect.

Natsumi was still stunned to have seen both the Superintendent and the Oshou within a five minute space. The music drifted her back to full alertness. Miyuki was elbowing her.

"C'mon, we better get going. Like he said, we don't want to hang around the police too long..." Miyuki said, aiming a sharp elbow nudge in her ribs.

"But we _are_ the police! This is where we belonnmmph!"

Miyuki had to put a hand over her partner's mouth, because the interaction between the Captain and two hippie girls was beginning to attract a lot of angry attention from the students and the conservatives. Thinking quickly, she ran to a nearby flowerbed and yanked a gripful of flowers, then returned to the Captain's police cruiser and started laying flowers out on the hood and sticking them in the grille. When she finished, she twirled around like a ballerina, offering her best imitation of what she thought a stoned flower girl would act like at a rally. The Captain reached out of his window and flipped her off for the public, but Miyuki caught glimpse of his approving wink right after he gave her the finger.

As Natsumi watched her partner from inside the cordoned area, a couple hippie guys broke ranks and walked up to her.

"Hey...that's really groovy, your friend puttin' the daisies on that pig's car! Want some jetfuel, sister?" a hippie said as he proffered Natsumi a large rolled cigarette. Natsumi looked at him in shock as she recognized that it was marijuana spiked with some hashish and god-knows-what-else. She shook her head "no", just as Miyuki finished 'decorating' the Captain's car. She almost wanted to giggle at the sight of her erstwhile partner acting so ridiculous, and suspected that her sudden joviality might be due to passive inhalation. She pranced over to Miyuki, hooked her arm with hers, and then the two skipped off towards the avenue accompanied by a loose applause from the students.

Once they were out of the park, Natsumi turned to Miyuki and burst out laughing.

"What would _our _Captain say if he knew that you were stealing public property? How shameless of you! I can't believe you stole those flowers right out of..."

"So? What about you, Miss Rice-Cooker Head..."

"Rice-Cooker Head?"

"Geesh...I have to spell everything out for you, Natsumi! Rice cooker as in pot. As in stoned. As in pothead. Your eyes are redder than a festival paper lantern in Kyushu! And you should see the silly grin on your face..."

"I didn't mean to get loopy, it was all those weed-smoking kids back there!"

"Excuses, excuses..." Miyuki replied, sticking out her tongue as she playfully wagged her finger at her partner. "Be that as it may, we need to figure out what's really going on here. The Captain just gave me 50K yen in an envelope."

"50 thou? That ain't worth much! That's what I would expect a guy to spend on me on a first date!" Natsumi replied, earning a look of exasperation from Miyuki.

"Natsumi, this is _1969_! This envelope contains a small fortune, by the money standards of those years," she noted.

"Uh, Miyuki! I gotta clue about why that young Arizuka turned out to be the Terror! Didya notice his uniform?" Natsumi volunteered.

"What are you talking about, stoned-girl?" Miyuki asked, making a face at her partner.

"His uniform was spotless. Impeccable, if I might say so."

A moment later, both women were bent over, hand-slapping their knees with laughter.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

The first thing the two policewomen did was rent an apartment in Shinjuku. The rent was about one-eighth of what they were paying back in 2007 Tokyo, which made both women envious. For their money, the apartment was nice enough: a post-WW II prefab with some sumptuary amenities like a TV and a wall radio. While Miyuki prepared some noodles for dinner, Natsumi watched the news on the black-and-white TV.

It didn't take an idiot to see that the war in Vietnam portrayed in the news broadcast was a gigantic waste of human lives. As the war coverage droned on, she remembered something she had read in one of the books she browsed. It was memorable, because she had felt nauseous when she first read it. In the past nine years, over 220,000 Japanese troops had been killed there. The announcers treated the war part of the news with gloating jingoist propaganda. Natsumi wondered about the true motive for such a wasteful war...

Miyuki said something about how it was her turn to cook breakfast in the morning as the news turned to sports and sumo...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

After breakfast, Miyuki and Natsumi had a thoughtful discussion about their present circumstances. They both readily concluded that they had been conveyed into the past by some kind of supernatural means. They both reluctantly admitted that it was quite possible that they may not be able to return back to the present. They both promised to be as supportive to each other as they could be, despite being raw-nerved after yesterday's series of shocks.

Then there was the matter of their present 'assignment'. Apparently, they were undercover cops in the city's Detective Division, whose ongoing task was to prevent high-profile crimes. They decided that it would be best if they treated this 'assignment' as if it was a job handed down from their own precinct. This would allow them to remain inconspicuous, while affording them opportunities to find out more about why they were here, and how they might be able to return to their own time and place. Miyuki regretted the lack of any computers in this timeframe; back in 20XX, it would take her all of five minutes to learn everything she needed to know to make an arrest. But now, she would have to do it the old-fashioned way...infiltrate, interview suspects and deduce criminal modus operandi.

She utterly disliked the Yakuza.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"How in the name of God did they _ever solve any crimes this way_?" Natsumi wailed. She and Miyuki had agreed to canvass one of the seedier neighborhoods in Shinjuku, a neighborhood known to be a haunt for hookers, dope dealers, gangsters and gamblers...in the 21st century. But in this time period, they rarely encountered the criminal types they were looking for.

What she was waiting for was to witness a drug deal, which would 'mark' one of students as having dealings with the mob. So she and Miyuki started interviewing a number of students, relying on their gut instincts to determine which ones looked 'criminal'. During the weekend they had arrived, Natsumi observed that almost all the university students were uniformed in hippie regalia. This made their job even more difficult; it was the ethos in this era for young people to dress like hoodlums. The first several 'suspects' that she conversed with were anything but hippies; they were honors students at various elite Tokyo universities. Despite totally looking the part, the students didn't even drink alcohol, let alone using any illegal drugs. Natsumi's frustration grew by strides as she talked to almost 40 people in the past few hours, without finding a single lead. It was getting to be almost embarrassing...

But Miyuki reminded her that her conversations _were_ informative, at least from the perspective of gathering grass-roots opinions and background information. She learned that many of the students were very pissed off about the war in Vietnam. Most of them had lost a close friend or boyfriend in the ongoing conflict. Through their opinions, Natsumi learned that the Japanese military presence was an effort to gain a beachhead in Southeast Asia, which would pincer the Chinese Nationalists between forces in Manchuria and Vietnam-Laos.

This was the exact thinking that had plunged Japan into the Pacific War...resulting in disaster for the country in 1945.

The anti-war stance of the students was strongly opposed by the majority of Japanese, many of whom were educated in the 1930s through 50s when jingoism was indoctrinated by the Japanese national education system. These were highly charged times, even more so than the historical 1960s in the Japan that Miyuki and Natsumi knew. Apparently, the Japanese government here was still democratic in structure, but it had become a political battleground between the militarists and the industrialists. Natsumi gathered from the many discussions she had with the students that the resulting instability of the Diet and the political factions had allowed for the Showa Emperor, Hirohito, to take a much greater 'hand's-on' role in governing his subjects. The students strongly hated the Emperor-worship that was still quite popular here. Natsumi was astonished by the very notion of Emperor-worship being practiced in a 'semi-modern' Japan. But then she realized that, in this reality, the Imperial Office had never suffered the sanctions imposed by the Japanese surrender of 1945...because that surrender had never happened. Thus, the role of the Emperor in the national culture remained intact, only somewhat diminished after the Pacific War and its huge amount of casualties.

She was going to share her conclusions with Miyuki, when her partner waived her back into the shadows. From their concealed position, Miyuki had espied a suspicious meeting between a hippie and a man dressed in the pinstripe flannel suits that typified the Yakuza.

"Just a little more..." Miyuki whispered as the beatnik handed the man in the suit a small leather handbag. The man glanced around, then checked the handbag, and invited the hippie into a small eatery.

"Damn it! Don't tell me they're going to eat some noodles!" Natsumi cursed.

A half hour later, the student departed. The only difference to Natsumi's trained eye was that his backpack seemed a little bit fuller.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

After the disappointing stakeout debacle in Shinjuku, Miyuki suggested that some retail therapy was in order.

"After all, how many women from 20XX get to shop in an actual 60's boutique?" she pointed out cheerfully to her partner. At first, Natsumi thought this was just another one of her partner's flights into the inane...until she saw the outlandish styles in one 'modern' fashion shoppe. Then she literally dragged Miyuki into the store.

"This is totally gnarly!" Natsumi said as she posed in the mirror in a miniskirt.

"You mean 'groovy'..." Miyuki corrected her with a giggle, earning a faceshot of irritation from her partner.

"How about this, Natsumi?" Miyuki chirped happily. She was wearing a minidress with bright leopard-spot patterns; the outfit had caught her eye because it reminded her of an old calendar in the office that portrayed JAL stewardess outfits. The style and cut of the outfit exactly matched the flight attendant uniform for 1971. It even had one of those bulky traditional Russian-style women's ushanka hats to match the outfit.

Natsumi whistled wolfishly at her partner as Miyuki spun a circle in front of the mirror.

Shopping mission accomplished, the two women rode one of the old trains back to their apartment, marveling at the worn seats and the grey cuts of the salarymen. Needless to say, Natsumi made the mistake of wearing her new miniskirt...and when one of the salarymen made a reach for her thigh, she decked him. The astonished stares of the other riders made it clear that it still wasn't acceptable behavior for a woman to defend herself against subway gropers. Natsumi didn't care for the type in the first place; for the rest of the train ride, she was rewarded with a view of the unconscious man's lolling head...the traincar was so crowded that her attacker remained 'out on his feet', packed tightly between the other passengers.

As they debarked from the train at the stop, Miyuki saw the beatnik whose house had been their arrival point. She hoped that he wouldn't notice them...

"Hey..it's the vicious babes!" the youth said, hailing them from another platform of the train stop. He walked over, taking care to keep her between Natsumi and he. He seemed nervous and awkward as they walked up the stairs to the street.

"Uh, sorry about the other day! I was a little...disconnected...if you know what I mean," Natsumi apologized to him.

"Awww...it's cool! It's not every day that I get attacked by a violent sister who's sleeping in my bed. Usually, _I'm_ doin' the attacking..." he replied flirtatiously.

"Hey! Don't push your luck!" Natsumi retorted, earning a smirk from Miyuki.

"Be cool, please be cool! No harm meant, no harm done! Peace and Love" the young man begged, flashing them the V-sign. "Besides, I know a way for you two chicks to get _way_ disconnected. Uh...d..do you feel like coming to a club with me and my friends? They've gotta really diggin' live band there! They're really shinki!" he asked in a shaky voice.

"Shinki?" Miyuki asked.

"Shinki...as in 'cool', 'hip', 'stony'. Don't you know _anything_, Miyuki?" Natsumi explained with a salt of teasing. Miyuki scowled at her partner.

And before Miyuki could even think about the live club situation, Natsumi heartily answered "Yes!" with a burst of enthusiasm. Once again, her wild partner's impulsive nature had run amok. Miyuki grimaced in resignation, and then made a mental note to chew her partner out when the night was over.

The hippie guy accompanied them to their new apartment so that they could drop off the fruits of their shopping expedition. Once inside, he made a number of comments on how the decor of the apartment looked "square", and then he got on the phone and called some friends to meet them at the club. Probably his college buddies.

Miyuki recognized the whole youthful ploy of his enthusiasm...he obviously thought that he was going to 'get some' from either she or Natsumi, so he had invited several of his friends so he could show off.

Then again, Natsumi being Natsumi...

Miyuki sighed in resignation as she realized that she needed to have another talk with her partner about the dangers of mixing booze and men.

As they walked to the club, the young man waxed enthusiastic about the evening.

"Someday, Shinjuku will really be a happening place, trippin' right on the map! And I'll be the one who gets to tell everyone that 'I told ya so!' when it happens in the 1980s! This place is turning out to be so hip! I even bet they'll legalize weed by 1975, if the stupid war's over by then!" he claimed with gleeful enthusiasm.

Miyuki didn't want to break the news to him that the Shinjuku ward would become a heavily commercialized area, and that the real trendy neighborhoods would turn out to be Harajuku and Shibuya. She doubted that he would believe her anyway.

"Here we are!" he announced with a skip. Miyuki looked up at the illuminated marquee that spelled "Goblins".

"Interesting name," she thought. Looking inside the door, she could see flashing strobe lights, colorful swirls of light projected on the walls that suggested bacteria, and tons of reveling college kids.

Natsumi started laughing unceremoniously.

"What's so funny, foxy babe? This is the _best_ club in town!" the beatnik exclaimed in a defensive voice, as if his pride had been wounded.

"It..looks like something..haha..out of some 40-year-old..hehee..Godzilla film!" her partner gasped.

"Natsumi!!" Miyuki hissed, grinding her foot onto her partner's instep to emphasize her point.

"What are you talking about? You're already stoned, aren't you!" Beatnik answered slyly. "Godzilla's only been around for _15 years_! Don't mess with the big lizard! And don't mess with my mind like this, or you'll get me thinking that this is some runaway Johnny Astro sci-fi flick!"

They waited outside for about 15 minutes until his three friends showed up. All of them were young kids, about 18 to 20 by Miyuki's best guess. Two of them wore some really old-fashioned glasses...obvious this era's equivalent of nerdish students. The other kid had a thin beard and was trying to look tough.

"Wow!!" Natsumi marveled as they paid their cover and walked into the club. The place was well lit with pulsing lights. Mini-skirted gogo dancers swayed sensually to a hybrid of American rock music and Japanese surfbeat jazz. The smell of pot smoke permeated the place, casting haze upon the spotlights that scanned over the writhing crowd of dancers.

"Here, you want a drink?" the beatnik offered and returned a couple minutes later with two drinks he called "Hunter Thompsons". Natsumi was thirsty from her walk, so she gulped down her drink in a single swig, earning "ooo's" of admiration from the four college guys.

"Gimme another!" she demanded, slapping the table.

After an hour in which she finished off eight mixed drinks, Natsumi noticed that the college guys were started to act bored. She decided to do something about it...

"Hey, let's have a drinking game!" she announced, causing Miyuki to worry even more.

"Yeah, that sounds really groovy! Jan-ken-pon?" one of the nerdy beatnik kids suggested, earning eyerolls from his three friends.

"That's a child's game, you moron!" Natsumi shot back. "Let's play a _real_ drinking game...something that takes some skill!"

She gave every student a 100 yen coin, while explaining the game.

"It's really very simple. At the count of 10, each of us spins their hundred-yen coin. When all the coins stop spinnin', we count to see who's got heads or tails. Whoever ends up in the minority has to say a tongue twister. Let's say that there are four tails and two heads. The people with the two heads have to say these two sentences as fast as they can:

_'Ranma ran round whacking wakisobi with hopping sighs fuzzy ducky wet rubber mawashis'_

Then the next player says:

_'Oh yeah?! Well, Akane can cackle candy cool canes with sharp hussy candles casting cannonfire'_

Then the next player repeats 'Oh yeah?' and starts with the Ranma line again. They go back and forth until someone screws up and says something like 'Oh yeah? Ranma ran wrong hacking whacky tobacky with happosai's fucky duzzy wet rubbing washies' or 'Oh yeah? Akane can hackle candy kawaiikunes with sure pussy candles casing camel fire'.

Then the loser has to drink a shot."

Miyuki was once again amazed at Natsumi's skills at making up drinking games on the spot.

"Ranma? Akane? Why'd you pick _those_ two names?" the students asked, clearly intrigued by the game.

"Don't worry, they'll be household names in 20 years...your kids'll love 'em!" Natsumi shot back smartly, drawing a knowing giggle from Miyuki.

"You chicks are both sooo weird!" Beatnik commented.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Shoo, whydaya keep ashkin' whazzup wiff youse colleg kidz? I don' know any Yashkuza..." 'Beatnik' announced, downing his shot glass after he lost another round to Natsumi.

"Here...hava 'nother shot, Beatnik," Natsumi urged.

"But I didn' losesh!"

"So what? You're young! It'sh good for you!" Natsumi pushed the shot glass towards 'Beatnik', who took cocked his head in contemplation and then pushed the shotglass back towards her.

"Wazza matter? Not man enough ta drink it? Ya know, I really like men who can hold their liquor!" Natsumi noted, posing seductively and pursing her lips for the kids. As expected, their eyes grew wide. She shot a knowing wink at Miyuki.

"I..I'll show you!" 'Beatnik' shouted in defiance, reaching out and grabbing the shotglass. He gulped a deep breath to prepare himself, and then downed it in a single draw. Miyuki grimaced in empathy, knowing that the college student was already past his limit and would probably lose his cookies.

"Now..._You_!!" he yelled as he refilled the glass and pushed it back to Natsumi.

"Sure thing, honey," Natsumi said with a grin, her eyes glazed with glee as she downed another slug.

Miyuki had seen this scene played out a number of times during the five years of their partnership. Instead of playing "good-cop bad-cop", Natsumi and she would play "drunk-cop sober-cop" when they were fishing for information. Miyuki would remain sober, but pretend to pass out after several drinks, after thoroughly chastising her friend. Natsumi would then roar into party mode and start drinking heavily. But Natsumi wouldn't be getting drunk, she would only play at getting drunk. Eventually, the suspects would get loose lips as the booze worked their throats...and then they would let slip some vital bit of info. Since Miyuki was alert, she could memorize whatever was said while Natsumi continued to work information out of the men she was drinking against. A typical night would end up with a drunken Natsumi, a sober Miyuki, and a heapful of information to be used in the investigation.

Natsumi was a pro at getting men to drink. Miyuki was grateful that her partner had followed her calling to be a traffic policewoman; Natsumi would have made the perfect bar hostess or bunnygirl if she hadn't gotten into law enforcement.

Two of the boys were passed out in the booth, while Beatnik was almost ready to go, and his friend Wolf was babbling drunkenese...

"Make that...Beatnik just went," Miyuki smiled to herself as the scrawny college kid slumped against her. She lightly shoved him away and he groaned, rolling to his side.

"Hey ya Wolf? Havva nother shot! Your buddies all are pashed out! I need someone to drink with...the nightsh still early!" Natsumi demanded, gleefully energetic. Wolf hung his head evasively, and then downed the glass.

Natsumi matched him four more glasses.

"Haf I got somethin' to tell yoush!" Wolf suddenly shouted. "I actually knowsh some Ya..Yakusha! One 'a my friensh knowsh 'em. An' you all were thinkin' that I wash BSing you, didnya?"

Miyuki and Natsumi perked up. Natsumi laid a leg across his lap to mellow him out even more, feigning deep interest.

"Oh do tell! You mush be really cool to know shome of thosh guysh! Are the Yakuza really ash tough as they sheem?"

"Uh..yesh! They are! I know...cuz' I met one ov' them! My friend introdushed me to 'im. His nickname wuz 'Panties'...er, thas' not right. Hmm...oh yeah, hish nickname wuz 'Panther'..."

_--Kaa-thunk!!--_

Wolf had passed out, knocking a couple glasses over onto the floor as he dropped onto the table. Natsumi quickly removed her leg from his lap and looked intently at Miyuki.

"That'sh our lead! I'm a good girl, aren't I?" she said, her voice a little less slurred than earlier.

"Yep. All we have to do now is keep an eye on Beatnik and Wolf. We'll run into his friend, and then his pal will lead us to this Panther character."

"You mean 'Panties'?"

Miyuki broke into laughter as Natsumi ordered a Kirin for her. As she sipped her beer, she swore that the Kirin of 1969 tasted a lot better than the Kirin of 2007.

"Let'sh blow this place!" Natsumi said after Miyuki finished her beer.

"Hey waitaminute! We can't just leave 'em here!" Miyuki protested. "Give 'em a break, Natsumi! They're college students! They don't have any money! We should at least be decent and pay the bill."

Natsumi was going to argue with Miyuki, until she realized the logic in her partner's statement. Grumbling something about "how students have it so easy," she pulled out a few crumpled yen bills. Miyuki was right; running out on the bill would be impractical, because they would need to keep in contact with these students until they finally located Panther.

She paid the bill, but she just couldn't resist stuffing a 1990s or 2000s mint 1000-yen note in each student's hand...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Even a grade schooler could spot yakuza from a block away," Miyuki thought as she and Natsumi staked out the alleyway which Wolf had pointed out as a gangster safe-house. But after a couple of hours, the men that sauntered in and out of the garishly-painted green door looked like salarymen intent on finding hookers, rather than gangsters. She cursed, hoping that Wolf wasn't bullshitting them when he said that this was the gangster's hangout.

Not a tattoo in sight...and the sky was getting darker...

"I'm gonna kill 'im!" her partner Natsumi growled as the sky started to press rain down on the crowded byways. She withdrew deeper into the dwindling dry ground that was under the awning.

Liquid cloudshine was dripping pearls off each policewoman's nose as several peals of thunder rumbled in basso echoes around them. Miyuki looked at Natsumi, and almost giggled at the mask of misery on her partner's face. The sheeting downpour made her homesick, reminding Miyuki of where she belonged...behind the driver's wheel of her police car: rescuing cats, busting speeders, policing street festivals, and helping young NIT students during typhoons...

It was more than enough displacement for the two of them to be flung 40 years in the past. Miyuki and Natsumi had mutually agreed that their sanity hinged upon how vigilant they were about _not_ paying close heed to the nature of their predicament. Yet, the afternoon shower only served to highlight the mystery of being here in some kind of Austin Powers-type time trip.

The wet kisses of the sky were sogging Miyuki with ennui. She wanted to do something, rather than just stand here mired in the pressing helplessness of being stranded in someone's weird dream of late 60s Japan!

She prayed to the gods to send her a sign...

"LOOK!!" Natsumi shout-whispered.

She followed Natsumi's eyes to her left, and saw a small group of five or six men hurriedly scampering from cloth awning to cloth awning in an effort to avoid being soaked. The men's disposition clearly marked them as yakuza; they mowed into an elderly passerby, nearly knocking him to the ground...and then they rounded on him and started yelling indignantly, feigning injury and demanding extortion. As Miyuki listened, she knew that this was clearly a case of minpo...a 'legal' intimidation technique that relied on veiled threats concealed by slick wordply, conveyed with dramatic arrogant huffiness.

The yakuza wore garishly huge sunglasses, which Miyuki remembered as being the rage during her grandmother's teen years during the late 60s. The old man was clearly terrified, bowed sharply to the gangsters with rapid, deep bows. It made Natsumi heartsick as the men continued to berate the frightened eldster.

"Hey! Don't you guys have any respect for your elders?" Natsumi started in with a piercing shout. Two of the yakuza paused in mid-sentence and turned to regard her partner with astonished curl-mouthed expressions.

"Here we go..." Miyuki thought with a sigh of resignation.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

_"Sluuurp!"_

Natsumi enjoyed the fact that slurping noodles hadn't gone out of fashion in this era, as it had in Tokyo of 20XX. Noodle slurping was considered gauche by most of her female friends. She felt envious that her guy friends still got to slurp their udon to their heart's content without attracting undue attention. Natsumi thought this was totally unfair. Slurping noodles was a natural means of expressing culinary joy...or venting frustration.

Right now, she was _very_ frustrated...

"So what do you think we should do next..._slurrrp!_" she asked.

"Well, now that you've managed to piss off those yakuza, I really don't know what we should do next..._slurrrp!_" Miyuki answered back.

"Well, I didn't _mean_ to knock out their ringleader!" Natsumi protested. After she had called out the yakuza, the toughest-looking one left the group of five who were harassing the old man and stomped over to get in her face. Natsumi relied on her old tactic of smilingly teasing the yakuza, which only salved the irritation of the head yakuza. It was clearly evident that he was losing face in front of his men, so he tried to punch her...

A minute later, he was flat on his back...knocked out by an innocent-looking 'hippie girl'.

"But Miyuki..._sluurph!_...think of it this way. Now that I managed to knock that group's head hoodlum on his ass, I bet you a 5000-yen note that he'll go back to his boss and complain. The boss will probably send some higher-ups to tag us, and then we'll be able to infiltrate further into the gang!

"How so?"

"You're so dense, Miyuki! I can't believe you didn't figure it out already! We've gained an edge on 'em, because now _they'll _be looking for _us_! Now, it'll be easy to get the information we need...all we have to do is wait. When the next group comes, we'll call them out as well. After another round or two, the Boss himself will probably be forced to deal with us personally in order to save face. Which means that he'll be under our thumb once I'm through with him. Then we'll have all the information we need for the case!" Natsumi explained excitedly.

Miyuki darted her a frown of disagreement and shook her head in exasperation.

"So it'll be that easy, huh? Just draw out the Boss and then we can take care of everything, eh? Have you ever considered the fact that we _don't_ have any backup? That we're in 1969 in a _different _Japan...perhaps on a different planet as well...and that the Yakuza of this era may have a _harsher_ means of dealing with their victims? Natsumi...these yakuza might just decide to send a hitman with a scope rifle instead of some higher-ups in their organization. We might wind up being targeted by snipers, instead of some hotheads trying to practice their minpo skills!"

_"Sluur..spffft!"_

Natsumi had spit out her udon in a rash expression of surprise. She had thought she had done the right thing by punching the daylights out of the punk, in order to make a statement to his underlings. But she hadn't even considered the M.O. of the Yakuza of this new plane of reality. They _could_ follow a completely alternate pattern of behavior, unlike the predictable Yakuza of the Bokuto Ward. The yakuza chief of Bokuto was in prison right now, thanks to she and Miyuki, plus a series of fantastic golf ball shots from Aoi, their fellow squadron cop who was a transvestite undercover agent. Dealing with yakuza meant proceeding with caution. But they had experienced a string of successes...even Yoriko had busted one of the major lieutenants of the replacement Boss just last year. Despite Miyuki's contention, one thing was familiar, if Wolf's account was truthful.

These yakuza were involved in the drug traffic.

Natsumi slurped meditatively on her noodles, trying to scale beyond the heights of her renewed uncertainty. Miyuki's concerns could be legit; if they were, then she and Miyuki would need to get some weapons.

Which meant that they would have to approach the police, and probably the 1969 versions of Superintendent Arizuka and Captain "Kitsune"...

Even though Arizuka and Kitsune were the 'good guys' and she and Miyuki were on the same side as the 'good guys' in this mixed-up version of reality...Natsumi was still very apprehensive about having any dealings with the police of this era. She and her partner were operating under a streetbeat deep cover of an undercover investigation. And yet they were operating within _another_ cover...the cover of having to fake-out everyone who considered them to be investigative cops. She knew that Miyuki could function fairly well as an investigative cop; her partner possessed that specialized mindset that would probably earn her a promotion to detective someday. But Natsumi knew that she herself didn't always think things through clearly like an investigative policewoman...the recent mishap with the yakuza punks was proof of this. But she did have one important asset that Miyuki didn't have. Besides the strength of two men.

She was a charmer and a pretty good actress.

If they found themselves pinched between a rock and a hard place, Natsumi felt pretty certain that she could sly her way out of any mess. She had handled the college kids pretty well, and she knew she could count on her street smarts if things got hairy.

"Kinda sucks, doesn't it? We're..._ sluurph!_...pretending to be pretending to be on an undercover assignment. Which means that we can't even be safe in our own ranks, or out on the street trying to find these so-called assassins among the little hoodlums," she noted.

"Definitely! We're going to have to be really careful on that account, Natsumi..._sluurph!_ We may be safe around the police of this era, but then again, I'd feel better if we kept to ourselves as much as possible. But there's also _another_ reason why we need to be careful," Miyuki warned.

"Huh?"

"Look inside your purse, Natsumi." Natsumi looked at her partner quizzically as she unstrapped her standard-issue policewoman's black purse.

Inside, she fingered through the ample amount of coins, her wallet, a makeup kit and several other items. Everything was in place, including her stun gun, sound pod, pager, PDA minipad computer, pepper spray and cell phone.

"So? All I have in here is my palm computer, my cell phone..."

"Natsumi! This is Tokyo in _1969_! They don't have personal digital assistant computers and cell phones..."

"Hey! What's a palmpad?" the noodle master asked. Miyuki looked at her in exasperation; obviously her partner didn't notice that the noodle chef was only standing a couple meters away. He had overheard their conversation!

Natsumi grinned silly and gestured, pointing her finger in the middle of her other hand. The noodle shop master grimaced, muttering "damn stoner hippies!" and returned to wiping down the luncheon counter. Despite the ridiculous reprieve, Natsumi felt a chill travel up and down her spine as Miyuki's words settled in. This was like some sci-fi sorta situation! She had technology from the future which she had to protect.

An ugly scenario passed through her mind, where she saw a yakuza underboss turning her stungun on her...

"Oh...you mean the _palm reader_! It's a gizmo! You know, a toy that imitates one of those palmologist guys you see at the festivals!" Miyuki quickly answered, trying to charm the noodle master.

The noodle guy wasn't buying Miyuki's answer.

"Hey! I need another bowl! How about the one with eels!" Natsumi exclaimed as she pointed up to the menu board, hoping that ordering some more food would jar his attention away from what he had overheard.

"Sure! Comin' up!" he acknowledged cheerfully.

"He better be cheerful...I just ordered his most expensive bowl," Natsumi said aside to Miyuki in a near-whisper. She paused as Miyuki looked at her with narrow-eyed parental expectancy. Natsumi hated that look...it made her feel like she had done something wrong. It was the same look that had haunted her ever since she first met Miyuki, who had shot her that glare of disapproval for the first time when she ticketed her for speeding...

Not wanting to reveal to her partner that she was bothered by the fact that Miyuki had the upper hand, Natsumi returned her attention to her fresh new bowl of eel and noodles.

"Might as well live it up..._Sluuurp!"_

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

The next day, the two policewomen-posing-as-hippie-girls had agreed to rent a lockbox at a local bank, so they could hide away all their toys from the future. Natsumi was especially reluctant to do this, since she had a number of games stored on her pocket computer.

Despite the fact that the department policy strictly prohibited personal programs on the PDA computers, Natsumi had loaded it up with a number of Gameboy and Playstation emulations. A girl had to do something during those long boring hours in the precinct office...

During _these _boring times as well.

She decided that she would have to find a way to get it back without Miyuki finding out.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Hey, it's the foxy ladies! Hey Foxy Ladies!!" Beatnik shouted after Miyuki and Natsumi. He was accompanied by Wolf and his other two friends from the university. Thus, a routine trip to the neighborhood grocery store was turned into an adventure...

It was Wolf who suggested that they go back to "Goblins" for another night of boozing and carousing.

"Of course they would want to go out partying, because _we_ paid the bar tab," Natsumi had noted sourly to her partner as they waited in the queued line to get into the club. Miyuki only giggled and said something about how "it's usually the other way around when you're concerned."

Natsumi could feel the grimace drawing across her face like a weather map of storm clouds.

Once inside, she and Miyuki left the table behind and went to the dance floor. Joining in, they started gyrating to the primitive-sounding rock music. The club had a live band tonight, one that Natsumi recognized from JTV music channel documentaries. The "Flower Traveling Band" would be a household name in Japan in a couple years. Once they had a set break, she almost wanted to sneak over and tell the band members that they'd be pop culture icons by 1975...

Psychedelic projections created colorful patterns on the walls as the strobelights flickered, slowing down the dancers to random snippets of motion in Miyuki's eyes. Once again, she reminded herself that these people probably _had_ to use drugs to be able to stand more than an hour of this kind of lighting effects. She reconsidered, noting to herself that the lighting effects were this era's equivalent of those used in raves. Twenty minutes after she went on the dance floor, Miyuki felt a severe headache draw on.

Winter smiles as she walked off the floor.

Back at the table, she sipped a mixed drink and listened to Beatnik, who...once he noticed he had an audience of one...launched into a drunken soliloquy of political criticisms. As his monologue progressed, Miyuki actually noted that it _was_ informative. Beatnik complained vehemently about the Emperor's policy of appeasing the populace with expensive public works projects like the new Narita Airport and the Hokkaido Tunnel project...projects that kept the public from flinching in disgust at the weekly death tolls from Vietnam. He added, much to Miyuki's surprise, that he was the son of a Dietman. Because of his father's political status, he had been exempted from the draft, otherwise he would be on the run as a draft-dodger or living in Thailand, where most of the young men had gone to avoid being drafted. He noted that he was awash with guilt every day because of this. He noted that he was plagued by guilt every day because of his 'silver spoon' exemption from conscription.

Wolf came over from the dance floor and joined right in, offering his opinions. Wolf described himself as being in constant fear of the war in Vietnam escalating, possibly to the point where it would result in a nuclear exchange between Japan and the United States. A justifiably sober concern, because in this reality, the Americans had responded to the Cuban Missile Crisis by bombing Havana into radioactive rubble. Wolf noted that he had avoided the draft by being an exemplary student, a fact that shocked Miyuki. He was also regretful that he had never been to Hawaii, which was now off-limits to all Japanese. Miyuki couldn't even imagine a world where Hawaii wasn't a vacation destination for the Japanese. Then Beatnik teased Wolf about his schooling. It turned out that Wolf was one of the country's top physics students.

Drunk one night, studying kaons and tachyons the next day.

Natsumi and the two other students joined them a little later, and the drinking began in earnest. If there was one constant in the universe, it was the fact that Natsumi could drink even the strongest shochu and sake like a pro...

Which meant that she was a little slow to respond when Miyuki elbowed her a couple hours later as their yakuza marks entered the club.

"Hey, lookit that! Tha's the dude I decked the other day!" Natsumi shouted in a too-loud voice. A _much _too loud voice.

The yakuza gangleader overheard her, and then walked over to their table.

"Ah, if it isn't the two lovely angels of the rain! The two _violent_ angels, I should say! Did you know that your suckerpunch cost me three visits to the dentist? I think you owe me...say, about 10,000 yen or so. Otherwise we'll report you to the police for assault!" he said, his words echoed with a chorus of growls and grumbles from his underlings.

"Go right ahead, big boy! Besides, how do ya know we _aren't the cops_?" Natsumi countered, causing Miyuki to facefault and tip over her drink. After that remark, the yakuza looked like a tuna out of water; his mouth was moving but nothing was coming out. Miyuki couldn't hold back her giggles.

"Lissen to the big man talk! Three vishits to the dentisht? You must have small teeth for such a _big_ mouth!" Natsumi snapped back sharply with a biting grin.

"ARRRGH!!" the yakuza screamed, trying to lunge at her while his fellow punks held him back. Now the 'toll' was 15,000 yen, justified by the fact that his underlings had just prevented him from rearranging Natsumi's face.

"Short memory, for an idiot!" Miyuki thought with a chuckle. She knew that her partner was play-acting being drunk...if there was a fight, Natsumi would mop him up. All those judo and karate classes her partner had been taking had proved useful on a number of occasions. Besides, it was a well-known 'secret' in the Department that Natsumi had actually beaten an _ozeki_ sumo wrestler in an arm wrestling match at a festival a couple years back.

Miyuki gauged the other four men, who looked lanky and inexperienced despite their aggro affectations.

Yes, she and Natsumi would have little problem with these five.

Natsumi continued to roundly taunt the yakuza, which terrified Beatnik and the other two students. Miyuki was amused by the dramatic looks of fear figuring the young student's faces. Beatnik kept exclaiming, "Leave him alone! Love and peace, man...ya know! Don't provoke him!"

In contrast, Wolf was watching the whole proceedings with an enigmatic calm. His out-of-character disdain was unsettling to Miyuki, who was certain that he would be freaking out like his three college buddies. Instead, he seemed to be coolly interested by the interchange.

"I got your money!" he finally said in a low voice, interrupting Natsumi and the yakuza ringleader.

"Deal's off!" the yakuza shouted back. "I don't like the company you're keeping!"

"Deal's on, or I'll call my brother tomorrow, and you'll be cement deep in shit! Actually, cement deep in the Sumida would be more like it!" Wolf replied in a thin raspy voice.

Caught off guard, Miyuki and Natsumi watched warily as a play of emotions washed through the yakuza's face. Reaching a decision, the thug pulled out a large plastic bag filled with marijuana and slid it on the table. Wolf paid him with an envelope full of money.

Instinctively, Miyuki surveyed the club, startled at the openness of the drug deal. A quick glance revealed nothing out of the ordinary. She looked at Natsumi, who was just as shocked as she at the over-the-table drug purchase.

"There! Now I don't have to call my bro on you! So get lost!" Wolf shouted.

"I..I'll be back! This ain't over yet!" the yakuza shouted over his shoulder as he and his four accomplices promptly left the club.

An hour later, Miyuki suggested that they leave as well. She was getting tired and bored, plus she didn't want to end up dealing with one or more passed out teenage college students a mere hour after a drug deal. Natsumi generously paid the barman and they walked outside into the fresh air.

Wolf and Beatnik had smoked two joints in the bar.

The cool air was refreshing to Miyuki as they loitered outside of the hippie club. A number of salarymen passed by, darting them "you buncha freaks" stares. After a number of days here, she was just now getting used to those kinds of reactions. The full moon cast an eerie shade on the street, made even stranger by the fact that the streetlights were florescent white, rather than the more modern yellow.

A large car quietly pulled out from across the street, and then suddenly whipped a quick U-turn. Instantly alert, Miyuki instinctively knew that this was bad, just as the limousine pulled even with them.

A door flew open and a man with a gun shouted "Get in!"

Beatnik screamed in panic.

"No, not you! We don't want you, you idiot! You...the two chicks! Get in now, or we'll blow you away!" the gunman shouted commandingly, gesturing with his pistol. It looked like a fake, but Natsumi wasn't going to take any chances. She looked at her partner and nodded, and then started stumbling towards the car with a drunken gait...

"Hey honey, if you want me to take a ride with ya so bad, why didn't chya just say so?" she said with drunken cheeriness. The man with the gun looked at her in surprise, reacting with masculine uncertainty to her bold frankness.

"If you treat me right, this could be your lucky night!" she said to the man with the gun with a wink. He grinned wolfishly at her.

"You bet I'll kiss you, you ugly punk...I'll give you a kiss of fire," Natsumi thought as the man looked at her expectantly, completely unaware that her flirtatious mood was her way of softening his guard. As he slowly lowered his gun, Natsumi reached for his wrist and twisted it up and inwards, causing him to drop his gun onto the street pavement. The metallic resounding of the gun hitting the pavement indicated that the firearm was real to Natsumi's practiced ears. Bracing one foot against the doorway, she yanked him out of the car. Falling backwards onto her back, she placed her other foot in his abdomen and kicked hard, and then flipped him backwards over her head, using his momentum against him.

Quickly gaining her feet, she watched as Miyuki kicked him in the nuts while he staggered to his feet, doubling him over. A knee to the jaw and he was unconscious.

The man on the passenger side opened the door and started to get out of the car.

"Not so fast, if you know what's good for you! Believe me, I know how to use this gun!" Natsumi shouted as she scooped up the gun and pointed it at him. Ignoring her, the man reached for his gunbelt...and as soon as he withdrew his gun, Natsumi shot it out of his hand.

"Good shot, Natsumi!" Miyuki shouted.

The shocked gunman quickly slid back into the large car...and then their would-be abductors made a hasty drive-away.

_Clap! Clap! Clap! Clap!_

Catching her breath, Miyuki heard loosely sounded handclapping from behind them. Adrenaline pumping, she spun around turned to see _another_ group of gangsters...

Ten men, with drawn guns.

She slumped her shoulders just as Wolf shouted, "Brother!"

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Miyuki was all eyes as they sped through Tokyo, driving south past the wharves of the lower city north of Chiba. She could tell that Natsumi was fascinated by the nighttime drive through the city as well, as her partner's face was pressed firmly against her window. One thing that 1969 Tokyo lacked was a completed network of freeways; however, Miyuki doubted that these yakuza would have driven on a main road anyway. Like taxicab drivers, the procession of three cars was weaving through a series of backroads and alleyways.

During the early part of the roadtrip journey, Miyuki had learned that their captors weren't really captors at all. They were another yakuza gang that were longstanding rivals to the gang that tried to abduct them at gunpoint. Wolf had lied to them: he didn't "just know" a yakuza like he had said in the club several days earlier. Instead, their host was "Panther"...his older brother.

"Panther" looked like an older version of Wolf, with shaggy hair and a thin beard accenting his rugged looks. He repeatedly praised she and Natsumi, clearly impressed by how they had dispatched the men from "Boss Tako's Gang". Noting that he was indebted to them, he had 'invited' them to a night at a rustic ryokan with all the flourishes.

Generosity within a lions den.

Miyuki was amazed at the changes in the landscape as they passed through several outlying urban wards...wards that she remembered as being fully developed "New Cities" while growing up. But now, almost forty years earlier, the urban sprawl still hadn't despoiled these districts with its concrete touch. In this era, these areas were empty expanses of grasslands, woods and farmlands. The three cars turned up a winding graveled mountain road just as dawn breathed a yellow-orange cast on the woodlands in the distance. A few minutes later, they pulled to a stop in front of a modest inn that looked well over a hundred years old.

Was their adventure over...or was it just beginning?

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --


	79. Pt 79: Belldandy and Mara: Mirror House ...

**Part 79: Belldandy and Mara: Mirror House--1st Movement**

"Where is everybody? Where are my _sisters_?" Belldandy wondered desperately to herself after thoughtcasting their names far and wide. The invisible string of sensation that always linked her with Urd and Skuld was conspicuously absent, ushered away by the splatter of sparkles that had swept her off the ground moments earlier. The vortex of colors still scatter-danced around her, flickering like a light shining through spinning birdcages.

And then it was gone.

Her senses dislocated, Belldandy felt as if she had been whisked away from the Bayside slum, only to be swiftly transported back to another part of the Earthrealm. There was no perceptible sense of travel through Time or Space...and yet she felt dizzy, as if she was still floating in the air rather than resting on solid space. Her thoughts vied against a sound collage, a mental barrage of grating noises that sounded like a blend of clatter-tracking onrushing trains and wailing ocean vessel sirens.

She continued to cast her thoughts, hoping she could summon her sisters to her side...but all the while she did this, Belldandy felt an almost intuitive doubt; sensing in her Soul that there wouldn't be any response. What was most disturbing was the fact that she couldn't discriminate _any_ familiar auras in the nearby vicinity, or on the entire Earthrealm, for that matter.

She wasn't accustomed to being unable to sense her sister's presence. Through the Yggdrasil Mainframe, the three Norns shared a common pathlink, regardless of their relative locations in TimeSpace. Their Souls were always 'connected' by a tendril of Metanative attribution, moderated in the vast Data Nodes of the Ygg Mainframe. But now, for the first time in millennia...Belldandy felt the absolute silence of aloneness. She realized that she had been cut off from Yggdrasil, Urd and Skuld all at once. Disoriented by the lack of a Soular connection with Urd and Skuld, she was swept up in a storm of 'arcanical feedback'; disorganized bursts of Divine 'white noise' that filled her senses with chaos. She struggled with the overwhelming 'static' in her Soul; an unexpected and unwanted substitute for the comforting presence of her sisters. She visibly strived to quiet her mind down, so she could tune into herself.

She needed to get to a phone and call up the GRO...

Closing her eyes to try and dint the randomsense in her mind, Belldandy's disappointment was keened by the fact that Keiichi's comforting presence was absent. Desperately, she extended her Goddess senses to the utmost to try and distinguish the unique vibration of his mortal's heartbeat. But when she listened, she only heard the heavy traffic of her own consternation. Ever since she had fallen in love with him, Belldandy had taught herself to filter out the unique sonics of Keiichi's heartbeat against those of the 6.5 billion other Earthrealm mortals.

But now, she couldn't hear a single cardiac syllable.

She was alone...frighteningly alone!

Awakening somewhat from the hurl of discord, Belldandy observed that she was sprawled inside a wretchedly messy trash dumpster. The dumpster interior was dark and dank with odorous rotting food...it was crammed with refuse, old produce and compacted shipping cartons. Her dress was utterly ruined, soiled in many places by the filthy trash bin. When she clang-opened the lid and peered over the top, she heaved a heartfelt sigh of relief as she recognized that she was in familiar environs. She had been 'dumped' in an alleyway in Makuhari. Nearby, she spied the noren curtains of the health food store where she frequently bought produce during the winter months, once she ran out of fresh vegetables from her garden. Gratitude warmed her...at least these surroundings were somewhat familiar to her! As she tried to climb out of the dumpster that she had been so abruptly deposited into, she heard a rustling in a pile of nearby boxes.

Belldandy tensed herself, ready for anything...

Turning towards the sound, she tried to stand on her right ankle as she lifted her left leg out of the dumpster. Her right ankle seemed to buckle...it didn't even seem to be there! Her left ankle got caught in the dumpster lid and she tumbled face-first into a pile of discarded lettuce. She felt a wrenching sound where her footing should have been.

"Uuhhhhhh..." someone moaned as more boxes seemed to unclutter in reaction to her spill, tumbling down each other like boulders on a hillside.

A head with disheveled straw-blonde curls emerged...

"Mara?!" Belldandy exclaimed as the Demoness poked her head out of the torn-down cardboard castle. The vivid impression of confusion expressed in Mara's Demonic features...haloed by a heap of russet-colored water-soaked cardboard boxes...provided a brief comic moment that tickled Belldandy's heart pleasantly; mercifully drawing her mind away from the grim situation of being isolated from her sisters.

_"You!!"_ Mara said in a voice that was more appropriate for cursing. At the sound of her shout, the Demoness winced, quickly raising a hand and resting it on her right temple.

"Owww, my head _really _hurts!" she complained in a groan-wards sigh.

"Are you okay, Mara?" Belldandy asked sweetly, knowing that if she didn't say something, she would dissolve into an uncivil fit of laughter. Mara's reaction was that of a hungover Demoness after a wild party; recalling to Belldandy's mind the times Mara would groan with discomfort the next day after a heavy drinking and karaoke bout with her twin sister Urd.

"'-_Are you okay-_?'" Mara repeated in sotto voce, imitating Belldandy with edgy derision. She eyerolled the Goddess's naïveté, measuring grains of irritation in her sarcasm.

"No, I'm _not_ 'okay', Belldandy! Do I _look_ okay? My head feels like it was slammed against a solid wall of neutrons by the Dark Lord Himself!" Mara exclaimed. She moaned a note of discomfort to emphasize her self-diagnosis.

"I've never heard a headache described _quite _that way," Belldandy noted, flashing Mara a quick smile as she tried to stand up again. Once she stayed her feet, a wrenching pain stabbed through her right ankle as she put her weight on it. Her ankle suddenly shifted away from the sharp darts of pain...and with a lunging gasp, Belldandy stumbled forward. She semi-caterwauled, arms and legs sprawling out towards anything that could give her purchase to check her fall...

...and she fell right into Mara's piles of boxes.

_--OooWooof!!--_

Belldandy's unexpected collapse resulted in a collision with Mara, who had been seated cross-legged in the middle of a box pile. Now the Norn of the Present found herself lying on her back with her head and shoulders resting on Mara's outstretched legs, the wind knocked out of her.

Mara struggled to upright herself...she had been knocked flat on her back by a falling Goddess!

"Oops!" Belldandy pipped, looking straight up at Mara after the Demoness pulled herself back into a seated position.

Mara looked down at her...

"She's so clumsy, she actually wound up falling _into me_!" Mara marveled. In her Demoness's heart she was flashed by irritation...she wanted to breath fire on Belldandy, perhaps just to singe her hair a bit. But all she could do was look at Belldandy's face in rapt amazement. The sight of a flustered, innocently-smiling Belldandy looking up at her, her head resting on Mara's thighs...was just _too much_!

"I think...it might just be possible that I have a broken ankle. I can't seem to stand up on my own two feet very well," Belldandy pronounced. Mara's orange-red eyes twinkled with a mixture of mirth and concern in response to her younger sister's assessment of her condition. Laughter escaped her lungs like balloons floating away during summer matsuri festivals.

"Bwhah ha ha ha! I can't _believe_ this! _You've_ got a broken ankle, Belldandy? How is that possible? Can Goddesses even _get_ broken ankles?" Mara asked, unable to suppress her laughter at the sight.

"It seems strange that you would ask whether Goddesses can get broken ankles, especially considering how _you_ were in traction after that Demon Rally debacle with Megumi, Mara," Belldandy noted.

"That was different!" Mara protested.

"How was it different?" Belldandy asked.

"Don't remind me...and don't start in on me!" Mara responded with a liberal disapprobation. Looking at Belldandy, she suddenly realized that Bell's mentioning of the "Megumi Incident" wasn't in the cant of trying to insult her. Belldandy was simply making an observation in an attempt to answer Mara's question...

Once again, Demonic anger was defeated by Goddess naïveté. With Belldandy, there was no energy of unkindness behind her words most of the time...she had this bizarre knack of delivering the choice insult while veiled in a cloud of complete unknowing. Which made the insult only worse, because the brunt of the resentment associated with the words were sustained exclusively by the recipient, and no one else. Thus, Belldandy's nescient words could drain one's strength, unlike a heated exchange that draws off the emotional energies of both participants. At least when one is in the middle of a passionate argument, they can feed off their opponent's energy. With Belldandy, it was like trying to use a black hole to light a candle.

"So why don't you just re-manifest yourself back to how you were before, without the break?" Mara noted condescendingly, trying to keep a cooler head than her Goddess sister.

"That seems to be the problem, Mara! I _cannot _seem to re-manifest myself back to an uninjured state. My ankle just won't go back to normal! What am I going to do?" Belldandy pleaded. Mara was about to accost her with an "I can't believe you're so stupid!" comment...until she heard the very real sense of panic in her sister's voice.

"I don't believe this! This is so retarded! Look at us!! We're like two ducks mired in a tarpit. You have a bum foot, and I have a concussion. And I was actually knocked on my ass by a Goddess who tripped over her own feet!" Mara said, dusting off her red-and-black leather short-jacket with a few handslaps.

"I did _not_ trip, Mara. I _fell_..." Belldandy tersely replied, indignant. Mara raised an eyebrow at this bit of uptightness.

"You're so _kawaii_ when your denial is cloaked by that righteous Goddess temper of yours, Belldandy," Mara noted with a grin. Belldandy made a moue with her mouth, but let that one pass. As far as she knew, Mara was the only other Divine being here...as such, it would bode well to avoid arguments and enmity.

"By the way, this place looks awfully blessed familiar, doesn't it? Isn't this street somewhere near you guys' temple?" Mara asked in a speculative voice, recognizing the pattern of the buildings nearby.

"Ummn!" Belldandy nodded her head. She slowly sat up, wincing with the effort...and looked down at her pained ankle. Her eyes widened with surprise; her ankle had swollen to double its normal size. She felt a dull pain throbbing with semaphore regularity _inside_ her foot...a physical sensation she had never experienced before.

Injury to her physical form was basically unknown to a Goddess.

Now that the comedic aspects of their situation had passed, a host of questions filled Belldandy's mind...not the least of which was why only she and Mara had been brought here, and not the others. Also, there was definitely some aspect of this reality that was deliberately inhibiting her Goddess powers to a significant degree. Belldandy felt her heartbeat fluttering as her thoughts circled amidst her consciousness like thirsty hummingbirds around a bouquet of nectarean flowers.

Flashes of deep concern for Keiichi's well-being filling her with a gloomy foreboding...

"You know...you shouldn't make such a flustered face. He's safe, wherever he is," Mara observed. "If your fiancé could handle five years of attacks by me, it stands to reason that he should be able to handle just about anything that comes his way. Otherwise, you wouldn't have accepted his suit to marry you in the first place, eh, _Younger Sister_?"

She blushed at Mara's words. Her Demoness sister had seemingly read her worried countenance, and now was trying to reassure her. Being a Goddess, Belldandy knew she was much more prone to flights of panic than a Demoness...and she sensed that Mara wouldn't feel like babysitting her younger sister for too long.

This was one of those times when Mara's actions reminded Belldandy that she was _definitely_ the younger sister in the relationship. She caught her breath and regained her smile, albeit stiffly. Any sense of parity she had shared with Mara when they were both competing over Keiichi's wish request had been quickly removed the moment she learned that Mara was her older sister. But surprisingly, Mara's words seemed to possess a degree of comfort; they were just was she needed to hear. It was as if Elder Sister Urd were speaking these words of sibling surefootedness. There was no fickleness here...Mara's words were sincere and heartspoken.

Mara was right.

As Mara watched her younger sister relax her tensed shoulders, she reminded herself not to place too much trust in appearances. For example...of the three sisters, Skuld seemed the most innocent; when in fact, Skuld was the most dangerous of the trio. As for Keiichi...well, his mortal's bearing and appearance often belied the fact that he was one of the most resourceful mortals she had ever known. Belldandy only had to recall to her the events of a few weeks ago to remind her of Keiichi's amazing survival in the middle of the Sahara Desert. Mara was genuinely amazed...and even a little impressed...when Belldandy described how Keiichi had strived against such overmounting adversity during his recent trials. All for some odd "Ritual of Preparedness" that the Gods invoked when marrying off her daughters. Mara hoped that her parents, Baael and Myducia, wouldn't make her have to endure some similar idiocy if she ever decided on marriage. If anyone should bear some kind of trial, that responsibility should rightly fall upon the broad shoulders of _the guy_, not her. The shoulders of the Demon who wished to marry her...

"As if _I'm _was going to get married any time soon," Mara thought to herself. Returning her attention to the subject of Keiichi, she had to grudgingly admit that her romantic side was pleased at this tale of his endurance.

"Thanks for reminding me, Mara," Belldandy said appreciatively. This was one of those times when she got the distinct impression that her older half-Demoness half-Goddess sister _wanted_ her to marry Keiichi. But knowing Mara, this desire was no doubt fueled by a realization that such a union might cause many shades of opportunity for her to create mischief upon her in-law parents, namely Keiichi's Mother and Father.

Sister or not, Mara was still a Demoness.

But Belldandy was still gravely troubled by her _other_ older sister's heartrending situation. Urd had killed the mortal that she had given her heart to. And then _something_ had gone totally mishapt. It was as if the intended result of reviving Cevn by using a Returning Mandala to unseal his Ultimate Force powers...had never occurred. Urd wasn't here...and Cevn wasn't here, which could only mean that their attempt had failed. More importantly, this failure might be a harbinger that Isilblius was on the loose!

"C'mon, I guess I'll have to carry you," Mara volunteered, interrupting Belldandy's congress of worries. She watched as the Demoness reached behind her neck to tie her hair back. Belldandy looked at her quizzically.

"So your transport powers aren't working either...eh, Mara?" Belldandy asked sly-grinningly, still smarting from Mara's earlier taunting.

"Ehh? Of course I can transport myself! I, uh..don't choose to at this very moment! Y'know, transporting one's self all the time is bad...a bit of exercise is good for one's Earthrealm physical manifestation once in a while! Besides, we're in an unknown environment! Transporting myself...might, uh, arouse undue suspicion or something!"

"Mara, if you're going to curve the truth around believability, please try to be more tactful. You do so make yourself into a very poor liar!" Belldandy teased, watching Mara sag her shoulders slightly in response to Belldandy's observation. She regarded the Demoness, who looked sadly at her and then nodded her head reluctantly.

"Gotchya!" Belldandy thought, noting the degree of restiveness in Mara's admission. But this tit-for-tat diversion didn't address the bigger quandary of how the two of them have been 'stranded' here. As soon as she had realized the gravity of her situation, Belldandy had tried to transport herself back to the place where she and the others had created the Ultimate Magical Returning Mandala. But she quickly discovered that she was unable to phase herself across the physical dimensions, with or without a mirror.

"This inability to transport ourselves is going to be a significant handicap. I wonder which of our other powers are affected?" Belldandy asked.

"Okay...I admit it! I can't seem to transport myself in TimeSpace either! I can float, super-deform, render myself in a simple invisible stealth form, and fly a very short distance in a circle," Mara said as she demonstrated each action in turn. "But I can't seem to transport myself instantly from point A to point B!"

"This is really discouraging," Belldandy said, heaving a sigh.

"Truly disgusting, if you ask me!!" Mara groused.

"We're pinned down here like butterflies in an entomology exhibition! What I would give for a hot lava soak in my lair right about now!" Mara reflected aloud. She counted herself fortunate; one good thing about Japan was that it had plenty of geothermal lava flows that she could tap into for her furoba. But there would be no lava soaks in the foreseeable future, as she couldn't even sense the aura of her Lair.

"I can't understand _why_ any of this is happening!" Belldandy said in a thin wisp of a voice.

"So the mirror has become a window," Mara noted, echoing Belldandy's sigh as she squatted down slightly and hunched her back.

"Mara? What are you doing?"

"Helping. We Demons do that sometimes. Do you know how ridiculous this is going to look, with me carrying you on my back?" Mara noted with a flush to her face. "I mean...we're both adults, we're both _women_...and neither one of us is drunk! It's going to look so idiotically ridiculous!"

Belldandy nodded her head in agreement, with an "it can't be helped" grimace. The familiar motif of grade-school kids giving each other piggyback rides flashed through Belldandy's thoughts. Then several darker seams of Earthrealm myths and folktales crossed her mind; in particular the Earthrealm fable of the duck and the snake crossing the flooding river...

Could she trust Mara?

"Well? Are you just going to sit there, Belldandy? It's definitely not doing anything for my dignity to be carrying a Goddess on my back! So stop pouting and get on!" Mara insisted, slapping her hip.

Belldandy stood up, hop-skipping on her left foot as she leaned against Mara's back. The sudden shift of weight against Mara's back sent both Divines sprawling sideways into the box pile.

"_Hey you kids! Quit jackin' around back there, or I'll call da cops!_ " a stern male voice shouted through an open doorway. Belldandy and Mara looked at each other...and burst into laughter. A moment later, they were throwing small boxes at each other, which drew another growly shout from the open doorway.

"If he only knew!" Belldandy said in between giggles. Mara broke into hearty laughter, and slapped Belldandy on the shoulder. A moment later, wearing her most ambitious face, Belldandy tried again to get to her feet. She unsteadily lifted one leg and then the other, leaning against Mara. After a slight struggle for balance, Mara hoisted her up off the ground and started walking towards the street.

"You know what I think? I think we oughta get you to one of the mortal hospitals and get your foot looked at!" Mara commented.

"No! I want to go to my house! I want to see if my dear Keiichi is there!" Belldandy insisted.

"Suit yourself! Lucky for me, I won't get physically drained carrying you around like a normal Earthrealm mortal would. But what about Skuld's stupid robot? Won't he zap me with some good fortune charms once he sees me approaching the gate? Skuld said that she programmed me out of the 'Demon Recognition Sensor Circuit' or whatever...but you know how your..er.._our_ little sister is. She may have claimed to have done so _before_ doing so...and then never did so."

Belldandy couldn't hide the knowing smile in response to Mara's assessment of Skuld. "I think that Banpei-kun is the least of our worries at the moment, Mara. It's doubtfully that he will attack us if he sees that you are assisting me into the temple grounds."

"Let's hope so...for _your_ sake! I know where each of the ponds are in your temple grounds," Mara grumbled as she turned down the street that led inlands towards the temple complex.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Belldandy felt a rapid thumping in her breast as they approached her temple home. Despite her pulsing anticipation, something about the Auric emanations here just wasn't right. The auras she _could_ sense were sending her Goddess intuition into all sorts of klaxons and flashpoints...and quite abruptly, she requested Mara to pause before turning the corner.

In response to Mara's questioning look, Belldandy glanced down the retaining grey-brown plaster wall that stretched towards the front gate torii. From this visual perspective, everything _looked_ normal as far as she could tell. She could even discern the thin black curvings that were finger-nailing the street surface near the entrance to the temple...indications of the many times when Keiichi or Megumi had peeled out from the temple on their motorcycles, late for school yet again. Still, the unsettled sense of her extrasensory perceptions flowed her towards a cautious regard.

"I think we can proceed safely, but I'm not certain if Skuld has reprogrammed Banpei to recognize you as our sister. And...my intuition is telling me that this is _wrong_. So we should be very careful," Belldandy noted as she tapped Mara on the shoulder, indicating that she felt it was safe to piggyback towards the temple gate.

"What's with her? She found out I was her sister _five months ago_! That's more than a mere case of procrastination! I'll teach that little brat to disrespect her older sister!" Mara complained with a threat. Hefting her shouldered, she lifted Belldandy back up and started walking towards the entrance.

"You better make sure that Skuld's semi-autonomous rolling junkpile doesn't get a massive ego and try to pike me with a bo staff! Because if he does, the brat is going to be in _real_ trouble the next time I see her! And if he doesn't have any charms to restrain my Demonic Powers, I'll melt him into a pool of slag!" Mara grumbled. Sure enough, she could hear the sure whirring of mecha footsteps.

Belldandy neglected to remind Mara that her Demonic powers were probably quite restrained in the present moment when it came to offensive firepower.

"Banpei-kun! It's me!" Belldandy shouted happily as the red-hat robotic guardian appeared from the temple house entryway. Banpei whipped to the corner of the wooden veranda and paused, sizing her up. Poised on the edge of the planking, he really did look like a little watchman...

"See!! It's all right, Mara! Banpei-kun _recognizes_ me!" she said in a relieved voice. Suddenly, Banpei started rolling towards them at a rapid clip. About five meters away, the metal-capped watchman slid to a stop, his brakes screeching against the driveway gravel. In the next few seconds, he transformed himself into a new mecha-configuration, one that Belldandy didn't recognize.

Bristling with extra mecha-plugouts and appendages...

"_Goddess intruder detected! Authorizing Skuld Def-Con Status One! Goddess Music Entrapment Strategy Four implemented! Full Goddess Interdiction Mode activated!_" he said in a crisp metallic voice.

The opening theme from "Zeiram, The Animation" started playing, filling the air with musical angst and beloharmony.

Almost immediately, Mara felt herself being kneed in the ribs by Belldandy's legs, which were now moving rhythmically on their own.

"Ooof! Argh! Belldandy...OW!...for Darkness's sake..oof!, wouldya...STOP IT!" Mara screamed, as the number of potential ribcage bruises increased. A stray elbow caught her in the side of the head.

The headache side. But then again, her whole head was 'the headache side'.

"YEEEOWWWWCH!" Mara screamed, almost collapsing under the blow.

"I..I didn't mean to! I..I can't stop myself!" Belldandy gasped desperately.

"And I can't hold you much longer!" Mara shouted, leaning hard right to try and keep her footing after the crack-sharp blow to the head.

Both Goddess and Demoness teetered...and fell flat on their faces.

Immediately, Banpei removed an extendable metal bo stick from his back and flicked it. The pole stretched segment-by-segment until it was almost three meters long. Mara flinched with recognition, as Banpei brandished the metallic cudgel. He swiftly rotored forward, his convex 'eyes' seemingly filled with menace.

And whacked Belldandy across the shoulders.

"_Goddess Physical Restraint Martiality Mode activated!_" the robotic sentry announced, twirling the bo stick in a complex kata-like routine as he prepared for unleash another blow.

Laying on her side, Mara looked at Belldandy in utter disbelief. Belldandy was sprawled akimbo on the ground, but yet she seemed to be trying to _dance_ while laying on her side. Her Goddess sister's body seemed to be remote-controlled, to the point where she couldn't even get back onto her knees. Banpei tractored to one side, seeking an opening. With a start, Mara realized that she wasn't the intended assaultive target...Banpei was trying to assail _Belldandy_ with his extendable iron rod!

Thinking quickly, she rolled to her side to face the mechanical robotic watchman, and then lashed out with a side kick, just enough to force Banpei's footing to the left. His attempt to bludgeon Belldandy fell off to the side of her head by a scant third of a meter.

He wasn't just playing around...Banpei was lashing out with full-force blows, hitting hard. The tip of his Bo stick was blasting out splinters and chips of concrete sparkage as it cracked down again, barely missing Belldandy.

Meanwhile, Belldandy continued to gyrate and sway to the anime music...

Reaching out, Mara hoisted herself to her feet, and then yanked Belldandy upwards as Banpei struck the Goddess again in the full of her ass...

"Ahh...AHHHAH!" Belldandy screamed in pain. "Banpei-kun, what are you..."

Belldandy felt a wrenching pain in her ankle as Mara deftly lifted her off the ground. A moment later, she felt the Demoness reaching around her waist, trying to position her so that she could carry her fireman-style...obviously to keep from being elbowed or kneed. Try as she might, Belldandy just couldn't prevent her legs and arms from moving to the music.

"Let's get the blazin' Yggdrasil-hell outta here!" Mara yelled as she shifted to her stealth manifestation and started running as fast as she could, carrying Belldandy over her shoulder.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"I carried you all that way from the temple to here...and you didn't even once think about super-deforming?!" Mara asked, very irritated. To add to sense of irritation, small circlets of steam puffed out from behind the Demoness's ears.

"Well Mara...why didn't _you_ think about it? It's not proper that you blame me for a situation that is the result of both of us forgetting. As a matter of principle, you should consider yourself even more blameworthy. After all, you _did_ super-deform back when we were in the alley, just to prove you could! Knowing this, you could have suggested it back then..." Belldandy answered back unflinchingly.

"What was I supposed to do while Skuld's idiot robot was attacking me?" Mara shot back angrily.

"Mara, please take a moment to recall Banpei-kun's _exact_ words. He said '_Goddess_ intruder detected'!" Belldandy emphasized. "It may just be me...but I got the distinct impression that he didn't seem the least bit interested in attacking you. He was attacking _me_, for some unknown reason. Perhaps he was malfunctioning..."

"Or perhaps we aren't on the Earthrealm at all!" Mara finished her younger sister's sentence. "Maybe we're on some plane of existence that exists only as a simulacrum of the Earthrealm we live on. One of the so-called Alternate Schemas."

"This would be dreadful! If this isn't the Earthrealm, then how am I supposed to find my future husband? What if Keiichi is in danger!" Belldandy fretted.

"Must you always think 'Keiichi this, Keiichi that' whenever a crisis comes up?" Mara snapped.

"Well, yes! I should! Keiichi-dear is my fiancé! It's natural that a wife-to-be would worry about her fiancé! It's become a habit over the past few years...and _you're_ partly to blame for that, Mara. Always trying to hurt my dear Keiichi!" Belldandy asserted.

"Not all habits are good, Little Sister!" Mara responded. As usual, Belldandy shot her the briefest expression of ire at being called "Little Sister". Mara realized that Belldandy's fixation on Keiichi was a clear sign that the Goddess was slipping ever deeper into panic mode. Weighing the confusion that seemed to reign over this irregular situation, all that Belldandy could seem to focus upon were domestic concerns of the heart.

But beyond this, Mara was extremely curious about the enigmatic behavior of Skuld's robot guardian. The idiot-chip mecha was actually malfing to the max...to the point where he had actually _attacked_ Belldandy! Mara still had to grit her teeth to keep from laughing when she remembered how Banpei had caned Belldandy on the ass with his extendable bo stick! But something measured even weirder in Mara's mind: the fact that Skuld's pet robot didn't even seem to attempt to try and harrow her. It was as if Banpei's Demon Attack Mode had been switched off. There was no torpedoed charm papers, no parrying with his bo stick, no loud sirens to alert the other Goddesses...

Instead, Banpei's full fury seemed to have been waged against Belldandy.

"Get a grip on yourself!" she overhead Belldandy exhorting herself in a low grim voice. Mara looked at Belldandy's ankle, which was appreciably even more swollen than earlier. All she could do was shake her head, still engaged in disbelief that a Goddess could have a sprained ankle.

Belldandy had felt her feelings fusing into solidly illusionary rationales. Like the uncertain flow of candle wax, the gaze of her profound Goddess intuition had yielded no insight into this present situation. She reminded herself that the heart of a Goddess is as broad as a galaxy and as deep as a white hole...and with a dint of effort, she successively relaxed her consciousness, level by level. She had been in worse circumstances before. She remembered her own words, about how life was a precious adventure that was meant to be lived _adventurously_. Pierce the veil, unman the stage, dim the lighthouse beams...and the truth is as real as one can allow. But oft times, the mind behind the eye had to be patient; allowing time for the eye to adjust to the darkness so as to perceive the truth that emerges from the absence of light...

All truths eventually converge in the Present, if one's will is strong enough to endure the swell of the moment's challenges.

"Mara, I think that the best approach to this unreliable situation is one of cautious observation. You and I should somehow station ourselves near the temple, so we can start to gather information that might explain Banpei-kun's erratic behavior. There must be a reasonable explanation to all of this..."

"The only reasonable explanation is that Skuld crossed a set of wires, so that Banpei is mixing up Demonesses and Goddesses! I always knew that her robot inventions were defective...now this proves it!"

"Not true! If Banpei-kun confused me with a Demoness, then how would he react when my sisters come home? Wouldn't he attack Urd and Skuld as well?"

"That's...a good point, Belldandy," Mara admitted.

"And what about Keiichi...would Banpei attack him when he comes home?" Belldandy noted. She was surprised that Mara had overlooked something so obvious.

"So what should we do? Wait until our sisters come home? Remember, Urd and Skuld are _my_ sisters too! So I have a vested interest in finding out what's going on here as well!" Mara emphasized.

"As long as we bring ourselves to this moment...we cannot find ourselves without our 'selfs'," Belldandy said, winking at Mara.

"Add confusing to the list of her attributes," Mara thought sullenly as she watched Belldandy from the corner of her eye.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Belldandy decided that she would wait up all night if need be, so that she could catch a glimpse of her beloved Keiichi as he returned home from school. But as the Sun glimpsed lands far to the West and the nightsky turned her breath into mist-clouds, her flowering hopes seemed to fade, closing in towards themselves. She knew that this must be a school day...while waiting for Keiichi, she had observed several groups of sailor-suited girls gaily walking by, filled with youthful vim and cheer.

She continued to wait...

Now, it was well past midnight and he hadn't returned. He _should_ have been home hours ago! From her vantage point high up on the hill that overlooked the temple complex and several kilometers of Makuhari, she could see the myriads of mortal activities. People driving on the roads, students up late at NIT, overnight deliverymen, carousing salarymen bar-hopping...

It _seemed_ to be the same. The only thing missing was Keiichi.

After nightfall, it was Mara who had first noticed that everybody that walked down the street fronting the temple did so by using the sidewalk _across_ the street from the temple gate and walls. Not a single Earthrealm mortal had walked alongside the beige wall that enclosed the temple grounds. This was another mystery. For a dozen seasons of afternoons, Belldandy had waited on the porch for Keiichi to come home...and she had smilingly observed thousands of mortals walk along their temple's walls. Back home, people seemed to go out of their way to walk along the temple walls; their stride marked by a lighter gait, a little bit more spy and gay in demeanor. She always believed that when the mortals walked next to their temple, they experienced a moment where all the cares of the mundane world were lifted from their Souls.

"Seemingly it's as if it is cursed, and the mortals know deep in the bones not to come near it," Mara had observed randomly with a yawn, gesturing with her chin towards the temple.

"Eh?"

"Much as_ I_ get creeped out by that front gate, isn't it too much of a coincidence that the Earthrealm mortals also avoid it? On a subconscious level, as if they sense that it poses a threat?" Mara had added, once again noting her uncomfortability with the temple's front gate torii.

Belldandy knew about the principle of matrix points. Throughout the history of the Earthrealm, certain geographical locales had, over time, become matrix points of Goddess or Demonic energy. These 'energy matrices' were points of Divine energy concentration: the result of a history of very powerful Grief bestowals by a DGO Agent or potent Relief bestowals by a GRO or Earth Otasuke agent. The Earth Spirits that inhabited the Earthrealm had spun a complex ecology of land and sea, so much so that the land itself was sometimes prone to 'remember' the good and bad events. In the case of grief and Demoness activity, the planet itself would react homeostatically to the ongoing presence of a Demoness, by creating an area of 'dark' energy that seemed to repulse those who came near it, save for those Earthrealm mortals whose natures were in affinity with the dark side of Life. Many areas on the Earthrealm repulsed the volition to explore; throughout history, these areas had been noted in humankind's myths as "dark woods" and "enchanted forests". However, she knew that the temple couldn't be such a spot, as it was constantly populated by three Goddesses over the past few years. Not to mention the fact that the site had been inhabited for eight centuries by venerable monks seeking spiritual holiness. In fact, the temple neighborhood was always the opposite...a place where the spirits of passersby were buoyed. So what could explain this foreboding she felt? The only recent permanent Demonic assignee to the Earthrealm in millennia...had been Mara. So there was little cause to construe the palpable dark energy around the temple grounds as being the result of Demonic powers. Belldandy turned to ask Mara about her interpretation of the darkling energies around the temple...

...and heard a dainty, yet unmistakable snore. Mara was fast asleep.

As she watched the sleeping Demoness, Belldandy suddenly sensed a 'rippling' in the arcanic forces nearby. Obviously the presence of another Divine being, hovering near the temple. Cautiously extending her Goddess senses, her initial sentiment was that the visitor possessed a benign nature. She also identified that the 'ripple' was barely discernible; whoever it was, she was approaching the temple with an _extreme_ level of arcanic stealth.

So why all the efforts to maintain a concealment?

More alert now, Belldandy corrected her identification of the presence. She had initially sensed that it was an Earth Grade Spirit...but a few moments later, the energy signatures shifted all wrong. Whatever the lifeforce was, it was radiating _a massive_ amount of Divine energy, on the order of a Goddess First or Second Class Licensee!

Perhaps it was another being masquerading as an Earth Grade Spirit in order to remain inconspicuous.

This wasn't a simple matter, as Belldandy began to harbor doubts that she was on the Earthrealm at all...or on any Earthrealm. At the edges of a Goddess's ability to sense their environment is the ability to search through the individual atoms of reality. The Multiverse was created out of a 'rightness', as it were. Each individual particle, element, compound, being...even the ethereal realities such as spirits, ghosts and Divines...were perfected and distinguishable from all other manifestations of reality. Ordered, rather than random. Organized along the lines of restraint, but a restraint that allowed for exponential growth and complexity. Thus, _everything_ in the Multiverse was monadic...was distinct in its arising. No two of anything were exactly the same. This infinitude of distinctive individuation was crucial, because it manifested in the fact that the most basic physical attributes allowed for an infinite recombinibility. The Multiverse thrived on this ever-expanding macrocosm of individuality. Even clones that were exact doppelgangers on the cellular level...were distinct beings from the very first moment of sentient self-awareness. They had their own Souls.

Therein routes the jagged road of confusion.

Belldandy was well aware that this Earthrealm was of the same coin as the Earthrealm she had lived in for the past several years. All her senses and intellect informed her of this fact. In her mind, she could hear the broadcasts of thousands of TV stations all over the globe...playing the same TV shows. In the case of Makuhari Japan, each of the TV networks were broadcasting the same late-night TV content. The kind of shows Urd liked, such as the more 'adult' anime series and the vulgar comedy shows. She could hear the 'breath' of the city; the same sleepers...the same somnambulant symphony of dreams...

And yet, despite the familiarities of the song and dance of humanity she sensed, Belldandy's heart remained colored, unsettled. The superficial sense of this place was the same...but fundamentally, in every channel of deep communion with recognizable dimensionalities, it was _not_ the same. Closing her eyes, she concentrated her Norn abilities to focus on the very marrow of Time itself, using her being as a key to unlock the mysteries of the TimeWeb. Examining this reality from the perspective of PresentTime, Belldandy discovered that this TimeWeave was the same as the TimeWeave she came from; in every respect as best as she could tell, this place was in its proper position within the TimeStream. And she knew for certain that there was only one TimeWeb...Kami-sama had told her as much when she was promoted to Norn of the Present. Thus, if everything was the same Space and Time here...why did Banpei confuse her for a Demoness?

That again. Another mystery to solve.

Then Belldandy started to fall asleep...and just after sleep had gathered her eyes to close, she thought she heard someone climbing over the temple wall in the distance...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Birdsong roused her to wakefulness the next day as the dawning sun sprayed luminous beams of sunlight through the peaked clouds onto Makuhari. At least the birds were friendly here...a fact that made Belldandy homesick. But oddly enough, they didn't recognize her. Every bird that passed within ten kilometers of Makuhari knew Belldandy by sight alone. Even migratory birds such as the Mongolian Plovers and the East Siberian Swifts would recognize her Angel's morning song, taking a break from their airborne thousands-of-kilometers journeying to come pay their respects. Holy Bell constantly sang to the birds, creating a global neighborhood of avian compatriotism that centered on their temple in Makuhari.

But Belldandy noticed that these birds were actually afraid of her at first, until Holy Bell sang the Sun to arise...

"How ironic that I'm only a block away from my temple home, and yet I feel such homesickness," she observed to herself. Mara was already awake, looking at the temple through some sort of hi-tech binoculars. Once again, Belldandy was reminded of Mara's penchant for gimmicks and toyish affectations. This was just another behavior that was the polar opposite of Skuld: Skuld built mechas...Mara played with them.

Set one straw-blonde curly-girl Demoness down in front of an XBox III, and she'll zone out for hours, oblivious to everyone and everything else. One of Mara's earlier Demon Lairs was located in the basement of a former early 80's videogame palace. As far as Belldandy knew, Urd was the only other divine being whose addiction to mortal video games even somewhat approached Mara's love of amusements. The two elder sisters were gaga about TV sets; just another trait among many that the twin sisters shared. Skuld didn't seem too interested in TV at all, and even less in mortal computer games. But Belldandy had strong suspicions that her youngest sister liked to play romance RPGs in the privacy of her "Skuld Labs" hobby room.

Over the past two days, Belldandy had observed no comings or goings through the temple gate. On a normal weekend, Keiichi would easily make two or three trips on his BMW. Then there was Megumi, who always spent Sundays either hanging out with her boyfriend Genji or mallratting with her best friend Sora. Urd would occasionally sneak out to snag a bottle of sake, or take a walk through one of the parks. And now that Skuld had mastered the bicycle, Belldandy was certain that her little sister couldn't go more than a few days without biking it over to one of the ice cream parlors or confectioners for a treat.

Three days was a long enough wait.

Yesterday, Mara had forced her to go to the hospital. After relenting to Mara's insistent demands, Belldandy and Mara visited the local emergency room. Mara, being who she was, she forgot to dress decently...her inappropriately alluring outfit causing a lot of commotion amongst the male medical staff. Despite this embarrassment, Belldandy managed to endure the series of x-rays of her ankle. An hour later, the on-duty physician pronounced that her ankle and foot had several stress fractures, possibly caused by a fall. By the time she and Mara left the hospital, the doctors had cast her foot in a bulky walking cast and given her a pair of crutches to use.

Naturally, she was able to walk without the crutches after some practice.

She eyed the crutches propped against the wall where she and Mara were hiding out. Belldandy found herself wondering how Keiichi could have possibly survived using them for so long after his racing accident...

Both she and Mara were immersed in verses of debate as to why they had noticed no mortals come out of the house and walk around the grounds. The only presence she noticed was that of Banpei-kun, who was patrolling the temple's grounds with his usual infans-ex-machina vigilance.

Belldandy decided that it was time to go to the source.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

The next evening, ignoring Mara's protests, Belldandy hobbled across the street. Once she reached the other side, she quietly stood herself in concealment next to the temple torii. Once again, Banpei halted in the midst of his patrolling and advanced on her with an unmistakable aggressiveness, shouting "_Goddess Intruder Detected!_" at the top of his metallic voice. She barely escaped the swing of his metal Bo stick. Fortunately, Banpei was in power cord mode, otherwise he would have chased her into the street with wolverine ferocity.

"Didn't I tell you that would happen?" Mara reminded Belldandy smugly once the Goddess returned to their alley-path hideaway.

"Yes..hnn..you did, Mara. But I cannot simply remain here spying on _my own house_ without..hunh!..knowing _why_ I'm doing so! The answers lie in our temple...and I can't even get in through the front gate without alarming Banpei!" Belldandy admitted in an out-of-breath voice, swallowing hard on the hemlock-taste of her deep frustration.

"Hmmm. Much as I am wary of being charm-attacked by Skuld's mechanical sentry, I think that it might be best if I try to get in the temple. After all, I _have_ managed to sneak in undetected dozens of times in the past..."

"_Don't_ remind me, Mara..." Belldandy interrupted, rolling her eyes with a sigh. "But I would caution you to avoid assuming an air of overconfidence. We _did_ detect you on a number of occasions as well. And you know what happened then..."

Mara flinched angrily as Belldandy's caveat hearkened numerous recollections of all the times she had been busted by the Norns. Choosing to ignore her sister's saliency, she continued her justification-cum-explanation.

"...which only goes to prove that I'm much better at sneaking around the temple than you. You _live_ there, which means that you're used to barging right in the front door. We Demons are more subtle in our ways. We're expert at willfully molding subterfuge and concealment to our own designs, in order to accomplish our noiric purposes. I, no doubt, will succeed where you failed, Younger Sister!" Mara announced, her voice edged with a tang of sibling competitiveness.

With a whoosh, Mara dashed across the street before Belldandy could remind her of how balloon-egoed she was acting.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Mara peeked around the corner; observing that Banpei was busy pacing in front of the temple house like a futuristic guardsknight. She slipped back into the shadows, deciding that it would be prudent to wait until Banpei returned to his "Banpei Shed" before making her move. She well remembered performing this same waiting game many times before; knowing full well that once Banpei went into the Banpei Shed, he would remain there for at least 20 minutes.

The Banpei Shed served as a home for all the various Banpei's Skuld had built. What they did when they went inside the shed, Mara didn't have a clue. She did know that there were several large living stuffed animals in there, thanks to Peorth's errant granting of Banpei's even more errant wish late last year. Her best guess was that Banpei would withdraw into his house so he could have the robotic equivalent of a social life. Or maybe he played at having a 'family': he was the dad, then all the Mini-Banpei's were the kids and one of the stuffed animals was the mom...

No, that wasn't right. Someone else would be have to be the 'mom'. In any case, Mara preferred to think of Banpei's home as the "doghouse". To her, Banpei was more of a pet to Skuld and the other Goddesses than a living AI mecha in his own right...a fact that had gotten Skuld in trouble more than once, much to Mara's amusement. Skuld felt that, since she created Banpei, that she owned him too. Several misadventures had proved her wrong...

_"Hi, Miss Mara! Welcome!"_

"EyyyaaahhH!" Mara shouted, her Soul nearly jumping out of her physical manifestation at the sound of the nearby voice.

"I'm glad to see that you're visiting our temple home again. Umm, did you do something with your forehead? I thought you were a Goddess! But you look...hee hee...like a Demoness. Are you wearing a disguise? And what are you doing out here in the open like this? Won't you get in trouble for being here in the midday?" the voice asked.

Mara's chest was heaving with surprised gasps of excitement...and then she realized that the suddenly intrusive voice was that of a _child_. Spinning around, she looked down to see another one of Skuld's mechas...Sigel...standing to her right, only about a meter away.

The blessed robot-girl had snuck up on her totally unawares!

"Yo..yo..yo..you..you," Mara stammered.

"Wow! You certainly look like you're surprised to see me! Don't you even recognize me?" the little girl-robot asked. She pranced in front of Mara like a ballerina and then curtsied and bowed, pulling the edges of her navy blue skirt up.

Now she remembered whom the 'mom' of Banpei's family was...

"Uh...yes!" Mara stammered, silently cursing herself for her flustered nervous reaction. After all, this was just another one of Skuld's robotic experiments. Unlike Banpei, this mechanized girl wouldn't attack her. Sigel wasn't designed to function in the role of house guardian, like Banpei. Sigel was more purposeful, serving as the temple's official welcomer. She often greeted humans and Divines with her pleasant smile and youthful presence. The only person she was known to attack was Dr. Morrow...

And Banpei, on occasion.

This natural outcome of having two such independent, headstrong-A.I.'d robots in one household...was always quite amusing to Mara. She couldn't have possibly ever put a better curse on Banpei than this state of circumstances created.

Patting Sigel on the head, Mara noted, "And you think that I'm supposed to be a Goddess? Then how do you explain these?"

She grinned wide and pointed to her fangs.

"Oooh...those are so pretty!" Sigel marveled with girlish fascination. "They look just the ones that the tigers have at the zoo!"

If Mara had been a manga character, she would have either big-sweated or would have emitted a puffcloud of grey smoke out of the back of her head. Yet, this was the real world...and she was astonished at the little robot's cheekiness. Mara quickly concluded that Skuld must have patterned parts of Sigel's AI after Belldandy; if this girl-robot's naivety was any indication. Or maybe Belldandy herself had something to do with Sigel's mecha-engrammed behavioral protocols.

"So why don't you tell me why you think I'm a Goddess, Sigel?" Mara asked in a parental tone. The fact that Sigel had admitted that she thought Mara was a Goddess piqued Mara's interest. Perhaps this little girl-robot could disclose some useful information.

"Because you visit our temple every night when everyone else is asleep. I'm surprised that Banpei isn't attacking you right now. He likes to attack Goddesses," she answered with matter-of-factness.

"You mean Banpei isn't malfunctioning?" Mara wondered aloud.

"Of course not! His only malfunction is that he can _never catch me_," Sigel answered with a smirky giggle. She skipped around in an oval, and then stood right up to Mara. "He thinks that he's in love with me, but I'm too smart for him! Besides, he's not even in a human form. I think he's ugly and stupid!"

"Appearances can be deceiving, Sigel. Many consider Demons to be nothing but evil, based on our appearance. But even Demons can love and be kind..." Mara replied. Sigel looked at her with wide eyes, as if she had expounded a profound truth.

"So who lives here, Sigel?"

"As if you don't know! Skuld, my creator...and Belldandy, Urd, and Keiichi!" Sigel replied with a mocking scowl.

Mara looked at her aghast.

"They're right! You Goddesses _are_ all idiots!" she added.

"I'm a _Demoness_, not a Goddess!" Mara shouted angrily.

"If you're a Demoness, then I'm a kappa's ass..." Sigel said sarcastically. Mara was readying a response when her thoughts were interrupted by a tell-tale whirring. She frowned, regretting her loud remonstration with Sigel as Banpei emerged from the shed and sped towards her.

"Well...that's my cue. Gotta run!" Mara explained quickly, as Banpei closed in...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"So Sigel said that my _sisters_ live there? That _Keiichi_ lives there? If this is true, why haven't we seen any of them? Do you think she may be mistaken?" Belldandy anguished after Mara finished describing her encounter with Sigel.

"Doubt it. She seemed to be fully coherent the whole time. And yep, that's exactly what she said. It even seems that she's the love-object of a frustrated Banpei, just as it has been for a couple years. Sigel even claimed that 'you Goddesses are all idiots!' That's the first thing she's ever said that made sense to me!" Mara replied with a grin.

"I'm not going to let myself be baited by your insipidence, Mara! Besides, this isn't true! I just don't understand how she could possibly say something so demeaning towards us! After all, it was Skuld who gave her an entirely new life. It would be more appropriate for her to be grateful to we Goddesses. But curiously enough, I've never known Sigel to be such a smart-aleck, except when she's around Banpei or Keiichi!" Belldandy noted.

"But that's what she said. Odd, isn't it!" Mara added.

"Yes, it is very strange. Perhaps it is time for me to accompany you to the temple, so I can talk to Sigel directly. Perhaps you could keep an eye on Banpei...and when he goes to his house for a break, you can motion me to come over. Then I could talk sensibly to Sigel. She may have been intimidated by the fact that you are a Demoness, Mara."

"Oh..hh..hh! I don't think so. She even said..." Mara corrected, whispering into Belldandy's ear.

"She said _that_? Our sweet, lovable Sigel?!" Belldandy blurted. Mara nodded her head.

"Then this place is much more terrible than I could ever imagine! Sigel has one of the most incorruptible AI's Skuld could have ever created. It isn't within the latitudes of her behavioral protocols to say such coarse things! Even Skuld would never say something like that. At least the _old_ Skuld, back when she was a girl. But now that she's a teenager...well, I still would doubt it!" Belldandy explained.

"She said what she said, Belldandy. Skuld or not, I heard Sigel say it with my own ears!"

"Now I'm even more convinced that I should talk to Sigel directly, if for anything, to give her some guidance," Belldandy concluded.

"Sounds safe enough. But I'm still wary about Banpei...right at the end of our talk, he seemed like he was going to attack me."

"Well, just as long as he doesn't play those anime soundtracks..." Belldandy said worriedly.

"So your dance weakness is anime soundtracks? Who'd have guessed!" Mara asked with slyly narrowed eyes.

"Yes," Belldandy admitted with a sigh. "All Goddesses have a dance weakness. You already know that Urd's weakness is polka music...it puts her right to sleep. Sometimes, it comes in handy when she's in a hissy fit."

"Polka music puts most mortals to sleep, except those burly-beard stein-champions during Oktoberfest!" Mara interrupted

"Now Mara, as you know, all cultures on the Earthrealm have national musicks. To many, our Japanese enka music would be just as boring," Belldandy said in a lecturing tone.

"That's cuz it _is_ boring!" Mara exclaimed. "Lovelorn wives, jilted salarymen, rehashs of stale historical romances...enka's a total drag on the ears! The only person I know who likes it is Tamiya. And to him, singing enka at a karaoke session is like some kind of drunken ritual! You saw how he was last Xmas at that crazy Karaoke party!"

"You must remember that our dear Tamiya-sempai is from the North. He's a country boy, although he would never admit _how much of a country boy_ he is to his friends. He's lived in rustic, rural Hokkaido for almost his whole life. So it is natural that he would admire the noble spontaneity of enka music," Belldandy reminded.

"He's a largish buffoon, if you ask me. Speaking of the foolish ones, I wonder what Skuld's musical weakness is?" Mara asked with a thoughtful expression.

"Knowing her, it's probably techno..." Belldandy answered, drawing a giggle from Mara. As she watched Mara's mirthful reaction, she paused for a moment as it struck her that she had just made fun of Skuld in front of Mara! A few months ago, she wouldn't have even thought of doing such a thing. But now, since Mara was 'family' for all practical purposes, it only seemed natural for Belldandy to point out the foibles of her siblings. And Mara's reaction to her little joke seemed to reciprocate with the fullness of sibling mischief...

"Do all Demonesses have musical weaknesses?" Belldandy asked.

"That's classified information, Belldandy! Besides, I'd get in a lot of trouble if I told you about what kinds of music each Demoness has a weakness for..." Mara answered.

Belldandy nodded her head in her best "do tell..." expression.

"Ooops!" Mara shouted. "Oh shit...now I'm really in for it! What if His Dark Majesty just heard what I said! This is blessedly terrible...I just gave away a state secret to a Goddess! Even if she's my younger sis, that won't count as an excuse if I'm called on the carpet by Him..."

Belldandy looked at Mara with a worrisome expression...until they both got pelted by chocobit stick candies that rained from the sky like hailstones!

"Oww! Ow! Ow! Owww!!" the Demoness and Goddess shouted as a couple thousand wrapped sticks of candy piled on them. In less than a minute, the 'downpour' ended.

"Do you think this was His response?" Belldandy asked as she tore open one end of a piece of candy and started crunching on the chocolate covered stick. As she tasted the milk-sweet flavor, she wished that Skuld was here. Despite being advanced in age some 40 thousand years, her teenaged younger sister still had a sweet tooth. In fact, Skuld's penchant for candies seemed even stronger now that she was older. Belldandy knew that Skuld would have been in "seventh heaven" as the mortals termed it, if chocolate candy had rained down on her.

"Nah, I doubt it," Mara answered Belldandy's question. "Oni-sama's response to any screwups that we Demons make is just a little bit more...darker...than this. For argument's sake, I'll just say that, having been brunted by His punishments a couple times in the past...our Dark Lord definitely has a nasty sadistic streak. He would never rain chocostix down on someone as a punishment...unless they were allergic to chocolate. That's just how He is..."

Belldandy shuddered at implications of this revelation. She had always considered the Almighty's sanctions were strict enough...even if they were rarely more severe than a license suspension. But even the Lord had a righteous streak, which He had brought to bear on Skuld when she revealed the existence of Vanagdrasil to the mortals last year. She still remembered how Cevn had stood up for her little sister that time...

So who had just rained chocolate pocky stix on them?

"Perhaps your Dark Lord has a sense of humor in addition to his mean streak..." Belldandy noted in a quiet voice as they walked back to their hiding place.

Mara stumbled and almost lost her footing...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Once again, a Goddess and a Demoness were studying the temple environs, creating acts of reconnaissance to satisfy their curiosity about chocostix, missing Goddesses and mortals, and errantly unpredictable robotic sentries...

Shortly after nightfall, Banpei retired to his shed/home for a recharge. Now that the coast was clear, Mara hurriedly motioned Belldandy to come over. The Norn of the Present hobbled across the street, her footcast making a "snik-papping" sound as she crossed the pavement. Mara was amazed at how fast Belldandy could move with that footcast!

Once Belldandy joined her, Mara gestured towards the house, noting that she thought she had noticed Keiichi peeking out of a window. Belldandy's heart was instantly forested with rejoicing at this news. She kept her eyes glued towards the window.

A few moments later, Keiichi emerged from the house. His furtive movements suggested to Belldandy that he was trying to avoid Banpei as well, as he stealthily tiptoed behind the garage, dashing from tree to tree along the way. Belldandy watched the corner of the garage hopefully...and sure enough, she saw Keiichi's face profiled against the light shining down from the eaves-corner.

"Keiich...mmmph!"

Mara hastily covered Belldandy's mouth with her hand before the Goddess could unleash one of her patent loud yells. Belldandy's reaction wasn't unexpected; Mara knew that her sister would react with impulsive exhilaration at first sighting of Keiichi. But the last thing they needed was to alert the whole mechanized armada!

Belldandy felt her breathing rapidify as Keiichi darted out from behind the garage. He was looking right at her...she could see the beautiful shades of his eyes even in the spare moonlight.

And then he broke his eye contact with her.

"Maraaaaa..." Keiichi shouted in reply, running towards her and Belldandy.

At the sound of her name, Mara became really confused...and dropped her hand away from Belldandy's mouth. She watched as Keiichi dashed up and melded into a shadow next to the tree closest to the front gate torii. He paused to cast a final searching glance at the temple, and then he sprinted towards the pair.

"Keiichi!" Belldandy exclaimed excitedly. At last, she would be reunited with her fiancé! Her mind hosted a thousand questions that she wanted to ask him. What had happened to Urd and Skuld? Was Cevn revived? Why was Banpei acting so strangely? How did he get brought back to the temple? Where were they...was this the Earthrealm?

She was seconds away from being in his arms. Every single cell of her being resonated with dragonfast memories...of all the times she had kissed him, talked to him, joked with him, listened to him, comforted him, made love with him...

Her excitement mounted as she leaned towards him as he ran up to her...

Ran past her...

And hugged Mara.

"Mara! _It's really you!!_ I've been waiting so long for us to be reunited! Oh God, how I've _missed_ you!!" Keiichi shouted breathlessly as he grabbed Mara around the shoulders and pulled her tightly against him.

And then kissed her on the lips.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Mara reacted with wordless shock as Keiichi dashed right by Belldandy and grabbed _her_ instead! Her paralysis increased as he pulled her tight against his body; in his excitement, he was hugging her so closely that he actually was pinning her arms against her sides. She could feel his heart pumping, his adrenaline racing, his bodily excitement and arousal. Before she could react at all, Keiichi said something to the effect of "How I missed you!"...and then he _kissed her_!

In a nanosecond, every Demonic reflex told her to burn him to a crisp on the spot, especially when he tried to force his tongue in her mouth. There were some lines that shouldn't be crossed...and this was definitely one of them! It had all happened so fast, she didn't even have time to react. That, and the strong heady lustful aura that Keiichi exuded had completely dazed her, disarming her of any defensive recoil. The boldness of his kisses took Mara's breath away before she could even breath it. Revolted and yet stirred by his unexpected amorous onslaught, Mara had sense enough to check herself right before she made him spontaneously combust. Burning Keiichi to death in front of Belldandy was against the Rules...not to mention that it would alienate her from her three sisters forever.

Then she remembered that Belldandy _was_ here...and that the entire portion and parcel of this extreme insanity was occurring right in front of her sister's eyes.

Mara jolted into a worry that _she_ might be the one who would wind up being burnt to a crisp.

Stunned, she tried to push Keiichi away instead of crisping him. Her struggles became more intense as he _continued_ to kiss her with a lover's ambrosial boldness. She was amazed at the masculine aggression of his embraces...it was as if he fully _expected_ her to respond with an equal fit of passion. As his physical affections increased, Mara struggled even more, writhing under his tight embrace. She felt her breasts heaving tight against his chest as he ran his hands up and down her back...

She realized that reasoning wasn't going to make Keiichi loosen his embrace. Deciding to tap into her Demoness abilities, Mara increased her considerable stamina to superhuman proportions of strength. Force was the only language she could use to break Keiichi's lunatic clasp and convincingly shove him away. With a heave, she repelled him...right into Belldandy. Guilt seized her as she realized that she may have hurt one or both of them.

Then she looked at Belldandy.

Belldandy was glaring at her with iceblue eyes that could melt the Sun...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

With bated breath, Belldandy had held her arms wide open to greet Keiichi. For even the short time he was beyond the window of her soul, she felt marred...incomplete. Every day, she wanted to tell him her life; to throw forth a series of delicious moments to taste against the honeyed dew of Keiichi's sweet excitement. She wanted to shower him with words and expressions, to reveal filaments and shadows against the golden candle of his heart...

In a moment, she would be safe in his arms!

As he sprinted towards her and Mara, Belldandy could see anxiety writ all over his face. Keiichi was gripped with terror; his fear-aura was so strong, Belldandy sensed that perhaps Death Himself had riveted His scourging morbidity to her fiancé's Soul. She desperately wanted to comfort Keiichi...without a doubt, he was far more disoriented than either she or Mara. She wanted to untangle his confusion with the winds of truth. With each step, the distance between her and her beloved was narrowed, and the tingling in her body grew with anticipation of his embrace.

Blinding...

Belldandy felt the wind rustle her skirt...saw the blur of motion ride past. With a hawk-like purposefulness, Keiichi had dashed _right past her_...and straight into the arms of Mara! He had completely ignored her greeting embrace! Instead of hugging her, he had gone right to Mara.

To..._Mara_.

In an instant, Belldandy was completely absorbed in a fugue berthed in rapt disappointment; the kind of anesthetized electric-flare that literally grips the spirit and squeezes it into disbelieving numbness. Transfixed by the enormity of the outrageous betrayal she had just witnessed, she held her fists by her hips. Her whole body was combed with opposites: a stunned stillness alongside a shuddering ire...as she watched her fiancé prizing Mara with a passionate lover's embrace. Kissing Mara with an unreserved passion. Holding Mara tightly against his chest, heartbeat to heartbeat. Roving his hands over Mara's hips and shoulders...

Betrayed, Belldandy felt her sanity leave and return a million times during those few seconds. Her emotions meteoring wildly, she noticed Mara's hands wavering madly under Keiichi's embrace. She seemed to be struggling against him..._fighting_ Keiichi, trying to get him off of her. Belldandy's confusion fused; the star of dismay that she had held over Mara was now concentrated on Keiichi.

"Ge..umph...get _offa me_!" she heard Mara shout, her voice smothered with Keiichi's kisses. Her bewilderment myriaded as Mara continued to try and repel Keiichi. A moment later, Belldandy sensed her Demoness sister increasing her physical manifest strength. With a gasping heft, Mara thrust Keiichi away from her with all the mettle of a pro wrestler. Keiichi flailed his arms as he violently tumbled backwards...

Smashing right into her.

Belldandy staggered against the sudden impact, quickly reaching out and grabbing one of the torii's wooden posts for support. Somehow, her injured ankle had been spared another wrenching twist. Retrieving the wind that had just been knocked out of her, she watched as Keiichi gathered himself from his sprawl on the ground. His face was shining in the moonlight like a smoky mirror as he regarded her. She smiled at him in recognition, trying to soothe his unease. But the moment Belldandy realized that Keiichi had met her eyes, he started screaming maniacally, like someone whose dreams had just been ground into dust.

"Keiichi dear, you better have a _good_ explanation for this!" Belldandy demanded, her level voice metal-blade cold. Angle-faced, Keiichi pierced her with a manic stare...and Belldandy flinched as the telltale wheels of fright continued to deadspin in his eyes. Instead of being calmed by her presence, his affright had increased severalfold, to the point where he was almost cataleptic. She quickly scanned his emotional aura, prying aside the terror that filled his being...and was stunned to learn that he wasn't feeling a single flinch of guilt about kissing Mara. Possibilities roamed through her mind as she attempted to make sense of his guiltless emotional state. It was entirely possible that Keiichi may have become sociopathic or paranoid in reaction to being torn away from her by the vortex of lights. Or perhaps this wasn't the Keiichi she knew. Maybe he had been Mindwiped, unable to recognize her at all. Or maybe Keiichi was confusing her for someone else...

She cautiously watched him as he returned his regard to Mara, shuddering with distress.

"Y..you're _not Mara_!!" he screamed in a peeling voice, pointing right at Mara.

Mara looked back and forth between Belldandy and Keiichi nervously.

"You're _not_ my girlfriend! You're a _Demoness_!! You're one of _them_! You have those two markings on your forehead! Oh my God, this is absolutely horrible! They've kept me cooped up in that cursed temple...and now they've made my girlfriend into a _Demoness_!! When will the torture ever stop! Why is this happening to me?!" Keiichi screamed as he pushed Mara away from him with manic force, knocking her backwards against Belldandy. He gripped his head tightly as if he was going to tear it off, and then staggered blindly around them...

Belldandy screamed in pain as Mara stepped on her injured ankle, right before the two tumbled down to the ground. Even as the wrenching pain sucked the breath out of her, she could see lights flashing on inside the temple house...she could hear approaching voices and footfalls. The front door suddenly slid open and two figures emerged, silhouetted by the interior lights of the entryway.

Urd and Skuld.

"Over here!" Belldandy shouted, feeling fibrous as she saw her two sisters standing on the veranda.

"Get him! The little whelp's with Mara again!" Urd shouted.

"Banpei-kun! Guard and restrain!" Skuld commanded. Belldandy shifted her attention to the nearby out-building that served as Banpei's 'house'. Sure enough, Banpei burst out from his shed and made for the three.

The whirring sound of Banpei's motorized limbs snapped Mara out of her sense of disgust. No matter how much she wiped her lips with her sleeve, Mara couldn't get Keiichi's taste out of her mouth. Not only had he attacked her in front of Belldandy...his hygiene was completely lacking. His breath was stale; obviously he hadn't bathed or brushed his teeth in days. Banpei armed himself with a series of "clicks", his limbs sprouting weaponry...

Mara regarded the situation and reached a decision. Assessing the huge amount of danger from Banpei _plus_ Urd and Skuld, she decided it would be wise to retreat.

Hastily.

Unexpectedly, Belldandy made a lunging grab for Keiichi. The girl was so focused on her fiancé, she was completely oblivious to all else. She was too obsessed to care a whit about the rapidly approaching danger in the form of a 1.6-meter-tall mecha with an AI brimming with hostility...

Banpei was almost upon them.

"Banpei! Stop!" Belldandy commanded.

The steelshine spheric globule that served as Banpei's head turned towards her. The metallic watchman regarded her dispassionately...pausing for just the briefest of moments to diagnose the situation. He didn't pay any heed to her directive; in fact, he seemed to tighten his grip on his steel truncheon. Belldandy was shocked at his disobedience, but she was even more shocked when the lens of his 'eyes' began to shine with a bright red glow, filled with menace. In that instant, Belldandy knew that this wasn't Banpei...it was some kind of replica.

An evil Banpei.

"Keiichi! Quickly! Come with me!" she shouted, trying to tug him by his sleeve.

"Leave me alone! You're the _worst _of them!" he yelled back, struggling against her grip, kicking at her. Belldandy felt hugely frustrated by her foot injury...she completely lacked the balance she needed to maintain her hold on Keiichi. With a "snip!" Keiichi's sleeve ripped out of her grasp.

Instantly, Banpei was upon them.

Banpei raised his extendable Bo stick and prodded Keiichi with it. A blue-haze electrical smell filled the air as Keiichi gasped "unnhh!" and collapsed. Banpei swiftly caught him in mid-fall and turned to return to the house, ignoring she and Mara.

"How could you let Banpei do that to Keiichi!" Belldandy angrily confronted her sisters in the loudest voice her Earthrealm physical manifest could muster. Urd and Skuld had _just stood there_ on the veranda decking and watched it happen, not even lifting a finger to try and prevent Banpei's amok behavior. She didn't care that her shouts would wake up half of Makuhari...Banpei-kun had just stunned her beloved with his Bo weapon, wielding it viciously like a cattle prod.

Urd and Skuld turned towards her, their expressions shadowed by night.

"We gotta get out of here before he gets you too!" Mara screamed at Belldandy. Reaching out like a wrestler, she wrapped her arms around Belldandy's waist and forcefully pulled her to her feet. Before her Goddess sister could offer up a word of protest or pretext, Mara started off for the opposite side of the street, half-dragging half-hauling Belldandy alongside her as she fled from the temple.

And then the second most amazing event of the night happened. As Mara was dashing across the street at a full sprint, she hit a wall. She was fleeing as fast as she could manage...as fast as Belldandy could manage while running with an injured ankle...and then all her forward momentum was inexplicably 'blocked' by an invisibility.

The force of the abrupt collision slammed her backwards, right into Belldandy. Her wind was definitely caved out of her...and the now-constant migraine headache that she had been nursing just jumped up another notch in the Richter Scale of throbbing pain.

Mara slowly sat up, moaning as she held the side of her head. When she looked up, she saw...

_Herself._

For a moment, Mara was too stupefied by the apparition to even try and get up off of the street. If the light played on the figure just right, it was as if she was looking in a mirror. The...being...floating in front of her possessed the absolute clarity and exactness of a reflection. Although the expression of her 'double' was indistinct, due to the spirals and stars circling Mara's head as a result of the collision...she could almost sense that the 'other' Mara was as surprised as she was. The 'other' Mara was holding a hand to her head and floating quite unsteadily. Just as she started wishing that her head could clear up so she could examine her duplicate more closely, the fleeting image of the 'other' Mara fleetly dissipated under the street lights. As Mara struggled to her feet, she looked over her shoulder to see Belldandy pointing at her.

Seconds later, a Goddess and Demoness were safely stealing into the night shadows like two cats, occasionally glancing back over their shoulders helplessly while Banpei entered the temple house with the limp form of Keiichi nestled in his metallic arms.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --


	80. Pt 80: Keiichi: Untethering the Shadow ...

**Part 80: Keiichi: Untethering the Shadow--1st Movement**

_**"LOOK!! THERE HE IS!! HE'S COMING!!"**_

The crowd swept through the atrium with an organic tenacity, resembling a cytophage surrounding a stray bacterium as it surged around the silver and black stretch limousine that pulled up into the entryway. From the rooftop, the thronging crowd looked like it was threatening to collapse the stretchcar from without. The people in the queue closest to the vehicle pressed their faces against the passenger's windows, while the roof bip-papped with a pounding sound. Expressions of joy twisted almost all the faces; faces spun so frenetically that they appeared to scream with stress and ecstasy. The queue was packed so tightly around the car that none of its occupants could even force a door open. And in the moments after the vehicle stilled its engine full stop, the crowd got even more boisterous.

Crackling voices sounded over walkie-talkies...

From the tall building, several helmeted guards emerged and began to firmly restrain the crowd, pushing them away from the parked luxury car. The crowd, consisting mostly of teenage girls, semi-fought the men as they were cleared backwards. A space gradually formed around the limo. Several of the girls swooned, forcing the squadron of rent-a-cops to carefully drag them away from the throng. Posters and handmade signs were waving above the sea of heads like butterflies flitting over flowers as the crowdbuzz got even louder, cleaving the air with hyena-like hooting.

A car door opened up, and a large angry-looking man with the build of a sumo wrestler emerged. Blacksuited, he wore a large Western-style fedora hat on his shaved head; his narrow black sunglasses forged emphasis to his intimidating stature and bearing. With slow, deliberate motions, he projected a commanding confidence that momentarily stuttered the clamor of the crowd.

A TV announcer in front of a camera started shouting into his handmike...

_"And here he is...Japan's Number One Idol Singer-Actor! Star of the "Shin Musashi" TV Drama! His genius CD, "Yume-Yume Invincible!" is this year's top album! He's the breakthrough star of the ages! The 21st Century's biggest sensation! And now he's here! Let's give it up for..._

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Moments in a lifetime...

Before he knew what was happening, Keiichi found himself surrounded by a glaring flash of light...and when it faded, he was inside a huge car. As the fog cleared a little, he sensed the telltale new-car smell; and then his attention tuned into the decor of the car's interior. In front of him were luxuriously appointed leather seats, a mini-bar, a HDTV panel and tinted windows with a sliding middle piece. Although his thoughts were spinning like a milk shake, he _did_ recognize that he seated in the back of some kind of limousine. Stunned by the new environment, he glanced to each side...and realized that he was sandwiched between two men in black suits.

Two _big_ men in black suits...

Disorientation fluidly followed, as he remembered being with Bell and her sisters just a moment ago..._outdoors_! Open-skied, they were gathered in the slums near the fisherman's wharves. He had stood with them, a tangent in a circle formed around an intricately designed mandala that he had helped them create. A returning mandala, with which they were hoping that they could summon Cevn's Soul back into his body while preventing some kind of apocalyptic disaster from happening...

And an eye-blink later, he was _here_...in a car, dwarfed between two strapping gorilla-men. All things being relative, these two men looked like they could belong to the Prime Minister's protective secret guard. His stomach was also grabbing his attention, through the presence of a queasy nausea.

Before the Meninblack could do anything to him, the car slowly rolled to a stop. Keiichi was worried that he had been kidnapped by the Yakuza, or maybe some kind of Secret Service-type branch of the government. Maybe they had found out about Belldandy and her sisters!

Immediately, he went on the defensive...looking around for possible escape routes.

He could hear dozens of thumping sounds drumming on the limousine as the driver cursed "damned fanatics!" He looked out through one of the side windows...and recoiled from the sight. The faces of a half-dozen schoolgirls were pressed against the glass tightly, a meter away from his face, screaming like they were going to die! Several of the girls were actually kissing the glass!

"What the hell?" he mumbled out loud.

"Don't worry, the guards'll take care of 'em in a minute! You should know the routine by now. It's been this way for years," the bald Maninblack on his left said. Keiichi flinched as the man spoke to him; the man's face was scarred like a prizefighter's, while his whole deportment blared out "boxer!" He looked like a cross between Tamiya on steroids and a professional wrestler...or what Tamiya would seem like if he wasn't a 'gentle giant'. This man had "don't mess with me!" pasted all over his expression. And yet, Keiichi had an inner sense that this man wasn't planning on hurting him.

"Hey, it's not like you've had to endure this a dozen times before! Besides, the driver got here a few minutes early...and you know what _that_ means," the other Maninblack said, his chuckles shivering his dreadlocks. He was massive, with a rich dark skin and warm eyes that belied his mesomorphic bearing. His dreadlocks were dyed blonde and red, creating a flurry of color that framed his handsome features.

Keiichi felt smothered in the confines of the limo.

"Hey, don't go blaming _me_ for this! It's all those stupid kids, all whipped up into a frenzy like birds in a zoo!" the driver shouted from the front seat, several rows of seats forward of where Keiichi was sitting.

"Spoken like a true father," the dredz Maninblack quipped, earning a chuckle from the driver. Or more properly, the chauffeur.

"Hey, I can't blame em'! Even my daughters like 'im! I had to buy both of 'em posters for Christmas. And he even signed them. That alone made me Dad of the Year to my girls! They might not even pester me about otoshi-dama money this year," the driver remarked colloquially, referencing the traditional gifts of money that parents give their children for New Year's.

A couple minutes later, the crowd was being pushed back to a safe distance by some uniformed guards. Another set of men were placing steel crowd barriers in front of them to cordon them away from the car Keiichi was in...

"What _is_ going on here?" Keiichi asked again, emphasizing his confusion.

"_You're_ what's going on here! Man, what I'd give to be in your shoes! Just look at 'em! And it's this way in every major city in Japan…or East Asia, for that matter. Hell, you could probably go into some bum-fuck country town in Hokkaido or Shikoku and they'd be the same way. Not just here either. Your English version of 'Dream-Dream' is number one on the charts in the fucking United States! That's something I never dreamed I'd ever see in my lifetime. Korea, China, Thailand, Malaysia, Australia…hell, that bigass dictator dude even lets you do an annual concert in _North Korea_! Probably to keep his people from revolting or something," the bald Maninblack on his left explained.

"Christ, you should've seen 'em when we arrived at Chek Lap Kok International Airport in Hong Kong the first time! You missed out that time because you were sick, remember?" the dredz Maninblack noted to his partner. "When we landed at the airport, there were 50 thousand of 'em. It was just like Beatlemania! It ain't just here in Japan, y'know!"

"You better not kill yourself like that guy from X Japan did years ago. They'd probably burn down Tokyo in your name," the bald Maninblack joked.

One of the guards rapped on the roof of the car with a riotstick.

"It's time. Let's go!" the two Meninblack stated.

"Hey, don't forget your hat! There's probably a hundred photographers out there!" one of the men said as he handed Keiichi a Russian foxfur cap. Keiichi looked at the hat with mystification...and then he noticed his clothes. He was dressed in a light blue designer suit with abstract black tiger-stripes and gold epaulets! A white knitted scarf was resting around his neck; another scarf hung down his chest like a thin bright red tie. Impossibly, he wore a pair of cobra skin boots, or something that looked like cobra skin. As he stared at the shoes, he didn't even want to ask if they were real...

He looked in the rear view mirror, which looked like it was 20 meters in front of him...and gasped.

He had long shaggy shoulder-length hair, dyed light brown with blonde streaks and tipped with red and blue on the end of his bangs. The face looking back at him screamed "Idol star!"

And then the crowdnoise filled his mind and emptied his thoughts as the car doors opened. The two big Meninblack on either side of him quickly got out of the car; Keiichi watched as they stalked around the car, looking like they were scanning the crowd. After a few seconds, they handmotioned for him to come out.

Keiichi cautiously stepped out of the car...and as soon as he stood up, one of the Meninblack draped a fur coat on him before he could even sense what was going on...

_"Ohmygod, it's –_him-_!" "Look at him, what a babe!" "Keiichi, please sign my bra!" "Can I have an autograph!" What a stud!" "Do you have a girlfriend, Keiichi?" "Please kiss me, Keiichi" "Sign my DVD!" "Keiichi, I love you...will you marry me!" "Keiichi, please let me take a picture of you!" "Keiichi, can you come sing at our girl's school prom!" "Keiichi, what's the next TV drama you're going to star in!" "Keiichi, is it true that you love that American model?" "Ohmygod, I can't believe it...he looked -_right at me-_!" "Keiichi, I have every one of your singles and a hundred of your dolls!" "Keiichi, make love with me...I'm yours!" "Keiichi, can you help me get a start in showbiz!" "Keiichi, please be my boyfriend!" "Keiichi, you're the sexiest idol in Japan!" "Keiichi will you sign..."_

And then Keiichi felt his knees turn rubbery, just as rubbery as the thoughts that seemed to spinwhirl as his sense of vision faded...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"My man, you really gave us a scare, heh heh! Passing out like that back there! It's going to be in all the entertainment news shows by 5pm tonight! Once we hauled you outta there, Doc had to give you a shot of speedballs to get you back up and around. Maybe you've been working too hard...maybe you need a rest!" a weaselish man with a greasy haircut and a thin moustache noted to Keiichi when he regained consciousness. He looked around the room, noticing that he was in what looked like a luxury suite at a high class hotel. A number of men and women surrounded his bed, each face burning with solicitous interest. He felt wired, as if he had just drank ten espressos in a row, or was at the line waiting to pounce on the starting gun.

And one of them...

"Sora!!" he exclaimed. Standing a meter away was Sora Hasegawa. She was busy taking notes and talking to several men through a partly-opened door. The men looked like reporters, and they were all talking at once.

Sora turned away from the pressmen briefly and bowed deeply.

"Sorry Boss! I..I didn't mean to cause you a..any problems. You don't have to n..notice me," she stammered, clearly surprised that he was addressing her so directly.

"Sora, what are you doing? You're my _friend_! You don't have to apologize for anything! Now...can you tell me what's going on here?"

This brought a round of raucous laughter from everyone in the room except Sora.

"What's the matter with you, Keiichi? There's no way in hell that our little Sora could be your friend! She's just another part of your entourage...remember? She's your personal assistant, kinda like a CEO's private secretary. Only she doesn't 'put out', if you get my drift. The publicity guys told us that we had to hire a sexless 'girl next door' type for your personal assistant, remember? Don't want to make any of the fangirls being threatened by the presence of a babe in your entourage, ya know! And she certain fits that bill!"

Keiichi watched Sora dip her head ashamedly at the cruel words.

"Yeah, Sora's been working for us for the past five years! Remember...she's the girl who schedules all your appearances and meetings. She's the girl..._who gets you the girls_," another man answered with a wink. Keiichi was immediately put off by his toothy grin shadowed by his ill-cropped moustache.

Sora blushed even deeper.

"What am I doing here? And who are you guys?" Keiichi asked.

"Bwah ha ha! It ain't enough that you're a music and movie star...now you gotta start playing the comedian too! For reference's sake...I'm your manager, Atsukara! He's Taniyama, your agent. She's Sora Hasegawa, your concierge and personal assistant. And she's Mitsubishi, your makeup and wardrobe artist. The two big guys in the black suits are X-ko and Y-ko, your bodyguards. American boxers. And this guy is Ono, your national press agent. We're all here for you, Mister Number One!"

"What's going on here?" Keiichi wondered, feeling like his neck was noosed with all the thunders of panic. This whole scene was so profoundly unreal, he briefly considered the extremely unlikely scenario that it might be one of Tamiya and Ootaki's practical jokes. If this was a joke, then it was the most expertly planned practical joke that those two could have ever imagined. He was getting the total idol-star treatment! As he scanned all the faces around his bed, he could see shrewdness in every pair of eyes, except for Sora and the two bodyguards.

Bodyguards? How could Tamiya and Ootaki make these two men go along with the prank? And how could Sora be in it? His respect for Sora Hasegawa slipped down a couple notches. Sora...a co-conspirator with his sempai? Wouldn't be the first time it happened...

"Okay, I get it! You guys think I'm an idol star! Alright...you had me totally fooled for a moment there! Now let's get back to reality. Where am I and how did I get here?" Keiichi inquired, drawing another round of nervous laughter from his "entourage".

It was time to put an end to this foolishness once and for all.

He had to find Belldandy...

"I wonder if he's got a case of amnesia?"

"Did he hit his head on the cement when he passed out?"

"No. But I think he truly believes that he isn't who he is."

"With the life he's led, how can that be? There's millions of teenagers who would die to have the kind of fame he has!"

"Do you think he's been doin' too muck coke or smokin' too much weed?"

"I doubt it. But I think we should postpone that New Year's appearance..."

"We can't postpone _anything_, goddammit! And you know it!"

As the men argued amongst themselves, Keiichi's attention perked up at the mention of a "New Year's appearance". In his first few minutes of sharpened consciousness after he emerged from the limo, he observed snowflakes drifting lazily over the crowd. Could it be that he could have been blacked out for over a month or so? Or maybe this was an unseasonably early snowfall. After all, it had been November when Urd had returned with her grim news.

But _New Year's_?

"_What_ New Year's appearance?" he asked, his voice shrill with dismay. Ono, his press agent, slapped his forehead in frustration and groaned like he had just farted in public.

"The New Year's appearance three days from now! You know, the one on national TV..." Atsukara answered.

"NATIONAL TV?!" Keiichi blurted out in shock.

"Of course...just another day in the life of Keiichi MoriStar! Where else would you be appearing on Dec. 31st, eh? Sorry m'boy, you don't get to sit at home and drink hajime-sake while watching all the TV specials! You have a sold-out concert at the Big Egg tomorrow, then another concert at the NHK TV complex Sunday. Naturally, NHK is filming that one for Jan 1st prime time...we got them to clear their parking lot outside of their headquarters and make it a free event. Lots of pretty chick-a-dees in snow parkas an' all that! Man, was that a hassle! We'll probably freeze our asses off on that one. But don't you worry, we got your personal dressing trailer in tow, and the stage will be heated," his agent Taniyama explained.

"What...about...the...national...TV?" Keiichi forced his voice to creak. The freak-out scale of this situation was travailing way beyond what he could handle. His throat was getting dry and he was gasping for breath. He felt more and more constricted, both viscerally and emotionally.

"Oh yeah, the TV gig! Actually, Monday's a day off for you to spend with your publicists and...oh, yeah, you have a magazine shoot for "Pati Pati" magazine that afternoon. And Tuesday's the grand finale...you're going to ride on the wind to 20XX! You're the captain of the White team on the Kohaku Uta Gassen show!"

Keiichi's face blanched to a bloodless white, as the only thought that survived the ensuing emotional and mental shocktribes in his head was "Oh Shit!"

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Sir, do you want your usual?" a beautiful woman in a bathrobe asked Keiichi at the start of his waking day as she gently roused him up from a deep sleep. He had wanted to sleep forever; when he woke up, he was momentarily thrust out of his ken when he noticed the luxurious surroundings. Reading his questioning expression, the woman explained that she was his permanent masseuse, and that she usually gave him a massage before drawing his bath. She went on to list a 'menu' of several types of massages, including the "Tokyo Playboy Suds Special Bathtub" massage.

"O..oh, _those_ usuals..." Keiichi stuttered, trying to play along despite being completely out of his element. He had been caught unawares when she woke him; he had been so used to kissing Bell-chan awake over the past year. It only took a moment for him to feel a wrenching heartsickness at Bell's absence.

After making certain that the woman understood that she wasn't going to give him a "Tokyo Playboy" type massage, he accepted her offer of a shiatsu therapy. He felt more than a little bit guilty for doing so, but his strained muscles and splitting headache definitely demanded attention. The masseuse oiled his skin with an aromatic oil and gave him an expert rubdown. As she worked him, Keiichi sweated his worries about whether this rubdown would splinter off into sexual grounds...despite remaining adamant about keeping his shorts on. He had heard all sorts of stories about how entertainers were 'pampered' by female assistants...

But the massage was decidedly professional, without even a single sexual overture. When it was done, Keiichi got off the bed, noting that even his sleeping shorts reflected the luxury of his celebrity...they were a soft Chinese red silk that felt fresh on his skin. He shuddered at the thought that he didn't remember dressing himself last night. When he stood up, he felt like he was going to collapse; his muscles were entirely relaxed into total softness.

His relaxed state was quickly undone when she offered him a "refresher"...a silver tray lined with cocaine. He emphatically refused and made a beeline for the bath room and safety.

While he soaked in the hotel's marble furoba amidst the roses that were floating in the hot water, Keiichi concentrated on how he could slip away so he could look for Belldandy. Feeling a measure of safety in the bathroom, he had tried to call his temple home...only to have his call intercepted by Atsukara, who curtly reminded him that he was not supposed to make phone calls on his own, unless he had special permission from Taniyama. Apparently, his contact with the outside world was strictly regimented by his overseers. So how could he possibly locate Belldandy when his celebrity allowed him no freedom?

As he toweled off, it occurred to him that his touring group...with the possible exceptions of Atsukara and Taniyama...would probably jump at his beck and call. If he _was_ a celebrity in this weirdling dream world, then why not invoke his fame and power in an effort to pit his assistants against his managers? It could be possible that he could gain some degree of leverage in this situation.

Then again, he was a rank amateur as far as celebrity was concerned. He remembered the post-race interviews when he won the Solar Federation race and the Le Mans: most of the time, he was either tongue-tied or stumbling over his words. Well, at least Urd wasn't here to tease him about being camera-shy.

The thought of Urd made his heart knot up. Evidently, their attempt to summon Cevn's Soul back to his body had failed. He replayed the tragic scene in his mind: Urd's heaving back as her mortal boyfriend died in her arms. Belldandy's face was still and white, a limbic chalkboard of sympathy and devastation, his own eyes stinging with tears...

He forced his mind back into the present. No amount of feeling sorrow over Urd's tragic loss was going to help him in this situation. So he had a group of 'keepers'...but who was paying the paychecks? Without knowing the politics of the payroll, Keiichi realized that his stratagems could easily backfire. He mentally noted that he would need to learn the identity of his accountant and then find out everything he could about the money stuff.

Foremost on his mind was finding Bell-chan. Putting on a Moroccan silk bathrobe with piano keys and guitars embroidered on it, he walked into the executive meeting room adjoining his suite and summoned Sora Hasegawa to his room.

"Sora, I have a big favor to ask you," Keiichi began.

"Yessir?" the bespectacled girl asked.

"I want you to call the number to my house," he instructed her. It felt _awkward_ giving orders to Sora; for a moment, he totally expected her to snap back at him with a "who the hell do you think you are, ordering me around?" Instead, she bowed curtly in acknowledgment.

"And..?" she asked.

"Huh?"

"How would I know which house to call, Boss? Your penthouse suite in Harajuku? Your country compound in Hokkaido? Your Kohala mansion in Hawaii? One of your ski cabins in Colorado, France, Sweden or Switzerland? Or maybe your Hong Kong getaway suite? You'll have to tell me which of your residences you wish me to contact," she answered, a slight drip of irritation in her voice.

Keiichi gulped hard at the news that he owned _houses_!

"Sora...think hard! Remember where I live? In Makuhari? Where my sister, myself and Belldandy live?"

"Your sister died a long time ago, when she was hit by a train in grade school. And who's this Belldandy, sir? I've never heard you mention _that_ name before. It's sounds quite...foreign, if you want my opinion."

"My fiancée!" Keiichi blurted out.

And then it hit him. Megumi..._dead_? The brilliantly horrid thought careened against his heart with the ferocity of a bull elephant slamming against a wall of feathers. Megumi's sweet smiling face passed through his visual thoughts: playing softball; riding her bike; bicycling up the hill behind the temple; returning home late at night from a date with Genji...

"Sora...leave me alone. _Now_!!" he shouted. Sora quickly gathered her briefcase together and left the executive meeting room, seemingly frightened by his intensity of mood.

Keiichi shook his head briskly to try and shut out the rawness, and then he went back into the hotel suite's bedroom and collapsed on the bed. A moment later, he started pounding the pillows with his fists, screaming into them.

His little sister was _gone_!

In the depths of his despair, he cried his heart out until exhaustion comforted him. All his crying debts paid for the moment, Keiichi started reflecting on his situation. If Sora was telling the truth, then he wasn't in Japan any more...at least in _his_ Japan. As he felt swallowed by the alienities, Keiichi vaguely remembered another time...another play deep in the backwaters of Japanese history. A time when he had been snatched with his cousin Tomohisa, Genji Mishima and Cevn...and thrust blindly into an ancient epoch of Japan's feudal period. If he could spend 13 years in the Japan of the divided Nambokucho era of Ashikaga, then this place and time could be anywhere! He hung his memory out, recalling that one of his assistants said that New Year's 20XX was coming up...

His sense of reality was being hurled against itself once again. Emotionally spent, he summoned Sora back to the exec meeting room and joined her there. One again, he directed her to call his fiancée...

"You don't have a fiancée! B..but the press certainly thinks so. They think you're going to marry Anni-Imoto Kanaka. Because she's one of Japan's most famous models, not to mention a top box-office draw actress...they've been pressing all sorts of rumors and fabrications. Every day, I have to deal with 'damage control' so that their unsavory assumptions don't tarnish your public image! So with all due respect Sir, p..please quit joking around with me...you're making me very nervous," Sora explained.

"S..sorry, Sora. I just want you to call this number. That's where she lives," Keiichi asked, apologizing as he wrote the temple house phone number on hotel stationary. Sora seemed taken back at his amends; she quickly grabbed the paper and departed the room.

Two minutes later, she returned. Keiichi felt his heart thumping in his throat in happy expectations...until he noticed Sora's dowdy demeanor.

"Sir, I may only be your personal assistant...but I don't appreciate being teased or sent on errands that turn out to be practical jokes. That phone number you had me call was for Antonio's Pizza Carryout...not a temple! If you wish, I could have their staff come here to the hotel, if it's pizza that you want for breakfast! I'm sure they wouldn't hesitate to accommodate such a request from you."

Keiichi stared blankly at her, then turned and walked towards the sliding glass doors. He slid them open and stepped out on the veranda. He was assaulted by the million visual refractions of the Tokyo cityscape that scratched to the horizon. Obviously, his room was on the top floor of a highrise hotel. For a moment, he thought about jumping over the railing as the bracing winter wind whipped through his hair.

Megumi was dead. Belldandy was gone.

His suicidal impulse passed as Belldandy's words came to mind. His Divine fiancée had consistently exhorted him _to live_. No matter what. When life trialed him towards a pensive joylessness, Bell would always remind him that her happiness was married to his. She was the light of his life...and sometimes, she had told him, light casts shadows that can be disconcerting. "Shadows of discouragement" she had called them. He remembered her words exactly. "All shadows are created by light...but no shadows could ever fully obscure the light; for if this was true, then shadows they could be no more."

"So go to the light!" Belldandy had instructed him. Over and through the periods of doubt in his life, this was one of many Bell-chan injunctions that kept his spirits afloat when they threatened to sink into the abyss of his doubtings. This was one of those times when it was dark because he was standing under the lighthouse. At least he had Sora, a familiar face even though her whole attitude towards him was sheer business-like professionalism.

And it may be possible that he might be able to find her. Just because this 'Sora' hadn't heard of her...didn't mean that his wife-to-be was truly missing. In this reality, Belldandy may not have moved into the temple. In fact, she may not have even answered his wish in the first place.

Then Keiichi felt possessed by foreboding dread as he realized that one of the wishes that he _almost_ wished for that fateful day 5 years ago...was to be an idol star. The thought _had_ crossed his mind, but only with a daffodil transience...

He turned towards Sora, surprising the small woman with his sudden resolve.

"Sora! How long have I been a star?" he asked.

"You've been the most famous entertainer in Japan and Asia for 5 years. Why do you keep asking such ridiculous questions? It's as if you _aren't_ Keiichi MoriStar!" she noted. Behind those glasses, she was assessing him with a very suspicious regard.

"Sora...look into my eyes! Tell me...what do you see?" Keiichi asked. Instead of looking in his eyes, Sora blushed again and backed away. Her expression revealed streams of inner turmoil and confusion to Keiichi.

"Sir! Shouldn't we be going over your schedule instead of playing head games?" Sora asked as she regained her composure, brandishing a PDA and a notebook.

"That's not important! _Don't you know who I am_?" Keiichi asked desperately.

"I...I think I should really be going! I'll come back later when you're ready to work with me," she blurted, exiting the room.

Keiichi stared at the veranda, watching the curtains furling in the winter breeze...and then abandoned his urge to plummet himself off the balcony.

"I'm going to see this through...because I know that's the only chance I'll ever have to be reunited with Belldandy!" he promised himself as he slid the glass doors shut. He felt like he was shutting a clampdown on his melancholy as well, as he heard the sliding doors clack shut in their tracks.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

The concert at Big Egg was scheduled for 8pm. Arriving several hours earlier, Keiichi felt a mounting paranoia as the clock kept ticking. He was going to go in front of 65,000 fans in the Tokyo Dome and sing for three hours. And once he screwed up miserably, as he knew he would do...then his immediate future would become very uncertain. Atsukara and Taniyama looked like the kind of shrewd businessmen who would give him the hatchet once he screwed up.

And then what?

As he looked at the cue sheets, he didn't recognize a single song on the handwritten billets. He was hoping that at least there would be a cover version during the concert; the only songs whose lyrics he knew by heart were rock classics that had to do with racing, such as Deep Purple, Lindberg or Kase-Kase Speed X.

Matthew Sweet, he was not...

He kept downing sodas to keep the flashing nightmares at bay. One particularly Grinch-ish maladream flashed on him like quicksilver, threatening to drone his confidence into silence.

"What if the songs I'm supposed to sing...are boy-band crap, like SMAP, Fa Fa, KAT-TUN, OSSaN and their ilk? Or what if I have to scream all my vocals like X Japan? What if I'm an _enka singer_?" he fretted, envisioning all sorts of unpleasant situations. But upon reflection, he seriously doubted the latter. The presence of a thousand teenage girls when he walked out of the limo when he first arrived made it quite improbable that he was a folky, or an enka singer.

But how in the Almighty's name was he going to perform?

Nervous, he walked out of the green room after eating a taco. His green room was a trailer parked just inside the access ramp to the stadium. Inside the trailer was a meditation tent painted with abstract colors, a TV and stereo setup, a small bar, several makeup chairs, and a couple cupboards filled with snack foods and juices. Upon emerging from his trailer, he could already hear the sound of 10,000 throats conversing as one...a loud buzzing mumbling voice that filled the air with flesh-flowered white noise. Add to that the echo effect of the stadium, and the sound suggested the Yomiuri Giant's baseball games he had watched on TV as a kid.

Immediately, his two bodyguards flanked him. They were dressed differently this time; no longer in meninblack bodyguard mode. X-ko, his Black bodyguard, wore a traditional flowing African robe patterned with rich colors and pictures of tigers, a leather fila cap on his head, and a damask pattern kenta over-robe and cape. Y-ko, his Japanese bodyguard, was dressed in a black silk zootsuit woven with sparkly futuristic designs; looking every bit like a character out of the Matrix film trilogy. Their outfits reminded Keiichi of those worn by the elites in the pro wrestling entertainment biz. Obviously part of the 'image' that he had to project...

"You ready? This concert has been sold out for the past three months...it's going to be the biggest event of the year!" the man of color asked, smiling at him richly. Keiichi nodded at X-ko, trying to act knowingly.

"Don't worry! You could come out here and read from the _Tales of the Heike_ and these fans would go nuts!" the bald futureman joked.

"X-ko...Y-ko, I just want to look at the stage..." Keiichi said quietly.

"Sure thing. We're almost there, Boss."

And about 30 meters later, they emerged from the tunnel into the stadium. A mammoth stage set was positioned nearby, linked to the tunnel by a double fenced passageway. Rows and rows of overhead lights scaffolded against the steel-grey roof of the upper half of the stage. The stage was roofed by some kind of folding metal dome, which looked like it could close down and completely cover the intricate stage set. Keiichi paused in his tracks...the stage looked like the gaping mouth of a dragon.

Threatening to swallow him.

"Go on, take a look! It's all here for you, ya know!" X-ko said proudly, slapping him on the back warmly. Keiichi felt like a prizefighter being encouraged by his trainers. He nodded at X-ko and nervously walked up one of the stage access stairwells. He immediately noticed two intricate drum sets poised on elevated metal grating...in fact, the whole floor of the stage was metal grated. On the far end of the stage were two banks of keyboards, nearer was a DJ setup with two sets of turntables. Another raised platform was empty. As he looked out into the field and stands, he could see that the place was already a quarter full with fans.

"Wh...what goes there?" he asked, pointing at the empty raised platform.

"That raised platform is for your five backup singers!" the two bodyguards answered in unison.

"Hey you!! Come back here! If the fans see you right now, they'll rush the stage. We'll get sued if someone gets hurt!" Atsukara's shouted voice echoed from within the tunnel.

Keiichi turned around and walked back, once again pondering the _very_ weighty question about how he was going to sing in front of 65,000 fans.

He couldn't even do karaoke right, even within the company of his closest friends. There was a reason why Skuld plugged her ears in preparation every time his drunken sempai pressed him to take the mike and sing...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Thirty minutes before stage call, his 'band' joined him in the trailer that was serving as a warmup "green room". Oh their heels was a Fuji TV Network camera crew. Keiichi felt more than a little shocked at this; normally, big-time entertainment companies didn't 'share' their artists-in-property. But he was doing specials for Fuji _and_ NHK!

Could he really be _that_ popular?

One of his entourage commented that the crowd was going to raise more of a stir than that Godzilla movie he starred in two years ago.

"Even _Godzilla_!?" Keiichi marveled...until he met his band. He almost held his breath to exhaustion as he recognized several of the musicians, who were major headline performers in their own right in the Japanese music scene. He fought to keep his fear down from his throat as they joked amongst themselves. Each of these guys had platinum albums in the Japan that he was familiar with...

Atsukara handed him a guitar, a guitar unlike anything he had ever seen. Instead of the traditional neck and body of a guitar, the 'guitar' was an elongated glass loop. Keiichi examined it...noting that it bore some resemblance to a double-neck guitar. It had two fretboards; the top had 7 strings while the lower fretboard was 13 stringed. But the machine heads of each fretboard were missing; instead the tops of the two fretboards were connected by a glass semicircle. And instead of having a body, the guitar simply had another mirrored semicircle that connected the bases of each fretboard. The semicircle at the base of the guitar was studded with jewels and control knobs, while the other semicircle at the top of the two fretboards had _gold_ tuning keys...

It looked like two magnets stuck together to create an elongated loop.

"H..hey! D..don't drop that! You had that made in America for 195,000 US!" Taniyama teased. _That_ comment almost made Keiichi drop the fragile-looking glass guitar, thank you very much.

What was oddling funny was the fact that once the futuristic guitar was in his hands, Keiichi found himself unconsciously playing it. He was amazed and a little frightened as he watched his fingers ply notes out of the fretboard with a virtuoso's skill. As he played, Keiichi distinctly had the impression that he had done this a thousand times before. Which was quite impossible, as he had almost no musical aptitude...unlike his mother, Skuld and Cevn. He was always too busy learning how to be a great motorcycle driver and mechanic to have time to pick up any musical instruments. But yet, here he was, playing a complex series of notes with the same ease as if he was turning a wrench to tune his BMW. The melodious sounds he was urging from his guitar reminded him of Holy Bell's singing...

The band members started singing in accompaniment, acappella.

"Wow, that sounds cool! What CD is that from?" Keiichi asked, impressed by the harmonies of the vocal refrains.

Laughter erupted in the room.

"That's...haha...offa your latest CD! You know, the 'Dreamy Mix--Reboot Our Love!' single? The one that gets played a million times a day, every day since you released it three months ago, you clown!" one of the band members explained between guffaws.

"C'mon! Sing with 'em!" Ono, his press agent urged. He motioned to a number of cameramen to set up for close-quarters videofilming.

One of the cameramen started a countdown...

And then Keiichi heard himself singing. His singing voice was otherworldly: richly melliflorous and fetching, with a sensual rasp and an operatic range. A voice that a listener could get absorbed into. Once again, he was performing with relative ease! He was singing like an expert, fluttering his voice, hitting impossibly high falsetto notes...singing solidly basso forms from someplace deep within his chest. After a few minutes, the song was over. The camera men applauded loosely as his bandmates slapped him on the back with roguish abandon. His voice was like that of a seiyuu...but even _more_ skilled! He was startled when he recognized that his voice had a definite presence of 'holiness' in it; the arresting vocal quality which could only come from Angelic song-crafting. Specifically, Heroic Vermilion Swift. He tried to summon his Angel, but there was no avail or response. Somehow, he had the singing voice of a Divine Angel!

"Hey man...ultimate unplugged moment, that was dude! Now let's go kick some ass!" one of the band members shouted, as Keiichi overheard the PA system announcing that the start of the concert was imminent. In a blur, the band and he dashed en masse up the tunnel towards the stage, like an American football team before the Super Bowl.

From darkness to light!

The stage exploded with light as his band ascended the stairway to the stage. Atsukara held him back, reminding him to wait on his ascending platform, where he would be raised up into the stage after the "shell" opened. Since he was the star of the show, he had to make a grand entrance. He was led to a small open-aired step platform, which would elevate him up into the stage from below. Even under the stage, Keiichi could feel the intense heat of the overhead lights. As he looked around, he could see why the stage was metal-grilled...there were a number of lights illuminating it from underneath.

He could hear the crowd roaring like a thunderstorm all around him, but he couldn't see them at all from where he was deep inside the stage. The elaborate stage was surrounded by a huge metal enclosure, which was slowly opening while folding to the back, like an old-fashioned bandshell. Through the gradually widening opening, Keiichi could see an ocean of faces brightly lit by rapidly streaking lights as lasers started shooting out all over the stadium. The lighting effects were highly suggestive of a space battle...

The already-loud stadium turned up a notch as the 'roof' of the stage pivoted and elongated itself, turning into an arch that backframed the entire stage. Fog machines pumped out generous bursts of smoke, creating a haze that pooled the overhead lights into floating anemones of color. Stagehands were sending out huge inflatable balloons, which were being bounced around by the crowd. Catching his breath as the platform he was standing up lifted him up to the stage, Keiichi looked around, his engineer's eye marveling at the complexity of lights, steel scaffolding and speakers all around him. Once his step platform fully ascended to stage level, an array of lasers and lights played out over the audience, whose roar seemed to get even _louder_ in response to his presence.

Then he stepped up and adjusted his microphone headset, and then started banging out the opening cords to a song...a song whose name he had learned only a couple hours earlier when he read the setlist...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

The last hour of the concert were a musical melee. During a guitar solo at the end of the third 75-minute-long set, Keiichi estimated that this crowd has easily spent over a hundred million yen to attend his performance. He couldn't even begin to imagine the expenses involved. Film crew, stage-building, T-Shirts with his logo and face, backup singers, dance troupe, SFX lighting projected onto the roof of Big Egg, mammoth video screens several storeys tall...

Humbled by the huge financial energies all around him, Keiichi gamely decided to throw in an extra encore before his finale.

He finished the second set with a song called "Blue Attitudes"...just him and an acoustic guitar on the immense stage. Thousands of frenzied teenage girls were raining blue roses on the stage as the purple and blue stage lights cast a softening atmosphere over the crowd. Keiichi was stunned as clearly heard an entire stadium-voice stridently _singing along_ with him as he performed the haunting love ballad...

A haunting ballad he had _never heard before_. It was so good, he would have gone out and bought the CD single after a single listening.

Then he and the band and the dancers left the stage to a thunderous roar of approval. He found time to go his green room trailer, towel off and down a large bottle of chilled water.

The crowd started chanting his name, 65,000 strong.

He returned twice more to the stage to perform three songs. Before the second encore, Atsukara and Taniyama tried to prevent him from throwing in a couple extra songs. Keiichi promptly told his managers to shove it...that the fans of Tokyo had paid a ton of yen, and he was going to deliver them their money's worth. His fellow bandmembers loudly cheered him on as he dashed in two more songs in the set list before the finale.

During his final stage call, he sat on the stage on a stool, soaked with sweat, filled with energy. With a table and desklamp as stageprops underneath a single spotlight, he fingerpicked a cadenza that led into yet another song that he never heard. After singing and playing an intricately improved 12-string guitar solo for three minutes, his band joined him and the sound system was cranked up to clip; the drums sounded like taiko cannonfire while his guitar played earthquake-loud notes that shook the stadium. This final song was obviously his signature piece...a 25 minute epic jam called "Love-Bliss-Panic-Kiss" that was nothing less than a musical workout for the band and a vocal workout for him. He played his 'loop guitar' with a virtuosity that went far beyond the level of a Steve Vai. There was an almost theatrical presence to the song, as stagehands moved huge anime-like props to create 'neighborhoods' on the stage during the performance. During two of the slower bridge themes, he played a concert grand piano with the sensitivity of a world-class concert pianist while dancers weaved sensuously, dancing in 'tubes' of aqua-blue laser lights and floating above the stage on wiring like a Cirque du Soliel production.

Again, girls threw bouquets of flowers and boxes of chocolates onto the stage during the song.

"This music...came from me?" Keiichi marveled as the final song played out. Even he was impressed by the music; if this CD would have been available in the Japan he knew, he would have snapped it up in an instant! The song was gutwrenchingly emotional, musically honest...and it had a sweeping grandeur that brought many faces in the audience to tears. Swept away by the music, Keiichi felt himself enter a 'zone' of performance that was strikingly similar to the competitive 'zone' of race driving.

It was utterly magical.

At the end, as he and his band took their last bows, Keiichi felt like he was spent. He had danced energetically, acted...played a host of instruments including guitar, keyboards, saxophone, shakuhachi, kodo and taiko drums, and turntables...plus he had sang his heart out, bantered humorously with the audience and pranced around the stage with the blatant swagger of a sex symbol.

As he walked off the stage and down the stairwell, Keiichi was gripped by disbelief. He knew that the only thing he could have possibly pulled off was the humorous banter between songs...and that was iffy. He could goof off and joke around with the best; but how could he possibly clown it up in front of 65,000 rabidly _loud_ fans? _Something_ had taken him over for the past four hours. He was still in control of his thoughts and feelings, but his musical performance was so effortless in execution, it was as if he had become possessed by a God-Muse. Somehow, a sonic magic seemed to imbue his every effort with unparalleled artistry...

While walking back to the "green room" trailer, Keiichi noticed a tall pale woman with dark black bangs cut squarely around her face, with a single long strand of hair streaming down her back. She was dressed in a female security guard's uniform...

Peorth?

Words tried to claw themselves out of his throat, but the woman simply smiled and nodded at him enigmatically before disappearing into thin air. Or did she just step around a corner? It had to be Peorth! Keiichi immediately knew that no one else had seen her; she had appeared just for his eyes only.

"Could she have anything to do with this?" Keiichi wondered. "Or more honestly..._what_ does Peorth have to do with this?"

Looking back on the concert, it was as if he had transformed into another person on stage. Every note, gesture and dance he had performed during the concert was flawless, effortless perfection. Several times, Keiichi felt himself floating away on the keen ecstasies of his musical creations; it was as if he had a deeper connection with the muse, one that normal people lacked. But once he left the stage and was walking back to his trailer, Keiichi's sense of familiarity returned.

He found himself nervous and wary again.

Once inside the trailer, he saw the press crew, his 'entourage'...and someone new. From the ranks of the busybodies, a woman in a low-cut black dress and a silver fur coat stepped out and kissed him on the cheek, while the paparazzi snapped flashpics like a group of angry piranhas attacking a side of beef.

"Lets get outta here, lover! I need some 'Keiichi Time', if you know what I mean..." she purred sensuously in his ear.

From the largesse of performing in front of a stadium-full of fans...to the privacy of being kissed by a strikingly beautiful woman...Keiichi was stunned into paralysis.

And then he mentally identified the woman who had just kissed him.

Anniko Kanaka.

His knees felt weak as the realization hit him. Back in "relative Japan", the Japan he had lived in up until a couple days ago...Anniko Kanaka was Japan's top model-actress. Beyond this, she was one of Japan's foremost movie-star idols in her own right. Any film starring her was a guaranteed box office blowout. Finally, Anniko was known throughout the country as one of Japan's most beautiful women; her face was on the cover of dozens of women's magazines each month. Men actually got into fistfights over her annual swimsuit calendars! The N.I.T. Motor Club's "Men's Dorm" bathroom even had one of those calendars, reputedly 'updated' each year by Tamiya! Anniko's 'image' was formed of a superb balancing of sophistication and demure sexiness.

Keiichi was momentarily hypnotized by her charm, which wafted through the room with perfume-like effervescence. He fidgeted under the spell of sexy-girl mystique, as it was focused right at him. Raising his head to look into her eyes, he could see an unbridled sexual lust. And something else.

Something coldly impersonal. A sermon of greed and manipulation...a debutante femininity ulcerated with an excess of ego and self-love. A willing martyr to tastes of life both sublime and jaded.

Her eyes seemed to bite into him like little sharks.

Keiichi immediately adjudged that, compared to Bell-chan...this starlet would never rank more than a distant second. And when he added Urd, Skuld, Peorth, even Sayoko and Megumi to the comparative beauty poll...Anniko Kanaka was distanced further down the ranking list. Her goldling appearance and mannerisms were complete antitheses to Bell's honest beauty. But in her eyes, Keiichi readily observed that she was in love with him...the kind of cautious love that an enemy might hide behind.

Or were her feelings for him honest?

Keiichi reminded himself to not be so quick to categorize others based on his stereotypes. Perhaps he had been judging her too harshly by first impressions. After all, she _was_ a starlet...she must have seen a lot of life during her public era...

"C'mon, MoriStar! Less gawking, more action! Let's _blow_!" she whispered privately in his ear.

"Hey fox-girl! We need him for just another hour or so for some extra footage! Or did it slip your mind that this concert is being filmed for a TV special to be aired on New Year's Day? He'll be done by 1 am, I assure you!" Atsukara explained testily in a dismissive voice that announced that he would brook no further discussion on the issue. Anni glared at him with open irritation, and then dramatically regained her composure with a broad smile. She wrapped her arms around Keiichi's neck and kissed him on the lips, and then fox-walked off...blowing him a kiss right before she left the trailer.

"Good! Now that little Ms. Idol-star shrew is gone, we can get back to business, eh?" Ono said with an irritated scowl.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Keiichi managed to evade Anniko Kanaka after the video shoot was complete; explaining to her that he was suffering from fatigue. With a pout, she told him that she would have her A-ko assistant call him in the morning to check up on him. He felt bad for lying to her, but in truth, he _was_ exhausted from his 220-minute performance at the Big Egg. As soon as he sat down in one of plush chairs in his hotel suite, Keiichi felt the drain on his being...

"The Big Egg!" Keiichi sighed to himself as he sat out on the hotel veranda, cooling himself in the flashpool of winter breezes and the continent of Tokyo citylights kissing the zenith. He could get to like this. Playing in front of huge gatherings of fans, seeing his CDs in all the music stores...heck, they even had model kits and stuffed dolls with his likeness!

"Fame sure can swell someone's head!" he heard a voice behind him. Jerk-spinning around, he saw Peorth perched on his bed, just like she had done when she had come to the temple that first time, over three years ago.

A gartered, lace-bra'd, panty-less silken seductress...

"You know, mon ami, it is tres curieaux. Here you are nearly five years after I granted your wish to become a superstar...and you're as pensive as a caged tiger! I gave you the flair to charm your way into the hearts...and pants...of any woman in Japan. The enchantment to perform flawlessly each time you are in front of an appreciative crowd. And I even allotted you a panache that faintly rivals mine! Yet, you continue to mope. I'm beginning to suspect that you aren't who you seem to be. Could this be the truth?" she said, speaking more to herself than to him.

"Peorth...what about Belldandy?"

Peorth looked at him with a winking expression. "Oh, she's busy, to be sure. It seems that my rival, fair Belldandy, has been given a wish that...hmmm, let's just say it's going to be quite difficult to fulfill. Nah...it'll _never_ happen. But she has to try, you know..."

"So she never came to the Earthrealm to grant my wish?"

Peorth started giggling, shifting on the bed. Keiichi fought to keep his eyes from combing over her body. She was nearly naked; her breasts threatened to spill out of the sheer lacework bra that barely covered them...

"Belldandy _never_ was summoned to you. _I was summoned! _Remember?! And after we made sweet, fragrant, _spellbinding_ sparkly passionate love...I granted your heart's deepest desire. I was quite disappointed that your deepest longings weren't to be with me, of course. But since you wished for lifelong fame, I get to check in with you once in a while. Kinda like inspecting the goods, oui?" she cooed.

"Where's Bell-chan?"

"Bell-_chan_? Isn't that a little bit _too_ familiar of a term to use when addressing a Goddess? How about 'Peorth-chan' instead?" she asked. Keiichi shook his head "no".

"Well...maybe not. However, you know that we could _do it_ again, if you wish. Just like we do each year, to mark the anniversary of my granting of your wish."

"Y..you m..mean that w..we..."

"Tout va très mal! I'm most insulted that you don't remember about you and me! It isn't every mortal that gets to spend a night with a Goddess's Goddess like me! Remember last year, how we blissfully shared a weekend together in.._sigh!_..passionate abandon, making love with each other, releasing our energies with.._sigh!_..joyful embraces, surrounded by roses and sweet airs and...my favorite place on the Earthrealm. You, me and Paris...all to ourselves!" Peorth answered with a dreamy expression.

Keiichi's mind was racing. Actually, it was more like sack-barreling over itself in stumbling shock. He was jarred; unable to even imagine the idea that it was _Peorth_ had came to grant his wish in this reality! And now she was claiming that she and he were in some kind of annual sexual relationship?

There was no questioning that she was beautiful...and his interest _had_ been aroused by her sexual prance-dancing when she first came to grant his wish. He wouldn't be a red-blooded Japanese male if he had been immune to her advances. Reluctantly, he had to admit that he had thought about her in a sexual way more than once during her first visit to the Earthrealm. But this was no apology to his manhood..._any_ man would be snared by Peorth if she exerted enough pressure. Tamiya-sempai had been hypnotized, completely entranced by his single encounter with her. In comparison, circumstances had forced Peorth to live with him...a Peorth in coy dishabille...in _his bed_, night after night. Despite the strong temptation factor, Keiichi still felt a quickening guilt in regards to the stirring of his libido. But each time Peorth had tried to fence him in romantically or sexually, he had immediately shifted out of his mind's wanderings into 'what-might-have-beens', because he always had Belldandy to turn to. One look at his Bell-chan's face would replenish his resolve. In the end, Peorth had granted his wish inadvertently...which amounted to a victory for Keiichi, as he had never seriously considered any romantic liaisons with Peorth. And the cupidity and callousness of her subsequent visits had driven this decision even deeper into his heart.

He loved Belldandy with every iota of his Soul...and that was that.

But yet, there _was_ this divinely scantily-clad Goddess curled up seductively on his hotel bed, and she looked like she wasn't going to budge. Seeing Peorth, Keiichi was reminded that sometime in the future, he would have to deal with Ms. Anni-Imoto Kanaka once again. Anniko's pointedly angry pout when he had excused himself for the night had revealed as much.

Yet, there was something innocent about _this_ Peorth. This Peorth probably never had to compete with Belldandy for his attentions, so her strong sexual come-ons weren't driven by feminine rivalry or a sense of inadequacy. Keiichi started big-sweating as it dawned on him just how much this Peorth didn't need to compete for his affections. She _already had a relationship_ with him!

Best to let her down gently...

"Peorth...I'm really tired tonight," he explained. As a Goddess, she could probably measure the degree of his exhaustion far better than he could.

Peorth nodded her head slightly in reluctant acquiescence, and then smiled at him knowingly as she assured him that "it's okay".

"But there's one thing I'm curious about, however. What _is_ Belldandy doing?" he asked.

"Still wondering about _her_? You know, I might just get jealous if you keep this up, Keiichi MoriStar! I've told you before...you know that it's strictly forbidden for an Earth Otasuke Agent to reveal the wishgranting assignment or work of another Agent! Or for that matter, the wishwork of a Goddess Relief Office Agent like Belldandy! Trust me...Belldandy's quite busy with concerns of her own! She was assigned to grant an Earthrealm mortal's wish, but there's a complication..."

"Which is?" Keiichi asked, hoping to plumb some more information from Peorth. Peorth paused to consider his request for a moment, and then smiled at him.

"Okay, I'll tell you the basics. But you'll owe me for this!" she added with a raised finger. Keiichi could only imagine what sort of 'debt' to her that he was walking into...

"In this particular instance, an Earthrealm mortal made a wish that directly conflicts with a wish that was _already granted_ by an Earth Otasuke Agent. So Belldandy can't just simply grant the wish...in fact, the only way Belldandy can make that wish come true is to create a situation where the mortals who are involved fulfill the wish by their own actions. In other words, the Yggdrasil Mainframe has a failsafe: it won't accept a wish-request that negates a wish-request that has already been granted. Which means that Belldandy _cannot_ apply any of her Goddess powers directly to grant the wish, as she would in a normal situation. She cannot register the wish with Yggdrasil, yet she is obliged to fulfill her assignment. Thus, she must follow the more difficult course..." Peorth explained, floating up and kissing Keiichi on the cheek.

"I bid you adieu!" she said as she vanished into a spray of rose petals.

Keiichi thought hard about the fact that he was getting kissed on the cheek a lot. First, by one of Japan's top models. And now by Peorth.

The unspoken words are often the most loudest resounding...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Sir, you have a busy schedule today...and you look very tired this morning!" Sora explained as she scanned over her logbook. "D..did you spend the night with Ms. Kanaka?"

Keiichi thought it odd that Sora, as his personal assistant, was inquiring after his personal affairs. Perhaps there was a reasonable explanation as to why she was interested in his personal life...but it was still quite strange that she'd be interested in who he spent the night with. And the way she asked it...it was almost like she tried to slip the question in unnoticed.

"No, I _didn't_ spend the night with her, or anyone else!" Keiichi barked back nervously. Sora seemed relieved, smiling briefly as she adjusted her circular wire-rims. Then she seemed to transform back into the petite personal assistant, all business again.

Keiichi was so curious about Sora's odd behavior, he spaced out on most of what she was explaining, so she had to patiently review his schedule once again with him. As before, it seemed that his ongoing assumptions about the "celebrity myth" of his fame were having their covers blown. All through his life, the media consistently depicted celebrities at leisure; boating, surfing, traveling to France and Hawaii, lounging around in luxurious homes. But as Keiichi listened to his schedule for the day, he realized that the public's perception of a public figure's life was completely illusory. At least in his case...his personal schedule was jam-packed from 6am to well past midnight.

And then there was _another_ concert tomorrow! And the next day, he would be on the Kohaku Gassen TV special...

Sora explained that today he was going to spend all morning in the studio, auditioning remixes for his next single "Weird Dreams of a Girl on the Stairs". After this, he was slated to attend several charity luncheons in the afternoon. In late afternoon, he was going to be interviewed in a mini-press-conference about his plans for next year. In the evening, he would jet over to Korea to attend the World Premiere of "Chuko Han and the Dragon" in Seoul. After all, he had the main composers credit for the sci-fi film; having had composed the symphonic soundtrack and contributed a single, sung in Korean. After the gala premiere, he would face yet another brace of reporters on the return flight, a crew dispatched by NHK TV to interview him about his outdoors "Snow Loop Child" concert the following day at the NHK Studios parking lot in Tokyo.

And of course, Ms. Kanaka was going to fly over with him to Korea.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"People only see what they want to see. When they see my public persona, then they naturally assume that what they see is the 'real' me. The invulnerable me, the sexy me, the girl-next-door me, the give-me-a-blowjob-girl me, the voice-behind-the-anime-characters me, the me who is playing some other 'me' in a movie me... But all of these 'me's' are only roles...the 'me' that the public wants. _None_ of those are truly Anni-Imoto Kanaka, none are truly who I am! And therein lies the danger. Because it's very easy to give the public the 'public Anniko Kanaka'...and then delude myself into the concept that I'm controlling it all. That I'm fulfilling the demands of the public, at my whim...when actually I'm enslaved by their demands. I don't do control that well, except for the times when I'm in front of the cameras. But even that is an illusion. Even in my personal life, I find myself drawn to measuring whether I'm truly being myself, or it's just another 'me' that is speaking with my voice. My heart is so bound up by all of these 'me's'...it's difficult to feel safe with my feelings. And sometimes when I'm in front of you, my dear MoriStar," Anni admitted to him as they rode a limo to Seoul's Inchon International airport for the return flight from Korea. She grinned broadly, letting Keiichi know that she was teasing him.

Keiichi was surprised that this steely-eyed actress was being so vulnerable, so openly honest with him. True to her words, he could never imagine a beautiful model like Anniko Kanaka having a "private face". Back in "Relative Japan", as he termed the Japan he had lived in, she was nothing more than a sex-object. He'd even heard of XXX doujin comics drawn about her...

But now he was face-to-face with the real woman. A complex woman, whose celebrity had forced her to create many layers of iron-willed emotional shields within a March cherry blossom exterior.

Against his better judgment, he was beginning to admire her, perhaps even like her. Certainly, she was attractive; but like a high-priced geisha, she was accomplished as well. As they conversed, Keiichi learned that Anni was very educated. She wasn't just some "bubble-headed-idol-girl"; with relative ease, she talked about Islamic mystics like Rumi and Chinese philosophers like Lieh Tzu. Anni disclosed to him her constant regret about having so many cosmetic surgeries...not because of the nearly invisible scars they left on her face and body, but because sometimes when she looked in the mirror, she inevitably was led by her changed appearance to question who she was. _That_ admission was something he could never imagine a movie-star celebrity acknowledging. When she let her guard down, Keiichi found Anni was quite pleasant to talk to by virtue of her fresh honesty.

Yet, there was also something very needy in the midst of her cold aloofness. As Keiichi observed her mannerisms, he imagined her life to be like the Arctic Lights that fired over the chill expanse of the polar regions...a glow amidst the hibernal frigidity. She thirsted for real human contact; in her own words, any moment of genuineness seemed precious to her. Despite her devastating beauty, her millions of yen, the incredible international sweep of her fame...Anniko was a woman who was soldiering through life without a purpose. She admitted that she needed to challenge _everything_ that approached her life...and when she was not in a position to do so, she was then at a loss. But in contrast, once someone close to her became 'safe'...once there was no need to challenge that person's integrity...then she would quickly became bored by the emotional inertia.

"This poster girl is getting swallowed up by her fame, to the point where she doesn't know who she is any more, sometimes," she noted, speaking about herself. "But _you_ give me so much ground to explore. Exploring who _you_ are, Keiichi MoriStar...allows me a brief freedom from having to watch my every move." She seemed to be wrapped by herself, in a quietly reflective moment right after they flew out of Seoul Int'l. Keiichi could relate somewhat to her feelings; he kept finding himself at a loss about how to respond when people called him by his 'performer's name'.

And then the press folks started besieging him with questions...

Her discussion about the Pyrrhic glamours of popularity started Keiichi off into a mental enquiry about _his_ purpose here. Belldandy had told him that everything that happens in the Multiverse is connected. There is a mover and a movee. The mover may be pure random chaos, or it may be very purposeful. Even thoughts were helped along by the thoughts that came before them; this was the prime function of memory, according to Cevn. Keiichi knew that _something_ had moved him here. He had been brought to some parallel-universe Earth, and then literally dumped into the lifestyle of a very famous musical artist who bore his name and likeness. In this world, Belldandy had never met him...he didn't even know if his temple in Makuhari even existed! His younger sister was dead, her spirit frozen forever in childhood. He was a willing participant in some kind of flingy relationship with Goddess Peorth. And Japan's top model and actress was confiding her innermost secrets to him 10,000 meters above the Sea of Japan in his private jet...hoping he could empathize with the vicissitudes of fame.

As if _he_ would be able to understand the price of fame!

The only recognizable person from his life in the "Relative Earth" was Sora. But this 'Sora' was the ultimate uptight OL version of a corporate assistant. The Sora he knew from N.I.T. had a decided radical streak lurking underneath her calm exterior. Megumi confided to him that Sora listened to artsy indie music; very much in a non-conformist sorta vein. Megumi jokingly considered Sora as a "punkette in sheep's clothing." Actually, in plaid skirts. Keiichi readily recognized that this Sora shared the sharp intellect of the other...however, it had been harnessed in the direction of business, rather than engineering. This Sora was a workaholic secretary who dressed in the most conservative plainclothes business fashions any woman could possibly wear. Keiichi briefly wondered how anyone could dress like that. Underneath the conservative makeup and dress, Keiichi readily sensed that the Sora of this place and time was keenly bitter and unhappy about her life, despite her accomplishments.

What kind of role was she trying to portray by dressing so...unwomanly? Was it something Sora had to do, just like he 'had to' fly to Seoul this evening for a film premiere? Could her choice of attire be attributable to a spit-n-polish perfectionism? Or was she simply afraid that dressing like a woman would expose her lack of feminine attributes.

As his thoughts drifted, so did his consciousness...

After what seemed like five minutes, he felt a tapping on the shoulder. Seated on the semi-circle of chairs on his Learjet, Sora was awakening him for his next battery of interviews. All Keiichi wanted to do was go back to sleep.

Sleep was definitely a casualty of this lifestyle.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --


	81. Pt 81: Urd and Skuld: Glass Hammer Seco...

**Part 81: Skuld and Urd: Glass Hammer****–2nd Movement**

"This is absolutely moronic! How did we ever get in this mess?! _I_ certainly didn't ask to be here in some Urusei Yatsura otaku nightmare!" Skuld yelled fractiously as she drew a tight circular pace around Urd, Belldandy and Keiichi.

"Urusei Yatsura? What's that?" Belldandy asked, raising an eyebrow.

"I dunno...but it's a pretty good description of my wife. She's an alien, she's _very_ irritating, she always interferes with whatever I want to do..." Keiichi answered, drawing a look of ire from Skuld.

Skuld cursed her bad luck. Instead of reviving Cevn, the Ultimate Returning Mandala had betrayed the purpose of its Metanative energies...and _sent_ her and Urd to some parallel Multiverse. An illusory realm, based on an old manga series that Urd fancied. A series that Big Sister Urd thought was _funny_.

"Well, there was nothing funny about this place!" Skuld groused, her remark drawing questioning looks from the others.

To the best of her knowledge, there were no anime universes among the trillions upon trillions of universes in the Multiverse, last time she checked. The only plausible explanation she could come up with was that they were back in Yggdrasil. The Yggdrasil Mainframe was certainly capable of creating a virtual reality universe like this. So either they were stuck in a VR simulation...or they _really_ were in a new universe based on a comedy manga. If it were a new universe, then Kami-sama Himself must have something to do with their situation, as He was the only one capable of creating new universes. But why? Why would He even bother? The more Skuld theorized, the more she questioned her assumptions and intuitions...and the more she cursed her bad luck.

Therefore, 'here' was someplace that couldn't be explained.

And to make matters worse, the Earthrealm was under threat of total annihilation by Lum's Father...who was someone called the Oni Warlord. An attack was forthcoming unless she could somehow reconcile Lum with her husband. And in this reality, _Keiichi_ had wound up being Lum's husband.

Finally, to cap off the entire comedy of absurdities...when Belldandy arrived to offer her GRO services, this Keiichi had made the worst possible wish imaginable. Under the most freakystyle of circumstances, his idiot wish required Belldandy to do anything within her all-too-considerable powers to keep Lum away from him...

In a nutshell, it was a fucked up mess!

Skuld felt her face contouring with the authority of her frustration.

Matters were coarsened by the fact that Big Sister Urd wasn't herself. Ever since she had been reunited with Urd, Skuld had turned the question over in her mind about whether or not she was really her oldest sister. Her suspicions increased when she learned that Urd didn't even know why she had been brought here. But the omnipresent ethereal link that bonded her and Urd as sisters and Norns was readily sensible to Skuld. The 'sisterly' link between she and Urd...was completely was absent between her and this 'Belldandy'.

Skuld had to reluctantly admit the impossible: that her older sister was suffering from a selective amnesia. She gathered that Urd remembered nothing about the loss of her mortal boyfriend, the Returning Mandala, or what she was doing here in the first place.

This was like a bad moonrise on Vega VII...

"Oiii...you look really upset! Wanna cigarette?" Keiichi said, offering her a Lucky Seven menthol after he pulled one out for himself.

Skuld looked at him with bemused disgust, finding it hard to believe that he could be so clueless. _When_ did she ever ask him for a cigarette? For that matter, when did any of us ever even hint at smoking around him?

Could it be...that this wasn't the Keiichi that she lovehated?

Keiichi grinned idiotically at her. Put off by his insipid reaction, she turned to Urd, who was glancing nervously back and forth at the sight of the lit cigarette and Belldandy's face. Her older sister was obviously expecting Belldandy to go off any minute. Skuld well remembered her sister's very strong dislike of Keiichi's smoking in those early days of her stay on the Earthrealm...

But Belldandy didn't react at all...which incited another bout of moody disgruntlement for Skuld.

"And _you_!! How could you possibly agree to grant his wish! Keiichi is _married_ to Lum in this reality...and you go and screw things up for both of them! Isn't there some kind of Rule that prevents Goddess Relief Office workers like you from ruining marriages?" Skuld remonstrated, already knowing the answer to her question.

"Of course there isn't! If the person making the wish is in an unpleasant marital situation, then wouldn't it be the most sensible form of charity to grant their wish and act to dissolve the marriage?" Belldandy answered. Skuld looked straight up at the ceiling and clenched her fists while hissing "Ooooooo!" angrily.

"She's still a child sometimes, isn't she?" Urd quipped.

"I heard that...and I am _not_ a kid! Especially now!" Skuld responded. Urd had forgotten a lot, but she obviously hadn't forgotten how to taunt her.

"Skuld, it seems that you must _still_ think you're a child in some recess of your consciousness. Otherwise you wouldn't react so harshly when someone deems you as being childish. Observe how your Big Sister Urd and I act. If Keiichi decided to call one of us a child, his words wouldn't upset us in the slightest. This is because we're used to being adults...we _know_ that we're grownups. Simply put, you're not quite an adult yet. Adult Goddesses aren't worried about being mistaken for children. Since you're so bothered by being viewed as a young girl...the only reasonable explanation is that, in your mind, you _still_ see yourself as a girl! And on the face of it, there is no questioning the fact that you _are_ a young girl!"

Skuld had mounted up on a herd of fast-racing mustangs of rage, her mind careening so fast with disgust and dismay that she was too angry to speak. She trembled from head-crown to heel-curls with dudgeon. This Belldandy…was worse than Mara was during her worst fits of Demonic taunting! This Belldandy wasn't her sister at all; she was absolutely the cruelest, most brainless Goddess in the Multiverse. She tensed her hand around a cluster of Skuld Bombs, fighting desperately with herself to keep from flinging them at this brown-haired, blue-eyed…witch…who had called her a young girl over and over.

Urd literally hung her mouth agape at this, watching her youngest sister implode with nova-strength resentment. Belldandy had basically blunted Skuld with a direct impugnment of her typical "I'm not a kid!" reaction. The younger sister she knew would never be so tactless as to chew Skuld out for the trivialities of her instincts. Skuld's "I'm not a kid!!" reaction was pleasantly tolerated by Belldandy...the job of teasing or remonstrating Skuld seemed to always fell to Urd. Urd realized that Skuld was a bit ampy, but then Belldandy often was the balancing factor against Skuld's rashness.

But this Goddess? Urd sensed that 'this' Belldandy was every bit as mischievous as _she_ was. Belldandy was resolute in denying that granting Keiichi's wish was risky business. Her sister seemed to be mirthfully aloof of the consequences of her actions...

Which meant that she _wasn't_ Belldandy…

poundpoundpound

DAAAAARRRRLING!!

"Oh great, it's Lum again!" Keiichi observed in a moaning voice of exasperation. The shuttered wooden doors to the temple resounded with a knocking that suggested the full-fisted pounding of kobolds in Medieval mytheries.

"Skuld..._you_ talk to her!" Urd insisted.

"No way!! _You_ talk to her, Big Sister!" Skuld counter-exclaimed. Urd shrugged her shoulders and stood up, spurring herself to face the inevitable.

"'Parmis tous les arts du monde, le plus beau sera toujours celui de t'aimer,' as Peorth would say," Urd announced to no one as she left the room.

Among all the arts of the world, the most beautiful are always those of love.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

In the hour that she and Urd spent talking to Keiichi, a nightmarish picture emerged in Skuld's mind. No, not a nightmare...just a reality that was bent the wrong way. Or just _bent_, for that matter. In this Earthrealm, the Keiichi Morisato her sister had been assigned to wishgrant was a total slacker. For one thing, his motivation was strictly "freeter", to coin a phrase. His uninspired attitude was fitly described by the Japanese media's neologism...a world that combined "arbeit" and "freeloader" to describe an unambitious part-time worker. Lum had remarked that he had no aspirations other than tooling around on his motorbike and chasing girls, much to her chagrin. Having never even attempted the college prep schools, Keiichi had never gone to N.I.T. in this reality. After Lum had appeared in his life, he basically sponged off of her allowance from her father. A Japanese government that was grateful to Keiichi for saving the world...and PR-hungry...had chipped in with Lum's Oni Father to buy this temple. Lum's Father had furnished the temple for his daughter and her 'husband' as some kind of bridal dowry...a place to help her daughter feel grounded in her new home planet. To Keiichi, this arrangement was convenient insofar as it meant that he never had to "lower himself" to fulltime work.

And Lum loved him with all her heart.

More and more, Skuld found herself contrasting the Keiichi of this reality with the Keiichi that her sister was in love with. Once again, she had to reluctantly confront the errors of her judgment regarding Belldandy's fiancé. Over the years, Skuld had put Keiichi to task time and time again to prove his love for her sister...and he had passed each and every 'test'. He had even passed her parent's test, the Ritual of Preparedness. Belldandy's Keiichi and 'this' Keiichi were like salt and water, total opposites! Skuld found herself fondly appreciating Keiichi's drive and ambition, especially in terms of his desire to get his Master's degree so that he could land a good job and support Belldandy. When Belldandy and she had searched for him, Keiichi had discovered they were captives of an evil marabout, and had smuggled himself into an armed cap at the risk of life and limb to rescue her and Belldandy. In doing so, he had saved her life, as she was dying from being stung by a poisonous desert scorpion. There was so much more to love and respect in the Keiichi her sister was going to marry; and she was so thankful that she was going to marry one of the best guys there was.

In contrast, this Keiichi was nothing more than a narcissistic leech.

Lum deserved better than this.

But the whole situation reeked and stung, like an onion that was many-layered with conundrums. If she and Urd somehow managed to outwit Belldandy's granting of Keiichi's wish, then Lum could have her husband back. Which would majorly suck for Lum, because he obviously didn't love her. And if she and Urd left things as they were, the Earthrealm would wind up being vaporized. And even if it wasn't, her 'sister' would wind up being saddled with a lamer for the next 60 years or so...

Skuld hated lose-lose situations.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"So what did my Darling tell you? Huh? Huh? Has he woken up to his senses and decided that he's going to come back to me?" Lum asked with machine-gun anxiety as soon as she and Urd returned from the temple.

Skuld pondered how to explain this one to the distraught Oni-girl.

Keiichi's wish had been very specific: that Belldandy had to keep Lum away from him. The gist of this was that it indebted Belldandy to invoke all her Goddess abilities to fulfill the wish. Lum and her friends could literally find themselves pitted against an unsealed Goddess First Class, Unlimited, Unrestricted licensee if matters found their ways to an extreme. And if Skuld and Urd sided with Lum against Keiichi and Belldandy, then she might...no, she would...have to challenge her own sister!

A prospect that both daunted and discouraged the Norn of the Future.

"Keiichi's not coming back to you, Lum," Skuld started to explain in a level voice. The reactions were dramatic to a degree that approached a hyperbolic candor: Benten looked like she was going to explode with rageful disgust; Oyuki sat passively and bowed her head, shaking "no" side-to-side with a look of rapt disappointment; Lum was almost paralyzed, tears rimming her eyes as she floated in the air, tight-fisted and silent.

But to Skuld's surprise, it was her sister Urd who was sobbing...

"I don't..snff..understand why I'm so upset. It's not my problem at all! But yet, I feel like I've lost someone very close to me. B..but I know I haven't, so my reaction's kinda..snff..ridiculous, isn't it?" Urd explained as she wiped away her tears with a sheepish expression of embarrassment.

Skuld was well aware that Urd still didn't have all of her memories back. But yet, it seemed that the powerfully empathetic reaction to Lum's dilemma disclosed a deep fracture in her sister's memories. Urd might be _feeling_ the pain of her loss, without even being aware of _why_ she was swarmed by a deep sadness. If this emotional dissonance was real, it would only be a matter of time before the tragic memories would reassert themselves. Which pushed the youngest Norn into a decision-making corner, so to speak. If she told Urd the truth about Cevn, Skuld would be opening up floodgates of heartfelt turmoil for her sister. And if she didn't inform Urd, then Urd might discover the truth on her own, perhaps at a vital juncture in their efforts to try and solve this puzzlepiece of an entanglement. Three loony teenaged space-girls was bad enough; but an emotionally ballistic Urd in addition to the three girls would be too much for Skuld to handle...

"I'm just a teenager myself!" Skuld observed in frustration while trying to seize upon a possible solution to the mess she found herself in.

Another lose-lose situation.

When faced with such perplexities, Skuld would normally rely on the wisdom and experience of her older sisters. Either one of them. But Urd wasn't herself, and Belldandy...wasn't Belldandy. Once again, the forge of Skuld's awareness sheparded the uncomfortable reminder that she was totally on her own; bereft of her sister's advice and completely reliant on her own ken.

"I say we take 'im by force!" Benten explained. "This isn't about Lum's husband as much as it is about Lum's friends! He may be a worthless undeserving scoundrel..."

"HE IS NOT!!" Lum screamed.

"...but all the friends we have on the Earth don't deserve to have their planet blown up by Lum's Dad. I can call upon my fellow Gods to help me out...we could raise an army if necessary to free Keiichi from that intruding hussy!" Benten pledged.

"I would advise against such a bold step," Oyuki commented. "The mysterious power that seems to prevent Lum from flyovers over her temple compound must certainly have arisen from a very powerful source. Any rash attempts to remove Lum's husband by force from these premises could be fraught with hazard. I, for one, have learned the soundness of eschewing such unplanned risky ventures."

Benten seemed to collapse upon herself with frustration.

"I just want my Darling back!" Lum lamented.

Skuld felt like an engineer with "design block"...there were so many factors to include in any decision that it would almost be better _not_ to make a decision. But something had to be done soon, because the Earthrealm was on a probation of sorts, facing imminent destruction from the Oni...

"Pro...bation?!" Skuld breathed out, as a proverbial lightbulb flashed alit in her mind.

"Ehh??" Lum, Benten and Oyuki exclaimed.

"_That's it_!!" she said with a burst of joy, jumping up into the air with a skip. "That's the answer to all our problems!!"

The solution drew upon her like a series of anonymous flashes, flashes of light now discovered to be May fireflies. Skuld vividly recalled the truth: that the Earthrealm _was_ on a probation! Not the week-long period that Lum's Father had commissioned as a result of the insult to his daughter's honor...but the true probationary period. The century-long observation period decided upon by the Almighty and the Assembly of Gods, lasting until 2047.

Would the August One allow this Oni Invader to destroy the Earthrealm in the midst of the probationary period that He had enacted?

No way!

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"May I please speak with the Lord?" Skuld enquired in her most polite voice. The instrument clusters inside of Oyuki's icewalled starship twinkled in the corners of her eyes like Christmas lights in downtown Tokyo on Dec 24th. She had requested Oyuki to allow her a moment alone on the bridge of her Neptunian UFO so that she could "make an urgent personal call". Skuld had decided that caution would be in order here, she didn't want to tip off to the others as to whom she was calling.

With the primitive Holophotic technology on Oyuki's starcraft, it might even be possible that she could see whoever it was she wound up talking to. Of course, she wouldn't be able to see the Lord directly through a vid-link; as He was loathe to have His image transmitted in such a rudimentary manner.

Hopefully, her call would go through...

After a series of clickings and tones, a punctilious voice came on the line.

"You wish to speak with the Lord? I'm afraid that this won't be possible...Our Majesty is very busy at the moment! He has no time to answer calls right now. Do you wish to leave a message?" the voice noted, now animated on the vidscreen with an image of a young pink-haired woman. Skuld smiled at the screen; all of the Almighty's personal secretaries had pink hair. Why this was...was another one of those mysteries that surrounded the Lord...

This girl didn't look a millennium over 200,000 to Skuld. Quite young in comparison to the usual secretaries. Maybe even a trainee. As Skuld watched on the viewscreen, the young woman's expression wandered even deeper into a frown as she tapped out some keys on her translucent holographic desk. Skuld felt her shoulders slink downwards with disappointment.

"Er, excuse me a moment," she heard the voice give pause. Despite her attempt to project a polished, professional appearance, the pink-haired girl's eyes seemed to widen briefly at something she had read on one of the holospheres that surrounded her.

"What now?" Skuld wondered as she heard the secretary say "Yes Sir!" several times to an invisible presence, one she couldn't see on Oyuki's viewscreen.

"Is this Skuld, Norn of the Future on the line?" the operator asked, fidgeting nervously with her hair. Obviously, Oyuki's holophotic viewer was a one-way connection...the Lord's secretary couldn't see her.

Skuld fought the urge to make a face at the viewscreen.

She assented, curious about why the operator had switched from "take a number and wait" mode to "I'll see if He's free" mode.

"I..I'm very sorry about the mixup, Miss Skuld! Please forgive me...I'm new here!" she said, floating up and away from her desk. Unexpectedly, she started bowing deeply towards Skuld on the viewscreen.

"Kami-sama has informed me that He has anticipated your call and has prepared a response for you. He has left a memo for you that will explain everything. It's at the bottom of the Earthrealm's Marianas Trench. You _do_ know where that is, don't you?" she asked.

"Yes, of course I know where it is!" Skuld blurted out with irritation before she could check herself. She recalled that she was speaking with one of the Lord's personal secretaries...verbal rudeness would not be tolerated, even with a trainee. Her oldest sister had gotten rebuffed several times by the Lord for being sassy with His staff over the millennia. Once such incident had resulted in a 50-year license suspension.

She didn't want to make the same mistake.

"Is He okay? I..I mean our Lord? My older sister had to sacrifice her boyfriend's life to try and prevent Isilblius from appearing in the Multiverse, and..."

"Isilblius? Sacrifice? The Lord in some kind of danger? Tee hee hee...of course not!" the trainee said, giggling so hard her pink hair shimmered. "Our Lord is Almighty, isn't he? He's just fine. What could possibly give you the ridiculous idea that the Ultimate Demon is on the loose? And what makes you think that..."

Skuld didn't hear the rest of the call...

She tuned out everything, except the loud sobbing of her sister from behind her, who had just overheard the last part of her conversation.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Urd was pain.

When she overheard Skuld talking about "killing her boyfriend", it all came crashing down. Her memories, her heart, her house-of-cards fragility of personality in this whack anime universe. The loneliness had traced rings around her serenity; rings of barb-wire harshness that sliced her confidence away.

She had killed her boyfriend, sacrificing his single mortal life in a last-ditch effort to prevent sure disaster. Isilblius was unleashed, which was probably why she and Skuld were here instead of home. The Ultimate Magical Returning Mandala, which should have somehow unsealed Cevn's UF powers while restoring his Soul to him, had failed because there was no Cevn for it to restore anything to. The Real Death had put a seal on any of their hopes.

A forever love, forever gone.

Grief is such a riveting emotion, make the Present about as painful as it can feel. As Norn of the Past, she should be drowning in regret for all the 'maybes' she could have shared with Cevn. But an ocean of tears could be cried out over a thousand years...or even a thousand thousands of years. Past was futility, rendered in grace but silent as steel. Her familiar withhold, the observation deck of Oyuki's starship, filled with patches of woods streaking underneath like highway signs as the ship accelerated towards the ocean. During the Le Mans, right before he started turning into a damaged human being, Cevn had told her in one of their private moments "that all we need to do is believe in ourselves, because we hold the key, we hold the answer, we hold the means to let go, we hold the very changing of reality if we have to."

Another crazy inspired bit of nonsense from the mortal guy she had opened her heart to. Belldandy had teased her about "choosing one the craziest men on the Earthrealm to fall in love with" but then praising her for following her heart in regards to Cevn, staying true to an "inspired choice for a boyfriend." So where was this answer now? Keiichi was the Key to Belldandy's heart; but the Key to her heart was lost...which meant to Urd that part of her own heart would always be locked away from the rest of her.

But at least Lum had someone special in her life. At least she had a chance to recover his affections, or decide to leave him behind. Lum had a _choice_...something that Life itself seemed to give everyone. Urd was crushed by the choicelessness of her situation. Cevn had been ripped from her, without as much as a goodbye. She could half-remember the condition he was in when she saw him for the last time...

Urd's heart felt mummified.

The shock of the sudden remeshing of memories left her feeling almost in a stupor. It was so little to marvel at, the reason why she had snapped into such a profound state of forgetfulness. Now she knew why she had holes in her memory...it was because she had a huge hole in her heart. Urd knew that her mind had been trying to protect her heart by the only means possible...it had shoved the pain of Cevn's death as far back into Urd's conscious as it could by using the failsafe of selective amnesia.

The Present is as much as the Past can bear.

Her visits to the common lounge of Oyuki's UFO usually were very brief, because she just wanted to be alone. Alone...just like she was before. The loneliness of being the Norn of the Past weighed her Soul down once again.

One miracle of love against the unending storms of despair...and it had been blown away like the slender fibers of a dandelion.

Despite being near-choked with grief, Urd could sense Skuld's emotional conflict. Her younger sister obviously didn't know how to comfort her; so she was choosing the path of deference, letting her grieve in private. She felt sympathy for her youngest sister, who was obviously deeply troubled by her inability to fix the situation by consoling Urd towards feeling better.

Skuld loved to fix things...

A slight jarring of the ship's momentum informed her that Oyuki's ship had submerged in the ocean...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Where is this going, Skuld? I mean, why are we traveling down to the bottom of this planet's ocean? Isn't that a bit of a radical detour for us? You know we don't have time to waste screwing around on side missions!" Benten asked, pacing irritably across the common area of the starcraft. Skuld could sense the battle-fervor in the warrior-girl had not abated.

"Benten, it's because I've received a message from my 'friend'...a message that will probably resolve this whole situation. My sister, Lum and Oyuki all agreed that we should investigate this message. You did too, remember? I can vouch for the source of the missive," Skuld replied, earning a brief snicker from the glum-spirited Urd who was sitting by herself in the nearby observation deck.

"How is this going to bring back my Darling? And how will it get rid of that _other woman_ who's seducing him?" Lum wailed indignantly. Skuld was amazed at the singleness of purpose in this one-minded Oni girl. She had just spent 20 minutes convincing the group an hour ago about the need for this dive into the oceans...

"Have you ever wondered about _if_ you should be with Keiichi, Lum? I may be an outsider, but he strikes me as being a few sentences short of a paragraph," Skuld commented.

"HOW DARE YOUuuuuu!!" Lum growled, her Oni horns growing longer and sharper. Skuld backstepped in response to the ferocity of Lum's wrathful expression. She really _was_ an Oni-demon when aroused to anger...at least by the standards of vengeful biting eyes and reddened forehead! But she wasn't a Demon in the sense that Skuld was accustomed to; unlike Mara, Lum's 'demonic' facial expression wasn't filled with evil malice...it was just the forceful ire of a frustrated young woman.

The air sparked around Lum. Oyuki immediately tried to calm her down by grasping her on the arm.

"Lum, there are so many other men in the universe! Good men, who don't chase every woman they set eyes upon. Men with ambition, men with deep feelings, deep hearts, deep minds. Men who are good listeners! Have you ever _really_ sat down and had a true heart-to-heart talk with Keiichi," Oyuki offered.

"Yes, I did! I do! I tell him that I love him all the time!"

Benten sighed with exasperation.

"So why did he chase after me the first time he attended our annual Gods-Demons Tourney?" Benton said, turning to face Lum, her tone confrontational. "I remember him saying to me 'if Lum's hamburger, then you're steak!' or something to that affect. Don't tell me you've forgotten that?!"

"That's only because we were newlyweds and he didn't know that you were my good friend! A..and he was confused, and didn't know the proper way to behave around Demons and Gods! Being so new to marriage, my Darling Keiichi couldn't have possibly known the correct role that a husband should play back then! And if you _also_ remember, a few days later I was able to cut him some slack and forgive him for that infraction. So there! Uu..cha!" Lum counter-argued with vituperate enthusiasm.

Oyuki sighed with aggravation.

"Well...that didn't stop him from acting all ecchi during the Setsubon Festival the next year! He _knew_ that I was your friend, he knew who I was by that point...and he actually groped me _here_," Benten replied, gesturing towards her ample partially-clad breasts.

"That's because he was trying to hang on for dear life due to _somebody's_ gung-ho rabbit-crazy driving! And that game was stupid! How come the Gods get to pelt the Demons with all those..." Lum justified.

Benten's cheeks turned bright rouge.

"Lum...that's a bunch of bullsh...er, nonsense!" Oyuki interjected. "Your husband is a known pervert! He even tried to make love to me the first time he and his friends visited Neptune. Certainly, that wasn't a very proper first meeting between he and I. I always have to be wary around him! I get the chills just by looking at him some times...it's so obvious that he's undressing me in his mind!"

Skuld almost wanted to giggle at the idea of a Neptunian Princess like Oyuki getting the chills...

"Remember, he's very sly in his own way. He's almost had me in his grasp a couple of times," Oyuki added.

"That's because you're ignorant of the world, sitting in that ivory snow tower that your royalty allows you. Besides, _you_ led him on, not the other way around. Keiichi told me so! Of course, back then you didn't know that he was my husband, so I can understand why you found him attractive, Oyuki. Don't worry! All is forgiven!" Lum explained.

Benten sighed with frustration, rattling the metal chain that hung over her shoulder.

As the arguing continued, Skuld had the distinct impression that this topic was an old row between the three girls. Their debating had a ritualistic, almost rehearsed air to it. What was very curious to her were the types of descriptions and rebuttals being shouted about; each description matched what she had read in the Takahashi Rumiko manga.

She overheard a long sigh behind her, and turned to see a drained-looking Urd standing in the doorway to the common area. Her sister had been aroused out of her grief by the gradually escalating argument. Because of this, Skuld was momentarily thankful for the consternation. Anything that could ease the emotional pain her sister was experiencing was more than welcome...

Then Big Sister Urd pulled out of her grief-fugue long enough to drop a bomb, so to speak.

"So, if you guys have been together over four years, have you ever 'done it'?" Urd asked slyly. Skuld felt her back tense rigid, as she fully knew the bent of Urd's question.

"My Darling and I have done _everything_!" Lum replied proudly.

"I mean...have you and Keiichi ever slept together?"

"Yes, I sleep in his room every night when I'm not on my UFO or somewhere else, like visiting Mom and Daddy!" Lum answered as she floated in the air. She folded her arms across her chest and nodded her head as if to gloat.

Benten and Oyuki sighed with frustration.

"Lum...have you and Keiichi ever had passionate sex? Ever spent a gloriously naked night tightwrapped in each other's arms, just the two of you and the gasping madness of your love for each other?" Urd demanded.

"W..what are you talking about?" Lum asked nervously, her face turning pale.

"Have you and Keiichi ever _fucked_ each other?"

Skuld felt her face rush with blood at the vim and bluntness of her Big Sister's words. Oyuki was so stunned, she dropped her raku teacup onto the decking. Benten was gripping her chain like a girl would grip a stuffed animal to her chest.

Lum's blush and wordless stuttering was answer enough.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Well, that just about settles it!" Skuld said in a disappointed voice after she read the Almighty's message. She carefully folded the slim metallic flower neatly and stuffed it in one of her pockets.

In the missive, the Almighty had directed in no uncertain terms that He would tolerate no tampering with Belldandy's assignment by either she or Urd. Skuld had expected some kind of injunction, so she wasn't particularly surprised by His position on the issue. But strangely enough, He didn't mention either Lum, Oyuki or Benten. Which meant that He _didn't know_ about the three girls. Which meant that Skuld and Urd _could_ interfere indirectly by aiding the trio.

Augeries of innocence that could be concealed within patterns of scheme-wise intent.

For some reason, a mental image of Tomohisa arose in her mind. The thoughtsight of him somehow made Skuld suddenly flutter with homesickness. Shuddering away the vividly nostalgic course of her feelings, she tried once again to probe the intricacies of Future TimeSpace. And once again, she was rebuffed by some kind of invisible wall that concealed TimeSpace from her...

"Why think about Tomohisa...and why now?" she asked herself, feeling nervous because of the persistent image in her mind. In the four years she had been on the Earthrealm, she had transcended herself on a number of levels. In fact, Skuld sometimes secretly felt like she had learned more during this brief span on the Earthrealm than in all the millennia that she had been training in Sysop work. Instead of clobbering Bugs with Mjolnir, she was learning about what makes mortals tick.

She had stumbled onto an unexpected fondness for Keiichi in her heart. Keiichi, who was the dreaded sister-stealer when she first arrived on the Earthrealm. Keiichi, whose goofy-go-lucky character had somehow charmed her sister. Keiichi, whose sincerity had shined through when everything else seemed dulled...

And now Tomohisa was invading her thoughts.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

_Skuld recalled the past: how Tomohisa was only 12 when she first came to the Earthrealm. He was short and spindly in physique, standing just a few cm taller than she, back when she was in her "child's body". She had only been on the Earthrealm a few weeks at that point in time in her new role as an Earthrealm Trainee._

_She smiled to herself. The picture forming in the grove of her memories reminded her how her first meeting with Tomohisa had not been very graceful..._

She was arguing vehemently with Urd about why she was trying to dose Keiichi with another one of her love potions. Urd wasn't only being obstinate, but she was being impractical as well. What could anyone possibly benefit from if she made Keiichi lust after Belldandy? But Urd kept trying, despite a series of mishaps and failures.

Skuld didn't understand her sister's whacko fascination with try to get Keiichi to be all smoochy with Elder Sister. She was already smoochy enough with him. And Urd was absolutely obsessive about something called "sex"...

She and Urd had been arguing so intently that they didn't notice the small boy who had entered under the front gate torii and had walked up the driveway towards them. A stranger, who had simply walked in as if he belonged at their temple home.

_"Hi!!"_

Urd had halted in mid-taunt, while Skuld had halted just short of pulling a Skuld Device out of her jacket flap. Their heated debate now discarded for the moment, they both stared at the newcomer, whose short hair was ruffled...

"Who are you?" both she and her sister had asked.

"Hi! I'm Tomohisa! Is this where I'm supposed to be?" he asked, showing Urd a hand-drawn map sketched out on a piece of notebook paper. Skuld was immediately put off by the gesture, sensing that this boy probably figured that Urd would be more suited to help him because she was older.

"I don't know! Where are you _supposed_ to be?" Skuld snapped irreverently, irritated by the fact that he hadn't asked _her_ for help too.

"Ignore her, she's just a brat!" Urd said in a deadpan voice. "What's your name again?"

"Big Sister Urd, I am not a..."

"Tomohisa," he said, interrupting Skuld's impending verbal flurry against her oldest sister. His bright smile was oblivious to Skuld's burning narrow-eyed disgruntled expression.

"Araaa? Keiichi didn't mention any Tomohisa to me," Urd said, resting a finger on her chin as she pondered.

"I'm his cousin! Y'know..._baseball_?"

"Baseball what?"

"Baseball! As in the younger cousin who loves to play baseball! I like hitting home runs an' stuff!" Tomohisa said brightly.

"Ahhh, so you must be very popular with all the girls in your school," Urd remarked. Tomohisa's face promptly faulted into an open-mouth paralysis. Skuld didn't what Urd was hinting at, but it certainly embarrassed the new kid big time.

"W..well, I'm Keiichi's _only_ cousin...but I'll be 13 soon! Is Cousin Megumi around? She could explain things to you," he explained, recovering his composure very quickly. Skuld noted another thing about mortals: children tend to regain their wits and emotions much quicker than adults here. They seemed to rebound from being flustered as if nothing had happened. Tomohisa was no exception. Perhaps it was immaturity...

"Megumi doesn't live here. She lives in an apartment near N.I.T.," Urd said matter-of-factly.

"Oh...I thought she lived here. Who are you?" he responded

"I'm Urd, and this is my kid sister Skuld!"

"URD!!"

"Sorry, sorry sorry!" Urd said, waving her hand apologetically. "She's a very sensitive child...she gets upset easily about her age!"

Skuld bit her lip as she realized that the apology that she had thought would be intended for her was instead directed at this newcomer, while secretly, it was just more taunting by Big Sister. She glared hostilely at the young boy. He was wearing a sweatshirt with a Yomiuri Giants logo on it, and his baggy jeans were piled up at the cuffs, too long for his legs.

Ignoring her completely, he suddenly seemed to change mental gears...

"Wow!! Isn't Tokyo such a _big_ city?!" he exclaimed with youthful amazement. "My Mom and Dad just moved here from Shiojuri. Do you know where that is?"

Skuld rolled her eyes. This kid was starting to really get on her nerves.

"Uh, Keiichi will be back soon. He's went on a motorcycle ride with his _girlfriend_," Urd noted, darting a telling sideglance at Skuld as she emphasized the word "girlfriend". Skuld reacted by sticking her tongue out at her sister.

"What's up with _her_? You'd almost think that she hates my cousin," Tomohisa asked.

One thing that really virused Skuld's temper into the stratospheres was being referred to in the third person. In this one area, she possessed a vanity that was fully the equal of her oldest sister's. And Tomohisa had just set her off...

"I'm not a 'her', I'm _me_! Did you come here just so you could get on my nerves? Why don't you go and play somewhere until Keiichi gets back!" Skuld blasted, then spun on her heel and stormed into the house.

"Hmmm, I think that might be a good idea. You can go play over there," she heard Urd say calmly. She watched her sister point towards the main vehicle garage.

"Cool! I can practice catching!" Tomohisa shouted as he unslung his bookbag.

A moment later, Skuld was digging into a quart of butterbrickle fudge ice cream in the living room. Ice cream was the only remedy; the soothing cool taste distracted her, helping her cope with the rude boy. She looked out the window and watched as her new enemy was throwing a tennis ball against the side of the garage. Skuld glared as her Big Sister's back from inside the house as Urd watched him playing.

"Time to tug on Skuld's ear again...and not just with words," Skuld overheard her sister mumble, just before she turned around and started walking back into the temple house.

Skuld knew that this was her cue to retreat to the safety of her new "Skuld Labs" room. She scooped up her ice cream and swifted down the hallway to her room. She was still in the process of setting up her computer networks, chronometric interfaces, holophotic tech and AI vats...so staying in her room a few hours wouldn't be total waste...

Hopefully this 'cousin' of Keiichi's would be gone by then.

But as soon as she sat down, the door flew open.

"Skuld, you brat! How could you be so rude to him? Here you are, acting all important by your lonesome! He's just a young Earthrealm kid! He doesn't know any better! You, of all people, should know how impetuous and unthinking children are!" Urd said, full-front Big Sisterish condemnation in every word.

"Leave me alone, Big Sister!" Skuld warned, reaching inside her jacket. The gesture didn't even faze Urd.

"And what if he _is_ Keiichi's cousin, like he claims to be? It would mean that he might come and visit more than just this one time, ya know! In which case, his first impression of you might work against you in the future! As an Earthrealm Trainee, you're certainly blowing it!"

"It will not! And I am not!" Skuld shouted back. "I don't care what he thinks of me! And I don't care what Keiichi thinks of me either! So there! End of discussion!"

"Not by a long shot, _Little Sister_! Think about Belldandy for a minute! Don't you care what our sister thinks of you?" Urd reasoned sharply.

"She loves me, and nothing's going to change that. Not even Keiichi and his hentai ways!"

"Uh, I hate to break it to you, Skuld...but 'hentai' is the last word I would think of to describe Keiichi. He's actually too scared to even _kiss_ your sister!"

"SHUT UP! I don't wanna hear about h..him!" Skuld fired back.

"Okay. But think about this. If you make one of Keiichi's family members uncomfortable around the house, how do you think that would affect our sister? Don't forget, this is _his_ house! If Keiichi's uncomfortable having company over to his own house, wouldn't that cause Belldandy to be uncomfortable too? And we certainly don't want that to happen, do we?" Urd noted in a parental tone of voice.

The voice that absolutely screamed for a Skuld-bombing!

"No way!! That won't happen, because there's no way I would do anything to make Elder Sister feel bad! Besides, you're just being stupid! Why would she feel bad just because that rotten Keiichi would feel all upset when his family comes to visit?"

"It's something...that a _child_ certainly wouldn't understand. Just take my word for it!" Urd said, shaking her head in exasperation. Skuld knew that she had scored one on Urd by calling her stupid.

"Well, I don't understand it...and I don't _care_ that I don't understand it! So why don't you leave me alone and go make some poison in your room! Or maybe you can make that kid your boyfriend or something!" Skuld said.

She held her hand over her mouth in shock...but it was too late. Skuld watched Urd's eyes turn groundwards, instantly causing her to regret what she had just said. Once again, Urd's status as Norn of the Past had cast its melancholic shadow over her sister. Skuld knew that Urd could never have a boyfriend again. And she had just slapped her oldest sister with this terrible fact...

Again.

Skuld tried to voice an apology as Urd silently walked out of her lab-in-the-making, leaving her to saturate with guilt and confusion...

"It's all your fault, you little jerk!" she shouted at the open window. "If you hadn't come visit us this afternoon, me and Big Sis wouldn't be fighting!"

_Skuld smiled wanly at the memories. _

_"Was I really such a little sassy bitch back then?" she asked herself. If the events of that day were to be believed, she didn't want to answer her own rhetorical question. She had laid into Tomohisa within moments of first meeting him. And then she laid into him again, later in the day._

_Not once, but thrice..._

As Tomohisa was pitching the tennis ball with greater force against the wall of the garage, he had to steadily step backwards as the ball rebounded in longer arcs.

Step by step, inch by inch...

And soon, he was standing in the middle of Belldandy's freshly planted flower garden...a tennis-shoed human flower-mower.

Skuld had picked just this moment to go out and take a walk around the property. She was too scattered by the accidental scathing remark to her sister to be able to concentrate fully on her schematics for the robotic watchman she was designing for the temple house. After all, if she was going to live here, she would need to be safe from Keiichi and any of those creepy guys he hung out with. Which might be impossible, because _all_ the men on the Earthrealm were creeps.

She walked around the corner and saw Tomohisa, just as Elder Sister and her goofy mortal charge pulled up the driveway.

"Tomohisa!! What the hell are you doing? You're stomping all over Bell's flowers!" Keiichi exclaimed.

Tomohisa looked down and frowned at the crushed roses and chrysanthemums.

"Oops!" he said as he tried to step out of the circular plot of flowers.

He only wound up crushing several more shoots.

"I can't believe you! Those are the flowers Belldandy tended by hand for _weeks_, and you just trounced them!" Keiichi scolded, his face screwed up with irritation. Even though she strongly disliked Keiichi, Skuld corked a wide grin, amused by how he was chewing out his younger cousin.

"Keiichi-san...is that your little cousin?" Belldandy asked, not even bothered by the trammeling of the fruits of her Goddess Green Thumb...

"Yep! That's why he should know better..."

"Keiichi-san, I know that he didn't mean to wreck my flowers. Even though he's only trampled about a third of them...the other two-thirds he didn't step on should be okay," Belldandy noted with a pleased smile.

Tomohisa only hung his head lower in response to Belldandy's assessment of the damage. Skuld almost wanted to laugh as she saw him being dipped in shame. Not only had he pissed off the only other kid his age, he was now in the doghouse for ruining his cousins girlfriend's small garden. He did the only thing that made sense...

"Can I have a ride in your sidecar, Cousin Keiichi!"

And that was when Skuld exploded the second time, rushing out from behind the house and yelling "BAKA!" at the top of her lungs while brandishing Mjolnir...

_Skuld's smile grew wider. That first visit by Tomohisa was the reason why Belldandy had decided to move her garden to a place _-behind-_ the temple house...away from budding baseball players with big feet._

_Tomohisa's first visit was back in the days when Keiichi and Belldandy used "san" when they addressed each other. Skuld felt a little nostalgic now and then about those first days on the Earthrealm. The "Furoba Incident" with Keiichi in the bathroom was her introduction to her sister's new home; in many ways, her first day at the temple was just as tumultuous as Tomohisa's first visit._

_Then again, maybe not..._

Belldandy had decided to cook a magnificent dinner to try and repair the tension between Keiichi and Tomohisa. Skuld could see right through her sister's motives as she busied herself in the kitchen. Her middle sister was fully into the peacemaker role. Actually, she was trying to smooth things out so she could have Keiichi's undivided attention.

Skuld didn't care if Keiichi and Tomohisa hated each other for the rest of their lives. In fact, she hoped they did hate each other. Maybe then, they'd _both_ go away.

She rubbed the bump on the back of her head.

"At least you got a bump on your head too!" she growl-whispered at the young Tomohisa, who was watching...what else...a baseball game on the TV.

After giving Tomohisa a second dose of piquant ireful pointers...actually, yelling at him until her lungs gave out...Skuld had punctuated her chastisement of the young mortal boy with a blow to the head from her mallet. This earned the wrath of both her sisters, so she decided to lie low and give it another try in her lab. After a couple hours, she looked outside her jalousied window to see Megumi and Tomohisa playing catch.

"Great...now there's _two_ of them!" she thought dourly.

This was definitely an "all Earthrealm mortals are scum!" day. She already hated Keiichi, disliked his younger sister Megumi...and now she had one more person to loathe.

A half-hour later, she was totally engaged in a brainstorm, feverishly weaving 3D mechadesigns on her computer. The A.I. circuitry for the robotic watchman was finally coming together! She was mentally debating how she should program the "Banpei", as she termed it. What personality matrix she should include? She started drawing up a behavioral psyche flowchart when she heard a crash.

_Felt_ a crash.

Heard nearby yelling.

"Tomohisa! Look what you did!! You're not supposed to hit it that hard! It's not a softball, it's a baseball...and we're not at a diamond, we're at my brother's place! And look over at the temple! You broke a window! Didn't you stop to think that this temple has jalousie windows? I hope Keiichi makes you pay for it out of your allowance!" Megumi shouted sharply.

"Ooops!"

Skuld glared towards the broken remains of a half-dozen horizontal slats in her windowsill. They were hanging loosely in her window, while the tatami floor sparkled with hundreds of pieces of glass from the shattered panes. As she heard the outdoors voices filtering through from the outside, they almost seemed to melt under her intense stare...

_Skuld giggled._

_"Well, it _-was-_ funny!" she reminded herself as she watched a pod of whales swimming in the distance, curiously checking out Oyuki's UFO. Oyuki must have seen them too, because her UFO's searchlights were basking the deepsea behemoths in a coolblue light. _

_Funny how it turned out that both she and Tomohisa had knots on their heads at the end of that bizarre day. Tomohisa's visit had turned into a nightmare, as surely as if the Ultimate Force had planned it that way. Skuld tried to imagine how Tomohisa must have felt that evening. His child-thoughts must have centered around the belief that he had hopelessly pissed off the only person his age in the whole temple complex. Not to mention alienating his two cousins in short order._

_It was amazing that he even survived that day..._

"Wow! This is totally awesome, Belldandy-san!" Keiichi said as he munched on the seasoned crab legs. Belldandy smiled brightly as his words of praise, while Urd made a finger-in-mouth "gag me!" hand motion and Skuld slapped her glass of chocolate milk down on the table a little too hard.

Megumi, of course, was oblivious to the tension in the dining room. She was in full munchout mode.

Skuld shot her a look. Keiichi's younger sister sure seemed to gorge herself whenever she came over for a visit. Which was often at meal times...

Another reason why Skuld regretted her sister's growing culinary abilities.

If it wasn't for the exquisite dessert dishes that Belldandy had prepared, Skuld would be totally put out at her older sister's proficiency with cooking Earthrealm dishes. All her cooking seemed to do was make Keiichi act goofy, and make Megumi come around more often. She agreed with Big Sister Urd, who thought that meal preparation was way beneath Belldandy. The idea of her sister actually _cooking_ food when she could simply materialize the best dishes from the best restaurants on the Earthrealm...really irritated Skuld. Belldandy could look in a cookbook and recreate any recipe with a gesture of her fingers.

And yet she was spending time in the kitchen instead.

Skuld wasn't too pleased with Belldandy's cooking abilities that night...

But that was no excuse for what happened next.

As luck would have it, Tomohisa was seated next to her.

And he was getting very quiet.

_"Ack...cough...hunnh!!"_

She heard a throaty gasping from nearby. She looked over to see Tomohisa clawing at his throat desperately.

"What are you doing?" Skuld asked in a thin icy voice, definitely not impressed with the choking sounds. She already knew what he was doing; he was up to another one of his clownish attention-getting stunts! Now he was pretending to be sick...

The young Earthrealm boy ignored her as he gasped for air. It almost sounded like something was blocking his windpipe. Megumi and Keiichi were both looking at their cousin with visible alarm.

...and a moment later, Skuld's lap was filled with warm, smelly vomit.

Tomohisa _had thrown up on her_!!

The little jerk had thrown up her sister's best cooking!

Skuld was speechless with rage. Not only was Skuld covered with chunks of food which totally ruined her white outfit...Tomohisa's sudden upchucking was a grave insult to her sister's honor. Belldandy had assumed diligent efforts to master the Earthrealm's varied cuisines, and this...loser...had just barfed it up.

All over her.

_--Crack!!--_

As soon as Tomohisa had regained his breath and settled down from his spastic heaving, Skuld had slapped him as hard as she could. At least as hard as she could while keeping the force of her blow within mortal terms. If she had _really_ slapped him, his head would be orbiting somewhere in the Oort Cloud right about now.

As it was, Tomohisa was now reeling like a drunk from the blow.

And everyone seated at the dinner table was glaring at her...except Belldandy, who was looking at the table with a sad expression.

Skuld didn't care.

"And because you're such an idiot, I'm going to actually skip out on dessert! I've gotta wash up! I can't stand it here!" she screamed in his face before storming out of the room...

_Skuld felt a tear in her eye as she smiled inwardly at the bittersweet memories. Much later, she had learned why he had gotten so sick on that first fateful visit to the temple. Tomohisa had suffered a severe asthmatic attack while eating dinner that night. The accompanying seizures and difficulty with breathing had caused him to choke on his food. He had no control over how and where he vomited._

_Back then, Tomohisa had kept his asthma condition to himself; his cousins Keiichi and Megumi didn't even have a clue about his ongoing malady. Skuld sensed that his secrecy was because of his pride, coupled with his pressing desire to be viewed as athletic by his peers. And perhaps in his own way, Tomohisa didn't want to trouble the two older cousins that he looked up to._

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"You idiot..." Skuld whispered to herself. She had to admit to herself that she missed him just a little bit.

Over the past four years, Tomohisa had grown older in age and body while she remained the same; manifesting every day in her 12-13ish physical manifest. He had outstripped her in stature, growing almost 40cm taller that she. His voice had deepened and his face had peachfuzzed, while his eyes had even gained more of a sparkle over those years...

But his drive to be a good baseball player had never changed. It would be a futile attempt; kids with asthma were often excluded from high school sports.

Skuld regretted that she hadn't even tried to invent a machine that would cure him of his asthma. Now that they were stranded in this 'anime universe', she might never have the chance. She measured herself with uncertainty; how could it be that she always wanted to be helpful to others, and yet she'd totally forgotten about Tomohisa? She felt stung by regret as she realized that she had never even once offered to help him in anything...

Four years is an eyeblink to a Goddess...but to a mortal, a lot can change in a mere four years. As Tomohisa grew into his teens, he started regarding her more and more as a kid. In a sense, Tomohisa's visits to the temple that first year had served to remind Skuld of that which she wasn't: a child. Watching a real child at play made her feel more mature in some ways. But the next few years brought an irony of their own. Once Tomohisa started growing into a handsome teenager, he no longer reminded her of what she wasn't. Instead, he reminded her of what she _was_...a physically immature girl with zero bust potential and no curves to her hips. And it even got worse, because he started treating her as a young girl, unaware of how uncomfortable the shifts in the nature of his attentions had made her.

Then, just a few months ago, she experienced the miraculous transformation that wasn't supposed to happen for forty millennia. Overnight, she had 'caught up' with him in terms of physical maturity. After mastering wearing a bra, Skuld would find herself gazing at her naked body in the mirror in the bathroom, marveling at how her proportions had suddenly filled out. She gradually grew accustomed to having the physical presence of a 16 or 17-year old.

Almost immediately in the wake of her transformation, she noticed another significant shift in Tomohisa's attitude towards her. The teenage boy was no longer regarding her as a child. Even a year ago, he seemed to look at her from time to time with an interest that was enigmatic...an interest that seemed to leap beyond the fact that she was '13' and he was 16.

Now he was 17...and she was a very lively '17', for all practical purposes.

His 'new style' attentions were extremely irritating at first. He couldn't seem to keep his eyes from roaming up and down her body. Skuld had reacted with a mixture of embarrassment and revulsion towards his fascination with her physical appearance. At times, his mind seemed to wander off while he was talking with her, which only fueled her irritation more. He would be saying something...and then he would mumbleword and stare at her for no reason at all.

Skuld found her thoughts resurfacing on the trip to Algeria. Her sister had claimed that since Urd and she had fallen in love with an Earthrealm mortal, then it was quite possible that Skuld herself might develop feelings for an Earthrealm man.

Or boy.

As in one particular boy who was almost her age.

Urd was always teasing her about being "Tomohisa's girlfriend"...words that would always pull the triggers of embarrassment. Or more often, rage. Elder Sister Belldandy even seemed to side with Urd sometimes, patiently explaining to Skuld about how she should behave more "delicately" around Tomohisa. How convenient that they thought he was her 'target', since he was the only boy her age that visited the temple regularly!

Any reasonably bright Earthrealm mortal wouldn't have ever spoken to her again after that first day. But instead, Tomohisa kept trying to become her friend. He had bought her ice cream at the malls despite his meager allowance, accompanied her to the beach when Keiichi and Belldandy would get "summer fever"...he even listened one day when she described her ambivalent feelings towards Sentaro, the bicycle boy. And then there was that stupid 'body-switching' episode, which forced she and her sisters to reveal the truth about their origin to him. When Tomohisa found out that she was a Goddess, he was hesitant around her for a while...but he didn't bail on the friendship that he sensed as existing between them. Even though Skuld discouraged him time and time again, he kept to an optimistic outlook.

She had gotten angry with him many times since that first day; and many of those times were fully justified by his idiotic behavior...but he kept hanging out with her. And just recently, she remembered one afternoon on the porch. For some reason, Skuld found herself talking with him about music. In the middle of their conversation, she unexpectedly felt an urge to describe the grave feelings of regret that she felt when she had told her Angel, Noble Scarlet, to seal herself away. Obviously, Tomohisa could barely understand the complexities of the relationship between a Goddess and her Angel...it just wasn't possible to convey such things to a mortal. Or so she thought. She remembered how he had smiled a comforting smile at her anyway while he listened. And she remembered what he had said once she had finished describing the heartbreaking experience of not being mature enough to have an Angel...

"There's always the future, Skuld."

And now Skuld found herself hesitantly wishing that he had tried harder to impress her. That he had made an effort to pay more attention to her. That he had been a little more assertive at times. That he had maybe taken a risk, and said...

"Skuld! Hey, are you there? We're almost back in Japan!" Benten shouted through the metal doorway.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --


	82. Pt 82: Miyuki and Natsumi: Canone Secon...

**Part 82: Miyuki and Natsumi: Canone -- 2nd Movement**

Living in this pastwards-gone-sideways Tokyo was like living in a sheetmetal chambered cage. Each new sight only reminded her of the alien inside of her; the woman who was a future-seeing shamaness, four decades removed from the truth of time. Each person's attitudes announced the stark generational separation between now and all that was familiar to her. These were heydeys: the Japanese economy was nascently robust as it pumped out millions of transistor radios and compact sedans; the anime was definitely "golden age" in the vein of Astro Boy, Star of the Giants, and Gigantor; the psychedelic music blaring from 'hip' radios and music shops scaled a folksy airiness and jarring grunginess at the same time. And the spectre of the escalating cold and hot wars shadowed over it all, poised overhead like an indefinable iron fist.

Natsumi hated it.

The charm of living in a different era was shaken off quite decisively a couple days ago when she and Miyuki found themselves getting caught up in a student anti-war protest that turned riotous. Demonstrations at several campuses had spilled over into the park where they were waiting. They were supposed to meet with Beatnik and his friends at the park...but they never got a chance. The demonstration turned volatile in some spots, as platforming students urged their peers at the universities to go on strike and hold sit-ins at government office buildings. The two policewomen, plus over 10,000 students caught up in the frenzy of public protest, were surrounded by SDF and police troops dispatched to contain the demonstration. Most of the students mellowed out, but a number of hotheaded radical collegians started pelting the troops with rocks and soda bottles while another group of students started tipping over the park's statuary. The police reprisal included gunfire, tear gas and swat-stick bludgeonings. Both she and Miyuki got gassed during the ensuing panic; the two friends barely made it out of the melee before puking their guts out.

Two days later, Natsumi's eyes still stung when she woke up in the morning.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"We need to visit Panther again. It seems that he's been lying to us about being a Yakuza!" Miyuki announced as they sat down for a curry. The curry was soup-watery and the rice was overcooked, but it was a garnet at under a hundred yen. In 20XX, a rice-only bento cost 450 yen from one of the subway stalls...and that for a single-scoop portion that could barely stave off the appetite of a 3rd-grader coming home from school. Miyuki eyed the small cook, who was stirring a large kettle of noodles...

Natsumi snapped her attention away from the Spanish bullfighting posters pasted on the walls near their table. Yep...only in Tokyo could one find a curry house filled with quirky Spanish décor. At least _that much_ was familiar...

"What?! Hello Miyuki...where've you been the past week? Panther is a yakuza through-and-through! Didya notice how he handled those underlings of his this morning when they harassed the old man? He definitely put them in their place!" Natsumi replied with a confident expression as she watched the rising steam from her plate of curry.

It seemed to form into the shape of a skull...

"That's what troubles me," Miyuki noted. While on 'patrol' of the area near the yakuza hangout, there was a repeat of the rainy day surveillance incident involving the same elderly man and the five junior yakuza who had harassed him before. Only this time, the five yakuza had lingered in the shadows, obviously polishing away plans to mug the spry eldster as he walked by. As the elderly Tokyoite strolled past the alley with a handbox full of fresh fish, they sprang on him. Before she and Natsumi could cross the street to intervene, the attempted mugging was halted by Panther. After ordering them to leave the old guy alone, Panther demanded that they tip their intended victim for troubling him with their crude harassment...and then he punched the leader of the group during the process of dressing them down.

Yakuza usually slapped their underlings in such public situations.

Which meant that...unless the yakuza code was markedly different in the Japan of this reality...Panther had acted highly inappropriately by punching his underling in public. Yakuza _never_ punched a subordinate in public...it was considered inexcusable bad manners to display such behavior in the open. Also, for reasons of their own, a face-slap was considered even more insulting by the gangsters. Slapping an underling was like a "father spanking a son" in the Yakuza demimonde; it was at once a chastisement and a strong assertion of the Boss's authority.

Natsumi silently chided herself for missing such an obvious situation. Once again, her personal feelings towards the suspects had caused her to overlook a vital piece of the puzzle. Miyuki's observation had unsettled her greatly; especially in the light of the fact that she was getting 'that feeling' again. She sensed that she kinda liked Panther...and not necessarily in a Platonic manner either. His younger brother was interesting too, but Wolf was still immature. One of the seeming curses of having a heart that was long-barrowed with energy was Natsumi's ability to get carried away by flights of fancy whenever she encountered any good-looking guy. Panther was roguish in looks, but his manners seemed to come from some other part of the constellation of male attributes. There was something offhanded about him, mysterious.

And Natsumi was easily attracted to mysteries...

She contemplated this fact as her erstwhile partner went on to elaborate on her theory about how Panther and Wolf were trying to pull a scam over on one of the local yakuza gangs. Miyuki held that Panther and Wolf were related in some way to a yakuza overboss...and that the two young men were trying to divert funds from the drug trade to some other venture without the knowledge or approval of the syndicate head. That could possibly explain their secretive retreat to the ryokan the other day. Miyuki went on to opine that the two young men might be marked by the Boss, who was only 'protecting' them insofar as they didn't usurp his authority. Now that Panther had punched an underling in _public_, his actions would become suspect...definitely an encroachment on the Boss's status.

For some reason, Natsumi found herself gorging her curry with a chowline pace. Five minutes later, her appetite was sated, yet she felt emptied emotionally.

Yes...Panther was an enigma.

As the two women briskly walked out of the curry store into the chilly Fall air, a black Toyota sedan spun around the corner. Pulling up over the curb with a violent recklessness, the car screeching to a halt, defiantly blocking their path on the sidewalk. In an instant, four men piled out of the car and drew beads on she and Miyuki with handguns...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Hmm, so you both claim to be Keio students? Feh! Neither of you two birds look smart enough for that! I seriously doubt that either of you even graduated high school!" a portly man with the scarred face said with a sour dubious expression.

Miyuki narrowed her eyes at the insult. She was definitely smart...in fact she had been offered a chance to study at one of the better universities in her home province; an opportunity she had passed up because she was already interested in becoming a law enforcement official. She could hear the shuffling of the chair next to her, a clarion indication of the anger her partner was growing.

They had been abducted at gunpoint and brought here by blindfold. Unlike the other night in front of the Goblins dance club, she and Natsumi didn't have a chance to defend themselves. Two women against 4 men with guns on a crowded restaurant row sidewalk...it just wasn't in the realm of possibilities to fight. Too many innocents that could get hit by stray gunfire bursts...

'Here' appeared to be a small abandoned warehouse. Miyuki could hear the drone of traffic; at least they were still in the bowels of the city. Stripped machinery parts were strewn all over the concrete floor, cobwebs added spindly appendages to the ceiling beams, dirt-caked windows with cracks and chipouts admitted a spare brownish sunlight that made the interior even more gloomy and bleak. A perfect hide-n-seek Disneyland...if one was a rodent. Lots of room to take concealment, lots of trash to amend any scrutiny, lots of shadows to disorient pursuers...

Even more dangerous.

These men were pros, to be sure. Miyuki was deeply worried by the blatant manner of the abduction; in midday on a crowded street at gunpoint. Obviously, the deliberate brazenness of their kidnapping indicated that these men meant serious business. Also, it was very probable that this show of force was commanded by the same person or persons who planned to kidnap them the first time; there was none of the tentativeness that marked the first attempt to seize them. Her senses tingled with the distinct intuition of a bigger game being afoot...quite possibly transcending any inter-gang fighting. Perhaps even a plot that was national in scope and syndication. Last year's crime investigation into the financial market software had given her a sense of what _major_ crime was all about...and this situation stank of major crime. Yakuza normally weren't _this_ organized. They were sloppy, even informal at times; relying on a deliberately casual approach in order to make them appear even more ruthless and intimidating to the public. And yet, to Miyuki's practiced eye...these men seemed expertly _trained_. Their behavior hinted of an almost military conduct, mixing quietude with disciplined efficiency. Yakuza were renowned to have "thief's loyalty"; their allegiance was based on family lines and opportunistic attitudes. These underlings certainly weren't the amateurs who had tried to kidnap her and Natsumi earlier. Once they had transported the two policewomen to the warehouse, they had wasted no time in restraining them by trussing them up tightly to a pair of high-backed metal chairs. With her hands tied to the metal bars of the chair and her ankles tied to the chair legs, Miyuki was effectively immobilized.

"You know, I don't do restraint!" she said in a low voice to Natsumi as she eyed the six men standing in a semi-circle behind their boss. The men hadn't said a word during the whole time, even after Fatscar came into the room.

Another clue that that there was more to these guys than what they were letting on. Yakuza thrived on the enjoyment of taunting their victims.

The man she nicknamed "Fatscar" possessed a haughty demeanor that marked him as the ringleader of the gang. Yet, the underlings didn't seem to react to him with the deference that was normally due to a yakuza Boss. While Fatscar paced in front of them, Miyuki scanned the environs. This large room might become a theater of combat, especially if she could disarm just one of the men.

One advantage: the partially disassembled machines that were set in rows up and down the room. These would provide ample dart-and-look cover under gunfire.

Fatscar seemed to have the yakuza menace act down pat. He would strut-stride in front of the two, his steel-heeled shoes making a loud clacking on the concrete flooring...and then he would suddenly pause to stroke his long Chinese-style moustache with an affected leisurely aloofness, while regarding them with a treacherously moody grin. This treatment would have made a rookie nervous, but it didn't faze Miyuki at all.

Finally, Fatscar paused...and then sat down behind a shopworn wooden desk nearby. Snapping his fingers, he summoned two of his underlings, who brought Miyuki and Natsumi's purses.

The man seemed to exude grease. Miyuki didn't want him touching her things in her purse. And she could sense that Natsumi was _extremely_ anxious...

"Well well well...what do we have here? Hmmm, these don't look like the usual kind of purses you hippie girls usually sport, do they? There's no peace sign buttons, no sewn-in places to conceal any dope...in fact, they look like some kind of standard-issue military purses..."

Natsumi snickered at him.

"Ahh...perhaps if we search these, we'll find something that might tell us just who you two are. We just happen to know that you're in cohorts with some guy named Panther. You may think you're onto us...but you're not!"

"Who are you?" Miyuki asked. His words revealed that this yakuza had already made the common mistake that so many criminals make: he had assumed that she and Natsumi had already discovered his crime, and was now taking precipitous action. Drastic action that he hoped would protect him...

But actually, he had made himself even more vulnerable by bringing _them_ to _him_...just as she told Natsumi he would do. Now, she and Natsumi wouldn't have to look. And it was quite possible that he might, in a moment of overconfidence, reveal some bit of information that could be used to nail him later.

"Haha wah bwah ha! Since you're both going to die anyway, why shouldn't I answer your question? It's not going to make a difference as far as the two of you are concerned!" Fatscar said with a sneer.

"Good..." Miyuki thought. He was acting cocky. She had heard more than a few death threats during her five years on the police force; his threat intimidated her, but it didn't really bother her. But she wouldn't let him know this...she would _act_ afraid and appear paralyzed with fright.

Her training immediately kicked in, causing her to regard the threat impersonally. She had been trained to keep her fears at bay when threatened, and she had faced a lot worse before. Just last year, some guy was trying to steal a super-secret stock market hacking program...a virus that could undermine the whole commodities economy in Japan and elsewhere. He even managed to frame her Captain in the process. But it was due to her and Natsumi's keeping a cool head that he was eventually busted and the plot was foiled.

Miyuki reminded herself that they had a singular advantage in the fact that Fatscar didn't know who they were. Didn't know about the wide extent of their backgrounds or training. Didn't know that they were from the future. Didn't know her smarts or Natsumi's strength. Didn't know how wild she and her partner were.

They weren't nicknamed "The Wild Ones" by accident!

"I'm Boss Tako, leader of the Tako-Shi Gang..." Fatscar said with a mocking stage bow.

"And I'm Beat Takashi," Natsumi murmured. Miyuki laughed at her partner's rebuke of the yakuza boss.

"Eh? Whaddya say? Who's this 'Beat Takashi'?"

"If I have my way, you won't live long enough to find out!" Natsumi said in a low threatening voice. Just down-n-cold enough to give Fatscar a pause.

"P..please ignore my friend, Mr. Tako! S..she's a headstrong girl!" Miyuki pleaded, consciously couching her voice in a shrill exclaim of terror. By casting the truth in a lie, they'd have another advantage. Being seasoned partners, they could play off each other and totally confuse their captors...

She hoped.

"But you won't have your way," Boss Tako said disparagingly. "There's forces at work here that are far beyond your imagination, girlie. My gang is actually a front for something far bigger. You see, there's influential voices in _very_ high places who feel that the Vietnam conflict should be expanded to include all of Southeast Asia. Our economy is in a boom, so why not? But the Emperor has grown old and timid...he doesn't have the fire in his belly that he used to have during the old days. So we're going to make a new world order for ourselves."

"And what does that mean?" Miyuki asked.

"I'll be sure to tell you right before we take you on a one-way trip to Tokyo Bay tomorrow!" Fatscar said. He started rifling through Miyuki's purse.

Fortunately, she and Natsumi had stashed all their IDs and future tech stuff safely away in a lock box...he would find nothing out of the ordinary. In fact, Miyuki had gone out of her way to grab some items that would appear inconspicuous, just in case her purse got searched. As she watched him withdraw a couple of 8-track tapes, some cuties, a few makeup items...she was relieved by her foresight. The contents of her purse continued to pile on the desk, items that she would never dream of using in a thousand years. He withdrew a small pink diary book... her 'fake' personal diary.

"No! That's _personal_ ! Don't read it!" Miyuki screamed shrilly.

"Dammit! This all looks like some stupid crap that any college girl would have in her purse. I'm going to have to read this diary of yours in my spare time...after you're dead, of course!" Fatscar stated, causing his underlings to laugh.

Then he started emptying out Natsumi's purse.

Miyuki could hear Natsumi shuffling against her chair, trying to free herself as the boss reached in and pulled items out of her purse, one-by-one.

Lipstick...a shoujo tankōbon book...a makeup kit...Natsumi's usually hefty pile of yen coins...some earrings and other accessories...

And then the boss pulled out her Sony PDA...

"EEEP!!"

_"Natsumi!"_

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"I just can't believe you sometimes, Natsumi! After we agreed to stash away any stuff we had that could appear out of ordinary in this time period! And then you went off and snuck out your Sony PDA mini-computer behind my back!" Miyuki shouted, her voice echoing in the tiny room.

She had plummeted off the cliffs of exasperation after Fatscar retrieved the mini-PC from Natsumi's purse. The obese yakuza Boss had scratched the back of his head, turned the Clieo over and said "20XX?" while looking at the manufacturing tag on the back of the handheld computer. It even got worse when he started pushing buttons...and the silence was suddenly pierced by an MP5 file that started blaring from the computer, full-volume. Miyuki recognized it as one of the Puffy AmiYumi dance remixes Natsumi liked to play at vacuum-cleaner loudness when she was doing her share of the weekend housework chores.

"Wha' kinda transistor radio is this? Looks pretty fancy! And what's that garbage that's coming out of it? If that's music it's playing...then it really sucks! I know music...and that ain't no music, that's _noise_!" he commented.

His underlings snickered.

"Howdya shut dis goddamned thing off?" he screamed.

Then Natsumi instructed him to press the red button with the circle in the middle.

Looking back, Miyuki had to allow for the fact that the incident _was_ pretty funny on its own merits. She wasn't certain which was more amusing: the shocked look on the yakuza kingpin's face when the 'radio' started playing, or Natsumi's ashen-faced gasp-pattering expression...

Either way, she wasn't going to let any smiles slip through the stern scolding that she was dishing out to Natsumi.

"Look! I said 'I'm sorry!' a dozen times already, Miyuki! So lay off of it, willya? Dammit...don't you think that I regret this just as much as you do? I admit it...I made a totally stupid mistake! It's probably the stupidest mistake I've ever made. But you gotta cut me some slack, too! Understand, it's totally _boring_ here in this time period! I _had_ to do something to keep myself from going bonkers!" Natsumi replied defensively.

"Natsumi, I don't even think you have a clue about how dangerous this could be. We are _so_ much in trouble because of your screwup! What if they figure out a way to get into the data files on your PDA? They could be disassembling it right now! And did you stop to think how people would treat us after finding a computer from _40 years in the future_? I wouldn't be surprised if we get hauled off to some secret lab and then get subjected to all sorts of mind-control drugs," Miyuki blurted out.

"Oh great! Now I'll lose all my games and music files!" Natsumi blurted.

Miyuki clenched her fists in irritation.

"Who cares about your games and MP5s! That PDA has all sorts of programs and vital data from the Precinct's main computer on..."

"Uh..Miyuki? I don't think so," Natsumi interrupted.

"You don't think so _what_? The main computer network at Bokuto is crammed full of evidentiary data on thousands of criminal cases! Any one of those files could really compromise people if they were to fall into public hands! Not to mention if they get their hands on all the files on the gamblers and bookies. They could learn all sorts of information about future sporting events. Just imagine what some sleazeball like Tako would do if he learned who won the Japan Series every year from 1970 to 20XX! He could make millions on gambling alone!"

"There's nothing to worry about, because there's no files on my PDA!"

"How can you have a brand-new Sony Clieo N1755CX Personal Digital Assistant...with a full pack of memory sticks and addons...and not have any files on it? That's ridiculous!"

"You're not hearing me...as usual! I said that there's no _files_ on it...files as in _data_ files. None! Not a single file of importance! Nothing that could cause any trouble, anyway."

"Uh...what do you mean, Natsumi?"

"I..I don't have any of those files, besides the basic Global Positioning System and the OS files needed to run my handheld Vaio. Other than that, there's nothing on my PDA. So there's nothing to worry about!"

"Well, that only makes it slightly less worse! At least you were sensible enough to delete any sensitive files once we got thrust 40 years into the past. But that still doesn't make up for..."

"Erm...Miyuki. Instead of transferring any of the Precinct's linkup files from the police department's database...I..uh..I got a buncha games instead. I mean, what's the use of having a 20XX top-of-the-line PDA if one can't play a few games on it? I..er, I _never did_ have any Bokuto Precinct police data on it! Ever since we were issued them this spring, all I've ever put in it were games and emulators," Natsumi admitted reluctantly.

"I just can't believe you, Natsumi!"

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"-. .- - ... ..- -- .. / .- -. -.. / -- .. -.-- ..- -.- .."

"Natsumi, what the hell is that? Do you hear that weird tapping on the wall?" Miyuki said, clasping the rough blanket around her as she urgently tried to shake her partner awake.

"Wha..wha..whaddya wan', wakin' me up like this?" Natsumi growled.

"Listen!" Miyuki demanded, gesturing towards the wall.

"-. .- - ... ..- -- .. / .- -. -.. / -- .. -.-- ..- -.- .."

"Waitaminute! That sounds familiar!" Natsumi said, trying to catch her waking breath and her waking alertness. She hated how her long hippie-girl hair got all matted and messy while she was asleep. She listened again, waiting for the next set of tappings...

"-. .- - ... ..- -- .. / .- -. -.. / -- .. -.-- ..- -.- .."

"Holy shit, Miyuki! That's Morse Code!" Natsumi exclaimed.

"_You_ know Morse Code?!" Miyuki asked in amazement, looked at her partner questioningly, eyes demanding an explanation.

"Uh-hum! When I was a girl, my grandpa was a ham radio operator. He taught me Morse Code one summer while I visited him at his farmhouse near Nagasaki. I'm almost positive that these sounds are in code!" Natsumi explained, shuffling closer to the wall.

Miyuki watched in amazement as Natsumi tapped out a sequence on the wall. It appeared to be the same sequence of taps that she had heard before. She quickly realized that Natsumi was replying by tapping out the same sounds!

Once again, the reply of walltaps kept to the same sequence.

"-. .- - ... ..- -- .. / .- -. -.. / -- .. -.-- ..- -.- .."

"That's our names! It says 'Natsumi and Miyuki'!"

"WHAT?!"

Natsumi took off her shoe and tapped out a sequence. Soon, she was 'conversing' with the unknown person in the room next to theirs.

"Miyuki! It's Wolf and Beatnik! They've been abducted too! They're in the cell next to ours!" Natsumi whispershouted.

Pleased at this discovery, Miyuki couldn't resist looking at her partner with slendered sly eyes.

"_What_, Miyuki?"

"I think it's quite odd that they would say '_Natsumi_ and Miyuki', don't you think!! I bet those two kids have a crush on you from the other night at that Goblin's place! You've been wearing your fox ears again..." she teased.

Natsumi stuck her tongue out at her partner.

"Hey, this is serious! Shut up so I can listen!" Natsumi urged.

"-.. -- / -.-- -- ..- / -.- -. -- .-- / .-- ... . .-. . / .-- . .--. .-. . / .- - ..--.."

(Do you know where we're at?) the tapping on the wall asked.

"... .- ...- . -. .--. - / .- / -.-. .-.. ..- . "

(Haven't a clue.) Natsumi tapped out in reply.

Natsumi patiently translated each sentence to her partner as she learned that both Wolf and Beatnik had been abducted from their school after a late night party hosted by one of their professors. During the course of the Morse Code conversation, she learned that Wolf, being a math genius, had learned Morse Code as an intellectual exercise when he was a kid.

"According to Wolf, they plan to kill us tomorrow!"

Miyuki nodded grimly at this, then instructed, "Tell them that we will make our escape tonight, Natsumi!"

Natsumi tapped out Miyuki's words, then told Wolf to try and get some sleep.

".. .--. -.. / ... .-.. . . .--. / . .- ... .. . .-. / .. ..-. / -.-- -- ..- / .-- . .-. . / ... .-.. . . .--. .. -. --. / .-- .. - ... / -- . "

"Smartass!" Natsumi yelled.

"What'd he say?"

"He said 'I'd sleep easier if you were sleeping with me'"

Miyuki had to giggle at this one. "I _told_ you he had a crush on you!" she noted with a smug expression, while Natsumi rolled her eyes with misery.

But Natsumi knew that this new development made their situation even more difficult, with just hours to plan an escape. Now she would have to contend with a lovestruck college student who would probably be more of a burden than a help. Yet, she realized that there was no way that she could live with herself if she and Miyuki escaped without also freeing Wolf and Beatnik.

"This sucks!" she groaned, earning another bright cascade of teasing giggles from Miyuki.

"Look at it this way, Nat! You're the first one of us to have a boyfriend who'll be old enough to be an oji-san grandpa in 20XX! Just think...when we get back to the year we belong in, he may pay you a visit and take you out to the park to watch flowers and play gateball!" Miyuki teased.

"You better quit while you're ahead, Miyuki!"

"Payback's a bitch, isn't it...Ms.-leaves-her-mini-Clieo-PC-in-her-purse!"

"Argggh! What am I going to do with you, you...troublemaker!"

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

It was almost too stupid, but it was their only chance. Natsumi would act at being sick, while Miyuki would alert the guards to her ailment. Miyuki would beg for some medicine in exchange for information about Natsumi's Clieo PDA.

The old "sick prisoner" trick.

Fatscar had decreed that they were to die in the morning, but the intriguing find in Natsumi's purse could be used as leverage. If he was greedy enough, Natsumi could invade his avarice and use it against him.

It may have been fortuitous that Natsumi had brought her mini-PC along after all...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"I can't stand it anymore! Ohhhh...my stomach feels like it's gonna burst! I need some medicine!" Natsumi moaned, kneeling on the floor of their squalorous 'cell'.

"Haha hah! That trick isn't gonna work, missy!" the man guarding the door said with a chuckle.

"But I'm _really _sick! A..and I wanna talk to your boss about that object that he found in my purse. It could make him rich! But it's not going to help anyone if he never learns how to work it!" Natsumi begged.

She could hear a muffled male voice saying, "Help her!! She's asthmatic!"

Wolf and Beatnik were trying their best to add to the consternation.

"Naw! I ain't gonna fall for that shit!" the guard reiterated.

"Well, just think what'll happen if your boss finds out that my girlfriend was about to tell you about her spying device...and you passed it by! He'll skin you alive before feeding you to the sharks!" Miyuki noted.

"You're bluffing!" the guard said.

"I'm soooooo sick!" Natsumi moaned.

"If you help her, you'll be doing yourself a favor! She's an undercover cop, and that gizmo your boss found is a top-secret device! As in _James Bond_ kine top secret!" Miyuki emphasized, trying her best to persuade the guard.

"Okay! Waitaminute while I get another couple guys. I don't trust you enough to come in there by myself. But you'll think twice if I have a few other guys with me," the guard explained.

A few minutes later, he returned with two companions...babbling about secret agents and mysterious weapons.

"Idiot!" Miyuki thought as the guard unlocked the door...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Sometimes, to be a good policewoman, you have to think more murderously than the criminals do. In this case, Natsumi's ruthless surprise attack of the three guardsmen was just enough to ensure the two policewomen's survival. When the three men entered their cell, Natsumi footswept all of them when they approached her, knocking their captors to the ground. Springing to her feet, she and Miyuki kicked them in the ribs and faces, sparing no chances that one of them might pull a firearm and shoot. When one of the guards tried to wrestle Miyuki to the ground, Natsumi leapt on his back and grabbed him by the chin, then snapped his head to the side. A loud fleshy crack popped the air, then the man slumped to the ground, gasping.

Breaking a man's neck isn't the same as it is portrayed in the martial arts and American action movies. Death doesn't come the moment the neck is snapped; it lingers for several minutes...

Having to kill in the line of duty was a law enforcement official's worse nightmare...at least for honest policewomen like she and Miyuki. Natsumi felt a disturbing coldness in her heart as she disarmed the man, who was still in his death throes. As she searched for weapons, she pulled out his wallet...and learned that he was _an American_!

"Miyuki!! Look at this! These guys aren't Yakuza! They're from the United States!"

"Natsumi, we don't have time to talk about this! Get their wallets and their guns. I think I hear some people coming!" Miyuki said urgently.

Natsumi stepped up the pace, finding two revolvers on one man and a small handgun on the dead man. She stuffed the two revolvers inside the waistline of her bluejeans and checked the pistol for rounds.

Two men jumped into the room...

Miyuki aimed for the first man's knees, trying to disable him. But a round went off before she pulled the trigger.

Natsumi screamed with unexpected pain as a bullet speared her shoulder with hot licks of agony. She took aim and fired a round into the man's chest.

The sound of her partner's scream shifted Miyuki's aim into realms of panic; instead of aiming below the waist, her gunfire pointed a line right up the man's chest...and then his face blasted crimson as she emptied all six rounds.

She whirled to attend to Natsumi, who had streamlets of blood dripping between her fingers as she held her collarbone.

"Let's get outta here!" Natsumi hissed through her pain.

They entered the hallway. As she had suspected, they were being held in the foreman's offices of the factory. The metal industrial-strength door stood between then and Wolf and Beatnik.

"Let me take care of that door!" Natsumi gasped. Gritting her teeth tightly, she leapt up into the air and thrashed a frontkick at the door. With a steely groan, the door resisted its hinges and pried...

Miyuki was amazed as her partner unleashed a second kick, which snapped the door open. Without even looking inside, she motioned for Wolf and Beatnik to come out and follow them. The two young guys were dressed up in clothes that belonged in a "swingin' 60's" telemovie...

"Do either of you know how to use a gun?" Miyuki asked.

"I do! I won a sharpshooting prize in Emperor's Scouts," Beatnik offered. Miyuki rolled her eyes.

Emperor's Scouts. Must be this Japan's equivalent of the Boy Scouts.

"Great! We're under gunfire, and the only one of you two who can handle a gun is a Boy Scout!" Miyuki complained. She didn't mean to be so grouchy, but the immediacy of the circumstances had reeled her towards a bitterness of stress.

"_Emperor's_ Scouts, not Boy Scouts!" Beatnik replied indignantly. "_Was_ a Emperor's Scout. I don't think I'd qualify anymore!"

Wolf chuckled and mentioned something about "selling weed to camp counselors."

"So you won some prize during some kiddie-army campout. How's that going to help us in this situation?" Miyuki complained.

"Uh...I won the _All-Japan_ sharp-shooting prize, man! And not just against other Emperor's Scouts. It was the national open-field competition trials for the '68 Olympics. Naturally, they didn't let me go because of my shinki beliefs," Beatnik corrected her with a grave expression.

"You're bullshitting me! I didn't know that about you!" Wolf exclaimed. Beatnik nodded his head.

"If those bastards in the army ever got me into the military, I'd wind up being some rifle instructor. That's why I hate this war so much...all the government does is use people to further its own ends!" Beatnik said angrily.

"If I wasn't hurting so bad, I'd be laughing my ass off right now," Natsumi said between gasps.

"You guys, I think we're in deep shit!" Wolf said warily as a half-dozen men in black suits scrambled into the main hall of the factory.

"Hey!!" Natsumi shouted as Beatnik reached towards her waist and grabbed one of the guns she had tucked in her jeans.

Miyuki looked on with surprise as Beatnik weighed the gun in his hand, and then squinted down its barrel. True, almost all the marksmanship contests in Japan were held with blanks instead of bullets because of the ban on firearms, but Miyuki could tell that Beatnik was a practiced gunhandler.

He 'tested' the handgun by downing three men with shots to their legs and hips...

"Hmm...I think it seems to work okay, for an American model!" he noted while Miyuki regarded him with wide-eyed amazement.

"Who'd have thought it?" Wolf commented, clearly impressed.

Miyuki narrowed her eyes as she saw two gunmen ditch behind one of the large engine-like structures. They seemed to be carrying some kind of automatic firearms...

Then she noticed a cable overhead. Optically racing towards a conclusion, she followed the stray circle of metal cabling with her eyes until she saw where it led...to a large hoisting mechanism. As she examined the hoist, she observed that there was only one other connecting cable to steady it. It was waving in the slight wind inside of the large factory.

Mentally calculating, Miyuki realized that if one of the two cables was snapped...the one on the right...the large hoist would swing downwards to the left.

Right towards where the two gunmen were seeking cover.

"The cable! Shoot at the cable!" she shouted, pointing at the metal strand with her gun. She fired her last four rounds, while Beatnik took aim and emptied his last two clips. Sparks shot off the metal as the bullets grazed it.

But it didn't fall.

"Here, use mine!" Natsumi said, handing Miyuki the pistol she had taken off one of the downed guardsmen. It still had one round in the magazine. Miyuki gripped the gun tightly, holding her arms as still as she could under the circumstances...and said a silent prayer.

_--BAM!!--_

The cabling snapped, whistling through the air with the sudden release of equilibrium. The hoist wrenched, then plummeted downwards towards the two gunmen, who screamed as it pounded into them with freightforce, scattering them both to the floor.

"Hey, that was really gear!" the two college guys shouted in unison, while Miyuki and Natsumi immediately dashed to the cover of one of the partially disassembled 'engines'.

"Let's see if they're still awake over there," Natsumi whispered as she tossed an empty pistol out into the open flooring.

A rattling gunfire answered.

"One's unconscious, the other's still armed!" Miyuki whispered back to her partner. She winced as she saw the beads of sweat peppering Natsumi's forehead...sure signs that her partner was in extreme pain.

"One more guy...and we're outta here!" Miyuki assured her partner.

"Cover me, Beatnik!" Miyuki shouted.

"With what? There's no more bullets in these guns!"

Miyuki could hear a man laughing devilishly. "Looks like I win! I've got an automatic, and you don't have any ammo. Now come out before I shoot all of ya!"

It was Fatscar.

Beatnik and Wolf emerged from the hallway, saying "we surrender!"

"You guys..._don't_!! You're walking into a trap!" Miyuki shouted desperately through a cupped hand as the two college students walked into the open. Fatscar emerged from behind his cover and walked towards them.

Two solid "bams!" filled the air.

"Whuh...yeow!!" Fatscar screamed as he crumpled to his knees, holding his thigh. Miyuki swiftly dashed over and recovered the automatic that had been shot out of his hands.

"Y..you said you were outta bullets. I counted! You were all out of bullets," the fatman gasped.

"Yep, except the lucky bullets my dad gave me to keep in my wallet. Good thing they were blanks," Beatnik answered.

Miyuki was the first to burst into laughter, followed by Natsumi.

How ironic. All the gunfire and weaponry...and their freedom had been gained by a pothead college student who carried rubber bullets in his wallet.

"Hey man...I take back all the bad things I've ever said about you. You're pretty groovy, Beatnik!" Wolf noted with genuine approval as Miyuki tied up Fatscar.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

The last thing Miyuki expected was to get dressed down by Captain "Kitsune" for their daring escape. But dress her down he did. Natsumi was in the hospital, recovering from the broken collarbone she suffered when she caught a bullet to the shoulder. And Wolf and Beatnik being with her didn't help matters...the police department possessed a singular stereotyping of all long-haired hippie students. To the Captain, they were dope-smoking troublemakers. Which was true, for all intents and purposes. So it was just she and the Captain.

Who was in the middle of the mother of all cursefesting fits...

He was angry because she and Natsumi had been captured in the first place. He was angry because she had been "dallying around with two misfit punks" instead of finding better cover so they could investigate the yakuza and other suspicious groups. And now his rage was turning on the fact that they had sought out the hospital to take care of Natsumi's injuries first before notifying the precinct to report in.

"Why didn't you fuckin' call us when you got out of that shithole warehouse or factory or whatever it was? There's no goddamned excuse for not giving me a personal report on something so important! I've had the whole fuckin' Tokyo PD looking for you and your partner! Now I look like a shit-faced idiot because you two dizzy bitches pop up in the _hospital_ unexpectedly, leaving me without any answers for my superiors. I had to learn about it through the fuckin' mandatory gunshot wound report from the emergency room! Fuckitall...I almost think that you didn't have the number to the station! I oughta put you on policebox duty for the next ten years, Kobayakawa!!" he screamed angrily as he paced around his office desk.

The part about the phone number...was true. In the heat of the hour after their hectic escape, Miyuki _had_ tried to dial the precinct number to summon assistance. She dialed the number for the Bokuto Precinct. A number that was current as of 20XX.

"So I made an honest mistake!" she thought as the Captain continued to curse up the walls of the Precinct office. She regretted the fact that he didn't have his own office; his desk was at the end of the room where the Precinct's 'think tank' was cluttered with officers. Everybody could hear him dressing her down; a fact made even more poignant by the stark silence in the room. Miyuki couldn't believe that this foul-mouthed firefist of a man could possibly wind up being the pranksterish retired 'monk' Kitsune.

"And then your partner gets injured in a gunfight! Your cover might as well be blown because of your fuckup! And all of those dogpiss culprits got away, except for the men you shot...who are dead...and some fat yakuza jackoff with a scar on his face! That dickhead's probably whining for his lawyers this very moment in the holding cell! How the hell am I supposed to feel good about what went down this morning in that abandoned factory, eh? I have _no_ clues, no evidence, no nothing! Which means you fucked me over!" Kitsune ranted.

Then Miyuki remembered something.

"But you _do_ have something, Captain! I forgot to tell you that Natsumi took the wallets from the three guys that we fought with while we were being detained," Miyuki interjected with timid embarrassment.

"So what? They could be faked IDs..." the Captain grumbled.

"I seriously doubt it. You see, they're _American_ IDs. And I can tell a fake ID from a real one," Miyuki added with an assertive headnod. The Captain cocked his head and glared at her; a couple more headnods finally assured him that she knew what she was talking about.

Which she did...because IDs in Sept 1969 didn't have security holograms and such. Fakes in this era would be sloppy because of the primitive techniques. They were probably still making fake IDs with mimeograph machines in this era. Miyuki could discern fake IDs from real ones with little effort in 20XX...IDs that were processed with much greater sophistication than the Captain could ever even imagine.

The Captain regarded her with a piercing expression...one that totally reminded Miyuki of the intensity of his older counterpart back in the "real" Japan she lived in. Then his face wrinkled into mischief...

"American, huh? Really? Well I'll be a goddamned monk! This may yet turn out to be bigger than we had thought..."

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"So when do you get out of here?" Miyuki asked Natsumi.

"They say that I have to stay here for a week. Remember, these are the days before HMOs shortened hospital stays, Miyuki," Natsumi said with a smile.

"Right. So are you planning to sneak out of here anytime soon?"

"How well you know me, hee heh! I was thinkin' about the day after tomorrow. It really sucks not having the full use of my right arm because of this shoulder injury."

"I'm just grateful that you didn't get shot up any worse, Nat! I was really worried there for a few moments," Miyuki noted.

"We both know that you weren't worried at all until we got to the hospital. You're...don't ever tell anyone that I told you this...you're the smartest policewoman in the precinct, perhaps in all of Tokyo. You would never back down on your training and get all panicky in a tight situation like we were in," Natsumi said, reaching out and gripping Miyuki's hand.

Miyuki felt a tear come and go in her eyes as she patted Natsumi's hand. Rarely did her partner compliment her like this. She could tell by Natsumi's eyes that the compliment was not only heartfelt...but that her partner _believed_ in the truth of it.

"Okay...you win. I was worried just a little bit. But once we got you to the hospital, I..I broke down in the waiting room," Miyuki admitted.

"You did?" Natsumi said, her voice wavering towards choking up.

"Of course I did, you idiot! My partner got shot! This isn't the movies where the hero gets shot five times and is still strong enough to beat the shit out of the villain! This is _real_...and I w..was really scared for you, Natsumi."

Natsumi looked at her partner gratefully. Miyuki still looked like a hippie college girl, with her pert flip hairstyle and 60s miniskirt outfit. But for a moment, her mind pierced the veil of her eyes and saw Miyuki as she really was...in her blue uniform with the familiar thick long single braid of hair queuing down her back.

"Are we ever going to get out of here?"

"You just said that you were going to sneak out of here in a couple days, Natsumi!"

"No!! I meant are we ever going to get out of _here_! Are we ever going to be able to return to our own time?"

Miyuki sighed as she regarded her partner on the hospital bed. After a pause, she gathered her thoughts.

"You know, sometimes when everything is gone except your faith...only then can you realize that your faith is the most important thing you have. _Something_ brought us back in time to this era. Ergo, something can push us forward through the years to the time we belong in. I believe it, Natsumi. I have faith that we'll return to 20XX. We just need to survive..."

"I just hope survival isn't what gets us back to 20XX! I'd be almost old enough to retire from the Force if I have to live out all the years between now and then!" Natsumi sombered.

"So _what_ are we doing here in this time period?" Miyuki anguished for what seemed like the thousandth time.

"I think that the mysterious force that brought us here is purposeful, as if it wants us to do something. Like passing a trial, or changing history, or who knows what!" Natsumi surmised.

"What if we're here because of some random freak accident? Like a time tunnel into the past, or some God-like being who decided to pluck us out of 20XX and drop us in the middle of this mess, just because he or she was bored?" Miyuki asked.

"You've been watching too much anime, Miyuki! Stop thinking like that! You're making my head hurt!"

"Sorry. I didn't mean to get all sci-fi on you, Natsumi. But you have to admit, this is a pretty sci-fi sort of situation we're in. Four decades in the past. A Japan with a totally different history..."

"That's just grand! But things are the same here, under the surface! Look, I'm in a hospital and they're treating me okay...except for the crappy food! You got chewed out by the Captain..."

"Natsumi, _you've_ gotten chewed out by our Captain far more often than I ever did! Besides, it's not the same! Our Captain is as gentle as a lamb compared to Kitsune!"

"Don't remind me! I meant to say that we need to focus our attention on the similarities, to avoid being blinded by all the differences. We have to assume that the criminal mind thinks the same way here. Those guys...they were after us _for a reason_! All we gotta do is figure out why."

"Why would they go to all that trouble to kidnap us?"

"I don't know. But while I'm laid up, I'll have plenty of time to construct motives for them. Don't worry about me, I'm not a bit bored being here in the hospital..."

"Oh! I almost forgot! I have to fill out some paperwork at the station. Cripes...I just hope I can figure out where everything goes on those report forms. I checked 'em out earlier, and they look totally retarded!"

"I don't envy you that. Besides, you were always the better of the two of us when it comes to paperwork, Miyuki. You know me...all disorganized and stuff..."

"Don't remind me!"

"Well, off with you to your chores before Kitsune decides to rip into you again," Natsumi said cheerily.

Miyuki patted Natsumi on her good shoulder and left the room. As she walked out of the hospital, she pondered on the unfairness of life. Just like in 20XX, she was stuck filling out all the paperwork. And without the automation of computers, she'd have to write everything out by hand! It then that she remembered that she had left her purse in Natsumi's room.

"Oooo! I'm such a moron!" she shouted as she halted herself in midstride. Miyuki dashed up to the room hastily, not wanting to delay a miserable night of paperwork any further. If she didn't do the paperwork right, the Captain would get suspicious...so she would _have_ to fill out all the official forms properly to get his department chop stamp to clear them.

When she swept into Natsumi's room, she saw her partner...playing a game on her Clieo.

"Natsumi! _H..how_? When did you have time to get that? W..where did you get your palm computer? I thought that it had been lost when we made our escape!" she stammered.

"Not telling!"

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Miyuki had the most amazing accident of her life occur on the way to visit Natsumi. She was walking down the street towards the hospital when she heard the tell-tale enginebuzz of a motorcycle at fast clip. Her trained ears told her that the rider was speeding; instinctively, she turned and looked over her shoulder...

...to see her fiancé, Kenny, riding fast through traffic on an antique Indian motorbike.

Clutching her hands to her breast, Miyuki felt like the breath had been knocked out of her. The motorcyclist winged on by before she could even shout out his name.

It had to be him! He had the same full face, the same thick-eyebrowed masculine features that had drawn her to him in the first place. And his eyes...

She only glimpsed his eyes for a moment.

Long enough to realize that a third person had been brought back into the past.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

_NATSUMI!!_

"Waaaaah!" The sudden blarehorn-loud shout startled Natsumi out of her nap, causing her to almost jump up on her feet while in the bed. She winced as the tight soreness of her shoulder reminded her of why she was in a hospital bed in the first place. Luckily, her IV didn't tear out of her forearm...

"He's here! He's here! He's here! He's here!"

Kneeling on her bed, Natsumi reached out and steadied the metal stand holding the saline drip as Miyuki skipped up and down on the floor with a school-girlish ebullition.

"Why does everyone have to wake me up the moment I go to sleep! The nurses here are bad enough at doing that. 'Here, Ms. Tsujimoto, your evening medications.' 'Here, Ms. Tsujimoto, your breakfast.' Now, you decide to jolt me out of a sound sleep!" Natsumi groused. Miyuki was having some kind of rapture...and was totally ignoring her.

"Okay..._who's_ here?" she sighed, resigned to being second-stringed in this conversation.

"_Kenny_!! I saw him riding on an old Indian bike while I was walking here! I only snagged a moment's glimpse, but I _know_ it was him!" Miyuki explained breathlessly.

"Have you been smoking weed, Miyuki? There's no way that Kenny could be here!" she teased. Then she visioned the look of intensity on Miyuki's face and realized that her partner earnestly believed that she had encountered her fiancé.

"How can you say that? After all..._we're_ here, aren't we?" Miyuki argued back. Natsumi finally felt herself easing out of the shock to the system that her partner's loud shout had ushered onto her.

It was possible that Kenny had somehow been brought backwards into the past with she and Miyuki. A remote possibility, to be sure. All along, she had sensed that the power that had brought the two crimefighters into the past had done so indiscriminately. With a pachinko randomness. But if Kenny was here...it would indicate a definite motive and purpose behind everything.

If it was Kenny that Miyuki had seen outside of the hospital, that changed everything! Their numbers would increase once they located him. Miyuki would be a pleased as a peach. As for him, he would probably freak out when he saw her with her 60's pagegirl look.

"And what would _he_ look like?" she wondered, envisioning him with a bandana and long hair pulled back into a ponytail.

"...Natsumi! Are you even listening to me? We have to find him! He could be in trouble too! What if he is undercover like we are? He could be out there all alone by himself! Not knowing anyone! Who's going to take care of his emotional needs? Nobody here even knows him...so there can't be anybody who can take care of him..."

That again.

Once more, her partner was caught up in the "who's going to take care of Kenny" routine. Miyuki would make a good obedient wife...until she learned that Kenny could take care of himself. Then all hell would break loose. Miyuki was a little bit more headstrong than her husband-to-be...just a sliver much, as far as Natsumi was concerned. Then again, maybe this was the nervous habit of a future bride.

In any case, she was right. If Kenny was here in Tokyo 1969 with them, they would have to seek him out. The sooner, the better. Natsumi had almost gone nuts after that riot; the full emotional brunt of being stranded in the past had nearly swept her under. Kenny could be freaking out by now...which could explain why he was speeding down a busy avenue. Perhaps he was trying to seek comfort in something familiar, like a fast bike under his seat and the wind in his hair.

"I think I'll be well enough to leave tomorrow, Miyuki. I know that you want to go now, but I really think that it would be best that I accompany you while we try to find Kenny. After all, we're a team!" Natsumi reasoned.

"No! I can't wait that long! I have to know _now_! I have to go look for him _now_!"

"And how are you going to do that? We don't have a car..."

"I..I'll rent a cab! I would rent a rickshaw in a heartbeat if it could lead me to Kenny!" Miyuki announced, full of impulsivity.

Natsumi knew better than to argue with her partner when she was _this_ worked up, so she chitchatted with her for a few minutes and then dismissed her with a "now go find your fiancé!"

Miyuki thanked her and sped out of the room, after draining Natsumi's purse of its large mass of coins...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

The first thing Miyuki did when she left the hospital was hail a cab. She paid the driver a thousand yen upfront and directed him to patrol the neighborhoods around the Bokuto precinct. If it was indeed Kenny who she had chanced upon earlier, then it was a strong probability that he would be keeping to the districts that he knew best. Trying to think like she was on a patrol hunt for speeders, Miyuki decided to bisect the district, and then concentrate on driving in patterned loops within the halved area.

"He's going to be my husband, so I should at least have enough of 'who he is' inside of me...so that I could enter his mind, enter his thoughts, and _think_ like he would think. If I was Kenny, where would I hang out? Where would I be going to?" she mentally appraised.

Home. He would check out his apartment. Since Kenny lived in a low-rise apartment complex near the station, he would probably check it out. Also, he would have to eat...

Miyuki tried to remember all of the noodle shops and other places that she knew Kenny frequented with his policeman buddies during lunch. As she listed all the eateries, she reminded herself that maybe he was in a situation like she and Natsumi. If he did manage to find a place to stay, he might not be able to cook at home. Kenny was strictly a instant-noodle bowl and TV-dinner type of guy...

"So where would he go to eat out a lot..." she thought. On further reflection, she reasoned that he might be eating cheaply if he didn't have the proper currency. The yen had gone through a couple redesigns between now and 20XX, so he might be broke.

Narrow alleys were out, because Kenny tended towards being crowd-shy when he was alone. Besides, he couldn't race his bike in one of the pedestrian-jammed narrow streets...

An Indian motorcycle with a hand-painted red gastank flew out of a narrow street a couple blocks ahead of them.

"HEY YOU!! FOLLOW THAT MOTORCYCLE!" she shout-directed the cab driver.

The force of her yell momentarily unnerved the cabbie, who turned around and started arguing with her. Thinking quickly, Miyuki reached inside her purse and withdrew her wallet. He continued to lecture her, until she 'convinced' him by flashing her badge. The cabbie instantly grew wide-eyed at the shiny metallic shield of the Tokyo PD.

"S..s..sorry ma'am! You just d..didn't look like a cop!"

"No questions, and you get to speed all you want, since I'm a police officer!" Miyuki barked. The cabbie grinned and nodded his head, then started accelerating after the motorbike. She could empathize with his assertion about her appearance...with the clothes she was wearing, the last thing Miyuki resembled was a policewoman. She briefly was glad she didn't have to wear what passed for policewomen's uniforms in the 1960s...

"He looks like he's getting a rush out of this!" Miyuki observed with bemusement as the cabbie wove his small Toyota between wedges of traffic. A moment later, the 50-something man was whooping it up...yelling "yaaahoooo!" at the top of his lungs.

The chase continued past Keio Hospital, and then the motorcyclist turned down Okubo-dori, the east-west avenue that ran through Shinjuku. Freeways that Miyuki was used to driving on hadn't even been built yet. The biker turned right again and headed towards Ochai Children's Park. He was sticking to familiar territory; Ochai Kid Park was often on her and Natsumi's patrol assignments. Miyuki usually kept a sack of candy in their car to give out to the kids...always vigilant about promoting the good image of a Tokyo policewoman while reinforcing the safety message that young children should walk carefully across the street.

Finally, the motorcyclist cornered onto Waseda-dori and headed east again. Miyuki guessed that he was trying to reach Otomeyama Park or the Gakusyuin Univ. campus. She directed the driver down some side streets, planning to corner him before he got to Yakuin Temple.

The driver waited, concealed in an alley near the temple. Miyuki heard a throttled motorbike and told the cab to block the lane. The motorcyclist drove up fast...and at the last second, decided not to try and thread the narrow gap between the cab and the oncoming traffic. He slowed down his bike and pulled it to a halt near the cab.

By this point, Miyuki was sure it was Kenny. Even under the helmet, she could see the intensity of his eyes. He was angry...and he looked like he was going to take someone's head off.

She quickly jumped out of the cab and ran around the front, shouting "KENNY!".

"Huh? Who're you? If you weren't such a good-lookin' chick, I'd punch ya in the face for cuttin' me off like that? Can't someone have a nice jaunt through town without bein' chased? You guys were hot on my tail like a cop would be! So whaddya want?"

The man took off his helmet. It looked just like Kenny...a 60s version of Kenny. He had a thick handlebar moustache, and his hair was long in the back and matted to his forehead in the front. But his eyes were definitely Kenny's...

"Kenny! It's you! It's me, Miyuki! Your fiancée!" Miyuki shouted.

"Eh? Whaddya say? I'm not Kenny...and I don't have a clue who you are! Miyuki, you say? I don' know any Miyuki's! And I sure as hell ain't getting married anytime soon!" he replied, pigeoned between irritation and choke-on-breath laughter.

"My name is Nakajima Daimaru! Not Kenny!"

_"D..d..d...d...Dad?_

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"I _told you_ not to go after him by yourself! But do you ever listen to me, Miyuki?" Natsumi taunted after she managed to stop laughing. This ranked up there with the funniest Miyuki screwups she had ever seen. Her shoulder and ribs were throbbing with pain, she had laughed so hard. But it was worth every single giggle...

"How was I supposed to know that it was his _dad_?" Miyuki said defensively. After she learned the man's identity, her first impulse was to jump back in the cab and dash off. Especially after he joked about "I'm not a dad yet...but I would love to try and become a dad with your help!" Natsumi had laughed mercilessly at that, while Miyuki felt her face crown itself with the most embarrassed blush it could muster.

"So..hee hee..you ran into Kenny's father. Ya' know, he would be about Ken's age in 1969. His new wife told me he was born in '44, if I recall. Well, are you going to hook up with him?"

"Natsumi, that's despicable! Th..that'd be like _incest_ or something! How could you even think of such a thing?" Miyuki shot back.

"Hey, I'm just joshin' ya! Besides, if you hook up with him, he might never meet Kenny's mom...because he would be totally smitten with you. Which would mean no Kenny!" Natsumi said. Miyuki knew that this was her partner's way of apologizing, but she wasn't going to let it go at that.

"You better be 'just kidding', perverted girl!" Miyuki confronted her with a sly smile.

"It's kinda hard to be perverted when I'm stuck in this hospital ward!" Natsumi replied. "So what now? I've gotta haul outta here tomorrow; I'm going crazy! You have any ideas on what to do next?"

"I thought you were supposed to be figuring out what those crims's motives were, Natsumi," Miyuki noted. Natsumi looked at her guiltily and reached under her pillow to withdraw her Clieo.

"That makes for _two_ disappointments in one day!" Miyuki cursed under her breath.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --


	83. Pt 83: Belldandy and Mara: Mirror House ...

**Part 83: Belldandy and Mara: Mirror House -- 2nd Movement**

"Intriguing..." Mara commented. "So after all of this...your conclusion is that there's another _me_ in this reality?"

Belldandy nodded her head in agreement, affirming Mara's query.

"Idiot sister! There can't be _two_ of me! It's bad enough that there's one of me, most of the time. But for you to actually claim that you saw a second person who looked just like me? That's nonsense! I saw what I saw...and although there was some resemblance, I can't possibly accept the possibility that the image I saw was another Demoness like me! It must have been a mirage! A moboroshi...or maybe some Earth Grade Spirit playing a prank! I believe you're totally at the mercy of the muddle of your notions," Mara shouted reprovingly. The vehemence of her denial caused Belldandy to backstep; she nearly stumbled in the alleyway because she forgot her weakened ankle.

"Mara...I know what I saw! Judging from the way you reacted, you saw her too," Belldandy answered in a determined voice. What was needed was solidity...the firm grounding of truth underfoot, to prevent any further sinking into quagmires of nebulous confusion. Otherwise, this discussion would flounder like an elephant trying to walk on water.

"This idea of yours is as preposterous as the chance of a manuscript of the Popol Vuh suddenly showing up on St. Nichiren's doorstep! Admittedly, the hard blow to my head I suffered in the collision might've scattered my senses momentarily," Mara replied, rubbing her forehead more for dramatic effect than anything else. "And in the midst of seeing stars and canaries, I briefly thought I was looking at a mirror-image of myself. But I'm positive that what I saw was only a filament of my vast capacity for imagination! As for you...you were understandably suffering from shock, seeing your fiancé getting prod-shocked by Banpei and then roughly hauled back into the house. My guess is that you were suffering from hallucinations as well!"

"Goddesses _don't_ hallucinate!" Belldandy said smartly in response to Mara's protest, feeling insulted by the implication her Demoness sister had arrived at.

Mara let that one pass, smiling inwardly at Belldandy's show of pride.

"But I do agree with you that this _has_ been a very intriguing night. Seeing a double of you wasn't the only thing that was shocking to me," Belldandy noted once she fully recovered her composure in the face of Mara's outburst. This was one of those times when there seemed to be a blight of reasonable explanations. Attempts to reason out their situation only seemed to lead them in circles: answers became questions; illusions became reality. What could sensify the present circumstances they found themselves in? Belldandy's intuition suggested that Mara's vain reaction was just a reflection of the turmoil she herself was feeling in her heart.

All because of Keiichi.

"Seeing Keiichi was like a ray of joy illuminating my being! And then what followed was the equivalent of someone pouring out a curative that had been intended for me; wasting the sole restorative medicine that could heal my lovesick heart," Belldandy continued to restate. "But despite the fact that I was extremely upset by all that had occurred, I _did_ witness you collide with someone that looked just like you, Mara. For a fleeting split-second, I saw another you."

"Demonesses _don't_ have doublets! Mara replied, deliberately miming Belldandy's earlier indignant tone of voice to tease her back. "No one does, remember? It all changed a short while ago! Remember Urd's boyfriend and his 'You are so irresponsible' speech to the Dark Lord and you guy's Lord? Hey wait a minute! What am I saying? That a mortal cancelled out the Doublet System? Now I'm totally confused," Mara confessed, her eyebrows crocked crookedly in an expression of uncertainty.

"Mara, did you just say that the Doublet System was canceled? By Cevn?" Belldandy asked, amazed.

"Just forget that I said it. I must be going bonkers because of this place, to even consider such a freaky idea!" Mara replied with a deep sigh. "This is so whack! I couldn't have seen a Doublet anyway. Besides, you know as well as I do that my case is special. I'm an exception to that Doublet System, just like my twin sister Urd. _Because_ of my twin sister Urd!

"Maybe you have a Doublet that you don't know about," Belldandy wondered aloud.

"Not a chance! Besides, whoever I saw...she _looked just like me_...almost like a clone! They're _Doublets_...not clones! No one I know of has been able to clone a Demon or God! A Demonic Doublet don't even bear any resemble who their 'opposite' looks like! Not to mention the Rule: Goddesses have Demons for Doublets, Demonesses have Gods for Doublets. Girl Demoness-Boy God, Boy Demon-girl Goddess -- all the way right down the line! I knew Velpser for over a hundred millennia before he was punished for his errant wreak of mischief...and he certainly doesn't look anything like you. Especially now, after he got punished!" Mara said confidently, folding her arms tightly over her chest, vigorously shaking her head "no".

Belldandy regarded Mara with cool suspicion as she remembered the turmoil Keiichi had encountered in the early days during their rival Office 'contest' over him. Mara had thoroughly beguiled him into thinking that not only was she was a man...but that she was Belldandy's fiancé as well. Years later into hindsight, Mara's deceit was rendered humorous by its silliness; Mara had even confided as much to her. But at the time, the scenario that had ensued on the coattails of Mara's deception had left much to be desired. Poor Keiichi was stupefied with panic and confusion. Shocked to the core by Mara's 'disclosure'; Belldandy noticed that his behavior around her was quite tentative...until she learned of what Mara had told him. Then she had to manage to convince him otherwise, without frightening him any further. And that was only one episode of Mara acting with Demonic deceit! More recently, Belldandy herself had been stung by the tumultuous discovery that Mara was Urd's twin sister. Mara insisted that she never knew about this...but how could one know?

"Er...Mara, do you have _another_ twin sister that none of us knows about?" Belldandy asked. She knew her question was a shot in the dark, but Mara's history was filled with practiced deceptions and surprises.

Her question brought a howl of gusty laughter from the Demoness.

"I believe you just answered my question, Mara," Belldandy said under her breath. She looked up at the starstuffed nightsky and observed aloud, "Either we're involved in events that are couched in some kind of mystical illusion, or the reality of life in this Earthrealm is transcendentally different from what we're accustomed to."

"Or maybe some being with a distasteful sense of humor is screwing with us! Blessed right it's different than what I'm used to! How would you feel if you bounced up against someone that looked just like you? Illusion or not, wouldn't something like that unnerve you?"

Belldandy smiled at Mara's unconscious admission.

"I would...be curious," Belldandy said, raising her eyebrows just so.

"You would be _freaked out,_ sis! Don't give me any of that 'I'd be curious' crap, Belldandy! You always look so calm and composed on the outside, even when I know that you're boiling over with uncertainty and fear on the inside. I'd bet my career as a former Demon Grief Office Agent that you'd be _crucially_ upset if you encountered another 'you'," Mara noted, looking Belldandy straight in the eye.

Belldandy reacted by trying to project a self-assured calm...and failed. She had to admit that Mara was right. After all, Mara's chosen Demonic line of work for the last _40 millennia_ had involved just these kind of tactics: methods designed to provoke just this kind of angsty reaction in the beings she was assigned to bear Grief against. If anyone in her experience could detect fear and trembling, it would be Mara. With a heave of resignation to her shoulders, Belldandy surrendered to the fact that there was no further use for her to try and pretend against the emotional gale-sweeps that trembled her troubled heart.

"Well, perhaps we should consider this problem from the prospect of what we _do_ know for certain. From every indication, it appears that Keiichi is deeply drawn to you..." Belldandy started, trying to approach the issue from a more intellectual, detached perspective. But it was distasteful; the words seemed to cloy in her throat as she spoke them. Her train of thought stifled, she felt her heart fluttering with frustration once again as she remembered seeing...

Mara didn't miss the glow-tinge of a red aura around Belldandy or the firm set of her jawline. She quickly decided that it would be in her best interest to emphasize her disavowal of the situation that happened between her and Keiichi. Besides, Belldandy was minimizing...Keiichi had acted as if he was _passionately_ in love with her.

She remembered the old Demonic adage: "Tread lightly on the heart of an obsessive Goddess..."

"Bell...his acting that way had nothing to do with any fault of mine, I'll remind you! And don't you dare harbor even a single suspicion that I'm trying to steal your husband away from you! My hentai attentions to him didn't arouse because I encouraged them..._eep_!!" she answered, clipping her reply short as she realized her gaffe...she had meant "His hentai attentions to me didn't arise..."

She cringed, and then scratched the nape of her neck as she vigorously shook her head to indicate reluctant affirmation.

"Of course not," Belldandy responded, completely missing that Mara had said "_husband_".

"It was just so...unexpected...that my Keiichi seemed so distant from me...and so interested in you. Given this, I'm reminded me of your past history of attempts to seduce mortal men. Including Keiichi on more than one occasion, if memory serves," Belldandy noted, regarding Mara with a severe expression.

Mara gulped her heart back down her throat.

"And not just with Keiichi either. For the record, Cevn informed me about the time when you tried to seduce him soon after he first arrived at our temple. And more recently, you insisted that he go out on a date with you, despite the fact that you _knew_ that he clearly belonged to Urd. So I wouldn't put it past you to..."

"Errr, Belldandy...you're getting worked up again! That whole dating thing with Cevn was mostly Urd's idea! Besides, I wouldn't be a Demoness if I didn't find him attractive...look what happened with Urd, getting all carried away with him despite the fact that he's a total freak-case loon. It totally sucks that my twin sister had to fucking kill him! You think I don't feel hurt as Bless by what went down back there? Get it through your Goddess tea-kettle of a brain...I really _didn't_ put the make on Keiichi this time. So keep a cool head! Besides, everything's changed between us. Don't you think that you and I being sisters might alter some situations just a teensy-weensy bit?" Mara reminded her distraught sister again.

Belldandy ignored Mara's self-humored wan smile...

"Canya imagine me, a Demoness, telling a Goddess to keep a _cool_ head?" she added while frowning self-consciously.

"OK. I'll allow that...for the moment. But considering the topic of our sisters, what I cannot account for is the fact that Urd and Skuld appeared to be completely indifferent to Banpei's _imprisoning_ Keiichi in the temple. And Banpei-kun was absolutely _sadistic_ in his treatment of my beloved fiancé. By some terrible flight of verve, I can almost envision an situation where Skuld had reverted to her old ways...but in an extremely exaggerated manner...and now she's trying to use Banpei-kun to get back at Keiichi for some perceived slight," Belldandy offered, pausing several times to catch her breath. She had been speaking so fast, she seemed to machinegun her speech with anxiety. Of her sisters, Skuld was the most difficult one to mentally accuse...

Mara smiled inwardly at the fact that Belldandy was finally referring to Urd and Skuld as "our sisters". She had never had any siblings in Vanagdrasil...so the jarring news a few months ago that she was a sister to the three Norns had been intrusive, unsettling and intimidating. At first. But now that she had spent some time living with the idea of having three Goddesses for sisters, she sometimes found herself acknowledging that having siblings wasn't too bad. Especially since two of the three were younger than she. How many Demonesses can claim to have family from "the other side", so to speak?

Life seemed to always present such novelties.

"Ya know, I think there is much much more to this than simply a matter of a vicious attack robot. Of course, being one of Skuld's mechas, a serious malfunction would be the reasonable explanation. But even that's doubtful, because I clearly sensed an evil intent in his earlier attacks on you. And I clearly heard our little Skuld telling Banpei to "get 'im!" Trust me...I definitely have a handle on sensing sinister vibes. And they're _overflowing_ that temple house, just like someone trying to empty a furoba's worth of bathwater into a rice cooker!" Mara noted.

"I heard what Skuld said as well. After our first encounter, I distantly sensed that this robot was some kind of an evil twin to Banpei-kun. This encounter definitely confirmed my initial impressions."

"Of course it did! It doesn't take a genius to figure out that Banpei was trying to wail on us with that Bo stick of his!"

"But I sensed more than a violent malice in Banpei, Mara! I'm almost certain that he was crafted by _evil_ hands," Belldandy noted, her face a study in concentration.

"Evil...hands," Mara said softly, repeating Belldandy's words as she clenched and unclenched her fingers.

"Speaking of evil hands, I also would really like to know about your thoughts concerning Keiichi's...reaction...to you, Mara," Belldandy inquired.

"_That_ again?" Mara sighed throatily. If a question could be loaded with fissionable nuclear material and then thrown into a fireplace stocked with TNT, then this would be that question. Belldandy seemed to hang her attentions too raptly on the subject of her 'encounter' with Keiichi in the temple lawn. Even though there was _no_ 'her and Keiichi'! Mara was even more troubled by her sister's mental leap between 'evil hands' and their bizarre encounter with Keiichi. _Her_ bizarre encounter with Keiichi. If anyone had 'evil hands', it was Keiichi; he had literally been pawing her with a Bacchanalian abandon, coveting her like a horny schoolboy! Concentrating hard, Mara tried to ram her racing thoughts down...she would need to answer the forbidding question without completely dive-bombing the apple cart of her sister's sensitivities. Steeling herself, Mara self-confided that she was a Senior First Class Demoness, every bit the equal of Belldandy in divine firepower. If Belldandy lost it and spiraled into a combative mood, she would at least be evenly matched with the Goddess...

Then she frowned, remembering that she had virtually no Demoness powers to draw upon, should she have to defend herself. And Belldandy was lamed by a twisted ankle.

Could they have been brought to this broken mirror of an Earthrealm just to catfight each other over a case of misbegotten jealousy? What if this whole craziness had been deliberately contrived, perhaps for the amusement of the Dark Lord? Perhaps this tense scenario was some kind of Divine Gladiatrix competition He arranged as a diversion for all of Vanagdrasil to witness...

"Bless him! How could Keiichi do this to me?" Mara cursed. "I'm going crazy! Now I'm suspecting Oni-sama!" The fabrications of her fantasies were getting more paranoid, fervently edgy with turmoil. Trying to master her delusions, she alighted on the memory of the hot embarrassment she felt when Keiichi had lip-played with her. _That_ didn't help her regain her resolve at all!

But...it _did_ feel good. Well, just a little bit good.

Over the past five years that she had been mired in her Earthrealm assignment, Mara had often fantasized about what it would be like to have Keiichi. Having Keiichi in a sexual and romantic way...would be the ultimate form of revenge upon her Goddess rivals. In fact, it would be a major coup for the Demoness Grief Office; Belldandy and her sisters would be sent packing, gripped by a devastating defeat. As for Belldandy, she would be emotionally devastated by such a reversal. But now, the very thought was distasteful, because she had begrudgingly become more than a little concerned about Belldandy and Keiichi's relationship. Perhaps she even cared about how they felt. But the not-so-innocent fantasies lingered, even though she had made a deliberate effort to purge them from her imaginings during the last year or so. Mara shook her head to try and dislodge the impressions, sending waves of generous ash-strawberry blonde ringlets arcing all around her.

"Well? Are you going to answer my question, Mara? What are your intentions towards Keiichi?" Belldandy asked, hands on her hips.

"Uh..I was..uh..surprised at the..um..unexpected force of his..um, his passionate...kisses, of course..." Mara started to explain, her memories dancing the impression of Keiichi's lips on hers. Belldandy's cheeks grew visibly red; her lips were quivering like fluttering wings on a cloud. Mara somehow caught her tongue and the fanciful impressions behind it...before she incriminated herself further...

"Blessit, what in the Graces are you thinking, Belldandy? I have _no_ intentions towards Keiichi!!" Mara shouted irritably, shifting gears from defensiveness to annoyance. Belldandy scowled questioningly at her; Mara realized that her outburst of frustration had only seemed to heighten Belldandy's moodiness.

Mara recognized a Jealousy Storm in the brewing...

"B..Belldandy! I think it's best that we should discuss what happened with Keiichi later! There's so many other questions that need answering, such as the identity of this 'twin' of mine that you thought you saw!" Mara quickly interjected, hoping a conversational re-queue would forestall her sister's temper from rising further with a volcanism-like surety.

"O..oh! Is there something wrong? What were we just talking about? I seem to have been distracted by something for a moment," Belldandy asked. Mara realized that Belldandy didn't even know that she was getting angry! She was so closely bonded to Keiichi, her resentful reaction was, for all purposes, purely a matter of instinct! Not knowing what else to do, she patted Belldandy on the shoulder to try and assure her that everything was okay.

Nothing was okay.

This fucked-up situation had much to be desired...and much to be despised. It was as if everything was ass-backwards. In this reality, she had encountered a Keiichi who whole-heartedly believed Belldandy was a Demoness...and was in love with _her_ instead! A Keiichi who had fully expected _her_ to be a Goddess! A Keiichi who had reacted to Belldandy with the kind of percussive terror that a cat would experience when its nap under a taiko drum was snapped apart on the morning of a small-village matsuri day. Recalling when Keiichi first recognized Belldandy outside the temple, Mara recognized that he had became completely disoriented with dreadshock...the kind of reaction usually observed only in proper Demon-mortal Grief interactions.

How could he actually believe Belldandy was a _Demoness_?

"One of us has got to stay sane," Mara thought, gripped with worry. If Belldandy didn't feed her thoughts on some answers sometime soon, Mara feared that her sister's thoughts would feed on the obsessive turmoils burning coal-like in her heart.

After all, she was Norn of the Present...and the present situation was chaotic in the extreme...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Belldandy and Mara agreed that it would be best to keep themselves at a safe remove from the temple for the time being. If there was another 'Mara', then it might be possible that there was another 'Belldandy' as well. If so, then the safest course of action meant that they would have to go undercover, so to speak. In view of this, Mara suggested that they base themselves at her old videogame lair in nearby Funabashi, located just a few km west of Makuhari. So they camped out in the abandoned building, sleeping bags and all.

The entertainment arcade formerly housed there was a business casualty when the "bubble economy" burst in the early 1990s. Once they entered through the back door, Mara spun around and gestured grandly, noting to Belldandy that she felt at home here because "it has that certain evanescent ghost-town atmosphere." Video arcade machines covered with dust and cobwebs still lined the walls, whose peeling paint used to be state-of-the-art game parlor decor circa 1990. Two 'islands' of pachinko machines created a diagonal corridor up through the middle of the large interior of the building. Numerous boxes were piled against another wall, and electrical cords criss-crossed the carpeted floor like nests of snakes.

For her part, Belldandy was amused by Mara's inability to magically repair the old game machines with a wave of her hand. Obviously, Mara had more on her mind than just shelter. For several hours, they discussed the implications of the odd behavior of the familiars in their lives. Intermittently during their conferencing, Mara would break off from the discussion and wander from machine to machine in an effort to try and start up a game. All Belldandy could do was observe with bemusement as...on the wings of each failure...her Demoness sister would screech out a string of curses while she kicked the side of the arcade console. Mara even went as far as to bust open a dispenser machine with a crowbar and grab a handful of game tokens. But no matter how many game tokens she plugged into the machines, she had no success.

"Awww crap! I really _am_ without my Demoness powers! I can't believe I have to resort to this!" she wailed in a mournful voice as she finally gave up, collapsing to a cross-legged position with the dramatic flair of someone who was bitterly disappointed. The floor was so dirty, a dust cloud fluted out from under her.

"Shit! I give up! Hey Belldandy, can't you do anything about this?" Mara asked, looking up at her needfully.

"Ahhh...I thought you would never ask, Mara," Belldandy replied with an innocent grin. "Here...perhaps I could be of assistance."

She approached one of the machines and gave it a good slap on the side.

With a rattle, the lights flickered on, and the blank screen fired up with an image of dueling street fighters. The music of a long-forgotten tin-sound game theme echoed through the empty building. Mara regarded her with an expression that blended equal amounts of disgust and excitement.

"Guess it just needed a Goddess's touch," Belldandy explained softly with a shrug of her slender shoulders, causing Mara to narrow her eyes and grimace.

"She really doesn't know that she's insulting me!" Mara grumbled to herself as she saw the pleased beam on Belldandy's face. Belldandy's expression of joy suggested that of a youngster doing something well and wanting a reward from a parent. Mara wanted to slap that look right off her sister's face...but then, it wouldn't be fun, because Belldandy would still be clueless.

Well, at least she wasn't moping on about Keiichi at the moment...

"Hey c'mon! I got an idea! Now that you fixed it, let's play a game together!" Mara invited, gesturing with her hand towards the machine.

"Okay! You're on!" Belldandy answered, nodding with determination on her face.

Five hours later, the two Divines were still playing...with an inhuman competitive ferocity...

_"That's it! I'll get 'er with my Thunder WheelSpoke Spin Kick!"_

_"You don't have a chance against my Flaming Tiger Chin-cracker ClawFist!"_

_"You just watch it! My Flying Dragon Back-breaker Grappler Leap will get ya!"_

_"Not if you can't block my Monkey-God Iron Bar Elbow!"_

Loud shouts pealed through the abandoned video arcade building as Belldandy and Mara coached their game fighters with frenetic shouts and screams. Fingers blurring over the control buttons, the two Divines were so animated in their struggle that they were bumping into each other with their elbows and shoulders as they fought to control their fighters. Mara would try and shove Belldandy aside with her hips, and a moment later, she felt Belldandy thrusting back with her hips and shoulders, almost bumping her away from the machine. Both Divine women gripped the arcade console tightly, as if it was a lifeboat adrift in a freezing ocean. Anything to keep from being dislodged from the button controls...

The arcade machine rocked like a rice cooker filled with popcorn...

_--Sniiizzzzp!!--_

The screen went blank.

"Dark Lord Blessit! Shitshitshit! I was just about ready to drop her with a Tornado Mystic Neck-cruncher Flip!" Mara shouted in rapt anguish, the sudden silence of the game console being a more severe blow than any of combos Belldandy had inflicted upon her game fighter...

"This is terrible! I would have used my Dragon Breath Foot-sweep to knock her off her feet before she could've done anything. Drats! Now I'll never know if I could have beaten her!" she overheard her Goddess sister wail in frustration.

"You'll never beat me, Belldandy!! You never could!"

"Well, you never managed to beat me either, Mara!! Every time we ever competed as kids, we always tied. So you have nothing to gloat about..."

"I can gloat if I want to! Besides, I was clearly ahead!"

"No you weren't. I know you, Mara...you weren't paying any attention to the score!"

"Err...how do you know that?" Mara shot back. "By the way, what _was_ the score, Ms. Fair-Play-Goody-Two-Shoes-Goddess?"

"Uhhm..." Belldandy answered tentatively, touching her index fingertips together nervously. Mara knew that she hadn't glimpsed the score either.

"See?! I would've beaten your ass!"

"In your dreams, Mara! Given time, my fighter would have punched your daylights out..." Belldandy replied. Mara looked at Belldandy's face, noticing how her auburn silk-lengths of hair were soaked with perspiration around the crown of her head as sweat dripped off her nose...

Mara felt her own chest heaving with deep gasping inhalations, beads of sweat on her forehead matting her curly off-blonde tresses against her cheeks...

Both sisters burst out into laughter.

"Tee..heee haa hhaah! You know what this means, Mara?"

"Bwah ha heeeh! Yep...it means we _tied again_, doesn't it?"

That night, exhausted from their videogame athletics, Belldandy and Mara both acknowledged that they had simply overpowered the videogame console interface with their blind-speed button and joystick gaming. They also agreed on the fact that their competitive spirit certainly hadn't atrophied over the millennia. Each of them noted that competition was a good thing once in a while; mindful that their erstwhile sparring had unexpectedly created a tighter bond between the two after they faced off today in the fantasy fighter game.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Once again, Belldandy noticed the peculiar side effect of her reduced powers...her physical manifestation was behaving more and more like an Earthrealm mortal's body. Her human physiology was making unexpected demands on her, demands she had felt only once before when she was "semi-mortalized" during Keiichi's recent endurance test during the Ritual of Endurance. Physical exhaustion leaned into the need for longer sleep...a growling stomach announced that she should sate her appetite...her swollen ankle insisted that she walk gingerly on it...and the like. She was unaccustomed to many of these demands; as a Goddess, she could either acknowledge the physical 'feedback' of her Earthrealm manifest form, or simply deny it by dint of her will. Just like turning a switch on and off. And when she was in bed with Keiichi...the switch was most definitely turned "on"...

But since she had been brought here, her reduced Goddess powers meant that the figurative 'switch' seemed to be permanently stuck in the "on" position. She had no choice but to feel the impressions of her physical body full force. Belldandy felt confused at times, because she was used to the sensations of her physical body providing only a fractional stimulus in relation to the rest of her being. As a Goddess, she was a being that was absolved of physical matter...she was a creation of Soul-Time-Energy. When her Soul felt sad, she'd frown or sob with emotion. When her Energy was depleted, she would fall fast asleep. The equilibrium was always in the modus of her Divine nature influencing her physical nature...her Earthrealm female physical form. But now, the equilibrium between Soul-Time-Energy and her physical body was reversed. It all felt _different_! Belldandy knew that she was completely invigorated with Divine energy, even if her Goddess powers were operating at a level that was slight when compared to what was normal for her. But if her body was exhausted, _she_ was exhausted, regardless of the levels of Divine qualities in her being. Nearby, Mara coughed lightly in her sleep, and then rolled over inside of her sleeping bag. As the sun bathed her in wakefulness, Belldandy felt an insistent urge to take a stroll before Mara woke up.

After the first good sleep she had since she arrived in "topsy-turvy Makuhari", Belldandy decided that a visit to familiar grounds other than the temple might buoy her spirits. Funabashi wasn't too far from the N.I.T. extension campus, so she decided to take a dawn-light outing to the secondary N.I.T. campus.

She felt cheered by the crispness of the morning smells as she strolled towards the extension campus. Reaching the end of a sidewalk, Belldandy decided to take a shortcut through a pathway of brambles adjoining a hillside of several vacant parcels of land. The wood grove seemed to whisper "...hush..." to the city noise-scape as she walked deeper into the stripe of pine trees. She was worried that her stroll would become a hike; her ankle was still too unsteady to do any real climbing or moderate hiking. Skirting along the base of the hill, the ambiance of the deeper woods soothed her anxieties. As expected, the temperature was cooler here than walking alongside the streets. Instead of angling down from the roof of the forest canopy, the sunlight seemed to peer out from between the tree trunks. A slight ground-fog created a will-o-the-wisp effect as she reached the middle of the hillside woods. She strolled leisurely until she emerged from the other side of the downhill kid-worn bicycle path. There, she decided to take pause and watch the traffic go by.

This was the very road that Megumi usually rode on with her Kawasaki KSR-II whenever she took a couple classes at the extension school. The same winding hillslope road that used to be 'owned' by the Racing Queen and her gang of bike riders. One of the roads the 'phantom biker' took, at least until they learned that it was the 'ghost' of an old motorbike of Chihiro's. As she recalled the spectral motorcycle in her mind...as if on cue, Belldandy heard the approach of a loud motorcycle with a throaty rumble, seconds away from her line-of-sight. It blew around the bend, cornering low to the road as it approached her. A flash of black and orange, driving recklessly down the middle of the road at almost double the posted speed limit.

But it wasn't Megumi that she saw riding past her...

The rider of the Harley was dressed in a tight-fitting cherry-orange outfit that immediately drew Belldandy's attention, like a single ink-splash on an otherwise white canvas. The rider's bike was definitely semi-chopped and heavily gear-meched...but it also looked _weird_, like some futuristic blend of motorcycle technologies. The rich red color of the rider's leather jacket and pants seemed to grab the sun and snuff it as they leaned low over the handlebars, bosozoku street-racing style. As the rider drew even with Belldandy, they turned their head for an instant's glance at her...and with a slow-motion clarity, Belldandy caught the flashpan expression of malice.

Belldandy felt like the rider's sinister red-orange eyes were choking her, as tightly as a winter glove grips the fingers. The rider was a _woman_! She had a black bandana wrapped around the top of her head, American-style...which made her long brown hair streaked with cardinal reds more jarring to the eye. Generous silk-swathes of hair whipped horizontally behind her head as she flew on past and rounded a curve.

It was just a moment caught up in the instant, but Belldandy felt an eternity's worth of exhaustion. She stood by the roadside, her hands trembling uncontrollably as the recent memory burned itself into her mind. Those eyes...were unlike anything she'd ever experienced. Even Mara in the peak form of her Demonic maliciousness couldn't match the oppressive aura that lingered after the rider flew by. The whole experience, while brief, had hijacked her senses. Quickly withdrawing into the safety of the trees, she found a large rock and hurriedly sat herself down, a strikedown panic besting her. Quelling her gasping breathes, Belldandy shuffled the memory through her mind, feeling almost frightened as she recalled the sinister intent in those eyes.

And there was no mistaking the two slender red ovals that centered on the woman's forehead...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"This is sounding like an American movie gone bad! You went out for a walk and you saw some woman riding a Harley? Wait'll Keiichi hears about _this_!" Mara said, her voice bouncing the words about like a basketball.

"Mara..."

"So what's got you so upset, Bell?" Mara interrupted. "This is the Earthrealm...just another day in Paradise, or something like that. There's probably bunches of women driving Harleys in the Tokyo area. Maybe one of them decided to go for a ride in the Chiba boonies..."

"That's not all. It wasn't just any Harley she was riding. One of the chrome engine plates read 'Harley-Davidson Motor Works, Milwaukee Wisconsin. Bicentennial Edition.'" Belldandy noted, narrowing her eyebrows to emphasize her point.

"Sooo..." Mara started to argue.

"_Bi-_centennial Edition!" Belldandy repeated, drawing out the words.

Mara gulped down hard as it dawned on her that the motorcycle the woman had been driving...was an impossibility.

Harley-Davidson's bicentennial was still almost a century away.

"Oh...blow me! This is totally jacked! I don't even wanna think about it!" Mara exclaimed sharply. She slowly sat down on one of the stools in front of a pachinko machine and hit her knee with her fist in frustration.

Whoever the rider was, she had _mega_ Divine powers! Not only the kind of powers to physically bring back an object from the Earthrealm's future, but she also possessed the associated spellcast abilities to mask its existence from the mortals. A motorcycle from 2103 would easily attract attention in 20XX. Or perhaps she simply explained her motorcycle as a novelty and got away with it. Earthrealm mortals were so gullible nowadays...and Japan was such a techno-fetishist culture...

"This biker chick must have some serious Divine firepower!" Mara noted, attended by an expression of vacant-concentration.

"Hnnn!" Belldandy nodded.

Normally, Mara's face seemed slightly more pallid than those of her sisters, but now her face was now almost chalk-white with consternation. Mara's red-orange eyes were fused with fiery concern as she stared off into space. No doubt, her Demoness sister's mind was working overtime.

"It's much worse than that, Mara," Belldandy continued, her voice growing thin. Her face was still flushed from the shock she felt from the encounter.

"She was unmistakably a Demoness..."

"WHAT?! _I'm_ the only Demoness on assignment to the Earthrealm, last time I checked!" Mara shouted.

"Mara, I caught a glimpse of her when she rode by. That...woman...was not a production of my imagination. She was _real_! She had _these_!" Belldandy exclaimed, placing her fingers across her forehead in an imitation of the markings she saw on her 'double', and then opening her mouth and pointing at her canine teeth.

"Wh..whoa! Slow down! Are those what I think they are?" Mara asked, her eyes widening. Unconsciously, she traced her fingers over her own twin slashes, perhaps just to make sure they were there.

"I clearly distinguished two red marks on her forehead. Each marking looked exactly like the elongated oval I have. Symmetrical double ovals positioned right above her eyebrows in the center of her forehead. Just like yours, if you could imagine ovals instead of slashes. I haven't seen too many Demons in person beside you, so I'm not too sure..."

"You haven't seen _any_ Demons except me, because of the Rule. The Mutual Exclusion Clause part of the Rule, in particular, that goes..."

"...no Gods and Demons shall ever have face-to-face meetings, with the exception of Doublet Pledges and other extraordinary circumstances. Different Multiverses, different realms, shared purpose," Belldandy finished. Spending time with Mara was a constant reminder to her of how similar the two of them were, despite their differences. Belldandy had learned more about Demons and Vanagdrasil from Mara in the last five months of their newly-discovered sisterhood than she had learned during the entire 140 millennia of her Inculcation: Prime, FirstTier, SecondTier, ThirdTier and Final Inculcations. It was almost mind-boggling how much the Demons and Gods had in common, despite being total opposites of each other...

"The only other Demons you've probably ever met...besides Hild and Velpser...was when our sister Urd was turned into a super-Demoness by the Ultimate..."

"I know what I saw!" Belldandy interrupted, asserting herself with a frustrated voice.

"Tell me more about..." Mara started to ask. But suddenly she felt the words in her throat dry up...

Translucent shadowshapes scampered menacingly about, as the environs of the gaming arcade seemed to close in on her, tight as a pillbox. The ill-defined shapes clacked noisily, just like dozens of crockery projectiles being thrown against the wall, shaped by an unseen athlete...no, an unseen attacker who was trying to _hurt_ her. Mara felt uncertainty as mantra; a diode of fear flickering on-and-off in her mind. In a narcotic waking dreamstate, her breath was smothered as she felt like she was confined in some kind of arcane cocoon, her Soul being devoured voraciously by ravenous SpiderDemons. Snippets of Soul-rending fangs tearing at her, threatening to completely overtake her focus of thought...

She faltered out of the nightmare remembrances to the sound of her own gasping breaths.

"...what's happening to you? Are you all right, Mara?!" Belldandy asked, her face woven with apt concern.

"I..I don't know!" Mara blurted out uneasily. "I thought for a moment that my Soul was being consumed by SpiderDemons. It was as if I had been someplace new, someplace 'other'...but yet familiar. A place or time...that I already had known! That I already knew that I had been there before. And I sensed the presence of Isilblius..."

Belldandy stiffened.

The environs of the videogame hangout were swept away like dried blood corpuscles being kicked by a cat-o-nine-tails. Everything seemed _replaced_. Belldandy felt the epic myth of life crushing down on her, filling her Soul with weariness. Overhead, the Moon loomed close: a gibbous pearl that threatened to crash down on her with Damoclean finality. A roaring voice skinned with malice shouted unheard words in her mind as the ocean of air seemed to transmute into a gigantic wave of water, pressing down on her, drowning her...

_Slap!!_

"What did you do that for?" Belldandy asked, feeling the stingly needling on her cheek.

"_You stopped breathing_! It looked like you were choking or suffocating, so I slapped you in the face to try and get you out of it! I didn't know what else to do," Mara answered, her words falling as fast as rainfall...

"I...was _suffocating_?"

"Blessed right you were!" Mara answered emphatically.

"It's Isilblius, isn't it?" both Belldandy and Mara said in stereo.

"Belldandy, I have the distinct impression that he's _already_ on the loose! Why else would I have a corridor of my mind awakened, a corridor that is totally off the map of my memories? I'm not totally certain...but my gut feeling is that I experienced a _memory_. Not a fantasy, but the recall of an _actual_ incident. How could I know this? It seems as if my 'observer self' was detached just enough to allow me to distinguish between 'where I am now' and 'where I was in my memories'. A few more minutes and I might have gotten lost, borne away by the swiftness of those shrouds of recollection. Instead, I was left wondering what in the lava-blazes was going on! Part of me was watching _another_ part of me being tortured in some distant place of sorrow, scorn and terror. I felt a strong thunderous impression accompanied by a chilling, horrible evil...a menace far worse than that of the Dark Lord. Worse, because it...was _cold_! A heartless bane, with no sense of purpose or passion behind it. Mysterious and deadly, like the Black Death that obliterated 70 of the Earthrealm's population just a few centuries ago. As you know, Evil borrows from Passion; but I could sense neither emotion in the place I saw in my mind. Which makes it far worse than any venomous malevolence that I've ever encountered. No offense if You're listening, most worshipful Dark Majesty!" Mara explained, adding a caveat at the end as she looked skywards.

"To me, it felt like I had lost the stewardship of my own Soul. My fear was inflamed to the point where it seemed that my reason was being swallowed by a despair to end all despairs. All around me was the darkness of Ragnarok..." Belldandy countered, detailing her own impressions.

"Rag..na..rok?" Mara interrupted incredulously. "Isn't that what you Gods term 'the End Days'?"

"Yes. It is a whispered word among us. A silent word, rarely repeated outside of Yggdrasil. Only once was this word mentioned here on the Earthrealm; whispered by one of our Goddess Relief Office agents. Whispered...and overheard. The hearer was a mystic from a clan of Nordic-Druidic witches; she was so affrighted by the very sound of the word, she committed it to all further retellings of the Norse legends...where it has been passed on through the centuries. One word. One nightmare," Belldandy explained.

"That GRO agent...wasn't you, was it?" Mara asked. She just _had_ to ask. Belldandy shook her head "no" and noted that the GRO agent in question received a millennial license suspension, along with a referral to the Ethiopsylogic Clinic.

"We Demons have a different word for the Time that Ends All Times. We term it the 'Nezkaton'. As with your Ragnarok, Nezkaton is our secret, hidden word. It too was overheard by an Earthrealm mortal. 7 millennia ago in Egypt, a priestess heard the word whispered in the sands of the desert from the lips of a Demoness on a Grief assignment, and she committed the word to symbol and folklore. The mortal word 'eschatology' is all that remains of it," Mara revealed.

"That Demoness wasn't you, was it?" Belldandy asked. She just had to ask...especially since Mara had asked her about "Ragnarok" earlier.

"Are you crazy!? Do you think I'm _that_ dumb!" Mara blurted in exasperation. Belldandy giggled at how flustered her sister had gotten.

"Well, in any case, what we just told each other confirms what I've always suspected," Belldandy said brightly.

"Which is what?"

"That Earthrealm women are better listeners than men. With the exception of Keiichi, of course. In each instance, the profanely sonciated words were heard by priestesses...because the men were probably too busy arguing over money or prestige. Odd, isn't it? That both our histories would have such a similar chapter..."

Mara snorted a giggle at Belldandy's 'conclusion'...and then her face drew serious.

"But now we know that there's more to it than coincidence..." she noted with a nod to Belldandy.

"And the commonality between them is Isilblius. We Gods always considered him the Ultimate Demon."

"To us, Isilblius was considered to be the Ultimate GodPower...therefore the Ultimate Demonizer of the Demons. But within this awareness was the suspicion that he was the most powerful of Gods. A God...who was the incarnation of an infectious good-and-evil that far transcends anything we could even imagine."

"And you tried to resurrect him?"

Belldandy's question sent an icepick chill down Mara's spine.

"I..I don't think that I was trying to raise Isilblius. To do something like that would get me in shitloads of trouble with the Dark Lord. If His Dark Majesty ever found out, my Soul _would_ wind up gorging several dozen SpiderDemons in some Forever Hell!" she replied with a shudder. She noticed Belldandy shuddering as well...

"Besides, I don't have anything even close to that level of arcanic skill. It would take a Master Proctor or a Demon Queen _hundreds_ of millennia to resurrect Isilblius, if such a thing could even be done at all! Besides, no Demon or Demoness would even make the attempt in the first place. One of the first teachings we Demons receive during our earliest childhood Prime Inculcation is this warning: 'Don't ever fuck with Isilblius!'" Mara explained.

Belldandy closed her eyes and tried to focus her concentration. She recalled being swept up by a deluge that made the Biblical Flood seem insignificant by comparison...a displacement of ocean that covered most of the Earthrealm's coastal areas. She was bobbing in the ocean several kilometers above the compressed remnants of her temple home. She tried to work her memories backwards, something that Urd could have done easily...but retrospection was underdeveloped in the Norn of the Present. She saw a cherry tree in her own backyard...an energy dome. She remembered pulling her special earring, unsealing her powers. Peorth may or may not have been there with her. She tallied all the faces she could remember.

Keiichi was there with her.

And Mara.

She could hear a severely-injured Mara mouthing invisible words of sorrow; seeking absolution for a grievous crime against the Multiverse. The spark of Mara's Soul was a mere splinter, a grain, a speck of energy against the chilling graveness of voice she used; remorsefully crying out her reasons for resurrecting the Ultimate Demon. In the noir-world of shadowed remembrances, Belldandy peeled aside the veil of disorientation...she _knew_ through the clouds that Mara had tried to summon Isilblius in the furnaces of alchemical complexity.

"How could I know this? It never happened!" Belldandy confronted herself. There was only one Present, one reality in this single strand of the TimeStream. One TimeWeave, one flow of TimeSpace. And there was definitely only one TimeWeb that served as a nexus, linking all the possible realities of Time. But yet she was clearly aware of another flow of events, one that didn't happen. It was as if her own memories had set out to spite her.

She felt like a guest in her own house of dreams...

"Mara, I'm certain that you tried to summon Isilblius, in a time and reality that isn't real," Belldandy asserted.

"How can a reality _not be real_?"

"It's something that only a Norn could understand. Don't you have a certain class of Demons whose responsibility is to regulate the flow of Time in the TimeWeb?"

"No, we don't. Manipulations of the realm of Time are restricted to Oni-sama. In the distant past, we did have a trio of Demonesses in charge of TimeSpace. The Scorns. But they attempted a coup, using their powers over Time to try and usurp the dominion of Our Dark Liege over Vanagdrasil. When He found out, they were remanded to janitorial duties as punishment. _Eternal_ drudgery as sanitation workers..."

"Sanitation workers? You mean to say that waste and refuse actually exists in Vanagdrasil?" Belldandy asked in an astonished voice.

"Of course not! But the Dark Lord has them working in squalor anyway. For all I know, He may have created a realm of compost in some unknown quarter of Vanagdrasil, just to keep 'em busy."

Belldandy decided not to venture any further questions, lest she find out even more unpleasant details. She was fascinated by Mara's disclosure that the Demons once had a triune of Demonesses responsible for Time...and that the "Demoness Norns" had used their special abilities for self-gain. Just like the Fates who had preceded she, Urd and Skuld...

Once again, she found herself grateful for the lengths the Almighty had taken to ensure that she and her sisters were well-grounded in ethics. He had lovingly gone to great pains to always remind her of the need for those who are Norns to be of _service_ to the greater good of Yggdrasil. Belldandy guessed that within His collective wisdom, Kami-sama must have known of the fate of their Demonic counterparts.

She decided it was time to give Mara a brief overview of Time and Space.

"By the endeavor of the single individual to find and occupy its existential niche," Belldandy explained, "all such acts leave undeletable traces on the evolutional history of the whole. These residuations are moderated by the Yggdrasil Mainframe and the Almighty...and I would guess that your Vanagdrasil Mainframe and your Dark Lord also plays a role. Thereby, Urd's awareness of Cevn's link to Isilblius may have possessed a unique encoding that somehow impacted upon all other related individuals. In the framework of Time and Space, any incidents on the Earthrealm, and lastly also in the whole Multiverse, are eternally affecting each other. Yet, regardless of their sequence in Time and Space, everything in the Multiverse is interpretable along lines of unity couched within diversity. Time and Space, as you know, are not universally descriptive of reality...the Metanative Dimension transcends them, of course."

"Of course," Mara noted.

"But Time and Space can be viewed from _within_ themselves. From our perspective as Norns, Time and Space appear as a gigantic web-like organic latticework...because of the interactions of all endeavors, sentient and otherwise. This is how we can _see_ Time. TimeSpace is inclusive of Time and Space, but the inclusive 'reality' of physical and chronometric properties also involves the mind in an intellectual submergence into the complex and strange. 'Reality' and 'non-reality', co-existing within and without one's thoughts. But still, somehow a familiar worldview is described by Time and Space...albeit an incomplete one.

"Using the Earthrealm mortals as an illustration, one can demonstrate this principle as it manifests forth. Employing certain particular concepts of Time and Space of their own devising, they have kindled a fascination with the burst of colors and complexity in their lives: their annual festivals and celebrations of national unity using fireworks. A systemization of Time, but one that has no bearing on actual TimeSpace. Yet, by the motive of intelligence, such a system is capable of rendering Time into unknown qualities. Thus enabled, the mortals drive deeper and deeper into spheres of the unknown. These unknown 'others', which are appearing like unused possibilities of natural forms and structures, manifest as tiny changes in the basic parameters of Time. In essence, these unknowns turn the evolutional process in a totally different direction."

She gave several more examples of Time and Space from the unique perspective of a Norn, basically explaining that 'reality' is approached from conceptual and perceptual distinctions, while a much deeper stratum of explanation is called for when the subject is 'existence'. When she was finished, Mara regarded her with a thoughtful expression.

"So this 'reality' that we're both remembering has already happened...and yet, it also _hasn't_ happened. Which means that the fact that you can claim that it hasn't happened...bears no consideration as to whether it actually occurred in any duration of Time or Space. _We_ think these memories haven't happened; but we have no way of knowing that they _didn't_ occur at some point in our lives. I'm assuming that you meant that these freakshow memories didn't occur in Time or Space...nor in any measurable reality, except our own awareness. As Divines, our awareness may or may not be suspect. That's why they had Skuld busily crushing Bugs in the Yggdrasil Mainframe, because...as we all know...if the Ygg Mainframe gets infected, then the 'feedback' could cause all you Gods and Goddesses to 'lose mind'. The same holds true for we Demons and Demonesses. We'd be lost without the moderating links between us and the Vang Mainframe. But mortals are a different case altogether. Their awareness is _always_ suspect. Their brains lack the higher neurological faculties that allow for eidetic recall, sound thinking, Tangental Groupmind, telepathy, communioncation, Divine intuition and so forth. Basically, they're _wired_ to lie, distrust, hallucinate, suffer delusions and the like.

"But in any case, there is no perfect recall in the Multiverses, except for our Dark Lord and your Lord. Which just happen to be the two Beings who exiled Isilblius. This would explain the nature of Isilblius's banishment! He was banished to a state of beingness that really couldn't exist. Because beingness can only be reconciled with reality in situations where it is self-arising and immanent. On the Divine scale, beingness would occur only throughout processes of reality, 'truths' that exist within the framework of a dynamism between Metanative and other dimensional planes. Which would exclude Isilblius's place of exile, because...according to your explanation...the reality that includes Isilblius only exists in the Metanative Dimension and no others. Since he's isolated to the Metanative Dimension, one can conclude that it is quite possible that _we_ could conceptualize such a reality. But Earthrealm mortals like Cevn, Keiichi, Megumi and the others...certainly could never even consider such a reality."

"Yes, that is a succinct way of explaining it," Belldandy said, genuine praise in her voice. Mara had grasped the essence of the intricate interactions between Time, Space and reality rather quickly, she thought.

"Shit! I'm getting another headache just considering the implications of this! Taken to the truthful conclusion, _nothing_ can exist solely in the Metanative Dimension...except the Ultimate Force and the two Lords, if they so chose to," Mara said wearily. It was clear that she was overwhelmed with what she had just learned. Even the Dark Lord, Oni-sama, existed inside and outside of the Metanative Dimension. If the Dark One restricted Himself to the Metanative Dimension, it would serve no purpose; He wouldn't be able to rule His subjects at the level of the eight lower dimensions. To them, He simply wouldn't exist.

"Can _anyone_ grasp such a reality? Isilblius can exist exclusively in the Metanative Dimension, and has been doing do for a long time," Belldandy answered grimly. "Which leaves me with a lack of understanding about how any of this has to do with Cevn...other than it _shouldn't_. Cevn's only a mortal."

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

In the middle of the night, Mara was jolted awake with a flash of insight. Following upon what Belldandy had told her about Time and Space from the vantage of a Norn, she finally understood what Urd had been doing all this time in Yggdrasil. Telling her sister about it would be very unpleasant, but she had to get it off her chest. Especially since it involved a very dangerous situation with Isilblius, which was probably ongoing...and perhaps responsible for their presence here. It might even explain the 'hallucinations' she and Belldandy seemed to be experiencing.

"Y'know, you might not understand how Cevn fits into the picture, but I think I'm beginning to see how this all fits together. Belldandy...I had a source of information that you didn't have. I think I'm beginning to understand what happened with Cevn," Mara ventured half-questioningly once her Goddess sister was up and about the next morning.

"My...our sister Urd seemed to think that Isilblius was linked to Cevn," Belldandy noted, trying to keep her thoughts away from the tragedy that had unfolded just before they were swifted away by the Returning Mandala.

"Belldandy, I need to tell you the truth about what happened between Urd, Cevn and myself. When you accidentally sealed yourself away in the temple, and I offered to help you out of your self-inflicted quandary...on condition of going out on a date with Cevn...I was unaware of the nature of any of Urd's discoveries..." Mara admitted.

"What are you talking about now, Mara? What does that ill-starred 'date' you wanted to have with Cevn have to do with any of this?" Belldandy asked impatiently.

"Look, I need to tell you this, because you're probably the only other creature in the Multiverse who might be able to understand why I did what I did. Back then, I really _was_ interested in Cevn, perhaps even romantically so," Mara admitted, slightly blushing with embarrassment.

Belldandy rolled her eyes...Mara was stating the obvious.

"But there's a reason why! There _is_ a strong Demonic property or attribute in him...don't ask me how it got there, or why it's there. But I sensed it from the first time I encountered him. Blessit, I'm a Demoness! Of course, I was fascinated. Like Keiichi, Cevn is somewhere else as far as Earthrealm mortal humanity is concerned. Keiichi is semi-divine in some ways, and Cevn must be too. And because I'm a Demon_ess_, I..er..felt urges," she explained. Belldandy's face colored as she interpreted Mara's unsaid admission, one which completely contradicted her earlier explanation about her 'date' with Cevn.

"Yes...even _those_ kind of urges," Mara confirmed, nodding sheepishly. "You can't blame me for this; after all, I've been a single Demoness for millennia, with nothing but idiot drooling Demons and their ilk chasing after me back on Vanagdrasil. And here I was, totally alone on the Earthrealm these past five years. And I saw how quickly _you_ hooked up with an Earthrealm guy..." Mara justified, her speech clipped and castellated.

"There's no need to get defensive now, Mara. I don't think it will make a difference anyway, considering our present situation," Belldandy said softly, trying to calm Mara down. Mara was lost for breath with anxiety. Belldandy sensed that her Demoness sister seemed to be suffering from an overload of guilt and uncertainty. Again, this new sister business between she and Mara was so unpredictable and testy. It wasn't like Urd or Skuld, where she often knew what to say to ease them towards calm.

"Hmmm, I don't know about how anything might make a difference, but I have to tell you this!" Mara argued. "Anyway, the day after I demanded that I was to go out on a date with Cevn in exchange for freeing you guys...just to find out how an Earthrealm male would 'date' a Demoness like myself, of course...Urd calls me at my lair. How she got my Demon Grief Office HotLine number, I'll never know! During that phone call, she spelled out this outlandish theory thingy, acting like some paranoid-obsessed wacko with a conspiracy theory. She explains to me that she thought Cevn was connected with Isilblius. Needless to say, _that_ freaked me out! She wouldn't explain how she arrived at such a conclusion, except for the fact that she had strong suspicions," Mara narrated.

Belldandy felt another wave of sadness as Mara's words evoked the image of Cevn's death. She remembered the moment Cevn died...how Urd had looked right at her with a torn expression of abject helplessness...

"Now, after what you just told me, I know how Urd knew!" Mara continued, "Especially since she's the Norn of the Past. Urd told me that she had been scripting a mega-complex simulation program in the Yggdrasil Mainframe...a program designed to simulate the elimination of all records of reality. By purging all recorded reality in the sim, nothing would be left in that Stack of the computer. Let me know if I'm explaining this clearly...I'm definitely no computer Demoness geek-girl!"

Belldandy was too anxious to hear Mara's explanation to be offended. After all, she had worked with the Yggdrasil Mainframe as a Debugger in her younger days...

"Anyway, Urd calls again to inform me that she planned to interface directly with a 'null-reality' Stack of you guy's Mainframe Computer. And if your Yggdrasil Mainframe is anything like the Vanagdrasil Mainframe, a simulated erasing of all reality records would have outputted a big fat _nothing_ if anyone interacted with a 'null-reality' Stack of the Mainframe. Basically, what happens is that you end up comparing an erased database...with an empty data storage Stack, as Urd explained it. And if the two match, then in 'real time', one would have sensed no reality whatsoever. Zero plus zero Zero. Even I know this! And in Urd's case, this would mean that she would have no awareness of a relation between Isilblius and Cevn. Urd said she wanted to uncover whether her suspicions were correct...because she suspected that even _her own speculations_ would have been eliminated as well, if her data-purge sim and the 'null-reality' stack had been in synch."

"And evidently, they weren't, which meant that her suspicions about the link between Cevn and Isilblius were _true_," Belldandy finished.

Urd had sought a hopeful return, but was met with a shattering truth that dashed her aspirations. Nevertheless, she was awestruck by Urd's accomplishment. Motivated by a inner-heart power of Love, her sister had basically reprogrammed one of the Stacks of the Yggdrasil Mainframe to rehearse a full deletion of reality...without actually blinking out of existence all the thousands of Multiverses which that particular Stack had tucked away in memory storage. It was the equivalent of the Earthrealm 'miracle' of a mother lifting a tank to free her trapped child from underneath. The power of a deeply-felt love could do anything, if wielded by the right person for the right purpose.

Love _is_ a moral imperative, Belldandy reminded herself.

Her sister loved to brag, swagger and gloat in a nebula of vanity, but one truth she rarely disclosed directly concerned her Final Inculcation conclusions. Using the common Earthrealm figure of speech, a conclusion was the equivalent of a 'final grade'. Urd had concluded her Final Inculcation with the highest honors in her Deca. Her conclusion assessment for Final Inculcation was so elevated, it excelled the top scores for the preceding seven Decas. Skuld considered herself the resident genius of the family, but Urd's scholastic accomplishment during Inculcation revealed an endowment of prodigy that Skuld couldn't even begin to approach. She had always suspected that Urd was embarrassed by her exemplary performance; perhaps worried that such a repute would tarnish her 'wild Goddess image'. But Belldandy knew for certain Urd's silence was mostly motivated to protect Skuld from getting upset by feeling overshadowed by her older sister's unapproachable performance in Inculcation.

Since the Yggdrasil Mainframe stores every bit of information about everything that had occurred, occurs, and will occur in the Multiverse, sans the Demons and their Multiverse...a total simulated purge was the equivalent of a Metauniversal Reboot. What the mortals termed "the Big Bang". And Urd had done all of this with complete surreptitious accuracy, in the space of four months. Without being detected by her fellow Sysops. She had to be secretive, because her peers would have shut down such a risky project in an instant. One small mistake in drafting a simulation of such magnitude could have caused the program to extend beyond its single Stack of the Mainframe, which would have cascaded into a full Metauniversal Reboot...and erased all of reality. If Urd had been caught, she would have been personally punished with severity by Kami-sama.

Urd had employed every advantage of her genius like a virtuoso, undertaking a profound risk to find out the truth and try to save her boyfriend from the fate Isilblius had cast upon him.

She realized that once Urd's sim program had run its course, her sister must have linked to it...and _still_ retained an awareness that Cevn was linked to Isilblius. Belldandy gulped as she imagined how this discovery must have shattered her sister; joining with the Mainframe...and still sensing the link in her mind between Cevn and Isilblius! Which meant that she would have to eliminate the only known bridge between the non-reality of Isilblius and the reality of the Multiverse.

Belldandy felt her heart sinking as Mara continued.

"So the night before I was going to go out with Cevn, Urd tells me that she might have to kill him. I thought she had lost her mind and turned into a crazed lunatic! But then she explained...somewhat lucidly...that some unknown process was killing him anyway, slowly devouring his Soul like a cancer. So we decided upon several contingencies, one of which changed the intent of my 'date' with Cevn. Instead of going on a romantic outing, I needed to use the ruse of a date to keep him under my 'protective custody'. Urd and I both felt that such a custodial precaution was very necessary...because if he were to kill himself, Urd was almost certain that such an act of self-destruction would immediately allow for Isilblius to enter this Multiverse unimpeded. Self-hatred manifesting as suicide would be the perfect 'doorway' for Isilblius into our reality. So I had to keep him alive. Later, as Urd arrived closer to the truth, she and I decided to hook Cevn on drugs. The whole reason was that, if he had to die, she didn't want him to suffer. In a drugged-out state, we figured that death would be far less painful, since he wouldn't have a clear mind," Mara explained, fumbling at her eyes because they were tearing up.

"This...is horrible!" Belldandy commented in a shouting whisper, almost driven to tears herself. She was barely holding on, overcome by an emotional nausea brought on by the implications of what Mara was describing. And Mara seemed to be foundering as well.

"So I introduced him to the Otaku Professor. The Otaku Professor was a 'project' of mine, something to keep me busy while I was trying to deal with my Grief Assignment to Keiichi. I was hoping that the Otaku Professor could scramble Cevn's awareness even more than a simple addiction to drugs would do. There were times when I wanted to kill Cevn, just to put him out of his misery...but Urd wouldn't let me. She..snff..insisted that _she_ would have to be the one when the time came to take Cevn's life, because she..snffsnff..was the only one who could do it with love..." Mara said, hovering her hand over her eyes as she sobbed.

Belldandy reached out, tentatively at first, to hug Mara. No one could have undertaken what Mara had done without bearing a heavy heart burden. Mara had accepted an emotionally complex struggle of her own, having to provide hospice for a terminally-ill Cevn, having to mislead others into thinking that she had insensibly taken Cevn 'hostage', knowing that Urd might have to kill her charge, and also having to provoke him to debase himself...as an act of mercy...

"I..I didn't plan on the fact that the Otaku Professor would actually try to fry his mind! And then Cevn just disappeared into the streets of Tokyo!" Mara exclaimed with hysterical regret, grabbing Belldandy's blouse by the shoulders.

Belldandy tried to shake off the fears as she comforted Mara. Her Demoness sister. Half Demoness, yet Half Goddess. Urd had spent her whole life coming to grip with her Demoness nature, but Mara was only beginning to awaken to her Goddess nature. And at the moment, she was a Demoness with a heart of gold, as far as Belldandy was concerned.

Demons were both a nemesis and antithesis to the Gods. So where did Mara fit into the scheme? Were her actions truly reproachful to the judging eye of Eternity?

How could anything ever be the same again?

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

The next day, Belldandy woke up with a sour taste in her mouth as she remembered how she had encountered the 'Demonic Belldandy' on the futuristic Harley. Most of all, she remembered the momentary bridge between their eyes...and how she had felt a horrid tearing scream of Evil as she beheld those orange orbs...

To her surprise, Mara was already gone.

She found Mara at the temple, spying on the building from across the street.

"Belldandy! I needed to take off and head over here!" Mara said anxiously. "Something's come up!"

"What _else_ could come up? Things are troublesome enough already," Belldandy commented.

"When I got up this morning, I started to consider our circumstances. We're stranded in an unknown place. You saw a Demoness Belldandy and I saw a Goddess Mara, if we're to believe our senses. Which means that now we're in a totally fucked situation!" Mara said sharply.

"Eh?" Belldandy looked at Mara, whose face had transformed into a tight picture of determination. "I was quite aware of all that before I went to sleep last night. I've known that we're in a predicament ever since we first arrived here."

"I want you to use your Goddess powers to pick up that car over there," Mara instructed.

"You know that I can't do that, Mara! I'm still hobbling around with this sore ankle," Belldandy said, pointing to the walking cast around her right ankle.

"Exactly!"

"Exactly _what_, Mara?" Belldandy asked, growing more and more irritated at the Demoness's deliberate efforts to be dramatically amorphous.

"Exactly the opposite of them!" Mara answered, pointing at Urd and Skuld, who were walking around the temple grounds as if on an inspection tour. "We don't have all our powers. Have you stopped to consider the fact that they _might_?"

"Oh my! If this is true, then it would be quite terrible!" Belldandy observed despondently.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

This was probably the first time that this particular Makuhari noodle shop had been visited by both a Goddess and a Demoness. Belldandy was so upset after Mara had sounded her observations, she impulsively decided to go to the Hasegawa Noodle Shop. She hoped that familiar trappings of the safe kind would allow her to subdue the calculus of her nerves. Besides, the menu items were always tasty. But when she and Mara arrived at the family noodle shop, once again everything was the same, yet different. Instead of the Hasegawa's running the shop, it was manned by a young couple she didn't recognize. So they sat down to eat anyway...

In between slurps of noodles, Mara admitted to her that Sora was always high on her "haunt" list. She further noted that Sora wasn't very 'hauntable', since she was too brilliant to be fooled by the kinds of Demonic Mischief that most mortals would fall for. That, and the fact that she was already hooked up with Toshiyuki Aoshima, the love of her life. Belldandy found herself discussing the probabilities that Sora might spend the rest of her life with Toshiyuki, while gently admonishing Mara to leave the two alone.

The presence of two Divine women in a noodle shop would have drawn a lot of notice, except for the fact that said Goddess and Demoness were ebbing on a bare minim of their normal Senior First Class Divine powers. Yet, despite this limitation, Belldandy could notice the frequent glances from several tables nearby, populated mostly by college boys and salarymen on lunch break. Obviously, she and Mara stood out because of their beauty.

Fire and Breeze...

Belldandy fiddled with her chopsticks, rubbing them together to get rid of the splinters after she unsnapped them. In the eye of her memories, she could see Megumi and Sora sitting at the counter, Megumi eating her usual udon and gyoza, Sora busily enjoying a 'on the house' strawberry malt with her eggrolls. Mara's comments about hauntings were less than reality, and far more than fiction.

Every familiar place seemed haunted by the absence of her friends; a ghost-like isolation made more poignant by the strong homesickness she felt.

Mara's assertion that their counterparts had full divine powers was extremely unsettling to her. Their options were already very limited, but this new revelation reduced the chances of freeing Keiichi to almost nil. In short, direct confrontation with the Belldandy, Urd and Skuld of this reality would be out of the question. Even Banpei could overpower them quite easily in light of their considerable shortfall of Divine powers...

She had faced mortals in the Algerian warlord's camp without being able to avail to her Goddess powers...but now she had to face _three Demonesses_ who, according to Mara, were overflowing with evil intentions. And she didn't have Keiichi to rescue her this time. Belldandy felt her heart beating rapidly as she remembered how he had gallantly stormed the marabout's fortress to free her.

Now she had to liberate him, and she didn't even know where to begin...

Keiichi had been gallant in quiet, innocuous ways before: helping her into her side car; offering to assist her with the housework; listening when she talked about some strain in her relationship with her sisters. At other times, his conduct approached chivalry: trying to retrieve the lightning-charged rod during Supertyphoon Akira at risk of life and limb; challenging Tyyr to mortal battle to prevent her from having to marrying that most ego-blinded of WarGods.

But most of those times, she had been possessed of her Goddess powers. In a way, Belldandy knew that she seemed to take Keiichi's valorous actions in stride...because in the back of her mind, she knew that she had recourse to her Goddess abilities. If events got _really_ bad, she could save him from harm. But when Keiichi kicked open that door to free her and Skuld from the clutches of a misguided zealot, Belldandy knew that the love he had for her in his heart wasn't always that of a deer...that time, it was the burning ardor of the tiger. _He_ didn't have any special powers to remedy the fact that he was risking his mortal life in order to save her...

Belldandy looked at her soup, noticing droplets patterning on the thin soy broth...and realized that she was crying once more, seized by melancholy and regret. She wished once again that Skuld and Urd were here; between the four sisters, they could come up with a worthwhile plan to rescue Keiichi and return to home.

Home.

Since she didn't know where she was, Belldandy didn't know how to get home. Once again, she tried guessing why only she, Mara and Keiichi had been brought here. The moment she discovered that Keiichi was here as well, she had been completely focused on reuniting with him. Now, even a reunion with her fiancé was dampened by his totally out-of-character reaction to her. Belldandy reasoned that his encounter and imprisonment by her Demonic counterpart must have unbalanced him to the point of a nervous breakdown. There had been times in her life when _she_ was shocked to the core of her being...and she was a Goddess. Imagine the affright that Keiichi's sensitive feelings would experience.

That must be it...his sense of terror was the reason why Keiichi had confused her and Mara. In some fractured sense of shock-fed delusion, it must have comforted his delirium to perceive Mara as a "good" Demon, in reaction to the "bad" Demons who were hurting him. Her fiancé was probably so strongly affected by the mirror-universe reality of this place, his psyche had lurched sideways. So now, he imagined that he was in love with the only other Demoness besides his captors. Belldandy could only hope that...in the back of his mind...Keiichi could discern the fact that she and Mara were the _true_ Goddess and Demoness that he knew. That he'd realize that the three sisters who were keeping him locked up in the temple were false to his experience.

If Keiichi was this unsettled...to the point where he couldn't recognize who he loved best...then how long would it be before his mind really cracked open like an egg and spilled out a irreversible constellation of psychotic insanities?

"Belldandy...eat your food! I can hear your stomach growling all the way from here!" she heard Mara note, interrupting her case-building thoughts.

"Mara, I'm really worried about Keiichi!" Belldandy quickly replied.

"When _aren't_ you worried about him?"

"But it's so horrid! H..he must be miserable, kept like a prisoner in that wretched temple! Every day, he sees Urd, Skuld and myself...and in his mind, we aren't what we're supposed to be. The people he loves the most, relies on the most...the people he has lived with for almost five years...are all Demonesses. He must be feeling dreadfully betrayed! And I think that he's losing his mind. That's why he confused you for me! We _have_ to get him out of there!" Belldandy argued urgently.

Mara slurped the dregs out of her soup bowl as Belldandy reiterated her concerns several more times. This was getting out of hand...

"Belldandy, what if we _aren't_ supposed to rescue Keiichi? What if he's behaving this way because he's _supposed_ to? It might be...that _we're_ the ones who are throwing everything out of whack, just by our presence here! Maybe the Keiichi we encountered..._isn't_ your Keiichi!" she argued, frustrated by Belldandy's single-mindedness.

Five minutes later, Mara was still picking noodles out of the long curls of her hair.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

When they returned to her former lair after the debacle at the noodle shop, the first thing Mara did was take a shower. For some reason, the employee bathroom of the arcade was equipped with a Western-style standup shower...with a little kink to it as well.

She turned the cold water off, and cracked the hot water knob to the highest setting, and then waited until the shower stall was emitting vaporspaces of steam before she stepped under the nozzle. As the hot water sprayed welcome warm jets over her shoulders and back, Mara poured shampoo on her rich shags of long and curly hair to try and drown out the smell of miso soy and onions.

"Bless that sister of mine!" she cursed as the suds flowed down her face. Despite her frustration, the pulsing heat of the water felt good against her skin. There was nothing like a good dip in some molten lava to clean one's body to perfection...but under the circumstances, this would have to do.

Belldandy's outburst at the noodle shop had been so out of character for her younger sister, Mara still couldn't fully wrap it with any reasonable sense of belief. All she had done was offer a very logical proposition, astutely noting that perhaps the rules that held reign in the reality they were used to...didn't necessarily apply here. So she had suggested that they might have to look at things differently.

And then Belldandy went wordlessly berserk.

The only other being she knew that could create such a cyclonic child-like disturbance was Skuld. But the scene Belldandy made in the noodle shop outdid any of Skuld's tantrums by light-years.

Mara regarded her reflection in the mirrors tiling the shower stall as she ran the large soft sponge over her breasts and navel, soaping them up. She smiled at the small crest in the ceiling that used to conceal a mini-camera. The owners of the arcade business were perverts in the truest sense.

"270,000 years...and I still have a perfect body," she whispered to the falling water as she wiggled her ass and slender hips. Looking in the mirror, she could see the curve of her generous bustline and the soft bend of her spine. No one could mistake her for a late developer _now_, 120 millennia after the fact. She wistfully remembered how most of her teen Decamillennia years had been fraught with teasing.

And now she was the youngest Senior First Class Demoness in Vanagdrasil, plus she had a killer physique on top of her accomplishments! Admiring herself in the mirrors, Mara reminded herself that she was the complete package, as far as Demonesses were concerned. Beautiful, accomplished, regal, titled...and quite available to the right mortal or Demon...

The softness of the sponge in her hand caused her skin to goosebump wherever she washed herself with it. As she squeezed it over her breasts, letting the soapy water drip down onto her nipples, Mara felt an unexpected current of erogenous stimulation. For some reason, her skin was extra sensitive to being touched today. Giving in to the tingling sensations, she rolled a nipple between her fingers, and heard herself respond with a gasp with pleasure. Closing her eyes, Mara's imagination soon found her floating on imaginary oceans of sensuality.

"What in His Darkness's name am I doing?" she said to the image in the mirror, pulling her hands away from her body. The mirror-image seemed to nod with permissive encouragement...and Mara began to touch herself again, arousing herself. The anonymity of her fantasies were gradually replaced by a more substantial vision; she mentally envisioned that it was Keiichi who was touching her; roaming his hands up and down her front, cupping her softly, reaching down between her legs...

"Stop it!" she gasped, snapping herself out of the erotic daydream.

She was actually getting turned on in the shower! By a fantasy, of all things! And not just _any_ fantasy...

Mara immediately sensed a blush rushing through her body. She felt a momentary self-reprimanding...it wasn't in her nature to be possessed by compulsive fantasies. And this unexpected ideality had swooped in on her so quickly, it had completely swept aside her simmering resentment against Belldandy for the noodle shop incident of an hour ago...

"I am a _strong_ Demoness! _I'm the one_ who controls my fantasies! I possess them...they don't possess me! I am in control! I'm a _Demoness Senior First Class_! I'm not going let these eidolons of desire about some mortal take over!" she promised herself, each word an effort as she splayed her hands on the walls of shower, trying to steady her trembling body.

She wiped the accumula of steam off the mirror on the side of the shower with a sweep of her hand...and then stepped back so quickly, she banged up against the far side of the shower stall, knocking over the soap rack.

A blue-eyed version of herself stared back. Bright blue eyes, three pink slashes in the middle of her forehead, an innocent smile curving her lip...

"EEEEEYAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH!!"

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

While Mara was in the shower, Belldandy continued to struggle with her unruly flights of intuition. Upon reflection, she _knew_ that the spectacle she had caused at the noodle shop was totally inappropriate...and completely undignified. Definitely not the kind of behavior that befitted a Goddess. When Mara had suggested that Keiichi's distorted behavior was normal, she had snapped. Enraged to a single flash-point of ire, without even bothering to think, she had upended her bowl of noodle soup over Mara's head. Fueled by the impulses of her jealousy and anger, she then stormed out of the noodle shop, adding insult to injury by sticking Mara with the bill. When her Demoness sister caught up with her a half-kilometer later, Belldandy had stowed away all sense of respect...giving Mara the silent treatment for the rest of the walk home.

She had just managed to calm herself down when Mara had burst out of the shower with manic abandon. Belldandy barely had time to dodge to the side as Mara dashed past her, wrapped in nothing more than soapy water, screaming hysterically.

"I saw her! I saw her!" Mara shouted shrilly, over and over again.

She had snapped in the noodle shop...and now it was Mara who was snapping. Her hair all tangle-wet, Mara streaked between the rows of pachinko machines, and then hovered into the air, flying around the video game parlor like a bird looking for escape from a cage...

"Mara!! _Who_ did you see?" Belldandy shouted, trying to follow her with her eyes as the Demoness continued to blur about the building. Ironically, Mara's frenetic movements reminded her of a steel ball slashing between the bumpers of one of the arcade's pachinko games. In the midst of her rapid airborne 'sprinting', Mara's skin peached through the air, shedding driplets of water. She was so intensely freaked, she didn't even notice.

"Mara! You're indecent! Please put a towel on..." Belldandy pleaded, feeling the warmth of embarrassment in her face.

"I saw her! I saw the other me! She was with me in the shower! I saw her!" Mara screamed, completely ignoring Belldandy.

After ten minutes or so, fatigue finally caught up with Mara. The twinned exertions of her physical manifest form and her waning Divine powers caused her to run out of steam. She stopped floating, and started pacing around large room, occasionally leaping up on one of the arcade machines...and then she finally stopped.

Standing in front of Belldandy, she said excitedly, "I was taking a shower, and I saw the other me. The 'Goddess' version of me. She was looking back at me from those damned mirrors in the shower! I oughta smash all of 'em! She was looking at me...and she had _blue_ eyes...and she..."

"Mara, slow down! And put some clothes on, for my sake!" Belldandy shouted, squinting her eyes. Mara looked down at her body, and then realized that she was stark naked. She instantly bloomed into the Demoness equivalent of a wordless wide-eyed blush...

"I'm _naked_!" she yelled in a panicked voice.

Belldandy sighed with relief as Mara hastily retreated to the shower room. A few moments later, Mara returned, dressed this time in a pair of low-cut jeans and a long sweater, her long straw-blonde hair piled up in a towel.

"So you encountered your counterpart in the shower, Mara?" Belldandy asked, hoping that Mara would be rational instead of crazy this time.

"Yes. This time, I had no doubts that it was her!"

"And then what happened?"

Mara remembered the whole shower experience, and bashfulness purchased her a deep rouge to her cheeks...until she looked at Belldandy's intent face. Then she started shivering.

"Are you cold, Mara? You _did_ run around a long time without any clothes on, while you were still wet from the shower," Belldandy offered helpfully. "That would make most mortals catch a cold..."

"Yep...that must be it," Mara answered, laughing timidly. "You know...we Demons like it hot..."

She blushed again at the sexual entendre of her words.

"I don't understand why you would see her while you were in the shower? I didn't sense anything amiss. I didn't feel the presence of any intruders, or any sudden flashes of Divine energy that could indicate a Goddess or a Demoness nearby. I sensed...nothing!" Belldandy observed.

"Look...if I told you what happened, you'd kill me! You doused me with my dinner just for suggesting that Keiichi's whacked-out reaction to you the other day might actually be normal behavior in this version of the Earthrealm," Mara reasoned cautiously.

"I had some time to think about that...and I'm really sorry about the soup," Belldandy said with an apologetic emphasis.

"Not to mention the 2500 yen bill I had to pay, which included a 500 yen 'tip' for the person who cleaned up the mess!"

"Okay, okay, Mara. _I'll_ buy the next few dinners!" Belldandy promised with a sigh as Mara toweled her hair.

"Now what could be so bad about you being in the shower? What is so important about the shower that you can't talk to me about it?" she asked her Demoness sister. "Need I remind you...if we don't share information, our chances of leaving this dreadful place will grow less and less each day. And I, for one, want to get back home. I miss my Keiichi and my sisters!"

Mara grumbled something about "naïveté" under her breath.

"Mara, while you were in the shower, I was thinking about what you said. There's always the possibility that you _could_ be right. Despite how I feel about it, the person we saw in the temple might not be _my_ Keiichi. He could be _another_ Keiichi...a different Keiichi with a different history and a different fate in life. He may belong in this mixed-up present reality, just the way he is. Which would mean that he _isn't_ in love with me..."

Mara regarded Belldandy with a suspicious air, unable to comprehend how her Goddess sister could blow up at the mention of Keiichi one minute and then embrace Mara's suggestion the next. Right now, Belldandy looked like she was on the verge of tears.

"Look, I _can't_ tell you any more about what happened in the shower!" Mara said with finality. But Belldandy kept pressing her...

Could it be that the encounter in the shower wasn't accidental? It _was_ embarrassing, the way she was suddenly caught up with a pressing urge to pleasure herself. And to see her "mirror image" in the mirror of the shower? There was no question that the face she saw wasn't hers! Even worse, the 'face' in the mirror had observed her while she was touching bliss all over her body!

Mara reflected on the strength of her intuitions centering on that moment. Intrinsically, she had a subtle-yet-distinct impression that her 'alter' had deliberately _chosen_ that place and time to make her existence known. Now that her panic had died down, all her Demonic perceptions were buzzing with extrasensory information. Reluctantly, she admitted that she would _have_ to tell Belldandy, because this encounter might hold a clue that would cast their predicament with a new light...

But it would be awkward and risk-ridden...not to mention perilous, considering the way Belldandy was reacting to every little issue that involved Keiichi. Not just reacting, but reacting _unpredictably_. Mara wondered for a fleeting moment if this place was gradually evolving Belldandy towards becoming a Demoness...

"Uh, Belldandy...when I was in the shower, right before I saw that other 'me', I was in the middle of a heavy _sexual_ fantasy," Mara said quickly, as if speaking rapidly would somehow cause Belldandy to 'miss' the words. To her dismay, Belldandy leaned closer, obviously wanting to hear this. Mara regretted the fact that she hadn't taken into account that her sister's relationship with Keiichi had taken on a sexual tenor. Not that sex predominated Belldandy's relationship with her fiancé, but it _was_ a factor in the love equation between the two. And naturally, Belldandy was more interested in sex now than she had been in the past...

Belldandy found herself somewhat fascinated with the possibility of learning about what kind of sexual fantasies a Demoness would have. In the workings of her imagination, all she could envision was a licentious parade of whips and chains and bondage, hot wax candles, voyeurism, rape...in sum, all the _wrong_ aspects of sexuality. Could Demons consider 'decent' forms of sexual behavior? Could Mara...as half-Demoness, half-Goddess...possibly have some wholesomeness to her conduct?

"I was daydreaming...but it felt so real! Soft fingers massaging every inch of my body...and then I started imagining that I was having sex with Keiichi," Mara said, her voice gradually dwindling to near inaudibility.

She watched Belldandy's jaw drop open, and prepared for the worst.

But nothing happened.

Belldandy just stared at her with sheep eyes for several minutes. Then an expression crossed her face; not of anger...but of sudden insight.

"That would make sense!"

"HUH? You're not going to kill me?" Mara exclaimed.

"No..hhee hee!" Belldandy answered with a giggle. "That one look of embarrassment mixed with terror on your face was more than enough for me!" Belldandy mischievously stuck her tongue out at Mara...

...who responded in kind with a Skuld-like "biii-da" to her younger sister. Mara was feeling frisky, relieved that Belldandy wasn't going to attack her or something based on what she had said about her "Keiichi-fantasy".

"Consider the possibilities! Assume for a moment that everything here is reversed," Belldandy reasoned, her fact lit up with excitement. "There's a Mara here...your counterpart...who is a Goddess! Who is in deeply in love with Keiichi! And the 'Keiichi' of this alternate dimension is in love with her...just like my Keiichi is in love with me! Wouldn't it make perfect sense for this Goddess Mara to try and reach us through you? It is certainly quite feasible that when you were in the shower, she was there with you in some kind of stealth or sprite form...and there was some kind of emotional transference. Perhaps even an erotic transference..."

"_That_ didn't sound too good!" Mara thought to herself, her mouth sloping a little crooked as she heard Belldandy babbling out her 'theory'...a crazyass theory that pivoted on the assumption that she wasn't in reign of her own sexuality.

"What if the Goddess Mara of this place loves this Keiichi like I love my Keiichi? Then of course the affection she has for him would be overflowing...and we'd sense it! _You'd_ sense it the most strongly of the two of us, since she's your double! Because of the intensity of her feelings of love, they must have somehow transferred to you when she was in close proximity with you. And of course, since you were in the shower, this may explain why those feelings definitely took on a sexual flavor!"

"Huh?" Mara blurted, unsettled by how casually Belldandy had premised _that_ point.

"I think that, for a moment, her feelings must have actually joined with yours...and you consequently experienced what the mortals call a 'wet dream' or a 'afternoon fantasy' about Keiichi. Which means that she's trying to communicate with us," Belldandy elaborated.

"You've gotta be kidding! That's totally perverted!" Mara interjected, biting her lip with her fangs in exasperation.

"Isn't that _so_ romantic? Two lovers, separated by contentious circumstances...and yet she's trying her best to find a way to be united with her heart's true love..." Belldandy said with her hands clasped in front of her breast.

"You've _gotta_ be kidding..."

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --


	84. Pt 84: Keiichi: Untethering the Shadow ...

**Part 84: ****Keiichi: Untethering the Shadow -- 2nd Movement**

Shadows played over his mind as his senses unaligned against the shake of the syncopative rhythming and the sonic audientity of the complex. A fog-thick snowfall traced descent-lines of light against the darkened downtown Tokyo cityscape while he performed. Looking out over the snow-showered sea of faces, Keiichi felt divided and conflicted. He was a single individual thriving hungrily on the energy unleashed in the crowd by his music, rewarding their exuberance by conforming it to a pureness of sonic art. He was also the Keiichi of his lifetime's sum experience; just wanting to be at home with his beloved Belldandy, sipping a cup of warm sake and eating her New Year's Eve cheesecake watching the quiet snow.

As he played his guitar cerca la lengua against the crowd's roar, Keiichi realized that fame was a no-man's land from which there was no escape. Stardom wasn't fleeting in the sense of momentum and discharge...instead, the public adulation was a telltale permanence that traveled with him wherever he went. As much as he tried to jettison his pop-idol persona, the trajectory of his renown seemed to seep into his character, just like the falling snowflakes that were melted in mid-flight by the bright stage lighting. He had no choice but to swallow the radiant beams of a history of public celebrity.

Dancing spirals circling down his thoughts.

Before the show, he had actually complained to Atsukara and Taniyama that he didn't want to sing any "old fashioned songs" at the New Year's Eve TV Special. As soon as those words escaped him, he was stunned into silence. Keiichi Morisato wouldn't have given a damn about what he sang, unless it was at one of Tamiya-sempai's drunken karaoke rousts at the Men's Dorm. But Keiichi MoriStar had a reputation to uphold, a public image of transcendent hipness carefully crafted for his own self-admiration and for his fan's fantasies.

He was losing himself...losing his sense of identity.

No enka songs this New Year's Eve...

By the time Keiichi had realized that his pop-idol life was already making demands on his ego, it was too late. It was just like his filmstar celeb 'girlfriend' Anni-Imoto Kanaka had said as they jetted back from Seoul last night...he was suffering from a dissonance of personality. The sense that he was controlling his destiny was illusory.

He was no longer himself...and he had only been here a few days!

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Calm down, Keiichi! I know what you're going through!" Anniko shouted, grabbing him on the balls of his shoulders. "It happens to me too! Every so often I go through a 'breakdown', haunted by a sense that my life isn't mine to live. But instead of resisting your impulses and fears, you need to _allow them to be real_. Otherwise you'll go crazy if you try to examine them too closely. And then they'll pass. That's what my psychiatrist keeps telling me..."

"I..it's just that something like this has never happened to me before! I..I've never had an identity crisis where I don't know who I am!" he near-shouted.

"Liar! As famous as you are? You're Japan's most popular man, next to the Prime Minister and Emperor Heisei!" Anni interrupted. "You've been a star for almost five years! Every month, there's dozens of glossy magazines in Japan, Korea and China with your face on the cover! They play muzak versions of your songs in supermarkets, malls and amusement parks, for heaven's sake. You've done voice acting on anime, starred in a Godzilla film, have dozens of concert DVDs out, have your own fan magazine, plus you've had more Number One hits than anyone in the history of Japan's recording industry! I don't believe you for a minute!" she responded. She stared him down with those beautiful eyes of hers, and then suddenly reached out and playfully tousled his hair.

"You have a gift! It wouldn't be stretching it to say that you're the Mozart or the Beatles of our generation. The first time I saw you perform in a live concert, I was sitting in the VIP box in tears because I realized that you were taking music and transforming it into a church of the spirit, somehow. All those screaming teengirls never would even think past your 'sex-symbol' image to see that you were creating _beauty._ Instead of playing that stupid corporate idol-star mush-crap that passes for J-pop music, you have an identifiable, authentic, _honest_ sound. Somehow, you've managed to avoid getting caught up in the 'play what we tell you to play' trap, like each new edition of Johnnie's Club boy bands does. Same old bland song-and-dance, year after year, just different faces. You're not like tons of other idols on the radio and TV because you take risks. You get to play what you _like_...and you're still successful! You've even had hit singles in America and Europe! So how could you possibly claim that you've gone all this time without having a 'breakdown'? That kind of pressure _demands_ breakdowns," she explained.

"Look at my life, for example. There's people in the entertainment industry who hate my guts, because I'm a 'face' who can _actually act._ I'm not just some pretty bimbo who stars in a drama after taking six months of method acting lessons. I dig deep inside myself to give my best portrayal of the character I choose to play. I've got an Oscar to prove it. You've earned the same enmity in the music biz. You took their business model for musical entertainers and shown it for what it is: bullshit moneymaking concealed inside pre-packaged 'performance'. Instead of going along with the music industry, you decided to kick it in the ass. That makes demands on your soul; because you ultimately have to draw upon your identity in ways we can't even comprehend. A tortured artist, striving to wrest forth something noble from inside of himself," Anniko finished.

Keiichi had to admit that her assessment of the 'Keiichi Moristar' half of his persona was spot-on, clean and smooth like his motorcycle after he and Chihiro had given it an expert tune-up. It was haunting to hear Anniko describe how he was a major transformative force in the music industry. This situation was strangely reminiscent of an Ultraman superhero scenario; where he co-existed with a super-powered alter-ego. In his case, her portrayal noted him as some kind of artistic super-hero. Genius with a toll booth. The warning signs were clear: the cocaine in the bedroom, the willing 'maids' for sexual escapes, the injection of amphetamines when he faltered during his first day here. He felt like he was helming the RMS Titanic in an iceberg floe...he didn't want to do a Kurt Cobain or Hide from X-Japan because he had painted himself into an artistic corner that he couldn't get out of.

Dammit! He was a speed racer, not a speed-and-weed taker.

"None of this helps at all! I just got here a few days ago, so I don't exactly know what to do or who to be in this screwed up version of reality! I know who I _am_, but there's nothing here that reflects my life! The entire history of my life...is useless here. Everything I know about myself doesn't apply. So what am I supposed to do?" Keiichi exclaimed. Anni raised an eyebrow at this, withdrew her hand from his shaggy hair and poured herself an orange juice from the fridge.

"What other reality is there? And what's this about 'just getting here a few days ago'?" she asked when she returned to the room from the kitchenette. "Don't tell me that I'm going to have to deal with a flipped-out boyfriend on New Year's Day."

But instead of reciting a litany of disbelief, Anni joked about what he just said...her light-hearted humoring of him trimmed the edges of Keiichi's anxiety. She elaborated on several ways and means to cope with the kind of fame that they shared. As she spoke, Keiichi was reminded of the time he won the Solar Car Federation race. Almost overnight, he had become a celebrity of sorts. And then the whole process repeated itself when the N.I.T. Unified Team won the Le Mans.

In one sense, he _had_ been here before. All the stress he underwent during the fleeting exposure to celebrity in his _real_ life may have purchased an unexpected blessing for him, a coping skill that could ensure his survival in this privacy-starved lifestyle until he could figure out how to back home. To get back to Bell-chan.

"Keiichi, the way I see it, our celebrity is part of the machine," Anni explained, suddenly serious.

"Machines, I know very well. The interdependence of the whole relies on the fluid coexistence of the parts. Sometimes, I've learned to view humanity as a machine. Deux ex machina, meeting Ars ex Machina?" he asked.

"Exactly!" Anni replied, a cheerful expression that belied the deep discussion they were having. Keiichi still couldn't believe that he _owned_ this Learjet they were flying in.

"There is an increasing alienation of people from their surrounding society, caused by new ideals propagated by the mass media; ideals which are mainly focused on the principle of maximum personal pleasure. For example, kid's shows are no longer strictly concerned with entertainment; there's a sinister undercurrent of mercantilism woven into each new TV anime. In the past, the embodiment of 'celebrity' in our society used to be prescribed by generally accepted social and religious rules. But in the last half-century or so, these rules were gradually overcome. So now there are no rules, other than avarice and cut-throating. The rules aren't rules...they're a justification for a melee, using manipulations as weaponry.

"So entertainment tries to push the envelope. Actually, it _punches_ the envelope; assuming that more radical forms of amusement can make up for the fact that the standards weren't ever substituted adequately. Yet, there always is a strong natural human urge for an emotional hold on life...and provision of a meaning to life in general. In the process of 'giving it to them', by leading lives that the average Tokyoite could only dream of, we top-tier performers are left with a vacuum. This vacuum is what you're feeling right now. I know tons of people who can't cope with their own idol-status, so they seek out obscure new age philosophies, New Religions, and all sorts of esoteric fuss. You know, sometimes I think that all those New Religions that keep popping up every few years are some kind of cultural reaction to the growing sophistication of the 'entertainment' complex. As you are aware, since so many of us who toil with our fame seek out such remedies to our own crisis of identity, it's no wonder that we cannot truly be supportive towards ourselves."

"So we end up getting really weird?"

"In a sense, we do. We're like blind sheep being fed to the wolves. It's either be swallowed by confusion and rage, or be choked by the tightness of the cage. But it doesn't have to be that way! I just want to help you through this, Keiichi...because I _can_. Because I'll need you to be strong for me someday. Because I want you to remember that I really care a lot for you, Keiichi. And that I understand that being famous isn't easy all the time. It exacts a terrible price..." she said, stepping behind him and massaging his back and shoulders.

Anni's words of counsel were comforting...and that was another thing that bothered Keiichi. The only being that could _really_ reach in his heart and still the troubled waters of his worries was Bell-chan. Over the past five years, he had come to expect...to _trust_...her words implicitly. Turmoil was easily surrounded and captured with a few pearls of wisdom from Bell-chan's lips. Her blue eyes could effortlessly impound the troubles of his Soul, massaging his worries into a relaxed calm. Only she could kiss him out of his doubts...

And now this...poster-idol babe...was causing him to feel the same way.

Since he had 'met' her, he had experienced how Anni could be as heartless as an unwitnessed twilight, especially to people that she perceived as inferiors. But unexpectedly, she seemed to be able to tune into him when he was feeling vulnerable and confused...to the point where she could elevate his spirits as if they were as heavy as a feather. Her good-humored crazy-girl approach reminded him of Urd in some way. She seemed to switch between moods as effortlessly as a swimmer switched between strokes. And Keiichi had a paranoid suspicion that she _knew_ him.

She obviously loved him. He could sense tender concern in her voice. Her dreamlike enamorment seemed to float within the cracks of his cautious reserve, strong enough in its airy refinement to almost convince him that the floating mood between them was solely _his_ affection towards her, not hers towards him. Could he be enmeshing her feelings with his?

Keiichi passionately resisted the very idea that he was falling in love with Anni Kanaka. It _couldn't possibly be love_!! Just a week ago in the Japan he knew, a beautiful, rich celebrity like Anni wouldn't have even glanced twice at a commoner like him. And if she would have unexpectedly shown up at his temple home one day, he wouldn't have borne her any undue notice as far as romantic inclinations were concerned. He would have been momentarily taken aback at her beauty and celebrity, but that would have been about it. In fact, she probably would have been intimidated by Belldandy. It seemed that beautiful women always felt overwhelmed by the challenge of being in proximity to a Goddess. Perhaps on an intuitive level, they knew that they were exceeded in every area of beauty and artful grace by Bell-chan. Sayoko Mishima's reaction to Bell-chan for almost four years was a good example of this axiom. For years, Keiichi had been totally satisfied with his life and love with Belldandy. What he couldn't understand...and didn't want to face...was the fact that a similar sense of satisfaction seemed to exist in _this_ life. A life where Belldandy was no longer by his side...

Could he keep that 'had been' sense of love for Belldandy fresh in his heart, in the now of his celebrity?

Shifting his thoughts, Keiichi realized that his warm feelings around Anni were little pools of desperation in disguise. Although his emotional bond with Annimoto Kanaka was slender at best, it bore a profundity all its own; especially because he experienced so very few interims where he could actually enjoy genuine human contact without having to be at guard for his celebrity. Consequently, his slight acquaintance with Anni was quite probably being amplified due to the fact that he felt totally alone here in this nightmare version of Japan. With his life so strictly regimented by his managers, social situations were like feasting at a banquet to him. He found himself wishing desperately that Sora would stop talking business and just have an actual conversation with him instead. Anything to relieve the tedium of not being one's self.

Once again, the pain of being stranded, alone, without a familiar soul in sight, struck him hard. All that was familiar was gone. Except for Sora.

And Peorth.

He made a mental note to summon the Goddess of the Eternity Rune as soon as he could free himself from Anni. Which would be quite difficult, because his 'girlfriend' had been practically hovering over him yesterday and today. He found himself at times wanting to chide Anni with a "Don't you have a career too?"

But right now, Anni was the only person he knew who could empathize with the emotional warfare between beingness and repute that was going on inside of him. Perhaps she could help him sort himself out of his confusion...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Boss? May I speak with you for a moment?"

"Ooooh! Keiichi, send her away! This is _our_ time together! Tomorrow, you've got a very full day with the Kohaku Uta Gassen special, honey!" Anni protested, her face uglied with a liberal scowling pout.

"Boss? It's really _important_! It's about your schedule tomorrow. We need to talk it over. Alone," Sora insisted. Keiichi looked at Anni and shrugged his shoulders in resignation. Anni darted her eyes towards Sora with an unmistakable malice, a souescent look whose harshness caused Keiichi to flinch. More and more, he realized that his 'girlfriend' was flawed by an enormously possessive jealousy.

Keiichi followed Sora into the anteroom of his hotel suite and tried to pay attention as his personal assistant detailed out the schedule of his busy day tomorrow. In the morning, he would review the final videoedits and mixdowns for the taped song that would be aired during the Nihon Recordo Taisho. Sora mentioned that he had swept the music awards show for "Best New Artist" and 11 other awards when he made his debut album...and now, his latest CD was nominated in a dozen categories once more. Since he would be performing live at the Kohaku, he would need to videotape his acceptance speeches. Which meant that, because he was nominated in 12 categories, Keiichi would need to videotape 12 award acceptances. Sora noted that Ono wanted him to tape each acceptance in a different wardrobe...

Keiichi scowled at this; he was strictly a t-shirt and bluejeans guy. He dreaded the whole process of makeup, hairstyle and wardrobing that his idol-star status demanded. Once again, he considered sending them all away, just so he could bask in a moment of peace.

Sora explained that, as 'Captain' of the male team, his would be the conspicuous otori...the final singing performance of the evening. In a business-like voice, Sora added that he was one of the youngest performers ever to receive such an honor. As she went on, Keiichi's thoughts lazily drifted towards his childhood. He remembered watching the New Year's Eve specials as a kid with his parents. The annual musical revue/contest which had fascinated him at 9 years of age became hopeless old-fashioned and unhip by the time he was 15. The only good thing about it was the snacks Mom always made for the holidays. And now, at 25, Keiichi Morisato agreed with his alter-ego Keiichi MoriStar about one thing...he wasn't going to sing some sappy 50s or 60s romantic enka ballad.

All of Vanagdrasil's Demons would have to agree to practice random acts of kindness for the rest of eternity before he'd do something so artistically vile.

When Sora mentioned that he was scheduled to sing Saburo Kitajima's "Namida Bune", he just about choked on his ice water. Namida Bune was the archetypical enka ballad: a little ditty about how the demands of manual labor and unreceptive wives made life into a boat of tears for men. In other words, it belonged in the hit parade of a retirement home for office workers and fishermen.

"I'm not going to make a fool of myself and sing that dreck! _I absolutely refuse_!!" Keiichi immediately responded with vehemence. The whole idea reeked of some kind of publicity stunt hatched by his 'keepers', the Fat Guy, the Snake, and the Weasel. For a moment, he wondered if this world had a Tamiya-sempai of its own...perhaps he could call his friend and mentor and arrange for a hasty substitution. Have _him_ sing that enka ballad on national TV. Tamiya's drunken cathowls would suit the occasion most amusingly...

"What's so funny, boss?" Sora asked, irritated at his sudden desultory attitude.

"Uh...nothing, Sora. Just a private joke," he explained guiltily.

"This is no joking matter. You _must_ sing what the program sponsors tell you to sing, otherwise it could spell ruin for your career!" Sora replied with officious concern.

"God, I hate it!! That's all anyone cares about...my freakin' career! I hate my fucking career! When do I get to be a real human being?" Keiichi shouted resentfully.

"B..boss! That isn't the only reason that I care about..." Sora stuttered, almost dropping her PDA in reaction to his tantrum.

"Yes?"

"I don't want to see you unhappy. I..I would rather see you be happy in life, no matter what. And if I can do anything to make your life better in any way, th..then I would _want_ to do that!" she said in a quavering voice. Sora may have been frightened by his outburst, but she was all determination nonetheless. When Keiichi's eyes met hers, he sensed that she had let her guard down just for a minute. There seemed to be a chink in her businesswoman's demeanor...just like the other time in the hotel room the day after he arrived. For a moment, he thought he noticed "the look" in her eyes; the telltale twinkle of desire and admiration...and maybe even love.

Even love? Sora? Me?

He had Japan's most beautiful woman waiting to go home with him to his mansion. Keiichi couldn't even begin to imagine what a mansion was like. But then again, compared to the usual crowded domiciles in Metro Tokyo, his temple environs were spacious to the point of luxury. That old priest had certainly bestowed a boon on Belldandy and him when he had left them the temple to live in...

In this reality, he had _houses_ all over Japan.

There was a part of him that viewed the trappings of his 'mundane' existence as an N.I.T. student as totally unacceptable, while the other part of him longed for a place he could call home.

"...so you see, you're going to have to keep it toned down for the Kohaku! Much of the TV audience is parents of youngsters...and as you know, they are the ones who will create your future fans. If you alienate them with some kind of stunt, you could find yourself on the outside looking in, Keiichi. Besides, you can't buck five decades of tradition," Sora explained.

Keiichi walked out of his meeting with Sora with a soured attitude.

"Screw it, this life isn't mine anyway!" he thought. He _wasn't_ some kind of idol star! Just a few days ago, he was an engineering student struggling through the rigors of grad school. And he was engaged to marry a Goddess...

He could take or leave the rock star persona in an instant.

"Keiichi? Are you _finally_ through with her? Because I've changed into something more...comfortable...for the limo ride to your place," Anni purred sultrily.

Change she had. She was wearing a sheer gold silk lame mini-dress, open in the back almost to her hips. Her nipples drew two small bumps against the shimmering gold fabric. As they left the hotel suite, his two bodyguards were struggling to keep their eyes off of her...

So was he.

Mercifully, he fell asleep from exhaustion two minutes after he got in the limo. When they got to his mansion, he woke up...

His hand had wandered onto Anni's lap while his head had been resting on her shoulder. He quickly withdrew his hand from the fire and felt himself blush deep red.

"What's the matter, honey? It's just my leg! Why are you acting like you just touched a hot stove?" Anni teased with a wink. "It's not as if your hands haven't been all that modest before...believe me, you've roamed them over every cm of my body. And I'm really looking forward to you touching me all over again...tonight!"

Keiichi blanche-gulped.

Thinking quickly, he decided to fake an illness. After all, it had worked before. The last thing that his keepers wanted was for their #1 star to get sick on the day of his appearance on live national TV. So once he got out of the limo, he took two steps...and collapsed in the snow.

Anni shrieked as he 'fainted'.

Keiichi overheard several of his house servants being quickly summoned, and a moment later, he felt strong hands lifting him. He felt an impulse to giggle uncontrollably as his servants gingerly carried him into his house. Apparently, this had happened before, if the comments of one of his servants were to be trusted. Hearing them grumble, he learned that had developed a considerable prescription drug habit over the first couple years of his ride on the fame train, which he relapsed into from time to time. Fortunately, he didn't go the way of Elvis...a fact that mystified those who were closest to him. Once he was settled down in a huge four-poster bed, Keiichi was almost asleep when his servant told him that Anni was going to stay the night in one of the guest bedrooms adjoining the indoors pool.

"Just...great," Keiichi complained in a fatigued voice.

"I'm glad you approve of the staff's choice for seeing to Ms. Kanaka's overnight accommodations. Pleasant dreams, sir," the uniformed man said to him, completely ignorant of the tired voice of protest in his comment.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Life here was like a mission impossible. Trying to get anything done was like toiling to fill an empty page with words when bereft of inspiration. The chasm of half-glimpsed dreams of Belldandy haunted his waking moments as he lay in his huge fluffy bed.

Keiichi didn't like Western beds to begin with, and the sumptuousness of this bed only served to heighten his sense of confinement. His "house" _was_ a mansion in the truest sense of the word, a monstrosity complete with drawing rooms, an art gallery filled with antique paintings and statues, an entire room devoted to a library of collectible manga and doujin, another room bursting to the ceilings with shelves of CDs and DVDs, a music and recording studio in the basement, an entertainment center that was really a mini-theatre, an indoors pool, an outdoors pool (currently converted to a skating rink), two tennis courts, a five-hole private golf range, a 12-car garage stocked with luxury cars and prototypes, and a number of theme rooms that reminded him of kinds of rooms featured by upscale love hotels. At least it wasn't freakish like Michael Jackson's 'Wonderland' or whatever it was called.

But his mansion was staffed with a dozen servants whose role was to make sure he was comfortable and pampered...and to monitor his actions within his spacious home.

One of his servants offered him breakfast after he indulged his curiosity and toured 'his' home. Keiichi couldn't help himself; he had never been in one of 'their' houses before, except for the Mishima Compound mansions. Even his servants were in on the act, reassuring him that his house was one of the most tasteful residences in the Tokyo area. After the tour, Keiichi voiced his disapproval by noting "how can people even live like this?" His remarks caused his servant to look askance with confusion. They seemed to reflect his astonishment, but for different reasons.

Breakfast consisted of Peking roast duck with a Hollandaise sauce beef brisket stew and blueberry French toast. Keiichi just wanted to marvel at the table's trappings; his peach juice was served in a chilled goblet.

"Shall we wake the mistress?" the servant asked as he filled Keiichi's gold-rimmed plate with stew. Keiichi almost choked on the coffee he was sipping...

"Wh.ahh..what? You mean I'm _married_?" Keiichi sputtered, dropping his silverware with dramatic flair. His blood seemed to high-tide dizzyingly to his head as he contemplated the possibility that he might be wedded in this reality. Hell, _anything_ was possible after what he had experienced in the past few days! His reality seemed to drop off into a shocked standstill as he fought for his breath.

"Ha ha ha heh! You are such the jokester, sir! No, you do not suffer from the eternal plague of matrimony that has cursed mankind through the ages. Not yet, anyway. No, I was referring to the 'guest'".

"What guest?"

The servant laughed again. "The Annimoto Kanaka guest. You know...'Anniko'! Though I cannot fathom why you would allow such a delicate creature to sleep elsewhere other than your master bedroom. If I were in your shoes, I would generously offer her the comforts of my own bed...without a single reserve of opinion. But mind me not. Shall I rouse her for you now?"

"N..NO! Pl..please, let Anni sleep in! Let her sleep to her heart's content! I have a busy day scheduled. A..and she'll be doubtlessly engaged as well, her being an idol star and such. So just let her be."

"Hmm, I seem to remember Ms. Kanaka last night making some remarks to the effect that she'll be preparing your first New Year's meal. She noted that she plans to make several special New Year's dishes, along with the able assistance of the kitchen staff, no doubt."

"You mean she's _staying here_ for the whole day?" Keiichi asked, feeling trepidatious.

"Yes. That is in keeping with your plans, isn't it sir? But of course, she'll accompany you to the Kohaku Uta Gassen...so it will not be as if Ms. Kanaka would be staying the _whole_ day. I've already made arrangements for her fashion consultants to bring their wardrobes here for her, so that she doesn't have to go elsewhere to select an outfit for tonight's event. But I can guarantee you that she plans to stay the whole night again, once you return. And should you be so remiss as to make her sleep in one of the guest bedrooms again, I can vouch for the lack of peace we will all suffer on New Year's Day."

"Uh...great. Thank you, Jeeves," Keiichi said. He always wanted to say that.

Today was going to be hell. And if he didn't sleep with Anni tonight, tomorrow would be even worse. Anni's genteel nature was matched by a profoundly suspicious bent. Keiichi could understand how the development of such a strong streak of protective thinking might happen. Assuming that she was surrounded by an entourage of shark-like 'helpers' like he was, Anni probably had to develop this trait out of a sheer need to survive the life-grinding process of celebrity.

"Uh, Jeeves, do we have any reading material in the house about Anni? Like a biography or something?" Keiichi asked, suddenly curious about his 'girlfriend'. He reasoned that a deeper knowledge of her would allow him some leverage in how he related to her. Besides, this relationship seemed one-sided...she knew him, but he knew very little about her. Anything he could learn that could 'fill in the gaps' would be helpful. To him, she was new, with many unknown qualities. But he had observed that Anni had already have developed a well-defined view of who he was. Which could place him at a great disadvantage should he need to challenge her. So far, she had been accommodating as long as he kept up his pretence of illness.

But he couldn't be sick forever. Can one even 'call in sick' when they're the headliner at the Kohaku Uta Gassen?

He remembered something from last night, while he was talking to Sora. Something about a substitution.

"It's time to see if his fame could find its own voice," Keiichi thought as he asked one of his servants to dial Sora's number.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

The "pow wow" meeting was scheduled for two hours before he was to arrive at the NHK studios for the Kohaku. Keiichi was feeling the pulls of fatigue already, having suffered through a half-dozen costume changes for the series of videotaped acceptance speeches.

Midway through the shoot, he put his foot down and demanded that he be filmed in the same clothes for the remainder of his acceptance videos. Naturally, his tight refusal sent Atsukara, Taniyama and Ono into nitwit fits. The three managers insisted with silk-smooth serpent's tongues that he needed to always be conscious of "image"; that his image wasn't just his to be had...his image belonged to the imaginations of the public as well. By changing into another six outfits, he would be doing the public a service by accommodating their expectations of him to be a jet-setter superstar idol and sex symbol. Anything less would be a disservice to the entertainment industry and the aspirations of the public. The way they were arguing, Keiichi wouldn't have been surprised if they had justified his costume changes by noting that "all of Japan depends on what you do today!" or something to that effect.

Initially, Keiichi had been fascinated by all the work that went on behind the scenes; cosmeticians hovering over him with brushes and makeup kits, wardrobers making slight adjustments to his clothes, the legion of cameramen and audio engineers who were taping his addresses, and another legion of stagecrafters who were recreating new worlds in the soundroom stage. But it seemed to him that a two-minute segment took a half-an-hour to film.

"How hard can it be to say 'thanks for the awards'?" he wondered as he put on another outfit in the dressing room. Why couldn't it be simple? This segment called for him to be filmed in black and white while standing in a spotlight as stagehands poured simulated snow on him. Atsukara warned him beforehand that this segment might take longer because they would have to get the ambiance of shadow and light just right; they were trying to recreate an old black-and-white TV detective show that only Ono was old enough to remember...

Once again, he felt at the mercy of the whims of his 'makers', the team of managers and agents that ran his career. No doubt, this untidy scenario was serving some sort of fetish Ono had for early 60s TV reruns.

The second to the last short was the worst, because it required a heavy amount of makeup for its sci-fi theme. Of course, it was for the "most innovative video" award...so what they had storyboarded was to gradually transform Keiichi into a marionette or puppet while he offered his acceptance speech. Makeup artists would create 'joints' on his wrists, neck, jaw and mouth. Of course, most of the work would be composited with CGI effects, but his makeup would also have to be tweaked to create the utmost realism. His voice would be gradually altered as well, starting as a normal human voice and finishing as heavily-processed mechanical metalvoice as he became fully 'marionette-ized'. It was all high art, and Keiichi felt little excitement with it. He had to say one sentence and then pause for makeup, and then speak another sentence, and then get swarmed again by the makeup artists.

Finally, for the last segment, they were going to have him dress as a salaryman. Keiichi once again put his foot down...and his trio of managers turned sourpuss.

"Okay, enough's enough! Don't even try to convince me that salarymen are the kind of target demographic that you guys want to reach!" Keiichi argued.

"We want to reach demographics across the board! Why in the hell do you think we made you go through all those fuckin' costume changes?" Atsukara snapped back, clearly irritated.

"Why not try for something different? How about a motorcyclist?" Keiichi suggested. Once the image of dressing up in coveralls with a helmet had flashed into his mind, he had glomped onto the image. He wanted to dress _normally_...in something that was part and parcel of his life before. His life before being thrust into this quagmire of publicity and 'image'...

"Hmm, that would be quite radical. How about making you a bosozuko?" Taniyama suggested.

"Idiot! That would totally screw his image! Besides, we can't afford to make any last-minute changes to what we've scripted here! He's supposed to be on the edge, but not _that_ much on the edge! Besides, if those biker gangs saw Japan's top recording artist dressed up on TV like they dress, they'd create havoc on the streets for weeks, icy roads or not..."

"Why not?" Keiichi interrupted/demanded.

A curious silence descended on the studio.

"Look, one of the problems with popular entertainment is that it's _popular_!" Keiichi argued. "It always reaches for the same image, the same crowd. I'm not no freakin' teen idol! I'm first and foremost a musician. And musicians live on the edge, just like motorcycle racers. They could crash any time. In an uphill climb or a sprint, one wrong move and I could crash my bike and get crippled. But you know, that's why people compete in races. Because of the _daring_ that's involved. So why not do something shocking, something gutsy here! You guys remember how popular Akira was when it came out in the theatres? I bet that there's still a buncha people who remember that. So why not make me into an Akira! The cultural references won't be lost on most viewers, even if they're not otaku..."

"Gee, the kid's making sense, for once," Ono commented. Apparently, his genius didn't extend to publicizing himself, or his managers didn't want to allow him to think that he had PR savvy.

"Well...I dunno about this," Atsukara commented in a mopey voice. But after a few minutes, the CGI techie guys came up with a novel idea...digitally insert Keiichi into a sequence from the Akira anime. Two phonecalls got the permissions thing straightened out; quite conveniently so, since the same parent company that owned the Akira anime 'owned' Keiichi's label...

Consequently, Keiichi finished that afternoon giving his thank you speech in the middle of the blowup finale to Akira.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"This has gotta be the lamest thing I've ever been involved in," Keiichi thought as the emcees for the Kohaku pranced around the stage, followed by an entourage of flaky underlings at their beck and call. The stage was an outlandish mix of traditional Japanese motifs and cutting-edge stagecraft effects. Just like the Kohaku Uta Gassen itself, the stage set was almost schizophrenic in its overall effect.

The main emcee was a comedian in the line of Beat Takashi, while the female co-emcee was a star of several popular evening drama series. The judges were all notaries of the musical and television scene; many were well past their prime and were functioning in an 'emeritus' sort of role. Keiichi was supposed to crack jokes with his fellow men's team singers and poke fun at the women, while teasing the trio of emcees. His fellow White Team members were recognizable celebrities from across the spectrum: two token 'rock' acts; several boy bands; three enka singers; two folk singers; an Osaka R & B group and several idol stars whose names would be forgotten in two years.

Not much fun there.

Keiichi hoped that Sora could pull off the task he had assigned her. It was daunting, to say the least. But he had sworn her to secrecy about his 'project', reminding her that it was his happiness that was on the line, not to mention his pride. So far, her business aptitude had been exacting and impeccable. Hopefully her work ethic would extend into 'special' assignments that had nothing to do with Atsukara and the others.

He was dressed in an outlandish costume that was clearly based on the hakama concept. Some fashion designer had altered the cut of the overrobe and skirt to make it look 'modern'...but to Keiichi, it looked clownish. The other people were dressed just as contemptibly, and the women in the Red team didn't fare any better. The idea was to get everyone to dress in opposition to their normal entertainment personas; the sexy starlets were dressed conservatively, while the 50ish enka singers were dressed like 20-something hipsters. All to create the illusion of one big interchangeable entertainment family.

More schizo stuff...

The scale of the stage effects were epic, with hoisted platforms and dais, rapid-change props and hundreds of indirect lights.

Keiichi wondered if the Prime Minister and his family would around their TVs to watch the whole mess unfold tonight.

"Boss! Hey Boss! I did it! Isn't this going to be exciting?" he heard a high-pitched voice shout above the din. He had hoped to hear that voice, and the "isn't this exciting!" comment earned a big smile as he recalled little Sora and her trademark approach to racing. He could always count on Sora back then; underneath the mild exterior, she was a prize-fighter. The complete reverse of Tamiya, who was all tough on the exterior and as gentle as a panda on the inside. Sora would forever be remembered in Makuhari as "the girl who raced to a victory in the Le Mans." Maybe this Sora had that kind of spirit in her as well. He'd find out tonight, that's for sure. He glanced at her, and she nodded at him and gave him a grin and a thumbs up.

It was on.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Kohaku Uta Gassen was based on a simple concept: the men and women would compete to see who could sing the best performance. A panel of celebrity judges would 'rate' the performances and the scores would be tallied for each team. Kohaku had that amateurish appeal to it that the old Godzilla films exemplified; gaudy enough to be campish and ridiculous, but still fun to watch if one could look past their rudimentary natures. It was like a national karaoke contest, complete with a friendly competitive scenario. Recently, the viewers had also been invited to evaluate the performances by any number of instant web-based polls. Lesser-known acts would kick off the 'competition', and the more famous acts would follow. An 'award' would be given for the best performance, and the teams almost invariably tied.

In a recent trend, a number of the younger acts had boycotted the Kohaku since the mid-90s, deciding to forego participation because the show was terminally lame and tasteless. Such refusals to participate often destroyed careers...rumor had it that skipping the Kohaku Uta Gassen was liable to piss off the CEOs and boards of the high-powered entertainment industry who wanted to use the Kohaku as a springboard to sell more product. Keiichi sensed that the powers-that-be viewed the Kohaku in terms of a horse race; an opportunity to show off their best thoroughbreds. And if a thoroughbred didn't race, it would get put out to farm or put out of its misery. So it was a matter of pride to the bigwigs that their fave acts show up for the circus.

"Screw all that! And screw all those stupid-ass corporate churls!" Keiichi thought. The Keiichi MoriStar persona had definitely started kicking in as soon as he entered the "arena". Once again, his hidden 'talent' arose as he assumed a charming 'life of the party' guise before the event. On one level, this _was_ a competition...all the acts had to compete to see who could project the most central presence to the whole event. Each performer had to steadfastly assert their image; a mercurial egoism that declared "I am the essence of tonight's show, everyone else is secondary!" Cocktail party politics, in a nutshell.

The "debs", as the press termed the new girl acts, were all giggly and nervous as the starting time approached. Cameramen were perched everywhere; special flower blossom 'floats' had been designed to conceal them as they filmed the event. Some of the idol girls were clearly eating up the attention, as their handlers fawned over them in a last-minute attempt to capture the right look for the cameras.

Keiichi fought with himself as the event started. A huge auditorium was filled to the rafters with entertainment industry celebs and the cream of the crop of the political, sports and business worlds. Keiichi had no problem picking out his managers...and sitting a few rows back, Anni. She was in a row with the ensemble cast of her latest TV drama. As he smiled at her, he remembered that her drama series was usual evening TV fare. Something about a female CEO who falls in love with the CEO of a rival corporation, but doesn't know that he is her business rival because she was hypnotized by one of his scheming subordinates to forget that crucial fact.

He felt like a game contestant.

Five minutes before he was supposed to go on, he would go backstage. The plan was for him to be hoisted down from above in a replica of a wooden fishing sloop. Then he would sing his enka ballad and draw a thunderous applause from the audience.

He wanted to grimace as most of the acts performed music that was culturally insignificant or artistically void, as far as he was concerned. But his polished Keiichi MoriStar exterior wouldn't allow for this. The willowy struggle between his entertainment alter-ego and his real self continued as the contestants performed their song-and-dance routines for the nation.

Finally, one of the stagehands cued him to leave the White panel and go backstage.

Sora was there to greet him.

"I..uh, did everything you asked for, Boss!" she said dryly. Keiichi could tell that she was scared out of her wits. Moved, he reached out and patted her on the head, as if she was a young child. Even though she was a tight-lipped businesswoman, Sora had demonstrated more courage than all those acts who skipped out on the Kohaku Gassen put together. They had run away from the fire. With her help, Keiichi was planning to embrace the fire, both figuratively and literally.

"Peorth, no matter what happens tonight, you have to make sure my wish stays enforced. I have to come out of this alive, and my star has to soar even higher," he said silently, calling upon his wish-granting Goddess. Even if she wasn't the right one.

Peorth had granted his namesake's wish five years ago. And now that he had found himself in this new life, it was time to make his wish work _for_ him, instead of against him. No more drug addiction, guns, sexy 'furniture girls' who were little more than expensive whores, or stupidass publicity mockeries like this one hatched up by his 'dream team' of managers. If he was going to be stranded here, cursed with everlasting fame and inexhaustible talent, then he was going to _use_ the latitude of his wish to his own ends.

It was time for him to grab the wheel of the Titanic and start steering it around the icebergs. And right now, what he had planned for the next eight minutes was going to turn the Kohaku Uta Gassen world upside down forever...

And hopefully it would be so unexpected and off-the-wall, it would totally vindicate everything that Annimoto Kanaka had claimed about his celebrity.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"And now, our final performer! Keiichi MoriStar of the White Team is going to give you the best service of the night by singing our finale: a song rich with history, a song that many of you will remember from the daylight of your own youths! His performance tonight will be a homage to youth, a youth whose flames rest on the achievements of its forebears! Keiichi MoriStar, Japan's Top Recording Artist, will take us on a trip down the Sumida River with his one-of-a-kind rich voice and talent! Tonight, he attempts a unique challenge: to sing a traditional song. Yet, life for Keiichi hasn't been a boat of tears, as his latest CD is the top seller in Japan for 20XX! May he have success next year and in the years to come! May each of you have success in the coming year! Here's Keiichi MoriStar, the Wizard-master of the airwaves, to sing this year's otori...the 'Namida Bune'!"

The orchestra started up the soothing string intro to the Namida Bune as Keiichi's wooden boat began to be lowered towards the stage, illuminated by spotlights. He reached down in the boat and grabbed his loop-shaped guitar, and then slung the strap over his right shoulder. Already, the emcee and a number of the judges were looking at him with shock. Surely an electric guitar didn't belong in an enka song from the early 60s!

Staring out over the audience, Keiichi fought to keep his balance in the little wooden mock-up boat as he searched inside his hakama and withdrew the box of matches Sora had put there. With a grin, he struck one alight and tossed it down into the floor of the boat.

Instantly, flames erupted all around him, tinkling along the wooden seams of the boat. Sora had personally soaked the boat down with an offmix of kerosene used in movie stunts. The flames soon reached throughout the interior of the boat. A liberal amount of flash powder mounded at each end of the boat caught on fire, creating an 'explosion' that rocked the air with a loud concussion. Spouts of fireworks flashed all over the stage as the flash powder spent itself...cueing his band on.

With a pyrotechnic burst, his band blasted into a new version of "Blue Attitudes", his acoustic guitar ballad. He had taken the basic chord refrains and jammed them tight up against a dense instrumental wall of uncompressed guitars, creating a grunge-inspired lushness to counter the keyboards that echoed the vocal lines. With a practiced flair, Keiichi ripped his hakama open, revealing a pair of blue silk and denim jeans and a white t-shirt with "Data Lust #1 Blue!!" emblazoned on the front. Despite the consternation, he caught a few screams of pleasure from the teenage girls in the audience and several of the "debs".

Most of the spectators in the auditorium were frozen with shock at the sight; Keiichi's dramatic entrance having thrown them over an emotional cliff...

"Imagine their surprise!" Keiichi thought with private amusement. Even the 'tough' hip-hop boy bands and the rock acts were squalling with stunned miens as they looked up at him. The idol girls were strangely silent, gripped by the Tao of the lightning-charged atmosphere.

The show's producers had carefully choreographed his performance. They had planned for him to slowly descend to the stage floor in the mockup boat, which would then 'sail' on the stage floor as showgirls unfurled wide strips of ultra reflective blue fabric. The fabric strips would be blown across the stage by wind machines, creating 'waves'...as he crooned a melancholic "Namida Bune" to the gentle sway of loungey orchestrations.

Nope! Wasn't going to happen.

Instead, the large auditorium filled with the elites of Tokyo, Osaka and many other cities were treated to the spectacle of a flaming pyre-boat slowly being lowered towards the stage. Keiichi had intended his little display to evoke the imagery of a Viking funeral gone wild, as all the stage lights except the blues and purples were shut off. The boat halted fully 3 meters above the stage floor, flaming brilliantly with orange-red licks of fire...a brilliant Ra against the velveting stage lights.

Through the flames, Keiichi could clearly see the panicked expressions of the trio of emcees. The comedian serving as "host" emcee was aghast at the sight...he was definitely not going to crack any more one-liners tonight. His wrinkled face appeared to shrivel with shock as his eyes bulged. The two sub-emcees were stunned with shock as well; the woman was clinging to her male counterpart with utter fright.

Keiichi could only imagine how the 50 million-or-so viewers in Japanese TV-Land were reacting as they watched Kohaku Uta Gassen turn into a hellish apocalypse. Actually, the driving concept behind what he had envisioned wasn't apocalyptic at all...it was a chrysalimenysis. A rebirthing of new breath from artistic staleness. A brilliant flash bursting out from the cocoonage of decades of perfunctory performances.

A _moment_.

The audience's initial shock slowly was turning to fascination as they realized that, while the boat was burning, somehow _he_ wasn't. Keiichi had counted on Peorth...that she wouldn't let him burn alive.

The comic emcee was trying to say something to reassure the audience, but his wide eyes and pallored expression gave him away. The cameramen were gamely trying to keep some semblance of order in their filming; several cameras pointed straight at Keiichi as he swayed energetically to his music. His backup band had completely drowned out the mini-orchestra as they belted out refrain after refrain of searing intense instrumental mayhem.

In the middle of a blue sky, a sun burned...

Keiichi felt his voice as he sang his heart out, lifting his performance beyond what he thought possible as he conveyed the weathering emotions with jet-engine demands on the listening audience. Shouts of fear slowly shifted to shouts of joy as the crowd realized that something _incredible_ was happening.

And then a profusion of blue roses started flying over the stage and the audience.

Keiichi could hear the audience clapping along. Clapped accompaniment was part and parcel of the more 'swingy' enka ballads, a polite cadence of applause to keep time and let the audience feel that it was participating in the performance. But these handclaps were boisterous; the crowd was obviously releasing the sudden pent of anxiety caused by the sight of his boat going up in flames. They were vigorously into the spell of his music, totally blown away by what they were witnessing.

Keiichi didn't expect the blue roses...until he realized that it must have been Peorth's touch. _This_ crazy over-the-top performance must have caught her attention, if at least for the fact that he could have potentially fried himself to death. Obviously, Peorth was adding even more magic to the performance by creating 'bursts' of blue roses. Blue rose petals fell like confetti...

The audience was clearly divided, just like this whole schizo Kohaku Uta Gassen event was divided. The younger members of the crowd were rallying, cheering with gusto. In contrast, the older bunch was looking on with disturbed disgust, the kind of disgust one feels when a drunk crashes a private party.

Good.

"Let's give the New Year's a real kick in the ass!" Keiichi screamed into his mike between guitar choruses.

Two minutes later, he gestured in imitation of an orchestra principal and the music faded down...and then Keiichi pulled the other shocker he had planned...

He launched into a solo rendition of "Life is Short--Fall in Love, Dear Maiden."

A classic fictional song from the 1920s, "Life is Short--Fall in Love, Dear Maiden" was immortalized by Kurosawa's 1952 film "Ikuru"...itself a film about a man dying from terminal cancer. A song about longing for what cannot ever be returned, about returning from what cannot be longed for anymore. The song was woven into the fabric of Japanese society as tightly as that other 1950s song...the Godzilla march.

The whole point was contrast, to make a mockery of the whole artistic anachronism which was Kohaku Uta Gassen. From the raucousness of a few moments earlier as he performed his frenetic "Blue Attitudes"...to the folksong of "Dear Maiden"...Keiichi had planned to take down the crowd. To flurry them on a rollercoaster ride of styles and intents. His backup band didn't even know about what he was going to perform for the last few minutes of his eight-minute slot.

As he sang and accompanied himself on guitar, Keiichi's heart unexpectedly filled his throat as the lyrics of the song seemed to take on a life of their own. He remembered how much he missed Belldandy...and he felt an unbearable agony scorching something deep within his Soul. A driving point-of-light anguish; the worsting sense of the reality that his wife-to-be was distanced by time, space and possibly dimensions of reality from him. He felt every scything ill-treasure of his profound loss. The half of his heart that was rendered inert by her absence asserted itself as he sang about the fragility of life and love...

Sometimes, a sharing of deep pain can take on a sanctity all its own.

This was one of those times. The song was no longer a focus of the mockery Keiichi wanted to work into it. Instead, Keiichi's performance was riveting in its emotional rawness.

Keiichi was taken aback; his idol-persona Keiichi MoriStar clearly didn't expect the huge emotional heaviness of Keiichi Morisato's longing for his fiancée to wield such a poignant impact on his performance. Every time he had performed since he first came here, he had seemed to function on some sort of 'autopilot'...it was as if the performance had a life of its own. And during those times, his idol-star persona would completely overtake his "regular-guy-Keiichi" consciousness. But now, his true self had smeared its pain all over his idol-star performance. Tears streaming down his face, Keiichi wore his heart on his sleeve as he finished up "Dear Maiden", the sweep of his feelings surfacing while he was singing the tragic song.

As if it had been planned that way, the flames which had died down to a near kindling flicker during solo vox finale of his performance...finally ghosted away their luminosity and faded as he sang out the last few words.

Keiichi wiped his eyes and looked out at the crowd. There wasn't a dry eye in the entire auditorium. The audience and the other performers were too moved by his heartsong to applaud his breathtaking performance. He had delivered a New Year's Eve performance live on the Kohaku Uta Gassen special that would never be forgotten by those who experienced it. A 'moment' that would ring through the shared memories of millions of viewers for the rest of their lives.

"Perhaps there is a chance after all," Keiichi noted to himself. He had hung on to his hope that he could someday find a way to return to Belldandy. Despite his unfamiliarity with this world and its rules, his keening desire had been strong enough to usher open a flood dam of emotional yearning...a candor that had totally overwhelmed the professional aloofness of "Keiichi MoriStar". He had touched his own performance, rather than simply watching it from afar.

Seemingly as a cosmic afterthought, all the New Year's props and balloons suddenly popped open all over the stage, spilling out "Happy New Year's!!" banners and metallic confetti against the silent auditorium...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

The NHK green room was totally surreal after the show was over, its solemnity suggesting to Keiichi the interior of a cathedral rather than a performer's roost. His medley had electrified the crowd, and opinions were flying fast and furious among his fellow musical stars. Most of them were completely awed by the brilliance of his gutsy revamp of the closing number. The rest were vehemently against the disruptive nature of his "egoistic stunt", as they termed it. A number of business-types in hundred-thousand-yen suits complained about how he "had made fools of the more respectable powers in the entertainment industry".

Screw 'em!! They can go eat miso soup with turds floating in it.

The normal routine of ending the old year with a fizzle had been usurped by Keiichi's bold act...his otori performance had ended the year with finality, just like the last axe-chop that fells the cedar. For the first time in the history of the Kohaku Uta Gassen, the judges had failed to 'score' a performance. After Keiichi had finished his medley and the New Year's props had opened up, a haunting silence had lingered until the emcee managed to restore order and conclude the broadcast with a subdued-yet-fond wish for the coming new year.

Naturally, the younger idol-boys and the girl-groups were thoroughly impressed with his rebellious action.

As he changed into his street clothes, Keiichi had a foreboding sense that his 'keepers'...Atsukara, Taniyama and Ono...wouldn't share in the enthusiasm. To his managers, his career was little more than a power ploy, as he was their gravy train to wealth and success. Indifferent to his own wishes, all they were concerned with was using his stature in the entertainment industry to manipulate circumstances to meet their own private agendas. And tonight he had served notice to them and all the others. He had definitely brought his game to them and took them to the rafters. By acting in total disregard of their carefully crafted plans for his career, he had wrested the power away from them.

He had no doubt that they would shove back.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"You fuckhead! When I'm done with you, you'll never perform in the music industry again! My boss just phoned me to tell me that he and the Board of Directors are going to shitcan the rest of your contract! And I'm gonna make sure you're blacklisted with every major distro organization! No licensing, no promotions, no studio time, nothing! You won't even be able to work in a shithole bunny bar as a lounge singer after I'm done cutting your strings!" Atsukara screamed.

He and the other two men had hammered on Keiichi for a solid half-hour, to the point where Keiichi could do little more than numbly take the abuse with a smirk...

Taniyama started in again, shouting like a yakuza gangster. Keiichi simply shrugged his shoulders and smirked. Getting no reaction from him, his managers turned on Sora as soon as she entered the room.

"And as for you, you stupid little bitch...you're fuckin' _fired_!!" Atsukara shouted at Sora. Sora halted in mid-step and dropped all the papers and the notebook computer she had been carrying. She reacted with all rigidity; her arms stuck to her sides as if they had been super-glued there, her feet were pigeon-rooted to the ground. Her face lost all its vibrancy, except for her lips, which trembled with what looked like an impending breakdown. Keiichi felt it imperative that he defend her.

"Leave her outta this! Sora was only following my own instructions, which she did to the letter. This was all my idea, this was entirely my plan. So there's really no need to retaliate against her!" Keiichi shouted back.

"How dare you take up that tone of voice with me! I don't give a shit who told her to fuck things up! She's nothing but a sexless robot corporate woman anyway. No one will have her...she's too ugly! And too unemployable, after this mess!"

Sora's sobbing stepped up a notch.

"Shut your ass up!" Keiichi threatened in a low voice, appalled by the man's insensitivity.

"You're telling _me_ to shut up? Whaddya going to do about it? Nothing!" Atsukara shot back. "Instead, I'm gonna shut _you_ up...permanently! Without me, you're nothing! You hear me..._nothing_!!"

Atsukara ranted some more until Sora interrupted him.

"You clueless idiot! Keiichi's performance is the hottest thing that has happened to Japan since the Nagano Olympics! And I don't care what you say or do, because he'll be the best performer in Japan without your crew of assholes!" Sora mustered. She threw her PDA down on the floor, hard enough to shatter it, and then she stormed out of the room.

"Good riddance!" Taniyama growled.

"I hope you enjoy the rest of your career serving tea to fat-assed executives like the rest of the worthless OLs!" Atsukara shouted after her.

"_You're all pathetic!_" Keiichi heard Sora's voice echo distantly from somewhere far down the hall.

Keiichi thought "way to go Sora!" By the sheer anguished disgruntlement in her tone of voice, it was obvious that she must have held that one inside of her for years. Someone like Atsukara was too coarse to appreciate what had just happened a couple hours earlier in the Kohaku. Sora certainly appreciated it...she wouldn't have cooperated with his ambition if she didn't believe in the result.

She had only wanted him to be happy.

A minute later, Annimoto stormed in, followed by an apologetic X-ko who explained, "Sorry, I couldn't exactly stop her, since she's Keiichi's girlfriend."

"Get the hell outta here, you whore!" Atsukara shouted before Anni could even say a word. Her china-smooth face colored with anger, and for a moment, Keiichi thought she was going to slap him.

"You touch me, and you can kiss your career bye-bye too, you little cheap idol-chasing slut! I know your boss and your agent..." Atsukara said menacingly.

Keiichi felt Anni's eyes lock on him expectantly, hoping that he would intervene. He decided to intervene, but not in the way he imagined that she wanted him to.

"Anni, I don't want you to get hurt...so please just leave before something nasty happens," Keiichi advised. "Please...for your own good?"

Anni looked at him with big teary eyes, then bowed her head and reluctantly turned around and walked out the door. Her sudden shift in demeanor seemed to hint to Keiichi that she too had experienced these kinds of dressing downs in the past, perhaps by her 'career keepers'.

It was just he, his three managers, and X-ko. Keiichi guessed that X-ko had sensed the tension in the room and had decided to stay, to prevent any fistfights that could break out from getting deadly.

Keiichi sensed that Atsukara was the kind of shady character that would pack a gun under his jacket.

"Look, you can do whatever you want to with me, but I'm still going to have a career. I _earned_ my fame! You guys call Anni an 'idol-chasing slut', which she isn't. You're the _real_ career-chasing sleazebags!" Keiichi exclaimed. He knew that his idol-star persona was taking command now, turning on the offensive.

He could hear Anni sobbing from outside the door. He couldn't defend her in front of her, because he didn't want to make her lose face by needing _him_ to speak up. But now that she was out of the room, he could snap on his bosses. He just didn't expect for her to be eavesdropping against the door.

Of course, he _should have_ expected her to do just that. Keiichi chided himself, as once again he had made the mistake of underestimating her affection for him. Now, he was worried that she might find him insincere.

"This is so dammed confusing!" he thought to himself. He had hoped that his radical Kohaku stunt would offend her to the point where she would want to break it off with him, at least temporarily if not permanently. The breakneck hard rocking performance followed by his rendition of "Dear Maiden" should have convinced her, the judges, the audience and everyone else that he was crazy. But he didn't expect his feelings of loss concerning Bell-chan to overwhelm him right at that moment. And rather than appearing to be the crazed court jester of the New Year's Eve performance, he had delivered a brilliant artistic statement that had gripped everyone and tore into the cores of their hearts.

Now, his managers were out for blood.

Atsukara fingered his thin moustache, as if weighing his words.

"So you think you can strike out on your own? Sure, some of the indies would love to snap you up. But you wouldn't get paid shit! This flash lifestyle that you're used to will come crashing down like a house of cards. Since you're my gravy train, I'll do ya a favor. There may be a way for you to redeem yourself in the eyes of the CEOs. Of course, if you had twenty years in showbiz, you might be able to get away with what you did. But you only have a few years..."

Keiichi was amazed. Atsukara was willing to renegotiate?

"What is going on here?" his mind warned him. Could this be some kind of retreat on his manager's part? Or was this just another move in the game of brinksmanship, and Atsukara was only bluffing, trying to test and bait him?

Atsukara and the bunch must need something from him, otherwise they would have been done with it by now. Atsukara had even ignored the insult Keiichi had lashed out with a few minutes earlier.

Probably because it was the truth.

"So what now?" Ono said dryly.

"I think we should give the Board a call and see what we can come up with," Atsukara said.

"NO! If I stay, then Sora stays too! Otherwise, no deal!" Keiichi blurted out. He was going to test their resolve first.

"Out of the question! She fucked up, she has to sit in her shit. There's no possible way I could rehire her after what she did," Taniyama quickly replied.

"Then all I have to say to you...is _FUCK YOU_! _All of you_!!" Keiichi shouted.

"THAT'S IT!! You're done! Get out of here!" Atsukara screamed.

"You think I'm done? Me?!" Keiichi shouted back. He paused to laugh derisively. "I have something you can never take away! It's called kokoro! There might be a hundred people in Japan that recognize the three of you on sight. Me...I could go to Mongolia or Thailand or Malaysia, and _hundreds of thousands_ of people would know who I am. They'll keep on buying my CDs, because I put my heart into them! What are they going to buy from you? What do you have to offer them? Fame? Talent? Your good looks? Feh! I've got more talent than your entire roster of idol stars. But I've got even more than talent...I've got heart! After I did my gig at tonight's show, there was no applause. I'd rather have it that way, because it meant that I gave the audience something truly beautiful and wonderful. And you idiots think that I screwed up! You don't know shit! I'm going to go into my studio next week and start working on a CD that'll be my masterwork. A CD that will show all of you that I'm for real, a CD that will be acclaimed a hundred years from now!"

His keepers were looking at him like tuna fish, their mouths wapping open but utterly wordless as if he had silenced them with a spell.

"_I'm firing your _asses!! Get the hell out of my sight...I don't ever want to see any of you bastards again. Sora is now my exclusive manager, agent, and CEO. I'm done with you and all your bullshit games. You think you can stop me from going indie? Just try it! My artistry will speak for itself, and it will speak volumes."

He surveyed the faces in the room. His managers were almost terrified by his outburst, while X-ko was grinning broadly, thoroughly amused by their discomfiture. Following Sora's example, he turned and wordlessly left the hotel room. Glancing over his shoulder, he saw X-ko walking a couple paces behind him. X-ko nodded his head approvingly when he caught his eye...

He was finally free.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --


	85. Pt 85: Urd and Skuld: Glass Hammer Thir...

**Part 85: Urd and Skuld: Glass Hammer -- 3rd Movement **

"What's there to celebrate?" Skuld asked with a scowl as she sat in the command chair of Oyuki's starship, her white-booted feet were propped casually on the bridge's stellar navigation console. As she gazed at the hollow red ovals on the insteps of her white boots, she grimaced. There was no way to shunt the raucous noises airing through the metallic doorway roughly eight meters behind her. Of course, there _was_...Skuld was practiced enough with arcane hyperkinetic manipulations; all she would have to do is concentrate and gesture, and then the door would slide shut. Assuming there was a door.

She had retreated here to the bridge to try and distance herself from the boisterous activities in the main 'lounge' room of the ship. Yet there was no escape; she couldn't miss hearing the loud shouting voices foaming with sentiment through the door hatch. Benten, Oyuki and Lum were getting drunk..._really_ drunk...and Urd was already passed out.

Another loud burst of shouting caused her to flinch.

"Why the hell can't a _Neptunian Princess_ afford to have a larger starship!" Skuld riled silently. Perhaps Oyuki did. For all she knew, the teenaged princess might have a fleet of starships. But this "UFO", as Lum called it, was only slightly bigger than the temple she and her sisters called home. One would think that a princess would deign to travel in the luxury of a more spacious craft. A huge sprawling palatial yacht of a starship where Skuld could hide hundreds of meters away from the inebriated noisymakers.

But no. No...not Oyuki.

Judging from what little she knew of Oyuki, Skuld concluded that the girl from Neptune was probably spacefaring in this small starship in order to be frugal and economize on travel costs. Benten and Lum both esteemed Oyuki as a confirmed businesswoman with a mercenary fiduciary streak that bordered on miserliness.

But this cramped ship was the worst! Especially because there was no refuge from the loud shouts, giggles and arguing of the 'party' located in the very middle of the ship. Oyuki's ship was designed like a donut; the 'hole' being the large commons 'lounge' in the middle. The central room was ringed by the Bridge, the Stores Room, four cabins, the Observation Deck and several other utility rooms.

"Wesh celebra.._burp!_..celebratin' becaush this stuff ish soo good at makin' ush forget just how misherable life ish! Right, Lum?!" Benten said. Lum nodded in agreement with drunken hyperbole, her long green hair shagging by bounds.

Skuld was surprised at the tardiness of the reply...and the fact that the warrior-girl had been able to overhear her grumbled comment at all. Obviously, Benten's hearing transcended what was audiologically normal for an Earthrealm mortal. In response, Skuld turned to look at Benten, who...once she noticed that Skuld was looking at her through the doorway, reacted by toasting her with a spillwards heft of her bottle. Benten wasn't even bothering with the drinking implements that had sunk a thousand alliances in medieval Japan; the tokkuri...the traditional pouring flask, or the choko...the small drinking cup.

Benten was in chugging mode, imbibing straight from a magnum-sized bottle of "Deer Brand" strong sake. Her eyes were slightly cross-eyed with intoxication...as were Lum's.

Despite the compactness of Oyuki's starship, Skuld was surprised to learn that it was equipped with a bar fully stocked with sake, shochu whiskey, and all the traditional Japanese drinking appurtenances. Weren't Oyuki, Benten and Lum supposed to be teenagers? And wasn't there a prohibition against operating starships while intoxicated in this sector of space?

Skuld fought with herself to keep from applying any tenets of 'realism' to this unrealistic situation.

"Come an join ush, Shkuld!" Benten urged with a loopy grin.

"That's a ridiculous reason to get drunk!" Skuld shot back.

"Your shister tol' us tha' you and she can't do a thing. So it'sh up to ush to get Lum'sh darling back, even if Keiichi'sh ish an.._hiccup!_..idiot!" Benten replied, repeating the answer she had given Skuld every 20 minutes or so.

Offended by the remark, Lum clenched her hands in fists as she yelled at Benten, who pacified her by pouring booze into her cup and all over her arm.

"She's so uni-dimensional!" Skuld thought as she watched Lum's vehemence, shaking her head in vex at the display of disinhibited silliness. She mentally cursed Urd once more. Heartbroken or not, Big Sister shouldn't have let that bit of vital information slip. Now that Lum and her friends had learned about she and Urd's impotence in dealing with the Keiichi situation, Skuld realized that she would have to assume the additional task of trying to keep the crazy trio of space-girls in line. Hopefully, Big Sister didn't disclose any details about the 'source' of the message as well. Things were already crazy-clumsy enough around here as it is, without Lum and her friends learning of the involvement of Kami-sama.

"Urusei Yatsura...my ass! This is _so_ retarded!" Skuld thought angrily when she considered their dismal chances.

"My darling lovesh her...and not me. When I finally.._hic_..get 'im back, I'm gonna zhack him like he'sh never been.._urp!_..zakked before! He'sh been unfaafful once too ma..many timesh! Tha'sh what'll do...Uuu-cha!.._urp!_" Lum exclaimed with a belch, the rosy glow on her cheeks almost matching her mis-pointed bloodshot orbs. She quickly emptied her flask into her drinking cup, spilling most of it on the deck while Benten applauded her 'speech' with staccato handclaps.

"Why are thesh choko cupsh so shmall? They're teeny weeny little glassesh, not even enough for a mousesh to get drunk!" Lum complained before tipping another cup of sake.

Oyuki looked at her friends as if she was making a study of them, and then sipped at her cup of peach wine in silence...

Skuld marveled once again at how _cold_ Oyuki's personality could be sometimes. Lum and Benten were cutting loose like divorced salarymen on a pub-crawling Saturday night...while in total contrast, Oyuki was calmly seated at the table in her usual formal tailor-style stance, sipping her fruit-liquor drink with dainty draws. Skuld marveled at Oyuki's demeanor; it must take a great deal of self-restraint to be at a drinking blowout with these two and act like it was the most formal of chokai tea ceremonies.

The ice blue-emerald precision of her crystalline bangs of hair added to the impression...making Oyuki look like a female Jack Frost in Skuld's mind. Yet, the azure glitter of her hair was quite striking, especially as it flowed out around her milk-white face, framing Oyuki's delicate features with a geometric tableau. Not a hair out of place.

Skuld wondered what thoughts were circulating behind that guise of quietude, within that silent effeminate chill-iron demeanor. Oyuki carried herself with an air that was almost always dignified and regal; but Skuld suspected that some part of the Neptunian princess's personality was wild...after all, she was best friends with Lum and Benten.

In some ways, Oyuki's deportment reminded her of Elder Sister Belldandy...at least the cheerful, restrained, polite-mannered part. Skuld could sense an almost esurient calculation to Oyuki's actions; the type of sovereign bearing that a CEO of a major corporation would have while mingling with his or her employees. Machiavellian clockworks of ambition.

In vivid juxtaposition, Lum...who _was_ a princess in her own right...possessed a brazenly impulsive nature, combined with a pedestrian lack of any semblance of self-consciousness. Acting without thinking, Lum was a complex galaxy of blithe collisions between id and ego, with an alluring charm thrown in for good measure. She was innocently ignorant.

And then there was Benten.

Benten had interrupted Skuld's wistful reverie hours earlier to herald their return to Japan. Skuld didn't know whether to thank her or resent her, considering that the daydream centered on a certain Earthrealm teenager...and it had embarrassed her in the most fascinating way!

After decrypting the message from the Almighty, Skuld had immediately informed Urd in private about Kami-sama's decided prohibition against the two of them. He had specifically prohibited either of them from using their Goddess abilities to enable Lum and the gang to deal with Belldandy's 'protection' of Keiichi against Lum. Consequently, she and Urd had decided to swear themselves to secrecy about this development.

After being on the ground for an hour, Benten...who was all "Ms.-Let's-Take-Action!" a few hours earlier...decided to convince Urd to join her in a drinking bout.

"To flush out your melancholy," she had suggested. To Skuld's surprise, Urd had joined right in. But it was no surprise when Lum and Oyuki also invited themselves to the 'festivities' as well.

Partygirls without a cause or a clue.

Skuld could somewhat find it within herself to excuse Urd in this single instance. Big Sister Urd was suffering from mopery; as far as Skuld was concerned, she had a right to drink this one time. Perhaps a little "living it up" might improve her sister's mood. But then again, there was no 'a little' whenever Urd made her mind up to party.

In Lum's case, Skuld felt that maybe even she deserved a few drinks, since she was dejected in the wake of being forcibly separated from her husband. But Benten seemed to appropriate _any circumstance_ and use it as an excuse to party...

And Skuld experienced the shock of her life when Urd was the first one to hit the floor!

_No one_ could outdrink Big Sister if she had her mind set on it, not even Mara.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Owwww! Whoohee...my head hurts!" Urd grumbled as she woke up. As she propped herself up on her elbows, she surveyed the central area of the UFO. Her eyes alighted on Lum and Benten, who were passed out alongside the round kosatsu-like drinking table. Oyuki and Skuld were nowhere to be seen.

Everything was hazily bright. Her eyes were watering with irritation at the profuse light, which felt like sand specks under her eyelids.

"Ahhh, Ms. Urd! You're the first to awaken," Oyuki observed aloud in her gently level voice. Urd glanced at her, once again noticing how Oyuki always seemed to speak in the most proper Japanese. The soft voice of the girl from Neptune seemed to pound echoes inside of Urd's skull.

"You have anything for headaches? I have a killer hangover!" Urd mumbled in guilty admission, wincing as she raised herself to a sitting position.

"Yes, I have several remedies...besides a caution that you really shouldn't overindulge, Ms. Urd..." the Neptunian Princess chided, as she walked over to a food bin. A moment later, she returned with a plate laden with some fruit. Urd looked doubtfully at the purplish round fruits.

"What's this?"

"Umeboshi...salted plums. It's a traditional Japanese recipe for combating hangovers, one that I learned from Lum's husband," Oyuki explained. Urd could almost catch the sense that Oyuki was torturing her; it was as if she was toying with Urd's hungover state by plying her with distasteful 'remedies'...and enjoying it.

Urd tried not to grimace.

_"Big Sister!"_

Urd grimaced, covered her ears with her palms, and shuddered all at once in reaction to the loud shouts of her sister. Skuld was only a few feet away, but she had to _shout_! The girl was much too genki for this time of the morning! Why can't she be an adult just once?

"Skuld, what happened last night?" Urd asked, resting her fingers against the throbbing of her temples.

As if that would make a difference.

"You got royally drunk...that's 'what happened'!" Skuld said angrily. Urd sensed a big-time confrontation in the offing, brewed with a vim that only her youngest sister could muster. Skuld was definitely hyper about something...the colors in her aura were quick-knotted like a rope, just like Keiichi's before a race.

"Here we are trying to save this planet from impending doom and get Lum back together with her husband...and you decide to get drunk! You're so irresponsible!! No wonder Cevn kept on you about..."

Oyuki paused in mid-sip and set her tea service down with a quick motion.

Urd immediately lowed her head; her platinum locks bailing over her face like the hood of a nun's habit, obscuring her expression.

Skuld let her voice trail off as she saw Urd's instant reaction to the mentioning of her boyfriend's name. Skuld's eyes beamed apologetic for her careless words...but it was too late. Urd had dropped the plate of fruit she was holding onto the metal decking, shattering it...and a few seconds later she wordlessly left the central common 'lounge' room.

Skuld watched the round plums rolling on the floorplating like marbles.

"Oh great, now I've gone and done it!" Skuld thought remorsefully. She pivoted between chasing after Urd and just letting her be. She looked at Oyuki with a beseeching expression. Oyuki pointed her eyes towards the observation cabin, and then nodded at Skuld.

Reaching a decision, Skuld decided to follow after Urd.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Urd looked out at the mid-day scene from the darkened interior of the observation cabin. It certainly ranked as one of Kami-sama's most beautiful paintings of Reality...but the sense of appreciation and enjoyment was lost on her. The traces of shadows around the trees informed Urd that it was bright outside, possibly around noontime. Inside the cabin, she had turned all the lights down and set the window's light filters to screen out most of the harsh sunlight. Her eyes had been irritated by the after-wrang of last night's drinking; now they were swollen with more crying debts.

"Just like me...glowing on the outside, gloomy on the inside," Urd observed to herself in a private voice. The positioning of life around her was allegory to her bleak sense of loss. Once again, she was crying...just like one of the main characters in any issue of Skuld's sizable shoujo manga collection. It seemed to her that most of the female characters in the many manga series were always crying over something.

"Ranma no Baka!" with a seasoning of tearfalls...

"Just like me..." she whispered again. Of course, Skuld didn't mean any malice by reminding her of Cevn. The remorseful look on her sister's face told a tale of its own. Yet, Urd found herself smiling thinly, sensing the irony of it all. Once she had refuged herself in this observation room, she immediately found herself wishing that it was Cevn who had chewed her out instead of Skuld. That Cevn was _here_, so that he could launch into some silly argument with her about getting drunk. Even a few censorious words from him would be treasured...would be much better than this emptiness.

This silence.

Instead, she had to feel the unquiet pangs of guilt all by herself. Cevn was gone forever from her life. "One more time" is an impossibility when you've passed out of the Past...

All these years on the Earthrealm, and he was the only one who had really got on her the most about her forays into drunkenness. Skuld had scoffed at her affinity for sake with childish disrespect; but she wasn't as diligently contentious about the issue as Cevn had been. Belldandy was prudent about her imbibing; to the degree that she seemed to acquiesce to the fact that it was Urd's nature to party heartily with the sake. To Bell, Urd's drinking was 'fate' or 'karma'. And Keiichi seemed to react the same way as his fiancée; seemingly bemused with Urd's faeish relationship with intoxicants. Mara...well, there would be no reproof from her. Her twin sister was a drinking buddy as far as Urd was concerned. Besides, Mara loved the booze as much as Urd did. Most of the members of the N.I.T. Unified Club heartily cheered her on when she would bust out the good stuff at one of their victory parties; they endorsed her reckless drinking with an enthusiastic sophomoric stamp of approval.

But Cevn had taken one of Urd's favorite pastimes and had totally flipflopped it. He had struggled to curb her will, claiming that she was addicted to the stuff. Even when she justified that sake was her powerup source, he brazenly continued to challenge her; constantly attempting to make her realize that her drinking wasn't "cute"...that it was the biggest chink of all in her emotional armor.

She would have given the Sun to hear his voice one more time.

"Urd...I'm sorry for what I said. I wasn't thinking..." a quiet voice sounded from the doorway, seamlessly plucking her out of her thoughts.

Skuld.

Urd turned and regarded her little sister, who bowed in deep apology as soon as she realized Urd had noticed her. Skuld's night-black hair almost touched the floor as she shook her head sorrowfully.

"I miss him too. I..I never thought I would miss any Earthrealm mortals. But I miss Keiichi...and Cevn...and Tomohisa. It feels terrible! It's as if a charmed thread that was used to sew my heart together was suddenly pulled out, leaving me with an open wound. But that's just me. I can't even begin to imagine how _you_ feel..snff..Big Sister. You _loved_ him! Even with all his stupid mortal faults. Faults and all! I..snff..guess that's what love is, being free to share both the sunshine and the shadows of your heart with someone," Skuld said, sniffling and rubbing her eyes.

"_She's really growing up!_" Urd noted to herself with a prideful sadness. She couldn't help but notice that Skuld had mentioned Tomohisa in the same breath as Keiichi and Cevn. Grouping the three together. Perhaps in her mind, her youngest sister was beginning to equate Tomohisa as a boyfriend. Under normal, happier conditions, she would have let Skuld have it...gleefully indulging her 'Big Sister' spirit to provoke the youngest Norn to get all indignant and ampy. Skuld's "brat storms" could easily match the fury of Belldandy's "jealousy storms".

But not today.

"It could have been the three of us, with our three mortal boyfriends," she reflected mournfully. "Now, it'll just be Bell and Keiichi, Skuld and Tomohisa. A wounded triangle. As for me...I'll just have to nurture this emptiness for the rest of my existence."

Not only had she been robbed of a lifespan with Cevn...in a sense, her sisters were also robbed. Belldandy and Skuld would never get to see love blossoming afield between the three families.

"Families! I'm really getting ahead of myself. Me, the Norn of the Past...thinking about the future with such expectations! Imagining the families that Skuld, Belldandy and I would have had," she pondered with a dryness of humor. To be sure, they would have been joined together for just a few decades of years, but that would be enough for a lifetime of memories. But in her life, Urd always sensed that love was imbalanced. A shadowplay rendered invisible against the moonlit night. Impossible wishes for the flowering of the future, when the past lies trampled in the mud and the present buries all traces of the erosion of sentiments. All were lost to Urd, Norn of the Past.

"He..was my only chance to have the kind of happiness that I _should_ have been allowed to keep! That I was denied for so long..." Urd said in a barely-audible voice.

"Why was I created a _Goddess_?" she shouted suddenly. "Why was I made a _Norn_? Why do I have this gaping hole in my heart, this irresolvable need for a companion of the opposite sex? Why do I need some kind of partner of the Soul in the first place? Why can't I just resign myself to the fact that I'm going to be alone forever!"

"Urd..." Skuld noted warily.

"And what difference does any of it make anyway, when Isilblius might destroy Yggdrasil and the Multiverse! What if he already _has_ conquered the Multiverse? A..and this is some kind of hell that we're exiled in? This could be nothing more than his version of a torture chamber! I gave up the most important person in my life next to you and Belldandy...and I didn't get shit in return!" Urd shouted, getting worked up by flexes of despair.

"Urd..._stop it_!!" Skuld interrupted. "S..stop talking crazy like that. You're scaring me!"

"What do _you_ have to be frightened of, little girl? You have your whole future in front of you! Norn of the Future! How I wish I could be you instead of me, Skuld! Unlike me, you have a chance at love. You don't have to make the hard decisions like I had to! A..and you _will_ find love, my youngest sister. I'm almost positive that you've already found it!" Urd exclaimed angrily, resentful at her sister's future...jealous of the love that would surround Skuld in the pathways of the Future.

Skuld blushed crimson in reaction to Urd's blunt assertion.

"You...get to be loved, while I get to be denied!" Urd shouted shrilly, pounding the metal wall of the observation cabin with the hams of her fists.

Blue haired, green-haired and black-haired heads peered from the doorway.

Skuld fought to keep her composure against Urd's burst of self-pity.

"You're a Goddess because the Lord wants it that way, Big Sister! Just because you're female doesn't mean that you're weak, or that you're the only one that feels loss! Just because that stupid Ultimate Force restriction prevents you from having a romantic relationship with guys...well, it doesn't limit you totally. Something _did_ happen between you and Cevn! Soooo, it might happen again! And you gotta stop thinking that it's the end! If you can't have a guy in your life, y..you could always fall in love with another Goddess!" Skuld offered, desperately trying to invoke some hope.

Urd spun on her heel and facefaulted. Keeping her back to Skuld, she covered her mouth and bit her tongue to keep from either heretic laughter or bitter screaming. Then she turned back around to face her sister, shooting Skuld a pin-eyed look of rapt exasperation.

"Well...I guess _that's_ out of the question!" Skuld quickly responded, verbally backpedaling as Urd's look of astonishment transformed into a manic giggling. For better or worse, her outrageous suggestion had jolted Urd into a less remorseful mood.

Skuld knew that sexual orientation was never an issue amongst the Gods like it was with the mortals. A large number of Gods didn't even didn't qualify as male or female; they were hermaphrodite or 'blends'. Still, Urd's shocked reaction to her earnest suggestion was a little strange. Just like last night, when Benten and Lum and Oyuki somehow managed to drink her under the table. Earthrealm humanity must be rubbing off of her sister a little _too_ much. Just like when...

Skuld almost choked on her thoughts.

"J..just like when I was daydreaming..." she admitted reluctantly with a near whisper. She found herself blushing as she remembered how...during a moment of solitude yesterday...her emotions had measured themselves into hectic flights of fantasy.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Ice cream! Ice cream! I want some! I _need_ some!" Skuld announced impulsively in the middle of a 'conference' she was having with her sister and the three alien girls.

"What is it with her and ice cream?" Lum interjected. "This is the second time this morning!"

"Yeah!! I'm jealous! I've never seen anyone put away so much candy and ice cream...and _never gain any weight_!" Benten added with admiration pooled in envy, raising an eyebrow.

"I think Miss Skuld has excellent taste. She would fit right in with my house staff...they all enjoy chilled dishes," Oyuki commented. "Perhaps we should swing back by my palace on Neptune and bring a couple Sherbet Birds?"

Skuld was intrigued by the concept of a "Sherbet Bird" and was almost ready to press the issue, when she noticed the expressions on Lum and Benten's faces immediately souring. She withdrew the questions she was planning to ask, sensing that the "Sherbet Bird" was a testy episode between these three.

"NO! Don't even think about it, Oyuki!" Lum and Benten shouted emphatically.

Oyuki shrugged her shoulders with the caption of the innocent.

"Absolutely not! That rotten little bird _totaled_ one of my skybikes! I don't ever want to see one again! So help me Oyuki...if you bring one of those birds, I'll blast it out of the sky!" Benten said angrily, causing the normally light-skinned Oyuki to turn a tinge more pallid. Lum's eyes were animated as well, filled with the glaring hardedge look of someone who was reliving a resentment.

"Excuse me for being premature. I was simply trying to be polite to our guest by offering a reasonable suggestion," Oyuki volunteered with a smile.

"Polite? Those birds are a flying _disaster hazard_," Benten shouted.

"I _did_ pay for the repairs to your vehicle, did I not...Benten?" Oyuki said warily.

Benten gulped and nodded her head.

"Why do you want to go out for ice cream while my darling Keiichi is still in that hussy's arms? Don't you care about what _I'm_ going through? He's always chasing after one girl or another!" Lum interjected irritably.

She sighed and continued. "I've caught him many times with that rich girl Sayoko Mishima. And then he got a love letter at school from some _other_ girl named Shiho Sakakibara, who claimed that he was possessed by ghosts! And he had her come over while I was visiting Daddy, instead of when I was home! Actually, I bet that all _she_ wanted to do was possess my Darling! And then there was..."

Despite the similarity to events in Keiichi's reality back in "realtime Japan", Lum's overboard complaining was exacting, reaffirming Skuld's need to get out of here...and enjoy some ice cream.

"Big Sister...do you have any money?" Urd shrugged her shoulders...but Oyuki came to the rescue. The Neptunian Princess reached inside the sashbelt of her kimono and withdrew a selection of yen bills.

"Is this enough, Ms. Skuld? I have more if you need it," Oyuki asked politely. Skuld gasped, counting at least 20 Fukuzawas.

A moment later, Skuld was dispatched with a wishlist of ice cream orders to 311 Flavors. Lum wanted the Mint Chocolate Chip, Benten wanted Ginger Licorice Snap, Oyuki wanted Pineapple Peach Sherbet, and Urd wanted plain Vanilla. With a skip to her stride, Skuld bounded down the ramp of Oyuki's UFO and headed across the park towards an ice cream shoppe. Being a Goddess, Skuld had a 'radar' for detecting ice creams shoppes...

As she walked past a shaded grove of cedars, Skuld suddenly halted in her tracks as the realization that Urd had ordered _plain Vanilla ice cream_ fixed itself rigidly in her thoughts. Big Sister _never_ ordered a 'regular' flavor; her favorite ice cream flavors were Cherry Blossom Burst and whatever "flavor of the month" ice cream that tasted closest to a mixed drink flavor.

Once again, this was proof that Urd was acting quite oddly. Her sister's memory was spotty, she was mood swinging with grief over the loss of her boyfriend, and she was acting seriously _weird_!

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

An earnest-faced young Goddess walked through the town towards an ice cream shoppe that was tucked away inside a drive-up mini-mart, alongside several small restaurants. As soon as she saw the desert shop, the young raven-haired Goddess picked up her quickening pace. Ignoring traffic, she sprinted across the narrow street...

And she was almost ran over by a woman riding a Harley, wearing a red leather outfit.

The onlookers gasped with shock, and then murmured with approval as the teenage girl became a creature of instinct, effortlessly dodging the motorcyclist with a ready somersault...

For some reason, Skuld once again was reminded that her 'adult' body was far more lithesome and coordinated than her 'child' body. A couple of years back, it had been a major struggle just for her to learn to ride a bicycle! Now, she could ballet! With a gymnast's grace, she settled back to her feet as she landed, just like one of the heroines in a martial arts anime.

She had almost levitated out of the path of the bike rider...which would have spelled disaster for the very important task of getting ice cream. Not to mention that the passersby would probably had viewed her as quite unusual, something which could compromise their mission.

Once inside, she ordered one of her fave ice creams, nestled deliciously in a chocolate-covered waffled cosmic cone. Several sugary tonguestrokes later, she was in bliss...

"Waaah! I'm not going to buy you any more beefbowls, Megane! Never again! Just because I lost the damned hillclimb race! Well, just because I got beat by that dirtbag Aoshima _again_ doesn't mean that I have to treat you to _two_ beefbowls in one sitting! They're _expensive_! What kinda idiot wants to eat beefbowls at an ice cream shoppe anyway?"

"You owe me Moroboshi! And we agreed that I got to pick the place! Besides, I lost a buncha money on those girls I hired to win us some fans at the race! Because of your poor racing performance, now everyone thinks our racing club is lame! And we didn't get anyone to sign up! So I ended up gettin' stuck paying _500 yen_ apiece for those girls to parade around in their swimsuits. Not to mention that you lost the race...and wrecked the custom BMX!"

"Quit harpin' on the damned race, willya? I already feel bad enough, ya vulture!"

For perhaps the first or second time in her not-too-brief life, Skuld dropped an ice cream cone.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Bwah hee hee! Check _her _out!" the young man said, staring right at Skuld. "She's a total babe! Definitely the full package, dude! Her hair alone is beautiful! Just the way I like 'em, too. Long black hair...doesn't that remind you of a certain fox-spirit of a temple priestess, Nurse Sakura, back in the high school days, Megane? Only this girl's hair is silk-straight instead of wavy. And her face...she's like a total babe! She's gotta be a model! She's every bit as pretty as..."

Skuld was so shocked, she simply stared back at the two young men, the dropped ice cream cone totally forgotten.

"Woo hoo! And she wants to talk to _me_, Megane! She's checkin' me out! Me...not you, assface...heh hee! She's like a little princess! I wonder if she's outta high school yet? She looks like she's only 16 or 17. Maybe she's an idol star..."

"Quit dreaming, you bastard! No way, Ataru! Not with that rack she's sporting! She must be least a C cup! Well, two of 'em, anyway! And she's got a _fine_ ass under that weird pink and white bulky coat she's wearing. Thank you God, for spandex..."

"AHEM!" Skuld cleared her throat irritably. She struggled between bringing down some 'divine retribution' on two college-aged pervert's heads...or going over and introducing herself. Distasteful as it was, she knew that she would need to break the ice with these two, especially with Ataru Moroboshi. If he _was_ Ataru Moroboshi.

Gulping deeply to keep from gagging in reaction to their leering stares, Skuld walked over and introduced herself to the two college students at the table. Her risk paid off, as she learned that the kid with the half-beard was indeed Moroboshi Ataru. Just like his idiot character in the manga and anime, he was a chatterbox of inanities.

Not wanting to spend another second in their presence, she walked to the counter and ordered another ice cream cone, and then found a table on the other side of the ice cream shoppe where she could eat in peace. Her peace was short-lived, because the two boys actually continued to trade comments about her _body_!

Right in front of her.

Skuld fought with herself to keep from rushing their table and slapping them. She immediately regretted that she didn't have her trusty mallet, Mjolnir. If she did, those two would be sporting knots on their head! Of course, the two college students were discussing her in lowered voices, perhaps thinking that she couldn't hear them.

And of course, she could.

Ataru sprang to his feet and sauntered over to her table, trying to appear suave. Skuld almost giggled at his shallowness. Like his fictional counterpart, he was a domino blend of geek and moron, with a dash of cuteness thrown in. He was wearing an orange "Tour de Detroit" t-shirt and a pair of beatup jeans peppered with grease stains. But he differed from his anime alter by the fact that he was several years older...he sported a slight beard on his chin, neatly trimmed. Just like one of those boy-group MTV wankers.

When she was '12', Skuld thought that the boy-group pop stars were the coolest thing on the Earthrealm. Now that she was '16', she found them quite detestable. Her musical tastes had just begun to change when she had suddenly been yanked into this Cartoonland reality.

"Can I have your phone number, babe? Please?" he asked with a twinkle in his eye.

"I don't have a phone. How about you give me yours?"

"Whoo hoo!" Ataru shouted, leaping in the air with joy. Hastily, he wrote his number down. Lofted by his rampant excitement, he wrote it on the table instead of the receipt paper Skuld had pushed towards him.

"Oops! Ain't every day that a beautiful chick like you wants my phone number!" he said, attempting to justify his idiot mistake. Turning towards his friend, he noted, "This is my lucky day, isn't it Megane?"

His friend grunted a grudgeful assent.

"Call me tonight babe! Better yet, call me and then come over to my house! I have a lot of model kits in my room I can show you..."

Skuld grimaced. This 'Ataru' probably had much more in mind than simply showing her his collection of model cars. He was obviously a mechanic, which differed from the shiftless Ataru of Urusei Yatsura, but she sensed that he was still fickle and lustful. Somehow, he was a blend of the Keiichi she knew and the Ataru from the manga.

"Great, just what the world needs...a witless motorcycle racer!" she thought to herself.

"Better hide your porno collection if you plan to have her over, Ataru..." Megane said slyly as he adjusted his glasses, causing both Skuld and Ataru to blush.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Psst! Big Sister! He's here!! I found him!" Skuld whispered, inches away from Urd's ear. Urd had fallen asleep while she was gone...which meant that Skuld had lucked out, because she ended up winning an extra portion of ice cream. Cheating at jan-ken-pon certainly wasn't beneath her, especially when the stakes were a pint of ice cream...

After ice creaming herself to a place of delight, she waited until the others went to sleep before waking Urd.

"Go away, you little pest...I'm trying to sleep!" Urd mumbled sleepily, pushing Skuld's face away with a half-strength wave of her hand.

"He's here! The possible solution to all our problems!"

"There is no solution, dear. The only way I can have my boyfriend back is to dream about him...so please just let me be," Urd slurred as she returned to sleep.

Skuld was going to redouble her efforts to wake Urd until her sister's words kindled an understanding. Skuld had witnessed the dawning of trillions of Souls on trillions of inhabited worlds scaled within trillions of TimeWeaves...but Urd's searing sadness over the deeply tragic personal loss remained strangely meaningless to Skuld. The enormity of Cevn's death was deprived of meaning whenever she attempted to place an imaginary frame around the emotions that such a profound deprivation would evoke. Urd had nowhere else to turn but her memories and her dreams.

Dream sequencers.

Understanding the unfathomable always came harshly to the analytically-trained mindset of the Norn of the Future. Yet, Skuld knew that leaving Urd to her dreams was the best thing to do. In some instances, it was better to trade in the unknown for the known. She had to take her sister's words to mean that Urd _needed_ a reprieve from her sadness, even if it was only in her dreams.

Besides, Ataru wasn't going to go anywhere, except maybe to N.I.T.

As she walked around the circular 'lobby' of Oyuki's UFO, silent except for the slight breathing of its female sleepers and the omnipresent humming of its energy drives, Skuld wondered if she and her sister would ever make it back to 'home'. Weary, she backed against a bulkjam and slowly slid down to the floor, the cold metal rub of the steel almost soothing her stress-knotted back and shoulders.

If this was some kind of spin-off of the Urusei Yatsura universe, then perhaps it would make sense to try and get Lum together with Ataru. Could such a thing even be possible? Lum was so fixated on Keiichi, she seemed oblivious to all other concerns. Not to forget that her Father had oathed himself into a frenzy, threatening to blow up the Earthrealm if his daughter didn't get her way.

Skuld felt every single one of her 120,000-plus years coiling in her fingertips as she sighed in confusion.

She looked in on the sleeping Urd, who was smiling demurely in her sleep. Urd smiled only rarely after her memories had been restored; so it was probably a good thing that she was protecting her fragile emotions by seeking refuge in her dreams.

But Skuld felt a stirring in her breast. Both her sisters seemed to _need_ to be physically held by their mortal boyfriends. They seemed to thrive on a single word of compliment, or a single alignment of deep soulful eyes. Skuld didn't understand this phenomenon fully, and she certainly didn't understand how these mere mortal _men_ could hold such power over her sisters. It was a paradox, to be sure...especially since she didn't ever feel the need to be held by anyone except Belldandy, Urd and her parents. She could only conclude that something had happened to her older sisters, a condition that caused them to have _additional_ needs besides the warmth of her and her family.

So what had caused the switch in her sisters? And would it happen to her? Someday, would she seek comfort in the arms of a boyfriend?

Skuld felt a wave of fear, even as the stirring in her breast burned like a warm candle...

Oddly enough, some words of counsel that Belldandy had once said filled her thoughts. Her sister had explained love to her one day, back when she was gripped by confusion about how to make friends with Sentaro. Elder Sister had said, "Skuld, Soul and life and love are all unified...when you enter into one, you are with the others as well."

Skuld reflected upon her sister's words of wisdom, but they only ushered in more homesickness.

"Who can I seek refuge with?" she asked silently. Her pensive mood struggled against another part of her being that cried, "As if!! As if I need _anyone_...especially a boy...to make me feel like I have a refuge. No way! I am my own refuge!"

"Who can I be with?" she thought as the feelings turned over and over in her heart. Nearby, the atoms obeyed her will...and soon she was watching elegantly cursive kanji form her thoughts on the sheen of the metallic plating. Just as fast as it had appeared, the question melted down the wall like dripping paint...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

As soon as she awoke, Urd remembered Skuld trying to wake her up last night with a shouted "we found him!" It was probably a whisper and not a shout, but it was unwelcome nonetheless. As she briefly studied the soft padding of her sleeping cabin, Urd tried to re-evoke the idyllic moodset of her dream. She and Cevn were strolling around a fun fair in Paris, France. They were watching the excited children bob and weave with joy as their parents giggled happily. Pennants and excited voices soared through the air; circus rides that thrilled and spooked, soft nasal Romaine accents everywhere...

Nowhere.

The last couple nights, dreams had become a joy to sink into...and a torment to awaken from. Life seemed to stretch like a vulture's wings over her; only in the flimsiest of moments could she feel a reprieve. Yet, a bright part of her heart still remained, still was enveloped in a reserve. A prairieland of hope against the bleak emotional terrain of her reality. There is no passive observer in the dance of life, as far as Urd was concerned. If she held out hope...then there _was_ hope. But right now, 'hope' was a feather-flimsy word.

Better to think of someone else.

Lum was also in grieving, a fellow mourner in Kami-sama's life force farm. Urd could empathize with the plight of the green-haired Oni beauty. In many ways, Lum reminded Urd of herself 100 millennia ago. Brash and impulsive, sexy and blatant, innocent and headstrong, possessive to a fault and a heavy partier.

Urd felt _old_.

"I need soo..ahhh...mmme _action_!" she said in a loud yawning voice, stretching her arms high overhead. Bounding out of bed, she gathered one of Oyuki's nightrobes around her shoulders and walked out of her sleeping quarters...

...and ran smack into Skuld.

"Big Sister! Big Sister! I found him!!" her younger sister shouted with the persistence of Krishna devotees chanting their mantras.

For a isosecond, Urd felt her whole being brighten as she realized that Skuld have found _Cevn_. Her happiness quickly dissolved as she sensed that Skuld wasn't projecting _that_ kind of anxious joy. Urd's mood blurred into disappointment and irritation.

"Found _who_?" Urd asked, fists on hips. Had Skuld been spying on her while she was sleeping? Did she say something in her sleep?

"Moroboshi! I found Ataru Moroboshi at the ice cream shoppe last night!"

"EH?!" Urd exclaimed as she shuddered from spleen to spine. One more impossibility had just manifested itself. Skuld had somehow located a version of _Moroboshi Ataru_ in this version of the Earthrealm! As she listened to her little sister yammer on about her encounter with Ataru, Urd's mind rippled through the possibilities.

What if they had been brought here to this reality to recreate the plot of the manga? In all the universes of mind and soul, the imagination was furthest afield...and yet closest to the mortal's hearts. Thus, their voracious penchant for fictions of entertainment; something they would have to discard in the 21st century if they were to survive the very real problems of population growth and environmental destruction. And yet, in this time and place, imagination had been rendered _real_. As real as the girl in the next room: a 17-year old Oni girl who wore a scanty tiger-striped bikini outfit and called Skuld "sempai". As real as sherbet birds and iceball UFOs flown by Neptunian princesses with azure ice-fibers for hair. As real as the maiden deity of the Shichifukujin who possessed the nature of Bishamon rather than the gentle biwa of her namesake in the pantheon of the Seven Lucky Gods. And now, according to Skuld, the cast of characters was expanded to include an idiot lecher boy who was attending N.I.T...

"How do we find him?" Urd asked, feeling a mounting excitement.

"I got his phone number, since we don't exactly have a phone at our disposal in this UFO!" Skuld answered, shoaling Urd along with her own burst of excitement.

"So why didn't you call him when you got home last night, brat?!" Urd demanded. She noticed Skuld's face immediately redden. This'll probably be good, she noted to herself.

"B..because h..he said I was cute..."

"So? In many cases, that compliment alone will cause Earthrealm girls to call as soon as they get home," Urd remarked.

"...and he s..said that my hair was beautiful..."

"Yeah...even I can see that."

"...and he said. H..he said...I just can't say it! I can't say what he said!" Skuld exclaimed, crossing her arms in front of her defensively.

"You better say it, or else!" Urd threatened, reaching for Skuld's nose. Being taller and more agile now that she had an adult's body, Skuld easily avoided the nose grab.

She hung her head in embarrassment.

"H..he said my breasts were bigger than average for a 17-year old mortal girl! Something about them being '80cm' and 'C cup'..." Skuld finally replied sheepishly, with thinly disguised rouge-cheeked uneasiness.

Five minutes later, Urd finally caught her breath. Skuld's explanation had ignited a laughfest; she had hooted it up until her ribs literally were sore. She never would have imagined that Skuld's encounter with Ataru and Megane would yield such a bounty of hilarity! She regretted that she hadn't accompanied Skuld to the ice creamery, so she could witness firsthand the embarrassed look on her sister's face.

As far as faces went, Skuld was glaring at her with a very sour expression. Urd thought that since they were in some weird anime-inspired universe, the only thing that was missing was the penciled-in hollow-cross on her sister's forehead.

Urd smiled to herself after her sister stormed off in a huff. Attracted by the shouting and shrieks of laughter, Lum and her two companions were staring at her in amazement. Urd's outfit, skin and face were covered with every expletive in the book, in glorious black-and-white kanji.

She didn't mind at all. Leaning out through the doorway, she delivered the fatal blow...

"Besides, _Little_ Sister" Urd shouted slyfully in a ranging theatrically-projected voice, "all the ireful letterzaps in the world won't change the fact that _mine_ are a generously full and pert bra-filling 90cm!"

Lum, Benten and Oyuki could only look at Urd with open-mouthed incredulity as something went "crash" in the kitchen.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Day Four of the deadline found Urd and Skuld still at loggerheads over the "Ataru Pervert Incident", as Skuld deemed it. Urd could sense the curiosity and amusement registering on Lum, Benten and Oyuki's faces as she and Skuld squared off once again over some bento lunches that Lum's red-headed friend Ran had brought over. They both wanted the bento with sausages. Lum made a comment that, "Ran probably made all the lunches different, knowing that someone would squabble over them."

Urd won at jan-ken-pon, so Lum offered Skuld hers. Skuld took the first bite of the curry, sucked a long gasping inhalation...and immediately made for the water dispenser. Benten casually explained that "Lum's people are used to a much spicier cuisine..."

Oddly enough, their sibling squabble seemed to resonate in the discussion that had occurred between Ran and Lum. Like so many of Urd's and her quarrels, Lum and Ran's had started off filled with friendly cordiality and concluded in a screaming match. Something about how Ran had gotten spanked by her mother for setting something on fire in her mom's kitchen when she and Lum were playing at trying to bake cookies when they were both in kindergarten.

Sucking on an ice cube, Skuld thought that the whole episode that had happened between Lum and Ran was patently ridiculous, totally lacking the validity of her contention with Urd. Urd had deeply wounded her pride by making fun of her bust size. No matter what, Urd always made fun of her bust size. And now, for some curious reason, Urd's teasing wasn't simply embarrassing, like it had been in the past. Now, _it mattered_!

And Skuld found herself very resentful at her sister.

For the past several years, she had wanted to "grow up"...and now that she had been mysteriously aged...she _was_ grown up. But it still wasn't enough for her older sister.

"Big Sister's always ruining everything that has to do with my bust! First, all those stupid 'Big Sister bust checks'. Then making fun of me when I had to learn how to wear an Earthrealm bra. Now, she's teasing me because some boys seemed interested in my bustline! And finally, she's acting all important because mine aren't as big as hers!" she grumbled irritably as she ate a sushi roll from Benten's bento pack.

There was a bottom line to all of this, in the fact that the Earthrealm's days were numbered unless she and Urd found a solution. Stupid Belldandy! Even if this Belldandy wasn't her _real_ sister...

She had never gone to war with her middle sister before.

And it would be a war, unless she could convince Lum to switch from Keiichi to Ataru. And even _if_ that could be managed, then there was the whole problem of Lum's Father. Would he accept Lum if she broke up with Keiichi and hooked up with Ataru? Some fathers tended to frown on such behavior.

Regrettably, Skuld surrendered to the fact that she would need to eat humble pie and patch things up with her sister. Of all the persons in their present group, Urd knew the most about all the in's and out's of human love relationships. Skuld didn't have a clue about how to attract boys...attracting boys was an unintended and irritating side-effect. One she would rather forget, because it always left her embarrassed and vulnerable. All she had to do was remember the time she was alone with Sentaro...and Urd, Keiichi and even Elder Sister Belldandy actually _spied_ on her, thinking she was going to kiss him! Skuld had to accept that her evasiveness around boys had left her with an ignorance of how to play matchmaker. But Urd was the quintessential matchmaker, even if her methods were overblown in the case of Elder Sister and Keiichi. She _did_ claim to be the "Goddess of Love"...

And Urd had been in love herself with an Earthrealm mortal.

But would Urd be willing to help out?

In normal circumstances, Skuld was certain that Urd would readily volunteer to play 'Cupid' with a pair of Earthrealm mortals. In fact, Urd would probably throw herself into the assignment with the single-mindedness that she experienced when she was working on a new invention. But this situation was less than desirable. Urd _wasn't_ normal...she was forgetful, spacey, prone to mood-vaults and very fragile. Enlisting her help could cause more harm than good.

This was one of those situations Skuld detested. The "I don't have any other choice" type of situation.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"I'm sorry, Big Sister."

"Eh? Are you talking to me, Skuld?"

"Yes I am! And I just wanted to say that I apologize for how I acted."

"Hmm, could you say that again?"

"I said...I'm sorry, Big Sister!"

"Skuld, I can barely hear what you're saying! Repeat after me: 'I apologize for being such a big-headed self-important brat, who is always pestering her Big Sister unnecessarily, and who is jealous that her big sister had bigger breasts and a prettier face...'"

"I am NOT saying any of that!" Skuld screamed shrilly. She reached for the nearest throwable and barely missed Urd's head with it.

Urd smiled at her younger sibling's angry face.

"Well, you can't fault me for trying to get you to say it," Urd said with a shrug of her shoulders. She rolled her eyes in resignation and admitted, "Okay...I forgive you! Besides, I was at fault as well. This stupid melancholy that I'm in causes me to feel so edgy. I seem to get irritated so easily..."

"Big Sister, can you say that again? I can't hear you..."

"I said that I'm at fault because I'm irritable, and because..." Urd started to repeat, until she heard Skuld's giggling.

"You _brat_!"

_"Bii--da!"_

In the background, Oyuki was heard to comment, "and I thought Ran acted childish..."

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

After much discussion, Skuld and Urd agreed that the mission objective had shifted from combating Belldandy to getting Lum together with Ataru. Truth be told, Skuld didn't know which would be worse for the Oni girl...her current 'husband' or the overtly sex-crazed Ataru. Skuld felt sorry for Lum, who seemed to be cursed to chase after men who didn't requite the love she had for them.

Urd had offered a number of useful suggestions, each replete with the deviousness that only she could devise: impersonation of Belldandy; outright bribery; a drunken blow-out seduction scene; getting Belldandy reassigned; forging the Almighty's signature; and summoning Peorth. Of all these, Skuld favored the one which involved a certain love potion.

The hardest part would be to convince Lum that getting back together with Keiichi would be impossible. In order to do this, she and Urd would have to visit the temple again.

It would be up to Big Sister Urd to make sure that the love potion she was going to concoct _would actually work_ this time. And to worsen matters, she would have to use 'primitive' methods, because she didn't have access to her familiar "Urd's Castle" lab. In other words, making a love potion might require straight-up cooked-from-scratch alchemy using only Earthrealm ingredients.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Hi Belldandy! Hi Keiichi!" Urd hailed in greeting as she walked past the two, Skuld in tow. She strolled down the hallway, feeling the crisp texture of the tatami underneath her feet. If her hopes were answered with truths, her hobby room would be the same as it was back home; fully equipped with all sorts of arcane materials, binding spells, mandalas, mystical icons and a full alchemistry lab. Otherwise she would have to do some major-league arcanical work.

She stopped in front of the familiar shoji door, which was lacking the "Urd's Castle" sign. This was to be expected, because this temple had formerly been the resident of Lum and Keiichi. In this reality, she and Skuld had never lived here. If this 'Belldandy' would have been as responsible as her real sister, she would have at least transported some of Skuld's and Urd's gear from Yggdrasil, in order to make these rooms appropriate for visits from her sisters.

Urd gulped as she imagined how crazy it would be to meet herself in this whacked-out version of reality...

When she slid the door open, she frowned at the sight.

The room was a chaos theory of boxes of old manga, discarded sports equipment, crumpled up newspapers, catshit, and several cases of Asahi beer.

"Shit!" Urd cursed under her breath.

This was going to be much more complicated than she thought. Skuld's look of intense concern steadied Urd's uneasiness. Urd regretted the fact that she was handicapped by her memory loss. Without her lab, she'd have to do everything from scratch. Would she be able to execute the arcanical formulae with any accuracy?

A nudging elbow from Skuld caught her attention, just as Keiichi rested his hands on her hips and squeezed. Jammed in the doorway, with Belldandy and Keiichi right behind Skuld and her, they were in tight quarters. Urd immediately gasped at his lecherous forwardness. The guy must be a practiced train groper, the way he was feeling around her...

"Sister Urd, what could be of such great interest in this room? It's just an old storage room..." Belldandy asked with wary curiosity. Urd squirmed as she tried to bat away Keiichi's hands. Lum was right about her husband...he _was_ a pervert! He was actually playing grabass with her hips!

"OWWW!" Keiichi screamed.

"Skuld, you didn't have to stomp on his foot! It's in his nature to do these things...to be inquisitive. Keiichi can't help it if he's perverted. It really isn't his fault," Belldandy said censoriously.

Skuld almost said "you're full of shit too!", but checked her tongue.

Urd silently thanked Skuld with her eyes for 'diverting' Keiichi's attention. She didn't come here to be groped by some loser who was impersonating her younger sister's fiancé!

But there still was the matter of her missing lab...

While mulling the contingencies of trying to use mortal technology and materials to mix up a love potion, Urd remembered her childhood. Centuries of difficult alchemistry assignments from the Proctors, accidental explosions, being tardy for her Prime Inculcation sessions because she didn't want to screw up, the alchemistry set that Mother and Father had given her for her birthday...

"Belldandy dear, could you do me a really major favor," Urd began.

"Depends on what it is, Urd. My wish assignment to protect Keiichi from Lum has me quite occupied at the moment. And knowing you, a 'favor' always arouses my suspicions," Belldandy answered. Skuld grinned at the implications of that remark.

"I understand. This would only take you a moment. Would it be possible for you to visit Mom and Dad's and bring back my alchemistry set from my old room?"

"Why would you want that old alchemistry set, Urd? You haven't dabbled with alchemistry in 200 millennia. Why, you were much more interested in chasing after BoyGods and stealing Sleipnirs than any actual work," Belldandy asked.

Much as she tried to stifle herself, Skuld let out a short whispered giggling. In this reality, Urd evidently wasn't an adept at arcanics or alchemistry...she had been boycrazy during her teen years!

Urd glanced at her giggling sisters. Even Keiichi was giggling. But she was too intent on her 'mission' to be embarrassed. She was also thankful...at least she _had_ an alchemistry set in this 'reality'. Which meant that she might have the necessary ingredients to mix up a "Flowering Ardor Special" potion.

"Please, Belldandy! I've been feeling...nostalgic...for my old things lately. And since I'm going to be here on the Earthrealm for a few more days, I'd really like to have them here with me," she lied.

"This isn't some trick to try and separate me from Keiichi, so you can have Lum come and sneak him away while I'm gone, is it?" Belldandy asked warily. Before Urd could answer, Skuld spoke up and confronted Belldandy.

"I can't believe you! You're a Goddess Relief Office worker, whose assignment is to grant wishes to those who desire them! And now your older sister is asking you to fetch her something from Yggdrasil...and you're debating with her! What kind of example is that? Just grant her wish already!"

Urd almost bit her lip in mirth as Belldandy blushed through the whole rainbow of shades of embarrassment. Skuld certainly had pounded her!

"I guess you're right...I _do_ have a reputation to uphold! I'll be back in a few moments with your alchemistry lab toy, Urd. But you both have to promise me that you'll do nothing to interfere with my work here while I'm gone. Which means that you have to leave Keiichi alone...oops! I mean that you'll can't do anything to interfere with the execution of his wish," Belldandy demanded.

She had almost slipped up and made them promise to leave Keiichi alone, Skuld noted to herself. In the literal sense, this would have left the door wide open for Lum to come fetch Keiichi. With Belldandy absent and no one protecting the temple house, there would be no way for Belldandy's special seals to prevent entry by certain young women. Which meant that Lum could break in with ease...a couple zakks of her lightning bolt powers and the doors would be flung wide open.

But Belldandy had caught her mistake before it was too late. So now she and Urd were committed to preserving their sister's special seals to prevent Lum and the others from breaking in and snatching Keiichi.

Too bad...it was a near miss.

Urd and Skuld both nodded their heads, regretful that Belldandy's "promise" hadn't left them a backdoor to smuggle Lum into the temple.

A moment later, the bathroom flashed neon bright as Belldandy used the mirror there to transport herself to Yggdrasil.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --


	86. Pt 86: Miyuki and Natsumi: Canone Third...

**Part 86: Miyuki and Natsumi: Canone -- 3rd Movement **

The day after Natsumi got out of the hospital, the two policewomen returned to the district they had been investigating, intending to jazz the local dime-droppers for hearsay about any major yakuza activities. All morning, Natsumi had tried her best to guilt-trip any junior bookies and yakuza they encountered, telling them "what kind of dishonorable scum would shoot a girl during a robbery!" as she fished them for information. But as the late September sun hovered high overhead, there still wasn't a viable lead to be had.

Miyuki possessed a sonar-like intuitive faculty that would warn her when a major crime was going to go down...and her intuition was going ballistic. Despite their lack of leads, she noticed that the yakuza community was getting pretty edgy about something. Subtle yet noticeable shifts in yakuza patterns told her this. To her experienced eye, slight changes in dress and mannerism, as well as the edgy fraternizing between rivals in certain gangs, informed her that they knew _something_. No one was spilling any useful info, but the junior gangsters were definitely nervous.

Something else was going ballistic as well, triggered by her mishap encounter with Ken's dad the other day. The close resemblance between Kenny's father and her fiancé was plaguing her like a poltergeist. Before the encounter, Miyuki had felt the pangs of homesickness brewing in a deep fugue of futility. Now, she found herself desperately awash, questioning why she and Natsumi were even trying to go through the paces of their investigation.

So much more was at stake for Miyuki...

True, an unknown criminal syndicate or agency had masterminded their kidnapping...and Miyuki knew that these same criminals were hard at work planning a "major crime". Their criminal adversaries had been sophisticated enough to see through their disguise; to be onto their cover. Why else would pseudo-yakuza thugs kidnap pseudo-hippiegirl students? And Fatscar had pretty much intimated that there was going to be an assassination attempt on a major political figure such as the Emperor or the Prime Minister.

But Captain 'Kitsune' wasn't buying Fatscar's squawk, believing that an assassination was too brazen a crime to be taken seriously. And yet, there was a much bigger problem than their investigation...one that no amount of detective work might be able to solve.

Miyuki knew that she was navigating between two realms of impossibility: the impossibility of being stranded four decades in the past...which was slowly becoming _now_ in her perspective; and the impossibility of returning _home_.

"How do we get back home?" her thoughts sirened their refrain. The sum of disorientation brought on by being in Sept 1969 was depressing her. The sea of strangetudes washed unrelenting tides of uncertainty against her sanity. It didn't help any that _everything_ she encountered served only to remind her of the vast gulf between 1969 and 20XX. 20XX was already several weeks behind her. She was afraid that she would become so acclimated to the 'now' that she would gradually lose her desire to return to the future that she remembered in her past. That a return to the era where she had lived her life...would be an impossible gap to bridge.

But, within the rubric of their investigation, Miyuki knew that the gap between the two of them and the reclusive Hirohito was even greater, figuratively speaking. Not to mention the fact that their undercover getup as hippie girls would consistently brand them as radicals. She seriously doubted that any of the politicians had ever even had a face-to-face contact with a hippie protester. Further, this Japan had been engaged in a protracted war with the Americans, through the indirection of the campaign in Vietnam. Which meant that Japan was under wartime security. At least it wasn't rife with the terroristic "secret thought police" of the pre-Pacific War Japan of the 1930s and 1940s; a regretful chapter from the history of the "real" Japan she hailed from.

The citizenry were too pleased with the rapid economic advances in personal income to mount any serious campaigns against the government...except for the college students and youth, who saw through the whole wartime commerce charade. To them, the economic boon didn't include all those young men who were being slaughtered in Vietnam. And as a member of this group...at least topically...she and Natsumi wouldn't be able to get within blocks of the Emperor, should he deign to make a rare public appearance.

She couldn't help it: whenever she thought "Emperor", Emperor Heisei's image came to mind. One more reminder that she was living in the past. Miyuki had to correct herself, as Akihito's reign was well-nigh 20 years into the future. The current Emperor was a graying Hirohito...

Her partner Natsumi was all but convinced that the Americans were going to make an attempt to assassinate Hirohito. Miyuki thought that such a plan would be an outlandish hostility; such a crazy act could start W.W. III if the attempt was successful. The barbarism involved in killing a Japanese Emperor would akin to a foreign power assassinating a head of state, or bombing a capital city.

All Hell would break loose.

And if the Americans did succeed in killing Hirohito, they couldn't even begin to estimate the profound impact such a foul atrocity would have on the heart and soul of the Japanese people. In this reality, Japan had "The Bomb" too...as well as missile bases in Saipan and Guam that could easily deliver it to American shores.

"Great...on top of everything else, we're poised on a possible nuclear war..." Miyuki muttered to herself. She quickly chided herself for slipping into paranoia. During her years on the force, she had learned the mental tools to keep from turning anxiety into paranoia. Every good policewoman did, otherwise she'd be a washout within a year...self-destructing on job-related stress. Several classmates from Miyuki's class at the Police Academy had suffered that fate.

"Huh? What're you saying Miyuki?" Natsumi mumbled, overhearing her partner's breathed strain of disillusion. Miyuki gulped deeply, trying to sort her thoughts out against the string of conjectures poised on her breath.

"Natsumi! I was thinking about your theory that someone is out to do a hit on the Emperor...and I think I might have an angle on it. What if those gangsters we ran into were a _diversion_? They could have gone after us to try and misdirect our investigation away from looking at the American gaijin. If they knew that we were undercover, they could make it look like they were trying to hit _us_. By doing so, it would full-on appear to be a gangster type thing, rather than some kind of espionage aimed at the government. If the Americans...or any other foreign power for that matter...wanted to push Japan into a more aggressive colonial policy, they would need to effectively remove the Emperor and most of the doves in the Democratic Liberal Party..."

"Which would mean that there would need to be a _series_ of high level assassinations, not just starting or ending with the Emperor, Miyuki!"

"Yep! But what could be worse than the Americans being caught red-handed in some kind of political hit? If someone high up in the government was killed, it would be insane for the Americans to be caught up in it!"

"But what if they made it look like some disaffected hippies were responsible?" Miyuki thought aloud with a shudder.

"Shit! If someone killed the Emperor and managed to shift the blame to the students and the hippies, then the warmongers in the Diet would have a carte blanche approval from the people to prosecute the war in Vietnam! Maybe even escalate it and invade Southern China!" Natsumi gasped out.

"So is it the Americans who are trying to pull the strings, or perhaps somebody from inside, maybe one of the Cabinet Ministers?" Miyuki asked.

"Hell, we can't even get the drop on the major yakuza action! We tried all morning to get leads. Now we're back in the same noodle shop, with the same noodles...and the same questions!" Natsumi said, bemoaning their lack of progress.

"No, Natsumi..._not_ the same questions! Look what's happening! We're beginning to draw together a scenario of the motives of these guys. A few days ago, we wouldn't have been able to rub two coins together to get a rabbit. Now, we know that it's a rabbit we're after," Miyuki said, trying to encourage herself as much as she was trying to bring cheer to her partner.

Of course, Natsumi being Natsumi, she was stubbornly skipping on the painkillers that the doctors had prescribed. The resulting pain made her partner prone to periods of smoothly resentful frustration.

"So what do we do now? If this is some big hurricane of conspiracy, what're we doing bothering with small-fry yakuza?" she asked.

"Hmm, perhaps we need to reinvestigate the people we've already crossed. Panther and Wolf are yakuza connected. Fatscar was connected with some gaijin types. We should dig around in the hole that we already started to dig out..." Miyuki reasoned.

"Totally! One thing these yahoos don't have on us is the fact that we've busted a shitload of 21st-century criminal types! Maybe we should stop trying to think like we're in 1969...and instead just be ourselves. _21st century policewomen_!! The criminals that _we've_ dealt with for the past several years are much more sophisticated, much more baseless and inhumane, much _worse_ than most of the creeps in this era. We just need to think about _nastiness_, and then we'll have an edge on the crims; basically, we'll be much more 'darker-minded' than they are. We need to get inside their heads, intuit their motives, and then take it up a notch in terms of corruption and immorality," Natsumi elaborated.

Miyuki thought that her partner was onto something. They _were_ from the future, a future that possessed a criminal element that was significantly more sociopathically bleak in many ways. They were used to dealing with gangsters who were smarter and more vicious than their predecessors in the 60s. So why not bring that same experience to bear on the current investigation?

Natsumi was right...if they could just profile their suspects with pathologies that were 'nastier' than their suspect's own motives, they might be able to develop enough investigative contingencies to outsmart the crims! They could deconstruct the modus of the crims, which would allow their detective work to step ahead of the perpetrators.

The traitors.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

They met with Wolf and Beatnik at Goblins for another night of dancing and drinking. Natsumi was actually beginning to like the old 60's music that was blaring from the shaggy heads playing like gypsies on the stage. Where else could one get live music like this for a pittance? What passed as a cover fee...was a pocket change by 20XX standards. As she looked around, she noticed once again that all the girls had _black_ hair; the hair coloring craze of the 80s and beyond wasn't happening in this era. True, there was the occasional girl who had bleached her hair, yet there was only a couple out of the crowd of hundreds. All the girls wore frayed jeans, mini-skirts, loud flower dresses and ponchos with tasseled trimming. The whole scene reminded Natsumi of a documentary that belonged on Fuji TV's history channel, rather than real life. She never imagined that she would be in the middle of the faces of yesterday...

Wolf had obliged them by bringing a few of his yakuza friends; a group of dour-faced young men who remained pretty mum until Natsumi started buying them drinks and acting the flirt. After a couple of hours of this, the information flowed quicker than the bar drinks being served to their booth table. Amidst the dusty orbits of cigarette and pot smoke, booze-air seasoned with dance-sweat, and wafting tribal psychedelic music...tongues began to wag.

"Even though everyone daresh to look the other way, _I'll_ tell ya..urp!..whash goin' on! One of da Bosshes ish doing something! T..top she..sheecret, too! Shomewhere in one of dose.._hic!_..bayfron warehoush in Kanagawa-Ku," one of the men blurted, his head wobbling unsteadily. He jerked his head back and gave Natsumi the chin.

"Which Boss?"

"Ah don' know everything, li'l ladysh! Ah heard it fromma one uh Ito'sh men! So doesh this mean tha we can leave this placesh an' head for a motel?"

"I think you need a few more drinks before we go off to have fun, big boy!" Natsumi said sarcastically. Wolf and Beatnik giggled, having experienced her 'shakedown' method first hand. They, of course, were only drinking half glasses of sake...having been drank under the table several times by Natsumi.

Meanwhile, Miyuki was trying to mentally picture the district the hoodlum had mentioned. Kanagawa was way out of the jurisdiction of the Bokuto Station, clear on the other side of Tokyo Bay. She remembered that the small Kanagawa Ward was situated virtually right in the middle of Kawasaki and Yokohama on the west side of the bay. Miyuki thought this location was too remote, until she remembered that there were a large number of trucking firms housed nearby. And then there was the Yokohama Harbor located a few km south.

The pain of joy is equal to its sequel, the joy of pain.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"We gotta get our own car! I can pick up a cheap used car and fix it up to run fast!" Miyuki pleaded, bowing deeply.

"Yeah, and I can paint some flowers and peace signs on it, so it'll fit right in with our cover," Natsumi pleaded, fawning in concert with her partner.

They watched nervously as Captain Kitsune stared then down with his narrowed beady eyes. Acting aloof, the Captain then turned his attention to one of the stacks of paperwork on his desk. Miyuki was used to their Captain's desk being mostly bereft of paperwork, since most of the reporting had been computerized for years, back in 20XX. But in 1969, everything was still paper-trailed and chopped with office stamps, organized to a degree that astounded Miyuki. Once again, she wondered how they ever got anything done with so many handwritten forms that needed to be filed. Watching the Captain, she was reminded of the old detective movie "Stray Dog"...

It was obvious that Captain Kitsune was deliberately ignoring her and Natsumi, making them sweat it out.

"Captain!! The lead is in Kanagawa-ku, for crisesakes! What're we supposed to do, ride the bus? Take a train out all the way 'cross town? _Walk_ there?"

Miyuki stomped lightly on Natsumi's foot, pointedly interrupting her rant. Natsumi was definitely in rant mode after the two got soaked in a late-September rain shower earlier today. Which meant that she had to change the heavy bandage wrap around her wounded collarbone and shoulder before they checked in at the station.

"What my partner is trying to say is that we need a better mode of transportation, so we can investigate our leads thoroughly. In other words, we need something _reliable_! Do we look like the kind of officers that would joyride around Tokyo in a department-budgeted unmarked car?"

Kitsune glanced up briefly from the folder he was reading, nodded in agreement, and then ignored her some more.

"Captain!! My shoulder is hurting, and I need to keep out of the rain! Besides, my feet are frickin' tired from walking, and we _have_ been spending thrifty. We've only used half our allowed per diems!" Natsumi urged.

Miyuki grimaced. Of course they had been spending half...in between buying drinks to glisten eyes and loosen mouths, they had to scrimp on the food budget. Lots of cup noodles and small portions of soupy udon at the cheapy ramen stands.

"What are you, a police officer or a mouse?" Captain Kitsune barked at Natsumi, causing her partner to flinch in synch with the words. As he eyed her down, he continued, "I've gotta whole goddamned precinct to run, and you're in here begging me for extra money so you can splurge it on some rundown car...and then spend even _more_ of the Department's money to fix it up into some kinda racecar! What the hell's the matter with you two?"

"When aren't you griping?!" Natsumi shouted, slapping her palms on the desk.

"Great! We're done for now..." Miyuki whispered under her breath.

"What was that you said, Officer Tsujimoto? Speak up, so we can all hear!" the Captain said in a bosso voce, glaring at her. Miyuki couldn't help but notice that the whole office suddenly had hushed into silence. Natsumi was paralyzed somewhere between an outburst and a nervous breakdown. And if Natsumi wasn't going to say it, Miyuki decided that she _would_.

"She said that you're _stingy_! With all due respect!"

In the background, somebody coughed and a couple male voices snickered.

"Miyuki!" Natsumi half-spoke, half-gasped as she saw the fisted hands of the Captain shivering as they rested on his desk.

"I'm sick of playing these games! My partner was injured last week in a gunfight! We busted a yakuza kingpin and are hot on the trail of trying to find out what the hell he was up to! A little cooperation on your part wouldn't hurt!" she shouted, slapping her hands on the Captain's desk just like Natsumi had done a moment earlier. Her eyes grew wide as a tall pile of papers on the corner of the Captain's desk leaned...and leaned...

And then fluttered to the floor, knocked over by one of her elbows.

"Shit!!" Miyuki and Natsumi both exclaimed.

The Captain eyed her piercingly. The whole office seemed to seize up like a blown motor. The only sound was a strangled gurgling that came from the metal coffee machine.

"Ya know, I was worried about the two of you for a moment! Ha ha ahah! But not anymore! I like 'em spirited on my squad! And you two certainly are a spirited pair of girlies! I would almost venture to guess that you've been partners for years, not just for a few months. I assigned the two of you to work together just this summer, and already you're arguing much less than I expected. Hell, you argue with _me_ more than you argue with each other! Who'd a thunk that? I would suggest that you encourage each other, rather than try and restrain each other. Stomping on an injured girl's foot to try and stifle her argumentative nature isn't very thoughtful now, is it Officer Kobayakawa? And putting your partner on the spot by not speaking up to your superior isn't very classy, is it Officer Tsujimoto?"

Despite being wide-eyed with astonishment, Natsumi and Miyuki didn't miss the paternal glitter in the Captain's eyes. The Captain had been flirting with them this whole time! Not in a romantic sense, but with the kind of testiness usually found in tart old men who thought too much of themselves.

The kind of old man the retired 'monk' called "Oshou" of their era was.

He was going to approve their request all along!

When they were both initially partnered up almost six years ago, the retired Kitsune had tested them by sending them on a snipe hunt. This younger version of the same man had tested them, only with words and attitudes rather than racing through the streets. It must have always been a part of his nature to play headgames with young women new to the force.

"Thanks, sir!" they both replied enthusiastically, bowing deeply to their superior officer. Captain Kitsune acknowledged their gratitude with a slight nod and a gruff grunt. Miyuki and Natsumi looked at each other and winked, then turned to walk away.

"HEY!! Aren't you two birds forgettin' something?"

Both policewomen halted in midstep. Miyuki and Natsumi nudged each other with their elbows both reluctant to answer his question.

"Answer his question!" "No...you answer his question!" they whispered. Finally, Miyuki gathered her nerves and asked, "What did we forget?"

"Get over here and pick up all these fuckin' papers you knocked all over the floor by my desk!" he shouted with an angry grin. "And sort 'em back in order alphabetically while you're at it!"

His angry grin turned to a smirk as two mini-skirted policewomen immediately fell to doing his bidding.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

After touring several used car lots, Miyuki was at a loss. She had been looking with a particular drift of mindset: she wanted a car that was sporty, yet affordable; whose engine could be readily cammed up and otherwise tweaked; and something that was rugged while being comfortable. Beyond this, she had to consider Natsumi's injury; her partner would never complain of shoulder and discomfort, but some of these cars would give anyone a stiff neck after a couple hours. Ergonometric concepts weren't even factored into the designs of the cars of this era. The driving ambition of Japanese automakers was utility: they wanted nothing more than an inexpensive, reliable car.

She remembered reading an interesting article in one of her car mags about the "People's Car" initiative of the mid-50s. In 1955, the Ministry of Trade and Industry (MITI) proposed the idea of developing a national people's car in an effort to "get Japan on the road" to economic recovery...and a few years later, the popular car was born. A number of automakers scrambled to develop a car that would live up to this ideal. Furthermore, during the hectic boom years of the 1960s, increased sales accompanied the high-paced economic growth. Markets were managed so as to keep pace with rising consumer demands as the technological levels rose to allow for efficient mass production of better autos.

But buying a new car was definitely out of the question.

Clearly disappointed by her failure to find a good used car, Miyuki reluctantly decided upon buying a '62 Mitsubishi 500 A11 that she had checked over, two used-car lots ago. It was a toss up between that, a '59 Subaru 360 K111, and a '61 Toyota Publica. The Toyota was definitely not her style; its compact 4 door chassis was all efficiency and economy...with no style. It looked like a matchbox on wheels. And the Subaru was underpowered. Most of the cars in the six lots she visited earlier were models that were rustbuckets or engine-flawed.

But a perspicacious and honest retailer told her that he knew of a lot that might have a line on a '61 Toyo Kogyo/Mazda R360 Coupe in good condition. Miyuki promised to tip him if his referral turned on a genuine coin.

"We gotta go to _one more_ car lot? This is the worst!" Natsumi complained wearily. She knew that Miyuki was on a mission...and not just any mission...she was engaged in car buying.

"Look, Natsumi...I _have_ to check this last lead out!"

"You mean you have to indulge your car fever, Miyuki!"

"Whatever!" Miyuki sniped. "If I really wanted to indulge my car fever, I'd just boost a '64 Corvette from some rich corporate VP and take it on a joyride!"

"Yeah, right! You just want to make my life even more miserable!"

They continued arguing light-heartedly in that vein until they reached the small used car lot, sandwiched between two strips of shops and eateries.

Miyuki immediately was drawn to a pale yellow 2-door car. It _looked_ antique, with its two tiny round headlamps, no grille in the front, flimsy weld-on fender and bumper assemblies, and its 'streamlined' rounded hood and trunk.

In a word, it looked _cute_!!

"We came all the way for _that_? It looks like a bumper-car from Tokyo Disneyland or one of those Bayfront amusement parks!" Natsumi groused. Yet, she was secretly pleased at the bright eyes Miyuki was making...maybe this would trim off a little of her partner's depression.

Miyuki quickly hailed a salesman.

"Isn't this a Mazda R360 KRBB?"

"Yes, and she's in fine condition, isn't she!" one of the lotsmen replied with the singsong cadence of an experienced salesman.

"Sooo...this car has the rear-mounted rear-drive 356cc air-cooled V2 OHV 16 horsepower engine?" Miyuki inquired. Without waiting for an answer, she continued. "Is it the two-speed automatic or the four-speed semi-automatic? Her monocoque body sure does have a sporty look...I would go as far as to say she looks pretty sexy, don't you think?"

Natsumi giggled as the salesman almost choked in response to Miyuki's frankness. In the midst of her enthusiasm, Miyuki was totally forgetting that women in the late 60s didn't act or speak like 'NewStyle' Japanese women.

Or had her partner miscued? Perhaps Miyuki was trying to get leverage on the salesman by freaking him out...in order to pressure a lower price out of him. Too bad Aoi didn't get zapped back into the past with them...it would have been a blast watching how this guy would react to a transvestite!

"I bet she's fitted with a full rack-and-pinion steering assembly. How's the four-wheel independent suspension incorporated rubber torsion springs?"

"Missy...how can a, pardon me, how can a hippie girl like you know so much about cars?" the salesman stammered.

Moments later, Natsumi smiled as Miyuki had transformed into her old self. She was bending over the trunk of the car, deep into the engine compartment, asking questions about the motor that baffled the salesman. What was even more comic was the fact that she had forgotten that she was wearing one of those mini-skirts that were the rage in 1969...and almost every set of male eyes in the lot and on the sidewalk were staring at her appreciably!

"We'll buy her! And can you throw in some body paint for her? We want to paint her!" Miyuki said excitedly as she withdrew from the engine compartment. The men nearby resumed their tasks as the sales dude went back to the office to fetch the necessary papers.

"Oh shit! I forgot! I don't have a license...at least a license I can show 'im. How're we going to register this car in my name when all I have is a 20XX Special Division License?"

"No worries...just leave it to me, Miyuki! Actually...you should leave it to your 'uncle' Kitsune!" Natsumi said with a giggle, pointing at the pay phone. The look of reluctance on Miyuki's face was priceless.

"If you want this car so bad...then _you're_ gonna be the one who calls the Captain to get a clearance!"

"Natsumi, that's so _unfair_!"

"Yep! Life's a bitch, ain't it, Miyuki?"

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Once she got behind the wheel of the Mazda, Miyuki realized that she would have died and gone to Siberia and back to own this car. She had never driven an antique 2-speed automatic before; therefore, the novelty of driving this mini-coupe was totally exhilarating to her. The seats were just perfect, stiff but not rock-solid, and the car handled with a rudiment of vigor. It was truly a car designed in the 50s, its chassis was much smaller than any of the various patrol cars she had driven before. As she drove it back to the apartment, her mind was already churning through various tweaks she could perform on the engine, given the availability of auto parts. A shuddered Fall downpour announced the presence of a squeaky windshield wiper; as the stiff rubber blade scratched across the curved transparent chalkboard of the front window. She had completely forgotten that these cars only had a single wiper blade for the front window! The screeching and blurred view reminded Miyuki unpleasantly of the need to work on their new car _soon_. She made a mental note; she would have to try and get Wolf or Beatnik to set her up with a place to garage it for a few days, so she could rebuild the engine. And fix some of the small problems, like the squeak-vocal wiper blades and the 'missing' horn...

"Nothing's ever perfect," she sighed to herself as they pulled into an alleyway near their apartment.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

They had spent a good deal of the night before discussing the division of assignments. How should they modify their new car? Of course, Miyuki would take on the responsibility for the repairs and spec boosting mechanical work...which left Natsumi with the task of creating an appropriate "look" for the Mazda that would fit right in with their cover.

"This ain't fair, Miyuki! You already know about repairing cars! You know what to do to make this car run better!" Natsumi groused. "But I don't have a clue about how to camouflage our new car so it looks like it belongs to two radical college students!"

"It isn't that easy for me, either! I'm used to working on cars with _real_ engines, Natsumi! This engine only has 16 horsepower...why, Ken's motorcycle engine displaces more power!" Miyuki shot back.

"But you're a _magician_ when it comes to working on cars! Remember that trashed Subaru R2 SS that you fixed up..."

"...and _you_ re-trashed, after all my hard work!" Miyuki finished in an icy voice.

"Well sorry, Ms. Perfect, but we were chasing a ratbag car salesman who was driving a souped-up car crammed with high performance parts he'd jacked from dozens of elite cars..." Natsumi corrected her partner.

"How could I forget? 'Rolling Thunder Turn!!' 'Natsumi Power Kick Brakes!!' By all the Buddhas...we nearly got _killed_! Because you were driving! Well, you're _not_ driving this car. It's a lot more fragile that that Subaru!" Miyuki said with emphatic determination.

"Who says that I _want_ to drive our car? I _hate_ stick shifts anyway," Natsumi countered.

"Natsumi, when I was working on your Subaru, I had the precinct garage at my disposal, plus all my connections for parts, plus my full set of power tools...and most importantly, I had Kenny, who spelled me with cans of coffee and compliments every couple hours. Now, I don't have any of those perks. So I don't want to hear you grumbling idiotically about 'Miyuki's got it so easy!' Okay?" Miyuki said with a wan smile.

Natsumi put a finger on her chin, pondering the logic of Miyuki's points. Actually, this was one of those times when her partner was unquestionably _right_! She would have to muffle any thoughts of complaint. But still, how was she going to 'decorate' the car?

"Okay, I gotchya! But how am I going to paint this car so it looks psychedelic? I'm a 21st-century woman! And I'm definitely no artist!" Natsumi said sourly.

"Hmmm, that's true. Guess we're both handicapped!" Miyuki agreed. "Let me think on that one..."

A half hour later, Miyuki's insight seared with a wonderful idea. They had been discussing possible plots, trying to get inside the conspirator's heads to arrive at a meaningful approximation of their M.O.

"Natsumi! I got it!"

"You know who's gonna try and kill the Emperor?" Natsumi asked excitedly.

"No, not that!" Miyuki said, frowning. "I know how we can refurbish our car so it blends in perfectly with our cover!"

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Miyuki had thought up the idea of having Wolf and Beatnik invite a few of their friends over for a "car painting party". She explained to Natsumi that...since neither of them had any 1960s fashion sense and their grandmothers weren't available to be consulted about such matters...that they would have to look for a different resource. Which happened to be a phone call away.

Beatnik, Wolf and their friends were about as 60s as anyone could be. They were _the real thing_! For them, an art project like this wouldn't be some pastiche of retro-nostalgia. Their ideas and execution would totally be flavored with the zeitgeist of this youthful, rebellious era...

The plan was for Miyuki and Natsumi to throw a little party in the garage that Wolf had found for them, give the boys and their girlfriends a set of paint cans and paintbrushes...and let 'em go to work. One thing they didn't prepare for was the garage's other occupants to join in.

Beatnik was a part-time roadie for a band called "Aurora"; it was he who scored them a place to work on the Mazda. Unfortunately for the two policewomen, it was also the band's rehearsal and practice digs. So while Miyuki was hard at work refitting the engine, she was 'treated' to a liberal amount of pot smoke and a four-piece rock band kicking out the jams...

Natsumi was merciful enough to get her a set of earplugs.

So when they announced the painting party, word somehow got out to the band members of "Aurora", who decided to bring their friends and groupies as well. Thus, instead of having a small gathering of six to eight persons, the painting effort involved almost 30.

And that's when things started getting bizarre...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Miyuki was looking at her paintbrush, then at the image of a flower that she had just painted on the Mazda. The petals seemed to flow, moving along the contours of the quarterpanel...as if they were blowing in a gentle breeze.

"NO!! Not the windshield, you idiots!" she overheard Natsumi screaming.

"Way cool, babe! Besides, who needs to see out of a windshield, huh?"

"Yeah...the squares don't realize that if you paint the windshield, you can still drive okay because the sun'll shine right through it!" a girl agreed with a stoned slur.

"What if someone wants to drive at night?" Natsumi challenged angrily.

"Look's like someone's loaded," Miyuki thought to herself with a chuckle. She returned her attention to the orange flower she was carefully trying to paint on the driver's side door of the car...and saw a green caterpillar crawling up it.

"Hi, Miyuki!" the caterpillar said.

Miyuki shook her head like a wet dog, trying to clear it. But the green insect was still on the petal, and now it was waving to her with dozens of hands.

"Oops, sorry! I didn't mean to spill green paint on that pretty flower you're working on!" a girl said to her.

Miyuki snapped back to reality.

"Natsumi! We need to talk!" Miyuki shouted, as the caterpillar turned into a butterfly before her eyes and flew off towards the nearest ceiling light. Everything was looking coily, like some warped version of an Escher painting.

"NO!! Not the headlights, you clowns!" she heard her partner scream in frustration.

"Why not? They would look better if they were blue! Why do they have be clear and white? Everything's so plain in this world. What if people were actually crystals? Then they could reflect light off each other! Wouldn't that be _groovy_? Just like the Bentora Space People!" she heard Beatnik explain.

"I don't think the police would appreciate that! What if some policewoman would confuse the headlights with her uniform?" Natsumi said. "By the way, did you know that..snicker..my friend Miyuki and I...hee hee, _we're_ cops! Yep, we're the fuzz!"

Miyuki felt a moment of panic, but then she noticed that her paintbrush seemed to be painting the air with its black bristles. She moved her hand and a 'fan of hands' seemed to stretch behind it. Blurred visual echoes, like some sci-fi movie.

Natsumi watched her partner, who was perched on the ceiling waving her hand in front of her eyes. She looked like she was conducting an invisible symphony orchestra. As if on cue, strains of violin music started up...

"What're you doing sitting on the ceiling, Miyuki?" she shouted as she blinked her eyes, squeezing them shut at the sight. When she opened them, Miyuki was back on the floor. Now, she was painting her fingers orange.

Everything seemed orange. The music had words that seemed to melt just before she could hear them. Natsumi regarded the half-painted windshield of the Mazda, blurs of arms and hands painting it with glowing neon-bright colors. A harbor of fear swept upon her; the imperfection of glass in the windshield threatened to swallow her...imprisoning her in the car itself.

"This garage...it's a _cage_! And I'm trapped!" she thought. She tried to scream, but her voice filled her ears with flute-like sounds.

"Hey, are you okay?" a man in a white suit asked her.

"What...did you..put in my sake?" she mumbled.

"Just a large sugarcube of acid. Nothing to worry about...LSD is good for helping along the creative process. Enjoy your trip, babe!" the man with the samurai suit said to her, painting the car with slashes of his katana blade.

Natsumi looked at Miyuki, but instead saw herself in the rearview mirror of the car.

She was painting her face...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Miyuki...if I'm alive, please tell me that I have a few brain cells leftover to rub together..." Natsumi moaned. A bright stripe of light illuminated the base of the sheetmetal garage door. The glow was harshness to her eyes, causing Natsumi to realize that it was already mid-day. She couldn't believe the amount of cobwebs in her thoughts; it was as if part of her mind had been dissolved into mush.

"Wow...so that's what it's like?" was all her partner could manage. Natsumi realized that the drugs must have hit Miyuki harder. Natsumi realized that some time during the painting party, someone must have spiked her sake with some LSD. She had experimented with marijuana a couple times in junior high school like the rest of her friends, but she didn't like the high, and she was disgusted by how some of her friends craved it. But the experience of last night wasn't a "_high"_...it was a nightmare. How could people take such a powerful drug for 'recreation'?

No wonder the 60s was such a crazy decade!

She couldn't remember a thing after 8pm last night. The last thing she recalled was glancing at the clock, whose hands seemed to be playing badminton with the numbers on its face. After that, her recollection was blurred into nonsense. Men in white coats, talking horses, and rabbits riding tofu peddler carts...

"Uh, Natsumi...what color am I?" Miyuki asked. Natsumi worried that her partner was still tripping; she remembered reading during her police academy training about how some people took drugs...and never came back. She uttered a mental prayer that Miyuki wasn't one of them.

She looked at Miyuki, who was gesturing towards her face with orange-colored hands.

"You're a beautiful Japanese girl with bobbed blue hair, whose face is painted green, orange and purple," she answered truthfully. Miyuki groaned at this as she stood up, quite wobbly on her feet. She stumbled over and sat down on a footbench. And looked at her Mazda...the car she had toiled over for almost a week.

"WHAT THE HELL?! They painted the _whole car_!! Windshield, brake lights, headlights, tires, fender and bumper..._everything_!" Miyuki shouted in exasperation. Then she opened the door and abruptly face-faulted at the 're-designed' interior, complete with painted steering wheel, painted seats, painted door handles, painted speedometer…

"All hail the psychedelic Sixties!" Natsumi moaned in sympathy as she looked the car over.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

So far, they had been tear-gassed, kidnapped, dosed with LSD...and they still didn't have a clue about how they had gotten stranded four decades in the past.

Both Miyuki and Natsumi were gripped by a fierce howling hum of resentment after having to spend an extra half-day undoing the damage of the night before. Using scrapers, they carefully peeled the many coats of paint off all the hard surfaces such as the windows and fender, finishing the job with generous applications of elbow-grease and an industrial strength cleaner. After working up a shirt-soaking sweat doing this, they turned their attention to the rest of the car, scrubbing the paint off the tires and other softer surfaces with paint thinner. The paint thinner made both policewomen feel ill; a light-headed slight return to the acidtrip they had been subjected to the night before. Then Miyuki popped the trunk engine compartment, only to sag to the floor in disgust and throw her scrub rag across the 'garage'. Someone in the midst of a drug-induced zeal had opened the hood and ambitiously painted all the visible rubber hoses and lines in the engine in bright colors...

"I'm gonna kill 'em!" she shouted.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

As it turned out, the car _was_ totally painted in the erratic-yet-groovy 60s theme she and Natsumi had wanted in the first place. After another two days of work, Miyuki dubbed their car the "Fuzz Bug" and took it on a road test. Natsumi even agreed that "Fuzz Bug" was the best name for her, considering her birthing process...

Miyuki was pleased with her work on the Fuzz Bug. She had performed a number of mechanical marvels...complete component overhauls...to try and squeeze as much HP out of the rear-mounted engine as she could. She had increased the flow in the expansion chambers, bored out piston blocks, reinforced the drive chain, shaved the carburetor, calibrated a whole slew of moving parts by sight; in other words, she had given the Fuzz Bug the works. Lacking any proper tools, it was the best she could do.

Despite the fact that Tokyo's population in 1969 was less than half of what it was in 20XX, the Tokyo of 1969 was far more traffic congested than the Tokyo of 20XX. Miyuki remembered her history; the sudden influx of residents during the boom years of the 1960s had completely overwhelmed the Tokyo infrastructure as the population growth greatly exceeded the levels anticipated by urban planners. The result was a stifling commuter deadlock on most roads. But she never expected to experience it firsthand. As she sat in traffic, she realized that she had taken for granted the huge number of public works projects that had eased traffic. Projects such as the Trans-Bay Expressway, the numerous Teito and Metro subway network lines, and the decentralized "satellite towns" and re-urbanized "New Towns" like Makuhari...were either unbuilt or not even on the drawing boards yet.

The drive was cramped and smogged out as Miyuki made her way north, wanting to escape the crowded city streets. The jamtight road system made her feel like she was climbing a steep hill rather than driving out of town. Finally, the congestion started to thin out.

Almost as an afterthought, Natsumi reached over and switched the radio on...

_"...traffic is backed up for 7-10 Km on the Northbound and Southbound lanes of Nikko-Kaido Hwy 4..."_

"Geez, tell me something I _don't_ know!" Miyuki said somberly.

_"...Meanwhile, in our war in Vietnam, our forces continue to tighten their stranglehold on Hanoi. Most supply routes in and out of the capital have been seized for several weeks now, and Gen. Numida estimates that the Communist Government will capitulate by the end of the year or early 1970 at the latest. This victory will provide a key starting point for the northward offensive planned for summer of 1970. Currently, there is terrific debate in the Diet about the prudence of such an incursion into Southeast China, and the British continue to warn Japan not to threaten their sovereignty over Hong Kong..."_

"Just what I wanted to hear. I can't believe they're actually thinking about invading lower China! The Chinese must hate us for holding onto Manchukuo for all these years since the Pacific War. And how do you think the Americans will react? You can bet that the Soviets won't mind, since China has been a thorn in their side..." Natsumi commented on the news broadcast in a voice laced with regret and disgust.

"Natsumi! What the hell are you saying? You're talking like you _belong_ here...as if there had never been a life for both of us in 20XX," Miyuki exclaimed, inserting confrontation into the closed cabin of the Mazda.

"How do you know if we'll _ever_ get back, Miyuki? Have you considered the possibility that this might be a one-way trip? What if the power that brought us here decides to _leave_ us here, huh? What then? How long will it take before we are forced to admit that we're going to have to live the rest of our lives in this era of Japan's history? How long will it take _you_ to accept the truth, Miyuki?! We've already been here over _six_ weeks! Even if I don't want to face the reality that we're stuck here, how in the Kami's name can I keep that reality _from facing me_? From rubbing off on me? Just like now...I wasn't even aware that I was caught up in an anti-war sentiment! How could I be? The Japan that I spent my whole life in has never been to war. And, no matter what, I can't stand the idea of young guys _our age_ getting blown to bits thousands of kilos away in some goddamned jungle! Can you?"

"That's not the point, Natsumi! We're just policewomen...we can't stop a war! Yeah, it really sucks that all those young college guys are getting killed. If they were in the Japan we grew up in, they'd be cutting loose with parties at school. I won't argue that! But I'm _not_ giving up hope that I can return to 20XX! I have a _fiancé_ waiting there for me! You don't. So how could you even begin to understand what I'm going through being stuck here!" Miyuki argued back, stepping on the brake.

Natsumi reached over with her foot and stomped down on Miyuki's foot, causing the Fuzz Bug to accelerate.

"You can't solve everything by stopping in traffic, Miyuki!"

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

As she watched the millipede glow of Tokyo's night lights through the window of their small flat, Miyuki reflected on her partner's admonition. That afternoon, Natsumi's words had left an indelible handprint on her thoughts, as if she had been slapped in the face. She had been so caught up in her frustration at being in 1969, she had actually stopped in traffic to argue with Natsumi. Reluctantly, she reckoned with the truth that seemed to lie just under the surface of Natsumi's remark. Was it wise to put her life on hold while hoping for some miracle to return Natsumi and her to 20XX?

Was she wrong to resist the flow of life here?

What would happen if she had to spend the rest of her life here? Would she be able to let go of Kenny? Her heart was punctured with weariness...weary from so much grieving for her dear Kenny Nakajima. Miyuki felt as if she had been widowed before even being married. Would she be able to find another man to take his place? No...no man could take Kenny's place in her heart. She and Kenny were a match made in heaven. Which meant that any man she did fall in love with in this era would remain in Kenny's shadow, in her heart. Could she spend the rest of her career in the past, working at Bokuto...waiting for the microwave oven, the personal computer, cable TV and a thousand other amenities to be invented? Or would she waste away, martyring herself against the future that could have been?

Was she just a quiet voice in traffic, trying to get attention by standing still in the middle of the queue?

Miyuki felt suicidal.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Natsumi was increasingly concerned about the gradually worsening sullenness she was noticing in her partner's demeanor. Miyuki's vital spark had seemed to diminish itself beginning in about mid-October. She just wasn't _there_...whenever Natsumi would talk to her about important matters, she seemed distant and unhearing. Her enthusiasm for pursuing the case they were investigating was lagging as well...

It was as if Miyuki seemed resigned to planning her life with a defeatist attitude. Natsumi could relate to this sense of brooding frustration, as she too was pinioned between the pincers of the same unwelcome fate. But last weekend, while she was shopping at the local grocery store, Natsumi found herself gently surrendering to the fact that she and Miyuki would probably have to spend the rest of their lives here. Shopping at the local mom-and-pop mart had become routine. And it wasn't _that_ uncomfortable.

That night, she decided that if she had to give up on the dream of returning back home to the 21st Century, then she would hang onto that dream with open hands. It just wasn't worth it to be miserable all the time over something that she couldn't change. A wise Buddhist nun had once said that serenity could only be achieved only when one holds all things in detached reverence; trouble as well as consolation, misfortune as well as success, life as well as death, distress as well as comfort, nakedness as well as clothing, infirmity as well as health...

1969 as well as 20XX.

Natsumi felt saddened by her friend's condition. She felt utterly powerless to relieve Miyuki of her grief. For all the years she had known Miyuki, she had come to learn that her partner had a hard time letting things go. Miyuki would hang onto her views with a deathgrip, if need be.

"Miyuki's my best friend in the whole world, bar none. Like me, she's a fighter at heart. But this may be the one fight that she can't win," Natsumi thought to herself dejectedly as she observed Miyuki sitting next to the window sill, staring out at the grey chill sky. She just wished that Miyuki could simply accept their lot, without going to war with the sum of her abandonments on her sleeve.

Still, they had uncovered no new leads...even though they had driven all over Tokyo every day for the past several weeks. Any suspicious activity that they got a lead on quickly went underground as soon as they started investigating. Natsumi had the distinct sense that they were being led astray on a wild rabbit hunt...

To complicate matters, she found herself falling in love with Panther. He had shown up unexpectedly at Goblins one night, and Natsumi had accepted his offer to dance. One thing led to another, and soon she was dancing tight against his chest. It wasn't the booze or the music that night...she was just too lonely and scared, and his warmth felt good. The next morning, she debated with herself so viciously, she had wound up with a migraine headache.

She never would have imagined that she could develop an affection for a man who was a known criminal...such a fascination was in complete annulment of common sense and personal ethics...but nevertheless, she _had_ feelings for him. Unlike most of his yakuza peers, Panther was a true gentleman. Most yakuza would have tried something by now, but Panther was respectful enough to be sensitive to Natsumi's tentativeness about being involved with a gangster. Still, she found herself craving a passionate sexual encounter with him in a hotel or remote onsen...

Despite Miyuki's heartened protestations, Natsumi couldn't keep Panther out of her mind. The phone exerted a pull on her that she hadn't felt since she was in high school; as soon as they got home, she had to call him to check up on him. It was frustrating as well, because he wasn't there to answer her calls most of the time. Natsumi was irritated by the fact that there were no answering machines or cell phones in 1969.

Being involved with Panther also meant that she had to be very careful about what she said during carefree moments in his presence. Natsumi drew up an uneasy boundary between personal information and investigative disclosure: she could discuss her feelings with him, but not much else. Another subject they never discussed was the fatalistic realities of their relationship that could spell doom for either of them. At any given moment, she might have to arrest him...or he might be ordered by his boss to do a "hit" on her.

Their relationship was already turning out to be a liquid tension experiment...and she hadn't even gotten laid by him yet!

Natsumi had juggled a symphony of notions in her mind about Panther. She was concerned that she was more in love with the fantasy than with the man. His 'Robin Hood' lifestyle intrigued her. Was she more enchanted with it than she was with him? This was an opinion that Miyuki had too freely offered as of late. Granted, he was definitely the dangerous type; involved with fights, gambling and drug deals...but he seemed to be something more. Natsumi couldn't quite put a finger on it.

She _could_ put on a finger on the fact that she was feeling guilty. Her guilt was couched in a dual sense of betrayal. She was having romantic fun while her best friend was pining away for her fiancé. And she had basically ignored Miyuki's warnings about fraternizing with "the crims".

Natsumi knew that her heart often held sway over the cautious addresses of her mind; which several times had led to emotional disasters with the men in her past. There was always Miyuki to pick up the pieces. Even her relationship with Sgt. Tokairin had turned sour when he chose to be transferred from Bokuto. Granted, it was a career-making opportunity, but Natsumi still had felt bitter. She was sure that he was "the One"...and yet he had chosen a job over her. After this, she swore to herself that she'd never get close to another policeman again. It might work for Miyuki and Kenny...but it would never again work for her.

But being with Panther only jetted the stakes far higher than Natsumi could ever imagine. She was the only one that Miyuki could turn to...and now she was gradually alienating her partner because of her choice of lovers. It was rather obvious; Natsumi _knew_ that Miyuki was feeling betrayed and not talking about it.

The only betrayal that is worse than a betrayal between best friends was the betrayal that murdered lovers.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

They were driving on patrol in Kamakaya, north of central Tokyo. Wolf had tipped them with a hearsay lead that there was going to be a big yakuza gangup meeting at a fruit warehouse there.

Miyuki was definitely feeling in a funk. Natsumi had done the inexcusable...going out with a known yakuza thug. And yet, she found it in her heart to have a little empathy for her partner. Miyuki felt as lonely as lady in the flame in the folktale...and she harbored no doubts that her partner was just as lonely. She remembered the old folktale her grandmother used to narrate when she was a young girl, almost hearing Granny's voice as if it had just been told to her yesterday...

_One of the Fujiwara Princes used to call upon one the Empress's attendant ladies, Kochujo by name, on a regular basis. It was obvious to all that she was deeply enamored of him. While he was away on a provincial assignment, she pined for him so heartily that her image manifested in a candle flame one evening. The other ladies-in-waiting didn't know that this was an omen for cremation, so they didn't act on the warning; they let the candle burn itself down until the flame died. Soon, Lady Kochujo fell deathly ill. It was murmured in court that her affliction was due to how direly she missed her Prince. _

_Several days before he returned, the Prince dispatched a poem to her residence to inform her that he would soon be by her side once again. On the day he was to return, he received her reply. A single word was written on the scented paper: Toribeno. _

_The crematory grounds._

_Holding the letter fast to his heart, as if the paper itself was Lady Kochujo's heartbeat, the young Prince rushed back to Kyoto with great haste. But his haste was for naught, because on his arrival he was detained by the rule of the court...like all nobles returning from the frontier regions, he was mandated to report to the Emperor. Once he finished his audience with the Emperor, the young prince hastened to Lady Kochujo's quarters in the Imperial Compound, only to find that she had breathed the 'breath that couldn't be spoken' the night before._

_White as snow in their mourning, the serving maids for Lady Kochujo tearfully told him that she had been taken to the Toribeno. The state of the young Prince's heart could easily be imagined._

...The story ended there, except for an admonition to not ignore a candle flame if one finds one's image in it. Miyuki secretly suspected that the young Prince had committed suicide soon after the death of his loved one. At least, a suicide would have been a _proper_ ending to the tragic tale of a doomed romance.

As often as she felt the impulse to kill herself, Miyuki sensed that Natsumi was experiencing just as much stress. Being relatively single and carefree, it was natural for her partner to seek companionship in male company to fend off the ennui and hopelessness.

Knowing Natsumi's track record with men, Miyuki could see Panther coming from a hundred kilometers away...

She and Natsumi would need to talk, and soon. Things were getting too uncomfortable between the two of them. She trusted Natsumi...somewhat...but her partner's love affair with Panther was an "11 out of 10" on the riskiness scale. And probably a "20 out of 10" on the stupidity scale.

Now was as good as a time as any...

"Natsumi, we need to discuss some things..." Miyuki started in her most diplomatically polite voice, when the music on the radio suddenly was cut off, replaced by the familiar strains of the Kimigayo.

"Why would they be playing the Japanese National Anthem at this time of the day?" Natsumi asked.

_"This is a special news announcement of the Imperial Household Broadcasting Network! Today, our glorious Vietnam Expeditionary Forces have successfully concluded their siege of Hanoi by capturing the Northern Capital! Last night, military tribunals convicted and executed Ho Chi Minh and all of his Cabinet officers. In the wake of this significant military victory, the Imperialist ambitions of the Americans have been thwarted._

_With the defeat of both their twin puppet governments in Hanoi and Saigon, a new day is dawning for our Nation!!_

_"In recognition of this military achievement, Emperor Hirohito has decided to convene an extraordinary session of both houses of the Diet, to be held beginning Tuesday, December 4th 1969..."_

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Nightmared by the news announcement, Natsumi felt like she was a shuttlecock, bouncing back and forth between the various roles she found herself counterfeiting: hippiechick, undercover detective, and a young woman from 20XX who was living in a past. Clumsily sifting between deceptions and realities, she found her emotions straining against the hilt as she attempted to strike a balance. With wormwood irony, these very efforts...intended to steady herself against her sense of displacement...had resulted in just the opposite. Instead of centering her, the concord being struck between opposites caused the various 'roles' she played to begin to blend into identities. Damaged ornaments of herself. With each palpable drift away from the woman she had been, Natsumi was painfully aware of how each 'persona' was eroding her self-confidence. Life in 1969 always seemed to meet her head-on with unrelenting dissonance, plumbing her fears at times when she least expected it.

20XX seemed like a distant shadow of itself. As for her own sense of character, it was as if her own shadow had suddenly been given a voice, and was forcefully trying to persuade her that _she_ wasn't real.

Beyond the blemishes against her selfness, Natsumi's sense of uncertainty was further driven by the fact that she was falling in love. The familiar sway between ecstasy and fatalism was once again thumping in her breast...an invisible amorous string that seemed to entwine her life with Panther's. Despite it all, whenever she was around him, his presence seemed to assure her of herself. With a magic of its own, being with Panther seemed to ward off the chaos.

But her relationship with Panther was a strange brew of heady passion and disturbing omens. At times, Natsumi was uncertain about the impulses that fueled her feelings towards him. He was young, handsome, ambitious and daring, charming...and a mid-tier Yakuza. It was quite reasonable...according to Miyuki...that her awakening love for Panther was the result of a form of irrationality in the face of their situation. Miyuki believed that since she was stranded in the past, all alone, she was compromising herself with poor reasoning. She had even suggested to Natsumi that "falling in love with Panther would be just as crazy as falling in love with Strikeman!" The double darts of improbability and impermanence poked into the flesh of her heart even deeper, because in her heart of hearts...she knew that Miyuki was speaking the truth. Panther was a yakuza mid-boss; too young to be an over-boss, but also too experienced to be an underling.

In other words, he was the most dangerous type: a young tiger.

Unfortunately, Natsumi had a weak spot for dangerous men. But never a criminal. Panther posed a serious danger to Natsumi...because she knew that someday her feelings towards him would collide with her mission...with the result that she would have to take him in or take him out. She would have to kill him...or he would kill her.

Yet, she was fascinated by the specter of danger that colored the grey-strokes of her life. Her situation was reminiscent of the theme of many a Japanese folktale; the rustic stories about the village headman's beautiful young wife whose will was bent upon carrying on an affair with the temple priest.

Natsumi was haunted by her heart. She shuddered as she recalled the ending of those fictive romances. Stamped with a true Japanese morality, most of those folktales ended in tragedy, with the wife and the priest remorsefully drowning themselves in the ocean...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

The "Fuzz Bug" rattled and hummed in a thousand mechanical dialects as Miyuki drove up and down the cabcrawl back roads of Yurakucho. Yurakucho was a narrow strip of a district sandwiched between the Ginza and the Imperial Palace wards; it was renowned for the plentiful up-all-night hostess bars and exotic foreign cuisine eateries. In the midnight hours, the backstreets here would become a yakuza cabaret; the gangsters often swarming all over Yurakucho after a night of carousing and touting in the adjacent Ginza district. As she drove by the eerily pale-lit streets, Miyuki couldn't help but notice how many of the landmarks familiar to her in 20XX were missing. As they passed Sogo's department store, she half-expected to see the sleek rise of the Kokusai Forum behind the large store building. Indeed, Sogo's didn't even have their "old" new annex built yet, and the nearby Mullion complex with its cinemas and department stores was conspicuously absent. She and Natsumi had often gone to the Yurakucho Mullion; letting off some steam from a hard day's work by taking in a flick and doing some shopping. The genius sway of conception that combined a bigscreen cineplex and a department store wasn't present in the thoughtscale of 1969 Japan.

"Dammit, this _isn't_ Japan!" she reminded herself as she watched a gaily-dressed geisha stroll by. This place was bereft of purpose...it was about as Japanese as the gaijin tourists from France walking through Shinjuku wearing faux-kimonos. These surroundings were slight returns of themselves; semblances but not realities. After struggling with the weighty issue of whether she could ever return to 20XX and Kenny, Miyuki had decided to utterly reject the notion that this Japan was where she belonged.

Either that...or go insane.

Unlike Natsumi, who seemed to have found romantic intrigue in the person of Panther, Miyuki had no choice but to remain level-headed. Always the realist of the pair, she consciously reminded herself that she didn't belong here.

The other night, she was surprised when the rookie cop Arizuka hit on her while she was working late in the precinct office. She was pleasantly startled, but she had to control her sensitivities. Admittedly, Officer Arizuka's clumsiness was charming to her in some sense; even though she was engaged to Kenny, Miyuki wasn't above being refreshed when the opposite sex was interested in her. Arizuka's juvenility was exactly what she had expected from a 22-year-old manboy. But his sophomoric allure was eclipsed by her memory of Head Superintendent Arizuka. Another juxtapose to confuse her. When she regarded young Arizuka after his 'confession', the mental image of Head Superintendent Arizuka formed in her mind. Instead of a young rookie, her thoughts gamed her with the truth: Arizuka would always be a sixtyish grouch of a man with an anal-retentive attention to detail. When Officer Arizuka spoke shyly to her with his high-pitched boyish voice, she heard its realtime echo: the gravel-n-gruff thickness of the Superintendent's Tokyo "Low City" drawl. Despite all appearances, the true essence of her memories informed her that there was no "Officer Arizuka". Years in the police force had instincted her towards a healthy fear of the _real_ Arizuka, the inspector-general who was the quality-control nightmare of the Tokyo Police Dept. Yoriko and many other policewomen had nicknamed him "Lord Emma" after the mythical demonic judge who presided over the Jigoku Hells in some Buddhist traditions. Head Superintendent Arizuka was a scourge, the boss who would exile you to duty in the Ogawasawa Islands without batting a wink. Too many black check marks...and one could find themselves languishing on the remote island chain a thousand kilometers away. Ogawasawa was a geographical quirk; somehow it had been flukeishly included in the Tokyo administrative district. There, a patrol cop could easily be bored to death, because the most action a policeman would see on their shift was watching the tourists as they watched the dolphins...

No, this reality wasn't real. Miyuki wasn't going to cave in, no matter how convincing her life in Tokyo 1969 was at times. Gritting her teeth, she motored the Fuzz Bug back and forth past Hibiya Park; she could see the ash and cedar trees lining the street aproned in their late-autumn glory as the dawning sun kissed them. Yet even this beauty wouldn't be enough to make her want to give up on the possibility of returning.

She would never accept 1969 as her home.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

After another night drive-crawling up and down Yurakucho's streets, Natsumi got a lead from Panther about some unusual gang activity in the alleyways of Nishi-Shinbashi. According to Panther, three Yakuza overbosses were supposed to meet with some gaijin from America...an event that would be quite unusual in Japan of 20XX...and extremely unlikely in _this_ Japan, considering that this Japan was in a state of war with the Americans in this era. Every visiting American was 'interviewed' by the Army at the airport and reminded at gunpoint not to go on record with any inflammatory remarks against the Japanese government. Miyuki knew that all US citizens who came to Tokyo were closely scrutinized by the government police. 95 percent of those allowed visas were either academicians, scientists, businessmen and diplomats. Needless to say, people from those strata of vocations rarely mixed with thugs and gangsters.

After she pulled the psychedelically-painted Fuzz Bug off to the side of the factory access road, she concealed it behind a trio of dumpsters. Once parked, Miyuki scanned the roof lines of the nearby buildings for snipers. As if on cue, Natsumi opened the door on her side and rolled out, using the trash bins for cover. Following suit, Miyuki crawled over gearshift and exited out the passenger door.

She stood up and peered over the top of the dumpster, taking in the sight of three limousine-like luxury cars, a Rolls Royce, several taxi-vans and several sports cars. The Rolls surprised her; only the very conspicuous captains of industry, prominent politicians and military officials, and entertainers could afford such a sumptuary vehicle. The buildings were dimly lit by their exterior lamps, adding to the salty gloom of the scene.

While Natsumi was surveying the parking lot and counting heads, she worked quickly to assemble the handheld listening device called the "Imp"...a bit of detection technology that wouldn't be invented for another thirty-five years or so. It was only by the merest thread of coincidence that Miyuki had checked out one of the handhelds from Bokuto the night before she and Natsumi had encountered Keiichi Morisato and then had been abruptly deposited here. She momentarily wondered once again about how Keiichi and the others were doing...had they been transported somewhere else as well?

She revisited her last days in 20XX, back in her _real_ life. That night, while she was showering herself, she had overheard Aoi talking to two policewomen in the locker room about his suspicions that Yoriko was dating a new transfer from Shibuya precinct. Since Aoi was tight with Yoriko, Miyuki was certain that this wasn't just another piece of idle gossip. After she dressed in her civies, Miyuki decided to take good-hearted revenge for all those times Yoriko had 'interfered' with her various dates with Kenny. So she went to the basement and convinced the department's stationmaster to loan her the remote digital listener, on condition that she inform him about the details of Yoriko's beau. Being a prime gossip, he readily agreed.

Two months later, four decades in the 'past', she had to swallow her embarrassment and explain to Natsumi why she was in possession of the precinct's listening devices. When she told her partner the truth, Natsumi had roared with giggling...

Now they were even again. Miyuki's tale about acquiring the Imp more than made up for Natsumi's mishap with her PDA.

And now, the selfsame listening remote was going to be crucial to their investigation. The Distance Audio Amp, or the "Imp" as most of her fellow officers had nicknamed it, was a motion detector that was rated to detect movement up to 100m away while eavesdropping on spoken conversations up to 800m away. She and Natsumi had used the Imp a few times in the past; most frequently during investigations of manufacturing bases that were making and distroing crack and ice, and while investigating gangs that were selling weapons caches smuggled in from China. The Imp was a great tool for such work, remarkably so because its motion detector added security, so that no one could sneak up on _them_ while they were reconnoitering the crims. And by a total quirk of fate, Miyuki had the Imp in her purse when they were shucked back to here...

If Yoriko had gone on her date, it was almost two months in the past.

"Knowing our luck, she's probably already hooked up with the guy...and we missed the whole thing," Miyuki mumbled as she finished attaching the two antennae.

"Huh?"

"I was talking about our sweet little Officer Yoriko, Nats," Miyuki said with a grin.

"I wonder if she's lost her virginity by now?" Natsumi asked.

"You and your filthy mind! Is that all you can think of? Forget about her for the moment...what about you and yours?" Miyuki asked slyly.

"Me and my _what_? What are you implying, Miyuki?"

Miyuki pulled a face in an attempt to approximate Panther's genki expression. Her attempt must have been somewhat accurate, because Natsumi's face colored with cool embarrassment.

"Panther and I have decided to have a chaste relationship...for now," Natsumi replied sharply. "Neither one of us thought that it would be wise to sleep together, given our current situation and the lack of contraceptives in this era. Besides, you know me...if I sleep with him, you'll be the first to know. Especially given our present circumstances."

Miyuki mentally applauded her partner's use of good common sense. Natsumi was one of those girls who liked to be in control...so much so that she usually slept with the guy after only four or five dates. Miyuki sensed that Natsumi's exercise of such uncharacteristic prudence might be indicative of her partner's unvoiced disillusionment about living in 1969 Japan. Then again, it might mean something totally unexpected.

Natsumi wasn't called the "Wild One" for nothing...

"Quit trying to figure me out, Miyuki!" Natsumi snapped. Miyuki felt a momentary recoil, as her partner had found out her thought process yet again. They had been partnered together for so long, their thoughts occasionally seemed to telegraph between each other. Naturally, Natsumi had noticed Miyuki's intensely thoughtful expression.

Miyuki rested the tuner atop the lip of the dumpster and steadied it until she could hear a conversation.

"Shhh!! Let me get the Imp tuned!" Miyuki requested as she put the earphone in her ear. She played with a couple of sliders to void out the rumble of traffic and the crispness of ambient background noise. Even in the dead of night, there was a steady cacophony in the air, whose caustic soundings bromined the silence she needed to listen in to the men's voices.

Concentrating, she listened in...it was a bunch of guys complaining about their wives and kids, and discussing how to pinch a few yen out of their Christmas annuity plans so they could go drinking on the weekends.

"Damn, it ain't these guys! It must be coming from that building over there," Miyuki whispered angrily as she shuffled the tuner around. Frowning, she dialed up the sensitivity settings another couple notches. Squinting her eyes as she cupped her hand over her ear, she could hear another ring of voices in the earpiece...

_"Oi! This is going to be grand! According to our plan, my gangsmen will create a couple diversions to keep the idiots in the police force busy...while your guys ready the bank!"_

_"Ahem...you mean -_my-_ bank!"_

An old man's voice, Miyuki realized.

_"Yah, whatever! Then the stupid gaijin will have his fartheads break in from the air ducts and clean out the safe," the high-pitched voice continued._

_"Yeah, if these American idiots don't screw anythin' up first!" _

The parched voice sounded cruel, like the voice of a sociopath.

_"#Uh Boss...are they talking about us?#"_

Somebody new, speaking English. Miyuki silently thanked her high school English teacher as she tried to make out the words.

_"#Just because they're talking Jap doesn't mean that every word is about us, nitwit!#"_

_"Uh, my associate was wondering what you were discussing, Ohto-san. Apparently they don't have such a good grasp of your language as I do..."_

_"You have very little grasp of our language, asshole!"_

_"#This Japanese guy is a total idiot! I bet he could never guess that I graduated from an Ivy League school.#"_

_"#We gotta sell'em on the bank robbery plan, or else every effort we've made to this point is wasted!#"_

_"#Don't worry! I can handle it! I just hate playing stupid for these gooks!#"_

Miyuki couldn't make out all the English words, but she could clearly sense the fuse of tension between the two Americans as they barked out their discussion.

_"Ahem! Now, gentlemen. I spent a number of years training in the CIA, and I can vouch for _-my-_ knowledge of Japanese. The important thing is that we all have our time schedules in sync for the robbery on the 4th. Ohto-san, Billy-san and Kenjo-san will create diversions by blowing up the gas stations. As planned, Mitsubishi's security squad in his bank will be spending the morning out drinking, courtesy of their boss...right Mitsubishi?"_

_"Yes. Of course."_

_"While they're away, that's when my special operatives will make their move."_

_"S..s..so where do we r..r..regroup to spread th..the wealth? I'm p..p..putting a dozen of muh..muh..my best henchmen on this job, so I buh...better be amply rewarded!"_

Miyuki was momentarily taken aback by the nervous stuttering of this new voice. Was this stutterer the head of one of the Yakuza gangs? She'd have to check it out with the Bokuto records and Panther. Someone would have to have some dirt on a Yakuza boss with a conspicuous stutter.

Her thoughts racing as the conversation continued, Miyuki was frustrated that she could only hear the voices. She couldn't pick out all the words the Americans were saying, but this much was clear...they were going to rob one of the main banks on December 4th, taking advantage of the day the Emperor was going to address the Diet. Much of the Tokyo police and military guard presence would be attached to the Emperor's visit to the Diet...leaving a reduced police force on the streets.

Could they have been mistaken? All along, she and Natsumi had been certain that the "something big" that Fatscar had bragged about was going to be some kind of assassination attempt on a government official. Now, the mobsters were blathering about a bank heist!

_"Don't you guys worry!! We'll meet in Yokohama the next day, at the prearranged place. We're not going to leave our Japanese friends high and dry!"_

_"You ain't leavin _-anyone-_ high and dry. An' we ain't your 'friends'! Our army kicked your army's ass in Vietnam, don't you forget!"_

Great...a troublemaker with a jingoistic mindset.

_"I'll ignore that comment! And don't _-you-_ forget that it's _-my-_ men who are going to do the bank, since your Japanese thugs don't seem to be very experienced at this sort of thing!"_

_"Fuck off!"_

_"Ah...Ohto-san, please try and be a little more cooperative! We have American guests and Mr. Mitsubishi to think of! We don't want to create airs of animosity that might urge them to withdraw from the deal! Incidentally, Mr. Wilson...how do we know you'll be there?"_

_"You Japanese are funny. No wonder your trains always run on time...your thinking is too patterned! In the US, no one would think twice about a banker setting up his own bank to be robbed. Don't worry, this plan is flawless! Mr. Mitsubishi will make out twice; he'll get insurance from the government...heh heh...from the government for the cash that was robbed. Plus he also gets a cut_ _of the loot. For using your men to create the diversions, you'll get some banking favors from him in the form of money laundering, as payment for services rendered. As for us...we'll get the thrill of robbing a Japanese bank, in addition to getting our hands on some of your country's yen currency. As you might suspect, Japanese yen are hard to get in the US because of the wartime trade and banking embargos. But a bankroll of yen can be very useful with, ah, some of our trade partners."_

_"Bwa ha hah!! You gaijin are really something! America's so weak because you guys have no qualms about robbin' from each other! Here in Japan, we can say no to such barbarism. We do things _-right-_ here...we just embezzle and bribe, and then cover the whole thing up. But you Yankees are like cowboys...you just run and gun."_

_"You oughta shut up! Just because your forces beat ours in Vietnam doesn't mean that you can swagger like that..."_

_"Everybody, shut the fuck up! This ain't no playground argument! I don't give a rat's ass who won the war in fuckin' Vietnam! All I care about is getting a few hundred billion yen out of those bank vaults! And we're trusting _-you-_ Americans to do it! You have that safecracker guy, that guy who you claim is the best in the world. He better be, because if this fucks up, I'm going to have my boys draw and quarter your asses...starting with you, Mr. Wilson!"_

_"How amusing that would be, Kenjo-san! By the time we're done with the heist, _-everyone-_ is going to have their hands quite full with the chaos we've caused..heh heh. Quite full indeed, I would say! Such paltry concerns like revenge and the like are going to recede, like a distant shoreline in the eyes of the drowning man. The tiger without teeth can only growl idle threats, Kenjo-san. We're going to wrap the fire with dynamite!"_

"This is bizarre!" Miyuki thought as she heard another round of arguing over the earpiece. "An alliance of the head of a prominent banking group, the Yakuza...and the Americans? What in God's name is _really_ going on here?"

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --


	87. Pt 87: Belldandy and Mara: Mirror House ...

**Part 87: Belldandy and Mara: Mirror House -- 3rd Movement**

To Belldandy's eye, everything was a witnessing semblance unto itself, a reflectivity as mirrorbound as the grands-plains icemetal layers inside a gas giant.

Standing across the street, she found herself gazing longingly at her temple home. Her eye was immediately drawn to the weatherworn torii that served as a front gate to the temple; the simple gate crested the entryway wall with a rustic simplicity and grace. The wooden walls on either side of the torii suggested an imaginary wingspan; each wall was planketed for 15 meters on either side of the ancient mon gateway. Adjoining the torii, these walls were built of an equally weathered wickerwork of bamboo and cedar wood. At the terminus of the wickerwall, Belldandy could see the compound's wall proper, with its piled earthworks of beige plaster, wood beamworks and sand stretching to the wooden corners of the compound enclosure.

Beyond the archaic symmetry of the temple compound's perimeter walls, Belldandy noticed the shifting yellow peaks of several gingko trees rising against the purpling autumnal sky. In one corner loomed the stately banyan behemoth, with its canopy of rich green tendrils of leaves descending into the ample warmth of shade. Belldandy knew that the ground underneath the ancient tree wasn't denuded of grass or other vegetation, unlike all other banyans on the Earthrealm. She had made sure of that.

In another corner of the compound, a dozen pointed shafts of dark green caught her eye. This was the thick copse of Skuld's Trees, a grouping of mostly tall coniferous pines and maples. Tree-skyscrapers that seemed to scratch the clouds above...

The marvels of the autumn day revealed themselves gloriously in the earthen sky of trees and foliage behind the temple. The tall hill that served as a backdrop to the temple was dotted with trees in their mid-shift; the fly and flow of the colors had suggested a Renoir painting to Belldandy many times over the years as she motored into the driveway in the sidecar of Keiichi's BMW. October was the best: the sense of depth alongside the hill was lost in the gentle, yet steep upsweep of gay Fall colors. The wind rippling through the hillside foliage and treetops cast the hill into a 400-meter tall carpet of the sun...a vision that rivaled Kami-sama's best organic paintings.

Underneath the torii was the pebbled driveway, which somehow reminded Belldandy of an ancient sea. On windy days such as this, a thin haze clung to the driveway as galaxies of dust broiled near-visible in the gusts.

The roofline of the temple's former Bell Tower was also visible near the far corner of the wall; its fingering dark moss spills delineating the shingling. When she 'resurrected' the temple and the grounds when she and Keiichi first moved in, Belldandy decided against recreating everything anew...after all, some of the buildings were eight centuries old. The Bell Tower was one of those outbuildings whose charm would be lost were it to be made to look brand new. Using her Goddess Powers, she had restored it to an archaic elegance, carefully balancing aesthetic sensitivities. After all, it was her namesake. Thus, the Bell Tower looked clean and in good repair, yet its age was never far from the warp of the wood.

Nebulous clumps of asters twinkled soft lilac, rouges and whites against the grass lawn, which was already thinning seasonably in the mid-Fall season. The carpet of grass beckoned her attention to the koi pond to the fore of the temple house. The koi pond was an ocean unto itself. With its single simple wooden viewing bench, the pond water rested cozily amongst stones rimmed with rich green shiba grass and moss. The familiar bamboo scoop of the shishi-odoshi, or deer scare, bounced up and down lazily in splash-beats as water trickled into it from the bamboo piping. In centuries past, deer and boar roamed the base of the mountain; the deer scare's rhythmic sound kept them at bay from foraging in the temple grounds. Several panicles of spindly pampas-grass swayed in the breeze like a choir. Stone ground lanterns, grayed with antiquity, cast cloud-like reflections upon the water in the waning daylight, their basins skirted with bamboo leaves.

Everything about her home was the same to Belldandy, except for the malign presence that seemed to pervade the remembered hospitality of the temple grounds. It penetrated every nuance and corner of the temple grounds, stealing away the solitude and tranquility as surely as the horizon was stealing away the sunlight.

Once again, she had to remind herself that the familiar grounds of the temple _wasn't a home_ any more. The main ingredient...love...was absent from this place. It was a doppelganger, a copy, a forgery of the one place on the Earthrealm that she felt most intimately attachment to. She couldn't help but fill the bowl of her thoughts with memories of her and Keiichi. All the loving, all the fighting between her sisters, all the drama, all the parties and reckless 'accidents', all of the _living_ that had made this temple much more than just a building or a home...was gone. As if it had never happened.

This temple wasn't alive in any sense. It was a dead thing, an empty piston of beauty.

"Huuunh!" she gasped slightly, sensing another one of those blurs of motion nearby. The enigmatic force was barely sensible, but it was _alive_.

Mara's 'double'?

Belldandy felt like she was on the event horizon of Eternity. As the Norn of the Present, she was especially attuned to the moment; a universal migrator in the possibilities of the Now. Try as she might, her Goddess powers were too reduced to confirm her suspicions about the other Mara. She strongly suspected that the other Mara was traveling in some kind of transphasic arcane stealth mode...phasing in and out of the physical and temporal TimeSpaces at near infinitesimal speed in order to render herself beyond notice. If so, then 'Mara' was definitely a Divine being of the highest echelon, possibly a Senior First Class Goddess.

Or a Demoness posing as a Goddess.

Belldandy once again felt like it was as if this whole circumstance had been constructed to deliberately spite her. Her injured ankle still hindered her, her lost powers haunted her, her missing fiancé aggrieved her...

And right across the street, _her_ temple mocked her...mocked her by looking exactly like itself.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Nothing was like itself.

Mara was still feeling tainted as she remembered the erotomanic daydream she had about Keiichi when she was in the shower. Somehow, she had been transported by a tsunami of lustful desires, aphrodisiacked into a very personal sensuous discourse with her body through selective touching. She shuddered as she recalled how each sensation had been illuminated by the presence of Keiichi's image, clearly stamped upon her fantasies. The sheer embarrassment of this weighed very heavy on Mara's conscience. Like a stray dart, her imagination examined how it would be if the roles were reversed...how heavily such a sex-whim vagary might have hung on Keiichi's conscience. How would he feel if he were to experience a rhapsodic scenario where he had been daydreaming about _her_ while relaxing in the furo?

The video parlor's shower was no longer a safe place for her...and when she confided this to Belldandy, Mara was greeted with giggles and a suggestion that they shower together, to protect her from "further frolicking." Great...so now the single shower in the place was going to become a shared gym-room shower? Her crazy sister and her crazy ideas!

As for Belldandy, Mara realized that her younger sister didn't seem like herself either. When she reluctantly admitted to the experience in the shower, Mara had expected a hail of jealous invective...or any equivalent of such that a proper-mannered Goddess like Belldandy could muster. Instead, Belldandy's reaction riveted Mara with blue-hazed amazement. Belldandy had passed Mara's experience off as an 'au naturale' reaction to the presence of her 'double', the oft-theorized but seldom seen 'Goddess' Mara.

In other words, Belldandy's reaction was just another quiddity in this inverted version of reality.

Mara couldn't even imagine what a 'Goddess Mara' would be like. The cast of her imaginings tended towards a milky-sweet sappy Goddess that looked just like her...except for the fact that she would have no fangs or red markings. She visualized a Goddess Mara with impossibly curly straw-blonde hair framing a face sparkling with innocence, with a cheerful twinkle to her eye. Something like the fictional "Good Witch of the North" from the Frank Baum books she sometimes discovered in Skuld's Lab room when she had been spying on the Goddesses.

Mimesis.

This whole reality seemed like it was an attempt to describe _another_ reality...perhaps caused by the vicissitudes of her long exile on the Earthrealm. An unexpected result of being assigned to bring Keiichi grief. The trialsome battles between she, Belldandy, Urd and Skuld...had involved enormous levels of arcane wit and treachery; they had left her weary and ill-confidenced. As if this wasn't enough to haunt any Demoness into grimoire recesses of Soul, she learned that her enemies _were_ her sisters. And finally, this whole insane incident with Isilblius. An Isilblius that Urd claimed _she_ had created. An Isilblius that threatened everything and every one, Divine or mortal.

Mara had experienced minor romantic impulses when she 'captured' Cevn soon after he first mysteriously arrived in Japan. Later, while safekeeping him until Urd could discover the connectedness between he and Isilblius; against her wishes, she felt a definite attraction to the ill-fated Earthrealm mortal. But these caprices were like the scenting of ozone in the air before a vicious storm. The amorous and erotic tingling she felt in her imaginings of Keiichi...comparatively, those sensations suggested the strident thunder strikes during the most violent of tempests.

_Nothing_ should have the power to make her heart beat out of her chest that fast!

"Mara?" a sweet voice interrupted. "You seem preoccupied with something. Are you okay?"

"N..n..no! Not me!" Mara exclaimed, trying to wash guilt and embarrassment from her face. She had meant to say "no" to being preoccupied, and "yes" to being okay...but the sudden shift from daydream to dayreality discomfited her.

"It's Keiichi again, isn't it?" Belldandy acknowledged, her blue eyes flickering left-and-right, reading Mara's expression. Mara gulped down an unsuccessful answer.

"Mara, you know that there is no door so profound as the door of silence. I've fully come to accept that this isn't your fault. Just because you're having such...pleasurable...thoughts about my fiancé doesn't mean that you're acting with indiscretion. I know that there is no indication that you are doing so _willingly_. Therefore, I cannot find my heart to be angry with you," Belldandy noted.

"They're not so pleasurable as you would imagine!" Mara interrupted, mulling her misfortune.

"Hmmm...I can imagine _a lot_," Belldandy replied, a wistful glimmer in her eyes. "Again, given the circumstances, it would be petty of me to harbor any resentments towards you. But I am frustrated by your inability to drive those thoughts towards some useful information that might remedy this horrible situation. Please try to resolve yourself to be more ambitious."

"I'm _trying_, by His Dark Name, Belldandy! Blessit!! You gotta understand...it's extremely difficult me to translate such thoughts into something meaningful. These feelings of love are too _pure_! They're too...gooey, if you catch my drift!"

"Why of course they are! They're the love expressions between a Goddess and a pure-hearted mortal..." Belldandy answered with romantic-sparkling eyes.

"Pure-hearted? What about Keiichi's girlie magazine collection..." Mara said in a low voice, snapping Belldandy out of her reverie.

"W..well, Keiichi _is_ a man some of the times, you know!" Belldandy answered, a regalia of blushes racing over her cheeks.

"Touché!" Mara thought gleefully.

"What would you expect between my dear Keiichi and I, when it comes to love? If this Goddess Mara has been charmed by him the way I was, then her love would be crystal clean and direct..." Belldandy offered, her arms folded over her chest defensively.

"You're not comprehending a thing I'm saying, are you Belldandy?" Mara said, sighing with pentling frustration. Belldandy nodded wordlessly, still looking confused.

"I'll explain it so even you can understand. First, you must follow your assumptions that we Demons are quite the opposite of you Gods...in _all_ matters. Wrap your mind around that thought for a moment..."

Mara watched Belldandy's face perch with concentration.

"Look, unlike you Goddesses, we Demons thrive on the more chaotic sentiments of love: the battles of influence and mastery between Demon and Demoness; the wild eroticism in our Flaring; the playful practice of artful intimidation; the outright competitive infighting; the constant trialing of each other to prove one's fidelity; the joy of trying to tweak jealous impulses...and much much more. All these attributes exist in love; but to the unenlightened, they're often relegated to being judged simply as 'negative' aspects of love. Rather, from the perspective of we Demons...they are crucial elements of any passionate concourse between two Souls in love!"

Belldandy nodded her head.

"But in your case, the love between you and Keiichi completely avoids most of these behaviors...the types of acting out that we Demons consider the "fun" side of being in love. And the feelings that I seem to summon to myself from this so-called 'Goddess Mara'...are of the same ilk: totally alien to what I know of 'love'. They don't possess _any_ of the qualities of the romantic sentiments that are familiar to me, except for the out-and-out erotic stuff. In nearer terms, it is a whole different language of love and lust; one I can barely comprehend. So it's hard to..."

"How wonderful! This Goddess Mara's love for Keiichi is just as honest as my love is for Keiichi back in the _real_ Earthrealm! Isn't that...beautiful!!" Belldandy blurted out happily.

Mara grimaced, as once again her sister had totally missed the bent of her thoughts. She pivoted between "which would be worse" theories: a Belldandy who threw a jealousy fits at random every time she mentioned Keiichi...or _this_ Belldandy, who was blithely ignorant of the consternation boiling inside Mara's breast. Frustrated at this impasse, Mara decided that listening may be the most direct route to gain useful information.

"Sooo, Belldandy...what is Love?" Mara asked casually.

Belldandy almost fell out of her chair.

"I don't mean Love in general or in the abstract...I mean Love as experienced by a Goddess like yourself. Love is a very different concept for you than it is for me. So I was thinking that if you could describe it to me, maybe frame a few concepts around it that I could understand...then perhaps I could get a better handle on these alien sensations I keep feeling. And that might help us in the long run. It would certainly help me. These feelings in my breast are leaving me totally confused."

Mara realized that she was asking a lot from her sister...but to her surprise, Belldandy gathered her knees against her chest and wrapped her arms around them. The Goddess's face seemed to drift into concentration...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Mara, I'd need at least six hours to explain Love to you," Belldandy began as she opened her eyes after bouting with deep introspection. Mara's question had caught her out of the blue; she had spent two hours in deep reflection about Love. During those two hours, she felt besieged by strong feelings of homesickness as she thought about Keiichi, about how the love had whirled around her heart every time she was around him...

She was disappointed when she noticed that Mara had wandered off to play an arcade game.

"And no matter what I say about Love, it still wouldn't be quite right...it would only be my opinion and nothing more," she disclaimed.

"Just try to explain it to me! I'm not an idiot, you know! And I'm not some kind of inexperienced virgin!" Mara demanded, tugging on her blouse as she walked up to where Belldandy was sitting.

"I couldn't possibly describe to you what love is like for we Gods," Belldandy said plainly.

"What?!" Mara said in exasperation, her face colored with disappointment. "How can that be? You're a _Goddess_! Who else is better qualified to lay down a discourse about the subject?!"

"I'm just being honest, Mara. I've never been in love with anyone before I met Keiichi. And since he's a mortal, our relationship doesn't exactly follow the same set of so-called 'rules' that a relationship between a Goddess and a God would adhere to. Equally, it doesn't follow the typical pattern of mortal love either."

"Well, a Goddess falling in love with a mortal isn't exactly an every-millennium sort of occurrence. Without a doubt, you both had to create your own understandings along the way. I can understand that. But I'm quite curious about how you did it. Tell me, what are they?" Mara asked as she pulled up a stool across from her and perched on it.

Belldandy could sense that Mara's desperation was borne out of the uncomfortability she was experiencing due to the 'Goddess-like' sensations of love. She could empathize with her sister; if the roles were reversed and she was unwillingly subjected to feeling Demoness aspects of Love, she'd probably be just as frenzied...

"The feelings between Keiichi and I are a hybrid of the kind of Love that Goddesses and mortals experience. I don't mean to be so obvious...but therein lies the crucial issue. Lord only knows, I've toiled over trying to answer my own questions about Love. The Love you described, the Love that exchanges between Demons...seems quite natural to me on one level. I can almost imagine what it would be like; but I could never imagine how it would feel."

"You have no idea how much I can relate to that, given my current situation!" Mara exclaimed.

"But the only Love I've experienced in a romantic sense...is anything _but_ natural. In fact, it remains quite a controversial subject among my people. My own Mother almost disowned me because of the feelings I had for Keiichi..." Belldandy admitted, pulling her legs tighter against her chest.

"Whoa! _Disowned_ you? Over Keiichi?" Mara interjected, her eyebrows raised. "I had no idea that Goddesses could be so harsh! That must have been hard for the two of you! Mothers..."

"Ah yes...Mothers..." Belldandy sighed along with Mara.

"My mother, Myducia, was always this stern perfectionist figure. I know in my soul that she loved me to death; but being a Demon Queen, she was always hung up on standards. She was _very_ demanding..." Mara said quietly, pulling her own knees up to her breast.

Belldandy observed Mara and wondered if she was unconsciously imitating her own self-nurturing posture? As Mara continued to discuss her Mother's character, Belldandy was struck by how similar Mara's Mother was to hers. Freiija always seemed to expect perfection from she and her sisters...

"Blessit, this is so hard to talk about!" Mara shouted.

"Of course it is. Love is one of the deepest of the mysteries," Belldandy said with a sigh.

"And so are our Mothers..." Mara quipped, catching Belldandy off guard. Belldandy shared in the giggles that followed for a few seconds. But when the laughter subsided, Mara's face clouded over with a grave expression.

"This is crazy! Here we are, stranded on some bizarre cookie-cutter imitation of the Earthrealm...and we're having a heart-to-heart about the most difficult subjects in all of the Multiverse. I didn't expect this! Of course, I never would have imagined in wildest dreams that I'd be having a heart-to-heart with _you_!"

"Likewise," Belldandy pondered as she clasped her hands together on her lap. "Verily, I can describe the relationship that Keiichi and I have. But one of the difficulties in describing Love is the fact that one tends to get caught up in describing the person they're in love with...rather than describing the _bond_ that exists between their Souls..."

"Tell me about it!" Mara agreed. "Most Earthrealm mortals wouldn't recognize a mature form of love if it slapped them in the face or pissed in their shoes!"

"Well, I would go quite that far as to say that mortals are _that_ inept at love," Belldandy commented. "After all, I _did_ fall in love with one of them."

"Maybe that's because you're immature!" Mara replied. As a Demoness and older sister, she just couldn't resist throwing the javelin Belldandy had just placed in her hand. Of course, it had the desired effect.

"Mara..." Belldandy warned.

"Just joking!!"

"I, for one, feel that the love I share with Keiichi is quite mature, in its own way," Belldandy asserted, still feeling defensive even as Mara disavowed her little 'joke'.

"Take romance, for example. Romance is a method of communicating 'I treasure you' to the other person. But what would seem to be 'romantic' on the Earthrealm...would be considered trite by our standards as Goddesses. Mortals often use the diamond as a symbol of fidelity; which is why such gems are disproportionately expensive. Keiichi bought me a ring with a very tiny gemstone during our first year together. By Yggdrasil standards, it was a trifle. I mean, I could snap my fingers and create a thousand diamonds..."

"So what was so special about the ring he gave you?"

"What was special was how his heart was involved in the giving. Demon or Goddess...it wouldn't take much effort to create precious gems out of thin air. One of the memory processors of Skuld's main computer has a diamond the size of a basketball, for example. But to Keiichi, buying a ring for me as a Christmas present meant working himself to near-exhaustion during his Christmas break from school. He was willing to make such a weighty demand on himself...just to prove to me that he felt that I was important in his life. _That_ was what made his actions romantic. As for me, I knit him a sweater every Christmas. I actually _knit_ it out of yarn, instead of just materializing it into existence. By doing that...I'm expressing my feelings for Keiichi by using a romantic 'sense of scale' that is meaningful for him. Each of these expressions is _significant_ to him; otherwise, he wouldn't be able to understand my feelings for him. If I decided to write his name on the surface of the Sun, for example, such an action wouldn't hold forth a troth of meaning to my beloved. Not to mention that such an act would play havoc with telecommunications all over the Earthrealm," Belldandy explained with a grin.

"Hmmm...that would make a great bit of mischief! I'll have to remember that!" Mara teased, noticing that her sister was getting lost in her own aeries of whimsy. It worked, drawing a scowl from Belldandy. Deciding to move the discussion along, she asked a few more questions.

So what does impress him? How do you show an Earthrealm mortal that you love him?"

"First, I had to learn what _didn't_ impress him," Belldandy promptly replied. "Of course, Keiichi was initially inspired by my Goddess powers. But by demonstrating my Goddess powers, my actions were only meaningful to him insofar as it proved that I had Divine attributes. No amount of arcanic expertise, magical spells, or Divine power could possibly communicate how I _felt_ about him. I realized that I had to convey my emotions with him on _his_ level, the level of an Earthrealm mortal. As far as proving my love for him, I discovered that Keiichi wasn't impressed with my powers...well, most of the time he wasn't. But he was impressed by the little things I did for him. Skuld and Urd both used to think that I was wasting my time when I knitted him a sweater, or hung out his laundry to dry by hand, or cooked his meals from scratch. But to me, those actions are my way of saying 'I love you, Keiichi'..."

"Hey! What you're saying reminds of something, Belldandy!" Mara interrupted. "As you probably are aware, we Demons really like to pick on each other. But did you know that wreaking mischief in each other's lives is one of the expressions of Love that _we_ consider to be romantically significant? The more involved and deceitful the 'attack', the more it shows that the attacker is willing to spend quality time thinking up mischief. Demons that simply paw at Demonesses don't get very far. But a Demon who would set up an elaborate deception aimed at getting a Demoness in trouble at work...or better yet, with her family...that Demon would definitely be praised to the walls in the heart of any Demoness. She'd be confident that she was very important to her Demon pursuer! But there's something else. I just don't understand why Demons...or even mortals...end up staying together. Don't they get bored? Romance is like running down a hill. But what about the down times? The day-to-day stuff, where it seems like one is struggling to run _up_ a hill?"

"Memories are like whispering strains, hints that softly steal among the gentle refrains of passion in my heart. It's often tempting to relive romantic episodes and memories during those times, isn't it?" Belldandy noted with a wistful smile.

"The mortals seem to be caught up in the same dilemma; which is why romance novels and manga sell so well. This is all well and good...but Keiichi and I have learned that our relationship demands that we _both_ grow, even if it seems that we're at a standstill. There is always room for a couple to grow towards understanding each other better. This is easily confusing to many. 'Growth' is often misinterpreted as the process of gaining more control over the other person, or it is seen as molding the other person into some idealized state. We are _all_ self-evolving; and what passes for 'intimacy' can easily become 'interference' in our personal journeys. With Keiichi and I, after a couple years together, we just sort of...settled down. The urgency to fill each moment with a sweet experience simply wasn't there. During those times, I sensed that he was worried that perhaps we were drifting apart. As a Goddess, I knew that our love was only moving into deeper companionship, but I had to wait for him to make that realization for himself. Consequently, we talked to each other a lot about feelings and perceptions...and we stumbled onto the awareness that we were actually forming a closer bond between our Souls. We discovered that Souls don't always have to thrive on action, romance, drama and the like," she elaborated. Mara recognized that the Goddesses had a kindred philosophy about Love; the self-evolving nature of Demons only being more focused on chaos than certain types of constancy.

"Souls are best satisfied when they are touching," Mara interjected. "We all have a Soul-shaped hole in our heart...an emptiness that can be only filled by nothing less than another Soul. How I wish that I might find someone, someday, who could fulfill me the way Keiichi fulfills you."

As Mara flicked her fingers through her hair, Belldandy wondered if these close empathic encounters with the 'other' Mara were causing her to feel heartsick. It would be like a child who had a taste of candy for the first time in a long while; but then was urged by the sweetness in her mouth to ponder the fact that she rarely had ever enjoyed sweets. Taking note of her words, Belldandy realized that these random 'love encounters' might be pushing Mara towards a deeper sense of loneliness.

"I'm certain that you'll find yourself madly in love someday, Mara!" Belldandy said with a giggle. Mara grinned pensively at Belldandy's 'prediction'.

"Sharing Souls is like sharing sex, isn't it?" Mara noted.

"In a way, this is true. You must remember that...to the mortals...sex is a procreative act, which is why it triggers so much pleasure in them. Sex had a distinct biological property that is integral to the reproductive success of the species. Being sentient creatures, the Earthrealm mortals have created all sorts of 'window dressing' via culture, religion and the like to obscure this essential fact about sex. But on the Divine level, our greatest intimacy is achieved through Sharing. If a God and Goddess wish to have children, they enter into a union...and that union is then given to Kami-sama. Thus, in a very real sense, we are all His children..."

"Same here. All Demonic children are created by a pairing of Demon and Demoness, which is then joined by The Dark Lord. He is our Father..."

"But Sharing has nothing at all to do with procreation, or even pleasure. The 'pleasure' we experience during Sharing...is a sort of 'Soul attuning'. Because of the union of Souls, we exchange the Joy Ultimate. The only greater joy a Goddess can experience is when she is Sharing with her beloved...and Kami-sama. For a slender moment, a couple can Share with the Almighty; and the resulting ray of Love and Light becomes their child. The thought of it has always thrilled me! But I obviously can't Share with Keiichi," Belldandy explained.

"You guys do that too? This is just too weird! We do the same thing, but we call it Flare. As in two Souls aflame, sharing the fires of their innermost beings. It is the highest joining that can be given between two of our kind."

"Flare..." Belldandy said, trying out the word.

"And almost everything you just said can be used to describe how the process works between Demons," Mara interjected excitedly.

"So, have you ever Shared...er, Flared, Mara? My Elder Sister has told me some of the details about it...but of course, I haven't Shared myself," Belldandy asked, blushing.

Mara looked down for a moment, almost embarrassed. Actually, the Demoness was _quite_ embarrassed, to the point where she started fidgeting with her feet and hooding her forehead with a hand. Regretting that she even broached such a subject, Belldandy spoke up quickly to save her Demoness sister from having to admit that she hadn't Flared...

"But Love isn't all about Sharing, or sex, or romance. As far as sex is concerned, with Keiichi and I...it _isn't_ procreative. Obviously, a Goddess can't have a child with a mortal. So baby-making isn't a consideration when Keiichi and I make love..." she started.

"So what is? I like to have wild flings once in a while like any other healthy Demoness...which included sexual encounters with mortals. Obviously, sex for the Earthrealm mortals is basically a form of getting each other 'high' on physical sensations. For me, if I allow it, my physical manifest can almost become drunk on the physical pleasures of sex. But despite this, sex is so...over-rated...it seems. These mortals have fought wars, committed crimes and built corporate empires based on sex. And that's just the mortals! Almost all the unions between Demons end up being open marriages. But what about you and Keiichi? I mean, it took _forever_ for you guys to bring sexuality into your relationship. Most mortal men would have gone nuts, or gone away. Their psyches are built that way, just like most people wouldn't eat rice without miso. Since he obviously didn't put too much emphasis on sex...and you can't have babies...why would you even bother?"

"Because our relationship was already secure and mature by that point. And don't assume that Keiichi didn't put a lot of emphasis on sex. I am always aware of the rhythm of his heartbeat. One time, when he first saw me in a two-piece swimsuit...his heart rate went up a third. And the time I fell on him while we were rowing out along the beach in a rental boat...his heart rate doubled. I didn't know why at first. But now I know," Belldandy explained.

"Heh heh!" Mara snickered. "Urd already had it figured out before she even came to the Earthrealm to check up on you two. How could you _not_ notice?"

"Eh?"

"Don't even bother trying to answer that, Belldandy!" Belldandy looked at Mara askance, not understanding why she would ask a question and then tell her not to answer it. Shrugging her shoulders, she continued.

"Again, because I'm a Goddess and he's a mortal...I don't have any biological constants firing me along as he does. I certainly couldn't ignore Keiichi's 'urges'; that would be grossly unfair to him. In a way, we each had to accept the fact that we were both reluctant to just jump into a sexual relationship. Keiichi was worried that he would lose himself if we had sex...which meant that he was also worried that he would lose me. As for me, I knew all along that part of my inattention toward sexuality wasn't necessarily due to a lack of desire. I wanted to give something special to Keiichi...a special part of myself. But that part of myself is incomplete. I was afraid that if we started off into a sexual direction, I would have to face the fact that I can't bear any children. Once we started making love with each other, my worst fears became true."

"You mean that every time you and Keiichi..." Mara said, leaving the rest unsaid.

"Yes. I feel bittersweet: both the joy of being so close to him...and the sadness of coming face-to-face with the only pleasure I can't give him. I could give my Keiichi the Multiverse, I could even give him the riches of the Multiverse that lies furthermost inside of my heart...but I can't give him a child! That's my secret 'sacrifice', Mara. If romance involves sacrifice, then making love to Keiichi bears a heavy romantic value. A sense of worth that Keiichi must never know. I have to keep this to myself, because if Keiichi ever suspected that I feel this way...it would really hurt him. I suspect that he wouldn't be able to recover to the point where he could enjoy our sexual life. A..and I want him to _enjoy_ his time with me, in every sense of the word! I want him to experience the pleasures of love-making, just like any other mortal man should experience. So in a sense, I truly am giving him 'service'. But, even though I feel a shallowness when Keiichi and I engage in sex...I also feel a sense of fulfillment. And pleasure. Believe me, I allow myself to feel the fullest ecstasy when I'm in Keiichi's arms!"

"I understand...somewhat. You're saying that you wouldn't have been able to share yourself sexually with Keiichi if you didn't love him from the deepest part of your being. So sex didn't really deepen your relationship," Mara summarized.

"Yes!" Belldandy said brightly. "Sex didn't really deepen our relationship, but it _widened_ it in a certain way. It widened us...in the sense that it broadened our shared experience. Just like when he and I went on our first vacation, or when we searched over all of southern Japan for Urd when she pulled her foolhardy disappearing act, or when we went to France together for the Le Mans racing competition. All of those individual experiences or prolonged chapters of our lives didn't significantly deepen our relationship either; they only broadened the shared experiences we had. What deepens a relationship is _listening_. Hearing past the sounds of silence, rather than listening solely to one's own thoughts...this allows for the richness of _moments_ to exist between us. This kind of love wouldn't have been possible if Keiichi and I didn't already have a strong bond...a _mature_ bond...between our hearts!"

"And now you guys are getting married..." Mara noted. Belldandy could sense the glimmer of jealousy that wrote itself across Mara's face.

"Yes. Again, this is different...and yet the same. Gods become Bonded with each other when they decide to entwine their companionship in a permanent stead. Indeed, when a God and Goddess become Bonded, it _is_ permanent, unlike the marriages of the mortals. In most cases, the ultimate expression of maturity for a mortal relationship is in the parting. But most mortals lack the strength and maturity to end that which has run its course. Instead, many mortals remain together in loveless unions: either out of a sense of obligation to rear the next generation, or a forlorn hope that the joy will return," Belldandy noted sadly.

"In Vanagdrasil, the Flaring between a Demon and Demoness ensures that they are compatible to be life-mates. There's no room for error, because Oni-sama would annul a Union that would only result in parting later on."

"That's interesting!" Belldandy commented. "In my and Keiichi's sake, there is no such guarantee, because we can't Share. So I have to remain intuitive to his needs, and practice the art of being happy while being harmless. So far, it's worked."

"Harmlessness is completely the opposite of my experience. In Vanagdrasil, we practice happiness seasoned with harm. But the harm is therapeutic...as in _pleasurable_ harm. Hee hee...the emotional bond between Demons is a serenade of threat; a lamp that radiates rivulets of splendid tears, similar to the mortal's concept of sadism and masochism. We hurt each other because we _want_ to feel the exchange of pain. Because it is thrilling to administer pain to the willing. But the pain has a certain tenderness to it. An unthorned meadow amidst a blazing forest-fire, so to speak. The peculiarities of pain doesn't drive a wedge in between a Demon and Demoness. Instead, this pain draws them closer. It fires the furnaces of Love and passion!"

"_That_...I will never understand!" Belldandy said with a smile. "I couldn't imagine hurting Keiichi deliberately."

"But it's so _fun_!" Mara said, her face bright with gleeful delight. "Besides, it's our way of doing Love. Making Love. Our way of arousing each other. You Gods tickle each other...we Demons _brand_ each other. But there's a deeper aspect to all of this, isn't there?"

"Which is?"

"Why does Love exist? My Mother told me that 'every word and action expresses Soul...so watch yourself closely.' There's a certain baseness with the mortals; every word and action is an expression of sexuality. Sexuality isn't love, just like Flaring isn't Love. But we're all compelled to Love. I used to think that Gods and Goddesses were incapable of being in Love, until I met you. I know that part of Love is the need to protect each other. Love forestalls loneliness...which in turn thwarts madness. If it were all about protection, we'd just need to seek out personal guardians. If it were all about sex, then we'd be satisfied with everyone being fuck-buddies. If Love was only about bearing our emotions to proof, then why wouldn't we simply co-therapathize each other? I could go on and on to illustrate my point; but you get the gist. It seems that Love fulfills needs that could just as easily be met in other ways! But Love always returns to the issue of Soul. What is the purpose of it all?" Mara asked.

"Being with Keiichi, I've learned that the ultimate goal of Love is to heighten the Soul," Belldandy answered.

"That's obvious!" Mara countered. "But is it possible in a _real_ relationship with a mortal. Their Souls barely ebb with Divinity..."

"Beyond romance, sex, money, children, status and loyalty...the Soul always remains," Belldandy stated, her hands clasped over her breast.

"A Soul that is enriched...enlightened...is a Soul that realizes that the treasure it seeks is _itself_. When I truly cherish myself, I can cherish all of those beings who are in the circle of my life. In the beautiful ecstasies and the acute desolations that inhabit my heart, there is a balance. My dear Keiichi has taught me in so many ways that _I am the treasure_ which I seek. There is nothing more profound than this; for this reason alone, I would spend the rest of my life with him. Keiichi's like a vessel that overflows with endless possibilities. And the strangest thing of all...is the fact that I don't know how he showed me my good fortune. I just know that my Soul soars when I'm with him!" Belldandy finished.

Belldandy realized that Mara would never fully understand this concept until she met the person destined to teach her about herself. Mara was looking at her with a puzzled expression; Belldandy could see the inner conflict between comprehension and disbelief.

"Perhaps this experience...this _entire_ experience...could awaken you to a form of Love that you've never experienced before, Mara. I know that it's difficult to have your heart filled with something you don't fully control or understand. But perhaps, rather than struggling against it, you should welcome it," she suggested.

Mara yawned as she walked over to the sleeping bags. "The only thing I'd welcome right now is some shut-eye! But I'll consider what you said about Love. I just wish..."

Belldandy leaned in to hear the last part of Mara's sentence...but the Demoness had already fallen asleep. She gathered up a blanket and wrapped it around Mara, and then curled up in her sleeping bag and watched her Demoness sister gently breathe a regime of aspirations...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"So how do we get her to come to us?" Belldandy asked gaily. Mara was so exhausted from the previous night's discussion, she almost leapt out of her blanket. She was awake...and yet still lulling in drowsiness.

"Huh? Who?"

"I was asking about what can we do to get Keiichi's girlfriend in this branch of reality to find us?" Belldandy clarified, hands-on-her-hips impatient. When Mara did little more than look at her with a lethargic expression, Belldandy started tapping her uninjured foot.

"What's the rush? I'm pretty sure she's already found us, Belldandy! Remember what happened to me in the shower?" Mara sighed in frustration, aflash with a brief shiver as she remembered the erotic encounter. She looked at her Goddess sister, who was all momentum and excitement. Mara briefly wondered if last night's discourse on Love and Keiichi had fired up Belldandy a little _too_ much! Her sister was looking at her with a glazey-eyed insistence that was totally out-of-character for her...

"It's not enough that we merely 'run into her' once in a while. We need to make her _stay_! These chance encounters aren't very helpful," Belldandy asserted.

"Wellll, since I can't come up with a suitable negotiation to summon her, I'm open to anything you would suggest," Mara asked. She loathed the idea of asking for help, but Belldandy was right...this situation could provide the link they needed to effect an escape from this messed-up reality. And since this 'Goddess' Mara was somehow linked with Keiichi, befriending her might aid Belldandy and her in liberating him from his exile...

"We definitely know that she seems to be nearby when you have these romantic-sexual daydreams about Keiichi, because she's the cause of them. And we encountered her when we were in close proximity to the temple. Perhaps you should go into the shower and wait for her to come again, and instead of resisting so much, try to go along wi..."

"NO WAY!!" Mara shouted in vociferous protest. "Get your mind out of the gutter and think about a _reasonable_ way to do this, Belldandy!"

Belldandy was blushing crimson...tight-lipped as she was.

"Well, if the shower is uncomfortable, it may be even more effective if you were to...you know...while we're near the temple."

_GAACK!!_

Mara choked a full-on facefault at the suggestion. What the Bless had gotten into her sister, making such an insane suggestion? Embarrassed to point of no return; Mara felt as if she had been groped, pinched and flashed by a subway lecher at the same time. The realization that she might have to go into the shower and try and conjure up her counterpart in the most naked of ways...rigored and disturbed her. Now, Belldandy was suggesting that she do it..._outside_!

After sounding so sagacious last night, her younger sister was boiling over with idiocy this morning!

She gazed reluctantly in the direction of the shower, her breast heaving lightly with unwillingness. Why did the emotional 'intersect' between she and her unseen-but-present double have to be so invested with sex and sensuality? Belldandy had nothing to lose; _she_ wasn't the one at the mercy of some other force manipulating her imagination and libido. She had it easy! Mara glanced at her sister resentfully as she swam through the tiding ocean of unknowns. She failed to comprehend why she couldn't just 'summon' her Goddess namesake by forcing herself to daydream romantic situations with Keiichi. Leave out the sex and just go with the imagination...

"Ulp!" she swallowed hard, audibly. Last night, Belldandy had pretty much elaborated on the fact that Goddesses had _completely_ different perspectives on romance than those that she understood. Because Demoness romance and Goddess romance were so dissimilar...perhaps the only means of being receptive and reaching out to try and contact her 'twin' was through the channel of sexuality.

"Dark Lord help me...there's gotta be another way!" Mara wailed.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

The 'other way' ran smack into Mara as she was reading a book on ESP that she had found lying around the videogame joint.

Belldandy was out talking to the birds at some nearby park, leaving Mara at their 'hideout'. Belldandy had her birds...Mara had her videogames. After playing a few rounds of a Street Fighter knockoff game, she started lull-pacing around the building in a dolorum. Unexpectedly, she stumbled upon a boxful of old books cached in a janitor's closet. Of course, when she had inhabited the v-game parlor before, Mara had full use of her Demoness powers...hence, she had no reason to bother checking out the cleaning supplies. But now, she had to clean the place herself.

"Curious! I don't remember these being here before," she noted to herself as she examined the titles. Being a Demoness, her Divine abilities normally would allow her to 'read' the whole stack just by passing her hand over it. Unbeknownst to humans, the thought-impressions of the intentions written into all printed material always leave a telltale residual 'aura', one that could be easily rendered by Demonesses. In other words, imprinting written materials stamped more than just ink or bytes onto the media...it also affixed the mind-consciousness of the words contained within.

But despite her best attempts, Mara couldn't hone in on anything intelligible. Thus hindered, she started to read the book in the mortal fashion, which was painstakingly slow. Anything to escape the boredom...

...when she heard a loud rumbling sound just outside the door.

Startled, she turned to look at the source of the sound, and observed a woman dressed in a tight leather riding outfit materializing through the wall...

"Ai-yo!! It's _you_! At last, I've discovered your hideout, Goddess Mara!" a woman's voice boomed, fierce and grating. Mara gasped and turned towards the voice...

"For far too long, you've been maliciously frustrating me and my sister's efforts to bring Grief to the mortal assignee, Keiichi Morisato! You're nothing more than an inexperienced meddler, young Goddess! But no more!! Now that I have discovered where your Goddess Abode is, my sisters and I can seal you in here! I spit at your vain efforts to interfere. Prepare to meet your misfortune!!" the intruder announced with all the hyperbole of a villainess.

Mara stared at the interloper. If this was any other situation, she would be laughing at such mealy-mouthed threats, but instead she dropping the ESP book she was reading to the floor as recognition dawned on her…completely spinning the 'topsy-turvy' curve of this reality into a new twist of absurdity.

"Isn't this a little shabby compared to what you Goddesses are used to? This place is absolutely _squalid_!!" the aggressor observed derisively while gesturing with her arms to encompass the videogame parlor's interior.

"B..Belldandy?" Mara half-shouted, half-choked. Could this be some bizarre prank that her younger sister was playing on her?

But she looked...different...

Mara was taken aback for the briefest flow of time as she regarded the figure hovering in front of her. The auburn hair was streaked with red-orange highlights that flashed like lasers; it was pulled back in a tight ponytail in back. The red ribbon that fastened the ponytail was woven down a good meter of the long thick strand of hair, Sailor Moon-style. The leather outfit was open to the waist, exposing an ample busty cleavage and her navel. Long red glovelets studded with black jewels covered her forearms, fastening at her fingers. Her fingernails were polished with the same kind of orange luminescent polish that Mara sometimes wore...

Her face.

Two bright red ovals dominated her forehead. Instead of being slashed inwards towards the bridge of the nose like hers were, this woman's twinned marks were shaped just like Belldandy's. Two ovaline marks, parallel to each other like upside-down exclamation marks. And the eyes...the irises glowed with the rainbow of flames found in all Demonic eyes. In front, several curly 'antennae' shot out of her browline, floating around her face like Belldandy's. Coil-curly, instead of straight. The whole effect made her look threatening, rather than innocuous.

"Demoness Belldandy, I presume?"

"Yes, that's my name, my dear nemesis! And I'm going to pay you back for all the hassles you've caused me over the years! Especially for despicable and disgusting act of making my Grief assignee fall in love with you! You're the worst! Because of your infatuation with Keiichi...my job here on this stinkin' shit-pit Earthrealm became so difficult, the Dark Lord had to dispatch both my sisters to help me! That made me lose face with my Demoness Grief Office co-workers! And your perverted sense of 'justice' hasn't just cost me! You've ruined several of Skuld's Banpeis...so my kid sister's got a score to settle with you as well! Heh heh! Even though I never got to beat you in Nebula Shaping when I was a kid, I have the upper hand now! Now..._everything's_ going to change!! But...just to be fair, I'm going to give you a ten-second headstart before I start disfiguring you by flinging energy globes at your departing form!"

Mara chortled at this; rolling her eyes in response to the arrogance of the new arrival. This...Demoness...was as every bit as egotistical and vain as Peorth! Storming in with a vengeance, all tough and ready to rumble...and then offering Mara a ten-second countdown to make an escape. Obviously, she was hoping that the encounter would become a game, rather than a simple fight.

"Yep, you're a Demoness!" Mara thought, clicking her tongue as Demoness Belldandy started counting down with dramatic vocal exclaim. Mara hesitated, caught between flight and fight...grasped by the intrusive situation. Then she remembered that she no longer had avail to her Demoness Senior First Class powers. If this 'Belldandy' was like her Goddess counterpart, she would be a Demoness Senior First Class, Unlimited. Which meant that she had _way_ more firepower than Mara. But this 'Belldandy' also had something else that her younger sister possessed.

She was a dimwit.

All this time, Demoness Belldandy was so caught up in her dramatic entry...trying to suck every bit of shock value out of it that she could...she had failed to notice that Mara was a Demoness.

In the end, Mara decided to wait out the ten-second countdown.

"I may not have all my powers, but I _do_ have all my cunning!" she affirmed to herself as Demoness Belldandy counted in a vox thespie...

Three!!

...Two!!...

..._ ...__One!!_

"That's it! You're going on a one-way trip back to the Goddess Relief Office! In pieces!!" Demoness Belldandy announced, her eyebrows arching as twin red glows formed in the palms of her hands...

Mara calmly pointed at her forehead.

The red glow of fiery Divine Energy forming around the hands of Demoness Belldandy started to dim.

_"NO FUCKIN' WAY!!"_

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Mara decided that she needed to steer this Demoness Belldandy out of their hiding place as quickly as possible. If the _real_ Belldandy returned while her Demoness counterpart was here, it would spell disaster for all!

"Th..this is impossible!! Unprecedented! You're not a Goddess...you're a _Demoness_?!" Demoness Belldandy protest-babbled for the sixty-third time.

"Of course I'm a Demoness! Do you read me as a Goddess? Do Goddesses have these?" Mara said, grinning wide and pointing to her fangs. Fortunately, right before she and Belldandy had been transported here, Mara had filed her fangs to a crisp sharpness. Demoness Belldandy leaned close to Mara's face, examining her fangs closely.

"Hmmm...I don't know," she mumbled. Mara readied an explanation when she suddenly added, "Either this is a clever counterfeit, or these fangs have been recently sharpened."

Without warning, the Demoness reached a slender hand into Mara's mouth and tugged at her canines.

"Mummph, whatmph the fumph are you doing...mmmph?" Mara protested at the sudden invasion of her mouth. She could taste Demoness Belldandy's fingers in her mouth...they tasted just like any Demon's fingers would taste.

Withdrawing her hand from Mara's mouth, Demoness Belldandy pronounced the fangs as real.

Then, she touched the side of Mara's temple and Probed her.

Mara enacted her mental defenses just in time. She didn't expect Demoness Belldandy to Probe her so readily, after having just 'met' her. Evidently, her mind was sufficiently decided about Mara's veracity that she was willing to risk weaving her thoughts with Mara's via a Probe.

As Demoness Belldandy's mind touched hers, Mara knew instantly that this Demoness wasn't very practiced at Probing. The initial fingers of consciousness that reached into her mind were clumsy, almost chaotic in their fumbling through concourses of Soul...

"«_Good. I can sense your Being..._»" she heard Demoness Belldandy thoughtcast.

"«_As I can sense yours as well, Demoness Sister,_»" Mara replied. Still, she ushered all her memories associated with Belldandy into a hastily formed transic castle keep in her Soul. Safely hidden away in the imaginative castle, they would be unreachable...unless some Demon decided to exert a huge amount of effort to reach them. Mara doubted that this Demoness Belldandy would even suspect their existence.

After several minutes, Demoness Belldandy dissolved the Probe.

"There! Are you satisfied that I'm a _real_ Demoness!" Mara asked smugly.

"I'm certain of this. In fact, your energy transmits a Demonic signature within each of the nine dimensions. And I could almost sense that...well, we can talk about that later. What in His Darkness's Name are you doing in this trashpit? Why don't you leave this dump with me and can come to our Lair? We've converted an old Shinto temple into our Lair. Isn't that just so deliciously ironic? In fact, because of the deviousness of using an Earthrealm religious site as a Lair, it's been nominated for this cycle's Best Lair award in the Demoness Category, First Class Licensee Division, 200 to 300 Millennia Level!" she said proudly.

"Yep, you're a Demoness!" Mara thought again. She herself had won the prestigious award once, back when she was in Vanagdrasil. Being nominated for the Best Lair award was an honor in itself...and this Demoness Belldandy was obviously prideful in her housekeeping.

But accompanying her to the temple?

That would be a huge risk! Urd and Skuld were there...which meant that Mara would have to carry on the subterfuge under three sets of watchful Demonic eyes. If all three decided to Probe her will at the same time, it might be possible that they could breach the safekeeping place in her Being and learn about the existence of Belldandy.

As she considered this, Mara felt a slight 'bump' in the aura-force of the neighborhood.

"Uh-Oh!" Mara thought to herself, just as Demoness Belldandy started glancing around.

"Didya feel that? It almost feels like a _Goddess_ is nearby!" Demoness Belldandy noted.

"I noticed it as well. The presence is very diminished, but it's definitely Goddess pattern. I suggest that we leave here at once before we're discovered," Mara said, playing along with Demoness Belldandy's suspicions.

In a flash, she was on a really cool-looking futuristic Harley that put the motorcycles in the Akira movie to shame, seated behind the red leather-clad Demoness. The Demoness kickstarted the motorcycle...and with a stuttering roar, she pulled it out into the street.

"I hope she doesn't drive like _I drive_," Mara worried as they swifted into traffic...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Something was definitely amiss. Belldandy sensed a strong Demonic presence as she walked towards the abandoned video-game arcade; the Demonic aura seemed to hover over the building like a coal-chimney fog. And it wasn't Mara's. Over the years, Belldandy had become attuned enough to Mara's particular 'signature' to allow her to readily determine whether the auras she felt belonged to Mara or not. Besides this, Mara was half-Goddess...and she didn't sense a trace of Goddess energy in this aura. Since she and Mara were both operating under greatly limited Divine powers; Belldandy reasoned that this energy presence was far too powerful to be Mara's.

Cautiously, Belldandy walked up to the front door and stepped onto the sidewalk. As a lingering odor of burnt rubber twinged her nostrils, she looked down and noticed a jagged black stripe on the sidewalk. Someone had rode a motorcycle up over the curb, parked it directly in front of the building, and then peeled out when they left. The burnt rubber in the air made her feel homesick for her fiancé.

Burnt rubber...and a Demonic aura.

Belldandy found herself subconsciously back-stepping away from the front door, backwards into the street. Car horns honked a symphony of warning knells in her ears. She hastily regained the sidewalk, just as a man in a truck sped by, giving her the finger.

This aura was that of a powerful Demoness. Definitely.

Like a fingerprint left at the scene of a crime, the Demonic energy permeated the videogame building. Thinking things over, Belldandy decided that it would be prudent to quietly 'break in' using one of the rear windows.

Belldandy warily approached the V-gaming parlor, peeked around to see if anyone was watching, and then climbed in through one of the back windows. She and Mara had left a single window ajar for just such a purpose. She was grateful that her foot was healed enough that she could propel herself over the window ledge...but when she landed inside the building, her ankle throbbed with a telltale pain.

So now she was sprawled on the floor inside the building, her ankle throbbing all the way into her teeth. It took several moments for the dull-sharp pain to subside enough for her to stand; once she gained her feet, Belldandy quickly hid behind a pile of boxes and surveyed the interior. She decided to wait for the Demonic energy traces to dissipate before emerging from her place of concealment.

Ascertaining that it was safe, she stepped into the open. As she walked around inside the building, everything appeared to be the same. Several video games were turned on; their patterned screens illuminating the squalid interior with a hue of strobed flashing colors.

"Mara!!" Belldandy thought in a panic.

Mara wasn't here!

What if her older sister had been abducted? Belldandy had the distinct impression that Mara had left this place in a hurry...she usually turned off the videogame consoles before she left, lest the TV monitors wear themselves out.

The motorcycle tire marks in front of the building could only mean that her Demonic counterpart had paid a visit. The recall of that chilling face..._her_ face...staring at her for that cliff-edge briefest of moments as she stood on the roadside...caused Belldandy to shiver, knife-pointed with fear.

Did Mara leave voluntarily, or was she kidnapped?

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

The inner sanctum.

As Demoness Belldandy pulled her loud-chargin' futura-Harley into the graveled driveway, Mara felt swathed in a sensorium of calming thoughts. This _was_ a Demoness's Lair, which meant that the spiritual wavelengths here would be...to some extent...familiar, soothing, inviting.

"We're here! This is the place of places!" Demoness Belldandy said proudly as they rode up to the garage. The darkness radiating from the temple's roofline cloaked the building in stillness; providing a gloom that leaped exponentially in strength once she was inside the temple compound. Mara hoped that the Demonic Aura here would reinvigorate her enough so she could remain here for a while: observing, learning, scheming.

Scheming what, she didn't know. However, being brought here by Demoness Belldandy was a flukish breakthrough, in the hilarodramatic sense. Now Mara had an opportunity to observe firsthand the motives of the three Demonesses that inhabited this place. Within this fulcrum of knowledge, Mara sensed that she might be able to grind out the truth about her Goddess counterpart. Demoness Belldandy had claimed that Goddess Mara had been locked in battle with her and her sisters for years. And if she could somehow free Keiichi from this place, then Goddess Mara may be able to reunite with him.

Which would be a very welcome development, since it would hopefully relieve Mara from having to endure those lurid pauses of romantic eroticism.

She could hear Banpei patrolling the grounds somewhere nearby. Unlike Skuld's Banpei, this mecha bristled with weaponry. His 'hat' was completely color-opposite of Skuld's Banpei: blood red, with a black symbol in the middle...the symbol obviously being a match to Demoness Skuld's forehead marking. Instead of the hollow upside-down plectrum-shaped marking, Banpei's 'hat' sported two black crescents shaped like paisleys; the paisleys faced each other, broad end on the bottom. The narrow tips of the paisleys reminded Mara of scimitar blades. His aggressive nature was enhanced by the tigertoothed 'grin' he had on his spherical 'face'; his mouth was filled with scissor-sharp metallic 'teeth'. His robotic expression was cold-hearted, malicious...

Banpei was patrolling the grounds like a lawn mower, section-by-section.

"Welcome to the only sovereign parcel of Vanagdrasil on this miserable cold dustball of a planet!" Demoness Belldandy announced with a grand sweep of her arms. Mara followed her host's gesture with her eyes, trying to appear to be appraising the environs...

"It's nice...but definitely _not_ Vanagdrasil," Mara parried with a subtly disparaging comment, deciding that the best defense was a good offense. By keeping this Belldandy on her toes with constant challenges, she would earn a grudging respect. But more importantly, she'd also earn the freedom to observe the lair more closely. As Mara expected, Demoness Belldandy's face briefly fired with ire...but then she recovered herself. Smiling self-knowingly, Belldandy nodded her head reluctantly at this truism.

"My sisters will be along shortly. They, like I, are surveiling the vicinity for signs of that blessed Goddess!"

Then Mara smelled the molten lava.

"You have a lava bath here?" she asked excitedly.

"Why of course!! Do you think I could endure spending _years_ on the Earthrealm if I didn't? The lava bath is really hot...and I have my younger sister Skuld to thank for that. It's probably the only useful thing she's done since she was assigned here as a Demoness Earthrealm Trainee. She spent two years creating a suitable tap through the Earthrealm's crust and mantle, so that we could have only the most molten of lava. Needless to say, the lava tap's quite stable...despite what my older sister Urd says. The lava we soak in is the most primo inside the planet. High in minerals and sulfides, just the right temperature...

For a moment, Mara's thoughts ferried away from the fact that she was in the heart of the enemy's turf. A soak in a hot lava pool held a very strong attraction, since the videogame arcade's shower now possessed a distinctly unappealing and distasteful air every time she walked by it.

"And of course, Skuld has it tightly regulated, so that no...accidents...will ever occur. After all, it would reflect poorly on we Demons if a large part of Tokyo Bay suddenly turned into a tectonic convection zone because of volcanismic eccentricities caused by our little 'luxury'. Myself, I would love to stand by and watch as a few million Earthrealm mortals got cooked by supercompressed mantle gases and ejecta!" Demoness Belldandy explained with a giggle, slapping Mara on the back.

Mara regretted the loss of her Demoness Powers...if she was at full Senior First Class strength, she would have zapped this Demoness Belldandy so hard that she would have been blasted clean through the Moon on her way to the middle of the Oort Cloud. Instead, Mara bit her tongue...and smiled amicably in response to the backslap. She noted to Demoness Belldandy that such a loss of tectonic cohesion in the lithosphere would only be briefly satisfying; the license suspensions that His Darkness would bestow on she and her sisters on the heels of such a disaster wouldn't be worth the enjoyment.

Once inside, Mara immediately noticed that the temple bore no resemblance to the interior of the Norn's house. The living room was furnished with malleable marble couches and pillows, bloodwalls with built-in portals and viewports, knot-trees with perches for SereHawks, several flashy electric guitars parked in front of a large amp, glowing ghostly Light-Skulls embedded in the ceiling amidst the charnel-tile decorative pattern...all in all, she had to admit that it was a tastefully decorated Demonic Lair.

The Demoness Belldandy noticed Mara staring at the guitars, which seemed out of place by virtue of their mortalish artifice. Everything else here was magic, arcanic...haunting, just like a Demoness Lair should be. So why the guitars?

"Those are my little sister's. She's in a heavy metal band...she loves the death metal music scene here on the Earthrealm. Quite a musician, she is! All because she saw some anime series on TV called Bubblegum Crisis; she immediately became infatuated with that show and decided that she wanted to be like one of the characters in it. Me...I can't stand anime. It's too tame, not enough sex and violence in it," Demoness Belldandy noted.

Mara smiled at this: the Skuld she knew always had her nose buried in the latest issue of "Ribon" weekly, or in one of her many "perfect collections" of shoujo manga series. At least the ones Peorth hadn't 'borrowed'...

Curious, Mara let her eyes wander into the dining room. She noted that food area had the usual trappings of a Demon's Lair...at least her Earthrealm Lair. A pile of pizza crusts was playing hide-and-seek with the dining table...as in covering almost the whole surface of the round dinner table, alongside a variety of bowls of various stirfries and noodle, half-empty containers of ice cream, and numerous bottles of sake.

Urd.

Judging by the mess, Demoness Skuld and Demoness Urd had the same powerup sources as their Goddess opposites. Well, before Urd's powerup got mysteriously changed to OJ and peach juice. If so, then what was Belldandy's source of energy? Mara strained herself to try and remember. Was it Oolong Tea...or was it Darjeeling Tea?

"You want something to eat? We have Kentucky Fried, McDonald's, Curry House, Burger King...all the best stuff!" Demoness Belldandy asked cheerfully as she rattled boxes inside of a refrigerator shaped like an Earthrealm coffin. The refrigerator was basically a box-shape with human femurs for door pulls, with a thick-yet-transparent reddish ice for the interior containing surface.

Mara didn't hesitate to request the McDonalds. Demoness Belldandy broke open the refrigerator and pulled out a crumpled paper bag. Her right hand started to glow orange as she moved it over the bag, heating up its contents. A minute later, she tossed the carry-out bag towards her. Soon, Mara was happily feasting on three Big Macs with teriyaki sauce and a pile of French fries, while Demoness Belldandy was gulping down one can of tea after another.

"So her powerup _is_ tea!" Mara observed to herself. She couldn't remember what Belldandy's powerup was, but it was evident from the way this Demoness woman was chugging the cans of chilled tea that she was powering herself up. Which was curious, because in normal circumstances, Demoness Belldandy should be getting her energy straight from the Vanagdrasil Mainframe.

Something was wrong here.

"Hi, Elder Sister!!" a voice sounded from the living room. "We're back! Hey...waitaminute, there's something wrong here. HEY!! Who in the Dark One's name is _she_?"

The voice grew loud and shrill with shocked menace. "That's _her_! That's Mara! What's she doing here, in our _Lair_?! She's that Goddess bitch who's always trying to interfere with your assignment by stealing Keiichi from us!"

"Skuld..." Demoness Belldandy said warily. Mara was taken aback as she saw Demoness Skuld emerge into sight. Skuld seemed to totally ignore her older sister; she was so fixated on the new intruder.

"Just like the Brat!" Mara observed under her breath, remembering all the times her little sister was trenchant and impulsive...

"Mara, what'd you do to my Big Sister Belldandy?" the little Demoness shouted angrily. "You don't belong here, ergo...you did something to get in here! I'm such a genius to figure that out!"

Demoness Belldandy rested a hand against her forehead and sighed with frustration.

Demoness Skuld was dressed in some futuristic version of a body armor suit, a metallic outfit that was styled along the lines of the Evangelion anime that was popular here on the Earthrealm a dozen years ago. Her outlandish techno-attire was overshadowed by her cosmetic choices...she had the most whacked Harujuku hairstyle imaginable! Ghosting stabs of green, orange and red hair spiked out of the crown of her head at impossible angles. The long shocks of hair blended in with the braided black hair that swept down her back. Dozens of rings lined the edges of each ear. She looked like she could fit right in with the most outlandishly loud styles in _Fruits_ magazine.

Punkette Skuld.

"Y..you better not have done anything to hurt her! If you've done any of that Goddess tricksy-stuff to my sister, I'll..." she threatened. Suddenly she paused in mid-sentence and glared at Mara.

"Why am I saying this? Now look what you've done to me! I'm arguing with myself! That does it! I sure as Bless ain't going to waste any more time with you, you sister-harasser!" Skuld declared.

"I'm gonna Skuld-bomb you..." she announced, immediately producing two red-and-black bomblets in her gloved hands. Mara reacted instantly by crouching close to the table, spilling her French fries all over the floor.

"Don't be so chill, Little Witch-Brat!"

A new voice.

Mara almost leapt out of her boots as a lasso of energy snapped out of nowhere and wrapped itself around Demoness Skuld's throat with horsewhip intensity. Spanning the micro-seconds, it then yanked backwards...causing the younger Demoness to lose her balance and drop her two Skuld-bombs. Instinctively, Mara plugged her ears as they hit the ground...but _didn't_ explode.

"Duds...as usual," the new voice noted drolly.

Another Demoness stepped out from behind the punkish Demoness Skuld.

Demoness Urd.

As Mara traveled her eyes to the evilly grinning Demoness Urd, she felt a sense of deja vu. Unlike Demoness Skuld, this Demoness was dressed _just like Goddess Urd dressed_ back in the Earthrealm. Well, almost. In fact, Demoness Urd's choice of dress was similar to Mara's own preferences...when she felt like seducing young Earthrealm men, that is. In other words, Demoness Urd's outfit was _sleek and sexy_. Demoness Urd's body was wrapped in a leather bodice that barely covered her breasts, held open by a loose meshing of leather strings. Urd's legs were hosed in some kind of red and blue fishnet stockings.

"Skuld, you shouldn't be so impatient! I'll have to punish you later for threatening our guest. Consider it part of your Earthrealm training...errant Demoness," Urd said condescendingly to Skuld in a thin voice scaled with sadistic malice. Mara watched as Urd snapped back the whip, leaving a slight red mark on Demoness Skuld's neck. Demoness Skuld cowered briefly at the threat, and then her eyes grew wide as she realized that Mara was not who she thought she was.

"She's...one of us! But how?" Demoness Urd stuttered.

"You guys..." Demoness Belldandy attempted to explain, but Urd cut her off with a hand motion.

"Yeah..._how_ in His Dark Name did _you_ come to be?" Demoness Urd asked in a commanding voice, snapping her whip like an S&M queen. She coiled her whip-lasso and walked right up to Mara, holding the coiled slash of energy a few cm under Mara's chin. Mara swam through bullets of nervousness as she realized that this 'Demoness' Urd was functioning at almost Demon Queen capacity! She had the _Voice_...the ability to askcommand her fellow Demons. Only Demon Queens, Demon Queen Trainees and Senior First Class Demonesses could use the Voice effectively.

Suddenly, this visit had turned dangerous. Unlike the Earthrealm, where Belldandy had been the most powerful of the three Goddesses until just recently, Mara could tell by Urd's arrogance that _she_ was the most powerful of the sisters. Mara deeply regretted that she had made such a crucial misjudgment.

"When my younger sister was assigned here to this piece-of-crap planet to bestow Grief on her mortal charge, our Goddess enemies sent one of their agents as well. But we got here first, so we were able to imprison young Morisato. But soon, it became apparent that my sister Belldandy had her hands full. Of course, the little one felt homesick, so she had to tag along too. But neither of my kid sisters could do the job right..." Urd explained. Mara heard an audible growling in Demoness Belldandy and Skuld's throats...

"So I came here to set matters right. With my superior skills as a Demon Queen Trainee, we were more than capable of protecting my sister's assignment," Demoness Urd noted proudly.

"That's not true! The Dark Lord _told_ me to come here!" Demoness Skuld protested. Demoness Urd biffed her on the head and grumbled something about "lying".

"Which in any case, still leaves us with the unanswered question..._why are you here_!" Demoness Urd asked again, using the Voice.

But Mara herself was a Senior First Class Demoness, albeit for only a few months in time as reckoned by the Earthrealm standard. Yet, this was enough for her to resist the magnetism of Urd's words...just barely.

Just barely enough so that she could concoct a lie.

So she told the truth...actually, a _version_ of the truth.

"You've no doubt heard about the occasional Chaos that works its way into the Doublet System, causing we Demons to have 'twins'," she started to explain, gambling on the hope that this Vanagdrasil functioned with an intact Doublet System. All three Demonesses regarded her with varying expressions.

"Approximately 270 millennia ago, there was one such aberration in the Doublet System, the result of a dormant Mainframe Quarky from the last war we had with the Gods. At the same time I came into being, the Quarky somehow was triggered...consequently screwing up the Vanagdrasil Mainframe for a split-second. The Mainframe went 'blink'. So instead of assigning me a God for a Doublet, the System misinterpreted the command relay structure...and doubled me instead. Actually, it didn't double me in the sense of a cloning procedure. It matched me with a Goddess..._too_ exactly."

"Who's your mother!" Demoness Urd demanded to know.

"My Mother is the Demoness Queen Myducia, Demimonde Companion of the First Rank to his Dark Majesty. Because of my special circumstance of having no Doublet, I also have a DemonMother, similar to what Earthrealm mortals term a 'Godfather'. I'm sure you've heard of her. Queen Hild, Demimonde Consort of the First Rank to His Darkness, First of the Demon Queens," Mara shot back with a vim, hoping that there _was_ a Queen Myducia and a Queen Hild in this twisted version of reality. If there wasn't, then she was majorly fucked. Judging from the vivid reactions from the three Demoness Sisters at the mention of the name, there was.

"Thanks for the save, Mom!" Mara breathed silently in gratitude. Royalty was royalty, and if Urd was a Demon Queen in training, she would have to respect this.

"Now that you know who my Mother is, perhaps you'll believe me when I say that I am just a mirror copy of this 'Goddess Mara' that you've been trifling with..."

"Trifling with?!" Demoness Urd said warily. "That Goddess is a royal pain in the ass! She actually fell in love with our Grief Assignee!"

"So how come we haven't ever met you?" Demoness Skuld added, jumping into interrogation mode, which jumped Mara into playing her trump card.

"Hmm, it's probably because I'm always so occupied with my administrative duties, being that I run one of the Offices. As a Demoness Senior First Class with an Unlimited, Unrestricted License, I have a lot of responsibilities..." Mara answered in a slow voice, deliberately pausing her words for dramatic emphasis.

"Waaaah!" all three Demonesses gasped, their faces suddenly rigid with anxiety...and a healthy dose of awe as well.

"Y..you're a Senior First Class License? You're not that much older than me!" Demoness Urd wailed in frustration. "How could _you_ be a Senior First Class Demoness?"

If this had been one of Skuld's shoujo manga mags, Mara would have big sweatdropped at Urd's not-too-subtle assertion. Urd and she were both the same age...and this Demoness Urd didn't look a day younger than her counterpart, the Urd who was Mara's twin sister. In spite of this, Demoness Urd had just insinuated to Mara that she was _older_ than her 270,000 years!

Despite herself, Mara was glaring at Demoness Urd with a very peeved expression.

"Heh heh...I think you just insulted her, you big idiot!" Demoness Skuld taunted with glee, obviously not one to miss Mara's cross expression. Mara was amused by the giddy malice in Skuld's eyes.

"That's so you, Big Sister Urd!" Demoness Skuld added. "Pissing off a _Senior_ First Class Demoness with some stupid comment! What if she's a candidate for Demon Queen? What if she _already is_ a Demoness Queen?! She might have a direct line to Oni-sama. In fact, she probably does, since she's the head of an entire _Office_!"

"Which means that you better apologize to her immediately for making fun of her age...or else you'll wind up...oh shit! Ooops!!" Demoness Belldandy started to chide, but chuffed herself in mid-sentence. The hazel-and-orange haired Demoness immediately covered her mouth, realizing that she had just unintentionally insulted Mara. Just like her sister, this Demoness Belldandy had interjected a random harmartia borne of her naivety. Mara fought with herself...she really wanted to milk the Demoness's solipsism to the fullest. She almost let loose a few giggles; observing to herself that this series of mishaps was _so_ typical of another trio of sisters she knew...

Urd was literally squirming inside of her laced sexy outfit.

Mara regarded Demoness Skuld, who was smiling smugly at both her older sisters' discomfiture. Demoness Urd's tanned face was falling pallid with uncertainty, while Demoness Belldandy looked like she was almost ready to grovel at Mara's feet.

"I..I'm sorry, Senior Demoness Mara!" the two Demonesses blurted out quickly, bowing curtly before Mara with ready reluctance. Demoness Skuld exploded into giggles at this. Mara realized that the relationship matrix between these three had to be dynamically similar to that of her Goddess sisters. Skuld and Urd were quick to gain leverage over a situation and exploit it, provided that any particular causes could potentially lead to the comeuppance of the other sister. And Belldandy bestowed tranquility by in her role as moderator between the two...

Only in this case, Mara was certain that Belldandy would be wont to abuse her position as mediator between her two siblings.

"The more things are different, the more they're the same," Mara mused uneasily as she watched Demoness Skuld and Demoness Urd explode into a heated shouting match.

Demoness Belldandy turned to Mara and shook her head apologetically.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Belldandy sniffed the air as she concealed herself by molding tightly against the trunk of the cedar tree across from the temple. The darkling aura of the three Demoness sisters was omnipresent, almost obscuring the traces of energy from Mara's Goddess half. She could barely sense Mara's presence in the temple.

Yet her supposition was correct! Mara was here.

In addition to Mara's specific energy signature, Belldandy could sense out _another_ source of Goddess energies nearby. The attempts to mask the energy 'signatures' were rather obvious to Belldandy, once she had been exposed to them long enough to measure and pattern them. Previously, their encounters with 'Goddess Mara' had been fleeting...but now, she was certain that these Goddess energies she sensed were constancies. Constant enough for Belldandy to discover that the stealth patterning used to conceal the Divine energy emanations were almost the same as the transphasic patterning she herself had employed to avoid being detected by Mara, back during several 'bouts' between she and her Demoness sister. The realization was somewhat unnerving; that another Goddess was using almost identical tactics to what she usually employed to sneak up on the Demonesses...

Goddess Mara.

"I wonder why she's here? Perhaps because she must be concerned about her counterpart. Could it be possible that she senses that some small part of 'my' Mara is actually good?" Belldandy mused, trying to stifle the restless images in her mind. A sense of reluctance gripped her. If only this Goddess Mara would trust she and Mara enough to cooperate by making herself more visible! Naturally, it was understandable that she wouldn't trust Mara, since Mara was a Demoness. Yet, she had to have noticed that the Divine energies coined in Mara's Being included both Demoness and Goddess signatures.

"Why is it this way? If this Goddess Mara wouldn't be so secretive...if she would just show herself to us...the odds would be more even. Three against three. Which means we would have a better chance at rescuing Keiichi," Belldandy said under her breath.

"Rescue him for _whom_?" a voice gently demanded.

Belldandy swirled her vision to try and find the source of the voice.

_"Hey...life isn't two-dimensional, ya know! Up here!"_

She looked up into the bowers of the tree...and saw Urd...

Not Urd.

The figure above her was perched on a large limb of the tree, her legs dangling a few meters above Belldandy's head. She was kicking her legs in a girlish fashion that reminded Belldandy of Skuld. Her dress was modest, yet ornate by Goddess standards; the most eye-catching feature was a long blue cape with prismatic patterns draping off her shoulders and down her back. She was dressed in layers, wearing a tight-fitting white, blue and pink unitard with a jacketing blouse and skirt. But unlike Urd's styling, she wore the one-piece zipped all the way up to the collar. Her boots suggested the kind of large footwear that Skuld preferred, white with a blue helix inlaid in the large anklets. She sported a short navy-blue mini-skirt inlaid with glitter that would have been indecent if she wasn't wearing the spandex-like unitard underneath it. Her top was a short-sleeved blouse-like leather jacket that reminded Belldandy of a summer session sailor-fuku top, complete with an ornately-tied pink 'ribbon' tie around the collar. Her arms were bare, with dozens of radiant bangles around her wrists.

She definitely had Mara's face.

Her eyes were the blue of the distant horizon, instead of fireglow red like Mara's. Belldandy examined the symbol in the middle of her forehead; it was a velvet-colored circular helix. Her cheekbones had the familiar triangular blue marks that all Goddesses had while on duty to the Earthrealm. A wealth of golden curly locks caught the sunlight, creating a haloic effect around her face. Belldandy half-expected to see fangs when she smiled, but she was tightlipped. Her face wasn't as angular as Mara's either; her chin and jawline were more rounded.

"Goddess Mara, I presume?"

"Who are you? And what is your connection with my dear Keiichi? You're transparent, you know! I can readily sense in your aura the strong love-impressions in your heart for Keiichi. They're almost as strong as mine..." she replied, her voice tinged with jealousy.

"They're _just_ as strong as yours, in their own way!" Belldandy snapped back without thinking.

"Don't even bother to make any excuses! Keiichi's _mine_! _I've_ been the one who's tried her best to free him for these past five years! You have no idea how strong my love is for Keiichi! Without him, my Being is left empty...his heart fills the oceans of my life with waterfalls of joy. I couldn't even imagine the changing of the seasons without the protection of his earnest smiles of affection! You...simply...have...no...idea..." Goddess Mara explained, her voice struggling through despair and affection reminisced.

"Can you please come down here? I can't climb the tree because of my injured ankle," Belldandy asked. She felt a wave of tension foresting her heart, especially since she couldn't even see this 'Mara' face-to-face. All her Goddess intuitions informed her that this was no trick...this woman was actually the Goddess counterpart that existed in this reality-set. But Belldandy had to be certain...

After reflecting on Belldandy's request for a moment, Goddess Mara hopped down, her navy-blue cape furling behind her as she descended like a flying squirrel to the ground.

Once she landed a mere meter away from Belldandy, she stepped in and regarded her with a vigored scrutiny.

"Y..y..you're a _Goddess_!" she gasped out. Belldandy nodded "yes" slowly.

"B..but how can this be? _I'm_ the only Goddess on permanent assignment on the Earthrealm...at least until I can finally free Keiichi from his Demonic captors. A..and you look just like Demoness Belldandy! Where's that flashy red leather skintight outfit she always wears? Why aren't you wearing it?" she observed, her narrowed eyes widening with intense astonishment.

"I would never wear such a thing..." Belldandy quickly retorted.

"Except for Keiichi! I can read it in your eyes. You're in l..love with him!" Goddess Mara pronounced...and then quickly covered her mouth in embarrassment.

"I did it again! This is ridiculous! I'm so screwed! I haven't stuttered in over 14 millennia... Now you've ruined my streak!" she announced with zealous disapproval, pointing a finger at Belldandy's breast.

Belldandy cocked her head to the side, wondering what this was all about. Goddess Mara had been all business a moment ago...and suddenly, she had launched herself into rapt anxiety in respect to a couple slips of the tongue. There was a certainly 'bubbly-ness' to Goddess Mara's behavior; but like bubbles, her mood seemed to shift like bubbles floating on random currents of wind.

"Now I'm going to lose my bet to Peorth-sempai!!" Goddess Mara quailed with a worried mien, holding her hands up under her chin. Belldandy almost wanted to giggle at this admission...until it dawned on her about_ how_ she had addressed Peorth.

She had used an honorific.

"Peorth..._sempai_!?" Belldandy thought to herself, seriously confused, but also amused.

"Y..you haven't been sent by the Proctors to check up on me, have you? Or maybe you're a Proctor, but in disguise, imitating one of those Demonesses so that you can follow me and see if I get all confused," Goddess Mara asked fretfully.

"I didn't mean to fall in love with him! I'm not in trouble, am I? You're not from the Adjudicator General Section of the Goddess Relief Office? Please, don't tell me that you're the AG for this millennium! D..does this mean that I'm going to be disciplined by the Goddess Relief Office? It's not my fault! I try so hard to do what's right..." she continued in a stream-of-consciousness outpouring of anxiety.

For a moment, Belldandy thought that she was listening to Skuld after one of her "mishaps" with one of her mecha inventions. This woman Goddess...was extremely distressed by Belldandy's unexpected presence. Thinking quickly, Belldandy concluded that Mara's surprise meant that she _hadn't_ detected Belldandy first! She didn't seem to expect Belldandy to be a Goddess.

Belldandy sensed that the source of Goddess Mara's distress was a complex emotional confliction. She could sense a strong aura of guilt around the Goddess. Obviously, Goddess Mara was feeling self-recriminating and uncertain about her feelings towards Keiichi. Not to mention that she was afraid of being discovered by her GRO superiors. Add to this the stress of being separated from the person she loved...and the fact that she had been battling three Demonesses for his freedom.

No wonder she had tried to background herself.

Belldandy decided that the best tact to try and reach an insecure Goddess would be to be forthright, projecting confidence and acceptance. If Goddess Mara remained this upset, she wouldn't be of any help. Belldandy already had her hands full with the disappearance of Demoness Mara.

"Hi! I'm Goddess Belldandy, Senior First Class, Unlimited, Unrestricted Licensee...at your service," Belldandy introduced herself, trying to calm her down.

"OH MY..OH MY..OH MY!! _NO WAY!!_ You're a _Senior_ First Class Goddess? I don't read a fraction of that type of power coming from you..."

Silent words of light linking upwards to the crystalline metaframe of the Yggdrasil Mainframe. Despite her diminished powers, Belldandy could sense the connection between Mara and the Mainframe.

Belldandy decided to take a risk.

"I am fully aware of why you're here. Goddess Mara, currently a Goddess First Class, Unlimited, Unrestricted Licensee, present assignment region by the Goddess Relief Office is Sector Z-Ispe-8732-Aegrud-Noht-1441. Present Wishgranting assignment is attached to the mortal Morisato Keiichi; such assignment coincident with a Demon Grief Office Assignment due to process Intercept of wish request on the part of the DGO. Wishgranting assignment to be considered ongoing until said mortal is relieved from his captors and his wish request is fulfilled, or until he reaches the natural terminus of his life functions. In regards to the recipient of the Wishgranting, the GRO Agent...being in prolonged contact with her assignee...has unexpectedly developed feelings of strong affection for her charge. Consequently, her efforts at providing Relief have become even more a source of frustration because she loves him," Belldandy stated in an officious voice.

"_H..how?_" Goddess Mara stammered, looking at her with keen interest. "You got everything right, except for the fact that I'm a Goddess Second Class! I _wish_ I was a Goddess First Class...but I'm not ready for that kind of responsibility yet! That's why I want to be a good girl and finish this assignment..."

Belldandy felt her jaw grow heavy, doused with more amazement.

During their exile here, Mara and she had accidentally discovered that the Demon's designation of this Sector and its thousand inhabited planets was almost the opposite of the God's designation of this Sector. Belldandy was hoping that...as everything seemed reversed here...that the Demon's designation would be the correct one. Which meant that the Goddess's designation for the Earthrealm and its Sector would actually be the designation normally used by the Demons, back on 'her' Earthrealm.

In other words, mirror-opposite of what she was used to. Just like this young Goddess standing before her.

She looked at Goddess Mara anew.

Goddess Mara's blue eyes sparkled with an emotional struggle that she could only barely manage to submerge. Tears formed on the sides of her eyes as they darted back and forth, examining Belldandy's face. Belldandy smiled gently in response to Goddess Mara's questioning look.

She suddenly leapt forward and seized Belldandy, pulling herself tightly against her.

"Oh my Lord! Oh my dearest Father Kami-sama! I'm not alone anymore!! You've sent someone to come..snff..here! T..to _help_ me get..sob..my Keiichi back! You're here to help me..snffle..finish what I came here to do! I don't have to do this all by myself anymore!" she shouted, her voice muffled as she yelled into Belldandy's shoulders.

A few seconds later, Belldandy found herself hugging a crying Goddess Mara, trying to console her...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --


	88. Pt 88: Keiichi: Untethering the Shadow ...

**Part 88: Keiichi: Untethering the Shadow -- 3rd Movement**

"Sora! Get over here! _Now_!!" Keiichi demanded as he yelled into the mansion's intercom. He had felt irritated and unfocused for too long this morning, and it was Sora's fault. Once again.

He bit his tongue, knowing that he really wanted to chew out every cm of the diminutive Sora Hasegawa. It was the end of January; in fact, today marked 13 months since he had arrived here. This realization fouled his mood even more...he had been stranded for an entire _year_ away from Bell-chan and "relative Japan", as he termed the Japan that he had lived his whole life in before coming here. The Japan he was used to. In that Japan, he was a nobody...maybe not so much a nobody, as he had won two high-profile races that garnered him and his N.I.T. teammates the attention of a nation. But he wasn't a media star by any means.

Somehow, despite his recent falling out with the triumvirate of Taniyama, Atsukara and Ono, Keiichi was still thriving as an entertainment icon a year later. In the wake of the Kohaku Uta Gassen "Reckless Incident" as the press termed it, word came out in all the entertainment variety mags about his disastrous falling out with his managers. The Fatman, Weasel and Snake had immediately fired up a campaign to discredit him with near-libelous claims, spilling the goods on all of his worst secrets in an all-out image-assassination effort. Regretfully, Keiichi MoriStar had no lack of skeletons in the closet during the early years of his soaring star. Keiichi was completely ranked off that his 'alter-ego' could have been such a dumbass. Like an idiot, his entertainer counterpart had squandered his wish-gift from Peorth by engaging in all sorts of distasteful sordid activities. Keiichi was brim-filled with disgust with every new revelation of his alter-ego's 'antics' that Sora had brought to his attention last year. He felt sorry for Peorth, who had given his counterpart...his alter-ego in this universe...the gift of a prodigious talent, and then had to witness him wastrel it away in meaningless débauché.

His primary reason in life was to find a way to get back home to Bell-chan. But with all of this craziness going down and a celebrity career to maintain, he was saddled with a host of distractions. He had formulated a secondary goal: to establish this 'Keiichi MoriStar' persona onto the fast track towards the morals he himself held dear. If he was going to be some kind of artistic 'leader', as Anniko had pointed out, then he was going to conduct himself on the higher moral and ethical path.

It occurred to him that his alter-ego's slide into depravity probably was orchestrated by the trio of slimeballs who had been serving as his keepers for the past five years. Fine...they can make him out to look like Hitler if they wanted to. They weren't dealing with Keiichi MoriStar anymore; they were dealing with Keiichi Morisato who possessed the phenomenal genius of Keiichi MoriStar but had none of his baser inclinations. He was already involved in his own active campaign to remold his image into a public-spirited artist; still on the edge but able to "do the right thing" instead of acting out selfishly. Given time, he would get the goods on the three ratbag managers and turn the tables on them. Sora had a team of lawyers and accountants on their asses, investigating them for the past several months.

But ironically, his defiant act at the Kohaku seemed to have an opposite effect on his image, causing all sorts of wild speculation. A number of the indie press papers and critical music journals had championed him in rebel colors. To them, Keiichi's 'moment' at the Kohaku and his subsequent defection from his managers were portrayed as a cause célèbre. They had completely missed the point that he had intended it as a noblesse oblige; he had acted to create a powerful artistic 'message' because it was the right thing to do. He wasn't going to be part of the 'machine' that spent billions of yen to fill people's heads with empty dreams. But many of his fans all over Asia seemed to 'get it'...they were engaged in thoughtful debate about his artistic work, which showed up every month on hundreds of blogs and webforums. The rest of his adoring public blithely remained focused on the easy idea that he was "the idol who pied the music execs in the face and got away with it."

It had played out so perfectly...to all of Japan, the edginess of his music and art wasn't just artistry any more, it was a bonafide lifestyle and personal conviction. Now, he just had to convince them that this new artistic intensity wasn't fueled by massive intake of cocaine and sexual orgies. So Sora and he had spent an insane amount of time in 'damage control mode' in an attempt to forestall any further ruination of his public image.

His former sleazeball manager's discrediting campaign even extended toward attempts to defame Sora. Millions of yen were missing, and they were trying to finger Sora as an embezzler. Since she was also blackballed in the industry, Keiichi had found it impossible to spurn her services. She didn't have the padding of celebrity to cushion her fall from the corridors of corporate power. In her case, there was no doubt that Atsukara had indeed completely shut every door to employment for the young woman who served as his personal assistant. He knew that it would be heartless to leave Sora hanging, so he found a way to accommodate her in his employ, continuing in her role as his professional aide...and much more.

As he had promised during his walkout, he had hired Sora and had given her complete rein over all the business aspects of his career. In the past year since he declared his independence from the mainstream industry, Sora had been serving as his personal assistant, business manager, publicity coordinator, CEO of his new music label, promotions scheduler...she wore so many hats, he had no idea how she kept it all straight. But she kept trying...

...and was doing a terrible job of it at times, because she was attempting to accomplish it all on her own out of some sense of loyalty to him.

Yet, he was still Keiichi MoriStar, Japan's most popular young male entertainer...the fixed subject of thousands of celebrity newspaper and magazine columns, TV specials and webpages.

Hell, even the _idol stars_ idolized him! Young starlets and divas, many of whom are poster girl sex symbols to most of teenaged Japan, literally fawned over him at gala parties and talk shows. Keiichi almost regretted how easily his charisma overflowed, touching everyone he met...strangling them, turning them into witless deferential sycophants.

It was as if his shadow knew secrets that he didn't.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

During the first half of last year, he had to deal with some fallout resulting from Atsukara's ongoing lameass attempts to dethrone him from the Japanese entertainment elite on a daily basis. Unfortunately for his spurned overseers, no matter how they tried to defame him, his adoring public had bought up his first CD single of 201X, "Weird Dreams of a Girl on the Stairs", like sushi shop owners buying sacks of rice. Last summer, his remix CD had sold over 30 million copies in Japan and Asia. He had starred in two movies; both films were his first foray into action flicks. To everyone's surprise, he was as accomplished in his martial arts stunts as Jackie Chan or Jet Li.

Towards the end of last year, he turned up his fame even further by co-starring in a very heavy sci-fi tragedy drama with Anni, with his character dying at the end of the film. Not only was "Fire and Ice" the top grossing movie of the season...it had broke both he and Anni in the American market. Anni had won her Oscar for "Best Foreign Film Lead Actress" a few years back; now she was strongly rated to be in the running for "Best Lead Actress". Rumor had it that the film was on the short list for a number of Oscar nominations. Keiichi was perversely gratified by the fact that, the more Atsukara and his cronies tried to damage his career, the more successful he became.

Plus, he had a little Goddess named Peorth in his corner.

Despite all the challenges of celebrity, he had exceeded each of his career expectations last year except for one key omission. When he shit-canned his trio of exploitive managers, he had promised them that he would deliver his masterwork last year. The "Dreams-Weird-World" CD he did release was a 'contractual obligation' work to finish off his ties with his previous music industry sponsors; it was a very strong effort which many critics and fans considered the equal of his recent "Blue Attitudes" and debut "Love-Bliss-Panic-Kiss" CDs. But he knew that it wasn't the type of work that he _truly_ wanted to create. He just couldn't pull the musical statement he wanted to make out of himself. The struggle within himself to wrest forth a meaningful work was as difficult in its own way as dealing with the biz, the nitwits, the press, the flake entourage and all the others. He wanted to raise the bar, to set a new standard in musical creativity with a Daedalian effort that would unify classical and modern music and revitalize both. This year, his goal was to craft a definitive statement, to really do what Anni had meant when she said he could "_take music and transform it into a church of spirit._" Back in 'relative Japan, Cevn had somehow been gifted with the ability to compose a music that Bell-chan had called the God's Music. Keiichi expected nothing less from this next CD. A deeply intuitive awareness informed him that by doing so, he could gain release from this place and be rejoined with Belldandy. If he could pour his entire Soul into the cup of his artistic vision, then he could create a God's Music of his own.

In his Upper Tokyo hilltop mansion, Keiichi had converted one of the guest bedroom suites into an office for Sora. Logistics pretty much demanded this arrangement, as he was actually having to consult with her about business matters on a daily basis.

As he leaned against the wall-sized window, the heavy snowfall on the other side was cresting whorls of windgusts, blanketing the thousands of high-rises in Tokyo once more in alabaster profile...

Business was a bother to him; paperwork, an eyesore.

But it had to get done. Earlier this year, he had reluctantly given Sora his approval to hire a staff of service girls to assist her, because she was no longer assisted by a staff of OLs at the corporate HQ. This only proved to be another irritant as far as Keiichi was concerned. Each time he saw one of Sora's staffers in the mansion, he would have to put up with the 'starstruck' fangirl treatment. And despite his prohibition on Sora's girlcrew wandering around the mansion, he kept finding them outside of their assigned boundaries. He was already feeling confined enough...without having to suffer through having a house full of groupies who happened to be crack secretaries and administrative assistants.

To her credit, Sora had been patiently trying to give him a cursory education in the intricacies of business over the past year. She had insisted that he learn some aspects of the business, noting that she couldn't make all the decisions on her own. Demanding his attention, Sora elicited his input whenever she felt that she needed to consult with him regarding the bigger decisions affecting his career, such as film and record deals. Therefore, as she pointed out, he needed to have some awareness of what was going on, business-wise.

Sora had done much more than simply serve as his 'Girl Friday' personal assistant during his years with Atsukara and his cronies. While she was teaching him the strings of the business side of life, she disclosed that she had supervised his brokers to make a series of very profitable investments in property and data estates in the past five years. So he was flush with cash all the time, because she had pespicaciously anticipated his manager's devious schemes and outwitted them. In other words, she had reamed them while they were trying to rip him off. She explained to him that one more year's worth of investments would make it possible for him to launch his own full-on entertainment company, complete with a roster of 40-50 artists, an anime studio, a manga publishing house, and all the promotional power of one of the majors. Which was good, because he didn't want to become a starving artist living on royalty checks. Sora's investment sense was savvy and accurate...his wealth on paper was many times that which he had earned through his record and film deals. It was nothing for him to go to the bank and withdraw a hundred grand for pocket change.

Or two hundred grand, if he felt like it...

Just as he was ready to call out her name again, Sora rushed in, her face flushed pink with the exertion of being at his beck and call. The effect was tinged with hilarity when Keiichi noticed that the lenses of her trademark round wirerims were steamed translucent. Sometimes when she arrived in his party den 'office', Sora wore this expression that seemed to express a goblinish resentful sentiment, something like "you're driving me away from my _important_ work!" Keiichi thought she was cute when she was miffed. Even if looks could kill, Sora's girlish face was too innocent to loose an intimidating demeanor for too long...

Because Sora was his right-hand-girl, she was obliged to drop everything at his summons. He had the upper hand. At times, Keiichi felt a certain sadistic impulse to call her forth from her work for no particular reason, just so that he could study that brief flash of irritation in her eyes.

But this time, it was important.

"Sora, I want you to make up an excuse so I don't have to deal with Anni tonight," he began to instruct her, feeling like he was some corporate saicho dictating to a secretary. In a way, he _was_ a saicho...a CEO...because he was the 'chief' of all his operations. Perhaps he should tell Sora's staff girls to start calling him "Mr. CEO MoriStar". No, he liked the term "saicho" much better than its Western counterpart, "CEO".

Sora looked at him wonderingly, waiting for his instructions as he babbled something about "saichos".

"In the past two days, I've had three magazine shoots, worked on a video for my next single, met with a board of execs from Crown Records who want me to contribute a single for somebody's next big animation feature, and last night's fashion show party ran late. I want to have a night to myself."

Sora nodded her head silently.

"As if _you_ could understand what I'm going through," Keiichi thought sarcastically as he watched her feign empathy. Sora didn't have a clue about the exacting price of celebrity. She was lucky...all she had to do was keep things flowing behind the scenes. She didn't have to put her image on the line every time she was in public.

He was suddenly struck by a fancy.

"You know Sora, I have a great idea! Wouldn't it cool if I went out incognito and caught a movie?" he asked whimsically. Sora's eyes, rendered slightly smaller than their actual size by her roundish glasses, grew wide.

"B..Boss, you can't go out in public! That would be...dangerous, unprecedented, and very foolhardy," she exclaimed, almost frightened. Keiichi wondered what kind of imaginings populated her head, to cause her to be so upset.

"Why not? I _own_ the public, Sora! All I have to do is put on a pair of sunglasses, get one of my cosmet girls to make my face up to look a bit different and then tuck my hair under my collar and wear a hat. I'll fit right in!"

"And what if someone _does_ recognize you? What if you're in a theatre and some teenage girls see through your disguise? You could cause a stampede...and persons can get hurt! You should really think about this, Boss!"

Sora had given him an idea. A theatre would be perfect! Besides, if Crown wanted him to write a single for their next flick, then they shouldn't have a problem with sending a couple regular guys to accompany him to the theater. If he walked into the superplex with two normal-looking guys at his side, then he'd be even less conspicuous.

"Sora, get on your cellphone and call Mr. Yamada at Crown Records. Tell him that one of my preconditions for giving them their single is for them to dispatch two of their staff here to my mansion ASAP! Inform them that if they don't do this for me, then there's no way that I'll do a damn thing for their new anime flick!"

Sora frowned at this, but then silently departed to do his bidding.

Tonight was going to be _fun_!

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

The two men that Crown records sent to his mansion looked like 'office boys' rather than 'regular guys', but Keiichi didn't mind too much. Perhaps the Crown Records execs thought that he had wanted male escorts to satisfy some hankering for homosexuality. As he watched them glancing nervously around his living room, Keiichi realized that it didn't really matter what the execs thought. He was going to have fun anyway. Besides, being in the presence of two gay men would be interesting, and it would add an extra element of evasion to his disguise.

Of course, Sora was pitching coiled fits over this. She asserted that "being in public with two of _them_" would have significant repercussions," were he to be discovered. She was right of course, so he decided to up the ante...

He told her that she was coming with him to the movies.

Sora's reaction was anything besides anemic.

So now...20 mins before they were going to leave, Sora was pacing back and forth alongside his living room swimming pool, seeming possessed by a frightened daze. Keiichi admired her for her spunk; she was dressed with a light blue French embroidered ski sweater, a long plaid red and navy blue skirt, tan leather boots and a tasteful scarf with cutesies. It was the first time in over a year that he had seen her in something other than a business suit. Yet, she was as nervous as a hen in a wolfpack.

The two 'twinks' were chatting to themselves in one of the other living rooms. Keiichi had made it crystal clear to them that he was bringing them along to help create a cover of anonymity, not for sexual favors...which disappointed both of them immensely. Their reactions of regret reminded him once again that it wasn't just women who had crushes on him. He explicitly instructed them not to act too "gay"; a caution grounded upon Sora's fears. Keiichi wasn't homophobic by nature, but in the past year since he had arrived in this Japan, he had been subject to repeated advances by gay men in the entertainment industry. His 'old self' was shocked by this, but fortunately his 'celeb' persona was quite experienced at rebuffing such advances with a firm tact. Dealing with homosexual and bisexual men was part and parcel of the music and film business; Keiichi was certainly grateful that he didn't have to play 'house boy' like these two kids did. But it wasn't his cup of o-cha. The tea he liked was flavored Belldandy...

Then again, they probably enjoyed being 'kept' by older men. Besides, gay men had their uses in business relationships. After all, the Beatles were managed by a gay man back in their heyday. Many of the execs he worked with who were gay were proficient at their work, and a number of them were wits whose conversation he thoroughly enjoyed. There was a reason why 'gay' and 'comedy' were so synonymous; the two guys Crown had sent over were quite funny to chat with once they got over being nervous around him. Both had aspirations to be TV comic writers when they grew up.

In the past months, Keiichi had often slammed up against these kinds of dissonances. He felt like he was pinned down by a cross-firing of ongoing confusions between his 'old self'...the Keiichi he was...and his 'celeb' persona, the Keiichi MoriStar he seemed to become when situations demanded it. Hence, this surreptitious trip into the night tonight was designed to satisfy his 'old self'. Thanks to Anniko, he was able to recognize when his 'selfness' was drowning and take action. Recently, he was actually going nuts struggling with his inability to just have a normal night on the town...to amuse himself the way 99.9 percent of the people in Japan were freely able to do.

So tonight, he was just going to be Keiichi. No MoriStar. No Anni. No limos or yachts or Learjets. Just a normal night out.

Being Keiichi MoriStar, he was unable to seek out the kinds of fun that he enjoyed routinely back in 'relative Japan'. Here, he felt subject to his fame so often, that another part of his was unnerved from time to time. True, Anni had spent a lot of time coaching him on ways to challenge these "meltdowns", as she termed them. But there was no way he could cope with how _confining_ his fame was. Last night, he woke up in the middle of the night, sweat-browed with emotional disquiet as he realized that...excluding a number of publicity photo shoots... _he hadn't even been on a motorbike_ since he arrived here!

So this 'adventure' was for his inner self.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

The movie was uninteresting, but cinematic ennui wasn't why Keiichi had gone in the first place. His fascination was swayed by the sheer market in people that populated the cineplex. Since his social circle was strictly limited to the so-called "beautiful people", Keiichi had become unaccustomed to seeing the other side of the Janis-face of humanity. Being in the midst of an actual gathering of hoi polloi was almost a culture shock to him. Here, he was witness to _real_ people: everyday people in all their humanity Short, fat, ugly, otaku, poor, sleazy, poser...people whose faces and bodies weren't 'improved' by cosmetic surgery. People who wore department store and thrift shop clothes, rather than designer wear created by the savants of the fashion industry. People who conversed about 'normal' topics like cars, work, politics, sports, home repairs...instead of film projects, lovers, investments, and clinging onto fame.

Like he, they were seeking escape from the everyday banes of their lives.

Sensing the similarity between himself and the sea of faces in the theatre, Keiichi felt his own humanity vigorously reaffirmed. True, he was seeking escape by mingling with 'commoners', while they were seeking escape through the vicarious pleasure of the movie. Yet, it felt so damned _good_ to be away from the demands of fame. To be in _front_ of the movie screen instead of _inside_ of it.

As the credits rolled and people hustled out of theater, Keiichi was shocked when he heard one of his songs accompanying the black-and-white scratches flowing horizontally on the celluloid tape.

His mood deflated. Even here, in the cloak of anonymity...as an unknown amongst the unknowns...Keiichi couldn't escape his fame! Impulsively, he wanted to scream "Keiichi MoriStar sucks!" at the top of his lungs as the crowd milled out of the cinema room, but he choked on the words. A tear traced down his cheek, surprising Sora and his two 'companions'.

His bout of melancholy was cut short when he saw a familiar, yet unexpected visage among the crowd.

_Belldandy!!_

The force of recognition launched him into an adrenaline rush whose force made debris of his logic. Before he could even think, he reacted.

"B...Belldandy! _BELL-CHAN!!_" he voiced above the crowd's murmur. It was only the back of her head, but he was certain that it was her. Long strands of light-auburn hair pulled up high and tied back with a blue ribbon...

She was walking away, and she would be out of sight before he could stop her!

Bridging the yes-no interval in record time, Keiichi decided to run after her. He shoved his way roughly through the crowd, earning curses and comments from the tightly-packed line exiting the lobby.

In mid-jostle, his sunglasses launched off his face as he bumped against a Tamiya-sized guy...

"Watch whereya goin', yuh litle mutherfu..." the beefy-man snarled.

_"IT'S KEIICHI MORISTAR!" _

Keiichi turned to see a group of teenage girls pointing at him, their faces complected with an amazed immediacy of stunned shock. His eyes were visible, hence he was known.

Instantly seized by a frenzy, the crowd seemed to collapse on him. The people-scape blurred, shifting direction from fanning out through the exit doors to an encircling movement, closing on him from all sides. Girls with awestruck expressions pressed up against him...

It was quickly turning into a mob scene as an army of hands reached towards his face, his shoulders, his body. Keiichi felt his breath squeezed from him as the crowd pressed even closer, literally suffocating him.

_"Everyone...back away from Keiichi MoriStar! NOW!!" _

He heard the commanding male voices shouting loudly over the din, sounding like it was projected through a bullhorn. X-ko and Y-Ko!! Thank God that Sora had put them on stand-by to keep an eye out for him!

A tremor in the cell of humanity.

To Keiichi's extreme surprise, the crowd obeyed the shouted orders. Gradually, a narrow pathway formed in the midst of the encircling crowd, leading towards the glass doors opening into the street. Keiichi desperately searched the faces for signs of Sora and the two twinks, but he didn't see them anywhere.

"Time to bail this place!" he thought as he walked briskly past the throng, escorted by his two bodyguards. He was completely at a lost as to what could possibly have caused the crowd to restrain themselves so obediently. It was certainly nothing that _he_ had done...left to their own devices, they were mobbing him like he was some kind of a messiah just a moment ago. _Every_ crowd seemed to lose itself in fits and agonies of idol-worship whenever he made a public appearance. X-ko and Y-ko, intimidating as they looked, certainly couldn't stifle a rapidly developing mob scene.

So what was really going on?

He stepped outside the theater, only to find a red carpet extending from a stretch limousine to the front of the cineplex; there was a large crowd queued on either side of the carpet. It reminded him of the gala for the latest Tojo premiere he attended a few days earlier.

"Over here!" a female voice shouted encouragingly. He saw the waving gloved hand reaching over the roof, from the driver's side of the limousine...and realized that this was his ride.

The two muscular Meninblack both gestured towards the limo, and he walked towards his 'taxi' and pulled the door open...

"Keiichi, mon chéri!! Once again, you've proved that you _do_ have a knack for pulling off the improbable!"

Peorth.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

She had saved him from certain endangerment at the hands of his 'adoring' fans. In the front seat, Peorth was driving the limo; she was smartly dressed in a navy-blue female chauffeur's outfit, complete with a livery-jacket and skirt, epaulets, a driver's cap and rose-tinted round wirerims that made her look like Laura Croft from the TombRaider games. In the back seat where he was seated, _another_ Peorth was reclining on the seat opposite him, her legs curled underneath her, filling a glass from a champagne bottle. She was dressed...less modestly.

"Avec plasir! This will take the edge off!" she purred as she handed him a frosty stemmed glass.

As Keiichi sipped the champagne, he wished it was beer instead. With a flash, Peorth obliged him. The steep champagne glass disappeared...replaced by a can of Sapporo Dry.

"Ahh...much better!" he sighed as he leaned back into the soft leather cushions of the limo.

"Keiichi, once again you've placed yourself in my favor. If you ever decide to go out in public again, please let me know first, lover boy! I can only undertake certain lengths to protect you during your little divertissements. But I must also complement you on your conduct this past year: your escapades no longer involve toxic amounts of drug abuses. Or combinations of guns, women, and jealous husbands," she half-complimented, half-teased him.

"But you must bear in thought that I am an Earth Otasuke Agent, who is normally assigned to monitor the Earth Program Division of the Yggdrasil Mainframe. Every time I come here to assist you, I have to be careful. As a Goddess, I must refrain from being _too_ blatant or generous with dispensing miraculous rescues! Especially with someone with your fame, Keiichi. You are constantly under the scrutiny of legions of mortal admirers. If you were just a regular wishgranting recipient, my role wouldn't be so difficult. But with your celebrity, I have to be much more discreet than usual. Otherwise those misguided mortals might witness one 'rescue' too many, and then they'll whip up some wild fantasies about it. The next thing you know, that will bloom into the next Japanese 'New Religion' fad! Or worse, they may actually guess about the reality of we Gods. Or they'll attribute the 'miracles' to you and make _you_ out to be some kind of divinity. Although I have observed quite often that it seems that some of the more maladjusted mortals have already done so in their minds. So you must promise me that you'll take better care of yourself!" Peorth chided him with a smile.

"But...but," Keiichi stuttered. He couldn't say the words because it was too difficult to explain.

"It's about _her_ again, isn't it?! You saw Belldandy in that theatre, didn't you?" Peorth noted with a searching expression.

"Yes! I'm in love with Belldandy! We were going to get married! I knew her for five years before I came here! I've told you all of this before...but you don't ever believe me! _NO ONE_ believes me!!" Keiichi answered, spilling his words in rapid fire frustration.

"Tres ridiculous! First..._I'm_ your Goddess. Not her! Moi!! I am the one who was assigned to fulfill your wish request. I was the one who granted your heart's desire to be an idol star. No one else! And second...Belldandy has her own wishgranting case to resolve. Yes, it's true that she's stranded on this mudball, but that doesn't mean that she has any interest in you. To be quite honest, Belldandy doesn't even know of you, in a sense. This fantasy that you have...that she answered your telephone call and granted you a wish...is completely absurd! The Yggdrasil Mainframe doesn't make mistakes, which is why _I was selected to grant your wish_. Not her. You shouldn't be fixated on Belldandy...you should be fixated on _me_!" Peorth confronted him. To accent her claims, Peorth slowly slid her skirt more open, revealing a slender length of leg.

Keiichi felt his eyes wandering up and down her body.

"Mmmm, je t'adore. It's not too often that a mortal has a chance to make passionate love to a Goddess. It would be fair to say that you _owe_ me, since I've saved your beau et controverse derriere from two mishaps of your own choosing. And you do know that I _need_ a certain...replenishment...for rescuing you from all the très terrible things you do! As they say, 'Tout le faut que ses amantes badiment noblement...'"

"Huh? Speak Japanese, Peorth! They didn't teach me French in 'the Idiot's Guide to Celebrity' school," Keiichi responded with irritation.

"'All lovers mustneeds trifle nobly...'"

"My love for Bell-chan isn't a trifle!!" he shouted. Peorth regarded him with a curious expression.

"Oui, I wasn't talking about you and her! Get this through your head, Keiichi...it is an impossibility! Belldandy's too busy with her Goddess Relief Office work to fall in love with anyone. Especially a mortal. Why...you'd almost have to wish for her to stay with you for the rest of your life in order to have even the slightest chance at being with her. I know Belldandy...unlike me, she's very shy and reserved when you get to know her. She spends a lot of time talking to birds and other animals. As far as I know, she's _never_ been in love; except maybe indirectly with a case of hero-worship love with Celestine. Of course, _all_ of us young girl-Goddesses were charmed by him..." Peorth explained, her eyes reflecting the city lights passing by.

Keiichi slumped inwardly. Peorth had precisely described what had happened between he and Bell-chan. A coincidence of will and wish-pleasure that _couldn't_ happen here; as Peorth had repeated told him that Belldandy was engaged in an ongoing wish assignment somewhere else on the Earthrealm. The design of life in this reality wouldn't allow her to grant a second wish until she finished with the first wish.

So why was Bell-chan at the theatre?

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Leave me alone, all of you! Go away! Take a break! Go swim in the pool or something," Keiichi shouted as he stormed up the curving marble stairway to the third floor and his bedroom suite. A simple night on the town...and it had turned into a total car-wreck of a disaster.

Stomp stomp jingle jingle.

Sora was nowhere to be seen. Evidently she and the two Crown Records guys had been caught up in the crowd. He was surprised...knowing Sora, he had expected her to return to her office in his mansion before he got dropped off by the limo.

After all, she _was_ his keeper...

He slammed the doors shut and threw himself on the bed, burying his face in one of the scented pillows. The thought of Belldandy permeated his thoughts, leadening his spirits towards a melancholic dormancy. Ironically, the inspiring glimpse of his fiancée only drew him further downwards into despair, like a doomed sea craft plummeting to the frozen depths of the unforgiving ocean.

"Reality is so unforgiving," his thoughts chorused, mounted his heart.

Belldandy _was_ there...he had seen her! As surely as he could have picked her out of the huge crowd for several years now, Keiichi was certain that he wasn't being fooled by his longings. She was taller than most Japanese women, but the distinctive radiating rainbow of browns, duns and auburns highlighting her long hair were a dead giveaway. No mortal woman could have such a glory of colors bound to her tresses of hair.

It _was_ Belldandy!

Bell-chan, Peorth, Sora...who else was here besides them? Maybe Urd and Skuld?

He rolled over on his side...and felt his cheek rest against something soft...

Skin, fuzzy with creaminess.

"Ah, my poor poor lovelorn Keiichi! I've come here to soothe you, to give you the kind of service you deserve, to share the 'paquet special' with you...to do whatever I can to boost you out of your misery," Peorth whispered in a purled voice, leaning close in to him.

Keiichi jerked his head away...his tear-swollen eyes wide open...and realized that Peorth was in his bed.

Nude.

"_Waaah!!_ P..Peorth! W..what are you doing? I don't want to see anyone right now, even you!" he shouted, while Peorth regarded him with an unfathomable expression. He fought his instincts and manhood, which were telling him to comb his attention all over every inch of her exquisite nakedness. As he captured her face in his eyes, Keiichi could clearly sense the bitter-run sorrow in Peorth's rose-purple eyes.

She wasn't here to harass him, like that _other_ Peorth. True, she was very forward with her sexuality, like 'his' Peorth...but one look at his anguished face seemed to dispel her libido. Instead, she was looking at him with a tender compassion. Her face was softly familiar, creased with gentle concern...and love.

_Love?_

This Peorth had a cloud of knowing about her, similar to Bell-chan's. Despite being unclothed and in bed with him, Peorth wasn't projecting an iota of erotic allure, like she had when he first saw her a moment ago. Instead, her presence seemed to bask him in silken raiments of safe, secure feelings. In a strange way, Peorth reminded him of Belldandy...how Belldandy was so attuned to him, she could read his moods with the ease of a mathematics professor adding whole numbers. Peorth seemed equally at ease around him. Her eyes were like a fountain; a pair of cooling pools that slaked his thirst for companionship.

He felt unnerved as he realized that it was quite possible that Peorth, in this situation, could remind him so much of Bell-chan. Even more discomforting was the intuitive sense that...if he let himself go, he could respond to her in the same way that he normally responded to Belldandy...

A soft sensation seemed to ease his stress away; Keiichi felt gentle hands stroking his shoulders, easing his shirt off, caressing his face and hair with practiced motions.

Lover's motions.

He knew what this was leading to...but this didn't feel like the times before when Peorth forcefully tried to seduce him. This felt...different.

"Keiichi...please release your sadness to me. I know that you feel alone in your world, that you seem to be convinced that you are separated from a great love, even though you cannot love her. The thorns encircling your heart prick at you with razors of anguish...so please, let me show you the roses..." Peorth urged in a soft whisper that windowed past his panic.

Keiichi leaned backwards into her and rested his head against her chest, not even embarrassed by the fact that Peorth's ample breasts pillowed his face.

And he started to cry.

Just like Belldandy had done so often, Peorth kissed his ears and lovingly massaged his face with feathery caresses. She wrapped her arms around his shoulders and rested him against her, slowly rocking him.

Keiichi felt like he was a pulse. Resting against Peorth gave him the sense that he was somehow gradually _dissolving_ into her...like a snow crystal melting in the palm of a hand. Becoming smaller and yet larger, his grief untangled from his heart, disfiguring and becoming intangible as the pulse of his being slowed itself, shedding his fears and anxieties...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Keiichi woke up with a start. He remembered being skin-to-skin with a naked Peorth in his bed...he sat up and looked to each side only to find that Peorth was gone. A single rose lay on one of the silk pillows; the attached note informed him not to worry, that nothing "dangerous or sexual" had happened last night. Peorth's note went on to explain that she would never take advantage of him while he was mired in the pool of emotional distress.

"_Thanks for being fragile with me last night, Keiichi,_" it finished.

"Whew!!" Keiichi thought. But on the flipside of his thoughts, the image of Peorth's gloriously naked body seemed to burn itself in his mind. He wondered how many times his 'alter' had slept with her...which led to a series of rather graphic daydreams involving rose petals and firm lengths of...

"BOSS!! Are you awake!"

_"Waaaggh!!"_

The sudden intrusion of a female voice launched him into orbits of panic. For a split second, he thought it was Peorth...and was deadstill with fright that she had been reading his mind...

"It's just me! Sora!! Keiichi, I was wondering if you were okay? We lost you at the theater, and then we learned from X-ko and Y-ko that you were picked up by a limousine. You could've at least warned me that this was part of the plan! I ended up getting stuck with two little gay boys. Needless to say, we went out drinking, and, you know me when I go to one of those karaoke places! So I had to chaperone them...you didn't tell me they were under 18! And..aughhyh..now I have a mean headache," Sora explained over the house intercom.

Keiichi gasped as the air rushed back into his brain. Once he recognized the voice was Sora's, he had a second wash of panic as he thought Sora _was in his bedroom_. He was emotionally drowsy, and the timing of her page over the house speakers had clipped short a decidedly erotic fantasy involving he and Peorth.

In any case, Sora had rescued him from his fantasies. As she continued to describe her night of barhopping with two young twinks, another embarrassing memory flickered into his waking consciousness.

He remembered being in a Karaoke room at a party. Midway through the party, Belldandy started singing...and then Megumi started clowning around with him. A moment later, he was pinned between a drunken Megumi and Sora, Sora lifting her t-shirt in an attempt to prove she had breasts...

Belldandy had gotten so upset, she had used her powers to explode every drinking glass in the room. Of course, Chihiro, Tamiya, Ootaki and the rest took this in stride; the next day they attributed it to either extreme inebriation or that it was another one of those "flukes" that always seemed to happen when Belldandy got excited over something.

That was barely two years after he had first met Belldandy, long before Sora learned that Belldandy was a Goddess. Long before Belldandy had accidentally dosed Megumi with a 300x beauty enhancement spell...

_Megumi was gone._

_Belldandy was gone._

But Sora was here, ready to brief him on the day's work, hangover and all.

"I don't know what's right or wrong anymore...I don't know who I am any more...where's the guiding light when life only mirrors wrong and right?" he asked himself, feeling the loneliness sinking him again, flailing against the powers of emotion that presided over his sense of selfness.

He was King...the King of the Shadow Kingdom of Sadness.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Keiichi! I thought you were sick!" Anni shouted, snow whipping her long hair over her face. For some reason, she was in overdrive...he could tell the moment she stepped out of her limo in front of his mansion. Sora had begged her off, telling her that he had taken ill and needed bed rest. Unfortunately, Sora's claims of his illness only caused Anni to increase her fervor to visit him; instead of staying away, Anni told Sora she was coming over immediately.

As soon as Keiichi heard the news, he went to the medicine cabinet and downed four aspirin.

Running up the entrywalk, Anni practically leapt into his arms like a snow monkey grabbing a tree limb after a long jump. She molded herself so closely to him that he could feel twin pressures resting on his chest and a leg wrapped around the side of his hip.

"We should do something to cheer you up!" she said in a bubbly voice, kissing him on the cheek. She pulled away from him, finally noticing that he wasn't reacting at all. Reaching a hand up to his forehead, Anni remarked that he didn't have a fever. Then she rested her hand on his chest...and observed in a mock-physician's voice that his heart was still beating.

Her silliness managed to bring a smile to Keiichi's face.

He nodded at Sora, dismissing her.

"Has it ever occurred to you that you're as rich as a pirate, my dear MoriStar?" Anni asked in a faux British accent. Keiichi shook his head.

"Annimoto's Official Cure for the Blues...Shopping expedition!" Anni announced, her voice filled with ebullient delight as she pointed a finger upwards in mime of a statesman making a 'make no mistake' declaration.

"Great! I'm feeling emotionally wrecked...and you want to go shopping," Keiichi answered dryly.

"Idiot! The last thing I would want to do is take you shopping when I'm shopping for myself! What do you take me for, a housewife?" she snapped back with a giggle, causing Keiichi's mouth to slide further into frown-dom.

"No! We're not going shopping for me...we're going shopping for _you_!"

"I don't want to buy anything. There's nothing that money can buy that can ease what ails me, Anni," Keiichi answered truthfully.

"Keiichi MoriStar! I'm not going to listen to any further bullshit from you!" she said as she clamped a hand on each shoulder. "Either you get in this limo with me, or I'm going to call the Tokyo papers and tell them the truth about the fact that you torture small animals in your basement!"

"But I don't torture any...oh, okay! I get the point!" he answered as he noticed her wink.

She gave him her trademark 'I've got the upper hand' grin, reminding him of Horo the wolf-girl from the anime "Spice and Wolf".

"Okay, okay...I don't want any more problems! Let's just get this over with..." he said resignedly.

"Yippie!! I won!" Anni said, clapping her gloved hands in front of her face. She grabbed him tightly by the arm and hustled him into the waiting limo.

As they drove towards Sunshine City, Keiichi noticed that Anni was regarding him closely...watching him as he silently observed the cars driving by. They had been 'together' over a year now, but not as lovers. Once Anni realized that he wasn't going to have sex with her, she surprised him by shifting her approach from cattish to owlish. Keiichi was almost certain that Anni would have left him for greener pastures; instead, she was a bosom buddy. Keiichi actually appreciated her friendship...in many ways, she reminded him of Sayoko after she cleaned her act up. Anni never pressed him for sex, but she did like to cuddle.

They drove past the glass canyon of the Sunshine City skyscrapers as she prompted him...

"Keiichi, why is it that you've never gotten a driver's license?"

Keiichi literally spit out the cola he was drinking.

"WHAT?! I don't have a driver's license in this reality?" he shouted once he regained his equilibrium.

"Oh great, here he goes again with that 'this reality' stuff!" Anni said to herself in disgruntlement. "Of course you don't drive! As far as I know, you've _never_ driven any vehicle..."

"This is insane...and I'm in some kind of Hell!" Keiichi muttered to himself exasperatedly. His Keiichi MoriStar alter seemed to be able to do everything with ease. So how could it be that he didn't drive? Keiichi knew that none of his mansions or penthouse condos had vehicles in the garage...he just didn't think anything was amiss about it until now. There were always drivers and chauffeurs and bodyguards and private jets...

"Ahh...I think I've hit a nerve!" Anni said foxily. "You feel insecure because you're in your 20s and you've never driven a car!"

_That did it!!_

Keiichi's racing fever was fanned into delirious leaps by Anni's remark. He knew she wasn't being malicious, yet he felt like his masculinity was being mocked by her assertion. The plush surrounding of the leather interior of his limo evolved into a trap in his mind. He had been so busy with his career over the past year and two months, he had forgotten about himself!

"OK!! So you don't think I know how to drive, huh? Well, I'm going to rent a car and we'll go on a drive that you'll never forget, Anni!" he shouted, his voice echoing in the limo so loud that the chauffeur looked back at him in concern from the driver's seat.

"What do you mean..._rent_ a car? You don't even have a driver's license. Remember? Why do you think we have all these guys to drive us everywhere?" Anni said with a giggle.

"I do..it's right...uh...um," Keiichi stuttered, searching through his leather wallet. "Uh..this is great! I don't...uh, you're right. I don't have a driver's license, Anniko."

The glum admission waxed over his esteem and sealed it away.

"So...why...not..._buy_...a...car," Anni whispered into his cheek seductively, finishing by licking his ear when she said "car". Keiichi shivered with the thrill of her tongue running over his ear. For some reason, her whimsical behavior reminded him of the American movie "Bedazzled", where the Devil takes a human form and leads the salaryman character on a Faustian plunge.

Or she could be Mara, for that matter. Maybe all this time, Anniko was Mara, using a mortal guise. It wouldn't be the first time Mara had pulled something like that...

A moment later, Anni was looking at him in complete bewilderment.

"Is this Mara...another ex-girlfriend or something?" she finally asked, her face screwed up with a mystified expression.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

All morning as they drove around Tokyo, Keiichi was preoccupied, brooding upon her suggestion. In the meantime, Anni had suggested dozens of places to go shopping. In a way, her shopping acumen reminding him of Sayoko Mishima, who was the ultimate "Shopping SuperGirl" as Megumi nicknamed her. Cevn had the misfortune to accompany Sayoko on one of her shopping splurges...Keiichi chuckled as he remembered how tired Cevn was when they got back to the temple. Anni was just as seasoned a shopper. She seemed to know where _everything_ was sold. But his thoughts were stoppered to her entreaties and suggestions.

Once she realized that he seemed fixated on cars, she snatched his cellphone from his jeans and started calling car dealerships.

"Yeah...right, Anni! As if I could buy a car! Maybe I could buy a used Toyota, or a Honda..." he grumbled.

"What is the matter with you?!" Annimoto Kanaka shot back. "You're one of the richest entertainers in Japan! What sense would it make for you to buy a Toyota...when you're a Bugatti type of guy? You could go to any luxury car dealer in the city and buy 10 cars; and it'd barely dent your credit line! Why stop there? You could buy the _dealership_ if you wanted to. You've got that hotshot Sora Hasegawa girl working wonders with your money...so why not _spend_ some of it for once?"

Keiichi looked at her and gulped.

When she suggested that he buy a car, he had started remembering all the times he had to scrimp and scrounge money from his Whirlwind paycheck just to keep his BMW motorbike in parts. Since he had an older motorbike, he was constantly replacing parts and improvising repairs on it. Bell-chan had to intervene on his behalf on more than one occasion when Skuld had volunteered to "fix" his BMW...pointedly reminding her younger sister that she had fixed Sentaro's bike once, with mixed results. So to him, the idea of buying a car was out of the question...

Now, it was definitely _in_ the question.

"So what kind of car you're going to buy, Keiichi MoriStar?" Anni demanded in a sultry voice.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Following Anni's instructions, the chauffeur took them to Tetsuo's Luxury Car Pad. Needless to say, the sight of a limousine driving into the indoor car showroom didn't turn many heads...but when Annimoto Kanaka stepped out of the car, every set of male eyes in the showroom turned away from work and towards her. And then when Keiichi MoriStar stepped out of the other side of the limo, every activity in the dealership's showroom was stifled by starstruck visages...as if it had been hit by a comet. The showroom was instantly aphonic, as silent as an orchid in spring.

After a moment, the hubbuzz started up as excited salesmen and customers queued around the couple. After all, he and Anni were practically "Japan's Couple", according to the hundreds of celeb mags saturating Japan with entertainment propaganda. To the two of them, their poster-boy/poster-girl status was a private joke.

They were best friends, nothing more.

Keiichi felt embarrassed once again, even though his eyes grew wide at the half-dozen cars in the showroom. He recognized an Aston Martin 2007 Vizion, a 2004 Alfa Romeo Spider, a 2006 Lamborghini Murcielago XC and several other cars...

Cars that cost _tens_ of millions of yen.

He didn't even begin to know what kind of questions to ask. Then again, once he remembered his engineering work on the Blaze at the Le Mans, he knew_ exactly_ what specifications to inquire about. If the cars here were mostly recognizable, then the technology used in this version of the Earthrealm had to be similar. Besides a few tricks from Peorth and his initial journey here, he hadn't witnessed any major breaches in the laws of physics. The engineering of vehicles was more than likely the same as the methods he was accustomed to back in 'relative Japan'.

A squat man with a cigar in his mouth made his way through the crowd and greeted them, handing them an introduction card that named him as "Tetsuo". Keiichi read his card, regarding the man with the silvery Elvis hairstyle with a mixture of amusement and distaste. Obviously, the business owner wanted to conduct the sale personally.

"What kind of car are ya' interested in?" Tetsuo asked with a fish-glimmer greed to his eyes. His junior salesman and the customers were looking on with fascination; obviously the boss rarely deigned to come onto the sales floor himself. But Keiichi and Anni's celebrity clearly demanded it.

Keiichi stood silently, until Anni elbowed him.

"Well, I'm wondering if any of these cars has an optimum weight distribution, let's say a 50-50 split between the axles? Does the transaxle design feature a combined rear-mounted gearbox and differential unit with conical torque and autolocking differential in the same unit? How about the electro-hydraulic "F1" control units? Mounted mid-car or rear-car? How do these cars minimize response time while ensuring a favorable operating temperature for the drivechain and engine component? Which cars have manual levers mounted on the back of the steering wheel, to allow for the best response for sports driving? You know, 350 to 400kph and faster? Any vehicle that calls itself a racecar should have two main ways of changing gear manually via the console-mounted controls: a more sporty change; or one aimed at a more relaxed driving style. Can you tell me which car performs better with the low grip vs. the automatic electro-actuaged transmission? And what about the tradeoff between quick gear changing and dampening? What kind of graphite is used in the brake and treading components? Since the best way to maximize acceleration is engineering balance...there needs to be a redundant control system, cuz' the analogue control of the suspension damping can be faulty when taking 'em over 300kph..."

Keiichi's voiced droned into silence as a hush filled the car dealership. Anni was staring at him like a clay figurine, gripped by torpor. For his part, Tetsuo further imitated a fish by working his mouth open and closed, unable to answer a single one of his questions.

Keiichi turned his attention back to Anni, whose face was faulted with shock...

"Ahem, I don't know what kinds of questions those are, kid!" he said, pulling his cigar to his mouth. The odor and Tetsuo calling him "kid" seemed to snap Anni out of her fugue. She quickly reached out and pulled the cigar out of his mouth, dropped it on the floor and stamped it out.

"Those are so disgusting..." she noted. Keiichi didn't miss the amused reactions from Tetsuo's underlings. Neither did Tetsuo, as he reluctantly executed a short bow and muttered an apology.

"There! That's better. I can't stand shopping in the middle of air pollution," Anni added, rubbing it in.

"Ahem!" Tetsuo cleared his throat, clearly put off.

"People who buy these cars usually aren't concerned about those types of matters...they just want a fast car that looks sporty. And we've got a lot of 'em here!" Tetsuo added, gesturing with a hand bejeweled with large gold rings on each finger. Keiichi couldn't miss the amused snickering from some of the junior salesmen, obviously entertained by the way Keiichi had bamboozled the boss with his technical questions.

"Uh, all we want to know is which car here is the most expensive," Anni asked, finally gathering her wits.

Keiichi's face flushed with a mix of embarrassment and disbelief. Here he was checking out cars that cost tens of millions of yen, and Anni was acting like a bimbo in a department store!

Anni saw his look of irritation.

"Excuse me, my boyfriend and I are going to talk things over," she said politely, and then swiftly led Keiichi by the arm to a corner of the shop. A couple young sales guys started to follow, until she gave them a menacing look that clearly said "back off and wilt!"

"What are you doing?!" she whispered, looking at him intently.

"Shopping. Your idea. Remember?" Keiichi teased.

"How did you know all that stuff back there? Have you been reading motor magazines while riding around in your limousine? Have you gone out of your mind? How could you even know what questions to ask...you, a guy who's never owned a car or driven one?" she asked in a low whisper, amazed and yet obviously impressed with his knowledge of cars.

"It's a long story..." Keiichi started to answer with a sigh, but she interrupted him before he could finish.

"I bet it is! But we'll have time for that later. I need to explain one of Anni's Shopping Rules to you, because this situation calls for it. In fact, it _demands_ it, in red and white! When you're a celeb on the level that you and I are, you _have_ to buy the most expensive item in the store, otherwise you'll lose face. Not that I care about losing face too much, but it..."

"That's ignorant!! What if we're in a restaurant, and the most expensive item in the place is burnt chili?" Keiichi snapped back.

"Then you buy the chili, taste it, complain to the management...and get your money back while the owner grovels at your feet begging for mercy!" Anni answered with a broad grin. Keiichi had to chuckle at that one; Anni may look like a polished actress-model but her looks weren't the one part of her that was polished. As friends, she had often bailed him out of confusion with her wit and humor.

"But really, I just care about you, Keiichi, otherwise I wouldn't be making such a stir!" Anni said, sincerity in her eyes. "You need to keep up appearances, especially on big-ticket items like cars. You're Japan's top entertainer...you can't afford to squabble over small change, or look cheap by buying something middle class. People's tongues will wag if you do!"

Keiichi realized that she was making sense.

"And now, my dear...since I pulled you away for our little chat, you need to pull me back. That's another of Anni's Rules. Otherwise it'll look to these greaseboys like I'm running your life. Which I'm not...at least not until we get married," she said, winking her whispering voice along.

"So you need to take charge of this situation! Do exactly as I say: offer to buy the most expensive car; then ask a bunch of those technical questions like you did before. And one other thing I've learned...most owners want a photo op with you when you eat at their restaurant or buy something at their store. Since there's the two of us, you refuse the photo op until that fat Tetsuo guy takes some off the top of his sales price," she advised.

"I'll do that as long as he makes everyone in the dealership sit in on it, in a group photo," Keiichi nodded. Deep inside, he was a mechanic, not a celeb; and he had no doubts about the expert mechanics 'behind the scenes' whose hard labor had underwritten the glam lifestyle of their boss and his showy gold rings. No way was he going to leave them out of the picture...literally or otherwise.

"Sorry, but she threw a little fit about the color of some of the cars," he explained. Anni's eyes flashed wide for a second at his explanation, but then she caught herself.

"Really, I can't blame her. Since she's a model and actress, she's got a far better eye for those things than I do. So anyway, I want the most expensive car you're selling. And I want it gassed and ready to go within an hour after I charge it to my credit card!" Keiichi said. He caught a private nod of approval from Anni in the corner of his eye.

"Ah, w..we'll try to do our best, sir!" Tetsuo stammered, clearly caught off guard by Keiichi's sudden assertiveness.

"Make sure that you do! It isn't every day that an artist of my stature comes into your little shop and buys your best car...uh, by the way, what is your best car?"

Tetsuo gestured towards a car rotating on a display dais with an unrecognizable manufacturer's dressage or emblem. To his practiced eye, he could sense that the model was so new, it hadn't been introduced in the "relative Japan" he had lived in up until 14 months ago.

"This is the 201X Ferrari-Bugatti-Shelby F95 Prototype Aero. It's based on the Shelby Aero design, but it incorporates some Maserati and Ferrari engineering. This is the world's fastest production car, with only ten models manufactured for this year..." Tetsuo read aloud from a descript sheet.

Keiichi didn't hear the rest. The palladium silver, blue and red sports car seemed to reach into his heart with a vehicular beat. The silver color reminded him of their unpainted Le Mans race car. Yet, it was a decade newer, with a futuristic chassis that looked 10 years ahead of its time. He was surprised that...in Jan 201X...there would be next year's model in Tokyo! Two ramscoop air intakes were molded into the body in front of the rear wheel wells. The front wedged down to the ground, with a single cowl running down the middle of the hood, tapering as it blended into the front of the car. The wheelbase was reduced by the wide overhang of the front, and the wheel wells literally looked like they gripped the tires. The front wheels were significantly smaller than the rear wheels, adding an element of nimbleness to the Aero's sleekness.

When Tetsuo used the remote control to raise the gull-wing doors, Keiichi knew this was the real deal as silver racing helmets rested on each of the two passenger seats. The cabin had two red-and-black leather bucket seats, with digital and analog console displays set into plastic and genuine wood moldings, which added sophistication to its futuristic stylings. It looked like the kind of designer cars that he only saw got to see once in his life whenever he went into Tokyo or Makuhari Messe for one of the car expos...or competed against at the Le Mans.

And he was actually going to _buy_ it!

Within a few hours, he was going to drive out of here in a car that was insanely expensive and ludicrously over-powered for the road!

"I'll take it!" Keiichi shouted, earning applause and envious smiles from everyone in the showroom. Keiichi felt like he was freeing a tiger from captivity, as Anni kissed him on the cheek and rubbed her shoulder against his...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

With Anni's expert help, Keiichi began the process of bargaining Tetsuo down from his asking price of 175 million yen. During the half-hour of back-and-forth, Anni toyed with the car dealership owner, using her charm and sophistication to soften him up...with the result that he knocked 10 percent off of the purchase price while mumbling that he was a "sucker for a pretty face". Of course, Anni's face was probably the prettiest face he'd ever seen in his life, a fact she readily reminded him of when he mentioned the requisite matter of a photo op.

Before filling out the paperwork, Keiichi had given Tetsuo his photo op on the condition that all his sales staff and garage mechanics were included in the photo. Keiichi didn't want the proles to be ignored; he detested the idea of the boss hogging all of the attention.

"This Tetsuo guy could learn a lesson or two about supervising workers from Chihiro," he observed, suddenly missing his job at Whirlwind. Tetsuo reluctantly agreed to include his staff in the photo op. Keiichi forced a second condition on him as well...Tetsuo was to use his industry connections to get Japan's top motoring magazines to do a feature article on him within ninety days or he'd be back with keys for a full refund. Keiichi reasoned that he might as well milk this for all the PR value it was worth. Naturally, Anni was quite impressed with his savvy.

Of course, he didn't mention that he had a surprise planned for the motoring magazine guys, who would be totally clueless of the fact that he was a seasoned racer who had won a Gran Prix de Le Mans. The reporters the motorcar mags sent to write their articles on him were going to shit their pants when he took them out for a little 'interview ride' on a race track!

And then he called Sora.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Sora went ballistic when he informed her that he was now the proud owner of a top-line supercar, for a 'mere' 141 million yen. So he listened with a half-opened ear while Sora pitched her fit over the phone. When she was finished...or more accurately, was out of breath from yelling...he handed the phone to Tetsuo, who consulted with her about the specifics of the first magazine shoot.

Meanwhile, he read the spec book on the Aero.

"How do I look?" Anni said. While he was doing all the paperwork stuff, she had called her A-ko for a wardrobe change in preparation for the photo shoot at the dealership. Now she was wearing a tight-fitting racing uniform. She looked beautiful, of course...but her appreciable charm only diverted Keiichi, reminding him of another. A beautiful Goddess who dressed in racing coveralls with "Belldandy" written on the leggings.

Before he could swim too far out into the ocean of melancholy, he heard a ruckus towards the front of the store. The glass windows in front of the dealership were packed jam-tight with observers. Keiichi could see a wall of faces on the other side of the glass, fans of his and Anni's, all peering into the store with curious miens.

It was too much.

He went back in the garage and started chatting to the team of mechanics engaged in prepping his new car. He learned that one of the mechanics happened to be an N.I.T. graduate; but when he asked about Chihiro, Tamiya and Ootaki, the guy looked at him with a blank face. Keiichi didn't recognize him as a Motor Club member, so he asked what motor club he belonged to at N.I.T. The mechanic was obviously anxious about being asked such questions by someone of Keiichi's social stature, but Keiichi assured him that he was just chitchatting. The guy answered Keiichi, telling him that he belonged to the "Roundhouse Motor Club." When Keiichi asked him about Whirlwind, his blank expression was enough for Keiichi to realize that Whirlwind didn't exist in this reality, either.

But the guy did have a spare N.I.T. racing uniform, and in a tentative voice, he asked Keiichi if he would do him the honor of wearing it in the photo op pic. Keiichi was truly overwhelmed, almost choking on his memories and tears as he donned the racing coveralls, feeling very heavy-hearted.

Conversationally, he asked each mechanic how much Tetsuo paid him in a year, and then tipped them two year's salary, which earned him enthusiastic thanks. From experience, he knew that mechanics usually had a digital camera handy in the shop for documenting repairs, and when he learned that they had one, he did buddy shots with each of them and autographed their girlie poster. His generosity to his fellow mechanics seemed to improve his mood some as he returned for the 'official' photo shoot. Actually, the whole highlight was the N.I.T. uniform he was wearing; an unexpected boon of grace for his tired heart.

So that was how it came about that Keiichi MoriStar and Annimoto Kanaka got their pics taken with all the guys at Tetsuo's Luxury Car Pad.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

The cockpit of the Ferrari tore his attention in ten directions at once as he slid into the bucket seat. Each LED gauge looked like a PDA wired into the dashboard, but the one that caught his attention was the analog speedometer with a top dial speed of 500Kph/300Mph. The black bucket seats were designed with red leather highlights in the shapes of flames sewn into them, reminding him of Mara.

Meanwhile, Tetsuo had to call the police to clear a pathway for he and Anni to drive out the back of the garage, as the auto dealership was thronged with paparazzi and fans. He almost wished that Natsumi and Miyuki, the 'Wild Ones', would show up as part of the police team. He remembered how the two policewomen had transported him to the hospital during impossible driving conditions while Supertyphoon Akira was destroying Chiba, and more recently had escorted him from Tokyo Rainbow Bridge to Makuhari and then back to the run-down wharf section fronting Tokyo Bay. They were two of the last people he had seen, right before this entire misadventure began.

His imagination flurried. What would be more comic than Officer Tsujimoto or Officer Kobayakawa asking him for proof of driver's license before he hit the road? It would be worth a night in jail just for the fun of being busted by them. He wondered if maybe they were somewhere else as well, dealing with some crazy alternative reality.

Keiichi thought it ironic that during the entire transaction, no one had bothered to ask him if he had a driver's license. He simply signed the credit and sales forms, put his seal on the purchase order, ordered some insurance over the phone and then he had the control card, remote and keys to the car. Fifteen minutes later when he was ready to drive out of the garage, none of the policemen and policewomen bothered to check up on him either. Everybody seemed to assume that he could drive legally.

Rather quickly, he was on the freeway. The wintry afternoon breezes gusted silently against the aerodynamic chassis of his new car. Anni was looking at him with approving eyes, smiling widely. She turned on the sound system...

"Hypnotic Love Stranger" played over the radio. The hit single to "Fire and Ice", the action movie he and Anni co-starred in. Keiichi felt Anni slapping his thigh in time to the beat of the song, a remix version of his latest hit single. Obviously, the coincidence had seized her towards a romantic whimsy.

It would have bothered him...but he was too damn happy!

Of course, driving a brand new Aero on the Bayshore Freeway caused him to get a lot of glances from other drivers. His new car was worth the purchase price of approximately 40 brand-new Hondas. As he drove over the famous Rainbow Bridge, he was possessed of a wild idea...

"Anni, let's drive to Osaka!"

Annimoto stopped her in-seat dancing and looked at him with a blanched expression of disbelief, measuring him with her eyes. A moment later, she shook her head and muttered "you're crazy!" Inspired by her comment, Keiichi rolled down his window and pitched his cellphone into Tokyo Bay.

_That_ got her attention.

"Keiichi!! You're nuts! I've got a magazine shoot tomorrow! And God only knows what you've got planned! We can't drive to Osaka today! It's already almost 4 in the afternoon...the sun will be setting in an hour! Y..you're serious about this, aren't you? What about the fact that you don't know how to drive?"

Keiichi nodded his head. Anni's face was colored red with panic...a panic that was beginning to border on the amusing end of the spectrum. His movie adventure yesterday had turned into an utter mishap, but now he was behind the wheel of a bonafide supercar...and he felt free for the first time since he had been stuck inside this alternate reality.

Anni was nervously naming off appointments and schedules for the next several days when Keiichi interrupted her.

"Anni! I _need_ this! The world isn't going to end just because you and I drop out of the scene for a few days! Mt. Fuji isn't going to erupt, Sapporo isn't going to get buried by an avalanche, Nagasaki and Sendai aren't going to get inundated by a tsunami...so just chill out and be yourself for a change! Isn't that what you're always telling me to do?"

"Yeah, but I didn't think you would go as far as to kidnap me to make your point!"

"As if you don't mind being kidnapped!" Keiichi shot back with a winning grin.

"My managers will kill me...after they kill you!" she exclaimed.

"Not if I can help it! I'll call 'em and tell them to fu..."

"Fool!" she interrupted him.

"Huh?"

"You threw your cellphone out the window!" Anni exclaimed with a teasing voice fringed with frustration. "You can't call _anyone_! God...this is like a bad Chinese detective movie! Hell, this is _worse_ than a bad Chinese movie!"

"Hey! Lemme borrow yours! I've gotta call Sora at least," he demanded. She fetched her phone out of her purse and handed it to him. With a reckless grin, he powered down the window and threw it to the fishes. Anni's face blanched.

"This is hilarious! With both our phones in the Bay, they'll run a GPS search on us when we don't answer their calls. And when the locate the phones, they'll probably think we drowned!" he exclaimed, barely keeping his laughter in.

"Very funny!" Anniko commented, apparently too exasperated to be angry.

"Anni...you're so cute when you're frustrated. But think of it this way...if you want to get to really know me, here's your chance. Just you and me and the road for the next week. I'll make sure to take a bunch of back roads so we don't get recognized. And if we do, I'll be able to evade being run down by the police or the press reporters. Just think of the fun the tabloids will have with this..."

Keiichi halted himself in mid-sentence. He couldn't believe that he was saying this, that he was even contemplating this. When he had woken up this morning, once again he had paid emotional debts to his lost, beloved Belldandy. Now he was thinking of getting away from it all, just like he used to ditch school for an afternoon in his high school days. And taking his actress-girlfriend with him...a woman he didn't love in any aspect far or close to how he loved Bell-chan. Annimoto was more of a Sayoko figure to him, a good female friend that he was really tight with on a friendship level. In another reality, he might have even liked Anni in a loving way, but at least she was a great friend.

The road up ahead curved slenderly around the mountainside...just the way he liked 'em to. He heavied his foot on the accelerator...

_"KEIICHI MORISTAR!! SLOW DOWNNnnnnnn..."_

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

In the end, it was Sora who had found them.

Keiichi couldn't believe his ears when Sora told him that she had hired two Tokyo-based private investigation firms to try and find him. The private eyes had combed all over Japan in their attempts to locate he and Anni. And for a couple of days, the detectives were actually in the same prefecture or town as they were. But they weren't able to narrow their search down to the particular hotel or onsen that he and Anni were staying at.

Yet, _Sora somehow was able to track him down_, doing what the professional detectives failed to accomplish. It was almost spooky, supernatural...Sora's seemingly innate ability to follow him wherever he went. Keiichi felt a wash of paranoia for a moment when that phone rang in his hotel suite...and it was Sora's voice on the other end.

He already had _one_ mother.

Sora had no reservations about treading on the tiger's tail. She didn't bat a lash in dressing him down, despite the fact that she was _his_ employee. She confronted him with a maternal verve, yelling at him for missing an entire week's appointments and leaving her in the lurch. He could almost taste the spite in her words as they projected out of the phone speaker and into his ear. She threatened to quit, she threatened to sue him, she broke down in tears, she unfurled a streak of epithets that would have curdled most people's blood...all in a space of ten minutes.

In her eyes, Sora was positive that Keiichi had taken Anni away for a weeklong sexual frolic...and she made it clear that she was disgusted with his misconduct.

When that was as far from the truth as possible.

Once again, Keiichi felt it odd that Sora should be so concerned about his romantic life so as to make such a broad sweep of assumptions. She was his personal assistant, not his psychologist! Naturally, his denials of any explicit amorous episodes between Anni and him fell on deaf ears. Sora was sure that, if he "wasn't man enough to take the initiative, she would," as she claimed. In the year that he had known her, Sora seemed to occasionally regress into a different person. This was another one of those times when she seemed to be possessed of a certain jealous streak. A Sora who was in full tyro mode was already unnerving enough; it was even worse with the added element of a Sora with an enervative jaundiced eye.

Yes, their getaway wasn't the romantic journey Sora had assumed...

_After driving out of Tokyo, Keiichi decided to drive northwest to Gunma Prefecture. There, he had driven to Honjo, and then turned southwest on Route 299, a road renowned for its scenery and cliffside curves...not to mention the kilometer-long tunnel under the Jukkoku Pass. The road was slick in the late January snows, and the fact that he wanted to drive fast didn't help matters for his passenger._

_The donuts he spun in the factory lot outside of Kumagaya didn't help his passenger's intestinal constitution much either. Keiichi could imagine the stunned look on the faces of the men in the security shacks as a 201X Aero pulled into the mostly empty lot and started spinning donuts and powerslides at 300kph. This resulted in a police chase...but Keiichi evaded the cops by driving into a road that led up a mountain, with a clearly marked "Hazardous Road" sign at the foot of the road where it joined the highway._

_So that first night, Anni had gotten a heavy case of carsickness._

_Because of this, the most 'evil' that they had done during that past week was to soak in the nude in a couple of onsens. Keiichi's daredevil driving exhibition had caused Anni to acquit herself of her normal steely poise; instead she was floundering in a deep nervousness. As a result of that first day's drive, it became necessary for Keiichi to seek out the serene environs of a rustic inn for his shell-shocked 'girlfriend', so she could recuperate. Needless to say, she wasn't in any mood for any romantic whimsies after experiencing a full day on the road with Keiichi at the wheel. It took two day's rest at the hidden-away Kirake Onsen located at the most remote reach of Route 485 in Nagano Prefecture for Anni to decompress. _

_Of course, of the other lodgers in the four-room ryokan, one was a family who had two teenage daughters. His eardrums were almost blown out when he turned down the hall that led to the outside onsen...and he was passed by two sprinting girls. One of them turned to glance at him over her shoulder; and halted dead in her tracks. The two immediately screamed with adolescent glee when they saw him padding barefoot down the covered wooden walkway that led to the hotspa, wearing the inn's worn cotton hakama..._

_The rest of the trip was fun, in a platonic sense. Anni was a good friend, but Keiichi found her intriguing at times...and found himself beginning to deeply question his situation. If he _-was-_ stranded here, and there was no possible chance for him to reunite with Belldandy...could he live with himself if he settled for Anni?_

_He tried to push that thought from his mind, so that he could savor her company and the fun of being a celebrity on the loose…_

_And then Sora had found them._

Sora called back a few minutes later, instructing Keiichi to remain in Osaka while she caught the next flight in. She made it clear that she was going to fetch him and return him to Tokyo by plane, so he could at least keep his business commitments for the next day. When he refused, Sora demanded that he fly back with her, or she was going to resign on the spot.

Acquiescing to her, he explained that he had driven down from Tokyo to Osaka in a brand new Aero...hoping that would change her mind. But Sora was a step ahead of him, telling him she had made arrangements to have it _semi-trucked_ back to Tokyo, ostensibly to 'protect his investment'.

Once again, his life was stabbing him in the life. He couldn't even drive his own new car back home to Tokyo! Especially after Sora had let it be known to the police that he had never earned a driver's license...

He was beginning to _hate_ Sora Hasegawa!

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --


	89. Pt 89: Urd and Skuld: Glass Hammer Four...

**Part 89: Urd and Skuld: Glass Hammer – 4th Movement**

"Finally!" Urd sighed, catching her breath as she finished assembling the Divine Reagent formula. Mopping away the critical tension dotting her forehead with sweatbeads, she encanted a sealant spell; one that would spindizzy the Reagent to bind on an alchemical level with the potion she had just created. Once she realized that nothing was going to blow up or get sucked into another dimension of the Multiverse, she stepped back and slapped herself lightly on the hip, feeling gloriously triumphant. At this final stage of the project, the slightest of errors would have culled disastrous consequences.

A mistake of just a few nanograms in the measurement of an additive, or the failure of an essential base property to exert a specific alchemical confluence upon the other portions, or even the incorrect reciting of an arcane enchantment designed to prevent volatility between the many sets of extremely refluent molecular compounds in the potion's mix...and every sentient being in a 50 km radius would be transformed in a mallard duck. Or worse.

But to all appearances, the potion seemed stable.

The erstwhile Norn of the Past and sometimes Mistress of Alchemical Secrets dabbed her brow with her sleeve and smiled at her handiwork.

Hours earlier, Belldandy had returned in short order from Yggdrasil with Urd's alchemistry set, which contained exactly the right ingredients she needed for the potion. The doe-eyed look on Belldandy's face disclosed that she didn't have a clue about why Urd needed such a complicated set of chemicals and liquidspells. Urd had explained to her that she was drawing up an apothecary aid to help Lum deal with the grief she was feeling about losing Keiichi. A Lethe-like potion of forgetting or some such nonsense...

And Belldandy had bought the lie, like a puppy hungrily devouring strips of beef jerky for the first time.

As part of their plan, Skuld was going to engage Belldandy in a game of TimeVector PosiChronics...while Urd labored on the potion in focused solitude. Hopefully, Skuld's TimeVector gameplay with Belldandy would take hours, engaging their host's full attention while giving Urd ample time to work on the potion.

As she glanced at the clock, Urd noted with surprise that six hours had passed. She was grateful the match had taken so long; she and Skuld had guestimated that the Time Vector match would only take a couple hours to finish. Evidently, Skuld must have improved vastly in her gameplay...the last time she had challenged Belldandy to a TimeVector match, Belldandy had soundly defeated her in less than an hour.

But that was the _real_ Belldandy.

Looking at the vial filled with a cloudly bluish substance, Urd could see her reflection on the surface of the tubular glass. The mirrored version of she wore an intent expression; no doubt allowed to the fact that every step of the way, she had faced considerable incertitude about whether or not she had remembered the formula accurately. There was no room for guessing: one mistake and Lum could turn into just about anything in the Multiverse...or be possessed of any one of a million mental diminishments.

Urd carefully capped the small glass vial with its lid and then tucked it inside of her bra. Flipping her hair so she didn't look like she was overly possessed with recent bouts of anxiety, Urd stepped into the hallway leading to the living room of the temple.

There, she noticed that Keiichi was gazing languidly into the big screen TV, absorbed in some inane game show, a half-empty can of Sapporo Dry in hand. In another corner of the room, Skuld and Belldandy were deftly moving holographic crystallines representing sections of Time.

In a TimeVector PosiChronic simulation match, the object was twofold. The first task was to bring all components of Time into synch with each other in a simulated sector of space. A single sector of space was designated as being the usual field of gameplay for TimeVector, of course. A sector of space is designated by the fact that it is comprised of exactly 1000 inhabited systems; for example, the Milky Way Galaxy contains 3,429.131 Sectors, or roughly 3.5 billion inhabited planets out of its 124 billion star systems. Using a sector for a game field was the 'tic-tac-toe' version of a TimeVector game; it would limit the duration of the contest to a few Earthrealm hours. But in Decamillennial Goddess-Demoness competitions, the 'Go' version of TimeVector game was the norm; an entire Galaxy was the simulated playing field. Naturally, no simulated mortal casualties were allowed while arranging Time components. So if a Goddess moved a piece of Time and created a simulated nova that obliterated an inhabited system, it was "game over". A TimeVector game was finished when both players completed a TimeWeb sim: creating a 'mini TimeWeb for that particular sector. This was the practical aspect of the game. But it was the second task that elevated TimeVector PosiChronics into a challenge, rather than just a sport. Urd had explained this second aspect of the game to Keiichi once using Earthrealm mortal terms: anyone can build a house, and it performs the same function of providing shelter to its residents. But there is a vast difference between a mud hut and a geodesic dome in terms of visual charm and sophistication. In a TimeVector PosiChronic match, the second task was to synchronize the Time components within the simulation in such a way that the resulting TimeWeb was not only self-harmonious, but that it was an object of artistic beauty as well. It isn't enough to simply synch Time to win the match...one had to do so _artfully_.

From the looks of it, Skuld's TimeWeb sim was woven with consummate grace; its Chronometric harmony was far more defined than her opponent's sim. Urd was amused by this...her younger sister was actually defeating this world's version of 'Belldandy' in the matchplay! In contrast to Skuld's sim, Belldandy's effort had too many fringes, spills and scatters...and the shimmer of the hologram indicated that it was unstable to the max.

Another clue that this whole frame of existence was a fake.

Both Skuld and Belldandy were concentrating so closely on the match, they hadn't even noticed her entry into the living room.

All the better.

"Skuld...I'm finished with my project for Lum! Let's go home! Thank you for the assist, sis...but we gotta go! Work to do, people to meet, ya' know!" Urd announced cheerfully.

Belldandy stood up and the game sim dissolved, causing Skuld to scowl. Keiichi leaned around the easy chair and tipped his beer at them; evidently his way of dismissing them. A moment later, Belldandy was hustling Skuld and her out the front door, proffering a series of goodbyes and good riddances. Being in the presence of a 'fake' version of her sister and Keiichi was disturbing in the same way rum was when it tasted sour or port.

As soon as they passed under the temple's torii, Urd felt a tug on her sleeve. Skuld turned to face her, her long dark hair queuing around a face colored with a sour expression.

"It's not fair...I was totally _beating_ her! I really was! Why'd you have to leave right away, Urd? I was _winning_! I _know_ I could've won! Another hour and I would've whipped her ass!"

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Skuld literally ripped awide two small divots of grass as she slid to a halt outside of the glade where Oyuki had secreted her UFO. Urd looked at her mischievously, wondering what was up. This footbraking was drastic, even for Skuld. Her sister muttered something and pointed...and then Urd gasped.

Ataru Moroboshi was wandering around in a wide circle, waving his hands frantically, shouting something about "a beauty, where's the beauty?"

Urd could only look on, mouth agape at the improbably sight.

It was the _real_ flesh-and-blood Ataru Moroboshi! Urd had only half-believed Skuld's fantastic tale of encountering an Ataru in the ice cream shoppe. But as she and her sister watched this twenty-something man with shaggy brown hair walking around in a slow circle, reaching his hands out at odd angles...she _knew_ it was Moroboshi. Skuld was actually sweating with nervousness, which only confirmed Urd's intuition.

In the distance, the young man with a beatnik shag that looked like it belonged in the 70s rather than the 2Ks was 'feeling' out the mid-air. He was wearing an N.I.T. 2005 Culture Day Festival t-shirt and jeans pitted with half washed-away black streaks and paint. As the improbable sight registered in Urd's mind, she also noticed his mime-like hand motions.

He wasn't aping around, he was touching something invisible, yet solid.

"_He knows!_" Skuld whispered grimly.

This was certainly a landslide into a flooding river! Ataru had somehow tracked Skuld down to this place, and now he was touching the transparent shield that concealed Oyuki's UFO. As if he had heard Skuld's fretted whispering, Ataru turned in their direction and stared...his mouth gradually widening into a grin of recognition.

Skuld wanted to cover her face with embarrassment.

"Woo hoo! So we meet again! It's you...the raven-haired babe from the ice cream shop!" Ataru exclaimed as soon as he saw her and Urd.

"'Raven-haired _babe_'?" Urd repeated aloud incredulously. Skuld caught Urd smirking out of the corner of her eye.

"And who's the buxom stripper chick standin' next to you?"

Skuld burst out in giggles as Urd's tanned face drained of color. A Big Sister Growl rumbled behind her. Quickly, for Urd's benefit, Skuld started to retort, "She's not a stri..."

"I'm her older sister! _O-nee-sama_ to you!! Get it?!" Urd interrupted, her angry voice booming. "And since a sensible young college student like yourself would wanna survive the next several minutes, then you're going to start according me with the respect I deserve!"

Ataru looked at her with astonishment, his expression reminding Skuld of that of a sleeping cat that had been suddenly sprayed with ice water. She glanced at her sister. Urd was smiling...the bite-smile she reserved for times when she was really ready to let someone have it.

"Oh...so you're the older sister! Babeness must run in your family! If I get married to Skuld, then I can show off my beautiful sister-in-law at the wedding! And if Skuld doesn't wanna get married, then there's always you..." he prattled on flirtatiously.

Idiotically.

"Oooooo! You little _bastard_!" Urd cursed. Skuld could swear that she could see the air around her older sister's head distort with emitted heat. Urd never did react too well in situations where she was ranked behind her.

"Big Sister! Calm down before you cause a calamity!" Skuld shouted, grasping her sister by the arm. Urd's flashing green-fire eyes slowly cooled down to emeraldness as Ataru continued to babble about the qualities of feminine buxom assets and how important they were in determining a woman's character.

"Come into the ship with us, before I 'calamity' your ass with a Urd Thunderbolt, dimwit!" Urd said, cutting him off as they fully emerged from their cover of bushes and walked into the small open meadow.

"What ship?" Ataru yelled.

Irritation poured upon irritation as Skuld noticed Ataru getting _that look_ in his eyes...the peculiar gape-mawed look an Earthrealm mortal boy got when he was mentally undressing a woman. A quick study of Ataru Moroboshi revealed that he was geeky, cocksure, and only slightly handsome. His face was rounded, with a weak chin and horse-long teeth. His eyes were beady rather than expressive, poised on top of high cheekbones that gave him an almost Chinese appearance. His head seemed small in proportion to the rest of his body, perhaps a visual proof of his imbecile orientation towards women.

"What ship?" he repeated as she and Urd reached him.

"_This _one!" Skuld said derisively, slapping the side of the UFO. "The one you've been pawing for the last few minutes!"

The sound of an audible metallic "pat pat slap!" against _nothing_ unnerved Ataru visibly, Urd noted with satisfaction.

On cue, Skuld pulled the remote control to Oyuki's UFO out of her jacket and pressed the trigger button to deactivate the stealthing shield. The thin air quickly coalesced into a grey matter sheer metal as a torus-shaped starcraft formed behind Ataru.

"Waaaaah!!" Ataru screamed hysterically. "Wh..wh..what's th..th..that!"

"That's a UFO," Skuld answered matter-of-factly.

""Th..that's a _UFO_?! I..I'm not going in there! No way! I refuse!! You can't make me!" he screamed, his shouts soaked with adrenaline.

"What's going on, Skuld?" Urd asked, glancing between the UFO, Ataru and she. Skuld could see the confusion crossing her sister's eyes as surely as bridges crossed the Sumida River. She hoped that Urd wasn't going to go funny on her, especially now. This was a very critical juncture; an Earthrealm mortal had just discovered their UFO. And not just _any_ Earthrealm mortal...it was Ataru Moroboshi. Urd looked at Ataru, her face blank with irrecognition.

"Skuld...who is _he_? Who is this man...and how did you meet him? He seems familiar to me. Are you _sure_ we should reveal the existence of Oyuki's UFO to him?"

Words in a spiral, questions dragoning through the sky.

Skuld shook her head side-to-side in resignation. Who knew what surprises her sister had in store? Urd only confirmed her fears when she started asking even more questions, disrupting the disturbing flow of events. If Urd was doing this deliberately, she would have Skuld-bombed her or worse; but she knew that her sister had been bouting with amnesia. It wasn't her fault...but it _was_ very disruptive and frustrating, nevertheless.

Regretfully, Urd's memory was still peppered with disturbing gaps of forgetfulness. Ironically, it had been Urd who had introduced her to the Urusei Yatsura anime and manga in the first place. Now, her older sister didn't remember Ataru at all. Five minutes ago, Urd was all bent out of shape because she had recognized Ataru.

"He's Ataru, Big Sister. _Ataru_! We need to get him to go with us into the UFO," Skuld noted patiently, as if she was instructing a child.

"Why?"

"Because the welfare of the Earthrealm depends on it!" Skuld blurted out. Urd nodded her head with a confused expression, and then turned to face Ataru. Like she had done during Megumi's ill-starred softball game, Urd started loosening her blouse...leaning forward to reveal an ample amount of cleavage.

Ataru reacted with wide-eyed interest.

"If you go in there, you'll meet three more beautiful girls, cute girls just like my sister and me," Urd said slyly.

Skuld alternated between bemusement and embarrassment towards Urd's approach. She finally relented on the embarrassment part, smiling to herself as she realized that Urd's patent witty manipulative nature was still intact.

For now.

"Definitely! I'll risk anything to go in there if you give me a kiss...or undo a couple more of those buttons!" Ataru said, his eyes locked on Urd like a net on fish, as he pointed at her sister's blouse. Skuld was amazed at how quickly his thoughts had shifted from self-preservation to girl-chasing! Of course, when Urd decides to flash an Earthrealm mortal, that was usually the result. Skuld wondered to herself how Cevn had survived a year of being in a relationship with Urd without succumbing to...

'Succumbing' suddenly turned into a black sadness in Skuld's thoughts as she remembered Cevn and Urd's cruel fate.

"That's not going to happen, not in your wildest dreams! I would never kiss you!" Urd shouted back, highly irritated. Ataru started to backtalk her...

"Just go already! Or else I'll have to use _this_ on you!" Skuld threatened, withdrawing a Skuld-bomb from one of the quantum pockets in her jacket. She heard Urd silently mutter "where'd she get time to make _that_!" as Ataru hunched into a compact, quivering form.

Skuld grinned at his hands-over-head reaction.

"Wa..wa...WAH! This is illegal! This is _kidnapping_! An..and you're both _space people_! Aliens from a distant world, seeking out new life and new civilizations...to boldly go where no alien has gone before..."

"Feh!" Skuld and Urd exclaimed, ill-amused by Ataru.

The young mortal was now looking around furtively, obviously scoping out possible routes of escape. Dammit! His stumbling onto Oyuki's UFO had completely ruined their plans! Skuld's intentions were to dope Lum with the love potion, lock her in her cabin...and then find Ataru and drag him here. Instead, he had followed her here after the encounter at their ice cream shoppe.

"And you better 'boldly go' up inside that entry port, or else!" Urd said thinly. To Skuld's complete abandon of belief, Urd broke ranks with her and walked straight up to Ataru. With a hawkwind motion, she grasped Ataru by the ear.

"Owwww!" Ataru squawked. Urd snickered and Skuld giggled.

The three walked up the gangplank leading into Oyuki's spacecraft, Urd half-pulling half-guiding Ataru by a tight grip on his earlobe. Skuld could tell by his expression that he was conflicted between lust and fear...and a measure of pain.

But the lust in his eyes was winning out.

And then the full sense of the fact struck Skuld. Ataru must have _followed her_ here last night! Things being what they were, she knew that this Ataru possessed no suffice of brainpower to discover Oyuki's UFO in this park on his own. He was too goofy...he certainly wasn't the kind of person who could employ the necessary detective skills such as induction or deduction to locate where she was staying. Which could only mean...

Shocked, she sucked a deep breath of tension-laden air.

"What if...he's one of those perverted _stalkers_?!" Skuld anxiously questioned, her thoughts rattling like chainmail as a police siren sounded in the distance. Tokyo was a very large conurbation...the chances of Ataru coming _here_ were infinitesimal.

"If he actually _followed_ me here, he could definitely be a perv! And here we are, thinking we should try and get Lum interested in him! What if he's some ecchi college student? What if he's so obsessed with women, he won't stop at anything to have his way with them? E..even sneaking around following them! Grrrm, if this is true, than hooking him up with Lum would be too sick to even consider! What if he's a peeping Tom? I...couldn't live with myself if that happened! He could do just about anything!" Skuld reflected as she searched her impressions of Ataru.

"We can't have him meet Lum!" she shouted at the top of her lungs. But it was too late, as Urd was already hauling Ataru by the ear up the gangwalk leading into the UFO.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Who's this average-lookin' idiot? And why are you bringing him here?" Benten said in a dry disinterest as Skuld, Urd and Ataru entered the central 'lobby' of Oyuki's UFO...a parade of two new friends and a straggling Earth boy. She, Lum and Oyuki were lunching on teriyaki slices. The delicious smell made Skuld's stomach grumble hungrily.

Once Urd released his ear, Ataru busied himself by gawking at the interior of the starcraft. He was so preoccupied, he didn't even hear the warrior-girl's words after she repeated them. To avoid an incident with Benten and her hair-trigger temper, Skuld elbowed Ataru in the ribs to bring his attention 'back to earth'. It would be the worst if Benten got angry because he was ignoring her. Ataru's eyes formed sharp black triangles as he whined in complaint.

"Owww, whadya' do that for, Skuld-chan? It ain't every day that I step onto an UFO and...hey! I smell teriyaki! And I smell miso soup! And I'm hungry! Whatta coincidence..."

All three space girls scowled.

Ataru almost turned blue with surprise.

Skuld realized that...by bringing Ataru here...she had just mixed gunpowder into an already volatile mix of personalities. She could only pray to the Lord for the best result...

"W..waitaminute! Major babe alert! Woo-hoo!! Major _freak_ babe alert! Major _freakshow_ alien babe alert!" Ataru announced randomly, his eyes lighting on each alien girl in turn. For some reason, he wound up gawking at Benten in an emulation of his cartoonish alter-ego.

Bad news.

"What are _you_ staring at, moron?" Benten challenged, quickly standing up from the circular dining table in response to Ataru's flippant words. Hands on hips, a three-dimensional reality confronting a one-dimensional comment, Benten radiated aggression.

"Uh-oh!" Skuld heard Urd gasp.

"Yeah! What do you mean...'freakshow'?" Lum added. The green-haired Oni girl floated up into the air, a flesh-colored cloudmass of indignant dudgeon.

"Sh..shi..shi.." Ataru stuttered. Skuld was amazed that he was too taken aback by Lum's levitation to even complete the epithet poised on his lips.

"Oh my! This is certainly ill-met," Oyuki added, her eyes beading with intensity. "Despite the fact that you have arrived here as a guest aboard my personal starfaring craft...you certainly wasted no time to insult me and my friends. I can only say this...that under the guise of blitheness, you have the poor manners of a bourgeoisie boor!"

That was probably Okuki's way of saying "fuck you!" in Royalese, Skuld observed to herself.

Ataru only looked at the trio with a wilder expression in his eyes.

"Let's see...I see a _rough-looking girl_ who looks like a guy, dressed in a some kind of road warrior red-plated biker outfit with chains. Then there's another girl with narrow strands of _icicles_ for hair, wearing some weird-ass kimono that belongs in a Heian Era museum. And finally, I see a third girl with green hair floating in the air wearing a tiger-striped bikini and knee high boots that would look sexy on the right woman, with a pair of _horns_ coming out of the top of her head! Did I miss anything?!" Ataru yelled hysterically.

Skuld slapped her hand against her forehead in utter defeat while Urd turned around and banged her fist in frustration against one of the metal bulkheads. How could the most carefully-devised plans of _two Goddesses_ be trumped by the inane stupidity of one mortal idiot? This wasn't a plan...this was a disaster!! Skuld regretted ever meeting Ataru; he was even _worse_ than his anime counterpart. Several of the characters in the anime had labeled him "the enemy of all women"; this Ataru was too ignorant to be the enemy of anyone. She couldn't even imagine how he had managed to get into N.I.T. He had probably passed his entrance exams by a series of lucky guesses.

They had planned to introduce Ataru to Lum under more controlled circumstances, but his sudden appearance had thrown off the timetable. So it was now or never...this was their only chance to create a favorable impression for Ataru...

...and the imbecile had just spouted out the worst possible spray of insults to feminine sensitivities she had ever heard. His insolent observations were as aggravating as anything she could ever imagine!

The teapot in the center of the dinner table boiled...its tremolo gurgling the sole sound in the room.

An apt metaphor for this situation, Skuld thought to herself. Ataru had put him and Urd in a unwieldy pinch; if any or all of the three alien teenagers decided to obliterate him on the spot, she and her sister would be forced to reluctantly protect him, which would make for a blatant display of their Goddess abilities.

Benten's face turned redder and redder, as if the hot tea had been poured over her head. The short horns on Lum's head grew outwards in size and sharp-pointedness. Oyuki didn't say a word, but the hand she was resting on the dinner table was shaking violently...if she was true to form, she would have a short tanto blade concealed inside the sash of her kimono.

"He's gonna melt in Hell for that one!" Urd whispered aside to her, as Skuld sensed that the Warrior Goddess was about ready to explode...

"_I'mmmm gonnnnNNA KILL HIM!!_" Benten screamed as she reached for some kind of weapon holstered to her waistbelt. Oyuki swiftly reached up...Skuld was almost certain that she was going to draw her short blade concealed in her obi sash and cut Ataru down.

But to Skuld's shock, Oyuki instead quickly reached out and laid a restraining hand on Benten's wrist, stopping her short.

"Not here in my UFO, Benten. It would be my pleasure if you take your quarrel with this insolent...sordid...Earth person outside. If you wish to spill blood, I would appreciate it if you harm him elsewhere, so as to not make a mess in here. And perhaps, so that we may be spectators at a safe distance and not be at risk of being soiled by flying body parts," she said in a low warning voice.

Ataru's face turned three-sheets white to the wind.

A few seconds later, a loud giggling burbled from Lum.

"Hee hee tee hee! He thinks you..snicker..look like a guy! Bwah ha haah! A _guy_, Benten! Th..that's payback f..giggle..for all those times you made my Darling Keiichi come onto you, B..Benten...whoo hoo bwah ha hee hahaha!" Lum managed to say before dissolving into bellylaughs.

Lum's laughter was contagious, at least for Oyuki. The Neptunian Princess was more modest than her Oni friend, politely holding a sleeve up to cover her mouth while she giggled, still grasping Benten's wrist. But it was obvious to Skuld that the Oyuki was highly amused...her ice-blue eyes were watering with the sparkle of mirth.

Benten's free hand slowly turned into a fist.

"YOU'RE DEAD MEAT, MORTAL!!" she screamed as she grabbed the nearest plate and sailed it at Ataru's head, teriyaki and all. Skuld was amazed at the superhuman fluidity of Benten's motion, despite the fact that Oyuki was hanging onto her other arm.

Neither she nor Urd had a chance to deflect it.

_--Clunk!!--_

The plate landed obliquely on Ataru's forehead, and then rebounded and struck Urd in the throat.

"G..gack!" she heard her sister choke, pitching forward. Benten's strike had knocked Ataru out on his feet; he was wobbling to and fro with the unsteadiness of a drunk leaving a Roppongi bar at 4am, his eyes rolled back in their sockets.

Reacting quickly, Skuld jumped and reached out to steady the two of them...but their combined weight was easily double hers. She felt herself being straw-pulled off balance.

Urd suddenly heaved forward in gag-reflex, coughing out the snag in her throat...and during one spasmic heave, a small glass vial popped out from the cleavage between her breasts...

Arcing...slowly...towards...the...floor.

Right in front of Skuld's eyes, as if Time had slowed to the merest of psychological motions, the slender glass container of cloudy blue liquid twirled end over end towards the decking, a history in the making. The interior lights of the UFO's central cabin glinted like stray comets in reflection against the rounded glass.

Skuld readied her Goddess Powers to instantly turn the interior of Oyuki's UFO into a zero-G environment...

But then Ataru collapsed.

In a resonant motion, Skuld completely lost her own footing and pitched to her side...

And fell right on top of the unconscious Ataru, who somehow...despite being totally in bird-and-spinning-wheels-lala-land...reflexively reached an arm around her as she landed on top of him. Embarrassed at the warm pressure of Ataru's hand resting on her hips, Skuld caught a flash-spark of blue light out of the corner of her eye. She grimaced as she saw the cabin quickly filling up with blue smoke...casting everything in an Assyrian blurriness.

"Oh Shitttttt..." she bewailed in a weak voice before she passed out.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Blue.

The last thing she saw was the cabin of Oyuki's UFO hazed blue with smoke. Which meant that Urd's love potion vial had broken. Skuld cursed the circumstances...she had reminded her sister dozens of times to use _unbreakable_ storage media for her alchemical concocts. But of course, Urd always responded with "Big Sister knows best!" So she had ignored Skuld once again, keeping the love potion in a glass container.

If only her Big Sister's ego would sometimes be as fragile as glass. But then again, it was fragile as glass, a fact that she exploited at least once a week on the Earthrealm. What was it Cevn had told her? Something about "being an expert at pushing her sister's buttons"? As smart as her oldest sister was, she just didn't _think_ sometimes!

When she fully regained her wits, Skuld was mortified with the very real possibility that she and four other females had been terminally dosed with one of Urd's strongest love potions...and the only male in the vicinity was _Ataru Moroboshi_!

Talk about nightmare scenarios!

She clenched her eyes shut for what seemed to be almost an hour after she came to...until Urd gave her the 'all clear'.

Even then, she felt around with her hands to make sure that she was facing one of the metal bulkheads when she opened her eyes. Urd's love potion formula may have been a dud...but Skuld wasn't going to take any chances. It may not work on Urd or the other three girls, but it might work on _her_! She remembered falling on top of Ataru..._that_ was already gross enough. But the possibility of being subject of one of her Big Sister's love potions? Skuld swore that she'd rather spend the rest of her life blind than be in love with Ataru Moroboshi.

"Skuld, you can open your eyes now! It didn't work!" Urd said, patting her on the cheek.

"I'M NOT FALLING IN LOVE WITH ATARU! NO WAY. NEVER!!" she screamed in response to her Big Sister's words.

"What didn't work?" she heard Lum ask cautiously, backgrounded by giggles from Benten and Oyuki.

Skuld opened her eyes...and felt her mouth drain out of words as the first person she saw was a grinning Ataru Moroboshi leaning against the bulkhead opposite her, complete with a knot on his forehead. She did a full body flinch, and then rolled away from his as fast as she could.

_Pant. Pant. Pant. Pant._

"Catch your breath, Skuld. It's okay...I explained everything," Urd informed her.

Apparently, thankfully, mercifully...Urd's potion was ineffective. At best, it was a laughing potion; everyone in the room was giddy-giggly, as if drunk.

"Yes, your sister explained to us that you had brought Mr. Moroboshi here to introduce him to Lum, Ms. Skuld. We can certainly empathize with your desperation; after all, there is only two days left before Lum's Father sends his fleet here to obliterate this planet. But why this particular Earth person, instead of the six billion fellow creatures on his planet? I cannot esteem any redeeming qualities in his personage that could possibly interest Lum. He's nothing special," Oyuki observed.

"You can say that again!" Benten chimed, breaking off into deep guffaws.

"Why do you want to introduce him to me? I'm in love with Darling, not this man!" Lum asked, snickering.

Skuld felt her bearing collapse like a house of cards, even as laugher in response to Benten and Urd's comments poured out of her.

Their carefully plotted plan had failed on all fronts! The only redeemable facet of this whole misadventure was the fact that it appeared that Urd hadn't explained everything, at least the part about the abortive love potion.

"And there is one further matter that warrants my curiosity. I would personally feel more comfortable in your presence if certain subjects were explained to me," Oyuki added cautiously.

"To the three of us, she means," Benten added.

"What now?" Skuld worried. Oyuki's light blue eyes were almost piercing her with curiosity...or was it impatience?

While she was out cold, Urd could have spun all sorts of mischief.

"I happened to overhear a certain discussion the other day that obviously wasn't intended for my ears. Of course, I initially assumed that what I overheard was simply a case of mistaken occurrence. But while you and your sister were gone, I discussed the matter with Lum and Benten. I learned that they too heard the same words as I, which only confirmed my impressions. Consequently, if either of you would be so kind as to be forthright, I would appreciate it..." Oyuki explained.

"Forthright with what?" Skuld asked, fearing the worst.

"Forthright with an explanation as to why you both referred to yourselves as 'Goddesses' two days ago. I would be wholly interested..." Oyuki asked.

Skuld almost felt a sense of relief at this. It could have been worse.

"Yeah! Whaddya mean, calling yourselves 'Goddesses'? _I'm_ a Goddess..." Benton interrupted with a voice tinged with indignance and pride, gesturing thumbwards towards her chest.

"Boy, _are_ you..." Ataru muttered under his breath, his voice slated with obvious appreciation of Benten's 'assets'.

"...and I've _never_ met the likes of you!" Benten finished, peering at Skuld and Urd with narrowed eyes. Then she turned to Ataru and shot him a withering glare.

"And _you_ thought I was a guy earlier! Moron!! Shows how much of a man _you_ are, to not recognize this! And these!" Benten noted, running her hands down her curvaceous figure from shoulders to hips in a very sensual manner. Ataru's eye grew wide with lust, and then he bowed his head in embarrassment, eyelids lowered.

"Hee hee, look at him! He's feverish with shame! Good one, Benten! Uuu-cha!" Lum said appraisingly.

"Ahem," Oyuki said, clearing her throat with a delicate sound. "Are you going to answer my question?"

_ "Uh...you go Skuld!" "Erm, you go Urd!"_

"Okay...we'll decide this fair and square! On the count of three...

Skuld readied her handthrow.

_ Jan-ken-pon!!_

Urd had paper, Skuld had stone.

Skuld stomped her foot on the metal decking, silently cursing her luck. She gathered her thoughts, trying to determine the best way to try and explain this new development to the three. As she reasoned an explanation, she realized that it was probably for the best that she had lost...as Urd still wasn't in full possession of her faculties. Urd's "love potion" had been a total flop! And if it were left to Urd to explain their Divine nature, just about anything could happen.

Urd couldn't be trusted...

"Not that Urd's trustworthiness hasn't ever been an issue before!" Skuld thought to herself with a chuckle. A brief memory flashed through her mind...about the time when Urd had attempted to impersonate a Proctor to play mischief on Belldandy for some perceived slight. She had been caught, of course. The resulting punitive consequences were that Urd was reassigned to perform 500 years menial secretarial work for the Proctors...along with a License Suspension.

The memory heralded a tension as Skuld remembered her own license suspension last year for accidentally mentioning Vanagdrasil in front of a mortal. The Lord had been swift and unyielding in His judgment...He had called soon after and yanked her license immediately.

She fervently hoped that this situation wouldn't get her in trouble with the Lord. Where ever He was, Skuld _knew_ that He would be watching this interchange with interest, especially given she and her sister's track record of 'misinterpreting' His directives...

The truth is a delicate thing, especially since the truth of this place seemed to zigzag in the wind like a bay of leaves. From day to day, Skuld didn't know _what_ reality she was in. All along, this place seemed like a pocket of TimeSpace that was somehow hidden away from the TimeWeb. The study of the Future involved a particular way of looking at Time; a reflexive reasoning out of events that have already occurred, yet have no manifested at a particular juncture of the TimeStream.

Take a string, dip both ends in water, and then suspend it. A bead of water will drip down the stream...it was already in motion from the start, but within the perspective of Time, it would not reach the midpoint of the string until a particular instant. Once it reached the midpoint of the string, it would remain for a moment, and then pass on, traveling downward. In much the same manner, Time was always traveling from the Future to the Now...always en route to a rendezvous. As Norn of the Future, Skuld was just learning to be able to see Time as it approached, to see the Future as _already occurring_ and yet not a _past_ occurrence.

Yet, in this unfamiliar universe of the imagination, Time was haywired. Despite the relative isolation of this place in Time, whether it was part of the TimeWeb, or somehow independent and outside of TimeSpace as Skuld suspected...there were some recognizable trappings. Here, there was a temple, Kami-sama, and Lum and her misfitten cast of fictional manga characters.

Skuld sighed...at least these characters were familiar to her. She could have fared far worse; it would have been a disaster if she had been stranded in some universe comprised of characters from an anime series she had never watched before. At least she was familiar enough with Urusei Yatsura to anticipate certain ground rules that she might be able to rely upon.

So what _was_ fiction and what was truth? And if the truth was not to be known, how could she explain anything in the first place?

Skuld decided to go with what she knew, rather than mire herself in trying to decipher an existential paroxysm. Not only would that introduce a series of complexities...it would certainly confuse Urd and all the others. Now was not the time to be casting about obfuscations.

Thus, the only real question of importance was whether to tell the truth as she knew it...or to comb out another veil of lies to obscure the truth, covering it like the coral reef rising from the ocean floor to conceal the sea bed.

And if she had to tell the truth...then _how much_ of the truth?

"Well...we're waiting!" Benten urged impatiently.

"Lum, Oyuki...Benten. What you overheard is the truth. My sister and I _are_ Goddesses," Skuld began.

"Boy are you!" Ataru added, moving his hands in the curvy-curve gesture guys use to describe girls.

_--BONK!!--_

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Of the three alien girls, Skuld sensed that Lum seemed to be the most freaked out by her disclosure. The nature of her and Urd's divinity had obviously usurped Lum's most commonly held views with complete recklessness. And with good reason...in this reality, Lum was an Oni Princess, belonging to a race of Demons whose counterparts were another race of Gods, modeled on the Seven Lucky Gods. Lum and her kind were eternally pitted against the Gods of Fortune in a perpetual intercourse of comic competitive battles and syrinx coexistences.

Lum's bewilderment was understandable, as her conception of the Gods was confined in keeping to that of the 'universe' of the manga. To Lum, the 'battles' between her kind and the Gods were more akin to amateur sports contests than actual fighting; the stakes being more or less who bought the celebratory meals and sake. There was no place in Lum's cosmology for _another_ set of Goddesses...

Namely herself and her sister.

Skuld had to gulp down several glasses of water because Lum's exasperated questions were almost like rabid fox-bites, edging her towards nervousness.

Naturally, Skuld had to conceal many particulars, especially those concerning the possible existence of the Lord. _That_ would be a sure-fire "Bust of the Millennia" if she mentioned anything about Him! She also refrained from informing Lum and the others about the nature of her responsibility as Norn of the Future. However, she did tell the truth about how it was that she and Urd came to be here.

And she definitely didn't mention a word about the whole issue with Isilblius.

During her explanation, Skuld reiterated that Urd was experiencing an intense amount of grief because of the loss of her mortal boyfriend, hoping that an emotional appeal would convey a persuasive influence on Lum and her friends. As expected, Urd became so upset at the reminder of Cevn's death that she had to leave the room. Lum also got teary-eyed as she felt her own loss of Keiichi.

Skuld lied about the blue gas...explaining that it was merely a form of chemical defense against Belldandy, were she to attack Oyuki's UFO. After this, it was easier going for her; she mixed her answers with bites of teriyaki.

Curiously enough, a small stack of manga collections caught her eye as she spun out her detailed explanations to the three teenage girls and a half-comprehending Ataru. She had to give the mortal guy credit, he was holding up pretty despite the circumstances.

But the manga...that was curious.

The topmost tankōbon were wrinkled from cover to binding...someone had spilled something on the manga collection.

Once she exhausted Oyuki of asking questions, the Neptunian Princess brought several trays of delicious food from the galley. Skuld's stomach was still grumbling, this time from stress, as she ate the meal with a Goddess-like relish. She felt sorry for Urd, who had exiled herself to the observation room...probably for another bout of crying debts.

As she savored a cheesecake dessert, Skuld noticed that one of the manga issues was wet with a bluish fluid.

Urd's 'potion'.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Skuld mused over her regrets about bringing Ataru aboard the UFO; his presence jeopardized the whole 'mission'. After the initial episode of insults and thrown plates, Ataru had blatantly threatened to expose them, promising that he would "go straight to the Asahi Shimbun with the location of your UFO". Of all the mortals on the Earthrealm, it seemed that they had happened to select a confirmed xenophobe. Skuld had completely forgotten that Benten and Oyuki were _not_ part of humanity's cosmological Pandora's Box. They were strictly Section 51...unknown entities to the rest of the world. Entities known only to Lum, Keiichi and their immediate circle of friends.

Even worse, Ataru was a chatterbox of inanities. His babbling wore so heavily on everyone's thoughts, Oyuki ended up coaxing him into a freezer under a pledge of a "make out session". Bested by his lust, Ataru readily agreed. Once in the freezer, Oyuki locked him within so she could freeze him into suspended animation. Otherwise, any possibility of enjoying a good night's sleep would be faulted.

The next day was spent in debate concerning "what to do with the idiot", as Benten so delicate put it. Ataru's presence on Oyuki's ship had added another hassling layer of secretiveness to the whole mess. In this reality, Lum's alien brood was real...after all, they had threatened to enslave the Earthrealm several years earlier.

Skuld and Urd managed to convince the Neptunian Princess to thaw out Ataru...noting that in all fairness, it wouldn't be meet to discuss his disposition while he was frozen solid. Fortunately, Oyuki's heart wasn't as ice-hard as one would think, considering her appearance.

The miscue with Urd's potion really worried Skuld. Once in a great while, Urd would get the potion right...but this mishap had spelled a kiss of doom to their idea of getting Ataru and Lum together. It would have been even worse if the three alien girls found out about the _true_ purpose of Urd's little potion! Any trust that she and her sister had gained with the trio would have been promptly evicted.

With the 'dosing Ataru and Lum' option nixed, their second-best choice would be to storm the temple. Yet, this was an intangible proposition as well. Skuld knew she lacked the necessary arcane skills to undo the seriously heavy portal-shields Belldandy had erected around the temple entrance. And if Urd couldn't even concoct a proper love-potion, how could she possibly overcome the numerous arcane spell-locks that basted the temple doors?

Frustrated at this impasse, she looked at Lum, Benten and Oyuki for support. But at the moment, all three were tight-lipped and red-eyed in response to another series of insults Ataru had thrown their way. All morning, he would occasionally refer to them as "the Space Circus Girls". Even Urd was growing weary of his stupidity...

"Perhaps he's only _acting_ stupid," Skuld reflected, wondering how he could be so piddling. From her observations, she knew that many mortals revert to a form of doltishness when they felt threatened. This 'idiot defense' seemed to be a form of self-protection in the face of overwhelming odds. Then again, Ataru's insults and comments seemed artless; they were either mean-spirited in conception, or birthed in a Belldandy-esque ignorance.

"Hey, if everyone wants, I can go get us some pizza!" Ataru offered, interrupting the round-table discussion about getting into Belldandy and Keiichi's temple home.

"Not a chance!" five female voices spoke as one.

Despite the reminder that she was hungry, Skuld pressed on. She mulled over possible ways of storming the gates at the temple. In this reality, there was no Banpei-kun to ward away intruders...it would just be a matter of defeating Belldandy's locks.

Too bad. If there _had been_ a Banpei-kun, Skuld might have been able to hack his AI...and gain entrance to the temple for she and the others.

Urd was sulking again.

It seemed to Skuld that her sister's memories were trying to probe into her being, a little at a time. Once Urd's memories were resumed enough to sense the loss and pain over Cevn's death, they would recede...taking a little bit of her knowledge in their remission. At other times, events unsuggested would cause Urd to be alert and fully engaged. Skuld had to be alert, never knowing when her older sister would devolve into sheer space-cadet bouts of forgetfulness. Despite her sister's nursing a broken heart, Skuld recognized the hard reality that Urd was unreliable.

Skuld felt like her own situation was unreliable as well. Back when she was...well, little...she would hate it when people would call her "kid", or "child", or "brat". Now that she was older, with a more mature feminine physique...she was still subject to untoward comments; comments which were just as disturbing. In effect, her sudden growth spurt had resulted in a trade-off...Ataru's continuing series of remarks about certain parts of her anatomy only served to make her feel even more edgy.

She wished that she could drop off the planet...or even better, drop him off the planet on a one-way trip to the Sun.

"Hey, if everybody wants, I could go get us some beefbowls, provided that one of you babes has some money you could loan me, eheh eh heh!" Ataru offered, a look of sheepish vacuousness on his face.

"Hmmm...that sounds like a good idea! I don't know about you, but I'm hungry. Skuld, since you're the one he favors, why don't you escort him on a food run," Urd suggested.

"Wha..wha..wha..what? ME?! Why _me_?"

"Because Ataru _likes_ you, as he's so fond of constantly reminding us. Since he seems to be so entranced with you, it's doubtful that he'll try and make a run for it. Infatuated mortal boys rarely try to give the dodge to girls that they like!" Urd explained with a knowing wink.

"I am not a...girl!!" Skuld screamed, while Urd and the alien trio burst into a chamber chorus of giggles.

"Of course you're not, otherwise he wouldn't be staring at you so much!" Lum noted, floating above the table. Lum's comments brought a mental image of another boy who would stare...Tomohisa. But unlike Ataru, Tomohisa wouldn't make such blatantly crude comments about her breasts and hips. Instead, his only comment was through his eyes; usually more sincere complement than lust.

Skuld wished that it was Tomohisa instead of Ataru who was here with her.

"You guys, you're embarrassing Skuld! She's blushing because of your teasing," Oyuki interjected. Skuld knew that the Neptunian Princess was trying quell the storm tide of teasing comments from the others, but pointing out her blush didn't help matters...it only brought out even more giggles.

"C'mon, lighten up Skuld! He's all yours!" Benten exhorted her, pointing at Ataru before she doubled over with more laughter. Skuld followed Benten's gesture...and half-grinning as she fought with herself to keep from laughing.

Ataru was looking at Benten with a mystified expression, totally unaware of the "I am not a girl!" sentences ploshed all over his clothes. When he finally noticed the words, he did a full facefall...his expression was like a blanched marble. This brought on another gale of laughter from the others.

Skuld found herself smiling with mirth. Ataru's shocked expression was too funny...and she finally gave in. All it took was a few snickers...and then she was bubbling over with giggles.

Ataru looked at her with a hopeless expression, "_I am not a girl!_" written in pink kanji on his t-shirt.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

_"Coolness! Pachinko parlor sighted!"_

"Eh?" Skuld exhaled, surprised at Ataru's sudden shift in behavior. Up to this point, the young Earthrealm college student had been gawking at girls, chattering about cars, and flirting with her. But now, he was paused in his tracks in front of a large brightly-lit arcade.

"We gotta stop in here and play some pachinko!" Ataru said, oblivious to the fact that Skuld was toting two large carryout bags of soba udon, shrimps, sweet potatoes and eggrolls...while he was walking hands-in-pockets.

Skuld scowled angrily with him and motioned "get going" with her head.

Ignoring her, Ataru ducked into the pachinko parlor. To Skuld's regretful amazement, he pulled several 100-yen coins out of his pocket and plugged them into the first available machine.

"Since you gotta keep an eye on me, guess that means you can't leave, canya? Hah wa hee!" Ataru noted, his voice sparkling with mischief as the vertical face of the pachinko machine lit up with patterned lightflashes. Resigning herself to a headache, Skuld set down her burdens, trading them for the burden of impatience.

The pachinko arcade was ajutter with machine noises, curses, and metal balls pip-papping against glass and metal stops...

"He's pretty good!" she noted as the slotpocket at the bottom of Ataru's machine started filling up with steel balls. After three rounds of pachinko, Ataru had amassed two bowlfuls of balls. Rattling them in the plastic container, he went up to the counter to redeem them.

"Ah...this is your lucky day, young man!" the owner remarked, withdrawing two painted balls from the rest. Apparently, Ataru's winnings included two balls that were worth 5000 yen. Skuld looked on as the pachinko parlor owner counted out 14000 yen. With a silly grin, Ataru tucked it away in his wallet, noting to Skuld that he would pay Oyuki back once they got back to her UFO.

"So there's at least a decent bone in your body! Rather than simply leeching your meals from us, you decided to 'earn' your meal by winning some money," Skuld commented dryly.

"Yep! I seem to have good luck at this particular pachinko stand!"

"And what if you didn't win anything?"

"Then I would have only been out 300 yen," Ataru answered cheerfully.

"Well, in that case, you can earn the rest of your lunch by carrying _these_!" Skuld demanded, nudging one of the carryout bags with her foot.

"No way! I refuse! You were carrying them to begin with...and you certainly look like a strong girl. Not as strong as that Benten chick, to be sure, but strong enough to carry our lunches home! So you're the one who has to carry them!"

"You're a _total_ idiot!" Skuld shouted, startling a couple of men seated at the nearby pachinko machines.

"If you don't carry our lunch home, I'll _make you_ carry it!"

"Yadda yadda! As if you can do anything! You're just a girl!" Ataru taunted.

Skuld felt her cheeks puffing out in dismay.

"Hmmm...how about I shout 'I'm gay and looking for a boyfriend!'" Skuld threatened.

Ataru looked at her with irrecognition for a moment...and then he caught her glancing at his t-shirt. His eyes flashed wide as he regarded the clean _wordless_ shirt. Skuld had waited outside of his dorm while he changed clothes...but even while standing near the entry door, she could hear the loud laughter of mocking male voices from within. Ataru had emerged from the Men's Dorm with a new t-shirt and a blush to his face, while several of his dorm mates chortled and taunted they waved him off. Although he didn't know how his shirt and pants had been lettered, Skuld was almost certain that he was smart enough...that he _did_ correlate the fact that it had been her words that had been printed into his clothes.

Of course, what he didn't realize that they might not wash out...the angrier Skuld got, the more permanent the word prints were.

"N..n..NO!! Don't do that! I get your drift! Message received!" Ataru quickly blurted out, looking at Skuld with panic in his eyes. He quickly grabbed the lunch bags and proceeded down the sidewalk without even waiting for her.

Skuld glanced back at the pachinko parlor, a thought-sparkle in her eye.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

To her surprise, Belldandy had readily accepted the challenge.

Urd thought Skuld's plan was a bit on the juvenile side...but if that what it would take to get them in a position to perhaps catch Belldandy unawares, then it would be well worth it. She was a little taken aback; Belldandy actually received Skuld's offer of a TimeVector PosiChronic sim rematch with an unexpected vim, seemingly without a single thought as to _why_ Skuld wanted to play her.

Skuld actually _did_ play her, in a sense...turning up every iota of her 'I want to beat my older sister' attitude to the point where it took on a charisma of its own. Belldandy seemed to have an attitude of her own, judging from her counter-challenge to Skuld.

So tomorrow, they would go over to the temple, she and Skuld, to play games.

Tomorrow was the final day of the ten-day ultimatum issued by Lum's father. Everything hinged on Skuld's plan...except for the fact that Lum still was obsessed with "Keiichi darling!"

In view of this, Urd decided that a nocturnal visit to the temple might be appropriate.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

After everyone went to sleep, Urd checked on each of the sleepers, and then stole out of Oyuki's UFO...

Getting near Belldandy tomorrow was a certainty at this point. But Lum's emotions would need a little prompting; the chances of her taking an interest in Ataru relied on their ability to turn her _away_ from Keiichi. So it was up to Urd, the Queen of Love, to ensure that this would happen.

Fortunately, Urd was well-practiced at voyeurism.

Approaching the temple, Urd was hoping that she could 'catch' Belldandy and Keiichi in an uncompromising situation. If she were to provide proof of Keiichi's infidelity, Lum's illusions about him would be shattered. All throughout, Lum was laboring under the impression that Keiichi had been 'kidnapped' by Belldandy, despite numerous attempts to convince her otherwise. Hence, Urd's attempt was aimed at providing visual evidence...

Lum couldn't argue with empirical facts in the form of a video. Hopefully, she could catch Keiichi and Belldandy on tape, show it to Lum tomorrow aboard Oyuki's UFO...and let Lum's own nature take its course.

An emotionally vulnerable Oni girl would be ripe for the picking.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

The system of arcane shields and locks designed to keep Goddesses and non-Earthrealm mortal out were deployed at two places: the front gate torii and perimeter walls of the temple compound; and the front door to the temple house itself. Surprisingly, the temple house didn't have a door on the northeast end where the sunroom was.

Urd encanted a number of hacklock spells to defeat Belldandy's shields. She was surprised at the lack of ingenuity employed in creating the spells. Her sister's spells and shields were much more thought-out than these; delicate works of beauty in comparison to the rudiments of shield spells she was encountering here. Once she patterned-out the final shield, she stepped in under the torii, half-expecting Banpei-kun to rush her.

Using the shadows, she crept along the wall until she drew even with the "Banpei Shed" outbuilding. She dashed from tree to tree, and then hid in the shadows of the Banpei Shed.

She could hear Belldandy and Keiichi's voices giggling with amorous laughter. Once again, Urd realized that this Goddess was not her sister...this Belldandy had failed to enclose the temple home in a stealthing mode of shielding! Carefully stepping around the piles of leaves, she walked up to the side of the temple.

A huge crush of sadness grasped Urd as she realized she was standing next to the jalousied windows to what was Cevn's room back home. She peeked in, almost hoping beyond hope that he would be in his room, reading or playing guitar or sleeping.

But he wasn't there.

She sunk to the ground and started crying.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"WHERE'S MY SISTER!" Skuld shouted. She had slept light last night, and was the first to awaken in the morning. Once she discovered her sister was gone, she quickly woke up all the others.

Skuld extended her Goddess senses, sensing the tel-tale Metanative connection with her older sister that always bound them together. Belldandy...her real elder sister Belldandy, was nowhere to be sensed. Whatever had dispensed them to this anime network reality had walloped her other sister to a completely different reality. She couldn't even sense Mara. Once again, she wondered if she and Urd were trapped in the Ygg Mainframe, confined within some kind of ultra virtual-reality sim. The rules were all different her, but still, she could sense Urd's vibration nearby. Unguided, always unguided. Once more, Urd had started off on a bromide of undoing.

Urd was at the temple. Why? After she told Urd of her scheme to create an opening for the three alien girls to swipe Keiichi out from under this bimbo version of her elder sister...Urd had to go ruin things by pulling a stunt! What was she thinking? Or was she even thinking at all? Her sister's thoughts were more unspoken, brooding vines of mind...actions that were like yen-pennies dropping from heaven, falling through her soul. Maybe her sister had simply blanked out and went on a subconscious walk to a familiar locale without even being aware of it.

"We've gotta go to the temple! Hurry!" she insisted urgently. Of course, Benten and Oyuki were quickly awake and alert. But Lum and Ataru were sleepyheaded to the max, Lum looking at her with half-lidded eyes and Ataru grumble-yawning.

"C'mon!" Skuld shouted, banging on the bulkheads.

Big Sister had to be at the temple! There would be no reason why she would go anywhere else! And they would have to get over to the temple quickly, before Belldandy and Keiichi woke up.

"Dammit, it's still dark outside!" Ataru groused, not noticing the pale blue early morning skies.

Skuld wanted to slap him, but refrained from doing so.

A few minutes later, Oyuki's UFO was hovering near the temple, invisible to all. Skuld could see Urd sitting next to Banpei's house, looking despondent.

The best chance would be to have Oyuki park her UFO partly down the steep hill behind the temple complex. They could walk downhill and then circle around the wall to the front gate of the temple.

Before the others could stop her, Skuld dashed down the hill along the walkpath that Megumi sometimes used for a bike trail. She completely forgot that it was glazed with chill dew at this time in the morning...she slipped into a full tumble, rolling almost down to the base of the hill. Lum had to carry her for the remainder of the way, because she had twisted her ankle and banged her knee up when she slipped.

Once they reached the front of the temple, Skuld motioned for Urd to come over.

"What are you _doing here_, Big Sister! You scared all of us to death by leaving without telling anyone!" Skuld admonished her sister. She pulled up short of voicing further reprovals when she saw Urd's swollen eyes.

"He's dead! I saw his room...it was empty! Cevn's dead!"

"Not again!" Skuld thought in frustration. Now they would have to wait for her sister to calm down. Once Urd had regained her wits a little, she told them that she had come here by herself to try and obtain proof that Keiichi wasn't interested in Lum anymore. But the memories of the temple coupled with her awareness of Cevn's death had caused her to have a breakdown. After this, she had forgotten why she had come, as well as how to undo Belldandy's shield-seals so that she could leave.

But Skuld reasoned it out: if Urd had gotten in...maybe she could come and go at will. She tested the shields...

...and discovered that Urd had disabled them all. She limped in through the gate and hugged her sister.

"What are you doing here?!" Belldandy shouted from the front doorway. "And how did you get past my wards?!"

"Oyuki, hurry! Plan B!" Skuld yelled through a cupped hand. The blue-haired Neptunian grabbed the boombox Ataru had been carrying and set it down on the ground. She inserted a mini-CD and turned the volume up full...

The theme from "Tenchi Muyo Universe!" started playing.

Belldandy started dancing in the doorway.

"Stop this..uh..right now! This isn't..oom..fair!" Belldandy shouted, dancing uncontrollably on the wooden gallery in front of the front door.

Benten took her cue and sprinted over where Belldandy was dancing, grabbing her arms and pinning them behind her back.

"Lum...help me, for crisesakes! This girl's _strong_!" she shouted as Belldandy struggled under her restraining wrestle-hold. Lum floated over and helped Benten tie Belldandy's hands behind her back.

"Her mouth! Don't forget to gag her mouth!" Skuld instructed. Oyuki withdrew a tag of silk from her kimono sleeve and tied it around Belldandy's face, covering her mouth.

"Whew!" Skuld sighed.

In less than two minutes, they had captured Belldandy and restrained her from making any verbal or gestural spells. Recalling that Urd had a weakness that could be exploited by polka music, Skuld had relied on her suspicion that Belldandy would be affected by anime soundtracks in the same manner that she and her sisters were affected by certain musics. She had become suspicious when Elder Sister seemed to always excuse herself to the kitchen during the closing credits of an OAV...

She wasn't old enough to have a musical weakness...one had to be 140,000 years old for that. But now that she was manifesting in a form akin to a Goddess of 160,000 to 170,000 years of age, she probably had developed a musical weak spot. Fortunately, no one knew what it was yet...including herself.

"Hmm, this ought to be easy!" Urd said as she walked up to the front door of the temple, testing it with her fingers.

Skuld was surprised once again. A few minutes earlier, Urd had been distraught to the point of forgetting that she had disabled the exterior shields. Now she was suggesting that disabling the interior set of shields around the temple house would be easily managed.

She watched as Urd touched one of the shield-layers, sending a visual ripple through the air.

"Give me five minutes and I'll have us in the temple!"

"Finally! That means that I can be reunited with my darling Keiichi!" Lum shouted excitedly.

"That depends on how he feels about you! Last night, he and Belldandy were in the bath together...and they were definitely romping around!" Urd noted in a cheerless voice.

Skuld watched the enthusiasm drain out of Lum's face as Urd started a series of complex hand motions to unlock the arcane shielding.

"Wow, this was a piece of cake! And I bet you were wondering if I could do it!" Urd announced proudly after a couple minutes. "All the wards and shields and stuff are disabled...we can go in any time we want."

Skuld regarded Lum; the Oni girl's stricken expression clearly indicating that she dreaded entering her former home. She saw that Lum was finally beginning to believe that Keiichi had totally betrayed her.

"So this is how the house of glass is hammered down," Skuld said under her breath.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --


	90. Pt 90: Miyuki and Natsumi: Canone Fourt...

**Part 90: Miyuki and Natsumi: Canone -- 4th Movement**

Normally, back in 20XX, Miyuki could rely on her own skills to hack into a personnel database whenever she wanted to locate information about someone, information that wasn't kept on the Tokyo Police Department's computer system. And if she couldn't find what she was seeking, Bokuto's resident megane-ko computer hacker genius, Yoriko, could. Instead, she had to do things the 1969 way; go into the cavernous archives in the basement of the main Metro station and plum through musty-odored boxes of yellowed paper folders, trying to get any information on the three Yakuza gangleaders. She found plenty of information on Ohto, Kenjo and Billy-san...mostly surveillance records and conjectures by detectives about their relationships with certain government officials, merchants, and hoteliers. Mostly useless shit, not even enough to give her a basis to grab after a warrant to bust their asses for some holding time Q&A interogs.

But what she was really interested in was this "Mr. Wilson" who had met with the Yakuza men.

According to the records, none of the three Yakuza bosses were known to have any dealings with Americans, with the exception of Ohto's dalliance with prostitutes in Hawaii before the Vietnam War. The war seemed to complicate everything...Miyuki hated the very idea of Japan being at war. It was even worse when she reflected on the fact that domestic security was influenced by an overt wariness; the intelligence she needed on Wilson would be quite inaccessible, even to the Police Department. The government ministries that dealt with national security, such as the National Police and the various intelligence agencies, certainly wouldn't allow her near any sensitive data.

So she would have to thwart whatever these men were planning the old-fashioned way...relying on her experience, her brainpower and her policewoman's gut instincts.

Fortunately, Miyuki was an old-fashioned girl...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"What in the fuck are you talking about, Officer Kobayakawa? You actually think that they're going to rob the main Mitsubishi Bank? And you want me to assign extra surveillance on it during the 4th? You're either full of shit...or you're even _more_ full of shit!" Captain Kitsune barked.

Miyuki gulped. She couldn't even imagine "Monk" Kitsune, or Oshou as he was known to everyone, ever uttering a single foul word. Just like she couldn't imagine rookie Arizuka turning into the Head Superintendent of the Tokyo Metro Police Force, Recordkeeping Compliance Division. But Captain Kitsune was a veritable fountain-mouth of epithets.

"Sir, with all due respect, I..."

"This is utter insanity...or you're onto something big!" he shouted, interrupting her. Braying angrily, he continued to berate their theory.

"But it won't work! Assigning patrols around Mitsubishi's bank would be like having flies swarming around horseshit! Not only would it make us all look stupid, but old man Mitsubishi would probably have a shitfit kadoodle if he ever found out why! Extra patrols...bah! And you arrive at this specious conclusion based on your claim to have overheard him talking to some Yakuza scumbags and some _American assholes_ about robbing his bank? How in the seven shits of Hell could you possibly link him to something like a bank heist? Dammit, I could get my ass fired for even considering your suggestion!"

Scowling, he glared at Miyuki and Natsumi, drumming his fingers on his crowded desk.

"This really sucks!" Miyuki said silently to Natsumi. The Imp had a built-in mini-CD recorder, and of course she had recorded the whole conversation onto disc. Yet, her efforts availed to naught...all the evidence she needed to convince the Captain was on a mini-CD. A mini-CD that couldn't be played back on any equipment other than the Imp itself, because once again, 1969 had struck an ill bargain with her. The cutting edge of technology in this era's police office was the handheld stereo mini-cassette tape player. And playing the disk on the Imp for the Captain was out of the question. The histrionic Captain Kitsune would have a heart attack if he saw the Imp in action. And Miyuki loved the older version of this man like a grandfather...despite the salt-n-sour disposition of his younger self. She didn't want to do anything that would jeopardize his chances of living into his ripe 80-something retiree's life in 20XX, in this or any other reality.

"Why don't we just play it to him on th...mpmmphimmp!" Natsumi suggested in a whisper. Miyuki's muffling hand came a moment too late. She looked at Kitsune, whose black-bead eye were scrutinizing eyeing her and Natsumi with supercilious reproof. Unlike his elderly alter-persona that she knew so well, _this_ Kitsune wasn't hard of hearing one bit...

"Play me the what? Are you two girls hiding something from me? Perhaps you've managed to capture this reputed discussion on cassette tape?"

Miyuki found herself compelled to nod in agreement, despite her unwillingness to do so. She was really beginning to notice the dry taste in her mouth as she eyed the coffee mug on the Captain's desk.

"Then why in the hell didn't you say so in the first place!" he shouted, the sparse hair over his forehead shivering as he raged.

Miyuki and Natsumi stepped back a pace from his desk, as if on cue.

"Oh great, we're really into it now...you and your big mouth, Natsumi!"

"Miyuki...I _whispered_! How was I supposed to know that he'd overhear me..."

"Quit arguing about girl's stuff and let me hear the tape! Bring it on!" the Captain demanded in an imperious voice.

Natsumi thought fast.

"Damn, I hate to do this, but here goes..." she said, reaching into her standard-issue policewoman's purse. She pulled something out...and let it 'slip'...

...Right into the tallest stack of papers on the Captain's desk...and his mostly-full coffee mug.

"N..Natsumi! N..no way!" her partner shouted as a flurry of papers flew off the desk onto the floor. Miyuki could do little but shield her mouth with a hand in shock. The last time they knocked the papers off the Captain's desk, he was as angry as a Tasmanian Devil. She flinched as the Captain shot up out of his chair.

Captain Kitsune's face turned the color of a radish as a week's worth of administrative paperwork was deposited on the floor with fractal disarray. His radish-face deepened to a dark purple as he looked down at his trousers and dress shirt and noticed that they were liberally browned with spilled hot coffee.

"What is it with you two birds and my desk? Pickup the god-damned papers before they start sticking together with coffee!" the Captain screamed, punching the side of his metal desk with his fist.

As Natsumi hurriedly knelt down to clean up the mess, she tripped over her feet...and bounced against the nearest detective's desk, spilling it and the detective over. As the detective tumbled to the floor amidst a shower of books, folders, papers and assorted office items, Natsumi struggled to her feet...bending over just enough to let some of the policemen get an quick flash of her panties...

"White!" an officer shouted.

Miyuki's face was white, the kind of pallor that one has when they wake up abruptly from a nightmare. Her partner had suddenly turned into a one-woman typhoon! And the Captain's face was as ugly with ire as an obake-ghost. Or rather, an akuma. A devil.

Miyuki quickly helped the detective to his feet while Natsumi flailed on the floor like a beached narwhal.

"Officer Tsujimoto, what the hell are you trying to do...wreck my office? How could a girl as clumsy as you ever have graduated from the Police Academy? Thank god you're not an office girl, otherwise I'd end up with hot tea all over the crotch of my pants instead of lukewarm coffee!" Kitsune scolded her sternly.

Natsumi ignored him and slipped against Miyuki, sending her partner to the floor.

"What are you _doing_, Natsumi?! What's gotten into you?!" Miyuki asked desperately as Natsumi reached around her waist hugged her tight. She looked at the men, who were almost ready to blow nosebleeds at the sight of the two tightly-embraced young policewomen on the floor amidst a pile of papers.

Natsumi made as if to kiss Miyuki, causing the men to "ahhhhh!" with expectation.

"Natsumi! W..what are y..you doing?" Miyuki gasped out in total shock. She could feel her heart threatening to bounce right out of her ears, if she didn't have a hernia first. She tried to push Natsumi's arms away from her waist...

"Just slipping a cassette recorder into your purse," Natsumi said with a wink. Miyuki's look of embarrassment and scorn gradually softened as she realized what Natsumi was doing. She looked at her partner at her gratefully...until Natsumi leaned in close and gave her a peck on the cheek.

"OOOooomph!" a couple of the male policeman gasped. Somewhere, Miyuki heard the shattering of a dropped coffee mug. Now the blood was roaring in her ears as she blushed scarlet.

"That was for effect...and because I love you for being my partner, Miyuki!" Natsumi whispered with a mischievous grin as she disentangled herself from Miyuki and smoothed out her mini-skirt.

"You pervert!" Miyuki whispered back as she fished in her purse for the handheld cassette recorder Natsumi had slipped in there.

Captain Kitsune was glaring at them like Sansho the Bailiff. His face flinched with a volcanism, as if currents of lava were flowing and bubbling just underneath his cheeks. He was gripping his desk so hard, he tipped it over on its side. Another stack of papers, a metal basket organizer, his phone, his family pictures, his framed commendations...all of them joined the heap of soaked paperwork on the floor. Aghast, he staggered back and mouthed silent curses, his face pallid.

Miyuki fumbled in her purse, plugging the Imp's aux cord into the cassette player. She uttered a silent prayer as she turned the Imp on to playback mode. The tape player Natsumi had snatched from the nearby detective's desk had a plugin for external speakers; it would be a major miracle if the signal from the Imp was compatible with it. If so, she could use the cassette player to 'broadcast' the recording of the Yakuza meeting...and tape the meeting onto a cassette at the same time using the recorder.

To her relief, the conversation played out over the tinny speaker of the cassette player.

"Here!" she shouted, her hands trembling violently as she pulled the blockish bulky cassette recorder out of her purse. The thing must weigh at least two Kilos at it clunked on the now-cleared off top of Kitsune's metal desk.

"Here's your proof, Captain!"

"Whoa!" a chorus of voices gasped as the words "bank robbery" were audible in the cramped office.

"_SHUT THE FUCK UP, ALL OF YOU!! I WANNA HEAR THIS!_" Captain Kitsune bellowed, suddenly regaining his composure as the voices sounded out over the tinny speaker. The office went silent as the details of the bank robbery were panned out, like a prison telephone call.

Miyuki's face was motionless as she watched the recorder with wide eyes.

The Captain hunched over his desk, taking notes as the recording played out. Throughout the recording, Miyuki was paralyzed with fear...and at the end of the conversation between the gangsters, she was so nervous that she forgot to turn the Imp off...

_"Hey Miyuki, so what dya think the odds of Yoriko hooking up with this guy that she's all infatuated with? I mean, if she does hook up with him...how's he gonna react when he finds out that her partner, Policewoman Aoi...is a _-he-_? Heheh heh! If I was dating a guy, and he found out that I was partnered with a transvestite undercover cop, I wouldn't blame him if he slipped a disk! Pity...I hope this isn't another situation where Aoi's 'preferences' end up costing Yoriko yet another boyfriend!"_

_"Natsumi! If he's a man with any integrity, he'd stick with Yoriko regardless of Aoi...don't you think? It's not her fault that she has Officer Aoi for a partner! Besides, Officer Aoi is an exemplary policeperson. I would venture to say that, if Yoriko's friend is really dedicated to his job, then he would respect her _-even more-_ for having Aoi as a partner. Aoi...is _-Aoi-_, and Yoriko's never once complained about working with a cross-dresser..."_

_"Hmmm, so the question is, if Yoriko has a guy that respects her, how can she keep him interested? She's such a..."_

"Psst...Miyuki! Shut that thing off!" Natsumi whispered. Miyuki felt the blood flow from her face with a tingle as she realized she was playing their private conversation about Yoriko. The Imp must have accidentally been bumped to the "record" setting when they were driving back in the Fuzz Bug after eavesdropping on the Yakuza meeting...

"AHEM!"

Everyone looked at the Captain for a reaction after he cleared his throat. He was stroking his chin thoughtfully. Sighing as he looked at the remains of his once-organized desk, he muttered "well this tears the fish off the hook!"

Natsumi and Miyuki looked at each other and sighed with relief.

"If this is real, then we've got our work cut out for us! This is some major shit you gals got on tape! Good work!"

Miyuki and Natsumi bowed deeply in acceptance of the compliment.

"And...I just wanna know who Yoriko and Aoi are? I don't recognize the names at all. Last I checked, there's no men who dress like women in the Tokyo Police Department, except when they're really drunk at a summer party!" Kitsune said mirthfully. A number of voices burst into laughter.

"Imagine that! A man who dresses like a woman to catch perverts? If that ever happens on my watch, then I'll...hell, there's no way something like that could _ever_ happen! We have a modern police force here in Tokyo! It'll never happen! And by the way, Officers Kobayakawa and Tsujimoto..."

"Yessir?"

"CLEAN UP THIS GODDAMMED MESS YOU MADE!"

Miyuki and Natsumi shuddered, and then immediately crouched down and picked up the huge pile of papers and started restacking them on the Captain's desk. As Natsumi handswept a number of papers into a pile, she halted herself and gasped.

"What?" Miyuki asked, worried about her partner's sudden paralysis.

Natsumi pointed a shaky finger towards the cassette recorder sitting on the desk, her facial expression wheezing. Her expression was so vivid, Miyuki almost looked over her shoulder; Natsumi's eyes were wide-white, as if she'd just been spooked by a ghost.

"Oh, you just now noticed?" Miyuki asked as Natsumi almost choked on her breath.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"It was _empty_ the whole time!! And Kitsune didn't even notice! What kinda precinct Captain wouldn't see something so obvious!" Natsumi said to Panther and the others, leaving out the part about the Imp as she shouted over the loud music blaring from the bulky speaker stacks. After the events of the last two days, Miyuki suggested they go unwind at Goblin's. So Beatnik, Wolf and their college buddies were here, along with Panther.

"Well, _you_ didn't notice that there was no tape in the player either, Natsumi! Guess you'll never make Captain!" Miyuki said bitingly, a fox-sly expression on her face.

"Argggh...get me another drink!" Natsumi shouted.

Panther looked worried.

"This doesn't make sense. It's unlike the Yakuza to do a big job like this...by enlisting outside help. Trust me, I should know," he said in a level voice.

Natsumi kissed him on the cheek, and then suggested in a faux-sultry voice that he should pay attention to his own matters and leave the detective work to the detectives. But no amount of flirtation seemed to remove the worry from his brow...he just kept staring at his drink with a far-away expression. Natsumi thought that her new boyfriend was thinking too hard, and elbowed him in the ribs.

"It still doesn't make sense!" Panther kept repeating.

As the loud psychedelic guitar-driven music wailed over the flashing bonbon lights, Miyuki's thoughts kept returning to the fact that it was unrealistic for Panther to keep dwelling on the bank robbery. After all, it was he who had tipped them off about the big ganglord meeting in the first place. So why was he so worried?

She questioned the possibility that he was involved with the planned heist in some way. Perhaps tipping them off about the meeting was something he did in order to suit his own agenda. If Panther could manipulate the police into arresting several Yakuza bigwigs red-handed in a major robbery, then the Tokyo PD would be doing his work for him, in a sense. His own Boss would no doubt promote him for such an exploit. Such a series of arrests would set the stage for a clean sweep of the hierarchy of a rival gang, without Panther's men spilling a drop of blood or gunpowder. Or if his own Boss was involved, such a bust would create a ready opportunity for Panther to take over the syndicate.

"They look so natural together," Miyuki thought as she observed Natsumi snuggling up against Panther and cozily stroking his hair. She scowled, wondering why her partner had to pick Panther as a romantic interest, when there were easily 10 million other men in Tokyo...

"Miyuki, just to let you know, I'm going to spend the night at Panther's," Natsumi announced.

"No, you're not!" Panther shot back. The vehemence of his refusal caused Miyuki to raise an eyebrow. Natsumi's face flared with 'that look' for a moment...the look she got just prior to going hell-bent into an argument. But her face softened into a hurt expression.

"Why not? I've never been to your place...I mean, your _real_ place," Natsumi answered in a hurt voice.

"And there's a good reason why I haven't invited you there, Natsumi! Someday, you'll understand..." Panther said with a thoughtful mien. Wolf and Beatnik also protested, saying that they had never been to his place either. Miyuki was surprised that Wolf had never been to his older brother's apartment.

"Ya know...we should go to an onsen!" Wolf suggested, looking at Miyuki suggestively.

"Uh nuh! Just because my friend is going out with your brother doesn't mean that there's anything between me and you! And frankly, I wouldn't doubt for a minute that you college boys would let your hormones get the best of you...and you'd take any given chance to peek into the women's side," Miyuki said in a firm voice, eyeing Wolf down. Wolf looked back at her...and then he and his friends broke into laughter. Miyuki cursed under her breath; it was obvious that they were putting her on.

"You should loosen up, Miyuki-chan!" Beatnik suggested. "Here, have a smoke on me!"

Miyuki refused the hand-rolled marijuana cigarette, once again amazed at the sheer amount of pot smoking going on all around her. She wondered if the lack of a crackdown on the drug traffic was the result of some social control policy of this wartime government; similar to that of many Western countries. It was well-known that the United States and many European countries allowed marijuana and other street drugs to have a 'quasi-legal' status by virtue of a lack of enforcement of the drug laws; a social control policy based on the concept that 'non-conformist' individuals who had ready access to mood-altering substances would 'stone' themselves out of serious social and political contention for power. Anesthetize the radicals with their own drugs, in other words. Allow the impoverished or otherwise marginalized segments of the population to self-medicate with alcohol and illicit drugs. Beatnik offered some weed to Panther and Natsumi, who both emphatically shook their heads "No!" He smiled and lit up the joint, mumbling something about "when you guys say no, that means there's more for me." Soon, Beatnik and his friends were smoking it up with two girls in the adjacent booth.

Once again, Miyuki struggled with deciding what to do about Panther. The more time she spent around him, the more enigmatic he seemed. On one hand, his manners reflected good breeding; they were too cultured to be those of a gambler. If she didn't know that he was a Yakuza, she would have guessed from his demeanor that Panther was a lawyer or an executive. But on the other hand, he seemed to have an insider's perspective on what was happening in the world of the Yakuza. Reluctantly, she realized that she would have to investigate Panther more closely. If this meant tailing him one day to find out the particulars of his modus vivendi, then so be it. The most challenging aspect of investigating Panther would be the delicate task of finding free time away from Natsumi, so she could case out him out thoroughly. Miyuki knew that such an action would definitely strain her friendship with Natsumi...but Panther was a suspect. Realistically, since Natsumi had decided to fall in love with him, she'd have to buy the bag if Panther turned out to be an accomplice to any criminal activity planned for the 4th...

As she watched the waitress shuffle out another round of mixed drinks and beers, Miyuki felt another nagging thought. There was something strange about that date on the calendar. Back in the 'relative Japan' of 20XX, Dec 4th was just another date. But here, there seemed to be a jingoist connotation with the date, as several of the pro-war counter-demonstrators were carrying hand-made "Dec 4th" flags during a couple of the rallies she and Natsumi attended. She tucked the question away in her mental notepad; her priority right now was trying to figure out who Panther was.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Two weeks before Dec. 4th, Miyuki discreetly followed Panther to an office building in northern Shinagawa. Natsumi was doing 'penance' for making yet another mess of Captain Kitsune's paperwork several days earlier. The Captain had assigned her to clean out the weapon lockers, the squad room, the women's shower and the break room...a task that would take her all afternoon. Miyuki had made a show of offering to help, hoping the Captain would bust her chops for "trying to lighten Officer Tsujimoto's punishment". True to form, the Captain thoroughly berated Miyuki for her offer to help Natsumi.

This way, Natsumi wouldn't suspect her of any betrayal. Miyuki felt a pang of guilt as Natsumi good-naturedly told her, "Good afternoon...and have fun willya!"

Once she got behind the wheel of the Fuzz Bug, Miyuki was all business. She knew she would have to fight down her feelings of guilt about carrying out this guileful bit of detective work behind Natsumi's back. She challenged herself against the feelings of transgression; constantly reminding herself that she was trying to protect her partner, not betray her. Yet, the inwardly seeping feeling that she was _doing something wrong_ kept haunting her. For no apparent reason, Miyuki felt unwanted tears welling in her eyes; a somber loneliness that colored her mood for a few minutes as she sobbed lightly in the Fuzz Bug. She quickly recovered, realizing that her bout of emotionality had arisen with the awareness that she was acting on her own. Usually, when it came to the tough calls about how to deal with her partner, she would have a heart-to-heart with Kenny to discuss it. Her boyfriend was solvent enough to offer her a detached opinion that often proved very helpful in guiding her towards making the right decisions about 'Natsumi Stuff'. The separation from her boyfriend was making her seeming betrayal of Natsumi feel even more wretched. Life in this whack version of Japan was a betrayal in itself...

The first snow was frosting her windshield with delicate flakes.

She bought herself a can of coffee to try and allay the moodiness she was feeling. It wasn't PMS...it was emotional exhaustion combined with heartsickness, seasoned with the difficult choices that accompanied police duty. Feeling a little more composed, she continued her sweep of the streets. After 40 minutes of driving, she spotted Panther's flash sports car on one of the main avenues. For a Yakuza mid-boss, Panther didn't seem to try very hard to cover his trail. Of course, Miyuki knew she was far smarter than Panther when it came to subterfuge...so it wasn't too hard for her to keep tabs on his location.

He pulled into a parking lot adjacent to a middle-sized office building. Several other new-model cars were parked in a row. She waited inside the Fuzz Bug until he entered the building, and then she pulled out a set of binoculars and scanned the building's windows. A moment later, she saw his profile in a window on the top floor.

Leaving the Fuzz Bug, Miyuki used a fire escape to climb up onto the roof of one of the buildings across the street, frightening the building superintendent who happened to be repairing a rail on the staircase. Obviously, he had thought she was going to create mischief on the rooftop, until she flashed him her police badge inside of her leather fringed vest, assuring him that she wasn't just a hippiegirl looking to make out with a guy or smoke some dope atop his building.

Once atop the roof, she positioned herself near one of the roof vents, a good vantage point to observe the building unobtrusively. As she watched through the binoculars, Miyuki observed Panther conducting some sort of a meeting with a number of men on the uppermost floor in a board room. She could only see bits and pieces of the room's interior through the blinds, but several facets of the whole scenario appealed to her curiosity. First, Panther was briefing the men in a setting that suggested a chief instructing his underlings. Second, Panther was using a series of complicated charts and maps to assist in his presentation. And finally, the men that were assembled in the swank board room seemed too clean-cut for Yakuza...and their behavior towards Panther was too deferential. No one had their feet up on the table, and there was no swaggering at the end when the men broke up the meeting.

As the men exited the room, Miyuki hurried down the fire escape ladder to the street, wanting to get a closer look at Panther's associates. Concealing herself behind some withered shrubbery, she could smell the clean chill of the breeze-laden snow all around her as she watched a number of men pile into vehicles.

Identical vehicles.

The 'company cars' she had noticed in the lot belonged to Panther's Men! One more mystery to cloak his true intentions. Finally, Panther emerged from the building. He looked around, as if searching for something. Miyuki ducked deeper into the landscaping as Panther looked in her direction. Then he relaxed, and leisurely got into his sports car and drove off.

Miyuki pursued him discreetly. Panther had never seen the Fuzz Bug, but he might be able to identify it from Wolf, who was one of the crew that had painted it during the ill-starred LSD party a couple months back. So she relied on the tried-and-true tactic of sight-throughs: using the thin alleys of Shinagawa to mark 'her' target while driving down the next avenue over from the street he was on. She would shuffle her car in traffic so that he wouldn't spot her; staying ahead of Panther, and then slowing down as she approached a narrow street. Waiting until she spied his car driving by a block or two over, and then pulling ahead. If she kept within a block of him, Miyuki knew she wouldn't lose him. It was getting to be mid-day and the schools were letting out, so the flow of traffic would be much more deliberate...especially with the snow-slickened roads.

She tailed him until he pulled off Sakura Avenue and parked his car on a shaded side street. Miyuki pulled the Fuzz Bug next to a delivery van and watched from a half-block away as he got out of his car and walked towards the park.

"There's something familiar about this park," she mused as she watched Panther walk towards the park entrance. "Why are you going to a _park_ after having a big meeting, Panther? Shouldn't you be meeting with some of your underlings, since you've got a big job to do on the 4th?"

But it wasn't the park he was going into. It was Senagaku-ji Temple.

Miyuki quickly got out of the Fuzz Bug and walk-paced herself into a lane of pedestrians, keeping watch as Panther stopped to hand out candy to a group of schoolkids queued in the open square in front of the temple. The kids were dressed up in puffy wool jackets, as the late November air was brisk and chill.

To her surprise, Panther walked into the temple grounds...

"He couldn't be visiting the 47!" Miyuki thought as Panther passed under the gate.

Keeping him in eyeshot, she stopped to regard the famous gate to the temple and cemetery. This was no simple torii gate; the famous motif of intricate carved dragons seemed to lift itself out of the aged wood, a litany of supernatural motion dancing with artistic fluidity. This gate was one of the most famous landmarks leftover from "old Edo"...it was guaranteed that every Tokyoite had visited here at least once as part of a daylong cultural awareness excursion. The story of the 47 Ronin was woven tightly into the fields of Japanese self-identity. It looked identical with its counterpart in the Japan she had lived in up until several months ago.

She could smell the burnt-orange odor of funereal incense wafting from within...

Borne away by the historicity and cultural flavor of the gate and temple, Miyuki had to get a grip on herself, taming her emotions by reminding herself that this _wasn't_ the Japan she knew was real. This was a nation at war, not the peaceful Japan she grew up in. The walkway to the gate was lined with floral pedestals...memorials to dead soldiers in Vietnam. As she entered the small plaza within, she couldn't miss how it was 'decorated' with placards and posters exhorting military virtue and loyalty. Alongside the ancient structures, the large-character signs looked out-of-place, reminding her of the scenes from China during the Cultural Revolution. She sadly noted how beauty and serenity could be opposed by a few red-letter posters; the jarring effect chilled her to the marrow. This was a place of dignity, not a rallying point for militaristic jingoism.

Already, she could sense hostile eyes glaring at her because of her dress. Her long winter jacket with its braids and peace signs marked her as a hippie girl...

"I belong here!" she mentally chided the bigoted onlookers.

She followed Panther as he went to the one of the stalls, purchased some incense bundles, and then followed the walkway leading into the neatly manicured cemetery of Lord Asano and his retainers.

Once again, Miyuki wondered why a Yakuza would come _here_, to the final resting place of the noble men who best exemplified Japan's highest moral code. Miyuki strayed near the Gishiken, the smaller temple given over to the 47, and kept watch for him.

Panther unwrapped one of the two bundles of incense, and then went proceeded down the line of gravestones. He brushed the accumulating snow off of each headstone with gloved hands. Carefully, he poured a little water on the headstone, lit an incense wand for each man, and finally clapped his hands together and gestured in the traditional prayerful attitude.

"He can't be _that_ old-fashioned!" Miyuki thought as she stole closer as he progressed down the line of tombstones...

"Miyuki, you can come out now," she heard someone say. Panther's back was to her as he lit another wand of incense from the brazier and placed it on the simple headstone. Then he turned and looked right at her. Miyuki smiled self-consciously at his gaze.

"You can come out now. I know you've been trailing me since you were on the roof of that building..."

Miyuki huffed her breath in rapt shock, sending a large cloud out in front of her in the chilly November air. Panther had known all this time that she was watching her! "H..how?!" her mind protested, still singed with disbelief. She had taken every care to be inconspicuous!

"I have to applaud you earnestness. I made sure to have our meeting in a place that was well-protected. In fact, you even ran into one of my men before you climbed up the back of that building. If you hadn't tipped him off, I would have never known," Panther explained nonchalantly.

"I..I'm sorry!" Miyuki sputtered, not knowing what else to say. So the building super was one of Panther's men! Anger flashed through her; she was resentful towards herself for being so inobservant. The man could have been a killer, for all she knew! And she had shown him her badge!

"There's really nothing to apologize about; I know that you were just doing your job, Miyuki. In fact, you were doing it really well...if I didn't know ahead of time, I wouldn't have been aware of your presence until just now. Why don't you come over here, so we can talk a little," Panther invited.

Miyuki measured his face and words, realizing that she was in a precarious situation. Panther had her completely under his control now...there was little she could do. It was quite possible that he might have some of his men prowling through the cemetery and temple, which would make escape difficult. She didn't like being pinned down.

And now, Natsumi would find out that she had been spying on her boyfriend...

Weighing the alternatives of fight or flight, Miyuki decided on a course of safe acquittal instead. Wary of any sudden moves, she walked over and stood by Panther.

"Here, could you please take these?" he asked, offering her a bundle of incense sticks. "Since you're here, you might as well help me pay honor to these worthies."

Silently, they placed the incense in three more graves. Miyuki was impressed with the diligent deliberation that Panther gave to each act of reverence...his earnestness wasn't just for show.

"You know, Natsumi's a really sweet girl. Because of that, I can empathize with your situation. You must really have to watch out for her, sometimes, neh? She's a bit reckless, isn't she?"

Miyuki didn't know what to make of Panther's observations, so she just nodded her head in agreement.

"It's understandable that her partner would want to check up on her boyfriend. If I were in your position, Miyuki...I would have done as you did. Natsumi is the kind of girl that needs protection from time to time, in spite of how strong she appears to be. Obviously, your deep concern for her is what led you to spy on me," Panther said as he knelt down to lay the incense on the next grave.

"Yes. I don't want to see Natsumi get hurt. I've known her ever since we both joined the Tokyo Police force. During that time, she's been heartbroken several times in the past by certain men...so I know that she can handle _that_ kind of hurt. But she's never been in a position like this, where one man could betray her not just in the romantic sense, but in the real-life sense of crime and justice. Natsumi is so open-hearted, an evil man _might_ just take advantage of this fact. Her heart can't always discern when she's placed herself in harm's way. And if something happened to her...if she was injured while on duty as the result of being involved with a certain man...I would never forgive myself. Or him. I wouldn't rest until I made sure that I had made him pay the ultimate price for harming her," Miyuki said grimly, firmly looking into Panther's eyes.

Panther stared back at her, seemingly assessing her resolve.

"Just like the 47 Ronin buried here, hmm?" he commented. "No...I guess you wouldn't rest until you exacted a revenge. Such a betrayal would be unforgivable, wouldn't it?"

"Umm," Miyuki said with a nod.

"I can respect such a strong desire for vengeance. After all, betrayal is what caused the death of Lord Asano over there...and cast these men into their place in our nation's history," he noted in a lecturing voice. Miyuki followed Panther's gesturing hand with her eyes until they rested on the grave of Lord Asano and his family. Large thin trees dotted the small graveyard; thin wooden placards rested against each narrow tree trunk, detailing the exploits of the deceased. Despite the leaves that had fallen everywhere from the autumn-burdened trees, the cement pathways were swept clean and tidy.

"What is honor and self-sacrifice? Have you ever really thought about this? There is the type of honor extolled in the Bushido, the honor of upholding a code of honor. Beyond this is the honor of Nation and Emperor, and we all know the dire results of that honor from 30 years ago. And even now, the young are mounded in burial vaults from the Vietnam War. The dead have no voices of protest or loyalty...history will mute them within two or three generations to the point where the cowardly or brave will be indistinguishable. My father was killed in the Pacific Conflict, back in 1944. And for what? A stalemate against the United States, decided by the fact that we and the Americans both developed the atomic weaponry at the same time. I was an unborn child in my mother's womb when she received the death notice. So I never really had a father...as the result of honor and self-sacrifice. Growing up, I learned to hate those words. In grade school, when they taught us all those patriotism classes...I felt nothing but disgust and mortification on the inside. Each word only reminded me that I didn't have a father. And it was this way until my mother died. On her deathbed, she told me that I should do my utmost to make this a better world...to make Japan a better nation. I was only 14 at the time," Panther said in a trailing voice.

Miyuki thought her regret out loud.

"So you became a Yakuza..."

Panther turned and regarded her with an intense expression.

"It can't be helped!! In my own way, I am choosing to fulfill my dying mother's wishes! It's what I _have_ to do; nothing more, nothing less! And I have to bear the consequences of my actions, just like everyone else! Natsumi is one of the consequences. In another lifetime, I would have shared the seat of my soul with her...I would have allowed Natsumi the full reign of my heart. In this world stacked with lies and subterfuges, like a deck of cards waiting to collapse...this much is true. My feelings towards Natsumi are of the utmost sincerity and integrity," he said with a sigh.

To Miyuki, his bearing suggested the typical "tragic lover" masculine type. She didn't expect Panther to be so openly warm with his feelings. Either that, or he was putting on an Oscar-level act. His self-disclosure caused her to sway between sympathy and disdain.

"Natsumi is a very beautiful, lovable woman. But in these times of peril, I could not let myself close the distance between she and I. For her own safety, I've had to keep her at arm's length. And it has tasked me, because I sense my own affection for her twinned in her heart. I would give my own spirit to bask in that passion for but a moment..."

"You're very poetic with words, Panther...quite unlike a Yakuza," Miyuki commented. Panther seemed to stall just for a moment in reaction to her observation.

"Natsumi...deserves better than I can give her. As you may know, the purpose of any meaningful relationship is to decide what part of yourself you'd like to see 'show up' when you're with the other person. Too many people are narrow-hearted; they're selfishly concerned about what part of another they can capture and hold. Because of who I am...I just can't simply 'show up' for Natsumi. I've often felt that life is akin to a chemist's crucible; filled with elements and compounds that burn at different temperatures and conditions. Life is burning all around us, but we all share the same thread of beingness. The same entwining thread of belonging. We create our own Hell...and our own Heaven. In a weak moment, I foolishly thought that I could create a Heaven with Natsumi. But isn't that what love is all about...capturing a moment of weakness, so that it can become a lifetime of strength? As of late, I often find myself pondering the inevitable. Who am I to strive against the sublime machining of our roles in life? Just as you and Natsumi play the role of young hippie girls as a result of your profession as policewomen, I too must play a role in life that separates me from my true essence."

They finished with the last tombstone, and then took the remaining incense and poised them in the central sand cauldron near the temple. Panther then walked over to the small shrine and tipped the shrine's attendants. Silently, they walked out into the plaza in front of the main temple building and watched the staff lighting the paper lanterns, as dusk was falling on Tokyo. The lanterns turned the falling snowflakes into yellow sparks...

"Panther...I have to ask you this one question. If the sword flashes down on Natsumi's neck, what would you do?"

"I would try to save her. And if this wasn't possible, I would place my own neck on hers," he answered without missing a beat.

Miyuki's eyes flared wide; it was obvious that he really _did_ love Natsumi!

"And please don't worry yourself about our little 'meeting' here. I won't breathe a word of this to Natsumi. I would suspect that she might react quite rashly if she knew that you were investigating me. I would be loathe to cause a deflection of your friendship and partnership with her, especially at this critical point in the game," Panther said with a smile.

Panther knew something, but wasn't telling.

"_Who_ are you...?" Miyuki asked as he buttoned up his topcoat.

"Perhaps tomorrow or the next day..." he answered with a smile as he turned away to blend into the crowd.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Later that evening, she decided to investigate the significance of December 4th. Panther had mentioned "30 years ago" at the Senagaku-ji Temple, casting a pebble of enigma into the troubled pond of Miyuki's consciousness. After eating instant noodles and grumbling to herself that Natsumi was _still_ at the Bokuto Station, performing penance...Miyuki decided to browse the neighborhood bookstore down the block. Outside, the falling snow easily doubled the pale incandescence casting down on the streets from the lamp posts, creating a winter's tale warmth to the eyes. Making her homesick.

She couldn't rid herself of the image of her and Kenny, snuggled tightly together under a comforter while the snow breezed by the window...

_December 4th, 1939._

Up till now, she had avoided the "Military History" section of the bookstore, mostly because it was usually frequented by arrogant young soldiers who were quite antagonistic towards civilians, and hippies in particular. But tonight, she decided to swallow back her disgust and browse the section, soldiers or not. There was an entire sub-section under the "Military History" shelves of the bookstore devoted to just this one date. Miyuki grabbed a book titled "The Glorious Mystique of December 4th" and began to read it. Moments later, she was numb with shock as she read of the exploit of the Japanese Navy and Air Forces that day.

She was so invested in avoiding reading anything about the Pacific War, she had completely missed the significance! Chiding herself for a lack of detachment towards her obligations to investigate this 'different Japan', she read the history of the Ten-Year Pacific War:

_On the 4th of December, 1939, the Japanese forces, led by Admiral Yamamoto, attacked Seattle, Los Angeles, San Francisco and San Diego with eight carrier groups and 700 airplanes. They had bypassed Hawaii and Pearl Harbor completely, and instead sailed down from the northern Canadian seas and up from Baja California. The first surprise attack completely devastated Seattle's vital shipping ports, while the second attack later that morning laid waste to almost all of the ships stationed at the CINCPAC Naval Headquarters shipyard in San Diego. That same morning, Los Angeles and San Francisco were also targeted with five hours of bombing from the remaining two carrier groups in an attempt to demoralize the Americans._

_Unlike Pearl Harbor, there were three and sometimes four waves of attack bombers from the massed fleets. The fires burned brightly in Los Angeles for four days..._

_Stunned, the Americans mobilized the Pacific US fleet from Pearl Harbor in an attempt to intercept the Japanese fleets returning home from the mission. But the Japanese had deployed -_another-_ two fleets of ships. As a result, the American Fleet was caught in a pincer between almost the entire Japanese Fleet. Outnumbered 3 to 1, most of the American fleet was annihilated. On the heels of this victory, Japan was quick to invade Hawaii. Three years later, the Americans wrested Hawaii back from the Japanese, island by island. By 1942, the rebuilt American fleets were beginning to sweep across the Pacific towards Japan._

_The tide of war was changed once again in 1944 when the Japanese military infiltrated American intelligence with Soviet-trained spies, learning about a secret scientific installation located in Los Alamos. They sent 400 planes on a one-way mission to bomb the research facility. The success of this mission stalled the American development of the atomic bomb until 1946. By 1947, the Americans, the Soviets and the Japanese had nuclear weapons at their disposal. But neither the Japanese nor the Americans had the means to deliver a decisive nuclear bombing strike to either nation's mainland. As a result, the Americans attempted a land invasion of Honshu, which resulted in millions of casualties when the Japanese bombed their own coastlines with nuclear weapons when it became apparent that the Americans might overrun their coastal defenses. Faced with this 'Ultimate Kamikaze' strategy, the Americans gave up on the notion of a Japanese surrender and instead sued for mutual armistice._

_For the Japanese, December 4th was an informal national holiday...celebrating their military resolve and daring. For the Americans, it was "a Day of Infamy_..."

Miyuki slowly reshelved the book, while an Airmen standing next to her taunted her for "reading history instead of joining in the patriotic movement and making history." A chilling numbness filled her as she was reminded once again about how _alien_ this version of Japan was. The Japan she knew and loved had earned its prosperity by peace-time economic initiatives, shouldered by the large educated class of salarymen. In contrast, this Japan's prosperity was the product of aggressive imperialism. The affluence was a veil, a darkling shade that concealed the victims of the "Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere" in China, Southeast Asia, Korea, Malaysia and the Philippines. The very fabric of this place seemed to have a stench of insecurity...and Miyuki promised herself to redouble her effort to keep herself from 'belonging' to this time and place emotionally. As a policewoman, she had a job to do.

But this Japan would never become her home.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

December 4th, 1969. Showtime.

Captain Kitsune was briefing them in the Squad Room about the deployment of the police net around the Central Mitsubishi Bank. As he lectured, Miyuki remembered the numerous briefings and prep talks she had received in this very same room. The only differences were superficial: at the front of the room, a weathered chalkboard was fastened to the wall instead of the video screen she was used to; the walls were painted a different color; the ceiling had hanging lamps instead of recessed lighting and designer hanging ceiling tiles. Chalk talks, instead of PowerPoint presentations.

The only difference was that this was a completely different world, in what was possibly a completely different universe. She wondered if they would ever even make it to the point where personal computers and data networking would revolutionize police work and personal lives. They may never reach the age of PowerPoint presentations; she had a strong sense that an all-out World War III nuclear exchange would see to that.

She nervously glanced at Natsumi, who was looking fatigued from yet another round of extra duties from two days earlier. Maps were taped up to the chalkboard, as Kitsune rambled on about possible scenarios. Miyuki observed privately that the Captain sure liked to hear himself talk...

She and Natsumi were assigned to roam the sidewalks on the main avenue fronting the multi-storey bank building, keeping to their cover as hippie girls so as to be inconspicuous. To lend a legitimate cast to the increased flow of police officers in the vicinity, several of Kitsune's men would occasionally harass them.

Once the briefing was over and they were sitting in the Fuzz Bug in the precinct garage, Miyuki noticed that something was bothering her. She felt like she was on a ship nearing the harbor...but the lighthouse that guided her ship safely to port wasn't flashing with any consistency. Her thoughts kept driving back in time to that conversation she and Natsumi had monitored with the Imp.

The foreigner, Mr. Wilson, had laughed when one of the gangsters threatened him. He had laughed when the government was mentioned as well. And at the end, his words were almost nonsensical...

"Natsumi, can you fish the Imp out of my purse? I want to listen to that conversation again?"

"Wah! We've heard it a dozen times, Miyuki! Why listen to it again?"

"I dunno! But something seems really _wrong_ about all of this. It's really buggin' me! I _have_ to find out!"

"Okay, I guess we'll have to play it your way! We better hurry up, because we need to be in position in a half-hour," Natsumi acquiesced as she unfolded the Imp.

She switched the Imp on, and the car was filled with men's voices...

_"Oi! This is going to be grand! According to..."_

"No, not there, Natsumi! A few minutes past there," Miyuki urged. Miyuki forwarded the disc a few minutes.

_ "Uh Boss...are they talking about us?"_

"No...I don't think it was something someone said in English. Try about ten minutes further into the discussion."

Natsumi selected 20 mins on the Imp and restarted the playback.

_"S..s..so where do we r..r..regroup to..."_

"Further, Natsumi. It wasn't the stutterer guy!"

"Miyuki, don't you know _where_ on the disc you want me to go? We could be jumping around this recording all morning," Natsumi protested as she dialed forward another five minutes.

_"...try and be a little more cooperative! We have..."_

"Dammit, it's close! It should be right around here! Just edge up a few more minutes!"

"Okay!" Natsumi said sharply, getting a second wind of patience.

_"...he'll get insurance from the government...heh heh...from the government for the cash that was robbed."_

"THERE!!" Miyuki shouted.

"There _what_, Miyuki? All he did was snicker in the middle of his sentence!"

"Natsumi, if you were going to pull off a robbery, wouldn't you be laughing at the mention of the bank you were going to rob? Most crims think they're so cool, they often snigger when they talk about their upcoming crimes. But this American guy is crowing at the mention of the government, not the bank. Don't you find that a little bit weird? Not to mention that his type of snickering sounds downright menacing!"

"Hmmm, perhaps he's upset that the US lost the war in Vietnam?"

"No...it's something else. That was a subconscious speech slip, not a conscious giggle."

"How could you possibly know that, Ms. Speech Therapist?"

"I have a hunch...just favor me for a moment, Natsumi!"

"All right. Should I fast forward it?"

"Yeah. It's almost at the end, when that Mr. Wilson guy is speaking.

_"...have my boys draw and quarter your asses...starting with you, Mr. Wilson!"_

"Shhht! Listen to Wilson's response, Natsumi!"

_"How amusing that would be, Kenjo-san! By the time we're done with the heist, _-everyone-_ is going to have their hands quite full with the chaos we've caused..heh heh. Quite full indeed, I would say! Such paltry concerns like revenge and the like are going to recede, like a distant shoreline in the eyes of the drowning man. The tiger without teeth can only growl idle threats, Kenjo-san. We're going to wrap the fire with dynamite!"_

"So he's bragging about chaos!"

"Not only that...he snickered again. And did you hear how he said 'everyone is going to have their hands full'? With the emphasis on _everyone_?"

"Miyuki, I don't like the sound of this. He's got that funny American accent, to be sure...but why would he say what he did at the end!"

"It's a clue, Natsumi! Wrapping the fire with dynamite has got to be some kind of codeword! _That's_ what was buggin' me. That phrase doesn't belong in normal conversation. It's one of those staple lines you see in the samurai dramas. That...and his constantly malicious attitude...has got me on edge. He's practically skylarking; skylarking about a hugely major crime. Something just doesn't fit! I think...that this isn't just about a bank heist!" Miyuki declared.

She looked at Natsumi, whose face suddenly faulted ashen white.

"Shit shit shit shit shit! Oh dear God, I hope I'm wrong!" Natsumi shouted, her face drawn into one of the most intense expressions of vexation Miyuki had ever seen. Miyuki had seen her look this shock-worried only once or twice before. The most recent occurrence was two years ago when the Sakura Bridge over the Sumida River was blown up, back when they were investigating the case where a group of smugglers were trying to steal the terrorist attack sim; cyberthieves who wanted to use the software to bring down the stock markets and all of Tokyo's labyrinthine infrastructure. When she and Natsumi learned that Bokuto Station itself was under attack, Natsumi's face had coiled with pallid shock...just like now.

If Natsumi was _that_ scared...

"Wrapping the fire with dynamite! It's obvious what they're going to do! They're not going to rob the bank, because that's the kind of paper you want to _keep_ away from fire. You know...paper of the currency kind."

Miyuki felt a wrenching sensation in her stomach as Natsumi's implication. If it wasn't the bank they were after, what was it? Why was Natsumi freaking out?

"Where is all the paperwork concentrated?" Natsumi asked.

"OH SHIT!"

"Not toilet paper, Miyuki!" Natsumi answered, unable to pass up the little joke Miyuki had walked into. She had to flutter with a momentary slip of wit, because the enormity of the conspiracy that she was beginning to suspect...was overwhelming her with fright. If the suppositions forming in her mind were true, then the conspirator's machinations would go far beyond the scope and concept of felony. On the bald of it, they were planning an unprecedented act of major terrorism!

Miyuki scowled at her with a "not now girl, this isn't the time to joke!" face.

"Miyuki, the papers that Wilson was talking about are those of the pencil-pushers, the bureaucrats... They're going to hit a government building!" Natsumi near-shouted, her voice rifling inside the car.

"THE DIET! They're gonna hit the Diet! Oh my God, all the Dietmen'll be there, because the Emperor's going to address the House of Councillors!" Miyuki shouted, her voice wavering.

Miyuki heard her partner gasp audibly in rapt shock.

It was Natsumi's turn to be surprised.

"Miyuki, they couldn't possibly go _that_ far! I was scared to death just thinking that they'd try and take out Tokyo City Hall! Well...the _old_ city hall, anyway. You can't be possibly be serious! You think they're going to try and take out the capital itself?!" she asked, visibly shaking as a nightmare scenario gripped her.

A burning Diet Building. Not the Godzilla vs. Mothra kind of cinematic Technicolor disaster, but something far more foul...far more deadly.

Real human lives...

"Natsumi, why do you think Wilson was snickering when the topic of the government came up? He's not planning a bank heist...he's planning something else. The Yakuza will create diversions upon diversions; all of Kitsune's men will be guarding the bank, and the rest of the police force will get snagged up in those explosions or whatever the Yakuza punks are going to create! Just like when the smugglers attacked our station! Remember?" Miyuki explained hurriedly as she started up the Fuzz Bug and drove out into the street.

Natsumi remembered how the smugglers had blown up a few bridges and overpasses, so that the entire Tokyo Police Department was mobilized into a "Disaster Alert" frenzy...all to keep as many units out in the field, because their _real_ target was Bokuto Precinct Station itself. She recalled the chaotic gunfight of that day.

"Dammit dammit dammit! I'm such an idiot! How could I ever miss something so obvious! Miyuki, didn't it ever occur to you that there's no possible way that the Yakuza could get their hands on explosives for those diversion blasts!" Natsumi added, her voice fraught with tension.

Miyuki almost slammed on the brakes of the Fuzz Bug in reaction to Natsumi's conclusion.

"Natsumi...are you saying that the _Americans_ are supplying them with explosives?"

"Yep! Who else would?"

"This is horrible!"

"It's even worse. Since they're planning to blow up some targets in the city, it means that they've _already_ got explosives stored here in Tokyo. It only follows that they're not going to go into the Diet to shoot some Ministers. They're going to try and _blow the whole building up_!"

"They couldn't! That would be too extreme!" Miyuki said, words to her fears casting a silence in the Fuzz Bug.

"Oh, we're _so_ screwed!" Natsumi finally exclaimed after a full minute's silence. "We don't have any guns, we're dressed in these ridiculous hippie girl outfits, and most of the precinct is doing guard duty around some rich bastard's bank! We couldn't even begin to get in the Diet building, let alone..."

"I don't care! We'll find a way! We _always_ find a way, Natsumi! We're going to the Diet Building!" Miyuki announced. Natsumi looked at her erstwhile partner, and nodded her head in sincere agreement. Seconds later, Miyuki pulled a U-turn in the middle of the busy Okubo-Dori avenue and headed back towards Shinjuku.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Signs everywhere announced "Restricted Parking" as they closed upon the Diet Building. Natsumi had seen the Diet building a million times on patrol, and had toured the inside of the building twice in grade school and junior high. But it looked different this time...the sun seemed to coat the white marble in a carnelian glow. But to Natsumi, it looked blood red.

"Halt!" an MP announced as Miyuki drove up Uchibori Avenue towards the front plaza entryway. Miyuki blew past him and turned hard left into the parking lot.

To add to the confusion, Captain Kitsune's voice shouted over the dispatch.

_"Kobayakawa? Tsujimoto? Where the fuck are you?! You're supposed to be outside of the bank acting like hippie street dopeheads! Why in the Seven Hells aren't you here with the rest of the precinct? If I don't see you and that stupid car of yours in a the couple of minutes, I'm gonna track you both down and kick your dimply asses myself! And then I'll put you on report! Now get the fuckin' hell back over in position with the rest of..."_

Natsumi shut off the radio, earning a grateful "thank you" from Miyuki.

The Diet's front lot was manic-congested with limos, military police, private cars and reporters. In the rearview mirror, Miyuki could see the MP they had passed by summoning together a squad of troops and police...

Blaring her horn, she sped through the chain of parking lots, heading towards the eastern iron-wrought gate and fence. She could hear panicked screaming as people cleared out of the lot in a hurry. She turned into another lot and piled right through a press corps tent...

"Miyuki! No! Not the steel gate! No way! A _tank_ couldn't ram that gate, let alone this little two-seater!" Natsumi shrilled, once she figured out where Miyuki was headed.

"You worried about the Fuzz Bug's paint job, Natsumi? I don't want to die either! We're going to clear the gate, not crash it!" Miyuki said, winking at her.

"H..how?! You're joking!" Natsumi screamed.

"See that trailer? It's the old up-the-back-of-the-semi-over-the-cab-over-the-wall routine!" Miyuki said, pointing at a trailer parked next to the gate. The sled-trailer was partially unloaded from the back, with an ascending stack of boxes and crates. Workmen with pushcarts were unloading crates and boxes of supplies down the wide ramp leading off the back of the flatbed...

"_What_ old routine! I..I don't remember that one from any of our patrols!" Natsumi shouted in a panicked voice. In the distance, she could see a partially unloaded trailer that Miyuki was referring to. She noticed the way the boxes had been unloaded off the trailer and quickly observed that the pile of boxes would look like a continuation of the angled grade of the loading ramp...

But only to a madwoman with a freakish imagination and insanely precise driving skills.

In answer to her fears, Miyuki sped up.

"Miyuki! If you crash...I..I'll never let you drive again!" Natsumi shouted.

"If I crash, _I won't let me drive again_! And in this little slip of an antique, we'll probably wind up squashed like bugs."

"Gee...thanks for sounding so confident!!" Natsumi taunted as she braced herself against the dashboard.

_"Here...we...goooooo!!"_

Miyuki could feel the thudding of the boxes underneath the Fuzz Bug as the small two-door car flattened them as it climbed up over the top of the semi. She could only hope that she had enough velocity to get airborne, and that the trusty sub-compact car would be light enough to sail over the fence.

A split second later, she heard Natsumi scream as they flew in the air towards the gate...

Over the gate.

The Fuzz Bug wrenched as the tail fender clipped the top of the metal gate, causing her and Natsumi to bounce around in the car. She clenched her teeth in split-second anticipation and fear as the Fuzz Bug landed. One of the front wheels snapped off on impact, and Miyuki fought to keep the car from pitching into a sideroll on the narrow access street on the other side of the gate.

By this time, sirens were wailing from every direction. Fortunately, the closed gate would prevent any vehicles from immediately giving chase, which would leave them perhaps a minute to escape on foot and find cover in the ample lawn groves immediately adjacent to the Diet Building. Fortunately, the snow wouldn't slow them down too much...

"Let's roll!" Miyuki shouted as the Fuzz Bug slowed to a smoke-hued stop.

Natsumi kicked her door open and sprinted towards the nearest hedge, a couple steps ahead of Miyuki. She fully expected to hear gunfire, but the fact that the Emperor himself was here seemed to be making the guardsmen more than a little hesitant to start firing on the gatecrashers.

Once they were concealed behind the hedge, she scanned the building for any ground level windows she could reach. Her vision jerked back and forth; checking the progress of their pursuers against trying to spy a way into the building.

"Japan's capital building.._huunh_.._hunhh_..and you'd think they'd have more guards here!" Miyuki said as she caught her breath from the sprint.

"We're not in the clear yet!" Natsumi noted, pointing towards the gate. Men were starting to climb over the iron gating in pursuit. Her injured shoulder throbbed deeply from the exertion; she still hadn't healed from the bullet wound at the hand of the thugs.

"Over there! An open window!" Miyuki shouted, silently thanking the divine powers for the fact that some officer worker had left a window open in _December_.

She ran up to the window and expertly dove up and over the sill, ripping through the thin nylon window screen. Natsumi was a pace behind her. She pulled Natsumi through the open window, and then slammed the window shut.

_"AIIIIIEEEEEEEE!!"_

Gaining her footing, Miyuki looked at a sharply-dressed elderly lady. She appeared to be an office worker. Papers were scattered all over the marble flooring, as she was screeching with absolute terror. On closer examination, she appeared to be a grandmotherly-type senior secretary, perhaps in her 50s as best as Miyuki could guess. The wooden plaque on her desk said "Ministry of Agriculture". Miyuki assumed that she must have been a secretary for one of the Ministers, or perhaps a junior official.

And she was terrified, her wrinkled face was twitching with spasms of fright.

"Ma'am, there's no time to explain! We're Tokyo Police...the good guys!" Miyuki said hurriedly, flashing the secretary her badge. She wanted to quickly assure her that she and Natsumi were here purposefully. Who knew what kind of alarm system they had in this building?

"...and we're here to prevent an assassination! We think someone is going to kill the Emperor!"

The older lady clacked her mouth shut, but she was hyperventilating with distress. Given time, the sight of Miyuki and Natsumi's badges seemed to calm her slightly. At the mention of the Emperor, her eyes flashed widely with concern.

"Y...you're policewomen?" she stuttered.

"Yes. We need to know how we can get into the House of Councillors!" Natsumi asked.

"You won't go anywhere looking like that!" the secretary said. "You look like my youngest girl. She's in Waseda University!"

"Ma'am, there's no time for that! We gotta know _now_!" Miyuki said firmly. The elderly woman ran her fingers through her silvered hair, stroking the bun on the back of her head...her hair still long unlike many late-middle aged women.

"I don't know if this will help, but they _do_ let page girls in for legislative sessions! And I'm almost certain that Mr. Yoshida's page girls will be allowed into the chamber...Mr. Yoshida is my boss, the Minister of Agriculture. Page girls often are allowed to run errands..."

"How's that going to help us?"

"I don't know...I..I was just thinking aloud! I'm just a Minister's secretary! A..and I think something terrible is happening! All the inter-office phones are dead! I can't even get the operator!" she warbled in a frustrated voice.

"It's okay, ma'am. We're here to help," Miyuki said in a calming voice.

"Aren't you two dears a little too young to be on the police force?" the elderly woman asked, finally calm enough to sit back down in her chair behind her desk.

She collapsed in her chair, still trembling like a leaf.

"Ma'am, can you call two page girls here to your office?" Natsumi asked politely, but firmly enough to indicate that it was a demand. The secretary nodded and punched some numbers on an antique office intercom, and then summoned two page girls to her office from another suite.

"Natsumi, what good is it to have two page girls come here? Once they get here, they'll find out about us, and they might be much more prone to panic than this lady!"

"We need to sneak in as page girls!" Natsumi answered with a wink.

"Page girls? _PAGE GIRLS_?" Miyuki shouted. "That's completely stupid! You're twenty years too old for that! Besides, you want some Dietman pinching your ass?"

"I'm _not_ twenty years too old for that...I'm still in _my twenties_, Miyuki!" Natsumi shot back, clearly irritated.

"It'll never work!"

"Of course it will, Miyuki! We've been trained by the best...if Aoi can pass himself off as a policewoman, we sure as hell can pass ourselves off as teenage girls! And Aoi _has_ trained all of us in disguise and concealment! Or maybe you were sleeping in those workshops?" Natsumi answered. The secretary had recovered enough of her wits to giggle at Miyuki's assertion about lecherous Dietmen.

Miyuki shook her head doubtfully.

"This's our _only_ chance! Since we were able to pull off this cover as hippie girls for the last several months, we should be able to blend in as page girls for a couple hours!" Natsumi insisted.

"Natsumi, we're supposed to be _college students_! Page girls are _high school students_! We'd look as ridiculous in page girl uniforms as we would in sailor suits! It's out of the question..." Miyuki countered.

"It's too late...here they are!"

_--thump!-- --thump!--_

Four minutes later, two very curvaceous teenage page girls left the Ministry of Agriculture annex office...

"Oh! Those poor dears!" an elderly woman's voice said as she put away her makeup kit and attended to the unconscious high schoolers.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --


	91. Pt 91: Belldandy and Mara: Mirror House ...

**Part 91: Belldandy and Mara: Mirror House -- 4th Movement**

"Weak!! I'm _weak_!"

The rocks surrounding the lava spring didn't answer her assertion; they were nothing more than mute witnesses to her shame. In the right situation, she could _make_ them answer, of course. But this wasn't the right situation...instead, it was ignoble to the point of excrescence. A culpable set of circumstances.

Mara wasn't used to being handed the fate of inadequacy.

After her initial meeting with the three Demoness sisters, she had asked for permission to soak in the hotpool of liquid mantle-lava behind the temple house. The stress of being in the temple with Demoness Belldandy, Demoness Skuld and Demoness Urd had migrated itself into a bothersome throbbing headache. A soak in the lava springs would help, she thought...

The glowing waves of bubbly lava crescented her body with a soothing flow...and yet, Mara felt like her whole existence at this point was nothing more than a banal context in the midst of an ongoing enigma.

The immediacy of the washing touches of lava drew her thoughts back and forth as she dipped herself deeper, soaking in the superheated fluid up to her chin. Relaxing soft buffets of foamy lava soothed away her tension; the fluid was pumped into the springs by under-lava jets, jacuzzi-style. As her manifest acclimated to the lava spring, Mara's body told her that Demoness Belldandy and her sisters obviously liked their molten baths a little cooler than what she herself was used to. She regretted the fact that she didn't have the full use of her Demoness powers; she would've loved to turn up the heat a few dozen degrees. What was the use of soaking in a lava hot springs if one didn't feel the slight dizziness that accompanied bathing at near-boiling temperatures? But as it was, the quality of the carefully-channeled hyperabyssal molten fluids pooling in the bathing spring...was more than enough to make up for the lukewarm temperature.

"I gotta have Skuld make one of these for me when I get back to the _real_ Earthrealm! If this Skuld can create a lava spring like this, I'm sure 'Little Miss Genius' could do it just as well! And if she refuses, I'll use my newly-acquired 'Big Sister Mara' powers on her!" Mara promised herself, thirsting after visions of her own private lava springs behind the temple house.

Yet she felt frustrated by more than just her inability to boost the temperature of the lava-bath. She felt weakened by the lascivious thoughts that glibly passed her mind as she viewed her naked body. Even here, alone in the depths of enemy territory, she wasn't safe from the sensuous onslaught...

_Her breasts brought images of Keiichi to her mind._

_Her legs brought images of Keiichi to her mind._

_Her hips brought images of Keiichi to her mind._

Every secret of her body seemed to shout "Keiichi!" as the liquid-hot lava rippled across her skin. The force of her sexual desires kept lumbering past Mara's mental defenses like a runaway rhino. No matter how vigorously she tried to ward them away, they persisted in haunting her. Mara felt as if she had been infected by some kind of sex-crafted virus; an infectious plague of aphrodisia that had somehow forced her body to overload her with lustful physical sensations. With her body on fire with arousing sexual shimmers, her mind was forced to accord itself with the messages her physical manifestation was sending...by tuning up mental images of all sorts of sexual situations involving Keiichi.

Mara angrily splashed a wave of lava against one of the nearby rocks that rimmed the pool, and then hugged herself protectively tight as the molten rock quickly cooled from a bright orange glow to a burnt-red color as it adhered to the jagged rock-rim that contained the lava hot spring.

"How could this happen to me?" she muttered in a plaintive voice.

"How could _what_ happen to you?" a woman's voice asked from behind her. Mara rotated herself in the lava to follow the direction of the voice. She saw Demoness Urd standing on the slate rock rinsing area next to the lava spring. Mara was disappointed at the loss of privacy...she had hoped for at least a short respite. Now she would have to share the bath.

Demoness Urd smiled at her once she caught Mara's eye, and unwrapped her bathtowel, freeing her ample breasts to bounce out in the air. She stretched her arms wide and inhaled deeply, taking in the heady burn-smell of the sulfur. Then she sprayed her body with hot water, coating every inch of her skin before stepping into the lava, paying special attention to her breasts...

Mara turned her head away...at this point, it was evident that Demoness Urd wasn't just showering herself down out of politeness's sake. She was flaunting her physique.

"But why?" Mara asked the lava as Urd stepped into the lava springs. The Demoness smiled with joy as the igneous fluid wrapped her body with its soothing substance. Mara moved across the lava-onsen to the other side of the springs to make room for Urd; but then Urd waded over so she was next to Mara.

Demoness Urd had a strange glow in her orange-red eyes.

"Isn't it funny that lava ponds...which are supposed to relax us Demonesses...have the opposite effect on us instead, sometimes? I couldn't help but overhear your worried comment, Mara. I mean, I've soaked in this pool of lava hundreds of times, just like you're doing right now. At times, instead of feeling soothed, the sensation of calmness I experience only speeds my heart up. While enjoying the soak, I also feel a form of excitement tingling inside of me. I wind up thinking about all that could be...and all that might be. My thoughts seem to race on their own, like a well-concealed haiku. So I'm not really relaxing when I do this, am I?" the Demoness asked Mara.

"I suppose not," Mara answered, wondering why Urd was being so candid.

"Hmmm, perhaps your anxieties are caused by the same source of mine. Being here on the Earthrealm does make one homesick, ne? Not only homesick...but _lonely_ as well. Maybe you're lonely; and that's why you're waxing melancholic over the 'how this can happen to me' type thoughts.

"Huh?!" Mara exclaimed, suddenly on the defensive. What was Demoness Urd up to? She tried to fathom why Urd was being so forward...implying that she was lonely, even though she had just met her a few hours earlier. This Urd seemed to have a deep curiosity about matters of the heart, just like Mara's own twin sister, Goddess Urd...

"You couldn't be lonely, Urd. After all, you're living here with your sisters," Mara interjected in a testy voice.

"Oh, I hope I didn't offend you by imagining things!" Demoness Urd blurted apologetically. "I know that it's awfully presumptuous of me, but I couldn't help but notice the state of your physical manifestation. You body seems to be on fire...with a sensuous passion...and you can't disguise it. Even a mere Third Class Demoness could sense the craving in your flesh."

Mara almost dipped her head under the lava out of embarrassment. Demoness Urd _knew_ about her struggles with her libido! And it was _obvious_ as well.

When she resurfaced, Mara noticed that Urd had edged closer to her in the lava springs pool. Urd smiled amiably at her.

"There's nothing to be embarrassed about; after all, you _are_ a Demoness!"

"I'm _not_ embarrassed!" Mara shot back, blushing. Urd was uncomfortably close to her...

"Did you know that my two sisters and I are the three Scorns of Vanagdrasil?" Demoness Urd asked.

"Three...Scorns?" Mara asked. It was common knowledge that the office of Scorns was vacant in Vanagdrasil. It had been this way since eons before she had been birthed. In the far distant past, the three Scorns had used their powers over TimeSpace to incite rebellion against His Darkness. A futile attempt, but Oni-sama had nonetheless decided to close the office of Scorns in order to prevent any further incursions against His sovereignty over Vanagdrasil. Rumor had it that the three Scorns had been selected from a group of His favorites; thus, not appointing any more Scorns was a preventative measure. It was His design to protect any Demonesses in the future from being tempted by the broad powers of the office of Scorn to the point where they would screw up and earn His wrath. Actions like these revealed much about His noble character...His subtle sense of compassion towards His Demonic charges, despite His legendary shrewdness.

Mara mentally noted that this Scorn issue was one more difference between home and this place. She would have to rely more earnestly on Belldandy's knowledge as a Norn in order to comprehend what they were up against. She leaned in closer, hoping that a show of interest would encourage Demoness Urd to reveal some more useful information.

"Yes. We're the Demons in charge of administering certain realms of TimeSpace. The Past, the Present and the Future, to be precise. Of course, Skuld is responsible for the Future, since she's the youngest. Belldandy is responsible for the Present...although I never could figure out why she has to pull duty in the Demon Grief Office on top of being a Scorn..."

"Which leaves you as the Scorn of the Past, when you're not Sysoping the Vanagdrasil Mainframe," Mara ventured.

"Absolutely correct!" Demoness Urd noted in a bubbly voice, nudging a little closer to Mara in the pool of hot lava...

Mara was beginning to sense _another_ set of sexual tensions besides her own.

"Ahhh, there's something I must tell you, Mara," the tan-faced Demoness said in a quiet voice, batting her eyelashes like a shy teenager.

"Y..yes?" Mara said, her face coloring as she felt uneasy with Urd's presence.

"As Scorn of the Past, I have this certain...situation...in regards to male Demons. Since my realm of responsibility is the Past, I'm not allowed to be in love with males of any kind in the present here-and-now. It has to do with a particular adjustment or aspect of the Ultimate Force. I _did_ have a number of Demons for lovers in my younger years, of course. But when I reached maturity and was designated as Scorn of the Past by our Dark Lord, I found that I wasn't able to have any other affairs with men. For some inexplicable reason, the Ultimate Force has made it impossible to for me to have romantic relationships or even out-and-out sexual flings with Male Demons. It's been this way for almost a hundred millennia," Demoness Urd explained.

Mara recalled her sister Urd's prohibition...and how it had somehow been nullified when she fell in love with the mortal Cevn. This observation brought up unpleasant thoughts about Urd and Cevn's shared fate. Mare felt her heart sicken briefly as her twin sister's sad visage pierced through _this_ Urd's words, impressing itself on this Urd's face. She and Belldandy had been stranded here as a result of trying to revivify Cevn; but their efforts failed to reach a result. Wherever Urd was, she was without Cevn. And Cevn...was still dead.

"Because of this, I could consider myself a tragic figure! Oni-sama has apprenticed me as a Demon Queen...but He and I could never have a hot time together, unlike His relationship with all His other Consorts. We would be nothing more than confidants. I suspect that this is His way of trying to make my situation as Scorn of the Past somewhat bearable," Urd admitted.

Mara nodded her head, feeling partially sympathetic to Demoness Urd's plight.

"Among all the Demonesses in Vanagdrasil, I am the _only one_ who cannot connect with the opposite sex in a meaningful romantic relationship! I've always had the capacity to feel attracted to male Demons...but they would never anticipate my feelings, let all requite my passions. So after a time, I began to revisit my perspective on things," Urd continued.

Mara felt the edge of her mouth curl up in jitters.

"Did anyone ever tell you that you are a remarkably beautiful Demoness, Mara? Especially when you're nude, in a hot lava springs, and blushing with innocent embarrassment?" Urd asked, her eyes narrowing slightly as they glazed with animated interest.

Now Mara's mouth was definitely curled in a "what in the name of Oni-sama are you driving at?" expression. Her mind was tornadoing through a few dozen unsavory suppositions about this Demoness Urd...

"Why of course I've been told that by _Demons_!" she answered emphatically. "Demons, mortal men...all sorts of men have told me this. I'm not above using my charm..ha ha!..to get my needs met, just like all Demonesses in Vanagdrasil."

She felt more than a little unnerved about Urd's sudden interest in her love life. A couple hours ago, Urd had used the Voice on her in an attempt to find out if she was an intruder posing as a Demoness. Now, Demoness Urd was probing her in a different way, by asking her a series of _very_ personal questions...

"Ara...you are quite exquisite, Mara! Despite myself, I..I can't seem to take my eyes off of you! Your face is an atlas of Demonic beauty! And when I saw you getting into the lava bath, I told myself that I just _had_ to come out her and join you," Urd said, brushing her shoulder against Mara's.

_--ULP!!--_

"This Demoness Urd...is _into other Demonesses_!!" Mara thought with wide-eyed bombshells of astonishment. There was no other possible explanation as to why Urd had joined her in the lava bath. She felt Urd's foot stroking the calf of her leg under the hot lava...

Urd reached over and started combing Mara's hair with her fingers, stroking the long straw-blonde curls with gentle motions. Her fingers explored Mara's generous hair...tracing the lengths of her curls from the crown of her head until they fell into the molten pool.

Mara shivered as she felt the same fingers now lightly stroking her neck and her shoulders. Urd was definitely coming on to her, starting at the top and moving downwards like a male Demon would do.

Mara felt her throat go dry at the sensation of Urd's fingers tracing soft lines of touch up and down her neck, around her collarbone, under her ear, along her jawline...

"Ur..uh..Urd?!" Mara asked in a squeaky voice, almost paralyzed by the sensation of Urd's caresses. And she was unable to rebuff Urd's exploring hands, no matter how much she wanted to! The combination of her erotic imaginings of Keiichi coupled with these _very real_ physical sensations was leaving her without a defense. She felt herself spilling over with panic on the inside as Urd's wandering hands reached around her shoulders in a soft hug...and then down her front, cupping her breasts.

Touching her nipples.

"Doesn't this feel good?" Demoness Urd spoke softly, resting her chin on Mara's shoulder. "A beautiful Demoness like you should be treasured. A Senior First Class, Unrestricted License Demoness like you _is_ a treasure to all of Vanagdrasil, otherwise our Dark Sovereign would never have promoted you. I feel...so excited...just knowing that you head your own branch of a Demon Office. You must wield _power and authority_ well beyond the reaches of most Demons. Power is such a stimulating aspect of existence, isn't it? I can certainly feel the stimulation..."

Stroking up and down her belly.

"And since you're on the Earthrealm with me and my sisters, this only serves notice that you cannot return to all your lovers in Vanagdrasil at the moment. Yes...I can feel your body responding, Mara. Can you feel it?! Your passion is purring like a FlameCat; I can sense the tingling of your skin. It's been so long since I touched a _real_ Demoness. All these years on the Earthrealm...and all I've had is Sayoko Mishima to play with. Not that Sayoko is bad; she's beautiful and sexy and vibrant in her own way. But she's only a mortal. You're the real thing! More than the real thing...you're a Senior First Class Demoness. And I'm burning..."

Mara felt her body going limp under Urd's bold caresses.

"Ma..aa..ra," Demoness Urd breathed into her ear in a sultry voice, causing Mara's body to flush with a wave of tingly weakness. Mara felt Urd slowly pulling her backwards, so that her back was resting snug against Urd's body. Urd was obviously interpreting her liquid passivity as an invitation to go further. She could feel Urd's ample breasts pressing into her back as Urd slowly shifted her body under the hot lava, widening her legs so they contoured against Mara's hips and thighs.

"The Ultimate Force has its own wisdom in a way. The prohibition it exacted against my being able to have male Demons for lovers...only served to open up a whole new vista of pleasures for me. With a great amount of patience, I have learned many...skills...involving pleasuring myself...and others. I have savored the delicious pleasures that only a Demoness can experience. Pleasures and sweeps of bodylove passion that can only be shared with another Demoness. My unique nature allows me to share myself with abandon," Urd said, kissing her up and down the neck as she rubbed Mara's belly with soft handstrokes.

"My sisters are the only other Demonesses here, and it would not be meet to share myself with them in such a way as this. But with you..." Urd said, trailing her fingers further down Mara's belly.

Mara tried to fight with herself, but the provocative image of Keiichi kept flashing in her mind as Urd tuned each erogenous zone with a sensual caress...

"BIG SISTER!! WHAT ARE YOU DOING WITH OUR GUEST?! YOU'RE AT IT AGAIN, YOU ECCHI PERVERT! AND YOU COULDN'T EVEN WAIT UNTIL _AFTER_ ELDER SISTER AND I TOOK OUR BATHS! BY HIS DARKNESS, YOU ARE _SO_ INCONSIDERATE!"

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Even though Goddess Mara had decided to reveal herself, Belldandy felt strongly that it would be far too risky for the both of them to remain near the temple and its Demonic occupants for any extended period of time. She prevailed on Goddess Mara to walk with her to a nearby park, so they could take in a more private setting and continue their conversation. En route to the park, Belldandy weighed a number of options. She didn't want to do anything that would frighten Goddess Mara back into hiding...instead, she dearly wanted to gain the young Goddess's trust.

If only if she could forestall Goddess Mara's flights of jealousy long enough to do so...

She also decided that returning to her and Mara's hideout with Goddess Mara in tow was an uncomfortable proposition at best. Mara's disappearance meant that their hideout had obviously been compromised. Belldandy hoped that Goddess Mara had some kind of permanent base where she was living, so she could join her there.

Walking with Goddess Mara only moved Belldandy deeper into worries about her Demoness sister. Mara must have been kidnapped by the Demonesses! And she certainly didn't want to expose _this_ Mara to further danger. Now that Goddess Mara had revealed herself to Belldandy, both their welfares had become even more imperiled.

Shunting away her concerned expression, Belldandy smiled at Goddess Mara as they strolled into the park. The young Goddess was regarding her with big blue bashful eyes...and a thousand unanswered questions. Curious about what passed for Goddess footwear in this mixed-up reality, she looked at Goddess Mara's feet, reminded by the glimpse she had of the shoes while Goddess Mara was sitting up in the tree. Like Skuld, Goddess Mara's wore large ankle-high booties with her Goddess Seal displayed on the vamp...

"Wha..huh!" Belldandy gasped involuntarily. During the entire time they had been walking, Goddess Mara was walking _almost 20cm off the ground_! All this time, she thought Mara was as tall as she was, when actually her physical manifestation was almost 20cm shorter! In fact, Mara's height compared favorably with Skuld's, after her younger sister's growth had been accelerated by 40 millennia several months ago. It began to dawn on her why...in some hidden way...Goddess Mara had reminded Belldandy of _herself_ when she was a teenager. Goddess Mara's diminutive physical manifest made her appear young for her age, just like Sora Hasegawa's small physique made her look like a high schooler even though she was a sophomore at N.I.T.

So this Mara wasn't a duplicate of Demoness Mara!

For her part, Goddess Mara was giddy with joy and sweetness as she walked next to Belldandy on an invisible plane a quarter-meter off the ground, occasionally skipping and jumping about. Belldandy found herself musing about how she could help Mara, and especially how she could liberate Keiichi. The situation was even more tentative by the impediments in place over her Senior First Class powers. She could almost feel the weight of Goddess Mara's strong expectations.

Once Goddess Mara had ascertained that Belldandy had not been dispatched here to sanction her for not completing her Goddess Relief Office Assignment, Belldandy observed that she had seemed to enthuse herself into believing that Belldandy was here to provide assistance towards freeing Keiichi from Demoness Belldandy and her sisters.

Belldandy was less than comfortable with the fact that, to Mara, she wasn't just another Goddess...she was a savior from Yggdrasil who would make everything right again. Not only this; Mara was starstruck with Belldandy's status as a Senior First Class Goddess. She seemed to expect her to have the answers to everything.

And then came the torrents of questions...

"Once we free my Keiichi from those evil Demons, I..I'll naturally want him to live with me...unless his wish is _not_ to live with me. But that would be dreadful...so I'm not going to think about it! Just consider it...me and Keiichi in our own house! Me and Keiichi...which means that I'll need to cook for him, and clean his laundry, and..."

"Mara, aren't you forgetting something?" Belldandy asked with polite concern as Mara voiced her thoughts out loud. This Mara was so emotionally immature, she didn't even bother to concern herself with _how_ they were going to free Keiichi! Instead, all her questions were focused on what she was going to do with Keiichi _after_ he was freed.

"Oh yeah, I did forget something!" she said, looking like she just remembered something.

"And?" Belldandy asked, feeling like she was answering a child.

"Belldandy-sempai, can you teach me how to cook mortal food? Especially Japanese cuisine! Pleeeease?!" Mara asked, her blue eyes glimmering innocently.

Belldandy felt herself stumble and almost lose her footing at this. She realized that one more interchange like _that_ and she might resprain her ankle. More and more, she felt like she was dealing with a child, rather than an adult Goddess. Quickly scanning the park, she found a nearby bench up ahead on the walkway.

"Uh...maybe I'm getting ahead of myself!" Mara observed, obviously noticing Belldandy's little stumble of frustration.

"Perhaps you are," Belldandy replied with a smile, hoping that Mara was going to redirect her attention to more germane concerns.

"Can Goddesses even _cook_ Earthrealm food?"

"Bench...have to find a bench!" Belldandy thought, trying to avoid looking at Mara. She was afraid she would either lose her patience or dissolve into laughter. Goddess Mara continued chattering without missing a beat, oblivious to Belldandy's reactions...

"...what if I make something for Keiichi...and he gets sick? That would be _awful_! He might wind up...hating me! And then he'll want to leave me if that happens. So I have to cook only _perfect_ food for Keiichi...right, sempai!" she concluded, her voice trailing off as she put a finger under her chin, a figure of thoughtfulness.

"There she goes again, calling me 'sempai'!" Belldandy thought with amused frustration as Goddess Mara struggled to try and list the kinds of domestic duties she and Keiichi would share in their new household. She could only name two or three chores.

Belldandy pointed to the nearest park bench, amidst a carpet of autumn defoilage. She hurriedly made for the bench and sat down. Goddess Mara stood in front of the bench, pacing back and forth.

"He'll hang the laundry, right? And I'll clean the kitchen. And if I cook, then does that mean that he has to do the dishes? Or maybe I should let him cook once in a while..." she mumbled to herself, oblivious to the fact that she had just asked Belldandy a question a moment earlier.

"And if I do the laundry? Eeeyaah!! That means I'll have to wash his _underwear_ things! No way!! I c..can't touch his _things_!" she squealed in a squeamish voice, clenching her hands in little fists and holding them side-by-side in front of her breast.

Ever since Belldandy had told Goddess Mara that she was a Senior First Class Goddess, Mara had treated her with an almost reverential awe. Her zealous respectfulness bordered on absurdity...at least until Belldandy remembered how she had viewed her seniors like Celestine and others, way back in her youth. Back then, any God or Goddess with a First Class License was pretty impressive to her. A Senior First Class Goddess would have been daunting...

Celestine wasn't even a Senior First Class God...and Belldandy had regarded him with near-awe when she was 80 or 90,000 years old.

"Uh Mara...how _old_ are you?" Belldandy asked, raising an eyebrow. In the half-hour she had spent with Mara's counterpart, the Goddess had consistently acted like an adolescent. She was insecure, flighty, prone to rapid mood-swings...and far more possessive of this Earthrealm's Keiichi than Belldandy could ever imagine her own self being. Goddess Mara's youthful jealousy was only matched by her inextinguishable sense of good cheer. She seemed mannered too innocently for a Goddess who was assigned to the Earthrealm by the GRO. Her eyes practically begged for affection...it was as if she had been love-starved for a long time. Above and beyond all of this, Belldandy had the nagging sense that Goddess Mara was looking up to her with a puppy dog admiration

"Me? I just celebrated my Fourteenth Deca before I was assigned here!"

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Shortly after Demoness Skuld had walked in on Demoness Urd's 'attack' on her in the lava hotsprings, Mara felt the flesh-flights of sexual energy slip away. As normalcy returned to her while she was in the safe confines of the temple's furoba, Mara reasoned that Goddess Mara must have been nearby the temple while Urd was attempting to seduce her. That had to be it...because while Demoness Urd was touching her all over, Mara was carried away by the sense that it was Keiichi who was actively engaged in foreplay with her...

_That_ gave Mara the chills...she had to accept a reality where she had no control over her counterpart's movements; and thus, no control over when she would be overgained by lust.

Thank all the Darknesses that Demoness Skuld had 'rescued' her from Urd!

Mara protected her privacy in matters of Demoness lust and love with a fierce possessiveness. This trait had been especially evolved because of the years of taunting by her peers during her teenage period, simply because she was slow to 'develop'. Mara kept her sexuality close to her breast as an adult Demoness. And yet, despite this reserve of character, she had totally flowed into Urd's promise of sensual satisfaction with an utterly crazed abandon of inhibition.

As she rinsed herself off with the steamy water, Mara was reluctantly aware that she had been enthralled by Urd's advances. She had been turned on by the fondling touches of another Demoness! She shuddered, trying to grasp at rationales and temperances. The sensation was similar to the kind of release that she normally experienced when she was closing in on the completion of a Grief Assignment. What was most disturbing was the _randomness_ of these spells of sexual arousal. Mara had no way of knowing when her Goddess counterpart would be proximal enough to trigger her cravings. Take one lust-craving Demoness in combination with a Goddess who longed for her mortal boyfriend, and...

Mara shuddered again as she reached for a towel.

If Demoness Skuld hadn't decided to take a dip in the lava pool at just the right moment...

Mara clenched her thoughts away from conjecture and back into adventure.

Regardless of what happened in the lava onsen, she still _had_ to find a way to pry herself securely into these Demon sister's confidence, so that she could check on Keiichi's status. In a way, if Urd was attracted to her, Mara could ply this to obtain leverage on the most powerful of the three sisters. With Urd being love-struck, Belldandy and Skuld would find it more difficult to prosecute Mara with any suspicions.

Mara finished sponging herself off, and wrapped her hair in the towel. The sooner her efforts resulted in the reunion of Keiichi with Goddess Mara, the sooner she'd be reprieved of enduring these pauses of sexual wantonness. For this reason, learning all she could about Keiichi took on a new vitality of importance.

As she toweled herself off in the furoba, Mara mentally reviewed how Demon Grief Office assignments were deployed, back in the reality she had come from. The process of dispensing Grief required a Demoness to master a wide latitude of methodologies in order to accomplish her assignment. The simplest 'direct' approach was to plague the mortal with bouts of undeserved grief, so that they would experience a total collapse of ego and humanity. However, many tactics of indirection were also routinely utilized by Demon Grief Office agents to evoke a state of Grief in the mortal victim. These methods were more subtle, but just as enjoyable when practiced. One such approach provided a delicious twist on the Goddess Relief Office's wishgranting services. Basically, the DGO agent would wait until their mortal 'charge' would fall into a spell of sincere ill-wishing towards others. Simple 'flashes' of wishing ill upon another mortal didn't qualify...the desire to wish harm must be deep-rooted, consistent, and earnest in intention. If a mortal qualified by harboring _this_ kind of ill-will towards another...the DGO agent would then grant their 'wish'. For example: mortal A hates his wife, so he wishes that she would be killed in a freak subway accident. The DGO agent causes this to occur by placing a banana at a certain spot on the subway platform. Mortal A's wife is creamed by the train...which produces huge amounts of reactionist Grief. Mortal A ends up suffering the rest of his days wracked with guilt, tortured on a very deep level with the awareness that it was _his_ ill-wish that had caused the demise of his wife. The trick was to grant the wish in such a manner where it would cause the mortal to be crippled with guilt.

"Nah!" Mara muttered to herself. If this Keiichi was like Belldandy's Keiichi...he would be incapable of wishing harm on anything or anyone! The worst Keiichi could manage was a liberal stinkeye while racing against the likes of Toshiyuki Aoshima...a far cry from fervently hoping disasters to befall another mortal. After reflecting upon a number of Grief-by-indirection methods, Mara was unable to intuit which technique these three Demonesses would most likely resort in the process of inflicting pain on Keiichi. As she considered which sense of Grief _these_ Demonesses would cause him to experience, she kept drawing up uncertainties instead of answers on the easel of her mind.

Then it flashed on Mara that trying to interpret these Demonesses' motives and moduses would be futile, since she barely knew them. Instead, what if she looked at the situation by considering the strategies she herself had been planning to invoke on Keiichi? How would _she_ have inflicted Grief on him, had she been able to pry him away from Belldandy?

As Mara mentally paged through the catalogue of baneful potentialities, she smiled. For some odd reason, the imagined look on Keiichi's face when he called out for fast-food delivery...and a _Demoness Belldandy_ appeared...brought her a moment of much needed amusement.

Flowing with the imaginary scenario, Mara knew that Belldandy would have introduced herself, and then she would have handed him a business card, as was required by the Rule. Once a mortal accepts a Demoness's meishi, their fate is sealed. Someone who was pure of heart would superconsciously recognize the situation, and decline the proffered card. Obviously, Keiichi had accepted Demoness Belldandy's name card, otherwise he wouldn't be here.

But how could that happen, if he was so supposedly pure-hearted?

Continuing her research into the 'what-might-have-been', Mare envisioned how it would have come down after Keiichi accepted the meishi. Demoness Belldandy would have told him that he was the recipient of a Grief for one reason or another, and withal would have proceeded to make his life miserable...

So why was Keiichi still _alive_?

Normally, Grief assignments usually required a Demoness's services over a period of only a brief duration. In most cases, all it took was a few moments work to cause a lifetime of Grief-experience. The fact that most Earthrealm mortals suffered from akrasia was very helpful in Grief bestowals. But bearing Grief onto the weak-willed only reduced the number of potential candidates. This status quo was very similar to the Earthrealm hunters' propensity to 'overhunt' a wildlife habitat, vastly reducing the numbers of their prey. Mara was almost certain that this phenomenon was the reason why she had been reassigned to administer a new Demoness Office: the Demoness Strife Mischief Office. Her new DSMO office was focused on bestowing 'low-grade pain' to a wider selection of mortals over a longer period of time. This would prevent the 'thinning of the chafe' phenomena that occurred in the process of DGO Grief bestowals. In other words, Strife Mischief wouldn't kill off the targeted population.

In many situations involving the infliction of Grief, the result was often fatal to the mortal. The aggrieved individual would commit suicide or be killed by another mortal. Or perhaps the Grief would cause permanent insanity. The Grief-stricken mortal would languish in a mental institution, which would release the Demoness discharging the Grief from further responsibility. In rare cases, the mortal would actually become _addicted_ to Grief, which would also release the DGO Agent from further obligation. Why bestow Grief on a mortal who seeks it out?

But, according to her Demoness hostesses, Keiichi had endured almost five years of being subjected to Grief. So what kind of tortures could Belldandy and her crew be inflicting on him? Usually, long-term Grief dispensations involved placing the mortal in one of the Earthrealm's penal asylums for a crime they didn't commit. This was one of Mara's favorite ploys...and it was this particular Grief that she had planned for Keiichi, back when he was her assignee. Back then, she had figured Keiichi for being such a wimp, he would be little more than 'meat' to the more seasoned prisoners.

Yet, since Keiichi was _here_, these Demonesses must have fashioned a type of Grief designed to keep him alive, and yet miserable. Either this, or they were completely incompetent in administering Grief. But Mara's Demoness sensitivities informed her that incapability was a very unlikely explanation. These Demonesses reeked of malevolence!

Mara's millennia of DGO experience could only arrive at a few possible scenarios to explain how Keiichi was alive, yet dead with Grief.

The White Room. It had to be the White Room.

As she emerged from the bathroom, Demoness Belldandy met her at the door, as if she had been lying in wait for her. Apologizing for Urd's 'behavior', she invited Mara to spend the night after eating dinner with she and her sisters. Taken aback by this proposition, Mara accepted...on the condition that Demoness Urd 'behaved' herself during the nocturnal hours.

Demoness Belldandy quickly assented, but warned that Urd was more powerful than she; so if snuff came up against cannonfire, she couldn't stop her older sister by force of Divine power.

"But since you're a Senior First Class Demoness, you should be able to handle my sister easily if she tried to force any of her 'tendencies' on you, right?" she confirmed. Mara almost wanted to argue with her, but she clipped her tongue instead. She had to be mindful of her situation: any mistakes on her part that might erode these Demonesses' illusion that she was their senior in Demoness powers...could be fatal.

At the dinner table, Demoness Urd regarded her with a covertly lustful expression. Trying to act aloof, Mara fueled Demoness Skuld with a series of questions, hoping that the youngest sister would be the most talkative. Demoness Skuld chitchatted with her, and then announced that she was going to a rave club tonight to perform with her band, aptly named "The HellChild Red Zonerz".

Mara was grateful that both Skuld's older sisters intervened when she ambitiously proposed that she 'audition' for Mara.

Like any other Demoness, Mara had a decided preference for the kind of noisy music typified in "heavy metal", "death metal" and "grunge" music. Recently, the Earthrealm mortals had developed something called "emo music", and the Japanese were just absorbing this style of music when Keiichi had made his fateful call five years ago. But as Mara found herself looking at Skuld's gear, she had her doubts that Demoness Skuld could perform it well. Poorly-executed death metal is as irritating to Demonic ears as piano-lounge pop vocal crapmusic.

Naturally, being Demonesses, they enjoyed a feast of fast food for dinner, courtesy of the Colonel. Mara was particularly fond of the new wasabi-spiced drumsticks, so Belldandy heated up a whole bucket, along with a bowlful of BBQ sauce. Mara's appetite seemed almost insatiable as she chowed down drumstick after drumstick, bones and all. She surmised that she was trying to eat away the embarrassed uneasiness leftover from her experience in the lava hotsprings...

"Urd, it's your turn to feed Keiichi," Demoness Belldandy prompted once they had finished dinner.

"No it isn't! It's Skuld's turn!" Urd protested testily.

"Nuh uh, Big Sister. You have evening duty this month!" Skuld remonstrated. "Besides, I'm not gonna miss my gig at 'Shred Vixens' just to feed that worthless dolt!"

"Yeah, I guess you're right," Demoness Urd admitted sourly after she glanced up at the calendar in the kitchen. "I get to feed him dinners this month! I almost forgot!"

"You mean you _wanted_ to forget!" Demoness Belldandy taunted. Ignoring her, Demoness Urd floated up over the dinner table and into the kitchen. A moment later, she returned with an opened tin of meat, a piece of dry bread in a pan and a large flask filled with tap water.

"Feeding him is like feeding the dogs! And it's always such a hassle!" Urd complained.

"Why?" Mara asked, curious. Demoness Belldandy's face fell into a foul irritation.

"Because I got saddled with the assignment to exact Grief on him, we cannot magick anything _good_ for him, such as food. Food is good for mortals in most cases, y'know! It's because of some blessed obscure clause in the DGO Rules! So we have to actually physically go and feed him, instead of simply using our powers to create food in his tight-room!" Belldandy noted.

"Can't you guys even give him a drumstick?" Mara asked, feeling sorry for Keiichi. This earned her irritated accusatory glares from all three Demonesses until Mara cleared her throat and clarified that she meant "drumstick bones, not an uneaten drumstick."

Demoness Skuld glared at her warily, but Mara deftly passed it off, noting, "I was just testing you three to make sure that you haven't gone soft on your Grief assignment."

The three Demonic sisters immediately started at this, and then began to exchange worried glances. So Mara decided to play her ruse further.

"And since I _am_ here, I would like to _personally_ inspect the conditions of Grief you are applying to your mortal charge. And Urd," she said, her voice turning grave with implied menace, "since you're so fond of me...I choose to accompany _you_ on the feeding round."

Demoness Urd blushed scarlet at this, eeped a brief of word of protest, and then nodded her head in resignation.

"Wah ha bwah hee he ha!! That's what you get for trying to rape a Senior First Class Demoness, Big Sister!" Belldandy and Skuld chittered, exploding into hearty guffaws of Demonized delight in reaction to their older sister's comeuppance. Urd's tan skintone turned candy-apple red with embarrassment.

While the two younger Demonesses were laughing at Urd's misfortune, Mara was feverishly wondering why Demoness Urd was acting with such reluctance about the matter of letting her visit Keiichi. She almost seemed to want to conceal the fact that they were serving up Grief to Keiichi at all. As if they were hiding something that even a fellow Demoness shouldn't witness.

What were they doing _wrong_?

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

In a single statement, everything can change.

Belldandy looked at Goddess Mara, unable to conceal her surprise. After Mara told her that she was only 14 Decamillennia in age, Belldandy wordlessly got up and walked over to one of the park's outdoor vending machines and got herself and Goddess Mara two cans of tea apiece.

"Here!" she said, holding out two cans of tea in her hand towards Mara.

"What? What's the matter, Belldandy-sempai?" Goddess Mara asked desperately. "Did I say something wrong? Did I do something wrong?"

"It's...it's just that you're so _young_!" Belldandy blurted out in between gulps. She was thankful that there was a tea machine nearby; Mara's admission had instantly dried out her throat while wet-wrenching her nerves. As she looked at Goddess Mara, the young Goddess seemed fixed with a Skuld-like determination. But a moment later, the young Goddess's face darkened...reminding Belldandy of her younger sister right before she launched into one of her "I'm not a kid!" tantrums.

"Oh..._now I get it_!!" Goddess Mara roared with an indignant anger, narrowing her eyes as she looked at Belldandy coldly. "They think I'm too inexperienced to handle this assignment by myself! So they sent _you_ here, a full Senior First Class Goddess...because they're afraid that I might blow it! I just _hate_ it when adults simply assume that a teenaged Goddess can't do anything right, just because of her age! It's so unfair when they judge me! I _got_ this assignment...it was given to me by the Yggdrasil Mainframe! It was given to _me_! No one else! Because the Mainframe assigned me to Keiichi's case, it can't be a mistake! _I'm_ the one who's meant to grant his wish!"

"Mara..."

"Don't you dare tell me that I'm 'young', while thinking I'm just some inexperienced young girl of a Goddess! I know you're thinking that! But I want you to know that I'm an _apprentice_ Goddess Relief Office Agent! Which means that I _am_ going to complete this assignment, with or without your help. And what's even worse..."

"Whoa!" Belldandy shouted, grabbing Goddess Mara by the shoulder. Goddess Mara quickly shrugged her shoulder away, and shot a frowning glare at Belldandy. Her ire-reddened face suddenly reminded Belldandy very much of the _other_ Mara.

Belldandy said the first thing that came in her mind.

"If you're not a girl, then why don't you stop acting like a little spoiled bitch!" she shouted at the young Goddess. Belldandy instantly covered her mouth with her hands, realizing that she had just said the worst thing possible under the circumstances. She was flamed with uncertainty...she _never_ used such harsh language.

_-- --Kgaaaadank!-- --_

Goddess Mara was shocked into silence. She was so gripped by Belldandy's words of censure that she had dropped her tea on the ground.

Belldandy felt _old_ for a moment, as she realized that the young Goddess had just pushed her into a level of irritation that she rarely ever reached, simply by acting...impulsively bratty. Goddess Mara was at the most difficult age, and Belldandy now realized that 'babysitting' this young Goddess would be fraught with potential frustrations.

"I..I'm sorry..." Belldandy started to apologize, but Goddess Mara waved her off. Goddess Mara's lips were trembling, as if she was going to turn on the torrents of tears.

"No. You're right! I'm.._snff_..totally screwing up...by thinking of my welfare before everyone else's, aren't I?" Goddess Mara admitted in a soft voice. Belldandy was astonished that this young girl-Goddess had accepted her chastisement without resorting to the furnaces of an emotion-wracked rebuttal.

"If it was anyone else, I would tell them to go choke themselves on a packet of choco stix! But since it's _you_, Belldandy-sempai...it _must_ be the truth," she confessed as she lifted her chin up.

"Mara...I don't think you understand..."

"As a Goddess Relief Office Apprentice," Mara recited with a dutiful expression, ignoring Belldandy, "I am aware that it is our sworn duty to bring happiness to our mortal assignees in the form of a wish. We have a very important role in helping the Earthrealm mortals reach the Next Level. Because of this, we cannot allow ourselves to get emotionally immersed in pride whenever we grant a wish. Kami-sama says that we cannot determine the fate of the mortals. And He's right! We need to be constantly vigilant to avoid being caught up in Wishout, thinking that granting wishes to a mortal is simply a job...or Washout, allowing our thoughts and feelings to become too attached to our mortal charges..."

Belldandy patted Goddess Mara on the head with collegial encouragement, recognizing the confident statement of purpose as Mara's way of reassuring herself.

"B..but, I _love_ him! I love Keiichi! So that means that I'm suffering from Washout, doesn't it?" Mara suddenly asked, her expressive face figured with fear and passion as she searched Belldandy's eyes for an answer.

Belldandy didn't reply right away. She couldn't. Goddess Mara _was_ suffering from Washout in a sense; she had been on the Earthrealm so long, she was becoming very impressionable. Just like a mortal. The mortal way of living has a way of rubbing off on one's being in the most peculiar ways...

Moodswings in regalia.

Often upon a time, she had asked herself the same question, back when her feelings for Keiichi had first blossomed into love-affection. Belldandy smiled whimsically as it dawned upon her that, by gist of irony, she was probably the Goddess most singularly suited to answering Mara's question. She remembered that first year with Keiichi...how she had journeyed through her doubts, searched her heart for the Truth about her feelings towards Keiichi...and had discovered that he was the Key.

"Mara, the answer that I found for myself is this. If my heart is in earnest...and the love I feel for him has _nothing_ to do with the fact that I am in his life as a result of my duties in connection with the Goddess Relief Office...then it's _not_ Washout. It is certainly, absolutely...truly Love!" Belldandy answered confidently.

Goddess Mara looked up at Belldandy, a study in wax-and-pastel confliction. She suddenly reached out and hugged herself to Belldandy, crying.

"_Wah aaah hanh haaah!!_ " she cried aloud. "Why is it always so _hard_!"

"Why indeed," Belldandy observed privately. Goddess Mara continued to cry, working her eyes with the hams of her tiny fists. She abruptly stopped in mid-sob and looked at Belldandy with grateful, yet reddened, eyes.

H..how do you.._snff_..know so much, Belldandy-sempai?" she asked, her cheeks wet with tears. "You're so..._wise_!"

Belldandy had to chuckle at this.

"Let's just say that I've been through a similar experience...and we'll leave it at that. After all, we Senior First Class Goddesses have to keep _some_ secrets to ourselves..." she informed Mara with a knowing smile.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Demoness Urd led Mara down the hallway of the temple, past "Urd's Arcane Chambers" and "Skuld's Heavy Metal Dungeon", to one of the rooms on the end of the hall. She slid the shoji door on the right open, and then gestured for Mara to follow her. On the _real_ Earthrealm, Mara recognized this doorway as the one which opened to the room where Megumi usually slept. Mara knew that Keiichi wasn't here, as she had passed this room twice when using the bathroom to rinse off. Both times, she didn't sense even a trace of his unique mortal vibration.

Demoness Urd was nervous, yet flirty as she grabbed some kind of electric prod off of a weapons rack located near the doorway. As she handled the rod, Mara thought she could hear Urd cursing under her breath at her two sisters...

"We'll need this," she said, twirling and swinging the electrical pole like a Bo stick. A small blue arc of electricity sparked off when the tip of the pole passed near the tatami, burning a black streak in the fibrous flooring. Mara could see many such burns slashing each tatami mat. Following Urd's movements with her eyes, Mara quickly recognized that Demoness Urd had undergone intermediate-to-advanced Demonic martial arts training, perhaps even Honor Guard-level training. Urd was effortlessly swinging the two-meter electrical prod around her shoulders and hips with the spry deftness of a gymnast.

"Caught your eye again, haven't I?" Urd said smugly, noticing that Mara was interested in her handling of the weapon. Mara fought back a blush as the Demoness continued.

"Perhaps we should spar some time, neh? My sisters are too quaint...they're absolutely unskilled at the art of weaponry. Skuld can only throw softball-sized bombs a short distance, and Belldandy can only disarm an opponent with subterfuge. Me...I like to _fight_! It gets me _very hot_ and sweaty! The most noble expenditure of my youth's energy! Combating each other in a sparring match, straining against the limits of endurance...it's almost as invigorating as sex, wouldn't you say?"

"Urd..." Mara warned, her voice thinly concealing a threat. She was actually a bit frightened by Demoness Urd's casual offer of a match. If she was pressed into bouting with Urd, her lack of Demoness powers would be readily exposed. But one sturdy Demonic maxim came to mind: "The more you're afraid, the more you need to project your fear into your rival."

"Urd...I _taught_ Honor-Guard field weapons! And _my_ sparring partner is the Marshal of the WarDemons himself!" Mara lied in a husky voice. "You wouldn't stand a chance in a practice match, even if I only fought at only one-fourth my level! But you wouldn't know what kind of intensive training I had, being the only daughter of a Demon Queen of the First Rank."

Demoness Urd almost dropped her metal electro-rod in mid-swing, her tan skin palloring as she came to terms with Mara's claim.

"Oops! I'm forgetting myself again!" Demoness Urd said apologetically.

"But you really can't blame me, the thought of the two of us in the lava hotsprings still lingers in the weaves of my mind, Mara. And now that I know that you're the sole daughter of a Demon Queen...that just makes you even _more_ interesting. You're practically _royalty_!" Demoness Urd confessed.

"Tell me something I don't know," Mara said sourly.

"I'm sorry. But you're different! With you, at least I can be frank...whether you approve of me or not. You should at least appreciate my candor."

Mara raised a straw-blonde eyebrow of dissent at that last statement. Demoness Urd started to say something, but Mara gestured "No!" with a wave of her finger. Realizing that her coquettishness had fallen on deaf ears, Demoness Urd pouted, and then waved her hand to open a dimensional portal concealed in the opposite wall. The inovate discus that appeared in the wall was a mix of swirly green-and-red glows, with a 'mouth' that looked like a shark's maw, complete with razor-sharp teeth. The dagger-teeth weren't just decoration...they were placed at the entrance to prevent escapes, Mara realized.

Demoness Urd stepped through the portal, and motioned for Mara to follow.

Mara hoped that this wasn't a trap.

Twenty meters on, the 'tunnel' ended in a pool of fluid. Demoness Urd dived into a green gooey substance lining the 'floor' of the glowing hollow. Reluctantly, Mara followed suit. It was like swimming in jelly. No wonder the Demoness sisters didn't like feeding Keiichi! Once again, another design element to prevent escapes...while making escapes _seem_ possible. If one could hold their breath for a couple of minutes, they could traverse its length.

Mara hoped that this wasn't just some ploy Demoness Urd had hatched in order to get her clothes wet, so that she would be in a 'wet-T shirt situation' when they surfaced. With a start, Mara realized that if once she stepped out of the gelatinous fluid, she would need to quickly reconstitute her physical manifest in dry clothes...or it would quickly become obvious that she _didn't_ have Senior First Class Demoness powers...

Urd cut through the viscous ectofluid with athletic grace as she swam towards the surface. A moment later, Mara emerged from the surface...and try as she might, she couldn't 'reset' her physical manifestation to dry off.

She noticed Urd looking at her with barely-concealed hot lust; Mara didn't have to glance down her front to know that her nipples were peaking against her top...

"Why can't you dry yourself?" Urd asked warily.

_Busted!!_

Mara prepared herself for the worst, while fighting to keep the panic from flushing her face with fear. But before Mara could reason up a believable line of bullshit to explain herself, Demoness Urd giggled and walked up to her. The tanned Demoness traced a finger up and down Mara's wet top as she chided her for "teasing instead of pleasing".

Mara sagged with relief as she sighed to herself. Demoness Urd's 'yuri' proclivities had asserted themselves in Mara's favor. Thankfully, she was assuming that Mara was just playing hard-to-get!

"Where's Keiichi?" Mara asked quickly, not wanting Demoness Urd to further her flights of assumption to the point where she would want to dawdle here and play Demonic love-games with her.

Urd looked at her and pouted. "How can you be all business like that...when your body is crying to be let out of those wet clothes?"

Mara put her hands on her hips and looked at Urd sternly.

"Ummmm, alright! If you insist! He over here, in this next room. It's actually the garage shed, but we converted it to a White Room."

"Why in His Dark Name would they use a transdimensional portal to link a room in the temple with the garage shed?" Mara notched a thought to a wonderment, as Urd opened a series of lockbolts on a bank vault-like metal door. As soon as the door wheezed opened a crack, a clawing hand fought through the gap and tried to grab Urd's skirt. Urd slapped the hand down, then wielded the electric shock prod and zapped the next attempt.

A shriek of pain in reaction, and then stillness.

"That'll learn ya!" Urd noted smugly. "How many years have we been through this, Keiichi-honey? Every time you try to escape, I wound you. And yet you still haven't learned."

She set the pan of food on the floor near the partly open door.

"Well, here's your crap. Bon appétit!" Urd announced sarcastically. She opened the door just wide enough to admit the metal pan and the water container, and then nudged the mealpan and water past the door with her foot. Mara watched as the two objects were quickly jerked into the room.

"You see, he's relatively uncomfortable. When he tries to escape, I shock him, or cut him, or chop off a finger or two. When it's Skuld's shift, she either gas bombs him, or bombs him with some kind of device that immobilizes him. Or worse. One time, he bit her...so she subjected him to a full day of recorded music from one of her band's gigs at maximum volume. He was pretty docile after that. Personally, heh heh...I think _that_ might have been the worst torture of his stay here!" Urd reported with a chuckle.

"I could see how that might happen," Mara commented.

"Of course, sometimes we tease him by letting him escape, just so Banpei can have a playmate to beat on once in a while. Skuld would throw a fit if we didn't let her pet mecha do some clobberin' on him once in a while. That's what started up that stupid Goddess Mara situation. Keiichi got loose, she rescued him for a week and hid out with him. Naturally, since he had been dealing with our good graces for awhile, he was delusional enough to see her as some kind of guardian angel figure. So, like the stupid shit he is, he fell in love with her. Which makes letting him escape even more fun, because now he's not only escaping, he's actually chasing after his so-called 'girlfriend'. Then Banpei gets 'im. Or usually my sister Bell, since she's the main harbinger of his Grief. Unless she's riding that hot-shot motorbike of hers, of course. Big Sister's opinion only...I think my middle sister needs to work on her torturing skills a bit more. Compared to Skuld or me, she's pretty light on the worthless mortal. But she has discovered something very devious that might make the torture angle seem lame and outmoded. It's pretty inventive if you ask me."

"What does Belldandy do to him? What makes you think she isn't doing a good job of making him feel Grief?"

"When we first got hold of him, Bell would just cast spells on him to disorient him, transform him, or make him scream in agony for a few hours. Sometimes she would summon her Devil, Holy Hell's Bells, to play with him. Her Devil loves to swoop him and breathe fire-jets at him. But then one day she started lecturing him instead of torturing him. I thought the lecture idea was stupid at first, until I saw what it did to him. When she lectures him, she really gets him riled up! That's when things get really hilarious! Every time my feeding shift comes after one of _those_ lecturing episodes, Keiichi goes absolutely apeshit on me! I've actually had to rip off his arms or legs a few times. Of course, he'd moan in pain until Belldandy's next shift. She's the only one who is allowed to heal him...if Skuld or I healed him, that would qualify us as being merciful, y'know. We can't have that, obviously! But since Bell is his actual Grief Agent, she gets to heal him, because it's all for the good. Heal him so we can do it all over again," Urd explained.

The Demoness in Mara was impressed with this; the Goddess in her was appalled.

"What does Belldandy lecture him about?"

"Oh, she talks to him about this-n-that! Often, she tells him how wonderful his life would be if he hadn't earned the attention of the Demoness Grief Office for his many shortcomings..."

"What shortcomings?" Mara asked, curious as to why this Earthrealm's Keiichi had been selected by the DGO. The only reason she had been dispatched to bring Grief to _her_ Earthrealm's Keiichi was due to the fact that his wish request had been decrypted by the Intercept System. Otherwise, he would have never been registered as a Grief candidate by the Vanagdrasil Mainframe.

But here, Keiichi had _earned_ the attention of the Demoness Grief Office for some infraction or evil...

"To answer your question, he was too individualistic in his outlook!" Urd said cheekily. "Since we're in Japan, individualism like his definitely goes against the grain. Keiichi is pregnant with egoism...he actually wished harm upon one of his racing opponents...some wimp of a guy named Toshiyuki Aoshima. The moment he harbored that evil in his heart, my sister was dispatched to wreak Grief in his life," Demoness Urd answered smugly.

"Ah...I see!" Mara noted, trying to sound contented and expectatious. But deep inside, she was strongly inclined towards disbelieving this explanation.

"You would be impressed with the work my younger sister is doing with him! She can really flay him mentally and emotionally! When I'm bored, I come down here just to listen in on her 'lectures'. She usually reminds Keiichi that if he wasn't in our 'care', he could have a girlfriend. She also reads reports from the many university-level auto clubs to him, and then tells him that he could be winning races and building motorbikes if he was free. Of course, she keeps him updated about all the events in the outside world that he is missing, such as sporting events, movies and concerts. Sometimes, she uses holophotics to depict how wonderful life in the outside is! The most delicious effect of all this...is that Bell's lectures only makes him want out so badly, he goes wild and tries to escape more often. Which is so _fun_, because it creates more chances for us to _punish_ him..." Urd explained with malign glee.

Mara was very familiar with this tactic. When bestowing Grief over a duration of time, an effective means of torture was to taunt the victim with scenes from the life they _could have had_...so that the estate of their Grief could be broadened by sheer regret. Keiichi's response to this technique was quite within the normative range: usually, the assignee would experience a bout of temporary insanity or an increased desperation to liberate themselves.

"And ever since that little fool Mara...whoops! I didn't mean _you_! I meant _her_...Goddess Mara," Urd quickly corrected herself. "Anyway, ever since that young slut of a Goddess stupidly fell in love with our assignee, my sister harps on this fact to wring his heart out. She tells him that Mara's going to leave him, she reminds him that Mara could free him but chooses not to, that she's cheating on him..."

"THAT'S NOT TRUE!!" an anguished voice bellowed from behind the metal door.

"Ah...the animal's been listening to us!" Urd quipped, brightly amused by Keiichi's protestation. "Like most mortals, he's little more than a creature who is unluckily sentient. No Goddess would ever want the likes of him. Imagine that...a Goddess in love with a mortal!"

"Imagine that..." Mara repeated sardonically to herself as Urd shouted "it will never happen!" through cupped hands towards the cell door, taunting Keiichi even more. The response was a flurry of fist-bangs on the metal door.

"And besides, Mara's barely a girl...while _this_ Mara is all woman!" Urd shouted at the metal door. "All Demoness! You should go for _her_, Keiichi! She's the real deal! She'd rock your socks off!"

Mara grimaced at Urd's choice of metaphors. She recalled the shocked expression on Keiichi's face when he realized that she wasn't Goddess Mara.

Keiichi had become terrified...

The other Mara...barely a _girl_? Then how could Keiichi have mistaken her for Goddess Mara? Mara started to wonder about this...but then decided that she didn't want to go there.

Mara had never seen her enigmatic counterpart for more than a split second. She only knew that the Goddess she had stumbled into...had resembled her to the point where she thought she was looking into a mirror. All she really noticed during those split-second glimpses were the shock of long bright curly hair and the beautiful face of her counterpart.

Keiichi...

The thought of that passionate kiss brought a blush to Mara's cheeks. Demoness Urd didn't fail to notice it.

"You're blushing again! Would..._do_ you want to return to the lava hotsprings, so that we can resume that which we left unfinished?" Urd asked.

"N..no! It would be...distracting. I am here because I want to visit with your charge," Mara emphasized. "I want to see what he looks like, and perhaps have a word with him so I can gainsay his inner torment and savor it. It's important that I assess his state of Grief!"

Demoness Urd got the message...her words were not a request but an instruction. She quickly heeded Mara's demand and prepared to depart.

"A word of warning. He's particularly deranged right now. Recently, he managed to venture out of his White Room cage...and during his escapade, he claimed to have encountered his Goddess girlfriend. We didn't learn much else; at that point, he went berserk and completely abandoned any lucidity of thought afterwards. His mind was so scrambled, we couldn't even read anything valuable from it for several days. Consequently, Belldandy chalked the whole episode up as a hallucinatory fragment of his fevered imagination. But since you closely resemble that little bitch of a Goddess, he might mistake you for her. Who knows what would happen then! He might even attack you...or he might try and molest you. Either way, I would handle him with care..." Urd cautioned as she handed Mara the electric rod.

"Ummm!" Mara said with a nod, noting that she understood.

"...unless you want him to handle you! And if you want to be handled, I could take you places he could never even dream of," Demoness Urd added playfully. With a wave of her hand, she opened the door to Keiichi's White Room...and Mara stepped inside. The room was featureless, except for the door. Once the door closed, it resolved itself in the white wall. For all intents and purposes, it wasn't there.

Keiichi was too busy devouring his 'meal' to notice that Mara had entered his anchor of imprisonment. He was hunched over his food in the corner, noisily sharking down his last piece of soaked bread.

Mara lowered herself down into a squat in the opposite corner and silently observed him.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

During their talk in the park, Belldandy had learned that Goddess Mara had created a Goddess Abode...she had been living in the transdimensional 'room' inside of an ice cream shoppe since she was assigned to the Earthrealm and Keiichi. She explained that she had created a stable warp-environ field in order to conceal herself from the three Demonesses while she was stationed on the Earthrealm. Every day when she woke up, she would emerge through the mirror across from the ice cream counter. She noted that this choice of venue had a strategic value as well; as this particular ice cream shoppe was frequented by Demoness Skuld, who would buy ice cream almost on a daily basis. By monitoring Demoness Skuld's comings and goings, Goddess Mara was able to surveil the temple with discretion. If Skuld was at the ice cream parlor, Banpei was in 'rest maintenance' mode.

They waited until the ice cream store was closed, then Goddess Mara used a key to enter through the delivery door. She justified her use of the key by explaining that "floating through the wall might be detected by one of the Demonesses, which would blow my cover." Belldandy was grateful, because this discretion on Goddess Mara's part had prevented her from being found out. If she couldn't heal an injured ankle...she certainly couldn't pass through solid matter!

As the flavorful aromas of the various specialty ice creams traced her nostrils, Belldandy's thoughts turned towards her younger sister: she found herself instinctively wishing that Skuld was here with her, so that she could watch her sister get blissed out by all these flavors. As the gnawing emptiness that was Skuld assailed her, Belldandy's optimistic mood was felled by this reminder of her sister's absence. The sweet tastes in the air only served to trigger pangs of heartsickness for her two sisters and Keiichi. Keiichi had treated her to ice cream at this very same shop on the way home from school many times.

With an effort, Belldandy fought to regain her perspective. But she kept returning to a fretful state of mind when she considered the possibility that the others might also be stranded in alternate Earthrealms...perhaps enduring situations far more challenging and dangerous than that which faced her and Mara...

As she looked at the neophyte Goddess bearing Mara's face, Belldandy observed to herself that, despite everything, it was such a nice relief to be in the company of an actual Goddess. She was worn out, being the only Goddess in this Goddess-deprived den of Demonesses.

Belldandy sensed that Goddess Mara seemed to notice her distress. Quickly, the younger Goddess hustled her through the mirror that lined the wall of the ice cream shop. Emerging from a mirror set into the wall of Mara's Earthrealm 'house', Belldandy was slightly cheered by the new surroundings.

The most noticeable tract was that Goddess Mara seemed to be a stuffed animal collector...she had mounds of plush cuties in every room of her Goddess Abode. As for the decor, her taste suited her early-teen-years age; everything was delicately pink, bright yellow, neon blue and purple. Posters of Japanese idol stars lined one wall. Belldandy noticed several pictures of Paris signed by "Aunt Peorth" in rose-pink ink on another wall. Origami sets and shoujo manga cluttered a series of pastel-blue shelves. Shoujo manga wallscrolls and anime character stuffed toys were neatly arranged behind lamps and furnishings.

The sheer innocence of Mara's Goddess Abode brought a sense of nostalgia to Belldandy, as she fondly remembered her own room at that age...the girlish dreamland she had retreated into for safety and frivolity.

"Hey, I have something _really cool_ to show you, sempai!" Goddess Mara announced urgently, tugging at Belldandy's sleeve. She walked over and picked up a fluffly rabbit-shaped remote control and pointed it at a wall that had been left conspicuously bare of posters and furnishings. The wall dissolved...and revealed _Yggdrasil_.

"Ehhhh?!" Belldandy gasped as the visual impression of her homerealm silenced her with its majesty. A few seconds passed, and the sight sobered her towards cautious reserve. What Mara had done was totally against the Rules! The Rules specifically stated that it was completely inappropriate to permanently bind a mortal world to Yggdrasil via any kind of dimensional portal or other means. Temporary portals were allowed under the most special of circumstances, like the Returning Mandala and the mirrors she used to travel back and forth between the Earthrealm and Yggdrasil. But a static transdimensional bridge between here and Yggdrasil...was decidedly prohibited! It would cause harm to the sentient Gate between the Earthrealm and Yggdrasil by depriving her the company of transient Gods and Goddesses.

She spun around and looked at Goddess Mara sternly.

"You know that this is a grave violation of everything we stand for!" Belldandy confronted the young Goddess. She flinched...but didn't have a trace of guilt on her face.

"I..it's not what you think, sempai!" she stammered.

"Doesn't she realize that she's done something very wrong?" Belldandy asked herself, returning her gaze to marvel upon the realms beyond the gateway. With a start, she realized that this was no portal to her homerealm...it was a _holomatrix representation of several scenic sections of Yggdrasil_! She felt her jaw slowly drop into open-mouthed astonishment as she realized how _real_ the image was. Fascinated by the realism and intricacy of the Mara's recreation, Belldandy almost felt like she was back home. The scene of Yggdrasil she witnessed was crafted with such accuracy, it had momentarily fooled her!

As they walked into the hologram, Belldandy was met by the familiar trappings of her homerealm. She beheld a series of CloudArcades, an AquaSun, several large BubbleTrees, a lengthy expanse of SpaceMist Forest, a small recreation of one of the Sysop Nodes, one of the Goddess Relief Office Retreat Centers...and in the distance, one of the Lord's floating CrystalPalaces. All had been rendered with loving care. Despite the fact that this holomatrix only simulated a fractional selection of the vistas of Yggdrasil, Belldandy felt daunted by the sense of spaciousness in Goddess Mara's creation. The composition of each element didn't lead to a sense of film-set crowding. Rather, it seemed to comfortably 'ease in' on her. Not only had Goddess Mara recreated each 'scene' of Yggdrasil with total fidelity...her _arrangement_ of each artistic arena into a whole had created an aesthetic harmony that was breathtaking to say the least.

Mara was not a GRO worker...she was an _artisan_!

It dawned on Belldandy that the young Goddess should have never been assigned to apprentice at the GRO. To Belldandy's trained eye, Mara's work on this holomatrix reflected the skills of an artist twice her age. There was a reason why Yggdrasil was so beautiful...it was an ever-evolving work of art created by the most talented of its Divine artists. As she looked out at Goddess Mara's 'Yggdrasil', she was even more convinced of consummate skill that had gone into this rendering. Gods and Goddesses with _this_ level of artistic execution were the Master-Crafters chosen to design parks and districts and offices in Yggdrasil.

And Mara was only 140 millennia old!

"It's _breath-taking_ ! This is enchanting…utterly_ beautiful_, Mara!" Belldandy praised with a genuine unhushed compliment. She looked at the young Goddess and observed that Mara was embarrassed by her own work; she was looking down at her feet, blushing.

"I worked on this recreation of some of my fave places in Yggdrasil, so I could fill in the time while I was planning new ways to try and save Keiichi. Actually, I made this because I kept getting so _homesick_ all the time! Since I can't go to Yggdrasil...at least I can bring Yggdrasil into my life a little bit," Mara said shyly in a near-whisper.

"Mara...it's okay to accept a compliment," Belldandy chided gently.

"You're not complimenting me...you're exaggerating!! It can't be _that_ good! I've never had any formal training in HoloMatrixing. I'm not good at a..anything! I..I just wanted to try and make something that didn't look utterly retarded," Mara replied shyly.

Belldandy patted her on the head.

"Mara, it's quite possible that you _shouldn't_ be in the Goddess Relief Office. I don't want you to misinterpret what I'm about to say...but sometimes the Ygg Mainframe has been known to make mistakes in where it assigns Goddesses to work," she explained. It was a lie, of course...the Yggdrasil Mainframe _never_ made such mistakes, unless it was compromised by a virus. And the chances of _that_ happening were infinitesimal...

Yet, the infinitesimal had happened twice recently, so it could have happened _here_ as well. Curiously, both times directly involved she and her sisters. Celestine had usurped the order of the Ygg Mainframe by introducing a virus into it. And Urd had discovered the damaged Deep Stacks, which linked her to Cevn...and Isilblius.

"Stop it!" Belldandy said to her mounting dread, almost speaking the words aloud.

"No! The Mainframe couldn't have possibly made a mistake in my case...because if it did, I would be seen as a failure! I _will_ be a GRO agent!" the young Goddess quickly protested.

"Mara, Mara, Mara..." Belldandy said, trying to calm her down. "If you respect my opinion, then you should believe me when I feel that such a mistake was made in your case."

"That can only mean that _I'm_ the mistake! This is my first GRO assignment, and I'm screwing it up! You're just trying to break the news to me kindly," Goddess Mara said, her eyes misting over with tears.

"Not at all! _This_," Belldandy said, swinging her arms in a wide gesture to take in the HoloMatrix, "is no ordinary accomplishment! The fact that you created all of this...on the _Earthrealm_...from just your memories, is nothing less than pure wizardry."

"R..really?" Mara asked, still sobbing.

"Yep! _Really_ really!!" Belldandy exclaimed peppily, nodding her head. The arcadia of Yggdrasil that this Goddess had created extended beyond mere wizardry; it was the act of a gifted prodigy. It was even more than a prodigious achievement; a creation possessing this grandeur of artistry would be an act of genius if executed by a trained artisan. But being the creation of an adolescent Goddess with no formal training…it was nothing less than a miracle! Taking full measure of the intricacy and care she had lavished on it, Belldandy felt awed and humbled. With proper guidance, this Goddess could create iconic masterworks in Yggdrasil, the kind of commissions that the Lord Himself would sponsor.

Mara's joyful expression quickly turned into an uncertain frown.

"But if I can't be in the Goddess Relief Office...then I'll lose my assignment. Which means that I can't grant Keiichi's wish! Which means _I'll lose Keiichi_!!" Goddess Mara shouted, her voice cracking with panic.

"Perhaps there is a way!" Belldandy quickly interjected. "You can remain here on the Earthrealm, and still be apprenticed to the Artisan's Guild. If the Lord were to see what you've done here, He would surely recognize that you have been misassigned. Not because you're lacking in ability to provide Goddess Relief services, Mara...but because the truest expression of your skills lies elsewhere. When they see how talented you are at art, I'm certain they'll let you Inculcate the Artisan apprenticeship here!" Belldandy quickly noted. Instead of succoring the anxious Goddess, her words only seemed to cast Mara into a suspicious mood.

Mara regarded her with questioning eyes.

"Who is that Demoness that hangs out with you, the one I saw that looks like me? And why can't you _float_, if you're a Senior First Class Goddess?"

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Mara eyed Keiichi warily as he shifted to face her after he finished eating. His face was slimed with the food he just ate as he sized her up with hooded eyes punctuated with wariness and guile. She noticed how tattered his clothes were: the knees and elbows were ripped out; his long-sleeve shirt was missing a cuff; blood wrote a brown scroll down one leg of his pants. A delirious gleam prismed in his eyes as he recognized her.

"Ma..Mara?" he choked.

Crab-like, he scrambled over to her, almost tumbling over himself in his haste to close the distance. He was disheveled, filthy...but it was definitely Keiichi.

"YOU'RE NOT MARA!!" he screamed, pulling up short a couple meters away from her. His eyes started to pool with the watery panic she had witnessed before, when she first encountered him.

"Wait...wait!" Mara shouted back. Keiichi kept screaming, so she reached out and slapped him.

Hard.

His head whip-spinned to the side with the impact of her palm. Mara held her fists in front of her defensively, expecting him to attack. As soon as he faced her again, his hands were at her throat...prying and digging into her.

"Stop it, Keiichi!"

When he didn't release his chokehold, Mara reached over and slid her forearm between his arms, expertly reaching around his wrist and lifting it up, twisting him to the side. Still gripping his wrist, she maneuvered it behind his back and pushed it tight against his backbone, and then forced him face-first towards the nearest wall.

"Okay...are you going to settle down, or do I have to break your arm?" Mara hissed in his ear as she pinned him up against the wall. She wasn't angry, nor did she plan to harm him; she just wanted him to slow his racing thoughts down for an instant.

"Go ahead and..and break it! You're no different from those other Demonesses!" Keiichi growled between clenched teeth.

"Oh yes I am! I'm here to _free you_!"

"Y..you're lying! You're a _Demoness_! All Demonesses lie! This is another one of Belldandy's tricks You're not real!! You're some kind of solid hologram or something!" Keiichi shouted. Mara continued to restrain him; despite his struggles, she was still much more physically powerful.

Then she smelled his sweat...which started to trigger a curious reaction. His manly odor gave her pause, as she fought with impulses to hug him, to love-wrestle with him...

"NO! Stop it!" she confronted herself.

"What's the matter, can't handle it!" Keiichi taunted, hearing the confusion in her voice. With a sheer of exertion, he slid a leg free and wedged it next to her ankle. With a surprising vault of strength, he twisted...Mara could feel his arm pop out of his shoulder...and spun around. He kicked Mara's other leg out from under her and swung his body over hers.

Pinning her to the ground.

"Now look who's on top!" Keiichi gloated. He was straddling Mara, his hips wrapped tight around her waist as he forced her wrists back against the floor.

Despite her precarious position, all Mara wanted to do was lean up and kiss him. He was so close...

Instead, she stilled herself.

"Why don't you fight me?" Keiichi asked, his face drawn into a questioning scowl.

"Because I don't want to fight you! Like I said...I'm here to help you!" Mara insisted.

"Y..you look so much like her! Like _my_ Mara! It's...hard...for me to look at you this closely, to feel you right next to me...and not think about her. If she was only older, she'd look just like you," Keiichi admitted, his chest heaving from his recent exertions. He reached up and held his head on either side, as if he was a madman trying to pull a psychosis out of his temples.

"It's kinda getting to you, isn't it?" Mara commented. "Ever since I got stranded in this forsaken place, I've been obsessed about you. Because of _her_! If we weren't fighting right now, I'd..."

"You'd what?"

"I'd do _this_!" Mara said, her voice leavened sultry with desire as she pulled Keiichi's head down and kissing him on the lips...

"How's that for someone who isn't _real_?"

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Mara, I really _am_ a Senior First Class Goddess!" Belldandy started to explain. "But it seems at present that I am lacking a significant portion of my Goddess powers."

"You can say that again! You can't even _levitate your Earthrealm manifest_. A bird could fly higher than you!" Goddess Mara noted as she gracefully pirouetted in the air in front of Belldandy.

"Show off!" Belldandy thought disapprovingly. She mentally girded herself, measuring whether this young Goddess could handle the truth about the circumstances surrounding her and Mara's presence here. Truth was always preferable to falsehood; but given _this_ situation, would it be sensible to lay it all out on the line for Goddess Mara? Despite being in Mara's own apartment, in the middle of a fictional construct of Yggdrasil, Belldandy felt swept up in ill-ease. Twenty meters away was Mara's main living room, just outside of sight.

Goddess Mara remained hovering in the air, clutching a large stuffed animal replica of Ryo-oh-ki from the Tenchi Muyo anime to her breast. Belldandy recognized it because Skuld had one just like it...

She remembered when the stuffed animals had become vivified, after Peorth granted Banpei's wish. Skuld's Ryo-oh-ki had quickly dismantled the storeroom door and gorged itself on all the carrots in the house.

Goddess Mara was stroking the plush toy's long ears with nervous motions while Belldandy sang to herself to return herself to _this_ side of reality.

"Could we _sit_ down together, Mara? I don't feel comfortable talking to you when you're floating above my head. You have me at a disadvantage," Belldandy asked.

"I suppose I can indulge you," Goddess Mara said cheekily as she floated down to the ground in front of Belldandy. She gestured towards one of the ground-reaching petals of a nearby Hazelnut Lotus, and then seated herself on one of the petals, perching on it like a fairy-girl. The petals slowly waved up and down in the breeze; the gently tiding motion suggested the sensation of sitting on a floating dock or boat harbored on the ocean to Belldandy. Belldandy preferred to let her legs dangle over the side of the wide-leaf.

"Explain yourself," Goddess Mara asked, trying to sound harsh.

Belldandy clearly sensed that the young Goddess was trying to put on a show of bravado. But the effect was lost on her, as the tang of fear was quite evident in Goddess Mara's voice. If anything, Goddess Mara was probably _more_ insecure now that she had discovered that Belldandy didn't have the kind of Divine firepower she first thought she had.

"I really don't know where to begin."

"Well, then start at the beginning!" Mara advised impatiently. Belldandy was again reminded that she was dealing with a Goddess who was barely into her teens...emotionally, just a slight bit older than Skuld. The difference between 12 and 14 was emotional stability...a 140,000 year-old Goddess was far more emotionally 'all over the place' than a 120,000 year-old. Goddess Mara had already demonstrated that she could pivot between cupidity and resentment with mercurial swiftness. Now she was being impetuous.

"We were trying to save a friend of mine, who had died at the hand of my sister, who loved him...but then had to kill him, so that the Multiverse could be saved from..." Belldandy sputtered out in a stream of anxious phrases.

"What are you talking about? She _loved_ him...and then she _killed_ him!" Mara exclaimed in disbelief. "This doesn't make any sense!"

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Now I've gone and done it!" Mara thought to herself as she woke up.

Curled next to Keiichi.

Naked.

The chill air in the White Room seemed to bite at her feet and every other part of her body not covered by the blanket or Keiichi. Wakeful now, Mara rolled over on her back and softly banged the back of her head against the hard floor in frustration, not wanting to rouse him from his deep sleep. Keiichi was sleeping soundly, a smile etched upon his lips.

It was so random! In an uncontrollable heated flash of sexual excitement...she had crossed every sensible boundary of her being. There was no going back now.

Flesh is only the raiment of the Soul. Her Soul and his had touched, last night.

Mara closed her eyes and re-envisioned the inflowing memories of passion with a mixture of joy and regret. The pureness of the moment had seemed to blaze forth like the heart of a nova, admitting sensuous liberties...liberties she would have never imagined herself taking with Keiichi. The erroneous constancy of passion that had deceived her heart previously...had come unsealed the moment Keiichi had pinned her down.

Keiichi had become her aphrodisiac.

How far she had strayed from her intentions! Mara had simply wanted to interview him, hoping to find out what he knew about the Demonesses, so she could effect his freedom. So she could effect _her_ freedom as well...from the confines of the seizing bouts of lust she had been plagued with in this mirror-reality. So she could prevent something like _this_ from ever happening.

But the past had ruined itself on itself; as she and Keiichi had engaged in a torrid expression of sex, indifferent to every circumstance and sense and wisdom.

He had completely forgotten that she was a Demoness.

She had completely forgotten who she was.

Despite his weakened state, Keiichi had _a lot_ of stamina last night! She still felt a brushfire of delicate sparks all over her skin where it brushed against his sleeping form. In the glories of their shared breathes and bodies, he had seemed to flow into her with an electrical energy as constant as that of a generator.

Mara had to admit...he had certainly generated _her_ into a pitch of excitement. After that first kiss, it was as if an invisible carpet that had separated the two of them had been torn asunder. Within minutes, Mara had shed every stitch of clothing she had.

It felt as if she was getting drunk on his caresses...

She had known that it was too late before she had even taken off any of her clothes.

Mara was surprised by the degree of carnality she had sowed as she plundered Keiichi's body with her hands. Keiichi had been equally possessed by the eroticism of the moment, touching her in all the right places...not too desperate, not too timid, not too urgent...and oh so fervent! He had fallen on her, had plunged his heat deep inside of her, had passioned her until both were sweaty and exhausted.

And then afterwards...he had confessed to her that he was a virgin.

That he _had_ been a virgin.

"If my sister Belldandy finds out about _this_, she'll kill me, Goddess or not!" Mara noted to herself as she remembered his after-words from last night. She looked at him and shuddered, buried by the sands of regret. It was as if she had just had sex with Belldandy's fiancé! Even though this was a different Keiichi, in a different reality...Mara's rote instincts were jacking her with unpleasant guilts.

"Demonesses aren't supposed to feel guilt!" Mara said under her breath as she mussed her hair. Bless it, she couldn't even enjoy the afterglow!

She rolled out from under the blanket and gathered her clothes. As she dressed herself, she made a study of Keiichi's sleeping form as the discourse of her confusion filled her heart, laying itself down on a wind full of smiles...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --


	92. Pt 92: Keiichi: Untethering the Shadow ...

**Part 92: Keiichi: Untethering the Shadow -- 4th Movement**

"Special delivery for Mr. MoriStar!" the girl in the Kanto Express Delivery Services uniform shouted. Normally, one of his household staff would suffice to sign a special delivery, but the girl was adamant that _he_ sign for it personally. So he was summoned by the gatesman to the front gate of his hilltop mansion to authorize the parcel.

"Must be important!" he grumbled as he walked down the cobblebrick driveway that sauntered down the hillside.

Once again, he marveled at the expansiveness of his estate. The large parcel of premium hilltop land enclosing his mansion was worth many billions of yen. By comparison, an entire year's salary at Whirlwind repair shop might have allowed him to buy one or two square meters of property in this section of Tokyo. Enough ground to stand on, and no more. Just the real estate under his driveway would have cost him several lifetime's worth of salary, were he to have graduated into a middle-class job.

As he strode towards the driveway gate, Keiichi could see the giddy excitement on the delivery girl's face, no different than the expressions he witnessed in the sea of countless fans as he looked out from the stage during a performance.

Obviously, she was a fan.

He reached the gate, only to hear his gatesman grumbling about how he should have had one of the maids drive him down the driveway in the golfing cart next time...it would be quicker.

Of course, once Keiichi signed for the parcel, he had to provide the obligatory autograph for the adoring delivery girl, who just happened to have a DVD of his Kohaku Uta Gassen performance.

Sora was currently pursuing a lawsuit to recover royalties in regards to this very DVD. The 20XX Kohaku DVD was the top-selling music DVD set of the year, and NHK hadn't paid him a penny over the past two years. Sora wouldn't accept the proffered royalty checks, because that would indicate an ipso facto confirmation of the contract. The legal arguments centered on the whether his electrifying performance was responsible for the fact that the DVD had sold 15 times as many copies as all the previously Kohaku DVDs _put together_. With seemingly logical corporate greed, the execs of NHK were paying him the same split of royalties that all the performers received...about 1/40th of the proceeds.

Naturally, the delivery girl wouldn't know a thing about this. Were it not for his flamboyant closing act at the New Year's Eve special, the network would have never even considered saturating the market with the Kohaku Uta Gassen TV special on DVD. And now they were selling DVDs to _his fans_, and not paying him a single yen in recompense!

"Geez!" he said to himself as he started back up the hill, shaking the parcel in an effort to guess what was inside.

He strolled past the twin fountain pools that marked the approach to his hilltop 'castle' and entered the foyer. Smelling a delicious aroma, he toured the kitchen to see what was for lunch. He sampled several dishes and praised his chef. Two maids approached him, requesting instructions on how he wanted the furniture rearranged in the guesthouse living room. As he made for the marble stairway, his chauffeur intercepted him, wanting his input on which company should come over and detail his new Rolls Royce.

He had liked his Aero F90 so much, he had decided to buy a _second_ luxury car, this time a sedan. And a third...and a fourth...

Might as well fill up the garage!

Sora was so pissed after he told her about the new Rolls, she swore she would never talk to him again. But she came back a few days later, composed and cool...with a smirk on her face. She even teased him about his new purchase, claiming that she should at least get one chance behind the wheel...or she wouldn't help him loophole out of the inevitable luxury taxes for it next year. Naturally, each new purchase was a promo gig, as his condition always included an article in some related magazine. For the Rolls, he and Sora had flown to England for the requisite article in the _London Times_. Along with performing a three sellout concert at the O2 Dome arena. Two years after Kohaku Gassen, he and Sora had developed their partnership so tightly, they were totally in sync on business concerns.

So now Sora was the joint owner of a number of luxury cars and supercars. This was fun at times, because it meant that he and Sora could talk business on the road, rather than in her suite of offices in his mansion. Not to mention the vicarious thrill he felt when Sora got a bit of 'racing spirit' in her blood. She was starting to get a rep as well, as she had taken the Aero on the racetrack with a reporter in tow for an article for _Mizz Bizz_ magazine, a magazine focusing on young businesswomen. A few minutes later, Sora pulled the Aero over and said reporter emerged from the supercar green-in-the-face. Sora insisted upon finishing that article somewhere else; after all, she didn't want some reporter chick vomiting in a 150 million yen car.

The memory bought chuckles to him as he walked up the semi-arc marble staircase up to the second floor landing, only to be accosted by another maid, who reminded him that the workmen were going to install his new bathtub in the master bath.

"Can't I even get a minute's peace and quiet in my own house!" Keiichi snapped, frightening the maid into silence. She nodded sheepishy and then quickly made off, probably to get away from him.

"I get a couple days to myself every month or so, and instead of being able to relax in my own house, my house staff has to constantly pester me about this-n-thats! Dammit, I'm going to lock myself in the tree house and kick everybody out! Either that, or I'm going to fly to Australia and hang out in Sydney with Anni," he announced to himself.

The tree house sounded better,

On a whim, Keiichi had ordered a tree house to be built in the giant oak tree near the mansion. It was equipped with every modern convenience; the most important convenience being that nobody was allowed in it beside he. Not even Anni or Sora.

Walking briskly across the lawn towards his treehouse, he nodded to one of the security guards to follow him. As was customary, the guard took his position underneath the wooden ladder as Keiichi climbed the stairway to his heaven of retreat.

Once inside the treehouse, he opened the 'important' package.

"What the hell?" he said as he read the title of the DVD:

_"Les Femmes Nu du Francais"_

"Oh boy...a sexy videodisc!" he thought, amused by the fact that someone had sent him a racy movie. Probably some fanboy from France who was into manga and anime and J-Pop...

"Well? Should I?" he asked himself, glancing alternately between the disc and the TV. For some strange reason, he mind landed on the memory of Urd appearing through the TV when he played her "Sexy Sister" videotape that day seven years ago, back in "relative Japan" that he had been away from for two and a half years...

Maybe it could happen again!

He looked over the package, confirming his suspicion that there was no return address.

"Well, here goes..." he announced as he fed the disc to his DVD player. The DVD started up with some loungey fanfare music that backgrounded the animated rolling titles.

It didn't appear to be a sexy movie.

He couldn't understand the French titles, other than having a slight awareness they were in French. Once the music finished, the title dissolved into a grainy image...

Keiichi lurched forward as he recognized his old room at his parents' house.

"What the..?" he gasped. It looked like one of those spycam clips from a reality TV show, except that the black & white image was of a much higher quality than a spycam could achieve. Not knowing what to make of this, he leaned back in his chair, stunned by what he was seeing.

On his TV, he saw an image of himself as he was in high school. It _was_ him; he could see the spring and summer student uniforms of his high school hanging on the closet door. The person in the picture was pacing around the room holding a cellphone. Keiichi choked down a heavy gulp of air when it struck him that the scene on his HDTV was _real_! It was authentic...the familiar shelves of model kits, auto manuals culled from numerous used bookstores, boxes of motorcycle parts. The room was cluttered with these, each in its place...exactly as he remembered.

"Is this some kind of joke?" he said as he tried to pause the DVD.

_Nothing happened. _

Figuring that the disc might be jammed in the tray, he clicked the remote to shut off the DVD.

_Nothing happened._

Frustrated, Keiichi stood up and walked over to the DVD player. He pressed the power button...but the DVD stayed on. He regarded the image on the HDTV; for some reason, it was paused. Frustrated, he unplugged the DVD player and the HDTV.

_Nothing happened._

"This seems awfully familiar!" Keiichi noted. Suddenly, he had the briefest of flashes. Perhaps Urd had come to rescue him! His elation at this possibility was weathered; his life here was _good_, far better than he could imagine. In fact, the only missing piece was Belldandy. He felt torn by the notion of having to leave his life here. At this point, after being in this reality for almost two years and six months, did he really want to return to "relative Japan"?

Resigned to the inevitable, he cobbled a can of tea from the mini-fridge and sat back down in his chair...

"_Chapter One: The Meeting_"

_"I can't believe it! I have a -_date-_ with Sayoko Mishima! Yeah, that babe that studies in France every year!" he heard his voice shouting into the phone. His younger self was pacing around the room, occasionally leaping into the air with youthful cheer._

_"Yeah, it's tonight. We're actually gonna go to a karaoke place, just the two of us! Uh huh! I'm not lying to you, she _-did-_ say she was going to meet me at 7pm at some place in Tokyo! Jealous?" he teased his friend on the phone._

_His friend on the phone shot off a snappy comeback, and then closed by asking if Keiichi wanted to go to one of the racing parks with him this weekend. Keiichi readily agreed and then clicked his cellphone off. Tossing the cellphone on his futon, Keiichi resumed his tearing search through his clothes closet with the desperation of a fast-food worker during lunch hour, looking for a suitable shirt and dress pants for his date._

_He couldn't get the image of a smiling Sayoko out of his mind. She was totally kawaii! He would _-have-_ to dress up for an evening out with her._

_"What am I gonna to wear?" he shouted at the ceiling, tormented with teenage angst. Unfortunately, being a t-shirt and jeans sorta guy, he didn't have too many 'dating clothes' in his closet, especially the kind of dress clothes that suited the occasion. He finally decided on a pair of gray Dockers slacks and a pin-stripe print shirt, an outfit his mother had bought for him during his senior class trip. One that he never had never worn, of course. He suspected that his mom had gotten the dress outfit not only for the senior class trip...but for job interviews as well. Whatever his mother's reasoning, he was going to dress up for something far more important._

_"Thank you Mom!" he shouted smugly, kissing the shirt as he dressed himself..._

Keiichi noticed that the DVD seemed to freeze when he wasn't looking at the TV. He had gotten a second chilled tea out of the refrigerator, chiding himself for his ignorance. This was obviously some sort of prank that Peorth or some other Divine character had pulled on him! He should have known that it was Peorth, not Urd, who had sent him the DVD. After all, the title was in French. The odd thing was that he was immersed in the DVD, as if he was actually living the life of his younger self. As if he _was_ his younger self.

He was both witness and participant.

Once he returned to his chair, the DVD started up again. The image on the TV dissolved into the interior of the bathroom of his parents' home. His younger self was frantically primping, trying to comb his hair just right. After a couple minutes of this, the image faded into a streetscene. He saw his younger self standing under the awning in front of a karaoke club, looking nervously up and down the street as the flashy lights colored him in reds, blues and greens...

_"...Where is she?! She was supposed to be here at 7! And it's after _-9pm-_! Dammit, she probably stood me up! I knew this was too good to be true! I have _-no-_ luck with girls! In fact, I know I'll never have a girlfriend!" he shouted, kicking the wall with the heel of his shoe. Several passersby shook their heads sadly at him as he stood alone on the sidewalk in front of the neon-lit entrance to a karaoke club._

_As he was waiting, one of those late-May 'instant' Tokyo rainfalls dazzled the streetlights, pelting him with liquid night. He dashed for cover under the alcove in front of the Karaoke club and waited, looking miserable. The swell of anonymity didn't stop his heart from nearly thumping out of his chest in disappointment..._

_A red BMW filled with giggling girls pulled up to the curb. Keiichi gawked his head at the sight of so many vivacious and boisterous high-schoolers. Their loud chatter became subdued as a door opened...and Sayoko Mishima emerged from it._

_"-_LUCKY!!- _Thank you God!!" Keiichi exclaimed to himself as he saw her step out of the car and open an umbrella. _

_It was as if the sun had come out from behind the clouds...Keiichi felt his spirits immediately brighten up. He turned away from Sayoko just for a second, so he could shake his fist in triumph. Then he spun on his heel and waited for her as she dashed towards the karaoke club under her umbrella._

_Mental images of he and Sayoko walking together in the rain under a single umbrella danced in Keiichi's mind._

"_Oh, I am _-so-_ sorry I'm late!! My friends had some..uh..car problems, so I couldn't get here at 7pm. I didn't think you'd feel too comfortable if I had the family chauffeur bring me, so I had no choice but to wait," she explained as she joined him under the awning, folding up her umbrella._

_"I can't believe you came!"_

_"I told you I would come! Why wouldn't I? I know...you thought I'd be a no-show because I'm so rich and talented. Don't worry, all the guys always think that! Besides, I think you're kinda cute. I never imagined that I'd meet someone like you at a motocross meet! Not to mention that you were the winner of the race that day! It must be exciting, riding motorcycles on those courses," Sayoko said, flurried with light-heartedness._

_Keiichi couldn't keep his eyes off of her, he was so giddy. And she had _-complemented-_ him! _

_Score! _

_Sayoko had the gentlest light brown eyes. Her hair was almost geometrically straight in places...and yet it had a peculiar angular weave as it cascaded down past her shoulders. She had highlighted it with several different tones of dark brown. _

_Her lips..._

_The feeling of having a girl next to him...a girl who _-wanted-_ to be next to him...for the first time in his life! Keiichi was almost intoxicated with joy._

_"Well, are you just going to stand there or do ya wanna go in?" Sayoko prompted._

_"Yeah! Let's party!" Keiichi said, snapping out of his momentary fugue. He fretted that Sayoko might think he was an idiot for trancing out so much on her looks, but she stood closer to him instead. He could smell an expensive perfume mixed with the tang of alcohol on her breath. With a nod, he opened the door for her, ushering her into the karaoke club._

_The karaoke club was filled with salarymen, OLs and college students. Keiichi was thankful he had reserved one of the booth rooms; this place was slammed with an evening crowd of karaoke aficionados. In the luxurious lobby, he spied the owner's stand, and then paid rent for one of the best booth rooms. He could only afford three hours, as this karaoke club catered to a well-heeled clientele. Looking at Sayoko's smile, he reminded himself why he had decided to splurge. Counting out the rest of his money, he added a tray of snacks and a bottle of wine to the bill. He hoped that three hours would be enough time to warm Sayoko up._

_He didn't have any more money to spend._

_Once everything was square with the club owner, he crossed his fingers, hoping that Sayoko would recognize his sacrifice for what it was. His cashflow wasn't that much to begin with...Sayoko probably spent more in a day than he earned in a month. The only money he earned was from weekend pickup jobs repairing and tuning motorcycles. He looked at Sayoko sheepishly, feeling embarrassed that he didn't have more money to spend on her. _

_Sayoko was dressed in a sleeveless sweater-top peppered with grey, blue, purple and red streaks cleverly knitted into the fabric. Her dark grey leather mini-skirt wrapped tight around her hips; Keiichi could see the sexy sway of her walk as she entered the karaoke booth in front of him. The miniskirt was highlighted by some kind of stylish wide belt with circular brass rings looped around it...Keiichi wasn't a fashion expert, but he could hear a metallic jingling as she walked._

_In other words, she was a _-major league babe-_!_

_"There must be a God, if a cutie like her is willing to go out with a guy like me!" Keiichi said under his breath as Sayoko preceded him into the karaoke room. She casually inspected the audio equipment before she turned on the TV that was suspended from the ceiling._

_"This is nice! I have to freshen up, I'll be back in a bit!" Sayoko said, tugging at her evening purse for emphasis._

_After she walked out, Keiichi sat down on one of the couches and started wringing his hands with anticipation._

_A couple minutes later, he could hear feminine giggling just outside the door._

_"Could she have brought her friends?" he thought. Having Sayoko to himself would have been better, but if she invited her friends to crash the scene, it might be to his advantage._

_It was all good._

_The door swung open, and Keiichi felt something wet criss-crossing his chest._

--"YOU LOSER!!"--

_In complete contrast to her giggly happy-go-lucky demeanor a few minutes ago, Sayoko Mishima was now glaring at him angrily. Her expression was one of the utmost haughty disdain. Keiichi gasped at the terrifying transformation, lurching to a standing position as he noticed three other girls standing in the doorway around her. One of the girls threw an opened cup of cooked instant noodles at him while the other two were spraying him down with bottled ketchup and chocolate._

_Keiichi felt his whole body go rigid with disbelief and shock._

_"Wh..wha..wha.." he stuttered._

_"Wh..wha..wha.." Sayoko repeated his words, sharply mocking him. She started laughing cruelly._

_"Ha aha ha! What do you _-think-_ we're doing, idiot? You actually believe that a girl like our friend Sayoko would want to date a worthless _-little- _guy like you? You're a nothing..." one of the girls said, each word spraying Keiichi with sarcasm._

_"...a..are you doing?" Keiichi finished his sentence, still stunned into disbelief. He looked at Sayoko and her three friends, pleading with his eyes._

_"Let's see why! You're so brokeass, you could only afford this room for three hours. You don't even own a car. You dress like a slob, even when you try to dress up. You're not even as tall as I am! You stink of motor grease all the time, and you think you're some kind of a hero just because you won some local motocross race against a few other high school motorgeeks. Haa! You're nothing but a pathetic lamer! No girl would want to date you with all your 'assets'!" Sayoko assessed sarcastically, bringing howls of laughter from her three friends._

_Behind her, her three friends were giggling hysterically as they showered Keiichi and the room with food. One of them hurled an egg at Keiichi, which splattered against his head._

_It stank of a foul, rotten odor._

_"Heee ha ha ha! Lookit him! Whatta loser! He's too much of a wimp to even try and fight back!" the girls chortled. It finally dawned on Keiichi that this whole 'date' had been nothing more than a cruel setup by Sayoko to amuse herself and her friends by abusing him. He looked down at his shoes, fighting back tears of humiliation._

_"You stupid jerk! Not even man enough to say something back to me? Can't you even talk back? You're nothing more than a shameless coward! You're less than a man! How dare you think you could date someone like me, you stupid asshole!" Sayoko snapped. "My _-dog-_ has more money and good taste than you do! IDIOT!"_

_One of the girls opened up a jar of jelly and whipped at him, holding onto the jar so that its contents were flung all over his face._

_"Oy, Sayoko! We're running out of food."_

"-Loser!!-"_ Sayoko shouted. In a final mocking gesture, she cleared her throat and spat at him, landing a blob of spittle on his face. Without another word, she spun on her heel and left, slamming the door behind her._

_His five minutes in Hell were over._

_Keiichi had never felt so humiliated in all his life as he heard the giggling voices recede into silence. He was so upset, he could feel the room spinning. His ears were buzzing with bloodflow._

_All alone in the world, all alone in the rented karaoke room._

_He collapsed onto one of the couches, deep sobs wracking him as he cried out his despair. His mind flitted like a burning butterfly, filled with remorseful conjectures and flashes of shame. How could a human being possibly mistreat another human being with such callousness? It wasn't his fault that he found Sayoko attractive! Any guy would hope for the best if they had a chance to go on a date with her! And she had abused him of his own feelings, turning his attraction to her against him, nailing him with spikes of betrayal that dug painfully deep into his being. She had _-used-_ him! Just like teasing a pet, she had used him for her own form of sick entertainment._

-- --"You loser!"-- --

_Two words that haunted him more than a lifetime's worth of chastisements, embarrassments and taunts. He looked around the room and shuddered...the karaoke booth was ruined! Chocolate syrup, ketchup, mustard, smashed rotten eggs and mushed-out ramen noodles were everywhere._

_"Why me?!" he shouted._

"EEEEIIIIIYYYYYAAAAAHHHHH!!"

_He started screaming uncontrollably, unable to stop the pain from finding his voice. His throat wretched with shout after shout of emotional agony._

_His screams attracted the attention of the karaoke club owner, who was shouting at the door. After several heavy doorknocks, the owner barged in._

_"WHAT THE HELL!!" the heavyset man screamed as he saw the room. Keiichi kept screaming maniacally, not even caring about the owner's presence...until the large man walked over and decked him with a punch to the jaw that sent him flailing over one of the couches._

_Seeing stars and bluebirds, Keiichi could only bow his head and grovel as he realized the gravity of his situation. The room was ruined for the night, or even worse._

_"You're going to jail for this! This room is _-trashed-_! Just look at the carpet and the furniture!" the balding owner screamed angrily as he paced around the room, stomping his feet. A queue of onlookers filled the hallway outside of the room, shaking their heads sadly at the site of the ruined boy in the ruined karaoke booth..._

_"I'm sorry! I'm sorry! I'm sorry! I'll do anything to clean it up!" Keiichi said, getting on his hands and knees and kissing his forehead to the floor in prostration._

_"Soooo...you expect that, just because you're a kid, that I've gotta let you off just because you apologize? You're a dumbass!" the karaoke manager shouted, hands on his hips, his voice thick with disgust. Several people looking in through the door snickered..._

"Pleeeeze!!"

_"I'll give you a chance, since you're such a loser. Obviously, those four girls that came to your room did this. But you're responsible! I expect you to stay here all night if necessary! I want you to clean up this room until it's cleaner than a newborn baby's ass! I don't care if your girlfriend dumped you...you better take your courage and clean up this mess!" the owner demanded._

_With that, he grabbed Keiichi roughly by the arm and hauled him towards the end of the hallway. _

_"There's your stuff," he shouted, shoving Keiichi into the janitor's closet. "And you can't leave until _-I say so-!_ And if you _-do-_ make a run for it before finishing the job, I _-will-_ call the police and report you for recklessness and property damage! Plus I'll make sure you get the shit beat out of you by some of my 'friends'!" the owner threatened._

_"O..o..okay!" Keiichi acknowledged with a deep bow._

_"Stupidass loser of a kid!" Keiichi heard him curse as he stomped down the hallway back to his desk at the front of the karaoke club._

_To Keiichi's ears, the many converging, overlapping strains of gaily cheerful singalong ballads from all the karaoke booth rooms seemed to knit together, blurring into a heavy-hearted symphony of despair._

As he watched the TV, Keiichi could feel it in his heart. A pressure of empathy, clawing in his chest. His temples were pounding with anger and shame, as if he had really been there. The image faded into blackness, and a caption appeared reading "Six hours later".

The viewpoint on the TV showed a sidewalk outside the karaoke club. It was very late into the night, as there was little traffic, pedestrian or otherwise. Many of the storefront neon signs were turned off, the noren curtains stowed away for the evening. The sidewalks were bare except for prowling winos...

...and a singular sweat-soaked figure that emerged from the front doorway of the karaoke club. The figure was hunched and tentative, as if hiding from himself. A thick balding man appeared in the doorway, taunting him a final time. Hang-headed, the figure turned and shuffled up the street, his gait as slow and tired as an octogenarian's.

Up in his tree house, Keiichi felt his heartstrings playing along with those of his weeping younger self on the TV. He didn't have any idea why someone had mailed him this DVD. Instead of being entertaining, it had cast a dreadful focus on the misadventures of his younger self. Not _his_ younger self...he had undergone no such humiliation at the hands of Sayoko in "relative Japan". The worse Sayoko had done was chew him out for being selfish. That...and several years of jealous fits.

This was someone else's history. But yet, it was _his_ history as well. Keiichi sensed that he was feeling too disturbed by the scene for this to just be some pseudo-dramatic slot-sketch of his life. Despite this truth, he found tears in his eyes and a strangely unsettled feeling in his heart, feeling each misfortune as if it was his own.

In a very real sense, he considered the possibility that this _had_ happened to a part of him...the Keiichi MoriStar part.

Or had it? He just didn't know...

"_Chapter Two: The Loving and the Wishing_"

_His clothes were ruined with food stains...one of the knees to his dress pants was ripped from scrubbing the carpet. His arms were sore from the cleaning effort. Several of his fingers were bleeding from open wounds blistered into them by hand-scrubbing the carpet._

_But his heart hurt the worst._

_Keiichi walked aimlessly down the street, wine bottle in hand, angrily kicking every metal can that he came across. The karaoke owner had let him keep the bottle, observing in a gruff voice of callous empathy that "a poor loser like you needs to hit the bottle after the night you've had!"_

_"I hate all people over 40!" Keiichi screamed angrily as he took another swig, remembering the taunting words of the karaoke club owner._

_He wanted to get dead drunk so he could forget the sour sting of tonight's mishap. Tonight's victimization. He felt like his pride had been plundered, callously conquered by the snobby rich girl. That Sayoko girl had utterly humiliated his manhood!_

_With a mounting dread, Keiichi realized that he couldn't possibly go home like this. His parents would kill him! He had just graduated high school a couple weeks ago. His plans were to take the summer off and then resume his education at one of those college prep schools. But if he showed up like this, he would probably get kicked out of the house. Or at the worst, his meager allowance would be suspended until he found a _-real-_ job._

_But tonight, he was miserably stranded in Tokyo, wearing a restaurant's worth of condiments, jellies and sauces on his clothes, sporting a bottle of wine like some old drunk geezer..._

_It wasn't even sake. He wished it was shochu, or whiskey; he could drink the whole bottle and not get drunk enough to forget his shame. _

_"I am a loser! Just look at me! I'm no better than the worst human scum!" he shouted at the streetlamps. Eighteen years old, and finally broken by the weight of the world. Keiichi felt like his spirit had been shattered irreparably by what had happened in that cursed karaoke booth!_

_He was The Broken Man._

_Looking up at a clock to see how late it was, Keiichi realized that the first morning trains wouldn't be running for another hour or so. Somehow, he mustered enough dignity to -_not-_ want to ride on the trains, with their congestion of early morning passengers heading off to work. He imagined himself in a tightly-packed train...every rider's eyes seeking him out, silently judging him. It was so obvious that he had been victimized on a date. That he had been dumped. That he was a loser._

_"I oughta just call a taxi!" he decided, feeling dizzy from the wine, his lack of sleep, and his exhausted emotions. This was worse than being dumped by a girl! To be dumped by a girl, a guy has to _-be together- _with the girl in the first place!_

_"I'm _-never-_ going on a date again!" he shouted as he spied a public phone booth across the street. He walked over to it unsteadily, and then fumbled in his pockets for a couple 100 yen coins, not caring if he had exact change or not._

_Dropping the wine bottle in the process._

--Keeehcheetzh!!--

_The bottle shattered, and his feet got splashed with the dregs and glass shards._

_"It can't get any worse than this! I just wish I had a..." he moaned into the phone as he punched up a sequence of numbers. He was completely distraught: midway through his dialing, Keiichi suddenly realized that he didn't know any taxicab numbers...he was just dialing without thinking. But six digits into the 8-digit local phone number, a voice came over the phone._

_"_«Hello? Vous avez atteint le Earth Otasuke Office! C'est conversation de Peorth.»"

_"HUH?!" Keiichi muttered. Tokyo phone numbers were xxxx-xxxx, and he had only dialed xxxx-xx! And this woman was speaking _-French-!

_"_«Oh, pardonnez-moi, you're Japanese!! My mistake! Allow me to introduce myself. Hi, my name's Peorth, the very best agent in the Earth Otasuke Office!»_" the voice said cheerily. _"«Your call has been registered by our Office, and I'll be with you shortly!»"

_"I just want a cabride to..." Keiichi started to say._

_"_«Excuse me,»_" the sweet-sounding voice interrupted, "_ «but wish requests cannot be fulfilled over the phone. They must be made in person, face-to-face. Remain where you are and I will be there presently to give you the _best_ service.»_"_

_"Eh?" Keiichi exclaimed as the phone went dead. _

_It literally went _-dead-_...no dial tone, no sound, nothing. Scowling at the uncooperative phone, he banged it against the side of the booth. But when he raised it to his ear, there still wasn't a dial tone._

_"Dammit, even the phone isn't working for me! Why does everything happen to me?!" he wailed as he slowly put the handset on the cradle. He leaned back against the plastic wall of the phone booth and slid downwards until he was sitting on sidewalk._

_Through half-lidded eyes, Keiichi could see something sparkling across the street, in the front window of a camera shop. To his eyes, it appeared that each of the cameras was flickering...and then they flashed on. Each camera seemed to emit a spotlight out of its lens shutter! A moment later, the cameras were bouncing...a thousand jets of lightarcs jolting illumination across the facade of the store! The eerie 'chamber of lights' visual effect reminded him of a UFO abduction from a movie he'd seen several years ago. He glanced upwards in a panic as it registered in his mind that something -_beyond normal-_ was happening across the street._

_Suddenly all the cameras seemed to focus their light in a single spot in front of the camera shop. Under the spotlight of their merged lights, a _-figure-_ rose up out of one of those flower planters sitting on the sidewalk!_

_Keiichi rubbed his eyes and blinked, thinking that he was hallucinating. Quickly, he pinched himself on the cheek. The brief flash of pain reminded him that he wasn't dreaming, that this was real._

_Real?_

_The figure that slowly ascended upwards out of the sidewalk was feminine. A shock of long bangs covered her face, cut levelly at shoulder length in an impossibly precise hairstyle. As her amply-busted torso emerged from the sidewalk, Keiichi realized that the woman was _-half-naked-_!_

_She was wearing little else than panties, and some kind of bizarre bodice jacket that barely covered her breasts. A set of leather 'wings'...for lack of a better term...seemed to wrap themselves around her, as if she was in zero gravity._

_The woman finished emerging upwards from the cement planter...and then _-continued upwards-_ until she was floating a meter above the ground._

--Floating!--

_Floating towards him._

_As she approached, Keiichi felt terrified. He tried to pull open the folding door on the phone booth, forgetting that one had to push the handle to open it. He screamed wordlessly as the pink-haloed figure closed in on him...until he saw the expression in her eyes. She had exquisite -_rose-purple-_ eyes and a blue diamond-shaped marking in the middle of her forehead! But instead of looking like some obake woman or demoness, she looked stunningly beautiful. Her eyes expressed sadness, wisdom, concern, compassion, glee, servility, and a commanding presence all at once..._

_"Keiichi Morisato, I presume?" she said in a mellifluous voice._

_Shaking like a leaf, Keiichi reached into his vest pocket and pulled out a cigarette, mostly because he was scared to death. This...woman...was _-glowing-_ like a fairy goddess from the Land of Oz!_

_"You really shouldn't do that, you know! Those are bad for your lungs!" she said. Something about her voice made him stop short of lighting his smoke._

_"Okay...so why haven't you taken me up to your UFO already?" he asked._

_The woman giggled, sending shivers of glow-colors through her hair._

_"Earth Otasuke Goddess Peorth at your service!" she said as she lighted on the ground. She curtsied fancifully with a European flair._

_"HUH?!"_

_"Do you remember talking to me on the phone a few minutes ago?" _

_"No. I tried to call a cab, and ended up...well, someone said something to me and then hung up the phone!"_

_Peorth rested a finger on her chin, leaning in very close to Keiichi as she eyed him speculatively. Keiichi's eyes were drawn downwards towards her breasts..._

_"You can't remember because you're intoxicated! We can't have that!" she said. Suddenly, she waived a hand in front of his forehead like some kind of magician...and unexpectedly, Keiichi felt his drunken edge go away. He was stone-cold sober! On the coattails of his sudden sobriety were prickling mental images of the mortifying experience he had suffered earlier._

_"I can feel a broken heart in here!" Peorth noted kindly, poking him in the chest. Before Keiichi could protest, Peorth rested a hand on his cheek in an attempt to quell his moodiness._

_"It's going to be alright for you, Keiichi Morisato," she promised. "You have been selected by the Earth Otasuke Office to receive a wish. When a mortal sinks far enough in despair, and their heart cries out...not for vengeance...but for _-hope-_, we are the ones who listen. We hear the heartbeat of the entire Earthrealm human race: every minute, every day, every century. And it is our pleasure to respond to the calls of those who are pure of heart, like yourself."_

_"Huh? Wish? You mean I get to make a wish? What are you...some kind of genie? No way!! _-I don't believe this-_! This has gotta be some kind of prank! I bet Sayoko's behind this..." Keiichi protested in a thin voice, trying to keep his eyes off the woman's panties._

_"Here, please take my business card," Peorth said. To Keiichi's amazement, a paper meishi _-formed in her hand from thin air-_._

_He read the proffered card aloud._

"Goddess Peorth, Goddess First Class, Unlimited, Unrestricted License. Senior Agent Exquisite D'affaires for the Otasuke Helper Office,

Earthrealm Division. Sysop Supervisory Adjunct for Yggdrasil Mainframe DeepStack Division Tau.

_"Ha ha ha! This is too much! This is ridiculous! You're...a _-Goddess-_?!" he laughed. _

_"Moi? Mnn hun! Oui!" Peorth confirmed with a cutely refreshing nod._

_The gales of laughter seemed to roll open the gateway of his heart. Here he was talking to some woman with some kind of weird clothes fetish, who spoke French and claimed she was a Goddess! He laughed so hard, he doubled on himself, his deep guffaws echoing in the near-empty street._

_His boisterous laughter folded itself into deep choking sobs._

_"We should go from here. You're too upset to be seen with me in public. Here...take my hand!" Peorth requested. Keiichi reached up blindly and grasped her hand._

_Everything faded._

_Everything appeared._

_In a blink of an eye, they were sitting on a hillside overlooking a city that fronted a long bay. And in the distance, on the other side of a bay, Keiichi could see a vast volcano, its rocky flanks deeply crevassed with veins of shadows in the early morning sun. A plume of smoke, cast in a rouge-glow in the light of the dawn, rose out of the bowled crater in the middle of the peak. Every schoolchild in Japan could recognize that mountain, as it had erupted over 6,000 times since the 1950s. Next to Mt. Fuji, it was one of Japan's most famous peaks._

_"No! It can't be! That's _-Mt. Sakura-_! Which means that we're in Kagoshima, all the way down south in Kyushu?" he said, stammering his questioning words like a jammed machine-gun._

_"Now do you believe me?" Peorth asked, grinning confidently. Keiichi looked at her. She wasn't some trick of his mind as she sat next to him on the grass. It dawned on him anew that she was _- devastatingly beautiful-_! She was, like, ten levels above Sayoko Mishima in the beauty department! As if she could read his thoughts, Peorth turned and smiled sweetly at him._

_"See! Just because some heartless mortal bitch decides to try and destroy your life...doesn't mean that you're hopeless. If anyone's hopeless...-_she's-_ hopeless! Mortals with predatory streaks like hers...well, let's just say that they usually hear from our Divine counterparts, rather than us! You, on the other hand, are poised at the tip of the greatest adventure a mortal could experience. I am here to grant the fondest desire of your heart."_

_"So let me get this straight. You're some kind of Goddess who was sent here to grant me a wish. And I can wish for _-anything-_, right?" Keiichi asked._

_"There are certain reasonable limits to your wish. You can't wish to be me, for example. You can't wish for something silly, wish for another wish, or wish to die. There's a bunch of prohibited wishes, so all you have to do is use your common sense and stay in touch with that pure part of your heart that cried out a few moments ago. But don't worry! I can service your wish request for almost anything, provided that it in good taste, doesn't involve death or mass destruction, Demons, etcetera. Or insolute conundrums and paradoxes," Peorth explained._

_Keiichi found himself collapsing on the inside._

_"What's the point? I'm a total _-loser-_! Everybody says I'm a loser. If I make a wish, it's just going to be a stupid screwed-up wish that won't make a difference anyway. I..I mean, I haven't ever had a girlfriend! So how could I possibly make a wish!" Keiichi protested, tears in his eyes. Here he was, in the presence of a beautiful _-Goddess-_...and he was crying like a momma's boy!_

_He felt so pathetic._

_Peorth leaned in and kissed him on the lips._

_"You're dense-tense with sadness and shame! We should do something about that -_before-_ you make your wish. You definitely need a...certain...type of healing," Peorth said gently. "Don't let it be said that I don't give the _-best-_ service!"_

_Keiichi's eyes bulged as Peorth started taking off her clothes._

_"Hey! You're a guy...I'm a girl...this is the best part, right?" she said in a very sexy voice that seemed to drown out every bit of the shame that he felt..._

...Keiichi watched as the high school version of him made passionate love to Peorth. Actually, it looked more like Peorth was making passionate love to his younger self. But she wasn't doing so with a craven, lust-filled selfishness. He could sense the tender care and deliberation within each touch, each caress, each loving kiss. Peorth wasn't simply being sexy, she was loving him in a _restorative, healing_ way, soothing his Soul and mending his broken spirit. This whole scenario reminded him of the time Belldandy had joined him in the furoba deep bathtub the morning before his all-important race against Tyyr...

Feeling a little embarrassed as he watched the scene play out on his TV, Keiichi tried to fast-forward the DVD through this section. But of course, he couldn't.

Seeing Peorth and his younger self entwined on the grassy knoll of the hillside only made him long for Belldandy.

The scene faded...and returned to Tokyo. Keiichi and Peorth were sitting side-by-side on a ledge overlooking Tokyo Bay. The early morning fisherman's boats dotted the seas as they came in with last night's catch...

_"So now that we know each other a little better, do you feel comfortable making a wish?" Peorth asked. "I didn't want to push you into something hasty, because you only get a single wish. But I could feel how harsh you are on yourself, just because some idiot of a girl threw a rock at your glass heart. Since your most recent pain was caused by romantic rejection, I _-knew-_ that you'd feel better about yourself if you weren't a virgin any more. So I decided to take your pain away, in my own special way. And Keiichi...I _-really-_ enjoyed being with you! You have a very loving heart. Don't be afraid to listen to its beat."_

_Keiichi felt his cheeks warming...he wanted to avoid eye contact with this 'Goddess' Peorth, but he couldn't bring himself to. He had never gone any further with a girl than holding hands; now he had done _-everything-_ with a beautiful woman._

_Twice._

_What does a boy do after he makes love with a woman? How does he talk to her? What does he say? Keiichi's mind stirred with questions...until his thoughts were interrupted by hot breathes tiding against his ear. He didn't have to guess whose they were. _

_"Well, I think I have a wish in my heart...although I'm really embarrassed to say it! You'd probably laugh in my face if I told you!" he admitted, his face flushing scarlet._

_"C'mon! We just made tres awesome love on the side of a hill overlooking Kagoshima! How could you be embarrassed after _-that-_?" Peorth teased, leaning up against him and kissing him on the cheek._

_"Ahhh," Keiichi purred. This woman...this _-Goddess-_...was so much different than Sayoko! Sayoko had treated him like trash; and in the process, had shown him all that was cruel and contemptible about women. But Peorth had actually _-made love-_ to him...and in the process of losing his virginity, he had also shed his sense of inadequacy. She was right! It was as if an invisible eraser had rubbed away all his self-doubts._

_She had mentioned about the _-beat-_ of his heartbeat, which had spurred him into a contemplation of what kind of wish he wanted to make. There is one language that speaks volumes when words cannot convey a meaning; a language of the heart. There was a _-reason-_ why the heart has a beat, rather than a whistle or a humming._

_"Okay, ready or not, here's my wish. But promise not to laugh!" he ventured. His voice gained momentum as he made his wish..._

_"My wish...is to be the most popular celebrity of my generation. I want to be a mega-rockstar, an idol, a movie star, someone whose face is known all over the world, or at least in Japan. I want to make people happy with my music, and I want to be charming and confident wherever I go. I want to be so famous that women find me irresistible...and yet I want to be loving, caring and kind in the midst of my fame. I want to be talented, so that I can help people feel the kind of joy they feel in a temple or a church._

_"Some wish, huh?!"_

_He fully expected her to tell him that his wish was on the so-called "prohibited wish list", or maybe even comment that his wish was too childish. But instead, he felt the wind suddenly whip up in speed all around him, as hundreds of rose petals rained down on where he and Peorth were sitting._

_Keiichi's voice trailed off as a bright pink light seemed to eject itself from the diamond-symbol in the middle of Peorth's forehead. As he looked on in amazement, the Goddess slowly floated up off of the ground, appearing as if she was lying on an invisible table. She looked unconscious! Her eyes were open, but they were pure white, with no iris or pupil. Her face was gentled with a meditative grace as her whole body leaned back in mid-air, so that the beam of light emitting from her forehead shot straight upwards in a perfect line, piercing the zenith of the sky. Everything within a distance of ten meters or so started swirling around her and he in a wide circle..._

_A few minutes later, the sci-fi 'fireworks' show was over._

_Peorth's eyes returned to their normal rose-purple color._

_"You wish request has been approved!" she announced cheerfully. "First off, you will have to have a showbiz name...Keiichi Morisato just won't cut it! For you, the Yggdrasil Mainframe has picked 'Keiichi MoriStar'. I will have to leave you shortly, but since your wish has the duration of one mortal lifetime, I will be always present to guide you. Don't ever worry about a shortfall of talent; you will _-always- _have more than enough talent whenever you need to perform your art. Whatever you decide to do, you will be both entertaining and talented!"_

_"Nooo waaaay..." Keiichi gasped._

_"And since I must be off shortly, would you like a repeat of what we did this morning? Only this time, we could take our leisure in the master bedroom of your new High Tokyo mansion?" Peorth asked in a pleasantly seductive voice._

_"Sure!"_

...The scene faded into blackness on his TV. At the mention of the mansion, Keiichi turned to look out the window at his hilltop estate. Despite himself, he was trembling with emotion. He had witnessed the birth of the circumstances that had turned Keiichi Morisato, high school graduate...to Keiichi MoriStar, Japan's top male idol! A final title appeared on the screen.

_Happy Anniversary! Today marks 7 years since you made your wish!_

_I will come to visit you later tonight...to give you my _-best-_ loving service,_

_Regards and Love,_

_Peorth._

Keiichi scratched the back of his head at this. Peorth was going to visit him _tonight_...

He felt the conflict between his two natures welling up again. Part of his consciousness was drawn to the idea of spending a night of passionate lovemaking with Peorth, grateful to be celebrating seven years together. Besides the sexual part, Peorth was the only being in the universe this side of "relative Japan" that he could tell _everything_ to.

The other half of his being wanted to go home to Belldandy...wanted to spend the night with Peorth trying to find a way to return where he wanted to be. _Didn't_ want to engage in any bedroom romping with Peorth, regardless of the purity of her intentions. Wanted to learn more about the Belldandy of _this_ frame of existence...

Two persons drowning in one life.

Shared unrest.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

As promised, Peorth appeared to him at 9pm, manifesting out of thin air in a burst of rosepetals and glowing pink energy. Keiichi marveled at her persistence...but he had committed himself to remaining chaste, regardless of his alter-ego's history of annual flaunts.

"Down MoriStar!" he noted to himself, looking at the crotch of his pants. Sometimes, the division within himself was so clear in his head, he actually found himself talking to his other self. If everything worked out, he would be reunited with Bell...and his celeb persona would have all the time in the world to enjoy his fame and Peorth.

Blurred by the whirlwind of the recent publicity tour, Keiichi MoriStar was preparing himself for another session in the studio, further work on trying to develop his 201X CD, "Naked Ghost".

The Naked Ghost.

The press was getting all whacky and weirdy about his lack of a new CD work. Here it was, five months into the year, and he had come up with nothing, other than promises that this would be his 'masterwork'. In the past, he could whip up a CD within a month in his home studio. He could oversee every aspect of production: instrumental performance, vocals, mixdown and engineering, mastering, digital production, re-mastering, proofing. Since he broke off and went solo with his own "Megahyper ElectroMage Genesis" label, he didn't even bother with a producer or engineer. Still, the resulting CD has sold the usual 30-40 million units. Now, his 'ghost' was here. A Goddess who _wanted_ nakedness. His and hers.

For all the right reasons.

"Did you miss me, mon amor?" Peorth queried in a sultry voice. "What did you think of my anniversary present. Enchanting, was it not?"

"Of course I missed you, but not for the reasons you assume. Peorth-chan. And the DVD you sent me was...most enlightening, to say the least. But I want us to have a different type of encounter to celebrate this year's anniversary. In other words, no sex."

Peorth's face flinched momentarily into a disappointed pout; her eyes resigning themselves to the inevitable.

"But I really wanted to please you! Especially today! It's our _anniversary_!" she protested, yet grinning in an easy-going manner. Keiichi felt himself struck by the laughable edge of her protest...she was almost like a wife who felt betrayed by her husband's forgetfulness of their wedding anniversary.

"And you can. You've been very good to me these past years," Keiichi said, feeling awkward with the fact that he had only known Peorth for two years and some months in this aspect.

"Thanks!" Peorth replied sunnily.

"I want to go with you where no mortal has gone before," Keiichi said, smiling at Peorth.

"Ne? Now I'm _interested_! Perhaps you might come up with a romantic lifesong that fully allows both of us to pour forth our joined emotions in a delicate dance of heartfelt ecstasy. Something more than a mere single expression of joie de eros! Since it is our special night, I would grant any _special_ desire you have, my lovely darling Keiichi!" Peorth said, settling herself on the bed so she was lying on her front, and propping her hands under her chin.

For a moment, she had that womanly look of innocent vulnerability, much like Bell had when she...

"Stop it!" Keiichi challenged himself. Belldandy was _Belldandy_! Not some ghost woman from a disjointed past that mirrored herself in Peorth, Anni, Sora or any other woman. Keiichi wanted Belldandy to be _real_; as it stood, he could only see her through the actions of others. Or in his imagination. So each time Bell-chan appeared in the shadow of a movement, or an expression...he challenged himself to let it go, reminding himself that it wasn't the truth. He didn't want events to suggest Belldandy; he wanted Belldandy to suggest events in his mind.

That was the whole idea behind his new CD...

Peorth smiled at him, her eyes mirthfully expectant.

_"I want you...to Share with me."_

Peorth's mouth wounded open, like that of a fish out of water.

"_What?!_ Where did you learn about such a thing? I've never mentioned Sharing to you! Besides that, you obviously don't realize that it's impossible for a Goddess and a mortal to Share. It'd be like channeling the total energy output of Japan's 60 nuclear plants into...this remote control," she said in a frantic voice as she flourished the DVD remote. Her rose-purple eyes were widened with anxiety...as if she had just witnessed a once-in-a-lifetime spectacle.

Keiichi expected as much. In one sense, perhaps this _was_ a once-in-a-lifetime event for Peorth, which accounted for her present astonishment. It wasn't every day that one of her mortal wish grantees asked to Share with her.

It was a risk...because Sharing presupposes Love, as far as the Gods were concerned. Asking a Goddess like Peorth to Share with him was basically asking her to admit that she loved him. Or making a marriage proposal to her...

Keiichi hoped that this time, for once, Peorth's love for him would serve to improve his state of being. In the past, all it had done was cause problems...

"Look...I _know_ we can do this!" Keiichi encouraged her. "But I want the Sharing to be one way. Or maybe 'one-directional' would be a better way to put it. What I mean is that I want you to have the opportunity to see inside of me, just as if you were Sharing with a God. But you don't have to let me inside of you, Peorth. So there's really no worry that I'll be 'overloaded', as you infer.

"H..How do you know so much about Sharing?" Peorth stammered in a near-still wisp of a voice.

"I know that I could never contain even a fraction of your mind, your Being, your Soul. But I also know that you could contain _me_...easily! If you _are_ a Goddess First Class, then I know that you could make this happen if you really _wan_t it to, Peorth" Keiichi explained.

Peorth sat up on the bed, and for a moment, her 'sexy' clothes flashed out of existence, replaced by her traditional black Goddess cat-suit attire. She peered off into space, her face locked in an expression of deep reflection. Keiichi realized that his appeal to Peorth's pride of status as a Goddess First Class had engaged her. Her eyes rapidly flickered right to left at a speed that was superhuman.

After several minutes, she looked up and him, piercing him with her gaze.

"Are you _sure_ you want to do this, Keiichi?" she asked in a very serious tone of voice. "Because once we Share, I'll know every aspect of your being that makes you an individual. I'll be able to feel every iota of emotion in your heart. You won't have to worry about any breach of confidence on my part...I can keep secrets! But I'm more concerned with how _you_ would view me afterwards, knowing that I knew _everything_ about you. Beyond this, once we Share, then it means that I truly Love you. And that's something you cannot back out of. We will be Bonded in a very special way, our Souls will entwine so tightly that they can never be sundered."

"Peorth, I know that a big part of me loves you. And I know that you love me, in your own way. So we can do this, without looking back with regrets. I trust you..." he said. Peorth continued to measure him with her eyes...

"Then it's settled. Come up here on the bed with me," she said, patting a spot on the futon bed. Keiichi kicked off his house slippers and tumbled onto the futon bed, almost knocking Peorth over.

"Now I want you to sit right across from me, as close as you can," she directed as she sat up into a cross-legged posture. Once he was seated close to her, so close that he could feel the warmth of her breath against his face...Peorth reached up and cradled his head with her hands. He could feel her fingers lightly pressing into his temples, massaging his scalp. A moment later, Peorth leaned forward and gently rested her forehead against his...

Keiichi closed his eyes as he felt an overwhelming relaxation smooth through him. It was as if he was at the edge of a galaxy of sleep, but without the grogginess that accompanied the moments right before he hit the Dreamlands. He had the impression of watching a thousand TV channels at once, as something _foreign_ entered his mind. The sensation of a cool breeze flowing through his thoughts calmed him, as flashes and images flurried through his consciousness. He could see himself as a web, as if he was watching the map of his life unfold.

Despite what he had asked, he could intuit brief glimpses of Peorth's life, buoyed up by whirlwinds of brief clustered memories. Perhaps it was impossible to Share without letting some glimpses of one's life experiences 'leak out'. He saw in his thoughts a chibi Peorth, appearing much like she did the time when she had been 'de-aged' by the Demon Velsper, before he was transformed into the Velpser the cat. In another image, he saw Peorth arguing with a young Belldandy over some assignment they had both botched, while the Lord was giving them a stern parental-type lecture. His thoughts shifted...and he felt pride as Peorth graduated from her Final Inculcation, the top of her class for that millennial class. His feelings of pride increased as he saw Peorth's reaction as she read her job assignment: she had been posted to the Earth Otasuke Office...

Despite being drawn into an interior world of joined minds and lives, Keiichi could feel sweat beading upon his forehead. Peorth's shallow breathes almost kissed his lips.

"Hnnnnnhhhh!" he heard her gasp, both in his thoughts and through his ears. Her grip on the sides of his head tightened. Then there was a deep vacuuming sensation...to Keiichi, it felt as if his consciousness was being drawn through the eye of a hallucinatory needle. Invisible tickly fingers combed through his past memories.

"There's _two_ of you!" he heard Peorth whisper in astonishment, only this time she said it aloud and not in his thoughts. Keiichi gritted his teeth as Peorth's thoughts sifted through his being, carefully prying out Keiichi Morisato's life from within Keiichi MoriStar's Soul...

Several minutes later, he felt her break off the Sharing with a gentle kiss on the lips. As he opened his sight, Keiichi could see tears streaming down Peorth's cheeks. She wasn't sobbing, but her eyes were filled with a haunting sadness as she looked at him. She slowly shook her head from side-to-side, a measure of her awareness of his situation.

He knew...that _she_ knew.

For almost twenty minutes, he and Peorth looked at each other wordlessly. Finally, Peorth reached over and hugged him tight to her, patting him on the shoulder.

"This is going to take some _extreme_ measures!" she explained.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Dissolving from sight.

One of the compliments Keiichi often heard from audio engineers concerned his ability to come up with a masterful vocal during the first take. Most performers needed at least 20 takes to find a 'range' on the lead vocal, and then many more attempts to 'tweak' it. In contrast to this, Keiichi usually got the vocal right during the first take.

It was his custom to divide his CDs between 'pop' ballads and 'serious' work. Now that he was free of the Terrible Trio of managers for over two years, Keiichi MoriStar had decided to forgo the 'pop' aspect of his work and focus strictly on serious art. For many other artists, delving into 'art' as opposed to 'pop' was the kiss of doom to their careers...the music industry and the fans were too fickle and too simplistic to be challenged by anything approaching real art. But Keiichi knew that no matter how embedded he was in the entertainment industry as Japan's top musician, he would not befall such a fate. Besides, his wish contract wouldn't allow him to dive down the charts as a failure.

But he wanted to come up with a defining artistic statement. A statement that was so radical, so fresh...that it would be forever perceived as a dividing point in all of music. A work so threaded with novelty that all subsequent work would be judged against it. An aesthetic musical statement that would divide the world of popular music; creating a 'before' and an 'after'...

So he started viewing his work on "The Naked Ghost" CD as "a gift" to his fans.

The concept behind his new CD was simple...at first.

_A girl loses her boyfriend in a terrible car accident the week before they start college together. But after he's dead and buried, she begins to experience 'visits' from him. In her dreams, she encounters him in the Ghost Nebula, as a ghost. She begins to prefer dreams to being awake... This forces her boyfriend to be faced with a dilemma: he must either stop appearing to her so she can return to health; or keep appearing to her at the risk of her health worsening. When he reluctantly informs her about his choice to leave her so she can live, she becomes so possessed by grief that she kills herself; fully believing that she would be reunited with him once she left the flesh. However, she winds up in the Realm of Suicidal Ghosts rather than the Ghost Nebula...and the only way he can join her there is by killing his own ghost. But naturally, this is impossible, since ghosts are already in the realm of the Dead..._

This was as far as Keiichi had mapped out the concept. He wanted to evoke the profound sense of separation he felt in his real-life circumstances...to artistically convey the void inside of him that only Belldandy could fill. He didn't want to express morbidity with his tale; naturally, he wanted it to have a happy ending. Just like he wanted his experience here to end happily with his return to Belldandy. But, in a case of art imitating life, an artistic block seemed to thwart him from devising the rousing conclusion he wanted.

This business of self-insertion into artistic expression wasn't as facile, as easy as he had thought it would be. It was a poorly-hidden secret that many manga artists' work was self-insertion to an extent...Keiichi could think of dozens of manga and anime creators who went as far as to create names for their protagonists that were little more than homonyms punning their own names. In the world of drama, actors often were so enmeshed in their roles that they would battle with scriptwriters concerning the disposition of the characters they played. Musicians often became engrossed in their public persona, to the extent that they would do _anything_ in an obsessive effort to affect the kind of image they attached to their 'other self'. Writers of fiction universally tried to convey a message..._their_ message...into their work, interwoven with characters that were more autobiographical than fictitious. On the bald of it, the separation between 'me' and 'my work' was often a thinly-disguised cloudline of metaphors and conceits.

Keiichi wasn't certain about _why_ it was so important for him to share his secret suffering for Belldandy...he just knew that it was important. Perhaps, if he were to subject the public to the inner workings of his reflective heart, he might somehow bridge the gap between he and Bell. As it was, the divide between he and his fiancée seemed to be filled with all sorts of fantasias, as if his heart was trying to recompense him for his loss.

One of the engineers asked Keiichi if he could call it a night, and then announced over the studio intercom that Anni had dropped by to talk to him. Keiichi could see her in the producer's booth, her foxfur coat illuminated by the various lights and VU displays of the mixing desk.

Keiichi motioned her to come into the soundstage. It was so ironic...he had recently witnessed his younger self laboring to clean a noodle-strewn karaoke club booth...and now he had the run of one of the most sophisticated recording studios in Tokyo.

Anni came in, kissed him on the cheek, and propped herself up on one of the musicians stools.

Their relationship had evolved into a friendship a couple years ago. Then Anni had broken up with him two months ago, much to the delight of the paparazzi. Her stated reason was the usual 'irreconcilable differences'...but Keiichi privately knew that the real reason behind the breakup was that he wasn't affectionate to her. Of course he couldn't be affectionate to her; his heart belonged to Belldandy. During his escapade with her to Osaka, he had explained the entire situation to her. She was disbelieving at first, but then she somehow gained a feminine intuition that his exile from his 'ex-wife figure' was real.

Anni remained his friend, and had not taken any lovers since the 'break up'. Instead, their relationship had developed into a Platonic love. He totally loved her as a best friend; the attraction was heart to heart rather than physical. Many nights they had lain in bed together, naked or not, with not a breath of passion, foreplay or love-making as they talked all night about the rigors of their celebrity. He could be _private_ with her; a luxury when he was engaged in the day-to-day crypto-dance of the feeding-frenzy entertainment world. Anni corresponded with him and visited him several times a week. These visits took on a new importance ever since Peorth disappeared at the end of March...he really needed a feminine voice to air his confusion against. Sora was an everyday presence, but her mind was more suited to the labyrinthine vicissitudes of the business kingdom, rather than the unsteady mazes of emotion. What was most peculiar was the fact that whenever he would bring personal matters to Sora's attention, she would start crying or wave him away...

"Keiichi MoriStar! Fancy running into you here!" Anni teased.

"Where else would I be, Ms. Detective? This is my studio, you know..." Keiichi teased back, playfully referring to Anni's lead role in the current drama series she was filming.

"Everyone in the recording industry in Japan knows I'm here, baka-girl!"

"Yes, but only you know why you're _not_ here!" Anni countered, tapping him on the forehead. "You're almost two persons, my dear MoriStar! I know that it's been a stressful couple months for you ever since you started on this CD project. At least as an actress, I have a good idea of how my character is going to evolve while I'm working on a drama series. But you have no idea where this runaway shinkansen of a project is heading, do you?"

Keiichi sighed and sat down near a guitar. Absent-mindedly, he picked it up and rested it across his lap, stroking its strings slowly as Anni talked.

"I'm here because I'm concerned about you. Not only am I concerned with the fact that your near-infinite fount of creativity has seemed to run dry...but _you_ seem to be running dry too. Look at you! It's 1am in the morning, and you're sitting here in a 300,000 yen-an-hour recording studio twiddling your thumbs! It's almost as if this 'naked ghost' of yours is haunting _you_!"

"Naked ghost, naked god...what's the difference?" Keiichi sighed wearily.

"The same difference between the pool-room and the swimming pool. Only the word looks the same."

"Belldandy."

Keiichi was so surprised, he stood up suddenly...and bumped his head against one of the boom mikes suspended from the ceiling.

How the hell did she find out about Bell? He had never told her Belldandy's name! He had referenced his love for Belldandy in vague terms, noting only that there was a 'long-lost' piece of his heart that belonged to another...at the time, Anni had assumed that he meant a dead ex-girlfriend. But now, she seemed to know about Belldandy.

"Who's Belldandy? she asked. Two words that filled the studio with more tension than a dozen of engineers and musicians could.

"She's someone that I try and paint in my memories every moment of every day because of my love for her. Her image haunts me, but yet I cannot paint it fully," he explained.

"So you _do_ love her! I've always sensed that I had some competition for your heart...your warmth seemed to die down to a chill around New Year's two years back. But I stayed with you for another two years, just to ride it out and see if you would change..."

"Sorry," Keiichi apologized sincerely.

"Just...tell me that you weren't cheating on me!" Anni pleaded.

"Ha..h..ha!" Keiichi laughed nervously. "I was actually more concerned with not cheating on _her_ by being with you. I just wish I could convince you that I don't belong here, Anni. You're a totally beautiful woman...I never expected that any girl in show business could be as elegant as you. Of course, I never expected _myself_ being in show business at all! Many people look at me as if I was born to my talent, but in fact, it was given to me. If you come to my mansion, I'll prove it to you..."

Anni nodded her head.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Keiichi felt like the kid who talked with animals in private, but in public they wouldn't talk back to him. As he drove his Aero home, he sweated bullets of fear, worried that the DVD wouldn't play if Anni was part of the audience.

Anni's face was figured with surprise as he invited her into his tree house. She made him climb the ladder first, so that he wouldn't be underneath her when she climbed up...as she was wearing a miniskirt.

Common-sense Anni.

Once she climbed up into his tree house, Anni looked around and commented "this is some inner sanctum, Keiichi!"

"Remember what I told you on the way to Osaka? About having another life? About being another man inside of this Keiichi MoriStar persona? It was all the truth. I hope that you'll forgive me after tonight, Anni. You're going to see the real me, and please understand that I'm doing this because I care about you. I would rather fill you with answers than leave you with questions," Keiichi said as he ushered her to a chair and fixed her up with a can of tea. Queuing up the DVD, he sat and waited, hoping for the best.

For the next half-hour, he and Anni watched several scenes of college racing club meets, culminating with the 20XX Solar Federation victory and then the Le Mans victory the following year. As the credits rolled at the end of the DVD, he was grateful that the disc had displayed his _real_ life history...the last thing he needed was for Anni to see the playback he saw when he first viewed the DVD, especially the part showing he and Peorth on a certain hillside in southern Japan...

"That's...not _you_! Th..that's impossible! You were on tour when that race took place!" Anni finally exclaimed, gasping and holding her hands over her heart from shock.

Peorth had delivered.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Keiichi had needed a break from his trials in the studio, so he had Sora schedule a concert at Osaka's Nagai Stadium for the Tanabata weekend. He reasoned that a large-venue live performance would jolt his creative juices enough to he could finish his new CD project. Since he was one of the only handful of performers who could fill a stadium to capacity for his concerts, the Nagai committee readily accepted his proposal, provided that he 'donate' a cut of his concert proceeds for 'soundsystem and turfing improvement' to the stadium.

Keiichi put on a four-hour show, debuting one of the new songs off his yet-to-be-completed CD...which brought the roof down. After his performance, he took an hour-long limo ride to the Fushio-Kaku Hotel outside of Osaka. Sora had recommended this hotel in glowing terms as a great place to unwind; apparently she had roomed here during her search for him during the time he and Anni went AWOL after he purchased his new Aero. A half-hotel, half-ryokan located in a quiet environ outside of Osaka, the Fushio-Kaku retained enough of the rustic charm for his tastes. The setting was nice, as the hotel was wrapped in a natural pristine forest.

He was looking forward to the breakfast, which was rumored to be of the Kuidaori type. Kuidaori, literally "eat until you fall down", was renowned through Japan as one of the Osaka specialty cuisines. Actually, it would have to be a kuidaori _lunch_, since he and his entourage didn't arrive at the hotel until well after 2am. The last instructions he gave to the kimono-clad maid was to let him sleep in. Wrapped in the hotel's scented yukata, Keiichi drifted off to sleep...

_--Knocka knocka knocka--_

He had been dreaming about Belldandy again. Being in Osaka had brought up memories of the time he and Bell-chan had hoteled here, during the summer of Urd's disappearance. Four summer's ago...

It was hard to imagine that he had survived over _two_ years here...it was already the middle of 201X! During the past couple of years, he felt like he had aged a dozen years. Because his moments of silence were betrayed by memories of his long-lost Belldandy, he had decided to throw himself into his artistic career with a crazed abandon. Even the workaholic Sora Hasegawa kept nagging him to slow down. But how could he? Even tonight, after playing to a stadium full of raucous fans...the moment he settled down in his hotel room by himself, he started remembering his life in "relative Japan" with Belldandy...

"Come in!" he said, not even looking at the shoji door. The maid opened the door and set a trayful of food down on the small ante-table next to his futon.

"Keiichi...we need to talk," she said. Keiichi looked up...and saw Peorth, dressed in a ryokan maid's kimono.

"Peorth! Where have you been these last three months!" Keiichi blurted out, both relieved and exasperated. In the circus of his life, Peorth was the lion-tamer...the presence that most assured him that he wasn't going to careen off the emotional cliffs he hung so tightly to.

Peorth looked at him uneasily.

"Mmmph!"

"Eh?" he asked. Peorth's serious expression suddenly contorted. Her eyes drew large as she reached up and held her hand over her mouth. Quickly, she dashed towards the balcony. Flinging the sliding-glass door open, she raced up to the railing and then quickly leaned over it...

_Blorrmpph! Barfff! Brammmph!"_

Keiichi could only look at her with incredulity as she puked over the wooden railing. His mind was going a thousand kilos a minute trying to figure out what was going on here. Peorth was gone for _three_ months...and then when she shows up, she gets _sick_?

"Goddesses...don't get sick! Or at least _that_ sick!" he mumbled to himself as Peorth straightened up. Belldandy had gotten sick before; but her illnesses were always the result of using up too much of her Goddess powers. When she was 'ill', Bell would get a slight fever and appear exhausted...suggesting someone dealing with a strong cold rather than the flu. The 'cure' was for her to sleep it off and regain her Goddess powers. Inevitably, she would be back to her normal self the next day.

Even as his mind raced, Keiichi watched as Peorth pulled the three pins that held her hair in place, letting her generous mane of silk-raven black hair fall out. She turned to face him, her face still remarkably unreadable.

"Peorth...are you okay?" Keiichi asked. "I thought Goddesses couldn't get sick! I mean, I know Goddesses can get sick if they use too much of their powers...but that's more a case of fatigue rather than an actual illness. But you're really sick, aren't you?"

"Keiichi," Peorth said, walking right up to him and resting a hand on his chest. "It's hard for me to be around certain foods and smells sometimes. I guess I'm not used to it yet."

"Huh? Not used to what?"

"I'm _pregnant_."

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --


	93. Pt 93: Urd and Skuld: Glass Hammer Fina...

**Part 93: Urd and Skuld: Glass Hammer -- Finale**

"Wh..what in the Lord's name is _this_?" Urd exclaimed uneasily, the right side of her mouth twitching upwards in stymied exasperation at the sight that greeted them after she nullified the final arcanic seal on the temple's front door.

Beyond the opened wooden doors, they beheld a cavernous room, echoing with bursting peals of laughter and the buzz-droning of chatter. The room was _huge_, cathedral-like in its interior expanse. Skuld estimated visually that its floor space could easily contain several soccer fields.

The source of the sound was cut from the most disjointed of dream states. The checker-field floor before them was populated with living chess pieces. Filling the eye's view; the 'pieces' were strolling singly, in groups, and in pairs. Small clusters of mixed chess pieces were queued along the floor, chatting amiably. In the middle of the floor, the chess pieces danced a waltz.

"We were at the front door of my house just a minute ago! And I don't remember Darling and mine's living room looking anything like this...uu-chaa!" Lum exclaimed. Next to her, Benten and Oyuki were glancing around the large room with incredulous expressions. Palatial chandeliers were suspended downwards from a ceiling...that looked like a floor. The arcade of the hall was palatial in the Italian or French decor, with rows of ornately decorated pillars arranged on either side of the hall.

Skuld could clearly see furniture pieces mounted into the ceiling of the room: couches, settees, chairs and tables. Confusingly, there were no pieces of furniture on the floor where the chess pieces were chatting and dancing and strolling...

"I don't think we're in Makuhari anymore..." Urd muttered.

"You're not...you're on the ceiling with us!" a rook shouted to them as it sped by on a skateboard.

Skuld's senses were drilling her with information, none of it rational. With one day to go, they had decided to go for broke and try and break in to the temple compound and rescue Keiichi. Since it was obvious that Lum was mum about any feelings of attraction to Ataru, this was the only possible resolution. One way or the other, the alien princess hadn't indicated anything other than a dismissive inattention to Ataru Moroboshi.

Skipping breakfast, they had come here to the temple...and Urd and she had set to work trying to unspell the many seals Belldandy had put on the front door of the temple house. According to Urd, the spells were childishly simple in execution; it only took her a few minutes to disable the lot of them.

But once she pulled the front doors open...chaos had spilled out. Or rather, inwards. The living room and Keiichi and everything she had expected was _gone_, replaced by yet another burst-place of craziness!

"Dammit! Why can't something be _real_, just once?" Urd shouted, bested by her frustration. "Just _once_!! By the Lord, we were in Oyuki's UFO just a few minutes ago...and then we decided to go back to the temple. Then I _strain myself into the headache zone_, having to pick through all these divine seals, spells and arcanic formulae Belldandy is using to protect this place...and once we open the door, _whoosh_ we're in another place! And I don't have a clue where!"

"If you didn't waste so much time watching all those soap operas and evening romance drama shows, Big Sister...you'd know what this is!" Skuld retorted sharply. Urd's harping was stressing her out.

"Is there something you're not telling us, Miss Skuld?" Oyuki asked with polite insistence.

"Of course she wouldn't know!" Skuld realized privately as she looked at Oyuki's delicate features. She's a Neptunian Princess, who only started visiting the Earthrealm because her close friend Lum was living here with Keiichi. Lum, Benten, Oyuki...they wouldn't have had the chance to be exposed to Earthrealm myths and children's fables...

They were in a manga...within a manga.

"Uh...hey guys! We _were_ standing in the doorway, weren't we?" Ataru and Lum asked at the same time. The two looked at each other, mystified that they had said the same words at the same time...and Skuld could swear that she saw a blue-green spark of attraction pass between them for the briefest of moments.

Attraction...or fascination. Skuld just couldn't tell which. But there was definitely an aura of some arcing softly between the two for a split second. If there hadn't been, the two would have never paid heed to their synchronous speech.

"If we were standing in the doorway, then how come we're _inside_ the room all of a sudden now!" Lum noted in an anxious voice, spinning around in mid-air.

Skuld followed the green-haired Oni beauty with her eyes...and then desperately searched for the wooden doorway.

It had disappeared.

Instead of standing in the entryway, they were in the middle of the large ballroom!

A Red Queen chess piece rolled up to them and said, "Come this way!"

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Puzzles? I _hate_ puzzles!" Urd groused.

"Puzzles? I _love_ puzzles!" Skuld rejoiced.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Curiously enough, there was one human being in the midst of this chess-chaos Baroque bazaar of the absurd. A girl in a sailor suit named Miyuki greeted them after the Red Queen escorted them to a large mirror at the end of the room. She looked like a normal high school girl, but Skuld wasn't accepting anything at face value in this place. Uncertain, Skuld rushed up in front of the mirror to look at her reflection, worried that she herself might have been transformed into a chess piece.

"If you were, you've been a pawn, of course. I'd be a Queen!" Urd said to her, guessing her intent as she preened in front of the mirror. Skuld glared at her older sister in dudgeon, yet thankful that Urd was possessed of enough faculties to seemingly 'read' her thoughts...and piss her off by assigning her to be a _pawn_.

"You'd be one of those horse pieces, because all you're good for is braying nonsense! _I'd_ be the Queen!" she snapped back testily.

"You're too young for that!" Urd shot back with a wink.

"Then I'd be a _princess_! And if you were the Queen, you'd be the Queen Dowager!" Skuld argued, satisfied when she noticed Urd puffing her cheeks in anger...

Miyuki waved frantically to them to get their attention.

"You have been brought here to the Looking-Glass Universe in order to solve a trialsome problem," the high-school aged girl began. "You must find the Twins first. They smoke an herb of secrets that will allow them to see into the near and far realms. I will meet with you again after you wake them!"

"That includes you, young mortal man!" she added, pointing at Ataru.

Ataru back-stepped nervously...

"Stop staring at me!" 'Miyuki' yelled at him, and then she jumped into the mirror.

"She's gone!" Benten observed. "Where'd she go?"

"Benten, it appears that this mirror is some kind of portal similar to what I use to convey myself from Neptune to Earth..." Oyuki noted.

"You mean to Keiichi's closet!" Lum clarified.

"Yes, that time, I was drawn to Keiichi's closet. I would suggest that we can go no further unless we step through this mirror. And I foredread remaining here much longer; this ruckus is quite disturbing."

"Agreed! But first, we should try and find another means of getting out of here," Urd said, nodding meaningfully at Lum as she floated up in the air. Within seconds, she was soaring high above the thousands of chess pieces cavorting on the marbled black-and-white checkerboard floor. A moment later, Lum joined her...

"I didn't know Ms. Urd could do that!" Oyuki commented in amazement as Skuld watched the two fly off in a streak of green and blue-platinum in their search for another exit. She overheard Benten grousing "Dammit! Where's my skybike when I need it!"

Ataru was gawking at the departing Urd and Lum, looking every bit like an Egyptologist who had stumbled on a secret burial chamber.

"They do that. It's their thing," Skuld told him in a matter-of-fact voice, nodding towards the two flying women. She sensed that it would be important to keep Ataru calm...the 'Miyuki' girl seemed to indicate that he held an integral role in the design of this puzzle...

Urd and Lum returned, hovering above the rest, shaking their heads in the negative.

"The mirror it is, then," Skuld thought glumly, uncertain if she was stepping into an answer to their problems...or a dangerous trap.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

They exited the 'ballroom' through the mirror and reappeared into a vast jungle. Skuld felt the familiar sensation of transport and was momentarily disoriented when she didn't appear out of a body of water. Judging from Urd's reaction upon their reappearance, her eldest sister felt just as confused.

She counted heads to make sure everyone was here, and then examined their immediate surroundings. Skuld could hear distant birdsong, which reminded her of Belldandy. Looking up, she witnessed a forest canopy that extended hundreds of meters above them; far greater in height than the terrestrial forests on the Earthrealm. As Skuld surveyed the impossibly tall forest, she noticed several swarms of insects lazing in the sun rays. One of the swarms seemed to notice the new arrivals and flew in closer, causing Ataru to bellow out anxious shouts of fear.

"Quit being such a baby!" Benten scolded him.

"B..but they're _weird_!" he exclaimed in dismay as the swarm overtook them.

Skuld's attention was directed towards the insects; the ones that flew close to her face had a very unusual appearance. The buzzing insects resembled 19th-century children's wooden toys: rocking horses, nutcrackers, porcelain dolls, and wooden toy soldiers. They hovered in front of her, seemingly beset with curiosity. Their variety of wings and impossibly top-heavy cabinetry gave them a dignified appearance as they floated in the air around her and the others in a curious mass...

"Isn't there supposed to be a Jabberwocky around here?" Skuld mused to herself, trying to remember all the details of the story. "And what about the live flowers?"

A Circus Horse Fly flew by Skuld's nose, neighing.

Of course, Lum was enchanted by the flying toys in a girlish sort of way. Soon, the Oni girl was levitating in the air, sweeping down in the midst of the swarms, dispersing them with giggles.

Skuld watched the swarms to see if they were actually going anywhere. In a forest this big, they could just be circling around tree trunks and any new animals or persons or aliens who came into their midst. Or the insect's haphazard flight might reveal a way out of this enormous forest...

She watched as one swarm of insects flew towards a fawn, startling it. The fawn turned and gamboled momentarily, then sprinted off down a trail at a brisk pace.

Skuld's intuition flashed on her, informing her that this was their sole chance to find an opening that led out of the forested area. The fawn had looked around for trails, and then _deliberately_ selected the one that she used to bolt away from the buzzing insects.

The fawn disappeared out of sight. The trail that the fawn used to escape the swarming insects seemed to bask aglow with a brighter portal of sunlight than any other areas circumferencing them. The only other source of illumination was the broad beams of sunlight that filtered downwards like skyscrapers from high above.

"That's the way out of here!" Skuld announced.

"How would _you_ know? Maybe we should ask this rabbit?" Lum observed. A small rabbit in a tailor-made suit had hopped up to them, unnoticed by Skuld.

"Mr. Bunny Rabbit...how do we leave the forest," Lum said, crouching down in midair, smiling at him.

"Lum, he's not Inaba-kun or Ten-Chan..." Oyuki warned, referring to the Rabbit Boy that Shinobu was all smitten with, or Lum's toddler cousin.

"Go towards the light, o' green-haired fair one!" the rabbit answered in a thickly accented Cockney voice before bounding into the nearby thicket.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

After walking through the forest for what seemed like hours, a clearing finally appeared in the tree line up ahead. As they approached it, the clearing opened up into a vast sloping hillside, thickly beset with tall grasses and warm yellow sunflowers. Skuld cautiously looked back into the forest to make sure they weren't being followed, but Urd and the others had already entered the wild meadowland.

Shrugging her shoulders, she followed suit.

Against the blue sky, a sky with silver slates of cloud that gradated into a light pink-red glow on the horizon, Skuld could see the outline of a large tree. Something seemed familiar about that tree...

After several hours of walking, she realized what this was.

"Big Sister! That's _Yggdrasil_!" she shouted.

"You've been eating too many Funky Flakes!" Urd remonstrated.

"It is! That tree is contoured just like our realm of Yggdrasil!" Skuld snapped back. Of course, Skuld had never seen Yggdrasil in its entirety...no Goddess or God had...but she had often marveled at the holographic schematics and representations of their realm.

And this tree that rose in the middle of the meadow was a duplicate.

"That's not Yggdrasil! The color's wrong...it isn't blue, it's a mix of yellow, greens and ambers!" Urd argued.

"But it looks just like Yggdrasil!"

"Excuse me, but I don't understand what either of you are talking about. If you are referring to the castle in the distance, I assure you that it isn't modeled upon some tree. There are no trees on Neptune...hence, I believe you're both wrong. That castle strongly resembles my castle home on Chionopolis, back home on Neptune," Oyuki noted.

"That's impossible! You're all blind! Can't you see...it's not yellow-green or ice-blue...it has orange-and-black stripes like everything else on my planet! It's our Sacred Mountain!" Lum shouted.

"_You're all wrong_!! Whattya you all on...drugs or somethin'? It's not a tree, or a castle or a mountain? It's shaped like a treasure boat. Just look at the broadsails blowing in the wind! It our boat...the Treasure Boat me and my fellow Gods ride when we deign to visit Earth as a group!" Benten added.

Skuld looked again at the tree, using all her Goddess senses to try and discern whether or not it was tree, castle, mountain or sailing barco...

"Obviously, this was a case of an object creating subjective impressions on those who are witnessing it. In other words, this might not be real at all, but simply imagery existing in our minds," Skuld concluded. Now, she had to convince the others of the validity of her reasoning.

"Something is majorly messed up here! We're all seeing something different, except for Skuld and I!" Urd shouted in exasperation. "Something...or somebeing...must be probing our minds, making this 'tree' appear to be what is most familiar to us."

"Yes, and if this 'Yggdrasil' is your home, as you claim, then this object that is appearing to us...is doing so within a specific pattern. It's manifesting to each of us as a familiar sight on our homeworlds. Don't you find this curious?" Oyuki noted.

The Neptunian Princess had a point. There was a consistency to the hallucination/manifestation that each person was seeing. It became even more complicated when Ataru, who had been silent the whole time, asked, "What the heck are you girls arguing about? There's _nothing_ there!"

Skuld found this very revealing, as it surmised that this 'force', for lack of a better word, only could draw impressions from the minds of higher intelligences. Ataru, being a mere Earthrealm mortal, was exempted for some reason. Obviously because he was a lower intelligence compared to the others.

Fortunately, it didn't work on idiots...

This brought up the difficult dilemma concerning the fact that she and Urd had experienced the same misleading vision as _the fictional characters_; this could only mean that they were all on the same level. In this reality, Lum, Oyuki and Benten _were_ every bit as real as she and Urd. Skuld looked at the tall tree with an expression bordering on defiance, resentful as she swept her gaze upwards, guessing that it towered a kilometer into the sky. There was no explanation for its presence here, nor could she explain why it was 'forcing' her to empirically admit to its presence!

It was in her mind!

Alice in Wonderland, Miyuki-chan in the Looking Glass...this tree didn't belong in either. She and Urd didn't belong here as well. But here they were, tucked away within a CLAMP adaptation of a Lewis Carroll side-story -- which was tucked away within a Rumiko Takahashi comedy manga.

Her best intuitions were screaming at her to go back to the forest.

"Let's go! This is turning into an adventure...uu-cha!" Lum exclaimed, her excited voice that of a teenager. Once again, she had shifted into brain-dead mode! At least she wasn't pining and whining about "darling Keiichi"...

Urd looked at Skuld and motioned towards the tree with her head.

Skuld frowned numbly, then started off with the others...plunging further into the green crests of waves, ripples of windblown tall grasses

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Skuld and Urd approached the shadow-shape of the tree that resembled Yggdrasil...but as they drew near it, a translucence rode the downwards air and quickly shrouded it in a misting fog. Once again, she had to question whether the shrouding field of air was there...or existing only in her mind. A spyglass guest lurking in the shadows that separated her thoughts, perhaps waiting to spring a trap.

This whole misadventure reminded Skuld of the process of magnification...how larger objects like buildings and Earthrealm mortals are pristinely visible...but when one closes in on successively smaller objects, they become less distinct.

Organisms into phages into cells into compounds into molecules into atoms into particles into nixspaces into Xetanums...

Xetanums were invisible to all but the Gods and Demons, they were so indistinct. No scientific instrument could measure them, because they were elementals of a reality that lay outside of physics, beyond the grasp of natural sciences.

The fog blinded her like an incessantly oscillating blur of dizzy spots.

"Just like the true image of this tree lies beyond the grasp of our minds," Skuld thought grudgingly. As they passed through the pyramiding fog, a sheering gust of wind cleared it away with a loud skree howl.

They found themselves under the shadow of a giant mushroom. The base of the mushroom flew upwards like a candle rising into the sky, tendrils streaked from the 'roof' of the mushroom like spiderlegs. The whole effect was that of a mute fountain captured in mid-fount; a cloudy glass of the atomic bomb, rendered into visible flesh.

Smaller toadstools, each half the size of a person, were clustered around the trunk of the outgrowthed fungi. The huge mushroom was multicolored; its trunk glistening with moisture as it towered over the group.

Seated on one of the two toadstools, Skuld could make out the profiles of a pair of figures.

"Over there!" Lum announced at the same time. "There's people! We should go see them!"

Excitedly, the group of six crafted over the tall grasses at a brisk jog, running towards that object that had seemed to draw them towards it from the moment they emerged from the forest. Indeed, as this object had exerted a unique pull on each of them.

Skuld and Urd ran up to the toadstool...and slammed to a halt, as if colliding with an invisible wall of air. Skuld didn't have time to notice the astonished looks on the faces of the others...

Her attention was riveted already.

"MY LORD!" both Skuld and Urd shouted. They beheld the personages sitting under the shade of the tall mushroom with utter galaxies of disbelief. The two Goddesses immediately assumed a respectful position, seating themselves in formal tailor-style postures and bowing deeply in front of the two beings, waiting to be addressed.

Lum and the others looked at them, curious about their odd behavior. The tree that was a castle that was a palace that was a treasure ship...was actually a tall mushroom after all! And it had frightened Urd and Skuld to the marrow of their bones!

Skuld had bowed so low to the ground, the only thing she could see was the green grass and her hands in front of her, fingertips and toetips touching in the most formal posture of deep supplication. She was shivering with fright. Once they had reached the 'trunk' of the tree that resembled Yggdrasil, she had beheld the Noble Visage Himself! The Lord, Kami-sama!!

Here, of all places!

And another person who looked like the Lord...

Skuld stole a quick peek at Urd, whose long cape and longer white-blue hair was vibrating like the surface of water on a simmering teakettle. Big Sister, for all her memory gaps...even she was gripped with fear.

"Please...not another license suspension," Skuld heard Urd whispering round and round. She bit her lip to keep from smiling secretly at her older sister's interpretation of events.

Skuld knew a disrespectful smile might cause _her_ to lose her license!

"Arise, Norns!" two voices shouted commandingly.

"What's a Norn?" Skuld overheard Lum asked aloud as she and Urd stood up to their full heights, still keeping their heads lowered and their hands crossed in front of their waists. Looking out through her eyelashes, Skuld saw the Lord...and the second person, who was like an Anti-Lord.

The Other One had flowing long silk black hair, highlighted with streaks of glowing red. His face bore a slight resemblance to Keiichi's when he had been possessed by the Ultimate Destruction program. Except that this being's face...in fact his whole body...was bronzed with the tanned complexion of Urd and Hild. The Other One's facial expression almost mirrored that of the Lord; gentle in repose...but with eyes so penetrating, Skuld felt that they could transform a Soul's secrets into writing in the sky in an instant.

He was holding a long spear of red light with a supple grace, resting it over his shoulders in a water-carrier style.

Seated next to him, the Lord was dressed in His usual bejeweled long cloakcape, with a crystal-blue katana sword resting against his thigh...

Skuld gasped as she noticed two little signs around their necks, like necklaces:

_"Tweedle-Kami"_ and _"Tweedle-Oni"_

Before she could pass her mind through another knothole of astonished observance, the Lord spoke up...

_"Tut tut! Ho ho! What makes you think we don't know what you know!"_

The Other One added...

_"Piddle piddle! Hee Hee! To gain your goal, defeat the Jabberwocky!"_

The two argued between themselves for several moments, completely ignoring Skuld, Urd and the rest. Skuld could only throttle her incomprehension, and cast amazed glances at Urd, whose triangular tanned face featured bewilderment.

Then the Lord and the Other One both halted their nonsensical contention in mid-sentence and looked at the party of six, rather sternly.

_"Seven must complete your fare, otherwise you'll all miss the show,"_

_"When the Rabbit follows you, you'll become realer by drinking tea,"_

_"While what one says is a lie, the other one may tell the truth,"_

_"Yet if one truth is false, than all falsehoods bear the proof,"_

_"The Eagle's wings spin weather, the Moorglade flies towards the Sun,"_

_"Wind and witchwood point the way, beware the rotund oval one,"_

_"A final joust with the Beast of Prey, a lasting Life...or Dead ye be,"_

_"Seven removes from six, the journey finished when One turns into Three,"_

"This is idiotic nonsense! Why are you so scared of these two idiots!" Lum screamed, her yell echoing shrilly in Skuld's ears.

Even though something in the back of her mind nagsayed her, telling her that this wasn't the _real_ Lord. Despite this, Lum's burst of insolence still fired Skuld into an anxious anticipation of a punitive response from Kami-sama. She felt a momentary absent-breathed pause, feeling almost certain that a bolt of energy would bear down and crush Lum into sub-atomic particles. Then again, since Lum seemed to have elemental lightshocks under her control, a bolt from above would probably be ineffective. Nevertheless, Skuld squinted her eyes, expecting the worse.

Skuld started shivering again, just as a dark cloud passed overhead...

And started pouring rain.

But it wasn't an ordinary rain. The water that was splashing her and the others felt like it was falling in plunging bursts, rather than a steady downpour. And there were _ice cubes_ mixed in with the rain! It was _freezing_, as if she had take a dip in a furoba filled with ice cream.

As the 'rain' continued, Skuld had the distinct impression that somebody was splashing water on her! And when she looked up between splooshes, Skuld silently cursed. Metal buckets of water were suspended in mid-air about ten meters overhead, dumping out their chilled contents on their small troupe. And nothing else.

Invisible hands dousing them with plummets of water out of buckets.

"This is most distressing! My hair is being _ruined_ by this outrage! Can't somebody do something to prevent this?" Oyuki cried out in bitter frustration.

Skuld was thoroughly confused now, with the buckets, the Lord and the Other One, the confusing poem, Lum screaming indignantly about being soaked, and Urd muttering "don't suspend my license please"...

"Begone, the lot of you!" the two Lords shouted with imperious temper.

_--POOF!!--_

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

They emerged in a bizarre landscape, a warren populated by rabbits rolling round watches. Actually, the 'rabbits' looked like village headmen wearing in rabbit suits, rather than _real_ rabbits. The 'rabbitmen' were busy rolling large replicas of hand watches, maybe a meter in diameter, across an absolutely flat terrain. The ground was pink, which made Skuld feel slightly nauseous...it was a particular kind of pink, a creamy pink of the medicine Belldandy or Big Sister gave her when she had a tummyache from eating too much ice cream.

"Didn't one of those bozos say something about a rabbit and tea?" Benten said roughly, once she stood up and straightened her chain and her 'armor' gear.

"These look like the Time Keeper Rabbits!" Lum announced, with recognition.

A group of Rabbitmen turned towards them.

_"Invaders! Imposters! Give chase! Make haste!"_

Skuld noticed that each time they rolled one of the giant hand watches, it would roll, then spin and topple down...and then a door would appear from thin air above the fallen hand watch. The Rabbitmen and doors were familiar in some way...

"Look out!!" Ataru screamed as another group of Rabbitmen started chasing after them. This group had backsacks that were stuffed to the brim with something...

The lead Rabbitman pulled his squad to a halt and shouted, "Aim true!" A chorus of voices echoed his sentiment as the Rabbitmen pulled small frisbee-sized clocks from their backsacks.

Suddenly, Skuld, Urd and the rest were being bombarded by a series of spinning airborne clocks. Urd was a little bit too slow...

_FLASH!!_

"Whaa...what happened?" Urd asked drowsily. She had been a little slow since Benten had beaned her with the plate back in Oyuki's UFO. Skuld was glad that she was okay, even though Skuld was literally restraining herself from uncorking a bevy of lung-bursting laughter...

Ataru's wolf-whistle gave it all away.

Urd looked down and saw that her clothes had been transformed...

"I CAN'T BELEIVE THIS IS HAPPENING TO ME!" she screamed, just as Oyuki and Benten were struck by the flying saucer Clocks.

Two flashes later, Benten and Oyuki reappeared, dressed the same as Urd.

"C'mon, quit dawdling!" Lum shouted just as a clock-shaped discus hit her from behind, boomerang-style.

Skuld started sprinting away from the hail of frisbeeing clocks, when she ran into a cluster of three clocks, centering in on her from separate trajectories...

She felt one clock hit her in the head, while another one hit her calf and the third thrown clock struck the arm she threw up to ward it off. The three impacts felt like the time Keiichi had pelted her with some of Belldandy's coffee cake after she contended that he didn't deserve a bite of her sister's cooking. Of course, Urd had been egging him on.

When Skuld reappeared, the first thing she noticed was the fishnet stockings covering her legs...

"NO!! NOT ME TOO!" she screamed. She had little white tux-cuffs around her wrists, a bustier/leotard that was cut so deep in front, she was worried that her nipples would be exposed, high heel shoes that immediate hurt her ankles, and a little bow-tie strapped around her neck...

Looking around frantically, she saw Ataru...who was gawking at her like a deer in the headlights. A pygmy sized rabbit...a _real_ rabbit, not a village headsman-looking guy in a rabbit suit...was throwing spitballs at him, trying to get his attention.

Ataru finally threw a hand to his neck, then turned and looked at the rabbit in frustration. They seemed to discuss something, but Skuld couldn't hear a word. Then the rabbit reached into thin air and pulled open a 'curtain' of space, as if it was pulling a window drapery aside...and gestured to Ataru to enter. The rabbit looked at Skuld and motioned "come here" with a large hand-shaped paw.

Skuld was gripped by high embarrassment.

The aggressive yells of the approaching Rabbitmen jolted her out of her timidity. They sounded like samurai retainers closing in on the capture of tax-evading villagers...

Taking one look back at the pink landscape with the clock wielding rabbits, Skuld plunged through the 'curtain'.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Urd kept giggling as the Rabbit calmly explained what had happened to them.

"Over there in the Time Joke Zone, I cannot be heard by women, so I had to get this young man's attention. It's to your benefit that you gentleladies brought a man with you...otherwise you'd have been captured and forced to marry those hooligan Rabbitmen. They make it so I cannot warn women in their Zone; so they can prey on women easier. But here in my Zone, I can talk to you plainly!" he explained.

"Don't you have any other clothes I can wear!" Skuld asked in exasperation, earning another row of giggling from Urd. Her younger sister was dressed like the rest of the women...in a full-on bunny bar hostess suit. Fishnet stockings, a cottony tail on her tush, high heels...and the front of her skin-tight leotard-like top plunged deep below her breasts. No doubt, Skuld had never worn high heels before...

No doubt, Skuld had never worn anything whose purpose was to expose 70 percent of her now semi-adult bosom.

Which was why, despite her rapt amusement at her sister's red-faced plight of embarrassment, Urd had maneuvered behind Ataru, covering his eyes with her hands.

After all, she had to protect Skuld's modesty. In a sense, Skuld was still very much a child...then again, so was Ataru. Skuld had never worn anything revealing before; her bunny outfit was causing her ill-ease that was edging towards panic. So Urd had to protect them both. Skuld was already covering her front tightly with her arms, as if she was nude or something. And Ataru was whining and complaining about not being able to see anything.

If he were to see Skuld and say the wrong thing...or even say _anything_...he would be writing his own death warrant. Skuld would get him, of course; but Urd knew that she would get him _first_.

So Urd kept his eyes covered up.

Skuld looked at her with a mixture of relief and resentment, causing Urd to stick her tongue out at her younger sis.

"...so what you have to do is drink a cup of tea with me."

"Eh? What if this is a trick?" Benten said, her body blushing underneath her pink rabbit suit. Of course, Lum wore a green suit, Oyuki a light blue suit, Skuld a black suit, and Urd a red bunny suit.

"This is what I get for making fun of Keiichi, Cevn and Tomohisa for having to wear those bunny suits..." Urd thought sadly, her heart skipping a beat as her deceased boyfriend's embarrassed face at the Budokan resolved into memory's view.

"What is drinking tea going to do?" Ataru asked. Urd regretted that she didn't have _four_ pairs of hands: two for covering his eyes, and two for covering his mouth.

"I have a portable Space Portal in the pocket of my waistcoat...which by the way is the best wool jacket this side of Sotheby's!" the Rabbit noted in a cheerful voice. "When you drink the tea, you'll all shrink in size...then I can pick you up and put you in my pocket, where you'll be transported out of this Time Zone into the Land of Inopportunity."

"Wh..what if you decide to crush us by stepping on us once we're shrunk!" Ataru asked with the wariness of a paranoid.

"Shut up, Ataru!" several female voices chorused.

Urd smiled at this. Lum, Oyuki and Benten all started to scold Ataru at once for being cowardly, lecherous and egotistical...

"Maybe, this level of antagonism might mean that the three might actually like him," she mused to herself. And if Lum's friends thought he was okay...then Lum would be easier to convince! Urd could clearly sense the slight undertones of feminine appraisal mixed in with the trio's wreaking to terms with Ataru's character defects.

"We agree!" Urd said to the Rabbit, speaking for the group.

"We _do not_!" Skuld countered. "I'm not going anywhere dressed like this!"

"You have no choice, my dear. While you were in the Time Joke Zone, the rabbits hit each of you with Levity Discs. They control the flow of humor in Time, so anything they strike with a Levity Disc becomes the butt of a joke. In your case, the costumes you are wearing must bear a presence of embarrassment-stigma in the world you come from," the Rabbit explained.

"I could undo their spell; that's easy enough. But once I did, then I wouldn't have the slightest idea about how to dress you. Which would mean that you all would be n..."

"N..nude! Waaaah! I wanna see! I wanna see!!" Ataru shouted, sounding like a kindergartner begging for a piece of pie or a cookie. Since she couldn't cuff him in the head, Urd bit him in the ear.

Skuld's face flushed crimson with anxiety.

"NO!" Skuld screamed. "Th..that's fine. Just forget it! We can get along without you undoing their stupid spell..."

"Skuld...do you have any better ideas?" Urd asked quietly. This brought a furrowed brow of concentration to her little sister...which intensified until she sudden stood up rigidly and shouted, "This is useless!"

"Heh ehe hee! If we all drink tea, than that means you can't hold your hands over my eyes, Urd-chan! You'll have to use one of your hands for the teacup!" Ataru said with a sly snicker. After Urd bit his other ear in reprisal, she asked the Rabbit if he had a kerchief in his woolen waistcoat.

"Of course, of course. Right here!" the Rabbit replied cordially. "What do you take me for...an ill-bred mongrel?"

Five females sighed in relief as the rabbit produced a black sneeze-cloth and deftly tied it around Ataru's face...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

After climbing in the rabbit's outstretched palm, which seemed like a human hand with pads of fur where lifelines normally crisscrossed, Urd braced herself as the rabbit dropped them carefully into his pocket. Urd expected to fall against something inside the pocket; but instead, she _kept_ falling...as though his jacket pocket had no bottom.

She fell...

And fell...

And fell some more...

The space around them kept spiraling, shifting, as if they were falling through strata after strata of the kinds of clouds that one would find in AquaSuns. The prolonged freefall reminded Urd of one the amusements on Yggdrasil, where Gods and Goddesses would go free-fall diving through millions of kilometers of AquaSun clouds, water bubbles, nebulae, crystal clouds.

"Perhaps we're supposed to keep falling!" Urd shouted to the others. Skuld seemed quite relaxed, but Oyuki kept getting caught in the face by her long kimono sleeves, and Benten seemed to panic once in a while. Ataru had assumed an attitude of prayerful fear, combed up into a fetal position as he fell. No doubt, the young mortal man was terrified.

"Isn't he good for _anything_?" Urd thought with disgust. She remanded herself from judging Ataru's anxiety further when she realized that most Earthrealm mortals would be emotionally adrift from dread with just a few seconds' experience of free fall. Here, they had been free falling for almost twenty minutes...

And he was still wearing the kerchief!

"Get yourself together, Ataru!" Urd shouted.

"Yeah! Brace up, blindfolded Earth Boy!" Lum added with a giggle. She was having fun, pirouetting in mid-fall with gymnastic grace. She gradually floated over to him and removed his blindfold. Ataru instantly looked around at each girl, his facial joy falling flat as he realized that they were back in their 'regular' outfits. When the Rabbit had shrank them, their bunny-suits didn't shrink with them, which meant...

The five of them giggled as Ataru laid on one of the most pitiful pouts a guy could muster.

"Tie your kimono sleeves, Oyuki!" Urd directed the younger girl. Despite falling in a region that resembled outer space, there was a definite wind buffeting them from below as they fell. Since Oyuki wore a maiden's kimono, the long sleeves that almost trailed to the ground when she was standing were windwhipped like flags in a gale...

Oyuki struggled to reign in her long sleeves, but after a couple of minutes she was able to manage them, rolling them up to her elbows and then tying them together.

Benten decided to rotate herself so she was facing downwards like a diver; apparently this was the most comfortable position for her. Urd thought that the Warrior Goddess was onto something, and followed suit. Soon, they were all upside down, falling into the wind rather than being tossed by it.

They noticed two doors flying up to meet them. As they drew closer to the doors, their speed of descent seemed to level down, and soon they 'landed' on the doors.

The six of them were standing on two side-by-side doors. Each door had a grotesquerie face carved into its lintel...

"So what do we do now?" Ataru asked in a shout, the first words he'd spoke since they passed through the Rabbit's pocket.

"He said this was the Land of Inopportunity..." Skuld noted.

"And so it is!" a door spoke. Or rather, the facade of the door.

"This one!!" Skuld shouted, reaching out and opening _the other door_ by grabbing hold of its ornate doorknob. "This is the way out of here!"

"What are you talking abou...whoooa!" Ataru shouted as Skuld sent him through the door with a solid kickpush to the back.

"Coming, Big Sister?"

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Six figures were sitting on a long wall, a wall that extended to the horizon like the Great Wall of China.

"So explain again how you knew that was the exit?" Urd asked.

"The first door said that we were in the Land of Inopportunity. Being the genius I am, I concluded that the other door was the exit. Remember what those two 'Lords' said? If the door was lying, the other door _may_ tell the truth. But the door that spoke first to us _was_ telling the truth, which was the 'one truth is false'. If we were in the Land of Inopportunity, then there would be no opportunity to leave. Which made the other door...the 'false' door...the _true_ door of opportunity. Hence, the other falsehood...the other door...was the way out. Because it was the unspoken truth. But since it _may_ speak the truth, I had to solve the riddle before our 'escape door' spoke, otherwise we would have been stranded."

"I don't understand!" Lum said, standing up atop the wall and looking at Skuld with a quizzical expression.

"It's a good thing I'm a genius, because..." Skuld said, holding her fists under her chin self-consciously. Urd bopped Skuld on the back of her head, sending a small shock of hair awry.

"Don't act important brat! Just answer Lum's question!"

"Urd...when we get back...you're really gonna get it!" Skuld snapped.

"Oh, is that so? Why, you're a hundred millennia too young to pull one over on..."

"What?!" Ataru interrupted with a shout of amazement. "What's this about a hundred millennia?"

"Just explain, Skuld!" Urd said in a commanding voice.

"Because I'm so smart, I knew that the silence was the falsehood...so I had to open the other door before it spoke. The door that spoke _may_ tell the truth, but it may not...a priori, so to speak. Since its veracity was realmed within _potentialities_, it was within the matrix of probabilities that whatever it said..."

"Okay, that's good enough!" Urd interjected, noticing Lum's eyes spiraling with dumbfoundment as Skuld's 'explanation' only seemed to confuse her more...

"I think you _guessed_!" Ataru declared.

Urd almost choked on her breath at this.

Seated next to her, she could feel the quantum leap in her sister's body heat. Skuld was red-faced with ire...in fact, she was so angry, she was gnashing her teeth while kicking her heels against the wall with techno breakbeat rapidity...

"All this in-fighting is not to our benefit!" Oyuki pleaded, as Skuld's eyes literally arced with an electrical rage. A flash flew from her eyes to Ataru...

The Earthrealm college kid was engulfed in smoke.

"Ha ha hah he bwah ha!" Benten laughed, pointing at Ataru as the smoke cleared.

"What?" Ataru asked irritably, not aware that he was lettered with colorful kanji that labeled him "_loser_" "_idiot male_" "_lameass_" and worse...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Skuld cast a sidelong glance at Ataru, who was _still_ grumbling about the letters on his shirt and jeans with all the fatalism he could muster. Upon arriving here, they had decided to walk down the meadow road that lined against the wall. Skuld was hoping that the road might lead somewhere, as there were no visible signs of habitation, like farmhouses and village steeples.

A creek meandered nearby, its riverbed populated by several deer thirstily lapping up its water. The deer scattered when Ataru rushed over to the small stream. Bending down, he stripped off his shirt, earning a sarcastic comment from Benten about how he could never beat her in arm-wrestling. After an irritated glance back towards the five women, Ataru tried to wash the letters off his shirt...and then screamed in frustration once he realized he couldn't make them dissolve in the water.

Of course he couldn't. When Skuld used her "Lettering Power" at _that_ level of strength...at _that_ level of irritation, to put it accurately...the letters literally fused with the atomic structure of whatever matter she was aiming them at.

Ataru's clothes were marked for the rest of the trip.

"Skuld-Baka!" Skuld heard him say under his breath as he rejoined the group, now donned in a wet shirt. His plight was too amusingly pathetic for her to take insult at this.

After conversations revolving around "boredom" and "what are we going to do next?" a girl in a mini-skirted sailor suit appeared from behind a brambles further down the road.

"This way! You have to avoid Humpty Dumpty, or he'll spit on you! And if he does, then you can't complete your mission! You'll be whisked back to the Land of Inopportunity and then you'll have to answer to another pair of doors!" she warned urgently. Her long brown hair ponytailed behind her as she ran off away from the road, kicking her heels high with each pace in true school-girl fashion.

Skuld visually followed the wall up ahead. In the distance, she saw a gleaming pile of gold, metal finery, bags of rice, precious carved wood, paintings...all heaped up against a section of the wall. On the top of the wall, presiding over the ersatz 'wall' of treasure, was an egg-shaped man. His spherical torso was half-face, half-body. His officious attire resembled that of a Kyoto courtier from the classical period. The resemblance didn't end with his dress; his rotund face was made up with rouged cheeks and pale flour-white facial cream. He wore a small cap that identified him as a Kamakura nobleman. And he was spitting on passersby...

Walking closer, Skuld could see that the creek drew near to the road, but the terrain had deepened, so that the stream cliffed off immediately next to the road into a deep crevice, possibly twenty or thirty meters deep. There was no other option except for crossing the road in front of the oval man and his hoard of treasure. People were lined up on either side of the road, traffic-jammed with horses, carts and buggies. As she watched, a man dashed as fast as his feet could carry him in front of the Eggman, weaving his path from side to side to avoid being spat upon.

"What's going on here?" a peasant couple on an oxcart asked as they rode near the ruckus. Immediately, the crowd of peasants queued on the road warned them not to cross near "Humpty Dumpty"...but the couple ignored the warnings, stating that it would be a two day detour to deliver their harvest using another route.

Too late.

The Eggman spat towards the oxcart drawing the young peasant couple, striking the oxen. The two bullocks disappeared in a flash; causing the oxcart to weigh towards its rear, tumbling out the two alarmed peasants. Under a rain of spit, they turned tail and ran for their lives, abandoning their rice.

A motley group of beggar-peasants rushed up and pushed the cylindrical bales of rice towards the Eggman...who tipped them each with a tossed coin.

"So that's how he can get his treasure piled up underneath him, the portly swine!" Urd said to her. "It doesn't look like he can climb off the wall, so he had henchmen bring it to him, for a trifling reward. Anyone else that approaches, he'll spit on."

Skuld nodded in disdainful agreement with her sister. She looked around for Miyuki-chan...but the girl was nowhere to be seen.

"We need to steer clear of _that_ freakin' queer!" Benten confirmed in a hushed voice as Humpty Dumpty chortled in cruel amusement. The vagabond peasants scattered away from the oxcart, their task left incomplete as a peasant riding an old horse approached. Skuld looked on as Humpty Dumpty unleashed another spray of spittle at the peasant. He barely missed the peasant, but he hit the horse on the flank. With a flash, the horse disappeared, causing the peasant to tumble to the ground on his cloth saddle. As before, the peasant reacted by screaming frightfully as he sprinted off down the road.

"This is unfair! What about those peasant's rice? We can't just let him steal it!" Ataru stammered angrily as a group of ill-dressed peasants started towards the oxcart...obviously intent on finishing their loot of the oxcart.

Skuld was surprised by the resolve figuring his face as he spoke. It was as if he had suddenly grown a spine! She narrowed her eyes, pessimistically expecting him to change his tune and turn tail and run...

Ataru seemed to reach a decision.

"This is unjust! I'm going to go get them their rice back!" he yelled, standing up and crouch-running towards Humpty Dumpty and the ox-cart. Impulsively, without a bit of warning to she and the others.

"Get back here!" Skuld shouted after him, grabbing towards his arm and missing it by centimeters. Ataru sprinted from one bush to another in an attempt to avoid detection by this Kyoto Court version of Humpty Dumpty.

"AHA!! Some sport, for a change!" an effeminate voice squealed in delight, as Ataru dashed behind a large rock.

"You think that you can eggscape _us_, the indomitable Humpty Dumpty? The Shogun of Eggstreme Licentiousness? The foremost Artist of Poetic Eggsposition in all the Lands? This is _my_ road...and I eggsact a toll on all who pass!! And your impending...ah!, I am moved to pronounce another one of my eggcellant po-ems...before I eggsecute you!"

"Give me a fuckin' break!" Skuld heard Urd moan under her breath.

_"Twas silly, all the smithy's anvil-tunes / slurp udon! and hammer 'gainst the day/_

_All cheesified were the Ashikaga men / their ill-made guns exploding in an Onin fray..."_

"YOU SUCK!!" several voices shouted from the small group of peasants watching on either side of the road as the Eggman giggled, pleased with his doggerel.

Skuld gasped as Ataru barely dodged a gobbet of spit while dashing for cover behind the ox-cart wagon. Humpty Dumpty was wheedling with glee at his extempore poetic creation, praising himself grandly in-between attempts to lob a loogie on Ataru.

It was then that Skuld noticed something peculiar. Humpty Dumpty's spit only seemed to affect _organic objects_! The oxen and the horse had instantly disappeared when they were spat upon. But the oxcart...he was pelting the wagon with spittle, but _nothing happened_!

Was it possible that Ataru had noticed this...first? If he did, then it was a near-impossible feat of observation. Skuld was a thousand times smarter than all of them combined...with the exception of Urd. And she knew that she was tons smarter than her Big Sister.

"How could he have figured it out _before I did_?" Skuld asked herself, as she watched Ataru clambering under the yoke beam. The yoke beam usually rested between the two oxen; a transverse harness pole with harnesses of girth-yoke for the oxen. The transverse pole was still tied down to the top of the yoke beam, it hadn't been broken when the oxen vanished. She watched as Ataru lifted the yoke beam slightly and with great effort, slowly turned it, using it to rotate the large wooden cart...using the cart itself to shield him from Humpty Dumpty.

"How dare you steal our rice! Y..you thief! Y..you brigand! A thousand fies on thee, ill-dressed ronin with curse words on your clothes! Return to us our goods immediately...or face the dire conseggquences of your miscreant behavior!" Humpty Dumpty raged maniacally. Several dozen peasant onlookers were joining the growing throng just out of reach of Humpty Dumpty's spit.

They were cheering Ataru.

"Go Ataru! Go!!" a voice squealed behind Skuld, sounding like it was right next to her ear. Skuld flinched at the loud shout, and then turned to see Lum jumping up and down atop the wall like a cheerleader.

Ataru was cautiously backpedaling the oxcart away from Humpty Dumpty. His cheeks were puffed out in exertion, and he was gasping deep tides of breath as he strained to pull the wagon towards the rejoicing peasants.

Then he stumbled on a rock...

The wooden harness bar broke loose, rotating along the beam of the yoke beam. The harness bar swung loosely, striking Ataru in the back of the head and dislodging him from under the yoke pole he was carrying.

Disorienting him.

Skuld watched in horror as Ataru dizzily staggered out from behind the oxcart, instinctively trying to separate himself from the injuring cart.

"No!" she screamed, running towards Ataru to try and rescue him. Her powers of transport were useless here, so she had to reach him by sprint, otherwise he'd be doomed.

About five meters away, Skuld felt a gooey splash against her cheek. She barely had time to think "Gross!!" before her body started freezing up.

Freezing in more than one sense...Skuld felt like she was being frozen from the inside. But she wasn't disappearing, like Miyuki-chan had warned. Instead, she was becoming paralyzed, like a statue.

"Bastard!!" she heard Ataru curse.

What happened in the next two minutes amazed even Skuld. Despite her own lack of Goddess powers, Lum somehow had retained her special abilities. The green-haired Oni girl's horns grew large, indicating that she was extremely pissed off.

"How dare you pick on a little Earth boy!" three female voices screamed angrily.

Lum floated up in the air...and started zakking Humpty Dumpty with bolts of electric shocks. This slowed the Eggman down enough that he couldn't spit. Skuld could see patches of his egg shell turning brown...

As if he was being cooked from the inside.

While Lum was zakking Humpty Dumpty, Oyuki had calmly pulled several silver hairpins from the back of her head, clenching each hairpin between a finger. Her ice blue hair came partly undone as she flicked them towards Humpty Dumpty like shurikan stars. A second later, three hairpins were lodged him Humpty Dumpty's shell.

Humpty Dumpty cursed her, "Bitch! You think that can harm m..me..."

His voice was cut off as portions of his eggshell started turning blue.

Freezing, brittle blue.

Benten was even more enraged than either Lum or Oyuki. With deadly malice in her eyes, she unwrapped her long thick strand of chain. Doubling it up, she started swinging it around her head.

As the chain cut through the air with helicopter-loud "whoosh-chops", she advanced on Humpty Dumpty. A red-faced teenaged Warrior Goddess with an attitude.

Swinging her chain, she struck Humpty Dumpty repeatedly; the afflicted Eggman screaming curses at her in a shrill voice.

Skuld could see cracks and chips forming in his eggshell with each strike. Benten obviously saw this too, as it seemed that she redoubled her efforts, slamming her chain against Humpty Dumpty.

Suddenly, a loud "_CRACK!!_"

Humpty Dumpty split wide open, his Kyoto courtier's face figured with a last expression of panic. A yellowish yolk-like substance spilled from the bisected Eggman, emptying him out...

A final swing from Benten's chain and Humpty Dumpty's shell shattered into a thousand shards. Already partly emptied of the yolk inside of him, the rest of the yolk spilled out in a flood.

Depositing a slime-covered girl in a sailor-suit on the huge pile of treasure.

Skuld instantly felt her mobility returning to her body, the frigid sensation which possessed her limbs quickly passing. She looked towards the yellow-syrupy mess that constituted Humpty Dumpty's innards, watching the girl struggle to stand up and clean off her face.

It was Miyuki-chan!

Lum, Oyuki and Benten turned their attention to Ataru, who was uneasy on his feet. He finally gave up and sat down on the road.

The peasants mobbed him and the three space girls, shouting loud huzzahs and cheers.

Miyuki-chan managed to clean enough of the slime off her face to be able to speak.

"Thank you, benefactors!" she said, spraying droplets of ooze as she spoke. "I am the _real_ Miyuki-chan! I fell through this mirror in my bedroom one day while getting ready for school...and then I was _here_! I was lost and all alone, and I wound up being captured by that baka, Humpty Dumpty. He forced me to marry him. Marriage to Humpty Dumpty meant that I was imprisoned inside of him...he's so possessive, he didn't want anyone to see me, his new bride. So I've been kept inside of him in this...gross snotty slime...forever! What year is it? Tell me...did they ever make those Escaflowne OVAs?" she asked.

Skuld felt her mouth twitch at this.

"Miyuki, I don't know what year it is here, in this place. But from where we came, before we arrived here, it was 20XX," Urd said in a level voice.

"_Two...thousand...and...?!_" Miyuki repeated over and over again, shocked. Skuld, being the Norn of the Future, could empathize with what the young high-schooler was going through. Her Present...was now the Future. She walked up to Miyuki, ignoring the ooze that covered her, and put a comforting arm around her shoulder.

"Look at it this way...at least you're free..." she started to say. Her words of succor were interrupted by Lum, Oyuki and Benten giggling as Ataru tried to stand up once again, only to fall against Oyuki's kimono-clad bosom.

"My turn! My turn!" she heard Lum say.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

So they had freed Miyuki-chan from Humpty Dumpty. As she and Urd debriefed the bewildered girl, Lum, Oyuki and Benten had played with Ataru for half an hour. They were definitely toying with him with feminine savvy...

The three stood around him, encouraging the groggy young man to stand up from time to time. Ataru would struggle to his feet, get dizzy...and then collapse against one of the three girls. Then he would slide back down, sitting on the ground, until the next 'round'.

They were keeping score, based on which girl he collapsed against...

"How juvenile!" Skuld sighed to herself.

"Hmmm, looks like someone's feeling left out! Perhaps you should join them in their fun?" Urd taunted.

"Big Sister! I'm _not_ interested! What is the matt..."

"Uh...excuse me, but why are you two fighting?" Miyuki-chan asked in an innocent voice, causing Skuld to completely lose the string of invective poised on her tongue.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

So now, six had become seven.

Miyuki-chan seemed to recognize the lay of the land much better than anyone else. While Miyuki-chan pointed out familiar landmarks as they traveled along the road, she also told the group that she was a first year high school student in one of the private schools in Tokyo. She confided to Urd that she was a fan of Keiko Nishi's manga (when she wasn't studying in cram school) and that she wanted to work in the radio industry alongside idol stars.

In other words, she was an ordinary teenage girl...from the early 1990s.

Urd thought that Skuld would hit it off with Miyuki-chan if they ever got into a discussion about shoujo manga. In fact, Urd was hoping that once they got back to the Earthrealm, Miyuki-chan could be Skuld's friend. During the four years that Skuld had been assigned to the Earthrealm, she had made very few friends her own age. Most of Skuld's friends were of the AI kind...

And Tomohisa, of course. But Tomohisa was another matter altogether. A different _type_ of friend for her younger sister, whether she realized it or not.

Now that Skuld was an adolescent, Urd realized that it would be very important for Skuld to have friends her own age...so that they could help guide her on the path to adulthood. Knowing Skuld, Urd sensed that her little sister's transition to maturity would be just as tempestuous as her own.

Of course, Belldandy seemed to have made the shift without a hitch.

As it was, Urd almost feel the intensity of Skuld's brooding as they walked. From time to time, Skuld would ask questions and offer suggestions or theories about their predicament...obviously, she was trying very hard to figure out the next stage of their 'puzzle'.

"Better her than me," Urd thought with a sigh.

One of Skuld's theories seemed to galvanize a memory in Miyuki-chan. She shifted into a purposeful aspect, informing them that she might know a way out of these lands. Over the next several days, Miyuki-chan led them down several horsecart 'highways' until they reached a small village. This was the first villa that Urd had seen since she arrived in this stage of the journey. The rustic town looked like something out of Holland, complete with large windmills and gardens profuse with tulip blooms.

"After this disgusting chess game with a _nude_ version of myself, I found myself back in my room. But when I walked outside my door...I emerged from that fountain in the middle of the city square," Miyuki-chan noted matter-of-factly, pointing towards a large gateway that passed through the wall that encircled the city. As they entered the city through the gate, Urd was amazed at the diversity of the town's populace. The architecture and ambiance was quintessentially Dutch, circa the 1850s. Urd caught herself wondering if _everything_ in this mirror-world was from the 19th century.

They strolled down the wide cobblestone road to a circular city square. Stepping around several flocks of ducks and other poultry birds, Urd and the others approached the central fountain. The fount was dominated by a sculpted quadrille of dauphins surrounding a central spire; the cherubic figures were pouring flasks of water into a large circular basin. Pigeons roosted liberally on the statuary; a significant portion of which was covered with their droppings.

"We gotta go in there? How? It looks like a wishing well to me!" Ataru commented.

Urd agreed with him. The bottom of the fountain pool was only about a third of a meter deep, and it was filled with a mosaic of glints from coins cast into it. Ataru stepped into the fountain pool to prove his point...

Nothing happened.

"You need to take a coin, make a wish...and then you can leave," one of the pigeons barked in a nasty irritant of a voice.

"Great!" Skuld said in a low voice. "Another stupid ritual!"

Skuld reached down and grabbed a gold dragoon...

"Ha ha! I _lied_!!" the pigeon cooed with malicious joy, launching itself from atop one of the dauphins and flying off with its flockmates. The statue, with its four cherubic angels pouring water into the fountain...started to rumble.

"I don't like the sound of that..." Benten noted with a wary ominium.

Urd and the others back-stepped cautiously away from the fountain as cracks formed in the fountainhead masonry. Seconds later, chipples and segments of carved infant faces fell away from the statue.

"THOU SHALT NOT STEAL!" a booming voice shouted, echoing off of the tradehouses on all four sides of the central square. By this point, the townsmen and women were screaming, dashing hither and fro in a panicked stampede as a dragon-like monster uncoiled itself from within the rubble of the smashed ornate masonry...

Urd gasped as she beheld the hideous creature. A large head in the middle snapped angrily; it was a reptilian version of an eagle's head. Above the beak was a cyclopean eye that generated electricity. Bolts of blue electrical flame seemed to randomly fork out of the corners of the eyelids. Underneath the neck was a squat hippopotamine body, with four snake-like trunks emerging from it. Each limbic trunk was about 10 meters in length, ending in vicious-faced child heads. The infant heads writhed in the air like tentacles of an octopus. Each infant head bore a sinister resemblance to the dauphins pouring water into the fountain a few moments ago. Their mouths were disproportionately large, with sharp biting teeth. The trunk of the beast was like a small Brontosaurus, resting on squat legs. It probably couldn't run very fast, but the coiling child-headed tentacles more than made up for its lack of mobility.

"That's gotta be the monster that the Lord mentioned!" Skuld pressed urgently. Despite the chaos, Urd was amused by the fact that Skuld still referred to one of the two inhabitants under the mushroom tree as "the Lord".

Lum had taken position high in the air above the monster, floating out of reach of the biting child-heads as she tried to draw the attention of the long coiled trunks. One of the trunks whipped downwards, and Urd watched in disgust as the infantine 'face' at the end of the trunk grabbed a small dog in its mouth. With tentaclelic precision, the 'arm' brought the dog to the beaked central head, which wasted no time in eating the dog.

"Shit! Did you see that! We gotta get out of here!" someone yelled.

The crowd continued to empty the square in all directions, post haste. Urd suddenly realized that this monster was sitting atop their only route of escape from this realm...

"We gotta beat it! We have to defeat it!" she shouted to the others. Reaching her hands above her head to cup the sky, Urd tried to summon the lightning...but the skies were clear. Her main weapon didn't work!

"Dammit!" she hissed. One of the tentacled limbs swung towards her, a vicious red-eyed cherubic face on the end ready to bite her head off. Without even thinking, Urd reached up and grabbed it by the nose, just like she so often did with Skuld when her little sister was acting like an unruly brat. Unexpectedly, the limb froze into a catatonic slackness...except for the face, whose jaw was snapping open and shut like a gecko's.

Urd looked at it, seeing the seething hate in its red eyes.

"There's no reasoning with you, you piece of shit!" she said to it, feeling enraged about how it had plucked up and eaten the little dog.

"Big Sister!! Big Sister!! Be careful!" Skuld warned.

"I don't think it's going to be able to bite me like this, after all, its face is flat," Urd noted to Skuld.

"THAT'S IT!!" Miyuki-chan yelled. "If you hold its nose, it can't move!"

"Right! There's seven of us...and four of it! We got it outnumbered!" Benten added. One of the heads came towards her...

With the practiced leap of a judo expert, she manipulated the limb's own weight and trajectory to throw it off balance. The dauphin's face expressed resentful surprise as Benten hurdled it, pivoting in mid-air so she could gain a climbing purchase on the wide trunk. Straddling the writhing tentacle, Benten pinned it to the ground and hooked her fingers in the nostrils of its nose to immobilize it.

The limb immediately went limp.

"That's two!" Lum shouted.

A head turned towards her hungrily. Lum seemed to will herself to zakk a powerful bolt of lightning towards the face, blinding it momentarily. Seizing the opportunity, she swooped down and quickly poked it in both eyes. Screaming in pain, the tentacle-head swirled and coiled in skewed agony. Lum maneuvered in front of it and deftly grabbed its nose.

"That's three!" she shouted.

Ataru was busy throwing brick and pieces of mortar at the fourth head. Occasionally, one of his throws would connect...bumping the head and the limb behind it to the side.

"Keep it up, Ataru!" Miyuki-chan encouraged.

The remaining head seemed to dodge Ataru's thrown objects with an increasing sluggishness. Urd could hear the head she was holding gasping and gagging.

It couldn't breathe through the mouth!

"Quick! Get the last head and hold its nostrils shut! It won't be able to breathe!" she shouted.

Oyuki withdrew the last two hair pins from the bun in back of her head. As her hair fell almost to the ground, she hurled them towards the remaining face. One pin lodged in the cheek of the child-face, while the other scored right into its right eye. The middle head of the beast bellowed in pain as Ataru quickly ran over and clasped a hand over the nose of the fourth head.

As with all living things, when the air supply is blocked...a spastic struggle ensues.

The four trunks started shuddering and bucking, thrashing themselves about in an attempt to dislodge the four persons blocking their noses. After five minutes, the monster suddenly heaved a final spasm of resignation...and was still.

Just to be sure, they waited ten more minutes before releasing the noses.

"Is it truly dead?" Oyuki asked. In answer, Ataru picked up a hefty stone and threw it right into the central head.

No reaction.

Slowly, the city squared started filling up with grateful townspeople. They told Urd and the others that this beast had held their city captive in much the same way as Humpty Dumpty had impoverished the rural lands with his "tolls". Urd had questioned the practice of a 'wishing well' fountain that was chock full of _gold and silver coins_. In a normal society, those would be stolen...

In a normal society, such a wealth of precious coins would never even make it into a fountain. They would be hoarded or kept in a mercantile institution.

Happy to be released from the dictatorship of the Jabberwocky, the townspeople threw a party...one that Urd and the others couldn't refuse.

Better to take their chances with a hero's welcome than an insulted citizenry...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

After diving into the remnants of the fountain pool, Skuld found herself tumbling onto the floor of a small room. Once her dizziness subsided, she noticed the walls were covered with faded posters of idol stars, covered with cobwebs...

Miyuki-chan's room, 20XX.

"We're back home!" Skuld thought happily...and then she noticed Miyuki-chan's melancholic demeanor. The first year high school student was surveying her room with a face figured with tension and conflicting emotions.

"You're home too!" Skuld added, trying to cheer her up.

"This _can't_ be my home!" Miyuki-chan shouted in an anguished voice. "It'd be foolish to believe that this is my old room! That would mean that my parent's had left this house for _fifteen years_ without selling it, or even going in my room! This kind of thing just can't happen in Tokyo!"

Skuld spied a note on the study desk.

"I think they left a letter for you, Miyuki-chan," Lum said in a hoping voice as she pointed towards a weathered envelope.

Miyuki-chan opened the letter and read it, her eyes scanning the yellowed paper with fear.

"It says that the only way I can be reunited with my parents is if the young man who came back with me marries three women!" she said, looking at Ataru.

"Waitaminute! He's supposed to marry Lum!" Urd shouted.

Skuld rested a palm on her forehead.

"I'm _already_ married...to my Darling! Keiichi's my man!" Lum shouted.

"Lum...Keiichi's with our sister Belldandy. There's nothing anyone of us can do about it. So I think you should reconsider..." Skuld started to suggest.

"_NO! NO! NO! NO! NO!!_" Lum screamed, her mouth so wide that her fangs evoked Mara in Skuld's mind.

So much for appeals to logic.

"Lum, I might note that Ataru _did_ risk his life to rescue the peasant's rice. This would seem to indicate that he would have some redeeming qualities, such as compassion and a sense of fair-play," Oyuki noted.

Ataru looked at the Neptunian Princess with his mouth agape...as if she had frozen him with her unexpected compliment.

"Yes, Lum. Ataru kicked some major ass too, when we fought the Jabberwocky! He was pounding it with rocks and stones...which allowed us to capture each of the heads. And then he risked his life again to capture the fourth head. And moments later, when that stupid monster tried to thrash us off of itself, he held on. He's very weak, but with some discipline and workouts, he _could_ be a strong man," Benten added, watching Ataru as he grinned boyishly.

Ataru flinched, as if he had been stuck upside the head with Benten's chain.

"And Lum...there is one whose feelings we cannot ignore. We must consider Miyuki-chan, who has been separated from her parents for a very long time. I.._sob_..know about the feeling of loss and separation from a loved one. Now. More than ever. And I couldn't live with myself if I witnessed it happening to another person's life; especially considering that in this case, there's something we can do about it," Urd said, her eyes traced with tears as she advocated the impossible..

"Big Sister's got a point! Don't you see? Our rescue of Miyuki-chan is incomplete if we don't reunite her with her parents!" Skuld added. "How would you feel if you couldn't ever see _your_ parents again, Lum?"

"Stop it, stop it, stop it! You're trying to deceive me! You're trying to make me give up on Keiichi-darling!" Lum protested.

"Hey Lum? _Who_ was cheering 'Go get im, Ataru!' when he was trying to take on Humpty Dumpty? And _who_ got angry and flew to his rescue when he got injured, neh? And finally..._who_ giggled when Ataru collapsed against her, his face nestled between her boobs..." Benten said in a sly voice.

"If it was up to me, I would venture as far as to say that you've already given up on Keiichi, Lum," Oyuki added.

"I don't remember that!" Ataru shouted. "S..she let me touch her _boobs_?!"

Skuld thought that the look of sheer paranoia on his face was pricelessly cute...his expression said "she's going to kill me!"

A tear formed on Lum's eye.

"B..but I..I just can't give up on Darling!" she said in a grief-stuttered voice. "I don't have the faith..."

"But we do! We know you can let go of Keiichi...if you want!" Urd urged.

Lum gulped deeply. "Okay!! Prove it! Jan Ken Pon! And whoever loses _has_ to marry Ataru!" she said.

"WAITAMINUTE! I'm a college student! It's illegal to have three wives in Japan! And how can I support _three wives_? And what about kids..."

"Details, details..." Urd interrupted him with a slygirl grin.

"Big Sister! How can you be so calm! You have to play too! And if you lose, you'll end up having to marry Ataru! And..oh my Lord! I'd have to play too! And that means... _I..I_ could lose!" Skuld stammered.

Urd watched her sister wavering with desperate credulity...

"A..and if _I lose_, I..I..." Skuld shouted hysterically.

"Skuld, my dear sister. I know in my heart that I can't possibly lose and have to marry anybody. That I _won't_ lose if we play jan-ken-pon. The only person I ever wanted to marry...is dead and gone. Beyond my or anyone's reach. Therefore, my heart wouldn't be in it if I were to have to marry Ataru. And I trust in the Lord that I won't lose..." Urd said calmly.

Skuld shot Ataru a menacing look.

"If I end up losing and have to become your wife, don't ever expect me to have sex with you!" she declared.

Everyone in the room except Skuld face-faulted at _that_. Benten was so shocked, she actually stumbled back into Miyuki-chan's dresser, knocking over several bottles of perfumes and cosmetics.

"Saaa, saaa! Now we _know_ what my little sister thinks about all the time when she considers relationships with young men!" Urd taunted.

Skuld blushed deep red...too embarrassed to counter Urd's accusation. The other girls in the room giggled, and Ataru tried to hide his face in his hands for shame.

"Let's just get this over with!" he mumbled wearily into his palms.

"Um!" all the women present said, nodding their heads in agreement.

For the last time, perhaps...

_JAN!! KEN!! PON!!_

In the flash between times before she threw her hand, Skuld thought that this was perhaps the biggest folly she had ever participated in during the 120,000-plus years of her life. Perhaps Big Sister knew that the Ultimate Force...if it participated in this mixed-up reality...wouldn't allow for her to become Ataru's wife. But Skuld didn't have this ascertainity...

_Ataru threw a scissors._

_Lum, Oyuki and Benten threw a paper._

_Urd...and Skuld...threw a rock._

"Whew!!" Skuld sighed, feeling a few galaxy-sized masses of weight withdraw from her back...

_--Knock Knock!!--_

The door opened...

_"MIYUKI-CHAN!!"_

_"MOM!! DAD!!"_

"D..dear Lord! Th..this...is, is it really you?" a woman in her 50s asked, her face quivering with awesome emotions.

"We'd given up hope! We couldn't think of selling the house, not after you disappeared. We'd always hoped that you would come back!" her husband said, his feelings coursing his speech into stutters.

"The neighbors called and told us that they heard some noises coming from our old house, so we drove over as fast as we could," the mother explained.

Skuld looked at Miyuki-chan, who had collapsed to her knees, speechless with tears. Soon, her own eyes welled up as she was swept away by the intense drama of this reunion between daughter and parents. She looked aside to Urd, who was covering her face with a tanned hand...tearlines on her cheekbones underneath it...

"EH?!" three female and one male voice screamed.

Lum, Oyuki, Benten and Ataru all had wedding bands on their ring fingers.

"All I can say is...you're going to _my_ planet first for the honeymoon!" Benten shouted.

"Benten, that isn't fair! My situation with that Keiichi character caused all this to happen. I should have the first honeymoon with uchi-wa-Ataru. He's my Darling!" Lum countered noisily.

"That may be true, but we need to consider how appropriate it would be for your father to learn that you're one of _three_ wives, Lum? And as for you, Benten...is your bed big enough for _four_? By elimination, I have no parents living with me, and my palace is more than large enough to accommodate a modest reception...of let's say, ten thousand guests. And you've both seen my bedroom quarters, we could _all_ fit in my bed..." Oyuki noted, her cheekbones flushing pinkly.

Ataru was glacing back and forth between his three wives with a woozy expression...

Skuld looked at Miyuki-chan, who had pinned herself tightly between her mother and father, trying to hug away the horrible years of separation...

"Let's get out of here, Big Sister!" Skuld said in a whining voice, pointing towards the bedroom mirror.

"How the hell do you know that that'll work?" Urd asked gruffly, the burst of empathy-joy for Miyuki-chan cut abruptly short by the squabble arising between Ataru and his Three Wives.

"Good luck, Ataru!" Skuld said with a giggle as she stepped into the mirror...

"Skuld! I hope we can meet agaaaaaainnnnnnn..." she heard Miyuki-chan shout after her as she disappeared into her reflection.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --


	94. Pt 94: Miyuki and Natsumi: Canone Final

**Part 94: Miyuki and Natsumi: Canone -- Finale**

Natsumi looked at Miyuki and giggled. It turned out that Mrs. Haneda, the secretary at the Ministry of Agriculture annex, still remembered how to put makeup on her junior-high aged granddaughters. With a quick make-up session, Miyuki and Natsumi began to bear some resemblance to 20-something women dressed as 17-year-olds.

The disguise was augmented by the fact that the two girls they had knocked out had all sorts of hair ribbons and clips; the types of accessories that Natsumi hadn't worn in ten years...

So now Miyuki had her hair pulled back in a clip that sported little bunny heads, while Natsumi's long hair was tied up in two pink-ribboned ponytails.

The girlish accessories made their disguise more convincing.

If things weren't so serious, Natsumi would have choked on the laughter threatening to overcome her. Miyuki looked _silly_!

They were dressed in navy blue prep-school style blazer jackets and knee-length skirts, with white blouses underneath. Each prep jacket had a patch featuring the Diet Building sewn on the breast. Fortunately, the jackets were loose...because the white blouses were designed for girls, not adult women with full bustlines. If the jackets were as tight-breasted as the shirts, Natsumi doubted if she would be able to breathe. The whole effect suggested that of the typical school uniform worn by girls who attended the exclusive college-prep academies.

The secretary, Mrs. Haneda, quickly sketched out a map of the building for them. Basically, the Diet building consisted of a central hall with a wing on each side. Two long hallways running in parallel linked the central hall and grand foyer with the House of Councillors. They were currently on the first floor on the rear side of the building. As she drew out the map, the senior secretary noted that there was a member's entrance lobby on the same floor, but it had been closed off due to renovations to the building's heating system. So they would have to take a stairwell to access the second floor. Once there, they could take either hallway to get to the large Chamber of the House of Councillors. In between the two hallways was a courtyard; thus the line of offices on each side of the hallway would be interrupted midway down the hall.

Miyuki and Natsumi discussed the possible routes they could take...and the plentiful hazards along the way. Because each adjunct wing of the Diet Building consisted of two long corridors, the overall floor plan of each wing was roughly that of an elongated rectangle. With such long, narrow hallways...anyone walking down the hall would be exposed to significant line-of-sight perspective for quite a distance. Because of this, the lengths of each arcade-hall would provide little cover, assuming that the terroristic conspirators were stationed on either end of the passages. Both hallways on each wing of the building admitted to the central lobby; a broad and spacious mezzanine galleria that wrapped around the massive central marble flight of stairs in the exact middle of the Diet Building. On the opposite end from the central galleria, the terminus of the two hallways wrapped around the actual chamber where the House of Councillors normally conducted Diet parliament.

Both policewomen discussed the fact that they would have to clear out any terrorists that were holding hostages _before_ they could safely attempt to enter the Chamber itself. The third floor had a special room for the Emperor near the legislative chambers; near the Emperor's Room at the end of those two hallways was a small antechamber that would admit one to the Upper Chamber, a balcony that served as a public viewing gallery above the legislature's floor.

Inside the Hall of Councillors proper, the Dietmen and their assistants would be seated in an auditorium with semi-circular pews of desks, with five rows leading inwards towards the raised central speaker's platform. A number of columns in the rear section of the Chamber's floor would provide some cover for the gunmen who would be guarding the doors leading into the chambers. Miyuki and Natsumi agreed that their best chance would be to go up the stairs and secure the second floor. Once there, they would then try and mingle in with the hostages, work their way towards the center of the assembly hall, and then take out any snipers positioned in the Upper Chamber balcony.

As they planned, it became apparent that all possible means of approach centered on the next floor up. Evidently, the terrorists had ignored this floor for the most part; otherwise they would have swept through the offices in order to prevent any possible means of entering the building. That would have meant no open office windows. Also, Mrs. Haneda and the two page girls would have been marched right out of her office and taken to wherever these outlaws were queuing their hostages.

Assessing the situation, Miyuki mentally listed the terrorist's oversights. The sheer amount of errors she tabulated convinced her that they were dealing with crims whose operational tactics were very haphazard, perhaps even sloppy. This wasn't sufficient reason for her to feel overconfident, but it was still important to keep in mind when the going would get rough.

Controlling chaos was part and parcel of making an arrest. Often, the difference between apprehending the perpetrators versus getting lost in the dust of the perps' getaway was contingent on who would be able to capitalize on the randomness of event first. This was a situation where she and Natsumi couldn't afford to be second.

She remembered reading somewhere that an average person in 2005 possessed an inferential capacity for cogitation that was roughly 30 percent faster than a person in 1950. In essence, people _thought_ faster in the 21st century than their mid-20th century counterparts. For all their sakes, she hoped that this theory wasn't simply hokem...

Mrs. Haneda, the senior secretary, was shaking with a confliction of fear and outrage.

"If I was younger, I'd do something about this! This is terrible, just terrible! All those people...and the _Emperor_! They could _kill_ the Emperor! What is to be done? Those poor dears!" she fretted.

"Ms. Haneda, we have an advantage. _We're_ here...and those bastards don't know it! We're going to give it our best effort to try and rescue everyone. You're safe here, as long as you remain in your office. If you weren't safe, they would have already come and taken you away. So please...just try to keep yourself as calm as possible until this is all over," Miyuki said, patting the matronly secretary on the shoulder reassuringly.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Natsumi surveyed the crowded hallway as they walked towards the middle of the Diet Building and the staircase to the second floor. All she could see were bureaucrats dressed in business suits, secretaries and a few other page girls...and several gunmen stationed at the end of the corridor on either side.

"Hey...I don't know you!" a 15 or 16-year-old page girl observed as she walked towards Miyuki and Natsumi in the hallway. She stopped to accost them with an accusatory expression. Natsumi could see the mix of fear and suspicion on her face; the young girl probably had them pegged as conspirators in her mind...

"Of course not!" Miyuki challenged her.

"That's because we're _seniors_ at Taisei Girl's High School! And _she's_ already been accepted at Keio!" Natsumi noted emphatically, trying to sound snobbish as she pointed towards Miyuki, who bowed graciously as she was introduced.

"What school do _you_ go to?" Natsumi asked haughtily, hands on her hips.

"I..I'm sorry, s..sempai!" the girl said, bowing with curt apologence before resuming her walk down the hallway.

"By the way, she and I are part of the Rescue Glee Club at Taisei. As in res..cue." Miyuki whispered emphatically. The page girl's eyes widened as the gist of Miyuki's words dawned upon her.

"Oh...my..."

"Sshhhh!" Natsumi interrupted with a finger-to-the-lips gesture. "Don't provoke your sempai!" she warned. As they made their way further down the hallway, Natsumi giggled at Miyuki.

"Stop acting like a schoolgirl, Natsumi!"

"You mean..._start_ acting like a schoolgirl, don't ya?"

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

They managed to slip into the stairwell unnoticed. Whenever one of the bureaucrats came down the stairs, Miyuki tried to act all giggly...attempting to project an image of two high school girls talking about boys. A couple of the bureaucrats shot them disparaging looks, and one chewed them out for being "lazy on such an important day". Through the closed door, they could hear an increase in the hubbub on the floor below them. Suddenly, there were screams. Several rounds of gunfire silenced the chaotic shouting.

From below, they could hear someone barking orders in Japanese to "storm the stairwells and get to the observation gallery."

This was it.

With a loud _crack!_, the door on the flight of stairs below them slammed open. Miyuki counted three sets of footfalls as the men rushed the up the stairs. She nodded at Natsumi, and then crouched back into the shadows slightly.

"HEY YOU GIRLS! WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING HERE! GET OUTTA THE STAIRWELL NOW!" the first masked man shouted, gesturing with his gun. Miyuki recognized it as an Israeli automatic with a muffler.

On cue, she and Natsumi shrieked in fear and dashed their hands high in the air, feigning terror. The masked man in front stepped closer...

"Should we take them as hostages?"

"No...they're only girls! We stick with the plan!"

"Then we should shoot 'em!" one of the men said. The other two men quickly nodded their heads in agreement.

"Sorry, it's nothing personal," the man in front said as he leveled his weapon...

"OH YES IT IS, ASSHOLE!" Natsumi shouted as she lashed out with a roundhouse kick. Flicker-fast, her instep clocked him aside the head before his eyes could even blink with astonishment. The front man of the three-man group was spun halfway around, the force of Natsumi's kick almost knocking him off his feet. All of a sudden, his gun was facing his two partners, several feet down the stairs. Miyuki took advantage of this, vaulting over the stair-rail to try and get between them and the man Natsumi had stunned with her kick. The two men in back reacted by trying to aim their guns at Natsumi, as she had hoped. Landing a couple steps below the falling man, Miyuki crouched down and kicked the nearest of the two men in the shin, hoping to get him off balance before he could shoot. Instinctively, he roared with pain as he shuffled his leg away from the impact...bumping into the man next to him. His gun arm flailed as Miyuki prepared to kick him again.

But the third man was swinging his automatic to sight on Miyuki.

_"BRraaapp ppam bam baap braaammp!"_

Splotches of red exploded in the chests of the two men facing Miyuki. As if in slow motion, they danced the danse mordere as another spray of bullets punched them backwards down the stairs, where they tumbled down limply and then lay still on the stairwell.

Miyuki turned around to see that Natsumi had relieved the third man of his weapon...

"Natsumi...you didn't have to shoot them! They're _dead_! Y..you _killed_ them" Miyuki shouted, stunned by her partner's burst of cold-steel aggressiveness. Natsumi had reached around the unconscious man's arm and used his gun. She could see her partner's face in silhouette, a face was filled with white flush of regret one has when they have to take a life.

Natsumi slowly stepped back from the three dead men, glancing at the gun in her hands with horrific revulsion. She felt as if she was drowning in blood; her heart spiraling into an endless whirlpool self-disgust. Her breath seemed to cloy in her throat, seemingly reluctant to leave the chambers of her lungs. She tried to speak, but a paralysis brought on by the certain knowledge that she had crossed the ultimate line...snuffed out her words.

The ultimate line that every policewomen was sworn to protect was the preservation of life. And she had just stepped over it, almost callously.

Carefully stepping over the bullet-pierced corpses, Miyuki leaned down and unmasked the third man.

He was _Japanese_!

Miyuki had expected the terrorists to be Americans.

"Miyuki, these guys aren't playing around. They _chose_ this; they wanted to be here. They wanted to be terrorist crims. I hate it too, but from this point on...it's either them or us. We've just gotta live with it from now until this is over," Natsumi answered with a sad expression, her voice soldierly cold as the gun dangled from her fingers.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Nothing in her career as a policewoman could have possibly prepared Natsumi for the reality that confronted her. She had been in a couple firefights before, exchanging gunfire with crims. Besides this, she and Miyuki had been involved in dozens of "take downs"...incidents where she had to resort to the use of force to apprehend a suspect. Take downs were a part and parcel of police work. Gun battles were a rarity in Japan, where private ownership of guns were illegal. In this abstraction of the Japan she knew, private ownership of guns was illegal as well. Consequently, shoot outs involving gunfire were pretty much relegated to fictional TV dramas rather than real life. As her thoughts flurried alongside the train wreck of her emotions, Natsumi she had to remind herself that this was a pitched battle. This kind of confrontation was more appropriate for military soldiers than police. In the middle of a dicey standoff, she had just shot two men down in cold blood in a stairwell inside the Diet building! This was a full-blown battle against terrorists!

Her training kicked in as she reloaded her automatic, using the fresh clip from one of the dead men's unused automatics.

Natsumi had always held that terrorists are cowards. She used to beat up the bullies who 'terrorized' the younger kids in her grade school, because she despised them. Years later, the horrific events of March 20th 1995 and Sept.11th, 2001 had opened hers and much of Japan's eyes to this stark truth. Terrorists used methods that were childishly simple: the first thing they do is take hostages and attempt to intimidate them; and then they would target their main objective, to try and kill someone or blow up something. Or they would release a weapon of mass destruction such as toxic sarin gas in a crowded milieu, and then rely on the casualties and the terror to carry their 'message'. They either accomplished their goals by blending in and infiltrating, or by rushing in with heartless boldness.

She had no doubt in her mind that these men roaming at large in the Diet were as desperate as any terrorist. Since they were equipped with automatics, they weren't planning to negotiate any terms. They would be committed to carrying out their plan, or die trying.

The gunmen she had shot in the stairway and their associates were a different type of criminal. They were lower even than the murderers and their ilk. Murderers often acted out crimes of passion: a cheating spouse; a boss who denied them a promotion; vengeance for some slight of honor. But these men were ambitiously ruthless...colder than cold. Inhuman.

_-- --BBBBA--BOOOOMMMM!!-- --_

"That sounded like it was from _outside_ the building!" Miyuki noted in an alarmed voice as the walls shook.

"Probably one of those 'diversions' that they were talking about!" Natsumi agreed.

While they were planning their route, the PA system fired up with an announcement...

_"We have taken control of the House of Councillors, and have the Emperor as hostage. Any attempts to enter the building by military or law enforcement officials will result in the immediate assassination of the Emperor and the systematic execution of all inside the House Chambers. We have secured and alarmed all entrances to the Diet Building. No one goes in...or goes out! Again, any attempts to enter or leave the building will result in a bloodbath!"_

"Bastards!" both policewomen said in unison.

Natsumi followed the flight of stairs directly above with her eye, noting that it ended in a landing that opened into the next floor; the second floor hallway would that would lead right into the legislative assembly hall of the Upper House. Natsumi was certain that it would be heavily guarded. Here, the gunmen would have already taken hostages. The question was, would the hostages be seated or standing? Would they grouped in the middle of the hall, or lining the walls of the corridor? Would the gunmen be using them as human shields, or would the gunmen be pacing nervously up and down the hallway, trying to frighten their captives while they kept a lookout for any possible attackers?

The only way to find out would be to kick the door open and storm the hallway.

She felt like she and Miyuki were Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, getting ready to fight their last gunfight. For all she knew, they could be outnumbered twenty-to-one once they committed themselves to leaping out in the open hallway. The seconds stretched out as she checked her weapon's clip...her life had suddenly taken on a precious tangibility.

Natsumi opened the door and peeked into the hallway, noticing that the armed men were marching a group of men and women and page girls down the hall towards the House Chamber...

"Great! They've taken even more hostages!" Miyuki said, her voice edged with frustration. They waited several minutes until the hallway became silent.

"On the count of three!" Natsumi said. As usual, she would charge in first...just they always did. Miyuki would emerge right after her.

_"One...Two...THREE!"_

"HIYAAAAAHHHHH!" Natsumi screamed as she kicked the door open. Instead of slamming open, the door flew towards the floor...she had kicked it down, not open. She leapt out into the hallway, picked out the nearest two men and fired at them.

Miyuki jumped out around the corner, facing towards the other end of the hallway. As she positioned herself, she saw three men in an office doorway about 20 meters down the hall ahead of Natsumi. Quickly turning her head, she took in the situation in front of her. There were two sets of two or three men posted on either of the ornate doorways that opened into the Cabinet Chambers. She decided to go for the men by the door, even before she could count heads; they had foolishly rounded up all the hostages and moved them away from the entrance to the chambers, perhaps in an attempt to allow freedom of access into the large House of Councillors. Their loss.

She positioned herself back-to-back with Natsumi, her automatic blazing as she tagged three or four of the doorguards with gunfire before they could react. A second later, she heard gun reports as the men on the far side of the hallway were responding to the sudden gunplay.

"Natsumi...back into the stairwell! Now!"

She could feel the recoil of Natsumi's automatic as her partner fired off a final strafe of rounds. Then they both desperately dived towards the doorway to the stairs, as the gunmen started firing at them. A split-second before she made it into the door, Miyuki felt an impact on her left foot.

She rolled in and somersaulted to her feet in a crouching position. Next to her, Natsumi was already in a gunman's crouch. They could hear running feet getting closer. Miyuki prayed that the modern-day brigands didn't have any grenades in their possession. These were the days before everyone was screened for weapons at the door...they could have brought in anything concealed in a briefcase or handbag.

An arm broke the plane of the doorway in front of them, reaching around the corner with a gun and firing into the open space blindly. If they had been standing, they both would have been shot. Miyuki and Natsumi instinctively laid flat against the incline of the staircase, peeking over the top of the landing.

With no shoulder to buffer the automatic's recoil, the wielded gun flashed wildly, throwing the man off balance. Thoughtlessly, he had tried to gun them down single-armed, without bracing himself. As a result of the sudden shift off balance, he had to thrust his leg out in front of him to keep his footing.

Miyuki eyed the shadowy figure in the doorframe...and fired. She heard an agonized scream, confirming that she had shot the gunman in the knee. A masked figure staggered into the doorway, and Natsumi shot him twice in the throat.

As the man fell to the floor, Miyuki could feel her eardrums buzzing with adrenaline.

"Natsumi, why the hell don't they have a SWAT team here?" Miyuki gasped out, her chest heaving as she watched the downed man spasming out his last gurgles of breath. Killing someone twenty meters down the hall provided a slight emotional reprieve. Their deaths were anonymous to the senses, unseen and unheard. But a man dying just a couple meters away...there would be no hiding from his death-throes, no means of emotional distancing. It was horrorshow, direct and up close.

She hated it.

"Because this is 1969...people didn't have to seriously worry about that kind of stuff until after the 1972 Olympics..." Natsumi answered back.

"Thanks for the history lesson," Miyuki commented sourly. "So what do we do now?"

"My best guess is that we're on our own! You cover me...I'm going to grab that door I kicked loose. It's the best thing I can think of for a shield."

"We're going to need _something_...there's a bunch of these terrorist-type goons in the hallway!"

Miyuki thought quickly and tore off her navy blue prep jacket. Wadding it up, she threw her out into the hall, drawing a spray of fire. She timed her response; as soon as the gun chatter ended, she stuck her head around the corner of the doorway and shot at the nearest group of gunmen, felling two.

Natsumi lunged out, trying to keep as low to the floor as she could as she reached for the door...she would only have a few seconds. She felt like she was stealing home plate all over again as she hit the floor. Reaching out, she grasped onto the heavy wooden door by its base and swiftly hauled it back into the open doorway, using it to shield her from gunfire.

Once inside, she leaned wearily against the wall of the stairs as the doorjamb to their stairwell became even more splintered under a fresh shower of bullets.

"I'm beginning to feel like we're Kei and Yuri!" she gasped, wiping the sweat off her forehead with her sleeve.

"Don't you _ever_ compare us to the Dirty Pair! We're the Lovely Angels, Natsumi...and don't you forget it!" Miyuki gasped back, forcing a brief grin.

Just the act of retrieving the door seemed more exhausting to Natsumi than running a 10Km sprint during summer training.

Miyuki looked at her foot where she had been shot.

The heel of her shoe was missing.

"Oh, this is great...they shot the heel off my shoe! Now I'm going to be a fashion disaster!" she mock-complained. Natsumi momentarily paled as she saw the bullet burn on the bottom of Miyuki's left shoe. Then the adrenaline kicked in again as she kicked off both shoes.

"That's too freakin' close, Miyuki! You gotta be careful...or our luck's going to run out! Were you able to get a clear look while I was getting the door?" Natsumi asked.

"Yep. I downed all the guys by the door into the Cabinet Chambers...and no one from the inside came out to take their place," Miyuki answered, trying to relax her nerves as another burst of gunfire riddled the open doorway a couple meters away.

"I think these bastard assholes are suffering from overconfidence. That guy who charged us was acting like an amateur! And nobody from within the House of Councillors had come out to replace the men we shot. Perhaps they haven't grouped in the central lobby."

"No...they're there in the center of the building, Natsumi. That way, they can cover the entrances to both halls. Since nobody came out of the House Chambers, they must be relying completely on the guys in the lobby to cover either hallway that leads to Chamber of Councillors. My guess is that they've got their hands full with all the Diet members and they can't spare someone from inside there. Or they've got a lot of men in there already, and don't need to worry about reinforcing the squads outside the Chamber."

"Like I said...they're overconfident!" Natsumi noted.

Miyuki nodded in agreement.

With cautious stealth, they made their way up the hallway and stopped short of the central lobby of the Diet Building's second floor. Miyuki peeked around the corner, only to draw gunfire from the men. They would have to take out all the gunmen in the central lobby and galleria stairs, and then go _back_ down the other hallway that led to the House of Councillors Chambers.

In other words, they would have to sweep the building of all terrorists before they could even go inside the legislative chamber hall itself.

"Natsumi...how solid do you think this door is?"

"There's only one way to find out..."

Yelling to get the masked gunmen's attention, Natsumi edged the door out into the open, about a half-meter. As expected, this action drew several bursts of rounds from the gunmen. She pulled the door back in, counting three holes and about a dozen dings and splinters.

"It's chancy! This door's pretty solid, but it won't stop all the bullets," she reported to Miyuki, poking her finger through one of the bullet holes.

Miyuki shook her head in frustration. "But they seem a bit edgy. Did you notice how trigger-happy they are? They fired too long, even after they had to realize that it was only a door," Miyuki commented.

"It's almost as if they're amateurs," Natsumi agreed.

"Also, when I listened to the reports of the gunfire, I distinctly heard rounds from two different types of automatics, plus a number semi-autos, mostly 45mm ACP pistols.

"So they _all_ don't have autos! Thank heaven for small favors and good news," Natsumi observed. "And a partner who is a gun nut!"

"I'm _not_ a gun nut! I just like collecting paint guns!" Miyuki protested, while Natsumi shook her head "no" and muttered "yeah...yeah." She reflected on some aspects of the terrorist's deployment through the building. Their logistics seemed flawed, disorganized. If these guys were amateurs, then when would they encounter the pros? It was highly unlikely that _all_ the terrorists would be this inexperienced.

"You know, Natsumi...the more I think about it, the more I think these guys are too slipshod. It's like all those American guys who play in the Japanese Baseball League; they're good players on their own...but in a team setting, they totally suck!" Miyuki explained.

"Right on, Miyuki! That makes perfect sense! Assuming this is a joint operation...planned by the Americans and several gangs of our local Yakuza scumbags...it's bound to get fouled up. Remember the surveillance audio from the Imp? Most of those American guys can't even speak decent Japanese!"

"Yeah, and the Yakuza certainly don't have honor-school skills in English...if they went to high schools at all!" Miyuki added with a knowing grin.

"Which means we're smarter than them on two fronts. We have degrees and specialized training...and our training is light-years ahead of the best this era can offer!" Natsumi said, starting to feel some much needed self-confidence.

Using the old trick, Miyuki opened her compact, rolled it along the floor until it rested against the opposite wall, and then opened Natsumi's compact and aligned it so she could see the reflection of the other compact in its mirror. This way, she could get a clear view of the wide lobby without exposing herself to gunfire. She could see a lone gunman pacing up and down near the third floor railing overlooking the grand stairwell, and four men on the second floor balcony right around the corner from where they were concealed.

"You ready?" Natsumi asked.

"Mmmn! Just another minute..."

Natsumi waited until Miyuki nodded, indicating her readiness to charge the balcony.

"Hey boys! You wanna see a naked woman!" she shouted as she threw the jacket down the hall.

Miyuki winced at her choice of words, but their shock value seemed to buy them an extra split second. Men being men, they leaned out of their doorway a little further than they should have before they spotted Natsumi's jacket.

Miyuki quickly sprang out into the hallway, side-rolling past the corner onto the balcony floor. She rested her automatic against a doorjamb and strafed the three men nearest to them.

Two down, three to go.

She side-rolled back into cover and listened to the drumroll of gun reports. When it quieted down, she side-rolled out once more...angling for the last gunman on the second floor. He fired at her first. She felt the air whiz as several bullets pocked the wall a dozen cm above her head. She aimed towards his waist, trying to conserve her rounds as she shot at him, striking him in the abdomen. The last thing she saw was the third gunman hunching down, holding his groin and wincing in pain.

While Miyuki was side-rolling on the floor to try and shoot the gunmen, Natsumi used the door for cover, shooting for the fourth man, who had partially concealing himself behind one of the thick support pillars. After two gunshot exchanges, she managed to nail him down, shooting him in the leg.

Miyuki rolled out a fourth time, only this time she scampered across the walkway to hide behind the railing that enclosed the Diet's wide main stairwell galleria, the broad promenade that lead to the front entrance. Lying on her back, she watched the gunman dash back and forth, trying to get a bead on her...

"You should have stayed still, idiot!" she said to the hooded gunman as she followed his movements with her automatic. She glimpsed an opening...

The third floor gunman fell over the railing after she shot him, his body thucking against the marble stairs two floors below, earning several shrill shrieks of fright from those in the lobby. Satisfied that the balcony was cleared of terrorist gunmen, Miyuki scampered back into the safety of the hallway.

Natsumi patted her on the shoulder for her good shooting as she caught her breath. The next step would be to use the door for cover and charge down the open walkway of the balcony until they reached the entrance of other hallway.

Miyuki readied the door, trying to decide if she should rush out into the open central lobby holding the door oblong to the floor, or straight up vertical. Which would shield them best?

"Miyuki, I want you to stand behind me when we rush into the open. That way, if the bullets pierce the door, only one of us'll get shot!"

"No way, we're in this together, Natsumi! I won't let you..." Miyuki protested

"...too late! Here I come!" Natsumi said, holding the door upright as she dashed out into the balcony walkway. As she emerged, she immediately sighted another queue of gunmen emerge from the hallway up ahead. She swung the door from side-to-side as she ran, trying to windmill it in an attempt to widen the target and confuse them. As they started firing on her and Miyuki, she could feel iron-hard impacts on the oaken door as she approached a doorway into an office on the right hand side of the hallway.

As she ran, she could hear Miyuki right behind her, firing short bursts from her automatic. She didn't have time to count shots or return fire, but after dashing midway to the next hallway, the return fire ceased.

_Safe!_

Miyuki had gunned down three more men that had emerged from the hallway.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

They made their way around the central foyer of the Diet building, so that they could face the 'front' hallway that lead towards the Hall of Councillors. A throng of people were gathered in the grand stairwell; Miyuki gestured for them to go as far up the opposite wing of hallways as they could. Hopefully, they could take cover in the Hall of Representatives.

She could see the sunlight filtering in through the vertical rectangular windows far above in the triangular capitol rotunda of the building. Overhead, the roof also glowed with the early morning light, illuminating the dark-marbled interior of the central arcade. Just below the four walls with their five vertical slits of windows, she could see the arch-vaulted entrances to the 3rd floor hallways, each arch decorated with brown, rouge and sorrel colored marble squares. The hallowing effect of the open space overhead reminded her of the interiors of the great European cathedrals she'd seen on one of the travel channels.

In 20XX, people were still sharply divided about the design of the Diet Building. Some thought that it was too infused with archaic Western design elements, while others thought that it didn't represent Japan's emergent "Post-Modern" culture. Every year, some group of architects would usher out a 'replacement plan' for the Diet building.

Natsumi shouted something, bringing Miyuki's attention back from the lofts...

"Dammit! What I would give for a couple gas grenades right now!" Natsumi exclaimed.

"We'd need a whole shopping cart of them! I sighted at least 8 to 12 terrorist perps on the other end of the hallway. They're using the conference room and various office doorways as cover. The hostages are grouped in the middle of the hall in front of them," Miyuki noted as she detailed the situation, causing Natsumi to grimace.

This was a worst-case scenario: two sets of gunmen, with a group of hostages between them.

Miyuki recalled how she had been thoroughly trained on visual memory clarification techniques as part of her year-long training in the Scientific Investigations Division. The idea was to take a brief glimpse of a situation...such as a bomb threat scenario...and then remember as many details about the crime scene as she could. She also had to learn how to construct an elaborated descriptive image; a skill deemed necessary in situations where she had to consult with others about how to disarm a weapon. Being able to accurately describe the arming mechanism of a bomb to other 'emergency consultants' while in the field was absolutely vital. During her field training, the most difficult part was trying to reconstruct a mental 'image' in her mind that would maintain a high degree of positional fidelity to the actual situation over time. But as she looked over the ornate interior decor of the Diet's central lobby to test herself, she felt more confident. The image in the hallway was fresh in her mind, stamped there because she knew her life and the lives of numerous citizens depended on the accuracy of her recall.

As they peeked around the corner to look down the hallway, Miyuki could see three or four gunmen posted two doorways down the hall on the right hand side...these gunmen would have the best angle to shoot at them once she and Natsumi emerged into the hallway from the central lobby of the Diet. A second quick glance revealed another group of gunmen stationed two doorways further down the hall, on the opposite side of the hall. The length of hallway then ran another hundred or so meters with offices on the right hand side...the left hand side had no offices, only windows overlooking the courtyard enclosed by the wing's two hallways.

In effect, the terrorists had deployed themselves to provide a form of "zig-zag" coverage of the hall's interior. Quite efficient, from a planning standpoint. Behind this was another set of offices and large meeting rooms...and then the hallway entrance to the House of Councillors.

Which meant that she and Natsumi would have to take the terrorist's positions out, zig-by-zag.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Somehow, they did it.

They took out all the gunmen on the near side of the hallway. Now the only thing between them and the entrance to the House of Councillors was another dozen terrorists.

Another zig zag.

After they dispatched the front group of terrorists, the rear group forced the hostages to move back _behind them_. Evidently, they were more concerned with crowd control than with using the hostages as human shields. Miyuki could hear confused shouts in English and Japanese being exchanged between the remaining men.

As soon as Miyuki dashed into the doorway, Natsumi ducked behind the door and quickly pulled the door in behind her. The door was worse for wear; she counted four more bullet holes and a number of chipdings. Someone had shot out a section of the door a short distance from where she had been gripping it. And the doorknob on the other side of the door facing the gunmen was gone. She sighed with amazement...she had been holding the door by the doorknob on her side. If the doorknob hadn't blocked the bullet, she would have been shot!

"Natsumi, I took out two more of their gunmen!" Miyuki announced excitedly.

"You go, policegirl!" Natsumi praised her.

"How's the door?"

"It's getting pretty shot up. It might last one more time. Dammit, we gotta do it again!" Natsumi said, her voice tinged with reluctance.

Miyuki fought against her stomach as she rolled over one of the dead man and searched him for weapons. She found a pistol in his vest pocket, covered with blood from a chest wound. As she held the pistol, she suddenly turned and vomited...

"Miyuki, it's okay! It's gonna be okay!" Natsumi said, immediately rushing to her side and crouching down next to her as she spewed glouts of puke on the richly carpeted floor. Once she finished throwing up, Miyuki turned her head and smiled weakly at her in appreciation. Natsumi gulped and went over one of the remaining gunmen and rolled him over with her foot.

Half his head was missing.

Turning away from the horrible sight, she found her stomach reflexively churning up everything she had eaten in the last 24 hours...

At the sound of their vomiting, several bursts of gunfire rang out. A man's form filled the doorway.

Dizzily puking, Miyuki threw a wastebasket at the half-seen figure as she scrambled for the blood-covered pistol. The lone gunman used his gun hand to ward away the mesh-metal wastebasket...just as Natsumi fired six rounds into his chest and face.

Miyuki found herself dry-heaving again at the sight as the man collapsed in the doorway. From the spread of bullet impacts, she knew that he was dead. Shooting a man from a distance was a far cry from having to see the result up close: where the bullet-hammered bodies bled their lifefluids to the floor, as still and silent as marble angels.

"It's not us! It's not because of us! I'm not doing this because I _want_ to do this!" her mind recoiled in protest, trying to make sense of the carnage. These men who were trying to take out the Diet...it was all _their_ fault! Their horrible actions of maliciousness were the inexorable causes that were forcing her and Natsumi's hand. If there would have been no terrorists, no hostages, no attack on the Diet Building...then she could be somewhere else: stopping a speeder; or lecturing a group of children about how to safely cross the street; or retrieving a lost cat for a little girl. Anywhere but here, anywhere but in this madhouse...this war zone.

"Natsumi! We have to remember that we didn't cause this situation! These men are trying to kill the _Emperor_ for heaven's sake! I didn't sign up for this, but as a policewoman, I'm sworn to my duty. We need to protect those hostages at all costs!"

"Umm! I was just thinking the same thing, Miyuki. These bastards are scaring the shit out of innocent citizens, and trying to _kill_ us! We have to keep our cool, because this is one fight we can't afford to lose! There's five guys left, in two groups," Natsumi noted.

"Yeah...I counted five as well," Miyuki confirmed. "Two are in front of the hostages, and three behind them. Two doorways apart, on opposite sides of the hallway."

"At least they aren't standing guard using facing doorways, with the hostages in front of them."

"Uh huh! So is there anything in this office we could use? Something that could create a split-second diversion, or otherwise? I don't think they're going to rush us, so we might as well take advantage of the situation and search the offices."

"Wouldn't it be nice if one of these Dietmen had a grenade launcher stashed in a closet somewhere, Yuri!" Natsumi quipped.

"Okay, you've had your fun...Kei! Let's scope this place out!" Miyuki said, sticking her tongue out at her partner. She searched the secretary's desk, finding nothing of value. Then she searched two other desks, and then walked into the adjoining office.

Judging by the maps and photos on the wall, this particular Diet member was from Fukui Province. He had several photos of the Echizen Coastline and the cape. She searched his desk, finding nothing of value. Having never been in a Diet member's office before, she was surprised as how spare it was. She had expected ostentatious luxury, like leatherwork couches, teakwood desks and chandeliers. Instead, his office looked like any other office, except for the ornate ceiling tiles, hardwood walls, and plush carpeting. She spotted a small display case with model aircraft, and next to it a odd-looking antique lamp. As she examined the lamp, she could smell kerosene...

"Miyuki! There's a gas lamp in this office!" she announced. Quickly searching the bathroom, she found some towels.

"How much gas does it have?"

"Enough!"

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Several minutes later, they had taken out the next two gunmen with a homemade 'bomb' consisting of a light bulb filled with gas, with gunpowder taped around it in layers. Miyuki had wrapped some cloth into a makeshift fuse, and then Natsumi had tossed it at the terrorist-gunmen. Of course, they had camouflaged it in a lamp shade to make it look harmless. The gunmen, seemingly in a panic as they had watched their numbers being whittled down by two page girls with guns...shot at it, setting it off.

"You see...we _are_ the Dirty Pair!" Natsumi shouted in exultation as the explosion ballasted the hallway with debris. When she looked in the hall, she could see that the floor and part of the wall were smoldering with small licks of fire, and the ceiling was scored with black burn marks.

After this, they ducked-and-dodged in a protracted gunfight to take down the two of the last three gunmen, as the third gunmen had lost his nerve and fled. As they walked up the hallway to find the missing gunmen, a number of bureaucrats and secretaries voiced their sincere thanks. Miyuki and Natsumi quickly hustled the hostages they freed towards the central lobby area and balcony, where they would be as far away as possible from the House of Councillors Chamber.

Miyuki was so roused with tension, it was hard to allow herself to accept the compliments as she escorted the former captives. She was almost feeling soothed by the words of praise and gratitude from the hostages they'd rescued, when a voice boomed out from the other end of the hallway...

"Don't move another inch! I have a hostage!" a voice shouted from behind them.

Miyuki shrugged her shoulders, as Natsumi turned around.

Natsumi's face immediately blanched.

The last masked gunman had an elderly woman in a chokehold: one around tight around her neck and shoulders, the other arm resting a revolver against her temple.

Miyuki thought "what now?" as she spun around to face the culprit. Her breath quickened as she recognized Mrs. Haneda, grandmother and senior secretary of the Minister of Agriculture.

"I..I'm gonna _kill_ this old bitch! She helped you do this! She helped you kill all everyone! So I'm gonna kill her...and you're gonna watch helplessly as I do her!"

The third gunman had fled downstairs to hide in one of the offices. During his search for a hiding place, he had obviously discovered Mrs. Haneda and the open window with the torn screen. Putting two and two together, he must have forced her to confess at gunpoint, and then took her hostage and returned _up_ the stairs on the far end of the hallway, near the entrance to the House of Councillors. Why Mrs. Haneda hadn't run off to safety puzzled Miyuki...until she realized that the elderly woman must have stayed because of the two Diet page girls she and Natsumi had knocked out. Plus the announcement that the building was wired to explode if anyone attempted to escape.

"Natsumi, Mrs. Haneda had to stay in her office to protect those two girls we decked!" Miyuki confessed, her lungs burning with each word.

"God dammit!! This is our fault!" Natsumi cursed, an angry expression of guilt on her face. Thorns of regret pierced her heart as she looked at the elderly Mrs. Haneda, helpless in the thug's clutches.

He was the only thing that stood between them and the twin doors to the Upper House hall.

"Mrs. Haneda, we'll get you out of this!" Miyuki shouted down the hallway through cupped hands.

"Oh...so you know this old bitch? It'll be much more fun when I put a bullet through her head!" the masked hostage-taker gloated.

"You really piss me off!" Natsumi shouted as she started walking towards the gunman and his hostage.

"I..I'll kill her! Don't fuck with me, I'll do it! I'll kill her...and then I'll kill you!" the gunman wailed nervously.

"Natsumi!" Miyuki warned as her friend and partner continued down the hall, a single figure in the middle of chaos and death.

The gunman pulled his gun away from Mrs. Haneda and took a shot at Natsumi. Miyuki screamed instinctively, thinking for sure that her partner was going to get hit. But the shot rounded stray, not even coming close to her partner. Unconsciously, she found herself walking down the hall, about five meters behind Natsumi...who was still closing in on the gunman.

Natsumi hadn't even bothered to duck.

"Lost your confidence a little, huh?" Natsumi shouted in an icy voice. "You can't say that I didn't give you a chance, unlike your buddies we took care of. I didn't even shoot back at you...and you _missed_! It's hard, isn't it...trying to aim a gun at someone walking towards you while you're holding a hostage. Not like the yakuza movies, huh?" Natsumi taunted, trying to confuse the man holding Mrs. Haneda.

"Shut up, you little bitch! I'll do her in the head, I swear it!"

"I'm not going to say 'go ahead, shoot her', because that too belongs in the movies. I've already shot a bunch of your goons. The guy back there I shot in the head...his brains are splattered all over the floor..."

"Shut up, shut up, shut up!" the gunman shouted, indecisively swinging his gun towards Natsumi, and then against his hostage's head.

"You know...she's somebody's mother. Somebody's grandmother. Do _you_ have a grandmother?" Natsumi pressed. Miyuki silently said "good girl, Natsumi!" as she saw the panicked expression on the gunman's face. Natsumi was digging deep into his psyche, totally messing up his mind. She recognized the technique from the hostage rescue training they had co-developed with the Americans when they were part of a summer-long officer exchange between the Tokyo PD and the Los Angeles PD a couple years back.

"Shut the fuck up! You're confusing me!" the man screamed, nearly hysteric.

"_You're_ confusing you! I have nothing to do with your indecision, perp! The only way I'm going to stop talking is if you shoot me. And what are you going to do if I decide to shoot back?" Natsumi asked, slapping her automatic with the palm of her hand. She suddenly ducked a hand behind her back as she stopped.

Miyuki watched from behind, a meter or two away. Natsumi started gesturing to her behind her back, and Miyuki immediately picked up on what her partner was trying to do. None of these guns had scopes, so a long-distance sniper-like shot was out of the question. Shooting with an automatic was also too dangerous; those guns weren't made for precision. So Natsumi's strategy all along was to close the distance on the hostage-taker, while demoralizing him at the same time. Forcing all of his attention on her, so that he'd ignore Miyuki, who was keeping pace a couple meters behind her. Natsumi made her fingers into the shape of a gun behind her back, and then pointed at Miyuki. Natsumi made the handsign again...

Not a gun...but a pistol.

Natsumi wanted her to shoot him with the 45 semi-automatic.

"Right!" Miyuki mentally answered her partner's request. Just one more shot...just one more killing. She dreaded having to shoot yet another human being, but when she thought of this cheap bastard shooting Mrs. Haneda in the head, Miyuki found it possible to summon her courage. Natsumi had played this one right, knowing that she was the one of the best shots on the Tokyo PD. Creating a situation so that they would be close enough so she could have a good chance at nailing the perp. She needed a good chance, because she would only get one chance. A chance to take her best shot.

"When this is over, we're going to have your hostage...and you're going to burn in the lowest hells of Jigoku for what you've done today!" Natsumi said angrily. "How dare you take someone's grandmother as a hostage!"

She suddenly ducked to the left hand of the hall, giving Miyuki a clear shot.

Miyuki squinted her eyes, thrust her arms out loose and limber as she gripped the pistol tightly, and aimed for Mrs. Haneda's ear...

A single shot.

The man was still standing, still holding the trigger of the gun he had pressed hard against Mrs. Haneda's left temple. But he would never fire the gun.

The hole in his forehead had seen to that.

Mrs. Haneda was screaming like an automaton, too shocked to even try and wrest herself out of the now-limp grasp of her attacker. Miyuki sagged with relief as Natsumi dashed up and pushed the gunman off of her.

"_Horrible...horrible...nightmare..._" the elderly woman gasped between tears as she hugged herself tight to Natsumi. Natsumi couldn't blame her for being terrified to the point where she was insensate. These extremists were willing to take any course of action to accomplish their evil...

"It's okay, Ms. Haneda! You're safe now!" Natsumi said over and over, trying to comfort the distraught middle-aged secretary. Miyuki watched the sight with an unexpected grimness, sensing that the real nightmare wasn't here. It was behind those ornate wooden doors, inside the large chamber of the Diet's Upper House.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

The Minister of Transportation gasped as two Diet page girls entered the door, skirts torn, blouses ripped open, looking like something out of the "Lipstick and Revolvers" crime serial being run in one of the cheapo detective magazines. The two guardsmen glanced back at them, and then ignored them...

Fatally.

The two girls each promptly walked up to one of the terrorists and shot him in the back of the head. As the two gunmen collapsed, the page girls caught them on the fall, and then dragged them back out the twin doors.

"Finally, someone's here to rescue us!" he whispered to the Dietman from Akita Prefecture standing next to him. His colleague looked at him hopefully...the first expression of anything besides fear he had seen on his colleague's face since the gunmen had secured the chamber and murdered the sergeant-at-arms and all of his men.

The horror that was happening in the dais gripped his attention as the two girls reappeared, wearing two sets of automatic weapons strapped around their shoulders with neckties they had taken from the men they had just dispatched to the afterlife.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

After they had killed the two terrorist door guardsmen with muffled gunshots, Miyuki motioned to the Dietmen to stay in place. She could see the panic in their eyes; the panic of men staring down a freight train rushing towards them at break-body speed. If they fled now, things could become ugly and dangerous. Especially if the unseen perps had explosives and were willing to use them at the slightest hint that their plans were being undone by rescuers.

She sighted a group of terrified page girls standing near the entry into one of the aisles. Blending in with the girls would make them less conspicuous. Motioning with her gun, she and Natsumi joined the group. The girls were shivering with terror as they walked towards them.

The Emperor was shouting something about "Japan's safety" in the midst of shouts and screamings.

Miyuki recognized one of the group, the girl who had confronted her and Natsumi in the hallway. Her eyes were swollen from crying as she greeted her with a "S..s..sempaiii!" in a quailing voice. The girl started to say something, but whimpered instead when she saw the automatic Miyuki was carrying.

"Shsssh! We're the the good guys! We're going to get you out of here!" she said in a hushed voice, patting the girl on the head.

"It's no use. They've got a bomb," the teenage girl said resignedly.

Miyuki looked at the teenager and thought to herself, "Damn, was I ever that young?" The girl was shuddering uncontrollably. Despite the fact that she was dressed in the same page girl's outfit that Miyuki was in, the girl...looked like a girl. Miyuki felt like all the remaining years of her youth had been burned away in the last half-hour, back in that hallway of carnage on the other side of the twin doors.

"We know they've got a bomb, kid. We're going to take care of you," Natsumi whispered, trying to calm the girls down.

"Nooo...they've..snff..got a _Bomb_!" the young teenager said emphatically, bursting into tears.

Before Miyuki could try and fathom what she meant, one of the large men standing in the center of the Diet started walking towards them.

"SHUT UP BACK THERE, YOU LITTLE SLUT!" an American-accented voice shouted in Japanese. He was a hulk of a man, at least 200cm tall; he was wearing the familiar black winter-stocking-hat over his head walked towards them, blue eyes blazing through the eyeholes.

He came right up to the group of teenage girls and hit the nearest one, sending her to the floor in a heap. It was like a wolf knocking down a house cat.

"Bastard! Why don't you pick on someone your own size?" Natsumi shouted, exploding with anger as she jumped through the clutch of girls and punched him in the face. But the man was fast, he evaded most of the force of Natsumi's punch. He slammed his fist into Natsumi's belly, doubling her over.

"Weak...just like all Japanese!" he shouted as Natsumi collapsed to her knees.

Miyuki tried to get a bead on him with her gun, but the group of page girls were in the way...as they scampered to get _out_ of the way of the two combatants.

"W..wrong!" she heard Natsumi said with a cough, forcing herself to stand upright.

"Right on Natsumi!" Miyuki marveled as her partner stood up. She watched as Natsumi gathered herself, half-choking and half-coughing...the punch had obviously taken the wind out of her.

"Wanna try that again, you asshole?" Natsumi taunted, grinning at him with a taunting sparkle in her eyes.

"Gerrrraaaaahhhhhh!" the huge masked man screamed as he swung a hammy fist at Natsumi, this time towards her head. She ducked under the punch, and then threw an elbow against the man's punching arm to unbalance him. Spinning on her heel, she twisted her torso and jumped off the ground, lodging a knee against the side of the man's unguarded ribcage. The masked terrorist groaned with the impact, stumbled and fell to his knees, while Miyuki kept a sharp lookout for other gunmen. The only two gunmen she could see were up on the dais, flanking Emperor Hirohito on either side. The frail Emperor was dwarfed by the two tall men, obviously American by their build. Apparently, the men on the platform were satisfied just to watch the dramatic fight in the aisle...they made no attempt to take their guns off the elderly Hirohito.

The man Natsumi had kneed got back up to his feet, a little wobbly.

"_#You Japanese whore! I'm gonna kick your ass for that!!#_" he cursed in English. He suddenly swept his long leg out, knocking Natsumi off her feet.

Natsumi felt the air get knocked out of her again as she crashed to the hard floor. The man she was fighting was very strong and expert. She was much smaller...and already exhausted from the gunfight. In her mind, she sensed that this physical battle would determine the safety of everyone in the building. The terrorist jumped atop her, trying to grab her around the throat as she was down on her back. Without thinking, she kicked him in the nuts before he could straddle her. The force of her kick sent him sailing over her head.

He recovered quickly...too quickly.

"Screw this!" he shouted, reaching down and grabbing his sidearm. As he brought it up to bear on Natsumi...

"Natsumi! Gun!!" Miyuki screamed.

Natsumi heard her partner and saw the gun in the corner of her vision. She ducked and weaved for a couple seconds...and heard gunfire.

Somebody had shot the gun out of her opponent's hand.

"Let's fight fair!" she heard someone shout, just as Natsumi drilled the gunman in the stomach with a punch combo, then jacking him in the jaw with the fifth punch. His head snapped back...

"What does it take to put you down, you big lug?!" Natsumi thought worriedly as the American spat out a tooth. He charged her with a wrestler's stance, hoping his superior size would allow him the edge.

Big tactical error.

Miyuki watched as Natsumi expertly flipped the black-masked man over her hip with a yorikiri sumo throw. As the man tried to get up, Natsumi kicked him in the face.

Once. Twice. Three times...

On the third kick, he stood up. He advanced on Natsumi, hunched up with menace...and clasped his hands on her shoulders. Grunting with strain, he pushed her back against one of the desks at the end of an aisle, reaching his hands towards her neck.

Miyuki couldn't see what he was doing, his form totally hid Natsumi's smaller frame...until his forward movement stopped. And then he started back-stepping, his black shoes sliding on the ornate carpet.

Natsumi was _forcing him backwards_!

She watched as Natsumi forced his arms away from her neck, and then she pushed him in the chest, causing him to backpedal a couple paces. Natsumi stepped right into his face...dodging the roundhouse punch he threw.

"RRRyyyyyyyeaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhH!" she heard Natsumi yell angrily from the bottom of her soul as she hammered the American in the middle of the face with a vicious punch, snapping his head back like rubberband. The gunman collapsed to the ground, a victim of Natsumi's knockout punch.

"_#NEXT!?#_" Natsumi shouted in English in between panting gasps. Miyuki grinned as her partner turned to the girl they had met in the hallway and winked.

Broken cheers and applause erupted in the assembly hall.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Gunfire cut short the cheering Dietmen; an explosion of noise which ushered in an oppressive stillness. The victory had been short-lived. Several men kept firing automatics towards the ceiling of the House of Councillors, trying to remind the Dietmen of their incarceration.

"Very amusing! But enough is enough!" a single voice shouted.

Mr. Wilson.

Miyuki recognized the voice from the Imp's recording...

He was standing in front of the central speaker's platform. Behind him, two hooded gunmen had their weapons trained on the Emperor and the presiding Chair and Vice Chair of the Diet. Three other gunmen were positioned on the raised speaker's platform, their guns trained on the Dietmen. She could see several suitcase-sized metal cases on the desks used by the Secretariat support flanking either side of the main speaker platform. Clusters of wires linked them in a row.

Bombs.

Wilson stood out, his blonde-haired crewcut and large body frame in stark contrast to the Dietmen and their assistants. He gestured towards the air...towards the speaker platform. Suddenly, one of the men next to the Emperor pushed His Majesty to the ground. Rushing against one of the wooden aisle guards that marked the end of a row of desks, Miyuki sought cover. Looking through the legs of a desk, she aimed at one of the other gunmen...but her gun jammed. Throwing it aside in disgust, she sidearmed her second automatic and rushed toward the central speaker's platform.

The gunman who had pushed the Emperor to the ground stood up and shot a strafing volley at her. Actually, he shot _over_ her...

A gunman had leapt down from the upper viewing gallery onto the main floor of Upper House, behind she and Natsumi...

He fell to the ground with a loud thud.

"Miyuki!! Get back here!" Natsumi shouted, not having time to think.

Miyuki started to crawl back, using the desks as cover...but her progress was halted by gunfire from above. She was pinned between the gunmen on the speaker's platform and the gunmen at the front of the spectator's gallery. She quickly rolled under a desk; the carpet on either side of her was getting torn up with bullet impacts.

As she peeked over the desk, she noticed that one of the gunman in front was hiding behind one of the wide desks flanking the speaker's dais...and he was _shooting at the other gunmen_! Could it be that one of the gunmen was rebelling against orders?

"GET HIM!!" Wilson screamed as the turnabout gunman dashed wide to the side. He rolled into a crouch and then shot the gunman standing next to the Emperor.

"What the hell?!" Natsumi said as sporadic bursts of gunfire echoed in the air. She and Miyuki were hiding under the Diet member's long desks, two rows apart. Like some parliaments, the seating was arranged in semi-circular fashion, after that of the US Congress. The desks provided ample cover from gunfire...so long as the gunmen weren't interested in firing into the crowd of Dietmen and their personal staffers...

She stole her head above the desk to survey the situation: both gunmen 'guarding' the Emperor were down; gunfire was coming from the balcony where the upper viewing gallery was located. Another gunman was trying to shoot her and Natsumi, and two gunmen were trying to shoot the "mystery gunman".

The enigmatic gunman shot down another terrorist in front as he forced his way to the end of the aisle furthest away from her present position.

There was a pause...everyone was cowering under whatever cover they could find.

"As you can see, there are two levels of human beings in this world: the uppers and the lowers!" Wilson shouted, taking advantage of the break. "The only way to join the uppers is to squash down the lowers...to literally step down on them for the inferiors they are. To trample them underfoot; which incidentally is one of the oldest metaphors for one nation conquering another. Human beings of the upper level always wind up standing on a carpet comprised of human beings of the lower level. Human beings of the lower level have nothing to hope for...they are the fodder of those who are superior. They are little more than doormats. Even your proud Japanese Diet is nothing more than a sham! These worthless old men are hiding for their lives. Cowards, all of them!! Bwah ha ha ha!"

His voice shouted into the huddling silence of the large chamber, sounding God-like because of the acoustics of the legislative hall.

"You're wrong! What would you know about pride and honor, Wilson?" a voice boomed in response. "Human beings as a whole should be devoted to making their homelands a better place to live. Not through war and conquest...but through empathy and..."

His voice was drowned by gunfire.

A chill went up and down Miyuki's spine as she thought recognized the thought behind the words.

Two more bursts of gunfire...then silence.

"I am here! I am waiting for you!" Wilson's voice sounded.

"Japan will become a better nation! I promised my mother this!" the voice answered.

Miyuki knew who the speaker was.

"So you thought you were clever, by posing as one of my men? If I can use Yakuza just as easily as I can use CIA men, who are you to dare stand against me? After my actions today, a whole new chapter of human history will be written!"

"It doesn't matter who I am. What matters is that I _am_ standing against you! As for you...your writing pen is about ready to run out of ink!"

"Not so! War is always preferable to peace...and those who win the wars will rule the peace!" Wilson shouted.

"Wreak havoc and let loose the gods of war, eh? Is that the lie you want to tell the children of your 'ideal world'?" the unseen voice challenged.

"My world's children are safe! Can you say as much for _yours_?"

"I have no children...my offspring are the principles I keep to! Isn't it equally wrong to tell lies to the youth, while at the same time trying to prove to them that these selfsame lies are _true_? That the world is a safe and pleasant place, void of danger and disagreement? The truth is...nothing is well with the world, and never will be! But that doesn't mean that all _isn't_ well with the world! Men of dignity _never_ compromise their principles in the face of hardship! There are difficulties that cannot be measured, in these present times and in the times to come..."

"Which is why my solution is the quick and painless remedy to the difficulties of our present time. I am the truth...and my way of thinking will prevail in the end!" Wilson declared in a proud voice.

"You way of thinking contributes nothing to mankind or nation! The sorrow and hardship of peace and war are equal; they are both obstinate beasts. The price of peace will never be paid in the currency of the bloodshed of war...just like the price of happiness will not be achieved by merely wishing to be happy. If you preach lies to the youth of the world, if you create terror in an effort to prove your lies, then you don't know the nature of human beings. If you forgive and ignore the errors and falsehoods you recognize in this world, the lies will increase until they become as truths. And then the children we taught to misidentify these lies as truths...will never forgive us for what we forgave and neglected! Nothing is accomplished!"

Miyuki waited for Wilson to shout out a reply, doubting he had an answer for _that_...

_That_ is why I believe in what you're doing is wrong. That is why I'm going to stop you! I want to see Japan and all the world prosper in peace and wisdom!" the voice shouted.

"DAMN YOU TO HELL!" Wilson screamed in a rage.

Miyuki got a sight on two men standing at the front of the balcony, each man armed with an automatic. They had the mysterious gunman covered, where ever he was concealed. It was up to her to try and even the odds. Since her gun was jammed, she couldn't shoot at them...but she could use the gun that had gotten knocked loose during Natsumi's fight with the thug...

She crawled alongside the row of desks until she reached Natsumi's gun, twenty meters away. She started to crawl back to Natsumi...but a burst of gunfire pinned her in place. She pointed up above her head, signing to Natsumi that the gunmen were up at the front of the balcony. Natsumi nodded, and then Miyuki kicked the automatic, sending it spinning along the floor towards her partner. She hoped that it would slide under the several desks until it reached Natsumi without hitting one of the table legs. Luckily, it did. Natsumi swiftly grabbed the gun, undid the safety and waited until the two men stood up to fire. When they did, she sighted them both and strafed them.

Screams burst into thin air...and two men smashed against the desks with loud thuds after they fell off the balcony. Natsumi crawled along the edge of the aisle, moving closer to the center of the hall, where the Ministers, the Speakers and the Emperor had taken refuge after being freed from the gunmen who flanked them. She noticed another automatic, discarded when one of the two men next to Hirohito was shot. During the next exchange of gunfire, Natsumi scowled as her gun ran out of ammo, or jammed. Natsumi glanced at Miyuki to stay away; she was going to try and fetch the unclaimed automatic lying several meters away from her position.

Miyuki watched nervously as her partner crouched and made her way towards the innermost row of desks. Suddenly, a black-masked man suddenly rushed towards Natsumi, automatic held aloft. Miyuki could only watch in horror. Her partner was dead. Natsumi didn't have a working gun, and the man rushing her did...

But instead of shooting at her, the gunman pushed her roughly aside, and then crouched and took aim at the remaining two terrorists on the balcony.

"Now _you_ die!" Wilson shouted, standing up from his cover a mere ten meters from Natsumi and firing at her point blank. The masked man spun around; with superhuman speed, he leapt in the path of the gunfire, taking several bullets as he shielded Natsumi with his body.

"Oh my GOD! Miyuki said to herself in a hushed voice of numbing dismay, her hand covering her mouth.

Natsumi picked up the automatic that he discarded and stood up, riddling Wilson with bullets.

"T..too late!" Wilson hissed as he went down, blood frothing from his mouth.

The last terrorist had fallen.

The Hall of Councillors suddenly was filled with voices.

"Everybody!! Do _not_ leave the building!" Miyuki announced, her heartbreak shunted aside for a moment. "The terrorists have alarmed all the exits! It's possible that anyone leaving the building might set off a bomb!"

"OH NO! PANTHERRRRRRrrrrrr!" she heard Natsumi shriek from behind her.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Natsumi was certain that she was going to die when Wilson fired at her. But a blur of black motion collided with her, sending her sprawling. Then she saw a gun on the floor out of the corner of her eye. She picked it up, and before Wilson could duck behind a desk, she emptied it into him.

"I hope that's the last one!" she said to herself.

"It is...Natsumi," a voice struggled to explain next to her.

Panther!

Miyuki tore the cotton hat mask off of his face and lifted him up so she could cradle him...but he winced in pain.

"You were always a little rough one, weren't you?" he gasped. Natsumi looked at his wounds...and screamed her anguish.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Miyuki dashed over to where Natsumi was cradling Panther in her arms. Her worst suspicions were confirmed...the "mystery gunman" was indeed Natsumi's boyfriend!

"I..I told you I w..would put my neck over hers if the sword came down," he stuttered, looking right at her. Miyuki fought back tears, her lips trembling. She wanted to scream at the world. Natsumi looked at her sadly, her face fragmented with a legion of conflicting emotions. She spied something on the floor, a leather wallet that must have fallen out of Panther's pocket.

"Th..the bomb! It's set to g..go off at noon!" Panther gasped.

Natsumi had never felt so helpless, so empty of power. After she had broken up with Sgt. Tokairin because he wouldn't relent and remain in Tokyo when he was offered the opportunity of a lifetime in Hokkaido, she had firmly decided to never let a man get to her heart again. Romance was always light and fluffy and superficial...

And then came Panther.

Now, he was lying in her arms...his life-force bleeding out of him. Natsumi bandaged the wound in his thigh as best she could, but the wound in his chest was seeping blood.

And because the damned terrorists had wired the building entrances, there was no possibility for an ambulance or medical staff to come into the building and offer aid.

"Forget about me. The bomb!" Panther kept saying in a weakening voice.

"I..can't..forget..about..you!" Natsumi hissed through her sobbing.

"Natsumi!" she heard Miyuki shout her name. Wordlessly, Miyuki held out a leather police badge wallet. Natsumi recognized Panther's face in the picture of the ID. She glanced at the title under the picture...it read: "Deputy National Administrator of the Japanese Intelligence Agency."

He had been working undercover! And he was one of the top officials of _Intelligence Agency_!

"Panther...why didn't you tell me?" she said sadly.

"I..I couldn't blow my cover, once I knew what w..we were up against. I didn't want to endanger you..." he answered, squeezing Natsumi's hand weakly. Natsumi felt tears blinding her eyes as her heart stung with sadness.

"I'm going to take care of the bomb, Natsumi! You stay here with him until help arrives!" Miyuki said, patting her on the shoulder.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Miyuki opened up the suitcase, once she confirmed that the latch itself wasn't triggered. As she exposed the densely packed bomb components, a cylinder caught her eye. Actually, what was painted on the black cylinder had caught her eye. Someone had tried to scrape it off, but the symbol had left a recognizable impression on the bomb casing.

A yellow circle with three black wedges inside of it.

"Holy Shit!" she cursed under her breath.

"Miyuki...Panther! Keep those people away!" she shouted as she noticed Diet members and others crowding closer, curious about the contents of the case.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Judging b..by your partner's reaction, then it's the worst!" Panther said weakly. "I..I was supposed to be the one who disarmed the bomb. But now that I..I've been hit, I can't do a thing."

Natsumi could see the disappointment clouding his eyes, the burden of his soul on his face...

"I..I'm sorry it had to be this way, Natsumi," Panther apologized, coughing up gouts of blood. She wiped his mouth with the end of her blouse and stroked his hair.

"We wouldn't have had a chance anyway. If it's a nuclear device, then there's no one else in Japan who has had any training in disarming it, since Japan's nuclear arsenal is its most tightly guarded secret. I was specially trained..." Panther explained, gathering strength for a moment.

Natsumi looked at Miyuki, who was working feverishly on the device. She weighed out whether she should tell Panther the truth. If he was going to die, she wasn't going to let him leave the flesh feeling guilty over an imagined failure...

"Panther, you're not the only one who's undercover. Miyuki was trained by the Scientific Investigations Division of the Tokyo Police Department, as part of a program designed to broaden the skill level of the female officers in the Department. If anyone can disarm a bomb...Miyuki can! She can disarm bombs in her sleep! Especially primitive detonating devices that were state-of-the-art forty years ago," Natsumi said confidently, leaning over and kissing Panther on the forehead.

"Scientific Investigations Division? There's no such thing!"

"That's because it was created in 2008, Panther. In a Japan that hasn't been at war for over sixty years. The Japan of peace and prosperity that you envisioned...is a _reality_ where Miyuki and I come from. Because of people like you. Men and women who held to the ideals that made our country strong, rather than a powerful colonial force. We have the strongest economy peacetime in the world. People live lives of luxury and comfort that you can't even begin to imagine. Japan isn't a paradise, but it's a wonderful country, one that I'm proud to call my home."

"W..what?" he exclaimed, his eyes wide with shock.

"Panther...I love you. You know this, but what you don't know is that Miyuki and I are from 20XX. We were brought back here by some kind of time-travel phenomena and stranded here. All this time, we've only appeared to be college students from 1969. Whatever those terrorists have cooked up, we're gonna take care of it. Don't worry about the bomb, nuke or otherwise. Miyuki's on it. To her, disarming it would be as easy as you putting together a model car kit. I...snff...want you to see something. This is..snff..what I _really_ look like," Natsumi said. She fished her policewomen's ID out of her skirt. Her real Bokuto Precinct ID, not the one she had from 1969...and showed it to Panther.

She expected him to be wide-eyed in shock as he read it, but instead, he coughed out, "you're as beautiful in your uniform as any flower I have ever seen. I will a..always...love you!"

His eyes dimmed...he squeezed her hand weakly...and then his head went limp in her lap.

"N..no! Oh God! NOoooo!" she wailed in a hoarse voice.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Miyuki worked in a flurry of concentration.

The nuclear device was set on a timed sequencer, very primitive in comparison to the kinds of devices she had been trained to frustrate. Its rudimentary design presented another problem however, as the builders of this bomb had wired all the components with the same color wire. She would have to mentally map the trigger and the sequencers, the analog timer, the fuse cap leads, and everything else.

The concept was simple...plug this main bomb trigger into the other cases, which each contained a bomb of their own. Once the two wires were plugged in, the other bomb's clocks would start and synch with the signal sent from this bomb. At noon, all four cases would blow up.

She clipped several strands of wires and pulled them, so that she 'narrowed' down the number of wires she would have to trace.

This wasn't like some sweatless Hollywood movie, where the hero working to defuse the bomb was faced with the traditional "blue wire/green wire" choice. She would have to pattern the trigger sequence in her head, and then work backwards from bomb to timer, cutting all sorts of wires.

Anyone of those wires could set the nuclear devices off...

She wedged a wire between the trigger caps, so that they wouldn't be able to close, then she isolated each firesafe and clipped one tine of each heat sink. She could tell by the redundant circuitry on the board that it was set to trigger the bomb if any of the electronic components were removed...but there was no contingency for the partial removal of a wired heat sink. The current would still run uninterrupted through the heat sink, but the circuits would rapidly overheat, causing them to fail.

A sudden interruption of current from one board would send a signal to the next. Once she interrupted the sequence of four firesafes, then all she would have to do was partially disassemble the timer, just in case there was a direct timer-to-trigger wire-in.

She looked over her shoulder and hailed Natsumi. Her partner looked up at her with heartdead sadness in her eyes, and shook her head from side-to-side.

"Panther, this one's for you!" she swore as she clipped the next heat sink. Her resolve was now redoubled by Natsumi's tragic loss...she _was_ going to disarm this weapon, no matter what. The police would find out who the terrorists were and deal with the US Government rather harshly if it was their men; Miyuki personally doubted that these men served the US government.

The components in the bomb were manufactured in a dozen countries, including Russia. Actually, the USSR in this time era. Wilson had mentioned something about using Japanese yen in a commerce setting with other countries. Perhaps this was a transnational terrorist organization...

Whatever it was, their efforts wouldn't come to fruition. Miyuki had reverse-engineered the whole trigger and arming system in her head...it was now just a matter of dissecting it.

A few minutes later, the bomb was defused, disarmed and the trigger was out of the box.

Solemnly, she set the trigger on the desk and then went over to where Natsumi was cradling Panther's still form.

"Natsumi, he loved you as much as any man could love a woman. He gave his life for you. It's what he wanted to do, from the depths of his kokoro. And now that the nuclear device is disarmed, his heroism will never be forgotten..."

"I just wish that I could bring him back to life, Miyuki. So I could tell him how much of his heart is inside of me," Natsumi said as Miyuki knelt down next to her and hugged her.

A white light, pure as the sun, flashed as Natsumi sobbed on her shoulder.

"It can't be...I _disarmed_ it!" Miyuki thought. As the light vortexed around her, she realized that it wasn't an explosion...it was some kind of prismatic tunnel...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

When consciousness found her, the first thing Natsumi noticed was that she was back in uniform! Her _real_ uniform. As she turned her head to see where she was, she saw Miyuki.

And Today...their patrol car.

She would've screamed "we're back!", but her heart felt like an empty bowl.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"What's with Natsumi? She's been so sad for the past couple weeks. But today, she came in _on time_! And she's smiling like her old self!!" Yoriko commented to Miyuki and Aoi.

Miyuki looked at her partner, who had spent the night at Shoji Tokairin's place 'patching things' up. Natsumi grinned and flashed them a V-sign as she walked over to her desk.

According to Yoriko, she and Natsumi had gone missing for two days...causing the Captain and the whole precinct to search the streets in a mad panic. Yoriko also said that Kenny was beside himself; he was so upset at her disappearance, he had actually burnt out his motorcycle engine in the midst of a non-stop street patrol, searching for them.

For her.

Miyuki remembered how it was Oshou that had tracked them down...to the very same place they had disappeared. In this reality, they _had_ disappeared for almost 55 hours!

Also, during those two days, Natsumi's ex-boyfriend had been reassigned with a pay raise and promotion...back to Tokyo. To the Bokuto Precinct! He was now Lt. Tokairin, Manager of Contingency Training and Resource Services for the Tokyo Police Department. Despite this amazing turn of events, Natsumi was still upset about the loss of Panther. When she refused to talk to Shoji Tokairin after he called a number of times, Miyuki had gently but insistently urged her partner to get on with her life...and take advantage of the fact that an ex-boyfriend had moved back to Tokyo.

It had taken two weeks to break Natsumi's resolve...almost as long as it took to repair Kenny's bike. It seemed to Miyuki that the girl was fixed upon remaining miserable. But finally, Miyuki got through to her partner and roommate...and Natsumi called up Shoji and asked if they could meet for dinner. She learned from Kenny the next day that he had been pep-talking Shoji about getting back together with Natsumi.

"Ahhh, my dear shy Kenny," she smiled wryly as she remembered that first night back home in 20XX. Especially the way Kenny had introduced her to his new larger bathtub with the waterjets...

A bathtub built for two.

"Hey Miyuki! I've got something to show you!" Natsumi said after she poured herself a cup of coffee. She walked over to Miyuki's desk and sat on it perkily. Miyuki smiled at her, happy that everything had worked out between her and Shoji...

"Shoji showed me this last night...erm, actually early this morning. We were rather 'busy' last night, if you catch my drift," Natsumi said slyly.

"I think the _whole office _catches your drift, Natsumi! You're absolutely _glowing_ with femininity! If I didn't know you, I would have never guessed that you were a tomboy when you were growing up," Miyuki said, equally slyly.

"Show me! Show me!" Yoriko shouted, jumping up and down in her typical schoolgirl excitement.

"Okay, but this is going to be rather heavy going," Natsumi warned as she placed a faded black-and-white picture on her desk. She looked right into Miyuki's eyes with a thoughtful expression.

Miyuki glanced at the picture...and her mind instantly shouted "This isn't real!" She felt her head spinning towards wholesale faintness as she recognized the person in the photo. She blinked and rubbed her eyes to make sure that they weren't failing her. Some of the other policewomen were queuing around her desk, curious about Natsumi's latest date. Miyuki quickly grabbed the snapshot and held it up close, scrutinizing it for every detail, checking to see that it wasn't faked. It was simply impossible...this photo couldn't possibly have existed. But once she was certain of the identity of the man and the woman in the photo, she slowly set the image down.

"Na..Na..Na..." she stuttered, too astonished to say anything.

"Miyuki, are you okay? You act like you've seen an obake...a ghost!" Yoriko asked with concern. Natsumi spoke up before Miyuki could answer.

"Last night, Shoji showed me this picture of his father and mother, taken shortly after they got married. You all know that his mother has always been tight-lipped about who Shoji's natural father is. Hence, all this time he's never known who his natural father was. Neither did I."

"Th..this m..man is his f..father?!" Miyuki gasped out.

"Shoji's mother remarried a few years after he was born. And she's never told him about his real father. Shoji always assumed that her reluctance was due to the fact that she was so young when her husband died. But right after he got promoted, Shoji's mother called him up out of the blue and came to Tokyo to meet with him. While she was visiting, she told him everything about his biological father," Natsumi explained, tears in her eyes.

"EH!!" a chorus of intrigued female voices gasped.

"This..snff..is Shoji's dad," Natsumi noted, unable to hold back her sobbing any longer. Miyuki smiled at her partner, even as she was crying in empathy.

"He passed away a couple months before Shoji was born," Natsumi said in a drawn voice, trying to regain her composure.

"How'd he die?" Aoi asked, gently and politely in his own inimitable way.

"He lost his life saving the lives of others in the late 1970s. He was a supervisor in the Parks Department for one of the National Parks. One spring, there was a late snowfall in March, a blizzard that trapped a group of college geology students and some high school students who were on a field trip. Five of his employees tried to rescue the group, but were stranded themselves because of an avalanche. He rescued all of them. Then he got buried in a freak collapse of snow on the mountain. For that, he was given the Emperor's Award for Valor...posthumously..." she finished, her head bowed.

"Wow! The Emperor's Award? That's Japan's highest civilian honor!" Aoi and Yoriko both exclaimed in awed voices.

"And here is that medal," Natsumi said, drawing another round of audible gasps as she produced a long red felt case. She opened it up carefully, so that everyone could see. Inside, her heart was pounding like it was going to burst out of her chest.

"Waaaa...that's what an Emperor's Award looks like? I never imagined I would actually be privileged enough to actually see one in my lifetime!" she heard the Captain note in reverent amazement. Even he was impressed...and it took _a lot_ to impress him.

"Shoji's mother gave it to him, saying it was time that he inherited his biological father's legacy. And then, when we got back together...he.._snff_..gave it to me. He said it was a 'restoration of relationship gift'...to prove that he's going to.._snff_..stay with me this time," Natsumi said with pride and sadness.

"Natsumi's gonna get married! Natsumi's gonna get married!" Yoriko teased, starting off a caucus of opinions, giggles and appreciative comments.

Natsumi closed the lid of the medal case with all the care of a one who had a precious treasure, and waived the admiring crowd away. Yoriko and Aoi she allowed to remain...after all, they were close friends. She opened up the medal box again, and then pulled down a small slipcase that was stored in the upper half of the box. She nudged Miyuki, and then held it up closely for Miyuki to look at privately, pointing to a name on the small slipcase inside the medal box.

Miyuki read the name on the silk slipcase:

_Seiji 'Panther' Tokairin._

She looked up at Natsumi, who nodded her head in response to Miyuki's questioning look. This discovery was too much for Miyuki to contain...her heart burst into another surge of tears as she looked at her partner. Natsumi's face was red with a melancholic joy; she was unable to capture the essence of Natsumi's expression in her eyes.

"Now you know the whole story about Panther..." Natsumi said, her voice trailing off as Miyuki rested a comforting hand on her shoulder.

"Who's Panther? Is that Shoji's dad's nickname? Tell me! Tell me! Tell me!" Yoriko shouted excitedly.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --


	95. Pt 95: Belldandy and Mara: Mirror House ...

**Part 95: Belldandy and Mara: Mirror House -- Finale**

Belldandy had to pause in her explanation several times to allow for Goddess Mara to 'catch up'. With each new revelation, Goddess Mara appeared more ungentled...her eyes were constantly darting about, expressing her deep-rooted uncertainty. Belldandy sympathized with the young Goddess; the information she was disclosing would be _a lot_ for any Divine being to handle. In essence, in order to believe what Belldandy was describing, Goddess Mara would have to suspend most of her knowledge and presuppositions concerning the structure of the Yggdrasilian Multiverse.

And simply _believe_.

As she continued, Belldandy noticed that the young Goddess would occasionally nod her head in agreement with some point she had made; this affirmed to Belldandy that the flux of dynamics at work in _this_ Yggdrasil and Earthrealm bore some fidelity with _her_ Yggdrasil and Earthrealm. She felt encouraged, because it disclosed that this place was more of a mirror to the reality she had come from than Belldandy had suspected.

Belldandy wanted to remain patient in the telling; any haste on her part might lend the appearance of deceit. Goddess Mara was already skittish and justifiably distrustful of her. She deliberated on each topic of explanation, calmly prompting Mara to voice any questions she had before going on to discuss the next concern.

When she turned to the topic of the love between Keiichi and her, Goddess Mara visibly perked with interest. Once Belldandy started describing her and Keiichi's love for each other; she found her heart soaring with unconfined wings as she talked about all the special feelings Keiichi had evoked in her Soul. When she mentioned that she was going to marry Keiichi in her own TimeSpace, Goddess Mara responded with an appreciatory "aaaaahhh!".

"So you were assigned to grant Keiichi's wish...and then you fell in love with him too?" Mara asked in a hopeful, laudatory voice. "Now I understand...I think. It was _another_ Keiichi that you're in love with. And since _my_ Keiichi is a near-duplicate of him, he must have caused you to feel those feelings in your heart."

She tapped Belldandy in the middle of her chest with emphasis.

"Yes. Now you know the truth of the _strong_ feelings you sensed, Mara. Feelings we both share...for two separate Keiichis. Perhaps, you might believe me then when I say that I can relate to your forlorn feelings about him. Like you, I am debarred from my heart's desire. Keiichi's star and yours' remain in opposition as long as he is held prisoner by the Demonesses. Likewise, I am separated from my one true love by events beyond my control."

Goddess Mara listened quietly the whole time. Belldandy could almost envision the whorls of consternation blowing through the teenaged Goddess's mind. Mara seemed to hunch herself up on the lotus petal with each new revelation.

"So what about the other Mara?" Goddess Mara asked.

"Mara...the _Demoness_ Mara...is my older sister."

"EHHHH!! You have a _Demoness_ for an older sister?!" Goddess Mara exclaimed, completely taken aback.

"It's a long confusing story that I cannot fully fathom myself. I've known her for almost all of my life...we were always poised as rivals in one way or another...and I only recently learned that she was my older sister. I have one older sister who is a Goddess, but is half-Demoness. Her name is Urd. Urd and Mara are twin sisters, both of them are in their Twenty-Seventh Deca. Urd grew up with me as a Goddess; we lived in Yggdrasil. Meanwhile, Mara grew up as a Demoness, living in Vanagdrasil. Mara is a Demoness who has only recently been awakened to her Goddess nature. For almost her entire life, she has believed that she was fully Demoness. Nevertheless, Mara _is_ family to me...and she wants to help you free Keiichi," Belldandy noted.

"Why would she want to help? She's a _Demoness_!! Demonesses are only interested in their own welfare," Goddess Mara asked, running a hand through her generous blonde curlylocks.

Once again, Belldandy felt herself being forced. Of course, she could never speak to Mara's motives. How could a Goddess possibly explain the inner beingness of a Demoness to another Goddess? That would be like trying to teach telepathy to an Earthrealm mortal. She sighed with resignation, fully aware that she herself didn't know from moment-to-moment how Mara would resolve the conflict between her Demoness nature and the kinship she shared with Belldandy and her other sisters.

But she knew quite well why her Demoness sister was so anxious to free Keiichi. It had to do with sex, pure and simple. Belldandy felt an awkwardness descend upon her. This situation felt just as clumsy as all those times when Urd had pestered her for details about her and Keiichi's sexual love life...

"Hmm, this is a quandary indeed!" Belldandy questioned herself. "How should I approach this? Do I explain to Goddess Mara that her passionate thoughts towards Keiichi somehow project themselves on Mara...and are then manifested by my sister? Does she even understand the concept of sexual craving? After all, she did get pretty upset with the idea of merely having to wash Keiichi's underwear!"

The memory of Goddess Mara's girlish discomfiture led to a brief giggle as the sky started misting pink and velvet raindrops inside of Mara's Yggdrasil HoloMatrix.

"I've noticed that Mara..._my_ Mara...seems to respond to you in a certain way. I hope that this isn't too embarrassing, but I have to ask this. When you think about Keiichi, do you ever consider him in an...indelicate light?" Belldandy asked, her voice betraying how nervous she was.

"What do you mean? What's an indelicate light? Is it something I can eat?" Goddess Mara asked, blue-eyed with curiosity. Belldandy sighed at this.

"As you know, mortals who love each other...well, they sometimes act upon that love in a manner of physical intimacy..."

"Oh! Y..you mean _sex_?" Goddess Mara interjected, her face flushing crimson as she fisted her hands under her chin, very much an insecure young Goddess again.

"Yes. In my Earthrealm, Keiichi and I both enjoy sharing our bodies sexually. It's something beautiful that a Goddess and a mortal can share. Most importantly, we waited until we were certain that we had an emotional bond that was based on honesty and love, before we attempted anything sexual. But once we did, I learned that it feels wonderful to be with him. Making love with Keiichi is hard to describe, but one way I can put it is like this. When we're together, it feels as if we've both mounted a glorious sunbeam that is filled with love!" Belldandy explained, her mind drifting faraway from the concerns of the moment. She reeled herself back from the powerfully charted seas of heart-imagery, and then continued.

"Waaaahhh!" Mara exclaimed, marveling at Belldandy's explanation. Belldandy felt like she was a parent giving a 'facts of life' talk to her daughter.

"To return to the situation with my older sister, what I've noticed is that she seems to feel a form of love for Keiichi whenever you're around her. This is very unusual, because she's never harbored any special feelings for Keiichi. In fact, in my plane of existence, Mara was in the same kind of position that Demoness Belldandy and her sisters are in _your_ world. Mara was assigned to cast Grief upon Keiichi," Belldandy illustrated.

"I thought she was just being perverted! One day when I was spying on you and her...and she went in the shower. I followed her in my stealth form, so I could see if she really was anything like me. A..and then she started touching herself..." Mara said, her voice twinged with disgust.

"Yes, she told me all about it," Belldandy interrupted, not wanting Goddess Mara to delve further into the mysteries of _that_ particular shower experience.

"Then...according to you...it all narrows down to this. Because of my deep love for Keiichi...whenever I'm around her, somehow it rubs off on her!" Goddess Mara said with a nod.

"Mmmn!" Belldandy agreed.

"So...what good is that?! Why does that happen? A..and, if she feels loving towards him, what if she _steals_ him away from me? It's not enough that I need to get him away from that trio of Demonesses! Now, I gotta protect him from another weirdo Demoness who looks like me!" Goddess Mara noted with a sharp wariness.

Belldandy shrugged her shoulders. With that one statement, the steadfast progress of the last several hours' discussion had instantly dissolved. Instead of thinking about solutions, the teenaged Goddess had veered herself into the midst of a full tantrum of paranoid confusion. Goddess Mara was kick-mucking the curled heads of her own consternated thoughts, whipping herself into a frenzy of doubts.

Take an already inexplicable situation, blend it with further chaos, season it with fruitlessness, and then leave it to boil over...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Uh..._who_ are you? And why are you in this cell with me? Have you've been captured by the Demonesses too?" a sleepy-eyed Keiichi asked.

"Huh?!" Mara interjected, as he looked at her with uncertainty.

"I asked 'who are you?'! Somehow, you look like my girlfriend Mara. But I know that you're not. You look _a lot_ older than she does. But your face is almost a mirror copy of hers. But...you're not a Goddess, are you? You're not trapped like me?"

"You mean...after what we did last night, you don't remember a single _thing_?!" Mara shouted angrily, a volcanic furnace of indignity welling up in her breast. Not to mention his comment about being "a lot older"...which came in a close second in the irritant department. She felt a rush of hostility that threatened to overwhelm her into a flashing rage.

He had _forgotten_!

"What'd we do last night?" Keiichi asked, scratching the back of his head.

Mara turned so red in the face, she could feel steam roiling off her forehead and cheeks. She had _given_ herself to him...at least her Earthrealm physical manifest...and now Keiichi had just claimed he didn't _remember_! She had even given him a small piece of her heart, such as it was under the circumstances. She wouldn't have slept with Keiichi if there wasn't at least a trace of sentiment towards him, regardless of all other considerations. Of course, being around him for five years had occasionally given rise to several fanciful fantasies.

But this forgetting on his part...was intolerable!

"Bless it! He's acting like _nothing_ happened!" she thought, trying to rein in the blazing chariots of her ire. Failing this, she bit her lip, hard, tasting blood.

Keiichi looked at her blankly.

"The poor lout obviously didn't remember at thing about our torrid encounter last night," she thought to herself. Mara couldn't decide whether she wanted to crack him aside the head with a spin-kick, or sigh in relief. He had just experienced a once-in-a-trillion-lifetimes encounter by sleeping with an actual Demoness...and yet he was passing it off like some kind of casual one-nighter. No...this was even worse; he wasn't even _acknowledging_ it!

Her Demonic femininity was crushed by his indifference.

"Y..you look angry. You look _scary_!! Y..you're not going to hurt me, are you?" Keiichi asked, backing up into one of the White Room's corners. He looked at her, uncertain and definitely afraid.

Mara regarded the demure of his eyes closely, and tried to 'read' him. His aura was subdued, and when she scanned his recent memories, all she sensed was whip-blended sponge-mush. At least he wasn't too upset. Her intuition realized that, despite his defensive exterior, on the inside Keiichi was somewhat calm and trusting. She recalled that his initial reaction to her when he first woke up was almost gentle in manner, completely unlike how he behaved last night when Urd had fed him. He was responding to her presence by yielding his hostility, which was completely different than how he reacted to the other Demonesses. It was quite possible that he didn't view her as a Demoness, or at least a Demoness in the same mold as Belldandy and her sisters.

Mara revisited that night when he had first encountered her, during his abortive escape from the temple. In that one brief incident, his being had been ravished by sheer terror when he discovered that she wasn't a Goddess. Further, Demoness Urd had avowed that he had become possessed of a delirium after that escape. Of course, Demoness Urd didn't know that he had run into her and Belldandy that night.

She watched as he looked at her, somewhat wary, but not rigid with fear. In an instant, she knew that _he_ knew...not on a conscious level, but within some innate recess of his Soul. Otherwise he would have attacked her first, and asked questions later.

Mara smiled to herself. Keiichi visibly relaxed when he noticed that she was grinning.

"I'll be blessed! Even though his mind doesn't remember our beautiful lovemaking last night...his Soul certainly does! That's good enough for me! Guess this makes up for his forgetfulness! Leave it to a Demoness like me to reach into the innermost part of an Earthrealm mortal's Soul. Awesome! I must still be a major _babe_! This is just like Beauty becalming the Beast...only this time, _I'm_ the beauty! You all can eat your hearts out!" Mara reflected sunnily.

"Uh, you never did answer my question. _Who_ are you? And why are you wearing such a silly grin on your face when you were mad just a few moments ago?" Keiichi asked.

"You'll never, ever guess why!!" Mara answered with a giggle. "And I'll never tell!"

"Huh?!"

She thought of Belldandy as she added, "And in answer to your other question, my name is Mara...and I've come to rescue you."

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

_"Haa chooo!"_

Belldandy sneezed herself awake. For some strange reason, her dreams were filled with an elecktrum, a haunting premonition that Mara had done something wrong. She looked over at the other Mara...the girlish Goddess was still sound in her slumbers.

She had to find her sister.

Goddess Mara stirred to wakefulness, rubbed her eyes and looked blankly at Belldandy.

"You know, I had this funny idea last night, right before I went to sleep. It's probably pretty stupid, but I wanted to tell you first thing in the morning to see what you think about it, Belldandy-sempai. Since your Demoness Mara falls in love with Keiichi when I'm near her, it might work the other way as well! I think it might be possible that Demoness Belldandy will develop affections for him when _you're_ near her..." she said with a yawn.

Belldandy wanted to slap herself on the forehead.

It was so obvious!

If the 'Mara effect' could be inversed, then it would follow that _she_ could make Demoness Belldandy feel love towards Keiichi. And if Demoness Belldandy were to develop that kind of emotional attachment towards her charge, then she would become prone to making errors in judgment...errors that could facilitate freeing Keiichi!

"...which would mean that we would need to find a way to get you near the temple. Or even _inside_ the temple, that'd be good enough. Then we'd have a long enough time to see if your presence can have an effect on Demoness Belldandy," Goddess Mara finished.

"Now you're starting to think like a Goddess Relief Office Agent who wants to get her mortal assignee back!" Belldandy sincerely praised her.

"So how do we get you in there?" Goddess Mara asked aloud.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Since you're here to rescue me...and for some strange reason, I believe you are...how are you going to get me out of here!" Keiichi asked. "As you've probably noticed, this entire room has nothing other than these maddening white walls."

Keiichi's statement only confirmed what Mara knew about how the White Room could be so effective. The mind of an Earthrealm mortal was 'wired' to rely on a constant syntax of visual differentiation. In essence, the mortal mind would 'freeze' its perception of its environs, so it could compare 'change' against the 'locked in' image. What made a White Room so effective in dismantling mortal sanities was the fact that there were no 'changes' to contrast with the 'locked in' surroundings. Thus, the mortal's imaginative faculties would be pressed into service to compensate for the lack of sensory stimulation. Psychologically, this would result in all sorts of neuroses rising to the surface. It was similar to the phenomenon of "sensory deprivation chambers"...except that the mortal couldn't just leave the chamber once they started going schizoid. The White Room was a very effective tool in the Demoness Grief repertoire.

The White Room was maddening in its blandness.

"It's simple. I can locate the door and open it," Mara said as she walked towards the wall where the doorway had been. She extended her senses...and didn't find it.

Of course! The Demonesses had obviously warped the symmetry of the room to allow for the doorway to appear randomly in a different wall each time, so that Keiichi wouldn't be able to easily free himself by waiting by the wall until the door appeared.

Mara successively tried all four walls without finding the door.

"Shit!!" she cursed after a half hour's worth of exploring. "This is _bad_!"

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

_"Bwah ha heeeh ha hah!" _

Skuld.

Mara cringed with potent embarrassment as she heard Demoness Skuld laughing just outside the partly opened door.

"So, you're a Senior First Class Demoness, huh? And you can't even find the door-portal out of Keiichi's cell? Give me a fuckin' break!" she taunted.

Keiichi looked at her, startled at Skuld's words.

"All this time, I was scared of you! The big, bad Miss Senior First Class Demoness who came to our temple like some Goth Queen, so she could inspect how we were mistreating our mortal charge! And it turns out that you're all attitude and _no_ action! As far as I'm concerned, we should make you share in his Grief for trying to bullshit us like you did! I can't believe that I let myself get bamboozleed by your lies. You may not have the powers of a Demoness, but you sure lie like one!" Skuld shouted belligerently.

Mara blushed at the irony of _that_ statement. What if Skuld and her sisters had been watching when she and Keiichi...

"And to think that my oldest sister found you attractive! Boy, is she going to be disappointed when I tell her that you don't even have enough Demoness powers to get yourself out of Keiichi's cell!" Skuld ranted.

Mara looked at Keiichi and simply hung her head in shame.

"Actually, there's been an accident. Something to do with, uh, this mortal. He seems to dampen my powers in some..uh..unforeseen fashion. So the best thing for all of us is for you to let me out of here," Mara tried to explain.

"I'm not buying _any_ of it, Ms. Senior First Class Demoness," Skuld snapped back. "You just wait until my middle sister gets back. She's gonna _kill_ you for lying to us! For all I know, you're just an Earth Grade Spirit masquerading as a Demoness!"

Mara could almost feel Keiichi's trembling. Obviously, of the three Demonesses, Belldandy terrified him the most.

"Blessit! I _am_ a Demoness Senior First Class!" Mara said in rapt frustration as the door slammed behind Skuld.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Your sister is in trouble!" Goddess Mara interrupted, shaking Belldandy's sleeve urgently.

"I know," Belldandy replies. She had discerned a slight 'shivering' in the air around her as she and Mara were walking up the hill towards the temple. She had thought it was just the November wind...

"Let me ask my friends where she's at," she requested.

"How? There's just you and me here," Goddess Mara asked as Belldandy whistled to summon several nearby birds. Goddess Mara looked at her, fascinated and mystified. Belldandy regretted that somehow, she wasn't able to summon her Angel, Holy Bell, to lend her exquisite voice to hers as she called the avians.

"You don't have to do that. Ever since you told me about the connection between your Demoness sister and I, I've been able to 'tune in' to her a little bit. And right now, I can sense that she is majorly stressed out over something!" Goddess Mara explained to Belldandy as a half-dozen feathered friends flew in a tight circle around her.

"DANGER!!" Belldandy heard the birds chirping and clintering.

As the shrikes, winter wrens and nuthatches hovered around her, Belldandy listened closely to the cadence of their birdsong. Something had really upset them; it was rare for three diverse breeds of birds such as these to be this upset at the same time. She extended her hand and one of the nuthatches flew down to perch on her fingers. The little bird chittered a narrative of distress usually reserved for times when predator birds made incursions into their aerial harborages. But this wasn't just a case of wayward Tokyo carrion crows threatening birds in their locality...the blue-white nuthatch told her that there was a deathly stillness in the air.

Belldandy found herself looking around for a certain Demoness in a tight-fitting leather bodysuit riding a Harley.

She looked at Goddess Mara, who suddenly seemed much older than her years as she faded into her stealth form.

"I think the best chance we have would be to let them capture you," she heard the invisible voice say. "They obviously know about your sister, but they don't know about _you._ If they were to capture you, then I could sneak into the temple inside your dress. Your Goddess emanations would disguise mine. Once inside the temple, we can see if you can get close enough so I can unhinge the other Belldandy. Maybe that'll be enough so that she slips up."

"That's too risky! What if..." Belldandy started to protest. She could think of a thousand reasons why Mara's plan could go awry. If the Demonesses managed to capture both she and Mara, it was doubtful that Goddess Mara could free them all by herself. The Demoness sisters might be sparing of malice towards Mara, because she was a fellow Demoness. But they would be brutal and ruthless if they had a Goddess as their captive. And they would be absolutely vicious towards Goddess Mara. If the Demonesses managed to kill the Goddess who had a competing assignment, this would free them from all obligation.

"I wish I had my powers back," Belldandy sighed to herself.

"Perhaps there is a reason why you don't have full use of your powers. Maybe you need them to return home or something. Maybe that's why your Goddess powers are on the ebb right now," Goddess Mara encouraged.

Thunderstruck, Belldandy realized that the teenaged Goddess had a point. Not so much about Goddess powers and such. Goddess Mara's words seemed to usher in an entirely different consciousness, an insight into the possibility that she and Mara had been exiled here as part of some process. All along, Belldandy had reasoned that the two of them had been transported to this alternate mirror of reality by chance. But now that she had encountered Mara's Goddess counterpart, there seemed to be much more to this than simple chaotics at work here. Goddess Mara and she shared a purpose, and even Demoness Mara shared in this means.

After all, she and Mara had been brought to Makuhari. They could have been transported to Nara instead. Or some place as remote from Japan as Tindouf...

_-- --It was all about freeing Keiichi!-- --_

Perhaps this adventure was some kind of tuning of balance.

Belldandy felt an unexpected confidence lift her spirits, sweeping aside the cloying fear of being trapped and powerless in this world. Courage seemed to cast itself about her like a Battle Suit of Goddess, flowing into her awareness like a wind caressing the seashore.

"Let's do it! Let's proceed on your plan, Mara!" Belldandy decided, turning to the younger Goddess.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Time assumes a leaden weight when one is incarcerated. Place can be heavier than the ocean when one is restricted. Situation can numb one's life force when one had no options but lethargy. Dolphins swim in the ocean, leap into the air...but are confined to water. Yet, they don't seem to mind the limitations of their environment at all...they were happy within the confines placed upon them by nature.

"If only the mortals were as playful as the dolphins. If only I could be as playful as a dolphin," Mara thought as she paced back and forth along the nondescript walls of the White Room. She had tried several times to enjoin Keiichi in a conversation, because the silence was jetting her towards stir-craziness. That, and she kept being haunted by the disappointment Keiichi must have felt. She had promised to rescue him...and ended up trapped with him instead.

How mortifying.

Finally, she heard Keiichi clear his throat as he began to speak up in a tentative voice. Mara stopped pacing as Keiichi explained how he had been victimized by the Demonesses. She hoped that her listening would calm him down...which was important, because Mara herself was almost freaking out in the face of being _confined_. This experience was triggering half-remembered phantom-thoughts of being trapped inside of a SpiderDemon cocoon, her Soul being slowly and painfully devoured by the voracious cyberorganic creatures.

If she was going to 'interview' him, now would be a good time. After all, they had all the time in the world.

Or maybe not.

"I had just finished a race," he started, his tan-brown eyes filled with intensity. "It was one of those staging rallies where you have to drive through a course by stages. Each stage has a set time, and you have to match the time from point A to point B as closely as possible. If you go above or below the set time, you lose points. At the end of the race, the judges add up the time differences between stages for each driver. The winner is the person whose cumulative time differences is lowest..."

"Definitely a racing nut!" Mara thought. She had expected him to confine his tale to regards about his captivity; but instead, Keiichi had immediately launched into a description of a race. His interest in driving and machines was no different than Belldandy's Keiichi. Perhaps this particular memory was sharpened in his recall because it described his last moments of freedom...

"Anyway, I was certain that I had won," he continued, "but it turned out that Aoshima had the lowest time. Tamiya and Ootaki thought something was fishy, and added up the scores. It turned out that the judges' times didn't match the times we recorded. Once again, I lost to Aoshima, because he _always_ bribes the judges. This was another one of those times where we won fair-and-square...and yet, we lost. I was getting _sick_ of him buying out the races.

"So that night in the Men's Dorm, I got really drunk...with Tamiya and Ootaki's encouragement, of course. I really didn't mean to, but for just a moment, I hoped that Aoshima would get in a wreck the next time we raced against each other. I mean...wouldn't _anyone_ wish for that, if they were in my situation? Anyway, I sobered up that morning and stayed home from school with an upset stomach, because I ate some of Ootaki's leftover pizza for breakfast. So that night, I figured that I'd order some delivery-type food...and some woman answers the phone saying 'You've reached the Demoness Grief Office HOTLine'..."

"You spoke to the HOTLine? That's for Demoness inter-office communications _only_!" Mara said, genuinely startled. Keiichi didn't seem to hear her, he was so wrapped up in his tale...

"...I mean, she just _appeared_ out of nowhere! Actually, she kinda flowed out of one of the overhead lights, and floated in the air in front of me. I was just a college freshman, so I figured that Ootaki might have slipped something weird into my sake. But she was real! Before I could say a word, she hands me this card which says "Demoness Grief Office Agent Belldandy" or something like that..." Keiichi recalled, a distant look in his eyes.

"...and you took the card, didn't you," Mara finished. The fact that his call had been fielded by the HOTLine, rather than one of the regular phone circuits, was highly dubious in the least. Her skepticism increased with Keiichi's latest claim...it was strictly against the Rules for a DGO agent to hand her meishi over without first talking with the mortal.

Either he was being absurd...or an impossiblism had occurred.

"Yes. All along, I thought it was some kind of joke my sempai were playing on me," he answered. "As soon as I took the card, she smiled at me. Evilly. The kind of knowing grin an axe-murderess would have in one of those slasher movies. Then she explains to me that I've been singled out for the distinct honor of being attacked by Grief. But right before she took me out of the room, I saw _another_ woman appear. She was in the mirror, kinda half-in-half-out...just her upper torso was sticking out of the mirror. All she said when she saw me and Belldandy was 'I'm too late!' And I'll never forget the sadness in her eyes as she said those words. They were the saddest eyes I have ever seen..." Keiichi recounted, hanging his head. He went on to describe this second divine being, continually focusing on how much Mara resembled her.

"That was Mara, wasn't it?"

"Yes. She's like a 14 or 15-year-old version of you. When I was brought here, I had just turned 20. Never had a girlfriend before in my life, 'cause I was a short guy, not tall enough to be interesting to girls. But there was something about her face and eyes that I could never let go of. It was as if...in that single moment I saw her...she had burned a hole right into my heart with her eyes! Just that one time. And I've been trying to get out of here, so that I can pour what's inside of my heart _out_ to her, through that hole that she made inside of me," Keiichi explained.

Mara marveled at this. Despite all the years of abuse and deprivation, this Keiichi had retained enough hope to be able to come up with a beautifully romantic metaphor for his first meeting with his Goddess girlfriend.

"The Demoness took me here, and then.._snff_..told me that it was my one ill-wish to Aoshima that had caused all of this. That I would.._snffsnff_.._never_ see the light of day again! And then they _tortured_ me, all three of them! They've confined me to this bright white room for years. I.._snff_..don't even know what month or year it is, it's been so long. I've been living in a nightmare...an unspeakable chamber of nightmares. All these years...and I only had one week of freedom, thanks to Mara. She never gave up on me!" Keiichi shouted, his voice breaking down into gasps as his body was wracked with his sobbing.

Mara hesitated before offering him a comforting hug. She didn't need a repeat of last night's lust-driven encounter. But Keiichi's plight had pulled on her heart-strings in a different way, evoking tender concern rather than flights of allurement. Besides his girlfriend, she was probably the first person Keiichi had ever talked to about this. Something else pulled at her consciousness too, as she distinctly realized that _this_ should have never happened.

She waited for Keiichi to cull himself out of his grief.

"Keiichi, I need you to tell me the truth. How drunk were you that night when you wished Aoshima would have an accident?"

"Very drunk. I was basically on the edge of passing out!" he answered.

"And did you _ever_ wish for him...or anyone else...to get hurt, other than that one time?"

"No!! Of course not! I'm not that kinda guy!" he said, looking her in the eye.

"I can freely admit that I _hated_ what he was doing. I hated losing to him every time we raced! And I would always wish that his vehicles would have breakdowns before we would race against each other. But other than that one time, I _never_ wished for Aoshima to get hurt in an accident!" Keiichi claimed adamantly.

Mara felt an indignant anger rustling in her throat. It was obvious that Keiichi was the victim of a gross injustice! The Rules were very discriminating in selecting mortal candidates for Grief...and Keiichi's situation certainly didn't qualify. A single wish for harm towards another mortal wasn't sufficient proof of a heart filled with malice. If the Vanagdrasil Mainframe assigned a DGO agent based on _this_ criteria, the Earthrealm wouldn't have a single remaining inhabitant...

"Could they be rogues?" she wondered.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Belldandy concluded that the best way to become a 'target' would be to return to Mara's video-game parlor that had served as home for the past several weeks. She and Goddess Mara had decided that it would be too risky for her to simply go to the temple and allow herself to be captured. Not only would that appear suspicious, but there was the distinct possibility that she might be confronted by Banpei. The robotic guardian of the temple could easily physically injure Belldandy in a fit of zealous mecha-guardianship, which would bode ill for their joint effort.

Belldandy watched as Goddess Mara miniaturized her physical manifest to super-deformed size, and then concealed herself in one of the hip-pockets of her skirt. Once Goddess Mara was tucked away, Belldandy extended her Goddess senses to try and lure the Demonesses...

The sisterly link of Divine Soul contours that bonded her with Skuld and Urd through TimeSpace hadn't fully presented itself between her and Mara. But _something_ was sensible to her; Belldandy was shadowed by an insistent sense of dread, which only served to profane her sense of confidence. Since Urd and Skuld weren't here, she reasoned that the bond between Mara and her had evolved into something tangible. This, in spite of the fact that Mara was a Demoness and she was a Goddess.

_Mitakuye Oyasin._

The Native American expression came to Belldandy's mind as she considered her relationship with Mara. Mitakuye oyasin was a word used by many American tribes to describe their understanding of the relatedness of all beings, of all natures, of all universes. One sense of mitakuye oyasin was literally rendered as "we are all related". This concept closely matched Belldandy's view of the Multiverse; seamed as it is by Metanative energies and the Divine consciousness of the Gods. But Mara, as a Demoness, didn't fit into this equation so smoothly. Despite the polarity that separated Goddess and Demoness, Belldandy could sense something new...a ribbon-thin Divine link between she and Mara. Not the ordinary 'detection of Demonic aura' type of sense information. Rather, it was something novel to her experience, a Divine bond that should have been impossible in the occurring. Just like it was "supposedly impossible" that she had a Demoness for an older sister.

But the banner-bridge between Souls _was_ there...and she could almost hear Mara's thoughts crying out for help.

She and Mara were related.

Mitakuye Oyasin.

"My sister, I am coming to your aid," Belldandy said to the chill night air.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

The next day, Belldandy was enjoying a can of chilled tea with her lunch when Demoness Belldandy float-shifted through the wall, a miasmic fury of red and black. Belldandy could hear Goddess Mara shout a tiny "eep!" as the Demoness solidified her Earthrealm manifest inside the building.

The enemy had arrived.

"At last!! I've found y..." Demoness Belldandy started to announce with a Peorthesque flair for the dramatic. But when she saw Belldandy, she lapsed into a silent mid-shout, widening her eyes to match her open-mouthed gape.

Belldandy quickly studied her Demoness counterpart. Demoness Belldandy's face had a slightly darker skin complexion than hers, somewhere between hers and Urd's, but closer to hers. The Demoness's hair was shaded differently as well; light streaks of red were mixed in with the browns and hazels, the ends of her generous length of hair curling into soft coils. Her eyes weren't narrow like Mara's and Urd's; they were more rounded, like Skuld's. If she would have been a Goddess, she might be seen as doe-eyed. But as a Demoness, her expressive eyes made her appear far more menacing. The guile behind her eyes was much more piercing in expression. Mara's eyes were sly as a fox, but this Belldandy's eyes were wide-away _evil_.

"Who the hell are _you_?!" the Demoness snarled, blending question with threat. "You're a Goddess...but you're not that stupid little twit Mara!"

Belldandy felt a thumb-sized kick against her hip where the pocket in her skirt rested. She silently looked into the red-orange eyes of her twinned being; mirror-perfect in almost every fashion. Demoness Belldandy was dressed in her red-leather outfit, with a black and orange cape that made her look like a female Nosferatu...

"Meet her gaze, don't betray your fear. Remember you're a Goddess!" Belldandy mentally prompted herself, trying to keep her sanity under grip. Several maxims flowed into her thoughts: One can only deceive dementia by silence. Quietude is the enemy of malice. Violence arises not out of superfluidity of power but out of a repressed fear of powerlessness.

She would stay the course, no matter what.

"You're a fuckin' _Goddess_!! And you look just like _me_?!" Demoness Belldandy exclaimed in astonishment. Stating the obvious. She had been so engrossed in the idea that she had finally discovered Goddess Mara's Earthrealm digs, she had completely failed to recognize Belldandy at first. Overconfident rather than observant. Because of this, Belldandy felt more encouraged that she could out-think this Demoness.

"Yes she is a Goddess! And for a moment, I thought that there were two of you! Silly me, to think such a thing despite the evidence in front of my eyes! But there's been weirder events than this, especially when it concerns that other Demoness..." another voice broke in, snapping Belldandy's attention. Belldandy whirled to look in the direction of the intrusive voice, but only saw empty walls and thin air.

Could it be _another_ Demoness?

"Besides...one Belldandy's enough already!" the voice teased. Demoness Belldandy scowled and then spun around, giving the finger to the invisible voice.

"Yeah, Big Sister! Look what we have here! A Goddess impersonating my Elder Sister. Very bad, very wrong, very...stupid! First, some Demoness skank named Mara shows up at our temple, posing as a Demoness Senior First Class..." a third voice sounded. To Belldandy's ears, the voice sounded almost girlish, younger and higher pitched than Demoness Belldandy's.

It almost sounded like...

"BAH!! That Mara Demoness was worthless! To think that I even wanted to sleep with her! I'm so disgusted with myself! I feel _tainted_!"

This really put Belldandy on notice. She looked at Demoness Belldandy, who was silently snickering.

"That's because you don't practice any discretion in your liaisons, Big Sister," the youthful voice said in a mocking tone.

"What would you know about 'discretion', brat? You've never even had a boyfriend!" the older voice shot back, dripping with venom.

Belldandy felt haunted by the two voices as they launched into a full-scale argument while Demoness Belldandy big-sweated with frustration. As the voices pitched upwards in intensity of contention, she recognized them. Rather, it was the particular _interrelationship_ of those two voices that she recognized. She knew of only two other Divine beings who could engage in a verbal rivalry of this magnitude. Two beings who were so impulsively inclined to do so, they would completely forget place and situation.

Urd and Skuld.

The two Demonesses were contending with such intensity, they forgot to stealth their Earthrealm manifests. Slowly, the two forms coalesced into solid visibility.

Belldandy glanced at one, then the other. She felt her body shivering at the harrowing sight of the _other_ Urd and Skuld. Although 'Demoness' Skuld's hairstyle and demeanor completely departed from that of her younger sister, 'Demoness' Urd's presence captivated her with fright. Perhaps this was because she had only glimpsed Urd briefly, back when she...

Belldandy didn't want to think about death. Not now.

Demoness Urd's long platinum hair was combed over and back like her older sister's. But unlike her sister's hair, the silver-whiteness faded into a red-orange-white sheen as it flowed down her back, rather than Urd's familiar light-blue-purple hair color.

Skuld was a shock. If she had been an Earthrealm mortal, her hairstyle would have been more juiced out than 99 of the most radical hairdos in Harajuku.

"Well...don't just stare at each other while you're arguing! Remember why we're here? You're both ruining my grand entrance with your bickering, while the Goddess is just sitting there gawking at you! Do something about _her_!" Demoness Belldandy commanded. The two Demoness sisters snapped out of their sibling holocaust. Demoness Urd formed a glowing orange energy-lasso in her right hand, and whipped it towards Belldandy, lashing it around her waist. With a jarring yank, she pulled back on the lasso to tighten it, noosing it sharply.

Belldandy felt the rope pull taunt around her hips...

Right where Goddess Mara was hiding in super-deformed form.

"OOooomph!" she heard as a 20cm version of Mara was ejected from her pocket.

Demoness Skuld whipped out a small handheld object that looked like a cross between a light-saber and a holo-projector. Belldandy watched helplessly as the young punkette Demoness punched a sequence...and Goddess Mara suddenly grew to full size.

"Goddess stealth dequalifier...just another feature of my Goddess SD-expanding Asskicker Mk. III!" Skuld announced gleefully as Goddess Mara's Earthrealm manifest reconstituted itself to full-scale.

Goddess Mara looked shocked, staring at her hands and feet.

"Leave her out of this!" Belldandy shouted.

"But she's very much _into_ this!" Demoness Belldandy countered. "She's been in this from the start! Just because she's a waif of a Goddess, it doesn't mean that I'm not going to go easy on her!" With that, Demoness Belldandy formed a whip in her hand.

Belldandy struggled against the binds of the lasso around her waist, watching helplessly as Goddess Mara glanced at all three Demonesses, picking a target. She raised her hand and pointed towards Demoness Urd, and then a bolt of blue energy lashed out.

Harmlessly, as Urd waved her hands and created a shield to deflect it.

"She doesn't even have enough skill and power to properly execute a basic energywarp bolt," Belldandy thought glumly as the three Demonesses laughed mockingly at Goddess Mara's failed attempt.

Demoness Belldandy lengthened her whip, and then lashed out at Goddess Mara, catching her clean across the back, leaving a stripe rich with blood.

"Aiiiyeee!" Goddess Mara screamed as Demoness Skuld poked out another sequence of commands on her handheld.

"Goddess containment sphere, the Chikyugi Stifler Mk V.!!" Demoness Skuld announced as a net of arcane matrix energy flashed out of the end of Skuld's device and tightly enveloped Goddess Mara, rendering her immobile.

"Finally!! After all these years on this miserable Earthrealm, we can finally leave!" Demoness Belldandy yelled joyfully.

"And all three of us will get promotions!" Demoness Skuld added in a bubbly voice.

"Not a chance, brat! Remember why we're here?" Demoness Urd chided.

Belldandy tried to filter out their voices, gritting her teeth as the environs of the video arcade faded into nothingness around her. The worst-case scenario had come true: they were captives of the Demonesses!

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

The Demonesses were silent as they transported Belldandy and Goddess Mara to the temple. A moment later, the two Goddesses were hastily shoved into a cell with walls of unblemished white glows. The metal door slammed behind them and quickly faded into invisibility.

"KEIICHI!!"

They both dashed towards Keiichi...

B..bummp!!

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

After Keiichi had described his plight in all of its inglorious detail, Mara had wracked her brains in an attempt to develop a proper escape plan. But when nothing practicable came to mind, she fell into a malaise.

The jarring doorslam startled Mara from her depressed musings.

She glanced at the opposite wall, just in time to see two women ushered into the White Room. Before she could hail them, they shouted "Keiichi!" at the top of their lungs. Impulsively, both women dashed towards Keiichi, colliding with each other at a full sprint a couple meters in front of him.

Mara flinched in reaction as the two women rebounded into a sprawl, tumbling to the floor unconscious.

Belldandy, and...

"MAAAARRRRRAAAAA!!" Keiichi screamed as he leapt up off the floor and ran towards one of the women.

"Mara?" she wondered aloud as Keiichi swept up one of the unconscious women in his arms and hugged her to his chest.

"You big idiot!! Be gentle with her! She might be injured!" Mara shouted angrily at him. Meanwhile, she hustled over to where Belldandy was laying on her back, moaning with pain. Belldandy's forehead was already sporting a knot from her collision with the other Mara.

The _Goddess_ Mara.

If it had been any other circumstances besides these, Mara knew that she would be doubled over with laughter. It was so...Belldandyish...for her younger sister to dash immediately to Keiichi's side, without any thought for safety. The whole scene reminded her of one of her favorite moments in baseball: when two players would collide at a full sprint trying to field a hit. Belldandy's unbridled and unminded enthusiasm, coupled with Goddess Mara's infatuation with Keiichi...made for a collision that was as inevitable as a black hole forming after a stellar collapse. Since Belldandy's Earthrealm physical manifest was a bit larger than Goddess Mara's, the younger Goddess had been worsted in the collision.

"Wake up, Bell!!" Mara encouraged desperately, slapping her younger sister's face to try and rouse her. After several moments of repeated urgings, Belldandy blinked her eyes open into a squint, and then looked at her with woozy eyes.

"You've _never_ called me 'Bell' before..." Belldandy told her in a slight voice.

Mara could only grin at her with embarrassment.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

As soon as Goddess Mara regained consciousness, Demoness Belldandy and her sisters manifested inside the White Room.

Keiichi had been by Goddess Mara's side the whole time, but when he saw the tripart personages of his nemesis, he immediately leapt at them in a rage. Belldandy and Mara remained still, recognizing that these were merely holophotic projections of the three Demonesses. Keiichi leapt through the three forms and crashed against the wall, causing the three holoimages to giggle forth their mockery.

"I think that it's time to end this Grief assignment, as we have both the Earthrealm mortal and the Goddess who was assigned to his case by the Goddess Relief Office," Belldandy announced. Her voice sent a chill down Belldandy and Mara's spines.

"What should we do to them? What would be a fitting punishment?" Demoness Skuld asked, her holoimaged eyes glistening evilly.

"You mean _execution_, not punishment, dimwit!" Demoness Urd corrected. "That is, unless you want to remain here on this armpit of a planet for the next 50 years or so until they blow themselves up!"

"Go to hell, Big Sister!" Demoness Skuld replied elastically.

"Exactly!" Demoness Belldandy interrupted. "We have a date with Vanagdrasil! I just can't wait to get back home!" She started skipping up and down with glee, like a school child during recess.

"So what do we do with the prisoners?" Demoness Urd asked.

"Hmm...this _is_ Japan, you know!" Demoness Belldandy said, gesturing with a finger.

"Duh!! You just now figured that out!" Demoness Skuld said snidely.

"You're so dense, Skuld! Think!! What do they do to prisoners here?"

"They jail 'em!"

"No, you Demoness dope! I meant, what did they _use_ to do to prisoners, back in the good ol' days of Feudal Japan?" Demoness Belldandy asked.

"Ahhhhh!" Demoness Urd exclaimed with barely-concealed delight. "How fitting, especially since it's a _past_ method of execution, and I'm the Scorn of the Past!"

"_Scorn_ of the past?" Belldandy asked, looked at Mara with a questioning expression.

"Yep! I hope this pleases you, Elder Sister..."

"WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO TO US?" Keiichi yelled, frustrated with the bickering and stalling.

"...and I can't think of a better way to finish this than an old-fashioned samurai-style beheading at dawn, tomorrow!" Demoness Belldandy announced in a pitiless voice.

"Cool!!" Demoness Urd and Skuld shouted in unison.

With a flash, the three Demonic figures disappeared.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

They had one final night together.

Belldandy regarded Goddess Mara with a mixture of sadness and envy. The young Goddess was snuggled tight against Keiichi, her arms wrapped around his chest as she slept. She had a contented smile on her face, as if all was right with the world.

Belldandy struggled to ignore the pathos that this situation so poignantly presented. Goddess Mara and Keiichi's plight was just like a narrative from a tragic Chinese folk fable. She had been fatefully reunited with her mortal boyfriend...but as a form of completion, not reunion. Two lovers, destined to have only one night together before they died. A single night for whence they could finally share the love that had been brewing in their hearts...

Even worse, Goddess Mara was barely a child.

"This isn't supposed to happen," Mara kept repeating, zounded by the fact that she was going to be executed tomorrow morning. "The DGO would never approve of one of its Agents killing another Demoness without a specific motive of vengeance. To do so would incur the utmost wrath of His Dark Majesty."

"Assuming, of course, that your Dark Lord behaves the same way in this alternate dimension of reality as He would back in _our_ realm," Belldandy noted glumly.

Mara shook her head sadly and slumped her shoulders.

"Further, there is the issue that you lied to all three of them, which could serve as means for a desire for vengeance. After all, you _did_ attempt to interfere with their Grief assignment," Belldandy added.

"Nah!" Mara quickly replied. "Demonesses try to sabotage each other's assignments quite often in the DGO. Besides, Demonesses lie to each other all the time! Especially in matters concerning their mates."

"Eh?" Belldandy exclaimed. "What does lying about one's mate have to do with our situation?"

"Eeep!" Mara gasped. She hadn't told her sister about _that_ situation!

"Uh...I..I, as I am single, I have no reason to worry on that accord!" Mara quickly explained. Belldandy looked at her...looked _through_ her.

"Mara...I saw how Demoness Urd was looking at you. It may just be my imagination, but I sensed that she was wearing a very visible expression of jealous love underneath her visible anger."

Mara felt her dignity plummeting.

"You sensed right, Belldandy...my sister," Mara conceded with a weary sigh. "In this reality, she is in the same position as my twin sister Urd. In charge of the Past, thus only able to experience a romantic love with the opposite sex...in the past. But instead of pining away in self-pity for thousands of years like our sister, this Urd decided to turn her affections towards her own sex. And yes, I did had an 'episode' with her, although it was not of my choosing, nor did I have the power to resist the situation."

"Ahhh, that explains it!" Belldandy said, noticing how much Mara was blushing. She regarded Mara with a renewed respect, realizing that it must have been quite difficult for Mara to admit to this.

"But we need to revisit our situation. Do you think that your Dark Lord would intervene on our behalf?"

"I just don't know. He's very fickle..."

"Can they really kill us? I know that they could kill Keiichi, since he's a mortal. But what about you, I and Goddess Mara?"

"Oh yes, they could kill us. I don't know about Goddess Mara, because she has her Goddess powers. But you and I...we don't have the full use of our powers, so I would venture to guess that they could. In any case, I don't want to risk finding out."

"Agreed!"

"What about contacting _your _Lord? Kami-sama, or whatever His name is?" Mara asked.

"I can't. I can't even sense Yggdrasil. And there's no phone nearby to call Him with," Belldandy said with a sigh.

"What about Goddess Mara? She has full powers, doesn't she?"

"Yes. But she only has a Goddess Second Class, Limited, Restricted License. And this is her _first_ GRO case. She's only Fourteen Decas," Belldandy answered.

"_Only 14_?!" Mara exclaimed, shocked.

"Yes. She's inexperienced as well as impulsive. When we were captured, Demoness Urd easily deflected Mara's attack. I highly doubt that she'll be able to help our cause. Besides...look at her," Belldandy noted, nodding her head towards Goddess Mara's recumbent form. "Now that she's with Keiichi, she's totally struck with puppy-love."

"Must be nice," Mara commented enviously.

"I've been trying, but I can't seem to find a way out of here," Belldandy said after a moment of silence.

"I couldn't either. If I couldn't find the way out as a Demoness, you're surely not going to find it as a Goddess," Mara reasoned.

"But there's something that has been bothering me about this whole situation with these Demonesses and Keiichi," Mara observed. She then launched into a detailed explanation about her suspicions that the three Demonesses' presence on the Earthrealm wasn't in accord with their respective assignments from Vanagdrasil.

"Rogues?" Belldandy repeated the world.

"Yes," Mara answered. "If they're rogues, then we're in really deep shit...because they won't be concerned with having to answer to His Dark Majesty, or the Demon Grief Office. They could get away with doing pretty much anything they wanted to do. Including killing the four of us."

"So much for optimism," Belldandy said dryly.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"I don't care what you do to me...but spare Keiichi!" Goddess Mara screamed, agonized by the readiness of Demoness Belldandy to behead Keiichi. In a flash, the white room they had been imprisoned within had dissolved. Now, they were grouped outside, behind the temple. The area Belldandy used for her garden back on the Earthrealm had been transformed into a surreal execution ground, circa the Bakumatsu period of the late 18th century.

An open-air execution chamber.

She, Mara, Goddess Belldandy and Keiichi were all lined in an orderly row, dressed in formal white hakama outfits. White cotton sheets cordoned off the area, and the grass had been transformed into a sand pit. Belldandy could feel her hands going numb. The Demonesses had bound each of them to an upright post; a hempen rope tied their hands together behind their backs, and then was looped around the wooden stake behind them, propping them upright. The three Demonesses kept out of view, as they were standing behind her and the others. Belldandy could only catch glimpses of them out of the corner of her eye. As she expected, they were dressed in the black kimono of the executioners.

The fact that the three Demonesses were half-hidden from direct eyesight made the situation even more mortifying, more terrible. None of them would have any notice to prepare themselves in that final instant before Death struck them down.

Belldandy could hear Keiichi gasping with exertion. He was visibly struggling...and yet was motionless. The Demonesses had somehow paralyzed him. His chest was heaving with deep breaths, but he was inert...unable to move his limbs. She couldn't move either, although she wasn't paralyzed like Keiichi. She had some freedom of movement, but she was too weak to free herself.

"Does it all end here?" Belldandy thought as Goddess Mara continued to plead for Keiichi's life. She had lived hundreds of thousands of years, had experienced love and joy, sadness and pain, on a scale that few Divine beings would ever approach. The idea that she was actually going to experience the Real Death was frightening...and yet interesting. But not this way. Not at the hands of three Demonesses, in another Earthrealm in another dimension of existence. Not as the result of a failed attempt to rescue Keiichi.

And now the dream was over...

Mara was angrily cursing out the three Demonesses.

Belldandy turned her head to watch her Demoness counterpart walk up behind Keiichi, the katana in her hands glinting in the early-morning sun. She slowly lowered the sword onto his neck, taking a few practice strokes prior to beheading him.

She swung it down in a flashing arc towards the back of Keiichi's neck...

_"NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!"_

Belldandy and Goddess Mara had both screamed in unison, horrified. Belldandy clenched her eyes shut, not wanting to see the horrible sight, not wanting to hear the "thud" of the head as it was severed from his body. When she opened her eyes, she realized that the Demoness was only taunting them with the inevitable. A thin trace of blood trickled down the nape of Keiichi's neck where she had checked her sword swing.

"Any last words before you die, mortal scum?" Demoness Belldandy asked in a mocking voice.

"Mara...what I have to say, I will say to you now! These three Demonesses aren't worth a breath of a word, so I won't speak to them. I wish to say only this: if our situation had somehow been different, I would have wished that a Goddess like you would be with me forever, so that we could share in the bounties of our heart's love for each other..."

"That's enough! That's _stupid_! How could you waste your last breath, your very last words, spewing such ridiculous bullshit! I oughta kill you just for that!" Demoness Belldandy screamed maniacally.

Belldandy heard a crackling sound behind her as someone walked up behind her. She quickly glanced to both sides, seeing Urd behind Mara and Belldandy behind Keiichi. In the most horrible twist of irony she could imagine, she was going to be beheaded by Skuld! A Demoness version of the younger sister she loved so much. The crackling turned into a tap-cracking sound. Although she couldn't see behind her, she knew that Skuld was growing impatient for the kill...tapping her foot on the gravel.

"I have something to say!" Mara shouted.

"We don't want to hear from you, traitorous Demoness whore!" Urd exclaimed, spitting out the words like fiery poisons.

"Well, you're going to hear it anyway! Whatever you do here won't change the fact that the three of you went _rogue_! By His Dark Name, the injustices that you visit upon me and these three innocents will be avenged! I am a Demoness, _Senior_ First Class...and my Dark Lord will not let my death go unpunished! I know that I can trust in Him totally! He'll _punish_ you for this...and he won't give you the Choice. You won't get to choose your own punishment, because He'll make you suffer a hundred times worse than you can even imagine for killing another Demoness and three innocents!" Mara screamed, expecting a sword to sever her head from her neck before she finished the sentence.

Instead, there was absolute silence.

Belldandy could see the shocked expressions on the faces of Demoness Belldandy and Demoness Urd.

_-- --BBBBRRZZZZZOOOOMMMMMCCCCCCKKKKK-- --_

A _mammoth_ bolt of bright-red lightning flashed down from above, piercing cloud and sky alike and enveloping the entire arena of death in a ochre-colored glow. Belldandy felt like she was caught in the middle of a nuclear furnace, it was so bright. The red glow gradually faded...

"My Lord!" she heard someone say to her left.

Goddess Mara was on her right, looking defiant and sad at the same time.

She looked left...and saw Mara bowed low to the ground in the formal tailor-style supplication posture. Mara's posture and bearing reminded Belldandy of the times when the phone had rang, and...

"This can't be!" she gasped under her breath as the red light solidified into a form.

Hovering in front of them was a...being. A male being with generous locks of long white hair whipping in the wind, framing a face with coal-black skin. Not the kind of skin that the people of color have on the Earthrealm...his skin was coal-black and smooth. The piercing red and green eyes seemed to have flames vorticing inside of them. Belldandy felt those eyes alight on her briefly; the moment she made eye contact, she faltered as a chill welled up inside of her. But along with the briefly shared gaze, she felt the confines of the ropes disappear, the paralysis that gripped her body instantly faded.

The astonishingly handsome being looked like a photo negative of the Lord!

Belldandy felt her limbs come free, and instantly she too bowed in respect to the being in front of her. The Lord Himself had come to rescue the four of them.

"«Goddess, raise yourself from your suppliant affect. It is not meet that one such as you should bear me any obsequience,»" a mellifluous voice echoed in her thoughts.

"I am He who shifts Reality with gates and guiles, so that Life itself is brought to bear My Dark Commission. At My whim are suns blotted by pure Night, which is but a spark where light is inaccessible and consumed," the voice boomed, audible this time.

"Holy shi..." Belldandy heard Goddess Mara gasp out.

"Isilblius?!" Belldandy asked Mara. Mara turned to look at her long enough to motion "no" with her head, and then bowed low to the ground again.

"My daughter, you may arise from your groveling, for it is by the strength of your debt of faith that I have heard your protestation. Yea, even unto the depths of My VoidPalace have I sense your distressful plaint!"

"My Dark Lord, Y..You came here on m..my behalf?" Mara asked meekly.

"Yes, My Child. A grievous wrongdoing has occurred here, involving you, the two Goddesses and a mortal. A _grievous_ wrongdoing, which demands My attention," Oni-sama noted in a voice that effortless shifted between tender concern and pointed menace.

"I..I can explain..." Demoness Belldandy interjected desperately.

"SILENCE!!" the Dark Lord's voice boomed, causing the ground to tremor.

Belldandy felt herself shaking violently in reaction to the angry voice. It was as if she herself had been scolded by Kami-sama.

"It is of no significance to Me concerning what happens to my Demonic daughter and her companions. However, I am sore aggrieved at the fact that you and your sisters abandoned your posts and duties on Vanagdrasil to come to this planet-arbor on some foolish tact. Further, the three of you contrived to conceal it from Me, and from My Demoness Grief Office. Finally, you acted in accord with your own wills, not Mine! And you dared flaunt the Rules so openly as to attempt to take the life of a sister Demoness without My permission!"

"I thought He came here because He cared about what could happen to you," Belldandy whispered to Mara.

"Sshhht! Don't let Him hear you!" Mara shushed.

"But He said..."

"Belldandy, it's His way of saying He cares! He's the _Dark Lord_, for crisesakes! He can't just come out and admit that He's here on my behalf!" Mara corrected her younger sister.

"Wh...what's happening?!" Goddess Mara said in a mouse of a voice, clearly overawed by what was happening. But not overawed enough to keep from hiding in Keiichi's arms, Belldandy noted humorously.

"My Darkness, w..we decided that we needed a vacation. T..to broaden our interests..."

"ENOUGH! It is plain to Me that I need to find replacement Scorns. _Three_ replacement Scorns. Do you bear the notion that you can continue this charade by dint of misspeech and soothing words? Do you harbor doubts that I lack the ability to see what is in your hearts? Would you question My judgment in coming here? Do you assume that I am here on a whim?"

"N..n...no!" three Demoness voices answered.

"I will choose to let you choose. Name...your...punishment!" the Dark Lord commanded, stretching each syllable out. To Mara's ears, His words were always delicious...but in this circumstance, even more so.

"Here's where it gets interesting. When the Dark Lord decides to punish a Demon or Demoness, He always offers them the option of deciding their own punishment. Sadistic, isn't it?" Mara explained in a side-whisper to Belldandy.

Belldandy gulped at this.

"This is based on the assumption that the punishment He metes out is worse than one could imagine. Actually, it's His way of being merciful. Most Demons will choose their own punishment, rather than risk having to face His decision."

"We refuse!" Demoness Urd shouted. Belldandy could see that her two younger sisters had murder written all over their faces in reaction to Urd's refusal.

"Boy, did they just blow it!" she heard Mara say under her breath.

"So be it. By the authority of Vanagdrasil invested in Me as its Sovereign, I banish you to the Sanitation Pools for 50 millennia to reflect on your mistaken attempt to deceive Me. There, you will serve as conducting fluid for solid waste. You will retain sentiency for the whole duration of your penance. After this term is completed..."

"Waita minute! Isn't that a little too harsh!"

Belldandy felt her jaw drop like a lead weight at Keiichi's words.

"Shut up shut up shut up! You're going to get us all killed!" Mara hissed, elbowing him in the ribs.

"You would show compassion for your captors? You would dare question My judgment of their actions?" the Dark Lord said, moving closer to float in front of Keiichi.

"Yes, I would most definitely question your judgment. Now...I have a question for you. What makes you think that I'm a mortal?" Keiichi said, standing up.

"EHHH?!" Belldandy, Mara and Goddess Mara gasped.

Belldandy's eyes grew wide as Keiichi's hair started growing out...slowly turning from dark brown to raven black as it stretched down his back. His white hakama was sparkling like a thousand glints of light as it changed form, turning into a regal robe and cloak. His physical form grew in stature as he floated up almost a meter above the ground.

"This...can't...be!" the Dark Lord stammered.

"Anything that can be..._can be_," Keiichi replied with a smile. But it was no longer his voice, no longer the voice of an Earthrealm mortal. Belldandy heard his thoughts in her mind.

"My..." Goddess Mara gasped.

"...Lord!" Belldandy finished in a hushed voice.

The Dark Lord started laughing as both Goddesses quickly bowed down in front of their Lord.

Taken aback, Mara bowed down with them.

"Bwah ha hah! This is by far the best jest You've done in a long time, My Brother. Posing as the captive of these three malcreant Demonesses! You even have one of My daughters bowing to You," He said, slapping the Lord on the shoulder. The friendly slap on the shoulder, which appeared to be nothing more than a soft handpat, thundered the air like a rumbling lightning bolt.

Belldandy didn't know what to do, so she bowed one more time deep to the ground, and then pulled herself up, seating herself in the most formal tailor-style posture she could muster with her injured ankle. She winced with effort. The Lord noticed her discomfort and nodded at her. Instantly, her sprained ankle was healed.

"But one must ask, why would You deign to do such a curious thing?" the Dark Lord asked.

"Ahh, but this is not a jest. Even one such as I wanders His castles, lonely for the company of a Goddess. I...who loves all beings, whom all love...need a companion for this cycle. As I am Keiichi, he is me. This young one," He said gently, motioning to Goddess Mara, "has fair eyes and a kind heart. I will grant her My company in the form of this mortal for a short time. And after he leaves the flesh, if she so desires it...an aspect of Me will remain in his form in Yggdrasil, so she may continue on with the love she bears for him."

"M..My Lord!" Goddess Mara said, her voice cracking as she shuddered violently with trepidation.

"My Child, reign in your fears. It is but I...and I am your Father, as well as your Servant, am I not? As for the mortal...would you not grant his wish?" the deep voice boomed through Keiichi's lips.

"B..but he didn't make a wish!" the young Goddess replied.

"M..my Lord," Belldandy spoke up. Against all better judgment, she felt that she had to tell the Lord about Goddess Mara. "W..with all due respect, Mara isn't suited for duties as a Goddess Relief Office Agent. It would be a waste to have her continue working at the GRO. I have seen her art...she crafted a holomatrix model of Yggdrasil that was so accurate and breathtaking, I was momentarily fooled into thinking that she had actually created a portal between the Earthrealm and Yggdrasil."

"Is this true, My child?" Kami-sama asked Goddess Mara. Lost for words, Goddess Mara could only gulp and nod, clearly embarrassed. The Lord-Keiichi closed His eyes for a moment...and then when He opened them, He regarded Goddess Mara with an appreciative expression. Belldandy instantly realized that He had visited Goddess Mara's Abode to see her work personally.

"She is quite skilled in artistry for one so young, isn't she?" Oni-sama praised, His words causing Goddess Mara to blush even deeper.

"My Daughter Belldandy is correct. She would be far better suited in the role of Artisan," the Lord said.

"But he did make a wish, lest we forget. He said 'I would have wished that a Goddess like you would be with me forever, so that we could share in the bounties of our heart's love for each other...'," the Dark Lord noted.

"Yes," the Lord said, His shape slowly shifting back into Keiichi's Earthrealm form.

"Mara...would you deny me the wish I have in the deepest part of my heart?" Keiichi asked, in his own voice.

Belldandy looked on as the familiar wishgranting ritual began. Goddess Mara's eyes went blank as she hovered in the air, a beam of light from her forehead symbol washing over the group as it lasered upwards...

As the light swam over she and Mara, Belldandy felt herself falling once again...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --


	96. Pt 96: Keiichi: Untethering the Shadow ...

**Part 96: Keiichi: Untethering the Shadow -- Finale**

"Whoa!! I think I'd better sit down for this one," Keiichi said blankly, his sense of mind immediately displaced by the jarring wrest of Peorth's announcement. He went into the bathroom and dampened a washcloth, then returned with the washcloth and towel so Peorth could clean herself up.

As the words slipped inwards into his heart, he fancied the hopeful notion that perhaps this was some kind of joke on Peorth's part. A prank of some kind that she had devised for some unknown, Peorth-eccentric Goddess-type reason. He glanced at Peorth...her eyes were affixed on him with an expression he had never encountered before. He discarded his escapist notion as it registered how Peorth was looking at him. She was eyelocking him with a seigniory intensity; a possessive tenderness, unusual even for Peorth.

"Keiichi, I _am_ pregnant!" Peorth reiterated. "And _you're_ the father!"

"Oh...my...Goddess!" Keiichi exclaimed, blurting out the first words that scrawled themselves across the tabla rasa of his mind.

This was the shock beyond all shocks!

His heart seemed to rain bullets of fear, disbelief and uneasiness faster than the speed of reaction! He immediately felt gripped with a sweaty paralysis, numbing and yet nerves-on-fire.

Peorth regarded him with a sweet expression: innocent and yet insistent. In all the times he had seen her, back on "relative Japan" and in this time/place, he had never seen her look so vulnerable. During the four years he had known her, Peorth had darted in and out of his life, seemingly at random. She was a study in contrasts: at times a self-proclaimed sex goddess; at other times a drama queen; frequently haughty and righteous; singularly over-the-top flirtatious...even worse than Urd in that aspect of her bearing. And yet, she had her tender side as well. Keiichi couldn't dismiss her courageous attributes. All along, he knew that Peorth really _did_ care for him, in her own way. Her disruption of the ill-planned omiai between Bell-chan and Tyyr was more than enough proof of her loyalty...

But _this_ Peorth seemed possessed by a type of incertitude that he had never witnessed before, either in a woman or a Goddess. In the past, Keiichi had witnessed Peorth _appear_ to be intimidated...but there was always that lingering doubt. However, he had never seen her so decidedly uncertain as she was in the moment, sitting in the chair across from him. Sure, she had reacted unsteadily whenever Bell-chan or her sisters had caught her in the midst of a wrongdoing. But that was simply a sense of panicked fright; usually, Peorth would quickly recover her wits and become defensive or confrontational.

In contrast, in the moment after her announcement, Peorth's normal state of self-assurance had seemed to deplete itself, as if it was going to sleep.

Keiichi sensed that her fear was possessed of insecurity.

This crazy situation reminded Keiichi of the many evening dramas he had seen on TV which revolved around an unexpected pregnancy between two lovers. Such a predicament could produce results as varied as the human spirit: a renewed love, kidnapping, abandonment, marriage, murder, chaos, abortion...or even double suicide in the case of dramas whose setting was traditional Japan. He wondered at the scenes playing out in his mind, realizing that this very same situation had occurred over a hundred billion times in the history of the human race.

He had always dreamed of having this talk with Belldandy...and then when he found out from her that having children was not to be in the realm of their future, he still clung onto his dreams. Despite it all, Keiichi continued fostering fostered a secret hope that someday, Bell-chan would bear him a delighted announcement that she was with child. That he was going to share in the glories of being a father.

But his dreams had never tumbled towards the idea of a fatherhood involving Peorth. Keiichi couldn't have imagined such a bizarre scenario in his wildest imaginings. The upheaval of his emotions was worsened by the fact that he had done _nothing_ with Peorth in the biological sense that could have possibly caused her to conceive a baby.

"This changes everything!!" Keiichi thought. Peorth's eyes seemed to linger as they gazed into his Soul, questioning him. She was hushed; her poise suggesting to Keiichi that...to her, _everything_ depended on whether he accepted or condemned this pregnancy.

"Is this the power a man feels when his girlfriend makes such an unexpected announcement?" he asked himself. Was it a form of power...or was it more a reaction to Peorth's intense desire to gain his approval? Or was it even more? Perhaps this feeling that was welling through his breast was an insignia of profundity, rather than power. A profundity that bonded a man and a woman at an essential level...the level of creation. Hence, it was so unexpected and powerful to his senses...

The idea of Peorth having a baby..._his_ baby...was simply too mountainous of a concept for his thoughts and feelings to climb. No matter what, Keiichi clearly recognized that Peorth's declaration had obligated him.

Humbled him.

Suddenly, a rashling image of an angry Belldandy rifled through his mind. He was swept up in a mental vision of his fiancée, her form surrounded by red flames of fire-aura that belonged in a martial-arts anime. In his wandering thoughts, he had somehow been restored to his familiar life back in "relative Japan"...and he was forced into a situation where he had to tell Bell-chan the truth. His fiancée had reacted with an initial bout of silence, followed by the throwing of a Jealousy Storm that decompressed all other zeals, overshadowing them as if they were nothings. He heard the dread words coming from her lips..."How could you father a child with another Goddess?!"...and then he visualized his fiancée calling off the engagement in a flash of ire, throwing the engagement ring at his face.

Disappearing totally from his life...

_Hnnnh!Hnnnh!Hnnnh!Hnnnh!_

"Keiichi? Are you alright?" Peorth asked. Her words were half-heard by Keiichi, as he felt his head lift away from his body. Peorth's look of alarm fading to a grey-white blur, as he pitched forward and almost fell to the ground. The imagined tumult of Bell-chan had upset him so much, he was hyperventilating. Keiichi quickly shunted the vivid mental imagery aside...he was already too upset with _this_ reality to worry about _that_ reality.

Everything had slid into a haze of chiaroscuros.

"I..I'm just..hnnh!..surprised by all of this. Please let me..nnhh!..catch my breath for a moment, Peorth," he requested, feeling nauseous and dizzy. She waited while Keiichi's breathing eased up into a semblance of regularity.

"H..how did you find out that you were going to have a baby, Peorth?" he asked, preparing himself for yet another deep session in the mindbending secrets of Gods and Goddesses...

"I went to the Proctors this morning, because I kept getting sick for no apparent reason. I first began to notice my illness sometime in the last month or so," Peorth started to explain. "An eyeblink in the life of a Goddess, to be sure. But when one feels sick, the moments are certain to stretch themselves."

Keiichi nodded his head in apt agreement.

"I would be working in my Sysop kiosk...and unexpectedly, I'd feel this heavy onset of some tres terrible nausea! Naturally, my roses picked up on this and tried to help me, the dears. Over the millennia, my plotted roses have become very closely attuned to my moods; they can readily sense what's going on in my life. Usually, whenever I'm ailing, they try to comfort me by shifting between medicinal aromatics. In most cases, their therapy of aromas is very beneficial. But this time, it didn't work...even worse, some of their floral scents caused me to wanna puke! Naturally, they were mortified..."

Keiichi nodded his head silently, trying to imagine what a mortified garden of roses would look like as Peorth continued.

"Finally, after several weeks, I decided to go visit the Proctors for a full checkup. While I was waiting to meet with them, something quite odd occurred. For some strange reason, I was gripped by a brewing flash of a memory...something about Urd being really sick...having some kind of terminal illness," Peorth noted.

Keiichi was stunned. To the best of his knowledge, Urd had never suffered any severe illness! And if Urd had been stricken in desperate health at some point in her existence, Bell-chan would have certainly mentioned it to him at some point during their relationship.

Yet, something in the backlots of his thoughts seemed to confirm Peorth's observation about Urd. More of a shade than a memory...but certainly disturbing to him despite its evanescence. It was if his recall was gauzed, yet he had a horrible sense that Bell-chan had gotten ill as well...

"Naturally, the thought of one of _us_ having a terminal illness frightened me in the extreme," Peorth continued, drawing his thoughts out of the circle of possibilities.

"So I demanded that the Proctors give me a thoroughgoing exam. Incidentally, when I mentioned Urd, they knew nothing about her contracting any serious illness...most of her visits were for the usual bouts of post-license-suspension depression she suffers when the Almighty revokes or suspends her license. The Proctors tested me and tested me; their careful attention seemed quite out-of-place. I felt like I was being experimented on, rather than examined...which caused me to feel quite distressed. Finally, once they were done, then they told that I was experiencing something called 'morning sickness'. Needless to say, I was shocked to the core! Then the Proctors informed me that my Earthrealm physical manifest was reconstituting itself in the first trimester of a pregnancy! Hence, _I was pregnant_! As you know, our Earthrealm physical forms...our bodies, if you would...craft themselves into a specific pattern in relation to the energy essences that comprise our Divine beings. Our Souls, as it were. Of course, we can alter our Earthrealm manifests by creating a series of sub-atomic matrices that differentiate between our 'being' and the 'form' we want to project. We have absolute control over this process. This is why you see me wearing different clothes from time to time, Keiichi. But, somehow, my Earthrealm 'body' seems stuck at a state of being three months pregnant, regardless of what I do to change it. So in a very real sense, I _am_ pregnant. To add to my distress, the Proctors couldn't even begin to explain _why_ my Earthrealm manifest is pregnant. They are the most experienced healer-beings of their kind in the whole Multiverse...and they didn't have a clue!"

Keiichi handed Peorth a glass of orange juice, and then poured himself a glass.

"Uh Peorth, are you _sure_ it's mine?"

"Are you wearing a chapeau de dunce? Ahh, you forget that I'm not an Earthrealm woman...I'm a _Goddess_! Which means that I can scan my own Earthbody...cell by cell, DNA strand by DNA strand if necessary. And it's pretty obvious that the little one inside of me bears _your_ DNA. Your TNA, if you want to be specific! When we Shared several months ago, I was perforce able to read your DNA and TNA. In this universe of the Multiverse, each biological entity has a unique TNA signature. So I _know_ that the child inside of me is a blend of our unique Soular essences. It is our child!"

Keiichi dropped his orange juice as he fell out of his chair in a dead faint. Everything had simply blurred out for a moment. When he came too, he was sprawled on the floor, looking up at Peorth.

She didn't _look_ pregnant...but then again, her belly seemed slightly more rounded than before.

"H..how? Belldandy told me that humans and Goddesses can't have babies! A..and we didn't _do_ anything!" he shouted, his voice filled with disbelief and protest.

"There you go again, talking about _her_ when it's _me_ that you need to be thinking about! _I'm_ the one having your baby...er, _our_ baby!" Peorth said, her voice just edgy enough for Keiichi to realize that any further mention of Bell-chan would get her upset. This was a very delicate discussion.

A mortal and a Goddess communicated wordlessly for an interval...

"So what should we do?" Keiichi finally asked, his whole body shaking uncontrollably.

"We are journeying together through a 'le porte etroite'...a narrow gate that only you and I can pass within. Together. There is no turning back. I _am_ going to have our baby. Unlike Earthrealm mortal women, I cannot simply abort a child whenever I choose to. The bond between this child and I is much more than simply fleshbound. So this means that you're going to have to take responsibility, Keiichi!" Peorth answered bluntly. Her answer wasn't a supposition, it was a statement of fact.

A demand for respect.

Keiichi felt a gulp cloying in his throat as he thought about how to reply to her. He had to admit to himself that he didn't have the slightest clue about what 'taking responsibility' meant. Taking responsibility for a child was one thing...but if the mother was a Goddess, it might involve much more than emotional and financial support.

It slowly dawned on him that it might mean that he would have to seriously choose between staying here _forever_ with Peorth to raise his child...and returning home to marry Bell-chan and spend the rest of his life with her.

_If _he could return home.

"I..I don't know what to say! I don't know what to do!" he said, tears forming in his eyes. "I don't want to hurt you, Peorth! But I hurt _so much_ inside!" The gold blood of indecision coursed through his thoughts, crazymaking him with fear and hopelessness. This wasn't supposed to happen...but it _had_ happened!

Keiichi drew himself up, trying to summon something deep within his heart.

"But I _do_ want to do the right thing! I just don't know what that is!" he pleaded, drawing an approving nod from Peorth.

Even if it meant that he would have to choose between Bell-chan and his unborn child.

"Keiichi, mon amour. You just have to be yourself. You.._snff_..don't have to do anything right now. Just promise me that.._snff_..you'll raise our child as best you can," Peorth said in a near whisper, her words punctuated with sobs.

"Peorth, I..I could marry you! Then we could stay here in my mansion and..."

"You're too sweet to be believed, my dear Keiichi. How could I marry you if you're engaged to another? And besides, we've already Shared..." she said with a thin smile, poking him in the chest with a finger.

"I have no doubt that you would choose to remain here out of obligation to me and our child. Not 'here' as in your mansion, but _'here'_, as in this reality. I know that your heart would allow it...that _both_ of you would stay here! Yet, we both know that one of you doesn't belong in this frame of reality. Keiichi MoriStar belongs here, but Keiichi Morisato...that persona of your being is obligated to another. When we Shared, I discovered that there is a part of you that lived in a totally different part of Eternity. I was filled with fleeting images: of you and Belldandy; of her sisters Urd and Skuld; of you and your circle of friends; of your sister Megumi, who in this reality died long ago; of some person called Cevn who died recently in your reality. I sensed that you had actually lived a life in _another_ reality! Once I encountered this, I realized that my obligations to you had just broadened. That was why I left so suddenly...I returned to Yggdrasil to try and find a way for you to go back to where you belong. Back to she with whom you truly _belong_ with."

Keiichi was stricken with Peorth's sincerity.

"But now that I'm with child, this really changes things," she noted, shifting away from the gravity of the dilemma.

"You're not kidding, it does!" Keiichi said under his breath, expecting Peorth to focus on another uncomfortable topic. Instead, a playful smile traced her lips...

"Can you believe it? They actually assigned me..tee hee!..to _pregnancy leave_ from the Earth Otasuke Office! This is the first time in the history of the Office where something like this has ever happened. Usually, when we Gods 'procreate', it's a rather instantaneous process that doesn't involve a pregnancy of any kind," she said with a bemused grin. Peorth went on to describe how all the girls at "Le Wish Office" were both intrigued and somewhat jealous of her 'delicate condition'. Keiichi learned from Peorth that her co-workers were dealing with her pregnancy in a myriad of ways. Fortunately for her, they were all fascinated with the process, and all of them approved of it.

Peorth basically gave him the short version of what 'normal' progenation was like for the Gods. When two Gods decide to have a child, the child is born out of their shared energy...Keiichi had known as much from Belldandy's explanation about why she and he couldn't have children. But in Peorth's case, the baby in her Earthrealm manifestation was causing some kind of 'feedback' of sorts to her pure Divine form. The resulting condition was that all her atomic and transatomic essences were, in effect, pregnant. Because of this, her Otasuke duties would be impaired...as each time she was dispatched to the Earthrealm to grant a wish, she would necessarily manifest as pregnant. A pregnant Goddess might not be able to complete her wishgranting work, especially if the wishgranting involved any kind of heavy physical or arcanical work. Beyond this was a significant concern for the welfare of her unborn child. Hence, the Proctors had recommended that she take a pregnancy-maternity leave.

To further complicate matters, according to Peorth, the Proctors lacked a reliable foreknowledge of what kind of baby she would have...a fact that greatly upset her. They could only stand around her, stammering theories and conjecturing quiddities and quintessences.

Would their child be part-God, part-mortal?

And even more importantly, would the Earthrealm be ready for a 'post-human' hybrid of mortal and Goddess?

It was certain that Peorth's pregnancy would be epochical, if not unique. As Peorth continued her explanation, Keiichi wondered about how the Almighty would view such a miscegenation. Over the years he had lived with Belldandy, he had become thoroughly backgrounded on many of the core principles of the Gods. One of their 'missions' was to cultivate humanity to the Next Level. But all of a sudden, a human being might arrive on the planet in the form of an infant demi-God.

A being that belonged to the level _after_ the Next Level...

The amazing thing was that Peorth had gotten pregnant despite the fact that he had avoided engaging in anything even remotely sexual with her. They had slept together, naked, just once. During the 31 months since he had been stranded in "alternative Japan", Keiichi had remained absolutely chaste from sexual relationships. There was no question of his commitment to Belldandy; he would never betray her in any way whatsoever.

But yet, he had betrayed his fiancée, somehow. The proof was in Peorth's belly.

"Peorth...do you have any idea how, er, what may have...uh...how you and I...got you pregnant?" Keiichi asked, his thoughts scattering like ants. He was more than a little afraid to hear her answer. What if he _did_ have sex with her...and didn't remember it?

"I think it happened because of who you are, mon chéri Keiichi. Because you don't belong in this frame of reality, part of your very being...your Soul, one might say...is just a little bit 'off'. Le miniscule out of synch with the 'vibration' of Time and Space in this reality. And because of that, the normal properties that define mortal and immortal...human and Goddess...perhaps they do not apply. I would like to think that something about you caused me to ripen into my present state. It may have been an action we undertook together, or perhaps your very existence caused it. We did not have sex...and even if we did, I would have never gotten pregnant. Despite my First Class Goddess License standing, despite my millennia of experience untangling the most complicated juxtaposes of the Earthrealm human condition...I find myself at a total loss! The answer to 'why' lies outside of the floral-groves of my intelligence," Peorth answered.

"Peorth, I just can't understand it! Back in 'my' reality, I was told that Goddesses and mortals can't have children. And yet...here we are." Keiichi noted. He caught a tender glimpse in Peorth's eye. Making up his mind, he stood up and walked over next to her. Kneeling down, he laid his head against her belly and began to stroke it through the kimono...

"No matter how it came about..._this_ is beautiful," he whispered, as if he was talking to the being inside of Peorth's belly. He felt Peorth stroke his hair; looking up, he noticed that her eyes were tearing up again.

What am I supposed to do now?" he asked in a quiet voice.

"Just be yourself...and hold on to hope. When all of life is finally extinguished from the Multiverse, only Love will remain. But what prevents Love from succumbing to the inevitable cycles of entropy-atrophy is the Hope that contains it. You and I are on a special journey together...and we need to 'go with the flow'. I must go now, I feel myself weakening..."

Keiichi raised his hand to try and halt Peorth from leaving, but her form was already fading into the not-thin-but-thick air of his hotel room.

"Belldandy...I really wish I could talk to you about this one!" Keiichi said in a hushed whisper, looking at the evening stars.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Boss, there's a lady on the phone who wants to talk to you. She said she's a friend of some woman you know who goes by the name of Peorth!"

Keiichi was loosening up, running arpeggiating scales up and down his guitar...but when he heard Sora's announcement over the studio intercom, his fret hand flailed off the neck, creating a distortion that fell somewhere between a rageful hawk's scream and a crashing train.

"Ouch!" he said to himself as he quickly turned down the amp.

"Could it be?" he thought to himself as he dashed through the sliding glass doors that separated the engineering console from the studio booths. Sora tossed him the cellphone with a grin, obviously amused by how this one call had completely disrupted his confidence. Her cellphone pitch curved by the one of the audio engineers, causing the audio techie to grumble something about "proper behavior in a recording studio!" Actually, he was pissed because Sora's thrown phone had caused him to flinch-jerk, spilling his ashtray on the floor.

Keiichi caught the phone and headed for the acoustic isolation booth. Once inside, he shut the door.

"Hello?"

"Keiichi, we need to talk!"

_"B..B..BELLDANDY!!"_

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

If a beating heart could throw one forward in the sprint of life, then Keiichi's pumping emotions were certainly spray-painting themselves all over the place. The throng of emotions triggered by her voice had revealed just how incomplete his life had been without Bell-chan. With a clarity, he saw his life for what it was. All the sumptuary trappings of his celebrity lifestyle were nothing more than a chassis...a brightly-colored eyecatch, but inert of motive.

Standstood, because Bell was the engine of his Love.

She had aimed to meet him at a discreet location outside of Tokyo, so as to not attract undue attention to herself. Her caution was warranted, because anywhere Keiichi went, he attracted queues of adoring fans. Of course, Belldandy's status as a Goddess disallowed her a state of ego which had a need for such things. But she clarified on the phone that her purpose on the planet didn't leave room for observers. She didn't want his fame to jeopardize her covert purposes.

As if he didn't know this already.

"What could I possibly say to her??" Keiichi thought as scraps of memory flagged his attentions away from the present. Vivid mind-paintings of Bell on the beach, shyly showing off her new swimsuit to him. He and Bell sitting on a sidewalk bench, silently watching Tokyo Bay reflect a gibbous moon. Bell and her sisters arguing over what videos they should rent, while a winter storm howled outside. Bell giving him her 'good luck kiss' before he started a race...

His thoughts seemed to slipgear as Keiichi ducked into his Aero. He was so adrenalined-out, he almost backed his car into another car parked behind him. It was effortless and mercurial, this transition from poised studio superstar confidence...to insecure adolescent anxiety. He wondered if Bell would look the same as she did the day he spotted her outside of the theater.

Why would Belldandy contact him _now_, of all times?

She had left a tantalizing clue by informing Sora that she "was a friend of Peorth". Evidently she felt it was safe to mention this to Keiichi's assistant. But why? Sora didn't have a clue about Peorth's existence. As he tried to fourth-guess himself, it seemed obvious to Keiichi that Belldandy had designs on discussing Peorth's situation with him. He fretted about how she would react to Peorth's pregnancy. Would she be on a nightmare-cloud of reproach, or would she realize that the pregnancy was unintentional? Could she even forgive him for conceiving a child with another Goddess? He tried to brace himself with an optimism, hoping that it was more likely that she was concerned with him in some way. Perhaps Belldandy had discovered a way for him to leave this 'alternative Japan' and return home!

Once he got out of Tokyo proper, Keiichi had to restrain himself from driving at double the speed limit. The roads leaving northwest out of Tokyo were known to be treacherous in the fall, winding ribbons of rain-slickened passes skirting the low mountains of Saitama Prefecture. He was so anxious, he punched up the meeting place location on his onboard GPS a dozen times. He would drive up the Kanetsu Expressway to Fujioka, then south about 15 km on a highway that basically paralleled the Kanna River.

Oddly enough, Belldandy had chosen a place called the Kodama Hot Springs, nestled near the border of Gunma and Saitama Prefectures northwest of Tokyo. The springs were located right off the main road, and the small park Belldandy had selected was adjacent to the Sanba River, a thin stream tributary to the Kanna River. The significance of the fact that their rendezvous locale was near the Kodama Hot Springs wasn't lost on Keiichi. He imagined the Ninjette leader sitting on his shoulder as he drove up the mountainside road, chattering on about the latest samurai flick. Perhaps Bell-chan was secretly signaling him that she knew of his plight. His excitement amped as he hoped that it was his fiancée that he was racing towards...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Bell-chan!" Keiichi shouted as he saw her standing near a fir tree. She was dressed in a chambray top with lace down the front and pillowed sleeves, her hair braided back with blue ribbons woven into the braids. The navy blue dress she wore was neither fanciful or feminine.

His emotions seemed to overflow at the familiar sight of his fiancée. The recognition melted his fanciful imaginings away, exploding through his psyche as it lit his nerves on fire...

"Please do not address me so familiarly. It is quite inappropriate within the context of your culture, and I will not allow for it," Belldandy replied stiffly, regarding him with an intense expression as he ran up to her. Keiichi halted in his steps as he saw the sharp look of aloof distance on her face.

"She doesn't recognize me!" he thought, his expectations of a happy reunion plunging down an abyss. The warm vitality of Belldandy's usual mien was completely absent; she was regarding him with a hindering distant expression.

Her blandness felt like a wall.

This Belldandy was simply another Goddess...not _his_ Belldandy!

"It would be better if you came closer, so that we don't have to shout to each other," Belldandy said in a raised voice. Keiichi had been so shocked by this 'alienesque' version of his fiancée, he had backed up several meters...as if he was trying to distance himself from his disappointment. As if he could undo his blighted hope...

Cautiously, he walked up closer to her, still intrigued to the point where he was staring at her. Belldandy regarded him with a Queen-like sovereign expression; clearly to certify who was the Goddess and who was the mortal.

"Peorth has appraised me of your current situation. This...predicament...has caused us much concern at the Goddess Relief Office. It has become a delicate source of debate. If Peorth hasn't told you already, I wish it to be known that my office isn't the same as Peorth's. The Office I work for has a 'jurisdiction' that extends beyond that of this planet, which means that we respond to wishes on countless other inhabited planets besides this one. In my case, one thousand planets. Also, I must note to you that Goddesses from the Goddess Relief Office only visit qualified wish candidates. Because of the...unusual...situation that has arisen between you and my friend, I have elected to dispense with protocol and visit you directly," she explained tersely.

"Bell-ch..er, Belldandy..." Keiichi punted verbally. Belldandy interrupted him and continued.

"You need to listen to me, rather than waste the air with your empty words. I have gathered from Peorth that part of your being belongs in another Multiverse, in a union of some sort with another version of myself. Although I find this difficult...and distasteful...to accept, I _can_ acquiesce to the possibility that the Lord has devised alternative realities to this one, for purposes which suit Him. But I have never heard Him broach such a subject. Therefore, I must assume for the moment that the existence of such an altered reality is not a truth. Therefore, your presence here is clearly unwarranted. Which leads me to consider the distinct possibility that you are here as the result of a Bug infestation of the Yggdrasil Mainframe. Which means that Peorth's pregnancy may be Bug-related. In any case, the force of Peorth's present condition may cause some alterations in the context of your wish."

"What do you mean? What do I need to do?" Keiichi asked. Part of him wanted so desperately to fold Belldandy in his embrace...or feel himself enfolded in her nurturance, comforted and safe. Another part of him wanted to shout "What the hell are you talking about?!"

"It is not my part to answer your questions. You already know what to do. Your fame has served to become the relentless enemy of your understanding. Truthfully, it is known that Time has been known to strengthen friendship while weakening love. I ask you this: During your time here, have you allowed yourself to love?"

"I love _you_!!" Keiichi blurted out.

"Impossible!!" she countered quickly. "Don't even suggest such a thing! There could be no love between us, as we have never met before. Peorth warned me about this; she told me that you suffered from a certain...derangement...concerning myself. Delusions that you and I share a bond of emotional intimacy. I see that she was right. Curiously, though...I sense a certain warmth in your heart for me."

Keiichi nodded his head, encouraging her. Belldandy's face, momentarily softened into an expression of curiosity, gradually resumed its harsh impersonal aspect.

"No matter. I am certain that your affections are clearly misplaced. They are but a mask that conceals your true purpose in being here," she noted dispassionately.

"Eh?! That's not true! They're _feelings_, Belldandy! I can't just shut them off! How can I possibly deny the feelings that dwell in the soil of my heart? The seeds of the Love that we share?" he protested angrily.

"The same way you can choose to easily deny what is in the hearts of others. As I speak, there are thousands of young woman in Japan who cherish you with a love deep in their hearts. Yet you remove yourself at a distance to protect your fame. Even Annimoto Kanaka, who is considered to be the epitome of sophistication and beauty by Earthrealm standards...even one such as her orbits the circle of your life. And yet you fail. You cannot even open your heart to once such as her. I find that...sad, and disappointing," Belldandy noted.

Keiichi felt his chin dropping to his chest. Belldandy..._this_ Belldandy...knew everything there was to know about his life. Debate would be useless. And yes, he had let Anni go. His heart was already filled, there was no room for another. Despite this, Belldandy was insisting that he would have to make room...

"The difference is that you must learn to be harmless within the aspect of love. I am here to tell you that you must shed your cocoon of fear, so that you can attain the wings of liberty. Otherwise, you will experience all of the trappings of success...and all of the failures of life," she admonished.

Keiichi felt his mind tighten in snake-coils of confusion.

"What I am asking you to do, for Peorth's sake...and for your sake as well...is to blind yourself to yourself. Just for the single moment that it is necessary. If you make this one choice, you will be rewarded with riches far more precious than fame, wealth and comfort. The empty vanities would be overturned, replaced by sincere joys..." Belldandy explained as she faded from his sight...

"WAIT!! I want to understand the meaning of what you said..."

No mortal means could restore her, the woman whom his heart's vibrance had praised above all others. Keiichi stumbled like a drunk back to his Aero, and once inside, he hugged himself and screamed.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Driving back to the studio, Keiichi felt like a phantom; his life little more than ghost-photos of experience. The late-summer thunderstorm that rolled over the mountainous Gunma terrain pelted his Aero with a steady pitter-patter...the steady noise a reflection of the pink noise barraging his being. The sweetness of seeing Belldandy had turned into a sourness; a philter of disappointment that had jellied his hopes, emprinting his heart with signets of futility.

He felt like pounding the dashboard in a fit of rage. He gripped his hands into fists on the steering wheel, and then turned the radio on, hoping that hear one of his songs would bring him back to earth. At any given time in Japan, over a hundred radio stations would be playing one of his songs. The demand on the airwaves for his music had increased with word that he was finishing his new CD. It was almost as if the masses were hungering after him, wanting to devour his creativity in their maw...

But he was mired in an artistic rut.

It had gotten to the point where he had taken to sleeping over in his studio. Sora had installed a foldout futon for him to crash-pad on. Nothing was working the way it was supposed. His encounter with Belldandy had turned into an emotional abortion...and he felt the fatigue set in. He was tired of the rat-race, of the pace of celebrity, of the intwisting of truths into lies...

It was well past darkfall by the time he arrived at the studio.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

The studio was actually several floors underground, secure beneath the basement-level garage. At this late hour, all the studio staff had left to go home. Or more than likely, they were out partying. Keiichi often spent these late hours accompanied by pen, paper and candlelight...trying to touch the music that seemed to have stubborned itself deep inside of him. Straining to pull it out by the threads of his imagination, measure for measure, note by note...

Sora was waiting for him when he emerged from the elevator. She was dressed casually...casual for Sora being a monogrammed white blouse, a navy-blue neck scarf, and dark knee-length black skirt. Keiichi waved her away as soon as he noticed her rapt attending concern. She quickly left for the studio's break room.

"Boss, you look really shook up! Are you okay?" Sora asked as she returned, offering him a mug of choco-coffee. Keiichi usually drank his coffee canned-and-chilled, but he was glad to see a familiar face. The familiar accommodation of his existence seemed to warm him a little. At this point, any gesture of familiarity seemed precious. He was clinging to the every-moment, because the Past and the Future were too painful to confront.

He was mourning, mourning the loss of Belldandy.

With a finality, Keiichi had excavated his Soul...and had learned that nothing was real; that nothing was worthwhile. It was as if he was in the Sahara desert once more; but this time, his emotions were cliffhanging precariously...despite being mired within a zone of blue melancholia.

Drained of himself, he slipped into one of the thick armchairs behind the audio engineer's deck. Keiichi sipped at the aromatic brew, and then set the cup down on the lip of the mixing deck. Sora mumbled something about "you need a napkin"; and began to pull something out of her purse...when suddenly the earth jerked.

Earthquake.

Every year, Tokyo had several minor earthquakes and dozens of noticeable tremors. Tokyoites were used to seeing warnings on TV about a minor shake here and there. At their worst, these "earth-trembles" would sometimes knock objects off shelves in grocery stores...or create the more memorable collapse of a termite-weakened structure. But more often than not, people took them in stride. Tremors and quakes were just another break in the routine, like summer thunderstorms. As the floor seemed to trampoline itself slightly underfoot, Keiichi sensed that this one seemed a little worse than usual. The magnitude seemed to increase to the point where he felt discomfort.

Then it stopped.

As he reached out to steady himself, the ground started rattling again, only this time it was grinding underfoot with a heaving violence. In slow-mo, Keiichi watched his cup of coffee slide off the ledge above the console, spilling its contents onto the mixing desk. With an improbably shower of lights, all the digital displays strobed-flickered like a confused army of twinkling stars...and then shut off.

"Great!" he mumbled with embarrassment...but then he noticed that the lights _kept_ shutting off. The ceiling lights flickered, the desklamps clicked off...

Within a second or two, all the lights in the studio had gone dark.

Lightness fading into darkness.

Unexpectedly, he heard Sora let out a little scream of fright from somewhere nearby.

"I...can't...believe...this! This really _sucks_!" Keiichi grumbled as his eyes were painfully flushed with non-sight. The hum of the air conditioner was gone; in fact, the shirking non-sight was complemented by non-noise.

"Isn't this building supposed to have a backup generator or something? For godssake, it's my freakin' state-of-the-art _recording studio_!" he groused, realizing that the power was off. The power generator should have restored electricity within a few seconds of the outage.

It seemed even the backup power supply was stifled.

"Yes, Boss! I...don't understand why the lights are out!" Sora's voice replied, somewhere to his left. Sora was obviously panicked; her levelly-posed 'businesswoman's talkabout had been discarded in favor of a high-tension reedy voice, much louder than usual. Normally, Sora talked with a news anchor drollness most of the time, to Keiichi's ears. But now that she was stressing, she sounded convincingly like a drama actress.

"Can you find the door?" Keiichi asked.

"I can't even find my _glasses_! They got knocked off during the tremors! Oh...this is so embarrassing...so _ridiculous_!!" Sora shot back, her voice a beacon of frustration. Keiichi could hear her brushing around with her hands, trying to find her specs.

"Lots of laughs! As if you could use them at the moment! I can't make out a single thing! I doubt if glasses or anything else would make a difference in this pitch black room!" he remarked, trying to keep things on the light side.

Sora giggled nervously as his little quip. He heard a shuffling sound...and then a bangaround clatter...

_"Waaaaaah!"_

-- --CRASH-- --

It all happened so fast, it was nothing more than sound. In the silence and darkness, Sora's scream and the crashing glass pierced the emptiness jet-engine loud.

"Oh God, she fell through one of the glass walls!!" Keiichi thought, his whole body rigid-spiking with a tingling concern. Like most recording studios, the engineering room was enclosed by a series of wall-sized glass panes, so that the performer and the engineer could see each other. Sora must have tripped over something and collided with one of the large panes of glass...

But they were supposed to be unbreakable. Glass coated with some anti-shatter polymer or something. Which meant that she must have fallen against it really _hard_!

"SORA!!" he screamed.

"I'm okay, I think!" Sora answered a moment later, her voice thin and weak. It sounded from his left and downwards, like it came from the floor. Keiichi could hear her panting from the shock of her accident...he sighed in relief until she spoke again.

"Boss, my right hand feels like it's going numb...and my wrist _really_ hurts. And it's all wet!" she added.

Keiichi tried to remember the direction of her voice and started walked towards it, stubbing his foot against something on the floor. It felt like a chair; he could hear one of the rolling feet spinning as he kicked it out of the way.

"Sora, I'm right here! Hang in there! I'll find you in a second!" he shouted.

Stepping through a crinkly carpet of broken glass shards, Keiichi wracked his brains trying to figure out where there might be a flashlight. Since the building had a backup generator, it would idiotic for them to _not_ have some kind of flashlight somewhere in the suite of recording studios. But then again, these engineers were stoneheads...it was quite possible that the flashlight might have been purloined for some seemingly 'urgent' purpose, such as a backroom "J" session with some "English T"...

"Sora, are you okay?" he asked again.

"I'm fine...I'm just feeling a bit dizzy! I'm so sorry to be such a thorn in your side, Boss! I can't help it if I'm just a clumsy girl," the disembodied voice answered.

Keiichi bit his lip with guilt. Sora had just had an accident, the kind of accident that could have befallen anyone during a power blackout...and now she was apologizing for being a bother.

Earnest, he redoubled his efforts, pulling drawers open on an attached desk next to some large cabinet. His eyesight was gradually acclimating itself to the dark, just enough so that he could see different depths of blackness. But he had to foremost his tactile senses...his fingers lingered over kleenex, pencils, some wadded papers, a plastic cup, several screwdrivers, a metal can of something...

The drawers were filled with trash.

"Dammit! All I want is a flashlight!" he thought angrily.

"Second desk in Studio A, third drawer!" Sora answered matter-of-factly, intuiting what he was looking for. Pausing for a second in amazement, Keiichi nodded his head in the direction of her voice, completely forgetting that she couldn't see him. Once he found a wall, he walking alongside it, touching it like a mime would touch thin air. By a sequence of touch-contour-touch, he made his way back across to the door to Studio A. Relying on memory, he wall-grasped his way until he banged his shin against the complicated mixing deck.

His resultant curse was met with a quiet giggle from the other room.

Working harder, Keiichi ran his fingers along the edge of the desk towards the second desk. A moment later, he had a rubbery flashlight in hand. He flicked it on...and a beam of light accompanied his satisfied sigh. Walking out of Studio A, he compassed the room with the lightbeam, until he landed it on Sora.

"Oh...shit!" he thought. He had almost said it aloud as he shown the light on her arm. Sora's right wrist was covered in blood, soaking the sleeve of her white blouse! Keiichi knew immediately that the glass has slashed her wrist or arm.

"Hunnh!" Sora gasped as she saw the wound revealed in the pan of light.

"S..Sora..." Keiichi started to ask

_"Eeeek!! EeeyyaaahII! Oh my God! Eeeek!" _

Sora pumped a series of screams as she followed the path of the light with her eyes. Thinking quickly, Keiichi pulled the flashlight aside to prevent her from becoming engrossed in the severity of her wound. Nevertheless, it was _bad_...

"Boss...first aid kit...in the other room! Please...hurry! My head is spinning! The room between Booth A and the Break Room!" she said, her voice tremoloing with urgency.

Keiichi hurriedly made his way across the studio room, crashing over several objects in the process, the flash light zigzagging its pole of illumination in haphazards. He located the door and kicked it open. Hastily, he located the first aid kit. It was one of those industrial-size metal kits attached to the wall. It wouldn't do to go back and forth to get medical stuff from the box-kit. Groping around until he found a chair, he struck out at it with the break room chair until he knocked the metal kit off the wall.

He regretted the fact that he knew pitifully little about First Aid, despite being around "Nurse" Urd for over four years back in 'relative Japan'. Gripping the flashlight tightly between his teeth, Keiichi hauled the First Aid kit back to where Sora was reclining against a wall. He almost felt sick to his stomach as he saw her injury up close; she had a jaggled rip that extended from the base of her palm to about midway down her forearm. It was oozing ebbs of blood, just like a slashing wound in a samurai movie. Fighting against his inhibitions, he pulled open the box of cotton and swabbed the pooling blood away. Sora's arm was slightly blue, which didn't look right at all. She watched at him as he used the cotton to staunch the bleeding. Then he wrapped her wrist and arm tight with the roll of gauze.

Sora seemed to watch him intently...but she didn't cry out. She seemed to be iron-calm, as opposed to her initial freakout when she first saw her injury in the light. Her face seemly ghostly-white; Keiichi surmised that she experiencing some kind of physical shock. He continued to hold the flashlight in his mouth so he could work with both hands. His jaw was tensing with hurt from biting it, but he wanted to make sure that he got the dressing right the first time. He didn't know if Sora was in danger of bleeding to death, so he wanted to make sure that she didn't lose any more blood. He tried to be gentle as he finished the gauze wrapping, clipping it tightly.

When he was finished, he walked over to his 'crashpad' corner of the studio and hunted down several candles. Returning with the candles, Keiichi arranged them up in a semi-circle around Sora. He knelt next to her and held his hand against Sora's forehead; noting that she clenched in a cold-sweat. Sighing, he slowly sat down next to her, exhaustion piled upon exhaustion.

Oddly enough, his deep despair after his meeting with Belldandy had been completely overshadowed by Sora's plight.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Hey Boss! Do you have any idea what time it is?" Sora asked, her voice burred with sleepiness. Keiichi was trying to keep himself from dozing off, but his head was starting to feel sluggishly spring-loaded. He pressed the illumine button on his watch and read off the time to her. By his guess, they had been stranded in the unlit studio for at least a couple of hours.

"I was wondering, Boss..."

"Sora, you don't have to call me 'Boss' all the time. Please, just call me Keiichi for once. Haven't we've been partners in this whole fame train thing for seven years? I think you've more than earned the right to call me whatever you want...Ms. Rolls Royce Girl," he interrupted her, irritated and yet teasing her. It was one thing for his retinue of fans, paparazzi and assistants to call him "sensei" or "tono". Beat Takeshi used to kid Keiichi about being the only idol star in memory whose followers called him "tono", an archaic Japanese honorific term used when by vassals when they addressed their lord. But at the moment, he felt that it was entirely inappropriate for Sora to call him "Boss". "Boss" was a term best reserved for those times when he was really pissed off at her. But right now, he was too worried about her injuries to give a damn about degrees of politeness of address...

"Hey, K..Keiichi, when do you think they're going to come get us?" Sora said. Keiichi was amused as he noticed the cute look of reluctance on her face as she stumbled over saying his name. For her part, Sora seemed quite surprised at hearing herself call him by his first name.

"Your guess is as good as mine, Sora. In fact, you seem to be far more knowledgeable about those kinds of things than I. Shouldn't I be asking _you_ that question?" he replied with a smile.

"So when do you think they'll come? And why can't the stairwell doors open?" he asked.

"Those doors really surprised me too! I really didn't think the earthquake was _that_ severe...it was just a minor tremor, nothing more. Nothing that would have been violent enough to block the doors _and_ knock out the studio building's backup power generators," she replied.

After seeing to Sora's injury, Keiichi had tried to force the steel fire escape doors that allowed access to the stairway. Despite his exertions, both stairwell doors remained jammed shut, as if blocked by a large and heavy object. None of them would budge a single cm.

"Really! It's almost as if something is conspiring to trap the two of us here! Doesn't it seem that way to you?" Keiichi noted whimsically. He paused his breath as it dawned on him what he _really_ had said. Sure enough, the air seemed to fill with awkwardness at his words.

"Um hm!" Sora agreed. All too readily.

He felt paralyzed. Could their current situation be attributable to some kind of Goddess activity on the part of Peorth? Or even Belldandy? Some strange, intractable Goddess-logical action that would wouldn't make sense even if he spent years trying to figure it out?

If so, then what was the sense of trapping him with his personal assistant? There was no reasonable explanation for their predicament. Any earthquake that was severe enough to knock out the power, block the doors and disable the elevator...would obviously be powerful enough to drop the ceiling on them.

Visions of the six thousand dead in Kobe haunted Keiichi's thoughts.

Yet, not even one ceiling tile or light had been knocked lose during the tremors. In fact, nothing was displaced by the tremble-earth other than a few small objects. Consequently, the sheer unknowingness of the situation added to Keiichi's sense of being trapped.

Time passes on...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Keiichi felt a gnawing hunger growling audibly in the pit of his stomach. He was so upset during the drive home, he had neglected to get anything to eat. As if he could. As if he could just pull up to a convenience store, walk in and buy a soda and chips...while the astonished counter clerk would look at him with gape-mouth awe before asking him for his autograph.

The problem with a multi-million yen super-sportscar was that one couldn't just pack a bag of munchies in the console hutch for those times when the appetite demanded a snacky respite.

So he decided to raid the fridge in the studio's lounge room. Good thing too, because the food was already starting to thaw out. Another couple hours and the fridge would've started to smell gross...

He regarded the microwave, useless without electricity.

Grabbing a box, Keiichi stuffed it full of junk food and cans of soda for Sora and him to 'feast' upon. When he returned, Sora thanked him wordlessly. She told him she was going to force herself to eat despite the nausea she felt from the shock that followed her accident. Soon, Sora was munching merrily, well into a bag of chocostix. He was glad that she seemed to have an appetite, and yet the sight of her made him feel homesick. Sora's snacking reminded him of all the times he had caught Megumi and her in the middle of an overnight sleepover test-cramming jam session, making a late-night raid of the snack cupboards back home...

Back home.

Now, in _this_ home away from home, the sensory deprivation of sight and sound made him feel even more estranged from himself.

Everything about this situation seemed apocalyptic.

"Uh, Keiichi, I've always wanted to ask you something," Sora asked once she finished the last chocostix. She reached in the box and withdrew another package of chocostix...

"Sure Sora, ask away!" he replied chipperly. Sora turned to look at him, her mien suddenly possessing a seriousness of character...the deadly sincere look she would wear right before broaching the subject of a major entertainment contract deal.

"I may never get another chance to ask you this, so...uhhh, I wanted to know...mmm, how do you deal with the loneliness?" she said in a grave voice.

The air around Keiichi seemed to gulp deeply. This was the last question he had ever expected from his personal assistant! Questions about business and travel, concert schedules, promo videos, film cameos, variety show appearances...those he could handle. But she had never asked him a direct question about his personal life. Not once.

"Me?! Haa haa he! I'm not lonely! I'm not all that.._sigh_..lonely," he answered quickly.

"You're not all that honest, either!" Sora commented bluntly, causing Keiichi to gurgle the draught from the can of tea he was drinking. With a rapier thrust of feminine intuition, she had seen right past him. The resolve behind her voice filled him with anxiety...this was one conversation that she wasn't planning to let him dodge, irrespective of the fact that he was her employer.

"I can sense that you're _very_ lonely. In fact, almost everyone who works with you can sense it! They're all talking behind your back, because none of them has the guts to confront you with it. They'd rather be a bunch of gossiping 'yessir' wimps. But I'm not going to stand by and watch you wither up. The fact that you dropped everything to visit this 'Belldandy' woman is just the latest in a series of selfish actions, all of which indicate to me...that you're feeling abandoned. Who is this woman to you? I mean, there are _thousands_ of women in Japan who would give their diamond earrings just to go out with you on a date. Then there was Anni...you seemed to have something really good going on with her, and then you just let it slip away! She's Japan's top actress! No man in his right mind could resist her. Besides, after I got to know her, it seemed to me that she was actually treating you nice. Now, everyone's thinking you've lost interest in women. I've been meaning to talk to you about this for awhile, and..."

"Hold it right there, Sora!" Keiichi interrupted. "My personal life _isn't_ any concern of yours! It's _my_ life! All you have to be concerned about is how my public image is maintained, and that I have some free time now and then! I have a professional life...that's your business. I have a private life...that's _not_ your business!"

"Which means what? What's the point of you even having a personal life? Any time you have free time, you spend it moping around this studio! You don't seem to give a damn about anything or anyone anymore!" Sora replied hotly.

"That's more than unfair, Sora!" Keiichi argued back. "I'm trying desperately to tear something out my soul...something that won't let me touch it! I'm _stuck_, Sora! I've never been stuck before, especially when it comes to creating my music! I don't have 'writer's block' or any other such crap! But now, I don't know why I can't end this! It's as if my muse...has corroded!"

He heard Sora gulp deeply, reacting to his impactful statement.

"I think you're stuck artistically because you're choosing to mire yourself in this isolationism. How much more self-pity is it going to take, Keiichi? You live the kind of life that everyone dreams of having. Fame, fortune, wealth, sophistication...all the joys of celebrity. In contrast, if anyone should feel a sense of sorrow, it's _me_!"

"What in a thousand years would _you_ have to feel sorry about, Sora? You make great money for a woman your age! Hell, you make more than most actresses and CEOs! Besides, the problems you deal with are nothing more than business stuff...buying the world sorta stuff. Problems that _have_ a solution, if you think about them long enough and hard enough. There's no reason for you to whine and bitch..."

"That's where you're wrong!" she interrupted him vehemently. "I've given my _youth_ to your career! I started working for you when I was 19...now I'm 26! I feel like an old maid!"

"You're not _that_ old..." Keiichi started to argue, privately amused by her assertion.

"When you want to play a concert at Big Egg in Tokyo, I make it happen. When you want to take a week off and hang out at the Costa del Sol, or maybe the French Riviera...I'm the one who has to drop everything and get the tickets or charter air-time for your private jet. When you want a day off to rest and recuperate, I'm the one who ends up juggling your schedule. I even coordinated all those teams of contractors who worked on those remodeling projects for your penthouse and mansion, not to mention that goofy treehouse project of yours. But do I ever get to sleep in a mansion? No! Do I ever get a week off to visit Europe? No! I do _all the work_...so you can have all the fun! I'm sick and tired of living in the 'no' of life! I want to live in the 'yes' of life, just once! I want to enjoy life once in a while too!"

Keiichi was taken aback at Sora's vehemence. These were extremely private feelings she was talking about. All along, he had never suspected that she felt this way!

"B..but I thought you liked to work! If you want to give yourself a raise, I don't have any qualms about it!" Keiichi offered, trying to defuse her frustration at the source.

"Work sucks!" Sora shouted, throwing her new bag of chocostix across the studio, and then gasping in pain as the motion shifted her injured hand. The heat of her anger was intimidating at close range to Keiichi, despite her diminutive stature and schoolgirlish looks. Or perhaps it was because of Sora's innocuous personality that Keiichi felt domineered; he could expect aggression from a bodyguard like Y-Ko...but not from little Sora.

"If you need a vacation, I'll give you all the time off you need to heal and rest, Sora!"

"That won't change a thing! Besides, who'd take my place? How would me taking time off help you any? If I were to just drop out for a week for a real vacation...not some weekend skiing stint in Kyushu...the whole thing would collapse. No one knows how to run your life like I do!" Sora noted grittily. She let out an audible "eep!" as she realized what she had just said.

Keiichi felt a sense of relief at her articulation of embarrassment.

"It's like we're married to each other. You need me!" Sora noted after a couple moments of snack-chewing silence.

That was followed by a double "eep!"

It was more than the acoustic properties of the studio that was dampening the sound...

"And what do you need?" he asked.

"That's not important! You need to deal with..." she started to explain.

"Sora," Keiichi asked, resting a hand on her shoulder. She winced in irritation at him and shrugged her shoulder away from his hand.

"Okay, I give up! What do _you _need? I've seen how you live...you're a work-maniac. You work from sunrise to midnight every day. On those days where you take time off, you go to the pub and get drunk! Your idea of a vacation is to catch a jet to Nagasaki and do nothing, just so you can say you went somewhere! You criticize me for not having any girlfriends...but I've _never_ seen you go out on a date! Surely, you must have _some_ guys that are interested in you?" he challenged her, almost angrily.

"I'm not interested in them! All of them only want to use me to get to you. Jerks!" she said bitterly.

"Huh?"

"Look at me! I look like an underdeveloped bookworm of a girl! I have this pageboy schoolgirl haircut and these thick round glasses...which are lost at the moment...and freckles all over my cheekbones. When I wear a sweater, my front looks like my back! No guys are interested in me! And whenever I sense that some guy is coming on to me, all he wants to do is get me drunk, so I can sleep with him. If it isn't that, then he starts asking all these questions about you! Those guys always seem to think that they can use me to get to you! They don't give a rat's tail about me! Nobody cares about me!"

Keiichi suddenly realized that it was _Sora_ who was the lonely one!

For whatever reason, she was projecting her loneliness on to him. He checked that thought; admitting to himself that he _was_ lonely without Belldandy. This was more than just a simple matter of Sora judging him! Sora wasn't judging him...she was _relating_ to him. Keiichi suspected that she probably didn't even know this. Or maybe she had known it all along! Sora may have been fully aware of the deep empathy she felt towards Keiichi; two souls joined by the loneliness in their lives. Perhaps this was why he and Sora made such a good team. Being a women, Sora probably knew what was in his heart...and had just now taken the risk to tell him about _her_ life, so that he could truly see the reality of _his_ life...

Keiichi felt awash in guilt. All along, her life had been overshadowed by his celebrity...to the point where she couldn't even go on a date! He cursed himself for not even suspecting how much she was suffering. Strip away all the professional and business acumen of this Sora...and she was just like the 'other' Sora.

Insecure about her less-than-mature body image...and slightly neurotic.

He promised himself that after they got out of this mess, after her arm got all mended from the inevitable trips to the doctors, that he would pick out a motorcycle and teach Sora how to drive it.

"You're the person who's the closest thing to a friend that I have, Sora," Keiichi admitted, hoping this would staunch her mounting gloom-sense. Sora looked at him as if he was lying through his teeth.

"It's true!" he added. Keiichi knew that, in one sense, Sora had been one of a very few constants in this food-processor-set-on-high mixing bowl of a life. Besides Peorth, she was the only one from "relative Japan" in his present sphere of being.

Because of this, he had taken her for granted.

"I want to be _more_ than friends!" Sora blurted out. She quickly covered her mouth with her hands.

"Owwwwieeee! Owwie! Owwie!" Keiichi heard her gasp in a girlish squeal. No doubt her sudden movement of the injured arm had sent a stabbing pain along her wrist and forearm. She was shivering with discomfort, gritting her teeth.

"I..I'm sorry Sora. Here I was, performing concerts and filming movies...and I never even knew that my life was affecting you that way," Keiichi said gently, feeling like he would drown in contrition, if contrition was an ocean to swim in.

"You didn't hear a word I said, did you. I said that I want to be _more_ than just your friend!" Sora answered, irritated.

"You are more than my friend...you're like a business partner."

"You idiot! No wonder you're single! You're totally hopeless! What I meant...was _this_!" Sora said. Before he could argue back, she leaned up and stole a kiss from his lips, fast as a panther.

Keiichi went rigid with shock.

"I wish...I just wish that for once in my life, I would have someone that really cares for _me_! Someone who cares _about_ me. Someone who values me for who I am...not for what I do or how I look or who I know," she said in measured-pace words, staring glumly at her feet.

She sighed and continued.

"Someone who would care for me...the way I care so much about you, your career, your well-being and happiness. And just to set the record straight, I don't care about those things because I'm some gold-digger...if I was a gold-digger, you'd be broke! I'd have cleaned out all of your assets! But I've always been honest with you, even if you're not honest with yourself!"

"Sora..." Keiichi started to say, trying to calm her down.

"Lately, I've been thinking about you and I. It's as if we're two penguins stranded in the middle of the desert. We're really useless to each other. I can't take away your loneliness...and you can't take away mine. When it's all said and done, all the CDs and movies and concerts and DVDs in the world...still won't fill an empty heart."

"I..I..I..I _love_ you, Keiichi!" Sora announced, as clumsily as a high school sophomore's love confession.

Keiichi stared at her blankly, not knowing what to say. When he didn't react, Sora seemed to withdraw into herself, resigned to his inattention.

"There, I went and actually said it! You see, it's just some stupid daydream of a stupid, worthless girl. Nothing that you need to concern yourself about," she said slowly, bowing her head down and looking wanly at the floor.

Despite her disavowal, Keiichi could see that Sora was struggling to hold back an outbreak of sobs. Touched to the deepmost core of his heart, Keiichi gathered her into his arms. Sora's small body felt like that of a little girl, rather than a woman. She was so light and frail, he was afraid she would disappear in his hug. Sora's hair tickled his chin as she cried into his chest.

"Sora...you're too good for me! I could never..."

"Don't.._snff_..say stupid stuff like that! Don't ruin this one perfect moment! Please, just let me be here with you, like this...just this once! I'll never talk to you again about anything other than business," she pleaded, looking at him with tears rimming her eyes.

Keiichi felt dizzy as he remembered Belldandy's words. Belldandy had cautioned him not to ignore the purity of the moment. She had further instructed him to turn away from himself, just for an instant. Deep in his heart, he loved Bell-chan with his whole being...but yet, here was Sora, who _also_ loved him with her whole being.

Not any Sora..._this_ Sora.

He would have to deny her.

As he looked at her, Keiichi could see her lips trembling with sadness and fear. Sora had utterly exposed her heart to him. Trusting him as no other woman had trusted him before, except for his fiancée. He felt spindles of shame choking him as he regarded her hazel-green eyes, which looked so beautiful without her glasses. Keiichi was suddenly struck by an odd thought; he found himself wondering how the hell Sora could manage every minute detail of his professional life...but yet, not pay enough attention to herself to bother to get contacts or corrective eye surgery. It dawned on him that they were what they were...her glasses were a mask, hiding the true girl within. She looked like the prim and proper executive with her glasses, but that only kept people at bay. Kept _men_ at bay.

"How could I have done this to her?" Keiichi reflected, at a loss for words. He was even more aggrieved because he had inflicted loss on her without intent. Simply by being who he was. Because he was Keiichi MoriStar...Sora couldn't be who she truly could be.

He glanced at her, watching her sob silently next to him, cradling her injured wrist.

There were so many times he had absolutely hated her...like the time when she threw a fit when he bought his Aero. Her solution to his wasteful spending was to have it trucked away. She seemed to hover over him at the strangest times, arguing that she had his "best interests" in mind. For a while, she had been actually _jealous_ of Anni; Keiichi had merely assumed that Sora was piqued because his time with Anni took him away from his work. Now he knew better.

But did he learn anything?

He felt the whole weight of his world collapsing.

Peorth was pregnant with his child. Sora was in love with him. Anni had evolved from being a fame-hungry girlfriend to sharing a true friendship with him...a showbiz confidante. He was all jammed up on his new CD, his grand concept of ghosts falling in love was becoming as ephemeral as ghostwalking along Surago Bay. His insiders were struck by his lack of affection towards women. His fans were hungry for his next work.

Sora was in _love_ with him.

There was no doubt in his mind that she had spoken her kokoro...putting the seal upon her truth by kissing the words out of her lips into his ears. It must have taken intense courage for her to open her heart up like that. It must have taken intense trust in him, for her to put everything on the line. Over the past two years, they had built a foundation of trust and friendship.

"'_If you make this one choice, you will be rewarded with riches more precious than fame, wealth and comfort_,'" he thought to himself, recalling Belldandy's words.

Despite the darkness, Keiichi felt aglow with a clarity of purpose.

"Crazy as it seems, maybe this is why I'm here!" he said to himself. "Here goes..."

Leaning over towards Sora, he planted a lingering kiss on her lips.

"Phffft! What the _hell_ are you doing?!" she reacted, astonished.

"Kissing you," he said, then he kissed her again.

Kissing her like he meant it.

Sora almost tried to push him away, but then the invisible web between a man and a woman wove itself between his heart and hers...and she surrendered to his kiss...and then she responded to his kiss with a passion that surprised Keiichi.

Keiichi felt his heart...and his Soul...leap out of his body, liquid-light and surrounded by vortices of sparkles...

Another mirror-life.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Was that just a dream?" Sora asked sleepily. "Why hasn't the power been turned back on? If this was just some kind of routine blackout, then why hasn't Tokyo Power fixed it? They should have had the power restored hours ago!"

"You're right again, Sora!" Keiichi MoriStar replied with a yawn, awakened by her hushed voice. He had woken up in a surprising position; his head was resting peacefully on Sora's lap. He looked up and brushed aside a burst of shaggy locks from his face with his hand. Sora was regarding his with a shy smile.

"I know one thing...when we get out of here, we're taking a month off. You're going to get your eyes looked into, so you don't have to wear those thick glasses anymore! And once you've been treated by the best doctors, we're going on a little vacation. Actually, we're going on a long working vacation, because I know that it would drive you nuts not to be working on _something_. Just you and I, Sora. You see, it came to me in a dream last night...now I know how my latest CD is going to end. I have the whole thing mapped out, composed and ready to go in my mind. And since I won't be in Japan, there's no need for you to remain in Tokyo to take care of my affairs."

"There you go again, acting as if it's so simple to...uh, Keiichi...did you say vacation?" Sora asked.

"Yep!" he said with a nod. He tried to sit up, but Sora quickly rested her uninjured hand on his chest, hinting to him not to move a cm.

"Stay!" she commanded...and then started giggling.

"You have full management of our travel plans too! Anywhere you want to go, we'll go! The itinerary is yours to decide, Sora!" Keiichi MoriStar said with a grin, nodding "yes" as Sora's face broke into a brilliant smile. No doubt, she was gearwheeling dozens of possible places to visit.

Last night, he had found his inspiration. And he had found the love of his life. Keiichi MoriStar knew that he truly loved her, this gem in the rough. She had been his charge d'affairs during the whole of his career...and now she was going to be his partner in _every_ aspect of his life. Right before going to sleep last night, he had made a promise to himself that he would take her to see every one of those places, real and imagined.

Especially to the imagined places of her heart...and his.

And with the speed of heart and thought, Sora kissed him again...

...and the studio lights came on.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Peorth, what are you doing with that plug?!" Belldandy demanded, hands on her hips, trying to look censorious. Peorth was amused by her GRO counterpart's expression...Belldandy was too much of a milk-softy to come off as stern. Yet, Bell's sternness towards Keiichi when she met him yesterday had been _almost_ convincing, even though Peorth was only monitoring the meeting from her kiosk in the Earth Otasuke Office.

"Oh, this petite plug?" she said, waving it. "It belongs to this building's petite backup generator."

"I know what it is, girl-Goddess! I just want to know why you're holding it!" Belldandy noted with irritation.

"Because it has to go in here!" Peorth darted as she inserted the plug into the backup generator. A crescendo of whirls and buzzes echoed amidst the physical structure of the building as its systems started powering up. Accompanying the mechanical chorus, Peorth watched as Belldandy's eyes grew clear...and a moment later, a familiar light flashed through the ceiling like quicksilver, intersecting with the oval symbol on her forehead.

"Wish transmission granted," Peorth whispered to herself.

They had done it on their own, Keiichi MoriStar and Sora Hasegawa.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Do you really believe what Keiichi told me, about there being _another_ Yggdrasil?" Belldandy asked. She had been pestering Peorth ever since they floated out of the anteroom of Kami-sama's CrystalCloud Palace.

Peorth shrugged her shoulders once again.

Within hours after Sora's wish had been granted, the two of them had been summoned back to Yggdrasil. As events had turned out, the Almighty was particularly interested in the situation between Keiichi MoriStar and Sora Hasegawa...but even more so, He was interested in learning about how two Goddesses from rival Offices could have possibly resolved such a significant Wish Conflict without resorting to cheating.

Not to mention that He wanted to look after Peorth and "the little one" still cozy in her belly.

So Peorth had to cover Belldandy's ass...and vice versa. That little visit Belldandy had with Keiichi was clearly a breach of conduct. But Peorth's 'pulling the plug' action was also inappropriate...

Yet, somehow they had managed to convince the Lord that Keiichi and Sora had fallen in love completely on their own...that there had been no meddling on either of their parts. Of course, Peorth had to alibi where Belldandy had been during the hour or so that she had been on the Earthrealm meeting with Keiichi. A little hackery on the Ygg Mainframe had accomplished that trick. And Belldandy, for her part, had to explain how a power outage in Tokyo had lasted almost 20 hours. Unusual enough, but even more remarkable since it had been triggered by an improbably tame earthquake that measured 4.2 magnitude. Naturally, Belldandy explained this by blaming it on her younger sister, who was supposedly 'experimenting' with Earthrealm technology instead of chasing Bugs. Peorth also managed to string Him along by shifting the focus of the conversation to babies and motherhood. After all, her child would be His grandchild, in a sense...and Kami-sama was renowned to be of a doting disposition when His children were concerned.

The sum result was that the two Goddesses were both safe...for now.

"You know, it's always possible that there could be _billions upon trillions_ of Yggdrasils," Peorth finally remarked. "Or maybe there is only one Yggdrasil...and you and I are but an infinitesimal fraction of it. In any case, it all worked out."

"Billions upon trillions of Yggdrasils? I couldn't even begin to imagine such a thing!" Belldandy exclaimed. "So what now? Both our wish grantees have gotten their wishes met. Keiichi is happy with Sora...and Sora is wrapped in a love so deep that she probably won't come up for air for several months. Which leaves you..."

"Moi?"

"You're carrying Keiichi's child. Couldn't that cause a bit of a complication? They _are_ Earthrealm mortals, you know. Emotionally crippled with passions, craziness, lack of good sense...and jealousy. They don't do triangular marriages very well!"

"Tell me about it!" Peorth sighed.

"Still, I'm worried about you. You couldn't possible raise a child who is half-Human, half-Goddess by yourself, Peorth. In fact, there is very little precedent on what to do with semi-Divine infants. By the way, how good are you at changing diapers?" Belldandy asked, looking thoughtful as they floated past a Bubbletree. Peorth's expression soured briefly at the mention of "diapers", but she quickly recovered her cheerful demeanor. Besides, part of her was looking forward to cleaning baby-butt poop...

"I'm sure everyone will manage!" Peorth said with a grin, secretly thrilled that Belldandy had taken such a personal interest in her pregnancy. Her eyes narrowed to a teasing expression.

"I'm surprised you didn't do your research, Belldandy! Usually you research your wish grantees quite thoroughly before you dispatch yourself to grant them a wish," she noted with an enigmatic flair.

"Huh? What are you talking about, Peorth! I did do my research! Sora Hasegawa has never had a boyfriend before..." Belldandy replied quickly.

"So she was a virgin, right?"

"Of course she was."

"So how do you know that she's fertile?"

Belldandy halted in mid-flight and regarded Peorth with an odd expression. Instantly, she motioned a spell and a holocloud formed in front of her. Weaving her hands in the air, she caused the holocloud to readout a scan of every atom in Sora's body. In a nanosecond or two, Belldandy had charted every aspect of Sora's physiology.

"She's sterile! She can't have children!"

"Bingo!"

"Bingo? Isn't that an Earthrealm game of chance, Peorth?" Belldandy tried to joke. Her forehead broke out in sweat as Peorth shook her head "no" to let her know that she wasn't going to get away with subject-evasion.

"Y..you _knew_, didn't you?!" Belldandy stammered. "You knew that if Keiichi and Sora were to fall in love, then her condition would eventually emerge as a concern! That she couldn't bear any children..."

"Oui!" Peorth said with a one-upping nod. After all, she was Twenty Six Decas old...a full 10,000 years older than Belldandy. She savored the unease figuring her friend's face.

"Wait a minute! Something's funny about all of this," Belldandy announced warily. She shifted the holocloud...and now Keiichi MoriStar's vital datum was glowing upon its surface. Her eyes shuttled back and forth faster than the speed of light as she read the details...

"Apparently, Keiichi is sterile too!" Belldandy pronounced.

"WHAT!!" Peorth blurted out. "That's impossible! There's no way that he could be sterile! He caused _this_!"

Belldandy giggled as Peorth patted her protruding belly.

"Didn't he say something to you, something like '_We didn't have sex, so how could you wind up pregnant?_'" Belldandy teased mirthfully. "And you yourself admitted that even the Proctors don't know why you wound up carrying an Earthrealm mortal baby..."

"Belldandy! You _listened in_ on that?" Peorth asked, her lip curling with incredulity as she winced with embarrassment.

"Heh heh hee. Hey! Hey, don't look at me like that!" Belldandy replied, waving Peorth to calm down. "Sora was my wish assignee...and since her wish involved a direct interest in Keiichi, it was well within my duties to her to investigate this situation. Besides, I _had_ to find out."

Peorth growled at her playfully, imitating the yowl-growl of a Tauran Tiger.

"Well, at least I didn't gossip about it to the whole GRO!" Belldandy said, her eyebrows crocked in apology.

Peorth simmered down a bit at Belldandy's half-hearted penitence. To her credit, Belldandy had kept confidence about Peorth's 'delicate condition'. Only a true friend would do that...and listen in on a supposedly 'private' conversation.

"So once you have this baby, a stork is going to appear at Keiichi MoriStar's mansion, complete with a babe in swaddling?" Belldandy asked. She could read Peorth's mind well enough to sense the visualization Peorth was cherishing.

"Well...why not? It'll surprise the daylights out of them!"

"That...would be so beautiful!" Belldandy asserted, clasping her hands in front of her breast.

"Yeah. You know me...Ms. Flashy-Entrance-Goddess! Besides, I think it would be bonne groovy! On the other hand, since I _did_ have a hand in helping _your_ wish grantee fulfill the circumstances of her wish, I think you owe me one!"

"You _always_ think I owe you one, Peorth! But..sigh..in this case, I suppose you're right," Belldandy agreed with a heave of resignation.

"Which is why I want _you_ to be her godmother," Peorth asked.

"You're joking!" Belldandy exclaimed. She saw the sincerely requestful look on Peorth's face.

"You're _not_ joking!"

"Why would I joke about something so important, Belldandy? I'm totally serious. You see...I had this recent conversation with your younger sister. You know, the one who's Norn of the Future and all that," Peorth noted in a faux-flippant voice. "Well anyway, Skuld told me that Keiichi, Sora's and my daughter...uh, _our_ daughter...is definitely going to need some expert guidance about twenty years from now, when she's in college."

"_Every_ Earthrealm 20-year old girl needs guidance! They're all crazy when they're that age. What's so special about that?" Belldandy offered in a level voice. "Why should her 'guidance' involve me?"

"Because, unlike her famous parents and I, my daughter is going to be very shy. Not to the point of being hermetically withdrawn into herself, but she _will_ experience some bouts of awkwardness because of her reserved character. Especially around guys...just like her Mom was. I know how good you are with helping Earthrealm women work through their awkwardness, Belldandy. Look at the miracles you've wrought in Sora's life! I'll never forget the look on his face when she kissed him that first time, down in the studio. It was truly a _coup de foudre_...a 'strike of thunder' that comes with awakened love at first sight. But in this case, the 'first sight' for those two was seven years later than it should have been."

"Yes...that was really something very sweet, wasn't it?! All my coworkers at the Goddess Relief Office have been talking about it nonstop, ever since I got back," Belldandy agreed. "So you want me to help your daughter?"

"Definitely! And she'll really need it during her later teen years. This CD that Keiichi is finishing up is going to introduce the God's Music to the mortals. It'll be legendary in artistic stature...so famous, he and Sora will be swamped in its aftermath for the rest of their lives. Our daughter will be a celebrity of her own, because she'll be caught up in the sweep of his fame as well. She's going to need both of us; not just because of the fame situation. She's going to be _half-mortal, half-Goddess_, remember? Keiichi and Sora will have their hands full enough as it is. Anniko is going to be her 'other' parent; a kind of aunty to our daughter. Anni will teach her the ropes about being a human girl, and we'll teach her the ropes about being a proper Goddess. But there's even more. It gets even better. Keiichi did much more than unlock your assignee's heart. He's unleashed a tigeress! I have it on the _best authority_ that, while her dad is going to continue being a 'goodwill ambassador to the entertainment world', her mom's going to be elected the _Prime Minister of Japan_ by the time she turns 17..."

"Hmm, I guess it can't be helped, can it?" Belldandy said, patting Peorth on the belly. Two crystal goblets of peach juice appeared in her hand. She handed one to Peorth, her oft-times rival at the Earth Otasuke Office. Also her best friend. And now an expectant mother...

"_To Love!!_" the two Goddesses' toasted each other, clinking their glasses of peace juice.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --


	97. Pt 97: LostWorld

**Part 97: LostWorld**

I waved my hand over the fad-sensor, fully expecting that this would finally be the time that the Library would fail in its conservatory purpose...fully expecting that I would experience silence instead of narrative. I normally wasn't interested in the Library, but I had reached a pausing point in writing my story on the wall, and curiosity had done the rest. It mattered little that the Library was the very last repository of all inglorious history of a vanished race. But once in a while when I visited the Library, I would sense an interest in the past, and would come here to worship at the altar of recollection information.

Why are the hooks and horns of tragedy so compelling?

The datalink process took longer than usual...but then the screen short-flickered, struggling with itself. A moment later, an image flashed into being, projected against one of the wall screens. The holographic features of the Library were muted, but at least there was a vestige of sight and sound.

The default image. The default narrative...

_Shortly after the 2023 American World Series, the United Nations Committee on Global Climatology released a long-awaited research report that addressed concerns regarding the increasing temperatures worldwide. According to the international team of scientists, the mean temperatures worldwide for the months of November and December 2022 were measured to be over 4 degrees Centigrade above what was normal in 1980-2000. Naturally, the climatic implications of such a meteorological anomaly would have global significance if this precedent trend were to continue. During all those years in the 2010s and 20s that the temperature kept mounting higher and higher, everybody was under the assumption that this overall heating of the biosphere was due to the Greenhouse Effect._

We were wrong.

_Beyond the acceleration of global warming, the UN scientists noted in their report that land and satellite-based observations of astronomical phenomena relating to the Sun had yielded a wealth of data...confirming the existence of an accelerating trend in the occurrence of 'abnormal' stellar behavior. Especially troubling were the noticeable increase in the frequency of solar flare 'cluster' activity, heliothermic instability, and rapid macular transference. This progressive pattern of solar eccentricities perplexed the researchers; who admitted that there was no controlling paradigm they could cite that would justify these aberrant events. Within weeks of publication, the world's foremost scientists dissected the UN report without success; they too were unable to explain why the Sun seemed to be having "DTs", as one newspaper jokingly put it. Solar science fell short of explaining this anomaly, despite the existence of such traditionally reputable models such as the Maunder Minimum and the observed 11-year cycles of sunspot increase and diminishment. As the savants debated, the Sun's hyperactive changes continued, and the orbiting satellites continued their monitoring of the wildly fluctuating patterns._

_It was a well known historical fact that the Earth had experienced a "mini-Ice Age" during the years 1645-1715. Astronomers observing the Sun during this period charted a significant reduction in the number of visible sunspots as compared to sunspot activity earlier in the 17th century and further back. Various historical records of the time clearly described environmental indications of global cooling such as glacial expansion, longer freeze times for riverbeds, annual snow cover at lower altitudes, and shorter crop seasons. Centuries later, scientists concluded that the dearth of solar sunspot activity clearly corresponded with a cooling of the Sun, which influenced significant climactic changes on a global scale. A later generation of astronomers and physicists determined that this "mini-Ice Age" wasn't simply an isolated incident; their premise was that these periods were definitely part of a greater pattern. Evidence pointed to a long-term cycle of sunspot activity, which was estimated to occur every 500 years. They developed a model to explain the fact that the Sun would experience a 'cool down' period every five centuries. With the advent of space travel, solar astronomers were able to confirm the "Maunder Minimum" model with direct empirical observations. Taking this theory to its logical conclusion, the midpoint of Maunder Minimum cycle would find the Sun experiencing its greatest activity of sunspots. Thus, 250 years after a Maunder Minimum, sunspot frequency would at its most pronounced epoch. Frequent sunspots would then correspond with a gradual increase of global temperatures for a period of several decades. Some environmental scientists employed this theory to explain the weather patterns that caused the world-wide 'dustbowl' droughts of the 1930s. If the model held true, than the midpoint of the 500-year-long Maunder Minimum would occur circa the 1950s. Naturally, taking into account the pattern of the Maunder Minimum cycle, what was supposed to happen after the mid-20th century was a gradual diminishing of sunspot activity during the following 75 years._

_By 2020, Solar science wasn't limited to Earth-based observation points. The Solar Probe Plus project had been diving in and out of the Sun's corona since 2017. The Near and Far Solar Dynamics Observatories had been measuring the solar atmosphere from locations in the inner planets and trans-Jupiter. Several High-Energy Solar Spectrographic Imagers had been studying the Sun since 2002. The trend towards global warming wasn't just impacting the Earth. Almost all of the planets had orbiting satellites of their own; those orbiting science platforms had confirmed that the mean temperature on every planet was increasing in proportion to that of the Earth. Significant observable changes, such as the reduction of polar ice on Mars and the development of a second permanent 'Great Spot' on Jupiter were indicative of the results of temperature increase on those planets. _

_There was no explanatory model. The Maunder Minimum which predicted a decrease in solar sunspot activity did not occur. Instead, the sunspot cycles were uncharacteristic from year to year, except for a singular pattern of increase. Solar activity after the mid-20th century varied widely, especially after 2010. The dispersal and frequency of sunspots seemed to map itself right out of the scientist's ability to predict such patterns. Astronomers and physicists were perplexed by the rapid and marked increase in the number of sunspots in the past two years, 2022 and 2023. _

_Two years later, the United Nations announced that a number of eminent astronomers and physicists specializing in Solar science had jointly projected that the Sun was undergoing a period of decline into instability...an instability that was unprecedented in the last hundred million years. Immediately, a vast number of theories were proposed to explain the exact cause of this shift in solar dynamics; but no single theory seemed to stand on its own merit. Many of these theories were thinly-gauzed attempts to disprove the UN findings, posited by scientists hoping to assure the alarmists that the Sun was just going to be okay, that no disaster was imminent. Yet, in the final analysis, what was happening to the Sun remained beyond comprehension or explanation._

_But it wasn't beyond observation. The UN researchers possessed an absolute certitude that...should the pattern of instability continue to increase...the Earth would become totally inhospitable to the human race within two decades. The theory of mass extinction of the dinosaurs due to the collision of a large meteorite was proven incorrect._

It had been the Sun all along. The life-giving Sun...source of all energy for the planet's living inhabitants, shaper of climates in rock, water and air...had brought death to the planet. Again and again and again.

The toll-bell of doom had hung mutely yellow-gold in the sky during the entire evolution of the human race.

_The shocking finality of this announcement was followed by a massive 'humankind grieving period' lasting approximately one year. During this "Year of Hell", as it was later termed, chaos reigned the day. Governments were toppled, threatened or encouped. Suicidal hedonistic lifestyles were in vogue with the youth. Warfare and breakouts of urban rioting were commonplace. Religions imploded as their followers suffered persecutory complexes, feeling that 'God was out to punish mankind' for sins real and imagined._

_Every week, the media would report another mass suicide. Groups of people would barricade themselves in large buildings, and then blow themselves up. Cultish groups would distribute poison during fervent rallies held in stadiums, causing the deaths of tens of thousands. Cultural fault lines erupted in armed conflict, as old rivalries sought a final resolution to history-leavened disputes between race and creed. Nihilism won over the hearts of millions, submerging them into further hopelessness and irresolve._

_The entire energy of the human race seemed to have become depressed; an en masse melancholia which stifled the urge to cooperate. If the entire community of humanity had been gathered into one heart during that year, that weakened heart would be bleak and forlorn; predominated with futility and prone to fanaticism._

_It took another two years for the nations to finally calm their domestic populations and marshal some semblance of order back into daily life. During the "Year of Hell", groups of scientists had gathered in survivalist think-tanks, only this time they were reaching for solutions. In 2027, the UN announced that there was a way to prevent the extinction of the human race. But it would come at great cost, and would demand unremitting sacrifice from every human being on the planet._

_The nations of the planet Earth began to gear their resources towards the creation of twelve "Humanity LifeShips". Most developed countries suspended their military, public works and welfare budgets to fund this endeavor. The so called "Third and Fourth World" countries willingly supplied manpower, usually in the form of conscription, as substitute for their lack of financial contribution. As construction of the LifeShips began, several years were spent in debate over enormously sensitive philosophical and ethical issues. Basically, decisions had to be reached concerning who should be saved, what flora and fauna of the biosphere should be preserved, and which cultural artifacts should be included on these voyages._

_The initial decision was to segregate the populations of the LifeShips; so that like cultural and religious populations would be grouped together on one ship. The predominant philosophy behind this decision was that once the LifeShip had found an inhabitable planet, the possibility of conflict would be reduced; giving each 'New Earth' a fighting chance to survive and flourish. This plan was later amended when the peril became more apparent and voices of reason reminded the politicos that humanity's greatest source of strength was its diversity..._

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Yeah, yeah yeah," I said to myself, shutting off the viewscreen. I had memorized that infodisk over 84,000 years ago.

All I wanted to do was die.

And the craziest thing of all...the thought that tortured we Survivors...was the fact that no one had ever been able to explain what _did_ happen to the Earth's Sun. One century, it suddenly just overheated, cooked the planet, and then presumably returned to normal a couple thousand years later. Hell, there might even be life of some kind thriving on the Earth by now.

But that isn't the rest of the story...

"So here's what really happened," I started to lecture the impassive screen, straining to remember the distant past, knowing the price of our journey to Lost had been a Pyrrhic victory.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Time had run out much quicker than anyone could have predicted.

We had starved during those final years on Earth. Crops had to be grown underground as the dried soil began to fail to yield nutrients. Each year became more hellish, in some ways much worse than the "Year of Hell". People had devolved into savages. Food and water were strictly rationed by whatever governments were left. Cannibalism plagued many countries. All that was familiar twenty years earlier, like sports, cable TV, music concerts, automotive vehicles...had been discarded.

Each night seemed to wound Time with a renewed desperation.

Japan was somewhat fortunate in some respects; being an island nation, it was somewhat insulated from incursions by the warlords that were turning the Asian Mainland into a piecemeal warzone. The Chinese had their hands too full with domestic uprisings to worry about bridging the sea to invade Japan. Domestically, the Japanese psyche also contributed to the favorable conditions in the Last Days. People in Japan possessed a deep-rooted sense of accommodation, which went far in maintaining a social and political structure while other nations dissolved into anarchy. In many countries, being outside after dark occurred at the risk of _being eaten_.

Somehow, I had made the Survivor's list. I never knew why...and of course we Survivors were never told why we were selected...but I sensed it was because of my seminal dissertation project, Magnum Organum, which I had published three decades earlier. The fact that I was fluent in over 20 languages may have also helped my prospects; as communication and cultural sensitivity were high on the list of desirable traits for Survivor candidates.

In a memory within a memory, I recalled the day that I learned that I had been selected as a Survivor. As was typical for Survivor 'extractions', a squadron of soldiers had burst into my classroom unannounced, and then shot everyone in the room but me. Moments later, I was escorted out of the University by gunpoint into a waiting helicopter...and whisked away.

The first few attempts by the military to retrieve individuals selected as Survivors had erupted into vicious mobscene melees, with casualties sometimes exceeding the thousands. Take a group of people, half-starved and devoid of hope, and then give the key of life to one in their midst...and the survival instinct kicks in, much more powerful than anyone had anticipated. People would kill the police, kill themselves, or kill the Survivor in a maddened reaction to the fact that they were being denied a chance for continued life in one of the LifeShips. In essence, if someone was tapped out to be a Survivor in the midst of a group setting, it meant that the rest of the group _wouldn't_ be selected as Survivors. Hence, Survivor pickups possessed the certainty of a death sentence for all that witnessed them. With the military being thinned out with the arduous task of maintaining some semblance of civilization in the face of impending social collapse, the special forces assigned to 'recruit' Survivors didn't have time to waste on open conflicts with those who were non-Survivors. The military was forced to quickly develop a method for snatching Survivors with minimal casualties. Killing all the witnesses was one way to ensure the success of a Survivor 'extraction'. But also, it was considered by those who justified it as a merciful expediency, because all of those weren't picked would have had to spend the rest of their days knowing _for certain_ that they were going to die...

I disagreed with their concept. I don't know if it was merciful or not, because I was horrorshocked as a whole classroom of students had been slaughtered right before my eyes. Students I had taught, counseled, fought with and _given hope to_ in the face of a seemingly hopeless situation. It was _hope_ that had led them to explore the philosophies of neo-Taoism, Plato, Freud, Derrida, Foucault, the Magnum Organum...in a place and time where no amount of inquiry into the humanities could possibly cool the hysteric Sun from its course. I had continued to teach the students I worked with as if nothing had happened during those years, as if the Earth _wasn't_ doomed, as if it were the most important mission and purpose in my life...because of my strong conviction that the personal dignity of mind and Soul had to be maintained, no matter what.

And then I watched them die, torn apart by machine guns...

My dignity was torn away from me that day. I don't know if I ever fully regained it.

Faux-fortunately for me, I had never married or had children. Marriage and parenting were simply incompatible with the pain written upon my heart.

Sometime back in 20XX, Urd, Keiichi and Belldandy, Skuld and several others had just simply disappeared. Vanished without a trace. I had come home to the temple, only to find it empty. No goodbye note, no words of explanation, no clues that could explain where they had traveled. They were simply _gone_.

And they had never returned.

That first week, I sat down and stared at the rice cooker until I passed out from exhaustion. The TV that would never be watched. The hot tea that would never be savored. Dishes in the sink, ready to be washed by invisible hands...

At the time of their disappearance, I had immediately assumed that Yggdrasil had recalled the Divines and their mortal circle. Being excluded, I couldn't escape the conviction that that there was something wrong with me. They had been taken, _I hadn't_. The next several years found me feeling baldly crushed between the existential millstones of apathy and angst. But I forced myself awake each day, when actually all I wanted to do was escape into a permanent dream-state. Of course, their sudden disappearance had occurred almost twenty years before we knew about the Sun's impending stellar 'mishap'. Years later, it became obvious that the government wasn't the only one 'abducting' people. But my sense of disillusionment was nothing compared to the debts of pain in my heart...

I never recovered from the crushing blow of losing Urd.

The very day that the announcement about the Sun's impending extinction-level instability was trumpeted, I finally knew why Urd and the others had suddenly vanished. They hadn't disappeared, they had been spared. I knew that, of the three sisters, Belldandy loved the Earth the most; perhaps her recall was as much to protect her from witnessing firsthand the death of the world she had learned to call "home"...as it was to preserve the continuity of her life. The special people in her life...Keiichi, Megumi, and all the mortals who disappeared that day...had been borne away with her, so that she wouldn't suffer the loss of love. They had all been stolen away to a better place; a shoreless land of dazzling sheen, with hoary piles of miracles and eternally unfurling sweeps of majestic joy and Love.

I just wish I would have been warned. From my perspective, it was traumatic; I felt as if they all had died in a mass accident.

«-- --» «-- --» «-- --» «-- --»

It _still_ feels that way, after almost 85 millennia of life. Turning my back on the Library's cybernetic refectorium and its wall of data monitors, I continued to scrawl my story on the unruined section of wall in one of the halls. Bit by bit, each word carefully formed in the stone; unlevel patterns formed of an extinct, unspoken language...

«-- --» «-- --» «-- --» «-- --»

So I became a Survivor. Life as a Survivor meant internment in a protected camp, because people were killing Survivors left and right. This was another reason why all witnesses to a Survivor pickup had to be killed on the spot, because the location of the internment camps was a tightly guarded secret. I spent the next several weeks coming to grips with the price of apocalypse...the unforgiving image branded into my mind of seeing all my students shot to death by grim-masked anonymous soldiers.

Everything that mattered was gone. I felt useless, haunted and used at the same time. To add to my misery, I was immediately subjected to all sorts of 'braingames' by the staff, designed to 'enlighten' me on the path to being a better Survivor. However, all that the therapy sessions accomplished was only to heighten my sense of survivor's guilt.

It was some sick, grim joke. Forged in the gridworks of manic desperation, this was a _real_ Survivor's competition, not some made-for-TV fare to amuse the bored beer-guzzling homeowners and tired trite yuppies of three decades in the past. Drama-pablum to keep their minds blunted, while endless commercials trained them to buy all sorts of useless crap that they didn't need in the first place. The tragic irony wasn't lost on me then, 847 centuries ago...

It still isn't lost on me.

I just never imagined that my pessimism would outlast the Sun.

«-- --» «-- --» «-- --» «-- --»

But feelings and pessimism are quickly buried when the survival of the species was at stake. I couldn't blame the general population for wanting to kill us; they were jealous and angry that such a small percentage of people would be saved. Approximately one in 64,000 were selected to be Survivors, according to the published oddsmakers. Their rage was just another expression of the human survival instinct...I couldn't fault it, no matter how much it revulsed me.

In the 2040s, there were many groups of terrorists and warlords in those days who wanted to hijack one of the LifeShips by force, or destroy one of the Survivor's camps. So the governments decided to house us in cavernous underground safeholds or sietches...at least in the case of the Japanese government's LifeShip project. That autumn day in Tokyo was the last time I ever saw the sky of the Earth.

Food was austerely rationed; we ate little else besides slight bowls of rice and millet for the last several years of our encampment. The guards mistreated us because they weren't Survivors. There were many incidents of 'night raids', where a group of guards would kill a Survivor for some reason. With the death of each Survivor, we would lose a chance to rekindle a certain flame of expertise or creativity. Naturally, any guards responsible for killing Survivors would be sought out, apprehended and immediately executed.

News of any events happening in the outside world was completely censored, so that we in the Survivor camps didn't have a clue about what was going on outside. Whenever I asked one of the guards about the outside world, I would get rebuked with a gruffly-worded, "It's still out there, asshole!" Psychologically, I knew that it made sound sense to desensitize us by information deprivation. Ideally, removing the source of our attachment to our home planet would allow us to adjust better to the forthcoming rigors of our journey.

We all suffered, crucified to the 'ideals".

_The journey..._

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Taking a reprieve from my word-carving, I walked out of the Memory Library and was immediately haunted by the ruined city. I realized once again that my psychoses had bromided my sanity. This place, this planet Lost, had been my home for almost ninety millennia. Everywhere I looked, the city was falling apart all around me, a wordless atoll. Ghosted by ghosts.

I remember spending 74 years sweeping every block of the 1200-square-kilometer city, 300 centuries ago. I remember spending a dozen years pursuing a cat through the city, from kittenhood to its death. I remember reading "War and Peace" a hundred times in a row, just to do _something_ to bring my life back into focus. I remember watching a clock not move for a decade or two.

How could it have turned out this way?

Nightfall compelled me to return to the Library and continue my story-stippling...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

The techies had synergized the best and brightest of the scientific advances of the age in order to wrought a marvel of technology. Design-wise, the orbiting LifeShip Projects made the Freedom Space Station seem like a child's lego toy set by comparison. It was all very Star Trekish. The largest crew ever launched into space at that time was 24. Each LifeShip would have a crew of over 1500. We watched as the orbiting ships were assembled by robotic spacecabs...

However, the Sun's instability was accelerating much quicker than the scientists had projected, so much so that the LifeShip Project had to cut some corners if it was going to be successful at all. The initial timetable of six years was now reduced to two years. Since they were going to rocket almost twenty thousand of us into deep space, it would be impractical to place us in suspended animation. At least _all_ of us...

The medical scientists and cyberneticists had decided early on that all Survivors would receive a cerebroectomy. Our brains and nerve stems would be neatly removed by automated laser surgery performed by state of the art robots and micro-robots. I always imagined that Skuld would have been intrigued by the whole setup, at least the engineering end of it. But no one wanted to think about the actual process itself. A network of several thousand lasers would systematically slice all non-nervous tissue of the body into mincemeat; the remaining intact flesh would then be immediately dipped into suspended animation, courtesy of cryogenics. This would reduce the payload from an average of 75 kilos per person to a little over 3-4 kilos. We were all forced to watch the process in order to pacify our fears. It took less than 5 minutes for the lasers to reduce the body of a living human being into a pile of fragmented carcass, as useless as the offal from butchered animals. Then a series of mechanical arms would hoist the remaining nervous system and brain and then drop it into a cryo-vat. Needless to say, viewing this did little to reduce my fears. Frankly, I sincerely feared that I would never wake up again as they wheeled me into "The Chamber", as we Survivors nicknamed the robotic surgical theater.

It was insane, because it seemed like they were killing the Survivors. What could possibly be left after sinew was stripped from cerebral cortex? Could a frozen coil of nervous tissue retain a Soul? Could it retain its humanity? Could consciousness be restored to it?

Haunting images of frozen disembodied brains forever floating through the vastness of space, not even conscious of the passing of time and life...

If we succeeded in traveling across the stars to a new home, the idea was that...once we achieved orbit around a planet that could host life...each preserved brain would be thawed out and vatted with builder cells. Over a period of a few months, the cloned tissue would 'grow' around it, creating a new human body.

That was the plan...

...but it didn't work out that way.

Because of the advances in cloning technology and DNA mapping, the decision was made to extract clone-viable biological material from as many species of flora and fauna as could be obtained. These samples were also cryogenically stored in micron-sized capsules, so that when we completed our journey, the animal and plant inhabitants of spaceship Earth could be regrown and then dispersed amongst the biosphere of our new home planet.

The LifeShip design being built by Japan was itself based on the old Daedalus design, using pulses of nuclear energy bursts as a means of propulsion, and then ramscooping radiative energy from near-solar space to travel to the next star or gaseous body. The only component of the ship that would be powered up during flight was the central computer and the 'wardens', the sentry robots designed to orbit near the LifeShip and monitor it for damages. Once the LifeShip reached deep space, not even the life support systems would receive power. Instead, the elements of the LifeShip that contained the banks of frozen humans and otherlife would be powered down. The 'payload' was frozen anyway, so there was no reason to waste precious power monitoring the ice mummies.

The flight path was simple...the ship would aim towards a star, use a series of nuclear pulses to accelerate itself in the general direction of a solar system, and then drift until it was pulled in by the solar system's gravitational field. Once it was within a planetary system, the LifeShip would chart a course to extensively map out the planets of the system in an attempt to decide if any were suitable. If it discovered a tenantable planet, it would orbit the planet for a couple centuries to make sure that it was stable, and then we would be awakened. If the solar system was barren of planets in the so-called "Life Belt", the LifeShip would orbit that system's sun until it gathered a suffice of energy. Then it would embark on another journey to the next system.

As for we Survivors, if we were to reach an inhabitable destination, we would be awakened and immediately interfaced with the shipboard computer, which would provide us with a 'virtual reality' monitoring of the new planet. But in light of the fact that the LifeShip construction timetable had been hurried towards the end, we wouldn't get to grow into new flesh-and-blood bodies. Instead, a whole section of the LifeShip was constructed as a 'factory', consisting of stores of robotic components...components that would be utilized by us to _build_ us. Upon arrival, our thawed brain tissue would be mounted into a robotic frame by an assembly-line process. As we Survivors faced the reality that we would awaken as cyborgs, rather than humans, the scientists mollified our doubts. To them, the concept was sound: a robotic body would have a much greater survivability than a human bioframe in a potentially hostile environment. To us, it was inconceivable.

It had worked all too well, in my case.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

I regarded my handiwork.

Using a flint rock, I had etched the words of my story again. This time, I was working inside of a cave wall. For some reason, I was once again possessed of a will to make my story immortal; by concealing it in a cave, perhaps the stone might not be taught to lie by the ravages of Time.

A story of life, love, loss, wishes and isolation. Perhaps I write my narrative in the hope that some future pair of eyes might witness it. This would redeem the mistakes, transform the definitive confusion. Some future sentience might witness the holon of my consciousness as it once existed on planet Lost. Or maybe I was writing so I wouldn't forget...because everything else was so forgettable. Maybe I was doing this to simply remember that I was once a real human being.

I've written my story all over Lost; devious attempts to communicate with an audience of one...

The One of my Past.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"_The Past is a Presence,_" I remember Urd telling me one time...

I was awakened by the gender-neutral voice of the LifeShip's central computer, which informed us in its metal-sober voice that we were in orbit around an inhabitable planet. The LifeShip noted to me that it had been in orbit for 243 years: mapping the planet; assessing the weather, terrain and biosphere; measuring the orbital eccentricity around the primary star...

After gaining consciousness, the computer plunged me into a world of virtual reality, while it fired up the robot assembly line. I got to learn about the viability of the planet's ecosystem, the lifeforms already inhabiting it, how the planet was placed in its system of solar planets. I remember being enchanted by the idea that there were two moons, and that a nearby star was only half a light-year away, creating a small-but-visible dark orange 'second sun'.

"How long?" I had asked, or rather croaked in my new mechanical voice once I had been assembled. I found out later that these two words were uttered by every Survivor once they had been fully integrated into their cyber-robotic 'bodies'. Of course, my question was unanswered. As one of Earth humanity's last jokes on us Survivors, they had programmed the computer to never disclose to us any details about the duration or direction of our flight. All flight logs and related data that could indicate how long we were in flight had been purged from the system prior to our awakening. The last humans had deliberately sundered our last ties with our own homeworld, so we would have no sense of the passage of Time between 'there' and 'here'. We were not supposed to think of 'there' any more.

We all knew that 'there' was dead.

Much later on, after we had thoroughly colonized the planet, a few astronomy whizzes were able to prove...at least to everybody's satisfaction...that we had been in flight 113,921 years 4 months and 9 days. Actually, they had it down to millionths of a second, as if anyone cared.

To me, the entire journey was sealed in an eyeblink epoch; the sum of impressions had been compressed into the sensation of a millionth of a second. The last thing I remembered was being wheeled into the operating theatre...and then I awakened into a cyber-reality that was part video-game, part classroom. The LifeShip's computer kept me stimulated with a series of VR scenarios while my robotic 'chassis' was being assembled and tested. The LifeShip CPU had drawn up a number of 'games' based on the new planet's topography, weather, biosphere, etc...where we had to compete against ourselves to see who could create the most efficient colony. Sleep was haphazard, and I didn't dream at all. Then one day, the LifeShip CPU told me that I was ready for a 'fitting'; that it was going to pull the plug on my VR. I would experience a period of 'cyber-night', and then I would 'awaken'.

A certain remove of time later, I regained consciousness...in a robotic body.

Group by group, we were shuttled down to the planet's surface, humans-now-robots sardined inside reusable flight vehicles which were little more than 3rd-generation Space Shuttles. They couldn't 'thaw' all of us at once, so the whole process took another couple years.

My first view of Lost with my own 'eyes' was out of a window as we braked against the atmosphere. To my untrained eye, I could see large continents and violent swirls of storms contained within the hued wrap of the curving planet.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

I don't know who started calling the planet "Lost"...but strangely enough, my fellow robot-human colonists assigned the naming to the least likely suspect.

Me.

I only knew that I had started calling our new home "Lost" before anyone else did. I had never heard the term mentioned in reference to our new home a single time. Very early on, I fell into the habit of calling our new world "Lost". Apparently, I was the first...no one else had heard the term until I thrust into the public vocabulary. A vocabulary of frustration, disorientation and optimism.

Newly arrived, lost just seemed to be what I was feeling all the time. People thought I was just being goofy...

_"Uh, where are we?"_

"_Lost..."_

...and so it seemed to be quite the votive of levity...

Throughout the first few harsh months of acclimation to our new home-planet, I simply assumed all along that everyone was silently calling our new planet "Lost". The sheer barrenness of the place was both brutal and enchanting, as our group of cyborgs grunt-labored to assemble a few metal break-sheds next to a river filled with fish that we could never eat. The whole pioneering ethos of community evoked in my mind the idea of one of those axial moments in human annals; a slice of history where the singularity of mind shared between thousands of individuals exerts itself with beehive precision. In one sense, we were truly lost, because we had no idea where the Earth was in the firmament overhead. Thus, we couldn't tell where _we_ were, where our sun was in relation to our birth planet. "Lost" was a term that, to me, transcended our physical and emotional reality. So I started calling the place Lost.

And they blamed the naming on me.

As a result of this 'accident', every year, which was 411 days of 33 hours, they would make me dress up in some stupid ceremonial costume and officiously announce "Lost Day", which would kick off a week of holidays and ritualized fanaticism. For the first couple hundred of years, this whole sense of holiday ritual just made me homesick for Japan's week-long New Year's holidays. Why have a holiday when there was nothing to celebrate?

«-- --» «-- --» «-- --» «-- --»

Only once in my life had I been blessed with the sight of Urd in her New Year's kimono: flowers elaborately woven against a motif of Yggdrasilian symbols and icons; a green obi sash around her waist; with a white fur collar and furred sleeve cuffs. Every year I had to endure that ridiculous Lost Day ceremony, I would close my eyes and try to remember what she looked like. And after hundreds of years, I sensed that the mental image of Urd on New Year's...was starting to fray along the edges. Buried deep in the vault of my mind, yet fading away. So I started drawing pictures of Urd so I wouldn't forget who she was. But paper only lasts a couple thousand years.

I remember spending the better part of a century struggling to carve an image of Urd out of marble. In some recess of my mind, I was possessed of a folly: if my mechanical hands could hew beauty out of the carved stone...perhaps such a realistic representation of Urd would come to life and _be_ her. Just like the old Pygmalion myth, from the ruined physic of my former homeworld. But after all my labors, I only ended up with a flawed likeness of Urd that dissatisfied me. No Goddess Aphrodite was going to boon mercy upon me and reanimate her, or myself, into living flesh.

The weathering winds and the ages polished off the face of my Urd statue over 50,000 years ago.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Back when we first arrived at Lost, we learned rather quickly that our robotic forms were mostly designed for utility, rather than ease of appearance. Thus, we were a group of 1300 cyborg-robots who all looked identical. Each of us resembled some sort of 'missing link' in a mechanical lineage that began with the robots in the Star Wars movies and ended in the robotic character in Bicentennial Man as he initially appeared fresh off the assembly line.

_We_, each and every one of us, were assembly-line sameness. So the human idea of sorting ourselves by factors of appearance, age and beauty was thrown to the moons. We were all ugly, barren-looking polishes of metal and coil.

I felt a shock every time I looked in a mirrored surface and observed an impassive metallic 'face' in lieu of my own features. Also, my sense of proprioception was completely disordered. My motor responses were radically different than what I expected: there was always a 'delay' between thinking to move an appendage, and the actual responsive movement of the appendage. The absence of routine body functions, such as eating, urination, headaches and breathing added to my discomfort.

Because we all looked alike, we resorted to wearing 'clothes' in those early days. Our attire initially was metallic, since there was no cotton to weave into cloth. Any synthetic materials that could have been used to create fibers were requisitioned for more important necessities. Clothing would have been wasteful, when fiber was necessary to line the greenhouses and pens we were using to regrow Earth flora and fauna.

Yet, like the figurative children of innocence in the Garden of Eden, we wore chains, metal tags and meshed wires over our robotic frames. This was done not out of a sense of modesty, but so we could simply tell each other apart. Without some kind of distinguishing features, one wouldn't have any idea of the sex or race of those he or she was talking to, because we all looked basically the same, even with clothes. Eventually, one of the artisans painted his metallic body...and this set off a stir. Soon, everybody was painting themselves.

But it didn't end there. As people began to familiarize themselves with themselves, their sense of selfness asserted itself...and they began to form cliques and societies. In a macabre twist on the concept of gang colors, bodypaint became a form of language. A green stripe on the shoulder plate meant "I'm in the military", a blue circle on the breastplate meant "I'm a marine ecologist", a green tree on the knee joint meant "I'm a botanist"...

And so on.

Soon, some of the more militant of those among us started 'tagging' members of the general populace with their colors. I would go to my energy kiosk, power down...and then wake up the next day with a blue double helix painted on my forearm, which meant that I was a member of the "Blue Reactionary Cadre", a group that advocated genetically altering the marine species to be more aggressive before we seeded Lost's oceans with them.

Little did they know about balance...

So I would have to go to an artisan and get my wrist painted over. Of course, in situations where I had been 'tagged', it was confusing to others, because those who knew me didn't know that I had been 'tagged'...for all they knew, my colors indicated that I had joined the Blues of my own volition, rather than being vandalized into _appearing_ like I had joined them.

Finally, I decided to get rid of all the colors on my robotic body. This way, if I _did_ wake up with some symbol painted on my metallic exterior, my fellow Lostfolk would know that I had nothing to do with the group whose symbol appeared on me.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

If there was one major psychological adjustment that had to be made in the first decade of life on Lost, it was in the areas of sex and gender. Since we robotic children of Earth now looked almost exactly alike, the only means of separating 'men' from 'women' was by anecdotal information. If someone claimed that they were a female African-American nuclear physicist back on Earth, they would have to be taken at face value that they were a 'she'.

Because of the exigencies of the period right before we were rocketed away from the Earth, it was not possible to create 'male' and 'female' robotic bodies. We just barely had enough technology to perfect the assembly-line process in the first place. And it would be centuries before we would even begin to have the technology at hand to 'refit' our robotic encasements to appear more human, or even more gendered.

Thus, a robot with a 'female' human inside of it looked and sounded the same as a robot with a 'male'.

But this wasn't the worst of it. The sex drive in all of us was rendered inert. First, we didn't have the 'equipment' to have any kind of sexual encounter. Second, all of us were denied the ability to procreate, because of our robotic forms. In other words, there was no sex, no orgasms, no foreplay, no kissing..._no_ means of physical intimacy whatsoever. If another Survivor sat down next to me and rested his or her mechanical arm on my shoulder, I wouldn't feel their touch.

The total lack of a whole spectrum of sensory information was maddening to adjust to. No touch, no taste, no smell. We only had sight and sound to use as means to interact with our environment and each other.

Romance and sexual impulses were blighted by our robotic state, as there was little we could do to express ourselves. As the years passed on, we realized that we were threatened with becoming a loveless society. In truth, the cognitive difference between men and women were revealed to be superficial at best. The state of mind was almost the sole means of denominating between male and female. Cognitively, women were intuitive and men were aggressive. With the passage a few dozens of years, we slowly gained the ability to sense the gender of 'mind'. Yet, despite this, gender no longer held its sway over us. Love couldn't be expressed using many of the means that traditionally _made it feel good_. The biological component had been cauterized, neatly and cleanly. Sure, we could engage in intellectual love, the kinds of love that involved flirting and playful mindgames. But these weren't enough to satisfy our craving for affection. Why flirt if you couldn't kiss?

Because of this one challenge to our stability, over one-fourth of the Survivors went hopelessly insane within the first 20 years we spent constructing our beachhead on planet Lost.

The other consequence of the sundering of our libido was that we became a collection of longwalkers; solitary souls whose only anchors to each other were our ambition to survive, the greater society we strived to create, and our intellectual vigor.

Once the first crude Library was built, many of us would simply sit in front of the micro-slide project and howl and moan in grief as we viewed images of our birthplaces. Each year seemed to bring an even more dismal stock of returns...

There was no sex, no love, no families to assuage us. As a group of solitaries, it was common for people to strike out on their own for a period of months or even years, exploring their world and their selves. In this sense, we humans had returned to our aboriginal roots...we were a tribe without of government.

My first LostWalk was necessitated by compelling circumstances and needs: either I would escape from the 'android society' we had formed, or I would go crazy. I walked from ocean to ocean, crossing the massive continent. During my LostWalk, my imagination was rich with bittersweet memories of Japan and America. The marrow of my thoughts was always darting conjectures, skeptical about how the future could possibly yield me a sense of hope. As twilight smoldered the horizon, my mood would descend. My heart gorged itself on melancholy whenever I found myself ruminating about the special relationship I had shared with Urd. A type of relationship that I would never share again with another woman.

On planet Lost, the women were no different than the men, because all were mechanical constructs. Same voice, same chassis, same eyes.

We had paid for the survival of our species by killing Love.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

But we eventually found Love...

The unspoken goal of the entire "LifeShip Project" was to preserve the human race at any cost. This we had accomplished. We had carefully grown almost a hundred thousand species of Earth flora and fauna in our efforts to craft a micro-ecology. With each species, we met with failures at first, as the biological realities of Lost would kill the 'alien' lives we were introducing into the ecosystem. Then we would have to start again, altering the genes and DNA so that the next generation of animal or plant would be resistant to whatever bacteria or virus had killed it. Eventually, we would succeed...and then we would zoo the animals or greenhouse the plants until we were certain that they could reproduce. This was followed by trial releases into the wilds of Lost. We also wanted to protect the native flora and fauna of Lost from being 'poisoned' by too hasty an introduction of Earth species into their environment. And we made adjustments to some of the animals. For example, some of the alpha-level predators on Earth...such as lions, tigers and bears...were second-tier predators on Lost, because the larger planet had some elephantine 'cats' of its own. So we had to re-engineer the big cats and dogs to suit their new environment. What we created were true alpha-predators; wolves and big cats that were double the size of their Earth ancestors. The large wolves were especially striking, as they reminded me of the wolves in "Mononoke Hime". Within a number of centuries, Earth species were fully interacting with Lost species, in a manner that threatened the extinction of neither.

But some of us, myself included, began to envision a further goal. I wasn't satisfied with my own personal survival. After creating all the animals and plants that we could, I felt that there were no new worlds to explore. Sure, we could return to the orbiting LifeShip and travel somewhere else. With the 800 of us that remained out of the original 1500 Survivors on the one thousandth year after our arrival, we could join together and leave Lost to explore another place. As a matter of fact, almost 100 did. They returned to the orbiting LifeShip, repaired and improved it, and then left on another stellar quest. A Chariot of the Gods, traveling from star to star to seed it with Earth life.

A thousand years passes very quickly.

During that throw of centuries, we had built a village-sized 'city' and several 'suburbs' in an area we called LostBase. Beyond this, we had tended to the restoration of organic life as best we could, and had created a Memory Library to preserve the culture and history of Earth. We also learned how to live without singing.

A great source of disappointment arose from the lack of contact with any of the other LifeShips. During that first millennia, we had never received any communication from the other LifeShips. Perhaps we were hoping that someone else had survived the EarthFall...that another LifeShip had colonized a planet in the wake of the annihilation of our homeworld. The astrophysicists had been very deliberate in plotting a dispersal program for the LifeShips; aiming each ark of life towards divergent sectors of space. This decision was reached by the scientists right before the Earth was killed; it was intended as another means of protecting our species...purposefully to prevent any chance of our LifeShips 'competing' for viable planets.

Thus, our Japanese LifeShip...christened the "Yamato" of course...had embarked on its own unique route as it sailed the sea of stars like a piece of wood bobbing on a river. It was quite possible that one of the other LifeShips may have settled an Earth-like planet tens of millennia before we arrived on Lost. If we could contact them, then we might gain a glimpse of how the Future would organize itself around us. Once we began to realize that our cyborgnetic lifetimes might extend into the thousands of years, the idea of a SETI-type search for other LifeShip-colonized planets loomed within the realm of possibilities. We could afford to wait out the centuries it would take for our 'messages' to cross space towards a reply...

«-- --» «-- --» «-- --» «-- --»

To this day, 85 millennia after I arrived here, I have never learned the fate of the other eleven LifeShips. Once in a hundred years or so, I make an effort to check one of the few astrobatories that remain intact on Lost, curiously hoping that someone out there will 'radio' our planet.

But space was tomb-silent.

When life is rendered into a deathless death, is there a means of resolve for the simplest questions? If there are no other beings to help me measure my own identity, do I then lose the need to have an identity at all? If there were no other 'me's'...aspects of my 'personhood' within myself...to swap egos or personalities with, then am I no longer 'myself'?

My artificially elongated life of solitude feels as touchless as a glass of water sometimes. The old child's game: leave your hand inside a tub of water and count out the seconds until you cannot feel the water against your skin. Over a period of many thousands of years, the heart becomes like water; present but absent to the touching of mind. My heart was gone at last; and still I lived. Still, I was lost.

This was also part of my story, the blank space on the wall that I left after each attempt to inscribe the history of Lost...

«-- --» «-- --» «-- --» «-- --»

Our first Millennium Day seemed to be a turning point for some of us; it forced us to inventory our accomplishments and failures. In the thousand years we Survivors had inhabited planet Lost, we had seeded it with dogs and cats, whales in the ocean, butterflies in the air, and a variety of flora that was comfortably coexisting with the flora already covering the continents of Lost. We had created a quasi-Earth ecosystem on Lost...a planet-wide zoology of species that populated the planet like a Mandelbrot tapestry.

But we didn't have _ourselves_. There were no human beings striding upon the surface of Lost. Given a few millions of years, the simian species might develop intelligence and possibly mime Homo sapiens. But the only intelligent life on Lost was metal-encased, cyber-wired, cerebral cortex-sparked 'fake' humans.

The word "Boomer" sometimes came to mind...

Within a thousand years, we had become so alien to our own sense of humanity that we couldn't even call ourselves "human beings" any more. The portion of my life that I had spent in the flesh back on Earth was only 70 years, a small percentage out of the thousand years of my living experience. In one sense, at the thousand-year mark in my life, remembering my life on Earth seemed like the equivalent of a 20-year old remembering their first 18 months of life.

Inspired by the anniversary, we Lost Survivors decided to engage in millennial debates about our situation. I felt drawn to participate in a series of intense philosophical discussions whose point was to prove that we were still human. I gravitated towards this topic because this was where my strengths lie, as one of the 'token' philosophers in our cohort of Survivors. I wasn't particularly skilled in the evaluative process of theorizing hard science, but I could at least keep up while engaged in the intuitive process of synergizing discursive science. The main philosophical discourse concerned the validity of our functionality within the greater framework of epigenesis and psychological maturation. The former proposition was difficult to assess, as there was no physiological maturation that could validate our existence as human beings, since we didn't have bodies. Ranking concepts like hierarchy and heterarchy were non-informative to our situation. There were no guiding episteme or meta-paradigms that could describe to us how we systematized our knowledge; how we knew what we knew about ourselves. Using the global living ecosystem to justify our humanity via mechanisms such as evolutionary diversification was also meaningless. Finally, the profound alteration of our behavioral nexus and emotional loci as a result of being 'mechanized' left serious doubts in our minds as to the validity of action, purpose, teleology and extrapolation...all of which flow out of behavior and emotion.

Of course, our brains and nervous tissue were human and organic, save for the various fleshmetal junctions of interface with our cyborg bodies. The 'core' was clearly capable of sending commands to our robotic forms. Certainly, the robotic 'shells' of our assembled bodies were artifices of human design and technology. But was the 'core' a human being? And if we _were_ humans, what about our identities? Was the individual still a Survivor of the EarthFall, or were they a denizen of the Lost Colony? The deeper attributions that defined our humanity...such as love, artistry, spirituality and incentive...seemed distant and unapproachable. Our uniqueness seemed to recede into the past, like a faded photograph.

We were numbed to our humanity and yet desperate to regain it. The alternative loomed threateningly over the horizon of our collective consciousness; we feared that we would devolve into _true_ robots...dullards in spirit, thinking machines without passion, intelligences suffering because we were displaced from the very sources that provided the richness of our creative endeavors.

So what made us _human_, in light of all this?

That night, under the twin moons we sometimes jokingly called "and" and "Found", we were able to step outside of the quandary, just for a moment. Since we couldn't procreate children...perhaps we could _create_ children.

One distinct quality of humanity is its desire to create, I had argued. Creation and destruction are but randomized impulses in the natural sciences, utilizing such natural phenomena as erosion, hurricanes and floods to accomplish change. But creation as an impulse of behavior...necessarily engages emotion, teleological intent, extrapolation and repetition. These were the hallmarks of intelligence. But to further distinguish _human_ intelligence out of this pattern of sentiency, one would have to consider the challenges involved. Creation even went beyond these, because it would involve poetry, artistry and passion...qualities that I felt were the supreme separation between automatonism and individual consciousness. These qualities possessed the transpersonal, noetic elements of selfhood; attributes which were absent in the artificial intelligence.

I finally concluded my argument by noting that aquantum metastatics would still 'chart' the flow of consciousness in we Survivors, making it tangibly derivable in such endeavors. One of the central tenets in aquantum metastatics was that the open-flow models of cognition-emotion, models that certainly would not apply to non-sentiencies or mimetic intelligences. In simpler terms, there was no aquantum metastatic for 'human' when there was no human being. Perhaps there were other alien intelligences in the universe, but the aquantum metastatics I had discovered long ago were specific only to _humanity_, not other species.

The arrow of Time hadn't felled our race, not yet.

For all these years, I had wondered why they had picked me to be a Survivor. I was little more than a philosopher-psychologist who had stumbled onto a new branch of intellectual discourse with the able assistance of super-normal beings called Goddesses. I didn't know anything useful, like how to build a nuclear reactor, or how to clone bees. But that night, I finally had a reckoning with why I had been spared. I had been brought here for a purpose that no one could have predicted or imagined. I was the apologist...the only one who could successfully argue the terms of our humanity, reduced and abstract as it was.

I can remember the long pause in the arguing after I finished. I fancied that if my fellow debaters had been human, rather than robots with permanently impassive faces, their expressions would have registered shock on the level of a "holy shit!" type experience.

The techniques involved in cloning a pig are rudimentary in comparison to the sophistication needed to clone an embryo that would grow into a _real_ human being. But we attempted it, throwing ourselves into the project with vigor. If our cyborganic society represented the endpoint of human evolution, then we were a failure...because _we_ were nothing more than an endpoint. But if we could recreate actual biological human beings, then we would have truly accomplished our goal of saving the _human_ race.

We, the remaining Survivors of a long-dead planet called Earth, attempted to become the animators of human life. We trained ourselves to develop into 'super-scientists' in a sense, using the centuries of our extended lifespans to hone our skills in a new science we termed "Biometrology". Engaged in constant research, we pioneered levels of sophistication in biological cloning science that our human ancestors couldn't ever have imagined.

The next several thousand years were devoted to dedicated experimentation focusing on recovering humanity by rediscovering it. We failed millions of times along the way, creating near-humans that needed to be immediately euthanized. We could create the physical body with relative ease, but cloning brain tissue was transcendentally complex and difficult. We were faced with having to blend the physiological and noological...a union that remained tenuous at best at the philosophical level until the late-20th, early-21st centuries.

In what was perhaps the noblest expression of our humanity, we...the collective of robots who considered ourselves as not being human...eventually created human children.

And unexpectedly, we found ourselves in love with our creations.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Now I was drawing a heart on the wall for history's sake. Like a meson bean made out of barb-wire, strangling my memories. Cities were assemblies of human bone, designed by human minds, cemented with the blood of human souls, populated by invisibilities and possibilities...both human and inhumane.

Planet Lost is dotted with millions of such cities.

Love invokes possession. I remember Belldandy warning me about this truism, back when I was a flesh-and-blood youth living in the temple. Belldandy had explained that "Love needed to be imbued with a 'lightness of spirit' along with a 'heaviness of sincerity'...an expression of heart rather than a demand for commitment." In the case of her and Keiichi's relationship, this had turned out to be true.

When I draw a heart, I sometimes think of Belldandy...

Once again, I found myself pausing in my writing on the cave wall, just like I had done hundreds of times before. I looked out at our sun, AmeRa through artificial eyes as it bathed Lost in a beautiful sunset rich with oranges, rouges, and velvets. My tale always seems to turn an existential corner here, when I start to write about the Children.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

We couldn't find it in ourselves to name our primary sun "Sun" because of what had happened to our homeworld, so we named it "AmeRa" instead. The Japanese "Amaterasu", for the Sun Goddess, combined with the Egyptian word "Ra" for Sun God. Our secondary sun, located approximately 1/3 of a light year away, was called "Tai"...a shortened form of the Chinese "Taiyang", the term used to denote the Sun by Earth's most populous country. Lost was a world perpetually bathed in some sort of light, as the two moons often would illuminate the planet at night, and Tai was an eternal orange presence in the night sky, most of the time.

No matter what stellar or planetary objects inhabited the nightsky, they couldn't possibly understand the sequence of tragedies of that had happened on planet Lost. They were the eternal witnesses to the mystery play...as was I.

In the case of our human 'children', our paternal feelings evolved from concern to possessive vicariousness. To our human creations, we were the "Protectors" as first.

Lost was a hot-blooded youth of a planet. Because of the proximity of Tai to AmeRa, Lost had been subjected to more than a usual amount of solar radiation and gravitational constants. Thus, the planet was seismically violent in comparison with the Earth. It had taken continents longer to form here on Lost; the greater percentage of continental drift had caused more tectonic 'hot spots'.

But it wasn't the ground that was our main antagonist...

One of the meteorological realities of living on Lost was the violent storms that frequently hammered the coast. The distribution of land to water wasn't 79 percent to 21 percent as it was on Earth. Continental land masses accounted for nearly 48 percent of Lost's surface. With longer seasons resulting from a 411-day orbit around AmeRa, and a diurnal cycle that was equivalent to 33 hours as time had been reckoned on Earth, atmospheric and orographic conditions were ripe for the formation of large, violent cyclonic storm systems. So we built large underground bunkers so that the Children could hunker down when one of these storms struck.

We hovered attentively over our Children at first, teaching them how to build and fish and cook and talk. Necessity had forced us to abandon the concepts of a barter or capitalist economy; not needing to eat had rendered the need for commerce as useless. So we had to invent and regulate economies for the Children in the early days. As the Children propagated, we guided them along in their cultural and social evolution. One hundred Children became one million Children before we knew it. Because they were starting out from scratch their technology level was primitive; basically at the agrarian hunter-gatherer stage. We didn't want their technological level to outstrip their cultural evolutionary development, so we 'paced' it by a gradual introduction of rudiments.

Our original settlement seemed like a 'city of the Gods' to them. But as their numbers grew, we 'weaned' the Children towards greater knowledge by introducing new concepts and technologies. Sometimes, the Children would pleasantly surprise us by developing a concept or technology generations before we had expected them to. As their numbers grow, their reliance upon us eventually diminished. Since they were no longer so invested in their dependency upon us, we were no longer "Protectors" to them...we were curiosities.

It took just seven centuries for our initial group of 100 Children to expand into a population of one billion. By this time, they were functioning at a medieval level of technology and culture. The steam engine was still decades away, but they were developing innovations in construction and agriculture. We watched as they created religions, fought wars, suffered plagues and survived natural disasters. All the while, our own numbers were diminishing. During a period of 40 years, a sect of one of Lost's major religions began to preach that we Survivors were blasphemous, and should be wiped out. After all, they _knew_ that we had created them...which made the spiritual concept of a creator God tenuous at best. So we Survivors retreated into hiding while hordes of this particular cult exacted parricidal 'witch hunts'. During those four decades, almost 90 percent of our remaining numbers had been destroyed.

Killed by those we gave life to.

Just a few dozen survived, after decades of concealment. The sect was eventually annihilated by one of the other religions, and we Survivors returned to our Children. We were now a scarcity among fecundity.

There were over a billion of them, and only several dozen of us.

We were strangers in a strange land, a land of our own making.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

But we loved them, even if they didn't know it or value it. Being a cyborg presented major handicaps when it came to expressing emotion. But there were pockets of Children who expressed appreciation towards us. Once in a while, one of the Children would seek us out for our wisdom. Because of my specialization in languages, philosophy and psychology, I was often in demand to 'guest lecture' at universities all around Lost. I was relieved when they developed reliable passenger air travel, as travel by rail or steamship often meant long durations in transit. Not that I minded...by that time, I was over 7000 years old. A journey of a month or two seemed to pass like a flash. But the delay meant that I wasn't able to share and teach as much, as I could only take one or two such commitments per year. With air travel, I could take on eight or ten sessions.

I felt that it was important to disseminate questions.

Eventually, the Children fought five world wars over a period of two centuries. Unlike Earth, which would only have two or three superpowers, Lost had seven. The situation evoked the Warring States period of China, as each superpower tried to swallow up the others. During these times, we Survivors deliberately sabotaged nuclear research...hoping to prevent the development of atomic weapons by the Children. But we couldn't be everywhere at once.

World War V started out with an atomic strike...and ended two years later with an atomic strike on a capital city. No one was the victor, except a hard-desired peace.

We decided that it was time to turn the Children's attention skywards...

All the remaining Survivors gathered at the launch site to look on with pride as the Children launched their first manned space flight. A representative from each of the seven world powers had an astronaut on board the ship. Instead of launching a small capsule, as the Soviets and Americans had done on Earth, we encouraged them to start with a reusable shuttle vehicle.

Being a robot-cyborg, I couldn't cry. I had mourned the loss of Urd and the others, reliving the nightmare of their disappearance on a daily basis deep in my subconscious. I had witnessed by proxy the death of my entire civilization and race. My own human flesh had been stripped away, and I had no tear ducts in my "mechanical man" suit of armor. This cybernetic-organic carriage that conveyed what was left of 'Cevn' from a place and time far removed from the present.

Other than my grief over Urd, Belldandy, Keiichi, Skuld and the others being snatched out of my life, there were only two times that I had felt anything like crying while on Lost. Watching the plume of ignition as the spacecraft rose skyward was one of them.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

The second time was when the Children died.

The Children had advanced beyond the level of technology and culture that humanity had achieved when the Sun had cooked the Earth. They were breaking new ground in so many ways, it was astonishing. Some of their discoveries were beginning to approach what I had nicknamed "SkuldTech" in another lifetime. A group of Children scientists sympathetic to our cyborg-robotic plight were actually working on organic computers, with the stated goal of creating an interface that would allow us to be reintroduced into flesh-and-blood bodies. The Children had actually established thriving lunar bases on Found I and II. They had sent robotic probes to each of the 17 planets in AmeRa's solar system. They became highly urbanized; but their cities were clean and efficient, linked by environmental-friendly mass transit that far surpassed Japan's Shinkansen trains. Several large space stations in orbit monitored the seasonal storms that had always plagued Lost, and used giant complexes of mirrors to direct heat around the storms to diminish their destructive potential.

The more things were different, the more they were the same. Music and the arts developed on Lost in a rough parallel to their development on Earth. Art started out with single dimensional frescos, then two dimensional canvas art, then three dimensional statues, and finally forth dimensional interpretation akin to that of the Expressionist and Cubist schools. Cinema became the rage...and the escape from the horrors of five world wars. For a century or so after they invented computer graphical art, the Children seemed poised to amuse themselves to death with an endless bounty of entertainments. But like everything else, the Children grew sick of their movies and television shows and video games...and emerged into a culture of spiritual introspection.

In the next century, the Children strived to develop orbiting or planetside settlements on all of AmeRa's planets. They had explored beyond the edge of AmeRa's solar system with deep space probes, and they were contemplating a manned expedition to Tai's solar system. A trio of observatory satellites stationed beyond the 17th Planet, Oma, had observed evidence of a planetary system revolving around the amber-orange giant sun, with _two_ planets within the theoretical "Life Belt". The possibility of life there...particularly life that may have settled there from the Earth...fascinated the Children. I myself was anxiously intrigued with the possibility that one of the LifeShips may have settled a planet in Tai's solar system.

The TaiShip project was supposed to take five years, but it was never completed. The Children had advanced quite far in medical science, to the point where cloning and DNA resequencing was becoming routine, rather than a lab-cloistered art form. The sophistication of 'youthening' bodies and extending life times was within their grasp...

A viral agent mutated in a herd of sheep.

Within a year, all the human Children were dead, victims of a plague. We tried our best to save them, but our efforts were in vain.

Lost became a planet full of stinking corpses. There was no way that a dozen Survivors could clean up over 8 billion dead. The virus managed to compromise some of our cyborg-robotic systems, reducing our numbers down to four. The remaining four of us bunkered down in atomic shelters built deep into the bowels of Lost for a millennium, until the pestilence passed.

When we emerged from our hiding, the cities had become boneyards. Even now, tens of thousands of years later, I occasionally encounter the skeletal remains of one of the Children, mummified by the arid elements, buried and later uncovered by erosion, or otherwise preserved.

Strange how it is that bones can outlast metals, plastics and concrete...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

I've been writing this novel in the sand, sheltered by a cave.

I don't even know if my life was ever real. This whole notion of me being scooped out of a miserable life, transported to Japan by a Goddess and then being granted a wish...is so far within me. My thoughts betray me as I return again and again to those happy days, buried under the debris of 60,000 years of loneliness and self-talk. I haven't seen another Survivor in over 20 millennia. I know that Lost is still here: AmeRa still rises bright and graceful in the east every morning. Tai still hangs onto nightsky for most of the year. Found I and II remain large pearls against the black sea of night. The rageful storms still pound the coasts every year. The powerup shelves of LostBase are still working, otherwise I'd be dead.

And grateful for a release from a life of hell.

I would have killed myself long ago, save for the T-chip.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Back when I was built, right after our stellar ark of a LifeShip had discovered Lost, the main computer of the LifeShip had decided to assemble us with an extra piece of hardware: a T-chip. Each and every one of us was equipped with a T-chip...whose purpose was to prevent us from killing ourselves or other lifeforms. It was crudely effective, as I found out the first time I tried to commit suicide.

During my first LostWalk, I had traveled across a chain of mountainous terrain, hoping to resolve the doubts I had about being a Survivor. I had experienced so many mental gyres while learning to adapt to a life without sleeping, dreaming, eating, romance or sex...that I just had to get away. With a 'backpack' nuclear generator, I started off towards the west. As I walked deeper into the pristine wilderness of Lost, I walked deeper into myself, emotionally. What I found was that I had become a fragment of who I had been. Being prone to depression in the first place, this tangible sense of lost 'beingness' plunged me into a suicidal funk. So I had climbed up to the top of a huge cliff towering a couple thousand meters above the forest...and tried to jump.

But my mechanical body wouldn't respond. It literally 'froze' in place. No matter how strongly I willed myself to leap off that cliff, my robotic limbs wouldn't move.

So if I couldn't kill myself by plunging to my death, I would simply wait it out. The atomic batteries in my backpack would provide a year's worth of energy before depleting, give or take a couple weeks. If I was patient enough, the energy source would die out...and I would die along with it.

Instead, when the battery pack went critical, I started walking towards our central encampment. Unwillingly. For over a month, I sprinted back towards LostBase, my cyborg body demonizing against my desperate will-to-die. I truly felt imprisoned against my will as I returned 'home'...when the only 'home' that made sense to me was death. A suicidal human being...rendered into a mecha homing pigeon.

I couldn't kill myself.

I tried other ways. I became a stormchaser, hoping to get swept up in one of the violent storms that pounded the shores. I chased after tornados, trying to dash in front of them so I could be caught in the vortex and shredded. I actually did manage to get swept up in a tornado...but after a moment in the cyclone, I was spewed out a few hundred meters into a meadow, surviving the experience. I would stand under mammoth walls of supercell thunderstorms, hoping that a lightning strike would eradicate my misery. But I never managed to draw a bolt of lightning to myself.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

I was so involved in writing the last parts of this story that I didn't notice the chill outside. The only sound in the acoustic receivers that served as my 'ears' was the scrawl-scratch of rock against rock. When I paused to rest, I heard an absence.

An absence. No sounds whatsoever.

I walked up to the cave entrance, and saw the forest as before. The clouds were motionless against the off-blue twilight sky. But there was no motion. No rustling of leaves, no sound of wind against cave entrance.

And then I saw the visible bird.

About 10 meters away, a hawk was suspended in mid-air, her extended wings stilled. It was as if everything in nature had suddenly been captured in a painting. Time had compressed down to a moment.

"Maybe this is finally my time to die," I thought gratefully. My immortality had tired me of life...a crime of attitude, perhaps. Tragedy can write its own epitaph, but I still _remember_ lost love.

My thoughts...

"_Your thoughts are of the machine. Your imagination is of the machine. Your emotions are of the machine. Your memories are of the machine,_" a voice sounded in my head.

I've been writing this story all along. A story about a young man who makes a wish, falls in love, is turned into a robot as his homeworld is blanketed by solar radiation, and then he winds up stranded on another planet.

I've written my story many times, on many rock surfaces, on stones and beaches and deserts and ice floes.

But now something other than myself seemed to be teasing into my consciousness, writing a new chapter in the story. I experienced confusion, because there has been nothing...no one...other than myself for a very very long time. In the intervening millennia, a thousand earthquakes had reduced many of the cities of the Children to rubble...and I had never sensed the presence of another being.

Was I still on the LifeShip, plugged into some kind of ever-looping virtual reality program?

Or was I in contact with the _real_ master computer, the Yggdrasil Mainframe? Would Urd and her sisters be alive? It had been almost 200,000 years since I last saw her...saw them. Would she even remember me? What would Belldandy's life be like, considering that Keiichi would have died 200 millennia into the Past? Or was he still alive? Urd had mentioned how some humans had been brought to Yggdrasil, to be preserved and granted immortality. Were they still alive?

Was Urd still alive?

_If so, then why in the fuck didn't they ever come and rescue me from my suffering?_

Anger submerged into the dull pain of a bleakened heart. My eye-sensors seemed to fade for just a moment, replaced just for a moment by an image of Urd as she was. Urd and her sisters. I saw seven rays of light, seven destinies. Seven beings seated in a circle, a canon of hopes surrounding a mounting cosmic flame that seemed to pierce the center of Existence.

If my life was of the machine, then had I ever lived?

Or was this a runaway dream express...fueled by wild imaginings?

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --


	98. Pt: 98 Chaos Found

**Part 98: Chaos Found**

Like Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, I had seen all those around me die. My heart burned to tell the tale of Planet Lost; I had carved it on walls, buildings, mountaintops and caves in attempt to cast it adrift, to expel and reject the nightmare. Instead of a skeletal ocean-faring mast-vessel, I had an entire planet of the dead within the whirlpool of my experience. Sinking downwards, memoried faces of machine and man, driving me inwards so that I wouldn't face the living-death for which I had been cursed. Unlike the Ancient Mariner, there was no pious pilot ship to ferry me to safety. I was alone; with no voice other than my own to correct me towards sanity.

What if imagination is no more than moss leavened onto the machinery of perfection...a process of mind and being not our own? Controlled by forces or agencies beyond our own will and intellect? Created not by an organism, but by an intelligence so artificial, it is indistinguishable from all forms of life and mind? A 'creator-circuit' that expressed a complex process that hovered beyond thought...an alien cosmicity that uses our creativity to power itself?

The Imagination Machine.

These waking dreams possessed me as I seemed to float away, constrained to doubt both reality and imagination, from that time-still moment in a cave on Planet Lost...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

As soon as she felt the weighty presence of her physical manifestation again, Belldandy quickly extended her senses. Faster than the sharp-speed of thought, more powerful than any possible transits of human intuition, able to leap and ply inwards through the curtains of Time...her Goddess nature immediately informed her that she had been returned to their departure point.

She was back home!

She looked down her front, aware that she was bathed in a brilliant glare. Before she and Mara had been snatched away, the Returning Mandala had somehow been transformed into a funnel of sparkling light. Now that they were back, it remained unchanged...a stab of pyreific light shearing through the grey overcast sky.

Belldandy could hear moans and sighs in every direction. Oddly enough, when she flexed her ankle prior to standing, as habit had forced her to do for the past several weeks, it didn't hurt at all. She visited each reclining form with her gaze...some were obscured by the funnel of radiant light. Her vision alighted on Keiichi's unconscious form, and she slumped in relief. She had sensed his unique physical and Soular presence immediately, of course...but she wanted to _see_ him. To have the confirmation of his livingness imprinted on her own eyes.

Her face coloring, Belldandy's blue irises fluttered wide with the twin stamps of shock and surprise. From the ocean of relief and gratitude in her heart, only one tear formed in her eye. Several times in the "Mirror World", she had all but given up hope that she'd ever see her beloved fiancé's face again. But before she could give voice to the joy that was fire-flashing in her heart, a motion in the corner of her eye caused her to shift her attention. It was Mara; her Demoness older sister was sprawled awkwardly on her back, furtively waving her hand in front of her face as if to test the truth of her vision.

Somehow, they had returned! Or _had been_ returned...

She clutched her hands in front of her breast, speechless with love-desire as Keiichi's presence showered her heart with an ageless sense of surety. Although unconscious, Keiichi's face seemed to return her gaze with an equally appreciative execution of expression. Belldandy felt gloriously _safe_ in the presence of her beloved, whether he was awake or not. It was as if she had been brought into existence once again; a second birthing of her Soul, rendered luminous and awakened by the moon-face of her beloved Keiichi.

Next to Belldandy, Mara grumbled to herself, checking to see if everything was real...that this wasn't another in a series of illusions. She could see Belldandy and Keiichi, plus a woman to her right dressed in a Tokyo policewoman's uniform. The shimmering vortex of light a couple meters away made her feel uneasy; it emanated auras of energies unknown to her Demoness experience. Instinctively, she willed herself to float away from it.

On the other side of the spiraling circle of light, Urd and Skuld slowly sat up and looked at each other with bewildered expressions as they rubbed the back of their heads. The sounds of the nearby Tokyo Bay were silently splashing against the sea walls, just as their sudden reappearance here had splashed against their sense of reality. There was no sign of Lum, Benten or Oyuki...or Miyuki-chan and Ataru. They had been in Miyuki-chan's bedroom just a moment earlier; now they were back to where they started. Skuld immediately set her mind upon trying to identify which action in the "Anime universe" had triggered their return.

Another pair of women slowly gained consciousness from a daze. Feeling like she'd been drugged, Miyuki regarded their surroundings for a split second. A moment earlier, she had been in the Bokuto station with Natsumi, looking through a photo memory album and a medal case...

"Wh..where the hell's the station?!" she shouted. Suspecting that she and her partner had been abducted again, she ran her hands through her hair. As her fingers gripped the thick braid of silk blue-black hair running down her back, she realized that she was still back to normal. Her partner Natsumi's late-summer-tanned face was framed by her familiar pert 'do with the light brown highlights. She and her partner were dressed the same: smartly outfitted in their navy-blue regulation Fall policewoman's uniforms.

The shouting voice startled Keiichi, rousing him to alertness. The sudden shift from darkness to light was painful to his eyes; he felt tears as they adjusted to the outdoors. He was worried that Peorth's pregnancy may have caused some kind of bizarre phenomena. He didn't know who the voice belonged to. A moment earlier, he had kissed Sora in the studio basement, taking notice of the "perfect moment" that Belldandy had mentioned...

He paused, looked at the purple-orange pillar of light rainbowing up towards the zenith of the sky, then returned his gaze on Belldandy. Naturally, he was the first of the two to speak...

"B..Bell-chan?!"

"Keiichi!!" Belldandy shouted joyfully. By her ebullient reaction, Keiichi immediately realized that this was _his_ Belldandy, not the brittle aloof Goddess he had talked to just yesterday at the park...

Two magnetic hearts that seemed to cling to each other through the eternities found motion once again, as she leapt into his arms, seeking an ageless and beautiful safety.

Safety against the disturbing void she felt in one of her senses.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Any sense of relief towards being returned home was blown away amidst a symphony of confusion. Skuld was figured with a zazen-like look of concentration, Urd was furtively searching the vicinity with her eyes, Belldandy and Keiichi were tight-locked in an embrace, and two policewomen were straightening up their uniforms.

Natsumi noticed a woman with strawberry-blonde curlylocks _floating_ in mid-air nearby. In the resultant loss of composure, she let out a shriek. With a cop's instinct, she pulled her whistle and blew heartily on it. The floating woman turned towards the two policewomen and hovered towards them, causing both to pale. Keiichi tried to intervene, waving his hands and shouting...but he tripped over Skuld in the process. Skuld mock-hit him on the back of his head as she cursed his clumsiness. Then Belldandy decided to levitate her physical form as well, realizing that...if Mara's powers were back...then she should test her own Goddess powers as well. This caused the two mortal women to wince even further with panic. Finally, Mara waved a hand, causing both policewomen's 'alert' whistles to disappear.

"Chill _out_, you two!" she demanded angrily. Belldandy floated next to her and clasped a calming hand on her shoulder.

"Mara, you're frightening them! Remember, you're a Demoness...and they don't know about you. About us," she noted in a smooth voice.

"_D..D..D...Demoness_!" Natsumi shouted in rigid disbelief. Nearby, Skuld ejected Keiichi out of her lap with a shove, and then shook her head in dismay.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"W..where's Time?" Skuld asked, shaking her head as if she had returned to consciousness from a blow to the head. She was so involved in trying to determine what force had returned them to the bayfront broadwalk that she completely failed to notice the absence of motion around them.

A simple enough question...in fact, enough of a question to cause everyone in the circle to drop their jaws agape.

"It's not here! Or maybe 'here' is not Time," Urd observed as she smoothed her platinum-blue locks with a backsweeping motion of her hand. Being the oldest of the three sisters, Urd was the most practiced at being sensitive to the ebb and flow of the TimeStream...yet, for all her experience, she could not feel the presence of the TimeStream _at all_. The sense of Time which made her and her sisters unique among the Goddesses of Yggdrasil had been blinded. Even when Velpser and Celestine had attempted to manipulate the Yggdrasil Mainframe to alter the TimeWeb, she could clearly sense Time. Despite their acts of perfidy, she could always discriminate the presence of Time in its many subtle chrono-manifests.

Now...she sensed _nothing_.

Her heart cloyed the words in her throat, as she realized _what else_ was missing. She couldn't feel Cevn's presence at all. Reluctantly, Urd turned her head to where his body was lain...

"C..Cevn! H..he's _gone_!" she shrieked. Her memory was fully intact now that they were back on the Earthrealm; the realization of what happened between she and Cevn was filling her with a catalog of misery and guilt.

Memory, the foul deceiver of joy.

Where life had once been, where its symbol silence had rested in stilled cold physical form, now only dust remained. Even the history of his life and his love for her was muted. Emptiness, cold and severe: the silence that spoke more volumes than all the words of thought her mind could compass. Even his body had been violated, spirited away. Anguish welled up in her breast, a rapt despair from deep inside of her being...a dispirit that threatened to suffocate her.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

In the moment, Skuld was faced with two distinct realities...both of which possessed horrid implications. Cevn's body had totally disappeared, leaving Big Sister Urd even more distraught than before.

Basically, the group had been returned to the exact point where they had started...three Goddesses, three mortals and a Demoness...grouped around a complex arcanical mandala with a light erupting from the middle of it. They had designed the Returning Mandala in an attempt to try and reunite Cevn's Soul with his physical being. Instead, his physical being had vanished altogether. Skuld realized the dire implication caused by the absence of his body.

There would be nothing to return his Soul to.

This meant that they couldn't stop Isilblius. Their plan to 'plug the hole' with Cevn's Soul by returning it to his body had been thwarted. Had failed. Skuld was bowered with the dreadful finality that Cevn's life had expired. That Big Sister's one shot at romantic love had been snuffed out. That Isilblius now had free and easy access to the Multiverse and everything in it.

"You bastard!" Skuld cursed under her breath. Obviously, Isilblius had stolen Cevn's body away while they were gone! Despite her innocence, Skuld was not immune to hate...and hate had certainly found her. Her eldest sister's grief seemed to drum the air; each beat firing Skuld toward a silent rage towards Isilblius. She, Belldandy and Mara were hovered over Urd, trying to nurse the elder Norn out of a complete emotional collapse. Skuld tried to pat Urd on the back with touches of assurance as her older sister's body was wreaked with deep sobbing. But nothing seemed to reach Urd; she was fast paralyzed with lament.

Their carefully-laid designs had been dashed into grief.

Beyond this wretched state of affairs, all sensation of Time was absent. As far as Skuld's mind could see, _everything_ was frozen into stillness. No essences of Past, Present, or Future were distinguishable to her. The absence of motion cast reality into a starkness. The hovering seagulls who poached upon discarded fish from the nearby fishmonger's market were suspended in mid-air like paper mobiles. Everywhere she looked, people was locked in mid-gait, as if they had been caught in the photographer's flash and then rendered into a truthless still-life. There was no sound, no motion, no change in visual impressions.

But yet, there was something even more troubling than the stillness of Time and the disappearance of Cevn's body. They had failed to summon his Soul back...

Far within her mind, Skuld _knew_ that this meant that Isilblius had found his way into _this_ existence.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Time...is not what you think it is, my dear Keiichi," Belldandy began, deciding that it was time to trail out surmises concerning their current situation.

The past couple hours had been filled with 'talk story' as each of the four 'teams' related the narratives of their adventures in the altered destinies they had been shifted into. The tales were fantastic, surreal, mind-bending...even funny in some cases. Yet, her older sister Urd was silent as stone through the whole 'getting back together' sequence. Belldandy wished that the shattered heart in Urd's expression would flee, just for a moment. It haunted her.

A universe populated with anime characters. A universe with a 1960s militant Japan at war with America.

And Keiichi's universe...

As Keiichi spun his tale of spending almost three years in his separate reality, Belldandy found herself willing to give her eyeteeth for a glimpse of her beloved playing to a capacity crowd at Tokyo Big Egg. Or to see him lauded on TV every night, his music videos playing to millions of fans...

She cut short her daydreaming as she gained an appreciation for just how much fame had smothered her fiancé in the 'universe' he had been stranded in. Like she, he had been starving for comfort...the succor that only she could give him. It was possibly even worse for her fiancé, because he had been stranded _alone_ in his altered destiny. She and the others had been taken away in pairs. Another mystery unexplained, yet real.

Not one of them had a clue as to why they had been taken away...or why they had been returned.

"I hope I don't get myself in trouble for disclosing information that is strictly prohibited...but if my suspicion is correct, there is no Lord who could punish me for telling you this," Belldandy noted in a measured, careful voice. If the Lord _was_ here, her Goddess powers would be toast; Kami-sama would yank her license away quicker than Skuld could pop a Bug with Mjolnir.

She was about to disclose information that even some _Gods_ didn't know about.

It was a risk that she would have to take...

"S..sister!" both Skuld and Urd gasped, so stunned their faces turned pale. Skuld was taken aback; her hand unclenched and Mjolnir crashed to the ground, putting a dent in the pavement. Skuld remembered when she mentioned the existence of Vanagdrasil, and how quickly the Lord had reacted to punish her. It was possible that there was no Lord to punish her older sister, but sometimes harm comes from knowledge itself. Skuld just hoped that Elder Sister knew what she was doing.

Belldandy was grateful that Urd had snapped out of her grief long enough to shoot her a look of concern. But just as quickly, Urd's face reverted back to a map of sorrow. She dipped her head between her palms and tightened her knees to her chest, as if that could hide her pain away. Belldandy felt saddened that her sister would even try to hide the emotional turmoil from she and Skuld.

"Certainly, we have to face facts," Belldandy stated, looking meaningfully at Mara. "If Time isn't active here, then it is quite possible that we are beyond the reach of the Lords. _Either_ of Them."

"Where Isilblius is concerned...They might both be gone," Mara admitted with a shudder. "And if the Dark Lord of Vanagdrasil and the Light Lord of Yggdrasil are gone, then we're fucked!"

"I wouldn't put it quite _that_ way, but I agree with the sentiment. We are caught up in a perilous situation, whether the Lords are alive or not. As some of you are well aware," Belldandy began, momentarily forgetting that Natsumi and Miyuki were completely ignorant of the truths about she and her Divine sisters.

"L..Lords? You mean...as in 'God'?" Miyuki asked in a voice screeched with disbelief.

"No, they're not Gods. _We're_ Goddesses. They're...something more," Skuld replied, glancing her disproof at Belldandy, who flushed red with embarrassment once she realized her mistake. Skuld picked up on this and embarked on the patent explanation that she, Belldandy, Urd and Mara were sisters and Goddesses.

"Demoness! _Not_ Goddess!" Mara quickly corrected her, narrowing her eyes with threat.

"Oops!"

"Sh..she's really a _Demoness_?!" Natsumi stammered, pointing at Mara while Skuld flashed white with embarrassment.

"Y..you don't look like one!" Miyuki added, pointing at Mara.

"Take care not to insult her," Belldandy hastily warned, catching the flash of ire in Mara's liquid-orange eyes. "Skuld can insult Mara because she's family...and a child. But you both are outsiders; she isn't familiar with you as of yet."

"I am _not_ a child!" Skuld shouted.

Mara grinned widely, brandishing her fangs. As the two policewomen regarded her with stunned expressions, she made the flames in the irises of her eyes dance crimson-orange; two beacons of fire-wind that searched their astonishment like meson lasers.

Both Miyuki and Natsumi deep-gulped and nodded.

The next twenty minutes were spent in a crash-course lecture about the basics...Gods and Demons, Yggdrasil and Vanagdrasil, Kami-sama and Oni-sama, the Earthrealm and such. Keiichi had heard it all before, but he was always fascinated by the spectacle of fellow human beings being confronted with proof of the existence of the Divine. Both policewomen were completely engaged by the 'lesson', yet he could tell that they were scared out of their wits as well. At least they seemed to be buying the explanations with a modicum of disbelief instead of arguing and denying the truth, as Sayoko Mishima had done for several years...

Resting her hand on her partner's shoulder, Miyuki could feel Natsumi's tension blindly shuddering; she immediately realized that she was taking this 'news' better than Natsumi. Natsumi tended towards 'thinking' with her gut reactions, rather than with her intellect. Miyuki had no doubts that her partner was probably fielding this astonishing disclosure with a deep-rooted emotional disquietude. Natsumi was emotionally raw in another way too...her heart had just rekindled a romantic flame, as she had just gotten back together with her old boyfriend, Lt. Shoji Tokairin.

And now they had been yanked away again.

She and Natsumi were being confronted afresh with another situation that was more appropriate as fiction rather than fact. As Belldandy and her sisters retooled Natsumi's and her perception of reality with their explanations, Miyuki mentally pinched herself to make sure she wasn't dreaming. This was a spinning of Nevermore, a 'reality' that belonged in magical-girl shoujo manga rather than real life! But they were here in the midst of it. Tokyo Bay was silent and motionless, incontrovertibly apparent to all the senses. A broad beam of light pierced the sky like a sword just a few meters away. So it was a magical-girl world of peril...but with one major difference. Neither she or Natsumi of them possessed 'magical-girl' powers and abilities. They were just two policewomen whose calling was to help others to tread the maze of decisions without harming society...

After all, they were only about 10 meters from Tokyo Bay, a visible ocean whose waves were frozen in mid-swell. Everything was suspended in place...and if _that_ could happen, then any cast of explaining would seem to make sense at this point. Miyuki still struggled with the fact that she and Natsumi had just been in the Bokuto Precinct station just a moment earlier...discussing the mystery of Panther...and now they were here.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

I knew from my studies of the Enigma Book that the technologies of the two Multiverses interlaced on a level that functioned almost semi-autonomously. There were known properties of each Multiverse; the Multiverses functioned to a high degree in accord with the will of their respective Lords. Each Lord had been co-created with a dominion for Himself, a Multiverse which He perceived to absolutely conform to His rules. But neither Multiverse 'worked' in a fashion that bore _total_ fidelity to how each Lord willed it to. On a sublime level, the Multiverses shared much; commonalities in essence and movement that neither Lord had observed or even suspected. Obviously, the two Multiverses were governed by Rules designed to keep the Gods and Demons from destroying each other. Time was regulated within each Multiverse by another aspect of the Rules. I had an idea of how the two Multiverses 'ran themselves' in certain ways, and 'ran each other' in other ways. An example of this was the fact that the two Multiverses actually _blended_. The foremost example of this blend was in their relationship to the Mid-Light Realm.

The Mid-Light Realm was formed synergistically when the two Multiverses were created. From the beginning, it was ruled by the Reaper, The Little Boy Who Was Death. Yet, to the Gods and Demons, and even their Regents...the Mid-Light universe was an enigma. The Little Boy Who Was Death was supposedly a lifeless being. A consciousness of void, he was Life itself while remaining dead. His Mid-Light Realm powered both the Multiverses, which in turn provided Souls for the Instrumentality...a repository for soul-consciousness which was later recreated as the Multiplicity.

The three Realms were a 'closed-cycle' system of Divine and mundane possibilities. Not quite in Balance, but harnessing equilibrium nonetheless.

But I had the unerring impression that Little Boy Who Was Death had been _killed_...by something so foul, it was capable of snuffing out the life of those even dead. Either this, or everything I had learned about the structure of the Everything...was a golden pavilion filled with bullshit.

But bullshit in the hands of a rice paddy farmer is profoundly different than bullshit in the mouth of a corporate executive. Excrement or tinsel in the mind of a computer; and yet, my non-existent eyelids weren't slickened by shammery. I could see something, but I didn't know what it was.

Ripened with uncertainty, I sensed that I was no longer restrained by my robotic 'body'. I couldn't 'feel' metal or flesh, but yet I felt a union with something other than myself. Or maybe it was my 'self'. My being seemed unified, yet dissolved. I felt like a song searching for a sunrise, or a lyric fragmenting against a sunset.

Could I still be back on the LifeShip? Perhaps this whole adventure of belonging to the Earth, to the Goddesses, to my friends, and to my wish...was nothing more than a cybernetic dream concocted by a bank of computer modules. If so, then I was trapped in the depths of space...targetless, limitless and lifeless in my self-awareness.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"In one sense, we Norns have a vital role of regulating Time, as I just explained. All Gods and Demons..." Belldandy started to elaborate. She glanced at Mara for a confirmation; after all, she didn't want to discourse about the Demons without Mara's cooperation. When Mara nodded, she continued.

"All Gods _and_ Demons have a 'sense' of Time. It's an actual sense of ours, as authentic for us as your sense of smell or touch or sight is real for you. Because of this, it is possible for either Gods or Demons to disrupt Time, such as when Velpser tried to disrupt Time and when Celestine attempted to render the Yggdrasil Mainframe inert with viruses. But there are a number of failsafes in place to prevent such acts from occurring."

"Failsafes that failed!" Mara noted, pointed towards the stillness of Tokyo Bay with her chin.

"But what about Peorth?" Keiichi asked. "Isn't she involved with Time as well? She told me that she's the Goddess of Eternity?"

"Yes, Peorth is the Goddess of Eternity. Whereas we each are assigned a section of Time, Peorth alone can sense the breadth of time at its fullest expansion within a single strand of Time. But she cannot travel back and forth in Time by herself like Skuld and Urd and I. She can traverse the TimeWeb, but she needs one of us to assist her. For all her abilities to sense the breadth of Time, she can't see the _unity_ of Time at once like we do. To her, Time is still an enigma...she can't see the 'Web', only the TimeStreams and their TimeWeaves. But she does have one very important function as concerns Time. In one sense, Peorth is the 'chance' element of Time. Without her, Time would still exist, but it would conform to an entirely different set of parameters. In essence, without Peorth...Time would become _too_ structured. It would be too...rigid. But to we Norns, Time is much more than simply a relativity that can be explored, or a temporal attribute of existence that can be influenced."

Belldandy sighed, her face fixed in meaningful reflection as she weighed over possible means of explaining the unthinkable to the unknowing. She remembered back to her own youth; all those times when the Almighty Himself had taken the time to patiently explain these very concepts to her. She had looked up at His immense figure and pointedly protested "I don't understand...I can't figure it out!" after each lesson. But His Majesty still was kind to her, unperturbed by her ignorance. And then one millennia, she _saw_ it for what it was. She finally knew what He had been trying to teach her! She could still remember the broad prideful smile on His face when she clapped her hands together with glee to signal Him that she finally understood...

Now, she was faced with minutes, not millennia...mortals, not Goddess-level intelligences. It might be an exercise in futility, but something deep within Belldandy told her she _had to try_ to help the mortals and Mara make sense of the intricacies of Time. Perhaps one of them might be able to discover why Time was absent here. Why 'here' still existed at all, despite having no dimensionality of Time.

"However, in another...more truthful sense, my sisters and I are very much different than Peorth or any other Gods and Goddesses. You see, Urd, Skuld and I...we _are_ Time," Belldandy proclaimed, the last words more of an announcement than a simple statement. She paused as Keiichi and the others gasped in recognition of what she had just said.

"Ya..yo..you're.." Keiichi stammered.

It was as she expected...they were shocked to the core. Especially her beloved Keiichi.

"Not so much that Time resides in us, although it certainly does. But we are also..." she struggled, her mind flickering over what would be the best way to explain this concept in a meaningful fashion, "...that we three Norns are also called upon to serve as are 'anchors' of Time."

"Eh?!" Keiichi, Natsumi and Miyuki gasped, their voices toned with incredulity, Keiichi's even more so. Belldandy looked at the silent Mara, realizing that what she had just said was probably most disturbing to her Demoness sister. And in true Demoness fashion, Mara was no doubt concealing her inexpectation. The mortals could barely manage to understand the most basic concepts of Time; but as a Demoness, Mara had certainly Inculcated a profound awareness of the mechanics of the 'dimension' of Time.

And Belldandy had just scorned everything she knew about Time, turning it against itself like an unfolding origami...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Keiichi was so shocked, his ears were ringing despite the absolute silence in the stilled world around him. Bell-chan's statement went far beyond everything she and her sisters had told him about their many roles as Norns. He remembered Cevn telling him one day that, at the time he had prevented Urd's attempted suicide in China, he had a very real intuitive sense that if Urd died, then the Past would die as well.

Now, he understood the thrust of his late friend's words completely.

"What my elder sister means to say is that Time itself cannot exist without us," Skuld answered, confirming Belldandy's blunt statement. "Don't even begin to try and ask me to explain, because I won't."

"You mean you _can't_!" Urd commented dryly, finally breaking her morose silence. The accusation caused Skuld to visibly scowl.

"Excuse my younger sister, who seems to be set on acting smart for the audience!" she said to Keiichi and the others. Turning to Skuld, she remarked, "Of course you can't explain it, brat! Kami-sama alone is the only one who could...and He's definitely not going to bother trying to teach it to someone as immature as you! I don't mean to burst your little bubble, but you really shouldn't go around casting false impressions. As in the 'you know but can't tell' kind!" Urd continued.

"WHY YOU..." Skuld started to growl until Belldandy gripped her on the shoulder with a restraining hand. This was an argument that she knew Skuld couldn't possibly win; the Lord had waited until both Belldandy and Urd were in their Sixteenth Deca before even starting to instruct them. Skuld _was_ a genius considering her age, but not genius enough to handle that kind of information 40,000 years before it was time...

"Skuld, please bear in mind that your sister is upset because of her loss...she isn't quite herself. So try and go easy on her, because she's liable to react suddenly to any perceived slight or abuse. She could easily become deranged," Belldandy cautioned.

Mara sniggered as Urd face-faulted.

"So what difference does that make? She's _always_ that way!" Skuld shot back impulsively, ignoring Belldandy's warning. "And I _bet_ that Kami-sama hasn't explained Time to her, either! It would be a waste for Him to try and teach someone as dense as Big Sister about the intricacies of Time...especially considering how many times her Goddess License has been suspended!"

"THAT DOES IT!!" Urd screamed back, suddenly floating up in the air over the group. Belldandy watched as Urd's tanned skin toned itself several shades into the red-zone. Her older sister's lips were quivering with barely-concealed rage, the tragedy of Cevn's death forgotten for a moment.

"Uhhh ha! Maybe we should..uh..return to our explanation of _the problem_ to the mortals. Preferably _before_ 'WWW III: The Goddess Version' breaks loose here!" Mara interjected, wince-smiling and waving her hands in a peace-makerly fashion as her twin sister threatened to blow up with a mega-tonnage of ire.

Miyuki and Natsumi looked at each other and shook their heads in resignation. For so-called Goddesses and Demonesses, these four seemed to quarrel between themselves a lot! The irony of it all was that the _Demoness_ seemed to be the one who was the most sane in the bunch. The older sister was upset with grief and volatile, the middle sister was artlessly naive, the younger sister was bratty and argumentative.

"Point taken, Mara," Belldandy acknowledged with a knowing sigh. She smiled at Keiichi and the two policewomen and continued.

"As Earthrealm mortals, the three of you are bound up in perceiving your existence in concepts known as 'dimensions'. Throughout your evolution, the pinnacle of your intellectual capacity has only progressed far enough to allow your best thinkers to theorize the existence of perhaps eleven or twelve of the 21 conceptual 'dimensions' of reality that are accessible to mortal species," Belldandy noted in a professorial tone of voice, pausing at the word "dimensions" so that it was obvious that she was using the word as metaphor, not fact.

"There's _21_ dimensions?" Miyuki interjected, amazed.

"Yes. But these 21 dimensions actually fit...or more truthfully, _interlink_...within the three dimensions that mortals are familiar with," Belldandy answered patiently. "It's a bit of a stretch, but try and think of it in terms of metropolitan Tokyo. Tokyo has cities within cities that are distinct in some way; these are called 'wards' for this reason, and yet the whole is only one city. There are roads connecting each ward, but the roads blur the distinctiveness of each ward. Likewise, each 'dimension' is discrete...but also inter-reliant."

"As if Tokyo could be called a 'city' in the first place," Natsumi commented, drawing giggles from Keiichi and Miyuki.

"As it may be," Belldandy said with a smile and a knowing giggle, recognizing the humor in the woman's statement. She liked the two policewomen...something inside her hoped that, if they emerged from this latest crisis, that she and Keiichi could be friends with the pair. She allowed herself this fancy...and then returned her attention to the explanation at hand.

"However, in terms of describing reality, the theories of 'superstring' dimensions and the like can only exist within the thought-capacities of beings bound within a three dimensional framework of reference. Beings such as you yourselves are thus limited. As such, Earthrealm mortals can only exercise observations and interpretations within the limits of the three dimensions of point, line and solid. Naturally, mortal beings tend to almost universally include Time as some type of 'fourth' dimension within this hierarchy, because they simply don't know what else to do with it. But this inclusion is totally erroneous, since Time exists _beyond_ what you would term as 'dimensionality' in the first place."

"That doesn't make sense, Bell-chan!" Keiichi noted.

"But it does, my love. Think of Tokyo again...but think of the scenario along the lines as if the person had lived only in Tokyo their whole life. A person who has never heard of or seen other places, like Hakone, Osaka...or even further afield, Hawaii, Paris, London, Beijing..." Belldandy said encouragingly.

"That would suck!" Miyuki commented, shedding some humor on the subject. Skuld was amazed how this woman could allow her light-heartedness to emerge in the midst of a very technical discussion. Such behavior was either intolerable, or quite intriguing.

"She must be a mechanic..." Skuld observed to herself wryly as Belldandy continued.

"...and the language, locations and 'moods' of Tokyo were all that they had ever known. Now, if they were to go to Osaka, how would they comprehend what they would experience there? They would have to use Tokyoite terms of thinking, because they would have no other means of interpreting what is going around them. Likewise, Time transcends the thoughts and observations that serve as attributes of determination; the 'guiding principles' that are conceptualized by those who belong only to the lowest three of the Nine Dimensions. It is impossible to put a finger on what Time is, when one cannot 'see' Time like we do. Consequently, what you mortals consider as 'Time'...is as removed from what Time actually is as a shadow is removed from the being that casts it," Belldandy explained.

"Didn't Cevn mention something about there being Nine Dimensions of existence?" Keiichi asked. He felt a dart of guilt as he noticed how the mention of Cevn's name had caused Urd to shudder and then dip her head sadly.

"Actually, the Nine are something entirely beyond dimensions. Cevn may have used that term only for convenience's sake, because the word 'dimension' implies dimensionality: expansion and contraction, finite and infinite, direction and singularity, universality and particularity, comprehension and void, and such. So when I say 'Nine Dimensions', I'm really only partially describing the structure of the Multiverse."

"Bell, this is _way_ giving me a headache! First, I wind up stranded in some bizarre alternate reality where I'm some kind of superstar idol...then I get jetted back here...and everything's as still as a painting...and now you're telling me that 'here' really isn't _here_!" Keiichi warned in a weary voice.

Urd was going to make a quip about "how many groupies did you pick up, Mr. Entertainment," but then Belldandy's face brightened in a tell-tale fashion.

"Keiichi, you'll always be _my_ superstar, whether you understand this or not!" Belldandy praised him sweetly. Her heart-felt laudations caused Mara and Skuld to start sweating with annoyance. Skuld wiped her brow with frustration, and then noticed that Urd had that sad, lost look in her eyes again.

"Why is everybody acting so schizo and pathetic around here?!" Mara shouted. "It's obvious what's wrong! We're back to where we started: but 'where we started' doesn't seem to have a 'when' attached to it! So now we can't even say that we are a 'where' or 'when', as far as Space and Time are concerned."

"Which is super-major-freaking serious, because _we're_ the 'when', you big idiot!!" Skuld lashed out with angry defiance, glaring at her Demoness sister.

Mara could sense the insolence in her youngest sister's voice, but dismissed it. After all, it _was_ somewhat amusing to observe Skuld getting so frustrated without even being properly taunted. Unsolved problems were one of her youngest sister's weak spots: all it would take would be a nudge in the direction of focusing herself back upon her inadequacy to answer the problem...

"Okay, Little Miss Mecha Genius! I guess you're right, even if you are wrong. But you're still a mere child in temperament..."

"_Ma..ra!!_" Skuld replied with a wide-eyed growling voice.

"'Big Sister Mara' to you, Skuld!" Mara said haughtily, the air around her hands glowing red. Skuld reacted to the admonishment with a flash of meekness in her expression, which was more than enough to satisfy Mara.

"So if you're so smart, answer me this. If Time is divided between you three...and I'm your sister as well, then how is it that I don't fit into this Time equation as well?"

"Beats me!" Urd said before Skuld could invent an explanation.

"This _is_ a curious suggestion you've made, Mara," Belldandy interjected. After spending so much time with Mara in the 'mirror' universe, she had learned not to dismiss the sudden flashes of insight her Demoness older sister sometimes came up with. Being a Demoness, Mara's intellectual processes simply _thought_ differently. An intuitive flash by a Demoness wouldn't ever make sense to a Goddess...but Belldandy had learned that in the larger schema, such observations were occasionally very meaningful.

"What do you mean?" Skuld asked.

"Skuld, as you so emphatically noted earlier, we are the 'when' of things. Yet, in this situation we find ourselves in, there is no 'when'. This can plainly be observed. But if this were truly the case, how is it that _we_ are here in the first place? How is it that we even exist? Obviously, we do exist as Norns, because we can observe the absence of Time in this place. This isn't some waking dream; this place is filled with reality. So wouldn't it follow that, if Time isn't functioning here...then _we_ wouldn't be here either? We would be somewhere else besides here, somewhere else where Time does exist. Yet, here we are..." Belldandy said wonderingly as she concluded her logic chain.

"Which could definitely mean that Mara has something to do with this!" Keiichi shouted excitedly. "The three of you are here, which means that the Past, Present and Future should be running here with clockwork precision. But they aren't! And I sure as hell can't control time! By elimination then, it must be something about Mara that is the cause."

"Something about Mara..." Urd quietly repeated in a musing voice.

"Sister, if he wasn't your fiancé, I would clobber him on the head with Mjolnir for being such a first rank idiot!" Skuld threatened. "_Of course_ it must have something to do with Mara!"

"Waitaminute! What if we are _still_ the possessors of Time, but perhaps we are cut off from Time?" Urd asked. "If we are separated from the Lord, then we could just as easily be totally isolated from Time, or at least that part of Time that reflects back upon us."

"Huh?" Skuld and Belldandy exclaimed.

"An intuitive Urd leap. I've come to consider our unique relationship with Time as some kind of mirroring," Urd began to elaborate.

"Please don't mention mirrors!" Belldandy and Mara sighed as one.

"Okay, I'll use reflective surfaces instead. The way I see it, we Norns are the 'anchors' of Time...which means that, while Time resides in us, we also 'project' Time outwardly. An anchor just can't exist on its own; it has to anchor _something_. That something, of course, is the TimeWeb...the expanse of Time that is constantly being projected back to us. Reflected back to us. This is why we three Norns possess the ability to interpret our respective 'regions' of Time so accurately. Because we are involved in Time from the standpoint of _both_ cause and effect, we have a greater command of the intricacies of Time than ordinary Gods and Demons. We are the 'cause'...and the 'effect' can be described as the appearance of our own image in a reflective surface. This allows us to travel the TimeStreams. But in a more conscious sense, we don't really _shape_ Time do we? We don't control Time either passively or actively. The Norse legends have us as 'Fates'; three beings whose conscious control determines how Time affects each mortal's life. Although we _do_ have an impact on Time, it is not one of conscious control. Our relationship with Time is such that we don't...in fact, we _can't_ willfully alter it," Urd explained.

"Where'd you come up with all that, Urd?" Keiichi asked.

"In most cases, what Urd said is true," Belldandy interrupted. "We've used the Ygg Mainframe before to regulate Time before during crisis situations. Also, we _have_ made minute changes to Time, such as going back and rescuing Keiichi and the others back when they were stranded in 14th century Japan..."

"W..what?! I don't remember that!" Skuld shouted. Belldandy was surprised that Skuld didn't remember this...until she noticed that Skuld was looking at her with a "what in the world?" quizzical expression.

"It seems strange, but I seem to almost remember that the guys had been taken backwards in Time too," Urd added. "Perhaps it's because you're the Norn of the Future that you can't recall it clearly, Skuld."

"No! You've both got it wrong! We were in the _future_! I remember being imprisoned by Toshiyuki Aoshima in the _future_! A..and I remember seeing Sora and Chihiro there! They were shave-head abbesses in some mega-Buddhist nunnery on a virtual-reality mountain in the middle of a Neo-Tokyo Mega-metroplex! They even called it Shin-kyo instead of Tokyo!" Skuld countered.

"Sora and Chihiro..._nuns_?" Keiichi said, scratching the back of his head.

"I don't remember a thing about being in the future," Urd declared.

"But I remember both!" Belldandy asserted. "We were in the future, and Keiichi and his friends were in the past. And _you_, Urd...went and rescued them!"

"Whatever! You guys are screwing up my explanation..." Urd exclaimed. Belldandy regarded her sister with uncertainty. How could she have dismissed her grief so suddenly, when just a few moments ago she was glutted with sorrow?

"And I say screw your explanation!" Mara shouted. "Don't you see what's happening here? My guess is that some time in the past, Isilblius snatched you three and sent you into the future. Which means that he _does_ control Time in some way. Mega-controls Time, if he could send the three of _you_ sometime else! So we can sit here and yammer all day about 'who controls Time' and 'who can travel through Time' stuff...or we can do something about it! In fact, we _gotta_ do something about it. And quickly!"

"Mara..." Urd blurted in an irritated voice.

"This is why you can't remember it clearly! Isilblius has been here before, just like Urd thought when she, er..uh.." Mara started to explain.

"When I killed Cevn," Urd finished bluntly.

"I'm so sorry, Urd. I didn't want to say it..."

"It's okay. It's.._snff_..the truth," Urd whispered in a raw, resigned voice.

"Right before we left, I started remembering some events that I _know_ didn't happen. I have distinct memories, like being trapped in a cocoon with SpiderDemons eating away at my Soul...and raising Isilblius when he was a little boy," Mara ventured.

"You...hee hee...a _mother_?" Belldandy said with a giggle. The serious circumstances demanded a graveness of character, but the mental image of Mara swaddling a babe begged for a few giggles.

"...and I _do_ remember being in the past!" Keiichi added. "Bell-chan's telling the truth! I spent _thirteen years_ in the past, way back in the Feudal Japan of the Nambokucho, the period of North and South. It felt like a whole chunk of my life was spent back there! I can remember fighting wars and learning all sorts of samurai stuff, and being a military advisor..."

"Keiichi!" Belldandy exclaimed in dismay, mortified by the very notion that he had been a warrior, let alone a militarist. The idea of Keiichi being a samurai warrior, skilled in combat...was so unlike anything she had ever witnessed in his heart. Keiichi was kind, gentle, compassionate, easy-going...but not a...

"Bell-chan, we had to do what we did to survive," Keiichi interrupted, waving her off before she grew more upset. He knew that Belldandy wasn't upset with _him_; it was just her protective streak coming out, causing her to worry that he had been worsted by life's harshnesses without her by his side to comfort him. The incident with Tyyr only proved how much Bell-chan held a marked distaste for over-confident soldierly men.

"You were back in _Feudal Japan_?! We were taken into the past, too!" Natsumi added. "But it was a _version_ of the past; some kind of sick, weird past where Japan and the Americans were fighting a protracted war because WW II had ended up in a stalemate."

"Which is different than Keiichi's case, because you two were actually in a different TimeStream. Just think of it as an altered destiny, a 'what if?' version of our current one," Skuld commented soberly.

"And there were all these hippies and riots going on and..." Miyuki reminded them.

"Sounds like fun!" Mara commented with a knowing grin. "The 60s was a great time for the Demon Grief Office."

"This...this is unbelievable! How is it that we can suddenly remember these things?" Urd asked wonderingly. "I just.._snff_..want to forget everything! Cevn's _gone_!"

Everything was a still as a reed, except for the sobbing.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Keiichi felt like he was in a museum of the absurd. A museum was an apt metaphor for this stillness; museums were mankind's attempt to recapture Time and hold it motionless. He remembered seeing a Renaissance exhibition with Bell-chan at the National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo. There, he saw a number of paintings that had artistically frozen scenes of time and space within their depictive bounds. And yet, the art works themselves were also frozen in time; looking just as fresh in the 21st century as they did in the 14th and 15th centuries. A preservatorium of life...

This absurdity of a place only preserved death in its stillness. Death was too absolute here, especially with Urd's constant emotional flits of lamentation.

"Let's go with your model for a moment, Big Sister," Skuld spoke up, pulling his thoughts back to reality.

"Suppose that we're located in a specific 'place' where Time cannot project back to us. This would mean that everything is intact, except the reflective surface. But maybe there _is_ a reflective surface here...four of them. Mara, Keiichi, Natsumi and Miyuki. They're the only ones that are keeping us from being frozen in Time. They are...uh, like, Time witnesses. I know that this probably sounds stupid and lame, but I can't describe it any other way without getting super-complex with details. I do know that since they can see us _and_ see how Time is locked-down into a standstill here, they would have to be functioning as our reflections in a sense," Skuld argued.

"I'm supposed to interview witnesses, not be one!" Natsumi said with a sigh.

"Uh, guys, there's a big problem," Keiichi interrupted.

"What else could be a problem?" Mara said sarcastically. "Isilblius is on the loose, Time is gone, we're stuck here without a clue as to how we got back, and Urd's boyfriend's body is gone, so we couldn't return his Soul even if we had it! Did I miss anything?"

"Since everything is at a standstill except us, how are we supposed to eat?"

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

For a moment, the feeling of unsheathed doom had left me. The crushing sickness of my soul had almost devoured whatever was left of my sanity, but now everything was still. I felt like a barnacle on the solid of reality, clinging desperately to the mass of thoughts and inclinations that had been my 'life'.

Two hundred thousand years could contain many lives.

The meeting with Keiichi and Belldandy, having a wish granted by Yggdrasil, falling in love with Urd, becoming an older brother figure to Megumi, going to France with the N.I.T. Unified Club to race in the Le Mans...all of this had never happened. Going further back...my years struggling with depression. My adolescent heroin usage. The series of abusive foster parents and orphanages...

All were fictions.

Earth was gone, never to be replaced. In the schema of the universe, it was as if my home planet had never existed. I found myself revisiting the old paradox about the realm of dreams. Where does a dream go when one awakes? The Earth, my life, everything I knew...had gone to the same place: the Timeless, empty place. The only people that remember Time are those who are trapped within it, those who are subject to the rot of their lives as their bodies decay...Time itself is unyielding, uncaring, unremembered and unforgotten.

I had been spared the physical decay of my body's vitality; but in all the other meaningful ways, _I had disappeared_ to myself. I couldn't even write my story on the beaches of Lost, because Lost probably didn't ever exist in the first place.

More fool me.

Perhaps the master computer of the LifeShip has released me from the scenario of illusions just long enough for me to be forced to confront the fact that my entire life had been nothing more than an AI program. An AI program that pinned me between a 'beginning' and an 'ending', like a novel or a play. Deliberately designed. But designed for what? To keep me warm and safe? To use my thoughts to power something else? To amuse itself with my reactions, psychoses and neuroses? To expiate some unnameable sin I had committed? Or maybe the master computer offered me this...a stain of a thousand regrets, so that it could purge its own inadequacy.

All I had to believe was that none of this had ever happened. That I had never been. That my life...was never a life. No Earth, no Lost, no Urd...not even my own consciousness. Nothing was real; all was contrived. Words of poems wrapped in memories that could not be, spoken by dead lips that could never feel a kiss.

If I surrendered to these fell truths...then I would have something to believe in.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Is it me, or is it getting difficult to breath?" Natsumi asked. Over the past few minutes, she found that her breathing had gradually become more and more labored. She seemed to sense in her skin that the air around her was becoming unseasonably humid and stale.

"We've gotta move away from here!" Keiichi shouted. "Since we're standing in one place, we're using up all the oxygen! The air around us isn't circulating, so there's no way for it to refresh itself!" He repeated his warning aloud, drawing comprehending nods from Miyuki and Natsumi. It was simple engineering physics...and yet, no one could have possibly imagined how such a fundamental principle would bear significant in _these_ circumstances.

The air was definitely turning rankish, so they walked down the pier docks fronting Tokyo Bay. Thirty meters away from the circular mandala and its beam of light, the air tasted decidedly fresher. Keiichi knew that air was comprised of simple elements rather than complex molecular combinations; consequently, it seemed that they could breathe without a problem, as long as they didn't use up the oxygen in a given area. But eating...

"Grwwwl!" Miyuki's stomach rumbled, as if on cue.

They walked past a noodle stand, the vendor and his customers as sessile as sculpted marble statues in a museum lobby. Keiichi could smell the salty odor of the immobile seafood udon. Victim of his appetite, he reached out to touch it.

"Keiichi...no!" Belldandy barked, stepping up and brushing his hand away from the bowl of udon. "You can't eat this, Darling! Food is constituted much more complexly than air; I'm worried that there may be no way we could be certain that you would be able to _digest_ it!"

"Well, can't you just conjure up some food for us, Bell-chan? I'm freaking _starving_!" Keiichi asked, his empty stomach edging him towards querulousness.

"Can she do that?" Natsumi asked. "Can you do that?"

"I _could_ easily create food for you...but there is a problem. Since Time is inert here, I can't use use it as part of a 'tool' to fashion a spell. Which means, unfortunately, that I cannot manifest food or anything else. Enchantments involve Time and Matter, as well as many other magicks...but they don't just take the form of _creating_ physical matter. Even as Goddess such as I cannot create something from nothing, especially since I don't have Time at my disposal to 'mix' into an arcane formulate. Because of this limit, I would have to 'borrow' the substances for your food from somewhere. This could be potentially dangerous, especially if Time here was to resume its normal course again. Someone might be deprived of vital carbon molecules for example, which may cause them to have a seizure. In other words, it would be 'robbing Ayanami to pay Asuka', to coin a phrase. Also, because of the peculiar circumstance involving Time here, I don't know if I could control matter so precisely that I could create food without risk. Besides, I'm quite certain that once I make the food, _it_ will be frozen in time as well, which wouldn't do any of you any good. Your mortal bodies might not be able to break down the food and draw nutrition from it," Belldandy explained.

"This really sucks!" Keiichi said gloomily. "What are we supposed to do...just wait here until we starve to death?"

Belldandy drew up to a halt, her face turning ashen. Skuld kicked the curb in frustration as she realized the depths of this dilemma...and how it threatened Keiichi and the other two mortals.

"Bell-chan, I..I'm sorry! I didn't mean to upset you! I was just thinking aloud! Something good will happen that will make all this go away. It always does...because you draw out the best of people around you. You're like a mega good-luck charm! " Keiichi said, rounding on her and projecting a comforting smile. He hugged her to his chest; when she didn't respond by reaching her arms around his shoulders, he knew that his fiancée had been stricken to the core by his words.

Belldandy found herself secretly wishing that she _was_ a good luck charm...that she and her sisters could come up with something to spirit themselves away from this wasteland. That it would be _easy_ to remedy their crisis. Her thoughts were interrupted by a banging noise...

"I..don't..want..to..talk..about..death!" Urd cursed angrily.

The moment Keiichi had mentioned starvation, Urd's memories focused on her last moment with Cevn, watching him with her mind as his life drained away from his body. The strong impressions of his final moments kept hammering her with guilt and regret. She remembered holding him, thinking that he was still alive...but then realizing that his flesh was warm only because she was holding him, not because it was filled with lifeforce.

Suddenly, she felt confined by an inexplicable terror. In her mind, she saw herself...dying. Her sisters...dying. The mental images were startling, the emotions attached to them felt like bomb blasts.

Death took Urd out of her consciousness.

Belldandy, Skuld and Mara were already worried about the Earthrealm mortals. But the last thing they ever expected was for their sister Urd to fold up in a dead faint.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

When Urd came to, she still felt the draw of Death. But it wasn't the Real Death. Death had claimed her life, but somehow, it _hadn't_ claimed her life as well.

She heard herself gasping, pent-up with a full bloom of anxious feelings. Turning her head from side-to-side in disorientation, she recovered herself enough to realize that she was nuzzling up against Belldandy...or was it Skuld?

"Are you okay, Big Sister?" Skuld shout-asked, her dapple-brown eyes filled with concern.

"I need some sake..." Urd groaned.

"No you don't!" Belldandy answered sharply. Their situation could only worse if a bereaved Urd got her hands on some alcohol.

Urd felt a sharp stab as her sister's voiced injunction reminded her of another person who was...who was...

"I remember! Isilblius took the form of Cevn...and then he _raped_ me," Urd said slowly. Skuld had been fanning her older sister with the flaps of her red and white poncho-jacket; but when Urd mentioned being attacked, she paused her fanning with a gasp, completely paralyzed with shock.

"He used himself to infect me. To infect you and Skuld. To infect every God in Yggdrasil. I remember Isilblius bragging to me, telling me of his plans. Then it got worse. As the disease wasted my Soul, my hatred of Cevn consumed my heart. I hated being alive, because I was getting so sick...I _wanted_ to die, just so the pain would end. I remember being delirious with agony, as if my mind was melting all around me like a candle thrown into a sun. And at the end, you were all there by my side. Mother and Father and Peorth were there too. And then the Reaper came for me..."

"Urd, you're upset about Cevn...you must be imagining all of this. Isilblius couldn't have possibly done something so horrible to you. I wouldn't allow something like that to happen," Belldandy offered, hoping that a direct challenge would keep Urd from plunging further away from reality.

"It..did," Urd muttered weakly, squeezing Belldandy and Mara's hands. "That was the glitch in the Yggdrasil Mainframe. Isilblius _has_ been here before...it _did_ have something to do with Cevn. I was right! He has stranded us here to die!"

"You should rest," Mara suggested, stroking her twin sister's platinum-blue hair. The notion of her newly-discovered sister being raped by Isilblius was repulsive; Mara was worried that once in the open, the horrid tale would cause Urd to rave. She looked for Skuld, sensing that the little one would have a meltdown if she took Urd's story as truth. She saw Skuld, who was back-stepping away from them with an unreadable expression on her face.

"NO!! You have to listen to me!" Urd pleaded, mistaking Skuld's withdrawal as rejection of what she was trying to say.

Filled with disgust, Skuld had to get away. The idea of her older sister being violated was too much for her to handle. Big Sister Urd was strong-willed, sexy, smart, brave, powerful and accomplished! How could this happen? It couldn't have happened...Belldandy and Keiichi wouldn't allow it. Skuld knew that she wouldn't allow it either; she'd fight to the last to protect her sisters. But Urd was so sad, that she was almost certain that the attack had happened. Suddenly very small and insignificant in her own mind, Skuld felt like she wanted to get sick to her stomach. Urd's tale of fugitive memories described an episode so deeply warped with malevolence, she literally felt chewed up on the inside. Overwhelmed, she walked dizzily...

Keiichi stood up, and then turned to look at her.

_"EEEEEYAAAAAH!! GH..GHH...GHHH...GHOSTS!!"_

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Sometimes our desire to remember that which has passed is met with such a strong attachment, we create 'paintings' of delusional phenomena...and then we call them 'ghosts'. But these ghostly poltergeists are not our pasts coming back to haunt us; rather, they are our present refusing to let go of the past. Night arises, bringing to task our recall, then it fades into Day...but the ghosts remain. Illusions comprised of quirky hallucinatory spillage of our hopes, coming out sideways. These sideways plunges into subconscious resolve themselves in our dreamstates.

Memory is a tricky thing, which is why the Gods and Goddesses of Yggdrasil need their Mainframe. For the same reason, I need to remain connected to the CPU of the LifeShip. There has to be _something_ that can record Time with absolute accuracy. Something that can serve as a control group; a baseline or yardstick of recollections towards which our own thoughts can be measured against. The very idea of history, only taken to the nth degree. In the reality I know, _our_ memories are the variables. Variable thoughts that adjudge, interpret and distort 'what is'. In contrast, the machine memories are flawless, while our memories are blunted by our limitations. Perhaps Kami-sama and Oni-sama have perfect memories as well. Perhaps they _are_ the Mainframes of their respective realms; inseparable from the mystery dance of life. But as far as memory is concerned, it seems that everything else...is nothing more than gross inaccuracies colliding with false impressions.

Even Goddesses and Demonesses have flawed memories. Perhaps even more so, because of their heightened senses, intellect and interaction with the fluidity of the Multiverse. During the two years I spent with them, I remember that Urd and her sisters had all sorts of memory problems.

Or maybe my own memory of my brief stay with the Goddesses was screwed up.

If everything is so much into the 'flow', then why do I feel at a standstill?

There was a time when I believed that I was the Ultimate Force. That the Ultimate Force had somehow merged with me as a result of some elaborate wish I had made, dimly remembered now. The UF had used me in order to fight for the survival of the Everything against a force that threatened to destroy it.

Instead, that battle had become another fight altogether...a contest between the 'real' me and the 'me' that I always wanted to be. All of life is self-insertion; I, and no one else, have the ability to insert the 'I' into the ocean of realities. I am the guide of my consciousness.

Or am I?

Yet, because of this uncertainty...I have to accept the possibility that all of life is also a fiction; because I will never know _who_ it is that is inserting the 'I' into reality. No being can ever truly know themselves. Belldandy had told me this; but I had believed it from childhood.

84 millennia as disembodied brain matter encased in a robotic shell.

A moment on a park bench in Beijing with Urd.

237 trillion years building the universe from scratch.

Was it ever any different? _Was there a difference?_

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Skuld went rigid with terror when she saw Keiichi's eyes. Or, more descriptively, his _lack_ of eyes. Where the dark amber circlets of his irises should have been, there were only pools of deepest black. A black so profoundly void, it reflected an eerie light...a pale luminosity that seemed to come from another source, not the Sun that was hovering motionless overhead. Keiichi's face was drawn, his cheeks pale almost to a chalk-white. His body seemed inanimate, limp.

The first thought that wrenched Skuld's mind was that Keiichi had become a ghost.

In the split-second before she screamed, Skuld remembered the reason why she was terrified of otherly apparitions. And of course, her Big Sister was involved...

_Shortly after being assigned to the Earthrealm as an Earth Trainee, Urd had taken her out for a visit to the local temple festival. "To acclimate you to the customs of your new home," Urd had explained guilelessly. Little did Skuld know that part and parcel of these 'customs' was the sponsoring temple's idea of a parade of enjoyment. Games booths, candies and foods, the selling of fortunes...and the cultural re-enactment of ghost-plays._

_Urd had left her next to a well by herself, while slipping away to get another bottle of sake. Skuld had just arrived in her Earthrealm manifest form...so she was feeling more 'mortal' than 'Goddess' at that particular time. Whenever one is assigned as a Trainee to a given planet, there is a transition period during which she learns the balance between being a Goddess and 'blending' in with the mortal species she was studying. Being highly intelligent, Skuld was a quick study...and anxious to learn everything she could about her new home, so she could use it against Keiichi. So she could have her Elder Sister's love back. _

_So that night, behind the midway and away from the festive lanterns, she patiently waited for Urd to return from the beverage booths..._

_Her senses were keen to absorb all they could. She heard the "whooting" of an owl overhead. Crinkly, crumbling sounds in the nearby bushes. The chitter-giggles of the happy festival goers seemed to drift away in the distance. The tastes of many foods wafting though the air. A silent moon overhead, framed by grey-wisp night clouds. Something crawling near her geta-clad feet. The wind whistling with a nocturne voice, stirring the sleeves of the unfamiliar kimono dress that Belldandy had insisted that she wear._

_And without warning, a figure leapt out of the well and shouted "Baaaaaao!"_

_Skuld had unleashed a bone-shredding shriek, and then instinctively floated into the air, trying to move away from the sudden sound. This only caused the dark-cloaked figure to react more aggressively. It was waving its hand threateningly in front of its face, wielding some kind of weapon. Despite the blurring hand-motions, she got a good look at the disfigured face. It was an Earthrealm mortal's face...but it was yellowed with death: drawn cheeks with flaky skin; tatters of hair strewn all over; lifeless eyes hollow in their sockets. The corpse's mouth seemed to silently blare "menace! menace! menace!"_

_Skuld had never seen a dead being up close before on the Earthrealm. After all, Death is a _-extremely-_ infrequent visitor to Yggdrasil._

_Urd rushed back, responding to the sound of her frantic screaming. She literally skidded to a halt, almost dropping the cask of sake she was carrying..._

_What made it the worst was the fact that her Big Sister had reacted to Skuld's traumatic experience _-with a burst of laughter-_! She thought it was funny! But for some unknown reason, the ghost was afraid of Urd's laughter. With one final horrifying leer, it regarded Skuld with its decayed visage, and then quickly faded into concealment in a nearby hedge._

_Later, Urd tried to explain to Skuld that she had probably frightened the mortal by floating up in mid-air and materializing Mjolnir; that all the frantic arm waving was due to a reaction of terror on the part of her ghastly 'attacker'. That the 'weapon' was nothing more than a prop, pulled out of the storage shed of one of the local Buddhist temples a couple times a year for these cheerful public fetes._

_But by that time, Skuld wasn't listening to any more of her Big Sister's lies._

_Skuld knew that it was a ghost. _

_She was pissed off that Big Sister didn't believe her from the start. And Belldandy was no help...she was off somewhere with that useless stupid scoundrel Keiichi trying to catch goldfish or something. When they got back to the semi-lit temple that was her new home on the Earthrealm, Skuld timidly crept into the living room and sat down in the corner of one of the couches. Keiichi and Belldandy went off to the kitchen, completely ignoring her consternation, while Urd declared that she was "going to prove a point."_

_"Ghosts don't exist, at least the kinds of ghosts that you assume are inhabiting this planet," she told Skuld with a wink._

_"Watch!"_

_Skuld watched as Big Sister fiddled with a primitive signal receiver with a cathode vessel display. She turned on the TV and tuned in the Fuji channel, which happened to be playing the "Tales of Terror From Tokyo" anthology. There, on the television screen, Skuld was subjected to seeing even _-more-_ ghosts..._

_Scratch one TV set._

_After demolishing the TV set with a single blow of her mallet, Skuld ran to the safety of her brand-new "Skuld Labs" room. Once inside the room that would one day become her mecha lab, she shivered in fear for hours. Being so terrified of ghosts, she had locked herself up with her strongest seals, so neither Urd or Belldandy could gain entrance to her lab room and comfort her..._

Ever since then, Skuld was wary of the supernatural. She knew that...as a Goddess...she was millions of times more powerful than any malign spirits on this planet. But she was still petrified of ghosts. And of course, once Big Sister Urd discovered this weakness, it was as good as exploited. Big Sister constantly tricked her with 'ghosts' and 'spectres' and 'shades'. And it even turned out that Big Sister Urd had lied about there being no ghosts on the Earthrealm! The whole planet was teeming with afterlife! Within a few months of arriving on the Earthrealm, Skuld's fear of ghosts had sharply increased. Especially after that so-called 'mystical exorcist' woman from Keiichi's school had showed up at the temple...and summoned all sorts of troublesome spirits.

So when she saw Keiichi so completely physically altered, her defenses of rationality collapsed. She was so frightened, she didn't even bother to reach inside the folds of her blouse to extract a Skuld-bomb.

She fired off a Belldandyish-loud scream of terror instead.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"What in His Darkness's name?" Mara sputtered as she observed Skuld from behind, her youngest sister's black hair whirling while she screamed at the top of her lungs. Skuld was moving her arms so fast, they seemed to take flight.

Mara looked at Keiichi...and instantly understood why Skuld was screaming. Keiichi certainly wasn't himself any longer. He looked dead. She looked at the other two mortals; the woman named Miyuki seemed to be totally dead as well. And the woman named Natsumi...

Had fiery red eyes.

Mara felt her cheeks quivering as she gazed upon those sun-orange windows of Soul. There was something blaze-blessedly familiar about them...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

I had wanted it all...and instead, I had _become_ it all. When one is so isolated from everything else that they have no way of learning except by listening to their own thoughts, don't they then become an 'all' to themselves?

The LifeShip had kept me hibernated, and then had awakened me into isolation, cooking up this floating dream of an 85,000-year-old life experience. In the process of feeding this dreamworld into my consciousness, it all but convinced me that I had 'lived' a life. Perhaps, some logic circuit in the ship's computer had concluded that this was the merciful thing to do, rather than letting me waste away. But the richness of the dream can only seduce for so long...then it too becomes tedium. Becomes a prison.

Assuming that I had no body, that I was just a mind hooked up to a cyber-organic interface with the ship's computer, I decided to seek my freedom. If I wanted to escape, I would need to acquire some kind of physical form. Something that would allow me to move about, to use tools, to shape my destiny. If the CPU of the LifeShip's computer was calling the shots, then it had to be _exchanging_ with me in some interactive way...otherwise it would have no ability to determine the effectiveness of the virtual reality dreams it had fed me.

I suspected that the whole scenario with Urd, Belldandy and Keiichi, and the others...was nothing more than an 'invented' life. If the computer had invented a backstory of my life leading up to the migration from doomed Earth, then perhaps I would have been spared the asking of certain questions. A mind that is calm and self-assured is easier to manipulate than a mind that is running on empty and seeking truths. The corpus callosium, the amygdala, the hippocampus, the medulla oblongata, the cereberal cortex...all would be firing at max while I was stirred into intelligence-conjecture about the nature of my life.

Obviously, the LifeShip main computer had drawn upon its huge library of Earth literature to create an appropriate scenario for me. Since my hobby of reading manga was a matter of record, it had chosen a manga that I had an affinity towards, and then it had cleverly simulated a virtual reality based on the manga.

My 'life' in the manga was as much a work of fiction as the manga itself...

Of course, if I was really nothing more than neurobio viscera, it would bode well to keep me sedate by recreating an ideal world. An artificial environment populated with Goddesses, love, friends, even heroism and sacrifice at times. This, as opposed to the brutal reality of being stranded in space, isolated from all others of my kind, perhaps doomed to wander in banal emptiness until the lights went out.

But if this was the case, then why didn't the computer create a better life history for me?

Granted, I found bliss in the knowledge that I had friends, that I had a learned towards loving a Soulmate, that I had accumulated some learning and managed to accomplish occasional achievements, that I was able to be of service to others. But what purpose did the tragedies hold...all the bummer trips of my life that were parceled with moments of joy? A phobic relationship towards women as the result of being sexually abused as a child? Severe bouts of depression and other mental health issues? Addiction to street drugs? Poverty and violence? The death of my wife? Years of homelessness while I was still a child? A self-torturing doubt of myself?

Maybe the dark-side experiences served a higher moral purpose, one that I could only guess towards? Humans, endowed with the capacity to ignite both pleasure and pain within the shrouds of memory and measure of themselves...needed _both_. The superiority of the computer recognized this and acted accordingly by creating a shuffle of variety in my 'pseudo-life'. But this consideration only served up huge frustration and distaste.

Now I'm making the computer into a 'God'?

Children ask questions like "why does God allow people to die?" And the answer is always no answer, it is simply a justification of the status quo. Something like "because that's the way it is", or "because that's how God wants it to be", or "who are we to understand the ways of God?", or "they are paying the dues of their karma." That's great, answer a question with another question. It doesn't make sense that a creator being would allow suffering in his creation. But now I found myself musing over the same kinds of speculative regions in relation to the LifeShip's computer and the virtual reality it had placed me in. Why didn't it choose to create an ideal life for me? I could be a soccer star on a World Cup team. Or I could be madly in love with a woman who is madly in love with me. Or I could be a member of the N.I.T. MCC with a penchant for riding motorbikes in excess of the speed limit. Or I could have been spared the darkness experiences of life...

Why did I have the witness the deaths of the Children we had created on Lost?

Why did I have to lose Urd?

If the main computer of the LifeShip was doing this to me, what about the Yggdrasil and Vanagdrasil Mainframes? Could they be in error too? Could their construction of Time and Space be screwed up? My remembrances of the dynamics between the Gods and Demons were spotty...but I do recall a nebulous symmetry existing. An Ultimate Force that moved in unpredictable ways, such as preventing Urd and I from any physical contact. I also remembered "Rules" governing Gods and Demons that were equally senseless.

In essence, things were never quite right in the Earthrealm, or the two Multiverses. In fact, the chaos was sloppy.

The emotional pain that I have endured in my life has to be something more than sloppiness! Most people would have withdrawn into dead-shell states of consciousness if they had lived through what I had endured. How did my pain suit the higher purpose of the LifeShip's CPU?

"Think hard for a moment...think deeply into the future," I heard my voice in my mind, challenging me. "Is this the life you wanted, this caterwauling back and forth between 'what is' and 'what could be'? What if the events in your life were _all_ true, in every single instance? What if you chose to release yourself from the grip of the LifeShip's virtual reality program long enough to make an educated guess?"

Should I attempt a dangerous leap of faithful insanity?

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Where am I?" Belldandy heard Keiichi ask. She immediately knew by the voice that it wasn't Keiichi who was forming the consciousness behind the words. The beads of utterance she heard coming from his mouth were _only_ sounds, totally void of expression. Flatline speech-tones that were completely bereft of emotion. Any familiar essence of Keiichi was gone. Belldandy quelled the rising glot of panic she felt when she extended her Goddess senses...and couldn't sense his being at all. It was a hard struggle to draw up against the flights of concern fueled by a heart's worth of instincts, but Belldandy knew that she had to keep her wits about her. Shoving her affright to the side for the moment, she replied to the question.

"You are on the Earthrealm, in the body of my fiancé," she answered. There was no use trying to reach Keiichi...he was simply gone. So she had stated the obvious, so that whoever had inhabited her fiancé's body would know that _she_ knew. It sounded almost ridiculous, saying that to Keiichi.

There was something distant in his eyes...or where his eyes had been. As she met his eyes, Belldandy felt a chilling unease that nearly made her lose her cool. She imagined herself being sucked into those eyes if she got too close; just like matter being drawn inward towards the event horizon of a black hole at a certain point of spatial or temporal proximity. Surprisingly, her Goddess intuition didn't sense either good or evil in this void. It didn't seem to be the kind of threat associated with a malefactor; instead, it was threatening just because it _was_. As far as sensing a being within the distance, she was uncertain. When she focused her attention on Keiichi, Belldandy found no hint of life in the being that had possessed her beloved's physical body.

Keiichi had become a Soul-less vacuum.

Belldandy's fear toppled over her resolve as she realized that this might be Isilblius! What better means were there for a foul being like Isilblius to cause her the greatest amount of emotional pain? He had _raped_ Urd, so it was quite possible that no savagery of spirit was beneath his sordid machinations. He could have torn Keiichi's Soul of his body with ease...

"K..K..K..K..Kei...Kei..." she faltered, driven to the brink of sanity.

"«_Where is my realm? Where is the Mid-Light?_»" Keiichi asked, looking about as if he was seeing the Earthrealm for the very first time. Belldandy mentally noted his disorientation towards his surroundings. Maybe he _wasn't_ Isilblius! If this had been Isilblius, he wouldn't look so bewildered. And then she remembered...

Isilblius had killed Keiichi. She remembered it all; powerful images that fused callous cruelty with psychological horror. She had watched helplessly as he broke her beloved's back in two...had strangled Skuld with Mjolnir...had blown a hole through Urd's chest...had decapitated Mara...had burned Cevn to a crisp...had crushed her temple under kilometers of ocean. He had killed _everybody_ whom she cared about and loved. And then he had vaingloriously threatened to kill her!

"What in the Blessed Realms is he talking about?" Mara asked. Urd was still too shook up to notice anything going on around her, and Skuld had been rendered fossil-still with fear.

"My dear Keiichi's been possessed!" Belldandy shout-whispered to her Demonic sister.

"It's not one of mine," Mara noted. "In fact, I can't sense _anything_...no aura, no energy, no Soul..."

Belldandy gulped; Mara had just confirmed Belldandy's worst fears.

"Isilblius!" she whispered to Mara. Mara blanched at the implication and backed off several steps, distancing herself from Keiichi.

"«_Did you say Soul? This is so strange! Your Souls seem to still be attached to bodies! Or in your case, your Goddess and Demoness manifestations. This is totally freaky! Could I actually be Outside?_»" 'Keiichi' asked.

Belldandy had no possible answer to _that_.

"Of course our Souls are attached to us! We're alive!" Mara remarked, trying hard not to be snide. But being a high-strung Demoness, she was irritated. Irritation was a useful asset when one is scared shitless.

"«_O..oh my! Y..you mean to say that I'm _-alive-_? This is nuts! No way!!_»"

Mara glanced at Belldandy, whose facial expression was riveted between shock and confusion. If this was Isilblius, then he was acting like a total imbecile. Or a young child lost in an amusement park.

"Of course He doesn't know where He is. He's the Reaper. He's _supposed_ to be dead," Urd said in a voice thick with weariness.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --


	99. Pt: 99 A Final Reboot

**Part 99: A Final Reboot**

Belldandy, Skuld and Mara's attention shifted pendulously back and forth between their bereaved sister Urd and the 'thing' that was inhabiting Keiichi's mortal physical form. As if to accent the discord wrought by Urd's matter-of-fact statement of the inconceivable, 'Keiichi' was silently returning their scrutiny with a piercing 'glance-scan', as if he was probing their thoughts. A disconcerting dread already pervaded the scene; an additional element of unwieldy incomprehension which did little to allay the sense of impending doom. They were being scrutinized by a being whose eyes seemed void of the spark of life...an intelligence guised in 'non-life' that truly was beyond their ken of experience.

"«_This is so retarded!! I am at a complete loss as to why I am here. I fail to comprehend this weird situation altogether. I didn't do anything wrong! In all instances, for as long as Time and Space have existed...there has only been a single evolution or instance of Me. Every moment, when a being is ready to leave the Living Realm, I create an aspect of Myself to meet with them. Each newly-dead arrival gets to meet with one of the many of Me. No one told me that I'm supposed to provide each individual with comfort and guidance, aiding them in their Transition. But I do it because I like being nice to others. That's my job! I know that those who come to the Mid-Light have an important task. Each and every one of them has to render up their Souls. So I help them, because it's fun to help. It would be stupid of Me to just sit around in My Realm. Since there's an infinity of Me, I can personally escort the Souls on their journey through the GatePath to the Instrumentality. I'm a good being. People are always scared of Me because I'm Death, but they always forget how helpful I am to the new dead that visit Me,_»" 'Keiichi' near-shouted.

Three Divine sisters looked at each other with bewildered expressions, while Urd wiped the tears from her cheeks with a damp sleeve.

"I feel frayed, frazzled and frightened to the point of exhaustion. I feel _old_," Urd thought, trying to compose herself. She smiled in reaction to her self-assessment; everything seemed so ironic, considering that Death Himself was here, mingling amongst the living.

"«_Yet, instead of being where I belong in the DeathRealm, I'm _-here-_...wherever 'here' is! Where is this place, anyway? What is this place?_»" the voice said, speaking through Keiichi's lips. Speaking with Keiichi's breath.

Belldandy was reminded of that dreadful time when her mortal soulmate had been possessed by the Ultimate Destruction Program. That event had been the first real test of her resolve to love Keiichi...she had risked _everything_ to save his life then...including defying the directives of the Almighty. She knew deep in her heart that she would gladly risk everything anew if it was called for; no risk was too great when Keiichi's safety was at stake. Fear fisted her slender fingers as she floated into a seated position and rested them against her thighs in frustration and confusion. Her fiancé was possessed by Death! She was uncertain if this situation could have been any worse than if he had actually been possessed by Isilblius. This was almost as bad! Keiichi was filled by _The Reaper_, the invoker of the Real Death, a being that had dominion over Goddesses and Demonesses alike!

"«_I feel so isolated in this place! Within this moment, I sense that I am an individual. I sense that there is only _-one-_ of Me...and _-several-_ of you. This isn't fair! This is grossly, utterly inappropriate to the max. It is not possible for a single instance of Me to be visible to several beings simultaneously. This really sucks, not knowing what's going on. How can I be here?_»" 'Keiichi' said. He frowned and shifted into explanation mode.

"This...sucks?" Mara repeated, glancing at her sisters.

"«_Look! Because of the delicate nature of My role,_»"'Keiichi' essayed, his expression curried with curiosity, "«_My vital service requires Me to create attributes for each and every creature that passes into the Death Realm. One of Me...for one of them. Not one of Me...for _-seven-_ of you! And certainly not here! It's been an eternity since this has happened! I've _-never-_ experienced the Living Realm before, if indeed this is the realm of the Alive._»"

"EH!?" four feminine voices exclaimed.

"«_This is totally bogusl!!_»" he added, almost childlike in his disdain. _"«Totally...idiotically...terribly..._-uncool-_!!_»"

Skuld raised an eyebrow at his after-comment; his tirade of complaints gradually weakened her intense fear of his ghostly manner. Everything he said spoke of profundity, yet it also seemed more appropriate for a young child prone to tantrums rather than a being who Urd had just called Death. If this 'visitor' using Keiichi's body was the being her sister claimed he was, then he was every bit the equal of the Lord in majestic eminence. But right now, he was acting bratty and self-absorbed. A bizarre thought passed through her mind: could he _be frightened of them_ in the same sense that she and her sisters were frightened by his presence?

Belldandy could almost imagine that she had heard an unsettled tone in his voice. Just barely...but enough to betray his uncertainty, disbelief...and the emotion of fear. An innocent fear that reminded her of her own insecurities as a fledgling youth. But his words were more confusing than informative; he reminded her of Skuld when her sister was over-the-top frustrated and unable to consider anything with a semblance of rationality.

"You guys, I've met Him before. He's just a kid," Urd noted matter-of-factly.

Skuld nodded to herself; _that_ explained a lot! He was spazzing like this because he was a kid! But it brought up even more questions. How could Big Sister have met Death? She felt the push, the sense of pressure exerted against her mind when answers became questions, and what was clear became obscured...

"So are you _really_ Death?" Mara asked bluntly, getting right to the point.

"Yes...and where is my darling Keiichi?" Belldandy added, feeling emboldened by Mara's direct approach.

"«_I've got to calm down. Ah...there. Now I'm calm. Don't worry, it's all cool with Keiichi. I assure you that your Soulbond-mate is unharmed. His mortal consciousness is enveloped safely within Me. He is not Dead, nor will he be as long as I am here. I have been driven from My Realm; thus, I cannot accompany any Souls to the Mid-Light. I have not replaced him in this physical form, I have merely stored him away for a time. I don't know why I've stored him away, but I did. As for who I am, yes...I am He whose domain is the Mid-Light. I am its Regent, the Keeper of the In-Between Zone. What you guys call the DeathRealm sometimes. To you and your kind on the Other Side, you typically refer to Me as 'Death'. Or perhaps in the light of how matters seem to stand, it would be more fitting for you to address Me as 'The Reaper'. That's a much cooler name than Death, don't you think?_»"

He stood up in Keiichi's body, and then skipped around for a half-minute like a child in the playground during recess.

"«_Just had to gain My footing there. I've never been in one of these before. This is kinda awesome! It's like I'm moving, but I'm not doing anything. How come nothing else is moving? Time must have died here, didn't it?_»" Keiichi/Death noted.

"«_In any case, be it known that I manifest attributes or 'shadows' of Myself in both Realms, but My consciousness is always in the Death Realm. In the Life Realms of Gods and Demons, populated by living mortals and Divine beings, an attribute of Myself is normally provided during the Deathing Process. I have found it expedient to use certain forms; so I usually present Myself in the form of recognizable archetypes. These 'images' are those that are readily identified with Death by the sentient beings that I come to collect, so that I may ease their disorientation during the Deathing process..._»"

Skuld felt her emotional stamina plummet as 'Keiichi' described himself. Gripped with dread, she almost exploded into a cry, chilled to the core of her being by how casually he use the term "collect" to describe his role as Death. Instead, she muffled a whimper and wedged herself tightly between her sisters, seeking safety. But she found little security there, and almost no reassurance. Skuld felt her sisters crowding closer to each other, each of them shaking uncontrollably with fear. Her elder sisters were heaving gasps of disillusionment, unwilling to comprehend the Reaper or his explanations. The undeniable mind-stretch of fear was shared amongst the four; it seemed as if her sisters were conduits for some invisible form of energy, like a circle of horses hoarding body warmth in the middle of winter. Or in this case, hoarding fear...because they were overwhelmed to do anything else with the fright-sense. Skuld's trepidation rose in her throat; she felt exposed and microscopic.

They were meet with the Real Death.

"«_...while the essence of My consciousness remains within My realm, the DeathRealm,_" Keiichi/Death continued, totally unaware of the unsettling impact his words had on the four sisters.

"_«There, bathed in the light of the GatePath, I deign to manifest aspects of Myself in whichever form is most suited for the purpose of guiding the new arrivals. My task is to ease each being's disorientation when confronted with the experience of consciousness after Life. I personally explain to each Soul about the necessity of the Instrumentality. After all, _-someone-_ has to oversee the methods of Death, especially with trillions of deaths occurring every nanosecond. But My job gets even more rad than this._»"

"Rad?" Mara whispered in an astonished rasp.

"«_I'm the Keeper of the vital energy source that powers the Multiverses...the Instrumentality. Everything relies on the proper functioning of the Instrumentality. You see, each Death creates Life; each Soul's consciousness is rendered into void. In this way, their Soul's energy can be harnessed, given up to the Instrumentality. The Living, when they pass into Death, provide what you might call 'fuel' to power the energy source. They shed their 'skin' of individuality at the door, and enter into a new Path...one with the Instrumentality. The Instrumentality is the glowing, golden power that releases energies back into the Multiverses. All they have to do is give up their consciousness...and I take care of all the rest._»"

Belldandy couldn't believe what she was hearing! If this being was Death, than he was basically claiming that _everything_ that accumulated as 'individuality' over Time, _everything_ that accounted for a 'self' while a person was alive...was removed from their Soul after Death. But the manner of his description made this information seem worse by leagues; the Reaper had explained the process with the same detachment as a sanitation worker discussing sewage recycling!

"«_Fear not, for I have not come for any of you,_»" Keiichi/Reaper assured them, misinterpreting their fear. "«_I am not here of my own volition. In fact, this really sucks, because now that I'm away from my Realm, I can't make myself meet _-anyone-_. Which could really be messed up, because _-someone else-_ may be in charge of the energies that renew the Multiverses! My Mid-Light realm seems to have been infected by the energy of a living being. A living being in the Realm of Death...could mean absolute chaos and destruction!_»"

"«_Verily, the situation is most grave! Yggdrasil itself has been attacked!_»" a new voice interjected drowsily, as if waking from a deep slumber. The second voice came from behind, from the policewoman with the long braid of dark hair running down her back. Belldandy cocked her head for a moment in wonderment; something about that voice was both chilling...and _familiar_. She looked at her sisters for confirmation as the voice spoke again.

"«_How has it come to be that I have been removed to this Timeless place?_»" a million voices spoke as legion in her mind. A mind voice...and a human voice sewn together with majesty.

Now she knew! Despite the delicate feminine soprano of the voice...Belldandy, Urd and Skuld immediately recognized its origin.

Mara looked at her sisters in astonishment as they suddenly broke rank and hastily positioned themselves in former tailor-style postures, knees tucked tight together, hands resting on their thighs, big toes touching together in back behind their hips. Seated thus, they bowed deeply to the ground in supplication.

"What the...?" Mara blurted.

"«_'Hell', were you about to say, My Daughter! Methinks you have been on this squalid excuse for an Earthrealm for far too long. You know how I dislike such tepid words. Withal, this is obviously not the Earthrealm, is it?_»" another new voice stated, spanning the silence. Mara jerked her head in the direction of the third voice; a woman's voice that came from the short-haired mortal woman. Framed by hues of brown, a tanned face...she could see the illumination of orange-red eyes. Small suns of expression...

_His_ eyes.

Despite the mortal physical form, Mara instantly knew that there was but one being in all of reality that possessed eyes wise with such a breadth of wile; eyes that were handsomely potent with mischief. Everything about the policewoman's appearance was unchanged, except for the intensely glowing orbs that seemed to fire themselves right down into Mara's Soul.

Totally taken aback, she gulped deeply...

"My Dark Lord!!" Mara gasped, so shocked at this unusual manifestation of her Sovereign that she completely forgot to prostrate herself.

"Mara..." Belldandy whispered in an unmistakable warning.

"Whoap!" Mara eeped as she assumed the formal position of respect, bowing an extra couple times to make amends for her tardiness in offering obeisance.

'Natsumi' nodded approvingly towards her, seemingly to dismiss her oversight with a pardoning.

"Wh..what are _they_ doing _here_?!" Skuld whispered aside to her sisters in as quiet a voice as she could muster. "I..I'm scared! Having _our_ Lord here is bad enough...but _their_ Lord is here too! S..something awful is going on, isn't it? This is the worst!"

"«_Indeed it is, My daughter,_»" 'Miyuki' agreed. Belldandy blanched; she sensed more than a little bit of smugness in the reply. Skuld also turned pale...she had been overheard! And she had just compared the unexpected presence of the Lord to "the worst!"

"Idiot!! Do you realize what you just said?" Urd and Mara shouted with censorious astonishment, completely caught off-guard by their youngest sibling's inference. Despite the heaviness in her heart and the weariness of her confusion, Urd managed to mutter a silent plea for the Lord to show mercy.

"«_Silence, all of you!! The little one didn't mean any disrespect to My Brother or I with her impulsive remarks. She is too immature, too childish and too unripe of mind to fully understand what she means by such words!_»" Natsumi/Oni-Sama said. Mara fought to quell the giggles that threatened to break out of her like a bull trampling a matador. It was obvious that He was taunting Skuld with His sharp cunning. His Sombre Majesty had pushed every one of Skuld's 'pet peeve statements' in a single sentence. No wonder He was the Dark Lord!

Belldandy quickly reached over and clamped a hand on Skuld's wrist and squeezed it tight.

"«_If anything is to be accomplished here other than idle prattle, each must direct her efforts towards quelling her jejune bent of thought!_»"'Miyuki/Kami-sama chided sternly. Urd immediately visualized a license suspension...but something inside her sensed that He couldn't revoke or suspend her license any more.

"«_I can only conclude that if the two of You are here, then the situation is extremely dire,_ »" Keiichi/Reaper noted.

"«_Who are you?!_ »" Natsumi/Oni-sama demanded in a no-nonsense tone of voice. The question was delivered with all the punch of an imperial command.

"«_How is it that you know who I am? Perhaps a better query would be..._-what-_ are you? I cannot sense any spiritual vibrations in your form...neither mortal, God or Demon,_»" Miyuki/Kami-sama noted.

"«_I am the Other. The One that you will never meet,_»" Keiichi/Reaper answered. The two possessed policewomen exchanged a look of grave deliberation before returning their attention to Keiichi/Reaper.

"«_T..this is inconceivable! You...cannot _-possibly-_ be the manifestation of Death! It is an unthinkable breach of the Rules for you to be present in the Multiverse in any other form than that of the attribute! Beyond this, you are forbidden from such appearances, except to beings that are on the cusp of dying!_»" Natsumi/Oni-sama exclaimed.

"«_Verily moresuch than an impossibility or non-comformity with the Ultimate Force and Rules. You, who acclaim yourself as the Keeper of the Death Realm, should _-never-_ appear to us, either in Reaper manifest or true Deathform!_»" Miyuki/Kami-sama added.

Belldandy realized that...for obvious reasons...both Lords had never encountered the Reaper. Certainly so! They could _never_ encounter the Reaper...because the two Lords were deathless beings. Kami-sama and Oni-sama were absolutely immortal in every imaginable sense of the concept.

This was what the Reaper meant when he said "the one you will never meet"!!

"«_So how do you think I feel, having to meet up with You, the Regents of Divinity? You guys always think of Yourselves and miss the bigger picture! Don't You see? I'm just as spun out by the idea of seeing you as you guys must be! Yes, I have been forcibly expelled from My Realm. I was lost for a span, until I found My way into the form of this living mortal. Yet, I am uncertain if I possessed this mortal being of My own volition. In a sense, I have been stranded without any recourse to My powers,_»" Keiichi/Reaper replied.

Mara and Belldandy shared a grimacing half-smile at how the persona of Death was addressing their respective Lords. It was at once amusing and strikingly juvenile. If he would have been a God or Demon, he would be on the receiving end of a stern lecturing from the Lords, at the very least.

Instead, Miyuki/Kami-sama and Natsumi/Oni-sama merely nodded their heads at this.

"«_Most assuredly, I am the Master of the Mid-Light. Your senses do not lie. Even the two of You...the most discrete and powerful beings in the Multiverses, cannot sense Me. This is necessarily so, because I am nothing to be sensed. I am an Absence, in contrast to your Presence._»"

Belldandy was completely awed by all of this...and then even more daunted as she realized that the awareness that the all-knowing Lord of Yggdrasil was completely stymied by Death's presence. Even the Demon's Dark Lord was stoically silent. Both Miyuki/Kami-sama and Natsumi/Oni-sama continued to mull silently over his fantastic claims. Their obvious lack of rapport in regards to the Reaper's presence set fire to Belldandy's nerves, causing her to start shivering again.

Despite the presence of their respective Lords, Belldandy knew that her sisters were just as rattled by all this as she was. Never in her 250 millennia of existence had she encountered such an upheaval. Truths that she believed, realities that she knew...all had been thrust out of her experience. No, she had to admit that she was even more upset than her sisters; with the obvious exception of Urd, who had lost the life of the one she loved. Urd had paid the heaviest of prices, sacrificing Love to try and save herself and so many others.

But as Belldandy looked at the three mortals...mortals who were currently the hosts of the most powerful Beings in existence, she felt very fragile...because it was _her_ fiancé whose body was currently inhabited by Death Himself.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

It was conceivable that...since there was a stream of virtual mind plugged into my consciousness...then there might be a means of ascertaining the location of the 'plug' itself, and then tracing it to its source. Assuming that I was being fed an artificial 'virtual dreamscape', there had to be a point of access _somewhere_. But how could I locate it? To attempt to find the entry point, I would have to exercise an unprecedented conscious control over my brain itself.

Since I lacked any useful afferent nervous system functions, the kinds of activity that would 'feedback' pain, sense of motion, and such...there would be no sensory input to rely upon. In other words, I couldn't taste, hear, smell, see or touch the component's route into my cerebral cortex. Consequently, the task I faced demanded the rerouting of neurons while I explored the complex pathways of axon and dendrite. Section by section I would have to 'test' the synapses, systematically mapping all the regions of my brain. This would be my only hope to locate the access point where the LifeShip's computer was interacting with the grey matter that housed my consciousness.

Then, if I followed the assumption to its logical conclusion, I might be able to consciously 'ride' that pathway _out_ of the physical confines of my mind. If I could 'feel' the functions of the CPU's introduction of 'thought-scenarios' within my brain, what could stop me from 'feeling' my way outwards? I could follow the pathway, travelling through the imaginary corridor that tethered my consciousness to the computer's AI. Quite possibly, I might even find myself 'living' within the AI of the LifeShip's CPU, experiencing cybernetic 'dreams' far different from the scenarios it had created for me.

The LifeShip's AI CPU had to have the technology to seamlessly convert processor binary code into electro-neuronic pulses of thought at some point. A circuit which linked biology with technology...

Therefore, _I could conceivably access it_.

It might take thousands of years just to begin to develop any sense of exercise over the neurobiological functions. The human brain itself has over ten billion densely clustered cells. Relying on coincidence, separated from any sensory organs, I would have to focus on rational thought itself. The most difficult task initially will be to learn how to isolate which neural pathways were being employed when certain thoughts and feelings came to the fore. For example, when I thought "cloud'...I would have to measure which parts of my brain were 'firing up' alongside that particular thought.

But it would be even more difficult than this. The brain uses different pathways in association with every cognition and emotion...and the neural-biological 'routes' change constantly. If it were even possible to do what I was planning, I would have to learn to _predict_ the networking; determining in advance where each pathway would fire off the flow of thought. Or perhaps I could discover the neurological 'switchboard' that mastered the whole process, if there was one.

Instead of having an offer I couldn't refuse, I now was faced with a choice that I couldn't choose. The 'choiceless choice', as the Zen philosophers called it, or the 'birthless awareness' of Christian Mystical tradition beginning with Meister Eckhardt.

I _had_ to find out if any of this remembered life involving the Goddesses, Japan, the manga plotline...was _real_. 30 years is a sliver of time when compared to almost 85 millennia of remembered experiences. But my first years of life during those three decades stood out like a sore thumb, always drawing my questioning gaze of thoughts back to the veil. There was no doubt in my mind that if I failed to follow through on my journey towards the possibility of truth, the result would be an eternity of regrets. Something deep within me sensed that I would lose part of myself. Perhaps I had already lost part of myself, and now it was time to try and reawaken it.

And in order to do this, I would have to believe in myself as much as I believed in their existence...the existence of those humans and Gods and Demons all those thousands of generations ago.

Even if this meant that I would have to journey into their pain.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"I solved it!" Skuld suddenly announced in a bright voice; her youthful enthusiasm fanning the gloomy fog-like ennui aside. Belldandy looked at her younger sister, noting to herself that Skuld had that familiar grin...the broad close-lipped grin she would flash when she was confident that she had solved a problem. With Skuld-like boisterousness, she launched into an explanation without waiting for anyone to comment or acknowledge her announcement.

"It's not really a solution, but it does explain why we're all here," she began, fidgeting with the bow that tied back her bounty of raven-black silky locks.

"What's happened is that the two Lords have been trapped here in the bodies of Miyuki and Natsumi for a _deliberate reason_! It was no accident! In this place of existence, where Time has made itself inert, the mortal bodies of Keiichi and the others cannot be adequately nourished, as we all know. But when you put the Lords in these bodies, it's basically like giving them a death sentence. What I mean to say is that when _they_ die...the Lords inside them will die as well. And once the two Lords die, then the Reaper will expire. The Reaper would be caught in an existential 'loop'; having witnessed something that is totally impossible...the mortality of truly immortal beings. He will have no reason to exist. Once that happens, then the four of us will be crushed, because this 'sphere' of reality will implode since three of the most powerful beings in existence would have died."

All eyes were feted upon Skuld...

"«_There is only one being who is willful enough to banish Us from our Own Realms. This dread work bears all the malignancy, all the perfidy...that only Isilblius could wreak. Far worse, there is only one Force that is powerful enough to remove the three of Us to this place. Only the Ultimate Force could accomplish such a feat,_»" Natsumi/Oni-sama stated.

"Sh..shit! Y..you mean that Isilblius _is_ the Ultimate Force?" Mara asked, her Demoness features growing pallid. The Ultimate Force itself was always a terrifying concept...a power that was potent enough to enforce the Rules upon the denizens of both the Demonic and the God's Realms. An energy that was synonymous with the Dark Lord Himself. The UF could be viewed as the Cosmic Moderator of all that existed. But the possibility that the UF was being manipulated by the Ultimate Demon...was nightmarish to even contemplate.

"«_I fear that My Brother speaks to the truth of the matter. Since I found Myself here in this place, I have had no conscious contact at all with the Yggdrasil Mainframe. As is to be expected, the Ygg Mainframe cannot exist apart from Me. I can only venture the unfortunate surmise that Yggdrasil no longer exists,_»" Miyuki/Kami-sama announced in a voice fraught with bitter sadness.

"NO!! I DON'T BELIEVE YOU!!" Urd suddenly screamed maniacally. "You're talking about my parents, my friends, my home...everything I've ever known! Y..you're saying that it's all...just simply _gone_? That's bullshit! Fuck that!"

"URD!!" Belldandy, Skuld and Mara jointly admonished. This was no longer just an issue of a Goddess effacing the Lord's opinion with a blatant disrespect. Urd was majorly _losing it_! One look at their sister and they could see that Urd's fragile state of sanity had collapsed like a straw-pier in the midst of a cyclone.

"I tried! Dammit, I killed the only person that mattered to me, in an attempt to prevent this! Now he's gone...everything's gone! Yggdrasil is gone! Keiichi is dying! The Lord is trapped! This is so fucked up! I don't want to live anymore! I don't feel like I _have_ anything to live for! Even Time is dead in this place." Urd exclaimed, screaming like a hysteric.

Without warning, Keiichi/Reaper walked over and slapped Urd on the face so hard, her head snapped back. Urd looked at him through flaring coils of platinum-light blue hair, dazed by the blow. He reached out and gripped her by the balls of her shoulders and shook her angrily.

"«_Don't you dare _-ever-_ choose to forego Life! Everything that exists in the Living Realms is the beneficiary of those who have came before. They have all yielded their Soul's energies to power all that is throughout the Realm of the Living. When you deny Life, you squander what they have given! You deny the whole purpose of the Cycle. The very love you mourn would be impossible without the energies of their Souls. Death is appointed as much as Life is appointed. Do not meddle!_»"

"Un..fucking..believable!" Mara gasped. Death was pissed off because her twin sister had given up on Life! The Reaper had been impassive, except during those times where his own welfare was concerned. Now, unexpectedly, he had transformed into a Divine counselor of sorts. She was relieved as well; when the Reaper first started towards Urd, Mara was briefly scared that he may be granting her suicidal wish.

"I don't care about your Cycle or you! All I know.._snff_..is that Cevn is dead. He's part of your stupid Cycle now..." Urd remonstrated angrily. Something about her words seemed to pierce the poise of Keiichi/Reaper. He stepped back and stared off into space with those vacant eyes, as if he was meditating...

"«_There has been some...irregularities as of late. A short while ago, I detected a division amongst the Instrumentality. In brief, the Instrumentality is a single environ of Soular Energy, undiminished by individual consciousness. Yet, several times I sensed that it had seemed to have developed a community...as if the self-awareness of the Souls that I have escorted there in the past...remains intact._»"

"What does that have to do with my beloved?" Urd demanded.

"«_My memory despairs me. Shortly before I found myself here, I encountered a being without a Soul in my Mid-Light realm. I already knew that his name was Cevn, and that, although he had passed through the Death into my existence, _-he wasn't supposed to be there-_._»"

Urd's tanned face turned even redder.

"Then where is he?! I want him _back_!" Urd asked/demanded resolutely.

Belldandy was shocked by her sister's single-mindedness. After all that had happened, it seemed that the Multiverse was falling apart at the seams...and yet, Urd remained obsessed with the welfare of her mortal boyfriend.

"Just like me and Keiichi!" her mind challenged her before she could judge her older sister further. Belldandy held a hand up to her mouth as it struck her that, despite all the struggles between her sister and Cevn, that Urd truly loved him with every iota of her being.

She remembered the words of Celestine, words of instruction given to her by her mentor when she was still a young child.

_"The Divine is in every thing, and Love is the means of joining All."_

Once again, from the least likely source, Belldandy had found a sense of security in the midst of Madness...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

In this quoin of my mind, I find myself. Facing me, amidst a stream of holographic windows, fibers and circuitry, was the faceless sentience of the LifeShip's CPU.

I had no doubt that the LifeShip's AI was a deux ex machina...far more intelligent than I. Time had been rendered inert as I explored and discovered the thought processes of my mind. Labyrinthine didn't even begin to explain the complexity of the 'maze' of brainwork I had to map out. Numerous times, I felt an intrusive mind...the LifeShip attempting to confuse me upon the spit of my labor, trying to force me back into Planet Lost. Or some other place or Time. I would be tracing a thought through the sequence of millions of synaptic junctions...and suddenly I would be in another universe. I would be in Paris, pre-Destruction. The Egypt of the Ten Commandments. The Sol Bianca. The Valdemar of Mercedes Lackey...

Each artificial reality was tempting, because it possessed a grace of being far better than the situation on Planet Lost, or the chain-link of pain I experienced while in a human body. I would find myself seduced by the charm of being in a 'story', of being joyously happy...and then I would somehow see through the charade.

It was all just in my mind anyway.

I would seamlessly shift from participant to reluctant audience in these scenarios. Then I would discover the lie, discard my 'link' by stoppering up the inflow of cybernetic information, and then resume my work. I sensed that I was getting closer to my answer, because the 'attacks' by the LifeShip's AI were more intense, more pleasurable. The vividly created world-scapes that the computer assailed me with were directly targeting the pleasure centers of my brain. With each succeeding recoil from the blissful cybernetic dreams that the computer had plunged me into, I would experience further withdrawal into anhedonism. Letting go of each fictional 'reality' only brought forth more pain.

A tightening circle of bliss and agony.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

I knew the contours of this electronic cavern quite well. When one struggles against their imprisoning environment, the walls become acute statements of limitation. Studied, the cavern's chaos may reveal patterns...yet when I looked for doors, I only found windows and mirrors. I searched for a floor, only to find walls. I punched, only to be punched back by holographic clones of myself. This virtual data-sphere was the ultimate freakshow mirror house, a labyrinth poised within the labyrinth of my own thoughts. Yet, subtle changes in environment clued me into a purpose; I sensed that I was no longer mired exclusively within the realm of my consciousness. This _wasn't_ me: the encompassing cavern of abstractions that surrounded me was the living mind-matter of the LifeShip's AI computer.

It had taken forever just to get here.

The closer I had approached the source of my 'daydreams', the more I had to train myself to think like a machine. Symmetry, rather than fuzziness. Shedding ethic and conjecture, and then replacing these with logic and heuralisms. The comic irony of my situation was that I had to mentally become a machine, in order to infiltrate the machine. I, who had spanned 85 millennia in the hard metal casing of a robotic cyborg.

The cavern didn't respond like an artificial virtual reality would. If I thought "punch', the simulated bounds of the cavern would simply sag against the blow. Nothing was solid, nothing was liquid, nothing was gaseous. All around me was a multifaceted glow, as if I was surrounded by billions of TV sets and computer monitors. I surmised that my mind was crafting these mental images to lend some appearance of tangibility to the 'cavern' I found myself inside of. A form of psychological defense against the imperceptible 'otherness' of the place. Otherwise, the alien complexity would bleed through and overwhelm my consciousness, riding me down like a psychedelic bull-horned screamdown. Tight-wired between impulses of creative thinking and pulses of binary instruction code, I pressed on.

I finally managed to hex myself though the cybernetic veil that surrounded me. By sheer dint of willpower, aided by accident or incident, I jumped off the cliff into the valley of my fears. Strangely, the mental impressions I experienced were that of diving _out_ of a pool. Exiting the 'cavern', the complete reverse of environments staggered my concentration momentarily. My thoughts were nebulous, yet only to find that I had been rebirthed into something utterly familiar.

I was in Japan.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

The sudden burst of reality was almost a shock to my senses. I could smell the air, taste my breath, feel touch and sound in my body. My senses had awakened, while my mind was stuttering with shock as it interpreted sensations that had been absent for most of my dreaming life.

The trees, the cicadas, the smell, the sound of the grass, the sun in the sky rising from the east, the calls of the doves...were all Japanese. I knew this deep in the marrow of my being. It was all familiar, so familiar.

Gasping, I clutched myself against the large rock...the very same rock I had desperately clawed to the first time...when I was first brought to the temple by Urd, after she had conveyed my wish-plea to the Yggdrasil Mainframe.

_"Cevn honey!"_

A cleaving side-track.

As the voice repeated itself, I noticed it anew. To my utter shock, I was hearing the voice _as it was_! The dulcet tones of the woman's voice were devoid of the ever-so-slight clicker-chatter; the mechanical distortion typical of all the sounds I had ever heard through my robotic 'ears'. Blandly, I reached up and rubbed my face.

I felt skin.

Fired with surprise, my hands guided themselves up and down my face, as if they were driven by their own devises. I could feel the bow of my earlobes, the long hair tracing on my face, the curve of my jaw. One whole side of my face was cheeked against the hard rock...and I could _feel_ its no-give slate, a cool roughness against my face and hands.

"Cevn! What are you doing out here? And why are you stroking your face like that? Did you forget to shave this morning? Hurry up, you've gotta get going! It's already getting late!" the voice hailed.

"Huh?" I gasped.

"Your 8am class, dimwit! For Lord's sake, what would you do without me? How can you be a professor at a major technical institute, and an adjunct faculty member of Tokyo University...and still be so dumb?! Admitted, you're pretty _cute_ when you're so dumb...but that doesn't excuse you from acting like an idiot of the first rank! Or maybe I'm the idiot, because I married you!" a familiar voice teased.

I went rigid, realizing that it was _her_ voice.

"Muh..muh..married?!" I sputtered. It was my _own voice_, not the mechanical speaker-phone voice that I used as a 'voice'. Swallowed by my own vox, I was gripped by uncertainty. I just couldn't look for the other voice, because I was all too certain that it wouldn't be her. Obviously, my imagination had intervened; all I could picture in my head was an image of a robot, whose cyborg-organic mecha voice only sounded like Urd's. More realistically, I sensed that this whole scenario was crafted by unconscious urges. Some burning part of my brain was spewing forth a mega-hallucination. A deep-seated delusion that mimed the one tender situation that I longed for the most in my life.

So I kept my face pressed hard against the rock.

"But I have a face!" my mind reasoned feverishly. My head wasn't woven plates of metal, it wasn't paint and plastic and grill-orifice...it was _real_! As real as I could remember: warm, soft, vibrant flesh. I fingered a kneading touch down my neck, and then rested my fingers against it and pressed the flesh lightly. I felt a pulsing sensation, regular and sensible. It wasn't just the outside surface that I was sensing, I could feel my jugular vein!

If I had a face, maybe I had a body. A _human_ body! And if I had a human form...then could the voice that I'm hearing have a face as well?

Sucking in a deep breath..."a breath?" I observed in amazement...I finally found the courage to turn towards Urd's voice.

A Goddess was revealed to my eyes...a beautiful woman with bronze-tanned skin, wearing a plush morning robe with floral patterns, drawn over her pajamas and sashed at her waist. Long locks of shiny platinum hair cascaded down her back, gradually shedding their diamond-white color as they softened to a very light blue-purple at their ends. A blue triangular mark drew my attention to her forehead, matched by triangles high on her cheeks. Surrounded by her Goddess markings, two sparkling eyes...eyes that were filled with emerald mysteries; a verdigris of passion and love and wisdom...

"U..Urd?!" I choked.

"Who else would be out here at 7am in the morning, watching you hug a rock? Are you okay, honey? You seemed to go away for a moment," she asked, reacting to my words. She regarded me intently; sensing my confused emotions, her concern seemed to deepen. Without hesitation, she knelt down close to me.

"Oh my...oh.._snff_..oh my God! I'm.._snff_.._home_!!" I sputtered as a thousand stumbling lifetimes of tears welled up and over the brow of my consciousness.

"I'm back home!" my mind shouted. Urd returned my words with a whispered "of course you're home."

I looked at Urd and nothing else. She was a universe. My whole being felt like it would melt away in given the chance. In an instant, I had returned to where I truly wanted to be.

I had returned to Love.

"You're looking at me...as if you've never seen me before!" she noted warily, reaching up and cupping my cheeks with her hands, regarding me with a worried mien. As she reached towards me, I saw a glint...a band of gold and a large gold band mounted with a brilliant gem, glimmering on her ring finger in the early morning sunlight.

Without cause or effect, I simply collapsed against her, letting her pull me in, letting her surround me. I hugged Urd for dear life, as if she was a precious lifeboat in the midst of a raging sea, a ship of succor and security that might be overturned by a violent ocean wave at any given moment.

Tears, like jeweled pearls, pattered from eyes that were no longer fiber-optic latticework cameras.

My long nightmare had ended.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"I..remember what happened!" Urd said, almost out of breath from crying. "If the Yggdrasil Mainframe is offline, then these memories aren't being blocked. They're even _more_ authentic, because we _aren't_ linked to the Ygg Mainframe at all anymore! So everything I discovered about Cevn and Isilblius is true!"

Belldandy's heart fluttered with relief as her older sister finally seemed to be acting rationally again. Skuld's analysis of their situation wasn't very optimistic; the situation itself was very draining.

"«_Your astute observation does not change matters, young Norn. This situation is unprecedented, and extremely discomfiting. It tears at the very pillars that uphold the vaults of Reality._ »" Natsumi/Oni-sama noted discouragingly. "«_Nought was done to predict or prevent these mishappenstances. The damage has already been done. I can feel this mortal shell weakening, ebbing away with the passing of every moment._»"

"Your Dark Eminence!" Mara shouted. "You cannot die! It's something...I _refuse_ to believe. I will not accept it!"

"«_This is not all. The _-sameness-_ of all things here, due to the inability of Time to seek its passage, is causing Me great distress. I am used to overseeing all of Yggdrasil. The Time and Space of the entire Yggdrasil Multiverse is My responsibility. My mind is often engaged in weighty decisions of creation. Yet, in this dearthful place, I have nothing to attend to. Everything is stillness...and it is driving Me away from My sanity,_»" Miyuki/Kami-sama observed.

"«_Even here, in the Realm of the Living, I find myself weakening as well. I agree that these are the most major of doldrums. How can anything survive in this boring place?_»" Keiichi/Reaper added.

"Would you all just...shut up! Please! This is bad enough, without the three of you complaining..." Urd interjected, adding "...with all due respect."

Belldandy felt an awkwardness as she realized that, most likely, the two Lord and the Reaper had less powers than she and her sisters. Urd's apology wasn't done to fend off a reprisal, it was offered in the vein of respect. An unnecessary concession, perhaps...

"Mara, I find it hard to believe that you, of all Demons, would attempt to raise the Ultimate Demon from the limbos," Belldandy began. "Taking risks is one thing, but toying with such a powerful entity is nothing more than foolhardiness! Calling Isilblius 'the Ultimate Demon' is misleading, as you noted earlier. He is the enemy of all that exists. And yet, you awakened him."

"It's all because of that stupid book Cevn had! I got the idea when I snuck into your temple soon after he arrived. Of course, I was curious when my SereHawk patrols discovered that you had _another_ mortal in the temple. His presence there had no sensible explanation, so I had to go and find out why he was there. Once I observed him, I discovered that book of his. I was totally blown away when I read the title, which mentioned something about the 'the One'. The sight of the book possessed me with ambition; it was as if I became enchanted. Me...I can't even get the more obtuse Demonic curses right! Summoning the Ultimate Demon makes even the most complex curses and poisons seem like child's play. No Demoness in her right mind would try to resurrect him. But I did..." Mara said, her voice betraying her weary sense of guilt.

"So it was _after_ you read the Enigma Book that you became obsessed?" Belldandy asked. When Mara nodded her head, Belldandy cleared her mind, trying to reflect on this fact with lucidity.

"I believe that it is possible that Isilblius might have planted the Enigma Book in our midst, hoping that you would encounter it. When Urd asked our Lord about the Book, He denied its existence. Also, Cevn was always uncertain as to the origin of the Enigma Book."

"But I wrote something in it! Something at the end of the book...because I felt that it would be important," Skuld interrupted. All eyes turned to her.

"I..._felt_...something in the Future that compelled me to write something in the back of the Enigma Book. Which is kinda funny...because now there's no Future," she explained.

"Or perhaps there is. For as long at the four of you exist along with the three of Us, then Time does have a passageway. Perhaps we can redeem this truth and use it to our advantage. The column of light over there certainly isn't just there for show. It's moving like the inside of the GatePath in My Mid-Light Realm..." Keiichi/Reaper noted soberly.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

After helping me into the temple and into my bedroom, Urd called N.I.T. and Tokyo University to inform them that I wouldn't be in to teach my classes.

Belldandy, Skuld and Tomohisa were the only others at the temple, as Keiichi, Genji and Megumi were all at school. Tomohisa was being tended by Skuld, who was nursing him through a bout of the flu. Occasionally, I could overhear them arguing...Skuld wanted to immediately cure Tomohisa, so he could study for his college entrance exams. Tomohisa argued that he didn't want to be 'instantly well', because it wasn't 'normal' to be snapped out of an illness just because his girlfriend wanted to be helpful. Belldandy finally had to intervene, reminding Skuld that she shouldn't overdo things by always trying to use her Goddess powers to make life easier for her mortal boyfriend. Then Urd joined in, quipping that Skuld would probably screw up the healing spell so bad, she would make Tomohisa miss a whole term of school by worsening his asthma.

Sibling chaos promptly ensued.

Things were definitely normal here.

As I lay in my futon, still disoriented by the ability to 'feel' a biological form surrounding my consciousness, I surveyed my bedroom. The room had definitely changed. Several hanging vases of flowers were being sunned by the open jalousie windows. The single dresser I used for clothes was replaced by two tall ornate pieces of case furniture. I recognized them as Ming Dynasty replicas, with inlaid black lacquer bases filigreed with pearl and silver floral patterns. Two bookshelves were gone, replaced by several vases of flowers and a stuffed animal...

My eyes were drawn to framed photo on the nightstand.

A wedding photo of Urd and myself.

"By the Lord, that younger sister of mine drives me crazy sometimes! Almost as crazy as _you_ can make me!" Urd said, sliding the shoji door shut behind her. Her familiarity with the room knelled me with the realization that this wasn't just 'my' room any more.

"I make you crazy?" I asked.

"Yep! All sorts of crazy. Crazy happy, crazy angry, crazy confused, crazy amused, crazy sexy, crazy...just crazy!" Urd answered, winking at me.

"Urd, you won't believe what has happened..." I started to explain. My voice was clobbered by hulking sobs as the intensity of the moment washed over me. Once again, joy overmounted my composure.

"What is the _matter_ with you? If I didn't know better, you seem to have come down with terminal 'crybaby-itis'! You act like you just returned from Vanagdrasil after being chased by a herd of kangaroos. Either that, or you slept on a cosmic sandglass," Urd asked softly. But she listened silently as I started my story.

When I finished, the afternoon sun was starting to grey. I was so involved with my tale, I didn't even notice that Skuld and Belldandy had joined their sister. All three Norns had tears in their eyes. Who wouldn't, once I gave voice to the arduous tragedies I had experience on Planet Lost? I couldn't even begin to describe how I had been imprisoned by the LifeShip's AI...

Now I was safe.

"Oh my! Dinner!" Belldandy blurted with embarrassment. "My dear Keiichi's going to be home from his evening Linear Engineering Systems class...and I won't have dinner ready!"

"Don't worry, Bell! Big Sister will help you cook dinner!" Urd announced. Belldandy reacted with a heaving sigh of relief.

"Linear Engineering Systems? Isn't that an undergrad course? Keiichi's in _grad_ school. Why would he be backtracking courses?" I interjected.

"You don't know anything, do you? Keiichi _teaches_ that class!" Skuld said with a mischievous grin. She added, "You must have gone way-way-out to forget something like that!"

Keiichi...was an instructor at N.I.T.?!

"Uh, Skuld...what year is this?" I asked in a stutter. Without a word, she pointed towards the calendar. I sat up in the futon to see the calendar better.

The Whirlwind Repair Shoppe calendar was flapped open to the "February" page. The February page that was from three years in the future!

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Skuld was pacing back and forth along the pier that extended out into Tokyo Bay. The lack of motion was unnerving her. Fish were drawn up in nets, frozen in mid-gyration. Skuld could almost imagine seeing them flopping around inside the nets as the hoists carried the full fishnets towards the containers. The sky was one large airsculpture, a canvas of moments suspended overhead. A sailor was standing at the edge of the pier, smoking a cigarette. The smoke curled from the tip; Skuld waved a hand through it and part of it broke off and fell to the group as if it was solid.

Time didn't work here, but gravity did.

She was trying to remember _what_ she had written in the Enigma Book. She remembered writing _something_, but she sensed that she had been Mindwiped shortly thereafter, for some reason. That could be the only explanation for the fuzziness of certain of her memories. In contrast, her three sisters seemed to be remembering things quite accurately. Skuld felt a moment's worry as she remembered how Urd was in the thralls of amnesia, back when she first encountered her eldest sister on Oyuki's planet. A Neptune populated with damsels in winter kimonos whose silicon-hair sparkled with varying shades of ice-blue.

"What did I write?" she asked herself again. She walked up and kicked one of the trash bins on the pier. Objects seemed harder now that they were frozen...which made sense, because the atoms and molecules weren't moving around. The Lord, the Demon's Lord, and the Reaper...they would all die when the mortal bodies they inhabited starved. But for she and her sisters...

An endless day of eternity Now.

"I'm not going to let that happen!" the youngest Norn promised herself.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

As I ate dinner, my mind whirled wary tiles of discomfort. The calendar said "February", but I swore that I heard cicadas outside. A minor inconsistency, but one that I would have to clear up with Urd after dinner. Perhaps she, like me, was prone to forgetting to change the pages of the calendar.

The other surprise was Urd's cooking. Before dinner, Urd had announced that she and Belldandy had cooked up a 'homecoming' dinner for me, since I felt that I had been away for awhile. I didn't know if I had been away, or if they were simply humoring me. I _did_ know that the Urd that I remembered would never 'dirty' herself with house chores, let alone cooking. But she claimed to have baked up a deluxe Beef Wellington dish, with a medley of Cajun vegetables over brown rice.

And Skuld was devouring the vegetable-race combo feverishly.

Skuld didn't like brown-rice...or spicy foods.

After dinner, Urd sipped a glass of wine and suggested that I go back to bed to rest up from my flu. Evidently, she felt that my disorientation was attributable to a high fever accompanied by nightmares. I didn't remember the fever, and I certainly was so stoked to be in a _real_ biological body that I would have probably shrugged off any discomfort. She did point out one very interesting question:

How does someone 'imagine' so many millennia of life experiences?

Why couldn't I convince her about my journey into the dark harbors of tragedy? It was as if she wanted to deny that any of my experiences on Planet Lost had ever happened.

I drank a sip of tea...

Urd silently opened the shoji door and closed it. Perhaps she was thinking that I was asleep. When she noticed that I was awake, she grinned at me and started undoing her blouse.

"U..Urd, what are you doing?!" I shouted.

"I'm getting undressed, just like I have for the seven and a half years that I have been here on the Earthrealm. Don't worry, you're not going to see anything that you haven't seen before," she answered coyly.

Torn between fascination and fear, I turned my head away.

A moment later, a naked Urd slipped under the covers of the futon.

"I know just the thing that will make you feel better," she whispered in my ear.

"Eh?" I intoned.

_"S..E..X."_

"Wahhh!" I blurted out.

"C'mon, I know you want to. Not just by tuning into all the hundreds of indicators in your mind and body, either. It's written all over your face, Cevn honey," she purred. I could feel her hand stroking my bare chest. I reached up and restrained it.

"Urd...this isn't right! W..we can't be doing this. I just returned here, and I'm only now getting used to being in a regular human body. Now, you want to..."

"Make love to you. A healing love, because you've been very sick and you need a soft, sensitive touch of passion," she finished.

Something was wrong here. Urd was always cupidic, sexy, sultry in almost an infinite amount of ways. But she seemed to change after we had been together for a while. She was no longer the 'naughty' Goddess who was unafraid to explore sexual matters. Her manner of dress was still fetching, but it wasn't so revealing as before. It seemed as if _something_ had put a fear in her, a fear of sexual intimacy that hadn't been present before.

I just couldn't put a finger on it, but I sensed that something was very amiss here.

When I refused her twice again, Urd responded with disappointment. She seemed to empathize with my situation to some degree, but it was apparent that she was crestfallen. She teased me about 'being bored' with her because of married life. This was more in lines with the Urd that I knew; always making light of a situation to hide her deeper feelings of frustration.

My own feelings were confused. I fought past centuries of crystal-clear memories, only to find that I was still afraid of women. Afraid of intimacy. I looked up at the wedding portrait...

Someone was missing.

"Urd...where's Mara?" I asked.

"Huh? Come again?"

"I'm looking at our wedding portrait, and I don't see Mara in it. So I was wondering why she isn't in the picture."

"Of course she wasn't part of our wedding, my love. She's a Demoness!" Urd replied with a "how could you miss something so obvious?" affectation of voice.

How could I miss something so obvious.

"Urd...I want to know the truth. Mara is _your twin sister_! There's no reason why she wouldn't be part of your..er, our..wedding. Why is it that there are cicadas outside in _February_? Since when did Skuld develop a liking for brown rice and spicy foods? Your youngest sister swore off all spicy foods after Keiichi played that prank on her when she first came to the Earthrealm! But what I really want to know is why Belldandy and Keiichi _aren't_ married, while we married. Why are _we_ married and not your sister and Keiichi?"

Urd could only look at me pensively.

"This isn't reality!" I shouted, so loud that it brought everyone to my room. I looked at Keiichi, Skuld, Belldandy, Megumi, Tomohisa and Genji...

"Calm down, Cevn!" Urd pleaded. I sat up in my bed, and she scooped two handfuls of bed sheeting to cover herself as she sat up as well.

"Okay...if this isn't reality, then I shouldn't be able to do this!" I yelled, grabbing the knife that I had stashed under the futon. With a swift motion, I plunged it into my throat...

I felt no pain as Urd and the others turned into glass-like figures...and then shattered into a million pieces.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Slumbering, Urd was dreaming of ocean waves.

The warmth of the setting sun tingled her skin as she smelled the salt-air. She recognized the ocean side summer beach house on the windward coast of Chiba; this was the very same place where she had tried to use Keiichi to make her sister all 'mellow-mellow' by employing various potions and lotions she had created. Naturally, because it was Keiichi...her plans to amuse herself that weekend had backfired.

Dramatically.

From her vantage point on the decking of the ocean side retreat house, she could see Belldandy and Keiichi below on the beach. The young couple were chatting leisurely, sipping mai-tais under a canopy umbrella on the beach, enjoying the last rays of the sun. Skuld was sprinting along next to the ocean, chasing down a soccer ball that Tomohisa had just kicked. Genji and Megumi were resting on a blanket, reading a translation of Annie Saumont's "Noir, comme d'habitude".

Nearby, Cevn was seated across from her. Dressed in denim shorts and a loose fitting shirt, he was wearing an artist's cap in a sloppy imitation of a painter. He was concentrating on a canvas mounted on an easel; at his side was a pallet with several wells of paint and numerous dab-marks. Near the railing of the deck, a dozen-or-so brushes were soaking in different-sized glasses of water. Urd wondered what he was painting...

_Why_ he was painting.

Cevn was a musician, a poet...but definitely not a painter. He always used to marvel about manga artists, wondering how they could draw their characters with such expressiveness and precision. Once in a while, he would doodle. But even Keiichi was a far better artist than Cevn; Cevn's 'art' resembled the line drawings of fourth-graders. Keiichi at least could execute a good likeness of Belldandy on charcoal, probably because he was so used to drawing schematics.

"If I'm in a dream, why am I wondering about things so much?" Urd thought.

She noticed how Cevn kept looking at her. He would glance at her, study her with his eyes for a moment, and then shift his attention back to the painting. However, every once in a while, Urd sensed that an expression of anxiety crossing his face, as if he was trying to say "help me!"

Why would he be asking for help while he was painting? It soon became obvious to Urd that he was painting _her_...that she was sitting for him. Randomly, she worried that he might be painting her nude! She looked down her front, only to be relieved by the sight of her tiger-striped string-thing swimsuit.

"Of course he wouldn't be painting me in the nude!" she teased herself, watching him as he swished a paintbrush in the water, scrutinized it, and then mixed up another set of colors.

Belldandy and Keiichi clattered up the stairs behind Cevn, their sandals slapping the wooden steps as they walked up onto the beach house veranda. They paused and called out to her.

"Urd! You gotta see this! Look what Cevn's painting!" Belldandy said excitedly. They were standing behind Cevn, looking over his shoulder at his work with admiring expressions.

Curious, Urd stood up and wrapped a beach sarong around her hips, knotted it, and then walked over to stand behind Cevn.

He certainly wasn't painting her. In fact, the canvas was pitch black, except for two spheres. In one corner of the painting, she could make out a tiny bubble sphere of blue-green. The remainder of the canvas was filled with a larger sphere that resembled a cell. It was ugly, filled with random splashes and scrawls, the sloppiness suggesting to Urd the efforts of a post-modernist artist's attempt to depict a smashed egg.

She looked back at Cevn...

...and he was gone.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

In a final attempt to thwart my bid for freedom, I had been demonized by the worst nightmare imaginable. The worst...because it was the best.

I remembered the dozens of statues of Urd that I had carved during all those hundreds of centuries on Planet Lost. Incidental attempts to hold onto something that maybe never existed, just to keep my memory of her fresh. Anything, so that my love for her wouldn't fade away over the millennia. Anything, so that her face wouldn't distort over time and space within the shrine of my memory.

On Planet Lost, Love had died for me. Had died within me...it was nailed shut so tightly within a hidden recess of my heart, I couldn't fill the absence with hate, regret or even sadness.

So the LifeShip's CPU had resurrected Love, using my own feelings of love-desire against me. I had experienced a fleeting moment of sweetness among the pools of bitter memories and regrets, only to find that the sweet taste was actually as bitter as wormwood under the tongue.

When I emerged from the 'dream', I remembered raping Urd. No...it wasn't me that raped her, it was someone else using me. For that instant, I was no longer in control of my memories or my consciousness. But I was in control of my conscience, and I was filled with self-hate as I participated in the heinous act. I watched unwillingly as every shred of protectiveness I felt towards Urd was stripped away. I experienced unimaginable horror, as I beat her, as I molested her, as I taunted her.

"_I'm not me!_ " a voice sounded in the back of my thoughts.

"_I _-hate- _you!_ " another voice...Urd's...shouted.

"This...is fucked!" I told myself.

"Keep me alive against my will, do whatever you want to do to me, but don't make me harm those I love!" I shouted mentally, addressing the LifeShip's CPU. The collapse of my confidence has spasmed into a final desperate thrust; a final gasp of hope.

Intuitively, I sensed that I was approaching everything wrong. All along, I had been struggling to escape the 'cavern', the cybernetic enclosure that the LifeShip's CPU had created in order to imprison me in my own mind. Now that I had fractured the final dream it had designed, refusing to be tempted into placid satiation...I realized that escape wasn't possible. But escape didn't have to _be_ possible, because escape wouldn't allow me to transcend my situation.

Rather than fight my way out of the 'cavern', I needed to dive _into_ it!

_This_ was the kind of insight that would never make sense to a machine. Computers have no sense of 'wu-wei'; the idea of unopposed opposition would never make sense to an AI. All along, the disjoint machine-mind intelligence of the CPU had been manipulating me, using my own sense of resistance against me. Expecting me to fight all the way. So what would happen if I _advocated_ its efforts...if I stopped struggling altogether? Instead of pushing the river, I would 'go with the flow'.

I would swim my Soul right to the heart of the CPU.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

As soon as Urd described her dream to the others, Belldandy immediately intuited that Cevn was alive. Why else would her older sister dream of him painting a Venn diagram that closely matched their current predicament? He had seemingly communicated the fact that he knew that they were sealed away from the Multiverse. But more than this, he had communicated that he was _alive_!

Belldandy could never conceive of the strength of the heart-link that romantic love evolves between two beings...because until she had met Keiichi, she had never experienced it. She had experienced the constant bond between she and her sisters, the deep connection that bonded her with their Souls. She could steadily rely on the fact that she was always part of her parents, always part of Kami-sama. She was joined with the Yggdrasil Mainframe at all times as well, just like any other God and Goddess. But when she had fallen in love with Keiichi, a new avenue of bonding had blossomed between she and he. It was at once intuitive and transcendental. She had a 'sense', for lack of a better word, about who Keiichi was and how he was feeling. Her Goddess Senses could always warn her when any danger threatened her beloved, but her amorous connection with Keiichi had only strengthened her awareness of him.

This was one of many reasons why she was certain that Keiichi and she were Soulmates. Keiichi had completed her as a Goddess.

Now, it was entirely possible that a similar bond existed between Urd and Cevn. Urd wouldn't sense it...perhaps she _couldn't_ sense it. Her older sister had been separated from Cevn by a huge emotional gulf during the past few several months. But if the bond _did_ exist, then it was far more than coincidence that Urd had dreamt so vividly of her mortal boyfriend.

Deceased or not, Cevn was still with her.

And for this reason, Belldandy knew that she couldn't tell Urd that he was still 'alive'.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

_Hark! Timeless witness_

_Wang River flowing onwards_

_past curling futures_

A destiny awaits now

This boundless vast life produces

_Bless braces, Damn relaxes-huh?_

_Dewdrops spring down broadleaf stairs_

_Gathered ice flow oceans_

Melting away the shadows

Reflecting identity

_Mirror-bound prisons_

_Libraries rendered inane_

_Under pearled clouds_

Scenic beauty comprises

Poetry comes in the mind

_Cyber thought juicing_

_Awaken gentle mass touch_

_Scenes transform spirit_

My soul is free--homeward bound

Light shines on mystic truth

_Unrequited search_

_A wet-hearted solitude_

_Life becomes fragile_

Fleeting ephemeral void

Transcending reality

_Komachi turned ugly_

_As will you, as will I...Troth!_

_Madness and wither_

The mystery to reckon

Awaiting the dawn to beckon

_Lush glades conceal bones_

_Verdant new discards the old_

_A twilight's vibrance_

Illumined branches coming

The moon shines over the mountain

_Rouged by the sun_

_Birdsong mists over reef mats_

_Grass blankets the path_

Coinciding wishes found

Weaving into one, not alone

_A spray of blossoms_

_The brightening pines emerge_

_Combing brush strokes_

Instantaneous insight

Emerges aesthetic taste

_Stark hues imbue a reason_

_Evanescent spectrum_

_Discovering a concept_

Frozen, the actor's mie

Motion, the body-flexed mask

_Chasing illusion_

_Clinging to reality_

_Imagine hearing_

Odes of the Bamboo Cutter

Plaintive boudoir melodies

_Radiance fashion_

_Illustrating to imply_

_A world with walls_

Singular, yet shared nightsky

Reflecting bright faces

_Glimpsed in devotion_

_Episode signifies love_

_Entwined in embrace_

Later, tear-filled morning sleeves

Dreams pillow passions anew

_A spark that flares up_

_Embodied in sentiment_

_A wish for her touch_

Soul caresses my body

Transient, the barren moor

_The water is warm_

_I invite you to the party_

_Exposing poetry_

Simplicity as splendor

Dignity in austerity

_Symbolic eclipse_

_Desires of convention_

_Falling leaves feathered_

Shedding life into stillness

Unseen, the depth's sad beauty

_Shaped in emotions_

_The light emerges to darkness_

_Weeds can go unpulled_

Thick chokes of melancholy

Rong Zi's barren gray estates

_The seeds have ripened_

_Rendering harvest again_

_Yet flowers are gone_

So lay the poem'd fan aside

Time witnesses lives passing

I heard my Soul recite the death poem, a waka-renga that slithered forth from two sides of the same coin of my insanity. Linking shades of life which were now slipping through my fingers...

Realities swirled around me like shredded wheat. I felt like I was eating mud, as I tried to decipher the cybernetic 'net' I found myself in. The cutting lights behind the artificial mental walls cast laser-ballets of impossible geometries in the cavernous wheel of thought.

I plummeted downwards, creasing space-time towards the core.

The core ahead was solid black, devoid of color.

Unexpectedly, I remembered another waka-renga, written by Urd and I soon after we disclosed our love-relationship to Keiichi, Belldandy, Skuld and the others...

(c) Dark meadow'd smiles

As inner hearts pour cloud-like

passages to dream

(u) The ever-Past scatters forth

Winnowed, slender threads of Time

(c) Fragile, each moment

Carried adrift by nocturne winds

Compassing mystery

(u) Wondering, I never weary

of touching your thoughts to mine

(c)Union of disorder

A smoothed pale night-gem enshrined

Deep within still pools

(u) Turning inward, longing ever

Neither waking nor sleeping

(c) Restless realities

Losing their way in darkness

Blinding my pure heart

(u) Spirits evolving towards bliss

Yet tangled over words and forms

(c) My finite being

Given over your Love's flame

Pushing homeward a new dawn

(u) Glowing embrace to erase fear

The risks admit no parallel

(c) Entwined, yet distinct

Beauteous tones, your night face

Tentative, my grasp

(u) Yet I would welcome your touch

As I honored your Soul's wish

(c) Fleeting, I seem lost

The autumn wind deepens

Beyond the dusk

(u) Noir cloudworks sing silently

The mute orb bears them witness

(c) Gazing afar, calm

Your scent hints at your sorrow

How could I have known?

(u) Worried moments surrounding

Oh, that I might share even these!

(c) My breath held in check

And then one mid-summer, you bloomed!

Petals bathed sound

(u) Falling outward past muted voice

Your words unshed my endless night

(u) The sun in your face

Melting my snow-capped laments

I forgot myself

(c) Pledging Past for promises new

Lashing life to opened eyes

(u) Vistas unveiled

Knowing our time passes by

Dewdrops fall to earth

(c) Travelers in our own lives

The unforgiving wind storms

(u) Hued raw, piercing, wild

I feared those bygone epochs

Lost in tangles of regret

(c) Deadened, my heart seemed to drift

Allied to yours, unknowing

(u) Delusions or truths

Your admission stirred me

My breast burned with Love

(c) That which is limitless, idles

A word from you can free it!

(u) I would pierce the veil

Your heard voice didn't fail you

Make the connection

(c) Grasses claimed against a giant oak

Your divinity exceeds me

(u) To the chill night air

even the moonlight hues all things

All suffer love's joy

(c) A heart's loss is one absence

risking towards presence, with you

(u) I have crossed Time

Only to start where I began

No more empty skies

(c) Guide me where we cannot know

Surrender my energy

(u) Dimly lit pathway

Aglow now, like oceans of stars

My heart-ship unmoored

(c) Clumsily navigating

Bitterness melting away

(u) When darkness settles

The candle no longer waxes

Birdsong to the East

(c) Governed by your radiance

Sakura sleeved by morn's wind

(u)It is not over

Spring goes on beyond our dreams

Your soul harbors mine

How could I remember this? After all those thousands of years, how could I still remember the renga with such exactitude? In my mind's view, I could recall the evening tears as Urd and I wrote that poem together, sitting on the gallery decking of our temple house under the stars. Once we finished...once _she_ finished with that amazing final stanza, we 'sealed' the fancy pseudo-parchment paper with red thumbprints. Each of us dipped our thumbs into the waxbowls of the wickered candles we had arranged around us, and then pressed them against the paper.

I never knew why we did this...the wholeness of the experience was entirely her suggestion.

I truly believe that if you love someone enough, you will experience moments of inseparability between the two of you. Love is like a deep lake of water; we can see the surface and call that 'love', but what love is exceeds any definition or perception...it is all the volumes of water, the volumes of heart-depth...that lie beyond the surface.

Somebody had to make Love an Eternity.

Which is why there has to be three Norns.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"If I ever get out of this, I'm gonna marry you, Urd!" I thought to myself as the pool of void started to strangle me. She would never hear my desperate promise, as she was hundreds of thousands of years in the past. Yet, if I survived...I would make her hear it. Not by simply repeating the words...but by my actions. Even if I never saw her again.

I was riding a limitless slide into the crushing alien darkness.

My being seemed to collapse into a singularity, folding upon itself with grave distortions of thought and memory. Everything I was...slamming into the reverse of itself as I was showered with unrecognizable stimuli.

I had reached the core of the LifeShip's CPU.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

The space started wavering around Skuld. For a moment, it seemed to ghost upon itself as it struggled, as if it were a living thing. In contrast to the motionlessness of everything around her, this sudden burst of sight unnerved her. Skuld quickly found herself imagining phantoms: oni-devils and gappa-fiends, akuma with horns and claws and evil snaggle-toothed grins.

"EEEEEK!!" she screamed at the 'chasm' suspended in mid-air.

Possessed by fright, she back-pedaled away from the tormented swirl of reality floating just meters away from her. So quickly she fled from the apparition, she collided roughly with Mara, knocking her Demoness older sister flat on her ass. In the resultant tumble of limbs, Skuld's panic reached feverishly towards her throat as Mara tried to wrest her off. She gripped Mara around the waist with a death-grip, scared out of her wits.

"H..hey!" she heard Mara yell angrily, hot breath by her ear. Being older and stronger, Mara eventually ejected Skuld back onto the concrete with a foot-thrust to the abdomen. Skuld cringed as Mara seemed to be readying herself to explode with angry words...

When suddenly, everything became fractured.

The air was screaming.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --


	100. Pt 100: An Instant's Tension Between Com...

**Part 100: An Instant's Tension Between Complexity and Grandeur (Draft)**

"Bell-chan...it..it feels so cold in here!"

The barely-heard voice ebbed Belldandy to awaken from her deep slumber with a start. Sleep had been an unwanted visitor in the first place...she wanted to spend all the remaining moments with Keiichi, even if the only remnant of her fiancé was a shadow of himself. Just his physical body, marred by the deadpool black eyes of the Reaper. Every moment embarked upon preciousness, because they were numbered...limited. Thoughts of Keiichi's mortality had often haunted her, but she rarely dwelled on this, because she was comforted by the awareness that she would give Keiichi a lifetime of her heart. _His_ lifetime. 

And that was what counted foremost; that she would love him for a human lifespan.

But sleep was stealing away unregained moments from her. Something about this place caused her Goddess powers to wane when Belldandy didn't spell herself with sleep. The stress was surfacing in the form of night-terror dreams; shock-thoughts triggered by this horrid situation. There was no lifespan to consider, for her beloved Keiichi...and for her. 

She thought she was having another nightmare; half-awake, she looked up and saw Keiichi leaning over her, beckoning to her to wake up. Everything about him seemed the same: her fiancé still had the void-pool eyes of the Reaper. But his voice...was unmistakably that of Keiichi. 

Belldandy shifted her legs under her and sat up in an instant, surprised and hopeful.

"Bell, it's really me! Keiichi!!!" Keiichi said, smiling. "This...little boy...is in control of my body. But don't worry, Bell-chan, it's not a bad feeling, like the time the Ultimate Destruction Program took me over. It's not even like all those times Mara used her Demonic powers to possess me. I felt 'invaded' those times...it was awful!"

Belldandy nodded her head and reached up to stroke Keiichi's cheek lovingly.

"Wh..what I mean to say that it's not _hurtful_, like those times were. It's way different. Belldandy, I _want_ this, because he convinced me how important it is to let him 'borrow' my body. I understand...things...now. But I still feel it...I feel so drawn and tired. I've never felt so worn out in my life, except when I was in the desert and almost about to die..."

Belldandy rested a silencing finger on his lips. Right now, she didn't want to hear about Keiichi's desert trial of suffrage. She paused to let herself observe a moment of gratitude. Evidently, the Reaper had sensed her mounting sense of isolation and had decided to let Keiichi return to his body so she and he could talk.

So Death _was_ capable of compassion!

"Bell, it's weird! I can see him clearly...in my thoughts, just as I can sense you right now. Even though he claims to be Death, he has the appearance of a young boy, maybe 8 to 10 years old. Everything about him glows. The best way to describe what he looks like in my mind...is that he reminds me of a character in one of those ET sci-fi movies. One of those flicks where the aliens are totally bright because there's a thousand spotlights on 'em."

Belldandy ran a hand through her hair, smoothing it, unsure that Keiichi could 'see' her but yet wanting to look her best for him.

"He says that I'm going to die..."

"Nuh..._**NO!!!**_" Belldandy shouted, almost collapsing at his prosaic statement. "You're not going to die, Keiichi! We...I won't allow that to happen! I'll do everything in my power to..."

"Bell-chan," Keiichi said, gripping her on each shoulder to steady her. "_What_ can you do? If this Isilblius being...is powerful enough to exile Death from where he belongs, how can any of _you_ find a way to beat him?"

Belldandy felt her confidence sag with his words. She started sobbing, as Keiichi's frankling observation only confirmed her own sense of powerlessness. Skuld was working on a plan, but even if her genius younger sister discovered a way to rescue themselves, there was little that any of them could do. Both Lords were exiled from their Realms, sealed off from their omnipotent energies. She and her sisters only possessed the Divine powers they had arrived with after being split up; there was no way for them to 'recharge' their energies either. No moonstone bracelets. No sake/tea/ice cream powerups.

"He told me that he wanted me to see him as he is, because I will be the last person he greets. When I die...there won't be any weird afterlife place for me to go to. I can almost comprehend it. It's all so much now, Bell-chan! Not too many mortals get to meet Death before they die, huh?" Keiichi said, trying to smile reassuringly.

"He's dying...and he's trying to cheer my spirits!" Belldandy thought, choking on her own words. For a flash, she wanted to tear out her hair in frustration, or scream like a madwoman. A howl the size of several large galaxies was clutched in her lungs, but she couldn't force it out.

It already hurt too much in her breast.

Keiichi reached up and tenderly wiped the tears as they traced down her cheeks, and then pulled her tight against his chest.

"Oh, my love," Keiichi said softly, kissing her on the forehead. She grabbed herself to his chest as he tried to soothe her. "Please...no regrets, okay? We've had five glorious years together. Five years might seem like a minute to you...but it's been a blessed eternity for me. Please understand this. I've been in love with you fully one fifth of my life. To me, it's been an eternity's worth of the most wonderful shared journey into Love that a man could ever experience. My life would have been so utterly incomplete without you. I wouldn't have ever become the man I became without your guidance and your loving support, Bell! I want you to know this...that I have been fulfilled...every hour of every day since I first met you. You've done so much more than simply grant me a wish; you've given me a life! When I think of the sheer odds of it, the odds of two people falling so deeply in love with each other as you and I have, it's totally mind-boggling. We've truly been a _we_, Bell-chan! We've touched hearts and overcome so many doubts together! Nothing can ever take that away from me. From us. I hope you're convinced. I've been able to walk in my lifetime with you, touch time and hearts with you...so it's very easy for my gratitude to outweigh my sense of loss."

Keiichi's words of reassurance only had the opposite effect on her. Belldandy could _feel_ the sincerity of love in his voice; a love that would soon be silenced forever. Even as he spoke, her heart was breaking into a thousand pieces...each fragment pierced away by the realization that the truth of their love would only result in endings, not beginnings.

And this time, Keiichi wouldn't be there to sweep up the pieces of her heart and mold them back together again.

"The Little Boy Death...hehe, what a funny name I've given him!...has assured me that I will feel no pain when my time comes. I'm feeling exhaustion and cold at the moment, but that's because we're sharing my body. He's feeling tired as well. But it doesn't hurt. Bell-chan, you know..snff..that now, because of how things are, we can never get married. But I want you to know that it really doesn't make..snff..any difference...because for a long time, I've..sob.._already_ considered myself...as your husband..."

"And I've..snff..considered myself...as your wife, Keiichi...my husband," Belldandy answered, her voice stumbling past her sobbing. She could hear Keiichi sobbing, but of course there were no tears from his eyes. His mouth grimaced with emotional pain, a sight which tore her heartstrings to pieces.

"Now...now, who was it that said 'no regrets', my love," she sighed, forcing herself to smile briefly. It was as if her own pain was being magnified by Keiichi's grief.

"You always know the right thing to say, Bell-chan..." he replied, "...most of the time."

_That_ comment whirled Belldandy into the ravel of her memories. It was a private joke; a joke that she'd only let him get away with. It wasn't long after she came to the Earthrealm that Keiichi became aware of her tendency to occasionally utter innocent-yet-embarrassing remarks. While her naivety irritated her sisters, worried her parents and enraged Mara...Keiichi had taken it in stride for the most part. And his friends, especially Tamiya and Ootaki, thought her pristinely unintentional insults were quite the howl....especially when Keiichi was scapepated by her naive misspeakings. Keiichi would blush red and shrug his shoulders, while his sempai and often the entire Motor Club would burst into gleeful laughter. Then one day during dinner, she did it again...and he teased her back by saying "You always know just what to say...most of the time." That time, she had noted that "certain parts" of Keiichi's body seemed small to her...within the wrong context, of course. Keiichi's face flushed itself, while Megumi had almost choked on the sushi roll she had been munching on. Both Urd and Skuld quickly dissolved their composures; Urd gripped by belly-laughs, Skuld gripped by a brooding scowl. It was so bad, her two sisters had to 'retire' to their respective hobby rooms. Clear in her memory, Belldandy revisited how she had reacted to his teasing that night: she had coolly flicked a spoonful of soy-soaked rice into the middle of Keiichi's forehead.

That was the first food fight that _she_ had ever started...but it wasn't the last. Being a Goddess had its privileges: no matter how messy the dining room after a food fight, she could whisk the whole room back into white-gloved cleanliness with a single wave of her index finger.

Now...there would be no more food fights, she realized sadly. No more pillow fights in the bedroom. No dining room to joke around in. No boyfriend to tease...

Once again, Belldandy was amazed at how her mind could trek off into streaks of seemingly random memories when she was around Keiichi. Something about him had cast her memories in a more meaningful light; it was as if she was remembering events for the both of them now, instead of just for herself or in her role as a Goddess Relief Office agent. Not just so she could teach her younger sister when Skuld made a mistake, or to chide her older sister when Urd was in the middle of a wrongdoing.

According to Skuld, once the three Lords 'died'...for the Reaper was a Lord of his own Realm in a sense...then the 'bubble' of non-Time they were in would probably collapse. Belldandy, Skuld, Mara and Urd would have the distinction of being the only four Souls in the history of existence whose deaths wouldn't be greeted by the Reaper, because Death would no longer be alive.

"What would happen to us if we experience the Real Death...and there is no Death to experience?" she asked Keiichi. In the Reaper's voice, he answered "unknown", and then he hugged Belldandy tight.

"For both of us," Keiichi/Reaper said in his normal human voice as he embraced her with tender desperation. 

* * * * * * * *

I felt like a snail who had wandered off into the middle of a carnival midway. The dizzying reality that constructed chaos around me was so _alien_, so complex...that it simply didn't make sense. My mental powers of observation and classification were completely unreliable here. I was faced with a sentient level of 'cognition' magnitudes beyond my own intelligence. 

For all intents and purposes, I might as well have been that snail. A snail sensing the lights and motion of the midst of illminated rollercoaster and merry-go-round rides...and not having any sense of what it was, what it did, or what it was for.

A snail...waiting to get stepped on by the passing crowds.

Forevers ago, I had this 'sixth sense' called a metallect. It was a form of super-intelligence, seemingly bestowed upon me as a side-effect of my wish, the wish that Urd had conduited to the Yggdrasil Mainframe. Now, I knew that the wish, the metallect, all of it...was nothing more than an artificial life-scenario created by the LifeShip's CPU. An implanted sequence of 'memories' designed to keep me wondering and sane. Perhaps the Earth had never been destroyed by some freakish solar event. But if so, then _what_ was I doing _here_, in the middle of the CPU?

Could the CPU be the Yggdrasil Mainframe?

The Enigma Book had featured language-keys that, when spoken aloud in a certain sequence, would trigger holophotic imagery that would take one on a mental 'virtual tour' of the Yggdrasil and Vanagdrasil Mainframes. I had never mentioned this to the Goddesses or Mara, because I was afraid that it would freak them out...not to mention that I was wary. I suspected that it would be extremely inappropriate for a Goddess or Demoness to 'tour' the Mainframes of their Divine counterparts. The inner workings of each Mainframe was definitely a tabu subject, not to be shared out among the mortal races. My caution had served me well...

Plus I _knew_ for certain what the two Mainframes were like, from the inside out.

This cybernetic monstrosity definitely wasn't either the Yggdrasil or Vanagdrasil Mainframe. The streamline of data wields were absent here. The 'circuitry' was too chaotic, too corrupt, too _ugly_...for lack of a better term. Both Mainframe Stacks belonging to the Gods and the Demons were complex-yet-orderly, clean, purposeful. Because of this, each Mainframe had a beauty of its own. In complete contrast, this computer system seemed to be a grotesquerie, deficient of any purpose.

Perhaps its only purpose was to imprison me, or anyone else in its grip.

The sense of confinement within disorder was the reason why I wished for my metallect. That special faculty of mind had absented itself from my life right before the Goddesses and Keiichi's mortal circle had been recalled. Of course it had; were I in possession of my metallectual faculties after they had left, I would have known for certain where they went...and perhaps could have found a way to follow them. I still didn't know for certain if they had returned to Yggdrasil before the Sun mortally wounded the Earth. And I was always haunted by a lingering guilt...that if I did have my metallect intact at the time, I might have been able to prevent the disaster itself.

I wished for a glimpse...just a single intuitive insight into the amorphic incoherence that constrained me. 

Mind-blank.

Puzzle pieces mean nothing when there is no 'picture' to assemble. Or in my case, the puzzle of a thousand pieces was incomplete by 999 parts. I just didn't know how to work it into a recognizable semblance of 'truth'. The whole universe had regressed into an inverted shattering of itself.

I felt too infirmed to bear reality.

* * * * * * * *

Watching Keiichi, Miyuki and Natsumi, Skuld met with an invader...the memories of the only other death-watch she had reluctantly participated in. Just once before in her youthful life had she waited on Death. She squeezed her eyes shut tight, but that did little to quiet the mental images. Big Sister Urd was mortally ill, wasting away before her own eyes. Thankfully, Urd had been in a coma. Skuld remembered having to excuse herself at times...she was too disturbed by Urd's freakish tantrums of delirium towards the end. Fortunately, Mother and Father had come to the Earthrealm to be with she and Belldandy as Urd passed away.

But then, Urd didn't pass away.

This was as much as she could remember. At some point after this, Urd had been restored to health by an enigma...and Skuld had found herself in serious need of a bra for the first time in her life. _Something_ had aged her, had matured her almost 45,000 years. Being Norn of the Future, she was just starting to become adept at distinguishing Present from Future. But Time had performed a mystery opera on her life, thrusting her future _back_ into in her present without her consent. She had felt no disturbance in the TimeWeb that could explain such a transformation. Yet, she herself felt _unchanged_; her Being remained essentially the same. She didn't know quite how this happened, but the two pleasantly rounded mounds of flesh resting on her ribs were always there to greet her whenever she remanifested herself in an Earthrealm mortal form.

Now, she was in the midst of another death-watch. A final death-watch. Keiichi and the two policewomen were so weakened by lack of nutrition, they couldn't remain on their feet up any more. All they could do was rest on their backs and sides. A nearby source of clean water could have kept them hydrated, but it too was frozen in time...there was no way to get the chronologically-challenged liquid 'out' of the container.

Her Big Sister on the Goddess side was pacing back and forth again. Big Sister Urd seemed to undergo feverish bouts of regret about killing Cevn. Urd's frustration force-fed Skuld with empathy. The loss of Urd's mortal boyfriend was compounded by futility; his death had achieved no purpose, it had done nothing to prevent this from happening. Isilblius was killing them, killing Time, killing Space. There was no day or night to measure the passage of time with, but it seemed like Urd would regress into a 'murderer's guilt' with regularity. Mara seemed to be ably suited to the task of allaying Urd's morosity during those emotional lapses. Perhaps it had something to do with the Mara's Demonic heritage. Skuld was grateful that _someone_ could reach Big Sister Urd during those times; she and Belldandy were too sensitive to their sister's moodswings to be able to draw Urd back into anything resembling coherent thinking.

Skuld felt stabbed by the sight of Keiichi. He was much like she had imagined he was when Mother and Father had foolishly stranded him in the desert. Gaunt, dry-skinned, severely weakened. The thought that her sister's heart-love _and_ the Lord Himself were both dying...was nothing less than devastating to Skuld. At times, Urd's self-impugning would rub off on her as well. Skuld would find herself feeling conflicted; angry and guilty that she wasn't smarter, that she couldn't remember the right things.

She knew that the answer lay in what she wrote in the Enigma Book.

But her memories seemed to evade her with a stubborn enmity every time she tried to recall _why_.

Suddenly, her thoughts were hauled out of the oceans of introspection as she overheard her sister and Keiichi talking. For a second time, the Reaper seemed to have allowed Keiichi to 'meet' with her. The voice sounding from Keiichi's lips was his own familiar phrasing, his accent more at home with the deliberateness of Tohoku idiom speech than that of the fast-talking Kanto Tokyoites.

"Because of the times we had together, I can resolve myself to fate," she heard Keiichi explain. Skuld sensed that he was trying to calm her sister down before her already fragile emotional state crumbled even more. She watched as her elder sister balled her fists at her side.

"I..will.._not_..resign..myself..to..fate," Belldandy promised, each word uttered in the oathing voice of a Warrior Goddess, firm with resolve.

"I..will..not..let..him..take..you..away..from..me. Not now...not ever!"

Tragically, Skuld knew that no amount of determination would remedy their fate. Yet, in the wake of Belldandy's words, everything in their time-stands-still world seemed to pause. Keiichi looked at her silently; for a moment, Skuld thought she was seeing her sister's reflection in his aniline ink-black eyes.

* * * * * * * * 

The ultimate code, the final cut, the last hurrah. 

I never imagined in my wildest dreams that I would be using my own thought process as a hacking tool. Almost by accident, I discovered a way to dismantle the constraints of the CPU, one byte at a time. It lay somewhere between binary and infinity; an unmapped environ of sentient latency that was pooling calmly. A stilled neurodance waiting to be stirred into pieces.

My non-resistance had paid off.

Slowly, subtly, I struggled to restructure certain elements of the CPU. As I worked, I became convinced that this computer prison wasn't the Lifeship's CPU or the Ygg Mainframe. It was something else, a machina ex malevolum...

A machine inside of Evil.

The CPU was just a tool of something greater.

Horrorshow images flooded my mind as I raced to try and 'dismantle' the last seed-codes of the computer. Metaphorically, I was burning out the circuitry of a microchip, one nano-circuit at a time.

Pausing for a moment, I found myself wishing that it could feel pain. The round cube of its fuzzy syllogisms had drained me of hope, causing me pain while it cached my consciousness within a fictional dreamed life. Making me think that I was in love with a Goddess. Making me think that I had lived 85 millennia on a lost planet. Making me think that some agency had actually granted my innermost wish. Making me think I had joined with the Ultimate Force. Every nanosecond, it had been carefully crafting an entire simulated 'life' for me...and then jerking it away.

Removing _her_ from my imaginings with surgical precision, this machine had forced me to smother inside of an eternity of regrets. 80 years seems like forever to the human mind; and I had been _alone_ for a thousand times that. Feeling the struggle of heart against mind, I tried to temper my rage. But I couldn't quell my anguished loneliness. My whole life was nothing more than a bitstream of codes, gusted into my mind by an ultra-computer. 

If I leapt off the bitstream, would I be anything? Would there still be a 'me'? For a moment, I felt paralyzed with a horrid suspicion that I had _never_ been alive in the first place...that I was nothing more than a subroutine in the CPU. It was entirely possible that my _entire_ life was nothing more than a neuro-oneriotic experience; a dream being expressed as life, rather than a life being expressed as dream.

And now I was trying to shut down the dreamer, possibly aborting my whole existence.

One more gate...

For a moment, I regarded the gate. It was shifting geometries with spikes and barbwires of electric mind. Without eyes that could see, without ears that could hear...the gate seemed like a spiderweb of crooked, warped strings. No symmetry, no beauty, no function.

So I reformatted it into a torii gate.

All I had to do was gather myself up in a small purple ball of thought and puncture the 'cyber net' within the torii gate. I knew it was the last line of defense, or maybe it was the first line of restraint. Envisioning my consciousness...my being...as a purple blue ball of flame, I marshaled every iota of my effort towards piercing that forbidding veil.

If it meant the end of my existence...

...then I would welcome the cessation of my painful solitude.

I made a wish.

* * * * * * * *

Instead of inhaling, Keiichi exhaled...and was still.

Miyuki and Natsumi's eyes turned white.

Belldandy screamed as she cradled her beloved Keiichi's head in her lap.

Skuld and Mara hugged their sister and cried.

Urd snapped her eyes wide open and shouted "He's here!"

* * * * * * * *

As I willed my way through the torii, I was met with a grotesque webbing of the unimaginable. For a moment, I felt myself snuffed out, suffocating. It seemed intent on squeezing me out of myself...just like when one squeezes a balloon too tight, the air pops out. Pain switch-pathed through every echo of my mind, demanding that I simply cease myself. Erase myself from existence. 

Pressing onward, I emerged from it...and then I realized that it wasn't a web at all. It was far more revolting, more terrifying than anything I could imagine. As I looked back past mind and space, I observed that 'it' was some kind of filthy, decaying ovum-egg, a cybernetic phage cell that had been devouring me.

Power.

Isilblius.

Before me, I beheld the intricacy, the absolute magic, the infinite geometries of the TimeWeb. For a moment, I felt disoriented.

But I gradually realized that the TimeWeb was different...if it was the TimeWeb at all. This TimeWeb _wasn't_ the TimeWeb...it just looked the same.

Finally, I _remembered_. I remembered _everything_. How Isilblius had manipulated me into creating the Enigma Book. How he had placed a formula inside of the Enigma Book that would subconsciously co-opt Mara into resurrecting him. How this had all come about because of my wish. How my wish had somehow made me become one with the Ultimate Force, wielding all the active and passive energies of the Everything. How I had fought Isilblius and defeated him, using up all the energies of the Everything. How I had sealed him away, outside of the Everything and yet a part of it. How I had spent 37 trillion years painstakingly rebuilding the Everything. How I had been returned by the Ultimate Force, fully expecting to die and yet being restored to life.

_I_ had restored myself to life. It was for Urd that I had done this.

One act of selfishness on my part had opened up the door for Isilblius to do what he had done. I couldn't allow myself to pass away from Urd...and _this_ had been the result.

If anything was selfish, it was Isilblius. I wanted to hit myself on the head, because the evidence was so obvious.

I was surrounded by it.

The Mindwipes I asked everyone to undergo were supposed to make all of us forget about my 'special' circumstances and Isilblius. To remove the memories each of us possessed about the whole Ragnarok of apocalypses that had occurred when I battled Isilblius. But they didn't work...couldn't work, because Isilblius had been inside of me. Eating my Soul.

Once again, Urd had paid the price. Somehow, I _knew_ that she had killed me, in an attempt to keep Isilblius sealed away. She had acted for the highest good...and paid the dearest price. Her efforts failed miserably. 

What I had done to Isilblius...he had done to them.

He had destroyed it all, and then imprisoned Urd and the others in a fragile 'oval' of a TimeWeave, removed from the entire TimeWeb. They were effectively isolated from Time itself, with the exception of a single thread of Metanative energy linking them with the monstrosity that was now the TimeWeb.

I could see the contrail of rainbowed lights leading away from the pseudo-TimeWeb, away from the Everything. Intuitively, I knew that Belldandy, Urd, Skuld and Mara were imprisoned inside of the 'bubble-like' terminus of that streak of light. It resembled a cosmic 'Q-tip' of sorts, a Q-tip of infinite distance and trillions of years old. Keiichi, Natsumi and Miyuki were there as well. The three mortal's bodies were inhabited by the Three: Kami-sama, Oni-sama and The Boy Who Is Death.

And they had just died.

The contrail was changing color, as the horrid mix of colors from the TimeWeb was 'feeding' back along its course towards the ovaline end-point. They had attempted to summon my Soul back into my body with a mandala, which created a 'super-Time-string' which tried to link with the Mid-Light. Instead, it had been deflected, because Isilblius had already usurped the Mid-Light realm. Isilblius had scattered them, but the Returning Mandala has summoned them back. So Isilblius decided to isolate them, using the 'super-Time-string'. Even now, it glistened with a rainbow of colors, a slender rod of energy focused on the opening created by the Seven when they tried to summon my Soul back. The Returning Mandala had completed its task in one sense...it had reached out of the 'pocket universe'. Now, it was a highway to hell.

Hell, in the form of Isilblius, was streaking towards their isolated 'universe'. The single strand of light-energy was being used by Isilblius, just like an airborne bomber used a column of air to drop a weapon upon their target. I could see a tentacled surge of energy rushing towards them down that column of light, like a bead of oil floating down a string.

There once was a time when I could do anything I willed.

I closed my eyes, for now I was in a human form again...and pointed a finger at the slender thread of light. A purple lance of energy flashed from my finger and merged with the column of light, _ahead_ of Isilblius's sickly orange-green light.

I felt the entire TimeWeb shudder, like a reflection on a calm pool of water being broken by a thrown rock. Waves of distortion passed around me, but I shielded myself from their buffeting energies.

What I intended to do was intercept Isilblius's 'destruct' signal...the command that he was 'sending down the pipe' towards the bubble universe that my friends were confined within. If it reached them first, the TimeWeave pocket he had removed them to...would collapse upon itself. For he was sending his version of 'Time' into a place of Timelessness.

Too bad, because he wasn't going to get away with it. Urd had killed me to save me. Belldandy _was_ going to marry Keiichi, on time. Skuld's genius was going to save the Everything. Mara was finally going to have a family.

"I'll be fucked if you think you can get away with this, you shit-hearted bastard!" I thoughtcast.

I knew Isilblius could hear me.

Because _everything_ was Isilblius. 

* * * * * * * *

Isilblius had merged with the Ultimate Force. The synergy between he and the UF was so complete, it was intractable and irreversible. This meant that...to rid the Everything of Isilblius...I had to _kill_ the Ultimate Force.

What Isilblius had done was to take all energies, forms and times within the Everything...and created countless copies of himself. The TimeWeb was Isilblius. The Multiverses were Isilblius. Yggdrasil and Vanagdrasil...was Isilblius. Now I understood why he was the Ultimate Demon. Or even the Ultimate God.

He had wiped out everything and replaced it with himself.

Isilblius was the ultimate Anti-Being. He had intended all along to replace the Everything with Nothing. 

With increasing urgency, I knew that Urd, Belldandy and Keiichi, Skuld, Mara, and the two policewomen would have to survive. If they survived, then Kami-sama, Oni-sama and Death could reinhabit and restructure the Everything.

* * * * * * * *

Now, I was challenged by two opponents.

As I reflected on how the Ultimate Force had used me, I realized that it had been trying to create Balance by employing restraints on individuality; basically creating a 'cookie-cutter consciousness' within the Multiverse.

It had to be stopped.

Complexity had to be served. Even if Isilblius was defeated somehow, the Everything wouldn't last if it was confined to the two World-Trees of Yggdrasil and Vanagdrasil. I exerted my energies and created an idea, nothing more. Yet, it was a powerful idea, because it would exist beyond the capabilities of the Ultimate Force. It would be an idea that could never be accomplished by the Ultimate Force...which would render it unique and unaffected by the UF.

An idea to expand each realm a thousand-fold...something that the Ultimate Force could never power into existence. Instead of two interlaced trees branching out from the Mid-Light, the Mid-Light would become centered in a rosette-shaped Everything, each 'petal' consisting of a restructured World-Tree. 777 Yggdrasils and 777 Vanagdrasils, each 'woven' into another.

For the first time in known history, an oak tree would blossom...if my 'idea' made it to the Seven first.

* * * * * * * *

I had one more act to do. Killing the Ultimate Force would be accomplished only if I shed away every bit of my wish. This was imperative, because my wish had been granted by the Ultimate Force in the first place. If the Ultimate Force had given me all of this power...and _it_ itself was out of Balance, then the only way I knew to undo the Ultimate Force would be to give it up.

Anything else would be the equivalent of trying to save a drowning swimmer by throwing a swimming pool on her or him.

In a remote corner of my consciousness, I sensed that my efforts to reach Urd and the others would be successful. I would have little time to prepare everything, as I was presently negotiating with the complexities of the Returning Mandala, _ahead_ of Isilblius. Within the next infinitesimal divide of Time, I would 'anchor' my energy, grounding it into the mandala.

This would be poignantly ironic. In an indirect way, I _was_ returning because of that arcane device they had constructed to try and summon my Soul back into my dead physical form.

I realized that they had constructed it out of love for me.

Although it wouldn't be 'me' that would return to them via the Returning Mandala, it would be the most important part of me. I planned to be lost in the resulting scramble that would occur as a result of my actions. For the good of everything that existed, I would have to remain unknown while the Seven battled Isilblius.

I had decided that the only way to defeat the Ultimate Force would be to surrender it. Isilblius didn't have a monopoly on the UF at all. He would expect me to use the rest of it in a futile pitched struggle against him. I could almost envision the machinations of his plan...

Once I was 'connected' with the slip of a bubble universe that Belldandy, Urd, Skuld and the others were trapped in, I would first strive to prevent its collapse. Before Isilblius could reach them, I would convey _all_ of my UF powers to that place and restore it to TimeSpace. Or SpaceTime, depending on how you look at it. Instead of having the UF being equally divided between Isilblius and I, it would be divided by the Seven and Isilblius.

It would be seven against one.

Seven people in that distant stretch of TimeSpace would have to transform the Ultimate Force into the Intimate Force, in order to defeat the Ultimate Force itself and do away with Isilblius forever.

The act of relinquishing the Ultimate Force would require me to create several paradoxes. First, the Multiplicity that I had created in the Mid-Light would have to be preserved. No more destruction of individuality in the Reaper's Realm. Second, the expansion of the Everything would necessarily remain unaltered. I _could_ do those things...but only by suggestion. The Seven would have to realize them into reality... 

Unless Isilblius managed to kill off Belldandy and the others and have the Everything and the UF all to himself. That had been his plan from the start. An Everything populated only by Isilblius, with no room for any other being, Space or Time.

In the split second that the Ultimate Force would be stripped from me, a portion of it would also be stripped from Isilblius. At that moment, I would need to return Kami-sama, Oni-sama and the Regent of the Mid-Light to their respective realms.

All this cosmic shit...and yet, the most difficult paradox was the one I would have to create was between Urd and myself.

In order to undo the Ultimate Force, I would have to eliminate all existence of my wish.

Urd would never 'hear' my wish. 

The wish that had brought me to Japan in the first place. The wish that had made Goddesses real, that had firmly placed me within a caring circle of new friends. The wish that had taken me into adventures beyond my wildest dreams. The wish that had brought me to a unknown place...only to find love in the most unexpected of places.

I had to make a choice.

Either Urd or myself would have to live out the rest of their days knowing that they were forever separated from the person they loved. One of us would remain forever untouched by the memories of our relationship; it would be as if the love we had shared had never happened. The other person would fully remember the love between us...and have to live with the loss. 

In simpler terms, either Urd would be haunted forever by the truth that she _had_ fallen in love with me, or she could be freed from having to experience any memory of the love we shared.

It was an obvious choice. Urd had lived 100,000 years without being romantically involved with any being, God or mortal. If she _knew_ in the rose of her heart that she had been in love, and then lost that love _again_, it would fill all the rest of her days with regret.

Over and over and over again for millennia.

Goddesses usually live over 700,000 years...and then they are 'renewed' to live another cycle of existence. For all eternity, it has been, is, and will be this way. This system was created by Kami-sama and Oni-sama so that the Divine beings...both Gods and Demons...would experience what may best be termed 'family' and 'society' and 'purpose'. The Doublet System is a consequence of this system of renewal as well. 

The Renewal System was the secret of secrets, know only to Kami-sama, Oni-sama and the Reaper Boy.

It was very important to have the closed-cycle of life renewal for Gods and Demons. To be Eternal, like Kami-sama and Oni-sama and Death...a particular form of omnipotence and omniscience is demanded by the circumstances. Qualities of attribution and being that all other beings in the Everything lacked. Otherwise, all those trillions of years would accumulate into a overwhelming sense of ennui and apathy, which would effectively debase the Gods and Demons into nihilism. Gods and Demons lacked the ability to evolve _on their own_ in certain ways, which also reinforced the need for the Renewal System. In one sense, the Divines were like 'perennials', flowering into themselves ever and ever... 

My thoughts kept returning to Urd. I knew that the Ultimate Force had barred Urd from being involved in a romantic relationship forever. I wished that I could undo that, but doing so would displace Time itself. For in a certain way, the three Norns _are_ Time. Urd would have to remain Norn of the Past. There was no possible way that I could give up the Ultimate Force and yet restore Urd's chances of finding a truly loving relationship. Nor could I offer her an 'idea' to do so, because it would bring her 'face to memory' with me. She would have to remember her feelings towards me in order to want such a thing.

Another reason why I would have to undo the connection between she and I.

Earthrealm mortals live approximately 70 years. There would be no renewal in the traditional sense, but what I had done by replacing the Instrumentality with the Multiplicity was to create an actual 'afterlife'. Before I did this, when any being died, their Soul would merge with the Instrumentality, causing them to lose all sense of self-awareness. But when I transformed the Instrumentality into the Multiplicity, any being that died would still go to the Mid-Light, still be greeted by the Little Boy Who Is Death...but they wouldn't _cease_. In the Multiplicity, _anything _is possible, as far as life and death are concerned. A Soul could stay there, or perhaps choose to be 'renewed'. The renewal process would be markedly different than that used by the Gods and the Demons, because it wouldn't be administered by the Mainframes of each Multiverse, as directed by the Lords of each Multiverse. In their respective realms of Yggdrasil and Vanagdrasil, Kami-sama and Oni-sama had made it so any God or Demon who 'died'...unless they experienced the Real Death...would be renewed into another aspect of their lives again. Otherwise, over trillions of years, the Gods and Demons would be eventually be outnumbered by the mortals. 

Without the Renewal System, the Gods and Demon's population would gradually die off, while the mortals would keep propagating. Alongside this was the need for Gods and Demons to cultivate mortal races to join them. The Gods and Demons labored over cultivating mortal races to achieve the Next Level...another way of creating Balance. Any other way, and the 'spiritually devolved' mortal races would accumulate in numbers, possibly evolving into a form of 'errant Divinity', and then wreak chaos by actually challenging the Gods and Demons.

But in the Multiplicity, renewal was rendered by the will of the Souls. They would be reincarnated in any form they pleased...mortal or divine...with a completeness of accommodation. If a person wanted to 'come back' as a human being, they would be renewed as such. If a mortal wanted to 'come back' as a God or Demon, they would also be renewed as such...but they would have the capacities for wisdom, power and ability that all Gods or Demons possessed, so that they could thrive in their new life.

My tweak would never be undone, not by Isilblius, nor the Ultimate Force...if Urd, Belldandy, Keiichi and the others could defeat Isilblius.

So it all came back to Urd and I...and an inarguable argument.

Do I let her live out the rest of her life knowing that she had me...and lost me? Or do I live out the rest of my life knowing that I had her...and lost her?

I could never allow myself to live in Urd's heart as an unreachable ghost; a faded memory of a love that once was and would forever be no more. There was no way that I would allow Urd to experience the regrets of lost love, on top of the eternity of loneliness she would have to face as Norn of the Past.

I couldn't do that to her...or live with myself if I chose to let her suffer any more regrets.

The last act of love I would ever give Urd would be so anonymous, she would never even be aware that it had happened. That's the beauty of anonymity. Once I surrendered the Ultimate Force, everything that had ever directly involved me and her would be sundered. She wouldn't have to face the loss of my love for her, because I would no longer exist to her. Meanwhile, if I survived, I would remember everything about her and I.

But it would be better that way. 

Sadly, by giving up the Ultimate Force, I would be letting go of the only way that I could have maintained the relationship between her and me. The invisible connection between me and the Ultimate Force which had been rendered by my wish had somehow offset the prohibition against love for Urd, which is why she and I found each other in the first place. But by letting go of my UF powers, there would be no way for me to make it so that Urd and I could stay together.

No matter what I did, Urd and I would be forever separated.

Urd was willing to kill me, so that the Everything could be saved. Following her example, I would be willing to 'kill myself out of her life', so that Balance could be achieved. She and the six others would have a much better chance of harnessing to Ultimate Force to achieve a true Balance than I would ever have.

The only way I could create Balance was to _not_ create it.

* * * * * * * *

In a moment of Time, a purple-blue luminosity descended into a world of Timelessness, riding a contoured rainbow of color. Having grounded itself within the mandala that anchored it, the light itself turned into wings of Metanative energy and splintered into seven directions.

* * * * * * * *

**BELLDANDY:**

_I remember holding Keiichi's head in my lap and realizing that he was truly dead. My heart felt like it was tearing apart from the inside; it didn't even matter to me at that point that _I_ was going to disappear from reality. From what Skuld had described, the place I was in was going to collapse and vanish, just like a bubble being popped by a pinprick. But that feeling of impending doom was indistinct, because I sensed that my heart was that bubble...and Keiichi's death was the pinprick. Unexpectedly, the column of light which emitted itself from the Returning Mandala we had created for Cevn started turning blue-purple. I turned away from Keiichi for just the briefest of seconds, and watched the purple light pass into me...and then I was here._

**SKULD:**

_I've always been afraid of the unexpected, which is quite a trip when you consider that my Realm of Time is the Future, which is pretty _all_ unexpected from the viewpoint of 99.99% of the Multiverse. I was watching my sister as Keiichi died. I'm a genius girl, so I knew what was going to happen then. Being smart can be very scary sometimes...and I was totally freakin' out. But instead of everything simply blinking out of existence, this really cool purple-blue light descended from the clouds. It was alive, that much I could tell. It was so cool! I watched it come straight towards me, arcing like a spark of electricity. And you know what? I think _we're_ the Ultimate Force. I don't know how, but I'm feeling mega-powerful right now! Yahooooo!!!_

**URD:**

_Hmph! _We're_...the Ultimate Force?! Don't act so important, you brat! Even if what you say is true, then you're just _part_ of the Ultimate Force. Look around us, wonder-girl! There's _ seven_ of us. Do you think it would pick you...and not any one of us? Well, enough of that. Anyway, I'm with you on the 'power is cool bit', however. It feels like my Senior First Class License just got upgraded a million-fold! This is awesome!!! I don't know why I'm here, or what that mandala was doing, but I do know that we've got the power to do anything we want. Which means that we're going to kick Isilblius's ass all the way back to nothingness, where he belongs! I've a personal score to settle with him, he tried to kill my sisters and my friends. He's gonna go down for that!_

**MARA:**

_This is freakin' blessed! Talk about being snatched from the abyss! I hate it when I can't figure out what's going on! Me...a Demoness, and I was almost ready to completely lose it when Belldandy's little dandy had died. Ooops, sorry Bell. I forgot that you're in my mind. Man, I wish I could have someone like that...but then again I don't. Seeing how she looked when Keiichi died is reminder enough to scare me away from giving my heart to _anyone_. Yet, I wonder if there _is_ someone out there for me. Now look what you guys have done! I'm moping like some lovesick Demoness. Grrrrr! This is so weird, I've got massive amounts of power inside of me. I bet I'm more powerful than the Dark Lord Himself right now! Why would we be given these powers, if little Ms. Wonder Girl is right about us being the Ultimate Force? And why would all this power be given to Goddesses?_

**KEIICHI:**

_Mara, one could ask why would it be given to Demonesses? Or a young mortal guy like myself, for that matter. By the way, where's that Reaper Kid? I'm back in my own body, but it doesn't feel like my own body. Bell-chan must have brought me back to life somehow. I remember everything fading to black...but then it wasn't black. I could see a glowing presence of purple-blue all around me. The little Death kid waved at me and disappeared...and then I was here. This is freaky...I'm actually _floating_ just like Urd does all the time. And I can see through walls. I see some kind of delicate, yet massive web all around me. It seems as if I can imagine anything...and then I see it. But it's not imagination, is it? It's real, isn't it? I guess I must have some kind of the powers like you guys have. Imagine me...having the powers of the Goddesses! First thing I'm gonna do with these new powers is whip up some beef teriyaki and shrimp tempura._

**MIYUKI:**

_Don't forget the rice and some homemade noodles! I'm totally starving! And if no one is going to correct you, Keiichi, I will. You don't have the powers of the Goddesses...you're a guy! Remember? This is too strange to believe. I'm floating too! And you know what's really bizarre about all of this? I have this fleeting...well, _more_ than fleeting suspicion that I had God inside of me. Not that kind of being most people think of as God, but something more. He..it?..He was totally majestic and powerful and unique. It's almost frightening how awesome He is. What's even weirder is this other feeling I have...that my partner had the Devil inside of her. Imagine that! Me...teehee...God! Natsumi...teehee...Devil!_

**NATSUMI:**

_You better not make fun of Oni-sama! He's really rad! He _was_ inside of me too! And I don't mean that in a hentai way, Miyuki, so stop thinking perverted thoughts! And don't any of you start judging me because of who was in possession of my body back when we were trapped in that universe-sphere. Besides, He isn't just some simplistic being of evil, like the devil in the Exorcist. He's...well, I really don't know how describe Him. But I could sense a purpose and power in Him while He was inside of me. He's like some kind of cosmic Narahira; witty and seductive in His own wicked way. He's totally 'dark side of the force'! But right before He left me, He told me that He and Kami-sama and Death are all safe, but they're powerless. Something's keeping them in some kinda of 'life preserver' universe, so that we can do what we've been called upon to do._

* * * * * * * *

Belldandy could _feel_ each speaker's thoughts in her will, as significant and present as her own thoughts. The sense of all of them talking at once didn't make a difference; she was able to hear each and every thought clearly. But she was experiencing far more than just thoughtcasts: she could feel their feelings; sense their senses; live their lives as if they were her own. With a start, she realized that they were _linked_ somehow...joined together in every conceivable way, in a manner that far surpassed telepathics or even Probing. She had never Shared, so she didn't know what that was like. But Urd and Mara _had_ Shared; and she knew that they were astonished as much as she was. She was in full possession of every nuance of their Beings. 

It was all good...

She _was_ Urd, Skuld, Keiichi, Mara, Miyuki and Natsumi. She was individual, and yet a group as well. Belldandy detached her perspective for a moment, noticing that it was as if her own being was mirrored in her two sisters. What they knew, _she_ knew as well. She was fully awarethat the union between the seven of them was a joining that was far more intimate than that of Sharing.

Which was hard to believe.

The 'temporary' universe that had enclosed the seven of them had collapsed upon itself. Instead of being in the middle of a frozen Tokyo Bayfront, she was suspended in the coolness of deep TimeSpace.

The sudden change in environment pushed the three mortals towards momentary panic. Along with her sisters, she proceeded to cast a calming vibration towards Keiichi and the two policewomen. Mara was also a little disoriented at first, as she was not a Norn, but her older Demoness sister recovered her composure rather quickly. Faster than light could bridge a naon, she sensed Keiichi relaxing.

The distance between shock and calm regard had been traveled almost instantly...far faster than mortal thought. Far faster than Divine thought. It was as if Belldandy could wish for something...

...and it would become real.

Even with her Goddess Powers unsealed, she had never experienced such a magnitude of Divine Energy. It was as if her Goddess Powers had gone off the scale.

As she looked out into TimeSpace, she realized with a gasp that she was even more powerful than she could ever dream of being.

She could see the _entire_ TimeWeb!

To a Norn, the TimeWeb was like a supercomputer...a Goddess could _use_ any part of the TimeWeb, but only one part at a time. Just like when someone logged on to a network computer, and they would have immediate access to All the possible functions of a computer...but could only run one computer command at a time. In like manner, she could view TimeStreams singly, one-by-one; like flicking pages in a book. But because Belldandy was a Norn, she could view TimeStreams _fast_, faster than all the Gods of Yggdrasil. Especially the passages of Time connected to the Present. Within each TimeStream, she could perceive each strand, each TimeWeave, as a entirety. Thus, TimeWeaves were instantly known to her, TimeStreams were recognized with particularity, but the TimeWeb was much too complex to be deciphered as a whole. It contained too much information; being able to view the TimeWeb in its entirely was as likely as looking through a subatomic microscope and expecting to view an entire galaxy at once. 

In Belldandy's case, her specialty was the Present...whenever she negotiated the TimeWeb, it seemed to fade off into the distance once her attention began to focus too far Pastwards or Futurewards. 

But in the present circumstance, she could see _all_ of it clearly: the incredibly beautiful architecture of Past, Present and Future.

Which was hypothetically impossible for any Divine being, except for the Lord.

Floating in something resembling TimeSpace, Belldandy regarded the TimeWeb momentarily. She could recognize that it _was_ the TimeWeb, but its features seemed to have lost their pristine order. She could hear Keiichi's voice in her thoughts commenting that it looked like a rotten apple when compared to its normal state.

"How could he possibly know something like that?" she asked herself...and was quickly answered by six voices confirming that Keiichi knew everything there was to know...

...and then some.

Returning her attention to the corpse-like TimeWeb, Belldandy stretched her senses and assessed the damage to it. Obviously, the TimeWeb was ailing because there were no currents of Time moving through it. She smiled to herself; for some odd reason, the TimeWeb's current diseased state reminded her of Keiichi when he had a raging fever and had to stay home from N.I.T. After a teasing comment in her mind from Keiichi, Belldandy concentrated on a solution. 

With a flash of wisdom, Belldandy knew that...although the TimeStream wasn't sentient per se...it was just like any other being suffering from a disease. It needed to be nursed back to health. For some unknown reason, Isilblius had paralyzed it completely.

That wouldn't do.

With a wave of her hand, Belldandy started Time again. Which was quite appropriate, because she was the Goddess of the Present.

The Goddess of Now.

* * * * * * * *

"Oh...my....wowwwwww! H..how did I do _that_!!!" Belldandy gasped in awe as it dawned on her that she had just jump-started the entire TimeWeb with the merest hand gesture. She remembered how she and her sisters has struggled to simply send Urd back seven centuries into the Past to rescue Keiichi and the others.

What she had just done didn't even require _that_ much effort...and yet it had required a unimaginably immense resource of Divine Energy to accomplish.

"Way to go, sis!!!" three mental voices chorused inside her thoughts.

"Now I understand why Mara is our sister!" Skuld's voice echoed in her mind, firmly into answer-mode.

"Spill it, Skuld," she heard Mara and Urd reply, intensely curious.

"We three Norns each have a domain of Time. And all along, I've been wondering how Mara fits into the Time equation thing. It's obvious now! In another sense, Mara _is_ Time. Not like how we three are, but in a totally different way. I've theorized that Mara 'regulates' Time in some way, perhaps as an agent of chaos and discord, as well as an agent of balance and accord. She does so unconsciously, of course. But now I know for certain that she had an extremely vital function in regards to TimeSpace. If, for any reason, Time is removed from the TimeWeb...the only way to start Time back up is through Mara. Mara's like...a 'sparkplug', to use a mechanical analogy."

"That explains why she's part of our group. Mara is the one being in existence whose unique Divine energy has a 'signature' that can reset the TimeWeb," Urd affirmed. "One of us has to be the one to will Time 'back into' the TimeWeb...and the 'spark', to use the brat's expression, can only come from Mara."

"Which makes it a closed system," Miyuki added. "Without three Norns and Mara, what Belldandy just did would have been impossible."

"It almost feels impossible as it is!" Belldandy said wonderingly. "This...power...we have is beyond comprehension."

"It's more than that!" Skuld said thoughtfully. "I sense, er...seem to know, that the Metanative power at our disposal is equivalent to that which is available to the Lord."

"Actually, it much greater than that of the Lord's. Otherwise _they_ would be called upon to do what we just did!" Urd said soberly.

"H..holy shit!" Keiichi interrupted urgently, his mental voice tinged with apprehension.

"What!!?" four voices asked.

"Don't you guys remember the most important thing about being powerful?" he asked.

"What?" Mara ventured, slightly irritated.

_"Greatness of ability does not imply greatness of wisdom!" _

* * * * * * * *

Skuld initially regretted Keiichi's declaration, because it was so true. Yet, despite his statement, she did shout "Yahooo!!!!" a few thousand times, reveling in her new state of being. And painting various portions of the TimeWeb with universe-sized words. Yet, the giddying sensation of having an absolute amount of power at her peruse had been cut short by Keiichi's reminder about the accountability of having such omnipotence. Only three beings were omnipotent...the Lord, the Dark Lord, and the Reaper Boy. With good reason, because being all-powerful didn't imply that one is all wise.

The fourth omnipotent being, Isilblius, was proof of that.

Now she knew why Keiichi and the two mortals had been included in their group of seven. They had lived their lives with distinctly non-Divine perspectives...which would weigh any decisions the group made with a cautionary perspective.

Whoever gave them all this power certainly knew what it was doing.

Hopefully, she and her sisters, plus Keiichi, Miyuki and Natsumi...would know what _they_ were doing as well...

* * * * * * * *

They had convened a War Council of sorts to discuss the present situation.

"Now that there _is_ a Now, we need to leave this place and find Isilblius," Mara announced, thrusting a red-gloved hand in the air.

"I'm going to make him pay dearly for what he did to us. Plus I've got all sorts of extra grudges against him. He tricked me...and no one gets away with that! Because of Isilblius, I was stuck babysitting Cevn while he was poisoning his Soul away. That was not a pretty sight to behold. And what's worse, I had to watch my twin sister kill the mortal man she loved. Finally, he tried to kill me by using Spider Demons! In my own lair too!" she added, getting angrier with each sentence.

"Cevn? Who's that?"

"**_HUH?!!_**" six voices sounded as they turned to face Urd.


	101. Pt 101: A Moment's Distinction Between B...

**Part 101: A Moment's Distinction Between Brutality and Beauty (Draft)**

Mara felt disgruntled. She had found herself in the midst of an ideal set of circumstances, and yet...

"Leave it to the mortals to totally mess things up!" she reflected angrily. "I have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity here! I've been empowered with what feels like an infinite amount of energy...far beyond any Demoness Powers I could have ever dreamed of having...and it all falls apart! I mean, I'm way more powerful than the Ultimate Destruction Program, by a thousandfold! But can I enjoy my newfound powers? Noo..oo..oo! That worthless idiot Keiichi had to ruin the whole thing with his stupid talk about 'responsibility'. Blessed killjoy first-rank moron!!! Why couldn't he just keep his little mortal mouth _shut_ for once?! And what's the worst by far? He's totally right, blessit!!!" she shouted, totally frustrated.

"We heard that, Mara!" six voices echoed, chorusing their accusations in her mind.

"_Waaaah!!!_"

Mara almost sweat-gagged over her complete negligence. For a moment, her awareness of the fact that they could 'overhear' her thoughts had totally absented itself. Because of the 'link' between them, the others could sense her almost as clearly as she could hear herself. Her antagonisms had reached the wrong audience. In frustration, she made to kick a nearby black hole with the aggressiveness of a soccer player, until Belldandy motioned "no" with her hand.

"There'll be no kicking stellar bodies until we decide that it's safe to do so," her younger sister announced censoriously. Mara gritted her teeth and fists in frustration, and then slumped down into cross-legged position.

A Demoness with a comet-sized dudgeon.

They seemed to be omnipotent, and perhaps even omniscient. Mara found that she was suddenly knowledgeable about fields of expertise that she had never been interested in. She was filled with understanding; arcane methods were never her strong suit, but now she could mentally composite formulae with the slightest effort. Even realms of science she should have never known anything about...such as the SysOperations of the Yggdrasil Mainframe...she seemed to have mastered with an uncanny exactitude. She was filled with the Yggdrasilian knowledge and experience of three Goddesses; three Goddesses whose intellects had been mysteriously expanded as well...

Yet, a short while later, Mara discovered that their group of seven _wasn't_ all-powerful and all-knowing. Especially in the all-knowing department.

Urd had completely forgotten about Cevn.

* * * * * * * *

"Urd, what do you mean, 'Cevn who?'!? Cevn's been your boyfriend for over a year now! Remember?" Keiichi confronted her. He wanted to thump her on the head to drive his point home, but he was still uncertain about how these cosmic energies that comprised their bodies worked. For all he knew, thumping Urd with a knuckle might create some kind of catastrophe on a galactic scale. Restraining his impulses, he narrowed his eyes at her to demonstrate his displeasure. Urd looked back at him blankly, with a quizzical expression. She clearly didn't know what he was referring to.

A short while ago, her spirit was grave with melancholy; weighed down by the realization that the man she loved was dead. But now, her being seemed to compass a blissfully blithe perception of reality. Urd was almost happy-go-lucky in her demeanor, especially in regards to the immense Divine powers she now possessed.

"I still don't know what you're talking about. I'm trying to remember...but I can't! I don't know this person whom you are describing as my 'lover'." Urd replied, arching her eyebrows.

"She never said 'lover', Big Sister Urd! And Keiichi said 'boyfriend'! Where do you hear such things?! Get your mind out of the gutter!" Skuld interrupted, her voice tanged with distaste.

"It's impossible for me to have a lover, or even a boyfriend! Remember the Ultimate Force? Just because I can fall in love with a guy, it doesn't mean that I can have him. And vice versa as well. I'm stuck with unrequited love forever, because I'm the Norn of the Past. Why do you think I've been single these past hundred millennia? Because I _want_ it to be that way?" Urd said, feeling sensitive in the wake of Skuld's accusations. For a moment, the old familiar longing grabbed her emotions and twisted them into coils...

For the first time in her life, Belldandy could fully sense her older sister's emptiness, because it was mirrored in her own heart. Urd's void was worse than she could have ever imagined; it reminded her of a lifeless landscape painting of a deep desert, or a random conflux of ice floes. A nether-place inside of Urd's kokoro.

Somehow, Cevn had never reached Urd's heart.

"This is...so wrong!" she observed aloud.

"...so even if I knew this 'Cevn' character, whom incidentally I can't remember ever meeting," Urd continued, "I certainly couldn't have possibly done the romantic hookup with him, if you know what I mean. But I understand why you guys would all think such a thing, however. Odds are if he's a mortal, then he's probably all infatuated with me, from afar. Oh hoooo...they _all_ are, of course! But let me assure you, it's all one-sided. No offense, Belldandy...but I would _never_ get involved with a mortal man!" Urd declared resolutely.

Belldandy and her sisters shook their heads sadly, brimmed with a sense of irony regarding Urd's statement. Belldandy noticed that Keiichi was staring at Urd with an questioning expression, as if he had never met her before.

"I believe you, Urd." Belldandy said gently, garnering astonished stares from the others. It was time to turn the tide.

She explained that, if her older sister was suffering from a bout of selective amnesia, then it certainly wasn't her fault. Perhaps Urd's distraught feelings towards Cevn had caused her so much pain, her subconscious had taken over and buried all memories of him. If this was so, then such a concealment would be rendered even more impenetrable to she and her sisters, because of the mysterious augmentation of their powers. Perhaps even impenetrable to Urd herself.

"Yet, you must understand that for all of us, this is quite odd, Urd, Belldandy noted. "Since we seven seem to share this profound harmony of thoughts and feelings, then we should be able to 'sense' something in your kokoro about Cevn. As it is, we cannot. I can't touch at a single vestige of his presence inside of you at all. It's as if you've never met him! But I certainly can see him in my own mind, as clear as the day he first came to our temple. I remember how happy Skuld and I were when you told us that you and he had fallen in love for real. Can't you feel that happiness inside of me, Urd?"

"Nn uh! I feel something bringing you to a state of vicarious joy, but it isn't this 'Cevn' you're talking about," Urd said, squinting her eyes with effort. Belldandy could tell that she was really trying hard to remember. Keiichi and the others nodded their heads in encouragement, but after a while Urd shook her head "no".

"Don't you guys get it?! I don't have some boyfriend called Cevn! I _never_ did! I don't know him! And I certainly don't sense his presence in your thoughts, either. Despite the fact that you claim to have known him. Zero, nada, nyet...nothing! So you know what I think? I think _you're_ the ones having memory problems here! Obviously, you all must be experiencing some kind of jointly-hallucinated fantasy about me and some Earthrealm guy being together....which is pretty scary, considering that we're all mega-powerful now! We're supposed to be getting ready to kick Isilblius's ass, and you guys are busy imagining things about me that aren't true! Well, nothing new with that..." Urd remonstrated, almost losing her cool.

Belldandy let the implications of Urd's assessment pass through her for the moment. She could sense the apprehension about their newly-bestowed abilities in each mind, especially Skuld's. Urd was right; it _ was_ a great concern to each of them! It was intimidating enough, having to wonder about whether they even had the _right_ to use their incredible new powers. Now, they had to question whether or not they had the _ability_ to use them wisely. But she didn't want to dwell on these vexes, because she was more concerned for her sister's sake.

Something had surgically removed all her memories of Cevn from Urd's consciousness. From her heart. From her kokoro.

"You guys! There's something else too!" Skuld said in a cautious voice. "While you guys have been investigating why Urd can't remember Cevn, I've been checking the TimeWeb to see if I can dial up any history on him. There's absolutely _no_ trace of Cevn in the _entire_ TimeWeb. None! It's as if he never existed within TimeSpace at all!"

"Waitaminute! You meant that the guy that came out in the middle of a typhoon to flag down our police car, so we could rescue this Keiichi and take him to the hospital...never existed?! That's impossible, because my partner and I _were there_! I only met him once, but I totally remember him. Not too many gaijins with long wild hair try to chase down our police car in the first place! Usually, it's the other way around; we're chasing them down in a blur of sirens. Any person who's crazy enough to go looking for a police car in an intense typhoon...well, that person tends to stick themselves in one's memories! I don't understand this at all, because he _does_ exist!" Natsumi exclaimed.

"Which leads to another question. Why would he be barred from Urd's memories...and also be missing from this TimeWeb thing you're talking about? _We_ remember him. I can see him in each of your minds, except for hers. And according to all of you, she's the girlfriend. Shouldn't she have the strongest memories of him?" Miyuki asked, gesturing towards Urd.

"So which one of us is mistaken? We...or her?" Keiichi asked.

His question resounded within their consciences, like a rock plummeting against the walls of a deep well. Moments later, a fugue-like silence wrote itself upon their minds as they had to admit to the feverishly dervishing confutation.

Their unity of thought, perception and emotion was disturbed, was flawed; perhaps to the point of being completely unreliable.

"Of course, only an idiot wouldn't see that there is two possible explanations for this situation," Skuld suddenly interjected, striking a pose as she raised a single gloved finger in the air and rested the other gloved hand on her hip. The only thing missing was a strobing light above her head. So she created a pulsar above her to add to the effect.

"Who's an idiot, brat?! Oh great...here comes another lecture! Skuld, you shouldn't be so condescending when we all can sense what you're thinking! You're totally embarrassing yourself with your pompousness, _Little_ Sister!" a flurry of voices chorused in her thoughts simultaneously. 

Skuld immediately blushed and tried to tone down her aloofness a few notches before engaging them with her theories. But she kept the pulsar alit...

"Possibility One: We know that Cevn _was_ the Ultimate Force at one time. It's possible that _we're_ the Ultimate Force now. Ergo, there can't be two Ultimate Forces at the same time. Which means that he truly doesn't exist any more. We ended up getting his UF powers somehow. Plus, maybe he didn't exist in the first place...that he was just something the UF cooked up on its own."

"I don't buy that at all, at least the part about the UF inventing memories of him in our heads! _I_ remember him...and my mind isn't messed up!" Mara replied with tight defensiveness.

"The state of your mind being un-messed-up is debatable, Mara," Keiichi quickly countered with a teasing smirk, unable to resist himself. Belldandy glanced over at her fiance and started to giggle despite herself; her fluid laughter was rendered even more delightful by the scowl it drew from Mara.

"Every time I try to explain something to you guys, you do this! You always ruin my explanations!!!" Skuld whined, a beacon of frustration.

Mara was thankful for her youngest sister, because Skuld's pouting expression had redirected the laughter away from her. She quickly joined in the giggling as Skuld squirmed uncomfortably against the sparks of mirth.

"Okay...here's Possibility Two: Cevn _was_ the Ultimate Force at one time," Skuld noted, trying to get a grip on herself. "Since each of us seems to have Ultimate Force-type powers, it's possible that he _gave_ them up. He may have even given them to _us_ for some reason. Which means that he's still alive, but somehow outside of our sphere of perceptions. This would make a lot of sense, since obviously there can't be two Ultimate Forces floating around the Multiverses at the same time..."

"You mean to imply, dear Skuld, that if Cevn is still alive, he somehow exists outside of TimeSpace? Outside of the will of our minds and the experience of our Beings? If we have the power of the so-called Ultimate Force, than how can it be that we can't sense him in the present moment, except in our own memories?" Belldandy asked, astonished.

"And that still doesn't explain why Urd can't remember him! A..and how come Urd can't 'see' him in our memories, despite the fact that we all remember him in some way? We seem to be able to sense _ everything_ that each of us knows and feels, except for Cevn. Why is this?" Keiichi added, firing off a serial of questions.

"You guys, I'm just offering theories, not definitive explanations!" Skuld acknowledged as they all turned to stare at her, seeking answers. She floated backwards a meter while waving her hand in front of her defensively.

"Here's a thought," Mara said quietly. Belldandy was somewhat surprised at the calmness in Mara's expression. Her Demoness sister was rarely calm under fire; in fact, in her own way Mara was as much a drama Queen as Peorth. But Belldandy had been around Mara enough to recognize the fire burning in her Demoness sister's red-orange eyes; an intense fire that exclaimed "I'm onto something big!"

"We've got an Everything to fix," Mara said, weaving her hands above her head. A large holosphere formed around them, superimposing the TimeWeb over the two sickly Multiverse-trees of Yggdrasil and Vanagdrasil.

Skuld gasped as they were quickly surrounded by a scale model of the entirety of known reality.

"Wow!! This is really awesome! It's pretty cool that I can do this, eh?" Mara said in a genki voice, admiring her 'model' of the Everything.

Belldandy was too shocked to acknowledge Mara's words. "Awesome" was an understatement. Being in the middle of a spherical simulacrum of the Everything was momentarily disconcerting to her. She knew from experience that rendering a stable fractional holo-visual representation of Yggdrasil required the allocation of a huge chunk of the Ygg Mainframe system resources. Belldandy had done this once before, as part of her Honors work in Sysoping. She remembered struggling over her Honors project for centuries from inception to completion; the resulting scale model she had created had represented only 1/200th of Yggdrasil's interface with the Multiverse. In comparison to Mara's holosphere, her Honors project seemed like a stick-figure drawing on display next to a Hokusai or Dali masterpiece. She glanced nervously at Urd and Skuld; both her sister's faces were brow-knitted with incredulity as they beheld the impossibly complex simulation. 

Only the Lord could do something like this. 

Swallowing hard, Belldandy regarded the representation and compared it against the visual records of the Multiverse that she remembered from investigative research utilizing the Yggdrasil Mainframe. She was daunted, as she realized that the damage was far worse than she had initially assessed it to be.

"It's quite possible that once we finish undoing all the destruction that has been rendered upon the Everything, then things will revert back to normal. An equilibrium will be struck, a homeostasis will be created. I think that...matters will return to the state they were just prior to when all of this started. We'll all be ourselves, Cevn will be back among us, and my twin sister Urd will remember how gaga she went over him."

"I've never gone 'gaga' over anybody!" Urd interjected indignantly.

"I offer two words of refutation to that opinion. Cherry Blossom Spirit. Troubadour. Well, actually four words of refutation. Case closed!" Skuld said with a sly grin, still marveling at Mara's 'model'.

"Okay, okay, okay! I give up!" Urd admitted desperately. "This really sucks, you know! I've had a hard enough time hiding things from you guys before. Now that you're a part of me, and I'm a part of you..sigh..I can't conceal a single thing!" Urd said, filled with frustration. If there was a downside to all of this, it was the thoroughgoing lack of privacy between her and the others. She didn't know how to shield certain of her thoughts and memories from the others...and in the moment, her thoughts seemed to beach themselves on an incident between she and the Brat...

Skuld's sly grin faded into an angry grimace...and then she suddenly exploded with fury.

"**_Oooooooo!!! Big Sister Urd!_ **Now I know what happened! It was _you_! Y..you put an itching potion inside of my bra, a week after you caught me 'borrowing' a couple things from your Urd's Castle room! You just admitted it to yourself...and I heard you!" she screamed angrily, filled with dudgeon.

"**Urd!!!**" Belldandy added in a voice of denunciation. "How could you do such a thing to your little sister!. Especially right after she went from being totally flat-chested to having to wear a bra for the first time! Now that she's small-busted, she's naturally bound to be sensitive about her size, and..."

Belldandy's hand flew to her mouth...but it was too late.

"Gee...thanks a lot, Elder Sister!" Skuld interrupted in a cold voice of disgust, her face contorted with a mixture of embarrassment, resentment and pure disbelief.

* * * * * * * *

After Bell's over-the-top gaffe, Keiichi realized that, before they attempted to save the Everything, they would have to save themselves _from themselves_. In the present moment, for all practical purposes they were functioning as a conspectus; their perspectives authored as much by their individuality as by the union of their beings. Consequently, they were handicapped by an inability to determine whether the "I" or the "We" was in the ascendancy. Beyond this was the sensitive issue of privacy...or lack thereof. Keiichi sensed that his thoughts and feelings were no longer distinctions. Instead, they felt like 'libraries' of awareness.

Taking all of this into account, Keiichi fervently advocated the necessity for them to develop a means to control or perhaps harness their 'groupmind'. Arguing the point to the others, he managed to convince them of the need for some method of separability. A process that they could use to turn the open flowgate of impressions and experiences 'on' and 'off'. 

Keiichi was gravely concerned about undesired transcendancy. He feared that they were so completely meshed emotionally and intellectually, it wouldn't be long before some _big_ secrets came out in the open. Unwanted secrets, benign and malicious. Not to mention some very private experiences. In his case, such experiences as he and Bell making love, or having a heart-to-heart conversation about their lives. 

They needed a way to consciously preserve their individuality. Surprising or not, they all agreed with his assessment.

Returning to his 'work', Keiichi smiled as Bell's image filled his thoughts. A particular memory of sweet bliss filled his mind, causing him to shiver. But his imagination was quickly skewed with embarrassment as he pictured the five others in the group all floating in the air in his bedroom, looking on while he and Bell were sharing tender intimacies on his futon...

"Ulp!" he gasped, thrusting his concentration back towards the issues at hand. His two partners paused to look up at him momentarily, Miyuki with a questioning look, Natsumi with a furtive grin.

Since he, Miyuki and Natsumi had lived all their lives without interpersonal forms of communication such as telepathy, meta-empathy, thoughtcasting and the like...naturally it fell to them to develop a form of volitional shielding.

They would have a 'fresh' perspective on the subject. The Goddesses and Mara were biased, because they were accustomed to using these modes of communication. Because of this, they might not be able to create the kind of 'shield' that was needed. So the 'shield project' was an all-mortal effort.

It was daunting enough that it took Cevn 37 trillion years to restructure the Everything. It was quite possible that they might have to repeat Cevn's feat, depending on how fucked up the Everything was after Isilblius ruined it. But in the moment, Keiichi had to focus his efforts to bear upon the near impossible task of rescuing thought from thought, feeling from feeling, memory from memory.

Bell-chan and the others had lived their whole lives having certain extrasensory links between themselves, but for Keiichi and the two other mortals, these 'senses' were strikingly new. It would be difficult for the three of them to shield their discovery from three Goddesses and a Demoness. Not that Bell and the others would be deliberately prying; but hiding their discovery from the four Divines would be like stopping up a leaky soup bowl in the presence of a starving man. Or trying to silence a voice after the words had reached the ears of many listeners.

This was a definitely worse than a paradox...

But all at once, Keiichi realized that the moment they created a working 'mental shield'...they'd have a _shield_. Once that would become a reality; their new shield would completely protect their thoughts from the four Divine sisters. While the mental shield was doing its work, veiling his thoughts initially...he and the two policewomen could expand on their work while 'shielded' and create an actual 'failsafe' system. He was especially concerned about Skuld; any mental shield they created would have to be complex enough so that it couldn't be 'debugged' by a genius mind fueled by natural inquisitiveness.

So what they really had to do was work toward constructing a reliable 'shield-within-a-shield'.

Once they initially created a means of thought shielding, they would have to 'tweak' it a bit, otherwise Bell-chan and her sisters would be able to bypass it. It was comparable to building an secret racing engine in public. As long as he worked during daylight in front of spectators, the engine itself wouldn't be very secret. But once it became dark, the spectators would leave...and he could fasten the engine onto a chassis and drive off invisibly to a repair garage, where he could finish modifying the engine unobserved.

He could hear Miyuki in his mind cheerfully agreeing with his analogy.

"Let's get back to work!" she said in his thoughts. 

* * * * * * * *

It took just under a trillion years. A significant cycle of time, but it was the moment that counted. Keiichi and the two policewomen triumphantly announced to the others that they had devised a functional 'thought shield'. Met with relief by the four sisters, Keiichi asked for permission to proceed. After an enthusiastic "Yes!", he snapped his finger and implanted a shield with a 'lock key' inside of the consciousness of Belldandy and the others, including Miyuki and Natsumi. Next, Miyuki and Natsumi each took a turn implanting another layer of shields and 'lock keys' inside of each of the six other's consciousness.

What they had done was encrypt the 'lock key' within their own thoughts in such a way that it couldn't be deciphered by others. Such a 'key' that could unlock the thought shields could only be implemented if the three of them agreed to it. It was comparable to a room with three sets of doors, doors that could only be unlocked by three different keys.

The shields they had created were triple-redundant, utilizing a harmonic insignia of cognition so complex that it would take Skuld a minimum of several hundred billion years to decipher each 'lock'. Assuming that Skuld would want to do such a thing.

The unspoken concern was whether Isilblius could undo their work. If he managed to bypass the shields, he could turn them against each other. Keiichi wasn't brimming over with confidence regarding this issue, but he _was_ confident that the 'engine' or 'kernel' of the thought shields was intricate enough to keep Isilblius busy a long time. According to Bell and the others, Isilblius was powerful...but he wasn't a prodigy.

Once they were finished, Miyuki and Natsumi compressed the trillion of years into a moment, so that they could circle back to the starting point of their work.

* * * * * * * *

To Belldandy's perspective, Keiichi had only been gone a short while...

"Done already, Keiichi?!" she said happily, her eyes sparkling with expectation. He hugged her, and then turned the 'key' in each of their minds. A moment later, he felt two small surges of thought activity in his thoughts as Miyuki and Natsumi locked up _his_ mind.

He looked at Belldandy expectantly, and smiled when he noticed his fiancée's face visibly relaxing. This was all the proof he needed, as she sighed with relief and smiled happily at him.

"Let's test this out, Bell-chan. Can you tell me what I'm thinking?" he asked. Keiichi's thoughts alighted on a special memory: a late evening sun setting below the hill behind their house, the clouds in the sky rouged with twilight. He and Belldandy were sitting on the roof of their temple home, shoulder-to-shoulder. It was the first time she had actually leaned against him intentionally. Together, they had watched the sunset, Belldandy leaning against him rather than pulling herself away with a blush of embarrassment after a brief moment's contact.

A very dear memory for Keiichi.

Belldandy smiled and shook her head "no". Keiichi then visualized an 'opening' in his mental shield and let the memory pass through. His fiancée's reaction was almost instant; her eyes flashed wide with recognition and she smiled sweetly, a slight blush to her cheekbones.

In response, she flashed a memory back at him. Keiichi saw the same scenario from Belldandy's perspective. He felt her feelings; how she had leaned against him that time because she was finally beginning to feel safe in the knowledge that it was more than just a wish that bound her to him. She had examined her own heart, and realized that she was really beginning to feel sentiments towards him that surpassed the simple joy she experienced whenever she granted a wish. The setting sun was important to her, because it had cast the whole experience in a romantic setting. Romance was something quite new for a young Goddess who had never sat next to a young Earthrealm man before. Keiichi blushed as he felt the surprise Belldandy had felt during that experience. She had been expecting _him_ to pull himself away with embarrassment. Then he felt a very warm feeling, almost like being bathed in a comforting bath as he felt the other surprise she felt...

Belldandy had felt a blossoming sense of love towards him for the first time that evening. The Goddess who couldn't recognize romance from radishes had been caught up in a delicious elegance...and was never the same thereafter.

Keiichi sighed, overwhelmed by the emotional impressions. It dawned on him that _that_ moment had been the spark...one of many, to be sure,...that had had urged their love to greater openness.

And he had never even suspected that a shared moment on the roof of the temple had so profoundly affected his Divine soulmate...

"Ahhh, this feels so good! Finally, I have 'me' back again!" she said as she flew up into Keiichi's arms for a kiss. An actual _ private_ kiss, just between the two of them. A kiss that Urd and the others wouldn't sense, feel and think.

A kiss he had been waiting a trillion years for.

"Hey you guys! Since the shields seem to be working really well, do you mind if Bell and I 'go off' for a while by ourselves?" Keiichi asked.

* * * * * * * *

This time, they convened an actual War Council.

Belldandy, Urd, Skuld and Mara were dressed respectively in their Warrior Goddess and Warrior Demoness battle outfits. Keiichi had outfitted himself in a stunning mix of traditional samurai garb and racing coveralls. Miyuki and Natsumi wore battle outfits of their own devising as well...a futuristic synergism between their regulation Tokyo policewomen's uniforms and something resembling the Knight Sabre mecha-outfits from Bubblegum Crisis.

After all, with the ability to control all forms of matter, it only made sense for the mortals to create battle outfits along imaginary lines...but using designs that mattered to them. Miyuki and Natsumi were fans of the many policewomen 'gun babe' anime and manga, including Bubblegum Crisis, Gunsmith Cats, and the Burn Up series. And since Keiichi had spent a decade in medieval Japan, the samurai armor was a must...plus he felt much more comfortable wearing racing outfits.

Mara looked at the others, and then remembered how she had been initially surprised when she remanifested herself in her Warrior Demoness attire in preparation to take on Isilblius...

To her immense shock, she had materialized in a battle outfit that was far more ornate than the typical enhancements that befitted a Senior First Class Demoness. She was dressed in a black bodysuit that was tight to her body, with a stripe of red slashing from her ankles up the sides of her legs, past her hips and waist and then running up under her armpits and inside of her arms until it reached her wrists. A pair of intricate wings of red and gold flared away from her shoulders. Under her wings, a silver cape descended from her shoulders. Her forehead was ringed with a spherical helmet with thin gold strands that bubbled out into an exotic semi-circle of tapering wands. Her midriff was exposed, creating just the right aura of sexiness. After all, she was a Demon_ness_...and fashion had to be served. She had been especially pleased with the large calf-high boots studded with diamonds and filigreed with steaks of Ixodenum, with flames hovering at their sides. Her hands were clad with glove-coverlets decorated with Demonic symbols and replica Sere-Hawks at the wrists. Her shoulders were shielded with translucent geometric auras of orange energy...

In a word, her military attire was far more ornate and sophisticated than that of Mephisopholis, the renowned Marshal of the WarDemons. She felt like a 4th-dimension dream...

Marveling at her Warrior Demoness Battlesuit, Mara had spun delicately around in the air. Pirouetting with glee, causing her silver cape to flutter breezily.

"Oh look...it's a Magical Girl! Pretty Warrior Scout Sailor Moon! Or maybe 'Sailor Scout Mara' would be more honest!" Urd quipped with amused causticity. Her self-admiring mood ruined, Mara quickly blushed crimson with embarrassment and indignance as her body stiffened up. Fists clenched at her sides, she summoned up a sphere of energy and then shot a few plasma firebolts at her twin sister. Urd easily dodged the half-hearted firebolts and waved her hand...

Mara felt a tingling condense on her skin, as if a thin mist had covered her entire body. She looked up...and Urd was giggling. She looked down...and she discovered that she was now clad in a red and white sailor fuku: complete with a red mini-skirt; ko-gal thick socks; ruby-red slippers that belonged in the Wizard of Oz; and a red and pink scarf-tie.

"**URD, I'M GONNA KILL YOU!!!**" Mara screamed, glaring at Urd balefully. With a wanding of her hands, she immediately willed Urd's Warrior Goddess Battlesuit into a white and green sailor outfit.

Urd now looked like a high-school girl during summer session.

Mara broke out into howls of laughter...at least until Urd discovered what she had done to her. Urd went nuts at this, and immediately streaked off in pursuit of Mara, flailing thunderbolts after the grinning, departing Demoness.

Left behind, Skuld and Belldandy had dissolved into tearful laughter at the sight of the two sailor-suit outfitted sisters doing battle...

"Look! There goes two noble girls!" Natsumi said between giggles as Urd and Mara blazed overhead like twin comets, no longer contending half-heartedly with each other.

"Hee hee..maybe _we_ should wear sailor outfits too!" Belldandy commented, her ribcage hurting after laughing so hard. Skuld reacted to her fanciful idea with an expression of shocked distaste at first...and then she smiled with a broad knowing grin as a flurry of imagination swept her up.

"Yeah! That would be so funny! Could you...bwah ha hah...imagine the look on Isilblius's face when he gets his ass kicked by all of us, dressed in Sailor Moon outfits..." Skuld exclaimed gleefuly. This brought on another cyclone of giggling.

"Bell! Much as I'd love to see you in a sailor fuku...don't you even think about including me in this 'idea' of yours!" Keiichi shouted in a warning voice, overhearing them.

"Wah! That'd be a total disaster! You would ruin the whole effect if you showed up in a sailor outfit, Keiichi! We wouldn't have to fight Isilblius at all if that happened...he'd probably laugh himself to death!" Natsumi teased.

While everyone burst into unrestrained howls of laughter at that, Miyuki looked at the twin sister battle unfolding above their heads and noted to herself, "At least they're getting in some combat practice."

Mara's attention returned to the present. As she listened distantly to the others discussing strategies, she found herself filled with doubt. How they were ever going to take on Isilblius if they were prone to such bouts of insanity?

* * * * * * * *

Even though the Seven were no longer cosmically challenged, they were still daunted by the task ahead. It was no simple thing, defeating Isilblius...

The dread rival of both Lords...and now the Seven...had performed the most execrable acts upon the Everything that could ever be imagined. No, it was worse than anything imaginable. Belldandy frequently had to check her emotions at the door, otherwise she would bout nauseous just thinking about what Isilblius had done to the Everything.

With a fruition of depravity, Isilblius had usurped the Ultimate Power for his own use...and then recreated the Everything in his own image. The transformed Everything was horrible, disgusting, trenchant in the extreme. All matter and energy in the Everything, from the smallest particles of matter to the largest structures of universe-patterns..._was_ Isilblius. He had taken the entire spatial structure of the Everything and recast every individual component of it into a part of himself. Isilblius atoms. Isilblius galaxies. Isilblius animals. Isilblius stars. 

Isilblius Yggdrasil. Isilblius Vanagdrasil.

But it hadn't stopped there. The vulgar baseness of his violations included the realm of Time. Isilblius wasn't satisfied with being Everything...he wanted to be Everywhen as well. In a sordid act of possessiveness, the entire TimeWeb had been warped to his own design. Time was now so tightly integrated with Space, that it served as a 'circulatory system' to the Everything, transferring chronometric energies for quantum energies, feeding the whole. Feeding Isilblius. In each instantial sequence of Time, there was an Isilblius...and nothing more.

An infinity of TimeWeaves, each with Isilblius inside of them.

The Mid-Space had been compromised as well, transformed into a sort of Soul Vortex. This particular alteration that Isilblius had wrought was by far the most disturbing to Belldandy. Continuing on his twisted mission to recreate all aspects of the Everything as non-Life, he had stripped all the Souls in the Multiplicity of their uniqueness. Every sentient Soul had been confined, and then altered to become an Isilblius Soul. The only Souls she could sense in the Multiplicity were countless of these Isilblius Souls. Each Soul had been surrounded, 'coated' by the Soul of Isilblius, trapping them. They had been 'digested' by Isilblius. No longer was each Soul fully sentient. Instead of having a life of their own, the Souls were bound up as reflections and attributions of Isilblius's foul Soul. Yet, they _ were_ Souls, so they were totally aware of what was happening to them despite the sense that they were violated, unwillingly forced to carry parts of Isilblius's consciousness...

Deep in her heart, Belldandy could hear the voices of quintillions of Souls, screaming in pain and fear.

Beyond her, the Mid-Light itself was a sickly pale yellow, the crux of two rotting trunks of two husk-trees. The firm light of energy that typified the Mid-Light now was oscillating weakly, burning out like a candle unwaxed.

Everything was Isilblius.

The task that had fallen to them was extremely adverse. They had to defeat an enemy that had made himself inseparable from Time, Space, Soul and the Ultimate Force. All four processes were sempiternal when considered within the rubric of Metanative trans-science; they were inexhaustible, inexpugnable, eternal and transfixed upon all dimensions of existence. As long as Metanative energies existed, these four essential processes would exist as well.

But were they indestructible?

Isilblius had scorched them. 

If she and her six teammates managed to destroy Isilblius, could they do so without causing irrevocable damage to Time, Space, and Soul? Beyond this was a greater paradox yet...if they destroyed Isilblius, what would happen to the Ultimate Force? Isilblius had grafted himself within the UF, merging with it so thoroughly that it was impossible for them at present to distinguish him from the UF. By destroying Isilblius, they might be sealing their own doom. 

Their resource of power _was_ the UF...

Belldandy found herself unable to reason out what Cevn's role in all this. He was definitely linked to Isilblius, as Urd had discovered? But what was his link? One of Skuld's observations seemed to aim at the conclusion that he was still alive. If they destroyed Isilblius, would he survive? Skuld had also hinted at the strong probability that he gave them their UF-level powers. If they defeated Isilblius, would his 'portion' of the UF revert back to Cevn?

How could he have done what Skuld claimed? His Soul was gone, his physical body had died back on the Earthrealm, the mandala they had designed to return him had failed. Skuld's idea was only thoughtspace; in the present reality, they had no proof the he was alive.

But Isilblius was definitely alive. Besides the seven of them...and the Lord, Dark Lord and Death...there were no other beings alive in the Everything. Isilblius couldn't even be properly acknowledged as 'alive; no living being could ever enact the heinous evil that he had done.

"How do you destroy an enemy when that enemy is everything? Can anything be left after everything is destroyed?" Belldandy asked herself once more, narrowing her eyes.

* * * * * * * *

Miyuki and Natsumi were huddled in deep thought. Of the seven in their group, they were the only ones who had actually partnered together...so they were more keen to the notion of teamwork than the others. True, Belldandy, Urd and Skuld were sisters...and as such, a strong link of empathy existed between them. They had occasionally allied their skills and intuition when events demanded it, such as during the time Celestine tried to bring Time to a halt. But kinship was a far cry away from dynamic camaraderie that they had experienced during years on patrol in Bokuto. If they were going to beat this thing, it would take flawless execution _as a unit_.

Being of an investigative bent, Miyuki was more reserved than the others during their council of plans. After each strategy was aired, she wasted no time in pointing out potential risks and flaws in it. This drew the derision of the four Divines, especially the Demoness woman. But Miyuki was used to this; she had often played Devil's Advocate against Natsumi's 'gung-ho approach' and Yoriko's 'calculated approach' to apprehending criminals. Despite the ire that her objections sometimes drew from the others, Miyuki remained steadfast in her belief that a single voice of discord within a group was often essential in process of reaching accord.

This was one 'case' that they couldn't screw up.

Sequences of eternity passed her by...

In a sense, this was by far the biggest 'arrest case' that she had ever worked on. Miyuki's mind kept vaulting to a single point of clarity: how necessary it was for her to view Isilblius along the lines of criminality. As a crim, he was a ruthless, narcissistic sociopath who had stopped at nothing to achieve his goal. There were no restraints to his dictatorial ambitions; Isilblius had conceived and acted out his destructive havoc with the callousness of an anthropophagite.

He was by far the most dangerous type of malefactor.

At first, after they had been transformed into this transcendent reality, she and Natsumi had felt intimidated at first. One day they were Tokyo policewoman on patrol, the next day they were all-powerful beings. Not the average experience one encounters during their traffic beat.

Keiichi even had an edge on she and her partner, because he _already knew about all of this stuff_. He could make sense of it, perhaps even take it in stride. Mention the words "Goddess" and "Demoness" and Keiichi would barely bat an eyelash. But when comparing herself with the four Divine women, Miyuki felt extremely belittled. After all, she and Natsumi were mortals...while the four sisters had lived almost _a million years_ between them. Belldandy and her sisters were accustomed to the experience of living with Goddess and Demoness powers... 

While adapting to her 'new' state of being, Miyuki often fought with herself, struggling with the possibility that she had nothing of consequence to offer to the group. She and Natsumi were outsiders. Rocks among the tuned bells of a harmonic gamelan or carillon. Lame ducks amidst beauteous swans...

But the five had welcomed them into their memories, into their minds and hearts. Slowly, Miyuki became acclimated to her new powers and abilities. She began to share in the profundity of the thoughts of the four Divine sisters. They too were overwhelmed by their new powers. But even after she had helped craft the essential 'mental' shields that allowed each of them to control the outflow of their thoughts and feelings...Miyuki still felt amiss.

Why had the cosmic powers-that-be chosen to include her and her partner in the group of Seven? She sensed that the barely-known Cevn was behind this, and yet she failed to understand _why_. "Why me?" questions had plagued her of late.

But as she participated in the discussions about how to deal with Isilblius, she realized that she _did_ have something to contribute. For none of the others were able to consider Isilblius in the same light as she. To the four Divines, he was a mega-Divine force to be reckoned with. They were focused on trying to confront him at the level of divine powers, the TimeWeb, Metanative energies, etc. To Keiichi, he was a mindless Evil. All that Keiichi wished for was a way to end Isilblius's reign of horror. 

But in her and Natsumi's reckoning, Isilblius was a nothing less or more than a terrorist criminal.

A particular type of Evil...

And within the stride of her convictions, Miyuki suddenly realized _why_ she and Natsumi had been included in the group.

* * * * * * * *

"There is one important factor that is absent from your considerations. Each of you view Isilblius in a certain way...and that's good. But Natsumi and I view him within an outlook that none of you possess. Because of this, I feel that your plans are missing something. To us, Isilblius is a perpetrator. A criminal. We have to see him as the distorted mirror of our own shortcomings, so that we can really _see_ him for what he is. We all struggle with egoism, the pervasive need to be affirmed in all matters of judgment. Just like an egoist desires to be the only voice of reason in their world...which makes them the _unchanging_ voice of truth...Isilblius has blighted away all opposition, so he can monopolize his own being. To be true to himself, he had to eliminate _everything_ else. His greatness is fragile, because it depends on the condition that everything else around him is on bended knee. Bended knee...as in not existing. A commonality among criminals is their strong fear of change, a dread that exists within them to a degree that moral beings cannot comprehend. Isilblius is no different. His weaknesses will need to be drawn out, not simply attacked. War with him...and he will emerge victorious. He had already won the war, so to speak," she explained, gesturing towards the pseudo-Everything.

"But once we convince Isilblius of the value of the one thing he doesn't share with any being...love...and he will fall. Ultimately, criminal behavior is but a manifestation of self-love above anything else. In contrast, _our_ strength derives from the friendships we share, the love that we share, the intimacy of expression, dead and empathy that binds us together. When these are profiled against the psyche of a criminal, Isilblius's weaknesses will become our strengths," Miyuki explained.

Natsumi looked at her partner, marveling at how Miyuki's explanation has spoken to her own feelings, her own heart.

"Isilblius is obviously a criminal, because he so easily crossed beyond every moral and ethical line imaginable. He's _killed_...on an unprecedented scale. The catalogue of his atrocities is far worse than mere genocide. We cannot stoke the fires of his hatred directly. Instead, we must convince him that his life isn't worth protecting. That will be the lever-gap in his psychological armor. Remember, we're dealing with a being that doesn't give a shit about anything. So we can't simply frustrate him. He needs to be possessed of doubt. When criminals are possessed of doubt, they screw up. As policewomen, our job is to detect these blunders and exploit them to our advantage. Isilblius is one perp that I'm not going to let get away," Natsumi added, nodding her head at Miyuki.

Warmed by Natsumi's determination, Miyuki continued. 

"Here's what I propose," Miyuki began, the weight of all existence carried forth on every word she would offer henceforth. "Using police parlance...Isilblius needs to treated like a common criminal...and have his ass arrested by us. He has committed the most heinous act in the history of the Everything. So we need to prepare ourselves to be police, judge, jury...and executioner."

Skuld felt a lump in her throat in reaction to _ how_ Miyuki had said the latter. She looked to her sisters for comfort, but they were listening raptly to Miyuki's plan. Skuld had never killed a being before...with the exception of Bugs, of course...but they weren't beings, per se. Neither was the Ultimate Destruction Program; to Skuld, it was just another suite of software that needed to be anti-virused out of existence. But Isilblius was a _being_ in every sense of the word. The worst kind of being, but a being none the less. She wanted him dead, but Skuld didn't want to be the one who killed him.

"There are seven of us, so we need to approach this as a team, with each person using their own strengths. Belldandy will be the first to confront Isilblius, because he hates what she represents the most. She is kind, loving, concerned, pure, innocent, and blissful in aspect. She is a nonpareil, the quintessence of a certain form of beauty that is pure and wonderful. Isilblius will be strongly affected by her presence, because he _ hates_ Life itself. When he is initially challenged by all the best that Life has to offer, he will become enraged and confused. Remember, to him...we can't possibly exist."

Belldandy smiled sweetly, somewhat embarrassed by Miyuki's sea of compliments. Her sense of humility only served to confirm Miyuki's opinion that Belldandy was the right person for the initial stage of the apprehension.

"After Belldandy raises his ire, Urd will be the next to attack Isilblius. We need to attack him not only with our UF powers, but also with our personalities. In contrast to Belldandy's innocence, Urd's rambunctious nature will serve well to further unbalance him. Urd is sharp-of-tongue, wily, unrepentant, irreverent, caustic and seductive. While Belldandy's assault will be of a moral ground, Urd's assault will consist of an emotional haranguing of Isilblius. Urd, you must face him head-on and convey every possible hurtful reality into his consciousness. Taunt him, ridicule him, mock him, subject him to the harshest assault-écrasez l'infame...until his resentment is inflamed even further."

Urd nodded her head, her eyes gleaming with resolve.

"Once Urd has thoroughly deranged Isilblius's emotions, it will be Skuld's turn. Skuld's youth will undermine Isilblius by initially making him overconfident. Criminals tend to stereotype children as 'non beings' and 'victims'..."

"I am not a 'children'!" Skuld shouted, interrupting Miyuki.

"One may wonder about that from time to time," Natsumi cooed smoothly, patting Skuld on the shoulder with fraternal encouragement. Skuld wasn't able to see the wide grin on Natsumi's face, as the erstwhile policewoman was standing behind her.

"...well, uh...in any case, we need to make sure that Isilblius takes the bait, so to speak," Miyuki resumed. "He'll objectify you, viewing you as nothing more than a child...which will be his profound loss. But we all know that you're the most creative and intelligent being amongst us. One look at you and Isilblius will think you're a pushover, because he'll immediately type you as a rambunctious teenage kid. But instead, you're going to cream him with that super-genius mind of yours, Skuld. Your job, Skuld, is to contest Isilblius intellectually by engaging him in a debate. You must argue ad reductio in response to anything he feels is 'the truth'. Once you've deconstructed his outlooks on 'reality', you'll need to confound him further yet. To wrap him up in so much confusion, he'll start to doubt _everything_. Especially himself."

"Sounds totally cool to me!" Skuld exclaimed, beaming with enthusiasm.

"Once you've completely disoriented him, we'll turn to Natsumi and myself for the actual 'arrest'. Natsumi has the strongest 'ki' energy of any of us. She's a warrior. Over the years as her partner, I've come to respect her 'wild human' strength..."

Natsumi frowned archily at this, but let Miyuki continue.

"Put simply, Natsumi has _guts_! Her immense strength comes from confidence in herself coupled with an irreversible resolve. I've witnessed all sorts of super-human feats from this woman," Miyuki said, gesturing towards her erstwhile partner. "She'll be perfect for our 'knockout punch'."

Natsumi smiled sheepishly at this, behind her blush.

"Natsumi. Your role in this is very simple, but very critical. After bouting with Belldandy, Urd and Skuld, Isilblius will be considerably weakened. Then it will be our turn...you and I will take him on. We need to consider him as the deadliest of all criminals. We'll pursue him until he becomes exhausted, and once that's done, all you have to do is kick Isilblius's ass! Up until this point, our attacks will be directed at him at the level of kokoro. Now, we'll rely on you to directly assail him at the level of manifest energies. In other words, pound on him with all the abandon of a street fighter until he's immobilized, and then I'll 'cuff him'!" Miyuki said, direct and to the point.

"How are you going to 'cuff him'?" Skuld asked.

"The same way we locked you out of certain parts of your minds. We'll use the 'mental shield' technique. I'll indwell a mental shield inside of his psyche, which should 'disconnect' him from parts of himself. Instead of being a whole, Isilblius will be momentarily fragmented. It will take him some time to recombine all the aspects of his being back into a single unity...but during that time, he'll be especially vulnerable. We'll be able to confine him, with Keiichi's help."

"Keiichi?" Belldandy, Urd, Skuld and Mara blurted out. Miyuki smiled smugly...especially since the only person who was nonplussed about this was Keiichi himself. Keiichi was looking at her attentively.

"Once he's apprehended, Keiichi will be called upon for a special task," she noted. Turning her attention to Keiichi, she continued. 

"What you'll need to do is create a 'cell' for him, Keiichi, using all the Ultimate Force energies at your disposal. You'll have to think faster, act quicker, and formulate temporal-physical constructs instantaneously, so that Isilblius will get dizzy trying to figure 'em out. What we need you to do, Keiichi, is confine him with the one thing he cannot fight..."

"Speed," Keiichi said, finishing Miyuki's sentence. He had already sensed what his role in eliminating Isilblius would be. None of the group had competed in a conflict while using the tool of velocity. But in Keiichi's mind, velocity was definitely a tool. As a seasoned racer, he was used to employing speed in a certain manner, towards a certain ends. However, this would be much more than a race...he would have to draw upon all his racing expertise, plus the split-second skills he had honed as a samurai back when Isilblius had stranded him in strife-ridden ancient Japan.

In his own way, he was a warrior too.

Keiichi looked forward to using his bushido skills against Isilblius, to pay him back for robbing him away from Belldandy for 13 years of his life. He would imprison Isilblius within an ever-changing convex of matter, energy and Time.

"And what do I get to do?" Mara asked.

"You're the executioner," Miyuki answered levelly.

"Figures. You guys get to fight Isilblius, and then you leave the dirty work to the Demoness. How typical," Mara said with a look of disgust.

Miyuki was almost crestfallen at Mara's strong words...at least until she caught the glimmer in the Demoness's orange-red eyes.

After savoring Miyuki's reaction...after all, Mara was _still_ the head of the Demoness Mischief Office...she slowly broke into a wide grin, exposing her fangs. She had definitely gotten over on Miyuki!

Miyuki whispered to Natsumi, "She really had me going for a moment there!"

"As I suspected, I'm going to be the executioner. That's double-plus good, because I've been busy considering all the best ways to kill Isilblius would be," Mara announced with thoughtful solemnity.

"Mara, you can't just destroy him! If you destroy Isilblius, you might end up taking the Ultimate Force and the Everything with him..." Keiichi noted with concern.

"Don't worry...I've come up with a demise for Isilblius that only a Demoness could invent," Mara replied with a grin.

"You've really been thinking about that?" Skuld asked. 

"What do you think I am...a Goddess?!" Mara shot back with mock indignity. This brought a ripple of giggles to the group.

"As you know, Isilblius manipulated me into creating him in the first place. I had to endure a lot of self-abuse and guilt because of his actions. Not to mention having my Soul almost completely drained away by those SpiderDemons. So I'm going to serve him up a dose of poetic justice for using me like that."

"How?" Miyuki enquired.

"I'm going to make him kill himself."


	102. Pt 102: A Chronology of Insanity and Luc...

**Part 102: A Chronology of Insanity and Lucidity (Draft)**

Within the gauze of fragility, Belldandy struggled against the overwhelming sentiments of reluctance regarding her assignment. Of the group, she would be the first to actually confront Isilblius. Even Holy Bell...who was often a centering influence on her...was frightened. Her Angel kept singing warning refrains, reminding Belldandy that she was exposing herself to an enormous unknown. But it was Keiichi who cast a new perspective on her upcoming confrontation. He assured her that by doing so, she'd prove herself as the most courageous of the group. In his own special way, Keiichi's words of comfort ushered her into the castles of confidence. Her fiancé emphasized that she would be never truly be alone when she confronted Isilblius; she would be buoyed by the courage of the entire group as well. Keiichi finally assured her that they would never let Isilblius harm her...if worse came to worse, they would quickly intervene on her behalf. Keiichi added that he would rescue her at the cost of his own life if events moved towards a dangerous pivot. 

When he was finished, Miyuki reiterated rather assertively that she had chosen Belldandy for this task after careful reflection; she had esteemed Belldandy as most ably suited for their initial foray into his warped version of the Everything. By defeating him, her role as Norn of the Present would 'hollow out' his confidence...which would increase their chances of winning the 'war' with him. 

Mara added that the first skirmish of any campaign of war is the most difficult, and that it was very important for Belldandy's innocence to create a shockwave that would resound deep within Isilblius's psyche. 

Encouraged thus by the group, Belldandy hugged each of them in turn, adjusted her Goddess battlesuit one last time, and then folded herself out of their stash of ether-space...

...and emerged into Isilblius's Everything.

The exchange of environments was guillotine-sharp and immediately noticeable. She could sense a palpable, transcendent hubris. She couldn't escape the impressions she felt: a sheen of darkest Cold Evil that permeated every vibration of Space and Time. The _wrongness_ of the Everything was disconcerting, unsettling. There was no comforting familiarity here. Belldandy felt ringed by a pervading emptiness, a noir-eschatology that was devoid of all sense of Being...void even of Death. An ambergris horrorshock that grabbed her by the spine and shook her violently.

Belldandy counted her thoughts, shaping them as she tried to flow back into her confidence. It would not do...this harsh violation of her senses. She needed to be _strong_, not confused by the mesh-pavement of destruction that stretched as far as she could sense. 

Too soon, a misshapen head coalesced out of nearby strands of energy in front of her. The 'head' was attached to a tentacle of superstring dimensional energy.

"**YOU!!!**" the disembodied thing-head shouted angrily. "Goddess bitch-whore abomination!"

Belldandy almost chuckled at the hyperbolic dramatism of his accusatory maledictions. After all, _he_ was the abomination...not her. His ranting made her uncomfortably aware of how entrenched Isilblius was inside of 'his' version of reality.

Miyuki and Natsumi had been right to view him as a criminal!

"Your presence here in My Being is impossible! Unwanted! Unwarranted! Nothing exists but Me! You and your weakling compatriots are all dead...I saw to it personally! My scheme succeeded, despite that unexpected purple light that fled down the energy-pole ahead of me. I experienced your deaths!" he shouted in a hissing voice.

Cutting teeth grinning greedily. 

Belldandy widened her eyes at this. Isilblius thought they were dead! Now, she was advantaged by the element of surprise. Miyuki had enjoined her to leverage her innocence against his arrogance, so that she could pry open a sense of doubt. But with this development, she was already causing him uncertainty by her presence alone. 

"I should have tortured all of you for eternity, but instead, I chose to grant you the mercy of perishing between the infinitisms of Time. I killed all of you when I collapsed your time-ruined echo of a pocket universe! You're nothing more than a ghost!" The mercury-face hardened into the monstrous visage of Isilblius. His eyes pierced her with antagonistic intent.

Belldandy stood her ground and smiled at him.

"Who is going to forgive you, if you can't forgive yourself?" she asked.

She felt the Everything quake from massive quantum energy displacements as Isilblius formed billions upon billions of superstring energy tentacles. Each superstring was ringed with countless Isilblius faces; the whole image reminding her of the suction pads on the tentacles of a cephalopod in one of the aquatic museums Keiichi had taken her to. She eyed the octopus-like tentacles warily...fighting to keep calm as they writhed around her like a nest of vipers. Instead, Belldandy found herself flinching as the swarming mass moved in, threatening to crush her. Each superstring could destroy normal matter or anti-matter with the slightest touch... 

Against the rubric of her fears, Belldandy searched for a center of truth...and found it. Revisiting his behavior, she realized that...for the briefest of seconds...her words had pierced the obstinate will of Isilblius. She had clearly seen a glimpse of how he had initially reacted to her question: his fierce expression had given way to a flash-flickering emotional shift, his eyes filling with alarm...

"Why aren't you afraid? I'm going to rip your life right out from inside of you...and yet you remain to face me instead of fleeing in terror!"

"I _am_ terrified!" Belldandy admitted. "Quite possibly more terrified now than I have ever been in my life. But fear isn't just an diminishing additive to the living spirit. When appreciated with a moral eye, fear itself is diminished. It becomes transformed, _fueling_ the spirit towards a higher good. Fear validates reality, in much the same way as kindness, love and charity. However, I sensed that _you_ are terrified as well. Despite your best efforts, you failed to disguise it."

"That's a lie!!! I have nothing to fear from you! You are a nothing in comparison with me! A gnat...ready to be squashed by the power of the Ultimate Force. I have the entire energy of the Everything at my beckon! With a slight gesture, I could gather up all of the Ultimate Force and snuff your very existence!" he railed threateningly.

"If so, than why haven't you?" Belldandy said evenly, fixing Isilblius with her silver-blue eyes. When he didn't respond, she continued.

"I'm a messenger, to inform you that there are _ seven_ of us. This is more than just myself. Each of us possesses the Ultimate Force as well. You may chose to believe me, or you may not believe me at all. You _will_ have to face all of us, however. Singly and as a group, we also possess something beyond the Ultimate Force...we share Love and Hope." 

"**NOOOOOOOOO!**" Isilblius screamed, a velocity of disbelief rendered towards horrific proportions as it was echoed by a legion of Isilblius-tentacles.

"Yes!" Belldandy countered firmly. 

"There is only one of you, not seven. You lie! I killed the mortal...I destroyed his Soul! He was the only one besides myself that could encounter the Ultimate Force. I banished the Lords, and then took their lives from them. Thus, no one has access to the Ultimate Force except I. In fact, it is _my_ Ultimate Force now!"

His strength of conviction gave Belldandy pause. What if Isilblius _did_ have a monopoly on the Ultimate Force? She and the others had assumed from the start that their enhanced abilities and energies derived from the Ultimate Force. What if they _hadn't_? Shuddering at the thought, Belldandy decided to look elsewhere. Threading her way into the realms of assumption, she decided to trust her Goddess intuition one more time. Isilblius had been defeated once before, by Cevn...so it was possible that referencing his earlier defeat might author more uncertainty in Isilblius's mind.

"Yet, I am most definitely _here_! Inexplicable, from your point of view, isn't it?" Belldandy challenged. "The single point of the Ultimate Force that Cevn possessed in the past is now multiplied, shared among the seven of us. In the past, present and future, he defeated you single-handedly. Now that there are seven of us, do you really think you can overcome us?"

"**WAY TO GO, BELL!!!**" six voices shouted exuberantly in the detached ether-space.

"You bitch! How dare you threaten me with your snide suppositions!" Isilblius said angrily.

"I pose no threat to you, other than serving as a messenger of truth. You know me, but you can never see into the depths of my heart. You'll never know that my nature is ringed with passionate innocence; I would never sever you from you life. I forgave you once before, despite your efforts to kill everyone I loved. But I assure you that I would never sully myself killing the likes of you. The sense of threat that you feel ventures not from me...it is _inside_ of you. You are master of your existence, carefully manufacturing your own truths, Isilblius. But despite your 'power', why do you feel threatened?"

Another flash of panic in Isilblius's eyes; Belldandy knew she was coursing herself towards the truth.

"Isn't everything here," Belldandy asked, gesturing with a sweep of her hands, "created by the cast of your own ambitions, and nothing else? If so, then how can you envision me defeating your 'truth'? Especially in the wake of your refusal to even admit that it is fear that you are sensing. In the midst of your righteousness, you are wrong. This is why I can forgive you, wretch that you are."

"I don't need any forgiveness, especially from a fuckin' mere Goddess like you!" Isilblius spat out.

"Ahhhh...but I am no mere Goddess," Belldandy noted, folding her hands over her breast. Amidst the wretched spawn of Isilblius's Everything, she looked like a angel of purity.

"You wiped out the Gods and Demons, but I remain to haunt you. Not as a ghost, but as something much more profound. Consider me your conscience, Isilblius. Since you do not have a conscience to speak of, I will forgive you that as well!" Belldandy said, smiling innocently.

Her smile had the desired effect. Isilblius screamed a billion screams. The tentacle-faces writhed in emotional pain. Becoming fuzzy with dissonance, they suddenly collapsed towards Belldandy in a crushing rush. But instead of repulsing them with a sweep Metanative energy, Belldandy simply disappeared.

She reappeared in another junction of TimeSpace.

"See how it feels to fight an opponent who won't fight back," she said with a smile. The legion of face-tentacles dissolved into their constituent energies, and then reappeared around her.

Isilblius was chasing her.

Over and over again, weaving through the billions of years, Isilblius would surround her with superstring dimensional tentacles, tentacles that could slice through any physically dimensionable energies. But Belldandy was more than a being of simple energy and form...

With each attack, Isilblius was hurting himself. Since he was the Everything, the stray whips of superstring energy he hurled at her were slicing through matter and dimension at the same time. In his desperation, he was gutting himself.

Belldandy didn't expect this to happen, but she was relieved that Isilblius was harming himself, rather than forcing her hand. As he weakened through the eons, Belldandy found herself growing in confidence. Deciding to shift her tactics, she closed her eyes and merged into the TimeWeb...

...and reappeared in a different TimeWhen, several billion years earlier. Jumping into a completely different TimeStream, Belldandy had deliberately chosen the home system of the Earthrealm for her first shift through TimeSpace. By appearing _here_, Belldandy knew she was sending a message to Isilblius, a message that stated quite markedly that she was in control of her own destiny. Even though she was the Norn of the Present, Belldandy had little difficulty navigating through the TimeWeb pastwards...

She felt nostalgic as she took in the stellar vista. The solar system was a protoplasmic discus; the Earthrealm wasn't even a planet yet, it was merely a gaseous oblong of superheated starstuff. She found herself amazed once again that life...and Keiichi...had resulted from _this_. A slight roar was audible to her; the crashing of immense amounts of hyperenergized hydrogen and helium atoms.

The tell-tale superstrings formed around her once more. This time, Belldandy manifested a naginata in her hands. She was familiar with only one weapon of the martial arts. The pole-like naginata was as tall as she was. The black staff of the weapon was crowned by a wide blade at the end, long and femininely curved. Rather than choosing a more practical weapon, such as a katana sword or a bo staff, Belldandy had chosen the naginata because the wielder had to focus more on the subtleties of form, rather than the substance of combat. 

Like all young Goddesses, it was required of Belldandy to take up one of martial disciplines in her mid-level inculcations. It was the Divine equivalent of 'phys-ed' courses that the many Earthrealm cultures included in their schooling of children. Thus, from 130 millennia of age until she graduated, she practiced her naginata skills. But unlike her peers, her martial arts training possessed a very special perk aspect. Some would say that she had a very special perk in the person of her training master.

Not all Goddesses have a former Marshall of the WarGods as a father.

Her Father, Odeyn, had pushed her beyond her limits...and Belldandy had tried hard to please him with all the daughterish enthusiasm she could muster. Thus, the synergism of parental indulgence and youthful ambition resulted in Belldandy's naginata skills being honed to a rarefied degree. Since the naginata was a weapon of style, Bell's only opponent was herself. By the time she finished her inculcation, Belldandy had developed a master's appreciation of her chosen weapon. 

Swinging her naginata with the delicacy of a crane, Belldandy felt reassured. Her choice was symbolic, because it reminded her of all those millennia studying under her beloved Father.

"Show yourself, Isilblius!" she demanded, twirling her naginata.

Throughout all her encounters with Isilblius, he had manifested himself by proxy; always presenting himself in the form of superstring tentacles. Perhaps he had read too much manga, because he seemed fixated on the idea that Belldandy...as a female...would be most frightened by tentacles. Consistently, he seemed to forget that she was a Goddess, not an Earthrealm woman. 

Belldandy was mortified as she remembered Isilblius's actions during his first attempt to destroy the Everything. She knew that he had raped Urd in the guise of Cevn, even if Urd had no memory of it. She knew that he had infected the Gods and the Demons with a virus, and had tried to kill she and her sisters using the same virus. Then he had attempted to destroy the Earthrealm, and had mortally wounded everyone she cared about. Especially Keiichi. She would be forever haunted by the memory of watching him die before her eyes. Now, he had furthered his destruction to a point of completion. He thought his 'truth' was invincible, irreversible.

Yet, she and her peers were going to undo all of this.

To her surprise, Isilblius appeared to her in his true form. She had encountered him once before when he had suddenly manifested himself in their midst, casting a fatal shadow over all of them. His body was colored differently this time; naturally, Isilblius could realize any physical form he wanted. Manifesting in a hulking, brutish form, Isilblius initially reminded her of Tyyr, former Marshall of the WarGods. His mesomorphic frame was predominantly dark-green skinned, with random streak-patterns of orange and silver that flared across his broad limbs like fire-flames. Long shaggy shocks of green-yellow hair streamed back from his temples. A blunt forehead forced his eyebrows to furrow low over his eyes, concealing them partially with shadow so thick that his gaze appeared deep-set and dangerous. Brutish golden horns wrapped back from his forehead into a semi-spiral. Jagged shards of bone pierced through the periphery of his arms and legs, looking like spikes. In like manner, his backbone was a profusion of sharp-pointed ridges of bone. He had a short wedge-like tail instead of a coccyx, and his legs were short and squat, with thick cords of muscle and claw.

"Now, it's time to attend to your death!" he announced. Belldandy tensed herself as a swarm of superstring dimensionalities manifested around her, each 'tentacle' figured with a maw of sharp teeth. With the speed of a popping bubble, they collapsed towards her...

Belldandy tightened her grip on her naginata. This would be the first actual physical contest between she and Isilblius. Naturally, the tentacles and the naginata were fictive archetypes; the real battle would occur between their minds, their wills, and their Souls. Yet, because of the determinist nature of the Ultimate Force, she had to utilize a representation of _something_ in order to make their combat manifest. Hence, the naginata...

She deftly executed a complex mid-air series of 'spins', cutting a spherical swath around her. Within the range of the 'sphere', Belldandy had beheaded each of the superstring dimensionalities.

Isilblius looked at her with a momentary expression of astonishment. Obviously, the last thing he expected from this most peaceable of Norns was a fiery display of martial finesse. When his eyes met hers, Belldandy arched her eyebrows, taunting him. 

As she expected, he reacted with an impulsive surge of rage. Brandishing an impossibly bulky broadsword as he weapon, he rushed her. Belldandy sucked a deep breath of fear as he closed in, spinning his huge sword overhead.

Ready to crash it down on her and crack her skull open...

Isilblius heaved his sword downwards, trying to cleave her in two.

Belldandy expertly sidestepped the blow, causing herself to flow low into an extended crouch. As the sword streaked by her, she felt the entire Everything shudder with the spending of force. Quickly rotating her naginata so that the curved in-blade faced inwards, she parried between Isilblius's legs and hooked one of his ankles...and then pulled as hard as she could.

Isilblius, already unsteady from his pile-driver sword rondo, was thrown off balance. He fell against his back in a loose-skewed tumble.

Elsewhere, Skuld shouted "Belldandy!" at the top of her lungs, rapturously marveling at her sister's display of personal combat skills. Skuld hadn't undergone any weapons training...she wasn't old enough when she was assigned to Earth as an Earthrealm Trainee. Both Belldandy and Urd had completed their physical culture training by the time she was in the Yggdrasilian equivalent of 'kindergarten', so she had never experienced this side of her elder sister before. Belldandy was every bit the Warrior Goddess; an Yggdrasilian Athena Nike...

And then Isilblius broadsided Belldandy with the flat of his sword, completely dazing her. Keiichi immediately prepared himself to fold out of their etherspace recluse in order to go to Bell's defense, but Miyuki rested an arm in front of his chest before he could.

Belldandy staggered to her feet, her always-perfect hair disheveled. A streak of blood dripped from the corner of her mouth. Keiichi almost went to pieces as he saw his fiancée's injuries.

"Why?" he asked Miyuki.

"She has to defeat him! We _each_ have to defeat him, so that the strength shared between us can defeat him as well," Miyuki answered steadfastly.

Keiichi didn't want to watch the combat, as he knew that Belldandy was disadvantaged. Belldandy's goal was to weaken Isilblius, while Isilblius was set on _killing_ his fiancée. Yet, it was force against force...

Could Belldandy hold her own?

Isilblius closed on her, hardly waiting for Belldandy to catch her breath. Scratching the surface of TimeSpace with the tip of her naginata, she 'flicked' a large galactic-core singularity into his at the moment he swung his sword at her. Momentarily disoriented, his blow went wild and was easily parried by the smaller, lithe Goddess.

Belldandy remembered that weapons were also multi-dimensional in nature. Isilblius was using his greatsword as a axe, as well as a sword. But her naginata was a much finer weapon. The long pole-like staff could be used to parry thrusts; the wide blade at the end could slap, slice and chop; the end of the staff could be used to punch...

Isilblius howled a roar as he rushed her again. This time, he missed her by a wide margin.

He was getting tired.

Belldandy decided to try another tact. While Isilblius was charging at her like a prize-fighter, she had been deftly dodging his sword-swings. An image came to mind...

Isilblius hefted his greatsword overhead...and Belldandy blew into the palm of her hand.

With a flash, a burst of birds appeared. A massive aviary of Earthrealm bird species swarmed around Isilblius, chirping and cuckooing. Owls, egrets, bluejays, plovers, doves...all the neighborhood birds she used to talk to back in Makuhari.

She had told them that Isilblius was a lonely person who needed someone to talk to...

"Away from me, foul winged pests!" Isilblius bellowed, trying to ward them off with his heavy sword. Of course, these birds were patterned after their Earthrealm originals...they were too precise of wing to be felled by a giant with a thick blade. Almost oblivious to his rage, they flittered about gaily...attempting to converse with Isilblius in all the colloquialisms of Tokyo-area Birdic and Owlese...

Belldandy tittered behind a gloved hand as Isilblius was turning red-faced with frustration, unable to ward off the feathered tribe.

"Bitch!" he shouted, turning towards her and ignoring the birds. Their song seemed to inspire Belldandy...and Holy Bell. Her Angel manifested behind her, golden hair weaving through as the birds mandala'd the two of them.

Holy Bell sang a mourning song.

Mourning the destruction of the Everything.

"Make it stop!" Isilblius screamed, flailing blindly with his sword. Obviously, he was unused to music of any kind. One particular play of his greatsword came too close to her; Holy Bell immediately retreated back inside of her.

Belldandy fought him a few more bouts, patiently waiting for an opening.

Finally, Isilblius made the mistake of overextending the arc of his sword-swing...and Belldandy quickly took advantage of this carelessness. She hurdled over the blade...Isilblius had been aiming for her mid-thighs...and spun her naginata in a full circle, thrusting the rounded end of the staff into the underside of Isilblius's chin. His head snapped back from the blow, the strength of which surprised Belldandy. Fluidly continuing the form of motion, she tucked the staff of her naginata under her armpit and swiveled it downwards, spinning once more on her ankles like a figure skater. As she rounded out of the jump-spin, the crest of her curved blade streaked in a semi-arc...and ripped into Isilblius's chest.

A purge of pus-like fluid sprayed from the strike.

Isilblius was now marked with a striping slash across his chest.

"You whore of a Goddess! That _hurt_ me!" he bellowed in agony...but Belldandy chose just that moment to fade out of the TimeWeb.

* * * * * * * *

"W..wow! Bell!!!" Keiichi shouted approvingly as Belldandy rematerialized in their etherspace 'island'. He immediately dashed over and hugged her tightly. Bell-chan was shaking like a wind-blustered flag from her exertion.

"Your turn!" she said to Urd.

She hefted her naginata and clacked it against Urd's wanding-staff.

* * * * * * * *

Urd folded into Isilblius's Everything and was immediately seized by a sensation of dread. The place seemed to seep dreariness and decay, like a rotting piece of wood after a storm. She could hear a hive-mind sound...the buzzing of millions of carrion-flies, each as big as a sun. An approaching galaxy-sized storm of insects comprised of pure energy.

Isilblius.

She had chosen one of the slipstream universes to manifest into. A slipstream universe resembles a 'normal' universe, with a singular exception. In a typical slipstream universe, thought equals Time. In other words, there is Time...and there is I-Time. Imaginary Time. The I-Time in a slipstream universe run obliquely to real Time; Time functions as a linearity, while I-Time runs crosswise to the flow of Time. Of course, both manifests of Time were but two of the many dimensionalities of the essence of Time that Urd had experienced as a Norn. They were variants of the 'chronometric' level of creation. But in a slipstream universe, the ability to navigate I-Time relies on one's ability to think outside of Time. 

A sentient being would have to remove themselves from the perspective of 'real' Time by withdrawing into a realm of pure imagination, unscathed by empirical or rational awareness. By deconstructing time and place, a being creates a situation where one can 'think' themselves into I-Time and thus displace themselves into different locations of the universe. In the normal 'stream' of Time, they would appear to disappear in one place and reappear in another place _in the same moment of Time_. Yet, in actuality, the 'travel' occurred by the 'avenue' of I-Time. The 'slipstreams' in this universe weren't TimeSpace anomalies such as black holes. Even a black hole is subject to the governance of Time. But I-Time isn't subject to physical laws or Time in a linear, chronological sense. Consequently, the species that evolved into self-awareness had to exercise clear restraints on their imaginations, otherwise they would float in and out of real Time with a devastating randomness. The species that were candidates for the Next Level in this universe had to develop a group-mind in order to harness their thought impulses...so that they could remain in real Time long enough to build a civilization. I-Time then became a tool of transit, rather than a confounding factor. 'Cities' were built not only on the ground, but through Time as well. The 'time-cities' of a slipstream universe had stable I-Time portals within them; their inhabitants could use the portals to travel back and forth in both Time and Space.

It would be all but incomprehensible to beings who didn't live in a slipstream universe. Most Earthrealm mortals perceived see Time as a long line extending into the Future. In some cases, they would account for Time as a circle, looping back into itself so that each 'moment' was actually _ all_ moments. Or they would even view Time as highway, with moments passing down each 'lane' like cars on the road, traveling towards the Past or the Future, or even parked in the Present. The concept of I-Time which exists in a slipstream universe was alien to all of these frames of reference, because I-Time ran counter to all speculations of Time. Besides, I-Time doesn't even exist in a non-slipstream universe. The 'mechanics' of I-Time were exceedingly complication, but to a Norn like Urd, it made perfect sense in their simplicity.

Which why she, of all the beings in the Everything save Kami-sama, could affix herself into an 'absolute' Past...a Past in a universe where 'past' didn't have any meaning at all.

A move designed to initially intimidate Isilblius.

Urd expected to hear the 'chatter' of the intelligences riding through the I-Time slipstreams...but they were silent. Isilblius had killed them all. She mourned for them briefly as the 'flies' closed in on her... 

Belldandy had been challenged by tentacles; it appeared that she was going to be attacked by flies. The insect swarm hovered all around her; a bright yellow amorphous cloud of menace. Each 'fly' had an Isilblius face attached by a narrow thorax to an arthropodic carapace. The whole effect was chilling and disconcerting. 

"Well well well...here comes the Lord of the Flies!" she taunted, fighting back her fears. Somehow, Isilblius _knew_ that she didn't like bugs. Urd felt a tension in her spine, spiraling past unknowns to freeze her as she beheld the Isilblius's legions.

"How did it feel to have me possess you? To feel the sheer ecstasy of being _violated_ by me?" Urd heard Isilblius's voice in her mind. The shrill insect-tone of his voice was unmistakably swaggert. There was no mistaking the sexual implications couched in his claims; yet she didn't have any idea of what he was referring to...

"The only violation I sense is your stupidity!" she taunted him. 

"You weren't that good of a lay anyway! I killed you once before...and I will kill you again!" Isilblius said menacingly.

Urd floated back from him, unsteadied by his implication that he had somehow possessed her sexually. A voice in the back of her head screamed "rape!"; she shifted her stance to try and regain possession of her senses. She had never been raped by anyone...so why was the not-so-subtle emotional voice so insistent?

Isilblius seemed to fasten advantage onto her confusion.

"Yes, I raped you. I beat you within an inch of your life. I tarnished your Soul, sullied your honor, poisoned your esteem. You were such an easy victim for one such as me. All I had to do was impersonate that dumbass mortal you think you're in love with. It was enjoyable...molesting you. Making you feel weak! Making you feel terror and revulsion in equal quantities," Isilblius pressed.

Urd felt her face blanching, a gloom forebearing her despite all evidence to the contrary. This Ultimate Anti-Being...for he was far worse than the Ultimate Demon...was actually prying into her thoughts, causing her to question herself. Forcing her to reflexively doubt her own experience.

"You're a first-rank idiot!" Urd countered angrily. Miyuki and Natsumi insisted that she was to cower him by insults. 

"Don't even begin to flatter yourself with claims of my demise, because...as you can see...I'm right _here_!!! Not 'killed', not 'to be killed', not even 'dead'! And don't you go off thinking I'm already dead...because _nobody_ does the Past as well as I do!" 

"Lies! Lies from the Queen of Lies!" Isilblius said shrilly. "This may be the Past, Time-Witch...but in the Present, you do not exist! Do you think you could fool me so easily, appearing in the Past in a slipstream universe? I have dominion over the entirety of Space and Time. If I say that I can kill you in the Past...then I _can_ kill you. If I said that I raped you horribly in the past...then I did. Past, Present or Future...you're dead meat, Goddess-whore!"

Urd found herself growing angry at the voice in her head. Isilblius kept insisting that she had died in an earlier time. Another Time. She remembered being at the brink of the Real Death...her Soul meeting the Reaper Boy at the waypoint, just before being dispatched to the Instrumentality. But something had brought her back.

Music.

Closing her eyes, Urd tuned into her Soul...and reproduced the music she had heard that day. I-Time flattened out into a oblation, as music burst into reality all around them.

The swarm of Isilblius-flies started to scatter like a cloud of smoke being dispersed by a fan. Tiny voices screaming "Make it stop!" echoed in her head; a sweering cacophony that tensed against the dignified supersonics of the cosmic music.

Urd quickly shifted I-Time and dove in amidst the sound.

The experience of being bathed in a symphony of rich color-sounds was not unlike the joy of soaking in a hot furoba. Even while dressed in a Goddess Battlesuit, Urd felt like the tones of the music were washing away her doubts...each refrain serving as a soft sponge against her skin.

All too soon, the music was drowned by a immense roar, cascading from every vista of TimeSpace. The 'fly' manifestations of Isilblius had grown in size...they were now wielded into the form of bats. Huge leathery wings were beating against the cloud-like expression of music, shifting it into discord.

It was time for the War of Magic to begin.

* * * * * * * *

Isilblius was couched in delusions. Urd kept reminding him that he had never 'had' her in any possible way. She projected holophotic images of she and her sisters recovering from the virus he had infected her with. For some strange reason, Isilblius kept insisting that he had raped her...but when she challenged him to create images into one of the slipstreams, he couldn't.

Howling with frustration, Isilblius tried to slipstream Urd into the Present I-Time...but she had anchored herself in the Past, so that he couldn't move Time against her. Finally realizing that he was outmatched in traversing the slipstreams, Isilblius's mass of bat-beings tried to slipstream out at once, in a vain attempt to collapse the physical space around her by fracturing it. Urd wielded enough control over I-Time to forestall the fragmenting of normal physical space-time; as billions of Isilblius-bats phased out of normal Time, Urd used her magic staff to create a chronological elixir to 'coat' the fold of space in much the same fashion as one coats a balloon with liquid to prevent it from popping when pricked by a sharp object.

Urd's elixir was music.

Arcanical nebulae netted the bursts of physical energies expending, as Isilblius tried to overstress Time. Darting in and out of I-Time, his bat-forms swooped close to her, trying to injure her. Each bat would hurl a lance of superplasma energy at her as it careened towards her at breakneck speed.

Taking a lead from her younger sister, Urd imagined herself elsewhere. Belldandy had fought Isilblius with non-resistance...and Urd felt it best that she do likewise. An unknown entity of memories seemed to possess her at times; she felt random streaks of terror in her Soul. It was as if Isilblius _had_ raped her...

She didn't escape the final attack of the bats unscathed. Several sections of her Goddess Battlesuit were blackened from the impacts of the cosmic energy 'lances' that the dive-bombing bats had pitched at her. Urd fought against a dizziness...she could feel parts of her body that she normally paid no heed to. Her thighs were throbbing with pain, and her left wrist felt like it was broken.

Her Angel, World of Elegance, was singing a healing song to mend her wounds.

For a brief respite, the Norn of the Past allowed herself to relax.

A slipstream universe is an exceedingly large construct, hundreds of times the size of the universe the Earthrealm belonged to. An allot of time would be spend before Isilblius located her.

Now, it was time to heal...and prepare Magic.

* * * * * * * *

Urd could sense the distortion of I-Time nearby. Isilblius was plumbing the slipstreams, much like a predator fish swimming at different depths of the ocean to find prey. She reasoned that she was as powerful as Isilblius. The Ultimate Force energies were now concentrated in a green orb mounted in the quint-spherical spire of her magical wanding-staff.

Of the three...no, the _four_ sisters, Urd knew that she was most skilled in magical arts. Thus, if Isilblius appeared in a physical manifest, he would appear as a mage. The archetypes for her conflict with him would be magical ones. Belldandy had relied on her weapon of innocence to wound Isilblius. Urd recognized that she would have to mount an offense at the level of Arcanical dimensionalities. Which was why the slipstream universe made a fitting background.

A universe of imagination, where Time and I-Time intersected with Magic. This particular universe was flowing with Arcane energies.

Rippling through the matter of space, Isilblius appeared.

He was cloaked in a thick robe, with rust-colored bat-like wings emerging from his back. His horned cranium was capped by a mage's scholar-cap. Long flowing robe-like sleeves concealed slender clawed fingers. His shoes were of an Arabic design, the toes curling upwards to a point.

Urd thought him very inelegant. Yet she was cautious...because here was a being who had nearly destroyed the Everything. One had to grant Isilblius a reluctant respect for what he had done; the scale of his destructive acts were truly epic.

"Finally we meet, erstwhile lover!" Isilblius gloated. Urd cocked her head...and then the vision filled her mind. Isilblius blunted his way through her mental defenses, revealing a scene in her bedroom...

Urd found herself gagging with revulsion as she experience being raped by him.

_Re_-experienced the abuse.

He had taken the form of an unknown mortal, and had completely dominated her. Urd felt like she was being swallowed by a thousand mouths. Clutching her warding staff against her chest, she did the only thing she knew that would break his iron grip on her mind.

She struck herself in the forehead with the glowing green orb in her staff.

Pain ushered in lucidity as she unraveled her emotions.

"You motherfucker!" she swore angrily at Isilblius. Isilblius laughed the mockard's laugh...and the nearby space reverberated with a chorus of pitiless laughter. Urd felt her anger seething over like tea spilled out of a flying teapot. A hurled teapot, thrown in a fit of rage.

"I will always have the upper hand, Norn of the Past. Despite your powers, you will remain mired in My Past. An eternal victim..."

"**URD THUNDERBOLT!!!**" Urd screamed. Isilblius hastily wove a magical shield against her bolting arc of energy...

To her surprise, her massively intense thunderbolt shredded the shield Isilblius had erected. Fully half of it splayed out into a sphere around him, glancing off the surface of his protective force-field. But the other half slammed him. Like a giant fist of light, Urd's thunderbolt hit Isilblius in the chest so hard, _it ejected him out the other side of his spherical shield_!

Urd had blasted him with such force, he actually crashed into one of the junctions between I-Time and Time. Like a car smashing into a wall, Isilblius rebounded from the impact and crumpled.

Bending over, hands on knees, Urd was gasping. She saw Isilblius spinning into a sprawl, cartwheeling as he floated freely in space like a dead astronaut. For a moment, she thought she had killed him. Wisps of smoke rose from the front of his torso where her bolt of energy had struck him.

He opened his eyes, righted himself...and shot her a piercing stare of Hate.

"Y..you're still mine!" he gasped in an angry spit of voice.

Urd knew what he meant. Instinctively, she crossed her arms tight against her chest as the feeling of wretchedness took over.

"No! She isn't yours! She's _my_ Big Sister...and she just kicked your ass!" a voice sounded. Urd felt someone grasping her tightly on the arm; literally yanking her out of the Everything.

Back to safety.

She had beaten Isilblius...but at what cost?

* * * * * * * *

Skuld literally glowed red with rage. Her gloved hands were shaking with anger as she prepared to confront Isilblius. Somehow, she had experienced the entire atrocity acted upon her sister...she had been with Urd while Isilblius had raped her. It was horror dashed upon horror; Isilblius had actually taken Cevn's form to worm his way into her confidence. Transforming security into confinement, love into terror...

She hated him. More than anything in the Everything...she _hated_ him.

What he had done to Urd was so disgusting, so sordid and cruel...Skuld found herself unable to forgive him. Belldandy may be able to forgive him, but she didn't have her older sister's generosity of heart. With a single-mindedness, Skuld didn't even care about what he had done to the Everything. She didn't even care about how he had tried to kill Kami-sama.

This one act of viciousness overshadowed all of that.

"This is going to be personal!" she promised.

Urd had paid the heaviest of prices for her victory over Isilblius. Belldandy had been physically beaten up during her combat with the dread Ultimate AntiBeing...but Urd was forever wounded emotionally. As was Skuld herself, because she shared in her sister's pain.

Skuld used the mallet-head of Mjolnir to create a fold-opening leading into the physical plane of Isilblius's Everything. Before she stepped through, she glanced back for a last look, her face pitched with a worried expression. Wordlessly, she knew that her sister was drowning in sorrow, self-disgust, fear and doubt. Urd was too weakened by her encounter with Isilblius; she had been totally drained of energy...to the point where Skuld doubted that she could even return herself to their safe 'patch' of ether-space. With a marginless intuition, Skuld intervened to pull Urd back to safety before she could properly manifest in the Everything.

She felt a momentary surge of pride in her sister. Despite what Isilblius had done to her, Urd had battled herself back to sanity...long enough to gather her strength and then strike him down with the 'mother of all Urd Thunderbolts'. Instead of bouting with him, Urd had focused all of her energy into a single discharge; a blast of energy so massive, it surprised even she and her sisters.

Shock had been burned into joy, as Skuld and the others were treated to the sight of Isilblius getting knocked flat on his ass by Urd's bolt. It was pretty cool! No...it was _extremely_ cool. Even Mara agreed with this.

Maybe having a Demoness for an older sister was a good thing. Mara seemed quite willing to sanction Skuld's 'rad' side...much more than Urd. Belldandy, of course, wanted her to be a 'proper lady' of a Goddess. Right now, Skuld needed all the rowdiness she could muster.

She smiled vicariously at her sister's victory as she appeared into the Everything. Urd had definitely taken the fight out of Isilblius. She had expected him to immediately appear to harry her the moment she appeared in the Everything. Instead, the Everything was as silent as a mood. Skuld almost sensed that the Everything seemed even darker than before, as if a significant portion of its energy had been drained away.

It was amazing, how resilient Urd had been. There was no explanation for what had happened, except perhaps that Urd had hurled all the pain and anger in her kokoro at Isilblius in the form of a magical thunderbolt. Skuld had no doubt that Urd's thunderbolt had gone off the scale as far as Arcane energies were concerned. Extending her senses, Skuld confirmed that the Arcanical flow of energy in the Everything was almost down to a trickle. Urd had tapped almost _all_ of it!

"Way to go, Big Sister!" she said to herself, keeping an eye out for Isilblius. Deep inside, Skuld knew that he would come for her sometime in the Future.

And she was going to make his Future miserable for what he had done to her sister.

* * * * * * * *

Like a shattering of ice, shards of crystalline prisms arose out of nowhere, creating themselves into multiplicities as they surrounded her. Skuld knew intuitively that they were trying to encase her in a cube, even before the prisms began to arrange themselves in vari-tiled 'walls' around her. She also knew _what_ they were...these were the building blocks of whatever passed for a over-system computer here in Isilblius's Everything.

The prisms bore only a rudimentary resemblance to the Yggdrasil Mainframe data nodes; a dull, lacking significance that suggested a child's rendition of the Tokyo Tower or the New World Trade Center. The prismatic objects were shaped uniformly, clearly cut from the same mold. Wafer-thin rectangular objects whose translucence was marred by a dark muddy yellow brown...they reminded Skuld of dead grasses in late November. Beauty was lacking; they were a complete contrast to the data structure of the Yggdrasil Mainframe. The Ygg Mainframe was populated with trillions of sophisticated crystals, with complex rainbows of geodesic porphyry and inlaid Ixodenum 'circuits'. Each as unique as a snowflake. 

In contrast, the mass of rectangular 'chips' had been stamped by their creator...each had an Isilblius-face etched into it.

Prisms formed around her, dancing in mathematical formulas.

"He's an unimaginative idiot!" Skuld thought to herself as she swung Mjolnir around her, preventing the prisms from forming solid walls. As a Sysop Trainee, she could barely manage to flatten the rabbit-like Bugs that infested the Ygg Mainframe. But now, she could swing her mallet with a fluid ease. The prisms scattered away from her graceful 'sweeping' of the space around her. She felt strangely confident, recognizing that Isilblius was taking the battle to her in Cyberspace. 

Skuld, although a novice compared to Belldandy and Urd, had a special capacity that neither of her older sisters possessed...

A streak of genius.

"_Abort encoded framerate absolution, delineate dimensionality. Nongeometric parameters designate functionality terminus,_" she said, commanding the crystal prisms to scatter. Bending to her will, the prisms shifted between wavelengths. Bound between wavelengths, the crystal squares couldn't form in the same physical space; thus, they were unable to be solid-spaced as an entity. No two prisms would occupy the same physical wavelength at the same time...there would be no cohesion between their energy structures.

"Piece of cake...with ice cream!" Skuld said to herself, clapping her hands together with a sense of accomplishment. Her broad grin slowly turned into a grimace as she watched the data crystals regroup themselves. Impossibly, the prisms were patterning...into words!

"Foolish girl! You think that you can trouble me by a few spoken commands and a wave of that tiny hammer of yours?" they spelled out, filling the universe-sphere with a signature of threat. If Skuld would have been standing on solid ground, she would have stamped her foot in frustration. The words dissolved into trillions of data chips, randomly displaced into chaos. From chaos, they re-patterned themselves, forming a new sentence:

"_Comprise lineation, mobility actuate transect anomalous target definitive provoke attribute antagonize existence abort!_" 

At the end of the cohesion of words floating in space, a streak of prisms suddenly broke off from the end of the sentence. Forming a spear-like tornado of trillions of squares, they hurled themselves towards Skuld, a near-solid line of data crystals.

Crystal thin...and razor-sharp. 

She cursed herself doubly...she didn't anticipate how quickly Isilblius would hack her instructions and regain control of his errant data crystals. And she was so involved in 'reading' the message he had been writing, she failed to notice that he was actually writing a command.

Not having time to think up a counter-instruction, Skuld did the only thing that made sense. She gripped Mjolnir tightly and swung it as fast as she could in front of her. The resulting circulation blurred with speed, creating a 'shield' between her and the approaching rectangular shards. Like a medieval knight, she used the shield to try and protect herself against the 'spear' of the data crystals.

But the data crystals were too fast. Even though she was twirling Mjolnir in front of her like a baton...so fast that it appeared to be a solid...the data node prisms penetrated through her 'shield'.

Skuld felt her body being bulleted by numerous blunt impacts, while glancing blows sliced through her battlesuit and sliced her skin like a thousand paper cuts.

"**SKULD!!!**" six voices screamed in shock.

The combine of several million impacts blasted her backwards, hurling her through tachyons and a white-hot galactic core. Skuld came to rest on the other side, dazed and smelling the telltale odor of singed hair.

Laughter followed her, echoing all around her...

"Bwah ha ha ha! Stupid little girl! Foolish one, to challenge the might of one such as I! You may have more attitude than your older sisters, but unlike them, you are very spare of talent or strength! Exactly what I expected _from a child_!"

"I am not a ki..ki.._kiss my ass_!" she spat out angrily. Her usual protestation of "I'm not a kid!" would be wasted on him.

She knew that somewhere, her older sister Belldandy was probably blushing from cheek to cheek...while Urd and Mara were probably wide-grinned and big-eyed with admiration.

She felt a dripping on her glove...and realized that she was bleeding. A major slice to the cheek was gushing blood. Proof that she couldn't outfight him.

It was time to move to the Future...

* * * * * * * *

Dimensionalities swirled around Skuld as she folded herself out of the TimeWeb into the End after the End. Here, cessation became origination. She was so far into the Future, it was almost like a dream. In this aeon, nothing 'died'...because there was no atrophy or entropy. Energy was ceaselessly recycled so as to perpetuate itself. An Eternal Motional form of the Everything.

Isilblius was even more integrated into this future version of the Everything. Far more entrenched, he was inseparable from all forms of energy, wave, matter and Time. The 'spirit' of the place had been completely removed.

She was in an Everything without a Soul.

Isilblius flew into her sight, grinning like a cat ready to pounce on a mouse. His armor-suit was cybernetic in design...in a way, his choice of attire reminded Skuld of the 'angels' in Neon Genesis Evangelion. Unlike his appearance to Belldandy and Urd, this Isilblius wasn't bearing a hybrid Human-Demon form at all. Multiple layers of eyes, sharp knife-like appendages, a trio of legs...Isilblius was a acid-rave cyber-Kabuki nightmare.

He was coming for her, confident and dangerous.

Which was exactly what she expected from him. Exactly _how_ she wanted him to behave.

Because she was where _she_ wanted to be. In the Future. Isilblius may have mastery over all of Time, but Skuld's mastery of Time was most resilient when she was weaving the moments of the Future. Despite the advanced corruption of the Everything, she felt a much more vital familiarity with her new environs. She had traversed the TimeWeb trillions of years to get here. The Everything had recycled itself countless times over countless aeons...but Time had grown steadily more 'present'. She could _feel_ Time in her veins and bones; the sensation was almost intoxicating.

Throw water at someone and they might just get irritated. But throw an iceball...and they might get knocked out. Time, in this aeon, was far more 'solid'. Skuld had counted on this, because she needed a greater command of herself.

With a sword of light, Isilblius etched words against the fabric of Time...

"_Geometric confine core-routine non-purge indemnify...execute!_" his cyber-voice shouted in triumph.

Once again, the data crystals started to complexify, creating patterns of intricacy as they started to enclose Skuld. Skuld could feel the power in the crystals, a reflection of Isilblius's increased power in this Future. But he was also mono-dimensional. With the mind of a hammer, he was trying to entrap her.

"_Intercept transact identify de-reg, codify decrypt encode supervisory admin, relegate thought-loop positive, substance omni-code override, encrypt compression re-admin typify, no-end commit negation, fuzzy construct anticipate, translate reduction segment deconstruction. Welt-code simulate Yggdrasil Mainframe, reconstruct encrypt designate all-math priority harmonic interaction admin, legacy reject, multiplier theorem modulate spin-Time summation reconstruct...execute!_" Skuld said.

The shards of data nodes that had been surrounding her reversed their course and began to form around Isilblius.

"Did I really say that?" she said to herself as Isilblius's data crystals betrayed his command. As they swarmed around him, Skuld felt truly astonished at the efficiency of her commands. She had exercised a control administrative command that was cybernetically impossible...an instruction-set so far beyond her own ken as a DeBugger that it would have been unrecognizable to her before.

Leaning against her mallet, she watched the results.

A multi-dimensional cube formed around Isilblius. Somehow, the crystalline rectangles had reintegrated themselves as superstring dimensionalities. But what was truly breathtaking was that they actually knit themselves into a weaving wall...without canceling out each other's existence. They even formed a 'window' for her, so she could look inside as they imprisoned Isilblius. 

Once the six-sides formed a permanence, she could see the cube shuddering as Isilblius desperately slammed his hook-like fists into the wall, trying to break out by dint of aggression. With each blow, he chattered commands in an attempt to instruct the prisms to release. 

She could hear his shouts of panic echoing in the cube, shrieks to shock as the realization dawned on him that he was _trapped_.

"Let me out of here, you little wretched brat!!! Or I'll kill you when I get out!" he shouted, his voice almost silly with desperation.

Skuld bided her time...

Isilblius was pounding the walls and ceiling...but he was totally ignoring the floor of his cubicular cell.

Skuld bided her time...

Isilblius was concentrating on trying to break down the walls. He was almost ready. He wasn't even looking at the floor under his feet.

"_Open exploit doorgate!_" Skuld commanded.

The 'floor' of the cube suddenly disappeared. Soundlessly, Isilblius fell partway through it. His panic edged even higher as he flailed his arms and legs for purchase against the walls of the 'cube'. Eventually, his clinghold slipped...and he plummeted downwards.

"**NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOooooooooooooooooooooooooo!**" Isilblius screamed.

It had taken a few billion years. As she had anticipated, Isilblius's desire to free himself had caused him to become acclimated to his prison to the degree that he no longer regarded reality quite properly. In other words, he was caught up in perceiving his environment as existing only in three dimensions. So much so...that when the 'floor' disappeared, he thought he was plummeting to his doom. 

"Here...catch my hammer! Grab onto this!" Skuld shouted solicitously through torn glovelets as she threw Mjolnir towards him.

Isilblius strained himself to reach out and grab the mallet, regarding it as a 'life preserver' to keep him from drowning in his free-fall. He snagged it with one hand, and then quickly got a purchase on it with his other three hands.

His downward plunge immediately jarred to a halt.

"Stupid bitch...I've got your hammer! Now, I'll use your innocent compassion...to crush you with it!" he announced once the hammer broke his fall.

"Think again!" Skuld said with girlish cheer as she reached behind her back and pulled Mjolnir out. Grinning slyly, she rested the head of her mallet against her right shoulder.

She watched Isilblius's eyes grow wide as he looked at her, and then at the mallet in his hands. Back and forth, back and forth.

Suddenly, his eyes grew bug-eyed. Skuld knew that he must have read what she had written on it.

On the slender cylindrical handle was engraved:

**"Skuld Ultimate Stealth Bomb, Metanative Omni Yield, MK Pi in Your Eye"**

"Ohhh Shiiiiiii..." Isilblius started to scream. 

But the rest of his words were noisily effaced, rendered inaudible by a deafening explosion as the mallet blew up right in his face.

Skuld watched as uncounted fragments of data crystals showered into a floating cloud all around her; the shattering of the infinite fields of sky. 

"Baka!" she said as she folded out of the Everything.

* * * * * * * *

When she returned to their safe harbor of ether space, Skuld found all three of her sisters gasping for breath, red-faced from laughing. Keiichi was doubled over with mirth, and even the two policewomen were blushing with rib-deep giggles.

"I...haha...can't believe it! Y..you threw him a _ bomb_!" Mara managed to huff out before she was gripped by uncontrollable laughter.

"A..and he was freaked out, because he thought he was falling to...heehee...his doom. In his own sp..space! He would have only fallen back into himself!" Miyuki gasped out.

"And I saw th..the look on his face, right before it blew up! Hahahaha!" Natsumi added.

Belldandy was laughing so hard, she had tears in her eyes. Obviously, she was still in a great deal of pain from her wounds. Even Big Sister Urd was laughing, her giggling was far more subdued from the others...but still it was giggling.

Skuld was grateful that she had managed to defeat Isilblius and escape. And that, for a brief gap between sorrows, her 'surprise' had brought a blessed ray of mirth to Urd's tortured Soul.

* * * * * * * *

Miyuki and Natsumi folded themselves into the Everything...and immediately noticed the difference. Skuld's 'explosion' in the far Future had sent ripples Pastwards towards the present moment. In the Present, the Everything was chaotic; it lacked the non-ordered 'voidness' that Isilblius had imposed upon it. In one sense, the Everything had been whole before Skuld had fought Isilblius. Whole, like an egg. 

Now it was a scrambled, burnt egg.

Isilblius would face them on the level of policewoman vs. criminal.

Miyuki tried to keep it in perspective...Isilblius was the worst mass-murderer in the history of Time. For that alone, they had to bring him in. But beyond this, she had witnessed the atrocity that he had perpetrated upon Urd. Urd, like any other woman who had been brutally victimized, would be scarred for life. She wouldn't be screwed up for life, because she had strong, caring sisters that would help her heal emotionally. But Miyuki had watched too many women come into the Bokuto Precinct station as victims of sex crimes.

In her judgment, rapists belonged in the bottom of the sewers along with the murderers. No one _ever_ has a reason to take another being's precious life...and no one _ever_ has a reason to force sex or love upon another being. Now that she was near-omniscient, she was even more clear in her convictions, because she knew this to be a universal truth.

Isilblius had to pay for what he had done.

"Ready?" she said to Natsumi.

"Yep! I'm gonna bring him down...and maybe kick him a few times while he's down there!" Natsumi replied with a nod.

Isilblius appeared to them, not with prisms or insects or tentacles...

But as Strike Man.

Natsumi gasped and Miyuki almost giggled as the apparition floating in front of them in space solidified. But then they saw his eyes...and the sight quickly relinquished all of its humor. 

Back in Planet Earth, City Tokyo...Strike Man was the total embodiment of hyperactivity; an ADHD baseball fan gone nuts after watching too many "Peace and Love" reruns on NHK. He had the enthusiasm and boisterousness of a rookie cop coupled with the intense fixation of a mercenary. In his mind, he thought of himself as some weird blend of Batman, Ichiro Suzuki, Lupin the Third and Kindaichi Kosuke. A joke to some, Strike Man's rashness caused the regulars at Bokuto Precinct to regard him as some kind of deranged character that escaped out of CLAMP's Campus Detective series. Yet, Strike Man was respectable in some ways because he _was_ trying to do the right thing...just going about it in all the wrong ways.

This Strike Man had the dark piercing eyes of a killer. Coldness haunted those eyes, the coldness of one whose Soul was ghosted away into nihilistic limbo. Miyuki remembered watching the news coverage of the Aum gas attacks while she was in high school. The absolute lack of remorse on the faces of those who released the gas in the train station had chilled her. Cold is a good word for absence of morality or compassion; fitting, because this Isilblius had created a universe of absolute zero around him. A joyless place, devoid of love and loyalty and all of the in-between emotional expressions that made living beings _thrive_.

"I'm coming after you, Home Run Girl! But this time, the baseball's gonna be your _head_!" Isilblius-Strike Man said, brandishing a black 'baseball bat'. Like before, he always received his 'visitors' with a greeting of menace. No doubt, he had assumed that aggressive threats would unnerve the Goddesses. Perhaps it did. But Natsumi was used to such taunts...no one survives even a year on the force without having to deal with people with Yakuza attitudes. Even during the act of ticketing someone for parking in a handicapped zone, she had to be prepared. Meek-looking businessmen would see her ticketing their car, and then snap into a completely different individual, as full of funk and attitude as a gang-boss. Intimidation wasn't a tactic that Natsumi reacted to. Instead, she was _proactive_...usually turning up the threat level a notch and silencing those who would try to frighten her. She could stand toe-to-toe with the most menacing thug and hold her own.

This wasn't one of those cutesy situations, like the time some nerd had concealed cameras in the shower room. This was dead-bang serious...

Isilblius swung the baseball bat-shaped cudgel of dark matter at her. The baseball bat was so solid with neutrons, it literally sucked in space and time as it moved through the air. She ducked, feeling the throbbing of the bat as it winged by her short hairdo, knocking off her helmet.

"That was way too close, Natsumi! Be careful!" Miyuki shouted in her mind.

Isilblius's 'strategy' of attack was consistent with the way he had attacked Belldandy. A frontal assault, hoping to overwhelm her with amok bursts of strength. Natsumi had only one weapon...that was the most that the Ultimate Force allowed her to have in this iconic reality...and she was hoping she wouldn't have to use it until the end.

Isilblius swung the bat at her again...and did something she never expected. He released his grip, and then the bat flew out of his hands and stuck her full in the chest.

"**_NATSUMI!!!_**" she heard Miyuki scream with panicked concern. Before she knew it, she was doubled over, the wind chased out of her by the blow. The impact felt _real_, just like how it would have been if she had been struck in the chest by a baseball bat. Dizziness flooded into Natsumi's mind as she heard a scraping sound nearby.

Isilblius was picking up his bat.

Still giddy after the blow, Natsumi knew that she had a crash of broken ribs. It hurt to breath, it hurt to think, it hurt to keep her eyes open. Why was there so much pain...and why couldn't she make it go away?

Isilblius reared the bat over his head like an executioner's axe, ready to hammer a finishing blow down on her skull.

Tottering on the brink of hallucination, grimacing under the fires of an agonizing pain in her chest, Natsumi reached up and caught the downward swing of the bat...just like the hero in one of those 1970s samurai dramas. In the split-second she gripped the bat, Isilblius paused with astonishment...

...long enough for Natsumi to pull the bat slightly to the left.

A tiny exertion of effort. But in the physics of the Way of Ju, redirecting an opponent's ki could easily cause them to lose their balance. 

Redirection provokes misdirection. 

Isilblius slipped and then stumbled towards his left, thrashing his arms about in a vain effort to try and maintain his balance. Natsumi saw an opening...

...and delivered an elbow to his ribs.

With an "oof!!!", Isilblius collapsed into a heap.

"Not so tough now, are you?" Natsumi taunted. "You hit me with a bat...and I'm hurt. But I hit you with my elbow...and now you're feeling it. Just imagine if _I_ had a bat."

"Huh..Home Run Whore! I'm gonna _kill_ you!" Isilblius said, righting himself.

Natsumi motioned for him to come with her fingers.

"**RRRAAAAAUGGGGGWWWWWHHHHH!**"

Isilblius rushed her and tackled her, trying to choke her, clawing at her throat. For some reason, Natsumi remembered an event of the past...something that had happened in the Diet Building. Someone there had also tried to choke her...

Pain rippled her towards stark awareness.

She could feel the heat of Isilblius's foul breath, the grip of his thick arms around her chest. He was cheating. A second set of arms wrapping her torso in coils of pain. Looking over his shoulder, she could see something rising from behind him, a something that would have been physically impossible for the real Strike Man.

A scorpion's tail.

Cobra-swift, the monster's hooked tail struck her twice. Natsumi felt excruciating pain in her thigh and her shoulder as the sharp stinger pierced her battlesuit. The breath was sucked out of her.

"You're already dead!" Isilblius hissed at her. "In a few moments, you'll collapse from the poison, fall into a coma...and die!"

Strike Man-Isilblius glared at Miyuki as he finished the last, defiantly damning her with his words. 

Miyuki paled as she heard the pronouncement. 

As with the previous confrontations, she couldn't interfere. No one could, because Natsumi had to defeat Isilblius on her own. Miyuki knew that if she jumped in right now to fight Isilblius, they would have to start all over again. She doubted if the three Goddess sisters could stand another round of bouting with him.

If Natsumi was defeated, the consequences would be bad...they would have to endure another cycle of fights. But this wasn't just a matter of defeat or arrest. The situation was dire, because Natsumi might die. Could be dying already.

She shunted away the thoughts, but her heart still leapt to her throat. With all the consciousness contained within her will, Miyuki wanted to break free...just once...and come to the aid of her partner. Just like all the other times, back in Tokyo. 

Miyuki wanted to shriek in frustration. Here she was, rendered all-powerful beyond the conception of power and energy by the Ultimate Force...and she couldn't even do the one thing that she had done a hundred times back on the Earthrealm, back in her mortal form.

She couldn't help her partner.

"This isn't fair!" she shouted in a voice of raw anguish.

"Huh?!" Isilblius exclaimed.

Natsumi split the seconds into distinct rhythms of existence, noticing that her opponent's attention had shifted from her to Miyuki. Reaching towards her waist, she gripped the weapon she had chosen and unholstered it. Testing her grip, she knew that she would only have one shot at this.

She kicked Isilblius in the shin with her un-wounded leg with all the strength she could muster. He relaxed his grip on her, just enough...

Natsumi reached her arms up in front of her and began to elbow his arms apart.

"N..not possible! Y..you're only a mortal woman! You don't deserve this kind..ooof..of power!" he said, his voice straining through gasps of exertion. Miyuki felt her body beading over with sweat, but she continued the battle of wills. Forcing his arms further apart...

Isilblius was so focused on her efforts to escape, he didn't notice that she had already escaped, even though she was still in his grip. With the slight bit of separation she had wedged between her and the monster, Natsumi drove her knee upwards.

Right into his nuts.

"Whhoaooowwwoooo!" Isilblius cried out in a high-pitched voice. Her gamble had paid off. Isilblius had prepared himself to manifest as a menacing character from the onset. Obviously, he had studied their memories closely in order to recreate himself as Strike Man. Unfortunately for him, his hubris continued to manifest itself in a perfectionistic bent; he had manifested himself as Strike Man...right down to the genitals.

Instantly, he relinquished his grip and sprang away from her. Hailing Natsumi with a string of curses between gasping moans, Isilblius gripped his groin and jumped up and down in knotted displeasure. Natsumi realized that she must have gotten him good; he looked like he was dancing on a bed of hot coals.

Wasting no time, Natsumi reached for her weapon. Spinning it by the handle, she swung it upwards...and in a single arcing motion, she clocked Isilblius solidly alongside the head with her blackbody replica of a police-issue baton.

Miyuki cheered as Isilblius crumpled down to the ground.

* * * * * * * *

As she dashed over to where Natsumi and Isilblius both lay, Miyuki realized that she was faced with an unwelcome choice. Natsumi's wounds were _bad_...far worse than what the three Goddesses had endured. A deep gaping hole in her erstwhile partner's thigh was gushing glouts of blood, and her shoulder with twitching spasmodically.

Poison.

"Ignore me and do your job, Officer Kobayakawa! Arrest that perp!" Natsumi said in a gasping, weak voice. Her partner's face was pallid...

"But..."

"No buts, Miyuki!"

Four words passing between two friends, four words that communicated an entire universe of meaning.

Miyuki turned to the unconscious Isilblius and shouted "Taiho Shichauzo!" between her tears as she applied the first of the mental 'locks' on his consciousness. As per their original plan, she would immobilize Isilblius by using the same basic 'shield' technique that their group had used upon themselves. Once she had him 'locked down' and confused, she would turn him over to Keiichi, who would create a 'jail cell' to hold him.

As she felt her way through the horrorshow of Isilblius's unconscious being, Miyuki fought with herself to keep from recoiling with disgust and fleeing from his mind. Quickly, she visualized the 'key' to the lock...and 'handcuffed' Isilblius.

"There! Now it's your turn to be incarcerated, you bastard!" she said angrily.

* * * * * * * *

Keiichi was running two races. He had to nimbly outrace Time itself, because Natsumi was dying. Isilblius had poisoned her with a scorpion's sting, wounding her gravely. Even now, Miyuki was huddled over Natsumi, sharing her lifeforce with Natsumi in a last-ditch effort to keep her friend alive. They all were trying to buoy Natsumi towards life by white-lighting her with their Soul's energies. But Miyuki was obviously giving a little bit more; Keiichi could readily see that she was straining with effort.

He realized that Miyuki was giving so much her own lifeforce to Natsumi that she was in danger of exhausting her own Soul shortly. Miyuki's choice was volitional, of course...but it was evident that Miyuki had set herself on a course to share fates with Natsumi. Miyuki would deplete her own energies to the point of death, in order to keep Natsumi from falling over the precipice. If Natsumi died, Miyuki probably would die too.

Keiichi's second race was against himself. He had to outrace Isilblius's efforts to free himself from his confinement. They had planned to take advantage of his unconscious state by implanting a triple layer of mental shields into his consciousness: his, Natsumi's and Miyuki's. By creating a sort of torsion between his memory and his will, they hoped to slow him down enough so that Keiichi would construct a singular place of imprisonment for him. 

But now that Natsumi was unconscious, she wasn't capable of creating a layer of thought-shielding around Isilblius. And Miyuki was fully occupied, dividing her efforts between saving her partner and imprisoning Isilblius in his own mind...which meant that Isilblius was only confined by a single set of thought-shields.

Keiichi's thought shield was supposed to be added to Miyuki's...but under the present circumstances, Keiichi was too busy keeping Isilblius at bay.

His task was simple, yet difficult.

All Keiichi had to do was use Velocity to race a prison around Isilblius, long enough to weaken him so that Mara could get into his Soul and make him suicidal.

* * * * * * * *

It was like a computer simulation of Debye's Theory of Heat Capacity...taken to the Nth dimension. Densely complex mathematics rendered into convergent dimensionalities of energy, constantly shifting and resequencing themselves to frustrate Isilblius's attempts to escape.

In essence, Keiichi had to think faster than Isilblius.

"Perhaps the only true bridge between Time and Space is Velocity," Keiichi reasoned aloud, trying to build his confidence in the task that lay ahead of him. With the bestowal of transcendental awareness...courtesy of the Ultimate Force, Keiichi had a complete different regard towards the cohesion between Time and Space. He knew that Time exists as an singularity, an instant...unless one is traveling within Time itself. Then, Time itself becomes a continuum; a chronological superhighway of histories. Time unifies probability and actuality. Yet, one must rely on Velocity to travel Pastwards, Presentwards and Futurewards along the TimeWeb. Space is a whole different matter, but yet Keiichi knew that it was the same as Time in some aspects. Traveling from Here to There requires Velocity, and nothing more. All the Mortal and Divine races had developed various technologies of ideas to get from physical space A to physical space B. The quicker, the better. Even imagination relied on Velocity...the speed of thought was paramount to the survival of any sentient species. But the concept of 'speed' _requires_ the attributes of Time and Space. The efficiency of Velocity is judged by how it arranges Time and Space. How it bonds them, how it relates them to each other. In essence, how Time and Space merge within Velocity.

Air balloons...versus trans-lightspeed starcraft.

Keiichi recognized the vitality of these truths, these facts. Yet, didn't ease his attempts to keep Isilblius confined. In all the races he had participated in throughout his life, Keiichi had always driven some kind of vehicle. 

But in this race, _he_ was the vehicle.

There was nothing that he had to operate. No object of plastic and steel and rubber. No fluxation or cessation of mechanical systems, no steering or other means of controlling direction, no acceleration or braking. Speed was no longer important in a relativistic sense...

He had to focus.

No distinction existed between his thoughts and what happened in SpaceTime or TimeSpace, other than the fact that he was limited only by his creativity. In other words, as soon as he envisioned a change to Isilblius's 'cell'...his thoughts would become reality. A single thought, and the products of that thought were instantaneous and manifest. 

But beyond this was another sense of Velocity...the Velocity of Ideas.

To out-imagine Isilblius, Keiichi would have to remain a step ahead. The strategy was similar to that of the game of Go, the strategy game so popular with the elder generation of men back in Japan. In the present moment, Isilblius was surrounded by a restriction of Keiichi's own creation, just like how a cordon of white stones surrounded the black stones positioned on the board. But in this variant of Go, the competition _started_ by his pieces enclosing his opponent's; the challenge was to keep anticipating where and how his enemy would position a piece outside of the closure.

Keiichi was honest enough to admit that he was frightened of Isilblius. The Earthrealm mortal part of his being recoiled at the sheer magnitude of hideousness exampled by Isilblius. The Ultimate Force part of his being was wary; keeping him cool and calculated against any sudden moves. Somewhere in the balance, Keiichi wished Belldandy was with him so that she could embolden him with simple words of wisdom.

But Bell-chan had her hands full...

Most recently, Isilblius had tried to phase himself out of Keiichi's 'container' by attempting to desynch several waveform layers. Waveforms layer themselves into stratas of energy, in much the same manner that one layers ingredients into a lunch sandwich. Earthrealm mortals tend to think of waveforms as distinct from each other, using the conventions of magnitude and amplitude to measure them. Limited by mortal science to viewing waveforms along a single dimension of conception, the mortals were completely ignorant of the more relevant interrelations between wave and matter. This shortsighted approach was akin to looking at a single wave though binoculars, while missing the rest of the ocean that comprised every single wave. Waveforms belonged within the diverse context of the greater harmony of Being. The Ultimate Force itself often moderated waveforms to accomplish its purposes... 

Viewed from the 'top', a sandwich only appears to be a single slice of bread. But viewed from the side, one can see _two_ slices of bread with dressings of meat, vegetables and condiments between them. Likewise, waveform layers are constructed in a specific pattern, just like a sandwich is made a certain way. One doesn't put the meat on the bottom, the bread in the middle, and the lettuce on top. But by desynching the waveform layers, Isilblius was attempting to 'slide' through a 'gap' between two waveforms. In essence, he was trying to 'fool' the waveforms into a new pattern, so that they would become chaotic. Consequently, Keiichi had to interpret the chaos, and then reconstruct the physical framework of Isilblius's 'cell' to accommodate the new resonance between the waveforms, and then focus his mind towards 'normalizing' the structure of waveform layers, returning them to their original state. 

Otherwise Isilblius would make good his escape.

Keiichi found himself neck-and-neck with Isilblius at times, even though the Ultimate Anti-Being was confined 'out of sight'. He could intuit when Isilblius was ready to try to escape once again.

Isilblius tried to bend Time.

Isilblius tried to deconstruct matter.

Isilblius tried to displace Space.

Isilblius tried to make Keiichi insane.

Finally, Isilblius tried to transcend Velocity.

* * * * * * * *

"Mara, I hope you're about ready to take on Isilblius!" Keiichi thought as the Everything turned into a blur. Isilblius couldn't free himself from inside the cage he was trapped in, so he tried to speed up the Everything on the outside of the cage instead. Pressure within, pressure without.

Keiichi found himself flying past tachyons, sentyons, and xodyons as the Everything whirlpooled into impossibly complex expressions of speed. He understood what Isilblius was trying to do. Isilblius was trying to accelerate the Everything beyond the so-called theoretical Velocity of Idea. If all the dimensionalities of the Everything moved faster than thought...they obviously wouldn't be able to conform to Keiichi's will. It might blast apart the Everything...

...but then again, it might blast apart Keiichi's mind.

Something would have to give.

Isilblius _was_ the Everything; obviously, he was confident that he would remain intact while Keiichi's will would shatter. The possibility existed that...if reality moved faster than thought...Keiichi might find himself 'locked' out of reality. He wouldn't be able to apprehend or comprehend anything around him; in a sense, he would be locked away in a 'temporal black hole', with as much chance of rejoining reality as a pedestrian had of walking up and getting into a speeding car on the Bayfront Expressway.

Keiichi knew of only one way to combat this.

He would have to become Velocity.

* * * * * * * *

In the end, it was Keiichi's familiarity with pushing himself beyond the limits that caused him to outrace Isilblius. Before Isilblius could accelerate the Everything to the point of no return, Keiichi already was there waiting for him.

Keiichi possessed a certain form of courage...the courage to go faster than what he thought was reasonable. For a thousand times in his life, he had pushed the envelope, his courage blossoming in the face of what seemed foolhardy and dangerous.

Only seven years old, and already riding a bicycle down the hilly streets by his parents house at full pedal, much faster than all the other kids dared to go. Wiping out when the pedals turned faster than his feet could manage. Bruised knees, scraped elbows, a concussion...and a stern lecture from his parents.

Always striving to go faster than his sense of control. 

Age 11, and almost breaking his neck by riding his bike off the roof of one building onto the roof of an adjacent building. One of the elementary school bullies had dared him...and he did it. The bully thought Keiichi was joking when he accepted the challenge, but when Keiichi actually flew his bike between the buildings, the bully turned white-faced with shock. Leaping off a makeshift wooden ramp, five stories above the alleyway separating the two buildings, over a distance of 4 or 5 meters. 

The police certainly didn't appreciate the after-school stunt.

Later, it was BMX bikes, motorcycles, ATVs, and Le Mans GMX race cars.

Now, it was his life.

Mara was wrong. At the end of the Le Mans, she had declared that Keiichi's was no longer fit to compete in races...that his last race would be the 2007 Le Mans competition. Towards the end of that race, Keiichi had lost his spirit; he was so obsessed with winning that he experienced a imperfect moment of selfishness. But in _this_ race against Isilblius, he became selfless in another way. The pursuit of fame meant nothing here; in order to exceed the velocity of Isilblius's sped-up Everything, Keiichi had to totally relinquish his ego. 

He knew that Mara could have never imagined that he would be involved in _this_ kind of race. But she was right.

After this, he would never race competitively again. 

Once he became Velocity, his perspective had forever changed. Controlling the physics of Time and Space, he slowed down Isilblius's Everything. Isilblius had 'bounced' against a barrier in his attempt...that barrier was Keiichi. After this, it was simple physics: one force striking an opposing force with more kinetic energy and potential and actual velocity...causing the slower force to lose energy and decelerate.

Isilblius screamed in his cage.

Mara came up to him and gave him a 'high five' for his efforts. Right before she left him to deal with Isilblius, she reached behind the back of his head and whispered in his ear...

"When you can't strive against others because there are none who are worthy to strive against you, yield...for in yielding, you will always preserve your wholeness. Your race is no longer against yourself, Keiichi...it is _for_ others." 

* * * * * * * *

"You know, everything that has happened up to now has been the work of ghosts," Mara started. "They're dead...I'm dead...but it's all in your head. Even though you exist all by yourself in this universe of your creating, we are your companions. We will haunt you through every echo of Time, through every corner of Space...through all the nooks and crannies of your Soul. I am your imagination run wild. And I will be the death of you..."

"You're not real!" Isilblius countered. He was as Mara remembered him before; a shroud of Void inside of the body of a Demon. Of course he had taken the form of a Demon; he certainly wouldn't have been very intimidating in the form of a God or Goddess. All this time, the Gods thought him as the "Ultimate Demon"...while the Demons regarded him as the "Ultimate God". In truth, Demons viewed Isilblius as the Ultimate _Anti-Demon_: a being whose existence would mean the destruction of all the Demons.

Such had happened.

All Mara had to do was convince him that it _ hadn't _happened...

"If you're real, and I am here, then what is real? If all that exists is you, then could your memories be conjuring me up? Assuming that you are only remembering me, then what is life without control of one's memories?" Mara asked, summiting confusion onto Isilblius.

* * * * * * * *

The Everything shook.

From the vantage point of their sphere of ethereality, Belldandy sensed that the quaking of the Everything was more of a spasm, rather than a shudder. The gasping spasm of a dying being. Mara was doing her work well.

Urd was still in shock, muttering soundless words that splashed pale against her spirit. Miyuki and Natsumi were only a slight ebb of Life; both women were on the brink of cessation. Skuld was exhausted, resting her chin on Mjolnir because she could barely sit up on her own. Keiichi was exhausted as well, still drenched with sweat after his race with Isilblius.

He was the only one maintaining the mental shields around Isilblius, while Mara was working hard to scramble Isilblius's psyche into a hopelessly intractable neurosis..

She groaned as she leaned over to smooth out his hair as he rested his head in her lap. Too weak to sit up, Keiichi kissed a finger and then pressed it to her lips.

It was now up to Mara to finish Isilblius.

* * * * * * * *

Mara realized that she didn't have the luxury of trillions of years to combat Isilblius, as Cevn had She had to finish him soon. The harmony of the Seven was rapidly failing.

Isilblius was significantly weakened, his psychological barriers almost non-existent.

Mara created a Singularity of Despair. The Singularity was a structure of Metanative energy, but limited to only a single emotional frame. Any being that was trapped in it would _only_ feel despair; the properties of the particular signature of Metanative energy would allow no other emotions. But beyond this, Mara encapsulated the Singularity in the form of Cevn.

Of all the beings Isilblius feared, he feared Cevn the most.

Mara felt that this was only fitting, that Isilblius would be undone by the one being that had defeated him and that he had killed. During his battle with Isilblius, Cevn had tortured Isilblius for billions of years...and then released him, only to seal him away in a reality that was indistinguishable from Reality. Mara had pried open Isilblius's doubts about the status of his own reality. Now it was time to paint those doubts in fear and despair...

Instead of encasing Isilblius in the Singularity of Despair...Mara hurled the Singularity of Despair _into_ Isilblius.

The reaction was immediate.

Isilblius froze in mid-gesture.

Mara said three words to him...

...and he vanished.

* * * * * * * *

Belldandy watched as the Everything imploded into itself. Their worst fears had been realized: the destruction of Isilblius had taken the Everything with it. Not a single trace of the TimeWeb remained. There was no physicality, no waveforms, no Soul.

There was only Void.

Isilblius had wanted to scourge the Everything of all Life, so that he alone could inhabit it. But now he was dead as well, and now the Everything was empty of all fullness.

Isilblius had gotten what he wanted. 

She wanted to cry, because no other current of feeling seemed to possess her heart. Their victory was Pyrrhic; they had rid the Everything of Isilblius...

Now there was no Everything.

Cradling her face in her hands, she started to sob. Tears wouldn't even begin to mourn the loss. She wanted to take every moment of life in the Everything and make a charm of it, to wear around her breast...to remember what had been lost this day. She was so dazed with grief, she neither saw nor comprehended. Limp as a rag, she felt mechanical against the melancholy of intensity. There was no dazzling whiteness of the Mid-Light, no welcoming azure glow of Yggdrasil, no brilliant crimson of Vanagdrasil.

She pounded her knees with her small fists, filled with vehemence.

"Why!!!?" she screamed.

"Why not?" a voice answered, stunning her.


	103. Pt 103: An Epoch's Requiescat Amidst Con...

**Part 103: ** **An Epoch's Requiescat Amidst Confusion and Remembrance (Draft)**

The absolute catalepsy of the emptiness that surrounded him was completely alien to Keiichi. The whole of existence was scoured clean, a mute requiescat to Isilblius's wanton folly of destruction. Even when he extended his senses to the limits of perceptibility, he received no rewarding stimulus, no indication of anything other than himself and the six others. All around him was a stilled, shoreless vacuity where the Everything had once existed in all its glory. Nothing remained to prolong or vault his spirit towards the welcoming hale of optimism. 

If there was an All here...it was totally devoid of Life.

His divine fiancée's weeping was the only sound he could distinguish; the soft sobs filtering through his mind.. There was no ground underfoot that could resound footfalls, no walls or objects to create echoes to a voice or thought, no sense of physical space to create sympathetic ambiences. Bell's lament was soundless, voiceless. He could only slightly bear her deep sadness in the halls of his heart; he could only echo her grief with his own fragility. Even a sense of stillness implied a returning; that the absence of life was only a temporary condition, soon to be relieved. 

But as time wore on, the surrounding dearth phantomed itself against Keiichi's will, wearying him. It seemed a nemesis, whose sole goal was to wear him down until his resolve withered. The emptiness transcended all possible innations...it was spaceless, timeless and lifeless...as if it had always been that way.

The Everything was a Nothing.

Bowing his head and rubbing the back of his scalp, Keiichi's feelings swirled around the twin flags of confusion and astonishment. Overhearing Belldandy invoking her sense of hopelessness with moist whispers only heightened his sense of ennui. Usually, life had dealt him the reverse: _ he_ would feet deplete of ambition and hope, and _she_ would respond by uttering soft words of wisdom. A phrase or two that would inspire him to look deeper within himself for the mercurial hope he so desperately needed. Bell-chan's exacting turn of the tongue always seemed to ornament the bareness of his despair with the illumination of possibility.

Belldandy was feeling shattered...her laments were so deep, they burst through his mental shield with their indelibility. There was no way he could 'tune out' her grief...and Keiichi felt frustrated that he could do so little in the face of it. He struggled against the fear that he was utterly isolated.

Before the tempestuous 'destruction' of the Isilblius and the Everything, Keiichi had sensed that they would need to be each other's measuring stick once they defeated their scourging enemy. Now that Isilblius was finally rid-gone, there was nothing here for them except each other. Deep inside, he urgently wanted to right the wrongs that had been heaped upon their group...upon the Everything. But the sheer cosmic scale of destruction had winged itself away, flying far beyond the limits of his imagination. 

What could they do to restore the heartbeat of the Everything?

"I guess rebuilding universes wasn't covered in Ultimate Force 101," he said to himself grimly. He didn't have a clue about how to restore order in a situation where there wasn't even a chaos to reorganize. He found himself wishing that reconstituting the Everything would be as easy as jump-starting an engine. 

But nothing was easy, now that he was a God...a God who was numbly distant from himself, as if he was an alien within his own being.

Belldandy continued to sob softly into her hands. Keiichi envied her...she was the only one strong enough to cry. Everyone else was dazed; floating around in a trance-like fugue of disbelief.

"I want to be strong for you too, my love..." Keiichi promised as he contemplated his soulmate's heaving figure. He knew what it would take. All he would have to do was take one step towards Bell-chan. One hovering stride towards her...and he would be committed to the course...

A single movement of body and heart...and the words would have to find themselves on his lips. One step, and he would _have_ to provide succor to her; otherwise, he'd be false upon hope. 

One step...and he would have to answer the unanswerable.

With a start, Keiichi abruptly recognized _why_ Belldandy was so upset in comparison to the others. Unlike her sisters, Bell was much more immediate with her feelings...she didn't have Mara's guile, Urd's savvy or Skuld's genius to occlude or 'delay' her emotions. Which was fitting, since she was Norn of the Present. When Belldandy _felt_ her feelings, she emoted them right away. Beyond this was the reality that his divine fiancée was _used_ to viewing existence in terms of cosmic magnitude. Many times, Bell-chan's emotional immediacy had saved them during treacherous situations. 

But even more significantly, Bell-chan had been a _ Goddess_...with a quarter of a million years of life experience prior to being 'awakened' by the Ultimate Force. Keiichi reasoned that, to his fiancée, the destruction of the Everything was an incalculable, unspeakable event. Doubtless, it had stricken her with a profoundly overwhelming sense of loss than he couldn't even begin to imagine.

In contrast to _her_ world, _his_ world was pretty much limited to Tokyo, Makuhari and Chiba. Even though he had lived billions of mortal lifetimes within the impress of the Ultimate Force...and billions more during their battles with Isilblius, Keiichi knew that the germinating seed of his self-identity was forever authored by his 25 years of life in Japan. Comparatively, those years were but a microcosm of his life...but they were the reason he was who he was. Not even the infinitely intervening aeons of UF experience could undo this truth. 

He couldn't fully empathize with Belldandy, but he knew that her sense of loss was one that he would _have_ to ease...otherwise he could never imagine himself calling himself her husband in some future day...

Dutifully, he swallowed the black hole of his uncertainty and took the the final step...

* * * * * * * *

"Bell...there's still _us_," a soft, yet firm voice assured her. 

A beckoning beacon amidst the void, offering to unbind her from her grief...

Belldandy pulled her hands away and looked down at her palms, dew-dampened with a rain of tears. Her senses seemed so dulled from the barren shock of the loss of the Everything. Her Soul was rent with agitation; conflicted, she couldn't even recognize whose voice it was. 

Her mind strobed briefly with the idea that it might be Kami-sama...

At last! He had come to their aid, His words an offering of reassurance that He would make everything all right! Momentarily, she was filled with the heady mix of awe and father-love she felt whenever she was in His presence...

Repeated, the male voice sounded different. It lacked the rich dulcet tones of placement that belonged to the voice of her Lord. A more gentle, more homely voice...

A more familiar voice...

She felt a hand rest itself on her shoulder, and then squeeze her with a light warmth. The soul contained and expressed in the soft touch tamped all her doubts away.

"K..Keiichi?" she said, half turning to look at him.

"Bell-chan...I..I just wanted to tell you that it's going to turn out okay. The Everything isn't dead as long as there are the seven of us. Besides, seven's kind of a lucky number in many cultures where I come from. Just think...we may be the Divine equivalent of the ShichiFukujin. The Seven Lucky Gods," he said with a grin. 

Belldandy found herself grinning despite her melancholy. If they were the ShichiFukujin, then Keiichi had to be Benzaiten, since he was the only male in the group...

"Obviously, we're all that remains of the Everything...but my guess is that things are the way they are because we're going to be the ones to make it better. The task has fallen on us to start the Everything back up. And somehow, I _know_ we'll manage to figure out how to do that. Remember what you've told me so often...about the true nature of life? That the true nature of life lies couched in the assurance that if one strives to reach for their dreams, then the entire universe will accompany them on the journey. All of existence will aid them, so that they can grow into the maturity that is necessary to allow them to enjoy the fruition of their accomplishments..."

"That's bullshit!" Mara interrupted vehemently, gesturing wildly with her arms.

"Can't you see?!" the Demoness exclaimed in a voice that couched an entirety of frustration. "There's _no_ blessed universe of any kind to 'aid' us! It's fuckin' _gone_!!! The dream is over! We're on our own, for the rest of eternity!"

Mara's violent shouting had snapped everyone else out of their numbness.

"What about the Lord?" Skuld asked. "Didn't we hide Him away while we were fighting Mr. Cosmic Retard Isilblius? What about your Lord, Mara? Isn't He going to come?"

"He's not gonna come, Skuld! I can't sense a single trace of His Noir Majesty at all!" Mara quickly answered. She punched the small of her hand angrily, shaking her head so sharply that her straw-blonde curly mane of hair ambled all over her shoulders. 

"Blessit, how could this end up being so fucked up! Every time we've taken on Isilblius, it always ends up getting worse! We tried to save Cevn...he ended up dying! We took on Isilblius...and almost got ourselves killed fighting that life-hating fuckup! Now, the blessed Everything is _gone_!!! It's never to come back! _What could possibly be worse than this?!_" Mara shouted. She slumped to her knees, fighting back the wailing fit that threatened to seize her. A 'floor' materialized in mid-space, and then Mara started drumming it with clenched fists.

Belldandy could sense Skuld writhing with anger, readying a sharp retort to Mara's words. Across from her younger sister, Mara's ill mood was almost over the top; her eyes were blazing orange-red as she was completely wrapped up in self-pity and rage. Belldandy tried to empathize with her Demoness sister's red-bleary bitterness. Without a doubt, Mara was probably the most disappointed of the group, since she was the one who had finally defeated Isilblius. No doubt, her older sister's hot Demoness blood was firing her temper along as well. Knowing this, it was clear to Belldandy that Mara's sharp-wit ire wasn't completely her fault; she was feeling the sense sense of failure that they all were feeling. She was just expressing herself in a different way...albeit an _extreme_ way, true to her Demoness nature. 

Belldandy silently shook her head with a sharp "_NO!_" at her younger sister, hoping censure would forestall Skuld from launching into a lambasting tirade. Unexpectedly, she noticed that the throbbing pains from her wounds that had been plaguing her since her 'battle' with Isilblius...were totally gone.

"Keiichi! I feel okay! I don't feel any pain!" Belldandy shouted.

Mara paused her fist-pounding and cocked her head to the side, regarding Belldandy with a mystified expression.

"That's it!" Skuld interjected exuberantly as she clapped her hands together in front of her.

"_What's_ it?" Mara asked impatiently, deftly springing to her feet. From Belldandy's perspective, she looked like a surfer as she was standing on a small, translucent rectangular thinness. 

Mara felt herself giving in to greater irritation. Once again, Skuld had used her usual 'flashy' way of announcing that she had an insight. This was one of Mara's biggest pet peeves about her youngest sister. There were so many to choose from, but this one really got to her...

Skuld always seemed to leap into a conversation or a dead silence with an exuberant "I have the answer!" voice. But instead of just voicing her idea, she had to introduce it with some attention-getting, overly-dramatic 'announcement'. Even worse, these sudden interjections were usually just Skuld's way of airing her own confusion, concealed within a overweening voice caused others to think she had solved a dilemma...when actually, she hadn't.

Mara allowed herself the luxury of rolling her eyes.

"Don't you guys see? Something _other than ourselves_ healed us! Which means that we're not as alone as we think we are!" Natsumi interjected as she performed a series of isometric stretches to loosen up her tight muscles.

Skuld's reaction was immediate.

Mara almost burst into laughter as Skuld's face faulted into astonishment in reaction to Natsumi's words. The brat was blushing root-red with disappointment and jealousy...obviously, Natsumi had trumped her planned explanation. To add to Mara's amusement, she had noticed Skuld sneaking a stinkeye at Natsumi, which was rendered all the more comical by the fact that the Earthrealm woman didn't even notice Skuld's resentful glare.

On the heels of that thought, Mara realized that 'Earthrealm' wasn't exactly an appropriate term any more. In this present circumstance, there _was_ no Earthrealm.

"Maraaaaa..." Skuld warned as she noticed the glimmer of mirth in Mara's eye.

"If we're not alone, this also means we need to figure out _what _we've become," Miyuki added with deliberate meaning. "We're _it_...the only living beings in existence. Perhaps this Ultimate Force power was the one who healed us; but the fact that we've been restored to full health doesn't imply that the UF did so by act of will. Perhaps it was simply trying to restore balance, like water seeking its own level."

"But what if it was Cevn who healed us? What if he's still alive? And where is Kami-sama, Oni-sama and the Death Kid? We concealed them away from the Everything in that 'StealthSphere' we created, so they wouldn't be harmed if the Everything was destroyed. So why haven't we heard from them? After all, _we_ were the ones who stashed them away in the first place! An even better question is this...if they're alive, why couldn't _they_ recreate the Everything? Then we wouldn't have to do a thing! I don't know about the rest of you, but I'm not comfortable playing the role of God," Keiichi ventured.

"It's quite possible that our Lord and the two others _cannot_ create the Everything," Skuld noted.

"Why?"

"Because they were co-created with the Everything. You know about the concept of synchrosimilarity? On all levels of dimensionality, there is a tendency for 'reality' to organize itself in relation to 'other' realities. For example, 'motion' is a fixed, synchronous concept at the subatomic, interstellar and Multiversal levels of organization. Motion can be discerned in electron rotations, planetary rotations and universe rotations at each of those levels. But in this stupid situation we're stuck in, where there's no Everything...there's also no absolutes of Space and Time. Think about _that_ for a moment! When that bastard Isilblius went down in flames or whatever, he left us in a reality where the two concepts...indeed, _any number of concepts_...are totally meaningless. Look around us! Do you find anything that is substantial? There is no substance, no essence, no property or form or being..._anywhere_! Thus, there can't be _anything_ synching with anything else! Total boredom, all the time."

"So what does that have to do with the two Lords?" Mara asked impatiently.

"Remember how universes are created, Mara? Traditionally, when there's no universe to start out with, one or the other of the Lords will decide to create it...and then the new universe appears, just like that! The newly-created universe is sorta like an archetype; a movement of the mind that creates it. The Earthrealm Bible explains this in simplistic terms as 'God created man in His own image' or something like that. But we all know this is _true_. Let's say Oni-sama is playing tennis one day, and He decides to think up a new universe. Instantly, a new universe appears out of nowhere. But as soon as He creates it, the new universe has to take its place in the structure of the Multiverses. Upon its 'arrival', so to speak, it immediately becomes concurrent and synchrosimilar to all the other universes. Concurrent, because it's 'plugged in' to the TimeWeb. Synchrosimilar, because it becomes subject to at least one monadological principle that affects the other universes; such as 'motion', for example. As a concept, synchrosimilarity is really cool when one wishes to explain certain aspects of how a universe comes into being. It can even explain some of the inner workings of the Multiverse; the 'juice' of how things are, as I like to think of it."

"But you cannot apply the same concepts to the Everything. The Everything didn't have the Lord, the Dark Lord and the Reaper Kid to 'think it up'. There were _no_ such observers in that distant beginning. Also, there was no 'other' Everything for it to be synchrosimilar to. Because of this, my best guess is that the Everything had to somehow self-organize itself...just like the Ultimate Force continually self-organizes itself. The Rules that we all love and hate, for example; they're just part of the UF's 'ordering' of its energies. In my opinion, there's no intelligence guiding the UF, unless the Ultimate Force is totally insane or totally subject to whimsical impulses. After all, what sense would it make to have Belldandy and Keiichi's hands get stuck together that one time, just because she got drunk? Or what possible reason could there be for the UF to prevent Big Sister Urd from touching Cevn? To the UF, those 'consequences' are just another function that is necessary because Big Sister is Norn of the Past and because Keiichi and Elder Sister are in love."

Belldandy felt her cheeks flush at how unhesitatingly Skuld had said that she and Keiichi were in love. What a contrast to how Skuld had behaved when she first came to the Earthrealm, all those years ago!

"Who's Cevn?" Urd asked, eyebrows raised.

"Never mind that, Urd," Belldandy replied, holding in her frustration. She was disappointed; she had hoped that the memory 'block' affecting her older sister would also disappear after Isilblius's demise. Or perhaps after they all had been healed. But Urd's selective amnesia still remained.

Skuld grimaced in sympathetic frustration as well, but continued her explanation. 

"Likewise, if the Everything was self-arising...if it brought itself into being...then the trio of Lords were probably seamlessly woven into that self-actualization. Well, actually 'self-actualization' isn't the best descriptive term since there was no 'self' involved," Skuld corrected herself. Placing a finger on her chin, she closed her eyes and pondered the white arcades of all the theories jumping around in her mind.

"Or maybe there _was_! Maybe the Lords are the 'self' of the Everything!" Skuld said enthusiastically, her explanation meandering into blind conjecture. "But if they are the 'self' of the Everything, then they still couldn't have existed _before_ the Everything. How can the 'self' exist before the self...if you get my drift! Cool, I just came up with a Zen koan! Quite a cosmogonical dilemma, isn't it?"

"That koan has been around for a while, Skuld," Keiichi denounced, his monotone voice cool and unimpressed. Skuld shrugged his comment off and continued.

"So if the Everything created itself...and the Lord were created along with it, then it must be uncreateable. Which means that we're still backed up against a wall. How can we create a thing that is uncreateable?" Miyuki asked.

"I'm getting a headache, thinking about all of this," Belldandy sighed, leaning wearily against Keiichi's shoulder.

"Waitaminute! There's gotta be something more! _ Something_ healed all of us...in fact, something is definitely keeping us alive. I, for one, am not going to assume that it's some kind of mindless balancing act by the Ultimate Force. We were able to guide the UF when we fought Isilblius. And when we defeated the dreaded shit-face, his portion of the UF had to go _somewhere_..." Urd said, rapidly chaining together her assumptions with a voice squeaking with excitement.

Belldandy righted herself against Keiichi's arm.

"_There's something or someone else_! There _ has_ to be! I can feel it in my heart!" Urd added, spitfire-sure of herself.

"Urd..." Belldandy sighed. For a moment, the 'old' Urd was back. Belldandy almost thought that it might be possible that Urd was feeling her memories of Cevn's presence deep in her heart, even if she didn't know who it was that had touched her that way. She did say '_someone_ else'! A love without a face...is still a love, no matter how it would seem otherwise...

"The important thing is that we _aren't_ the only beings left alive, if what Urd believes is true! All of it...Yggdrasil, Vanagdrasil, the Mid-Light...has vanished like air in the haze. But they aren't totally gone, because they're inside of us as well. We remember them! If the Ultimate Force still exists, then we may have the means to recreate what was lost after all!" Keiichi ventured joyfully.

"Eh?!"

"Remember what Cevn said? He claimed that he _ rebuilt_ the Everything after he defeated Isilblius. Rebuilt...which I choose to interpret as in 'recreated'! If he was telling us the truth, then it's possible that _we_ could do the same. It's all the same Ultimate Force, isn't it? If I understand Skuld's theory of synchrosimilarity correctly, creation requires some sort of 'observer' or watcher in cases where there isn't two universes to rub up against each other. Which means that _we're_ the observers," Keiichi explained.

"_We can do this, guys!_" he pleaded.

"Soooo...if that's the case, then why not _improve_ what was lost? We have a unique opportunity here! We can make a bigger, better Everything. We can create an EveryWhen using a different TimeWeb, for example. More Time...less headaches. And why stop there? Why not start the Everything off with a whole new different set of Rules, since we control some or all of the Ultimate Force? We could design different matrices of dimensionality into the Everything. Why _not_ go all the way? We could undo pain and suffering, make things equitable for all sentient species, maybe put an end to the Real Death..."

"URD!" Belldandy and Mara shouted, not believing what they were hearing. 

"Maybe we could even get rid of my memories about being raped by that fuckup..." Urd suggested, looking thoughtful.

"Don't even go there, Big Sister! We can't eliminate Death! Not only would that put the Reaper out of business, it would severely hamper the equilibrium of the Everything. Plus, aren't you forgetting that struggling against challenges is necessary? Without purposeful evolutionary hindrances , _none_ of the mortal species would reach the Next Level! Pain and suffering, inequity, mortality...they're all built into the plan!" Skuld argued hastily.

"So what?! The 'plan' didn't work too good, did it? It certainly didn't prevent Isilblius from taking over the Everything!" Urd retorted, glancing pointedly at the inglorious absence that compassed them.

"And what about _my_ pain?! None of you could even imagine what it was like to be...violated...like I was by Isilblius. H..he tortured me...brutally...during the entire time he abused me! It was more horrible than anything I've ever experienced! He forced himself _inside of me_, not just in the sexual sense. He got inside of my head and twisted me! He stole my sense of dignity away, as surely as I stand here. Now, I have to live out the rest of my existence with the disgusting, nauseating memory of his hideous Soul being inside of mine...using me against myself! It was the worst!"

Urd was so angry, she was literally spiting her words at Skuld.

"Urd, Isilblius didn't do something like...Sharing...with you, did he?" Belldandy asked cautiously. She had no idea that the rapine encounter with Isilblius had been _this_ bad for Urd.

"What difference would've that have made, Bell? The bastard stole deep into my Being, far deeper than anyone has ever gone before. He ruined me...forever!" Urd said in a voice that made Belldandy shudder. 

"So yes...in a sense, he did Share with me. He Shared the most mortifying, sickening, poisonous part of Evil with me. Ever since then, I've felt like my life was torn into two pieces. Two pasts: the part of my life that existed before he hurt me; and the second part which is the Now. The Now I'm experiencing in another piece of my life, having to live with the aftermath of what he did to me. None of you could even begin to understand the sense of defeat I feel. Isilblius _used_ me! He took a precious part of my Being, against my will. Because of this, I feel like my will has been diminished. I don't feel like I'm in control of my life any more. There's parts of me...parts of my spirit...that don't feel like me any more!"

"Urd...Isilblius is _gone_! He's dead! I told you that I would force him to kill himself...and I did! We all watched him die! He's not coming back to hurt you any more!" Mara said, tentatively resting her hand against Urd's back. It was either that, or slap her twin sister in the face to try and shake her out of her self.

"So why can't we make it better? Are we supposed to do nothing more than simply hit some kind of cosmic 'rewind button'...and end up with the same Multiverses, TimeWeb and Mid-Light that we had before? That'd be idiotic! They were all screwed up! You know as well as I do that the Everything had all sorts of flaws in the first place. So I ask again...why not make it better? Don't we owe it all the trillions of species whose existence was snuffed out by Isilblius?" Urd said, gesturing towards the void.

"Of course we do, Urd!" Keiichi agreed.

"And what about Isilblius? He managed to corrupt the Everything to his own ends. If we create the Everything exactly as it was before, what's to stop him from doing it again? The potential would always be there! What if he isn't dead, like Mara claims? He could come back and do all this again. He could hurt me again!" Urd said, continuing to contest the issue with ardent vigor while Belldandy found herself weighing out massive chunks of ethics and morality in her mind.

Belldandy could tell that her older sister wasn't going to back down on this one. Urd's face was drawn into a rapacious look of determination; the same expression she'd gain upon deciding to chain herself irrevocably to her convictions.

But what if Urd was in the right?

"I believe Mara when she says that Isilblius is gone. Also, I don't think we have the privilege of speaking on behalf of those who cannot be here," Keiichi reasoned in a even voice. "Even if we've been granted superior firepower...do we have a superior morality to go along with it?"

"Keiichi dear...much as I respect your opinion, I must disagree," Belldandy noted. "We have to examine the issue from all sides, instead of dismissing Urd's suggestion. What if her suggestion is the correct path to follow? She said the Everything was flawed before...but what if it was flawed in the sense that a gem is flawed? Do you throw the diamond in the rough because it doesn't glimmer in the sun? Or do we polish it, make it shine beauteously, even brighter than before..."

"I'm not God!" Natsumi interrupted. "_None_ of us are! And no Goddess jokes this time! I'm not just referring to the Yggdrasil Gods either...I'm talking about the concept of a omni-everything creator being. The God that God worships."

"Of course we're not Gods...we're _Goddesses_!" Skuld snapped hastily, willfully paying Natsumi back for one-upping her earlier announcement about that 'something else' everyone was debating. 

Natsumi clenched her fists in tight-wrapped rage.

"Don't be such as smartass, Skuld!" Miyuki said bluntly.

Skuld put her hands on her hips and scowled. 

"I'm with Natsumi. We're talking about something that is too much bigger than all of us...and I'm very uncomfortable with the idea of rebuilding the Everything in the first place. Let alone changing it based upon our own ideas of what might constitute a 'better' reality! There's only seven of us...and we're all a little 'bent' in some ways. Belldandy's naive. Urd's self-centered. Skuld's a brat. Mara's devious. Keiichi's a motor-geek. Natsumi's impulsive and I'm...I'm way confused!" Miyuki said, pointing to each person in turn.

"You're a motor-geek too!" Keiichi confronted her.

"So that proves my point! I'm not going to sit here contemplating how to play God! And none of you are going to force me take part of some wild idea to 'improve' an Everything!"

"Nobody is forcing you to do anything, Miyuki. It is my wish that any actions we undertake on behalf of the Everything will be determined by consensus, not by majority," Belldandy said softly, challenging Miyuki's wild sway of opinion with gentleness. She hoped that a sensible approach would calm Miyuki down. She realized how important it was that she intervened first, before Mara overhanded the situation by escalating it into a heated screaming match. 

It didn't work.

"If this is the way you want to do this...you can count me out!" Miyuki announced, crossing her arms over her breast. Even as she voiced her frustration, she and Natsumi were fading themselves from sight.

Belldandy could readily sense the developing schism in their ranks...a strong divide between mortals and Divines. She turned to Keiichi to see how he was doing with all of this; he merely looked at her and shook his head in disapproval. Belldandy's spirits sank.

She was grave with concern, because such a philosophical and ethical divide could eventually graduate to a situation pitting mortals _against_ Divines.

* * * * * * * * *

No one was speaking to another. 

"There's something _way_ screwed up about all this!" Skuld muttered to herself. The standoff between mortals and Divines had arisen as a complete surprise to the Norn of the Future. She and the others had evolved a definite espirit d'corps as they struggled together over billions of years to defeat Isilblius. Now that they had rid themselves of their bane, they suddenly found themselves sharing a second common goal...the restoration of the Everything. All along, Skuld had assumed that their teamwork would extend to this second major undertaking. But their purchase on any sense of unity of purpose was rapidly slipping away. It was as if the issue of how to re-create the Everything had become a thousand times worse than fighting Isilblius. Fighting Isilblius was in some ways like treating a cancer; his single-minded swath of destruction had spent itself of any strategy towards the end. There was nothing divisive about taking him on. In contrast, rebuilding the Everything would be far more involved and potentially divisive.

A source of curiosity for Skuld was the fact that everyone seemed so focused on their 'before' lives, once the round of decisions turned towards the issue of how to rebuild the Everything. By her calculations, she and the others had lived several trillion years...which was a rough estimate, since Time didn't exist in any form anymore. In contrast, her 'before life' years as a young Goddess were fractional when held up against the longevity of her existence. Yet, she found hers sentiments increasingly drawn towards those years, those memories, as well. Despite the trillions of years that linked them with she and her sisters, the mortals were leveraging their opinions on the mere decades of life they had experienced on the Earthrealm. 

It simply didn't make sense.

Skuld caught a glimpse of Miyuki in the corner of her eye. Miyuki glanced sharply at her, and then turned her head with a dramatically snooty "hmmph!"; looking away so fast that her long braid of black-sheen-blue hair whipped halfway around her waist.

"Where are Kami-sama, Oni-sama and the Kid?" Skuld wondered as she put some distance between herself and the resentful mortal girls. It was frustrating, because she knew that the Three Lords _had_ to be somewhere! She remembered exactly where she and the others had stolen away the three Lords; they had placed Them in a Metanatively neutral 'StealthSphere', similar to the one they created for themselves while they were planning to attack Isilblius. An ethereal 'bubble' of null-SpaceTime, completely separate and distinct from the TimeWeb, SpaceTime and the Everything. Concealed, so that Isilblius couldn't discover it.

But when she checked, it wasn't there.

The thought crossed her mind that the impossible might have occurred...that their careful preparations to 'hide' the StealthSphere may have been _too_ effective. In other words, in hiding the Lords away, they may had ended up hiding the StealthSphere from _themselves_.

Lacking anything better to do, and certainly not willing to engage in further squabbling with the others, Skuld decided to extend her senses in order to search out the pocket of space containing the Lords. She closed her eyes and focused her senses outwardly.

And kept extending them...

The space that 'contained' the Everything should have been both infinite and finite. In actuality, infinity and finity are the same property when one perceives them at the Metanative level of existence. But after a few million years of extending her senses outwards...without a single parallax...Skuld realized that she should have 'bumped' against something that wasn't there.

"Where the hell is it?!" she exclaimed, gaining the impression that she was diving through an endlessly deep ocean. A bottomless ocean of noir-depths; fathoms that extended beyond sanity and sensibility. As she continued on her journey, she remained mindful that the deprivation of sensation and conjunction could easily become maddening in its own way.

"Good thing I'm a Goddess..._and_ a genius!" she affirmed to herself. Any of the others...particularly Keiichi, Miyuki and Natsumi...wouldn't have been able to handle the absolute zero of stimulus she was encountering. She had journeyed such an immense distance, she couldn't even distinguish the unique Soular 'signatures' of her sisters any more. When one doesn't encounter anything that one can use to affirm the existence of something other than themselves, their senses and their thoughts...one tends to lose their own 'selfness' in the isolation. Skuld was grateful that she had such a strong sense of self, an expected result of her years as an Earthrealm Trainee. The demands of living life with her sisters on the Earthrealm had caused her ego to be strengthened considerably. 

"Perhaps this is why my life was advanced 40,000 years in age back on the Earthrealm," Skuld noted to herself. Despite her curiosity, Skuld had never learned _how_ she had been accelerated in age from her mid-12s to her mid-16s. Even with the awesome enhancement of her intellectual capabilities once she joined with the Ultimate Force, she still didn't know who or what had done this to her.

But she did know why. It _had_ been her wish to be more grown up...a secret wish that none of the others had ever known about, nor had she spoken of it to her sisters. Even when they shared the essence of their conscious awareness back when they were first 'augmented' by the Ultimate Force...prior to Keiichi and the other two mortals developing the 'thought shield'...Skuld had managed to keep her secret. The context of that wish was as secret as her bra size.

So _who_ had known about it? 

There was so much she didn't know.

Suspending her doubts, she traveled further onwards...drawn towards what she knew she didn't know...

* * * * * * * * *

"Mortals. Love 'em or lose 'em, eh Belldandy?" Mara groused as she floated in the air, her hands tucked leisurely behind the nape of her neck as if she was suspended by an invisible hammock. 

Moments earlier, Keiichi had stormed off once again after hotly arguing with them, leaving she and Bell by themselves. Nearby, Skuld remained anchored in some quasi-meditative state...you could have hit the girl in the head with a supernova and she wouldn't have blinked an eye or acknowledged you. Her twin sister Urd was off somewhere else, tripping over the rabbit-holes of her memories. And of course, the two policewomen...Ms. Brainy Detective and Ms. Macho Woman...had conveniently absented themselves at the start of this mess and still remained at large.

These verbal grappling contests that Keiichi kept starting were leaving Belldandy looking the worse for wear. Her sister's glum expression suggested to Mara the lost look of a little girl whose puppy had inexplicably ran away from home.

It was all Keiichi's fault anyway! He would drop in, start to argue, and then speak too soon, too often. Belldandy had no choice but to continually protest his taking issue with her views...and once he realized that he hadn't swayed her opinions, Keiichi would gruffly excuse himself without notice.

"_Keiichi-baka_!" Mara hissed to herself as she regarded Belldandy's gloomy bearing.

Something about her younger sister caused her to suddenly feel inspired to do a very un-Demoness-like thing. Floating right up to her sister, Mara leaned over until she was almost chin-to-chin with Belldandy. She could feel the soft tides of Belldandy's breath as she spared her a brief glance before returning to her downcast expression. 

Belldandy's countenance remained withdrawn and abject. Mara continued to peer into her sister's azure skyblue eyes, trying to get her attention. When that didn't work, she waved her hands frenetically. But Belldandy was so self-absorbed with internal emotional conflict, she barely noticed Mara. Not even a flicker of an eyelash in reaction to the whirling handwaves...

Sticking her fingers in the corners of her eyes and mouth, Mara pulled a face.

Belldandy finally looked up at her, her somber expression melted away as her eyes brightened for a moment, and then she giggled briefly.

"She's alive!" Mara exclaimed in her best impersonation of the ancient Dr. Frankenstein. Continuing to be silly, she patted Belldandy on the cheek with mock solicitude, causing her Goddess sister to smile self-consciously and blush.

"All the billions of ages we've lived...and still the few years we were assigned to the Earthrealm seem to have imparted such a significance to us, eh? Don't you find this quite strange, Belldandy? But what _isn't_ so strange is your uncanny ability to sink into a deep funk whenever Keiichi doesn't see things your way! If you plan on marrying him, you'd better fix that little character trait of wanting to control him..."

"But he's always trying to control me!" Belldandy started to counter in a voice of exasperation, until she realized that she was simply confirming Mara's observation.

Her blush deepened.

"My dear Keiichi's so completely engrossed in seeing this issue in a singular light, it is almost as he was still an Earthrealm mortal," Belldandy noted. "And he isn't the only one. My thoughts have been drifting back to Yggdrasil and the Earthrealm, uncommonly so. It would also seem that you're stuck on the Earthrealm-ish perspective as well, Mara...despite trying to keep all appearances to the contrary."

Mara regretted the fact that her younger sister knew her so well. Having no choice, she nodded agreement. Belldandy had made her meaning quite clear. After all, Frankenstein was one of her favorite movies. Reluctantly, Mara once again had to admit that the Earthrealm was one of favorite places as well, apart from Vanagdrasil.

"Mara, it remains difficult for me to grasp at any plausible reason why there are _mortals_ within the ranks of our group. I can certainly understand the need for the four of us...especially considering our unique relationship with the TimeWeb. But why would our 'unseen agency' that has subtly assisted us...or even the Ultimate Force...involve Keiichi and those two mortal women as well? Their presence is too much of a synchronism; seemingly Miyuki and Natsumi were almost randomly included in the equation. They hardly even know the five of us! Six billion people live on the Earthrealm, and at least 25 million in metro Tokyo. So why the two of them? It seems almost capricious!"

"Maybe...and maybe not." Mara ventured. "Remember, Belldandy...it was your fiancé who encountered those two on the Bayshore Expressway while he was racing towards you guy's temple house to snag those the negatives, so we could construct that mandala and try to get Cevn back. And once they encountered him, they _chose_ to render aid to Keiichi by escorting him back. Even more, whatever power that yanked all of us out of the Earthrealm into those weird alternate dimensions...it took them as well. They were deliberately stranded in some alternative 1960s-version Japan. It's quite possible that their involvement wasn't mere 'coincidence'."

"But still! There's so much at stake here! Not to mention such a _huge_ responsibility has been laid upon our souls. Because of our Divine upbringing, you and I share some sense of what it's like to bear complete accountability for our actions. As a Goddess, I know that my actions need to meet certain standards. And you, Mara...you're the head of an entire Demon Office, for goodness's sake! But in this situation...inevitably, won't we have to reach our decisions as a _group_, if we decide anything at all? If not, could you imagine the consequences? In the window of my imagination, I can clearly envision what would occur if some of us decided to rebuild the Everything a certain way, while the others disagreed with how we accomplished the task. I don't even want to foresee how chaotic that could be."

"Truely true! If we all don't aspire together and strive together to _jointly_ recreate the Everything, we could easily find ourselves acting separately to destroy each other's efforts. Any point of contention or disagreement could become grounds for any one of us to undo the labor of the others. Again and again and again...ad infinitum. The design would rend itself to pieces. And if it were thus, would we be any different than Isilblius and his wicked designs and devices?" Mara said grimly.

Belldandy shivered at the thought.

"There's something else that weighs heavily on my heart, Mara," Belldandy said in a beginning voice of weariness. "I..I don't even know if things will _ever_ be the way they were before we were caught up in all of this. Will the course of our lives resume its flow? I don't know if we can even return to the lives we lived before, after we're done here. What if we don't revert back to our normal selves? We could be arguing amongst ourselves for all of eternity about what course of action we should take..."

"Tell me about it! Assuming that we can actually manage to reconstruct the Everything, and then by some small chance, we wind up back in Japan...what then? We've lived agelong lives, shared in the invention of an almost unlimited ocean of knowledge, expressed ourselves using Divine powers that perhaps call summon all of the Ultimate Force to bear on whatever we want. Considering what we know, knowing what we have done...could we ever fit in? That scares me to death! If we go back to our 'old' lives, might our previous states of existence on the Earthrealm seem more of a burden than a freedom? Remember how it was when your Goddess powers were limited during that stupid stunt when your parents stranded Keiichi in the desert?"

Belldandy's eyes flipped wide with reluctant remembrance as Mara continued.

"Our former lives might even be completely unbearable to us; seemingly nothing more than a strangling confinement, a narrow defile of our potential. We may never again experience a full 'life'! I, for one, don't want all this knowledge and power that I have. The minute we finish our task of restoring the Everything, _I want to go back to who I was_!" Mara said, deliberately letting her words pause out as she spoke.

"You speak for my sentiments as well. I would imagine that each of us wishes to be restored to some sense of normalcy when this is over and done with. This desire may be the only common bond we share between us at the moment, divided as we are on the issue of how to rebuild the Everything," Belldandy agreed.

"Yeah...could you imagine how screwed up it would be if Skuld made the Everything by herself? Or...even worse, Urd?"

"Tee hee hee! Yes, that would be dreadful, Mara," Belldandy said, giggling into her half-gloved hand momentarily. She resumed her focused, serious mien.

"I have a hidden feeling. From all manners of perspective, I can feel that we'd be doing the right thing _only_ if we created the Everything _exactly as it was_, before Isilblius corrupted it. But this brings up another suite of problems. What if we 'clone' the Everything, as is was? Wouldn't we be recreating all those horrible things that were part of fabric of the 'old' Everything? Death, the pain of evolution, injustice, insanity and depravity, warfare, evil..."

"Evil's cool!!! Don't knock it!" Mara interrupted.

"...okay. Then what about pureness, chastity, innocence, honesty..." Belldandy continued, grinning slyly.

"Yeesh! Say no more! You're gonna make me puke!" Mara quickly protested.

"That's my point, Mara! Regardless of the situation we find ourselves in, we are going to have to recreate the Everything. We cannot abide by this lifeless, deathless space. I know _I_ certainly can't!"

Mara voiced a vigorous agreement to this.

"Because we must rebuild the Everything, we will also be forced during the process of recreating the Everything to revive the aspects that formally existed within it...aspects that one or all of us will doubtlessly find abhorrent. The mortals hate physical death more than anything else. You'd want everybody to feel grief. Urd would want sensual pleasure all of the time. Skuld would want all literature to be drawn up along the lines of shojo manga. And who knows what Miyuki and Natsumi would want?"

"They'd probably want no crime in their version of the Everything...or maybe cities with no traffic jams," Mara noted.

"Probably so. But don't you see? Each of us has her quirks and dislikes. But unless we decide upon exempting certain aspects from the Everything that we will create, we'll inevitably have to recreate it _ intact_."

"Here we go again!" Mara said in a cursing voice. "Do we or do we not 'design' a new Everything? We're certainly not limited in our choices. What if we decide to create a partial Everything? There was a lot of unnecessary bullshit floating around the old Everything..."

"How do we know that any of it is unnecessary, Mara?" Belldandy asked rhetorically.

Mara smiled thinly. Belldandy's question was laced with irony, as yet unknown to its speaker. What Bell had just said...was pretty much a summation of Keiichi's argument _against_ tweaking the Everything to their own designs. A short while earlier, Belldandy had earnestly held to the position that the Everything should be slightly altered to be more of an accommodating place. Now Mara knew why Belldandy was so invested in her position. It was all about being comfortable, being rid of unpleasant consequences...

Belldandy certainly was thinking like a Goddess on this one! Mara wished that there were more Demons in the group, so that the fluffy 'worldview' of the Goddesses could be countered by cold, hard truths.

"We _could_ effect change upon the Everything, perhaps alter a few attributes and essences here and there. But who would decide? _How_ would we decide?" Belldandy pointed out.

"We'd put it to a vote!"

"Mara, you know as well as I do that votes do not represent a _voice_. The Earthrealm is but one of a million planets plagued with so-called democracies that rarely reflect the will of the people they represent. So often, majority rules only because ignorance decides. We can't afford to be ignorant of _anything_ in our decision-making. In our case, with only seven of us, the demos would be even shallower. Plus, I'm still not decided on whether we should...or even _can_...make these decisions on our own," Belldandy admitted with a resigned sigh.

"Well, I don't see any advisory councils over my shoulder that could help us decide the tough questions. Who else is gonna do it, if we don't?" Mara asked somberly.

"That remains a mystery. But could you live with the knowledge that you created an Everything...an Everything that consisted of guiltless, griefless Multiverses?"

Mara shook her head "no" as Belldandy continued. 

"I doubt it! Knowing you, my Demoness sister...you'd plague yourself with the blackest of regrets for the rest of your days if you knew you were responsible for all the mortal species living their do-about daily lives without a single stretch of grief. And how should we deal with evil? Not the 'fun' kind of evil that you and your fellow Demons are drawn to...but the horrid, profane aspects of evil. For example, the kind of evil that drove Isilblius to brutalize Urd? How would we account for the _worst_ kinds of evil; the typifications of evil that even you as a Demoness would find repulsive? As a Goddess, I'm much more sensitive to the more pernicious emotions and actions. If I knew that I was involved in recreating the kind of malignancy that finds its expression in rape, murder, corruption and injustice...the rest of my life would be dimmed by a sense of shame and guilt. I'd be creating suffering...and that is _not_ what lies deep inside my heart! That is not my purpose in life!!!"

"Suffering's necessary, Bell...as you full well know!" Mara said gently. A moment later, her face turned fierce as she slapped her hands together angrily, her fangs glowing with ire. 

"This really fyuckin' sucks!!!" she screamed. "Why can't the Dark Lord and your Lord just appear on the scene and magically fix things up? They're all-wise...they should be able to handle it! I mean, they've lived with the Everything from the start; so shouldn't that mean that they obviously have the courage to deal with _all_ of it? I highly doubt that they would have to struggle for a sense of purpose in this kind of a situation, like we are! Unlike us, they _have_ a moral superiority. They _must_!" Mara said after a long pause while she soaking in what Belldandy was trying to make her understand.

Belldandy paused as the thought struck her. What if the Lord _did_ have to suffer pangs of doubt because He created aspects of life that He would have rather done without? When He obliterated a species because they were running afoul of the plan to cultivate all species to the Next Level...did He feel a sadness? If so, then how was He able live with His feelings? She observed Mara's eyes grow wide...and guessed that her sister was contemplating the same questions about her Dark Lord. 

Belldandy found herself esteeming Kami-sama all the more. He must have enormous courage to be able to make such difficult decisions every day!

How could the Seven of them live with the decisions they were about to make?

Once again, she longed for His presence...

"Oh how I wish Oni-sama was here!" Mara said longingly. "He'd certainly know how to create an Everything! He could tell us what to do! He could even help us whip up a killer Everything!"

"Not to bear false upon your wishes, Mara...but remember what Skuld said? The Lords _didn't_ create the Everything."

"Yeah...you're right!" Mara said, slumping her shoulders slightly. "So who's gonna help us? We can't even decide amongst ourselves what to do? What if the mortals want to make themselves immortal...eliminate death altogether? Could you even begin to imagine how screwed up that would be?"

Belldandy nodded her head grimly as her thoughts were once again filled with unpleasant imaginations...

"It would seem that we have no choice but to leave everything as it was, should we be able to recreate the Everything," Belldandy finally noted, feeling almost disgusted with her inability to find an alternative solution.

"That's just great!" Mara noted, her voice soured with disagreement.

* * * * * * * *

"Miyuki, what if we _can't_ become who we were? Remember when we were stranded back in that alternative Japan? We had to constantly keep vigilant, so that we wouldn't allow ourselves to get hung up on the notion that there was no way to return back to present-day Tokyo. We had to hang onto hope!" Natsumi asked.

"How could I forget that? It was dreadful!" her partner agreed.

"Yes it was...but I feel that this is even worse. Everyone we've ever known is dead; a trillion times over, a trillion years ago! There's a Demoness and three Goddesses who _want_ to recreate the Everything...and they can't even decide between themselves about _what_ kind of Everything it should be! Keiichi is diametrically opposed to Belldandy...he's giving her a silent treatment that's worthy of a wife catching her husband in bed with her daughter! Skuld is in some kind of la-la land trance; while Urd's walking around all hollow-eyed, like she's seen a ghost. We don't have a chance, do we?"

"Natsumi, we _do_ have a chance! The bottom line is this...we _have_ to create an Everything! Otherwise, we'll drive ourselves nuts with just the seven of us. I can't even begin to know which would be worse. The guilt we'd have to endure if we decided to create an Everything that is as full of bad as it is of good. Or if we decide to alter the Everything, the unease of never quite knowing if we did the right thing, but always suspecting that we may have made a mistake," Miyuki explained.

"What a wonderful set of options!" Natsumi said sarcastically.

"But I _do_ know this...the guilt that haunts me when I look out there and I see _nothing_ in the place where an Everything should be," Miyuki said fervently, gesturing at the blank tableau of near-space, "is a thousand times worse! And I'm suffering from it right now! I just want it to end!!!" 

Natsumi followed Miyuki's hand-sweep with her eyes, while all the while her memories lodged themselves in a particular remembrance of her art class in high school.

The high school was one of those pre-fab rush-job schools built during the post-war boom of the 60s. In other words, it was poorly planned. Her art classroom 'studio' was located next to the large music room; so all the time she was in class learning art, she'd hear off-key piano playing and singing from next door. In the midst of this distraction, her sensei would happily conduct art class as if nothing was happening. For the painting portion of the curriculum, her sensei would bring in a still-life setting, usually a floral setting since she also taught flower arranging for the school's Flower Arrangement Club. She would spend a few moments lovingly arranging it on her desk or on a stool while lecturing the class on the various means they could use to portray the setting. After the ten-minute lecture, she'd go to her desk and sit down to read an art book while Natsumi and her classmates went to work. Most of her classmates would dive right into their paintings. But Natsumi would toil with herself as she stared down the blank piece of canvas on her easel. One wrong paint-stroke and the purity of the untouched canvas would be ruined. She remembered how hard it was for her just to get started...

When she looked out at the empty, black 'canvas' that surrounded her, Natsumi didn't have to stretch her imagination too far in order to see ominous winged shadows invisibly floating in its midst.

The shadows that half-visible nightmares are made of.

"I'm sick of all this 'great power requires great responsibility' bullshit!" she said breathlessly as Belldandy phased into existence next to her. 


	104. Pt 104: An Eternity's Accord Between Inf...

**Part 104: An Eternity's Accord Between Infinity and Compassion (Draft)**

"There's something _way_ screwed up about all of this!" Skuld exclaimed to the voiding darkness as it continued to consume the distance around her. She should have encountered the 'something that wasn't there' by now. But it _still wasn't there_!!! Steadily employing the faculties of her Goddess senses to their utmost acuity, she journeyed away from herself into the depths of Space and Time, much further than she could even imagine. 

Each moment of her search seemed an eternity as she strived to comprehend the intricacies of the fathomless expanse she was probing with her mind. Even with the profound augmentation of her Divine powers by the Ultimate Force, she could only feel emptinesses heaped upon themselves. In the past, whenever she traveled such great distances, Skuld was accustomed to the sight of galaxies, superstrings, DarkStreams, crystalplexes, Miniverses and other large Multiversal phenomena streaking past her like fireflies lanterning the summer breeze. Yet, she had encountered _no_ stimuli that she could hang a thread of recognition upon.

No trace of the Lord or the two other regents.

Skuld being Skuld, her curiosity became more and more insatiable with each heartbeat of her journey of discovery. 

Being of an investigative bent, Skuld had been captivated early on by the disappearance of the Lord and the two Other Lords. Before they had engaged Isilblius in combat, she and the others had sealed up the Lord, Oni-sama and the Little Reaper Boy in a "StealthSphere" of their own fashioning. The intent was to remove the trio from the Everything, just in case it was destroyed along with Isilblius. Their precautionary safekeeping was well-founded, as the Everything had vanished completely after they defeated Isilblius. But in the desolate wake, their efforts to find the StealthSphere came to naught, because the StealthSphere was missing.

The Everything had been totally obliterated when Isilblius suicided himself.

Initially, Skuld systematically searched the known vicinity where the StealthSphere was supposed to be...only to find a void-enigma of massive proportions. She realized that there was no way that Isilblius could have expanded the Everything. In fact, she found it reasonable to conclude that while he wreaked his profanity on all of Life, the resulting destruction more than likely would have weakened the fabric of the Everything...causing it to diminish in size. Each round of defeat for Isilblius by her sisters and the others had caused the Everything to be rendered more grotesque, more misshapen. Thus, once the Everything was 'gone', the StealthSphere may have been dislocated from its original TimeSpace...

It could be anywhere in all of reality!

So she decided to use her genius to probe the container space of the Everything. Without a doubt, she knew that she was by far the best qualified of the Seven to undertake such a task. While the others were engaged in heated debate about the weighty issue of how to reconstruct the Everything, Skuld closed her eyes and fell into a deep trancing...

During her excursion, Skuld remembered how Belldandy had struggled over her 'senior thesis' project, endeavoring to create a model of just a miniscule portion of Yggdrasil. But in her 120 millennia of existence, Skuld had not advanced far enough in her schooling to be exposed to the higher level theoretical inculcations that truly allowed a Goddess to appreciate the vastness of the Yggdrasilian Multiverse. Her schooling was interrupted when she was assigned to the Earthrealm by Kami-sama. There, she had encountered Cevn, who had interpreted the Enigma Book and boldly declared that there were _two_ Multiverses; that Yggdrasil's 'twin', Vanagdrasil, was a Multiverse unto itself. Her 'world' had instantly doubled. Finally, after being stranded in the Timeless Egg of a Mock-Earthrealm, Skuld herself had been swept up by the Ultimate Force. She had been infused with a knowledge of 'reality' that was incremented by an near-infinity of magnitudes...and yet her mind remained bare of certain insights...

There was no possible explanation as to why this expanse was so unbounded. Even the Ultimate Force didn't seem to work out here...she couldn't even sense her the Soular vibrations of her sisters! Her astonishment at how the immense distance she had traversed had faded all signs of her sisters into insensibility...soon turned to fear. Skuld felt a chill as she realized that she was definitely _lost_! Because there was no 'beacon' for her to mentally tune into, there would be no 'lifeline' linking her to the point where her journey originated. Any lesser being would have panicked; but Skuld calmed herself down by maintaining the awareness that she would eventually divide the non-limit, which would give her a chance to hone in on her sisters.

With no end in sight to her journey, Skuld found herself still directing her sensory consciousness outwards into the unknowable...

A mental flame of thought aimed at a nonexistent void.

* * * * * * * * 

"We gotta do..." Mara started to say.

"We gotta do _what_?" Natsumi interrupted abrasively. "We don't _have_ to do anything! I didn't agree to come here just so I could be told what to do by the likes of you! I seriously doubt that you have any perspective on the problem that Miyuki and I haven't already considered..."

"How dare you assume what I'm thinking!" Mara yelled, her face rued with ire.

Uh oh!" Belldandy thought to herself. She was afraid that the small modicum of civility she had tried to harvest would be blown away by the harsh gales of disagreement. Mara's upbringing as Vanagdrasilian royalty was coming to the fore...she was acting every bit as suzerain as Hild, Urd's Demon Queen 'stepmom'.

Belldandy reflected on her efforts. It had taken her a near-forever just to convince everybody to sit down together for this 'summit' meeting. To accomplish this, she had exercised her Goddess charm and innocence to the fullest; appearing innocuous while she negotiated all the delicate balances.

And now, she felt glum as Mara and Natsumi were on the brink of undoing all her hard work.

"Could you guys try to hold it down, please? I'm trying to listen..." Urd pleaded as Natsumi and Mara eyeballed each other to icicles.

Urd's bizarre statement was enough to momentarily dampen the embers of resentment. Mara and Natsumi looked back and forth between each other and Urd, their faces almost paralyzed with quizzical expressions. Belldandy tried to catch her sister's attention...but Urd had already mentally drifted away.

Skuld was a non-presence, barely more than an immobile floating object; still gripped by some kind of deep introspection. Her little sister's semi-comatose state was a constant source of worry for Belldandy. Meanwhile, Urd remained weighed down by a blanket of confusion...a good portion of any conversation Belldandy attempted to have with her older sister consisted of word-salad conjectures on Urd's part.

Lacking Skuld and Urd's input, there would only be five opinions to be given voice in this 'council' of sorts. Perhaps it was better this way; five opinions would be easier to manage than seven. But without the comforting presence of two of her three sisters, Belldandy felt justifiably insecure. 

"What we _must_ do is crucify our prejudices," Mara said bluntly. "We all want a chunk of the Everything to suit our own particular needs, one that would express our personal conceptions about how reality should be structured. But that would never do; that will never happen! Even with the seven of us, someone's going to be disappointed. So what then? Obviously, we're all struggling...searching for the same answers, asking the same questions. You know, the "how do we know what's best?" type of questions. Those blessed questions have been plaguing me ever since we purged Isilblius from reality! They contend with me constantly, like a pack of dogs that won't go away until you feed them some scraps of meat!"

"Sooo?" Miyuki sighed testily.

"So...they're totally _screwing with me_!" Mara countered, having worked herself into a dudgeon. "Me!!! A Demoness who's used to being in total control of her own destiny and desires! And I can't fuckin' stand it!!! Because of this ridiculous uncertainty, I've become ailed by a terrible derangement. I find myself so confused at times, I'm beginning to question my own morals!"

"You mean Demons _have_ morals?" Miyuki taunted. Mara shot her a baleful glance. 

"And isn't questioning one's morals supposed to be a good thing?" Natsumi also commented derisively.

"Hmmph!!! Very funny, you two!" Mara groused. "I suppose examining one's morals is okay...if you're an Earthrealm mortal. But for Demonesses, it isn't so good, because it isn't exactly..."

Keiichi tentatively raised his hand to indicate that he wanted to speak.

Belldandy thought he was being cute as he waved his hand frantically, his actions suggesting to her those of a schoolchild wanting to be called on by the teacher. But her relationship with him as of late was far from being "cute".

He had been coarsely inconsiderate, abusive, cold-hearted and resentful with her for so long, she didn't even want to think about it. Every instinct in her cried out to give him the cold shoulder...

But she always hoped upon Love.

She smiled briefly at him, encouraging him to speak.

* * * * * * * *

Keiichi noticed that Belldandy was the only one paying any heed to him. 

Over the past several hundred million years, Bell-chan had been so persistent in trying to convince him to attend this summit meeting...that he began to wonder _why_ it was so important to her. What could possibly be driving Bell to come back to him again and again to plead her case? She knew that he would remain rock-solid in his conviction that the Everything should be recreated exactly as it had before. No tweaking, no tampering...no 'improving'. 

But Bell's last visit had yielded a sense of latency; her candor seemed possessed of a far-wise serenity. She was still insistent, but her steadfastness was gentle in manner, lacking the urgency that she had from before.

Once more, in her own special way...Belldandy had held up a mirror for him to look at. 

After she convinced him to attend the 'summit meeting', Keiichi realized that...in contrast to her sweetness...he was fired by uncertainty. Of course, they were _all_ fixed with insecurity by the situation that loomed over them. But Bell-chan was smoothly placid; not exhibiting a single outwardly sign of turmoil. She seemed resolved to handle the wearying circumstances with tranquility...

"Not like me..." Keiichi found himself confronting himself after he had grudgingly agreed to attend the meeting she was hawking. A gnawing fear had daunted him every time he considered the possibility of an Everything 'getting away' from him. If the others had their way, they'd create an Everything where he wouldn't belong...

And then there was his conscience.

Reluctantly, he had to admit that he had been abusive to Belldandy with increasing frequency during her visits. His misuse of her wasn't aggressive in nature; but it was more insidious...when he turned away from her opinions, he was also turning away from _her_.

He has mistreated her, after vowing to himself that he would forever cherish her! 

Keiichi cursed himself, realizing that he had withdrawn from Bell-chan at just the time when she might be needing him the most! To sip the cup of philosophical contention was one thing, but he had been acting like a total jerk to her! Reluctantly, he had to admit that his respect for her had become fugitive. With a dart of insight, he empathized how mortifying his behavior must have seemed to Bell-chan. 

His guilt stood upright against his sense of self-humiliation.

Returning to the present moment in his mind, he felt meekened by how calm she was. Even now, during the stressed out funky little meeting they were having, Bell's Goddess nature afforded her tranquility amidst the harsh forces of dilemma and drama.

But with Belldandy, Keiichi knew that a calm could easily conceal a raging storm...

He noticed her mouthing his name, and realized that it was his turn to speak.

"Isn't it true that we are molded just as much by those kinds of adversities that Mara described...the ones that cause us to question the very cores of our being, the essence of what we know about the truth...as we are molded by all the 'goodness' that surrounds our lives?" Keiichi quickly interjected, not wanting Mara and Natsumi to get into it again.

Belldandy focused her full attention on Keiichi. He had been tight-lipped with her every time she tried to convince him to attend this meeting. His disappointment towards her was thickly palpable, almost too much for her to bear. He was acting like she had _done something wrong_; when in truth, she was only standing up for what she felt was right.

But in the end, she had managed to gain his cooperation. Now that he was here, he was acting completely different than he had when it was just she and him. His angry righteousness seemed subdued somewhat. Belldandy guessed that perhaps this was so because Keiichi knew that there were two other former Earthrealm mortal with him. He was probably aware that Miyuki and Natsumi would be more apt to agree with his views...

Which would make him less defensive, more confident.

Belldandy clenched her slender hands slightly, hoping that he wouldn't attack her views in public.

"I just wish we could all stop fighting!" he offered. Belldandy almost dropped her mouth agape!

"Everything or not, it's not worth it! I'm sick of always having to fight with myself, always feeling backed up against the corner by you guys. It's been going on so long, I'm beginning to forget about what I was fighting for in the first place..." Keiichi admitted.

Belldandy immediately fastened her attention onto Keiichi's words, silently hoping that Keiichi had decided to reverse his aggressive attitudes.

"Bell-chan...can we call a truce?" he asked.

* * * * * * * *

Keiichi couldn't have put in any plainer than he did. In the mansions of his heart, he had begun to feel how much it _hurt_ to keep fighting with his beloved. To see her face crowned with sadness whenever he withdrew from her. To hear the uncertainty in her voice as she talked to him...as if she was worried that one word too many would bear him off into further acrimony towards her. It only made him feel more and more wretched. His contentious behavior towards her had only served to poison his spirit; confining him to the clammy cell of his ego.

He looked to Belldandy, hoping that his words had pleased her. But she only nodded her head curtly towards him, which he understood as a summons to continue...and nothing more.

"Take Bell-chan and I, for example. We've grown together over the years, but our growing love for each other wasn't exactly an automatic process. We've had to toe the line, relying on the faith that we could surmount our disagreements," he started to explain, feeling awkward talking about the love between he and Bell; when of late, all he had afforded her was resentment.

"What's love got to do with any of this?" Mara complained.

"It has a lot...because this is all about getting along with each other, Mara. With Bell-chan and I...love often comes very easy. Fortunately, because we share so much between ourselves, we've learned to accept each other's views, often without even a single question. This is why we're so agreeable about so many things. But this rebuilding the Everything issue...it scares the shit out of me! Because it's not just about she and I. I freely admit that the strength of my opinions arose out of a impenetrable uncertainty! My disagreements with Belldandy kept growing in zeal, despite the fact that I'm used to agreeing with her. I _expected_ her to concur with me; and when she didn't, I became super-frustrated. This is why it's been so hard for me to acquiesce to the possibility that we may have to consider some intensive structural changes to the Everything. This is why I've been fighting with Belldandy all this time. And I'm sorry of it..."

"Obviously, you should be! I'd even go as far as to say that you've been behaving like an absolute asshole to her! It took you _ how_ many millions of years to figure that you've been a prick..." Mara interjected sarcastically.

Keiichi looked at Mara and slowly nodded his head in agreement. He sought out Belldandy with his eyes, and then hung his head for a moment, beseeching her for forgiveness. But she studied him with a cautious regard instead. If she was going to absolve him for being so oppressive towards her in the past, she certainly wasn't being very expressive of it.

"Okay! I'll tell you what I _have_ figured out! If Peorth were here, she'd say 'Tout notre mal vient de nu pouvoir etre seule'. All our ills arise from not being able to be alone. Because once we _are_ alone with our opinions and our Ultimate Force-enhanced powers, we begin to feel that anything else...any other view...is a personal attack. Our sensibilities slip away from us. And when you dish in the substantial element of uncertainty, our sense of isolation encastles us in an immovable wall of belief. But don't these walls we erect around us...only serve to pin us up tightly against our fears? Each time Belldandy questioned my views about how to restore the Everything, I felt even more committed to my own beliefs. So I hardened myself against her...against all of you. But I realize that this might have been wrong of me..."

"_Might have been wrong_?!" Mara interrupted, feigning amazement.

"Mara, go easy on him!" Miyuki urged. "Can't you see that he's admitting he was wrong, in his own way? He's trying to apologize! And you know how difficult it is for a man to step out of his stubbornness and beg pardon..."

"Geez, Miyuki! And you too, Mara! You don't have to be so blunt!" Natsumi confronted the two other women, noticing the look of apologetic embarrassment on Keiichi's face.

"Okay...I promise! No uncool comments for the next couple of paragraphs," Mara vouched.

Keiichi sighed with relief and continued.

"All right! Not 'might have'...but 'is'! _Is_ the wrong way! There! Are you satisfied now?" he corrected himself, bringing knowing smiles to all present.

"Keiichi...do you really think anything's changed?" Belldandy asked. Keiichi looked at her, wondering if she meant "changed between us" or "changed in the overall situation." 

"Yes, I do. In our case, all our problems are the result of our fear of being _together_!" Keiichi emphasized, his amends embarrassed by Miyuki's comments. "And my fears have shifted off pole as well. Now, what scares me the most is that if we don't start agreeing on some things, we're going to wind up so isolative in nature, we could easily reach the point where we won't ever speak to each other again. Or even worse...we'll be at each other's throats!"

A snuff of silence descended on the group as Keiichi's sobering words sank in.

"I think that it's totally _stupid_ for us to be so self-absorbed in what we feel is right! We've gotten so dogmatic in our own opinions, we actually seem to prefer them over the strength that we share. That's so idiotic! Remember...it took _all_ of us to defeat Isilblius! It's going to take all of us to rebuild the Everything!" Miyuki stated emphatically.

"Well, I can live with that. It does seem kinda foolish..." Mara noted with a sighing self-reproof. Keiichi was surprised that the contentious Demoness hadn't given Miyuki more grief...instead, Mara seemed almost penitent.

"And another thing. I'm probably going out on a limb here, but recently, I've been getting this enigmatic feeling..." Keiichi added.

"Another voice in the head?" Miyuki asked, dismayed. 

"Mn hmm!" Keiichi affirmed with a nod. 

"Is _everybody _suffering from hallucinations?" Natsumi wondered aloud, worried about Keiichi's disclosure.

"But it's not a hallucination. And it wasn't quite like a voice; rather, it was an endeavoring _feeling_ that seemed to seize me at times. Anyway, I'm beginning to look at all of this quite differently than before. I sense that this is a puzzle...and _we're_ the pieces."

"Huh?!" several voices exclaimed.

Mara bit her tongue before she could declaim him with a "Keiichi, that's retarded!"

"Individually, we lack the means to create the Everything, just like unlinked pieces of a jigsaw puzzle cannot form a picture or an object. We're conflicted from within and from without; fooling ourselves into thinking we know what to do...when we really don't! If we're too willful, we'll only multiply our confusion amongst ourselves. But together, we _can_ solve the puzzle! But it's like Miyuki said: it'll take all of us to to do what we have to do! There's a harmony between us...one that I suspect will allow us to 'piece together' the puzzle. To form the picture as is should be formed, whatever that should be. Which in this case, the 'picture' would be the Everything, of course!"

Mara, Natsumi and Miyuki regarded Keiichi with a speculative wariness, while Belldandy reflected cautiously on his words.

Suddenly, Belldandy's face brightened...

"Keiichi!" she shouted gaily, feeling a huge burst of love for him founting in her breast. She now knew for certain that he had turned away from his own convictions about the Everything! Yet, she could see that he was straining, trying to grasp at some thought or feeling just beyond his reach; possibly something more profound than any of them had considered.

Wanting to help him along, she floated behind him and hugged herself to his back, kissing him on the neck...

Oh, it felt so good to feel his warmth against her body!

"Hoy! Oi! Don't you two ever quit with the lovey-dovey mushy-mushy stuff?" Mara teased, despite the fact that she was very proud of her younger sister. Belldandy had held out against impulsively forgiving Keiichi just because he had asked for it. She reckoned that perhaps there was hope for Belldandy after all... 

Suddenly Urd 'stood up' from where she was floating cross-legged, and then hovered towards the group.

"What if the sum of who we are is stronger than the sum of who we aren't? Separately, there is no we...thus, it's a 'we aren't' situation. But together, don't we exist?" Urd offered unexpectedly.

All of them turned to look at Urd, not knowing how to react to her sudden participation in the debate. Belldandy was grateful that her older sister was at least attempting to follow the decision-making process. But Urd's statement was a quiddity in the extreme; she could make no sense of it. Even more curious to her was the total lack of mystification on her older sister's face. Belldandy found herself almost staring at Urd, who was looking obliviously content with what she had just said.

To her eyes, it seemed that Urd was almost drunk on herself.

* * * * * * * *

"The only way we're going to pull this off is if we remove the mental shields and go all out. Perhaps the group-kokoro that would emerge would be grounded enough to keep us from damaging the Everything by rebuilding it incorrectly..."

"You're talking as if rebuilding the Everything is like building a dollhouse! It's much more than a dollhouse, Miyuki! As for me, I _still_ don't know if it's a good decision to remove the mental shields. I'm really worried that removing the shields might screw up our chances of reconstituting the Everything. In the first place, we voluntarily indwelled them in ourselves because of the constant sharing of thoughts, feelings, memories, and more. In short, we were driving each other nuts by being _too_ aware of each other. Consequently, if we decide to remove the shields, what assurance do we have that we'll remain sane? We could restore the Everything...or just as easily cripple ourselves in the process! And if _we're_ disabled, then who's going to recreate the Everything? It's a huge, unwieldy...unmerited risk!" Natsumi argued, almost sounding indignant.

"Perhaps it isn't a risk at all," Belldandy noted, her eyes smiling. 

"Love is the truest emblem of the infinite. If we call all agree that Love is the strongest factor in our lives...that it is the essence of what drives us, that it blossoms from our kokoro and pervades all of our thoughts, feelings and actions...then perhaps we may have a 'safety valve' of sorts that would allow up to release the boundaries between us," she elucidated.

"Then why didn't it work before? If your 'safety value' would have been in effect before, we wouldn't have needed the shields in the first place, would've we? We decided to use them because we needed to restrain ourselves. Now you're suggesting that if we remove the restraints, we'll still have enough self-discipline between us to keep us from overwhelming each other?" Miyuki contended. 

"Perhaps. But Yggdrasil and Vanagdrasil," Belldandy continued, "were both built on restraint. Neither Realm is ruled by chaos, anarchy or nihilism of any sort. The Ultimate Force seems to have also evolved itself along these lines of restraint, so that it can express Rules that govern both Realms. Even Death's Mid-Light Realm has its own intuitive, mysterious order. The Little Reaper Boy couldn't do what he does if he were incapable of feeling love, even if the only source of joy for him is in the love he has for his assigned role in the schema of things. So it is _not_ redeemable that we should eliminate Death. If we create all life to be immortal, we'll be depriving the Everything of one aspect of Love. And I would rather give up Life than Love!" she said gravely.

Everyone in the circle agreed, because Belldandy has spoken the truth. Nothing less, nothing more. Belldandy couldn't help but notice Miyuki's sinking spirits as she continued...

"In addition, I believe that if we eliminate the barriers between us, the goodwill that we felt for each other when we defeated Isilblius will lend unity to us...preventing us from losing ourselves in the task of recreating the Everything," she stated. It was obvious, but Belldandy's words weren't offered in the form of conjecture. Belldandy had spoken in a voice that was firmly gospel.

"Belldandy...that's..uh..quite interesting. But isn't that a bit of an intuitive leap?" Mara observed softly in a questioning voice.

* * * * * * * *

Miyuki felt saddened...almost depressed...by the realization that she would never have an immortal lifetime to share with Ken, her fiancé. Belldandy had been right. Death would continue to extend His rule over their lives. The hand of mortality would not be stayed, it would strike her. She had held onto a hope that she could live a never-ending love with Kenny...a hope that had filled her thoughts for almost 40 billion years...but it was a hope that had escaped in an instant, as fleetingly as a daffodil blowing in the breeze.

In the end, it would be the same as before. Either she or he would draw one precious breath too many...and the other one would be left behind. No more to hear the voice who would speak in the sweetest key; no more to gaze upon the form that was clothed in life's greatest delight.

So reposed in mourning was she, Miyuki failed to notice that she wasn't alone.

Unseen, Belldandy had phased into existence next to her. Wiping a tear from her eyes, Miyuki looked up at the hazel-haired woman who was formerly a Goddess. Belldandy was regarding her with a tender solicitude, almost the same kind of affectionate compassion that a mother would offer her daughter.

"Miyuki, I know the troubles that weigh despair on your heart...the sadness and defeat you feel about having to live out your years as a mortal...as well as the lost hopes of living for a span of forevers with he whose Soul is mated to yours," she said in a soft, calm voice, a succoring warmth in her azure eyes.

Miyuki didn't want to embarrass herself by crying, but she felt a tear tracing down towards her chin. Once it dripped off her chin, her tear would go on an endless journey through the void...unlike her life, which would only blossom for a brief season...

"If we are somehow restored to the lives we formerly led, the lives we had back on the Earthrealm...then I too will be marrying a mortal man. But it will be very different for me than it is for you. Keiichi will only live a span of 70 to 90 years, maybe more if he's lucky. My life will stretch onward, far beyond the present age. I will outlive the love of my life by hundreds of millennia. My autumn and winter years would remain half a million years in the future after Keiichi's passing. Islands will form and fall, species will live and die, civilizations will span and decrease...and the only refuge I will have is in my memories of the prosperity of the love he and I shared. I name this truth with you, Miyuki, because what we have to do isn't going to be easy for any of us. It isn't just you mortals who will be making sacrifices. For me as well, there won't be a place where no joy dies until love has gotten more."

"If you..snff..knew this, then why did you fall in love with him?" Miyuki asked.

"Love is the deepest of all the mysteries. But even for all its joyful bliss, Love will always harbor a bitter pall," Belldandy answered. "And I wouldn't have it any other way."

Miyuki looked at Belldandy, deeply moved by the tragic words she had just admitted. A speech deeper than tragedy; and yet Belldandy's words had kindled the same melancholy that resided in her heart. The sabled mortality of Love, slain upon the passing years. 

She realized with a start that, despite being assigned equal divisions of power and intelligence by the Ultimate Force...Belldandy was clearly far beyond her in wisdom. She wasn't speaking to her as one of the Seven, she had been addressing her as a _Goddess_. Compassionate, patient, courageous and loving. There was always something...profound...in how Belldandy spoke; in her elegance, in the rich beauty of her face, in the near-perfection of her manners. A marked distinction that set her apart from everyone Miyuki had ever met...

Miyuki realized that it was the strength of Belldandy's ability to live in acceptance of what was. 

She shuddered with wonderment as she reflected on Belldandy's dignity of character.

"Miyuki...each of us needs someone to watch over us from time to time," Belldandy said slowly. "I share a heart-bond with you, because we both love so deeply. I guess this means that I'm the one who's going to watch over you from now on..."

Miyuki started sobbing again, not only from a sense of loss but from a sense of gain. And when Belldandy floated over to comfort her with a hug, she allowed herself to cry her doubts out on Bell's shoulder.

* * * * * * * *

The plan was to rebuild the Everything exactly as it was. Belldandy, Urd and Skuld would commingle their Norn capabilities and then focus them through Mara to 'rechronorate' the TimeWeb..."rechronorate" being the term they coined to describe the process of restoring the chronological complex of matrices in the TimeWeb. In the entire history of the Gods and Demons, nobody had 'rechronorated' anything before. Since Mara was the essence of Time itself, Belldandy speculated that the process would be similar to passing varicolored lights through a prism to yield a full refractory spectrum...but she wasn't absolutely certain of _what_ would happen after that. She _was_ certain that jump-starting Time was possible, because they already possessed an intuitive glimpse into how the process would unfold.

Once they were finished with rechronorating the TimeWeb, they would turn their attention to regenerating the 'spatial' aspect of the Everything. But there was no exact science or methodology to describe this next task. It still remained an enigma. The only movement the group had made towards accomplishing the physical reconstruction of the Everything was to come to 'one mind' about what type of Everything should be the result of their efforts. The consensus...with the exception of Skuld, who remained fast into some kind of trance...was to rebuild the Everything just as Cevn had done before. It would be guesswork to try and extrapolate what the Everything had been like before Cevn had rebuilt it. Thus, they had to rely on faith that Cevn had repaired the Everything while keeping fidelity to its 'plan'. The group's only certainty was that Keiichi, Miyuki and Natsumi would need to 'unlock' the mental shields that separated their minds, so that they could achieve the unity that was necessary. But beyond that, it was anybody's guess about what would happen next.

However, none of this would be possible without Skuld. They would have to wait until Skuld returned from her mysterious hibernal state before they could move forward. To their immense frustration, all efforts to 'awaken' Skuld had failed so far. Skuld was like the proverbial Sleeping Beauty; she would only wake up when the time was due.

There was no Prince Charming to steal a kiss from her lips to awaken her. And even if there was, Skuld would probably do anything to avoid being kissed on the lips.

Regardless of Skuld's status, they were grateful that they at least had a sense of how the Everything would be created.

It would be a restoration, rather than a revision...

* * * * * * * *

Keiichi savored the invisible moments of relaxation that he enjoyed with Belldandy. Still basking in the afterglow of her generous forgiveness, he had wanted to create a small replica of a gentle rolling meadow with a single shade tree on a hillside, so that he and Bell-chan could repose in an Arcadian setting. He knew how much Belldandy missed the adoring birds that used to cheerfully warble around her in airborne parades every morning. But he thought better of it; he was worried that creating any replica of a _part_ of the Everything might jeopardize their efforts. It would be akin to scribbling all over a blank sheet of paper before writing on it...

So he had to content himself with floating on his back, his head holding sway in Bell's lap. She was slowly stroking the bangs of his hair while he gazed lovingly at her face...

"Hey you guys! I'm back! And guess what?! We _ can't_ rebuild the Everything as it was! While you've been arguing among yourselves..."

Keiichi's genteel scene of bliss shattered.

"We haven't been arguing! We've been _debating_!" Keiichi argued with snappy immediacy. The words had hardly burst through the dam of his mouth when he realized that he didn't recognize the voice. He looked up, and noticed the wide-eyed joy on his fiancée's face.

"...and it's _way_ more complex and immense..." the voice continued.

Bell-chan's excited reaction was all he needed to allow him to discern whose voice it was. A little breathless and hoarse, but it was recognizable. He broke into a grin as Belldandy leaned low and kissed him on the nose before floating off...

* * * * * * * *

"Skuld!" Belldandy and Mara chimed in unison.

All this time, she had been floating nearby, silent and immobile for what seemed like an eternity. And then, just like that...she was awake and alert.

And naturally, post-haste...she had started talking.

In an instant, Belldandy and Mara floated over and embraced their little sister, interrupting her in mid-sentence. Belldandy smiled the smile of one whose worries had just been winged away like palm branches in dove's beaks. Enlivened, Mara playfully jostled Skuld's head, sending shimmers of perfectly ravenesque hair all over her face. Skuld blew the hair off her nose and looked at the assemblage with a girlish expression...

"What's wrong with Big Sister Urd?" Skuld asked in a frantic voice, noticing that Urd hadn't joined in the rush to greet her. She instantly tried to summon an awareness of their sister via her thoughts, trying to touch her mind to Urd's...and encountered a hurl of confusion.

It was as if Urd was in her own world.

"Urd's been acting really spacey since we first arrived here. But while you were 'away', she's been steadily getting worse. I sense only discord in her mind," Belldandy answered matter-of-factly.

"Er, Skuld...we've arrived at some solutions while you were away. We have a pretty good idea of what we need to do," Keiichi noted, trying to bring forth some good tidings.

"Cool! Well anyway, you'll have to rethink 'em! I've taken a trip that you won't believe!" Skuld started to say.

"'Taken a trip?!' That's an epic an understatement, Skuld! Normally, when persons go off on a trip, they tell their loved ones where they're going and when they'll be back. Especially _when they'll be back_!" Belldandy said in a stern voice.

Skuld felt all the blood rush out of her cheeks...

"But you didn't even give us the courtesy of any notice at all! We've been really worried about you this whole time! You didn't even bother yourself to tell us what you were doing...you just drifted into a deep meditative state. I couldn't reach you at all!" Belldandy continued, still severe despite her relief that Skuld had returned. 

"That because I was too far out..." Skuld started to explain.

"You've always been 'too far out'! So where have you been, kiddo?" Mara asked, slapping Skuld on the shoulder a little _too_ hard, obviously messaging her displeasure.

"Ooooph!" Skuld gasped at the near-punch. Mara's friendly 'pat' nearly knocked Skuld in a circle.

"That's for both of us, _Little_ Sister!" Mara said with a sibling-by-rights sneer, side-glancing at Belldandy. "Now that summary punishment has been exacted for errant little sisters whose brattiness prevents them from having respect for their elder sisters, it would behoove you to explain yourself._ **WHERE IN THE HELL HAVE YOU BEEN, SKULD!!!**_"

Watching Skuld cringe, Belldandy was amused that the fluid shift in Mara from loving older sister who was thankful to have Skuld back...to stern disciplinarian older sister who was angry with her little sister's impertinence. While she would stop short of disciplining Skuld with a punch to the shoulder, Mara would not. Belldandy relied on words and wit to rebuke her sisters. But Mara had a different style, an 'enforcer' style of sisterly watchkeeping. She sighed privately, relieved that she didn't have a Demoness for an older sister while _she_ was growing up...

"Big Sister" Urd was bad enough...

After the bruising blow to the shoulder, Skuld's enthusiasm had faltered significantly. She had wanted to make a dramatic entrance, seize the moment, and then blow them away with her discovery. Instead, Mara had effectively pulled the wind from her sails.

"When we couldn't find the StealthSphere," Skuld started to explain, her voice reserved and timid in the wake of Mara's rather forceful admonition, "I decided to start off on my own to try and locate the Lord and the other Two. I really tried hard to find them! But they weren't where we left 'em. Of course, all of you know this already. But what you don't know is where I went after I couldn't find them."

"Do tell," Mara said smartly.

"I decided that it would be worthwhile if I sought after the non-limit of the Everything. So I've been looking for it all this time..."

Skuld smiled sweetly, savoring how rapidly Mara's deignty expression was collapsing into abject disbelief as the realization quickly sank in. Skuld thought it served her right for impulsively assuming the mantle of 'older sister' and castigating her before she had been given the chance to explain her absence.

An absence that had resulted in a revelation that completely imploded the cosmic eggshell...

"All this time, Skuld?!" Belldandy interjected, clearly amazed. "Did you know that you've been asleep for 34.7 _billion_ years? And all this time...you've been searching for the non-limit?!"

Recovering somewhat from her wheeling stun of shock, Mara narrowed her eyes with a decided skepticism, scrutinizing Skuld closely for any flinch of suspicion. Trying to sound nonplussed, she asked Skuld the obvious question.

"Okay...let me get this right. You're claiming that you were mentally trying to find the non-limit of the space that contains the Everything...during the entire time you were away?"

"Well, sorta!" Skuld answered smugly, still relishing the jaw-drop looks of amazement lingering on her sister's faces. "And I couldn't find it! At least right away. So I keep searching _beyond_ infinity and all that crap. You wanna know what I found?"

Belldandy and Mara both nodded their heads.

"When I reached the 'something that isn't there', it was way, way, _way_ further out than I expected!" Skuld answered, talking as much with excited sweeps of her hands as with her voice.

"How much further out?" Belldandy asked warily.

"This better not be one of your tricks, Skuld!" Urd warned. 

Belldandy raised an eyebrow at this. Urd had been silent during the whole time, not even acknowledging Skuld's return with as much as a sigh of relief. Now, she was acting like herself again; dubious in the face of Skuld's claim.

"Let's just say that I found it a few minutes ago."

"**_WH..WHAT!!!_**" three voices rushed as one.

Belldandy felt her knees turn rubbery as she tried to grasp the glossy implications of what Skuld had just stated. Overwhelmed, she quickly glanced over at Urd and Mara; noticing that both seemed as equally discomfited as she was. Apparently, Urd had 'heard' what Skuld had just said...and it seemed to register a telltale cognizance in her sister's mind.

Shocking news tends to do that.

Belldandy surmised...and hoped...that Skuld's announcement might have jolted Urd back into reality.

"After I couldn't find the Lords, I decided to extend my senses outwards in a _straight_ line, just to get an idea of how big the Everything had been. I knew that Isilblius didn't expand the Everything when he usurped it...in fact, I found it reasonable to believe that his sinister ruination had probably caused it to collapse somewhat. So when we defeated him, and 'Boom!', no more Everything...I assumed that the StealthSphere that we put the three Lords in had somehow been disturbed from its original position when Isilblius met his demise. Sorta like a glass ball being picked off the beach by a tiding wave," Skuld explained.

"Ahhh...I think I understand now. You were trying to determine the radius of the 'space' that formally contained the Everything, so that you could then attempt to mathematically resolve the relative position of the 'StealthSphere'...and find Oni-sama and the other two?" Belldandy asked.

"Yep! In other words, I traversed the distance meta-asymptoticially. How else can one approach the infinite? Anyway, I started getting majorly freaked out when I kept voyaging out, deeper and deeper into the unknown...and I didn't encounter the non-limit!"

Skuld recognized that Keiichi and the two former Earthrealm women didn't react as dramatically as her sisters did, so she concluded that they may need a short reminder course concerning the intersects of transfinity and singularity and such. Shifting into lecture mode, she continued...

"As you know, the Everything has a defined transfinite presence; which means that it's both infinite and finite. The non-limit serves as the 'shell' of the Everything...what we Gods call a 'container space'. In theory, it functions like a loop. The easiest way to explain it is to say that the Everything is contained by the _Everything_. There's no meniscus or 'wall' to speak of. The Everything doesn't have any discrete limitation in terms of Time, Space, and Metanative dimensionalities. Since the Everything consists of _only_ Yggdrasil, Vanagdrasil and the Mid-Light Realm, the same principles apply to those three places as well...with the exception of the fact that they interpenetrate or 'blend into' each other. The reality is, when you reach the 'limit' of Yggdrasil, you find yourself _ back_ in Yggdrasil. It's the same with the Everything. Thus, there is nothing 'beyond' Yggdrasil or the Everything...but the Everything. The Everything is bounded by itself. So once I reached the non-limit, I would know it by the fact that I would be displaced to the 'other side' of the Everything. But what really spun me out was this: when I reached the non-limit, I ended up _here_!" she noted for the benefit of the three former mortals in the group.

"I discovered the container space for the Everything is so large, 1554 Yggdrasils could fit inside of it."

"**_WHAT!!! _NO WAY!!!**" Belldandy, Urd and Mara exclaimed.

"Yes way. 777 Yggdrasils and 777 Vanagdrasils. It's _immense_! It took me _billions_ of years just to reach the non-limit! And it seems to have been planned that way," Skuld added.

"We've been arguing for _billions of years_?!" Miyuki noted, astonished and a little ashamed. Skuld's eyes widened with triumphant mirth. They had been engaged in heated arguments when she left on her little journey of discovery, so obviously they had continued to chop logic for the duration of her absence...probably right up to the moment she returned.

"_Bii-da!_" Skuld taunted dramatically, sticking her tongue out to sass Keiichi.

"No...not bii-da, Skuld. _Cevn_! If my suspicions bear any truth...it was Cevn who must have done this. Somehow, he expanded the Everything," Belldandy said resolutely.

"Belldandy, he couldn't have. He's _dead_!" Mara said, trying to be practical.

"Who's Cevn?" Urd asked.

"If you ask that one more time, Urd...I'm gonna pelt you in the head with a hail of galaxy sized objects. Cevn's you _boyfriend_, Dark Blessit! Before we were brought here, you lived on the Earthrealm with the rest of us. You had a boyfriend there...a boyfriend whose memories have somehow been flushed from your mind. Now get with the program, sister!" Mara shouted.

"_Whatever_!" Urd replied bitchily.

Mara formed a moue with her mouth, surprised at her twin sister's unexpected cap-blast of a remark. The sharp retort didn't correspond at all with Urd's longstanding airheadedness. Urd's thoughts had been almost imbecile for a serious stretch of time, especially after they defeated Isilblius. In fact, to Mara, Urd's presence of mind had steadily decayed since then. But now, it seemed that her twin sis's irreverent tongue had returned.

Mara was almost glad of it.

"So you think this was Cevn's doing?" Skuld asked, mystified.

"Very much so. I have...a feeling...that he restructured the Everything in some way," Belldandy noted in an even voice.

"And I almost feel...like I can hear his voice in my mind."

* * * * * * * *

There was no turning aside now. Yet how could one turn aside from the path they're on when they aren't even aware that they are on a path?

Miyuki was struggling with a little spectre called 'trust'.

According to Skuld, the Everything was already being altered, _had_ already been altered...without their involvement. And Keiichi and Belldandy both claimed that there was a 'master plan' to reconstruct the Everything. A plan that was somehow resident _inside_ of the Seven of them...but so tacitly concealed, none of them would even be able to recognize it. Finally, she was almost paranoid about the possibility that the 'group-kokoro' that would arise within the blend of their consciousness's...might betray them.

She desperately wanted to feel unsullied by doubt.

Natsumi, as usual, brought Miyuki back to reality. Their days on patrol in the Bokuto precinct seemed so removed in the distant past, and yet so _present_ at the same time. After an imperishable span of lifetimes, she still thought of Natsumi as her partner...and her best friend. 

Each of the others could say "trust the process, girl!"...and she'd half-heartedly believe their words. But when Natsumi called upon her to be more trusting, Miyuki knew that it was the truth. Natsumi's confidences often seemed to sink right down into the marrow of her Soul.

A couple million reminders was all it took for her partner to restore Miyuki's confidence and resolve.

Miyuki almost felt embarrassed at these lapses of faith. She wanted to be like Belldandy, who was embracing their decision with optimistic enthusiasm. Nothing had really changed on the outside...it was still the same empty expanse of nothingness every time she looked out into space...but on the inside of her troubled heart, emotions and thoughts were always buffeting her. To her surprise, Miyuki found that she had never experienced any feelings of boredom here. And as if to demonstrate the point, a voice punched through her reverie...

"Don't you guys see? It's not about us...our needs, our fears, our abilities! There once was a whole _Everything_ in this place! Something deep inside of me, a voice of concern...or perhaps a voice of wisdom, is telling me that our..." Urd suddenly blurted out.

Urd's sudden outburst had quickened everyone's attention, causing the six others to regard her with askance expressions.

Miyuki thought that Urd's bubble had finally burst. Either she was completely mad...or Urd was mad with the kind of burning awareness one experiences when they are overwrought; the 'insanity' that is caused by the discovery of a profound truth.

* * * * * * * *

Urd's hysterical fervor had taken everyone by surprise. It was apparent to Belldandy that an ill-guided light had caused something to snap in her sister's mind. It was true that shortly after Skuld returned, Urd's 'aloofness' had seemed to dissolve. Her reason even appeared to be returning to full faculty. Urd could actually hold a conversation without digressing into _too many_ nonsensical flights of fantasy. She was even focused enough to engage Mara with a witty snap. The 'gone-away' look in Urd's eyes were gone, replaced by a purposeful mien. Unexpectedly, Urd's nonchalance had been transformed into a vigorous fixation on the condition of the Everything.

In this case, _too_ vigorous...

Urd the Space Cadet had become Urd the Mystic.

Belldandy regarded her older sister, whose emerald eyes gleamed with the lure of the fanatic...

* * * * * * * *

"All of this around us," Urd shouted, sweeping her hand through the vacuum with airy passion, "is bestowed with _holiness_! I've seen many seasons of life, I have harbored a longer shore of Time than any of you...thus, I am one who sees the Past much more clearly. The Life that once permeated the Everything was sacred. Every instance of it was precious! This foul emptiness that surrounds us...is but a cloak, a falseness that hides away the jewel of Life that is shining fair and sacred all around us! We need to honor the Souls whose expressions of Life are lost to the ages, the Souls who have been erased from the slate of reality because of one being's selfishness. Regarded of woe, chary of hope, fixed by confusion we are...yet, we are the appointed ones! We are the ones whose sublimity will visit Life on this desolation!"

"Urd...what in the name of the Dark Lord are you talking about?!" Mara asked.

Urd seemed so caught up in the rhapsody of her own design, she didn't even react to Mara's question. She didn't even react to _ any_ of them!

"Yet, we cannot pass through the gates of transcendence unless we begin to realize the spirit of courage and compassion chambered within our own Souls! We must nurture it, refuse it nothing, challenge it steadfastly, illuminate it with every corner of our beings...because it is the ever-lamp that will ignite the Everything. This spirit...it is much the same as the Love that we all weave into our essences. But it is far more as well! It beautifies both light and dark; it is resplendid and provident in design. A glory that witnesses as heart, mystery and kokoro all rolled up into one. We need but kiss the air...and it will kiss all of creation!"

Skuld glanced at each of the others worriedly. Big Sister Urd wasn't making any sense at all! How could someone kiss the air when they were in the midst of a nothingness so profound, there wasn't even a vacuum?

"Somebody...please say something to her! She's scaring me!" Skuld pleaded in a whisper, looking at Belldandy. Belldandy sighed and nodded to her, assuring her that she would take the initiative.

"Urd? Did you hear a voice, possibly words that were shown to your mind?" Belldandy asked tentatively. If it _was_ a voice, then perhaps Urd would be okay. Each of them had heard a mysterious voice over the last several hundred million years. But if it wasn't a voice, then Urd was clearly even more mentally unstable.

"Yes. Yes, that's what happened!" Urd exclaimed, as if recognizing the truth for the first time. "I've been hearing them all the time; a transient shower of ideas and emotions that kept falling harshly on the wound of my Soul. Harshly at first...but later, softly and gently."

"Please Urd, go on," Belldandy encouraged, even though her sister wasn't making any sense.

"Ha haha ha!" Urd giggled. "In the beginning, the voices built upon themselves, languaging me straightaway into a riveting confusion. I just wanted to shut them out, to pry out what was left of my ego and hide away. You must understand...they were a plurality of intrusive thoughtforms in my mind; pervasive to the point where they were crowding out my own thoughts! Too many passengers on the Shinkansen platform! Too many stupid sitcoms on the TV! This is why I must have seemed so 'crazy' to you guys! Because I _was_ crazy for a while!"

The prospect of Urd so openly admitting that she was crazy made Mara feel edgy. Urd was a class act...but getting her sister to volunteer any admissions of fault was nigh impossible. All too often, she had witnessed Urd being badgered by her two younger sisters because she just wouldn't let go of her stubbornness. Now, she was being honest.

It just didn't feel right.

"All throughout, I was fighting them! I was sparked with terror; scared to let them in because I sensed that these 'ideas' were _ probing_ me. It seemed like they were trying to drive themselves into my consciousness. Clearly, they were coming from something outside of myself. Something _else_! _Someone_ else! And because of this, I was almost paralyzed by the suspicion that they might belong to Isilblius. Since there's only the seven of us and our Angels..."

"Angels?" Miyuki asked.

"_Seven_?" Skuld observed, dumbfounded.

"Uh..Bell-chan, could they..." Keiichi asked, nodding his head towards Miyuki and Natsumi, "...be like me?"

Belldandy shrugged her shoulders and softly patted Keiichi on the back, trying to hint to him that she was more concerned with Urd's fury of explanations. Besides, Urd had said "Angels"...not "seven Angels".

Or had she?

"...so because of this, then there couldn't be anyone else who could be the source of the voices. But there _was_; I could hear the voices clearly in my mind. So who else could it be? And after all these eons of feeling like I was gripped in a constant psychological meltdown, I came to a place where I sensed that I could_ trust_ the 'ideas' floating around in my head. This awareness was triggered when Skuld came back and started talking about how the container space for the Everything had been expanded. At that point, I realized that the voices weren't lying to me. And because they weren't lying to me, perhaps they wouldn't hurt me. They had already told me that the Everything was much larger than before! So I let my guard down, just a little, in an attempt to welcome them. They weren't going to go away anyway, so I thought I might as well start trusting them, start listening to them. Once I stopped struggling with the voices, I felt...massaged...by their presence in my mind. From then on, I was absolutely certain that the voices were _good_. Just like Skuld was journeying outwards to find the non-limit of the Everything, I was journeying _inwards_ to go past the limits of my insecurities and fears. Early on, it was a bit more than I could handle. But the voices were patient with me, because they wanted affiance. I even felt odd stirrings in my heart...I sensed for a moment that they _loved_ me in some say."

"Urd..." Belldandy said softly to herself, a vicarious thrill passing through her being. Everyone that loved her was _here_; but Urd had openly admitted that she felt an additional sense of love from another source. Belldandy briefly hoped that her sister's memories of Cevn may have somehow reached her...and perhaps had righted her to sanity.

"What did the voices say to you then, Big Sister?" Skuld ventured.

"The voices...are like an almanac of observations, feelings and intuitions. They told me that it was vital that we recreate the Everything. They were quite insistent about this! They said that we cannot turn away from what we've been tasked to do. They also informed me that it is imperative that we should totally give ourselves to trust and Love. I was assured by them that the Everything was going to be much better than it ever was. I couldn't fully comprehend the explanation they offered, but I heard them mention that the Everything _won't_ be the same as before, because it was sacred from the very beginning. It was nearly destroyed once by Isilblius, but someone managed to defeat him...and later, that person carefully recreated it over _trillions_ of years, restoring it to its glory. I only wish I could have met such a person..." Urd explained.

Belldandy felt her heart pierced by sorrow. Urd was obviously talking about Cevn's encounter with Isilblius...and yet she didn't recognize _whose_ actions she was describing. Didn't remember that she _ loved_ the person she was describing.

"Made anew, the Everything was _still_ sacred. And in the Future...it will be even more holy. The Everything that will be shaped by our hearts and spirits will be magnificent..." Urd declared.

Belldandy felt breathless in the wake of Urd's pronouncement. She sensed an _energy _alongside Urd's declaration, weaving in out of the fabric of the words, crafting them with ostentation. 

"The voices told me that when we invoke the Everything, it will expand upon itself. This will be necessary, so that the Everything can become something it wasn't before. In terms of TimeSpace, the Everything will manifest at a exponential plane of existence that can barely be comprehended. The container space will become something like 777 to the 7777th power in size," Urd noted, almost as an afterthought.

Everybody in the circle that had formed around Urd gasped with incredulity.

"That's completely..._humongous_! I..I can't even begin to calculate...oh wowwwwww!" Skuld said, almost feeling woozy as her mind tried to wrap itself around the concept. She had shed her earlier disbelief; somehow Urd's description of her voices seemed to ring true.

It was real!

Skuld felt transported to a near ecstasy as Urd smiled an assuring smile towards her, affirming her own belief in the voices she had encountered in her mind. She realized that the expanded non-limit of the Everything that she had searched out was infinitesimal by comparison. Perhaps the present container space was a cradle for a _new_ type of Everything...

"There's something called the Multiplicity that will become the center of a flower..." Urd noted, continuing her discourse.

Belldandy faintly remembered the Multiplicity; this was the term Cevn used to describe the Mid-Light. He had mentioned something about transforming the Instrumentality into the Multiplicity...but she hadn't fully comprehended the significance of it at the time.

"I want to know what she meant by 'Angels"!" Miyuki interjected. Belldandy waved her off politely, nodding at Urd to continue.

"A flower?" Mara interjected warily. Urd had just suggested that the Everything would transcendentally _huge_...and now she had shifted her attention to discuss flowers! Could Urd be hallucinating?

"Don't worry, Mara. It'll have thorns as well as petals," Urd assured her.

Mara was pondering the obscure meaning of Urd's assurance when Urd suddenly faltered into a near-faint. Urd clutched her arms around her breast and curled up slightly, slowly spinning in mid-space like a semi-conscious astronaut in zero-G. Reacting swiftly, Keiichi floated over and caught Urd up in his arms and cradled her.

It dawned on Skuld that Urd had exerted a huge amount of Metanative energy during her explanation. Which was strange...because she hadn't _done_ anything with the energy. Urd looked at her sleepily and assured Skuld that she was all right.

Keiichi floated Urd over to Belldandy and Mara...and Urd promptly fell to sleep between her two sisters.

Belldandy was thankful that this wasn't a total crisis; Urd seemed to be sleeping like a baby, a slight smile curving her lips. But while Urd slept, everyone else fought with a syndrome called "too much information".

Someone would have to give in to their curiosity sooner or later.

"That's it! I want to know about these Angels...**_NOW _ **!!!" Natsumi insisted, punctuating the silence.

* * * * * * * *

Mysteriously, Bell-chan just happened to have two Angel Eggs in the pocket of her Goddess outfit...

Shortly after Urd's little spiel about the supposed 'Seven Angels', Keiichi and Belldandy had gone away for a while, taking a much-needed break from all the heavy decision-making...and the group. Everybody had assumed that Urd's reference to Angels meant that Natsumi and Miyuki had Angels of their own. Of course, Belldandy took it upon herself to discuss the very practical aspects of Angels and Goddesses, noting that Angels were fledged from Angel Eggs, which were in short supply as of late...

All alone with no one to bother them, Keiichi and Belldandy had decided to cuddle together and take a nap.

Shortly after waking up and whispering poems of kisses to each other's lips, two silver oval-shaped pearls fell out of Bell's blouse when she rolled over to rest her head on his chest. Keiichi blinked his eyes in astonishment, but said very little.

How could someone throw words towards the impossible?

But when Belldandy spied them, her eyes immediately widened with recognition. She actually _stuttered_ as she exclaimed in a wavering voice of shock that they were definitely Angel Eggs. She took each Angel's Egg and examined it closely, and then solemnly noted to Keiichi that they were the real thing.

Once they meandered past their excited astonishment at the inexplicable presence of the two Angel Eggs, Belldandy suggested with a flirty grin that they should shed _all_ their clothes, just in case there were any more "hither and thither, and heretofore undiscovered relics and other hidden objects" to be found.

Needless to say, the resulting 'search' was quite enjoyable... 

* * * * * * * *

Out of politeness, Keiichi had offered to wait quietly in a different corner of the Everything while Belldandy and her sisters midspirited Miyuki and Natsumi's Angels. His intent was cavalier; he was only trying to be considerate towards the two former Earthrealm women.

But Mara interpreted his intentions differently.

It had been quite awhile since she had acted in 'provocation' mode...but Keiichi knew that sooner or later, Mara would act the Demoness. He just didn't expect to happen so soon...

Mara's own designs on his intentions made themselves known when she kept pestering him about his "maternity ward" mentality, as she termed it. She teased him and Miyuki and Natsumi, grandly embarrassing the three of them and drawing ire from Belldandy and Urd...especially Urd. And she didn't know when to quit. Carrying on with deliberate taunting in the very best tradition of the Demoness Grief Office, Mara kept turning the screws on him. Keiichi knew beyond suspicion that Mara was enjoying the harassment she was dishing out.

Finally one day, she managed to corner him away from the others...Miyuki and Natsumi were away, discussing the Angel situation once again with Bell and her sisters.

"C'mon, why are you acting so much the gentleman when I know you aren't, Keiichi? It isn't like you haven't seen a woman's 'you-know-what' before!" she said, attempting the penultimate in shamecasting.

Naturally, Mara had conveniently said this while Miyuki and Natsumi were away; Keiichi had no doubt that the two women would have chased Mara all the way to the non-limit and back to exact revenge for such remarks...

His face turned beet-red while Mara howled with laughter.

It's often said that if you give a Demoness enough rope, she'll hang herself. This was one of those cases. Mara 'joke' had gone unheard...but her raucous hoots of mirth had been overheard by several others...

Her teasing had elicited an immediate response from his fiancée.

Both Belldandy and Urd suddenly 'phased in' nearby, rescuing Keiichi from further 'torture'. They promptly announced that Mara was kicked off the "Angel Special Birthday Squad Project", as Skuld had called the midspiriting effort. Bell-chan stated that her rationale for excluding Mara was that she was deeply worried that one look at Mara's Devil, Torrid Mystic, and the two newly-fledged Angels might just climb back into her formerly-human hosts and never come back out.

Keiichi almost died from laughter as Mara got the git.

It was a spilled fruitbowl of hilarity when Mara turned all grave in reaction to her ouster. She responded by abject apologies, sprinkled with frantic arguments that desperately tried to maintain that her Devil wouldn't be cruel at all to the new Angels.

To her credit, Bell kept a straight face the whole time...

But Keiichi knew his fiancée all too well. Belldandy _almost_ always told the truth; but when she didn't, she usually had a sound reason. He was fully aware that the matter of Mara's Devil had nothing to do with Bell's decision. Bell-chan had simply gotten fed up when Mara's clowning around had gotten _too_ personal. And Urd had probably supplied the convenient excuse, in order to make Mara's expulsion appear to be genuinely necessary.

The 'reason' was so obvious to everyone...but Mara.

Later on, Belldandy confided to him that...after she and the others were finished helping birth Miyuki and Natsumi's Angels...she would inform Mara of her _true_ reasons. She added with a wide smile that it would be "delicious payback" for Mara's recent flurry of mischief. She kissed him and phased out, heading back to where the "Angel Special Birthday Squad Project" was going to take place.

"Wicked, isn't she?!" Urd commented in a sly voice, lingering after Belldandy left. "You _sure_ you want to marry her?"

And with that final quip, Urd left to rejoin her sisters.

* * * * * * * *

But the embarrassment for Keiichi didn't end with Mara's lurid attempts at 'humor'...

The _really_ embarrassing part came about when Miyuki and Natsumi pulled him aside after returning from another 'prep session' with Bell and the others at the "Delivery Sphere". He could tell by the anxiety wrought into their expressions that something was going on...

"What was it like, giving birth to an Angel? Did it hurt? Where does the Angel come out? What does the Angel's Egg taste like? Will our Angels resemble us in any way? Will they talk with us? What will they say if they do?" they asked, seeding a forest of questions for him to get lost within.

Despite receiving several full preparatory 'briefings' from Nurse Urd, the two women were peppering him with inquiries. Keiichi surmised that Urd's 'briefings' were probably bringing up more questions than answers. Or maybe Miyuki and Natsumi were seeking him out because they simply needed assurances from a fellow former Earthrealm mortal that the process wouldn't be too painful.

So he tried to describe the experience, as best as he could remember...but sooner than later, Miyuki and Natsumi were making jest of his constant flush of awkwardness as he tried to answer their questions.

Their _very personal_ questions.

Keiichi couldn't blame them _too_ much for being amused at his lubberly embarrassment...if the roles had been reversed, he might have done the same. He related how he had 'given birth' to Heroic Vermillion Swift, his own Angel. The 'birthing' method itself was quite difficult to describe; at the time, he had been so stricken with anxiety, he had almost hyperventilated himself into a faint during the 'delivery'. Since words seemed to fail him, he resorted to painting thoughtpictures, hoping that a visual approach might be more readily understood by the two women.

But instead, he got it wrong...causing more giggling from the two.

"That's it! If you aren't going to be serious about this, then I'm not going to waste any more of my time trying to answer your questions! I'm tired of being teased!" Keiichi finally exclaimed, exasperated beyond his limit.

More giggles.

"You're both behaving this way because you're _ scared_. I can understand why you're so wrapped up in this. But instead of being all flighty and dizzy, why don't you both just own up to your fears? If you don't, then it's quite possible that your Angels will come out instead...as Devils!" he added.

He was surprised at himself; the deliberate fabrication that had slipped his lips was totally unplanned. Admittedly, the stress was definitely getting to him, to cause him to lie like that...

But even more surprising, neither Miyuki or Natsumi reacted to being called "dizzy" by responding with indignant anger. Not only had his blunt confrontation gone uncontested...it had actually riveted them. And his fantastically frivolous invention of "Angels coming out as Devils" had been somehow been interpreted as undisputed reality by the two women! Consequently, to his amazement...Miyuki and Natsumi's faces were lyred with shock.

Facefallen with trepidation, they hastily apologized to him...

They'd actually bought it!!! They had actually believed the bit about Angels turning into Devils!

"Gotchya!" he said, feeling like he had won a victory. He went on to explain that there was no swapping between Angels and Devils during the midspiriting process...that it had just been a slip of his tongue.

_That_ was a mistake, as it set off another round of repartee between the three.

* * * * * * * *

Lingering in the back of Keiichi's mind was a very troubling question. Miyuki and Natsumi were going to give birth to Angels any minute now...which meant that there would only be _six_ Angels, not seven as Urd had inferred. His own Angel, Heroic Vermillion Swift, had been destroyed when Isilblius had stolen the Everything away from its rightful denizens. _Had_ to have been destroyed, because Keiichi didn't have the slightest hint that his Angel was alive...

Besides, Bell-chan only had _two_ Angel Eggs.

So what of _his_ Angel?

Belldandy had vouched that an Angel was inseparable from their "TwinSoul", the word she used to describe the intimate bond between an Angel and their 'host' or 'anchor'. But ever since he had been brought here by the Ultimate Force, Keiichi had failed to sense his Angel's presence at all.

Keiichi's heart was possessed of a profound guilt because of this.

To his shame, all this time he had been grossly unconcerned about his Angel's demise. He had simply accepted that Heroic Vermillion Swift was gone...without feeling any significant emotional fanfare. Now, with all the focus on Miyuki and Natsumi's Angels, his callousness towards his own Angel had become offensive. Weary of himself, Keiichi sincerely regretted his insensitivity.

With only Mara to witness, he covered his face with his palms and sobbed.

Tearfully, he mourned...and remembered. He recalled how Heroic Vermillion Swift had rescued him in the midst of a desert sandstorm that threatened to crush his mortal body. He remembered the feeling of wholeness he would experience in the presence of his Angel. He missed the gentle kindness that clung to his Soul like cerements whenever he heard Heroic Vermillion Swift sing to him...

Each memory only plunged him deeper into the depths of despair.

"It's a loss that's almost too extreme to bear, isn't it?" Mara said in a quiet voice. "There was a time when I thought I had lost my Devil once, back during the first time Isilblius tried to destroy the Everything and kill all the Gods and Demons. Without Torrid Mystic, I felt like I was the loneliest of all the creatures in the Multiverse, even though I was surrounded by billions of mortal lives and my three sisters. I felt _empty_ of myself...a feeling that was so blessedly real, because Torrid Mystic is a part of who I am. She is bonded to my vitality as a Demoness."

Behind Mara, Keiichi could see Mara's Devil, Torrid Mystic. Her black-feathered wings were cowling her as she mimicked Mara's gestures with her own.

"Without my Devil, I feel...incomplete," Mara said, turning to smile at Torrid Mystic.

Torrid Mystic started to sing a song, but Keiichi interrupted her.

"I didn't even grieve for him!" Keiichi groaned between hulking sobs.

"Hmmmm," Mara said. "Normally, I thoroughly enjoy grief. The sublime flush I feel in my breast when someone is squeezed breathless with sorrow...is indescribably exquisite. But in this case, because it's you who is suffering, _and_ because I'm not the cause of it...I find it hard to feel very overjoyed."

"Well, I'm sorry that I couldn't make you happy!" Keiichi shouted with angry sarcasm, still crying.

"Keiichi, Keiichi. Even if you can't forgive me my nature, I find myself eminently forgivable. Perhaps it would redeem me in your eyes if I offered you a boon of my hard-fought wisdom."

Keiichi looked up at her, feeling miserable and helpless.

"The loss of a part of ourselves is like a mutiny," Mara noted. "We cannot fully comprehend it, nor can we readily face the dolor that inevitably comes in the wake of such an absence. We become fixed upon comparing ourselves with the 'who' that we were; almost always terming ourselves as lacking in the bye. If my sister Belldandy were here, she'd probably counsel you to be gentle towards yourself. In her stead, I would suggest the same."

"That's easy for you to say!" Keiichi protested. "You're not the one missing an Angel!"

He watched as Mara regarded him thoughtfully for a moment. She was so damned unpredictable! One century, she's taunting him in the most embarrassing ways imaginable. The next century, she's acting all sympathetic towards him...

"One can only feel regret when they're _ready_ to feel it, Keiichi. Obviously, you sealed away your concerns about your Angel out of a sense of fear. It was _self-protection_ that led you to do this! You wanna know why certain Demons excel at dispensing Grief? It's because they are always ready to excuse their guilt. If you think on this for a moment...you'll probably see yourself as I see you. Since you're so sorely aggrieved with such deep guilt, it only serves to prove how much you love your Angel, in my eyes."

Mara faded from sight, leaving Keiichi to reckon with himself.

* * * * * * * *

Once she swallowed the Angel's Egg, the first thing Natsumi wanted to do was to curl up and go to sleep. Despite a plurality of assurances from Urd and Belldandy, she was seized with a deep fear. Turning her head, she looked at Miyuki. She and Miyuki were floating a few meters from each other, face down with their blouses pulled all the way up to the nape of their necks, so that Urd and her sisters could attend to both of them at once. Natsumi spied the fear in Miyuki's face; her eyes were darting about nervously..

Urd was dressed in some corny pink nurse's outfit...

Natsumi was stirred with a legion of worries. How would her Angel come out? Would her Angel recognize her? Would her Angel be mischievous, as Skuld's Noble Scarlet had been? Would her Angel manifest a physical presence that would look like her?

Being stuck floating stomach-down didn't help matters.

Natsumi wasn't exactly a modest girl...and she was worried that her Angel might reflect this. Not only in the mischief department, but also in the strength department. Miyuki had teased her right before they left for the Delivery Sphere, joking that her Angel would probably look like one of those Amazonian half-women that often showed up in manga as comic relief. Natsumi dreaded the very idea of a muscle-bound female behemoth of an Angel coming out of her back. Yet, since she was the 'wild one' of the pair, anything could happen...

In describing the birthing process, Keiichi had noted that he had sensed a slight pulling in the square of his back, right below the shoulder blades. Natsumi could now feel the stretching of skin right above her backbone, accompanied by a growing sensation of heat from within her, as if it was sourced a few cm below her spinal column. But it didn't hurt as she had expected.

Of course, she had expected the kind of agonizing pain associated with childbirth.

Childbirth...

This brought up another season of disquiet in her heart. Giving birth to an Angel was _too_ similar to having a child in Natsumi's mind. Natsumi didn't want to have any kids; she didn't want to be straddled with the years of dependency that children required. She realized that this was very much a teenaged attitude...but she was troubled by the fact that it had extended far into her adult years. Already, a number of her high school classmates were moms; and some even had more than one kid. Of course, Natsumi had justifications aplenty to support her position concerning not having kids. She was a policewoman, she had a roommate, the cost of living in Tokyo was high in respect to her salary, the pregnancy would sap her of her vitality...she could easily list a dozen more.

Besides, none of the men she had been with seemed to be good candidates for fathers. Good lovers...yes, that they were. A couple of them would even qualify as great lovers. But father-figures...not a chance. The men in her life were too much the same as her in respects to wanting to enjoy their youthtimes. Party and have a good time...yes. Settle down and raise kids...no. But men or no men, Natsumi was on the verge of having a being _come out of her_; a being who would be with her for the rest of her life, if Belldandy was to be believed.

Just like a baby.

"W..what's happening? I.is everything going okay?" she asked nervously...and instead of being answered by a voice, she was answered by carnation-colored glow.

And a song...

A beautiful enchantment of sound lazed around her. It was as if the singing was coming from _within_ her. Natsumi could 'hear' a harmony of a million voices singing as one. She tingled from head to toes as the joyous strains flowed throughout her body. 

She squinted her eyes and clenched her fists, almost afraid to roll over on her back and look.

"Don't be afraid, Natsumi. I'm _definitely_ not some freak-of-nature musclewoman," a melodious voice sounded inside of her thoughts. "In fact, I would say that I am very beautiful! But then again, I'm also _quite_ biased!"

Her uncertainty softening to curiosity, Natsumi swiveled so she could see...

"Not yet, Natsumi! She's not ready," Urd cautioned, restraining Natsumi so she couldn't sit up and see her Angel.

"Great...I've got an Angel that primps!" Natsumi thought reproachfully.

"Natsumi, meeting her TwinSoul for the first time is possibly the most important moment of an Angel's life. You must be patient a little longer," Belldandy reminded her.

"Look!!! She's ready!" Skuld shouted excitedly a moment later.

Rolling over on her back, Natsumi gazed into the light-carmine radiance...

And saw a form...

"Hi! I'm Gossamer Amber Mist!"

Hovering in front of her...was a perfect winged being!

Natsumi gasped, the words wrenched out of her by the exquisiteness of her Angel. Her regard was immediately drawn to her Angel's eyes; she was fascinated by the strawberry color of her irises. Gossamer Amber Mist's eyes glistened softly like two gems, slightly larger in proportion to her face than what was normal for a human being. Natsumi was shocked to see that her Angel's face...was exactly the same as hers! No, her Angel's face was even more lovely than hers. It was almost an idealized version of her face, unconstrained by human proportions.

It was just like looking into a mirror! 

Her Angel's pink-blonde hair was styled almost the same as Natsumi's, short in the front with longer bangs on the sides. But it was generously _long_ in the back, swept back under a intricate crystalline diadem resting on her crown of her head. Her hair sparkled with innumerable scintillations; it was as if each strand of hair had been beaded with millions of stars.

And then Natsumi noticed that her Angel was _nude_...

Flushed with embarrassment, she was suddenly thankful that Keiichi had stayed behind; she was uneasy enough with the others looking at an unclothed Angel who so _closely_ resembled her.

But as she took a closer look, Natsumi realized that her Angel wasn't exactly _naked_. A swirling translucent cloud of pink mist wrapped her body, encircling her breasts and hips with a haze, rendering her enchantingly naked-but-not-naked. Natsumi observed that her Angel's limbs were unnaturally long and slender in proportion to the rest of her body. Gossamer Amber Mist's hair curled lazily in the opalescence that wrapped her like cotton-clouds.

And then she noticed her wings...

Her wings were just like the proverbial Christian angel-being wings, only far more beauteous. Sweeping out and back from her shoulder blades, Gossamer Amber Mist's wings were gloriously plumed with pink and silver feathers; the edges of her wings soft with a dark pink down. They were so rich with body, they draped down past her feet.

"Oh my God...you're so beautiful, Gossamer Amber Mist..." Natsumi gasped.

Her Angel beamed smiles in response to the compliment. Closing her eyes, blissfully happy, she started to sing...

Natsumi heard the Song of Recognition inside of her heart...the private song that an Angel would only sing for her TwinSoul. Natsumi felt herself lifted up by the pureness of Love in the song; it was as if her heart had been transformed into an orchestra of ecstasy.

When Gossamer Amber Mist finished her song, Natsumi felt overflowed with Love...

* * * * * * * *

Miyuki tried to catch the eyes of the three former Goddesses as they worked on her. Oddly enough, Urd had dressed herself in some kind of pink nurse's outfit, complete with a Red Cross symbol emblazoned across her chest. Obviously an eccentricity. Belldandy was shifting her attention between she and Natsumi, while Skuld was darting about with youthful verve, wearing an OL-type pair of glasses. 

They didn't look too worried...

But in contrast, when Miyuki observed Natsumi, her erstwhile partnet appeared to be scared to death as she floated on her stomach. She noticed that Miyuki was looking at her, and winked...but then resumed her anxious glancing about.

Keiichi and Urd had told them what to expect, but when the dull distending feeling began in the small of her back, Miyuki felt her breathing turn rapid. The swelling sensation in her back reminded her of a day-old deep muscle bruise. It was soon replaced by a warm impression, as if someone had placed a heating pad on the middle of her back, right above her hips. The heat flowed into a throbbing non-pain, a she felt her back opening up like a flower...

"Come on sweetie! Don't be afraid. This is your very special birthday, honey! Don't be afraid of us, come out in the world! We all love and adore you with all our hearts! Come on, sweetie!" Belldandy encouraged.

Miyuki almost answered Belldandy...but then realized that she wasn't addressing her, she was addressing the Angel that was coming out of her body!

She sensed a sky-dyed azure glow in the corner of her eye, radiating from somewhere behind and above her. Could this mean that her Angel was birthed already? Miyuki felt light-headed; it had all happened so fast. Then she realized that she had hyperventilated, just like Keiichi had done when he gave birth to his Angel.

A moment later, Urd announced "she's ready, Miyuki!" 

This was it, the big moment of truth, Miyuki thought as she rotated so she could see her Angel... 

"Hi! I'm Precious Sapphire Vale!"

Miyuki was so stunned, she lost herself for a moment as she realized that she was looking at an actual _Angelic being_!

Her amazement was caught into her Angel's eyes; two circles of pure cobalt-blue, sparkling and twinkling like jewels. Her Angel's face...Miyuki realized that her Angel's face was _hers_. Precious Sapphire Vale had the same angular jawline, pointed chin and rounded cheekbones that she had, save for one major difference...

Her Angel appeared to be a _girl_! Rather, Precious Sapphire Vale resembled how Miyuki had looked when she was a sophomore in high school. She looked no older than 15 or 16 years of age, by Earthrealm reckoning.

In response to her 'inspection', Precious Sapphire Vale pirouetted in mid-air like a proverbial Magical Girl. Her hair was otherworldly, with alternating streaks of blue and blonde, pulled up by a ribbon into a ponytail that descended halfway down her back. Her face was partially concealed by uneven curly-bangs of hair; one side falling longer than the other. Underneath the bobbing ponytail, two long 'flanks' of hair cascaded down her Angel's back, a shimmering rainbow of cerulean hues that was absolutely prepossessing.

Miyuki felt herself blushing when she realized that Precious Sapphire Vale wasn't wearing a stitch of clothing!

Yet, she seemed to be enveloped in powder-blue swirls of shimmering nacre, a mini-weather system that hid most of her body from view. Miyuki could see the shadows of Precious Sapphire Vale's limbs underneath the concealing welkin; her arms and legs were unnaturally long and slender. Two enormous wings fluttered gracefully behind her; generously plumed with silver-blue feathers and tufted with navy-blue aigrettes.

She _was_ an Angel...

"Precious...Sapphire...Vale?" Miyuki breathed her name.

Her Angel smiled beatifically and broke into singing an exquisite melody. Nobody could hear her song except Miyuki. Belldandy had told her that when an Angel is first named by her TwinSoul, she will sing the Song of Recognition; the heart-song that would forever bind her to her TwinSoul. She would sing this song to her master and no-one else, as a mark of loyalty and love. For in a way, an Angel's Muse was her TwinSoul. 

Miyuki could _feel_ a delicate aria of felicity chorusing inside of her, a breath of sound that buoyed her spirits towards bliss... 

* * * * * * * *

And now he felt empty.

Moribundity and confusion ruled his heart, as Keiichi felt almost paralyzed by uncertainty. Even as he tried to make sense of Mara's words, a howling aloneness confronted with harsh cruelty. He was forever parted from his Angel, which in its own way felt like being parted from Bell-chan.

Like Bell, Heroic Vermillion Swift was irreplaceable.

In the distance, Keiichi could make out an approaching sphere of light with ten beings inside of it. As the glowing globe drew closer, he could discern the forms of Bell-chan and her sisters, Miyuki and Natsumi, and..._five_ Angels.

He could distinguish the two new Angels hovering over Miyuki and Natsumi; beauteous winged expressions of grace and delicacy. His wonderment was admixed with sorrow, as he lamented his own Angel-less state. The two newly-fledged Angels were flanked by Skuld's Angel, Noble Scarlet...Urd's half-Angel, half-Devil World of Elegance...and Bell's Angel, Holy Bell. The three Angels were swooping back and forth, pridefully excited and appreciative towards the two neophyte Angels.

The Delivery Sphere's 'bubble' then faded and the five Angels burst forth, like birds let out of a cage. The two newcomer Angels espied him and flocked ahead of the other three, flying up close to him and then hovering like hummingbirds, fanning their wings excitedly. 

As he got a clearer view of the two new Angels, he could sense their demeanors right away. The young-looking blue-haired Angel was precocious and flighty, while the Angel with the pink-red hair was athletic and sovereign. The two Angels introduced themselves as Precious Sapphire Vale and Gossamer Amber Mist. Keiichi briefly wondered why they were both named after precious gems.

"Keiichi! Stop _staring_!" Miyuki shouted crossly, causing him to blush scarlet red with embarrassment.

"Don't be so uppity! There's nothing wrong him staring at us," the blue-haired Angel sang in a perky refrain. "He's a guy! Guys are impressed with this sort of thing. Besides, what guy could turn his eyes away from me? He's just entranced with my beauty!"

Urd and Skuld hooded their eyes with their hands to partially cover their facefaults, while Belldandy's face clouded over. Miyuki and Natsumi turned the other way in embarrassment...

And Keiichi kept staring...

"See! Look...he's still staring!" she sang triumphantly.

Belldandy's face clouded over even more.

Startled, Keiichi realized that Miyuki's Angel was _just like Belldandy_ in her ability to unleash the most naive remarks! Natsumi's Angel, Gossamer Amber Mist, made a face and elbowed the younger Angel in the ribs while the other three Angels tittered with laughter.

"Why is everybody acting so strange? I didn't say anything wrong, did I?" Precious Sapphire Vale sang solemnly.

"Bwah ha haha ha!" he heard Mara explode with merriment. The two newly-fledged Angels flinched back in fear momentarily as they got their first good look at her Devil, Torrid Mystic. Naturally, Torrid Mystic decided to fly over and look _them_ over more closely, which caused them to recoil even more. Keiichi overheard her say "watch this!" and then she swept up and away a distance on her black wings. She grinned at the Gossamer Amber Mist and Precious Sapphire Vale, and then fired out a kilometer-long stream of fiery breath.

The new Angels applauded excitedly at the 'feat', since they couldn't breath fire at all. Torrid Mystic returned to the flock of Angels with a grin. She glanced his way, and then whispered something to the two new-fledged Angels. Their faces broke into mirth, while Precious Sapphire Vale shot Belldandy an apologetic glance.

Soon, everybody's Angels, Devils and half-n-halves were making friends...

"I think this new Angel is going to be _quite_ the rambunctious one, eh?" Mara noted, half-serious, half-amused by the whole embarrassing of Keiichi and Belldandy. In a few sentences, Precious Sapphire Vale had managed to bring deep blushes to all but her.

Skuld's Angel, Noble Scarlet, nodded her girlish head in enthusiastic agreement...

* * * * * * * *

Bell-chan! Where's _my_ Angel?" Keiichi asked as the aerie of Angels flew overhead in acrobatic swoops. Evidently, the older Angels had decided to teach the two newborn Angels how to fly; they were executing some very complex and difficult Angelic maneuvers while Gossamer Amber Mist and Precious Sapphire Vale looked on with awe...

Belldandy looked at him and shook her head sadly...but then she broke out into a beaming smile. 

"Keiichi," a warm voice noted, deeply chorused. "I've always been here with you. There is _nothing_ that can separate the two of us! You haven't lost me...I lost myself for a time."

"_Heroic Vermillion Swift!_" he shouted. Tears rushed to his eyes as he turned to witness his fiery-haired Angel. Heroic Vermillion Swift looked exactly the same as before; tall and athletic, with brush-red long hair and a masterful comportment.

Six female winged beings paused in mid-flight...and then their wings started fluttering passionately as they noticed the seventh Angel hovering over Keiichi. Looks of adoring fascination figured on each of their faces as they swooped in to get a closer look.

"**He's _MINE_!**" Belldandy suddenly shouted, making a beeline for Keiichi.

"Bell...they're interested in Keiichi's Angel, not so much in Keiichi!" Urd said in a dry voice, shaking her head with disbelief. The reactions were typical: Skuld scowled, Urd corked a look of dismay, Mara broke into howls of laughter, and Miyuki and Natsumi giggled.

"Where have you been?!" Keiichi asked as Belldandy hugged herself to him protectively.

Heroic Vermillion Swift looked at him with a care, and then a sadness passed over his face. Keiichi felt a mourning pass through his heart...

"Peorth..." his Angel answered in a creaking, thin voice of despair.

Keiichi immediately knew why his Angel had been absent.

"How would any of you react if the love of your life was snuffed out, like a torch in the driving rain? Peorth championed my heart...and then foul Isilblius took her away. With the full joys of her smile removed harshly from the soil of my heart, I withdrew and grieved the loss. I hid myself away, until the moss of despair overgrew my Soul. I listened on as you bickered amongst yourselves about how to restore Life to Death, all the while wondering if my other Twin could be resurrected. If she too could be clothed in vitality, so that I could serenade her with my heartsong once more..." he explained.

Angels do not cry, so Keiichi cried in his Angel's stead. He wasn't alone in his sobbing...

"Heroic Vermillion Swift," Keiichi said solemnly, "...for your sake alone, I will strive my utmost to bring back the Everything. We _will_ rekindle Life...and Peorth will soon be back in your arms again. This place will be stuffed to the seams with Life, so much so that her absence will seem like a passing nightmare. I promise you this!"

Enlivened by Keiichi's promise, Heroic Vermillion Swift stretched to his full height. He flexed every muscle in his body, drawing his chest out and flaring his wings wide. An orange-red aura seemed to dance around him...

"Wowwwww!" Precious Sapphire Vale gasped, having never seen a male Angel in all his glory.

"Then let's go home!" Heroic Vermillion Swift declared. 

* * * * * * * *

**Let there be LiTiLoGhMeVeT!**

Seven voices, Seven Angels, Seven hearts, Seven Souls...all singing as One... 

Three poises of light suddenly emerged from the bosoms of Belldandy, Urd and Skuld and then kindled themselves. It was as if their Souls had been rendered into vessels of light, and then floated straight out through their skin, settling in their hands.

Each Goddess found herself holding a dazzling nebula-heart of radiance; the fiery brightness each had cupped in her hands bathing their faces with light.

Urd looked down at her upturned palms, entranced by the presence of a brilliant emerald green sphere of energy that seemed to consist of trillions of sparkling filaments of energy. Once she calmed her wits somewhat, she dared a glance at her sisters.

Standing next to her, Belldandy was cradling a similar orb of light. It moved and spiraled, glimmering in her hands. Urd noticed that Belldandy's light was the same shape as hers, save for its color: a shining plasma-bright light with a diamond-blue halofication. And next to Belldandy, Urd could see Skuld looking down at the glowing empyrean-shaped luminance in her palms...her blissful expression rendered almost cherubic by the cast of light issuing from the carnation-pink brilliance hovering above her gloved hands.

The frames of radiance shot out from the three spheres of light and passed through Mara, creating a clearlight that unfolded behind her; a web of Time sweeping outwards to fill the darkness with Chronometric fireworks.

Belldandy could feel the Present once again, as the intricate complexity of TimeStreams and TimeWeaves patterning themselves in a design where there was no Beyond.

It had taken Skuld billions of years to traverse the distance of the container space for the Everything...but it had taken the TimeWeb only a few moments to expand to the furthest reaches of Reality. Belldandy knew that Urd's prediction of a 'mega-Everything' was absolutely true; she could feel herself aligned once more with an active TimeWeb, a TimeWeb that was articulated to a magnitude of 'size' that was transcended anything she could even imagine.

These were the Gates of Transcendence.

...and the TimeWeb was now a TimeSphere...

* * * * * * * *

...and then she was weaving Light.

They _all_ were weaving light with their fingers. Belldandy could feel something else controlling her, could feel herself controlling something else. Every motion of her hands seemed directed by her Soul...the SoulKokoro that had evolved when they released the mental shields and became a One.

Belldandy finally realized why the Seven of them were so fixated on their brief existences as mortal, Goddess and Demoness. They were returning to the center of their lives, so that the most heartfelt experiences in their Souls could harvest the Ultimate Force and transform it into the Intimate Force. By separating out their personalities from their powers, the union of their 'selfs' would take the ascendancy...

Creating the Heart that would spark the fires of creation.

Belldandy watched as filaments of light issued from the Seven and their TwinSouls: the Angels, Devil and Angel-Devil weaving light into matter, light into emptiness, light into Souls...

Goddesses into Mortals into Demonesses into Reality...

With a growing awareness, Belldandy realized that they were creating something _new_. It wasn't the Everything, it was something so far beyond the Everything that it was incomprehensible to behold. The intricate latticework of reality they were weaving was limitless, formless and boundless. She knew deep inside that they were crafting a perpetuity, that the Everything would never be destroyed again, because there _was_ no new Everything. In its stead, this massive creation would give Life to unlimited Souls.

Her consciousness dimmed as the 'automatic' synergy of minds and hearts took over, guiding her motions as she wove moons, stars and suns.

"Wh..what is this?" she asked, witnessing the plexus of light folding outwards, filling the void with Life... 

A guiding, gentle voice told her that it would be good, that it was the ultimate expression of the Intimate Force, that it had a name... 

The OmniArc.


	105. Pt 105: The Shufflebout

**Part 105: The Shufflebout (Draft)**

Chiba Polytech freshman Belldandy Morisato gingerly massaged her ankles, trying to knead out the tension coiled in her heels. If she had time, she would have massaged almost every inch of her body; it wasn't just her feet that were still feeling a bit tender after this afternoon's rugged workout. She wasn't used to so much running, and the strenuous sessions in the weight room were only making her knees sore. The weight room was Tamiya's domain; the senior squad leader often bull-horned threats in her ear, causing Belldandy to push herself beyond her limits on the exercise machines.

And then there was squad practice. From 4 to 5:30pm, Coach Chihiro had made the entire team do "dig-n-burns". The concept was simple...the team would split into two squads, and then face off against each other. Standing behind the court line, each player would run out into the mid-court as fast as she could and dig for a spiked ball fired from the other side of the net by one of her teammates on the "spiker's" side of the court. Only digs were allowed...any other types of return resulted in laps. After making a diving dig, she would then dash full-sprint around the net to the other side of court, where she would wait her turn to fire one off over the net to the "digger's" side of the court. But there was no standing still...each team member had to run in place while she waited for one of the coaching assistants to set her up for a spike. On the receiving end, she would have to bunny squat while waiting in line before taking the court for a chance to dig out a spiked ball. And if the Coach caught anyone with her hands on her hips, she'd have her run ten laps...

In other words, it was much more grueling than anything Belldandy had ever experienced in high school. But that's what you get when you have a former Olympian volleyball player as a coach...and you're attending college on an athletic scholarship.

"Some scholarship," Belldandy grumbled as she rolled her kneecaps under her skin with her fingers, loosening them up. Once again, she felt like she had signed up for one of the Self Defense Force's boot camps, rather than the Chiba Polytech volleyball team...

Belldandy looked up miserably at the bulletin board, which was crammed with layers of fast-food delivery ads, guy's phone numbers, doodles, postcards and pictures of idol stars and various announcements. This whole scenario was much different than what she had pictured college life to be. Her senior year in high school, she had joyously accepted the athletic scholarship, thinking that this crucial next step in her life would be a springboard for adventure and independence. She had assumed that college life as a volleyball team member would be one long fun-fest, with lots of guys to hang out with and parties to go to, and luxurious dorms for the athletes with catered meals in private cafeteria. But the Athletic Director who recruited her never told her about _this_...

The Girl's Dorm was an old run down two-storey affair located several blocks from Chiba Poly. It looked squalid on the outside; a shapeless concrete fab with broken-down shutters, peeling paint and rotting eaves. Inside, it was crowded and house-pitted; seasoned with the heady smells of perfume, food, booze, sweaty clothes and musty textbooks. 

In other words, it was a dump. 

"This place is a pit...and once again, I'm stuck here all alone minding the fort on a Saturday night. Why? Because I'm the freshman!" Belldandy lamented as she pulled at her long auburn-colored hair. She removed the sports tie, finger-combed her hair, and then pulled it through the tie again. Captain Tamiya kept pestering her to braid her hair for practice, but Belldandy thought that braiding would be too rough on her hair. So she had elected to use sports-bons to tie her hair back. Needless to say, someone in the Dorm seemed to keep 'borrowing' her favorite hair-ties.

It just wasn't fair!

She _really_ needed a shower...she still had her wrist sweatbands on...but all the hot water had been hogged up by her upperclasswomen teammates. The chances of getting a hot shower seemed even more remote as she eyed the laundry room. Chiba Polytech only had one new volleyball scholarship this year, which meant that the team had only one new face. One freshman squad member.

Her.

She walked up to one of the windows and looked out at the orange night sky, but the night scene did little to stow the tides of irritation she felt. Her 'sisters' were all gone, having a fun-filled Saturday night on the town hitting Karaoke clubs. They were probably meeting all sorts of interesting guys, and having tons of fun...

Belldandy sat down on the couch and stretched her legs. Her feet felt raw, her quads were throbbing with pain, and one of her elbows stung from a floor burn resulting from a particularly nasty dive to the floor a couple days ago. Jumping in for a dig during a scrimmage, her elbow pad had been dislodged and her elbow had taken the full brunt of the slide across the hardwood. It seemed that no matter what she did, she couldn't ever prove herself to Coach Chihiro.

"This isn't _fair_!!! This _really_ sucks!!!" she shouted to the empty hallway, full of girl-teen angst. In a pique, she grabbed one of the nearby towels and twirled it over her head before sailing it across the room. The towel cruised through the air, barely missing the break-room's bulletin board. But one of the small lamps in the lobby wasn't so lucky. The damp towel flashed and took out the small lamp.

"Eeep!" Belldandy gasped, hoping that the lamp wasn't broken. She hurdled the couch and ran across the lobby to check on the lamp. The fixture was gaudy and cheap, probably worth a couple hundred yen at Grandma's garage sale. But she knew that if it was broken, she'd get yelled at by her teammates. Not because of the cost of the damages, but simply to ride her dignity down a notch. But to her immense relief, it was intact. She quickly restored it to its shelf, and then returned to the couch to pout.

Being stuck in the dorm on a weekend night was bad enough. But it wasn't just mere house-sitting. As Captains Tamiya and Ootaki pointed out right before they left on cloud of giggles, she had _chores_ to do on top of minding the Girl's Dorm. In other words, she was stuck with having to _do the team's laundry_ tonight! All of the towels, the uniforms, the socks, the team's warm-up jackets...at least ten loads of stuff.

And no hot water.

Stomping her foot angrily, Belldandy swooped the offending towel up off the floor, wadded it up to a cotton density, and then blindly threw it as hard as she could, venting her spitfire. It slashed into the bulletin board...and Belldandy gulped as the _entire board_ came down with a crash!

"I'm so screwed!" she fretted. One of the pieces of paper that got knocked off the bulletin board floated upwards-downwards in a leaf-spring spiral. After a few seconds of twirly-birding around the room, it finally landed on her lap.

"Probably some guy Captain Ootaki's after," she grumbled as she picked up the errant slip of paper. Captain Ootaki was one of the most popular girls on the volleyball squad, mostly because of her wild blonde hair and wilder behavior at parties. She didn't keep too many of her boyfriends, because she was simply too tall; at 194cm, she towered over most men.

Unlike Belldandy, who...despite being over 10 cm above the national average height for Japanese girls her age...was still one of the shortest girls on the squad. But she had another strike against her in the dating department: she was also a gaijin. Her mother hailed from Norway...and Belldandy was the bellyfruit of a teenaged love affair her Mom had with a classmate in high school. Years later, she married Belldandy's father and moved to Japan. Uprooted to Japan when she was nine years old, Belldandy had to learn a whole new language and culture. Consequently, she was slightly 'off' in her Japanese. Plus, because she was gaijin, most of the boys her age were either diffident or rude.

"Better to put the paper back on the board, otherwise someone will raise shit about it," Belldandy chafed to an invisible audience. As she started to pin the paper back on the board, she pulled herself short. Unable to resist her growing curiosity, she unfolded the paper and took a peek...

**"Divine Wish Escort Service. We will make your deepest wishes come true!" **

Belldandy grimaced in disgust as she reread the paper. _ Escort Service_?! Unbelievable!!! The name of the business sounded like some kind of sex-trade sort of thing, especially the part about "deepest wishes"! She didn't miss the fact that there was no street address printed on the note; other than the name of the business, there was just some barely legible writing in a torn corner of the paper that read "Windowsill" or something like that. The lack of a legit street address definitely pegged this as some kind of kinky sex shop! It was probably some shithole perv bar in an alleyway in Kabuki-cho. Bemused, she looked to see if there was a number...

An idea started to form in her mind.

"Hmmm...what if this is some kind of bunny bar or strip club sorta thing? Could one of the girls here be moonlighting at a place like that? Ah-haaa!!! What if this is one of those phone-in sex encounter lines? Maybe one of my 'sisters' here has a sugar-daddy!" she mused aloud, rereading the paper and imagining all sorts of lurid scenarios. Scenarios that might give her leverage over one or more of her dorm-mates, if played out the right way. Looking at the note more carefully, she noticed that it was handwritten on regular Chiba university-type stationary, probably scribbled down in haste. So it _had_ to be one of her 'sisters'.

And there was a contact number.

"Maybe I should call this number!" she thought excitedly. 

"But what if I wind up talking to some letch? Some old some pervert who knows one of my 'sisters' here? And what if he's all weird and obscene on the phone with me?" she argued with herself, checking her impulsive nature with a series of worries. That would be totally uncool!

"On the other hand, what if I can learn about _who_ in our dorm is doing this from whatever old fart I end up talking to on the phone? What if this is one of those co-ed call girl scandals like they show on TV? I could wind up getting the goods on some old geezer who's a rich businessman or politician! Then I wouldn't have worry about money for the rest of my life! Even better, I could pay back some embarrassment back to someone!" she enthused. Then her light spirits sank as she realized that this was probably some prank cooked up by her teammates. They'd been hazing her all along this term...this was probably just a clever ruse.

"Too bad it's probably a joke!" Belldandy giggled as she imagined how she could stir up a little bit of hell by fucking with one of the pervs. She could play him, leading him on to think that she was coming over to go out on 'date'...

Maybe she could get out of having to do the team's laundry while she was at it.

"Let's see, 02...3363...7712..." she said aloud as she dialed the number. The dialing tone seemed normal, but once the phone picked up on the other line, she heard a bizarre sequence of tones over the phone. The sounds remotely suggested a modem link, but they were too complex. And they were semi-melodious...

"Hello?" a voice finally answered on the other line. "Hey, wow! Cool! It's you! Thanks for calling me. I'll be along in a moment. Stay right there!"

"**_WH..WH..WAIT!_**" she shouted into the phone just as it went "click". She didn't even have time to answer! Gulping deeply in her throat, Belldandy felt a rush of anxiety clutch her. Within seconds, her whole body started shivering with nervousness.

"What have I done? This _completely hurls_! The guy who answered the phone probably knows right where this dorm is...and _he's gonna come here_! How could I have been so retarded?" she exclaimed in a reedy voice of desperation. She angrily wadded up the note in her hand and threw it against the wall.

Now she found herself hoping that this _was_ one of her 'sister's' pranks! She wouldn't put it past her teammates; after all, they had stranded her here with an inordinate amount of laundry to do. Fired with apprehension, Belldandy sprung to her feet and started pacing around the Girl's Dorm, her long pony-tail bobbing against her back...

Suddenly, one of the washing machines started buzzing, indicating that it was finished with its load. Cursing her luck and the machine's bad timing, Belldandy stormed off down the hall towards the laundry room. Without missing a step, she angrily slid the shoji door open and walked into the laundry room...

_**"YEEEEEEEEEEEEEEK!!!!!!"**_

There was a _guy_ sitting on the washing machine!

* * * * * * * *

"A..are you the guy from the sex c..club th..that I just c..called?" Belldandy stammered at the man sitting on the washer. As soon as she spied him, she had backed herself tight against the wall, as far away from the intruder pervert as she could manage. Grabbing a nearby steel pipe, she brandished it in front of her, making it clear that she didn't want the interloper to take a single step towards her.

"What's a sex club?" he asked blithely.

Belldandy almost choked at his idiotic question. Oddly enough, upon a second glance...he seemed to be a _young_ pervert. In fact, he didn't appear to be much older than she was. On closer examination, he seemed almost boyish: he was lithe and casual as he sat cross-legged on one of the laundry machines. His dress was quite striking; he was clothed in some kind of tight black leather costume, something that would have been right at home in the college's Cosplay Club. But Belldandy realized that these weren't the ill-fitting, amateurish costumes your everyday otaku would wear to anime conventions. Not to mention that his outfit didn't resemble any of the anime or manga series that were popular in Japan at the time. His boots, his cape, his shirt and tight leather pants...were too intricate, too articulated with accessories. He looked like he would be right at home as one of the male characters in Magic Knight Rayearth...

His clothes looked _too_ good.

She felt the blood rushing to her cheeks as she realized that it wasn't just the _clothes_ that she thought looked too good...

This guy was a babe!

He had some kind of longish hairstyle, with braids and dreads and straight locks of hair, all mixed together in layers. And he was wearing some kind of 'crown' thing...his 'crown' brought to Belldandy's mind the types of headgear Tenchi from the old "Tenchi Muyo!" series would wear when he was in Jurai Prince mode. But the guy's face and eyes were the epitome of what Belldandy considered handsome.

"Why am I thinking manga and anime all of a sudden?!" she confronted herself. Looking at the young man across the room seemed to trigger all sorts of imaginings. 

He was like some idol star! No...a _mega_ idol-star! Blinking her eyes, she quickly regretted the fact that the most beautiful man she'd seen since she'd come to Chiba...was some ecchi guy who responded to a sex ad!

It just wasn't fair!

Belldandy suddenly paled as she remembered the laundry...

"Could you please move off the washing machine. I..I need to get in there!" she asked, gesturing with the length of pipe. "And don't you even dare come near me, or I'll beat your head in with this!"

Raising his hands to indicate that he was no threat, he started to move slowly across the laundry room. As soon as he was distant from her, Belldandy hastily made for the laundry machine. But then she stumbled over a laundry basket and fell against hard against his chest, partly because she didn't take into account that he was _floating_ in mid-air.

He reached out and caught her...and Belldandy felt all of the blood in her body rush to her head as she felt his body cushion her fall. She looked up...

...and noticed that his lips were only a few cm away from hers. His eyes made her feel all buttery as he smiled at her. She could hear her heart thumping in her ears as she went limp in his arms. His breath was potpourri-sweet in her nostrils...

And then it was over. Belldandy swallowed hard and tried to gather her spiraling thoughts as he let go of her and went to sit on one of the dryers. She hoped that she wasn't blushing...

""I'm sorry, how rude of me!" he saw, bowing slightly. "I forgot to introduce myself. I'm the God Keiichi...First Class, Unlimited, Unrestricted, Apprentice Senior Licensee, Head Agent of the God's Wish Escort Office for this Sector." 

That was the last thing Belldandy heard before she fainted in his arms...

* * * * * * * *

When she came to, Belldandy found herself lying in her own bed. She felt tides of cool air drawing against her face. Opening her eyes and looking around her room, she noticed the intruder fanning her with an ornate fan that looked like it belonged in a museum, rather than in the hands of a young pervert.

She pulled the covers tight against her, tensing her hands underneath her jawline.

"I hope you don't mind that I brought you to your room after you swooned," he said casually, smiling gaily as if he had done nothing wrong.

"_GET OUT!!!_" Belldandy shouted at him, pointing her chin towards the door. He leaned closer to her and raised an eyebrow. Under the bed sheets, Belldandy felt her feet nervously rubbing against each other. Thinking the worst, she quickly peeked under the bedding to see if she still had her clothes. Thankfully, she was in the same clothes as she was wearing when she ran into the pervert-boy in the laundry room. 

"This is an all-girls dorm, if you didn't happen to read the sign outside! And not just _any_ girl's dorm...this is the dorm for the university volleyball team! When my team gets back and finds you here, I'll be in deep shit. And you'll probably get your ass kicked by my teammates!" she warned. Instead of reacting with fear, the stranger simply giggled.

"Ha ha aha! That's not very likely. You see, I _ can't_ leave," he answered her. Belldandy felt giddy with consternation; she wasn't used to _any_ guys being in her bedroom. And he was sitting cross-legged on her roommate's bed as if he belonged there! 

"Look! I don't care who you are, I don't care that it's my fault that I called some 'escort service' and you picked up the phone...I don't even care if you're here because of a mistake. If you don't leave right this minute, I'm calling campus security!" Belldandy threatened.

"I think you don't understand what I'm trying to say. You _called_ me, Belldandy! So I have to stay until I grant you a wish!" he said, smiling at her.

Belldandy glared at him, gripped with exasperation. This guy was unbelievable! He sneaks into a girl's dorm, claims to be God, dresses up like some kind of extra from an American sci-fi flick, and then says that he can't leave. She pulled her bedcovers even tighter under her chin.

"I am _not_ having sex with you, even if you pay me a billion yen!"

"My name is Keiichi, not 'you'. And you don't have to have sex with me, unless you want to. By the way, why don't you try to be more polite, Belldandy?" he said with that irritating grin. Belldandy felt a wave of shock go up and down her spine as she became alert to the fact that he knew her name.

This might be even worse than an intrusive pervert situation, she realized. This guy...what if he's some escaped psycho from a mental unit! What if he was some kind of whacko stalker. He _knew_ her name!

"H..how did you know my name?" she demanded.

"Well, I am the _Head_ Agent of the GWEO for this Sector, so I know the names of all 864.9 septillion sentient mortal beings in my jurisdiction," he answered.

"Y..you're nuts!!!" Belldandy exclaimed. Then a sly thought passed through her mind. If the guy thought he was God, then why not make him make a fool of himself? Then, she might be able to convince him to leave before she called the cops...

"Okay. You said that you'd go away if I make a wish? All right, I'll make one! My wish is for you to do all the laundry that I have to do tonight. Let's see you do that, Mr. God!" she said smugly, sitting up in her bed and crossing her arms across her chest.

'Keiichi' smiled and snapped his fingers.

"All done!" he said cheerfully. Belldandy glared at him, definitely not amused at his sense of humor. "But I should inform you that wish doesn't count, because it was a whim. It wasn't a _true_ wish," he added.

"That's pretty weak, y'know!!" Belldandy shouted, knowing that she had gotten the best of him. She hated guys who bullshitted her...especially when guys were too lame to even do a half-assed job of it. "You lied to me and I can prove it! You said that you would grant a wish of mine, so I asked you to do the laundry, which you obviously _couldn't have done_ because you've been sitting there the whole time! That just proves that you're a liar!"

"Go check the laundry room," Keiichi said politely, folding up his fan. "Oh, and by the way, I even sorted and stacked everything, plus I got rid of all the stains that your Earthrealm laundry machines are incapable of cleaning. I also repaired all the defects and rips in the uniforms, and I..."

While he babbled out a description of how he 'washed' the laundry, Belldandy nervously got of her bed, grabbed for the nearest softball bat in the closet for protection, and then cautiously backed herself out of the doorway into the hall. She continued walking backwards towards the Laundry Room. She paused at the pay phone, but decided that she would at least check the laundry before calling the cops.

When she entered the Laundry Room, she dropped the softball bat in shock.

Inside, every single item of laundry in the whole dorm folded and stacked neatly. Not only was the laundry done...but all of it looked _ brand new_. The team's uniforms looked fresh off the hanger! Amazed, Belldandy inspected one the washing machines to see if the load she had started was still inside of it...

"Not to worry, I didn't forget that load. I hope everything is as you would expect it to be. If not, I can do your laundry again," Keiichi offered. His voice sounded so close, Belldandy literally jumped up in the air in shock.

"Don't sneak up on me!!!" she snapped as she quickly turned around, preparing to dash out of the room. And then she almost bumped into him again. Checking herself in mid-turn, she back-stepped away from him warily. He was blocking the doorway, his feet a dozen-or-so cm above the floor. 

"Ohmigod!!! Y..you're _floating_!" she shrieked, her eyes bugged out with awe.

"Now, do you believe me?" Keiichi asked.

* * * * * * * *

The last thing Keiichi remembered was a black sphere of energy swifting away from he and the others. A hazy shard of a memory, but a shard nevertheless, piercing all the awe-melting events of the creation of the OmniArc. Against the hooked light-brilliance that expanded into matter to fill the OmniArc, the sphere was like an ebony marble of non-depths, non-spaces. Keiichi immediately recognized it as the StealthSphere they had created to preserve the two Lords and the Reaper Kid while they fought Isilblius and restored the Everything. As the wave of light regained and regarded a blossoming into the 'petals' of the OmniArc, Life seemed to faucet all around him with grandiose expanses of Soular consciousness...

...and then the faucet started to stem its flow...

...flowing into a stream...

...and then a trickle...

...and dissolving into droplets...

...each drip became a screed...

The tiny moments began to loom larger as Time itself slowed down all around him. Billions of years that had been compressed into nanoseconds were now complexifying...stretching open beyond inertial regions of expression, filling his consciousness with the sense that TimeSpace itself was dilating, slowing down all around him. Turning in towards itself...

With a series of lightning flashes, the Everything expanded. Keiichi's field of vision was filled with seed-like shapes; the orbs of countless universes floating in an ocean of Being. He had the sensation of his body growing around him as he fell down to the Earth...

**_*thud!!!*_**

* * * * * * * *

Belldandy was in a haze-faint, her vision and hearing...even her thoughts...misting over with information overflow. A pervert intruder had come to the Girl's Dorm, claiming to be some kind of Divine being, dressed in some kind of sci-fi cosplay costume that looked like it belonged in the Matrix movie trilogy, or maybe Macross or some as-yet-unmade anime feature. Wary that his claims to be God were some sort of effort to influence her thoughts...after all, people were getting fooled by such cultish claims every day...Belldandy had armed herself with a steel baseball bat, just in case the intruder made any ecchi moves towards her. But in the unscripted vision of reality, she was conflicted...the 'pervert' was actually a _very_ cute guy; definitely not your average everyday couch-slouch or lecherous salaryman. He was beyond-cute...as in heroically handsome and otherworldly mysterious. In other words, he really was a tall, dark, handsome stranger! And then when she had watched him floating in the doorway of the laundry room, Belldandy felt her belief system suffering one of those 'lights out' sort of moments.

In fact, _she_ had suffered a 'lights out' moment!

The only times Belldandy could recall that she had fainted in the past were due to athletic overexertion. She had trained extra hard in high school all year long; her first love was volleyball, but she also was the star of the school's track team, and she was just starting to take judo lessons. She would push herself to her burning limits, exercising until she became light-headed at times. Now that she was on Coach Chihiro's team, the years of hard work during high school were paying off; at least she could survive the Coach's grueling workouts. Coach Chihiro was fully expecting their team to win the national collegiate tournament this year. So a little dizziness from a vigorous work...that was something she expected. The occasional fainting spell, although very rare, did occur when she overdid it.

But Chiba Polytech freshman Belldandy Morisato never experienced a head-spinner like this...

Her eyes felt like they were fluttering uncontrollably as she tried to focus her vision. She could feel a cold steely flatness against her back; she surmised that she was propped up against one of the washing machines in the laundry room. The pervert...scratch that...Keiichi was leaning over her, his handsome features figured with a concerned expression. He looked like one of those romantic heroes from a CLAMP manga, impossibly effeminate and yet dashingly masculine. Disturbed as she remembered the 'God' part of his introduction into her life, Belldandy hastily looked towards his feet...and sighed with relief when she noticed that he wasn't floating. He did have some pretty funky hi-tech type boots on his feet, however. She measured the look of his face, noticing for the first time how smooth his skin was. She could see that there were no blemishes there; his skin was lightly shaded and baby's-breath smooth.

She flitted with an odd impulse to reach up and touch his cheek, just to see if his skin was real. The fearful symmetry of her convictions were already broken, so Belldandy boldly decided "why not?" Extending her hand tentatively, she cupped his chin and began to stroke the line of his jaw. It was as if she was stroking silk...

"What the hell's going on here!"

When she heard that shrill voice of disdain, the silken curiosity of the moment was shattered. Keiichi didn't react at all, but Belldandy did the only thing that made sense. She grabbed the black collar of her 'captor' with her free hand.

"@*#&~%!!!" she thought...but it was too late. Her mouth worded a silent "it isn't what it looks like!" as she looked past Keiichi's shoulder to see a good portion of her team queued in the doorway of the laundry room. Captains Tamiya and Ootaki looked completely pleased with themselves; sadistically gleeful in the knowledge that they had caught the only freshman girl on the team in the midst of a significant wrongdoing. Belldandy wanted to force her hands away from Keiichi's collar and cheek...but paralysis had already set in.

This was the worst!

Her face bloomed crimson tides as she realized how this must appear to her teammates. Belldandy had avowed herself to her sempai as a tomboyish girl who thought that boys were nothing more than pawns to be exploited. Maybe that was all some sort of girlish bravado, but she was always wary around guys when she hung out with them...and also very observant when an opportunity would arise that would give her an opening to manipulate a guy to do her bidding. But now, she was caught up in the midst of a scenario; a 'snapshot' that would only require a small leap of her teammate's imaginative 'choreographing' in order to be easily interpreted as a surreptitious make-out scene in the laundry room. It was even worse, because it would appear that she was doing the deed _behind their backs_!

Wrongdoing...no. Hanky-panky...yes.

"What do you think you're doing, bringing a _guy_ in here!" Captain Ootaki shouted, smirking drunkenly in the doorway. Her smug expression made it be known that she knew she had Belldandy pinned down on this one, even if Belldandy hadn't done anything. Looking at the taller girl, Belldandy felt her lips trembling. She nervously glanced at Keiichi, but his face was turned; he seemed to be regarding the six or seven girls pressed tightly in the doorway. To her surprise, Belldandy watched as all of her sempai's faces grew wide-eyed and pink-cheeked as they looked at her. Heap another helping of embarrassment on it, why don't you...

No, it wasn't her. She realized that they were looking at _Keiichi_. Gripped by embarrassment and panic, Belldandy was almost dizzy again from the shock of being paralyzed by this horribly amiss train-wreck of a compromising situation.

What was going on here? It seemed that something was occurring, but it was a shadow of truth, or maybe a truth out of reach... 

"Breathe!" she willed to herself as the laundry room was filled with a moment's silence and the odor of detergent. Then it struck her like a bullet; her teammates were practically fawning attention over Keiichi. If this was a scene from an anime series, they would have had heart-shaped irises in their eyes...

"H..how come we go out partying, only to end up in a karaoke room with a bunch of jerks from Waseda University...while _you_ wind up with such a babe-alicious hunk all to yourself?!" one of her teammates stammered, clearly irritated and jealous...and quite intoxicated. The remark only deepened the pools of Belldandy's embarrassment. Now, her teammates were assuming that she had hooked up with this Keiichi character!

"W..waitaminute! He and I are..." Belldandy gasped, wanting the words to pour as quickly as she could speak them now that she had finally found her voice. But Keiichi's lips finally found hers. In mid-sentence, he leaned down towards her. His lips brushing against hers delicately. Time stood into a stillness, as Belldandy felt a sparkle of electricity pass up and down her spine...the kind of 'juice' that she had only sensed during competition when she had blasted a nose-flattening spike over the net. It wasn't just some kind of mental trickery; her entire body seemed to tense up as well.

And in a split second, Keiichi's lips passed hers. He kissed her on the cheek, and then she felt his breath against her ear. Her sparkly body-rush began to flow towards a willy-wobbly feeling of inertia...

"Slap me!" he whispered in her ear.

As he pulled his head away from her, she did just that. Not because he had asked her to, but because he had done the worst thing in the world to her. Kissing her in front of her teammates, without warning, without permission.

**slaaapcrack!**

Keiichi's head jolted sharply to the side with the blow. As he recovered from her palm-stinger, he winked at her. Making a show of it, he quickly stood up and warily backed away from her. Spinning on his heels, he bowled towards the doorway with a dash. In the space of two seconds, he rushed the throng of her teammates and literally wedged through their ranks like a knife cutting butter, bumping them aside. Fast as a blink. But Belldandy didn't fail to notice something very strange about his swift exit from the laundry room; for the force of his dash through the doorway, her teammates should have been hurled to and fro from the brunt impact. They should have been knocked flat on their asses. But instead, it was as if he _wove_ through the tightly packed circle of girls with a superhuman speed, carefully avoiding injuring any one of them. 

"Damn! He's _tall_!" Belldandy suddenly realized, replaying the split second glimpse of him breaking through the queue of her sempai in her mind. Captain Ootaki was the tallest girl on the squad...and Keiichi looked like he towered another 20 or 25 cm taller than her! He was easily over 2 meters in height...definitely in the NBA league of physical loftiness! Thoughts of Yao Ming danced in her head...

Could she have been imagining that he was floating in the air, simply because he towered over her? As Belldandy's thoughts warred between facts and fiction, Captain Tamiya stamped a foot on the ground.

"Allll right, you!" Captain Tamiya shouted sternly, her short black hair shivering with each syllable as she rested her hands on her hips. "What the hell kinda stunt do you think you were trying to pull, inviting a guy to our Dorm while we're out partying? You're supposed to be doing _ laundry_, Morisato!"

"Yah! An' where the hell did you find that guy! He looks like some kinda freak, in a good way, but still a freak! He sure ain't from _our_ campus! And he's gotta be the tallest dude I've ever seen. An' I've dated some tall ones," Captain Ootaki chimed in.

"You've told some tall ones too, Ootaki!" one her sempai jeered. Ootaki tousled the shorter girl's hair, and then pulled on her ear...

"Da rulez is da rulez!" Captain Tamiya interrupted. "No men's allowed in our Dorm! We're _athletes_, not just regular coeds! Having men in our Dorm is like putting wasabi on sweet mochi. You guys...men defile the purity of our feminine energy! A..and they distract our team from its goals! They're useless!"

Several of her teammates winced briefly in distaste for Tamiya's mochi metaphor, but the emphasis wasn't lost on anyone.

"Can't we make an exception for her?" one of her sempai argued back. "She's just a _frosh_, for gods sake! She's barely more than a little girl...she's still a teenager! So she made a high schooler's mistake. We should go easy on her! We're not some lez dorm filled with butch dykes; this is the _Chiba Poly_ Women's Volleyball Team, not the Takarazuka theater troupe!"

"Rulez is rulez! Especially in her case, since she's a freshman! Morisato needs to be punished! We need to make an example of her!" Captain Tamiya insisted. Belldandy could see that her Captain was definitely churning a sadistic bent.

"Besides, what do you girls think Coach Chihiro would do if she found out about this!" the squad captain continued, running a hand through her closely clipped hair. Belldandy's face blanched at the mention of the squad's Coach. Chihiro was a _Olympian_...she certainly wouldn't put up with horseplay or guyplay in the teams dorm! Belldandy sheepishly noted "I did do all the laundry!" in a meek attempt to qualify some merit on her behalf while back stepping away from her teammates, especially Captain Tamiya. She mouthed a private prayer that she wouldn't get kicked off the team.

It wasn't fair!

As she watched the mixture of emotions playing over the faces of her disheveled, inebriated sempai teammates, Belldandy returned her mental gaze to the source of the whole problem in the first place. This...nightmare...was all that idiot Keiichi's fault! God or human, he had actually kissed her in front of the worst audience possible.

Belldandy felt sullied...and murderous...

"As of now, you're kicked out of the Girl's Dorm for the next month, Morisato! Pack your junk up and find a place to crash for the next few weeks while you figure out how to keep from screwing up like that again!" Captain Tamiya pronounced judgment, her eyes flaring wide to emphasize that this was a no-debate-allowed decision.

"What about Coach?" one of her sempai asked.

"We'll tell Coach Chihiro that you had to stay at an elderly relative's house in Tokyo to take care of them. A sudden illness or something personal, something she can't pester you about. We'll cover your ass as long as you behave, Morisato. And if I see that guy in our Dorm again, I'm gonna kick his butt all over the place. You may have slapped him...but I'll _ punch_ him! I'll punch his daylights out..."

"Tamiya, chill out!" Captain Ootaki interrupted. She turned to Belldandy with a sly-fox grin. "Never mind our resident man-hater! But you do have to hit the street, kiddo. We'll box up a boxful of your crap, so you don't have to..."

"But I don't have any relatives in Tokyo!" Belldandy protested in a wail of frustration. "And my parents live in _Choshi_, clear over on the ocean 80 Km from here! What am I gonna tell 'em? They'll _kill_ me if I have to move back in! They'll think I flunked out or something."

"That's your problem, not ours, Morisato!" Tamiya said mercilessly. Belldandy looked at her with a withering expression of anger for as long as she thought she could get away with it, and then pouted and asked for the phone.

"The phone's dead!" one of her sempai announced.

Figures.

Belldandy guessed that her call to wherever Keiichi had come from had shorted out the Dorm's phone system. There was that weird series of tones while she was being connected to that Windowsill place! Well, the phone would have gone out sooner or later; the Dorm was pretty crummy anyway, with all sorts a patch-on wiring and peeling paint and banged-up phone outlets. A moment later, she tried punching up a friend's number on her cell phone, only to learn that the cell system was down. Even the cell phones were working against her!

But what difference did it make? Who was she going to call at 3am in the morning? Not to mention that she didn't have a lot of friends, and the friends she did have outside of the Girl's Dorm were either living with their parents or they were shacked up with their boyfriends. 

"This is _mega_ unfair!" she thought.

Five minutes later, her dorm mates had given her the 'toss'. As soon as they learned that the phone was out, they escorted her to the front porch and slammed the door behind her, giggling drunkenly. Belldandy's mood soured even more as she was surrounded by the silence of night, broken only by odd shifts of traffic and the sounds of her room being rummaged. A few minutes later, a hastily-compiled boxful of personal belongings was shoved through the door, which then was 'clicked', locked up for the night.

Chin in hands, elbows on knees, she sat with her belongings on the Girl's Dorm porch.

This night had been the ultimate nightmare. Her summary expulsion from the Girl's Dorm was Keiichi's fault! As well as her squad mate's...they were all pretty lit up with excitement and booze when they got home from a night on the town. Belldandy mentally envisioned Keiichi's smiling face, just so she could further imagine it being blasted in the face with a cannon-fire of volleyballs. Her fists tightened up beside her as she meandered through her misery. In contrast to the stillness of night, she couldn't still the flurried racing of thoughts and worries. Where was she going to stay? How would she explain this to her parents? What if Coach Chihiro figured out the truth about her banishment from the Dorm? How was she going to face her squad mates...how was she going to act at tomorrow's practice?

"What am I going to do?" she groused. "Life is _so_ unfair!"

Belldandy silently watched the moon descend towards the horizon; silent, because she had no one to talk to on the porch. A cat fight nearby in the neighborhood startled her out of her morose reverie. She realized that she had been staring at the selene pearl long enough to be aware that it had moved a significant distance across the nightsky. Not one to wear watches, Bellandy didn't know how much time had passed, except that the early-waking birds were starting to chirp all around her. The birdcalls seemed to be mocking her; avian laughter from hidden tree copses, mirthfully taking advantage of her lamentable situation. She wished she was a hunter with a gun, so she could shoot a few of them, to shut them up.

She stared at her Nikes and then started tapping her feet on the porch. She was dressed in her 'dressy' jogging outfit, figuring that if she was going to be out walking about before sunrise, she might as well look the part of an early-morning jogger. At least her clothes were clean, courtesy of Keiichi.

"God damn you, Keiichi!" she cursed. "For a fuckin' God, you're certainly a dimwit! How could you do this to me!"

"Oiii!" she heard someone shout behind her. Captain Ootaki was leaning out of the front window. She told Belldandy to brace up and stop yelling...chiding her for waking up her teammates. Then her face softened, and with a smile, she tossed a kerchief wrapping towards Belldandy. Belldandy quickly grabbed it and opened it up; there was a number of coins and bills inside. Not even bothering to count the money, she looked up at Captain Ootaki and inclined her head with sincere gratitude.

"We took a collection for you, Morisato, to help you out just in case you need to ride the train or something!" she noted to Belldandy before pulling the window shut. As she counted the money, Belldandy felt touched by their kindness despite their rough handling of her expulsion from the Girl's Dorm.

All things being a milkshake of emotion, Belldandy wanted to break down and cry, or break down and scream maniacally. But screaming was definitely out. She had been warned, fortunately by Captain Ootaki rather than Captain Tamiya. Belldandy knew that keeping her dorm mates up with shouting would probably ruin their resolve to fib to Coach Chihiro about her moving out of the Girl's Dorm.

"And there's no way that..snff.._I'm_ going to cry over this!" she said firmly to herself, an actress and audience of one. With a will of the champion, she bit her lip, hard enough to taste blood. If that's what it was going to take to keep from crying, then that's what it took! A moment later, she felt something wet on her cheek.

Rain.

Even the weather was being unfair! It wasn't bad enough that she had to sit outside in the pre-dawn hours, spurned by her drunken teammates and kicked out of her college dorm. Now the sky was pissing on her! 

It was all Keiichi's fault!

"God must _really_ hate me!" she said, punching her pendant leg in frustration as the rainfall intensified.

*****frrweeet!!!*****

Belldandy turned to look in the direction of the whistle...and saw Keiichi standing across the street. He brandished a large umbrella in one hand, shielding him from the steadily increasing patter of raindrops. 

She flipped him off.

He whistled towards her again, and she flipped him off again, only this time she shot him a stinkface and stuck out her tongue at. He whistled a third time..._loud_...and she heard the rattling of someone in the Girl's Dorm trying to open a window. Taking the hint, she quickly scooped up her box of belongings and walked across the street. She made sure to stand near Keiichi...but _not_ under the umbrella.

"What _are_ you doing, coming back here after getting me in a shitload of trouble? And why the fuck are you whistling so loud? You wanna wake up everybody and get me in even _more_ trouble?! I just got kicked out of my house because of you!" she hissed at him angrily, feeling the plips of rain dripping down her forehead and nose.

"Here," Keiichi gestured, extending his umbrella. Belldandy stepped aside with a smart aplomb, avoiding any chance of standing underneath it.

"There's no way I'm getting under that with you! I _hate_ you! You're the cause of all my miseries! I _really_ hate you!" she snapped, seething with rage.

"Do you want to make a wish now?" Keiichi asked.

Belldandy was so angry at his words, she almost dropped her box.

"How could you ask something like that, when I'm in this situation?" she asked in a dry voice, her teeth biting in the rain. "Can't we at least stand under a tree?"

Keiichi gestured with his umbrella, she shook her head "no!" and then he walked under the nearest tree and leaned up against the tree trunk. Belldandy rolled her eyes...he should have at least offered her the tree trunk!

"Look, I don't ever want to see you again! But before then, I want to know just one thing. Why the hell did you kiss me...and then tell me to slap you? What did you think, that I _wasn't_ going to slap you? As if you had to ask me to slap you after you went and kissed me in front of all my teammates, you big jerk!"

"Belldandy, I could read their minds, and they were thinking all sorts of unsavory ideas about you and me..."

"You're damned right they were! What'd you think they would think?! You were practically all over me!" she replied. Then she realized what she had just said...and blushed. For a moment, _she_ had been thinking the same thing!

On the coattails of this realization, she was startled to discover that she was acting as if she actually believed that he had read her sempai's minds. He was using that "God" story again to mess with her mind!

"What in God's name am I thinking! I'm actually believing you! Stop confusing me with that 'God' bullshit! It isn't very cool!" she shouted, turning away from him. Her wet ponytail swung around and slapped against her chest.

"If I recall, it was you who wanted to touch me..." Keiichi noted.

"**_NO!!! IT DIDN'T HAPPEN THAT WAY!!!_**" she screamed. "And if I could touch you again, I'd...gladly wanna break your nose!"

"Mortal see, mortal do..." Keiichi sighed to himself resignedly. She didn't miss the condescending tone in his voice, which only caused her to get even more angry with him. Belldandy had no idea how much more anger she could bottle up, because she had never been this angry before. Even that bad call by the ref in the high school tournament that cost her team the championship during her junior year didn't even get her this riled up!

Determined, she started walking away from him...and regretted her decision, as the rain pelted her mercilessly until her eyes stung. She quickly sought out refuge, as the downpour was getting downright vicious...

"Dammit! Why'd you kiss me?! Just shut up and answer me!" she screamed, dashing toward a nearby kid's park. She was sprinting by the time she pulled to a halt under a streetlight sheltered underneath a giant wisteria tree. A moment later, Keiichi caught up to her. Belldandy saw red as she noticed that his hair was completely dry...

"I wish for you to explain yourself! Why'd you act so retarded back there?" she asked.

"Again, that doesn't count as a wish!" Keiichi noted.

"Wishes, wishes, wishes! Is that all you think about? Gods, you're worse than a guy who's got nothing but sex on his mind!" Belldandy observed. Keiichi smiled at her, as if he was thinking that she was cracking a joke.

"Under the circumstances, I presumed that if I kissed you, followed by the perfunctory handslap to the face, it would render the appearance to your inebriate roommates that my presence was unwanted. It would stand to reason that, if they saw you rebuffing me, then the logical course of action would be compassionate empathy. Therefore, I assumed that they wouldn't expel you from your domicile. But mortals being so unpredictable, it would seem that they fled from reason when acquitting your situation..."

"Quit talking like a lawyer and just tell me why!" she insisted. She also wanted to ask him why he had stolen a kiss from her _ lips_, but figured that this guy who though he was a God would make up another string of fantasies. The last thing she wanted was to encourage him on a course of imaginings that could lead into the ecchi realm of things...

Keiichi pierced her with a moment's stare. 

"How impolite! He's staring at me!" Belldandy thought. Even if his face was very handsome, she didn't like being stared at. How could he be so socially inept? Or was he trying to be ill-mannered to keep her off her guard?

"Belldandy, I didn't want you to appear undignified in front of your friends. And I didn't want you to get in trouble with them either!" he admitted, his eyes sparkling with sincerity.

Belldandy gulped deep in her throat, shufflebouting as she reappraised him. Even though he had screwed up in the worst possible way, he was convinced that he was trying to protect her honor. Well, that was one gold star in his favor. Along with his good looks, he had two golden stars...against a few million checkmarks for getting her in so much trouble. And for being a liar. And for sneaking into her room...

Then it dawned on her that Keiichi was trying to shield her repute. Belldandy scowled at this realization; she didn't need _ anyone_ to protect her honor, especially a guy. And yet, his intentions seemed to warm her somewhat, somewhere deep inside.

"Why do I feel this way?" she asked herself, wondering if he was telling her the truth. As she measured him, he was measuring _her_ silently. She felt a little sorry for him...after all, she _had_ slapped him rather forcefully.

"Couldn't you think of some other way besides kissing me? You knew that would set me up to slap you!" she asked, her voice a little calmer than before.

"How do you know that I _felt_ your slap?" he answered. "I mean, I did _feel_ your slap...you're definitely a strong girl, Belldandy...but I didn't feel it in the sense of any pain. Of course, I could feel the pain if I wanted to. But why do that?"

Wordlessly, he left the shelter of the tree and started walking down the sidewalk again. Not knowing what else to do, Belldandy watched him walk away...and then decided to catch up with him. The crown of her head tingled as the rainfall plashed her.

The wind started up, driving the rain against her now-soaked jogging outfit. She looked down at her box, aware that the clothes, cosmetics and whatever else inside of it was already soaked. 

He seemed to be walking purposefully, as if he had a destination in mind.

Continuing to walk next to him in the rain, Belldandy felt completely abandoned, lost for everything except her confusion. Her emotions boiled into turmoil. She was sullen and angry, because she had to walk next to the guy who had kissed her and got her kicked out of her dorm. Even worse, she was _choosing_ to do so, for some unknown reason! She was definitely embarrassed; she had suffered a whole year's worth of that tonight. She felt even more ashamed in her embarrassment; as she recalled the kiss, Belldandy still felt a tingly afterglow. Fright seemed to clench her as well. Keiichi was a total enigma, a 'left field' reality in the 'right field' of her life. She didn't have a clue...she had no way of knowing who or what he was. What if he _was_ some kind of God? Or maybe this whole evening was a mismass of memories, confounded by the shock of an intruder and getting kicked out of the Girl's Dorm? She even sensed a tiny bit appreciative towards him, because he had claimed he was trying to protect her dignity...

"Protect me?" Belldandy whispered to herself. Suddenly, the idea of being 'protected' by this tall, dark stranger...really pissed her off to the max! Her anger volcanoed, transformed the irritating sensation of being soaked by the rain into a vivid pleasure of martyrdom...

"You should take this umbrella. You're getting pretty wet," Keiichi asked, proffering her his umbrella. "This way, you won't have worry yourself about walking close to me...you can have it all to yourself."

Belldandy slapped it away.

"Good! I hope I get completely soaked! I would rather get drenched and struck by lightning than stand under your umbrella! I hope I catch the flu because I got soaked to the bone tonight!" she shouted angrily. 

She narrowed her eyes at him, while he looked at her with an expression of surprise.

"I suppose you think you're cute, trying to get me to walk close to you by doing the 'umbrella trick'. I know the routine...you give me the umbrella, then when you get soaked in the rain, you figure that I'll start feeling all sorry for you, which'll lead me to ask you to walk under it with me, and then we wind up walking together under the one umbrella anyway. Give me a break!!! Isn't that pretty weak, for a guy who claims to be God?" she yelled, dropping the box of her personal belongings and standing to face him, arms straight and rigid against her sides.

Belldandy wanted to project the Total Bitch Posture to him, wanted to sear him with her disgust, wanted to savor how she was glaring at the edge of rage. If he was a guy, he might as well wither into the ground. No male can possibly stand up to the Total Bitch act!

Keiichi seemed to regard her for a moment, and then he smiled to himself.

"**_WHAT?!!_**" she scream-asked irritably, taken aback at his introspective aloofness.

"Ahhh that's right! he admitted, punching the palm of his opened hand with his fist as he looked skyward, almost seeming to Belldandy that he was deeply embarrassed.

_Oh Seeds of Light, make yourself known/Let folds of grey column away  
Quell yon shower's airy throne/dispel its energies to another sway _

Belldandy looked on as he waved his hand with a peculiar bent of his wrist...

...and then the rain _stopped_.

Totally.

"_Oh..My..God!!!_" Belldandy gasped.

"That's one way to put it," Keiichi commented with a grin.

Her anger was instantly dissolved as Belldandy stared in rapt amazement at the overhead sky. High above her, the rain clouds began to dissipate...as rapidly as one of those time-elapse sequences in a Hollywood movie or the Science TV channel. In less than 15 seconds, a torrential downpour had completely disappeared, impossibly revealing a pink-edged sundawn...

There was no way he could have faked that! There was no way _anybody_ could have faked that!

This wasn't like the mysterious event in the laundry room, where she had tested him by telling him to clean all the backloads of uniforms and towels and such. He had claimed to have completed the test; the clothes were clean, but she had never witnessed him doing anything extraordinary. Belldandy could have her doubts about that...maybe she had laundered the clothes already and had been so shocked by his sudden appearance in the Girl's Dorm, she had completely forgotten that she had already completed her chores. The illusion of him floating...maybe that was another result of shock. His clothes could have been handmade, or rented from a classy cosplay shop. All that mumbo-jumbo about "Windowsill" and jurisdiction over "trillions of species"...any high school geek fanboy could have come up with that. And printing up a hundred meishi business cards could be had for a few thousand yen. But this utterly incomprehensible feat of shutting down an entire storm? She had witnessed the miracle, she had beheld it all, from start to finish, and all the moments in between...

Which meant that he was the real thing! 

Belldandy felt all the blood in her body seemingly rush to her head. She heard knelling bells pounding in her ears; her tongue was heavy with speechlessness. She was walking next to God! He had just made a rainstorm vanish with just a few words and a gesture. The sky was huge...and beautiful; her upward gaze was almost arrested as she strived against the sudden impression that she was miniscule, inconsequential. All along, Keiichi had been trying to tell her that he was God...and all along, she was convinced that he was bullshitting her. What could be the punishment for not believing in God when He tells you that He's with you? What if she got sent to hell for that? If He could stop a storm, what else could He do? Was there even a conceivable limit to His powers?

"There! No more rain!" Keiichi announced, pleased with himself. Belldandy looked up and down at the sky, and forced herself to look at him. She would have rather hidden under one of the slides in the kiddie park a block down the street...

"Why me why me why me why me..." she wondered as she stared at him in amazement. Belldandy struggled to put on a game face...to conceal the fact that she was scared to death, overawed and feeling very insignificant in the face of His display of power, all at once. 

"Why would God show up in _my_ life? I'm just a girl! And why does he have to come as he such a cute guy?! Why couldn't he be some old man that looks like something out of a Renaissance painting? Why does he have to look so handsome!" she pondered. Keiichi certainly didn't look like God...if He was God, then Heaven and all it's angels were Visual Kei to the max!

The waterpools in her sneakers interrupted her gawking as she squished in her shoes, shifting from side-to-side to keep from going heels up with shock. Keiichi was still dry, the result of using the umbrella. It didn't make a difference whether he was God or not, the umbrella had kept him dry. Was there a penalty for not accepting a walking under an umbrella with God? Belldandy felt miserable...she was soaked, to the point where water was puddling under her where she was standing. She noticed that the umbrella was gone, it was no longer needed.

No longer needed...

She felt her jaw clench just as the rage hit her.

"You mean...that I got drenched...while you could've fixed the weather all along?" she screamed at him hysterically, soaked with rain and irritation. "Keiichi...you _**IDIOT** _!!! Why'd you wait until I got _ totally soaked_ by a downpour before doing your God thing and making the rain go away?"

"Now make me dry, right this instant!" she commanded him.

"I will gladly do that for you, Belldandy. But that doesn't count as your wish."


	106. Pt 106: Epitaph

**Part 106: Epitaph**

If one is squeezed down from God to Being, do they feel the change? Or do they turn into some kind of ethereal orange juice...

When I surrendered the Ultimate Force powers to Belldandy and the others, I was obliged to 'unplug' myself from myself for a time. During that suspension of my being, I didn't know if I was aspect or if I was truly myself. The resultant somnolent hibernation of sorts had blunted my awareness, keeping me warmly numb to events while the Seven fought against Isilblius. Isilblius...the being of Never-eating-Night. I knew that 'I' might be destroyed in the battle with Isilblius, should such contest result in the destruction of Isilblius's Everything. If 'I' survived the war, then I could just as easily be spiritually disemboweled by the recreation of the Everything. I had to _trust_ the Seven _totally_...hoping that my nether-conscious 'suggestions' would be 'heard' by them, and then subsequently acted upon when they rebuilt Reality. Trust is like a slight skiff trimmed against a hurricane; but my very existence relied on the actions of the last survivors of a doomed Everything. They were my friends...and in one instance...much more. My heart couldn't bear to interfere in their process; I had to defer to the group-wisdom of three mortals and four Divines. A mystical tour of the ultimate, perhaps threaded through the intimate. I had defeated the Ultimate Anti-Being before, and could do so again...but I had to let it all go. There were so many reasons.

If the Seven managed to save me, it mattered little in the scheme of things. But if they actually managed to construct the OmniArc, then they had transcended Love itself...

The very fact that I was thinking...thinking _ anything_ at all...must stamp assurance on my deepest hopes.

THEY HAD SUCCEEDED!!

Astonished, the waking moments stretched beyond the ascension of shadows and light; they pierced the imagination and thrust all the fantasias back into reality. Reality? The sensations that passed through me were a fen of exhausted, cataleptic uncertainties. Unquiet anxieties marshed within the tall grasses of stillness. My first introduction to awakening: a hammering headache and prickling tingles latticing throughout my body. Body? I wouldn't recognize a physical shelter for my Soul, unless it was mechanical, cyborganic or ethereal. Yet, if this substantiality I felt was a human-flesh body, then my fogbound senses and physical nausea were a rude introduction to mortality. My discomfort was a possible result of a compression of sorts, as if I had been sucked through a straw. Or maybe spat out through a straw would be more descriptive. A coloring haze filled my vision; I could only see obscure blue and green chimera in the background; Van Gogh-like swirls highlighted with purple lights flashing with an insistent strobing.

I could distantly hear my breath, a tinny-yet-reassuring susurration of sorts. Breath...the ocean of Life. This, combined with the flitting butterflies of blue-green blobs of vision, was the only proof that I was now clothed in physicality. For the first time since Planet Lost, for the very first time since Isilblius had endeavored to destroy all of existence...I could feel a tension-relaxation in my chest. I was no longer machine, no longer Ultimate Force, no longer a false plenum, no longer myself...

I wanted to breath for life...

"WHERE'S BELLDANDY?!"

Keiichi regained consciousness in the least likely place he expected to be. Just a few minutes earlier, he had been watching intently as Belldandy and her sisters were firing up a Returning Mandala. They were using a complex weave of spoken and gestural esoteric spells, in an effort to try and summon Cevn's Soul back. Hours earlier, Urd had killed Cevn out of what she believed was an absolute necessity of purpose. And yet they were still at risk...hence an arcane design was employed in order to prevent a nightmarish being called Isilblius from breaching into this Multiverse and cutting an Armageddon-like swath of destruction through all of reality.

Armageddon was simply another movie title to Keiichi up until the three Goddesses had burst into his life. Unexpectedly, they had ushered a 'cosmic' awareness of sorts into his everyday existence, causing him to realize just how precarious the Earthrealm's position was in the greater path of Divinity and Reality. He learned that energies and ambitions much more evocative than atomic energy existed in the universe.

He couldn't even call the Earth "the Earth" any more. Now, he always thought of his home planet as "the Earthrealm".

Amazement heaped upon astonishment as the mandala had 'activated' itself of its own accord. Keiichi didn't know if this was the proper way, as he had witness only one other time when the Divine sisters had created a mandala. He remembered the elaborate mandala that Urd and Skuld had wove into the ground when Belldandy had been summoned back to Yggdrasil, way back when he was just getting to know his fiancee. That mandala seemed to require a complex set of 'operations' on the part of Urd and Skuld to make it work. But they seemed to have it under control back then.

This time was different. An unbidden column of light had rainbowed down...or maybe exploded upwards...from the mandala, threading through the gray overhead sky like a needle of solid light. He had encountered occasional celestial fireworks during his life with Belldandy, part and parcel of living life with three Goddesses. But it was nothing like this; the lambent thread of light in the glowing circle of the mandala seemed like something _alive_, writhing completely out of Belldandy and her sister's control. The glowing vortex widened like a unharnessed tornado...and for a moment, _everything_ was luminosity. It was as if he was standing on the blue-red-white rim of Heaven itself...

The ensuing moments were blur.

And now, he was lying on his back on the cold grass in the middle of the temple's front lawn, a few meters away from the koi pond. Keiichi's body ached dully...he felt like he had been just thrown from his motorbike. He certainly recognized the rag-doll feeling of landing with his arms and legs akimbo. Flat-grounded. He turned his head to the side, and recognized the koi pond. The koi pond was an instantly recognizable fixture in their yard; a deliberate attempt by Belldandy to 'grace' their temple grounds with an aesthetically tasteful ambience. This pond was very unique: it was the only outdoor koi pond he knew in Japan of that was stocked with koi all year long. Bell had magically invested the stones surrounding the pond with a Stewart's Steakhouse, which in turn brought a gang of hungry Stewart's 'demons'. Stewarts were the tiny beings in charge of regulating temperatures in engines; along with the Maxwell's 'demons', they worked 'behind the scenes' as the 'soul' of mechanized engines. But since there was no engine to run, the Stewarts had simply stayed and kept the pond stones warmed with their own brand of energy, which in turn provided a yearlong temperate environment for the fish. It was a equitable arrangement; the koi carp were content all year long and the Stewarts had an unlimited supply of prime rib, which was thoroughly enjoyed by the 'Beefeater Englishman' aspect of their personalities.

It was all coming back to him.

As his disorientation dissipated, Keiichi chided himself for thinking so much about the koi...and then he wished that the temperate environment of the fish pond would extend to other parts of the lawn as well. As his head spun down from a tornadic whirl to a slow coil-spin, he sensed the air tingling against his face. It was November-cold, sharpened with chill like a freshly-ground pencil. The overhead clouds were matched by his breath, wisping above him with each exhalation. The grass was clean, but crunchy and sterile...almost crisp against the back of his head. Keiichi pulled himself up to a seated position and looked down at himself, hoping that he was all in one piece. To his immense relief, there were no serious injuries or missing limbs. He was even dressed exactly the same as he had been when he had fetched the photo-negative from the temple.

He suddenly was spiked with a sense of dread...and something even heavier. His soul felt weighed down by the irons of empathy. Urd had killed Cevn. Belldandy had watched her sister give up her chance at Love, so that the Multiverse might be safe from Isilblius. Keiichi had never watched anyone actually die in front of his eyes before...not less than a close friend and mentor. His stomach seemed to click a tongue in the middle of his belly as sadness warmed him against the frigid air...

But then it quickly faded. Urd...in love with Cevn? Not likely!

Keiichi was amazed that he could even consider the two as a couple. Cevn was a studious musician type, while Urd was mischievous and sexy. They were like water and ice, those two. Totally opposite types. Besides, Belldandy had told him something about how her elder sister could never have a boyfriend; something to do with the fact that she was Norn of the Past. Searching his memories, Keiichi couldn't find a single instance of Urd acting interested towards Cevn in a romantic sense.

Must have been some kind of hallucination.

Troubled, Keiichi shook his head from side-to-side, trying to clear out the cobwebs.

A motion of black caught the corner of his eye.

"Wh..wha..what happened?" he heard Skuld ask. Her voice seemed throatier than usual to Keiichi, almost husky-hoarse. She was looking down at her hands and legs, just like he had done a moment earlier. One of her boots had been stripped off her foot somehow; it lay a few meters away. With a look of surprise, she wiggled the toes on her unshod foot, and then she leapt up to her feet with a gymnast's feline grace.

Keiichi groaned as he stood up to his feet. His head was pounding at the temples; the kind of headache he would only experience during a particularly stressful bout of tests, or when he would get thrown from his bike and get his bell rung.

"Big Sister Urd!?" "Elder Sister Belldandy!?" "Big Sister-Demoness Mara!?" the teenaged Goddess yelled through cupped hands. Seeing Skuld immediately smoothed Keiichi's fears; for a moment, he was deathly afraid that he had been removed to the temple all by himself. If Skuld was here, then maybe the others would be nearby...

Skuld whirled around and saw him.

"Keiichi-sama!" she shouted, her face flushed with a profound sense of relief to Keiichi's eyes. Suddenly, the young Goddess seemed to transform into the little girl she once was...and without hesitation, she rushed up to him and grabbed him around his rib cage, tightly squeezing herself against him. Even though Skuld was now almost as tall as he was, she felt light and child-small against his body. She was shivering from head to toe as she hugged herself to him, almost squeezing the breath out of his lungs. Keiichi could feel her silken black hair rippling against his cheek as she shivered like a cat who had just taken an unintended dip in a swimming pool. Waving his hands behind her back for a moment, Keiichi finally surrendered his awkwardness and hugged her back. Skuld looked up at him, tears framing her delicate brown eyes.

"I..I was so scared! All of sudden, I felt so...full, for some reason! Full of...everything! It was as if I had the whole Multiverse inside of me!" she gasped, her lips quivering as she tried to hold back her tears. "I'm filled with this _weird_ feeling that I've been all over Time and Space. Even deep into the distant Past!"

Keiichi looked at her, clueless about what she was talking about.

"Skuld, it's okay! You're here with me, and I'm sure we'll find the others," Keiichi said softly, feeling silly because he was winging out assurances when he really didn't know what to say. It felt even more ridiculous, since Skuld was so tall in her 'teenaged' look...but he tousled the hair on the top of her head anyway, just like he used to do when she was much smaller. Instead of reacting adversely, Skuld looked up at him with a grateful sparkle to her wetted eyes. Still, Keiichi felt a malingering worry...normally, he would have found Belldandy first, or she would have found him before her sisters.

The link between them would have seen to that.

As the young Goddess shivered against his chest, Keiichi scanned the temple grounds, but his look-seeking was interrupted by a groaning from somewhere behind him. He craned his neck in the direction of the groaning and saw a woman rolling over. She was dressed...more accurately, she was tangled...in a long navy blue cape and dress with red trimmed designs, the plunge collar and waist-sash of her tightly-draped dress sported tiger-striped patterns...

It was Urd!

Her platinum-purpled hair was disheveled into a shock, but it was definitely Urd. Keiichi was more than a little pleased to see her. Unlike Skuld, Urd was slow to gain her feet...which meant that _something_ had given her a wallop. Keiichi mulled over the question...what could stagger a Goddess? Or maybe she was still dazed by the recent death of their mortal friend. Yet, Urd wasn't just any Goddess; she had a Senior First Class License with Unlimited, Unrestricted privileges. She even had one of those uber-Goddess earring seals, just like Belldandy. Yet, some power had tossed her to the ground like an October leaf-fall. She was clearly disoriented; Keiichi watched as Urd tried to sit up and promptly swayed into and out of balance, as if she was dizzy. Tentatively, she gained her feet, as unsteady as an infant taking its first few steps.

"Ohhhh mannn, where am I?" she groaned, holding a hand to her head. Hearing the voice, Skuld suddenly unburied her face from hiding against Keiichi's chest and literally pushed herself off of him. Dashing at a full sprint, she leapt into Urd's arms before Urd could say a word. Skuld almost tackled Urd...with an "ooof!", Urd caught her younger sister and spun her around playfully in mid-air.

"You're okay, Big Sister!! You're really okay!" Skuld wailed with joy as Urd clasped her hands on her shoulders.

"Of course I'm okay!" Urd noted in a teasing voice. "It takes much more than some old trickery bend-light effect to keep Urd, Norn of the Thunderbolt, down and out!"

Keiichi watched as Skuld grinned in respectful appreciation at Urd's braggadocio.

"But it beats me what happened back there!" Urd admitted. "We were trying to bring our friend Cevn back, and then we wound up back here at the temple. But other than that, I don't remember a thing!"

Keiichi arched an eyebrow when Urd mentioned Cevn as "our friend". The manner of her words contrasted sharply with the recent memories he had of the events leading up to the construction of their mandala. She seemed sad...but not possessed by the emotional devastation of just a couple hours ago. In a grey, bleak mid-day on the edge of Tokyo Bay, Urd had given Cevn a fatal palliative; some kind of arcane conium she had created so she could end his life painlessly. And then she had screamed herself through the heart-wrench, her voice hoarse with staggard grief...

No...that couldn't be!

THERA:

Belldandy walked briskly, carefully ensuring that she was a few paces behind Keiichi. Not _those_ few paces...the lingering distance that would tip off an onlooker that she was chasing after him. Or the half-pace behind him that would lend the impression that she was a shy girlfriend. She walked discretely, keeping herself few meters away from him. To add to the distinction, she would venture out away from him at times, periodically glancing side-to-side once in a while to throw off the impression that she was interested in him.

Which she was.

But not for any romantic reasons. And certainly not for any ecchi reasons! Her interest was purely practical...and she had to admit that her curiosity was a little bit wrought by her fears. Belldandy was interested about where he was going. Where does God go on a stroll on Sunday morning? She half-chuckled as the mental image passed into her musings. In her mind's eye, she saw Keiichi ducking into one of the Christian churches in the neighborhood. Taking the fantasy further, she imagined Keiichi walking down the central aisle of a crowded church in the midst of a service. Interrupting the sermon, he would wave a hand or speak a phrase...and all the people and animals in the church's stained glass windows would then spring to life. Stained glass martyrs, apostles and saviors, all walking about the naves of churches, frightening the congregations inside...

A stretch in her thigh reminded her that it was hard keeping up with Keiichi's brisk pace.

"Damn! He sure walks fast with those long legs of his!" she muttered to herself. Keiichi turned around and smiled at her, and then slowed his stroll-pace down a little. Belldandy wondered why...if He was God...didn't Keiichi simply whisk them away to His intended destination? For some reason, his actions in making a rainstorm completely disappear a short while ago had proven incontrovertibly to her that he was who he said he was.

That he was God...

But her thoughts had betrayed her. Belldandy bit her lip, irritated at herself for thinking "them" about she and Keiichi and his mysterious destination...when she really had meant "him". It was _his_ destination, not hers!

"How can I be such an idiot!" she thought. "There's no "them" or "us" existing between me and this Keiichi!"

"So why are you still following me? An invisible string tied between our pinkies, perhaps?" he said, not even turning his head to look at her. He had read her thoughts!

Outraged, Belldandy reached alongside the stone wall next to the sidewalk and pulled out a loose rock without even breaking her pace. Winding up with softball accuracy, she slung the rock at him. It hit Keiichi square in the back of his head; but of course it didn't hurt him. Didn't even faze him. Didn't even move his head a single millimeter!

Across the street, an elderly obaasan working on her garden paused with a shocked expression. Her face turning stern, the eldster immediately launched into a tirade of vituperant scoldings, chewing Belldandy out for throwing rocks at her "boyfriend". The matron was waving her gardening hoe to accent her remonstrations, which oddly reminded Belldandy of an orchestra conductor in the throes of a particularly busy symphony. Normally, she would have found the whole scenario quite funny; getting chewed out by one of the older generation was always a source of amusement. But this wasn't funny at all! Belldandy didn't fully taste the sourness of the vitriolic ranting with her ears...she was face-flushed with embarrassment, because the eldster had had somehow put her and Keiichi 'together' in her ancient mind...

Now she was God's girlfriend in the eyes of an 80-year-old Chiba granny!

She jerkily halted her fast walking. Holding holding her arms straight against her sides, she turned to face Keiichi. Tapping her foot against the sidewalk, she announced, "I'm not moving another step, no matter how how you try to get me to follow. I don't care about you, you...Cosmic Pervert Boy menace!"

Keiichi regarded her with a smile.

"It's so unfair!" she added by way of a shout.

"Of course it is. It's a matter of principle that Life is unfair. Did you ever wonder what Life would be like if every aspect of living a lifetime was sealed within a comfortable equanimity?" Keiichi answered, walking towards her. Belldandy wanted to backstep away from him, but she was rooted to the spot. He stopped a mere meter away from her. His figure framed by the dawning sun, she was reminded how tall he was.

Since he was God, he could be as tall as he wanted to be. At least he wasn't trying to be as tall as some kind of kaiju, like Godzilla or Gamera...

"Math has its own design of perfection, but human beings do not. Yet, human beings transcend mathematics in so many ways. Life lived fully has to _rely_ on the fact that accidents happen! It's a well-known fact that Therarealm mortals make poor houseguests during their stay on the planet. Left to their own devices, they often say the wrong things to each other when their mood becomes unsettled. They frequently lose money or love over acts of avarice and lust. And their governments, heh heh...well their political systems are far more randomized and disordered than a significant number of the social groups that exist in the animal kingdom. In fact, there is little that is neat and tidy about mortals, is there?" Keiichi noted, as if he was talking to himself.

"Likewise, there is little that is neat and tidy about Life itself. So mortals and Life share a common bond by design. Fortunately, order doesn't redeem sentience. And yet, it is these very qualities of untidiness in the mortals that populate your Therarealm...that allow a being such as I to love them so much. Accidents can be endearing, if one is a God like myself. But ultimately, Life doesn't have to 'be' anything. Life is Life...because Life can be always be approached every day with love and kindness towards self and others. The potential is always there. And the 'fairness' of the living experience can never detract from this truth," Keiichi answered.

As he spoke, Keiichi's explanation was lifting in an oddly transcendental way. It was much more than a simple lecture by a professor at Chiba Poly, it was really really deep! For a hallowed minute or two, Belldandy felt a serenity glance her...a feeling she had never encountered before in her life. She was so calm...so _safe_...that nothing stirred her spirit towards uncertainty.

Belldandy had _almost_ bought it. But the profundity of His words seemed to melt away rather quickly as she realized once again that she was still homeless. If life was fair, she'd be sound asleep in her warm bed right now, instead of walking around the suburbs of Chiba super-early on Sunday morning with God. The only other people up and about at this ungodly hour were all the grannies and grandpas fooling around in their gardens. With that, she yawned...sullenly remembering that her present exile from the Girl's Dorm was Keiichi's fault, entirely!

"Life's totally unfair!! How can you believe otherwise! I don't have a place to stay, my sempai are probably going to make fun of me all day tomorrow, and right now I feel utterly, completely hopeless. And it's all because of _you_! Because of that idiot stunt you pulled back there! I still can't believe that you actually _kissed_ me!" she argued, her cheeks snapping with every word.

"And you tasted like strawberries," Keiichi quipped. Belldandy's face flushed berry-red with rage at his words. Keiichi realized his gaffe and nodded apologetically.

"I wish I was a Goddess! Because if I was, I..I would make you take that back! In fact, I'd kiss your...eep! Now you've got me so mad, I can't say what I want to say! JERK!!" Belldandy shouted angrily.

"Sorry, but we don't grant wishes for mortals to become Gods or Goddesses," Keiichi answered matter-of-factly. "Those wishes are on the prohibited list."

"Who said I gave a damn about some kind of wish?! If I were a Goddess, I'd kick your ass, Keiichi!" she declared, full of conviction.

"Ahh...hopelessness. Belldandy, hopelessness is like a small rubber raft..." Keiichi started to say calmly.

"Whatever you're talking about, I don't want to hear it!" Belldandy interrupted. He had completely _ignored_ her! "This is so uncool! How am I supposed to get mad at you...when you don't get mad back?"

Keiichi was looking at her with an amused smirk on his face.

"Stop looking at me!" Belldandy demanded.

"When one is on the raft, it's all they know, Belldandy," Keiichi continued. "Sometimes, hopelessness becomes a life raft of sorts for people. It keeps them safe and sane during times of trial and self-doubt. But something significant happens to a very select group of people, people like yourself, Belldandy. The kind of people who are willing to look over the sides of the rubber raft. The rubber raft of hopelessness...is always kept afloat, because it is floating on an ocean. And do you know what that ocean is, Belldandy?" he asked.

Belldandy silently shook her head.

"That ocean...is an ocean of Hope."

Something about the way Keiichi answered his question seemed to fathom deep into Belldandy's heart. If He was God...then he was a God of Hope! Over the years, she had stored away a clockwork of moments in her life; a parade of doubts brought on by the disturbing realization that Life was always out to get her. That Life was out to oppress her. But his words had jarred that secret chamber of her heart open, and the memoried fears spilled away like clouds borne on a strong wind. Suddenly, Belldandy felt totally f_ree_! Keiichi had told her that Hope prevails over _ everything_! In fact, she felt like she was an angel...

Unexpectedly, she felt so happy, she was in tears.

"I'm..snff.._not_ gonna cry!" she promised herself even as she felt a trickle of teardrops flowing down next to her nose.

"Ahhh...we're here!" Keiichi said, gesturing to an wooden entry gate. Belldandy halted her sobbing; they had been standing and talking the whole time, but now they were somewhere else. Just as she was going ask Keiichi where they were, he reached in a pocket and produced a handkerchief, and then handed it to her wordlessly. Belldandy flashed a reluctant half-grin and then daubed at her eyes. At least he didn't make fun of her crying...

"All this is yours..." Keiichi noted to her, nodding towards the gate with a swing of his head. Belldandy finished attending her eyes...and then had to blink them again, because she was filled with unbelief.

They were standing in the entryway to a Buddhist temple! The temple itself was in the middle of a walled enclosure, about 30 meters intowards the central yard. Belldandy was sincerely shocked; she definitely didn't remember a temple being here! Not only that, but the temple was one of those big ones, like the kind shown in the samurai dramas. A tall, stately wooden retaining wall circled the grounds on all four sides. Several outbuildings of ancient appearance was visible nearby the main temple 'house'. The main building was a medieval-looking single-storey structure. It was definitely the real thing! Belldandy marveled as she realized that two or three good-sized modern homes could easily fit inside the central building. And the grounds were enormous, maybe the size of three or four soccer fields! The whole scene had a peculiar rustic charm amidst the sanctity of the temple environs; looking at it, Belldandy imagined that a small farm had somehow been transported to the middle of Chiba...

"...and mine," he finished.

Belldandy's ascent into the airy realms of appreciation suddenly turned leaden, as the reality of _that_ statement plunged her down into the mud of reality. She was so shocked, she had to replay the words in her memory just to make sure she heard them right.

"NO FUCKIN' WAY!" she answered with a shouted gasp of dismay and anger.

"Sshh...keep it down! He's coming!" Keiichi said, waving her to be quiet. As soon as he finished his caution, a black-robed shave-head priest holding a weathered sweep-broom stepped in front of them. Belldandy let out an "eep!" of surprise, the bonze had rounded the gateway corner so quickly. He would have walked straight past them, but her "eep!" had caught his attention.

The priest turned to face them and bowed perfunctorily.

"Sir, we seek shelter. My friend and I would be most honored if you could extend the temple's hospitality to us, for we are in dire straits and are in need of both sustenence and guidance," Keiichi asked, suddenly a paragon of respectful gentility. In true priestly fashion, the elderly monk rubbed the back of his bald pate while he mulled things over.

Despite her bloom of anger towards Keiichi's presumption that she _and_ he would be staying here, Belldandy did manage to briefly giggle; privately amused by the notion that the priest was talking to God Himself...and didn't even know it. The monk shifted his attention to her, and she sucked up her giggle rather quickly as he fixed his deep-browed blue-grey eyes on her for a moment. His whole face was a frown; she sensed that he was scanning her soul for any sign of moral blemishes, it seemed. After a full minute of this scrutiny, he mentioned "You're tall, for a woman!" and then returned his attention to Keiichi.

Belldandy rolled her eyes with disbelief.

"I will admit you to these sacred premises...but you must abide by certain guidelines. You both must promise that no...carnal...acts will occur between the two of you while you stay here," he stated. Keiichi readily agreed, while Belldandy almost bit her tongue with embarrassment. Certainly, Keiichi was acting no-nonsense, dealing with the priest with a measure of tact she didn't know he possessed. Tact he definitely didn't display when he surprised her at the Girl's Dorm...

The elderly temple-keeper went on to note several other conditions with an equal degree of frankness. As he listed the 'rules of conduct' as it were, Belldandy felt almost insulted. He was directing his conditions to Keiichi, as if to infer that he was responsible for her. But then again, Belldandy observed to herself, he _was_ a priest. Perhaps he was put off by having to deal with a young, attractive, modern girl such as she.

Keiichi turned his head and nodded approvingly at her, as if he was praising her.

"I live here by myself, and as you can see, this temple is in grave need of repairs," he opined wearily. "I can only manage to keep the old kondo hall and a few other rooms in good repair. The Bell Tower is going to collapse one of these years, and the flooring around the temple is naught but warped wood. If only..."

"Then perhaps she and I can help you clean things up a bit, as recompense for your generosity. I bet that its been a while since you've had a meal cooked for you," Keiichi offered, glancing meaningfully at Belldandy.

"That..totally..majorly.._blows_!" she shouted...but only in her thoughts. It took all of Belldandy's emotional strength to bite off the protest that was ready to pounce off her tongue. Now Keiichi had appointed her as _temple cook_! Even if he was God, he was acting like some idiot male pig! A couple moments later, resigned to her fate, Belldandy wondered how in the Seven Hells would she know how to cook any fare that a monk might eat? She shuddered as she realized that she was not only cooking for a priest...but she was cooking for God. Could God get an upset stomach? What if she burned the meal she was supposed to make for Him? Belldandy instantly regretted the fact that she had skipped out of so many Home Economics classes while in Jr. and Sr. high school. Jogging laps on the school's track was much more important than baking brownies...

An hour later, she was busy chopping daikon, onions, and melons in the kitchen while Keiichi and the priest were deep into a discussion about something called the "Seal of Exposition". The kitchen was a disappointment; a small fridge with nothing but vegetables to be sliced and several tubs of miso soup paste. No sodas, no beers, no milk, no chilled coffee...just a few pitchers of ice water. The stove looked like it was pre-Pacific War; it was an old iron-grilled thing that looked as sturdy as a SUV. A large open-fire rice cooker pot was bubbling on the gas-heated stove. Belldandy found herself wishing that there was a phone in the kitchen, so she could order a pizza...

Then she blanched as she remembered how her most recent phone call had turned her life upside down.

"Grrr! Life isn't..chop chop chop..any fair!"

It wasn't enough that she had to cook for Keiichi and the elderly temple priest. The 'lunch' had turned out all right...as far as Keiichi and the priest were concerned. Belldandy thought she was eating mush: the rice was undercooked and chewy; the daikons and other vegetables were overcooked and pasty; the miso soup was too thin and unflavored. But the priest said his devout preambles before the meal, and finished his bowls down to the last speck of rice without a single utterance of complaint.

She washed the dishes while Keiichi and the priest conversed about something called the "Four Corners of Sanctity". Belldandy was already feeling threadbare; she was worried that they'd have her scrubbing the wooden floors next. Sure enough, the priest called her out as soon as she finished the dishes...but instead of putting her to more labors, he 'invited' her to sit in meditation with he and Keiichi.

"It's India's everlasting gift to humanity, this practice of quiet reflection called 'meditation'," he had insisted. Fifteen minutes later, Belldandy found herself in an ill-fitting novice priest's robe that smelled musty from years of disuse, sitting on a hard cloth pillow in front of a trio of metal-worked Buddha images.

"If life isn't tragedy...it's comedy!" she thought as she examined her new attire.

Before the meditation session started, the priest launched into an explanation of how something called the "Cosmic Buddha" ruled over all of the "other Buddhas" except for the "Earthly Buddha Shakya". He pointed to the three bronze figures at the head of the small meditation hall and launched into a professorial description of some of their attributes, such as their clothes, their hand-gestures and their expressions. Belldandy was quickly lost in the lecture and almost drifted off to sleep. After all, she had been up all day...and all night.

And now it was mid-afternoon...

The priest rang a ceremonial bell to begin the meditation session.

Belldandy promptly nodded off...

"SMACK!!"

She heard the sound before she felt the sting on her shoulder. Jolted to wakefulness thus, she started to stand to her feet, fully intent on throttling whoever had just hit her. The last thing in the world she expected was to be hit with an object. She was struck by a mortifying suspicion...could Coach Chihiro have found out where she was? As she struggled to launch herself at her assailant, an invisible force restrained her to her meditation mat. She looked at the priest, who was holding some kind of wooden switch. Obviously, he had hit her...

But why?

"Don't fall asleep again, or you'll get it!" Keiichi whispered to her. "There's a difference between contemplation...and contemplating sheep jumping over a fence."

"Very funny!" Belldandy hissed languidly. The priest waved the wooden stick in his hands, making it clear through his motions that he would hit her again if she said one more word. Resigned, Belldandy closed her eyes and tried to concentrate.

But the only 'mantra' that circled around her thoughts was that life was unfair.

EARTH:

I had to watch the whole tragedy unravel, because there was no way to avoid it. If I could have stepped my mind and soul away from the coil of this calamity, just for a moment, I would gladly done so. But sometimes, witnessing can be as burning as experiencing...and no amount of reluctance can shut my eyes or my heart.

Apparently, Keiichi was the first to come to, followed by Skuld and Urd...and then Mara. Skuld was frightened and uncertain, Urd had been pounded hollow, and Mara was exhausted to the point of collapse. To his surprise, he discovered that I was alive as well. For a moment, I was encompassed by a celebratory enthusiasm; the three of them had hovered around me as we exchanged hugs. To them, my safe return not only marked a restoration of loss, but my presence certified in some sense that Isilblius had been prevented from prying his way into the Multiverses and cutting a swath of destruction...

Shortly after I gained consciousness, Miyuki and Natsumi walked into the temple grounds and joined our circle. We learned that the two policewomen had come to inside of their trusty police car. Remarkably, they and their trusty Today patrol car had been transported almost 25 kilometers from the Tokyo Bayfront fisherman's wharfs near Shinagawa to our temple house in Makuhari. Miyuki appeared dazed, while Natsumi was physically ill, but otherwise they were unharmed. They recognized the temple from their adventure with an injured Keiichi during SuperTyphoon Akira; Miyuki returned with their car and parked it inside the temple, under the guise of checking to see if we were all okay. Actually, I surmised that Miyuki and Natsumi's motives seemed more fired up by a need to seek assurance and comfort. It wasn't every day that they encountered a 's‚ance'...and wound up regaining consciousness moments later in a different part of the city. Natsumi quipped that their 'flight path' would have taken them directly over Tokyo Disneyland. After a few moments while we all decompressed somewhat, they called Bokuto Precinct to report that they were going to spend the afternoon in Makuhari investigating a 'disappearance'.

It was clear to me that none of them seemed to remember their transcendental cosmological experience.

Conversely, I could remember patches of my experience while I was in union with the Ultimate Force...but I could not remember the weeks leading up to my 'death'. I felt the chilling horror that accompanies being dispossessed of one's own ego and will by something evil and malign. To think that Isilblius made me a secret unto myself, using me in an attempt to return to the Everything and destroy it! The sense of a lurking shadow inside of me suggested a Gothic sentiment of unease. Gothic horror isn't about dressing up in Halloween black and listening to Die Krupps or Skinny Puppy. "Gothic" horror in its original form as authored by writers like Walpole and Lewis narrated stories about prodigies and omens that threaten to awaken the dormant 'secret dweller' inside of each of us. What the Japanese call "moboroshi". Thus, while the others were joyously welcoming my 'return', I was troubled by the possibilities. Would be any further hidden darkenings brought to light? Was I truly freed of Isilblius? Were we truly safe?

Was I clearly myself?

As I embraced their good cheer, I sensed the irony of the situation. Keiichi and the three Divine women were grateful to see me; they remembered everything up to the point where they had been whisked away by the column of light generated by their mandala. According to them, I had been miraculously restored to life. A restoration that had been authored by their own efforts, by their deep concern and friendship.

But deep inside, I wanted to celebrate _them_; they were the ones who had saved my life. Not by summoning my Soul back via the Returning Mandala, but by actions of a far more cosmic nature...

They had saved _everything_!

"All of existence...and then some..." I had muttered with bittersweet joy. "And no one can tell them 'Well done!'"

However, the thrill of being alive again was tempered by a sobering loss.

Urd.

As Urd stepped over to hug me, I could immediately sense the missing depths between us. There was no tight embrace or kiss from her. Within an instance of romantic impulse, I wanted to stroke her hair; just to touch it tenderly and smell its perfume-like essence. But when I reached towards her, the _unknowing_ in her eyes stayed my hand. It was then that I remembered what I had done...the gulf that had been created between she and I. Her eyes sparkled with irrecognition.

In order to achieve Balance, I had to 'uncreate' the love that existed between she and I. But I could only uncreate half of it; Urd would never remember being in love with me. I had chosen to remove her memories rather than mine, because one of us would have to live with a lifetime of regrets for lost love. A Goddess 'lives' a life every 700,000 years. I will only live another 40-50 years.

The choice had been so obvious.

But in that interrupted moment of reunion, my own heart sighed...as I could sense the weight of every moment of every journey into love that I had shared with Urd. Urd, thankfully could not. Wordlessly, she was blithely unaware of the romantic history that we had shared in the past.

Which was as it should be...

Urd's remembrance of her love for me had been removed...sterilized...by my actions when I had UF powers. There was no other way to grant 'safe access' for the Seven to accomplish their task. Part of the reason Isilblius had been unleashed the first time was due to Urd's initial granting of my wish. Thereafter, the progression of events that led to Isilblius were really very simple:

I had wished to become the Balance when Urd, not a regular GRO Goddess, had been summoned to grant my wish -- the Enigma Book had been brought to me in order to help this wish along -- Isilblius had influenced Mara to use the instructions in the Enigma Book to resurrect him -- Isilblius had destroyed the Everything and I fought him, finally defeating him and exiling him away, and then I rebuilt the Everything...with a few modifications -- while in UF form, I created the Enigma Book then and sent it into the past so my 'earlier' self could use it to defeat Isilblius -- despite Mindwiping myself and the others so no one would remember Isilblius, Isilblius had guilefully hidden a part of himself in me and in the Enigma Book -- to effect his return, he had slow-poisoned my psyche and my Soul, so that if either should die, he would freed from the place I had exiled him to -- Urd had killed me, out of love, to prevent his return...but Isilblius had returned anyway and had destroyed the Everything -- the Seven had received my UF powers and transformed them into an "Intimate Force", which allowed them to defeat Isilblius for good and then recreate the Everything v3...the OmniArc -- Isilblius was gone, wiped from existence by the Seven.

And my wish had never been granted, my love with Urd never realized...at least from her perspective.

In hindsight, I realized that Urd had been drawn to me because _something unknown_ had chosen me for her. If there had been no love, there would have been no wish...and with no wish to be the Balance, there would have been no Isilblius. One of us would have to be made to forget. I had earnestly wanted to retain our love, more than any other conceivable outcome...but there was one thing I wanted even more than that.

Beyond this was my overkeening need to protect both her and the Everything. It would be my last act of love for her, offered in an amnesiac veil of complete anonymity. A small thing to sacrifice for the good of the whole. And for some stupid reason, I had assumed that I would be able to bear the loss. But the moment I felt the _absence_ between she and I...I felt an absence inside of me as well. I had amputated my heart. No longer could I feel how Urd had made me feel; a sense of belonging that had blanketed my heart and Soul with a feeling of comfort that I had never experienced before. I realized that I had asked too much of myself.

In my efforts to strive towards nobility, I had accomplished stupidity instead.

Sounds like a possible plot for a novel of epic proportions, a work of fiction that maybe could fit within a hundred chapters or so. Either this...or it was the sorriest indulgence of sci-fi soap opera ever imagined!

In any case, it was clear that Urd didn't remember a thing about me.

However, there were ripples...

Casting Urd within a cloud of knowing also meant that the others would also 'forget' the romantic history between Urd and I. But would they forget _more_? What would be the repercussions of removing one single relationship from the web of love, friendship and camaraderie that existed between Keiichi, the Goddesses, and myself?

But now it is time to reflect on the _real_ tragedy...

According to Aristotle, the central character of a tragedy must not appear to be so virtuous to our inclinations that...rather than feeling pity or fear at his or her downfall...we are simply possessed by a sense of outrage towards what happens to them. But what if a character _is_ virtuous? What if the character in this 'play' of ours acts with merit, loves those around them with the totality of their being, remains always open to the possibility that any moment may usher forth a profound sense of bliss? What if the protagonist is deeply in love with another...a love that is off-the-radar impossible, but yet it manifests in their life. A love that is so well-deserved, so _right_ with the universe of possibilities...that one can only witness their falling in love as something far beyond pre-ordained? If Love is the roots, then what is tragedy but the rotting of the roots?

And how do _we_ survive, emotionally, the deeply-felt loss that occurs when the 'unknown' of reality swoops in and utterly destroys a human heart? If it is our own human heart, then we are forced to realize that we must go on despite what has happened...but each movement of 'moving on' only serves to poignantly remind us of what was taken away. If the loss belongs most indelibly to someone else...someone we care about, then our own sense of humanity is tarnished; diminished by the acute awareness of our own internal flaws, or the flaws of the universe as a whole.

Which is worse: being burned raw by the deepest loss, or seeing another person find a haunting emptiness in that sacred place in their kokoro?

Compassion becomes defeated by the inexplicable 'other'...

Keiichi. Urd. Skuld. Mara. Miyuki. Natsumi.

Which left one other person unaccounted for.

I still haze-remembered what had happened at the end...what had gone _right_ about the Seven. They had achieved the dream that I could only glimpse; not only had they defeated Isilblius, but they had also harnessed the Ultimate Force and transformed it into the Intimate Force, so that they could forge the impossibility of the OmniArc.

There was a reason while the world-trees of Yggdrasil and Vanagdrasil had been transformed into a near infinitude of Divine realms. The expansion from two Multiverses to a 'flower' comprising 7,777,777 to the 7,777,777th power Multiverses was staggering. That's the idea of overkill.

But now, something dreadful had happened to Keiichi and Belldandy.

And Keiichi didn't know what it was.

"What do you mean 'so she's gone'?!" Skuld yelled, balling her fists and gulping in her throat deeply after shouting. Urd locked a restraining hand on her younger sister's shoulder, trying to rein in Skuld's volcanic rage. She knew her little sister well; if Skuld was allowed to continue yelling and raging like this, it wouldn't be too long before she started pulling Skuld Bombs out of her jacket.

"So your sister's gone," Keiichi repeated back at her. "That doesn't mean that it's the end of the world, Skuld! That's all I'm trying to say. I know something pretty whacked out happened to us back there, back at the Bay. I'm the last one who can explain what happened. All I know is that we were there...and then we wound up _here_ a moment later, minus Belldandy. But we got Cevn back, so it wasn't a complete failure. I'm concerned that she's gone too. But I can understand why you guys are so more upset than I am. After all, Belldandy _is_ your sister."

"Shouldn't it be the other way around, Keiichi?" Mara asked in a gravelly voice. She had been silent for the past few minutes, still overawed by what had happened. She wanted to fall asleep sitting up, but she had forced herself to stay awake no matter what.

"Huh?"

"Skuld and Urd have a sisterly connection to Belldandy that none of us can even begin to fathom. But you shared something much deeper with Belldandy. At least deeper in another sense than the bonds of family," Cevn observed, visibly worried.

"I've been around you long enough to know how you act when something happens to Belldandy," Mara added. "To put it bluntly, you go apeshit with worry. But now, you're acting smooth as silk despite the fact that she'd gone missing. So...WHAT THE BLESS IS WRONG WITH YOU?!"

Urd flinched as Mara screamed at the end.

Keiichi momentarily hunched his shoulders, caught between flight and fight. He hadn't done anything wrong...and yet, here were Belldandy's sisters; each of them were yelling at him. Especially Mara. Even if she was a Demoness, he felt a substantial irritation and resentment toward her. Towards Urd and Skuld too. They all seemed to be misdirecting their frustrations, punishing him for Belldandy's disappearance.

"Look, there is nothing wrong with me...except for the fact that I wound up being zapped by a big column of light, transported 25 kilometers by magical means, and now I've got a super-sized headache and no aspirin. Now, your sister is gone...and you guys are raggin' _me_ about it! I had nothing to do with Belldandy's disappearance! So why don't you three try to get your wits in synch and start looking for her, instead of trouncing on me?"

"Keiichi, did you say 'Belldandy'?" Urd asked.

"Of course I said 'Belldandy'!" Keiichi snapped back. "That's her name, isn't it? What else would I call her?"

Urd noticed that her two sisters were just as troubled as she was. After Miyuki and Natsumi left, they had searched every nook-and-cranny of the temple grounds for Belldandy. Urd was hoping that her sister was simply rendered unconscious by whatever event had brought the rest of them here. The mandala had restored Cevn to life, but it wasn't supposed to zap them back to the temple.

Which meant that something went wrong...

And now, Keiichi wasn't acting himself. He was acting goofy, especially by his lack of concern over Belldandy's disappearance. Mara was right: Keiichi should be wringing his hands with vexatious worry, instead of acting all low-profile and such.

"Well, since you guys have been a couple...and you've done _everything_ with each other," Mara said with a wink, "doesn't that mean that you should call her 'Bell-chan'? That's what guys do, isn't it?"

Keiichi visibly flushed at the overtly sexual content of Mara's words. He looked at Cevn, the only other male in the group, for support. But Cevn seemed to be out of sorts concerning the topic of conversation. For some reason, he was staring at Urd...

"Wh..wha...waitaminute!" Keiichi stammered. "Don't talk wild stuff like that in front of Skuld! You'll get her upset! She's liable to do anything!"

Skuld raised an eyebrow at this. Keiichi was acting like he'd done something to offend her, which irritated her. She was a big girl now; if his actions pissed her off, she'd be sure to let him know. But this assumption on his part that she was going to blow up at him...that was borderline contemptible. She felt like he was making her out to be some kind of taunt-tempered witch girl...

She demanded that Keiichi explain himself.

"I..I mean, Belldandy and I _didn't do anything_! H..how could we? You're implying that she and I have ha..ah..ha.."

"'Sex' is the word you're searching for," Urd finished. Keiichi's face drained of color, a visible lump in his throat.

"But not only sex. You and my younger sister have been together for the last five years. I was checking up on you two for a few months after she granted your wish, just to seek if anything was cookin' between the two of you. But you being you, and my sister...well, being herself, I found out that nothing was happening. You were both googling each other with these kawaii fawning eyes almost every moment you two were alone. I just couldn't stand it any longer! So I..."

"So Big Sister dropped in on you two, and promptly got her license suspended!" Skuld interrupted.

"That's not all that happened, you brat!" Urd shot back. "I tried to get you and Belldandy to get all 'mellow-mellow' with each other. But it backfired, and I got in trouble with the Almighty. So I got stuck here, playing chaperone to a boy and a girl who wanted to get it on, but were too shy to admit it to themselves."

"And then there's me!" Mara jumped in. "I was stuck here too, because of that stupid wish that you made! I kept having to stir up shit in your life in an attempt to offset your wish, because _I_ got assigned to you too. When you made your wish, Keiichi...the Demoness Grief Office dispatched me to try and 'intercept' your wish before Belldandy could grant it. But I ended up arriving a few moments too late. So as long as your wish is in force with Belldandy, I have to disrupt it. But in the end, I found out that these two bimbos here are my sisters..."

"I am not a bimbo!" Urd protested vociferously.

"Yes, you are!" Skuld shouted with a smirk.

"...and so now we're all friends. Sort of," Mara concluded.

"I was brought here more recently," Cevn added. "But it was by an airplane, not through any supernatural means. Urd brought me to Japan. Then I got a job at N.I.T. as a teacher, and I found myself renting Megumi's old apartment, and then later on I moved in here."

"Be that as it may, you're relationship with Belldandy had progress quite...well...in the past couple of years. You finally consummated your lust with..." Urd said slyly.

"It's love, not lust, Big Sister!" Skuld interjected angrily. "Why do you always have to have your mind set upon ecchi topics?!" She noticed Cevn, who seemed to be looking at Urd with a wistful expression.

"Urd!" Keiichi screeched, almost looking like he was going to have an emotional meltdown. "What about Skuld? Please don't accuse me of things! Skuld might hurt me!"

Instead of being irritated this time, Skuld found herself giggling in reaction to Keiichi's near-terror. He was almost begging Urd to keep the topic away from sex.

"Oh, that was a long time ago, Keiichi! Water under the bridge!" Skuld managed between giggles. Keiichi looked at her with a shocked expression, as if he hadn't expected to hear what she had just said.

"When I first came to the Earthrealm, I used to hate you," Skuld admitted.

"Rumor has it that you were the first one besides me to see Keiichi in the nude!" Mara noted with teasing eyes.

"SHUT UP, MARA!" Skuld retorted sharply, her face blushed.

Keiichi found himself unconsciously crossing his arms in front of himself defensively. Being out-talked by two Goddesses and a Demoness was bad enough; he couldn't get a word in edge-wise. Cevn wasn't much help either; he was more of an observer than a participant. But now they were talking about his body! When he noticed how he was squirming with discomfort, he quickly uncrossed his arms and start snapping his fingers nervously.

"Look, I know I've been a pest at times!" Skuld confessed. "I looked up to Elder Sister...and when I saw that she was starting to like you, I felt insulted. And maybe a little scared, because I was worried that I'd lose her to you. But then _I_ got stuck on the Earthrealm. And it wasn't because I did something wrong like Big Sister or because I had to stay here because of a job, like my other Big Sister. Unlike them, I was _asked_ to stay here by the Lord..."

Mara was about ready to give Skuld a thorough dressing-down, but Urd beat her to it.

"Yeah, right!" Urd interjected. "The Lord doesn't ask anybody anything! He _assigned_ you to be an Earthrealm trainee, _Little Sister_! No doubt because He probably knew what everyone else knew...that you're so immature, you needed lesser beings like Earthrealm mortals to teach you how to act like a grown up!"

Mara burst into laughter as Skuld's expression sharpened.

"But I..." Keiichi start to speak up.

"Skuld here was assigned to the Earthrealm by the Lord. But she eventually came to respect how our sister feels towards you, Keiichi. So why are you acting all worried that she's going to get angry with you?" Urd asked.

"Big Sister's right, much as I hate to admit it," Skuld acknowledged with a sigh. "I mean, it's okay that you and Elder Sister are doing that...hentai thing...that you mortals do. Just don't do it in front of me, or ask me to join in with you..."

Mara slapped a hand to her forehead in exasperation, while Keiichi tried to tuck his head under his shirt collar to conceal his bright red cheeks. Urd simply stared at her little sister, caught up in a wordless mental dithyramb.

"I can't believe she's been on the Earthrealm for over four years, and then she uncorks a statement like _that_!" Mara acknowledged with a snorting sigh after the silence loomed too loud.

The meaning of Skuld's words finally caught up with her. Skuld didn't mean it _that_ way, but all the dirty minds in the circle had interpreted her reasonable statement with perverted intent. Ashamed beyond the breach, she spun around on her heel to face away from the others, and then started fidgeting with her hair, too embarrassed to say anything. After all, it was Big Sister Urd's fault that she had gotten too excited, and then said such an ecchi thing!

Urd, meanwhile, was watching Keiichi intently. Skuld's little gaffe was over-the-top funny, but she couldn't find it in herself to break down into belly laughs. It was either too funny to laugh at...or she was too worried about Belldandy to give in to mirth.

Keiichi's love for her sister was perhaps the strongest romantic love between two beings that she had ever encountered. It was so intense that, at first, it had overwhelmed both of them. Sometimes you miss the forest for the trees...and in the case of Belldandy and Keiichi, their love was so strong, they couldn't give voice to it for the longest time. And then, once they did admit their feelings to themselves, it took another stretch of time and a lot of nudging from their hearts before they shared the deep feelings they had for each other. After that, it was only a matter of time...

But their love had deepened, reminding Urd in some ways of her own relationship with Troubadour. The maturation of Keiichi's love for Belldandy didn't just stop with holding hands, exchanging presents, dating, working out conflicts, making love to each other...

Even after he had proposed to her, his love for her sister still grew. He had literally risked his life to save her and Skuld after they had tried to find him in Tindouf. Urd was away from the Earthrealm at that time, but she remembered how proud she was that Keiichi was willing to give _everything_ to free Belldandy from her imprisonment in the desert. Even then, his love had matured...he had actually moved Mother to tears with his confession of love for Belldandy...

A Mother's heart is the most protective force in the universe, and Keiichi had breached it with his sincerity. All of a sudden, Urd watched as her Mother was filled with maternal joy, rambling on to everyone she met about her daughter's fiance...

And now, Keiichi was...markedly different.

"You still haven't answered my question, Keiichi," Mara said in a serious voice. "For someone who's deeply in love, you're sure acting aloof and unconcerned about the disappearance of your fiancee. She may be your fiancee, but she's my younger sister too! Shouldn't you be biting your fingernails with worry or something? Don't you care that she's gone? You're almost acting like a Demon, putting on airs of unconcern!"

"Ah..aha ha," Keiichi started shouting. No one could tell if he was laughing or crying. But eventually, he broke into maniacal laughter.

"Ah hah ha was not bwah ha ha ha hah!"

Unused to being laughed at by Keiichi, Mara grinned angrily, baring her fangs.

"What are you laughing at, you retard?" Skuld managed. Either he was insane...or he was stupid, laughing at Mara like that!

"Belldandy and me...in love?" Keiichi stuttered, almost choking on his laughter. "You've gotta be kidding!"

"Huh?!" the three sisters and Cevn gasped.

"What about your wish? What about how you feel about Belldandy?" Urd asked, her voice faltering. She was absolutely stunned to the core of her heart by Keiichi's reaction.

Cevn searched Keiichi's eyes to determine the truth of Keiichi's statement. He didn't believe that Keiichi could believe he wasn't in love with Belldandy. Ever since he had arrived in Japan via Urd, Keiichi had been deeply in love. Satisfied that Keiichi was being genuine, Cevn's face clouded over with worry, as if something was deeply disturbing and unprecedented.

"What are you guys talking about?!" Keiichi continued. "Some kind of wish? I don't remember making any kind of wish! As for Belldandy, I was at the Men's Dorm, and I called out for some noodles or something...and I ended up talking to her. I didn't know she was a Goddess, I thought she was some girl who worked at the noodle shop! But you all know this already!"

"Uh, Keiichi...maybe you could explain it again, for our benefit," Mara and Cevn both requested warily.

"Okay," he answered with a nod. "I was talking to Belldandy, but right in the middle of our call, some guy with a deep voice gets on the phone. He tells me that he's her dad, and that I've been randomly selected by the Yggdrasil computer to be her husband."

Urd, Skuld and Mara all exchanged glances of astonishment as Keiichi paused to catch his breath.

"Needless to say, I freaked out! I hung up the phone, thinking it was a prank my sempai set up. But a few minutes later, Belldandy pops out of a mirror with a marriage contract in her hand. Naturally, I tried to avoid her. But then all these bad things happened to me. I got kicked out of my dorm, my bike broke down on a daily basis...well, you get the picture."

"No I don't!" Skuld peeped in before Mara or Urd could 'sssh!' her.

"I realized that there was nothing I could do about it. Being a regular guy, I was quite upset...because I want to marry the woman_ I_ want to marry! This is the 21st century, y'know!" Keiichi continued. "But after awhile, I realized that it was fate. Belldandy's mom and dad kept cursing me with misfortune until I signed the damned thing."

Mara was utterly taken aback at the notion of Gods 'cursing' mortals. Cevn leaned over and whispered "that's impossible!" in her ear. Mara nodded her head in agreement.

"It's all fate that brought Belldandy and I together. After all, you're all Gods and Goddesses...and Demonesses. So what could I do under the circumstances?"

"Don't you love her?" Skuld asked.

"Look...I know she's my fiancee, but it doesn't mean that I love her. The whole thing was her parent's idea. Don't you know anything about arranged marriages? Just because we're getting married by omiai doesn't mean that some switch is going to be thrown on our wedding night, and I suddenly start loving your sister! These things take time! Belldandy's kinda like a good friend to me, but nothing more. She's a good cook and housekeeper, she's funny in her own way, she's not bad to look at, and her being a Goddess comes in handy once in a while," Keiichi explained.

Skuld felt like she was going to have a heart attack as Keiichi rattled off Belldandy's good points. She barely heard Mara ask "what have you been smoking, Keiichi?" She didn't know what was worse: Keiichi's skewed appreciation of Belldandy's assets; or the fact that he wasn't in love with her sister. As long as she had known him, he had been in love with her sister! Now, Keiichi was describing a completely different reality than what she knew was the truth!

What had happened in that circle of light?

Her middle sister was missing, while everyone else had been returned safely to the temple grounds. Keiichi, who had been completely absorbed in his love for her sister for _years_, was now acting like he barely knew her! Cevn, who had died because Isilblius was trying to use him to gain access to the Multiverses, was now alive and in their midst. But even he was acting funny. Skuld kept catching him staring at Big Sister Urd when she wasn't watching.

But the worst of it was that Belldandy was still gone.

Skuld felt haunted by the awareness that something had died recently...

Keiichi was troubled as he searched out the rest of the temple grounds, trying to discover where Belldandy was. He couldn't understand why everyone was so upset when he admitted that he didn't love Belldandy. He _did_ like her, and he considered that he might be able to learn to love her, given time. But they were all acting as if his heart had been burnt up with the flames of love from the first moment he met her.

It simply wasn't true!

The temple house was intact; it looked the same as before with its rustic charm. They had been through the grounds searching for hours, and he was getting tired of the effort. Everything looked the same as before. He strolled by Banpei's shed and the garage, heading back towards the temple house when his thoughts were interrupted by a horrified scream...

"Keiichi!!" an alarmed voice shouted. "The _koi_!"

Keiichi could see terror writ across Skuld and Urd's eyes. Skuld was pointing at the koi pond, her face ghost-pale. Cevn was running toward the two sisters, while Mara phased into existence about them. Mara immediately covered her mouth with her hands, her eyes wide with dismay.

Keiichi looked at the koi pond...and then his breath was stolen from him by shock.

It was frozen solid.

He walked towards the impossibly-frozen pond, his whole being cancerously unsettled. Belldandy had crafted the koi pond so that this would never happen! How could it be possibly be frozen?

Unless...

As he reached the pond, Keiichi suddenly sagged to the ground, like a collapsing building.

Underneath the ice, captured in perfect, crystalline stillness like a fly in amber or a figure in a amethystine Wyeth painting...was Belldandy!


	107. Pt 107: Backfire

**Part 107: Backfire**

This was the one reality she could never imagine surviving.

The chambered hall in the Cathedral of Memories was a soft grey drift of silence. Delicacy rhymed with bulwark, the arching walls of solid light preserved a nobleness to the place; a sanctity for those who wished to reflect on the truths of self-knowledge. But for her, the Cathedral was a guardian of sanity...the sanity of numbness. Perhaps it was also a sentinel; a verse rendered into form. A house of relief, that would draw out the pain of all the questions that remained unanswered, even after the passage of dozens of centuries.

The black-garbed woman visited here often, because the sameness of the walls was a comfort. But the quietude of the sanctum was not; she didn't want to be comforted by stillness of the chambered silence. She fought, she _refused_ to be succored by the serenity of the great hall. Instead, she came here for the utter and absolute privacy afforded by the Cathedral. As the Cathedral sensed her presence, an invisible bell would begin to toll from within the tallest tower; a resounding reminder to all that the hall was occupied by the one whose moments must never be disturbed. The Cathedral respected her Soul, even if she did not.

Gathering herself within the hall, she was floating to remember, to dream, to reflect. And then she would start screaming. The journey inside...the hard-sought pathway to her heart...would forever more would be a winding passage through tortured hales of truth. Her spirit hung suspended at times within those pale unyielding walls, dazed with grief. The Present had become an infection, a blistering suppression of joy that cornered against itself, until it spiraled into a bleak darkness.

Time had no meaning. After the scream-cleansing was done, she gathered herself, drawing her cloak around her shoulders. She always felt so weakened after exhaling her pain. A moment later, the silence of the place got to her; she quickly floated above the floor towards the portal doors.

She was a flowing myth of shadow. A long, pitch-colored unornamented greatcoat descended down to her ankles, covering her like a blanket. Underneath the cloaking coat, she was dressed simply in a long-sleeved black blouse, with a matching pair of leather flared jeans. Black lace gloves covered her delicate hands. Simplicity; a geometric darkness that mirrored the malaise inside of her.

She was dressed in black. Totally and completely, except for a single locket that she wore around her neck.

The locket contained the only color, the only light, that she would bare her face to.

In her Soul, she could hear the echoes of his voice...calling her name, calling her for love. She could almost taste his breath on her lips as he spoke gentle confidences to her as she half-slept in his arms. Each and every single sweet word contained a world-full of memories, because that was what her heart directed her mind to do. To remember it all. Dream-like, a soaring dizziness gripped her momentarily as the words filled themselves, pouring into a mental image of his eyes. The pulsing twinkle of _openness_ in his eyes would draw her in, and the vibrancy of his Love for her that she witnessed therein suggested the treasures of his heart. Soon she was hearing the rhythmic cadence of his heartbeats...another language that was now lost to her forever.

Every day, she wrestled with the Beast of her memories. When the twines of grief became too great a confinement upon her spirit, she would come here to witness herself. She would scream her pain...and then remember between each scream. But memory was a bitter salve for her wounds. Soon, the memories would become too complete, too vivid. Her screams would exhaust themselves into deep sobs; her tears became flakes of snow as she recognized that she would have to become the knife. That she would have to sever herself from her memories...her joys...once again. Knife-like, because witnessing herself only bore her towards witnessing truths that were worn and faded over time. Memories of the one great love of her life, transformed into tattered bleaknesses that loomed over her like gangrened bones, threatening to crush her...

With a sudden motion, she gripped the locket in the palm of her hand, holding onto it so tight that her hand started to bleed. She _wanted_ to feel the pain of closing that locket, shutting away the picture within.

Gritting her teeth, she tucked it back into her blouse, where it rested next to her heart. No one in all of Yggdrasil knew of the existence of her locket, except for Kami-sama. The entire ritual of her grief had been repeated thousands of times in this place, this Cathedral of Memories. This Palace of her Sorrow. And yet, each time she moved her heart through the turbulence of the remembering...the most difficult, painful act was to click that keepsake shut and return it to its place. This one act was a finality, an agonizing surrender to the unalterable truth of her existence.

Clearing the heartsickness in her throat, she pulled the dark hood up over her neck and tugged it forward over the crown of her head. Her auburn-sorrel hair, now streaked with a wide lash of silver-white down the middle, matted against her head under the thick cloth of concealment. With a practiced motion, she lifted the scarf-veil from around her neck and fastened it onto her hood.

In the silent grey Cathedral where everything and nothing once made sense, she tried once again to leave the room and face the debris of her guilt...

For her, Love had become the final atrocity.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

_On the way back from Tindouf, she and Keiichi, her two sisters, and her parents had taken a plane ride back to Japan.__Keiichi had miraculously rescued her and Skuld from the evil marabout's enclave in the middle of the Algerian Desert.__Belldandy still didn't have her Goddess powers back; in fact neither she nor Skuld had access to their divine Goddess abilities.__She had assumed all along that upon Keiichi's completion of the Ritual of Preparedness, her status as a full-fledged Goddess would be restored with all due expedience.__But she sensed no restoration of grand productions of her Divinity; hence, the need for her and the others to fly home to Japan on a jet._

_Their itinerary was a hodge-podge of flights: from Algiers to Madrid; Madrid to Istanbul; Istanbul to Bombay; Bombay to Hong Kong; and then finally a JAL flight from Hong Kong to Tokyo.__Their return trip would take almost two days to complete, but it was the best Skuld could do on such short notice, especially since they were limited to the lobby phone at the local hotel in Tindouf that they were staying at.__No internet hackery for Skuld to move things along._

_As they flew over high over the Mediterranean Sea, the tranquil image of the waters below contrasted sharply with the turmoil in Belldandy's breast.__Sure enough, the source of anxiety soon appeared.__A flash of light behind she and Keiichi's seats...and Belldandy knew that her parents had 'dropped in' for a visit._

_They had a lot of explaining to do._

_For some reason, Father and Mother had dragged Urd along with them when they surprised she and Keiichi and Skuld by suddenly appearing on their air flight.__Belldandy knew that her older sister had gone away to Yggdrasil after having some kind of big blow-up with Cevn in France.__She seemed to be fleeing something.__Right before leaving, Urd had confided to Belldandy "he doesn't love me any more!" and had left the Earthrealm for the relative safety of Yggdrasil, to distance herself from her grief.__Belldandy wasn't too certain about Cevn not loving Urd any more...but Cevn wasn't acting himself either.__He had actually gone on a date with Mara, and had not returned._

_Belldandy had planned on giving him a stern lecture when they returned...if she could reach him before Skuld got to him.__She knew that if her younger sister were to get to him first, he might not survive the experience.__Of the three, Skuld was the most protective of her sisters at times...especially where mortals were concerned._

_She had also planned on urging Urd to talk about her feelings.__Perhaps in the middle of the discussion, she might find out if Urd knew where Cevn was.__Belldandy was curious to see if her older sister was interested enough to track Cevn's movements.__If so, then she was going to try and talk Urd into giving her relationship with Cevn a second chance.__Relationships with mortals were very difficult at times, and Urd had picked herself a particularly challenging boyfriend..._

Belldandy stared at the cubicular room at the Clinic, feeling emptied of emptiness. There was no extinction of ego here; rather, the Ethiopsylogic Clinic was a place of healing...a sanctuary and sanatorium retreat that a Goddess would seek out if she needed to _repair_ her ego. Here, she would receive guidance on the intricacies of rediscovering herself, so that she could once again learn to appreciate the bliss and wondrousness of life as a Goddess living in Yggdrasil. Belldandy wondered if such a recovery was even possible in her case. Cevn had talked about recovery all the time, about the need to pierce the veil of denial with the vision of clarity. To face things as they really were, rather than illusion them into 'truths' that bore no resemblance to reality.

Belldandy would have given the Sun for even a moment's worth of denial.

_The flight out of Madrid was eventful for her; seldom did she reach such a hysteric emotional pitch.__Her parents attempted to explain their actions, and __Belldandy had vigorously protested.__She knew that Mother was bigoted towards __Earthrealm mortals, and that was more than enough argumentative ammunition to lend her a severe doubting towards her parent's motives.__There was no excuse for what they had done to Keiichi, she __steadfasted claimed during the heated argument with her parents about the need for Keiichi's "Ritual of Preparedness" trials.__About an hour in the air, __ Belldandy was unable to restrain her temper any longer.__Keiichi had nearly died as a result of his trials...and she wanted answers, not excuses!__Rarely did she demand anything from her parents, for they had always been the loving custodians of her welfare.__But this was different.__She found herself shouting at her parents, accusing them of being grossly insensitive to her feelings.__It was either that...or splash them with coffee.__What especially miffed her was the fact that Mom and Dad had stripped her and __Skuld's Goddess powers during Keiichi's 'trial', effectively preventing them from intervening on his behalf.__After becoming more and more frustrated as her parents winged and backpedaled a series of excuses and justifications, _ _Belldandy changed her tact and decided to challenge her parents in a different way._

_"You both think that it is a matter of ease for Skuld and I to be here on the Earthrealm without our powers?__Why don't _you_ try living without your Divine powers, just for a minute?__And what about Keiichi?__He doesn't have any special Divine powers...and yet he proved himself more competent than any of us!__He saved Skuld and my lives!__I'll never let you forget that!__I..I doubt that either of you could last a day in his shoes, living life without the use of Divine powers or Goddess Licenses or arcanical abilities!" she demanded in an ice-cold voice.__It was a dare, a cavil, and an indictment all rolled up into one exaction._

_So Odeyn and Freiija had obliged her demand._

_And that's when the plane went down._

_In less than two harrowing minutes of total chaos and confusion, their jet had plummeted 10 kilometers and crashed into the Mediterranean Sea..._

_And she had watched every member of her family drown._Every_ member..._

_Including Keiichi._

_In the end, she and Keiichi had shared a single floatation device for what seemed like days as they floated within a water-borne halo of wreckage.__Bobbing in the warm waters of the Mediterranean Sea, they waited for rescue.__But nothing could rescue Belldandy from the shock that electrified her. _ _Urd and Skuld and her parents had perished in the airplane crash, but somehow she and Keiichi had been spewed out of the airplane cabin with just enough lungpower to swim to the surface._

_During those days, Belldandy was filled with self-loathing.__If she hadn't been so demanding on her parents, they wouldn't have decided to give up their Divine powers to 'prove' themselves to her.__Their deaths were all her fault!__Because they had given up their powers for an entire day, striving to meet her condition...they had drowned in the plane crash._

_The Reaper had hovered over the wreckage to collect over 200 orbs of light.__But only four orbs of light mattered to Belldandy.__And she could do nothing to stop Him._

_During the plodding melancholy of sharing a single floating seat cushion with Keiichi, Belldandy replayed the crash over and over in her mind.__The sudden jarring burst of sound and gravity as the plane hit the water; the crack in the fuselage that appeared right in front of her and Keiichi; being sucked out into the sea with an explosive force; looking back one last time to see window-glimpses of her parents and her sisters still trapped within the aircraft as it sank downwards..._

_They were the sole survivors of the disaster._

_As the sun rounded overhead from one side of the sea to the other, Keiichi had tried his best to convince her that she wasn't blameworthy.__Part of Belldandy's heart wanted to leap into his breast, so desperately she need to hear his words of comforting absolution.__But she just couldn't manage her feelings.__She couldn't be swayed to view the deaths of her family in any other light.__Keiichi had exerted his entire heart and all its strength into the ambition of convincing her to realize that she can't live with regrets._

Now, several thousand years later, Belldandy was painfully aware of how much he wanted her to relinquish her guilt...but knowledge often comes too late. Her stubborn clinging to self-disparagement had caused her nothing but ill. In the end, Belldandy had even betrayed herself. By not surrendering to the truth of Keiichi's words, she knew that she had even let him down; ignoring his last pleadings to forgive herself.

In her memory, Belldandy watched helplessly as Keiichi slipped into the ocean for the last time...

_As the days passed, he was so weakened from hunger and thirst, he could barely hold onto the small lifebuoy they shared.__They were both significantly dwarfed by the the ocean-sea around them; even Belldandy felt fatigue fingering inside of her Earthrealm manifest form.__For several days, whenever Keiichi would slip into unconsciousness and loose his grip on the floating cushion, she would swim out and grab him by the arm.__Pulling him back towards the surface of the sea, she would shove the floatation device under him so he could float, while she treaded water a meter away._

_But finally, she herself had become too weak to rescue him.__Belldandy had forced herself to stay awake for three days straight, just to make sure that Keiichi didn't slip off into the sea while she was sleeping.__She was certain that a rescue team would discover her and Keiichi any time soon.__Any moment, a rescue boat would appear on the horizon, coming in the nick of time._

_Half-conscious and totally exhausted, she witnessed his face for the last time.__He let go of floating airplane seat and slid into the sea as silently as a bursting bubble.__She tried to force her limbs to move, so she could save him once more time...but she was utterly paralyzed by the frailty of her Earthrealm mortal physical manifestation.__Her 'body' had reached it's limit._

_An hour later, as if to torture her conscience even further, a rescue boat drew up to where she was floating and pulled her to safety.__The rescuers marveled at the fact that she had survived such a disastrous airplane crash.__But Belldandy only felt poisoned by her own shortcomings.__She wished that she could have died alongside Keiichi._

_Out of over 200 passengers, she was the only survivor._

_The next day, as if to mock her, Belldandy's Goddess powers were restored.__She learned that Yggdrasil had experienced a 'glitch' that prevented a more timely restoration of her powers...a mishap caused by the deaths of her precious family members._

_She had wanted to say "I love you!" to Keiichi as he floated on the shred of buoyancy they shared.__Whenever she thought about how she would experience the probability of surviving her mortal fiance, she oft imagined saying those comforting words to him on his deathbed.__She wanted Keiichi to pass into the Real Death knowing the deepest truth in her heart...that she had loved him with a love that made her Soul sing with joy while he was alive.__She wanted to hold his hand, rest her head on his chest as he shared his last breath with her..._

_Instead, her last words to him were "Y..you're wrong!__ You don't know me at all!"_

_Right before he died, almost delirious from lack of food and water, Keiichi had tried once again to gainsay her.__He was adamant that she should forgive herself, relinquish her guilt, and practice the deeper form of Love that she had always tried to get him to acknowledge...the form of Love that transcended all other events, motives and outcomes._

_And she had redoubted him with a righteous resentment, couched inside of eight short words._

Thus betrayed, Belldandy vowed to never speak to anyone again.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Peorth waited outside the chambered doorway of the Cathedral of Memories, as she had done for many thousands of years. The chiming bells fell silent, and Belldandy emerged wordlessly from the Cathedral portal. Peorth continued to hover near the portal, waiting for her friend...and then Belldandy floated towards her. Knowing that permission had been granted, Peorth gathered her best friend into a hug. One more time, she hoped against hopes that perhaps this would be the day that Belldandy would break her silence...or perhaps cry on her shoulder. But her friend was still muted by her grief; once more it was Peorth who shed tears on her behalf.

After all, she had loved him too.

But beyond her love for Keiichi was her love for his Angel, Heroic Vermillion Swift. When Keiichi had been lost, his Angel had died as well. Without warning, Heroic Vermillion Swift had just disappeared one day, never to return. Peorth was heartbroken, but her agony was miniscule in relation to Belldandy's. She had a broken heart...but Belldandy, was simply _broken_. What kind of emotional concussion could force a Goddess to become silent, and to wear only black? Widow. Peorth had lost her soulmate, just like Belldandy. She was certain that her love for Heroic Vermillion Swift was just as deep, as all-embracing, as Belldandy's love for Keiichi. But Belldandy had _watched_ Keiichi, Urd, Skuld and her parents die...and had no one but herself to blame for their deaths.

Peorth couldn't even imagine _that_ kind of loss...a loss so profound, it had caused her best friend to perpetrate a fraud upon herself that everyone else considered to be the furthest repair from the truth.

Why didn't the Almighty just 'fix' her? Why couldn't He undo the tragic loss, or simply heal Belldandy to wholeness, or do _something_ to put an end to her melancholy?

Damn Him!

As they floated upwards and outwards from the Ethiopsylogic Clinic towards a shimmering AquaSun in the distance, Peorth once again had to confront the truest meaning of irony.

Within the most beautiful realm in the all of the Multiverse...resided the most heartbroken, tormented Soul in the Multiverse.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

The Silent Goddess, as Belldandy was now known to all of Yggdrasil except for Peorth, was the only being in remembered history who had lost her _entire_ Divine family to an accident. In fact, she was the only Goddess in known Yggdrasilian history who had lost _any_ members of her family, save for those who lost loved ones in the legendary War with the Demons some 500 thousand years earlier. That War had resulted in the establishment of the Doublet System, to prevent any further killings between Gods and Demons. Besides the Doublet System, there were many other safeguards to prevent Gods and Goddesses from experiencing the Real Death.

But Belldandy had even lost her other older sister, Mara, precisely because of some quirk in the Doublet System. Belldandy had just started to establish a relationship with her Demoness older sister...and now she didn't even have that to turn to. Mara was still alive, still heading her Demon Strife Mischief Office...but the UF wouldn't allow _any_ communication between her and Belldandy. Any attempts on the part of Belldandy or Mara to communicate to each other by using all the means of technology and magic at their disposal failed, without exception. Peorth had even offered to serve as a go-between between the two sisters, but even this didn't work. Any message she was given to exchange between the two would slip away from her mind before she had the chance to share it.

Because of Belldandy's unique circumstances, the Proctors at the Ethiopsylogic Clinic were ill-equipped to heal her. She was _still_ undergoing 'therapy' at the Clinic, over 12,000 years later! Peorth knew that it was a hopeless situation, yet her constant encouragement and a bewildering determination on the part of Belldandy had kept her from dropping out of the Clinic completely.

Perhaps there _was_ hope...

Peorth had recently experienced the good graces of the Ethiopsylogic Clinic when she checked herself in for Wishout. Belldandy had confronted her on her misbehaviors whenever she came to the Earthrealm, especially around Keiichi and Cevn. Thus convinced, Peorth had sought out help. The Proctors had counseled her through to the truth, and she was better for it.

Even though she worked in a rival Office, Peorth was quite aware that Belldandy's brooding silence had initially been extremely unsettling, perhaps even frightening, to her GRO co-workers. Belldandy had been one of the brightest, most cultured, most _respected_ Goddess Relief Office agents in all of Yggdrasil. Everyone she worked with adored her open-hearted approach to wishgranting, as well as her pleasant optimism and fetching personality. Her record as a GRO Agent was virtually unblemished; her wishes always were successful. But when tragedy had fouled her Soul with such an inexpressible loss, her co-workers didn't know what to say or do. Their Belldandy had been ripped away from them, only to be replaced with the black-cloaked figure of the Silent Goddess. They all could appreciate the truth of her profound mishap: four immortal beings in her family had died the Real Death. They also knew that she had lost her soulmate, who just happened to be the Test Mortal for the evaluation of the Earthrealm's century-long Probation. In the Divine realm, Love between two beings always ended by mutual agreement, not by sudden death. The idea of Love suddenly being severed between two Divine beings was alien to the Gods and Goddesses of Yggdrasil. But even if they couldn't fathom the possibility of how a Goddess could fall in love with a mortal, one look at Belldandy's silent despondency was enough to disclose her deep heartbroken state of being to all that beheld it.

Peorth felt a lump in her throat as she remembered the inevitable epicedial ceremonies...

Yggdrasil was never a place of funerals, for its realm-denizens were Divine...immortal and yet life-spanned within a chain of attribute cycles. They would live forever, one 'lifetime' after another. Because of their amaranthine nature, each God and Goddess's Soul was like a flower that would never fade. Hence, there was no precedent in Yggdrasil for rituals that celebrated Life after the Real Death.

Someone had to plan the funerals that would need to be observed...and Peorth had taken it upon herself to attempt the solemn task. Borrowing from the rich obsequial customs of the Earthrealm...in deference to Keiichi's home...Peorth had prepared the mournful ceremony with humorless reluctance. Every moment hurt, because she was still raw from her own loss of Heroic Vermillion Swift. But she willed herself to labor on, no matter what.

Her planning had resulted in a funeral which was attended by the _entire_ Assembly of Gods and Goddesses. Every denizen of Yggdrasil had presented themselves to the ceremonies honoring Odeyn, Freiija, Urd, Skuld and Keiichi. The Almighty Himself had insisted to Peorth that Keiichi and his Angel be honored equally alongside the other members of Belldandy's family.

As if she needed Him to tell her that.

Peorth was almost certain that, in His compassionate wisdom, He knew that Keiichi was not only family to Belldandy...but by marking Keiichi's passing thus, it affirmed to all who were present that he was Bonded to Belldandy as a husband would be married to a wife.

In death, Keiichi would be Bonded to his soulmate.

The Lord even honored the observances with a personal appearance in His Grieving Aspect, a sight that had not been witnessed since the War between the Gods and Demons half a million years earlier. Seldom did the Lord wear black, but during the marking of His Children's passing, He personally lit each pyre with Divine Flames. He posthumously adopted Keiichi as one of His own, granting him the status of God and entering his name into the Shrine of Charters.

For a moment, all of Yggdrasil had been of one heart. A singularity of emotion; empathy for the black-shrouded daughter, sister...and widow. But all the outpouring of Love from the Lord and the assembled Gods and Goddesses had failed to ease Belldandy's pain in the slightest. She was unreachable. Peorth was frustrated when her efforts couldn't heal Belldandy towards forgiveness; she had harbored a fervent hope that the funeral would bring some closure to Belldandy's grief. But when the combined population of all the Gods failed to do so, she realized that helping Belldandy would almost be an impossibility.

But she still tried, after all these years.

It came to pass that the Lord had to relieve Belldandy of being a Norn. Three new Norns were selected, and Belldandy's Goddess abilities were adjusted to reflect her change in status. No longer could she access the TimeWeaves and TimeStreams in the manner that she had done before. Through Belldandy's silence, Peorth realized that her friend was relieved to be released from the burden of being the Present for all of the Multiverse.

Even now, nearly 13 millennia later, Peorth was still moved to tears by the catastrophe that been writ across the life of her friend...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

EARTHREALM:

Keiichi had completely forgotten that he had been in love with Belldandy. This much was apparent after Urd had screamed at him, Skuld had called him every name in the book, I had literally tried to shake the truth out of him, and Mara had threatened him with immolation. His heart had become a Chinese puzzle box, but to Bell's sisters, his attitude was heretical and offensive.

I had to intervene on his behalf, because I could sense a certain 'fade-out' in his statements that the others could not. As seed-ink on papyrii fades over time, the memories of being in union with the Ultimate Force were designed to fade away as well. In a few more hours, none of us would remember the cadenzas...let alone the symphonies...of our lives as universe-creators.

Coda for us, a shimmering silence that would both separate us from being Uber-Divine, and also free us from having to look away from our lives here on the Earthrealm.

Once the OmniArc was created, it was absolutely necessary that any memories of its creation in the minds of those who 'built' it would be extinguished. The 'formula' for the creation of the OmniArc was instantial; it could only exist in the Now that the Seven had wielded during the birth and formation of the OmniArc. Once someone eats a banana, they cannot 'unpeel' it shut, and then open it up to find another banana within. So forgetting was the key to humanity for Keiichi, Miyuki, Natsumi and I...while it would allow Belldandy, Urd, Skuld and Mara to rekindle their Goddess selves.

I was aware that my own memories of the OmniArc event would dissolve like water on a hot metal bench. Despite the fact that I wasn't an active participant in the restoration process, I too would be relieved of my recall in short order. The UF had almost withdrew completely from each of us, but there were occasional lingering impressions. Perhaps the 'memory' of the defeat of Isilblius and the birthing of the OmniArc 'belonged' to the Ultimate Force...when it departed from our lives, it had taken the memories with it.

Keiichi could still seem to sense that something was amiss between Urd and I. I could almost feel his uncertainty, his conflicted awareness in regards to the fact that Urd and I had been in love at one time. Confirming my suspicions, he even asked Urd if she had ever been in love with me. For a moment, I hoped that Urd would say "yes!", but instead, she was quite offended by his assertion...and the result was that the Norn of the Past got pissed off at me as well.

Anger instead of Love.

But twenty minutes later, Keiichi didn't remember a thing about Urd and I. I wished that this would be true in my case as well, but my memories about Urd had to stay intact, at least the part about how Urd and I had been in love in the past. Becausing of the remembering, I would never make a wish to be the Balance again. Everything else concerning the Ultimate Force, the OmniArc, and Isilblius would soon be forgotten...including the reason why I was still aware of being in love with Urd. I'd be haunted by what was, but I would never know why I was haunted.

_Ken wa Tenchi ni Katazu._

Power cannot overcome Heaven.

The last refrain, somewhat modified, from the Kamikaze Oath during World War II...was an apt description of what had to be. I had suggested a number of failsafes into the process of OmniArc creation...and the Seven had implemented them all without fault. The irony wasn't lost on me; most of my mental impressions had been detected by Urd and communicated to the others by her. In the process, she was constantly slipping towards the sea of insanity; but she had grandly summoned her courage to 'hear' my voice, and then had convinced the others that they were capable of creating the OmniArc. Sadly, this would be the last time her heart would hear my heart with a 'special' ear.

Now she and I were nothing more than friends.

If I have to damn myself for doing this to myself for the rest of my life, I'd have done it all over again. Each of us had martyred some part of their heart in order to achieve the twin impossibilities of defeating Isilblius and creating the OmniArc. So why should I be the one to shirk my responsibility?

But what could explain Belldandy's unexpected disappearance? How could Keiichi possibly forget how much he loved her?

Keiichi's love for Belldandy had been indefatigable from almost the first minute he laid his eyes on her, even in the past when she visited him while he was still a young boy. Then, as we all knew, Keiichi had become in love with the 'unknown'...encounters between children and Goddesses tend to reach this sort of reaction...and then when the 'unknown' became manifest in his life, the direction of his heart was thoroughly destined. With the accuracy of Cupid's arrow, Keiichi's heart was aimed at Belldandy's.

Now, someone or something had stolen the arrow. And beyond this was an undeniable evidence that an enigmatic force or conscious design had messed with Keiichi's mind, to the point where he didn't believe that he had been in love with Belldandy. As we listened in on a brainticket account of his 'version' of how Belldandy had entered into his life, we realized that it was profoundly different than what we had known from our own experience. Keiichi had narrated a distortion of truth with complete confidence, as if it had been his own experience.

After failing to convince him of the flaws in his 'story' about Belldandy, we huddled together for a short 'decompression session'. Actually, it was more purposeful than this; we all needed a forum to air out disbelief towards Belldandy's absence and Keiichi's forgetting.

Skuld had suggested that, if Keiichi's memory was defective, than _our_ memories might be suspect as well...which would bode ill for us in our attempts to find out what had happened to Belldandy. So we talked story to try and confirm if we all remembered the same events in some kind of recognizable sequence. Urd was the first to speak, as she had visited the Earthrealm before any of us, and was the first witness to how much her younger sister was deeply in love with Keiichi. Skuld followed, rendering an amusing series of anecdotes about how how she evolved from hating "Keiichi the Sister-Stealer!" to loving Keiichi as a future brother-in-law. Mara took her turn next, recalling how she used to manipulate Keiichi and Belldandy's their mutual attraction to her benefit as she tried to pry Keiichi out of his wish contract with Belldandy. A word from him...and the contract would have been voided, allowing Mara to deal him Grief for the rest of his life. The story about how Keiichi's reaction to her fictional "I'm Belldandy's fiance" was still funny, after all we had been through. Plus, I had never heard it described from Mara's point of view, which made it even funnier. Finally, as the newest member of the "Belldandy and Keiichi circle of friends", it was my turn to share my memories. I described my first days here, how Keiichi had been so kind to me...and how easily he was distracted by Belldandy. Sometimes, he would be in the middle of a conversation with me as I was working on my rock garden; Belldandy would come outside the temple to hang laundry, and Keiichi would see her and pause in mid-thought, warmly seeking her smile. An "ahem!" would bring him back into the bounds of conversation.

After a few rounds of reminiscing, we agreed that our memories of Belldandy and Keiichi were accurate for the most part.

Everything had gone perfectly to plan...except this!

The possibility that Belldandy may have been stranded in another Multiverse during the creation of the OmniArc occurred to me. But even then, Urd and Skuld would certainly be able to sense their sister's presence with the invisible-string bond of Divine perception that they shared between them. But try as they might, each sister couldn't sense any trace of Belldandy.

What could have gone wrong? I had tried to anticipate all possibilities in my orchestration of suggestions to the Seven. The Seven had taken my caution even further than I could, steeping plans in their hearts and minds to protect all the holiness of Life while they loved the OmniArc into existence.

Could my efforts to sever Urd's memories of the love we shared have backfired? Urd had certainly forgotten her romantic feelings towards me, but it should have stopped there. Keiichi's forgetting...how could it possibly be an unintended result of my actions? Nothing I did should have affected Keiichi's feelings towards Belldandy at all. Keiichi was _meant_ to remember Belldandy! Their affection towards each other had been forged in the truest trials of Love; they were destined to share a lifetime of sweetness along the avenue of romance and passion. Certainly, their strong love towards each other was one of the keystones to the construction of light that became the OmniArc. It stood to reason that...if Keiichi and Belldandy didn't love each other as resolutely as they had...the OmniArc wouldn't have ever emerged into existence. The Intimate Force that created the OmniArc would never had been have been rendered into possibility!

So somehow, during the creation of the OmniArc, Keiichi's memories of his love for Belldandy had been stripped away. I argued with myself, trying to consider all the chaos and collect it into some semblance of an explanation about what had mishappened.

Could his loss of memory just be a loss of memory and nothing more? Or had Keiichi actually lost _all_ his fond feelings for Belldandy? The 'false' memories might be a clue to distinguish amnesia from 'stolen' heart-love. Forgetting is one thing...but the heart_ never_ forgets. Belldandy had existed inside of Keiichi's kokoro; she was the queen of his life. His mind might draw a blank, but his heart would be constant...

As I listened to Urd, Skuld and Mara, I was keenly aware that they had forgotten their role in the creation of the OmniArc by this point...and that I would soon forget my role as well. I suddenly realized that, once my memories slipped away and I could no longer recall the Ultimate Force and the long struggle to establish Balance, then it was possible that _not one_ of us would even pause to consider the OmniArc creation event as the point of departure to explain Keiichi's amnesia and Belldandy's disappearance.

We would lose the only clue to recovering both!

Frantic with this insight, I dashed into the house to try and locate the Enigma Book. I was hoping that I could write a message to myself in the nick of time, to warn myself and the others to investigate this point of time somewhere in the future.

To write about...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Dammit! I can't remember why I'm standing here, in my bedroom! I came here for _some_ reason, didn't I? Oh yes, I'm here for the Enigma Book! That's why I came here. But what am I looking for in the Enigma Book? Why am I suddenly so obsessed with it?

And where _is_ it?

I tore through my room, trying to find the Enigma Book. I always keep it on the nightstand next to my futon bed. Keeping it in sight and in arm's reach, so that no parties with untoward intentions could steal it away and possibly pry open the secrets of the Gods and Demons.

I finally gave up when I realized that I was almost ready to start tearing up the tatami mats. Obviously, the Enigma Book didn't crawl itself underneath the floor, just to spite me!

Bundled by confusion, I sat down on the my futon bed...uncertain as to why I had been so frantic a moment earlier.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

ASGARD AUMATRIX VII:

In the midst of an infinitude of energy, voices, thoughtcasts, and travelers, four children were walking down a latticework rainbowed bridge of light. They weren't actually walking, because one cannot physically walk on the purity of illumined magic. Of course, the children knew that they _could_ do so if they wished to, but like almost all the pedestrians, they found it more convenient to float over the BridgePath. Besides, floating was much more fun than walking! Passersby, both God and Demon, couldn't help but notice the earnest expressions on the children's faces...expressions that some adults might readily adjudge as too self-possessed and intense for children their age. All the other kids their age were gaily skydancing; skipping and performing hovering acrobatics as they traveled along the surface of the BridgePath. But these three girls and one boy were floating down the bridge with a gravely sober intent.

The small group of four continued traversing the isthmus of light, bowing on occasion to the senior rank Gods and Demons they encountered along the way. About a fourth of the way across the span of the BridgePortal, they turned and floated towards a 'park' suspended between the light-bridge and a square deckwork that adjoined it. The park was a concourse, a floating 'bridge' a few hundred kilometers wide filled with colonnades of trees from thousands of worlds spanned the gap between the rainbow-colored bridge and their destination. In front of them, the floating deckwork had several million colored patched of light, and arising from the middle was a circular missile-like tower that ascended as far as the eye could see. Overhead, above the magnificent shikhara-shaped tower, the four children could see the blue-purple mist of energy that partially obscured all the other bridges in the Aumatrix. Instead of a nightsky filling with starry points of light, the 'sky' of the Aumatrix was a pleasing blue...bright with lines of rainbow-light energy, as if each star had been changed into a laser-streak of illumination.

Once they reached the platform, the four youngsters briefly lingered at a few kiosks near the main boulevard, and then started towards the platform's towering Swarp Gate. The platform itself was a outdoors 'mall' of sorts; with temple-like 'shops' that had everything in the Multiverse that one could dream of. But here, there was never any need for money...for this was part of Yggdrasil, and any desired commodity could be had for the asking. Money was the curse and bane of the mortals. Here, enveloped by the Cosmic Plenty, there was no need to hoard or deny.

The puzzle-piece plotted parks that surrounded the Swarp Gate had numerous 'suburbs' of forests; each area specifically designed to recreate a planetary environment in an area of a few billion hectares. Each environment would swap from time to time; it would be on the grounds of the parkway surrounding one Swarp Gate, and then an inaudible klaxon would sound and it would be 'transported' to a park-belt surrounding another Swarp Gate somewhere else.

But the four children didn't pause to check out the forests, unlike many of the other Divine children who wanted to see the exotic animals residing within. Reluctantly, they bypassed all the enchantments of the parklands and malls surrounding the Swarp Gate, because their destination was the Gate itself. Increasing the speed of their hover-floating, they disappeared into the mammoth Swarp Gate complex.

Asgard Aumatrix VII was one of the 'hubs' of the Yggdrasilian Multiversal Logorinth. Because of its nature, in effect, the Aumatrix was one of the the busiest places in all of the OmniArc. The Aumatrix was spherical in design; from a distance, it resembled a pulsating giant blue-purple golf ball. But inside the sphere were trillions of trillions of BridgePaths just like the one the four children had taken to get to the Swarp Gate; each span of light was a rainbow that went from nowhere to nowhere. The bridges didn't actually link anything; they didn't span a physical distance between Point A to Point B. Instead, each BridgePortal connected Point A to Non-Point A via its seven Swarp Gates. The Aumatrix was as large as a Multiverse just by itself, but it wasn't just a haphazard crowding of light-filament bridges. The bridges were designed in all sorts of curvatures and shapes, creating a chaotic randomness that evoked symmetry with any number of measures and meanings. Because of this, the Aumatrices were considered to be one of the most beautiful places in all of Yggdrasil...a perfect synergism between functionality and aesthetics. It was difficult to experience the Aumatrix without being awed, even for four young children who were routinely amazed by everything they saw whenever they took a trip away from home.

Asgard Aumatrix VII was one of seven Aumatrices that served as transportation 'bond-places' between the many Multiverses of Yggdrasil, as well as linking Yggdrasil to Vanagdrasil. Of course, the Demons had their own system of Aumatrices. For them, a system of seven Nieflgard Aumatrices served as 'hubs' to interconnect the entirety of the Vanagdrasilian Multiversal Logorinth. But the system was even more complex than it seemed. Each Aumatrix was not only a form of transportation _within_ its realm, but it connected with the other 13 Aumatrices as well. In other words, they were available for those Divines who wanted to travel _between_ the Realms of Yggdrasil and Vanagdrasil. Using one of the Asgard Aumatrices, one could travel to Vanagdrasil just as easily as they could travel within Yggdrasil. Of course, one had to obtain visa permission from both Kami-sama and Oni-sama to do so. An exchange program between the two Logorinths had just been negotiated several years ago, and passage between the two was strictly limited. Neither the Gods or the Demons wanted to plunge into carefree transit between the two Logorinths without testing the system first; there may be a hue of balances that would have to be maintained as a result of the possibility of travel between Yggdrasil and Vanagdrasil. And when one was referencing all fourteen Aumatrices, the proper term to use was the "UmbraPlexiar System".

It was all extremely confusing, at first.

Each of the four children knew that, fourteen years ago by Earthrealm reckoning, the Yggdrasilian Multiverse had been suddenly changed. Drastically, profoundly, inexplicably changed. And those words of description didn't even begin to lend sense to what had happened.

It took the Gods and Demons fully two Earthrealm years to finally comprehend the enormity of the transformation which had taken place. This was in part due to the fact that it took the two Divine races that long just to learn how to operate the 'expanded' Ygg Xeomnic and Vang Mnoexic computer networks. It was the equivalent of a scientist working on Dr. Berry's ABC diode-analogue computer in the 1940s being confronted with a modern 475Ghz computer of 2018.

The Multiverse itself had changed as well. Instead of just having one Multiverse for each Realm, there were more Multiverses in each Realm that there were been _atoms_ in the universe that the Earthrealm resided within. Once in a while, one of the four children would ask their mothers to explain how it was like before The Expansion, as the Gods and Demons informally termed the event. They were amazed to find that Demons and Gods lived in a _single_ Multiverse; two interlaced Multiverses, one for Demons, the other for Gods. Even more amazing, there was no travel between the two Multiverses!

The UmbraPlexiar System inexplicably came online by itself, once the Ygg and Yang computer networks were activated. But it didn't do anything. Energized and yet inert, only later did it provide transit between Yggdrasil and Vanagdrasil for the first time ever.

Even the two Lieges of each Realm were at a loss to explain how the Multiverse could have been _expanded_ so profoundly. If anyone were to ask the Lord or the Dark Lord about what had happened, they would be given an improbable story about how something called the Seven had glorified the OmniArc into existence, while saving the two Lords and the Little Boy Who Was Death from destruction at the same time. Even though the explanation provided little assurance, the presence of their Lord assured the Gods and Goddesses of Yggdrasil that everything would be okay.

But even the four children knew this.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Pryzm looked anxiously across the Bridge from one of the upper storeys of the Swarp Gate while she nibbled at her raspberry-flavored cotton candy. Only here on the Aumatrix could one find a Swarp Gate in the middle of a 'shopping mall' of stores that sold Earthrealm confections. Her slightly-younger twin sister sat next to her in mid-air, cheerfully eating tossing peanuts in the air and catching them in her mouth, occasionally missing one.

There was so much to explore...and so little time.

Pryzm was well aware that she had inherited her mother's prowess for sophistications of technology. Naturally, her Mom was completely impressed by this. Mom would certainly would be impressed if she could look in on she and her sister right at this moment. Despite the sweetness of her cotton candy, Pryzm was avidly scanning the magnificent columnar Swarp Hypernality housed within the Swarp Gate with an appreciative, entranced eye.

After all, it had been her Mother who had figured out how the Swarp Hypernalities worked.

Her sister, Ulfryn, was also very interested in the blue-white glow of the Swarp Hypernality. But Pryzm knew her sister too well...her younger sis was easily distracted by boys, much more so than she. Ulfryn was distracted by boys because she _liked_ them, while she was distracted by boys because they were irritating pests. As Pryzm looked at her sister, she noticed that every once in a while, Ulfryn would miss a peanut, and then stoop to pick it up. Pryzm had no doubt that those misses were caused by some handsome God or Demon catching her younger sis's attention.

They may be twins, but in this one aspect, they were like oil in water. Pryzm couldn't stand boys her own age. Fortunately, her Mom had the same tomboyish inclination when she was Pryzm's age; which was reassuring during those crises of identity Pryzm was prone to encounter whenever her cousins teased her about not liking boys. Mom would pat her on the shoulder and assure her that she was 'normal', whatever that was.

Mothers are so cool!

As for adult men, Pryzm was known to kick them in the shin if they praised her too perfunctorily...at least the mortal men. Pryzm _hated_ phonies, especially of the male persuasion. Once, she had made the mistake of kicking an adult Demon in the shin because he had given her a compliment, which she had interpreted as being insincere. Boy, did her Aunt give her hell for that! And the make it the worst, Mom had sided with her Aunt _and made fun of her_!

Mothers can be so uncool sometimes!

"So here we are," she noted to the others in a tense voice, mentally moving away from any further considerations of Mom and Aunt wicked team-ups.

"I'd rather be back in Tokyo, even if this place makes Tokyo look like a mud hut in the middle of the desert," Ulfryn shot back, even as her eyes wandered over to another table where a young teenaged God was hovering. A young Goddess floated up to him, and then they floated away. Pryzm almost giggled as Ulfryn scoffed in disappointment.

"Hey, what about you two? Aren't you going say anything? I know that this is a little out of the way for you, but..."

"But what? Bless it, we could be in deep shit if we get caught! And not only because we're skipping school! We didn't get our visas approved!" the young boy across from her shouted worriedly. His sister waved him to keep his voice down, but he ignored her.

"_Your_ Lord may be all cool and stuff if this thing blows up in our face, but _our_ Lord won't be so forgiving. He cherishes catching us in the middle of causing some kind of trouble!" he added.

Pryzm smiled diplomatically at her cousin, concealing her disappointment that he was such a worry-idiot. Falcyn was several years older than she was, and his physical manifest showed it. He was the tallest member of the group of cousins, much taller than she and the other two girls. In fact, he was as tall as his mom already, even though he was only fourteen. He had an angular face framed by long straight blonde hair, with black shaggy bangs in front and with red streaks at the ends of his lengthy bangs. Despite his athletic bearing, he liked to wear these funny little round wire-rim glasses low on his nose. The whole "library scholar" effect rendered by his delicate eyewear was obtrusive and misleading; Falcyn was anything but the studious type. Pryzm always thought that he wore them to distract attention away from his high forehead. Too bad, because his angular eyes were bright orange and vivid...even brighter than his mother's. He was also quite athletic, even at his young age, his muscles were sinewy and well-defined on his arms and legs. Even though he was a show-off, he was the only boy that Pryzm was friends with...but she didn't have much choice. After all, he _was_ family.

Besides, she thought his two slashing red forehead marks and his fangs were quite cute. Pryzm often wondered if she would have been friends with him regardless of whether he was her cousin or not.

"Falcyn, I..I don't want to hear about His Darkness right now," the fourth child said in a quiet, quavering voice.

Her other cousin, Sygyn. If Falcyn was all bluster and buff, Sygyn was delicately composed to the point of appearing to be a pixyish waif. She had inherited her mom's good looks: her eyes were more ovaline than angular, the orange glow of her irises were softer than both her mom's and her brother's eyes. But her hair was a beautiful sorrel-red, streaked with bright red and pink streaks. Her hair was long as well, already reaching to her knees. But instead of being hyper-curly like her mom's, Sygyn's hair was a waterfall of soft-angled 'waves', resembling some of the girls in Harajuku who pressed their hair with zig-zag salon-irons. She was underdeveloped for her age as well, already 14 and just beginning to show a bustline. Pryzm knew that her cousin got teased a lot for her 'immature' looks by her fellow Demons in school. She also knew that Falcyn had punched the daylights out of every one of the Earthrealm _and_ Demon boys who taunted Sygyn.

"Sygyn, the truth's the truth!" he shouted at his sister, irritated. Pryzm was irritated too; Falcyn clearly thought his own concerns were valid, while he dismissed Sygyn's worries.

Who cares about playing hooky from school anyway, Pryzm thought. Much ado about nothing!

"Hey, don't pick on your little sister!" her sister Ulfryn snapped, echoing Pryzm's own thoughts.

"I've told you a thousand times not to call me that! I'm not his little sister. Just because I was born a half hour later doesn't mean that I'm any littler than Falcyn! How would you like if if I called you Pryzm's Little Sister, Ulfryn?" Sygyn remonstrated angrily, her comments drawing giggles from Pryzm and Ulfryn. Ironically, despite her resentment, her appearance fully supported the idea that she was several years younger than her brother. Standing together, Sygyn was much smaller than Falcyn in stature.

The Demoness in her thus goaded, Sygyn floated up to her full height, red ponytails floating up behind her like a pair of red cobras...and then she pulled her eyelid down and stuck her tongue out at Ulfryn.

"Great!" Pryzm thought with a downcasting frustration as Ulfryn started calling Sygyn names. "Another younger sister fight!"

Falcyn swifted up between the two girls and promptly reminded them that he was the strongest of the group, and that he would beat up anyone who beat up on anyone. Pryzm tittered as he puffed his chest out...he may be the strongest, but he certainly wasn't the smartest of the group. Which only made sense, since he was the only boy among the four.

"Look, before the Second God-Demon War starts up here, we need to chill out and remember why we're here!" Pryzm pleaded, hoping that a shot of reality would settle things down. Her three siblings looked at her...and then burst into giggles at her joke. She joined them, completely disabled by her younger sister's giggling. Any laughter on Ulfryn's part almost always triggered a miming response in her, a fact that her Mom would always taunt her about.

"You're the oldest, so you're supposed to be the mature one," her Mother would say, tousling her on the crown of her head whenever Ulfryn's giggling would trigger hers. And often, Mom would join them.

It was nice having a Mom who was a best friend!

But GrandMother was a whole other story. Mom and Dad didn't hide the fact that they both expected good things from she and Ulfryn.

GrandMother was practically ruthless in her expectations...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"The stage is set, the players are assembled, the task is at hand!" Pryzm announced after she finished another cotton candy bouquet to try and settle down her frustration. Ulfryn and Sygyn had argued for half an hour about piano lessons, of all things.

Typical Goddess and Demoness kids!

"Geez...you've been on the Earthrealm too long! Now you're misquoting Shakespeare!" her younger sister taunted with a sly look on her face.

"Of course I've been on the Earthrealm too long. We _live_ there, you dope! _They_ live there as well, in the Demon's Wing of our temple home when their visiting, and in Auntie's Lair when they aren't! And just so you know, that wasn't Shakespeare! That was Seami."

"Actually you guys, it was both playwrights who penned that line," Sygyn clarified, causing Pryzm to regard her cousin with a grimace. She was right, of course.

Sygyn was the family artist; give the girl a drawing pen set and she'd execute a perfect replica of any CLAMP studio character. Actually, she was so prodigious an artist, she could make an exact replica of _any_ manga character! Ulfryn used to whisper sly suggestions in Pryzm's ear that they should have Sygyn draw copies of famous mangaka works and then sell them on EBay to trust-baby Otakus, advertising them as original manga panels and such.

As if _our family_ needs money.

Her and Ulfryn's Dad was a star pitcher and batter for the Yomiuri Giants. Pryzm could remember several seasons where he had lead the league in strikeouts and wins. His .282 career batting average wasn't something to scoff at either. His trophy room at the temple was already filled with individual and team honors, trophies, plaques, pictures with several Prime Ministers and the Emperor, etc. Because Dad was such a sports celeb, their family was well off. And even though Auntie was a single mom, she was always flush with yen.

Pryzm had grown up being tutored by Sygyn. Sygyn was always available to help her brother or her cousins with homework. Pryzm and Ulfryn were both 11; they would be entering junior high next year...and encountering that famous curse word of all Japanese high schoolers.

_Engrish._

Sygyn had offered to start teaching them English, so they'd get a head start on the subject next school year. But Pryzm wanted to help her Mom build things, while Ulfryn was quickly on the way to becoming a primadonna mallrat.

The funny thing was this: while in Yggdrasil, Pryzm could understand_ every_ language on the Earthrealm...in fact, she could instantly interpret almost every language she encountered. But on the Earthrealm, she could only understand as much English as any other girl her age. She always chalked this up to her mixed heritage.

But her cousin Sygyn was a tireless reader; actually, Falcyn's glasses would fit Sygen's personality perfectly. Sygyn also liked to read the lighter stuff too...her manga collection was almost half as big as Mom's. Pryzm thought it very likely that a large number of Sygyn's manga tankouban had been 'borrowed' from her Mom, since Sygyn's mother abhorred manga in general. Sygyn's brother was more like Dad; tall, athletic and intense. Mom used to tell her about when she first met Dad; back then, she was taller than he was. Pryzm had a hard time imagining what _that_ would have been like!

If she was the inventor and engineer of the family, then Ulfryn was the dreamer, Falcyn was the jock, and Sygyn was the bookworm artist.

"Man, I didn't know this place was so kewl!" Falcyn noted appreciatively, looking over towards the SwarpGlow. "You guy's Swarp Hypernality looks so different than ours!"

"Of course it does..." his sister replied in a dry voice. "It's blue. Ours is red."

Even before she started laughing, Pryzm knew that this was Sygyn's way of paying back her brother for cutting her off earliers. Falcyn ignored his sister, still examining the Swarp Hypernality...but Pryzm could see the azure glow of the Swarp Hypernality becoming slightly discolored around him; it was easy for her to sense that his Demonic aura was quickly turning "resentful red".

But he was right on the money about the Swarp Tower. Imagine a slender bullet-shaped silver tower of floors roughly the size of a sun, with a round hollow space bored through the exact middle of the building, extending from the pinnacle roof to the basefloor, kind of like those ritzy hotels with the big vertical lobbies in Tokyo and Sapporo. Inside of this round 'hole' through the central core of the Swarp Tower...a space that was wide enough to fit the entire Earthrealm...was a column of bluish light with white streaks, encircled by the departure floors of the Swarp Tower. These trillions of floors looked out towards the shimmering glance of the Swarp Hypernality; each platform a mere kilometer away from the Hypernality. Even though she could mentally describe the Swarp Tower thus, Pryzm was still amazed by the sheer engineering feat in its creation. And to think that there were a trillion trillion _ trillion_ Swarp Towers in just this single Asgard Aumatrix...

Pryzm wanted to chide Falcyn further, but she realized that this was his first time seeing an Yggdrasilian Swarp Hypernality at his leisure. In Vanagdrasil, the Swarp Gates were the same, except that they were built of black metal, surrounding a red column of light.

Her mother had visited Yggdrasil soon after she and Ulfryn had been born. Mom always prefaced this story by noting that she had come to see the new Swarp Gates for herself; but in reality, GrandMother had told her that she had 'summoned' Mom instead. Pryzm could fill in the rest via her imagination: Mom had been 'invited' by an insistent GrandMother, who had probably browbeaten her with the efficiency of a Yakuza brokering an extortion out of a Ginza shopowner. GrandMother had obviously coerced her into bringing she and her sister so she could see them, even if Mom was just weeks out of the maternity ward. Pryzm was certain that it must have been kind of hard for Mom to get away from the Earthrealm; after all, she was married to an Earthrealm mortal and all. Sometimes, her and Dad carried on like newlyweds, much to her and Ulfryn's embarrassment. At least they toned down the 'lovey-dovey' stuff _ most_ of the time when she or her sister had friends over.

After dropping she and her sister off at one of GrandMother's sky-mansions, Mom had visited GrandFather's Energy Guild offices. After the usual 'tour' of the greatly-expanded Energy Creactor, Mom was inspired to design and build a machine that could map out the various functions of the Swarp Gates. By an utterly absurd accident...or a meticulously weird quirk of fate, Mom ended up losing the machine she built after she introduced it into the Swarp Hypernality...

It has gone missing in the Future. Where she promptly recovered it.

Analyzing its holographic CPU and AI components, Mom had learned that her machine, the Swarp Holophotic Observance Joho Omnitron, or "SHOJO" for short, had traveled to almost _every_ Multiverse in the Ygg Logorinth in the space of time equivalent to three hours on Earthrealm. Naturally, Mom's discovery had made her a celebrity in Yggdrasil for a short while, earning her the respect of her Goddess peers and a promotion in license to Goddess Senior First Class. GrandMother was elated at the sensation her daughter had caused, and was holding nightly dinner soirees to show off 'the twins' and celebrate Mom's promotion.

But Mom's success had also earned a liberal amount of teasing from she and Ulfryn's Aunt, who happened to be Mom's older sister. Auntie often called Mom's mecha the "Super Horrific Overpriced Junk Omni-trashbucket", a moniker that would always get a rise out of Mom. Falcyn and Sygyn's mother was always teasing Mom about her inventions, but it was good-natured for the most part.

Years later, Mom even admitted to Auntie that the acronym referred to a hobby of hers that she used to partake in as a child. Ulfryn had later inadvertently embarrassed Mom in front of Auntie by discovering certain tankouban manga in Mom's Lab.

"You _still_ read that stuff?!" Auntie had ridiculed Mom with a sharpened tongue. Mom certainly had handled herself well that night...after it was over, she had even soothed Ulfryn. Pryzm remembered how distraught her younger sister had been that night. Ulfryn was the sensitive type; she was so upset by her mistake, she had cried herself to sleep because she felt that she had caused shame to fall upon Mom. Mom gently convinced her that it wasn't her fault...after all, Mom had taken the liberty to collect the manga because she _liked_ to read them. So, in their Mother's expert hands and heart, a lesson in embarrassment had been transformed into a lesson of sticking to what your heart desires regardless of how others think about it or judge it.

For all her faults, Pryzm knew that she and Ulfryn had the best Mom on the Earthrealm _and_ Yggdrasil!

But oddly enough, fate had intervened...because Auntie's daughter Sygyn became _really_ interested in the manga books, even going as far as stealing them! This embarrassed Auntie to no end; so she really couldn't get by on teasing Mom any more about her manga-reading habits, because her own daughter was hooked. Falcyn even teased his sister by calling her an "otaku"...for which he got it good one day as Sygyn surprised him by beaning him in the face with a Spice and Wolf boxset for saying it one time too often, giving him a black eye.

Sygyn promised that when she became old enough to have her own Devil's Egg...when she turned 16 in Earthrealm years...she'd have her newly-awakened Devil pester Falcyn for the rest of his days. In the realm of the Demons, as in the realm of the Gods, if there were boy-girl twins, the girl would be always be the first one to receive a Demon's Egg. It was another one of those Rules that no one knows anything about.

Actually, it made perfect sense to Pryzm...because girls were _always_ more mature and poised than boys. Besides, a Goddess's Angel was always prettier than a God's Angel. So Beauty and Brains won out over Beastliness and Bravado.

Now, thankfully because of Sygyn's new 'addiction', it was Mom's turn to laugh at Auntie once in a while.

But that was family history.

And family history was the reason she and the others were here in the first place.

At least this was the case, according to Ulfryn.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --


	108. Pt 108: Curvilinear Rainbows

**Part 108: Curvilinear Rainbows**

EARTHREALM:

My memories were leaking away, like the sparkling dew of late-night aethers dissipating in the early morning sundawn. Within the constellation of forgotten possibilities, the confusion in my heart remained, stalwart against the leeching of mind and soul as I was transformed back into some semblance of 'me'.

Still.

The quadrangle of Keiichi, Skuld, Urd and myself was a very unsettled formation as we gathered around the round cedarwood table in the dining room. Without Belldandy to cast form upon on our evening repast, we had to make do with microwavable food. Each of us, excepting Keiichi, was too greatly disturbed to volunteer the duty of meal prep. Keiichi, being the least distraught, offered to cook dinner for us.

Keiichi was an excellent mechanic, but his engineering skills had definitely borrowed vastly from the pool of his talents, especially borrowing from his skills as chef. Without Belldandy's supervision, Keiichi was hard-pressed to cook anything more elaborate than simple cup-noodle type dishes. So we politely declined his offer. For some reason, I felt grumble-gnawed, as if I hadn't eaten a meal in days. The last thing I wanted was mal-cooked food inside of me.

Urd and Skuld were visibly devastated when they discovered the form of their sister so elegantly captured in a frigid cage of ice. Ever worse than seeing the spectral physical manifestation of Belldandy...the two sisters shared the awareness that they couldn't 'sense' their sister at all. It would have been easier if Belldandy was a ghost; at least she wouldn't look so _real_. But instead, she looked _too_ real in her congealed transparent casing. The ice-body resembled Belldandy so much, I expected her to become vivified and float up out of her icy prison at any moment. My mind flighted on the wary notion that someone had encoffined Belldandy in the koi pond simply to fuck with us. To taunt us with the unreachable, so that we would doubt our sight and our senses. The tragic overtones of the situation reminded me of the plight of Orpheus and Eurydice...

Soon after I had arrived in Japan, I was made aware of the 'invisible thread' of recognition that bonded the three together. Because Belldandy, Skuld and Urd were Norns, they exchanged a mysterious type of 'vibration', for lack of a better word. They shared a Metanative wave of sensation that was invisible to we mere mortals, but was quite discernible to them. The Enigma Book confirmed that they possessed a special link, but I couldn't begin to comprehend how it felt like. Urd had described this impression as being as familiar to her as the sense of wearing clothes would be to us. Tragically, the body wearing Belldandy's delicate facial features imprisoned in the koi pond might as well have been a wax figure from Madame Tussand's museum. It _was_ Belldandy on the outside...but on the inside, there was a null where the Soul should have been according to Skuld and Urd.

A lifeless simulacrum.

Because of this, I felt very uneasy around Keiichi...not so much as a result of his remembering...but as a result of his forgetting. Belldandy was encased in ice, and Keiichi was only slightly perturbed at this. He was acting as if this was just another day in the neighborhood. Like an enigmatic Chinese Box puzzle, Keiichi didn't seem to have any knowledge of his love for Belldandy. If he did, he would obviously be assailed by the kind of grief he had felt when she had been promised to Tyyr by her parents during the omiai mishap. This was _not_ the Keiichi that risked life and limb to climb a tall ladder in the eye of SuperTyphoon Akira so he could retrieve Mjolnir from its mount atop a tall beam we had fastened to our house. I remembered how he fell to injury when the winds became punchy buffets of air, dangerous to all who were unsheltered. But through his efforts, we were able to return Skuld and Belldandy back into their normal bodies. Only Love could fuel such a daredevil ambition in a man. And this certainly wasn't the Keiichi who had humbled himself while proposing to Belldandy in the middle of a victory speech at the post-Le Mans banquet.

Try as I might, I sensed no ripples disturbing Keiichi's Soul regarding her disappearance. Not even a hint of the overwrought grief I expected him to feel when we discovered that she was gone. Belldandy's absence seemed to be about as upsetting to Keiichi as a missing wrench in the garage. To me, this cast him in the psychological garment of being _alien_. Alien to himself, alien to my experience of him, his affection for Belldandy congealed into an alien clot that blocked his heart from expressing itself. I could fancifully assume that Keiichi had been possessed by a ghost without reaching too far into my imaginative faculties. In a sense, he _was_ a ghost of himself; the passion that his divine girlfriend seemed to ignite in his heart was gone. Belldandy had been life itself to Keiichi; their love deeper and more vivid than a brilliant meadow of sunflowers weaving in the May-time zephyrs. This person sitting next to me at the dinner table was definitely Keiichi, as I could sense the nuances of his bearing that distinguished him. Yet, he wasn't Keiichi as well. The absence of Belldandy within Keiichi was more than a little disturbing to me.

While his 'amnesia' made Keiichi seem simply alien to me...in the eyes of Belldandy's sisters, his attitude of nonchalance towards Belldandy's plight was an insidious act of betrayal that verged on criminality. The amnesia he was suffering wasn't a type of severe retrograde memory loss where he was missing whole months or years out of his life. Nor did Keiichi seem to have a head injury or some other trauma that could indicate that he was suffering from Post-trauma induced amnesia. Further, his memory deficits _only_ arose when we asked him about his feelings towards Belldandy. He didn't have the dream-like quality to his feelings, or the mythology of impressions that usually accompanies amnesia. This whole thing was too damn selective to be a coincidence!

Or was it?

Skuld and Urd just couldn't seem to get it through their heads that Keiichi wasn't forgetting Belldandy out of spite. I felt uncertain as well, but I wasn't convinced that his air of unconcern towards Belldandy's absence was borne out of maliciousness. The more and more Urd and Skuld got angry with him, the more and more Keiichi's face would screw up with an expression of exasperation and disbelief. He truly seemed to believe that Belldandy was nothing more than a friend to him. I exhausted myself trying to suggest to him otherwise, then I tired myself out even further by suggesting to Urd and Skuld that Keiichi's betrayal may have been forced upon him somehow. Inside of his heart, I argued, he still loved Belldandy. But something was shielding him from feeling his love for her.

Just like inside of my heart, I still loved Urd.

But I knew why Urd had been made to discharge the proof of her feelings towards me. It was my choice, my responsibility, my loss. What would Urd have done, if she was in my place? I knew that Keiichi was bewildered; he didn't know why he had lost all sense of his love for Belldandy...and _none_ of us could explain this change to ourselves or each other. I had given up Urd so that Isilblius could be defeated. Beyond this, I didn't know _how_ he had been defeated. But Urd and Skuld had experienced five years of Keiichi expressing affection towards their sister. And now it was gone. I had to admit that two sisters were trying really hard to maintain a household whose core had been removed.

I was convinced that some force had robbed him of his feelings for Belldandy. Either that, or I would have to face the fact that the forgetting that I had bestowed upon Urd...had also been mistakenly bestowed upon Keiichi.

But to Urd and Skuld, the silence of his heart was a refusal.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Keiichi looked up from the textbook on Advanced Transform mathematics. His mind was wandering again...he had completely drifted away from Professor Matsumoto's lecture. Which was dangerous, considering that there were only eleven other students in the class. The Prof didn't tolerate slacking in his NIT Graduate School seminars. He was quick to remind his students that they were in his class only by virtue of the sufferance of others: either the taxpayers in the case of those who received student aid; or family members, in the case of Sayoko. Any snoozing or inattentiveness in class, and the elderly Chair of Mathematics at NIT would snap out a quick reproof against the transgressor. He came from the old school, where public humiliation in the classroom was considered a 'teaching' method.

Once again, tears had visited his eyes for no apparent reason. Every so often, Keiichi would feel his eyes well up with unbidden wetness. Of course, he hadn't broken into any bouts of girlish sobbing, but his heart would feel so lead-weight heavy at the most unexpected times. Everyone at school kept asking him about Belldandy's whereabouts, and he had to lie that his friend was "off on vacation to visit her homeland". Occasionally, he would catch his closest friends at NIT looking at him askance, as if there was something wrong with him. They all seemed to think that he was in love with Belldandy! Which wasn't true...Keiichi had never had a steady girlfriend in his life. While all the other guys were dating in high school and college, he was too uncertain of himself to ask any girls out. But they kept insisting that he was "Belldandy's boyfriend". It was bad enough getting pecked by Urd and Skuld at home, but he was getting vibed at school as well.

Then, hours later, Keiichi would be laying in his futon in his room after a hard night at work studying engineering schematics...and the sudden urge to cry would once again possess him. True, he was definitely saddened by the fact that Belldandy was gone. Like the others in his household, he was unnerved by the fact that some life-like replica of Belldandy had been deposited in a frozen pool of ice where the koi pond used to be. But not sad enough that he'd be crying over it. Belldandy was a Goddess...wherever she was, Keiichi knew that she could take care of herself.

"What the hell is wrong with me?" he asked himself, unamused at his flights of inattention. He bit his tongue sharply, forcing his gaze to fix upon Dr. Matsumoto, who was hurriedly scrawling the outline for today's lecture on the chalkboard.

Against the noisy clacker-screech of chalk on chalkboard, Keiichi reminded himself that he could visit Cevn after class was over. His friend had a roomy office, and kept office hours in the afternoon on Tuesdays and Thursdays. But something seemed different about him as well. Cevn had become a little stand-offish to Keiichi as of late. Keiichi knew that Cevn had majored in psychology in his undergrad years; thus, he had hoped that his friend could put on a 'therapist's cap' and explain these sudden bouts of melancholy. But instead of explanations, Cevn would probe him with searching questions. Also, Keiichi sensed that his worries seemed to trouble Cevn as well. Ever since he had awakened from the mysterious dreamless sleep he experienced a couple weeks ago, Keiichi was constantly conflicted by indecision.

Urd and Skuld were ice-cold to him...their polite deference as ice-cold as Belldandy's form under the koi pond. No one could explain how she had wound up in the koi pond in the first place, statue-like in the frozen shallowness. Now that it was early December, the first seasonal snows had flurried upon Chiba, painting the cityscape with grey and white. With each snowfall, either Skuld or Urd would solemnly go out into the front yard and sweep the snow off the ice of the koi pond, so that Belldandy wouldn't be buried out of sight in the drifts.

They could cry, because they had a reason to gather their sadness.

Several midnights ago, he heard a wailing sobbing coming from the sister's bedroom during a mid-night waking spell. He could understand why Skuld and Urd were so upset that they would put on a face while they fenced their emotions inside until he was asleep. Oddly enough, he sensed that the two sisters seemed to _blame_ him for Belldandy's disappearance. But Keiichi couldn't fathom why _he_ was sad as well.

Belldandy had come down from heaven to grant him a wish, and he couldn't remember what his wish had been.

For a second, he tried again to remember what his wish had been, but such a task was quite impossible in the midst of one of Professor Matsumoto's lectures on the higher advances of technical math.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Would you stop staring at me!" Urd yelled at Cevn. She had caught him staring at her again. Floating in mid-air in front of the TV in a red sweater, black mini-skirt and knee-high knits, she had shifted position...and spied him looking at her from the corner of the living room. The insensitive jerk! He was only _pretending_ to read the book he had in his hands. Why'd he even bother flipping the pages to make his reading appear authentic? Everyone knew that he was spying on her. She thought briefly that she and Skuld should ban him from being in the living room in the evening while she was watching her sitcoms. He could read his books in his room, for all Urd cared.

Sitcoms were stupid, because they reminded her of how stupid mortal men and women really are. But for some reason, she couldn't label Cevn as being stupid. Irritating to an extreme...yes! He was definitely treading on her nerves. But stupid...no, she didn't see him as stupid.

He was much worse than that.

When she had first brought him here, the guy was almost phobic towards women. While most guys would stare at her gawkishly with lust-fascinated, borderline-drooling expressions...she didn't hold that kind of power over Cevn. Instead, Urd discerned that his aura was percolated with tension and anxiety whenever he was around her. At first, Urd had assumed that he was gay, but later on Belldandy and Keiichi confided to her that Cevn was 'troubled'. Then Cevn himself had disclosed the horrific events in his past, which sealed her sister's assessment of him. His anxiety around her wasn't his fault, nor hers. Naturally, Urd was fascinated with the challenge of trying to use her beauty to see if she force him past his shyness. But numerous attempts at seduction had transformed themselves in 'incidents'; usually, Cevn would have an emotional meltdown and wind up blenching away from her. And everyone else in the house had gotten on her for attempting to seduce Cevn, chewing her out for being disrespectful towards his sensitivities. Eventually, the game grew old, especially when Urd realized that her charm couldn't offset his fears. After this, she allowed herself to tolerate him, resigned to the fact that he was even more hapless than Keiichi. But romantically, he might as well be brick thrown into mud.

Urd knew that Cevn's 'sensitivities' were nothing more than the result of his being fucked up around women. Like most mortals, he had converted his 'issues' into 'baggage'; he eventually became convinced that he had no traits of consequence to render himself attractive in the eyes of the opposite sex. Being a Goddess Senior First Class, Urd knew that she could easily employ a selective Mindwipe technique to remove all the bad memories from him, so that he could start behaving normally like most other guys. Instead of shedding waves of fear like a cat sheds hair, Cevn could get a nosebleed whenever she pranced around him in an alluring outfit.

That would be normal.

But right now, Urd was inclined to Mindwipe him completely. Wash the paint off the canvas, erase the chalkboard, drain the teapot...

Lately, Cevn _wasn't_ acting himself. It was bad enough that Keiichi was so weird in the head, totally forgetting five years of being heart-bonded with Belldandy. Keiichi's ignorance of this was a constant source of irritation to her and Skuld. But Cevn's 'attentions' towards her were wearing Urd's patience thin. Paper thin. The nervousness she sensed when she sat near him at the dinner table wasn't the "stay away from me" kind. Strangely enough, Cevn's edgy demeanor reminded Urd of an ex-boyfriend, especially how awkward he acted around her after they had broken up. Normally, when a God and Goddess chose to end a romantic relationship, the pair simply reconstitute their relationship...and their hearts do the rest. There was no stringing along, no back-biting, no enmeshment, no back-and-forth denial, no stalking, no battles in court...none of the bitter afflictions that often plagued mortals when they call it off. And yet, when Urd broke up with the Cherry Blossom Spirit, she remained infatuated. 90 millennia later, and a simple T-shirt design for Keiichi's motor club would still set her off into passionate fantasies about her ex. Then there was Troubadour, who simply had bailed on her, seeking some 'muse' instead of her affections. Dimwit. Before Troubadour, Cherry Blossom and she had mutually agreed to break up because their relationship had hit a dead end of sorts. Even after she had broken up with the Cherry Blossom Spirit, his fickle nature caused him to try and win her affections back for a couple millennia before she finally made him aware that she was no longer interested in him. But they had been in love, so she could understand his lingering affection. As a young adult, Urd later became the Norn of the Past and was forbidden by the Ultimate Force to have a romantic relationship. Cevn and she had never been in love...such a love being utterly impossible considering her status as Norn of the Past and its consequence of limitations. Yet, she still wondered "what if?" from time to time. But yet, here he was acting goofy again, as if he had been in love with her.

She sensed the same emotional wanderlust in Cevn's eyes, as if _he_ was wondering "what if?"

There he was again, peeking over the top of his book at her.

"This is _my_ living room!" Urd said in a punctuating growl of a voice. "If you're going to stare, at least do so discretely. Otherwise, go read your stupid book in your room."

Without a word, Cevn stood up and left the living room.

Urd sighed, as she could sense the troubled aura lingering behind him. A moment later, her attention was engaged by the antics of the girl on TV trying to decide between the kind-hearted accountant and the rebellious artist.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

THERA:

Belldandy awoke to find Keiichi staring at her. Instinctively, she pulled the futon covers tight under her chin and glared at him.

"The nerve of you! We're in a temple, and you're observing me while I'm sleeping. What if the priest saw you...eeep!!"

As if on cue, the priest waved at her. This was just great; now _two_ men were invading her waking moments. One was God, the other was a Buddhist priest. In neither case was it appropriate for them to be in the same room with her. This could only mean one thing...

"What'd I do wrong?" Belldandy stammered, assuming the obvious. The world was unfair, and she was going to get it from one of the two.

"You didn't do anything wrong," Keiichi assured her. "But our honorable host has a few words he'd like to offer you."

Belldandy didn't feel very assured by this choice of words. She felt just like she did as a young girl, knowing that she was going to get scolded by the principal for being tardy. Maybe the priest was mad at her for sleeping in or something. For godly people, priests tend to wake get up at ungodly hours. Who in their right mind would want to arise _very_ early in the morning. No wonder they needed to pray and meditate!

"Young lady, after talking to your boyfriend..."

Belldandy shot an withering stare at Keiichi, who grinned sheepishly and rubbed the back of his head with a shy embarrassment that was almost cute.

"I have decided to travel to China and India to seek further enlightenment. In my conversations with your boyfriend, I've learned that for one so young, he seems to be well versed in the Way. He has actually given me much to contemplate. However, I am hindered by a material bond that I must relinquish in order to be receptive to greater purity and rigor. Thus, I cannot leave in good conscience without assigning the care of this ancient temple to a responsible party. Normally, I would have to maneuver through catacombs of bureaucracy, both governmental and religious, to accomplish such a task. Handing over a temple isn't as easy as handing over a shrine; there is no family involved in matters of inheritance. As I am a poor monk, I have no followers or apprentices that I can avail to for such a matter. However, your companion suggested a reasonable alternative. He said that he would undertake the keep of this temple, provided that you share in the task. Which means that you and he would reside here. He appraised me of your current indigent status and vouches for your chastity," the priest noted.

"What did you tell him!" Belldandy shouted, sitting up quickly in her futon as blood rushed to her face.

"He merely said that you were a college student who had lost her student housing, and that you and he were abstemious in matters of the flesh " the priest answered, patting Keiichi's shoulder. "He _is_ solicitous towards your well-being...and in this matter I offer that you should trust your boyfriend."

"HE IS NOT MY BOYFRIEND!" Belldandy shouted, pounding her fist on the wooden temple flooring. Her face was probably purple now with pent-up rage. The idea that he and the elderly priest had discussed her sex life was insulting to the Nth degree. Why is it that whenever he's around her, her life sucks so much that she wanted to hurl?

"Ahhh, but you quarrel like..." the priest started to comment. Keiichi waved him off with an up-and-down hand motion.

"My proposition is this. I am willing to let you and this young man live here in the ancient temple, provided that you see to the upkeep of all the buildings and the grounds. This young man," the priest noted, reaching up and clapping a hand on Keiichi's shoulder, "assures me that he is fully capable of hard physical work. He even claims to be a competent repairman. This old temple needs so _many_ repairs..."

Every instinct inside of her was screaming at her to say "NO!"

"We'll do it!"

She covered her mouth with her hands, but it was too late.

"Ahhh!! This is wonderful!" the priest exclaimed with delight, happily clapping his hands together in front of his chin. Keiichi grinned at her, perhaps surprised that she had agreed. With Mr. Mysterious God, anything could mean something weird.

Before Belldandy could get another word in, the priest asked, "My dear, could you prepare a final meal for an aged spiritual wanderer, one that will christen his coming journey with a seasoning of good memories?"

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Somehow, she had managed it. Belldandy had used almost all of the food in the kitchen to prepare a feast for the priest. Obligation commingled with frustration; she felt obligated because the priest was willing to loan them an _entire_ temple. Real estate prices being what they were in Makuhari and Chiba, the expansive temple grounds alone were worth more money than she'd see in a dozen lifetimes. Her frustration dwelled upon the realization that she had been shuffled into 'cook duty' without even bothering to protest. Stupid male chauvinists, exploiting her and making decisions on her behalf without asking! Keiichi even visited her in the temple kitchen from time to time, offering suggestions to her about how to spice her food. Blithely ignorant that he was rubbing salt in her wounded ego. His advice further fueled Belldandy's irritation; especially when she realized that he probably knew what he was talking about.

After all, he was God.

"I am so not into this...I am so not into this," she said aloud as she chopped more vegetables.

Keiichi had taken it upon himself to lay out a large floormat for the 'banquet'. Belldandy sat on the end, while he and the priest sat across from each other. The food was very tasty, but Belldandy was warily eying the dozens of bowls and plates that had accumulated during the meal.

She was definitely _not_ going to do the dishes!

The next several hours passed quickly, as the aged priest dealt them explicit instructions on the numerous chores involved in taking care of the temple. How could he remember all that crap? Finally, after a monologue of 'rules' about the functions of the temple, their priestly benefactor rubbed his belly and belched, signifying the end of their supper. He stood up and bowed to her and Keiichi appreciatively.

"If you will excuse me," he asked. All that Belldandy could mind was how cramped her legs were, as she had sat in a formal position for hours on end listening to his slow voice droning on and on. Now that dinner was over, she noticed that she was already hungry again. A coffee from a cafe and a croissant would be nice right about now, Belldandy observed privately.

"Sir, if I may have your leave to begin repairs on the temple," Keiichi volunteered. The priest fixed him with a surprised expression, noting that "none should leave the dinner table and begin chores so quickly."

"I feel that I should start right away, to repay your act of compassionate kindness with a prompt respect," Keiichi insisted.

"If you feel that way, then freely go about your repairs," the priest acquiesced.

Keiichi waved his hand...

Belldandy gasped as the entire temple was wrapped in a golden light for what seemed like five or six seconds. She could hear all sorts of sounds, a cacophony of muffled noise. "What the hell is going on now?" she wondered. When the light lifted, she was left speechless...

The cedarwood floor was no longer scratched and thin worn. The stripes of wood in the flooring seemed brand new; there wasn't a hint of warping or ill-fitting pieces. In fact, _everything_ seemed brand new. The Buddha-images in the worship room shone brightly with a polish of golds and silvers, the ceiling beams were sturdy and aromatic with woodkin, the walls were freshly paneled and unchipped.

The priest was awestruck in his silence.

"Now you've gone and done it!" Belldandy thought to herself as she regarded Keiichi. Arms crossed, he was surveying his handwork. He didn't just repair the temple...he had rendered it brand new. It could have been built yesterday, as far as the eye could reckon.

"M..mmm...nmer...Merciful Buddha!" the priest finally gasped in a thin voice. Belldandy was seriously worried that the old man might have a heart attack right here and now.

"I hope this small effort meets with your approval, sir," Keiichi said, bowing deeply to the priest. "Those who undertake spiritual pursuits are rarely appreciated in this modern age of instant convenience and consumer decadence. There are so many distractions to lead wayward minds and souls astray from their true purpose. What you see before you is not my doing, but it is of the temple itself. I have but allowed the spirit of the temple to manifest itself as it would, and the temple chose to manifest thus in gratitude for the many years of devotion and hard work you have poured into it. This is the temple's essence, and it is most thankful to you. Please enjoy this glimpse into its Soul..."

The priest twirled around in the middle of the room, somehow rendered much more spry for his age.

"Do you think it's safe?" Belldandy commented aside to Keiichi behind her hand. "That old baldy...he doesn't know anything about who you really are. He's a _priest_...and you just performed a miracle! Isn't that a little bit on the obvious side? We are so busted. He's bound to tell someone..."

"Not if he's in India," Keiichi replied with a wink. "He'll take at least a dozen years just to learn the languages there, while all the while he will be instructed by the most revered and advanced holy spiritual masters. Once he gains further enlightenment, he'll realize the miracle for what it is...just a part of life."

"B..but," Belldandy started to argue.

"And now, to India with you!" Keiichi said. With a flash, the priest was gone.

"He's well on his way to becoming a Buddha!" Keiichi commented to himself with a grin.

Belldandy shook her head...and then realized that she was alone. In a temple. With a man. Just the two of them. And He was God.

She was now officially in Hell.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

ASGARD MATRIX VII:

Pryzm surveyed the bowed bridge of a million technicolors from the balcony of the Swarp Gate tower. She could see the six other Swarp Gate towers piercing the sky-mist in the distance, each slender circular tower perched along alternating sides of the bridge. Beyond them was the blue glow of the Matrix, ribboned by millions of other Bridges. Although the floating constellation-city of Kami-sama was the _true_ hub of the Yggdrasil Logorinth...when she gazed out at the nebulous Matrix, Pryzm could almost feel a certain sense that Asgard Matrix VII was the center of all of Yggdrasil. The Matrix was a construct of Beauty itself; she felt graced simply by being present within it.

"Okay, now that we're all here, do you want to explain to us why we're here, Ulfryn?" Pryzm asked, holding her hands behind her back as she turned to face her younger twin sister. Ulfryn had beckoned their flight to this gathering place with desperate pleadings, even more so than the usual whining when she wanted something. Her sister was actually serious about this, whatever it was! So Pryzm had to cave in, then became a good sport and finally she made it so. Whether their little escapade would remain undiscovered remained to be seen, but she had taken care of the hard part...getting them to Yggdrasil. Pryzm was going on sheer trust, hoping that her sis knew what she was doing. However, when she pressed Ulfryn for an explanation about why this expedition was so urgent, her sister kept her lips sealed. All she could pry out of her was that it _was_ serious.

"Okay, Ulfryn. Spill. What can be so important that you asked us all to skip school, leave the Earthrealm and come here? You even told us not to tell our parents or grandparents! And you seem too bothered to tell me what's up. Me, you own twin sister. You just said it had to do with 'family business' or something," Pryzm added with a soft scowl, her grey-brown eyes piercing.

"It does!! It does have to do with family!" Ulfryn interjected hastily, meeting her sister's eyes with an intensity of her own. Pryzm could feel the basso subsonic humming of the Swarp Hypernality...which seemed to vibrate in synch with her own excitation. She and the other three children had a hybrid of capabilities that reflected their dual nature. On the Earthrealm, they struggled with math and geography, aged in spans equivalent to other mortal children, and had the usual conflicts with peers and parents. Here, in the Yggdrasil Logorinth, they possessed the Goddess powers of, say, an Earthrealm Spirit. They could jump in on any inculcate session with their God-boy and God-girl classmates and not lose a beat. And they didn't age, although their physical manifestations matched those they had on the Earthrealm. They led dual lives, and it was often fun. But it was a pain as well. Mom had to prepare them each time they visited the grandparents...the sudden shift from being 11-year-old schoolgirls to being young Goddesses was often overwhelming during the first few moments of transition into the Logorinth. As far as family education...Mother took care of all the "Goddess" stuff, while Father took care of the "Human" stuff, at least when he was off-season or playing at home. Of course, both their parents talked to them about the 'sex' stuff, while Father instructed them on athletics and 'no drug lectures'. You'd have to be an idiot to do drugs!

Both she and Ulfryn still felt a little creepy at time with the idea of having breakfast with their Dad before going to school in the morning, and then catching the train home at dusk, eating dinner with Mom, and then turning on the TV to watch him pitch for the Giants on NHK national network the same night. On weekends, they would travel to Yggdrasil in the morning, catch a decade or two of Ygg time, and then return in the evening refreshed or tired, depending on how hard they played and studied.

Family.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

As Ulfryn tried to decide on how she was going to explain herself, her memory lit upon the events that set the whole wheel spinning...

It was about a year ago when she first started noticing the ghosties.

Actually, this entire thing seemed to have started when Falcyn and Sygyn came to visit. Demons had this aura of mischief, and sometimes it would burst upon her. Whenever their cousins and their Aunt would visit, they would stay in the Demon's Wing of the temple house. Usually during summer break, Auntie would leave them for a few weeks while she conducted 'business' in Vanagdrasil.

Ulfryn had known Falcyn as far back as she could remember; he was always the tall boy-cousin who looked so cute and acted so rotten. At times Ulfryn aspired to be like Falcyn...especially when he started into his teens. Suddenly, he wasn't a punk; instead, she thought he was so mature. Already in Junior High at that time, he was wearing the dark blue uniform of his school. Auntie had enrolled him and Sygyn in one of those 'good' schools, mostly so that Falcyn could have the best sports instructors and Sygyn's genius wouldn't go to waste. But that day, seeing him in his uniform...

She was reminded of another boy. No, not a boy...but a grown-up. Or was it a boy? It was the weirdest thing she had experienced, which was saying a lot when your Mom is a Goddess, your Dad is a star baseball player, your Aunt is a Demoness, and you could travel millions of light-years by simply stepping off a platform. What was so weird about it? Every time she would look at Falcyn...Ulfryn would see _two_ of him. She would see a shaggy-haired teenage boy who had an unpolished idol-star looks when he didn't wear his silly glasses. But she would also see an _older_ Falcyn; a young man who had dark bangs of straight brown hair and a winning smile, almost shadowing her cousin.

That first 'dreamtime' was so hideously unreal that Ulfryn had eaten a whole half gallon of her Mom's favorite ice cream later that night just to check into reality, and had gotten sick.

The next day was more of the same. Falcyn was always so serious, except when he was flirting with girls. Then, he was simply goofy. Of course, Pryzm used this trait to tease him all the time. But later in the day, Auntie and Mom left for a "grown-ups shopping expedition", leaving the four of them to play around in the yard. In the afternoon, Ulfryn noticed that she was definitely feeling uncomfortable around Falcyn...feeling almost feverish whenever at times. Worried that she was sick, she chased down Mom when they got back from shopping and asked her if she could take a nap.

That night, she had a telling dream. Falcyn was riding a motorcycle down a curve of highway that seemed to be perilously attached to a steep hillside or cliff. The dream was vivid to the point of being as clear as a movie. She could even smell burning oil, or something. But that wasn't all; in her catalog of dreams, she also sensed the presence of an older woman. Not a _old_ woman, but a woman about Mom's age. Mid 20s, perhaps. The woman seemed to smile gently at her just like a Goddess would, wordlessly reassuring her that she wasn't dreaming...and then she woke up.

But then, after dreaming the same dream a few dozen times and sometimes, Ulfryn awakened one morning to find that the woman and man were still in her room _after she woke up_! They were no long just dreams or figments of her imagination. They had gone up a level, and now were ghosts in Ulfryn's mind. Ghosts or something even more than strange.

When she fearfully explained all this to Mother, her Mom simply suggested that she had been working too hard in school, and now she had taken on some 'imaginary friends' to help her ease the pressure. True to her nature, Mom didn't ignore her outright; she installed a network of surveillance devices in Ulfryn's room, so she could 'catch' the holophotic imprint of the visitors the next time they came.

But nothing happened. Mom's detection devices yielded nothing out of the ordinary. It was quite unlikely for her Mother's mecha creations to malfunction...after all, Mom was _very good_ at designing and building new inventions. So Ulfryn decided that she was just imagining the whole thing. Maybe Mom was right about the "pressures of school" thing she had pointed out. She was right about so many things...

Ulfryn had wonder if maybe her reaction was due to the fact that her cousin was not just a boy, but a Demon. She even fretted with the idea that perhaps she was old enough to find her older cousin attractive, as in "I wish he was my boyfriend" sort of attractive. This scared her to death, and Pryzm had teased her to death once she had admitted her 'secret'. Maybe that was why she was imagining all sorts of stuff, like an older version of Falcyn.

Mortified at her own inability to discover a reasonable explanation, Ulfryn almost gave up, hoping that the dream-visitors would go away if she stopped dwelling on them. She didn't feel bothered by them, but she _was_ bothered by the mystery surrounding them. There was no way to prove that they existed, and no one else ever saw them.

Then one day, she saw _four_ of them. She had dozed off in school, irritated because one of the boys in her class had teased her and her sister once again. Her hair was a remarkable color of pink, with streaks of black and brunette mixed in, and she always had to lie about it. Duh! Girls on the Earthrealm just don't have naturally pink hair, with apologies to all the anime heroines who do. And Pryzm would stick up for her, which resulted in additional teasing of the 'tomboy' variety directed at her older twin sister. Which was true, because Pryzm was a tomboy through and through.

Trying another tact, Ulfryn began faking sleep at school so that the boy and his worthless friends wouldn't bother her and her sister any more. But one day she fell asleep for real. When she woke up, embarrassed at falling asleep on her desk with a small puddle of drool next to her cheek, Ulfryn saw a girl and a boy in addition to the woman and the man-who-looked-like-Falcyn.

Mom didn't have a clue what _that_ had meant. Now, all four 'ghosties' were distinct forms, almost realistic if they weren't so transparent.

Since Mom didn't know, in Ulfryn shifted to Plan B. Plan B was infinitely more difficult than Plan A. Deep into the night, she snuck away from her bedroom and sought out the only other Being who could solve problems that her mother couldn't solve. At least she thought it'd turn out that way, because she was going to meet with the highest Authority she knew of...

Kami-sama Himself.

Scared to death...not only because she was visiting the Presence, but that she might get caught sneaking out of the house, Ulfryn had approached the constellation-city residence of the Almighty. Inside of the reception castle, the pink-haired receptionist informed her that she was expected...and then Ulfryn had became even more terrified. She remembered thinking, "He _must_ be the Almighty! He's actually _awaiting_ my visit, and I haven't told _any one_!!" By the time she was admitted through the crystal doors into His mega-awe-inspiring audience chamber, she was quivering from head to toe.

In less than a minute, He had her giggling.

Her fears forgotten, Ulfryn posed the single question that had journeyed her towards risking everything to seek His insight.

"What do my dreams mean, Sir?" she asked in a tiny, inconspicuous little-girl voice. The Lord regarded her with His chin resting against his hand. After a pause, He answered,

"Your dreams are a part of yourself, and yet not a part of yourself, My Child."

When Ulfryn pressed Him for further explanation, He declined. What kind of an answer was this? She was disappointed, until He told her an Earthrealm fable about the husband would couldn't feed himself, and when his wife left to visit her parents, he starved to death. Ulfryn immediately knew what He was suggesting in His silence. She would have to come up with the answers herself. But He was very loving and tender towards her...she had never felt so protected and safe, even when she was around Mother and Father. She told Him that she thought he was the greatest man in all of the Multiverse...and He answered her "It is not so. Your mortal father is even greater than I, because he loves you totally, with all of his heart."

She was brought to tears by His heart-touching revelation of the truth about her Dad. He beckoned her to approach, and gently gathered her onto His lap and hugged her to His chest for a moment. She remembered His last words to her...

_"My Child, everything you ever will need to know in your life is already inside of your heart. The greatest joy one can find in life is learning how to listen to their heart."_

With a sly grin, He even snuck her back home by doing some neat trick with Time and Space, so that she wouldn't get in trouble with Mom. Once home, she was both awed and terrified by what she had just accomplished. Despite His busy schedule, He had made time to meet with her.

He was the Almighty!

The next morning, she felt like she had experienced a power-up. Ulfryn told Pryzm about her adventure in the Lord's palace, and His answer-that-wasn't-an-answer. Needless to say, Pryzm almost choked on her breath at first, gasped out "You visited the _Almighty_?!" But once her older twin became inclined to believe her, she started the usual teasing about her being "a dreamer" and threatened to tell on her to Mom. But Ulfryn knew that Pryzm was also very concerned about her in a twin-sisterly way that couldn't be explained. Pryzm even confided to her that sometimes she was worried about her, even while walking home from school.

How could she let some silly dreams influence her enough to cause her to go to the _Lord_ to get help?

In a final act of desperation, Ulfryn decided to try and follow the Lord's advice. But listening to one's heart is quite difficult, for the speech of the heart is uncertain and often whispered. Ulfryn spent several months listening to her kokoro. A year ago, she didn't even know what a kokoro was, except the kind of kokoro that she read about in shojo manga and saw during evening dramas on TV.

And then it all came to her last week.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Okay, you guys...I'll tell you my big secret," Ulfryn said in a wavering voice. Pryzm could tell that her sister was scared; she was visibly fighting with herself to maintain eye contact with she and the others.

Must be _some_ secret!

"But you all have to pinky-promise me that you won't tease me if I'm wrong, and that you won't tell Mom and Dad and Auntie about this. It's _our_ secret from now on..." Ulfryn added, a worried look on her face.

"That's stupid! That's beyond stupid...that's retarded! Besides, guys don't do pinky-promises! That's girlie stuff!" Falcyn immediately protested disapprovingly, his half-boy half-man's voice shrill with irritation.

"Falcyn..." Sygyn warned in a threatening voice dewy with displeasure. Pryzm almost giggled as 'Falcyn The Mighty' cautiously backed down, convincingly chided by a single word from his younger sis. Grimacing, he stuck out his pinky...

The four joined their pinkies and took a solemn oath. Pryzm thought Ulfryn's solemnity about her 'secret' was a bit on the inane side, but she hooked her pinky finger with the others and shook it three times. Oddly enough, she noticed that Ulfryn's initial anxiety seemed to mellow once the assurance had been granted by her cousins.

"Okay...now I can tell you all," Ulfryn said, and then paused, her gaze wandering off in the direction of a handsome young God who floated by.

"Ahem. About the secret..." Pryzm asked, spiced with impatience. She was almost ready to step on her sister's foot if Ulfryn spent even another nanosecond looking at that young God...

"Ahhh...did you know we have an older brother and sister?" Ulfryn said, her face matter-of-factly calm.

"Of course we have an older boy-cousin and girl-cous..." Pryzm started to argue. Her breath clipped short in mid-sentence. For some reason, she cocked her head slightly to the side and regarded her sister. Ulfryn's face seemed to be a palate of conflicting emotions.

"Uh...Ulfryn, uh...can you say that again?"

"I asked you if you knew that we have an older brother and sister. Because we do!" Ulfryn near-shouted.

Falcyn's face was rapidly turning red; he looked like he was going to explode into a Demonic Rage. Sygyn wasn't that far behind him, her dainty face was peppered with red freckles...

"Y..y..y..you asked us to come here...so you could tell us _that_?" Pryzm gasped, almost choking on her own surprise and anger.

"This...is the worst!" Sygyn shouted. Despite her waifish form, her older cousin seemed to take on stature, figuratively standing three meters high when she was _this_ angry. Sygyn was delicate in physical frame and emotional makeup, but she was also her Mother's daughter. Which meant that she could snap...

Sygyn's fangs were definitely glistening and lengthening as they peeked out of the corners of her mouth.

"Look, Ulfryn! This isn't fair to us! I don't know what possessed you to set all of this up, but you made all of us skip school! For nothing more than a prank! If you need attention, then you shouldn't do stupid things to get it! Negative attention is not the way to go, sis!" Pryzm shouted.

"I SAW IT!! I SAW THEM! I'VE BEEN SEEING THEM FOR ALMOST SIX MONTHS! AND THEY'RE _REAL_!!" Ulfryn screamed at the top of her lungs.

Several hundred Gods and Goddesses literally paused in mid-flight to stare at them.

Pryzm slapped a hand against her forehead in frustration. As she tried to shy off from the stares of the nearby Gods and Goddesses, she turned on her heel to face away from the interior of the building, her face suddenly hot. Not only had Ulfryn sent them on some stupid idiot errand...it had all turned out to be a stupid prank! And now she was acting stupid, screaming in the middle of a Swarp Gate tower! Stupid younger sister! She was making a stupid scene. And it was about those stupid dreams of hers!

"Ahh...what do we have here, Skuld? Looks like someone's skipping school..."

Pryzm's hastily convened mishmash of resentment towards her younger sister quickly flew the coop at the sound of the familiar voice. The voice was calm and assured, confident to the point of sounding insouciant...but the impact of that one remark was anything besides being nonchalant. The words were like a series of stones being thrown into a placid pond. The tingling in her cheekbones told her the rest: her face had probably shifted in the White Hole zone in terms of being flushed with dismay and fear. And then the most terrifying voice she could imagine spoke...

"Mara, what are we going to do about these four little strays?"

"Ohhh…SHIT!" Falcyn managed to gasp right before his Mother, Mara, grabbed him tightly by the earlobe and started shaking his head roughly.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Outside the Swarp Gate tower, four children were floating briskly back towards the BridgePortal, escorted by two adults, a Goddess and a Demoness. Both women wore exasperated expressions on their faces.

"Okay, let me try to get this straight," Skuld said in a weary voice. "The four of you decided to skip out of school on a Monday, and then came here because you believe that these dreams you're having are actually signs from somewhere? And you all suppose that you're smart enough to start some kind of investigation about those signs. And you believe these 'signs' are telling each of you that you have an older sister and brother?"

"Yes, Mother!" Ulfryn and Pryzm shouted, their faces briefly lit up with a hopeful expression.

"My daughter the dreamer..." Skuld sighed, looking right at Ulfryn. She had a strong suspicion that this whole scheme was something Ulfryn had cooked up. After all, her youngest had approached her several times about these strange night visions as of late. Dreams that turn into ghosts, so she had claimed.

"Here I am, the Norn of the Future, and I didn't even see this one coming!" Skuld said with self-amused sigh. Her sister paused in mid-flight and regarded her with a knowing grin. Skuld stroked her long ravenesque black hair and then tied it into a bun on the back of her head, hoping this would make her appear more 'parental'. As much as she loved her daughters, Skuld knew that she had to fully be in 'Mother Mode' to deal with this mess.

This was a doozy, to say the least.

Mara could no longer contain herself; she started laughing in a rich voice at her younger sister's joke. It was a private inside joke that her sister brought out only in the most trying of circumstances with the kids. But she quickly regained her stern expression, regarding her sister's and her kids with an imperial authority. As expected, Sygyn seemed to make herself smaller, and Falcyn looked sullenly down at the ground as they floated up towards the BridgePortal, occasionally glancing up briefly to look at her with defiance.

"He'll make a good Demon when he grows up," Mara thought to herself, impressed by the daring glances of resentment he shot towards her.

But not today.

"I don't know how we can possibly let this one go unpunished, Mara," Skuld announced. "I would suggest that we ground the kids for a couple of weeks, so they can reflect on the fact that free will has consequences, even for children. Especially for willful children who decide to run away to Yggdrasil Logorinth on a whim."

"I was thinking the same thing, Skuld!" Mara said, her red-orange Demoness eyes gleaming as she overheard sighs of protest from the kids. "But grounding is just the beginning, as far as I'm concerned."

"Mommmmm..." Sygyn wailed pensively.

"They didn't bother to tell either of us about their little 'trip'. I'm all for a little harmless dishonesty once in a while..._if _one is smooth enough to get away with it. But they didn't even bother to cover their tracks. Your Banpei caught their departure on holo..."

Skuld watched as both her daughters visibly sagged with regret. Of course they couldn't just run away! And yet, they had tried again. She had spent years continually upgrading Banpei, just for these kinds of situations. After all, Pryzm and Ulfryn were the _only_ half-mortal half-Goddess kids on the Earthrealm. Because of this peculiarity of their natures, it was imperative that she went to great measures to prevent any 'mishaps' should her daughters decide to tap into their nascent Goddess abilities. The security network she created was almost paranoid in its completeness. It had to be, for her daughter's own protection as much as to protect the entire planet. Even with the limits placed on their Goddess abilities and powers while they were on the Earthrealm, Skuld knew that an all-out effort by either one of her daughters could effect significant change; something like deforesting the entire EarthRealm within an hour or so.

Yet, she had to begrudgingly give Pryzm credit; her eldest daughter had managed to create a Transport Mandala right under her nose. Of course, she had her husband to blame for this...Tomohisa had booked a "Romantic Weekend Getaway" at a very private onsen ryokan in Shikoku. Overjoyed at a chance to have her husband all to herself for a whole weekend, Skuld wasted no time in calling Mara to see if Falcyn and Sygyn could come over and help Banpei babysit for the weekend. Mara was more than happy to oblige, grateful to have her Demoness Lair all to herself. Her sister was so damned busy, any breaks Skuld could offer were warmly received.

Skuld realized that, obviously, the older cousins were in on the whole game as well. But still, the fact that Pryzm had built the Mandala in just one weekend was very impressive. Skuld felt a moody whimsy, remembering how she had done something just as risky when she was her daughter's age.

And on a more adult level, Skuld realized that her getaway with her husband was well worth it, despite the present situation. _Very_ satisfying...especially the shopping and the late night cuddling. Her amorous reminisces were sheerly interrupted by Pryzm's grumbling voice of dismay.

"Mother! Weren't you a girl, once!" Pryzm protested. "This isn't _fair_! You can't ground us for _two whole weeks_..."

"Wanna bet?!" Mara interrupted in a snappy voice. "She's the mom! She can do whatever she wants to!"

"...and why should we all get punished when it was just one of Ulfryn's ideas in the first pl...ulp!"

Skuld was amused by Pryzm's arguments. She had gotten over _that_ one years ago; the "weren't you once just a kid?" attempts by her daughters to elicit sympathy or leniency. Sometimes her girls even taunted her with it; she had let slip that she used to hate being reminded that she was a kid when she was younger. Now, it was "weren't you even a girl once?". Her daughters were at that age now; it seemed that they were getting more sophisticated in their attempts to build a case for stretching the limits. No doubt her daughters were struggling with the same issues that made her careworn when she was their age.

"Oh well, they'll get through it just as messily as I did," she thought with a smile. To her surprise, Falcyn interrupted Pryzm by trying to lay the blame squarely on himself, protecting Ulfryn.

But it was a moot point, because she knew her daughters so well. Ulfryn's guilty expression was all Skuld needed to realize that this whole affair had been initiated and driven by her youngest, even though Pryzm was the actual architect of the escape.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

The silence was almost overbearing, even though they were approaching the BridgePortal to return to the EarthRealm. Pryzm seemed to be locked within a cascading, never-ending sense of regret...the gnawing repining that had followed once she realized that she had broken their pinky-promise.

"It's okay, sis," Ulfryn whispered to her. "They already know everything. No doubt, Banpei recorded our conversations as well as our using the Mandala to get here."

"I'm so sorry, sis," Pryzm offered. She was supposed to be the tough one of the two sisters, and yet she had been the first to cave in when the pressure heated up on them this time. She floated low over the rainbow surface of the bridge and kicked it, pent up with guilt. Her Mother quickly motioned her back up with an insistent hand-wave, clearly irritated. Pryzm was almost at the point where she didn't even care if she made Mom angry. She floated back to join the group, but she didn't want to look at anyone. Especially Aunt Mara, who was probably eating all of this up.

Stupid Demoness of an Aunt!

Why, of all the young Goddesses in Yggdrasil, was she and her sister the only ones to have a _Demoness_ for an Aunt? It was hard enough being half-mortal...but to be raised around a Aunt that delighted in catching them in the middle of a wrongdoing...this was wickedly terrible!

Pryzm sensed an approaching presence.

"Ha ah ha! Where are they? Where are my little girls?" a thick male voice boomed nearby, drawing Pryzm's attention away from her misgivings about her so-called life...

"AHA! There they are! There's my little darling angels!" the basso voice shouted, even closer.

Pryzm and Ulfryn exchanged a glance, and then grinned.

Grandpa!

With a whisk of feigned effort, Grandpa Odeyn floated over to the gathering.

"Rescued!" they both thought to each other.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Skuld couldn't believe her luck. Of all the times for her Father to drop in! Now she couldn't scold her daughters at all. Not that she wanted to scold them, of course, but now that Grandpa was here, the immediacy of enforcing some kind of discipline for their misbehavior would be lost. Now, they would get pampered...and she couldn't do a thing about it. Her Father, Odeyn, was probably one of the most doting grandfather in the Yggdrasil Logorinth. Not to mention that he was the _only_ grandfather of half-human, half-Goddess granddaughters.

"Er...Hi Dad," Skuld said in a level voice.

"They're all here! All my cuties!" Odeyn shouted, gathering Skuld and her two girls in a broad-armed bear hug. Skuld glanced over his shoulder at Mara, knowing that now her sister couldn't do anything to discipline her kids either. Mara's disappointment was writ all over her face, her expression reminded Skuld of the time Falcyn had poured soy sauce in her dinner wine.

Skuld didn't miss Falcyn's sharply bratty grin either. The little insolent brat! He _knew_ that Grandpa Odeyn's presence had both surprised and upstaged her...and he wasn't about to hide his amusement at the circumstances. His sister Sygyn was transparent; the relief at being let off the hook by Grandpa's unexpected encounter almost radiating from her grateful mien.

"What a surprise! And Mara...and Falcyn and Sygyn too! Wait until Grandma sees the two of you! It's been so long since you visited last!" Odeyn acknowledged with a hearty enthusiasm. "And since it's a surprise visit, that's all the better! We're all going to have a really fun time together. Grandma will be so glad to have company, especially since it's her niece and nephew!"

Skuld snickered as Falcyn and Sygyn's faces fell flat in response to Odeyn's 'invitation'. She winked at Mara. They may have gotten off the hook, but now they were in the fire.

"Well, I guess it can't be helped," Mara said, shrugging herself in resignation as Odeyn clapped a thick arm around her shoulders.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

That night, while everyone was asleep, four children in Stealth Mode manifests snuck out of their bedrooms and floated up into one of the Cylindrical Forests hovering near their grandparent's compound.

Unlike their temple home on the Earthrealm, there was no Banpei here to detect half-mortal half-Divine children leaving the premises, a fact that Pryzm was quite pleased with. Since Grandpa and Grandma only had a single daughter, there wasn't a need for any security measures. Besides, Pryzm knew that her grandparents had learned the futility of trying to alarm the place the hard way. Even as a young girl, Mom would easily defeat any technological means they created to try and keep her from sneaking out at night.

"How could have I been so ignorant?" she argued with herself. "I completely forgot about Banpei! That makes me a total idiot!" For a moment, she imagined getting even with the robot sentry by painting his face up to look stupid and ridiculous. When she and Ulfryn were little, Banpei and Mom used to let she and her sister get away with that. They would dress Banpei up in women's kimonos and paint 'hair' on his round head. Or they would try and make his face look like an anime character. But now that they were 11, any tomfoolery with Banpei wouldn't be tolerated.

Besides, it wasn't his fault...Banpei was beyond blame in this situation. Pryzm knew full well that his AI was very protective of she and Ulfryn. She knew that, in his own way, Banpei loved them almost as much as he loved Sigel.

Once they were deep into the floating cylinder of forests, they gathered a copse of tree to conceal themselves and started a campfire, huddling close to enjoy the flickering licks of flame.

As if on cue, everybody turned and looked at Ulfryn.

"Please Pryzm...you _have_ to believe me! These dreams I've been having...they're not just dreams. I can _tell_ that our brother and sister are trying to communicate to us!" Ulfryn pleaded, tears in her eye.

"How do you know this? How can we trust you, Ulfryn?" Sygyn asked. Something must be up, because she couldn't remember the last time her sister was _this_ upset. Ulfryn had mentioned the dreams to her before, but Pryzm couldn't begin to guess that she had thought they were real. Yet, her younger twin was floating in the air, a figure that was solid with conviction that she was telling the truth.

"I don't know how to prove it! Don't ask me that! They're my dreams! How can I make you guys see my dreams?" Ulfryn quickly argued, clearly frustrated. "Look, I see this guy that looks like Falcyn...and then some beautiful woman near him. She's like _way_ beautiful and kind. Just like Mom!"

"Our Mom's beautiful too!" Sygyn interrupted, vexed that Ulfryn hadn't included Mara in the comparison.

"Sooo..oo...o?" Falcyn asked impatiently, crossing his arms like a little Napoleon.

"Since Mom's the Norn of the Future, do you think I might be seeing Falcyn's future?" Ulfryn guessed out loud, a finger on her chin.

"EHHH?" Falcyn gasped out.

"Not likely," Pryzm answered. "Falcyn's _never_ going to have a girlfriend, until he stops being such a show-off."

The three girls giggled as a cloud of steam formed above Falcyn's head.

"Fine. Be that way!" Falcyn snapped, folding his arms even more tightly across his chest.

"C'mon you guys!" Ulfryn pleaded. "I doubt that any of our Mom's Norn abilities have been passed onto us. It's kinda hard to explain, but I've always suspected that Mom and the Norn thing are two different sides of the coin. Like...they're kinda _separate_ in a way. Mom wasn't always a Norn, was she? So did she have her special TimeSpace abilities before she was tapped out to be a Norn? Or maybe she didn't. Maybe the Norn office _picked_ Mom...which means that seeing into the Future is something that goes along with being a Norn, not something that's special about Mom."

"If it isn't the Future, then what can it be? We don't know who the Norn of the Past or the Norn of the Present is..." Sygyn wondered aloud.

No...not that argument again, Pryzm thought. "Besides, I said it a hundred times...the stupid Rules prevent Mom from telling us?" she interjected in a commanding voice.

"You guys! You guys! I read in one of the Earthrealm myth books that the Norns have to be three, and they have to be sisters. It was very clear on the point that they _had_ to be sisters, not just best friends or something!" Sygyn noted.

"Not that again!" Falcyn exclaimed. "I know that you're part Demoness, but these are _Goddesses_ we're talking about. Who's right...some evolutionary descendent of the chimps living in Scandinavia who drank too much homebrew and cooked up some divinities in his head while having DTs? Or would you rather what the Goddesses here are saying? Aunt Skuld's a _pure_ Goddess, and she's never said anything about the other two Norns. And she doesn't have any sisters either, besides Mom. So there! I'd rather take my chances believing what's real, instead of those Earthrealm fictions you always read, Sygyn."

"Bite me, Falcyn! Our Aunt reads em too, y'know!" Sygyn retorted in a shout as she flipped off her brother.

"Still, even if it's a stretch, I've always thought it _is_ an interesting idea!" Pryzm noted. "C'mon...could you imagine if Mom had two more sisters? What if she was the youngest sister? Or the middle sister..."

"She _is_ the youngest sister, you nitwad!" Falcyn corrected her.

"What if she was the oldest sister, except for our Mom?" Sygyn added.

"No way! Could you imagine that? It'd be totally silly!" Pryzm exclaimed.

"It'd be totally happenin'!" Falcyn noted. "Like happenin' down the sewer pipe..." he added sarcastically.

"Sooo...what about these two kids you see in your dream?" Sygyn asked.

"They're older than us...but younger than you and your brother," Ulfryn explained. "Maybe they're 12 or 13 in Earthrealm years."

"Are they wearing school uniforms?" Sygyn asked.

"C'mon, be serious!" Ulfryn answered, exasperated. "They're _dreams_, not TV dramas! Okay!?"

"But you said you thought they were real. Are you lying...or are you telling the truth?" Falcyn asked seriously.

"It's the truth! I swear it! I mean...they're like shadows or something. They're dark and vague and transparent; they'd be right in front of you and you'd miss 'em. Sometimes, all I can see is an outline that's kinda half there, if you know what I mean. Sorta like the afterflash that you see in one of the picture club booths. They seem to fade into mid-air..."

"They couldn't be ghosts," Pryzm noted thoughtfully. "Mom's totally spooked by ghosts of any kind. You should see that woman when we go to see a scary movie at the theater. She screams sometimes unless Dad's sitting right next to her!"

"So if they're not ghosts, and they're not real, and they're not not-real...then what the hell are they?" Falcyn asked.

"They're _something_, Falcyn...otherwise why would they pick Ulfryn? Why would they show themselves to our cousin, instead of showing themselves to you or me?" Sygyn reasoned. "If they are something, then they have to be in one of the Multiverses, don't they? I mean, Everything is totally in the OmniArc..."

Pryzm was glad that her cousin was casting about reasonable explanations before this whole discussion turned into a freak-fest about spooks and mysteries. She thought really hard for a minute, trying to figure out how they could prove Ulfryn's theory. The Ygg Xeomnic mainframe network was responsible for regulating all of the Nine Dimensions, assisting the Almighty...and constantly networked with their Vanagdrasilian counterparts.

"I have an idea! Since everything that can possibly happen is measured and monitored by the Xeomnic network, then we should see some evidence there of Ulfryn's dreams," Sygyn offered.

"Hmm...that's at least partially true. But the Ygg Xeomnic network part of the Mainframe computer system doesn't regulate free will, creativity and the like. Which means that it can't measure dreams, per se. Dreams are the free will of the subconscious and superconscious, they manifest because Gods and mortals need to 'detune' themselves sometimes. I don't think we can make it zone in on her dreams. My Mom could, and your Mom could...but it'd be total death brigade suicide to even ask them," Pryzm argued.

"So if we can't find some way to monitor her dreams, we're basically shit wit nit wit. We can't prove that these 'visitors' even came at all," Sygyn said in a voice low with disappointment. "Not to mention that we'd have to wait until Ulfryn dreamed them up again..."

"And since she is the_ only_ one who sees them, how do we know that _we_ can see them? I mean...if they want to reveal themselves only to Ulfryn, wouldn't anything we do wind up being screwed up? Because no matter what, they don't want to be seen by anyone else? So even if we find a way to 'see' them somehow, we still won't be able to perceive them?" Falcyn offered.

"For once, my brother said something intelligent. Can't we just Probe into her Mind and find out?" Sygyn offered. "If we did, then Pryzm would be the ideal candidate, since she's Ulfryn's sister."

Both Pryzm and Ulfryn paled at this. Yes, they were sisters. But no...they wouldn't be comfortable Probing each other's thoughts. Ulfryn brought up the additional point that since they were half-mortals, a mental Probe might create problems down the road. In fact, it might even be dangerous.

"So we're back to the same problem. How do you prove that nothing is something?"

"Actually, a better way to look at this challenge might be to _disprove_ that nothing is nothing. Eliminate the unknowable...and then you can discover the knowable. A basic principle of knowledge. And I think I might know of a way to get at the truth of what Ulfryn's claiming to see. But it'll involve some _major_ hacking of the Ygg Mainframe and even the Xeomnic network itself. Basically, a challenge that approaches the legendary level of difficulty..."

"MOM!!" "AUNT SKULD!!"

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --


	109. Pt 109: Kidstory

**Part 109: Kidstory**

A CYLINDRICAL FOREST, YGGDRASIL

Even before she spun around to see the rich swirls of black hair behind the voice, Pryzm felt like her heart had been stunned by a shower of feathery blows!

She didn't know what was more dauntingly unbelievable...that Mom had managed to track their sneak-away here to the middle of one of the Cylindrical Forests...or that she had actually offered to _help_ them in their cause. Her Mother's offer of assistance was so unexpected, Pryzm had to pause and remember what she had for dinner; because stuff like this is either a parental prank that was more Aunt Mara's style or the result of eating too many weird mushrooms. Tried between the horns of guilt and the horns of relief, Pryzm caught her Mother's eyes for a flash, and then dipped her head and regarded the campfire for a moment, seeing her mother's reflection in the glimmer-flames.

"Hmmm...let me guess! The four of you might be wondering 'If we learn more about them, we can discover where they are. Then it becomes easy, because using the Aumatrix can conceivably take someone to every part of the OmniArc. So then, why can't we simply just cross one of the bridges and follow them?' Or something like that," Skuld said to her daughters and Falcyn and Sygyn. The four kids all nodded their head in synch.

Skuld nodded to each youngster, affirming that they were at least clear-headed enough to ponder on their dilemma a little bit.

"Yeah, that's definitely the problem! Either the Ygg schnoodle-computo is totally whacked...or cousin Ulfryn has just been cooking up one super-gigantic fantasy in her head. Ghosts and goblins? Sounds like something out of 'Gakko no Kwaidan'," Falcyn noted impetuously, darting a brief stinkeye at his younger cousin. Skuld scowled at the teenaged Demon, the effect of which caused him to snap his mouth shut before starting another disparaging remark directed towards her daughter.

"Beyond all the existential-type questions, what's preventing us from trying to use one of the Swarp Gates to explore the OmniArc?" Sygyn added. "I mean, what you say is true, Aunt Skuld! Why can't we just get back on one of the BridgePaths, and then go into the nearest Swarp Gate, shiftspace to the next Aumatrix, and then go exploring?"

"Yeah, just like that...eh, Sygyn?" Pryzm interrupted, her voice sour with sarcasm. "I can't believe that with all your brains, you overlooked one totally important fact. Do you know how many Multiverses there are in the OmniArc? And you just want to go out and start making random jumps into Swarp Hypernalities until we find the right Multiverse?"

Sygyn rolled her eyes at her cousin's criticism. "You guys, I didn't mean that we'd be exploring _randomly_! What do you think I am? A retard or something? I'm sure that between Pryzm and I, we could fire up some kind of machine that can do the exploring for us. I mean...we're in Yggdrasil, for the Dark One's sake! We have access to all sorts of stuff that we couldn't even touch in the Earthrealm. She knows Ygg Tech and I know Vang Physics. We can do this, majorly! I have this really cool idea of how to do it too! What if we found a way to retrieve some kind of image or imprint from Ulfryn's mind, and then created a measuring machine that would seek out that unique vibration? Since they only seem interested in Ulfryn, we can use that. We can make you, Ulfryn, into a kind of 'Ghost detector' and thus find out who they are. Once that's done, I can wormsearch the Vang Mnoexic and narrow down where they are. After that, Pryzm gets busy with it. Not only that, but we'd create an AI which would command the mecha to replicate itself every time it emerged from a Swarp Hypernality? One goes in, two comes out...until we find her 'ghosts'. We can even set up a 'command center' somewhere in Yggdrasil since they're Pryzm's invention! Each machine would report back to us, telling us if there are any 'unaccounted for' beings in that particular Multiverse."

"Huh?" Falcyn interjected his eyebrows raised in confusion.

"What's your sister's trying to explain is that she and I would build a mecha that would 'go into' a Hypernality as one machine, and then would emerge from it as two. One mecha would stay behind and look for Ulfryn's dream-beings in whatever Multiverse it's in, while the the second machine would go back into the Swarp Gate, travel the Hypernality until it reaches another Multiverse. Simple cyberscience-type replication, just like we learned in Nanotech 101. Or were you snoozing in class that day? Anyway, we set things in motion, the machines copycat each other, then so on and so on until there's a machine for every Swarp exit point. Then we simply compare the results..."

"Wouldn't work!" Ulfryn shouted. "We're looking for the ghosts of _our relatives_, not real beings! Could you build a machine that can detect ghosts? Don't you think that I would be able to connect with them on some level and learn their specifics, like their unique Metanative signature or something? And I don't feel down with the idea that you guys are going probe my memories to extract the substance of my dreams. No way! Dad told me about all those mishaps with Mom's little 'experiments'...and neither of you have experience in this."

"Mishaps? Indeed?" Skuld thought as she smiled with embarrassment at her daughter's observation, making a mental note to have a talk with Tomohisa when she got back to the Earthrealm. Failed machines were privileged information, only to be shared between wife and husband. Not the kids. Which meant that Tomohisa defied her for Pryzm and Ulfryn's sake. Not that this is bad on its own, as it shows that he loves his daughters enough to go against their mom once in a while. Still...not even her beloved husband can get away with libeling her ability to create useful machines, especially to Pryzm and Ulfryn!

"Nah. There's already one 'ghost-detection' person in our ranks...which is one too many!" Falcyn added with a sly grin.

"That's because you're too stupid to have an imagination! We already talked about that too!" Ulfryn shot back, sparks flying out of her eyes towards her older cousin.

"Ulfryn...shut your mouth before I take it away from you!" Aunt Mara had been silent all this time, but now she was upset. Ulfryn knew she had stepped over the line with that one. She also knew that her Aunt could easily make good on that threat. Or any threat, if she really meant to. Her knees knocked together a few times as she flinched at her Aunt's words. She could hear her zigzag pink hair rattling.

"Before you four decide anything, you need to think it through some more!" Skuld said, clapping her hands together to interrupt the mounting name-calling and arguing between the four kids. Once her sister started getting offended, that was a red alert that they were close to the danger zone.

"EHHHHhhh?" the kids all gasped. Now Skuld would need to talk to them on their level, call them by the pet name they'd given their group. "Assuming that you four, your little Quad, winds up building a duplicating mecha and then sends it into the Swarp Hypernality. So how do you know that it would remain stable _within_ the Hypernality? What if it does a major malf and the AI decides to make a _million _copies of itself once it arrives at its destination, instead of just one?"

Pryzm and Sygyn both looked at her with moments of confusion, and then bowed their heads in resignation. A few seconds later, Falcyn understood what his Aunt had just pointed out, and giggled snidely behind his hand.

"Falcyn!!" four irritated female voices chorused. Irritation soon turned into uneasy moodiness and frustration.

"Witness the power of a Senior First Class Goddess!" Skuld privately gloated to herself, unaffected by the detente of reasoning. For she had already formulated a possible answer to this perplexity. Back on Earth, she had wanted to be a home-schooling teacher, but her husband was totally against the idea...at least until she had Pryzm and Ulfryn. After that, he was all for the idea. Skuld knew that she was really good with children, and that she possessed the twin suns of patience and creativity which were so essential towards illuminating young minds so they could reach their own potentials. Skuld was proud of her strange little ability to weave intricacies into straightforward 'folk-tales' for her daughters. In a way, she was already home-schooling her girls...after all, they couldn't just go to Yggdrasil and take the inculcation curricula like normal full Gods and Goddesses. She'd have to wait another 10 or 15 years before she could open up the temple for teaching. Maybe when her kids had kids of their own...

Hers and Mara's children had the right idea, but they were going about it in a decidedly juvenile manner.

"Remember my SHOJO mecha? I only created _one_ of those, and it was able to map out all the possible Swarp Hypernality routes in the Yggdrasil Logorinth, in just under three hours," Skuld explained.

"Yeah, but how come you were never able to repeat that feat when you sent the SHOJO Mk II into the Swarp Hypernality via one of the Gates?" Sygyn asked. It was a fair question, one that Skuld had been trying to solve for several years.

"Owned!" Falcyn shouted after Skuld was silent for several minutes.

"Huh?"

"It means that you're 'owned' by the person or problem that you're trying to deal with," Sygyn clarified, acting as a generation-gap translator for her Aunt.

"Huh?"

"It means that he's one up on you, sister," Mara noted.

"Well that settles it. I'm joining you, because I don't let anyone own me! Or even think they do!" Skuld declared, spending a withering glance at Falcyn. "Besides, I can't just walk away from a challenge like this. This problem you kids are trying to solve might actually be something interesting for a change."

"Great! Now she's turning juvenile," Mara muttered to herself as she noticed the gleam in her younger sister's eyes. The same gleam Skuld would get way back when she was a teen and Mara was an young woman.

With this, Skuld decided that if she was was going to join in their cause, she might as well look the part. One of the advantages of being a Senior First Class Goddess with an Special Delimited, Unrestricted License...was that she could easily re-enable her physical manifest to represent almost anything, except another God or Goddess, or Kami-sama.

Nope. There had to be some limits to this ability. Couldn't have anyone impersonating the Lord. But the thought itself was a nice fancy for Skuld to consider. She briefly imagined how the kids would have reacted if the Lord had suddenly 'dropped in' to their little campfire discussion...

"Who would be 'owned' then?" she thought with a smile.

"Yep! I knew it!" she heard Mara sigh. Her older sis obviously knew what was coming next. Suddenly, Mara seemed to look into the air for a moment and then announced that she had to start a fire or something and vanished with an orange flash. Skuld knew that Mara either had an urgent Demoness Grief Office summons, or that she just wanted to skip out on Skuld's little bit of self-indulgence.

With a side-to-side shake of her head, Skuld reconstituted her physical manifest to appear to be that of herself when she was a young girl; roughly around a mere 130 millennia of age.

The effect was instantaneous...

Falcyn's glasses slid off his narrow nose as he preened forward to stare at her with widen-eyed appreciation. He always had thought that Aunt Skuld was a major babe to begin with, even though her physical manifest was thirty-something in the Earthrealm. But to see her as a girl his own age...

"Down boy! Don't drool on your shoes, brother," Sygyn said with a sly voice and an elbow to his ribs, her brother's infatuation quite obvious to her eyes. "She's our Aunt, y'know!"

Meanwhile, Prizm and Ulfryn's breath was clutched too deeply in their breasts. Their Mother was suddenly..._their age_!! If they had been normal Earthrealm 11-year-old girls, they would have probably had a really freaky time of it. Yet, even as they accepted inwardly this 'miracle'...neither girl could fully get past the idea that their Mom was so _beautiful_ when she was their age!

Seeing her mother as a 13-year-old, Pryzm was amazed that Mom could have ever been the tomboy she had claimed she was. Following Aunt Mara's lead, she had adjusted her physical manifest to 'age' in terms of a normal Earthrealm mortal's life span. Currently, she manifested as a youngish-looking 31-year old woman on the Earthrealm. Pryzm was used to seeing her Mom wearing her long black hair in a single thick braid down her back, or tied up in buns on either side of her head, Chinese-style, or pinned back when she wanted to look elegant and 'courtly'. But as she took in the 'girl-form' of their Mother, she couldn't help but notice the luxurious long back hair that flowed towards her Mom's waist, with a slight curling 'antenna' arising from the off-center part down the middle of her head. Mom's blue hollow 'plectrum' shaped mark seemed much larger on her forehead. She was wearing some kind of pink and red half-jacket lined with gold braid, with a tight white and pink bodysuit underneath it that suggested to Pryzm a marathoner's running outfit; blending spandex and leather. Pryzm felt a bit disarmed by her Mom's charming girlish appearance; she looked just like she did in the old photographs of her and Dad when they were still teenagers...

Skuld was suitably amused by the impression her girlish form had on the four, particularly her daughters. Yet, she sensed that her juvenancy of appearance was stressing her youngest girl. Ulfryn kept noticeably looking towards her and then back at herself, furtively glancing down her front. Skuld immediately sensed that she was obviously worrying over the slight but noticeable difference in bustline. Being 11, neither of her daughters had a bustline yet, but they would in a couple of years...

Two years can make quite a difference in a girl's body.

"Ulfryn, this was how I looked when I was 130 millennia..." Skuld noted, aware that her youngest was beginning to brew an insecurity storm in her mind by comparing herself with her mother.

"B..But you're so _gorgeous_, Mom!" Ulfryn stammered. "How could I ever compare to you? How could I be so kawaii as you..."

While Pryzm wasn't too attached to her appearance, Ulfryn was the epitome of girlish vanity. When the girls were three or four years old, she couldn't get Pryzm into a ballerina outfit...but Ulfryn would put hers on and then climb on the bathroom counter and dance in front of the mirror for hours. Of course, her youngest daughter would feel insecure! She was always self-conscious around boys, another clue that Ulfryn was on the constant lookout to 'look good'. The regrettable reality, in her Mom's eyes, was that Ulfryn _already_ was a beauty...she just wouldn't allow herself to see this.

"Ahh, my little Ulfryn! You forget that I'm Norn of the Future! And I can see in the Future...and I see you being every bit as beautiful as me when you become a teenager!" Skuld offered, speaking in a maternal, comforting lullaby of a voice.

"No way!" Falcyn mock-protested, just before Sygyn kicked him in the shin.

But Ulfryn was too amazed by her Mom's words to shine attention on his attempt to get a rise out of her. She was still comparing herself with Mom, trying hard to consider the remote possibility that she could look as good as her Mother when she was 13. Ulfryn knew that looks weren't everything; her Mom was beautiful on the inside because she was smart, poised, and exercised everyday. That, and the fact that she was kind to neighbors, and was always asking Dad to visit one more children's hospital, one more orphanage, one more hospice. Mom was a work of art...and seeing her at 13 years of age was like seeing a rough draft of the finished masterpiece.

Now that she had assured Ulfryn, Skuld was almost embarrassed by the fawning attention that her daughters were ushering on her. Both Ulfryn and Pryzm were blushing.

"Oooo, aren't you two so _cute_!" Skuld announced to the woods in a shimmering voice of pleasance, hoping that would yank the two girls out of their daydreams. Funny, but now that she was manifesting as her 13-year-old self, Skuld noticed that both her girls were almost as tall as she was. Their bodies were already getting girlishly spindly and long-limbed, no doubt due to their dad's genome. She remembered how Tomohisa had undergone a mean growth spurt while he was in college. Skuld knew that by the time they were 13, her twin girls would be many cm taller than she was at that age.

"Wow! This is so cool! Now, there's like..._five_ of us!" Falcyn appraised, changing his tone as he settled down, clearly impressed by Skuld's 'feat'.

"Falcyn, when we get back, you have to thank your Mom for this," Skuld said in a serious voice. "Mara and I were talking about how to discipline you guys for running away from home, when it suddenly dawned on her that she had never seen the four of you cooperate like this before. Usually, the four of you argue more than cooperate, being that you're all Goddesses and Demonesses..."

"I'm a Demon, not a Demoness!" Falcyn protested, thrusting his arm in the air.

"Yeah," Skuld noted flatly, rolling her mouth in a grimace as the three girls giggled at their boy-cousin's silliness.

"In any case, having the four of you agree on something is as likely as combining earth, fire, air, and water...and expecting to get Hokkaido Udon soup in Appalachia. In other words, it's very rare."

"Sooo?!" Sygyn asked.

"You see, your Mom was thinking that if this was so important to you that you would risk disappointing her so much...that it must be something worthwhile. I don't quite understand her reasoning, but she said something to the effect that, normally, you and Falcyn would only do something like this if the goal was to piss her off..." Skuld explained.

"I understand perfectly," Sygyn interrupted. "It's something a Goddess like yourself wouldn't understand, Aunt Skuld. What Mom means is that we did this for a reason, not just to get her upset. If we act for any other reason other than to cause Mischief or Grief in her life...then we weren't just behaving Demonic. Mom know that we weren't just acting on our Demonic impulses to cause trouble. And if we're willing to cooperate with our Goddess cousins, then Mom must have figured that it must be _really_ important to us. More important than simply acting crazy to get Mom all freaked out!"

"You Demons...I'll never understand you," Skuld observed with a sigh.

"I'm a _Demoness_, not a Demon!" Sygyn protested, her ponytails flaring angrily behind her.

"Yep, you're definitely your mother's daughter," Skuld hastily noted, not wanting to lose the momentum she was gaining.

"So Mom convinced you that we're for real? And you believed her?" Falcyn noted in a wary voice, still thinking that there might be a 'catch' to all of this. After all, Aunt Skuld _was_ a Goddess...and a very smart, very powerful Goddess at that. Definitely not to be trifled with.

"Yes, as I tried to explain earlier, Falcyn, your Mom convinced me that I should try and help you," Skuld answered. "Mara figured that I would be more able to assist you in finding these 'ghosts' of Ulfryn's, because of my ability and extensive experience in researching such phenomena."

"But you're afraid of ghosts, Mom!" Pryzm counted.

"Yes...but I'm almost certain that these aren't ghosts!" Skuld answered. Turning to her daughter, she asked, "You don't think they're ghosts, do you, sweetie? You just call them 'ghosties' because you don't know what else to say."

"Nnn Nnnn!" Ulfryn answered with a sharp side-to-side of her chin. "No way!"

Before Skuld could go on, Ulfryn noted, "At first I did. Ghosts are real on the Earthrealm, y'know! But ghosts _do_ things; they have some kind of act. They're out for revenge, or out for unrequited love, or they play pranks like Demons..."

"Now I've heard it all!" Falcyn interrupted with a shout. "You guys always think we Demons have nothing to do but play pranks on you Goddesses! That's so retarded! Just because I..."

"Learn some chill skills, Falcyn," Skuld interjected, causing a dead pause in the air. A few seconds later, Falcyn and the others burst out into laughter at the admonishment. While she was wondering about this strange turn, Pryzm clapped a hand on her shoulder.

"Mom...just because you..hee hee...look like us...doesn't mean that you can..giggle.._talk_ like us and get away with it! In fact, don't even..snicker!..try!" she advised before loosing her voice to the cyclone of giggling that was mounting. Skuld understood, and blushed briefly in embarrassment. At least she was gaining their confidence, despite having the occasional stumble along the way. Earning their trust was really important.

_Really_ important.

She needed to obtain their full cooperation on this one, because if she and the kids wound up having to follow through on her 'plan'...being in trouble for skipping school would be the very least of their worries.

There was so much more to this than she was letting on to them.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Skuld patiently explained to her Mother and Father that she was going to take the kids on a tour of the Ygg Xeomnic network. Actually, she didn't plan on taking them to see the Nodes, or the Sys Holarch Stacks, or the various Interfaces of the Ygg Xeomnic itself. No, she was going to take them inside the Axial CorePlex, the very 'heart' of the computer that ran the Yggdrasil Logorinth. Which was restricted to all but Senior First Class Licensees who specialized in Xeomn tech and the Lord Himself. The restrictions were a necessary measure; not to prevent sabotage, because Gods and Goddesses simply don't sabotage anything in Yggdrasil. They were enacted because the Gods were still trying how to figure out how the Xeomnic computer network operated. Or ran. Or ran itself. Or whatever did what it did whatever.

The Lord knew how the Ygg Xeomnic operated. Or at least He claimed that He knew...but Skuld highly doubted this. He didn't know the role of the Aumatrices, after all. Not that she was in the habit of doubting the wisdom of the Almighty, but the fact that _everyone_ was confused about the Xeomnic while He didn't attempt to advise them about its functioning was quite curious. Either He knew, and wanted His Children to earn the fruits of their knowledge, or He didn't have a clue, and was busy trying to figure things out Himself.

The fact that she couldn't replicate the SHOJO experiment meant one of several distinct possibilities. She had often tried her best to hypothesize her inability to reproduce the initial results from SHOJO I. The Swarp transportation 'system' or the Xeomnic network that 'ran' it had deliberately discriminated between SHOJO I and SHOJO II. Assuming this, if the Aumatrix prevented SHOJO II from traveling within it like SHOJO I had, then it may be a fundamental engineering problem with the whole transportation system itself. But if the Xeomn had prevented it, then the problem may be a software 'glitch' in the computer itself. If it wasn't a 'glitch', then the second possibility came to mind...one that was almost frightening in is implications. Perhaps, the Xeomn system had acted as a conscious entity, allowing a single instance of 'universal' transportation in the Aumatrix, so that a 'map' of the paths between the seven Asgard Aumatrices, the seven Neiflgard Aumatrices, and the various Multiverses in the Yggdrasil Logorinth could be discovered. A sort of 'one-shot' as it were, to give the Gods and Demons an idea of what the Aumatrix system was all about. After all, Skuld knew that one of the Heads of the Demonic Chaos Ministry managed to partially duplicate her feat, mapping out from the starting point of the Demon's Vanagdrasil Nieflgard Aumatrics. She had worried that the Demons would shut down the system, since the Gods had been the ones to start it up. All other attempts to map the UmbraPlexiar system had failed.

The UmbraPlexiar system, consisting of seven Aumatrices in the God's Realm and seven Aumatrices in the Demon's Realm. Each Aumatrice connected to everywhere in the two Realms by using a previously-unknown technology called Swarping. The Swarp Hypernality, a kind of transportation field that allowed instant nonduplicative reproduction of any sentient being who entered it. Each Aumatrix had a gazillion Swarp Gates; all one had to do was jump off the platform into its 'ray' of light and they'd be somewhere else. Yet, there were mysteries to be solved. Some points were restricted; like parts of the Almighty's Palace or certain residences of Gods and Demons at certain times. After all, if a God and Goddess were Sharing, it wouldn't be nice to have the neighbors drop in for a chat. So the UmbraPlexiar system respected privacy. It also respected the sentient beings that had not reached the Next Level. Thus, Skuld couldn't pop in during the middle of a Yomiuri Giants game to have a chat with her husband on the pitching mound. Travel between Yggdrasil and Vanagdrasil was regulated by a system of permits; the Aumatrix wouldn't swarp you to the Demon's Realm just for the asking. And of course no one, God or Demon, could travel to the Mid-Light to visit the Boy Who Was Death. Skuld had always wondered about the efficiency of the system as well. If an Aumatrix could connect with everywhere else, then why were there _seven_ of them. Overkill? Redundancy? Aesthetics? Another big unresolved question concerned the Swarp Hypernality itself. It was right on that cutting edge between tech and magic, and no one could decide whether it was a magical construct or science-based tech. Skuld suspected that the Swarp Hypernality was both, but that could never be proven. Finally, the ultimate mystery...who or what was running the system?

Of the two possibilities that had allowed for her discovery and activation of the UmbraPlexiar...an engineering glitch or a deliberate cleverness...neither explanation even came close to satisfying Skuld's curiosity. She had introduce the SHOJO I, a construct the size of a volleyball, into the Swarp Hypernality. It had returned with a map of the entire system, something the Ygg Xeomnic couldn't even decipher. She doubted that a transportation system this complex would rely on a _single instance_ of an object traveling to every point in the Ygg Logorinth in order to 'map' the transit 'roads'. With so many Multiverses in the Yggdrasil Logorinth, it would have been easy for the SHOJO to accidentally 'miss' a few trillion.

Which arrives to the third possibility, the one which troubled Skuld the most. What if the Aumatrix System wasn't just a transportation system between SpaceTime? What if the Aumatrix System was a 'blend' of Time itself? In days before "The Expansion" event, Time had been regulated by the Ygg Mainframe and the Almighty. Time consisted of TimeStreams, the 'ropes' of Time, consisting of TimeWeaves, the 'strands' that the 'rope' consisted of. Skuld wasn't a Norn back then, so she lacked the precious perspective on Time that she possessed in the Now. In fact, she had been appointed to be a Norn just a few Earthrealm years before the Expansion. As a Norn, she learned how to navigate the TimeStreams of the Future; in effect, she could weave Time. But she needed training, and the Lord had decided to send her to the Earthrealm as part of that training. At first, Skuld had felt like she had been exiled to the most undesirable place in the Multiverse. Earth was filled with mortal conflicts. She hated it with a passion at first. Only later did she discover that her assignment to the Earthrealm had a significant purpose: it had taught her to experience Time from the mortal perspective. As Norn of the Future, she couldn't just limit herself to viewing Time using the Divine perspective. Thus, her 'field trip' to the Earthrealm as a trainee was a gift rather than a curse. The gift blossomed even more with her subsequent meeting with Tomohisa, which resulted in a wonderful marriage and two beautiful girls.

But in the present, she still wasn't certain what really regulated Time. The TimeStreams were still there, but they were different. As the Ygg Mainframe had evolved into the Xeomnic Network, so had Time also evolved into something new as well. It was almost as if the web-continuum of TimeStreams were now organized along cyclical patterns. She mentally pictured this new Time as a TimeSphere, an interlaced 'globe' of Time. If Time was organized, then who or what was shaping it? Was it the Aumatrix System? Or the Ygg Xeomnic Network? Or Kami-sama? Or some weird aspect of the Ultimate Force?

Or something entirely different?

With all due adulation and respect for His wisdom, Skuld found it hard to swallow that the Lord was fully aware of the extent of the changes that occurred during the Expansion. "And what about this _other_ issue?" her heart reminded her in a clearlight beacon of curiosity.

The very little problem, consisting of the fact that there were _no_ Norns for the Past and the Present.

"Why not disprove the fact that there are no other Norns!"

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"No way! Maybe Mom's the only Norn because she's so special!"

"But what if there are other Goddesses waiting to be Norns, and the whole Expansion thingy-jingy somehow threw off the timetable?"

"I still _insist_ that the Earthrealm Norse legends are right! The Norn's have to be sisters! Somehow, they knew. After all, there's no other mortal culture in the Multiverse that calls them Norns, or divides them into Past, Present and Future. Try and explain that, why don't ya!"

Skuld sighed as the kids continued to chop arguments with dulled knives. It wasn't their fault, they were just too young to properly contemplate such an incredible array of metaphysical problems. After all, most Earthrealm kids their age didn't even know the meaning of the word "metaphysics". Her niece Sygyn in particular was frustrated with their inability to solve the problem. Knowing that she was the smartest of the group, she seemed to be holding herself personally responsible for the shortcomings of any viable solutions the kids came up. In other words, she figured that she was the weakest link in the chain, because she was the smartest. Ironically, the reality of the matter was just the opposite.

"Mara had better get on that girl to start holding her head up more!" Skuld observed privately. Sygyn was like a timid cat who would hide under the bed when strangers visited, and then would be totally confident and affectionate only in the company of her intimates. Intelligent to a fault, she was almost retreating into a dream world of books, even though she was only 14 years old. Skuld worried about her from time to time, hoping that she wouldn't turn out to be a teenaged 'hermit'.

Yet, she was impressed with the energy these kids had. No matter what, they were going to solve this dilemma.

Unfortunately, Skuld had to wait it out, until they were convinced of their inability.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Shit! It's no fuckin' use!" Falcyn swore, almost in tears with Demonic rage. Frustration had shifted into outright anger, and it was writ on his face. He looked like he was ready to break down sobbing and beat the crap out of somebody at the same time.

"Falcyn, watch your mouth!" Skuld quickly interjected. The last few hours were rough waters emotionally, as she had to look on as her precious daughters mounted a series of enthusiastic attempts to solve the problem of Ulfryn's 'ghosts'. Once they did, any glow of their ardor would get snuffed out when they followed upon their scheme-works by developing reasoned out, gut-wrenchingly disappointing flaws.

Nobody wants to see their child fail, but Skuld's maternal instincts steered her, telling her that such stumbling and discomfort was necessary in this case. Several times, she almost wanted to cry along with Pryzm when one of her daughter's plans got shot down in flames. For some reason, Pryzm reminded her of the rough-n-tumble biker chick in Bubblegum Crisis...the one who was tortoise-tough on the outside, but would fall to pieces when she sensed that she had failed the Knight Sabers group. So whenever Pryzm felt like she had fallen short of her own abilities, she would tantrum against herself and then the tears would come. Like a true tomboy, Pryzm would only cry in the presence of her best friend, in this case, her Mother. Skuld was grateful for the trust of her daughter, which would be sorely tested by the upcoming challenge she was going to pose to the kids.

Finally, Ulfryn started sobbing, pleading, "Mom, please help us figure this out! We can't do it!! It's not only for us, but what if the others are trapped? What if I'm seeing the shadows of people who really exist? And they're our brothers and sisters? Pleeezzeee..."

Skuld swallowed a bubble of air in her throat, stemming the vicarious tears that lingered in her eyes.

"Ulfryn, I love you so much. It's going to be okay, dear!" she said, soothing her daughter's hair with gentle handstrokes. This calmed Ulfryn's sobbing subsided somewhat, and then her daughter asked, "You're not going to poke around inside of my head, are you?"

Skuld couldn't help but giggle at the complete symphony of worry, reprieve and affection visible in her daughter's expression.

She was just too cute!

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Okay, here's the deal. Remember when you were arguing about this problem, and I noted that a better way to face a dead-ending challenge might be to _disprove_ that nothing is nothing? Eliminate the unknowable...and then you can discover the knowable? Remember?"

Blank stares.

"Good..." Skuld observed to herself.

"If you guys _really_ want to follow through on this gig, then you're going to have to trust me 110 percent!" Skuld demanded. After an exchange of glances, all four children nodded their heads solemnly.

"...and no pinky-promises this time, either," Falcyn added by dint of complaint. Skuld didn't know what that one was all about, but it was clear from his air of defensiveness that his boyish pride had been tinkered with by the three girls recently. Besides, he was a Demon, and Demons generally don't like being bound to promises. But his courage as a Demon would be one of the pillars they would have to rely on in order to accomplish what she was going to propose. Because her plan would easily be the most difficult thing they had ever done in their young lives.

"So what are we going to do, Mom?" Pryzm asked.

"We're going to go into the Axial CorePlex..."

"WHAT?"

"Mom, I may be a half-Goddess girl, but even I know that the central sections of the Xeomnic system, the Axial Coreplex, are off limits to everyone but you! Well, Goddesses like you, I mean," Ulfryn said, her voice harried with panic. Skuld wondered if her youngest was thinking "Great! Now Mom's gone over the edge!"

"I have a very solid plan, but we'll have to take some _real_ risks. If I get caught, I risk a license suspension and demotion. If _you_ kids get caught, you could be banned from Yggdrasil! In Falcyn and Sygyn's case, there would definitely be a ban. And I imagine that the loss of face for being the first Demons banned from the Ygg Logorinth wouldn't sit too lightly with you guy's Dark Lord. Or your Mom." she explained, nodding imposingly at the two Demonic children. "So we have to really be certain that we're in this...all the way," she said to her daughters, niece and nephew, hands resting on her hips.

Pryzm of course immediately refused, fully into "daughter protecting Mom mode". Ulfryn seemed to be staggered to the depths of her soul by the twin notions of "Mom risking it all" on her behalf, and the "this is all my fault, and it's spinning out of control!" train of guilt-impressions. Falcyn was gung-ho on the idea, ever the bold mischief-maker despite her realistic appraisal of the Dark Lord's potential response. Sygyn seemed to cocoon herself in deep thought, painting clouds of rapidly changing mood-auras to accompany her racing mind. She was the frail one; but on the inside, she was the strongest of the four in one certain area. Skuld could rely on the fact that Sygyn wouldn't just cave in to her impulses.

Skuld was glad that the kids were so strongly emotional about this, because it was a serious matter. But she realized after talking to her older sister Mara...and listening to the fervent attempts by the kids to solve their problem...that she couldn't let this one lie any longer. What if Ulfryn had these 'visions' for the rest of her life? It would be a horrible existence for her daughter; Ulfryn might even go schizoid during her adult years if the intrusive visions got too involved. And what if Ulfryn was _right_?

Skuld had to question herself. What if she herself had another two sisters, a Norn of the Past and a Norn of the Present? And what if those sisters were destined to be in love, have children, and live a life on the Earthrealm? Who was she, to deny these fictional 'sisters' a life? But the clincher was this: could she live with herself if Ulfryn was seeing the truth? By failing to do her best to follow her daughter's hunch, no matter how new-agey and spooky it may be, Skuld knew her heart well enough to know that she'd never be able to live with the regrets.

If her daughter was right, then it would be a miracle on the scale of her discovery of the UmbraPlexiar system. But if Ulfryn was wrong, Mom would definitely have to shower some attention on a very disappointed, self-doubting little girl.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

It took the kids a couple hours to decide. They pressed Skuld for a further explanation, but she withheld it. Skuld needed them to _feel_ the faith they would have to draw upon in order to pull this off.

In the end, it was Sygyn who debated the other three into accepting Skuld's risk.

After giving each one of the four kids a hug, Skuld embarked on an explanation of her plan...

"We know that the 'ghosties' that Ulfryn has been sensing may or may not exist. Because of this fact, then we have to settle on that uncertainty as our basis to investigate our problem. Which in fact, if you look at our problem in another way, really means that we truthfully have nothing to go on. There's no foundation on which to build our house of theories and assumptions. That's why you guys couldn't arrive at working solutions, no matter how hard you tried. So, in order to disprove nothing, we have to create _something_, but do so in a very special way. Do you follow me?"

"Yeah!" they chorused impulsively. But a moment later it sunk in and the kid's faces became all mopey with doubt.

"So we're going to travel into the deepest part of Xeomnic 'mainframe' as it were, and then take TNA samples from each of us."

"Why? What does TNA have to do with this?" Sygyn asked. "TNA is the basic 'genetic' building block of all life, to use the mortal concept of genetics. It allows for the non-replicability of Life for one thing, preventing lifeforms from being copies or clones of each other. It's what makes each life and Soul unique. Not to ignore the fact that TNA supposedly is the substance that interacts with the Ygg Xeomnic computer, so that Life can be programmed into..."

Her voice dropped off, and her Demoness eyes grew wide, flaring orange with intensity.

"Holy Blazes, Auntie! You can't possibly be thinking..."

"Smart girl, Sygyn!" Skuld praised her niece, whose eyes had widened with astonishment. Sygyn had good reason to be shocked, as she has made an intuitive leap that was the equivalent of a ten-meter long jump by an Earthrealm athlete. Impressive, to say the least.

"I'm going to take our TNA samples and extrapolate four new beings. They might wind up being mortal, God or Demon...but we'll know for sure. Basically, we're going to _create_ Ulfryn's 'family', fool the Xeomnic network, and draw her 'ghosties' into some kind of tangible reality...all at the same time! That way, the unknowable is no longer unknowable, because it would be real. As real as you and me! But only we would know this," Skuld announcing, thrusting a lecturing finger in the air for old time's sake, just like she used to do when she was a girl.

Pryzm was almost sputtering, struggling to say something.

"Isn't that, like, _way_ against the Rules!" Ulfryn noted. "You're talking about creating _Life_, Mom! Kami-sama is the only one who's supposed to do that! I mean, you and Dad gave us life, but this is way different! And how can you, me, or anyone else go against the Rules? They say in school that going against the Rules is totally impossible."

"Don't believe everything you've been taught, Ulfryn. Besides, there is _nothing_ that I wouldn't do for you and your sister! If I really thought that I would have to go against the Rules, the Ultimate Force...or even Kami-sama Himself...in order for you girls to be safe, happy and healthy, then I would! And I will! The Multiverse revolves around a mother's love for her children. And the strength of a Mother's love is like the strength of the flower that blossoms after a storm. No matter how much it rains in the spring months, the cherry blossoms will _always_ flower. Just like the cherry blossoms, my love will always flower for you girls. You kids, all four of you in your Quad, are very precious to me. So I say...'Screw the Rules' because I'm going to find a way to defy them! With your help," Skuld said in a tender voice that belied the courage of her convictions.

"Mom!" her daughters exclaimed, eyes brimming with devotion and tears. Even Falcyn and Sygyn were crying.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

YGG XEOMNIC NETWORK, IN TRANSIT

Sygyn has suspected that her cousin Ulfryn was not well, and now she was certain of it. She knew beyond a doubt that this was another bigtime complication to this riddle. But now, their challenge was taking on a whole new level, because it was getting personal. She had glimpsed her cousin falter every so slightly, just as she and the others floated into an energy conduit.

A secret energy conduit.

A reliable, transcendental source of puissance was required to power the God's computer, the Ygg Xeomnic Network, as they called it. How convenient it was that her Aunt's dad...Pryzm and Ulfryn's Grandfather...was the head of the God's 'department of energy'. Sygyn couldn't remember the name of the department or ministry or Office or whatever.

Right now, she was too scared for her cousin's health to think clearly.

Falcyn, the Goddess Twins, and her Aunt floated in front of her. It seemed that they were motionless, as they were traveling above a segmented 'pipeline' of light that extended as far as the mind could sense. There was no wind to ruffle her ponytails, but Sygyn knew that they were traveling _fast_. No doubt, Aunt Skuld could go even faster, since she was a Senior First Class Goddess. But her Aunt was pacing them, and thus Sygyn was flying down the pipe as fast as she could manage.

They were going into the very center of the 'brain' that ran Yggdrasil. For a moment, Sygyn's Demonic instincts took over as she briefly plotted sabotage. If she managed to destroy the core of the Xeomnic Network, all of the Ygg Logorinth would be thrown into chaos. The Gods would be susceptible to defeat, her Mom would be overjoyed at the accomplishment, and she would be on the fast track to being the youngest Demoness ever to get a First Class License. Thoughts of having medals pinned on her blouse by the Dark Lord Himself danced in her head...

"Nnn nnh!" a voice thoughtcast in her mind. Falcyn's voice.

"I was thinking the same thing, but we _can't_ do something crazy like that. It wouldn't be right, because Aunt Skuld's totally going out on a limb by sneaking us in. Sabotage would cause problems, not to mention that Mom would kill us for betraying our Aunt after Mom gave her the idea to come help us. And isn't it true that we shouldn't take advantage of such easy opportunities to create havoc? Remember what Mom says? You have to _earn_ the right to create havoc!"

Sygyn nodded her head in agreement and silently cursed her older brother for ruining her fleeting fantasies of fame. She smiled to herself because Falcyn had considered the same thing.

Then the fear gripped her again.

Being a Demoness in Yggdrasil was bad enough. Being a Demoness _girl_ in Yggdrasil was even worse. The Gods her age were always staring at her with unknowable expressions. Sygyn always assumed that it was either lust, admiration, malice or condescension. Lust was probably out, since she was very underdeveloped for her age. 14 years old, and Aunt Skuld as a 13-year-old had a truer bustline than she did. Admiration was doubtful, because none of the young teenaged Gods could appreciate the finer points of her Demonic intellect. Malice was always a possibility when one was around Gods. But immodesty was the probable explanation, since boy Gods always had misconceptions about Demoness girls.

Being a Demoness girl in Yggdrasil, racing along somewhere on a hidden path of energy leading to an area where all but a few Gods were restricted...this was enough to scare the Demoness nearly out of her!

They emerged through an amplification portal, which altered the Metanative properties of the energy stream. Turning left, they flew down a corridor that looked like the computer room in the old Kubrick 2001 flick, all red rectangles and circuits. The flowing, blurring red spillings of light comforted her, reminding her of the predominant colors of Vanagdrasil. She noticed her skin glowing purple, as she was cast between the vermillion walls of the energy 'tube' and the bright skyblue glow of the energy stream.

"How far do we have to travel, Aunt Skuld?" she shouted.

"Not much further. Maybe another 23 or 24 years, relative Earthrealm time."

Sygyn scowled at this. Since this was Yggdrasil, time had totally different properties from the Earthrealm. So she didn't have to worry that she'd emerge from their adventure as a late 30-ish Earthrealm woman. But 24 years was a long time, especially to a girl who was only 14 years in the mortal way of reckoning. An eyeblink of Divine time. She would spend almost double her life-span traveling down this tube.

"Are you sure we won't age, Mom? I don't want to go to Junior High looking like I'm older than all the teachers!" she overheard Pryzm shout.

"Nah! Nothing to worry about," her Aunt answered. "The Divine half of your beings will take care of things naturally. Besides, once we reach our destination, I have a feeling that 'relative' Time won't really matter..."

Great.

Sygyn was already frustrated by all this mystical chronological mumble-jumble that Aunt Skuld was always spouting. She may be the Norn of the Future, but Sygyn sometimes suspected that Aunt was the only one who could understand her own explanations. There were limits to belief, and Sygyn was hampered by the fact that she'd spent almost every day of her life on the Earthrealm. Mom was the head of the Demon Strife Mischief Office, and thus wasn't really concerned about Time and all its intricacies. The only chronological stuff that mattered to Sygyn was Chrono Trigger, Inu Yasha and other time-travel manga. Anything else was too heady for her, and she was a smart girl.

Now, she had to wonder...how could Time _not_ matter?

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

They had been traveling for what seemed like forever. Somewhere behind them, they had passed through a zone where energy had transformed into data. Now they were streaking along a narrow pulse of floating light circlets, like an endless stretch of doorways with Christmas lights. The longer they were in the data stream, as her Mom called it, the more the lights seemed to blur.

Finally, in the horizon of her senses, Pryzm felt the crystalline translucent 'gate' looming ahead of them. This was the entryway into the Axial Coreplex that her Mom had told her to keep a lookout for.

"There it is!" she shouted, gesturing with a pointed finger.

"Woohoo!" Falcyn yelped excitedly.

For a moment, everyone seemed to heave a sigh of relief. They were finally there! Pryzm still couldn't wrap her mind around how vast the Xeomnic Network was. They had traveled inside the Ygg Xeomnic Network on a wave of energy. As they traveled inwards inside the Xeomnic Network, the limitations of energy were gradually removed and they then traveled even faster on a datapath that streamed inwardly at unimaginable speeds. And now they were at the core! It had taken 21.8 Earthrealm years traveling at billions of times the speed of light to traverse the many subcomponents of the Ygg Xeomnic operating complex in order to reach the heart of it, the Axial CorePlex. Pryzm recalled the various simulations of the Sysop Nodes and control centers of the Xeomnic Network she had visited during field trips at Goddess Prime Inculcation...but they paled in comparison to this! Visiting her Grandparents; she had seen the central energy control stations of the Xeomnic, which didn't seem much larger than the bridges of certain starships that she had seen in various anime series. But the processing power, not to mention the processing speed required to run the Ygg Logorinth half of the OmniArc was incomprehensible. Time was all weird here too; it had taken their group years to reach this point, but she knew that the transfer of factum to data to manifest was instantaneous. It had to be instantiate, because the _Everything_ had to be regulated, monitored...

The crystalline gate started growing solid as they approached.

"Hurry! Hurry! It's turning into solid Ixodenum!" she heard her Mother urge. Mom was almost panicked! Unlike a regular gate, which blocked access by closing a door or something, this gate seemed to transmute. Pryzm had heard of Ixodenum; some kind of quintessence that conducted Metanative energies and such. The 'force' behind all matter, so to speak. And they were heading straight into a galactic-scale chunk of it!

Suddenly, Pryzm felt like she wasn't flying. Everything seemed turned around; she was _falling_ rather than flying. She suppressed the urge to scream...her senses reeled as if she had jumped off a cliff into a deep ravine. Seized by terror, she started flailing her arms and legs, as if she could brake her descent towards the solidifying diamond in front of her.

From nowhere, a hand seized her by the scruff of her neck-collar and she felt herself _accelerate_!

"Noooo!" she screamed, struggling to see who grabbed her. She spun in mid-flight and saw her older cousin's face...

Falcyn glanced at her, his face corkscrewed up with fear and adrenaline, or whatever juices Demons to be crazy. Pryzm was too freaked out to blush, but she was swarmed with embarrassment. She was supposed to be the tough one.

She looked the other way and saw that her Mom had 'scooped up' Sygyn and Ulfryn, one under each arm. Her Mom was now adult-sized, no longer in her 13-year old. This was serious! Pryzm glanced back at Falcyn, feeling uncomfortable about how the front of his body was squeezed tight against the back of hers.

He better not be thinking anything perverted!

"I'm scared shitless too, Pryzm!" he confided to her, totally shattering another one of illusions concerning the irascibility of Demons and boys. "And don't you _ever_ tell that to anybody, understand!" he added, trying to look menacing. But his fear-rippled face just didn't follow his words, and Pryzm almost started to giggle at him. Besides rescuing her, he was giving her comic relief. Yet, it was totally embarrassing, having to be being caught up by her boy cousin just like how a lifeguard would rescue a little girl who was afraid to jump into the deep end of the swimming pool, but did so anyway. But there was some recompense...Falcyn had just given her a juicy tidbit that she could use later on if she needed. Something her Dad would call "an ace in the pocket".

They were traveling insane fast, so fast that they could pass through the Milky Way in a few seconds. The gate loomed even larger, and Pryzm realized that it was much larger than a galaxy, or even a cluster of galaxies. It was as large as a couple good-sized universes.

And in a few seconds, she would either be on the other side of the barrier, or she would be squashed against its surface. The ultimate fly-on-the-windshield experience.

"Please, Almighty Kami-sama!" she prayed.

A second later, she dived past the gate.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

If Jello could be made of a mixture of amethyst and the interior of a blue giant sun, then this would be it, Ulfryn imagined. But unlike Jello, the semi-solid 'glop' all around her was odorless and tasteless. She found herself swimming along with the others in some kind of fluidic substance. Thick and gooey it felt, but it wasn't sticky like molasses and honey...Ulfryn could see her generous lengths of hair swaying around her shoulders as if they were being buffeted by a strong wind while she 'swam' towards the fractalizing glow up ahead.

Whatever it was, it was air, liquid and solid...all at once. Of course, this being the Yggdrasil Logorinth, physical properties were completely meaningless. For all she knew, she could be swimming in a dream...

"How long do we have to spend swimming through this stuff?" she wondered silently. She had imagined the gate into the Axial CorePlex to be just what it was supposed to be; a slender doorway of matter that emitted energy into the 'CPU' of the Ygg Xeomnic network. Nothing like this. But after traveling all this distance, frustration scrawled across her emotions as she realized that she and the others would have had to travel some more. Ulfryn didn't know if the 'sea' surrounding her was liquid Ixodenum, but it was much harder to float through than air. Harder, as in more effort require for movement. Of course, Mom. Pryzm and Falcyn could float through it easily...but she and Sygyn were struggling with effort. It was like doing sit-ups during gym class! Ulfryn briefly imagined that she was one of those athletes who took on the challenge of swimming across Tokyo Bay, only to find that the last several kilometers was far more exhausting than the first 30.

And then, unexpectedly, she burst through to the other side.

"Waaahhhhrrrg!" she gasped as she plummeted out-aways from the gate, streaking through the air as the liquid flowed off of her body like droplets of mercury. As her senses adjusted, Ulfryn's gasp of exertion became a sigh of astonishment, because no words or thoughts could fully convey the wonder that she beheld.

They were inside of a mammoth area. Ulfryn couldn't even call it a room, or a cavern, or an ocean. It was indescribably complex; an organic geometry of impossible visual and perceptual fields. Her mind feasted on the sight; which was nothing less than a gourmet course of Beauty itself. People are beautiful in one way, while things are beautiful in another. Art had to articulate some kind of message, some kind of beauty. For some reason, the creation all around her suggested the word "museum" more than computer. Ulfryn glanced in every direction, almost sweating as she was surrounded by countless spires of datacrystals, with curling bridges of translucent metal interconnections. The laces of metal reminded her of ermine fur, for some strange reason. The bridges would form, then fade between the spires like threads of hair. The air itself was shimmering with energy, as lights and non-lights pulsed all around her...

Her Mom paused to a halt in front of them, and with a grand sweep of her slender arms, announced, "Welcome to the Axial CorePlex!"

"C..cool!" she heard her cousin Sygyn gasp. She couldn't have said it better; she was overwhelmed with feelings of awe and reverence. In a sense, this was the Holy of Holies of the God's Realm. It was so magical, Ulfryn felt like she was in a dream. This...whatever it was...was more complex than one of the Asgard Aumatrixes. Each Aumatrix was an amazing construct in itself; but this was more compact. But it seemed larger, more ornate, and much more beautiful and awe-inspiring. How can something be immense and intimate at the same time? Her Mom had cautioned them that Time and Space were different here. No wonder the Axial CorePlex was off-limits to everyone except her Mom, a couple other Divines, and Kami-sama Himself! She imagined herself as an ant who had entered the Tokyo Museum of Modern Art. She looked down at her physical manifest and noticed that she was _glowing_. For a moment, she thought this was something her Mom had done...but then it struck her that she was actually inside the interior 'vault' of the Xeomnic Network itself! The luminosity of her Goddess form must be caused by the Axial CorePlex in some way. There was so _much_ to behold; the very complexity of the structures towering in every direction gave Ulfryn the impression that it would be very easy for someone to screw something up here.

For a fleeting moment, she worried that Falcyn would do something stupid. For all she knew, Ulfryn realized that this incredible manifestation of all forms of matter, space, time and "who knows what else!" could be structured like a proverbial deck of cards. Pull one card out, and the whole thing would collapse.

"I'm not touching a thing!" Ulfryn promised herself, accepting that she was within the zero and infinite. She was dumbfounded...and yet her Mother, now in adult form, was already hard at work. She seemed to be weaving something out of thin air into visibility. It was as if she was sculpting light out of nothingness. Entranced, Ulfryn watched her Mother with rapt admiration as a globe-like glow began to assemble itself between her hands.

"How could Mom possibly know where to go in this maze?" she whispered aside to her sister, who was equally riveted by the twin scenes of the Axial CorePlex and their Mother's deft hand motions. If Yggdrasil was a Logorinth, then this was a labyrinth! Even Kami-sama could get lost in here!

And Mom was going to somehow use this to create living manifestations of the four people who kept visiting her in her dreams?

Ulfryn had often witnessed her Mother using her Goddess powers in a variety of ways. There was the minor stuff, like 'instant' meals, fixing broken toys, rescuing stray kittens that got stranded in one of the temple home's trees. Snap fingers, floor polished. And then there was the major stuff...always within the privacy of their home or here in the Ygg world. Here, Mom could wave her hand in a gesture...and an Aquasun would turn on. But it was always so different on the Earthrealm.

Ever since she and Dad got married, Ulfryn knew that her Mother had to restrain her Goddess powers to a great degree...after all, she had to set a good example for her twin half-Goddess daughters. She had strongly impressed on Ulfryn and her sister right from their youngest days that they had to keep their special powers concealed from the rest of the Earthrealm mortals. And yet, Mom wasn't above occasionally performing a 'miracle show' to amuse and impress she and Pryzm. Mom's silly excuse was "if I don't use it, I might lose it." But Ulfryn generally sensed that Mom was always secretly pleased to excite her daughters about the possibilities of the true powers that a Goddess had at her disposal. Mom had these quirky abilities, like creating words out of thin air, or magically assembling intricate mechas, or making the HDVD player 'stutter' whenever Dad surprised her with a kiss on the couch.

But watching her Mother pull a globe of light out of nothingness, Ulfryn realized that this was the _real_ Goddess stuff, not just some showy Divine power trickery or lightbulb sun flashups. Her Mother's face was knitted in rivets of concentration, her brow furled by the intensity of her efforts...all of which belied the appearance that she was 'just' simply manifesting matter. Ulfryn felt a deep-seated intuition that Mom was creating something _beyond_ physical form. If here, in the Axial CorePlex where Space and Time were all weirded out...how could anyone craft something beyond form or sequence? Yet, here was her Mom, designing and painting into reality something entirely beyond Ulfryn's experience.

And then what?

Ulfryn's mind raced, seemingly amped into a higher click of thinking by the surroundings. If Mom managed to create this 'other' family, then would that mean that the four beings she had created would be _alive_? This wasn't a case of merely cloning or duplicating...Mom had stated that she was going to create Life. Ulfryn thought of the recent Frankenstein anime series on TV, and shuddered at all the possible implications. What if they were alive? Would that mean that their existence would somehow 'erase' the people or beings that were at the very source of her dreams? Could there be _two_ sets of beings with the exact same impress of physicality and consciousness? Would they have Souls? Would they be the same people that kept showing up in her dreams? If they were alive, wouldn't that be murder if Mom decided to 'turn them off'?

What about her dreams...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

YGGDRASIL XEONMNIC - THE AXIAL COREPLEX

"Hnnnnh!"

"What's up, Ulfryn? Are you okay?" she half-heard Pryzm ask in a haze of noise and sight. Ulfryn edged towards panic as everything seemed to fade into a fog; the semi-sleep state dream-idyll she would experience at the edge of consciousness. It felt like her brain suddenly had earmuffs. Now that she was in Yggdrasil in her Goddess form, Ulfryn didn't need to sleep at all, of course. But something seemed to draw her into somnolence, swiftly pulling her from waking conscious to a dreamless dream-state. She seemed to pass through a million rootless thoughts and impressions...

A glow-that-was-shadow hovered in front of her, as everything went black.

It was _them_...the ghosties!

Deep in her heart, Ulfryn felt something new. Before, she sensed that the young boy and girl were trying to reach _her_, rather than simply waiting for her to reach them. Now, she felt like they were reciprocating her efforts; that they weren't just hanging around waiting to be found. For some reason, she felt like they were somehow trapped in an in-between place.

Maybe they were trying to escape!

The beautiful young woman standing behind them _had_ to be a Goddess! Ulfryn had suspected it before, but something about the woman's elegant bearing seemed to confirm this impression even more indelibly in her mind. She knew that she was in the middle of the Yggdrasil Xeomnic Network...and yet she was somewhere else as well. Behind the two children, the young sandy-haired woman was hugging a young man protectively. Or was it affectionately? Or maybe she was scared too? She didn't look like she could be scared of anything; she had a regal air of steadfastness and composure. The two children were hugging their parents, looking at her with pleading eyes.

Ulfryn realized that her dreams up to this point were only hinting at things. Half-sensed truths, crow's foot realities, burned sun illuminations. Everything had been shadows of shadows. Dreams, like she had been like walking on the beach, and then had encountered a set of footprints, knowing that they had been made by people, but not knowing who or what those people were. Having to build imagination upon dreams; shallow flights of fantasy that only offered glimpses...

But now, in another 'center' of Yggdrasil, Ulfryn felt like she was finally seeing the feet that had left the footprints across her imagination.

"There!" she heard her Mom's voice announce in the distance.

"We're ready to go."

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"You mean they're _inside_ of that green globe-thing?" Falcyn asked, clearly impressed by his Aunt's show of power.

"Yes, Falcyn," Aunt Skuld answered. "What I've done is create a discreet 'computer-within-a-computer' here. When Ulfryn touched the globe, it extracted the information..."

"WHAT!! I don't remember touching that glowing globe!" Ulfryn interrupted.

"Temporary amnesia is one of the after-effects," her Mom replied. "And I emphasize the 'temporary'. Your memories will come back, sweetie. I'm sorry, but it has to be this way."

Falcyn watched as Pryzm floated over and squeezed her sister's hand while their Mother continued her explanation.

"It extracted the information from that part of her mind that regulates her dream-state. Then I took a TNA sample from each of you and myself, so that I could calibrate her dreamforms with our family's specific genenergetex patterns. Otherwise, only Ulfryn could see whatever results we get; we wouldn't see a thing and that would not be good. By the way, genenergetex science isn't something that the mortals have discovered, so don't tell anyone at school, okay?"

"Tell them about what?" Falcyn asked. Behind him, his younger sis started giggling. Falcyn shook his head, realizing that he must have misunderstood his Aunt again. He cursed the stars; it wasn't his fault that he wasn't as smart as Sygyn! Sometimes when he was around his sister and two cousins, they seemed to have some kind of secret 'girl's language' that they would exchange between themselves; a language that he clearly wasn't privy to understanding. It really irked him when they would whisper among themselves and then turn to look at him...and start giggling. About the time he would be ready to launch himself and tackle one of the girls, his Mom would appear out of thin air and yank him by the ears, or otherwise restrain him.

Now they were doing it again...and even Aunt Skuld was even in on it!

"It's not my fault!" he shouted.

"What's not your fault?" Aunt Skuld asked. Falcyn thought about how he was going to explain himself, but his Demonic temper took his thoughts to task...he couldn't form the words that he wanted to say.

"Never mind!" he grumbled. His Aunt looked at him with a sympathetic expression, which was the last thing he wanted to see from her. Falcyn, son of Mara, doesn't need sympathy! Especially from a Goddess! But then he realized that his Aunt was truly sorry that he didn't understand her. He could tell by her auburn-brown eyes that she wanted him to feel okay about himself. Clearing her throat, she resumed.

"You see, I can't use the regular Xeomnic Network. If I did that, then once I create the beings in Ulfryn's dreams, then they actually would become _real_ in every sense of the word," Aunt Skuld remarked. "The Xeomnic Network would detect their presence, and they would manifest with Life somewhere in the Ygg Logorinth. Which would cause problems for the 'originals' that show up in Ulfryn's dreams."

"You mean, they'd show up somewhere in the OmniArc!" Falcyn corrected. After all, Yggdrasil was only _half_ of existence.

"No, it would have to be in the Ygg Logorinth, since we're using the Ygg Xeomnic computer," Aunt Skuld countered. Falcyn quickly turned red-faced, angry at himself for missing the obvious.

"So, Aunt Skuld, you can't _actually_ create Life because then you would have to destroy it later," Sygyn observed.

"Yes, Sygyn!" his Aunt remarked approvingly. Falcyn squinted his eyes at his younger twin, who was stealing the spotlight right after he had just embarrassed himself by once again proving how stupid he was.

Stupid sister!

"As a Goddess, I am sworn not to take Life. But I'm also sworn not to give Life either, otherwise the temptation to revive the dead, or create copies of the living, would be too great. Naturally, since I have to create 'aspects' of the characters in Ulfryn's dreams, they can't be truly alive. But I can create them in such a way where they would serve as 'matches' for the real people who are visiting Ulfryn in her dreams. So they can come to us. And since she was convinced that they...or at least some of them...were Gods, I have to instill them with Metanative properties. Once I do that, then we have something tangible," Skuld clarified.

"Huh?"

"We have a synthesis of matter, dream and context that is 99.9 percent real, so to speak," his Aunt answered. "With that degree of accuracy, I can use some forbidden math...the kind of mathematics that's illegal to use in Yggdrasil...to render that difference 'downwardly imperfect'. Simply put, that illegal math allows for something which shouldn't match another thing...it makes it so it _will_ match another thing. No two apples are the same, but using the fact that they're both apples, one can derive any number of commonalities between them. Apply the secret arcanic formulas, and then the whole process 'minimizes' or 'downsizes' the imperfection between the apples. In other words, it 'erases' the significance of the differences between the two."

"This is why I hate math!" Falcyn muttered to himself, having missed almost all of his Aunt's explanation as soon as it veered towards numbers and formulas. Even his genius sister, Sygyn, looked befuddled by the explanation.

"So what we have is 'exact' inexact synthetic copies of the four beings in Ulfryn's dreams, created via a psuedo-Xeomnic computer so that the real Xeomnic Network won't detect them. They'll even have 'life' non-Life, and 'souls' non-Souls. But they're frozen in TimeSpace, so they aren't self-conscious. What they really are is rendered AI in its purest form...but not intelligent and self-aware, like most AI's are. For example, Banpei-kun is self-aware, has an AI, is capable of love, is a machine...basically he's machine life. Destroying him would be murder in every sense of the word. But these are 'ghosts-of-a-ghost'...a ghost in the machine in the truest sense," Aunt Skuld said, her enthusiasm mounting.

As much as he loved and admired his Aunt, Falcyn always hated this side of her. He knew she wasn't being mean, but it seemed that once she launched herself into a technical explanation, she drifted away from everything else. An atom bomb could blow up next to her house, and he figured that Aunt Skuld would continue rattling off mecha-techa babble.

"So what you're saying, Aunt Skuld, is that you're making 99.9 into 100," Sygyn interpreted. "You built a sandbox computer so the Ygg Xeomnic won't see what you're doing. And you're creating recepticles so Ulfryn's ghosties can visit us if they want. Kinda like using a bowl to put ice cream in. No bowl, no ice cream for dessert."

Falcyn scratched his head at the implications of his sis's words.

IF they wanted to visit us.

"So what do we do now?" his cousin Pryzm asked, impatient with her Mom.

"Ooops!" Aunt Skuld chirped, her gloved hand almost concealing the embarrassed blush of her cheeks. Falcyn sneered at his Aunt's comeuppance.

"Sorry, my dears," she apologized. "What we do is use Ulfryn's Metanative form...the essence of her Goddess form...and then we go looking...and hope _they're_ looking for us."

Ulfryn perked up at this, and asked, "Are you sure this is safe, Mom?"

"Nothing's safe, Ulfryn," Aunt Skuld answered in a level voice that sent a chill even deep into Falcyn's spine. "You're going to be the link between the 'globe' and 'reality'. All I want you to do is put one hand on the globe, and then use your other hand to interface directly with the Axial CorePlex."

"How do I do that?" Ulfryn asked.

"It's easy! Just touch any surface, like this spiral of datacrystals right here," Aunt Skuld said, gesturing towards a nearby 'tree' of data.

"I..I don't know if I want to do that," Ulfryn stammered. Falcyn was irritated by her sudden cowardice; it was her idea all along that had gotten everybody embroiled in this mess! And he still wasn't certain that he would get off without being punished by his Mom, even if she said she was okay with them doing this. Since Mom was a Demon Queen, he and his sister often had to act like little 'proper' Demons; another aspect of his life that he resented. So she had to go the extra length to ensure that he behaved "appropriately". Now, his little bratty cousin was getting weak-kneed and sappy about it...

"Just do it! We're all with you on this!" he shouted at Ulfryn in a voice that sounded more manly than he had intended it to. Falcyn smiled to himself because she paused at his words and then seemed to lose her worried expression. To him, his voice had sounded like that of a commanding Shogun.

"Honey, we're all going to be right here!" Aunt Skuld added, polishing his verbal demand with the softness of encouragement. "_I'm_ going to be right here. Do you think I would let something happen to you if I could prevent it? This is going to finally solve the question about whether those 'ghosts' in your dreams are real. Don't you want that, honey?"

"It's all possible, Ulfryn, that once we do this, then your 'ghosts' won't bother you again," Sygyn added. "If they're real, then they won't have a need to communicate with you any more. And if they're fake, then your Mom can probably figure a way to reverse whatever it is that's causing you to dream them. Doesn't that sound good? Besides, it's something I think you gotta do. Otherwise you're stuck with them for the rest of your life. Lesser of two evils...something we Demons deal with all the time."

"Okay! I'll do it!" Ulfryn said, her face fixed with determination. Falcyn was pleased and somewhat amused by how his daydreaming younger cousin was putting on airs of confidence. She was a Goddess, and it was obvious how scared she was. Yet, he had to give her a little credit for having the guts to do this.

Now all they could do is watch and hope.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Gathering up every vestige of her courage, Ulfryn tentatively reached towards the green glowing orb, her fingers quivering as if she expected to get an electrical shock if she touched it. As she touched the 'surface' of light, her fingertips seemed to sink in a few cm into it. It wasn't an unpleasant jolt as she half-expected; in fact it felt like she was stroking warm water with her fingers right before taking a bath in the furo. With her other hand, she cautiously reached out and touched a branch of datacrystals just to the right of her head. In response, the datacrystals started crawling up her arm, halfway to her elbow...

"M..mm...Mom!" she wailed in sheer panic.

"It's okay, it's okay! This is supposed to happen," Skuld assured her, hugging her from behind, wrapping her arms around Ulfryn's shoulders and chest. "I'm right here!"

Pryzm realized that the datacrystals were fusing with her sister's manifest. Mom probably didn't mention this part because she would be adding fright to a testy process that easily provoked fear in the worst way. But Ulfryn didn't seem be in any pain; just scared out of her wits. Pryzm was shaking wity tension, and she was only watching things unfold. Why would Mom do it this way? Why have Ulfryn touch the interior of the Axial CorePlex?

Of course! She was doing this so that they could 'interface' with Ulfryn more directly. Still, the process was a quite unnerving. It reminded her of those 'monster-morph' sequences in anime, where the human being would change into a machine or a monster. Even if Mom said it was supposed to happen, it looked pretty scary.

Ulfryn blinked, and her Mom lifted a hand off her shoulder and drew a circle in the air with her finger. Instantly, a translucent 'keyboard' appeared in mid-air. She talked to it, and part of a nearby wall of datacrystals shifted form, smoothing into a holophotic display panel. Pryzm immediately recognized it as a copy of one of the units in Mom's home lab. Even Aunt Mara had one at her lair. In her Aunt's case, she had to use it once in a while to report to Oni-sama about the progress of Strife Mischief her 'agents' were causing among the mortals.

On the holophotic screen, images of whole Multiverses flickered, while a 'ticker' on the bottom of the display kept track. Already, they had visited 7,777,777 to the 4000th power of Multiverses. It was fast, but when one thinks how big the Ygg Logorinth is, Pryzm sensed that it was going to take awhile.

So she was grateful when Mom invited her cousin and her sister to play a game of telekinetic volley-frisbee, amidst the stacks of the Xeomnic Network's Axial CorePlex.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Skuld was incredibly dismayed. The 'interface' she created had dialed through 90 percent of the Multiverses in the Ygg Logorinth...and there had been no matches. Nothing in the Past, nothing in the Present, nothing in the Future. She was beginning to think that there would be _no_ matches between her 'AI sim-Life' beings in the globe and any actual beings in the Ygg Logorinth, Divine or mortal.

And then, as the meter reached 97 percent, it stopped.

"What the fuck!?" Skuld shrieked, so astonished by this unexplainable pause that she completely forgot that she was around the kids. Oh well, it certainly wasn't the first time they had heard that word. Ulfryn looked up at her with a bewildered expression as the datacrystals that were sealing around her forearm began to withdraw.

A moment later, the _datacrystals themselves_ broke contact with Ulfryn!

Skuld's mind raced feverishly. Pryzm and Mara's kids had stopped in the middle of their volley-frisbee play, and were quickly coming back to check out the ruckus.

This was insane! "What the fuck!" didn't even begin to describe it.

Three percent of the Ygg Logorinth was _missing_, if the readout was to believed. Skuld had always suspected that there was a glitch in the Ygg Xeomn...this only proved her suspicions. But _three percent_?!

That's a massive amount of Time, Space and Life that was unaccounted for by the Ygg Xeomnic Network!

"This is supposed to be the Axial CorePlex, which runs the entire Network!" Skuld mumbled to herself, clearly unnerved to the very essence of her being. This was like waking up and not being able to feel anything below your neck. "How can it possibly end before reaching 100 percent in its scanning of the Multiverses?!"

"Mom, did you notice _how_ it ended," Ulfryn interrupted. "_It_ pulled itself away from me. I almost got the impression that the computer interface thingy was scared, for some reason."

"Mom!" she heard Pryzm shout as she approached. "What's wrong? You look really upset!"

Skuld wondered how she could possibly explain this one to her kids. The Xeomnic Network, which basically ran the entire Yggdrasil Logorinth, had just misreported the existence of uncounted Multiverses. Skuld was truly frightened by the implications of this.

"There's something wrong," was all she could say.

"Could it be your machine? What if that green orb you made to recreate Ulfryn's 'dream angels' was screwed up?" Pryzm asked.

"NO!!" she shouted. Skuld almost wanted to cover her mouth, she was so taken aback by the vehemence of her defensiveness. Her guilt was compounded when she saw that her daughters had recoiled in the face of her anger. She had literally frightened them.

"I'm sorry for being so short with you, but if the 'orb' with my re-creation of Ulfryn's 'dream people' is screwed up, then that means that Ulfryn is screwed up. And I'm not going to allow that as a consideration. If my daughter says that she's seeing these four people...the _same_ four people each time...than I'm going to stand by her," Skuld told everyone.

"So if Ulfryn's not the problem, then the Ygg Xeomnic is?" Sygyn clarified.

"Well...it looks that way," she told her niece. Fine answer that one was, she thought privately. The kids are already stressed out, confused, tired. Now she has no clue about what just happened, nothing she could say to try and take the edge off.

"So how do you explain _that_?!" Falcyn asked.

"I can't!" Skuld admitted with a sigh of disappointment. "You see, we're not even supposed to be here! And I hacked into the Ygg Xeomn, created a quasi-lifeform in a ether-space stack that I appropriated from it, and then allowed an unauthorized person to interact directly with the Axial CorePlex."

"Which means you can't tell anyone, because you'd get in trouble!" Pryzm shouted.

"_We'd_ get in trouble," Skuld replied. "Do you think that the Lord will look kindly upon us if we told Him that we had taken _Demons_ into the Axial CorePlex? This is so messed up! I've found a glitch that could threaten the whole existence of Yggdrasil...and I can't tell a soul about it. But I can't just sit on this information. I'm going to have to tell Kami-sama, because I can't just ignore this. Not with the possible implications it portends. If part of the system is corrupted, what's to keep the whole Xeomnic Network from crashing. I used to pound Bugs when I was a kid, and a Bug was only a tiny virus that corrupted a tiny portion of the system. Then The Expansion occurred, and we had the Ygg Xeomnic suddenly doing all the computerwork, a gazillion times larger and more complex than the old Yggdrasil Mainframe. And three percent of it is _missing_! Arrrgh...this is _so_ screwed up!"

"So we're all going to be in trouble, no matter what we do?" Ulfryn said. "And I'll be the worst in trouble, because I was the one who was touching the computer..."

"No, you won't!" Falcyn said firmly, counterpointing his cousin's self-pity. "Sygyn and I will be in the most trouble."

"Why's that?" Pryzm asked.

"Because you guys don't have to deal with the Dark Lord," Falcyn answered, his semi-tanned face blanching.

The Dark Lord...

Something about Falcyn's words triggered a thought in Skuld that almost made her face-fault. What if they had been going about this all wrong? All along, she had assumed that the ghostly emanations that Ulfryn was senseing had come from Yggdrasil.

What if they didn't?

Skuld decided to turn failure into a lesson for her nephew. Earlier, Falcyn had been so embarrassed by his goofup about searching the OmniArc, instead of just Yggdrasil. She remembered how he had dipped his head in shame, and then how angry he had gotten when his younger sis corrected him. The poor boy reminded her of someone, someone who would easily get embarrassed when his intuitive steered him wrong.

"Falcyn..." Skuld asked. "What did you say earlier about the OmniArc?"

She already knew that he had seen something that all of them had missed, but it was important for her nephew to hear himself say it aloud, find his own voice so she could then confirm his words, anointing him with some praise and hopefully some self-esteem to go with it.

"I was saying that I thought we should be looking in the OmniArc, not just in Yggdrasil. There's always the possibility that Ulfryn's 'ghost's might come from _our_ homerealm!"

"You mean my ghosts are Demons?!" Ulfryn blurted out, gripping her fists tight at her side.

"Before we get into an argument over what they are, we need to focus on _where_ they are," Skuld hastily explained before the kids launched into a hysterical argument. "Just because Ulfryn believes that they're Gods and Goddesses _doesn't_ mean that they are limited to Yggdrasil. They could be in Vanagdrasil...and still be Gods. Falcyn was right to note that we should search the whole OmniArc."

She tousled Falcyn's hair playfully, pleased that he was grinning sheepishly with embarrassment at being proven right.

"So what do we do, Mom? We can't exactly go looking for them in Vanagdrasil from here!" Pryzm asked, already ready to move on in their searching.

That brought up another problem. She couldn't reveal to the Lord anything that had happened here. She'd burned that bridge long ago just by smuggling the kids here. Without the resources of the Ygg computer at her full command, the search was pretty much road-blocked at this point. If she tried to use the Ygg Xeomnic Network to examine this anomaly, she'd set off every alarm bell in the God's Realm. Hacking the Axial CorePlex was an act of legendary difficulty. Trying to use a computer to create a demonstrable proof that three percent of Ygg data was missing? While that very computer wasn't running at 100 percent and didn't even know that it was experiencing data loss? No, there had to be another way. She had to talk to someone about this. Skuld gritted her teeth in frustration and started floating in a wide circle, as if she was pacing up and down the hallway back home on the Earthrealm. She looked at her daughters, and then at Mara's kids...they would be the ones who would suffer the most. Skuld already was beyond the point of caring what happened to her, but she had to do something to protect the kids from suffering punishment. Keep them from suffering...

...and then the most insane, wreckless idea she had ever conceived of became clear as water in her mind. Even as she tried to dismiss it, her intellect and Soul told her it was the only way out of this mess.

"I guess this means that we're going to Vanagdrasil..."

Both of Skuld's daughter's faces went white, and with good reason. The closest they had ever been to Vanagdrasil was their Aunt Mara's Demoness Lair back on the Earthrealm.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --


	110. Pt 110: Snow Riders

**Part 110: Snow Riders**

"Neee, Cevn-sensei! You lose again!" Megumi shouted triumphantly. I could feel the heat from her body as she held my head tight against her ribcage. Damn, that girl was strong! She had wrestled me into one of those awkward positions, her arm tightly crocked across the back of my head and neck, pinning me with a vise-lock in a half-crouching position against her side. I felt my face tingling with a rouge of embarrassment as I felt a soft bulbous pressure against my forehead and realized that it was one of her breasts.

In front of me was a drunken Sora Hasegawa. A wobbly, silly-grinned, crooked-glasses Sora Hasegawa. I didn't remember her showing up to my class drunk, ever. But here she was, and she looked worse for wear. Keiichi had often warned me about the combustible mixture of Sora and sake. Diminutive Sora had a diminutive tolerance for any type of alcohol. True to form, Sora was looking at me with her head cocked to the side, her largish round glasses lopsided and low on her nose. Reaching a decision, she snapped her head up straight.

"I'm gonna..hic..prove to you onesh and for all that I have breashtsh, senshei! Becaushe I kn..kn..know in your perverted mind that..hiccup!..you've alwaysh wondered if I did," she shouted at the top of her voice, as if she was hailing someone halfway across the campus. She was weaving as she stood in place, merely a meter or so in front of me. The way Megumi had me positioned in a wrestler's side-arm hold, I couldn't look away from her. Sora's taunt only served to escalate Megumi's crazy giggling; she tightened her armlock to ensure that I couldn't turn my head away. I tried to shift my weight against her, struggling to get her off-balance...but she barely moved. I knew that, at 72 kilograms, I must have outweighed her by at least 20 kilos or more. I had always pegged Megumi as weighing around 55 kilos, but obviously I would never ask her about her weight. Some taboos should never be tampered with. Steadfast against my efforts to budge her, Megumi might as well have been a sumo yokozuna; it felt like she weighed 200 kilos.

I couldn't shunt her a single centimeter in any direction.

Sora started lifting her white blouse, not even trying to undress in some semblance of a sexy striptease. Which was good, as far as I was concerned.

Instinctively, I clenched my jaw and my eyes shut, hearing the smooth-breeze sound of a blouse being taken off. Megumi was still laughing; which only seemed to tighten her grip around my head in pulses. How did she get so strong all of a sudden?

_Crack!!_

I felt a searing pain across my ass. Gasping with surprise and pain, I opened my eyes in reaction, and closed them just as quickly, not wanting to see the afterimage of a half-dressed Sora in my 'interior eyes'. Fortunately, I was able to shut my eyes quick enough to keep from really seeing anything.

Sora had accused me of being a perv, and here I was trying to keep a grip on myself. Besides, she was Aoshima's girlfriend. What the hell had gotten into her, besides a bottle or two of sake?

Where was Aoshima when I needed him the most?

"Ho ho ho ho!" one of those bone-shivering wickedass Japanese-girl type laughs echoed in my ears. It might as well be Carrera Marker from the Karin vampire anime, or Kirabayashi-sempai from RealBout Samurai Girl. Dominatrix to the max, with more than a subtle shading of menace and taunt mixed in.

But I was already certain who the voice belonged to.

She should have been one of my star students, but instead she was hitting me in the butt with something that snapped through the air. A whip, a lash, a branch...I didn't care. All I sensed was a stinging sensation, as if a dozen bees suddenly decided to sting me on the asscheeks.

What the fuck?!

"I'm going to make you worship me, Cevn-sensei! I am your Queen, and you are going to grovel underneath my high-heeled spikes! Bwah ha ah ha! You're never going to escape from Mistress Sayoko! You've caught my attention, and just like a black widow, I'm going to poison you! And when I'm done with you, you're going to crawl into a hole for a month, like the worm you are..." she shouted in a hooting, shrill voice.

Too much information.

Sayoko was clean from drugs, last I remembered. And she wasn't in that newcomer phase any more, so there wasn't that whole adrenaline-junky trip going on with her. Yet, here she was, as self-proclaimed "Mistress Sayoko". I felt my knees shudder as I realized that I'd be dead meat if her boyfriend, Tamiya, showed up. Fortunately, my back was to her...so I couldn't see what she was wearing. I tried to imagine shiny black leather and fishnet, but failed to keep my imagination from dwelling fearfully on her description of her shoes.

What the hell's the matter with me?

Normally, I could shift my attention away when it was drifting into the sordid zone. And I was _still_ scared of sexual situations with women, or anything approaching them. Not frightened to death like before, but noticeably uneasy due to the pervasive sense of threat such situations brought on. Two years ago, I would have had a total emotional meltdown if this would have happened. But now, I was just freaked out.

Urd.

It must have been Urd! This whole thing reeked of one of her 'interferences'.

Unfortunately, my backside faced Sayoko...

_ Snapck!!_

Another searing lash. Sayoko wasn't holding back, she was actually whipping me _hard_ across the ass! How did I get into this compromising position, in my own faculty office?

"Sempai! Look at my breashts! They're righ here, righ..in..fron..of..your..noshe!" I heard Sora demand in a slurred, coquettish voice. She was so intoxicated that she had forgotten that I was her college professor. Instead, she was calling me with the ubiquitous 'sempai' word...which could mean a thousand things.

I was scared to death that she might press herself against my face!

"Hee hee hee hee! Let's wrestle some more, teach!!" Megumi laughed hungrily, her choke-hold arm around my neck literally doing just that; choking me. What the hell was she trying to do, kill me? My breath was cut off as my Adam's apple felt like it was being yanked into the back of my skull.

"Yes! Gaze upon her breasts, slave!" Sayoko shouted, accenting her command with two lashes of her whip. "And then when she's done playing with you, you can lick the laces of my corset before I take you on a journey into the world of exquisite agony! You'll learn the true meaning of stiletto! Ho ho ho ho!"

Drilled with sharp needles of whip-lashed pain, hazy with asphyxiation, my eyes blinked open of their own accord...

"Waaaaaaahhhhhh!"

I was in my room.

It was just a nightmare. One of those crazy dreams that can jerk a person into wakefulness with their eyes blinking _fast_...

Or was it?

I could hear the sound of feminine giggling down towards the entryway of the hallway.

"URD, GODDAMMIT!!" I shouted as I stormed out of my room, flinging the shoji door open so hard it nearly snapped.

One morning each week I get to sleep in...and she had just totally messed it up!

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

I groaned with a sigh, watching the snow flurries just outside the veranda. After being thoroughly scolded by both Skuld and Urd...Urd resolutely claiming that she did nothing to influence my dreams last night...I pulled on a parka, stuffed the hood over my head and sat myself down on the wooden veranda near the front door.

A few minutes later, Keiichi joined me.

Two glumps in a field of white.

I felt defeated both ways. Urd was always getting the best of me, no matter what I did to defend myself. And whenever I tried to impress her, I ended up making a fool of myself. I knew that I was totally in love with her, but I was beginning to lose track of _why_ it mattered so much. I felt like I was banging my head against an invisible wall.

At one time, Urd had meant the world to me. Not figuratively, because I never got that obsessed over her. But spiritually...where it counts...she was able to brighten my days just a little bit. All she had to do was offer me a special smile. But some days, she was the only person who could give me warmth; especially during those days where the chill of the routine gripped me. As a teenager, I vowed to never get caught up in the day-to-day rhythm of life; I viewed any full-time job or schoolwork as a means of freezing one's self in place. Trapped in ice.

Now, I was freed in snowfall.

True, the snow had always excited my daydreams; I seemed to be replacing the grayness outside with indulgent colorful flights of fancy. The snow was a bright herald of the mid-morning sun, but its brightness only reminded me of the sheen, the ice-light of Urd's hair. The heavy, silken strands of silver-white hair that mysteriously faded into light lilac-purple two third of the way down her back. Urd was a free-spirit, but fate had blended our hearts together, knitting our disbelief into shared affection. I remembered the treasures of admiration I had for her, a dawning of sentiment that seemed to have been defrauded by my earlier life as a drug addict. I wanted to make her mine, but with a jealous care, so that I could gather her innermost thoughts and guard them with my life.

Silence could be the repose of serenity...or the crushing sentinel of loneliness.

"Keiichi, I'm completely at a loss here. I don't know what got into me, but being around Urd is really getting difficult. I'm definitely lacking in the 'clue what to do' dept. You have any suggestions?" I asked.

"Urd's...well, she's Urd," Keiichi answered me. "It's hard enough figuring out mortal women; but Urd and Skuld are Goddesses, which makes the unfathomable female mind even more unfathomable. I would suggest that you stop trying to analyze her behavior. And yours."

"But what do I do then? I don't exactly feel like I belong here any more. I absolutely pissed off Urd this morning by accusing her of invading my sleep with nightmares, just because I overheard her and Skuld giggling. It turned out they were laughing about something Tomohisa had said when he visited us during New Year's break..."

"What kind of nightmares?"

"The Urd kind," I said, feeling sleepy.

"You mean the sexy, wet-dream-run-amok, scary _inappropriate_ kind," he answered with a chuckle.

"Yep!" I shot back. He had definitely hit that one on the head. Now, I was beginning to doubt Urd's claims of innocence.

"Urd's been acting so weird since her sister's been put away in that pool of ice. I imagine that she's just stressing it," he noted. There it was again, Keiichi referring to Belldandy like she nothing more than a neighborly acquaintance. It wasn't just Urd that was unsettling.

"Actually, _I'm_ stressing it much worse. I feel like I'm walking on eggshells at times when I'm here at the temple. Teaching at N.I.T. isn't exactly a cakewalk, either. When I come home, I need to unwind a bit. But relaxation seems to be a fleeting luxury around here."

"Heh heh. Cevn, I've lived with the three of them for a good three years before you arrived on the scene," Keiichi noted. "So I know all about 'household' stress. I almost miss Belldandy...she seemed to be able to take the edge off of Urd and Skuld. Quite easily most of the time. In fact, Belldandy was something like a referee between the two. And for a while, she was more powerful than either of them, which conveniently kept their little squabbles at bay for the most part. Especially Urd's tendency to play pranks. But now that Belldandy's gone...I find myself feeling really sad. I really miss her..."

"Keiichi? Don't you remember anything? Anything about Urd and I being in love? Or you being in love with Belldandy?"

"Me...in love with Belldandy? Nah!" he answered too quickly. "Belldandy is totally not my type. And Urd's probably never been in love with anyone, except with herself. She likes you...as a friend...otherwise, she wouldn't get so upset. And she doesn't play pranks on people she doesn't care about. I used to think she _hated_ me, because she always kept pestering me to try and get together with Belldandy, for some whimsical reason or another. And when she didn't succeed in getting her way, she'd get all mad at me. Or she'd try and seduce me, out of spite. A few of those times turned out quite disastrous, as I recall. But Urd has her good side too. She can have these bouts of kindness sometimes, like when I went and got Bell a ring during...the...Christmas..."

Keiichi's voice suddenly trailed off, as if he had briefly held a thought in his mind and then it had flowed out through his forgetfulness, like water being strained through a mesh. He returned his attention to the grounds, staring silently at the snowfall decorating the temple's garage. But my mind was racing with excitement, because he had half-remembered an event that was important in his romantic life with Belldandy! As long as he had these 'flashes' of recall, there was hope.

If Belldandy was only a friend, as Keiichi had claimed, then he wouldn't have borne the trials he undertaken in order to buy her an inexpensive ring for a present. A ring purchased by the commodity of the fullness of his caring nature, a product of what was clearly his blossoming love for her. He was remembering! Somehow, he was recalling an event which _proved_ that he had been in love with Belldandy!

"Keiichi!" I interrupted urgently. "I remember what you're talking about! During the last couple weeks of the Fall term, you worked overtime at a variety of temp agency jobs along with Tamiya and Ootaki. On top of studying for finals, you wanted to save up money to buy something! And then when you collapsed from exhaustion, Urd healed you with some mystic incense she put in your room."

"How do you know all that?!" Keiichi blurted out warily.

"Everybody in the house knows that," I quickly answered. "But do you remember _why_ you worked so hard, Keiichi? What was so important that you worked yourself until you were punch-drunk wore out? Remember what you gave Belldandy that Christmas?"

"She's not here, so I can't ask her what it was. Who could possibly remember all the presents they gave away for Christmas a year ago, let alone five years ago," he answered, shrugging his shoulders.

"Dammit!" I swore loudly.

"Hey, what'd I say?" Keiichi asked, not understanding why I was frustrated.

It was another near miss. Obviously, Keiichi didn't remember about the ring at all! The 'old' Keiichi...the one who was in love with Belldandy, had told me on several occasions that the ring he gave her that Christmas was one of the most important things he had ever done in his life. And Belldandy had often told him how much she cherished that ring, since it was Keiichi's first real gift to her. Once again, I had the strong sense that his memories seemed tied up in Belldandy's mind somehow. Whenever we managed to corner him on one of his 'half-remembered' events, he always protested with a "Belldandy isn't here to confirm what you guys are saying", or words to that effect. His memories seemed just below the surface, just far enough to be invisible to him. A moment ago, he was remembering everything about the first Christmas season with Belldandy...but then his memory seemed to dissipate like smoke clouds against a fan. Once in a while, it almost seemed like he was going to make a breakthrough and remember everything about he and Belldandy. But not this time.

"Lunch's ready!" Urd announced through the front door.

"Who's cooking tonight?" Keiichi asked.

"Skuld," she answered. "Although I could say that one of the two of you doesn't deserve lunch!"

"Bleech!" Keiichi exclaimed, intentionally audible to the sisters.

"Make that _two_ of you that don't deserve lunch!" Urd scowled, shutting the front door.

"Uh-oh!" Keiichi said, looking at me with a worried expression. We alternated the cooking chores: Keiichi and I one day; Urd and Skuld the next. Since Skuld was cooking dinner, it meant that Urd had made lunch. Keiichi had slyly asked who was making dinner, in order to find out who had made lunch. And he had just insulted the lunch chef...who was already pissed off at me.

I read his mind; in a flurry, we both sprang to our feet and tried the front door.

Stuck.

Urd must have been really pissed off, because she had locked us out of the house!

I slumped back down on the cold floor of the veranda, which only caused my stomach to growl. I knew that Urd didn't care if it was bitter-crisp cold and snowy outside at all. She was fully into Divine Witch-Bitch mode, meaning that she was raw-nerved in her resentment towards me. Keiichi's little comment about her cooking had evidently pushed her over the edge.

What an unfair trade! Being stuck out in the cold versus a single feigned expression of distaste. If they were Goddesses, they damned well knew that Keiichi was only kidding around. Once again, I felt like I was getting the short end of the stick.

"Might as well surrender," I joked with Keiichi. "We'll probably be out here all afternoon."

"Yeah," he agreed, sitting down on the wooden flooring of the veranda a couple meters away from me. "I doubt that Skuld will let us miss out on dinner..."

"For God's sake, don't let either of us make a bad remark about her cooking!" I said, semi-jesting, semi-serious.

"Hey! You know what? We should head over to the garage. I've got a space heater there...and maybe a couple sandwiches stashed away in the mini-fridge. They're old, but at least it's something..." Keiichi offered.

"Cool! You're a life-saver, dude!" I exclaimed happily. Eating a not-so-fresh, probably freezer-burned, sandwich was almost an absolute victory in my mind. At least Urd's impulsivity wasn't going to make us go hungry all afternoon!

"Hurrah for the mortals!" I thought as we tramped through the crisp drifts of snow towards the garage. Once inside, Keiichi fired up the small space heater...and within a few minutes, it was warm enough for me to take off my gloves. Trying to eat a microwaved sandwich with thick winter gloves intended for January's worst wasn't my idea of fun.

"Why does everyone keep thinking that I'm supposed to be in love with Belldandy?" Keiichi asked me, after he pulled two sandwiches out of the nuker. "My sister keeps pecking at me about it. Sayoko is all moody whenever I'm around her. You keep trying to draw something out of me that simply isn't there..."

"Look, Keiichi...I'm sorry about that. At least partly sorry. You have to understand that there seems to be this weirdness in our minds, because we remember you being in love with her. It's firmly fixed in our minds. I can picture you and her being an item from the moment I arrived in Japan. In fact, if you two hadn't gotten together, I wouldn't even be here. You ever consider that? You and Belldandy became a couple, then Urd and Skuld came to the Earthrealm because of that. Then Urd got dispatched to grant my wish by some Goddess goofup, and she brought me here. Remember? I know that somewhere inside of your heart, you love Belldandy. It was more than just a wish. You two were a _couple_...lovers, friends, confidants...the whole works! I can see it as clearly as yesterday; and so can everyone else. Just like I can clearly picture another couple being in love..."

"Is that why you keep fawning over Urd?" he asked.

Ulp!

I was so caught off guard by his random remark, I almost dropped my sandwich and the folded 'napkin' of oil wipes that it was sitting on. Up to this point, my flights of attentiveness towards Urd had been viewed any which way but true by those around me. Urd, of course, had been steadily irritated by my attentions. Skuld seemed to be alternately amused and irritated by them; amused when it embarrassed Urd, irritated when I seemed to be gaining ground against Urd's standoffishness. Both Megumi and Sayoko interpreted my actions as being awkward and ridiculous. Keiichi thought I was nuts, trying to be coy around someone as ballistic as Urd.

But now, he was guessing the truth of the matter.

"You talk about me being in love with Belldandy...but it's because _you're_ the one in love! You're projecting your own little run of head-game fantasies about Urd onto me, because she won't have anything to do with you," Keiichi stated, putting down his sandwich. I couldn't tell if he was angry at me, because he was wearing one of those enigmatic 'Japanese smiles' while he was speaking.

"Look, I know that my feelings about Urd are not an accident. And it frustrates me to no end that she cannot return them. What am I supposed to do? Use a 'magic emotional eraser' to expediently conceal how I feel? And the cursed, rotten irony of all this is that while you've completely forgotten that you loved Belldandy, the person I love will never remember her love for me. It's almost far more than anyone's fair share of adversity to bear! But the main difference is that my solitude is built of regret, while yours is built of ignorance," I answered.

"So you're calling me ignorant?" Keiichi asked testily.

"No, not the way you're taking it. I'm just saying that you've _forgotten_ about Belldandy; so the 'ignorance' is the result of an irrecoverable quondam...not the result of stupidity or baseness."

"Quondam?"

"Yes, it's a Latin term that carries a certain meaning about 'that which was'. That which was...was that you and Belldandy were engaged to be married later this year. Something happened in the interim, and then Belldandy was imprisoned in the frozen koi pond, and you forgot about how you felt towards her."

"I've been hearing that for the last couple months!" Keiichi protested, his voice acrid with frustration. "Tell me something different, something that makes sense!"

"I can't. Nobody can!" I answered.

"Just like nobody can make Urd remember how she felt about you," Keiichi stated.

"Mm-hmn!"

My agreement was too ready, too quick to slip off the tongue. It was almost embarrassing the way Keiichi and I were arguing, our sandwiches forgotten. This was getting to be an old row between us. Not that we were fighting, but we were definitely coming from different hemispheres of awareness and memory.

Both of us possessed inspirations so big that our heads could barely hold them, but events always seemed to flay our ambition, preventing us from touching our dreams. I remembered all the struggles along the way, especially on Keiichi's part. The omiai with Tyyr. The fights with Skuld. Having to ward off a jealous Peorth. Urd's blundering attempts at 'assistance'.

Urd...

Urd had interfered in my life to the max. Her impersonation of my therapist had caused me to hate her guts, but in Love's vocabulary, my disgust was miraculously rendered into affection once we gainsayed the feelings nestled in our hearts. Feelings neither one of us even knew were there. After that, it was one trial after another.

And now, Keiichi couldn't remember any of it. Belldandy represented his highest aspiration; lacking this, he seemed like a mere shell of himself.

"Hey, you need a hobby!" Keiichi announced.

"I already have a bunch of hobbies. Remember that room filled with synthesizers and keyboards next to my bedroom that I spend a few hours in every weekend? Or the rock garden currently buried under the snow?"

"I mean something different! Something fun!" Keiichi insisted.

"Making music is fun..."

"But it's only an outlet for your creativity. You need an outlet for your _adrenaline_!" he argued.

"Huh?!" I exhaled, frost-lunged and confused.

"Your music is really cool, and everyone likes it, even if it's a bit on the weird side of 'left of center'. It certainly isn't pop music! But does it give you a rush?"

"I'm not exactly in the mood for a 'rush' right now!"

"That's the point!" he declared smugly. I wondered what I had just said; obviously I had played right into his plan in some way. Naturally, I didn't know what he was trying to do.

"You've been going off on Urd because you've got a bunch of pent-up energy. It's even gotten to the point where you're getting snappy. I know you, Cevn...you usually keep a pretty level profile. Like me, it takes a lot to ruffle you. But do you ever indulge your radical streak? Let go of your mind...and simply be?"

"You're confusing me, Keiichi!"

"Let's go for a ride!" he said, slapping the side of one of the several motorcycles in the garage.

"Are you crazy?! It's _January_ outside!" I blurted out. "Besides, I don't know how to ride one of those things..."

"They're motorbikes!" Keiichi said with a grimace.

"So, your idea to deal with this situation with me and Urd, you and Belldandy...is to take one of these bad boys out on the road, braving snow in the air and ice on the roads? Just standing here in the garage with space heater kickin' is freezing my ass off."

"I'll teach you!" he promised. A little too readily.

"Have you been sniffing glue or something?" I joked. "I can't ride anything bigger that one of those rat-a-ta mopeds you see on the N.I.T. campus. Which you _don't_ see on the campus right now, because sane people take the bus to school in winter instead of riding mopeds. Like me."

"I know just the place! Shopping mall!" he said, ignoring my harps of reason. "Girls like to go to malls for shopping...but malls have another important, vital function in society for us guys."

"Which is?"

"Covered parking lots! As in dry, heated concrete type surfaces where one can learn to ride a motorbike in relative safety, even in the middle of winter," he explained, folding his arms across his chest and looking at me with a triumphant expression.

Only Keiichi could come up with an explanation like that and make it stick. I had to give him his due; he had argued a powerful case that I needed to get out of this ennui I was in. Therefore, against my better judgment, I agreed to his suggestion.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Now look what you've done, Big Sister! You locked those two idiots out of the house...and now they're going for a ride on Keiichi's motorcycle!" Skuld observed as she heard the declining buzz of a motorcycle pulling out of the driveway.

"Who cares?" Urd snapped back.

"They're mortals...and this isn't exactly the middle of summer. This isn't like that time you went on a spin on Keiichi's bike wearing nothing more than a floral print cheongsam!"

At least I was wearing panties then!" Urd said defensively.

"Is that all you care about? If you would have gotten in a wreck that time, you wouldn't have been hurt one bit. But if they get in a wreck, they could really get messed up! One of us has to go, so we can keep an eye on those two retards!" Skuld demanded. "What if they get in an accident?" Who's going to take care to keep that from happening..."

"You go! I don't want to talk to either of them for the rest of the day! They insulted me once again!"

"Big Sister Urd, I'm supposed to cook dinner tonight. So you need be the one to go!" Skuld insisted.

"I can't...and I won't!" Urd offered, her insistent manner indicating to Skuld that she was not going to back down. Skuld thought quickly.

"Okay, I'll go on one condition! _You_ take over my dinner chores, and you cook exactly what I was planning to cook for dinner. Okay?"

"Yeah, whatever!" Urd agreed flippantly.

"Promise?"

"Yah, yah...I promise!"

"Alright. I'll go. Here's the list of ingredients!" Skuld said, handing a list to Urd and then shifting into stealth form. A second later, she was gone...

Urd absentmindedly held the list, her attention focused on why Skuld was so hasty to go check up on Keiichi and Cevn. Knowing her little sister, Urd sensed all the warning signals...the alarms going off in her head that would lead her to suspect that Skuld was trying to pull one over on her. But all they did was switch who was going to cook dinner tonight.

Then Urd remembered the smirk on Skuld's face right before she turned herself invisible.

With a deep exhalation, Urd read the meal plan for dinner that Skuld had handed her.

"WHAT! Kiratampo!? Th..that's _difficult_! Pounded ricecakes on cedarwood sticks, lightly browned over a fire, and then added to a nage hotpot with chicken, onions, taro, burdock root and all sorts of spices...and sake? And beef tripe champon noodles for the main dish? This is like...real cooking-type stuff! And what's this? Cheese croquettes? And for desert...vanilla-mint nama-gashi sweetcakes with coconut tapioca as a side snack?! What was she thinking?! This ain't one of her meal plans! This is like one of those full-on New Year's Day feasts...and New Year's was three weeks ago!"

At the bottom of the list was a PS that said:

_"__You have to -_really-_ cook this too. No Goddess powers or magic Big Sis. And no 'secret ingredients' like love potions. Hope you have fun in the kitchen!"_

Urd lit the tip of one of her fingers on fire and held it next to the offending paper.

"THAT BRAT!! She is _so_ going to get it! I'm gonna wring her ears out when she gets bake...er, back!" Urd screamed angrily in the direction of the kitchen. She realized that she couldn't burn the paper, because she had promised to make _exactly_ what Skuld had been planning to cook. Of course, Urd knew that Skuld wasn't planning anything so complex as this! Her little sister couldn't even boil hotdogs right! This was obviously the petulant teenager's idea of a revenge scheme for some perceived slight. Naturally, Urd was bound by her word; the last thing she wanted earn some sanction from the Lord because she had broken a promise with her sister. Resigned to such baneful circumstances, she re-read the list of ingredients and the recipe, fuming with resentment. Then Urd noticed something.

"Sake? Sake!! That shouldn't be here...because Cevn doesn't drink! Hmmm... What to do, what to do? Should I add it to the nage, or not?" she asked aloud, resting a finger on her chin.

"Well, I probably shouldn't. Which means..heh hee!..that I'll just have to drink it, so it won't go to waste!"

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

The roads were well-plowed, unlike the winter right after SuperTyphoon Akira when all the snowplows had been smashed up by the storm and people just had to bear with the snowdrifts. I was impressed with Keiichi's experience; this trip into the winter wasn't just some random bit of craziness on his part. He clearly had done this before. The two of us rode on his large Rennesport BMW, sans side-car. Keiichi rode around searching for something, it seemed. A few minutes later, we found a snowplow...and then we simply followed it until it passed by one of the major malls. No doubt, Keiichi wasn't the type to keep put during the winter months. I was surprised he didn't have a snowmobile in the garage, so he could get his 'racing jive' during winter. Racing and speed sports were in his blood, and this trip reminded me of how hard-core he and his Unified Club teammates were when it came to performance riding.

"Here we are!" he shouted through his helmet as we pulled into the Anagawa Clock Mall. I recognized the place because one of Skuld's pet ice cream shoppes was located here, right next to a pastry store that sold specialty Akita Prefecture cakes. A double-slam for Skuld, who was impervious to sugar overloads unlike the rest of the human mortal race. If I ate as much sweets as she did, my ears would ring.

After I got off the bike from the rearmost part of the seat, Keiichi hopped off the BMW and kick-pedaled the stand down to park the bike. Patting on the seat, he said "Now it's your turn!"

The last time someone had tried to teach me to ride a motorcycle, it was a 250cc bike...and I had promptly rode it into a telephone pole because I mixed up the brake grip with the accelerator grip-throttle. I hoped that, since this motorbike was British, that the speed grip and the brakes would be reversed, so I wouldn't wreck Keiichi's prize.

I slowly climbed over the seat and rested my legs around the bike. It was _big_, larger than I expected. Nothing like Megumi's moped. Without even moving, I could feel the power underneath me. Keiichi explained the controls to me twice; I sensed that he was a bit worried that I might get mixed up.

"So why are you doing this?" I asked him. "I mean, truthfully..."

"Because I like to teach people how to ride bikes. And because I'm sick of you getting all mopey around Urd. And maybe, this will build some trust between us that's been lost, since you claim that I'm some kind of different person because I'm not in love with Belldandy."

At least he was being truthful.

"So why are _you_ doing this?" he asked back.

"Because I wanna push the envelope. You know, something like 'I'd rather do what no one has done, rather than not do what everyone is doing...'"

"That's so bullshitty!" he exclaimed with a grin. "Where'd you get that crazy idea?"

"Because I'm an American?" I said, laughing. The old tongue...joke around to cover up my nervousness.

"You ever thought about getting a Japanese citizenship?" Keiichi asked, suddenly serious.

"Of course I have. But then I'd have to marry someone who is Japanese, and..." I started to answer, until the words dipped out of me. The reality slammed me in the face; I doubted if I could marry anyone but Urd.

"Oops...ha ha! Wrong question!" Keiichi stammered apologetically, as we both rubbed the back of our heads in the midst of the awkward moment.

A million airplanes droning on the roof.

I nodded to him, and gave him the pilot's "thumbs-up"...and then kickstarted his BMW. The bike thundered to life underneath me; the engine rumbling a deep basso caterwaul of puffet-sounds. The well-tuned bike didn't emit the trademark bluish-cloud of oil-smoke, thanks to Keiichi's loving devotion and frequent tune-ups. I tested the brake handles, and then lightly turned the accelerator grip. This beast was much more powerful than I...there would be no 'foot braking' if it got away from me.

Okay.

I turned the accelerator grip just a notch, and then the bike picked up speed. The fluidity of motion took over, and I felt a bit of confidence as Keiichi's BMW moved into glide. Already, I was going 15 kph...and the ride was silk-smooth. I had to be careful, because this was a shopping mall in mid-afternoon on a Sunday. We were on the third floor of the four-floor parking lot next to the mall, which meant that there wasn't too many cars. Most of them were clustered around the elevators anyway, which meant that the parking lot had a couple stretches of ample space. Still, I cautioned myself that I should be very alert, just in case someone starts driving their car outside of the painted traffic lanes.

Just like I was doing.

I sped up to the ramp and then slowed the bike down to a near-halt. The slower I took it, the more I had to exert my balance. Keiichi's motorcycle was of a vintage; a product of the post-WW II boom in mid-50s Great Britain, back when vehicles were made of real metal, rather than polymer designer-frames like today's sports bikes. It was solid...and it was heavy.

Turning slowly in a semi-arc...

"Put your foot down!" Keiichi shouted urgently. "You're turning too narrowly!"

I heeded his advice, right before I felt the bike tipping to the side. I didn't have an idea what constituted a 'tight curve' on a large motorbike such as this. It was designed for a side-car option...so it wasn't exactly as maneuverable as I had assumed. I briefly flared a resentment; why didn't Keiichi take one of the smaller bikes for my first lesson?

Duh! The two of us wouldn't fit on his BMX, or either of the other two motorbikes! And since Belldandy wasn't here to ride with him, he had detached the side car.

"Good thing you know what I'm doing!" I shouted jestily as I pulled out of the turn. Actually I was grateful; Keiichi's quick observation had saved me from canning his bike. If I could almost wipe-out at a mere 20 kph, how the hell could I deal with normal street-traffic speeds, like 50-60 kph? My respect for Keiichi jumped a quantum leap when I realized that he routinely took these motorbikes over 120 kph on the race track. And it wasn't a straight shot, like the parking lot! How could he do _that_ without losing his nerve?

I pulled up next to him, and he thumped me on the helmet and chided me for "almost getting in a wreck!" Totally embarrassing. But then he flicked the faceshield of my helmet down and challenged me to take the next trip around the parking lot a little faster.

"What are you trying to do, get me ready for the spring races?!" I shouted through the helmet.

"Don't be a chicken, Cevn! Brace up! You're doing okay!"

That was a relief. The Master had just told me that my first foray around the lot was acceptable, even though I had almost dumped his bike on the first turn! Keiichi must have nerves of steel...and a patience to match, if he was actually encouraging me to go a little faster on the next go-round.

Hmm, I did 20 kph last time. Maybe I should shoot for 25?

I did two laps around the perimeter of the parking lot, and then Keiichi waved me over...

"You're being too cautious!" he observed. "Cautiousness is okay when you're taking a final exam, but when you're just starting to learn how to ride a motorbike, it can cause more problems than good. Remember driver's ed?"

"Keiichi, you forget that I was living on the streets shooting heroin when most kids my age were in a high school taking driver's ed. I never took it!" I answered.

"And I'm letting you ride my BMW!?" he said in mock-dismay.

"I'll get off it if you want me to," I suggested with a modest amount of sincerity. True, the first lap was like being hooked by stress, but the second lap wasn't as bad. And the third lap was kinda fun.

"Nah, you're doing fine! I want you to try and take it to 35 on the straight lanes this time, just to see if you can handle it," Keiichi instructed me.

"Yo kai!" I replied, trying not to sound too worried. After all, I was getting a personal lesson on riding a motorbike by a guy who won the Le Mans last year. What could possibly go wrong? On his part, not a single thing in the world. On my part, any one of a million things.

I rode slowly into the straight lane that bisected the parking lot, and then I turned the accelerator grip a little further this time. My eyes seemed to dance their attention between the pavement and the speedometer as I took it past 35...

I felt an enthusiasm break the vital chain of my composure, as fear was replaced by thrill. As I reached the end of the parking lot, I pulled to a halt and thumped both my feet down to steady the motorcycle. I had only gone a very short distance, but I had gone _fast_. Maybe not at all fast in terms of how Keiichi would see it; but to me, I felt like I had just broke the sound barrier!

"WAY COOL!" I shouted to the chill January air.

Keiichi clapped his hand gleefully. "You see?! You're getting it! This is what I'm talking about when I say _adrenaline_, man! Isn't it fun?"

I turned the bike around in a wide semi-circle and rode it up to where he was standing. Mentally, I was already speeding down the freeway on Keiichi's bike, the wind ruffling my long hair, a bandana across my forehead...

"Hey! Quit daydreaming!" he confronted me, alert to the fact that my mind was racing. I looked at him questioningly, and then recognized that he probably could see right through me at the moment. Keiichi had the need for speed; it wouldn't be too remarkable if he sensed the 'rush' gripping another person. Especially a beginner like myself.

"Let's find a _bigger_ parking lot!" I shouted, taking off my helmet.

Keiichi grinned like a co-conspirator...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Skuld was sitting in the Hakibars Ice Cream Shoppe, eagerly plundering a banana split showered with fudge and white chocolate shavings.

Earlier, she had followed Keiichi and Cevn to the mall, remaining incognito. She was curious as to why they were coming _here_...which just happened to be the place where one of her fave ice cream shoppes was located. They obviously weren't visiting the mall for the food; so it soon became clear to Skuld that she had nothing to worry about. It wasn't like they were going to go all the way across town, just to brave the frosty weather. To her surprise, they didn't go into the mall at all. Wondering why they had come to the Clock Mall in the first place, she eavesdropped on their conversation...and overheard Keiichi coaching Cevn about motorcycle riding techniques.

"So that's why they left!" she thought to herself. "This is critically bad!"

Now she had something to really worry about. Cevn was quite open with the fact that he had 'bad vehicle karma', and she knew about his various mishaps with trying to learn how to ride a motorbike. The guy was practically allergic to cars, bikes, and bicycles! It went hand-in-hand with the fact that he didn't know squat about engine mechanics.

Then, Keiichi had let Cevn ride his BMW solo...and Skuld realized that she had _a lot_ to worry about.

So she hovered close to him and Keiichi while he tried out his hand at trying to ride the BMW down a short length of the parking lot. Skuld didn't know whether to be panicked or amused when he nearly dropped Keiichi's bike during his first practice lap. But after a few laps, he seemed to gain some confidence. She could sense that he was getting the hang of it.

And then he started getting cocky.

"Wheee hee hee!" Skuld thought, humored by his bravado. He was only going 35 kilos an hour, and he was acting like he had broken some kind of speed record! She had to bite her invisible lip to keep from breaking into giggles as Cevn was all "let's go faster, Keiichi!" after that. Twenty minutes earlier, he was scared to death...now, he was overconfident.

Typical mortal.

But she didn't want to get caught out loud laughing at his show of enthusiasm. Keiichi seemed to be sincere in his effort to teach Cevn how to ride...if she made of fun of his student, he'd probably be upset with her. As for Cevn, having his best performance laughed at wouldn't do him any good. His spirits were already into the sink because of this stupid infatuation with her older sister. Of course, it had made for some funny moments...

But getting yelled at by him this morning because he suspected Urd of "plaguing his dreams with nightmares" or something like that certainly wasn't too pleasant. Even though he was accusing Big Sister, Skuld was almost certain that he was secretly accusing her as well. As if she was in on some big conspiracy to disrupt his sleep cycle or something.

She watched as Cevn got even more blustered as he learned to ride Keiichi's bike. He was making such a big deal out of it...and he wasn't even going the speed limit! Finally, it was either burst into giggles, or go somewhere else. Deciding to spare Cevn a dose of shame, Skuld opted to visit the mall and have a treat.

By now, Urd was probably halfway done with dinner.

Skuld snickered at the image of her older sister trying to prepare the elaborate meal that she had outlined. Once again, she was thankful for her 'word-projection' powers...she had planned to boil some spaghetti and pour a pre-made sauce over it for dinner. But in the split seconds after Urd agreed to sub for dinner, Skuld had written out an elaborate multi-course meal recipe on a blank piece of paper she had in her pocket.

"Hee heh hee!" she giggled, visualizing Urd slaving away in the kitchen. Of course, Skuld knew that her older sister could simply use her Goddess powers to 'instant prepare' the meal, but Urd would probably worry out that such an action would be cheating.

A half-hour later, armed with a bag of chocolate petit-fours from the baked sweets shop, Skuld walked out the side door of the mall and took the elevator to the third floor...

And realized that Keiichi and Cevn were gone.

"Uh-oh!" she exclaimed to herself as she extended her Goddess senses to try and locate their auras.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

We were in one of Chiba's biggest malls, a monster by Japanese standards. Japan was the "compact culture"...everything here is much smaller than European and American standards. Westerners often assumed that 'making small things' equated with 'thinking small', an inference that the Japanese had thoroughly resented for a long time. Unlike the US, Japan didn't blow 1/4th of its national budget on military projects; thus, they spent the last twenty years contriving large public works and infrastructure improvements. They gradually became accustomed to a larger sense of scale. This ethos extended into the commercial sector as well, which leads us to this shopping mall, the largest in Chiba Prefecture.

Not quite the Mall of the Americas, but close.

The mall was located next to one of the 'new towns' built during the 90s when planned communities were in vogue. We spent about an hour on the road getting to it; cars passing by staring at two guys on a motorbike in the middle of a light snow in January. Yep, we were crazy.

I was on fire with anticipation, especially when Keiichi described the parking lot as being much larger than that of the Clock Mall. I even offered to switch places with him, completely forgetting that I didn't have a Japanese driver's license. I was amazed that I had been here almost two years and had never taken the driving tests.

The mall had a three story parking lot adjacent to it, leisurely spread out on the east side facing the mountains. The view was nice, as the mall was built on the outskirts of the new city, without any housing mid-rise complexes to obscure the view of the mountain range.

We were on the second floor, sipping hot coffee, getting ready for my next lesson. The parking lot had a huge section of parking spaces vacant, which suited me quite well.

I loved to learn.

Once I got clean from drugs, the world became mine to explore. Lacking the money of a jet-setter, I took the noble path of reading all sorts of books to do my exploring. Then I learned several languages, hungry for the treasures of different cultures as I passed through my undergrad years. Graduate schools and scholarships took me to several countries along the way. Academic learning eventually turned itself inside out; now, I was the teacher. Responsible for the learners, being taught by them as I shuffled information out for their curiosity to glean over.

Academic learning was one thing, but this was another. Riding Keiichi's BMW was rawly exciting, as if I was having a first sexual experience. I could see why the so-called "bikers" and "bosozoku" felt such freedom in riding. But Keiichi had refined his sense of liberation a few steps beyond mere gang-biking. His arena was competition, his freedom was in pushing himself beyond himself. By propelling himself forward, he had passed into the narrow path between hoodlumism and hobbyism...and had emerged with a stronger masterage of himself and his abilities.

And he had opened a new doorway for me.

The parking lot awaited.

Keiichi slapped me on the back right before I took off. I figured that the parking lot was a block, maybe a block-and-a-half in length. A couple dozen cars were parked near a stairwell, while other cars were parked sporadically near the walkway that led to the second floor of the mall.

Perfect.

I throttled up the bike and almost peeled out...

"Slow down!" Keiichi said, nearly laughing. "The parking lot isn't going anywhere!"

I took the BMW up to 45 kph, watching the lights overhead flash by like giddy strobes. Reaching the end of the lot, I slowed down and slowly circled around for another run.

"50! 50!" Keiichi shouted through cupped hands.

How the hell did he know how fast I was going? It was almost funny in a way; you look at Keiichi and figure him to be the typical tech school student. Geeky, somewhat eccentric, a little errant sparkle to his eyes that admitted to his intelligence. But on the road, he seemed to have some kind of supernatural mojo; a 'sixth sense' that had allowed him to actually _read_ how fast I was going! Amazing! He seemed to sense my thoughts and see when I was getting caught up in road 'fever'...

"50 it is!" I shouted back, hoping that I could hold the bike steady. It wasn't exactly a bicycle.

I cashed in the brakes and twisted the accelerator grip. The bike leapt out from under me and I started down the middle lane of the parking lot. Keiichi, standing near the end of the lot, was waving his hands in imitation of a race official swinging the checkered flag. I chuckled to myself, happy to see this playful side of my friend.

I glanced down at the speedometer and noticed it was barely over 50 kph...and then I slowed down.

"Way to go!" Keiichi praised me as I pulled up to where he was standing. A little bit of embarrassment shivered through me: here was a guy who could drive a car at 350kph...and he was giving me kudos for going barely over 50? I tempered my dubiety with the awareness that he wasn't encouraging me based on how fast I was going, but that he was probably complimenting me because I was pushing myself beyond what I was used to. A couple hours ago, I wouldn't have gotten on his bike if he had paid me to.

"One more time, okay?" I asked. Naturally, Keiichi nodded his head.

This motorbike riding thing was addictive!

I questioned my impulsiveness, because I knew that the daring involved in riding this bike for the first time was flexing my self-gratification, juicing me with emotional electricity. Not dangerously so, but enough to cause me to remind myself that I could easily get over-involved in the 'rush' part of the experience.

I sped down the parking lot until I reached the end. I noticed that it had stopped snowing outside; in fact, the sun was starting to back-glow some of the clouds with a bright grey luminescence that was curious to winter...

Turning the bike around without stopping, I headed back.

I heard a screech, some shouts, a blaring horn, and then a thud.

The world started spinning around...

I wanted to go to sleep as lights and air whirled all around me, but the solid embrace of cold concrete jarred me out of my micro-seconds of daydream. Footsteps seemed to echo in every direction. I tried to raise my head up off the ground; my neck felt like it had been tied to a millstone.

"Not another fuckin' accident!" I muttered to myself weakly, aware enough to realize what had happened. I didn't know whether I had lost control of Keiichi's bike or what, but I hoped that he would be forgiving if I banged it up. God dammit! I didn't want this to happen! The guy's kind enough to lend me his own fave motorcycle so he can teach me to ride on a proper bike...and I dump it!

I lolled my head to the side, and saw a 2005 Honda nearby, with a big dent in one of the doors.

"My entire body's energies have been drained into that hole," I thought abstractly to myself, feeling dizzy. I had been inattentive, idiotic, irresponsible...all of the above.

My arm was spurting some kind of green fluid out of my sleeve...which jarred me into remembering the truth. Now it all made sense...

Someone was trying to get my thick winter jacket off of me...when suddenly, it disappeared. My eyesight seemed to glaze in and out as I looked at my arm. Metal cabling, several severed paper-thin rubber tubes, and some kind of metal rod or servo joint...

My leg hurt.

"Call an ambulance!" a voice shouted in the middle of a bluebird of lights.

"No!" I said in a voice thinned by physical shock. "I'm not human! I need a _mechanic_, not a doctor!"

"What?"

"What the hell do you mean, 'what?'? Think! I'm a fucking cyborg, just like I've always been! You know that a doctor can't do a thing to help me!"

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Keiichi watched in horror as the Honda pulled out of the ramp onto the parking lot...and instead of turning into the nearby lane, it sped up and cut across the lot diagonally, heading for the far corner.

He didn't even have time to warn his friend.

The car, filled with teenagers, saw Cevn too late. It slammed on its brakes, started to spin out of control, and broadsided him.

It had all taken less than five seconds.

"CEVN!" he screamed. He heard his voice echoed by another, even higher-pitched voice...

Skuld dashed past him, running at superhuman speed towards the accident scene. Hopefully, the kids in the Honda were too dazed by the accident to notice this. They were all staring out of the windows of the car at Cevn, who was lying on his side, crumpled-curled by the impact.

Keiichi immediately regretted his decision to try and teach Cevn how to ride his BMW. This could endanger everything! N.I.T. didn't know that Cevn was living with he and the others; if they found out, not only could Cevn get fired...but he and Megumi could get suspended from the school! One of the Honda kids was already on his cellphone, obviously calling his parents or ambulance or police.

Stupid shits! They practically rammed him!

Skuld was already leaning over Cevn when Keiichi reached him. He could see blood dripping out of the sleeve of his friend's navy-blue winter coat. It didn't look good at all. The force of the impact had ripped the helmet clean off of his head. Keiichi was grateful that Cevn was wearing a motocross helmet; otherwise, he would have bought it for sure! But his arm looked like it was bent the wrong way, and his right leg was angled wrong as well.

"Skuld, I'm going to try and get the jacket off of him!" Keiichi shouted as he reached towards the zipper of the jacket.

"Don't! Let me!" Skuld insisted. Forgetting...or maybe not caring...that they were in public, she reached down and touched the sleeve, making the jacket disappear into thin air.

"What's he doing ridin' around _on a motorcycle_ without a winter coat?! In fact, what kind of stupid asshole would ride a motorbike in middle of January in a shopping mall parking lot?" one of the kids asked, his voice clearly inferring that he thought the whole thing was Cevn's fault.

"Shut the hell up!" Keiichi screamed, standing up and getting into the kid's face. "You don't know shit, you little fuck! _You_ guys hit _him_! I saw the whole thing go down!"

The teenager got red-faced, balling his fists up like he wanted to throw a punch. Keiichi didn't care if the driver of the Honda was taller than him. Even if the kid would have been as big as Tamiya-sempai, Keiichi was certain that he still wouldn't have hesitated to get in his face. Even now, his friends in the car were egging him on, trying to peer-pressure him into hefting a punch...

"Keiichi, this looks pretty bad!" Skuld said, trying to hold her freshly-eaten ice cream in. The force of the impact had torn Cevn's sweater on the _inside_ coat; a bone protruded from his arm. When Keiichi looked at the injury, it reminded him of the accident he had during the beach rally a couple summers ago. Or was it the time he fell off the pole during SuperTyphoon Akira?

And Belldandy had healed him of his injury, after some kind of weird arranged wedding plan that her parents had set up. No, that can't be it! Why would he interfere in her affairs if her parents wanted her to marry some God?

But that God turned out to be his enemy.

"Bell-chan!" he screamed.

Skuld looked up at Keiichi, her face completely draining of expression. He had actually said "Bell-chan"! Ever since he had started suffering his bizarre illusions about never being in love with her sister, Keiichi had never referred to her sister as "Bell-chan". It was always a very formal "Belldandy-tan".

Could his memory loss finally have shocked out by Cevn's accident?

"What's going on here!" a pair of shopping mall security guards shouted in commanding voices, clearly intent on taking command of the situation. Skuld looked at them with barely concealed resentment...she had little patience for adults who thought they had the right to their power-trips just because they were wearing a uniform.

"This stupid fuck was riding a motorcycle..." one of the Honda kids yelled.

"Shut your ass up!" Skuld said, her vehemence even surprising Keiichi. The kid regarded her angry expression with a fish-mouthed shock; and then he did what he was told, obviously scared to death by her outburst. Skuld looked like she on the verge of launching herself at his throat.

"Hey you kids! Stop that yelling! We're Mall Security! What's going on here? Explain yourselves!" one of the guards shouted, confronting the group with an authoritative stance. His partner slap-punched him on the sleeve and pointed towards Cevn.

"That's it! I'm calling an ambulance! Don't anybody move!" the mall-cop insisted in a no-nonsense voice as he fished a phone from his belt.

"Don't call an ambulance! I'm a cyborg!"

Keiichi couldn't believe his ears. He looked at Skuld, who seemed equally baffled by Cevn's claim. And then Cevn repeated his words, his voice shrill with panic.

"Don't let them take me to a hospital! I'll die! I need a mechanic from the LifeShip, not a doctor!"

Keiichi considered the situation for a flash. Cevn took a heavy blow to the head, hard enough to knock his helmet clean off. Now, he was hallucinating that he was a _cyborg_? One of the mall cops knelt down near Cevn and informed him that an ambulance was on the way.

The effect was immediate. Cevn started writhing on the ground, attempting to push the security guard away _with his injured arm_!

"Keiichi, we gotta get him out of here!" Skuld shouted in an urgent voice.

"But..."

"NOW, Keiichi, before he hurts himself!" Skuld said. She waved her hand in a circle above her head, light trailing behind it. Once she completed the circle of light, she motioned downwards with her arm...and the light-circle descended, forming a cone around she, Keiichi and Cevn. Once it reached the ground, he saw the mall parking lot disappear...

And the temple reappeared around them, complete with virgin snowed lawn.

"Where'd you learn to do that, Skuld?" Keiichi asked, amazed. Skuld had just performed an act of magic that belonged in a magical-girl anime, not in real life!

"I've been studying some things," she answered enigmatically. Keiichi wondered why she had brought them outside the temple house, instead of inside the temple. Obviously, she didn't have full control over whatever she did. He noticed that his bike was here too; the handlebars and front wheel completely banged up. Skuld repeated her 'light circle in the air' gesture, and then they blinked into the temple home's living room.

"What happened?!" Urd shouted, literally flying up out of her chair like a kitten surprised by a sudden foot gesture.

"_You're_ what happened, Big Sister!" Skuld shot back angrily. "You locked these two out of the house, and then they decided to go on a joyride. Keiichi let Cevn ride his BMW, and a carload of kids in a Honda reamed him because they were too busy being crackhead idiots or something..."

"Wh..wh..whoa! This ish _my_ fault?!" Urd confronted Skuld, her hands quickly fastening onto her hips.

"Oh great!" Keiichi thought sourly as he regarded Urd, and then glanced at the empty bottles of sake next to the TV. He immediately sensed that something really bad was going to happen. Urd was well a-glow with the warmth of intoxication. She leaned over to take a look at Cevn...and the anger fled from her face.

"By the Lord, he's hurt bad! Why'd you bring him here, baka-girl? He belongsh in a hospital..."

"Urd..." Cevn said in a gasping voice. "I'm a cyborg...and you're drunk!"

"What'd you do to him, you brat?! What is he babbling about?" Urd shouted angrily, her empathy for Cevn's not-so-insignificant injuries fleeing as she realized that Skuld had brought him to the temple, not to an emergency room. And then, despite being well into her fifth bottle, Urd intuited that Skuld had _transported_ the three of them here, probably in front of mortal witnesses.

She suddenly sobered up.

"I didn't do anything to him, you big shrew! You're the problem here! None of this would have happened if you treated him and Keiichi with any kind of respect!"

"I don't have to respect him...and I certainly don't have to respect _you_!"

"Oh yeah? Then here...you can eat this Skuld Bomb!"

"Urd Lightning Bolt!"

Keiichi winced as the two sisters stared down each other, completely forgetting about the medical emergency in the form of Cevn lying on the living room tatami. Forgetting about him as well. This was one of those times Belldandy would have stepped in and brought some semblance of reason into the room. Keiichi really found himself missing Belldandy's presence as he watched a glow of purple-blue kindlings of lightning crackling around Urd's hand, while Skuld had her arm cocked back, ready to toss one of her softball-sized Skuld bombs...

"You two are totally ridiculous!" Keiichi screamed, hoping to bring the two Goddesses back to reality. Behind him, he heard the front door slide open. Actually, it _slammed_ open. Just as Keiichi started to think, "What now? Who could that be?", someone spoke in a calming, gentle voice.

"Neither of you have the luxury to be arguing...let alone fighting...at the moment! Our injured friend is lying on our living room floor, scared out of his wits and in deep-seated shock and pain. Don't you think there's something wrong with him? Didn't you hear what he said? He thinks that he's a robot! You should be ashamed of yourselves, Urd and Skuld! My darling Keiichi is absolutely right...it _is_ ridiculous for you to be acting so completely...irresponsible...under these circumstances. This is one of those times when I can't believe what I'm seeing..."

"B...Bell-chan?"

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --


	111. Pt 111: Mercease Tender

**Part 111: Mercease Tender**

NULLN:

Peorth waited patiently outside the Cathedral of Piercing Light, as she had done many times over many thousands of years. Inside, she could hear the strains of mourn-song echoing through the vaulted halls of the Cathedral. Here was the only place in Yggdrasil where one could hear such plaintive singing; the song, a sole coronach against all the bright and strident soundforms of music constantly backgrounding most of the God's realm. She knew that her best friend...now known as the "Silent Goddess" to all of Yggdrasil...was singing the soul-chilling epicedium, a melodious tune rendered more poignant by the resonance effect of the vast chamber, which was walled with light rendered into crystform. Usually, the Silent Goddess reserved her deathly repose, singing only in one of the Cathedral of Memories on rare instances. Whenever she could, Peorth would accompany the Silent Goddess on her vigils, hoping to witness some slight breakthrough in mood, some hint that she was relinquishing her lamenting. For all these millennia, the dark-veiled Goddess had never spoke a word to anyone, but once in a while when she was nested within the privacy of one of the Cathedrals, she would break into song. This was one of those times: Peorth could feel a quavering ripple up and down her neck and shoulders...instead of having a piercing light, the Cathedral was possessed by the eerie piercing lament...

Despite being 'retired' from her duties because of the incapacity that had resulted from the death of her beloved, the Silent Goddess still occasioned herself to travel to the Earthrealm, supposedly to grant wishes. What was most curious to Peorth was that the Lord seemed to indulge her this whimsy; perhaps regarding the Silent Goddess as so bereaved by the loss of family and SoulMate, she could never create harm in the lives of others. However, just to be sure of this, the Silent Goddess's license had been revoked when it became apparent that she was suffering an emotional derangement. Since then, she was granted barely enough Goddess powers to perform minor magicks and spells.

"Why would she visit the Earthrealm?" Peorth asked herself once again. The Silent Goddess had veiled herself in the blackest of mourning-clothes; for all appearances, she might as well have been a Demoness because of her noiric attire. If it had been anyone else, Peorth would have accused them of fawning upon the sympathy of others; but this was a lifelong friend...and she knew that her friend's heart-loss was genuine. This was no act of self-indulgence; the grief was truly agonizing. When she considered the Slient Goddess's visits to the Earthrealm, Peorth found herself wondering what it would be like for some mortal who was considered to be worthy of a wish...to be visited by the black shrouded figure. If she herself was filled with a grim foreboding at the sight of that night-dark sentinel of anguish, they would probably be terrified by the sight of the Silent Goddess.

And with good reason.

The Earthrealm mortal's world was far more ferment with superstition in the After Times.

"The Earthrealm..." Peorth whispered in a sigh, as the dirge-like singing in the Cathedral continued...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Relatively speaking, forty thousand years was a short time in the life of a Goddess. Peorth had been shocked to discover that her two gray hairs had doubled to four during the past four decamillennia. Of course, only she knew of their existence; one would have to look very closely at her hair to even see four gray strands amidst the rich bouquets of dark rose-brown and the cinnamon streaks of her hair. After the 'vanishing' of Keiichi's Angel, Heroic Vermilion Swift, Peorth had engaged in a promiscuous run through a number of Gods, trying to edge away the emptiness inside of her. But after a couple of millennia of romantic and sexual indulgences, she realized that nothing seemed to change. The idea of a permanent attachment to a man or God seemed all but impossible to her. Once the 'play time' was over, Peorth had done little to change her sleek hairstyle over the last forty thousand years. Unlike Belldandy, who had a 'madwoman's streak' of silver-white hair slashing back from her forehead to the ends of her hair. The one time Peorth had seen her without her nun's-habit-like hood, what she saw had suggested a lightning bolt amidst a garden of cedar-amber tresses.

But 40,000 years had altered the Earthrealm and its peoples drastically.

Regrettably, humanity had never reached the Next Level...and perhaps they never would. At least they had survived the Probation enacted so many centuries ago. But during the darkness and savagery of the After Times, Peorth and her peers in the Earth Otasuke Office were still obliged to remain on call, should an opportunity arise to render aid to deserving mortals. Her counterparts in the Goddess Relief Office also remained active; when they didn't get any calls from any Earthrealm mortals for thousands of years, they still continued to grant wishes to the sentient species in the other 999 worlds of their Sector. As wish-granting Goddesses, they were still bound by the charters of their respective Offices, fully sanctioned to grant the wishes of Earthrealm men and women, carefully cultivating the Earthrealm mortals like a gardener tends to roses in a flowerbed.

Even if their charges lacked the self-awareness to formulate wishes.

Like Belldandy's slash of white hair, a couple of bad centuries had left a permanent scar upon the mortals that populated the Earthrealm. Most of it had occurred during Belldandy's 'mania'...the period of hysterical grieving she had endured after she recognized the finality of Keiichi's death. Peorth was relieved to some extent that Belldandy, who had always been an erstwhile champion of the Earthrealm mortals, had been spared the pains of witnessing the worst of it. But Peorth remembered those foul years of decline, as if they had occurred in the most recent of yesterdays...

Which was unavoidable, because the task had fallen to her to prepare the reference report that would be used as a case study to explain the decline into grossness of the Earthrealm mortal's to the newly-graduated Goddesses who were training for positions in the Earth Otasuke Office:

_In the 21st century, the mercantile corporations the Earthrealm mortals had instituted into their society had grown at an alarming rate; unbridled by moral judgment, sound sense and jurisprudence. The corporations evolved into mega-corporations, entities that flavored every aspect of social life as they transcended business in their quest for survival. Corporations started buying cities towards the latter part of the 21st century...and later, they purchased whole nations. By the early 22nd century, corporations had been renamed "CorpoNations" to describe their true nature. In a manner similar to the Tokugawa Era, the daily activities of the citizenry were tightly regulated; but such strictures were performed with the total ignorance of the population. In the 17th century, a citizen knew why the government prohibited him from wearing a hakama of a certain color...but in the 22nd century, the citizen didn't have a clue why he was prohibited from buying a 5-door hovercar. The art of cultural suggestion was so subtle, any citizen of that era could be 'programmed' into buying a 4-door hovercar...and not even be aware of it. In this way, the citizen was completely convinced that such a decision had been made 'on his own'._

_Behavior control had become so refined via the many forms of mass propagandizing, people went through their whole lives without even the slightest awareness that they were constantly targeted to be manipulated. They weren't citizens; they were nothing more than a target market to the elites. The populace was prepped from infancy to consume the various products produced by the monopolistic CorpoNations. Entertainment became a primary tool to 'program' behavior, since people were so wired in to whatever culture they saw in the movie theaters and television networks. The United States, for example, still had 52 states by the end of 2100...but for all intents and purposes, it was divided into six CorpoNation zones. People in the larger nations didn't even bother to travel from one region to another, because they were under the impression that everything they needed was in their own zone. Tourism was replaced by 'holo-packaged' vacations. The optimisitc 'global omni-community' predicted in the wake of the Information Age according to people living in the late 20th and early 21st centuries...had never occurred. Instead, the result of mass communication was mass manipulation; the InfoAge had crafted humanity into a rigidly stratified society of insular citizen-subjects ruled by a debauched business-savvy elite._

_An age of information, carefully manipulated by the CorpoNations._

_But having a compliant populace wasn't enough for several CorpoNations. Being acquisitive beasts by nature, they desired a larger population base of willing subjects. Since it was very difficult to obtain the labor skills of citizens trained from birth by rival CorpoNations, several teams of scientists began to experiment with new methods of nanotechnology. They eventually created 'nano-bombs'; a variant on chemo-war weapons that could disperse a large cloud of neuronanotic 'robots' over a large city. The microscopic neuronanotic 'organic robots' would then infiltrate the human body and ride the bloodstream to the brain, their primary objective. Once they settled inside the brain, the neuronans would begin to selectively manipulate the brain centers that controlled certain regimens of free will. In this way, they would 'deprogram' a person, which would cause the consumer to 'reject' the products of certain CorpoNations. Further, the invasive neuronans would 'reprogram' people by weakening their abilities and acuities, rendering them less productive in their rank-and-file jobs for their regional CorpoNation. Thus, if the population base was weakened in the twin areas of production and consumption, a CorpoNation would be ripe pickings for a hostile takeover by another CorpoNation._

_By 2130, the average human being had over 70 different types of these neuronanotic robots coursing around in their brain. The remainder of humanity had been genetically retrogressed into servile NewTypes by the CorpoNations: a servile labor force of human begins vacuous of almost all impulses save the ability to perform simple tasks. Of course, the Powers That Be continued to conduct the affairs of each CorpoNation while sealing themselves themselves away in hermetic 'Heavens'. This was a necessary precaution, because they were constantly at risk...in the open, they could be preyed upon by the nanos of another CorpoNation. It would spell disaster for a CorpoNation if its elite were to become 'infected' by a rival corp's neuronans. But eventually, several CorpoNations decided that mere social sabotage wasn't enough...so they created genetically-altered NewStyle human workers for their own workforce. The advantage was that the NewStyle workers were created with a moron level of intelligence; lacking keenness, they were practically immune to the effects of the neuronans. At the same time, these CorpoNations began spreading 'hostile' neuronans amongst the citizenry of their rivals. The 'hostile' neuronanotics differed from their ancestors in one critical area; they completely erased free will and then replaced the resulting 'blank slate' with the agenda of the CorpoNation. Naturally, such a drastic move was bound to create a lot of harm on several levels. In the 2240s, it wasn't uncommon for a citizen to undergo three or four total personality shifts within the space of a year. For example, they would start out as a subject of the Beautex CorpoNation living in Trendic North Los Angeles in January 2143. By year's end, they would be living in SoftMitsu OsakaPlex as a subject of the MicroSysMachi CorpoNation. Naturally, they would have no memory of where they lived or which CorpoNation they worked for at the beginning of that year._

_Thus, free will had been stripped from almost the entire human race by the CorpoNations in their attempt to 'hijack' whole populations to further their avarice for power. It even became a capital offense for citizens __to _--not-- _have neuronans in their brain. Trained militia GPS'd These 'rouges' and executed them on the spot. With a tightly controlled population, there was no longer any need for trials, 'justice' or 'rights'._

_But within 10 years of the 'launch' of the hostile neuronans, the nanotech itself got out of control. First, the creators of the neuronanotic micro-bots got infected...and then the Powers That Be received a dose of their own medicine. With no one to run the CorpoNations, chaos quickly ensued. But it wasn't the anarchistic chaos of the willful political revolution; the semi-sentient nanos were still under the impression that they had to find new human hosts and co-opt their free will._

The tapestry of tragedy had flowered fully as the Earthrealm mortals were done in by their own greed.

The following several thousand years found the Earthrealm mortals reverting to proto-savagery. It was a miracle they survived at all, especially considering the constant 'battle' between all those nanos in their brain tissue, each 'squad' of neuronans fighting to reduce the self-will of their human host to the point where they could be controlled. Pure animalism; not even the cut-throat savagery or tribal warfare normal to reverse sentients. Humanity had been reduced to a scattering of migrating hordes of Earthrealm mortals who lacked all but the slightest minim of self-will. The population was thinned by natural predators that would stalk and seize the befuddled Earthrealm mortals with greater ease than preying on savanna herbivores. Naturally, miscegenation with the sub-intelligent NewTypes occurred, and the genetic strains of the Earthrealm mortals became even more unstable as the intellectual capacities were sharply reduced.

About 18000 years later, the brains of the human-NewType blends started evolving a resistance to the neuronans. This process was aided by the rapid decline of neuronans, which were finally starting to die off. Their creators didn't intend for each strain of specialized nanotech to last for ten thousand years. They didn't think that far ahead.

Eventually, the free will of the humankind reasserted itself, quite slowly at first.

Peorth had witnessed this same scenario unfold on several planets during her lifetime...such a devolution in a sentient mortal species was the exception, rather than the rule. But even as early as Anthro of Mortal Mammalian Bipeds 101, she was taught that when the power of business entities became so absolute that they achieved immunity to the ethics that guided society, culture and politics, the usual result was 'technological cooption'...the term usually given to describe such 'betrayals' by technology. She knew that the end was coming for the Earthrealm mortals when the CorpoNations decided that it wasn't enough just to manipulate whole populations; but that it was acceptable to _enslave_ people by any means.

The Gods and Demons both labeled the period after the 22nd century as the "After Times"; simply meaning the times after the human race had reached its zenith. Their fall from the peak of their evolution had been devastating...and long-lasting. The Earthrealm mortals had become so enfeebled by akrasia and intellectual inertia, they couldn't even cooperate to build a city until about 21000 years into the After Times.

So in effect, the Earthrealm mortals were starting over. A little mutated in the gray matter, exhausted from millennia of decline in evolution, and challenged by the occasional 'viral plague' of neuronans taking over certain segments of the population...but still recognizable as human beings. Still sentient, still mimetic, still communal, and still creative.

Life endures.

In her own way, Peorth was proud of the Earthrealm mortals. Not as a society, nor a nation, nor a culture...but as a _species_, they had proven to be resilient in the face of near extinction. They were making a comeback. For many millennia, the Earthrealm mortals were so debased in their squalor that _no_ wish requests had been received the Ygg Mainframe. Human beings were simply cognitively incapable of making wishes. But in the last fifteen millennia, the Earth Otasuke Office had began to receive a steady trickle of Wish candidates.

Life endures...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

As the singing stopped, Peorth sadly observed to herself that the Silent Goddess would never experience this truth. For Belldandy, five single deaths had erased her faith. Peorth knew all too well that the Silent Goddess had been blinded to the miracle of Life; it had died when her beloved Keiichi drowned in front of her eyes in the Mediterranean Sea. It had been burned away when her entire family perished while she alone survived. So why was she still visiting the Earth? To see the barely-recognizable ruins of Tokyo? To watch the advance of the current Ice Age that was beginning to encroach upon the inhabited zones. Half of Hokkaido was already under a spreading glaciation...

What would Belldandy want, going to the Earth to pretend to grant wishes?

Belldandy was her friend...because she allowed Peorth to be the only being in Yggdrasil who could address her by her true name. If any other God or Goddess called her "Belldandy", the Silent Goddess would simply ignore them and leave, shunning their presence. But if Peorth called her "Belldandy", Belldandy would remain and listen silently.

But she never spoke.

Because of this, there would be no explanation of her odd behavior. Peorth couldn't figure it out at all. Imaginatively putting herself in Belldandy's Soul for a moment, she concluded that she would harbor absolutely no desire to return to the very place where the most painful memories existed. _She_ would never go back to the Earthrealm, had she suffered the kind of loss that Belldandy did! In a sense, she was bonded to Belldandy by loss, because her own life was forever shadowed by the loss of Heroic Vermilion Swift, Keiichi's Angel. Love had just started to bloom between she and Heroic Vermilion Swift. She felt darkened by reality as well.

But nothing like Belldandy.

Mastered by the enigma of Belldandy's behavior, Peorth decided to solicit the wisdom of the one Being in all of Yggdrasil who could possibly make sense of the matter. Gathering her courage, she asked the Almighty about the Silent Goddess, trying to learn from His vast reserve of sapience so that she could understand her friend's behavior.

"Ah, here she comes," Peorth observed to herself as Belldandy floated up towards her. Seeing Belldandy swaddled in her black robes, Peorth's mind was drawn to remember her interview with the Lord. When she had asked Him about why Belldandy was visiting the Earthrealm, He told her to observe the Silent Goddess during her next two visits there, so that she could learn firsthand what was drawing the Silent Goddess Belldandy back to the birthplace of her lost love...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Pa'ala was sitting on the stoop of the earth-thatch temple, clutching a tattered shred of hempcloth tight in her hands. The two-storey temple was as silent as the orange-and-black butterflies flitting about in the early dawn light. The occasional crowing of birdsong punctuated the stillness in the air, casting a somber mood about the place while most of the village slept. Pa'ala's chest was heaving, not from the exhaustion due her because of the two sleepless days she spent searching for her missing son...but from the millstone heaviness that weighed her heart down.

"I should have never left him alone at home while I went to get some grain," she said to the dust under her weathered straw sandals.

She never could imagine that a few grains of rice...could cost her dearly!

For most of the season, the travelers from the neighboring village had reported hearing wolf-howls in the middle of the night as they encamped under the watchful eye of the moon. One of the sheep that belonged to the village fire-keeper had vanished a half-moon ago; the men found it the next day near the lake, mauled beyond recognition. The wolves were silent when they were near the village, so silent that even the most skilled hunters couldn't track them down...

All the signs had been there, as plain to see as a cardinal flying against the blue sky.

"I'm the most wretched mother in the world!" Pa'ala thought, as she started hitting herself on the head again with her fists. But she was so worn from the search, she couldn't hurt herself like she wanted to. Pa'ala kicked her feet against the temple stoop, and then reached down and grabbed handfuls of dirt and showered it over her head, bathing her face and hair with dust and grass.

Last year, her stupid husband Urluk had stolen several cooking vessels and numerous necklaces from several village families...and then had ran off into the night with one of the village's daughters. Pa'ala knew in the seed of her heart that she would never see him again; and at the time, she was well rid of him. If the lout showed up at her hut begging for forgiveness, he'd get a belly full of spear from her! Left behind by her worthless bonds-mate, Pa'ala labored to raise her son by herself, caring for a boy who was five harvests old and already without a father. She also labored to understand why men could hide such cruelty in their hearts behind words of love. She knew that she was very beautiful compared to the other village girls...but her beauty had undone her, because she had caught the eye of a man whose seeds were only shallowly planted in his mind. He only had an eye for beauty, and had no sense of harvesting love in his soul for the one he was wed to. So he had left her and her boy...

The village shaman had pronounced her ill-starred and forbid any of the village women from watching over her son while she worked in the fields, lest they suffer the same fate. Yet, at the same time, the shaman would speak cruel words to her if she didn't attend the rites of the temple every week. And if she was sparing in her harvest offering, he would berate her even more the worse. Pa'ala had lost faith in the Gods after this...for how could they abandon her so? How could their shaman...their _voice_...prove to be so two-faced?

But fate had even more cruel darts of lightning to strike her with.

Several days ago after coming home from the fields, Pa'ala saw that the cooking pot was near-empty before the fire, so she decided to quick-walk to the village granary to get a cask-full of rice grain. When she returned, her son was missing. She wasn't too worried; perhaps one of the older children had invited him for a game of hoop-chase. But as the rice boiled in the light of the waning sunset, it became apparent to Pa'ala that her son was _missing_. She passed through all the huts of the village seeking her son...but none of her fellow villagers knew where the boy was. The leaders conferred and decided to gather the strong arms of the village men and go on a search party. On the third day, they found the blood-stained remnants of her son's pants.

The wolves had carried him off.

Pa'ala had fallen to the ground, struck dumb by the winter-ice that had crept into the seed of her heart. The huntsmen had to carry her back to the village, and the priest allowed her to sleep in the temple, for fear that she might lose her wit and harm herself or others in the midst of her grief.

"The curse is on me! First my husband...and now my son! The seed of my womb! How could the wolves come in the afternoon daylight to steal away my only son?! It has to be the punishment of the Gods! All this searching...which should have caused me to find my boy safe! Instead, all I have to show is this wretched piece of cloth with his blood on it!" Pa'ala said as she cried into the precious hempweave, the ochre-colored rips being the last piece of life she would ever see from her son. She wished that she were dead, or that she would have been home with a paddy-rake, so she could defend her son from the marauding wolves. She wished that her stupid husband Urluk had never left...

When she pulled her face away from the musty tatter of hemp-cloth, Pa'ala saw a new shadow in the keen-dawn sunlight.

As her eyes traveled up the dust that spun circlets around the dark figure, Pa'ala realized that what she thought was a shadow...instead was a wraith-like _form_. It was so dark, it seemed to snuff out the sunlight.

It was Death.

Pa'ala was only 21 harvests old; any mother her age would have screamed herself hoarse at the apparition. Ever since she gave birth to her only child, Pa'ala had wanted to live to the ripe old age of 40 harvests, so that she could see her son grow up and start his own family. So she could see the sons of her son. Death should have frightened her to stillness, but instead, Pa'ala simply bowed her head in resignation.

She had no reason to live, now that her boy was gone.

"So you've come for me at last, in the hour of my despair," she said to the ground, head bowed as she spoke to the spectral figure hovering in front of her. "Perhaps I should thank you for this. I am not afraid to die, because now I am afraid to live. My son is dead, his bones resting in the dens of the wolves, the seeds of his spirit walking among the moon clouds. What more of life could I desire, now that everything I lived for has been taken away? I welcome you!"

Summoning her courage, she regarded Death in the face. Pa'ala knew the myths deep in the seed of her heart...not everyone has the chance to regard Death, for Death visited the village quite often, but only in secret. Only visiting one person at a time; only coming to collect the seeds of their soul but once.

Pa'ala would face Death with dignity, unashamed to look upon His face...

As if it had been listening to her mind, the black-cloaked figure slowly reached up and unfastened the black veil covering all but its eyes. Pa'ala gasped in amazement to see that the figure was female...and that she had _blue_ eyes!

The parchments had never mentioned Death being a woman! A beautiful woman, with skin as pale as snow under the fullness of the moon, and with eyes the bright blue of the lake.

"I am not that which you think I am, Pa'ala," the figure spoke in a voice filled with world-weary sadness. Pa'ala almost felt like the woman's voice was echoing the emptiness she felt in her own heart; the void where her son's smile used to be. The voice spoke of deserts, seedless lands far away, of emptiness and death and life...

"I only wish for death, My Lady," Pa'ala said in a barely-heard whisper. She didn't know how to address a Goddess; "My Lady" was the best she could offer. All the while, she thought of the many carved images of pregnant women in the temple...wooden totems that represented the joys of motherhood. Female images ripe with harvest-lore. Female legends mysterious with star-light. Female figures who were the Mothers of the World.

But this woman...this Goddess...was nothing at all like the legends.

"Pa'ala, my Daughter...it is not death for which you wish. I was not summoned by your despair. I was summoned by your hope," the voice said softly.

"I..have..no..hope..." Pa'ala answered, her voice croaked with sorrow.

"And yet, deep in your heart...even deeper than the pain that you feel for the loss of your precious son, you wish for his life in return. I can hear your wish as clearly as the wind rustles the wheat bales in the fields! It is your deepest wish that he would be restored to health again. That he be restored to your loving arms, so that you can once more cradle him and bless his smile with your heartbeat. This is your truth, Pa'ala," the Goddess spoke.

Pa'ala started sobbing, the image of her tender son falling asleep next to her in the coolness of her thatched bedding being rendered too _real_ by the Goddess's words.

"Please, Dark Goddess! Please, I beg of you! Reunite me with my son! If not in life, than in Death! This world...I cannot bear it any longer! It is nothing but season after season of woe!" she pleaded, grabbing onto the black foot-robes of the dark figure and kissing them.

"I will grant your wish on one condition," the Goddess answered. Pa'ala paused in her obeisance, stunned by how readily the Goddess had agreed to grant her wish. She was going to bring her son back to life!

"What would you have me do? I would do _anything_ to bring him back!" she shouted.

"Then all I ask of you is to go forth and find three copper coins, and then bring them back to this temple and offer them for the harvest. But you must borrow the three coins from a house that has not been touched by Death," the Goddess instructed her.

Lacking the means of thanks, Pa'ala prostrated herself at the feet of the black-cloaked Goddess. Three coins...and her son would be brought back from the Realm of the Dead! Three coins to pay for his passage from the Other World to this world!

A mere three coins...

She set out immediately on her quest, not even waiting for the cock to crow for the dawn meal.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Four days later, after visiting all of her neighbors in the village...and after visiting the three nearby villages and the River Town...Pa'ala returned to the temple. She was bitterly disappointed, because she didn't have a single copper in her possession. The Dark Goddess had sent her on a fool's errand!

Every house she visited...

...had been visited by Death.

In some homes, it was a young child. Or a parent. More often, an Elder or a distant relative. In every hearth, there was a tablet stone for the dead. Each mother she talked to had described the death of someone in the family. Many mothers had lost their own bellyseed: some from disease; some from hunger; some from the acts of the Gods. Pa'ala had passed through thickets, woods and fields in her search for the house untouched by Death. And then, she finally learned the harshest lesson of all.

There is _no_ house that was untouched by Death.

Bursting into the temple, she screamed at her betrayer. "Where are you?! Why don't you answer me, Oh Dark Lady?! You promised me! You promised to bring my son back! But you never intended to! Why did you send me out on such a hopeless quest! _Everyone_ dies! There is no house that is free from the shadow of Death!"

The black figure appeared in front of her, summoned by the furnace of her frustration. The incense-smoke in the temple formed itself in the shape of a woman...and then she was there, a black void against the sunlit interior of the thatch-temple.

"WHY?!" Pa'ala wailed in a voice raw with agony.

"So that you can learn the most terrible lesson of Life. That it _ends_," the dark-clad Goddess answered her with finality, not even bothering to remove her face-veil.

"But I don't want it to end!" Pa'ala protested. She was stirred into confusion by the task she had failed. She had held out hope that she would find someone...just one single house...which had been spared the touch of Death. With a mother's love, she had walked until her feet had bled.

Soft delicate hands were massaging her feet.

Before her eyes, Pa'ala witnessed her blistered feet being healed by the Dark Goddess, who was kneeling before her, caressing her pain away.

"You earnestly despaired of life just a few days ago, My Daughter," the black-cloaked figure said. "Now you want to live. But what kind of life will you lead henceforth? In the harvest of your seasons, what lies ahead for you? Your only child is dead. If I were to restore him to your home, what would that mean? I would then be obliged to restore every mother's son who had ever died. All the seeds in the world cannot feed the dead, if they were brought back to life. And in your travels these days past, you have learned that there are many who grieve in the deepmost seeds of their hearts. Many who would do anything just to fill one more minute with the breath of their beloved departed. And in the end...without Death, Life would lose its 'life'..."

Pa'ala was both humbled and terrified by the words of the Goddess. Her heart nearly leapt from her mouth for the tears that watered her cheeks as she realized the kernel of the wisdom in her words. Collapsing, she fell to her knees...and then sought the nearest refuge of the embrace of the Goddess...

"My Beautiful, Lovely Child Pa'ala," the Goddess said in a quiet voice. "There is no pain like the loss of one's beloved. This I know...this I know, my tender heart. But you are young, you have many harvests, many many moons before you. Realizing this truth, you can find Life within Death. Life becomes more precious, because it _ends_. It is the treasure of treasures, for this reason. Were it in my power, I would bring your son back to you. Were it in my power, I would wash the muddying pain away from your heart with the cleansing rivers of the Mother of the Earth, so that your spirit could feel joy again. Yet, I cannot do these things."

Pa'ala looked into the eyes of the Goddess...and shuddered as she felt herself transported to a place beyond despair.

"There will be pain, Pa'ala. But there is joy as well; after the dark night of your grief, your life will one day blossom with the seeds that you have moistened with your tears. You _must_ endure, and allow yourself _to live_. For all of those who cannot bring themselves away from their mourning, you must stand as an example. No house is untouched by Death...but every house is touched by a mother's love. Find the love that remains in your heart, and give it to a deserving man who will treasure it. When you have wed him, and your next son is born, name him after your firstborn. Give your newborn two harvests of love throughout his life...the first harvest being the love you would have given your departed son were he alive, and the second harvest of love being for the seed of life you nourished in him. This is your path, Pa'ala. To live!"

Pa'ala felt like her heart was going to melt in the furnace of the sun. The Goddess had talked about life _as if it continued_! When the few tattered clothes that remained of her son was discovered, Pa'ala knew that her life as a woman and as a mother was over. Hence, there was no reason to waken in the moonlight ever again. But the Dark Goddess had sewn the seeds of a new hope in her heart...and they had taken root. Ever so slight against the wind and soil, but yet they had taken root.

The Goddess had said to Pa'ala that she had been summoned by her hope, not by her sense of loss.

"Do Goddesses even feel loss?" she wondered to herself. This Goddess, this dark figure that was holding her so gently, seemed to have seen the birth and death of every person. Pa'ala shuddered as she tried to imagine how many harvests this Goddess had borne witness to. Perhaps she was even older than the Sun itself! And now, despite the grave tragedy that had blackened her life, this Dark Lady of a Goddess had told her _to live_. Had promised her a second husband, a second son, a second chance!

Without a miracle, the Dark Goddess had miraculously shed light into her empty heart!

Pa'ala let the sadness drawn out of her, sobbing until she was voiceless with sorrow. The entire time, the black-robed Goddess comforted her like a mother would hold a child, gently stroking her hair and cheeks, whispering words in her ear that slowly restored her faith. She didn't understand what the Goddess meant by telling her "to be strong, for there are those who cannot release their grief", but she was grateful...

Grateful for what had been given, grateful for what had been taken away.

And then the Goddess kissed her on the forehead...and faded into the air.

Pa'ala immediately felt the agony of loneliness. A single woman, forlorn and weak, empty-handed and empty-hearted...and yet, she was _strong_! She clutched the bloody, ripped pants of her son to her breast, the pants she had knit for her young son with her own two hands during the White Season, and then she cried some more.

But within each gasping sob, she could hear her own heartbeat.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Peorth was waiting at the Cathedral, her whole being profoundly stirred by what she had just witnessed on the Earthrealm. As soon as Belldandy closed the front portals to the Cathedral of Memories behind her, Peorth broke into tears. For all these years, Belldandy had never spoken a word to anyone! And yet, when she visited the Earthrealm, she had spoken nothing but truth. She had said the harsh words, but had seasoned them with an incomparable love...

Without using any Goddess powers, without relying on the Yggdrasil Mainframe to 'approve' a wish for her to grant, without any arcane skills or MindWipes or GRO wishgranting 'techniques'...Belldandy had soothed the heart of the young woman, Pa'ala. That young woman had no hope before Belldandy had spoken to her! She had been dead inside, her hopes and aspirations buried so deep by her grief that she was little more than an emotional numbness clasped in the form of a beautiful young woman.

And now, she was holding the kernel of life tight in her heart, alongside the memories of her little boy. Belldandy had cheated Death by giving Pa'ala the will to live; even the will to live through the profound, heart-rending tragedy of the loss of her son. Why would she do this?

Peorth began gather an idea that could explain Belldandy's enigmatic visits to the Earthrealm.

Could she be visiting the Earthrealm in order to help others to do what she herself couldn't do? Why would she guide them through the pain of their losses, when she herself couldn't let go of Keiichi's death? It just didn't seem reasonable, or even logical.

Peorth released her questioning for a moment. Was it just her imagination...or was it true that in her mind, she had faintly sensed an angry bellowing scream at the very moment Pa'ala had decided to face the rest of her life and accept the truth of her loss?

Why?

Was this what the Almighty had hinted at? Was this the reason why He had suggested to Peorth that she follow Belldandy to the Earthrealm? Or was there something more?

After all, He had said "twice".

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

One of the GRO agents had been assigned to the Earthrealm, and for some mysterious reason, Belldandy had followed her in secret. The locale was in the middle of what used to be Germany, in the heart of the continent formerly referred to as Europe. The people that lived there now didn't have any knowledge of global geography...they didn't even have any nations. Thus, the densely forested land was called Rikevir, and the collection of villages that were friendly to each other was called Bigelsterg.

Belldandy silently followed the GRO agent...and Peorth silently followed her.

The GRO agent had been dispatched to grant the wish of an old man named Sebastin.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Sebastin broke the crust of bread and wetted his lips with a draught of river-wine. He was on his way to Elkestrand, to visit Baker Thoren. Heavy sleep lidded his eyes, and he laid his blanket down on the moss-covered ground under the shade of the tall pine tree, so that he could take a nap.

It was almost a year ago that he had started visiting the Baker. Sebastin's kin were known throughout the gentle lands of Bigelsterg as the practitioners of Magister. He, like his father and his father's father, had been consulted for his wisdom concerning affairs of emotion and property. Sebastin's guidance was accepted throughout the lands; in a sense, he was a judge of character and a arbiter of decisions when such decisions were muddied. He was on his way to listen in on such a case, a matter of two families fighting over a road, when fatigue gained up on him and he decided to take a nap.

It had happened right in this very spot a year ago...

...Wakened by the birdsong, he had sat up and noticed a bird...a young maiden of sixteen or seventeen years of age. Her freshness was spellbinding; her rosy cheeks and pink-carmine lips were refreshing, her generous blonde hair was gathered in two long tresses that fell as far as her waist. He adjudged her to be a young peasant, her sun-burned arms resting on a basket she held resting against her belly as she hailed him with a friendly whistle.

"Good day, my pretty one!" Sebastin had answered her. After she curtsied to introduce herself, she told him that she was on an errand, and that she was fast approaching her home. After exchanging a few names with her, Sebastin recognized that she was the Baker's daughter. She offered him berries...but all he could think about was the berries of her lips.

As he was going into the town, Sebastin offered to accompany Kista...such a pretty name!...down the road. All too soon, it was time to break ways, and Sebastin promised to visit her kinfolk after he had heard his case in the town.

Nightfell...

On the way home, Sebastin walked by her house thrice, wondering if it would be meet for him to seek shelter for the night. His mind recalled the beauty of her face; and he made his will for the visit. He gathered his courage and knocked on Baker Thoren's door.

"Sir Baker, I am belated in your hills and valleys. Have you a vacant corner at your table, and a bed at the disposition of a traveler?" he asked.

The Baker was all the more pleased when Kista whispered in his ear that their visitor was none other than Magister Sebastin! He quickly offered shelter for the night, while his wife and daughter composed themselves to the kitchen to prepare the goose. He could tell that Kista was very proud of herself for having the means to bring such a distinguished visitor to her home.

Carried on by the whims of youth, Kista quickly changed into a fetching domestic garb to impress this on her parents, and to charm Sebastin's eye. And Sebastin, as he gazed upon her slender profile, was transported...as if he had been carried away by angels.

His old heart echoed "This is love! This is love!" as they enjoyed the large room, the hearthfire, the warmth of the time-browned ceiling rafters, the nightwind breezing through the opened windows, and the white-clothed table with the goose in the middle and an arrangement of the Baker's best pastries for dessert.

He enquired after several townsmen, including the old woodsman, Hans.

"Oh yes!" Baker Thoren answered animatedly, in a voice that made clear that he and Hans were boon friends. "I am anxious to visit his cabin in the woods sometime soon. I haven't visited him in many a fortnight...perhaps because he is getting long in the tooth and doesn't get out much any more."

"Did you know him as a youth?" Kista broke in innocently. "He must be about your age, sir...between fifty and five and sixty years of age." This simple statement recalled Sebastin to his senses with a whirl. Pensively, he reflected on his folly. What could he have possibly been thinking of? All his life, he had been a brave and worthy man, who had labored to bring justice and reason to the folkspeople of Bigelsterg, only to find that when he had discharged all of his many duties, he had neglected the greatest, most sacred, most beautiful duty of all.

The duty that belonged to romantic love.

Full force, he felt the pangs of regret as he reconciled himself to the fact that he had discovered Love when it was too late.

After half-heartedly drinking a toast offered by his host to the "autumn of life", Sebastin was shown the guest-berth by the Baker's wife, and then left to his own melancholy.

The next day, he arose and confessed to himself that he would never visit the Baker again.

But men's hearts often lie to their minds. Or perhaps it was the other way around. In any case, Sebastin made it a point to visit the Baker and stay the night every time he was hastened to arbitrate a dispute in the nearby Elkestrand township. And each time, he secretly wished that he could press a kiss...just a single kiss!...to Kista's delicate hand. It was all he could do to keep from arising from his slumbers and stealing off to gaze upon her sleeping form, safe in her bed.

His heart was filled with the fatigue of age as his visits had passed through the four seasons, the drain of energy even more pronounced by the fact that he had to restrain himself from sharing the affection of his heart upon the person he so greatly cherished. He could fawn upon her, but only with the solicitude of a kindly uncle.

He wanted so much more.

If only Life could unroll its mat...and transport him back to the days of his youth.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Sebastin awakened from his nap under the pine tree, and noticed a lady standing in front of him. Were it within his experience, he would have viewed her as dressed quite regally. But there were no kings and queens in Bigelsterg. Nonetheless, her queer attire stole his breath away.

She looked more the vision of a Forest Fairy than a woman.

"I am the Goddess Yerri!" she said with bright smile. It was then that Sebastin noted that her hair was light blue, with braids of pink and amber running down her back. And that she was _floating_ above the moss-grass carpet under the pine bowers.

Sebastin was too astonished to be frightened. He knew about the Legends...that there had been a Golden Age long before, where men flew through the air on wings of gold, and understood each other through moving paintings. The world was filled with the fashionings of these God-men; tall imposing structures crafted of mysterious metals that rose out of the ground itself like giant trees.

He hastily pulled himself to a seated position on his blanket, uncertain if he was still dreaming. His back ached, as was usual whenever he slept on the ground for even a short while. Yet, Sebastin forgot his pain as he regarded the silver-and-gold clad figure before him.

"I have been summoned by your heart. You have lived the life of a good man, Sebastin. You have not heeded the voice of mendacity that causes other men to stray from the good. Your heart is pure...hence, I have been sent here to grant you a single wish. You may wish for anything, and if it is within my means, I shall grant it," the beautiful Fairy Goddess declared.

Scratching his balding pate, Sebastin twice asked her to repeat her words. When he was assured that she was indeed his benefactor, his mind worked feverishly to draw forth a wish that would be worthy of his life. He didn't lack for material wealth; he had two horses, a large cottage next to the highway, a sturdy fireplace and a hire-maid to assist him with the chores. He was already famous in Bigelsterg. He had even served a term as the Leader of the Council, five and twenty years ago...an honor that fell to only the most perspicacious men in the lands of Bigelsterg. He was beloved by his fellow temple-goers, and respected by all.

But in all his riches, he was missing but a single cup of gold.

Blushing, his mind decided, he made his wish request.

"I want to be young again. I wish to be in the bloom of my youth, so that I may woo the apple of my heart, the fair maiden Kista!" he said, hesitantly. He knew that his wish was folly, that it was the simple hope of a simple old man who wanted to drink twice of the Fountain of Life.

But then, a funny thing happened.

The glowing Fairy Goddess seemed to lean back into the air, and a light emitted from the center of her forehead, piercing the forest of clouds high above in the sky. A moment later, the light fell down from the heavens, and the divine maiden returned to normal. She smiled at him and told him that his wish was granted.

Despite his disbelief at the silhouette of the fading image of the Goddess, Sebastin started to chuckle...and then he gasped.

Zounds!! His voice was no longer the gravelly, slurred voice of an aged man! It was higher-pitched, with rich clear tones! Pressing his hands to his face, he felt no crows feet around his eyes, no thickness of jowls on his jaw, no folds of flesh along his neck. Staring at his hands, he saw that they were the hands of a young man, not wrinkled and bespotted with age!

"A mirror! I must make haste to find a mirror!" he shouted, almost dancing with incredulous glee. On the coattails of that urgency, he decided to pay a visit to Baker Thoren's house.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

As he saw the house of his beloved Kista roll over the ford as he walked towards it, Sebastin started to hum a gay ditty. He was young again, maybe eighteen or twenty years of age! Young enough to marry a youthful maiden! He could actually skip along the road instead walking with a sprig cane to lean on. No longer was he two or three times the age of his beloved...he was only two or three years older. Everything would be perfect!

Striding up the path that cleaved the meadow-yard, he reached the door of Baker Thoren's cottage and knocked on the door. The Baker wasn't at home, but his wife answered. He almost blurted out, "It's me! Sebastin, your old friend!", but he checked his enthusiasm just in the nick of time. There was no storyteller in the land who could convince the old matron that he was the personage of their frequent visitor. She was paying him wary regard because his shadow was strange to their hearth step. So he quickly aspired to an invention of his fancy, aided by the keen observation of the Baker's wife.

"Why, you look the very image of Sebastin, I declare!" she said appraisingly. "Are you perhaps his son or grandson?"

The kind old matron, mother of his beloved Kista, had tipped the scales of opportunity to his side. She had invented the tale that could salt his lips. The tale that could win him the heart of his sweetheart!

"Yes, Ma'am, what you say is truth!" he answered. "I have been traveling across the land, gathering experience and wisdom as a stonemason gathers rock for hewing. I will succeed my grandsire whence I finish my journeys and acquit myself suitably to his scrutiny. For his is a grave and noble responsibility, and he would have no village idiot succeed him. His ambition is lofty, and I hope to satisfy him with my worthiness."

"What brings you here?" she asked.

"Grandfather Sebastin...for whom I am named after...recommended me to your care and comfort, as he has lodged here many a time during his travels through the land."

"Kista, we have a visitor!" the housemom shouted through a cup of her hands.

Upon her summons, Kista quickly scampered down the stairs, and when she saw Sebastin, she gave pause. This single hesitation on the part of the object of his admiration was more than enough proof to his heart; for would she glance twice at an old man upon a first meeting? Sebastin noticed that she was looking at her searchingly, her eyes seemingly warmed by his youthful appearance. All the hopes that had been torn from his heart over the past year now flooded back into his breast, and his mind was filled with charming illusions and fancies, like a latecomer in a nest of warblers...

The Baker returned home leavened with breads and sweetcakes from his labors, only to find a unexpected visitor in his house in the form of a young man. All along, he had been grateful for Magister Sebastin's visits; his coffers and cellars were full of wines, gifts and meats from the elderly donor. His mean judgment told him that there was something amiss, for why would the old man shower such gifts on he and his family? But he never dreamed of suspecting the good man's errant folly.

But, instead of the elderly Magister, there was a young man in his living-room. There was something familiar about the manners and affectations of the young man, and the Baker hit upon the answer even before his wife announced the visitor as "Sebastin, the grandson of the Magister."

As for Sebastin, his eyes brightened and affixed themselves on Kista, who was wearing a short poppy-colored skirt faint covering her knees, her arms bare to the shoulder as she ran about in the garden, gathering flowers to decorate the dinner table.

The blush overspreading the cheeks of the young man didn't escape the attention of the Baker Thoren; clouds of worry browed his fatherly forehead as he observed the all-too-familiar sight of a young man fancying his daughter. And his wife had promised the young gentleman a night's lodging in his house!

Could he be trusted? Did he possess the moral character of his grandfather?

At the dinner table, the young man was well-mannered and polite, offering a toast to the Baker and his family for being so kind to his grandfather. The Baker eventually became content as far as the young man's attentions, and soon he and the boy were deep into their cups, while his wife and daughter mended clothes in the drawing-room.

Sebastin was excited as he went to sleep. Feverish visions of a night-time visit to his room from fair Kista danced in his agitated mind as he went to sleep. For it was so that when he was returned to his youth, his adolescent vigor and lust were also returned to him. He pulled the sheets up tight and tried to fall asleep, but the bed which had been a comfort to his elderly self was little more than a confinement to his newly-found youthful self. He knew that the mountaineers from several villages would be passing by here this week on their way to the north, so that they could mow the high grass in the valleys. As they trode the highway, they would sing folksong in the middle of the night to speed them along their journey. As the moon brighted his blanket, he could hear the strange harmony in the distance, approaching ever louder, punctuated by the cheerful laughing of the young men and women bearing scythes and rakes.

He was half-asleep when he heard the patter of a handful of peas being thrown against a window. With a start he awakened, assuming that this was a youthful prank of some of the mountaineers...when his ears barely glimpsed a whistling that sounded like a bird's whisper. His heart fluttered, as the whistle was _answered_ from within the house by another soft whistle.

"Kista...Kista...it is I!" a voice replied to the whistle.

Sebastin trembled as the foliage on the trellis struck against the window...and to his affright, a nocturnal figure stared into the room. Slowly, he heard the screeching of a windowsill being opened...and then the figure climbed through the open window into the room. Consternation plumbed consternation, as Sebastin realized that this was the dreaded scourge of the night...a highway robber coming to kidnap his beloved Kista!

"Where are you, Kista?" the voice whispered.

"Here I am!" cried Sebastin, turning the lamp light on and then sitting up in his bed with a livid face, gazing fiercely at his rival. The young man before his was tall and slender, attired in the rugged jacket and boots of the mountain-folk. He sported a slight moustache, and his forester's hat was tilted a little to the side.

Needless to say, finding Sebastin instead of Kista stunned the intruder into immobility. But as Sebastin was about to cry out, the young man exclaimed:

"In the name of the Gods, do not call out! I..I am no robber! I'm here because I love Kista!"

"And...she? And she?" Sebastin stammered.

"She loves me also! Fear not, if you are one of her relatives. We were secretly betrothed at the last festival. She and I have agreed to practice the custom of chaste-visiting in the night. It is the custom of mountain-folk such as I who live in the Rikevir."

"Does...does her father know of this?

"No, he has no wit of our betrothal as of yet," the young man replied in a lower tone of voice. "But I couldn't wait any longer! I asked for his permission last year, but the old man told me to forebear; he deemed his daughter to be too young. So we were betrothed in secret. This is my first visit; I confessed my feelings to my father yesterday, and he had agreed to come here and inform the Baker of my suit himself! I tarried here to tell her the good news!"

"And she loves you?"

"Yes, oh yes! She loves me with all the devotion a man could ever ask for from a woman!"

Sebastin bowed his head to his chest, trembling with emotion. He felt _old_...even older than he had before the Forest Fairy had restored him to youth. Still trembling, he gestured to the window and told the young man to leave, appraising him that he had performed mischief by secretly betrothing with Kista instead of gaining permission from her father. The young man didn't hesitate a whit. With a bound he hurdled the windowsill and then dashed down the path to rejoin the night-train of mountain-folk marching down the highway.

"Oh my poor soul!" Sebastin cried. "All your illusions are faded, blown astray by the winds of Fate!"

The next morning, he arose and tried to put on a calm demeanor before he descended the stairs to breakfast with the Baker and his family. Sebastin silently ate the porridge, his heart utterly crushed like a tree between two boulders.

He had wanted his youth...and now this!

On the road home, Sebastin stopped to rest under his old friend, the pine tree. Here it was that he had met the woman of his dreams. Here it was that the Forest Fairy Yerri had brought him around to his youth. And here it was that he would decide...

Either to take his own life...or to take the life of Kista's betrothed.

He fingered the sharp knife holstered against his leather belt. Either way, he would suffer. If he killed himself, his pain would end. But if he lived, he would be forced to spend the rest of his life watching Kista and the mountain youth grow old together. He cursed himself for even harboring a conceit about killing the lad; if he struck down Kista's beloved, he might as well have been plunging a dart into her breast.

"If only I had never made that fool wish!" he sighed...and then his mood dissolved into tears. Sebastin realized that he had been such a fool from the start! Kista could never love him as an old man. He, he had he had been so blind, he never even harbored the notion that her heart may have been fetched by a young man her own age! He had squandered a wish based on utter tomfoolery! Now, instead of being sixty and having to watch Kista get married and live in domestic lock for the next ten years...he would have to bear his sorrow for forty or fifty years! He was perfectly capable of discerning the correct course through the briars of the most sticky contentions between two parties who disagreed on principle or property. And yet, he had fooled himself with the stupidity of falling in love with a maiden during his winter years...

"Love is never foolish," a voice said to him.

Sebastin looked through tear-blurred eyes to find the figure of a Demon in front of him. It was dressed entirely in black. It resembled the ancient sculptures of Death that one could find in the northlands of Bigelsterg. The dark cloak seemed to be made of shadow; the only color he could see was a narrow band of flesh between veil and hood. Two bright blue eyes riveted him to the spot, like a wild turkey arrowed by an archer. Mayhaps the evil impulses of his heart had been heard by the devils, and now one had harried to him to strike him down.

"I am an old man in a young man's body," Sebastin sighed. "I have no need of life any more. The one I love...is in love with another. A Forest Fairy came unto me while I slept under this very tree, and she granted my wish to be a young man again. B..but for what? If you're here to take me, then take me and be done with it!"

"Love guides us down many paths, but we are the ones who must choose when to walk down the path...and when to turn around. You are poised upon the path of destruction, Sebastin," the voice observed. He suddenly realized that the speaker was a woman! Perhaps she was another Forest Fairy? Or some other type of Goddess not mentioned in the legends. Or maybe she was one of the Golden Ones from the long-lost Age of the Gods?

"Yes, you may say that I am a Goddess. And I have come to your side to save you from your regret," she said in a solemn voice that belonged more to the funeral procession than to a young woman.

"Why does life do me this offense?"

"Why should it not? Life is life. Love is permanent, it transcends all the stars in the sky. The loss of love, borne on the wings of regret, is equally as permanent. You, being a twice-born young man, should know this by now," she said sternly.

"I shan't kill myself, nor the young man! Those wishes were but the flights of bitter passion!" Sebastin said, almost apologetic in his manner.

"Nor shall you. If you truly love the maiden Kista, then the love she has awakened in you will guide you to the true path of Love. Do not confuse it for the petty paths of jealousy, resentment and regret! Words...once spoken, can never be recalled. Actions...once enacted, cannot be withdrawn. Think carefully, Sebastin! For you _must_ meet the future, no matter if you live a thousand lifetimes, as one such as I have done. Do the right thing, for the right reasons!" the figure of darkness encouraged him.

Before he could reply to her, she faded into the moss.

Several days later, Sebastin was reading a book on his porch when the mountain folk returned from the valley, their labors there concluded. To his surprise, the very young man who had crept into his room at night, mistaking it for Kista's room, suddenly broke ranks with his fellows and walked up to path leading to his house.

"Is this the house of Magister Sebastin?!" he hailed as he approached. "For long, we in the mountain have spoke his name with respect. I would meet him, if such a dignified personage could be convinced to stoop low in order to greet one such as I."

With those words, Sebastin's hatred of the man quickly melted. He had the rugged appearance of the mountain-folk...but his words were far more humbler than one his age. During his sixty years of life, Sebastin had met hundreds of young men like this one; and most of them were ill-mannered, self-assuming, cocksure, and in wont of gaining something for the expedience of as little effort as possible. He could tell that this young forester was of a different coinage than most of the youth of Bigelsterg.

"Come in, come in!" he replied, waving his hand to invite the youth into his hearth. The young lad instantly recognized him from the ill-met encounter at the Baker's home. Sebastian wasted no time in trying to gainsay his trust.

"I must apologize for my rudeness the other day. To my grief, my grandfather has died! I am the new Magister now. And I am in need of companionship during my aggrievement. Please feel free to sup a glass of ale with me!"

The young man, upon learning that he was the Magister, made a quick effort to bow in respect...which only made Sebastin more keen on him. Soon, as they enjoyed two river-chilled ales, the young man introduced himself as Alca. He quickly explained the dilemma he found himself in regarding Kista. It became obvious to Sebastin that Alca was so in love with Kista, he had thought of little else besides rectifying his mistake during his labors in the valley these days past.

"Such a grievous mistake I have made, on behalf of she whom I love!" he finally admitted. "And we will be doubly stricken; for through my recklessness she will be denied her love for me, as I will be denied my love for her. I have not the means to make a proper suit, for I am but a forester from the mountains. Her father is a well-renowned Baker; he will only see me as uncouth. As for my father, he is lamed by his advancing years and cannot come on my behalf to sponsor my proposal. My mother has been taken gravely ill; he remains at her side."

"Has he summoned a healer?" Sebastin asked.

"With what gold do we have to do such a thing? Can we trade wood-axes for healing potions?" Alca sighed in a voice heavy-laden with despair. Sebastin suddenly remembered the words of the Black Fairy Goddess who had visited him several days earlier. She had instructed him to take the "right path". By all rights, he should hate this man, who had stolen away the ardor of his beloved Kista. But instead of finding malice in his heart, he only could find heartfelt empathy for the young man's plight.

The Black Fairy Goddess had counseled that _he_ was the one who had the freedom to choose all the paths that unfold, once a heart is touched by love. And all of a sudden, the essence of her words struck Sebastin roundly on the head.

"Ha ha ahaha ha!" he howled with laughter, realizing the jest.

He was but eighteen years of age...but with the earnings of a man of sixty. He was barely a slip of a youth, but he possessed the sagacity of a former Leader of the Council and the lifelong experience of a Magister. He had been fervently in love with Kista as if she was the sole satisfaction of his youth. There was so much more, so much to do. Henceforth, his love was now moderated by the wisdom of experience.

Kista had mysteriously touched his old man's heart with Love...and now, he had the perfect opportunity to touch her young maiden's heart with the many seasons of wisdom.

Alca was indignant, as it appeared that Sebastin was laughing in the face of his quandary. He stood up, almost knocking down the drinking-stool he had been sitting in.

"Dare you laugh at my misery, you scoundrel!" he shouted, fisting his hands in front of his breast.

"Becalm yourself, my friend!" Sebastin reassured him. "My wits sometimes leave me because of the recent loss of my dear grandfather. I laugh not at your mother's illness, nor at the complexity of your situation with your beloved. I only laugh, because I can easily rid you of both burdens. Here...have another ale and we'll discuss what to do!"

Sebastin watched as Alca's face fell, surprised by the sudden shift. He realized that, although he was now a young man barely out of boyhood, he still possessed the old man's trait of 'testing' younger folk, just to see if he could get a rise out of them. He hadn't been trying to get a rise out of Alca, of course. But he was amused enough by the workings of confusion on the lad's face to at least wink at himself in pleasure.

Walking over to his great-desk, Sebastin opened a drawer, withdrew a large wooden box, and then opened it. Carefully counting out a hundred coins, he placed them in a scarf and then returned to the table.

"Here, Alca. This belongs to you...and Kista," he said in a cheerful-yet-insistent voice.

Alca opened up the cloth, and almost tipped his ale over with surprise as he saw the gold coins stacked inside.

"B..but sir! I cannot accept this! This...is a _fortune_!" he gasped, his face red with embarrassment. "And you're but a stranger!"

"And as long as you say I'm a stranger, a stranger I'll remain, lad!" Sebastin said solemnly. "Kista and her parents made their home into a second home for my grandfather, warming his heart in his last days. This is but a small token of esteem for such good people. Besides, it would bode ill for Kista to lose her mother-in-law before the wedding..."

"W..wedding?"

"Why yes, my boy! I will personally write you a letter of introduction, explaining to Baker Thoren that your father cannot meet him because of your mother's illness. I will then bestir myself to visit him in person and serve as your proxy to formalize the introduction, and there broach the matter of your suit. I will offer my regard that I approve the betrothal with a wholeness of heart, which shall carry no mean weight with the Baker and his madame. Only this time, don't go about furtively with matters, when your heart matters the most! Be sure to give half of this sum to the Baker, for his dearness to the maiden you love. Take the rest and give them to your father with my regards, so that he may suit himself with a healer who can make your mother well again. And finally...take the advice of an old man...er, heed these words my grandfather once told me.

"Do the right thing, for love is never foolish!"

Young Alca was speechless with thanks for his benefactor, which only bespoke to Sebastin of the breadth of his gratitude for the assistance. Sebastin had given him the means to hire the best doctor in all of Bigelsterg, as well as a hearty sum to promote his suit with the Baker. The Baker could open up an entirely new shop in another village with the money Alca was going to give him. This would rest well with the young couple, because the father would be even more renowned with a new bakery under his wing.

Sebastin then drained the dregs of his ale, and then retired to his great-desk to draft a letter to the Elder of the Mountain folks, recommending that Alca be schooled in the finest arts of the forest guild.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

The wedding of Kista and Alca was the affair of the summer. Sebastin had taken care of all the expenses, so that the wedding could accommodate a large number of mountain-folk, as well as the patrons and friends of Baker Thoren. The sight of Kista in her wedding dress, with eyes only for Alca, made his heart tremble...not with the fullness of regret, but with the joy of satisfaction. She would never know the truth why the old Magister had showered her family with visits, and why the young Magister had showered her husband and family with gifts. Verily, he felt a bittersweet heartache as she spoke her vows. Pleased as he was at the nuptial celebration, part of him still yearned for Love...now that Love was no longer clothed in the smile and form of Kista.

In the field near the pine tree, the festive throng of wedding guests were making quite merry; dancing in rounds, hoisting ales and wines, and plundering the roast swine and cattle. Musicians were playing curious and clever dancing ditties. Joyous voices burst like stars under the night sky. Taking a break, he walked over to his old friend, the pine tree.

"You and I...we've been through a lot, old tree," he greeted the pine, with its shade-bed of moss grass underneath its stately limbs. He sat himself down and leaned his back against the sturdy trunk. "I don't know who she was, the nameless Black Fairy Goddess who visited me on this very spot. But she was as right as berries! I have been twice-blessed with a wonderful life, and I have truly learned how to love in the stead of my own confusion."

He finished his draught and sat up against the tree, whistling along with the joyous music nearby. Soon, his chin was on his chest...

"Sir!" he heard a young woman's voice calling him. "Sir! Be you all right!"

Sebastin opened his eyes and raised his head at the sound of the voice.

Standing in front of him, holding a torch-light in her hand, was a charming girl of sixteen. Her dark-brown hair seemed to flutter in the light of the fire she carried; her attention was fixed on him, her expression one of concern...with a hint of mischief.

"What are you doing up here, all alone? For the life of me, I mistook you for the old man who oft fallen asleep under this tree! So I came up here to see after you! And what do I find? A silly young boy who is all by his lonesome, taking a nap while he should be making merry with all the others who are enjoying the wedding. Hee hee! Perhaps this silly young man is but a shy gentleman, embarrassed that he has no maiden to dance with!" she declared in a bright voice.

She pondered momentarily, and then held out her hand to him...

"Here! I will dance with you. I give you fair warning, for I am Trilla...Alca's cousin, and you had best be mannerful towards me and my kin," she introduced herself, as she hoisted him up to his feet. Sebastin figured her for a strong mountain-girl; she had hefted him to his feet while holding a torch in her other hand, almost effortlessly. With a giggle, she hooked her arm in his and started back down the hill. As the fire of her torch steadied, her face was revealed up close to Sebastin. She had long lashes, fair brown hair that was wavy, like the tail of a horse. Her cheeks were high and bright, and her eyes.

Sebastin felt his heart nearly leap out of his chest as he saw the mirth, the strength, and the warmth in her eyes!

"O..oh my!" he gasped, a strong evolution of ardor possessing him.

"C'mon! Let's dance! You and me!" she said gaily as they approached the bonfire. She was so excited by the boister and music that when he finally gathered his courage and gallantly asked her to dance close to him, she readily accepted with a curtsy...and nay did she notice the tears streaming down Sebastin's cheeks.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Belldandy had already departed for Yggdrasil, but Peorth had decided to linger a little longer, her heartstrings being pulled by what had transpired on the Earthrealm. The elderly Earthrealm mortal's wish had gone dreadfully astray, as if he had been cursed by a Demoness Grief Office worker instead. But she knew Yerri very well; Yerri had granted his wish with the best of intentions. And it had been registered by the Yggdrasil Mainframe! So why did it end up so screwed up for him?

How could Belldandy have known that Sebastin's wish would 'backfire' on him? Why did she come here? To fix Yerri's wish? Goddesses aren't allowed to tinker with other Goddess's wish-grants. But Belldandy had literally snatched Sebastin from the jaws of futility. The poor man was going to kill himself!

And when Belldandy had guided him to realize the full potential of his love for Kista, Peorth again heard the same screaming as before. It startled her to the very center of her being; the shout of anger and anguish sounded as if a DGO Demoness had been beaten to the punch by an act of wish-granting by the GRO! But those bellows of frustration weren't that of a Demoness...they were clearly a _male's_ voice. Certainly not an imagined rage of a member of Demoness Grief Office. Peorth knew full well that there were _no_ Demons in the DGO, only Demonesses! The Rules were very explicit on this.

The screams she had heard were filled with naked hatred, bitterness, and raging frustration.

What was Belldandy up to?

Peorth knew now why Kami-sama had suggested that she followed Belldandy. Belldandy couldn't get over Keiichi's death...but she could still grant wishes, in her own way. She could turn despair into hope, death into life, lost love into a higher form of love.

Sebastin's wish had backfired on him, and yet, Belldandy had granted him a higher form of wisdom. All the regrets in his heart had been shed, and he was like the proverbial Scrooge...reborn, but with the best of intentions.

Peorth turned away and regarded the pine tree, tears in her eyes.

"I feel...so incomplete! As if part of _me_ is missing as well!" she admitted to herself. "And as long as Belldandy cannot love...then I will continue to hope for the day she can finally let go of Keiichi. Why can't she have some happiness as well?! Why can't _she_ enjoy the rest of her life? She's my _best friend_ and she still won't let go of the past!"

But then, it occurred to Peorth that, impossible as it may be, perhaps something was _preventing_ Belldandy from moving on, barring her from getting over Keiichi's death. For _forty millennia_, Belldandy had been acting the bereaved widow. Something just didn't seem right.

She stayed long enough to watch two couples kissing under the starlight, and then she vanished. Peorth knew exactly where Belldandy would be at this time...and this time, she wasn't going to let her friend hide herself away, all alone inside of the Cathedral.

Something was very wrong here. How could a Goddess create so much good in the lives of others and yet feel so much pain in her own life?

"I'm gonna get to the bottom of this, even if it means risking my friendship with Belldandy!" Peorth swore to herself.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --


	112. Pt 112: Jingle Hells

**Part 112: Jingle Hells**

THERA:

Belldandy was beat-exhausted; her head was banging from the inside, as if she had stayed up all night at one of those Shinjuku raves in Tokyo. The raves that she _used_ to go to, before she moved into the Women's Dorm at Chiba Poly and got stuck house-sitting on a regular basis during the weekends. While her sempai went out for a night of partying, dancing and karaoke clubbing on the town. The pulsing endured, a beat-box metallic sort of drumming, keeping a vicious rhythm to the throbbing, gristly migraine she was enduring.

Yet, it was only 5pm in the afternoon, and Belldandy knew that practice would last another two hours. For some sadistic reason that would only make sense to a former member of Japan's Olympic Women's Volleyball team, Chiba frosh Belldandy Morisato was running "10s" under the ever-watchful eye of her coach, Chihiro Fujimi. Coach Chihiro...who adamantly resented being called by her last name for some reason...had decided on a particularly cruel and unusual punishment; all because Belldandy had arrived at today's practice ten minutes late. Hence, Belldandy was running the "10s": ten laps around the 440m track. Timed laps. Coach Chihiro had clocked her time when she finished the first set of ten laps, and then told Belldandy that she would have to run "10s" until practice was over, unless she knocked 30 seconds off her initial 10-lap time. If she managed that, then she could rejoin the team in the gym for "hustle and dig" scrimmages.

What kind of nut makes her player jog laps around the track in mid-November? And how could Coach Chihiro monitor her running so closely, while supervising scrimmages as well? Belldandy felt confined, as she was wrapped double-layer with two thick cotton track outfits, gloves and a scarf around her neck. In her migraine-moderated flights of abstraction, she imagined that she must look like a jogging penguin as she rounded towards the straightaway on the Chiba Poly track. This was not one of her best moments.

"What the hell..huff huff..does she think I'm doing here? Trying out for the..ghasp!..Chiba Polytech track squad?" Belldandy groused as she turned the corner on her ninth lap. Of course, she knew that she could easily make the track team if she wanted to, as she had placed rather high on the Chiba Prefectural track meets in each of her high school years.

"She's not a coach; she's a drill-instructor Demoness from the Self Defense Force, posing in disguise as a college volleyball coach!"

"_Naa, naa!! Making fun of Demons one mustn't! For that matter, the Demonesses too! If you persist, then your luck factor way way down must go!_" a voice said in her ear.

Senbei.

"Waaaa!" she shouted, noticing the small translucent cloud floating over her shoulder, fog-shaped in the likeness of that poser Demon weirdo!

"Shut up! You're bothering me, you little foy-boy!" she shout-hissed.

"What was that, Morisato?" Coach Chihiro hailed, her eyes narrowed suspiciously as she tucked her glasses down her nose. Belldandy's already sweaty body seemed to big sweat; she had cursed out Senbei while running right past the Coach.

"I said 'What's the clocking speed, oiy?'...as in how's my time doin'!" Belldandy shouted the lie, almost gasping for effort. Running 4km time trials in the hibernal chill air didn't exactly leave a lot of lungpower for idle conversation.

It wasn't enough that she had been saddled with God in the past several weeks. Now, she was also saddled with the Devil.

Take two shitheads and mix them together, and a girl's life becomes as messy as a clogged toilet. Belldandy didn't know which was worse: Senbei's efforts to plague her with bad luck, or Keiichi's efforts to try to be kind to her.

Or the mix of the two...which made life _really_ unfair!

It was like mixing fleas and ticks. Or having two boyfriends at once, with none of the romance and all of the drama. It seemed that Senbei's efforts to create bad luck in her life usually resulted in Belldandy being caught in some kind of accidental whacky-ecchi situation involving Keiichi. These mishaps kept recalling to her the kinds of 'fan service' shenanigans in the old turn-of-the-millennium Love Hina series, ala Naru and Keitaro. Unfortunately, she couldn't punch Keiichi in the jaw and send him into low orbit.

Belldandy's mind flashed back to a memory held crisp in her mind, if for anything, for the sheer bungee-jump rush of discord and chaos it had presaged. It had all started so inconspicuously...

...Soon after she and Keiichi had 'inherited' the old wreck of a temple, Keiichi had fixed it with his Divine powers and sent the old priest on his way to India. A few days later, she kept getting the 'vibe' from him that she should pitch in and do something towards the temple's upkeep: after all, they had promised the elderly priest that they would tend to the temple and its grounds in his stead. Since Keiichi had 'fixed' the temple and all the environs, that left the grounds to be attended to. Deciding that she might as well mow the lawn one last time before it snowed, she walked around the quadrangular grounds, policing it for trash objects and other discards. The intent was to clear it out before she started mowing it. The compound's lawns and gardens were over an acre in size, which was immense by Chiba standards. Her task would be worsened by the fact that she would be stuck mowing the lawn with the antique gas mower in the shed, instead of a rider mower. The mower in the shed looked as old as the priest who had formally tenanted the Buddhist temple as caretaker. Hoping for the best, Belldandy asked 'God' if he could deign to fetch her a rider mower; Keiichi's reply was "that's a whim, not a true wish."

And then he went off somewhere in the temple, probably to loaf around, leaving Belldandy all alone to wonder why he suddenly seemed to have 'gone on strike' in terms of granting wishes. Sighing with disappointment, Belldandy tried to make good out of ill. Mowing a huge enclosed 'mini-park' of a lawn would probably be a good physical workout for a Sunday.

As she cleaned up the yard's rubbish, Belldandy noticed a glimmer under the shrubbery that skirted the squat Bell Tower to the north of the temple. When she squatted down to peer underneath the bushes, she found an unopened bottle of Ramune soda. Belldandy pulled it out of the ground, curious as to why a bottle of Ramune soda was half-buried near the temple's Bell Tower. How could the elderly priest have missed something so obvious? Looking it over, she could discern from the faded label that it was one of those 1990s types; Peach-flavored with the trademark 'face' at the top of the bottle. But the shape of the face seemed awfully familiar. When she turned it over, she noticed a promotional sticker featuring one of the ghostly 'chibi-kodoma' tree-spirits from Mononoke Hime. Her heartpulse quickened, because she was now holding in her hands a genuine collector's item! Visions of yen danced through her head. Since this year was the 10th anniversary of the release of Mononoke Hime, the media were hyping up a 'mini-fad' for Mononoke movie collectibles.

"I'm rich! Or at least a little rich! Some fanboy will pay a _fortune_ for this!" Belldandy happily announced to herself, pleased at her good hazard. But the bottle was muddied by its decade-long stay on the ground; it would have to be cleaned carefully and thoroughly before she could sell it on the 'net. So she took it over to one of the spigots on the main temple house, so she could at least rinse it off. She was so excited, she used her own t-shirt to carefully dry the bottle after thoroughly rinsing it. After all, she had dressed in her grubbies especially because of the yard-chores she had planned to do that afternoon.

Somehow, while drying the top of the bottle with a ginger touch, Belldandy managed to _accidentally_ peel off the seal, lift off the cap, and push down the center...releasing the opener. How this happened was of no importance. Belldandy was too shocked to say a word as, incredibly, the marble popped _out_, instead of sinking down into the bottle.

Belldandy had opened her fair share of Ramune soda pops in her 18 years of life; and nothing like this had _ever_ happened to her! Her face figured with misery as she realized that she had just lost a month's worth of shopping-mall money.

And just like in the proverbial Arabian Nights, she ended up releasing an evil genie.

The bottle spat out an ethereal cloud of purplish gas...which formed into a tall young man and small woman who sat on his shoulder, Barbie-doll sized. The man looked dashingly handsome at first, a blonde contrast to Keiichi's dark looks. But once Belldandy met his eyes, she sensed something rather unpleasant, something malevolent and mischievous, that completely unscrewed her nerves.

"Here we go again..." she sighed in resignation as the Devil Senbei along with his miniature side-kick Mara the Demoness announced themselves. After offering her a name-card, which she politely declined, Senbei the Devil promptly told Belldandy they had been assigned by Windowsill or whatever to cause her bad luck. Belldandy almost giggled at him, because he spoke in some kind of garbled pidgin-Japanese that sounded like he was from the very 'rural' parts of Okinawa. Or that he was from Korea, and just learning Japanese. In any case, her urge to laugh was choked down as the realization lit a fire of recognition in her mind.

_This was the Devil Himself she was talking to!!_

Caught between disbelief and cursing, Belldandy quickly explained to the pair that she was already plagued by bad luck in the form of God. The curly-haired Devil was dressed in some kind of gauche livery which made him look like a cross between Michael Jackson, a character from the Goong K-drama, and a hotel bellhop. Certainly not the kind of popular image one has of the Devil. To her surprise, he was momentarily was possessed of an expression of panic. Then he recovered himself, clapped his hands and gleefully shouted "Splendid!"

Belldandy fidgeted with the now-empty Ramune bottle as the Devil started laughing his lungs out. Mara tugged at his sleeve, and he sudden halted in mid-guffaw, and then started, muttering "Blessit! I just drew his attention!"

Comedic elements aside, this weirdness only added to Belldandy's confusion and consternation. Senbei quickly informed Belldandy that he and Keiichi were now in 'competition' for her soul or something. A tingling, thrill-gone-bad chill seized her as Senbei then bowed politely to her and promised to "wreak havoc" in her life at a later date with the aplomb of a character straight out of Hamlet. Right before the pair vanished into thin air, his side-kick Mara suggested to Belldandy that she take the rest of the day off and take a bath.

Or else.

Thoroughly bamboozled and distraught by what had just happened, Belldandy thought the suggestion sounded reasonable enough, even if it came in the form of a threat from the lips of Devil's little blonde-haired assistant. What could be safer, now that she was the subject of some freak-ass Faustian drama between God and the Devil? She noticed that she was sweating just as bad as if she had already been mowing the lawn for an hour or two.

So bath-time, it was!

Ever since she wound up cohabitating with a male in the Buddhist temple, Belldandy had endeavored to take all the necessary precautions...including hanging a prudently visible wooden "Occupied!" sign on the door of each of the temple's bathrooms.

Just in case.

There was a small outdoor hot springs nestled in the middle of a brake of pine trees behind the temple...but there was no way she was going to use that while Keiichi was around. The three bathrooms were relatively clean; the main one even had a large wooden furoba of the quaint, antique kind, complete with mountain scenery muraled on the walls and a wooden stove to heat the water. Naturally, she doubted that Keiichi would ever use one of the temple bathrooms. After all, he was God and probably never had to pee.

But a girl could never be safe. And from the very first moment she had met him, Keiichi already had established a proven track record for callously invading her privacy. Just from their first meeting, his actions had set off a catastrophic chain of events, which was why she was living in this weirdass temple in the first place, instead of the Girl's Dorm with her teammates where she belonged.

A few minutes later, she nearly drowned in the furo.

While she was twiggling her toes in the soothing heat of the water, the wooden door to the inner bathroom creaked open.

As soon as she heard the door-sound, Belldandy instantly sucked her breath in and held it as she totally submerged under the bath water, not knowing what else to do. Keiichi had _walked in on her while she was naked taking a bath_! She counted to 70, after which she couldn't keep her breath in any longer...and then she 'surfaced', praying that Keiichi was gone.

He was.

She had explicitly warned him at least a dozen times to never enter any of the temple's bathrooms at all, especially if she was in them. And in true Keiichi fashion, he had ignored her instructions completely!

Angrily plotting revenge, Belldandy hopped out of the furo, not even bothering to towel herself off. She grabbed the nearest long bath towel and quickly wrapped herself tightly in it. Snagging a second towel, she dipped it in the furoba until it was good and wet. With an angry grin, she coiled up the wet towel. She was going to put an end to the favors of misfortune that seemed to tenure her whenever Keiichi was around! No excuse would allow him to shirk responsibility this time! God or not, he was going to get it for walking in on her while she was luxuriating in the wooden furo!

Once Belldandy walked out into the hallway, she noticed that the sign that normally read "Occupied!" now read "DeMonS InSIdE!".

The idiot had actually fallen for it!

"Keiichi no Bakaaaaa!!" she screamed, every muscle in her body taunt. Belldandy was so livid, she was seeing red. Her Divine roommate-slash-adversary-slash-pest did one of those magical 'appearing out of the wall' type things in response to her summons. Wasting no time, Belldandy dashed up to him while he was half-out of the hallway wall, fully intent on snapping him with her towel. But funny things happen when you combine Demons and Ramune bottles.

The Ramune bottle Belldandy had left outside...had unexpectedly wound up under her left foot.

With a wrench, her footing suddenly was totally unspun-uneven, the kind of gyro-turmoil she had experienced several times when had stepped on a teammate's foot during a v-ball game or a practice. Completely thrown off balance, Belldandy flailed to gain purchase by grabbing onto something, anything. Instead, her hands slapped furtively against the flat of the wooden wall as she tumbled to the ground, her momentum converted from a sprinting dash towards Keiichi to a full cartwheel. Something else was also thrown off as well.

In less then a second, Belldandy watched helplessly as the bath towel she had wrapped around herself went sailing into the air amidst a blur of limbs. With a deft motion, Keiichi caught it as it flagged towards his chest, a pink-colored cloth butterfly. With nothing to cover her besides her long lengths of auburn hair, Belldandy wordlessly stared at Keiichi, who was wordlessly staring at her nakedness. If Time was a flowing stream of water, then that few seconds would have been frozen as snug as glacier!

Belldandy was almost certain that she saw a smile tucked within the blush to his cheeks...and then she aimed the wet towel she still had in her hands at his face. As Keiichi got a face-full of sopping-wet bath towel, Belldandy had just enough time to sprint back into the safety of the bathroom before she started screaming.

Mirthful giggles in her mind punctuated her screams of dismay, punching home the truth that Senbei was a force to be reckoned with. After the calamity had drained her throat hoarse, Belldandy almost felt regretful that she had taken out her anger on Keiichi once she realized that the whole incident had been obviously orchestrated by the Devil Senbei. But since Keiichi was God, she figured that He could probably handle some misdirected anger. But even though she knew that he was God, Belldandy was completely red-faced when she emerged from the bathroom and saw him for the first time after the ecchi incident...

She certainly had never lived under the same roof with a guy who had just seen her _naked_.

Then there was the time a couple days later when someone had stealthily concealed mud in her futon during a particularly nasty set of mid-term exams at school. Tests had been coming her way like freight trains; half-exhausted, Belldandy had pulled aside the blanket and collapsed on her bedding...only to get liberally plastered with wet mud. So she went to the laundry room to soak her jeans before the foul mixture of mud and grease set in...and while in a state of undress, Keiichi just happened to walk in on her. The door had been glowing red.

Or that time last week when half her bras somehow got starched in the wash because the laundry detergent had been screwed with. The other half, supposedly 'safe' in the dryer, somehow got 'burnt' because the rickety antique overheated and caught fire. And the single bra that Belldandy was wearing had snapped its clasp, so it was worthless. Belldandy had no choice but to rewash all of her remaining bras. Either that, or suffer through a bad case of the itchies the next day. That time, she had assumed that she could get from the laundry room to her room without being spotted walking around the temple with no bra underneath her t-shirt. Just a 15-second walk to her room, where she could put on a sweatshirt to cover-up until the wash was done. But somehow, the ceiling sprinkler system activated the moment she left the wash-room, and she was instantly soaked. Keiichi was instantly there in the hallway with her, asking her why she set off the indoor sprinklers and why she wasn't wearing a bra. Sprinklers?! Belldandy could swear that she had never seen them in the month or so that she had been living in the temple. And to add ire to ire, Senbei had tartly suggested afterwards that she should enter a 'wet t-shirt' contest, so she could earn some extra cash and replace her missing lingerie!

And then the rest of her bras ended up getting 'burnt' in the dryer...

Finally, there was today's 'stunt'. An 'attack' by Senbei that had caused her to run into Keiichi at a full sprint while he was polishing one of the Buddhas in the main hall. Senbei had startled her by changing one of the Buddhas, the Miroku Buddha, into a lucky badger statue, surrounded by snakes. Even though Belldandy immediately knew who the culprit was, her mind was outwitted by her not-so-subtle terror of snakes. Shrieking bloody murder, she dashed into the main hall as fast as her feet could wing her...when she stepped on a oiled dustrag someone had dropped on the floor. Sliding across the floor like a skateboarder, she crashed full flat against him, knocking him off the footstool.

The metal polishing oil ended up spilling all over her front.

And Keiichi was all over her front as well, having landed on her.

Just like before, when she had first fainted against him in the Girl's Dorm, Belldandy was glowing with an embarrassed blush. Even though she was shocked by the sensation of his body pressed against hers, even though she was pinned to the ground underneath him...part of her didn't mind it at all.

Which made her even more angry.

She quickly wrestled herself out from under him and literally threw him aside as she scooted against the wall, pulling her knees up against her chest and touching her index fingers together in the well-known "I'm totally embarrassed" gesture. Keiichi didn't seem embarrassed at all; he kept asking if she was okay. His inquiries about her welfare made Belldandy feel more awkward, so she pleaded with him to dismiss himself from her presence. Then she hunkered down in the bathroom to wash the smelly oil-goo off of herself. It took a brush, which no doubt didn't help her complexion any.

So she had shown up 10 minutes late, despite sprinting to school...

...which was why, in the present moment, she was running these stupid worthless laps around the track while her teammates were honing their volleyball skills, just because she had ended up getting soaked in oil.

And she was still angry at Keiichi, because he had wormed his way into her heart just enough for a tiny part of her conscience to brazenly interpret the mishap with a "it was all worth it!" The windless November air seemed to shrivel her lungs; but she also felt a warmth inside as she remembered how it had felt to briefly be pinned underneath him. She had expected him to crush her with her weight, but instead, his firm body had only blanketed her with a lightness...and a flicker of pleasure.

"Life sucks! I live with God...and he can't even keep the Devil at bay!" Belldandy groused, her words rhythmed by the crispy sounds of her footfalls on the frigid cinder track.

"What'd you say, Morisato?"

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Keiichi, can't you _do_ something about Senbei and Mara? I'm sick of getting caught up in these idiotic disasters that usually wind up with you gawking at my panties."

"Belldandy, there's nothing I can do about Senbei at the moment. And I would never dream of gawking at your panties! Besides, if I really wanted to gawk at your panties, do you think you could do anything to stop me?" he answered.

Great. Just what was needed, an assurance veiled within a threat. Belldandy felt a crock in her neck snap as she bowed her head in exasperation. Keiichi obviously didn't even really understand what he had just said.

God was an ignoramus!

"Thanks _a lot_!!" she shot back, her words an aegis of irritation. "Aren't you supposed to be God or something, Keiichi? Aren't you supposed to be omnipotent and all that shit? That's what they teach us in our freshman humanities classes! So why don't you _do_ something about all this Devil and Ms. Mara crap?! I'm sick of it!"

Keiichi simply shook his head sadly...and Belldandy suddenly got a brainstorm.

"Sooo," she said slyly. "You said you came here to grant my wish, didn't ya?" When Keiichi nodded "yes", her smile broadened.

_She had him!!_

"Okay, I've come up with a wish! My wish...is for you to get rid of Senbei!"

"Can't do," Keiichi quickly answered. While Belldandy mouthed a silent "Fuck! I can't believe this!", he explained his refusal.

"You see, the reason Senbei's here is because of _you_."

"That's so...full of bullshit!" she answered, filled with indignant vim. "That's so...you. You can't handle it down here, Keiichi. So what do you do? You blame it on the lowly Earthrealm mortal! You say it's _her_ fault!"

Keiichi grimaced in the face of her vehemence.

"Just for the record, I had absolutely _nothing_ to do with that retard Demon or Devil or whatever he is being here!" Belldandy shouted, clarifying what was obvious to her. "I didn't ask for you, and I didn't ask for him either! Now I'm stuck with both of you...and it's driving me crazy. Another week of this and I'm going to shave my head and become and nun and move to a cave in Hokkaido!"

_"Heh heh...that might be an improvement! Much of our Demonic work is carried on under the cloak of the clergy!"_ a voice in her mind said gleefully._  
_

"Senbei, shut up already!" she heard herself shout in unison with Keiichi.

"Look, Belldandy," Keiichi said, clearing his throat. "The reason I'm still here is because you won't make a wish. And that's why Senbei remains here as well. It's really complicated! But to put it simply, when I received your wish proposa...er, your wish request, Senbei also was contacted. He works for the Demon Grief Office, which has two purposes. Their main purpose is to cause grief and chaos in people's lives, as you probably know by now."

Belldandy could only roll her eyes.

"Their secondary endeavor is to frustrate the wish requests we receive from you mortals."

"O..office?" Belldandy asked, sounding confused. Her mind filtered through all the images of the Devil sitting in an office, counting out souls, promoting Demons, assigning punishments to sinners, etc. A Demonic Trickster archetype, like Susa-no-o...or a King Yama magisterial type, presiding over a sea of souls under the shadow of Celestial Hall of Purgatory on Mt. Tai-yama. Or the tried-and-true Western image of the 'executive-devil'."

It almost sounded too hokey. When the mist of her astonishment cleared, she realized that Keiichi wasn't pulling her leg with some kind of bogus idiocy.

Why would God lie about the Devil?

"You really don't know anything, do you?" Keiichi observed. Belldandy felt her whole body stiffen up...she _really_ hated being called ignorant.

"Well forgive me for not being an all-knowing, semi-omnipotent Being like you!! Who's also stupid, wishy-washy, lecherous, intrusive, ignorant and idiotic!" she shouted, almost screaming in his face.

"Whoa! Slow down and listen, will ya?" Keiichi requested. "This is for your own good, it's really important! What you need to know is this: as long as you don't make a wish, then it's undecided between us. It's like a stalemate in shogi chess. Which means that, right now, Senbei has the potential to lay a curse on you. Try to think of your situation in terms of as an airplane taxing around in a holding pattern, waiting to decide on which runway it'll land. You can either land on the 'wish' runway, or you can land on the 'grief' runway."

"Th..that doesn't make any sense, because it's something that only an imbecile would come up with! You expect me to believe that the Divine world...which is supposed to be all holy and divine and shit...operates on some stupid notion of fighting over people's souls?" Belldandy stammered.

"Uh-huh!" Keiichi affirmed.

"That's..._idiotic_! How come Senbei gets to be here, and I didn't even phone him? I had to phone you to get you to come here! I didn't 'summon' him at all; he just popped out of a Ramune soda bottle I found in the yard...and whammo!...my so-called life gets even more totally fucked up!" she observed angrily.

"Yes. Could you please tame your language a bit?" Keiichi asked her. "However..."

"And I didn't summon you either, but yet here you are!! It's so _totally_ unfair!"

"Actually, it isn't unfair, Belldandy. It was no accident that fate had bound us together," Keiichi said calmly. "But sometimes, I have to wonder why..."

"Yep! Me too!" she agreed. "That single phone call caused all of this shit! I wish the telephone had never been invented! Life is just too unfair! I should be using the phone to talk to my sweet, shaggy-hair, cool-acting boyfriend. Instead, I called...and _you_ answered! I get kicked out of the Women's Dorm! I almost get kicked off the _team_ for being late to so many practices! I have to spend what few days I have free cleaning this antique temple...and I have to sneak home food from the university cafeteria half the time, because I'm too tired to cook! And you! You've actually kissed me and seen me naked!"

"...and I'm also going have to take you to task about that tongue of yours! You swear like an Osaka grrl."

"KEIICHI!!" Belldandy boomed a threatening growling scream. Now he was trying to correct her speech! What the hell does he think he's doing? She wondered if there was some silly prohibition against swearing, like people being banned from swearing in Windowsill, on pain of death or something.

Keiichi's question alighted her on the more important onus; Belldandy sensed that the lingering doubts she had about why Fate had bound her up with Keiichi was probably the only thing she had in common with him. Still, he had to live with her in the same house until she made her wish. Even though she could kill two birds with one stone...get rid of Keiichi and Senbei by making a single wish...she couldn't think of what to wish for. If she was going to have a wish, she definitely wasn't going to waste it! And Keiichi had pretty much laid out a moratorium on what he interpreted as 'whimsical wishes'.

Belldandy schemed a little scheme. Perhaps she could use this wish thing to manipulate Keiichi.

What if he got homesick, but in spite of his feelings, he still had to remain on the Earthrealm with her because she wouldn't make up her mind about her wish? If this was the case, she could earn some hard-fought leverage over him. What 18-year-old university freshman girl _wouldn't_ want to have God Himself under her thumb?

"I've decided on my wish!" she announced.

"Oh really? That's great!" Keiichi replied, his youthful face brightening up with excitement.

"Yep! And it's going to remain a secret!"

Belldandy treasured the look on Keiichi's face when she said _that_...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

A couple months pass rather quickly when a girl is living with God and being plagued by the Devil...

Christmas was rolling around, and Belldandy decided to go out shopping with her teammates. Earlier in the week, she had purchased some knick-knack gifts for everybody at some of the discount stores. But now, she faced the task of picking out the _important_ gifts; presents for her mother and stepfather. Since she was going to be out in public with her friends, she insisted to Keiichi that he take every precaution to keep Senbei away from her and her 'tribe'. The last thing she needed was to be in the changing room at her favorite clothing store in the middle of an earthquake...or something as simple as a broken door hinge.

Not being the kind of girl that indulges herself by making lists, Belldandy sauntered around with Captain Tamiya, Captain Ootaki, and several of the other girls in the big nine-storey shopping mall. The air was electrified with Christmas carols, the buzz of excited conversation, squeals of delight from young children, the smells of candy and ice cream, and numerous flashing lights from all the seasonal displays at the various specialty shoppes. Going shopping with the girls was always fun, especially when Captain Ootaki was acting as ringleader. Captain Ootaki was renowned for her razor-sharp wit and acrid comments. One can be sure that going shopping with Ootaki would result in at least a couple laugh riots.

"Look at those two!" Belldandy heard the spiky-haired senior announce, pointing at one of the more visible couples from their school. "I bet she's the kind of old-fashioned girl who goes to college to look for a husband. He's a hundred years too late to be considered much of a looker, with those thick glasses of his!"

"Yeah, but I bet he's a pervert!"

"Hmm...what kind of pervert do you think he is?" Captain Tamiya asked slyly.

"Probably the kind that invites his girlfriend to spend the evening with him when his parents are away from his house, and then 'invites' his girlfriend to cook dinner wearing one of those kitchen aprons...and nothing else!"

"Ah...truly a case of the salaryman-in-training, you mean?" Captain Ootaki said with a giggle. Belldandy found herself cracking up at the old joke...after all, it wasn't the jokes but the _way_ that Ootaki offered her punchlines that made the whole thing so funny.

"Yeah. Chiba Poly's supposed to be a good school, but I bet she's joined one of those cosplay clubs..."

"Which cosplay club? You know there's only one!"

"Huh?" Belldandy asked.

"Yeah, the salaryman's wife-in-training dress up club!" Captain Ootaki said, her face all serious.

"No way!" Belldandy ferreted. "You mean to tell me that there's actually a student club named..."

Her comment was interrupted by giggling; and Belldandy blushed with embarrassment, knowing that she'd been had. How would she know anything about this goofy experience called Chiba Polytech? All the students were crazy, and the faculty were a bunch of eccentric young guys or lecherous old farts. Sometimes she caught herself thinking that Coach Chihiro was the only sane one in the school, which wasn't saying much. She didn't even bother to go out and explore the booths during the school's Fall Cultural Fair, for fear of getting conned into some stupid club. So she had no idea what kinds of clubs there were at a college.

The blood rushing to her cheeks reminded Belldandy about the fact that Captain Ootaki's wit could turn into a sword bringing down embarrassment on anyone, at any time. Just as Belldandy wished that she was as smart as Captain Ootaki, she heard Ootaki whoop and point at another couple.

"Look! A two-person 'banana'!" she shouted. Belldandy followed her gesture and saw a gaijin woman walking with a middle-aged Japanese man.

"Yep! I wonder what kind of ugly kids _they_ have!"

"Hssst!" Belldandy shout-whispered. "Stop it right now!"

"Why? We're just getting started..." Captain Tamiya protested, grinning evilly.

"Because that's my mom and my stepdad!" Belldandy said, half-embarrassed, half-angry. She paused to savor the shocked looks on the faces of her teammates. This situation was too good to be passed up, and she was going to milk it for all the guilt-trips she could dish out. It was amazing how quickly her teammates fanned out in different directions as her parents approached.

So much for the milking.

"HONEY!" her mom hailed solicitously, waving her arm high above her head. Her mother was dressed in one of those OL-type business suits that looked at least 10 'style years' younger than her age. Belldandy fretted that Ootaki's tongue would lash around this, but fortunately her team captain had the good sense to absent herself with all the other scurrying rats.

"Ah, Belldandy!" her mother announced, animated joyfully in 'mother mode'. "What a pleasant surprise! How's my little girl doing?"

Belldandy scowled as she heard tittering from behind a planter with a Christmas tree. Ignoring the clowning with some effort, she walked up and hugged her mother, and then bowed curtly to her stepdad.

"We're just finishing up our Christmas shop...ulp!" she started to answer. Her words were black-holed halfway out of her mouth, because she saw Senbei and Mara hovering behind her parents, surrounded by some kind of dark purple cloud. Bewildered, she glanced over her shoulder at her teammates, worried that they might be seeing the pair of Devils.

But they obviously didn't. Each of her teammate's faces was wrinkled with the twin postulates of trying to keep from laughing, and trying to behave respectfully in the presence of her parents.

As her mother talked about how good it was going to be to have her home for Christmas, and her dad talked tidbits about his job, Belldandy watched as a 'battle' unfolded between Senbei & Mara vs. Keiichi. It seemed to be going on invisibly; at least invisibly as far as everyone else was concerned. But she could half-see see the cosmic-scale explosions going off between the three combatants. It was as if the bouting was happening in another dimension, but a dimension that she was privy to witness. Once in a while, it seemed like Senbei would try to 'break through'...possibly into _this_ dimension, she realized with absolute panic...but then Keiichi would restrain him with some kind of magical hand gestures. Senbei would 'push' the air with his hands, which would distort like clear plastic wrap being stretched by a piece of food.

He was trying to get out, get out into _her _world!

"How's life at the Girl's Dorm?" her mother asked. "Are they keeping you out of trouble there?"

Staying out of trouble was the last thing that could possibly have ever happened during the time she was living in the run-down apartments of the Girl's Dorm. She didn't _have_ time to get in trouble back then! She was always house sitting for her sempai. Actually, it was the other way around. Her sempai were always getting into trouble, and she was kept out of it totally. They had all the fun, while she had...

"Actually, she isn't living with us any..."

Belldandy felt her face go white with panic. In the past two months, she had concealed everything that related to her expulsion from the Girl's Dorm! Not to mention that she was living in a refurbished Buddhist temple with a _guy_! If her parents found out about _that_, she could kiss her college career goodbye!

"Oh shit!" she exclaimed silently, gesturing with downward waves of her hand to try and get them to shut up. To her surprise, Keiichi reacted as if he had _heard_ her desperate thoughts...and in the middle of a tight quarters 'magical swordfight' with Senbei, he managed to point a finger at her crew and flick a small globe of light towards them.

Before Captain Tamiya could finish her sentence, she started sneezing. In fact, all five of her teammates started sneezing.

She looked up at Keiichi, just as Senbei hit him in the chest with a blast of energy. He was propelled clear through the roof of the shopping mall. Senbei turned and grinned evilly at her, and then 'stretched' the air behind her parents, trying to break out into the _real_ world.

Just before he managed to break on through to the other side, Keiichi reappeared, rocketing downwards like a lightning bolt. Unseen by Senbei but standing behind the Devil from Belldandy's perspective, Keiichi swiftly pulled the kerchief that he kept wrapped around his neck. Belldandy had assumed all along that the scarf was just some fashion accessory; but as he loosened it, Keiichi seemed to _glow_ with a blue energy. The sight suggested to her mind a character blowing up qi in one of those Chinese animes.

Balling up a globe of energy in his hands, Keiichi cast it out at Senbei and Mara. It expanded from a hurl of light into a intricate 'net' of glowing filaments, which quickly surrounded Senbei and Mara. Caught in the snare, the mesh collapsed inwards; forcing Senbei and Mara to shrink along with it. Senbei turned and gave Keiichi the finger, and then he and Mara 'vanished' themselves out of it before they got crushed.

"...oh, and don't forget that I've made your favorite hot cocoa mix. I even bought imported European dark chocolate, your favorite!" her mother said, completely oblivious to the battle that had taken place behind her.

"Cool!" Belldandy shouted, doubly pleased. Mom's hot cocoa was the best thing under the sun...it even made the snow feel less frigid. And Keiichi had rid her of those two pesty Devils and taken care of her laugh-riot rowdy teammates, who were still sneezing by the Christmas tree.

Her parents both bowed slightly towards her teammates, and then wandered off. Even if her mom was Euro and her stepdad was Japanese, Belldandy felt comforted by the fact that they were still so much in love. So many of her friends had watched their parent's marriages dissolve into bitterness; Belldandy had luckily been spared this. Somehow, her folks had kept the fires alit; this was obvious when she saw how mom unhesitatingly hooked her arm with her stepdad's as they walked away, walking close together like high school sweethearts. Belldandy was reminded that some of mom's European traits had rubbed off on her stepdad; her mom was naturally touchy-feelly already, much more so than what was acceptable in Japanese culture. Her stepdad had taken it in stride; as she grew up, she noticed her stepdad actually becoming more affectionate towards her and mom with each passing year.

"Why can't I have something like that?" Belldandy thought enviously as she watched her parents walk away. She momentarily crafted a romantic whimsy, but the ambrosia of her imaginings was quickly despoiled. Reality was, the only touchy-feelly thing on the minds of the guys her age was sex...and little else.

She regarded her teammates, who were all snotty-nosed and red-eyed from their sudden 'mysterious' sneezing fit. Belldandy was grateful she had run into her parents at the beginning of her shopping trip; if she had seen them towards the end of her Christmas shopping, they might see the presents she was going to give them. Not to mention that they might reduce her living allowance, figuring that she was more well-off than they had imagined. One good thing about residing in the temple was that it was _free_; she didn't have to pay the extra 'dorm fees' or any other related living expenses.

Keiichi had kept his promise to her.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

When she arrived back at the temple from shopping, Keiichi was nowhere to be found...at first. After the fight he had put up against that poser Senbei, Belldandy expected him to greet her at the door, acting self-important and pleased with himself. Setting down her many bags and boxes, Belldandy walked by one of the Buddha statues, which she had irreverently decorated by putting a Christmas cap on the Enlightened One's curly-knotted head.

"Where is he?" she asked the muted statue. Unexpected, Belldandy's emotions began to waver towards panic. Normally, if she called on him, he would do that 'popping out of the wall' thingy almost immediately. What if he had decided to leave anyway, without granting her wish? She checked the kitchen, and then started a thoroughgoing exploration, searching through the rooms one by one.

She found him in the temple's scriptorium, slumped against one of the bookshelves.

"Oi!" she shouted. "Keiichi, get up!"

He didn't move.

"C'mon! I just wanted to thank you for what you did at the mall! You don't have to make a game of it, Mr. God!" she explained, assuming that he was flirting with her by playing at being asleep. Still, he didn't answer her. He looked like he was taking a nap. Belldandy walked up and leaned over him, making a study of him. Keiichi's face was soaked with sweat, his forehead beaded with little rivulets of it. His forehead...in fact, his whole face...was beet-red.

Belldandy knew enough about first aid to realize the signs of heat stroke. Her high school coach had made certain to drill her and her teammates on the subject, a necessary precaution considering that heat stroke was an infrequent but ever-present cause of accidents, injury and even death among high school athletes. Even standing a half-meter away from him, she could almost feel the heat emanating from his body. Completely forgetting the fact that he was God, even as she was amazed and a little humbled by the notion that God could get sick, she rested her hand on his forehead to check his temperature. It was like touching a stove.

"Dammit!! Jesus, Keiichi...you're burning up! You're really _are_ sick!" she blurted in a vale of exasperation, her voice loud enough to stir Keiichi to semi-consciousness. He opened his eyes briefly and regarded her, his face flushed and weak.

"Are you okay, Belldandy?" he asked in a thin, gasping voice.

"Can you move?" she asked, ignoring his question. Keiichi slowly shook his head "no".

Belldandy thought quickly. Keiichi was over two meters tall, which made it completely impractical for her to move him to another room. She could assist him into the bathroom, perhaps get him in the showering area so she could spray him with cool water.

She blushed deeply, briefly embarrassed by the thought of being in the bathroom with him. Unheralded, a mind-vision of having to take his clothes off to cool his body temperature down flashed through her consciousness. Startled by the unexpected mental imagery, Belldandy jogged her head to try and clear the intrusive thoughts. Dashing off to the kitchen, she concluded that if she couldn't get him to a bedroom, then she'd bring one to him. Hurriedly filling a bag with icecubes and water, Belldandy grabbed one of the kitchen towels and wrapped it. Then she ducked into the nearest room and grabbed a futon and a light bed-sheet. Returning to the temple library room, she set the futon down next to Keiichi, and then rolled him over on top of it. He seemed to be as limp-limber as a sleeping cat. Trying to swallow her embarrassment at being so close to him, Belldandy set up the little hoist over his head, so she could hang the icebag to rest on his forehead. He was still sweating profusely, even though she was fanning him as he went to sleep.

The presents!

"I've gotta get ready to go to my parents. You're such a bother, Keiichi..." she remarked. But he was fast asleep. Belldandy still had to wrap the remaining gifts, shower, and dress in some Christmasy clothes. It would be many hours before she would make the call from the train terminal in Murakami to have her stepdad pick her up.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

The mid-afternoon trains from Murakami to Choshi to Chiba was crowded with waygoers, but the people congestion in the train car was nothing in comparison to the crowding of regrets, worries, and confusions in Belldandy's mind. Christmas had come and gone; her visit with her mom and stepdad had turned out to be really fun. It was so nice to be away from school, volleyball, and the two pests at the temple. Both Mom and Dad were filled with questions about how her college life experience was going. But despite the two nice dinners at the fancy restaurants, the night she went karaokeing with some of her old high school friends, and the nice winter jacket her parents had bought her...Belldandy felt a foreboding.

From time to time, her thoughts would hail back to the temple...and Keiichi.

During high school, she was always totally in the groove with her own sports career. Mixing sports with cramming for the college entrance exams and enjoying the calm of her home life; Belldandy was rarely bothered to think twice about guys. Belldandy felt safest when she was at a dance club, dancing away with some hot guy who had caught her eye. Clubbing was quite the rare and precious experience when a girl is growing up in the boonies on a farm; she often had to go all the way to Niigata because Murakami clubs were lame and boring. As were the guys. Even with a cool guy in a cool club, the conversation afterwards was always an awkwardness; especially since she wasn't born and raised with the language. And then, late in the evening, most guys she met would try and steer her towards a 'private' karaoke session...or even a love hotel. At this point, Belldandy would give them the "fuck off" treatment and go her own way. It was either that or she'd end up trying to manipulate the guy in some way, whether she had intended to or not. Unfortunately, the only tried-and-true method of turning men into mush that she knew of was to lure them with sex. And Belldandy wasn't the kind of girl who could 'fake' the seductress.

So she recognized that she wasn't very experienced with having to worry about a guy.

As the train clattered down the elevated tracks, Belldandy scowled to the window, as they passed an old-looking temple building...and her thoughts once again turned towards Keiichi.

All the symptoms were there.

The day after Christmas, she was hanging out with her mother, enjoying a mother-to-daughter conversation in Norwegian...when her thoughts were drawn open like curtains, pulling back to the pitiful sight of Keiichi laying in the scriptorium. Dinner with Mom and Dad at the fancy steak restaurant was interrupted by worries about whether Keiichi was well enough to eat something. At karaoke, she was singing MX Musume's "Love Revolution 21"...and when she got to the lyric "_Falling in love/working it fun life/my history's carved into the Earth_", Belldandy forgot the rest of the song, because she was thinking about _him_ again.

"Could this be love?" she muttered to herself, trying to diagnose her symptoms. If it was 'spring fever', then it was three or four months too early! She couldn't shed her mind of Keiichi, no matter how hard she tried.

Belldandy tried to reassess the situation; after all, she had lived with him for only a couple months. It was reasonable to assume that he would pop up in her thoughts from time to time just because of this. When she was living in the Girl's Dorm, she would recall a conversation with her roommate on occasion, especially during boring classes. Or she would think "which guy is Captain Ootaki going to try and hook up with _this_ week?" And Coach Chihiro was a ever-haunting presence in her mind; whenever Belldandy would pass by a shoe store at the mall, a mental impression of Coach Chihiro would almost always follow. A couple specialty sports stores even had faded posters of Coach and her teammates on the wall.

"So it really doesn't have anything to do with Keiichi!" she mumbled to herself. "It could be _anyone_...and I'd still have flash-thoughts about he or she on my mind once in a while. I'm thinking about him only because I've spent some time with him over the past two months. Nothing more! And it's not like I'm hangin' onto the guy, or something."

One of the salarymen standing next to her cleared his throat, pointedly encouraging Belldandy to keep her thoughts to herself.

"Whew!!" she sighed to herself with relief. All this thinking about Keiichi was _normal_...it wasn't some kind of love!

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Keiichi! I'm home!" Belldandy shouted, pleased that she had proven to herself during the train ride that being concerned about him didn't equate with being in love with him. Confident that her greeting wasn't housewife-ish, that she was simply announcing herself, Belldandy waited for him to do his flowing-out-of-the-wall thing.

When he didn't come, she walked back to the scriptorium room.

In the middle of the musty, book-filled room, Keiichi was sound asleep, curled up on the futon she had spread out for him five days earlier. Belldandy ran her fingers through her hair, completely mystified. It looked as if he hadn't moved from his bedding during the entire time she was away! Shaking her head, Belldandy pulled the covers back over his recumbent form, not wanting to wake him. Naturally, anyone else who had slept in the same clothes for five days would smell like dogshit; yet, Keiichi's divine nature kept him from smelling dirty at all. Belldandy sniffed the air as she tucked him in, smelling the fragrant odor of his body.

His "physical manifest" as he called it. Even as Keiichi lay sleeping, she marveled at the fact that he was consciously reconstituting billions of atoms to retain his form. She wondered once again why he had chosen such a bishy form to visit her in. He could have appeared as a kappa, or a sheik, or some kind of apostolic old guy with a beard. But he had chosen _this_ form to appear in.

Why was he still sleeping?

Why was she fawning on him?

"What the hell am I doing?!" Belldandy shouted, grasping at her head. "I just got home five minutes ago, and now I'm playing _nurse_ with this guy?! This really hurls! What am I turning into...his girlfriend or something?"

_There._ Despite the congress she had held in her mind on the way home from Murakami, she had said it.

Belldandy quickly covered her mouth, feeling the burn of her words.

And Keiichi was awake.

"Do you want to have sex?" he asked.

Belldandy feelings blurred, her thoughts instantly became a museum of confusion. She wanted to shout back "say what?!"...but she was certain that she had heard him right the first time. Keiichi had actually _propositioned_ her! No..._God_ had just came on to her! She balled her fists and held them tight over her chest, not knowing what else to say or do. Even though he was God, this was one of those moments when he seemed to have the maturity of a 14-year-old boy. No, more like an 8-year-old brat! He had actually mentioned _sex_! The words exasperated her, stumbling her poise like a karate chop to the throat. For asking her that, she would have rained beats on his head with the nearest blunt object she could grab if he were any other guy.

Yet, she was too shocked to be angry with him, too caught off guard to feel insulted. Just like that, he had asked her if she wanted to be intimate with him!

"M..m..maybe..." she stammered.

"Maybe?"

"M..mm..maybe you're still ill!" Belldandy finished. "I'm not going to pretend that I didn't hear what you just asked. But I am going to pretend that I heard it, on account that you're sick...er, I don't mean _that_ kind of sick! Uh, I meant to say that you're feeling physically ill, and obviously saying things that you really don't mean to say...er...and you're..."

"Just...resting," Keiichi finished with a nod, his eyes half-lidded. "Christmas...present...in the next room..."

Christmas present?!

"But you're _sick_!" Belldandy fluted. "How could you have possibly gotten me a Christmas present? You've been in bed all this time!"

"Next room," he repeated, glancing to his left. Belldandy looked to the door, and then back at Keiichi.

"First he wants sex...now he's giving me a Christmas present? Why would God give a girl like me a Christmas present? What if God wasn't Christian? If so, then what would be the point of him giving a present to me? What kind of Christmas present could Divine Boy give me?" Belldandy wondered. Knowing Keiichi..._anything_ could be in that room!

In the past couple months, Belldandy still didn't know when Keiichi was coming across as "him" or "Him". Just another guy, or The Guy who sat on the glowing throne. The sex thing...well, that was definitely a "him" sorta moment. Totally the clumsy, unexpectedly weirdass Keiichi-type random remark. This talk of a Christmas present...it could be either "him" or "Him". If it was "Him", then it would either be totally groovy, or totally rank! Then again, if it was "him", it could be a disaster as well, only on a smaller scale.

Curiosity rolled through her mind, like white muffin clouds passing in the sky over dun pastures. Belldandy wanted to ask Keiichi if it was safe to look at her 'present'...but he was already back into la-la land, burr-snoring away.

"Oh well! So much for asking him about it!" Belldandy said to herself with a shrug. She knew that this was one of those moments where her 'uppity' nature could get her in trouble. Occasionally, Belldandy was inclined to wonder if all the mishaps she had encountered in life were simply the result of her personality. As she was much more headstrong that the native-born Japanese girls, Belldandy's tomboyish nature often placed her square in the middle of some crazy situations. The patterns of risk repeated themselves, melting into the surface of the moment.

She got up and walked to the room next door.

Feeling like she was toeing the edge of a promontory high above a turbulent ocean, Belldandy eyed the shoji door warily. After a full minute, she nodded her head "ummn!" and slid the door open. Gazing inside, Belldandy felt all her breath being drawn into the room as she recognized her present...

"T..T...T...TIIIIGGGGGEERRR!"

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --


	113. Pt 113: Abyssmed

**Part 113: Abyssmed**

YGGDRASIL VISA EMPORTAL OFFICE:

_"Moving to Hokkaido soon...Gonna be a yakitori tycoon..."_

"Falcyn, shut it!"

Pryzm was miffed at the sudden show of cockiness on the part of her older cousin. Unlike her sister, she wasn't afraid to tell him off when he needed it. Ever since Mom had indicated that a trip to Vanagdrasil was in order, her little Demon boy cousin was acting all proud of himself, singing stupid ditties and behaving the part of the fart.

It was hard to believe that he was several years older than she was! Sometimes, Falcyn seemed to slip into the maturity of a 3rd-grader! Even here, in the reception area, he was acting like a spoiled little brat! She felt a sympathetic embarrassment when she noticed two of the Almighty's pink-haired reception girls giving their group of four a sharp eye-bite of disapproval. Mom was inside somewhere, conferring with one of the Lord's senior staff about their visas to Vanagdrasil. Naturally, Falcyn and Sygyn didn't need visas because they were Demons, but there was the matter of their unannounced presence in Yggdrasil that Mom had to explain.

Their journey back out of the Ygg Xeomn computer had been anything but unremarkable. In contrast, the silver-ice decor of the Reception Node possessed an unnerving calm, as far as Pryzm was concerned. She rubbed her thigh, just to see if it remained free of pain.

Getting here was all the trouble...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

…Mom had warned them about the possibility that they might encounter some sort of 'security system' upon entering or leaving the CorePlex. They had arrived without incident, and were relatively safe while inside the MultiUnified Processor that made up most of the CorePlex. The CorePlex itself was too sensitive to have any sort of security measures within it; so the risk would pour upon them most greatly once they left the CorePlex. In a fugue of frustration because their journey into the heart of the Yggdrasil Logorinth's computer had only yielded more mysteries, they sought out another semi-solid crystalline translucent 'gate' to make a stealthy retreat. Using the same energy conduit to leave the CorePlex would be the height of stupidity...and Pryzm knew her Mother was anything but stupid. They had to much more careful about their exiting.

After passing beyond the energy gate, they were immediately set upon by a legion of SensorByte MonitorBots. All the 'coolness points' from being in the CorePlex were swifted away in a cloud of holographic machines. The only possibility that they could get caught was if they encountered a random patrol of holobots.

And it had happened.

The 'holobots' were a squadron of octopoid meta-hologramic robots whose job was to detect and prevent unauthorized access to the Axial CorePlex. She and the others _were_ the unauthorized access. Swarming towards them like a haze of angry wasps, the sentry bots had obviously detected their intrusion the minute they left the CorePlex. Pryzm watched as her Mother withdrew something that looked like an engineering slide ruler out of one of the pockets of her jacket; she pulled on the side of the slide ruler and a length of semi-transparent 'film' came out. The process reminded Pryzm very much of someone pulling a length of aluminum foil from a dispenser. But instead of aluminum foil, it was a translucent 'keyboard' of sorts. Pryzm knew that this was only a representation, not an actual 'object'...but it was impressive none the less. Her Mom quickly typed a number of commands into the keyboard, and then pushed the side bar of the slide ruler back to its original position. She bent the slide ruler into a boomerang shape...and then flung it towards the pursuing holobots. The 'boomerang' object sailed within the formation of holobots, confusing them. They gave chase to it, and as Pryzm watched, the 'boomerang' flew in a bizarre series of patterns. The scrambling holobots became confused, and then started colliding with each other. A moment later, they were all hanging inert in mid-air, having knocked themselves out of commission.

"Stupid bots!" her Mother Skuld said derisively. She gestured with her hand, and the boomerang-slide ruler returned to her like a yo-yo being snapped back by an invisible string. Pryzm overheard her sister Ulfryn giggling at the sight of the immobilized holobots...and admittedly, it _was_ funny. The holobots had been decoyed, confused and then led on a snipe chase until each of them crashed into each other, rendering their AIs temporarily disabled.

But within moments, sneaking out of the Xeomn was no longer an option, as the 'next generation' of holobots gave chase, pursuing them down the energy flutes that fed power to the Axial CorePlex. Obviously, the first set of holobots had managed to signal the newly-arriving holobots before Mom screwed up their day.

The 'second generation' of holobots were much larger than the first; their holo-metallic shapes reminded Pryzm of ostriches for some reason, except that they had four spindly hook-clawed legs. These holobots pursued them with such abandon, Pryzm suspected that in their AI minds, they had somehow taken it personally that Mom had snuck her and the others into the CorePlex undetected. They seemed hell-bent on catching her and the others.

It was then and there that Mom demonstrated that she wasn't a Goddess to be messed with.

Very quickly, the pursuit turned into a war.

Pryzm could only look on as her Mother started firing off beams of some kind of light with piano-player graced finger gestures. The next-gen holobots were swooping low towards their group in 'diving runs', but instead of bombing them, they fired off rosicura-colored lances of energy. To Pryzm, the exchange looked like a laser-gun fight that one would see on a Gundam-type anime. Mom would mold light into streams of energy and then 'fling' them at the pursing holobots. Pryzm could only wonder what the arcs of light were; her best guess was that Mom was 'shooting' the holobots with highly-encrypted 'flu' viruses. At least that's how it looked, because every energy-globule that 'hit' a holobot rendered it sluggish. She wondered how Mom could do this. Manifesting data-crypt viruses out of the streams of energy in close proximity to the Xeomn's Axial CorePlex was like hosing down a house-fire with gasoline.

But unlike a regular virus that would spread itself from one database to another, these viruses weren't 'contagious'; it seemed to Pryzm that their sole function was to make the holobot's AI feel 'sick', rather than disabling it totally. After all, Mom didn't want to be responsible for crashing the entire security network that protected the innermost chambers of the Ygg Xeomn. If that happened, every Sysop in Yggdrasil would be scrutinizing the Mainframe for any disturbance in its routine, big or small.

However, the sentry bots didn't have such considerations in mind. Their whole purpose was to transmit data on the intruders to the upper echelons of the Ygg Xeomnic Network, so that it could inform Kami-sama. Their tertiary purpose was to attack the intruders with a variety of low-to-middle grade weapons. Why have sentry holobots if they were unable to immobilize intruders? Pryzm knew that the holobots wouldn't be sporting any lethal weapons like SoulGuns, of course. But she suspected that the weapons could easily injure or capture a Goddess.

Or prove even worse for half-mortal half-Divine children like herself.

Finally, the 'third generation' holobots swarmed in, materializing through the walls of the 'datastream conduit' their group was using to flee. Pryzm felt her heartbeat figuratively doubling in speed as she beheld this new threat. These were the so-called "battle bots" that Mom had spoke of during their journey within the Xeomn; the final tier in the defense system of the Axial CorePlex. And they certainly looked the part. These holobots resembled large rats, with hundreds of scythe-shaped 'tentacles' rising out of their backs. She heard Sygyn shriek with terror. Her cousin's patent fear of rodents obviously had consumed her at the sight of these behemoths, each as large as a city block.

Mom battled with the sentry holobots...and she was also tasked with shielding four children from hostile fire. Pryzm wished she could do something to help her Mother, but having any mastery of her latent Goddess powers was still a few years away. She knew that her Mother's powers didn't start manifesting until she was nearly 13 decamillennia. 130,000 Earthrealm-years old. She and Ulfryn were only 11, and that was in human years. Supposedly their Yggdrasilian age was the equivalent of any other Godkid who was 110,000 year old.

Sygyn was too immobilized with fear to do anything with her Demoness powers, while Falcyn could only augment Mom's shields with a series of his own shields, which were much weaker than Mom's. Pryzm watched as several beams tore right through Falcyn's shields like flames consuming toilet paper. She knew he was trying his best; his face was studied with concentration. And anger, because his defensive measures were being so easily defeated by the holobots. Falcyn _definitely_ couldn't handle losing. To her oldest cousin, losing was tantamount to being publicly upstaged and insulted. If this wasn't enough, while avoiding the attacking 'rat-bots', they had to travel a few trillion times the speed of light down the conduit that would eventually lead them out of the Xeomn. They had to outrace that data that even now was moving outward from the Axial CorePlex. Data that disclosed their presence in the Xeomnic Network.

"We gotta go _faster_!!" her Mother gasped, flinging discus-shaped 'shields' of energy to deflect the beams of searing energy tracing around she and the other kids. Pryzm was exerting herself to the fullest just to dodge the darts of energy. She felt a chill; it was entirely possible that the security safeguards for the Axial CorePlex may have been designed to overcome _any and all_ Divine interventions.

Maybe even Kami-sama!

"N..no way!" she heard Falcyn shout in disbelief as an energy beam grazed his arm. His sleeve was split open where the beam had sliced him...in fact, it had sliced him _deeply_. Blood poured from the wound. Any normal kid would have screamed at such a wound, but her Demon cousin grinned with determination instead.

_"Owwwiieee!"_

Next to her, her younger twin Ulfryn staggered in mid-flight, favoring her right foot as she whimpered. A second later, she heard a scream from Sygyn...and almost instantly felt a searing heat slice through her thigh as she shouted "Ulfryn!"

"Huunnnuuh!" Pryzm gasped as she watched a pale hook-beam of light slice into her lower thigh and knee. It was almost surreal; the pain in her leg was so liquid, it rendered the chambering conduit of energy they were traveling within as a mirage for a split-second. Everything she saw was wobbly, distorted.

Then the _real_ pain slammed her nerves. Pryzm had never felt such a pain in her life; it had exploded on her so quickly...so nastily...that she was almost swimming in it. It was many times worse than the time she broke her arm when she crashed her bicycle after taking on a dare. Some boy she hated in elementary school had dared her to ride her bike downhill as fast as she could; and she had wiped out at the bottom of the steep road. Of course, the boy didn't attempt to duplicate her feat, so in the end, she 'gained a level' and he got teased mercilessly by his classmates. But this pain tore at her, as if it had a life of its own.

Biting her lip, she turned to her Mom; and watched with horror as an orange band of light barely missed her Mother's head, severing a length of ivory black hair where it had passed.

A wordless glance passed between she and her Mom. Pryzm could sense the sympathy in her Mother's soft-dun eyes. Sympathy...and something else.

Fury.

"THAT DOES IT!!" Pryzm heard her Mom shout in a voice so filled with anger, it also scared _her_. "Children, hover-gather yourselves behind me. Quickly!"

A few adjustments in their 'flight pattern' and then she, her sister, and her cousins were safely sheltered behind her Mom, like air molecules behind a speeding bullet. Mom's body started to grow and age, slowly transforming back into her _real_ self. Her 'Mom' self. Pryzm was just beginning to get used to seeing her Mom as a kid her age and now these stupid robots had ruined everything!

It was as if Mom had doubled in age in less than a minute. Pryzm wondered why Mom had chosen this very moment to 'age' herself.

"Whoa!!" she heard herself gasp as Mom manifested Mjolnir from behind her back, pulling the mallet over her shoulder like an armsman would unsheath a long-sword. Brandishing Mjolnir in front of her with both hands, Mom twisted the grip on the mallet in opposite directions.

The events that followed Mom's unsheathing of Mjolnir definitely ranked up there as one of the coolest things Pryzm had ever seen in her life.

Mjolnir lengthened itself. Not only did it stretch itself outwards in her Mom's hands, but the slender handle of the mallet started to curve, just like a samurai sword. Mom's mallet all of a sudden had _two_ mallet-heads, each perched at the end of a curving 'blade' that looked like a long katana. Mjolnir had transformed from a delicate 'magical girl' type wand-mallet into a _double-malleted_ weapon! The rounded hammerheads of the mallet started elongating, curving and sharpening at same time into scythe-like prongs.

"Awesome wicked!" she heard Falcyn exclaim. "She's like a freakin' Demon Queen Valkyr!"

Startled, Pryzm realized that her Mom had just _totally unsealed her Goddess powers_. Pryzm had always wondered where Mom's Seal was...and now she knew. Her Mother's Seal was Mjolnir itself! The slender, lightweight mallet was completely transformed into a double-curved length of energy. In Mom's hands, "Battle Mjolnir" resembled two samurai swords placed hilt-to-hilt, but obversely, so that the sword blades curved out on opposite directions, rendering them in a very slender "s" shape. The hammerheads themselves were very complex-looking; short scythes with a 'hub' atop them that resembled the lacy pewter-metal heads of the Buddhist warning staffs she remembered from the "Journey to the West" anime she saw as a kid. Only they were turned sideways and paired together, so that the 'hammer' was double arrow-head shaped. Each 'arrow' point had a pink glowing sphere of energy enclosed within it.

But it wasn't just Mjolnir that changed. Mom's outfit itself was changing, re-imaging itself into what Pryzm recognized as a full-on Goddess Battlesuit. A _mega_ Goddess Battlesuit, with a pink and red winged 'jacket', wrist gauntlets of gold...

"It's been a long time since I went Bug smashing! And I didn't have this Mjolnir Mk. II back then!" she heard her Mom announce magical-girl style as she spun the weapon skillfully in her hands. "And I definitely wasn't a Senior First Class Goddess back when I was a kid!"

The holobot 'rats' seemed to sense that something was up. They flitted about even faster, hovering with sudden, jerky motions like dragonflies over a flower-bed in July. The blur of the corridor gradually delineated itself into a glow. Pryzm wanted to cheer for joy...

Mom to the rescue!

"You bugs' ass is grass! _No one_ hurts my kids!" her Mom shouted, her black hair arcing electric as she pointed the transformed Mjolnir at the swarm. As a one, the rat-bugs stilled their path.

Mom never looked like the fighting type to Pryzm, which was why she was stunned speechless when Mom _attacked_ the huge rat-bot MonitorBots. Leaping forward as a flash, her Mother swung Mjolnir in a series of radiant-daub crescent motions, creating arcs of light that slashed out from both ends of Mjolnir. The curved slashes of energy ripped into the holobots, disabling them several at a time. The sentry 'machines' regrouped, and then tried to phase in existence in a 'globe', enclosing the group of five Divines.

Mother pulled on the shaft of Mjolnir...and it again divided, separated into _two_ mallets, one for each hand.

"Waaaah!" she gasped, her sense of awe echoed by Ulfryn and her two cousins as her Mom's Goddess Battlesuit started glowing with neon-precise blue-and-pink lacings and designs. It was like one of those RPG games where you get the ultimate big power-up before fighting the final boss!

With some kind of uber-martial arts skills that Pryzm could only dream of ever mastering, her Mom proceeded to dispatch squadron after squadron of holobots, mowing them down with wild swings of her two Mjolnirs. She was moving so fast, everything around them was starting to blur. What was even more amazing was that her Mom seemed to _know_ ahead of time where and how the 'rat-bots' were going to attack! Wave after wave of the horrid MonitorBots phased into the datastream around them, but finally the legions of holobots began to slow to a trickle...and then they stopped coming out of the walls of the energy corridor entirely.

The nearspace around her and the others was littered with floating immobilized holobots as far as she could see. Mom joined the two halves of Mjolnir together, and then performed some kind of kata-form, dancing in the air like a ballerina. Pryzm was breathless as she watched the display of deadly grace. She had always considered her Mother as beautiful, but as she witnessed the complex exercising, Pryzm discovered that she had never seen this kind of beauty before! Mom was glowing with sweat and energy, but she also radiated confidence and a type of strength-love that Pryzm had never seen before.

Their Mother had never looked so beautiful!! To Pryzm, Mom seemed to have created a perfect fusion of Inspiration and Beauty. She only wished that her Father was here to see Mom wrapped in such breath-taking beauty.

Mom finally finished her whistle-fast movements with a flourish, and then swung Mjolnir over her shoulder, pike-style.

"We're all..nunh!..safe now," she declared. "I took..huff!..care of all them! There's none left to..ahhh!..report on us! This was a lot..gasp!..harder than smashing Bugs, but I'm..pant!.._massively_ more experienced now than when I was..hah!..your kid's age. I'm still pretty good at Debugging, neh?"

Tears welled up in Pryzm's eyes.

"Let me rest for a moment, and then we can be on our way," her Mom requested, regaining her breath.

"H..How'd you do it, Aunt Skuld?!" Sygyn asked, obviously daunted by Mom in full-on battle mode. "It appeared that you recognized the attack patterns the holobots were deploying before they even created them!"

"That's because I attacked them from a number of Futures. After all, I _am_ Norn of the Future. I had to perform the Whirling Dance of Time afterwards so I could gather all my future selves and reintegrate them back into me."

"Aunt Skuld, you were fuckin' Musashi-badass back there!! That was the coolest thing I've ever seen!" Falcyn shouted as they resumed their flight path out of the Xeomn.

"Don't swear, Falcyn," her Mom admonished without a hint of reaction, "or else you'll get a taste of the same!"

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"The Lord will see you now," the pink-haired receptionist announced, floating up and over her bubble-desk. Ulfryn was amazed that the Lord was actually going to take time out of His busy schedule to grant an audience with someone in the reception area! It was like being granted a private meeting with the Emperor or the Prime Minister or something! She quickly glanced around at the several dozen Gods in the lobby.

"Kami-sama doesn't appreciate being kept waiting. His schedule is quite full, as you could well imagine," the pink-haired lady said, hovering in front of she and Pryzm. A few seconds later, she added, "Well, actually, neither of you could _possibly_ imagine what His schedule is like! Just be prompt when summoned."

Ulfryn looked at Pryzm with a mystified expression.

"Well, are we going to go or not?!" the pink-haired lady asked firmly. "If you please, you two Demon kids will remain here in the lobby. You two," she beckoned with an up-down wave of her hand, "follow me."

Ulfryn pointed at herself and mouthed "You mean _us_?!", and the pink-haired receptionist nodded her head "yes".

--Ulp!!--

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Ulfryn was both amazed and terrified as they ascended a hallway of arched AquaSuns towards a palace. The hallway curved high over head, forming abstract patterns of light blue-green as she and her sister approached an entry portal, accompanied by the receptionist. There was no way that they could have gotten lost; the hallway had no side exits to speak of. But the receptionist escorted them to the very top of the winding passageway anyway, pausing from time to time to allow them to marvel at the lights and the lookouts. Ulfryn figured that it must be part of the lady's job. Once they reached the end of the corridor, she smiled at them...and with a wave of her pink-gloved hand, the purplish porticos opened.

"Don't be afraid," she said sweetly, bowing politely.

"Easy for you to say!" Ulfryn heard her sister mutter. Ulfryn had been through this before, having visited the Lord to discuss her little problem with the 'ghosties'. Even yet, she instinctively shivered as she and her sister were enveloped in a warm blue light that swept out from the portal like a suddenly unleashed wind. They were standing on a semi-transparent disc, which then floated away from the door towards an inner sanctum suspended in the middle of a dark-violet nebula-space.

"OhmyLord...OhmyLord...OhmyLord..." she heard her sister whispering to herself, echoing the intense diffidence Ulfryn felt deep within the innermost reaches of her heart. Any second now, and they would be in the Presence of the August One! The ruler of the _entire_ Yggdrasil Logorinth!

And they'd been given no warning that this was going to happen! How can a girl possibly prepare herself for meeting the Lord without any advance notice! Ulfryn knew that Pryzm would probably take things in stride, being that she was a tomboy and all...but for herself, she was quickly falling towards worries about her hair being out of place. And there was no mirror for her to check with!

The doors to the inner chamber swept open of their own accord, and she and Pryzm had their first glimpse of His Presence.

She couldn't even begin to describe Him to herself. He was different this time than before. Mega-long black hair flowed over His shoulders and back, contrasting with some kind of robe that _emitted_ light. His face was pure-skinned and peach-colored, until Ulfryn recognized that it was glowing. The chamber was un-illuminated by any lights, because He was the sole light. He wasn't seated on a throne as she had expected; instead, He was styled like one of the Shoguns from the old Japanese portraits. Only much, much more regal in bearing.

"Come forth to Me, My GrandDaughters!" He said, beckoning them with a wave of His hand. His voice was at once soothing...and overpowering. Ulfryn gripped her sister's arm tightly.

"Do not be afraid, for you have earned no ill-consideration from Me."

"As if we could run anywhere to hide if He did think ill of us!" Ulfryn thought, as their disc floated up to face Him, Ulfryn did the only thing that made sense. She curtsied to Him, and then tucked her legs underneath her and sat in the most formal seiza posture she could effect. She noticed long sleeves draping to either side of her as she bowed, touching her head to the surface of the floating disc. Once she had entered His room, her clothes must have changed themselves somehow. She and her sister were now dressed in gorgeous festival kimonos that was fit for princesses to wear during a Girl's day celebration!

"Arise from your obeisance, my GrandDaughters," He said kindly. "We have much to discuss."

Ulfryn trembled as she beheld His countenance, but then her tremors subsided as she felt drawn into His eyes. For some reason, the love she felt when she looked in her Mother's eyes...was visible in His eyes and face as well.

"He..._is_ the Lord!!" she blurted out, and then blushed and covered her mouth with her hand, feeling awkward and shy.

"Why of course I am!" He noted with a chuckle, as He uncrossed His legs and sat in a leisurely fashion. He gestured, and a small writing desk appeared next to Him. "Who else would go to all this trouble just to see two half-Goddess, half-mortal girls? And you, Ulfryn...have you learned to listen to your heart? It would be poorly occasioned for the two of you to meet Me this more formal setting for the first time without a little pomp and circumstance, would it not?"

Ulfryn reluctantly nodded her head in agreement, not quite understanding His meaning. He was talking old-fashioned, like a Tokyo grandpa!

"I must confess...your mother really did a number on My sentry bots!" He remarked, causing Ulfryn to break out into a sweat.

Mom was in trouble!

"Please comfort yourselves. Your mother is not going to be punished in any way...other than being assigned to create an improved security system for the Xeomn," He noted. "Such an assignment mayhaps will seem like a reward to your mother, rather than a punishment. I favored no small amusement when I was informed of the fact that she managed to destroy _all_ of My X-Level security holobots. Her earnestness is quite praiseworthy!"

"H..how did You know that M..Mom and..." she heard Pryzm ask in a faltering voice.

"It became quite apparent to all whence she unsealed her Senior First Class Goddess Powers within the Axial CorePlex itself," He answered. "When a Goddess's power suddenly spikes with a thousand-fold increase, such an incident surely cannot pass unnoticed forthwith."

"Please, My Lord! It was our fault, not Mom's!" Pryzm interjected in a desperate voice. "We can explain everything!"

"There is no need to tender justifications, because your mother has already told all. Well has she made Me aware of the purpose of your efforts! Ulfryn's charge to listen to her heart was the seed that blossomed your courage. Now, I mustneeds ask the two of you concerning your willingness to see this matter through to its conclusion," He noted, His voice suddenly grave.

"Huh?" the two sisters interjected.

"We are most chary as to the custom of allowing young Goddesses to sojourn to Vanagdrasil..." He started to explain, when Pryzm interrupted Him.

"Your Lord!" she asked in a pip of a voice. "Would You please stop talking like someone out of the Kojiki! I..I am not some dumb girl, but you're confusing me!"

Ulfryn almost choked; her sister had actually _interrupted the Lord_!

"I understand," the Lord acquiesced. He gestured and a tray of sweet-fruit mochi appeared next to them. "Relax and enjoy a snack, My Granddaughters. Normally, a request by young Goddesses like the two of you would be denied outright. But these circumstances are special, to say the least. So I would like to hear from each of your lips if you are willing to travel with your aunt to the Realm of the Demons."

"Our..._Aunt_?!" Ulfryn said, her voice a trombone of dismay.

"Yes. I have discussed this with my Brother, who as you know is Sovereign Ruler over all of Vanagdrasil. He has agreed to permit a passage for each of you, but only under the watchful eye of your Aunt Mara. Since your Aunt is one of His Queens, with whom Oni-sama is well disposed towards, a single travel visa may be arranged. However, there is no way that He will grant permission for your mother to travel to Vanagdrasil. And with good reason, which easily gained My agreement."

"We can't go without our Mother! Y..You're asking us to go to the heart of where the Demons live...without Mom?!"

"Yes, I am. And I'm not asking you to do anything. If you choose to go, it will be _your_ decision, not Mine. If you wish to go visit Vanagdrasil, I will make it so. But only under the conditions My Brother has laid out," the Lord said, making it clear that there would be no negotiation on this point.

Ulfryn thought feverishly, her mind a scale-works measuring out the risks and threats vs. the possible gains. It had taken almost 30 Earthrealm years for them to return; she had plenty of time to steel her nerves against the proposition of traveling into the Demon's Logorinth. But all along, her courage was bolstered by the fact that Mother would be with her. Now that the Almighty had pretty much barred Mom from going to Vanagdrasil with them..._everything_ was changed!

"Consider this. If you were the Regent of the Demons, and you knew of a Goddess who had stolen undetected into the deepest reaches of the Ygg Logorinth's most-protected main computer network, would _you_ allow her to travel freely within _your_ Realm? Mind you, Skuld managed to steal in and out of the Axial CorePlex before _I_ was even aware of it. This has never been done before. My Brother Oni-sama couldn't even do it."

Ulfryn couldn't argue around that point at all. But her thoughts slammed to a halt when it registered that the Lord had said that Mom has accomplished something that the Lord of the Demons couldn't even do! She suddenly felt safe; if anything threatened she and Pryzm while they were in Vanagdrasil, chances were really good that Mom could rescue them. If she could hack the Ygg AxialPlex without Him knowing about it, she could definitely find a way to travel to Vanagdrasil, permit or not.

"Okay, we'll go!"

"Ulfryn?!" her sister protested. "ULFRYN!! Are you trying to be a _spazz_!! Vanagdrasil is the _Demon's Realm_! As in D..E..M..O..N..S!! We can't just go dancing in there and do whatever we want! A..and Demons are _mean_! A..and Demons are _cruel_! And Demons are..."

"I can't take it anymore!" Ulfryn shouted, quickly rising from her formal seated position. She stood on her tiptoes...and almost floated off the disc she and her sister were seated upon.

"I've got to _know_! I've got to know why I'm seeing what could possibly be other members of our family. You don't see it the same way I do, sis...because it isn't happening to you! But it's happening to me!! T..there's some times when a girl has to know a thing, no matter how much effort it takes her. Like finding out if a boy is right for her to date! Well..._this_ is more important than checking out guys at the mall! I've gone this far already! A..and I..I'll _go alone_ if you don't come with me, Pryzm!"

As soon as she finished speaking, Ulfryn instantly wanted to take back what she had just said. But she had done what the Lord had told her to do, listen to her kokoro...and she couldn't change what was in her deepmost heart. She wished upon a star that Pryzm would agree to go with her.

"O..of course, I'll go with you, Ulfryn! I can't just abandon my baby sister when she's going on her first trip to Vanagdrasil!" Pryzm said awkwardly, almost apologetic.

"I am _not_ your baby sister!" Ulfryn shouted angrily. "I'm your _twin_ sister! Don't you pull that 'baby sister' stuff here, especially in front of the Lord!"

"Why not?!" Przym volleyed back. "You're the one who's acting all selfish and stuff. Just like a baby! Little sweet 'got to have it my way or the highway' Ulfryn!"

_"Grrr...Pryzm..." "Rrrr...Ulfryn..."_

Completely forgetting that she was a few meters away from the Sovereign of Yggdrasil, Ulfryn stared down her older sister, trying to look as mean as she could...trying not to flinch.

"Cease this childish nonsense immediately!!" the Lord said in a forceful voice that literally shook the surrounding air.

"Now you've gone and done it!" Pryzm managed to squeeze in, right before Ulfryn felt her face blanch pale with apprehensiveness.

"Excuse me? What part of 'nonsense' didn't you understand, young lady?" the Lord asked in an icy voice.

Ulfryn giggled.

"That's enough! From _both_ of you! One more antagonistic word from either of you and I will mute your voices for the rest of this meeting," the Lord said, waving His decorative fan with a frisk agitation as He leaned forward to regard Ulfryn and her sister.

"Surely, once your mother finds out how poorly you've been behaving in the middle of an audience with Me, she will no doubt deal with you most suitably."

Ulfryn heard a 'click' as she clamped her mouth tight-shut.

"Children..." the Lord sighed to Himself. He faced each girl and looked them squarely in the eyes.

"Despite your temperaments, you are both very...special...girls. It is exceedingly rare for a Goddess to have mortal children. In fact they cannot," the Lord said slowly.

"What!! So why are _we_ here?" Pryzm promptly asked.

"Ah, I was just going to explain this. Since your mother was so heart-fond of the Earthrealm mortal man whom she had fallen in love with, I decided to allow it," the Lord answered. "I could not bear to see one of My Children's fondest wishes go unfulfilled."

"You mean..._You_ made it possible for Mom to have me and Pryzm?" Ulfryn asked.

"Yes, I made it so. I realized that your mother was not only a very special and loving Soul...which is an essential requirement for a Norn...but that she possessed the necessary breadth of maternal charm and wisdom that would allow her to take on the difficult task of rearing you girls away from Yggdrasil. Your twinned nature makes each of you more ambitious...and much more volatile in insight...than all other Goddesses. Your mortal nature cannot be disregarded in this respect; but you both have to learn to trust each other even more," He explained in a lecturing voice.

Mom had told her that the Lord was literally the Father of all the Gods. According to her, it was a very complicated process, the creation of a new God or Goddess. The Almighty's role was somewhat of equivalent to that of both godfather and midwife. Mom had never mentioned that He was responsible in any way for her and Pryzm. She had always assumed that Mom could have kids, just like any other Earthrealm woman. But the Lord...

Perhaps Mom didn't mention this because she wanted her and Pryzm to hear it personally from Kami-sama! This whole journey was about the precious qualities of family...and Ulfryn had just met her "High-Father". Tears welled up in her eyes; this Being who was the Ruler of all the vacant skies, in all the planets, in all the Multiverses...had loved her Mother enough to boon her a miracle! And by booning Mom a miracle, He had given she and Pryzm Life...and the best Mother in all of the OmniArc!!

"Sometimes, circumstances call upon you to tuck your strength _within_ your appreciation of each other, so that it only appears to be hidden...while in truth, it is ever-present...allowing you to strive together for the good result."

Ulfryn felt a lumping in her throat as she realized that the Lord was talking about her and Pryzm. Despite all the teasing and the fact that Pryzm was a tomboy, and the fact that Pryzm _was_ the elder sister, even if only by an hour or so...Ulfryn felt His words sinking into her. Pryzm was willing to travel to _Vanagdrasil_ with her, just to help her learn about why she was having these weird dreams.

"As for your 'dreams', Ulfryn...the fact that you were sense the afterimages of these beings...was a planned irregularity. It is all part of a plan without a plan," the Lord answered.

"HUH?!" the two exclaimed. "What does a 'planned irregularity' mean?"

Instead of answering them, the Lord floated down from His ceremonial dais until He was hovering in front of she and her sister, His robes fluttering, His bearing princely. Ulfryn looked up at him wordlessly, her eyes sparkling with a profound respect.

With a paternal gesture, He patted them both on the head.

"These are your visas to Vanagdrasil," He said with a warm smile as He handed a droplet of glowing rose-colored energy into Ulfryn and her sister's hands. "I have to attend to many other matters, but I want to assure you that as long as you have these visas, you are under My protection. No Demon, noble or foul, will dare to harm you...lest he or she would face the fullness of My wrath! And My Brother's!"

Ulfryn looked at the tiny glowing crimson pearl in the palm of her hand. Curious, she looked at Pryzm's, which looked identical.

"While you are in Vanagdrasil, I expect both of you girls to be on your best behavior...as if you were meeting the Sports Music Assemble People for the first time," He noted.

"Sports Music Assemble People?" Pryzm asked.

"SMAP, you dummy! Don't you know anything?" Ulfryn answered, fully getting the thrust of His point.

"Ahhh, another one of your idol-boy bands," Pryzm sighed.

"Um-hmm!" Ulfryn nodded excitedly, her imaginings turning towards that most kawaii of idol guys, the lead-singer in the group.

"Waitaminute!!" she shouted, her face screwed up with astonishment. "Does this mean that the Lord...er, Your Majesty...actually listens to J-Pop?!"

Ulfryn could only answer her twin's consternation with a heart-felt breeze of giggles.

_"Ahem!"_

Signaled thus by the Lord, both girls bowed deeply to Him, and then he waved them off, concluding the interview.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Falcyn turned his head as the portal opened...and did a double-take as he noticed a Demoness float in. She was dressed up in the very height of Demoness style: an elaborate affair with a low cut blouse, doublet-jackets, a long leather-fur cape with avant-garde Vanagdrasil design motifs woven into it, leather leggings, dozens of intricately-crafted Ixodenum bangles on each wrist, diamond-studded boots, holographic evening gloves. Totally formal, as if she was going to have an audience with the Dark One Himself. But this was Yggdrasil, not the Realm! Could she have gotten lost getting off one of the Swarp Gates?

Then he almost choked as he recognized _who_ it was.

"Oh shit! We're royally screwed now!" Falcyn said under his breath as he nudged Sygyn with his shoulder. They both watched, dumbfounded, as their _Mother_ floated over to the reception desk to register with the pink-haired attendant. Mom had dressed to the hilt in formal Demon Queen attire, no doubt because she was visiting one of the Reception Nodes for the God's Lord Almighty.

"W..why?" he heard his twin sister grasp in a frail voice of wear-thin amazement. Sygyn was almost scared out of her wits...but at least her voice betrayed her fear. Falcyn was certain that he and his sister were going to get grounded _forever_ once they got back to the Earthrealm.

Mom could only be here because they were in big-time, deep-shit trouble!!

The two pink-haired Goddesses heralding the reception desk were staring at their Mother with a wide-eyed agitation. No doubt, they had never seen a Demon Queen dressed in full regalia. How often does a Senior First Class License Demoness personally attend to matters at the God's Visa Emportal Office? Being desk-girls in a little waiting area, Mom's presence certainly took them out of their element! One of the receptionists manifested a Scanning Globe, the same thing she had done when Aunt Skuld and their party had arrived. But the girl with the light-carnation colored ponytails was shivering; the Scanning Globe in her hand was shaking unsteadily as she hovered around Mom, scanning her. Mother smiled at the two young Goddesses reassuringly as they worked to confirm her identity; when they finished, she then bowed politely to them. The receptionists bowed as deep as they could in return, almost touching their foreheads to their knees. Falcyn knew that his Mom was behaving with a forced diplomacy...if this had been anywhere else, she would have warred the girls' nervousness against them, just to amuse herself.

"H..h..here's your paperwork, ma'am!" one of the pink-haired girls said diffidently, proffering their Mother a 'sign-in' holocube. Falcyn watched as his Mother reconstituted the holocube into a holosphere, registering herself with the receptionist.

"Falcyn! Sygyn! What in the Bless is going on here?!" she immediately shouted once she finished signing in, the angry disappointment in her voice so qualified, it caused the two Goddesses at the reception desk to duck underneath it. Every other Goddess quickly fled the room.

"I just got summoned here by the God's Lord Himself, with no explanation given at all! And now I was just told that I'm to take you and my two nieces to our HomeRealm! What did you two have to do with this!"

Falcyn's mind was awhirl with the possibilities...all of them lies, all of them possibly resulting in certain disaster if Mom found out the truth.

Which she probably already knew.

There's nothing like the stress of dancing on a scalpel-sharp knife-edge, especially when the wielder of the blade was Mom! Thankfully, a voice interrupted the silence.

"Aunt Mara, we really need you to come with us," he heard two little-girl voices plead.

"And do what?" his Mom answered, hands on her hips.

"We need to check out something with the Mnoexic Network, in you guys's Mainframe." Falcyn looked at Sygyn and then back at his Mother. Mom's face was overcast with an unreadable expression.

"Oh...man!!" Mara lamented as her niece's words soaked her with the proverbial ice-water bucket of ill-ease.

"What have you kids gotten me into this time?!"

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

_"Moving to Imari soon...Gonna be a tonkotsu tycoon..."_

"Falcyn, stow it!" Mara shouted as she mock-punched her son on the back of his head. "Or at least get the lyrics right! Now is not the time to be singing Earthrealm folksongs. You're supposed to be listening to Psycroptic, not enka."

"It's not a folk song, it's Frank Zappa!"

Mara was waiting patiently while Skuld was lecturing Pryzm and Ulfryn about the basics of Vanagdrasilian protocols for visitors. Nearby, the Swarp Hypernality loomed in the columnar open interior of the Swarp Tower; a pillar of blue-white light with streaks of silver riding scree up and down its length. Naturally, her daughter Sygyn was regarding it with a sharply calculating eye, no doubt trying to figure out what was powering the Swarp Hypernality. If she learned its secret, she would be the first Demon or God to figure it out.

The Swarp Tower was filled with Divine beings of every sort, almost all of them Gods and Goddesses. Bored with waiting, Mara noticed how a few of the young Gods would glance at her two or three times, obvious attracted to her. She was still dressed in her 'Sunday best', so to speak. If she could catch the eye of the Dark Sovereign with this outfit, then alluring young Gods with her charms was mere and inevitable. So why not take advantage of the situation while her younger sister lectured her nieces? She noticed a handful of teenaged Gods ogling her; Mara would smile back at them coyly...and then the young Gods would float off, their faces flushed with embarrassment.

Young Boy-Gods are such fun creatures to play with!

She was more than a little worried about this "mission" that her kids kept yapping about. Not to mention that she was chaperoning her sister's kids, who had never been to Vanagdrasil before. And the Lord Himself had granted them their passports! Her kids, Falcyn and Sygyn, had vacationed to Vanagdrasil a lot, and even traveled to Yggdrasil a few times. But Pryzm and Ulfryn had never been to the Demon's Realm. Maybe it was because of that over-protective sister of hers. Mara grumbled inaudibly; she remembered how the two girls used to get scared just by visiting her Demon Lair when they were in kindergarten. So what if she had bats flying around one of her living rooms? Fortunately, they had outgrown that a few years ago...but a magnitude of difference exists when once contrasts her Lair on the Earthrealm with Vanagdrasil itself. Even though her Lair recently won an award for "Most Hauntingly Mysterious Non-Vanagdrasil Demoness Lair", it was tame compared to the environs of Vanagdrasil. And they were going to the very _center_ of the Demon's Realm, not one of those outlying Multiverses on the fringes that was demographically part-Demon, part-God. Pryzm and Ulfryn would fully be in the midst of the awesome calamity of beauty that was Vanagdrasil.

She just hoped that the two girls could keep a grip on their sanity; even some adult Gods and Goddesses wound up having what the Earthrealm mortals would call a "nervous breakdown" simply by being in Vanagdrasil. Pryzm could probably handle it...she had her Mom's tough stubborn streak. But Ulfryn was so prepossessed with these 'dreams' she claimed to have, Mara recently began to wonder if the younger of her nieces hadn't _already_ lost it. Beyond this, Ulfryn's personality was completely 'girly-girl'; she was the kind of child who would faint at the sign of blood.

"So this isn't going to be some pleasure cruise!" Mara reminded herself, her tanned skin rendered light blue by the glow of the nearby Swarp Hypernality. The thoughts of skin mellowed her anxieties. Hopefully, she could find time to share some Flare with a young Demon...or if she was really lucky, Oni-sama herself. After all, she _was_ one of His wives.

Flaring with Him would be worth the whole trip! The Dark Lord was the most exquisite of lovers; his favor only meted out to the most deserving, most beautiful of Demonesses.

Skuld had briefed her on the general purpose of their excursion a few hours earlier. Mara couldn't help but smile when her little sister confessed to her that she was being punished by Kami-sama for sneaking the kids into the very core of the Yggdrasil Xeomn. The punishment her Lord had exacted was impressive in its irony...almost worthy of a sanction the Dark One would dish out in reprisal for a minor transgression! Of course, if a Demon or Demoness ever snuck into the Mnoexic Network of the Vang Mainframe, they would probably pay for their error in judgment with millennia of torture.

"There's no way _I'd_ do something so suicidal!" Mara thought to herself. Still, the idea of having Skuld design a security system that would be so secure, she herself couldn't breach it...that was quite a promising form of discipline, as far as the God's Lord was concerned. Mara couldn't help but feel admiration for His genius. Besides, it would be a good exercise for her younger sister, and it would keep her from worrying too much about her kids. She just hoped Skuld's husband could handle the household by himself for the couple weeks it would take. Mara wished that she could had some exercise to occupy her time, so that she could work off the frustration the "Divine Brat Wrecking Crew" had wrought upon her.

As for the kids and their Quad Adventure, Mara was still royally upset with them. They had simply disappeared from Odeyn and Freiija's mansion in the middle of the night, and were gone for almost _60 years_ relative Earthrealm time! Odeyn and Freiija had graciously offered to let her stay in the detached mansion, but Mara had a Demoness Office to run. So she returned to her Lair on the Earthrealm, somewhat certain that Falcyn and Sygyn and her nieces would be okay. After all, Skuld had also gone missing after briefly discussing with her what she assumed the kids were trying to do. She had even counseled her younger sis to do whatever it takes if she thought it best. And she had certainly done that!

But what irked her the most was that neither Falcyn or Sygyn had made an effort to contact her. One call on the HotLine, or a message relayed through the Vang Mnoex would have sufficed. Instead..._nothing_! Her two kids had simply _bailed_! Mara didn't have a clue that they were trying to sneak into the heart of the Ygg computer, a journey of almost 30 years each way. If she had known this, she would have killed them! Well, not really, but she would have at least frozen their allowances for the rest of 2024!

Yet...it must have been _some_ adventure.

Falcyn was fast approaching the age where he would be old enough to want to take driver's ed classes in high school on the Earthrealm. And Sygyn wanted her to buy her a new lab in her room, so she could start delving into Intermediate Alchemistry.

Mara grinned to herself. They might have surprise or two coming their way, after pulling _this_ kind of stunt!

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

_"One of the really cool things about the Swarp Hypernalities is how you use them. You think about where you want to go, hover-fly into the column of blue light, and then _--you're there-_-! It's totally awesome, like diving into a swimming pool...but instead of splashing into water, you splash into a vortex of energy that can take you anywhere. Of course, you have to know where you were going! Which was why traveling via Swarp Gates between Yggdrasil and Vanagdrasil is a little bit different than traveling within Yggdrasil. Mom says that the UmbraPlexiar system of Aumatrices seems to strictly regulate transit between Yggdrasil and Vanagdrasil by an as-of-yet undiscovered means. For example, if you try to go into the exclusively Demonic Multiverses of the Vanagdrasil Logorinth without a Passport-Visa of Energy, you simply 'bounce back' to the Swarp Gate you started from. And whenever anyone travels _--between-- _Logorinths, the only way they can travel is strictly Swarp Gate-to-Swarp Gate. You can't depart Yggdrasil and reappear any place you want to within the Vang Logorinth. For this reason, first timers traveling from Yggdrasil to Vanagdrasil always have to have an escort from the other realm. This is necessary for two reasons: the Gods and Demons learned that first-time travel between the two Logorinths was impossible without an escort 'from the other side', as the UmbraPlexiar didn't allow it. Secondly, someone had to be there with you to provide assistance while you acclimate yourself to Vanagdrasil. _

_Despite everything, I'm feeling both happy and scared about having the opportunity to go there. It's like a big-time school field trip in a way! But Vanagdrasil certainly isn't Tokyo Disneyland. According to Mom, the first few moments in Vanagdrasil are normally quite disorienting to any God or Goddess who traveled there._

_I'm also really worried about my sister. I don't think she has any idea of what she's getting us all into. Of course, I don't have any idea either. And I think the ghosties are making her sick. She doesn't have all her energy; she's slowed down some. I hope this isn't true. But I'm worried._

_That's it for now. I'll write again when we get there._

_ Pryzm's Blog, 11 March 2024"_

Pryzm sent the entry to her website, and then shut off her PalmPad Diary and tucked it inside her jeans. She'd been keeping her little web journal for a year or so, with her Mom's permission and supervision. The amusing thing about her weblog was the number of people who had emailed her, praising her for having such a vivid imagination for an 11-year old. She actually had a loyal group of fans, many of them her age! Naturally, her older readers thought she was _inventing_ all of this...that all these little stories about Gods and Demons and magic and spells were products of the imagination of a young girl with too much time on her hands.

Her blog entries were a private joke between her and Ulfryn. It was especially funny whenever some fledgling manga artist...who was probably just some kid in junior high school...would sign her guestbook, promising to make her rich by selling her stories to Shonen Jump or something, as long as he or she could do the artwork. As if! If she ever was serious about making a manga based on her 'fictional' adventures, she'd have Sygyn do the illustrations.

"Vanagdrasil was different in almost every way than Yggdrasil," her Mom had cautioned her and Ulfryn. "The thoughtforms are different there...you won't be able to telepathize as easily and you won't understand almost everything you sense. The environment is completely different as well. It has its own set of Rules that don't apply to anything here. Its own beauty and horror, so to speak. You can't try and interpret everything there through the eyes of a Goddess...or an Earthrealm mortal girl. And if you get scared, remember why you're there!"

She kind of knew what to expect, but she didn't know _what_ to expect.

"Are you guys ready?!" Falcyn hollered in an excited voice, waving a hand high over his head. Pryzm noticed that he had taken off his glasses for some reason. Maybe it had something to do with the Swarp Hypernality.

"You're going to be okay! And I'm going to make sure we have some _fun_ while we're there!" her cousin Sygyn promised. She normally wore her hair gathered in two pony-tails, Sailor-Moon style...but now she had her hair tied back with a single red ribbon that made her pink highlights stand out even more.

"C'mon, Pryzm and Ulfryn," Aunt Mara said, wedging between them and wrapping an arm around each girl's shoulder.

Pryzm walked up the balcony ledge, feeling like a parachutist who was going to take her first jump out of the plane. Nearby, the Swarp Hypernality crackled with energy; a will-o-the-wisp rendered into a grace of sparkle.

Taking a last longing look at her Mother, she waved goodbye. Then she flexed herself, leapt outwards from the platform...and dived into the Hypernality.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

NIEFLGARD AUMATRIX VII:

"Uhhhh...I feel...really dizzy..." Ulfryn gasped.

"Here, take this!" her Aunt offered, giving her two Seals. "This will alleviate the nausea symptoms."

Ulfryn applied both Seals to her forehead, on each side of her Goddess emblem, and then gazed out.

Her jaw dropped open of its own accord as she beheld Vanagdrasil for the first time.

They were standing on a platform ledge, just like the one they had 'leapt' off of a split-second earlier. But the floor was a complicated tile-works of dark-metal patterns, not the silvery metal of the Yggdrasil Swarp Tower. It took a few seconds for her senses to initially adjust, because they initially _just didn't want to._ Everything seemed to be a photo-negative protest of the sights and sound that she was used to!

Nothing...even Mom's careful preparation...could have fully prepared her for this!

Mom had used mind-links and near-Probes to try and convey a sense of the place to she and Pryzm before they left, hoping this would ease their anxieties. Ulfryn realized that it was almost a riddle of futility: how could a Goddess's mind even begin to convey the depth of the Demon's Realm?

She could hear a deep subsonic throbbing coming from somewhere distant and nearby. The Demon's Swarp Tower was _dark_, as dark as night...but yet, the tower interior was cast in a blood-red glow. It was like one of those high-end PlayStation X games, where the heroine is suddenly transported into Dante's Inferno or some intergalactic war. Looking over her shoulder, Ulfryn observed the Swarp Hypernality.

It was bright red!

Another wake of light-headedness threatened to overtake her. The 'energy juice' of the Demon's Swarp Hypernality reminded her too much of blood! Ulfryn felt her knees seemingly turning into jelly as the nightmarish place seemed to crush in on her. She stumbled without taking a single step, her legs giving out from under her, but her Aunt quickly stepped up and braced her from falling with a tight grip on her arm.

All she could see...were _Demons_! Boy Demons, Girl Demons...Demonesses dressed in all sorts of outfits ranging from holographic battle armor to outfits that belonged in a whips-and-chains S&M catalogue. Young Demon teenagers, their orange eyes glowing with mischief and passion, riding some sort of orange-liquid 'skateboards' that suggested mercury in zero-G...

"Well, whaddya'd expect?!" Falcyn stated, acknowledging and challenging her rising panic at the same time.

"Falcyn, stay out of her mind!" Aunt Mara snapped sharply. "She's just arrived here, for His Darkness's sake! Look at her! The poor thing's overwhelmed by all of this! It's her first time visiting our HomeRealm, so could you guys give her a break? And stay out of Pryzm's mind too! That goes for you too, Sygyn! If I sense either of you trying anything funny, I'm going to call this whole trip off and send you all back to Chiba!"

"Auntie..._don't_!!" Ulfryn pleaded, her firm voice surprisingly strong despite the fact that she felt as weak as an out-of-control as an autumn maple leaf in a late-summer storm.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Pryzm was absolutely stunned by the vision of crimson shadows that filled her with such dreadful recoil. She bit her lip, wanting to run back into the Swarp Hypernality and go back from where this had all started. Return to safety, return to a place where menace didn't pervade every sublime hook of sight, every silent flow of invisibility. But her feet were firm upon the wetworks metal of the 'landing platform' of the Demon's Swarp Tower. There was no going back now.

Besides, she had promised Ulfryn that she would accompany her to Vanagdrasil. But now she was regretting it. _Really_ regretting it.

"Vanagdrasil..." she gasped, the multi-toned word flowing off her tongue like stale sandpaper. The Demon's Swarp Tower was constructed of some kind of dark matter that Pryzm had never seen before; at once metallic, crystalline and holographic. The engineer in her mind was too subdued to shift into analysis mode...but she was overawed. Overawed, overwhelmed, over-stimulated...

Her confidence was despoiled as she gazed past the busy concourse of the Swarp Tower. Unexpectedly, she and the others had arrived at the ground floor of the Swarp Tower, instead of any of the trillions of floors above. Was this how it always was when a Goddess first comes to Vanagdrasil?

"This place is totally crack-whacked!" she whispered.

"No, it's not!" Sygyn promptly rejoined. This place is _smokin_! "It's totally _rad_! You're just not used to it yet, Cousin Pryzm! You don't see me getting all wimpy and judgmental whenever we go to _your_ Realm, do you?"

The older girl had a point. Mom had cautioned her and Ulfryn...especially her...to avoid confusing the "unknown" with the "undesirable".

_"In a way,"_ Mom had said just before they left, _"this will be a true test of your Goddess abilities. If you are truly open-hearted, you'll be open-minded. The beliefs that served Mankind as articles of faith in the 16th century...do they apply to the world as it is today? Certainly not! A Goddess must be able to bend with Time and Space, like a newly-grassed bamboo shoot, so that she can grow steadfast and yet flow with the tides of Change."_

Those tides of Change were stabbing at Pryzm's senses like a battery of kitchen knives. In the distance, she could see the grand entrance and the foyer of the Swarp Tower. She could hear the wind howling like a pack of wolves. The air smelled like charcoal. The air itself seemed to assault her, as if it hated her. Pryzm tried to ignore it and look beyond the Swarp Tower to examine the Swarp Gate platform.

The sky was black!

It was eerie. Everything new strangeness she saw seemed to roll off the balls of her eyes. Pryzm ran her hand through her short bob of dark-brown hair, just to make sure that it was there. No...the sky wasn't entirely black. If you took the powder blue of the Earthrealm's sky and rendered it in ink-black, and then transformed the white clouds into flame...you'd have a pretty good visual impression of the 'sky' of Vanagdrasil. But there were no stars to accent the colors. Nearby, a group of bald Demonesses her age were cheerfully chatting. With a start, Pryzm acknowledged that she could 'hear' the thought-impressions of the Demon girls...but she couldn't understand it at all. They might have all been speaking English, for all she knew. This must be the Demon's Language! If she was only another year older, she could have been fitted with one of those Metatranseal devices, so she could understand what everyone was saying. This was another reason why they didn't allow Goddesses who were of minority to go to Vanagdrasil! No wonder the UmbraPlexiar system insisted on travel with 'travel guides'!

"Bald's in, this millennia," Sygyn commented, nodding towards the coven of young Demonesses. "I'm glad I don't live here, I'd hate having to be bald just to fit in with my classmates. Me...I like having my long hair!"

As she spun in a circle with her arms straight out, magic-girl style, the nearby Demonesses giggled tauntingly until Falcyn floated next to his sister and shot them a withering glance of anger.

"This is going to be great..." Pryzm observed sarcastically to herself with irony. She looked over to see Aunt Mara still aiding her younger sis. Ulfryn looked worse for wear, her pale face reminded Pryzm of the time her sis had caught a bad case of the Christmas Flu that went around Tokyo a couple years ago. Obviously, she was struggling to weather the transition to the Demon's Realm. Pryzm worried about her; after all, Ulfryn was the reason why everyone had come here in the first place.

This dangerous, malevolent place...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

It took a couple hours for her sister Ulfryn to 'catch her wind', so Pryzm found herself waiting with the others in the lobby of the Swarp Tower. Even with the calming spell Aunt Mara had cast over her younger sis, Ulfryn's eyes were still rapidly darting around with uncertainty, like a little girl spooked by dust bunnies in the attic. Finally, Aunt Mara managed to draw Ulfryn out of her shell-shocked state with a promise to get her some ice cream at the nearby mall.

"They have _ice cream_ in Vanagdrasil?!" Pryzm had wondered, sheerly amazed. If the Demons had ice cream, then it was probably confected with weird flavors like "Newt", "Centipede" and "Cockroach". Pryzm quickly stalled her mental ramblings, realizing that she was judging the Demons once again. Something simple like ice cream, and she was already flavoring it with all the repugnant ingredients of a proverbial witch's brew.

"The only cockroaches here are in one of the Zoos," she heard Aunt whisper in a low voice, a sly grin on her face. "But I see a couple Goddesses who may join their ranks if they don't stop having bad thoughts about their hosts..."

Pryzm gulped deeply. Aunt Mara had already broken her promise; she had read Pryzm's mind.

"Hey, I had to test the waters," her Aunt elaborated, seemingly for Pryzm's benefit. "We're on different wavelengths, and I need to be in constant sync with you two girls on a lot of levels. For your own safety. I promised your Mom that I'd watch out for you, and that means being attuned to your unique Goddess thoughtforms and vibrations so I can telepathize with you. We need the four of you to be in touch with each other at all times. Especially if we get in a situation where we need to communicate among ourselves without intruders or eavesdroppers. I'm just calibrating all your thoughtforms...think of it as setting up a private discussion group on the internet with just the five of us."

Pryzm reassessed Aunt Mara's initial chiding. Now it made perfect sense; Mara would have to create communication channels between she and the others that would be completely private. Which wouldn't be easy with her and Ulfryn's particular Goddess signatures, Metanative and otherwise. True to her word, as soon as they left the Swarp Tower, Aunt Mara steered them to "the best ice cream shop on Nieflgard VII!" Pryzm was amazed at the activity in the mall of stores; the Demons were just as passionate about shopping as Gods! She almost thought for a moment that the Demons were actually using _money_...but as she observed some 'transactions', she realized that there was no currency or trade being used at all. Her Aunt explained that the vendors were there simply because they liked meeting other Demons. The most noticeable difference was how the Demon shopped; they loved to haggle to the point where they'd actually trade insults and even get in fights. With the absence of a commerce mentality, Pryzm guessed that the contentiousness was some form of weird recreation that only made sense to Demons. Something else was unnerving her. Because of the scarcity of Gods and Goddesses in this section of Vanagdrasil, Pryzm felt all kinds of curious Demonic eyes closely watching her and her sister. Eventually, they pulled to a halt in front of a small kiosk styled after a New York City hotdog stand, complete with shade umbrella.

"Eeeep!" she heard Ulfryn pipe as a dwarf-Demon suddenly popped up from behind the cart. Pryzm's reaction was almost the opposite of her sister's; she wanted to giggle brightly. The Demon looked like one of those munchkin midgets from the Wizard of Oz...only Demonic. He appeared harmless, with his long nose, thick moustache and two small horns popping out the crown of his forehead. Sitting cross-legged on a cotton-candy cloud, he was maybe a meter in height. He smiled at them brightly, and was even favoring her and Ulfryn, remarking about how rare it was for girl-Goddesses to be seen in this part of the Vanagdrasil, let alone coming to his ice cream stand. Pryzm wondered if her Mom had ever visited this particular stand. Mom consumed mass-quantities of ice cream back home…

"Hmmm...let's see. You two look like you're from the Earthrealm. Lemme see you up close," the dwarf-Demon said, floating off his candy-flavored dais and swiftly circuiting around she and her sister. "Yep, definitely from the Earthrealm, or at least have been there. Picked the one New Yorker Demon out of the whole bunch of us, too! That means you have good taste...well, as far Goddesses can have good taste, I suppose."

"Aha! You look just like Skuld's kids! I bet you _are_ Skuld's kids!" the dwarf-Demon shouted, suddenly manifesting himself in his full size. "I knew there was something different about you...you're both half-mortal!" He was just over two meters tall, with a wily expression that immediately marked him with an animated, quirky personality. He thanked Mara profusely for customing his ice cream kiosk, and sprinkled extra treats on everyone's ice cream.

She went for the licorice ice cream. And it was _delicious_! Clearly the equal of any ice cream she had tasted anywhere else. It just looked a little funny, perhaps because of the black sky overhead, which was now thinly streaked with ribbons of dark red. The more acclimated she felt, the more Pryzm wanted to explore the place. She wanted to check out the attached parklands on the Swarp Gate platform, just to see what kind of incredible animals were in the zoo. No doubt, there were probably many 'lands' there which had Earthrealm-like environments, just like there were 'lands' in the parks of Yggdrasil which had all sorts of engineered terraforms.

Gazing upwards, she could make out a rose-dark Aquasun slowly moving across the sky, a speck of alizarin against the canopy. As her eyes adjusted, Pryzm noticed that the bleakness in the sky wasn't entirely black...it had 'pools' of deep dark-velvet and near-black navy blue. It was a mix of all sorts of different types of darkness.

Maybe Mom was right about this place. It did have a sententious character, but it was also pretty cool in the sublime department as well! As her eyes...or rather, her mind...slowly ordered the alien-ness of Vanagdrasil even further, Pryzm became aware that the black sky was an illusion, or perhaps a moboroshi...a phantom awareness. She should have known it all along!

After all, they _were_ in the middle of the Nieflgard Aumatrix.

Overhead, the glow seemed to absorb all the attention she could pour into it. Slender contrails ribboned across in complex patterns, almost the color-inverse of the Asgard Aumatrix. Pryzm shifted her regard to the horizon, and saw that the Swarp Gate platform was linked to the rainbowed BridgePath in much the same manner as Yggdrasil. Palatial sculptures lined either side of the thoroughfare as they floated out towards the BridgePath.

Occasionally, her attention would be revolted by the obscene. The symmetry of some of the structures were simply too _wrong_ for her tastes. A series of erotic statues on either side of the link to the bridge forced Pryzm to keep her eyes front-and-center; she was embarrassed at the sexual statuary which blatantly depicted ritualized ecstatic trances from many different religions. How could the Demons be so frank about sex? She felt the blood rushing through her head.

"Remember, Pryzm...the reason you find these statues revolting is because you've lived on the Earthrealm long enough to absorb their cultural sentiments towards sexuality. While enticing people with sexually-charged ads and music, the Earthrealm media also depicts sexuality as revolting. Pretty mixed up, if you ask me! This is because most mortals have a detached perspective towards their lives. Sexuality is a _glory_, not a perversion," her Aunt explained, obviously noticing Pryzm's attempt to ignore the pornographic art.

"We Demon's believe that Chaos lies within Sexuality; thus, we are less 'inhibited' than our counterparts, the Gods. There is a certain 'edge', if you will, when intimacy is involved...for in being intimate, one discovers the Chaos within themselves. It's a cycle, not a paradox. When one can embrace the Chaos for what it is, rather than pooling it within a hue of shame, they can aspire to greater heights of Soul and Spirit. Think of the Earthrealm's esoteric traditions, such as Tantra, Tao Qia, or Kabbalah. Don't be locked into the thinking that "sex is love" or "love is sex". On a grosser level of sentience, sex is not Love, nor is Love a manifestation of sex. But on a refined level, the same is true. By acclimating to the most 'spiritual' levels of non-Loving sex, one can redeem Love and Chaos. And this awareness leads to that special place where there's no difference between absolute Lust and absolute Love. Finding an equity between the two is essential for Demons; it is the jumping off point to develop the ability to Flare, either in or out of the flesh. This is this principle these art works represent."

Pryzm was too embarrassed to ask any questions or remark about what her Aunt had just said. She noticed that both her cousins were colored at the height of embarrassment; evidently, they didn't share their Mom's view about the 'sexual liberation' in the Demon rubric of inclination. Not to mention their Mom was giving a lecture about sex right in front of them. She almost wanted to stick her tongue out at Falcyn to get him back for reading Ulfryn's mind earlier, but checked herself. Watching him squirm with embarrassment was payback enough. Sygyn was glancing in every direction but theirs, her face blue with embarrassment.

They had only been in Vanagdrasil just a couple hours and she had already tasted an exquisite licorice ice cream and had then had encountered actual pornography! The black sky had turned into a dark rust-red color with blotches of color matching that of the Aumatrix construct, with orange streaks of light mixed in. She could sense the chatter and clamor of thousands of Divine voices, but couldn't understand what they were saying. Already, a small group of young Demon boys, probably no older than 110 or 120 millennia, were giving her the eye.

"Hiiii!" a voice hailed as soon as their troupe gained onto the polychrome-hued BridgePath. The voice sounded to Pryzm's ears of a nosy vanity; like a mixture of gossiping middle-age-housewife neighbor and self-obsessed actress. Approaching them was a scantily-dressed woman with dark tanned features, slit-narrow green eyes and a bright red six-pointed star in the middle of her head. All the Demons and Demonesses near her seemed to grant her a wide berth; and then Pryzm noticed that they were all bowing to her with deep respect. She bristled with sexual vigor...and a regal bearing.

Her ankles, wrists and shoulders were accessorized with thick wands of gold, which looked remarkable considering that most of her long legs and arms were left bare by the scanty thing that seemed to function as her 'dress'. Her hair was platinum-white at the crown, fading into a very light orange at then ends; it was pulled back with a thick braid of gold into a huge shag pony-tail that showered all the way down her back until it reached her feet. Several long strands of hair floated around her, each long bang of hair ornamented Chinese-style with gold balls and hoops. Instead of wearing boots like many of the Demons and Demonesses she had encountered, this woman wore white mid-heel pumps with gold trim, which seemed completely 'office' in contrast to the generously sexy chic of her outfit. The front of her black and red 'dress', if it could be called that, extended open all the way past her navel, reveal the full sides of her breasts. The skirt was slit almost all the way to her waist, so that a daring portion of her thigh and hips was open to the air. Leather 'mini-straps' seemed to corset along the open plunge of her dress, drawing attention to the overly-erotic allure of her open front. Pryzm quickly formed the opinion that this Demoness's outfit was definitely fashion-disaster tasteless. Only a Demoness would be wacky enough to wear something so contrived and ostentatious! Her outfit gave the impression that it was going to drift off her body at any given moment.

To her surprise, she noticed Aunt Mara acting all sulky and wary in reaction to this Demoness, who was approaching them with a purposeful intent. Oblivious to the fact than an absolute stranger was floating up to their group, her style-crazy twin sister Ulfryn was cooing, clearly impressed with the aggressive elaboration of the Demoness's dress.

"Hi...my name is Hild!" the dark-tanned lady announced brightly, without even waiting for Mara to formally introduce her.

"Greetings of Respect, Elder Sister," Aunt Mara said, crossing one arm across her breast and bowing with deep formality.

"_Elder Sister_!?" Pryzm blurted out, hearing the astonishment in her voice echoed by her sister's higher-pitched voice. Aunt Mara's only sister was _Mom_!! Could this woman...be the missing link that Ulfryn keeps talking about in her dreams? But that's impossible! Mom wouldn't hide anything like this! She couldn't, could she?

Pryzm gulped deeply as the Demoness leaned up close...far too close, pausing just a few cm from her face. Hild was probably the same age as Grandma Freiija; maybe 400 or 450 millennia old. But her beauty was nothing like her Goddess grandmother's! Freiija had the beauty of a world of elegance, a holy bell whose chime would ease comfort into anyone who met her. In contrast, Hild's beauty was of the wild, untamed tigress; a beauty that could entrap, betray, or even maul the heart of an admirer.

And if she was 'sempai' to Mara, that meant that she must be a Demon Queen!

"Aha!" 'Hild' preened cheerfully. "So these are the little ones! The Goddess girls! They're much more cherubic than I imagined, Younger Sister! You must be Pryzm...and you must be Ulfryn, neh? Neh?" she said in turn, patting she and her twin on the head.

"My my my! This is going to be extraordinary! We're going to have so much fun together! I have _plans_ for the two of you!"

As Hild hugged her tightly, Pryzm could help but catch a glance out of the corner of her eye...her Aunt's face was clouded with a _very_ troubled expression.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --


	114. Pt 114: Neoteric Horizons

**Part 114: Neoteric Horizons**

EARTHREALM:

"You'd better humor him, Skuld," Urd whispered, shaking her head side-wise with resignation. "As soon as he sees me in his room, he starts screaming..."

"Why should I be the one to check on him? _You're_ the resident alchemist! Some 'Nurse Urd' you are! The only thing you're nursing is a hangover, Big Sister! I know you...you just don't want to examine his progress because you're hung over from drinking last night! Six bottles of shochu! _Six_ bottles you drank last night! W..when you were supposed to be fixing dinner for all of us! It's a good thing Elder Sister..." Skuld countered in a stream of angrily whispered undertones.

Elder Sister.

Belldandy.

"Go kill yourself a Totoro or something! And it was only _five_ bottles! At least I think it was..." Urd sniped. She decided to ignore the ranting tyros of her youngest sister as she enviously regarded Bell's sleeping form. She found it hard to believe that Belldandy had been imprisoned in the frozen koi pond for the last two months. Her younger sister was sleeping placidly, as if she didn't have a care in the world.

At least Belldandy got to sleep, even got to sleep in past 6am. On the other hand, Urd felt like she needed some aspirin for the throbbing headache that seemed to accent on each of Skuld's conspiratorial accusations...

...Belldandy's aloofness regarding what had happened to her was inexplicable...perhaps even quite bizarre. Urd and Skuld were arguing over what to do about Cevn when she just walked in the front door, acted as if nothing had happened, and then started scolding everyone. Later, after Belldandy took command of the household and rescued Urd's aborted dinner with a daring feat of culinary omake, Urd and Skuld peppered her with questions. Why couldn't she remember anything concerning her imprisonment in the ice? Was there someone out to get her, like a rouge Demoness from the Grief Office? What explanation could she offer about her own amnesia? Bell's mind was comatose blank; she had no memories of the past two months and even thought it was still October 20XX! She looked confused when they entered the living room and she saw the decorations.

Christmas was just a few days away, and New Year's 20XX just around the corner. In a way, Belldandy's safe return was the best Christmas present Urd could have ever wished for. Yet, it meant that she had to go out shopping one more time. Unlike the Brat, her middle sister was difficult to shop for. Skuld still participated in that childish habit of dropping 'hints' about what she wanted for Christmas, even though she was 120 millennia old...and was wearing the physical manifest of a girl somewhere between 16 and 17 years of age. Even in an older teen's body, Skuld was still a self-centered brat. The only difference this year was that her youngest sister was much more concerned with clothes. Urd smiled to herself...Skuld would never admit to herself or anyone else about _why_ clothes were more important to her now than before. Of course, Urd knew the reasons why Skuld was trying to 'sneak' into some kind of fashion sense. Hence, there were several gift-wrapped sets of clothes under the Christmas tree for Skuld, including two outfits that were probably more 'adult' than she would be expecting. Urd's grin broadened as she mentally constructed how her sister would react to the sexier fashions she had gotten her. Skuld would either blush public and exult privately...or she would throw a fit. It would be an amusing test of her younger sister's maturity. As a tween child in a teen's body, Skuld was unpredictable; Urd half-expected her to develop an eccentric fashion sense. After all, both she and Belldandy had done the same thing when they were her age.

Yep, in contrast to Skuld, getting presents for Belldandy was always a major chore. For one thing, Belldandy's fashion sense had become quite unsteady over the course of the past couple years. One day, she would wear a subdued "Naru" homebody-style outfit around the house; about as plain as you could get. The next day, she'd be dressed in one of her trademark frilly dresses. Urd attributed these changes in habiliment to the deepening relationship between she and Keiichi, as well as spending five years on the Earthrealm. So presents that involved clothes were out. A further consideration that presented some difficulty was the fact that Belldandy was so content with her life. Thus, it was difficult for Urd to settle on what to get her for Christmas. Presents were supposed to bring pleasure to the recipient; which was a challenge when the recipient was already fulfilled, already enlightened with the cool torch of serenity. What to do, what to do? In light of what just happened, Urd felt especially compelled to get Belldandy a very heartfelt gift this Christmas, one that would confirm her love for her younger sister.

Her younger sis was a bundle of paradoxes, as usual. In fact, _both_ of her younger sisters were. Not to mention the idiot mortals...

"Can't you just whip up some potion to fix him?" Skuld grumbled in a low voice, interrupting Urd's contemplations and almost waking Belldandy. Urd shushed her with a narrow-eyed glance.

"That's the problem, Skuld," she argued. "He wants to be 'fixed', rather than healed! Cevn, baka that he is, still thinks he's a machine instead of an Earthrealm mortal! Which is why I keep getting on _you_ to be the one who looks after him. After all, you're the resident mecha genius! This is one time when I'm not being selfish, either. It's for his own good. He's already as confused as a kitten in a dog kennel! Make him worse...and we'll never get any sleep in this household!"

"Uh-hmm!" Skuld agreed with a sharp nod of her head. Right before going to sleep last night, Urd had stolen into Cevn's room to replenish the healing incense she had left there. Despite her stealthiness, he had woken up and started raving at her, demanding that Skuld "repair" him before he had a "power shutdown". He was pretty badly injured from the motorcycle accident at the mall; Urd recognized that in his fragile mental state, it was best to keep him calm. Urd wasn't too worried about his injuries; all she had to do was exert a miniscule momentum of her Senior First Class License Goddess powers and all his wounds would instantly be healed. If she wanted to play around a bit, she could draft up a magical formula to do the trick in her "Urd's Castle" room.

His physical injuries aside, she was more worried about the healing of his mind. Somehow, the motorcycle accident had left him quite deranged. Urd suspected that if she were to instantly heal him, there was a strong possibility that he might become even more unbalanced. Cevn was completely convinced that he was some kind of cyborganic mecha; that his body was comprised of robotic components, rather than an organic physiology. It was the most insane thing the young Earthrealm mortal had pulled since she had met him. He almost seemed enthralled by his own delusions, which made it uber-irritating. And he was still far too weakened by the physical shock to endure any long debates that could convince him that he was human. Hence, the fugues of panic he presented whenever 'Nurse Urd' came into the room.

"Since you agree with me, get to it and 'fix' him already!" Urd commanded.

"Again?" Skuld answered, frustration clear in her voice. "But I can't do anything...mechanical...to him! I can't even pretend to. It's just too stupid for me to do! And it's your fault too, Big Sister! Even though you know he's deluded himself into thinking he's a machine, you still have to go into his room dressed in that silly pink nurse's uniform with the red cross in the middle! The sight of you in a nurse's uniform alone is usually enough to upset any mortal! Just ask Tomohisa!"

Urd readied a snappy comeback, but paused herself. Her sister's empathy for Cevn was probably quite accurate, perhaps because she had spent so much time with _real mechas_ like Banpei and Sigil. Skuld could be a total irritant at times, but she was certainly the most even-handed of the sisters when it came to machine intelligences.

"Okay!" Skuld suddenly switch-backed, surprising Urd. "I'll go see him. But what should I do this time? I can't just walk in there with a set of wrenches, calipers and ratchets...and then say I'm going to 'tune up his knee' or something. That didn't work the last couple times. Any suggestions?"

"Bring Banpei with you," Urd quickly replied. "Perhaps if he sees an _actual_ mecha, it'll snap him out of his warped view of reality."

"And if it doesn't?"

"Then act like you're using some tools to fix him!" Urd sighed. "I don't know! Maybe you can try and cast a low-grade stasis spell to relieve his pain, while telling him some engineering mumbojumbo like you disconnected the sensory relays in his leg. Remember, he's so stupid about machines, he doesn't know a carburetor from a cylinder. Just BS him. That'll bide us some time."

"Do I have to?" Skuld whined. "This is so retarded! I could heal him in an instant!"

"And then what?"

"This is all Keiichi's fault!" Skuld said as she whacked the tatami with a small fist. She stood up and stormed out of the sister's bedroom.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

It really w_as_ Keiichi's fault! Like the blind leading the deaf, he had taken Cevn...a total beginner and an admitted klutz around motorcycles...scratch that, around vehicles of any type...Keiichi had taken him out in the middle of a winter's day to learn how to ride his motorbike. Even if those stupid high schoolers hadn't been racing around in the shopping mall's parking lot, even if they hadn't plowed into Cevn as he was riding practice laps in the wide-open parking area...it was still one of Keiichi's worst ideas ever. As in total recipe for disaster. What were those two thinking? If they just would have stayed at home...

Well, it was Big Sister's fault too. She's always riding Cevn hard, and picking on Keiichi too. Her tongue had been a little too sharp yesterday, especially towards Keiichi. Now that Elder Sister Belldandy was back, would that change? Skuld was totally happy that her younger older sister was back, but her joy soon changed to confusion at the dinner table. Apparently, Belldandy wasn't even aware that she had been gone for the past two months! And as soon as Keiichi laid eyes on her, the feathers covering his eyes seemed to blow away...and he remembered everything about her. Especially the part about being in love with her. Keiichi, whose amnesia about his true relationship with Belldandy had been the source of significant frustration for everyone in the household, had returned to his normal self. Which was just as frustrating, now that Keiichi was being 'Keiichi' again.

Which meant that he was fawning after his fiancée.

After Belldandy laid out the generous meal Skuld had planned to torture Urd with, the two lovebirds would do little more than nibble at their food while staring at each other with solicitous expressions. Already distraught, Skuld suffered an even worse fate at dinner when she asked Keiichi to pass her the miso. A simple enough request, one would think. Not! Love-addled, he had passed it to her without even looking in her direction, because he was entranced by the Belldandy. Consequently, he had missed her hand completely, bumping the bowl against her arm and spilling it all over her lap. So she had hot miso soup on her, which was totally embarrassing because it looked like she'd peed herself. She angrily excused herself from dinner and sequestered herself in her "Skuld's Labs" room with two liters of raspberry ice cream.

Keiichi and Belldandy were acting so dippy, it almost seemed to Skuld like they were trying to make up for lost time. And then they did the ecchi in Keiichi's room until almost until 3am...which is why Belldandy was sleeping in. Not to mention Big Sister had kept _her_ awake in the sister's bedroom by doing an imaginary play-by-play of what was going on in Keiichi's bedroom.

So Skuld was happy, tired, confused and disgusted.

Living with the mortals had always been a burden, but this was the worst! Megumi and Genji had left for the next several days; taking another skiing trip together, this time to Nagano, site of the Olympics held years ago. Tomohisa, the pervert, had left as well to stay with his parents for the Christmas holidays. Good riddance! She knew that he'd gotten her several Christmas presents...but knowing him, they were probably attempts at gift-giving that would subtly try to persuade her that she was his wannabe girlfriend. And Elder Sister had reserved all of today so that she could knit a sweater for Keiichi. Every year for Christmas, she gave Keiichi a hand-knit sweater with an Yggdrasilian design motif. And each Christmas, Keiichi would wear the sweater he had received the previous year. So it all boiled down to some silly little ritual between her sister and Keiichi designed to promote 'romance', whatever that was.

Being a Goddess living on the Earthrealm was difficult, principally because one had to pick and choose human attributes and Divine attributes...with a considerable restraint on the Divine side of the equation. Skuld knew deep inside that this was the reason she was still titled an "Earthrealm Trainee", even though she had a full Second Class Goddess License. But what was she supposed to learn in all of this?

Could it have been a serious mistake to snatch Keiichi and the injured Cevn with such a blatant display of Goddess powers last night? There was a mention of a "Shopping mall UFO incident" in the local paper, which seemed to be the norm whenever she and her sisters did something that was a little too 'public'. The mortals were usually completely bamboozled by these events. This time, her hasty exit had obviously exceeded the limited capacity of their small brains to process information. So it had been written up as another 'UFO' phenomenon. She sighed as she slid Cevn's bedroom shoji door open along its tracks. Cevn was already semi-awake, and he greeted her in a raspy voice as she entered his room. He should have been in an ICU ward in a hospital, rather than here; but Skuld had thought it best that she whisk both he and Keiichi away from the scene of the accident. If he had been in the hospital, he would have been surrounded by medical equipment, but here in his bedroom, there was only Urd's incense beaker. Still, he looked quite out of place with his surroundings.

"Let's take a look at you...er, take a look at your parts," Skuld noted as Banpei-kun pulled off the bedding. Cevn's head was heavily bandaged, his nose was caked with dried blood after bleeding sometime during the night.

Skuld got an idea.

After she dampened a cloth and washed the blood off of his face and nose, she showed him the reddened washcloth and asked, "Do you know what this is?"

"It looks like blood, but that's because it was made to look like blood when I was assembled in the LifeShip. Vital chemical fluids are dyed different colors in accordance with their degree of maintenance importance: red-colored fluid are obviously the most critical. They did it that way so it would be easy to recognize."

"LifeShip?" Skuld asked, disappointed that her demonstration had failed to elicit any recognition on his part. "What's a LifeShip?"

"I don't know. I just know that I was built there."

"Ahhh," Skuld sighed. This was going nowhere fast. "Are you sure that this isn't blood? Banpei doesn't have any fluids like this floating around in his mechanical frame. Do you, Banpei-kun?"

Sigil nudged Banpei with her elbow, and he nodded his head in agreement.

"They were built by you, so of course they're designed differently. Probably much more advanced than my design," Cevn answered readily, glancing at Banpei and Sigil.

"Besides, they're robots...and I'm a cyborg! My entire body is a mechanical construct...except for my brain and some sequences of nervous tissue. Also, I'm not a derivative design, like Sigil."

Skuld could feel the small girl-robot bristling at the observation, interpreting it as an insult.

"Sigil, he didn't mean that you're inferior!" Skuld hastily explained. "He meant that you were already crafted as a mechanized greeter, before I lovingly rebuilt you and restored you to the cute robotic form that you have today. Besides, you _are_ derivative in the sense that you're designed along human lines...unlike Banpei-kun, who is designed with a more 'pure' mecha aesthetic."

She had to watch her wording, because Banpei occasionally was sensitive about the fact that Sigil looked like an Earthrealm mortal, and he didn't. Sigil's initial dislike of him was a form of prejudice, but providence had dealt with that. Skuld had noticed her adjust her opinion of Banpei significantly after he rescued her from Dr. Morrow.

"Of course you're not inferior, Sigil!" Cevn asserted. "I'm just trying to explain to Skuld that I'm different than Banpei or you. I don't have an AI like the two of you, for instance. You have fully-functional 'brains', while I have my original flesh-and-blood brain encased in a metallic skull. Further, my bio-mechanical chassis has a discrete organic-mechanical interface. I can assure you, Skuld, that there is no blood in my cyborganic body. Blood would serve no purpose to the machine that I am, since it specifically nourishes organic matter. Besides, it is an inefficient biological component. When I was built, it was replaced by a more efficient synthetic fluid that would also be compatible with my robotic components. Besides, blood decomposes rather quickly. This fluid undoubtedly was designed to interact at the level of brain-body junction, since it is dyed red. In other words, it's a blood _replacement_ that can be processed by my energy batteries, without damaging the nervous tissue-to-nano component data interface."

"Of course!" Skuld nodded her head, playing along with his explanation. She wanted so badly to tell him that he was full of shit...especially since she _knew_ about the workings bio-mecha systems.

"That would make sense. But why is it dry? Doesn't it look like dried blood to you?"

"Any fluid can coagulate in the open air, given time."

"Oohhhooo..." Skuld breathed to herself, clenching her fists as she grew even more irritated by his stubbornness. This was just great...he could probably come up with a specious, nonsensical explanation for almost everything that could be pointed out to the contrary. And he would believe his own pseudo-technological explanation, not matter how far removed it was from real bio-mecha engineering axioms. She could plainly see the scrapes on his face, the huge purple swelling of his arm with the flesh-rip where his bone had pierced the skin, the awkward direction of his ankle where it had been broken, the rasps all along his knuckles and wrist.

What did _he_ see when he regarded his injuries?

"Skuld...I can't move my arm at all. Can you repair it?" Cevn asked in a worried voice. "It might be a bad rotor assembly, or maybe the fluid tension is all screwed up. But I'm no engineer, so I don't know why it's broken."

Ignoring her dismay, Skuld felt her heart-strings being plucked by his request. Despite everything, Cevn truly trusted in her judgment. If he would have been in a regular hospital, his arm would probably be in a cast to keep it immobile. She remembered how he tried to fight off the security guards at the shopping mall parking lot; he probably made his injuries much worse by succumbing to his panic. Or perhaps it was possible that his delusions were so strong in his mind, that he couldn't feel pain. Could his afferent nervous system might have even been impaired? Her thoughts returned to the necessity of treatment for his injuries.

The Earthrealm mortals still maintained what was essentially a mechanistic approach to medicine and healing. If a body part was injured, the doctors would treat it like a machine that needed to be repaired. In many cases if a body part failed, the replacement 'part' was a machine...which was even more proof of the mechanistic approach. Medical professionals were just now starting to realize that no two human bodies are the same, rather than taking the 'factory assembly' approach that had predominated medical treatments in the 20th century. Large-scale studies of 'Eastern Medicine' by fully-funded technologically robust research groups were still in their infancy. Despite rapid medical progress, or perhaps because of the rapid advances, many techniques to promote health were sympathomimetic, rather than holistic. Putting a cast around an injured limb, for example.

"I've got an idea! Wait here and I'll be back in a few!" Skuld said excitedly, her mind blazing with possibilities.

"As if I can just get up and walk. Don't worry, I'll still be waiting," Cevn said after her in a bemused voice as she dashed out of his room. Once inside her "Skuld's Lab" room, Skuld tweaked the Intellihancer Mk. IV helmet she had used on Keiichi with such disastrous results last year. Keiichi had been cramming for his graduate school exams, and she had decided to 'help out' by creating an invention aimed at increasing his memory retention and intelligence. But instead of just increasing his intelligence, her mecha had also increased his evolutionary intelligence as well...resulting in a decided physiognomic alteration, almost tripling the size of his brain and making him look like a Grey. Boy, did both Big Sister and Elder Sister lay it on her thick after that incident!

But this time, she'd use the same helmet to heal and strengthen the bones in Cevn's skull, while neutralizing the migraine headaches with a mild micro-lasering system. As Skuld altered the AI fit-flow and tacked on several neurobio scanners, she sensed that she was evening the scales by doing something good with an old invention. After all, she didn't like seeing one of her creations go to waste.

So she'd transform this one from mecha to medi-mecha.

Finishing with her work, she added a series of strictly cosmetic features such as neon tubing and holophotic wires to make the helmet look even more futuristic. In like manner, she designed 'casts' for Cevn's leg, arm, and ankle out of some spare parts that were lying around her Lab. She wasn't too concerned with functionality, because they would basically be performing a very simple task. But she did want them to be suitably 'metallica' in the sense that Cevn would be convinced that they were "machines that repaired machines". With Banpei and Sigil's able assistance, Skuld built polymetallic casings for his limbs and chest within ten minutes or so. By all appearances, the equipment appeared cybernetic; complete with dials, monitor screens, the mandatory "sci-fi hum" effect, and other gizmos and eye-catches.

"There! That should convince him!" Skuld said smugly to herself, satisfied with her handiwork. Each piece of equipment looked convincingly like a robotic 'plugin' or 'add on'...but in truth, they were basically casts. Not quite the plaster casts used by doctors to affix broken limbs, because she had added some low-key local effects like osteocyte regeneration, GABA moderators, pain induction regulators, ultrasound tensile modulators and the like. Yet the principle was still the same; they would immobilize Cevn's limbs, allowing the healing process to unfold.

Also, they would fully 'repair' Cevn's injuries within a relatively short time, which would further 'convince' him that he was a cyborg. A normal Earthrealm mortal would spend 3-6 months recuperating from these kinds of injuries...Skuld's medi-mechas would have him back on his feet in a week and a half. The idea was that once he had fully recovered from his physical injuries, she and her sisters could employ themselves in smashing down his self-made myth about being a cyborg.

She returned to his room with her 'casts', and he quickly granted his agreement to put them on. Skuld fabricated a plethora of techno-babble about each medi-mecha: explaining how they were 'tuners', 'nuclear battery rechargers', 'self-modulating repair kits' and 'cyborg fluid replenishers'. Cevn bought her explanations without a word of protest, probably because he didn't understand 10 of it. For a person who thought he was a cyborg, he certainly was ignorant of basic mechanics!

In an hour, she had gotten further than Big Sister would have done in a week! Not that she was in competition with Urd or anything over who could help Cevn. Urd had a simmering dislike of the young mortal man; it was obvious to Skuld that her sister certainly wasn't interested in him like she was interested in other mortal men. Yet, Skuld still wondered why Cevn seemed to evoke such strong feelings in her oldest sister.

Using her magic, Skuld materialized the components around Cevn's injuries. Naturally, she didn't want to go through the embarrassing trials of taking off his clothes so she could 'fit' him with the devices she had created. Urd, despite her disinclination towards Cevn, would have undressed him anyway, just because she could take advantage of the situation.

"At least _I_ have some morals!" Skuld sighed happily as the 'repair procedure' was finished for the morning.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Keiichi breathed in the smell of Belldandy, mixed with the aromatic vanilla-tinged coffee he was sipping for lunch. His Divine fiancée was seated next to him on a cushion, leaning gently against him shoulder-to-shoulder, her bay-dapple lengths of hair curling around his arm. He was at a loss to explain to himself how he could have ever lost sight of the love he cherished in his heart for Belldandy, simply because she had been taken away from him for a time.

Love may be the first and greatest mystery, but Keiichi was profoundly aware that the essence of his heart's desire was captured like light in a bottle, freely accessible and visible to him whenever his eyes met those of Bell-chan.

Could he ever have foreseen how his heart would have been doubly captive to hers? Hadn't Belldandy's mere presence had elevated sentiments in his soul to the point where nothing could diminish his love for her? If so, then why was his mind absent for the past two months? In every moment since she had returned, Keiichi felt compelled to search out her heart for the life that had shrunk from around him since she had been held captive in the koi pond. He struggled to make sense of things. Was his solitude the result of a forgetful ennui, brought on by a mournful consonance and disenchantment?

What is the next step, now that she was back in his arms?

Keiichi felt all the defined limits between respect and adoration, virtue and love, familiarity and intimacy...simply melting away, nourished by Bell's loving presence.

How could he have ever denied his love for her?

"Open wide," she said with a pert smile, feeding him a spoonful of cheesecake. Keiichi felt like he was rediscovering Belldandy; meeting her for the first time, falling in love with her all over again. All that passed between them last night...the long conversation, the passionate love-making, the soothing ardor of a shared embrace amidst the glow of wax-candles...seemed fresh. She had come into his life to stay in a cold November five years ago, and in the moment, he felt like he had known her all of his life.

In just under a year, he and Bell-chan would have a sweet wedding.

He regarded her and wondered how married life would affect their relationship. For a instant's whimsy, Keiichi wished that he had Skuld's mastery over the Future, just for a moment, so that he could leap forward in Time and see his wife-to-be as his _wife_. Being married would put a colophon on this stage of their relationship; he and Bell-chan would be bound by a vow, not just a wish granted by the offices her job as a Goddess Relief Office agent.

What changes would befall them?

A bittersweet memory passed through Keiichi's heart as he remembered Celestin and Morgan Le Fey. It was some time in their third year together that Bell's sempai and mentor, Celestin, had set into motion a series of machinations that would cause Bell-chan to forget about him completely. Belldandy's amnesia was so profound in its gravity, she actually thought that living on the Earthrealm with him would only result in further misery in his life. In the ensuing chaos, he learned about the Gate of Judgment: a kind of 'test' for Divine couples: those who are truly in love can pass through the Gate; while those who harbor doubts about their shared love would be forever separated. When he and Bell-chan passed through the Gate, it put a seal on their love. And even though his original wish had been revoked by the measures Peorth and her assistants had taken to counteract the virus that Celestin had unleashed in an effort to destroy the Gate...he ended up rekindling his wish by asking for her a second time "to be with me always".

End of story, right?

But Celestin had been exiled for his mischief, while Morgan Le Fey had exiled herself out of a need to be penitent. She remained at the Gate still, to succor new lovers who wished to pass through the Gate and test their love. Even though she was forever separated from her soulmate, Morgan Le Fey would describe his and Bell-chan's successful trial at the Gate; a last-ditch attempt on her part to dispel any doubts that remained before a Divine couple would walk within its 'challenge portal'. But Morgan Le Fey was still alone...her love unrequited...a Faerie Princess without a Prince.

If recent events had resolved themselves just a little bit differently, _he_ would have been the one who would have spent the rest of his days in a lovelorn limbo, never fully tasting the preciousness of Belldandy's love for him. He had been blissfully unaware for _two months_ of the true essence of his relationship with Bell! Perhaps this would have been a mercy, because if his heart was as warmly awake to her them as it is now...he might have harried himself into the abyss.

Keiichi regarded his Divine fiancée, wondering what he could do to make up for the months that had been stolen away from them.

The theft of Love...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

It was curious, this reinventing of myself. All along, I was a cyborg...who thought he was human. Who thought he had read a manga, was mysteriously transported to Japan by a Goddess, was given an Enigma Book to educate him in the secret denominations of awareness that governed the universe, and then fell in love with one of the Goddesses. A human who was a robot, who had fallen into a scraping sunset of decay...and then burned bright once again.

It was all a mythic denial.

No wonder Urd couldn't feel love for me. I'm a robot. Visions of cyberpunkish hells and Blade Runner greenhouses fluted through my consciousness, like trains squealing on tracks in sub-zero winterlands. One can only cockroach a certain muchness of facts and fictions in a lifetime; I had become saturated with knowledges and insights, to the point where my self-awareness had escaped me like a canoe in the ocean.

Skuld's mecha repair units were definitely doing their work. This morning, I could flex my fingers for the first time since I was injured.

I could faintly remember 85 millennia of existence on Planet Lost.

Somehow, I was back to where it had all started. This reminded me of the time that I was bedridden and blind, after Mara had turned me into a Soul-golem and made me tear my eyeballs out. Then, as now, Urd and Skuld had tended to me, rebuilding my eyesight. This was no doubt due to the fact that my eyeballs were some kind of complex visual imaging device, possibly operating on the same principles as Banpei and Sigil's 'eyes'.

I felt happy for Keiichi and the sisters. It's amazing how Belldandy had become the spindle in the middle of their hanging mobile of personalities; her absence had thrown everything akilter in the household. Now that she was back, perhaps Urd's feelings might change towards me.

Not that her feelings towards me were all that important anyway.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

We Humans and our rituals…

New Year's in Japan is so much fun compared to how the holiday is celebrated in the US. For one thing, New Year's in the US for many means partying on the Eve, and then sleeping in on the Day for most people. College football games with hangovers, leftovers and junk food...never was my idea of fun. In Japan, New Year's morning means Hatsumote visits to a temple!

Goddesses in bright floral kimono.

Last year at this time, Skuld was wearing a girl's kimono...this year, she was dressed in a faint-blue kimono with white clouds and cherry pink floral patterns. Urd was dressed in her usual navy blue kimono with gold traceries and white and green blossoms, with lightning bolts as flourishes to the background. Belldandy was dressed in a soft red kimono with silver and gold patterns and plum and wisteria motifs. As we drove past Narita on Highway 356, I imagined that the three would create quite a stir once we reached the shrine, not only because they appeared to be gaijin, but because their kimono were almost inhumanly intricate. For 20XX, we had decided to visit the Ooto Shrine, about 60 kilometers from our temple home.

Once we parked Genji's SUV van, we got out in the parking lot and admired the hazy mid-morning light filtering through the white-fringed pine, maple, willow and cedars. Admiring eyes weren't just limited to us, many male eyes seemed to stutter attention towards the three women...and my futuristic arm cast. Keiichi was dressed in a long pale blue down jacket and blue jeans, while I was dressed in a longcoat, jeans and faux-geta sandals, one sleeve floppy because of my arm sling.

The first New Years I spent in Japan had been a tumultuous experience, as Urd and I had gone through an emotional schism since I didn't get her a ring for Christmas. In hindsight, even if I had bought her that ring, it wouldn't have made any difference anyway. Even though the New Year's holidays signify regeneration, purity, and revivification for many cultures, this year's holiday ushered me into the awareness that I had been left clinging on to a rope that isn't connected to anything. Urd would never love me, now that I'm nothing more than a thinking machine. Yet, as we began to ascend the long staircase that scaled the hillside, I found myself wishing I had gone the extra distance.

Amazing how the emptiness inside of a ring can actually enclose an infinity of regrets.

Keiichi had told me this morning while we were waiting for the girls to put on their holiday best that he wanted to have a serious talk with me. Likewise, I wanted to have a serious talk with Skuld, because the artificial skin on my arm next to the cast was slowly turning green. It wasn't supposed to do that.

Once we reached the top of the stairs, a swarm of birds suddenly swooped down and surrounded Belldandy; winged dreams given dynamic forms. What do birds think of when they fly over snow? Do they feel nostalgic when the Earthrealm turns white? I almost imagined that I could smell the Beijing coal-smog that routinely hung around the city in a haze during the deep winter months. But this was Japan; electricity had won the day over coal as source of warmth for cold fingers and toes. Decades ago.

"Hey you guys! It's me!" I heard a voice shout amidst the forest of trees and sacred buildings.

"Of course it's you!" Skuld shouted back with a grin. "Who else would you be?"

Tomohisa's face edged towards irritation for a moment, but then he smiled broadly as he jogged up to join us. Naturally, he paced himself on Skuld's side of our group.

"What'd you all get for Christmas?" he asked excitedly.

"Keiichi got a bizarre sweater from Elder Sister. It's supposed to be a scene from our homeland, but it looks all weird!" Skuld answered.

"That's because my knitting wasn't up to par this year, after what just happened to me," Belldandy quickly explained.

"Skuld, why don't you try telling him what _you_ got for Christmas," I commented, earning a steely-eyed squint from the raven-haired Goddess.

"Yeah, tell him what'd you got! He wasn't there, remember?" Urd chimed in. I wasn't there to watch everyone open their Christmas gifts, as I was still bed-stayed with my injuries. A couple days later, Keiichi told me that Skuld had opened up one of her packages to discover a very sexy outfit...and then had promptly turned white with embarrassment.

"I got a mini-skirt and sailor fuku crop top combo with a leather belt...from some hentai high school kid who probably bought them at a sleazy sex shop!" Skuld answered, turning her head completely away from Tomohisa with all the dudgeon she could muster.

"W..what?" Tomohisa sputtered. "S..sailor fuku?! I..I didn't get you _that_!"

Was it me, or did my acoustic attenuators just hear feminine smiff-giggling?

"You're just too ashamed to admit to your own perversions!" Skuld argued back, still keeping her face turned away from Tomohisa. "You're a _high school_ student...and when it comes to getting me a Christmas present, you decide to buy something that belongs on a Shinjiku hooker, not a Goddess!"

"B..but..."

"Lying is irresponsible, Tomohisa! Don't even bother explaining!" Skuld said with a crunching finality. Tomohisa started to hang his head...but then, Urd burst into bubbly giggling, apparently quite amused by Skuld's rapier thrust of disdain. Then I remembered that Tomohisa had spent Christmas with his family, and hadn't been back to the temple since before the holidays started.

"I got you the white sweater, a pair of jeans, and a..."

"Tomohisa, it isn't very nice to brag about the Christmas presents you buy for a girl," Urd remarked in a censorious voice that fully competed with the chill in the air. At this, Keiichi darted a look at me...and I quickly interpreted the sounds of silence in his expression.

By this time, Belldandy was joining Urd with giggles.

"Why me?!" I heard Tomohisa whimper in a pattering voice, and then Skuld pulled us all to a halt.

"I'm not going a step further until you explain yourself, Tomohisa! How could you try to ruin my Christmas with such an embarrassing gift? What could possibly motivate you to give me such a horrible present? Especially since you knew that you wouldn't be here to answer for you poor judgment!!"

"I've had it! First you tell me not to bother with explanations, and now you demand one!" Tomohisa shouted. "Skuld...I wouldn't ever get you something sexy, because you'd _never wear it_! And it would never look sexy on you, because..."

"And the boy gets hung by his tongue," I heard Keiichi mutter in a knowing voice. I almost wanted to break into applause; at least Tomohisa was being honest, even if it was the kind of desperate truth-casting one does when they are facing the firing squad.

Skuld was shocked into silence by his words, while Urd and Belldandy were smirking.

"What do you two think is so funny about this?!" Skuld snapped, turning on her sisters. "Maybe I'll _wear_ his skimpy little outfit, just to prove that I can do sexy!"

Urd and Belldandy's laughter grew louder.

"Urd...you switched the tags, didn't you?" I said in an accusatory voice. "I wasn't there to see what went down, but I _know_ you. This totally reeks of the kind of prankish stuff you like to pull on holidays. Like 'Life Soguraku' or whatever it was. You probably figured that you could embarrass Skuld and Tomohisa at the same time by making it look like he got her a risqué gift. Or maybe you even thought that such a deception might push Skuld and Tomohisa towards getting closer. If that was your motive, than it obviously backfired...just like all those times you 'assisted' Keiichi!"

"You stupid mortal jerk! How dare you!" Urd shouted back.

Bingo.

"Urd," Keiichi said, visibly trying to keep from laughing, "how could you do something like that to my cousin and his girlfriend...eeep!" Keiichi tried to cover his mouth with a leather-gloved hand...but it was too late. I could only look at my friend with wide-eyed disbelief. Tomohisa and Skuld were both blushing, their cheeks as deeply rouged as Belldandy's kimono.

I started laughing.

"And what do you think is so funny, mister roboto?" Urd rounded on me.

"Don't you guys get it? Keiichi's been around Belldandy so long, he's starting to _act_ like her! What he just said a moment ago...isn't that the type of comment that we all usually expect _Belldandy_ to come up with? We all know that truth's a matter of timing; and sometimes your timing is off, Belldandy. Just now, Keiichi's timing was way off."

I caught Keiichi's expression doing the 'freeze-out' for a split-second...and then he started laughing as well. The laughter seemed contagious between Keiichi and I. Urd was still looking at me with a cross expression, while Belldandy seemed amused. Skuld and Tomohisa were trying to avoid looking at each other.

It _was_ pretty funny! If Skuld and Tomohisa _didn't_ harbor any feelings for each other, they would have instantly protested his comment with all the vehemence they could muster. Instead, each of them glowed red-faced with shyness and didn't offer a rebuttal. We resumed our walk towards the temple. I could sense _heat_ coming from Urd, who was doing very little to hide the fact that she was still pissed off at me for calling her out. I figured that by the time we got to the temple to make out offerings, she'd probably be wishing that I was dead when it came time to toss her offering coins. I could feel the cold metal coins in my hand, a reflection of the cold metal skeleton inside of my cyborganic body.

It all made sense now.

My Metallect...the 'hyper-intelligence' that seemed to clarify the world around me at times...wasn't some kind of Divine gift. It was merely the result of the interface between my nervous tissue and the computational components that superstructured my brain. Being able to survive a blast from Belldandy when she thought I had raped Urd...

I raped Urd? How could I do something so foul? How could I even think of such an act? Maybe the reason I was always so allergic to attractive women was due to my being a cyborg. But I would never do something so horrific! Easing into my memories, I couldn't gain a sense of why Belldandy had been convinced that I had hurt her sister. But I had a lingering shadow-sense that something had gone very amiss. Just like I had a shadow sense of the Earthrealm dying. Being on Planet Lost, watching the Children pass into dust.

Did I ever really love Urd? Or was that some fractal delirium as well? A shadow of a darkness.

Isilb...

The word seemed just at the tip of my tongue, but I couldn't finish it. A focus of dread suddenly wrapped me, snuffing out the gay voices of the festive New Year's crowd. When is a feeling just a feeling? What makes horror so traumatizing?

The crowd was busybodied in the midst of Hatsumode, or "first temple visit of the year". This was far too crowded for my liking; several thousand people were queuing around the offering box. It was slow going to get up the stairs to the offering area. Even from several dozen meters away, I could hear that rattle-rap of coins banging against the wooden drawbars and basin of the collection coffer. The ritual was simple: you toss a handful of coins in the box, then clap your hands twice and offer a prayer to the shrine's Kami, while holding your hands clasped flat in front of your face in a gesture of reverent supplication. Obviously, this ritual predates the bowl games in America by a few centuries. I could smell the generations of culture buried just under the surface of the cell phones that pi-pi'd every few seconds.

Belldandy was waving a fan slowly in front of her face with delicate grace, fanning away the occasional wind-blistered snowflakes scooped up by the breeze. Gathered in the crowd, we passed by a series of stalls manned by yukata-clad monks serving amazuke, a pseudo-sake beverage brewed from rice that contained about as much alcohol as near-beer. Naturally, everyone but Skuld and I grabbed a glass and tipped the monks.

"Hatsu-sake!" Urd shouted, quickly leaving our ranks for the group of sake vendor stalls further up the aisle.

Some things never change.

We were in a 'lane' of milling crowds alongside a long white tent that saundered up one side of the shrine's courtyard, like a strip-mall flea market in western China. It seemed like every shrine-keeper in Chiba was here, minding small stalls that were selling cutesy charms, sake, omamori and hamaya, and informational programs about the shrine. I glanced through the shrine program, because we were moving so slowly towards the temple, and was surprised to find that the temple was built in the 14th century.

Across the courtyard, a pile of discarded omamori charms was piling up; these would be burnt in a bonfire later in the day. The prevailing spiritual concept behind the omamori was that they functioned like vehicle inspections...they only provided good fortune for a year. When the next New Year's came around, people had to 'recycle' them by buying new ones and trashing the old ones in the bonfire heap. Hamaya...which were basically arrow shafts wrapped with ornamental streamers of white paper with auspicious fortunes written on them...seemed to be a hot item at this temple. It was general knowledge that each temple has a 'specialty' that it is renowned for; this temple's parexcel was obviously its arrow charms. That was why the line was moving so slowly.

I snorted to myself, amused by the monkish practicality of the arrangement. With sheer cleverness, they had located the hot sales ticket items at the _end_ of the tent, so that people had to linger in front of the other booths before reaching the exit point, where they would buy their prescriptive hamaya and then step into another queue leading up into the temple proper.

Keiichi paused at one of the booths and offered to get Belldandy an enmusuki omamori charm. Tomohisa asked Skuld if she wanted one; she shot him a wan stare that was at once icy and flared with ire. He giggled and explained, "you have to already be a couple for these to work!" Skuld stuck her tongue out at him, and then tugged on Belldandy's kimono long-sleeve and demanded that Bell make Keiichi get one, since they were a couple. Belldandy explained to her sister that the mood was already lost due to Tomohisa's prankishness. She added that she and Keiichi didn't need any lucky amulets, because she knew their upcoming marriage this year would be just fine, with or without fortune objects.

Disgruntled, Skuld then turned on me and demanded that I buy a kanae anzen omomori amulet, to safeguard my recovery and prevent further accidents. Since she had done so much repair-work on my cyborganic components during the days after my accident, I indulged her and bought a charm. Keiichi jokingly commented that she should remain at the tent, since she seemed so interested in hawking the virtues of the 'sacred amulets'.

I clutched my 500 yen tightly in hand as we pressed into the throng, the envelope of people gathering tighter and tighter as we slowly made our way up the wooden staircase leading into the shrine. Finally, I was up against the wooden offering box. I looked out of the corner of my eye and saw Skuld finishing up her handclaps. The only wish that mattered was the one I couldn't make.

"Are you feeling strange?" I heard a voice ask quietly. I turned and saw Urd...and she was looking at me with tears rimming her eyes. Then I felt the crashing cascades of social pressure; a silent tension that told me that I was taking too long at the offering bin.

I chucked my coins in the rattlebox, clapped my hands to call the spirits...and made the one wish that I knew would never come true.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Wheeew! Thank god we survived that! I felt like we were going on a family trip to the mountains or something! At least Urd didn't try and break out some freaky-weird game for us to play when we got home!" Keiichi said with a sigh. Cevn sighed as well, looking at Keiichi as he shrugged his shoulders. The day was winding down; the sunset was already upon the sky, creating masterful strokes of auburn and velvet across the heavens. Keiichi could see that his friend felt a little weathered by the whole shrine experience, Tomohisa hijinks notwithstanding. He reminded himself that Cevn was still recuperating from a rather serious accident.

Cevn still thought he was some kind of half-machine, half human being. Keiichi wondered if the mental energy that he was employing to keep the facade going was the true source of his exhaustion. He was almost certain that it was some kind of subconscious dream-delirium that fueled his self-delusions. He himself felt haggard; the trip had really zapped his energy. Granted, doing the New Year's Day temple visit is _supposed_ to be an ordeal of sorts; along the lines of a pilgrimage. Keiichi once again had the opportunity to marvel at how a bunch of villagers in medieval Japan had managed to build a temple in the middle of a forested nowhere...on a steep mountain slope...isolated from the rest of the world save for a few hundred stairs.

Maybe now wasn't the right time to bring up such a heavy discussion topic, but then again, the conversation he had with Bell-chan last night was burning him with anxiety.

"You know that Bell and I are going to get married this year?"

"Of course!" Cevn replied with a smile. "Second week of November, right? I mean...who doesn't know that you guys are going to get hitched?! You proposed to Belldandy at the Le Mans celebration dinner in front of everybody but your parents and professors, Keiichi. Then Urd split to Yggdrasil and Belldandy was reading every bridal magazine she could lay her hands on for the next several weeks. You never told us when the _second_ wedding is going to be, however."

"You mean the 'B'dandy' wedding, eh?" he said with a chuckle, trying to imitate a smarmy haute culture voice. Bell's Mother, Freiija, was an unnerving example of glam-socialite meets heiress anegohada. Keiichi felt that the only thing missing from the picture was the Shih Tzu lapdog with the pink bonnet and red toenails.

Naturally, Cevn knew exactly who he was referring to. As he thought a little further, Keiichi was suddenly struck by the observation that it was quite odd that Belldandy's parents had never once appeared during her imprisonment in the koi pond! How could they have _not_ known that their daughter was missing? Keiichi had suffered from a bout of amnesia...could they have as well? But surely, Urd and Skuld had told them that she was missing! As for the parents...nothing. Quite out of whack, considering the deep solicitude Freiija always had for her daughter's welfare. Which often resulted in extremes, like a certain little adventure in Tindouf, Algeria. Suspicions are like clouds; heap clouds upon clouds and the translucency becomes darkness.

"The second wedding occurs after the one on the Earthrealm. We agreed on that," Keiichi asserted with manly conviction. "But now, everything may change."

"How so?" Cevn asked, his face drawn. For a moment, Keiichi felt a chill ripple through the air. Cevn seemed to flash on the possibility that the engagement had been called off. Or maybe once again, it had been complicated by Bell's parents or some other force majeure.

"It's not what you're thinking!" Keiichi quickly reassured, noticing the unease on Cevn's face. Rubbing the back of his head thoughtfully, Keiichi nodded to himself and continued.

"Bell and I are getting along just great ever since she came back out of the pond! There's no way she'd suddenly decide not to marry me! I've been feeling that I'm moving from dream to dream inside of myself. And then Belldandy dropped a kinda bombshell on me last night. Her way of bringing the New Year's in with a bang, I think," Keiichi explained, grinning self-consciously.

Keenly interested, Cevn asked about Belldandy's 'bombshell'.

"She wants to move up the wedding date."

"Huh!!" Cevn exhaled, almost tipping over his hot cocoa onto the veranda decking. "Move it up to _when_, Keiichi?"

"Valentine's Day. Six weeks from now."

"N..no shit?!" Cevn stammered. "No wonder you wanted to talk! That's like...right around the corner! That's insane!"

"Which is exactly why I wanted to talk to you. You've already been down that passage of life; so I wanted to get your opinion. Is it do-able, for one thing? If I'm going to follow my heart...which is pounding 'yes yes yes!' in my chest...then I've got to give my reply to her tonight!"

"Man...that is totally left-field of her! Belldandy usually is a bit more solid than springing something on you like _that_! Isn't she?"

"Yeah, it totally caught me off-guard!" Keiichi acknowledged. "But you have to consider what we've been through. Both she and I feel that we had _two months_ of our life together...ripped off. Stolen, secreted away from us, incommunicado. In the scale of the relationship that Bell and I have, that's a lot of heart-to-heart talks that were silenced! I decided a long time ago to give love, devotion and surrender to Belldandy. Even though she brought this up, I'm fully aware that it's coming from her heart."

"What did Megumi say?"

"My sis is all for it. You know how she is. Ms. Impulsive," Keiichi noted. When he had called Megumi a short while after they got back from Ooto Shrine, his sister was all too readily agreeable to the idea of having the wedding sooner. He suspected that Megumi was fixed with a feminine logic that reasoned that once he and Bell-chan were married, that would bring her and Genji's nuptials to the fore...and possibly build momentum or rhythm that would move them towards a sooner-than-later date. He knew that his sister wanted to keep Genji; her ready acquiescence was just more proof of this. What girl wouldn't? The guy was cultured, a good listener, first son of a billionaire family...and most importantly, he didn't act like some rich snob. Later in the phone call, Megumi had teased him good-naturedly about "being such a good lover, he had made Belldandy insatiable" and "moving from forgetfulness to shotgun-wedding in the span of two weeks" and the inevitable "is she expecting?" Keiichi had wasted no time debunking _that_ assumption of his sister's, teasing or not.

Cevn listened as Keiichi noted Megumi's enthusiasm. Of course, the logistics of putting a wedding together in six weeks would be mind-boggling to the average couple...but Belldandy was an expert household administrator. He commented, "Keiichi, time doesn't matter in this situation. Between three Goddesses...er, three Norns, they might be able to pull it off,"

"Might?" Keiichi replied, mock surprised. "Those three can do almost anything if they put their hearts into it."

"Getting married is like being a gypsy. People seem to drift between somewhere and elsewhere, always going elsewhere. But when you're married, there isn't an elsewhere. And you gotta watch out that you don't drift..." Cevn noted.

"Tell me about it!" Keiichi agreed. "I've had a strong sense of inner direction ever since Belldandy got back."

"Hey! If you guys get married in February, when are you going to honeymoon? That's right smack in the last few weeks of the term. If one of my students was going to take a couple weeks off to go on a honeymoon with his new wife, I'd gladly accommodate this. But the kind of technical courses that you're taking this term, Keiichi...I doubt if you can get those old geezers to give you a cm...let alone time off for 'soar upon halcyon days'."

"Bell didn't mention it, but I'm sure she wouldn't mind if we waited until the end of March. We could maybe even hold it off until sometime during summer break. After all, the way we've been lately, every day seems like a honeymoon."

"Which may or may not be good," Cevn noted soberly. "There's an old Chinese saying which goes, 'in times of festivity, the fox can guise itself with the authority of the tiger.' You and Belldandy are on a pink cloud; if I were you Keiichi, I'd at least be concerned about reality crashing in too abruptly. You're going to have to deal with a lot of people...and a lot of details, should you decide to get married sooner. I'll do whatever I can to help, and I'm sure that Megumi, Urd, Skuld and Tomohisa will help out as well."

"You and your eccentricisms, dude!" Keiichi said with laugh. "I know I can count on you guys; if I didn't, I wouldn't having this conversation with you in the first place. Don't worry, I don't plan on burning myself out by doing it alone. And I'm not going to screw up the Spring term either...I'll keep my studies in the slot. But I know now what I want. Perhaps Bell knows what I want too; because in her mysterious way, her sudden insistence on getting married now instead of later really brought it together for me.

"I've realized that if I'm the Key to Belldandy's Heart...than she's the Light to the Lamp of my Soul. Bell-chan's has been like a blue-golden light that warmly caresses my heart, showering me with endless universes of contentment. Sometimes, I feel that I can only do little more than lay my love at her feet, like an offering. But then I look into her eyes and find the message to my heart that she keeps within. Then it all starts all over again with every word, every gesture, every kiss. If Life wishes to link my heart with the bonds of joy and sorrow, then I know that nothing is truly unfamiliar as long as I'm with Belldandy. Because of all this, I _want_ to take that next step! I want to go out there, farther than I've ever gone with my heart! Hearts need horizons!! Getting married to Bell-chan is the horizon I want to strive towards, for the rest of my life!"

Cevn felt heart-touched by Keiichi's firm conviction; Keiichi's expression was firm-forward. He realized that Keiichi had spoken his kokoro; of course, the next essence of his relationship with Belldandy would be matrimony. He felt humbled as well that Keiichi would confide such an inmost affiance to him.

"Well Keiichi, since you put it that way...I guess I'll have to cancel that hot date I've got planned for Valentine's Day," Cevn joked.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --


	115. Pt 115: Glance

**Part 115: Glance**

THERA:

Belldandy set the scene in her head: her Chiba Poly squad was playing in the Kanto Regional Tourney finals. If they won this game, they'd advance to the National championship bracket to play round-robin against the other teams from the regions of Hokkaido, Tohoku, Chubu, Kinki, Chugoku, Shikoku and Kyushu.

On the other side of the net, the girls from Utsunomiya University. Since Chiba Poly was an academically-inclined institution with a focus on science and engineering, their athletic programs were mediocre at best. The Men's basketball team finished dead last in the conference three years running. Both track teams finished with losing records at meets. The Men's volleyball team won one game for every five that it played. But the Women's volleyball program had finished at the top of their conference three years running, thanks to Coach Chihiro. Belldandy knew that their squad _was_ the athletic program of Chiba Poly: they were only varsity squad that had a chance to actually win their conference, or even win a tourney. But they never made it to the Nationals in the past three years, because they always got beat in the Regionals by either Tokyo Keio University or Utsunomiya University.

It was the final game of the match against Utsunomiya Univ. In the final game under sudden death rules, every play results in a point...unlike the scoring in normal games where only the serving team can be awarded points. Her squad was up by one point, three points away from match point. The game could go either way at this juncture; but in match point, the team still had to win by two points. No 30-29 victory margins here. Coach Chihiro had reshuffled their lineup, focusing on defensive ball, while clustering the team's offensive firepower...Captain's Tamiya and Ootaki...to play their rotations against Utsunomiya's special weapon. Their main weapon was Ryoko Kusuhara...a senior girl who had won the National Beach Volleyball Pairs championship this year and was going to Beijing as part of the Japanese Olympic women's v-ball squad. Kusuhara was definitely the best player in the conference, with a solid .750 kill percentage even when double teamed by Tamiya and Ootaki. Thus, Belldandy was playing guard, with the difficult task to digging out Kusuhara's massive spikes.

Then, one of the players on Utsunomiya slipped on a diving dig and wrenched her ankle, causing the rival coach to change-up his lineup. Belldandy felt a lump in her throat as she realized that when she rotated to the net, she'd be paired up against Kusuhara. She was almost certain that Coach Chihiro would pull her out of the rotation before this ever happened...but three plays later, it was Captain Tamiya serving against, with Chiba U up 29 to 28. If they made point, the Regional would be theirs!

Tamiya served a sizzling ball over the net, and Belldandy prayed that it would be an ace. But one of the guards dived under it save it from bouncing in the corner.

"Set!"

Belldandy knew who they were setting to.

In slow-mo, she watched the taller Kusuhara spring into the air, her hand tightly fisted, ready to plaster the ball like a rocket hitting a balloon. A split second later, Belldandy jumped as high as she could...both hands trying to reach the ceiling...

--B-Bamph!!--

The force of the impact was so hard, Belldandy felt her momentum yank backwards as if she had been punched in the chest. She knew that she had blocked Kusuhara's spike; she could feel the rubbery sting on her wrists that accompanied a block. But which side of the net would the ball fall on? As she flew flat against her back, she saw the ball bounce against the court..._on the other side of the net_...

They won! Chiba Univ had beaten Utsunomiya and taken the Regional Cham...

"Hey, Morisato, hee..hee..pull your head out of your ass!"

"Bwah ha ha! Good one, Morisato! Who'da thought that a girl can return a spike just by letting it hit her head!"

"All of you, shut up!" Coach shouted angrily, blowing on her whistle. "Morisato!! Goddammit, what the fuck are you doing?! This is _volleyball,_ not soccer! Quit your daydreaming! This is why I keep telling you guys that those who daydream end up losing...because if you've got enough energy to daydream, you're _wasting_ the energy you need to be spending on practicing harder! Why do I keep feeling like I'm spinnin' my wheels here, like some kinda whirlwind or something?!"

Coach was pointing at her; the older woman was so pissed off, her scratch-board was quivering in her hand.

"Just because you're a freshman, Morisato, doesn't mean that you get to make goddamn freshman mistakes! Not on _my_ team! And not while everyone else is workin' her butt off to play her best, or at least pretending to do so! You ain't even pretending; you're too ditzy to do that! What happened to that girl who was voted 'Chubu Region Best High School Women's Volleyball Player', huh? Go hit the showers, dreamer-girl! I don't want to see you on my court again until you decide to _try_ and play some ball!"

Belldandy almost flipped off Coach Chihiro, but caught herself in mid-gesture.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Her mood thus fouled, Belldandy stormed towards the temple from the train station, backpack on her shoulders and gym bag in gloved hand. She couldn't blame today's mishap on Keiichi, or even Senbei or Mara. After Keiichi decisively dealt with the two Demons, she hadn't seen or heard any sign of them for almost a week. New Year's being a few days away, she doubted that they would keep their peace _too_ much longer. Arriving at the front mon gate, she swung the wooden creak-gate doors open and entered the temple complex. Almost immediately, Belldandy was greeted by a playful yawn from her 'Christmas present'.

Even though Keiichi had been bedridden with exhaustion after fighting off Senbei and Mara a few days before Christmas, he had managed to get her a very special gift. There were only about 200 of them in entire world, and she had one in her backyard.

Getting up off the deck, Furo, her pet albino Bengal Tiger, sauntered over and stood in front of her, blocking her way to the porch. She frowned at the giant feline, knowing that this was his way of demanding her attention. Belldandy reached down to stroke him behind his ears Closing his eyes in pleasure, a feline 'smile' perked his jaw, accompanied by loud purring thrumbing the air. She still felt a little hesitant in stroking his fur, as he wasn't exactly a house cat. Furo's massive head was almost as large as her chest, each of his legs were thick as her thighs, and he stood over a meter tall at the shoulder. As he brushed up against her, rubbing alongside her with kittenish persistence, she had to stagger to keep from being knocked over. Furo was a nearly-full-grown young adult Bengal, who weighed well over 200 Kg...almost triple her body weight.

Ever since she was a little girl, Belldandy had always wanted a tiger of her own. She remembered seeing Ryeka and Ulysses, the two tigers in the Dyrepark in Kristiansand, back when she was a little girl and her family still lived in Norway. The two tigers were one of the main attractions of the zoo, and had left a lasting impression on the young three-year old girl. But when she got into high school and competitive volleyball, she never gave this hidden wish a second thought. She had left her childhood behind, of course, and had no time for childish whims.

Now, thanks to her Divine roommate, she had a _real_ tiger in her temple.

Once he recuperated, Keiichi had explained to her that he had considered giving her Furo as a tiger kitten; but he decided against this because Furo's care would demand too much of her time during the first six months of his life. So he had elected to give her Furo as a young 'teenaged' adult tiger, but with the memories of a tiger who had been raised from birth by her. In other words, she was imprinted in his feline mind as his 'mom' and 'master'. Because of this, Furo would be as tame in demeanor as any domesticated cat, and would even be protective of her to a fault. However, Keiichi impressed upon her that owning a pet tiger would require some responsibility on her part: she would have to feed him and tend to the inevitable 'grounds chores' that were part-and-parcel of the ownership of a big cat. In other words, she would have to do a daily choreograph: feed him 10 kilos of meat every day, and scoop up the half-buried cat shit in the yard before sundown.

Three days later, Belldandy had to accept the simple lesson that caring for an animal meant daily chores. And the bigger the animal, the more demanding the chores. Fortunately, Keiichi had thoughtfully included in his gift that he would take care of the 'supplies' to feed Furo...which was a godsend, since tigers were expensive even for zoos to maintain. Three or four day's supply of just the meat would cost an entire semester's tuition.

She wanted to throw her gym bag in disgust at the walls of the temple, but checked herself. Belldandy didn't know if sudden motions would startle her new feline companion. Even if Keiichi claimed that Furo was 'safe', she didn't want to risk it. After all, this gift did come from Keiichi. So she sat down on the veranda of the temple, and held back the tears of frustration that threatened to breach the dam of her will. The sky was mid-cast in shades of grey; sure indication that it was going to snow again sometime soon. Furo leapt up onto the veranda and quickly laid down next to her. Yawning lazily, he stretched himself out on the wooden floor and then rested his head on her lap, chuffing and yawning.

Absentmindedly, Belldandy stroked the crown of his head, still upset over today's disaster of a practice. In unison with her stroking, she felt Furo's purring throat vibrating pleasurably against her thigh. He lifted his head and licked her hand several times with his huge tongue, expressing his gratitude, and then resumed his contented purring.

Despite the broil of confusion and resentments, Belldandy realized that it was probably worth it to own a pet tiger.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Why do I keep screwing up?! Why do I _have_ to keep screwing up!" Belldandy wailed, gulping down a cup of sake. Keiichi was seated across from her at the kisaten, waving his hands to try and get her to simmer down. Of course, most of the people's eyes were upon him because of his height; at least she had convinced him this time not to wear one of his weird 'God costumes' when they went out.

For his part, Keiichi was concerned by how much Belldandy was making a spectacle of herself. Their booth was the subject of numerous whispered conversations. Of course, being a God, Keiichi could hear every word of every wounding derision. He almost wanted to wince, not only because of the vicious name-calling, but because Belldandy's self-pity was so palpably morose.

"I try just as hard as the other girls!" she shouted in a too-loud voice. "_They_ get to go out and party on the weekends, while me...I'm stuck at that stupid temple doing cleaning chores! No wonder I daydream all the time! Shit! I need some excitement once in a while too! I'm only 18, and I've got no social life to speak of!"

"Wah. Wah. Wah!" a low voice with stinging sarcasm sounded from a nearby booth. Belldandy stuck her arm up and extended her middle finger without even turning around to see who had spoken. When she pulled her arm down, she saw three guys in their early 20s who'd been eying her all night stand up, and then gather by her and Keiichi's booth.

"Hey baby! If you're not having any fun in your life, why don't you come with us? We'll show you a _bitchin_ good time!" a young guy with long greasy hair interrupted. "We gotta car, we gotta lot of money...and we know how to treat girls!"

"Yeah, if you hang out with us, we'll take you to places you never could..."

"Fuck off, you ball-less losers!" Belldandy said dismissively.

"Ahhh, so yuh think you're better than us, just because you're some gaijin chick wearing a Chiba Poly sweatshirt! Well, we ain't no college students, to be sure. But you ain't got a knife on yuh, bitch! So's..heh heh!..I guess that means that you're going to come with us anyway, you snobby little ho'! Seems like you need some trainin'!"

"Yeah! I bet you got some sweet lovin' underneath that sweater, bijin girl! We can give you some 'bridal experience' in a karaoke club down the street! And then you'll probably beg us for more when it's done!" another of the trio said sarcastically, fidgeting with a knife.

"What part of 'fuck off' don't you understand, you wankers?" Belldandy shot back, completely disgusted by these monkey boys who were posing as men. College-aged retards, probably freeters or stay-at-home smarms. In any case, they were further proof that all men are beasts. The leader of the trio, a stocky man with curly dyed hair and a thin beard on his chin, slapped both hands on the table and eyed Keiichi with a bravado expression of challenge.

"Well…why don't _you _say something, wimp guy? You gonna let your girl do all the talkin'?"

Belldandy felt deeply embarrassed by his implication, until Keiichi noted nonchalantly, "It seems she is communicating herself to you quite well without my help."

Irked that he didn't say something like "she's not my girlfriend!", Belldandy nevertheless almost wanted to snicker. Keiichi was so tall, he was leaning back in the booth, his legs propped up on the seat she was sitting on, to keep his knees from hitting the bottom of the table. All her anger that was directed at the screwed-up practice earlier today was now foisted on these three jerk-offs.

"My friend wants _you_ to say something, lamer!" one of his buddies snarled.

"Something lamer."

The three wannabe yakuza punks all turned red-faced with anger, while Belldandy giggled and quickly slipped in a gulp of sake. Keiichi was actually _screwing with_ these morons!

"What's this!! Wanna fuck wit' us? Wanna throw down wit' us?" they shouted, all scowly-threat and genki. The leader whipped out one of those flashy switch-knifes and stabbed it down on the table, right between Keiichi's fingers. Keiichi didn't even move. Belldandy was already in an angry mood; watching these punks do their macho showoff bit only evinced more resentment.

"I'll take this!" she said with a broad grin, swiping the switch-knife and gripping it tightly. The curly-haired youth's eyes flew wide with shocked astonishment. Corkscrewed with confused frustration, he lunged at her...but Keiichi swiftly reached out and grabbed his arm, restraining him.

"I believe that you're disturbing the patrons of this coffee house with your rude behavior. You're certainly disturbing Belldandy. And you're _definitely_ disturbing me. It would be in your best interest to becalm yourself and take your bad intentions elsewhere," Keiichi said smoothly.

"You're gonna go to hell..ll! You're gonna go to hell..ll!" Belldandy sang in a taunting voice, amused by the idea that the trio's stupid behavior was pissing off God Himself.

"Belldandy, return his knife to him, so that he may leave without too great of a tarnish on his honor." Belldandy stared at Keiichi for a moment, realizing that he wasn't _asking_ her to return the idiot's knife, he was _telling_ her to! If it had been any other guy besides Keiichi, she knew she would have told him "go fuck yourself!" or something worse.

"Don't get any ideas that I'm doing this because he told me to!" she disclaimed. "I..I'm not his obedient girlfriend or anything! I'm only doing this because I don't want your little knife. Unlike you, I don't need any weapons to protect myself. I can protect myself just fine, especially against guys like you. You three jerks definitely prove 'man smart, woman smarter'!"

Belldandy slapped the switch-knife flat on the table, overhearing several guys at a nearby booth chuckling at her snap-back. The punk snatched his knife back and backed off warily, fidgeting with his shades. As they started to leave, Belldandy stood up out of the booth, and smiled with smug satisfaction when she recognized that the three guys had just found out that she was taller than them. She stared them down until they exited out the front door, and then she quickly sat down and gulped the remainder of her sake.

"AHHhhh!" she exclaimed, smacking her lips. "Why are men like that such dweebs? And why are women attracted to men like that?"

"Each to their own purpose. Someone has to champion stupidity once in a while, Belldandy," Keiichi answered. Belldandy lilted her head to the side and pondered; then she started giggling.

"You..tee hee..actually _made a joke_ back there, Keiichi!" she said, her voice calming down. "Two of them!"

"Comedy isn't solely within the purview of mortal sentient species, you know," Keiichi noted. "But on a more sober note, I would suggest practicing a little temperance with your consumption of sake, else you yourself will become the next champion of stupidity."

Belldandy felt her hand clenching tightly on her empty glass. Keiichi was ordering her around again! After what happened today during volleyball practice, all she wanted to do is get plastered so she could forget about it. Isn't one's college years supposed to be filled with parties? The last time she really partied was after her 'hazing' at the Girl's Dorm. Funny how the three uglies had intruded on their peace when she started yelling about 'not having fun' or something to that effect. But it was true! Her life was about as boring as a middle-aged housewife's.

"I'm gonna cut loose!" Belldandy shouted, reaching out and grabbing one of the waiters by his sleeve. "Bring me another cold one!"

In the next hour, she downed two more glasses of sake, just for the sake of dignity. Keiichi wasn't exactly the kind of person who could make chit-chat; in fact, his conversational skills sucked. Being out in public with him was about as stultifying as going to a movie with one of her grandparents on her stepdad's side. Or talking with a priest or a philosophy professor. Yet, she was quite amused that Keiichi had intentionally joked around with the beast-men guys when they were messing with her. Usually, anything funny borne of Keiichi's mouth was in the form of a gaffe; or some other words of ignorant misdirection. But this time, she was certain that her Divine companion had been deliberate in his clowning around. A little stale and forced, but at least he was trying.

It was getting to be 11 o'clock, and with the 30 mins or so it would take for them to walk back to the temple, Belldandy knew that she should quit the sake. Yet, fueled towards contrariness by Keiichi's 'instruction' for her to stop drinking, she had another one. Just to bug him. But she knew that it wouldn't work; Keiichi lacked the personality that seemed to respond to spite with spite, so half the amusement would be lost. Instead of arguing with her, he'd just give her a puppy-dog look of sad resignation.

Finally finished, Belldandy decided that she was too tired to walk home, so she dug into her backpack for her wallet, planning to call a cab.

Instead, she found a Ramune bottle.

"This totally _hurls_!" she shouted, brandishing the bottle. "As for you, you and Mara can go blow yourselves, Senbei!"

The other customers in the coffee-shop took it in stride, as she'd been raving about "how totally unfair life is" for the last several hours.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Five blocks down the avenue they strolled...and then she and Keiichi encountered the three creeps who had been harassing her at the kisaten. They were twice as intoxicated as they were when she made fools of them earlier. When the chauvinist dorks stepped out from their concealment in an alleyway, Belldandy felt herself rounding numb with shock. What did they want, if they were actually willing to hover nearby the coffee bar for _two hours_, just to surprise her in the street?

With a spine-tingling chill, she recognized that this could only mean one thing.

Gokan.

"Gokan" was the Japanese word for rape, a combination of the characters for "coerce" and three characters for "woman". The word was highly stigmatized; it was never spoken in public by women because of the sordid implications, and yet it was often flavored in the conversations of the boys in college. Japanese culture didn't have a concept like 'date rape' which was common in the US and the Euros. Here, there was always the subtle implication that the woman who got attacked had somehow 'led on' her attackers.

She could see straight through their simplistic reasoning, like a hot knife cutting tofu. They had figured that, since she was well on the way towards getting drunk two hours ago, that she'd be all mellow-stumble by now. An easy victim. Also, they obviously didn't miss her strong implication that Keiichi wasn't her boyfriend; meaning that she was single, and unprotected. In their minds, all the factors were collected together that pointed towards an opportunity to prey on a single, intoxicated woman.

Almost unconsciously, she wrapped her arm inside of Keiichi's as the fright chewed on her. With a blush, Belldandy realized what she was doing...and quickly pulled her arm out from under his. No way was she going to allow herself to be clingy in this situation! She'd deal with this on her own, just like she'd dealt with dozens of snotty boys back in high school!

But she felt just a little bit safer knowing that God was walking next to her.

Fuck 'em!

Hurriedly, she pulled off her backpack, and when she wobbled with the effort, she suddenly regretted that she had ignored Keiichi's advice to stop drinking a couple hours back. Dammit, she was tipsy with sake! Her mind flashed on a headline in tomorrow's Chiba Nippo newspaper: "Chiba Poly Freshman Athlete Attacked by Thugs!" This would ruin her! There would be no way she could face her teammates! And Coach Chihiro...

"Hnuh-huh!!" Belldandy gasped as she discovered that each of the assailants had a weapon. One was sporting a chain, another had a tire-iron, and the third was flicking his switch-knife.

They weren't fooling around, they were definitely planning to punk it up!

Belldandy felt a pressure on her arm, as Keiichi said "Don't worry..." in a calming voice, and then lightly squeezed her shoulder. His words were only a scarf against the blizzard of affright that was blasting her.

"Heya baby! Did you miss us? We certainly missed you! You look totally beauty, even with all that winter clothing! Why not come with us to some place warmer, so you can get rid of that heavy jacket. We figured that you'd be tonight's dessert for the three of us! You probably taste sweeter than anything in that stupid coffee shop."

Belldandy wanted to hurl!

"Why don't you go home and take a bath, you ugly scumbags!" she shouted. As if the three men would simply take heed of her warning and leave her alone. Ignoring her, the three started yelling amongst themselves, shouting boisterously and making obscene comments. Belldandy knew that they were trying to intimidate her, trying to gross her out into submission.

In an insane bent of logic, the thugs walked right up to them and started chattering, bantering, threatening Keiichi. One of them was swinging his switchblade lazily in a figure-eight pattern, creating glitter-arcs of sparkle as he brandished it in front of Keiichi's face. Keiichi reached out into the blur.

"Huunh!" The action was so unexpected, Belldandy literally gasped out her breath. For a second, she thought she'd see severed fingertips flying through the air. Instead, the blade of the switch-knife was pinched between Keiichi's index finger and thumb, as if he was holding a chop-stix. He had plucked it out of the hands of the creepy guy!

"Children shouldn't play with lethal weapons," he said. With a slight movement of his finger and thumb, the blade snapped with an audible "-_crack_-!" The hood's face grew wide-eyed with discomprehension.

Belldandy almost wanted to giggle at the punk's carp-mouthed, gaggle-eyed expression.

"What the fuck!" he stammered angrily. "That's bullshit! Goddamn cheapass knife! Let's see you do that to _this_!" He pulled a stout military-issue knife from where he had it concealed inside of his beltline; it was thick-handled and longer than the switchblade, which was probably more for show than anything else. Holding in front of him, he swiped it side-to-side. Belldandy found herself instinctively taking a step backwards, so that she was partially shielded by standing halfway behind Keiichi. These goofups were obviously drunk with something more than foolish bravado; the air was foul-salted with the reek of their breath.

"Wyeeep!" she screamed as one of the other punks erupted into motion, making for her and Keiichi with his tire-iron, the weapon held high overhead, readying a blow aimed at Keiichi. As he swung the tire-iron, Keiichi seemed to 'phase' aside, like some kind of Jedi Knight-type move from the Star Wars movies. He matched the downward swing of the thugish metal bludgeon and relieved the punk of his weapon by what looked like a sleight-of-hand magic trick. Casually, he tossed it over his shoulder.

Belldandy watched as idiot-boy #3 advanced towards Keiichi with his length of chain, whirling it overhead, helicopter-style. Keiichi simply reached up and caught it. Belldandy inadvertently shouted "Oh My GOD!!" in sheer panic, her mind instinctively telling her that his hand would have been snapped off, or at least crushed by the blow. But she still wasn't used to the fact that Keiichi was no ordinary person. Yanking it out of the punk's hands, he gathered it together, and then commented, "Now, this could really hurt a person if used with ill intent."

"Ill intent, my ass! You ill fucker! I'll 'ill intent' your shit!!" the knife-wielding boy shouted...and in a swift motion, he threw his knife at _her_. Belldandy screamed at the top of her lungs, expecting to feel a knife wedging in her body a split-second later.

Instead, she saw a mist of black. Quicker than her eye could follow, the knife was in Keiichi's hand. The malefactor was looking at Keiichi with fear; obviously just now figuring out that they were dealing with something beyond the bounds of normalcy.

"Good, you little prick!!" she thought angrily. The hoodlum was such a chicken-shit! Once he figured that Keiichi could take him and his buddies, the worthless scum tried to hurt _her_ instead, obviously to get back at Keiichi for humiliating him earlier. Belldandy privately hoped he'd beat their asses for that.

Keiichi held the knife up to his face, and then turned to face the moon, which was a couple buildings up on the horizon. Leaning back, he hurled it high in the sky towards the moon. A couple seconds later, he said "Bulls-eye! Right in the middle of the Sea of Tranquility, 5 meters from the Apollo 11 landing site. Of course, I can't just leave it there. Someone might find it next time they go to the moon. I guess I'll have to go get it one of these years."

The three hoodlums looked at him with ajar expressions, and then one finally mumbled "You gotta be kidding!"

Looking down at the three miscreants, Keiichi 'wadded up' the length of chain in his hands, the image evoking someone crumpling a piece of paper prior to throwing it in the wastebasket. Dumbfounded, she looked on as he finished moving with his hands. Inside of his palms she saw a solid ball of steel.

"4.0 Kg...isn't that the appropriate weight for a shot put in women's competitions?" he asked her as he handed her the metal sphere. Belldandy almost wanted to laugh; she was on the school track team, and had never heard of any women competing in shot put at the high school level in Japan.

"Y..you freak asshole!" the three guys shouted, readying to charge him. Keiichi raised a hand outwards, a benedictory gesture that froze them in their tracks.

"Playtime's over. The three of you will now go home to your parents. Tomorrow morning, each of you will call the Chiba Prefecture Adult Education Extension Office and sign up for knitting classes. After this phone call, you will contact a hospice and volunteer to provide charitable services there on the weekends. Henceforth, you will harass no more women, nor will you carry weapons. You are only allowed to respond to threat, not initiate it. Now go on your ways!"

Keiichi 'pushed' the air with his hand; Belldandy marveled as a circular ring of rippling air that looked like a summertime heat distortion formed in front of him. He motioned the air...and it lifted the three about a meter off the pavement, forcing them backwards. To her, it looked like they were standing on a moving sidewalk at Narita, only it was moving backwards at hundreds of miles per hour.

An eyeblink later, they were standing on their feet two blocks down the street.

RRRROOOAAARRRRR!!

Belldandy could hear the roar quite clearly from where she was standing. Probably the whole neighborhood could hear the roar...even as a child, she knew that a tiger's roar can be heard over a kilometer away under certain conditions. It was almost cartoonish, the scene that swiftly unfolded in front of her eyes. Two blocks away, three guys were screaming in panicked voices as a Bengal Tiger walked up the middle of the street towards them.

Belldandy knew that Furo's fur was probably bristling with enmity towards the three hoodlums.

_"Yiiiaaaahh!! Let's g..get out of here!"_

_ "M..mommy!" "N..nice Kitty!"_

_"P..please, just let us go...and we'll be on our w..way!"_

_ " What the hell's a _-tiger_- doing in the middle of the street?!"_

She watched in the distance as they scattered in opposite directions, running full-sprint, leaving Furo standing alone under the streetlights.

"Furo!! Come here, boy!" Belldandy shouted, worried that he might go chasing after one of the three perpetrators. As her pet tiger trotted up, she gave in to her impulses and burst into laughter; almost doubling over as her gasping chortles and giggles filled the chill air around her with breath-steam. Furo came up to her and gamboled to and fro in front of her, waiting for her laughing fit to pass. Catching her breath, she knelt down and hugged him around the neck, stroking him on the head. Obviously, he had heard her scream of terror and had leapt over the enclosing walls of the temple. Bengal tigers can sometimes jump over 4 meters in the air; tonight, Belldandy had just learned that the temple's walls were certainly no restraint if Furo really wanted to get out.

Belldandy looked up at Keiichi, who was wearing a self-pleased smile. She felt a twinge of gratitude for his protection...he had acted rather manly, or rather Godly, when she had been threatened by the three punks.

"Thanks," she offered shyly.

"You're so very welcome, Belldandy," he answered, reaching down and offering a hand to help her to her feet. For a moment, Belldandy felt lost in his dark blue-brown eyes. Keiichi seemed so dashingly handsome, so bishonen, so seductively masculine...

"I wouldn't want any harm to befall you, since you're the one whose wish I have to grant."

Screeched!! Ruined!! The moment was _ruined_!

"I..I can't _believe_ you!!" Belldandy spat out angrily, completely blown away by what she had just heard. "No man's ever protected me before, except for my stepdad! So I allowed you to show your stuff. I _allowed_ you to stand up for me against those plug-ugly assholes! And now you tell me it was only because I'm your 'wish candidate'? That there was _no_ other justification for your actions?"

"This is true," Keiichi said in a sad voice.

"THEN YOU'RE WORSE THAN THEY ARE!" Belldandy screamed, pointing in the direction where the thugs Keiichi had dispatched had been.

It was because of the wish...not because of her!

"You stupid fuck!!" she shouted. Without saying a single word more, she stormed off down the street, leaving Keiichi, Furo and her backpack behind.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Why can't I be taller! I'm not the shortest girl on the squad, but I'm only 1.77 meters tall. The national average for girls my age is 1.64 meters. Why can't I be like Ootaki! She's 1.94 cm tall! She always gets to play the front line! Even though my reach-to-jump difference is greater than anyone on the team, I always get stuck playing defense! And lately, I've been a benchwarmer! I didn't sign up to Chiba Poly just to drink Gatarade and sit on the freakin' bench! This sucks! This _really_ sucks!"

Life is so unfair! Why couldn't she have had a major growth spurt in high school!

Belldandy caught herself. She felt Keiichi giving her _that_ look again; it was practically the same look her Mom used to give her when she was a girl, and she came home from school saying that she wanted to become a scientist so she could find the cure for AIDs.

The "yeah, right..." expression.

"You're not taking me seriously, are you Keiichi?!" she shouted. In response, Keiichi poured her a cup of tea. Granted, it _was_ a little cold in the temple. Like most such structures in Japan, the temple didn't have central heating. Central heating doesn't go well with antique wooden buildings that had weathered centuries of seasons. Keiichi had claimed that this temple was built during the first years of the Muromachi Era, and Belldandy had no reason to disbelieve him. Hence, she and Keiichi were sharing the warmth of a kotatsu table; in any other situation, it would have been cozy. Of course, since he was God, he could easily use some kind of supernatural means to heat the temple, but when she asked him a few days ago, he refused on the grounds that she "needed a little hardship in order to value what was already important in her life."

Jerk!!

But Belldandy was too worked up to notice anything beyond her current tribulations. She shot him a glare marked with distaste and irritation.

"Belldandy, I assure you, I _am_ taking you seriously," Keiichi countered. "But your problem is that you shouldn't take your problems so seriously."

"Okay! Then prove it!" she fired back. "Since you're supposed to be the wish-granting type of God, then give me my wish! I wish to be the best volleyball player in Japan..."

"That's a whim carved out of the wood of desperation, Belldandy," Keiichi answered. "How do you know that you _aren't already_ the best volleyball player in Japan?"

"You _moron_!!" Belldandy growled, really pissed off now that he was playing word-games with her. "Why don't you come to one of our games and see! You can watch all the girls play...while I have the important and difficult task of sitting on the bench. How can you be so dense sometimes, for a so-called omniscient being?"

"Aren't there observers at those events who are also sitting down?" Keiichi asked.

"That's cause they're _fans._ Fans! They pay _money_ to watch our team play! They aren't players! They're fans!!" she near-screamed. Belldandy caught her breath and tried to slow her wheels down.

"How do you know that, Belldandy? Have you considered the possibility that they may be there to cheer your team on because of vicarious reasons? Maybe they would _want_ to play volleyball on your team if they could, but for some reason, they cannot. So they play the game...through you and your teammates. This sensation is what makes them feel like they belong, like they're a part of something more," he answered.

"So what?" she exclaimed. "This sucks! You even make the fans sound...perverted, or something!"

"There's no perversion in wishing to be something you cannot be, as long as it is engendered within the pureness of your heart, and bears no malice towards others."

Belldandy felt like she was on the bench again.

She sighed to herself. Keiichi had gotten her good this time! She knew that there was no use arguing with God, because he would always win. But once again, he had turned herself against herself...against her wishes. She wanted to be a better volleyball player, and if it was possible, she wanted to compete in the Olympics. Every girl dreams of doing something like that!

In high school, she was ranked 11th on the list of Japan's 20 best varsity female v-ball players. Coach Chihiro, with only one athletic scholarship at her disposal, had picked _her_ over all the other girls in Japan who applied. Belldandy didn't dwell on this fact too often, but every now and then, she was struck once again with the realization that Coach Chihiro must have seem _something_ in her...something that made her stand out against all the other prospects who wanted to play on the team. It was humbling to even think about. Coach Chihiro certainly wasn't a slouch; she was renowned in the college volleyball ranks because of her captaincy of the bronze medal 2004 Athens team. She was also gaining renown in the coaching world too; having turned a deadbeat tech-school volleyball program into a contender. Girls actually _wanted_ to play for her, to the point where they would suffer through all sorts of prep classes appropriate to pass the admissions exam at a polytechnic school! Belldandy knew this well, because she was one of them.

And Coach Chihiro had given the precious scholarship to a young girl named Belldandy Morisato from a farm on the northern tip of Niigata Prefecture, near Murakami.

Why? So she could spend her whole freshman year sitting on the bench?

All this thinking was making her tired.

Right before going to sleep, she heard Keiichi tell her, "I hope you enjoy practice tomorrow..."

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Hey, Morisato! Hurry up! We can't wait here all day for your lazy ass!" she heard Captain Tamiya shout from across the street. The short-haired co-captain was waving her over to her car, offering Belldandy a ride. Belldandy grinned and dashed across the street to Tamiya's waiting Honda. Anything was better than riding in the jam-packed 7:10am train!

"Ahh, now this is the life!" Belldandy sighed as she got in.

_Grunk!_

"OWW!" Belldandy heard giggling as she blinked the pain out of her eyes. She had banged her head trying to get into Tamiya's car. Her cheerful impulse from a moment earlier vanished as tiny stars flecked through her vision.

"Yuh did it again! You're gonna wreck my car someday, Morisato!" Tamiya cursed at her.

"It can't be helped! We can't have you getting all cramped up ridin' on the train! Not to mention that you'd scare off all the gropers!" Captain Ootaki jived, always ready to pounce on her because she was a freshman.

"Yeah. We's gotta protect our own!" Tamiya agreed, leaving Belldandy to wonder if she meant her or the train gropers. At least the car was warm as they sped down Highway 51 towards school. Belldandy had never been in Tamiya's car before; that was a privilege extended only to upperclassmen. But it was a bit uncomfortable. Even though she was sitting in the back, her legs felt bunched up. Back seats _never_ seem to have enough leg room! Finally, Tamiya zoomed the school lot and found a parking space near the gym. Getting out, Belldandy stretched herself...and then almost choked.

She could see the tops of _both_ Tamiya's and Ootaki's heads!

"What'r yuh 'ulping' about, Morisato?! Scoot!! Or yuh'll be late for that freshman calculus class, girlfriend!" Tamiya shouted in a sempai-ic scolding voice.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

The girls were giggling in the locker room over some story Captain Ootaki had spun about Tamiya beating up purse-snatchers back in her high school days in Bihoro, Hokkaido. Belldandy could barely hear them, because her whole perspective was screwed up. As she pulled her uniform top down over her sports bra, she looked at her equipment locker. It _looked_ the same, but the angles were all wrong.

She was taller, much taller.

When she looked in the mirror, Belldandy immediately noticed that her face seemed a little more narrow and ovaline than what she was used to, but otherwise she was the same. But her arms and legs were...

"C'mon, Belldandy! Quit gawkin' at yourself in the mirror!! You're pretty enough as you are! Or uglier than you can imagine! You can waste your time figuring out which one later!" Coach Chihiro shouted from around the corner, unseen...but always watching her players.

This morning, nobody had seemed to notice that she was taller. In each of her three classes, there was no reaction on behalf of her classmates. It seemed that she was the only one reacting to her increased stature; everyone else either didn't know that she had changed from before, or didn't think her change as being remarkable. But it was remarkable, as she had to duck her head when she went into the Women's Room in the older school building.

What the hell had Keiichi done to her this time?

She was now, for all practical purposes, the tallest girl in the school...if not the whole of Chiba Prefecture! She was even significantly taller than Hachiko Hibikiyama, who was the center for Chiba Poly's women's basketball team...and was even taller than Captain Ootaki. This morning when she passed Hachiko in the hallway, the junior had simply nodded her head in the unspoken athlete-to-athlete appraisal-approval.

Hair tied back and rare-fit to go, Belldandy dashed out onto the practice court. Coach Chihiro promptly assigned her to practice drills focusing on spiking and blocking skills. Ten minutes into practice, Belldandy felt all screwed up. She began to realize that her 'old ways' of playing at the net, earned through years of growing up in her own body, weren't exactly suited for her new physique. Her blocks were over-extended, and her spiking was off-ball...usually striking the ball with the ham of her wrist, instead of her fist. Her legs seemed to have a mind of their own half the time she tried to jump.

"Morisato! What's the matter? You jump like a girl who's 30cm shorter than you are! Try it this way..." Coach Chihiro corrected with a voice of expertise. She asked Ootaki to give her a set, and executed a flawless spike. She repeated the demonstration a few more times, each play at the net seeming to flow as naturally as silk in the wind. Coach Chihiro had a militant view towards physical workouts and skill-building exercises, but she once again impressed Belldandy with the other aspects of her coaching abilities. She had immediately spotted the shortcoming in Belldandy's play at the net, and quickly showed her some fine points to try and offset her technique faults.

Still, after an hour's diligent effort to correct her paces, Belldandy still felt 'off' in her jumping. The rest of the practice session consisted of chalk-talk by Coach Chihiro, prepping them for next Friday's match against Ibaraki Univ. Ibaraki would be a cake-walk compared to the upcoming exhibition match against Long Beach State a couple months from now. Long Beach State had won the American NCAA National Championship last season, and remained undefeated so far this year in America. Their women's v-ball team wasn't just recognized as champions in America. They were considered a women's v-ball dynasty.

As she showered, Belldandy bumped her head on the shower nozzle...as if she needed further proof that she was gangly and awkward in her new height scheme. She almost wanted to ask Captain's Tamiya and Ootaki if they could remember her being shorter, but checked her curiosity at the shower stall. She didn't want to be viewed by her teammates as crazy as well as clumsy.

"Keiichi, you'd better have a good explanation for this," she muttered as she vigorously shampooed her hair.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"You wanted to be tall, so I made you tall, Belldandy. You are now 217 cm tall, which makes you taller than the tallest player in Japan's Olympic team," Keiichi said with a smile, looking over the Chiba Nippon paper he was reading. "So are you happy, or what?" he added.

"I'm undecided about whether I should kill you, or thank you," Belldandy said to him. "You prize idiot!! How could you do something like that to me without even telling me! You didn't even bother to ask me...you just changed me into a taller version of myself. Now I'm over _seven _feet tall! You just think you can go off and do whatever you want to with my body..."

Belldandy turned crimson, completely embarrassed by the implicit innuendo in what she just said. Clenching her fingers, she sat down in a huff, realizing that shouting at Keiichi was just a waste of breath. She would have more success turning udon into soba by pouring coffee on it.

"Belldandy, you said that you wanted to be the best volleyball player in Japan. The chances of you doing that weren't exactly all that great because of your physical..er, limitations. So I helped you along. You've been given the height; now you have to make the effort! And don't forget to feed Furo before going off to your studies!" he said before turning his attention to the newspaper.

"Keiichi, put the goddamned newspaper down for a minute and _listen_ to me!" To her surprised, Keiichi folded the paper neatly and set it down on the dinner table.

"Isn't this the proper behavior in this part of the Earthrealm for a man who is living with a woman? Normally, isn't the ideal situation one where a man reads the newspaper when he gets home from work, while the woman cooks the meal, tends to the kids, and does the housework? Granted, we don't have any offspring, and my job isn't exactly a 9-5 sort of thing...but Furo can be thought of as a kid, since he's dependent on you and he's quite affectionate."

Belldandy was exasperated. "Keiichi...that's a stereotype of a _married couple_! A retarded, outdated, ridiculous stereotype that isn't even... Why should I even bother explaining it to you! You and me ain't anywhere near getting married! And we never will be, so don't start getting any crazy ideas! I just want you to listen to me! You know…to be supportive once in a while. It isn't every day that I wake up 30 cm taller than I was when I went to sleep the night before. And everything is 'off'; I keep bumping stuff with my head! And I can't jump straight, my coordination isn't coordinated anymore, and..."

"Wasn't as easy as you thought it would be, was it?" he noted.

Damn him!! Belldandy simmered her anger a little bit, recognizing that he wasn't trying to crawl up her back by being condescending. Keiichi obviously was doing this to her to teach her some kind of lesson! Wasn't he supposed to be involved in her life strictly to give her a wish, as part of his role as a Helper God or whatever? Instead of just waiting around for her to make her wish, he was doing all this 'moral lesson' shit! For Christmas, he had saddled her with a pet Bengal Tiger and all the responsibilities involved with that. Now today, he'd 'grown' her into another girl, so to speak.

"Keiichi, what is it that I'm supposed to learn?" she asked him, surrendering to the notion that she didn't know what was going on.

"How would I know?" he replied. "What you discover along the path is yours to keep, not mine to give."

"THAT'S IT!! I'm gonna feed Furo!" she shouted and stormed off. At least Furo wasn't trying to mess with her head!

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Belldandy was amazed at how quickly she was adjusting to her new height. And Coach Chihiro even _started_ her against Ibaraki! During the game, she began to feel the difference 30cm could make in her performance, as she easily out-jumped the players on the other side of the net. During a time-out, Coach Chihiro scolded her for having too much fun, and urged her to try and play better.

"I'll show her!" Belldandy promised, whip-stirred between resentment for being criticized and an urgency to impress her coach.

In the third game, Belldandy had all kills on her spikes. Chiba Poly won easily, 30-11. She was almost disappointed; there wasn't any challenge to this. Coach Chihiro asked her to stay after the game, and pulled her into her office. Belldandy was almost trembling with fear as she realized that Coach was going to chew her out good.

Sitting behind her desk, Coach Chihiro ran a towel through her raven-dark hair.

"Morisato, I want to talk to you about your performance in tonight's game..."

"Coach! I can try to play bett..." she interrupted.

"_Sssht_! I want you to try and listen, rather than trying to impress me with trying to play better. We're not on a volleyball court now, are we? So stop acting like a volleyball player for a minute!" her Coach chided. Belldandy nodded her head and sat down when Coach Chihiro gestured her to do so.

"Morisato, I know that college ball is quite an adjustment for any girl. But for you, it's even going to be more of an adjustment. You're not only the tallest player in Japan, but you're a _freshman_. And you're probably going to grow a few more cm. You probably figured out by now that I'm not your average everyday college coach. I'm definitely not a high school girls coach, because I coach _women_, not girls. Chiba Poly hired me because they want winners. And I love teaching Auto Mechanics and playin' around with dirt bikes. So it was a win-win situation. And this year, I'm not settling for anything less than a National Championship!"

"Yeah, yeah!" Belldandy thought drolly. Typical coach's motivational speechifying.

"Which is why I picked you for the scholarship, Morisato," Coach Chihiro said. Belldandy perked her ears and sat up straight in her chair.

"Like it or not, by the time we get to the Regionals, I expect you to be carrying this team!"

"That's impossible! I can't even get over a .500 kill ratio! You're asking me to improve 100 percent in a couple months?" Belldandy protested.

"Which is why you and me are going to spend some extra time together," Coach Chihiro noted. "I have some special punishments planned for you."

Belldandy gulped.

"Hee hee hee...just kidding, kiddo!" she added a moment later, almost laughing at Belldandy's discomfiture. "Don't get too many angry thoughts in that head of yours, Morisato! My Olympic coach said the same thing to me once...and I almost slapped him. I just wanted to try it out, just once, just to see how it felt from _this_ side of the desk."

"But why? Wh..why me?" Belldandy stammered, completely embarrassed.

"Because you stand out! And I'm not just talking about your height, either! You stood out from the first moment I laid eyes on you, Morisato. When you came to Chiba and I watched you scrimmage with the team as a junior in high school, I found myself sitting here in this office asking 'Where the hell has she been hiding?'. I figured it out once I found out where you lived. I even took time out to drive over the hill to that bumfuck warehouse they call a high school, just to watch you play in a game. You wanna know why you were only rated 11th in the nation for high school women's v-ball players? Because no one's even heard of where you come from! No scouts lookin' after v-ball players there, and the competition you had was pretty much blow-overs, neh?

"What you you mean, _only_ 11th? I was lucky to even be the top 50," Belldandy said, looking at the floor.

"We'll talk about that later, you gangly baka-girl! One more thing. Wanna know what Tamiya and Ootaki said after that first try-out scrimmage?" Coach Chihiro teased. Belldandy nodded her head reluctantly, not wanting to hear any more of her sempai's mean remarks, especially repeated by their Coach. "They said, and I'm quoting them...'that girl's gonna be the best player on the court...any court...next year, if she really tries.'"

Belldandy was hard-pressed to believe that her prideful sempai said that.

"They'll never say that to your face, of course. So imagine my surprise when I gave you a scholarship in the Fall term of your senior year in high school...and then you show up for your first practice this Fall with a 30cm growth!" Chihiro added. "To tell you the truth, I felt like I'd won the damned New Year's lottery."

Belldandy wordlessly got up and excused herself for a moment to get a bottle of water from the fridge. As she pulled the cap off, she realized that her teammates had been impressed with her regardless of her 'new' stature! She remembered how keenly the other girls had watched her during that one tryout practice with the team. She'd always thought their close observation was because she was such a screwup; that she was getting attention because of all her glaring mistakes that college players wouldn't make. But it had been _her_ all along! She leaned against the locker, closed her eyes and took a couple deep breaths to still her racing thoughts. Her heart was beating so hard, it felt like it was going to pop. Splashing herself in the face with the rest of the water, she returned to the Coach's office with a little bit more pep in her step.

"Y'know, I know all about what happened at the Girl's Dorm," Chihiro said, leaning back in her chair, scrutinizing Belldandy. "That they kicked you out because you had some guy over. Pretty handsome too, if their word can be trusted. Even Tamiya thought he was good-lookin'."

"I'm royally fucked!" Belldandy thought to herself, everything flashing to a bright white in her mind. Despite the promises of her sempai, they had told Chihiro! For a flash-second, she wanted to go over to the Girl's Dorm with a gallon of gasoline and burn it to the ground.

"So I guess I'm kicked off the team," she said sorrowfully, almost ready to cry. "I'll go get my stuff..."

"Hold it!" Coach Chihiro said, standing up. "You really are a dope! Don't you go assuming that you're off my team when I haven't said so!"

Belldandy paused, looking down at her Coach. Before Keiichi had changed her, Coach Chihiro was a bit taller than she.

"If it had been anyone else, I would've kicked her ass off the team without batting an eyelash! How could you think that you could hide something like that from me? And don't go gushing blame on your teammates...they held out until the very end. If there's any more problems with that guy, I want you to come straightaway to my office and _tell me_! I'll hunt him down and straighten his ass out so harsh, he'll go running back to mommy begging for a glass of milk!"

Belldandy almost giggled at the ironic impossibility of her Coach's words. But this was serious. The Coach had basically said she would kick ass on her behalf if it came down to it.

"Morisato...Belldandy," Coach Chihiro said, her face filled with intensity. Belldandy gulped and almost choked. The _Coach_ had called her by her first name! "The only reason you're not off the team is because I have faith in you. Why do you think I've been riding you so hard? You probably think I'm just being a merciless bitch."

She quickly shook her head "no". Coach Chihiro looked at her, and then her face crinkled, and then she burst into laughter, slapping her desk to accent her mirth.

"You...hee hee liar!" she forced out between giggles. "I'd..ha ha!..be shocked if you _didn't_ think that!"

Belldandy didn't know whether to smile, laugh, or just look stupid by default.

"Look, Morisato. I'm going to tell you something in all seriousness, and I don't want it getting to your head, okay. The only reason we're even having this little chat...is because you're the best damned women's volleyball player I've ever seen!! And when I say 'ever seen', I mean _everyone_ I've ever seen play the game. The reason you weren't ranked the top player in Japan had nothing to do with you. You came from Nowheresville. I know what that's like. No competition, no press, no crowds…nothing to recommend you, but your heart for the game. That's why I scooped you up. You truly are a diamond in the rough."

"Coach..." Belldandy said under her breath, utterly startled.

"But not yet," her Coach said, fingering her whistle. "Not even close at this point! You need to polish those skills _a lot_, which is why I'm going to double-practice with you, Tamiya and Ootaki. The three of us are going to hone you to the bone. We're going to spend an extra hour after the regular practice drilling you. And you wanna know why? Because those two are seniors and they want to win it all this year! This is their last chance! And if they win Nationals, it's possible that they might slot on to the Olympic team."

She looked at Coach Chihiro and realized that her Coach wasn't kidding. Tamiya and Ootaki…were _that_ good? She had no idea!

"As for me, I can only say this...if we would have had you on our 2004 squad...I mean the 'you' that's going to be the end result of these extra practices...I'd probably have a gold medal on that wall instead of this bronze one!"

Belldandy turned her head away and flung her hands to her face, unable to hold her tears back any longer.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

True to her word, Coach Chihiro spent an extra hour every night fine-tuning Belldandy's net attack skills. She even went as far as to videotape her, using slow-mo playback to tightly critique her techniques. Tamiya and Ootaki seemed to enjoy the extra drill time as well. She began to work her way through the awkwardness, and her teammates often gave her encouraging slaps on the back during regular practice. She did a mind-numbing amount of practice sets, spikes, digs, blocks and serves. Sometimes she would stay in the darkened gym late into the evening, rehearsing what she'd been taught earlier in the day for a couple extra hours. Once in a while, she'd spot a lone figure standing in the half-lit gym doorway out of the corner of her eye. Especially the times she went past midnight. She initially thought it was Keiichi, but one night she thought she saw a sparkle glint off a whistle...

She began to notice on the nights she stayed late in the gym, that Furo would already be fed the next morning. Some days, she couldn't find any of the household cleaning supplies to do her temple cleaning duties. But the temple would be clean anyway.

As the extra practices got even more intense, the four of them began to bond in a way that made Belldandy feel like she had three older sisters. Well, maybe two older sisters and a stepmom.

The last snows of the season were almost all melted away; the cherry blossoms were starting to bulb on the branches as the squad walked from the trailer that served as their locker room to the gym, which was packed to the rafters for the goodwill game against Long Beach State.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

So it really came down to the fifth game, sudden death.

Long Beach State was serving, one up on Chiba Poly. Although she didn't understand very much English, Belldandy could hear her opponent's chattering about her whenever she was net-rotated. Expertly, they kept the ball away from her, and double-teamed her whenever she received a set. She initially matched aggression for aggression, wanting to overpower the American girls. But Coach Chihiro instructed her to do some change-ups in her net play, like touch-overs and cuts. Coach emphasized between games that they weren't going to win on offense; the American team just had too much offensive firepower.

So Belldandy varied her net play, focusing more on defense. Long Beach had two All-Americans on its team, who were rumored to be in contention for spots on the American Olympic team. Much to the crowd's and her teammate's pleasure, Belldandy actually stuffed their spikes three times in Game 4. The third time she roofed the Long Beach attackers, the entire squad whooped ebulliently.

In the huddle for the final game of the match, Chihiro gestured towards their opponents. "Look at 'em! They're confused as hell! They expected us to fold before the end of the first game, so they could finish us in three without breakin' a sweat! Now that we've taken them all the way to the stretch, they don't know what the fuck's going on. You can tell, because their coach is getting off-the-hook manic with 'em. But we're not going to do that, we're not going to buy into our stress. Just keep it cool, ladies. Keep it cool. We're here to have fun!"

"No!" Belldandy corrected. "We're here to win!"

Chihiro glanced at her, and Belldandy almost thought she saw a flash of sadness pass across her eyes. The final game was tight from the start, a toss-up. Either team could win. Belldandy felt needled with adrenalin as she played the best game of her life. Tamiya and Ootaki were absolutely bonkers-elated as she made the Americans eat ball two more times. The normally-quiet home crowd was actually getting boisterous, cheering and yelling at them with the intensity of sumo match spectators. But now they were behind, 29-28. If Long Beach made point, they'd take the match.

The redhead girl served, away from Belldandy of course. Takahari dug out the serve, and Ootaki fielded it.

"Set!"

The two American girls opposite her leapt high in the air...but Belldandy leapt even higher. She hit the ball as hard as she could, felt a good straight-on solid connection with her fist.

_"Out!"_

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Tamiya and Ootaki had decided to take Belldandy out to a bar for some serious drinking. It didn't take much to notice that her spirit was a bit on the shattered side. The whole team had taken the loss bad, but Belldandy looked absolutely miserable. She was a silent presence in the locker room. While a couple of the girls cried a few tears, she just stared at the wall, not even making an attempt to undress to take a shower for almost ten minutes. After showering, her teammates offered consolation, but it seemed to sluice off like oil on water. Finally, her sempai badgered her into going to a bar with them. "After all, seniors are supposed to shelter their younger sisters," Captain Ootaki had said.

"Whatever," was all she could manage in reply. She could have lost everything in an earthquake and it wouldn't feel as bad as this did. Belldandy looked out the window emptily, unable to focus her attention on anything. She could sense that Tamiya-sempai was well on the way to getting drunk. When Captain Tamiya got drunk, she would shift into 'man-blasting' mode; berating all men with a viciousness that eclipsed the intensity she'd show on the volleyball court.

"Why does a man fall in love at firsht sight? Because it savesh them a lotta time..." Belldandy was so upset with herself, she couldn't even giggle at the stupid joke. Why giggle at a stupid joke when she felt like _she_ was the stupid joke? The stupidest joke in the world! All that work and extra practice and attention...and she had fucked up the biggest chance she had ever had in her life to prove herself.

"I can do one better than that, Tamiya," Ootaki said, combing her fingers through her hair like a certain actress. "What do you call a wife without an asshole?"

"Divorced!" a familiar voice answered. "May I join you ladies?"

"Coach!" two of the three girls said in unison as Coach Chihiro sat down at their table. Belldandy just stared out the window, nodding briefly to acknowledge her Coach's presence without even looking at her. Chihiro wasted no time in ordering a round, noting that "college girls have to scrimp their money, so the next couple are on me."

Belldandy was more interested in the moon than the conversation.

"The hushband wants a quickie. But hish wife answers, 'As opposed to what?'" Tamiya mumbled with a grin. Belldandy wondered how a girl could be such a man-hater. Rumor had it that her high-school sweetheart jilted Tamiya at her school's prom dance. Something must have snapped, because Tamiya had a deep-seated resentment towards all men.

"Hey, Tamiya, let's talk about the game!" Coach Chihiro said brightly. Tamiya's moan of anguish was echoed by Ootaki's, and Belldandy finally turned her head away from the window to look blandly at her Coach and teammates. She knew they'd come here to _escape_ from the world of volleyball for a night, so that they could try and comfort her. But nothing could comfort her bruised spirit. Worst of all, she was shocked into fear because she had betrayed her teammates. No...they weren't fears. It was the truth! They had lost...and it was all her fault! There were no other explanations or excuses. She had aimed for the corner and had missed it by a meter. Not even close.

She had let _everybody_ down.

"You know, you three remind me of how I was right after we lost the semis in the Olympics. If we weren't playing for the Bronze the next day, they would have had to carry me out of the Olympic Village bar on a stretcher, I was so disappointed! Not to belittle you...but you guys just narrowly lost to an American champion team in an exhibition match...which hardly qualifies as disappointing. Besides, it's only one game. There'll be more..."

Belldandy felt a vein snap in her head.

"Whaddya mean it's only a game, Coach!" Belldandy screamed at the top of her lungs, slamming her glass down on the table so hard she broke its handle and splashed everyone in the booth with its contents. The whole bar was suddenly quiet.

"We fuckin' lost! We _lost_!! We actually had a chance, and we lost! A..and I blew it! I totally blew for our team with that sloppy spike! I didn't choke...I sucked! If I would have just kept my cool...shit, what's the use? You guys spend all this time doing extra practices with me, and I reward you with wayward junior high-level spikes during match points! I'm an idiot! A stupid god-damned worthless volleyball idiot! Why do you even bother with me? I might as well have hands full of thumbs! I don't deserve...I..I don't even belong..."

Tamiya and Ootaki were shell-shocked speechless with Belldandy's outburst.

"Y'know, I was really impressed with the three of you!" Chihiro interrupted without missing a beat, her voice a mixture of praise and censure. It was as if she didn't even hear a single word of her tirade. "And I don't want to hear the booze talkin' through you any more tonight, Morisato. That's cheap!"

"Huh?" Tamiya exclaimed, suddenly sober.

"Listen to me and listen to me good, you guys!" Chihiro said in a low voice, her face red with intensity as she leaned in closer. "I didn't expect you girls to last four games with those girls. But goddammit, you proved me wrong! You went _five_ games, and you actually took the last game down to the wire! You three are the core of the team, you're the leaders. Based on what happened tonight, you can look at things from inside a sake glass, moaning and whining and bitching about what you _didn't_ do. Or you can take pride in what you _did_ do! I chose to see things in the latter perspective, because I had to. I gotta look at that Bronze Medal in my office for the rest of my life...and feel proud of myself and my team. You think that's easy? But you know what? I'm fuckin' proud of that medal! And I'm proud of you guys! I saw Tamiya stand toe-to-toe against an All-American and hold her own! I saw Ootaki demonstrate some real leadership, instead of just getting carried away in her head! And I saw Morisato snuff the daylights out of two American First-team MVPs _seven_ times during that match! I could tell that those American girls were surprised as shit when their power-players got flamed by you guys..."

"Yeah, that was pretty cool, wasn't it?" Ootaki and Tamiya chimed in, gaining some heart back. "We seen the look on their faces in the backcourt when Belldandy choked their captain's spikes!"

"You're damn right it was cool! Those three things alone made the whole evening worth it for me! Not to mention that the coach for Long Beach praised the three of you. She told me that you girls got skills, regardless of your heights."

Belldandy almost spilled her second sake glass in reaction to what the Coach had just said. Keiichi had been telling her the same thing! It was all about _attitude_, not just about aptitude! Or altitude, for that matter.

"We may have lost the battle...but we're going to win the war. If we can come this close to taking one of the American's top college teams, we're gonna kick ass in the tournaments. And I'm not going to let Tamiya and Ootaki finish their senior years without a Championship! So you girls need to let go of your mopey, dopey, down-the-tubes stupidass defeatism and show up crisp for practice at sunrise tomorrow."

"Tomorrow?!" Belldandy and her teammates blurted out. "Tomorrow's supposed to be a day off!"

"Yep!" Chihiro said with a twinkle in her eye and a wide grin. "We're practicing tomorrow, so be in the gym at 6am!

"6 AM?! That's four hours from now!"

"Heh..heh. Don't you girls know that the whole world revolves around volleyball?"

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

She had Coach Chihiro drop her off in front of the temple. Tamiya was too drunk to drive her own car, so the Coach had to act as chaperone and drive them home. Belldandy decided to play it straight about the temple...hoping that her story about living in an abandoned Buddhist temple would be too incredible for her Coach to believe. When she stepped out of Coach Chihiro's car, her Coach told her "next time, have me drop you off at your house!" before pulling away into the night.

Now, her only companion was the night breeze as she walked past the gate. As expected, part of the new routine made itself known as she shut the gate-door behind her. She felt that Furo could almost sense her heavy-heartedness; he approached her with his head lowered, looking sad. She took off her gloves and scratched him behind the ears. For a big cat, his ears seemed only a little larger than a housecat's ears.

Inside, Keiichi came up to her and asked her about the game.

"We lost," she said glumly...and padded towards the room.

"You don't look so 'lost' to me!" Keiichi observed in a cheerful voice.

"Why does everybody have to act so goddamned cheerful?!" she shouted. "We _lost_! I hit the ball out of bounds. End of story. End of game!"

"So now you understand what you're supposed to get out being a taller girl, Belldandy?" Keiichi asked.

"Yes! Yes! Yes!" she yelled at him. "You and your stupid lesson! I learned that I can be a good volleyball player at _any_ height! So why don't you change me back?!"

"Then you haven't really learned anything," he noted. "You've simply rediscovered what you already knew."

"Fuck you!!" Belldandy screamed. "I don't have time for this!"

She started down the hall, deliberately stomping her feet against the smooth wooden floor. Pausing right before her room, she yelled, "And I learned that you can't take back what was lost! We _lost_!! Are you happy? Did you enjoy seeing me fuck up that last chance..snff..causing my goddamned team to..ssn..fn.._lose_ after they fought so hard? Is that how you get your kicks, Mr. God? By watching us mere mortals fail time after time? Well, haven't you ever made a mistake, Mr. Perfect God? You ever lose something you worked your ass off for? I bet you never failed at anything! So don't go lecturing me, because you don't know shit!"

With that, she slammed the door behind her, promising to herself that she'd give Keiichi the silent treatment until she was good and ready to make him squirm.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Belldandy was so upset by Keiichi's insights, her practice and her grades suffered. She sat out the next three practices and one game, benched by Coach Chihiro because of her moodiness. To her surprise, Keiichi didn't change her back to her previous stature. She threatened and begged him to change her back, and he wouldn't. Every morning she woke up still gangle-tall and raw-boned. Despite everything, Coach Chihiro kept working her, giving her extra attention and drills.

In the locker room, Captains Tamiya and Ootaki kept talking in low voices about how she "has bigtime boyfriend problems, especially because it's her first love." Her teammates were solicitous, always wanting to know about her welfare, always asking if there was some special guy in her life. Everyone seemed to assume that the tall guy they had caught her kissing the night they'd kicked Belldandy out of the Girl's Dorm...was indeed her boyfriend. Several of the girls intimated to her that they were totally jealous that she could hook up with such a gorgeous guy, especially during her frosh year in college.

If only they knew.

She guessed that it would probably take a while before she could muster up the courage to have a real talk with Keiichi again.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

And then it all changed…

"I hate myself! How could I have ever been so heartless! I'm totally, utterly a bitch! Why didn't I stop myself when I had the chance! God, I'm so clueless!!" Belldandy self-assessed between tears as the soft white walls of her room shimmered in the light of the antique floor-candle lamp. She was so ashamed, she didn't ever want to look at Keiichi again. She didn't feel that she _deserved_ to look at him.

Furo hawned mournfully in the room next to hers.

For the whole week, Belldandy had been struggling with herself, trying to ungather yet another skein of conflicting emotions that cloyed her conscience. On one hand, she wanted to forgive Keiichi just a little bit...after all, he _had_ protected her against those thugs. By some miracle, he had increased her height; and the extra sessions with Chihiro, Tamiya and Ootaki were paying dividends in friendships as well skill development. Playing with her two sempai, she finally felt like she had the kind of peers she'd been looking for her whole life. Women she could really compete with on the court. She even had a pet albino Bengal Tiger with a teddy-bear disposition. Life since Keiichi had arrived in her life hadn't been too bad, wasn't too bad.

Or was it?

But this sentiment was entangled with the strong resentment she felt towards his motives. She was bitterly disappointed, because she had wanted to hear that it was _she_ that had motivated him to act on her behalf that night. Not some stupid wish, or Divine Rule, or something to do with that Windowsill place he kept yammering about.

Yet, the chill breeze and the crunching of a March snow under her boots as she walked home from the bus stop had seemed to cool off her mood as well as her skin. But her memories still burned with feverish guilt...

...Two nights ago, Keiichi had done it again. She'd finally felt safe enough to go out to coffee...no sake, just some Starbucks. She still felt like she'd let the entire school down, and people would be reminded of that whenever they saw her, wherever she went. Keiichi invited himself along, so she figured it would be harmless. Maybe she could break the ice with him and all that. Once again, he started saying some ignorant stuff that caused her to get in a huff. And then, she worked it even more, all the more irritated once she realized that she was letting him get her all upset. In the end, she threw her coffee at him and stormed out. And it had all gone down in _public_, with several dozen students from her school in attendance!

They were probably already gossiping about "the tall volleyball Amazon and her boyfriend!" School would be hell the next day. Of course, Keiichi was waiting for her at the temple gate. By that time, Belldandy's anger had eased off just enough for her to ask Keiichi if he had ever been in love. After all, she had wanted to know why he could act so gallantly at times, like he did with those thugs several weeks ago...and not feel _any_ inclination of romance. Granted, a girl asking a guy about his love life was liable to open up some doors that are best be kept shut, but Belldandy felt that she could trust Keiichi to some extent.

Even if he was an insensitive, stupid, intrusive idiot!

So she asked him if he had ever been in love. When he had answered "no", she almost said "well, good! You wouldn't know how to treat a girl if you _did_ love her!" Instead, she stopped dead-pace and stared at him as his admission slowly registered in her mind. She rubbed her ears under her faux-fur hat, feeling a bit nervous because God had just confided to her that he had never been in love. She almost chided herself for asking. She sometimes felt alone in the middle of campus, because she was one of the top athletes in the school. Guys were afraid of her, not interested in her. It was lonely at the top...

...for her, a jock volleyball player. But Keiichi was God. She felt a sick feeling growing in her heart when it began to dawn on her that maybe it was lonely being God. But he had said he had _never_ been in love...and she told herself that there was something seriously wrong with that.

And then, without being prompted, Keiichi told her why he'd never been in love.

Belldandy had paused in the middle of the street, in the middle of the frigid Winter air, just to hear his story. Keiichi began by explaining that he was rambunctious by nature when he was young, and prone to defy common-sense. Belldandy noted to herself with some amusement that he was still a loose cannon; not because he was head-strong, but because he frequently ignored caution and common sense. And he had this certain streak of naïveté to his personality.

"Oh, you mean stuff like entering a girl's bedroom without asking, less than an hour after he had first met her. Or kissing her in front of her peer group, without permission. Or making her cook dinner for he and a priest, without even offering to help," Belldandy quickly volunteered, speaking her thoughts aloud.

"Have you ever done something, Belldandy, and then wished that you could take it back?" he asked her.

"You dimwit!!" she shouted back. "Hello?! Didn't I just lose the biggest game of my volleyball career a week ago? Where have you been?" Keiichi smiled at her and offered an apology.

"I had hoped that you'd gotten over that game by now, but I know that it will take time itself to fade your sense of responsibility for what happened. Time can fade most things..." he noted with a sigh, suddenly genuflective.

"In Yggdrasil, we have many places of Spirit, such as Urd's Well, the Ygg Mainframe, the Ringhorn, the Hall of the Almighty, and the Gate of Judgment," Keiichi described. "Each place performs a certain role. For example, the Well of Urd is a place of Gathering as well as a place of Banishment. The Hall of the Almighty is the place where...you might term Him as the 'God of the Gods'...administers all of Yggdrasil and all of its Multiverses."

Belldandy was blinking back a mental overload as she tried to follow what he was saying. At times, her senses had glimpsed impressions that Keiichi wasn't _the_ God. Now, he had admitted as much; that he was only one of many Gods and Goddesses. Also, his description of the place she had called "Windowsill"...only because she couldn't pronounce the other word that was its true name, _not_ because she was stupid or something!...sounded like some kind of vision of Heaven, or a Paradise. Yet, within the Paradise, there were places that brooded with destruction. It was all very Norse...or maybe very Taoist. She visualized some kind of heaven with a Chinese-type bureaucracy of Gods.

Maybe it was _all_ of the spiritual paths.

"It falls to nature that Gods and Goddesses will evoke love within each other. But because of our incredibly long life-spans and our perfection of being, we Gods cannot form the same types of romantic attachments and commitments that are commonly held by you mortal-folk. If you get married, it means forty or more years of shared life. If we get 'married'...what we call Bonded...it is a commitment of hundreds of thousands of years. Thus, when a God and Goddess desire each other, they Contract for periods of a hundred or maybe a thousand years. For some, it is what you would call a 'fling'; but for others, it serves as a 'trial run' of sorts. Similar to the Earthrealm ritual of 'dating', perhaps. However, if the consonance between the two is filled with fondness, the lovers may wish to Bond. Yet, if a God and Goddess wish to Bond with each other, they must pass a single test. For once a couple is Bonded, they cannot get 'divorced', as you Earthrealm mortals term such annulments. There are no 'laws' governing Yggdrasil, other than the Ultimate Force and the will of Kami-sama. So Love _must_ be unflinching and infallible between the two of them, lest they spend the rest of their lives hating each other in a Bond they cannot breach.

"In light of this, there is a place in Yggdrasil called the Gate of Judgment. Before a God and Goddess may become as One through the Bonding of their Souls...they must pass within the Gate to demonstrate the surety of their affection towards each other. If their love possesses no fluctuation of willingness or any other circumstance of incertitude, then they are 'Sealed'...which means that they may proceed to be Bonded together. But if there is even the slightest strand of doubt, the Gate will re-encode certain matrixes within the Soul of each lover, so that their emotions will tide away from each other, forever separated."

"This sounds like a fairytale, Keiichi," Belldandy finally commented. "I mean, it sounds like one of those fantasy anime series that run on Tokyo TV or something. A Gate of Love? Come on! I'm not stupid, you know."

"Of course you aren't, otherwise I wouldn't have been dispatched to grant you a wish," Keiichi answered, smiling briefly.

"I am getting sick and tired about hearing constant talk about wishes! I want to hear about _you_! I asked you if you've ever been in love, and you said 'no'...which I find totally hard to believe," Belldandy remarked, irritated. "You're a God, you're not so bad to look at, you've got some measure of personality...someone must be interested in you. Interesting to you..."

Her face pinkened as she caught herself complementing him so openly.

"In the youth millennia of my life...or what you would call 'childhood'...I was strictly warned by the Elder Gods to never go near the Gate of Judgment. I knew about the Gate, of course; for all young Gods and Goddesses are taught to respect its powers. But in this one instance, I decided to take exception to their words. I walked through the Gate, alone."

Belldandy held her breath back as Keiichi's eyes began to well up with tears. She could never imagine that a God would cry...but there it was.

"When Time cycled me onwards, I did begin to notice the charms of the Goddesses; it was as if their reflections had been caught within my heart. They became...interesting, as you put it. The millennia passed their course, but I could only wonder about why only I felt this way. No one felt that kind of love towards me. And I...only felt interested. I didn't feel passionate, infatuated, insane and all the paradigms that are affectations of Love. Ages passed in my life, and other Gods and Goddesses of the same era as myself began to experience the ennobling garlands of Love upon their Souls. All around me, _everyone_ was falling in Love...except for myself. What I thought to be love in my heart...was simply admiration. Not love. Desperate for the truth, I traveled to that part of Yggdrasil where the Gate lies; a desolate place with a stark beauty of its own, because it is rarely frequented. There, I asked the Gate why I was constantly excluded from the joys of being in love with a Goddess. And it..snff..answered me..."

"The Gate told me that it would forever separate two lovers if even a single doubt about their love was harbored in _either_ of their hearts. And in my case, it separated me from Love itself."

Keiichi's composure had slipped away bit by bit as he related his story, but he completely broke down into deep sobbing as he explained to her that...just because he had walked through the Gate by himself as a little kid...he was forever separated from being in love with _anything_. For what mortal or Divine could face the entirety of their life without possessing a dearness of any doubts? The Gate had simply performed its assigned function: it had sensed the misgivings in Keiichi's heart and then forever divorced him from that which accompanied him. Which just happened to be nothing...and everything.

Belldandy was horrified.

Since Keiichi had passed within the Gate without a 'partner', the Gate had no single point of focus...no single Goddess or other being...in which to re-encode his Soul with a banishing spell. There was no single 'other' that he could be separated from.

Therefore, by default, the Gate had to bar him from being in love with _everything_, and barred everything from being in love with him.

From _all_ beings...

...and even himself.

Keiichi, the God who seemed to have everything under control, could _never_ experience love. It wasn't even possible for him to feel any love for himself.

Mortified to the very root of her being, Belldandy could only feel burned by the shame of her own insensitivity! Here she was, an independent girl who didn't want the complications of being in love, who absolutely refused to look at guys her age unless she wanted to use them. There he was, a God with immense powers, who would probably give anything he had just for the slightest witness of Love.

And when he had finished, Keiichi had simply resumed their walk to the temple, silent and hang-headed.

When they got home, Belldandy immediately went to her bedroom without a word...and punched the tatami until her knuckles bled.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Belldandy couldn't even go to school the next two days. Keiichi's story had completely altered her view of him. His story was so tragic, she couldn't even begin to sway herself out of the malingering depression she felt. Sorrow blanketed sorrow, like an endless barren desert. Her heart was torn...

Walking from her bedroom to the bathroom, Belldandy saw Keiichi sweeping out the main lobby.

Every iota of her being in that moment wanted her to throw herself against his chest, to hug him with a comforting compassion, to let him know that he wasn't alone...that she understood the pale of his pain, even if she couldn't feel it.

So she decided to prove him wrong. A simple loving hug wouldn't be denied, would it? She walked up to him, cheerfully greeting him with the brightest smile she could manage under the circumstances, and tried to move in to hug him.

But something physically held her back. It was as if her feet had been rooted to the floor. With a sinking heart, Belldandy realized that it was the Curse of the Gate.

And the fact that she didn't love him.

Keiichi had only been a child, and yet he was still being punished for doing something that he knew was wrong. But he didn't mean anything wrong!! It was the mistake of a child, not some conspiracy to try and destroy Windowsill!

Why Keiichi?!

Everything seemed so horribly unfair!

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --


	116. Pt 116: Jaws of Obscurity

**Part 116: Jaws of Obscurity**

VANAGDRASIL NILHORN:

After they departed Nieflgard Aumatrix VII, Queen Hild 'hijacked' their group to a place called the "Nilhorn". The Nilhorn was an arrowhead-shaped formation of several million mammoth volcanic 'mountains' floating in DarkSpace; from a distance, it looked like a cloud of shards, or perhaps the Teeth of Hell. A Red Hole hovered above the aggregate; a spatial eccentricity lazing over the massive Nilhorn in an irregular orbit. As their group encountered the periphery of the Nilhorn, Pryzm could see the moon-sized promontories just below. Each 'space mountain' was a sequence of geological purgation that fired into the bleak sky, waterfalls of lava bleeding down its sides like glow worms. The volcanic mountains looked like the segments of a shattered planet...only flipped upside down so that the curved lithosphere remained intact at the basin of each massive asteroid-shape, anchoring the jag-knife rise of the mountains.

As they passed by one of the floating scarfs, Pryzm recognized with mounting horror that they _were_ shattered pieces of planets! The basin of many of the volcanic mountains were oceaned with blue water and retained some kind of an atmosphere...leaving Pryzm to wonder if there were any living beings inhabiting their surfaces. Her revulsion exceeded her fear when she examined the remnants closely. Each of the shattered planetary basins was bespotted with dead cities; the kind of destroyed lands that occur when a sentient mortal species eradicates itself in warfare, or is destroyed by natural catastrophe. She felt her stomach wrench, the ice cream she had recently enjoyed turning acrid and bile in her throat as she held her hands over her mouth to keep from vomiting. Around them, the uncaring sky-of-space was a dirty dark red-purple fog, streaked with fiery clouds whose appearance seemed to be visual echoes of the formations in the sky of the Earthrealm...if those clouds were comprised of rarefied flame rather than condensed moisture.

The Nilhorn was a horrid collection of destroyed mortal civilizations!! Pryzm sensed that the whole scene in front of her was some kind of warped dream, or an asteroid field gone horribly wrong. Even though she was in the airless gulf of Space, Pryzm could smell the rich tang of ozone mixed with burrs of brimstone.

"How could _anyone_ gather together pieces of dead planets?" she asked herself, appalled at the planetary 'graveyard'. "And more importantly, _why_ would someone create this?"

To add to Pryzm's discomfort, Hild pointedly informed her and the others that they were en route to her Black Palace, which was vantaged at the very apex of the Nilhorn. Hild's exuberance felt intimidating to Pryzm as the tan-skinned Demoness emphasized that they were going to be her 'guests' for a few days.

This wasn't turning out to be 'just some sightseeing tour' of Vanagdrasil!

Pryzm could almost taste Aunt Mara's mounting tension as they passed within the orange flares of lightning in the wake of the red hole. A series of spatial distortions zigging from the event horizon jittered the formations of planet-chunks. Adding to the brew of sensory consternation, an occasional invisible 'wave' of energy would buffet the entire constellation of volcanoes that comprised the Nilhorn. In Pryzm's mind, the 'shuddering' of semi-planet shapes in the Nilhorn suggested a temple's koi pond back home...how the clear surface of the pond would 'bobble' her view of the carp swimming under the water whenever she splashed a rock into it. In a sublime way, the fragmented planetscapes suggested floating brown-grey-blue-orange flower petals as she and the others traveled towards the 'tip' of the Nilhorn.

The scene was strangely beautiful...and beautifully lurid.

Pryzm tried to concentrate on the mystery surrounding the "Elder Sister" - "Younger Sister" business between Aunt Mara and "Queen" Hild. Hild was obviously much older than their Aunt. Pryzm's Goddess intuition seemed to convey the impression that she was at least a half a million years old. But there was no physical resemblance between the two at all. Their personalities seemed to be quite different: Aunt Mara's personality seemed more suited to the 'working girl' ethos, while Hild's seemed to be hyperactive with hidden malice. They weren't sisters by means of having the same parents. But then again, Aunt Mara and Mom were sisters, even though they had _different_ parents. Could this 'Queen' Hild be Aunt Mara's sister? Was Hild a long-lost relative of Aunt Mara?

While they were traveling up the Nilhorn, she asked Falcyn and Sygyn about what they knew about the Queen of Hell. Her Demon cousins informed Pryzm that they had never met Queen Hild before...but they quickly added that they had certainly heard about her. According to Falcyn, Hild was known to devise schemes whose deviousness and cruelty would appall even the most seasoned Demoness, including his Mother. Sygyn added that she didn't know much more about Hild, except that Hild had a direct link to Oni-sama.

Overbearing, sovereign to a fault, rambunctious, threatening...and now, an intimate of the Demon's Dark Lord! Pryzm felt her uncertainties purpling into reaching fears and gripping paranoias.

Hild casually noted that they would have to fly through several 'FireClouds' during their ascent. As they approached the FireClouds, Pryzm felt gripped with fright. Each cloud seemed nova-fired...gaping mouths of pyreific threat, looming close and ready to swallow her and her sister. These weren't the novas and aquasuns of Yggdrasil: those were comforting, while these 'FireClouds' seeme to exude discomfort. She didn't want her fear to be visible to the others, not in _this_ place, where everything was so different that Yggdrasil. Fortunately, her cousin Sygyn sensed her unease before it became _too_ obvious. If this was Yggdrasil, then she probably wouldn't be so afraid. FireClouds there didn't emanate any aura of malign intent; they were inviting, not threatening. Sygyn suggested that the FireClouds in Vanagdrasil were akin to the Aurora Borealis effect, only much more colorful and intense. Pryzm breathed words of thanks to her older cousin; once again, Sygyn seemed to have an uncanny ability to guide her impressions away from terrific analogisms.

Ulfryn asked about the red-hole orbiting the Nilhorn; adding that she was wary of black holes and white holes because of the uncertainty that she couldn't survive being drawn into one or the other. Pryzm shared her sis's concern, acutely aware that a black hole would pose no threat whatsoever to a normal Goddess or Demoness, but it might be deadly to a half-mortal, half-Goddess like herself. Especially since they weren't in Yggdrasil, where Mom's 'safety matrix' would kick in if they passed near any extreme gravitational anomalies.

Whenever she resided on the Earthrealm, she and Ulfryn were practically half-human, half-Goddess...well-embedded in their physical manifestations, prone to illness and injury and headaches from studying fractions on school nights. But here, in the Divine realms, the two sisters were _almost_ full Goddesses. Even though their 'Divine manifestation' was in the equation of approximately 1.3 quintillion parts energy to one part Earthrealm mortal vibration, it was that miniscule portion of humanity in their being that might be the fatal weakness should they attempt certain actions.

If that one mortal fragment of their beings was destroyed, she and Ulfryn would never be able to return to the Earthrealm.

Or worse.

And if she and Ulfryn were unable to manifest on the Earthrealm, Mom would be forced to choose between she and her sister, or Dad. Of course, Mom could split into two...but their family wouldn't ever be the same again.

Hild seemed to sense her anxieties; the bronzed Demon Queen assured them that the Red Hole was "keyed" so that only she could approach it. Hild informed them that the Red Hole was her direct conduit to the one of the Thrones of Oni-sama. If she was summoned by the Dark Lord, or if she merely wanted to visit Him...she'd simply travel into the Red Hole...and she'd be in His Presence a whisk of Time later.

"Actually," Hild added, "I'd arrive in His chambers a moment before I left."

Pryzm was skeptical of Hild's explanation. If the Dark Lord governed all of the Vanagdrasil Logorinth, then why would He choose to create a direct means of access between He and Hild? Couldn't they rely on the Aumatrix system like everyone else? Or was Hild that important to Him? _How_ could she, a mere Demoness, be important to the Dark Sovereign of Vanagdrasil? Or if the red hole was Hild's creation, why would the Dark Lord permit it?

It was just too freaky to figure out.

Hild was a Demoness of many mysteries...and if Falcyn's impressions were to be believed...she was a wildly reckless time bomb waiting to go off.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

As they approached the massive network of bulwarks and spires that jarred together to form the intricate environs of Hild's Black Palace, Falcyn was completely stoked about how cool Queen Hild's estate looked. It was _definitely_ a palace in every sense of the word...Mom's Demoness Lair wasn't even anywhere in the same league as Hild's Black Palace! Of course, Mom was stationed on the Earthrealm, and had to make use of whatever SpaceTime attributions she could manage to create within conformance to the Earthrealm's environment. It was strictly against the Rules to create Lairs using sumptuary extremes of SpaceTime on any planet populated by mortals. But Hild's place was _immense_ and totally Gothed out...far more freak-scary than the young Demon teenager could hope for. It made the Dark Towers of the Lord of the Rings movies look like a three-year old's beach sandcastle!

And he was actually going to visit it!

Falcyn couldn't wait to see the inside of Hild's palace, as their group decelerated upon their approach. They streaked upwards along a glowing green stairwell that angled up the steep 'mountain' of planet. After many hundreds of kilometers, the stairwell reached a plateau summit. Falcyn was treated to the sight of an enormous square or plaza of black obsidian, which poured into the front gate like a silent waterfall. The entrance gate complex consisted of several tall buildings; their curved columns and pillars were carved with life-like gargoyles and grotesqueries. Cauldrons peripeted from atop the massive structures; oasts that poured streams of molten fire down their facades, illuminating their form against the dark sky. It was just too cool! Falcyn was already inspired by this, and they weren't even inside of the place yet.

Naturally, his kid cousins were acting like total spazz's...peering around with wary, darting eyes...as if one of the carved statues would come to life and eat them. More proof that Pryzm and Ulfryn were lightweights! Falcyn was amused by the rich sense of terror Hild's palace evoked. It was like the ultimate Halloween haunted house! For a moment, he wished that the dark figures in the entry promenade to Hild's Black Palace _would_ come to life, just so he could taste the fright of his cousins more deeply.

Once they passed under the grand entrance, it seemed to Falcyn that Hild's palace seemed to be laid out in a pentagram design within a circle, with richly decorated towers arising at various points along the halls and the intersects. Any person of the Christian religious persuasion would be scared witless by the ominous shape, despite the fact that the pentagram was a symbol for Christ in the early days of that religion. Thus, the irony that Hild had chosen this shape for her Black Palace wasn't lost on Falcyn.

Sharp-edged towers and menacing curved battlements and walls...that's what it looked like from the heights of outside. But Falcyn knew well enough that the exterior appearance often had little to do with the interior layout, especially with Demoness Lairs. Both of his Mom's Lairs was prime examples of this design strategy. Each of Mom's Lairs posed a sense of normalcy when one approached it: one appeared to be nothing more than a maintenance stairway leading down from a Shinkansen platform into a tunnel. The other Lair was an abandoned videogame 'palace' from way back in the 1980s. But on the inside, both Lairs were totally Demonic.

Once Hild had conducted them inside her grand foyer, Falcyn marveled at the obscurity of the design. Several lengths of hallway branched out from the main hall; two of curved out of sight. Hild turned and floated down an interior hallway to the left; as he followed, Falcyn's attention was immediately gripped by the sights and sounds of the interior of Hild's Palace.

The walls were arrayed with all sorts of holophotic and real-life pieces of museum quality art from any number of sentient mortal species. Each work of art depicted scenes of destruction, despair, sublime darkness and erotic lust. Smoky portraits of 'devils' from thousands of mortal cultures hovered in the air as they hovered down the long hallway. Once they passed thought the 'gallery' wing of the palace, which seemed to be many kilometers in length, Hild turned left again and led them forth into another section of the palace. The interior wall suddenly opened up, revealing that this hallway fronted a lake-sized lava springs.

He couldn't decide which was more marvelous; the interior of the hall or the magnificent opening view onto a solid lake of magma-seasoned lava. Each 'wing' of Hild's Black Palace featured tall vaulted ceilings with intricate transept designs. Falcyn noted approvingly that the 'ribs' of the vaults were actual bones...dinosaur-sized ones too! Besides being a feast for the eyes, Falcyn's other senses were also aroused by the smell of richly seasoned brews of magma and lava. The tantalizing fragrance almost made his mouth water. The scenic setting of the lava springs was completed by a vista of forested mountains and blizzarding snowfall. A Demon could actually soak in the hot pond and watch the snow float down to the surface of the lava!

It was totally molten!!

Hild herself was totally molten, as well!

Falcyn was usually quite reserved and nervous around the opposite sex, an aspect of his character that his sister and cousins constantly teased him about. But something about Hild seemed to ease his usual 'girl-nervous' tensions, relaxing him. It wasn't like Hild was exactly a girl, either! She was _definitely_ not a girl!

Despite her lofty role in the scheme of Vanagdrasil, Hild seemed _easy_ somehow. Falcyn could sense himself feeling relaxed around Hild, ever since he had met her. And yet, there was a certain charm she exuded. He couldn't exactly put his finger on that quality...but he did sense that Hild seemed to 'do all the work for him', so that he could feel comfortable around her. Perhaps it was some quality that mature Goddesses and Demonesses seemed to possess; a sort of becalming radiance of wisdom and experience. It was sorta like how Aunt Skuld made him feel, except that Aunt Skuld didn't seem attractive to him as either as a woman or Goddess. Aunt Skuld was Aunt Skuld, nothing more. His heart sank as he had to admit that Queen Hild was a beautiful Demoness...who was many thousands of levels above him in terms of class, sophistication and elegance. Yet, he didn't feel afraid of her! Falcyn couldn't explain it to himself any other way. Hild was so easy to talk to! And she was so _sexy_!

Whoo boy, was she sexy!

Of course, his younger sis would probably give him crap later...he could tell by a certain smirk playing across her face. Sygyn had probably caught him gawking at Hild's body while they were ascending the Nilhorn. But he hadn't been around a _true_ Demoness other than Mom for the longest time! And Hild was a total babe, even if she was probably 500,000 years old! She was aged and young and girlish at the same time, which made her appear deviously exotic. And she sported this rich, copper-toned skin. As if she has spent all her life on the beach! Falcyn kept looking up the slit of her dress to see if she had any tanlines, but he couldn't find any.

Did that mean that she tanned herself _in the nude_?

While the sensual imagining caused the blood to rush to his cheeks, Mom kept pestering he and Sygyn to 'behave yourselves' in whispered tones, which to Falcyn was just like piling ants on a birthday cake. Despite Mom's over-caution, Hild didn't strike him as the kind of Demoness who would get all grousy if things weren't 'just so'. Blessit!...Mom could be such an irritant sometimes! It was obvious that she was sucking up to Hild, which was something he wasn't used to seeing his Mother doing. It made him feel uncomfortable, because it was usually the other way around: any Demonesses that came to visit Mom were very edgy, as if they were walking on skull-shells.

"Ahh, we've come to the end of my little tour!" Hild said with a wide grin. "Tell me, young Goddesses...what do you think about my Black Palace?"

Pryzm and Ulfryn simply shivered, too overwhelmed to give her an answer.

"C'mon! Give them a break, Elder Sister!" his Mom said in a reasoning voice, answering for them. "They just got here an hour ago. They're probably just suffering from disorientation from transit."

"Am _not_!!" Pryzm suddenly shouted, defiantly. Her fists were solid at her sides; in fact, her whole posture was rigid...reminding Falcyn of a cornered cat. A cornered cat surrounded by a pack of wild dogs.

"This place is _spooky_, in a sick, perverted, freaky kind of way! _Anyone_ would be scared by it! I don't like it! At all!!"

His cousin Ulfryn looked like she was going to drop dead in shock. Her sister's unexpected remark had obviously paralyzed her as effectively as hot water thrown on a turtle. Even he was a bit caught-off guard by Pryzm's rebellious observation! Despite the breath of awe that he felt within these surroundings, for a moment Falcyn was even more amazed at his cousin's abruptness! He looked at his Mom...even she seemed stupefied by the young Goddess's remark for a split-second.

You just don't go around dissing the palace of a Demon Queen of the First Rank!

His astonishment turned into giggles, as Hild and Mom started laughing sarcastically at Pryzm's observation. Of course, his cousin was right. This place was very horrifying. To a Goddess, the air of diabolism in Hild's Black Palace _would_ be appalling. There was no escape from it; one might as well try to escape from sunlight or the sky as to try and hide away from the spectral qualities of a Demon's Lair.

However, horror is a refined taste; its appreciation was a point of difference between he and his girlish Goddess cousins. Horror's blunt edge could crawl up one's neck with a noose of nervousness; but a refined horror like those on display here in Hild's Black Palace was like savoring silk-smooth miso soup. It wasn't just the sights and sounds of the place that created the horror, it was the secretive depths of terror which lurked just behind the sights and sound which impressed Falcyn the most. He could feel the silent tides of fright mounting in his being, but unlike the Goddesses, he _enjoyed_ the knife-edge titillation that accompanied such overwhelms of fear.

Falcyn sighed...he was just glad that Hild hadn't taken Pryzm's comment seriously.

"I think she just complimented me, neh?" Hild said in a singing voice, which brought on another round of Demonic boister. Falcyn could see Pryzm's face reddening: she certainly wasn't amused. His cousin reminded him of Aunt Skuld's little robot Sigel when she got mad at Banpei.

Scared to death, and yet spirited enough to feel hostility when she sensed that she was being insulted.

He had to admit that he was impressed with Pryzm, for all her tomboyishness! But his admiration was abruptly cut short when Queen Hild abruptly broke from her giggling and floated right up to Pryzm. She eyed his short-haired cousin for a moment. As soon as Pryzm broke eye-contact with her, the elegant Demon Queen reached out with whip-lash suddenness, cupping the small child-Goddess's chin in the palm of her hand. Hild floated closer, so that her face was just a few cm from Pryzm's.

"My...my!! Aren't _you_ the little spark! The game's already afoot!" Hild said in a voice that could freeze a sun, forcing Pryzm to look right at her. His cousin was shivering uncontrollably from head to boots, in complete contrast to Hild's free-and-easygoing demeanor.

"Oh shit!" he thought he heard his Mom whisper under her breath.

"I'd wager that...deep inside your heart...you feel deep hatred. You hate my guts right now, don't you Pryzm?" Hild observed in an icy voice of quiet, an _adult_ voice that even tore forth uneasy chills that traveled up and down Falcyn's spine.

"Ah yes!! Now I remember!" Hild declared. "Goddesses aren't _supposed_ to harbor hatred, are they? Goddesses fight fair, Goddesses don't cheat, Goddesses are innocent, Goddesses are forgiving...and all that sort of nonsense! Ahhh...but _you're_ not a pure Goddess, are you...little girl?! _I_ can see it clearly in your eyes, little girl! You're as angry as hell towards me, because I made fun of you. Aren't you, little girl?"

Falcyn was truly afraid now. As for his cousin, Pryzm looked like she was going to melt; her lips were quivering, and her eyes were partially rolling back with terror. The decided shift in the atmosphere made him feel very uncomfortable; the light-hearted giggling of a moment ago was gone, replaced by a very harsh and malign air of menace. Even though he wasn't the subject of Hild's attention, Falcyn felt himself yielding to a sense of pure fright. Dread had become _real_...and it was very oppressive in the hands of a Demoness who has mastered it.

He felt sorry for his cousin.

Falcyn gulped as Hild turned her head away from Pryzm for a brief few seconds, regarding him intensely with her green-orange eyes...fixing him like an insect pinned to an arthropologist's display board.

"_And you're so impressed with this little child?! She may be your cousin...but she's a nothing, my young boy!_" a voice thoughtcast in his head. Hild hovered near him, and ran a finger from his chin to his belly that sent shivers of delight coursing through his body. "_Come to the Lava Pools tomorrow night after LastMeal...and I will show you the _–true-_ meaning of things._"

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Holy shit! She's a freakin' maniac!!" Ulfryn heard her sister whisper as she slipped out of her clothes. Once they were alone in their room, the first thing Ulfryn wanted to do was strip out of her outfit and put something cooler on. All along, Vanagdrasil was quite _humid_, like the intemperate dankness of the middle of a jungle. As she formed herself some new clothes designed to cool her body temperature, she heard Pryzm repeat herself. Ulfryn couldn't agree more with her sister's observation about 'Queen' Hild. While Hild had bore down on Pryzm with such a ferocious scrutiny a short while ago, Ulfryn had felt like _she_ was going to pass out from empathic fear. She was definitely shaking worse than her sister.

The thought of it still gave her goosebumps!

Their room _seemed_ safe enough. When Hild opened the rolling great-stone 'door' to the room, several skeletal figures that seemed to be made of smoke fled out through the opening. Inside, it was filled with some kind of night creatures that looked like a cross between a spider and a bat. The walls were _dripping florescent red blood_.

It resembled a torture chamber, or an ancient tomb...not a guest room!

Hild simply waved her hand, and the room instantly reorganized itself into a different configuration. Although Hild noted that "this should be more to your liking", Ulfryn thought that their room looked conspicuously like a dungeon. The windows were barred with some kind of angular metal grille-works which were jointed with sharp spikes. The walls were greystoned with unevenly hewn large blocks of porous rock, and the ceiling had a barbed-wire chandelier that emitted an off-yellow colored light that seemed to create more shadows than illumination. Their two beds were richly appointed with thick comforters, which didn't make much sense since Vanagdrasil was so _hot_. And the floor was made of this weird marble that had _veins_ running through it, pulsing with some kind of purplish fluid.

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw a shape...

"YEEEEEKKKKK!!"

She and Pryzm screamed at the apparition, literally jumping into each other's arms...clutching each other in terror...

...as their Aunt phased through one of the stone walls of their room.

"Sorry about scaring you girls, but I had to sneak in," Aunt Mara said apologetically as she patted down her leather jacket, dusting it off. Ulfryn held onto Pryzm tightly for at least a minute after their Aunt had 'pulled herself' fully out of the wall. Even though it was only Aunt Mara, she was still hot-numb with the blade of fear. Once her heart stopped skipping, Ulfryn realized with a thorough dismay that this place had totally disoriented her. Her fears and insecurities had become so ungoverned, the mere appearance of her _Aunt_ had sent her and her sister into screams of dread.

And her Aunt was probably the only adult Demoness she could trust in all of Vanagdrasil!

"How are you two faring? I'm sorry this has turned out so badly, but we really need to have a talk. So I managed to split off a bit of myself, so I can sneak in here to have a discussion with you two about Hild. Sorry I can't do the chibi Mara this time," Aunt Mara began, sitting in mid-air with one leg casually draped over the other. She had changed clothes since they had left Ulfryn and her sister in their room; now she was wearing a short midriff-baring blouse with a spaghetti-string open side, a red leather jacket, and a pair of knee-length jeans.

"Hild is one of the most powerful Demonesses...scratch that, she _is_ the most powerful Demoness in Vanagdrasil. Not only is she powerful, but she's equally as dangerous as well. You girls do know what a Queen of the Demons is, don't you? And I'm certain that you both know that I'm a Demoness Queen, right?"

Ulfryn nodded her head silently.

"Well, Hild is _the_ Demoness Queen. Ichiban, numero uno, magnifique, top dog, and all that. All those bangles and accessories you see in her hair...those are there to _restrain_ her power! I'm sure you girls both know how your Mom and all other Licensed Goddesses use a unique Seal as a 'security lock' for their enhanced powers. A Seal which, when it is 'unsealed', allows their Goddess powers to increase a thousand-fold?"

Ulfryn nodded her head again, having just witnessed Mom unsealing her powers in the Axial CorePlex back in Yggdrasil Logorinth. The difference once Mom's powers were unsealed was dramatic, to say the least. She had never witnessed a Goddess unsealing her powers before; the sheer _energy_ of her Mom's being had figuratively hovered somewhere in the Metanative stratospheres.

"Well consider this carefully. _Every_ piece of jewelry that you see Hild wearing, in her hair, on her arms and ankles, her earrings, her necklaces..._is_ a Seal!!" their Aunt said slowly in a sober tone of voice, her orange eyes widening to emphasize her point.

"Great. A lunatic...with a lot of power. Just what we need!" Ulfryn heard Pryzm observe in a despairing voice. She felt her knees almost give way as she grasped the implications.

"N..no way!!" she gasped. "Oh my Lord!"

"Well, that's not quite how I would put it..." Aunt Mara said with a chuckle, "but in your case, it is quite apt."

Pryzm was looking at Aunt Mara, shaking her head slowly in disbelief.

"She's _that_ powerful! Think of her as some kind of Demoness equivalent of a mega-Senior First Class License Goddess. She's probably every bit as powerful as your Mom. Just like you guys have Norns and we don't...we Demons have Queens, which you guys don't have in Yggdrasil. As a Demon Queen of the First Rank, Hild has many times more Divine firepower than your Mom and I combined. But that's just here in her Lair. If we were in Yggdrasil, your Mom could hold her own against Hild, hands down. But Hild is a force to be reckoned with. She can take on Rind of the Demoness Valkyrs without batting a lash! That's why I'm so worried about you guys being here. I don't know how she found out that we're coming, because our little foray in Vanagdrasil was contracted out between the Dark Lord and you guy's Lord. Hild _shouldn't_ have even known about it. But somehow, that mixed-up minx found out! The fact that she met us at the Aumatrix totally caught me off guard! Understand this...I'll have to play along, because I need to learn _why_ Hild was there to meet us, and what she has planned. Now that she's invited you to her own palace, I'm afraid that you girls are in grave danger! To you girls, this may sound like I'm repeating the obvious, or maybe the stupid and redundant ramblings of an adult Demoness...but I _know_ that Hild's plotting something dreadful. I just wanted to warn you girls about her. Because of who she is, we're _all_ in danger!"

"Even you, Aunt Mara?"

"Yes, even me. And your cousins as well," their Aunt confirmed, her face deepened with a fretful expression.

"Hild is a genius when it comes to subterfuge, manipulation, betrayal and mayhem," Mara said in a voice that was rock-solid with verity. "She's done some stuff that even _I_ would find abhorrent!"

"Ahhhh..." both Ulfryn and her sister gasped. Ulfryn felt herself shivering again, just because of the _way_ Aunt Mara had said those words about Hild.

"Let me tell you girls a story..." Aunt Mara said in a quiet voice, motioning for she and Pryzm to come sit at her feet.

"Before Hild, there were _no_ Demon Queens..."

"Ehhh?!"

"Hild was the _first_ Demon Queen. She's one of the very very few of us who has ever gotten one over on His Dark Majesty. Waybackwhen, Hild managed to exert some influence on His Noirness, convincing Him to fall in love with her. And then, once He had given her His special affections, she Flared with a different Demon every night for several thousands of years. In Earthrealm terms...she 'slept around'. A lot."

"That's really messed up, not to mention unkind!" Pryzm observed bluntly. Ulfryn didn't feel herself as quick to judge as her older sister; in this bizarre place, anything could go.

"But you don't understand Demons, Pryzm. And none of us truly understands the Dark Lord, who is the personification of all Demons. But in this case, our Sovereign acted as any male Demon would," Mara countered, shaking her head slightly. "You see...once Hild did that, Oni-sama became absolutely _infatuated_ with her. Our Lord is a control freak; and I'm quite sure that He found something...attractive...in Hild's many infidelities. Hild did a lot of other stuff two: she vandalized the Dark Proctor's Research Center; put a Bug in the Demoness Grief Office sub-routine hubs; blew up part of one of the Obsidian Dark Cathedrals; and even attempted to destroy several inhabited galaxies.

"No way!" Ulfryn gasped. "That's insane!"

"Quite," Mara agreed. "In sum, Hild managed to get in so much trouble here in Vanagdrasil, that the Dark One was faced with either having to do away with her, or banish her from Vanagdrasil. She had broken so many of the Laws here that the other Demons were begging Him to do something about her! However, since He was in Love with her, both choices were no doubt very unpleasant for Him to consider. The Dark One has little patience for matters which are distasteful to Him. Hild, crafty fox-spirit that she is, managed to pretend to ease His discomfort by proposing a third option. She promised our Dark Lord that she would be 'loyal' to Him, but only in exchange for His promise to marry her and make her Queen of Vanagdrasil."

"I..I don't understand, Aunt Mara," Ulfryn said in a voice soured with confusion.

"Even some young Demons and Demonesses find it a little hard to understand at first, Ulfryn," her Aunt answered with a knowing smile. "Shortly after this, our Dark One decided to marry Hild...who thereafter became the first Demon Queen, by His leave. But a mere Demoness could never match the Evil campaigns of secrecy that broil within the breast of the Dark Lord! Hild was obligated to be faithful to the Dark Lord from then on. But He had made no such commitment to her. Soon after they were married, He cleverly revealed the folly within her cunning. He sought out a new Demoness and made her his wife. And then another, and another, and on and on. Hild could do nothing but watch as Oni-sama took on wife after wife after wife.

"And then, finally, He chose me."

"You?!" Ulfryn exclaimed. She knew that Aunt Mara was a Demon Queen, but up until now, she didn't know why.

"Finally?" Pryzm added in a questioning voice.

"I'm the last Demon Queen," Mara confirmed. "For some reason, the Ultimate Force would not let him have more than 666 wives. All along, Hild thought that she would have the Sovereign of Night to herself...but He had outplayed her completely. She was undone by her own avarice and thirst for power. So now, Hild's one capricious and very angry Demoness. Behind her smile is a brew of animosity and frustration. She's probably insane as well. And because I'm the youngest of His wives, she bears extra jealousy towards me."

Ulfryn was sickened by this glimpse into the inner workings of a mind of a Demoness. Aunt Mara's voice was mixed with admiration for Hild's cunning, as well as pity for her betrayal by the Lord of all the Demons. The admiration part...that made Ulfryn feel very awkward. Her Aunt was volunteering this information, presumably to help she and Pryzm, and yet when she was telling the story, her voiced sounded like she was all impressed with Hild's devious behavior. And besides that, their Aunt was afraid of Hild. And even more emotionally confusing, Aunt Mara seemed to be proud of the fact that she was the youngest of the Dark Lord's wives.

"If only Aunt Mara could be a Goddess! Or even half a Goddess!" Ulfryn thought to herself. Aunt Mara was kind, for a Demoness. But Ulfryn didn't know if this kindness was due to the fact that Mara was bound by the restraints of family...that she could never be abusive to she and Pryzm because they were her sister's daughters...or that Mara's charity of spirit towards she and her sister was a reflection of a benign nature that somehow existed deep within her Demoness Soul.

"So that's why you call her 'Elder Sister'?" Pryzm asked.

"Yes," Aunt Mara replied. "There's no way that I would be her _real_ sister. Hild's too evil to have a sister! Besides, who'd want to have that psycho for a sister, anyway?! She'd as soon kill me and feed me to the SpiderDemons as she would invite me to her Black Palace. But there's one thing in my favor. Because of the Doublet System, she can't kill off any of the other Demon Queens. But she _can_ make their lives a trudgery of misery: what you Earthrealm mortals would call 'a living Hell'. So she can't kill me, and she can't keep me penned up here, because I run one of His Darkness's Demoness Offices."

"Waitaminute!" Pryzm interjected. "I thought the Doublet System went the way of the dinosaurs when the 'Expansion Event' happened. That it was no longer needed, because Gods and Demons could comingle in each other's Realms."

"That's just the thing, Pryzm," Mara answered. "The Doublet System was abolished by the Expansion Event. So Oni-sama created a new Doublet System to keep His wives in check. After Hild murdered the next dozen or so Demon Queens, of course."

"She..murdered..the..other..Demon..Queens," Pryzm choked out.

"Yes. As soon as she learned the Doublet System was no more, Hild went on a murderous rampage. So the Dark Lord made a special Doublet System. If a Demon Queen kills a Demon Queen, another Demon Queen dies. Since none of us know who our Doublet is, we could kill one of our fellow Queens...and we ourselves would be their Doublet. Poof! Killed by our own hand. Pretty neat, isn't it?"

"I'm scared!" Ulfryn shouted. "Now, I'm _really_ scared! What if she decides to kill _us_! We're not full Goddesses...so we don't have full powers! Or Doublets. She's mean...she could do anything to us!"

As soon as she spoke, Aunt Mara's face went white as cotton.

"Oh...no!! OH NO!! Oh, My Dark Lord! No!!" she shouted in an anguished voice, her hands suddenly trembling. Ulfryn felt her mind turn to glass. Something she had said had totally upset her Aunt. What could be worse than being in the epicenter of Evil?

"This whole unexpected encounter with Hild has stressed me out so completely, I'm not thinking straight. I completely forgot!" her Aunt said in a low voice, her face still flushed.

"Forgot what, Aunt Mara?"

"Falcyn and Sygyn...they're half-Demon, half-mortal! They're just as vulnerable as you two are!"

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Sygyn didn't like Hild.

It may have been the subtle shades of feminine intuition, a quality of percipience that was most acute in a 14-year-old observer of life. Or maybe it was the quasi-wisdom of a teenage girl with a keen intellect, who had Demonic blood flowing through her veins. In any case, now that she was a creature of pure energy, Sygyn was in her element. Here in her 'other' HomeRealm, Vanagdrasil, faculties that were only latent glimpses of potential while she lived on the Earthrealm had now come to the fore.

Besides, she wasn't just some dumb Earthrealm teenage girl!

Ever since they got here, Sygyn had the distinct impression that Queen Hild was leading her brother on. She just couldn't figure out why. Falcyn wouldn't know better; her brother was gullibility itself when it came to girls. Sygyn knew that she was hampered by an underdeveloped body, much the same as her Mother had been troubled with when _she_ was growing up. In the past two years of her adolescence, she had received more tauntings than come-ons from the boys in her junior high. Which wasn't a lot, since Falcyn had pounded the crap out of any boys he caught pestering her, ever since they both entered the 7th and 8th grades. But Falcyn was hampered by an underdeveloped maturity. Unfortunately, this seemed to make him more a "Momma's Boy" than a "young man on the prowl." At least, this was the impression that her girlfriends had of her twin brother.

It was _that_ obvious.

Despite her deep misgivings about being in Hild's Black Palace, Sygyn was fevered with anxiety. She desperately wanted to figure out a way to thwart this unwanted delay that had been thrust upon their mission. Preferably without insulting Queen Hild. Aunt Skuld had been very insistent: they would have to check out the Vang Mnoexic Network, the computer that synchro-processed all the vital functions of the Vanagdrasil Logorinth. They didn't find their answers in Yggdrasil, so they needed to check the Mnoexic Network of the Demon's Mainframe computer.

And she hadn't even told her Mom about the _true_ intent of their journey here!

Aunt Skuld's words echoed in her mind, as clear as if she had spoken them an hour ago...

_"I'm relying on you, Sygyn! I'm completely trusting you with this," _Aunt Skuld had confided to her. Secretly, privately._ "It -_has-_ to be you, because none of the others will know how to use this. Not even my 'engineer' daughter! More than likely, I won't be permitted to go to Vanagdrasil with the four of you. So it's all up to you!"_

Sygyn reached in her skirt and withdrew the object Aunt Skuld had given her. As it lay in her hands, it seemed innocuous enough.

Hild, for all the powers that Mom claimed she had, obviously wasn't _that_ smart, or she would have detected its presence.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Dinner is served!" the skeletal waiter announced as he rolled open the great-stone 'door' to their room. "You are both expected in the dining hall shortly."

"This is lame!" Pryzm grumbled under her breath as she watched the departing figure float off. She slowly shook her head, wondering if Hild was trying to creep them out by being hokey! It figures!! The cheesy skeleton-dude would come and say "dinner's ready!" and then tell them that they were "expected shortly." Confusing and contradictory, just like everything else in Vanagdrasil.

"C'mon!" Ulfryn said intolerantly, exasperated. "A stupid skull hovering above a butler's livery outfit, with flames for hands and feet! What is she thinking? That's like something you'd see in that retarded spook house at Tokyo Disneyland or something!"

"My guess is that she's thinking that...by appearing silly...she can lull us into letting our guard down," Pryzm answered, eyes narrowed soberly. "At least, that's how it seems to me!"

She and her sister stood out like sore thumbs; they were probably the only kids in Vanagdrasil who were dressed in khaki shorts, designer "Princess Kitty" t-shirts and the latest Nike running shoes that bore their Dad's name, with their socks rolled down low to their ankles. Even then, it was so humid that Pryzm could feel herself soaking down with sweat inside her shirt...

"Guess we better attend the Queen Bee's dinner," Ulfryn muttered in an un-enthused droll. The hallway outside of their room had changed since she and Ulfryn had been shown to their room. The place looked even darker, with pale-silver miniature 'moons' lighting the corridor from above. Outside, the black sky had darkened into a deep blood-red color; wispy crystalline clouds of smoked absinthe jade jerked from horizon to horizon like a time-stopped sky-painting. The eerie overhead lights in the corridor seemed to create shadows against the stone walls; or perhaps the stone walls were emitting shadows by design. Dark shapes that were realmed just beyond the perception of the inner eye seemed to be following them stealthily.

"Steven King, eat your simple heart out!" she overheard Ulfryn whisper in a tight voice. Her sister was floating over the floor rather stiffly; any sense of fluidity having been lost to her by account of the sheer creepiness of the place. Ahead of them, a reptilian arm floated, grasping a flickering torch as it led them on. Obviously Hild's idea of an 'escort' to guide them from their room to the dining hall.

"Woo..oooo..oooo!" Pryzm cooed with a taunting grin, imitating a ghost.

"That's not funny, Pryzm!" Ulfryn shouted angrily. "Remember what Aunt Mara said? What are the odds that she'll try and feed us something poisonous? I'm scared!"

"I'm more scared about what's going to be served for dinner!" Pryzm answered back. "I know that Falcyn and Sygyn are junk-food junkies; but that's when they're on the Earthrealm. I don't want to see some waiter shaped like a monster feeding us a tray of roast rats!"

"Ewww!! That's _so_ gross!" Ulfryn squealed. "Or even worse, what if they feed us _the waiter_?!"

"That's totally ger..ross!!" Pryzm spat out. "How do you come up with that kind of stuff, Ulfryn? That's _sick_!"

"Where do you come up with all this stuff, Pryzm?" Ulfryn shot back, her mouth curled in a grimace.

"In my head, just like everyone else," Pryzm sassed back, grinning bracingly at her sister. Ulfryn shot her a look of disgust, which was unexpected. Pryzm expected the "bii-da!" or something worse.

"But we're here because of what's in _your_ head...and don't think I've forgotten that, Ulfryn."

"Ahhhh...WAAH!!" Ulfryn gasped.

The reptile-arm halted its torch-brigade in front of a bare section of wall...which suddenly just _opened up_, like one of those tesseract thingies that Mom had showed them in Yggdrasil Logorinth. Inside, Pryzm could see a huge banquet room, crammed with decorations and glimmers. As her eyes adjusted, her first impressions of the dining hall were that it seemed to be some perversely bizarre blend of Ancient Egypt and Modern Hong Kong. Chandeliers of spider-webs hung from the gabled ceiling, while waiters with cat-heads walked around, carrying large trays of covered food service. The table looked like it belonged in an English castle; it was covered with white cloth and ornately decorated with exotic candelabras. Pryzm's stomach began to turn when she noticed that the graviers were made out of hollowed human skulls. The chopstix at each table setting were pale white...

"Ah, the girls have arrived!" Hild shouted in acknowledgment, fluttering a dinner napkin as she hovered up from her seat at the end of the table. She floated down its length until she was directly in front of Pryzm and her sister. Pryzm flinched and floated back a full meter, remembering her last close up encounter with Hild. Their Demoness hostess was dressed in a red silk multi-layered gown, with a plunge neck and black wristbands studded with diamonds.

"Thank you for honoring my humble abode with your presence, young Goddess-girls!" she noted, clapping her hands together in delight. Glancing past their exuberant host, Pryzm observed Aunt Mara scowling and rolling her eyes in disdain.

"I think you'll appreciate tonight's fare," Hild said gaily in that weird sing-song voice of hers; but Pryzm noticed a glint in her eyes that was inaudibly pronounced "praise me for dinner or die!" She felt Ulfryn clutching at her, something Pryzm would have never tolerated in normal situations. But in the present circumstances, she knew her sister was probably twice as scared as she was.

Then she noticed that she was clutching at Ulfryn as well.

"Wh..what's for dinner?" Ulfryn asked meekly, her head bowed so she didn't have to look at Hild squarely.

"Come see for yourselves!"

So they were corteged to their seats by the cat-butlers and cat-hostesses. The exotic cat-hostesses intrigued Pryzm. They were decidedly feline; their physique resembling any one of the countless number of species where the feline branch of the mammalian phylum had become the dominant sentient race. She recalled her Elementary Survey of Feline Mortal Cultures class. There, she had learned that the usual result of interspecific competition among canalized high-order feline sentients was a highly vibrant coat of fur, much more elaborated that those of housecats or big cats. These cats definitely exhibited those traits: the serving staff was furred with an colorful and complex mix of spots, stripes and blotches. The females were all dressed in Middle Dynastic Egyptian banded skirts or Qing Dynasty Chinese cheongsams. For a brief interim, Pryzm was almost fooled into believing that they were alive. But once her common sense caught up her, she had no doubts that these were holograms. Real mortal species wouldn't survive very long in Vanagdrasil.

Along the periphery of the roof-gables, the vertical registers of stained-glass windows flashed with glances of lightning. Peals of thunder occasionally rattled the delicate filaments of the spidery overhead light-lusters, causing flickering disjunctions of light to fall upon their table. Pryzm quickly concluded that there wasn't a storm outside; the lightning and thunder were _created_ by the stained-glass windows to add a flow of drama to the atmosphere. As if on cue, several wonky lances of lightning flared between windows on opposite ends of the dining room once she and Ulfryn had seated themselves on the tall-backed chairs. Pryzm fought to ignore the fact that the chairs were constructed of sinew, bone and flesh.

She felt like she was sitting at a dissection table, not a dinner.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Falcyn felt comforted by the ghoulish ambience of Queen Hild's dining area. He wanted to go to the lava ponds _tonight_, just to see if Hild herself would show up. In his mind, an invitation to meet her at the lava springs could only mean one thing.

Distraction.

His Mother seemed to read his mind, as if he was consciously thought-projecting his lustful imaginings. Occasionally, he would sense a reproachful air around his Mom as she munched on her cheeseburger. The two cousins...well, they were certainly surprised to find McDonalds, KFC and Curry House dinners under all that silver, gold and Ixodenum service-ware. Naturally, Pryzm and Ulfryn didn't believe him when he noted that the Demonic penchant for junk-food extended even into Vanagdrasil. At least Hild hadn't tried to surprise them with MorkFuaken Raz Exhuma Bakes from Deneb V. There, the favorite junk food of the Denebian mortals was their recently-deceased, served just this side of slime-mucus decayed, with a crisply-baked shell. He looked over at Pryzm and grinned, knowing that his younger cousin couldn't possibly guess that he was imagining her ralfing her guts out over a plateful of crisped MorkFuaken Raz Skull-Cakes.

"What?" she asked, catching his glance and glaring it back at him with an irked expression. Falcyn ignored her and bit into his chicken breast sandwich.

"He's just got a major crush on Hild, that's all!" Sygyn whispered with conspiratorial glee, leaning across the table to convey her message.

Falcyn overheard her...and literally spat out his food and turned pale. His younger sis shot him a piercing grin that was more a bite of mischief than a true smile, while Pryzm passed the 'news' on to Ulfryn. Soon, all three girls were giggling; the gloomy atmosphere of Queen Hild's dining chamber momentarily forgotten.

And his Mom was looking at him with a pissed-off expression, filled with distaste.

Falcyn quickly grabbed a drumstick and laid into it with quick bites, keep his eyes on his plate.

"May I regale you children with a small tale?" Hild interrupted, her eyebrows pouncing on his two cousins. Both girls gulped down their giggling immediately. Falcyn looked at his dinner plate gratefully, realizing that he had just been rescued. There was no way that his sister or his cousins could make nuisances of themselves and taunt him while Hild was reciting a tale!

_"A river twines headlong down the side of a mountain...any mountain will do for this legend. At its source, it is but a cold and feeble stream, perhaps birthed from the icy womb of a glacier in the far North. But as it descends, the river gathers vigor; a terrible life of its own, hurtling rampantly among the rocks and crags. Hungrily, as if it was going forth to devour them. Swelling to a boisterous torrent, it surges riotously as it shakes the earth and deafens the solitudes. Lost for a time, the river reemerges into sight, preceded by the muffling roar of its angry writhing. Waters too wild for a moment's sigh are writhing now, swirling round the jagged-hewn base of a towering cliff. Reaching a plateau, the river swells to fill the shallower and broader bed; but soon it hastens havoc as it plunges ever downwards and onwards. Dark waters now, leaping madly over the sharp brink of a sudden precipice, dashing against the sunshine, defying it. Like chilled diamonds, it steals the sunlight within its lunatic course, winding like a sinew against the protesting earth until it despoils summer meads and laughing gardens; ever plunging into the far-off sea...to the terrible unknown of the sea..._

_"And hence! The river flies against the abyss, wreathed for a moment in the splendor of the sun, until all is snuffed out. The radiance of love has fallen; unlooked-upon, unheeded! For upon each and every luckless life at the very instant of its greatest joy, the river deluges them with the greatest of horrors and despair. And yet, the smile of fear...is it not a beautiful thing? _

_"Wither may it not lead?"_

"Cool!!" Falcyn shouted, clapping his hands together as Hild took a perfunctory bow at the conclusion of her 'story'. Her metaphor for the river seemed to encapsulate the very essence of what it was like to be a Demon!

Even his Mom was deeply impressed with Hild's dinner-tale.

Pryzm and Ulfryn were seized rigid with fear.

"Ahhh, I sense that some of our guests did not fully appreciate my little story. Forgive me if it was too engaging," Hild quickly apologized. She hovered up out of her chair and floated down to the end of the table, where his cousins were seated.

"May I make it up to you two girls?" she asked solicitously. Both Pryzm and Ulfryn silently nodded their heads, sharply.

"I hear that girls like presents on the Earthrealm, neh?" she asked. Falcyn could only look on as the two 11-year olds gulped and nodded their heads again.

Amazing how terror could mimic shyness.

Hild waved her hands, and produced two exquisite Girl's Day dolls in mid-air. Falcyn felt momentarily jealous. His _cousins_ were receiving _gifts_ from Hild herself! He hadn't received anything! When she handed the dolls to the two girls, the miniature figures started to glow warmly.

His cousin's fearful expressions quickly disappeared, replaced by fascinated girlish smiles as they examined their dolls.

"Sygyn...your mother tells me that you have quite the keen intellect," Hild continued, turning her attention to his sister. "Please feel free to peruse my personal library at allhours tomorrow."

"What about me?" Falcyn thought loudly. Hild floated up to him and tipped herself low, so low that he could see past the low-front cut of her gown, deeply into the valley of her bosom.

"Tomorrow..." she said in a private, husky whisper. "Children must learn patience, for patience bears rewards."

"I think I've had enough of this meal!" his Mom suddenly shouted, stamping her hands on the table and then floating up from her chair. "If you will excuse me, Elder Sister?"

"Why of course, Younger Sister!" Hild answered with a snigger.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Pryzm, if Hild is such a wacko...why would she give us such _cute_ dolls?" Ulfryn asked. "It's not like she's our Mom or anything, either. Have you looked at these dolls? They're not cheaply-made at all. In fact, these dolls look so _authentic_. As in antique-show or museum-type authentic. They look just like princesses from the Heian Era! And they _glow_!!"

"I'd be careful about anything Hild does, Ulfryn," her sister replied, her voice intoned with caution. "But on the other hand, I'm with you about theses dolls. They _are_ cute! But do you really think that 'Psycho Queen Hild' could come up with anything 'cute' on her own? 'Cute' is that last word I think of when I'm around her! She must have stolen these!"

Ulfryn giggled, and then looked at the doll and commented, "Knowing her, these _could_ be dolls from the Heian Era! After all, she's like some Mega-Demoness! And this whacked out palace of hers seems to have almost everything! So getting dolls from the 10th or 11th century would be easy for her. Just think! Maybe these dolls belonged to Lady Murasaki when she was a girl."

"Now you're starting to sound like our bookworm cousin Sygyn!" Pryzm teased. "Either that, or you've been watching too much anime lately!"

_"Am not!!"_

_"Am too!!"_

Pryzm looked at her sister and started giggling, laying the delicate porcelain doll on her bed. She didn't want to break it, or drop it accidentally. Besides, how would Queen Hild react if she learned that one of her gifts had been misused?

"Hey, do you think that the Demons have some means of regulating Time, like our Norns are capable of doing?" Ulfryn asked. "Didn't Hild say something about using that Red Hole to arrive before she left?"

"You mean _Norn_," Pryzm corrected. "Mom still doesn't have the other two Norns to complete the Triad. And why are you asking such obvious questions out of the blue?"

"Oh, that again!" Ulfryn sighed. "That's so retarded! Why are they taking so long to decide upon the other two Norns? Why can't the Lord just appoint two other Goddesses to fill in as Norns? Or why can't He just appoint two Norns?! According to Mom, they're almost 70,000 years tardy on making that decision."

"That's a lot of missed classes!" Pryzm noted with a giggle, picking up on the 'tardy' comment her sister made.

"I certainly don't miss school!" Ulfryn noted. "Why'd you have to mention it here, of all places? Isn't being in Hild's Black Palace bad enough?"

"Spoilsport!" Pryzm shot back, sticking her tongue out.

"But this room, it certainly doesn't do me any good! I won't miss anything about _it_," Ulfryn said with a worried expression. "I really doubt that I'll have any dreams about the 'others' tonight! This room fills me with nightmares...and I'm not even asleep yet!"

"Dream navigator girl..." Pryzm teased, throwing her pillow at Ulfryn.

"It's _not_ funny! And don't you go breaking one of these pillows open!" Ulfryn whined, playing at being the younger sister. "Who knows what's inside of them? What if they're filled with poltergeists or something?"

"This place is totally creepy!" Pryzm sighed, suddenly somber. She wasn't worried about nightmares so much as she was worried about whether she could even fall asleep in this horrorshow place of Hild's. Would a rabbit fall asleep if it were in a cage filled with lions at Ueno Park Zoo?

"And what if they're _real_?"

"You mean the four people you keep seeing?" she asked her sister.

"No, you idiot!" Ulfryn quickly replied.

"I meant the _nightmares_!"

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Pryzm had nightmares. In them, she saw Queen Hild trying to use some kind of bowl or vase to eat the Souls of Angels...the Angels of Goddesses she didn't know. Then she dreamed that her Mom's Angel, Noble Scarlet, was trapped in a Ramune soda bottle. Finally, she dreamed of _another_ dark-skinned Goddess, who looked like a younger version of Hild. The Goddess was mourning over the dismembered shell of some kind of cyborganic lifeform, that seemed to be designed to emulate the appearance of an Earthrealm mortal...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Ulfryn had nightmares. In them, a legion of monstrous beings a thousand times more foul than Hild were slashing against the Yggdrasil Logorinth with bloody claws, tearing giant rends into the fabric of TimeSpace. A young man, the boy-man that she saw in her dreams who resembled her Father, was struggling to free himself from his Future. A black-robed woman with an invisible face was singing wordlessly in the middle of a forest, a speck of black against the verdant abundance of Life. And finally, she saw her Mother...drowning in the ocean, drowning in the river that Queen Hild had described...

"AAAAIIIIYYYYEEEEEE!!"

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Don't scare me like that!!" Pryzm shrieked at her sister, suddenly awake. She didn't even have time to feel morning-bleary. Looking down at the bed sheets that covered her, she noticed that they were rippling from her chin to her feet as her whole body shivered underneath them. Her heart was fluttering like a paper ship floating on a rapids; and the omnipresent hissing air only added to her discomfort. Ever since she had arrived in Vanagdrasil, her Goddess senses were accompanied by a kind of static, similar to that of a radio tuned slightly off station. The crackling-hazing hovered just within her senses, always displacing enough of her attention to keep her Goddess perceptivity on edge. Mom had forewarned her that Vanagdrasil would be a little 'off pitch' as far as Goddess Divine abilities were concerned. It was similar to the strain when one goes to a country where no one speaks the same language.

"You scared me half to death, Ulfryn!" she reiterated, scowling at her sister.

"As if I can be any more scary than _this_ place!" Ulfryn shot back, her eyes broad with fear. Pryzm reached out for her doll, wanting to hit Ulfryn over the head with it. Even if her younger sister had roused her from a nightmare with a scream, her timing was inexcusable. If one is wrapped within dreams of terror, then a _real_ exclaim of fright only compounded the horror of those dreams.

"Am I awake or am I still sleeping?" she asked, looking tersely at the doll's impassive face. For some strange reason, Pryzm recalled the time in her life when she actually thought dolls were little beings. Little beings, who had little Souls within them. When she was a really young girl, she could almost imagine that her dolls were alive as Mom set them up on their display case during Girl's Day. She would stare at the neat rows of dolls, just waiting for them to break into conversation. The next year, she turned 7 and no longer had time for girlish dolls.

But Mom had never gotten her a doll _this_ nice before! The dolls that Mom had so carefully arranged in their rows during Girl's Day festivities, those dolls were mass-produced and marketed. Bought at a department store, probably in Mainichi's in Tokyo. Probably with Dad's money.

But this dolly...her delicately painted eyebrows were the result of the hands of a craftsman, not a machine. A person with a Soul...had given it a Soul. The expression of sovereign expectancy on her carefully-featured face wasn't something that could be painted on by a machine. Her fine hair wasn't polyester; it was as soft as human hair. Maybe it _was_ human hair! Even as the idea of human hair being used for a doll seemed to be repugnant to her, Pryzm felt like the doll was all the more precious because of this. It was _authentic_ rather than generic!

"Mom never got me such a nice doll!" she thought resentfully.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Sygyn was entranced by the book she spied on the very top shelf of Hild's library. Unlike the other books, it didn't have a title clearly visible on the spine. There seemed to be a million tomes bookshelved with in the recesses of Hild's refectory-like library. Yet, this particular tome had beckoned to her, like a beacon in the night. She felt glad that she had gotten up early this morning, so she could get a good start in browsing through Hild's library.

"This is so tight!" she whispered in a pleased voice to herself as she floated in front of the shelves, each one filled with shadowed recesses. Who knows when an opportunity like this would come up again?

As she withdrew the book from the cram of the shelf, a cloud of dust buffeted out from above and below it, causing Sygyn to cough daintily. But once she had pulled it out away from the others, she noticed that the book itself looked ancient. It resembled the incunabulum books on display at several of the Tokyo museums she had had visited during school excursions; books that had been crafted while printing was in its infancy on the Earthrealm. But this was no Earthrealm work of print that could have even been conceived by the craftsmen of Gutenberg or elsewhere; for it was heavily layered with arcanic energies. Sygyn also felt a distinct sense that it was _old_...possibly hundreds of thousands of years old. Not to mention that it seemed more phantomed than any book she had ever seen before.

Perhaps no one had ever read it!

Floating over to one of the hover-chairs dangling conveniently under a reading chandelier, Sygyn sat herself down in its plushness, cross-legged. She rested the atlas folio-sized book in her lap; it was much too large to hold up to read like a regular book. Running her hands over the binding and cover, she marveled at the exquisite workmanship that seemed to breathe "precious" into every cm of the tome. The binding seemed to be worked calf-leather, with gold filigreed calligraphy for the titles tooled into the covers. Some kind of silver-powder was gilded along the decorative gauffered deckle-cut pages; it coated her fingers as she stroked along the unevenly-cut edges of paper.

She was tempted to read the whole thing in one setting, because the name given this tome was as improbable as the chances of her being allowed to browse through Queen Hild's magnificent library unattended. It was moments like this that made a trip to Vanagdrasil worthwhile, even if Hild had decided to hold their group at bay for a few days as her guests.

Sygyn unclasped the two leatherwork latches and slowly opened the book, smelling the dust of Time as it spilled out from the book's pages...

_"A Guide to the Noble and Mysterious Acts of the Ultimate Demon, with Sundry and Plentiful Diversions into the Secret Arts of..."_

...she read aloud as her eyes alighted on the ornately-drawn frontispiece page of the folio.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Mara could sense that her daughter seemed more than a little bit preoccupied during the lunch meal. Sygyn was barely poking at her food; back on the Earthrealm, anything resembling toasted chicken katsu strips and curry would have her youngest in an appreciative uproar. Instead, she was absent-mindedly stirring her rice into the curry with her chopstix.

Her mother's instincts informed her that this wasn't a simple case of teenaged ennui; especially considering that Sygyn had spent the entire morning in Hild's voluminous stacks of Demonic Lore. When she asked, Sygyn cryptically explained to her that she had been reading some mysterious book that seemed indecipherable at first. She added that the stories written in the book was well worth her efforts to struggle through it. Usually, such a task was just the thing to animate her daughter towards a girlish height of excitement. Sygyn went through a serious Harry Potter stage when she was 7 years old. But now, Sygyn looked like she had just been through a month of jigoku gaku, the high school exam hell. Mara couldn't understand why Sygyn was looking dullardly and introspective instead of ambitious and excited.

"As for the other one," she thought, regarding her other child with a raised eyebrow of disapprobation. Falcyn wasn't doing much better. He seemed all thumbs with his chopstix...no doubt because he was too busy trying to sneak glances at Hild's ample cleavage instead of paying attention to what was going on with his plate. Hild certainly wasn't helping matters by leaning low over her plate.

For lunch, Hild had served each of the kids their favorites...which meant ice cream for Ulfryn, fresh berries and spaghetti for Pryzm, curry for Sygyn and spicy Chinese cuisine for Falcyn. Mara had the distinct impression that Hild was 'fattening the veal' by all this pandering to the kid's tastes. In fact, it reminded her of the various myths of child-eating witches who lived in the middle of the forest.

Skuld's two were staying in their room, with the exception of coming out for this lunch. This was a relief; at least they couldn't get caught up in trouble by exploring Hild's Black Palace. Oddly enough, Pryzm and Ulfryn seemed strangely ambivalent compared to yesterday; even a bit on the cheerful side. Mara studied Pryzm, who was busy eating strawberries without a care in the world.

And Falcyn was lusting over Hild.

Mara felt disgusted by the whole thing. Hild should know better! Falcyn is a junior high...and not even a full Demon. He just started noticing girls a couple years ago; Mara could sense the tell-tales signs of a burgeoning adolescence when Falcyn started behaving awkwardly around girls his own age. As she looked back and forth between the Demon Queen and her son, Mara sourly observed that "Falcyn should know better too!"

But as a Mother and a junior Demon Queen, Mara felt conflicted about how to bring this matter up for discussion. Falcyn was so caught up in Hild's aura, he was either missing or ignoring her 'hints' to cool it around Hild. Mara was acutely aware of Hild's personality; after all, the prideful 'Queen' Hild certainly would seize upon the opportunity of having her vanity provoked by the worshipful glances of a young boy-man Demon. Falcyn was at that combustible age where he seemed to totally change every year. Not quite a boy, but several years removed from being a man. But yet, her son was 'male' enough to do more than a cursory once-over glance at Hild's body whenever she was in the same room as he.

And just reckless enough to maybe get in trouble.

Mara sighed the inevitable sigh. Raising Sygyn was easier in certain ways than raising Falcyn. Her daughter had to face the same kinds of challenges that she had faced when she was Sygyn's age. Bust too small, hips too narrow, a boyish roundness to her face. It must be harsh; almost all the boys that Sygyn was interested in were _teasing_ her instead of appreciating and admiring her. The delicate irony that flowered within the bloom of adolescence was fully upon her daughter. Mara almost felt like she was reliving those years whenever she had a deep mother-to-daughter talk with Sygyn. Sygyn, at least, was experiencing struggles that were familiar territory. But raising a son was much more difficult for Mara, because Falcyn was hot-blooded.

Just like his father.

But no matter how much she combed the rainy furloughs of her memory, Mara never could recall who Falcyn and Sygyn's father was. Even with the able assistance of expert Demonic Proctors and others...she couldn't remember a face, nor a name. But she could always 'sense' his presence, melting into the surface of her heart as if he was alive and living with her. And she was quite surprised...indeed, quite taken aback with shock!...when she learned that her children were going to be hybrids of mortal and Demonic strains of energy. It was the most upsetting news of her entire life; her disappointment was amplified because she had sworn off _ever_ having children. Being a mother was the last thing she had ever wished upon herself.

And now, it was the most precious perspective of her existence.

Adolescence wasn't the only period of delicate irony in a Demoness's life.

This situation was like trying to balance mechanical pencils on their tips. Mara had her son's sexuality to worry about. She was acutely aware that, among Earthrealm boys, the most shaming circumstances a teen could possibly face was when his Mother started asking pointed sexual questions. Well, truthfully, perhaps this was the _second_ worst thing a teenage boy could endure. There was one thing that was worse.

After an extremely taxing conference with all the other Demon Office Heads and the Dark Lord, Mara had returned home exhausted...and then had accidentally walked in on Falcyn while he was masturbating. She doubted that anything could top that in the embarrassment department in her son's mind. Once again, she briefly wondered if that traumatic incident was the reason why Falcyn was so shy around girls...and if it was all her fault in the first place.

"Stop blaming yourself!" Mara quickly remonstrated. Self-blame was the last thing she needed to indulge in the presence of Hild. If Hild sensed any lack of confidence, she could use it to turn Mara against herself.

So Falcyn was turning the corner of his teen years, easily embarrassed and shy around girls. But Hild certainly wasn't a 'girl' in any sense of the word. Hild possessed the deceit and hypocrisy of an Earthrealm avian species called the "Tokyo Crow". She'd bewail the dead roadkill along the highway, and then eat their carcasses under cover of night. Mara felt the strings of resentment tightening around her fingers; fingers that would be choking her 'sister' Demon Queen by the throat if such actions were permissible, or even possible.

"Bless her!" Mara cursed. "Now I've gotta have one of 'those' talks with my son!"

Reaching a decision, Mara regretfully realized that poor Falcyn would have to bear the brand of Hild's actions, because she would have to confront _him_ because of Hild's lasciviousness, rather than Hild herself. The worst part was...once she challenged him on the wisdom of his actions...Falcyn probably wouldn't even understand that he was doing something wrong. And a sense, he wasn't doing any wrong by being interested in the opposite sex. Mara was worried that he'd probably just react with anger and slip into his 'teenage victim' mode.

But confronting Hild was definitely out of the question. Any suggestions that she was preying sexually on Falcyn would cause Hild to become so pissed off, she'd figuratively blow a spleen or something. Mara found herself wishing that Skuld had accompanied their group, so she could at least run some things by her sister before she attempted to talk to her son. Skuld seemed to have a better handle on having 'those' kinds of talks with the kids than she did.

But of course, Skuld had two girls. And those two girls were still pre-teens. Mara had no doubt that Ulfryn would become desperately boy-crazy by the time she was Sygyn's age. And Pryzm more than likely would probably prefer beating up a boy to kissing him.

Her thoughts returning to her son, Mara decided that she was going to talk with him tomorrow, so she could take some time to plan out her words.

She just hoped that Falcyn would be able to handle it.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"A series of waterfalls of glowing lava in the distance; sulfur-ether hanging in the air; winged shadow-creatures that belonged in the ergot-inspired fevered imaginings of a medieval painter; the snow of dearth and death...these are a few of my favorite things! NOT!!" thought Ulfryn, mentally sing-alonging to the one of the tunes her 3rd grade music teacher was fond of having her class sing.

Dinner was pressing right around the corner, but her appetite seemed to have flown out through the barred, spiked windows of their room, which Pryzm had started to jokingly refer to as "the Jail". The only bright spot in the dismal shadings of their situation was the doll that Hild had given her. The last thing she'd expected when she came to Vanagdrasil was a gift. Ulfryn had posed the doll so she was sitting on the edge of the nightstand near her bed. The doll was dressed in a magnificent Heian costume; the kind of noble attire that Ulfryn imagined was be worn by princesses of the Heian-kyo court.

Too bad her Mom was the Norn of the Future. Otherwise, Ulfryn could have made her to go back in time and take some photos of the Heian Era noblewomen.

"These dolls...they really _are_ pretty cool, huh?" Pryzm observed, clearly admiring hers. Pryzm's doll was also dressed like a princess of the Heian era; her little kimono and overcoat were patterned with delicately-stitched Spring scenes.

Cherry-blossom vistas in the middle of Hell.

"Y'know, I don't understand why Mom doesn't spend more money on us," Pryzm ventured. "It's not like our family's poor or something! We go to one of the best private schools in Chiba, and most days, we get to ride there in a nice taxi instead of having to use the crowded trains like most other kids. Then there's the piano lessons, the dance lessons, the computer tutoring..."

"Which you hated every moment of, except for the computer-geek stuff, Tomboy-girl!" Ulfryn teased.

"Yep!" Pryzm answered smugly. "But it's weird. Mom's a Senior First Class Goddess, and a Norn to boot. But she _never_ buys us any expensive toys. You know how much I want to get a motorbike! I've been asking her since I was _eight _to buy me one. But nooooo!! Mom won't get me one! I even had Dad almost convinced too, last year. But Mom kept harping about 'you'll grow out of it in a few years' and stuff! How does she know what I'll grow out of? _I_ don't even know that!"

Her sister's comments seemed to fetch Ulfryn's attention, and she started pondering why Mom hadn't gotten _her_ more stuff, like clothes and accessories. Ulfryn knew that gifts certainly weren't a measure of love by any means. But then again, were they really gestures that were devoid of affection? Girls just a few years older than she seemed to become gripped by materialistic urges. Ulfryn had even heard of high school girls running away from home and prostituting themselves because their parents didn't buy them the right brand-name shoes for Christmas. And a little part of her could imagine herself doing the same thing in senior high school, if Mom kept being so stingy.

In contrast, Hild was anything but stingy. Her palace was vestibular and frightening, but it was also very shamp and tight! In a way, Hild exuded a Demonic version of hipness that seemed to be totally lacking in her family. Hild was like one of those woman CEOs that were sometimes the subject of a drama on TV, or something. She was a Demoness who had everything and everyone under control. Which made Hild's gift seem even more unexpected. Perhaps the Demon Queen was trying to make their stay in Vanagdrasil a little bit more comfortable. If so, then why would she act like a bitch to Pryzm yesterday, and then give them dolls during dinner? And lunch this afternoon was totally great! In fact, eating here was like totally "junk food city"!

Was she insane, like Aunt Mara believed?

Surely, she and her sister couldn't expect Queen Hild to change everything in her own house just to accommodate two young Goddesses, could they? That'd be rude and ridiculous at the same time! The dolls that she had given them seemed to providing a calming influence, something that offset the many paradoxes of this wretched place.

And Aunt Mara's story about Hild...was it really the truth?

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Falcyn couldn't wait for dinner to start. Tonight was the night he was going to meet Hild at the lava springs hot pond!! He was so anxious, he had shown up for the LastMeal nearly an hour early. Having nothing else to do but loiter around until Hild and the others showed up, Falcyn found himself wandering one of the wings of Hild's Black Palace. This wing, which he nicknamed the 'Portrait Wing', had depictions of all the demi-Demonic and Demonic deities that the sentient mortal races worshipped. It was quite a gallery to behold, trillions upon trillions of layers of art.

Of course, this being Vanagdrasil, there were no clocks to be seen anywhere. As he looked out through the arched porticos into a courtyard of sublime beauty, Falcyn suddenly realized that he had kept himself occupied well past the time he had planned to return to the dining hall. Turning quickly, Falcyn floated swiftly down the corridor, as fast as an arrow. Bone-shaped eaves and ceilings passed overhead with a blur as he hastened to the dinner table.

Dinner...and then Hild!

"Heh heh! Maybe _she'll_ be dessert!" he said to himself as he saw the doorway to the dining hall up ahead.

Whence he arrived, he overheard his Mom asking Hild if she'd seen Sygyn. Hild replied that Sygyn was quite engrossed with one of the books she had found in her library; the young teenage Demoness was probably skipping out on dinner. She promptly summoned a waiter and instructed the cat-girl to prepare a tray to take to the library for Sygyn. The explanation seemed to ease Mom's tensions a bit, but Falcyn could still sense an aura of resentment-concern flowing from his Mother. He was amused at how easily Hild could handle his Mom.

Hild was quite the blazing example of Demoness! Mom may be a Demon Queen by title, but Hild was a Demon Queen by conduct. Falcyn felt his eyes feasting on her, rather than his dinner. Somehow, the dress she was wearing was even _sexier_ than the low-cut one she wore last night.

Once again, his two Goddess cousins showed up late. But Pryzm and Ulfryn seemed a little dazed, as if they had the flu. And oddly enough, they had brought those dolls to the dinner table with them. Why were they acting so goofy?

"Aren't you a little old to be bringing your toys to the dinner table?" his Mom asked.

"No, we aren't!" Pryzm replied tartly. "We're _children..._and you can't make us grow up!"

"Yeah, Aunt Mara! We like these dolls that Queen Hild gave us!" Ulfryn chimed in, her tentativeness of the previous night seemingly hidden away somewhere. Falcyn raised an eyebrow at this; he noticed that his Mom was also looking at the two girlish Goddesses with an expression edging between curiosity and disbelief. He sensed that something was wrong for a split-second, but then he caught a glimpse of Hild's generous bust and completely forgot what he was concerned about.

"Farbeit for we adults to lecture young girls about growing up, neh?" Hild said, humoring to the two Goddesses. Falcyn chuckled behind his hand as Pryzm and Ulfryn gazed back at her with appreciative miens, grateful that their hostess had rescued them from possible embarrassment at the hands of their Aunt.

"Mothers...who needs 'em!" he thought he heard Ulfryn say under her breath.

He couldn't agree more.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

The lava springs were a total immersion into the realms of Demonic relaxation. Glowing statues of various forms of torture were cunningly placed around the perimeter of the lava ponds, creating a very calming air. Falcyn felt like he belonged here, rather than just being a visitor. The scenery oddly reminded him of one of those rustic onsens back in Japan, only this time, he didn't feel like he was 'borrowing' the beauty of the place. As soon as he peeled off his towel and stepped into the essence of the lava, Falcyn felt all his worries floating away. His body was soothed by the massaging currents of magma within the lava. He could hear the sacred strains of the Demon's Music floating around him, as if it was coming from the hot springs pond itself!

Now, there was only one missing ingredient.

Playfully, he swept his arms back and forth under the lava, creating orange whorls on the surface of the hot springs. One good thing about molten lava, it didn't possess the transparency of water! Otherwise, he might have a reason to keep his hands tight against his groin.

And then he heard the door creak open...

It was Hild!

She walked out onto the decking with a measured gait, like a supermodel. Falcyn gulped as he realized that she wasn't wrapped in a towel. Already staggered by the implications that she was actually here, Falcyn feasted on her form, like a dragon lapping up sweetmeats. Instead of having a towel tucked around her, Hild simply had the towel draped over her front, held in place by an arm across her chest. He could see that she was _naked_ under the towel! Hild's tan skin was uncovered all the way from her shoulders to her ankles! He could clearly make out the curve of her back, how the generous plunge of her hair shadowed against her calves...

Her breasts looked like they were going to pop out from behind the towel at any moment!

Falcyn gulped just as Hild caught his eye. She smiled at him; an enigmatic smile that wasn't lusty, wasn't stern, wasn't happy, but was a complexity of chameleon emotions.

"Falcyn, you know you shouldn't be staring at a lady preparing for a bath. Please turn around, _now_," Hild commanded in an imperious voice. Falcyn felt his heart plummet with disappointment. Reluctantly, he turned around and looked out towards the snowfall and the mountains. He wanted to manifest eyes in the back of his head, so he could see if Hild removed that blessed towel! If she took it off, then he could see _everything_!

"I'm coming in now," Hild announced. "And you, young man, will not dare look back, unless you want to experience the exquisite sensation of your head floating on the lava, separated from your body!"

Falcyn almost choked at Hild's not-so-subtle threat. He had no doubt that she could do it; that she could slice his head off as easily as she could inhale. He wasn't even old enough to rate a Demon License...and Hild was a full-on Demon Queen.

Feeling powerless and contrarily, gravely disappointed, Falcyn fought the inner battle to keep from turning his head just a little.

He heard the "splaooop!" of someone entering the lava springs behind him. The lava around his waist ebbed slightly.

A second later, he felt hands on his shoulders.

Instinctively, he started to turn his head...and the hands flew up and grabbed him firmly by his jaw, fixing his head in place.

"I said don't turn your head..._and I meant it_!" Queen Hild said in a voice that made it clear that she would brook no more disobedience from him. Falcyn felt trapped. All Hild had to do was bring her hands a little lower and she could choke him.

"Yes ma'am!" he quickly answered.

"Ahhh, that's a good boy..." her voice purred, sounding like it was right next to his ears. Falcyn was momentarily fazed; it felt as if Hild's voice was breathing against his face.

"If you are going to learn adult games, then you need to learn from an adult, neh? But only if you promise to be a good boy. Okay?"

Falcyn's gulp collided with his skipping heart. As much as he hated being called "boy", he couldn't defense Hild's use of the term. After all, he knew he _was_ a boy. He had never had sex with a girl. Bless it! He had never even gotten to kiss a girl that he liked! His confidence was quickly eroding as he measured how inexperienced he truly was. And what if Hild wanted to do more than just have sex with him? What if she wanted to Flare? What then?

His flurry of indetermination was jarred once he felt two soft pressures on his upper back.

"C..co..could this be her br..br..br.." Falcyn thought in skitters, his mind feeling like a series of atomic bombs were going off inside of it. A moment later, the twinned pressures expanded. His back was sealed with a soft sensation...and it wasn't from the lava! In the corners of his eyes, he could see two slender tanned arms resting against his shoulders and chest. Falcyn realized that his foot was splashing about under the lava, unconsciously.

"Isn't this fun, Falcyn?" a husky voice breathed into his ear. "This is what you wanted from the start, isn't it? This is what you've been waiting for since you first saw me! You even dreamt of this last night, didn't you?"

"Hu..huh...how did y..you know what I d..dreamt last night?" he mumbled, until one of the hands resting on his chest lifted up and put a finger on his lips.

"There isn't much that passes within the walls of my Black Palace that is unobserved," Hild answered. Falcyn started to turn his head, and the two arms resting on his chest flew up under his chin, restraining him from looking back over his shoulder once again.

"You are going to be a good boy for me, aren't you?" Hild hissed sultrily. "Because this is where it gets to be fun for both of us! I'm going to teach you _so_ many things tonight."

And then he felt her hand, rubbing with light strokes up and down his chest and belly...and then reaching towards his groin, between his legs.

"Ahhh, what's this hard thingie!" the voice purred as the hands pushed his hands aside, uncovering him.

Falcyn wanted to close up like a clam at her touch, but he felt a thousand sparks going off all over his body, tingling him as she touched and caressed him.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Have you girls seen Falcyn?" Mara asked as soon as she materialized out of the walls where Skuld's daughters were staying. She had been to his room a little while earlier, where she expected him to be moping around. Instead, he was nowhere to be found. So she had stopped by the library to see if Sygyn knew where he was. Sygyn could barely pry her eyes away from the book she was reading. Being a mom, Mara could easily tell when her daughter was saying "don't bother me!" in the wordless language of secrets.

"No...why?" Ulfryn asked sleepily.

"I'm worried about him! Aren't you worried?" Mara interjected. "He's been gone since dinner, and I can't find him in his room, or in the library with Sygyn."

Pryzm glanced at her briefly, and then returned her attention to the doll she was holding. Mara watched as her niece carefully stroked the doll's long hair with her fingers, and then tugged on one of the sleeves of the doll's kimono, straightening it out.

"What's the matter with you, Pryzm?" Mara interrupted.

"Huh?"

"You haven't played with dolls since you were a little girl!" Mara exclaimed, fully aware that Pryzm _was_ a little girl, despite what she thought of herself.

"But she's so pretty!" Pryzm said in a tiny voice of protest, not even bothering to look at Mara.

"You've got plenty of dolls you can play with at home!" Mara said angrily. "This is not the time to be playing around! Have you forgotten what I've told you about Hild?"

"You better not say anything against our Mom...or I'll be mad at you, Aunt Mara!" Pryzm replied in a thin, biting voice.

"I said _Hild_, not Skuld!"

"Who's Skuld?" Ulfryn asked sleepily. "Is she a friend of our Mom's?"

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Mara was so shocked, she had to take a time out and leave the girl's room for a few moments. She almost wanted to hide within the silence. Either her ears were betraying her, or Ulfryn had uttered the most incomprehensible statement she could ever come up with. Or maybe the young Goddess was trying to pull a joke over on her. If it was a joke, then one little Goddess was going to be in _deep_ trouble with her Mom once they got back to Yggdrasil! And Ulfryn's troubles would only begin there. Her Aunt's temper wouldn't be moderated by motherly affection or Goddess niceties. Mara wouldn't tolerate smart-asses for nieces.

Returning to the room, she fixed at stern look at Ulfryn, trying to communicate with her eyes that she wasn't in a joking mood. Her son was unaccounted for, among other things.

"Who is Skuld?" Mara asked the two girls warily.

"I don't know!" Ulfryn quickly retorted. "Besides_, I_ asked you that question first! Don't ask me back when it's clear that I don't know who you're talking about!"

"Yeah, Aunt Mara!" Pryzm chimed in. "Leave us alone if you're going to be asking stupid questions."

"That does it! These two have definitely clocked-out the 'brattiness meter'!" Mara shouted in her mind, readying herself to slap the pink-haired girl. But something gave her pause. This kind of defiance was too out of character for Ulfryn. Even Pryzm, the rebellious one, wouldn't take brattiness this far. She looked deeply into Ulfryn's eyes. Being a Demoness, Mara knew that she couldn't get that 'link' with her niece that a Goddess would get; the kind of eye-lock that would allow her to scan the young Goddess to see if see if she was being truthful. But instead of seeing the truth, she saw something even less obvious...because it was so unexpected. Her niece looked like one of those stoners who hung out around the Shibuya and Harajuku train stations at night! She could even see the gleam of madness in her eyes; the type of demented gaze that Otaku Professor would have whenever he had sealed himself away for a weekend with a couple dozen DVDs.

There was a certain vacancy within Ulfryn's eyes.

"Hild!!" she hissed angrily

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Mara's mind was burning with fevered edifices of consternation; plans building upon plans, schemes concealing within schemes. None of them hers, all of them Hild's. She was utterly dismayed by what Hild had done to her nieces...and yet, she couldn't prefigure _what_ would be the next course of strife the Demon Queen was planning. Somehow, Hild had royally screwed up Skuld's kids...to the point where they were so confused, they had forgotten who their real mom was! And more importantly, Falcyn was _still_ missing. In a nanosecond, Mara extrapolated a thousand possible horrors that Hild could inflict on her son.

Hiding in the shadows of an architrave, Mara manifested a mirror out of the air and then regarded her expression in the convexity. She realized that if she was to gain an advantage over her senior in the Demoness world, she would have to get a grip on herself. Anything more than an economy of fluster on her face, and Hild would become immediately suspicious and go to even greater lengths to conceal her treachery. Counting her breaths in her throat, Mara unscattered her wits. With a last look in the mirror to assure herself that she possessed the visage of a becalmed Demoness, Mara proceeded to continue her search down the halls of Hild's Black Palace. As she examined the vast corridors of doorways and other portals, she acknowledged that finding Falcyn was only one of two tasks for this evening. After finding Falcyn, Mara knew that she would have to steal into the girl's guestroom and snatch one of those dolls, so she could examine it.

She flew around a corner and nearly collided with Pryzm.

A Goddess stalking through Hild's Palace, alone, was definitely an invitation to danger. Mara floated closer to her niece, being careful not to startle her. Pryzm's eyes were full-lidded, and Mara realized with a start that she was sleepwalking! Skuld had never mentioned that either of the girls were sleepwalkers. Pondering her next course of action, Mara decided that immediacy required her to return the somnambulant Pryzm to her room. Mara cursed the fact that this would delay her search for Falycn even further.

But then again, this would be the perfect opportunity to examine one of those dolls.

She scooped up Pryzm in her arms, and sped past the statuary of marble and beryl that lined this particular hallway. Hild's Black Palace was very impressive; Mara was almost disgusted by how ornate and darkly beautiful it was. Hild's mischievous nature was abominable, which bittered Mara's appreciation of the environs. Even for a Demoness, Hild was madness itself.

Up ahead, she spied the rolling stone that marked the doorway to the lodgings of her nieces. Somehow, Pryzm had prized it open while remaining asleep. For a moment, Mara thought that _this_ might be a trap...imagining that as soon as she arrived at the girl's room, Pryzm would awaken and laugh at her, while Hild would appear out of the wall.

"Pryzm must be having nightmares," Mara observed to herself. She was almost struggling in Mara's arms, moaning in small clips of fear, obvious signs that her nocturnal vision-dreams were plummeting her into chasms of terror. Looking both ways, Mara swooped into the door. A second later, the stone cylinder rolled of its own accord, sealing the entryway shut. Ulfryn was tossing and turning in her bed like she had been possessed by a ghost.

Mara gingerly laid Pryzm down on the bed and tucked her in, kicking legs and all.

The doll on the nightstand was emitting an odd aura.

"What the..?" Mara muttered as the doll seemed to turn into Skuld.

"LEAVE HER ALONE!"

Mara switched in midair, only to see Ulfryn standing up in her bed, her eyes glowing bright red-orange like a Demon's.

"Don't touch my dolly, Aunt Mara!!" the young Goddess threatened. Mara was almost amused by the fact that a child Goddess was _threatening_ her. But Ulfryn was dead serious...and Mara suspected that she would have to put her niece down with a binding spell if Ulfryn decided to launch an attack. Mara wasn't worried at all about injury; she was more worried that the disturbance would bring Hild running to the girl's room. Or that she might injure Ulfryn. Unlike her twin sister, Ulfryn was a frail child.

"O..okay, Ulfryn!" Mara said assuringly as she returned the doll to the nightstand. "I was just admiring her anyway. Pryzm went sleepwalking, so I brought her back to your room. No harm done, eh? Now, why don't you be a good girl and go back to sleep?"

"I don't want to be a good girl!" Ulfryn spat out. "I want my mommy!!"

Mara felt pierced. She sensed that Ulfryn's plea wasn't for Hild...but for her real mother. Even though her face was flattened with anger, Mara could see a tear passing down Ulfryn's cheek. Her little mind and heart were probably locked in emotional warfare right now; any chance of peaceably reconciling them was disturbed by the nightmares.

Wordlessly, Mara phased out of the room.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

A single hair.

Mara examined the slight black fiber she held between her fingers, squinting her eyes so that she could read the surface of the hair. She looked for the more obvious signs of enchantment, such as a curse-aura or a deliberate manipulation of a Metanative vibration. But there was no sign of arcancial or alchemical tampering.

"It has to be the doll!" Mara sighed to herself. Deciding to spell herself from getting too obsessed by her current inquiries, she decided to pay a visit to Hild's Scriptorium-Library, so she could check up on Sygyn. As she poured her energies through the theoplasm-portal to the vast vaults of books, Mara suddenly had a flash of insight. It was probably just a spark of stupidity, but it was worth checking out. She magnified the hair, and noticed little flickers in the light. She narrowed her eyes, so she could increase the magnification to sub-atomic precision if she had to.

Symbols.

She immediately recognized them. These weren't random markings on the surface of a hair, even though someone had gone to great lengths to make them _seem_ that way. They were part of an arcane formula; the type of formula that manifests by visual concordance with certain elemental matrices. A very _complex_ arcane formula.

There it was! A number of 'words' spelled out a geomancing, high-level arcane dictionary of curse-effects. They were carved on the scaly surface of the hair follicle by the thousands. But Mara only had _one_ hair. She knew that Hild wouldn't create a spell using a single hair on a doll's head, a spell whose effect would be multiplied a thousand-fold by replication. Just like a cursed Shinto temple had to be 'cleansed' by being papered with dozens of warding spells. Hild was much more sophisticated and subtle than that. And this didn't seem to be a simple accumulation-spell. The entire formula must be written out over all the hairs on the doll's head! She would have to go back and 'read' the rest of the hairs.

"Screw that!" Mara said to herself as she eyed the distant dull glow in the corner of Hild's library.

Sygyn.

"I didn't get my Senior First Class Demoness License as a freebie! I had to _earn_ it, just like Hild and everyone else! Which means that I can figure this out formula out without having to go get the rest of those doll hairs! Let's see, what would 'xyprtzmekim ir dakuli schoch neio szyhsgticke' in reverse intaglio symbolize?"

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Mara was floating down the hall in the general direction of the hot springs when she noticed something quite curious. The opening along the wall that foyered out alongside the lava ponds was closed up by a thick wall of bristly plants. It was almost as if someone had planted a hedgerow of prickle-thorns to keep people out of the lava springs! As she stopped to regard the sudden plant growth, she could smell the putrid odors of decay, a fetid aroma that could only be admitted by things left better unsurrendered from the ground.

But why?

Could this be Hild's way of keeping her private hot lava springs off-limits at night to guests? The smell was wretched, like that of a flooded graveyard in June. Mara could sense the avoidance spells mixed within the nasty brew of sight and odor. This was an arcanic 'Keep Out!' sign if she'd ever saw one.

But then she thought she heard the wind whispering giggles between the strands of clay-moist plant shrapnels. The vital fluids that pulsed through the spiked plants seemed to echo with the unexpected buzz-noise of taunting laughter. Gathering her courage, Mara forced her way through the thicket; all the while, the small lizard-corpse-like vines were snapping at her, biting her. She narrowed her fingers into knife-shapes and waved her hands in front of her, literally slicing out a path through the obstructing corpse-plants. When she emerged on the other side, Mara noticed that her outfit was ripped in a dozen places.

She was in the bathhouse attached to Hild's lava hot springs!

The giggling was even louder, and it sounded like it was coming just from around the corner. Mara resisted the impulse to peel out of her shredded clothes; after all, this was a hot spring and clothing was optional. The levy of laughter seemed to be punctuated by gasps of lusty exertion. Not lusty as in invigorating...but lusty as in _sexual_. Mara reintegrated her outfit into a whole, and then walked out onto the decking adjoining the lava springs. Her eyes widened in shock, and then she gasped out all her breath in a huge gulp.

Hild was in the lava pond. With _Falcyn_!

Her initial shock at seeing the Demon Queen with her son was overnumbed by the fact that both were completely naked. Falcyn was sitting in front of Hild, a languorously intoxicated expression on his face. Behind him, Hild was resting her chin on his shoulder, her arms wrapped around his chest, playfully caressing him with hand motions that could only be shared between lovers during afterplay following some very heavy sexual exertion.

Mara's knees turned to water as she watched Hild seal her son's mouth with a passionate kiss. Falcyn was seemingly dazed; the kind of daze that came upon a sexual spending of energy. After a long breathless kiss, Hild finally noticed her presence. The senior Demon Queen looked her straight in the eye with a biting grin, and then wrapped her arms possessively around Falcyn. Falcyn was so blissed out, it didn't even register that he had been caught naked with a Demon Queen in a lava hot springs by his Mother.

"I..I can't believe you, Hild!!" Mara finally shouted, as Hild enfolded Falcyn with a deliberately lusty defiance, darting kisses on his neck.

"You actually tried to seduce my son! And you used Heart Blinder Spells on my sister's kids to make them forget her! At least, that's what I think they are!" she added. She wasn't certain about the Heart Blinder Spells, she was stolen to the core by the sight of Hild visiting the most unwarranted erotic improprieties upon her son.

"Ho ho ho ho!" Hild laughed shrilly. "What do you mean, 'tried' to seduce him? Are you saying that I tried to take advantage of this young Demon? It's too late for that, Mara. I _have_ seduced him!!" Hild answered back, licking up and down Falcyn's cheek. Despite her best efforts at self-governance, Mara was trembling with rage as Falcyn looked her straight in the eye and then kissed her with an unabashed passion.

"Y..you _stole_ his virginity, didn't you?"

"No, I didn't steal his virginity," Hild answered slyly. "I could care less about his virginity at the moment. I'm more concerned with _you_!"

"Release my son this instant, Hild!" Mara demanded, her hands suddenly springing with Metanative flame-glows.

"Or what, _Younger Sister_?!" Hild spat back. "You think you can take me on? Me? Here? Here, in my Black Palace? Ahhh, but what if your son objects? He seems quite taken with me! Aren't you, Falcyn?" Falcyn looked back over his shoulder at Hild with rapt affection and nodded his head. Mara's heart faltered and then plummeted as her son so readily disregarded her maternal love and protectiveness in favor of...some perverted sexual acting-out with Hild.

"But let's not be hasty. I assure you, your son _did_ have his share of pleasure this night in the lava pond with me. Just think! I was your son's very first..." Hild answered haughtily, leaving the rest so Mara could be skewered by her own fretful imaginings.

Mara felt her feet shuffling under her with anger.

"How could you do something so sick to my son, Hild? He's barely _a fourth_ of your age!"

"Oh Ho!" Hild exclaimed. "He may be young, but his equipment is certainly of the right proportion!"

"Shut up!!" Mara screamed, squinting her eyes shut, trying to purge the horrible realities from her mind.

"Bwah hah ha! It's not your son that I'm doing it to, Mara. You're too uni-dimensional in your scheming! That's why I'm the Queen...and you're only the head of a Demon Office! Don't you see why this is happening? I'm doing this to _you_!"

Mara felt her breath steal out of her lungs as a spine-snapping fear rippled through her.

"Me? What did I ever do to you?"

"You stole my youth, Mara!" Hild explained, her eyes fiery-fair with barely-compressed rage. "I know how He looks at you! I've seen you with Him, youngest of the Demoness Queens! I've seen how you trifle with His noble heart!"

"No one trifles with Oni-sama's heart, you stupid Demon Queen!" Mara protested. "He's the Dark Lord!! It's impossible for someone to trip up His sentiments. He's totally in contr..."

"Except for me!" Hild interrupted, her voice suddenly sober and cruel. Soberly reminding Mara of who she was...one of the few Demonesses in all the ages of Vanagdrasil that had actually gotten one over on His Darkness.

"Which is why I'm so special, and you're not!" Hild answered with a flash of pride in her Demonic eyes. "You're the dolt, while I'm the _real_ example of what a Demon Queen is! You're nothing more than OL material...while I'm the CEO!! And tonight, I'm going to have my long-awaited revenge!"

"Nothing you can do can hurt me!" Mara said before she meant to say it, goading Hild before common-sense could steal the words from her tongue and replace them with wiser ones.

"Lots of laughs, Demon-girl! Since I can't steal your youth, Mara...I'm going to steal your son's!" Hild said, her hair bristle-frizzling with anger like a cornered cat who had sighted a large dog.

"Yes, I've planned to steal your son's virginity tonight! It was so convenient for you to bring your children and Skuld's little girls down here to Vanagdrasil! This makes my task doubly rewarding! I've been preparing my little student of love here all along, waiting for the one missing ingredient to show up. He's so sexed up, he could explode just by looking at me. Wouldn't you, my dear little Falcyn," she added, stroking his jawline for effect with one hand while reaching under the lava with her other. Falcyn responded like any other hormone-driven 14-year-old boy, gasping in rapturous enjoyment. Mara felt even more sickened by Hild's 'playing' of Falcyn; she was playing his erogenous zones like a master geisha playing the 13-stringed koto.

"I've teased and taunted him, tickling his Demonic libido like it's never been tickled before. All for this perfect moment. A perfect moment _for me_! You see, stealing Falcyn's virginity is only somewhat pleasurable in and of itself. Hee hee...I must admit, it's been awhile since I've had a virgin boy-Demon, especially one who's so virile as your son! You must admit, they're so _maleable_ when they're this young, you know.

"STOP THIS!" Mara screamed, unable to contain herself. Hild may be the insane one, but Mara was starting to seriously fear that she'd lose her own mind. Already her grasp on reason was slipping bigtime.

"But the true, exquisite pleasure," Hild continued, "is the pleasure that jades itself in hushed corners and brilliant symphonies of lust. The pleasure that mounts upon unknown spheres and powers with the tenacity of unleashed lightning. The pleasure that toils with itself...the pleasure of agony. Not just any agony will do. No, it must be the all-possessing agony that scratches upon the soul, soiling it, malforming it into a shadow of itself. The supreme sublimity of bliss: mortification blended with ecstasy. _That_ kind of pleasure cannot be achieved by a mere consummation of carnality. I'm going to treat his mortal and his Demonic nature to _all_ the pleasures of the senses! I'm going to have sexual _feast_ with your son, Mara! And then I'm going Flare with him. I'm going to Flare his little mind to shreds...to the point where he's drooling with satiation! He won't remember you, he won't remember the Earthrealm, he won't remember his sister. Because _I'll_ be his whole world! And you know what will make all of this delicious beyond taste? This whole sensual carnage will occur while his mother bears witness to his 'deflowering'..."

"W..why?!" Mara wailed, tormented to the core of her being by Hild's depravity.

"Why? Because I want it this way! I can't kill you, you little bitch of a Demoness. But I can make you live with the wish for death forever stamped upon your heart. I will take _everything_ away from you. Your precious son. Your talented daughter. Your twin twit-girl Goddess nieces. And when the two little girls have departed the stage, do you think your sister will be Goddess enough to forgive you? Skuld will never talk to you again! Sygyn will become trapped, comatose in a Drow-Demon Multiverse of her own imagining, a Multiverse so foul that it will make the most dark fantasies seem like mercies in the wind! As for my dear Falcyn, I'll make him my sex slave right in front of you, and there's nothing you can do about it! If you try to interfere...well, you know what'll happen! His heat will come from me, and me alone! He will turn against you if you dare try to take him away from me. And you have to ask me 'why?' Mara? I'll even be a good Demon Queen and tell you why."

"Because, my dear Mara, my greatest joy in life is that I want you to feel terrible, agonizing, shattering emotional _pain_!"

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --


	117. Pt 117: A Work in Progress

**Part 117: A Work in Progress**

EARTHREALM:

_Wedding Minus Three Weeks_

Marriage.

Sipping a vanilla-blend coffee and munching on one of Bell-chan's fresh-baked cinnamon rolls, Keiichi's thoughts played backwards, regressing by stages back into his childhood. In elementary school, he and his friends used to play the "husband and wife" game once in a while at the school's playground. The squat jungle gym in the playground was magically transformed into a pretend 'chapel' by means of the youthful imagination of his classmates. Then, he and one of the girls in his second grade class, a girl whose name he had forgotten at least ten years ago, would climb across the vertical bars, cheered on by their classmates. Once he finished the hand-over-hand grasping journey down the three or four meters of the vertical bars, she would follow suit. And if they both finished without falling to the ground, they were considered to have proven their love to each other. Only then could they be married. Once in a while, one of the other boys would want to be the priest, shouting out formulaic words like "do you take this..." and "you may give her the ring" and "you may kiss the bride."

But of course, being all of seven years old, kissing the bride was definitely _not_ an option. Girls were yucky, girls were 'others', girls were classmates you picked on if you got bullied enough by the other boys, girls picked on you in ways that didn't make any sense at all, girls were nothing but trouble, and couldn't play ball very well.

Girls were wonderful.

Women, even more so.

And a Goddess...well, that was the best!

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Keiichi had no idea what he was in for. From the night he told Bell-chan that he welcomed moving their wedding forward to Valentine's Day, events unfolded as unsteadily as a blanket being unfurled in a blizzard. Once he passed the mysterious intersections of decision, he was bathed in even more enigmatic consequences. The decision to marry Bell on Valentine's Day was a turn-of-the-will, so easy for his heart to embrace. So profound in its repercussions, as he had been discovering over the past several weeks.

How much can a single moment multiply itself, anyway?

The simple decision to marry the woman he beloved...and yet, life seemed to map itself out in mysterious scatters. Each moment seemed to be tended by holy beings of mercurial light; Fates that were hovering just out of sight behind the clouds in the sky, readying with a breath of ambition to usher havoc and complications upon his best-designed plans. Every day, a militia of mercenary confusion seemed to be at play in his thoughts moments after he would wake up. Over the years, his relationship with Bell-chan had seemed to magnetize its share of 'adjustments', both warranted and unwanted, but he felt like the Universe 'had it out' it out for them even more than usual. At least Tyyr wasn't showing up to create a scene. And it had started out so peacefully…

Straightaway after his discussion with Cevn about the possibility of moving ahead on his and Bell's wedding plans, Keiichi had felt like his heart was going to pound out of his chest. He was _certain_ that he had arrived at the correct decision! Unable to prolong his choice a moment longer, he had invited Bell-chan to his bed room and joyously shared with her that he fully agreed with her idea about moving the wedding up to Thursday, Feb 14th, 20XX. After this, he and Belldandy had a very long, delicious talk about their future together, and then they celebrated by making heart-thundering passionate love to each other under candlelight, and finally, they fell together in dizzy exhaustion into the pillows of each other's arms. Love was supposed to be selfish by virtue of truth; that one only sees themselves and their desires in the other person, not the essence of the other person. Once again, Bell-chan had disproved this by her generosity of spirit and devotion. Keiichi knew that the plumbs of her innermost heart were hers alone, and that he was the privileged recipient of her unique kokoro.

Within a day, the onslaught began.

Belldandy herself was teeming with enthusiasm; as even more so than he, she seemed to overbrim with joy the next morning. Keiichi intuited that Bell's brilliance of mood was due to the pleasant prospect of informing her sisters about their decision. Bell-chan wasted no time in breaking the wonderful news to Urd and Skuld over breakfast the next morning. Keiichi had wanted to witness the revelation of the joyous news, but he was called by his academic duties and had already left for school. So she was on her own with Skuld and Urd. As Belldandy later related it, Urd had immediately excused herself without even bothering to finish her waffles. Skuld lingered just long enough to finish one chocolate-syrup covered slice of French toast, and then suddenly told Bell that she had to "go check on Banpei".

The rest didn't require any guesswork. Within five minutes of stealing into her "Urd's Castle" room, Urd had gotten her Mother on the holoscreen and was quickly laying out the gossipy details for her Mom's disposition, couched in the usual exaggerations she tended to interweave such 'announcements' with. Joy shared is joy multiplied; and Keiichi knew that Urd loved being the bearer of glad tidings. The sister's Mother immediately plunged into 'Mama' mode and chattered excitedly about "B'dandy's precious moment" and all the plans she had for it. Meanwhile, Skuld had managed to contact her Father using something she called a "Nomenxy Co-Moden HoloRelay" system. Contacting him at work, she managed to engage him in a real-time live holophotic chat while he was supervising the evolution of a new wing for one of the Energy Tholens of the Ygg Creactor. Needless to say, he "took the rest of the day off", according to Skuld. Within minutes, both sisters had swiftly ushered the 'news' onto the foyers of their parent's hearts. Impulsively so, because they had deprived Bell of opportunity to inform her Mother and Father _herself_.

Keiichi had never imagined that Skuld had built-in a means to contact Yggdrasil using Banpei. In retrospect, it made sense. Skuld acknowledged that it was a precaution, just in case she ever needed to 'phone home' if some kind of disaster had taken out the temple.

When he came home from school that night, the phone rang less than a minute after he traded his tennis shoes for his cold-weather house slippers, the first of many prompt summons for him the moment he arrived home.

Slipstreamed from calm to intensity, Keiichi had felt a little anxious as he waited for Megumi to come home from school. Like Bell, he was anxious to tell his family! His sister had left even earlier than he had that morning; it was her week to drive by Sora's place and pick her up for school. Keiichi waited up late that night, having to endure two arguments between Urd and Skuld about the TV, waiting and waiting. Finally, Megumi and Genji came home, and he immediately told them the good news about Bell-chan and his 'fast-forward' wedding date. Megumi looked at him with a stunned expression, and then warily asked him, "Did you tell Mom and Dad about this yet?" Keiichi shook his head "no", and Megumi threatened to do it herself if he didn't call them the next morning before going to N.I.T.

Within minutes, Megs was already pulling the 'responsible little sister' act!

By the following day, Keiichi was consumed with the awareness that planning his and Bell-chan's wedding and reception was going to involve an immense contrivance of people skills, financial planning, logistics, and the fielding of many, many phone calls. Even finals week at grad school didn't even come close to pulling the stress out of him like this did!

Weren't weddings supposed to be fun and relaxing affairs?

It seemed that the phone had a life of its own...and it was crazier than Banpei, Mini-Banpei and Sigil combined on one of their 'wild' days! Even though Belldandy was handling most of the details, the overlay of tension in the household seemed to drift towards him like an inescapable fog. And then there were the calls that he _couldn't_ make, but could only receive. For every day since the announcement, Bell's Mother Freiija was burning up the temple's phone line with clinical precision. She seemed to time her calls _just so_. The moment he returned to school, the phone would sentinel his attention. Keiichi didn't even have to ask Bell-chan who it was once the phone started sounding off less than a minute after he came in the front door. At least she wasn't calling him on his cellphone while he was at school. Keiichi didn't even want to imagine the sheer amount of interruptions this would bring to his school work; nor the odd looks he might have garnered from fellow students who overheard him discussing particulars like 'how to keep the sentient house rats from sneaking drinks from the ceremonial wine', a concern he definitely shared with his future Mother-in-Law.

Bell's Mom usually wanted to talk to him regarding the upcoming wedding and reception. A willful tornado of coercion, Freiija had attempted many times to exert a peculiar craft of Mother-in-Law urgency, demanding that he "be the husband and make her see things my way. You must change B'dandy's mind!" Unaccustomed to a demanding Mother-in Law, Keiichi tried to go with the flow. But her calls were transiting between stations of irritation and daffiness. Freiija was acting like a high-school principal, being officious and meddling over minutiae. Her "urgent issues that have to be taken care of _now_!" usually centered on some micro-unimportant aspect of the marriage ceremony, such as where the flowers in the back of the hall should be placed in relation to the aisle. Keiichi had observed the Goddesses creating precise mandalas to affect demanding feats of magic, learning an appreciation for design and precision that was a simile to his work with motorcycle engines. Any other wedding ceremony would simply merit having the flower arrangements visible and nicely arranged throughout the church; Bell's 'Mama' had some kind of Divine nuptial ceremonial 'geomancy' in mind which required the precise placement of _everything_.

Once his daily phone encounter with Bell's Mom was finished, Belldandy would then give him a run-down of the _other_ dozen-or-so phone calls she had received from her Mom while he was in school. A single call from his future mother-in-law was nearly enough to push Keiichi over the precipice of frustration. He couldn't even imagine having to deal with all the calls Bell-chan was getting! And of course, Belldandy was taking everything with her usual poise and charm, like a smiling mayflower greeting the Sun in springtime.

If only he could maintain such a sunny disposition himself.

Sundays were a break in the routine. Every Sunday afternoon, Bell-chan would sing out "it's for you, Keiichi!" and toss him the portable phone. And a gruff, deep-basso male voice on the other side would announce itself to him.

Straight to his conscience.

Sundays with Odeyn.

Bell's Father...his future Father-in-Law...had decided within a certain peculiar 'protective father strategy' to engage Keiichi in earnest "man-to-man" talks with Keiichi about the more serious and entrenched aspects of married life. Keiichi was already pursed between deep respect and unmitigated fear of Bell's Father. After all, he was _Belldandy's Dad_! The first two weekends Odeyn had called, Keiichi's mind kept flickering with worries that he might accidentally say the wrong thing to Bell's Dad and end up having to undergo another "Ritual of Preparedness" trial at this late date before their wedding. The hellish experience in the Algerian waste-erg was one time too many, as far as he was concerned!

The first Sunday Odeyn called, he held sway with Keiichi for ninety minutes, lecturing him about "pleasing the other half". Namely, a talk about sex and the arts of passion. It was half-embarrassing, half-amusing...and totally nerve-wracking. Because he was a God, Odeyn could only give him advice about 'pleasuring the delicate sex' by abstraction. He even went so far as to acknowledge that Gods and Goddesses usually didn't perform sexual acts together, except as a curiosity. Keiichi felt awkward, because Odeyn had seemingly presumed that, in five year of living with Bell-chan, he and his fiancée had never talked about such things.

Then the conversation turned towards Odeyn and Freiija's relationship. Odeyn admitted that he and Freiija had engaged in sexual intercourse in the mortal manner "but a few times", curious to understand what their daughter was experiencing with him. In his words, "it possessed a certain charm, but didn't possess all that much excitement." Keiichi was abashed to the point of stumbling over his tongue on the phone, drawing an amused sneer from Urd who had obviously intuited the nature of his little chat with her father. But Odeyn continued, furthering Keiichi's embarrassment. He explained that, as a Divine being, sexual expression for him was "rather different than it would be for a healthy mortal male like you." To Gods and Goddesses, orgasms were only fractionally interesting. Divines had much more profound means of provoking ecstasy. Keiichi agreed with him that sex was far more engaging for mortals than it would be for Gods, because of the physiologically indwelt orgasmic nature of the experience. Taking this as a cue, Odeyn insisted that Keiichi explain his 'technique'. After a moment of shocked silence, Keiichi straightaway promised that he would take good care of Belldandy in that department, and the conversation shifted to other area of discourse.

Keiichi could hear the thrill in his voice when the Elder God talked about Sharing with Bell's Mom. Odeyn's bossa voice would become higher-pitched and rapid, and he would exclaim "Freiija takes me to heavens I didn't even know existed when we Share together!" Odeyn seemed to be compensating for Keiichi's lack of being forthcoming about his 'love life' with Bell-chan by talking freely about his and Freiija's 'fun' together. Keiichi couldn't understand a wit of it, so he simply had to say "uh-huh" every so often to feign empathy and comprehension. The call at first seemed to be a grueling version of going to confessional; now, it seemed that he was on the other side of the booth, listening to a confession. Odeyn finished that first call by chiding him for making Belldandy wait so long to be initiated into the world of mortal sexuality, and then reminded Keiichi that it was "fine and permissible for him to indulge himself in shared pleasures with his wife, for otherwise life would be prosaic and boresome." Or something to that effect.

By the time that first call with his future Father-in-Law was concluded, Keiichi's face was as red as Skuld's 'flower power' Goddess boots. He was so flustered, when Bell-chan tapped him on the shoulder and innocently asked him what they had discussed, he nearly leapt out of his house slippers. After surviving a phone call like that, he _deserved_ to marry Bell-chan! He was grateful for one thing: at least Bell's Dad hadn't invited him out drinking.

After one week of solid wedding planning, Keiichi was asking himself important questions like "Does married life mean that you and your wife have to endure torturing phone calls from her parents?"

_--And that was only half of it.—_

The other half was _his_ parents...

Today, three weeks into the rigors of working on his wedding, Keiichi found himself wishing briefly that Genji would just scoop up Megumi and take her on a surprise vacation to Okinawa or Hokkaido. Someplace far, far away...maybe even as far away as Singapore or Hong Kong. Or Denmark. Just so his younger sister couldn't possibly be in a position to bring his parents to the temple.

Like she had done for the last three weeks.

Every two or three days, and then both Saturday and Sunday on the weekends!

Once in a while, Keiichi would experience a pure sense of relief when Megs would pull up in her car, and the only person who got out on the passenger's side was Sora or Genji. But more frequently than not, it would be his parents that piled out of her car. Early Saturday mornings, Megumi would leave after breakfast. An hour later, she'd return; driving up into the temple and parking her car near the main house. A moment later, their parents...Reiko and Osamu...would emerge out of Megumi's compact car. Keiichi quickly noticed that she always seemed to have this sly grin on her face whenever she brought Mom and Dad over for a visit.

Who says eyes can't wag tongues?

While Megumi busied herself unloading boxes from the trunk of her car, Mom would rush up and give him a big hug and a kiss on the cheek. Meanwhile, Dad would walk right past him into the house and bow curtly to Belldandy. Then he'd ask her "what's for lunch?" Mom utterly adored Belldandy...and even Urd and Skuld to a lesser degree. Keiichi remembered how his Dad had initially gravitated towards a strong dislike of Belldandy when he first met her, because she was a gaijin. Part of his father's reaction was molded by a blatant misstep by Keiichi, as he had been going out with Bell for several years and had kept it a secret. But his Dad had grown to like her over the past 18 months, and seemed resigned to the idea that she was going to be his daughter-in-law in a few weeks. So now, Belldandy was facing a sort of 'trial' of her own, administered by his father. Already, three weeks later, Dad's beltline was a few cm wider; a clear indication that Bell-chan was passing the 'wifely culinary exams' with flying colors.

But 'cooking exams' were the least of their worries. Since Mom and Dad had never really gotten to know Belldandy, lunchtime on Saturdays was almost like an interrogation. They wanted to know _everything_ about her...and sometimes, the questions would spill over towards Urd and Skuld. Belldandy, he could trust. Urd and Skuld, in contrast, could say anything and everything. Very scary, those lunches. Megumi, who was the prime instigator of these impromptu parental visits, usually just sat at the dinner table and watched the proceedings with an amused eye! Keiichi mentally promised to get her back someday. Megumi probably wasn't thinking far enough ahead to realize that someday she and Genji would have to go through all this nerve-squeezing stuff. When that time came, she would feel the force of his "Big Brother's Wedding Revenge" and know that her dues would be exacted in full. Sayoko would probably even cooperate to make it extra-embarrassing for his sister. But lunch had a single reprieve from the stress. Fortunately, like Cevn, Dad was a little awkward around women, so the 'questioning' was mostly done by his Mom, who already adored Belldandy and was genuinely pleased to learn all she could about her.

What would she and Dad think when they found out she was a _Goddess_?

Yet, Mom and Dad's visits weren't all bad...just nerve-wracking. The third weekend after he had announced their wedding date, Megumi brought the folks over for the usual visit; but this particular Saturday was one for the books. During dinner, Dad had slipped a bankbook under Keiichi's zabuton, with a couple "ahems!" and an elbow to the ribs. Keiichi didn't have the courage to open it until Megumi left to take Mom and Dad back home. When he did open it, a small handwritten note fell out. The little handwritten note said,

_"For your wedding, Son. Love, Mom and Dad." _

The balance figure at the end of the page tallied 1.7 million yen. Keiichi spent part of that night paying debts to his parents with teary-eyed remembrances.

_--And that was only a third of it.--_

The other two-thirds were Bell's sisters. As the wedding date approached, Urd was visibly getting more and more hyper. Keiichi almost wished for the old days, back when Urd's flirtation with trying to 'jump-start' his and Bell's relationship involved "love potions" and "Mellow-Mellow Suntan Lotion" and "Goddess Irresistible Perfumes". But nothing's simple with Urd.

Now, Urd wanted her piece of the pie as well.

During breakfast a couple weeks ago, she had insisted that Bell-chan change their designated wedding photographer. He and Bell had already decided last year on a young photographer named Kasuga Kyosuke; whose work had caught Bell's eye at a cafe she had visited. It was because of this photographer's work that she had been able to find him after he had been stranded in Africa by Bell's parents. Somehow, Belldandy had 'sensed' him within one of the posters Kasuga had shot. Kasuga was married to a woman named Madoka, who was renowned one of Japan's most accomplished concert pianists. So the choice of Kasuga for wedding photographer was touched lightly but significantly with plumbs of sentiment. Several months ago, Belldandy had told Kasuga the strange tale of how she has 'sensed' Keiichi through one of his photo-posters. Once his wife, Madoka, learned about this, she happily volunteered to perform on the piano during the ceremony, without even charging them! So now, they were getting a package deal, with a 'bonus' of a nationally known pianist and composer playing at their wedding.

But none of this made sense to Urd, as she had been away in Yggdrasil for some reason during that time. Keiichi knew that this particular absence had to do with her and Cevn's relationship; but Urd didn't recognize that as the reason, of course. To her, it was simply "a vacation from the boring Earthrealm." So she knew nothing about why he and Bell had picked Kasuga for the wedding photography! Urd viewed hiring Kasuga as nothing more than an extravagance. Since when did Urd worry about extravagance, anyway? But worry she did; she actually pitched a total spindizzy fit about the money they were going to spend hiring Kasuga instead of some regular ad-in-the-phonebook wedding photographer.

Finally, Urd had been hinting to Keiichi that she wanted to "try him out" just once while he was still 'unhitched', just so she could make sure that her sister "was getting the real thing". These intimations were uncomfortable reminders of all the times Urd had attempted to "share the wonders of the realm of the senses" with him, soon after she had arrived on the Earthrealm. She had told him that the only way to 'recharge' Bell's energy was to have sex with her: by 'injecting' her with his 'essence', she could restore Belldandy to health. Fortunately, he had been saved from disaster when Urd got blasted by a very wroth Almighty; an incident was but the first of Urd's many 'license suspension' screwups!

Keiichi was concerned about how Cevn felt about all of this; worried that his friend might get jealous or even upset since Urd was hitting on him all these times. Keiichi was almost thankful when Cevn had come into their lives, because his presence had thankfully diverted Urd's curiosity and cupidity away from him for the most part. But now that Urd didn't remember her relationship with Cevn, she was targeting him again. And that he though he was a machine, Cevn seemed so mixed up that Keiichi didn't know if his friend recognized that he had been in love with Urd or not.

And then there was Skuld, the final third.

The girl was on a mission, that much was apparent! Three times in the first two weeks since his and Bell-chan's announcement of their Feb wedding, she had almost come to blows with Urd over the designs for the bridesmaid dresses. Once he and Bell-chan started planning their wedding in earnest, they decided on bridesmaid dresses for Urd, Skuld, Sigel and Megumi, Sora, Chihiro and Sayoko...and even Mara, since she was part of the family. This was one of those things that couldn't wait; the dresses would have to be measured and custom sewn, so it was imperative that they get the order in to the Tokyo wedding tailors ASAP. But it didn't happen that way. Skuld was completely bratty for an entire week once she learned that she had to wear "one of those stupid girly-girly frilly freak-dresses." Keiichi had assumed that Skuld's obstinacy would last until the day of the wedding, but lo!...Skuld totally surprised him by suddenly shifting her attitudinal gears.

After all, she was a 12-year old girl who had lived over 120,000 years...who was now 'wearing' the body of a hormone-driven, terminally image-conscious, trying-to-be-hip 17-year old girl. To put it bluntly, Skuld was becoming very complicated. The upcoming wedding seemed to only heighten the complications. The first week, she fought the dress issue tooth-and-nail. The next week, she reversed her position and became very agreeable towards wearing a bridesmaid dress. It wasn't merely an acquiescence; Skuld seemed to become thrilled with idea.

Provided that the bridesmaid's dress she wore was _white_.

Keiichi had almost choked on his coffee that afternoon when Skuld laid out her conditions for her bridesmaid dress. Belldandy simply looked at her with blank astonishment, and Urd held her hand up over her mouth and beat a hasty exit out of the dining room. Skuld became all smug-pouty when Bell-chan regained her composure enough to point out to her that in an Earthrealm wedding, the color white was reserved for the bride. _Only_ the bride.

Skuld, exit stage left...

A few days later, while Skuld was still in a sullen retreat in her "Skuld Labs" room, Urd showed up out of the blue with some 'sketches' of her design for the bridesmaid dress _she_ wanted to wear. Manga artist, Urd was not! As she laid out her designs over the dinner table, Keiichi quickly observed that Urd's 'dress' was strikingly similar to the tiger-striped string-thing swimsuit she wore in the summer. It was _very_ revealing, with a few additions such as a gold and pink-red cape, a half-skirt half-apron that left the whole side of her legs bare up to her hips, two 'wings' of red leather fastened onto the shoulder straps of her dress, and some kind of outlandish diadem hair-piece that looked like a crown. When Keiichi told her "no", Urd started yelling.

Skuld, enter stage right...

Bounding into the kitchen, Skuld took one glance at Urd's 'concept drawings'...and then made the grievous mistake of giggling.

The next several days were filled with Big Sister-Little Sister warfare!

So on top of everything else, Belldandy had to replace the living room three times, the kitchen twice, Keiichi's bedroom four times, and the bathroom six times. Not to mention that she _still_ didn't manage to get Urd and Skuld's measurements for the dresses until the following weekend, when Mara showed up. Somehow, Mara performed a very un-Demoness-like miracle and brokered a truce between the factioning sisters. In his mind, Mara's feat bordered on the Earthrealm equivalent of getting the Israelis and Palestinians to agree on sharing Jerusalem.

But even though the house was in a more peaceable mood, Skuld remained stubborn, refusing to be fitted for her dress. She finally relented several days ago when Keiichi decided to clutch at some grassy straws of logic in a desperate attempt to elicit some cooperation from her. He strongly suggested that she would spend her time and energy more effectively by modifying Banpei and Mini-Banpei, rather than Skuld-Bombing Urd and wrecking different parts of the temple house as "necessary collateral damage". Somehow, his reasoning had penetrated Skuld's teenage angst. It certainly made sense to Keiichi; he and Bell-chan had planned for their two robotic watchmen to assume the important task of being ring-bearers for the ceremony. Keiichi also reminded Skuld that she would have to rehearse Sigel's role in the wedding, since the little mecha-girl had been designated to be the flower-girl.

With that, Skuld decided to cooperate and be fitted with her dress. But just to make sure, Keiichi planned for Mara, Peorth, Urd and Bell-chan to be present, just in case Skuld decided to go off and pitch a fit of last-minute defiance. But it proved unnecessary, as three Senior First Class Goddesses and one Senior First Class Demoness were more than enough to keep her in line.

By this point, only 17 days after he announced the wedding date, Keiichi was often up in the middle of the night, pacing back and forth down the long hallway and around the living room to wear down his tensions. His sleep had become invisible.

_--But that was only six-eighths of the chaos.--_

Then there were the Ninjettes. The three Ninja warrior-girls had reached a decision that...if he and Bell were going to get married...then that made it okay for them to marry _their_ sweethearts. After all, they were loyal shinobi, who were inclined to follow the lead of their mistress, Bell-chan. In a very moving manner, the three girls approached Belldandy and him and begged her leave to marry their beaus, seated in the most formal seiza tailor-style postures and bowing prodigiously as they asked. Feeling quite pleased with their decision, he and Belldandy readily granted them leave of their guard-vigilant duties to prepare for their worthies.

Naturally, when you have Kodama, Hikari and Nojomi in one space for a prolonged period, their restless Bushido spirits would get all genki. This meant that the three would become the modicum of rowdiness. Of a like mind, their three husbands-to-be...Toshiro, Yoshi and Musashi...were equally possessed of a peculiar martial spirit. Apparently, they had inherited a rather knotty strain of noble warrior ethics that seemed to run in a particularly bizarre 'tribe' of rats. The three chibi Ninja boys were originally teenaged temple-rats that lived under the temple and inside its walls, before Bell-chan had recast them into their present chibi human-like forms. Because of their origins among the rodents, they were well known to Ganjin; in fact, it was Ganjin who had introduced them to the three Ninjettes in the first place. 'Sponsored' them, as it were. Now, Ganjin seemed to feel that he had to sponsor them again...guiding them through his idea of 'appropriate' pre-wedding licentious excess.

Consequently, if you took six seriously dedicated practitioners of ninjitsu, who were already uppity and high-strung in the first place...and then you combined them with one crafty rodent, whose most probable route of incarnation in his next life would be that of a tout for a bunny-bar...the result was utter Bacchanalian chaos. In other words, all that massive crescendo of Bushido energy which was normally distilled between the six dedicated martial artists via bouting, guarding and practicing their skills…was now being dissipated by totally crazy, totally debauched drinking parties underneath the temple. Parties that Ganjin, the well-known 'corrupter' of younger rodents, had wassailed. Parties that happened _every_ night. Parties that seemed to last to 4am.

Every. Night.

A volatile mix in and of itself, to be sure. But his efforts to get some much-needed sleep were further frustrated by the match that seemed to ignite the powder-keg; in the person of Mini-Urd, who frequently dropped in on their night-time partying and whooped it up a level. Keiichi suspected that she was doing this to get back at him for reacting coolly towards her flirtations. She _knew_ that he had to get some sleep! And yet, last night he had to stomp on the floor again to try and get them to cool it down because mini-Urd had decided to bring a set of mini-taiko drums underneath the temple as her 'contribution' to the festivities.

On a Tuesday. A school night!

And then there was Cevn...and that was a whole other offramp into the weird zone.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Are you ready for me to remove that cast? Does everything seem okay?" Skuld asked Cevn.

"Yeahm, sure," he answered in what seemed to be a disinterested voice. Skuld felt more than a little disappointed in his lack of enthusiasm. When she had first met him, she was scared of him. Later, when Mara used him to abduct her, he had risked his life to set her free. Skuld discovered that she was afraid of his emotional scars, not of him. The process of extricating themselves from Mara's clutches cost him his eyes. Almost feeling indebted to him, Skuld had worked feverishly to restore Cevn's vision. And when she and Urd succeeded, Cevn was so happy, he practically worshiped the ground she walked on.

"Well, that's a little bit too much," Skuld thought to herself with a smile as she remembered how much his respect for her SkuldTech skills had grown after that. "But he could at least put on some show of gratitude! After all, I _did_ heal his wounds this time"

She almost regretted the fact that she had programmed the 'cast' to work more quickly. Cevn seemed to have this crazy notion in his head that he was some kind of blend between organism and machine; something along the lines of a cybernetic being. Today, she and her sisters and Keiichi were going to peel the skin off his self-delusion. Skuld was really beginning to get sick of hearing about it. All this talk about being a robot! If he thought he was a robot, why didn't he hang out with Banpei and Sigil in the "Banpei Shed"? So once Cevn was completely healed by her mechas, she was going to lay into him something fierce. Mortal against Goddess...Cevn wouldn't even come close in a battle of wits! And she had her sisters and Keiichi to back her up just in case.

But something seemed screwy. Yesterday during a routine check, she noticed that Cevn's skin was turning green around the edges of the tight-fitting HealTech mecha around his arm and shoulder. She didn't want his skin to get too much of a dose of oxidation.

And then it had struck her...the metal she had used to create the 'arm casts' was absolutely rust-proof, composed of an amalgam of non-oxidizing alloys. The seamless metals shouldn't have caused any irritation or discoloration to his flesh whatsoever. Only a total idiot would put someone's entire arm inside of a metal casing for almost two weeks without making sure the metal was safe for medical applications!

She paused for a moment and looked around Cevn's room. Keiichi, Belldandy and Urd were here with her, providing an 'audience' for the unveiling. Actually, it had been Keiichi's idea that this would be an opportune time for them to try and convince him that he wasn't some kind of cyber-organic mechanism. Cevn was a big fan of 'interventions', where a group of concerned individuals would elaborate on an issue in an attempt to sway the 'victim' to do something about it. According to Keiichi, it had worked extremely well addressing Sayoko's drug addiction.

She was anxious to release the arm-cast, so they could begin to lay into him about this idiot nonsense about being a cyborg!

Skuld pressed a sequence of buttons on the 'wrist' of the arm-cast.

And as it opened, her eyes flew wide with recognition...and shock.

"See!" Cevn said levelly. "I _told_ you that I'm a machine!"

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"What the _hell_ did you do to him, Skuld!?" Urd screamed, more out of a sense of frustration and irritation than anything else.

"For the fourth time, Big Sister, I didn't do _anything_ to make him the way he is!!" Skuld snapped back, her eyes flaring wide with anger and frustration. "How could I do something like that? Why would I have any reason to convert his physiology into a cyber-organic framework? Not to mention that I like him better as a true human Earthrealm mortal!"

Urd caught herself before she could launch into another tirade against her younger sister as Skuld's words sank in. The first three times she accused Skuld, Skuld had hotly defended herself. But this time, Urd looked her sister right in the eye and engaged the 'sister-to-sister' link to see if she was telling the truth. Urd could see the uncertainty playing through Skuld's eyes. If her sister...the supreme mecha-genius of the family...didn't know what was going on, then it was quite obvious that _something_ was pretty messed up with Cevn!

She momentarily wondered if Mara could be up to her old tricks. But Mara was one of the bridesmaids and older sister to the bride...nothing short of a fit of Demonic insanity would cause her to pull a stunt like this just a few weeks before Belldandy and Keiichi's wedding. It couldn't possibly be another Demon either; no Demon would even be one-tenth stupid enough to do something like this! The Rules specifically forbade any Divine being from converting an organic life-form into any other type of beingness, such as ethereal, cybernetic, robotic, etc...unless there was a very good reason. The Rules in this case were very sensible; any sudden shift in a being's composition usually caused a rapid rush of insanity within the individual, or open warfare within the changeling's society. Cevn's insane ravings about some imagined history on a planet he called "Planet Lost" was a good example of this mental imbalance in action.

Of course, all this was theoretical where Earthrealm mortals were concerned, as no one had ever used her Divine powers to turn a human being into a robot. It was a prevalent pattern among mortal societies that attempts to replace their organic systems with biomech systems usually reached a terminus that included warfare or enslavement of either the 'man' or the 'machine'. Despite the dangers, many mortal societies did pursue this technological route however, thinking they could earn immortality on the cheap by substituting long-lasting robotic components for flesh-and-blood. Those that didn't destroy themselves during this phase usually made good candidates for the Next Level. Yet, there would be no concealing such a change either: the Divines only needed to observe the typical pattern of societal destruction to realize that a sudden 'evolution' from man to machine had caused the disaster.

Even her already-crazy stepmom Hild would have to be out of her mind to do something like this to him! And if Cevn's condition wasn't enough, creating _this_ kind of crisis just weeks before Keiichi and Bell's wedding would be the ultimate stupid Hild move! Her sister already had a full plate of concerns. Urd mulled over the idea if her Demon Queen 'mother' might be trying to pass this one off as 'Strife Mischief', if indeed she was the architect of Cevn's sudden transformation to machine-being. But loopy as her 'mother' was, she probably didn't want to earn the wrath of every party to the wedding, including Kami-sama Himself.

As she gulped down a glass of shochu...because strong liquor was definitely merited in this case...Urd remembered how, just a half-hour ago, she had been poised on the seat of her 'invisible chair' watching the proceedings. Actually, she had been floating over Cevn as Skuld keyed in the release sequence to his HealTech cast. When her sister finished, the cast popped open like a cocoon and she watched in shock as his newly-revealed skin turned from green to fleshtone in less than five seconds. Immediately suspicious, Urd extended her Goddess senses into diagnostic perception-eidos and quickly scanned him. She discovered that Cevn was no longer human: his physical form was an synthetic construct comprising of 15 percent biological, 45 percent cyborganic, 35 percent mechanical, and 5 percent datanet components. Their carefully planned confrontation of Cevn had been turned inside-out within a few seconds.

No, this definitely had nothing to do with Skuld.

After bracing herself with another slug of shochu, Urd hastily apologized to her sister. This wasn't Skuld's fault at all. As much as she _wanted_ to blame her younger sister, just to get even over Skuld's mocking comments about her bridesmaid dress designs, Urd knew she couldn't use this incident to fasten culpability on Skuld. But something seemed a bit strange. Belldandy usually would try and mediate fights between she and Skuld; but instead, her middle sister had seemed lost in deep thought for a moment. Which was strange, because as Norn of the Present, Bell usually comprehended a dilemma faster than she or Skuld. Also, Bell would normally take the most morbid of situations and at least try and frame them in a positive light. Maybe something like "well, at least he was right, so now we don't have to listen to him fretting about trying to prove to us that he's a robot anymore!" No, Bell wouldn't say something like _that_, but she would at least put a positive spin on this new development. Yet, her sister seemed mummed by what had happened. She didn't even offer one of her patent 'Bell-isms' to try and shed hope on Cevn's plight.

Keiichi was pretty astonished, which was expected. But fortunately, Skuld had the insight to tell Cevn to stay in his room until his 'systems regained a mobile balance'. In truth, Skuld had done this so that the four of them could take their astonishment to another part of the house. It was bad enough with all the stuff going on with her sister's wedding. Keiichi was acting like a jerk one minute, a gentleman the next. Urd felt bitter as she remembered how he had rejected her advances once again last night, while her sister was taking a bath. She briefly flighted with the thought of just hopping in the bathtub with him next time he took a bath, but nixed it. Something like that could get Bell _and_ the Almighty pissed off at her!

But it was such a waste. Urd knew that she _did_ love Keiichi in her own way; she just wanted to express it honestly and deeply in a new way. Just once, before he became Bell's husband. As the Norn of the Past, Urd knew that she would never experience romantic love from a man. Never. Not possible. Not changeable. But at least, now that Keiichi was going to be part of her family, he could at least sleep with her just once, so she could remember a slight return of what it meant to be intimate. Most people on the Earthrealm would term this 'incest'...but to Urd, it was all good. All wrapped up under the label of 'family'. Besides, a little fling might cause Keiichi to shed some of that stress which was building up every day inside of him.

Once again, she was trying to clean up a mess that her sister had made...and once again, no one wanted to give her credit for it. Keiichi's resolve under pressure was admirable, but Urd wanted to make him feel good; and at the same time, make herself feel good too. At least he had kissed her a couple days ago! God only knows what Peorth would pull if she was in the house! Unlike her, Peorth lacked subtlety. Thank the Lord that Peorth was probably completely satisfied with Heroic Vermilion Swift! But Urd wondered if Peorth, like her, still secretly wanted Keiichi.

Just once.

One moment to remember and cherish for an eternity of millennia.

Urd felt a brief falter in her thoughts.

All this mental grasping about 'love' and 'cherishing'...and strangely enough, Cevn's face seemed to pull around in her mind.

"Why am I thinking of _him _right now?" she confronted herself. Urd quickly summarized that she was concerned about him as a friend, nothing more. Her concern was probably compounded by the fact that he was going to be in the wedding, and she didn't want him messing anything up. Any Goddess who lived with a mortal would be bound by worries if that mortal suddenly changed into a cyborg! But if so, then did his face keep coming to mind when she thought about love? Or about Keiichi's continual repulses of her advances? Or even the idea that she could actually cherish another being?

How did Cevn get here in the first place?

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

I moved my arm, the arm that Skuld repaired, satisfied with the telltale near-quiet whirring of servo-cabling inside of it. Recalling when I had a human body, I remembered how I could hear all sorts of sounds. Popping in my ears, my heartbeat, the squeak-movement of muscles, blood rushing to my head during finals. All of these were the 'orchestra' of my physiology. Normally, my mind just tuned them out. But now that I am in a robotic shell, there is no tuning out of sound. But with the complex blending of circuit, nanometic mechas, organic cellular structure and the like...it was supremely important that I had a network of redundant monitoring devices to inform me of the status of my cyborganic body. Of course, part of this system of sentinels was my acoustic-sensory devices, a sense of 'hearing' that functioned at a much higher level, far beyond that of the human ear.

But if they did, then why couldn't I hear what they're talking about in the kitchen? I could hear them in the kitchen, but I wasn't able to make out a single word.

After she finished reweaving the components in my arm with her HealTech mechas, Skuld had told me to stay here and rest, to test my arm out and see if it was properly fit. So I did some span-of-motion exercises to see if it was functioning correctly. Skuld obviously knows her tech stuff; I could sense a slight refinement in the damaged portions of my cyborganic 'body'. They were better than new.

But I can't remember when new was.

There was the escapade on the LifeShip, where I was created. Somehow, I had wound up back here on the Earth. Or was it the Earthrealm? Perhaps Urd had brought me back? Or maybe, the Goddesses had rebuilt all of reality, and I just managed to 'dip' into the fathoms of existence by accident?

I could see the Enigma Book resting on its familiar place on the bookshelf near my futon. Glancing at it, I recognized the title of the book, in both the God's and the Demon's Languages. But I didn't understand why it was there. Thumbing through it, as a good test of fine motor operations, I noticed that something was scribbled on the last page in a handwritten note, almost like an afterthought. But I couldn't read the writing; it was cursive God's Language, and thus not couched in visibility to machine or human eyes.

At least they finally seemed to believe me when I said I wasn't like the other humans. It took them long enough! I usually don't get too passionate about trying to convince others that I'm right about something, although there was a time when I was more righteous than correct in form and candor. But when they watched my artificial skin launching into 'regeneration and cleanse protocol', I almost felt relieved. If I was a human, which I'm not, the simple task of purging the impurities that had turned my skin green would have been impossible. Or would have required liberal use of soap and a few days wait.

Yet, I didn't expect the discovery to be so upsetting to them. They're _Goddesses_, for reason's sake! And Keiichi had lived through Velpser, Fenrir the Wolf, Celestine, Hild and Rind...so he should be accustomed to the many leavenings of peculiarity on his daily bread. Belldandy? She can take these things in stride. Urd? She seemed almost ready to go off on Skuld. Keiichi? All he could do was regard me with a jaw-drop expression. And Skuld? She seemed more embarrassed and surprised than upset.

But I'd been telling them all along, and they had decided to ignore me.

There was an unexpected emptiness in the knowledge that they now recognized what I had known all along. Now that they've witnessed my cyborganic body in action, there would be no more reason to dispute the fact that I'm not human. But why do I feel like I've lost something too? It's not like I didn't know that I was a cyborg. I couldn't discount the fact that I had denied being a cyborg for most of the two years I had lived here. But that was well behind me now. So why the sense of melancholy?

Admittedly, being part-robot has a host of advantages, of course. Anyone with a reasonable level of intelligence could argue a thousand reasons why cyborganic beings have a good lot. I can live almost forever, as long as spare parts can be replaced and my neuro-response chemicals and brain tissue remain intact. I didn't have to waste time eating or sleeping...but I've been doing these anyway, just to observe conventions. But this sadness that I feel…was it an even deeper sense of loss?

Could I have finally lost Urd?

Granted, her general emotional reaction to me usually alternates between spite, pity, disinterest or contempt. Anything but love, attraction, admiration...even curiosity. All that I've wanted for the last several months is for her to love me, in the same way that we had loved each other before. But now, 'before' seems to be such a remote place. Lost love, in my case, might be merciful.

Sometimes, one can wish for love so fervently that they end up turning a corner, coming out of a cave, weathering a storm...and their wish for love evolves into a wish to be freed from the want of love. I sensed that I had reached that point a few weeks back with Urd. I don't know how long I can go on loving her so much that it hurts. Stupid me, a robot hoping to be in love with a Goddess. Hoping for her to notice me. I'm lacking in so many areas, while she is perfection itself. Perhaps my ardent love for her had been a fantasy all along; a sideways affectation of confusion caused by my denial of my cyborganic nature. Like a child being bit by the dog, and then kicking the cat.

What would happen if I live the rest of my days without love?

Probably nothing significant.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

_"Ah, Future son-in-law!"_ the voice sound on the phone.

"Oh..hi, Cologne...er...Ms. Freiija," Keiichi answered.

_"My dear child...what kind of flowers are you having for the corsages that assigned to the flower-girl robot? And has Skuld been behaving herself today? Not to mention Urd? Has she been pestering you again? If she does, you just tell her to take a bath by herself! And I want to make you aware that you have to make sure that the Earthrealm facilities are to be sprayed for rodents the night before the wedding! I abhor filth, and it's bad enough that I have to go to the Earthrealm to witness your bonding! So be a dear and double check with the pest control experts, okay? Also, there should be a triangular stone placed on each side of the aisle, preferably between the second and third rows. Preferably in a place where the wedding guests won't stub their toes! And don't forget to make sure that the carnations have been given exactly six drops of water on the morning of the wedding. And by the way, did I mention that..."_

Half an hour..went..down..the..tubes.

When he got off the phone, Keiichi was exhausted. During the entire call, he estimated that he spoke less than fifty words. Looking up at the clock in the kitchen, he thought of how much money half an hour would earn him working at Whirlpool. Of course, Chihiro wasn't being much of a help either. Now that he was getting married, he'd hoped that she would give him a raise. That's the normal, traditional thing to do for one's employees!

But no..ooooo...

Chihiro said that he would have to wait until 90 days after he got married before she could hike his salary, because of some obscure tax-law sorta thing. Despite this, in between engine-rebuilding sessions, she would pepper him with questions about his wedding, what she should wear, would it be alright to invite Pierre Ar Bras to fly over from France, and if the French Formula One racedriver did attend, how should she make him behave around the Goddesses without tipping him off to their Divine heritages. And then, in the midst of all the questions, she would suddenly catch on to the fact that the work orders weren't getting done soon enough and chew him out for working so slowly!

Nowhere was safe, not even Whirlwind.

Catching himself spacing out with phone still in hand, Keiichi suddenly felt entangled. Quickly hanging it up, he swiftly turned around, wanting to get away from it before it rang again. Bell's Mom was more persistent than a telemarketer; he wouldn't put it past her to do a call-back! As he spun on his heels, preparing to bolt down the hallway, he impacted with something. Everything went dark, and then felt his face bounce against two warm objects.

"Accckmmmph!" he muffle-screamed at the sudden sensation of being blocked in his tracks. Almost leaping backwards and knocking the phone stand over in his haste, he pulled up short when he saw Urd.

She had been eavesdropping again!

Keiichi's face turned beet red as he watched the tan-skinned Goddess adjust her blouse around her cleavage, tucking it just so around her breasts.

Great! It was _those_ two pillows he had felt on his face.

"So playful, Keiichi!" Urd giggled with a lascivious sparkle. "Remember, if you ever need 'older sister training' to prepare you for your honeymoon duties, I'm the one! Big Sister Urd will avail herself and come to your side the instant your heart desires a 'lesson in love'! You'll receive the best 'service'!"

"Cheesh, Urd! Can you give it a rest! I already know all that stuff!" Keiichi shouted through his embarrassment, trying to keep his eyes averted from Urd's ample, bouncy bosom.

"Hee hee, I bet you do! At least my sister claims you do! But she's not me, so maybe you should prove your manhood to me. Then I can say that you _are_ a man!" Urd agreed with more giggling. Keiichi's facial-bloom of embarrassment deepened, and he watched Urd's expression become serious.

"Anyway, what did Mom want this time? She's still not thinking of spraying the place with rat poison, is she? I've told her a dozen times that Ganjin and all his buds are invited to the wedding, as long as they keep it quiet until the reception! She should know better than trying to sneakily 'de-invite' certain wedding guests. Not to mention it would make the church smell like a chemical plant."

"Yeah, she did mention that among other things," Keiichi muttered, his irritation salting into resigned frustration. For a moment, he was seized with the most terrible of thoughts. _What if Freiija called him like this every day for the rest of his life? _ He almost choked at the lucubrative intrusion, visibly shaking his head from side-to-side, wet-dogging the horrid chain of conjectures that seemed to fill his mind.

"Ooooo! For the Goddess of Marriages, she sure is forgetful!" Urd said, curling her legs up under her and floating in a coy pose that belied her own frustration. She seemed to share Keiichi's own sense of dismay whenever Freiija called. Which wasn't necessarily a good thing, because it also contributed to the pool of stress that seemed to thicken the mood inside of the temple.

"Why is you guy's Mom acting so whacked about this?" Keiichi suddenly asked. It was fair...it was _right_ that someone would give him an answer to this one question. If he was going to have calls like this every day until the wedding, he had a right to know! "I mean, she's totally hyper-into this wedding! It's like she's obsessed or something! I expected her to be fully into 'mother in law' mode, but this is ridiculous!" he added.

"I know a secret. And I'm not telling!" Urd sang out slyly.

"Urd!!" Keiichi groaned, trying not to pitch too much whine into his dismay.

"Okay okay okay! I'll tell you...for a kiss!" she said seductively, regarding him with emerald eyes.

"Okay!" Keiichi answered. As Urd leaned down towards him, he gave her a brotherly peck on the cheek.

"Since you're going to be my sister-in-law, I guess it's okay this once," he explained, thoroughly amused by the brief flash of disappointment on her face. Obviously Urd was hoping for a 'better' kiss. Even though she's a Goddess, she can be so transparent sometimes!

"Alright, you win!" Urd sighed. "I _did_ promise I'd tell you...so I will." She looked away from him for a moment as she feigned sadness. Keiichi realized that she had been toying with him all along! Or maybe this was some weird form of flirtation! Whatever it was, he just hoped this 'information' would be something substantive. But knowing Urd, it could be something as trivial as the type of salad dressing served at the reception.

"You wanna know why my Mom's so wound up? Consider this! She's the Goddess of Marriages, right? And her daughter is getting married, right?" Urd said, holding a finger aloft in imitation of Skuld when she launched into 'mecha lecture' mode.

"So..oo..oo? Tell me something I don't know, Urd!" Keiichi asked impatiently, resting his hands on his hips to posture his annoyance.

"She's stressing out because the Lord Himself is going to officiate you guy's wedding!"

"Oh, so that's all it is...WHAT!!" Keiichi blurted out, his heart threatening to heave itself into orbit. His voice turned shrill. "Y..you mean that _Kami-sama_ Himself is going to perform the wedding?! T...the Lord of Yggdrasil?! _Him_? He's going to be the priest...er, He's going to do what the priest normally does!! No way! You're only joking! Please tell me you're only joking, right, Urd? No way! Noooo way?"

"I did say that I'd tell you if you'd kiss me," Urd said with sly grin. "And kiss me you did. Go figure the rest out."

Keiichi shook his head from side-to-side and Urd frowned. Then he reluctantly nodded his head up-and-down with a grimace. Urd peered into his eyes, widened her eyes and mimicked him, nodding 'yes' as well to confirm her claim.

"Yes way. Didn't anybody tell you, my 'future brother-in-law'?" she added with a whimsical expression, imitating her Mother's phone voice while Keiichi's panic assaulted him like a flood.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

The next couple days after my 'robotization' became apparent to everyone, I seemed to be walking on metal pins. Either that, or my housemates were walking on eggshells all around me. Or perhaps we were both uncomfortable with my 'status' as an artificial being?

We all were snowed in by a mid-January blizzard, and someone wittily joked that it might snow on the day Keiichi and Belldandy were supposed to get married. Skuld assured us that it would not, even if she had to 'tweak' the local weather. Of course, Urd or Belldandy...or even Mara and Peorth could instantly change the weather of an entire planet. At least Skuld was thinking reasonably; back last year when she was more girlish, she wouldn't have hesitated to claim that she could make Feb 14th in Japan a balmy 80 degrees Fahrenheit. With the snow outside, I could only think of the Ghost in the Shell manga and anime. Now, literally speaking, I _was_ the ghost in the shell. My consciousness was ghosted with the debris of several lives, it seemed. I was worried that I was becoming neurotic, as least to the extent where my thinking was schizotypal or my personality was conspiring to split into multiple arcs of self-awareness.

My uncertainty was obviously rubbing off on Keiichi and the others, which made things between us even more uncomfortable. But I did have an outlet where I could relax. Teaching at N.I.T. was my redemption among the mess.

I'd been teaching at N.I.T. for almost two years now; it would be two years in a couple months. Soon after I arrived, chance had played an esoteric strain in the form of Megumi urging me to apply to teach at N.I.T. I had been to China, and my Magnum Organum was still a hot topic in any one of several dozen scholarly journals. I had learned to abstain from getting into the debates about it; Magnum Organum was something that one either understood, or they didn't. Most the articles were trying to reconcile it with an established philosophy or psychology, which was kind of fool-hearty in the same sense that someone would try to make root beer out of lemons.

Keiichi seemed to stop by every so often during my office hours, basically to spell himself from the stress of his upcoming wedding. I know that he felt greatly betrayed by the fact that I was a robotic being, rather than human. He still maintained his claim that I wasn't always a robot. Fantastic as his claims were, I realized that perhaps he was telling the truth. On planet Lost, I had lived for almost 90 millennia. I could remember each and every terrible event of that existence in the fade of my mind; muddied a bit, but still emotable. So he and I would share a cup of tea, savoring the quietude.

I was still trying to sort it out when Skuld visited me at N.I.T.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Can I come in?" I heard a voice behind me. During office hours, I kept my door open for students. Today, I was expecting Sayoko, who had visited with me a couple times during this final term of the school year. The exam sessions were only six weeks away; I had promised to take her and Tamiya out to a movie this weekend. Hopefully we could go see this year's winter disaster flick that had been in the theatres since mid-Dec. So I assumed that she had come to finalize the times and places and all that. But when I detached my attention from the journal I was reading, I noticed that it was Skuld, not Sayoko.

Blinking back my surprise, I nodded to her to come in, surprised that she didn't just do a "Goddess appearance" thing. Then I remembered that I didn't have any sink or other source of water in my office that she could use for transport, save for the bucket that I kept under the creaky window air conditioner and the teapot on the Bunsen plate. But this was deep into Winter; the AC was as inert as a helium molecule, so the bucket was empty. As she closed the door behind her, I marveled at the change in her bearing. For a moment, Skuld looked surprisingly like a college student as she stepped into my office...with a slight change in clothing, she could pass for an N.I.T. freshman.

She looked innocent, but I felt that this was dangerous. Why would she come to my office, rather than just pull me aside at home to talk? With all the tension skittering about the temple because of Keiichi and Bell's upcoming wedding ceremony, an unprecedented visit like this could mean anything.

"I don't suppose you're here to discuss the non-dynastic interpretation of the Zhou Dynasty Ruist movement as it was integrated within the cultural context, are you?" I asked. Skuld smiled knowingly and shook her head "no", and then she pulled up a chair and sat down.

"You can float, you know," I commented. "Just because you're in my office doesn't mean that you have to act like a human being instead of a Goddess..." It was then that I noticed that she was examining me, to the point where I caught my words in mid-sentence and choked them away.

"You know," she said with an appraising smile, "I can really see why my older sister fell in love with you. You look younger than I remember."

"Of course I look younger. I'm a cyborg. I don't age in the sense that normal human beings do. And what's this about your sister falling in love with me? She's getting married in a few weeks..."

"I meant my _other _older sister, you idiot!" she interrupted, incensed. The brunt of her irritation seemed to trigger a vague memory of Urd falling in love with me when I thought I was a human being. Urd fell in love with me when I was a human?

"It never happened," I noted tersely. "It never _could _happen. Even assuming that your claim is true, that Urd had or has any feelings towards me, the point is still moot. I'm robotic, she isn't. How could she love me? To her, I'm just another machine, like Banpei and Sigel and..."

"Ssshhh!" Skuld said, putting a finger to her lips. "You're thinking too much! Then again...hee hee, that's what you do, isn't it Cevn? Ever since I first met you, I noticed that you brood in your thoughts like a duck in a pond. Calm on the surface, straining with mental exertion under the surface. Do you remember when we first met?"

I combed the passages of my memory, and then I strained to remember when the memories seemed out of grasp. Ironically, I was proving Skuld true by my stewing attempts to recall our first meeting! After a couple of minutes, I surrendered to the fact that I couldn't remember the pivotal event that had brought me here.

"No...I don't remember it, Skuld!" I sighed.

"Ahhh, I see," she replied. "Well, I _do_ know how you came to be in Makuhari Japan, two years ago next month. But I cannot tell you, because it's in the Future. I really wish I could, but you'll have to discover that for yourself."

"Skuld, please don't talk in riddles. My office is full of them," I said, gesturing at the stacks of scholarly journals in Japanese, English, German, Russian and Chinese that were piled all over my office.

"Heh heh, so you can be funny if you want to. But I know what I'm talking about, and it's true, Cevn. Dare me to ask you a question, point blank," Skuld said with a grin.

"Go on, ask away."

"Do you love Urd?"

I had to think about that one for a moment. I remembered when Keiichi described how Skuld had taken him literally to the point of death, nearly blowing him up in the process. All because she had learned that he and Belldandy were getting more than a little physical in their relationship. All because she wanted to test the depths of his love for her sister. Now, she was asking me the most important question she could possibly ask.

"You don't happen to have a Skuld Bomb readied?" I asked in a halting voice.

"No, you dope! Do you think I'd want to blow up the entire wing of this school?" she answered, all brown-eyed and intense. For my part, I felt like a metal ball banging against the sides of a cube; as every thought sent a repercussion through my mind, heart and Soul. I could lie to her, and say that I still loved Urd. I could lie to myself and say that I didn't love Urd. Or I could be truthful with her and tell her that I grew out of my love for Urd. Or I could be truthful to myself and admit that Urd still belonged in my heart. Or I could just say that Urd will never leave me, whether or not she loves me any more...so I'll just have to be content with my memories of her. Maybe that answer would be 'Future' enough for Skuld! But if I didn't say something soon, my silence might be interpreted as an answer.

"Skuld, I don't know if I still love her. I don't know if I'm even capable of loving anyone, after all I've been through! I'm not even certain if I ever did love Urd."

"I see," she sighed. "It's just as I thought! Your indecisiveness has nothing to do with my Big Sister. It has to do with your most basic fears...which at the moment, hinge on your worries about whether or not you lack humanity. You think you're a cyborg-type robot, Cevn. But I see you as something much more than a machine. You think in terms of absolutes and possibilities; but that kind of awareness is so limited."

"All there is are absolutes and approximals! There _is_ nothing else! Either something is, or it isn't. Ergo, if it isn't is/isn't, then it 'might be' or 'might not be', to varying degrees! And that's the empty logic of it," I answered.

"And you're the one who wrote the Magnum Organum? What a joke!" she said, laughing to herself at my expense. I almost wanted to ask her to get the hell out of my office, but I held my resentments in abeyance.

"You know, Cevn...you should read your dissertation once in a while. A thousand pages of parsimonious, elegant, pristine and rigorous inquiry into the nature of things. Then you might begin to understand what you've forgotten."

"Understand what? Forgotten what?" I quickly asked.

"You say either something is, or isn't. But is that really all there is to it? I say...what if something _was_ or _wasn't_? What if it _will_ be, or _will not_ be? Remember, I'm the Norn of the Future. I've got a Senior First Class Goddess License, Special Delimited, Unrestricted. And I'm willing and able to use it! So...as someone who witnesses the cycles of the time-beyond-twilight, the day-after-this-evening...I want to ask you again...

...Do you love her?"

"Goddammit Skuld, you know the fuckin' answer to that!" I bursted, my sentiments suddenly ballistic. "Don't torture me anymore! I totally, absolutely, wildly love her! But wh..snff..what does that have to do with anything? I CAN'T HAVE HER! She won't even look twice at me! Something has totally erased her love for me, and I think I had something to do with it. Not like I pissed her off, or I did some stupid shit that drove her away from me. It's like something poised _beyond the beyond_ caused all of this! An ineluctable otherness that once touched me, and stirred me towards saving life itself...by giving up love. Are you happy now?"

I couldn't believe what had just forced itself out of my mouth.

"You should really try to keep from yelling. You'll have campus security here in a few minutes if you keep getting so worked up, and that simply won't do," Skuld warned me. I looked at her, feeling my face contorting into a piteous mask. For that was all that it was. A mask. Synthetic fiber on synthetic metal attached to a synthorganic brain case salted with billions of nanotech circuits. Fake hair, fake eyes, fake facial features...fake tears. Fake memories of a fake love…

...a love that had made my heart drop into my Soul. I felt channels of affection towards Urd suddenly tide themselves though my being. What I had said…was true! I did feel something for Urd! How could Skuld know this? How could she possibly know that I didn't even know my own heart?

"Your mind is racing ahead of you again. Slow down, please!" Skuld told me, like a mother scolding an errant child. In response, I took a couple deep breaths and tried to de-stress my peripheral components.

"Would you do _anything_ to get Urd back? Because that's really why I'm here," Skuld asked me gravely. I buried my face in my hands, and then I felt her rest a hand on each of my cheeks and gently guide me away from hiding.

"God, you're so young! Such a child..." she said in a marveling voice. "Urd really deserves someone like you, because you really _feel_ what's inside of you. Despite all the scars, all the stolen moments, all the vaulted greatnesses and weaknesses of your Soul...you're genuine! And that's what makes you humble. There's nothing that I want more than to help you at this moment. But I can't. You're the one who has to ride the zephyrs to your destiny! But I assure you, all is not lost. You have one chance..._only_ one chance...to regain what your heart desires the most."

"Okay, I'll play your little game," I answered, bewildered and irritated.

"To win my sister back is to destroy the universe, turn your back on her totally, make her fall in love with another, and then kill every bit of fear you have about women. Not to mention that you have to travel to hell and back a time or two. Not the figurative, mythological hell, but the real thing. The 'V' thing. If you can do these things, then I _promise_ you that you will have earned Urd's love. Which is so ironic, because the saddest part of all of this is that, somewhere, you really don't have to do a thing to be loved by Urd. Or by me. Or by anyone. But life is like a crucible, isn't it? Life forces us to forge against Fate, regardless of whether we're deserving or not. Even beauty's fairest paragons fade with time. This is my burden as Norn of the Future; having to bear with the inevitability of Fate. At the end of Time, all truths are channeled into realities, all fictions are streamed into creativities, all loves...well, even I can't tell you what happens to them. You'll just have to find out!"

"I can't do that! I can't do shit! I'm _scared_ of the Future, even more now than ever before!" I moaned, pressing my forehead into her shoulder. For some reason, I felt _mothered_ by Skuld; she didn't recoil from the fact that I was trembling too hard from my torn feelings. Even though I wanted to slap her out of frustration for making my feelings so naked to me, I could feel her soothing my hair, just like Urd did once before.

God, it's been so long since I felt that!

"There are two things written in the end of the Enigma Book. I need you to read them both..."

"Why can't you just help me? Just a little, Skuld?" I requested amidst the painful reckoning that I might never spend another moment of shared affection with Urd.

"Because I can't be in two places at once, at least in a certain way," she answered mysteriously. "Just like you aren't who you think you are...I'm not who you think I am. I am _way_ beyond the Skuld that you think you know."

"Of course you are. You're over a hundred and twenty thousand years old," I noted.

"Well, okay, if you say so," she answered with a wan smile. There was something very troubling about the way she was so open-ended. Skuld usually wanted answers, not conjectures. Once she felt like she had discovered the truth, she would brow-beat everyone around her until they were convinced of her truth. Now, instead, she was letting me amble about in my own confusion. Now, she was letting me question her knowledge.

"Your journey starts tonight, and ends by sunrise tomorrow," she added, opening up my mini-fridge and searching out a couple bottles of Pami drink. "Ahhh, I knew you had some of these! Aren't they the best?" she said as she opened up one of the bottles. Pami drink bottles are small, perhaps only 4 fluid ounces. Skuld was very zealous of her stash of sweet beverages in our temple's two refrigerators; rumor had it that she had attached an invisible Skuld bomb to each package of Pami bottles. Anyone who stole them would get blown up. And asking her for Pami's was completely out of the question. Which is why I had a bunch here.

But if I didn't need to eat or drink, why would I have a case of Pami drink bottles in my mini-fridge?

Skuld finished the second one with a smack of her lips. She looked at me again, appraisingly.

"Yes, I can see what Urd sees in you. It's no coincidence that she decided to give her heart to you, because you're probably the only being in the OmniArc who's crazy enough to treasure it."

And with that, she _faded_ from sight. No water, no swirl of rain, no appearing out of a bathtub or fountain or bucket or teapot.

I looked at the clock and realized that I was going to be late for my Asian History Survey course if I didn't hudge it to the Watanabe Bldg.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --


	118. Pt 118: Untitled as of Yes

**Part 118: Untitled as of Yes**

THERA:

If there was one thing that Belldandy couldn't stand, it was computers. All throughout her high school years, she had skillfully managed to avoid taking any Home Econ. and computing classes. Her typing skills were mediocre at best, and computers scared her for some reason. She reasoned that her aversion to computers was the result of two possibilities. Because she lived in a rural setting just outside of Murakami, she didn't have the benefit of being 'wired' like all the townie kids. But more likely than this, Belldandy was taught her unease through years of experience growing up in a house where her adoptive father was a real technophobe. He didn't like computers, VCRs, cell phones, and DVD players.

Thus, her wariness around computers was the source of constant teasing by her friends at Chiba Poly. Ootaki and her squadmates were prone to calling her "cavewoman" because she was so unwired. Ironically, the last thing Belldandy wanted was to be seen as a computer-geek...but now, she _was_ considered a geek because she knew next to nothing about computers. But all this was going to change in a hurry, because she had to take the mandatory computer sciences course during the last term of her freshman year. She _had_ to complete the course in order to maintain her eligibility to play on the team. Which meant hours in the computer lab learning how to do spreadsheets, use various word editors, and explore other computing fundamentals.

She didn't know which was harder...computer class or Coach Chihiro's drills.

Now that she was almost eight weeks into the third term, Belldandy felt plagued by regrets that she had put her off taking Basic Computer Sciences until the January-to-April term. She was struggling with a difficult class that coincided with volleyball season. But that's what you get when you get really drunk the night before meeting your faculty advisor for the first time. She couldn't even blame that one on Tamiya and Ootaki's propensity to have blow up parties at the Girl's Dorm! And naturally, they'd given her a "Welcome to Chiba Polytech" party. When she met with her advisor, she was too hungover to ask any questions when he wrote up her schedule for her first year in college.

Consequently, Chiba Polytech frosh Belldandy Morisato was up to her elbows in computer science and typing classes. The typing class was an unwelcomed add-on after she tested at a dismal 8 words per minute after counting typing errors. Anyone that had under 40 wpm had to take the 'remedial' typing class in addition to the computer class. Taking piano lessons would have been more fun than this!

But it was there, somewhere in the middle of learning all that worthless crap, that she discovered chat rooms. Naturally, this magical 'discovery' was influenced by the watchful lead of Captain Ootaki.

"Computers are for fun, not work!" was her sempai's motto. One day, the senior had dropped in on her while she was nonplused, struggling though spreadsheets in the computer lab. Belldandy turned her attention away from rows and cells for a moment, and watched in amazement as Captain Ootaki was 'talking' to some guy in Osaka, making fun of him while with Belldandy while she was flirting with him online! She didn't know that computers could be used for _that_! Sending emoticons and text messages on her cell phone was hard enough, so she didn't really bother with it. But Ootaki walked her through the steps necessary to get her into a chat room, and Belldandy sensed that she had been missing out on a Big Secret.

The waggle-haired senior swore that the J-Bay network chat rooms were a great place to chat with all sorts of interesting people, mostly college students. Not to mention that it was even more fun because it was illegal; all the Chiba Polytech computer labs strictly forbade students from using the school's computers for instant messaging and chatting.

But rules were made to be broken. And Belldandy wasn't the kind of girl who played by the rules. So she gave it a whirl a couple days later...and wound up getting hooked.

And that's how she met "Ajax"...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Ajax was his online nick, of course, but Belldandy's interest was piqued when he claimed that he was a player on the Tokyo Giants. Over the past couple of weeks, she had quickly spun through the chat-room learning curve, discovering that 95 percent of the guys she chatted with were bullshitters, pervs and flakes. Sweet talkers, quick wits, intriguing personalities...but oh so full of shit! Which made it even more fun, because she could talk circles around them. Not to mention that her typing somehow seemed to improve while she was chatting with a guy.

But 'Ajax' seemed different right from the start. Whenever she talked about sports with most guys, they would immediately talk baseball and sumo and wrestling, just like the fanboys they were. Yet, when she chatted with Ajax, he didn't talk about baseball like it was a game. Belldandy could tell right away that it was an _occupation _to him. Reading through the lines when chatting with him, she realized that he was either the real thing, or perhaps he was the biggest sports geek in Tokyo! He seemed to know _everything_ about Japanese baseball, including some very personal information about all the players on the Giants team.

Belldandy nervously invited Ootaki, who was much more seasoned with dealing with men than she was, to sit in on one of her chat sessions with Ajax. Ootaki had been computer fluent since she was 10, which to Belldandy meant that she could probably quickly sense if the guy was a poser scumbag. After observing an hour-long chat, Ootaki suggested that she should set up lunch date with the guy to meet him.

Belldandy was absolutely astonished!

According to Ajax, he played first base on the Giants, was 29 and single, and lived in a nice gentrified neighborhood on the west side of Tokyo. He owned two cats and five dogs, and had dated a professional golfer who was on tour with the JLPGA. When Belldandy asked out of curiosity who she was, Ajax promptly told her that his former girlfriends were not her concern. Especially former girlfriends who were professionals in their own right. Ajax added that he didn't want to compromise their career by creating untoward opportunities for gossips to wag. At least he was discrete.

Even Captain Ootaki was impressed with that when Belldandy told her about Ajax.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

cootaki-at-chibapoly.ne.jp;bmorisat-at-chibapoly.ne.jp; private chat activated.

_Morispikegrrl:Hey, how's it going, sempai?_

_Takibunz:It's cool, it's cool! Howz Mr Ajax? Is he your stud yet?_

_Morispikegrrl:No way! I ain't gonna meet him. He ain't my stud! And don't you start some shit about me dating a guy on the Tokyo Giants,_

_either. I already got enough problems with my classes and Coach Chihiro!_

_Takibunz:U gotta meet this this guy and find out if he's real, gf!_

_Morispikegrrl:No way!_

_Takibunz:Don't go assuming that he's some short Ichiro sorta guy, just because he's a baseball player! I have a good feeling about_

_this. And you got a whole temple building all to yourself. That guy who lives with you won't mind. Tamiya will, but I'll bat cleanup_

_for ya! Stop thinking like you're living in the Girl's Dorm, Morigirl!_

Keiichi. She had to mention Keiichi.

Belldandy's heart sank a little as she stared at the computer screen, her mind shutting out all the other students in the lab. Here she was, flirting with guys on the internet, while that guy that interested her the most...wasn't available.

Wouldn't _ever_ be available.

She still hadn't talked to him about that fateful conversation they had on the way home. It was too mortifying for her to bring up. Even now, just by Ootaki's indirect mention of Keiichi, Belldandy felt her heart fluttering like a threadworn pennant, assailed by winds of sadness. His was the truest tragedy of all, and she didn't know what to say to him. As if words could make a difference. She was seized with guilt, because she was toying with the idea of actually meeting 'Ajax', a guy who communicated with her solely by means of a computer. The guy that lived with her at home, who just happened to be a God, could never be more than a friend.

_Takibunz:Hey, u there?_

_Morispikegrrl:Sorry, got distracted for a moment. Anyway, what if hes a dork? He could be anyone! He could be some guy qho runs a bunny bar_

_in Kabuki-cho, for all I now. And you think I should meet hin in rl?_

_Takibunz:You dork! I've done this before, met guys in rl that I met ol. It's not that hard, if u play your cards right, gf! All u gotta_

_do is demand proof before you give him ur phone number. Tell Mr. Ajax that he has to send a personal pic. Like a picture of_

_him in his house, standing next to one of his trophies or somethin'. Some kind of picture that can't be faked or easily_

_found in a sports magazine. Since he says that he owns a Corvette, have him take a pic of himself in his Corvette in his_

_garage! I don't know, just use ur imagination and come up with something that will prove beyond a doubt that he's really a_

_baseball player for the Giants._

_Morispikegrrl:I don't know about this..._

_Takibunz:What do u got to lose? If he's not who he says he is, u can report him to the cops for identity forgery. You can tell 'em_

_some big sob story like he tried to spam money out of u by claiming he's a professional baseball player or something! Hey!!_

_I know an ever better one! U know what'd be hilarious? If he's some fakeout internet dirtbag, u could set him up for a_

_second date...and send Tamiya instead of yourself! And tell Tamiya everything about how he lied to you, and then let 'er go_

_get 'im! Just make sure to bring a videocam to watch while she rips him a new one!_

"Hah aha ha!" Belldandy chortled, her mind filled with mental filmreels of Tamiya pouncing on some hapless Shibuya cyber-waif nitwit posing as a pro baseball player. This chatting stuff was fun, and her typing was getting better too.

_Morispikegrrl:LOL! That's pretty cool!_

_Takibunz:Yeah, wouldn't that'd be totally hilarious!_

_Morispikegrrl:I know one that would even be better. How aboyt sending Coach instead of Tamiya?_

_Takibunz:Fuckin' radical! U r a merciless bitch, grrlfriend! How could u even think of doing something...hee hee...as cruel_

_and demented as that? LOL!! Owned!_

Belldandy giggled at the monitor, and then hushed herself as the girl next to her gave her a stinkeye for being too loud in the lab. She immediately looked in the direction of the lab monitor's desk, and was relieved when she saw that he was goofing off, flirting with a couple of girls.

_Morispikegrrl:But what if he's really who he says he is?_

_Takibunz:I'd screw his brains out and make him mine! But that's me. U gotta do what u gotta do._

_Morispikegrrl:But I don'r know what to do!_

_Takibunz:Hey, I gotta close out of here soon. My next class is in ten minutes. CYA_

_Morispikegrrl:See you later, sempai!_

"What to do, what to do?" Belldandy said as she watched Captain Ootaki's name go off the chat window. She had to admit, she was _very_ curious about this Ajax guy. What if he truly _was_ a baseball player for the Giants? Belldandy didn't exactly relish the idea of going out with a guy in his late-20s, but this was one of those cases where everything seemed to have a different set of rules. If he was mid-30s, then she'd definitely trash the idea, even if he was a millionaire. But if 'Ajax' was some kind of sports celeb, then it might be something she could do.

Ootaki's little comment about him being her "stud" also got Belldandy's imagination going. If he was a professional athlete, then he'd definitely would be very fit and toned...and have energy to match. He'd certainly be a manly man, unlike all of these lightweight science student freeters who were always hitting up on her whenever she went to a kisaten or Starbucks coffee shop. Belldandy had always wanted to go out with a guy who was at least as fit as she was; a guy who took care of his body. Not only for the sex stuff, which would probably be fun with a pro athlete, but for all other sorts of activities like jogging together, working out together, dancing, clubbing.

He might even have a private gym and trainer in his own house!

"How much money do professional baseball players make?" she asked the girl next to her.

"What? Huh?"

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

She had planned to talk to him tonight about everything.

After practice wrapped, Tamiya and Ootaki remained at school to cram for an exam, so Belldandy had to take the late train and then catch a bus to get back home. Usually, she would head straight home with the two after practice. But for the last couple of weeks, she'd wind up wandering into one of the computer labs, anxiously awaiting her next chat-around with Ajax. But tonight, she went to the lab intentionally. Chatting with Ajax was becoming important in her life, and she didn't want to miss it. But once she was logged on and about ready to click the IM program launch icon, Keiichi's image came to mind. So instead of chatting with the mysterious 'Ajax', she decided to go home for the night.

All the time she was on the mass-transpo, Belldandy was mulling over how she should talk to Keiichi about all of this. Not only about what was going on with her and 'Ajax', but also about what was going on with him. Keiichi always _seemed_ friendly enough; whenever she wanted to have some small talk, he'd drop whatever he was doing and make time to listen to her.

But something seemed different.

Before, whenever she thought of Keiichi, Belldandy's imaginings stirred visions of sacred vaults and heavenly imperial palaces. He was an idiot, a jerk at times, naive, insensitive, pedantic and unromantic as hell...but he was also very much Divine. Sometimes in his presence, she could feel a little bit of him, something tangibly different that she didn't feel in people. It was if she was sensed a connection with a mystic aura that was as immense as the Universe. Such worshipful feelings would elate her, drawing her into a sense of "being-less serenity", as the old priest had termed it.

But on a more tangible level, she was confronted daily with the force of his coexistence in her life. Keiichi's presence was an inescapable syrinx. In particular, Furo was a constant reminder of just how 'otherworldly' Keiichi really was. Every morning, she'd find the wooden crate out back of the temple house filled with fresh steak and ribs for her pet tiger. As soon as she shuffled the top of the crate off, Furo would pad up behind her and prod her with his nose, letting her know he was famished.

Keiichi could be irritating at times...but he was also very powerful and kind-hearted, in his own way.

How could she possibly get a grip on how lonely he must feel? His story...the whole tragic fallout from his misadventure at the Gate of Judgment...had left her feeling numb and insignificant. Not to mention extremely angry. It was the equivalent of a kindergartner strolling into the janitor's closet by accident and drinking bleach that had been poured into a soda can. But it wasn't _her_ insignificance that really mattered. Despite the daunting grandeur she attached to his divinity, Belldandy couldn't help but sense that Keiichi was now somewhat tarnished. He was Divine, and yet terribly _haunted_. Whenever she looked at him in the days after he explained the whole wretched episode at the Gate, he seemed to be missing something. She felt inclined towards a certain prejudice or deference, in the same sense that she would view someone who was confined to a wheelchair. Not that being wheelchair-bound made a person less a 'person' than anyone else, of course. But one cannot simply ignore what's missing, what's lacking. Keiichi, for all his good intentions and spontaneity, was one _really_ flawed God! Could the reason he acted so goofy half the time have something to do with this 'erasing' he mentioned? Could he be so weird because he lost that part of him that could fall in love? Tomboyish as she was, Belldandy couldn't ignore the lodestone of her own aspirations to meet a deserving man and fall in love.

But the pond of Belldandy's heart seemed to ripple on occasion with glance-awareness, a subtle hinting that _maybe_ Keiichi was in love with her, despite what he had told her about the Gate of Judgment.

Yet, every time she wanted to test to see if her intuitions were true, Keiichi would reveal his neutrality towards her. Or vice versa. That night, after he told her about the Gate, she had wanted to comfort him...but try as she might, she couldn't push herself to hug him. Any attempts to guise her morose mood by appearing cheerful failed dismally; Keiichi could read her like a book most of the time. She would often feel twice-miserable because her sadness was but a small reflection of his. All the pulp psychology in the world didn't make sense any more. And Keiichi would only value her because she was some kind of Wish Candidate, not because of _who_ she was! Belldandy desperately wanted to burst out of this small-talk impasse with Keiichi, but she didn't even know how to begin.

How do you talk about love with someone who doesn't have a clue about what love is? Or maybe even more challenging, how could _she_ understand and empathize with what it would be like to be shut away from love...even from the love of friends and family and lovers!

She didn't want to hurt him, but Belldandy knew that she had to tell him about 'Ajax'.

For a moment, she had the insight that her fears about telling Keiichi about 'Ajax' were totally groundless. As the street lights blurred by, Belldandy realized with a start that it was presumptuous for her to think that anything she could do could cause Keiichi any amount of emotional distress! Besides, if he could never have a girlfriend, then why should he be troubled if she decided to have a boyfriend? Her fears were based in utter stupidity! Worries about telling Keiichi about 'Ajax" would be like being worried about praising the virtues of fresh eel to someone who was allergic to seafood.

"So why am I wasting my time worrying about all of this, anyway?" Belldandy said to herself. "And why do I feel so dirty...so guilty...just because I'm interested in finding out who this 'Ajax' is? Keiichi can't expect me to stay single forever, just out of sympathy for him! That'd be so messed up! And he shouldn't be jealous of a man who can give me something he can't. And me? I'm acting like some stupid junior high girl who has a crush on her sempai!"

Belldandy shuddered in her seat. It was entirely possible that Keiichi was already fully aware of what was going on between she and 'Ajax'. He was a _God_, for crissakes! Who knows...perhaps he foresaw this sequence of events happening ten thousand years ago. Maybe he even caused it, so she wouldn't have to dwell on his personal tragedies.

_That_ was scary ground to tread on. Keiichi had maintained all along that the Gods weren't all about taking away free will. According to him, there were no pre-ordained, pre-destined acts and thoughts, so to speak. The way he had explained it, she and everyone else was controlled by Windowsill, but that 'control' was more at the level of unconscious control. Like how the brain regulates breathing. Not the deliberate influence upon conscious decisions like "let's go to see Morning Musume next time they play in Chiba!" A car has complete control over how a person gets from point A to point B...but the driver is the one who operates it, steering it this way and that. The car doesn't make that decision on its own.

"So what? Were does Keiichi fit in this stupid puzzle called 'my life'?" she asked herself, watching the snow-moon cast itself over the white-desert of roof-top glimmers.

How could she fit him in her life if she had a boyfriend?

A half hour later, Belldandy had her answer.

Walking through the 20cm or so of snow that was on the ground from the latest snowstorm, Belldandy's nervousness increased with each crackling footstep as she approached the front of the temple grounds. The pathway to the temple wasn't clear of snow.

Ever since the first snowfall, Keiichi had magically created 'aisles' of grass that would be free of snow, so she wouldn't have to shovel.

"I'm home!" she announced as she pulled her snow boots off on the decking afront the main entrance doorway. When nobody answered, even Furo...she became worried. For some reason, she decided to check on her pet tiger first, figuring that Keiichi would come to her. To her immense relief, Furo was asleep in his room; his massive paws recoiling and twitching. She imagined that he was dreaming dreams of catching gazelle or something. Turning down the hallway, Belldandy went and checked Furo's food area, and then grabbed a shovel and cleaned out the little clear-space behind the house which served as his 'litter box'. Keiichi had created a place where the snow wouldn't accumulate back here, telling her that "Furo isn't comfortable burying his spoor under the snow." Belldandy was grateful in a way, because it meant that she didn't have to comb the entire temple grounds in search of his droppings. It was already freezing enough having to walk from the bus stop to her temple house. After she finished her 'tiger chores', Belldandy felt a sense of dread climbing up and down her shoulders. Keiichi _still_ hadn't shown up to greet her! What could be keeping him so busy? She quickly skated into a slew of suspicions, most of them focused on the possibility that his absence might have something to do with Senbei and Mara. Perhaps the two Demons had returned from wherever they were hiding and had engaged him in some kind of God-Demon fighting! Heating herself a cup of hot cocoa in the kitchen, Belldandy decided to skip dinner and head straight to her room to crash-n-burn. She could always talk with Keiichi tomorrow.

As she walked down the smooth wood-grid flooring past the main hall, she caught sight of a envelope resting against one of the gilded Buddha statues. Quickly walking up to the statue, she grabbed the envelope and tore it open. A moment later, Belldandy unclutched her hand and the paper and enveloped stirred airwise to the floor like a pair of falling leaves. In disbelief, she stared at the missive lying at her feet:

_Belldandy, _

_I regret to inform you that the Ygg Mainframe has issued a warrant for my return to Yggdrasil. I have been recalled by the God's _

_Wish Escort Helper Office because I have failed to grant you a wish within the specified time frame._

_ This is highly irregular, and I offer my apologies,_

_ Keiichi_

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

ajtakamitsu-at-yomiuri.co.jp;bmorisat-at-chibapoly.ne.jp; private chat activated.

_Morispikegrrl:Hi, how are you? I feel horrible. Wretched. Bummed out._

_Ajax: I'm busy._

_Morispikegrrl:Huh?_

_Ajax: No, I didn't mean busy as in not having time for u. I meant busy with winter practice and studying playbooks and charts._

_Morispikegrrl:Oh, I thought you meant something else. I have a major problem in my life, and I wanted to talk to you_

_and see what your view is on it. I just learned yesterday that something I did got a friend of mine in a lot of trouble. I know_

_that it's my fault._

_Ajax: Something you did? Plz tell me more._

_Morispikegrrl:You see, he was staying witj me, and then last night he left without even saying goodbye. And it's my fault!_

_Ajax: I didn't know u had a guy living with u! Is he ur bf? Did you have a fight, and he left u?_

_Morispikegrrl:No, it's nothing like that. God, I'm so confused! He was just a nice guy who wss staying with me. Like a foreign exchange_

_student, I guess. Now, he had to go back home._

_Ajax: So you like foreign guys, huh?_

_Morispikegrrl:Stop being a jerk! This is serious! Besides, I'M a gaijin too, you know. Or did you forget?_

_Ajax: Whoops! My bad! So u and he were really close?_

_Morispikegrrl:Well, yes and no. He has a lot of issues._

_Ajax: Maybe it's better that he's gone. U don't need someone who's got a lot of issues cluttering up ur life._

_Morispikegrrl:Are you for real?_

_Ajax: Yes, I am. Are u sure that he's really gone away? Because I don't like women who play around. I don't have time to waste on_

_women who aren't being sincere with me. We talked about dating last time, and I've decided to send you proof, so u can see that_

_I'm really who I am. So I've scanned copies of my bankbook, pictures of my yard and living room, a copy of one of my checks,_

_and a pic of me on vacation in Hawaii._

_Morispikegrrl:I don't know if I want to see them. I'm too upset right now._

_Ajax: Then maybe u should take a risk. When one door closes, another opens._

_Morispikegrrl:That's so retarded! Where do you come up with this shit?_

_Ajax: Sorry, but I'm not going to play around anymore with u. Playtime's over. I want to meet u! If u aren't serious,_

_then I'll find some other ho' to hook up with. But if u r serious, then I think you'll be in for a surprise._

_Morispikegrrl:Let me think about it for a moment. And don't ever fuckin' call me a 'ho' again! I hate that word! BRB._

Belldandy stared at the monitor for a minute, gripped by a recherche passage of bewilderment. On one hand, 'Ajax' seemed to be really insensitive; he was utterly dismissive of her feelings about Keiichi's hasty and unexpected departure. On the other hand, he had just dropped an ultimatum on her. Why did he have to do it now, of all the possible times?

But what if he _was_ the real thing? An actual professional athlete who was a starter on Japan's highest-salaried team? She had no reason to doubt him, and even Ootaki had suggested that she ask him for proof, because he might be for real. Now, he seemed to have anticipated her curiosity, and was willing to send 'proof' of his identity. But at what price?

Somehow, Belldandy had a wary suspicion of her motives, feeling like she was waltzing with her darker urges. But Keiichi was gone. She was bummed out, and definitely needed a break. Life had been too hard lately, with her computer and typing classes, extra volleyball practices, and the bombshell that Keiichi had dropped on her a couple weeks back. And last night's note.

_Morispikegrrl:OK. Send 'em._

_Ajax: Here they are. I'm sending them to ur email. It's not safe for_

_me to send them while we're online, of course._

Belldandy fidgeted around, opening up an email program and waiting for the pictures to post on her inbox. She hoped that she could remember Ootaki's directions on how to open pictures that come with emails!

_Ajax: BTW, once u see my pics and u know that I'm for real, how about giving me ur phone #? I mean, that would be the next step._

_It might be good for u to enjoy a night out, away from school, ur team, and ur worries about ur former roommate. I know_

_just the place._

_Morispikegrrl:Don't rush me, I haven't even gotten your email yet. When I do, maybe I'll think about it._

_Ajax: OK. I gotta run. Same time tomorrow?_

_Morispikegrrl:Yeah, unless you sent me a set of news-photos of the PM or sone_

_pro wrestler. If you do that, my friends will hunt you down._

_Ajax: That's what I like about u. U don't bs around! CYA_

_Morispikegrrl:CYA_

"Great. Now I've really gone and done it!" she sighed to herself as she logged off the chat program.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Basking in the bed, Belldandy could remember hearing her teammates whistling appreciatively when 'Ajax' pulled up in a Corvette to pick her up after practice. Ajax turned out to be a pretty nice guy. Of course, his first words when he saw her were "Damn, you're tall!" But his second words were "Damn you're beautiful!" which saved his ass and earned a couple points. His views on life, politics and women were quite unenlightened and chauvinistic, which was to be expected. Most male athletes she met were that way, and she didn't expect to discover that the male 'idiot gene' was somehow excluded at the professional levels of sport. But Belldandy found his character flaws tolerable when placed alongside his charming manner. Ajax was very energetic, almost nervous, which dislodged her expectations. Everything he did seemed to be bundled with intensity; like a coiled jackspring ready to fly out of box. She had never dated a pro athlete before, so she didn't really know what to expect.

Dinner at a nice restaurant...led to a boat cruise down Tokyo Bay...led to dancing at Club Core in Roppongi with some DJ-whatever celeb DJ from American...which led to a visit to an expensive hotel for a night of recreational sex...

Which led to standing in front of a Buddhist temple at 4:30am, watching the ever-snow drift in dragon primordial spools in the windless chill.

Ajax had promised her another date.

Belldandy glowingly thought that she was in love.

The temple seemed to be even more of a vacuum than before. Keiichi had enlivened the temple, sometimes to an embarrassing effect. But in the deep-night, now that he was gone...the wind was a little colder than it sounded. Perhaps even more so because Belldandy felt warm inside.

A circle bounded by a geometry of elation and confusion.

She could hear her old high school friend's voices in her mind, saying the "don't give it up on the first date!" mantra. But she felt so thrilled at the memory. Ajax was power, in the form of a starting player for Japan's most prestigious baseball team. She had never even been in a Corvette before; and Ajax was actually driving her around town in his car. A really expensive car that he _owned_. Already feeling swept up into another world, the ferry ride on Tokyo Bay was expensive as well, confirmed by the private room on the second floor of the boat and the bottle of champagne cooling in a silver cooler in the middle of the tatami floor. Not to mention the expensive cuts of seafood and sushi.

Laying in the warmth of her futon, Belldandy was fired with romantic imaginings, fueled by the acute realization that Ajax had definitely gone all out to impress her. Not that money was impressive to her. Anyone can have money; what made money impressive was when the spending of it was accompanied by a man's desire to create a unique experience for them to share together.

"When did I start thinking like that?" she whispered into her pillow. All those retarded love songs came rushing through her mind, accompanied in syncopation by the wind whirring down the wooden enclosures of the temple.

"Did I just give myself to him?" Belldandy asked as she walked into the bathroom to brush her teeth before going to sleep. She could sense the half-heard feminine alarm-clocks, hidden between the rapid beating of her heart, telling her "caution! caution! too fast! too fast!"

Yet, the tension was played out by her awareness that she'd always been a girl who would plummet into places where angels and devils feared to tread.

Angels.

Keiichi.

Biting down on her toothbrush, Belldandy gulped down an unexpected mix of saliva and guilt.

"No way!" she argued with her mirror-face. "Keiichi's gone, and I've got nothing to feel guilty about! Besides, life is meant to be _lived_...because no one ever gets out alive anyway! So why the fuck not?! Why should I turn my back on the chance of a lifetime! Go for it, girl!"

She started making faces in the mirror: shy-girl, pissed-off girl, wide-eyed girl, pouty girl, wan smile girl, buttoned-with-girlish grin girl, blink-crazy astonished girl. The rapid procession of Belldandys she saw floated one into another, reminding her that her heart was the source of her stability.

Only now, it felt unstable.

Ajax had rocked her in more ways than one...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

After their second date, 'Ajax' told Belldandy that he'd call her within a week and set up a trip for the two of them "to make an escape" to somewhere exotic. Naturally, Belldandy thought "Hawaii!" just like Tokyo TV had programmed her to. But when Ajax called from Korea over the weekend, he informed her that his travel agent was working on a package deal for them to go "down south", possibly to Kyushu. Belldandy had never been to Kyushu; simply moving to the urban jam-pack that was Chiba seemed a figurative light-year's leap forward for a girl who lived in the rural reaches of Niigata Prefecture. Crazy at it seems, back where she lived, some of her neighbors still lived in Minka-style farmhouses with _thatched roofs_! The kind of houses that wound up on TV documentaries and stuff! Her volleyball teammates would often look at her with expressions of disbelief when she told them about _that_.

Belldandy giggled to herself as she realized that going to Kyushu with 'Ajax' would be like stepping on Mars. He would be back next week, and then they could plan for their escape. And hopefully, he would be very 'Mars' when they were in Kyushu...

...and the set sailed right past her, landing deflectively against the net and then rolling towards Coach Chihiro's feet.

"Uh oh! Trouble!" she heard Captain Tamiya gasp, right before Coach Chihiro flicked the rolling volleyball up with her foot, soccer-style, deftly catching it. The older woman started dribbling the v-ball, glaring at Belldandy.

"Morisato. Office. NOW!!" her Coach said tersely. As she followed Coach Chihiro off the court, Belldandy looked over her shoulder at Tamiya and Ootaki. Ootaki was grinning as she shook her head side-to-side in resignation, while Tamiya was ruffling her hair with nervous hand-gestures.

"Shit!" Belldandy whisper-cursed as Coach Chihiro _kicked_ open the door to the trailer that served as Women's Locker Room instead of opening it the usual way. She knew that her volleyball play had become increasingly erratic over the past couple weeks, despite her best efforts to compensate. She just couldn't concentrate sometimes, which really bothered her. Keiichi had shined on her, leaving her with a tiger, a temple and a mystery. She had Ajax, who wasn't _that_ important in her life, was he? Yet, she was making high-school mistakes on the court! She knew it...and she had hoped that her Coach would overlook her mistakes as being caused by a temporary state of distraction. But keeping things from Coach Chihiro was like covering up a robbery committed in front of Kindaichi. Impossible, impossible...and even more impossible.

"So when are you going to stop obsessing about your new boyfriend?" Coach Chihiro said bluntly as soon as they entered her office, not even looking at her. Belldandy gulp-choked, as if she'd swallowed a volleyball! Coach Chihiro continued to stare at the wall, where an Olympic Bronze Medal hung on a peg between several trophies, including an MVP award in the National Championships. Belldandy dawdled, wondering how her Coach could correctly interpret the source of her inconsistency on the court.

"Boyfriend problems!" Chihiro muttered as she wagged a hand, motioning Belldandy to sit down. Belldandy was amazed that her Coach, who was only eight years older than she was, could be so perspicacious as to immediately intuit that her unstable play on the volleyball deck was the by-product...or "boy-product" as she called it...of a heart trying to outrun itself in the guessing game between the sexes. She, Ootaki, Tamiya and the Coach were still having those 'extra' practices after the regular team workouts. Once in a while, some of the other players would stay late, just to work out with the four women. Chihiro was always one to encourage extra workouts.

"You know, this is absolutely the _worst_ time for this to happen, Morisato," Coach Chihiro stated bluntly, eyeballing her. "We've got Regionals coming up in April...and Nationals in May. _If_ we make it through Regionals. But you being an air-head and all, it probably ain't gonna happen. There's two Morisato's on this team right now. One plays really good during the games, where she _has_ to strut her stuff. The other one shows up for practice, misses sets, consistently under-performs, and her technique is sliding into the 'sucks badly' zone! So how do we get these two girls to meet?"

Belldandy exhaled in a gasp, as she had involuntarily held her breath. She looked at Coach Chihiro...and then looked at the floor. After a moment, she jerked her head up and glared at her coach.

"Hey! What're you lookin' at, Morisato?" her Coach said angrily. "This is _my_ team, and I'm not going to tolerate any shitty mind-sets! Especially from my so-called marquee players! How dare you act all pissed off...when the truth of the matter is that you're _fucking up_! Don't give me that bitchy attitude! If you wanna get all drama-queen angry, do it out on the court! Maybe you'll play a little better because of it!"

Anger melting into shock, the lid of the ice-cream cone flopping against the ground, the shock charging into tears. Like stealing from a baby. Like throwing a net over a sleeping kitten.

"You can't tell me whether or not I can have a boyfriend!" Belldandy remonstrated with a shout. Coach Chihiro interrupted her before she could rant.

"Of course I can't. But how come the other girls can have boyfriends and _still _play with some focus, huh? You're playing like a ditz who's never even stepped on a volleyball court before!" Chihiro rejoined, standing up from behind her desk so she could look down on her. Belldandy felt a shiver pass up and down her spine, as if she was being scrutinized by a judge.

"But this one's _special_..."

"I don't care how fuckin' 'special' he is! Now, you're sounding like a junior high!" her Coach said with a snort. "You wanna know what's special? This TEAM is special!! I know two girls on this squad who plan to _marry_ their boyfriends once they graduate from Chiba Poly...so I don't need to hear any crap about some guy being 'special'. You probably wouldn't know 'special' if it hit you in the face!"

"Yes I would! And just for your information, Coach," Belldandy said in a level voice, "my 'boyfriend' is none other than..."

And she told her.

"Holy shit! You mean he's the _real_..." Chihiro blurted out, the rigidity on her face suddenly fallowed by genuine surprise. Belldandy felt a sadistic sense of satisfaction; she had actually stolen the words out of her Coach's mouth for once! She explained about how she met 'Ajax', and that she was actually dating him. Chihiro cocked her head to the side, clearly impressed with the story. The older woman fingered the whistle that hung around her neck, almost grinning.

"I can't believe this!" she finally adjudged. "You met a starter for the Tokyo Giants in an internet _chat room_?! That sounds totally bogus! Besides, you've gotta be at least 20 cm taller than the biggest guy on their team! Nah! I just can't believe it."

"It's true!" Belldandy shouted. "If it was any other guy, then I wouldn't be so worried. But he's a total dreamboat professional baseball player."

"So you let him get to home plate?"

"Coachhhh!" Belldandy wallowed. "That's not even funny! _Now_, can you see why I'm the way I am? This is the chance of a lifetime for me!"

"Morisato...er, Belldandy," the short-haired Chiba Poly coach sighed. "If this guy's who I think he is, he's bad news. He played on the 2004 Olympic baseball team. He has a rep for going from one girl to another like a rabbit. A couple of the girls on my team nick-named him "The Snake" because he seemed to zero in on girls while they were drunk in the Olympic Village. Not to mention that he purportedly was a frequent visitor to some of the Athens brothels. Okay, so he may be charming. But think for a minute! Charm doesn't necessarily mean sincerity. It can be the result of a practiced 'act'! A lot of guys say shit that they don't mean, and they're _good_ at it. But it's all bullshit, because their 'charm' comes from being experienced at being sleazy. Nothing else. It sounds good, but it's totally insincere. I don't want to sound mean or harsh...but have you _really_ thought this thing through?"

"I don't believe you!" Belldandy said, almost jumping out of her chair. "He spends money on me! He treats me like a gentleman."

"Yeah, as if! How many 'gentlemen' take an 18-year old girl to a hotel on the first date?" Chihiro said coldly. Belldandy blanched, realizing that the Coach _knew_ that she had already had sex with Ajax. Which made her stories about Ajax's behavior at the Olympics into something more than fictions and something less than truths. But then again, how could she know? She was only a volleyball coach for a women's college team!

"You don't know what it's like! It's not fair!" Belldandy shouted.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

cootaki-at-chibapoly.ne.jp;bmorisat-at-chibapoly.ne.jp; private chat activated.

_Morispikegrrl:You there?_

_Takibunz:Yep. Howzit, grrl?_

_Morispikegrrl:It sucks! He hasn't called me in two weeks. I think I did something wrong._

_Takibunz:??_

_Morispikegrrl:Ajax told me that we were going to go on a trip...and now he's totally bailed on me! I totally feel used!_

_Takibunz:Don't get ur panties in a bunch, Spikegirl! He's a professional baseball player. He's probably got a full schedule. You know_

_how it is._

_Morispikegrrl:No I don't!. Besides, he's probably a retard! I'm gonma kill him when I get a hold of him! How could he do this to me?_

_Takibunz:Waitaminute! Don't do something stupid. You gotta play this out your way, not his! There could be lots of good, reasonable_

_excuses for him not calling you. Maybe he's feeling insecure about dating a college girl? Or he's really fallen for you, and_

_he's taking his time to sort his feelings out._

_Morispikegrrl:That's what I'M doing! I really like this guy! Why do you think Coach has been riding my ass so hard? B3cause I've been_

_totally distracted! We've got Regionals coming up! And I'm screwing up. My life is such a mess all the time! Why do these_

_things always happen to me?_

_Takibunz:Poor baby! You're a star volleyball player, you're dating a professional baseball player, you're passing your computer class,_

_etc. I think you've got it good. How many girls on our team have a boyfriend who picks them up in a Corvette, huh? Need I say more?_

_Morispikegrrl:Well, you've got a point. But I don't like being held on a leash by some guy! It really sux!_

_Takibunz:Yep! But I'm also wiser in the way of men then you are, Frosh Girl! He's stalling. He hasn't dug out on you at all. I have_

_this sense...that you've really gotten to him._

_Morispikegrrl:You really mean that? So WTF do I do?_

_Takibunz:You wait. But wait with dignity. And when he contacts you again, you act aloof. Lie to him, tell him that you went out on_

_a date with another guy or something. That'll teach him._

_Morispikegrrl:LOL! That would serve him right!_

_Takibunz:Nah, the way he sounds, he might buy it and then really do the splitsville on ya. My suggestion: Just don't get all_

_emotionally clingy to him when he contacts you. Remember, it's supposed to be the other way around. He's supposed to be_

_infatuated with you!_

_Morispikegrrl:Yeah right. So what do I do in the meantime?_

_Takibunz:Get drunk, go to a club, and then hang out with us at a karaoke booth and sing your intoxicated heart out._

_Morispikegrrl:You really mean it? You're inbiting me to go out with you guys?!_

_Takibunz:Yes, I'm 'inbiting' you! Usually, a girl don't get the privilege of going out on the town with her sempai until she's a soph._

_But since you've done real well with all the extra practices, I suppose we can make an exception in the case of Miss Belldandy Morisato._

_Morispikegrrl:Really?! Wow!! This is totally tight! This weekend then?_

_Takibunz:Sure. Just don't go blowing your test in computer class! We need you to be eligible for the tournaments._

_Morispikegrrl:OK! Hey, thanks a lot! I feel better now_

_Takibunz:Don't mention it._

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

The quarterfinal game against Akita was the worst game in Belldandy's career. Not because of her play; her kill percentage was the highest it had been all season. They had beaten Akita 30-11, 30-16, 30-9 in straight sets. Coach Chihiro was all smiles, completely impressed with her performance. The team was working together like a machine, grinding up any opposition.

The agony started when she went out onto the floor to warm-up...and saw Ajax sitting in one of the front rows.

So she had to perform for three audiences: her coach, the paying audience of Chiba students...and Ajax. Belldandy was worried that his being at her game would cause her to blow it; but instead, her game had risen to a new level. After the game, she realized that she had played for him. It reminded her of high school when she was playing for her parents. Whenever they went to one of her games, she always performed better. The unknown element of Love had been thrown into the mix. But this was way different from playing for Mom and Dad.

After she showered and changed, Ajax offered to take her out on the town to celebrate her team's victory...and she had accepted without even thinking twice. Heart on her sleeve, Belldandy walked out of the gym arm-in-arm with her beau, accompanied by teasing catcalls from her teammates.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"How did I get here?" Belldandy said to herself as she woke up in the strange room. Her vision was blearied, and the bed (bed!) was spinning underneath her. She rolled over and felt something moist against her arms...

Trying to pick through her thoughts was like trying to balance a bowling ball on a spider web.

"Gasp!!" she choked, feeling an acrid taste in her throat as the sensation of taste layered upon her blurred vision and tin-rasp hearing. Her ears buzzed with a murmur, as if someone had partially stuffed them with cotton. Half heard sounds...actually silence.

Actually car horns.

"Where..am..I?" she asked in a parched voice. She tried to perch up on her elbows, but she slipped in the goo.

Vomit.

"Wha...the...fuck!!"

As much as she wanted acuteness to return to her, her consciousness was stubbornly blunted. It was worse than being drunk; being drunk didn't feel this at all, but it was closest thing she could compare her present mood to. It wasn't even a mood. She could sense the feeling of surprise at the puke all over her arm, could sense that it seemed alarming, but the alarm bells going off didn't quite register emotionally. Take the emotions and stuff them in a paper towel tube. How much can one feel if they're presently spilling through a keyhole instead of opening the door and walking in to their heart?

She looked at herself...

...stark naked.

"Fuck!" she cursed again. The foul stench of the slime-griff assaulted her, perhaps worsened by the fact that she was nude in a strange bed. Not just a strange bed, but a strange room.

Flashing lights outside pricked the night.

Squinting her vision down pat, Belldandy looked out of...or rather through...the cheap filmy window curtains. She could see the katakana characters for "ho" and "te"...

She allowed herself to fall neck-backwards onto the bed in frustration, bouncing it as she stared at the ceiling. The last thing she wanted to see was her reflection. But the ceiling had an unforgiving mirror; which reflected a nightmare back at her blurred eyes and mind.

"Ohmygod, what happened to me!" her hoarse voice shallowed, a tear streaking down her cheek.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"You're gonna be okay!" Captain Ootaki told her. "We're gonna take you back to the Girl's Dorm, and then we're gonna call the police! What happened to you is total bullshit, and I'm not gonna stand for it. It ain't slidin'!"

"Don't call the cops! Please! I gotta think about this!" Belldandy begged, holding the blanket up closer to her shoulders. She wished it was a cloak of invisibility, so she could curl up inside of it and disappear from the face of Tokyo. Or Thera. Or disappear from her own face, her own memories.

She still couldn't bring herself to say that word.

"Look, we're only tryin' to help yuh! It ain't every night we get a call at 4am in the morning from a half-conscious girl in a love hotel," Captain Tamiya said. "You look like you did some ice or somethin'! Look at yuh, nodding like you're about ready to pass out!"

"That's cause I am!" Belldandy started, trying to keep her eyes open. She looked at Tamiya; the co-captain's skin was burnt orange as the street-lights cast about in the car, but Belldandy could see the bitterness and anger in her eyes.

Even the colors seemed sour and empty.

"Look, Belldandy!" Ootaki started. "You can't go blaming yourself for this. You didn't drink that much, did you?"

Belldandy weakly shook her head in the negative. She could only remember having a single glass of wine. She couldn't remember finishing it.

"So it's obvious! I don't see you as the kind of girl who goes out on a date, gets really drunk at bar with a guy she's just met, and then...one thing leads to another...and the guy takes advantage of the situation."

"I..can't..believe..this..happened..to..me!" she said, her voice slurred by shock and something else.

Her lips felt like they were chapped, and her mouth was as dry as fired clay.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

When she left Chiba, the skies were graying over west, over Tokyo. By the time the train passed through Shinjuku station, the clouds had dipped close to the earth, spilling their contents over concrete and pedestrian alike. Belldandy was simply trying to keep the ride alive...haplessly going west on the Chuo Line, no destination in mind. Her life was already a dead-end; her volleyball career was shot, for all practical purposes.

By this time next year, she'd be nursing a baby.

Her squad had lost in the Regional semis, against a team they should have beaten in straight sets. Belldandy blamed herself for their loss, but her anger against Ajax mounted even more. What he had done to her that night...had totally thrown the entire team out of rhythm. They were all upset. And they had lost. Captain Ootaki and Tamiya's last chance to get to the national tournament had been spoiled. Totally ruined.

Because of that bastard.

To make matters even worse, after the spring term ended, her period was late. And a couple weeks later, she started feeling nauseous around certain foods and odors.

She couldn't remember a thing, but she didn't have to remember anything to know the details. Ajax had slipped a drug in her drink, and then had taken her to a love hotel and raped her. Hopefully, it was only _he_ who had been in that hotel room with her. The thought of other guys...made her want to puke. How could life be so wretched? It was the last thing Belldandy ever had expected from him. But the torrent of betrayal didn't end there.

Immediately after Ootaki and Tamiya got her back to the safety of the Girl's Dorm, she had to decide whether or not she should report the heinous act to the police. A professional baseball player's career was on the line, not to mention her own career. Tamiya wanted to kill Ajax...almost as much as Belldandy wanted to. The only difference was that Tamiya was crazy enough to do it.

In the midst of the turmoil, she had reluctantly decided to keep it quiet. It was by far the most difficult decision she had ever made in her life. Belldandy had to consider how her Mom and Dad would feel, seeing their daughter's name splashed across the media, involved with such a sordid affair. Even though she was the victim, there would be many who wouldn't see it that way. She had to consider whether the police would even believe her...after all, she was college athlete and Ajax was a star professional player. The weight of bringing down an idol to thousands of kids. The sheer humiliation of going to court and having to describe what was done to her, how she felt about it, how sick to her heart it had made her feel. The possibility that he would be proven innocent, just because he could afford the best lawyers. The possibility that there were others involved, that she had been gang-raped. She had to consider that her parents would go broke just dealing with the legal expenses. Her dad wasn't a rich guy; he made a living selling wooden wall panels and carved doors and selling some crops and livestock. Not to mention the loss of face she would suffer. She lived in a small town...if she made this public, she could never go back there. Hell, her parents might even have to move for the shame of it!

So she had kept it quiet...and cried herself to sleep every night for two months.

Not exactly the most comforting emotional environment for a girl who had a baby inside of her.

The train was going west, out of Tokyo. Heading towards the gentrified neighborhoods. Headed towards Ajax's house. Borne out of her misery by an inner-flame rage, Belldandy decided that she would go and hunt him down. Go to the fucker's house, if necessary.

She'd saved his ass by keeping silent about what he had done to her...but he was sure as hell going to support her and her baby for the next 20 years!

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

When she told the cabdriver that she was going to Ajax's house, he looked at her like she was some crazed baseball groupie or something. Ajax lived in a neighborhood that had the precious commodity of room space; the houses here were two-and-three storey affairs with actual yards and fenced-in acreages. Each house was filled with the ghost-voices of thousands of homeless people and hundreds of exploited workers, in Belldandy's mind. She was utterly, completely pissed off at life. Life had fucked her...and left her to fend alone with a baby on the way.

The cabbie dropped her off at Ajax's gated house with a derisive "don't get yerself arrested, girlie!" Jerk. Belldandy turned her warmup jacket inside-out; she had spray-painted the insides black so she could blend into the night. She stalked in front of the wall facing the street, like a panther seeking its prey. When no one came out to the fenced-gate driveway, she briefly considered screaming...but then the cabbie's words took on a sheen of wisdom. No, she wasn't going to make a scene, at least outside of the house. Inside of the house, that would be another matter.

She still couldn't believe that she was pregnant with his kid. She didn't _feel_ pregnant, except for the bouts of morning sickness. Even that was inconsistent, like everything else in her life. No matter how hostile her feelings towards Ajax were, she was going to keep her baby. She wouldn't let him have _that_ victory; no way was she going to kill an unborn child just because he was a scumbag rapist. But she really felt like it was her vs. the world. She felt enveloped by a loneliness that she couldn't even dream could possibly exist. What really sucked was that the one woman she wanted to talk to the most about her pregnancy...her Mom...was absolutely the last person she wanted to talk to. Something like this would break her Mom's heart! Of course, the plan was for her to graduate Chiba Poly, get a half-way decent job, meet a guy who had a successful career in front of him, and then settle down and have a family. That was the plan...

Belldandy had grown up always daydreaming about having the magical "I'm going to have a baby" talk with her Mom. It would be a blessed, tear-filled, positive enlightenment for the two of them. She would feel on equal footing with her Mom in a new way, which was bound to widen the bridge of love she already had between her heart and her Mom's. Now, it would be nothing less than traumatic. Ajax had even robbed her and her Mom of the chance to have a 'happy news' session about pregnancy and babies.

Instead, she'd be faced with all sorts of difficult choices. What if Ajax managed to snake out and not take responsibility? This pregnancy had thrust Belldandy into very serious considerations of how she was going to earn a living. Up until now, having a workaday life was always 'off in the future' somewhere. Now, it was staring her in the face. Her parents would probably have to support her and her child, since she lacked any marketable job skills or experience. She'd have to deal with all sorts of social service agencies. She might even have to live with her parents; which would feel even more disgraceful.

"I feel so alone!" she muttered to herself as she eyed the unyielding wall between her and Ajax's house. Suddenly remembering that she a very tall girl, Belldandy looked both ways down the street...and then scaled the 3-meter-tall wall with ease. When she landed on the other side, she got soaked by the lawn watering spray-heads. She almost wanted to laugh, because it was so silly. So stupidly random! She just wanted to stand in their path and get soaked to the bone, just so she could feel _something_ other than humiliation and resentment.

When she knocked on the door, rang the doorbell, yelled at the door, kicked the base of the door...nobody answered.

Her restlessness mounting, Belldandy decided to walk around the large mansion. She peered into the lower windows, but they were all shuttered shut with fancy metallic window blinds. In the back, she saw a large pool deck and exercise area, with a double jaccuzi and a small batting range. She had expected to encounter some house servants, or at least some type of yards-keepers, but there was no one in sight. The pool looked like it was freshly cleaned, the yard furniture was polished. But Ajax's house seemed as vacant as the summit of Mt. Aso during one of its frequent eruptions. The backyard had a small rock garden, a thing of elegant beauty. A source of a large rock to throw at one of the sliding glass doors that opened up into the pool area.

With a crash, Belldandy gained entrance to his house.

She was anything but a cat-burglar; as the alarms went off, Belldandy cursed herself for being so stupid as to try and break into his house. Of course, it would be alarmed with a security system! But the shock of the klaxon-wails was shadowed by the sight that met her eyes.

The house was empty, except for a note tacked onto one of the bare walls in the living room. She walked up to the note and tore it off the tack. In crude writing, it said:

_"Don't bother looking for me, you stupid bitch!"_

Belldandy sagged to the floor, emotionally exhausted, and remained there until the police came and hauled her off to jail.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

The prosecution had convinced the pre-trial judge to not permit her to have any visitors for the first three days of her incarceration. Being in jail was a horrible experience, far worse than Belldandy could ever imagine. The closest she'd been to a jail in her life was driving by one. The nearest she'd gotten to being arrested was when she and a few of her drunken teammates got caught egging a teacher's car in her junior year of high school. That was all childhood innocence and stuff...but now, she was in a _real_ jail! With _real_ criminals. These women acted like they were almost animals; Belldandy was continually disgusted by their 'jail talk', especially the sexual remarks. Because of her stature and youth, some of the hardened women inmates felt threatened, or thought that it would be easy to bully her. As a result, one of them was walking around with a missing front tooth, courtesy of Belldandy's elbow. The other women that had picked fights with her those first two days she was jailed were keeping a respectful distance. But Belldandy was keenly aware that they were also regarding her with a baleful eye. These women were _toughened_, and would look for any sign of weakness. Drawing on her inner strength, Belldandy had to sleep very lightly at night lest they try to assault her. When she heard that her two sempai were going to visit her, she'd given a whoop of joy that amused some of her cell-mates.

"Ootaki! Tamiya!" Belldandy shouted thankfully through the protective glass as the two seniors walked into the interview room.

"Jail coveralls don't look good on tall girls," Ootaki quipped. She was right. Belldandy was so tall, they didn't have a woman's coverall that would fit her. So she was wearing the male version of XXL inmate's coveralls...and they _still_ didn't fit her. All she could do was grin self-consciously at her friend's observation.

"Guess what? Someone came and trashed the Girl's Dorm last night while we wuz having practice," Tamiya said glumly. Now that the volleyball season was over, the spike-haired senior was letting her hair grow out.

"What!! What the fuck? What do you mean, trashed the dorm?" Belldandy blurted out. She could be as loud as she wanted to, since she was in the jail's interview room. Still, it was shocking. Another type of violation.

"Well, it looked like a Yakuza job. They were very thorough. Stupid perverts even stole our panties!" Ootaki said with a grimace.

"I keep tellin' yuh, all men are wankers!" Tamiya grumbled irritably.

"Yeah, and I'm beginning to believe you, Tamiya-girl!" Ootaki said, shrugging her shoulders. "But there's some good news along with the bad news. We're going to get you bailed out tonight!"

"No way!!" Belldandy shouted.

"Yeah!" Tamiya answered. "Coach Chihiro took a loan out to get the money together, so you don't have to rot in this hole with all the real criminal whores and creeps!"

"Coach...Chihiro?" Belldandy gasped in a whisper. She could only answer her sempai by gamely holding back her tears while her face shuddered with emotion.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Chihiro had bailed Belldandy out of jail so she could watch her 'sisters', Ootaki and Tamiya, graduate from Chiba Poly. After all they had been through, the Coach with the will of fire and the heart of steel had crafted a small miracle for the three students. Belldandy had only been in jail for three days, but it had seemed like forever. As soon as she stepped outside of the jail, she started jumping up and down like a little girl.

Both Ootaki and Tamiya were thrilled to be graduating from the University, but their mood was somber as well...soured by the realization that graduation meant that their volleyball days were probably over. Since they both had taken degrees in engineering, it was doubtful that they'd land a job where they could coach a volleyball team. Neither one was of Olympic caliber, especially after what had happened to her and the fact that Chiba Poly didn't even make it past Regionals. No matter how many strings Coach Chihiro tried to pull, she couldn't convince the Olympic committee to even give her two sempai a tryout. Once again, she felt bitter towards herself; she was always letting everybody down and hurting those around her. But her two sempai took it in stride. Ootaki kept teasing Tamiya that she was "too ugly for the beach volleyball circuit!" while Tamiya taunted Ootaki with being "too tall to work in a bunny bar!"

The three girls had gone shopping for dresses to wear to the graduation ceremony, to be held next week. Belldandy rarely wore dresses, but the graduation of her two best friends almost seemed to demand it. Not to mention Coach Chihiro's threat: "If _I'm_ going to wear a dress to their funeral, _you're_ going to wear one too!"

Volleyball was over for Belldandy as well. Coach Chihiro tried to treat her like nothing had happened, but Belldandy could see the strains of disappointment on her Coach's face. Coach Chihiro even volunteered to drive her to Murakami whenever she finally felt ready to have "The Talk" with her Mother and Father, just so she wouldn't have to face her parents alone. But no matter how much everyone seemed to pretend that it was 'old times', Belldandy felt like a fish out of water because she knew that the 'old times' were over. There would be no way she could continue attending college while she was caring for an infant. She had thought long and hard about getting an abortion, but her sentiments wouldn't allow her to follow through on her fears. She wasn't having the baby so she could milk money from Ajax for the rest of her life, either. It just didn't feel _right_.

Which was all the more reason why she needed to make her decisions soon.

Life seemed simpler, in a way. In the past several months, she had endured so much of living, Belldandy felt like she was already 21, instead of just-about-19. She, Ootaki and Tamiya cut quite a line in the crowded Chiba sidewalks; all three girls were heads taller than most of the shoppers. Store after store had beautiful summer dresses and formal wear in their gallery windows. Most of the items were OL-priced, which meant that they were looking in the wrong shopping districts. They were students, and they couldn't afford them.

Belldandy was looking at a red dress that caught her eye...and then her vision got fuzzy as she looked at her reflection in a mirror. The mirror had some kind of fake diamond necklace strung over it. She heard a "meow" nearby and turned towards the sound...

--SHHHCRASSSSHHHH!--

The display window simply exploded. Her scream was dissolved in the brash of a hundred screams, as people started scattering. She screamed again, just as she heard a soft "pop!" noise. One of the mannequins' heads shattered into plastic fragments.

"What da fuck?!" Tamiya shouted, the first of the trio to recover her wits.

"Holy shit! Someone's shooting at us!" Ootaki yelled back. All around them, the crowded sidewalk was suddenly a scene of pedestrian chaos. People were dodging cars trying to rapidly cross the street, while others were seeking shelter against the sides of the parked cars. It was like a Korean action movie gone manic.

Belldandy simply stood there for a split second, watching the shadow-sniper on the roofline of the building across the street.

"Morisato, get your ass down here!" Ootaki hissed. Finally, Tamiya sprung up and tackled her, just as another bullet twanked against the metal frame of the large display window. Her head had been there just a split-second earlier.

"What's going on?" Ootaki asked, her face screwed up tight with anxiety and disbelief. "Someone's shooting at us!"

"Yuh said that already, Ootaki!" Tamiya gasped, her brow furrowed with worry. "We better get outta here, or there ain't gonna be no graduation party for us!"

"What the hell? Why would someone start shooting at people in a ritzy Chiba shopping district?" Ootaki shouted, clearly the most traumatized of the three girls. Belldandy felt the car she was leaning against shudder with the force of bullet impacts. Whoever it was, they weren't just shooting randomly into the crowd. The air was quickly filling with the sound of approaching distant sirens, punctuated by screams.

"I told you we should have gone to a place where the stores were more reasonable!" Belldandy noted with a gallows-humor grimace.

"Lotta good that'll do us now!" Ootaki shouted as another window shattered nearby.

"I think I've got a good idea who it is..." Belldandy said, flinching as the passenger side window right above her head blew out.

"Do you think it's the same guys that wrecked our dorm rooms?" Tamiya asked.

"Yep!" Belldandy said, her face squared with determination. "And it's going to stop. I'm not putting up with this shit any more. And neither is the team. The season's over for us, but we'll _always_ be teammates! This has to stop!"

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Two days.

Two separate attempts.

The common belief shared by many people who watch thriller movies and detective shows on TV is this: being pursued by a killer can be a psychologically cool thing. But it isn't. Each moment is leavened with a sweaty uncertainty, to the point where one simply gives in and doesn't care whether they live or die. Life or death...death or life, it didn't make any difference anymore. Life was too precious to cling to; and too slippery to hold onto. In one day, Belldandy had reached that point of nihilist despair three times. It didn't make sense, why all of this was happening to her and her friends. They were supposed to be happy-go-lucky college girls on the top of their game, ready for a last blow-out June graduation party before several of their numbers entered the 'real' world and started giving back what they'd been given.

Belldandy was huddled next to Furo, who was trying to dislodge the laptop from her lap with shakes of his great-head.

"Sorry boy, but you can't have my lap. Not yet," Belldandy said patiently, stroking Furo behind his pointed ears. Unlike other Bengals, who had stub-ears that were rounded at the top, Furo had sharp backswept ears, almost like those of a fox. Keiichi had made him unique in more ways than one. She looked at him, thinking that he was definitely some kind of sci-fi cat.

Given to her by the ultimate sci-fi guy.

Keiichi...

Ever since he had been 'warranted' out of her life by Windowsill, her life had turned from feathers of anxiety to barbed wires of brutality. Yet, she could only stumble forward; there was no going back to how it was before. As she logged onto the website, and then navigated to the chat BBS, Belldandy wondered if Keiichi even acknowledged her existence any more, now that he was gone.

She waited six hours while the laptop cast pale illumination on the Buddhas...

ajtakamitsu-at-yomiuri.co.jp;bmorisat-at-chibapoly.ne.jp; private chat activated.

_Morispikegrrl:So you're here._

_Ajax: I'm busy._

_Morispikegrrl:Not so busy that you couldn't find time to send a hitman after me, you little prick! And you trashed my friends stuff too!_

_Ajax: Don't let your tongue wag like a whore's. I want to get this over right quick._

_Morispikegrrl:Call 'em off, and I'll never tell anyone._

_Ajax: Heh. You think that I'd trust you. You're a regular burglar! So how was jail, huh? I bet you're pretty proud of yourself_

_after spending a few nights in the klink!_

_Morispikegrrl:You're the one who's ill, not me! You gave me a sleeper drug, raped me, and left me in some sleazy hotel. You're going to get_

_what's coming to you, you bastard._

_Ajax: Nah. You can't touch me. Besides, I know where you live. By the way, it wasn't just me that night. I definitely scored some bonus_

_points with my teammates that night._

Belldandy froze, her fingers tingling with twinned horror and disgust as they rested on the compact keyboard. That 'stolen' night...was even more stolen than she had imagined. He was trying to freak her out in the worst way! She wanted to heave the laptop across the room; but she couldn't, since it was Ootaki's. A serious art-chill descended down her spine as she gripped the computer tensely. Amidst the feelings of revulsion and violation, her mind kept hammering out disbelief and disgust. How could Ajax _possibly_ know where she lived? Each time they had went on a date, he had met her at the school. His claim was impossible.

Unless she was being stalked.

Genuinely frightened now, she stroked Furo on the head. _He_ would protect her against any intruders for sure! But could she protect him if they had guns? These weren't like those three drunk guys that harassed her and Keiichi outside of the mini-bar in January! She was the human, and she had to take care of him. Keiichi would have wanted it that way. Even though Keiichi was gone, the same ten kilos of meat showed up in the wooden box, every morning. Proof that Furo was still in her charge. But she worried…Furo wouldn't have the sense to wait before leaping on a group of men loaded for bear with handguns.

_Morispikegrrl:Sorry, I'm not going to fall for your shit. If you know where I live, then you know what's living with me._

_Ajax: There's no way I'm going to let you live through this, Belldandy._

_You're pregnant, and I'm not the fathering kind. I still have my youth ahead of me._

_Morispikegrrl:Damn straight you aren't. Anybody that had you as a dad would probably be fucked up. Or molested, if she was a girl._

_Ajax: Shut the fuck up!! You're irritating me, you worthless slut! Which is why you have to buy it. Either in your temple or at_

_the bottom of Tokyo Bay, you're gonna wind up swatted away and hammered down. Worms or fish, baby. Your corpse is gonna be a_

_feast for someone._

_Morispikegrrl:You're a ghoul! I can't believe you! You actually think you can get away with this?_

_Ajax: Bimbo! I can get away with whatever I want. There's no one who can stop me! You're so stupid, you assumed that you could come_

_out to my house, threaten me with some kind of paternity shit, and then walk out with a couple hundred million yen in alimony_

_and child support? You're stupider that I thought! Any girl who is flakey enough to meet a guy and fall in love with him_

_over the internet deserves what she gets._

_Morispikegrrl:How? How did you find out? About the baby?_

_Ajax: Wasn't hard, at all, especially with my friends in the police department. They combed over the hospital reports for me._

_Remember the blood test they took while you were in jail? Here's some new for u. Those two guys who have been trying to blow out that_

_sweet, empty head of yours? They're cops!_

Belldandy choked as a haze of implications threatened to strangle her, threatened to scrape the last remnants of her sanity away. Sanity that had been shielding her heart, shielding her from a nervous breakdown. She wanted to scream with frustration, because she didn't know what else to do. Ajax had actually bribed some policemen into trying to kill her! If he could do that, then she'd never be safe!

_Ajax: I'm done playing games with you, little girl._

_How does it feel, knowing that you're going to die?_

Frozen. She heard a _voice_ along from behind her, echoing the typed words on the computer display! Her blood pounding in her ears, Belldandy turned towards the voice...

Furo roared, backstepping twice and then launching his fur-bristled frame towards the intruder. His feline rage was so daunting, it completely freaked her out. He was always so calm and gentle towards her. But now, he was all murder and mayhem, his claws extended, his teeth glistening, his chest puffed out with rage. She felt a tear in her eye as her tiger...her pet...struggled to get back on his feet.

In the slash-distance of several seconds, Belldandy watched in horror as Ajax caught Furo in mid-air and threw him against the far wall of the room, like a child throwing a stuffed penguin. There was no way _anyone_ could do that to a tiger the size of Furo!

Grinning with malice, Ajax rounded upon her with a murderous gleam in his eye...

"SENBEI! DON'T YOU EVEN THINK OF TOUCHING HER!"

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Belldandy literally went light-headed with shock as Keiichi stepped out from behind the main Buddha statue. She blinked her eyes rapidly, thinking that this was one more nightmare. The worst kind of nightmare, the kind of withering terror that spawned a last glimmer of hope in the guise of a hallucination. A hope that can only be crushed. Even though her limbs were paralyzed with fear, her nerves were ridden into crisp jerks of sparks, her heart was drumming tight against her chest like a railroad car...Belldandy managed to look at Keiichi and silently, hopefully, smile.

Keiichi silently acknowledged her with a nod.

It _was_ him!!

"Ah, so the idiot God appears at last!" Ajax shouted with devilish glee as Keiichi walked towards them. Belldandy took advantage of the moment and quickly shuffle-crawled away from where Ajax/Senbei was standing.

"I've watched you toy with her long enough, Senbei. It's over!" Keiichi announced in a narrow thin-voice of threat.

_"What's_ over, eh? Hmmm, weren't you the one who got himself dismissed. Removed from your assignment here, Keiichi? Am I right? I seem to recall that you were summoned back to Yggdrasil because of sheer incompetence! Because you couldn't grant this stupid girl a little wish or two..." Senbei noted with a mocking grin.

"It wasn't his fault!" Belldandy shouted, finally finding her voice. "It was because I was so stubb..."

"Shut up, you mortal weanling! This is between Keiichi and I! As it should be. You are beneath consideration. You are nothing!" Ajax said. Belldandy felt her lips disappear into her mouth. Her mouth...simply wasn't there anymore. There was no opening where her lips had been. She ran her fingers over her face, and made half-discernible noises when she discovered the smooth skin running from her nose to her chin. Her eyes felt burned as she watched Ajax slowly melting into Sembei's Demonic form.

"Bwah hee hee hee!" Senbei laughed maniacally, resting a gloved hand on his forehead. "You can't even undo a simple body-shifting curse, can you? This is so rich! The God who was recalled from a Wish Assignment because of his incompetence. The mortal who was too stupid to see the rare opportunity given to her. The Demon who was left behind after the God left."

"Senbei...if you've done anything to harm her, I'll..." Keiichi shouted.

"Still a naive idiot, aren't you Keiichi!" Senbei taunted. "Well then again, you always _were_ a little dense. What have you been doing all this time in Yggdrasil...taking a nap? You think that you could leave me alone on this armpit of a planet with your Wish Candidate...and nothing would happen? Why don't you look in her eyes, Keiichi. I've done _everything_ to harm her!"

"I know what you did, Senbei. Everything. And I will make sure that you won't do anything to hurt Belldandy again!" Keiichi said evenly.

"Oh ho!? So says who? I didn't make her pregnant!" Senbei gloated. A mini-Mara peeked over his shoulder and snickered with a bite. "Only some Wish Candidate that you'd be assigned to...would be so stupid as to assume she's pregnant...without even taking a pregnancy test! In her own way, she's a dense as you. You didn't take any tests to check and see, did you?"

Belldandy shook her head "no", since she could speak. Her feelings seemed to puree between relief that she wasn't pregnant, and a deep-seated sadness.

"Of course, you're not pregnant! Demons can't make mortals pregnant! But we _can_ make them _sterile_! And that's exactly what I did to her!" Senbei declared with sadistic glee. Belldandy felt his eyes laughing raucously at her. "She's _never_ going to have any children! I want her memories of you to be very unpleasant, Keiichi! Whenever this mortal woman thinks of her barrenness, she'll have your face in her mind, knowing that _you_ were the cause of it!"

Belldandy instinctively brought her hands against her stomach. The impact of what Senbei had said and done was so traumatic, she emptied her stomach into her lap. Vomited. Because her mouth was no longer there, the retching backed up through her nose, painfully as it streamed out.

Sterile!

An indescribable fugue of despair seemed to drill into her, possessing her with numbness. Almost choking on the former contents of her stomach, Belldandy fell over onto her side. All along, she thought she was going to have a baby...the one redeeming light in this horrorshow. And now this! Her 'morning sickness' wasn't because of pregnancy; she was physically ill because of something horrid that Senbei had done to her! Her heart felt like it was grinding against the millstone, weighted by disbeliefs too heavy for her to carry.

"You are in so much trouble, Keiichi!" Senbei added. "Do you know what our Dark Lord would do to one of _us_ if we disobeyed a directive as blatantly as you have? You're _not supposed_ to be here! You were _withdrawn_ from your assignment! So all on your own, you disobeyed your Lord and came here anyway! They'll probably be here in a few minutes to retrieve you. Probably send a Valkyrie so you won't take your stupidity and double it. You can kiss your Wish Escort Office goodbye, your God License goodbye, your ability to travel to mortal realms goodbye...and this worthless mortal goodbye. Ironic isn't it? You'll never be able to see her again, but you'll know deep in the very innermost part of your disgusting God's heart that I have free reign to plague her with suffering. Ha ha aha…you really blew it this time, you loveless excuse for a God! The Rules specifically state that..."

"_Fuck_...the...Rules!" Keiichi spat out.

Belldandy fought against herself, trying to not cry like a little girl...at least until she was amazed by what Keiichi had just said. Keiichi was a stickler about cursing, and he had just said the mother of all swear words. Keiichi's defiant attitude was so unexpected, it unexpectedly gave her the chance to summon her courage. She willed herself to stand up...she wasn't going to give Sembei the pleasure of seeing her rendered immobile because she had been emotionally trainwrecked by his loathsome actions.

"You know, you're done for, Keiichi! I wouldn't be surprised if my own Dark Lord comes here, after hearing that. Not only did you violate one of the most sacred edicts of the God's Wish Escort Helper Office, you've also defied your _own_ Lord! Unimaginable! All because of this stupid mortal girl! There is only one outcome for you. At the very least, you'll receive a punishment of total banishment from all mortal worlds. Or maybe house arrest in Yggdrasil! Or maybe...even death! The Ultimate Force may simply strike you down for being such an unruly, disobedient God!"

Despite his show of courage, Belldandy watched Keiichi shudder for a moment as Senbei's words hung in the air like landscape paintings.

"I want to grant her wish. I don't know why it's so important to me, but I'm not going to let you or anything else get in my way!" Keiichi declared. Once again, Belldandy felt the familiar wave of disappointment arc across her heart. It was always the _wish_, not her! It never was about her. He had risked everything to come here, and it really didn't matter to him that _she_ was being threatened. It could have been any person on the planet and he'd have taken on the same risks.

"So what are you going to do, weak God?" Senbei sneered.

The room lit up as Keiichi formed something that looked like a sword of light from thin air. To Belldandy's eyes, it seemed to be a bolt of energy, katana-shaped, but with a surface of weird patterned angles, like a crystal.

"I win, you leave. You win..."

"I already have what I want, weakling God. You're going to experience the Real Death anyway. And this mortal wench is already mine. The only satisfaction I'll need beyond all of this is the look of pain and hopelessness on your face as I defeat you," Senbei said as he formed a pale yellow lightsword in his hand.

"Oh, and I forgot to tell you, my assistant Mara is an expert at weapons!" Senbei said as Mara hopped off his shoulder and instantly 'grew' from chibi-size to regular-size. Belldandy had never seen the Demoness in her 'full' size before; she looked ugly and ferocious! Her mind was so detached from reality at this point that she was light-headed. Detached from reality because she'd been spiked in the heart by reality.

"Shall we dance?" Senbei asked with mock graciousness.

"No. I want you to _swear_ on the name of your Dark Sovereign, Oni-sama, that if I defeat you in fair combat, then you and Mara _will_ leave Thera and never come back. I'm not going to fall for any Demonic deceits. You're transparent, Senbei. You may think that I'm inexperienced because I'm 40,000 years younger than you, but I have strengths that you will never ever expect," Keiichi said with conviction.

"We will!" Mara shouted out. Senbei promptly lashed out and whacked her on the back of the head.

"OWWW!"

"You prize idiot!" he said angrily, thumping Mara on the head as he talked. "All we had to do is wait, and then this idiot God here would inevitably meet his doom for breaking the Rule. His own Lord is going to come and take him away in short order. Or the UF would zap him into a cinder! But no! Now that some stupid Demonic assistant had to open her mouth, we _have_ to fight this cretin! Oni-sama's name has been invoked!"

"Sorry..." Mara apologized with a look of sheer misery.

"Why do I have to get saddled with all the dumb blonde ones?" Senbei sighed in faux-frustration. "Now, _I_ might actually have to sully myself with this distasteful combat."

"What do you mean, Senbei?" Mara asked credulously.

"You were so quick to agree, so _you're_ going to the one who gets to fight him. There's no use for me to dirty my hands with this business. And if he defeats you, you'll have worn him down to the point where I can easily beat him."

Mara advanced on Keiichi, her glowing red lightsword raised overhead.

Belldandy realized that Senbei had played her like a violin; all of her anger was directed at Keiichi.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

The fight between Keiichi and Mara wasn't anything like the 'invisible' battle she had witnessed in the shopping mall right before Christmas last year. That was like a battle of magic...but this was much more vicious. Take a martial arts or samurai movie and up the intensity level tenfold, and it might approach the bouting between Keiichi and the smaller Demoness.

Mara was good.

The battle was like something out of a video game, taking place on the floor, _in_ the floor, on the ceilings, along the walls. Keiichi and Mara's lightswords were moving so fast, all Belldandy could see at times was a purplish blur-globe. She could hear an angry crackling and thundering as the two swords of energy roared against each other. Holding onto Furo, who was barely breathing, Belldandy prayed that Keiichi would defeat Mara. The fighting moved closer, until it was right in front of her. Fear upon fear seized her as she realized that she was right in the midst of it. But she couldn't just leave Furo.

She screamed as a red blade of crystallized light flashed within a few cm's of her nose. Mara was trying to divide Keiichi's attention by attacking _her_. Swift as the eye could follow, Keiichi parried her arcing sword-swaths.

Belldandy still screamed when Keiichi's sword of blue light unexpectedly cleft Mara in two, bring a deadly silence to the combat. She couldn't open her mouth; her scream seemed to fill her ears like water.

"Stupid mortal! She isn't dead!" Senbei bellowed. "Only her physical manifest has been harmed. It's illegal for a God to _really_ kill a Demon, and vice versa."

"Tell her why, Senbei!" Keiichi gasped. Belldandy could see the exhaustion written all over his face; the tall God's shoulders were heaving with exertion. True to Senbei's prediction, Keiichi had been worn down into deep levels of fatigue by his combat with Mara.

"Each Demon has a Doublet, which is a God. Because of this, if a Demon kills a God, then their Doublet...a Demon...will also die. It's a stupid, bothersome system that prevents us from killing such weakling Gods like Keiichi here. But we have to live with it, don't we Keiichi?"

"So you know what will happen if I kill you?" Keiichi asked.

Senbei face-faulted.

"_Y..you're_ my Doublet! You moron, you c..can't possibly be thinking..." Senbei stuttered, his blonde-locks framed face flushing with genuine fear. He was so distraught, his words were stolen from him.

"For what you've done to her?" Keiichi said. Belldandy almost jumped as he gestured towards her with his lightsword, even though he was several meters away.

"Senbei, you took away her innocence! You even took away her ability to have children! You took away everything that was precious in her life, Senbei! Now, she's never going to have a chance to have her wish granted! So what if I kill you? And if I can't kill you, I'll kill myself...which will kill you anyway."

"Game over, Senbei!"

"Y..you can't be serious! Y..you're mad!" Senbei managed to scream before Keiichi rushed him with his lightsword.

All this time, Belldandy was wondering why Senbei had gone to such great lengths to hurt her. Through the haze of all that had happened in the past couple hours, it suddenly dawned on her that he was using her to get at Keiichi. He wanted to hurt Keiichi by hurting her! But how could that be, if Keiichi wasn't able to feel love? Could Keiichi's sense of duty be that strong? Or was there something _more_ to Keiichi than a simple dedication to his role as a God who grants Wishes? Belldandy almost wanted to imagine that Keiichi was being gallant, in some sort of whacked-out medieval fashion. But she knew that it wasn't _she_ for whom he was fighting for. Her welfare was tied up in the fact that she had been given a wish.

It was her wish!

Of course, it was her wish. Keiichi couldn't feel love, so there was no way he could be fighting for _her_! Senbei had claimed to have rendered her sterile. But Keiichi's sterility was far more profound than hers could ever be. And it was no coincidence that Senbei's lightsword was yellow. Already, he was pressing Keiichi with blur-fast parries of his lightsword. Keiichi was backed up against the Buddha, desperately trying to defend himself. Belldandy was fraught with tension, to the point where she was biting her lips.

Her...lips?

"No wonder your sword is yellow, Senbei! You're a _coward_!" Belldandy shouted angrily.

"Wha...what? Who opened your mouth, you little mortal ant!" Senbei shouted angrily, glaring at her.

"I did!" Keiichi said with triumph. Senbei had been momentarily distracted, and Keiichi swiftly brought his sword across Senbei's chest, splitting him in two. Belldandy remembered what Senbei had said about the Doublet System...and screamed. Keiichi was going to die because he killed Senbei! She squinted her eyes, not wanting to watch the awful scene.

"No..." Keiichi said to her in a gasping voice. "I...hnh..._lied_ to him! Did you think that they...gasp!...that Demons are the only ones who lie?"

"K..Keiichi!" Belldandy said, as she started to rush towards him...but then Furo sprung nimbly to his feet, suddenly healed, and pounced on her. Belldandy hugged herself to the white-n-striped furry chest of her pet, feeling bittersweet despite her joy in seeing Furo unharmed.

The anti-Love thing again.

Belldandy watched Keiichi collapse onto the floor, resting his palms against his haunches, a figure of winter-still exhaustion.

"He's coming..." Keiichi announced with a weary expression.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

_"I am most disappointed in your inglorious conduct, My son,"_ the old glowing man said, His face stern with reproach. _"You were grievously negligent in leaving Yggdrasil. The Office you serve removed you from any dealings with the mortal, Belldandy Morisato, because the Xeomnic Network advised it to do so. Yet, despite this, you decided on your own to return to Thera, under the guise of carrying out your wish contract with this mortal girl."_

"Woman," Belldandy corrected Him.

Keiichi looked at her with a horrified expression...and Belldandy suddenly realized that this 'Old Man God' was the God of Gods. And she had just corrected Him!

_"Further, you entered into a duel of honor with not one, but –_two-_ Demons, for purely selfish reasons. Invoking My Name. Already, I have had to explain the situation to My Brother in the Demon's Realm, so that He is aware of why two of His Demons cannot attend to any situations on the Therarealm henceforth. You even went as far as to threaten one of the Demons with death!"_ He stated angrily, sounding to Belldandy like an aged prosecutor begging the jury for a guilty verdict.

Keiichi was guilty of nothing.

_"Guilty of nothing, mortal woman?" _the Elder God said, turning to regard her. Belldandy felt her mouth go dry as she realized that He had read her mind. To Him, she was probably as transparent as a glass window.

"_He is guilty of selfishness, which is a most serious deviation for a God. He was bound by certain Rules, and he chose to transgress against them. He blatantly ignored the latitude of his duties to the God Wish Escort Office. All contacts between our kind and yours are tightly regulated; one cannot simply choose when and where they are to descend to your mortal plane."_

"It's too late for any of that," Keiichi said.

"What do you mean?" Belldandy said.

"Because I have offered the last of my Divine essence in order to banish Senbei and Mara from the Therarealm. In other words, when my energy exhausts it essence, I will experience the Real Death."

"NOOOOOOOOOOOO!!" Belldandy screamed. "It's not true! It _can't_ be true!"

_"Then you have wasted your life,"_ the God of the Gods said.

"But it is," Keiichi said with a sigh. "If I wouldn't have banished Senbei, he would have plagued you for the rest of your life. Normally, when a God and a Demon show up for a Wish Candidate, it's because the Demons intercepted the Wish Request. So both are 'assigned' to the mortal Wish Candidate. If the Demon gets to them first, then the mortal is cursed with Grief for the rest of their lives...which usually isn't very long. If the God succeeds in granting the mortal's Wish, then the Demon has to leave them alone. In this case, since I was recalled to Yggdrasil, there was no one to oppose Senbei. He should have been recalled to the Demon's Realm as well, but he wasn't. Perhaps he was recalled, but he chose to ignore his assignment and remain here to haunt you. In either case, I had to do away with him...for your safety."

"How could this happen to Keiichi? How could Keiichi...who could never experience love...do such a loving thing? Why did he have to die because of _my_ mistake? How am I supposed to live with that?" Belldandy feverishly observed to herself, wiping the tears that clouded her eyes with her sleeve.

"THIS ISN'T FAIR!" she screamed at the top of her breath, her scream causing both the Lord and Keiichi to blink. "He didn't do anything wrong! _I_ was the one who didn't want to make a wish."

_"Yes, this is true, young mortal girl..."_

"Woman! I am a _woman_!"

_"Yes, one can tell by your uncivil tongue that you are the female of the species,"_ the Lord said, irritated. His irritation faded...and He regarded her and shook His head sadly. Belldandy felt like she was going to melt under His gaze.

_"There is naught that can be done here. We can forthwith return Keiichi to his HomeRealm of Yggdrasil, so that when the Reaper comes for him, he could be resting in a familiar surroundings."_

"_This_ is a familiar surrounding for him!" Belldandy boldly ventured. She and Keiichi had made a household out of this old temple, and she felt that here was where he belonged, whether he could feel loved or not.

_"SILENCE! I have had enough of your childish insolence!"_ the Lord shouted in a voice that sounded like a million voices.

"Excuse her, My Lord. She's very upset..." Keiichi pleaded.

"You're damn right I am!" Belldandy bristled in a loud voice. "What about me? What about my wish?"

_"It will go ungranted,"_ the Lord said matter-of-factly. _"All traces of our presence here will be MindWiped from your memories."_

"But that's so _retarded_! Keiichi's here...and _I'm_ here. How could my wish go ungranted if Keiichi's here? If You say it will go ungranted, then doesn't that mean that my wish 'candidacy' or whatever the fuck you call it, is still in effect?"

_"Verily, your wish candidacy is still in effect until the end of your days," _the Lord answered. Weakened as he was, Belldandy noticed that Keiichi winced at her brash language in the presence of his Lord.

"So, as a last favor to Keiichi, who is going to die anyway, can't he complete his mission by granting me a wish?" Belldandy asked, her voice hobbled.

_"This is possible, but I doubt that he has the strength to do so,"_ the Lord said. _"Be aware, that if Keiichi is pressed upon to grant your wish, then his life will be shortened by a few years."_

"Huh? I thought he was going to die!"

"I am, Belldandy. But not for another 10 or 20 years. In the way we Gods reckon years, that is a _very_ short time. In your terms, it would be two days or so," Keiichi explained.

"Keiichi...you're an idiot! You got me all worried that you were going to..sob..die in a few minutes or..snff..hours!" Belldandy said, crying and smiling at the same time.

Same old Keiichi.

"So let me ask you this, Mister Lord!" Belldandy said, slowly getting to her feet so she could stand tall. "If he's too weak to grant my wish, then could _You_ grant it? You never know...I might come up with a doozy of a wish!"

_"Your request is highly irregular,"_ the Lord said, resting a finger on His bearded chin for a moment. _"Nevertheless, it is easily within My powers to do so. Thus, I will agree to grant you one wish, as proxy for the God Keiichi."_

"Any wish?" Belldandy asked.

_"Any wish that is allowable under the Rules that govern wishgranting,"_ the Lord confirmed.

For a moment, Belldandy had a fleeting glimpse of being a movie star, owning a corporation, winning the Gold Medal in the Olympics in Volleyball and a dozen Track and Field events, not to mention Soccer, Basketball, Softball...

But then she reached her heart, where it all really matters.

"I know what I want for my wish. I know it in the bottom of my heart. This is my true wish..."

"Then I freely decide to give my wish to him," she said, gesturing to Keiichi.

_"Wishes cannot be reassigned,"_ the Lord and Keiichi swiftly answered her. Belldandy felt a sinking feeling in her chest as once more her wish had not been deemed worthy. Which really confused her, because this time it had been heartfelt, as heartfelt as she could possibly make it.

"Okay, then I'm going to make _this_ wish! If I can't give him my wish, then I'm going to make a wish on his behalf! I want..snff..Keiichi to be able to experience _love_! No more of this fucked up, stupid bullshit about how the Gate of Judgment banned him from being able to share love with another being! I want that prohibition that was put on him...gone!"

"That can't be undone, Belldandy!" Keiichi wheezed in a gasping pained voice. "Nothing can undo what the Gate of Judgment has done! Besides, that's a whim borne of sympathy, not what's in your true heart..."

"Wanna bet?" Belldandy asked, staring at Keiichi and the Lord with deadly seriousness. I'm willing to bet my _life_ that He," she said, pointing at the Lord, "can undo any goddamned thing that your stupid Gate has done! And I bet that my wish does come from my true heart, because it _will _come true!"

"So here's my wish! I wish for Keiichi to be freed from any and all effects caused by the Gate of Judgment. And that means that he gets to experience the deepest love a God could ever experience! Not only with everyone that's important to him, and anyone he chooses...but also with the one Goddess in the universe that is most suited to love him back. I want it so he can learn to love again, and then continue to share a truly loving nature with anyone and anything he wants to!

"With all my heart I make this wish for him, because I want Keiichi to feel what it is like to have love in his life again!! Which...by the way...means that he gets his life _back_!"

Belldandy felt faint-headed for a moment as the blood rushed into her head...and then she noticed three lights emanating from the forehead of the Lord. He was no longer wearing the visage of an old man; His physical form now was that of a young man with long white-silver hair, dressed in a dreamcoat of a thousand universes. One light arced upwards through the roof...or rather, the hole in the roof that had been blasted by its fiery force. The second lash of light whipped towards Keiichi. And the third stream of light seemed to be aimed at _her_ head. She tried to dodge it, but the light followed her around the room. She felt a heated sensation in the middle of her forehead.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Did it really happen did it really happen did it really happen?

"Are you awake?"

"Belldandy, are you awake?"

She blinked her eyes open...and saw Keiichi's face. He was leaning over her, looking at her with tender concern.

"Quit breathin' on me! C'mon, get away!" she said, pushing against him, pushing his face away. What a way to wake up, with a guy staring right into your face!

The most productive artist of all...her anonymous random thoughts...chased her. Caught up with her. Reminded her about what happened...

Wet. Slurp. Wet.

Wet. Slurp. Wet.

"Furo, stop it!!" she giggled, recognizing the thick tongue of her pet Bengal Tiger as it slopped across the side of her face.

"Go on, stop it already!"

She could hear Keiichi giggling.

"What's so funny?!"

"Your face, stupid!" he said, and then he dissolved into more mirth.

"Well fine! Be that way. Get out! Both of you!" she shouted to God and tiger.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Grumbling, Belldandy padded down the shining wood floor of the temple to the bathroom. She knew that the smoothness of the temple's wooden floor wasn't due to waxing or any other wood treatment...it was the result of being washed twice a day for centuries by novice monks. She breathed a sigh of relief that _she_ wasn't required to clean it every day.

Once inside the bathroom, she looked in the mirror...

...and looked at a wreck of a girl.

Her brown hair was even more disheveled than usual, and her eyes were bloodshot. Her breath tasted horrible...it even smelled nearly as bad as Furo's. Grabbing a toothbrush, she slapped a slab of toothpaste on it and started brushing away.

"God, what a crazy dream I had last night!" she said to her reflection. "It was totally freaky...waaah!! All those disgusting things that happened..."

Standing in the mirror behind her was a tall young man in a black futuristic outfit. Belldandy was so startled, she spazzed for a moment...and her toothbrush went flying out of her hand.

"Keiichi, you _idiot_! How many times do I have to tell you not to come into the bathroom while I'm in it!" she screamed. Into the mirror. She spun on her heels to face him, grabbing the front of her pajama tops just in case he was trying to see anything.

"Oh, what's the use!" she sighed. She looked up at Keiichi...and something in his eyes made her almost want to cry. But Belldandy wasn't going to cry in front of him. Not in the bathroom, and certainly not in her pajamas.

"Where's my toothbrush?" she asked.

"It's over here," Keiichi said, walking towards the toilet.

"Now look what you made me do!" Belldandy shouted, almost horrified as Keiichi reached into the toilet and recovered her toothbrush.

"Do you want it?"

Belldandy slapped a hand against her head, just to make sure she wasn't feverish and having hallucinations.

"No...just, uh, just throw it away Keiichi!" she grumbled. "And make me a new one while you're at it."

A toothbrush instantly appeared in her hand.

"Your wish is my command," he said with a smile...or was it a smirk. Something about the way he said "wish" seemed to trigger a dizzying vertigo for a few seconds. Belldandy clutched the edges of the sink to steady herself.

"Hurry up!" Keiichi shouted, sticking his head through a crack in the doorway. Belldandy reached for the nearest towel and threw it at him. It landed atop his head, hanging there just like it was on a towel-hook.

"You've got your Regional finals tonight. Remember? You're playing Utsunomiya University in the Regional Championships!"

"WHAT!!" Belldandy sputtered. "That's impossible! They kicked our asses months ago! School's done, graduations are this weekend!"

"Well, you gave me a second chance, so I did a little weirdness with Time, so now you've got a second chance!" the head under the towel said.

"What are you saying Keiichi? Who gave who a second chance? I don't really know what you're talking about! _What day is it_?"

"It's March 11th," the towel said.

"Take that stupid towel off your head, you dummy!" Belldandy commanded.

"Why?"

"Because I'm going to do _this_!" Belldandy said in a bright voice. With a girlish mischief, she walked briskly up to him, stood on her tiptoes...and kissed him on the cheek.

"You're an angel, but don't expect me to _ever_ kiss you again!" she said sharply.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --


	119. Pt 119: Ripcord of Discord

**Part 119: Ripcord of Discord**

­SOMEWHERE IN THE TEMPLE:

This is where it gets a little sketchy.

Skuld had paid a rare visit to my office at N.I.T., and then had started babbling on about "destroying the OmniArc, fighting for love, giving everything up"...basically, an entire opera of meaningless nonsense. Not to mention that she grilled me about my feelings towards her oldest sister. _That_ was a voyage into well-charted districts of misery; her questions only served up feelings that I would have been more comfortable denying. For a moment, it was so painful that I wished there was some way to euthanize the part of my heart that could experience romantic love. That I still had feelings for Urd.

But Urd certainly didn't feel that same way that I did, a fact that she reminded me of on a daily basis. If I spent too much time looking at her at the dinner table, she'd spray me with pepper-sauce. Which was totally in character for her...but yet out of character for her as well. She _always_ insisted on sitting next to me at dinner. If she disliked me so much, why didn't she simply sit on another mat at the table? There were other times as well, most recently an episode earlier this week where I came home in a fit of exhaustion, and decided to relax myself by playing some music in my "Music Room". I was playing a symphonic melody on the keyboards, drifting into the left side of my mind, when I noticed that someone had slid the shoji door open partway. When I turned around, I noticed it was Urd. As soon as she noticed that I had noticed her, she got up and left without a word. Of course I wouldn't have heard her, because I had all the speakers off and was playing the music through my headphones.

But was that a tear in her eye?

The next day, _someone_ had cleaned my "Cevn's Studio" room.

My best guess was that Skuld's visit was her attempt to hammer down the fact that I still nurtured feelings for Urd...for reasons unknown. But beyond this, Skuld told me that it was possible to 'bridge' the emotional gap between Urd and myself. Her 'formula' to accomplish this seemed to a Goddess version of a quest, straight out of the quest-lore of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight or Journey to the West. Naturally, since it was Skuld, I was only 80 percent inclined to believe everything that she had described to me. During her visit to my office, I couldn't help but notice that her behavior bordered on irregular, even by Skuld standards. She seemed lacking in the usual skittish teenage tension that exuded from every dart-motion of her brown eyes, every word that slipped out of her mouth. I had this strange feeling that she wasn't herself. I was certain that she had visited me to gain some approval for something she did, but instead, she simply interviewed me, and then left me with a dilemma.

She said that all I had to do was go to sleep...and dream.

Needless to say, after _that_ visit, any chance of my being able to sleep tonight was completely thwarted. Skuld has witnessed to me an insane scenario to win Urd back; my anxieties were doing the rest. And what was this bit about having to "go to Hell"? As I laid down on my futon and tried for sleep, her words seemed to probe my mind like errant geese trying to find a pond to land in. And when sleep didn't come, I tried to activate my standby mode. Normally, standby mode would reduce my bio-mech functions to the minimal point of activity; whereupon sleep became a possibility. In its own way, my standby mode was like a 'sleeping medication'. A cybernetic sleep aid. So why was I fully awake, drawing a series of incredibly intricate patterns of geometries and curvatures on the tatami of my bedroom?

Skuld had said, "Your journey starts tonight and ends by sunrise tomorrow." It was nearing 3am, so if my journey was going to start, it'd better start soon...

It seemed that I was engaged in some kind of auto-concepted activity. Normally, the automata of vivacity required my systems to shift priorities on occasion. Basically, this meant that my cyborganic 'body' would redirect energy into running a complete self-diagnostic series. I would shut down all non-requisite functions to speed the process along. But instead of being rendered inert for the duration; I was busily sketching meaningless patterns on the floor. I felt a looming sense of worry; what if there was some kind of malfunction within the delicate instruments that served as my organic-cybernetic interface? What else could account for the randomness of my behavior in the middle of the night? Could Skuld, being Norn of the Future, have been attempting in her own indirect way to warn me about a possible breakdown in my engineered physical frame? I knew that she couldn't outright tell me about any threats from the Future...but she was known to 'hint' around when events rushed backwards to the Present. I'd seen her do it with Keiichi and her sisters enough times. Or was it something totally _alien_ that had taken possession of me, like an invasive data-forge biocyber virus?

Was I creating art in the middle of my bedroom floor?

A couple hours ago, when I finally acknowledged that I wasn't going to be able to sleep, I decided to take a glance into the Enigma Book, since I hadn't read from it for a while. Something feverishly sifted through my consciousness...and I started creating this unrecognizable chaos on my floor. Fortunately, Belldandy and I had an agreement about my room: she would allow me to clean up after myself. Belldandy, as housekeeper, would gladly clean any room in our temple house; she enjoyed cleaning the house, but we always had the option to ask her to skip our rooms during her weekly cleanings. I was glad, because if she had cleaned my room...and I was doing _this_...there'd be hell to pay for the mess I was making. Knowing Belldandy's temperament, I was quite certain that she would never get angry if she had to clean a messy room or a marked-up tatami. Just as certain as I was that Urd would certainly let me have it for wrecking a room that her younger sister had just cleaned. She'd berate me again and again and again. Urd seemed to enjoy fault-finding, especially when the fault was mine. And I was marking up the floor like a kid going to town on his room with a magic marker set.

Using an ink-stone and sumi-e brush, the diagram I was creating on the floor possessed a strange brew of Daoist calligraphy, Runic symbology, and Arabic geometry. But there were two patterns of painting: an ink-washed faded sequence of thin-grays; and bolder strokes of willowy slender marks and vigorous slashes. The bewildering profusion of designs on the floor were incoherent; they made about as much sense to me as a Jackson Pollack or Jean Spyropoulos painting would have made to a 6th-century Byzantine mosaicist.

But obviously, there _was_ a pattern emerging from my arthouse madness. Standing in my doorway, Banpei and Sigil were observing my 'project' with keen interest. One of the cats tried to walk into my room; Banpei blocked her path with a shuffle of his mechanical 'foot' appendages and then Sigil leaned down and picked her up.

How nice of them to perform 'guard duty' while I trashed my room with ink.

To the accompaniment of feline purring, I continued to craft whatever I was drawing on the floor, staining the tatami with feverish brush-strokes.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

­HILD'S BLACK PALACE, THE SCRIPTORIUM:

Sygyn knew that she'd been reading the Ultimate Demon Book far too long when the cursive Demonic glyphs on the weathered pages started turning red on their lower edges. Even though her stomach was growling, she had remained in Hild's Library, wanting to reap _all_ of the knowledge inside of the antebellum arcane-mythed text that was resting in her lap. Now, her eyes were rebelling against her ambitions. In a manner that reminded her of study sessions at home where she had spent too much time with her nose in the English textbook, the 'letters' on the pages of the Demonic tome began to dance against each other. Either that, or she had absorbed so much Demonic wisdom, lore and abstruse formulae that it was possible that her mind was beginning to peel into fatigue. Things were quickly becoming a hypnotic blur.

Yes, this book about the Ultimate Demon was hypnotic!

She motioned with her hand to raise the illumination level of the floating chamber-chandelier suspended above her chair. Demonic libraries often were cloaked in darkness, so that the activity of reading could be more enjoyable. But Sygyn surmised that additional light might improve her reading. Perhaps something about her mortal-half might be causing her to struggle with the poor lighting. But she was disappointed in her progress. Two days...and she was only half-way through the book!

As the book-walled chamber brightened to a fade-brown yellow glow, Sygyn squinted her eyes as a shadow-form was suddenly revealed in the corner of the library. She hadn't noticed anyone else entering the library since she had arrived! Could it be Falcyn? Or even one of her Goddess cousins?

"Who's there?!" she thoughtcast as the figure continued to hover nearby. She repeated her thoughtcast with a little more emphatic urgency...and then she heard a response.

A _voice_.

A voice?!

Nobody uses voices here in Vanagdrasil! Vocalization as a communication technique in Vanagdrasil was the equivalent of tapping on stones to convey messages when there were 1TBHz laptops at hand nearby. In other words, it was ridiculously, completely ineffective. All of the Demons here communicated by thoughtcasting, because voices were too archaic and insufficient to communicate Divine expressions. Which left Sygyn with a bizarre question: who could possibly be replying to her in a spoken voice?

"Hello?" the voice replied against her silence.

In Japanese.

"Wh..what's this?" Sygyn gasped privately, replaying the words in her mind. Her first thought was that someone was spying on her. Swiftly, she slapped shut the large tome in her lap, set it down in the chair, and then floated towards the form. If this 'thing' had been silently observing her, it was going to be in major trouble! Being a Demoness in her HomeRealm, Sygyn knew that she needed to take the offensive and find out who this stranger was. This wasn't some tame kind of place, like Tokyo or Chiba. Vanagdrasil was a toccata of mischief, mayhem, cunning and competing.

As she neared the floating figure, she could make out a shadow-outline and a face...the face of a man that she had never seen before! He had long hair, light brown on top and fading darker as it fell past his shoulders, in an Earthrealm style that was probably 20 years old. To her surprise, he _wasn't_ Japanese...he looked American or European. Which didn't change the fact that his style was more appropriate to the first decade of the 21st century rather than her own age. His clothes were old too; she judged that they were from 2005 or so.

What in the rages is going on here? This was totally uncool!

"Who are you?! Don't you realize that you're bothering me! Spying on someone while she's reading is extremely lame! Not to mention rude!" she spoke loudly...in Japanese...just to be sure. This stranger had interrupted her reading! Sygyn was already irritated by the possibility of being spied upon, but now someone was playing a prank on her, by sending a sprite-form in the mimesis of an Earthrealm mortal.

"Answer me, or I'll fire off on you! I'm here as one of Hild's special guests! And I'm almost certain that _she_ wouldn't appreciate it if my studies were disturbed!" she shouted, badgering the threat.

Whoops.

Sygyn realized too late that she had unleashed a blast of Demonic Pyre-lash energy _before_ her words of warning to the intruder. Bad form at home, liable to get her chewed out by Mom...but not so in Vanagdrasil. With all the subterfuge going on here, it was best to err on the side of caution. So, with the sharp instincts of a true Demoness, she had burnt whatever it was that had been spying on her to a crisp!

Oh well, it was no big deal.

But as the flare-cloud dissipated, she was startled to see that the lash of Demonic energy didn't instantly disintegrate the person who was now floating in front of her. It was clearly a person, as she could sense a discernable emotional aura raimenting the Soul of whoever it was. Amazed that he had survived her discharge of Demonic energy unscathed, she was greeted with another shock when she scanned his molecular and TNA structure.

He was a full-on _cyborg_!

"My name is Cevn...and you are?"

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

So this is Hell.

Not the 'hell' that I imagined, or even the 'hell' that I had experienced in the streets. Shooting heroin and dropping mescaline had never produced such a broad sweep of nightmarish visions as those that seemed coily-shaded within every cm of this place. An immense palace of colorless black, with grotesqueries and horror-show angularities that were swollen with palpable unease. If HP Lovecraft had been born as a spider and not a human being, this place may have resembled the web he would have woven.

One moment, I had been in my room, attended by Banpei and Sigil while all the others slept. And unexpectedly, a light swallowed me...and now I was here. A tingling inside of my memories warned me that this wasn't the place where the nice Divines played. This place was the cosmic equivalent of being 'on the wrong side of the tracks'.

Was I asleep? Skuld had said that I would dream...and that my 'battles' would be in my dreams. But this place looked as real as anything I'd ever experienced. Just to be sure, I pinched my face...and my exosensors registered the pressure and converted it to a pain-impulse.

So I _was_ awake.

A bat-like creature passed by me, or rather, _through_ me. It was ethereal and translucent in form, and as I followed its laboring flight, I quickly noticed that I was inside of the loft of some kind of library, or vaulted scriptorium. Floating pillars that glowed rust-darkly supported a cupola dome-shaped 'roof-that-wasn't-a-roof'. Overhead made about as much sense as a 3D visual trick-play illustration. All around me were shelves of books, suspended in mid-air like wall-scrolls hanging on invisible threads. Each stack or wall of books smelled of death and evil; the eerie yellowish illumination of the interior of the library was obscured by floating fogs of dust or smoke. The sum effect of the environs were more appropriate to the crypt, rather than of the study. Ghost forms floated around me in semi-translucent sworls, skullish and bizarre.

There was a young girl in front of me as well, the sole living occupant of this place. My visual sensors could sense a thermal pattern consistent with that of a human being. Or a Goddess. Or even a Demoness. She certainly _looked_ human; an angular waifish face on a small frame, perhaps appearing to be in her tween years. But she also looked otherworldly as well; her hair was unnaturally colored, assuming a blood-rouge tone in the dank interior of the adytum-study.

Somehow, through the windows that crept into ribbed patterns on the ceiling, I could make out a sky of dark red space, with fires of clouds passing by like boiling bright bloodflows.

This has to be Vanagdrasil.

The girl seemed to be just as shocked by my presence here as I was. Drawing closer to her, I noticed that her high cheekbones made her face seem almost pixiesh and mischievous. But her mien was anything but that at the moment. Two long ponytails floating out from the back of her head, writhing through the air. Her hair was maroon, pink, purple and red; the colors were unnatural and yet pleasing. But her eyes were cadmium-red, just like Mara's.

In fact, she seemed to resemble Mara in a lot of ways!

Her temper was like Mara's as well. She floated towards me, and then suddenly raised her hands...and I felt a burning sensation all over my frame, even before she balled up a orange-white bead of lancing energy and launched it at me.

I should have been melted. Or at least my exosensory net should have been utterly slagged. When the heat cleared, I looked at my hand, clearly expecting to see nothing more than lumps of metal. But I was intact, undamaged! I realized that if I had been furnaced by the typical nova-temperature energy blast of a Demon, I wouldn't be seeing anything.

And I certainly wouldn't be thinking these types of thoughts.

The girl was clearly bewildered now, darting her head from side-to-side, possibly looking for possible routes of escape. Despite her aggressiveness, I sensed that she didn't mean me any harm. She was simply panicked; she obviously perceived _me_ as the threat. Just as I was telling myself that I had to calm her down...for some unknown reason...her confusion wheeled me back in time to other memories. I pictured the bewildered reaction of another Divine being. Belldandy's Father, Odeyn, had tried to fry me a while back. I couldn't remember the circumstances that led him to attack me with any clarity, but I did recall that I was trying to do something helpful, and instead was perceived as a threat. Or was that the case? Why was Odeyn, of all people, appearing in the eye of my memories? I didn't remember even meeting him. When he had come with the ill-fated omiai 'party' from Yggdrasil, I had been hiding under a blanket, terrified out of my skull because Peorth had 'sexually' attacked me. I learned everything about that visit second-hand, through an excited Keiichi who was glad to be rid of his wheel-chair.

Knowing not what I should do to placate the situation, I offered her my name...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Where's our Mother?" Ulfryn whined. "I'm totally bored! I want to _do_ something!

"I don't know!" Pryzm answered snappily, her voice coated with irritation. "You know how Hild is! She's very busy, being a Demoness Queen! Doing stuff! Important stuff! Otherwise, she'd be here with us, right?"

The two girls were sitting in their bedroom, legs dangling over their beds. The pall of being left unattended had gotten to them several hours ago, so they had made their beds float in the air, and then started colliding them like go-carts. After a few minutes of crashing into each other, Pryzm and Ulfryn's room was almost unrecognizable. Pillow feathers and wood splinters were everywhere, blanketing floor, furniture and both girls.

Pryzm hoped that her Mother wouldn't mind a little horseplay. Rather, she _assumed_ that Hild wouldn't take heed of her two daughters goofing off.

"You know what seems weird? I can almost convince myself that I can recall being in Yggdrasil once or twice," Ulfryn said, switching from girlish ennui to girlish curiosity. "I can remember seeing blue Swarp Hypernalities or whatever they're called. But that's not possible, is it? Is it?! Have we ever been to Yggdrasil, Pryzm?"

"Of course not, you dweeb! But...yeah, I know what you mean, sis!" Pryzm said. "Even though _this_ is our home, I can see Yggdrasil in my mind too! Vividly, as if I had been there! Do you think that Mom could have used some part of her Black Palace to create a fake Yggdrasil, just to confuse us?"

"That would be soooo stupid!" Ulfryn answered. "There's no need for her to do that, you ditz! Why create some stupid copy of Yggdrasil when we have the run of Mom's entire Black Palace!"

"We do? Then how come I can't remember what her lava springs look like?" Pryzm argued. "I distinctly remember Mom talking about them during dinner a couple nights back. She said that she had one of coolest lava springs this side of the Nilhorn! When I think of them, I can almost smell the rich, steely aroma of sulfur as we walked by them on the way to somewhere. But I can't be certain that I ever went _into_ them."

"What do you mean, you can't remember going into them? You're a _Demoness_, Pryzm! Demonesses like you and me _love_ soaking in magma-enriched lava ponds! You gotta be really tired or something...because you're forgetting your Demonic heritage. Hello?! Is there anything in here?" she said, knocking on Pryzm's head with a faux door-rapping motion, earning a scowl from her sister.

"Mom's a Demon Queen! Which means that we could get in a lot of trouble if we started acting like anything else besides her kids. Canya imagine how much trouble we'd get in if we started acting like Goddesses?" Ulfryn added, slyly.

"She'd beat our asses for that, Ulfryn!" Pryzm answered with a weary sigh. Slowly, she made her bed descend until it rested on the floor.

"We should clean this mess up before Mom finds out. Aunt Mara was just here...and she might tell on us!"

"That Aunt Mara's a stupid bitch! That's totally her style. She'll smile in your face, and then stab you in the back when you're not looking! Knowing our Aunt, she's probably looking for Mom right this minute! And once she finds Mom, she'll exaggerate! She might tell Mom that we _destroyed_ our room or something!" Ulfryn noted.

"Yeah! And I get the feeling she was trying to swipe the dolls that Mom gave us! Y'know, maybe _we_ should tell on _her_!" Pryzm schemed. Ulfryn giggled at the idea, amused by the possibility of having some leverage against their Aunt.

Hearing her own words, Pryzm's face drew taut with urgency. If Mom came in and found their room this messy, they might get grounded or something! Nodding her head, she quickly encanted a Room Restore Curse and began to 'sweep' the debris covering the room.

"Hey! We better get our room cleaned before Mom shows up!" Pryzm said anxiously. "Especially since she gave us such a cool room to stay in!"

"Yeah! Could you even wish for anything more mordant? This place is so awesome!" Ulfryn agreed, quickly devoting herself to her magical cleaning chores.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Okay, I'm gonna ask you again!" Sygyn demanded in a louder-than-usual voice. "Why are you here, and who are you?"

"Look, my name is Cevn, and I don't know how I got here. But I do know that I'm here because I've got to destroy the universe."

This newcomer was more than just a little suspicious. For one thing, he was a cyborg. For another thing, he was floating in the air as easily as a Demon or Demoness would. There were no tell-tale signs of gravitational lensing which would indicate that he was using some kind of anti-grav technology. He looked like he was in his mid-to late 20s, and he looked too _human_ to be a machine. There was no hint of arcanical or alchemical spellworks.

"That doesn't make any sense!" Sygyn opined. Humoring him with a hint of sarcasm, she asked, "If you're supposed to do something as simple as destroy a universe, why would you come to a _library_ to do it?"

Cevn shrugged his shoulders.

"Waitaminute! Why am I even asking you these questions? You're just a cyborg! You certain don't have any means of destroying a universe anyway. You don't have anywhere even near that kind of firepower! Neither do I, for that matter...and I'm a Demoness! Besides that, you can't read the Demon's Language, which happens to be the language most of these books are written in."

"As in that book you were just reading?" Cevn asked, gesturing at the large, thick tome that Sygyn had left on her reading chair. Sygyn eyed him warily, suspecting some form of deceit.

"Could you tell me why you are reading a book about the Ultimate Demon, Sygyn? Do you know that the Ultimate Demon is a force that is much worse than what this book describes? What if the Ultimate Demon is actually far more uncontrollable...and dangerous to _everyone_, Demons and Gods? And how would you answer me if I claimed that the Ultimate Demon wants to destroy the entire OmniArc, including you and all the other Demons?"

Sygyn wanted to burn him with another blast of Demonic Energy...but then she paused short of acting impulsively. Her mouth slowly pursed open in astonishment as it dawned on her that the human-machine floating in front of her had actually _read_ the title of the book she'd been reading. He had correctly identified the title of the book! She was almost certain that no one had read the book before, except maybe for Hild. Books like this didn't just show up in public libraries. Obviously, "Cyborg Guy" wasn't supposed to know about such things! The Ultimate Demon was classified, restricted knowledge. But he was putting up a good front, trying to act all smart and that.

"What are you talking about? Who _are_ you?" Sygyn challenged him. This whole encounter was impossible! As she looked this 'Cevn' over, her curiosity deepened. This guy had Earthrealm mortal written all over him, which was quite out-of-place with his physical structure. And now he was spouting blasphemous riddles about how the Ultimate Demon would turn on the Demons! Here he was...a robot clothed in Earthrealm fashions that went out of style before she was even born. He was even dressed a little sloppily as well. He kept rambling on about the Ultimate Demon every time she asked him a question. She still couldn't figure out what he was doing in Vanagdrasil. Or even _how_ he had gotten to Vanagdrasil. If he would have 'phased in' the library using any means of teleportation, her Demoness senses would have immediately alerted her. And what were the odds of one of Vang Nieflgard Aumatrices depositing him right _here_, in Hild's Library?

How could he have possibly even gotten access to an Aumatrix in the first place? Last time she looked, there were no Aumatrices on the Earthrealm. Probably wouldn't ever be. And humanioid cyborgs usually didn't wander around Yggdrasil or Vanagdrasil unnoticed for too long. Sygyn remembered all the arrangements she had to make just to come to Vanagdrasil...and she was a Demoness!

Beyond this was another matter of inexplication. This 'Cevn' was an extremely sophisticated cyborganic flesh-mecha, far beyond the technological capabilities of any nation on the Earthrealm. Just the necessary computer and bio-engineering designs to render a functional brain-machine cybernetic interface, that was at least several centuries beyond current Earthrealm science. Her cousin or Aunt could have designed him with relative ease, but Sygyn doubted that Pryzm or Aunt Skuld would have done such a thing. She seemed to recall that the Rules that bound both the Demons and Gods completely forbade any Divine being from converting biological lifeforms to mechanical ones, and vice versa. Assuming that he wasn't an Earthrealm cyborg brought up other possibilities. Could this be a prank by Aunt Skuld? Or even Mom? Could Mom be using this as a ruse to try and get her to leave the library, so she'd have to hang out with her brother and cousins a little bit? Or could he be from the Earthrealm's future, circa 2580 CE or so? He could even be some kind of creation of Queen Hild's, a security system designed to make sure that she didn't steal any books!

"How do you know all this?" Sygyn demanded, accepting the fact that she would have to be analytical in order to determine who or what he was.

"Because I fought the Ultimate Demon. He tried to kill me, and then he tried to kill everyone I loved. I had to give up someone who was very special to me, so that he could be exiled to a place where he could no longer attempt to destroy _all_ other life in the Everything?"

"The _Everything_? You mean the OmniArc!" Sygyn corrected him, still uncertain if this new person was feeding her a bowlful of lies.

"No way! Nobody can fight the Ultimate Demon, except for the Dark Lord and the God's Lord! Especially not you! It says so in this book! And yet, you claim to have taken him on in some kind of battle? You're a _robot_! An artificial being."

"I'm totally confused," Cevn acknowledged, not even trying to sound sure of himself.

"This is great!" Sygyn shouted, tight-fisted, frustrated beyond her means. "First you intrude on me. Then you come off like you actually have some knowledge about the Ultimate Demon. Now, you're saying that you're confused! Do you even know where you are?"

"Vanagdrasil. But I don't know _where_ in Vanagdrasil I am."

"You either gotta be kidding, or you're a total idiot! You're in the Black Palace of Hild, the First-Most of the Demon Queens!"

"Shit!" the man swore, his vehemence surprising Sygyn. Up to this point, he had been polite in the manner of certain Earthrealm mortals. His demeanor was suddenly agitated. "How am I supposed to destroy the universe from _here_?"

"That's what I've been telling you, you idiot! I don't know where you get such weird ideas, because they don't make sense!" Sygyn snapped back sharply. But something about what he said seemed to hang onto her for a second. He had said _the_ universe, not 'a' universe! Obviously, he was suffering from some kind of dementia or lunacy. Which meant that he might be dangerous. Especially since he was a cyborg.

Sygyn stroked one of her long ponytails, wrapping it around her wrist and then unraveling it; a sign that she was unnerved. This guy had actually withered her confidence! It was bad enough that he interrupted her privacy...now, he was weaving confusion in her mind.

"I'm a _Demoness_! I'm not going to let him trick me towards being all confused!" she pledged to herself under her breath.

"Huh?"

Obviously, his range of hearing far exceeded that of a normal human's.

"Okay, let's say for the moment that you're telling me the truth," she reasoned, deciding to try and change tact. By taking the offensive, she should be able to confuse _him_. After all, he was just a human brain inside of a machine.

"So how do you, whatever you are, know about the Ultimate Demon? Isn't the Ultimate Demon sorta an ultimate secret?" she asked. "I mean...I read a lot of books whenever I visit Vanagdrasil; and I've never seen a book like this one! You have to be a Demon to even hear about the Ultimate Demon. And you're certainly no Demon! Besides all that, I don't believe you when you say that the Ultimate Demon would turn on us! How could I believe something like that, when even _our_ Demonic lore doesn't mention such a thing?"

"He did...and he'll do so again. He is not an 'Ultimate Demon', at least in the sense you Demons take him to be. You give him some kind of assignation of qualities that would be marvelous and exemplary in a Demon, similar to those of your Dark Lord. But there's nothing about him that's worthy of any glorification. He is not Demonic, he is not Evil, he's not even close to any of that. The best way I can describe him is to say that he's a sentient force of pure selfishness. An ego so paramountly narcissistic and self-obsessed, he literally wants to destroy every other intelligent life-form, living or dead. His goal is to destroy Life itself. Which would leave him _being_ the OmniArc."

"If my Mom was here, she'd say that you're full of shit!" Sygyn exclaimed angrily, completely disappointed in his improbable explanation. It went against everything she had read in the Ultimate Demon Book! It went against everything she'd been taught in Prime and SecondTier Inculcation in Vanagdrasil! Her simmering resentment towards being interrupted in her studies almost boiled over when Cevn reiterated that that Ultimate Demon would destroy all the Demons if given the chance.

Like a broken CD player, he kept saying the same things. And if that wasn't enough, when she demanded that he show her a passage or two in the book which discussed his 'claims' about the Ultimate Demon, he grabbed a nearby candelabra, brought it over near the book...and accidentally set it on fire! Sygyn was so horrified and angry, she had to bite her lip to keep from killing him. She hadn't finished reading the book yet, and he had gone clumsy and destroyed it!

Or _was_ it an accident?

When the book reappeared after being burnt to a crisp, Sygyn heaved a deep sigh of relief. Of course, it couldn't be destroyed. Important Demonic books are indestructible, because they are virtual-linked with the Vanagdrasil Mnoexic computer network. They are 'expressions' of the Mnoex; the only way to destroy them would be to erase part or all of the Vanagdrasil Mnoexic Network. Which was impossible, of course.

This was all the proof she needed.

"See!! The book is telling the truth, not you! It had an Everlast Curse on it, which means that it can't be destroyed, because it's the _truth_!" she sarcastically noted, as if she was lecturing an infant.

"Everything I said...is described in that book," Cevn said levelly. "Finish it, if you don't believe me."

The frankness of his voice was disconcerting to Sygyn. She wanted to ignore him and get back to her reading. After all, she had been enjoying absolute unperturbed peace and quiet before he came. And she knew how valuable peace and quiet were in the Realm of Vanagdrasil. Even worse, he seemed to be faulting her for not finishing the Ultimate Demon Book...when _he_ had interrupted her in the first place!

"It isn't _my_ fault that I haven't finished this book! _Someone_, who is a jerk, interrupted me," Sygyn noted, her voice laced with sarcasm and disgruntlement. "Besides, I read most of that book. Er, well...maybe _half_ of it. And it never mentioned anything about any Ultimate Demon trying to kill the Dark Lord or the Demons. If you hadn't have shown up to interrupt me."

"That's because you didn't read to the end of the book, Sygyn," he said, looking thoughtful. Sygyn could take any more; with a whip-fast motion, she slapped him on the face.

"You asshole! How dare you intrude upon me, and then play stupid games with me!" she shouted after the slap. "Of course I didn't finish the book!"

Cevn shook his head jerkily, possibly groggy from the force of her slap. He looked at her with his light-blue eyes.

"No one has."

"No one has _what_?

"No one has read that book. No one has ever finished reading it. Not even the one who wrote that book."

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Ulfryn was dreaming in the least likely of places. In her dreams, she was suspended in mid-air over something called a "meadow"; a placid wind-flown area that was visually uninteresting, punctuated with various shades of green and a monotonous pale blue sky overhead. The colors were jarring, unlike normal colors like those in Vanagdrasil. It was sickeningly similar to the M-Class planets that some mortal species lived on.

In other words, the dreamscape was totally unappealing. In her dream, she saw phantom images of two children sitting against the base of a shade tree, on opposite sides of the trunk. Leaves rattled around them as the breeze wove through the bowers, creating an orchestra of clitter-sounds.

The girl seemed to be several years older than she was. She had dark brown hair with sandy streaks, piled up in back in a pony-tail. Two braids of hair peeked out from under her angular bangs, resting just in front of her ears.

The boy had black hair, cut short in back and shaggy in front. He was tall and slender, and also appeared to be 14 or 15 years old. His hair seemed to be swept back, he kept having to brush his bangs out of his eyes, as if he was accustomed to standing against the wind.

"These two hold the means for us to find our Mother. And besides that, they're our cousins!" she overheard the girl say.

"How do you know that for sure, Keleste?"

"Look at them, Keiyasu!" the girl with the brown-hair answered. "Who do they look like?"

"I know, I know," the boy answered. "You keep telling me that they look like our Aunt! But I'm not so certain. Neither one of us is an expert in using this Soul Mirror thingamajig! So they could be anyone, could they?"

"Just try and reach a little further, brother!" the girl instructed the boy. The boy closed his eyes, appearing meditative for a moment. Blinking his eyes open, he nodded to the girl.

"Bingo, Keiyasu!" If their hair was straight black instead of brown-red and weird-pink, they'd look just like her! Look at their eyes."

"This is totally unexpected. If they're Goddesses, then what're they doing in _Vanagdrasil_?"

"That _is_ very odd, isn't it?" the girl said. "They're _supposed_ to be Goddesses...but I can clearly make out what seems like _red_ markings on their foreheads."

"What do you mean, red markings, Keleste!"

"I know what I saw! Red markings. Like Demonesses, not Goddesses!" the girl shouted, her voice heavy with conviction.

"If that's so...and they're the ones...then we can't wait any longer, can we?"

"Absolutely not! We're gonna have to risk it."

"Agreed!"

Ulfryn looked at her sister, wishing that Pryzm could see the 'ghosties' like she. The 'ghosties' seemed to be on a bent to insult her by saying she was a Goddess. More confusing was this talk of their Mother. Didn't everyone know who their Mom was? Yet, when she thought of Hild, Ulfryn felt a tear tracing down her check, very unbecoming for a Demoness. The girl almost looked severe in her bearing, like one of those samurai/traditional girl types who played the secondary or third love interest in a 'harem' anime. Before the two faded, she studied the boy closely...and could faintly make out that his God forehead marking seals were of a type she'd never seen before.

"Since when did the markings of _Gods_ mean anything to me? These 'ghosties' are driving me mental!" she thought uneasily.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

­YGGDRASIL MULTIVERSE, IN ORBIT AROUND AN AQUASUN:

Over the past 150,000 years, Keleste had been driven by only one ambition. She and Keiyasu, her fraternal twin brother, had been navigating a journey of assumptions for almost their entire lives. She felt like she'd been on an ocean of inquiry, without a compass to guide her towards asking the 'right' questions. Philosophically, the quandary she and her brother faced every moment of their lives was much deeper than the simple question, "where do I come from?" Emotionally, it touched the deepest parts of their hearts. And there always seemed to be no answer, even when the truth seemed to be suspended just out of their reach.

In Yggdrasil, twins were almost unheard of...unless they both were half-Demoness/half-Goddess. There had been a few of those in all of the recorded history of Yggdrasil. But half-Divine, half-mortal twins were even more improbable. There wasn't any record of such beings to be found in the Ygg Mainframe.

But there they were.

The distinction between she and her brother...and the other God and Goddess children...ran much deeper than the fact that they were twins. For Keleste and Keiyasu were the _only_ children of Yggdrasil who didn't have parents.

Not even the Almighty could explain how they came to be. When a God and a Goddess decide to create offspring, the Almighty performs an intermediary function to synergize and harmonize the two's Souls, which allowed for the new God or Goddess would be 'birthed' into Yggdrasil. In effect, this was to ensure that He was the Father of all the Gods and Goddesses in His Realm. But His participation was to introduce a certain element of Love into the relationship between parent and child, since the idea of 'family' wasn't defined by the same parameters that kinship fitness fulfilled in mortal, sentient species. As a consequence of this, every being that was born in Yggdrasil was 'fathered' by Kami-sama...which was why they regarded him with so much respect, devotion and love. In a very tangible sense, He was their 'third' parent.

Yet, when she and her brother reached the age where they could gain an audience with the Lord, Kami-sama admitted that He didn't recall _their_ birthing process. By that time, she and her brother were almost certain that the Yggdrasil Mainframe computer didn't have _any_ records of their birth either. Even after exhaustive searching with the assistance of the most experienced Sysops and Debuggers, nobody could explain how the foolproof Ygg Mainframe network lacked information on her and her brother's TNA. With all of its failsafes, how could the computer possibly 'miss' the record of their birth. In a way, Keleste and Keiyasu were 'deux non cognito' as far as Yggdrasil was concerned.

And as everyone knows, if it doesn't have a record in the Mainframe, it never existed.

Because of their unusual circumstances, the twins were the sole orphans of the Realm of the Gods. Despite there being no way of proving for certain that they had been born, Kami-sama had willingly loved them as one of His own, committing their care and upbringing to two Senior Goddesses, Skuld and Peorth. Skuld was Norn of the Future, and Peorth was a Goddess of the Rune, in charge of certain arcane aspects of Eternity. Peorth worked in various Helper Offices and was a top Sysop as well; minor responsibilities for a Goddess who was charged with the care of the most chaotic, unpredictable of the Runes. Skuld was a genius at building mechas and designing new and better technologies; her thirst for invention a rarity in a place where the pinnacles of science and magic had been attained millennia ago. Kami-sama had chosen their foster parents well, although Keleste could sometimes sense her brother's longing for a father-figure in his life. Over the first several thousand years of being under the loving care of Skuld and Peorth, Keleste and Keiyasu grew to love their foster-parents. In their hearts, the two Goddesses were esteemed very preciously; Skuld and Peorth were every bit as loving as they imagined a real mother to be. But at the same time, they both sensed that something was terribly amiss.

When she and Keiyasu celebrated their Fifth Decamillennia birthdays, the Proctors summoned them into the Ethiopsylogic Clinic for what seemed to be a routine consultation. But instead of giving them a checkup, the sage Proctors informed Keleste and Keiyasu that their physical manifestations had trace elements of an extinct species of mortals. The mortal species had an identifiable DNA signature, which could be cross-referenced in the Ygg Mainframe. The Proctors revealed that the mortal 'mote' in their beings matched a species that had formerly inhabited a planet in Sector A-Epsi-2378-Durgea-Thon-4114, in a particular Galaxy, in a particular Universe, in such-and-such quadrant of the Multiverse.

Something _was_ terribly amiss!

It came as an absolute shock when the twins learned of their unique heritage. Since their birth, they had assumed that they were fully Divine. 'Aunt' Skuld later explained that the Almighty had personally taken an interest in their situation, and had directed the Proctors to bear silence about their mixed background until He considered she and Keiyasu of an age mature enough to handle the disclosure. Why He decided that their 50,000-year 'birthday' was the appropriate age of 'maturity', Keleste would never know. Farbeit for her to second-guess the Almighty.

Given this new information, the twins naturally shifted their efforts to bear on discovering their parents. Despite the mutual affection between the twins and their foster-mothers, Skuld and Peorth always encouraged them to try and find their real parents. Obviously, since their mortal parent was long-ago dead, Keleste and Keiyasu altered their hypotheses and earnestly searched for their Divine parent. For the next 100,000 years, she and her brother had attempted every know means of trying to discover who their Mother was. Since the Yggdrasil Mainframe Network had no record of their 'birth', nor did it have any genealogical information about their parents, either mortal or Divine...everything was guesswork. But she and Keiyasu could agree on one certainty:

_Their Mother was a Goddess._

Neither of them could fully understand why they intuited that the Divinity in their heritage was inherited from their Mother's side, but they both knew with absolute certainty that their Mother was a Goddess. Whenever Keleste or Keiyasu thought about their Mother, the glowing presence of an imagined Goddess would herald their hearts.

Which meant that their father...was long consigned to the Reaper.

Thus, when they reached their Tenth Decamillennia birthday celebration, Keleste and her brother decided to pay a visit to the planet that the Proctors had revealed to be the homeworld of their father, so that they could homage their respects to him. It was a sad, heavy-hearted journey, filled with longing, regrets, a sense of tragedy, and the fear of encounter.

When they arrived at the planet...formally known as "Earth"...they found a world that was overrun with vast jungles and deserts, with hardly any physical indication that a sentient species had ever populated it. The only evidence was a few widely scattered metal-skeletal ruins, mostly submerged by desert and ice oceans. The tell-tales of an extinct mortal species were everywhere: the atmosphere was trace irradiated with a complex mixture of decaying artificial elements; the genomes of all the biospheric species had been severely constricted over 140 millennia ago, indicative of the mass extinction of millions of fauna and flora species; the rate of genetic mutation in the present biosphere was many times greater than expected; the atmospheric dynamics were far more unstable than the normative range for a planet whose orbit fell within the 'lifebelt' radius of a G-type star.

Typical of a sentient mortal race that failed to achieve the Next Level.

Their hearts were knitted tight with a weary melancholy as they weighed the loss. Not only was their father dead...but his _entire species_ was extinct. In the unending march of Time, entire races of sentient beings had risen and fallen with relative anonymity; as Gods, they were witnesses to all the cycles of civilization; be it tragic, comic or noble. Yet, such ceasings had never held such a personal impact as this one. Keleste and Keiyasu's only recourse to 'remember' the existence of their father's mortal species was to peruse the record of their existence, carefully maintained as data storage in the Yggdrasil Mainframe. There, they observed while...with cold precision...the Ygg Mainframe took them on a journey through the history of their father's mortal civilization, from their first efforts at fire-starting and agriculture...to their final ruination, brought on by a massive proliferation of nuclear conflagrations.

Keleste and Keiyasu had spent a portion of a year...a Divine 'year'...on the wild planet, amidst its swirling storms and climatic extremes, crafting a suitable monument to the Father they would never meet.

Tragically, their Father's world had run out of time.

Heartbreaking as this funereal realization was, it softly created another window for them. A window that blossomed with hope, with insight and ambition. If their Father was dead, it was always possible that their Goddess Mother could still be alive! Kami-sama Himself encouraged the twins to pursue the possibility that they could find their Mom somewhere amongst the vastness that was the Ygg Multiverse.

And then, just a few months ago, she and Keiyasu started having the visions.

It was the craziest thing, Keleste first thought, when she initially discovered a sense-impression of the presence of two young girls in her dreams. It took her several months before she dared broach the subject of the 'night visitors' to her twin brother. But much to her shock, Keiyasu readily confirmed that _he_ had seen the two girls in his dreams as well! The ley apparitions of the two girls 'visited' them with increasing frequency. This was very confusing, because there was no deliberate pattern to their appearances

Several days ago, Keleste sat back-against-back with him on the surface of a CloudPlanet giant orbiting an AquaSun, and asked him to sketch out a holographic image of what he thought his 'dream girls' looked like, while she did the same. Naturally, he made a joke of it, causing her to blush when he mentioned something about drawing Goddesses in skimpy bathing suits. But this was serious! After a few minutes of sibling bant and protest, they got to work on their sketches. A short time later, Keiyasu elbowed her lightly in the back, indicating that he was ready to exchange renditions. They switched sketch-pads and holograms...and Keleste was riveted with shock as she looked at Keiyasu's rendering of his 'dream visitor' girls.

They looked exactly the same as hers!

That day, she realized that she was bound to Keiyasu by more than a mutual parentage. The two girls of her dreams...seemed to be _reaching_ towards her. Striving to reach her and her brother.

How were they all interconnected?

The warm, healing glow of the water-sun 140 million kilometers away had seemed to sooth her tensions that day. Only in Yggdrasil could a sphere of water serve as a solar object, while _not_ creating the harsh glow and radiation of a hydrogen-fusion stellar sphere. Since they were floating on the surface of a CloudPlanet, Keiyasu suggested that they take a break and indulge themselves in some Planet Diving. Keleste couldn't agree more; a moment later, she was diving through the mantle of the CloudPlanet. Everything about this place was perfect, except for one thing.

She didn't have a Mother.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

­THE NILHORN, VANAGDRASIL LOGORINTH:

"Oh NO! We're too late!" Keleste shouted, as the last vestiges of Pryzm and Ulfryn's Goddess forehead markings turned red. She hovered over one, and then the other sleeping girl, just to confirm her observations. To confirm her beliefs. After all this time, and all the effort it had taken just to get here...they had come face-to-face with a bitter, unexpected result. Both she and her brother knew that something very unusual had brought these two to Vanagdrasil. For it had to be the Demon's Realm; a place where no God could travel. The two Goddess-girl's unexpected departure from Yggdrasil had forced she and her brother to speed up their timetable; they couldn't waste any time dawdling over plans for First Contact. No chances to be wasted on creating sim-scenarios to try out. Instead, they had to risk everything and come here unprepared.

"We _can't_ be too late, Keleste! This means they've turned completely into Demonesses! How can something turn Goddesses into Demonesses? It's impossible!" her brother cried in angry anguish. Keiyasu swept his hand through his hair, and then punched a fist out at the air, which caused him to spin in mid-air several times like a gymnast. Her brother was much more temperamental than she was, perhaps because he had more of his father in him. Or maybe it was just because he was a boy-God.

"This is _Vanagdrasil_, for Lord's sake! Anything can happen here! I think that this...transformation...is being caused by that spell we sensed, Keiyasu!" Keleste guessed aloud, her mind calculating and assessing the situation. "Like us, they may be only half-Goddess, I suspect. I have a strong feeling that they're half-Goddess, half-Earthrealm mortal! Which means that a Demonic spell could go haywire when introduced into their Souls. Can you try and identify the spell? I can't sense anything beyond the Demonic emanations these two girls are suffused with."

"This place is creepy! How am I supposed to identify a spell? I can barely feel _myself_ here!" Keiyasu complained. His sister looked at him with an unsteady expression. They were in the Demon's Realm, and didn't even know how these two girl-Goddesses had come here. Everything about this place was disorienting, dangerous, treacherous. There was a reason why the Doublet System was in place: Gods and Demons couldn't co-exist in each other's Realms. The Ygg Multiverse-tree was the Realm of the Gods, but this place seemed to want to destroy Gods.

"It's a very advanced Demonic spell, and that's about all I can make out," Keiyasu answered his sister after closing his eyes and concentrating for a moment. Piercing his frustration, he was able to 'envision' an extremely subtle process, reshifting the TNA in the girl's bodies. All the Goddess 'elements' were being reversed; these girls were now almost full Demons.

"Who could do such a thing?" Keleste asked wonderingly. "I've never been to Vanagdrasil, because Kami-sama said it would be too dangerous for any God to go unless under the most extreme circumstances. So I just don't know enough about how Demons live in order to even presume a guess."

"This certainly doesn't match all the Demon-sims that I've played on the Ygg Mainframe, either! You know, the ones where we train for a possible invasion by Vanagdrasil. Believe me, they aren't _half_ as weird as the real thing!" Keiyasu agreed.

"Of course not!" Keleste noted. "They're only games. Whatever happened here to these girls is blatant, which doesn't fit the Demon's M.O. at all. Or maybe the undercurrent of subterfuge...and yet, this spell or curse or whatever it is...had Demon written all over it."

"But wouldn't it have _had_ to be subtle as well, Keleste? Otherwise someone here would have caught it," Keiyasu observed.

"Could _we_ catch it?" Keleste asked, suddenly worried. She was the techie, he was the magic-maker; so it fell to him to explain arcanic forces as they encountered them. The labors of their millennia-long search for their parents had afforded the twins little opportunity to gain the well-rounded Inculcation that other Godkids received. So he and Keleste early on had decided to focus on specializing their own educations by each mastering a single channel of knowledge. By becoming expert in tech and magic, their efforts may be more fruitful in searching for their parents. They had become specialized..._very_ specialized in their respective 'majors'.

"Doubtful," Keiyasu quickly answered. "Oh...you mean can we _catch_ it, as in get sick?!" When Keleste nodded her head, he assured her that he thought they couldn't be effected by the curse. But his uncertainty troubled him; if a complex magical enchantment was powerful enough to reverse the properties of certain TNA strands, there was a possibility that it _could_ affect he and his sister. So he wanted to sound confident, so that he wouldn't get ruffled. So that _she_ wouldn't get ruffled either, since Keleste was more emotionally sensitive to upsets than he was sometimes.

"Which brings up another question," Keleste noted. "Where is these two girl's Mother?"

"Obviously not here," Keiyasu said.

Keleste tried to extend her Goddess senses to comb through the various interstices of the arcanical aura that surrounded the two sleeping girls. But no matter how she approached the TNA strands, no matter how deeply she peered into the Metanative dimensionalities...she couldn't discern a single tangible clue that could explain why the two girls had been 'converted' to Demonesses.

"This is so frustrating!"

"I got an idea! Maybe if we replay the room, sis, we might manage to find out how that spell manifested!" Keiyasu suggested with hopeful excitement.

"Good idea! But let's please stop calling it a 'spell', okay? Because in truth, it's nothing less than a _curse_. There's nothing good about it. Only someone extremely wicked and baneful could do such a horrid thing to these two girls!" Keleste said, emphatically nodding her head.

Replaying the room might yield some clues. It was a good idea...because it was their _only_ idea. Both of them were still many thousands of years away from being eligible for promotion to an entry-level God or Goddess License. And since they were orphans, they didn't have the advantage of parental guidance during all those millennia of Inculcation. As a result, their magical efforts were eccentric, at best. Half the time Keleste wanted to transform a rock into an apple, it turned out becoming an orange. Keiyasu's spells were much more powerful and accurate. But when they were 'off, they were even more unpredictable. His attempts to turn rocks into apples sometimes produced zebras and giraffes.

And right now, the only threadline that could connect them with their missing mother was these two girls.

Keiyasu produced a holophotic projector out of his shirt pocket, and tossed it to his sister. Keleste took a moment to calibrate as best she could to the few available TimeWeaves she could sense, so it had a reference point before they started dabbling with temporal mechanics. Once satisfied that she'd done the best she could, she then scanned the room to determine how the chrono-sequence of the environment was layered. Using the premise that all Time happens at once, their Stepmom Skuld had designed an experimental mecha that would analyze a TimeWeave from a completely different perspective. In Yggdrasil, a thousand years could be one year in one place, or a million years in another stretch of the Multiverse. These temporal 'inconstancies' were not perceptible to mortals, of course. And it was little more than theory to most Gods, because only a select few like their two Aunts/foster-mothers were given the duties and powers to manipulate Time. So Skuld, who had the responsibility as Norn, possessed a unique viewpoint on certain dimensionalities of Time. Instead of measuring Time on the usual linearity of Past-Present-Future, she had created a device that would measure Time as a series of transfinite strata: Future atop Present, Present atop Past, Past atop Future. Their Stepmom had been working on this particular device intermittently for almost 60 millennia, continually tinkering and tuning it.

Hopefully, 'Mom' Skuld would forgive her for stealing it.

Keleste downloaded the the data from the holophotic device into her stepmom's invention, keyed in the warm-up sequence, and then watched as the hand-held discus-shaped mecha emitted a wavering image of the room. It was filled with goblinish shapes...but no two girls. She didn't know what to expect, because she'd never used it before.

"Pull it up a few!" Keiyasu suggested. "I think it's reading layers that are too far into the Past."

"I know, I know! I'm already on it!" Keleste replied irritably. "But it isn't easy to operate in the first place. And I'm more nervous than usual, because we're in Vanagdrasil...and because I feel guilty knowing that I stole this from our Stepmom."

"I understand, sis," Keiyasu said warmly. "It's too bad that we had to borrow it, but you gotta set that aside for now. I'm just as anxious to find out anything as you are!" The great thing about his twin sister was the fact that whenever she was bested by her impatience, she was quick to recover her senses.

"Look...here are the two girls," she noted as the holophotic image coalesced to show the two girls entering the room with two adult women.

"Freeze!" she commanded the instrument. While Keiyasu looked at her with a curious expression, she did a rapid sequence of close-ups on the forehead markings of the four Divines. A moment later, four spheres floated in the middle of the room, each with a prominent forehead marking and two eyes.

"Keleste, this is really weird! Do you see what I'm seeing?" he asked. "These two girls are Goddesses in this hologram; you can clearly tell by their forehead markings. But these two adults...are both Demonesses."

"I know that this might be a totally stupid question to ask...but could one of them be these girl's Mother?" Keleste asked.

"Unless the Rule operates in a fundamentally different way in Vanagdrasil, I totally doubt it..." Keiyasu answered in a teasing voice.

"Well, I had to ask!" Keleste said, her cheeks tingling with embarrassment.

"Thought-scan, verbal interact!" she commanded the instrument. The air in the room filled with visible representations of all the thoughtcasts created in the room since the two girls had arrived. Keleste started skimming through the billions of 'sentences' floating about the room in distorted glowing blue glyphs. It took longer than usual for her to discern what had been thought in this room, because Vanagdrasil seemed to 'bend' the glyphs at random.

"Hmmm...one Demoness is named Hild...the other one's...their _Aunt_?" she said aloud, surprised. Keiyasu nodded his head to confirm her finding. "Which one do you think is their Aunt?"

"I would say the older one of the two. The other one seems too unruly to be a parent," Keiyasu speculated.

"What?! Wait! Replay sequence," Keleste directed the mecha. She re-read the barely-heard conversation...and gasped.

"Keiyasu!! They're _both_ Demon Queens!"

Keiyasu almost didn't want to believe his sister, but he read over the context of the thoughtcasts just to make sure. Keleste was right! The younger Demoness was a Demon Queen as well!

"Well isn't this just great. This is so messed up!" he said with poignant frustration, kicking the nearest wall. "Now this really complicates everything! I wonder what our Stepmom Peorth would do?"

"Peorth would do something direct. You know her well enough to know that she doesn't mess around. Being a Goddess of Eternity, she tends to be more impulsive than Skuld. And if one of these two was a guy, say in his early 20s..." Keleste answered, grinning slyly at the last.

"Sis...who do you think those two kids are?" Keiyasu asked, as the holophotic image of two young teenaged Demons displayed in mid-air.

"What! There's more!" Keleste shouted, exasperated as she advanced the Time sequence and saw what looked like two more children enter the room to talk with the two Goddess kids. "I've never seen those two _other_ kids before, dreams or otherwise. I don't have a clue who they are!"

Amidst the clear and discrete figures of the two Goddess girls...were two more shadowy outlines. The images almost looked like ghosts caught by a camera onto grain-speckled film. The 'ghosties', as Keleste called them in her mind, seemed to fade in and out; their inconstant presence rendered the task of distinguishing them difficult. She floated up to the holo-image and surveyed the two figures in it closely during one of their more 'visible' phases.

"Hey! This one looks _a lot_ like you!"

Keiyasu followed her lead and floated up to the holo-image. Keleste was certainly right...it was as if he was looking in the mirror at a slightly younger version of himself. Actually, a slightly younger version of himself with one radical difference. This boy was obviously a Demon. He studied the face of the boy in the holo-image for a moment, and then felt a wave of fear and distaste.

"This is unnerving me to the max!" he exclaimed. The resemblance between the Demon boy and he was too close for comfort.

"In that case, I'm going to speed up the sequence a little bit!" Keleste informed her brother. "I don't like looking at the two of you this way. It's also possible that your presence here is being 'echoed' into one of the layers of Past."

"At least it's me and not you. One of you is bad enough already," Keiyasu countered, reaching out and pulling on her ear lightly. Keleste slapped him lightly on the cheek in response to his teasing.

"Look!" Keleste exclaimed. "The younger Demon Queen again!" Reading the thoughtcast dialogue, she could discern thoughtcast 'shouts' through the room. The two girls had reacted with fright to the appearance of their 'Aunt'. Which meant that they were still Goddesses at that point; with the bluish glyphs and runes of their thoughts circling within the room. Examining the thoughtcasts, Keleste noted to herself that that it was possible that the two teenaged Demons were the children of this "Mara". She didn't know for sure; it was just her Goddess intuitions going off.

On a hunch, she ignored the kids and focused her attention on this Demoness Mara's thoughtcasts...and was twice-over shocked.

"This is utterly confounding!" Keleste suddenly shouted. "Did I hear her right? She said that these two girl's Mother is _Skuld_!!"

"Yeah, that's exactly what I heard too! But I heard something even worse. This Hild Demoness...is the First-Most Demon Queen!"

"Ohhh, screw it!" Keleste cursed. "This just isn't our lucky day, is it? We're way in over our heads. We might have had a chance if Peorth and Skuld were here with us."

"Hey, don't give up yet, Keleste! We still have one advantage in our favor. _They_ don't know _we're_ here!" Keiyasu corrected him. She quickly shifted her attention to another thoughtcast conversation, reading in silence about the doll and the two girls, a sibling pillow fight, and finally two bored girls ramming their beds together before cleaning the room and going to sleep.

"Talk about being in a wretched situation. We're in the 'headquarters' of the most powerful of the Demon Queens, in the middle of Vanagdrasil, with two Goddesses who have been changed into Demonesses. This really bites!"

_"And your situation is going to get even more wretched!"_ a voice interrupted her. Keleste turned her attention away from the hologlyphs. The short-haired Demonsess-girl was wide awake, a yellow-orange glow forming around her right hand.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Pryzm had woken up to the sound of conversation in her room. Since the only other occupant was Ulfryn, it was obvious that the voices were those of intruders. As wakefulness became sharpened with insecurity, she noted that one of the voices was a boy's...and it didn't belong to her cousin Falcyn! She listened, amazed that these two credulous beings could actually believe that she and her sister were once Goddesses!

With _that_ comment, she couldn't take any more.

"I don't know who you are, but you're trespassers! I don't recognize either of you! And because of that, that means you're trespassing on our Mom's property!" she snarled angrily. She discharged a flow of light from her hand; but the girl-Goddess was too quick to be hit by it.

"She's pretty good!" Pryzm appraised her opponent's nimble dodging of her attack. "This might be a fun challenge, and we won't even have to tell anyone about it!" It was just then that she noticed that the two were twins. The two of them even looked alike! She hovered up out of her bed and kicked out towards Ulfryn, trying to rouse her. When that didn't work, she shouted in Ulfryn's ear. Ulfryn snapped out of her sleep, looking at her with a mixture of dismay and wrath...until she pointed in the direction of the two intruders. Ulfryn seemed to regard the God and Goddess with a look of confusion. Her sister quickly sat up in her bed, and her eyes seemed to question Pryzm's with a definitely look of uncertainty.

"They're Gods...and they're in our room, Ulfryn! That's all I know! That's all I need to know. We gotta fight 'em!" she yelled at her soporific sister.

"That's fine...wake me up when you're done!" her sister mumbled, pulling a pillow over her head. Pryzm quickly regretted the fact that Ulfryn wasn't a fighter.

She sized up the two. The girl with the long tan-brown hair looked like she was a couple years older than she, maybe even older than their cousins Sygyn and Falcyn. She had a Goddess marking on her forehead that looked like an exclamation point, only without the 'dot' underneath it. The boy...

...looked uncannily like Falcyn!

Pryzm hesitated for a moment. If Falcyn had been a God instead of a Demon; with a face shaped by some of those stupid gentle natures that Gods seem to excel in...he'd look almost like this boy! The girl floated around like a flitting dragonfly, and Pryzm tracked her before firing bolts of energy at her and the boy. Unfortunately, Pryzm knew that her attacks were powerful, but poorly controlled.

Obviously, because she was a tomboy who was prone to emphasize power over poise. Unlike her sister, who was all about poise. Pryzm steeled herself as the girl-Goddess unwrapped her hair-bandana and snapped it into a warding staff. Two stupid little hair-antennaes popped up along her forehead hairline, another indication that this girl was a dainty Goddess. She glanced at Ulfryn, who was _still_ sitting up in bed as dazed as a rock. She wasn't too worried about the girl...after all, she was only a Goddess and not too many years older than she was. But the boy gave her cause for concern. He held his hands out in front of his chest, and materialized what looked like a Counter-Elemental Orb.

It looked like he was planning to play a little dodgeball...

"Pryzm! Stop it!"

"What do you mean, stop it?! Ulfryn, these two are Gods! We're Demons. If that isn't enough, then you tell me what the fuck are they doing in our bedroom? And what are you doing? You're doing nothing! I can't take these two on by myself!" she shouted at her sister, completely exasperated.

"They're the dream kids!" Ulfryn. "They're the ones who I've been seeing in my dreams!"

"Dream kids, scream kids...who cares? You liar! They can't be our 'missing' family members, or whatever! One's a God and the other's a Goddess!" Pryzm yelled at her sister, who was being a total idiot. "We're the daughters of Queen Hild! There's _no_ way they could be related to _us_. We're Demon royality, or did you forget! Get your butt out of bed...you're obligated to fight them! If not for your sake, than for our family's honor. Besides, if we capture them, Mom'll be very proud of us!"

"I..will..not!"

Pryzm felt a hot rush of blood to her cheeks and forehead, even as she was stunned to the core by Ulfryn's refusal. She felt like she was going to have an emotional meltdown! Ulfryn was just going to float there and let her take on these two by herself?

She looked back and forth between her sister and the God and Goddess kids.

Where was the boy? She could see the auburn-haired girl...but the boy was gone. This situation was beginning to feel very threatening: what if the boy was going to try and steal something from her Mother? Pryzm was utterly flustered by his vanishing, and almost as flustered by the stupid benign smile on the face of the Goddess.

She wanted to smack that insipid smile right off of her face!

"What your sister just said...is why we're here as well," the Goddess explained to her.

"Shut up and just fight me!" Pryzm screamed. She unleashed a series of phased Demonic Noir-globules, which were warded expertly by the Goddess girl into harmlessness. She was using her staff to deflect them with a skill that Pryzm hadn't anticipated. A typical Goddess move; act all sweet and innocent in order to conceal one's skill! So this one's a mecha techie...

"I saw both of you in my dreams. And in those dreams, you were both _Goddesses_!" the girl continued.

"YOU LIAR!!" Pryzm screamed maniacly.

"And we think that you both are related to us in some..."

"Ulp!!" Pryzm gasped as her arms were suddenly pulled back and pinned behind her. She had been so wrapped up in arguing with the girl-Goddess, she hadn't even considered that the boy half of the twins might have been sneaking behind her. He had her in some kind of wrestling hold, his fingers laced behind her neck...rendering her hands and arms immobilized.

He...was _touching_ her!

"OOPH! LET GO OF ME..GRR! YOU..GRR..PUNK BASTARD GOD!!" Pryzm screamed, her arms pinned away so she couldn't use them. She started writhing violently, kicking her legs like rope-whips in an attempt to kick or knee her captor. Just one kick in the shin or the balls and she'd be free!

"C'mon, Ulfryn!" she gasped. "Don't..oof!..just sit there! _Do_ something! He..elf!..help me!"

But her sister just sat in her bed, watching her struggle.

The boy-God was taller than she was, and much stronger. His arms were like steel cords, so elbowing him was out of the question. And he kept shifting his weight to counter her struggles, so she couldn't get enough leverage to launch a good kick backwards at him. Pryzm began to consider the dismal possibility that she might not be able to escape from his wrestle-lock. Not to mention that she could feel some kind of arcane restraints forming around her wrists.

"Keleste, I can't hold onto her forever!" she heard him gasp, straining with effort. "She's _strong_ for her age...stronger than a boy would be!"

Pryzm's mind was curtained with purple-red resentment at _that_ comment. Not only was this boy actually touching her person, he had just compared her to a boy! She could feel the crackling of an enraged Demonic Aura floating around her body...and she went completely amok, responding to his stupid comment with a hail of choice curses. How dare he call her "strong as a boy!" With a supreme effort, she twisted and coiled her body tightly in his grip and...managed to free herself!

"You _asshole_!!" she screamed at the boy, angry beyond livid. Quickly spinning around, she launched a foot at his groin.

"OOOFFF!" the boy shouted as her kick connected solidly. Pryzm was more than satisfied with the wheeze of pain she heard; she knew that she'd gotten him good with that kick! He was hunched in a fetal position, hands over his groin, floating slowly. Immobilized. Now it was time for the coup de grace. She raised both her hands high above her head and formed the most powerful pulse she could muster.

"Oh no you don't!" she heard the girl Goddess shout from behind her. Pryzm realized that she had made a big mistake. When one is fighting two, one shouldn't get caught up in trying to exact revenge on another...because it was too easy to forget the other one of the opponents.

She had forgotten the girl-Goddess just for a moment, so intent she was on paying the boy-Goddess back for his insult.

Now, her hands were bound behind her with a length of bandana.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Keleste was grateful that the fighting was over. She felt bad for her twin brother, who was limping about while holding his privates, looking around with an expression of embarrassment writ on his face. The little girl-Demoness had responded to her brother's observation by going ballistic. Keleste realized that Keiyasu's naive comment had _really_ pissed off the little Demoness. She was struggling with all of her might to free herself from his grip...he said one thing too many...and she became so enraged, she freed herself and then leveled a vicious kick at his unmentionables.

Well anyway, it was her loss as well, because the girl-Demoness had left herself vulnerable for just a split-second, long enough for Keleste to grab one and then both of her wrists and bind them with her hair-bandana ribbon. Once Keiyasu recovered his breath and his dignity, he quickly floated behind the other Demoness girl and 'cuffed' her with a nebula of God's Rope. She didn't even bother to resist.

So now they had a struggling, violent tomboy Demoness on one side of the room, and a quiet, vacuous-faced Demoness floating on the other side of the room.

"What do we do now?" she asked her brother. "We didn't plan any of this!"

"Neither did we plan _beyond_ this either. All we wanted to do was to talk to these two girls, not fight them!" he answered. "What are we supposed to do, kidnap them? This is the heart of the Demon's Realm..."

"You kidnap us, and our Mother will kill you! She'll wipe out every God in Yggdrasil. She destroy all the Aumatrices, so that none of your kind can ever bother us again. She'll..." the tomboy Demoness threatened angrily.

"Aumatrices?" her brother Keiyasu wondered aloud at the strange word.

"I hate to do this, but I do so very much dislike Demonesses when they start making claims and threats that they can't possibly enforce," Keleste said, as she tore off a piece of the bed sheet and covered Pryzm's mouth with it. She knew that no one ever talked using their mouths here, but covering the young Demoness's mouth would have the same effect as gagging the mouth of a mortal...it would shut her up.

Then she remembered something about a Red Hole being mentioned. Pulling her attention away from her brother and the two girl-Demonesses, she quickly re-read all of the thoughtcast hologlyphs that were displayed in the room.

"Keiyasu!" Keleste said urgently. "We _do_ have a chance! We can restore these two girls to their Goddess natures. There's a Red Hole somewhere outside of this place; its exit point occurs before its entry point! You know, one of those time-warpy holds that has collapsed Time so densely that..."

"...if we go through it, we'll wind up at a point in Time _before_ we went into it!" he finished. "Cool! But where does it go?"

"I don't know! Who cares? We can worry about that later," she replied with a shrug of her shoulders. "But there's a possibility that if we take these two girls through the Red Hole, we'll wind up in a previous part of the TimeWeave. That means that we could end up in a place _prior to_ their process of changing from Goddess to Demoness was completed. Then we won't have to worry about changing them back, because the effect would be nullified!"

"I've never been through a Red Hole before!" Keiyasu quickly noted. "Neither have you!"

"You can't do this!" the Demoness who called herself Ulfryn wailed desperately. "We've never been through a Red Hole either. Or a Black Hole, a White Hole, a Purple Hole...we've only been through the small stuff, like wormholes and stuff! They always told us that the miniscule part of us that is mortal might be destroyed! We'll be extinguished!"

Keleste exchanged a sharp glance with Keiyasu. Despite all the craziness of the last two moments, something in her heart leapt for joy. Something in her eyes watered ever-so-slightly.

"We have to try!"

"I mmph not a Goddessmmph, I am a Demonuumph!" the tomboy girl-Demoness yelled angrily through her gage, before Keiyasu reached up around her cheek and muffled her mouth, his form of payback for kicking him where she did.

"I'm sorry, but you'll have to come with us!" Keleste said, bowing politely to the pink-haired Demoness...and then swiftly floating behind her and pinning her arms against her sides in a bear-hug. The young Demoness girl screamed through all the registers of panic, probably loud enough to be heard by everyone in Vanagdrasil.

Not wanting to waste any more time, Keleste and her brother spirited the two Demonesses away, accelerating up and outwards from the black structure as fast as they could.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Hild! For the love of all that's unholy...for the respect that we share in our allegiance to the Dark Sovereign, _think_ about what you're doing! You're going to enslave my only son, my oldest child, out of some perceived slight that only exists in your mind! I'm not out to steal the Dark Lord from you! By the Darkness in us all, He certain doesn't belong to anyone, let alone me or you! Please...stop this!"

"Let me consider your request," Hild said, resting a finger on her cheek thoughtfully. Mara sighed deeply, she'd finally gotten through to her enough to stop her rambling. Maybe there was a chance that Hild might stop this ugliness.

"Hmm...Nah! Request denied! I just thought of another reason why I hate you!" she answered flippantly in a slip-of-time. Mara almost slumped...Hild was toying with her again. It wasn't enough that she had conquered Falcyn's will, to the point where he was as immobile as a possum caught in a net; she was also trying to bend _her_ reality, to make _her_ feel inadequate. A mind-plague of games to disorient her.

"You know what makes me hate you the most, Mara? More than anything else?" Hild said, her whole face quivering with rage. "You are the final Demon Queen. Which means you're the youngest of all of us Demonesses. Which means that the Dark One wasn't satisfied with all 665 of us, because he had to get one more. We weren't enough to please Him, so he got _you_. Did you ever stop to think about that?"

Mara could only grimace at how warped Hild's perspective had become.

"He made you his last Consort to spite all of us! Since you're the final Demon Queen, it means that He sees you as being more beautiful than the rest of us. Which means that, to Him, He considers you as better than any of us. It wasn't enough to be content with me and my Demon Queen sisters. Ha haha aha ha! Don't you see? This is His final curse on we, his dutiful Demon Queens! Now, He can rub all it in our faces for all eternity: the fact that you're better than any of us! That He loves you the most! I was His first Demon Queen, I was the best of all! I was the one He had spent the most time with. I..I was the Queen of the Demon Queens! The most important of all Demonesses! Until you showed up. Which makes me want to torture you for an eternity of Eternities...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

For some reason, I was describing experiences of events I shouldn't have ever experienced. It seemed that being here in Vanagdrasil had awakened a dormant part of my being. I had just told Sygyn that I had fought the Ultimate Demon, and that he was much more than just a 'Demon'...that he was the antithesis of Life itself. And then I told her that the book she had been reading had never been read before.

So if it hadn't been read before, it hadn't been written either. For a book that is written must also _read_ by its author during the process of its creation.

No wonder she was looking at me like I was some escapee from a mental ward! Which was funny, because several times during my active drug addiction, I was committed to mental institutions. And had escaped, lured by the siren call of the street and the drugs. But that part of my life seemed like it was eons in the past, even though it was just like yesterday. Addiction and depression of the severity I experienced _never_ leave a person. There is no cure. Once you have it, it's with you for the rest of your life. But now, it shouldn't matter, because I was in the midst of something even more unfathomable.

"Where's your brother?" I asked.

"How do you know that I have a brother?" Sygyn non-answered with a challenge, examining me with beautiful eyes ringed with orange-red irises, a younger version of her Mother.

"Just a lucky venture, I guess," I answered truthfully. "There's something about you that seems to hint that you didn't grow up as an only child. I grew up as an only child; perhaps this is why I can sense the notion that you have a brother or sister. Given a 50-50 chance, I guessed brother."

She smiled briefly at me, possibly amused by my humble admission of uncertainty. It dawned on me that if I appeared to be uncertain, _her_ uncertainty wouldn't be so pronounced, because it would be something she and I had in common. This might allow her to trust me more. But then again, she was still a child.

"I am not a child! I'm _14_ years old!" Sygyn said to me, correcting me with a glance of reproach.

"And you can read the minds of cyborgs as well! You're very skilled," I praised her. "You know, I remember someone else saying that as well."

"Of course! My Aunt Skuld told me she used to say it all the time when she was a girl!" Sygyn noted. "And my cousins say it at least once a week"

_Aunt_ Skuld? Cousins?

My mind whirled with possibilities. If what Sygyn just said was true, than I was not only in Vanagdrasil, I might be in the _Future_ as well! The prospect of being totally displaced via TimeSpace to a completely different reality was daunting, to the point where I started feeling a sense of vertigo. I felt my attention falter.

"Not that I care, but you don't look too good!" she observed, floating closer to me. I waved her off, hoping Sygyn didn't notice the look of shocked confusion written all over my face.

"You know, for a cyborg...you certainly act like an Earthrealm mortal," she noted, tilting her head slightly to one side. One of her ponytails danced behind her in the windless 'wind' of the library.

"That's because I _was_ an Earthrealm mortal at one time," I answered. "But that's not important right now. Is it possible for me to meet your brother?"

"Yeah, of course. But I don't want to! So it's not happening!" she answered me defiantly, crossing her arms. She was definitely acting like a kid; solicitous one moment, 'screw you' attitude the next. "I was all comfy and reading this book before you came. _You_ interrupted me! So now, I want to continue where I left off. So you'll just have to wait here until I finish, or you can go look for my brother yourself."

"Sygyn, it's too late. You'll never get to read that book. The pages inside of it are blank," I answered her. Hey, where did that come from? I had never even seen that book before I arrived here in Vanagdrasil; now I was talking about it with surety and conviction. Which was exceedingly odd, because such a book could never exist in the Earthrealm.

A book like the Enigma Book.

"What..is..going..on here?" I said under my breath. I was beginning to feel like I was suffering from MPD. Multiple Personality Disorder. Part of me was human, part of me was machine...and part of me was _something else_. The 'something else' part really was beginning to scare me. It was as if someone was controlling me, influencing my thoughts and actions.

I remembered being on Planet Lost. I remembered fighting Isilblius. I remembered being in love with Urd. And I remembered making a wish...but I couldn't clearly recall what it was. But I didn't have time to try and ferret out where the cheese-holes in my mind were. While I was trying to gaze at the constellation of memories that were colliding in my mind, Sygyn had seated herself back in her floating reading chair, with the Ultimate Demon Book in her lap.

"By the Dark Lord!" I heard her gasp as she opened it. With growing frustration, she leafed through page after page; her face growing redder by the minute. Finally, she stood up and flung the book across the library. Hell hath no fury like a frustrated teenage girl. I readied myself for an onslaught of Demonic rage.

"You were right!" she shouted at me, taking me completely by surprise. "Let's go find my brother, since there's nothing else for me to do here."

No arguing, no accusations, no incendiary bursts of Demonic Energy...just an admission of willingness to believe.

Surprisingly, amidst the impulsivity, this Demoness teenage girl was _quite_ mature for her age.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Jump into the fire.

One of his friends had told Keiyasu that "if you're not living on the edge, you're taking too much room." As they floated towards the vortex of flame, he wished that he could have an edge to stand on. What he and his sister were doing was an utter leap of faith, in the truest sense of the word. Because a minute portion of their Soul was mortal, it was possible that they could be torn to shreds by the TimeSpace conduit that squalled before them.

Not to mention that they could be harming their 'captives' by their decision to travel through the Red Hole.

Traveling through the Asgardian Dimensional Bridges linking one part of the Ygg World-Tree with another was already daunting enough. But this wasn't just traveling through Space...it was traveling through Time as well! And he and his sister had no idea where they'd end up.

As if that wasn't enough, this Red Hole had been locked by a Demonic Key. Fortunately, Keleste had become an experienced hacker after all those surreptitious visits to different Sysop Nodes of the Ygg Mainframe, ones that were usually off-limits to Godkids their age. She had to be, because their long-term search for their Mother demanded that she bypass the more 'secret' data-archs of the Mainframe. Her sister sweated a little, but she found the key rather quickly and pirated it. Her sister sweated a little, but she found the key rather quickly and pirated it. Whoever had made the lockout routine was a total newbie...or insanely careless.

Now there was no going back...

He could feel the vacuuming of his physical manifest; the Red Hole was drawing them into its whorlpool of colors. Gravity, Arcanical 'dimensionalities', Space and Time...all of which seemed to bend and distort as they were swallowed by the Red Hole. He could hear his scream in unison with three other voices.

Inside the Red Hole.

Keiyasu had expected a moment where he would black out, a 'blank' period of unconsciousness or something. He didn't know why he had expected that; none of the Gods who had traveled through a Hole of any color had ever experienced unconsciousness. A semi-moment of haziness or disorientation was the worst that had ever been reported. And of course, Senior First Class License Goddesses like Skuld and Peorth could travel through a Hole without any ill effects, as easily as he or Keleste would drink a malt at an ice cream shoppe. And in the case of his two Stepmothers, either one could whip up a Black Hole whenever she wished.

"I wonder if I'll ever be able to do that?" he thought, as he sensed a gradual shift in their auras...

...and then they landed, rather harshly, on an incredibly elaborate floor of an incredibly articulated structure. The place was shockingly _holy_, if such a word could be used to describe anything in Vanagdrasil. The place was so abstract, it was disorienting to him. Quickly checking himself, Keiyasu noticed that he felt a little dizzy in the head, but other than that, he was fine.

_Was_ fine...

"WHO THE BLESS ARE _YOU_?!" a voice bellowed, filling the entire chamber, shaking the foundations and walls with thunder.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --


	120. Pt 120: What? Ever? Whatever!

**Part 120: What? Ever? Whatever!**

EARTHREALM:

_Wedding Minus One Week_

A few days to go before the wedding, and Keiichi was feeling the jitters. After he got home from school and fielded his daily phone call from Freiija, he took a long bath and then talked to Cevn about his skittish nerves. During their conversation, Cevn reminded him that his nervousness probably had nothing to do with the depths of his feelings towards Belldandy...at least in a bad way. He suggested to Keiichi that his anxiety was very likely the result of being sensitized by all the stress in a household busily planning for a wedding that was only nine days away.

That was a relief to hear, even if it was a bit too obvious!

For several moments during his school day, Keiichi had questioned himself, wondering if he was all uptight because he was having 'second guesses' about marrying Bell-chan. Cevn acknowledged going through similar feelings when he got married; it was all part of the weird and wonderful process called "the last couple weeks of being single." Cevn added that it would definitely get even more stressful, but that the stress was in some ways a proving ground, because it was a trial run to demonstrate a bride and groom's ability to handle _life_ and each other. If they could weather the typhoon called marriage, with its attendant storms of 'family', 'friends', 'revelers' and 'lack of privacy', then the two of them were probably fit to meet the more difficult challenges Life would bring into their joined path.

In the middle of their discussion, Belldandy opened the door to Keiichi's room and silently handed him the portable phone. As soon as he heard the voice, he waved Cevn out the door so he could have some privacy.

A short while later, Keiichi returned to the dining room and sat down at the table, resting the phone between his hands.

"That was Freiija," he said, looking at Bell-chan, Cevn and Megumi. As usual, Megumi was munching on something, trying to fill her bottomless pit of a stomach. Cevn looked like he was getting ready to grade some exams; he had two stacks of papers and a couple red pencils. Bell-chan had just finished fixing tomorrow's bento lunches for Keiichi, Megumi, Cevn and Tomohisa, and noted that she was going to retire to her bedroom for the remainder of the night.

Keiichi prefaced his story by joking to his sister and Cevn about something that happened during Freiija's daily phone call yesterday. Freiija had spent 10 minutes reviewing the food list for the reception; of course, being a Goddess, she could remember everything in her head. But Keiichi, being a mortal, obviously couldn't. So he ended up having to scramble back and forth to the kitchen to find all the purchase orders from the caterers for the reception. Freiija had overheard the scuffling and asked him why he was running around...and Keiichi told him that he had to look up each set of items against a list.

He then noted that tonight's phone call was from Freiija as well, and added that Freiija had _actually apologized_ for forgetting that he was a mortal during her earlier call. Needless to say, his sister and Cevn both gasped; Megumi's gasp rendered more audible because she was in the middle of sipping hot cocoa. As the two looked at him gape-mouthed, Keiichi continued to recount Freiija's evening phone call. He said he had mentioned to her that it would be more helpful if he put his fiancée on the phone instead of himself whenever she wanted to confirm a lengthy set of instructions or information...and Freiija seized on what he said and lectured him.

"Keiichi, my dear...when are you going to start calling B'dandy your _bride_?! Eh? In a woman's life, she's called a 'girl' for many of her youthyears, a 'woman' for most of her life, and 'grandma' in her later years. She's called a 'girlfriend' by the one who loves her, a 'fiancée' for a short period of time before she's married, and a 'wife' for all the years after she's married. But to be called a 'bride'...that is one of the briefest titles a woman will ever have. It'd be ridiculous for my husband, Odeyn, to call me a 'bride'. At our ages, it would be silly...although at times, he still can make me feel like a bride, let me assure you! So do consider just a word of advice from your Mother-In-Law: start referring to B'dandy as your bride _now_. Don't tarry until the day of the wedding! Calling her a bride now will touch an area of her heart that you won't have too many opportunities to touch, so take the chance and run with it. For how many times will _you_ get to see her in her wedding dress; a vision of beauty that will outshine all the stars and suns, a beauty that will outshine everything?"

Keiichi narrated that, by the time Freiija had finished her little speech, his eyes were heavy with tears of shame. Megumi seemed fascinated by the exchange by Keiichi and Bell's Mom; she was looking at him with rapt attention. Keiichi narrated Freiija's words further, remembering what she said a few minutes later as he described it to Megumi and Cevn.

"My dear, don't be ashamed that you didn't think of this. All of us have been nagging you and B'dandy about every detail of your wedding, because we want both of you to be happy. It's not your fault that you didn't notice this. I've never been a Mother-In-Law before; this is a learning experience for me as well. I'm learning that my role in all of this is to guide you once in a while, to help you see things that you otherwise might forget or bear little notice upon. And to remind you that mistakes aren't always your fault. You really love my daughter, from the deepest reaches of your heart...and that is more than gift enough for me."

All Cevn and Megumi could say was an appreciative "Waahh!!" as Keiichi explained that, for the first time, he felt an emotional connection with his future Mother-In-Law that was rid of the usual fear and irritation he felt towards her. As an aside, he finished with Freiija's little joke...

"But just because this Goddess had a heartfelt moment with you, don't place any high expectations on the possibilities that you won't get a phone call tomorrow, the very moment you arrive from school! Mother-In-Law prerogative will still be in effect, tee hee hee!"

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Bwah ha hee hehe hee ha ha hah!"

Keiichi could hear a bevy of footsteps behind him; obviously a group of men entering the repair shop. This was highly unusual...usually the only time a group of people came into Whirlwind was when they were having a Unified Club meeting. But it was the first week in February, and the only racing going on locally was on skis and snowmobiles. Before Keiichi could even turn around on the bench he was sitting on, a pillow-case swiftly descended around his head, plunging him into sudden shadow depths.

"Yeeawwwh!" he screamed at the unexpected fate-run.

"MORISATO! WE'S KIDNAPPIN' YUH!" a male basso voice bellowed, sounding like a PA speaker placed only 10 cm from his ear. As he ears rang from the shout, he could hear Chihiro giggling nearby. Hands grasped him and pinned his arms to his sides; they were probably Tamiya's, since it felt like they were mashing his muscles into his bone!

"Owwww! What's going on here?!" he shouted as everything went dark-bluish.

"Uh...sorry, Morisato! But a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do! An' I ain't gonna skip out on yuh in your moment of need!" And with that, Keiichi immediately knew that it was Tamiya. He could hear Ootaki's wheezy laughing in the background, along with several other recognizable voices from the Unified Club. He resigned himself; there was no use struggling. What was this about a "moment of need"? He already had everything he needed, except for a stress-free day and a little extra sleep-in time. Something that felt like a rope was being tied around his neck. No, it probably wasn't a rope. Those dimwits wouldn't be so stupid as to use a rope. Hopefully.

"Heh heh hee! Morisato's here gettin' hitched, so we gotta primo excuse to part-teee! And we're goin' to the best show in town!" he heard Ootaki's voice announce shrilly. Great! The chances that he had a rope around his neck just doubled. Now they were tying his hands behind his back. Keiichi hoped that they weren't going to truss him up in some weirdass S&M configuration, just to make a fool out of him. Especially in front of Chihiro. _That_ would be majorly humiliating!

What were the guys up to?

He speculated that something was afoot when Chihiro called him last night and pleaded with him to work a shift at Whirlwind today. In respect to his upcoming wedding, she had given him a leave of absence from his job starting last week; but out of the blue, she had called, nearly in tears, saying that they had an "emergency order" and something about "the PM's motorcycle"; her code-word for a drop-everything job. Her voice convincingly desperate, Keiichi agreed to come in to work after school today. After all, refusing Chihiro would almost be as bad as refusing Bell-chan! He couldn't hesitate on this one; after all, he _did_ owe a lot to Chihiro. And he was more than a little intrigued by her mention of a motorcycle belonging to the Prime Minister! One never knows with her. It could be an urgent job, or it could be the real thing. It sounded totally improbable, but then again, his life had been a convex of improbabilities from the moment Bell-chan had answered his fateful call. Reminding himself that he was marrying a Goddess in a few days, Keiichi declined his skepticism and decided to show up for work. Visions of a gold-plated vintage Yamaha bike danced in his head.

But once he arrived at Whirlwind, the shop looked exactly the same as it always did; disassembled motorbikes and engines were everywhere. The only thing neat about Chihiro's shop were the tool boxes. She was a stickler for that. And instead of putting him to work, Chihiro sat on her desk, crossed one leg over the other, and started chatting about cars, motorbikes, and marriage preparations. Chihiro wasn't one to put up with slacking, especially when she was _paying_ the wages of the slacker! Usually, if he wasn't hard at work within a couple minutes of punching in, she was sure to bust his chops. And when he asked about the 'special' order, Chihiro simply broke into a heave-ho gigglefit.

Evidently, the giggles were her cue to the men waiting outside, because that's when they rushed in and bound him up.

"Hey, don't break him, you guys! He's getting married next week!" he heard Chihiro shout mirthfully, her words punctuated with loud snickering. The men started laughing.

"Don't worry, Boss! You won't get stuck having to pay job insurance or medical for your injured worker!" Ootaki said. "We'll take good care of him, at least while he's conscious. But once he's unconscious, anything goes."

The way his sempai had said that, Keiichi felt several degrees of horror pulsing through his chest. Memories of being made up as a girl after one drunk debauch swam right in front of his nose; the nose that he couldn't see at the moment.

"Bell-chan, where are you when I need you?" Keiichi plainted mentally. But he knew that there was no escaping Fate.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Hee hee!! They're gone! I can sense them leaving Chihiro's place. Boys will be boys and all that. They'll be totally out of our hair for a least a few hours, thank the Lord," Urd said with a snicker, flasking her hands together as if she had just picked up a palmful of fairydust and was trying to clap her hands clean.

"Who's gone? Why would they be gone?" Belldandy asked, curiously. She had been sitting on her futon reading...you guessed it..."Modern J-Bride". Marking her place in the bridal magazine, she laid it on her lap and looked up at her two sisters innocently. In complete contrast to Urd and Skuld, who were grinning at each other with conspiratorial smiles.

"Bell-chan," Urd said, imitating Keiichi's voice. "There's an old Earthrealm custom which exists in almost every culture here. It's called the 'bachelor party'. When a man is about to get married, his friends come and get him, and take him to a strip club or something, so he can get his rocks off one last time before he's hitched."

"Big Sister! You're a total pervert!" Skuld interrupted. "Don't explain it like that! That's not what happens!"

"What would you know? You're but a child."

"Grrrr, Big Sister...you're but an idiot!"

"Urd, what are you saying? My darling Keiichi wouldn't _ever_ do something like steal off to a strip club with his friends, Earthrealm custom or not!" Belldandy said firmly. "He doesn't need anyone besides _me_ to 'get his rocks' off, so to speak."

Urd grinned greedily at Belldandy's hasty rebuttal, offered in the midst of what seemed to be a little fit of jealousy. Her middle sister quickly covered her mouth, her cheeks flushing red.

"Elder Sister! You're a pervert too!" Skuld said, glaring at her. "You're e..even worse than Urd! Urd just wishes she could 'do it'. But you and Keiichi...actually _are_ doing 'it'."

"Yeah! But she'sh ishn't worsh than meee!! Les' all get..urph!..perverted!" a slurred voice said in the doorway. At this, Belldandy floated up from her seated position on her futon, and...

Suddenly, with a blast-shower of pink-madder glints, the three sisters were covered with scented rose petals of every imaginable size, color, and hue. The air was so thick with florid aroma, Urd could barely see across the room. But she didn't need to, because the roses could only mean one thing.

_"C'est moi!!"_

Peorth pirouetted in the air like a ballerina, which didn't make any sense to Skuld, because she was dressed in her usual "black bikini swimsuit under leather wings" outfit. If she would have worn a skirt, it might have been interesting. Urd clapped her hands, as if she was applauding a magic trick.

"Good one, Peorsh!" another feminine voice acclaimed.

The three Goddesses watched Belldandy as she finally completed her roundabout, and then stepped back two steps away from the doorway. A drunken Mara was leaning against the shoji door at the entrance to the sister's now-floral-becovered bedroom. Mara wasn't exactly standing either, she was wobbling ungainly from side to side; if she leaned too far, she'd simply allow herself to fall against the opposite doorjamb.

"Mara, you're _drunk_!" Belldandy said accusingly. Mara almost fell off the doorjamb.

"You're _very_ drunk!"

"Hah hah heeeh! You bet I am!!" the Demoness roared, laughing with guffaws that shook her whole body.

"I demand to know what's going on here!" Belldandy yelled. In response, Urd stood up and floated next to her. Draping an arm around her sister's shoulders, she started stroking Belldandy's face in a very sensual manner, just like Keiichi would. Skuld giggled as she watched her middle sister blushing deeply across her cheeks.

"You're in no position to demand _anything_, Little Sister," Urd said in her sultry, sexy voice, while Mara snickered in the background as Belldandy's face turned ten shades of red.

"Mara, I thought I told you not to start drinking until the party started!" Peorth said, shooting her a look of dismay. "Typical Demoness, getting started before everyone shows up!"

"What party?" Belldandy exclaimed anxiously. Urd placed a finger on her lips to shush her.

"What? They didn't cover this in one of your bridal magazines?" Mara asked in a carking voice, floating in the air and doing a mock magical-girl stunt. "See! I was only pretending to be drunk! Faked you out totally, didn't I, Peorth!"

Skuld immediately broke into a fit of giggles, especially since Peorth was scowling _just right_. The look on Peorth's face reminded Skuld of when she had been 'de-aged' into a child by Velpser! Producing white fans with red suns in the middle from one of her sleeves, Skuld started waving them gleefully, skipping up and down.

"Skuld, I don't think you're doing it right," Urd said in a deadpan voice.

"I DEMAND TO KNOW WHY YOU'RE ALL ACTING SO CRAZY!" Belldandy shouted, indignant from head to toe.

"Oh, you must be sooo upset! All this business about planning for your wedding...and then _we_ show up," Mara cooed, mock sympathetic. "You're probably considering the possibility that we're all under some kind of spell, aren't you, Belldandy? I'm pretending to be drunk! Urd here is acting like your lover. Peorth just overdosed your bedroom with roses. And even Skuld here is acting totally goofy, even by her standards. So of course, that busy little bride's mind of yours is probably jelling overtime, trying to figure all of this out. Trying to see the meaning couched in all of this unusual behavior."

"Well, I'm _not_ going to tell you..." Mara finished in a tease-song voice.

"Mara..." Peorth and Urd groaned. "This isn't the time to be playing Demon Strife Grief Office stuff! You can do that at another time. Don't keep the poor girl in suspense!"

"Because..." Skuld said.

"This is..." Mara said.

"Your..." Peorth said.

"Bachelorette pa..." Urd said.

"PARTY!! WEE HEEEE!!" a new voice shouted, interrupting Urd before she could finish the sentence.

Peorth watched as Urd's face froze in mid-wordply; her tanned features not even merely gripped by a big-sweatdrop, face-faulting expression that would accompany a shock to the system. It was much worse: Urd was gape-jawed and wide-eyed, complete bucket-of-ice-water-poured-on-head frozen. Only one being in the whole Multiverse could evoke such an astringent reaction from Urd. Peorth had met this one being once before, and that being was much worse than Velpser ever was.

Already, Urd's grin had gone hollow, while Mara's nervous grimace fully disclosed her dismay.

"SO LETS PARTY!" the voice shouted.

"Uh, who invited _you_, obaa-chan?" Skuld asked in a wary voice. Urd saw her little sister's life pass before her eyes in a flash, realizing that Skuld's life was probably forfeit now that she'd mouthed off to the most crazy, egotistical being in the OmniArc. Someone you definitely don't call "granny"!!

"Do I need to be invited to something as important as my daughter's wedding-girl party?"

Urd finally broke out of her paralysis.

"Oh...it's you, Hild," she said in a subdued, irritated voice.

"Aren't you going to call me 'Mom', sweetie!" Hild asked without batting a lash of her fox-narrowed eyes. She leapt across the now-crowded room and hugged her daughter. Urd still was as immobile as a marble statue outside of the Diet Building.

"No!"

"I'm not either!" Mara chimed in. Being Urd's twin sister was bad enough, but having to even think about having to acknowledge Hild as a mother-figure was borderline disgusting.

"I'm glad I'm not involved in this," Peorth said, frisking a hand through her hair and eyeing Hild with suspicion.

"No way!" Skuld started, waving her fans agitatedly. "You're a bitc..."

"Hild, we're..uh..ho ho hoho.._delighted_ that you're here! Please make yourself comfortable. It isn't every day that a Demon Queen comes to pay a social visit," Peorth managed to blurt out, recovering her wits enough to at least sound a little diplomatic. Urd and Mara privately glanced at her with nods of gratitude, relieved that her impromptu 'save' had kept Skuld out of being boiled in hot oil by an insulted Demon Queen. Hild had a thousand malicious plans in her mind, each one as treacherous as the Angel Eater had been. Most of them even worse.

It would be best to humor her.

"And how about you, my dear young girl? Eh...Belldandy?" Hild said, floating right up to the Norn of the Present. As expected, Hild held little regard for anyone's personal space. Just a few cm away from Belldandy's nose, the Demon Queen asked, "Can you not find it in your heart to call me 'Mother'? You are the younger sister of Urd and Mara, y'know! And family is _very_ important to me!"

"Hild-sama, I don't think that calling you 'Mother' would be a wise idea," Belldandy answered flatly. "With all due respect...after all that you've done during your last several impromptu 'visits', acknowledging you as a family member would seem out-of-place, and forced. If I were to call you by a familiar name when I do not feel that way, would only mean that I am not respecting my personal feelings. Which would also be disrespectful to you. I would rather not be forced by duress to deceive you."

Hild started clapping her hands together, a pleased expression on her tanned face. For a brief moment, Urd could see that her Mother's sinister aura had dropped to a bare minim...in fact, it was even colored with respect and affection!

"Bravo!! Well said, Belldandy! Well said! Because you were honest with me, I give you my word as a Demon Queen, on the Seal of the Dark Lord Himself, that I will not attempt any undue actions to frustrate your wedding, or this party. I'm simply here to hang out with the girls..."

"Since when were you a girl?" Mara grumbled, interrupting.

"Stow it, Mara!" Hild snapped back, her eyes flaming red for a split-second. "If I'm going to behave, then _you're_ going to have to behave too! I gave my word as a Demon Queen, and until you become a Demon Queen yourself...which I highly doubt you ever will...you wouldn't even begin to understand just how solemn my oath was. By invoking the seal of Oni-sama."

"I know, I know, I know..." Mara sighed, resting the back of her hand against her forehead. "It means that you will have to keep to the promise with the same attention and respect that you would use to follow one of the Dark Lord's commands! Blah di dah di da!"

"Really!!" Urd said, brightening up. "So I could...let's say...pull on her ears or tweak her nose and she couldn't do a thing? Or if I sprayed her with a water pistol, she'd just have to stand there and take it?"

"Urd!!" Skuld shouted, completely dismayed and embarrassed. And a little scared as well. After all, this was _Hild_, live and direct in their bedroom! You don't just go around taunting a Demon Queen because it looks like something that's fun to do!

"Stick it, fatso!" Hild growled. "I said any _undue_ actions! If you provoke me, then any extreme actions on my part wouldn't no longer be considered as 'undue', now would they? They'd fall within the realm of an appropriate response to aggravation. And in your case, Urd, they would fall within the category of 'Mother chastising recalcitrant bratty daughter'! If you dare pull on my ears or squirt me with _anything_, I'll spank you right in front of your sisters and friends, bare-bottomed, just like I did when you were a baby."

Skuld watched Urd's face fault up with poignant embarrassment. It was so funny, she couldn't hold back any longer. The howls of laughter literally flew out of her lungs like birds freshly released from their cages. She had never seen her sister put in her place so forcefully, except for a few times by Belldandy and once or twice by Cevn. Hild-sama had definitely given Urd the smackdown!

"And you, _little girl_!" Hild said, turning on Skuld.

_"Eeep!"_

"Since you're the youngest, naturally, you'll have to be the best behaved! These adult Goddesses can get away with acting a little silly, because they're grownups. But you...I'll be watching you _very_ closely, of course. If you smart off even once like you did with that horrid 'obaa-chan' comment, or even hint at acting like a brat," Hild said in a deadly serious voice, leaving the threat unsaid. In the ensuing silence, Urd watched with satisfaction as her little sister's face turned as white as a freshly laundered bedsheet. She knew better than to laugh at Skuld right at this moment. After all, one had to show mercy to one's younger sisters once in a while. Laughing would be injurious to Skuld's fragile ego at this point...and she didn't want the Brat of Brats to be all pouty tonight.

Especially tonight.

"Can you guys just tell me one thing?" Belldandy pleaded, breaking the silence. "Just one teeny weeny thing? Please?"

Urd and the others turned and looked at her questioningly.

"What is this party all about, again?"

Five divine beings contorted in mid-air, limbs knuckle-askew in response to Belldandy's question.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

It took several minutes for everyone to recover from Belldandy's unabashedly ignorant question. Skuld finally managed to get the point across to her that, since they were living on the Earthrealm, they were going to do what the guys did, and have an all-girls bachelorette party.

"We are not!" Belldandy shouted. "I am not going to allow any male strippers in my house!"

"Chill, Belldandy!" Mara asserted. "Urd was only joking about that part. Although there might be a male stripper or two at the party Megumi is organizing!"

"You mean I've got to go to _another_ one of these!" Belldandy asked, exasperated.

"Well, we can't exactly have a 'regular' party with the six of us and invite all our mortal friends, now could we?" Peorth reasoned. "Let's see...there's _three_ Senior First Class Goddesses, a First Class Goddess, a Senior First Class Demoness...and a Demon Queen Demoness in the room. Which makes the six of us."

"Actually, the _seven_ of us! You forgot the Valkyrie, Military Unrestricted, Senior Command License Goddess. After all, seven's a very lucky number for a wedding!"

"Rind!" several voices chorused with bubbly pleasure, Hild's voice not among them.

"An Unrestricted...Command License?" Urd ventured in a blend of disbelief and rapt respect. That was like…a mega-promotion!

"Urd, she said more than that," Peorth added. "Rind, did I hear you right?" Did you say _Senior _Command?"

"Yes. Because of my ability to control both Cool Mint and Spear Mint, the Almighty Gave me a promotion to a permanent status license. Since I'm the only Valkyrie with two angels, I guess I gained a couple levels," the tan-haired Goddess explained, rubbing the back of her head nervously.

"A couple levels?" Skuld blurted enviously. "You have a Senior license! That's _way_ more than a couple levels!"

"Awesome!! Congratulations! That's _way cool_, Rind!" the four Goddesses in the group praised her, clearly impressed.

"Well, it is, and it isn't. As you know, we Valkyrie are the Goddess equivalent of the WarGods, or the Demon's Valkyrs. Having a Senior Command License, in effect, uh..kinda sorta makes me the head of the Valkyrie for the next ten thousand years," Rind said, bowing her head because she was a little embarrassed by all the attention.

_"EHHhhh!" _

Hild stinkeyed Rind. Their last little altercation a while back was just an amusing diversion. Being bored with Vanagdrasil, she had come to the Earthrealm to check up on her daughter and stir up some trouble. Just a bit of playing around for a bored Demon Queen. Urd wouldn't call her "Mother", so she decided to have a go at making her daughter squirm a little. All in fun, of course. But Rind and the others had thwarted her, much to her surprise. And now, to salve the wound of that defeat with salt, _Rind had gotten herself a promotion_. Not just any promotion, either. As a Senior Command Valkyrie, Rind could kick major ass in direct face-to-face combat! If it ever came down to unsealing her powers, Rind would have the formidable might of a Senior Licensee status, a Military specialization, and a Command expertise…which would allow her to draw down huge amounts of power from the Ygg Xeomnic. Demon Queen level powers. Hild wanted to draw blood...but she noticed that Rind had brought that stupid axe-hammer with her! And making a scene right now would be inappropriate, given the circumstances. Even if restrained by common sense, Hild was so angry she bit the inside of her lip until it bled.

But there's always tomorrow.

"For the record, I _was_ invited, Hild!" Rind stated, seeming to sense the threat aura surrounding her Demon Queen nemesis. "And as you made a promise to not cause any trouble, I hereby make a pledge as the First Knight of the Valkyrie to do likewise. I have not come here in my capacity as a Warrior Goddess. I have come here as a close friend of the bride-to-be, and I intend to bear witness to what is to come as well."

And with that, the serious-faced Warrior Goddess broke into a smile and shyly walked up and hugged Belldandy.

"Congratulations!" she said. Everybody except Hild was very happy that Rind was here...and that Rind had given them a rare smile.

"Didya see that? She smiled!" Skuld observed.

"I'm trying to work on that more. I mean, the smile," Rind said to the group after breaking the embrace.

"You did just fine!" Urd and Peorth chimed in.

"I have to practice, because I'm sure I'm going to have to smile a lot at you guy's wedding," Rind said, winking at Belldandy.

"You mean you're going to be able to come?" Skuld asked happily!

"Yep!" Rind said, flashing a blue card in her hand. Skuld immediately recognized it as a Valkyrie Vacation Pass. "The Lord Himself gave me leave; the equivalent of two Earthrealm weeks off. I hope you have a spare room for me."

"Alright!" Urd said. "We can kick one of the guys out of his room, and have you sleep there."

"Urd, we will _not_ do that!" Belldandy corrected her.

"Why not? Cevn can sleep in the garage! He's a cyborg, I'm sure he wouldn't mind."

"Urd, aren't you forgetting something? That it's the first week in February?" Peorth said, clearly irritated by the Elder Norn's bent of thought. She could recognize sadism in almost any form. A couple centuries back, she had been dispatched to grant the wish of one Marquise de Sade; but the Intercept System had caught the wish request, and a Demoness had beaten her to the quick. As a result, the Demoness had contracted with the Marquise de Sade instead of her...and the rest was a notorious chapter of Earthrealm history.

"He'd freeze in the garage, even if he's a cyborg." Skuld accused.

"And I would wish for other accommodations," Rind added. "I would not want to displace anyone from their household routines. I..I would also feel uncomfortable sleeping in a room that a..that a man had slept in. Especially a mortal male. It would somehow...taint me."

"There!" Skuld said, angry at her sister. "You see! You just wanted to pick on Cevn again! So much that you forgot who Rind is, and why she's the head of our female warriors."

"Perhaps you suggested it because you've decided to keep him company in the garage, Urd. I know you could keep him warm in the coldest of weather!" Mara added. "And if you did that, I don't think Cevn would feel picked on in the slightest."

Urd's face flushed straight into crimson. Peorth sensed that, from the intensity of Urd's reaction, she must still have feelings for Cevn hidden somewhere inside of her heart. Urd's inability to remember her relationship with Cevn was a well-worn thread of gossip at the Earth Otasuke Office. Maybe Bell and Keiichi's wedding would help her true feelings towards him awaken.

"If so, then where's my precious Keiichi going with all those guys from the Unified Club? What if _they_ have a 'traditional' bachelor party in mind? Why, they could hire call-girls and all sorts of..." Belldandy noted, her voice fringed with concern and disgust.

"Amazing how that girl can change topics so immediately!" Hild said under her breath. "She's more impulsive than Mara half the time!"

"Don't worry, Belldandy!" Peorth said. "It's totally covered."

Urd held up a poster which read:

_"Yumi Adachi, Ayumi Hamasaki and Aikawa Nanase --_

_Appearing at the Ring-Ring Bunny Club this weekend._

_Don't miss it to see their cosplay as bunny-girl"_

"They're going to see _that_!?" Mara blurted out. "Whatta bunch of morons! Drooling after some idol singers! They actually believed that those three J-Pop idols are going to walk around a club in bunny suits? They're even stupider than I thought!"

"Hee heehe hee! It gets even better! Ring-Ring Bunny Club is clear over south of Yokohama. It's a loooong way from here! And it's a _Men's_ bunny club!" Urd noted.

"Of course it's a men's club," Hild and Rind said sarcastically. They looked at each other with surprised expressions, shocked that they had spoken in sync. "How many bunnygirl clubs are frequented by hoards of OLs and housewives on this planet?"

"No, you girls clearly don't get it. It's a..hee hee..male-only bunny club. The bunnies are...bwah wa hah..well, let's just say that they're in for a treat!" Peorth chortled, before she finally lost it and bent over in howls of laughter. Hild and Rind had stricken looks on their faces...for all of maybe one or two seconds. Then the Valkyrie Knight and the Demon Queen burst into laughter. Feeling pleased with herself, Urd glanced at her soon-to-be-married sister, who looked like she was going to have a soon-to-be-heart attack.

Uh-oh!! Belldandy didn't see the humor in it!

"A..actually, it was _Peorth's_ idea..."

"Was not! Don't go blaming this one on me, Urd!" Peorth protested. "It was Mara's idea..."

"Nhh-uh! Don't look at me! The Demoness part of the family isn't guilty this time," Mara said, shrugging her hands. "I had nothing to do with it!"

"I can't believe that any of you could do something so...incredibly cruel...to Keiichi and his friends! They're just trying to practice a traditional Earthrealm male-bonding custom," Belldandy noted in an agitated voice. "And while we're on the subject of customs, whose idea was it to send them to such a place? I mean, really?"

Peorth, Urd and Mara all pointed at Skuld, who turned red-faced and tried to grin innocently, and finally flashed a V-sign and said "Peace Rules!"

Feminine laughter burst in the room, almost blowing the sliding shoji door out of its track. Even Belldandy admitted in the midst of giggles that Skuld's idea was a little bit funny, in a bent sort of way.

Hild felt thrilled by being in the company of such young, perky women and girls. She hadn't had a laugh like this in a long time! And she didn't have to do anything to cause it! As she giggled until tears came to her emerald green eyes, she caught sight of Rind, who was roaring with laughter, her eyes nearly squinted shut as she was half-doubled over with mirth. But as soon as Rind noticed that Hild was watching her, she immediate ceased laughing.

"Well, Rind...at least we agree on some things once in a while," Hild commented diplomatically. "Even coming from a Goddess, that _was_ pretty clever, wasn't it!? A Demoness would be hard-pressed to..giggle..do something so heartless!"

"Yes, Hild," Rind answered, trying not to smile and finally giving up. "Who'd have expected it? Just don't get any ideas in your head that the little one is a Demoness."

"No way! Raising one daughter who's half-Goddess, half-Demoness was bad enough!" Hild said, glancing at Urd. Unexpectedly, Rind found herself giggling at Hild's remark, as Urd...oblivious to their notice...was breaking out the sake and shochu.

"Hey, no rules tonight, okay!" Peorth shouted, holding her wine-glass out as Urd filled it with a 1794 Chateau Lafite Rothschild Pauillac. With a raucous shout, she hefted the large glass in the air, spilling most of it on Skuld and Belldandy.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Look, if we're going to have fun, then we can't pay attenshun to any rules!" Ootaki argued. "Rulesh suck! Totally!!"

"No! Yuh got it backwards! If we'sh can't pay any stinking attention ta rulesh, how can we have any fun? No rulesh, no fun!" Tamiya argued back. Both sempai slugged down a glass of tequila, eyeing each other down.

"Them'sh fightin' wordsh!" Ootaki shouted. Then he and Tamiya started bellowing with laughter, punching each other on the shoulder. Keiichi watched the two argue with half-lidded eyes. He himself was well on the way to getting sloshed. Needless to say, his bachelor party had started off with a disastrous thud. Now, everybody was so drunk, most of them didn't know where they were, or how they got there. Keiichi wasn't that drunk yet, but another couple small glasses would get him there.

Thankfully...

...Once they had arrived in Yokosuka, mid-way down the Miura Peninsula, his sempai had finally taken the home-made 'hood' off of him. He didn't know where he was, only that they had been driving for several hours. As he looked out, he discovered that they were parked in front of a club on the outskirts of town; the large pink neon sign loudly displaying "Ring-Ring Bunny Club". He felt a mixture of uneasiness and relief. His unease was fired by the fact that bunny clubs didn't really appeal to him in the first place. Yet, he was grateful that his sempai didn't pick a far crazier place to go for his bachelor party, like some parlor in the Kabuki-cho Red Light District.

"Lookee here!" Ootaki said, his trademark toothy grin even wider than usual. Keiichi read a flyer that claimed, amazingly, that three of Japan's top female idol stars were going to do a 'bunny show' at this club. His interest was perked, more so because he wanted to hear the three girls sing than seeing them in bunny suits. Of course, the bunny suit idea was somewhat appealing...and he knew that Belldandy wouldn't view his presence here as a transgression, so to speak. Hopefully, Megumi could probably explain it to her.

Three carloads of guys piled out of the cars, sucking in the chill February air, and then walked into the "Ring-Ring" club. The name itself brought up lustful connotations of 'telephone club' girls and hidden prostitution. Keiichi didn't want to get mixed up in any of that, of course. But he was worried that Tamiya, Ootaki and the others might go off the hook. He remembered the Le Mans, where the whole crew got arrested in a brawl at a French pub. The look of disdain on Chihiro's face when she saw the group of them in their cell would be forever burned into his memories.

Opening the swing doors that led to the bar itself, the revelers filled four tables near the stage. Tamiya ordered drinks for everyone, while Ootaki kept pestering the bartender about when the 'special' bunny show was. After being assured that the show would start at 9pm, several Unified Club members launched into a drinking game. Keiichi didn't expect anything less; for some of them, this was merely a convenient excuse to go out on the town and stir up a bit of drunken craziness.

"Hey, Morisato!" Tamiya asked. "Do yuh think I'll ever get married?"

The largish sempai looked at him with a rapt, almost pleading expression, and Keiichi realized that...in this one thing...he was going where none of his friends had gone. Of the entire social group that he ran with, he was the first one to get married. On the coattails of this realization arose another insight: it was now within the realm of probability for some of the new guys in the Club to assume that he was an 'expert' in relationships with women, just because he was married.

"Tamiya, I'm pretty sure that Sayoko will marry you."

"Oh thank you, thank you, thank you, Morisato!" Tamiya shouted, vigorously shaking his hand. Obviously, one of his sempai had already launched himself towards the nearby moon of Inebriation, orbiting the planet Saturnalia...

"Bring on the bunnies!" Ootaki shouted, pounding his bottle on the table. Soon, all the guys were banging and chanting "Bunnies, Bunnies!" at the top of their lungs. Even though he was caught up in the moment, Keiichi noticed something that was a little odd. There were _no_ women in the club to be seen! Usually, bunny girl clubs had waitresses, either dressed in mini-skirts or bunny outfits. But there were no waitresses at all! Besides their group, the club was filled with mostly thirtysomething salarymen. And some of the men looked pretty weird, as they sported some funky leather-jackets and vests.

"Announcing our first bunny! Please give a hand for Miss Yumi!" the bartender shouted, now in the role of emcee. A spotlight appeared on the stage, and Ootaki shouted "Cool!"

A few seconds later, everyone in the club was shouting and applauding...except for the stunned Unified Club students.

Instead of a J-Pop idol, something else popped as a _guy_ came out onto the spotlit stage! Keiichi almost spat out his sake at the sight, completely taken aback. The man was wearing a wig coiffed in Yumi Adachi's current hairstyle. He was dressed in a stage-costume that was half bunny suit, half pop-star frilly-dress. And his feet were clad in high-heels. He even looked like Yumi Adachi!

Watching the man prance around on the stage, Keiichi was uncomfortably reminded of his own 'bunny suit' experience, back when Peorth granted Banpei's wish and Japan narrowly missed being buried in a pile of animated, hybrid stuffed-plushy animals. The only difference here was that this man obviously _wanted_ to be in a bunny suit, while Keiichi had donned his with extreme reluctance, even with the fate of the world at stake.

He heard a crash somewhere next to him.

He looked over at Ootaki, who was so stunned, he had dropped his glass onto the floor. On the other side of the table, Tamiya seemed to be choking on something. The big guy must have been munching on rice crackers when the 'bunny' came out!

"Ah don' believe this! This is whacked! This is disturbing! This is mortifying!" Tamiya groaned. He held his head in his hands like a brooding politician...and didn't notice the man in a business suit who walked up next to him.

"Hi, handsome!" the man said cheerfully. "That Yumi's _hot_, if you know what I mean. And that makes _me_ hot, sugar! You're a really muscular guy. I bet all the other guys say that to you, of course. But you're my type; you definitely have that Northern Hokkaido Roughneck look down pat, my pet. Do you wanna come over to my table and have a drink? I'll buy whatever you want to dri..."

"LET ME OUTTA HERE!!" Tamiya roared. Without missing a beat, he stood up out of the chair, tipping it over, and then made a sprint towards the exit, almost knocking over several bystanders as he dashed out the door. Keiichi was almost certain that the big guy was going to deck the man who was hitting up on him, but he didn't. Evidently, a year of being involved with Sayoko, who was a recovering addict, had rubbed some tolerance off on him towards lifestyles and gender preferences different than his own. Maybe the big guy _would_ get married to her after all.

Despite the pall of shock and disappointment, the scenario that unfolded between the guy and Tamiya had everybody in stitches.

At least until the same man walked around to the other side of the table where Ootaki was sitting, and asked him if he wanted to dance, complimenting him on being the "wild, Punkish type with a swimmer's build." Ootaki made a beeline to the door, to join his friend in the parking lot. By that point, it was more than crystal clear to the Club members that they had 'dialed the wrong number', so to speak.

Keiichi looked up at the man, and quickly realized that he was the only one remaining at the table. Without missing a beat, he stood up and briskly walked out of the Ring-Ring Club.

But on the way out, he got stopped by the bartender, who requested payment for the remaining drinks on the table. Keiichi slapped a 10K yen bill on the bar and fled the place.

"Gimme that flyer! Where's that flyer!" Tamiya stormed, as Keiichi reached the parking lot. It was freezing outside, and everybody was deeply disappointed. Tamiya was angrily rummaging through his car, throwing out anything that wasn't the flyer. Beer cars, soda bottles, cigarette packs, empty bowls of noodles, oil fluid bottles, wadded up papers and drive-thru fast-food bags and wrappers filled the parking lot next to his mini-van. Finally, he emerged from his vehicle with flyer in hand. He walked under one of the parking lot lights and read it...and then dropped it to the ground, his face screwed up in disbelief. Ootaki quickly snatched it up, and then grumbled "that's wicked messed up!" and passed it to Keiichi.

On the front of the flyer were pictures of three men in campy dresses wearing bunny-girl ears with a caption that read:

_"Female Impersonation Night - Special J-pop Idol Cabaret!"_

"Ah'm gonna _kill_ Urd when I get back to that temple! She gave me dis flyer an said 'go knock yourself out'!! Ah'm gonna knock _her_ out!" Tamiya screamed, snagging the flyer out of Keiichi's hands and shredding it with lawnmower hands. Keiichi thought the whole episode reeked of Goddess tricksies...but even he had to admit that Urd had gone too far this time.

"An nobody...ah means _nobody_...is ever goin' to mention anything about what happened in dis here stupidass Ring-Ring Club. Or ah'll Ring-Ring his neck!" Tamiya yelled. This only brought gales of mockery-laughter, and then Tamiya had no choice but join in or lose face.

"Of course, no one's going to mention your 'boyfriend', Big Guy!" Ootaki said, clapping him on the back, and then bowling over in laughter. A short time later, two cars and a van filled with disappointed N.I.T. students convoyed back to Tokyo; an invisible fog of discontent floating above them. Once in Tokyo, they made a few random turns and wound up here and there and somewhere, in an obscure bar in an anonymous-looking street in an unknown neighborhood of Tokyo.

Naturally, Tamiya was angry, while Ootaki was guilty. The more the two of them drank, the more apologetic they tended towards Keiichi. Keiichi realized that the night was quickly drawing towards the necessity of his being the designated driver. But then, in a burst of sempai-logic, Tamiya and Ootaki had reasoned it out that he didn't have enough to drink. So they turned on the Karaoke machine, invented some singing contest game, and then made him match them, drink for drink.

As his mind clouded up, Keiichi wanted to call Bell-chan and check in, just to let her know that he was okay. Searching through his pockets, he couldn't find it and guessed that his cell-phone somehow had gotten lost during the trip. Or maybe it was at Whirlwind. After all, he didn't have any forewarning about being kidnapped out of Chihiro's shop. After five minutes of fumbling around in his pockets, he finally found it. But when he punched the call button, nothing happened. He turned it over and found that someone had removed the battery.

"Thanks a lot, Chihiro!" he cursed, causing Tamiya and Ootaki burst into hoots of laughter.

An hour later, Keiichi looked up at the clock, and discerned that it was getting late. Odds are, at this rate, they'd have to take the late-night trains to get home...if they could even find the nearest train station. No way was anyone in this bunch even going to try and drive anything tonight. Keiichi's usual role as designated driver had been usurped by the festivities; he could barely hold his own head up. Already, several of his Unified Club teammates were passed out on their tables, glass still in hand.

"Some bachelor party _this_ is..." Keiichi observed privately.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Bwah hah ha! Do another fan dance, Rind!" Peorth shouted, gleefully clapping her hands together and falling against Belldandy. Rind performed an elaborate stage-bow to the seated group, and hopped off the couch. Several pillows had been torn up during her dance, but she was sure that Belldandy or somebody would fix them tomorrow. She felt nice; it was _fun_ to be able to perform something other than a complicated martial-arts skill-form with a weapon or two. Her improvised dance with the traditional folding fans had hit a funny bone in all those in the room.

"Ah...it's my turn!" Belldandy said in a loud voice. Skuld was surprised that her sisters had actually allowed her to drink. Unexpectedly, they had rather encouraged her to drink. She would have never imagined that a Demon Queen would fill up her sister's cup with sake, but there it was. Hild and Mara seemed to be competing to see who could give her more sake. She was even more shocked when Belldandy kept up with the others, drink-for-drink. Elder sister wasn't even wasted!

She, on the other hand, was having a difficult time just keeping upright, even though she was sitting cross-legged on the floor. It didn't help matters when 'Big Sister' Urd and 'Big Sister' Mara kept filling her glass with some devilish refreshment they called shochu. She suspected that Hild may have even slipped her something in one of her drinks.

Skuld could feel her eyeballs swimming like noodles in broth.

Belldandy stood up, and materialized a deck of cards. "Now, I'm going to show you one of the best Earthrealm card tricks!" She unbuttoned the top two buttons on the front of her dress, exposing the top of her cleavage, while everyone cooed and whistled. Taking a card between her teeth, she bent her head down...and very carefully, managed to lodge it tight within the cleft of her breasts.

"Woo hoo!" several voices shouted with drunken glee. Belldandy bowed low in front of her seated audience...and the card popped out. She lunged forward to try and catch it in mid-flight; but instead, she plowed into the tatami face-first, knocking over Peorth and two bottles of booze in the process.

"Whoopsie!" she said, struggling to sit up with her legs splayed out under her. She massaged her reddened forehead with a pained expression, while everyone exploded into laughter.

"My turn! My turn!" Mara shouted. "Remember when Keiichi first met me, and I told him that I was a guy! And that I was Belldandy's fiancé? Well, I didn't just tell him that...because I actually manifested as a guy! Wanna see?"

"You still look like a guy!" Hild said with a giggle.

"Shut up, Hild!" Mara snapped, knowing that this was probably the only time in her life she would be able to say _that_ and get away with it. Getting this drunk with a superior would excuse behavior that would otherwise get her in deep trouble.

"Okay, I'll shut up!" Hild said. "But this better be good!"

"Anyway, here's what I looked like!" Mara announced with dramatic flair. She burst into a cloud of flames, and then reappeared as a male Demon. Her hair was shorter and far more curly, while her buxom chest was as flat as a board. She wore a short leather jacket and leather pants that flared out at the hips, with some kind of heavy-boots for her feet.

"I liked the other guy better!" Skuld said drunkenly, swinging her arms wildly and knocking over one of the bottles. Her remark set off another eruption of giggles from all assembled. Mara shot Skuld a piercing glance, but then surrendered to the mood and joined in the giggling.

"Mara, it was a good thing Keiichi wasn't gay...he'd have been all over you!" Urd quipped, complimenting her twin sister. Yes, it was a nasty trick on Mara's part to deceive Keiichi like that, but repeating it here might be was Mara's way of letting bygones be bygones. But Urd also wished she would have been there in person to see the shocked look on Keiichi's face.

But someone wasn't taking it too lightly!

"Mara!" Belldandy shouted as she stood up stiffly, knocking over a bottle of wine from Louis the XIVth's wine cellar. "I formally challenge you to a hanetsuki match!"

"But it ishn't New Year'sh!" Skuld droned in a drunken slur, oblivious to the sudden shift in mood from gaiety to tightrope-tense.

"Belldandy, calm down!" Urd and Peorth said, floating up on each side of her and resting a calming hand on each shoulder. "Mara's just trying to make up for the past, she'd not making fun of you!"

"C'mon! I wanna see this!" Hild shouted through cupped hands, egging them on. "I bet the Demoness'll kick her butt in a match!"

"Not a chance! The Goddess will win, every time!" Rind countered, darting a competitive glance at Hild.

"Actually, neither one ever wins," Urd said in a deadpan voice. She marveled at the fact that Belldandy had thrown the gauntlet in the middle of the party they had carefully planned for her. This was the worst possible example of being totally tactless.

"Here! You two wanna tossh my Shkuld bombs..hiccup!..at eacsh other?!" Skuld shouted, brandishing a handful of golf-ball-sized Skuld Bombs at Hild and Rind.

"Skuld, what the bless are you thinking! This is why you _don't_ feed booze to a minor!" Mara shouted, completely appalled and alarmed. "Somebody get her outta here! She's gonna get us all killed!"

Peorth hovered over towards Skuld, but the young raven-haired Goddess tipped over before she could reach her. Fortunately, Rind was nimble enough to retrieve all the mini-Skuld Bombs that fell out of her hand before any of them hit the ground and exploded. Peorth floated wobbily over Skuld, fanning her hand in front of Skuld's face.

"She's out!" Peorth pronounced as she floated back down to the safety of the living room floor.

"Whew!" Urd sighed. "Thank the Lord! That was close!"

"Mara, what are you doing, just standing there!?" Hild prompted. "She _challenged_ you! Are you just going to ignore it, and make us Demonesses look bad?"

"Why me?!" Mara sighed as she materialized a hagoita paddle with a picture of an akuma on it. The last time...and every time...she played Belldandy, it always ended up in a draw. No one would win, and both of them would be too exhausted to go on.

_"Play!" "Play!" "Play!" "Play!" "Play!" "Play!"_

Now all the participants were chanting and clapping in slurred voices, encouraging the game. Mara realized that she couldn't back out of this. She looked towards Belldandy.

...and was seized by fright for a moment!

Belldandy was gazing at her with the most serious expression that Mara had ever seen her muster. For a moment, Mara blinked her eyes in disbelief. Belldandy's whole bearing was as ireful as that of a Demoness!

"Oh blessit!! This is for real!" Mara thought desperately, as Belldandy served the hane shuttlecock as her with blinding speed.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Keiichi staggered home at 5:30 am in the morning, his head pounding like a turbine motor. Tamiya and Ootaki had finally passed out around 3am, which gave him the opportunity to sneak out of the bar after waiting almost 45 minutes to be sober enough to walk. It took him 30 minutes to find the nearest train station, but the trains were done for the night, so he had to take a cab home, which took an hour or so because he was too sake-fuddled to give proper directions to the cabbie. After getting lost twice on the way to his own house, they finally arrived and he paid the cabbie with his credit card, the ride costing much more than it should have because of all the extra driving. Keiichi noted to himself that he was poorer financially, but happier that he didn't get in too much trouble.

Once he kicked off his shoes and entered the foyer, he could hear loud snoring coming from the living room. Peeking inside, he saw six women passed out on the floor, while Mara was hunched up against one of the couches, a hagoita in her hand. She was drenched in sweat, and her shoulders were heaving in rhythm with her deep gasping breaths.

Obviously, he and his friends weren't the only ones who were partying last night. Even Skuld was passed out, a contented loopy grin on her face!

Mara looked up at him long enough to say, "I don't believe it...she actually _beat_ me! She didn't just beat me, she kicked my butt!" And then she slowly rolled over and plopped on her side, passing out.

The room was whirring, so Keiichi stepped over the several Goddesses and Demonesses on the floor...giving himself a start as he recognized Hild and Rind's recumbent forms...and then laid down next to Bell-chan, spooning himself against her as he quickly fell away from wakefulness.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Urd, ah'm gonna kill you!" Tamiya yelled angrily, his first waking thought. But of course, it wasn't just a thought...he had shouted it aloud. On the other side of the dorm room, Ootaki snapped awake and jerked himself to a sitting position, hitting his head with a "crash!" on the shelf of his 'precious'...his collection of good-luck charms...in the process.

"I'm gonna mutilate her! Ah don't care if she was Cevn's girlfriend at one time, or that she's gonna be Keiichi's sister-in-law, or that she's beautiful and sexy an' our Club's one-an-only cheerleader! There's no forgiveness after what she did ta us last night!" Tamiya groused.

The phone rang before he could really launch a tirade of resentment.

Tamiya fumbled between bags of cheetos, potato chips, cooked peas and Asahi beer cans to try and find his cell phone. When he located it, he pulled it to his ear and groaned, "Who is it?"

"Tamiya, it's Urd! Did you guys...hee hee...have fun last night?"

"Urd!! I'm gonna murderize yuh! Yuh're gonna be unrecognizable after ah'm done with yuh!" Tamiya screamed, his shout causing Ootaki to groan and put a pillow over his head.

"Better put a hold on that thought for a moment, Tamiya, old buddy. It was your mistake, not mine! But anyway..."

"MY MISTAKE! Tell me how dat flyer changed from girls to guys, why don't ya?"

"Oh ho ho ho! You must have been drinking! Haven't I warned you about that?"

"Shaddup, you!!"

"Okay. But anyway, just because I'm a nice girl, I phoned to let you know that you'll be getting a call in 30 seconds. That's all!"

--_click_--

By this point, Tamiya was totally burned. He reached under his bed, feeling around for a shirt and pants. Once he got dressed, he was going to go on over to that temple and beat the crap out of Urd. Well, not beat the crap out of her, since she was a woman. Only sissies hit women! But he would at least yell at her until his voice turned hoarse and her face turned white.

--_ring_--

"Dammit!" he said, picking up the phone, then yelled "Who da hell is it?!" into the receiver...

"I'm calling to inform you that you've won 50 free tickets to the exclusive Tochiomata Onsen and Resort, in beautiful Southern Niigata Prefecture! You need to call this number and we will fax you the free passes! But you only have five minutes to claim your prize!"

Tamiya slowly set his phone down, and muttered to himself, "How the hell? How could she possibly know about that?!" He looked over at Ootaki, who was fast asleep again.

"OOTAKI! WAKE UP! WHERE'S DA NEAREST FAX MACHINE!!"

_C..crash!!_

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

The second attempt at a bachelor party was quite fun, Keiichi had to admit. He learned from Peorth how Urd had given the guys a flyer which led them on a fool's errand, just so the gals could get together and have _their_ party. To his utter dismay and shock, it was revealed that Skuld was the master architect of the whole distasteful ruse! But Urd had made amends by doing her "Goddess of Luck" thing and 'arranging' a lottery win for Tamiya, so that they'd all have a chance to have a _real_ bachelor party at a hot springs resort.

It was one of the few times Keiichi had ever been served food and entertained musically by an honest-to-goodness geisha.

That weekend, they had shuffled into a private tour bus and took the long ride to Niigata Prefecture, passing through Gunma and Ibaraki Prefectures on the way. Niigata was definitely in "Snow Country" mode as they crossed the mountain ridge-line; the snow banks along the road were sometimes nearly as tall as the tour bus. He and his crew got back late in the afternoon the next day, and when his sempai dropped him off at his house, Keiichi was immediately hugged by his wine-flushed younger sister. He had heard a rumor that Megumi was going to hire a male stripper or two for 'her' bachelorette party.

The living room looked the same, except for the bag of X-rated fortune cookies that someone had forgotten to clean up. Sora was snoozing on the couch, and Sayoko and Urd were talking in lowered voices. At least _their_ party had been safe; especially since there was no Hild or Rind around to complicate things or have an 'incident'. Belldandy came out of the kitchen with a cheerful, breezy expression; she gave him a wet kiss on the cheek, and then patted Megumi on the shoulder and thanked her for the 'wild time'.

Keiichi almost got jealous as Bell winked at him, but his common-sense played out. If he was going to have a crazy, sake-driven bachelor party at a hot springs, it was only fair that Belldandy have her own version of a party. At least he didn't try to peep into the women's side of the hot springs, unlike his sempai. According to his sister, the 'girl's party' wasn't quite done...Megumi noted that they were going to a comedy club tonight to complete the party, so Keiichi would have the house to himself.

Keiichi just wanted to catch up on sleep, because he knew that sleep would be a precious commodity in the coming weeks.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

They did a practice run-through on Monday after school. Since Bell and her Mother had agreed on a mixed Christian-Shinto-Buddhist-Islamic wedding, the ceremonies would be more complicated than usual. In view of this, Freiija had suggested two rehearsals instead of the usual single run-through. Of course, since it was Freiija, it was more of a demand than a suggestion.

The living room had been converted to a mock wedding chapel. Megumi was standing atop one of the couches, playing the role of priest. Two of the couches had been moved, to create a 'pews and aisles' effect. Several blankets were placed end-to-end to form a 'runway' leading to the altar. Everybody had typed sheets that looked like play scripts, courtesy of Freiija.

The ceremony would start with a ritual purification by Kami-sama, who would be officiating the ceremony in the role of priest. This would be followed by the assertion by the wali...which would be Bell's Mother...that the bride was willing to participate in the wedding. This was an important custom of weddings in the Islamic tradition; Bell-chan's Mother would perform the role in lieu of the usual speech by the go-between. Urd was playing Bell's Mother, for the purposes of the run-through. After this, there would be a report and prayer at the base of the stairs leading to the altar, followed by a moment of silence for reflection and meditation. Then he and Bell-chan would step onto the lowest stair and exchange the three-by-three cups of ceremonial sake, and then wash their hands in the purification font located to the right of the stairwell. For the purposes of their rehearsal, Skuld had provided styrofoam cups filled with grape juice in lieu of the ritual cups. Following the ritual exchange of sake, The Lord would then call out to those attending the ceremony to ask if anyone held reason that the wedding should not be fulfilled; the traditional "last chance to object to the marriage" sorta thing.

After this, the priest would call he and Bell-chan up to the altar. On the way to the alter, they would pass within the Gate of Judgment to 'seal' their love, and then offer incense to Kami-sama. Once they ascended the dais, the Almighty would bless them, bless their union, and then offer a sermon on love. After He finished His exposition, He would clap His hands three times to expel any evil spirits from the vicinity. Keiichi highly doubted that _any_ evil spirits would come within a million kilometers of their wedding, because of the presence of the Almighty Himself. For a moment, he fancied a humorous situation where Hild and all the other Demons and Demonesses in the building would disappear in a flash!

After 'scaring off the ghosts', the Lord would then summon Sigil to approach the altar with the wedding rings. He would bless each ring, and then give them to he and Bell-chan. He would ask the traditional "do you take this man?" "do you take this woman?" questions, and then He would rest His hands on theirs as they exchanged rings...which was an accommodation to the Yggdrasilian tradition of the Lord serving as a 'bridge' between two Divine beings when they Bonded. Once this was done, he and Bell-chan would kiss for the first time as husband and wife.

Following their special kiss, they would offer the traditional floral sprigs and trees to Kami-sama, each set of parents, those attending the ceremony, and those would could not attend the ceremony. Keiichi was again bemused by the ceremonial traditions; the notion of offering the traditional sakaki sacred-tree to the Gods when the _Lord Himself_ would be in the room seemed quite unnecessary, not to ignore the fact that there would be plenty of Gods and Demons to go around as well.

Once all this was finished, he and Bell would kneel in formal fashion at the front of the altar, while the usher would pass the ceremonial wine cups to the relatives. Each immediate relative would approach the altar, and then offer their pledge and blessing over a cup of sake. With each pledge, he and Bell would alternate serving each other a thin glass of sake...with all the relatives he was going to have, if they both had to drink each time they were pledged, they'd be drunk by the time it was all over! After this, Kasuga's wife, Madoka, would play a piano interlude...and then she would play the Western-version wedding processional on the organ, while he and Belldandy walked solemnly down the aisle. Once they reached the end of the aisle, they would be pelted by rice by the more 'celebrant' members of the wedding audience...namely his N.I.T. schoolmates...and then they would proceed to the basement for the reception.

Between the wedding and the reception, Bell would change from her white wedding kimono to a pink floral-designed one, the last time she would get to wear the maiden's long-sleeved kimono. Then they would be ushered to sit at the front of the hall, alone in the center of a long white-clothed table. There, they would be introduced by each other's parents, and then each set of parents would be seated. A microphone stand would be set up on the far aisle of the reception hall, and the best men, bridesmaids, and then anyone else who wished to would make toast-speeches to the bridge and groom. After this was finished, the caterers would bring in the food, and everybody would eat.

Keiichi sighed as it dawned on him once again how much he needed to remember!

"Ahem!" Megumi said in a faux male voice, talking to the group but eyeing him. "Are you guys ready?! It's not nice to keep the Lord..hee hee..waiting!"

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

_Wedding Minus Three Days_

"Don't forget the wedding license!" I teased Keiichi over breakfast. He and Bell were getting married on Thursday, and here it was Monday morning...and he hadn't mentioned a word about it! I could tell by the panicked look on Keiichi's face that he _had_ forgotten the license, which was another one of those 'unsaid' traditions about the wedding adventure. Chuckling to myself, I admitted that I had postponed getting my wedding certificate until the last minute too. Of course, Urd had to add that I had forgotten it because I "didn't care about the wedding or the bride enough to be responsible."

When was she going to cool it?! I needed a friend, not a hen-pecking den mother! Even though I was swept up with joy in the wedding preparations, weddings were a trying time for me too! Once again, Urd's insensitive words reminded me of the enormous emotional distance between her and me.

Last week, I had gone to sleep the night after Skuld had come to my office. Skuld had promised me that there was something I could do to erase the separation between Urd and I. Of course, when I woke up that morning, I made the mistake of going to the sister's bedroom and waking up Urd, fully believing that everything was different between us, now that I had survived Skuld's little 'mission'.

My cheek was still reddened that afternoon from the slap she had given me. It's a good thing that my cyborganic body had an auto-regulate function so I wouldn't feel pain in the same manner as my human body used to!

For a moment, I thought that Skuld had played a prank on me; especially since I had learned that she had orchestrated the "Ring-Ring" debacle a few days later. When I talked to her about it, she told me that she didn't know anything about visiting my office at N.I.T., and then confirmed once again that she thought her sister was a dimwit for forgetting about how she felt about me. I could live with that, but it was curious that she lied about coming to my office.

Unlike Urd, Skuld could be truthful to a fault.

Right now, the most important thing was to listen in while Keiichi planned out how to get out to the Ward Office with Belldandy, so they could get a freshly-minted wedding license. Valentine's Day was kinda a goof-off day at N.I.T. anyway; most of the student's minds wouldn't be on homework and assignments. With Belldandy and Keiichi's wedding, there would probably be a lot of absences from a lot of classes that day...and probably the next day. For some, it would be a four-day weekend.

As Keiichi and Belldandy planned their side-trip to get the public documents for their wedding, my thoughts returned to what had happened last week. I remembered marking up the floor...but then when I woke up that morning, my room was just the same as it always was. Perhaps my 'memory' of marking up the floor was just a dream as well. I couldn't remember any other parts of the dream, except for the drawing-on-the-floor bit. Oddly enough, I could still remember that slice of my dream, even this morning. Didn't people normally _forget_ their dreams? And it was supposedly impossible for cyborgs to remember their dreams at all! Unlike sheep, cyborganics don't dream.

Weddings were a mixed-bag to me in many ways. After I got married, my wife had overdosed and died within a year. As I looked at Keiichi and Belldandy, sitting there so happily in each other's company, I saw myself at 21...sitting next to my wife, filled with joy. The other vision slammed into the happy vision, and I saw her lifeless body in the morgue. I had been asked by the coroner to identify the remains. My joy was wrecked upon the highway of sighs.

For me, no matter how I put it away from my mind, weddings always seem to have a hint of Death.

Maybe it was best that Urd didn't love me. I couldn't stand watching her die. I remembered when she had _wanted_ to die, way back a couple years ago when I went to Beijing to finish my dissertation. I didn't want to go through _that_ again...but ironically, that very episode was one of the things that brought Urd into my life. It had awakened inside of me a sense about how very much I cared for her. I had lost my wife to a drug-overdose death; and then ironically, near-death had stirred dormant feelings in my hardened heart and awakened me to a love for Urd.

What could have changed things between us? Urd didn't have the slightest recall that I was meaningful in her life. Yet, she seemed to unconsciously do certain things that hinted of a sense of possessiveness towards me. Even now, despite her cutting remarks earlier this morning, she sat on her usual zabuton, right next to me. Always on my left side. If Skuld sat there, Urd would make her get up and move to another part of the table.

Or maybe it had nothing to do with me at all. Urd just liked that certain seat at the table.

For that matter, why did _I_ always sit in the same place? Maybe tomorrow, I should experiment a little...maybe sit in another place on the table, and see if Urd insists on sitting to my left.

I looked at Belldandy and Keiichi again, realizing that...for some...love wasn't a confusing mess all the time.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

_Wedding Morning _

Keiichi awoke the same way he awoke on every other day in his life. A little earlier than usual, perhaps. But the same sky was outside of his window, and the same snow was on the ground that was there yesterday. His sleep had been quite thin; but despite this, he had woken up somewhat invigorated.

--_tap tap tap_--

"Come in!" he half-said, half-yawned. The shoji door slid open and Urd knelt in the doorway, dressed in a wisteria kimono.

"Good morning, Keiichi-groom!" she said with a grin. Reaching next to her, she grabbed a serving tray and shuffled forward on her knees until she was about a meter away from Keiichi's futon. She studied Keiichi for a moment.

"Neh...you sure you don't want to experience a last fling before married life?" Urd said. "You certainly have a little tent going on under those bed-covers! I could show you some special Big Sister Techniques to relieve you of your."

"URD!" Keiichi shouted squeamishly. Dammit, she was right! But what was a guy supposed to do? Guys don't always wake up on the 'soft' side of things! And he was famished for affection; Belldandy hadn't slept in his room for the last nine days, something that tradition and his future Mother-In-Law had insisted upon. Which was why Urd was here serving him breakfast, instead of him going to the dining room to eat. Skuld was probably on the other side of the hallway, serving Bell-chan her breakfast. Looking down at his rapidly-diminishing manhood, Keiichi found some gratitude in the otherwise embarrassing circumstances.

At least Urd had served him his morning meal instead of Skuld...otherwise, he'd probably be _wearing_ his breakfast...

"I cooked it myself," Urd said casually to Keiichi as she set the tray down. Keiichi was surprised; Urd's cookery actually resembled real food. She told him that she cooked his, while Skuld cooked Bell's. There was no way that either of them would allow Bell into the kitchen on this, her wedding day.

Typical oddball Goddesses. Urd won't allow her sister in the kitchen, but then she offers herself to the groom instead of just serving him breakfast! Knowing Skuld, Keiichi suspected that she might be engaged in a last-ditch attempt to talk Bell-chan out of marrying him.

The miso soup tasted great.

Urd stood guard over him while he ate her breakfast at his leisure. For today, unlike any other day in the week, he wasn't allowed to see Belldandy _at all_ until right before he and she were bonded in marital bliss.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

_--Bang! Pound! Bang! Pound!--_

"Urd, it's your turn..." Skuld sighed with a grimace as she adjusted Belldandy's dress once again. Urd lifted the train of her skirt, and then walked up to the shoji door, making sure not to step on anything.

"Daddy, I don't care if you're a Senior First Class God, or Head of the Energy Guild, or a formal Marshal of the WarGods. I wouldn't even care if you were the Almighty Himself! You're _not_ coming in this room! You have to wait like all the others before seeing her! No men allowed!! Being the husband of the Goddess of Marriages, you should know the routine."

"But it's my baby girl!" the rich basso voice pleaded from the other side of the door.

"Why don't you go off and bother Keiichi or something?" Mara shouted at the closed door.

Megumi giggled. Who'd have figured Belldandy's Father to be such the doting type? Every few minutes, Odeyn would pound on the door; and then either Skuld or Urd would shoo him away, and she'd hear grumbling from somewhere in the hallway about "unappreciative daughters!"

"Too bad! Too bad!" she thought, smirking.

Belldandy had never looked so beautiful. True, she was unearthly in the beauty department to begin with, because she was a Goddess. But seeing her in her wedding kimono was simply like viewing Perfection. For about an hour this morning, no one was allowed in the sister's bedroom, which had been converted to a bridal dressing chamber by Peorth. It was just Belldandy and Freiija together, alone in the sister's bedroom for that hour. Bell's Mom was going to do her hair in a special coiffure, and had insisted on absolute Mother-Daughter privacy. Megumi guessed that it was a final chance for the mother to talk to her daughter before she was married off. Urd and Skuld eavesdropped, of course, but Megumi didn't have to listen too hard to hear the occasional sobbing from behind the shoji.

She wondered how her brother was faring.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"How am I supposed to get married wearing this?!" Keiichi asked. "It's bad enough that I have to wear a tux...but to wear a complete formal haori _and_ hakama over it? I'm gonna roast!"

"Don't worry, son," his father said. "It's February! And the church is air-conditioned, not that we'll need it, of course! The worst that can happen is that you'll be rendered immobile by all those layers of clothes while you're walking down the aisle. Just think! You won't have to pretend at being all stiff and formal, because in those clothes, you'll definitely be stiff. Ha ahaha ha!!"

"Gee thanks, Dad!" Keiichi replied sourly as his father playfully slapped him on the back. At least _someone_ was having fun!

True, the many layers of clothing felt confining. Not even double outfits of the tightest racing coveralls he had ever worn could have felt this stifling! It didn't make sense that he had to wear both the traditional Western and Japanese groom's vestments...but Freiija had insisted. And his Mom had demanded it. Who was going to argue with the Goddess of Marriages, or even more importantly, one's own Mother?

His dad had wanted to slick his hair back in some 'Be-bop Boys' hair-style that went out in the 1980s, but Keiichi had put his foot down at that. Nevertheless, he did have his hair combed back, which made him feel ridiculous. He could just imagine Tamiya, Ootaki and the gang hooting it up when he showed up, looking like a greasy-headed penguin.

Oh...the misery of it all.

He looked in the mirror, and then grabbed a towel and tousled his hair into something that resembled its typical shaggy configuration. If Freiija was disappointed at his unkempt hair, so what?

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

The church was crowded, but no overmuch. It had been a while since I had gone to a wedding; since it was for Keiichi and Belldandy, I actually wore a suit. After all, this was Japan, and formal dress for formal occasions was much more socially 'enforced' than in the US. Gratefully, I wasn't the only one out of his element. I could hear occasional grumbling from the back of the nave; Ootaki and Tamiya were in mingling with the other ushers, looking very uncomfortable dressed in formal black tuxes with corsages and lace ties. Whenever they escorted a group of wedding guests up the center aisle, I could feel the awkwardness like waves of heat in a July afternoon. I myself was standing on the far end of the pew, jittery enough to want to make sure I could make a quick escape if need be.

None of the principles had arrived up yet. Odeyn had chased all us guys out of the men's waiting room about 30 mins ago, so he could have a one-on-one with Keiichi. Not that we were doing anything important; the last hour or so was basically clowning around and telling "remember when so-and-so?" anecdotes. Freiija had insisted on an extra best man's corsage...and sure enough, it became necessary. Tamiya had stubbornly refused to let Sayoko pin his corsage on his tux, so he tried to do it himself and ended up demolishing the fragile flowers. Much needed comic relief, because Keiichi's palpable tension diminished somewhat after that. Needless to say, Tamiya humbled himself and asked his girlfriend to "do it right". And when he returned with an intact corsage, we all unloaded on him until he got red-faced. So Odeyn wasn't interrupting anything when he moofed us all out of the 'Groom Room'. It was impossible to miss his constant vigil next to the sister's bedroom this morning; he had certainly earned his share of curt remarks from Urd and Skuld, based on the selection my acoustic monitors overheard. Now, he was focusing his attention to bear on Keiichi.

Oddly enough, I remembered the manga that I used to read, back before my life had been transformed by Keiichi and the 'Goddess Family'...or rather, before I had been transformed _into_ Keiichi and the Goddesses's lives. But this reality was whacked compared to that one. I had been in the middle of it for the past two years; any doubt that this was a silly dream had long ago been dispelled. Yet, the manga always seemed to linger, casting a shadow of doubt on it all. Several times, I had gone to manga booksellers just to see if there were any "Oh My Goddess!!" mangas. As I suspected, I never did find any trace of them...but then again, I saw lots of familiar mangas and otaku gear. And there was even a number of new series that I didn't even recognize from my 'old' days. There was always the possibility that I was on a whole different world.

But I could remember the AMS manga fairly clearly, despite all the other cheese-holes in my recollection. The storylines usually alternated: there'd be a racing storyline, and then a divine storyline. Over and over and over again, with the exception of a few storylines that focused on introducing or revisiting minor characters. But as I looked around the large interior of the church, I was struck by the fact that this event certainly wasn't part of the manga or anime. Nor would it have ever been, I suspected. It took 60 years for Superman and Lois Lane to get married...but Keiichi and Belldandy were going to embark on the marriage ceremony in less than an hour.

Weddings being a time for reflection, I contemplated the notion that my journey had always been leading up to this point. The path I had taken had been given me purchase on a renewed hope and sanity. Urd had figured predominantly in my life, having granted some unknown wish I had made, and then transported me to Japan, and eventually had even softened her brusque attitude towards me. I had watched Skuld literally grow up over the past two years. Yes, it was almost two years ago when I wound up in this crazy place! Since then, I had witnessed wonders both awesome and sublime, couched in mysteries and paradoxes that had fueled my soul towards a higher ground. Yes, I was still afraid of women. Yes, I still was depressed from time to time. And yes, I still didn't have a clue about who I was.

In those two years, I felt like I had lived a trillion lifetimes.

I had started off as a human being, and then ended up here as a cyborg. Or maybe I had been a cyborganic artificial lifeform all along. In between, I had lived a thousand lifetimes on Planet Lost, had been given the Enigma Book, and was somehow 'touched' by the Ultimate Force. I had finished my dissertation, and had fallen in love with a Goddess, just like Keiichi. But everything was different between Urd and I, and I couldn't remember that part too well. Traceries of memory-whispers seemed to dance through the grasp of my mind; it seemed that Urd may have loved me at one time, but then something happened. She certainly didn't love me now. I had probably screwed something up and then alienated her. Or some kind of divine 'reality check' had asserted itself, distancing her from me. Being a Goddess, she was quite uppity and full of herself...but that was part of her charm. Charm pillars eroding in the sand.

Keiichi and Belldandy's love represented Hope.

For me, their love served as a reminder to all of us that love conquers all. They had been spared the pain of a doomed relationship, because they had undergone the work to patiently teach each other how to magnify their love. They were the spoke of the wheel; the secret voice in the wind that whispers so slightly, one initially assumes that it's nothing more than a voice in their head. Then the words blow down, rendering metaphor into truth...and there is no doubt of their source any more.

The Almighty Himself was going to perform the ceremony. For some reason, I had a sketch moment of humor, envisioning that He would show up looking like George Carlin.

Madoka was a beautiful woman, playing beautiful melodies on the piano. Another character from another manga, but somehow mixed into this reality. She was dressed in a teal-and-blue concert gown with her long black hair cascading down her back, an expressive face that was only slightly engaged in concentrating on her piano-play. Hers was a mastery of the keyboard, making my playing look amateurish and thumbishly plodding; as she had the formal training of a musician. Even without the wedding program, I could recognize the selections from Liszt's B-Flat Sonata flowing through the chambered hall, but Madoka had interpolated it with some jazz shadings...a tribute to her virtuosity and genius. Liszt was followed by an arrangement of two Chopin etudes played simultaneously. Now she was showing off; only a handful of pianists in the world could play something like that. Her arrangement was a weave of extreme technical difficulties involving dynamic contrasts, numerous key changes, massive arpeggios of very complicated patterns, octave glissandi, multiple melodies per hand, subtle heterophonies as bridging melodies, and leapfrog jumps all over the ivories. I could see why her performances routinely commanded handsome ticket prices all over Asia. After a brief pause, she started playing a fugue, listed in the wedding program as composed by the Chinese composer Hui Ma.

Finally, Keiichi emerged from the left side of the rear of the church, along with Odeyn. Tamiya and Ootaki walked over to his side, and seemed to make hushed comments to him behind their hands. For once, the two lions of the Unified Club seemed to be tamed by the circumstances. No megaphones and muscle-flexing here.

And then a group of women appeared on the right side of the aisle. Urd, Mara and Skuld all emerged from the Bridal Dressing Chambers, wearing intricate-patterned bridesmaid's dresses. Each of them was a stunning vision of beauty. Sora, Chihiro, Sayoko and Megumi followed, each mortal woman wearing variant versions of the sister's bridesmaid dresses. Behind them, the doorway glowed with brightness...and then Belldandy stepped out into the church foyer. I could hear a rustling as everybody turned around in their church pews to see the bride...followed by a collective gasp.

I felt my breath choke up; seeing her in her wedding dress brought heavy soundings of joy to my artificial heart.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Keiichi was so befit with nervousness, he commented "isn't the weather nice?" five times in a row to his friends, like an answering machine on autoloop. Ootaki finally punched him in the middle of the back, startling him out of his jitters once again. Ootaki then turned white when Odeyn covered his mouth with a fist and did an "ahem!" causing Keiichi to giggle. Ootaki had punched him for all the right reasons, but Bell's Dad had missed the context...and Ootaki found himself nodding in apology. Keiichi was back in gear, back to his senses. Of course, he had never seen Bell's bridal dress design, and had only seen the bridesmaid dresses on paper, so he had no idea who would look like what when the girls came out.

Urd was the first one out, and Keiichi heaved a sigh of relief...he was still wary of the possibility that Urd would pitch a fit at the last minute and wear 'her' version of the bridesmaid dress...after all, the crazy Goddess had propositioned him for sex early this morning. Mara followed closely behind Urd, and Keiichi noticed how much Bell's two older sisters looked alike, being dressed in almost the same dress. The only difference in their dresses was that Urd's was trimmed in green, while Mara's was trimmed in red. Skuld followed; her dress was trimmed in pink. She stumbled out of the door, obviously not used to wearing heeled shoes like Urd and Mara were. Next came Sora...and Keiichi did a double-take, as he realized that she wasn't wearing glasses! He had never seen her in contact lenses before, and almost didn't recognize her pixieish face, with its high cheekbones and freckles. Strangely enough, not wearing her glasses made Sora look even younger than normal; she looked like she was all of 16, not a sophomore at N.I.T. Chihiro followed, and Keiichi was treated to seeing his Whirlwind boss in an improbable dress. Chihiro's hair was freshly permed; the curls had been highlighted. Sayoko was next, her waist-length black hair flawless, her bearing regal. Megumi was the last one out, and Keiichi had to admit that he had never seen his sister so beautiful, save for the time when she returned from Paris with Genji wearing a promise ring.

And then he saw a vision in white. The doorway seemed to spread rays of light, as if a super-bright spotlight was shining out from within it...

Bell-chan!!

His breath stuck in his throat as he saw his bride-to-be slowly step out of the door. He promised himself that he wasn't going to cry during the wedding, but seeing Belldandy thus made him feel that Beauty itself had just been consecrated. A tear traced down his cheek as she turned to look at him, her face filled with vibrant emotions. She was dressed in a magnificent white kimono with intricate Yggdrasilian designs of gold lacing, over a Western-style wedding dress. Her train was all lace-and-sparkle, with two white-blue 'tails' floating atop it, with the familiar Goddess pattern that she was wearing when she first met him. Her hair was covered in a silver-white 'hood'.

She was literally glowing!

Keiichi panicked momentarily at the hazard of a supernaturally illuminated Goddess clasped in the middle of a mortal wedding ceremony. He was ready to mouth "Bell, tone it down!" when Ootaki commented "Belldandy sure does look beautiful, little buddy!" in a short-winded voices of marvel. Keiichi felt relieved; if anyone could spot the supernatural, it was his charm-fetishist sempai Ootaki. Tamiya, of course, wasn't paying too much attention to Belldandy...as his girlfriend, Sayoko, was part of the bride's entourage. Even Chihiro was there, wearing a _dress_ instead of her usual coveralls and sweatshirts!

Bell-chan nodded at him privately, her smile wordlessly saying "this is it!"

Kasuga was busily taking pictures.

Keiichi felt like his heart was almost going to burst into a stellar bonfire; Belldandy was splendoring his soul with an absolutely clarity of Love. He had never ascended to the emotional heights he was scaling right now; he was intoxicated on the sight of beloved in all her bridal resplendence.

"Wordless, huh?" Cevn finally said, patting him affectionately on the shoulder. His NIT sensei and housemate evidently had decided to forgo the church seating and hang out with him and the guys for the last couple minutes before the ceremony started.

"Yep!" Keiichi gasped.

Soon, he would be walking up the aisle with his beloved Bell-chan, a poem of his heart unraveling softly in the world of Gods, Demons and Men.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Don't shake so much, Keiichi," Belldandy whispered to him. "It'll all be over soon. It's all going to be like kindling on the fire."

Keiichi looked at his bride, wondering at her curious choice of words. Yes, he felt excited, on fire, but it was odd that Belldandy would describe their wedding in such terms. The piano music finished with a soft flourish, signaling that any minute now, Kami-sama would appear at the front of the church to start the ceremony.

There was a flash.

A single gasp arose from the crowd; for a moment, it appeared that the sunlight had pierced through the stained-glass rosette window at the head of the church with a bright beam of light, laser-bright and fluid with colors. And then He was there. With a flash, He stepped on the dais at the front of the church.

Kami-sama was dressed in purple, white and silver priestly vestments. Even though he was at the far end of the church, Keiichi could feel the entire atmosphere in the building noticeably shift. The church itself felt almost tingly; the February air inside of it charged by the holy dignity of His presence. The assembly of Gods, Demons and mortals was so hushed, you could hear a pin drop.

He looked at Urd and her sisters, half-expecting them to prostrate themselves as they usually did in His Presence, or even when He called on the phone. But Urd, Skuld, Peorth, and Rind simply bowed their heads for a moment in humble and reverent acknowledgment. Even Mara paid Him reverence with a humble head bow. When they lifted their eyes, Rind turned her head to glance at Keiichi, shooting him a knowing wink.

In a way, Rind knew him better than anyone in the room, besides Belldandy. Maybe even more so in a particular sense, because he had shared a very special relationship with Rind by being host to her Angel Cool Mint. The love given him by the Goddesses had touched the Divine part of his heart, allowing him to support Rind's Angel at a time when Hild was enacting one of her haywire 'playful' schemes. Keiichi was very glad that she was here, because her little gesture had just restored his confidence and stilled his trembling. Just like what would be expected from a "lifelong friend". Rind had taught all of them how to be warriors when she first came into their lives...now, he would be a warrior for Belldandy by keeping his nerves cooled and not freaking out.

The Almighty had appeared as a man in his 60s, Keiichi guessed. He had a close-trimmed beard, and a full head of long flowing silver-gray hair. His expression was at once kind, serene and noble. Nodding to the assembled wedding guests to sit down, He moved his hands in an arc, and then dipped them into a pool of water. He repeated the motion three times; to purify the Gods, the Demons, and the mortals in attendance. Watching from the back of the church, Keiichi felt like he was getting married by the Pope! Kami-sama could probably be in a billion places at once, and yet He had deigned to come to the Earthrealm to marry Belldandy and Keiichi Morisato.

With a nod, He clasped His hands in front of His breast and made a prayerful gesture.

"I call upon Freiija, wife of Odeyn, Mother of Belldandy...to arise!" He said in a firm voice.

Keiichi squinted his eyes as Bell's Mom stood up, a single figure amongst the gathering. She was wearing a dress that looked like it was made of pure gold, with copper and silver highlights. With a flight of humor, Keiichi joked to himself that she had probably spent 10 millennia deciding on what dress to wear to her daughter's wedding.

"Freiija, Mother of Belldandy," the Lord began in a solemn, officious voice, "today, we are gathered here within the arc and compass of companionship, love, parental devotion and freedom. Your daughter has been petitioned by Keiichi Morisato to enter into the solemn and glorious bond of marriage. You are acquainted with the groom: you know his habits, his goings-from and comings-to, his willfulness and his discretion, and his devotion. Of all those present, you are the most learned in the manner of those sentiments to which your daughter holds to be as truths, engraved upon the richness of her heart. Thus, your heart is bonded to hers with the maternal sanctity of verity and trust. Because of this, you are the Witness for Belldandy. As Witness and Guardian, do you sanction the proposal of marriage?"

"I do," Freiija answered without hesitation. "He had proven himself to the satisfaction of my husband and I. In my heart, and in my daughter's heart, this man, Keiichi, is fully prepared to assume the responsibilities and joys of marriage. His dowry is nothing less than the free-reckoning gift of his heart; the total and unashamed offering of affection and respect towards my daughter. As Godd..er, as Belldandy's Mother, I formally grant his request on behalf of myself, my husband, and my daughter...for all to witness."

Keiichi patted himself on the chest as his heart seemed to somersault inside his breast at the generous speech of his future Mother-in-law. True, he didn't have a bounty of money and resources to give as proof of his willingness to support Bell-chan; but then again, money was probably the most useless of his assets. It certainly cultured the least importance to the Gods, of course. But Freiija had spoken of the feelings deep in his soul, the truth of his kokoro, as spoken on his return flight from Algeria. She and Odeyn had submitted him to the Trial of Preparedness...and he had not only passed the trial, he had saved the very lives of Belldandy and Skuld. The truest 'gift' Keiichi knew he could give she and Odeyn was threaded within the deep love he had for Belldandy. By making her feel happy and loved, he would be sharing with them the most important devotion of all.

"Keiichi, having heard the yield of assent in the words of Freiija, mother of Belldandy...do you accept her words of confirmation and sanction?" the Lord asked him. Keiichi knew that He could already see the answer in his heart, but the powerful presence of the Lord made the question even more gravely imposing. This was the first of three vows to join his life with Belldandy's in the Soul-bond of marriage.

"I do!" Keiichi said excitedly, squeezing Belldandy's hand.

"The bride and groom may now approach."

The traditional wedding processional started up, and everyone in the church stood at attention. Keiichi was almost paralyzed, riveted by the strains of organ music that surrounded him. It was the _real thing_; the actual strains of 'Here Comes the Bride!" _Everything_ was so real! One step forward, and he would be on the road to a change in destiny that he would never reverse. Divorce wasn't even a question between he and Bell-chan; once he married her, it would be for every single remaining moment of his life.

Momentarily frozen at the pomp and dignity, Keiichi managed to step forward, realizing that he was going to walk the aisle with Bell.

Walk the aisle...

_"Don't rush it!" he heard Megumi's voice shouting in his memory. Two nights ago, his sister had pulled him aside after the second rehearsal. She then noted that he had almost dashed from the back to the front of their mock 'church' in the living room during the processional part of the ceremony._

_"This is the one time in your life when you -_don't-_ have to race, brother!!" she had said. "Make sure you walk slowly and confidently towards the altar! The song's not going to end until you finish the walk. Don't be hasty, like you always are!"_

...and he sought Megumi out with his eyes and nodded to her, signifying his gratitude for her insight. Checking his pace, he walked slowly up towards the altar, Belldandy next to him. Unlike the Christian ceremonies where the mother of the groom and the father of the bride accompanied the marital principles, it was just he and Bell-chan. He could hear the rustling of the lace-woven train of her wedding dress and the silk of her long kimono as it whisked over the carpeted aisle behind her. Keiichi couldn't help it; he felt so reverent because of the music and the vision of beauty walking next to him. He remembered watching the marriage of the Imperial Princess on TV when he was a kid...Belldandy's dress was even more elaborate and fetching than that used in the Imperial wedding. It was a good thing that he was wearing a groom's tux, haori jacket and pleated hakama skirt...it hid the shiver-tingle of goosebumps he was feeling all over his skin.

They finally reached the front of the narthex and stood in front of the chancel. Keiichi could almost imagine that he could see the Gate of Judgment that stood invisibly between he and Belldandy and the upper stairs of the chancel where the cance-dais and alter were.

"Let us pause for a moment of reflection, meditation, and quiet introspection," the Lord said. Quiet wasn't quite the operative word, as far as Keiichi was concerned. He could hear his heart beating in his ears. He cast a quick glance at Belldandy, who was engrossed in a serene aspect, her eyes closed. For a moment, Keiichi felt his spirit floating out of his body, traveling towards an ocean of Souls. His heart was filled with a sense of union with all the billions of men and women throughout human history who had done what he was going to do...enter into the simple and profound act of life-bonding with their spouse. His future with Belldandy would be filled with brightness, and he would exert his best effort to try and make her feel beloved.

The Lord made a gesture to end the meditation, and then inclined His head towards the right side of the sanctuary. Urd and Mara, as eldest sisters of the bride, approached he and Bell-chan. Both were dressed in the traditional shrine-maiden miko outfits; the white chihaya kimono overcoat and the red hibikama hakama-skirt. They both were carrying the ceremonial sake and three cups on an ornate porcelain tray. Three sequentially smaller red flat cups were stacked on the tray, next to a sake decanter with his and Bell's names etched on it, and a folding miniature shoji screen with a dragon and phoenix, representing male and female respectively. Kneeling before him, probably for the only time in his life, Mara silently served him the first cup, pouring the special sake into the smallest cup three times from the sake pot. She must have sensed his nervousness, because she smiled a private smile for him right before handing the slender sake cup to him. Keiichi bowed to her, and then sipped out of it slowly, taking three sips to finish the cup. Then Mara handed the cup to Urd, who filled it for Belldandy. Bell-chan took three dainty sips and handed it back to Urd, who placed it on the tray and then bowed. Then Urd filled the second, larger flat-cup for Bell, who silently sipped it three times and then returned it to Urd. Urd handed the sake cup to Mara, who filled it up for him. He drank from it three sips, and then Mara returned it to the tray. Mara handed him the last, largest cup, which he handed to Belldandy. In a break from the tradition san san kudo sequence, Keiichi filled Bell's cup with sake from the personalized wedding sake decanter, and then she filled his to finish the sake-sharing part of the ceremony. Keiichi knew that this part of the wedding would greatly please his dad, who was more a traditionalist in his values than his mother. The exchange of sake between he and Bell was a bonding of families, as well as bride and groom.

Mara nodded at Keiichi with a reassuring smile before lifting up the tray with Urd and withdrawing, walking backwards with practiced sliding steps as they withdrew away from he and Bell. It was so ironic...when he had first met her, Mara had been a 'he', and she had even claimed she was married to Belldandy. She had also tried to possess him, and also tried to kill him. And that was just the beginning. Now, she had just served him sake at his wedding.

Another reminder that Life is a continuous cycle of surprises and turnabouts.

"Having exchanged the traditional offerings of sake as a silent oath of their hearts, Keiichi and Belldandy have united their families within the grace of their pledge of matrimony. As the pattern of their lives will soon be henceforth threaded, I mustneeds ask if there are any among you who would hold an objection to this union..."

There was a brief pause of silence, and then Keiichi heard the words he had never, ever, expected to hear at his wedding:

"I DEMAND THAT YOU CEASE THIS ABOMINATION OF A CEREMONY IMMEDIATELY!!"

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --


	121. Pt 121: Propagation of Dedication

**Part 121: Propagation of Dedication**

VANAGDRASIL, REALMS UNKNOWN:

They were surrounded by airs of solidity, a framework fired harshly by all the hues of red and orange, seemingly vastly enclosed inside of a living organism of furnace and ferocity. The immense structure was recognizably a spiderworks colosseum...but it was distorted, unwieldy, uncomfortable. A nightmare arrayed on a palatial scale. Above and below, tall arched glass-ways with rainbows of colors were set in within curling 'flaming walls'. Huge pillars of ornate rope-knit laserworks were constantly ascending and descending through the floor. Geometric shifts with terrifying prismaticity floated through the air, their near-rounded forms like misshapen jagged marbles, creating motioning visual chaos. The basso "thrummng" that was ever-present in Vanagdrasil was even more pronounced here, as if the very floor itself was vibrating underfoot. The floor itself was glass-transparent, creating a sense of vertigo and disorientation. Overhead, a series of circular 'windows' hung suspended in mid-air like rosette windows in a darkened Italian Gothic cathedral. Each 'window' was a visual vagary, defined with a bluish swirl at its center, the air wavering around their azure cast, wobbling it to the sight because of the heat.

But it didn't _feel_ hot.

The ceiling seemed to be shrouded in a thick devil's brew of purplish fog. Or maybe the obscuring haze _was_ the vault-roof. The soupish air above paisleyed like a boiling violent storm cloud, illuminated with electric warbles of multicolored lightning in complete defiance to normal physics. There was no sense of axiality or order; each glance was absorbed in sublime chaos, as if the eldritch grandeur of the place was both approaching and fleeing at the same time. Once the shape of the surrounding environs sharpened, their organgular thrust made Keleste sense that she had been trapped inside of an engine of madness...

Keleste felt the strength of the place ripping away her senses.

Her whole body hurt; the physical aches gripping her with an assembled ferocity. It was as if she had been pushed off the highest diving board at a swimming pool, and then had punched through the pool-water pancake-flat and wide-eyed startled. A moment earlier, she and her brother were traveling in the vortex...the recent sensation of shifty mid-air tumbling still fresh in her mind...riding invisible tigers of energy inside of a bright red swirl. And then something hard and invisible had checked her fall with abrupt finality. It seemed like it was over before it had even started.

Now solidly alert, Keleste shuffled back in her memories a couple moments; her mind's eye revisiting the massive swarm of gravity energy that yawed vertiginously around the event horizon of the Red Hole. Her physical manifest still tingled from the sensation of being stretched...but being stretched outside of Time, not just simply being stretched within the physics of Time and Space. Yet, her swirl of emotions seemed out of synch with her mind, as if they were discus-films of oil floating on water. Or more accurately, her feelings were scrambled...and her mind was scrambling. But she had enough of her beingness intact to feel grateful that she had survived.

But what had she survived into?

Keleste was barely into sorting the tumult of her consciousness when the most powerful thoughtcast she had ever felt in her life blasted her. It was if every molecule and chronocule in the vicinity was stuffed to overflowing with cannon-fire Thought...and that vast Thought was hotfire with surprise and high dudgeon. The thoughtcast quickly overpowered her mind, as if her mind was a coffee cup and someone was trying to fill it with water by standing under a thousand-meter high waterfall.

_"Would somebody care to explain why there are four Goddesses and a God here?"_ the voice had shouted.

Keleste blinked back her astonishment, as she beheld a being of massive proportions materializing in the air above her. It was a 'form', half-in and half-out of her Goddess senses. To her eye, it was remotely similar to that of an Earthrealm mortal, with two arms and two legs. It didn't seem to be a giant being in the sense of stature or mass; but the 'dark cathedral' she had landed in was suddenly filled with a bearing that created an impression of immediacy and awe-wonder. At the most, the floating 'shadow' appeared to be perhaps only twice as tall as she was; but something about him gave her a hinting feeling, as if she was in the presence of a being far deeper than a Multiverse. Despite her best efforts, her Goddess senses failed to peg a face on the dark figure. As it floated nearby, all she could discern was almost a silhouette, the edges of the obscure form defined by crackling orange-bluish energy. Something was indistinct, mysterious about this figure...

She reached down and flattened her skirt, because her knees were knocking together.

"Wh..what are we doing here? Where are w..we?" a girlish voice suddenly squealed from behind her, interrupting her symphony of uncertainties. "This isn't Hild's Black Palace! This isn't any place I've ever been before! What happened?!"

"Oh my God!! You're the two that I've seen in my dreams!!" another voice shouted shrilly, an agitated lake-voice filled with astonishment. Keleste raised an eyebrow as the pink-haired girl suddenly sprung to her feet and pointed at her. She looked at Keiyasu; his face was painted with hues of uncertainty.

_"You will _-not- _use such improper language in this place! Mind yourselves, children!!"_ the voice sounded angrily, the trumpet-works of thought filling Keleste's mind with fear. She blinked her eyes as she noticed the two girls staring at her...and then she remembered why she was here, where ever here was. She and her brother had been on a searching mission for their Mother, and they had been led to Vanagdrasil and two girl-Goddesses. But when they had furtively secreted themselves into the Demon's Realm, the two Goddesses were no longer Goddesses...they had somehow been turned into Demonesses. So she and her twin brother had attempted to rescue the two girls.

The young pink-haired girl who mentioned 'dreams' was clearly a _Goddess_! She was emanating all the signature energies of a being directly linked to Yggdrasil. And yet, Keleste had never encountered her before today! In the process of trying to find her Mother, she had exhaustively mentally catalogued _every_ God and Goddess in the Ygg Mainframe that were even close in age to her brother and her sister. But this girl-Goddess...was a total mystery. How could she have missed not one, but _two_ Goddesses?!

Including herself, this made three Goddesses_. So where was the fourth Goddess?_

The short-haired girl who had fought her and her brother with sharp words and sassy attitude was clearly a Goddess as well; but Keleste still sensed that her temperament was closer to that of a Demoness. In an odd way, her directness while she was a 'Demoness' had reminded Keleste of her brother, Keiyasu. Perhaps, the Goddess with the pert brown-bobbin hairdo was a tomboy...that could explain her short hair and boyish motions. It certainly explained why the only option was to subdue her.

As a pair, they seemed like girls that were maybe 10 or 11 years of age, by Earthrealm mortal standards. Goddesses who had seen a hundred thousand years or more of dawnings and twilights. Thankfully, the hostility and angst impressed upon the pair's affects was gone. Now they were scared and disoriented, just like she was. Keleste nodded silently as both Goddesses seemed to stare at her, the pink-haired one with exuberant joy tempered with fear, the brown-haired one with irrecognition and irritation. Keleste heaved a sigh of relief as she looked at her brother, Keiyasu, and saw the cameo of easement in his expression as he nodded to her.

It had worked!! It had totally worked!

The two young Goddesses had been reverted back to their original forms! The Red Hole had reversed the effect, because the exit event horizon was situated earlier in time than the entrance event horizon! It was a foolish gamble, traveling through a Red Hole to vistas unknown in Time and Space...and once again, Keleste felt regret that she didn't have a Mother or Father to chide her, as would be the case with normal Gods who flirted with the brink of disaster.

She turned her attention to the half-there half-not-there being, who was looking at them on with arms folded across chest, seemingly waiting for something to play out.

Even as Keleste was overpowered by feelings of confident success that their risky ploy had worked, the pink-haired girl launched into higher emotional reaches with a trembling voice.

"I _knew_ you were real! I..snff..knew it all the time! Deep in my heart, where the truth is...I knew!" she said, staring straight at she and Keiyasu. "There was a reason why..snff..I kept seeing you in my dreams! And we tried so hard to find you! We snuck into the Yggdrasil Xeomnic Network, and then into the Axial CorePlex! And then we got visas to come to Vanagdrasil from the Lord Himself...and you can imagine that _that_ took some doing! We even lied to our parents and skipped school too! But our Mom believed me...and she even helped us! So it must true!!"

Keleste felt a deep stirring in her heart; she wanted to float over and hug the younger girl in her arms to comfort her. After all, she might be the missing link to help her and Keiyasu find their Mother. She might even be much more than just a younger Goddess! But Keleste was too startled within the moment: she had almost missed the young Goddess's claim. She had basically said that she had been seeking _them_! But how could that possibly be? And what was that word "Xeomnic Network" again?

For thousands of years, she and Keiyasu had investigated any and all signs of the other members of their family, in an effort to find their Mother. Some of their 'projects' involving the Ygg Mainframe had taken decades and even centuries to complete. Always...always, they were left with the reside of disappoint after each attempt. But then, there was the Breakthrough...the unbidden tangle of accidental clues that had led she and Keiyasu to this juncture. To this adventure. And yet, Keleste knew without a doubt that this young girl of a Goddess had been on a searching journey as well. It was in her face; she had the eyes of a farseer...the same kind of semi-detached aura that a select few of the Proctors had. Even while she marveled, even if she was hearing this 'Ulfryn' girl right, Keleste questioned the possibility that Ulfryn had somehow, unaided by magic or tech, had _seen her and her brother in her mind_!! To her and Keiyasu, Ulfryn and her sister didn't even exist. They weren't listed on the tally of Gods and Goddesses registered to the Yggdrasil Mainframe ; none of the Mainframes had even alluded to the existence of _another pair_ of half-Divine, half-mortal children.

Yet, there they were.

"We were looking for _you_..." Keleste started to say, but the deep mental voice curbed her short. In the brief seconds of mutual curiosity, they had completely forgotten the irritated shadow-figure floating about the four of them.

_"Repeat your words, child-Goddess!" _the voice had boomed, interrupting her. Keleste pointed her index fingers together and started to repeat her explanation, but the being quickly held up a hand.

_"Not you! The _-other-_ child-Goddess!"_ he said, his voice briefly breaking amusement_. "But bear well that you repeat your words in truth! For you are trespassing into regions of sublime reality, regions which lie far beyond your ken. There is Lore in this place; a dark abysmal truth that is not for your kind to bear appreciations towards. And I assure you that your very existence is forfeit if you are attempting a deception, for I am the Darkness that bleeds forth all Shadows..."_

"Eeeep!" Keleste heard the girl choke, just as her own throat clutched a gasp of anxiety.

"Say something, sis!!" the other girl with the short brown hair hiss-whispered with a sense of angry urgency, shaking the pink-haired Goddess by the blouse. "I don't know where we are, but this place _has_ to be somewhere in Vanagdrasil. And I have no idea as who's Shadow Dude hovering over there! For God's sake, don't just sit there like a dork, Ulfryn! He's talking to you! Say somethi..."

_"DO NOT UTTER THAT WORD AGAIN IN THIS PLACE!!"_ the voice boomed, causing Keleste to reach her hands towards her head, trying to cover up her temples. But when she missed with her hands and ended up clipping herself in the jaw with her palm instead, she realized that she was utterly exhausted. Either that, or she was really drunk. And it had to be the first choice, because she wasn't old enough to drink.

"We...we were given t..t..t..two passes from the Lord to v..visit...Vanagdrasil!" the younger-looking of the two Goddesses stammered. "But we d..don't know where we are, or w..w..why we're here!"

Keleste was confused by her mention of _passes to visit Vanagdrasil_...but this mystery was nothing next to the turmoil in her breast. She could feel the swooping vultures of dread circling above her. The form of the being hovering over her and the others remained a noirish chimera obscura, a true shadow against mere comprehension and sensation. It seemed to phase in and out of existence in a way that she had never experienced before. She could only surmise that this was due to an extraordinary concentration of Metanative energies, energy-forms that seemed to be unbound to the TimeSpace she was accustomed to experiencing. Either that, or the alienness of Vanagdrasil had finally gotten to her. She turned her attention back to the young Goddess named Ulfryn, who was fumbling in her skirt for something.

"H..h..here!" the pink-haired Goddess said, rapidly withdrawing an object from the pocket in her skirt. She proffered it towards the half-visible being with shaky hands, dropped it, and quickly scooped it up in her hand. Even tight-fisted, the 'inside' of her hand seemed to glow bright red...to Keleste, it appeared to be a rose-colored droplet of some kind of energy. But Keleste didn't recognize the object the Goddess grasped in her hand at all. It had a very distinctive 'flavor' of energy; her Goddess senses could easily distinguish that it was very tightly charged with Arcane, Divine and Metanative energies.

_"Hmmmh? From whence did you obtain this, young Goddess?"_ the voice said in a softening tone, yet unmistakably even more demanding than before. Keleste could now see two bright-red glows forming within the 'head' of the shadow-figure; ghosting-eyes that were laser sharp and threatening.

"D..don't yell at me l..like that!" the girl-Goddess said, shaking so hard that her pink-red mane of hair was all shimmering waves across her shoulders, willowing in an invisible wind of her own fear. She could barely hold the pearl of light in her hand.

"Ka..Kami-sama!! I..I got it from Kami-sama! The L..Lord gave it to me!" she managed. "He really did! And my sister has one too! The Almighty _promised_ me that this would keep me safe while I was in Vanagdrasil, because it symbolized that I'm under His protection..."

_"...and Mine as well,"_ the Being answered in a gentler voice, finally solidifying.

"Ulp!!" Keleste gulped deep in her throat as the 'form' became a Being. Not just _any_ Being either...she felt like she was almost passing out from trepidation, she was so riveted by the sight of such a majestic Being. He was dressed in a series of ornately layered _glowing_ robe, His face was pure darkness, His hair silver white and long like threaded lightning.

Her thoughts chattered warnings and suspicions; out of which, Keleste was suddenly fixed with a flash-insight concerning _who_ this enigmatic Being could be. Or even more terrifying, _what_ he might be. Vanagdrasil was nothing more than a holo-sim in her mind, never visited by the Gods. So she wasn't widow's-web certain about His identity. But her Goddess intuition was working overtime with the possibility that this might be...

_"Your surmise is most correct, young teenaged Goddess,"_ He said, looking right at her. Keleste felt her backbone swimming all squirmy as He regarded her with deeply-flamed eyes. He had sensed her inner thoughts! Effortlessly, He seemed to exude a magnetism that brought her towards twinned emotions of fear and reverence. Even though He was the Other...

_"I am the Regent of all that is Vanagdrasil. The very center-source of all of the Demons...the pivot of every aspect and flaw that comprises the Demon's Realm. I am the Endless End and Beginningless Beginning of all that Is within this Realm. I am the Hand that Moves the Wheel of Grief, Chaos and Strife. I am the Counterbalance to those who would be Gods. And that which you have in your hands...is a token of My Essence. My Brother spoke truly when He said that any who bear such passports are vouchsafed; for they are most certainly assured safe conduct within My Realm...lest any that molest them risk incurring My Wrath. And verily, _-My-_ Wrath is not a trifling matter..."_

"Your...Realm?" Keleste gasped, almost at the verge of fainting out from a sudden loss of strength, just as she heard her brother hoarsely venture "We are _so_ screwed!"

And then consciousness fled her.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Just like that, as soon as the boy-God rasped "we are so screwed!" Pryzm felt herself whisked instantly to where she and the others were now resting. Well, more correctly, where she and her sister were resting. The other two...were sound asleep, tucked deep within comfortable plushly blanketed futons. This place seemed to be an apartment, or perhaps a guest house. Wordlessly, at the moment they had been transported here, she was given the awareness that they were being allowed a chance to chill out and regain their strength. Of course He would know that travel through Hild's Red Hole had forced fatigue upon them, especially on their two unknown companions! She felt so flagged, so tired from the ordeal. But what ordeal had she undergone?

Pryzm didn't know if she was more light-headed from being tired, or from the fact that she had actually come face-to-face with the dreaded Oni-sama...without a single clue of why or how she and her sister got there. Meeting the Dark Lord was like meeting the overboss of the Tokyo Yakuza. No, scratch that. Meeting Oni-sama was a thousand times more intimidating and scary. A yakuza overboss could only take a person's life. Oni-sama could exact punishments a thousand times worse.

The only possibility was that they had somehow traveled to Oni-sama's Throne via the Red Hole. But that would have been an insane act of suicide, because she and her sister surely couldn't have survived such a journey. Hild had said that it was personally keyed to her and no one else; so she and the others shouldn't have been able to travel through it in the first place. Even worse, she _couldn't even remember_ going into the Red Hole at all...and doing something like _that_ would have certainly cast a deep impression on the plain of her memories. Like a meteor striking a city!

Hild was pretty scary, but in a crazy sort of way. Hild was obviously someone you didn't yield your trust to. On top of that, Aunt Mara had told that awful story about how Hild had become the first of the Demon Queens. But Oni-sama was far more intimidating than the Demon Queen. If He was anything like the Lord, then He was all-powerful here. Meeting Him was almost as scary as when she talked to the Lord. But yet, she felt an immense respect for Him, as if He was a holy being worthy of utmost reverence.

She couldn't get His ebony-starless face out of her mind. And those blazing red eyes...

"Huh?" she said to herself, recognizing the comparative currents of her thoughts. Hopefully, there wasn't some kind of penalty for young Goddesses who contemplated any similarities between the Lord and the Demon's Dark Lord! If there was, then she'd be in for it once they got back to the Yggdrasil Logorinth! Of course, Oni-sama was frightening, but that fear was lodged into the very core of her consciousness, somewhat in the same way that Kami-sama was frightening. The similitude of her emotional reaction to the Dark Lord gave her cause to recall her Mother's words about "not judging the Demons." Yet, it didn't make a difference if it was Kami-sama or Oni-sama...a girl definitely wanted to be on her best behavior when in the Presence of One or the Other!

He truly was the Ruler of the Demons!

Even more amazing was the fact that the Lord of the Demons had actually spoken to she and Ulfryn in what passed for a kind tone of voice. Once He had learned about the safe-conduct 'orbs' that the Almighty had given them, His entire measure of them had changed. He almost seemed _paternal_, in the same sense that the Lord was all cuddly and kind when He was in 'Grandpa Mode'. Pryzm giggled at the mental image of the Dark Sovereign of Vanagdrasil scooping she and her sister up in a fatherly hug. Pryzm couldn't have expected _that_ in a million years of dreams! Demons aren't supposed to be all kind to young Goddesses! And wasn't the Ruler of the Demons supposed to set an example for cruelty?

Everything about Vanagdrasil was weird, just like Mom had promised!

A girlish snoring pitched through her thoughts, reminding her. And then there was the matter of the two others who were with them. She looked over at the Goddess who was sleep-curled under an ornate blanket-comforter on one of the futons. She seemed closer in age to Falcyn and Sygyn than to she and Ulfryn. In fact, she even looked older than Sygyn. But Pryzm could also sense something very amiss about the teenaged Goddess...it didn't take an expert to perceive that there was a certain 'aura' of profound sadness that figured her facial features. Something was very wrong about this girl! But despite her melancholic affect, she was extremely beautiful...fully the equal of any Goddess her age in the looks department. Pryzm fought back a brief surge of jealousy as she admired the recumbent teenaged Goddess. Her hair was silk-smooth and naturally sandy-brown, almost the lightest shade of brunette she had ever seen. And most unusually for a Goddess her age, she wore a bandana; her hair flairing and feathering out from under the white and gold kerchief. Pryzm briefly wondered if she had 'antennae' underneath that bandana...her face reminded Pryzm of Tamako, Keitaro and Naru's daughter from the "Love Hina X-Fever Generation" anime series that started airing in 2016. Her Goddess marking were clearly visible on her forehead, a single rounded mark that looked like an elongated diamond-shape. Her beauty was deepened by a soulful face and a small, delicate mouth. Pryzm reassessed her as she slept; this girl Goddess definitely looked to be Sygyn's age, or maybe even a year older. Maybe even 150,000 years old!

Resting in the other futon was the form of a young boy-God; but all Pryzm could see was part of his head and one of his feet peeking out from under the blankets. Much as it embarrassed her to be in the same room as a sleeping boy, Pryzm's attention kept being drawn back to him. It was so uncanny, how much he strongly resembled Falcyn! He did...he didn't, but it was more 'did' than 'didn't'. Every time she regarded the young God's sleeping form, certain features of his face made her wonder if it _was_ Falcyn that she was looking at. But it certainly wasn't Falcyn...this boy had short shaggy hair, rich-brown in color...and of course, he didn't wear glasses. His head was more rounded then Falcyn's as well; he lacked the high forehead that made Falcyn's face so distinctive. And from what she could remember, he was _short_ for a God boy his age! A thought came to her mind...Sygyn was short for a Demoness her age. Could there be a link?

_Who were they?_

She could hear Ulfryn humming to herself contentedly; her younger sis was sitting in a windowsill on one side of the room, staring out into the vistas beyond. For some reason, the Dark Lord had chosen to transport them to a suite of rooms that looked like any regular Earthrealm room in Japan. Well, at least any museum-type furnished room; the place looked absolutely antique. It would have been perfect in the 17th century. There was a simple, rustic charm to the environs; the kind of charm that salarymen would pay a hundred thousand yen to rent for just a weekend, once every several years. Polished wooden floors and ceilings, fresh tatami mats, ornately painted sliding shoji doors. It was definitely 'the works'...the only thing missing was Tokyo Disneyland, Pryzm thought as she chuckled to herself. For a moment, she allowed herself to be lulled into the illusion that she wasn't in Vanagdrasil anymore.

Unlike Hild's Black Palace, this place didn't ooze of hidden treachery. It was almost idyllic, even down to the refrigerator in the kitchen that was fully stocked with soda, ice cream, cookies, sausages and enchiladas, and all sorts of elegant seafood. Pryzm even found her favorite brand of choco-stix in the cooler. All of her favorite munchies, ready to be plundered whenever she felt hungry.

Looking past her sister's idling profile in the bay-window, Pryzm noticed that the sky beyond was rich blue, with traces of summer-wisp clouds. In the distance were the darker hues of the ocean, as if their 'guesthouse' was perched on a hill overlooking a seaside beach vista a few hundred meters away. Pryzm could actually smell the slight tang of ocean salt in the air. It was like a summer resort...the atmosphere in the suite of rooms was so casual, they might have been visiting a friend's home for all appearances! Since the windowsill was so huge, Pryzm decided to float up and perch herself on the other side of it, settling onto the shelf, facing her sister. Getting comfortable, she stretched her feet out, cat-like, until they rested against Ulfryn's. Naturally, Ulfryn was in day-dream-girl land; she started when Pryzm finally kicked one of her feet because she wasn't paying attention.

Her sis's eyes still had a far-away look when she spoke sotto-voce to Pryzm without even looking at her. "Those two _are_ our cousins! I don't know exactly how I know this, but they are. I'm certain of it. The girl's name is Keleste, and the boy's name is Keiyasu..."

"Keleste...and Keiyasu?" Pryzm asked, trying the names on her tongue. "How could you possibly figure that out, sis?! I've never seen them before in my life! And you're sitting here acting like they're classmates from school or something! Like you know who they are!! You can't know that for certain."

"But _I do_, Pryzm!" Ulfryn quickly answered, her eyes no longer dream-clouded. "Even though you think I'm a total space case sometimes, you gotta remember that I've been seeing these two in my dreams for the better part of a year back on the Earthrealm. You guys haven't! So I kinda _know_ them in a sense. Just trust me on this, I know what I'm talking about. I thought they were a missing sister and brother to us, but I now realize that they're our cousins, just as much as Sygyn and Falcyn. They may be strangers to you, but I've seen them almost as much as I've seen you and our...other...cousins! Almost every night while I'm asleep. _They're_ the reason why we're here!"

"Huh?! That sounds totally flaky, Ulfryn! Are you sure they're the ones you've been seeing in your dreams?" Pryzm said sarcastically. "If they are, then I don't know. It's seems disappointing, huh, now that we've found them? I can't wait for them to wake up!"

"I don't know about that, sis...because _I'm_ definitely not disappointed! I think they're cool! And that Goddess! That headscarf she's wearing is really tight!" Ulfryn answered, responding to the taunt just like Pryzm had expected her to.

"It's not a scarf, Ulfryn. It's called a bandana!" Pryzm corrected her sister. "I can't believe that you don't know that, Ms. Mallrat Fashion Queen!"

"Of course you'd call it a bandana, because you're more boy than girl!" Ulfryn countered slyly. Pryzm felt the blood rush to her face...if Ulfryn was a boy, she would have thrown a fist to that nose...

"You know what's really weird though, Pryzm? I have this strange feeling that they _rescued_ us from something! In fact, I'm almost certain of it!" her sister said. Ulfryn was the queen of short-attention span...she could be in the middle of a serious debate about clothes and suddenly start talking about dolphins. Now she was suggesting that they'd been in some kind of danger? And someone, namely these two 'cousins', had intervened and saved them?

_That_ made Pryzm feel suddenly clear-headed. She was all for pouncing on the two sleepers and charging them into wakefulness; but that might be perceived as an ingratitude...and then she'd have to feel guilty. Even more so if these two fellow Gods had pulled her and Ulfryn out of a sticky situation.

She strained the harp of her memories, but the last thing she could remember was playing with an antique doll that Hild had given her. Hild had also given one to Ulfryn. The dolls were like twins, the kind of miniature Heian princess dolls that went up on Girl's Day back in the olden days. Both she and her sister had remarked that there was something strange about those dolls. In her case, even more so because she was actually _playing_ with her doll. By the way, where were the two porcelain figurines? Pryzm sighed, feeling troubled by all of this. The dolls...that was definitely crazy, especially considering that she had outgrown playing with dolls a few years ago. Why play with dolls when you can beat up boys in school?!

And why would Queen Hild...who was the most arrogant, self-possessed Demoness she had ever met...give her and her sister _anything_, let alone gifts?

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Hey...how are you guys feeling?" Ulfryn asked, as the two sleepers rustled into wakefulness under their blankets.

"By the Lord, my head hurts!" Keiyasu said, rubbing the nape of his neck. "Right here! I feel like I was swimming through an AquaSun that suddenly turned supernova or something! What in the Lord's name happened back there? I was totally out of it...and I don't remember coming here! I really feel like I've got the flu, as in a major 'Bug City' type virus!"

"You look like you've got the flu, Kei!" Keleste said sharply to her brother. "And I feel like I got the flu right along with you! I wonder if they have any aspirin here in Vanagdrasil? And I could use a shower...my hair's probably all messy! And I'm still wearing this thing."

Pryzm watched the older Goddess untie her bandana. Four wisps of antennae hair popped out, a little saggy at first after being bound by the head kerchief.

"Pretty doubtful about the aspirin, sis," Keiyasu answered. "This is Vanagdrasil...if they'd have anything, they'd have arsenic, not aspirin! And their idea of hot springs involves molten carbon-based compounds. Not that I'd mind that for the novelty of the experience, of course. But a bath'd be great! Knowing this place, I could imagine what a bathtub here would be like."

"Wahhh!" Keleste said, suddenly cheerful as she examined the room. "This is really cool, Kei! It's like one of those ancient houses on the Earthrealm! I bet this place _does_ have a bath."

"I'll race you to it, sis!" Keiyasu said, sitting upright in his futon and throwing off his blankets...

_"Hey!!"_ Pryzm interrupted with angry shout. "Would you guys quit ignoring us and answer my sister's question?! You can always take a bath later! And for your information, there _is_ a bath down the hallway...but I'll personally make sure it's off-limits to the two of you until you give us some answers!"

"Oh! How rude of me..." Keleste answered, bowing her head slightly. It wasn't every day that she blacked out and then had awakened elsewhere, in a completely different place. For one thing, Goddesses _don't_ black out. It would take something really major to cause that, like being _really_ sick, or almost depleting one's Divine Energy. But she certainly wasn't tired now. She looked at the two younger Goddesses, who were the very pictures of girlish impatience.

"Was I ever like that?" Keleste wondered to herself. Actually, because she was always bright-spirited when she first woke up; it was quite possible that she was too energetic with wakefulness to notice the other two Goddesses in the room. Even her brother got irritated on occasion whenever he was in "let me yawn myself awake" mode, while she was in "let's go to the Ygg Mainframe and work on finding Mom!" mode. Sleep wasn't a necessity for Gods, of course...but something to do with their mortal heritage demanded that they get a few hours sleep every few decades or so. In any case, ignoring the two girls _was_ very bad form.

"I'm..." she started to say.

"You're Keleste, and he's Keiyasu! Right?!" Ulfryn interrupted, flashing a pet grin. The two looked at her with utterly shocked expressions, obviously taken aback by the fact that she knew their names. She skipped in the air with delight, impressed that she had caught the two older kids off-guard.

"Little Ms. Escaflowne..." Pryzm muttered under her breath.

"Well, we've been sitting here watching you both sleep for the longest time, which was totally boring. So I had to tell you your names first, just to make up for you two being so boring to us. Just so I could see the looks of shock on your faces," Ulfryn added. "And sure enough, you both look like you're freaking out!"

"Hee heh hee!" Pryzm chuckled at her sister's reasoning, reappraising things. It was pretty funny how the Goddess and God had looked askance at her sister, their mouths gawing for a few seconds.

"And it was well worth it! You two looked totally snap!" Ulfryn noted, trying to dampen her giggling.

Surprisingly, the new Goddess giggled in agreement.

"Since this is a first meeting, please allow me to introduce myself properly," the Goddess said, flicking her hair back with a smoothing gesture. Now, the two younger girls were embarrassed...she smiled at them with her eyes, but also made them aware that they had acted like brats during something as important as a formal first meeting.

"My name is Keleste, and this is my younger brother Keiyasu..." Keleste said, bowing with deep formality to the two younger girls. "I apologize, but we don't have our introduction cards with us. We left them back in Yggdrasil. We're both just a few decades shy of our Fifteenth Decamillennial."

"Waaaah," Ulfryn appraised. They were _teenagers_!

"You wouldn't believe who he looks like..." Pryzm said in an amazed voice, eyeing Keiyasu with an appreciative look-over.

"Sshh!" Ulfryn said to her sister, shooting Pryzm a warning look. "This could be another trick! We're in the middle of Demon-dom, I'll remind you."

"Yeah, but we're here totally because it was _your_ idea!" Pryzm shot back. "And just a few hours ago, you were all 'They're our cousins! They're our family!' And you were staring at the guy while he was sleeping. I saw you! Grab a brain cell or two, sis!"

"NO! I w..was _not_ staring! And don't go blaming all of this on me! My original idea was to go to Yggdrasil, not here! And you agreed to come here on your own! Not because anybody twisted your arm!" Ulfryn argued, blush-angry that her sister had ratted her out for staring at the teenage God. He was kinda cute though, when he was sleeping like a puppy.

"You're hopeless, Ulfryn!" Pryzm grumbled, rolling her eyes. "Speaking of hopeless, where's Falcyn and Sygyn? Why aren't they here with us?"

"Waaahhh...this is just too weird!" Ulfryn sighed in agreement. "Those two are probably too busy getting in trouble! Which would be the thing to do, since they're..."

"Falcyn...and...Sygyn?" Keiyasu asked, interrupting.

"Heh heh hee!" Keleste giggled sweetly. "You know, you two must be sisters! You certainly argue like you're sibs! Even Keiyasu and I don't ever get that bad."

"Wanna bet?" Keiyasu said defensively. "We argue just like everyone else! In fact, we argue _more_ than most brothers and sisters! You just want to look nice for our new friends! Tell the truth, sis..."

"But it never gets out of hand, because the girl is the older of the twins!" Keleste replied, half-taunting her brother.

"Bite me, sis!" Keiyasu said to his sister, faux growling.

"TWINS!" Pryzm and Ulfryn shouted in stereo voices of shock. Pryzm caught her breath, clearly undone by the sudden discovery that the two were twins!

"This is really scary! _We're_ twins too!" Pryzm said, trying to keep her voice from pitching into a squeak. "And all along, we thought that there weren't any other twins in all of Yggdrasil Logorinth! That's what the Proctors told us. They said Gods and Goddesses hardly ever have twins. So there's only a few...and they're grownups. I always thought it had something to do because we're half-Goddess, half-mortal..."

"Logorinth?" Keleste asked, her voice tinged curious.

"Yeah! And if you're who you claim to be, then why doesn't the Ygg Xeomnic Network have..any data..on you..." the two younger Goddesses said as one, their voices jointly faltering to a near whisper as they realized they were all thinking the same thing.

"Wow! You actually know your parents?" Keleste asked urgently, recovering herself. This was too bizarre to be believed. Not only were the the two sisters...but they were twins. What were the chances of _that_ happening?! And 'their' Ygg computer didn't know about she and Keiyasu. But what the heck was a Xeomnic?

Pryzm thought that it was peculiar that the young Goddess had glomped onto her reply and was asking questions about Mom and Dad, instead of she and Ulfryn. Usually, people don't just meet and then start saying the obvious, especially about parents. Parents...is about the most totally uncool topic anyone could bring up at a first meeting! Asking about parents at school when meeting a new classmate was grounds for ridicule and social suicide. Might as well transfer to a new school after doing something so dumb! _Never_ talk about parents...

Unless it was a date or something. Supposedly.

"What are they like? How old are they? Where do they live..." Keiyasu bulleted queries. Keleste quickly raised her hand to hush her brother. Something Pryzm had said had caught her attention. More like nailed it to the side of a tree, like a wanted poster.

"Did you say that you're half-Goddess, half-mortal, Pryzm?" she asked, trying on the girl's name for the first time. Trying to be calm, despite the fact that her mind was fevered with suppositions.

"Yep! My Mom's a..."

"Sshh!" Ulfryn hissed, interrupting her with a panicked expression. Pryzm turned to her and said, "well, if they _are_ Demons, there ain't junk that we can do about it!"

"Wrong!!" Ulfryn countered, her eyes flashing brightly with insight. "Now I remember! We have _these_!" With a smirk, she fetched her red-glowing 'visa' out of her skirt-pocket.

"That's right!" Pryzm exclaimed. "If they _are_ Demons, the Dark Lord'll kick their ass to the Aumatrices and back if they try and screw with us! We're on 'official business', y'know!"

"Are you sure _you're_ not a Demoness?" Keleste commented with a straight face, and then broke into laughter as Keiyasu unconsciously covered his unmentionables with his hands.

"What's so funny?" Pryzm asked, annoyed.

That was too much! The irony of the situation was off the hook. Keleste and Keiyasu found themselves giggling self-consciously at being suspected as "Demons" by two Goddesses who _were_ Demonesses a short time ago. And then their mirth continued as the two Goddesses briefly argued about what to tell them...and in the process, ended up disclosing all sorts of details about themselves. In the middle of their arguing, Keleste learned that Pryzm and Ulfryn had an Earthrealm mortal father, and a Goddess mother. Their Dad was a professional baseball player for one of the most renowned teams in Historical Japan. And their Mother?

"Our Mom's a _Norn_! She's the best" Ulfryn said proudly, completely reversing her earlier reticence to talk about her parents.

"Mom's really cool, even for a Mom! And she's a Senior First Class, Unrestricted, Special Delimited, Licensee. That's another reason why you better not mess with us! She's in control of the Future!" Pryzm added. She noticed that the new kids were looking at her wide-eyed.

"What's a Special Delimited license?" Keiyasu and Keleste asked in unison.

"It's an extra-unlimited Unlimited License," Ulfryn explained, remembering her Mom's killer dispatching of the rat-bots in the Axial CorePlex. "It's an _unlimited_ Unlimited license, which means that Mom doesn't have to bother with that Limited or Unlimited license stuff, because she can unseal powers beyond that of an Unlimited License holder. In other words, she's way more powerful than a Demon Queen if she needs to be...as long as she's linked directly with the Xeomnic Network in a Sysop Node or in the Xeomn itself. She's the only Goddess in the Ygg Logorinth with that type of special license. Just like the Military Senior Command status License is given only to the Goddess who is the head of the Valkyrie. What's more, Mom has total access to the Ygg Xeomn, without any restrictions. Just like the Senior Command Goddess can command the Valkyrie, our Mom can _run_ the Xeomnic single-handedly if there was an emergency."

"This is getting more confusing by the minute!" Keiyasu admitted. Now they were talking about their Mother having some kinda license category that didn't even exist! And this Ygg Xeomn...was that some kind of version of the Ygg Mainframe computer? The Valkyrie…he could recognize what she meant, as they were the female warriors that defended the Ygg World-tree.

"But the really odd thing is that she's the only Norn," Ulfryn continued. "Which makes her _the_ Norn!! But she's probably the smartest Goddess in Yggdrasil; she even discovered the purpose of the Aumatrices! And she's unparalleled when it comes to designing hard-science mecha-tech. They even nickname her inventions "SkuldTech" on Yggdrasil! They aren't that stupid magic tech that everybody learns in the first grade. Her creations are the real thing! Stuff that _no one _else has ever thought up!"

Pryzm muttered, "There she goes!" to herself, earning a scowl from Ulfryn and giggles from the other two.

"Kei, I don't what she's been talking about? " Keleste noted after the mirth died down. "She's younger than us, but she knows things we don't…"

"Well, at least the Dark Lord called you a 'teenaged Goddess'!" Pryzm remarked, a slight flavor of envy to her voice. The Dark Lord had called her a "girl"!

Keleste noticed that something was bothering her, really bothering her. The twin Goddesses had said that their Mother was a Norn! All this explanation about something called Aumatrices and Xeomnics and Logorinths. Even more tantalizing was this 'Skuldtech' that she mentioned; that was too coincidental! Her mind raced down pathways and possibilities even as she asked, "What's your Mom's name?"

"Skuld. Our Mom's name is Skuld," both girls answered brightly, clearly proud of their Mother.

Keleste and Keiyasu looked at each other with stunned expressions, literally shivering with astonishment. How could their Stepmom be these girl's Mom? The idea of the coexistence of two Skulds was even more overwhelming. Almost terrifying. They didn't know what to make of it. Choking his surprise down, Keiyasu waved his hands side-to-side at his waist, clearly saying "don't tell them right now, maybe later!" Keleste nodded at him, her nod saying "we need to learn more about this before we bring our Stepmom up!"

"How old are you guys, anyway?" she continued. "My socially-retarded younger sister..."

"Pryzm!!" Ulfryn growled. "She already told us she and her brother are almost 15. Talk about not listening..."

"...has been babbling on about how cool our family is," Pryzm cut in, ignoring her sister. "You'll have to excuse her, she gets carried away sometimes. Since the topic seems to be about Moms and Dads, is there anything you want to tell us about _your_ family? How do you get along with your parents?"

Pryzm immediately sensed a swarming, deafening silence descend upon the room. The atmosphere seemed to have quantum-shifted into a very uncomfortable zone. It was almost gloomy...but something she sensed in the room went way beyond dejection and sadness. Both Keleste and Keiyasu bowed their heads; almost instantly, they changed from happy-go-lucky teenagers to something dark. Pryzm's unease was mirrored on her sister's face. She sensed a darkness that seemed to draw the pity right out of her heart. Not an evil-type darkness, but something else.

"What'd I say?" Pryzm asked in a low, hesitant voice. Was it her imagination, or was the boy-God actually _crying_?

"Our Father died over a hundred and forty millennia ago, on the Earthrealm," Keiyasu explained, wiping the tears from his eye with his sleeve. He didn't even bother to cover his face up; the familar sense of loss gripped him too quickly for that.

"EHH?!" Pryzm blurted in stereo with her sister. That was impossible! He would have had to been a Neanderthal or Cro-Magnum something! How could a caveman father a Goddess? This was really getting freaky...and the sudden shift in mood was unnerving as well. And then she felt as chill as she realized the teenage Goddess said that their _Father was dead_. They had lost their Father? She tried to imagine what it would be like to lose her Father, Tomohisa, to a car accident or something. Her heart quickened with fear; the unspeakable thoughts made her throat felt all lumpy and knotted.

"Oh my God..." she heard Ulfryn gasp out.

"No, it's not what you're thinking," Keleste corrected, a tear running down her cheek as she sensed Ulfryn and Pryzm's own fears. "I think that where we are from...is where you're going to be. In other words, we're from your Future. When my brother and I turned 5...er, we had our Fifth Decamillennia, you know...the Proctors told us that part of our physical manifestations comes from an extinct mortal species. We didn't have a clue, because they Bound the Ygg Mainframe to prevent us from finding out until the Almighty decided we were old enough. In other words, our data enquiries in that area of investigation kept yielding null results. But once we found out that we were part mortal, we were free to cross-check the DNA sigs entrenched in our TNA against the Ygg database. Once we did, we discovered that they were from a planet once called Earth. I know that there's a few billion planets that call themselves 'Earth' in the Logorinth, but this particular one is in Sector A-Epsi-2378-Durgea-Thon-4114..."

"Waitaminute!" Ulfryn shouted, interrupting. "That's _our_ sector! That's where our home is! That's _Earth_!"

"…So we've been looking for our Mother for the last 100,000 years," Keiyasu continued, picking up his sister's narrative because she was getting upset thinking about Father.

Ulfryn wanted to grill him...his sister had said that the Earthrealm mortals were _extinct_ in their version of the Future...but she held herself just short of asking questions. The hurt on the two God's faces was too commanding.

"Oh..my..Lord!" she gasped as it finally hit her that, impossibly, these two were _orphans_.

"We even went to the Earthrealm when we reached our Tenth Decamillennium," Keleste said. "It was a real sad journey for Kei and I...but we wanted to go..snff..and give proper respects to our Father on his HomeWorld. So we made a little..snff..actually, we made a very elaborate and impressive monument to him. The Earthrealm is a wasteland now; there's no sentient species on that planet. Everything about that planet remains greatly depleted from when the mortals were the planet's dominant species."

"So you guys...have _no_ parents?" Pryzm ventured boldly, not wanting to ask the question, not wanting to hear the answer. Keleste nodded her head sorrowfully at the younger Goddess.

"How can that be? _All_ Gods and Goddesses have parents!" Ulfryn near-shouted, her eyes tearing up. "When you grow old, you become someone's kid! When you grow young, you become someone's parent! That's how it's always been in Yggdrasil. There _are_ no Gods and Goddesses your age without parents!"

"Except my sister and I. Which is why we must find out why..." Keiyasu noted in a voice heavy with sadness, "...this has happened to us. It's the equivalent of a God being born without a Demon Doublet."

"Heee!" Ulfryn said mischievously. "You must be kidding! There's no Doublet System between the Gods and Demons. That got done away with when the Expansion Event happened. You know, when the Everything became the OmniArc."

"What's an OmniArc?" Keleste asked, drawing an uneasy glance from Pryzm.

"Nevermind that! How do you guys know that it's your Mom who's the Goddess?" Ulfryn said. "In my dreams, I see the two of you...and _both_ your Mother and Father..."

"WHAT!!"

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"HILD! DESIST IN THIS MALIGN WICKEDNESS _IMMEDIATELY_!!" a voice boomed from behind Mara. Mara's emotions were already drawn-and-quartered by the sheer tauntness of Hild's display of reckless evil...a maliciousness that was bearing down on her with unparalleled viciousness. But now she was imagining that she was hearing the voice of the Dark One Himself!

It was that bad. Hild had basically stolen her son's virginity, and now was stealing his will to live.

"This is..." Mara thought desperately, "...me going out of my mind."

"Hild!! _Obey_ Me! _NOW_!! This is not a request...this is a command! For you have perpetrated a foul and perfidious design upon these, My specially invited guests to Vanagdrasil. Guests that are under My protection. I will permit no other actions besides your complete and total compliance with My will! At once!!" the voice sounded again.

Angrily.

"Wheeep!" Mara gasped, the surreality of the bristling voice needling her mind. There was only one voice in all of the Vanagdrasil Logorinth that could possess such a massive sweep of rage! She could _feel_ the heat of His ire! Mara couldn't see Him, couldn't even sense Him...but she still thought it best to assume the most humble position of servile supplication she could manage. After all, He _was_ her husband.

And He was as pissed-off as a bull that had been castrated without an anesthetic pain-killer. Boy, was He pissed off!

Without even looking around for fear of seeing the rage on His face, Mara quickly assumed a tailor-style posture on the decking of Hild's lava-springs, dipped her head low until her forehead was resting on the obsidian-ochre slabstones.

"You're bowing the wrong way, my Wife!" the voice said impatiently, followed by what sounded like children gasping.

"Which wife?" Hild asked, insolently. Mara stole a peek...Hild had released Falcyn and was propped up on one of the rocks that served as 'islands' in her hot springs. Totally tan-naked...and bowing in a different direction as well.

"This way! Over here!" several girlish voices shouted brattily.

"Ulfryn? Pryzm?" Mara thought, not willing to risk raising her head to have a look-see. After all, the Dark Sovereign was definitely upset at Hild...and maybe at her as well for sneaking around Hild's Dark Palace. If she was the subject of his brew of cholor, the best Mara could hope for was for a long enough delay so she wouldn't get chewed out in front of her son. Or worse.

"Bestill yourselves, impertinent child-Goddesses!" Oni-sama said gravely. "This is _My_ Realm, and it would behoove you to remain aware of your station! Yea, even mindful that you have been allowed visas to visit here as My guests, fully because of My liberty to make such decisions. You are in the presence of two Demon Queens; they are my beloved Wives. As their Husband, I will brook no aimless and demeaning airs towards them. Miscreant as she is, Hild is still my FirstWife, and a Demon Queen...you shall henceforth treat her with due addresses of respect, regardless of her past actions towards yourselves. Regardless even of what you may think of her. In her own way, urged on by the inimitable recklessness that she alone possesses, Hild has only acted out of love."

"M..my Lord?!" Mara heard Hild venture timidly, almost choked up with astonishment. She had never heard Hild use _that_ tone of voice before! Even more surprising to Mara was the clear inflection of affectionate love in His voice. The Dark Lord certainly wasn't putting on a show of affection for the Goddess kids...He was being genuinely heart-fond towards Hild. Mara herself was choked up, but for a different reason. Hild had molested her son, tried to brainwash her daughter, had came very close to succeeding in stealing Skuld's daughter's Goddess natures and transforming them into Demonesses...and the Dark Sovereign was dismissing all of her insane, depraved behaviors as acts of love? He was definitely acting like her Husband and Liege; because she was seeing red. And it wasn't the magma in Hild's little outdoors cauldarium.

"Hild, would you...please put some clothes on. It does not become you to be in such a state of undress whence there are many strangers here, including children and Goddesses and a boy-God," the Dark Voice beseeched. Mara could almost taste a tang of humor in His words. Of course, Hild wouldn't be the slightest bit embarrassed if she was nude in the middle of Shibuya station, let alone her own private baths.

"Many strangers? But...how?" Mara reflected, clearly puzzled. He had mentioned a boy-God...and Mara felt a split-second's icy chill thinking that Hild had tried to get further revenge on her by turning Falcyn into a God. Where was Falcyn? She rose her head off the ground and glanced around the hot springs, trying to find her son.

When last she had left her nieces, they were fully under the thrall of Hild's accursed dolls; a pair of wretched dolls that had been enchanted with all-powerful Heart Blinder spells written on every strand of hair. Pryzm and Ulfryn were so intoxicated with the idea that Hild was their mother, they couldn't even recognize Skuld's name when she mentioned it to them. And they had turned on her, thinking she was trying to betray their relationship with their 'mom'. Especially Pryzm. Mara had realized that if she didn't do something, they might even turn into Demonesses. She had been trying to rescue them before it was too late, but her journey had brought her here, where Hild was fully in the midst of another terrible act of usurpation...the Demon Queen was literally 'raping' her son, who was all-too-willing because she had gotten him drunk on his own hormones. And now, the Darkness Himself had come to Hild's Black Palace, with her two nieces in tow.

So what were they doing here, with the Darkness Himself? What the Blaze was going on here?

_"Eyyyaaaahhhhh!"_

Unable to hold to her supplication at the sound of the scream, Mara quick jerked up and turned her head in the direction of the shout, instantly recognizing the full-throttle fright in her son's voice. She felt a blush of empathy as she saw her son...his face as bright as an orange in the sun, covering himself with his hands right before he slipped off the rock outcropping and dipped deep into the lava springs, until only his eyes and nose were showing above the hot meniscus of lava.

"Oh..shit!" she heard him gasp. Mara turned to face the Dark Lord...and saw _three_ young Goddesses and a God thronging His stately figure. The three girls were turned away, covering their flushed faces with their hands; she could recognize Pryzm and Ulfryn by their distinctive hair styles.

Who was the young boy-God? And who was the third young Goddess?

And then, she realized what had just happened. With a sighing gulp, Mara was shadowed with pity for her son, who had been caught _in the nude_ by the sudden entrance of his two cousins. Evidently, it had taken several seconds for Hild's sexual allure to wear off once she had broken physical contact with him. Obviously, once Falcyn's wits returned to him, he saw Oni-sama...and next to the Dark Lord, his two girlish Goddess cousins. The rest was an instant slide into mortifying in-bare-ass-ment for him, and probably something bordering on vivid shock for her nieces.

Mara regarded Falcyn, who was shivering as he 'hid' under the surface of the lava, the inexpedience of the situation totally overwhelming him. As if her son wasn't already struggling enough around girls, now _this_ had to happen to him. Mara shot a quick glance of anger at Hild...this was totally her fault!

"I will not enjoy any wifely quarreling at this point, so don't you two even think about starting something, Hild and Mara. In this situation, it would not be a source of amusement to Me," the lean tall dark figure of Oni-sama commanded imperiously. "I have not divorced or executed any of my 666 Wives _yet_; pray tell I do not wish to set a precedent today. Be mindful of the Demon Queen Doublet System; forthwith one is First and the other Last, which brokers a special bond between them."

Mara felt an earthquake of fear as His words made His implied meaning clearer than light. Oni-sama enjoyed watching his wives contend; He often orchestrated spats between them for His own divertissement. But He often didn't take joy when the wives fought without His permission and encouragement. And He certainly was capable of 'doing away' with any Demon or Demoness in Vanagdrasil, now that the Doublet System between Gods and Demons had been irrevocably changed. Demons don't kill Demons: that was the Rule that governed Vanagdrasil. But being the Dark Almighty, He was probably exempt from that Rule...and He was the only one who knew who each Demon Queen's Doublet was amongst the ranks of His wives.

That was a possibility Mara was not willing to take a chance with.

She looked at Hild, who was shaking with fright just as hard as she was. In this one way, she and Hild truly were sisters; Demonesses who were subject to the demands and tastes of their imperious Husband. Mara felt a twinge of sympathy for Hild...she had been caught by Oni-sama while committing a major fuckup of sorts. Seducing a 14-year-old Demon boy was bad enough. Seducing the son of one of His Wives was even worse. And the worst part was that Hild hadn't invited Him to this little 'revenge fest' she was working out. He would have either stopped it cold, or He would have withheld so that he could enjoy it. But exacting such perversions behind His back was definitely a no-no! If anyone was going to suffer His wrath, it would be Hild.

Mara almost felt a fraction of sorrow for her Demoness 'sister'.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Who are you? the boy and girl asked, their attention fixed towards a still-embarrassed Falcyn.

"That's our cousin, Falcyn," Pryzm explained hastily, her cheeks still fleshed beet-red. "And I wish I wouldn't have seen him the way I just saw him!"

"Ditto!" Ulfryn agreed. "Way too much information! My eyes will never be the same."

"Wait a minute!" Keiyasu shouted in protest. "_You're_ our cousins...and _they're_ your cousins? How can that be? He's a _Demon_! I mean...duh! Would you care to explain how a Demon could possibly be our cousin? How could he be related to my sister and I..."

"How can he look like a younger version of you, Keiyasu!" Keleste said, finally calming down after being shocked almost into paralysis at seeing a naked Demon boy that was almost the same age as she and her brother.

"I swear, once we find our Mom, I'm going to demand that she make you get an eye exam, Keiyasu! Or better yet, get your head examined to find out how your brains leaked out."

"Sis..." Keiyasu groused. But as he looked closer at the Demon boy's face, he couldn't deny that there was some resemblance between the teenager and he. But that would mean that...

"I don't want to even think about this!" the younger of the two Demon Queens said wearily. Keiyasu was impressed by her eyes, even if she was just an adult Demoness. She had a generous flow of curly straw-blonde hair, loosely ringed, flowing down past her waist. For a Demoness, she was quite attractive. The other Demoness had almost too much hair; multiple bangs of platinum-silver hair pulled into tails. Keiyasu could easily believe that both of these Demonesses were royalty; each one was haughty in her own way...even noticeable from a brief first impression.

"_He_..." the younger Demoness said in a harsh voice, pointing at Keiyasu, "looks way too much like my son!"

"What?!" Keleste and Keiyasu gasped. "That Demon kid...he's _your_ son!"

"Tssk..." the Goddess twins smirked.

Keleste felt her head swimming. A naked Demon orgy. Her two new cousins. Another Skuld. The Dark Lord Himself...this was getting way too out of hand. Not only was there a Demon boy who was reputedly their cousin, but his Demon Mother was here as well! She was an elegant-looking Demoness with wavy soft curls of straw-blonde hair. If he was the Demon's mother, that meant that she...was..their..Aunt!!

Their Aunt.

"Keiyasu!" she whispered to her brother. When he didn't answer her, she followed his eyes...and noticed that he was staring at the other Demon Queen, who was perched on a rock, totally nude. She aimed the heel of her foot at the instep of his, and then ground down hard.

"OWWWW!" he shouted. "What'd you do that for!"

"Because you're being a see-a-girl-naked-turn-to-worms pervert, that's why!" Keleste answered chidingly. Her actions were reinforced by girlish giggling...her two brand-new cousins were brightly chirping with laughter at her handling of her brother. Even the Dark Lord was smiling wistfully.

"Which leave the question of me..." the Demon Queen named 'Hild' said in a high-pitched voice as she manifested a suitable outfit for clothing. "Everybody here has children...except me!"

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Mara had never expected to see this side of Hild. Hild was almost in tears as she broke out in a fitful lamentation about the fact that she didn't have any children. Which was true, but at the same time quite unusual. Mara had always figured that Hild didn't _want_ any children. Hild was too much of a free spirit, too wild a Demoness...too reckless to ever be considered as the motherly type. But yet, here it was. Mara recognized that in this, Hild wasn't lying. Those tears were _real_!

And Demonesses _never_ cry, especially around others.

Over the millennia, Mara knew that Hild had always hated her because she was the youngest of the Demon Queens. Not that Hild was unattractive; she was a very beautiful Demoness who could easily hold her own with any of the Dark Lord's wives. Powerful, elegant, devious, sexy...all the attributes that made a Demoness alluring, Hild had mastered. Yet, she had a simmering sense of insecurity towards the other Demon Queens, who were all younger than she. Mara had assumed that Hild's simmering resentments were fueled by jealousy towards the younger Demonesses. But could her anger have been caused by something else?

Mara reflected on what her life would be like without Falcyn and Sygyn. Her children were her World, in a sense. She didn't have a live-in Husband, and the Dark Lord invited her to Vanagdrasil sparingly. At least He _did_ invite her...and the kids.

Life without her children would be unbearably empty.

"...and my life is barren. Mara has two children, Skuld has two children...and me, I'll never have kids of my own. The Dark One is my Husband; and it's impossible for Him to father children. I..I mean, He's not impotent or anything. The Rules won't allow for my Husband and I to have kids. And I don't want to bring another male Demon in front of Him, so he can enrich us with a child in his role as AllFather. He's my husband! And despite what you see here, I would never trust another Demon enough to bear a child with him. So you see? I'm _never _going to have children..."

"Yet!"

Mara's ears twitched at the male voice. Someone else? And it was a _voice_, not a thoughtcast. It has spoken out loud, using speech. In an Earthrealm male voice. In English-inflected Japanese. In a mechanized-generated voice; an impossible utterance of sound, at least impossible here in Vanagdrasil where everyone was light-years beyond using speech. Speech was way to slow compared to instant thoughtcasts.

And Mara almost imagined that she brief glimpsed a look of surprise on the Dark Lord's face, as if her Liege hadn't expected any other visitors to the scene.

Then she saw her daughter!

Sygyn!" Falcyn shouted, floating out of the lava. Two Goddesses shrieked and covered their eyes as he launched out of the hot lava springs. Mara could only shake her head at her niece's impulsivity; they had completely missed out on the fact that he was clothed in a t-shirt and surf shorts. Then again, he did 'flash' them by accident just a moment ago. And they were both girls, that's for sure.

"Goddess Idiots! Do you think that'd I flash myself to my own _sister_!" he hissed as he flew past them. Mara smiled to herself at this...but then her son jerked to a pause, in mid-flight, as a _cyborg_ stepped out into the hot springs rinse decking.

"Who the hell is he?" he shouted, pointing at the cyborg.

"Falcyn!" Mara snapped censoriously. "Don't make me ground you for another week...saying 'hell' here is almost as bad as saying the G-word! Don't you dare embarrass me any further in front of _my_ Husband."

She heard the Dark One chuckling.

Falcyn gulped deep in his throat. Grounded! He could tell that Mom wasn't clowning around either. It suddenly dawned on him that he was acting rather rudely in front of the Dark Lord Himself. No wonder Mom was so quick to threaten him with a grounding! He didn't know which was worse: his rapt embarrassment at being caught nude by every member of his family except his sister, or his Mom putting the foot down on his neck in front of the Dark Lord. All he had wanted to do was have some fun with Hild...

Tempered by an overwhelm of embarrassment, Hild suddenly didn't seem all that attractive to him any more.

Mara looked at the newcomer, who was quite out of place in the middle of this particular gathering of Gods and Demons.

The cyborg introduced himself, bowing to her son in the Earthrealm manner. Mara had never seen him before, but she was drawn to him in some way, as if he had a Demonic nature. His long hair gave him a mysterious charm, and his blue eyes were completely out of ken here in Vanagdrasil. But he certainly was a cyborg; he had enough densely-packed metal inside of him to set off a metal detector for a week at an airport back on the Earthrealm. For some reason, she fancied the idea that he might be one of Skuld's mechas...perhaps her sister had sent him through the Swarp Gate as some form of 'insurance'.

"Mom!!" her daughter burst-shouted, rushing up and hugging her with a desperation that could have only been borne out of a deep sense of peril. Mara caught a brief glimmer of disgust and disappointment in Hild's face.

Hild have been going after Sygyn as well.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Sygyn reached into the vest pocket of her top and withdrew a small, moebius-loop shaped grid of blue energy. Somehow, she felt solemn as she cradled the slender twist of azure in the palm of her hand...it almost looked like a piece of candy, rather than an object of importance. Like most of her Aunt's 'SkuldTech' inventions, it conformed utility within beauty. Sygyn knew that her Aunt's inventions hadn't always been that way; but as she got older, her Aunt's engineering abilities took on an artistic characteristic. Perhaps this kind of expertise was what the Earthrealm mortals usually termed "mastery" of a discipline. The object pulsed with energy, but beyond that, Sygyn was unsure of its purpose. All she knew was that Aunt Skuld had insisted that it was extremely important.

"My Aunt said that I was to give it to the person in authority here, at the time that I felt it would be most needed. I was going to give it to Queen Hild...but I think I'd better give it to You, my Dark Eminence," she said nervously, eyeing the Dark Lord.

"Huh?" several voices huffed curiously.

"Well, go on, sis!" Falcyn whispered. But Sygyn felt frozen in place, as if her feet had melted into the ground. She couldn't take another step closer to Oni-sama. It was intimidating enough just to look up at His muscular silver-mantled form, His face as black as the emptiness of space, His eyes burning deep red, piercing through her Soul like a bullet passing through butter.

"You may approach, My Granddaughter. You have no wages of fear to contend with, for you have done naught to earn My wrath. You have not transgressed against My will," the tall figure said in a soft voice of harshness. When Sygyn didn't take any steps towards Him, He smiled at her and nodded His head permissibly.

Mara, who was watching all of this with deep concern, was deeply worried that her daughter had completely gotten herself in trouble. Or over her head. "Just like her Mom used to do when she was a teenaged Demoness," she thought, remembering her own trialsome teen years. To her surprise, she saw Oni-sama smile at Sygyn instead. Her mind quickly wheeled into light-haziness, and she literally fell backwards and with a "splash!" crashed into the lava springs in a near-faint.

When she pulled her head up out of the magma-lava, she realized with the deepest of shocks that the Dark Lord had done something exceedingly rare...He had actually smiled a _real_ smile. Not an evil grin, or a maniacal sneer, or the thin-lipped enigmatic smile of sadism. His smile was candid, unprovoked, unmocking.

"At my daughter too!" she said under her breath, clearly impressed with Sygyn. The wordless praise of her daughter by the Dark Lord seemed to loosen her somewhat from the reins of the shocking nightmare Hild had put her through with Falcyn. Hild would get hers someday, but not today.

"Don't act too proud, Younger Sister!" Hild said in a soft voice from behind her. "He's smiled at me too..."

"What is going on?" Mara asked Oni-sama, completely ignoring her attempt to steal away the moment. "What does she have in her hand?"

"All that I know is that it appears to be Yggdrasilian," Hild said in a hushed voice behind her hand as she slid back into the hot lava ponds next to Mara. Mara quickly waded over to her left, distancing herself from her Demon Queen elder.

"Hild, I really doubt that it can be from the God's Realm. If that's Yggdrasilian, it would have set off every alarm in the Aumatrices, wouldn't it? And it certainly would have triggered all the alarms that are rigged all over your Demoness Lair..." Mara noted.

"Curious, isn't it?" the tan-skinned, platinum-maned Demon Queen noted, her emerald eyes filled with curiosity. "But _feel_ it's energy, Mara. It's definitely from Yggdrasil!" Mara was wondering how something like this could happen...but then she realized, with a breath of recognition, that her younger sister was a true genius when it came to stealth. Skuld's genius definitely over-visioned anything that could be crafted by the technology of engineering.

"Skuld..." she hissed. It _had_ to be her sister! Skuld must have given the strange object to Sygyn before they left for Vanagdrasil. And Sygyn had kept it secret from her the whole time they were here! Mara's maternal pride towards her daughter instantly melted, as if it had been thrown into Hild's lava spring at the same moment she fainted and fell into the molten magma-lave.

"This is going to be interesting," Hild said, noticing the look of anger cross the younger Demon Queen's face. Instead of being insulted and perturbed by the fact that that young Demoness had smuggled a piece of Ygg-tech into her Black Palace, Hild was intrigued. But she was also intrigued by the single word the mortal cyborg had said.

When she had mourned aloud the fact that she had no children, the cyborg had clearly said "yet!"

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --


	122. Pt 122: Whoom!

**Part 122: Whoom!**

THERA:

"The thing I fear most about life is being thoroughly bored with it," Belldandy said sullenly to herself as she sipped her miso soup. She was watching the latest ragin' evening drama series..."Love Mess"...on the Tokyo NHK channel. It was one of those series that _everyone_ was watching at school; thus, in the team locker room, it was a hot conversation topic. Love Mess was basically Pygmalion with a twist. A perky OL fresh out of college accidentally runs in the CEO of a movie production company on the Shinkansen while traveling south to attend her mother's funeral. When she finds out that he's the Chairman of S Corporation, she becomes so edgy, she spills coffee on him. The mystery begins when it turns out that he's going to her mom's funeral too...

The show hadn't gotten to the point where _that_ was going to be explained yet. In Episode 4, the CEO becomes attracted to her, and embarks on an attempt to 'groom' her for haute culture. But instead of the familiar theme of street-wise girl transformed into cultured debutante, she decides to train _him_ to become a decent human being because he's such a tightass. He makes the mistake of using his influence to make her an office head...and very quickly, all the OLs in the office are in an uproar. Besides having 'office battles' with her boss and co-workers, she discovers that...under the gentlemanly affectation of her new boyfriend...it is quite evident that he's consumed by a passion for risky...and corrupt...business deals. And in last week's episode, S corporation's Golden Week summer 'blockbuster' movie that they had poured millions of yen into as grand-sponsor...had totally flopped at the box office.

Rumor had it that he would get canned by the Board of Directors in this episode.

What would Mikako do with him then?

"Thank God for TV on demand!" Belldandy thought as she nibbled on a piece of currant bread with strawberry jam. Coach Chihiro wasn't reckless...but she definitely wasn't satisfied with the team's effort. Scrimmages had been extended by half-an-hour now that they were in the Regionals. And Coach was watching every girl on the team like a hawk guarding her chicklings. _Especially_ her, since Belldandy was the point woman in the front line of attackers. A lot was at stake; the whole of Chiba Poly was pulling for them to finally get past their roadblock and make it into the Nationals.

Sometimes, she could feel the weight of an entire university on her shoulders.

Which was why little guilty pleasures like drowning one's worries in evening drama series were so vital to her well-being! Essential, if an unsettled girl was going to endure the rigors of typing class and computer class...and the demands of Coach Chihiro. And no boyfriend to taunt as well. But life certainly wasn't boring. Boredom had been banished from Belldandy's life several months ago, when she met a God named Keiichi.

Keiichi, who was strikingly handsome in the "tall, dark and mysterious" way. Keiichi, who was always looking out for her...even when she wanted to be left alone. Keiichi, who had _kissed_ her within an hour of interrupting her life. Keiichi, whose breath tasted like berries, potpourri and sweetcakes, whose skin smelled like lightly herbed shortbread and rose blossoms. Keiichi, who was her live-in 'roommate'. Keiichi, who tonight, had intruded upon her precious TV viewing time _twice_ before she made it clear with scoff-and-gesture that she wasn't interested in making a late-winter snowman.

Keiichi, the Divine Idiot.

Life is a series of pitched battles and subtle trade-offs. Keiichi could be totally irritating at times...but he looked like a rock-star blended with an Olympian athlete. He would catch everyone's eyes whenever they went out in public to visit a kisaten or hangout. Especially the eyes of all the girls. If eyes could drool, their eyes would be dribbling down their chins. He certainly wasn't some skinny tall guy, because he was filled out in all the right places with long lean muscles. Of course, it might also have been because he pretty conspicuous anywhere they went, as he was taller than Yao Ming...

But what was a girl to do with him?

Keiichi had given her another one of his 'lectures' after another retarded 'ecchi' incident. He had described how it was a long-established tradition that Buddhist temples have many denizens besides the priest-monks that are charged with their upkeep and sanctification. In the case of this temple, especially so as there was only the elderly priest to watch over the entire complex of buildings for the past decade or so. Then he started babbling on about a more closely-guarded secret among the Buddhist clergy: the fact that they routinely offer a means of daily bread to the temple mice that scurry about through the wooden walls. This made natural sense in the Buddhist ethos, since an act of being merciful to all sentient beings represented the principle of coexistence rather than resistance; a respect for all life regardless of its purpose.

And this approach had worked very well, he had elaborated with simplistic satisfaction, with the pleasant result that the mice wouldn't raid the temple's granary because they were well-fed. Everyone was one big happy spiritual family. Of course, the priests weren't adverse to feeding feline 'visitors' as well; but how many cats like to hang around a place where the only fare is vegetarian and the mice are safely nested away in the woodwork? Cats and daikon-flavored rice don't mix. So the cats hiked it to greener pastures, like the butcher shop and the fish market. Keiichi was very impressed with the ingenuity of it all: take a locale where there's very few cats and lots of free food...and over the centuries, the mice somehow got it canalized into their collective instincts that this was 'The Place to Hang Out'. It was ingrained in their little minds that the temple was the safest of havens for them. How practical it was, he noted enthusiastically.

It was all very wonderful and spiritual, except for the fact that the mice seemed to have it in for her by making themselves known when she least expected it. Which meant she now had to deal with her own expectations; expectations that mice would pop into sight at any time, anywhere in the temple. Not the kind of routine that's good for the nerves of an 18-year-old girl! Naturally, the Divine Dimwit was so caught up in the "pleasant result" of well-fed rodents having free reign of the temple, it escaped his attention that their presence was bothering her and sometimes scaring her. Ever since the monk had his revelation and was now studying in India, no one had bothered to continue feeding the mice on a regular basis; so now they were getting more bold. Furo was no help...if a mouse or rat scampered across his Tiger Room, he'd cock his head to one side and maybe sluggishly move a paw in a totally non-earnest attempt to imitate a swat. Rodents were too trifling to be bothered with.

Naturally, Belldandy learned about all this rodent-lore after the fact. A couple days back, while she was just emerging out of the furo, two soot-gray furred temple cohabitants kattered across the wooden floor of the rinsing area, their long tails furling behind them like small furry coils.

Instinctively, Belldandy had grabbed a towel and screamed...and instantly, Keiichi did one of his 'appearing through the wall things'.

She was totally nude, with nothing to protect her dignity except a bath towel. The towel wasn't even wrapped around her...so there wasn't much coverage when he popped out of the wall. In an instant, the shocked mice were gone, no doubt freaked out by the sudden appearance of a dark-clad human figure. Belldandy would have joined them in their disappearing act if she could; she was shocked speechless as well. When a guy unexpectedly sees a naked girl in an anime, the usual result is a nosebleed. In real life, the reaction to such an unexpected encounter is a quick aversion of the eyes, followed by both parties turning around, and concluded by a swift rouging of the cheekbones. But in this instance, none of that happened. Belldandy was trembling with a mix of embarrassment and anger...especially when it seemed to her that Keiichi was staring. He didn't even make an attempt to do the decent thing and stare at the floor or the walls. Instead, he was giving her the infamous 'look over'.

It took three "GET OUT!!" screams before he finally broke out of whatever trance he was in and cleared out with a fade.

"How the hell could _I_ put Keiichi in a trance?" Belldandy wondered as the credits rolled on the TV screen. Ever since that morning when he had fished her toothbrush out of the toilet, she had clearly perceived that Keiichi somehow seemed _different_. He was acting like a freakin' awkward teenager! How could someone who had lived over 200,000 years change overnight? The idea itself was pretty mind-boggling. But somehow, he had changed. But what had he changed into? He was still the baka, un-romantic, terminally dizzy, male-wretch, uncouth, sneek-peeking pervert at times. Despite being a God, Keiichi still had significant problems when it came to reading the "Occupied" sign on the temple's bathrooms. And Belldandy was beginning to get the impression that his 'accidental' intrusions weren't so accidental. Since he was a God, there would be reason to assume that he possessed some kind of super-awareness. Here's a guy who can hear a pin drop on a planet orbiting a sun 35 light-years away...and when she confronted him about the latest 'peeking incident', she was supposed to believe him when he claimed he didn't know that it was only mice in the bathroom?

Not very likely.

"I guess men are the same everywhere, even if they're Gods," Belldandy sighed to herself, sinking deeper into the couch. Men were animals with thick brains; they could be cast into an upset with ease...their volatile nature made them quite malleable, easily manipulated. And somewhere deep in that masculine gray matter was a very active group of brain cells that fired overdoses of neurons in the presence of a semi-clad woman. Thank God for that, because it made men pretty predictable in the scheme of things. Catching them was just as easy as fishing. It was after you pulled the line in...man attached...that things began to suck.

And because of two Demons, Belldandy's view of men was deeply mired in the 'sucky' side of things.

When Keiichi had arrived last Fall, he had unintentionally brought two pesky Demons in tow, just to keep life even more interesting for her. But they had been missing in action for the past week. Keiichi explained to her that he had 'banned' them from Thera...but Belldandy wasn't so sure. No matter what he said to assure her, she just didn't feel safe. He seemed earnest when she kept seeking assurances that the two Demons were gone for good; in fact, he seemed really pissed off at them too! Ask him about Senbei and Mara, and Keiichi would narrow his eyes menacingly for a moment...his expression even would send stabs of fear up and down Belldandy's spine.

Fuck Senbei and Mara!!

Her life was forever tainted by what that Tokyo Giants baseball player nicknamed "Ajax" had done to her. One horrible night that never should have happened, in a sleazy hotel room, while she was semi-stuporous from a date-rape drug.

The school therapist had asked her what describe what it was like to be raped, in an effort to get her to open up. The only words that Belldandy could say were these: "Imagine the shock and regret of having a 100,000 yen stolen from you. Now imagine that it happened 100,000 times. Then imagine something even worse...and you might have a sense of how I feel."

The TV drama that she had been raptly watching had turned into a drone of voices and images.

She shook her head to clear the ill-memoried storm that threatened to overflow the dam of her reasoning. Coach Chihiro and all her sempai had been a real source of support through all of this. And the sad thing was that the Tokyo Giants guy didn't really even do it. Didn't even know he had done anything to her. He had been _used_ by the two Demons; possessed by vampirism like one of those minion servants in a horror film. It was worse than just being victimized by a rapist. The whole scenario took on a frightening aspect: reality itself was brought into question because there was an entire supernatural air to the incident. Belldandy felt scarred against life...raw, confused, and diminished.

Keiichi had even claimed that since the two Demons were gone, the bad memories would eventually disappear as well. _Totally _disappear…not just disappearing as in a forgetting, where a bad experience would remain on the rearmost shelves of the mind until it was recalled by a similar trauma. No, he had told her that the horrible events of the past months would be fully erased from her mind; as if they had never happened. If he was telling the truth, she definitely welcomed the idea of those horrid memories being destroyed, burned, ripped to pieces…gone! In a sense, the erasure process had already started: she had found herself thrown back in time over four months. A temporal 'start-over', he had called it. She didn't know what truly had happened to the two Demons, or how Keiichi had banned them from her life. But she fervently hoped that he had kicked their fucking asses as hard as a comet to make up for the violation and grief they had brought her.

Why can't life be like an evening TV drama?

Could anyone even imagine what it is like to live with a God? There were dozens of manga and anime productions out there that thrived on the theme of Gods or Goddesses coming down to Thera to mingle with the mortals. Magical girls, boys with a harem of Goddesses, girls with a circle of hunky Gods, God-like beings who came to Thera and wreaked comic havoc, Gods with super-science technology who brought giant robots in their wake...all were tried and true pop culture themes. But truth is far-winged, and a stranger to any fiction that a mortal mind could conceive. So far, there was no one she could turn to; no person with whom she could confide.

No answers.

Belldandy didn't know _anyone_ who had ever _really_ lived with a Divine being, unless one considers all the kooks who were cult-crazy, or cracked out on drugs. But then again, theirs was merely the lunacy of madmen. Irrelevant, as long as Keiichi was reality.

And Keiichi _was_ reality.

As long as she had known him, Keiichi had adamantly maintained that he was the only God currently assigned a permanent station on the Therarealm, as he called Thera. His long venture here was all because she hadn't made a wish. But Belldandy knew that she _had_ made a wish! She was 100 percent certain that she had made a wish. She fully knew that, supposedly, after a Wish Escort Office God grants a wish, they were immediately summoned back to Windowsill. Keiichi had pounded that into her head a few hundred times over the past few months as well. So why was he still here?

"I couldn't _possibly_ have been insane enough to wish for a God like him to stay with me forever! Only a total idiot would wish for something like that!" Belldandy said to the remote control, microphone-style, before she let it bounce on the futon couch.

At least he wasn't pestering her about making wishes anymore.

Could she have made a wish, and not be aware of it?

In the Tiger Room, she could hear Furo chuffing and yawning, his tail restlessly thumping the wooden floor and tatami. It was getting late, and she was keeping her self-appointed feline protector awake. Dutifully, he wouldn't go to sleep until she retired for the night.

From this point on, there was no guidance to follow. Life is a series of unguided moments, with little more than strands of memory to tie them together...strands of memory that functioned as an 'instruction manual' on how to get things done. Belldandy knew that she couldn't exactly call Mom and Dad at home in distant Murakami and discuss any of this. She fancied that she could simply phone home and ask them, "how does a girl live with God?" or "what does a girl do when God decides to live with her?" But in the truth of things, if the folks were ever to find out that she was living with a guy, they both would be madder than boiled piss! Of course, their anger would spin from completely different angles of the resentment spectrum. Dad was a total prude from the rural hick-stix; he'd be all gung-ho 'Jap Dad' protective and probably want to go after Keiichi with a golf club. Mom would be all enraged and indignant toward her, because she hadn't right-away confided to her that she was living with a guy.

And there really was nothing to assume, because she and Keiichi weren't exactly romantic. Not even close, by any stretch of the imagination. Even if her imagination stretched in that direction at least a dozen times a day, which it didn't. After what happened with Ajax, Belldandy knew that romantic daydreams would be a long time coming. Ajax had taken the joy out of romance and choked her with it. Belldandy wondered if Keiichi had any romantic imaginings involving _her_, but the thought was almost repellent. She felt a flash of anger at him for not being more of man...he could at least be inclined towards seeing her as a woman, rather than just some mortal girl he had to grant a wish to.

But that didn't stop everyone from assuming their asses away anyway at school, despite all her protests to the contrary. Captains Ootaki and Tamiya was constantly pestering her about her 'boyfriend', and Coach Chihiro routinely questioned her every few days about her and Keiichi's relationship; wanting to ensure that she didn't lose her "winner's mindset"...whatever that was...before the tournament.

"Makes my skin crawl," Belldandy muttered to herself, rewinding the show because her inward-looking had made her miss the last ten minutes. The way her mind was racing, she'd probably space out miss the last bit again. More proof that living with a guy is way too complicated. So she tossed the remote on the couch and padded off to her bedroom.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Chiba Polytech breezed through the Regional tourney, much to the delight of the whole university. Belldandy and her teammates were basking in the glow of attention on campus, but soon it would be time to go to Osaka for the National Championship tourney. The Nationals rotated host cities every year; this year, it was Kinki Region's turn to serve as tournament host. Belldandy was excited about catching the bus to Osaka over the weekend.

She'd have rather flown from Tokyo Narita, but the school certainly didn't have that kind of funding for women's sports, even if their team was the first team from Chiba Poly to _ever_ make it to a national tournament, in any sport. In any endeavor, for that matter. The school's most brainy whiz-kid teams couldn't even make the nationals in engineering competitions. The athletic budget was...well, it was low-budget. A portable trailer served as a locker room, dressing room and Coach's office. The showers in the gym sometimes didn't even have hot water. There was no dressing room in the gym, and the showers were shared between the V-ball team and all the other squads, even the guy's teams. Winter really sucked: they'd have to take showers and then walk from the gym to the trailer two blocks away, barely-dry in the chilly air, just so they could change. In true keeping with their economy-rate athletic budget, her team couldn't even take the Shinkansen, because it cost too much money!

But during the celebration party hosted by Coach Chihiro, Coach made it clear that the usual 'road trip' rules were off for the bus haul to Osaka. In other words, the team could party all they wanted for the 14 hours or so it would take to travel from Tokyo to the Osaka by the cheapo charter bus they had hired. Belldandy jokingly wondered if the tour bus driver would survive the trip. But once they landed in Second City, there'd be no more screwing around. They'd have an evening to detox and the next day to get their shopping and sight-seeing out of the way...and then they would have all-day practices beginning on Monday.

Friday, they'd face their first opponent.

The National Tournament consisted of semi-finals on Friday, finals on Saturday, and the championship game on Monday. Eight teams from each of the athletic-scholastic regions would compete in the tourney, the winner and runner-up teams would receive trophies. Besides being a national tournament, it was considered a warm-up for this summer's 2008 Olympics in Beijing. Several players already selected on the Olympic Volleyball team would be there, playing for their college and university squads.

In other words, this was the cream of the crop of Japan's women's volleyball talent. The hype was mounting, especially this year, since everyone was so fired up about the Olympics. For volleyball enthusiasts, watching this year's Nationals was a sneak-peek at how some of Japan's women's Olympic squad members were going to perform under pressure. Belldandy reminded herself that Coach Chihiro had taken this very same path, several years ago. She had played for Osaka, and then promptly started work-outs with the Olympic team after the tourney.

Winning the championship was the main incentive of every participant...but there was an additional incentive as well. The coach of the Olympic team was going to be present at the tourney, and it was rumored that 3-5 more girls might be considered for tryouts for the remaining slots on Japan's women's volleyball team.

The Olympics.

Belldandy had daydreamed about being in the Olympics ever since she tied on her first pair of athletic shoes. In this one thing, the whole of Thera was One. No national divides, no political agendas..._nothing_ could overcome the desire for victory. Uninterrupted for 2800 years, the people of Thera had honored the Olympic Games with the utmost esteem. Warring nations or factions would declare an armistice during the two weeks of the Games, an unbroken tradition since the Eight Century BCE. For two weeks, there would be no war or civil violence, anywhere on Thera. All of the 'fighting' would occur on the honorable field of athletic endeavor. Athletes would transcend the role of champion to become heroes, not just to their home country but to all of Thera. Next to the Olympics, competitive sports were simply a pastime, while the Olympics were a glory. Entrants from the poorest countries in the world had defeated the best-trained professionals in their sport, winning a lifetime of glory for themselves and a deep-seated pride for their nations. These were some of the most remarkable stories in the annals of sport, because they transcended the notion of competition. A farmgirl with zero training from rural Japan had won the Women's 400 hurdles. A young man born with a single arm had fitted a prosthetic on his missing hand, so he could hold a bow steady...he had won the gold medal in Archery. A highlight of the 1992 Olympics occurred when a Paralympian living with borderline mental retardation had been urged by his coach to try out for the hammer-throw, qualified for the Barcelona Olympics and actually won a Silver Medal. The Gold Medal winner and the IOC, in a break from tradition and with a true understanding of the word "para", meaning "alongside" in Greek, allowed him to share the gold medalist stand during the medal presentations. Side-by-side with the Gold medalist on the topmost stand, he was further honored when the Olympic orchestra played his nation's anthem following the champion's national anthem.

One of the most poignant chapters in the two-century-long history of the Modern Olympic Era came about during the last two Summer Games. A soccer team had won the qualifying rounds and an invite to the Olympics, but they were from a country that was so impoverished, they had to ride to the Games on bicycles. They rode almost 1600 kilometers just to get to the Olympics; no one had offered to transport them during the three weeks because they had been confused as Tour de France entrants. In a strange quirk of irony, they advanced to the Gold Medal round and defeated France-Euro in sudden death to claim the Gold. But the story didn't end there. Immediately upon returning to their homeland, each team member sold his Gold medal to raise money to put a dent in the starvation in their homeland and finance a much-needed children's hospital in the capital city. Over the next four years, an anonymous group of businessmen had searched out and bought back each of the gold medals. They then arranged for the soccer team to participate in the Opening Ceremonies of the 2004 Summer Games, where the president of the International Olympic Committee announced that the Olympic Movement had set up a foundation on their behalf to underwrite any and all expenses of the children's hospital on condition that they never again sell their medals; and then the IOC returned their gold medals in a stunning presentation ceremony that brought the stadium roof down and made the NHK anchor choke up during the live coverage. These were the real stories of the Olympics, more dynamic and touching than anything a writer could possibly script.

As the Summer Olympics approached, NHK, Fuji and the other networks had been televising specials on the athletes, the building projects in Beijing, the history of China-States and the possible teams from Japan with increasing frequency. Belldandy knew that Japan had a storied history in the sport of Women's Indoor Volleyball, having won the first gold medals awarded in that sport during the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. The day before they left, Coach Chihiro showed them two films in the meeting room. The first film was the replay of last year's championship game: Osaka vs. Sapporo. The second film was the gold medal round in the 1964 Olympics. As Belldandy watched the grainy black-and-white footage from another era, she could only wonder what it would have been like to be on that team. To win the game of games in front of the home crowd...not just _any_ home crowd, but the home crowd of an entire nation. To hear the strains of the Kimigayo performed as the Rising Sun rose to the rafters.

Coach Chihiro had definitely gotten their team motivated. None of this "you're all winners because you made it the Nationals" type crap. It was "do you want to live with anything less than first place for the rest of your lives?" Something the coach knew too well.

To her surprise, Keiichi had discreetly seen her off at the bus terminal in downtown Chiba, doing one of his 'for your eyes only' spectral appearances. She was relieved, because she didn't need to be teased all the way to Osaka about her 'boyfriend' by her sake-fueled teammates.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Belldandy told herself, "A single word of praise can create a far-reaching blossoming of effort," as the bus sped through Shizouka. Keiichi hadn't said a word when she departed; he just waved at her with a sad expression on his face. What was there to be sad about? She was on her way to realizing her dreams.

Didn't he care about that?

Well-wishing didn't seem to be his strong suit. Perhaps he already knew the outcome and didn't want to tip her off, either way. But his lack of empathy flashed across Belldandy's heart several times during the trip...and the further they got from Chiba, the more she realized with a sense of foreboding that she was truly alone in the world. She just wanted him to be considerate, just once. But as usual, he seemed aloof and distant; as if his mind was aloft in the far reaches of Windowsill while his body was firmly planted on Thera. It was hard to get enthused around the guy as of late.

Why did God have to be such a hopeless guy?

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"At last, we're alone!" the new Goddess shouted feverishly to Keiichi as she alighted on the temple's entry foyer.

_Another_ new Goddess.

Most of the Goddesses who had arrived had greeted him politely, even deferentially. They would regard him with shy eyes...which would momentarily melt his heart into a puddle of compassion. But the new Goddess was anything but shy in her demeanor.

Keiichi glanced at the visitor, his mouth somewhat askance. She had a longish face, with a small nose, pointed chin, and brilliant blue eyes; all of which was framed by blazing flames of long curly hair pulled back by several hair bands and ponytails. Her dress was provocative, to say the least. So provocative that he didn't notice her mouth moving when she spoke, because his eyes were lodged elsewhere.

Of all the Goddesses to have the hots for him, this latest Goddess had to be one of the Valkyrie!!

All of this love stuff was so sudden for him...after living almost his entire existence with the knowledge that Goddesses and love were unreachable, amorous feelings swiftly tumbled into his life for the first time. Ironically, Keiichi was now in the position where Goddesses viewed _him_ as unreachable. All day, Keiichi had the impression that he was drowning in a pageant of fawning Goddesses.

The mortals had an expression for this, called "Love Stinks!"

As soon as Belldandy had left the temple on her way to Osaka, he started getting 'house calls' from several Goddesses. This was the fallout from Belldandy's earnest but ill-devised wish. With all the gathered impulsivity of a mortal, she had wished for him to be released from his silent heart-vigil imposed by the Gate of Judgment. But that in itself didn't suffice: she had also wished for him to have the deepest love a God could ever experience...with the one Goddess in the universe that was most suited to share that love with him. Normally, such a wish would have never been granted by the Ygg Xeomnic; but to his surprise, the wish was duly registered and enacted. Even more conspicuously, it had been manifested by the Almighty Himself; the Lord acting as proxy for Keiichi since he was badly worsted by his epic battle with Senbei and Mara.

Yet, if a God is destined to have the 'deepest love' with the Goddess of his choice, doesn't that mean that the _Goddess_ would experience the deepest possible affection as well? Love...the deep, profound, Soul-embracing type of Love...certainly wouldn't compass a one-sided relationship. Its powerful sentiments of affection would be redeemed _equally_ between God and Goddess.

Somehow, word of Belldandy's wish had leaked out of the God Wish Escort office...

...and into the ears of a few million Goddesses, who realized with thoroughgoing enthusiasm that Keiichi would be the most marvelous of Gods to be in love with, because he would love with nothing less than his entire heart. The Goddess he wound up with would share the most rapturous, passionate, TwinSouled love imaginable!

So now they were coming.

One of the Ygg Sysops had hacked the Ygg Xeomn and created a fictitious visit permit to attend to something in the Therarealm...as if a Sysop would ever have a reason to come to a mortal planet. The likelihood of a Bug outbreak on Thera was non-categoric: it would never happen. One of the ThoughtPainters had painted a portal to the Therarealm, expertly concealing it within her work at an exhibition. While her audience was submerged in the impressions of her artistry, she slipped away to call upon him. Another Goddess from the Ethiopsylogic Clinic had somehow been given 'leave' to check up on him for symptoms of wishout...being on the Therarealm too long and seeing Wish requests as 'jobs'...or washout...getting too emotionally attached to his Escort God Office assignee. She was a Proctor Apprentice, which was an accomplishment in itself; on Yggdrasil, a Proctor Apprentice was considered absolutely emotionally mature...a major 'score' for any God who managed to win her heart. Of course, he was well aware that he suffered from neither malady...but try to convince her of that! She had arrived dressed in a pink nurse's outfit, ready to 'examine' him. She was also outfitted with the absolute conviction that he was too attached to Belldandy, and that it was impairing his job.

Now it was the Valkyrie's turn.

A vision of honed warrior beauty hovered in front of him. Most of the Valkyrie wore uniforms that tailored towards functionality during combat...but this dark-tanned red-headed Valkyrie was dressed in more revealing attire, befitting of _another_ facet of combat. Keiichi was uncannily reminded of an anime character called "Bloodberry" from one of the oldies animes running on the Anime Ramp network. For some reason, Belldandy seemed to like that particular series.

If Belldandy was here, he would have a legitimate excuse to conduct his affairs without granting them an audience. It was bad enough that she knew of his existence; if she encountered a dozen or a hundred Goddesses, it would be much worse. So they had stayed away until she left for her volleyball tournament...but now, there was no reason for them not to visit, since he had all the privacy in the Multiverse now that he was alone in the temple.

"Did you know that the Ygg Xeomn has listed you as the most eligible bachelor in all of Yggdrasil?" the Valkyrie noted in a sparkling voice. His disbelief was stirred by her outrageous claim. Did the Ygg Xeomn actually keep such a list? Beyond this was the dreadful notion that some Goddess had set it to task to conclude which God is the most 'eligible'. What kind of Goddess would do _that_? Obviously, the Sysops, the Proctors, the ThoughtPainters and the Valkyrie! The Xeomn had the ability to present any information in any configurable holon; since it was responsible for the guidance and data of all that occurred in the Yggdrasil Logorinth. Apparently, this Valkyrie had taken it upon herself to investigate him using the Ygg Xeomn.

As she spoke Keiichi could immediately discern the 'commander's edge' in her voice. Clearly, this Goddess was used to giving orders. For a moment, he unconsciously wanted to comply...but then he checked himself. _He_ was in charge too! Keiichi reminded himself that he was a First Class God licensee, head of this sector's God's Wish Escort Office, and an apprentice Senior Licensee. In ten or twenty millennia, _he_ would be heading the entire Wish Escort Office for a cycle! After that, he would be eligible for promotion to a Senior First Class God License.

"Naturally, since you're one of Yggdrasil's most desirable Gods, I just had to tear myself away from honing my battle skills long enough to meet you!" the buxom Valkyrie noted. "And what they say is true...you are quite adorable, in your own way. Amusing too, if your interactions with your mortal charge are any indication."

"Fancy that..." Keiichi answered, trying to project disinterest. But his cardinine-haired visitor wasn't having any of it.

He felt a flight of resentment at his circumstances. His universe had been turned inside out, and it was all the result of his wish assignee. He remembered the whole thing: how he had fought Senbei and Mara to point of the Real Death; blatantly ignoring his recall to Yggdrasil and stealing back to the Therarealm; how Belldandy had wished for _him_ to be freed of the emotional neutering visited upon him by the Gate of Judgment, and that he fall in love.

How ironic.

"My name is Athenle," the redhead Goddess said, fluffing back her long hair with a practiced motion before proffering him her meishi card. Keiichi searched his memory for any info about her; with an inward gasp, he recognized that she had been the head of the Valkyrie 3 rotations ago. Each leadership rotation lasted 10,000 years...the current head of the Valkyrie was some Goddess named Rind, recently appointed to the post.

Knowing that Athenle was a former Valkyrie Commander didn't exactly suit Keiichi with comfortability. By their nature, Valkyrie could only seek relationships with male Gods that they could dominate, if they wished to be involved with a male at all. It _had_ to be so, because theirs was the Way of the Warrioress. If her chosen mate or TwinSoul asserted any indication of equity in the relationship...or even worse, became dominant over her...she would be summarily dismissed from the Valkyrie corps because she had proven herself weak. To the Valkyrie, there were no excuses for any sign of weakness or submission, even within the honored hallows of love and companionship. Quite often, Valkyrie intermarried among themselves; both were Valkyrie and thus neither could be dominant, only equal.

It was a crazy, outmoded system in Keiichi's opinion, since the transformation of the Everything into the OmniArc had irrevocably altered the relationship between Gods and Demons, rendering such 'battle readiness' to fight the Demons very unlikely. Such martial vigilance didn't seem to be as necessary now as it was in the pre-OmniArc days. In those times, a conflict with the Demons was always reckoned among the range of potentialities...a telling justification for the Valkyrie to remain ever vigilant. But now, as Gods, they no longer were living under the threat of potential War with the Demons. Long before Keiichi was born, the Xeomn Annals recorded that there had been such a War; the elder Gods and Goddesses still talked about it as if it had happened yesterday, not several hundred thousand years ago.

Athenle had dressed herself in a open-laced breast-guard that revealed the ampleness of her breasts; her 'skirt' was actually little more than a hip-hoop with a pleated length down in front and back, leaving the sides of her legs open up to her waist. Her shoulders were draped with fur-fringe 'epaulet-shoulderpads' that tapered roundly. A rich red-and-black geometric robe was tucked along her shoulderpads, draping down behind her, framing the sensuous swells and curves of her body.

Breasts.

"Why do they always have to dress so provocatively?" Keiichi's mind was rambling...mostly because his heart was threatening to fly out of the nest of his Soul. Athenle possessed a powerful allure, and Keiichi quickly regretted his lack of amorous experience with Goddesses. She was definitely 100 percent Goddess! He cloaked his thoughts as imaginings of intimacy flinched along the curve of his fancy.

Keiichi felt like summoning Furo, just so he retain a sense of confidence around this Valkyrie. Valkyrie, by their nature, were _intimidating_...even if you were on their side. But he doubted that the presence of the albino Bengal Tiger would ruffle a hair on Athenle's head. Athenle was the beast of prey...and Keiichi was her next target.

He wanted to indulge in the sensuous beauty of this very attractive Goddess.

For a moment, he went with the fantasy. Athenle laying in his arms. Merging Soul-to-Soul with her, Sharing themselves. Passing through unexplored terrain in Yggdrasil, just the two of them.

Fighting...

The idea of getting into an argument with a Valkyrie shuntered Keiichi's whim-flights. By reputation, Valkyrie were considered notorious for their obstinacy: it was commonplace for them to escalate a argument to a tension that only barely slighted away from causing a fight. Otherwise, they would resist by a stoic non-resistance, aka 'the silent sullen' technique. In either case, one didn't want to get into a pitched chop-logic debate with a Valkyrie...unless they were planning to back up their prospects with a weapon or two. This was one of the reasons the Valkyrie tended to sororitize rather than mingle with the general population of Gods and demi-Gods in Yggdrasil. They had to keep to themselves, otherwise their journeying among other Divines tended towards combative results. Keiichi had only spent the requisite 3,500 years learning basic weaponry during his inculcation; his slightness of fighting techniques would be most ineffective against even a novice Valkyrie.

Despite all of this, he recognized that Athenle was paying him an extreme honor by even visiting him. Because Valkyrie were so close-knit and segregated from the usual demos of the Gods, a courting visit by one of their ranks was rare indeed. And it was quite apparent that Athenle was intrigued by him; she certainly wasn't here to protect him from the 'harem' of Goddesses who were 'interested' in him.

She was actually considering him as a potential mate.

This brought up another, rather unpleasant, insight. Once a Valkyrie selects a God to be her mate, she won't give up until she becomes Bonded with him. Nothing could dissuade her once she had knitted together her mind and her heart...which meant that the end result was almost always inevitable. With an earnest fixation on the God they had chosen for a soul-mate, a Valkyrie would pursue her paramour. And it definitely wasn't the subservient "I'll appease you until you see how important I am to you" approach. For a Valkyrie, the mating dance was nothing more than a hunt; she would _overcome_ and _win_ her mate's heart via ninja-like love-craft skills and tenacious patience. Gods who were to be Bonded with Valkyrie still had to pass the Gate of Judgment like all other divines, and quite often these unions were Sealed by the Gate. Affirming the truth of their love: a Bonding of passive and aggressive natures, interwoven at a heart level, their love honestly complementary to each other.

Keiichi regarded the fiery-haired visitor as she floated through the temple, purposefully inspecting it as one would inspect an assembly of subalterns, asking questions about why he was "wasting away by remaining on the Therarealm" when he could be on duty in Yggdrasil.

He fervently hoped that Athenle hadn't reached a firm decision that he was "the one" for her, because he certain didn't feel that he was the 'passive type' who would match well with her. He couldn't even handle his hot-headed mortal charge.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Why are you damned polite?!" Athenle shouted at him. Obviously, she wasn't impressed when he brought forth a tray of tea and snacks for her.

"Why not?" Keiichi replied. "It would follow that, since I'm a God who serves in the God Wish Escort Office, that I would be cultured, mannered, and respectful of others. As you have your duty as Valkyrie, I have my duty as Wish Escort Agent. Your role is to fight, to defend...my role is to grant wishes, to please others."

"I certainly know how you could please me, Keiichi," she countered in a husky voice, causing him to float back away from her a pace. "Can't you be serious? Just once! I've come all the way to the Therarealm just to meet you! Do you know what _this_ means? Valkyrie don't just go throwing themselves at any God! If my Sisters found out that I had skipped away to come visit you for any frivolous reason, I wouldn't hear the end of it! For your sake, you should get it into your Soul that you're _valuable_, Keiichi!"

"I am greatly honored by your visit, Athenle. But why me...what distinguishes me from all the other Gods on Yggdrasil?" Keiichi argued. "Am I valuable because of some wish that a mortal made on my behalf? That she wished for me to experience the most profound love with a Goddess that is possible? What does that have to do with _me_? Before her wish, I was persona non gratis in terms of receiving shows of affection from any Goddess. Now, every Goddess and her sister is coming here with aspirations of courtship. Isn't it true that I should be doing the courting as well?"

"It has _everything_ to do with you, you moron! Are all the Gods in the Wish Escort Office as dense as you?" Athenle shot back with an air.

"Sigh...apparently so..." Keiichi said. "That being said, perhaps you should be on your way, since you've discovered my garbled faculties of wisdom and intellect."

"Hmmm," Athenle paused, resting her hands on her hips; a figure of pensiveness. "It's quite possible that your naivety may be an asset. Perhaps you're so lovable because you're innocent..."

Keiichi moaned deep in his throat at this. His gamut had totally backfired!

"You intrigue me, Keiichi of the Wish Escort Office. We shall no doubt meet again in the near future," Athenle announced. Without further ado, she unfolded a translucent axe and struck it on the ground, creating a convex of light that spirited her away.

"Drama Queen!" Keiichi said under his breath as the glow faded.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

The buzz at the National Championships centered on the news that Coach Fujiwara, the man selected to coach Japan's women's v-ball team in the 2008 Olympics, had canceled his attendance at the event. For many, this was a disappointing news because it meant...in all likelihood...that none of the girls playing in the tourney who hadn't been rostered on to the Olympic team would be selected for the remaining open slots on the squad. This cast a pall over some of the competitor's locker rooms, since there were certain of their numbers who had aspired to qualify for the Olympic team.

Including Belldandy Morisato.

Belldandy knew that being picked for the Olympic team was a long-shot, since she was only an inexperienced college freshman. However, during the first championship game, that all changed when she found herself in a 'zone'...playing the very best game of her life. Usually, she was precariously matched against the other team's strikers; who were usually juniors and seniors and knew all sorts of tricks at the net that she didn't. But last night, she was totally dominant in her net play. Even Coach Chihiro briefly acknowledged that she was a little bit impressed with Belldandy's .866 kill percentage, and the fact that her line play was unflawed. Like most frosh players, Belldandy was often too aggressive on the ball; she had a weakness for playing volleys that should have been left alone to fall outside the court. But during the first game, her eye was keen on gameplay, and she had made several crucial digs that broke the services of their opponent's top servers.

She was so intent on her game, she didn't have time to see if Keiichi or her parents were in the stands. But she was almost certain that Keiichi wouldn't come; he didn't seem to be the type that would see the honor in honest sports competition. Once again, she wondered what it was like to see the outcome, to know the secrets, to not have to occupy one's thoughts with wondering about the wondrous any more. Being a God would be something like that.

In sum, she had played so well, _she_ was even impressed.

Belldandy realized that her championship games were quite insignificant in the scheme of things...but for some reason, she wanted them to be important to Keiichi. She wanted to be more than just a roomie at the temple.

She just couldn't imagine what it would be like to be friends with God. But it was quite possible that she was a friend of Keiichi's.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Belldandy was joking around with Captains Tamiya and Ootaki as she wrapped her generous auburn-tan hair in the towel, letting it ease the water away from her hair. Tamiya, with her crisp, short haircut, wouldn't need a towel at all. And Ootaki was fussing her hair as usual; the bright-haired senior was a walking cosmetology clinic. Ootaki's locker was always lined with a dozen hair-care products...dips, mousse, quick-dye, glitter, designer shampoos...the works. Once, Tamiya had hidden Ootaki's hair-care stash in another locker; and the squad was treated to a completely ranked-out-berserker version of the already-crazed senior co-captain. Bad hair day maximus.

Tonight's practice was deadly serious, involving a series of complicated drills based on some new plays that Coach Chihiro had drawn up especially for their next opponent. Everyone was physically and mentally ripped with enthusiasm...and fatigue. As she tucked her arms into her sweater, Belldandy paused as she overheard Coach Chihiro nearly-shouting on the phone. Her Coach's loud voice wasn't the usual demand-bark that dominated practices...it was almost hyperbolic. Coach Chihiro rarely lost her cool.

"What?" "He's what?!" "And you want me to what?!" "Why me?!" "You can't _possibly_ be serious!"

"I've got a tournament to prep for, and you're bothering me with _this_?"

All three girls piled up at the end of the lockers, leaning out just far enough so they could eavesdrop around the corner. This didn't look very good. Coach Chihiro was pacing back-and-forth in the small 'hallway' in front of the team-room and coaching offices, her face pinched with dismay and uncertainty. Belldandy had never seen their Coach like this before. Coach Chihiro was combing her fingers through her hair with nervous motions as she talked on the phone. Ootaki and Tamiya immediately started the surmise-surprise polls; they initially pegged the source of Coach Chihiro's consternation with flippant guesswork, such as "Coach's mystery boyfriend", "she's pregnant", "she's been fired from Chiba Poly", "the team got disqualified" and other sorts of conjectures. Ootaki being Ootaki, some of those ideas were a bit on the risque side. But Belldandy was worried by the whole demeanor of the Coach; her seemingly unassailable confidence seemed to be flagging. Soon, Tamiya and Ootaki's joking mood simmered; the two seniors were almost rigid with concern. This wasn't a joke...whoever Coach was talking to on the other line of the phone, it was deadly _serious_!

Finally, their Coach said something into the phone in a barely-audible voice, and then clicked it shut. She turned to look towards Belldandy and her two teammates...and Belldandy was so surprised that she'd been discovered, she stumbled out...pulling Tamiya and Ootaki along with her.

All three girls tumbled onto the locker room floor, a pink spindle-legged spider.

Coach Chihiro simply looked at them, shook her head from side to side, and walked off.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

It had come down to this.

Yesterday, they had defeated the team from Nagasaki University in a sudden-death fifth game match to reach the championship round. But savoring their narrow victory was short-lived: tomorrow, they were playing against the perennial champions from Osaka for the national title.

In Osaka.

It was practically a home-crowd game for the girls from Osaka. Osaka University had won five national championships since 2000; they were hailed as one of those 'dynasty' teams in the collegiate women's volleyball world. If the Osaka squad lost more than two games in the regular season, their record was considered to be "disappointing". The last time they had lost a match, other than a national title match, was in 2002. Their combined losses this decade could be counted on the fingers of one hand. And it was even more complicated than this, much to the delight of the sports press.

Coach Chihiro had started on the Osaka team from 2001-2004 before competing in the Athens Olympics. She was coaching a team that was playing her alma mater for a National title. She was coaching against her former coach. Pupil versus Teacher. The drama-mongers loved it. But it totally sucked, because it was making Belldandy's nerves dance like fire moths in a garden.

Championship games took on a mythic meaning. Two hours, either way. A season of thirty games and endlessly mounting hours of drills, scrimmages and weight-room burns...all of this would now be compressed into the space of 90 minutes, maybe longer if the match went to five games. Two teams...two _units_ measuring up against the best each could offer. A convergence of unpredictable realities.

Why does humanity have to measure the iota; the miniscule difference between best and second-best? Between 'us' and 'them'? What pertinence, what relevance, what sense did such comparisons have? Team sports were still relatively modern; Japan didn't have such competitions in the pre-Meiji days. The closest thing was the Bushido ethic and the occasional martial competitions. Back in earlier times, you either cut down your opponent, or you were cut down. Competition was life and death for the samurai and ninja. Belldandy's mind tried to prize away a meaningful insight into all of this. Is there a vouchsafed dignity in competition, or is it just a diversion, an amusement? Why can't everybody be winners?

"Dammit!!" Belldandy hissed to the steel-and-sweat enclosure of her equipment locker, and then she slammed it shut explosively. This was definitely the wrong shit to be thinking the night before a championship!! Before Keiichi had come into her life, she would have never even given weight to such considerations! There was a game to be played, the most important game of her life...and she was waxing philosophical! This game was a tour-de-force of athletic devotion, it would be leagues beyond a high school league championship game. Tomorrow evening, a crowd would be assembling in the arena. _National_ network TV broadcasts. The game she had finished yesterday had five NHK sports-camera units broadcasting it to a national cable audience. She couldn't even begin to imagine how many Chiba students and faculty had booked the Shinkansen to attend the game. And when she thought of Keiichi, her mind started spin-cycling.

She reasoned with her disbelief, frustrated about how Keiichi could have made such an impact on her thinking. Angry at herself for listening to his invisible voice. God or not, she shouldn't have let him into herself! Coach Chihiro's words after the game yesterday were distant, yet clear.

"How do you burn down a machine?" she had asked.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

The sound of the Maishima Arena's main interior blasted her like a wave of desert heat as Belldandy and her team emerged from the guest locker room. The National Tournament venue was located on Sports Island in the central arenas. Sports Island was famous in all of Japan; it was built on a man-made island in Osaka Bay in anticipation of a successful bid for the 2008 Olympics. Even though Beijing was awarded the Olympics, the project was still city-driven...each year, a new sports facility debuted. Sports Island had already hosted several international events during its short history, and another one was slated for 2010. The large waterfront sports complex was home to the Maishima Large and Small Arenas, the Maishima Baseball Stadium, numerous tennis courts and sports grounds. Several World Cup soccer matches had been played here in 2002. Even though it was less than 15 years old, Belldandy could sense the history of the place.

Outside, the Arena had a nice view of the nearby Tempozan amusement park, with its famous Giant Wheel and Aquarium. When they entered the sub-arena, dusk was quickly settling in, and the huge Ferris wheel was already illuminated with its trademark shifting patterns of light. Belldandy had seen the Giant Wheel in dozens of anime and TV shows; it had a strong romantic appeal for young couples. It was an archetype, just like Sports Island was an archetype for athletic competitions.

The preliminary rounds had been held in the smaller arena that was attached to the Maishima Arena complex. Even that was daunting at first sight. But the championship game had been moved from the sub-arena to the main court. Risers had been set up on all four sides of the volleyball court, a necessary floor arrangement for spectators since the floor could accommodate a dozen volleyball courts. There actually was a suspended electronic scoreboard and video screen above the court! As they entered, the sound system was playing some J-pop songs...the sexy vocals bing-bonging around the cavernous interior of the arena.

Walking along the side of the court, Belldandy quickly noticed that the stands were already filled with hundreds of fans, even though it was still 40 minutes before the championship game. These were the hard-core volleyball enthusiasts, who would scrutinize every iota of the upcoming game from warm-ups to trophy presentation. This was by far the biggest crowd Belldandy had ever played a match in front of. In her imaginings, almost everybody in Osaka had turned out to cheer on their team. By contrast, the entire student body of Chiba Poly wouldn't fill half the seats in one of the four seating sections of the arena.

They were in the house...Osaka U's house.

Osaka truly was a sports-minded city, and she sensed that the place might fill up. The volleyball court had been freshly painted and taped for the competition, with the Japan Women's College Volleyball logo in the center under the net. As she peeled off her warm-up jacket, Belldandy wanted to avoid looking at the Osaka girls, but she couldn't refrain from checking out the other team.

The Osaka women were _big_!

She noticed that a couple of their players were checking her out as well. Belldandy knew that she was the tallest girl on the court, but the Osaka girls had a sleek leanness in addition to a size advantage. On the other side of the court, they were pacing about the floor confidently as they lined up for their final warm-up. As was clearly apparent from their bearing, the Osaka team obviously felt like they owned the court. They were expected to win this title match by all the media, especially since Chiba Poly was the Cinderella entry into the national tournament.

"Do your best, Belldandy!" she heard someone explosively shout from the seats. Even within the echoing chatter and her tight mental focus on the game, she recognized her Mom's voice. "Play hard!" she overheard her Dad yelling hoarsely in his trademark rural accent.

Mom and Dad were _here_!!

They had actually driven or train-passaged all the way from home to here! Knowing Dad, he had probably convinced a few of the neighbors to come as well. Belldandy wanted to wave at them, but such a personal display would draw a sharp rebuke from Coach Chihiro. All she could do was nod in the general direction of the sound, hoping her parents would be close enough to see the brief gesture. Right now, she wasn't a person...she was a team member.

The floor in the mid-1990s-built arena facility smelled like freshly-hewn pine wood. Coach Chihiro unbagged a set of balls and bounced them to her and the others, to start their drills. Oddly, Belldandy was acutely aware for a moment that the bouncing balls didn't have the familiar echo the resounded inside their home gym. The echo was longer and louder, a valley of tension sounding between every bounce.

The net-ref blew her whistle, indicating that the game would start in ten minutes. Coach Chihiro had made the team fully aware that the net referee was a member of the fabled Tokyo 1964 women's volleyball Gold medalist team. Being in the presence of a true sports legend even seemed to make Coach Chihiro nervous, as her coach's seat was only a few meters away from a woman who, in her 60s, still looked fit and alert.

Belldandy daydreamed about the Olympics...

-bamp!-

"Get back here, Morisato!" Coach shouted in her ear as Belldandy almost tripped over her spot on the bench. "We've gotta a game to win!"

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Volleyball, like many team sports, is an ocean. On the shores of competition, each wave passes with a unique autographing of reality; a series of rallies and tepid moments. Wrapped within the striving, the players often are uncertain of which wave they would be riding. Would the next wave be shallow and sedate, or would it be tempestuous with vigor? When a team combines their talents, something larger emerges. But there is always something larger than even the blend of skills...and no one would ever know what it was. They would only know that it had passed through them, like the fading sound of a wave-crash against a sandy shore. In the first game, their team had started out strong, shocking themselves and the hometown crowd taking a five point lead over Osaka midway through the first game. Then Osaka found their game, and streaked right by the Chiba Poly team.

30-26, game win Osaka.

The second game was almost a mirror opposite of the first. Osaka looked like they were going to run away with the second game. The Chiba girls were _almost_ broken; a loss of confidence seemed to descend on their team as Osaka seemed to chunk up points seemingly without extending an undue amount of effort. They hit kills, they hit on line attacks, they aced serves that left the Chiba girls campfired. As in standing like idiots in a circle around the empty court space where the ball hid just hit. An insurmountable lead...but somewhere within, Belldandy and her teammates rallied to catch up. But the rally had wearied their concentration, and they lost the second match.

30-28, game win Osaka.

They were going to lose.

Losing the National Championship was disheartening enough, but it seemed like they were going to bear humiliation above and beyond their disappointment by getting _swept_. Osaka was loaded with too many seniors. They were playing tight and right; but then again, so was Chiba Poly.

"Look, you guys!" Coach Chihiro said, slapping her play book in drumbeat with every syllable. "That Osaka team is _beatable_! You guys actually won the first half of the first game, and the second half of the second game. Which means that you _can_ beat them. I don't want you to be thinking about all the folks back in Chiba, your parents, the Osaka team, the sports networks broadcasting this game...none of that distracting shit! I don't want you girls even trying to get inside of their game! Let me worry about that! I want you to keep your focus on winning this next game. I _know_ that if we win this next game, we'll break them! Osaka is used to winning, and the scoreboard is a liar! They didn't win shit in the first two games...we were just warming up. And they know it! They don't know they know it, but we have their number! Just don't go trying to figure it all out. Remember: in game one, you guys led 17-12. Just pour it on, and get one more point past 15! Get one point past 30!! If they lose in the next game, they'll lose their confidence. And we're just building ours.

"Now here's what we need to do. I want you guys to focus more on off-speed hits, do middle-back middle-up changeups every three service breaks so they don't know what's happening. We're gonna have to switch to multiple offense so we can play 'em by keeping 'em wary. None of this random play shit like a bunch of amateur beach volleyball players. Formation! Formation! Formation! Isolate #17 on cross-court attacks; I noticed she has a weakness in fielding power-alley shots. Morisato and Ootaki, dink the ball once in a while...kills are great, but they've got your number if you do it all the time. That's why they're isolating you on the front, Morisato. You've guys got #6 nervous, so I might pull you two for six-two rotations so they don't think we're just gonna key on their weak side attacker. Tamiya, I want you to change up...and keep your eyes on the antenna when you rotate to the outside hitter position so you can sneak some line shots on 'em. That's your specialty, precision hitting. Use it! Now go out there and take 'em!"

Belldandy felt her spirit soaring after Coach's pep-talk.

Kinosh'ta served, and Tamiya caught the return spike opposite court with a diving dig. As the ball arced high towards the ceiling, Ootaki spun and back-pedaled, got under it, and sent it her way. Belldandy slipped out of herself, kept her eye on the ball, and imagined splitting the ball in two with her fist. It was stupid, but it was the only thing that could flash through her mind as she uncocked her arm.

Her first spike of the third game was huge! She nailed the power-alley, blasting the ball towards the far corner so hard, it caught #17 flat-footed and rebounded up into the stands. The roar from the Chiba 'section' of the arena etched up a notch, obviously impressed with her mammoth kill. The Osaka fans were blipped with a split-second's hesitant hush; a momentary pause that was clearly telegraphed in her mind and her teammate's thoughts. After her teammates slapped her a quick round of high-slaps, she returned to the net. She checked herself, still blood-rushing her powerful spike...and fixed her eyes on the Osaka squad captain. If she was going to be daunting, she'd better act the part! To her surprise and satisfaction, the older Osaka girl seemed to have a flinch of uncertainty in her eyes.

30-27, game win Chiba.

Coach Chihiro tempered their surge of confidence with sharp critiques of their play, and then sent them back out for game four. It wasn't at all like her girl-kid daydreams of winning a championship. Game four came and slipped through their hands. But Osaka's rally came up short...and the Chiba girls, even though they didn't feel like they were going to win...scooped up the two most vital points in a game. Belldandy put an exclamation mark on the 35th point with an untouchable kill from the back row. It was totally lucky; she knew her back-row attacks were always iffy, and she was prone to step past the 3m line and foul. She could just as easily have spiraled it out of bounds as she did half the time she played that shot in practice. Instead, she had scorched the center of the court.

35-33, game win Chiba.

Shoulders heaving, she and her teammates circled around Coach Chihiro. The Olympian was busy sketching plays on the blank pages. She heard a series of sharp whistles...

Looking away from the play board, Belldandy saw a large homemade banner unfurling on the balcony, framed by a bunch of students wearing thick glasses:

_"This is it! 2008 National Women's Volleyball Champions! Chiba Polytech!"_

Much as she was heartened by the display, she ripped her attention back to Coach Chihiro. Coach Chihiro was rapid-talking...and Belldandy sensed from her enthusiasm that the Coach had discovered a weakness in Osaka's play-plan that she hadn't noticed in the first four games. Saying that "everything rides on this!" Coach Chihiro shuffled the rotation and sketched out several triangles on the playbook for multiple offense. Belldandy was worried...the Coach was talking so fast, she couldn't fully make out what Chihiro was plotting. She felt a little light-headed to begin with, and Coach Chihiro was talking in volleyball technobabble. She looked up at Tamiya and Ootaki with a searching expression, and observing with some relief that both seniors were nodding their heads along with Chihiro. Hopefully, they knew what the hell she was talking about and could 'translate' it to her on the court.

As the team walked back to the court, Belldandy glanced at the banner again...and the horde of geeky, ungainly students who were cheering maniacally underneath it.

"Let's give 'em something to get drunk about tonight!" Ootaki said, slapping her on the back of her head as she took her place on the front hitter's line. Instead of having she and Ootaki in opposite frames of the rotation, Coach Chihiro had put them side-to-side. Stacking the deck with the two tallest players on the team, it was Coach Chihiro's hope that Ootaki and her being in the same row would psych-out the Osaka squad. If Osaka took the bait, they would adjust by reaction, assuming that Chiba was overconfident in their strength by putting their two ace spikers in the same row in the rotation. But Belldandy was worried...Osaka's coach was the mentor, while Chihiro was merely a student. Osaka's coach had been _Chihiro's_ coach for four years! If she discerned the craft of Coach Chihiro's ploy, the Chiba team might be in for a long and disappointing fifth game.

Six points into the match, Belldandy realized what was going on.

It was a misdirection.

Ootaki had expertly set to Kinosh'ta near mid-net. Kinosh'ta was their power spiker, crafty as well as accurate. By playing to their strongest player, Chiba was sending a message to the Osaka team. Her two sempai played a sonata of tap-overs, small spikes, decoys and long-court shots. Chiba started to build a lead, founded on the confusion of the Osaka squad. They had expected her and Ootaki to power-play the front line with serious spike damage. But then, Osaka adjusted and started to rally.

Coach pulled her when Osaka was up by 2 points.

"Morisato, before you start pleading with me to let you back in, I'm going to let you in on a secret," the Coach said, griping her shoulder so tightly, it was almost painful. Belldandy was mortified to the marrow of her bones that she had been benched at such a crucial point in the game. If Chiba didn't break Osaka's rally, they'd lose!

"Remember when I told you way back when...that you're our main weapon?" the Coach said in a hushed voice, leaning tight against her. "I wasn't kidding. And that's why you're out of the game right now. I'm _playing_ 'em...by benching you, I'm playing Osaka's game. Or so they think. Actually, they're going to feel more confident now that you're on the bench. Just wait and watch...their seniors will take extra risks, and I'm betting that we can turn that into chaos. You noticed that Ootaki and Tamiya are in total rhythm? They didn't get to be seniors on my team by slacking. You may not have understood everything in the playbook, but they're down with it. They'll do even better with you out of the picture for a few. The whole team's playing 'em tight, and they'll erode Osaka's rally. My guess is those girls know exactly what I'm doing, but they'll poker face Osaka instead. And once we get to 25, we should be tied or one point behind. And that's when I'm putting you back in. Your assignment is simple: catch your breath cus' you need to _break_ their two ace spikers! If you can do that, we're gonna win this match in bitchin' style!"

Belldandy fought with herself, unused to watching game play. Coach's idea was simple...draw out the opponent's confidence, then match it, and then make them realize that their confidence was part of Chiba's game, not just theirs. At 26-25, Coach Chihiro slapped her on the ass and sent her back into the game. Belldandy was momentarily scared...the Coach had said 25, and here it was 26! Four points and Osaka would win.

But as expected, their service was returned deep into their court by Tamiya, and the Osaka squad set up their ace spiker, Kinosh'ta, who was right in front of her. Belldandy kept her eye on the ball, timed her jump, and then leoparded into the air.

...and roofed the Osaka spiker's ball right back into her face.

"That's it, Morisato!!" Coach Chihiro shouted through cupped hands. "Do it again!"

The second block was a gimme; the middle spiker clipped the ball with her fist and it flew right into Belldandy's outstretched arms. Belldandy stepped up to the service line, and sent her serve over the net. She wasn't the best server on the team, but now that Chiba was tied with Osaka at 27, she decided not to try and power the serve over or attempt a floater, a no-spin shot that was erratic and hard to read by the defenders.

The long volley was fielded expertly by both teams, but Ootaki finished it with a tap-over when her Osaka counterpart got out of position, too far away from the net.

It dawned on Belldandy...the Coach's strategy. Chihiro had waited until the _26th_ point before sending her back in the game for her sake. To make her extra desperate. Extra hungry. Extra determined. Not quite panicked, but as close to the emotional edge as she could go. Two points, and then she was rotated off the front line. It was enough to cause a hesitation in Osaka's game-play; those two points had cost them the lead. But those two points wouldn't be repeated, because Belldandy was no longer in the front row. Ootaki and Tamiya were in the fore court, ready for anything. Three more points and it would be 30-29, Chiba, with Ootaki serving. Belldandy would be back at the forecourt...on the Osaka girl's strong side. Their two ace hitters would wall her for sure.

It would come down to her.

Coach Chihiro wasn't pulling any shit when she said that she was their weapon! If she could just repeat her monster spike at the start of game three, they'd win. Coach was trusting that the team would pull Osaka by a single point...and then Belldandy would ice the match.

Dammit, it was too much for a freshman girl!

"Stop thinking like an asswipe!" she told herself, confronting her inconfidence. _She_ might suffer ails of self-conviction, but her Coach believed in her. Chihiro obviously believed with all her conviction and expertise that Belldandy would take the challenge. That had to amount to _something_! Belldandy felt the familiar nightmare that had crossed her mind in dozens of day-dreams...the game-winning smash against Long Beach State that had sailed way out-of-bounds and lost her team the exhibition. She squeezed her eyes tight shut for a second, trying to stifle it.

"Not...now!" she said to herself as she stepped up to the front line, looked up at the overhead scoreboard, and steeled herself. It had all lined up just as Coach Chihiro had planned it. They were up by a point, and she had the outside position in the front. She looked through the net at the Osaka players, and for the first time since she got on the court, she could see that they were _scared_. Ootaki's serve flew past her, deep into the Osaka ranks.

"Set!" the Osaka point shouted as she sailed the ball towards her. Belldandy jumped a split-second too early, and the Osaka ace spiker chopped the ball across the net, trying to cross-court her cut shot. She could hear Coach Chihiro shouting "Adjust! Adjust!" as Ootaki dived for it, and then set it towards Tamiya. Tamiya arced the ball low, and Belldandy smashed it...but Osaka dug it out. Dammit! She had hit the ball perfectly, and Osaka had tenaciously thwarted the kill. How many times was this going to happen? Two more volleys and the ball was still in play. Tamiya set the ball away from her for a mid-row spike, and the Chiba shot was blocked...and blooped out-of-bounds on their side of the net. It was too far out-court!! Belldandy scampered at the speed of reflex in a desperate attempt to get a hand under it. She wasn't going to make it. She stretched out and dived, both fists clenched underneath where she thought the ball would land. "Pancake! Pancake it!" she heard Coach Chihiro yelling. She reached her hand out, palm on the floor like she'd been taught and extended her arm as far as she could. The ball hit the meat of the back of her hand and somehow sailed backwards over her head in a slow loop, safely in-bounds. But now, Chiba had a hole in the front line, since she was so far out-of-position.

"Cover it!" Chihiro screamed as Belldandy was gaining her footing.

As expected, they exploited it. But Ootaki closed the hole in their ranks right when the Osaka strong attacker blasted it. Ootaki tamed it, finessing the ball to arc high in the air to the back of Osaka's court with her bump shot. In their Chiba Poly gym, it would have hit the roof. But here, Ootaki had just bought her another half second to get in position.

Belldandy leapt to her feet and dashed back into position, just as Coach Chihiro screamed "Roof it, Morisato!" She didn't have time to focus on the ball, the Osaka player on the other side of the net, or whether she was in position. All she could do was line herself up with the other team's ace and jump as high as she could.

The Osaka girl hammered the ball.

...against her wrists.

The force of the impact against her off-balanced jump spun Belldandy around away from facing the net...and she saw Coach Chihiro throwing her play-book high in the air, an ecstatic expression on her face.

"YEEEEEEEEEAH!!"

She heard her whole team explode in a single exclaim. For a brief touch of time, she was stunned beyond recognizing what had just happened...and then her senses and feelings returned to her. The ball was bouncing lazily on the other side of the net. Just like that, they had won.

And now it was Swarm time.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Belldandy didn't like to cry, especially around others. Especially in public. And very especially on cable TV. NHK, Fuji, TV Tokyo...they were all there, microphones and flash cameras...

But when the tournament officials brought out the 2008 Women's National Championship trophy, the tears forced themselves out of her eyes and trickled down her cheeks. Their name wasn't on it yet, but it was _theirs_! Chiba Poly's gym would have a pennant on the rafters, announcing to all that their team had won a championship. A Polytechnic school preparing engineering geeks to pro at building robots, designing engines, and improving industrial networks...and they had stormed the title. This trophy would have a place of honor in the old beat-up gym building that she and her teammates had practiced, scrimmaged, and played in over the last year. A gym anointed with their sweat.

Winning felt so hollow, she wanted to scream through her tears.

The team was a sorority, to be certain...but in many ways, they were even closer than sisters under the eyes of each other and their parents. Belldandy saw her mother and father along with the other Chiba parents, lining the first couple rows of the risers nearest to the presentation, beaming with pride and ear-to-ear grins. Both of them wearing Chiba Poly t-shirts. She couldn't hear a word of the short speech by the athletic official; her shoulders were still heaving with exertion and excitement. 10 minutes ago, she had blocked Osaka's ace spiker in the final volley of the match...

She still couldn't believe it.

"Shit, I didn't want to do this!" she said to her tears. Even with the disappointment of their loss, Osaka's caption and ace attacker Kinosh'ta had nodded to her with silent respect. Not grudging respect, but an honest acknowledgment of what she and her team had done. Kinosh'ta would go on, as it was rumored that she was already picked for a slot in the Olympic team. That girl was a true sportswoman; even though Belldandy's team had won, she felt like she had been honorably defeated by that one nod from the tourney's MVP. Because now she knew that she had something more to shoot for, and that girl had it.

Composure.

As the official presented the trophy to Coach Chihiro, she looked on in amazement as her normally-stern Coach started rubbing at her eyes. Her coach, Asakura, was watching from the corner of the court with several of her players, no doubt telling them how proud she was of her former player.

"Quit crying, Coach!" Tamiya shouted prankishly.

"I'm not crying! I..it just came out..." Chihiro snapped back in a wavering voice, as she held the championship trophy in front of her. It was almost as tall as she was. The assembled Chiba Poly gang broke into a raucous series of screaming cheers as Coach Chihiro carefully lofted the trophy over her head. Belldandy noticed that Osaka's coach was nodding her head approvingly as her pupil accepted the championship trophy. Sometimes, even in victory, there is a bitter sweetness and chivalrous pride.

And just then, some guy from NHK sports news shoved a microphone in her face, ruining the moment for a moment...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

She hadn't counted on the news people and the bruhaha that accompanied their victory. It was almost an hour after the match when Coach Chihiro asked them to gather in the middle of the guest locker room. Her longish face seemed even more flashed with urgency than usual; there seemed to be a battle going on inside of Chihiro's heart as she looked at each of them in the eye. What could possible defray the exuberant joy of winning a long-sought championship? Or the pride she obviously harbored for her team? What could be troubling their iron-willed Coach?

"I have to ask you guys something...to..to help me make a decision," she started out.

Dead concrete walls.

"As you all know, Coach Fujiwara didn't attend the tourney. But what you don't know is that he's resigned as coach of the Olympic team, because his wife is seriously ill with a sudden kidney failure. It seems that his kidneys are compatible, so he's going to donate one of his kidneys to her as soon as it can be arranged. In the face of all this, he's decided that he cannot serve the Olympic team as coach. I know what a difficult decision it must have been, but Coach Fujiwara has decided to place his personal life ahead of his coaching obligations to the Olympic team. I fully agree with his decision...and I want nothing of this to leave this room. The announcement will come to the press in a few days, once the new coach has been selected. So keep it mum until then...or else!"

Belldandy savored this shocking news for a moment, weighing the relevance. Why would Coach Chihiro tell them about this _now_, instead of in the hotel or on the bus home? They had already gone through the celebratory speeches, toasts, roasts and exuberant goofing-off that accompanied a championship victory. But now that everyone was showered and slightly less amped, Coach had called them together for another round of discussion.

"As you know, the Olympics are only a few months away. We need a coach for Japan's team _now_, not two weeks down the road..."

"No..way!" she heard Ootaki say in a gasping voice, her mouth agape.

"Yes way," Coach Chihiro snapped back crisply. "They've asked me to be the coach of the 2008 team."

_"Cool!" "Alright!" "You can do it!" "Success is ours!" "What are you going to do?" "What about us?" "When do you start?"_

Coach Chihiro waved down everybody's excitement. Belldandy felt a lump in her throat as she realized that the Coach was involving them in a very serious and important decision. Could it be that Coach Chihiro hadn't given them an answer yet?

"I told them that I will accept the coaching position, if my team approves. You guys come first, you will always come first...which is why I'm asking _you_ to decide. If you say 'yes', I'll take your faith, accept the position, and try to teach some girls how to wear some medals. And if you say 'no', I'll decline the position...and make each of you returning squad members run laps all summer long," she said, joking at the end.

"There's no need ta discuss this!" Tamiya blurted out, combing her short hair with her fingers. "They already know that the Coach is da right woman for the job, dats why they picked her! I says that we let her live her dream and go back to da Olympics!"

All the team members applauded this.

"Not so fast, Tamiya!" Coach Chihiro interrupted. "I told them that I would take the position, but only under the condition that I get to pick the last four open slots on the starting team."

"Cool!" several voices shouted.

"So far as I know, they agreed," Coach Chihiro emphasized. "But there's gonna be some shit mixed in with pearls. You see, I've already picked my four girls for the Olympic squad. And three of them are in this very room!"

Belldandy felt her heart start hammering in her ears.

"This is a championship team, and we're all champions in this room. But you know, and I know...that there are three girls who have shouldered just a little bit more of the burden. They've proven themselves this season because of that. And they're the girls I want on my Olympic team," Chihiro said with a fixed expression of determination.

"Oh my fucking God!" Belldandy blurted out as the whole of Miashima Arena seemed to crash down on her.

"You had better start praying to God instead of cursing him, Morisato...because you're one of them," the Coach announced in a level voice. Belldandy could already felt the encouraging slaps on the back and shoulders by her teammates; they had already given her the okay.

"Tamiya, Ootaki, Morisato. Here's the deal. I'll do this, but _only_ if I can have the three of you this summer for the Olympic team. And Kinosh'ta as well, because that girl's gonna have my job one of these years. She's a true leader, and she didn't get picked MVP just for her playing."

"That's freakin' spastic, Coach!" Ootaki shouted. "Why do you need us?"

"Because the three of you are good enough...and I've been _coaching_ you, you fluff-haired dimwit! How can you be so sharp with your tongue and so dull in your head, sometimes, Ootaki!" Chihiro countered, bringing on some muffled giggles. "Why would I want to take on a team of total strangers? I'd be screwed from the start if I did that! But if you three go, then I'll at least have a toe-hold on the team. I already know you three inside out, so I won't have to start from scratch. And the other girls will follow. I'm gonna pick the Osaka captain; her coach…my former coach…will give her the lowdown on me and she'll do just fine. But if I can't have the three of you, I ain't gonna do it. I don't have time to fuck around...and neither does the Japan Olympic Committee."

"Well...I gotta ask my folks," Belldandy said in a wavering voice, "but if they say okay, then I'll go for it. I've never been to China."

"Just what yuh'd expect from Morisato! She's not even old enough to drink legally yet, and she's goin' to the Olympics," Tamiya-sempai teased.

The rest of the team stared at her hard, before breaking into excited laughter.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

She could hear the tell-tale 'hurdling' sound of the engines as the Nozomi shot down the tracks, the countryside painted to a blur that was only anchored by the mountain chain prominencing in the background. Belldandy had never been in the 'green car' section of a Shinkansen train before; the classy 'first-class' car was filled with executive types who were more than a little voyeuristic towards the group of attractive college girls. Every time she stood up in the aisle to stretch her legs...being that she was at least 40cm taller than the kinds of travelers the seats had been designed for...she could hear the rattling of newspapers as invisible male eyes peered from above them, no doubt checking her out. In a way, it was an absolute treat that they were riding the Shinkansen back to Tokyo and Chiba. Especially in a 'green car', with all the amenities and perks that were usually reserved for the elite business commuters. Someone in the Chiba Poly alumni club...a club that Belldandy didn't even know existed, had forked out some serious cash so they could take the bullet train back home. Of course, Belldandy and her teammates took advantage of this boon, spending the extra day shopping in Osaka, doing the tourist bit in Second City. Belldandy even got to ride the Giant Wheel at the Tempozan...

...And it was there, while the huge 100-meter diameter wheel slowly lofted her over the harbor and the night-time cityscape, that she felt the emptiness again. She revisited the memory, only because the uncertainty of her unsettled heart seemed to beckon her to seek it out.

"What the fuck is up with me?" she had said to herself, clearly upset and edgily depressed. "We just won a _national championship_, and I've got a chance to be on the Olympic team! The freakin' _Olympics_! As a player! This is like...all my dreams coming true all at once! I should be jumping around like a junior high! But instead, I'm feeling all messed up. It's so messed up that I feel this way! Why do I feel so _sad_, all of a sudden?"

She remembered how she had looked across the ferris wheel car at Ootaki and Tamiya, who were excitedly pointing out different landmarks such as Osaka Castle, Expoland, Festivalgate, and the downtown district. She looked past Ootaki's shoulder to follow her pointing finger...and realized with a start that she couldn't even look over her sempai's shoulder just a few months ago.

Keiichi.

Keiichi had 'grown' her into the tallest girl on campus...which allowed her to hone her volleyball skills in ways and means she could have never imagined. Instead of being a backcourt skill setter, she was an ace attacker for the team. Not just any team; the best college team in Japan! Keiichi had made it possible for her.

No, he hadn't.

Yes, he had.

NO, HE HADN'T!!

Her mind tumbled over the arguments and considerations. If Keiichi's manipulation of her stature hadn't occurred, would she be in this position now? Why was he still staying at the temple with her? Would she have won the game in her 'old' self? He had said "how do you know you aren't the best volleyball player in Japan already?" all those months ago. Was it even right for him to do what he did to make her taller? Why did he pick _her_, out of the 6.5 billion people on the planet? What was so special about her? Or had she picked _him_? As some Buddhists hold to the notion that each person chooses their own karma...could she have somehow drawn him into her life, like a resurrected soul choosing their karmic pathway?

Karma...now that's a laugh.

Was it her karma to have to deal with Keiichi on a daily basic? If so, than her karma definitely sucked. It was bad enough that life was so unfair...but now she had to deal with a guy who wasn't anything approaching a normal boy or man. Keiichi was a delicate balance of idiot and delicious boy-toy quality hunk, with some extra but irritating traits thrown in the mix, such as omniscience and semi-omnipotence. But he could do some of the stupidest moves, like pulling her toothbrush out of the toilet. And that confrontation with the hoodlums a couple months back...was that the actions of a man protecting a woman's dignity, or was Keiichi simply preserving his mealticket. That whole horrible episode with Ajax...was that even necessary? He had turned back time to give her another chance to get it right; but he also left her with all the sickening memories of that nightmare. Was she nothing more than his ticket back to Windowsill? Was he just trying to prevent his wish-candidate from being injured? His behavior was so unpredictable, Belldandy sometimes even doubted that his motivations were purely to 'protect' her ability to release him with a wish. What if there was another excuse for his actions?

Irritated, she clenched her fists in her lap as she pondered why Keiichi didn't even make the effort to come to Osaka and watch her play. Did he even have to be in the same place to see her tournament games? At any given moment, he could be sitting on the surface of Sol, blowing dandelion ornaments into the solar flares, for all she knew. If he could split into a horde of those "mini-little Keiichi's", as she had seen several times before, why couldn't he be in two places at once? He could have been home in Chiba, and in Osaka cheering her on. With mounting anger, Belldandy could only conclude that her volleyball tournament fell below the standards that would hold Keiichi's interest. But it would have _meant_ something to her if he had come in person. Instead, he had skipped the tournament altogether.

Stupid jerk! Idiot! Dolt! Moron!

One of her high-school friends had once said, "If someone thinks about another person, and is willing to change her whole life around because of how she hears him in her mind...then it's obvious that she likes him." Keiichi had certainly changed her whole life around. And yet, could she account herself as a willing participant to those changes?

Belldandy couldn't understand why she felt such a lacking sentiment in the midst of a deeply rewarding period in her life. She was on top of the world...and yet, the world was on top of her. As she looked out over nightscape Osaka, the pinions and streaks of night lights wouldn't answer her, of course. But she _needed_ answers! Eventually, she'd have to deal with her feelings about Keiichi. A guy just doesn't hang around a girl, or live with her for months at a time...and not expect _some_ emotional turbulence to arise between them. But Keiichi didn't seem to like her; and yet, he had played a hand in making her fondest dreams come true. How much did he really know about her? She often fretted that he was lurking inside of her mind, like some kind of super-powerful clairvoyant mind-reader. But Keiichi had repeatedly assured her that he wasn't poking around in the glade of her thoughts. And she _had_ to believe him, because the other possibility was too whacked, too crazy to even go with.

What if he loved her?

What if she loved him?

In the world of "what if's", could love even arise between a mortal girl and a God? What then? If Keiichi had feelings for her, what would happen if she rejected him? Why didn't he already have a Goddess girlfriend? He was good-looking enough. Despite all the fault lines on the surface of his character, it was obvious that underneath it all, the mantle and core powering his actions was furnaced by a pure heart and child-like naivety.

"I'm sick of questions! I want answers!" Belldandy said to herself, drawing astonished glances from Tamiya and Ootaki on the other side of their ferris wheel car. Their car was almost at the top of the 100-meter tall wheel; she felt a little height-sickened for a moment, but then the unease passed. The Giant Wheel wouldn't break out of its axle mooring and roll into Osaka Harbor...not while Keiichi was still on Thera...

...as the oceanside landscape rolled by like a Hokusai painting, Belldandy realized that there must be something, something unfinished between them, that was holding him back from digging out and returning to Windowsill.

It was time to stop screwing around and find out!

Belldandy made up her mind that she would have 'the talk' with Keiichi when she returned tonight. No more monkey-boying around with the truth! It just wasn't going to work out if she kept her feelings in the closet of her heart...feelings that she didn't even know about, or couldn't guess what they were.

The landscape blurred by, telephone poles that were extended into blobs of fuzz as they shimmered near the window of the train.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Athenle was back. This time, she was garbed more conservatively, in some semblance of the standard issue Valkyrie outfit. A tight red-and-black skin-latex Valkyrie bodysuit conformed to her body; her narrow waist was belted by a wide belt for hand weapons; an axe was shoulder-strapped to her back, the thin drawstring crossing between her breasts; her red hair flared out from under a gold diadem head-piece; a long over-robe of gold and white fluttered behind her. Her mid-calf boots made heavy sounds on the temple's wooden floor. To Keiichi's eye, if her physical manifest was any indication of her mood...she looked like she was ready to pick a fight.

During the past several days, hundreds of other Goddesses who had visited him had done just that, forging credentials and 'assignments' to justify their presence on the Therarealm. Keiichi was polite enough not to report them, for their sake. After all, they _were_ suitors of a sort...getting them in trouble would quickly give him a bad rep amongst the Goddesses in Yggdrasil. Or would it? Could he act out in all sorts of recalcitrant ways and still not have his misbehaviors infringe upon Belldandy's "love wish"? In any case, he didn't want to risk it. This whole "love-love" scenario was too far unknown, too uncertain, for him to play around with. But he wondered if Athenle had stooped to the same types of chicanery and deceit. In the wake of the steady stream of Goddess visitors who had been 'dropping in' to the temple during Belldandy's absence, he was beginning to feel fear. Not the fear of affright; rather, the fear that all his inadequacies might be exploited. The broad relief of Goddesses who had visited him only served to demonstrate how crafty Goddesses could be, if they really felt like it. Athenle was right at the top of them in terms of beauty and intelligence...but being a Valkyrie, she would excel most Goddesses in the arts of feminine wiles. Not to mention axe-wielding and other forms of fighting.

"Uh...you're not on duty, are you?" Keiichi asked, wanting to be certain that she wasn't on the Therarealm because of some invented 'duty' assignment.

"No, you atlas-brained fool!" she answered him, resting her hands on her hips. "I'm on break from training some wannabe Valkyrie apprentice Goddesses. So I took the initiative to steal away and come here, just so I could see how my dream-boat is doing."

"Dream boat? Isn't someone else in charge of dreams? We don't normally deal with _those_ kinds of dreams in the God Wish Escort Office," Keiichi replied, uncertain of her meaning. He had nothing to do with the jurisdiction of dreams, although he could penetrate them if needed to help with a wish-granting assignment. But so far, he hadn't found the need to do so with Belldandy. Why was she talking dreams all of a sudden? Athenle looked at him, her face clearly poignant with a "you _are_ a dullard!" expression of frustration.

"You're thinking about that mortal girl again, aren't you?" Athenle said slyly, walking up to him with a suggestive sway of her hips. "I bet...that you _like_ her!"

"As a matter of fact, I do," Keiichi answered, just to tame her flippant remark. He quickly regretted his answer. Athenle's face turned hot-red for a moment, and Keiichi sensed the brief appearance of a fire-aura behind her. Then she regained her smile and looked at him with amber-lined blue eyes.

"Wah...but you really had me going for a moment," she explained, knowing that he had seen her flash of fury. "That's quite unusual, even for a God. I don't suffer defeat kindly, even if it's in these kinds of childish games. Speaking of children, it would be folly to imagine a God falling in love with a Therarealm mortal! Mortal women here are nothing less than little girls! You would never be satisfied with the likes of her. Thus, it's obvious that you like this 'Belldandy' simply because she's your wish assignment. Nothing more. Besides, I do recall that her wish specifically said 'Goddess'. She wished for you to fall in love with a _Goddess_. Last time I looked, there's only you and me on the planet...everyone else is mortal. So I was all worked up over nothing. But I must hand it to you, your answer was pretty clever. Getting past my barriers and making me believe your lie, if even for a split-second...certainly makes you _interesting_!"

Keiichi let a brief glance of disappointment slip through his eyes.

"I know what I'm going to do!" Athenle said, as she phased out of the main room of the temple.

Keiichi was troubled by two perspectives. Her intemperate reaction to his testing comment was more than he expected. If she was disinterested, Athenle would have probably joked around with him about Belldandy. Instead, she got quite angry and defensive, if only for a moment. But what a moment! Was that anger a slice out of the melon of jealousy? If she was already forward enough in her feelings to be jealous over him, then that was bad news. The other troubling advance on his suppositions was the look in Athenle's eyes right as she phased out of the living room. Her eyes had clearly said "storm".

Clasping his hands behind his back, Keiichi extended his senses to seek out a particular heartbeat that pulsed between the threaded racketing of a particular shinkansen train en route to Tokyo.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"I'm home!" Belldandy shouted. All the snow that was on the ground when she left their temple home in Chiba for the Nationals was melted away, and the late-afternoon sky was filled with thunderheads on the horizon. Global warming was definitely impacting the transitions between the seasons; and a scientist on NHK had recently warned that the current trend in climate pointed towards a 2050 where 70 of the surface of Thera would be cooked by 35 degree Celsius temperature during the summer seasons.

She wouldn't have cared about such things, were it not for one stupid God who was living in this temple with her.

"H..hey, that's a good boy!" Naturally, Furo was the first to greet her. Belldandy prepared herself to be knocked down on the ground by her overly enthusiastic adolescent Bengal Tiger. True to his species, Furo bulled her down, pinned her shoulders to the ground, and started licking her face in greeting.

With Furo heeling aside her, she walked into the foyer of the temple, clearly expecting Keiichi to be polishing the gold-gilt bronze Buddha images. For a God, he spent a lot of time doting on the religious imagery in the temple. When he didn't answer her, Belldandy dropped her travel bags, and then turned down the hall and went into the kitchen, so she could drink a can of chilled tea.

She paused before she got to the refrigerator...and then forgot to breathe.

In the middle of the counter was a large square cake, frosted with a rich medley of sparkles and white frosting. In the middle of the cake, spelled out in diamond-shaped strawberries, was a single phrase:

_Marry Me!_

Belldandy regarded the sugar-based intruder with wary eyes. Then shocked eyes. Then angry eyes. Then tearful eyes.

"Of all the freakin' stunts he could pull, he has to do _this_!" she said to herself under her breath. "Why can't he do anything _right_, just for once!"

She had committed herself to prying answers out of Keiichi when she returned home, and then he had trumped her with this. This wasn't just an answer to how he felt about her...it was a blunt statement. A marriage proposal was the last thing she could ever expect from the once-loveless God. Belldandy acknowledged the cake with a nod, thinking wryly, "well, he didn't waste any time, did he?"

But what in the hell was she going to do with this? The likelihood of Keiichi proposing to her on bended knee was utterly impossible. But yet, the cake had strawberries...her favorite fruit. It was left in the kitchen, conspicuously, so that she would stumble upon it alone. The timing could be considered to be provident, as she was riding a high from her championship dream-season.

Was he being serious?

But how serious could a guy be if his idea of a marriage proposal was writing a note on a _cake_? Belldandy clenched her hands in front of her breast and regarded the cake. This wasn't a game, this was a direct statement aimed at her heart, as true as the proverbial Cupid's arrow. Memories of Keiichi whirred around in her mind...and for a brief instant, she could hear her heart crying "yes!"

Yes?

"No way!" Belldandy answered her heart. "He didn't even give me any warning! This is so like him! I swear, he doesn't have a romantic bone in his body! It figures; now that he has the ability to love, I bet he wants to practice with me by doing stupid stuff like this! That's what this is all about! He's worse than a junior high-schooler..."

A voice interrupted her thoughts. It was so sudden, Belldandy thought she was hearing things, until it repeated itself.

"Oh, you must be the mortal woman," the voice said. "You're Keiichi's wish assignee, aren't you? Well don't worry, I'm going to take him off of your hands really soon. By the way, what do you think of my cake? You're a Therarealm woman, surely you've baked a number of these desserts. Is there enough frosting on it?"

Belldandy had to punch herself in the heart...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --


	123. Pt 123: The Day the Night Went Out

**Part 123: The Day the Night Went Out**

VANAGDRASIL, HILD'S DARK PALACE:

The object Sygyn had brought forth was all aglow with a sky-blue radiance, a blot of light that was completely askew to the predominantly dark-blood and night-pitch hues of the Hild's Black Palace. To my eyes, it appeared to be a sentinel; a silent voyager cradled within the Dark Lord's hands. Intrigued, I regarded the Dark Lord...a being whose body surface seemed totally devoid of light, reflection or diffraction. Increasing the magnification factor in my cybernetic eyes, I zoomed in on the object, only to discover that it was as recursive in archidesign as any chaos abstraction. There seemed to be no formal logic or language of form. No representation at all in the artifact. Crystalline shapes seemed to fold in upon themselves with fuzzy math irregularity, ever repeating, ever restoring the shape of the object. Yet, the mirroring infinitudes within the shape of the object didn't conform to any particular planer or cubicular pattern: it was an amorphism rendered into randomness, and then subscribed into a pulsating form.

Only Skuld could devise something so beautiful.

Even the Dark Lord appeared to be off-guarded by the object folded within in His hand. Resting two slender fingers on His chin, He examined it with utmost scrutiny, His gray fingernails stroking the object, trying to discern its function. Hild's identification of the object as Yggdrasilian in origin was suitably correct, and quite unusual, since she was a Demon Queen. How would she know about Ygg technology, except by leave of the possibility that she had been to Yggdrasil herself? All the familiar 'rules' that I was used to...the frameworks that I expected to reliantly guide the relationship between Gods and Demons...seemed to have been tossed out like last week's fishbones. Since when did Demon Queens know so much about the Gods?

Her ID of the object did little to explain its purpose. Why did Sygyn bring it here in the first place? During the time I was with her in Hild's Library, I had never noticed that the young teenaged Demoness had a piece of Skuldtech tucked away in her skirt. Apparently, no one had noticed.

Something was vexingly peculiar about the object. It seemed to cause the immediate vicinity around it to 'flicker'. The phenomenon seemed to have some semblance to the brief staccato flashing of lights right before a power outage in the city. The Dark Lord's hand wasn't affected, of course, but everything within a two-meter radius of the object was slightly distorted, like heat waves rippling over hot desert rocks.

"That looks pretty dangerous!" the young Demon boy in the lava springs observed, his voice more animated with excitement than bitten with wary. He was another reminder that this 'reality' was far removed from what I was familiar with.

This definitely wasn't in the manga…

Mara had two children!! Seeing she and Sygyn together confirmed my intuitive prow from earlier; Sygyn looked just like a young version of her mother with her mischievous eyes and elfishly pointed chin. Falcyn also resembled his mom...but his face had some other essence of features that I just couldn't put a finger on. He looked like Mara, yet he resembled someone else I knew. The two Goddess kids, who appeared to be no older than sixth-graders to my eyes, were supposedly Skuld's kids. When I was first brought to Japan, the Skuld I had met looked only a year or so older than these two girls, before she had been aged to her middle teens. "Aged to perfection," as she and Urd put it whenever they were in a playful mood and had spied Tomohisa staring at her with ooggle-eyes.

According to the manga, Hild was Urd's Mother. A little less clear was the reason _why_ Urd resented her so much. Did Hild abandon her as a young girl? Or did Urd's hybriding of Goddess and Demoness heritage cause a rift between mother and daughter? Or was it something more.

Hild, in this reality, was barren. Childless. And even if she had a child, it would take another 270,000 years before that infant would grow up into the Urd that I knew. The mortal world renews itself every hundred years, because no one lives through a second hundred years. I lived for 80,000 years on Planet Lost; which was only a portion of Urd's lifespan. The universe would be a decidedly different place that far into the future. I studied Hild's face a little closer, trying to contrive it against my memories of Urd's expression. The Demon Queen's chin was more rounded that Urd's, her mouth slightly smaller...this combination of features gave Hild a capricious, sensuous visage. Her eyes were dead-on Urd's, except that they seemed slightly narrower because her face was more oval than Urd's. Perhaps this roundness was due in course to Hild's fantastic heaps of silver hair framing her head with curvatures, rather than the angularity of Urd's 'waterfall straight' hair, which made Urd's face seem long and saturnine. Hild lacked the high cheekbones of Urd; in the dour light of the Black Palace, her face seemed almost Selene...a moon amongst the stars of her abode.

And she didn't know that she had a daughter.

Somewhere, anywhere, I imagined how Urd was probably watching all of this within the sphere of a gypsy's globe, giggling at the irony and comedy of the situation. And if I were to crawl into Urd's mind, I would probably encounter mirth at the idea that Skuld and Mara both had children...and that the four kids were so rowdy.

Four little combustible consciousnesses.

In contrast, the other two God-kids seemed subdued, even a little bit grave in manner. They were older than Pryzm and Ulfryn, and just a little older than Falcyn and Sygyn. Yet, in their eyes, I could discern a weariness that was mirrored by my own bleary eyes, back when I was a hopeless dope-fiend living on the streets. Their eyes were weathered with hard-sought questions that remained unanswered. I didn't have a clue where the two older God children came from, or who their parents were. Soon enough, I imagined that I would find out.

Vanagdrasil was tearing at my mind, like a psalm screamed backwards.

I didn't belong here; and if I remained here much longer, I would suffer a shutdown. My sense of da-sein...of Beingness...was being threatened with every atom of this place. I couldn't begin to speculate how the four God-kids were enduring the environment, especially considering the truth that their sensitivities were far beyond my best faculties of awareness.

...awareness? A ware? Waremasu? Wareru..."to split, to shatter, to crack apart"?

Crackled pyramids of intellect splayed upon a pillowing threat of clouds, under the red-fried sky that moaned of discontent and dismay, overhead.

It never left...

"My metallect never left..." my mind observed, as a surge of Mind seemed to swarm through me. Ever since Urd had dragged me to Japan, there was a newness inside of me...an ineffable something that reached deeper than myself, a cognitive capacity that quite transcended my inherent faculties of intellect. I had maxed the WAIS when I was seven, which in an 18-year-old would indicate an IQ of 155. I was 11 years younger than that, and the docs retested me, because they suspected that there was some kind of mistake. But how many kids would answer "Latinium" when asked "what is the capital of Italy?" And then go on to explain that "Rome" was misnomer for the city that had served as hub of the Italian Peninsula for almost 2500 years. I was a 'fact machine' with no sense of maturity growing up as a kid. No wonder drugs were so attractive to me. The whole emo thing about it was that my intelligence never really felt like it was _mine_; it was always a 'thing', an ability, a survival skill.

But the metallect was a capricious creature; like a swan, it would alight whenever _it_ wanted to. I couldn't consistently 'demand' it into action, no matter how desperate I was or how urgent the circumstances. Yet, I could always sense when it was dawning upon me. A sudden sharpening of acuity when I considered Life was usually the first warning signs that it was going to take my will for a ride.

Right now, I felt like I was riding a missile with a broken guidance system.

There was something very familiar about the context of the object that Sygyn had smuggled into Vanagdrasil. Mara had attributed it to Skuld...and I had no reason to doubt her. The beauty of the design seemed to evoke a sense of 'Skuldness'.

It is certainly easy enough to bend physical structures to create curved lines and straight curves. To create what appeared to be visual illusions...fakeries that created reality whence none was there. But when one pierces through the illusion by wit of their senses, within the 'illusion' itself was another determined reality. A reality that couched another illusion...and on and on: infinite abstractions of "not-Trues" contained within Truth. Simple complexities that fragmented a wholeness without disturbing its singularity. The powder blue-glowing object was pulsing, slowly shifting from one physical design into another. One second, it resembled a 30cm long shard of ceruleaite; the next second, it was a slender moebius curvature with streaks of dark-cobalt sparkling within its translucence.

The indigo glow-form object definitely didn't exist within Time or Space. Creating materiality in the form of an object that can exist outside of TimeSpace or SpaceTime wasn't too far a dip into Skuld's bag of engineering tricks. But the amazing facet of all this was _how_ this object existed outside of TimeSpace. It was warping _each_ of the Nine Dimensions; in fact, it was warping everything around it. Warping all of it...except Life. The visual signatures of the effect reminded me of hot air wavering around a heat duct in mid-January. I mentally revisited the moment Sygyn had produced it from her dress...it definitely didn't warp Sygyn's hand when she was holding it, or when she passed it over to the Dark Lord.

I had to touch it...

"May I...may I examine the object?" I asked, accenting my quiet-willed request with a gesture of obeisance towards the Dark Ruler of Vanagdrasil. He waited until I bowed a second time, and then raised a silvery eyebrow as He handed me the object. For a brief second, I glimpsed His obsidian eyes...and saw everything, including my own death. That was enough to set me upon debts of fright; but I braced up, grasped the object and then closed my eyes. The Earthrealm mortal within me didn't know what else to do, except to go with the flow. My metallectual awareness prismed down into the object, charting its benign and dangerous pathways, recombining the patterns into chaos, reprising the confusion into clarity.

"Shit!" I half-heard my voice whisper. I was deep into my observer-self now, almost completely out-of-cyborg-body as the object began to coalesce into Sense and Fact within the grasp of my hands. With a sharp shocking awareness, I discovered that the crystalline shape resting in my hands was utterly impossible. Totally, completely, _unreal_...a possibility that should never have been wrought into existence. The pulsing circlet-shard was a feat of vision that could never be created! I heard my throat gasping as the entirety of it puzzle-pieced into a mental picture. This was without a doubt one of the figurative Seven Wonders of the OmniArc!

"Cease with the displays of indulgent dramatics, cyborg!" the Dark Lord demanded. The grate of irritation in His voice jacked me back into myself, and I tore my attention upon Him. For a slightness of Time, His eyes widened. Had He discovered what I had learned? Or was it me? Was there something about me that caught Him off-guard? When one confronts an omniscient being, how does one account for the distinction between interpretation and intuition? Wouldn't all faculties of intellect be the same within an all-knowing Being? By His earlier reaction when Sygyn and I first came upon Mara, Hild, and all the kids...kids?...it was almost apparent that He was surprised by my presence. That He had somehow failed to sense my entrance onto His Realm. I felt stunned, sharply realizing the possibility that the Regent of Vanagdrasil might _not_ be aware of _everything_ within His Realm. He had missed the object...and He had not noticed me. Which somehow made me the obvious choice to discover the object's secrets.

"This object is an image of the _entire Yggdrasil Xeomnic_. In Earthrealm terms, it is somewhat similar to a 'hard drive image'...a snapshot of the contents of data on a physical drive of a computer at a given time," I began to explain in an even voice, trying not to dribble over myself with awe.

"But this is much more than simply an 'image' of the Ygg system. If Skuld truly created this object, what she has done is utterly incredible! This object contains _everything_ in the whole Ygg network! The Yggdrasil Mainframe, Xeomn, Network...whatever...is totally duplicated within this object. In effect, this is a 'cameo-clone' of the computer that runs the Ygg Logorinth."

"Holy..." I heard Pryzm gasp, but the Dark Lord interrupted her with a loud "shhht!". "Holy" was definitely the wrong word to use in Vanagdrasil, especially in this context. Yelling "Profane" might have fit the bill, but never "Holy".

"Mom!!" Ulfryn choked out in a proud, yet worried voice.

"Excuse me a minute, but aren't you a _cyborg_?" Hild observed in a questioning voice laced with sarcasm. "What could _you_ know about the Yggdrasil computer network? Not even one of _us_ could abstract the entirety of our Vanagdrasil Mnoex, or even begin to understand its systems. Not even my Dark Husband! We're talking _mega-immense_ here...and you're dallying along as if you know what the entire Ygg network looks like? That's the equivalent of looking at a pin and then saying it resembles a galaxy. In other words, how could I not think that you're completely full of shit!"

"Naturally, you don't know what the Ygg Xeomnic contains, because you're a Demoness," I noted. Mara quickly burst into snickers and then covered her mouth when Hild scowled at her. Regretfully, my response to Hild had been misconstrued as an insult, rather than a statement of fact. Hild was glaring at me, her face reddened with ire.

Her anger reminded me of another's strong-willed resentments, occasionally flashing within emerald eyes.

"I don't care! I think he's right!" Pryzm shouted, defending me like the whirlwind. "Our Mother _can_ create anything she wants, and if he says Mom made a copy of the Ygg Xeomn, then I believe him. Totally!"

"Sister..." Ulfryn commented in a cautioning voice. "I don't know about this. Do you remember how long it took us just to reach the Axial CorePlex of the Ygg Xeomn? And you actually think that she took all of that...and put it in this?"

She gestured towards the glowing artifact in my hand. Feeling embarrassed, I quickly returned it to the Dark Lord.

"This is totally lame!" Falcyn shouted. "We came here because of Ulfryn's blessed visions of the 'others'! Now, I find out that my sis has smuggled something that Aunt Skuld built into Vanagdrasil. And this half-human, half-robot claims that it's some kind of backup for the Yggdrasil computer? And what about this new God and Goddess? We're wasting time here!"

"No, we're not!" Ulfryn argued. "You see these two here? _They're_ the ones I've been seeing in my dreams! Just because you're not smart enough to have..."

"And what about you guys?" Keiyasu suddenly shouted. "To us,_ you_ don't exist! It totally burns me just to think that sis and I have cousins who are _Demons_. We spent millennia combing through the Ygg Mainframe System, and there's no mention of either of you Goddesses! Keleste and I were dreaming about you. Now you're _real_! Really here, with us!"

"You can suck on a big one, you idiot God brat!" Sygyn screamed, fists at her sides. "How dare you act all embarrassed because we're supposedly your cousins! _We're_ the ones who are getting screwed over here, because there's _four_ of you Gods, and only my brother and me..."

"SILENCE, JUVENILES!!" the Dark Lord shouted in a booming voice. Obviously, He wasn't about to let the kids fever-pitch into an argument about the artifact. He glared at each child in turn; each Divine kid recoiled slightly in sequence as His attention lighted on them, like candles being blown out on a birthday cake. The young Demon boy was the only one who didn't cower; instead, he lowered his head in supplication...but had a twinge of resentment sparkling in his red-orange eyes.

"All of this is merely hearsay," the Dark Lord noted. "A flight of fancy concocted by a mortal cybernetic being, and then favored by excited young minds. We, as Divines, cannot allow ourselves to be swayed by such a rapport."

"Then explain why You didn't notice the cyborg's presence," Mara asked. "With all due respect, My Liege of Darkness...both the object and this mortal intruded upon our sovereign Vanagdrasil without Your taking leave to identify them. Neither Hild or myself noticed that my daughter was carrying such a freakish thing. My sister Skuld, if You will recall, built the SHOJO object that not only mapped out the entire UmbraPlexiar system and jump-started it, but also mapped out all the transit Swarp Hypernalities. She was just out her teens when she did that. Now, many years later, it's entirely possible that she build this...thing...with an even greater capacity. Enough to 'clone' the Ygg Xeomnic network, perhaps. I wouldn't put it past her. But this still doesn't answer the question of _him_. None of us, Demons or Gods, were expecting a cyborganic artificial life-form to suddenly waltz out of the rinsing room onto the patio of Hild's molten lava springs. Which also brings up the question...how did you get here?"

It took me a couple seconds to recognize that she was asking me a question.

"I don't have an answer for that, except that I think I was asleep...and now I'm dreaming," I answered truthfully.

I had to quickly duck to the right to avoid being hit by Hild's thrown glob of lava.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

VANAGDRASIL, LOCATION UNKNOWN:

Pryzm winced, marveling at the unexpected shift in surroundings. Just like that, they all had been whisked from Hild's Black Palace to this unknown place by His Darkness. As she took in the incredibly complex environment, her Goddess intuitions warned her with siren clarity that this place was _dangerous_. Her best guess was that this was the heart of the Vanagdrasil Network of computers. It was only a guess, but this place was _mammoth_...and in many ways, its grandeur reminded her of the Axial CorePlex of the Ygg computer. Like everything else in Vanagdrasil, the color schema was different from that of Yggdrasil; here, there was a predominance of crimsons, oranges, shadow-dusk reds and abyss-dark blacks. The jarring, cacophonous 'static' that was ever-present in Vanagdrasil was much stronger here; Pryzm felt like it was trying to war with her senses. Laces of crow-black 'lightning' crackled through the air, as an ever-shifting geometry of damask and maroon-colored crystals floated overhead and underneath where she was floating. Pulses of orange streaked within the 'walls', 'floors', and 'ceilings' of the huge chamber, reminding Pryzm of volcanic eruptions and flowing blood. To her mind, the bristle of the huge chamber was like peeking in upon something secret, like a history lesson depicting the creation of a Multiverse.

"We are now present in the Heart of the Vanagdrasil Mainframe computer. This is a place called the Focal NavePlex, the innermost chamber of the Mnoexic Network," the Dark Lord announced, nodding towards her and the others. "It is essential that none of you attempt to interfere with the structured intelligences at work here. Doing so would cause unwanted complications...and incur My wrath."

Pryzm didn't doubt _that_ for a second. She noticed that her cousins seemed as equally riveted with awe as she and her sister were. Even more so perhaps, because this was _their_ Realm, rather than the Xeomnic Axial CorePlex. In the case of Keleste and Keiyasu, there was a chance that the two had traveled inwards to the center of the Ygg System in their search for their Mother. Pryzm still couldn't fully embrace the idea that there was _another_ part of Yggdrasil that she didn't know about. Being around Keleste and Keiyasu made her feel uneasy and afraid, like someone had stolen her reflection from a mirror. Wherever they came from, it seemed like a place that her classmates in school would probably call "an alternate universe". Pryzm wished with all her heart that she could find the two's Mother; a shuddering dread gripped her when she imagined what life would have been like for her if she didn't have Skuld for her Mom. Yet, their struggle seemed to have made them brave...after all, it was the two of them who had rescued her and Ulfryn from Hild's horrid scheme.

The place seemed to lance with energy.

"What to do, what to do..." Queen Hild said flippantly. "You don't actually believe what the robot..."

"Cyborg!" Cevn interrupted her.

"...man-machine claimed, do you, My Liege of Shadow?" she continued. "What he described is theoretically impossible, even for we Demons...let alone for the Gods. It's a very 'Blessed up' notion that someone could compress the contents of the Yggdrasil Network into something small enough to be held in one's hand. Or that someone could replicate the contents of the computer at all...assuming that their computer system is fundamentally the same as ours. The only way to 'back up' the Vanagdrasil Network would be to create _another_ Vang computer. I know that that there's TimeSpace to spare in Vanagdrasil to provide room for a project like that, if You wished for the creation of another Vang Network. But could it really be done? And what if it could? Doesn't that create a shitload of other potential problems, such as two computers for the Gods to hack instead of just one? And what about making sure that they are in synch with each other? There's a whole slew of..."

"_Idiot!_" Mara grumbled, slapping a hand against her forehead as she huffed out the word. Hild was a master at cunning deceit, arcanic magicks, sexual entrapment and plunder, and weaving malfeascences tight around other's Souls…but she was a total blitz of stupidity when it came to computers. As soon as the words floated out of her mouth, Mara quickly realized what she had said and instantly blanched. She had completely forgotten that she was in the Presence! She hoped that her Husband was in a forgiving mood.

"Maybe we can plug it into one of those crystal thingies floating around us. There's plenty of 'em. We could just pick one and use it," Falcyn offered. His Mom and the other two adults gave him scathering looks of disapproval, while his twin sister snickered behind her hand. Falcyn receded into himself with a scowl, clearly embarrassed but too proud to show it.

"And what gem of brilliance do _you_ have to reveal, My wife?" the Dark Lord hissed, flapping His overcloak with deliberate agitation. A swift motion of His arms as He turned in mid-air and then He was focusing His full attention towards Mara. "Mayhaps you could offer a thrifty solution that would give us leave of this insoluble dilemma? From the tone of your attitude, I'm given to a certitude that you're just _dying _to offer a cogent explanation about the fashioning and purpose of this object that would enlighten us all."

Gulping deeply, Mara started playing with the nearest curlylock of her hair that she could grab. Fidgeting, she flayed through her mind, feverishly trying to find a suggestion to offer that would appease Him. Or rescue herself. Her errant comment had eclipsed Hild's inept guesses; now _she_ was under the hot scrutiny of Oni-sama. She made a mental note to not criticize Hild in His Presence...at least for now.

"Blessit! Blessit! Blessit!" Mara stammered in a mantra-like whisper.

"Why not just go with your intuitions, Mara?" the cyborg offered. "That what you seek is inside of you."

Mara pulled a grimacing face, astonished that 'Robot-Man' actually had the audacity to offer advice to her. Stupid, insolent pseudo-mortal! Clearly, he was so dazed by the surroundings, he was suffering delusions. What a retarded idea...suggesting the answer is already known! She readied her hand to slap him, but then she haltingly checked herself by degrees. Maybe he was right. Nothing here was making any sense anyway. She looked at the object again; something stirred inside of her each time she sensed its presence. This whole 'mystery artifact' scenario had Skuld's handiwork juiced all over it. And if Skuld was the person who created the device, then why not...

"Why not have the one who created it come here and explain its purpose herself?" Mara offered. Her sister was going to kill her for this! She played out a scenario in her mind where Skuld was suddenly dispatched here, learned that it was her idea, and then pitched a fit like she used to do when she was teenaged Goddess. Or worse. Thankfully, none of the kids had ever seen her sister in total 'Brat Mode'.

Hopefully her sister would understand it if she explained that she had suggested this idea to save her own ass.

"Hmmm..." Oni-sama sighed, clearly surprised at the merit of Mara's idea. Mara felt a great dark massing onus lift off her shoulders. She relaxed herself, surprised at the devious simplicity of her suggestion. But what if Skuld _wasn't_ the one who had made it? Then she'd be in big-time trouble with her sister _and_ The Awesome Crafter of Darkness! Skuld wouldn't take too kindly to be summoned to Vanagdrasil on a chaise-carriage of impulsivity. And the Dark Lord would definitely not appreciate being caught up in a fool's errand.

She hushed her thoughts as He reached into his robes and withdrew a cell phone, punched 777 on it, and waited while it played an infernal sequence of ring tones.

"No way!!" Cevn spat out in a dismayed voice. "That's just too...no way. He didn't just do that!" The visual idea of Oni-sama using a cell phone was quite ludicrous to begin with...but then he recognized that the ring tones were a remix of the Demon's Music he had been composing. He was tweezered between astonishment at the ridiculous sight and paranoia that the Dark Lord had somehow taken the music from his mind and arranged the song on His cell phone. Even more shocking was the voice that answered.

_"Yes, My Brother."_

"It is I, My Brother," Oni-sama said on the phone.

_"Of course it is you. You are the only Being in the OmniArc who has My private cell phone number,"_ the voice answered.

Mara scratched her head, curious as to why the Dark Sovereign was using such primitive technology, even if it was in the form of an iconic representation.

"We have a situation here," the Dark Lord began, "with an object whose design and energies clearly indicate that it is of Yggdrasilian origin."

_"Really? What a curious state of affairs that must be."_

"It is important to note that the artifact was presented to Me by the Demoness daughter of one of My Wives, whose name is Mara."

_"Ah, is she the one with the curlylocks?"_

"To which one do You refer to, the wife or the daughter? If you mean My wife, the same is she. The daughter appears innocent, but there is a formidable host of Demonic wiles concealed in her eyes for one so young," the Dark Lord answered. Mara glanced over at Sygyn with a proudly expressed motherly bearing. Her daughter's face was beaming with a broad smile of gratitude in reaction to His generous compliment.

"My Brother, this situation demands the presence of one of your Goddesses. According to Mara, this artifact may have been manufactured by Skuld, who is renowned as one of Your most proficient engineers of trans-SpaceTime curiosities."

_"Skuld?"_ the Lord said with a sigh that could have been a groan of dismay_._ _"She's been up to one of her 'secret' projects again! And to think that she actually contrived to convince a Demoness, albeit a child..."_

Sygyn growled.

_"...to smuggle the artifact into Your Realm. Indeed, this is quite disturbing."_

"Even more distressing is the composition of the object. The mortal cyborg claimed that it is an 'image' of the entire Yggdrasil System, or at least the computing sector of it."

_"That would be quite...er, did You say that a 'mortal cyborg'?"_

"Yes, I did, My Brother. Perhaps You should recharge Your cell phone so that the signal is clearer and I don't have to repeat Myself," the Dark Lord noted, giving Kami-sama pay-grief for earlier poorly-humored remarks.

_"Whatever!"_

"All magnitudes aside, I am in need of Your cooperation in this matter, My Brother. If You would brook a kindness with Me, You would dispatch Skuld to My Realm with all haste. Mara seems to strongly believe that your Norn of the Future can convey us to the truth of this mystery-object."

_"I will oblige, as long as You offer Your troth not to harm her under any circumstances. And by any circumstances, I mean _–any- _contingent situations!"_

The Dark Lord grimaced in disappointment. It was clear to the Demonic segment of the group from His reaction that already He was definitely scheming 'harm' towards His requested guest. Shaking His head slowly in resignation, He agreed to Kami-sama's terms with a drawn voice of reluctance.

Skuld would be received in Vanagdrasil within the hour.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

When Skuld finally arrived at the Vanagdrasil Mnoex, Pryzm and Ulfryn rushed up to her, shouting "Mom!" in excited voices. She was grateful that she didn't have to travel to the very heart of the Vang computer via the same methods she used to reach the Axial CorePlex of the Ygg Xeomn. Kami-sama had snapped His fingers, and she was suddenly _here_. Didn't pass Go, didn't have to use the Swarp Gates, didn't get her 20,000 yen. But the complexity of the Vanagdrasil System was evidenced by the fact that it took both Kami-sama and the Demon's Lord almost 40 minutes to arrange for the transition. She tried to tame her astonishment at the place; her engineering mind was clearly impressed with the precious marvels surrounding her. Most importantly, she was aware that she needed to appear strong and confident to her daughters. _They_ were scared. She could feel Ulfryn shivering as she pressed up against her, and Pryzm's forehead was matted with sweat as she finger-brushed through her daughter's short brown hair.

This singular instance caused three sets of reactions. Cevn was looking at Skuld as if he had never seen her before. Here was an _adult_ Skuld, not even the girlish version or the teenaged version that he was used to, but a fully adult Goddess who looked almost as old as he did by appearances. Skuld had grown up into a beautiful Goddess, whose appearance hovered between her late twenties and early thirties. He was also taken aback by her maternal affect...the 'old' Skuld would have been all darty eyes and ears, intensely curious about the machines and technology of this place. In contrast, this Skuld was totally focused on her children to the exclusion of all else.

Keleste and Keiyasu felt intimidated and saddened by the display of affection showered on Pryzm and Ulfryn by their mom. Once again, they were witnessing the open affection of family members towards each other, a feeling which they had dearly desired for their entire lives. Even more unsettling was that this 'Skuld' looked like _their_ Skuld, the Goddess who along with Peorth had served them as stepmothers. They had to check themselves, because they wanted to dash over and rest in the maternal affection as well. Their Stepmom Skuld would have comforted them with as much sincerity, even though they weren't her own children. It was eerie, to say the least. Yet, mixed in with this was a sense of relief. Skuld's presence might resolve the next stage of this mystery, which might get them closer to their real Mother.

Hild was outright jealous of the young Goddess, whose twin children she had tried to steal just a short time earlier. She longed for what had Skuld so freely enjoyed: someone to receive a nurturing love. Hild had no such person in her life, no such dependents. Even a Demoness as incompetent as Mara had kids!

"You cannot smother what you do not have," the robotic mortal said to Hild, interrupting her miserations.

"Shuddup!" she cursed back at him.

"Skuld, daughter of Odeyn and Freiija, Norn of the Future...do you recognize this?" the Dark Lord asked impatiently, interrupting the family reunion by holding the artifact aloft in front of the Goddesses.

"Of course! I _made_ it!" Skuld answered back proudly. Then she realized who the querant was, and swiftly bit her lip to keep from saying too much. In Yggdrasil, the Lord Himself had summoned her, and then had dispatched her to Vanagdrasil on a "matter of urgency". Now, she understood why...obviously, Oni-sama Himself had requested her presence. She had tried to explain the object's importance to Sygyn, but it was plain that the specifics of her elucidation were too esoteric for a teenaged Demoness, even one as smart as her niece. Which wasn't demeaning Sygyn's intelligence by any means, because most adult Gods wouldn't be able to discern its purpose. She was relieved that all six children were safe.

_Six_ children?

She blinked her eyes as she looked at two older children, a young God and Goddess...and then cocked her head to the side in amazement. Could these be the kids that Ulfryn had been seeing in her dreams? They certainly seemed like older versions of Pryzm and Ulfryn. But they were regarding her with the oddest expression; their visages seemed to express bitterness, loving and jealousy at the same time. She studied their faces, trying to map out their Souls. Clearly discernible were the young girl's and boy's Divine auras; glow-aspects that indicated that these two children were seekers. But what were they seeking?

"Mom...that's _them_!" Ulfryn answered her unvoiced question, daughter-intuitive to the point where she had 'read' the questioning look on her face while she was studying the boy-girl pair. Skuld snapped out of her brief fugue and regarded the young Goddess and God with an incredulous expression

"Those two are the Gods that I've been seeing in my dreams. The girl is Keleste, the boy's Keiyasu!" her daughter said hurriedly. "And they were looking for _us_ too..."

Skuld sucked a breath deep in her breast; for some reason, the two names were familiar. But she was _certain_ that she had never met them before. Despite this initial introduction, the two bowed to her deeply and formally, as if they were bowing to a senior family member.

Her daughter's claim that the two were "looking for us, too" tumbled over and over in her mind.

"Skuld..." her older sister Mara interjected with a diplomatic "ahem!", "How could you possibly create a backup of the Ygg Network, as this cyborg claims? Such a project is utterly impossible, because it takes _tens of millennia_ just to create a simulation of a small _portion_ of the Vang Network. Assuming that you guy's computer system is as complex as ours, creating a model of the entire system of computers would take an eternity..."

"I said I made the Nitton, but it wasn't exactly I who made the Nitton."

"Nitton!?" a number of voices echoed excitedly.

"Hmmm...that is what you called it when you gave it to yourself, wasn't it?" Cevn noted. Skuld's eyes widened in surprise and delight. Somehow, he _knew_! She had planned for him to be here simply for the Bridging, but obviously this cyborg was much more than he seemed. She had a distant memory of him, a distant flickering link with an awareness that there was something about this 'Cevn' that was remarkable. For this very reason, she had visited him earlier at his office in school, to plant the idea that he should come here. And he had dutifully followed her suggestion to the letter.

But she couldn't quite remember _when_ and _how_ she had visited him.

"Yes, you're quite observant, aren't you?" she said, hovering closer to the robotic mortal man. Now that she was older, he appeared to be younger than she remembered. In his physical form of metal and flesh, he seemed so brittle of mortality. Fragile, even...especially here in the dwelling Realm of the Demons. And he was regarding her with utter surprise as she 'examined' him. She could see it in his robotic eyes, even if no one else could. For who else was better suited to identify the feelings of a machine then she?

Since she was in Vanagdrasil, the particular fashion Skuld had chosen was a quite un-motherly-like black leather catsuit complemented by a long leather jacket. Sexy action-heroine clothes that she wouldn't ever get away with wearing on the Earthrealm or Yggdrasil. Tomohisa would blow a kidney if he saw her outside of the bedroom dressed like this. Not really, of course, but her husband liked _this_ particular outfit very well.

"But here's something that you probably weren't expecting," she said with a sly smile. With a knowing nod, she reached inside of the cloak of her long leather jacket...and then she pulled out the Enigma Book.

"How does she do that?" Mara commented, as once again her sister had pulled a large object out of the folds of a seemingly thin piece of clothing.

"Wha..wha..wha!" Cevn stammered as she handed him the book. "Why'd you bring it here?"

"Simple!" Skuld sang out in a rich voice. "One object that shouldn't exist demands the presence of another equally impossible object. Besides, this book is unique, as it is the only codex in all of the OmniArc that records _both_ the God's Language and the Demon's Language."

"Impossible!" the Dark Lord shouted. "There is a reason why those two sets of...thoughts...cannot intersect. In their purest form, the languages of both Realms are exclusive of each other! Necessarily so, because..."

"Then how can we understand _you_? How can we understand what _You're_ saying?" Pryzm squealed triumphantly, brattily confident that she had caught the Demon's Lord in a lie. If the Dark Lord said that the two languages were separate, then how come she could 'hear' His words in her mind? Of course, since he was the Demon's Lord, he probably knew the God's Language and could understand her and her sister without effort.

"Child, you weary my patience," both Skuld and Oni-sama chided, a stereo of irritation. Skuld looked at the Dark Lord in surprise, but He only smiled at her with His eyes.

"Pryzm, if your cousin Sygyn couldn't understand the purpose of the Nitton, how could _you_ expect to? You're the girl who's all worried that she won't be able to learn English when she starts junior high school next year," Skuld chastised her oldest girl, proving once again who was the Mom and who was the daughter. She _had_ to, after that little bit of inadvertent synching with the Dark Lord.

"Yeah, yeah. Blaa, blaa..." Pryzm observed indignantly.

"Przym!" Ulfryn hissed, alarmed. "You can't act like that in front of Mom! Especially in front of the Demons, and your Aunt, and the Dark Lord..."

"Bwah ha ha ha," Oni-sama chuckled loudly. "Your daughter behaves herself richly in her defiance, just like a Demoness girl mayhaps. In fact, if it weren't for the forehead markings, I couldn't tell her to be a Goddess girl at all!"

Pryzm blanched with embarrassment. No wonder He was the Demon's Lord...He was a first-class bastard! He had just taunted her with the most embarrassing thing a Goddess her age could hear. He had just compared her to a Demoness! Even Mom was grinning, amused by His cruel observation. The traitor!

"Y..you're _m..mean_!!" she shouted with clench-fisted rigidity, causing all the adults and Demons to giggle mockingly.

"Of course I am," the Dark Lord acknowledged with an imperious nod. "Now that you have the truest of insights into My nature, be grateful that you do not incur My Wrath, Little Goddess. It would make a jesting matter such as this seem like a pleasantry."

That observation brought a dearthy silence onto the group.

"Since we have settled the question of who is the Lord and which beings are His subjects, we should move on to more tacit concerns, such as the purpose of this object, and how to operate it," the Dark Lord said.

Skuld started shifting her weight from one foot to the other as she hovered in front of the group.

"We..ee..ellllll?" He signaled, His eyes widening.

"Uh...I don't know how to..uh..tell you this," Skuld stuttered out, "but I..uh..don't know how it works. I..uh..only know what it _does_."

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Skuld's explanation made sense, if only in a quirky Skuldish sort of way. It turned out that the 'Skuld' that had built this object was the 790,000 year-old 'obaa-chan' version of the Skuld presently floating in front of our group. 'GranSkuld' had created the "Nitton", or what I mentally described as the 'MicroYgg', by employing a level of engineering expertise that was purposeful and mythical, a quantum leap beyond the abilities of the 'current' Skuld, by her own admission. Even Oni-sama didn't know how it operated. Skuld basically said that this Nitton had such a high degree of techy sophistication, trying to figure out how it works with her current level of mecha-expertise would be like trying to start a PDA with a book of matches. Scary thoughts. It was becoming increasingly difficult to wrap my mind around this concept. I revisited the past two years that I had lived with Keiichi and the Goddesses. The inventions of the Skuld that I knew back at the temple often appeared to be more magic than technology. Just ask if anyone has seen a broken-down household rice cooker transformed into an inter-dimensional travel portal lately, and you'll know what I mean. And those were the workings of a 120,000 year-old Goddess practicing her 'hobby'. Of course, even we select mortals who viewed the finished mecha could only describe it as 'miraculous' and 'magical'. Sometimes, even Belldandy and Urd were reverently mystified by the outpourings of Skuld's genius.

With Skuld, the magic is real.

It was Mara who jokingly remarked, "Leave it to the older, future version of yourself to give you this artifact, and not leave instructions on how to use it. Perhaps she was a bit funny in the head because of senility."

That singular comment incited an argument which quickly became vociferous. But the Dark Lord didn't deign to intervene despite the disruption and chaos the two shouting Divines were stirring up. I sensed that in His laissez-faire attitude, there was a reluctance to stop the sibling catfight because He was enjoying it. After all, it probably wasn't too often that He was audience to a seriously hysterical arguing match between a Goddess and a Demoness who were sisters.

Meanwhile, I thumbed through the Enigma Book, trying to block the high-pitched shouting out of my mind. Four of the kids had now joined in the avalanching argument. I had a hunch that Skuld had brought it here for a reason. During the entire time I had known Skuld, I was keenly aware that she rarely wasted energy on any project or action. Efficiency was her keyword: everything she did had a purpose. I recalled how one of Urd's favorite ways to 'torture' her was to make Skuld create 'useless' objects. Skuld loathed inefficiency; ergo, her bringing the Enigma Book to me wasn't an accident. She had brought it to me, not anyone else...which could possibly imply that I was the one who needed to read it.

As Mara and Skuld argued about whether Divines could or should make sleeping fish awake by changing spots to squares on cheetahs, I pondered. Bringing the Enigma Book here...was that _this_ Skuld's idea, or perhaps it was at the suggestion of 'obaa-san' GranSkuld? If it was the latter choice, than it was possible that the 'instruction' manual for the object is right here, in these pages.

Sure enough, towards the back, written in God's and Demon's Languages in parallel text, was an appendix aptly named:

"_Transcendental Functioning of the Nitton, MK I: Operations Manual"_

Of course, it hadn't been there the last time I remembered reading the Enigma Book.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Don't be such a wimp! If the Enigma Book says you can do it, then you just need to brace up and do it! Don't you have any faith?" Mara shouted at Cevn.

"Yeah, I do! But faith is one thing, while idiocy is clearly another. And this is ichiban idiotic! T..t..that book says that I have to be a conduit between this 'Nitton' object and the Vang computer. That the data has to pass through _me_! Do you have any idea how _insane_ that sounds?" Cevn shot back.

"Just think of it as loaning us your body for a while," Hild said with a giggle, floating up behind Cevn and wrapping her arms around his chest, pressing herself against his back. As she had expected, Cevn quickly turned beet-red with embarrassment and fear. She had quickly scanned the organic endowments of his being that housed his Soul and kokoro, and had discovered that he had deep-rooted fear of women that had been lodged in his being because of past events. This fold of his character would be something to play with later, for her own amusement. But for now, he was the tool to solve this mystery.

But she couldn't resist toying with him just a little bit.

Cevn was even more embarrassed when the six kids giggled at Hild's innuendo and his reaction to her 'hug', while Skuld chided "Stop teasing him!" He muttered "they're too young to be thinking that!" under his breath as he tried to wrestle himself out of the Demoness Queen's embrace. As the ashamedness lessened, the deeply troubling prospect of having the combined data of both computer networks streaming through his physical body returned. Daunting didn't even come close to the impossibility he sensed in the offing.

"Look. How do I know that I can even do this? I'm a cyborganic lifeform, physically incapable of being a 'wire' between Skuld's Nitton and the Vanagdrasil Network. I mean, wouldn't something like that would probably fry _your_ minds if you were to attempt it? And you're all are so much more...enhanced...than I am, it isn't even funny. So imagine what it would do to me! I might as well be sitting in an electric chair, waiting for the current to be switched on. Waiting to get zapped while someone else keeps telling me "it'll only tickle."

"Nice analogy," Mara commented. "I'll have to test that one out some time."

"Consider this, Cevn," Skuld noted, raising a finger to launch into instructive lecturing mode. "What if someone came to you and said that you could have your heart's desire if you did the impossible? And what then? Would you go ahead and try to accomplish the impossible? And assuming you did make the attempt, what would happen once you completed the task or challenge given to you?"

"If I could do it, it would no longer be impossible, now would it?" Cevn quickly retorted. "Ergo, if it was impossible, I couldn't do it."

"Baka! You're just so _mortal_ sometimes!" Skuld sighed. She gathered her thoughts and marshaled a smile before she continued. Gotta smile when trying to convince children to eat their spinach udon.

"So then...why don't you explain to us why you're _here_, needle-in-the-groove, live and direct, in the _middle_ of Vanagdrasil! And not just any place, but in the very core of the Vang computer Complex! A place where even Demons aren't allowed, unless they have a very good reason...and special permission from our Dark Host, Oni-sama. It took my kids and I almost 30 years to travel from the boundary of the Ygg Xeomnic to the Axial CorePlex, traveling at speeds that would make galaxies fly by like snowflakes in a blizzard. 30 _years_, Earthrealm time!"

"30 years is nothing. I've lived almost 90,000 years in this cyborganic frame," Cevn replied. "So that number doesn't impress me."

"And that's another thing I find quite odd, since the metal in your body seems to have a SpaceTime sig that would indicate that it's only a few weeks old, not 90,000 years," Skuld noted, floating around him and examining his body with an engineer's eye.

"Would you quit looking at me like I'm a damned sportscar engine?" Cevn noted, irritated.

"Yep!" Skuld said with a nod. "You're clearly a cyborg, and a fairly well-crafted one at that. But you're not anywhere near 90,000 years old. And that cyborganic 'body' of yours is centuries ahead of present Earthrealm tech!"

That's total bullshit!" Cevn snarled angrily. "I remember being on Planet Lost, after you and your sisters..."

"Sis.._ters_?!" Skuld and Mara gasped.

"Yeah. You and your sisters bailed on the Earthrealm, and it was destroyed by some freaky mishap with the Sun or something...I really don't want to remember that part. Then me and a bunch of survivors went to a new home planet in a space ark, and got dumped into these cyborganic forms so we could make the journey. We named the new planet 'Lost', and tried to grow another Earth-like biosphere on it, including a cloned, new species of human beings. But after many thousands of years, civilization got trenchant and fought a final battle, leaving Planet Lost a wasteland. Leaving me and a few other cyborgs to survive another 70,000 years, because we had failsafes put in us to prevent us from attempting suicide. Then some weird shit happened and I found myself back at the temple, with everyone saying that I was a normal human being, in a normal organic physical body. But I was all crippled up from a motorcycle accident. I don't even ride motorcycles! Now I'm here, and I don't know if I'm sleeping or I'm awake. But I do know that I was in love with your sister at one time."

"Don't blow him up, Mara," Skuld asked her sister in a whispered stage-voice. "I don't think he means you or me. Because if he did, I'd blow him up right along with you with one of my Skuld Bombs."

"What a fetching and pleasant comedy you weave, Earthrealm construct, " the Dark Lord remarked. "The suffering couched within you is refreshingly genuine. Your tale is very entertaining, especially in its bleakness. A suspended hope mingled with just the right amount of desperation. The final flowering of optimism by a dying race, which is then choked into stillness. The utter annihilation of redemption...by its own creators. Tastefully humorous, with just the right touch of tragedy to sweeten the pathos. Is it not charming and romantic?" Cevn looked at Him with a bit-lip grimace, until he remembered that Demons probably thrived on tales of grief and tragedy. Hell, even the huge chamber of this place seemed to pulse with a baleful ruination.

"Sounds like you're a bit scrambled in the cyber-noggin, robot," Hild said with a chuckle. "Somebody's lying here, and my money says that the Goddess is telling the truth. Not the mere mortal man-machine who can't tell his head from his ass. If she says you're supposed to do it, then you're supposed to do it."

Skuld picked up on Hild's sarcastic comment and redirected it. "And maybe, just maybe...if you do this, something will happen that will unscramble those memories you have."

"No can do, no wanna do," Cevn said sharply. "Assuming that the data doesn't condition me or change me in any way, I will still be the same afterwards."

"We're wasting time here!" Mara exclaimed, beyond frustrated at this point. "We should just make him do it!"

"With all due respect, hold off on that for a moment. How do you know for certain that you'll be unchanged?" Keleste questioned him with a searing expression. "In all of Life, isn't it true that if nothing is ventured, naught is gained? Even _you_ must understand that!" She and the other five kids had kept to themselves the entire time, letting the adults quibble-quabble. But Cevn's firm refusals really were starting to provoke her, especially since...of all the beings present...she and her brother had the most to gain. Cevn had said that this Skuld and Mara had _sisters_! Perhaps one of those sisters he had mentioned was _her_ Skuld's sister. Her and Keiyasu's long-lost Mother! There was no way she was going to let an opportunity like this get messed up, just because of an Earthrealm mortal's fidgety attitude!

Cevn regarded the teenaged Goddess with the solemn expression and the bangs frisking out from her bandana. He could sense the long march of affliction that had shadowed her life, it was visible in her intense eyes and drawn, tired face. But if this...girl Goddess...had the courage to risk it all, and the courage to encourage him, then how could he deny or disclaim her convictions? Being told "nothing ventured, nothing gained" by a _kid_, and then _still_ holding onto his fears...would brand him a coward.

"It occurs to Me that the reason you have been appointed for this task is quite simple. We are a gathering of Demons and Gods. You are the only mortal within our ranks. It is My surmise that this act that calls you to it...cannot be accomplished by a Divine being, perhaps because of our natures. So it _must_ be you," Oni-sama reasoned.

"Well, if You put it that way..." Cevn muttered.

"And if it fails, then there's no loss, as you are only a sentient mortal artifact. As they are fond of saying on your planet, to make an omelet you have to break some eggs. Better to sacrifice one of _you_ rather than one of _us_," the Dark Lord added.

Bristling at this, Cevn impulsive answered, "I'll do it...and I hope that You are shown the error of your assumptions."

"Good, good! As I had expected, you're quite easily provoked," the Dark Lord laughed haughtily. "But as for showing Me to be wrong in My judgment, it is not very likely. For I am _rarely_ mistaken. Just ask Hild and Mara, if you need witness to this."

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

There is a belief system that the mind is but a point, a dot on a piece of paper. It contains nothing, because it is mind. A mind that is empty, even empty of vacant space...so that it cannot be filled with anything. Over time, events and phenomena brush up against it, like the wind buffeting a tree in the meadow. During this process, once in a while certain 'conditions' stick to it, like paper glued to a bulletin board. What constitutes 'memory' isn't the accumulation of experiences stored within the mind. Instead, it is the aggregation of 'conditions' that adhere to the mind. Thus, one passes through the seasons of life gathering up these experiences like a tumbling weed gathering up grass and roots. The mind contains nothing, but interacts with everything around it.

If my mind was a point on a piece of paper, it was probably going to get erased.

The potential that I might short-circuit my mind loomed heavy over me as I held Skuld's Nitton Mk. I in my hand. I intuitively knew why it was designated Mk. I. The Nitton was probably the lifework of an elderly, wizened Skuld. I could feel her ambience within the Nitton, I could feel _her_ in it...as if it was an echo of the time Skuld and I had blended minds while imprisoned in Mara's lair. There was always something cosmic about Skuld, the little girl with the transcendental understanding of science. A teenager when last I had seen her. Now, as I watched her rereading the entry in the Enigma Book, a young mother with two children and a matured, serene outlook on life.

But still the take-charge mecha genius.

"All you have to do is hold the Nitton in one hand, and touch the wall of the Mnoexic Network's Focal NavePlex with the other hand. The two computers will do the rest..." she cited, reading from the Enigma Book.

All you have to do. Reminds me of when I was a kid, and the doctor said all you have to do is pull your shirt sleeve up, right before giving me a shot.

I placed my trust in a Skuld that I had never met...and reached out to touch the wall of the computer. My hand sunk into it, like reaching into a bowlful of jello. Then, I sensed a heat rush through my body...and my mind fluttered out of my skull.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Skuld watched as the Nitton turned into a shapeless glow inside of Cevn's hand. Cevn's eyes were open, but his mind seemed completely absent. He was a vacancy amidst the shell of lights that comprised the inner sanctum of the Vang computer. She was alarmed by the possibility that his Soul had been swifted away, but when she checked, it was still with him. No Reaper seemed to be floating around, like a vulture waiting for prey.

Suddenly, the lights started going out inside of the Focal NavePlex. Entire grids of light started vanishing, thrusting colossal shadows in their wake. The huge swarms of crystalline shapes floating overhead and underfoot started losing their illumination. The glowing 'bloodlines' in the walls started to dim.

"My ass is grass! This is totally _wrong_!" she thought, transfixed by fright. Whatever she had done, it was causing the Vang Mnoexic System to experience a shutdown. Not even the swiftest virus could do _this_. Quickly calculating, Skuld almost choked when she discovered that it would be gone in less than a minute.

She quickly glanced at the Dark Lord, whose face was piqued with an expression of panic. If the Vang System experienced a complete shutdown, what would happen to reality? What would happen to the Demons? Would Mara, Falcyn and Sygyn simply cease to exist? Each shattering of light heightened her dizzying dismay, and there was nothing she could do to stop it. She tried to float towards Cevn, hoping she could pull his arm out of the wall...but she bounced against him instead. The nearer she approached him, the worse her internal 'gyros' of Goddess awareness became.

The Ygg System had never shut down in all of history. Now, she had directly linked the Ygg System with the Vang System. Not the old Ygg and Vang Mainframes of those days: these were the quantum-leap-ahead complex networks that had been created by the Expansion Event. She was chilled with an unbearable regret. For a fleeting moment, a terror possessed her as she considered that possibility that whatever was happening here...was being repeated in Yggdrasil.

_This was a disaster!_

"I..I'm sorry!" she shouted to Mara and her kids, totally wrapped up in the thought that they might be 'erased' at some point when the Vanagdrasil computer shut down. She pounded the walls of the Mnoex with her fists in frustration...but then something really bizarre happened.

Cevn's other hand started glowing red. He was still blank-eyed, but he seemed to be writhing in silent agony, a shadow within the rapidly dimming chamber. Skuld felt further regret...she had placed him in a fatal situation by forcing him to do something incredibly risky.

She watched as the lights seemed to be sucked within Cevn's hand.

Riveted by the sight, Skuld sudden realized what was happening...and she audibly gasped. The contents of the Vang System were being drawn towards the red glow! Maybe, even drawn _within_ it! Even now, every light was racing towards the carmine sphere of light, like water streaming towards a river after a heavy rainfall. Mountains of light were compressed and pierced into the gathering brightness in the Earthrealm mortal's hand.

Could the Nitton be duplicating itself?

Finally, the last fragments of rust-ribbon light were vacuumed into the glowing sphere. A slice of utter darkness surrounded them, and then the entire place exploded with light.

And awash in the burst of illumination, she saw the improbable scene of the Dark Lord kneeling reverently in front of an Earthrealm mortal cyborg.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Wha...what just happened?" Falcyn asked his sister, then his Mother, then Queen Hild and then finally Oni-sama himself. None of them answered him. No one was talking about how the Dark Sovereign had knelt respectfully on one knee towards the cyborganic being when the power came back on. No one needed to, because the possibility of the Dark Lord paying homage to a mortal was utterly ludicrous.

But it had happened. Falcyn hoped that this was all a joke, a ploy on the part of the Shadow Ruler of Vanagdrasil to get a rise out of His subjects. But His face belied no mirth or light-heartedness as He floated up from their group towards the mortal.

The Dark Lord hovered up in front of Cevn, and then pulled the red and blue lights out of his hands. He heard his sister Sygyn gasp as Cevn slumped further into unconsciousness, a limp, immobile form.

"He is uninjured. As you suspected, Goddess Skuld, he is much more than he appears to be. He will be fine," the Dark Lord announced bluntly.

"Th..there's _two_ of those!" Hild observed, breaking from her silence into wonderment as she pointed towards His hands.

Falcyn wanted to curse her out for saying something so obvious, but then he remembered how close he had come to doing 'it' with the foxy Demon Queen. Or had he actually done 'it' with her? His mind seemed to mist when he tried to recall his encounter with Hild in her hot springs. Feeling the unease, he gripped his hands tight instead and floated closer to his Mother. He remembered the instant right before the lights went on. He thought he had glimpsed Demon's markings on the forehead of the mortal cyborg. Or were they God's markings? A circle and a square, the union of opposites, the balance of line and curve...

"I saw it too, Falcyn," Sygyn said to him, confirming his belief. "And I don't understand it any more than you do. He's just a primitive blend of mortal flesh and tech."

Falcyn looked up at his Mom, but she was looking at the Dark Lord with wide eyes. He could sense in her demeanor that she was just as shocked about the whole deal as everyone else. Who wouldn't be? The Vanagdrasil Mnoexic Network had just done a total spazz-out, reminding him of a bug-killer lamp when it was nailed by a dozen moths at the same time! Her uncertainty only made him feel even more uneasy.

The Dark Lord held the two artifacts side-by-side in front of His face, and then He closed His eyes. His face glowed with concentration.

After a pause, He opened His eyes...and they were burning.

"We must leave at once. We had a function to attend," He announced.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --


	124. Pt 124: MeshPhase

**Part 124: MeshPhase**

THE EARTHREALM: AT A CELEBRATION:

_"I DEMAND THAT YOU CEASE THIS ABOMINATION OF A CEREMONY IMMEDIATELY!!"_

The sharply-voiced shout bit into my slumbering idyll; like the proverbial beach game where a whisking blunt-force broom handle would smash a melon on a hot summer sand-lea. Laced with ominous threat, the words snapped me back to consciousness while stealing my breath. As the world faded into clarity, I became shamefully aware of what had just happened...and then I didn't want to believe it. I had actually nodded off during Belldandy and Keiichi's wedding!

What the hell was wrong with me? Did anyone notice?

Fretful that someone might have regarded my ill-mannered lapse of attention at this most important of ceremonies, I gathered the strewn remnants of my wits and looked searchingly towards the chancel of the church. Searching out Freiija, I was relieved to notice that she wasn't looking towards the back of the church. If the Goddess of Marriages had spied me napping at her daughter's wedding, I might find myself instantly stranded on the Ellsworth mountain range in Antarctica amidst the barest elements of ice, rock and wind-snow...barely attired with nothing more than a pair of boxers with "idiot" stenciled on them.

I returned my attention forwards towards the ceremony. There, Keiichi and Belldandy were being given matrimony; the sacred rite being officiated by the Lord. But once the vibrant shout finished its cross-echoing pace within the cambered church hall, a sea of faces turned in unison to look at me. A twinge of paranoia scratched my mind, at least until I sensed that they weren't staring at me. They were looking _past_ me, towards the antechambers and lobby of the rearmost nave of the church. As my heartbeat pattered, I remembered the agitated voice that had popped my slumber-bubble like a prickly thorn. Was the voice that I just heard a dream-voice, or did I actually hear someone objecting to Keiichi and Bell's marriage?

Looking for confirmation, I sought out Keiichi with my eyes. I caught his stricken expression all-too-briefly, but it was enough to verify my worst fears. A contrast in black tux and ashen face, Keiichi looked like someone had clobbered him on the back of his head with a brick.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Skuld couldn't stall off the crashing disconcertedness that had exploded into her reality. Actually, she felt like _she_ was who had crashed; a comet that had plunged into a murky, wave-tossed ocean of disbelief. This long sequence of paradoxes had started innocently enough with her two daughters skipping elementary school. With Shinjuku craziness, the map of certainty had quickly spiraled out of control, strewing her on a Logo-to-Logo spindizzy journey. Adventuring through a series of astonishing waypoints with Pryzm and Ulfryn, their quest had folded into itself once they reached the last point of transit, being the very heart of the Demon's computer system in Vanagdrasil. There, impossibly, she had witnessed the death-throes of the Demon's Mainframe System as it experienced a complete shutdown-restart sequence. Yet, once all of its contents were seemingly drained into the 'red' Nitton in Cevn's hands, the network of computers mystically restored itself to life with a roar of crimsonesque psycho-cybernetics...a mythic, inexplicable process that remained a total mystery to Skuld. Oni-sama was fond of saying "Anything Happens!" in much the same manner as mortals would exclaim "shit happens!" This certainly was one of those shit happening incidents.

With the sanctum of ultimate Demon-data thus resurrected, the Dark Lord had taken the two Nittons from the human-like cyborg that had bridged the Ygg and Vang system. She had intended Cevn to be a bridge between the two Networks so she could overlay them and determine why three percent of the Ygg Xeomnic was missing. Instead, the Nitton had duplicated itself. In His dark hands, both artifacts were pulsating back and forth between icicle shard and slender looping curve shapes, as if nothing had happened. Holding the blue and red Nittons in His hands, the Dark Lord seemed to have blown a piston in His mind, because He suddenly declared "Let's go to a function!"

And an instant later, they were here. At a wedding function. Because this random destination was a mortal planet, Skuld could take it all in almost instantaneously. In stark contrast to the assailing cacophony of Vanagdrasil, this mortal realm was innocence and tranquility. She couldn't betray the instant shock she felt to be in the middle of the Demon's Vang Mnoex one moment, and the next moment on a mortal-populated planet. Even more, Skuld immediately recognized that she was back on the Earthrealm. And yet, something was different. For one thing, a couple billion or so Earthrealm mortals were missing.

And by the time she figured out that she was over a decade in the past…Earth's past…that's when everything turned Freaksville.

Sweeping her knee-length ravenesque hair back with a practiced hand-motion, Skuld looked up the aisle that bisected the nave of the church...and saw the Lord Himself! His physical manifestation was cast as that of a wizened, elderly Earthrealm mortal being, which was almost as shocking. For her entire existence, He had always seemed _young_ to her, perhaps because He had no 'age' to His Being. Dressed sovereignly in the regalia and vestments of the priesthood, He actually seemed to be conducting some kind of ceremony! To add quiddity to confusion, the Gate of Judgment had been brought here. Amidst this very chaotic order, she could see a young couple at the base of the steps leading to the altar. She could only conclude the impossible: the _Lord Himself_ was conducting the wedding! Stunned, she readied herself to drop to her knees and pay Him her humble reverence when something else caught her eye.

She saw _herself_!!

Any thought of offering devout homage to the Lord swiftly rioted out of Skuld's mind and heart. Throat unclamping, she gasped a deep suck of air, shocked at the image of a teenaged version of herself!! And the 'teenager' was staring back at her with wide-open tan-brown eyes! _Her_ eyes! She might as well have been looking into a still-pond reflection of herself. Jolted to the core of her Soul, Skuld flinched in utter disbelief. Involuntarily, her whole physical manifestation seemed to be crackling with fevered electricity. Her eyebrows arched with further shock when she noticed two women dressed in bridesmaid's outfits standing next to her 'double' in the front pew.

One of them was _Mara_!

She whipped her eyes away from the front of the church to look at Mara, confirming that her Demoness sister was really standing right next to her. A mirror for Skuld's astonishment...her older sister had figuratively dropped her jaw open and was muttering "wob wob bhwob wob" in shock. Mara had obviously spied her 'double' in the front pew. But who was the Goddess with the platinum hair and fox-mischievous narrow evergreen eyes standing next to 'her' and 'Mara' at the front of the church? Skuld looked back and forth between her sister and the other 'Mara' until her Demoness sis finally managed to clamp her mouth shut. As Mara turned her attention towards her, Skuld could almost feel the burn of her older sister's wary, defensive fixed gaze.

"Is it really you?" they both asked in blended voices of wariness.

"Yes! I'm me! I'm me!" Skuld quickly answered, gripping her Demoness sister on the shoulder. "And I think...that's me too. And that's you as well! Are the kids all here? Are they okay?"

"Oh my Darkness...if this is spinnin' us out, it's gotta be totally _freakin_ them out!" Mara near-shouted.

"--M..M...MOM!!--"

Skuld heard Ulfryn's clarion shout of fright just as two pairs of hands clutched at her arms. Her daughters must have noticed her 'double' standing at front of the church. Being a full Goddess, Skuld could easily squeeze a few billion thought processes and perceptions between the nano-seconds, many of which overlap Present with Future. But her daughters couldn't. Especially here, on the Earthrealm, where the twin's Goddess powers were rendered fractional at best. She reached out to comfort Ulfryn...and noticed that her daughter's Goddess facial markings were gone.

Yep, they were definitely on the Earthrealm!

"Why are we back _here_?" Pryzm asked, her quavering voice clearly indicating how shaken she was. Skuld could barely hear her daughter between the taiko drumbeating of her racing heart; her thoughts pounded her as her mind swam in orbits of recognition. In the pew behind her younger twin...was her husband!

Not hardly!!

This Tomohisa was a skinny little kid, barely into his high school years!!

She felt a brief surge of jealousy. Tomohisa didn't even notice her...wasn't even looking at her. His full attention was focused in an expression of concern directed towards the younger version of herself. She permitted herself a brief whimsy as she watched the puppyish adolescent display. "Oh...to be young and in love again!" she thought. And the two youngsters probably didn't even know it!

"Dammit, I'm used to the Future...and this looks like it's the Past!" she cursed under her breath. She could see her Mother and Father in the front row pew on the opposite side of the aisle. Her Mother was dressed to perfection, her hairstyle elaborately coiffed in the traditional Goddess of Marriage formal style. In particular, an extremely consummate series of swirling patterns and zigzags, decorated with precious Ixodenum jewels and hairpins. Next to Mom, Father was awkwardly dressed in an Earthrealm tuxedo; awkward since the tux seemed on the verge of peeling off of her Father's stout frame. Seeing Dad dressed up and fidgety was a funky sight.

Why was Mom wearing the Mother of the Bride hairstyle and Dad was squeezed into a tux?

She didn't have time to assess, but Skuld's Goddess intuition quickly sharpened towards the obvious: that Mom and Dad were giving away the bride. But why were they here? Why are _we _here? The proliferation of floral arrangements further added to this impression; only her Mom could be so scrupulously precise with ceremonial decorations. Could she be watching a re-enactment of her own wedding ceremony? But she clearly had seen 'herself' and a teen version of her husband Tomohisa sitting in the pew usually assigned for maids of honor and family. If so, then was this the Dark Lord's idea of a cruel joke to pay her back for having poor Sygyn smuggle the Nitton into Vanagdrasil? This setting had nothing to do with why the Lord had sent her to Vanagdrasil, or her attempt to investigate the Demon's computer. Or Ulfryn's visions of 'ghosties'. Or anything that had to do with anything...

A split second of scene of chaos, which barely slighted upon the chaos Skuld was feeling in her troubled heart.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Sh...shit! Elder Sister!! Big Sister Mara!! Big Sister Urd!!" Skuld gasped as the vortex of light coalesced into human forms in the back of the church. Her two older sisters had just finished serving the traditional three-by-three cups of ceremonial wedding sake to Belldandy and Keiichi; next up was the betrothed's walk through the Gate of Judgment up to the alter where the Lord was standing...a walk designed to confirm their Love and to please all those Divines in attendance.

And now this!!

She could already envision the ensuing chaos in her mind...after all, it didn't require her particular skills with any nexus of communication into the Future. In a few seconds, Mom would blast into a full-on Goddess equivalent of a bitch-fit because a group of uninvited guests had crashed Bell's wedding! Skuld was afraid, very afraid. Once Mother got riled up, her response to the 'intrusion' would undoubtedly be much more recklessly disturbing than the intrusion itself. Mom could rip through the proceedings with a scream-down at the intruders!

This was the worst!!

She glanced round-and-round between Urd and Mara, who had freshly changed out of the traditional red-and-white shrine maiden mika outfits back into their bridesmaid's dresses. Urd was peering towards the projecting rays of light, her emeraldine eyes narrowed, her mouth set in a scowl. Mara's face was also poised in an angry, irritated expression.

Then she saw the Future.

Future Skuld.

Skuld gripped her mind before it flew it away like a Boy's Day kite in a gale. Gathering, gathering, trying to ground herself against the impossible...trying not to let a mounting fright turn her three shades of cream taper-wax in the face. Fighting to prevent the shock from causing her to melt away into a puddle of neuroses in snapcase reaction to the disturbing sight.

How many times can one divide a moment? How many moments can one divide Time? Divide, divine, decide. Each TimeStream consists of an infinite number of TimeWeaves, so Time as a finitude was theoretically impossible. Yet, there was one moment that couldn't possibly be divided; the moment that existed between a Norn and herself. Being in the Now was everything...but then again, it wasn't. Skuld knew this better than anyone in the OmniArc, with the possible exception of the Lord Himself, her two sister Norns, and maybe even Peorth whenever she was in 'Eternity Mode'. But one of the Rules the governed the Norn's mysterious range of TimeSpace powers was that Skuld could never meet her Future directly.

Apparently, the Rules had changed.

Whenever she scanned the Future, Skuld would probe TimeSpace methodically by looking inward until she encountered herself in a particular TimeWeave. Normally, any given Time could be streamed within thousands of outcomes; each 'event' could be composed of a legion of alternative time-lines. The 'correct' Futures weren't random sequences, they had certain 'charms' about them that she was beginning to learn how to 'see'. Whenever Skuld recognized a 'shadow-image' of herself while passing into the journey within, she was certain that the Future TimeStream she was monitoring was indeed the chronological progression of the moment. It was this moment's Future 'Now', to be precise. But this moment's Future...should never have been made manifest, especially since she was looking at an older version of herself. And this wasn't something that existed in the dream-like state of scaling the oceans of Time by looking. The...Goddess who was her Future...was _real_.

With two daughters.

"D..d..d..daughters?!" Skuld squeezed out breathily. Somehow, she _knew_ this. "Th..th..that means that I've had s..s...se" She quickly turned and shot Tomohisa a glare that would have melted a nova. Then she turned red-faced, realizing how her sequence of thoughts had just turned.

Faced with a glacier-solid impossibility in the forms of her two children, Skuld did the only thing that made sense. Excited to the very limits, she allowed her consciousness to flee her...and she checked out. Fainting backwards with a sigh, right towards Urd's arms.

Which was why Skuld never knew that Urd was so rigidified by the shocking sight of the Dark Lord, an older Skuld and Mara, and a six-pack of Divine kids...that her oldest sister didn't even react to her swoon...

...and instead, she wound up collapsing into Tomohisa's arms.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Keleste gripped Keiyasu's hand as tightly as she could as a whole new world materialized into glaring brightness all around them. She was already feeling travel-sick from bouncing around all the weirdest places in Vanagdrasil, but her Goddesses senses were once again discomfited by the unexpected transportation to yet another new universe. Compared to the rouge-shadows and obsidian cerements of Vanagdrasil, the hall they were standing inside of seemed to explode with sparkling sunlight. It also seemed that the Dark Lord's method of instant transport lacked the smoothness of stepping on the Asgard Dimensional Bridge and being whisked to another part of the Ygg Multiverse. She almost wanted to retch at the sudden flange of vertigo that assaulted her.

They had landed on a mortal world.

Not just any mortal world...

"Is..this..Earth?" her brother stammered in a voice choked with astonishment. Keiyasu's telepathic shout was so strongly projected, it bellowed within her mind with a roar. Keleste noticed that her fingers were shivering, twitching as they rested against her hip. She glanced at her other hand, noticing a thin trickle of blood where she was grasping her brother's hand. Her fingernails were digging into his flesh. She tried to relax her grip, chagrined that her brother had just let her hurt his hand without saying a word...but then she dismissed the thought. Keiyasu was probably just as startled as she was. More than likely, he didn't even notice the pain. More than likely, he was even more startled. And then she noticed his God facial markings were gone.

Unintended, her mind floated into a series of memories. In Yggdrasil, she and her brother in demi-Goddess mode had tasked a millennium of their existence on the Earthrealm, creating a fitting memorial to the mortal father they had never met. She recalled the working of the monument with videogame clarity. With all the dedication their hearts could bear, they had labored on the soaring wings of regret and love. In that solemn, desolate wasteland, where humankind had been extinct for many thousands of years...Keleste had a wealth of time on her hands to learn to recognize the heartbeat of the planet. Returning to now, her thoughts played between memoried moments and startling realities. Surveying the gathering of Earthrealm mortals...biting on her amazement that these were actual, living human beings! She desperately wanted to still her mind so she could listen to the rhythms of the planet. But the raucous chatter of the other Divines clogged her mind. Everyone was thoughtcasting with cannonfire rapidity and magnitude.

Amidst the din, Keiyasu broke free of his fugue and started gesturing towards the front of the building with tremoring pointing of his finger. To add to her confusion, the Demon's Lord suddenly bellowed an angry challenge.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

_"HOW DARE YOU INTRUDE UPON THIS HOLY UNION OF MATRIMONY!"_

…he heard the Lord yelled in reply to Oni-sama's shouted interruption. His humaned elderkin physical manifest turned red-faced with ire at the affront. Standing in the back of the church, the Dark Lord hovered a meter above the ground, thronged by a group of Gods and Demons.

"Your immoderacy in bursting amidst this sacred place while I am conducting a solemn Union between one of My daughters and her beloved is unspeakable! Clearly, you bear a decided disregard for propriety! Such comportment passes shades beyond the galling impudence one would expect from the lowest, most ill-mannered scoundrel! Even mortals have better manners!" the Lord shouted, tingeing his words with a final insult.

"I am no scoundrel, as You well know, My fair-visioned Brother! I have made myself here with good reason. My presence is not borne upon a whim, nor upon a desire to curry mischief with You!" Oni-sama replied. With a wave of His hand, He effortlessly froze all the mortals and Divines into a phase of StillTime. As it was, things were already escalating way out of hand; the Norn and his youngest Demon Queen had already noticed their counterparts in this TimeStream. This would not do, especially with the Norn of the Future. Most importantly, He and His Brother needed privacy to conduct this affair, for this was a grievous situation that threatened both Realms…

Oni-sama braced Himself, because this was dread matters.

"That Goddess is an abomination!" He yelled, gesturing his accusation towards Belldandy.

"I don't know who You are, but You can't talk that way about my fiancée!" Keiichi shouted angrily, reacting quickly to the shadow-figure's imputation. "Belldandy is the sweetest Goddess there is...and I love her with all of my heart! She is _not_ an abomination! How could You barge in here, interrupt _my _wedding, and then try and get off making such sickening accusations? Making such an outrage claim about the Goddess that I love! By what right do You have to call her that?"

The Dark Lord gasped in truest astonishment...somehow, this Earthrealm mortal wasn't TimeStilled! Every other Being in the place besides Kami-sama, Himself, and this...virulence in the form of a Goddess...had been rendered statuesque with immobility. The mortal should have been stilled as well; but here he was, chattering with inane indignity about the interruption of his precious wedding.

Oni-sama reckoned it obvious that _it_ was doing something to keep the young mortal man from being bound by the StillTime spell He had cast. Which could only mean that whoever this being was, shrewdly using the form of a Goddess as a guise, it was one powerful motherfucker!

Few were the beings in the OmniArc who could resist a spell encanted by the Lord of the Demons. Hopefully his Brother Sovereign would not miss this fact.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"She is _not_ a Goddess!!" Keiichi heard the Demon's Lord insist in an urgent voice. He looked at Bell-chan, who simply shook her head in tremulous mystification.

"Verily, I know this to be fact," the Demon's Lord continued, firmly declaring His conviction. "While correcting a certain chain of mishaps caused by My underlings, I was afforded an opportunity to compare the two computer Systems...Yours and Mine. The two Networks, as You know, are absolute opposites of each other. Our Realms may differ from place to place, but the fiber of the computers are identical. Yet, I have identified a significant difference between them."

"You came all the way here to tell me _that_?" the God's Lord asked, His voice salty with incredulity and irritation. Even Keiichi knew that the computer systems of the Gods and Demons were different. In the years of living with Belldandy, he had gained an essential understanding of the Divines and their 'systems'.

"Ignore the mockering obvious...and _listen_ to me for a moment!" Oni-sama demanded. "As You know, both Systems should be exactly the same in every respect, save for their total opposition of data metastatics. The Grids, the Mainframes, the Nodes and Cores...all possess the same design. Yours is predominantly blue, Ours is predominantly red. Has been thus for all of Time, will be thus for all of Time. Overlay one upon the other; do they not render as mirror-opposite across all Nine Dimensions? Are they not each other's shadow?"

Keiichi noticed the color shallowing back to normal on the Lord's face.

"Yet, by the workings of this curious device, I have discovered a most disturbing malfeat. The systems _do not oppose_ each other. The mirror-perfect precision of antinomy which allows for two contradictory computer networks to coexist within the OmniArc is gone. In facile terms, the difference between them...is _different_. It fails to correspond. By the accounting of this curious work of technology, both systems are missing a significance of data and consilience. What could account for such a profound discrepancy between the two? I can only state this: because the two computer systems are no longer mirror-opposite, the OmniArc must itself be in imbalance!"

"How could You possibly know this?" Kami-sama asked querulously. "Do You actually think that I would subscribe to such a grossly fabricated untruth? I suppose that You just somehow happen to have the _entirety_ of the Yggdrasil Xeomn at Your fingertips, so You can compare it to the Vanagdrasil System..."

"Verily, I do. See for yourself!" Oni-sama said, dramatically raising both arms. Keiichi saw what looked like two Skuld-tech type objects in each of the Dark Lord's hand. It was a bizarre type of...weapon? Artform? Tool? Toy?

With effortless ease, Oni-sama lofted them in the air towards the Lord of Yggdrasil. To Keiichi's eyes, the objects seemed to pulse through the air with a bizarre rippling effect, something he had never seen before. It was as if they were 'there' and yet 'not there'. The red and blue glows floated like fuzzy soccer balls until the Lord caught one in each hand.

This was getting way out of hand...

"Keiichi..."

Keiichi turned to look at his bride-to-be, the imploring tone of her voice pulling him away from the drama unfolding between Lord and the Dark Lord. He sought the safety of his beloved's eyes. _Here_ was the reality of his life! Bell-chan was looking at him with unsure eyes, beseeching him to trust her. Hands clutched tight over her breast in a tender repose, his fiancée was almost in tears. It was given that Belldandy was always the most sensitive of the sisters; he could only imagine how strongly she felt the injury of being suspected as being something other than who she really was. He had been so close to marrying her...they were just minutes away from exchanging their vows...and now this had happened! Once again, another cosmic pipe wrench had been thrown into the mix. Once again, something had happened to thoroughly vex his resolve to remain steadfast in his commitment to the Goddess he loved the most.

Intrusions upon their peace were so typical of their relationship. Belldandy had warned him of this long ago, way back when he and she first kindled their love together with the flames of their hearts. Since then, she continued to caution him repeatedly that being with a Goddess would create complications in his life that he could never even dream of. He often viewed these admonitions as a form of test. It was true that females constantly 'test' their mates to assure themselves. But then, Bell-chan promised that her love for him would always turn disaster into adventure. Eye-to-eye, he could still see the glowing expectations of a joyful married life in her face.

Destiny sparkled in every word she spoke.

It didn't make a difference _who_ stood in the way of his marrying her, even if it was the Demon's Dark Lord Himself. _Nothing_ was going to stop him from marrying the Goddess of his heart today!

"Come with me, Keiichi. Ignore those idiots who try to doubt your love for me. We have but to walk through the Gate of Judgment to prove how tightly our Souls are entwined with the threads of Love. Please trust me..."

"SOMEBODY STOP HER!" he heard Cevn scream.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Another mortal speaks?!" the Dark Lord exclaimed with thorough disgust. What was it with these insignificant creatures? With a start, He recognized the speaker...it was the cyborg who had served as a bridge between the two Nittons that the Norn Goddess had created!

This mortal cyborg was the...

"Keiichi, listen to Him!!" Cevn shouted. "She isn't Belldandy! She's _gone_...and this fucking _thing_ stole her away!"

Keiichi blinked his eyes in dismay, and then looked at Belldandy for reassurance. Cevn may be a good friend and colleague, but if he was accusing Belldandy, then he was clearly in the wrong. What kind of terrible thoughts could be causing his friend to accuse Bell-chan? Why was he siding with the Dark Lord instead of supporting he and Bell-chan? Cevn seemed to be steadfast in his views, but yet here he was. Sourly, Keiichi realized that even Cevn had turned against him. He noticed a flicker of emotion peel away...

But instead comforting him with a tender expression, Belldandy was glaring towards Cevn with a murderous expression in her eyes, an expression of hate that was almost choking in it malignancy.

Keiichi felt his spine turn to ice.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"It's a SurGoth wraith!" I shouted. For a moment, I had dozed off. Oddly enough, I felt myself being turned inside out in a dream-state. Yet, I was still sitting at the pew. While I was sleeping, I saw another 'me' phase into existence within me. I saw another 'me' sleeping in my room at the temple. I saw another me pooling energies...

I saw it all so clearly, but it was all too much.

Urgent. There wasn't a second to lose, I had to chose my words clear and fast. There were no known words to identify the being that had been created in Isilblius's wake; for this abomination was beyond Reality. The Divines would never recognize it for what it is. I seriously doubted that "Isilblius's Ghost" would sound even the slightest bit convincing. There was nothing I could do myself. If this threat was to be eliminated, it would have to be at the initiative of the two Lords. Only They had the power to deal with this. And I had to persuade them to believe in something that I didn't even understand.

"This SurGoth...is the embodiment of annihilation. It was there at the Emergence of the OmniArc..."

"Impossible!" Kami-sama exclaimed. To my surprise, Oni-sama didn't bother to contest my claim. Of the two, I had suspected that the Demon's Lord would hold the strongest disagreement against me. And implying that I was present at the creation of the OmniArc was the probably the wrong foot to start off of. That might invite Them to ask me to explain the 'why's' and 'how's'...and I wouldn't have a clue how to answer Their questions. Feeling forced, I decided that the best approach was the direct one.

"...and this _horror_ emerged out of it, somehow..."

I noticed that Keiichi was slowly stepping away from Belldandy. No, I corrected myself, realizing that it was _not_ Belldandy, not matter how much I wanted it to be. It only looked like Belldandy, wearing her physical manifestation of beauty like a guttersnipe would wear a new outfit. The tides of my resentment towards it raised a level. A very personal level. This was Keiichi's wedding day, the most sacred day in his life. With all the alienation between Urd and myself, this bright spot in Keiichi's life had become my beacon of hope as well. And this malign imposter had _ruined_ it for him! For that alone, it deserved to be wiped from all existence. The SurGoth had cunningly played all of us to get to this present moment of peril. That's how menacing it was. It was a few steps away from wreaking the worst disaster that could ever befall the OmniArc. This being was dangerous in the extreme! Could it be something that was potentially even more deadly than Isilblius? All of the OmniArc would be squeezed into a melon seed of pure Evil, if that thing can't be stopped.

All of this knowledge had come to me in a disturbing series of nightmares while I had fallen asleep during the wedding.

"If you take this, the Soul of Isilblius, and then combine it with the Death of the Everything, what you have is something exponentially more ruinous than either! Can you imagine insanity? An OmniArc with _only_ insanity, nothing else? Deranged minds and savage hearts as the sole expression of life throughout all of existence, without reprieve? The strength of love banished from all reality? The absolute suffering of all beings? Both of You gripped by madness? It _will_ happen if the two of You don't act! Please listen to me!!" I beseeched, begging with every iota of my existence.

"Bestill yourself!" I heard someone say. I felt myself fracturing as everything within me seemed to resist the movement of Time. I was being TimeStilled…and it wasn't by either of the two Lords.

"Somehow, when Isilblius destroyed the Everything...and then the Seven destroyed him...the 'ghost' of Isilblius and the 'void' of his corrupted version of the Everything somehow re-integrated. Akin with the urge to destroy all in their path, the two forces re-energized each other..." I shouted as my vocalizer froze in mid-sentence. I couldn't feel my cyborganic body; it was almost completely shifted into StillTime. No longer could I give voice to the terrible jag of intuition that had pierced my hopes.

"Keiichi!!" Belldandy said angrily, turning on him and stamping her feet. "Don't believe him! He's a liar! He means to harm us!"

I looked up at the Lord, who was clutching the two objects against His chest. Uncannily, I got a sense that He was 'reading' their contents. Could that be how the Demon's Lord had found the aberration between the two computer systems, by something that was contained in those two objects? What were those objects?

I noticed that Keiichi was looking at Belldandy with a wary expression.

"If you don't believe me, Keiichi, I..I'll make you suffer unspeakable pain for an eternity's eternity. Your punishment will be exquisitely agonizing, and it will last far beyond the point when your sanity takes leave of you..." 'Belldandy' hissed as she snapped a restraining hand around Keiichi's wrist. I watched his face blanch with shock as she started dragging him towards the invisibly concealed Gate of Judgment. Invisible to mortals, but not to my cybernetic eyes.

The SurWraith was revealing its true motives...

Why did it want to pass within the Gate of Judgment? The two Lords were just standing around, watching the drama unfold, unmoved or possibly confused by all of this. Could it be in love with Keiichi, somehow? If so, that would be a _major_ complication!

"No! That's sick!" I fevered, my mind sluggish. I felt like I was drowning, only instead of in an ocean, I was drowning into an emptiness. I fought to keep afloat mentally.

There was no answer. There seemed to be no purpose to the SurGoth's actions. Love was an impossibility for such a being; there was no love in Isilblius to transmit to this ghoul, his successor. There couldn't be, after what he schemed, after what he did. Isilblius had charted a course of uncaring destruction. He had purposefully extinguished all life in the Everything, without even a shred of remorse...

...and then it struck me!! So hard, I felt reality choke within me. A tingling coursed throughout all of my metallic components and systems, their complexities giving sense as if the faux-flesh was melting away. Impossibly, I was feeling fear on a physical level as spirals of innerspace. And with good reason. This SurGoth, borne of Isilblius's Soul, didn't simply want to destroy Life. Its purpose was far more villainous than simple destruction. Why kill Reality, when instead the entire OmniArc could be plunged into an emotional abyss where all would suffer in agony? A recollection pasted itself upon my consciousness as my mind fevered to conceptualize such a 'hell'. With fog-thoughted steps, I glimpse-remembered how Isilblius had contrived to have the Gods and Demons war against each other. War? Between God and Demon, there could be competition and enmity, but never war. Disturbed, I asked myself how could I remember such a thing? Scene switch in my mind...and then I remembered Urd lying on her deathbed, while I frantically sought to find a cure for her, my grasp on sanity being ripped away during the process of trying to prevent...something. _That _memory slammed me with choke-heart shock! Yet another memory, like a grainy film switching reels, purchased my attention. Total recall, revealing how Isilblius used me as some kind of anchor, poisoning my Soul so that I would die and create an 'opening' for him to return to the Everything. Through a hazing lee, I recalled with utter disbelief how I had fought with Isilblius for trillions of years. A pattern of conflict, weaving within the eons...

Over and over again, Isilblius used _others_ to do his dirty work.

"What the hell am I?" I thought to myself in a whispering mental voice. Trillions of years? Nothing could survive such epochs, eternities, and perdurances! How could I comprehend any of this? Experience teared against the smooth sheen skin of reality. I was losing track of existence. I was losing my mind! Yet, I must have lived through it...no imaginings could ever paint such a bizarre fabric of occurrences. I admitted to the defeating, frightening confusion. How could I understand that the SurGoth wraith had been created at the beginning of the OmniArc unless _I was there_? Thoughts splayed akimbo, I exerted my utmost effort and started to walk up the center aisle of the church towards where Keiichi, the Lord and 'Belldandy' were gathered. It seemed like the only sensible thing to do, because it made no sense.

The SurGoth only hastened its efforts to drag Keiichi through the Gate of Judgment.

The Gate of Judgment...

I remembered how Keiichi and Belldandy...the _real_ Belldandy...had explained to me that the Gate of Judgment was manifested to serve as a Seal for the Gods. To confirm the presence of Love. I had heard it often; it was one of their favorite adventure-tales. When two Divines who loved each other walked underneath the Gate, those who truly loved each other without regret or doubt would be 'touched' in some way; their love would be recognized and affirmed. Strengthened. Opposingly, those who harbored misgivings towards their loved one would be forever separated once they passed within the Gate.

Somehow, the Gate was the key to the SurGoth's schemes!

But what if a being lacked love completely? If a being that was absolutely bereft of love were to pass through the Gate...

"Oh my...shit!" I gasped. Keiichi loved Belldandy more than anything else in the world. Certainly, that love couldn't fade in the last minute, because he had learned that Belldandy wasn't who he thought she was. Which could only mean...

"It wants to kill Love!" I exclaimed, my voice already hoarse even though I had hardly spoken. I didn't know how, but I sensed that I had fully intuited the SurGoth's design. Another surprise: what had seemed to take an hour of concentrated mental investigation...hadn't taken any time at all. I looked at the surroundings. Everything was the same!

The glaze of hatred 'Belldandy' cast in my direction in reaction only further vindicated my surmise. Suddenly, I felt very glad that both the Lord and the Dark Lord were here. There might be a chance to escape this one unscathed.

"Belldandy...you're hurting me..." I heard Keiichi gasp, grasping his chest with searching fingers. From where I was standing, it looked like he was having a heart attack. I felt a sharp pain of empathy for him; his heart was probably shattered after what had just gone down. It was being torn out.

"Brother..._stop_ her!!" Oni-sama cried, His voice shrill with desperation. "If this false-Goddess passes within the Gate with this mortal, Love will no longer exist in the OmniArc! If the ultimate expression of an active, anti-Love...totally devoid of any love or hatred for anything...walks through the Gate of Judgment with a heart that is filled with Love, the result will short circuit _all _of the Love, everywhere! It will destroy the agency of free will, which founts out of the capacity for Love!"

"We shall not let you pass within the Gate!" Kami-sama declared in a shout filled with conviction. My heart leapt at the sound of resolve in His voice; Oni-sama had convinced His Brother towards taking action. Framing words with actions, He and the Dark Lord raised their hands and slashed 'Belldandy' with intense broad radiates of blue and red light. The air in the church turned neon-colored as the blasts of light-rendered-into-energy slammed against Belldandy. I could only hope that this wasn't the real Belldandy...that she hadn't been 'possessed' by the SurGoth like I had been when Mara possessed me several times in the past. They ramped up the power, and the lances of light widened in an arc. Nothing could survive the force of the two Lords attacking full-throttle!

Belldandy's 'form' seemed to divide under the jetflow of Metanative energies...and a small blue-white translucence started to pull away from the shock of light. It appeared to be in the form of a butterfly-frail ether-shape that was barely discernible to my cybernetic eyes. Beneath the faint blue figure, a skeletal animus sheered forth from the conflagration. It was horrifying to behold. A dead-toothed vision of Death would have been more comfortable to the senses. Yellowish-grey sparkles of light outlined its amorphous form, while green-ice 'wing's' flapped slowly behind it, emitting a leathery, stenchy fog. It seemed to bleed disgust at the events, at the Lords, at the Gods and mortals, at everything.

The force of the combined powers of the Lord and Dark Lord's bursts of Metanative potency seemed to prism and reflect off of the point where Belldandy had been standing, like water splashing off of a mirror. Fortunately, Keiichi had been thrown a few meters away from the swirling dervish of light, safely out of harm's way. One or the other of the Lords had shielded him. Was shielding _us_...the energies swarming around the church were no doubt pulsing on a scale of destructiveness that could not be measured by mortal ken. I sensed that one or both of the Lords had seen to his safety, because the energies focused on the SurGoth wraith looked like they could have easily melted a galaxy. Actually, knowing that the wielders were the two Lords, the deadly streaks of force were probably exponentially more powerful than any galaxy-destroying potentiality that I could imagine. Miraculously, the damage was contained; there was no disintegration of matter like one would expect in a giant robot sci-fi anime.

The blow-out of structured chaos slowly caused a rift to open up behind the SurGoth. It wasn't one of those Hollywood 'black holes' by any means. No SFX unit could ever create a vision like the one I watched unfold. The rift was like pure energy splashed by a heavy rain; it constantly bowled and distorted upon itself...but clearly led _somewhere_. I could see broad vistas within its inconstant sphere.

Spontaneously, the light-blue 'angel' form seemed to flee _into_ the void, disappearing from sight.

I rushed over to Keiichi and helped him to his feet. Gasping for breath, it seemed that he was knocked almost senseless by his tumble. He had collided with the front row pew so hard, it had been knocked over. Wobbling against my assistance, Keiichi looked around, his eyes errantly darting about...

Suddenly, he broke free of my grasp and _leapt_ into the rift, chasing after the 'angel' shape.

"--_DAD!!_--"

I heard two children screaming from somewhere behind me. A boy and a girl apparently aged in their early teens suddenly dashed towards the front of the church, pursuing Keiichi. Before anyone could react, the two God-kids ran full-speed into the rift.

How did I know that they were _God-kids_? And their names...Keleste and Keiyasu...what experience or memory informed me of their names? Belldandy...the real Belldandy, had assured me "that reality will always depart from its perceived path." Now I knew what she had meant.

And then the writhing skeletal ghost-wings narrowed into a stream of pitch darkness and flowed _inside_ of me...

I was rocketed backwards by the force, spinning through the air. I felt myself collide with something or someone in the back of the church. Out of the mist of my eye, I saw _another_ me lying underneath me. An exact duplicate of my cyborganic form. Within the span of a few seconds, my neuronet of awareness seemed to melt away...

Through a haze of pain, I staggered towards the rift.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Keiichi was swept by a wave of revulsion that was so intense, he slammed down on his knees and vomited on the ground. He wanted to hurl the horrible truth out of his mind. The entire time he had been with Belldandy, she had actually been that Wraith thing! A terrifying thought scratched for his attention: could Bell-chan have _always_ been an evil poltergeist? With a body-sized shudder, he forced himself to shunt that speculation out of his mind. In his heart, he tried to assure himself that he had known two Belldandys. One was the Goddess that he had lived with over the past five-plus years. She had shared a love with him that was too genuine and intense to be confused with deceit or malice. The other Belldandy was this...abhorrence. No...she hadn't always been a creature of evil! It couldn't be!! Keiichi simply wanted to believe that the Belldandy he loved was _real_...anything else would be impossibly cruel.

But his heart had lied to him; his sense of reality tainted with the betrayal. His love for her was so deeply embedded in his life, he had failed to notice that she had changed. That she wasn't really there at all. Yet, there was another part of her too. Right before his eyes, Belldandy had been blasted into atoms by Kami-sama and Oni-sama. Witnessing this was horrorshow poured upon nightmare. But like a phoenix rising from the ashes, two winged ghostly figures emerged...and one of them looked tenuously familiar.

That vision of gossamer might have been an _angel_.

He was hopeful of one thing...that the ethereal form he had glimpsed was a Goddess Angel! During the 'fight' that had erupted in the midst of his wedding ceremony, it was apparent that all of the participants had been 'frozen in time'. Even Bell's parents were motionless, despite their status as Senior First Class Gods. But somehow, he had been spared their fate. Mysteriously, Cevn had been spared as well. And he even thought he had seen another Skuld and Mara.

Unable to stand, Keiichi steadied himself on hands and knees, his lungs sharply hurting after dry-heaving his guts empty. Quick-glancing, Keiichi took in that he was surrounded by what appeared to be a drab, colorless rocky plains punctuated with skyscraper-tall escarpments summiting violently from the arid, cracked land. The ground was very spare of vegetation, the grey-lemon sky was disturbing to look at, the air was nose-bleed sear with the smell of mustiness. He saw a horizon deeply pouched with varied mounts and valleys, alien and uninviting. Remote and nearby collided here. Lacking the smooth line-of-sight edge, the vista suggested a calcareous clay vase topped off with a shattered rim. Curiously, the environs strongly reminded Keiichi of the rugged scenery he had encountered deep in the desert wadi in Algeria. Totally weird, totally unnerving.

The scenery also recalled the deadened district surrounding the Gate of Judgment. He had occasionally wondered why the Gate of Judgment had been located in such a desolate place. Why wasn't it given pride of place in some beautiful theme park in the most populated place in Yggdrasil? Something so important shouldn't be stashed away in the midst of what appeared to be ruins of an ancient civilization. The Gate's appearance in the stilled land was as incongruous as placing Kyoto's Golden Pavilion on the perimeter of the Athenian Acropolis. He turned and looked to the horizon and could only see emptiness. No Gate. Could the Gate be a being, as he had learned several years back when Peorth got stranded and the Earth-Yggdrasil Gate came in the form of a girl?

Thinking of the Gate this way caused him to wonder where its Guardian was. In the aftermath of Celestin's ill-starred rebellion against Kami-sama, Morgan Le Fey had decided to serve as a guide and voice of encouragement for all those who volunteered to pass within the Gate. But if she wasn't here, then the Gate obviously wasn't here either. Was it still back on the Earthrealm? Keiichi had been too coiled tight with tension to even notice if Morgan was at the wedding. Standing up, Keiichi ignored the wrenching muscle pain searing up and down his lower back, and slapped the dust off of his tuxedo.

Cevn had said that Belldandy was _gone_...

He had tried to push it from his mind, but the haunting possibility struck Keiichi with a Soul-squeezing force. Insanity is crafted when one's emotions are ripped from the heights of bliss and plummeted down into the compassing well of disappointment. Keiichi felt like his mind was being shredded, like he was going insane. Suddenly, where he was, what he was, who he was…simply didn't matter. Everything that mattered was brought to doubt, stripped by the recent ruination of his wedding. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn't put it away.

His beloved Goddess might be dead.

Might have been dead for a day, a month, a year. He didn't have a clue where Belldandy was, or the how and when this _thing_ had switched places with her. He didn't even know where he was at this moment! He tried to recollect recent events in an effort to disperse his mounting despair, to keep what little grasp on sanity that he could fingerhold.

Bell-chan had gone with him to France where he won the Le Mans. At the victory celebration, he had proposed marriage to her on bended knee in front of everyone that mattered in his life, and she had graciously accepted. She was so _beautiful _at that moment! Then he had been separated from her and shifted into some rockstar's life in a weird version of Tokyo. From there, his memories became hazy. There was a circle of life, a circle of light, a mass of confusion, and another race of some kind that he had to win. He had a vague impression that he had built something, some kind of massive engine...and then he was out of that mess and back in his own skin, back home at the temple, where he belonged. But Belldandy had been put in an ice-like pool in the temple grounds, like an insect in amber. Something had to be immensely powerful and sadistic to do that to a Goddess. Yet, he had the impression that his love for her during that time was also in some kind of suspended animation. Everyone was frustrated with him. Winter came and he tried to teach Cevn how to ride, and of course Cevn had crashed his prize BMW Rennesport...and then Bell-chan appeared. No one saw her arise from that prison or whatever she had been frozen in. But she was back! She had been so loving and tender to him, and his feelings towards her were reawakened. Bell-chan ran the house as usual, tolerated her sister's nonsense and refereed them at times. She even was feted with a bachelorette party by her Divine peers, and then a second one by his own sister, who had known her for five years, longer than anyone else but him. Combing through the sequence of memories, he couldn't find a single place where Bell-chan could have disappeared, and been…replaced…by that terror. No matter how he looked at it, _she…was…gone_!

_She was gone…_

Utterly defeated, utterly heartbroken, Keiichi collapsed to his knees. His heart desperately wanted to feel numb, but he couldn't turn away from it. His mind could not release itself from his feelings. Looking at his dust-smeared palms for a moment, he scooped up two handfuls of silt and slapped them to his face as he started sobbing and howling heartrending screams. The breath of life that was Belldandy had been taken away from him.

He had come close to losing Bell before: during the omiai with Tyyr; when he had been sent into Medieval Japan by Isilblius; when Bell's parents had dropped him in the middle of the Algerian erg-desert for their stupid little trial; when he had wound up in the 'Keiichi Moristar Universe' with sexy Peorth as his wish-bestowing Goddess instead of Bell-chan. But this was different than any of those times, because this time he had _lost_ Belldandy without even being aware of it. His recent time with her...the love had fled away.

His heart itself had been stolen.

There was no reason for what had happened. There was no reason for him to go on. He was all by himself now. What hope could a mortal have to resurrect a Goddess? Yet, even as his life and love seemed blighted by the circumstances, a faint girl's voice seemed to pierce his dire sense of ominium.

He collapsed into himself, a synapse of agony...and was touched. Physically touched. Keiichi thought he was hallucinating from grief as he felt himself surrounded by two warm bodies.

"Father, you are _not_ alone!" the voice said softly, gently, but with a conviction that almost frightened him with its stridency. _"We're_ with you...and together, the three of us are going to find her! My brother and I _promise_ that you will be reunited with her, and that together we'll be a family!"

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Keleste had never imagined that it would happen _this_ way. For most of her life, she had anticipated an eventful day in the mists of the Future, a glorious moment of reunion where she would finally meet her Goddess Mother. She remembered how she would sometimes feel...all those times when she combed through the stacks of the Ygg System with earnest diligence and then she would become almost loopy with exhaustion. Drawn out into such a spin-barreling fatigue, she would daydream of imagined moments in time. Precious moments of tearful discoveries with a Goddess who was kind, gentle, understanding and caring. Whispered confidences with her Mother. The security of an adult looking after her with absolute devotion and protection. This was the invisible bond between Mother and daughter that she had never experienced; this was the heart-keep maternal love of her desperate imaginings. Keleste had spent a lifetime trying to prepare herself for the inevitable moment when she would find the person who would make her life rich with Love. While most Goddesses her age were starting to imagine boy-Gods in the role of "the one and only!" and "the one who is destined for me!" she was seeking an entirely different realm of loving affiance.

"But reality has a habit of re-engineering its miracles," as her Stepmom-Aunt Skuld would say. The search for Mother had consumed so much of her attention and efforts through the millennia...and now she had found her Father instead!

As she and Keiyasu emerged from the vortex, they found themselves in the middle of an empty land. A forlorn, desolate wasteland...save for the sobbing figure crouched down in the dust nearby. Perhaps it was foolhardy to take a leap of faith, but it wasn't the first time she'd done so in recent moments. She and her brother didn't have the slightest idea where the Red Hole above Hild's Black Palace would take them...and she had no certainty where the rift that opened up inside of the church would terminus.

Her heart pounding in her throat, she felt a gripping nervousness because she may have glimpsed both her Father and her Mother. Despite the chaos that erupted almost immediately upon their arrival, despite the Dark Lord's spell that had stilled everybody in the chamber, despite the shock of being on the Earthrealm and seeing its mortal inhabitants...Keleste had fought with all of her heart for a chance to 'read' the young man at the front of the church. Something seemed to drain her Goddess abilities and powers rapidly. Realizing that her Goddess nature was being stripped away, she tried one more time…and breathlessly, she was jolted with the discovery that his DNA matched hers and her brother's with a full degree of perfection! All these millennia, she had wanted to meet her Mother...had _planned_ on meeting her Goddess Mother...but now, she was encountering her Father for the first time.

_Her FATHER !__!!_

"D..dad!" she said for the first time in her life, so quiet she could barely hear her own voice. Keleste felt her heart pouring out tears of gratitude that her eyes couldn't shed. He was supposed to dead! Dead and mingled into the dust of a barren ruined Earth over a hundred thousand years ago. Yet, she had never given up hope that she would find him. Not once! When she and her brother built that memorial to him in the middle of a wasted continent, Keleste had finally accepted that _she _would never find her Father. It was beyond her. _She_ would never reach him through the quiet millennia...but that only meant that someone else might. Once she had found her Goddess Mother, once she was reunited with her, Keleste knew in her deepmost heart that her Mother would do anything, would exert any effort, would attempt the workings that neither she or her brother could do...to reunite her with her Father. Her Mother would be older, would be a full Goddess with a real Goddess License, and would have much more wisdom and Divine powers than either she or Keiyasu. Her Mother would love her more than anyone could, and the power of love would move her to reunite she and her brother with their Father. Her Mother would know what to do, even if it meant turning Time back on itself!

She never imagined that it would happen like this…

"Breathe," she reminded herself as the young figure in front of her broadcast his tattered emotions with howls of grief. His spirit was falling to pieces, right in front of her eyes. She choked back her own tears. Everything was so mixed-up!

"Look at his strength," Keiyasu thoughtcast to her…and Keleste realized that her Goddess powers were back! "It takes courage to be one with such a deeply-felt loss. His heart is brave enough to face the love he has...rather than run away from it."

She was glad he was her brother, because he had looked for strength while she had been overcome with gratitude. But she could sense something new with Keiyasu; a father-desire that only a son could have for his Father. Her emotions soared even higher because of her brother's joy.

"Could you even imagine how it must feel?" she answered. "Father must have loved Mother with all his heart!"

"Yes, a part of me can imagine it," her brother answered tentatively. "I've been living upon a wish that I could meet our real parents...and both the wish and the absence have brought me to feel so much sadness."

Keiyasu, being the boy, was the first to step towards their grieving Father. Fighting her impulses, Keleste remained more reserved about approaching him at such a delicate time. For a first meeting, this wasn't exactly an ideal emotional state for anyone to be in. Watching her Father pounding the ground with his fists, she felt so disheartened with empathy that her tears of joy quickly sorrowed. Keleste was familiar with the emotions that encircled a lifetime's sadness because of never having...but her Father was feeling the shattering wake of having lost what he had just _had_.

They needed each other, now more than ever before.

Gulping, she stepped quietly forward, feeling the dust stirring around her with each footstep. She felt like she was rowing a small boat towards an immense waterfall. The young man was so entrapped in despair, he didn't even notice she or Keiyasu. Shaking, she tentatively touched her Father's heaving shoulders; the brief contact almost arcing with electricity. His name...Keiichi...he was really her Father! Flesh and blood, warm to the touch, living and breathing...

Dreamlike. The need pouring into her Soul, Keleste crouched down and hugged herself close to her Father for the first time in her life. Even though he didn't know she was his daughter, Keleste could feel Keiichi's living essence; the kindness in his Soul and the profound sense of heart-injury he was feeling. Having lived with loss all her life, Keleste felt her feelings twinning with his. She looked at his dust-covered face, and then at Keiyasu's...and sucked a sudden gasp deep in her chest.

With a start, she recognized that her brother actually _looked like_ her father! The eyes, the positioning of the eyebrows, the shallow arch of the nose, the slightly raised cheekbones, the ovule chin...were almost identical!! Keleste struggled to say a few words of comfort, but nothing came out. Carefully, she buried her cheek in her Father's shoulders and opened herself to the tears she had been holding onto for an entire lifetime of lifetimes...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

_"You're not alone…"_

"B..Bell-chan?" Keiichi thought as a flowing lock of hair strayed breezily, brushing his cheek. Dashing into the rift, he had wanted to kill the pain...to get away from the harsh fracture of his wedding. And yet, he had glimpsed a will-o-the-wisp with wings, almost transparent, arise from where Belldandy had been. Barely an outline of a form, it had taken flight into the void. On the slimmest wings of hope, he had imagined that it was Bell-chan's Angel. The _real_ Belldandy's Angel. But once he arrived here, he was all alone; isolated and imploding with grief.

No one else was here.

Looking towards his shoulder and following the silken gossamer with his eyes, he noticed that he was being hugged by a Goddess. He thought he had heard someone mentioning something about "Father", but he was too distraught to be fully aware of the voices in his head, let alone the voices in his ears. Whatever she said, she sounded confident…just like Bell-chan would sound if she really was intent on doing something. He reasoned that they must have been talking about Kami-sama. Torn momentarily from his woe, he looked at the Goddess's face...and his eyes flared wide open when he noticed that she had the same facial marks on her cheekbones that Bell had.

Maybe this was _his_ Belldandy! Could it be Bell-chan?!

She turned to look at him, and he saw the most beautiful pair of baby-blue eyes he had ever seen in his life. Swirling his view, he looked at the other person hugging him, and saw a young boy nuzzling his other shoulder. The boy's face was all screwed up, mannishly trying not to cry. But the tears glistened on his cheeks, and when his eyes met Keiichi's briefly, he quickly hid his face and broke into heavy sobbing. He too had Bell-chan's distinctive Divine markings on his forehead and cheekbones...

"Dad!!" he heard the young boy choke out, his voice muffled as he hugged him so tight across the chest. Keiichi worried that his breath might be squeezed out of his lungs. In fact, the boy was grasping him so tightly, he started coughing.

His eyes stinging from crying, Keiichi blinked the tear-blurs out of his sight and looked at the girl again. His mind was spiraling; the gated moments of blank-consciousness only added to his confusion. His awareness strobed as he watched the young Goddess...she was sobbing even harder than he had been when the pain of losing Belldandy threatened to pull him under. But a voice had said _"You're not alone"_ and he was pulled back from the abyss. Her face was partially hidden by her hair so he didn't get a clear view , just enough to see that she seemed to have Bell-chan's eyes! The profound despair that was burning through his heart like a forest fire was quickly dampened by a rainstorm of surprise. Perhaps Belldandy had been 'de-aged', just like she had been during their initial encounter with Velpser!

Doko...soko...koko

But it wasn't quite Belldandy.

Instead of wearing a colorful ribbon to tie her hair back, the young Goddess was wearing a kind of bandana that gave her a more 'masculine' look, almost tomboyish. Her nose was narrower and longer than Bell's, and her hair was richer in deep browns and reds. Two long bangs of braided dark russet hair fell in front of her ears; the back of her bandana was knotted around her gathered hair, so that it fell down her back in a long thick single ponytail in the style of female athletes. For some reason, her head-cloth reminded Keiichi of Lime from the old Saber Marionette series he had watched as a teenager. Her eyes sparkled with an intensity that Belldandy's would never have had...

One thing was certain...she _definitely_ wasn't Belldandy.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Sunless, yet the sense of being torn apart, which sliced my being within the split seconds as the SurGoth somehow buried itself inside of me. I felt pregnant with Death, with an insensate Voidness. The dark sphere that had emerged from the twinned energy-blasts of the two Lords had enveloped me briefly, and then it stabbed into me silently like a penetrating chill-fog. Needled with pain, Life seemed to be snuffled out. And yet I swam in struggling consciousness, feeling like the time I was on the verge of drowning in a lake. It wasn't at all like the times I had been possessed by Mara, early on during my new lifetime in Japan. Instead of sensing the 'static' of a Demonic aura, I was overwhelmed with a chilling numbness, as if a hole had been carved out of my kokoro.

I did feel frightened.

For some reason, the rift that had appeared in the chapel area of the church seemed to beckon to me. A stark fear gripped me, hazing me with daunting insecurities. Plagued by what was inside of me, I had to get out of _here_...and the rift represented some place _there_. A place outside of the reach of the horrific scene.

A moment ago, I had been dozing off at Keiichi and Belldandy's wedding.

The rift spat me out into the middle of a wasteland.

Had I turned into a Frankenstein monster? As archetype, the monster is always rippled with the element of the 'other'; the hidden quality or faculty of character that skews its refractory actions toward cruelty and morbidity. The unknown transforms uncertainty into fear; and with the added elements of perversity and malice, the unknown evokes terror. Now that I had the nightmare inside of me, could I be safe from myself? I could hear it drumming against my Soul, screaming hatred and destruction.

Enough...just wouldn't be enough.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"So Mother's name is Bell-chan..." Keiyasu thought as he reached out a trembling hand and rested it on his Father's face. The way Keiichi…his Father…was looking at him, it was clear to the young God that his Dad didn't recognize him. How could he possibly explain to their Father that he and Keleste were his children? Apparently, his Father had earlier been in the midst of the Earthrealm ritual called "wedding"...

Confusion reigned supreme on his Father's face. Deciding on impulse, Keiyasu passed a calming trance into his dad to try and settle his mortified nerves. He really didn't want to mess with anyone's mind, especially his dad's...but he also didn't want to stack disillusion upon disillusion. Keiyasu felt a little pang of guilt until he realized that once his father discovered that he had two teenaged children, the realization would _totally_ mess with his mind. To the max.

So helping Dad calm down might be the best approach right now.

Observing that Keleste was too wrapped up in herself to talk at the moment, Keiyasu let go and reluctantly stepped away from his dad. Keleste followed his lead, and then his father stood up. Keiyasu noticed right away that his dad was _short_; he was almost as tall as his father, even though his physical manifestation was that of a 15-year old boy.

"Dad, we're going change all of this. We're going to change you from a bridegloom back into a bridegroom!" Keiyasu said in English. Almost immediately, he heard his sister sighing deeply, the back of her hand resting against her forehead.

"Aiyyyy. You dope! How could you joke around at a time like this?" she said, clearly irritated. "Besides, did you ever stop to think that he might not understand English?"

"Well, we were in a Christian church..." Keiyasu replied tensely.

_"Hea, ha ha, hah, haha haha..."_

It started off as a trickling giggle, but within short order, he heard laughter fronted with maniacal abandon. Amazingly, his father had burst into rakes of laughter. Keiyasu sensed that something in his Father had totally snapped…

"Now look what you've done! He's completely lost his senses!" Keleste accused in a low voice, making sure to elbow him hard in the ribs to emphasize her point.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --


	125. Pt 125: Recomposing

**Part 125: Recomposing**

SOMEWHERE:

Everything can restart," I observed to myself. "Even this..."

Why do we have emotions? At one time, simple cellular organisms developed a sensory apparatus that informed them of 'joy' and 'pain'. Safety and comfort versus. threat and unease. So here we are, a billion years further down the evolutionary flowchart...and we still measure our reality by feeling joy and pain. But in our case, the joy and pain becomes blurred by our cognition and ability to recall. In one sense, a mind is like a black hole; able to trap stray experiences just like an event horizon draws in matter. The 'cosmic dust' of experience then adheres to the mind, causing it to become more ready to draw in like experiences. Like magnets, joyful 'moments' attract joyful experiences...and the mind attends to these, creating deeper channels of emotion. Like water carving out a valley, predominant emotions gain greater influence on the mind, causing it to interpret 'joy' and 'pain' in more resolute ways. At times, the mind can interpret reality in rigidified manners; phenomena are sensed dysfunctionally as the mind continually interprets them as 'anger', 'depression', 'confusion' as so forth. Experiences that others would view as 'joyful' are interpreted oppositionally, creating a powerful sense of dysphoria. If emotions are an 'on/off' switch to aid sentient beings with their interaction of the outside world, why are they so intense?

Okay, so we humans have emotions. Now, time to take the next intuitive leap. If the 'joy/pain' sensorium has become so sophisticated in mortal beings, how much more sophisticated can such faculties become? When one considers Divine beings like Gods and Demons, is the mortal concept of 'feelings' transcended? Could their sense of emotions compare to ours like our human senses would compare to those of reptiles? Or even further? To them, our entire lifetime of emotional energy could be nothing more than an atom. Are electrons then a manifest of Love? Positive energy? Obvious, the Gods and Demons have perceptive capacities that transcend emotion. When Urd would talk about her "Goddess Sense", what was she _really_ describing? Ever since I was brought to Japan and deposited among a sisterhood of Goddesses and a Demoness thrown in for good measure, I had periodically contemplated these knots of inquiry. This, and the fact that I never could figure out what kind of emotional 'charge' people got when they read the gossip magazines frequently sold at supermarkets. Both were total mysteries to me.

Take a bunch of us emotional beings with our so-called rationality and put us together, and you have a created template. Over the centuries, over the millennia, the template is recapitulated. There's a need for us to self-organize into a society, just like bees in a hive. Yet, it's always the same society, with the same munificence and avarice bouncing back and forth since the beginning of recorded history. We do the same thing over and over as a species, thinking we're doing something new, assuming we are bringing novelty into the world. But the template is always there. With all this repetition, does the template become refined? Do we get any better at it? Instead of building pyramids, we build churches; instead of warring with spears, we war with remote-controlled bombs; instead of working together in the fields, we swarm to convenience stores. There is only so much to go around, and always, most are left out in the cold. Our histories edify us with the notion that we're smarter, wiser, better than our forebears...which goes back to that little thing about dysfunction senses and oppositional interpretations. These templates of group behavior seem more like the madness of the masses than actual society. Fueled by the same joy/pain as it evolved into more complex measures of all that is going on around us. Only now the template is yielded because those emotions are focused on measuring what's going on _between_ us. The more we think we're pushing the boundaries of the template, the more we're trapped within it. Yet, somehow, the Gods and Demons got past all of that. Somehow, they contrived to break out of the template and ended up transcending it. With their emotions intact.

One can only observe reality for so long, and then it all starts to look the same...and one then becomes an alien. Aloof and numb at the same time. Diving within the absurdity of day-to-day emotional life is like swallowing and then choking on the nonsense. Why would anyone chose to swim in a place where there is so much peace juxtaposed with so much violence? Even the truth cannot spare a bystander. There is no turning away. There's _never_ a turning away. But many manage the escape through whatever means are available. Actually, they attempt escape and then emerge as prisoner and warden at the same time. Using whatevers to drug the senses and intellect away from the 'that' which matters most. Movies, food, travel, religion, sex, drugs, anime, money...

Even then, there is no _true_ turning away...

Yet, here I am, unable to turn away. Hold me down long enough, and I'll come up fighting. Right now, feeling like a tree splintered by a tornado. Nearby, two young teenagers are feeling an intensity of emotion so palpable, it was curving the air around them. Something about Keiichi had triggered a storm of fervency in them...and I didn't have any answers. If my robotic 'skin' was human skin instead of bioplastic, I would be feeling goose bumps at the scene I was witnessing. But my body wasn't human; so again I felt like I was being cold, when the 'human' part of my cybernetic being was screaming empathy...

So again, why do we have emotions?

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

EARTHREALM:

Urd noticed the sensation of being 'frozen' gradually receding. The Eldest Norn recovered her awareness with a layering of spite; someone or something had stilled Time on her, the bastard! But being a Norn comes with unique gifts, one of which is a partial immunity to silence within Time. No matter what, she could perceive what was happening during TimeStilled states as lingering quicksilver shadows-acts. She could hear the whispering of Time's cycling mechanisms in the midst of the absence of movement. Any other 'normal' God or Demon would have totally been blanked out during the passage of Time. Belldandy had awakened this skill as well, while Skuld still had a few millennia to go before she could hear the sounds of Time, even if Time was emptied out of the Now like water poured out of a beaker. Urd regarded the blank expressions on the faces of Gods and mortals alike; everyone had seemed to take a vacation from consciousness. Stupid dipwads, trying to sneak one by her! Flexing her fingers next to her hips, she felt pissed-off that someone had tried to lock her out of Time by a StillTime spell. Even worse, it had happened during Belldandy's wedding. To deny Time to a Norn was like stealing the baker's cakes...

_"Yhheeeeeekkk!"_

Swirling around, Urd saw the source of ear-pitching scream. The teenaged-irritant, Skuld, was limply suspended in Tomohisa's arms, looking every bit like a damsel freshly-rescued from distress. As Urd pondered the situation with amusement, her little sister's eyes blinked rapidly...and then widened to beads.

"Leggo of me!" her youngest sister shouted at Tomohisa in biting tones of outrage. But oddly enough, Urd noticed that Skuld had turned _towards_ him, was holding herself _tighter_ against him, was pressing her head against his chest, was grasping him with her forearms. Tomohisa's gasping for breath confirmed this fact. Urd hoped he had brought his inhaler, because it looked like he might need it sooner than later.

If circumstances weren't so dire and confusing, Urd would have allowed herself to burst into laughter and taunt her little sister to the core. This was truly one of Skuld's better emotional misfires! Instead, she reluctantly muffled a chuckle with her hand and continued to orient herself to the surroundings.

There would be time to play later.

Mara, freshly released from the StillTime spell, was staring at her with rage-rilled Demoness eyes. Urd knew that if she herself wasn't taking this unwarranted intrusion well, her Demoness sister would be that much more filled with ire. It didn't take much to make Mara brim with frustration.

"In the name of all that's Dark, what's going on here? Cough..cough..who did this? How could they, right in the middle of a wedding! Ignorant shitheads, if I find out who's responsible for this, I'm gonna own their asses bad..." Mara threatened. Suddenly, something seemed to draw the Demoness out of her anger...Urd looked on as Mara gasped and then shuddered from head to toe. Blanching, Mara gestured with her head. Urd followed her gaze to the back of the church and saw the Demon's Dark Lord. Urd felt a deep gulp in her throat as she watched in awe. Just as fast as they had appeared, the older versions of Skuld and Mara, along with the several children that were standing next to them, swift-phased into invisibility.

Urd knew that they were gone. Not just to somewhere, but to somewhen as well. All that was left of that crowd was the Demon's Dark Lord. Shifting her attention towards the altar, she saw the Lord, no longer guised as a wizened mortal priest. The church looked intact, but Urd had a shadow-sense of an epic struggle that had passed while she was 'frozen'. The Metanative fields and forces in the area were stirred, just like water and shochu mixed by an expert barkeep. "I could use a drink about right now," she muttered to no one in particular.

"Me too, Urd! What in the Dark Lord's name happened here?" Mara stammered.

_"Leggo of me, you pervert!"_

Urd ignored Skuld and shook her head 'no' to Mara. As usual, the answers didn't come quickly. Belldandy and Keiichi were missing. That idiot Cevn was missing, too. She had actually seen a version of her younger sister; amazingly, a Skuld that was _her_ age! Not the whining teenage girl next to her. The elder Skuld was definitely not in childhood, Urd didn't fail to notice the curve of her hips and a bustline that could cause many Goddesses towards envy. As with Skuld, the older Mara that she had glimpsed was almost a whole different Demoness. That 'older' Mara actually resembled Urd's wacky mother, Hild. But her features were distinctly Maraish: curlywire long hair looking like it had just been crisped out by a Demonic soak in a fire pit, pallid skin without blemish, riveting redfire eyes. Whoever it was, the Demoness who looked exactly like an older Mara was more severe and sinister in bearing. More intense then even Mara at her most hella-bella-killya mode, if that could even be possible. Urd had to admit to herself that the other 'Mara' had a Demon Queen's nobility, but for a split-second, Urd could almost sense that she was crying.

And this 'other Mara who looks like Hild' had locked eye-to-eye with her as she faded from this focus of TimeSpace.

_"Eggo of me, you hentai perv! I have to tell my sisters that those guys in the back came from the _–future-_!!"_

"Why do I have to let you go so you can say that?" she heard Tomohisa reply. "Anyway, you just told 'em, Skuld! Besides, _you're_ the one who's hanging onto me!"

Mara was snickering.

Urd was glad for Tomohisa's sake that their parents had insisted that Skuld leave her mallet at home for the wedding ceremony.

From the future, eh? This could be interesting...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

SOMEWHERE:

"Y..you're saying that you're my daughter? My son?" Keiichi asked, his tongue stumbling over his disbelief. His mind and eyes were at war with each other; he couldn't grasp the fact that these were his kids. It was insane, utterly impossible. Belldandy had oft told him that she could never bear children with a mortal. One of those unyielding impossibilities within a universe of possibilities. Why? But his vision clearly informed him that the girl, who called herself Keleste, appeared to be more than a coincidence-mirror of his fiancée. For a split-second, when he looked into the eyes of the young boy, Keiyasu, Keiichi strongly sensed that he was looking into _his_ own eyes, perfectly reflected.

Like looking into a mirror.

"W..who are you?" he asked.

The girl curtsied in front of him and called herself "Keleste", while the boy stood faux-mannishly with his hands on his hips and introduced himself as "Keiyasu".

It was so laughable, he could cry.

Keiichi regarded the girl, Keleste, traveling with his imaginings to a place where he envisioned Bell-chan at the sprigs of teenage years. She was beautiful, but her face was lined with a hollowness. A bitterness just below the surface, that he had recognized only a few times before. There was that guy in the N.I.T. club that had lost his mother to cancer during his freshman year. He shook his head, hoping to dislodge his thoughts like a shivering dog splatting driblets of water against the grass and anything else nearby.

"This is so clumsy," he thought. "Why do I feel so awkward? I've never felt so devastated in my life. I thought I'd be numb, but instead my heart is in my face, and everything is clear and sharp. That's why it hurts so bad." Everything turned black again as he recalled the scene of destruction at the wedding. Belldandy was gone! This time, Keiichi pushed the thought aside; it was too bizarre and unreal to comprehend, even as his tears clotted his eyes again.

This was the Death of Hope.

He noticed Cevn standing afar at the edge of a large boulder, his long hair weaving in the wind. There was wind, but no sound. The usual whir and whoosh that accompanied a wind were absent! This isn't the desert, isn't Africa, isn't...real? Searching his memory, Keiichi has a suspect sense of deja vu. He had been here before. The environs looked bleak and indifferent, a jumble of deadness that would not give a mind something to grab onto in which to recall it. But it felt familiar.

He saw footsteps in the sand.

"Dad?" the young Goddess who called herself Keleste asked in an uncertain voice. "Are you okay? You look like you're spacing out. Keiyasu, did you overdose him with chillout thoughts?"

_Chillout thoughts?_

"Look sis! He is our Father! I'm sure of it! You're sure of it! After all these millennia, we've found him! My heart is bursting right now, so excuse me if I'm a bit on the nervous side. I know, I know…the Earthrealm mortals destroyed themselves and their planet like a bunch of wasteful idiots. We've seen that go down, we've seen it all! But we haven't seen him! He's a live human being! I don't know what to do…how to help him," the boy who called himself "Keiyasu" said, lightly slap-punching him on the shoulder for emphasis.

"Hey, he's not a lab rat!" he heard Keleste remonstrate.

"Look! I...I just lost the one true love of my life," Keiichi said. "I saw her, torn apart in that fight between the Lord and Dark Lord. Why were they fighting? What's really going on here? Belldandy's dead: yet I see you two, who claim to be her...our...kids. A son and daughter? Gimme a break! Bell has told me time and again that we can't have kids. A mortal DNA strand is not complex enough to fit together with the equivalent chromosomes in a Goddess. DNA vs. TNA. She said that the physical components of her being can closely match those of a human being, but any combination between my DNA and hers would result in an empty physical shell. The DNA would work, but the TNA wouldn't. Result: a husk, devoid of being. No Soul. No Life. She explained it all to me!"

"Then how do you explain _us_!" Keleste snapped back, no longer willing to broker disbelief, even if he was her Father. "We're _here_. And we're really real! Half mortal, half God. Not equal halves, of course, otherwise we couldn't' live in Yggdrasil. But it's there, our mortal part; it says so whenever we log into the Yggdrasil Mainframe. We even needed a special routine built for us by our Stepmoms, Skuld and Peorth, so we could even use the Ygg computer. And it always says we're Gods! We've been looking for you, Dad, for…I won't even say how long, because you wouldn't understand it. We've got Divine powers and stuff. Wanna see me blow up a mountain? Somehow, when we zoned into the Earthrealm, where you live, we lost our Divine powers. I can only guess that the mortal half of us took over and became dominant. But it didn't happen forty millennia ago when we went to what's left of the Earthrealm, because we still had our powers. You have no idea about how much time and energy we've spent searching you out! Thousands of years of intense research in the Ygg stacks and libraries. We even had to hack our way thru all sorts of syn-walls and securities. And now we've found you, but you don't believe us. You're our _Father_. Look at him! Look at me! You see yourself in these eyes? Or his face?"

"NO!!" Keiichi shouted angrily. "I told you already, Bell and I can't have kids! She's a Goddess, I'm a mortal, it won't ever be. Especially now! How could we, now, after what happened? She's _gone_! S..she doesn't exist anymore...so how c..could you be here and say that you're my kids…" Once again, he fell to his knees and clutched his face in dust caked hands. Suddenly, he drummed his fists on the cracked arid ground like a madman.

Cevn walked over and rested a hand against the ball of Keiichi's elbow, trying to calm him down. Shrugging the hand away with an angry jerk of his arm, Keiichi stood up with intense emotional effort. To his surprise, Cevn grasped him on both shoulders and shook him.

"What if?" Cevn challenged him. "So what if they are who they say they are? Nothing can take me by surprise any more, since I came to be involved in your lives. Not even this! And you should _know_...deep in your Soul...that they're telling the truth, Keiichi. This isn't some random play of existence. What possible explanation could you throw out to explain this place and why we're here? You followed something through that portal. I saw it too, so I know it's not just something in your head. And then they followed you, a person they had met less than a minute earlier. You know that everything and everyone was frozen in Time in that church nave. So how did these two teenagers manage to break free long enough to chase after you? They followed you here, without an instant's care of where they'd wind up once they went through the Gate of Judgment. Either they're totally mental...or they love the hell out of you!"

Keiichi suddenly remembered the nascent maybe-Angel that he had seen emerge from the shattering forces. In his grief, he had completely forgotten! He replayed the scene in his mind, heeding the ecstasy and giddiness, slowing his thoughts down. If these two kids were his, were some kind of mix of he and Bell, were some kind of blended mortal and Divine beings...

If he could believe them, it would turn the nightmare inside out.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

VANAGDRASIL:

"Owwwww!" Pryzm blurted as she sat up. She instinctively smoothed her clothes, feeling the bruising pain in her ass where she had just landed. She had hit the ground hard, like the time at school when she did a backflip instead of a flip and ended up flipping right off the trampoline onto the gym floor. The pain then was almost as bad as the embarrassment. But here, there was no stressed out idiocy to mediate things. They were back in Hild's Black Palace, in one of the central courtyards. She could smell the heady scent of magma nearby. Stinky like burnt cheese, a smell that only a Demon could enjoy. She looked up and saw the Red Hole balefully glowing against the sky. Her sister Ulfryn moaned nearby, probably feeling the pain in her butt as well.

"Well, at least we didn't land on our heads," Ulfryn said in a weak voice. Pryzm looked at her slightly younger twin sister with dismay. My sister the dreamer, the ever-optimist, the space case with the carefree personality. She _would_ say something like that.

_Where's Mom?!_

Pryzm took a quick census. She sighed with visible relief. Mom was right here, looking at her and her sister with a parental expression of gratitude; a beacon of safety amid the craziness. Frightened, Pryzm butt-scampered across the tiling until she was sitting right next to her mother. Her legs felt like rubber. Her head felt like rubber, despite her sister's dainty observation. Mom's long stream of jet-ebon hair was frazzled from the abrupt trip, but she was okay otherwise. She could tell that Mom was analyzing their situation even now, and this diminished Pryzm's insecurity even more. She saw her older Demon cousins, Falcyn and Sygyn. Falcyn the simpleton showoff who can never admit it when he's wrong. Sygyn, who seemed as delicate as a blade of grass...and as dangerous as the blade of a katana. Their Demoness mom, Aunt Mara, the final Demon Queen, was here too. And then there was Hild, the crazy bitch Demon Queen who tried to kill them all, and then herself. Even Hild looked like she had been tossed through a stellar galactic core.

The Dark Lord, the biggest meanest Demon she had ever met...was gone. Pryzm breathed a silent thanks.

So the Quad of she, her sister and her two Demonic cousins was intact. She remembered the beginning of this whole thing, how it had started in Yggdrasil at a Swarp Gate in Asgard-Aumatrix VII. Actually, it all started over lunch in the private school she and her sister, the primadonna mallrat, went to. Ulfryn and her whacky visions of _more_ cousins. Apparitions, fables, myths...it was all dreamy pitter-patter to her younger twin sister. Yet, she herself had seen Ulfryn's 'ghosties'! So did Mom, Falcyn and Sygyn, and Robot Guy. Speaking of which, where was that cyborg dude? Definitely not here, because there were no telltale mortal vibes or machine sounds in the air. So Ulfryn had been right all along! Hopefully she wouldn't rub it in like a little girl! She does get annoying when she's impressed with herself sometimes.

Pryzm did a logical approach, creating a sequence of true/false assumptions the way Mom had taught her. She envisioned a schematic of a new machine, plugged in conjectures and facts where she would otherwise use components and energy, and then let the whole thing fly in her mind. Beyond doubt, her sis had been right! So why weren't their two new cousins or whatever here? The two were there with everybody when they had blinked into that church. She remembered a photo-quick impression that there was a wedding going on, and then everything went funny, and now they were here. Maybe Keleste and Keiyasu went back home instead of here.

Pryzm looked at her Mom, realizing that if she was spinning mental cogs and coils in her mind, Mom was doing the same thing a hundred times more intensely.

Mom was too cool when she was solving a mystery!

If they couldn't be safe with Mom here with them, there would be nowhere else they could be safe except for Kami-sama's residences. Comforted by this thought, Pryzm kick-started a memory to try and calm her nerves even further.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Pryzm recalled Mom telling her and her sister the epic saga about the Aumatrices and the UmbraPlexiars and the Swarp Hypernality Gates and her role in the middle of all that stuff. She couldn't even imagine life without them, despite Mom's attempt to explain how it was in her own youth without them. What was it like before, when Gods and Demons rarely met? They even had something called a "Doublet System" back then; if you died, your Demonic counterpart would die as well. How terrible and cruel! Of course, Death was never of a permanent nature to a Divine being, or so she had been told. Pryzm smiled to herself, revisiting how she and sis had grown up with the unavoidable reality that Mom was totally a celeb back in Yggdrasil. Like Mega-idol superstar fame status type of celebrity. She had heard the story from the source a hundred times and still didn't tire of it, even though she knew it by heart.

Mom had suspected that the new devices were some kind of transportation system, while almost everyone else thought they were some expanded nodes for the Ygg Mainframe or a collection of random artforms. Even Kami-sama didn't know what they were, back then. Already considered an eccentric by many Gods and Goddesses for marrying an Earthrealm mortal, Mom decided that she was going to create and then send a special invention into the new system to try and map it out. If this new network of constructs functioned as a transit, Mom's invention would attempt to create and download a 'map' of it to the Ygg Mainframe. At this point in the storytelling, Mom usually would got all embarrassed when she described how she had crafted her invention from start to finish during the second and third trimesters of her pregnancy. With she and her sister inside of her, Mom had plenty of idle time...and she always gets all mushy and shy when she explains that Dad practically doted on her during that time. Of course, this was back before Dad's pro baseball league days with the Giants. They're so in love with each other! Dad _still_ dotes on Mom.

After she and Ulfryn were born and calmly in the cradle, Mom decided to launch her experiment. She tossed the sentient robot, the Swarp Holophotic Observance Ultra Joho Omnitron or S.H.O.U.J.O. for short, into one of the blue-glowing Swarp Hypernalities. Where it promptly got lost. Mom endured three hours of self-ridicule; she had tried to introduce a traveling device into an inert transportation system. Something like trying to float a boat at the top of Mt. Fuji. For all she knew, her creation could have simply blinked out of existence once she introduced it into the energies of the Swarp. Wasn't the first time she had blown it; the burn-blasts scouring the walls in her many labs remain as a visual testimony of her mistakes. But the S.H.O.U.J.O. wound up in the Future. Almost like it had been placed there. Which was the all-time stupidest place in all of reality and Time to try and conceal something from the Norn of the Future. Naturally, Mom had found it with almost zero effort. The results were shocking, to say the least. Pryzm along with her classmates in Prime Inculcation had watched the playback of her mother placing her hand against the transmit panel of the S.H.O.U.J.O. in order to access its data, to begin to analyze the AI and CPU as holograms arrayed themselves around her...and then Mom turning pink with shock at the discoveries yielded by her robotic explorer. What God or Goddess hadn't looked up the discovery in the Ygg Mainframe and experienced her mother's profound discovery for themselves? Everyone watches that holoclip; it was famous...and mandatory for Primers to study during Inculcation. Mom's name was now in the Annals of Yggdrasil; all students were required to replicate her experiment in a sim-lab setting as part of their SecondTier Inculcation curriculum. For many, this assignment was about as attractive as studying geometry in middle school would be to the average Tokyo teenager.

Mom had discovered that her little exercise in engineering had not only mapped out the entire UmbraPlexiar and every access between the Aumatrixes, it had done so in an impossibly short time. But what was totally unexpected was the discovery that the seven Aumatrix complexes in Yggdrasil had seven counterparts in Vanagdrasil! Thus, Mom had inadvertently mapped out the Demon's entire Realm. Needless to say, this didn't seem so cheesy to Kami-sama and Oni-sama, who had been upstaged by Mom. Not to mention that now everyone had to live with the knowledge that all of each Realm was in the 'public domain', so to speak. Each Mainframe now had an intact 'map' of the other's Realm. Mom's efforts had confirmed her hypotheses. She had discovered the truth about the transportation system; a truth that had escaped both Lords. Pryzm always felt a surge of pride when she imagined how Kami-sama and Oni-sama had taken it on the chin because of Mom courage and genius. Mom had just celebrated her Twenty First Decamillennia; she was so young back then. But Pryzm knew it had been punishing sometimes for her Mother, who now had to juggle fame, family and fear because her discovery had occurred so shortly after she had Pryzm and Ulfryn.

Mom sometimes joked that she and her sister were the "frostings on the cake."

As if this wasn't enough, Mom's tentative effort to explore the suspect mode of transport between the God's Realm and the Demon's Realm had done something else, something with much greater impact than the mapping thing. Mom's invention had _activated_ it! Somehow, her robot was the 'key' that had started up the whole UmbraPlexiar system. Mom often joked that she had the whole thing planned out from the beginning, when actually the 'boot sequence' of the system was a totally accidental outcome. For several years after that mysterious event called The Expansion, no one had a clue about the purpose of the immense complexes that had suddenly appeared in the two Realms. Mom usually explained it using the example of a Tokyo street system with no cars. Without vehicles, the streets were nothing more than slabs of pavement; and buildings would be impossibly distant from each other. Even Falcyn could understand that analogy. Her older cousin, the sole boy amongst the "Quad" as they sometimes called themselves, wasn't the brightest bulb in the land by any means. His twin sister Sygyn, on the other hand...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Returning to the present, Pryzm looked at her Demoness cousin, who was chatting it up with Aunt Mara. Thinking about Sygyn brought up images of venomous fingers. Her Demoness cousin wasn't _that_ dangerous, of course. Just unpredictable. Dynamite in a tiny package. With Sygyn, anything could be said or done. Without apology, if Sygyn was really into one of her moods. Sygyn and Ulfryn sometimes got into it, a total younger sis catfight. But Sygyn was pretty cool in her own way. She was helping out as English tutor for she and Ulfryn, trying to get them ready for middle school next year. Sygyn was insane cool with languages as well, which made her a natural. But many purported study sessions with Sygyn mutated into pranks, pillow-fights and big-time gossiping. Mom and Aunt Mara seemed to turn a blind eye to _those_ study sessions.

So she was very much looking forward to next year, where Mom had said that she and Ulfryn would be in the same school as her Demoness cousins. Which meant more fun with Sygyn! And if anyone messed with them, they would face Falcyn's wrath. It didn't make a difference whether it was the Earthrealm, Yggdrasil or Vanagdrasil. It pretty much was that way now, as several foolhardy bullies had learned the hard way when they picked on her and Ulfryn when they were in the park with Falcyn and Sygyn. The big difference by sharing schools with Falcyn would be the fact that she would be around to witness the beatdowns he meted out to bullies. Maybe she'd even join in 'em! Falcyn wasn't a bully himself, despite being a Demon. But the thing that pissed him off his cookies was those times when some dumbass would try and shame Sygyn because she looked like a 10-year-old, even though she was 14. Simply put, Falcyn would go brutal on them.

Pryzm noted again to herself that MIA were the Dark Lord, android-guy Cevn, and the two kids who had been the whole cause of this complicated mess. She remembered now…right before they flashed into here, the two new kids had chased after the guy who was getting married. There was a big commotion and fighting of some kind between the Dark Lord...and Kami-sama? Did that really happen? Was there some kind of big-time cosmic battle that they had left behind when they came back here?

"Sis, they looked just like they did in my dreams," Ulfryn stated, as if it were common knowledge. Which it was.

"Hmmm...dream or not, you guys are in for it when His Infernal Majesty returns from whatever is going on in that oddball planet we just came from," Hild noted. "And that goes for you too, Falcyn and Sygyn!"

Stupid Hild! Ruining the mood by stating the obvious.

This whole thing had started out as a whim to try and appease her flighty sister. Instead, their adventure had spun itself out of proportions into spirals of fun and danger that she knew none of the Quad could even imagine in his or her imaginings. The four had snuck out into Yggdrasil, and then made an unauthorized transit to the Ygg Xeomnic. There, they had broke into the Xeomnic and hacked its core of cores, the AxialPlex thingy. Mom wasted all sorts of sentry bots, which was really awesome to watch. Then they went to Vanagdrasil, and hooked up with Dark Lord, who took them to the core of the Demon Mnoexic Network. Sygyn smuggled a prohibited device in the process. If this was the Earthrealm, they would be locked away and someone would toss the key into the Pacific...

But it had been totally fun!

Pryzm felt a light, spindly sensation on her foot. Her clothes were a mess, her shoes were long gone. Her hair looked like plaster of Paris, it was so soaked with sweat. She looked down at her toes...

_"Cockroach!!"_

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

SOMEWHERE:

The Filth Carrier could remember the worst day of her life, the day where her life was wrested away from her grasp and she was suddenly never the same. The pain of that day soared beyond the malevolent taunts of the children who passed by her family's hut. It stuck in her heart like a spade in shallow mud, for it was that day that her father had given the Filth Carrier her own filth pot.

Father had built it, layer upon layer of spinning ceramic weave. He drew a design upon it with his fingernails, marking it to obtain its uniqueness, perhaps hoping that the crush of responsibility upon his young daughter would be somewhat relieved. But she was of age, and work couldn't be avoided any longer.

"This is yours, my daughter," her father had said gruffly. "Now go to the temple and get to work."

The Filth Carrier cried, and sought comfort and solace in her mother's arms...but her mother unexpectedly rebuffed her. She lectured the Filth Carrier on the differences of skin, and how she and her family were given to be haulers of filth because they were different. It was the way of the tribe, and had always been that way.

The Filth Carrier cried herself hoarse that night, the night when her nine-year-old heart's wishes and dreams had been smashed into illusion by cruel truth.

As the years passed and she grew up into a strong young woman, the burden of the pot grew lighter with each passing season. At first, the callouses grew of themselves on the rims of her shoulder blades. Gradually, her shoulders instinctively bent backwards, bowling laboriously to the girth of the round filth pot. Because she was carrying filth, she was stung repeatedly by insects, and constantly swarmed by pestering flies. Many times, her Grandfather consoled her after another tearful return from the village market. He promised the Filth Carrier that she would find a place inside where she would discover hidden dignity.

Like most young maidens, the Filth Carrier's heart often wandered into imaginings about the young men in the village. She saw the youthful man-boys from the veil of her heart, knowing that they were unapproachable to one such as she. No matter how often she bathed in the river, her skin still reeked of the filth. At times, the warriors would come into the village and entertain themselves by making her run fast across the center square in front of the temple, chasing her at spearpoint while the filth spilled over the pot and down her back. She feared that she would never find a man to stand alongside her, who could gently bathe the filth away with a softened sponge and gentle words of kindness and council. So she was content to pray to the Goddess, and to relief herself of the tension and sorrow in the dreams that made sleep a comfort.

Her breasts grew large and her family ignored her birthdays. One day, a celebrated Teacher was rumored to be traveling through the homelands, and it was whispered in the streets that he would stop at the village to preach his wisdom. On that day, hundreds of families arrived to partake of his jewels of perfect knowledge.

The Filth Carrier had set her thick clay pot on the edge of the village and walked towards the masses gathered in the open square. The resounding of excited voices raced through the air, and she hoped she would find salvation from the destiny that kept her aspirations at bay. She was only going to ask the Teacher one simple question: "What of my skin, ere that the villagers treat me differently? Are we not all the same?"

But the boisterous crowd refused to part for her, not at all like how they usually made way for her when she was carrying her filth pot. So she returned to the village's edge-fence and strapped her filth pot on her back. As she approached the crowd again, she was yelled at by a crowd of young men who roughly pushed her on her back, shattering her filth pot. Keeping their distance because of the malodorous smell, they threw rocks at her and taunted her, forcing her to lie in the puddles of filth slowly draining into the ground.

A figure of misery, the Filth Carrier looked around her with pleading eyes. The crowd grew noisier, and she saw the Teacher approaching, riding on a donkey. He paused a short distance from the Filth Carrier, his attention aroused by the commotions. Looking at her with a pitying stare, he then pronounced to one and all the fate of those who live immorally--that their lot would be to become like her. How could one be moral, if her skin color is different and she carries the excrement of mankind on her back? Horrified at his dispassion, the Filth Carrier crawled away; the shards of her broken jar sticking out of her bloodied back like a bird's feathered coat.

She couldn't go to her house. She felt so alone, so alien, so ashamed. If she had been a man, she could choose to be conscripted into the King's army...a fate far more preferable than this. She didn't even want to go to her private spot high upon the hill, the secret place where she could reflect on the cool air and the greens of the vines and the trees. She couldn't even run away to the Capital; her misery there would be redoubled.

There was no escaping Fate.

Her heart said run, leap off a cliff, dash your life and your hopes to pieces on the far-below rocks...but her heart trembled. Wherever she went, she would be a filth carrier. She dreamed again the fantasy of the handsome young village boy, his skin brushing against hers, her hands sifting through the richness of his hair.

She wished that everything could be different.

"Feeling the weight of the world upon your back again?"

She looked up to see her Grandfather's eyes, looking at her with all of the compassion that was missing from the rest of the world. Her defenses and desperations collapsed, and the 'weight of the world'...the old inside joke among her family...tumbled out into a torrent of tears. The two of them sat underneath the night sky, and her grandsire told her of the Cave.

_"Once, there was a dream. When it became real, it became a cave. A cave that furrows deep into the Mother Earth. This cave is your soul. My young granddaughter, I believe that it is time for you to go to it...and in a fortnight, I will take you there."_

Her Grandfather gently helped her to her feet, and the Filth Carrier and he bathed in the river, relaxing in the coolness of snow-turned-water. Several days later, Grandfather arrived at her family's tent with a brace of rabbits, and a leather pack on his back instead of the filth pot. It was time.

The Filth Carrier followed her Grandfather as he ascended the mountain, higher than she had ever traveled before. They camped in a valley pass, and each time she looked back, she saw the village lights.

The filth of humanity. The weight of the world.

After three sun's walking, they arrived at the edge of the mountains. A plains spread out before them, with a large river in the distance. Shiny hills of mysterious rock cut through the ground, catching the sun and flickering in the distance. Rocks whose shapes were more of man than of nature were strewn as far as the eye could see. Here and there, the grass was parted by broken narrow bands of grey, much wider than the footpaths between the villages.

They walked down into the lightly bowling basin, and Grandfather followed one of the flat-rock 'strips' that led into the shining hills. They were more trees than hills, copper-colored and spindly like the forest right before first snow. Night descended, and they arrived at the Cave, its entrance crescented from the light of the pale full moon. He gave the Filth Carrier a torch, and with the sound of gesture, pointed her towards the cave. Fearfully, she cautiously walked inside.

The colors were unnatural, brightened into myriad hues by the glow of her torch. An indoor rainbow. She gazed around her with awe. What powers could have created such a secret beauty?

Farther in, she arrived at an underground stream, with a small slip-boat carved of a tree trunk ledged upon the side of the cave. She climbed into the sturdy little bark and paddled into the next cave-chamber. Her heart was still and her mind was clear. For the first time in her young life, the hurt that had assailed her daily since she was a little girl...was gone. She was now in a different world.

Deep inside the cave, the coolness of the Mother embraced her. The sounds of the world were stilled save for the gentle water-rhythm of her paddling. After a silent lifetime of moments, her boat had drifted into an immense cavern. A grating told her that her boat had beached on rocks. She pulled the boat up out of the water and dragged it over to a safe place on the rocky floor. Catching her breath, she looked up into the flicker-flame.

And then she saw them.

On the wall were scratchings. She had never seen such rocks before, had never seen such marks. Some were even the same! As her curiosity mounted, her body resisted. She was suddenly taken tired...the long journey's labor was pulling her into the land of dreams. The Filth Carrier looked at the cave walls uneasily, knowing that this wasn't the place to sleep. Hunting animals were known to hide their lairs in caves. She would have to go back to Grandfather and the safety of the campfire. Shoaling her boat back up the underground stream, she reached the hollow and then ascended the rocks to the entrance of the Cave.

Despite being tired, she was all excited with her discovery. But with a sinking realization, the Filth Carrier realized that her enthusiasm would be ill-spent here; after all, her Grandfather already knew the secrets of this Cave into the Mother Earth. She smoothed out a place on the ground, laid out her coarse blanket, and then crept inside of it and fell into a slumber.

When the sun gained the eastern hills and the clouds rayed pink, the Filth Carrier was anxious to return to her hallowed Cave. Before Grandfather even awoke, she stirred the ashes of the campfire, and then stole silently into the Cave into Mother Earth. The boat was right where she left it.

Returning to the chamber, she marveled at the scratches carved into the rock; they seemed to dance like little stick-figures in the torch light. But there was something curious...the torch light didn't cast a yellow-orange glow against the rock walls like before. Instead, the cavern was glowing in a faint blue color she had never seen before. The Filth Carrier was filled with dread as she sensed that she wasn't alone in the chamber.

Biting her heart to still her fears, the Filth Carrier slowly turned around, brandishing her kindle-wick like a knife. Her breath caught in her throat when she saw the dark figure, clothed in voluminous robes from head to toe. The figure was as dark as the unlit cave, save for a pair of burning light-blue eyes and a tangle of lightning-silver hair peeking out from under its cowl-hood.

For a moment, the Filth Carrier's mind screamed "Bear!"...at least until she noticed that the figure was more human than animal. What could possibly reside this deep in the Mother Earth?

Unless this was the Mother of the Earth...

Remembering the disgust shown her by the Teacher, the Filth Carrier defiantly refrained from humble groveling in front of the figure. If there was a Spirit, then why did It allow her life to be such a trudgery of suffering?

The Dark Spirit watched her, betraying no emotion.

It was then that the Filth Carrier noticed that the midnight-black visitor had a filth pot strapped upon its back. But it wasn't an ordinary filth pot; it cast a cerulean halo around the spectral figure. The Spirit approached her, floating above the smooth rock floor.

_"My precious daughter, I have heard your cries of affliction, I have seen your sufferings, I have listened to the voice of despair in your heart,"_ the Spirit said in a woman's voice.

It _was_ the Mother of the Earth!

The black-cloaked Goddess...for what else could she be?...spoke with a voice rich with compassion and fullness, not at all like the Teacher's sneer of hypocrisy. The Filth Carrier felt her knees rubbing together in fear and shame: it was she who had been chosen by the Mother of the Earth, and yet she reeked of all the years of filth she had carried.

The hooded Spirit set down the filth pot that she had been carrying, and calmly removed the black-cloth veil that have covered all but her eyes. The Filth Carrier marveled at the Mother's beauty...and at the filth pot she had been carrying. For unlike her burdensome vessel, it was sparkling resplendent with rare jewels and precious gold and silver metals. Overwhelmed, the Filth Carrier stood silent as the Spirit faced her from a distance of a few footsteps. A few lifetimes.

"My dear child, you wish to be free in your heart. But to receive this boon, you must drink of the jar, to show that you are ready," the Spirit Goddess instructed.

The Filth Carrier almost fell to her knees in shock, looking at the Spirit Goddess in astonishment. Her mind shouted "No, never, a thousand times no!" The daily horror of hauling humanity's waste was a grievous tasking. The taunts of the villagers, the painful weight against her back, the cloying smell of shit and piss that never left her, the utter disgust she felt towards herself in her private moments. And now the Goddess had demanded that she _drink_ of it. But as her revulsion worked into curiosity, she took a leap of faith and walked up to the shining filth pot. Instead of putrid stench she expected, the Filth Carrier smelled a rich fragrance, sweet and mellow beyond measure as she stood over it. Detached, she watched herself reach into the filth pot and cup the liquid in her hands.

She drank.

Sharp. Thought. Distance. Recall. Release. Recompose. Realize.

She was awakened.

She looked at the Spirit, and the black-clad Goddess nodded at her in approval, never brooking a smile. The Goddess gestured towards the rock walls of the Cave. Startled, the Filth Carrier regarded the walls...and remembered the odd scratchings. The voices of her forebears. She witnessed the patterns, the prisms, the absolute joy of creation in those markings. It suddenly dawned on her that she wasn't in a 'cave' at all, but that she was in a _room_! A room that had been _made_, stone that had been formed into shape just like the mudwall rooms in the marketplace where the talkers sold their harvests of vegetables and fruits. A small pedestal stood to one side of the interior, with ornate scratchings hewn into its rock. As she regarded the scratchings, miraculous words seemed to fill her mind of their own accord:

_"As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others."_

_Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela_

Could it be that the scratchings had _put the words into her mind_?

She heard a singing, and turned to the Spirit. The Spirit, garbed in the darkest of blackcloth, was singing a mournful song. Something in her heart reckoned that it was a widow's song...a song for a long-lost love. The Filth Carrier read other scratchings in the rock; each scratching seemed to contain words of guidance, words of wisdom. The more she read, the more she realized that she was in a very holy place; that the Mother Earth herself had offered her a revelation.

"It is a precious gift called writing. It is also called language," the Black Goddess explained. "The Ancients Ones used it to communicate, to exchange ideas, concepts and feelings. It is an art that has been lost to your people since the beginning of time. Now, it has called you to it, because it is your legacy."

"Wh..why _me_?" the Filth Carrier asked in a quavering voice. "I am untouchable to all but my family, a carrier of shit and piss and filth. Why should I be given this precious gift?"

"Because through your struggles, my dearest one, you have learned the way of Peace. All men and women are deserving of its bounty; yet so very few are willing to share it. You wished for freedom, but in order to be free, you must be of service to others for the remainder of your life. You must teach this to _all_ who are willing and interested."

"How could a girl such as I do this?" the Filth Carrier asked humbly.

The Dark Goddess shared many secrets with the Filth Carrier that afternoon. When she emerged from the Cave into Mother Earth, she beckoned her Grandfather to accompany her back into the underground chambers. There, with a sharp rock, she and her Grandfather wrote the first words to be written on that continent in over forty thousand years.

After a five-day return journey, the Filth Carrier went into the temple, a place where she and all women were forbidden to go. She challenged the archons who kept vigil there, and refuted their knowledge and their myths. The chieftain was wroth with this, and summoned the men to oust her from the temple...but once they heard the wisdom flowing out of her heart, they were moved to think ill of mistreating her in any way.

Whence the Teacher returned to the village in the next year's bright season, he encountered a smaller crowd of worshipers than before. Looking across the village square, he was astounded by the sight of a group of men and women gathered around the Filth Carrier. She was the very same young woman who he had berated during his last visit! She seemed to be _teaching_ the gathered throng of ignorant villagers! Filled with disgust and anger at the sight of one of the lowest caste discoursing freely on the porch of the temple, he and his followers swiftly stormed across the village square to confront her. There she was, with her smelly filth pot sitting next to her, talking all sorts of nonsense!

He walked right up to her, braving the stench of her filth pot, and told her that she was unclean, unworthy and unmoral...

When he was driven out of the village that evening, he had no disciples at all.

From that day on, until her hair was silvered with the winter of her years, the Filth Carrier was known as the Teacher of Teachers. Multitudes came from distant lands to savor her words. The first books that were written, were written by her and those who had heard her teachings. No longer did the villagers need to rely on Rememberers to carry forth the lore and knowledge from generation to generation.

The Filth Carrier herself returned many time to make a study of the words in the Cave into Mother Earth. She learned that the Cave wasn't a cave: it was a place called _Library_. She taught her folk the wisdom of the Golden Ones, and they learned about irrigation, predicting weather, building carts...and writing.

And still she carried her filth pot, until age dispossessed her of the ability to carry its burden. Even then, many of her followers bore filth pots of their own, and they were more than willing to humble themselves to the simple task of hauling filth, just as their Teacher of Teachers had.

When asked about why she still carried filth despite being blessed with wisdom, the Filth Carrier was wont to smile and explain, "It is a task that has to fall to _someone_. And yes, it shall be an expression of gratitude, of reverence for life...rather than something one _has_ to do. All men and women are saints in their hearts; but when they are truly humble, their hearts are lifted high with quiet dignity."

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

NULLN:

As the Silent Goddess released her attention from the Filth Carrier, Peorth felt in her heart that she had never been so moved by an exchange between a Divine and a mortal in her entire life. A wishgranting Goddess naturally feels a sense of joy and accomplishment when she grants a mortal's heartfelt petition. But this...the sense of joy and triumph was profound and sublime. Belldandy had done more than simply grant a wish. She had evoked the supreme quality of the mortals; the very quality that had made Peorth so proud of them despite their many failings. The quality which, if nurtured and treasured, would surely bring them to the Next Level.

In her mind, she could hear the accompanying shriek of rage. Each time before, she had assumed this was the Demon Grief Office reacting to being outwitted by their Goddess counterparts. On occasion, a Demon who was a poor loser would lose sight of their 'professional' nature and lose their composure. But this sounded different; a Demonic shouting would be filled with resentment and frustration...but this mental voice was filled with a terrible ardor.

As much as Peorth was filled with a terrible burden...

She followed her friend as the Silent Goddess made her way to her sanctuary; a billow of black against the many-colored jewel of colors that was Yggdrasil. Despite the fact that Belldandy in her funereal aspect was harmless and oft-encountered for many many millennnia...Gods and Goddesses, particularly Godkids and youth, would almost flee from her. As if they were threatened by her in some way. God could not kill God, nor did the Silent Goddess have but the minim of Divine Powers. Her Goddess Licenses had been revoked long ago because of the fear that she was too unbalanced in her grief to be able to control them properly. The other option would have been to assign a God to 'chaperone' her, so that she didn't cause misfires and accidents because of an inability to concentrate. Which would have made Belldandy's private Hell even worse, because she sought solitude rather than solace.

Peorth had considered herself Belldandy's guardian ever since her friend had lost her family...and her heart.

Her visit to the continent formerly called Australia would have a profound impact, as she had taught one of the aboriginal natives the skill of written language. Australia was still too isolated by geography to have a commerce of travelers with the other continents; thus it was more stable in society at the expense of being less scientifically advanced. This stability depended on a rigorous caste system based on racial differences, as well as the people's illiteracy. They remained ignorant of their own culture and were incapable of challenging the disgusting notion that skin color and physical nature made one mortal more valuable than another mortal. Belldandy's travel to there would change _all_ of this.

The mournful singing filled the Cathedral; the structure, somber already by virtue of its silence, became even more so as it housed the strains of her friend's tragedy. Peorth decided that she would be courteous enough to wait for Belldandy to finish her 'ritual' before floating down to meet her.

And getting in her face.

Peorth realized that she was probably the one resident of Yggdrasil who could put up with this. Yggdrasil was a vehicle for the gathering of joys and pleasantries in the scheme of things. Yet, she could understand why those young Godkids would flee whenever Belldandy would pass in their midst. No one likes pain, even when pain is a necessary function of existence. But Belldandy wore her pain on her sleeve, literally, and the Silent Goddess's pain was even more poignant to others because she never gave voice to it.

"She had no idea what it's like to be around her," Peorth mused, "and she better be grateful for this!"

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

When Peorth met her, the Silent Goddess just looked at her with an expressionless face. No reaction, not even a flinch when Peorth hovered up until she was a handful of cm away from her.

"Belldandy, this has got to stop! You cannot spend the rest of your Future in regrets for the Past!" Peorth yelled in her face, her voice so loud that Belldandy's face-scarf and cowl shivered.

"Look! Have you ever thought about why this is happening? How could four Gods be brought down in a primitive airtravel conveyance on a backwards mortal planet? While you've been mourning and feeling sorry for yourself, I've been investigating. I never believed that it was just an 'accident' or 'fate' that caused your whole family to die! They were dear to you...but they were also dear to me. Friends, just like you and I, friends that I cared about. Do you want to know what I found? I searched the Ygg Mainframe and learned that there were no weather anomalies that day. No convection downdrafts, no storms, no air stream eccentricities, _nothing_ that could have brought that plane down! The plane itself was structurally sound, as it had been given a thorough monthly inspection by air techs just a couple days earlier. Why don't you stop this symphony of self-pity and try to figure out why? Something took your parents and Keiichi away from you...and yet you do this?"

Peorth swallowed hard; this was much more difficult than she had imagined. Belldandy just looked at her with eyes that betrayed no emotion.

"You visit that horrible excuse for a planet..._only_ that planet...over and over and over. The mortals on that planet blew it! They had their chance to reach the Next Level just like every other sentient species and they decided that it would be more fun to jump off the technological cliff than to take the slower route of inward cultivation," she shouted, ignoring how proud she was of the Earthrealm mortals.

"Now look at them! That tribal girl you just visited, she belongs to a culture that has been illiterate for almost 40,000 years. Nothing you or I do can change that. But we can change what happened to you; you have the inner strength to do it. You were one of the top GRO agents working in any sector, and now you're _this_," she confronted, gesturing towards Belldandy with a sweep of her arms.

"Belldandy, Keiichi would have died anyway after another 50-60 years together with you. He was a mortal, and you knew it when let him inside your deepmost heart! In a way, I'm glad he's not here to see what you've become. Do you think this life is what Keiichi would have wanted for you? You didn't marry him or his memory. Instead, you married your own selfish pain! Is this how he would have expected you to treasure your time with him after he was gone? Do you think he would want you to remember him by being Yggdrasil's biggest expression of misery? The big, dark, scary solemn Silent Goddess? You keep telling the mortals 'life moves on'...so why don't you listen to yourself for change? Or are you satisfied with being nothing more than a hypocrite? If Keiichi were alive today, he'd be utterly disgusted with what you've become!"

Belldandy's blue eyes suddenly turned to ice-sharp steel.

"I got through to her!" Peorth thought, amazed at the strong reaction.

"There's a Belldandy inside of that Silent Goddess after all!" she continued. "You can sing your throat dry, and it won't change a thing. You should know this: you were a Norn once. What in the Lord's Name happened to your Angel, Holy Bell? How do think _she_ feels? I haven't seen her since Keiichi died, and unless she's been emerging from you while you're all alone in that Cathedral, she's gone! Our Angels weren't meant to hide themselves away, or be stashed from the rest of reality because we won't let them out to play. They're the essence of what makes us _beautiful_!"

Peorth felt a familiar rippling along the length of her back as her Angel, Gorgeous Rose, emerged behind her. Without a single strain of song, Gorgeous Rose closed in...and _slapped_ Belldandy in the face. Peorth was stunned into speechlessness. All around her, she could see rose bowers exploding angrily like fireworks; the stems of the roses bristling fiercely with wicked-looking clusters of thorns.

Belldandy gasped and convulsed...and Holy Bell emerged behind her. Bell's Angel looked like she was suffering from consumption; her body was ribbed and haggard, her face drawn tight, her wings lacking their splendor, her once-beautiful hair now thin and balding. At once, Holy Bell broke into song, raising her hands high in front of her with operatic grace.

Her song wasn't the dirge of tragedy as Peorth would have expected. Holy Bell was singing her Heart out, in complete control of herself, her song a vibrant paean with calm triumph. The strains of her voiced psalms of joy filled the air, charging it with calm and grace. As she sang, Holy Bell herself was changing aspect. Her hair was brightening to a golden luster, her wings stretched forth and gathered sunlight into sparkles, her gaunt frame slowly smoothing out and curving.

Her friend was looking at her with a murderous expression, her litham-like mouth veil loosened by the forceful egression of her Angel. Peorth realized that she _had_ been confining her Angel, something a Goddess would never even consider doing.

"HOW DARE YOU!" Peorth yelled angrily.

"You have the time and motivation to go to the stupid Earthrealm and tinker with other Goddesses' wishes, and yet you kept her pent up inside of you? So you didn't have feel your pain alone, was it? Or were you just being ignorant! How could you put her," nodding at Holy Bell, who had abruptly stopped singing, "...through that? Didn't you know that she _already_ feels your heartbreak. And you imprisoned her!"

"Shh..shhuu..shh"

She was going to speak! Peorth notched her surprise up a level and continued berating Belldandy. "Being Norn of the Present must have really gotten to you in the worst way, because you are the most selfish Goddess I've ever known! As Norn, you were given jurisdiction over the Now...but you shrunk that 'Now' down so far that it became a 'me'. Me me me me me! Who cares what everyone thinks or does, it's always me! Now I know why you kept going to the Earthrealm; it wasn't for the sake of the mortals, it was for _your_ sake. So you could vicariously feel the joy of giving wishes again. So that would remind you of Keiichi. Some other Goddess would get a wish, and you would latch onto it and milk it for your own thirsts of sentiment. Some other Goddess's wish!"

Peorth had shouted so much, she was out of breath. Her mind, exhausted from the extremely taxing confrontation and its flurry of Thoughtcasts, was stilled momentarily. In that gap of silence, Peorth had a disturbing realization.

There was no wish involved this time! Belldandy had gone to the Earthrealm on her _own _initiative without a GRO Goddess being dispatched. The mortal had not made a wish! The Ygg Mainframe had not registered a wish request and then assigned it to a Relief Office agent to complete. Which meant that she had interacted with mortals without authorization.

"Oh dear, this is really bad!" Peorth exclaimed as the implications of Bell's errancy bore full fruit in her mind. Divines cannot freely involve themselves in the lives of mortals, nor do anything to influence a mortal culture. Even GRO Goddesses couldn't do this. The Wish System was set up with fail-safes to prevent the granting of wishes that would have a significance of impact on the evolutionary potential of a mortal species. Thus, a mortal wishing to be the inventor of light-speed travel would not have their wish granted if they lived in a culture where rocketry was still in the primitive stage of solid-fuel propellants.

And Belldandy had taught her _language_.

She barely had time to contemplate _how_ Belldandy could have been allowed to do this without being intercepted or prevented by someone when a familiar booming voice cleft through her thoughts...

BELLDANDY, GODDESS FIRST CLASS, UNLIMITED, UNRESTRICTED LICENSE, INDEFINITE SUSPENSION STATUS...YOU HAVE BREACHED OUR SACRED CONDUCT BY ATTENDING PROFOUND CULTURAL ADVANCEMENT TO A MORTAL RACE WITHOUT WISHGRANTING AUTHORIZATION. IN VIEW OF THE SERIOUSNESS OF YOUR TRANSGRESSION, I WILL GRANT YOU AN AUDIENCE TO EXPLAIN YOUR ACTIONS BEFORE EXILING YOU TO THE WELL OF URD.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --


	126. Pt 126: Rustic Mintonettes

**Part 126: Rustic Mintonettes**

THERA, JAPAN, CHIBA PREFECTURE:

"MARRY ME!" Belldandy shouted in emo disbelief. "I can't believe you! I was in Osaka, playing in the most important tournament in my life, and you didn't even come! I..I wanted you to be there to be with me, so that you could see first-hand what you helped bring out in me. So you could be part of it. That's all I would have wanted from you. Now I can see why you weren't there, you selfish little prick! I'm gone, playing my heart out in Osaka, while you bake me a cake with a frosting-written note asking 'Marry Me'. While _she's_ here. Why don't you just fuck around behind my back...right here in front of me! It'd wouldn't have been any worse than _this_. I don't even know why I even bothered to give you the time of day in my thoughts."

Baka Baka Baka Baka Baaaaka!

"Bellda.."

"Shut up!" she interrupted. "I want you to listen to me, for once! I'm not your toy to do with as you wish, to play tricks upon, to train like a puppy! You've been messing around with me all this time. You do something really nice, really sweet...and then the next day you fuck it up. Back and forth, back and forth, so much that I don't even know what to expect next. How do you think I feel? How do you think I feel when I see this?" she shouted, kicking the table and the cake over and skinning her ankle in the process.

"Owww! Goddammit, now look what you made me do, Keiichi," she said as she favored her ankle with a hobble.

"Bellda.."

"Tsk tsk tsk. It hurts, doesn't it, little one?" the newcomer remarked, her voice lily with smugness. "This is why he made that cake _for me_. It isn't meant for you. Because you've got problems, little girl. You see how easily you just got hurt? A little temper tantrum, a single kick, and now you've injured yourself. Poor thing."

"Wh..what are you talking about?" Belldandy asked bitingly, regarding the new woman.

"I'm talking about the difference between you and I," she replied. "The big difference between mortals and Divines. You mortals are too frail, too weak, too stupid to be of interest to a God. Do you think you could possibly offer him the emotional and intellectual maturity that he needs? He'd be wasted on you, and you'd be a waste for him. This is why I'm taking him off your hands, and rather soon. It's fortuitous that you arrived when you did, because now you can see just how hopeless it was for you to even imagine that you could love him. He's given himself to me..."

"Who the fuck are you? Some kind of Goddess, like he's a God? And what makes you think that I _love_ him, you stupid bitch!" Belldandy seethed, her anger turning from Keiichi to this newcomer. Obviously a Goddess, because she was built like a weightlifter and yet wore clothes that no female body-builder would be caught dead in. Not to mention the ornate, huge, battleaxe thingy strapped to her back. She looked like a walking steroid advertisement, with no body fat to speak of.

"You insolent mortal, how dare you address me..."

"I don't need to know who you are, 'cause I don't care!" Belldandy heedlessly answered, even more resentful towards this new woman. "You know who's insolent? You are! This is my house that you're in. My house! Keiichi and I live here, and if you know what's good for you, you'll leave right now. Or I'll send him after you, and he'll kick your red-blonde ass out the door. How would you like that, huh?"

Belldandy folded her arms against her chest confidently. After a short silent pause, she looked at Keiichi to confirm her threat. Keiichi's face was white as a bleached futon spread.

"Bwah ha ha ha!" the intruder belly-laughed, consumed by mirth. "Him...beat _me_ up?" Belldandy saw the rage in her eyes even while she laughed haughtily at her threat. She wondered what could be so funny, because this new Goddess woman was almost bent over with body-raking guffaws. There certainly wasn't anything funny about this. She had been all worried about Keiichi, worried about trying to find out what he really felt, what he really was all about. The ride home on the Shinkansen was filled with fretful apprehension as she rehearsed how she was going to try and tell him how much he meant to her, and that he had become a best friend in his own stead, despite being a total idiot at times. The possibility of having a heart to heart talk with him was shot down in flames; he was playing around with this...Amazonian muscle-woman who looks like she belongs in an American superhero comic book. And he doesn't have the balls to confirm or deny why she was here in the first place.

"Oh, but she doesn't know who I am, does she? But of course she doesn't. You certainly couldn't tell her, could you? You're just a wish-granting God from the Escort Office who can't even do his job right. One mishap after another; that's your pattern, isn't it Keiichi? You were the one God stupid enough to ignore the warnings everyone else has to heed in childhood. Thinking you were different somehow, you actually went through the Gate of Judgment by yourself despite the dire prohibition against it. That alone makes you notorious as one of the stupidest Gods that ever graced Yggdrasil. Or the most tragic, because you ruined your chances of ever being a part of the fundamental elixir of life...Love. But lucky you! She undid all of that for you, didn't she? So now instead of being a worst-case scenario of ignorance, you're the hottest commodity around. You hold all the keys; there's Goddesses who would give their forehead seals just to come here and meet you."

Despite her fuming anger at the intrusion and the intruder, Belldandy had to turn her head away and snicker. Keiichi, a 'hot commodity'?

"Oh excuse me, did I say something funny?" the Goddess asked, unsheathing her battleaxe and twirling it in an expert motion with the fluidity of a Chinese opera actor before resting it with deliberate ease on the temple floor. Resting it so gently, Belldandy was unnerved when she saw the floor splinter underneath it as the air snapped with a booming sound. She should have been scared by this deliberate display of weaponskill, but instead she glared at her adversary. For this woman, Goddess or not, seemed to pull every bit of her contentious spirit to the fore. Something about her made Belldandy feel like she was on fire with competitiveness.

"I'm Athenle, an Emeritus Commander of the Yggdrasil Valkyrie Corps," the red-and-blonde haired Goddess announced. Something about her name plucked at Belldandy's memories. Valkyrie...that name sounded familiar. Valkyrie, valkyrie, valkyrie, she wondered as she tried to dial through the attic dustballs of knowledge. But her brain could only stew on it. The Goddess's name, Athenle, even sounded familiar. Dammit, why did her humanities classes always wind up being her nap sessions in high school! Greece, Greece... Athens...Athene. Athena. Athena? As in Athena, the Greek warrior Goddess? Athena, the one that they built the Parthenon for? The Goddess that has the spear and helmet in the pictures? She looked at Athenle, who smirked with knowing superiority.

"Since your shallow mortal mind is so befuddled, I'll spare you the effort. I am she. I visited your planet, Thera, several thousand years ago during my rounds. Routine tours of this area of SpaceTime to ensure that your solar system was defensible. This task would only take but a brief flash in time as you mortals account it. Speedier than a lightning bolt reaching up to the skies from the ground. Yet, some of the more perspicacious of your mortal seers, called oracles, managed to sense my presence despite my efforts to hasten on to the next specied system. Naturally, my visage impressed them so strongly on a subconscious level, they built an entire religion around my single visit. Why was I visiting, you might ask? Because I am a Valkyrie...the exclusive corps of warrior-Goddesses whose holy duty is to defend Yggdrasil against any and all threats of martial force. Thirty thousand years ago, when your ancestors were still learning the difference between mud and rocks, I was the Champion Valkyrie. I earned the right to command the Valkyrie through trial of combat, for the standard term of 10,000 of your mortal years. You might consider me to be the elite of the elite warriors that protect Yggdrasil. Compared to me, Keiichi is but a waif, a walking clumsiness. Gods like him have about as much training in combat as you would have in geography in your so-called educational institutes. Our rawest new trainee could defeat him in a duel effortlessly. He would be beneath my notice except for his possession of one intriguing attribute that no other God has. He has been given the gift to be the very essence of Love. Weak as he may be, whichever of we Goddesses manages to be Bonded with him will receive his absolute devotion and will give our absolute devotion in the most intense and uninterruptible marriage of Souls that can be possibly exist between a God and Goddess."

"Stop it, Athenle!" she heard Keiichi interrupt in a subdued voice. "She's heard enough of your words tonight. Give it a rest."

"As a Valkyrie, the absolute proof of my total devotion in a relationship is when I can totally dominate my partner. As a Valkyrie, this is how we express our sentiments of Love...through sheer dominance. Dominance is what we are. Keiichi is the ideal mate for me. I plan to make Keiichi mine. I _will_ make him mine; and then I'll enjoy a long relationship in Bond with him, overpowering every aspect of his life. Surpassing his authority with mine in our married life. Ruling over him so intensely that he will have little time for anything else, because his entire heart and being will be devoted to me. Next to that, what could you offer him, little girl?"

Belldandy felt a bile of disgust in her throat. Keiichi may be crazy, but this Goddess was fucked in the head. She _really_ disliked this Athenle, who was so full of herself. She actually thinks that love equates with dominance? Obviously, women always dominate men in a marriage. Duh! But what she proposed was nothing more than emotional slavery. And if she's who she claims to be, if she is the leader of the Goddesses who fight wars...what kind of opponents would she contend with? Demons like Senbei and Mara? Or even worse, would she fight with more powerful opponents? Keiichi had almost given up his life just to put away that bastard Senbei the Demon. This Athenle claimed she would chew him up like a creampuff without breaking a sweat, if she's telling the truth. And what did she mean when she mentioned this 'attribute' Keiichi has? To be the essence of Love and give absolute devotion to a Goddess? What kind of God nonsense is that? Wouldn't it be a given that all the Gods would have a God-like love for each other in Windowsill? And she says that Keiichi can offer something more than that? It dawned on her that, if Keiichi was the only one who could provide a perfect Love in a situation of marriage among the Gods, then...

"Shit!" she gasped. It'd be like a reality show, one of those romance shows with the billionaire bachelor being swarmed by pursuing women. No, it would be a hundred times worse. If such a guy existed on Thera, every girl who knew about it would be pounding down the doors trying to 'get' him. Even a man-hater like Tamiya would probably go bonkers for him if she knew that his love was guaranteed to be something much more heartfelt than the typical romantic boyfriend-girlfriend thing. A guy who would listen, who would be safe, romantic and considerate, would stay and be a father, who would be the kind of magic lover every girl would wish for in her dreams? This would be totally tight for the girls; but the guy would have to hide in a bunker because every woman he saw would want him. And Keiichi? He doesn't act like he knows the first thing about women. He can't even make it through a day with _me_ without messing up. It'd be like a goldfish in a shark tank.

Who could have done such a horrible thing to him?

"I must ask you to leave, Athenle," Keiichi demanded. "I believe you've overstayed your visit, and you've overstated your intent, and you have overly upset Belldandy. I will not Bond with you, I will not Bond with any Goddess..." As fast as the eye could follow, Athenle swung her axe up and around, stopping the edge of it with a snap right under Keiichi's chin with impossible speed and precision. Belldandy didn't even have time to be scared that she might decapitate him.

"You have no say in this, Wish-granter," Athenle steeled in a voice malign with intent. "There's nothing you can do, because I have decided that you will be my Bondmate."

Keiichi was paralyzed. Belldandy had seen him do many things, be many things...but never frozen like this.

"And I have you to thank for this, little whelpling mortal girl. You were the one that made him this way."

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"It's not fair!"

Chiba Polytech Freshman Belldandy Morisato could only hiss her dissatisfaction between her teeth as she toweled the sweat off of Keiichi's face. Athenle's visit had blown Keiichi off his hinges; he had remained as rock-still as a marble carving for half an hour after the Valkyrie whisked herself back to Windowsill. Belldandy tried yelling at him, slapping him in the face, pinching him...she even threw a bucket of cold water on him. On a whim, she decided to make silly faces at him, which finally broke him out of his catatonia. It was totally irritating that he didn't react until she had made a fool of herself. But at least he was back in his body instead of being a statue like the gold-leafed Buddhas in the Sangha Hall.

"It is what it is, and nothing can be done about it. Once a Valkyrie sets her sights on a goal, nothing save the Almighty or the Ultimate Force can deter her from accomplishing it. They are the very zenith of ambitious pursuit of their convictions."

"But...why?" Belldandy countered. "I remember how you told me that you could never feel or receive Love because you walked alone through that Gate of Judgment thingy. Then something changed and now you're suddenly Mister Love God himself? You don't look different, you don't act different, you're the same God that I first met in the Girl's Dorm. I didn't figure that you would get scared stiff like this. Then again, she acted like she was going to cut your head off."

"Belldandy, I got 'scared stiff' because Athenle is already exerting some control on me. She cannot harm me in the 'physical' sense. For a Valkyrie to attack a God with harmful intent for any reason would result in her immediate dismissal. Otherwise, Yggdrasil would be like many of your Thera nations; ruled by those who have strength. A militiacracy, if you will."

"But how can she influence you? She can make you do stuff that you don't want to do, if she can make you this upset. Isn't that acting with harmful intent?" she asked. Which brought up another issue. With the flurry of Athenle's intrusion into her homecoming, she'd forgotten her intent to have that heart-to-heart talk with him. Her triumphant homecoming was ruined! She had wanted to tell him all about her adventures in Osaka, the National Championship she had won, and her invitation to the Olympics.

The Olympics.

"Keiichi, we won the tournament!" she related, forgetting everything as she filled with the energy of her recent victory. "It was totally intense the whole time. You have no idea how scared I was when we ended up playing Osaka in the championship game! We thought we were gonna get killed, and we lost the first two games, but then we started to...hey! Are you even listening to me?"

"Champ..ion..ship?" he answered in a halting voice. Belldandy wondered if maybe now was not the time to have a heavy conversation with him. Apparently he was so unsettled from this visit by Athenle that he couldn't even share in her enthusiasm. He seemed totally out-of-it. No, now was not the time to try and extract his admission about his feelings. How could it be? It was as if he had attended an omiai and totally disliked the bridal candidate, and then learned that he was being forced by his parents to marry her anyway. But there was one burning question she couldn't let go of.

"Keiichi, she said that somehow _I_ was responsible for this eternal love that you're supposed to have. She said that any Goddess who marries you will enjoy a lifelong, deeply passionate loving relationship. But if you're God, doesn't that mean that you would be able to do that anyway? How could you Gods have something other than perfect Love?"

"Belldandy, no love is perfect, as I am beginning to discover. Take a look at Athenle. I have no doubt that she truly loves me after her own fashion. But it's all one-sided..."

"Now you just waitaminute!" Belldandy interrupted. "God, you're so lame-brained sometimes. She's not in love with you, you dork! She's in love with herself! She's in love with the _idea_ of being in love with you. I should know, because I'm a woman and I can sense these things."

"Your so-called feminine intuition, eh?" Keiichi said, finally managing to smile.

"Yep! We mortal women have it, in spades!" Belldandy answered brightly. "Just like I now know that you didn't bake me that cake. You didn't want to marry me...that was something Athenle cooked up as a plan to get me all bitchy and pissed off so I'd bail on you. It almost worked too, except that I was so disgusted with her being all this 'I'm the Queen Amazon' that I couldn't stay angry with her, because she's _stupid_. Even stupider than you!"

"Belldandy, are you complementing me?" Keiichi asked.

"Y'know, you're starting to get better. You couldn't make a joke when you first came here. You could only _be_ a joke. Or make me into a joke in front of my friends. But now...you're almost human."

"Now you're insulting me," he answered. Belldandy giggled briefly at this. There's hope him yet; he's was a long way from being a comedian, but he was just a teensy bit funny. There's no way I can be serious with right now, he might make a joke out of it.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

The next morning, Belldandy awoke to strawberry-flavored mochi on a tray floating in a near-full bathroom sink. She smiled to herself, intuiting that this was Keiichi's awkward way of making amends for yesterday. It was amazing that she even got a wink of sleep last night...she had a vague impression of Keiichi coming into her bedroom and lighting some weird incense. If that happened, it would mark the first time he'd ever been in her room without getting scolded or assaulted.

"Mochi in the bathroom sink next to the soap, huh?" she said to the mirror.

"Well, I thought that you'd want to eat it straightaway," the familiar voice noted from somewhere behind her.

"Keiichi! Didn't you read the sign? The one that says: '_Gods not allowed to enter when occupied_'!"

"Instead of getting upset with me, you should be thankful somebody in Japan makes XXXXXL pajamas. Just think what it would be like if you had to wear a normal-sized nightshirt. Then you'd have a reason to worry about..."

"Not now, for God's sake!" she interrupted.

"True," the voice said from in front of her as he emerged from the mirror. Belldandy stepped back, thrown off by an image of Keiichi's head appearing right in the middle of her mirror-image chest. "You know you still need to have a talk with your parents about going to Beijing."

Beijing. He'd have to bring that up. The only bad thing about calling her folks and asking permission would be her inability to see the looks on their faces as she told them that she'd been offered a slot on the team. Her dad especially would get all emotional just at high school games; they must have blown a year's savings traveling to Osaka for the championships. Beijing would be out of their reach financially. Yet they'd give her their blessing, without a doubt. Dad would sell his farm to send her there if he had to.

"Not if you go...urgh!" Keiichi said as he pulled himself out the mirror, straining to squeeze through the narrow mirror. "Not if you go in person."

"What did I tell you about reading my mind, Keiichi?!" she said irritably. "Besides, you gotta be kidding! Yen doesn't grow on trees, dimwit!"

"Belldandy, did you ever hear the story about the panda and the crocodile?" Belldandy had to admit that she hadn't, in fact it was hard for her to imagine the two animals in a fairytale at all, they had so little in common.

_"Long ago, even before humans had developed ideas like cities and religions, sound and space agreed in the language of birds, fish and animals that walked the lands. Untouched except by stormworks, the marshes then were unsullied by the excreta of mortal civilization. Many species of animals met and conferenced their joys and disappointments there and elsewhere. It came to pass that one such animal, a crocodile, wished to travel upstream to the marsh-delta so that he could participate in the joining. Yet, swimming among the reeds was all he could design, because his lamed foot made land travel impossible._

_"After a particularly violent storm, a panda who had lost her way arrived at the marsh. Pandas may be gentle creatures, but their waking hours are invested in the very important task of eating delicacies like bamboo, bamboo shoots, bamboo leaves. One may say that their diet is the blandest of all animals, but they enjoy bamboo. Yet, if there is no bamboo for them to savor, the panda must go elsewhere in search of a bamboo forest. She was confused because the monsoons had devastated her forest, tearing out familiar landmarks and bamboo tors with fury. The passages of life she was accustomed to were gone, the bamboo forest of her birthplace now a mouldering, rotting heap of food. The smell itself was enough to drive her away. So she found her way through the marsh to the riverbank, half-starved._

_"The crocodile had never beheld such a curious creature, larger than he and clothed in colorless fur. All his brothers and sisters ignored the newcomer, thinking it ugly. But he gathered his courage and swam over to greet the strange enigma. After they exchanged greetings, he learned that she was starving and she learned that he wanted to swim to the delta for the gathering of animals. She lamented that she couldn't help him, because she could not swim. The crocodile in his wily mind thought that if he could convince her to enjoin the water, that he could bite her in the neck and squeeze the breath out of her. Her corpse would be ample floatillion for him; he'd be spared the overland crossing as he could float on her as he was wont to float on fallen logs. The panda in her cunning saw a lame crocodile who she could drag out of the water and stave off starvation with his scaly skin, which would be roughage in her stomach like the bamboo she enjoyed._

_"But both are heaven-beasts, and for some reason each was touched with enough compassion to peer through the veil of their selfish designs. The panda learned that she could fold the water with her paws with ease; the crocodile learned that he could rest his lamed leg and move himself along overland with his powerful tail, swimming upon the dusts. After a journey of many months to the south, the pair reached their destination. Did the pair starve? No, for in learning to swim, the panda learned to widen her diet to include fish. She discovered that bamboo isn't limited to hillsides and valleys; that it touches the rivers. The crocodile learned to rely on others instead of his own devices, as he was able to eat from the bounty of fish the panda caught for she was an expert swimmer and hunter._

_"At the mouth of the delta, with the ocean speaking in their ears and the tang of salt in their nostrils, they waited along with all the creatures for something. A wise being was said to pass without, and would teach all those assembled a path of wisdom. Days and days they waited, their patience tested as they climbed up the mountain of their vigilance. Finally, a creature appeared; parting not the marsh brush like a lion or elephant would, but in the forest of water! For a gigantic form mounted the surface, one that even cowered the rhinos and elephants by its magnificence and size. Larger than a tree was tall, the new heaven-beast gamboled against the sky. Past the sun, past the dreams, past all being; the moment stood still for every assembled creature in that throng as the giant swam near the shore and passed these thoughts to them:_

_"To spend what one has lost, one must lose all one has earned: for the future is pleased only insofar as the present is generous."_

"Uhh...nice story Keiichi," Belldandy reflected in a deadpan voice. "I can't believe I just sat still through that whole thing because...because…hey, waitaminute! Are you saying that the only way I can drop something I have but don't want to have…is by giving away something I need? To someone who doesn't need it as much? Or to say it another way, make a gift of something very dear to me that wouldn't be as important to someone else as it is to me?"

"It's not the only way, Belldandy, but it is the best way," he answered, waving his hand like a sleight-of-hand cardshark and producing a bus ticket and itinerary to Murakami via Choshi.

"But what about Ms. Pain-in-the-Butt? If I'm gone, you know she's gonna come here, and that's a big problem," Belldandy asked. There. It was out in the open, whether she liked it or not. If she went to see her parents, Keiichi would have to deal with the advances of Athenle for a few days. She was pretty confident that he could handle her for short periods of time. But if she went to Tokyo for squad-building and then Beijing for the Olympics, she would be gone for the entire summer. Sadly, she would lose Keiichi for sure, because that bitch of a Goddess would pester him until he was a pliable as udon noodles in a bowl of miso.

"That is because she is your problem, not mine," Keiichi explained. Belldandy grabbed the tickets and stomped out of the room. He had just ruined any chance that she could talk to him as a friend. He didn't even care that _she_ cared about what happens to him!

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Of course, her parents were shocked when she came in person to tell them about Beijing. Mom almost fainted off the wooden porch, and Dad's bottle of ice water managed to slip out of his hand. Just to see their expressive faces of shock was a priceless memory. Not a word was said the rest of the afternoon until dinner, when Mom started in with the thousand-and-one questions. Who else is going? Is the coach reputable? Did she have her passport? Would the water be safe to drink? Do they have good trains in China-States?

Dad insisted on feting her by taking her into town to visit all his friends the next day. Actually, to show her off and brag. Belldandy couldn't say no to Dad's whim; he deserved a return for all the effort and support he'd given since her first kiddie-league v-ball days.

"Who's this? Michelle Wie?" the manager of the farming supply warehouse asked. "No, she's too tall to be her. Doesn't look much like a golfer either, with those arms," he noted as he squeezed her biceps. The guy had probably been touching hog feed a few minutes earlier, or maybe even hogs...but she took it in stride. It was home, and these were her folks. Her name and picture were already well known in the Murakami district thanks to the newspaper. She was a minor home-town celebrity.

"Lookit who we got here?" the counter waitress said at the sit-down soba shop Dad used to take her to as a kid. Belldandy had grown up coming into town with Mom and Dad every so often; and the 'treat' of sitting at the counter and enjoying the delicious soba noodles in broth. For years, the husband, who was the noodle chef, had loaded her bowl with extras noting "she's a growing girl" which brought a round of good-natured laughter from the other patrons. He didn't miss a beat doing so again, and the regulars laughed on cue once again. It's so good to be home, she realized. At least things are stable here in her hometown.

Next stop was another eatery, and she had to down a bowl of donburi while people took photos of her. She begged off going to more restaurants; if she went to all the ones Dad was planning on, she'd gain five kilos before going home.

"Beijing, huh?" her grade school teacher remarked. Dad had insisted on the drive back from Murakami that she accompany him to his favorite bar in a hamlet next to the ocean. "Don't reckon I'd like the place. Liable to have rocks mixed in with the rice. Liable to smile at ya' and steal ya' blind."

Her roots...a bunch of old geezer hicks. And she loved them for it, even when she hated it.

The next day was Mom's day to show her off, and this meant visits to the aunties. Of course Dad wouldn't parade her around his sisters, he left that task to Mom. Belldandy thought he was being negligent, but when she noticed how happy her Mom was when visiting the aunties, Belldandy sensed that he'd skipped over them deliberately. Duh! He skipped them so Mom could have a 'ladies night' away from the homestead. Her aunties were all over her with questions for about thirty minutes, and then settled in to talk about all their middle-aged friends, none of which Belldandy knew. So she fended off boredom by watching TV as they gossiped and giggled. One Aunt insisted on mahjongg so she was drafted to be the fourth player for a few rounds. Another aunt demanded karaoke, so she was hauled along to a nearby K-bar for a singalong. Titters of delight when she hit her head on the noren over the doorway and broke it, she was so anxious to get out of there. Eurythmics, Chage & Aska, The Alfee, and folksongs weren't exactly her idea of music to sing with.

Naturally, Dad slipped her an envelope with a small fortune before she left. She refused it three times just to be the dutiful daughter. After the third refusal, he told her that the guys at the supply warehouse had taken a collection and had given _him_ an envelope that morning with more than enough money for he and Mom to stay in Beijing for the two weeks of the Olympics. Dad was told that each worker there had burned up the phone asking their friends and neighbors, and everybody had pitched in. Belldandy could only swallow a little of her awe.

"Now don't you go telling Mom before I do," Dad requested. So she kept a lid on it, which was almost as difficult as playing Osaka University again. Dad finally informed Mom right after dinner while Belldandy was helping her with the dishes. Without a word, Mom set her dishes down and then grabbed her as tight as she could and cried into her breast until her t-shirt was soaked...with Dad's help, because he was crying almost as hard as Mom. He even addressed Mom by her Euro name as the three of them hugged, something she'd seen him do maybe four or five times in her life.

Holding her parents close, Belldandy felt bouyed with emotion as she sensed that this was the first time in her life that _she was holding them_, not the other way around. Could this be what happens when a girl becomes an adult?

Once again, Keiichi had sent her out to take a risk, but this time it had turned out right.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

When she returned to the temple, Belldandy was almost bursting with curiosity to see how Keiichi had fared, almost as much as she was enthusing about describing her visit to her parent's farm and her hometown. As she passed through the outer gate to the temple courtyard, Keiichi and Furo both greeted her, Furo of course wanting to wrestle with her as his way of saying "Hi, I missed you!" Keiichi seemed a bit reserved, but was almost pleased when she told him that her parents were going to Beijing. She could discern that he was emotionally wrung out; Athenle had obviously visited him several times while she was away in Niigata. He explained that it wasn't just Athenle. He was being 'stalked' by dozens of Goddesses who would visit him at every possible chance.

The poor guy.

Belldandy felt the cheerful aftertaste from her visit with Mom and Dad gradually become tempered with guilt. She had accused Keiichi of doing bad stuff behind her back when she was gone, but in truth he was rejecting one Goddess after another just to survive without losing his head. Belldandy thought it was so ironic that the guy has to dis the girls rather than the other way around. It wasn't like he was doing anything wrong, but she did feel a tint of jealousy shade across her brow when she realized that he had entertained female visitors while she was gone. The fact that she was even concerned about him _that_ way was unexpected and even trialsome to her. Why would she harbor any jealous feelings if she wasn't romantically interested in him? Besides, the weird 'love magnet' thing Keiichi had did specify Goddesses. She wasn't a Goddess by any means. Which in a sense was a blessing to Keiichi, because she could be a 'normal' female around him, in contrast to all the other females who all in heat over him. She dismissed the jealousy bit as being the kind of suspicious envy that would arise when a friend didn't have enough time to hang out because she or he was too busy with other friends. So it was no big deal. But it was a big deal in the sense that Keiichi was being hounded by love-hungry Goddesses whenever she left the temple.

"As long as you're here, they can't come," Keiichi noted. "As far as the so-called Ultimate Force is concerned, I am the only immortal who is supposed to have contact with you. I don't know how Athenle was able to come here to the Therarealm and encounter you; that is totally against policy. The system is set up to prevent wish candidates from being visited by other Gods. One God is already overwhelming for most mortals. But then again, you already made your wish. So the Rule might not apply in this case. But there's supposed to be many safeguards built into the system to prevent..."

"HUH! I _already_ made a wish? I don't remember making a wish!" Belldandy blurted out, stroking her long auburn ponytail. "I don't feel like I made a wish...I mean, my life is pretty much the same as it was when...er, what did I wish for?"

Keiichi offered a lengthy explanation about why a Divine Wish Escort Service God couldn't tell a wish candidate what their wish had been if they forgot it. Belldandy once again wondered about how it was possible that Windowsill could possibly run itself without doing a crash-n-burn. Even with email accounts, if a person forgot her password, she could reset it. Life is supposed to have reminders because people's memories don't work very well. His explanation didn't jive with common sense, and it certainly didn't justify why there wasn't a 'do over' for people who had wishes granted. If a person made a wish and couldn't remember it, would that be a blessing or a curse? What if they wished for an ideal job, and then when it was right in front of their noses, they didn't recognize it?. One more facet of Windowsill that didn't make any sense.

"Let me see if I understand this right," she clarified. "You say that I already made a wish, which was why Ms. Bitch could show herself in front of me. Plus, if I heard you right, the wish I made can't be told back to me." Keiichi nodded "yes" to both.

"So why are _you_ still here?" Belldandy noticed that she'd caught Keiichi off-guard with that one, and decided to pursue it further. "You're supposed to be assigned by this Windowsill Wish Office, and once I make a wish, then your job is done. Complete. Finished. Then you're supposed to go on to the next job, right? So how come you haven't been sent after another wisher?"

"I bet you're in love with me, you prize baka!" she said daringly, eyeing him with narrowed fox eyes.

"Then you better only bet a 100 yen piece, so you don't gamble your savings away, Belldandy," he answered. "Because I'm not in love with you. I wouldn't even begin to know how to be in love with you, because you're a mortal. Perhaps this is the wisdom in the fact that my 'love condition' specifies Goddesses, not mortals."

"So have any _Gods_ visited you?" she teased. The look of distaste on Keiichi's face was enough to confirm that he wasn't open to homosexual relationships. Maybe gender didn't make any difference to the Gods, maybe it did. Belldandy had a brief thought of male Gods in drag trying to pose themselves off as Goddesses and coming to visit Keiichi.

"Oh please!" Keiichi complained, hand against head. Evidently her little imaginative exercise was 'loud' enough for him to overhear.

"Hey! I got an idea!" Belldandy noted, pointing a finger in the air declaratively.

"I don't know if I wish to be subjected to an 'idea' of yours, as the last couple ideas you've offered were anything but sensible. Even for a flighty mortal female like yourself, they were quite irrational and groundless," he replied in a wary voice. Belldandy stuck her tongue out at him in answer. Besides, her idea was almost a brainstorm, and it was totally do-able!

"When was the last time you went to college?"

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Belldandy knew that the first day at Chiba Poly with Keiichi would be the most critical day, because of the sheer number of first impressions that would be made when she showed up with him in tow. She spent the previous two evenings debriefing Keiichi on how to behave on campus. The story was that he was an exchange student from Norway, and he was staying with her only because his parents were friends with his Mom's parents back in Europe. He had a fiancée back in the home country that he would marry upon graduating from college with a Masters in Civic Engineering. The Civic Engineering idea was Keiichi's; when she asked him "why Civic Engineering?" he replied that he always wanted to work on something small scale like a large urban city. To his credit, he seemed caught up in the idea once his initial anxieties about being around a host of Thera mortals settled down. She could empathize with his hesitance; he didn't have to 'pretend' to be mortal around her. He also reminded her that Wish Escort Gods had a one-to-one relationship with the mortals they were assigned to, and were strictly forbidden to reveal themselves to any other mortal beings.

So off they went on a warm April day to Chiba Poly.

Belldandy was used to catching stares on campus because she was a frosh, and because of her height. Being the star player of Chiba Poly's first-ever National Champion team only added to her being spotlighted. With Keiichi walking next to her, the attention seemed to double. She had gone shopping with him over the weekend in Tokyo so that he'd have a 'trial run' at being a fake mortal around a bunch of real mortals. The more important reason for the shopping trip was for her to buy him some clothes with part of the money Dad had given her...after all, Dad did specify that it was for "fun and omiyage gifts for your friends and family." The last thing she needed was to show up to school with Keiichi dressed for fashion disaster. Besides, it was kinda fun watching God be all nervous as she guided him through a department store.

Keiichi gained quick notoriety in her first class by pulling what he later termed a "Belldandy move". As he walked into the lab, he banged his head on the mantle of the doorway. This deliberate clumsiness caused her classmates to giggle and make oddball comments. There was a collective gasp as he straightened up once inside the room; Belldandy had no doubts that he was probably the tallest human being any of them had ever seen in real life. He was able to mimic her Norwegian-inflected Japanese with no problem. One less thing to spazz over; it would be difficult to try and sell her friends on the idea that he was from Norway when his Japanese was more Kanto than Kanto dialect speakers.

The next class would be the real test, as it was the requisite sports medicine class and most of her teammates were in it. She knew it was going to be trouble as soon as Keiichi stepped through the doorway, ducking under the top of the doorway this time, and the whistling and chatter started. Keiichi stood behind her at the front of the class so Belldandy could introduce him to the instructor.

"Oh my God!" she heard Ootaki gasp. Belldandy rolled her eyes, and then Keiichi caught her eye with a briefly flashed eye-smile and she started giggling. If Ootaki only knew the truth of what she had just said! The instructor assigned him to the back row of the classroom and he took his seat, his knees barely fitting under the desk.

"So dat's the boyfriend, huh?" Tamiya whispered as soon as she sat down. "I don' know whether to tease you or kill you. He's so good-looking, even I'm envious."

"Tamiya sempai, for the hundredth time, he's not my boyfriend! He's a friend of the family, that's all. He's got a fiancée in Norway! And don't be envious; if you knew what he's really like, you might not be envious about anything," she noted and went on to describe some of tamer Keiichi mishaps, including the toothbrush in the toilet one.

"So he's a total bishie, and a total airhead," Ootaki whispered. "Figures. I'm gonna ask him to say something in Norwegian after class."

Somehow, Belldandy was able to pass the next hour without having to field too many gossipy questions from her teammates. She was almost indignant at one point. It wasn't fair that she was the one who had shouldered so much of the team's burdens, and now they were grilling her about Keiichi like a bunch of private investigators. Just waiting for her to make one slipup and give them grist for the chatterbox mill. When class finished, Ootaki made a beeline for Keiichi while Belldandy thought a panicky "Uh-oh!"

"Belldandy sez you're from Norway," she asked. When Keiichi answered, she glanced at Belldandy with an expression of pure mischief. "So how do you say 'I love you' in Norwegian?"

Belldandy could only open her mouth to a rounded window so that the gasp could escape.

"Jeg elsker deg," he answered without missing a beat.

"Okay," Ootaki replied, clumsily trying to pronounce the phrase.

"So...how do you say 'I love you' to _her_?" she asked, pointing at Belldandy.

"H..Hey!" Belldandy shouted, stepping in the middle of the circle and then waving her arms frantically. "If you want to learn Norwegian, then go to Norway, Ootaki!"

Her embarrassment was drowned out by loud peals of feminine laughter.

"I can't take you anywhere, can I?" Belldandy grumbled as she grabbed Keiichi by the wrist and briskly walked out of the room, half-pulling, half-dragging him. Glancing over her shoulder to glare at Ootaki, she saw her sempai circling her finger around her temple in an unmistakable "she's nuts" gesture. Even though it was a short distance out of the class to the safety of the hallway, Belldandy was breathing as deeply as if she had just ran sprints.

"Dur et sot," Keiichi said to her.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

The next few days passed without too many incidents. Keiichi was pretty distracting at first, but gradually the gang got used to him. In one sense, his errant comments and gaffes helped convince her crew that he was indeed an awkward Norway-Euro gaijin, sealing the deal on her cover story. The only thing that made her nervous was when everyone kept asking him to show them a picture of his fiancée; Keiichi repeatedly insisted "that's private." The matter would drop until the next day and the next round of "show us! show us!" from her friends.

One time he almost blew it when one of her teammates, the brainiest one on the squad, asked him to help her with a calculus proof. Tamiya sniggered at this, but clamped her mouth tight when Keiichi wrote up the proof without hesitation and then announced that the vector calculus wasn't much of a challenge. Her teammate caught her by elbow after her computer class finished and asked her if they taught advanced math in high school in Norway, because Keiichi had solved the proof without even writing out the steps, just like a schoolchild would add 4 plus 4 and instantly know the answer was 8.

Then on Friday, Coach Chihiro attended her sports medicine class.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"This is him?" her Coach asked after class was over. "Damn, he's really one big kahuna!"

Naturally, Tamiya and Ootaki were going to linger instead of shuffling along to their next class; Belldandy knew that they'd skip any class just to witness _this_ meeting and conversation. Her best friends, the freaks.

"Keiichi, this is my Coach, Chihiro," she said after Tamiya elbowed her to remind her to do the introductions. Keiichi bowed respectfully to her Coach and then said "Charmed," which almost had Tamiya and Ootaki in stitches. Belldandy was rapt, stilled to perfection by the fluidly intimidating circumstances in the air. Keiichi had said the most witless thing he could have possibly offered in greeting her Coach...her _female_ Coach.

Ootaki said "Jeg elsker deg" in a whispered-aside voice.

"Wah ha ha ha..." the two seniors burst into laughter while Belldandy turned red and shot them a stinkeye, simultaneously humiliated and resentful. Dumbasses! They always forget that she lived in Norway until she was nine and was a native speaker of Bokmaal and Nyonrsk. Chihiro raised an eyebrow at this, somehow sensing that she could be the butt of a joke.

"Jeg elsker deg," her Coach said slowly, trying the words out, drawing another gale of laughter from her sempai. Belldandy's red face turned purple.

"Oh, I get it! You wanted him to say "Jog and dig' didn't you, Ootaki? As in extra jogging and digging practices after school today? Right!" Chihiro clarified with a sadistic look in her eye. Belldandy watched her sempai's wide grin snap into a grimace and thought "serves you right, you eel-head!"

"That includes you too Morisato. Now that Mr. Dark and Handsome is coming to school with you, I'm gonna have to keep it tight with you so you don't get distracted. He's big enough to distract a sumo wrestler. Hmm, by the way, would you like to come watch us practice, Keiichi?"

No. No. Please say no. Please say no. No. Don't. Just...say...no.

"Really? I think that'd be really cool! Thanks for the invite, Ms. Chihiro!"

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

During scrimmage, Belldandy was completely off her rhythm. For that matter, the entire team was off balance. She felt like she was at her first practice with the team again, making freshman mistakes. After drills, Chihiro invited Keiichi to serve a couple services and showed him by example how to move into a flowing service style. She nailed a couple good serves, one of them an ace because Tamiya was too preoccupied with the 'lesson' the Coach was giving Keiichi; and was slow to fill the corner. Belldandy said a silent prayer that Keiichi wouldn't pull a stunt, like hit the ball so hard it would puncture the net or something. But he aired his first attempt past the court line, and then hit two out of bounds and one into the net.

"Well, at least you're human," Coach Chihiro commented after he went 1 for 10 on his service attempts. Belldandy didn't know if the lesson Coach gave Keiichi was some kind of test, or simply Chihiro's idea of a whim.

"Let's take a break, ladies!" Chihiro announced and the squad broke ranks to swarm around the water cooler and talk about their play and what had just happened with their tall visitor. Belldandy begged off Ootaki to get her an ice water from the cooler because she didn't want to overhear their remarks, many of which she knew would be unkind or mirthful after his poor performance at the service line. Ootaki returned with a liter bottle and pressed it on her back to elicit a quick shudder, the usual little private joke they shared.

"What a waste!" she commented. "The guy is Norwegian, looks like he could be a Viking or something, not the butt-ugly type Vikings, I mean. But he's so damn tall...and he can't even do anything with ball control. Any volleyball team in the country would love to have him in their front row. But he's just like you said. He's a geek! He's as clumsy as an otaku who comes out from under his mountain of manga once a year to play softball, and forgets which end of the bat to hold."

Meanwhile, the basketball team had been practicing half-court scrimmages in the other half of the gym. Belldandy knew that the guys had been eyeballing Keiichi from the moment he walked into the gym. Observing that Keiichi was 'released' by the volleyball coach, the guys were hailing him to shoot some hoops with the men's team. Belldandy had an unsightly fantasy of watching Keiichi try and do a layup and ripping his jeans open in the butt.

"I gotta see dis!" Tamiya said, sitting down on her other side and watching the action unfold. Too far away to hear, they watched as several basketball players gestured towards the lane and basket, and then they handed him the ball. Keiichi walked over to the basket and reached up and dropped the ball in. He dribbled the ball a few times and then walked back to the gathered basketball team. There was no more gesturing; one of the b-ball players grabbed the ball from Keiichi and walked away with a disgusted expression and a disappointed bent to his shoulders. Keiichi shrugged his shoulders and then walked back to the volleyball half of the gym.

"They told me to try and bounce the ball and then put it the hoop, so I did what they told me," he informed them matter-of-factly, as if he had just taken out the trash or walked across the street. 

Tamiya and Ootaki looked at each other, then at Belldandy, then at Coach Chihiro, who had watched the whole incident transpire with an unreadable expression.

"N..no fuckin' way!" Tamiya finally blurted, "He did not do what I just saw him do!" She looked at Ootaki and burst into explosive laughter so intense that she almost shot-noodled her ice water out her nose. Belldandy pulled her jersey over her head to hide, hoping that Keiichi wouldn't walk back over to ask her opinion about how he did.

Which was exactly what he did.

Ootaki mumbled "jeg elsker deg", which garnered another round of chest-heaving laughter out of her teammates. The laughter was so contagious, even Coach Chihiro was laughing despite her best efforts to hide it behind her scratch board.

"You know Keiichi," Belldandy told him in a deadpan voice, "I think you better sit out the rest of the practice and just watch. As in sitting over there." She pointed towards a row of risers that had been pulled out to accommodate onlookers and visitors. Keiichi nodded his head with a smile and walked over to the seats.

"Wh...hee..hee...what part of Norway is he from?" Coach Chihiro managed to sputter before she bent double with laughter.

"The baka part," Belldandy observed in disgust, unintentionally finishing the laugh riot with a coup de grace which sent her teammates and Coach into hysterics.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"There's a reason why I had him come to our practice a couple days back. And you guys proved me right," Coach Chihiro said after everyone hit the showers. Belldandy pulled her hair through the hairtie and soothed it back, squeezing the last bit of water out of the auburn-dun ponytail.

"He was much more distracting than I thought he could ever be, and the look on Coach Omiyana's face when he walked up and dropped the ball in the basket without even jumping is something I'll probably never forget. But I wanted you guys to see how easy it is to take you off your game. Two days later, you're still off your game."

"One clumsy teen-aged dude...and now you're all playing like shit!" Chihiro shouted, shifting into serious mode. "One guy! Do you know how many distractions are going to be in Beijing? Not just on the court, but off the court? Dammit, this is not going to work!"

Belldandy and her two sempai flinched with the crack of scratch board hitting the office wall.

"Next week, I've gotta introduce a dozen girls and women to each other. Women who don't even know each other, who don't even know each other's names, let alone each other's strengths and weaknesses. That's going to be the team we're taking to Beijing for Japan! The two Osaka U girls know each other; Miyahara was a senior when Kinosh'ta was a frosh. And you've played Kinosh'ta, so you know she's gonna bring her game with her. The captain was my teammate in 2004 and is going to be hell to coach, because she thinks she should have tapped to be the coach. I'm _fuckin'_ younger than she is! Then there's my three star players on my college team that won the National title...and they're playing with their heads up their asses. I might as well put my head on the chopping block now and save everybody the wait!"

The three women felt the silence drown them. Belldandy had been scolded many times by her Coach. Sometimes she didn't even understand what she doing wrong when Chihiro would suddenly blow her whistle and then walk over and start yelling and pushing. But this angry outburst was way beyond anything she had experienced from her Coach...any coach. She looked up at Chihiro with a look of raw hatred. It wasn't fair that she used Keiichi to make them get distracted, and now was jumping all over their asses.

"This is bullshit!" Belldandy shouted, glaring at her Coach. Tamiya and Ootaki both looked like they were going to fall off their chairs. "This is bullshit because it isn't right! You think that we're so goddamned stupid that we don't take this seriously! Keiichi is an idiot! We aren't!"

"Brave words from a freshman who can't even hit the corner on her spikes. And I said 'spikes', not kills. Because if she knew how to blast the ball so it curves away from the foul line instead of towards it, we wouldn't have to be saying spikes, would we?" Chihiro answered back steely, her fighting spirit chilling Belldandy. Belldandy's dander was ruffled and she was ready to snap back at her Coach; but Chihiro stared her down. Why was this happening? Hadn't she done everything the Coach had asked her to do...and even more? What was she doing wrong this time? Coach Chihiro had pointed out the most glaring weakness in her game, the weakness that had cost them the exhibition match against Long Beach State.

"If you're trying to be a Coach, you're doing a shitty job of it," Ootaki said in a slow angry voice. Belldandy couldn't believe her ears; her sempai had actually stood up for her against the Coach.

"Yuh!" Tamiya agreed. "She's worked harder than any of us to get here. She's worked her heart out just ta get here...and all you can see is that she...that _we_ are fuckups? Some Coach you are! Coaches are supposed to inspire their players. Obviously no one inspired you, cuz you don't have Gold sitting on that wall over there."

"Christ, Tamiya!" Belldandy said in a panic. That was beyond cold, that was a stab in the heart. Tamiya had just committed suicide, hung by her tongue.

"You're right," Coach Chihiro said after milking the tension for a full five minutes of silence. Belldandy was so scared, she thought she was going to have a emotional meltdown or pee her pants during that pause. Tamiya eased back into her chair, relieved that Chihiro didn't tear her head off.

"Always a big talker, you," Chihiro added, with a murderous look to her eyes that made Belldandy push her chair even harder against the wall to try and move away. "So go get yourself a medal! I'd like to see you get one. When you get your Gold, then you've earned the right to say what you just said. Until then, shut the fuck up, because you won't even make it past the first round of the elims with that kind of attitude. None of you will. _You're not even a team yet!_ I had hoped that the only three girls who know each other's games would be able to contribute to the squad. Maybe help all the other women form a unit. But you three can't even agree on anything. I'm gonna find three other women who will appreciate the chance to play for Japan at the Olympics."

"N..NO!!" Belldandy said, half shouting, half whimpering. "I won't let you!"

"You...won't let _me_?" Chihiro retorted in a dry voice. "Okay. Okay, go ahead and try, Morisato. Try and convince me. But if you don't say _exactly_ what I want to hear, then you're off the team. All three of you."

_It's hopeless. After I went to my home town, told my parents, got a Visa to go to China-State. After I worked my ass off and put up with everything else in my so-called messed up life. Stupid Keiichi caused all of this! I hate...him...I hate.._

"I HATE IT!!"

Huh?!" her sempai exclaimed, totally taken off-guard by her outburst.

"I hate volleyball!!" Belldandy screamed at the top of her voice. "I hate it, I hate it, I hate it! Every afternoon and evening, I bust ass and practice while everyone else goes home and watches TV. Every weekend, I practice even more. Practice practice practice! My muscles hurt, I have headaches, sometimes I feel like I'm gonna puke when I hit the lockers. I freeze my ass walking from the showers to this trash-heap trailer that passes for a 'locker room'. Then I come home and realize that I don't have a social life. I never had a boyfriend in high school!"

Tamiya and Ootaki didn't say a word about _that_ one. Throughout her Frosh year, Belldandy had lied and made it out that she was Ms. Popular in high school. Admitting that she wasn't the high school queen of hearts was hard...her dishonesty made her feel wretched.

"I come here and I have to put up with you yelling at me all the time. With them laughing at me when I screw up. With these two riding me every day about my 'boyfriend' when I don't even have one! Then you make me do extra practices. I practiced after midnight some nights, doing what you told to me do. And then..snff..the next day I have to hear you once again say that I've got my head up my ass and can't play for shit."

"So what?" Chihiro asked in an emotionless voice.

"So this! I hate it with every ounce of my being! I admit it...I hate volleyball!" Belldandy spilled her words. "But you really wanna know why I keep playing? Because no matter how much I hate Volleyball, I..love..it..even..more. I love it with my soul. I don't know why I love it so much, God only knows I've tried to figure that one out. I love it because it's _me_. It's who I am. I don't give a flying crap about all the other stuff. Volleyball has taught me..snff..that I can handle life. That I can..snff..be something more than what I am. And I love this sport so goddamned much..snff..that I went out and won us a National championship. Not just for..me..but for these two clowns. For _you_ too, Coach!

"You may..snff..think that I'm a loser, but you made me _a winner_."

Belldandy blinked back her tears. She'd completely blown it. She'd lost it in front of the Coach one time too often and now she was off the team. She saw the Olympics in her mind, flying away like an airborne 747. She had said everything stupid-assed instead of making sense. She looked up at Chihiro, ready for the axe to fall...and saw tears streaming down the older woman's cheeks.

"You know..snff..I hate it too," Coach Chihiro said softly, wiping her tears on her warm-up jacket sleeve. "I went to the Olympics, won a bronze medal when my heart was set on the gold. I busted ass, ran laps, did everything except swim across the Japan Sea and back just to get there. You see me arm-in-arm with some guy? I'm single too...and I ain't getting any younger. Fuckit, some of my classmates from high school have _kids_. Me, I'm stuck in this stupid college teaching classes that suck, because coaches don't get a free ride just by coaching. My players are so brokeass, I've gotta take them out drinking. Then I come home to a tiny little apartment in Faculty Housing with hardly anything in it, because I..snff..because I blew my whole paycheck..snff..on you guy's new warm up suits. That's right, this cheapass school wouldn't even spring for some nice warmup outfits for their team that earned a berth in the National Championship tournament."

She reached out and grasped Belldandy on the shoulder.

"Who do you think..snff..was watching you practice in that dark gym after midnite?" Chihiro admitted. She leaned forward and grabbed Tamiya and Ootaki by the wrists. "I even hate this game so much that I'd go watch her..snff..make a total fool of herself, and then I'd go back in this fuckin' dump of an office and sketch out plays..snff..for a couple hours, because I didn't know what else to do. While you guys were all sleeping snug in bed like babies.

"So you see, you ladies don't got nothing on me when it comes to hating this game. And you know what? I wouldn't have it any other way, because I'm a fool for this sport, just like the three of you goofs. I'm such a baka-head, I took on this Olympic coaching job on top of everything else that's brewin' in my life. Because I have a dream too. That dream is to see you..snff..three go out there and blow the socks off every team you play, beat'em into the court mercilessly and bring home the gold medals that I never got a chance to wear. To bring the gold to Japan where it belongs! And yes Morisato, I wasn't bullshitting when I said you can fix your corner kills. There actually _is_ a technique to curve your spikes inwards towards the court while hitting 'em even harder. And I'm gonna teach it to you if I gotta jam it down your throat myself."

Belldandy buried her head in her arms on her Coach's desk.

"I want you girls to suit up and show up here at 5am next Monday. You ain't playin for Chiba Poly any more. You're playing for _Japan_. That means day-long practices, playbook studies, and tutoring sessions at ungodly times when sane people are sleeping."

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

The week before the squad was to leave for Beijing, Coach Chihiro gave them their only day off. Belldandy stepped off the bus from Tokyo and smelled the summer air, letting it sift through her nostrils for the first time in almost three months. The only outdoors activities she had been allowed were photo shoots in Ueno Park and other landmarks, and, if Chihiro was feeling generous, an hour or two on an outdoor track. The rest of the time was invested in the practice gym. Belldandy was so used to that gym, she knew exactly how many planks were in the floor inside the v-ball court stripes.

Above the street and the trees, the clouds were cotton-weaved stuffed animals in the sheltering sky.

It took two weeks of hard practice before she managed to nail her first curveball spike with the technique Chihiro had patiently taught her. At the moment, she'd felt like it was fluke. Tamiya, Ootaki and several other teammates were so excited, they woke her up the next morning by shaking up canned sodas and spraying her, much to the chagrin of the dorm staff. Hurricanes in her veins, Belldandy slowly eased into more efficiency with her kills, sensing the 'feel' of the technique and lining it up with results on the floor. Even Coach Chihiro seemed secretly impressed.

Keiichi had kept his word, and had kept away from their practices.

As she turned the corner of the temple gate, Belldandy paused for a moment to take in the sight. The grounds of the temple were brilliant with grasses, the trees had magnificent boughs of leaves, the main temple and outbuildings caught the sunlight and seemed to warm it up even more, the gallery decks around the temples was skirted with long-grass.

"Hello Kitty!" she joked as Furo came padding up to greet her. She realized that she'd been away so long, he looked even bigger than before. When she went up to the main Sangha Hall, she spotted Keiichi sitting on the gallery deck with a handful of birds sporting around him. It almost looked like he was talking to them...

"Hey!"

"Hey you!" he answered her hail, the birds taking flight as he stood up to walk over and greet her. She knew that the past couple months had been very trying for him; in his own path, Keiichi was honing his skills to face adversity just like she had been. Once a week, he'd call her on the phone to assure her that he was dealing with Athenle and all the Goddesses okay. Sometimes gracefully, sometimes messily. Several of those calls shifted into her attempting to coach Keiichi on what to say and do, so he wouldn't make obvious mistakes that would send mixed signals to feed feminine wiles. Walking into the main Hall, Belldandy spun around with her arms flailing out like a little girl, greeting the Buddhas. "Hi Miroku...I'm home! Hi Shakya, I'm back! Hi Kannon, didya miss me?" She looked over her shoulder to see Keiichi regarding her with a bemused expression.

"Belldandy, since you're so interested in the Buddhas, you'll be happy to know that I made some Monk's Food for your 'welcome back' meal," he announced.

"Monk's Food? As in a bowl of rice and a couple stewed vegetables?" she noted with disdain. Exasperating, to say the least. After two months of calorie-rich cafeteria food...this. Stupid is as stupid does. Put God in a temple and he starts thinking like a monk.

"Yes. Easy on the stomach, good amount of calories, solid natural flavoring with no preservatives," Keiichi noted, listing the attributes of the fare he was offering her. "In consideration of all the processed food that you've been indulging in, I thought it would please you to eat something a bit different than what you've..."

"Bland..." Belldandy interrupted. "Bland, bland and even more bland. Do I look like an ascetic to you? Forget it! I'll cook us something. Uh, no…I take that back. No, I won't! No way am I going into that kitchen on my one day off! We're gonna go out and get us some pizza."

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"What is wrong with him?" she thought as he accidentally grabbed the same piece of pizza she was going for, the second time tonight. As he quickly withdrew his hand in wordless apology, she could see a mist-shadow of Athenle floating behind him. Blinking the momentary geisting image out of her eyes, Belldandy at once recognized why he was being so awkward. Even here, she was keeping watch on him. He bent close over the table and explained that he had created a sort of 'ward' to protect the temple from unwanted visitors. It was necessary, as he discovered. Whenever he left the temple, he would return to find an audience of several Goddesses to greet him. She could empathize with the need to leave the temple sometimes; otherwise it would just be another form of confinement. If it were her, she would lose it if she couldn't leave the temple whenever she wanted to.

"Hey, let's just enjoy this. Stop worrying about her, please," she asked, patting him lightly on the hand. She wasn't going to let Athenle or any other Goddess ruin her brief time with her friend.

Her friend.

Keiichi was probably one of a handful of friends she had. He certainly was the only friend she'd ever had with whom she hated with a passion at first. She no longer questioned herself if she had the strength to put off the discovery of his friendship. It just wasn't necessary to have to create a truce with herself every time she had a flash of recognition that he was firmly in her social orbit. The struggles came on the court, when she had to put aside all remembrances of him and focus on her game.

She watched Keiichi eating his pizza. If he was an auto engine, he'd be running at top RPM right now. It didn't take a rocket scientist to notice that her companion's mind was racing in some mysterious higher gear of God-type thoughts. If he was so upset with Athenle's presence that he couldn't enjoy pizza with her, she might as well give it up and have the rest of it boxed so they could return home to the temple. Maybe back in her home turf, she and Keiichi could have some privacy. She had so much she wanted to tell him about her past two months.

As they walked back to the temple, Keiichi had his hands in his pockets, a serious expression on his face.

"Hey, you look like you're lost in thought," she offered.

"At least I can get lost in thought," Keiichi quickly replied. "With you, it's unfamiliar territory."

Belldandy giggled at this, not even put off by the old stupid joke. Walking slowly under the night sky, she remembered how these walks had been hurried a few months back because she didn't want to be seen in public with him. She didn't want people thinking he was her boyfriend or something. Now, it didn't even matter; they could think whatever they wanted to think. She chuckled as they passed the alley where the three wannabe yakuza punks had harassed her...and a little further down the road was the streetlight where Furo had emerged to put the finishing touches on them that night. She imagined three tough-looking guys helping out at the local library on Saturdays. If only they could do the same thing with Athenle, somehow banish her out of their lives like they did with the hoods. No, not out of _their_ lives. Out of his life. He was the one who was being harassed and stalked by Athenle. For she was stalking him, otherwise Belldandy would never have caught that split-second eyeful of her smirking, over-confident form floating in the pizzeria.

As they entered the main Sangha hall, Keiichi suddenly demanded "Athenle, show yourself!!" startling Belldandy. Two of the golden Buddhas had been knocked over.

Great. Now the night was fucked up for sure.

"I'll answer your summons, but only because I deign to, not because it was you that asked," the Valkyrie answered haughtily from the ceiling. She floated upside down from the rafters and righted herself in a slow circle to land on her feet. Belldandy glared at her when she solidified into her full form.

"I should have figured it was you," Athenle observed in a thin voice. "He's been holing up here for the past few weeks like a hermit. When I saw that he was gone, it was easy to breach his ward and come here."

"What do you mean, you 'figured it was me'?" Belldandy sharply corrected. "You knew it was me all along, because you saw me in the restaurant while we were eating dinner. If I'd have blinked my eyes, I would have missed you. But I saw you. And you know I saw you!" Keiichi turned his head so fast to regard her, she thought he might break his neck. What was that all about?

"Even worse, you even stalked us! You knew where we were going, which means that you were spying on us while we were here. Or do you like Italian Pizza? I thought your style would be more gyros being that you're some Greek Goddess and all."

Keiichi sniggered audibly, and Athenle yelled at him to be silent.

"Not this time, Athenle. You and I will have words," Keiichi answered defiantly. "You've just made a huge blunder, thoroughly unbecoming to a Goddess or a Valkyrie. Did you not learn strategy in Valkyrie class or whatever passes for education in the Valkyrie corps? If you had, then you would know that you cannot simply choose to reveal yourself to mortal sentients whenever you wish. You've done it twice with her. She saw you...and I know she saw you, because I saw her see you..."

"See saw, sea 'ci, si si...who cares?" Athenle answered. "Since we're talking schools and stuff, let me clue you in on a little secret. A Valkyrie License isn't like a standard God License, with all that Unlimited/Limited, Restricted/Unrestricted business. In one matter you are correct. If I was just any Goddess, I would be in trouble right now. But as a Valkyrie, two accidental sightings by the same mortal doesn't mean a thing. I would only find myself in trouble if the little mortal girl had observed me _three_ times."

"She _has_ seen you three times," Keiichi answered in a steady voice, catching Belldandy completely off guard.

Midway through the practices, Coach Chihiro had called Belldandy into her office and suspended her from the team. After a moment of surreal shock, she looked at her Coach...and noticed that Chihiro had a vague, distant look in her eyes. She had recognized almost immediately that there was no way that this was her Coach. Not the Coach who had peeled her heart open in her office at Chiba Poly, revealing emotions Belldandy never even suspected that she had towards the game. Strong sentiments and concerns towards she and her two sempai, and their team as well. Suspending her from the team was something Chihiro had promised she'd never do; she'd even told Belldandy that the only way off the team was by injury or by quitting. Taking a crazy intuitive leap, Belldandy had answered "Nice try, but it's not gonna work, Athenle," and had noticed Chihiro shudder briefly. But long enough to see Athenle's eyes flash where her Coach's eyes should have been.

He _knew_.

"He's grown a backbone," she thought as Athenle face-faulted. This wasn't the same Keiichi who had been paralyzed with nervousness for half an hour the last time she was here when Athenle dropped in. It was almost funny...he had even ignored her request to stay away from her while she practicing in Tokyo. Which didn't surprise her, all the times he accidentally intruded on her while she was half-naked in the bathroom.

"It would be my distinct impression that we shall be getting a call from Kami-sama in short order," he added. As if on cue, the phone rang.

"I think I'll take this one," Keiichi announced, his face a figure of earnest confidence.

"B..but the temple...we don't have a phone," Belldandy observed. And then a loud voice trumpeted in her mind.

_Athenle, Valkyrie, Senior Command License. It has been noted that you have transgressed the prohibition of limited contact with mortal species. You have been identified three times by the mortal Belldandy Morisato. Twice in this temple and once in Tokyo. The incident in Tokyo is an inexcusable grievous behavior, because you stole away the will of the Therarealm mortal Chihiro Fujimi to make it possible for you to engage in acts of deliberate intimidation._

Belldandy noticed that Keiichi and Athenle were on their knees, seiza-style, humbly bowing before the voice. She noticed that _she_ was on her knees as well, just like a hatamoto retainer in audience with the Shogun in one of those old samurai movies. She had no idea how she had gotten on her knees, but there she was.

_Herewith, your license is reduced to Novice Command status. You will engage in a cleansing of your willfulness, for I will brook no foolhardiness within the ranks of my Valkyrie. Concentrate on the truth that the innermost victory arises when you set aside yourself for the cause of the greater good, for this cause is also that which is of your greater self._

The glow faded from the Sangha Hall, and Athenle started laughing as she quickly stood up.

"I win!" she announced. "As a Novice License, I'm restricted to Yggdrasil. I can't leave. Which means that whenever you return to Yggdrasil, I'll be waiting for you, Keiichi. Wherever you are, I will be there. You'll have to come back home soon, because you'll have to restore your Divine energies. So it really makes no difference what the Lord does about my license. I've got you now, wrapped around my finger. You cannot avoid me. Which makes me the victor in this little contest."

Belldandy couldn't believe what she was hearing. Athenle had done something that Keiichi had said was really really wrong, and her punishment wasn't even a punishment? Keiichi _had_ to return to Windowsill? He'd never told her that! Then she remembered when Keiichi had the 'flu' after fighting off Senbei and Mara at last year's Christmas. Was that what would happen if he didn't return?

"How does it feel to be schooled?" Athenle said, not to Keiichi but to her.

"This isn't fair...no, wait. _I'm done saying that!_" Belldandy stammered. "I don't care if it's fair or not!"

She saw Keiichi smile at her sadly, his eyes proud. With a flash, she recognized that _this_ was what he had been trying to teach her all along, that even if life seemed unfair, it never _was_ unfair. It was all just in her head! That time he said Athenle was her problem and she got upset at him, he wasn't saying that Athenle wasn't his problem. He was saying that...to her...Athenle was her own personal problem. _She_ made it, not he or anyone else. That Athenle was a problem because she chose to see it that way. That it was all in her head...

"How could you get away with it? You break all these rules to force yourself on Keiichi, and it's obvious that he doesn't want anything to do with you. Yet you kept on harassing him, and now your punishment makes it so that you can just lay in wait for him when he goes back to Windowsill?"

"Ho ho hoh hoho ho!" Athenle laughed in an irritating anegohada-type strained laugh.

"If you weren't a Goddess, I'd kick your ass," Belldandy said. She heard a "whomp!" and looked over at Keiichi, whose legs had just buckled under him causing him to bang his knees on the floor as he almost fell on his butt.

If Athenle was going to get away with this, she was at least going to give the Goddess a final piece of her mind. A piece of her heart too, for that matter. Her mind was whirling with memories, how she had pounded the tatami until her knuckles bled when she learned that Keiichi was somehow excluded from ever feeling love because of a childhood mistake. Keiichi lying in the foyer with an off-the-hook fever, pointing her towards her four-legged Christmas present who even now was pacing back and forth behind her, his back arched and his fur bristling with anger. The very first time he had touched her in the Girl's Dorm to fake out her teammates, a strawberry kiss. Keiichi floating in the bathroom, seeing her nude, and having the decency to close his eyes and spin around away from her. Keiichi floating in the bathroom, seeing her nude, and giving her the once over with appreciative eyes.

Belldandy shook her head to try and rid herself of _that_ image.

"You think you're so strong, Miss bitchin' warrior Goddess?" she challenged. "You think you've got what it takes? You think you can just sit there and say you've won? You wouldn't last a day in my shoes. You wouldn't last a day in my world. But you'll never know, because you've never been challenged! You can keep on playing God, being all-powerful and shit...because it's a hiding place for you. I'd love to see you try and prove yourself the way I have to!"

"What are you saying..." Athenle stammered angrily.

"I wish I could have my wish back! Because if I did, I would love to see you try and take me in a volleyball match. No superpowers, no unfair advantages, no Goddess stuff...just you and me. Just skill and heart and conviction."

Athenle looked at her with a lopsided moue which belied her confusion.

"It's too bad, because if we were on a level playing field, I'd take you!" Belldandy said. Athenle immediately turned red in the face, and Belldandy could see small scatters of lightning framing her eyes. "I'd take that smug Goddess smirk of yours and shove it down your throat. I'm only good at one thing, and it's volleyball...but if it was you and me on a volleyball court, I'd..school.._you_!"

"Ha ha aha ahha! Too bad it'll never happen, little girl," Athenle replied, bringing a sobering dose of reality that halted Belldandy. The Goddess gestured with a finger and sent a blast of blue energy at her. Belldandy squinted her eyes shut, knowing that Athenle was so pissed off, she was probably going to be fried...but even before she could finishing shutting her eyes, a blur of black swept up in front of her. Just as fast she saw Keiichi take the full brunt of the attack, which knocked him off-balance. He staggered to try and keep his feet like someone who had been six-packed hard on the head with a volleyball.

"I don't believe it...she tried to kill me!" Belldandy said under her breath. But instead of being afraid, her resentment ramped up a level. She looked at Keiichi, who was dazed from being zapped. He had just saved her life.

Again.

Something was familiar about all of this, and another reality hammered Belldandy, something that had been buried in the far reaches of her mind until now. Keiichi said he had banished Senbei and Mara, but he never told her how. Now, he didn't need to, because she remembered it _all_. She recalled with crystalline clarity how Keiichi had fought Senbei and Mara, and then had given his very last piece of life to banish them. Banishing them to protect _her_. She heard herself as she was: howling in heartfelt pain, Keiichi's head weakly resting on her lap, feeling her heart breaking because she thought he was going to die and be taken away from her and there was nothing she could do about it. And she remembered her wish! She had wished for Keiichi to live and love again! The Head Honcho God was there that time too.

Maybe He was still here.

"Yeah it's too bad, isn't it?" she snapped back, emboldened by her rush of memories. "There's a big difference between you and me, Athenle. You get pissed off and try to burn me to a crisp. But I don't have to do that to show how I feel. Unlike you, I'd fight to keep someone from taking him away from me. You wouldn't. It's just like I told Keiichi: you're only in love with yourself. If you really loved Keiichi, if you really wanted him, you'd be willing to fight for him, instead of trying to take me out with some Goddess attack. You'd be willing to do anything for him. But you can't even do that. Keiichi..snff..he's worth a thousand of you, because he was willing to give _everything_ to free me from being cursed by those Demons. The first time he did that, I thought it was because I was nothing more than a wish candidate he was assigned to. That he was protecting me so I could make a wish. But this time, you guys said I already made my wish. And then He stood in front of me and shielded me...for _me_!"

Belldandy felt her heart do a flip-flop as she realized the truth of what she had just said.

"I'm willing to fight for him, and I'm just...I'm just...I don't care anymore! He did..he did it for me, not for m..my wish! Not because of his stupid job, not because he's God, not because you guy's Boss is here, not because of anything else. And I'd do the same thing for him, because I...am...

...No! Because I feel...because he means so much to me that...

...because I feel inside that...that I've...that I...

"Fuck it!! I'm in _love_ with him!" she shouted at the top of her lungs. "I'm not going to let you do this. You can't take him away from me!"

Fueled by her admission, Belldandy abandoned all of her cares and ran over to Keiichi, almost leaping against him. He was so unsteady on his feet and was so surprised, she felt herself crash into him, tackling him and knocking him backwards against the wall, where he collided with a loud thud. She wrapped him with her arms as tight as she could around his shoulders and sealed his lips with her kiss...the first real kiss she had ever given a guy...her entire body a circuit of passion, her heartbeat pounding in her breast, her eyes squinted tight with tears.

"Baka baka baka baka baka baaaaka!" she cried on his shoulder. Then she pushed him away.

"You..snff..big idiot! Look what you've done to me! Baka baka baka baka baka!" she shouted, drumming her fists on his chest and shoulders with each word...

...and then she felt Keiichi pull her firm against his chest in a gentle way that she'd never felt before...and then she really started crying.

For a moment, nothing existed except her and Keiichi. And then a voice broke the silence...

_Rarely have I witnessed such a display of pure devotion expressed by a mortal being. It is said that the highest form of love is that which calls upon one to give their life for another. To My shame, My Valkyrie have neglected this simple lesson. I therefore decree that Athenle, Novice Command status Valkyrie, is hereforth probated and reassigned as an Therarealm Trainee. She is to be constrained in all manners Divine, so that she is mortal in mind, body and spirit. She is to compete against Belldandy Morisato in the honorable combat of Volleyball, with no advantage or handicap save her competitive spirit. If she is defeated, then she will agree to never have any contact with the God Keiichi henceforth. In like manner, if the mortal Belldandy Morisato is defeated in honorable combat, she will agree to have all memories of the God Keiichi removed from the writ of her mind, so that it will be as if he had never existed._

"My Lord, You can't be serious! To match me against this mortal girl? With me as a mortal? You can't be..."

"I'll do it!" Belldandy shouted without hesitation.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --


	127. Pt 127: Psychodesolation

**Part 127: Psychodesolation**

SOMEWHERE:

The soundless wind had started up as the sky had faded to a pasteled grayness, the nondescript transition to what apparently was this place's 'night'. The lack of sound accompanying the wind brushing my hair over my face was eerie. Instead of becoming darker, 'night' here was a further blanding of color and feature; everything that was already drab and etiolated became even more so. The gray sky and the yellow-rust ground were almost indistinguishable by gradient, with little more than the distinctness of outline to provide contrast. Which was strange, I thought, because there was no sun or other evident source of illumination. The physical laws of optics just didn't apply here; the minor ones like gravity seemed to be the same, as we weren't floating in the air, obviously. But the wind had no sound as it circuited us, while the windless doldrums were pauses accompanied by a light howling sound which usually accompanied moderate winds. My suspicions were aroused by the crazy fancy that this place was trying to attack us via sensory deprivation. If there was a place that could be termed "nowhere", our current environs would certainly seem as such.

I was heartened by Keleste and Keiyasu's discovery that Keiichi was their father. In a sense, this encounter should have never happened. The God and Goddess seemed only a few years younger than Keiichi, which could only mean that they had arrived from the Future. Oddly enough, I felt like I had known them in the recent past. I had a clouded memory of being in a hellish place. A place of malign architecture and essence; uncomfortable by its alien-ness...permeated by intense evils and loves. A place where emotions were jacked up with electricity, adrenalized and worn on the sleeve. A total contrast to the emptiness of here.

The boy closely resembled pictures I had seen of Keiichi in his early-to-mid teens, the years he was in junior high. The girl even resembled Belldandy, with her distinctive Goddess markings, full hair, and her smile. But despite her youth seemed _older_ than the Goddess I knew. They had the same child-drive of energy that Skuld has, but it was tempered away from cheerfulness. They weren't silly or glad-joyed like Skuld often was. There was a seriousness to them that seemed mature…and disturbing.

The way they had reacted to Keiichi, it was as if they had been lost at sea for all their lives and suddenly discovered civilization. If it were me, I'd be overwhelmed with emotion. In contrast, Keiichi was overwhelmed by another set of emotions; Belldandy had been obliterated right before our eyes. The SurGoth wraith had shot inside of me and even now was filling me with unpleasantness. Yet, my visual sensors seemed to image a light blue outline rapture out of the blazing destruction. Hovering for a brief instance, it fled into the Gate of Judgment. So I followed the two kids and Keiichi.

Soul Mirrors.

Somewhere in the Enigma Book was a passage describing these; they were tools of some kind that the Gods used, particularly in the Ethiopsylogic Clinic, but I couldn't remember any more. It was one of those nights Urd was tutoring me and we were doing more fighting than studying. A move of nostalgia passed through me; I would surrender all that I could just to re-experience just one of our conflicts. Strange how the emotion of love can permutate under certain conditions. Now I was feeling do-or-die because I craved the experience of an argument with her.

Deprivation.

This place was a manifestation of deprivation. The loss in my heart was amplified by the emptiness all around me; a surface that was only a shadow of form, just enough to tease the mind to sense it. More empty than substantive. The absence suggested the French expression l'heure bleue...the period of transition between daylight and night where the world is basically different because the sky was dark blue and the sense of light is unique. The whole light spectrum shifted against that blue, creating a glory that rarely was noticed by those caught up in the hustle of life. That 'Blue Hour' was beautiful, with its own enchantment if one just chose to seek it. This was bland, with nothing to recommend it to the senses. Its impercepience was just a subtle remove from the deprivation encountered in a sensory isolation chamber.

Yet, a miracle was unfolding before me, the sole redeeming event in this whole world-gone-wrong scenario. If these two Godkids were Keiichi and Belldandy's, the implications were massive and profound. It meant no less than the fact that Belldandy was alive. But even more suggestive was the Godkids themselves; because I had thought that Divines and mortals couldn't procreate. The Enigma Book was very explicit about this; there were a host of reasons why mortals and Gods couldn't bear offspring. In Greek myth, the pantheon of Gods could do all sorts of stuff, but in the real world of human beings and Yggdrasilian beings, it was a no-go. The pair represented hope, a hope that battled against the deprivation of this place. Keiichi had been deprived of the love of his life, and I knew how that felt. I sensed that somewhere out there, Belldandy might be feeling the same pain of seperation he was. Seperated from Keiichi. I wished she was here, not only to get us out of this mess, but just to see how she would react to the truth that Keleste and Keiyasu were her own children. But she wasn't here, and the longing I felt for her as a friend was multiplied a thousandfold by Keiichi's longing for her as the one true love of his life. But as I looked at Keleste and Keiyasu, an inner voice urged "it doesn't have to be that way."

"Keiichi, I don't feel than any of this is the truth pattern of our lives," I offered. Keleste and Keiyasu shot me angry looks; and I sense that they felt I was disaffirming them and their reality.

"No, I don't mean you guys, Keleste and Keiyasu!" I quickly interjected. "Bear with me a moment while I reason this out. It seems that there is an overlap of realities here. The Keiichi I've know for the past two years isn't even married, let alone a father. He's madly in love with Belldandy, who isn't here. Now, just a short while ago he lost the Goddess who he loved more than anything on the planet. Supposedly she was destroyed. But it wasn't her, so I would venture that she still exists. Then there's you both, who are obviously a God and Goddess, and even more obviously his children. Your long search for your Father was just as real to you...as my experience of him. Your joy at finding him was so genuine and candorous, I couldn't possibly question or disregard it. He _is_ your father. He is real to both you two and I, but _our_ realities...yours and mine...aren't real to each other. It's almost as if it we were on different surfaces of the same egg. He's just experienced loss and grief at the deepest emotional level possible, while you have experienced reunion and exhilaration just as profound, while I've never seen either of you before. This isn't just the colliding of realities, this is a merging of realities."

"B..but how?" Keiichi asked, finally able to pierce his emotional hell with words.

"I don't know how this has come about, my good friend," I said as I squeezed his shoulder softly, trying to soothe his unease and pain. "We are each other's anchors in a sense. _We_ brought each of us here, and I'm almost certain that the answer to how this overlap of realities lies within the four of us. We're well-equipped to discover it."

"What do you mean, well-equipped?" Keiyasu challenged.

"Could it be that this overlap of realities...is our greatest asset at the moment? Where else do you have a father, his two offspring and a friend? A half-mortal God and Goddess who have been searching for their parents for eons? Two Divines who possess a significant chunk of Yggdrasilian know how. A mortal man who was loved by a Goddess, because of the qualities of love and compassion inside of him? A cyborg who willingly surrendered the love of his life for something more important? Two from one point in time, two from another. I'd say that we have a killer talent pool here...even if we're stranded in this never-land."

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Keleste regarded the cyborganic that called himself Cevn with curiosity. It seemed that he had been with the group that she and Keiyasu had discovered in Vanagdrasil, of all places. When they arrived at the Earthrealm...an Earthrealm still teeming with mortals...he was there as well. The two cyborgs seemed to blur together into one, and then he had followed her father, she and her brother, and a faint blue glow through the gateway to here. If this was an overlap of SpaceTime, then somehow he was the axis point because he was the only one of the four _in both places_.

He could be telling the truth.

She consulted with Keiyasu to get his feedback.

"Can we trust him?" she asked in a whisper. "Because that's what it comes down to. He could be our only chance at straightening this all out. Where's the rest of our cousins, plus the different version of Skuld and that Demoness? They aren't here. Something happened to us, and we're either lost...or we're a step closer to finding Mom."

"I don't know, Keleste," her brother opined. "I mean, this is too messed up! Duplicates? Those other children were our cousins? Those two _Demons_ were our relatives? Then why wasn't our real mother there with everybody else? Why isn't she here, for that matter?"

"How could she be there or here, if our Dad doesn't even know where she is?" Keleste countered. "Why do you think Dad's been losing it, you dope! Dad thinks that she was destroyed, but what I saw didn't look like a Goddess. There was some ugly, horrid _thing_ inside of her. Something was totally trying to fake Dad out, while our Mom was...is...somewhere else. It had to resemble our mom very closely in order to fool him. Even though the Goddess we saw wasn't our Mom, it was our Mom in a sense. Does our Dad look like some kind of mortal that was called...let's see...that was called a 'playboy'; one that randomly goes and creates children? No way!! Dad was going to participate in the ancient Earthrealm custom of marriage. The ritual ceremony where a license is given for the man to read the newspaper and earn that stupid thing called money, while the woman is licensed to cook the food they eat and save or disperse the stupid thing as she sees fit. The ritual which gives them the permission to do the s..se..se..."

"It's called sex, sis. How old are you...and you're still embarrassed sometimes about mortal procreative activities?" Keiyasu noted. "The marriage is the esoteric solemnization that allows an Earthrealm man and woman to create offspring and then be responsible for their upbringing until they are old enough to be licensed to marry."

"Yeah, whatevers..." Keleste groused. "The point is, that Dad was willing to marry her, so he must have been willing to read the newspaper, earn the stupid thing, and have ss..se...procreate with her to have children of his own. There must have been a lot of love between them. He's too upset...he must have really loved her."

"I know that, sis! Who do you think has been giving him chill-spells all this time? And it's tiring me out, because he is raw with pain and I have to really try hard to keep up with him. This place is wreaking havoc with my God powers and senses; it's as if they're here one minute and gone the next."

"What if this Cevn knows something? Remember back in the Demon's computer, when the other Skuld said that he had to hold that Nitton invention so that it could do something to the Demon's computer? When he did, the invention seemed to drain the computer into itself. If that Skuld trusted him enough to assign him to do something like that..." she wondered aloud. "Whoa, Sleipnir!! We don't have to decide whether we can trust him or not!"

"Huh?"

"We don't even know who he is; he was just tossed in our path like everyone else. But our Father...this Father...knows him well. Cevn was talking about Dad's pain as if it was his own; obviously they're close to each other. Why not go with what our Father says? If Dad trusts this cyborg, then who are we to _not_ trust this cyborg?"

She walked with Keiyasu and stood right by Keiichi, reached out a hand and helped her Father steady himself.

"Dad, we need to know...do you trust Cevn?"

Keiichi looked at this beautiful girl who was such a close match for Belldandy, and remembered how Cevn had started off in their lives with a bang, rampaging through their temple house. But in the ensuing months, Cevn had become more than just a friend; he sometimes regarded Cevn as the older brother he didn't have. Even Megumi saw him in that light. If anyone could help them find Belldandy, he knew Cevn would. Or he would at least try with all of his being.

"I'd trust him. Despite all this spited shit that I'm feeling, I would trust him with my life. In his own way, he wants Belldandy back as bad as I do...for my sake. For her sake as well."

"But he's got that _thing_ inside of him!" Keleste noted. "You went after that blue light...but something dark went into him. What if it's affecting him?"

"Then he'll need us to be strong for him, and help him."

Keleste marveled at how this young mortal man...her Father...had basically ignored or downplayed the possible threat to himself and the two of them, and was instead was focused on the how the threat might affect his friend.

"Dad's friend..." she said in a hushed voice. She had no idea that these two men, from an Earthrealm that had perished long ago in her 'reality', could be such close friends. And that her Dad was so concerned about his friend's welfare, as much as the cyborg-mortal was concerned about her Father's well-being. She had learned about how friendships emerged between mortals via the Ygg Mainframe while reviewing the Earthrealm's history that was carefully stored in a single crystalmatrix. But now her Father was asking her to believe in the real thing.

"Keleste, this is totally going to work," Keiyasu said as he pulled at her elbow. "In their own way, those two are as close as you and I. We need to worry about _helping them_, not trusting them! They don't have the knowledge that we have..."

She felt a boiling of confusion and emotions, but one truth rang clarion clear over all the others. Moving beyond the whirlwind in her Soul, she knew on a deep level that she was here because her Father needed her. When she and her brother started out on this journey, the last thing they expected was to encounter their Father. Yet, through all of Time and Space, they had been summoned to this moment, to this man. Maybe even _by_ this man, on a heart or Soul level. He had shared in a love that had given her and her brother life, and he needed someone to guide him back from his loss.

Her Father needed her and her brother, even more than they needed him.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

­THERA:

"Belldandy, we need to have a serious talk," Keiichi had insisted when she first emerged from her bedroom. Unlike yesterday where his face reflected the surprise of his life...and of her life, for that matter...he seemed all business this morning. After Athenle left, Keiichi had vanished like a kid caught with his hands in the cookie jar. Belldandy knew that her confession must have been embarrassing for him. Right in front of his dread "Almighty" even. Confessions of love are usually set up with a "let's meet behind the school" letter, then a meeting and a walk to a private place. But she had given him no warning. She had given _herself_ no warning. Once it was out of her mouth, she was probably more in shock than Keiichi was.

But that kiss! That kiss...it had melted her into light-headedness, it was so intense. If he could awaken so much feeling behind a single kiss, then it had to be love, didn't it? So was her confession a truth, or just a means to get back at Athenle? Confessions of love usually come after at least a couple had been dating; and with a lot of guys it was postponed until after dating had moved into a decidedly skinship or sexual direction. There was the one rare guy who would withhold on the "I Love You" stuff and the sex stuff until a friendship of sorts had been afield in the relationship. Keiichi thought those kinds of guys were either stuck in Meiji's, read too much shoujo manga, or were too good for their own good.

"A...friendship?" Belldandy paused, looking in the mirror as she started to brush her teeth. Maybe her confession hadn't caught Keiichi by surprise, as she had considered him a friend for a while now. It was entirely possible that _she_ had waited until she was certain of their friendship before moving into the romantic arena. But doesn't one have to rebel against that friendship in order to give full flight to her desire for a loving relationship? It wasn't like she was thinking of Keiichi in any other way than being a friend. With the intense team practices in Tokyo, she really didn't have much time to think about anything else. It was hardest on her; all the other women on the team were experienced ballplayers in their 20s while she was only an 18-year-old freshman.

Gargling, she wondered, "But what if he tells me that what we did was wrong, that he couldn't love me?" She spat out the water, visualizing in her mind that she was spitting out _that_ thought. She didn't even want to consider it. But Keiichi had been knife-sharp sincere with his "let's talk" request.

"Well, might as well get it over with," Belldandy thought. She had to return to Tokyo today, and she hadn't even changed out of her pajamas! Knowing Keiichi, there was always the chance that this ­would be another exercise in idiocy on his part. Belldandy giggled, remembering some of his more blatant missteps. She sat down next to the kisaten-sized table and waited.

And waited...

"Why wasn't he here? The fool asked me to have this talk with him! He's God, he knows I'm here already! Or does he expect me to make him breakfast? As if," she said to herself. Presumably answering her voiced complaint, Keiichi emerged from the kitchen with a tray full of juice, coffee, sliced fruit...and pastries. Belldandy had to giggle at the pastries; they were so lop-sided it was obvious that they were home-baked by a clueless wannabe pastry chef. She looked up at Keiichi with mirthful eyes as he sat the tray and himself down at the table.

"You know that I can't love you..." he said, almost as an aside.

Belldandy felt her heart lump in her throat. She didn't know if it was from the casual way he bombshelled her with those words, or the sense that he was 'rejecting' her confession from yesterday. The bastard! Her heart was pounding a command: take that tray and bash him over the head with it! How could she have believed that her burst of love for him really could mean anything? The stupid motherfucker...and I'm even more stupid than...

She looked down as she felt his hands holding hers.

"...but that doesn't mean that I don't_ want_ to love you, because I do," he added. "I really wish you were a Goddess, because then it wouldn't be a problem. But wishes are only for mortals, there's no Wish Escort Office to give _me_ a wish. I still have to wonder how it can be that your wish for me to fall in love...is preventing me from falling in love with you."

Feeling herself weaving, because the blood-rush to her head was making her dizzy. Was that a _confession_ he just made? Keiichi basically had said that he can't love her, but then he said that he would if he could. That he wanted to love her. That he _wanted_ her. The wish she had made had been totally selfless; the essence of her desire wasn't for herself, but it was for Keiichi. So why couldn't she be the recipient of her own goodwill? Dammit!! Keiichi had taught her to stop seeing life as unfair. But this really sucks!!

"Belldandy, I need you to forget about me for awhile," he continued. "If you can, push your heart to the side as far as your feelings towards me. You've got the Olympics to worry about...and Athenle. If you get all distracted with...I hate to say...but with these puppy-love..."

"Puppy love?!" she exclaimed. "Who the hell do you think I am, a junior high with cutesies on her phone? I'm _18_!! I'm old enough to know what I want!"

"Well, that's what it looks like from here," Keiichi answered. "It's okay to have that kind of love, so don't judge it too harshly. In fact, you mortals are _wired_ to have puppy-love in a sense, otherwise you'd miss out on the development of faculties of perspicuity as a means of ordering love. In other words, you'd 'hook up' with the first guy you had a crush on and spend the rest of your life with him, instead of looking around for mating partners. It would be quite a challenge to the survival of your species if first loves were meaningful, deeply-felt and bound with maturity of affection."

"Y..you Godzilla-sized baka! How do you know that I _don't_ have deep feelings for you? The 'mating partner' stuff, I don't even wanna touch that. But everything else? Puppy love...my ass!" Belldandy confronted him. She couldn't believe what he had just said. Then again, she could. If he didn't know how to love her, how could he really get a grip on how she felt about him? He'd have about as much chance of that as a kindergartner would. She sighed, realizing that it really wasn't his fault that he didn't...that he couldn't know what was in her heart. If he did, she and he wouldn't even be having this discussion.

"What I mean about Beijing," he said, returning to his topic, "is that you need to be _entirely _focused. It's no longer just a tourney-type competition to validate the athletic prowess of one or another nation-states, it's..."

"You're actually _nervous_, Keiichi," Belldandy noted, squeezing his hands back. "You're talking like a college professor. It's me! Belldandy! You can cut out the bullshit and just tell me what's in your heart."

Keiichi seemed taken aback for a moment. Belldandy sensed that he wasn't used to being comforted like this. Or, funny enough...confronted like this. He probably wasn't used to being around a woman who could 'read' him like she could. He had a deer-in-the-headlights look, confused as hell. She felt a big sense of relief that Athenle wasn't here; he'd be clay in hands if he was like this. Belldandy reminded herself that Keiichi was a rank amateur in relationship-type stuff. She'd have to lead him whenever he faltered. And that Athenle bitch claimed that mortal women had nothing to offer him, were worthless in comparison to him...that _she_ had nothing that would possibly be of value to him. That she couldn't even give him anything he needed.

"What I'm saying is that this Olympics you're going to is so damned important!" he blurted out. "If you lose, then I'm basically...as you mortals would say it...I'm basically 'fucked'. There's a reason why I told all those Goddesses that I didn't want to get involved with a Goddess. I'm just not ready for those kinds of emotions. Try to imagine what it would be like to live in a house with no pets, and then suddenly be asked to run the city kennel. This...love thing, it's too new for me. I don't know what I'm feeling most of the time!"

"Keiichi, when I kissed you, what did you do in response?" Belldandy asked, embarrassed even to ask him such a question. It was obvious what he did: he had kissed her back, and then held her tightly. But did he know what that meant? As he answered with an almost clinical attachment, she realized what was at stake here. It was like asking a second-grader what it meant to be Prime Minister. Keiichi knew about the movements and motions of love, but he didn't know what the _essence_ was. Perhaps this sense of ignorance was the result of her wish. Maybe only a Goddess could coax him towards a recognition of romantic love. Right now, there was a disconnect in his mind between his actions, feelings and intentions.

"I know I didn't say what you wanted me to say, Belldandy," Keiichi observed, noticing her crestfallen expression. "But I'm trying, because I _want_ to learn how to love. How to love you. It may seem daunting to you, trying to deal with someone like me in matters of love. But if you don't beat Athenle in the Olympics, it's not going to matter. This is a battle you must win, if you're going to stand a chance of winning the war. If you don't do your volleyball thing, then there will never be a chance for you and I to even try and create a relationship based on love. You've got to win, because I don't want to imagine what my life would be like without you."

Belldandy could only sit in stunned silence. Keiichi didn't even realize it, but he had said _exactly_ what she had wanted to hear.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

­NULLN:

"Belldandy!" Peorth shouted. "This is the _Almighty_ you're going to have to convince that these missions you've been taking to the Earthrealm are not an attempt to tamper with the GRO, or the evolution of a sentient species! Do you have any idea how serious this is? He's considering banishing you to the Well of Urd! I don't need to remind you what that means. The feelings of loneliness you feel now will be compounded enormously if you're Banished, because you will not even have _us_ as part of your life. No Almighty, no Ethiopsylogic Clinic, no other Divines, not even me! You can't just be silent, not now. You've got to defend yourself."

The Silent Goddess simply nodded.

"What? Do you think _I'm_ supposed to defend you? I get it...I'm your best friend; by the Lord, I'm your _only_ friend...so it falls to me to speak on your behalf?"

The Silent Goddess simply nodded.

"Damn you and your Silent Goddess trip, Belldandy! I ain't going to do it!"

The Silent Goddess simply nodded.

But Peorth knew that she would defend Belldandy, that she would go to the limit to protect her. She couldn't be angry with her friend because the Silent Goddess wouldn't even notice it. Even if she did notice Peorth's resentment, she wouldn't respond, argue, or even return her anger. Being angry with Belldandy was like being angry with a milk shake. It dawned on Peorth that it had fallen to her to defend Belldandy by default. Now she was angry with herself for once again being pressed into an uncomfortable position. Arranging the funeral for Bell's family and Keiichi had been a nightmare clothed in reality. Now she had to stand up against the Lord Himself.

She remembered the courtroom dramas popular on the Earthrealm during the time she had been visiting Belldandy and Keiichi; how the defense attorney would bring a surprise witness at the end who would prevent the condemning of an innocent for a crime they didn't commit. But Belldandy had committed a crime; one that figured among the most serious transgressions a Goddess could make. And she had to defend Belldandy without even a hint of explanation for her actions.

Or not. Peorth had followed her sister Goddess during three sojourns to the Earthrealm. The first time, she had granted a wish without even granting a wish, consoling a mother who had lost her child and offering her a direction for the rest of her life. The second time, she had rectified a wish gone bad; some mortals make wishes that blow up in their faces, and this one had made a doozy. But Belldandy again had consoled him and provided a new outlook and direction for him to follow. The third time, Belldandy had broken every Rule in the book by teaching language to an illiterate waste-carrier of the lowest social caste, throwing an entire culture into turmoil. The first two she could understand, and the third intervention she could empathize with. But GRO Goddesses went through rigorous training to transcend their emotions of pity and sympathy towards their mortal charges. Yet, Belldandy had set all that aside.

What was the link?

If she couldn't get an answer out of Belldandy, that left only one other option...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Peorth felt a little intimidated as she was ushered into the office of TaiLin, the head Proctor of the Ethiopsylogic Clinic. She had recomposed her attire to be less revealing and more 'officey', and even wore the glasses that would manifest whenever there was a major Ygg system crash.

TaiLin was one of the oldest Gods she had ever met. It was rumored that he was over a hundred Decamillennia old. Of course, the elderly form of his bearing was just an affectation, as much so as her own conservative dress. She arranged her leather 'winglets' to form a seat under her thighs as she sat cross-legged in a meditative posture. She waited politely for him to acknowledge her, as he was very senior to her and respect would be a demanded decorum here, in his Clinic.

"My dear, my time is yours," TaiLin noted in a deliberate, kind voice as he poured her a cup of tea. "How may I be of service?"

"It's about Belldandy..."

"Yes, I suspected as much. Tragic, that. She has been one of our most intractable cases through the millennia, but at one time she did speak."

Peorth sprayed out her tea in astonishment. Belldandy had spoken? _Belldandy had spoken!!_

"It is as I said," TaiLin noted. "She spoke to me for just a single instance. I had no warning, because we didn't attempt anything different than all the other counseling and therapies we had been giving her. So I don't know how to recreate the setting or even the context; there was nothing that we could analyze that could explain what had evoked her to talk. She just...talked. For no reason. To put it into a perspective, consider the Earthrealm mortals who are comatose. They lay in a vegetative state, seemingly unaware of their environment. But unexpectedly, they shout out the name of a loved one, or a locale, or a complete sentence.

Such appears to be the case with your friend. Her mind was so disoriented because of her profound loss, an experience that none of us could possibly begin to understand. During that interview, I was convinced that she was insane. Each of us has a constellation of personalities and attributes, as you know. The binding of these to create a whole being is a delicate matter of continuous adjustment. Much energy is required for a God or Goddess to reconcile these with Soul. You and I, we take it for granted; we do not even notice it. It is as routine for us as the continual reconstitution of these visible aspects, these manifests we clothe ourselves with."

Nodding her head, Peorth followed his explanation.

"In her case, the binding between character and Soul was severed. We can always repair this through practice and therapy. It requires one of the Proctors to assist in rebuilding and restructuring, for which we at the Ethiopsylogic Clinic are eminently qualified to do. You yourself received this form of assistance when you were experiencing Wishout...the condition where you became too detached to your mortal charges and started seeing them as 'assignments', which caused you to act out indiscriminately amongst the mortals, usually within the sexual sphere of communication.

Peorth felt a bloom of embarrassment in her cheeks as the Proctor nonchalantly discussed her own treatment at the Ethiopsylogic Clinic with a clinical detachment.

"All GRO Goddesses experience it at one time or another. As the 'social workers' of the Multiverse, you deal with severely disenfranchised Souls at times. For who would make a wish if they were content with their life? Each one of you, coming here for Wishout or Washout, always feels ashamed of it. As we counsel, GRO staff have a very difficult job to perform, just in dealing with mortal sentients. In your case of Wishout, certain aspects of your personality which normally would allow you to remain detached became 'skewed', as it were. This resulted, my dear, in you becoming overly-invested in achieving your GRO tasks, to the point where it was more a disruption than a contribution to the mortal's welfare. With our guidance, you regained the skill to reconnect that thread of your being with Soul. Something akin to relearning a skill so basic, you would never even notice that it was amiss.

"In Belldandy's situation, we discovered that the binding of her personhood to her Soul had been shattered, but repairable. However, when we tried to adjust the subtle flux of Metanative energies needed to 'realign' the displaced aspects of her Being...of her personhood...we found that we couldn't. Not for lack of ability, but because the energies themselves were absent."

"Nehhh?! You're saying that the energy that normally binds our Souls to our sense of self...was missing in Belldandy?" Peorth asked.

"Yes and no. The innate energy signatures were present and discernible within her, but somehow they were resistant to our efforts. Practically speaking, they were not tangible in a manner where we could contour them. A descriptive analogy would be found if a mortal had been asked to attempt to create a solid object but was limited only to sound waves as a building material. We in the God's Realm can easily create solids and liquids with sound, but mortals obviously can't. Inconceivable as it was, we couldn't work with her particular energies."

"H..how could this be, Head Proctor? If she's missing something that each Goddess and God has, something so essential to us that it goes unnoticed, then how can she exist? What could change this 'energy' you mention into something else."

"I cannot answer that, in all truth-sense," the aged Proctor answered. "But my conjecture is this: that something of pure Evil had malformed the energy inside of her. An Evil which cannot be reckoned within morale or ethical latitudes, as that of the Demons. Rather, an Evil that transcends the perfidy of a Demon, or even Evil itself. A force or intelligent design that possesses an unimaginable level of antipathy towards life and Soul."

He refilled her tea, suspecting correctly that Peorth would require significant time to grasp his words.

Peorth had to slow her thoughts down, because what TaiLin had suggested was just too...incredible. It was beyond the realm of possibility. An Evil that was more evil than Evil? She wanted to dismiss the idea as a hypothetical abstraction without ground to stand on, but TaiLin was renowed as the best of the best of the Proctors. He wouldn't make idle conjectures.

"Does she know? Did you ever mention your suspicions to her?" Peorth asked.

"I did not. She was already injured enough, and I didn't want to exacerbate her. But you must know this, young Goddess. It was I who suggested that she not speak," TaiLin noted, almost scrutinizing her.

"YOU?!" Peorth shouted angrily, forgetting who she was addressing. "H..How could you even contemplate such a horrible thing? You're supposed to _help_ Goddesses, not tell them to shut up and bear their pain silently."

"Peorth," TaiLin answered gently, not even phased by her outburst. "Your friend has a pain inside of her that is so intense, she cannot articulate it. It speaks a different language than you and I. If you were unable to communicate your feelings to another, would you not become frustrated? It is as thus with her. I suggested such a radical approach with her highest welfare at mind. She was already a Silent Goddess by that point for several millennia. When she broke her silence with me, it was a salading of emotions that even I could not interpret. Thus, I did not want to correct a coping skill that she had already chosen by her nature. Further, her deep pain would have been compounded by trying to communicate it to her fellow Gods and Goddesses. She was silenced at the moment she experienced the loss of her SoulMate, her parents and her sisters. I could not in good faith try to convey an alternative, to give her hope when none is there. So I taught her to sing."

Peorth widened her eyes in appreciation. No wonder TaiLin was the Head of the Proctors! Now it made sense; the almost ritualistic visits to the Cathedral of Memories, the singing, the silence..all of it. Everything made sense, except why. Why was Belldandy so out of touch with herself?

"The mournful songs she sings in the Cathedral of Memories is the only way she can communicate her pain. By doing so, your dear friend is expressing her being, and this is helping to knit her personhood with her Soul. But know this: Belldandy will always be damaged. There is no 'cure' for her. We can only lessen the agony of her heart slightly."

Peorth accepted the proffered kerchief so she could wipe her face clear of the tears. Recovering her composure, she asked about what Belldandy had said. Perhaps there was a clue that could explain her behavior.

TaiLin's face possessed a reflective mien. He finally answered, "She said she heard screaming. Screaming emerged as a theme prominently in her words. She also mentioned 'lost realities', but could not explain her meaning. She didn't even mention Keiichi's name a single time. She referred to his death as 'damned myself'."

Peorth thanked TaiLin with the traditional courteous gift of peaches and left the Clinic.

Returning to her kiosk at the GRO office, she was struck by an occurrence that seemed to join each of the three incidents. She had heard an unvoiced screaming in her mind at the point where the wish candidates pain had turned to joy. When the Filth Carrier recognized the utility of language for the first time, and rejoiced in the knowledge that she had a purpose in life other than carrying humanity's shit, the scream had been angry...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

THERA: BEIJING CAPITOL, CHINA-STATES:

Belldandy had never left Japan, save for the high school trip to the Hawaiian Monarchy in her senior year. She had saved up almost six months for that trip, and it had been a bust. Hawaii was squalid, overrun with nervous tourists, the hotel rooms smelled of mold and cigarettes, and the so-called 'Island Beauty' was walled away by skyscraper-hotels. The only beauty she saw was during the bus rides out of the main cities. Nothing she could really grasp. Okinawa would have been a hundred times better!

Beijing, the capital of the China-States, was as large as Tokyo in population and area. The airport terminal was daunting, clearly the biggest building she had ever been in. Coach Chihiro mentioned that the main terminal could hold 800 volleyball courts under its curving roof. Belldandy could see other Olympian teams arriving as they rode the sliding people-movers towards the buslifts. Their team was dressed in hoodie jackets and warmups with abstract white-and-red designs intended to evoke sunrise and cherry blossoms. Belldandy was reluctant to wear her uniform, because it was just too massively cool. Like something an idol star would wear on TV! Coach Chihiro looked sharp in her outfit, the only difference was that the color pattern on her coach's hoodie was reversed, making it predominately red with white blossoms.

Belldandy could feel eyes ogling her from all directions, not only because she was in a swarm of young women dressed in outfits some designer had been paid a million yen to create, but also because she was a head taller than most of the team, save Ootaki and Kinosh'ta. Which made her three heads taller than most of the people in the terminal. Which announced to one and all that she was an Olympian.

From her lighthouse-like vantage point, she could see over the crowd as they approached the transit terminal where the team would board their bus for the ride to the Olympic village. Tamiya and Ootaki were all eyes as well, trying to take it all in. It was almost cute that her sempai were so nervous. Kinosh'ta, the Osaka Univ. grad who had been her opponent in the Nationals and was now a friend and teammate, nudged her with an elbow and pointed through the throng.

"Look at her!" Kinosh'ta noted in an admiring voice. "She's going to be a challenge."

Kinosh'ta was Japan's other strong attacker, in a sense she was Belldandy's counterpart on the team. Coach Chihiro had focused Kinosh'ta on defense, and had often played her up against Belldandy, ­who Chihiro was drilling for offensive firepower. Kinosh'ta, though slightly smaller than Belldandy, made up the difference by her tremendous repertoire of skills, and the two girls had pushed each other to the limits of their abilities. Ootaki humorously nicknamed Kinosh'ta as the "Queen of Destruction" for her defensive prowess, while calling Belldandy the "Queen of Devastation". If Kinosh'ta knew that a player was going to be a challenge...

Belldandy followed her teammate's gesture with her eyes...and her blood chilled as she saw the blonde hair with red streaks. Eye level with her, not a cm taller or shorter.

The other shock was the fact that the object of Kinosh'ta's concern was walking in the middle of the Norway-Euro team. Belldandy immediately knew that this was no quirk or accident; using the team of her birthplace was a deliberate message designed to humiliate and intimidate her. Belldandy narrowed her eyes in recognition.

Even from a distance, it was clear that Athenle was glaring at her. Walking towards her with an eye-to-eye lockdown. Belldandy forced herself to not look away as the two teams approached each other. If she backed down in this crucial stare-down, then she'd might as well be acknowledging that she wouldn't be able to hold up on the court, where it counts. She felt her skin bristling as the Valkyrie Goddess came even closer.

"Ssuger pikk i helvete, din støgging kjerring," Athenle growled at her in passing.

Belldandy felt like the wind had been knocked out of her by a body-blow.

"What the fuck did you just say to her, bitch!" Kinosh'ta yelled at the tall Euro girl with true Osaka brusqueness, sensing the obvious malice in the words. Ootaki and Tamaya quickly stepped up to restrain her teammate; Kinosh'ta looked so angry, she could tear someone's head off. Despite her fugue, Belldandy felt shocked by how protective Kinosh'ta had just been. She realized that her teammate was taking her role as sempai very seriously.

"Save it for the court, ladies!" Coach Chihiro shouted. "Save..it..for..the..court!"

"There's no love lost there," Ootaki commented sarcastically, anger written on her face. Belldandy's three closest teammates immediately swarmed her, realizing how shaken up she was.

They had no idea.

Belldandy was quavering uncontrollably, she had been so caught off-guard and psyched by the vicious comment. Her confidence seemed to have just imploded. It was gone, dissipated by just a few spoken words and a fixed glower. Disheartened, she felt herself fighting back tears as she realized that Athenle had just beaten her soundly in a test of wills. It was going to be hopeless! If Athenle had her number this easily, she didn't stand a chance. The fight was over before it even started.

She was going to lose the game, the medal, Keiichi...and the rest of her life.

"Jesus, Morisato...what'd she say to you?" Chihiro asked, genuinely concerned.

"She said..snff..she said 'go suck cock in hell, you ugly bitch!'", Belldandy said reluctantly, tearfully fighting back the shame. And the desire to give Athenle an elbow in the face for making her feel so worthless. Chihiro's face immediately turned dark-clouded...even angrier than the time she had threatened to kick Belldandy, Tamiya and Ootaki off the Olympic team.

"Oh shit!" she overheard heard Kinosh'ta mutter as their Coach elbowed her way through their ranks to stand in front of the team.

_"Freeet!"_

Chihiro whistled again, cat-whistling loud as hell with two index fingers in her mouth. A farm-girl's whistle, Belldandy noted with surprise. Siren-loud in the high-ceiling lobby, the whistling caught the attention of everybody in the vicinity, including the Norway-Euro team. The Euro volleyball team turned around in the direction of the sound...

...and Chihiro flipped them off.

"Interpret _this_!" Chihiro said in a low voice, glaring at Athenle and the rest of her team.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Fuck 'em! They can make it into whatever they want to," Chihiro told the team when she returned to their dorms at the Olympic Village after her staff meeting. "I ain't here to be their sweet little model coach, to do what they expect, to be all nice and smiley for them. One of my players got insulted, and I'm not about to let that Euro team think they can get away with that shit!"

Chihiro's little 'incident' had been caught on camera, and she was now being treated as a liability by the press, which was making a big deal of her supposed 'lacking Olympic spirit or sportsmanship'. The China-States press preyed on it to the max, tauntingly making her the 'unofficial mascot' of the Japanese Olympic team. Meanwhile, the photo was instantly famous in Japan, and Chihiro was being praised for her candor in the internet communities. Of course, the next day she was called on the floor by the head honchos of the Japanese Olympic team for her outburst, and she took the scolding without even sharing the blame. She did admit that she barely managed to get out of the meeting without having her head handed to her on a platter.

That night, Belldandy couldn't get to sleep and wound up talking to her roommate, Kinosh'ta almost all night. Between Chihiro's and Kinosh'ta's reactions to Athenle's words, Belldandy was struck by something Keiichi had told her. Kinosh'ta had tried to calm her down, exasperated that Belldandy was blaming herself for getting their Coach in trouble. Finally, Kinosh'ta threw a pillow in her face and told Belldandy "Stop thinking selfishly! We're a team, dammit! We fight for our young! We'll kick ass for you if we have to, Morisato! On the courts, like Coach told us! So stop being wierd already!"

Kinosh'ta's confrontation drew Belldandy's memory right back into something Keiichi had said, right before she left. His last words to her at the temple were something to the effect that 'they've got your back, but only if you let them'. Maybe he was right on that one...

The several free days at the Olympic Village had been a whirlywind. Mandatory exams and blood draws to test for steroids. Chinese interpreters gleefully proclaiming the 'triumph' of the Beijing Games while touring them around the impressive Olympic Village and environs. A class on recognizing terrorists and con-men. Another class on recognizing Chinese etiquette. Meals in the huge cafeteria, with menus in Japanese touting over 800 dishes, Western and Asian. An orientation tour of the Polyclinic medical facilities at Olympic Village. Visits to the two major V-ball venues: the Technical Stadium and the Capital Stadium. Photo sessions with Japanese sports anchors.

The next day, a photo-op 'unity meeting' with Tatsuya Ueta and the Men's V-ball team. Chihiro's counterpart who coached Japan's men's volleyball team, Ueta was well-known in Japan because he had taken a listless men's team who boozed and smoked instead of practicing, and had coached them into a hardened medal-hungry unit. Belldandy felt humbled by being in the room with the Men's team and their coach, even more so since she was taller than any of the guys. Humorously, one of the Men's team players actually flirted with her after the meeting. Her 'expanded' sempai, now Tamiya, Ootaki and Kinosh'ta, really let her have it later that afternoon, hounding her with ribald joking for the rest of the day.

Every once in a while, Belldandy would recognize a top Japanese athlete during free time at the Village and would pinch herself while asking "_Am I really here?_" Then she'd see the larger-than-life Fuwa mascots walking around the village like amusement park characters, which would trigger her teammates and she with a severe case of the giggles.

The Japanese press had been labeling her as "Phenom" and "V-ball Magic Girl" for the past month or so, much to her dismay. She could tolerate the silliness of the "Magic Girl" label as it was probably aimed at younger girls to try and encourage an interest in sports and volleyball in particular. As if she wasn't under enough pressure already! She was being 'marketed' to young girls all across Japan who would be watching the Games, like it or not. But she realized that it _had_ to be her; in a sense she was the only one on the team who was a teenager and would be seen as a girl by the kiddies. Talk about embarrassing, being 'packaged' by the media as a _girl_ when she was almost 19! Tamiya or Ootaki weren't poster girl material at all; they would scare away any girls aspiring to play v-ball in the junior leagues. Kinosh'ta was pretty, but she was just too...intense. So she had to suck it in and roll with the Magic Girl campaign...

The team she had joined had been competing internationally for years, and two members had been on Chihiro's 2004 team. They were co-captains of the team; one of the two had been injured and didn't make it to that Olympiad. So this was her chance to make it up. The other seasoned girl on the team fought Chihiro tooth-and-nail for two weeks before she accepted her as coach. What brought the truce about was a gaffe by Ootaki during a practice, as her sempai had confused the gold and silver medal teams from 2004, which launched Chihiro and the captain into royally-pissed-off land. The meaning that emerged was that both women recognized that they were each shooting for the same goal, and both wanted another shot at gold. Once she accepted Chihiro, she played her heart out during practices and sailed into her role as feet-on-the-court team leader.

As the tallest woman in the Japanese Olympic Women's Delegation, Belldandy definitely stood out. Awkwardly. To her surprise, several of her sister Japanese athletes actually wanted to have their pictures taken with _her_, as if she was some kind of celebrity. She was too scared to even try and chase down the recognizable female athletes for their autographs. Being one of the youngest members of the contingent Japan had sent to Beijing didn't help either. However, it seemed that some of the older women recognized this and took the initiative to meet her. Belldandy felt star-struck as senior Japanese female athletes introduced themselves during the afternoon.

Dinner at their dorm cafeteria was interesting, as she couldn't help but feel over-stimmed by all the nationalities of the women and men she saw. Kenyans wearing bright floral-print sarong dresses with elaborately tied headdress. Scottish men wearing argyle dress jackets and heath-tartar kilts. The Chinese women with their new-trend hairstyles; shag-cut bangs with a long narrow tail in the back. The French Euro teams with their brilliant red-white-green geometric track suits, designed by Ralph Lauren.

"OhmyGod!!" she overhead Kinosh'ta hiss in a low voice as a lithe greyhound of a woman approached her table. When she saw who it was, Belldandy felt a lump in her throat and an urge to hide under the dinner table.

The older woman asked if she could join her and her three sempai for dinner, introducing herself as Reiko Takahashi...as if she wasn't the most famous woman in Japan athletics...and casually informed them that she was going for her seventh gold medal in a row in her chosen individual sport. She was so composed and calm, she sounded to Belldandy like she was discussing the weather. Belldandy was anything but composed and calm; she was so humbled by the honor of even being approached by a seven-time Olympian, she dropped her chopsticks on the floor, and then snatched them up so fast she almost fell out of her chair. Of course, this baited her sempai to act all juvenile and soon the mood had lightened up.

She felt completely out of her league as Takahashi struck up a conversation with her and her sempai...as a peer. Takahashi noted that Belldandy reminded her of her daughters, by virtue of being talented and headstrong. She was amazed that this woman had a daughter _her age_, and still was a top contender for a gold medal. This shifted the energy away from casual dinner talk, as the four girls realized that this woman was a 'mega-sempai' as Ootaki later noted.

Takahashi spent a half-hour with them, schooling them on her Olympic experiences and encouraging them. She explained that although the women's delegation wasn't exactly a team per se, it was important for all the women to have an esprite-de-corps. The individual competitors would have to draw upon this, so she encouraged the girls to attend as many events as they could. She noted that "it's not all work, you have to play, enjoy the experience and be a tourist...when the time is right." She also brought up the point that, unlike the individual sports, there would be no world records to inspire an athlete to compete with herself in the team sports. Without this extra edge of self-challenge, the team competitions were cast in another light. Takahashi praised them for their hard work and encouraged them to compete with themselves, not just with their opponents.

"Make every effort for your team..._your_ personal attempt, with the mindset that _you_ are shooting for a world record, not just your personal best," she advised them. Belldandy and her teammates said they would take this to heart. When they left the cafeteria, Chihiro came up to them with a look of concern.

"You guys didn't embarrass me, did you?" she asked, drawing confusion from everyone. "Do you guys even know who she is? She's Takahashi!"

"Yah, she told us five minute minutes after she sat with us," Ootaki noted. "So why are you so concerned, Coach?"

"I don't think we did anything to embarrass you or ourselves, Coach," Kinosh'ta added. "Morisato here dropped her chopstix in her soba, but who could blame her..."

"Thank the Gods!" Chihiro said with a sigh of relief. "Thanks for being on your better behavior for once and not embarrassing the team, girls! I really mean it, I respect her _that much_. Four years ago in Athens, she did the same thing to me. Came right up out the blue and sat down and pep-talked me, just like I was another one of the gals. I was so nervous, I tipped a glass of juice over and splashed her. And don't you ever fuckin' tell anybody about that, or you are off the team!" she said with a wink.

"By the way, I'll give you one guess as to who's carrying the national flag during the Parade of Nations at the Opening Ceremony..."

"_Holy shit!!_" four voices splashed in a single gasp.

"Well, as Takahashi told me, go have some fun when the time's right," Chihiro said with a smile. "As a reward, you goofs can goof off for the rest of the night..."

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Volleyball was one of the few competitions whose tournament would span almost the entire Olympics. As a Pool A team, Japan would jump right into tourney play two days after the Opening Ceremony. She would advance to the quarterfinals only if she was in the top four teams in her pool. The tournament phase was to eliminate two teams from each pool. During the quarterfinals, their tourney record would influence their opponents. The top Pool A team would play the fourth place Pool B team and vice versa, while the middle slots would be decided by lot. The quarterfinals would eliminate two teams more teams per pool, leaving the top two teams of each pool to advance to the semifinals. The winner of the semifinals would play for the gold and silver, the losing team would compete for the bronze. At the last Olympics, Chihiro's team had gotten all the way to the semifinals, ­but lost to the China-States team, which won the gold. Chihiro's squad defeated Brazil for the bronze, but just barely.

China-States was a strong favorite to win the Gold, due to their powerful team and the home-field advantage. But also highly regarded were the Cuban, the United States and the Norway-Euro teams. Word of a "crazy woman" attacker on the Norway-Euro team had added an extra wariness to those facing the Euros in Pool B. Japan was predicted to _maybe_ make the bronze medal round, a fact that both amused and pissed off Chihiro.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

The Games had been a continuous presence on Thera for almost 3000 years, in one form or another. The Olympics generally were divided into three eras: the Ancient Era, the Unified Era, and the Modern Era. The Ancient Era of the Olympics began in Greece in 792BCE at Olympos. It was held every four years, and was later adapted by the Romans, then it was outlawed and persecuted by the Christians but was saved by the Ostrogoth Barbarians who continued to hold Olympiads in the latter 4th century CE. Centuries later, the Games were taken to Persia and then East Asia in the 9th century by the Islamic Abassid Empire while Europe famished during the Dark Ages. It was discovered that the Chinese and Indian empires had been holding their own competitions for over a thousand years. The first unified Olympiad was held by the Mongolian Khanate in 1208CE. From then on, the two sets of games were unified into a single competition, ushering in the Unified Era. With the discovery and urbanization of the Americas, the Olympics sponsored the sister New World Games beginning in 1724, as travel between the Old and New World was impractical. The Olympiads continued to alternate between Asia and Europe every four years by agreement until 1800 with the first non-Asia/non-Euro competition which was hosted in Buenos Aires. This was generally acknowledged as the beginning of the Modern Era of the Olympics.

These 2008 Games were special for two reasons. They celebrated the 800th anniversary of the founding of the Unified Olympic Games in Mongolia in 1208. But the importance of the 800th anniversary was eclipsed by the significance that this Olympiad marked the 700th Olympic Games, reckoned from the start of the first Olympiad and not including off-year Winter Olympics. With this in mind, the Olympic Movement put out a vote on the internet and via ballot to everyone on Thera who wanted to decide if this should be a Jubilee Olympics in the manner of the 1900 games: combining the Winter and Summer games into a single competition. All the athletes would participate in the Opening Ceremony, then the Winter 'half' of the competition would be bullet-trained or flown to Lhasa, capital of the Tibetan Republic while the Summer 'half' would have a rest day. The competitions would be held contiguously in both cities, and then the Closing Ceremony would be held in Lhasa at the National Freedom Stadium.

During the Opening Ceremony, the President of the Olympic Committee would read from the actual original leather Ekecheiria Charter and the actual original bamboo Zhung Chim Proclamation, both of which declared all military action to be postponed by truce until the end of the Games. The tradition of truce and safe-conduct had been adhered to without fail by all nations throughout history: for two weeks, there would be no war on Thera, not even civil wars. Following the Declaration of Truce ­was the Parade of Nations, with Greece entering first as the original host of the Ancient Games, followed by Mongolia and then Brazil, in honor of the founders of each Olympic Era. The rest of the teams would be announced in Chinese Mandarin pinyin, and finally the Tibet and Chinese delegations would walk together to conclude the Parade. After this was the presentation of the Artistic Program for about two hours, followed by the lighting of the Olympic Torch. The Beijing Olympics would be the first Olympics in history to light the torch by compressed laser; it would take 248 precisely positioned mirrors to create the angular refractions which would narrow the beam enough so that it had the necessary thermal properties to light the torch. Which meant that for 90 seconds, laser beams would trace a web around the stadium, like someone drawing a sequence of lines of light in mid-air, and then the final light would ignite the torch. The Dalai Lama, the China-States President, and the two final torch bearers, one from Tibet and one from China-States, would set a ceremonial tassel on fire. Like a firecracker fuse, the flames would travel up about two hundred feet to the top of the stadium and burn through a trip-wire. This would cause a mirror fastened to the end of a levered panel to rise into the air, like a playground see-saw, which would position the first mirror in front of the laser and fire up the sequence of laser-beams.

"It's gonna be _awesome_!" Belldandy thought, trying to imagine what the stadium would look like at that moment.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

The Opening Ceremonies for the spectators was really simple: you show your ID card; get scanned; go through metal and chemical detectors; be ushered to your seat by a China-States National Guard; and then cheer like hell for six hours. The Opening Ceremony for athletes and performers was so complex, Belldandy couldn't even grasp it. Being Thera's most populated nation, the China-States loved to put on displays involving _a lot_ of people. An army of costumed performers and stage techs surrounded the queue that would march in the Parade of Nations. Growing up, she remembered the profound sense she felt when she watched her first Olympics on TV with Mom. The music captivated her. Mom moved to Japan a year later and remarried when she was nine. The next year, she watched the Olympics with both parents in their centuries-old farmhouse. She was more interested in the entertainment part of the Opening Ceremony, but as a 10-year old, she grasped the solemn dignity of the Parade. Each nation was dressed differently, and there were so many of them! Nations she hadn't even heard of in school.

Now, eight years later, she was going to _be in the parade_. Chihiro and the V-Ball team were honored by bringing up the rear of the 450-person delegation. When word got around as to _why_ she had flipped off the Norway-Euro team, the athletes realized that the higher-ups had completely missed the point and decided as a form of protest to give the V-ball team the conspicuous placement. Chihiro may have pissed off the bigwigs, but she had earned the respect of the rank-and-file athletes. Even now, she was milling about like a mother hen, making sure the team didn't get separated or misplaced in the choreographing of Japan's entrance to the stadium. Chihiro had even drilled them on the parade: don't gawk, don't march, wave right-center-left-center-right every minute, walk crisply, don't fidget with your warmup suit and hoodies, and tie a smile on as if you were trying to impress a guy on a first date...

The Olympic anthem was played, and then the Olympic Symphony was performed in a repeating song-cycle as the teams entered the stadium. Each nation had an usher to accompany them right up to the entrance to the field; Belldandy watched as far ahead, she could see red flags waving to start the next in line. Finally, their usher waved his handflags to signal them to start the walk. The experience oddly reminded her of the high school graduation ceremony. She held that thought as they slowly approached the entrance to the field.

Japan was announced by the PA, and they started their walk. The relative quiet of the entry 'tunnel' suddenly shifted into an explosion of light as their delegation gained the field. The roar of approval was almost deafening as thousands of camera flashes exploded from all over the stadium. There was no need for spotlights...the entire stadium _was_ a spotlight! Belldandy was hoping there wasn't any cameras on her, because she knew she was goggle-eyed at the site. This was a million light-years away from the tiny gym in Murakami.

She felt a chest-filling burst of awe when it struck her that this was the _world's_ gym...

Belldandy knew that her parents were up there, in the stands, the recipients of an extraordinary neighborly generosity from her hometown. Only people in a hick town in Niigata would do something so crazy; everybody in the close-knit town probably donated something. She felt a swell of pride that she was a small-town girl who lived on a farm...people in Tokyo wouldn't even have a clue. She tried looking for her parents for all of five seconds and then gave up, realizing that she would never see them amongst the 140,000 spectators. But they would definitely would see her...one of those flashes in the stands were her Mom and Dad clicking away on the camera. Many of the other women on the team had family here, and both co-captains had husbands in the stands. The experience was so intense, she felt like her head was a balloon trying to break its string-tie to her shoulders. She and her teammates were on _a world stage_, their images broadcast to a couple billion TVs all over Thera. To say that she felt giddy would be a tremendous understatement.

When they finished their circuit, the Japanese delegation took their assigned place in the middle of the field. They were ahead of the Norway-Euro team in the parade; Belldandy debated whether she would avert her eyes or scrutinize the N-E delegation for Athenle. She decided on the latter, and spied Athenle from afar at the Norwegian team entered the central grounds. Athenle wasn't even looking for her.

"I see you, but you don't see me," she said to herself in a private voice. Athenle knew she had bested Belldandy in that first encounter at the airport; now, she was so confident, she didn't even bother to search out her opponent. Which meant that Belldandy had won this round by default.

After another hour, the Parade ended, and the Artistic program began. Martial artists performed incredible feats, wire-fu acrobatics floating and tumbling in mid-air. Giant light-sculptures of the Fuwa marching around the circular track, each fifteen meters tall. C-pop stars from Honk Kong, Shanghai and Beijing belted out their trademark hit songs. Thousands of sleeve dancers spun gymnastically in the soccer pitch, recreating dances over a thousand years old with precise synchronization. A huge gathering of Tibetan monks playing long trumpets at least three meters long, with other monks playing conch shells and bells; creating an eerie, chilling sound that seemed profound and sublime. More Tibetans in color costumes performing sword fighting dances. Tibetan archers shooting glowing arrows in a lazy arc over the field. Finally, to the sound of the Olympic anthem, fireworks shot out from the top and sides of the stadium, turning night into day...

...and then two elderly men walked in to a thundering applause. Belldandy knew the story well; for these were the only two men in the history of the Modern Era of the Olympics who had actually tied in the Decathlon, sixty years ago. They finished with the exact same number of total points after the ten events. Since it would be ludicrous to hold an eleventh event 'tie-breaker' in a ten-event competition, they were jointly awarded gold medals. But the story continued, because twenty years later, both countries were at war within themselves and with each other. At the 1968 games in Mexico City, they emulated the African-American athletes from the United States by hold red-gloved fists in the air, a gesture that said "we're tired of fighting, let's just have some peace." In 1972, the China-States and Tibetan Republic Accord was signed...by both of these men, who had risen to be heads of state for both countries. As they walked around the track, spry and nimble even in their 80s, the applause for these two national heroes was almost deafening. Olympic athletes had a long tradition of becoming leading politicians, innovators and leaders; these two men were peacemakers who were exemplars of the athletic and Theran tradition. Finally, they finished their circuit and ascended the stairs to the awaiting President and Dalai Lama...

...and the stadium went dark. To Belldandy, who had been inundated with bright lights, the absence of light made everything pitch black while her eyes adjusted. A single flame lit the tassel and then the flame itself seemed to float upwards against the dark. At the top, it exploded like a fireworks rocket, and then the red lasers started...

"Ohmygod!!" Belldandy exclaimed...and the entire stadium seemed to let out a collective gasp as the red narrow beam began to make its way from mirror to mirror, creating a web of red light with geometric precision. It divided into two separate beams and criss-crossed the open-air roof of the stadium like shoe-laces of light, gathering at the end where the torch pylon was. A 'V" shaped burst of light pinpointed the cauldron below between its two beams...and the flame flared into life amidst the loudest noise Belldandy had ever heard in her life, as the crowd-noise blasted into the stratospheres of decibels with a roar of approval and delight. As the stadium lights turned on, she and her V-ball teammates were jumping up and down in excitement, a moment forever captured in their hearts.

With the lighting of the torch, Belldandy realized that this was the best that Thera had to offer...and it was proof that she would have the mettle to take on any adversity she'd face in the next two weeks, including a Goddess who would have no appreciation whatsoever for the effort it took to light that torch.

Which meant that everyone on Thera had claimed a victory tonight...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --


	128. Pt 128: Centrifugal

**Part 128: Centrifugal**

SOMEWHERE:

That first night in this no-where of a land, Keleste and Keiyasu had insisted on sleeping next to him, which initially bugged Keiichi to no end. Cevn had to reason with him to convince him that it wasn't a violation of his love for Belldandy; advocating that the two kids saw him as family, even if he didn't. Cevn added that Keiichi would have to try and work on changing his attitude towards them and stop treating them like strangers. He also admitted to Keiichi that doing so would be a significant challenge, since the two Godkids were so newly introduced to his life.

"Easy for him to say," Keiichi mused. "He doesn't have two teenagers sandwiching him, teenagers he met just a few hours ago."

The next morning, Keleste and Keiyasu immediately wanted to start working on a plan of escape. Cevn suggested that they instead focus on breaking the ice with each other by each of them relating their life stories. Both kids thought this would be a waste of time...at least until Keiichi agreed with Cevn. He was caught off-guard when the two Godkids actually seemed to act like kids. Just like that, they changed their minds and accepted his opinion as authoritative. As if they were responding to their parents. Keleste and Keiyasu simply dropped their objections and followed his lead. No debate, no arguing, no reluctance; they just smiled and said they'd do it and it'd be fun.

"So this is what it feels like to be a father? This is _scary_," Keiichi commented aside to Cevn. It felt weird, to be sure, as the only authority role he'd really settled into during his life was being sempai to younger members of the Unified Club, like Sora. His younger sister, Megumi, often seemed like she was more mature than he, which stole the fire away from his "I'm the older brother!" family influence. Now he had two children who not only obeyed him with a fealty usually reserved for parent-figures, but also seemed to shift their mood based upon what he said. Both of them had been clearly disgruntled by any delay in getting on with their 'work', but as soon as he agreed that it would be more to everyone's advantage to have a rap session, they did a turnabout and brightened with confidence. And he didn't _tell_ them to do it; he had just suggested his agreement with Cevn's idea.

Keiichi exhorted himself to try and ask himself "what would my father do?" as a habit from now on, hoping that this would build up a relationship with them more quickly than trial-and-error speculations on his part. He could second-guess himself to the end of days if he started wondering if he was doing 'right' actions. It was the only thing he had to go on; the parenting experience he would have to rely on wasn't even his own. Cevn suggested that Keiichi work on calling them by their given names as well, so that they felt closer to him. This was difficult, as every Japanese social context deep inside of him demanded that he call them "Keleste-kun" and "Keiyasu-kun" until he knew them much better. Cevn said understood how much of a challenge this would be, and offered to 'remind' him if he forgot.

The four found a nearby lopsy circle of rocks and sat facing each other. Keiyasu flippantly suggested that he go first, which drew a brief argument from Keleste, who noted that she was the elder twin and his older sister. Keiichi decided not to even try and referee this argument; such a decision might be interpreted as favoritism at this sensitive time. He thanked his Dad for that one, remembering how he or Megumi would pout if one or the other got what they wanted. Eventually Keleste deferred, noting with a parting shot that "I'm the smart one, so it makes sense that I go after you, so I can fill in the gaps."

Keiyasu narrated a life without parents, riveting Keiichi with story after story of he and his sister's unsuccessful efforts to locate him and Belldandy. When Keiyasu described how he and Keleste had formed a memorial statue of him on a dead Earth, Keiichi felt both awed and frightened. The concept of a dead Earth brought back to mind his role as the "Test Mortal", whose actions were being closely monitored by the Gods and Kami-sama. How he lived his life as a 'normal' mortal would become a significant influencing factor on whether Kami-sama and the Gods were going to destroy humanity or not. He remembered how he and Bell were in Hiroshima, and she had dropped a bombshell of her own on him, noting that the humans were one of only a few species of mortal beings who were reckless enough to use nuclear weapons to kill each other. Thus, they were on a 100-year long probation which would end in 2047 or thereabouts.

Returning his thoughts to Keiyasu's life experience, Keiichi found it hard to even imagine these two kids spending a thousand years of their lives making a memorial to him, without even knowing anything about him. Even when converting Divine years into human terms, this was almost a month of their lives. And the poor kids didn't even know who he was or what he looked like! That's how they spent their 10th birthday; roughly 100,000 years into the future. Keiyasu described his life growing up with Skuld and Peorth as foster-mothers...a concept that brought a wry series of thoughts to Keiichi's mind as he tried to envision _those_ two cooperating on anything. According to Keiyasu, the two Goddesses had lovingly raised he and his sister as if they were their own, and that they had wanted for nothing. Except one thing.

They didn't have a father-figure.

Lacking a father-figure was especially trying for Keiyasu; Keleste quickly added that finding Keiichi was all the more precious because her brother would finally have the guidance of a strong male figure in his life. Keiichi was almost embarrassed when she said this; the last quality he saw in himself at times was "strong male figure", whatever that was. Keiyasu continued by noting that Skuld and Peorth always acted out of the goodness of their hearts, but some of the decisions they made didn't make sense to him. This got Cevn going, commenting about other decisions that didn't make sense, like trying to understand why the Gods would 'adopt' the two to a pair of Goddesses instead of a couple.

"Typical Ygg screw-brained idiocy," he heard Cevn grouse. Cevn said he could empathize with Keiyasu, explaining that he didn't have a father-figure either; his dad certainly wasn't fatherly except when there was a beating to be given. The two kids seemed shocked that parental qualities could take such a turn. Cevn was quick to add that it wasn't his dad's fault; his dad had been treated that way as a kid by his father. He started discussing the flaws in mortal families and Keiichi interrupted him and told him to hold put a lid on it; the two kids were already confused as it was. Keiichi talked about his dad and how his father, although quirky, always had his best interests at heart.

He could tell that Cevn was deeply ashamed for getting so wrapped up in negativity. Keiichi had to remind him that his new 'family' at the temple house really did care about him, and that his outburst was probably the result of being unnerved by what had happened over the past 24 hours.

Keleste went next, and discussed how they had been informed that they were considered mature enough at five "Decas"…meaning fifty thousand years…to be told that they had mixed parentage. She explained that they would have figured it out eventually, because the level of their Divine powers were different than their peers. This difference became more apparent as they grew older. She described how Kami-sama had taken a special interest in she and her brother because of their unique heritage, offering bounties of His time to console them when they were heartbroken after one more failed attempt to find their Goddess mother. It seemed that their mortal 'half' cast them in a position to be more emotionally sensitive and volatile; which also required His counsel and loving care. In a sense, they were both fragile because of the conflicts resolving from their dual heritage.

By this time, Keiichi's mind was beginning to drift towards the sands of his own emotional desert; he had lost Belldandy when she was destroyed at the wedding ceremony. More than likely even sooner, since this SurGoth thing had seemed to have been impersonating her for some time. He felt a souring when it struck him that his loss was terrible, to be sure...but these two kids had _never_ experienced Belldandy in their lives. They had no idea what they were missing. In a sense, his recent loss paled in contrast to the shadows of sadness that cast a pall over them.

Cevn volunteered to go next "for reasons that will become evident", and noted that he felt like he was two or even three persons in one. He remembered being a mortal, he remembered some kind of battle with a being called Isilblius, and he described his life on Planet Lost. When it came to the part about Urd, all that Cevn could say was that he loved her, but he had to set aside that love because matters at hand mandated that choice. Something was more important. Keiichi knew that he and Urd were close, had been in an improbable love...but Cevn's explanation did little to clarify what might have been the cause for Urd's 'forgetting' of her feelings towards him. Thankfully, his earlier admonition of his friend had took hold, as Cevn skipped over all the crazymaking stuff in his life like abuse, drugs, abandonment, etc.

The round finally reached Keiichi, and he started story-telling the events of his life. He related his that his childhood years were pretty fun: growing up with a younger sister, going to school, what life on the Earthrealm was like for a kid. He tried to focus upon his impressions of life when he was about the same age as Keleste and Keiyasu, hoping these impressions would be more genuine to them. He shifted to his love for racing and vehicle engineering. The words came easy now as he described his passion for competitive racing and going ever faster: beginning with riding bicycles; then BMX and a brief fling with skateboarding; and then learning actual automotive and motorcycle racing; and finally evolving each year until his lifework involved racing with Formula One GT1 race cars. He brought laughter all when he described the different personalities of some of the Unified Club members, like Tamiya, Ootaki, Sora and Chihiro. He elaborated that he didn't just drive or ride vehicles; he _built_ them as well. This seemed to really impress the two Godkids. He almost thought it funny; these two seemed more than a little impressed with mechanical works and racing. Could they have inherited their traits and interests from him? Even though they had never met him? Could they really be his very own children? Could his own paths and preferences through life be theirs as well?

But he wanted to impress on them with absolute certainty that his real lifework was centered on his love for Belldandy, and once he began to talk about her, he lost his composure.

Each word, each memory he related only deepened the shadows of his loss, as if he was pulling the sun down towards the horizon. He gut-checked his heart, realizing that he had to be strong, he _had_ to talk about her. Because it was entirely possible that Bell-chan _was_ Keleste and Keiyasu's mother. Following upon the two's vivid descriptions of the intensity of their search for he and Bell-chan, they deserved no less. It was horrible to consider, but it was possible that they would never meet Bell-chan, which made his memories and impression not only precious to himself, but to Keleste and Keiyasu as well. Each memory of Belldandy was frightful to recall, because Keiichi knew that in the retelling, his inmost spirit would only wound itself further. He looked at Cevn and saw a kindred soul; someone else who had lost the one they loved. He swallowed his fears, and pressed on.

Which wasn't necessary, because the kids began to pepper him with questions. Here he was, dressed in a ragged rip-torn wedding tux in the middle of a planet that could be a demo model for Purgatory; an environment of desolation shot in grainy black-and-white film. At this moment, he _should_ have been married, he _should_ have been basking in the bliss of his honeymoon with Belldandy. Instead, he was _here_...choked by the residue of his life, famished for comfort, and tired...just tired of life.

He felt so emotionally exhausted, he couldn't go on...

...and then Keleste asked "What did she look like?"

"She looks like you, of course," Keiichi explained patiently. "Except that her hair is lighter, she doesn't wear a bandana, she had a couple antennae 'just so'" as he gestured to his forehead with two wiggling fingers, "...and her eyes are little bit different. Your eyes are definitely a lighter blue, even with this blah sunlight or whatever it is, I can tell."

He could see that Keleste in particular was raptured with attention, her face pressured up as she was clearly trying to visualize Bell-chan based on his description. But words couldn't even begin to convey the kind of Goddess beauty that Belldandy possessed...

The wallet!

Despite Belldandy's insistence...and he realized once again that it was some evil being in the form of his Divine fiancée that had been at the marriage ceremony...he had taken his wallet to the wedding ceremony, just in case. Of all the people who could have insisted, it was Tamiya and Ootaki who kept taunting him about "being stuck without ID when the cops come to bust up the reception." So he had kept his wallet on his person. Keiichi rifled through the pockets of his jacket and found it.

Why try to explain her to them when he could show them a bunch of pictures of Belldandy!

"Every picture's worth a thousand words" echoing in his mind, Keiichi immediately opened his wallet and searched out one of his favorites, taken the day after he asked her to marry him at the Le Mans. They were in Paris at that time, the guests of Sayoko and Genji's parents, seated at some ritzy restaurant with the view of the Eiffel Tower and the Champs de Mars mall. Belldandy was standing in front of a gondala or bay window, blushing with a Mona Lisa smile. Her face haloed by wind-blown hair, her eyes slightly red from all the tears of joy she had given the night before. With a heavy heart, Keiichi realized that this picture was worth more than a thousand words to Keleste and Keiyasu…it was worth a hundred thousand years of searching. He just hoped he had chosen well for their first-ever seeing of their Mother.

"This is Belldandy, the day after I asked her to marry me," Keiichi said solemnly, tears rimming his eyes. God, how he wished she was here with him right now!

Keleste and Keiyasu looked at Bell's picture, nothing more than a clipped snapshot, with studious and silent reverence. After a few moments, they wordlessly ran their fingers along the surface of the picture, tracing out Bell's face. Keiichi looked back and forth between Bell's image and the two Godkids. Back and forth, back and forth...his attention trying to span the photo and the faces so that he could more clearly perceive their likeness to Bell-chan.

And then it hit him. It hit him so hard that he almost lost his footing. These two _were_ Belldandy's son and daughter! They _had_ to be; the similarity of facial features, their facial expressions, the contours of nose and jaw, the sparkled sunnyness of their eyes despite their lifelong struggles to grow up without their birth parents...

Keleste and Keiyasu were _his_ son and daughter! _He_ was their birth parent!

""Oh..my..Goddess!" he gasped, the absolute certainty of his discovery at mind, filling his heart with an awe and joy. His shocked expression and wobbly footing drew concerned looks from all present.

"I'm okay! I'm okay!" he answered their unasked questions, waving them off. In fact, he was more than okay...this was the most 'okay' he had felt since they arrived here. The children that Belldandy had said he and she could never have...were standing right in front of him, their faces a perfect mix of his own and Bell-chan's features! Their concerned expressions weren't just the concern of a friend; these were faces filled with deep _love_. In his mind's eye, he could see his Mom and Dad's faces within theirs, looking at him with the same intensity of loving solicitude.

"Keleste, Keiyasu, this is your mother, Belldandy. My _real _fiancée," he announced in a wavy-gravy emotional voice. Cevn looked him with a searching expression, noticing the sudden emotional bond that had bridged him and his two children.

"My God..she's so _beautiful_!!" Keleste gasped, finally able to find her voice. Keiyasu reached around her shoulders to steady her; his sister looked like she was going to faint. And he knew he wasn't too far away from taking flight of his senses himself. This was his _Mother_, more real and vivid than he ever could have imagined her to be!!

"I spent..snff..most of my life trying..snff..to imagine what my Mother would..huhn..look like. Seeing..snff..her for the first time, I know that..she..whinff..was much more beautiful than I could have ever thought. She's..."

"So are you, sis! So are you..." Keiyasu noted, overwrought with his own joy, compounded by his sister's. His Mother was every bit a Goddess. He could readily discern her grace even through the informal setting of the picture. She would have stood out in any throng of Goddesses! In the presence of this first experience of his Mother's true image, his sister Keleste looked somehow different to him. Keiyasu realized that it was because he now had glimpsed the original; the mode from which his sister had been given her beauty. A beauty she was zealously ashamed of, much to his frustration as they grew older. Her vanity seemed even more silly in the wake of learning that their Mother was an exemplar of Goddess qualities. He could tell, just from this picture.

"Now we know where you got your good looks," he commented, squeezing her shoulder.

By this time, Keiichi was sobbing so hard, he dropped his wallet. He couldn't believe that his own daughter was ashamed of her appearance! She had never mentioned it, but somehow he _knew_. It was so wrong! Keleste had been blessed with every bit of beauty Bell-chan had, if not more...

Keleste looked at Keiyasu, startled. She then regarded Keiichi with an unreadable expression, as if she was trying to see into his soul somehow. Not knowing what else to do, Keiichi simply nodded to confirm his son's observation and then smiled at her. His daughter blushed and then smiled at her brother with obvious loving devotion.

"I don't think I need this anymore," she said as she untied her bandana slowly.

Four shoots of antennae hair popped out as she pulled the loose cloth off, pulled her hair back into a ponytail and tied the bandana around her hair in place of her hair ribbon.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Please, let's go over this again," Keiichi asked. His son and daughter had described in detail how they had initially sensed two other Godkids via a series of 'visions' of a sort, their narrative reminding him of a clairvoyant sensing ghosts in a séance. In turn they had investigated these 'ghosts' and discovered that the children they saw populating their visions were possibly related to them. How they had intuited this, neither could explain.

They quickly realized that the two might be able to lead them to Keiichi and Belldandy. They learned that the two children had a mother named Skuld; by coincidence, the same name as their 'stepmom'. With the assistance of the Ygg Mainframe computer, they determined a series of possible locations and then went and stole a Soul Mirror. Soul Mirrors are special devices that can 'radar' the Souls of other Gods and Goddesses, and it was their hope that they could find the two apparitions in their visions and see them _for real_.

The two children, noticeably younger than Keleste and Keiyasu, had distinct 'echoes' of Souls. Keleste and Keiyasu decided that the best explanation for this was that they were 'another' Skuld's kids, which implied that they somehow existed in another reality or TimeStream, it seemed. They explained how they had chanced it that the other two kids...as children of that reality's Skuld...would have a remnant Divine 'signature' passed on from their birth mother. Tuning the Soul Mirror using their 'stepmom' Skuld's unique Goddess 'signature' as a template or means of direction, they were able to locate the other two kids after significant efforts.

Hoping the two girl's Goddess signatures were strong enough for Keleste and Keiyasu to home in on, they used the Soul Mirror as a looking glass to peer even deeper into the two girl's reality, like a compass pointing towards Magnetic North. Assured that they had been on the right track so far, they 'borrowed' an instrument of SkuldTech from their 'stepmom' Skuld. They weren't satisfied with simply looking; they intended to not only use the Soul Mirror to view the other kids, but to _travel_ to where they were at. Which, to their shock, had been the Demon's Realm, not the God's Realm as they expected.

It was too confusing, but Keleste and Keiyasu patiently repeated their explanation several times until Keiichi finally comprehended the gist of it. Cevn seemed to understand it right off the bat; but he also seemed to be distracted as if he was trying to remember something. To Keiichi, a distracted Cevn was quite easy to notice...his friend had a nervous habit of disheveling his hair by rubbing the top of his head, causing his long shaggy bangs to partially cover his face while he had a blank expression in his eyes.

Keiichi waved his hands in front of Cevn, but didn't get his attention. It seemed that his friend was looking through him and his children, trying to see something that wasn't there. Maybe he had seized upon something that Keleste and Keiyasu had explained. Hopefully, their explication didn't send him into a mental lockdown.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Dad, this whole thing _hurls_!" Keleste said angrily, her vehemence bringing an eyeroll from her brother. "We know some of the methods and processes which brought us here, but we're still stuck."

She had explained it several times, and now the whole adventure was fixed in her mind with total clarity. The only missing piece was how they had arrived to this empty place. The device they 'borrowed' from their stepmom was only supposed to work on Soul Mirrors. She had it tucked away when she and Keiyasu had jumped through the Gate of Judgment to chase after their Father. But Dad had arrived just ahead of them, without any extra device or means, _before_ they came through the Gate. Cyborg-guy Cevn had also been brought here without it _after_ they passed through the Gate. So it wasn't the device that was the key to them leaving this place. It had to be something else.

Why couldn't life be simple just this once, now that they had found their Father and were one step closer to finding their Mother as well?

"What do you know about the Gate of Judgment?" she heard Keiyasu ask their Dad. Maybe her brother was on to something she didn't think about.

"It's this place where a God and Goddess have to go before they become married...I think Bell-chan called it 'Bonded'. Since you guys live so long, it's super-important that you pick the _right_ person to spend your life with," her Father explained casually, clearly sensing her frustration.

"Unlike the Earthrealm, there are no legal and religious stuffs tied up with marriage in Yggdrasil, so the concept of divorce on those grounds is pretty much out the door. The Gate, in a sense, is kinda like a final exam. If you make it through, then you're okay...you're in love, everyone knows it, it's all cool. If not, then you are faced with the doubts of your own love, which basically prevents you from being in love with that person. I can't remember what Bell-ch...er, your Mother told me entirely, but it's really important. There's all sorts of warnings about it. She said the most important thing was to never go through it by yourself, and to only go through it when you were serious about the one you loved."

"She and I both went through it one time, and it did something which she explained as a 'Seal' to confirm that our love was true," he added.

"Why?" Keleste asked, intrigued by this new information and amazed that her Father and Mother actually had gone through the Gate themselves. They must really love each other!! She had heard about the Gate of Judgment, but only the warning part. Their Prime, FirstTier, and SecondTier Inculcations both stopped short of explaining the reason for all the warnings, citing that she had to be a little older before she could be informed fully about the Gate's true function. The Proctors didn't even tell her; she'd thought for sure that they would oblige her thirst for knowledge about the Gate. After all, they had revealed the news to her and Keiyasu about their mortal heritage, and then at their Tenth Deca, where their Father had lived. Now they were almost another five Decas older, and almost through SecondTier. Wouldn't 150,000 years be old enough for the Proctors to spill the info to she and her brother?

"Sis, you're an idiot, I swear," Keiyasu teased, drawing a frown on her face with a painter's expertise. "Dad said that the God and Goddess have to be in love. The Gate must be some kind of 'love eraser' for those who pass within it who aren't in love. Otherwise, why even bother? Why all the bigass warnings from all the old geezers at Prime Inculcation? If a God walked through on his own, without a partner for the Gate to 'test', the Gate would just think 'he's not in love' and then do its thing. It would take away his ability to give or receive love."

"That's horrible!" Keleste said, and then she shuddered with a terrifying thought. Each of them had gone through the Gate by themselves. Their Dad was heartbroken because their Mom had been torn away from him, without him even knowing it until the debacle at that Earthrealm church. And Cevn the cyborg had explained that he loved a Goddess named Urd, but she was unable to love him in return because she didn't even know that she _had_ loved him.

And she and Keiyasu had gone through it as well...

"K..Keiyasu?" she stammered, her heart pounding in her ears. "Do you love me?"

Her brother basically face-rocked at that.

"What do you mean, foolish Goddess-girl?" he answered after unfreezing. "You're my sister! Of course I love you!"

Keleste sighed with relief and explained her reasoning. She was worried that the Gate had somehow tampered with her and her brother so that they wouldn't love each other. But if that was the case...what if it blocked all other forms of love? What if _only_ she and Keiyasu could love each other? She blinked aside the incest aspect; that was too unthinkable to even waste consideration on. But if she was limited to only loving her brother, then what? What if she found her Mom?

And learned that her Mom couldn't love her...

"Dad...do you _love me and Keiyasu_?" she turned and asked her Father suddenly. His shocked face was even more face-faulted than her brother's had been. "This is really massively important! I need to know if you love me and Keiyasu. I know you've just met us, we're almost half as old as you are in the mortal reckoning, and that we come from a hundred thousand years in the future. Your future. You probably aren't even totally certain that we're your kids. I'm sorry to ask this...I know that you just realized you've lost the love of your life. But I have to know, so please search your heart!"

"Keleste, I love you and Keiyasu not only because you're my kids, but because you're _you_!" he answered.

Immediately. Without even a second's hesitation.

"Dammit, I'm _not_ going to cry again!" Keleste said, wringing her bandana in her hands and then dabbing her eyes with it. "I was scared to death because of what you just told me about the Gate...that it either approves Love or takes it away. You both went through it by yourselves, and lost the love of your lives. I..was..just..scared..that..it..would..happen..to..me, too."

In response, her Father walked up and stroked her gently on the cheek, and then patted her head. Just like she had always imagined the way a father would comfort her.

"But you forgot a couple things," he said. "First, Cevn and I lost our Soulmates _before_ entering that Gate. Second, the Gate made it possible for you to meet me. Also, in a sense, you got to meet your Mom a little bit. _After_ you and your brother went through the Gate. If you really think I'm your Father, then you'd really love me, wouldn't you? Keleste, I can feel you and your brother's love. When I showed you both those pictures of Bell-chan, your feelings of love towards her were just as strong as mine. No...yours were even stronger...and now I understand why. I love her as a girlfriend, as a SoulMate. But you both love her because she's your Mom. I don't know how, but the love between a child and their parents is just different. I almost feel awkward with how emotional you both get around me. Maybe it's the same. I just hope you feel _my_ love for you and your brother."

"Da..aad!" Keleste gasped, her Father's words touching a part of her heart she didn't even know existed.

"Neh...now that that's been said, you must realize that I've just met you, and I wish you'd stop calling me 'Dad' all the time. Please," Keiichi asked her. "It's just...difficult, even though I know it's true. It's hard for me to feel like a real father in the short time we've had together. Just try to call me 'Keiichi' and know that I love you both. Which means that the Gate didn't mess with your ability to experience love. Or my capacity to love, for that matter."

Keleste looked at her Father...no, Keiichi...with renewed respect. He had seen through her worries straight to the heart of the problem, and then had told her it that she had nothing to fear from the Gate. This was the power of a real Father! It was almost shocking; he'd only been in her life for a single day, and yet he was totally acting like a father should. He wasn't just some young mortal guy...everything he said _meant_ something to her.

"Hey, Keiichi," Keiyasu said. "I think I understand what your meaning is. In the SpaceTime that you come from, you weren't planning to have kids until you were older, right? To me, you look just a few years older than us, which is kinda weird for us as well. But I totally relate. You weren't expecting us, and suddenly here we are. But we've been expecting...wanting...you for thousands of years. So I guess we're totally jumping the gun by all this 'Dad' stuff, aren't we? Even though you _are _our Father."

Keleste was cheered by Keiichi's broad grin; this was the first time he had smiled without crying since they'd arrived.

"That's it!" she overheard Cevn shout. The cyborg-mortal leapt to his feet, his face quickly animated with conviction.

"There's an exit portal to the Gate of Judgment here! All we..."

"Well...duh! We didn't wind up here by eating popcorn! Of course there's an exit!" Keleste interrupted sourly. Cevn was acting all important, like he had made some major discovery.

"...so all we really need to do is find it. And..uh, you eat popcorn where you guys come from?" Cevn asked, totally jarred from his train of thought. Keleste had to restrain herself from giggling; he might take her laughing to mean that she was making fun of him.

"Who doesn't eat popcorn?" Keiyasu answered. Her brother was just as amused as she was.

"Well anyway, now that we know about the universality of popcorn consumption, let's return our attention to the problem of the Gate, okay?" Cevn asked, catching on to the fun. "I know we can find the Gate because of that invention you have, Keleste. That device somehow negated the Gate's purpose and function! You said that your device could only work to transport people through a Soul Mirror. What if it turned the _Gate_ into a Soul Mirror? It's possible that it did transport you...and Keiichi and I...to this place. Everything I know about the Gate of Judgment, and not once does it even mention that the Gate transports someone from point A to point B. From there to here. It's simply a doorway, not a door. You walk through it, and you're still in the same physical locale; just like a real gateway. It's not like you walk through it and wind up on the other side of Yggdrasil, right Keiichi?"

"Yeah," Keiichi answered, being the only one in the group that had actually walked through the Gate of Judgment. "Bell-chan and I didn't disappear and find ourselves somewhere else."

"When you open a door, you're opening up a new physical locale, the unseen place on the other side of the door. We do it every day on the Earthrealm and don't even think that what's on the other side of the door is a totally different reality. Keleste, Keiyasu, you both said the Soul Mirror was like a looking glass, a way to peer into other places and times. Could Skuld's...your stepmom's...device have made it into a doorway? With all the energy bouncing around that church, her device might have been powerful enough just by its presence to shut the Gate down...or maybe power it up...so it functioned like a Soul Mirror. _That's_ how I think we got here!"

Keleste realized that Cevn's chain of hypothetical reasoning made a lot of sense. It answered many of her questions and even provided an explanatory method. The only problem was that there was no exit Gate. The 'door, as he termed it, had 'shut' so completely, it was no longer present in this wasteland-place.

"But it's not here," she noted with frustration. "The Gate totally disappeared when we finished going through it. It closed itself. If it was a 'door', it only opens and closes one way. We can't open it from this side. Once we came here, the door was left behind us and vanished. We'll never find it."

"Reverse Engineering," Keiichi said with a thoughtful expression.

"HUH?!"

"We'll find it using reverse engineering," her Father noted. "I learned early on that preparing a vehicle for a race requires a lot of last-minute adjusting and planning. Sometimes even repairs. In my experience, I've learned that unexpected or unwanted results can be solved by reverse engineering. Let's assume that a car has a problem, like a RPM threshold that's too low or an off-center torque. I know you guys don't know what a car is, so just bear with me for a moment. If the cause is completely unknown, then we start disassembling the vehicle, component by component. This allows us to diagnose the _source_ of the problem, rather than the problem itself. It sounds simple, but it's a tedious process. By methodically retesting each component system, we discover which ones are 'safe'; those systems that don't cause problems for the whole vehicle. Eliminate them, and the remaining components are definitely the troublemakers. Then it's just a matter of tweaking the problematic components to eliminate the problem."

"The device you have, Keleste, is the key. Let's assume for a moment that it brought us here by doing something to the Gate, changing it into a portal between there and here. That's enough to go on! We reverse-engineer it so we can use it to change the invisible portal back into a Gate. All we have to do is rebuild it to work backwards, so to speak. Somehow, it turned the Gate into a 'door', to use Cevn's analogy. I'm willing to bet that _it closed the Gate_, rather than the Gate closing itself. Once it went through the Gate, the device was no longer powering the Gate to be 'open'…so the Gate simply shut down. By rebuilding it to reverse that process, your device will be able open a closed gate. Which means that it has to find the Gate or Soul Mirror first!"

"Whaaaa," Keleste gasped, instantly comprehending the process her Father described. "So once we do this 'reverse engineering' thing, then it'll be able open the Gate from our end, wherever it is. Which means that we'll find the Gate, no probs!"

"Yep! Exactly!" Keiichi affirmed with a smile.

"If we can do that, then we need to rely on both of you," Cevn added. "Keiichi and I don't have a clue how that device works or what runs it. But you both have used it and even 'tweaked' it. I don't want to go back to the same place where we entered that Gate. You kid's skills at using the device to 'home in' on certain Goddess signatures is all we have to go on."

"And I just thought of something else!" Keiichi shouted. The insight he just had was almost doubling him over with excitement and optimism. "You and Keiyasu...minus me...equals Belldandy. Shit, that's it!! Right in front of us the whole time. We've already got your _Mom's Goddess signature_."

"Rad, tight and cool!" Keiyasu interjected. "Once sis and I do Keiichi's 'reverse engineering' on the device, then we whip open the Gate or Soul Mirror, whichever it finds. Then we zone in on her, just like we did before when we applied Skuld's Goddess 'signature' as a baseline to find the two other kids in our dreams. We can make the Soul Mirror find Mom…your wife…by using it in 'looking glass' mode!"

Cevn couldn't help but bump shoulders with Keiichi, noticing how the two had called Belldandy his "wife". Keiichi looked at his friend and they both started laughing.

"Hey, they're not married yet," Cevn forced out between laughs.

Keiichi realized that his chances of finding Bell-chan had just went from zero to 500kph, like the burst of speed at the beginning of a drag race. They were definitely in the holeshot zone now!

"We can find her!" Keleste shouted. "We can actually find her! We can even go to see her! Is it really true, Kei? After all the millennia we've tried, we're gonna find our Mom!"

"When we do find her, we're finally going to be part of a _family_!" Keiyasu shouted back at his sister, grabbing her hands in his. "Not only that, but we're going to give our Fath..er, Keiichi...we're going to find Belldandy for you, so you'll never have to miss her in your life again!"

Keleste was very happy to see her Father very happy...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

NULLN:

For the Listening, Peorth had chosen her most formal Goddess Relief Office Otasuke Sysop outfit, even dressier than her Goddess-Battlesuit. She even humbled herself and wore a long skirt, something she hadn't done for millennia. If she was going to defend Belldandy during the Listening, then she had to look the part. The gesture wouldn't affect Kami-sama's decision one bit; but it would make Peorth feel just a midge more empowered to do her best.

Anything less than her best, and Belldandy would feel the full brunt of punishment.

If Belldandy was found to have acted with selfish intent, then she would be forever exiled to the Well of Urd. "Forever" was a misnomer; she would be exiled for a time...a very long time. The Well of Urd was a place of Assemblage for the Gods to congress major decisions which required the unity of Kami-sama and the assembled Divines. The Almighty would call an Assemblage only for the most serious of matters; decisions so profound that even He needed to seek guidance. The Well of Urd was also a place where certain mortal worthies could ascend to Yggdrasil from the Mid-Light, being deemed as appropriate by the Boy Who Was Death. As a place of exile, the Well of Urd itself was the limbo of banishment. A God or Goddess exiled to the Well of Urd would be trapped for a time, as if in a tunnel that was blocked on both ends by unbreakable windows. Once exiled, they would be able to witness the glory of Yggdrasil from inside the Well, but also would unable to join with their fellow Divines. A penance of banishment, continually aware of what they had been deprived of, until the period of Sanctioning was completed and they could ascend back into the God's Realm.

Because of the profundity of her misdeed, Belldandy could be exiled to the Well of Urd for 500 millennia in order to achieve the desired purgation of selfishness. Her actions were not in question at this Listening; as it was known and recorded by the Ygg Network that she had taught writing to the Earthrealm mortals. The focus of the Listening was to determine the level of her intent. If a Divine being had acted with pure Selfishness, then they would be punished accordingly. A God who had acted with an admixture of selfishness and congruence would receive a lesser period of exile. Belldandy, by violating a deeply-held sacred precept, could be found to have an according level of selfishness. "The bigger the crime, the longer the time," as the Earthrealm mortals had termed it thousands of years ago when they actually had something resembling a civilization.

Peorth had devised two possible defenses. She first would try to prove that Belldandy is incompetent and thus not responsible for her actions. This would require meticulous explanation on her part: there was no precedent to determine if a Goddess could be insane. Insanity as a pathological mental and emotional disturbance simply didn't exist in Yggdrasil. It _couldn't_ exist, by virtue of the fact that any sentient race which achieves the Next Level must be cleansed of insanity. This precondition was critical; the shedding of insanity was necessary so a sentient species could develop their telepathic abilities without destroying themselves. The Next Level was the beginning phase in a long evolutionary journey which would proceed on to the Demi-God status, attained by the accomplishment of shedding physical bodies and thus accomplishing immortality. The final step was for them to become attuned to the Metanative qualities of the Gods. Thus, as a Goddess, Belldandy was two huge evolutionary leaps ahead of any capacity, faculty or attribute that could even resemble insanity.

Gods may behave irrationally from time to time, caught up in their passions and ambitions; but these were the actions of sane-minded Divines. The God or Goddess would be fully aware of their actions, and their behavior would be explicable to others. Peorth would have to disprove both in order to support a claim of insanity. Since LinTai had claimed Belldandy was insane, his learned opinion would have to hold some weight. The Almighty would need to be convinced that LinTai's assessment wasn't a parenthetical collation of estimates. Peorth recognized that she might have to allow the Lord total access to her Soul in order to witness in support that Belldandy's insanity was categorical, appreciable and tangible.

Her second tact would be to elaborate on these 'screamings' that Belldandy had mentioned during the sole time she had spoken since the disaster. She had only spoken once since the loss of her family and Keiichi; and despite her confusion, she was lucid enough to communicate repeatedly that the 'screams' were real to her. So Peorth would need to convince the Almighty that the 'screams' weren't just imaginative fixtures in Belldandy's mind. She herself had heard them, so she could corroborate as a witnessing Goddess. Yet, she would then have to link Belldandy's behavior to the 'screams'. Peorth sensed deep in her Soul that Belldandy was somehow _fighting against_ whatever it was that had cast a pall on her life, because she heard the screams right after Belldandy had created a joyful outcome. It seemed to Peorth that each little triumph brought a scream of pain to her whatever it was that may be tormenting Belldandy. But how could she communicate this to the Lord without any certitude about what forces Belldandy was struggling against? Again, the Lord could interpret the screams simply as proof that she was struggling against herself, and acted selfishly as a result of her own internal conflict.

After LinTai's revelations, Peorth was increasingly convinced that Belldandy's sole thread of sanity was centered in trying to reverse what had been done to her. Something had done this to her; Peorth had suspected as much because it seemed so obvious. What could possibly cause a disconnect between Belldandy's Soul and her sense of being, of her own 'selfness'? Grief of the kind Belldandy had endured could cause her to fold up in sorrow; but over time, her friend would be responsive to the efforts of the Proctors to make her whole again. But LinTai had admitted that she was 'beyond help'. Peorth didn't even want to consider the harrowing possibility that something could be powerful enough to kill everyone in Bell's family, and then attack her Soul directly. After talking with LinTai, she somehow _knew_ intuitively that her best friend had been attacked.

By who or what, she didn't know.

_"By My leave, this Listening is now intended. Belldandy, known as the Silent Goddess, stands accused of actions which constitute gross irresponsibility and neglect of principles essential to we in the God's Realm. These principles are not only integrated as Rules, they are also the considered wisdom of Myself and all other Gods and Goddesses. Withal, her offense not only bears infidelity to our holy duty to defend mortal sentient species, but herewith accords a defiance of her peers. What say ye in kind or defense?"_

Peorth swallowed a deep gulp, knowing that the next few moments were critical.

"My Lord, I wish to present for your consideration the possibility that Belldandy is deranged due to an exceed of grief; this has resulted in her inability to make rational decisions. I contend that her irrational behavior is not the result of willfulness; instead, it is the result of incompetence. LinTai, Head Proctor of the Ethiopsylogic Clinic, has intimated to me that in his opinion, Belldandy is insane. I offer my discussion with him. You may scan."

Peorth reached up and rested her hand on the ThoughtForm Globe, transferring her memories and impressions of her conversation with LinTai into the glowing sphere, which gradually shifted from yellow to green while expanding slightly in size. With a wave of her hand, she directed it towards the Lord. The Almighty let it rest in the palm of His hand, where it slowly dissolved.

_"This proves that Belldandy had an energy imbalance that is intractable. Her Soul is isolated from her Being as a result. Although the anomalous nature of her unease is admissible, proof of volition or lack of volition cannot be ascertained."_ the Lord adjudged.

Peorth expected as much.

"In this case, I would like to share my own personal impressions, by your Leave," Peorth volunteered. What she was offering the Lord was her sum memories of Belldandy before and after the horrible events so many years ago. It was everything she could possibly give as evidence; an index of every interaction, thought and feeling she had ever possessed towards her friend. She didn't want to risk this level of witnessing so soon, but it was evident that the Lord would not be convinced of her sincerity to defend her friend unless she ventured to be vulnerable. Opening herself up for Him to peer into her mind, heart, and Soul...perhaps she could second the Proctor's impressions with her own honorable memories of Belldandy. If she could accomplish this, then the Lord might reassess LinTai's observation of Bell's insanity and offer leniency instead of punishment.

_"Approach, My Daughter,"_ the Almighty permitted her in a kind voice. He knew that she was frightened by the possible consequences of this Listening, and was comforting her despite His awesome and mighty role as judge.

Floating in front of Kami-sama, Peorth felt Him lay the palm of His hand on her Goddess marking. Her forehead warmed with His touch and the rapid flow of herself being touched by His mind. She could sense the rewinding 'filmreel' as her memories surged backwards, stimulating her Goddess awareness as she felt her own exposure to her experience of Belldandy. Everything from love to anger to jealousy to friendship flew through her consciousness with hurricane-force gusts of thought.

Once He finished, the Almighty settled back in His dais and reflected thoughtfully for a moment.

_"It is still not enough, My Daughter,"_ He announced.

"Then what about the 'screams'?" Peorth noted, trying to evade the fact that He still wasn't convinced. "The Proctor LinTai mentioned that Belldandy claimed to have heard them clearly. I _heard _them when I attended to Belldandy while she visited the Earthrealm, as You had instructed me to do. You did sense them, did you not?"

_"No, your mind was bereft of any screaming, save when you first heard of your friend's great loss,"_ He answered. _"Those laments were of your own heart, in your own kind, in sheer disbelief and empathy for the losses your sister Goddess had just experienced."_

"B..but how?" Peorth stammered angrily, not caring if it was in the Presence or not. The three times she followed the Silent Goddess, she had heard anguished screaming when her friend's actions corrected a painful experience for the mortals. Loudest yet was the shout that had filled her mind when Belldandy taught the mortal Filth-Carrier the arts of language. The screams rifted with agony...and anger. They were hostile to a degree that Peorth had never imagined, even worse than the basest of mortals.

"Lord, I did experience the screams, without a doubt," Peorth noted. "I can only say this: I feel that the Silent Goddess was assaulted by an evil, and the screams result from her attempts, however small and insignificant, to defend herself."

_"Yet, no single wish or changed mortal life is insignificant,"_ the Lord corrected. _"You of the Goddess Relief and Earth Otasuke Offices should be well aware of this. A single being whose sorrow is thwarted by a successful Wish, who is cleansed of a Demonic Strife of Grief, who experiences a moment of serene joy...none of these are insignificant. The fabric of reality is threaded by miracles of life, large and small. The Silent Goddess has created such moments of miraculous joy, even while suspended of her Goddess powers. Even one as I can feel impressed by her efforts."_

Peorth felt hopeful. Maybe He finally understood that Belldandy wasn't being selfish, she was acting for a higher good.

_"All such acts are significant, for a single mortal life is elevated. The revealing of writing is an event of signal significance," _the Lord noted. _"Writing frees both good and evil impulses and expressions in mortals; allowing them to be communicated in new fashions. Language is one of mortal's first encounters with infinity and immortality, for language as written is infinitely irreplicable and recombinant. Thus it embraces infinity. Writing allows for the communication of thought across time, for as long as the media it is stored on can exist. Thus, it embraces immortality. No two written words can ever possess the same meaning, no matter how many times they are written. The significance of this developmental step cannot be understated; many will feel joy as literacy frees their minds. Yet, many will be enslaved by literacy. The mortals _-always-_ use written words to oppress other mortals. The Silent Goddess created this path for the mortals; a path they should have created for themselves. She is therefore responsible for all the ensuing consequences, both good and bad. Need I remind you the role that literacy played in the downfall of the Earthrealm mortals, my Daughter? Now the stage has been set for the mortals to again cycle through self-destruction."_

"But how do we know the Earthrealm mortals will choose that path again?" Peorth argued.

_"How do we know they won't?"_ the Lord responded with a grave countenance.

_"We are guides, Peorth. We are not makers. Mortal sentient species should…_-must-_...have the freedom of self-recognition and self-advancement. The gift of literacy is not ours to bestow; it falls to the mortals to struggle forth to create that innovation for themselves. By doing so, the responsibility for the consequences fall to them, and they alone. We are absolved of having to consider if our 'meddling' caused the extinction of a species. Only in extreme circumstances can we intervene to adjust a mortal species with thoroughgoing interventions like depopulation. Your sister, the Silent Goddess, has acted in a manner that even one as I would be chary of. It remains to be discovered why."_

_"Belldandy, Silent Goddess of Nulln Yggdrasil, I offer you this chance to speak on your behalf. Only you can clarify this matter."_ the Lord beckoned, shifting His attention to fall upon the black-cloaked figure.

"Please Belldandy! Please say _something_!" Peorth begged with her thoughts. "This is your only chance to make this right. Release your silence and give voice to your..."

"_P..pain…_" the Silent Goddess attempted to say in a rasping choke of a thought. Peorth winced with empathy as Belldandy struggled to Thoughtcast further, but her mind didn't say anything more. Peorth felt her heart sink as she realized that Belldandy had been silent so long, she had lost the ability to speak. Or perhaps she had never was able to speak after the 'accident', save that one time with LinTai. The Silent Goddess communicated with her eyes, an intense emotional suffering that appalled Peorth, making her want to turn away, to not witness it. Finally, the Silent Goddess ceased her struggle and sadly shook her head.

_"Wherefore, the Silent Goddess chooses not to convey her meanings and intents to those present at this Listening, either by design, mischief, or lack of volition...We have decided to Exile her to the Well of Urd for the remainder of her Life Expression in this cycle. It will be declared that this action is done not for punitive reasons, but to protect Yggdrasil and the mortal sentients from possible further harm by her deeds. So it shall be."_

The Listening room turned fuzzy as Peorth heard her heart drumming in disappointment, and then horror as she realized that Belldandy, the Silent Goddess, would spend the rest of this cycle of existence in Exile. She would never see her friend again!

"M..my Lord," Peorth called out. She floated down to the marbled floor and fell to her knees, bowing forward and touching her head to the ground with absolute obeisance. She waited, willing in her mind that perhaps the Lord would recognize her gesture of deep respect and humility.

_"Yes, My daughter?"_

"I..I request a boon, for my efforts to defend my friend and the sake of our friendship," Peorth heard herself say, for the sense of pathos overwhelmed her awareness of what she was doing. "I request that you grant me the favor of a single day's postponement of Exile, so that I may prepare myself to say my farewells to my friend. For I will be the only one who will do so, and she at least deserves the company of my presence."

_"Your boon is granted, but for reasons beyond your ken, Goddess,"_ the Lord adjudged_. "That which is known...must be discarded."_

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Peorth and the Silent Goddess hovered slowly as they traveled towards the Well of Urd. The vivid coloring of Yggdrasil was beauteous to behold, but Peorth felt a stilting of her appreciation as she realized this would be Belldandy's final experience of this loveliness. The closer they traveled to the Well, the less Divines they encountered. The Divines to a one had regarded their procession with saddened eyes as the pair would pass amongst them.

The Well of Urd was located in a natural amphitheatre of prairie grass, populated by bursts of sunflowers. The tall grass gave sight to the motion of the wind as it curled and wavered in the breeze. Several AquaSuns drifted overhead in a lazy circuit, their dirigible shapes lending even more verdurous fancy to the meadows.

The solemn pair slowed their traverse and pulled to a stop nearby the Well. The Well was nothing more than a hole in the ground perimetered by a rockpile that sloped outwards, resembling a tiny volcano. Innocuous and natural, it reminded Peorth of any watering mow she would encounter on the Earthrealm.

Belldandy regarded the silent Well, and then turned to Peorth and reached out, as if she wanted to grasp her hands. The noir-clad elegiac figure beseeched her with piercing eyes; Peorth was taken aback by the gesture and was somewhat afraid to let herself be touched. Tentatively, she reached her hands out and the Silent Goddess clutched at them, grasped her tightly at both wrists. The physical contact seemed to open a channel, as Peorth realized that she was trying to thoughcast by the most immediate means possible, conveyed via direct touching. She could hear sounds in her head...whistles, screeches, murmurs and then quiet. But nothing even resembling God's Language or any language. She looked at Belldandy sadly. Belldandy released her wrists, and then reached up and removed the black mouth-veil which covered the bottom half of her face. With careful, deliberate motions, she then pulled back her leatherworked hood and undid her black-lace headscarf. Peorth gasped as she saw Belldandy's face for the first time in almost forty millennia.

Belldandy's mouth moved, quivering, shifting from smile to grimace to wan-thin with effort, finally breaching her silence with spoken words, for she could not thoughtcast.

_"Th..thank you."_

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

It was curiously interesting in an odd way, watching the three as they worked on Skuld's device. The device seemed nothing more than a handheld, slightly larger than a PDA with smoothly-rounded contours, shaped like a glowing teardrop or PC mouse. Unlike the SkuldTech I was accustomed to with its spindly angles, struts and ajuts, haphazard wiring like tangled netting...this invention seemed almost aesthetic and simple. Ironically, as a cyborganic, I was of no help at all because the complexities were beyond me. Me, the mechanical man of the group, was as useless as a flat tire. Allusions to the Wizard of Oz: Keleste as Dorothy, Keiyasu as the Scarecrow, myself as the Tin Man...Keiichi as...well, probably the Wizard, since he was definitely no Cowardly Lion. Not after all he had been through in the past few days.

Evidently, their 'stepmom' Skuld has used tesseract technology, because once they 'opened' the device and started removing the contents, they kept removing parts until the piles looked like they could fill a small house. This seemed to really confuse Keiichi, who was used to working within well-established physical laws. If a motorbike engine was indicated to be have a 950cc displacement, then that's how large it was. The more gear they extracted from the device, the more Keiichi would scratch the back of his head in astonishment. I was reminded of those old silent comedy films where a person would walk into an outhouse and then dash back out, pursued by fire engines, a small militia and police wagons.

As the layout of parts became larger and more complex, Keleste and Keiyasu repeatedly assured Keiichi that they could reassemble the device, which seemed to be a hard sale. They were making sure to group the disassembled parts in an organized manner, using a sequencing technique similar to archaeological digs. Each set of components would be sub-disassembled and then partitioned into grid quadrants. I had to remind Keiichi several times that his two children were Divines, hoping that this would take the edge off. Even I was worried; this technology was far beyond my experience.

As long as I had known Keiichi, he was rarely out of his element in matters of design and engineering. It would take one of Skuld's more esoteric builds of SkuldTech to confuse him. Even then, he often could intuit the functioning of one of her 'inventions' even if he didn't know why. How can someone possibly explain how a rice cooker had been turned into a transdimensional rendering device? Keiichi had related to me a chapter in his life involving one of Skuld's early miscues. Skuld had attempted to enlarge a closet using technology similar to tesseract dimensional forging. Borrowing the same physical space from another slice of time, and overlaying it with the physical space of 'this' time, to create a doubling of available physical space. The closet had been expanded exponentially by accident, and Keiichi and Belldandy had found themselves inside of an infinity, with no definable features other than the floor and the Schroedinger Whales.

Kind of like this place.

Once in a while, the discussion would turn heated as the three argued about the design and functioning of a component. As they argued some more, I was grateful that they weren't disassembling _me_. Keiichi realized that the project of removing and organizing components was tedious work; their efforts were being frustrated by the complexity and accordingly, they were facing their irritation off of each other. He called for breaks, reminding us that this was no different from when he and the gang worked on engines overnight at N.I.T. and would get in each other's hair after a few hours. It was slow work, but Keiichi paced it so that it seemed to proceed more rapidly, at least psychologically. The kids seemed to lend the appearance of not knowing what the hell they were doing, but I sensed that the mental 'pieces' were being assembled in their minds despite appearances. I had to allow that this was SkuldTech, which meant that the guesswork factor would be increased significantly.

Yet, these were the same Godkids who had deciphered the workings of a Soul Mirror to the point where they could discern _theoretical_ Souls. Beyond this, they had tweaked the Soul Mirror to travel from Yggdrasil to Vanagdrasil. Naturally, we were all driven by a desire to find Belldandy and go home, but Keleste and Keiichi had the additional aim of finding their Mother, which made them all the more zealous to complete the 'reverse engineering project'. 'Soon' wasn't soon enough.

Oddly enough, none of us seemed to be hungry. As much as this place was a dead zone, as maddening as the lack of sensory stimuli was...at least we weren't starving. Fatigue would settle in, and we'd all take a rest; sleep was quite difficult for some reason. I was useful in at least one regard: the enhancements to my cybernetic visual/audio subsystems could be used to fine-tune the alignment of parts upon request. When needed, I could also assist by detecting sight and sounds outside the perceptory spectrum normal to mortals.

Finally we reached a point where the assembled components were going _back_ into the handheld device. Keleste and Keiyasu were confident that they had determined how to enhance the device so it could detect the Gate's exit portal, while retaining its functioning to use the Gates as transit points. My internal clock indicated that we had been working for almost a month, but we had rarely slept nor did we ever once have appetitive urges of hunger and thirst. I joked with them that we had to get out of here, because the desolation and lack of appetite over the long term would be like pulling electrical plugs out of certain brain centers, causing permanent damage because of disuse.

We finished after a marathon session of reassembly, and Keiichi called for us to all take as much sleep as we could to prepare for the search the next day. Naturally, Keleste and Keiyasu woke both he and I up, like kids getting up at the crack of dawn on Christmas Day. Using the handheld, Keiyasu scanned the horizon for a Gate while walking in a circuit around our immediate 'campsite'; but we found no Gate or Soul Mirror. Yet, we weren't disappointed. We would just have to hike it until we came upon a strong enough 'signal' which then could lead us to the Gate. I had hoped that it was in our vicinity, like the magical closet in Narnia which reliably was tucked away in the same grove in the forest. The Gate had moved; with all the suspension of physical laws here, I hoped we wouldn't have to walk for years until we found it.

As we walked, the true sense of how desolate this place was seemed to grip all four of us. Even conversation seemed oppressive at times, as our words seemed to be rendered bland of feeling by the sheer sameness of everything around us. Rocks, rocks, cracked earth, jagged boulders...a colorless sky dim of illumination. No vegetation, animals or clouds in sight. Depressing as hell, this limbo of a place.

"Hey, I've got something!" Keiyasu shouted excitedly. He pointed down a sloping gulch peppered with lava rocks and talas and we followed his lead. When we gained the interior of the 'valley', I could discern a faint glow.

"Over there!" I shouted.

We jogged up to the glow, and it became visible...then brightened...and then took on the contours of a Gate. But it wasn't quite a Gate. We could see through it, but we also saw ourselves reflected within its portal, plus we saw a shadowed reality of some sort. Keleste started using the device to 'tune out' the layers of transparency, so we didn't have to view the Gate's interior as one would see the outside through a window. We had to get rid of the 'outside' totally. It was tricky, just as tricky as seeing one's own reflection against a smooth-tiled wall, where you would have to stand _just right_ to get the effect. Eventually, the 'see-through side' of the portal dimmed, leaving only our reflections and the murky seams of a partially-viewed 'other' reality. The two Godkids then began selecting out our reflected images. Visually, the process struck me as similar to using the eraser tool to remove parts of a superimposed layer in a graphics editing program. As they attuned the 'layers', they began to brighten the contrasts so the images of the 'other side' clarified. We all whooped for joy when we were finally treated to a comforting pastiche of colors, the first cheerful view we had seen since arriving in this gray zone. The scene was almost like a ocean, only the moving waves were light-orange tall grasses parceled with patches of purple and blue underneath a sky that was a soft green.

It struck me that we were looking at an 'elsewhere'! The viewpoint in front of us seemed idyllic, which only heightened the sense I had that it was _remote_. The Gate had pointed us towards another place or maybe even another time that was possibly in another universe or dimension. For all I knew, we could be looking upon a scene in Yggdrasil itself!

"Let's do it!" Keiichi said with a triumph ringing in his voice, reminding me of the times he knew deep in his heart that he was going to win a race. Keleste scanned him with the device to obtain his unique DNA and TNA sigs, and then scanned herself and Keiyasu for their TNA and Metanative energies. She toiled over the device to calibrate it, and after some effort she explained that she thought she had extrapolated a possible 'signature' for Belldandy. Next was to try and 'blend' this with an archetypal Goddess Soul, namely 'their' stepmom Skuld's…so they could 'tweak' the settings further and work towards a variance. It wouldn't be enough to utilize the 'signature'; as with their efforts to find the other Godkids, they had to bring everything together so that the Gate could function as a Soul Mirror. They had to fine-tune it so it would recognize Soul.

Moving the device in a circle as she pointed it at the Gate, Keleste calibrated the mysterious portal...

...and our Gate became our Looking Glass.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

The Gate-turned-Soul Mirror filled with a telling translucence, as the vistas within its frame clouded over each other in a seeming race to be the first to clarify. Ten thousand movie projectors all flashing different film works onto the same screen. Finally, a scene filled the interior of the Soul Mirror: a large expanse that was meadowed with rich green swathes of grass. Flying above the grasslands, the angle narrowed downwards and focused on two figures around a circular apron of stone...

"Oh..my..God!" Keleste half-shouted, half-sobbed as she beheld the holophotic image of a sepulchral-robed figure within the Gate of Judgment, now being used as a Soul Mirror. It wasn't a clear image at first; the Soul Mirror was sparkling with static. But she could make out a woman, clearly a Goddess, who was garbed in dark black sweeping robes and hood. Despite the fading sight, her heart was leadened with sadness.

"My..Lord!" she heard her brother echo her sentiment in a sob before his voice choked to rasp. The Goddess was wearing a black cloth veiling her face, so that only her blue eyes were visible. Keleste felt her heart shatter as she sensed the utter _sadness_ in those eyes. As they watched, she grasped another Goddess by the hands in a companionate gesture.

"Peorth?" the four onlookers said aloud. For it was clearly Peorth, dressed in a black and white bodysuit with her hallmark leather 'wings' curling over her shoulder and back, robe-like. Her hair was cut severely around the base of her neck and a single thick strand of shiny black hair cascaded down her back to her knees. It _had_ to be Peorth!

As Keiichi's mind raced, the black-robed Goddess undid a face veil that reminded him of the women's niqab facial veils he had seen during his trials in the Algerian Desert last year. Unpinning the veil, her lower face and mouth was exposed.

"B..Bell-chan?!" Keiichi gasped with a mix of joy and horror. The Goddess he saw within the Soul Mirror was dressed with layers of funereal adornments, her clothing clearly intended to create a visual context of loss. A long black robe, a folded down hood in the back, black lace gloves, black leather pants...

She reached up and pulled her hood away from her face. Underneath she wore a black rounded fez-hat that almost served as a type of calotte, fitting over some kind of veil that almost hugged the sides of her head. Her hair from her forehead down the sides was covered by a black jilbab, another layer of scarf similar to a nun's habit that covered the forehead, sides and back of the head. As she pulled back her final head-covering, generous lengths of brown hair streaked with grey fell out over her shoulders. A riveting streak of silver, almost a lightning bolt of hair, ran from the middle of her forehead all the way back and down the center of her shoulders.

"M..mother?" Keleste whispered to herself. Of course, the figure in the SoulMirror couldn't hear her, because it was a fragment of a Soul, lost in another part of Yggdrasil. She had expected to see within the Soul Mirror the image of the beautiful Goddess of her Dad's photographs; a smiling cheerful presence brimming with confidence and grace. Not this. This woman seemed to be an exemplar of mourning, a Divine 'lost Soul' whose whole bearing seemed testimonial to personal agonies Keleste could only imagine. All this discomfort seemed to be _projected_ from this Black Goddess. Not evil, not malice, not aloofness...but anguish.

"My God!! Th.._this _is sick! What happened to her?" Cevn gasped, both appalled and angry. This wasn't the cheerful Belldandy that he had known for the past two years. He felt a heart-crushing grief as he looked at the nightmare-Belldandy viewed within the Soul Mirror. For it was a nightmare; this Belldandy resembled no God or Demon he had ever seen. He looked at Keiichi, who was too upset for words. The Belldandy he saw in the Soul Mirror was a toccata of emotions, all of them centered on hopelessness. This was the Belldandy he would have expected to guise the SurGoth; a Goddess whose Soul was as desolate as the gravel-lemon-gray non-world surrounding them.

"Who or what could have done this to her?" Keiyasu asked, while Keleste was riveted with melancholy. "What could cause a Goddess to take this path? What could possibly be so painful that she chose to live like _this_?"

"Did she even have a choice?" Cevn asked in a hoarse voice.

"B..Bell-chan?" Keiichi asked in a quavering voice. He approached the Soul Mirror, gazing closer at her face even while repulsed by what he was seeing. The dreadful transformation of his Divine beloved was strangely familiar...it was as if she was _wearing_ the pain of loss…the same loss that he felt when he realized that she was truly gone from his life. Faring no better than the others, his shock found utterance in choking sobs. He didn't want this to be his beloved Belldandy, but this figure of sorrow resembled Belldandy too clearly. The joy seemed to be sucked out of him as she started a mournful singing; her face wan with grief, her hair...her hair was disheveled with a streak of white down the middle!

"What the fuck happened to her?" Cevn said angrily, repeating himself. He was already beginning to suspect the worst...

"We need to go to her!" Keleste shouted.

"NO!!" Cevn interrupted in an authoritative voice.

"Don't tell us what to do, mortal cyborg!" Keiyasu warned. This Goddess was their Mother, whom they had spent almost the entire breadth of their young lives seeking after. He wasn't about to delay any longer, even if the tragic figure wasn't the joyous Goddess in the photograph. He and his sister would change that, would _heal_ her back to joy.

Keiichi was so caught up in the unhappiness, he was oblivious to all else.

"Goddammit! _Look behind her!! _" Cevn shouted furiously, his voice fierce for the first time since they had been shifted to this empty place by the Gate. Both Godkids felt a surge of rage at him, but checked themselves as they realized that his urgency wasn't an admonishment to them. Keleste looked behind the dark-clad figure...and recognized the rounded apron of stone. The Well of Urd. The place of Exile. Peorth was watching the Night-clad Goddess silently with sad eyes, a look of resignation on her face.

Their Mother, this Silent Goddess…was being banished!

"Look, we've got to get them out of there. Now! I don't know what's going on here, but I don't think they're visiting the Well of Urd just to go sightseeing," Keiyasu shouted. Keleste was confused, she looked back and forth at her brother and Keiichi. Her Dad was in la-la-land; his shock must have been the worst of all.

She made her decision...and grabbed the Soul Mirror device from her brother…

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Peorth watched dejectedly as Belldandy's robe rippled, a form pulling itself out along her backbone. She was letting Holy Bell out! With glow that was white with just a touch of blue, Bell's Angel formed behind her. One being clothed in deepest black, another being created in brightest blue...

As Holy Bell started to lend her voice to Belldandy's song, Peorth felt her own voice echoing the sorrowful plaint. She _had_ to sing along with her sister Goddess, it was in her nature to lend her voice in song. There they were, a threnody of despair. Peorth imagined that she was feeling just a fraction of Belldandy's sense of loss, as in a few moments the song would end and Bell would walk into the Well of Urd. This was every bit as heart-rending as the funeral for Bell's family...she would _never_ see her best friend again. She wanted to stop up her ears; but what she _really_ wanted to do was stop up Time itself to prevent the Future from coming into the Present.

Enraptured in their lamenting harmony, neither Goddess saw the two fire-flashes of light behind them.

Suddenly, Peorth's song was snapped away as she felt her arms being pinned against her from behind. Before she even had time to react, she saw a young girl leap at Belldandy, hurtling her friend to the ground, just barely missing falling into the Well of Urd. As she struggled, she caught a glimpse of her assailant's face...a face that seemed borderline recognizable to her. He was just a boy on the cusp of adolescence, maybe 14 or 15 Decas at the most. What could he possibly be doing here, so far removed from the populated areas of Yggdrasil? Could he be here for witness as Belldandy plunged into the Well of Urd? Unthinkable!

He grabbed her long single strand of hair and with a deft motion, wrapped it around her throat. He had pinned himself so tightly against her back, Peorth couldn't manifest Gorgeous Rose.

This was a kidnapping!

Instantly, she sent out a ThoughtForm distress signal to any Gods in the vicinity. This reeked of Demonic tricksies; a brazen abduction of two Goddesses who were rendered even more vulnerable because one wouldn't even struggle or resist their assailants. But Demons in Yggdrasil was impossible...

Unless this was an invasion of the God's Realm!

Trying to push aside the chilling thought, Peorth looked at Belldandy, who might as well had been a Bunraku puppet; her sister Goddess was offering no repulse at all. She felt disoriented, perhaps due to the suddenness of the attack, or the shock of Bell's impending Exile...because she was seeing _two_ Belldandys near the Well. She felt her breath narrowing as the fuzziness crept into her consciousness. She was being strangled by her own hair! Twisting, she tried to elbow her captor in the ribs. She nailed him a good one in the side, heard a "whoof!" of exhalation, but her actions didn't ease his tenacity at all. She kicked out, trying to throw him just enough off balance so she could loosen herself against his grip, without success. Damn, but he was strong!

A...Soul Mirror?

He was using the ground for purchase and propelling her towards a Soul Mirror. This already bizarre scene was becoming completely confusing to the Goddess of Eternity. Just like her Rune, Chaos, she felt herself disassociating from this weird chaotic scene. What was he trying to do? All that would happen is that he'd bang her head against the mirror. Maybe he was trying to knock her out...

She could see other Souls in the Mirror, a mortal and a cyborg.

"A mortal?" she thought as the blackness roared over her. The last sight which befell her was the image of two Belldandys falling _through_ the Soul Mirror!

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

After what had happened at his wedding, Keiichi was wary of approaching the dark figure. The Belldandy at his wedding had looked normal in every detail until the end when she had become that...thing. This Belldandy looked crazy scary, like a demonically evil character from a J-horror movie. The 'evil' Belldandy at the aborted wedding should have looked like this unconscious Goddess resting on the ground in front of him. He was disturbed and light-headed at once; it was all those smothering black clothes and that streak of white hair, like a Frankenstein bride. Over to his left, Peorth was in a fetal position, all curled up with a calm expression on her face. Keiyasu said that he basically had to choke her into unconsciousness in order to get her through the Soul Mirror. Belldandy, on the other hand, was laying on her back like a corpse, her arms and legs akimbo. Her hair with its slash of white down the middle was bunched up under her head.

Keiyasu looked worse for wear, his face was bruised and his breathing was labored with pain. He joked with Keleste that "you had it easy compared to me!" Keiichi couldn't agree more; this Belldandy went almost catatonic when his daughter grabbed her.

His two children, Keleste and Keiyasu, were shaking terribly. They had come all this way, only to find their Mother...in this condition. Belldandy looked like a cross between a madwoman, an ascetic recluse, and a miserly cheerless widow. Keiichi imagined that if the joy of the Belldandy he knew had been turned inside out into a suffocating woe, this would be the result. She seemed older; her eyes were lined with crow's feet and the facial lines around her mouth were deepset. His Bell-chan was light...this Belldandy was darkness and grief.

"Shit!" he heard Cevn shout as Belldandy suddenly jerked into convulsions.

Without even thinking, Keiichi immediately sought to try and restrain her...

...when he himself was restrained by a pair of long slender arms wrapping him from behind.

"Keiichi! Keiichi!" he heard a woman's voice cry out with astonishment. Peorth's voice.

"It's really you!" she said, sobbing against his back.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

The Silent Goddess had decided to sing her final eulogies before descending into the Well. It had taken almost all of her willpower just to say a single word of gratitude to Peorth, her dutiful best friend. No matter how hard she tried, her heartfelt thoughts just wouldn't find the direction she was trying to move them in. She heard the screaming again, and realized that it was her own voice, her own Angel. She began her song of distress...

Holy Bell manifested behind her. She could sense her Angel's profound apprehension, but she couldn't even mentally apologize to Holy Bell, no matter how hard she tried. She felt so much sorrow for putting her Angel through so much isolation; now her Angel was going to join her in Exile. Belldandy didn't even know why she was being exiled. She had been fighting so long, she had forgotten what had moved her to battle with herself since the beginning. She remembered all of them, her Parents, Urd and Skuld...and Keiichi. She wished that her mind would stuff up her heart so she didn't have to see his face one more time, drowning in the Mediterranean Sea. The love of her life had turned into a ghastly mental spectre of morbidness.

Suddenly, Holy Bell retreated back inside of her, confused and frightened. This scattered her mind even more, so much so that she could barely sense a reach of restraint circuited her shoulders. Belldandy had a brief remembrance of the Faustian scenario of being dragged down to Hell by devils. Then it was Keiichi, being dragged down into the depths of the sea. Then it was her Soul, being dragged down by an evil green screaming. Urd and Skuld were laughing. Megumi choking on a sushi roll. Riding a bicycle. An empty bottle of cologne on the bathroom floor. The Earthrealm, being dragged into the abyss of space. Time, being dragged out of the Present by a cloying emptiness. Love, being dragged into a Void of Evil…

Despite her Angel's fright, she couldn't feel anything but desolation and despair. She let herself be hauled backwards away from Urd's Well. She could hardly recognize anything, and if she was being dragged, it would be no worse than the clutter that bound her Soul with horrible memories.

The darkness was pierced by a face.

He was looking at her with a mixed expression of fear and concern, slapping her face lightly. In the fixedness of her mind, the entire landscape was twirling, swirling, spinning out of control. His face seemed to loop around itself as her vision brightened. A part of her mind was cogent enough to qualify that she was inside of Urd's Well.

His face became clear and bright...and the heavy traffic of confusion in her mind collapsed out of itself.

It was impossible!

She rehearsed his final words to her, watched as the waters overtook him and his stilled form faded into green brine of the sea. Memories echoed back and forth in her mind. She heard a tearing, a scratching, as if a broken piece of glass was somehow un-shattering itself. Windtunneling her pain, she felt her fingers for the first time in 30,000 years. A tingling glow seemed to spread itself from her forehead, racing back to the crown of her head and then sinking downwards through her body. Phantoms of emotions long lost paraded in front of her mind, each phantom prying her steeled heart open just a little. More and more, _the hidden_ was emerging. She could hear soundings, echoes of sounds hazed with a buzzing susurration, busily attaching the world back to her senses. Her Soul, long dormant and disconnected, seemed to want to swallow her...

_"Bell-chan?"_

"KEIIIIIIICHI!"

She screamed his name with every iota of her being, hurling herself against the impossible as she grasped herself to his chest, choking against her pain as her tears started to wrest themselves out of her deepmost heart.

Her forever-lost Keiichi had come for her.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --


	129. Pt 129: TouchVines

**Part 129: TouchVines**

THERA:

The first round matched up Japan vs. Brazil. Belldandy knew they were in trouble when she stumbled over her own feet gaining the court in the first game. Pre-game Jitters. She thought she had worked them out, but obviously not. So what if she didn't? This was the Olympics, for God's sake! Who wouldn't be a little freaked out? She was grateful when she noticed that her three sempai had them as well. The other two women, the co-captains, were urging them to calm down and relax. Easy for them to say; they weren't 18 and playing in front of 15,000 spectators fresh out of their frosh year at college!

Brazil had come out smoking-hot on offense and had beaten them soundly 30-22 in the first game. That first game hammered home to Belldandy the heavy-duty realization that this was the ultimate level of competition: there _were_ no better women's volleyball players to play against. The collegiate tournament seemed to be a cakewalk compared to this. This team was a couple levels above the college teams, and it showed. She felt a renewed appreciation for all those extra-long crazyass practices that Chihiro had drilled them through for the past two-and-a-half months.

The second game almost matched the first in rhythm. Brazil was considered a gold medal contender, and they were all over the court, lightning-quick as they fielded her team's attacks. Chihiro brought in change-ups to their offense, keeping the rotations staggered so the Brazilian women didn't know what was coming their way. But Brazil's coach caught on to Chihiro's offense and adjusted. The Brazilian women were _all_ good at the game; there were no weak points or positions to isolate and attack. Belldandy was hard-pressed to keep up with the powerful Brazilian attacks when she rotated to back court, and found herself diving and digging out spikes like she never had done in her life.

Brazil 30, Japan 26.

This game was quickly becoming a bitter dose of reality for the Japanese girls. The younger women...Tamiya, Ootaki, Kinosh'ta and herself...started making stupid mistakes, getting caught out of position, setting sloppy, missing digs. Despite Chihiro's substitutions, their sloppy play was pissing off the veteran players, which then shifted them off their game despite their seasoned skills.

Belldandy wanted to scream in frustration as the Brazilian team rounded 20...

But something else made her scream.

On the 21st point, Brazil served Japan. Kinosh'ta fielded the hard-hit serve, setting it to Ootaki, who then bumped it to Tamiya for a spike. Belldandy was already frustrated, over-enthusiastic and jittery from the beatdown Brazil was giving them. She watched Tamiya spike the ball, but it was an off-speed hit which wobbled right into the Brazilian fore-line. The Brazilian attacker blasted it back over, but Belldandy was there to roof it.

Her right ankle shot a cord of pain up her leg and instead of landing, her right leg seemed to rubber out from under her and she buckled to the floor, banging the back of her head against the knickerwood and seeing bird-sparks amidst the din.

"SHIT!" she half-heard Coach Chihiro shout with grave concern.

She had landed on Tamiya's foot and twisted her ankle.

In her mind, Belldandy heard a taunting, twisted laughing as she realized that she was fucked. She might be out for the rest of the competition.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"She'd done for this Olympics," the Japanese doctor said glumly.

The sports medics had examined her on site, performing range-of-motion tests on her ankle. Instead of wrapping it, they decided to transport her by stretcher to the Polyclinic med facility to see a specialist, who immediately ordered an MRI. Belldandy was more than a little concerned when the docs had given her the full scrutiny due a serious injury, including extensive exams of her ankle.

"But I can play! I can play through the pain!" Belldandy protested. "Please!!"

"No, Morisato," Coach Chihiro said, gripping her shoulder tightly. "You can't even walk! I'm not going to let you cripple yourself just to try and win one more game. You can barely put any weight on that ankle, according to the doctor. We just won our first one and we need to keep focused. I don't need these ladies worrying about you."

"We...won?" Belldandy echoed in disbelief, momentarily jarred out of her frustration towards this injury she had been saddled with. And all of its implications for her heart.

"Yeah, we did," Chihiro confided, rubbing the back of her head. "Don't ask me to explain why, cause it was one of the weirdest things I ever saw. Actually, I do know what happened...I just never thought I'd see it with this group of women. After you went down, the team seemed to pull out all the stops and started playing with their hearts. I don't how else to describe it. Kinosh'ta seemed to be unstoppable at the attack line, kill after kill. And Ootaki really shocked me in Game 4 when she hit _five_ ace serves in a row. I guess her spiky-mouse hair was distracting the Brazilians. I dunno, but Tamiya seemed to know where their attacks were coming like a mind-reader, and filled the gaps. Weird, huh? Those ladies really care about you, obviously, because when you were assisted off that court, they were like a whole different team. Our captains kept tight with 'em, and we ended up winning in five."

The doctor gave her some pain killers and a tight ankle wrap to stabilize the sprain. At least she hadn't broken her ankle. But it was over. She had multiple sprains to her ankle, severe sprains that indicated that she had shredded some of her tendons. Any weight on her foot resulted in shooting, wincing pain.

Reduced to the role of spectator, Belldandy felt bitter. There was nothing she could do to further compete against Athenle, except hope that she'd get injured as well; and there was no way she was going to stoop to that kind of stupid shit; wishing injury on competitors. She knew she was better than that! Banishing the thought, she glumly recognized that whether her team won the gold or not, she had already lost her private battles. The crutches didn't help either; a clear sign to all the competitors that Japan's v-ball team was down a player. The walk back to the Olympic Village after debarking the bus was grim; she couldn't even bring herself to talk to her sempai, no matter how hard they tried to cheer her up. Crazy bitches! She wouldn't trade them in for any other friends. They knew it was futile and yet they kept trying to pour some cheer on the situation. How could she not love such loony teammates? At dinner, their 'super-sempai' Takahashi even made a brief appearance and expressed her regrets that Belldandy had been injured so early in the Games. Tomorrow, Takahashi was going to run the first round of the women's marathon...

Belldandy couldn't even run down the hallway to her room.

Chihiro came by later that evening to try and rekindle her spirits. She wanted so bad to tell her coach about the Athenle thing, to tell her why the Norway-Euro woman had taunted her so bad, to explain that she was in love and she had just had her boyfriend ripped out from under her like a rug. She wanted to spill it all out, because she was drowning in frustration. But she couldn't...and she wouldn't. Coach Chihiro was already in hot water, and their team had just squeaked by Brazil in the opening match. Tomorrow, they faced the vaulted Chinese team that was favored to win the Gold. Belldandy admitted to Chihiro that she just wanted to hide her head under a pillow; which of course drew a strong rebuke from her Coach.

"Coach," Belldandy asked after she had been dressed down. "How do you win when you've already been defeated?"

Rarely was her Coach caught without a ready comeback or a gem of wisdom just waiting on the tip of her tongue, but Belldandy's question seemed to give her pause to reflect.

"Belldandy, I just don't know the answer to that one. I only know what it feels like," Chihiro answered, trying to soothe her jumble of confusions. Belldandy hated feel so delicate inside that she could melt away, like a snowflake in the palm of the hand of the Olympics. She needed hope, and she needed it _now_!

"Think of the passion to achieve, to win...as a fog, while the gut-wrench disappointment of defeat is a bright torchlight. The light can always pierce the fog, but it can never disperse it," Chihiro explained. "Remember what we talked about? As long as you retain your passion for the game, then you're not dead to victory. You have to ask yourself if you still love the game more than you hate it; and you have to hate it with all of your heart sometimes. But the real victory is to keep the desire, the want to taste victory even if you can't."

Belldandy could only nod her head at this, for it was the truth.

"There are 20,000 athletes who have gone through hell and back to be here, and only 600 medals get handed out. Most of us are going to go back with nothing more than memories, vidcam clips and souvenirs. But that's the whole point! Every one of us has learned that defeat is not a personal destruction, otherwise we wouldn't be here. Most of us know how to survive disappointment...but not be defeated by it. Even now, there are people right here in this building who are fuckin' doping themselves because they haven't learned that lesson. _They've already lost!_ There's so many richass pros here who could give a shit whether they win or lose, because they have fame and money to go back to. _They already lost too, because they have no spirit!_ People like Takahashi, however? She'll get a couple endorsements and have some athletic shoes named after her, but they'll forget her name a few weeks after the Games are done. But she's better than all of them jerkwads. She wins the Marathon this time out, she'll have won a single event seven times. No one's _ever_ done that! That's why she carried Japan's flag in the Opening Ceremonies. And so are you. I know that you, on the other hand, would give _everything_ to have your ankle back to normal. That's your personal victory, even though you just got defeated by an unfortunate injury."

"Coach Chihiro, I want to play because I love the sport. That's why I feel so messed up inside. I can't win against an injury!" Belldandy lamented.

"Sure you can, because you've got that spirit!" Chihiro replied. "I know what that spirit is, because I earned it four years ago. That's what makes you different; I saw that spirit in you back when you were playing in that dumpy gym in Niigata! The true victory is on the inside. I could have said 'fuck it!' and thrown in the towel after losing in the semis...but I didn't. I ended up teaching at a Polytech college, and kept playing because I love the sport. Now I'm coaching an Olympic team, because I didn't give up on myself. When you persevere to reach this level of competition, the only one who can truly defeat you...is yourself. Just don't give up on your dreams, kiddo!"

A short while after Chihiro left, Belldandy heard the TV come on by itself. Her face turned white as Keiichi pulled himself out of the small flatscreen set.

"Ooofff!" he gasped as he hit his knee on the way out of the screen, just like he always did. Instead of just starting in with talking to her, he paused to arrange his clothes...which was a first for him. Mr God normally didn't fret about his appearance. Belldandy couldn't help by smile to herself at his sudden trait of vanity.

"What are you doing here?" she hissed in a whisper. "My coach just left! What if my roomie comes back and sees you here? How am I supposed to explain that?"

"You heard what your coach said, Belldandy...but do you want to believe her?" Keiichi asked her, out of the blue. The idiot had been here all the time, eavesdropping! She let him know in no uncertain terms that she didn't appreciate it.

"You're the worst of the worst!" she stormed. "My life is totally fucked because of an injury, and now you come here to have a philosophical debate. I can't believe you! How much more does it take to convince you? I can't believe that I could fall in love with such an idiot! Why don't you just go back to Japan and leave me alone!"

"Just answer the question, Belldandy," he demanded. Belldandy was taken aback by his insistence. He had basically commanded her to answer him; sternly, as in 'don't fuck with me' major seriously. Belldandy pulled herself up short as she realized that Keiichi had just shifted into boyfriend mode and was actually _telling_ her what to do. The tone of his voice was solid as steel, and for a moment she wanted to hit him on the head with the nearest object she could grab. Before she could, it dawned on her again that he was in boyfriend mode. _For real._ Not just the wishy-washy, whimsical, goofy Keiichi like he so often was. This was the Keiichi who had stood in front of her and had taken a full-force blast from Athenle. She felt a stretch of gratitude...because for all his seriousness, Keiichi must be really concerned for her. Somehow, her hot flash of anger towards him seemed to melt itself away.

There was a knife stuck on the surface of the Moon in the Sea of Tranquility because of this guy...

"Okay, I think you know what you're doing, so I'll play along," she said evenly. "Of course I would do anything, you moron! Don't you think that if I could do today over, somehow, then I would? I'd go for it in a heartbeat!"

"Forget about you and me for a moment, and really think it through," he said, still being serious.

"I said I'd go for it in a heartbeat! I'd do anything to undo what happened today!"

"Even if your team lost?" Keiichi asked. "Remember, they reacted to your injury by rallying themselves to a higher level of teamwork and effort."

"If that's the condition, then the answer is 'hell no!'" Belldandy replied without even needed to think it over. No way was she going to take her team's hard-fought victory from them!

"Fair enough. Now think about you and me. If you say yes, then your team would lose…and you would get another chance to win, and to keep me. But if you say no, then there is no possibility that you could win. Which means you'd lose me, and I'd have to deal with Athenle for the rest of my existence," he explained, regarding her with an intense eye-lock.

Belldandy felt like he was staring straight into her Soul. Which was quite possible, since he was God. How could he ask such a retarded question? That's like asking a girl whether she likes her Mom or her Dad more! Well, not that retarded, but certainly it was mega-stupid of him to demand an answer from her. She wanted to protest; yet a quality inside of her seemed to awaken…her faculty to make the _really_ hard decisions. This one was a doozy! Give up her boyfriend for her team? Or give up her team for a chance to keep her boyfriend? She worried over it for a moment, and then gave her answer.

"I'd still say no, Keiichi. I'd rather leave things as they are, so my team wouldn't lose what they worked for. Those are my _friends_, you know," Belldandy said, fearful in a real big way that she had just rejected Keiichi.

Keiichi walked over and started unwrapping her ankle.

"What the..ow!..hell are you doing? I told you I don't want to have my ankle fixed, if it means my team is gonna lose! " she yelled at him, trying to push him away with her other foot. But when she pushed him with the ball of her heel in the forehead, he didn't budge. Didn't even notice.

"If you would have even considered exchanging your team's victory for this, then I would have just left you alone to have yourself a little pity-party," he noted as he unrolled layer after layer of her bandage. "But you didn't. Belldandy, one of the most admirable traits you have is your willingness to put others first. Unlike your opponent. Who majorly messed up by laughing in your mind when you had your slip up. Athenle was supposed to _only_ manifest mortal attributes and characteristics common to this phase-level of sentient evolution. Telepathic communication was strictly against the conditions she and you agreed upon with the Lord. I had a sense that this injury was her doing as well. If she's going to cheat, then I'm going to cheat back!"

"Owww!" Belldandy sharply shouted when he slapped her ankle.

"Another point for you to consider is this," he added. "You also put yourself first by standing by the decision you made. If you would have changed it just because of me, then that wouldn't be putting yourself first. You'd be throwing away your love for the game of volleyball, your friends, and your spirit…just for me."

"But what about you? Doesn't it bother you about Athenle?"

"Ooops! Sorry, don't know my own strength!" Keiichi mumbled at the mention of the Valkyrie's name as he squeezed her ankle too hard and caused her to flinch. He looked at her apologetically. His expression was just too cute!

"One of your philosophers, whom is termed Kung-fu-tze, once said that 'being true to your vision and to yourself is the law of God. Trying to be true to your vision and yourself is the law of man.' You know me well enough to know which set of laws I live by. I know the difference. If you would have thrown everything away for me, then you would only be _trying_ to be true to yourself. But by being willing to be true to yourself no matter what…that's a quality that draws me to you," he explained. Belldandy knew she was in major blushing face territory with that remark.

"So…you're saying that I think like one of the Gods?" she asked. That was what he had meant, that she was following the kind of stuff the Gods do, not the kind of stuff men do. So she had a little bit of Goddess in her, at least by virtue of how she made decisions sometimes!

"Don't get ahead of yourself, Bell-chan. One of our philosophers, the God Keiichi, once said that when a girl is willing to give everything up for a guy, then she's boy-crazy. But if she's willing to stick to her principles, then she's only crazy."

It didn't take long for Belldandy to start giggling at this. He had taken the pain out of her ankle…and out of her spirit.

"Don't worry about Athenle. I took care of it already by reporting her. The Almighty gave me leave to undo her actions, because she cheated. While I'm here with you, my guess is that she's getting chewed out by Our Sovereign for her lack of fair play," he noted with an amused scorn.

"But you did injure yourself. When you stepped on your teammate's foot, you twisted this ankle. The injury is as real as the nose on your face. But Athenle tried to take advantage of it by making it much worse. Trying to pull a fast one."

"But a certain guardian angel in the form of God caught her, right?" Belldandy said, continuing his words. "So now..owww!..he's going to play doctor and make me all well."

"Nothing can make you well," Keiichi teased, squeezing her knee to tickle her into a squirm. Belldandy felt the sharp jolts of pain subside into a dull throbbing. Wordlessly, she reached up and pulled Keiichi towards her to give him his reward. As soon as her lips brushed his...

...he faded out.

"Morisato!" she heard her roommate Kinosh'ta shout out in a odd voice as she came into the room. "I could have sworn I saw a guy in here!"

She barely had enough time to shove the birthday card under her bed's pillow.

An hour later, she laid her head on that same pillow and was nearly asleep when she was rousted out of her near-dreams by a recollection that flashed against her inward eye.

Keiichi had called her "_Bell-chan_"!!

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Belldandy watched as China beat Japan in straight games. She knew her ankle wasn't strong enough to play on, despite Keiichi's healing ministrations. The pain was still there, about a four compared to the ten it was yesterday. The Chinese team was even stronger than they had planned for, packed with women who played on the 2004 team that had won the Gold. These women had been selected out as young girls and trained in the Chinese style, similar to the life-long training a gymnast or Beijing Opera actor would receive. Whereas the Japanese team was designed to be the most competitive team they could field, the women on the Chinese team were chosen as the best _individuals_ by competing against each other for slots on the team. Belldandy sensed that this could be a possible flaw in the Chinese squad.

One advantage of sitting it out was that she got to view Coach Chihiro in action from a whole new perspective. Usually, the Coach would bark orders, launch into elaborate explanations, or pitch into a shouting session...while Belldandy and her teammates would be the targets. Always Us and her. Sitting out the entire series with her Coach, Belldandy saw for the first time what it seemed to be like for the Coach. Chihiro seemed to be an emotional thermometer for the team. Belldandy even pointed out some little quirks she noticed about the Chinese team. She was surprised when Coach Chihiro didn't dismiss them but took into account, and even incorporated one into her game plan. After the second loss, Chihiro sent the team out again and noted in a side-voice to Belldandy, "If they beat us, then we've got something they don't have. We know we're beatable. They don't. Does this remind you of something, Morisato?"

"Osaka!" Belldandy answered...and then her Coach was all business again, focusing on the game.

After the loss, the team was somewhat dejected. Losing to China had stolen some of their thunder, but at least they hadn't lost to Portugal or Canada. They had met one of the best teams in the Olympics and now had a sense of the Chinese team's mettle. Now it was Belldandy's turn to try and cheer up her sempai as they returned to Olympic Village.

But no matter what she said, it didn't help. This passage was a complete reversal of yesterday's walk back to the dorms. Ootaki and Tamiya were crestfallen, and Kinosh'ta was obviously pissed off at herself. Her older roommate was a lot like her in that aspect; always taking on everything...and when it blew up in her face, she'd blame herself angrily. There's a fine line between being a ball-hog and an MVP; Kinosh'ta's intensity allowed her to walk that tightrope with skill. Despite this, even an MVP like Kinosh'ta she could slip up once in a while. Right now, her roomie's spirits were definitely in the dumps. So Belldandy decided on to go off into crazy mode herself...

"Hey, I want you guys to consider this!" she started. "What if I told you that I was playing for something more than a medal. Let's say that there was a _guy_ involved..."

"Now yuh're speakin' some dirt, girl!" Tamiya said, suddenly dropping out of her droopy mood. "Ah toldya she's got a boyfriend. He's probably back in Japan, watchin' us on TV right now!"

One down.

"Okay, here's what happened," Belldandy noted. "There's this guy that I met, and I found out that he's God. He's really powerful and stuff, and he can do weird shit like make the rain stop, or break knifes between his fingers. Anyway, he can't fall in love because of a curse he put on himself, because he did a stupid thing as a kid. So me being the good girl I am, I made a wish for the curse to disperse. Presto! Now he can fall in love with anyone. As long as they're a Goddess."

"Well, you ain't no Goddess, as we all know," Ootaki quipped. "The guy would have to be a total idiot to fall in love with you, Morisato. You're a walkin' spazz-basket, mental girl!"

Two down, and some giggles.

"So anyway, it turns out that he's some kind of perfect lover, because when I wished to reverse the curse, it really happened and he became a chick magnet. A real live divine 'Love God'. So now all these Goddesses are hitting on him like he's the first son of the Emperor Akahito. Major dizzy-blonde action, I mean. And this one Goddess is the worst. She's like a biker girl, like the head of a bosozuko biker chick gang. She pesters this God until he's so totally uptight with himself, he don't know up from down. So yours truly tells her to get lost. But she's a Goddess, so she's not giving up so easily."

"Okay, now you're getting into psycho-drama land," Kinosh'ta noted. "See what I have to deal with? Maybe one of you two girls wanna swap rooms and deal with this neurotic freshman girl?"

Three down, and a salting of sarcasm.

"No way!" Tamiya and Ootaki answered, giggling.

"So here's the rest of the story. This biker-chick Goddess does a major fuckup and gets busted by the head God, who's kinda like a yakuza overboss, but he does good deeds instead of bad shit. So he busts her down a few levels, and now she's just like one of us. But she still wants the goofball God I've been talking about. Feeling sorry for the jerk, I tell her that I'll take her on in a volleyball game. She wins, she can have him. I win, I'm stuck with him."

"And I suppose you did this act of charity because you felt sorry for him?" Ootaki commented.

"Nuh!" Tamiya interjected. "Guys...dis is Morisato we're talkin' about. Bragged about how she was like Ms. Popular in high school, and then the truth comes out that she's never dated a guy steady! She probably _loves_ the guy and is all melty in the knees, so's that's why she decides to take on da biker chick! She's probably all mellow-mellow for some God action."

"Yep!" Belldandy said without thinking, and then waved her hands frantically. "Well no! Of course not! I just wanted to have an extra motivation to play a better game. You know...just like Coach Chihiro says, 'it's all in the mind.'"

"Coach Chihiro never said that," Kinosh'ta noted coolly. "She said 'mindset'. I remember..."

"So dis is what yuh think about when we play?" Tamiya said, trying to hold back her laughter. But couldn't.

"Bwah hah ha ha aha ha!!" the three sempai laughed, causing nearby athletes to glance at them with irritated or bemused expressions.

"What a bunch of panda shit!" Ootaki noted. "You sure you didn't read some light novel? Because that sounds more like the plot to some whack shoujo anime than anything else. No...it's not even stupid enough to be an anime. My little sister wouldn't even be silly enough to think of stuff like that."

"Bwah haha ha! Morisato, you're killin' me!" Tamiya gasped as another round of raucous laughter leapt around her sempai, contagious as all hell.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Ehhh?!" Coach Chihiro gasped, looking at the Polyclinic physician.

"Without a doubt. She can play if you let her," he repeated, typing some commands and pulling up two scans on the overhead monitors.

"Observe these two MRIs side-by-side. The first one is from right after she sustained her injury. There's clear evidence of an eversion-type injury to her ankle of the Type III variety. See the swelling here, here and here to the tendon clusters? Her tendons sustained significant trauma, which caused the rapid swelling. There's even a hairline fracture of her talus bone right here. When she complained of a shooting pain up her leg, I suspected she might have a syndesmotic injury...a high ankle sprain. That's when the ligaments connecting her ankle to her leg receive significant trauma. Usually, treatment includes a walking cast, or in more serious cases, surgically inserting a screwpin between the tibia and fibula to stabilize the area so the ligaments can heal. Normally, I would just X-ray a sprained ankle, but the stress tests indicated that I needed to look closer, so I ordered the MRIs instead.

"I could have sworn that she had significant ankle sprain trauma based on this first MRI, but now that I closely look at this second MRI, there's no evidence of a high ankle sprain at all! The swelling of the deltoid tendons is markedly less severe than the first MRI indicated. She's going to have discomfort along her instep and inner side of her ankle. But she's responded very well. The first MRI must have had a software or fireware glitch, because recoveries like this just don't happen! But she'll need to remember to RICE: Rest, Ice, Compress and Elevate. If you let her play, she'll need to keep that ankle wrapped very tight. But I don't foresee any reason why she can't play. If she can handle the pain, she can probably play at 95 to 100 percent."

"This the work of yuhr boyfriend?" Tamiya teased, gaining snickers from the whole squad which brought a flush to Belldandy's face. Of course Ootaki had told everybody about her little 'story'!

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

SOMEWHERE:

The only thing that Cevn could compare this to was an occurrence resulting in Urd's shocked outburst after he defeated Isilblius the first time. He had ended things with her, and walked out. Then she got really sick and almost died. Then he himself died...at least he thought he did. Urd thought so as well, and she later related that she knew at that time that he was most assuredly dead. They were literally going to 'light the pyre' to dispose of his mortal remains. Suddenly, he had woken up and pulled her into his arms. Must have been some shock. Urd always tried to downplay it around her sisters. Cevn didn't know any of this when he been brought back to the Earthrealm by the Ultimate Force, all he recalled was Urd looking at him like he had returned from the dead.

And then she had lost it.

Now, he was witnessing another 'return from the dead' reunion. Belldandy...for this _had_ to be Belldandy...had completely melted into a vein of gratitude. Keiichi and she held each other, looking in each other's eyes. Cevn knew that to Keiichi and her, the world didn't exist; her world in the form of Keiichi had been returned to her. Unexpectedly, she had been reunited with the love of her life. Cevn could only imagine the clockworks of affection spinning a new fondness in her heart, a waterfall of joy that were being harnessed as she trembled in his arms.

"It's you, my love!" she sobbed. "It's really you! You're _here with me_!"

Cevn walked over and rested his arms on Keleste and Keiyasu's shoulders. The emotions were overmanning him; if he could cry, he would. But cyborganics don't have build-ins like tear ducts. He could feel the tension in the two Godkid's shoulders, knowing that they wanted to go to their Mother. He admired them for their restraint; they seemed to know that this moment belonged to Keiichi and Belldandy and they were willing to let time rule its emotional bounds for just a little longer.

He wouldn't be surprised if Belldandy were to pay her crying debts for a year...for now she had exchanged lamentation for a treasure.

"She waited so long for him," Keleste whispered, marveling at the reunion. Cevn didn't know how, but the young Goddess must have observed in Belldandy a sense of her own longing. Amazing how close the connection was, even with no words having been said. Only the conveying emotions that overflowed the reunited pair. Perhaps she was these children's _real_ mother? He was nagged with doubts; Keiichi had chased after a blue mist-form that had appeared out of the conflagration. Where was that half-glimpsed spark that Keiichi was pursuing? It wasn't this Goddess, unless it had somehow revivified her once she was brought here. Maybe that explained the seizures.

'Belldandy' had been ripped to elemental shreds by the combined attacks of the Lord and the Dark Lord, right in front of Keiichi. Yet here she was. Cevn had no doubt in his heart that this Belldandy was genuine. Any doubts were dispelled by the sheer outburst of joy she had when she first saw Keiichi. Surely there was no SurGoth wraith or Isilblius in this Goddess. But was she the Belldandy that had been with Keiichi back on the Earthrealm?

He was reminded of the other half that emerged from that devouring intensity of unleashed Divine energy; the darkness that had sought to hide itself within him, the SurGoth wraith.

"Bell-chan," Keiichi said, pushing her away gently. "I know that you've been waiting for a long time to see me. I know you never thought you would see me again. But there are two here who have waited even longer to meet you. They've waited their _entire lives_..."

Belldandy looked at him with a quizzical expression as Keiichi gestured towards the Godkids.

"Bell, this is Keleste and Keiyasu," Keiichi introduced. "They're the reason why we're all here. They made it possible for you and I to be together again."

Cevn watched Belldandy examine the two, regarding them with a grateful expression.

"And Bell...these two aren't just any children. They're...your...no, _our_...son and daughter."

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Belldandy had never felt such a joy in her life. _She was in his arms again!_ She never wanted to let go of this precious moment, to let go of her precious Keiichi. The long nightmare she had endured for over forty millennia in Nulln had ceased to have meaning. The severe aspect she had donned as the only way she could cope with the emotional torture-works that choked her spirit...had melted away of its own accord, because Love had returned to her Present. She glanced at Peorth occasionally and saw her sister Goddess bound to her with tears of empathy, her heart moved by the reunion. Belldandy recognized her memories beginning to knit together for the first time since Keiichi had been ripped from her life. Her thoughts seemed to clarify with each moment she and Keiichi held each other. She could hear an insane screaming in her mind, backgrounding her joy with sheer rage, and knew it for what it was. That force, that scream...was the unknown that had taken Keiichi away from her all those years ago. But something had restored Keiichi to her, and its evil design had been thwarted. She felt safe with herself for the first time since the darkness rendered her silent. Yet, she could remember each sojourn to the Earthrealm; surreptitious journeyings that she didn't even realize she had coursed...until she touched Keiichi's mortal flesh.

She was awakening.

When Keiichi announced that the two children nearby had been chiefly responsible for her reunion with her beloved, she remembered how the girl had tackled her back at the Well of Urd. In mouth of her madness, her Goddess senses returning kindness for absence, because she looked at the young girl and felt a dash of recall in her mind. While the girl was restraining her, Belldandy had gone limp not just because of fear, but because she felt a soulful thirst in those thin arms encircling her chest.

A thirst borne out of a sense of loss that was far deeper than the shadow of grief that had been cast over her life.

She felt a feeling within this feeling, a connection of some kind that she had never experienced before. A sense of belonging, not the kind of belonging between she and other Divines, but a significance of a type she could not identify.

"...they're your...no, our..._son and daughter_..."

As much as she had longed for Keiichi, she felt the young Goddess pile up against her and bury her head against her bosom, wracked with sobbing. The touching was electric, and Belldandy felt an energy flowing around her, enveloping her...

She perceived the energy seeping into her, an influx of healing Metanative filaments that seemed to rearrange her confusion into a solidity of lucidity.

"My...LORD!" she gasped. This young Goddess has TNA that matches hers! There was a resonance between her and this 'Keleste', the same kind of resonance she felt with her Father and Mother. The TNA wasn't just in sync with her own TNA, it seemed to be blending with hers in some way, banishing her confusions.

Belldandy felt her Soul emerging for the first time since the Horrible.

"Mom! MOMMY!" the girl cried out. "You..snff..don't know how long we've been looking for you. We tried everything! Brother and I have been trying to find you for over a hundred thousand years..."

"A hundred..._thousand_...years?!" Belldandy marveled inwardly. She looked helplessly at Keiichi, who had his face buried in his sleeve.

This child had spent her entire childhood looking for a mother? This girl-Goddess couldn't be more than 15 Decamillennia of age. How could a Goddess not have a mother? She looked at the young Goddess's eyes, and then upwards to her forehead where she saw the same long ovaline Goddess seal-marking she had. Even higher, the two pairs of lacy wisps of hair antennae.

Belldandy cradled the young child's face in her hands and touched her forehead against hers. Goddess seal to Goddess seal.

...she felt the long spring of pain, of emptiness. Not as shocking or intense as her loss, but even more deeply emoted because there was always an absence. Sensing the mounting of one failure upon another, building upon a foundation of frustration. Hearing the Proctors declare that she and her brother were unique among Gods because they were half-Divine, half-Mortal. Transanative searches through the Ygg Mainframe for even a trace of Metanative energy, anything that could be signature evidence or just a random hint of her existence. Crying on her brother's shoulders, feeling that she had nowhere to go but down. Her brother crying on her shoulders, and she feeling the awful boyhood pain he felt for lack of a father. Frustrated, because she was a girl and didn't know what to say to comfort him. Spending a thousand years on a dead Earthrealm building an intricate memorial complex to the Father she had never met, a monument the size of Manhattan. The fear of never finding her Mother always just a heartbeat away, suffocating her, stealing away both sleep and ambition...fighting against it, always fighting...

"Just like me, always fighting against the loss," Belldandy said, softly soothing the young Goddess with gentle touches on her back.

Her _Daughter_!

Keiichi had not only given her his love...he had given her a child. Two children, as the young boyish God walked up and hugged her once she pulled her forehead away from her daughter's.

Her _Son_!

He had waited for Keiichi, and then his sister Keleste to have their reunions with her. Belldandy realized that this was probably the greatest example of courage she had ever witnessed in her life, for she could perceive in his face how much he wanted to seek her immediately...but withheld himself patiently instead. A hundred millennia of devoted seeking compressed into an hour or two of prolonged waiting. This boy definitely had Keiichi's...his father's...selfless spirit.

She hugged him tight, sensing his moment's boyish embarrassment before he freed his tears. Closing her eyes, she touched her forehead to his...

...she felt a deep fear that he would always be alone. Peorth...and Skuld? His and his sister's step-mothers? His sister, Keleste, ashamed of her own beauty because she was embarrassed to have antenna hairs. How angry this made him when she used a bandana to cover them up. The Proctors telling him that his Father was from the Earthrealm. Destroyed Earth, for 150 millennia? Using a device stolen from Skuld to travel to Vanagdrasil to find two more children, always looking for a family so he and his sister could find their way to their birth parents. An overwhelming sense of joy when he found his Father; and a deeply felt sense of loss escaped. This boy _never_ had a father! Learning arcane skills to match against his sister's mecha skills. Perilously sneaking into SecondTier and ThirdTier Inculcations millennia before he was supposed to receive them; risking mental paralysis by being overwhelmed with Inculcation intended for older Gods. His sister squeezing his hand so hard, it bled when they first saw her and Keiichi getting married in a church...

Getting married in a church? She and Keiichi never got married; he had just asked her to marry him a couple months before after the Le Mans!

Belldandy was filled with questions, and she availed to a tremendous restraint to push them out of her thoughts. Not here, not now. This was a holy heart-shrine of a child and Mother reunion, not the place to be pondering mysteries. As her Mother had taught her, she closed that part of her mind and pictured it as a comet being carried by a starstream. Don't push the cosmos; go with the moment and its direction. The wisdom of being a Norn was returning to her, and she gathered the dignity and humility she felt towards such an important office. She passed onto her teenage son that she was the Norn of the Present, and received his reaction of astonishment…and pride. She opened her eyes and briefly caught her daughter's eye; she was brimming with joy for her brother and unvoiced admiration for his strength.

"Just like Keiichi, standing strong for those around him," Belldandy said, patting the young God on his back. Realizing that he was as tall as she was...

"O..Oh my!" she heard Peorth gasp. "Belldandy...take a look at yourself!"

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

I was riveted.

Keiichi had been reunited with Belldandy, and then he introduced Keleste and Keiyasu to her. The reunion was filled with the kind of emotions one would see on a daytime talk show when a family reunion had been arranged without the principles knowing of it. No...this was even more intense. Far more intense, because of the strength of Divine emotionality seemed to mist the very air with a refreshing breeze of love and joy. All four of these people had been dead to each other. Confirmed dead, with the exception of Keleste and Keiyasu who had grown up sister and brother. The GodKid's burden was even worse; as Keiichi had mentioned to me that they suffered not only loss but absence.

It was a miracle that they had been brought together.

But another miracle was arising out of the love outpouring. Belldandy seemed to be returning back to her 'old' self. The many layers of widow's black clothing were slowly turning into a rich blue and white outfit. Like an actor in a playhouse, she had stepped out of the shadows into the spotlight of a truthful reality; the reality that she should have been living all these years. Vivid, because _she_ was the spotlight, literally glowing. A love song for the eyes. One Goddess had knitted all these hearts together. Rarely did I ever travel the imaginary whimsy of clothing her in the role of motherhood; Belldandy was always just Belldandy to all of us. Now, I was privileged to see her assume a new role: Mother. Belldandy seemed born to it, just like she was with every little thing she does. Motherhood was favoring her quite well, if the adoring faces of Keleste and Keiyasu were any indication.

Hugging her daughter, Belldandy's hair was gradually regaining its color and sheen; the frizz and rippled grays fading against lustrous auburn and gold tresses. Her face was filling out; losing the gaunt, grim expression that she had when Keleste had first brought her back through the Soul Mirror. Hugging her son, she seemed to project an air of deservingness; not of all the pain of the past, but of all the bounty of joys in the Present.

I had to grit my teeth, for each transformation that returned her to health brought me agonizing pain. The thing inside of me, the SurGoth, was having a heyday with my cyborg body. It seemed to want to take me over in some way, and when I resisted, my electronic and cybernetic functions started haywireing...

With a mounting uneasy apprehension, I realized that my temperature regulation sensors were monitoring increased heat in my neuronet braincase. The only organic part of my cyborganic 'body' was the gray matter that had been transplanted into the cybernetic human-like shell many thousands of years, back when we colonized...when we colonized...someplace I can't remember.

The SurGoth. It was trying to cook my brain!

"H..help me!" I thought desperately, unable to speech because my vocal servos were locking up.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Belldandy felt her mind returning, her whole being seemed to awaken, to blossom like a flower that had been couched in its bulb, hidden by ages of glaciation. She realized that this Keiichi, was not _her_ Keiichi; these children were _not_ her children. When she touched Keleste and Keiyasu, she learned that they were almost a hundred millennia forward into her Future, while her beloved Keiichi was from a Past that was thrust forty millennia waywards.

She could remember faint echoes of her role as Norn, being a regulator of Time simply by her existence, building a TimeWeb in union with her two sisters. If Keiichi...this Keiichi...was alive, then perhaps her sisters and parents were alive as well. A tentative reach of Metanative probing revealed nothing. Perhaps _her_ Keiichi was alive.

But there was something else about this Keiichi. It seemed that there was a form of Divine energy within him. The Keiichi she had loved had a divine energy as well; manifested by occasional unsteady attempts at telepathy and of course, Heroic Vermilion Swift. Keiichi's Angel.

Feeling the presence of an Angel inside of him, but not inside of the sister and brother who wanted so badly to be her children. They were almost to their Fifteenth Deca; which would be about the time where they should be able to open their Angel Eggs.

But her immediate attention was shifted away from these thoughts as she sensed a mental cry nearby. The android was in some sort of physical agony.

She intuited that Peorth would be quicker to act; despite all the clarity that had returned to her since she recovered her inner being, Belldandy felt a lingering drowsiness blunt her senses and her reactions. She needed to rest, emotionally drained. Too tired to act, she could only sit on a rock and collect her thoughts. Oddly enough, it seemed that the cyborg's most vital mechanisms, the ones that preserved and interacted with his central and peripheral brain loci, were malfunctioning dangerously.

"Hurry, Peorth," she urged.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Peorth had watched her best friend's reunion with a rapt riveting of emotion, overjoyed and astonished at the same time. Her own reunion with Keiichi was one of the most shocking events of her existence; a rippling through forty thousand years of regret. Belldandy had somehow managed, with a supreme effort Peorth couldn't even begin to imagine, to speak a "thank you" to her at the Well of Urd, right before they were kidnapped. She had assumed that the kidnappers were Demons, because no one in their right mind would kidnap a Goddess. Belldandy had been mandated to be Banished; interfering with her exile was tantamount to openly defying the Almighty. It was ironic-comic because she had argued that Belldandy was insane during her attempts to defend her best friend...and now she and Belldandy were in this non-place because of an apparent act of insanity on the part of two teenagers.

Her kidnappers were two teenaged Gods. To her shock, the Goddess resembled Belldandy with such familiarity, she had thought her a duplicate Belldandy at the time of the abduction. Now that things had calmed from hurricane force craziness to just craziness, she could sense that the Goddess was no more than 150,000 years old, by the Earthrealm reckoning. The young Goddess was almost a throwback to the Belldandy she knew when she was a teenager herself.

The boy who had restrained her was her twin brother, which in itself was an oddity. Twins are extremely rare in Yggdrasil to begin with. The young God was favoring his ribs where she had elbowed him; Peorth felt a flash of satisfaction at his blench of discomfort when she remembered that he had choked her into unconsciousness with her own hair.

She could sense that Keiichi had an Angel...and her heart fluttered as she realized that it might be Heroic Vermilion Swift!

She might have a reunion of her own to match that of Belldandy.

Belldandy...

As her sister Goddess touched her forehead to the young Goddess, and then the young God who claimed they were her children (Belldandy with kids?!), something was communicated between the two which seemed to transform Belldandy! What she was seeing was a blatant upheaval, defying all sense of order and conduct for Divines, Her friend began to evolve...or rather devolve...back into her healthy self. She was becoming the Belldandy that she had loved and admired as a best friend! Her manifest was healing itself as her face was restored to the beauteous expression of joy and kindness she used to have. Her Silent Goddess garb was also tranfiguring, returning to the white-blue-red outfit she normally wore in Yggdrasil. Peorth looked in her eyes and saw an emerging awareness, an intelligence and alertness that had been missing for so many thousands of years.

There was an android as well, of a type she had never encountered. Keiichi seemed to act like this 'Cevn' was a friend of his, and had talked to him several times right before Belldandy revived out of her seizuring. Oddly enough, the cyborganic construct had an Earthrealm bio-signature as well, at least the organic parts did. Which was impossible, because the Earthrealm mortals had nano'ed themselves into savagery long before they had the ability to preserve organic neurofunctioning into a cybernetic interface or artifact.

None of this added up.

How could this Keiichi still be _alive_, if he was from an Earthrealm forty millennia dead?

Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed Belldandy gesturing with her eyes towards the cyborg. His cybernetic and mecha systems were massively malfunctioning. Putting her conjectures on hold, she swiftly floated over and felt heat emanating from his metallic brain case. His face was twitching and spasming; rapid eyeblinks, jerk-jaw bruxism, flinching of his facial features. He was short-circuiting!

Relaxing herself, Peorth explored the simple machinery of his cyborganic construct, mapped its design and functions in her mind, and quickly began to repair the damage before he would sustain permanent brain injury.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

THERA:

Belldandy felt herself ease into the practice prior to their game against Canada, her ankle occasionally firing off darts of pain up her calf. She tested it with a few digs, turns, and jump to see if she could put her entire pivot-weight on it. To her surprise, there was no noticeable loss of strength. She smiled sheepishly at her Coach, who had been watching her like a hawk for the first few minutes of practice.

Keiichi had left her a card, obviously for her birthday tomorrow. Kinosh'ta kept joking about how their dorm room was 'haunted'; she insisted that she had noticed a shadow form of a tall, dark mysterious man in the room. Of course, Ootaki and Tamiya immediately pounced on the 'boyfriend' scenario for another rounding of teasing, jiving her mercilessly during breakfast. Luckily, Kinosh'ta had never seen Keiichi, so her description of the 'night visitor' was vague.

Her goofy teammates and their over-active imaginations.

She wanted to read that card so bad, but she had to focus on the game against Canada. The Canadian team wasn't even considered in the top ten of the Pool A & B teams, but had a history of pulling random upsets as they had beaten both the US and Cuban teams once during the North American qualifying rounds. Coach Chihiro emphasized that this was the Olympics, and there would be no cakewalks. They had lost once already to China, and another loss would send them home.

The venue was the same Technical Univ. arena that they had played the last two games in. Brand new, it still smelled of fresh concrete and paint to Belldandy as the teams took to the floor. Unlike regular high school and college V-ball matches, there were no announcements of individual players before the game to rah-rah the fans in the stands. Their team was simply introduced as the "Japanese Women' Volleyball Team" by the China-States emcee. Chihiro had made them memorize the words in Chinese so that "you ladies don't get confused and go out when the Cubans are announced". But Chihiro's ploy had an extra incentive; every instance she heard the announcement gave her an extra thrill to be playing for her homeland.

For the first time since they started elimination play, her team won the first game, 30-24. Chihiro pumped them up with a reminder that it was "us or them"; if Japan lost this game, then they'd be a longshot for the quarterfinals. Belldandy was off in her game, but she was quick to notice that Kinosh'ta was in a 'zone'. Chihiro shifted her to focus more on net defense, so Kinosh'ta could shine on offense...and the team started routing the Canadians.

30-21. 30-19.

She could see the dispirited girls and women on the other side of the net, and she recalled Coach Chihiro's words from the night earlier about winning attitude. Excited as she was by victory, she followed Kinosh'ta's lead and postponed her joy a little longer so she could offer her respects to the Canadians with encouraging pats on the shoulders, hand-shakes and affirming nods.

Shower. Dinner. Dorm. Playbook study.

Keiichi's card.

Kinosh'ta ducked out to catch some night air, and she fought herself again to open the card Keiichi had left. Belldandy realized that this could be another test in patience. If she opened it now, she might get thrown off her game. After all, Kinosh'ta had reminded her that Coach Chihiro said "it's all in the mindset".

Tonight, everyone on her team was on the same page, rather than banging their heads against the walls of disappointment.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

VANAGDRASIL, NILHORN, HILD' DARK PALACE:

"EEEEEKK!!"

Pryzm screamed again as the spindly shape with the dry thorns for legs crawled back over her bare foot, possibly responding to her first shout. It was a cockroach, that much was obvious. But how did it get here? She shuddered at the thought that maybe Hild had little bugs that ate the Souls of young Goddesses...

"Ulfryn!" she shouted. "Don't just stand there! Do something! It's gross and ugly and...it's a bug. It's big! Step on it, smash it, kill it!"

'Nuh...no way!" Ulfryn shouted, her face wrinkled with disgust and distaste. Pryzm looked at the impossible shape, recognizing it as a particular type of cockroach. The flying kind.

Przym gathered her nerves and courage, squinted her eyes and stomped a few times. Ulfryn might be afraid to squash a bug barefooted, but she wasn't. But the reservations of smashing a large gooey insect under her foot seemed to cause her to miss on several tries, as if her subconscious itself was grossed out.

And then the cockroach flew...

"EEEEEEeeeee!" she heard her sister scream at the spindly-legged insect attached itself to her torn-up shirt.

"Get it off! Get it off! GETITOFFAME!!" Ulfryn sirened in rapt fearful disgust. The insect regarded her...and started climbing her shirt towards her face. Her terrified screams jumped even higher in thoughtcast 'decibels'.

Falcyn was shocked by the sight of a cockroach here in Queen Hild's Dark Palace. Hild had just threatened him and the others in the Quad by reminding them that the Dark Lord would be displeased with them, and would take some kind of action when He returned. But now, he was amused by how his two Goddess cousins had rapidly shifted into Earthrealm 'girl mode' and started screaming their lungs out. When it crawled on Pryzm, causing the tomboy Goddess to turn all chickenshit, he almost laughed. Now it was on Ulfryn, instinctively seeking harbor in a dark area...his cousin's wide-agape yelling mouth. Ulfryn was all girly-girly, a dainty mallrat Goddess. It was her fault that they were in this mess anyway, even if they had found her 'ghosties'. His Dark Liege wouldn't care about minor details when it came time to punish. Falcyn so badly wanted to break up laughing; but then he saw the look of horror in his cousin's eyes. The better Demon part in him won out, recognizing the insect as bullying his cousin just as surely as those losers in the park did a few weeks back. He swifted over and knocked the offending insect off of her shirt with a lucky swipe of his hand.

He was getting ready to stomp it into oblivion when he felt a hand grasp him under the chin from behind, just enough to choke his breath...

"No one kills _anything_ in my Dark Palace except me!" Hild said angrily, totally throwing him off his quest to squash the roach. He blinked and looked at the senior Demon Queen, who was beside herself with rage. He flinched before he even had time to realize she wasn't mad at him.

Hild floated down to the tiling around her hot springs and stamped her foot imperiously, shaking the grounds noticeably.

In its mind, the cockroach felt the tell-tale ground-shake of a 'something big' pursuing it, and took the normal course its species taught had taught it to follow over hundreds of millions of years of evolution. It looked for the nearest dark place to hide. But there were no crevice-shadows in the immediate vicinity; everything was bright and the only darkness was up above in the unreachable. Its tiny insect brain usually had four thoughts: eat, shit, run and hide, seek light and water. There was a brightness nearby, and moving ground which meant liquid water. The roach's secondary instinct kicked in. Go seek the light! It made a rapid sprint towards the light.

_--Fffhsssspt!--_

Sygyn wondered why the cockroach had decided to run towards Hild's hot springs pool. A pool filled with a specially-seasoned mix of molten lava. It was instantly incinerated; or rather converted to a puff of organic steam and a half-flash of flame. But the deeper quandary that occupied her thoughts centered on how an Earthrealm insect could even get to Vanagdrasil. Cockroaches didn't know how to seek out Aumatrices, last time she checked. Cockroaches definitely couldn't survive transit within a Swarp Hypernality. Even if it somehow passed those two very weighty obstacles, the third obstacle was the killer one. Organic forms cannot exist in Vanagdrasil, except within special protective confinements. The only 'organic' embodiments possible were Demons and Gods using divine energies to reconstitute their physical manifests. She looked at the rising puff of steam-smoke as it dispersed and wondered why.

"What the _hell_...pardon the expression, I know we're in Vanagdrasil...is a cockroach doing _here_?" Skuld asked, not caring that she had just insulted every Demon in listening range on their home turf. That wasn't important right now.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Mara ignored her sister's Goddess-style blunder and pondered the situation. The Dark One wasn't here. Skuld was here. The kids were all here, except for the two new Godkids.

This would be perfect!

"Well, it certainly didn't fly here from one of Zoos or Mortal Preserves! That blaze-blessed thing was as real as the slashes on my forehead! It took us part of a day to come here in the first place. But I have to wonder...why _here_? Why Hild's Dark Palace? I'd be totally embarrassed if one of those insects showed up in one _my_ Lairs! Even as a prank; and I don't think any of us think this is funny at all. Could it be a case of one roach seeking another?" she wondered aloud, with a subtle sarcasm.

A look of deep shame admixed with some sheer-cliff rage filled Hild's expression, literally causing the older Demon Queen's forehead to steam. Mara grinned with malicious glee, licking her fangs as her 'Elder Sister's' face performed a gymnastics of vehemence; all angry, all embarrassed. A little payback for what she did to Skuld's kids, and Sygyn...and especially Falcyn. Now it was time to add one more ingredient to make her sister Demoness's discomfort delicious.

"Oh Skuld, did you know that Pryzm and Ulfryn were staying here before His Darkness summoned you? I wanted to let you know about how dear Queen Hild was such a good hostess for us and _your kids_..."

"No! _No no no_!" Hild mouthed silently to her, waving her hands in front of her frantically. Just a little bomb of fright to ice the cake.

"She _hosted_ Pryzm and Ulfryn? My children stayed here?" her sister asked, now curious.

"Yepperz! She did a _real bang up job_, just like any good Demoness hostess would be expected to provide for your two children; they being dignitaries personally invited by Oni-sama and all. We can talk about it later, _anytime_ you wanna discuss it," Mara replied. Hild's face blanched white with a very satisfying look of terror.

"I own your ass!" Mara thoughtcast privately to Hild as she stared her down, informing her in no uncertain terms that if she acted like an idiot again with hers or anyone's children, all she had to do was pull Skuld aside and tell her about Mara's attempt to coopt Pryzm and Ulfryn into Demonesses. As the mortals say, "nothing causes anger in a mother as when she learns that her children are threatened." According to Falcyn and Sygyn, her younger sister went tech-shit on the rat-bots when they attacked the kids, destroying them all. Mara wished she could have been there to see _that_!

"We..well, of course I was nice to the little dears!" Hild stammered. "Roll out the red carpet, only the best junk food and snacks...the works!"

Mara loved every moment of Hild's fear-fraught assurances to her younger sister that the kids were 'pampered', in her words. But being a true Demon Queen, Hild recovered her composure rather quickly.

"I was thinking...what if there's more than one of those Earthrealm insects here in my Black Palace?" she noted. "There might be hundred, or even thousands of them crawling around my grounds. And I won't stand for it!"

"Those things are disgusting, sick, horrible and gross!" Ulfryn agreed. "I wouldn't want them in my house, either."

"Which means that we're going to go on a roach hunting expedition until we find _every_ one of those...God-blessed things!" Hild announced. "This also means _no_ killing. Capture only. I'm the one who gets to kill every one of them, especially after they've ruined my rep as a good housekeeper and hostess. Not to mention sullying my relaxing hot springs."

"No way! You gotta be shitting me!" she heard her daughter Sygyn snap angrily. Mara overlooked her daughter's cursing, realizing that Hild didn't even recognize the evil in what she had just tasked everyone to do.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

11,171 cockroaches later, the group reconvened at Hild's private hot springs.

"There! That takes care of those horrid little bastardly creatures," Hild said as she vaporized the lot with a burst of red arcane lightning.

"Which leaves the important question unsolved. How did they get here?" Mara asked. She looked at her younger sister to see what she would say, and noticed that Skuld had _that look_ in her eyes. The 'I'm on it, so don't bother me' look.

"Reviewing what happened, we got whisked from here to the Earthrealm of, let's say 20XX. A few years in our past. We attended a mortal wedding, and we saw younger version of ourselves," Mara recapped. "Then our Dark Lord and you guy's Lord started some kind of light-war to destroy the bride. Everything goes dim...and we wake up here. Nothing about cockroaches in that scenario."

Pryzm knew that her Mom was totally absorbed in the problem at hand, realizing that if everyone was spinning mental cogs and coils in their minds, Mom was doing the same thing a hundred times more intensely. But with Mom, it was more like she was harnessing tornados of hypotheses.

Mom was too cool when she was solving a mystery! Now, all they had to do was...

"Wait!" Skuld shouted excitedly. "I figured out what the Ultimate Force is!"

_"HUH??"_

"Are you sure all this bouncing around between that squalid Earthrealm planet, the Vang Logorinth, and here…didn't scramble your mind just a little bit," Hild asked sarcastically.

Pryzm and Ulfryn looked at each other and nodded. They looked at their cousins, Falcyn and Sygyn...who also nodded. Mom had one hand on her hip and the other one raised with a uplifted index finger, as if she didn't even hear Hild's comment. Both girls knew what this meant: Mom was going to launch into major lecture mode!

"The Ultimate Force explains all of this," their Mom started.

"Of course it does!" Mara interrupted. "But hw can you say that you know what the Ultimate Force is. Solving the mystery of the Swarp Gates and Hypernalities is one thing, _but now you claim to have IDd the Ultimate Force_?"

"Absolutely without a doubt," their Mother answered.

"Then indulge us by all means," Queen Hild said in a venomous voice, filled with doubt and ready to ridicule.

"It is a given fact that one of the most important properties in all of existence is the attribute of separation. Every field of science, magic and intellectual inquiry has to recognize it for what it is. The mortals almost always start up mythological constructs and religions to try and explain it. We Gods and Demons can't explain it, even though we all experience separation. Kami-sama will only say 'that's privileged information'...and believe me, I've tried to get it out of Him.

"When we thoughtcast, our mental 'words' are separated by gaps of Time and Space, otherwise everything we think and communicate would all come out at once. At the same time. This makes communication and syncognition impossible. At the level of Soul, our very beings, personalities and our Souls are separated. Separated from themselves...which is why our Souls don't come auto-equipped with personalities. Distinct from each other's unique Soular essences. Everywhere we look, everywhen we think, everyhow we act...we encounter separation."

"Okay, you're giving us stuff we all learned in Prime and FirstTier Inculcation," Mara noted impatiently.

"I'm sorry, but I have to set this up just right so you guys can understand," their Mother answered apologetically. "Especially since the children are here."

Pryzm and Ulfryn could hear Sygyn growl under her breath.

"So a universal force is separation. But there is another universal force, co-equal with separation. That attribute is integration, of course. Our Souls are whole because they're bound together, otherwise Souls would be fragmented; and we wouldn't '_be'_. We wouldn't exist without an entire Soul inside of us. On a more fundamental level, integration is everywhere as well. When you look at the magma in the hot springs over there, the physical molecules are designed to present a unit...a comforting hot bath for Demons..."

Pryzm and Ulfryn noticed their cousin Falcyn blushing deep red at this.

"When I communicate with you, there's a common element between us called understanding, which allows for the integration of your thoughts to mine. Science reaches ultimate hypotheses in our two Realms, but isn't that different from ultimate recipes in spellcasting and alchemistry? Magic requires ultimate mastery, otherwise it blows up in our faces. Literally," their Mom said, poking a little fun at everybody for all the failed experiments and magicks that had resulted in combustible outcomes.

"Here's where it gets transcendental. If something is separate, then there has to be a quality of integration. If something is integrated, then there has to be a quality of separation."

"This is totally not making sense!" Sygyn exclaimed, her voice filled with confusion and frustration.

"That's good, Sygyn, because it means that you're ready for some _nonsense_," Skuld noted to her niece.

"Now for the real deal. A unified solid _still_ has separation within it. The only difference is that the separation attributes have been nullified. Take physical matter, which is a blend of energies from several of the Nine Dimensions. Matter, energy, organization are all brought together to create a solid object, like the shoes we all should be wearing but aren't. But how is it solid, if it composed of many atoms, molecules, etc.? What appears integrated is actually complete only because some of the separations within it have been 'turned off'.

"Likewise, the separation between everything is actually an integrated whole, in and of itself. Let's take the words 'integrate' and 'separate'. In Japanese, both have spaces between each stroke; in English, spaces between each letter. Yet we can read them. So distinction and comprehension both occur at the same time. The integration in our minds is 'turned off' when we write the two words, because we skip over the spaces to see the whole. We're aiming for an entire word, not some random collection of strokes or letters. Thus, the separation _isn't_ a separation any more in our minds. But this is only in the realm of mental functioning. However, this principle of 'integration within separation' isn't just in our minds.

_Everything_ has both separation and integration at the same time. A whole is composed of an index of separations, some turned on, some turned off. A collection of individually separate, distinctions has an index of integration, some turned on and some turned off. Wanna know what turns them on and off?"

She looked at her audience and realized they were struggling to keep up with her simple examples.

"Balance."

"Whaaaw!" Sygyn sounded her appreciation. "I'm beginning to get it."

Skuld nodded at her niece; recognizing that Sygyn was almost beside herself with the wonderment of a fresh insight.

"I'll use an Earthrealm mortal example, because they're easy to explain. I can kinda see what you mean. Picture one of those old brass scales like you see in a museum or antique shop. The kind with a pivot point in the middle of a long beam or hoist-arm, with two pans or platters on each side suspended by a chain of tiny chainlinks. When it's used to weigh something out, it creates an equal match to each side, in terms of weight. You put coins or medicine in one pan, and then the little weights on the other side. When each platter is level with the other, we say they're balanced. But actually, they're just two platters filled with stuff: one with a pile of weights, the other one with a pile of whatever is being weighed. The _real_ balance is the scale itself. Without it, there is no balancing between the two piles. So really, the two whatevers that it is trying to weigh...are only _borrowing_ balance."

"Exactly, Sygyn!" Skuld confirmed, proud of her niece's correct grasp of the theory.

"So Balance is the key...the controlling force that regulates the shut-on/shut-off of both separation and integration..._within_ separation and integration," Skuld noted, resuming her explanation.

"Take a road with ten stoplights; let's call it the 'Highway of Integration'. The UF decides how many lights are 'stop' or 'go' along the route. The road itself doesn't decide this. Turn all the signs 'go' and the sum total of ten separations is now shut off on the road. Now you can drive straight through the road without stopping. Which means a full integration...continuous movement...had been achieved within the 'Highway of Integration'. However, there is a reductio ad absurdium at work here: if you want, you can argue a regression down to infinity. Take an attribute of separation; which consists of integration on/offs and the separation quality. Within each of these two halves is another separation/integration. Just like the old paradox of Zeno where Achilles can never catch the Tortoise. What is half of a half of a half? On and on, ad infinitum. But it doesn't matter, because balance is _always_ there, infinite regression or not. Because it's transinfinite. It's even beyond transfinite. Ultimate."

"I won't even pretend to follow what you're blathering on about, Norn," Hild said. "But what does all that have to do with our situation?"

"You're an idiot, Hild...and you just proved it," Skuld said, meeting the Demon Queen's haughty air with an insult of truth. It didn't make a difference if she was in Yggdrasil, her Earthrealm temple home with her husband and kids, or here in Hild's Black Palace. The truth is the truth.

_This_ truth...was frightening.

"Those cockroaches you just destroyed that weren't supposed to be here...are a clear indication that the Balance...the Ultimate Force itself...is breaking down.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --


	130. Pt 130: The Eclipsing of Desolation

**Part 130: The Eclipsing of Desolation**

SOMEWHERE:

While I was unconscious, Peorth had repaired my physical circuitry and bio-components to forestall further injury to my mortal bioframe. The SurGoth had blatantly tried to kill me, serving notice that it wasn't dependent on me as a physical anchor. Each passing moment had been a constant struggle against this malign force, as it was trying to hijack my individuality away from me. The SurGoth now was even more dangerous; a passenger that could jump around from being to being. Disguised inside of Belldandy for an unknown extent of time, it was now trying to confine me. Keeping it occupied would reduce the opportunities for it to attempt to inhabit one of those immediately within it's reach: Keiichi, Belldandy, Peorth, or Keleste and Keiyasu.

The SurGoth aspect of Isilblius was as silent as a ghost, frightening as kwaidan; a dearth that flies against the calming pools of my Soul like a coarse rock shattering the ground. A shadow of a shadow, this _thing_ was filled with utter depravity, seeking its senseless goal of destroying the OmniArc. I could feel its ambitions coursing through me, burning me on an emotional level like boiling water poured on naked skin. No matter what I did, Isilblius would keep coming back.

If it couldn't use me, it would use someone else and still aim to resurrect Isilblius.

Concealing itself within Belldandy, designing manifolds of evil as it tried to enter the Gate of Judgment in an effort to 'defuse' all the Love essences in the universe. The implications of this one act of perfidy were staggering. The Souls in the Mid-Light would no longer be able to manifest in the Ygg and Vang OmniArcs as Love energy; the cyclic nature of exchange between life and death would be interrupted, causing both to break break down. There would be no Real Death anymore...because there would be no death. Life would end with no Reaper to harvest the deceased, no Little Boy Who Was Death on the 'other side' to smile and greet them, no Instrumentality to merge their consciousness in, and no Souls released back into life to power the emotion called Love. Death would become a state of non-existence.

Living would become a state of non-being. Many assume that love is an emotion, that it arises in reaction to certain people or situations. But what is within that love? Each action of love re-energizes the universe in a tangible manner; because the love itself is an energy. Those who populate the OmniArc amplify the love energy by molding it with intelligence and emotion. The SurGoth wraith wanted to negate the capacity of love that infuses mortals and Divines; with the consequence that the motive agent for discovery, curiosity and controversy would no longer exist. Sentient beings would become zombie-like mummies; disinterested in each other or trying to further themselves. In the longer term, mortals species would die off quickly because of an absence of reproductive instinct as sexuality itself would be about as interesting as watching a rock on the ground. The Divines would expire almost as quickly, because they would no longer maintain the Logorinth computers, grant wishes and strife mischiefs to mortals, or design energies to replenish Ygg and Vang magic-tech.

In a word, the OmniArc would be majorly fucked.

The two Lords, by destroying the 'host' of the SurGoth wraith, had thwarted a disaster of monstrous proportions. I still held out hope that Belldandy survived the attack in some form, even though her manifest and Goddess energies appeared to be completely dissymmetrized. The SurGoth buried itself within me, and was already attempting to overwhelm my individuality and take control of my thoughts and actions. Methodically, it was using me to further its purpose. Enigmatically, it employed a modus that appeared random and unplanned. Instead of attempting to co-opt me, why didn't the SurGoth simply 'jump ship' into one of the divines present at the wedding? Odeyn, Freiija, Hild were all very powerful and wise Divines...much better vehicles to accomplish its evil plans than I.

A dilemma was staring me in the face with a haunting visage. How could I tell them that this thing inside of me is dangerous? Sure, they could go ahead and kill me, but the SurGoth would repeat its actions at the wedding and simply inhabit someone else. To my dismay, it was unstoppable at this point.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Belldandy had been immersed in the dawning glow of her reunion with Keiichi; she had wanted to treasure that joyous ecstasy forever, to extend it as long as possible. Yet she was feeling a reserve, as if a tissue of cloud was obscuring the one so endeared to her, her beloved Keiichi. She sensed a faint stirring in her breast, a growing pensive mood that slightened her joy. This long-cherished reunion felt _wrong_; no matter how much she wanted to design her spirit around the allowance that it was right. The flower of love was in her hand, spectacled by the luminescence of a nurturing sun...but it wasn't blooming. She had wanted a happy ending to the tragic tapestry of her life, and yet she knew deep in her heart that the warmth was fading. If this was really her Keiichi, her passion would suffer no diminishment; instead her heart-joy would flame all the more intensely. To her profound regret, when she extended her Goddess senses, she detected no trace of the signature energies of Nulln or the long-ago Earthrealm in his person or Soul.

One of Love's greatest paradoxes: a quickening of heart-love resulting from a particular situation, an ecstasy arising within the situation...is not an assertion that the _situation itself_ is good. A thought scribed onto the parchment of confusion and disappointment.

As a Norn, she was granted abilities that excelled those of her Divine peers, a far remove from the usual orientation towards Time among Gods. The conflux of Time that she sensed in this place was unsettling; the threads of the TimeWeave were greatly disturbed. The TimeStream itself seemed corrupted; a river of Time that meandered purposelessly without finding its flow into the bosom of the ocean...the ocean of Infinite Time that brought together Past, Present and Future.

Two children from a hundred millennia in her future.

Keiichi from forty millennia in her past.

A cyborg that seemed to have several TimeStreams within him all at once.

In this moment: a love blossoming in her heart, seemingly endless and yet fleeting.

During the process of discarding her past madness, Belldandy finally recognized how her mind had quickly eroded when the Horrible happened. Her ability to sense her surroundings was seemingly destroyed by all the years of grieving Keiichi's death, casting her into a state of fixed insanity. Peorth had described how the Ethiopsylogic Proctors had tried to adjust her Goddess energies and instead discovered that somehow her Soul had become 'detached' from her Goddess energies, energies so important to her individuality and beingness. Yet, an unexpected benefit of her singular focus on mourning her loss was the strengthening of her heart. The extremes of emotional agony had molded her; rendering her heart honest, like a sword that had been hammered and recast for forty millennia.

Peorth had noted that she possessed a possible 'supersanity' while her life was disrupted. According to her best friend, she had 'corrected' wishes that had gone awry despite having a minimal resource of Goddess powers to draw upon. Her license had been indefinitely suspended, she had been relieved of all duties as a GRO agent...and yet, she answered wishes without directly wishgranting via the Nulln Mainframe. Always to the Earthrealm she had traveled, nowhere else. Peorth described her final visit to the Earthrealm; she had taught the gift of literacy to one of humanity's distant descendants. A woman, once downtrodden and shunned, had become a legendary teacher.

She didn't remember any of this.

But now she would have to teach again. She had to dissuade them from simply giving in to their own heartfelt impulses to cling to each other as a 'family'. She needed to visit discouragement and hope to Keiichi, Keleste and Keiyasu in equal measures. Would she be able to draw upon her own experience? Would they understand that profound disappointments can be surmounted with reason and a heartfelt conviction? This would set them all upon a course towards creating honesty, rather than concealing themselves inside a hollow truth. Once she informed her loved ones that they weren't her _real_ loved ones, she knew this would be most trying for the children. Her Keiichi from long ago had been resilient; plus he had an extra strength of character, because he knew _when_ to be resilient. Keiichi always would be at his strongest at the times when it was most necessary for him to step up; she could rely on him to buoy the spirits of those his life touched. Her Goddess and feminine intuitions sensed that this Keiichi would be able to think on his feet despite his profound disappointment.

But if her suspicions were correct, then the children's _true_ parents were still alive, only somewhere or somewhen else. 'His' Belldandy would be still alive as well, for she could sense a trace of Goddess inside of him.

For her, the reality she faced was quite different. Even if she had lived a full life with Keiichi, he would be long-ago dust on the Earthrealm, the voice of his life and Soul muted by the Real Death. The horrible accident that had claimed him and the lives of her entire family had simply foreshortened his passage through life by perhaps fifty or sixty years. There was no chance of his mortality ever changing; she had accepted this the moment she chose to give her heart to him. She had only desired that Death would come for him by stages, possessing his life at the end with the dignity of acceptance. Instead, Death had ripped him out of her grasp; the harboring love and life she enjoyed became hostile and inclement.

She had silently borne the blackest shadings of sorrow, her Soul had become a tomb for her absent loved ones. Her sweetness could never taste either the fruit or the dust of the Earthrealm or the God's Realm. Life had spared Keiichi no breath at the end, and she was ill-made to follow him by earning her own death.

Now she would have to bear a heavier burden than her own matters of loss.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

THERA:

Having a birthday in the middle of August had always been a mixture of joy and woe for Belldandy Morisato. Of course, birthdays sparkled with fun when she was a little girl in Norway. When her Mom moved to Japan and married, she now had a StepDad to spoil her as well. But she could only be spoiled so much, because her birthday fell in the midst of that timezone that all school-age children dread: the end of summer vacation and the first week of school. As a teenager, this dread took on an even greater pulse of distaste, as it marked the end of enjoying summer in the outdoors. Instead, she was smothered under hot days in classrooms with bellowing, choking brokeass air conditioners that barely kept the temp below 30 degrees Celsius, roughly 85 degrees Fahrenheit. Sweating it out in a nylon sailor fuku when she could be relaxing at her parent's farm, or enjoying the beach, or just being under the open sky in a t-shirt and shorts.

This year, her birthday fell right in the midst of the Jubilee Olympics.

Since her parents were here in Beijing to watch her compete, it was Mom and Dad who invited her out to celebrate her birthday with a trip to the Haiden section of Beijing, NHK camera crew in tow. Of course, a birthday for the press-designated "Phenom" of Japan's v-ball team meant the filming of a 'personal reality' coverage clip, to be squeezed in between nationally broadcast live Olympic coverage over the next two weeks. With her parents and a two-man (cameraman and interviewer woman) crew crammed into the mini-bus cab, they started off in search of a rumored Mongolian Beef restaurant recommended by the locals for its excellent mix of Chinese and Uygar dishes. Amusingly, they got the taxi driver lost on the way there, which brought out a brief spat between Mom and Dad which was more flirtatious than serious. So they got to cruise around northern Beijing for an extra hour as the taxi driver pulled over and got directions from locals by degrees until they reached their destination. Belldandy secretly thought the taxi guy was doing the 'lost in the woods' scam to ream money out of her folks; one of the many arts of dishonesty her Olympic orientation had warned her against.

The dinner was totally great grinds...the Mongolian Beef reminded her of shabu-shabu and the Uygar dishes were very spicy, but not like a curry or stir fry. Of course, her parents were all thumbs with conversation and all ears with questions, which ran counter to Belldandy's own sense of distractedness. Her folks and the newswoman had to repeat their questions several times; and she would shake her head and look silly for a couple seconds. Having two extras at the table chowing down and doing video bytes about the food was an additional headache. Isn't this tasty...do you like that...oh, look at this dish...blab blah blab. She tried to be polite, but her mind was locked in on tomorrow afternoon's final Prelims match with the Americans. If they beat the U.S. team, Japan would advance to the Quarterfinals. If they lost, the rest of the Olympics would be a vacation. Mother was her usual dear self, worried about her ankle and very solicitous about how she was holding up with the injury. At the end of the dinner, the manager of the restaurant came out and made a big production out of the fact that they had an Olympian in his restaurant; embarrassing her and confusing her parents who didn't understand a lick of Chinese. The NHK staff loved it.

Then it was back to Olympic Village, and this time the taxi driver didn't get lost. Belldandy would have kicked his ass if he did, camera crew or not.

Of course, her sempai...who also doubled as a prize idiots and tormenters...had thrown together a little wackiness involving Chinese snacks and alcohol. Chihiro had warned them that Chinese beer was three to four times as strong as Japanese beer by alcohol content, but that didn't stop Tamiya, Ootaki and Kinosh'ta from bribing some security guard to let them sneak the toxic sake in to the Olympic Village.

So here they were, a couple hours later, singing off the fifth-floor balcony of her room like a bunch of drunken aunties at a K-bar.

The Olympic Village security, consisting of inexperienced Red Guards, were hard-pressed to deal with the situation. Being Olympians, she and her crew were semi-immune to threats of being jailed unless they did something outrageous like throw a bed off the balcony. The first few interruptions by security were laugh-riots, fuelled by the Red Guard's attempts at Japanese: "You go make noise, bother people others. Bad sport mouth toilet, make bad Olympics."

The four co-eds were buzzing enough to find these interruptions to be the inspiration for more craziness. The Red Guards would come by every fifteen minutes and beg them in broken Japanese to 'conduct themselves'...which pitched the party into a higher rowdiness. Finally, one of the Red Guards had a stroke of genius and threatened to find out who their coach was, and send _her_ over to deal with them. This brought the Osaka-style party to slammin' halt.

After it all dimmed down and Kinosh'ta was asleep, she read the birthday card Keiichi had left her, which asked "Remember Ajax?" She didn't know what the hell that meant; she didn't know anyone named Ajax.

Despite being moderately intoxicated, there was something about tomorrow that was nagging at her. It wasn't just the practice warmup or the final Prelim game...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

She woke up at 5:30 am with a bangin' hangover...or more accurately, _because_ of the bangin' hangover. Goddamned Chinese beer! No wonder the locals act like idiots after downing a couple bottles. Turning on the TV, remoting it to the Japanese-language Olympic Channel. About five minutes into the broadcast, the sportscaster noted that the Women's Marathon finals starts at 7:30am this morning...

"Holy shit, that's it! The Marathon! How could I forget?" she shouted, waking up Kinosh'ta.

"Leave me alone, Morisato," Kinosh'ta moaned, pulling her blanket over her head until Belldandy pounded on it lightly and explained that this was the Women's Marathon finals. _That_ got Kinosh'ta all bright and awake, like a cup of cold water splashed on a cat's face. A few minutes later, she and her roommate had roused up everyone on the v-ball team by beaning them with leftover meat jun buns from the birthday party. It was ungodly early, but she needed everybody awake so they could catch the transit bus to the National Stadium to watch the running of the marathon.

Beijing is hazy in the summer, which makes morning hours almost ghost-like with fog. They arrived at National Stadium at 7:10sm dressed in their warm-up hoodies, jackets and ID badges. Unlike regular spectators, Olympic athletes had a gold card at their disposal in the form of their athletic badge, allowing them almost as much free run of the place as the press corps. When they explained that they here to support Takahashi from their homeland, the security guys generously guided them to the 'holding area'; a small area located in the corner of the athletic field, cordoned off with nylon roping. There, they could lean against the wall and watch the race from the corner of the athletic field. She recognized several track and field athletes from Japan's Olympic delegation, both men and women. Both 15000 meter runners and the two marathon guys were here. Her team wasn't the only squad from Japan's Women's Delegation: the field hockey team was here on their day off, and a few players from the basketball team were here as well.

Japan's Women's Field Hockey team was making waves of their own, as they had shocked everyone by sweeping through their A Pool prelims without a loss. If they won tomorrow, they would be in the Semis and have a shot at a medal.

It was a good comradarie to be among her peers, and very quickly she was making new friends and swapping stories. Naturally, the women from the basketball teams jokingly tried to get her to 'defect' to their team, because her height and speed would make her perfect for the center position. They noted that she was only one of a handful of very tall women in the competition, and one of only two women in the Olympics in the 2.10 meter range.

They would have to bring up Athenle.

Belldandy forced herself to back off from contemplating her Valkyrie opponent, shifting her attention towards the track as the runners lined up. Any time she thought of Athenle, she realized that it was the wrong mindset to be occupied with. Looking at the bigscreen, she could see the starting staging area in front of Tian'anmen Square, swarmed by at least a hundred thousand spectators. Takahashi was in the center of the line of runners, numbering roughly 80 women from 60 countries. She had finished 6th overall in the qualifying heats prior to the Olympics. Best in Asia, but behind the US, the Nigerian and the German-Euro runners who had won their continental qualifications. Takahashi looked poised and ready to run the race of her life. Inside the stadium, the field was filling up with entertainers whose role would be to keep the spectators busy for the two hours it would take before the runners approached the stadium.

The running of the marathon was one of the _marquee_ events of the Olympics: in honor of this, there would be no other events scheduled in the stadium until the first group of marathon front-runners crossed the finish line. No practice sessions for the track-and-field athletes would be allowed; the entire athletic field was empty and silent. A ring of drummers along the perimeter of the race track began to drum a countdown with steady drumming, and when the starting gun fired off, a group of Tibetans blew a loud trump through their huge ancient brass blow-horns.

As the runners began their long arduous race, Belldandy hoped that the haze would clear...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

It would take a little over two hours before the marathoners would return to the stadium for their final lap. The marathon was held early in the day so it wouldn't interfere with traffic too much, and to prevent the daily smog and heat from overcoming the runners. Beijing was by nature an atmospheric 'catchment' for hazy air and smog; heavy industrialization coupled with wind cycles blowing dust from interior Asian deserts combined to make the air a brew of particulate congestion.

The scoreboard updated periodically with the progress of the race, but it was only in Chinese, English and French. The stadium HDTV big screen nearest to them alternated between the marathon and other events, so every ten minutes, she would get about two minutes of marathon coverage to check Takahashi's progress. Belldandy had to ask several times where Takahashi was positioned in the race, because her command of English wasn't all that much of a command. She had other priorities in high school, such as honing her v-ball skills, harassing guys, and working on her parent's farm to earn a little extra spending yen. Like many girls in high school, she thought English was a pain in the ass.

Twenty minutes into the race, the bigscreen showed the marathoners approaching the route's return lap around Tian'anmen Square, Belldandy noticed that the stadium had been steadily filling up with spectators; it was almost 3/4 full. Soon, the women were running through the Temple of Heaven park, another famous Beijing landmark. It was amazing to see the group running through wide avenues with skyscrapers and then suddenly a few minutes later shifting course and centuries as they coursed through ancient parks and temples. Most of the marathoners were running in the 'herd', with a few women striding ahead of the queue of runners as they turned onto a freeway, going north towards another business district. Takahashi was at the head of the herd of runners, and at the midway point, some of the women were already dropping out from exhaustion and leg cramps. They turned east along a wide avenue and ran into a park that was almost a thousand years old. They exited the Tang Park and turned left, their track-path taking them into Beijing University with its famous 'twin tower' library and admin buildings, each styled after the Chrysler Building in New York City. They ran along the pagoda-lined garden route and then onto another hub freeway. Several women had pulled out of in front of the forty or so women remaining in the race. They dashed down an offramp and onto another wide avenue, bordered by huge 200m modern skyscrapers. The women finally reached the last watering tables and turned left onto the avenue concourse towards the stadium on the hub avenue. Another five minutes and they would be running through the tunnel ramp back into National Stadium. Takahashi was running a close third or fourth. Immediately, all the Japanese athletes started cheering her on. Takahashi was a legend in her own right, but was also a mentor to many of the women who were here. A number of women and men in the athletic and team events remembered watching an 18 year-old unknown from Japan race her first amazing victory 24 years ago, back at the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles, setting a new World Record. Most were just children, many not even in primary school.

Ten years before she was born, back when _her own mother was in grade school _in Norway.

Takahashi had won an unprecedented six gold medals in her event, and had universally earned the nickname "The Immortal" by the Japanese and many other competing nations. This was her 'retirement race', and she wasn't expected to be in the running for the medals at all. Yet, she pulled it together and won out her heats with impressive times, and now she was here in Beijing. A number of her fellow Women's Delegation athletes were clearly dispirited as the big screen display showed the runners approaching the entryway tunnel to the stadium, Takahashi trailing the frontrunners by about three or four meters. Several sighed sadly that there was no way Takahashi could catch up this late in the Women's Marathon.

Belldandy knew better than count Takahashi out, having an experienced eye for track events that some of the others lacked. Alongside v-ball, she had participated in her chosen sport, the hurdles, all through junior and senior high. Being on the track team kept her in shape during the v-ball off-season and gave her gym access she normally wouldn't have. Because of her height, it was a no-brainer for her coaches to steer her towards the hurdles events. However, her height worked against her; wind resistance had overgained her efforts whenever she competed against shorter girls, which was almost all the time. Despite this, she had made it all the way to the Niigata Prefectural championships. Advantaged by her track and field experience, she noticed two factors that most of the other women wouldn't be able to identify. She glanced at one of the men scheduled to run in track race events and nodded her head...and he nodded back, confirming what she was seeing.

Takahashi had a kick-stride, while the two women in front of her were lock-strided. Incredibly, the stadium clock had a "WR" next to the timer display. As the runners entered the stadium, she heard a tell-tale shrieking whistle from somewhere off to the side. Coach Chihiro was here as well, cheering on Japan's senior female athlete.

_"C'mon Taki!" "Afterburners!" "You go girl!" "Kick it, kick it!" "Keep it up!" "Do it to it!" "Bring it home for us!"_

As Takahashi ran past their group, Belldandy joined in as the cheers and encouragements from her fellow athletes resounded boisterously. She could discern a number of male voices in the mix; the guys all yelling rowdy-loudy. Belldandy doubted that Takahashi even heard them. Takahashi certainly didn't have time to glance towards the gathering of Japanese athletes. Even a slight turn of her head would shave a miniscule amount of time off her finish, and throw her off her rhythm. Belldandy and her group were positioned at the first turn, and as the three front runners passed the second turn, the crowd threw its acclaim into the stadium air with an increasingly loud roaring.

From where she was standing, there was no visible difference in position. The bigscreen was displaying the video-feed from the track-mount camera; the image looked like a single woman with six legs racing down the track pitch. It shifted to another camera and the three were in a dead heat. This race was going to come right down to the wire...

Takahashi looked beautiful, her entire being focused on her race, her face shined with sweat and determination, a salt-n-pepper short grey ponytail bouncing against her back. A forty year-old running her last race...

...pulling ahead just by a half stride as they rounded the final turn.

The other two marathoners picked up their pace, as it was gut-check "burn to earn" at this point. Glancing quickly at the scoring board, Belldandy felt a shiver as the "WR" remained next to all three leaders.

_All three were running at a world record pace!!_

The crowd was roaring like a jet airliner as the three women closed in on the tape. It would be too close to tell by sight, this would be a replay finish. As the three burst into the tape, Takahashi showed why she was a seasoned champion marathoner, leaning forward right at the critical moment...appearing to dive towards the tape to finish ahead of her two competitors. The lunge completely jerked her off her running rhythm and she stumbled and fell face first, eating track because she had literally leaped into the tape at the finish.

Takahashi had won her Gold Medal.

Instantly, Belldandy flashed on a memory; an eleven year-old girl watching this very same racing event from a farm house with her Mom and Stepdad, cheering Japan's premier female athlete and secretly wishing "I want to be like her someday."

As Takahashi lay crumpled and gasping on the track, Belldandy and fifty other women and men from Japan's Olympic Delegation were whooping it up, cheering, screaming and jumping up and down like little kids, high-fives to each other mixed with joyful air punches. Ootaki was doing her trademark air guitar leaping to accent her shouting.

"Fucking hey, I can't believe it!" she heard Coach Chihiro exclaim as the final time results were displayed:

_Old World Record: 2:15.25_

_New World Record: 2:14.44_

She watched Takahashi slowly got up on her hands and knees, and then sit back down on the track, too exhausted to stand up on her feet. The Red Guards who had been their escort and keepers for the last two hours were noticeably caught up in the drama as much as the Japanese athletes. With a true Olympian spirit of sportsmanship and esprite, they opened up the cordon ropes and motioned them onto the track with waves of their flashlights. With several of them escorting the group of athletes, they jogged down the track, surrounded a surprised Takahashi, and hoisted her up on their shoulders to carry her around the track in the victory lap she was too exhausted to run by herself.

The Stadium crowd was going nuts, every one of a hundred and twenty thousand or more spectators in the stands loving every moment of it. Fans friskily waving Japanese flags and pennants were running down the stands to position themselves as close to the track as they could manage as she and her fellow Japanese paraded Takahashi around the track. She noticed a father and two girls about her age right next to the lip of the stands, cheering and crying. Possibly Takahashi's husband and two daughters.

Fifteen minutes later, Belldandy and her fellow Japanese Olympians had a front row view as Takahashi...with bandaged knees and elbows from her wrestling bout with the track and with athletic history...received the laurel crown, bouquet of roses, and then the Gold Medal. As the huge Rising Sun flag was raised up on the mast the end of the stadium in front of the lit Olympic torch, and then the familiar solemn strains of the Kimigayo sounding to the now-hushed stadium, Belldandy felt a sense of reverence towards her 'super-sempai' Takahashi. She felt extremely honored just to witness this race; Takahashi in her final run had displayed the heart of a true champion. Takahashi smiled through her tears, and Belldandy remembered what the marathoner had told her and her teammates during their first dinner at Olympic Village:

_"Make every effort for your team...your personal attempt, with the mindset that you are shooting for a world record, not just your personal best."_

Ironically, Takahashi's words had taken on a new meaning. In her final marathon, she had eclipsed the world record by an incredible _forty seconds_ in a haze-filled Beijing that was predicted to add two to five minutes on the marathon just because of the poor air quality. Even more, she had made her effort for the team...the entire Japanese Women's Delegation, by excelling her personal best and beating a field of twenty and thirty year-olds.

Inspired by Takahashi's feat, Belldandy and her teammates completely amazed themselves and Coach Chihiro by sweeping the American team in three sets in their final Prelim match, qualifying them for the Quarterfinals with a 3-1 record. But the victory came with a price, as two key players on her team suffered injuries. Sato, a veteran of two prior Olympics, had broken her thumb on a lunging dig and was given a medical red-card for the rest of the games. This was a dear blow to the team, because Sato was the more experienced and skilled of the two liberos, the team's defensive specialists. She was also the unofficial 'den mother' to all the college-aged women on the team. Sugihara, who was Ootaki's counterpart in the middle hitter role and fourth tallest attacker on the team, had her knee blow out in the third set and was doubtful for the rest of the Games. So now they were ten, which put pressure on their attackers and shifted Tamiya into a more defensive role.

The next day, the Japanese Women's field hockey team made history for Japan by beating the favored Korean team and winning their continental qualifications match, which placed them into the medal rounds at the Olympics for the first time ever.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

SOMEWHERE:

"I know this is painful for you to hear, especially from me. But I need to make it clear to all of you that our reunion is only a shadow of the truth. We've been conditioned by the events over the course of our lives to want to believe in this reunion, but we cannot hold to that belief. In our hearts, this situation is totally wonderful, beautiful and enriching. We've received a restoration of faith and love, one that was unexpected and miraculous. But in a wider view, the circumstances that have gathered us together have created a situation that simply _isn't right_. We don't belong together in this certain way. Our emotional bonds are strong, but beyond these are deeply troubling matters," Belldandy repeated herself.

"Each of you surely must sense a reservation or hesitance in your hearts. This is the guiding voice of your deepmost Soul telling you that we aren't meant for each other. We _do_ belong to each other; I know that I'm supposed to be with Keiichi, and I know that both of you, Keleste and Keiyasu, are my children. With a wholeness of my heart, I wish that there was no shadowing of uncertainty. But I'm a Norn, and I have an...expertise...in matters of Time that none of you possess. All I can say is this: we cannot remain together because doing so will be harmful to us all."

"How can you say that!!" Keleste shouted angrily. "Do you have any idea how we feel? We _need_ you! We _needed_ a Mother in our lives, for our whole lives! We've been desperate-lonely for you! Now, you're saying that we aren't supposed to be together? That I'm not supposed to be your daughter? Or are you just rejecting us for some other reason?"

"No!! How could I possibly reject you, Keleste?!" Belldandy snapped back, shocked and hurt that the young Goddess could even bring regard to such a idea.

"You're my _daughter_! Through and through, all my Goddesses senses tell me this! But you're also _not_ my daughter, because you're from my Future. The God's Realm I come from is named Nulln; your God's Realm has a totally different name. I've just woken up from being in the grip of some kind of madness for forty millennia. Creating a timeline from when I first met 'my' Keiichi until now, about 40,000 years have passed. You both would be only Four Decas old if you were in the Nulln that Peorth and I come from. From my perspective of Time, I'm only in my Twenty-Fourth Deca. From your perspective of Time, you both are almost Fifteen Decas in age. The Earthrealm in your experience has been a dead planet for 150,000 years, while the Earthrealm I knew was nearly depopulated 40,000 years ago. If both Earthrealms had the same timeline...the mortal's self-destruction...it would mean that I come from Ten Decas in your past. If I was your true Mother, I would have had the two of you as my children before my Tenth Deca. We both know that the Almighty would not permit any Goddess to be a parent at such a young age," Belldandy patiently explained.

"But Bell-chan, I have to agree with Keleste," Keiichi added. "I was going to marry you back on the Earthrealm. Instead, I looked on helplessly as you...or someone almost exactly like you...turned murderous against me and then was killed! Back there, back then; some other place in Time, if what you're saying is true. Putting all that aside, why should I care about who's from what point in time? The only meaningful fact to me is that I..I just don't want to lose you again! I..I don't know if I could live without you in my life. Peorth described your mental state as once being 'insane' or 'disconnected from reality' a little while back. I need to ask you: are you able to tell the difference between being realistic versus being confused? Could you be experiencing a disorientation or a leftover effect without being aware of it? I, and Keleste and Keiyasu, belong here with you. You can't just turn your back on us! Can't you make it work? Please?"

"Even if there's another Belldandy that you're supposed to be with? Your _true_ Belldandy, who would live out the rest of her days without you? Would you want that for her?" Belldandy quickly asserted.

"This totally sucks!" Cevn interjected. "But she's trying really hard to be reasonable, not cruel. I understand where she's coming from. It's a bitter pill to swallow, but it may be the truth we have to face. If you stay with her and she's the 'wrong' Belldandy, then the 'real' Belldandy intended for you guys will end up without her boyfriend or her children. Could you live with yourselves, knowing that a moment of selfishness now could tally such a high price for yourselves and others later?"

"You stupid cyborg!" Keiyasu argued. "What the hell do you know about paying a high price? The high price my sister and I paid _was an entire lifetime without a mother_! You have no idea how hard it's been..."

"CHILDREN!" Belldandy shouted. "I want you both to really think hard about this for a minute. What if there is a mother out there who has _waited her entire life for you_? Each of you come from an era removed a hundred millennia in the future of the 'time' that I live. We all know this. But this also implies that 150,000 years ago in your past, your actual Mother gave birth to you. You aren't just some figment of imagination; there's a Goddess out there somewhere that loved you and cared enough for you to _give birth_ to both of you. I don't know why she and you were separated; but I can see reason to believe that she still exists. We need to stop letting our emotions run rampant for a moment and just calm ourselves down. What has brought us all to be in this situation? This Keiichi...saw his 'Belldandy' killed, annihilated by the combined forces of the Regents of his God's and Demon's Realms. You found four other children in Vanagdrasil, your Demon's Realm, that were 'ghosts' in your minds. The God's Realm I live in is called Nulln, while the Demon's Realm is called Loux. You and I both said that Gods cannot travel to the Demon's Realm, yet you also said that you did travel to..."

"Excuse me, Belldandy," Cevn interrupted. "Did you say that Gods and Demons cannot travel between their Realms? Yggdrasil and Vanagdrasil? Nulln and Loux, which rhymes with 'coax'? That's simply not true."

"What would you know about what's true and what isn't true? You're half-robot, and the rest of you is an Earthrealm mortal, I hate to break it to you, but your species is about two million years behind us in the evolutionary method. Should I also mention that your cyborganic construct is so primitive, I'm amazed that it even works?" Peorth interjected.

"Ever hear of a Swarp Hypernality, Peorth? A Swarp Gate? An Aumatrix?" Cevn answered by questioning her, offended by her prompt dismissal of his opinion.

"What does any of this have to do with anything?" Keleste shouted angrily.

"Hey, waitaminute, sis! It totally has to do with what we're discussing!" Keiyasu added. "Those two Demon kids...the ones that are almost our age...got scolded mega-huge by their Demoness Mother for going to the God's Realm by something called an Aumatrix. Which also implies that the two Demon kids we met were _already in Yggdrasil_ prior to you and I encountering them in Vanagdrasil. The two Goddesses said their Mom, Skuld, was all types of mad at them for sneaking off from the Earthrealm to Yggdrasil. Even more jacked, the two Goddess girls claimed to have _visas_ given to them by the Lord. The Dark Lord even said that the visas were part of Him, serving as a guarantee against harm while in the Demon's Realm. A safe passage visa for Gods who are traveling in the Demon's Realm? No way! That's full-on crazy, but there they were when we arrived on the scene."

"You're referring to the glowy-red magatama-shaped objects that the cutesy Goddess girl Ulfryn had!" Keleste noted. "She and the tomboy Goddess girl Pryzm both said that the Dark Lord of the Demons couldn't harm them because of this. Ahhhh, now it's all coming back to me! We got there by using a modified Soul Mirror..."

"Did you say a Soul Mirror?" Peorth and Belldandy both asked aloud.

"That's impossible! Soul Mirrors don't exist in Yggdrasil!" Peorth exclaimed in a high-pitched voice. "Soul Mirrors are rumored to only exist in the Afterlife Realm, but the Almighty will neither confirm or deny this rumor. So no one really knows if this is true or not. You'd have to die the Real Death to find out for sure if the Soul Mirrors are there."

"Which still doesn't explain how you two could use a device to create a Soul Mirror out of thin air, so you could kidnap us right before I was to be exiled to the Well of Urd. If there can be no Soul Mirrors in Yggdrasil, how is it that _you_ claim to have one?" Belldandy questioned, gesturing at the floating portal nearby. A portal that was now as dark as starless space, because it had closed up after she and Peorth were brought here.

"This is majorly messed up!" Keleste exclaimed. "It's almost as if we're not only from different times, but from different places as well. We have a few Soul Mirrors in the Yggdrasil that we come from. We used one to find the 'ghosties', but we didn't take it with us. This device that our Stepmom Skuld created was able to take a Soul Mirror and turn it into an actual spatial 'door' that we then could use to meet the other kids."

"What if we are from _different _places?" Keiichi interjected. "Bell-chan...er, Belldandy says that the Earthrealm of her experience was destroyed during some weird biological..."

"Destroyed by their own avarice, manifested by a nanological plague. Believe me, it was very painful to witness," Peorth corrected.

"...yeah, what Peorth just said," Keiichi continued. "We've spent some time together, and we've been able to swap much of our life histories while we were rebuilding Skuld's 'Gate-to-Mirror' device. I feel like I know you both pretty well, and I remember you telling me that your Earthrealm was completely devastated by a nuclear war, to the point where no life existed on it at all due excessive radiation levels. Obviously, two different Earthrealms, with two different histories. This is crystal clear to all of us, but how do you explain _my_ Earthrealm? The one I lived in with Bell-chan, where the year was 20XX and the Earthrealm was filled with six billion people? Keleste and Keiyasu, you both saw my Earthrealm with your own eyes. How could you possibly hang onto the belief that both Earthrealms are the same?"

"Score one for the mortals!" Cevn said cheerfully, giving Keiichi a slap on the back. Keiichi's observation had drawn silence out of the group, because it seemed inarguable.

"You guys...remember how we sat down and talked story about our lives when we first met here in this nothingplace of a planet? Now that Belldandy and Peorth are here, maybe we should do it again. One of us might come up with an insight while we're reviewing our lives with each other. Besides, it'll also kill some time; this limbo-land is a total drag on the nerves," Keleste offered.

"Hey, it worked last time," Keiichi agreed. "This time, I'll be the one to start..."

"I agree. We may gain an explanation for our circumstances by doing so," Belldandy asserted in an even voice. "No matter what we learn, I do know the appropriate course we need to take. If there exists even the slightest possibility that we belong in some other configuration of the TimeStream, a configuration that is home to our _appropriate and truthful_ families...then we must make the attempt to reunite with them."

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

As soon as Keiichi finished his story, Belldandy's suspicions that he wasn't 'the' Keiichi she had lost forty millennia ago were absolutely confirmed. This Keiichi's life had both subtle and significant differences. Her Keiichi had proposed marriage after he rescued her and Skuld from the evil marabout in Tindouf Algeria, while this Keiichi had proposed before his Belldandy's parents had dispatched him to their Trial of Preparedness. In her experience with Keiichi, there was no cyborg named Cevn, unlike this Cevn that Keiichi was friendly towards. Cevn in her reality was a mortal that her older sister seemed to be in love with, but they never got past the stage of arguing, despite her and Skuld's efforts to try and induce them to go on a date. Her Keiichi struggled to deal with his younger sister Megumi all the time, because she was constantly getting in trouble with guys and the police. In contrast, this Keiichi had a younger sister Megumi who was very responsible, who was attending the same Earthrealm college that he attended. This Keiichi and 'her' Keiichi had made the same wish: "To be with you for all time". But his wish request was answered instantly, while the Keiichi she fell in love with had to wait several months because the Nulln Mainframe had to fully evaluate such an unusual wish request.

That delay was the entire reason why she had adequate time to discover her feelings towards him. The 'other' Belldandy must have had it hard; she was immediately thrust into an intimate living situation with a mortal she hardly even knew. Yet she also had fallen in love with 'her' Keiichi within a year of granting his wish.

"Incredible" didn't even begin to describe the coincidence.

He shifted his narrative and described Mara, 'his' Belldandy's older sister who was a half-Demoness half-Goddess. This was very different than her own experience. Her older sister Mara was a full Demoness living in the Demon's Realm of Loux. Keiichi described numerous episodes where Mara had harassed him and 'his' Belldandy, which in her experience would have been an absurdity. Her older sister Mara would never do anything to harm her or any mortal she was assigned to. Besides, there seemed to be a fault-prevention in effect: the Ultimate Force prevented she and Mara from ever being designated for the same mortal. Keiichi related how 'his' Mara had finally been reassigned to head a new office called DMSO, apparently a successor office to the Demon Grief Office in his reality. He noted that Mara was now more of an "aggressive older sister type" than a Demoness out for blood. Amazingly, Mara even lived at their temple home from time to time when she needed a 'vacation'. In Nulln, Gods and Demons had very limited communication in almost all circumstances, excepting Doublet meetings and VR competitions. However, she and Skuld were distinguished from this limitation because their sisters Urd and Mara were of the Demons; they could communicate more often and even meet on mortal planets. But when her family died, an anomaly in the Doublet System arose and prevented her from having any contact with Mara at all.

Keiichi's narrative was disturbing on many levels to her, because he was describing daily life with her two sisters; pulling the tides back so her own island of emotional loss was exposed to the view of her heart once again. Yet, her heart-felt grief wasn't as intense as before.

His description of his life wasn't all so serious, as Keiichi finished by discussing Peorth in his reality, who was a frequent visitor to his temple home. His experience of Peorth was that of a flirtatious virago of a Goddess, apparently stuck in some teenage "boy-crazy" stage of development...clearly the opposite of the officious and responsible Peorth who had been her best friend for most of her life. When she observed Peorth's reaction of embarrassment and disgust while Keiichi described her counterpart, she couldn't hold back the belly-laughs...

Which brought her thoughts back to longing for 'her' Keiichi. She recalled that the last time she had laughed so hard was when he was still alive, laughing at how he had completely fooled her captors in the Algerian marabout's camp when he freed her and Skuld. She felt bedeviled by her sadness again, but it didn't seem so overwhelming now that another Keiichi was here in the flesh. His very presence was soothing her, comforting her.

The two children described their lives as being centered around a intense search for their parents. It was heart-rending to hear, especially from two Divines so young. Especially in the light of her discovery that they weren't _exactly_ Mother and children.

Her best friend Peorth eased into her life story with descriptions of a routine and cheerful childhood in Nulln; but when Belldandy had lost her family and Keiichi, all that joy was devoured. Her sister Goddess's bearing swiftly had become a daily struggle just to reconcile herself with the loss of her own SoulMate: Keiichi's Angel, Heroic Vermillion Swift. She explained how the Almighty had tasked her with organizing the funeral for her family and Keiichi, because she was the closest friend of the family.

Peorth's narrative held particular interest to her, because of their long shared history as best friends. Also, Belldandy had missed out on Four Decas of Peorth's life: she wanted to learn everything she could so that she could make up for lost time. But Peorth spun a different tale, noting that she had endured a heavy emotional toll to conduct a funeral while mourning the loss of _her_ own boyfriend. Peorth had loved Heroic Vermillion Swift since the day of his birth from the Angel's Egg, a relationship which only bonded her even closer to Belldandy. But unlike Keiichi, who had left the flesh in a single instance when he drowned in the Mediterranean Sea, Heroic Vermillion Swift simply faded away over a period of several weeks.

"Oh..my..Lord, Peorth! I never knew," Belldandy said, horrified by Peorth's teary-eyed description of watching her loved one dissolve away while she was utterly helpless to intervene. Heroic Vermillion Swift had lost his mortal 'anchor', and nothing could be done. For the first time since Keiichi's death, she felt tragedy anew from the perspective of another. Someone else's pain. Unbelievably, Peorth had managed the funeral at the same time! She indicated that she went through a grieving period that required many visits to the Ethiopsylogic Clinic. Unlike herself, Peorth was able to define a truce with Death.

She had been wearing her loss on the edge of her being, dressing in funeral rainments like a widow, suffused with visible agony. But Peorth had buried her loss deep in her heart and had carried on with the vigors of life as a Goddess. Peorth described the many times she accompanied her to the Cathedral of Memories or other places of solace and solitude; just to be there when she emerged from her mourning. All for the hope that she wouldn't feel alone in her grieving, and that the presence of her best friend would perhaps restore her lost sanity. Belldandy had no idea that her friend had coursed such a true path of caring devotion to her! Peorth finally finished by describing how Belldandy had said 'thank you' in a broken voice right before the kids brought her here...two words that were more than enough reward for forty thousand years of chaperoning. For Belldandy had realized from her narrative that Peorth's role in her life had been that of a guardian; protecting her as one would protect a very young child. When her mind seemed to be flayed by the agonies she was feeling in her heart, she could often distantly sense a figure that seemed to anchor her in sanity just enough that she didn't detach into total emotional chaos. Belldandy now recognized that dimly experienced shadow-being...it had been Peorth.

Wordlessly, she floated over to her emotionally distraught friend and encouraged her to cry the tears she had been holding in for Heroic Vermillion Swift. Peorth looked at her with a trembling face, and then clutched her as she howled, sobbing into her shoulder...tears that were forty thousands years overdue for a release.

Once again, the cyborg Cevn had experienced a major malfunction right at the point where Peorth was describing how LinTan at the Ethiopsylogic Clinic had assessed Belldandy's being as 'energy isolated' from her Soul due to an unknown type of affliction. This time, Belldandy was the one to repair him; his motor control interfaces had become disrupted to the point where he was experiencing random and dangerous movements of his extremities.

Belldandy followed her friend, and began by describing her life growing up in Nulln, observing Keiichi closely for his reactions. When Urd turned Eighteen Decas and was assigned the Norn of the Past, it automatically mandated she and Skuld to become Norns; fulfilling the requirement that the Norns be three sisters. She discussed how she had been granted the Norn role at Sixteen Decamillennia, although she had known several Decas prior that she would be assigned Norn of the Present. Keiichi was keenly surprised when she mentioned that Urd and Skuld got along very well with each other, and that they didn't live in the shrine compound with her and Keiichi. He reacted curiously when she noted that Urd and Skuld divided their time between Nulln and the Earthrealm; evidently 'his' Urd and Skuld actually lived on the Earthrealm with him. She described how her younger sister Skuld was being mentored by Lokii, the head of the Deliberate Chaos Office. This contrasted sharply with the Skuld of his experience, who was assigned as an Earthrealm Trainee. The biggest shock on his face was when she noted that she and Keiichi were planning to have children. He seemed very upset at this, and learned that in his reality, Gods and Mortals couldn't create a unitylife in the form of an infant. This was a consideration she had never thought of. There was no precedent in Nulln history for a Goddess and a mortal to procreate; she and Keiichi simply had assumed that they could have children in a fashion normal for mortal species. She felt very discomfited by how strongly he had reacted with disappointment when she talked about planning a family and children with her beloved Keiichi. What if his claim was somehow true...that she and Keiichi _couldn't_ safely have children? She finally had to close herself away from talking any further, as it very trialsome to describe the events leading up to Keiichi and her family's deaths; after that her mind was a blank until just recently.

Belldandy knew that Keiichi knew that she wasn't 'his' Belldandy.

She felt him distancing himself emotionally, which brought a sway of compassion for him and rekindled a sense of her own loss. How difficult it must be for him to watch 'his' Belldandy die, and then encounter the children and her...only to learn that she wasn't 'his' Belldandy! She wanted to comfort him and assure him that events would manifest in such a way that 'his' Belldandy would be reunited with her. He was a total stranger, living and breathing in the form of her beloved boyfriend, and yet he was Keiichi and she couldn't resist consoling him. Setting everything aside, she hugged herself to him and swayed him gently in mid-air, feeling his confusion and sadness diminish.

The cyborg Cevn finished their roundabout of life narratives, and presented a confusing account of living 89 millennia on a planet called "Lost", explaining that he had lived with Keiichi for two years. He mentioned falling in love with 'his' Urd and starting a relationship, which Urd no longer remembered because of some type of amnesia. Cevn added that he had been to Vanagdrasil, where he encountered Keleste and Keiyasu for the first time. But he didn't know how he had arrived there. Vanagdrasil in 'his' reality had some kind of portals called "Aumatrixes". Finally, Cevn noted that he saw himself in Keiichi's Earthrealm and had merged with his 'other' mechanical self who had been attending Keiichi's wedding.

She realized that he was either schizophrenic, or had suffered significant brain injury from the period that his cyborganic systems faulted.

However, one aspect of Cevn's self-description truly puzzled her. He had claimed that he had been possessed by some kind of poltergeist that was neither God or Demon, but was more destructive than both.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Could it be possible to find other Soul Mirrors by creating something like an inverse panopticon?" Cevn asked.

His theory was simple in the sense of refractive optics: place one mirror in opposition to another, and a theoretically infinite series of progressively smaller mirror-images would reflect on both mirrors. What he then proposed was a leap of faith; if they stood between the two Soul Mirrors facing each other, their group would be presented with a vast assemblage of alternate realities as the Soul Mirrors would 'reflect' each other's apertures. Instead of a single 'back door' in a single reality, they would have a single observation point that possessed manifold observational properties. His assumption rested on the notion that the progression of portals-within-portals in each Soul Mirror would be overwhelming for everyone, except Belldandy and Peorth. The two Goddesses could scan several million of these 'back doors' in short order to sort out the portals until they found an exit point within the locale of more Soul Mirrors. Once they located an appropriate alternate TimeStream, Keleste would attempt to delimit or 'filter' out all extraneous 'doorways' mirrored in the opposite Soul Mirror. By eliminating all but the 'correct' exit, one or two of the Divines could then use the conduit to enter the other TimeStreams and to obtain further Soul Mirrors. If they succeeded in this effort, the new Soul Mirrors could then be transformed by Keleste and Keiyasu into 'exit portals' that they could use to transit back and forth between here and the other realities. In order to get the entire effect, Cevn claimed that they needed eight Soul Mirrors, which would then allow them to look into _any_ alternative Yggdrasil.

They would have to either voyage into another place, another God's Realm, and acquire a second Soul Mirror. The other alternative wasn't actionable at all: a journey to the Mid-Light Realm, which Cevn claimed was the residence of Death Himself. The most extreme hazard in either case would be the uncertainty that a Soul Mirror could be used as a 'gate' to conduct another Soul Mirror back to here.

It seemed like a crazy idea to everyone except Keiichi and Peorth.

"Let's think about this instead of just dismissing it. Keleste and Keiyasu have traveled through the Soul Mirror three times. Like me, they came here via a Guardian Gate that was somehow converted into a Soul Mirror with a portal-type exit. Retrieving Belldandy and Peorth required two more trips through the Soul Mirror. The question begs to be asked...is this mirror or gate that we recently discovered the _same_ Soul Mirror as the one we used to arrive here?" Keiichi brought up.

"There's no way we can confirm if it is or isn't the same 'gateway'," Keleste countered. "Or if it even is a true Soul Mirror. This device that we've been using to jump around from one place to another seems to _create_ Soul Mirrors by converting Gates, specifically the Gate of Judgement."

"What's a Gate of Judgement?" Belldandy asked, which brought raised eyebrows from Keiichi and Cevn.

"It's a Gate that proves whether a God or Goddess love each other. If they do, then it's all good. But if there is a slenderest doubt, it changes them so that they cannot be in love with each other," Keiichi briefly explained.

"That's inhumane! It's no wonder that such a Gate doesn't exist in Nulln!" Peorth interjected. "It's almost monstrous, because it can be used to erase love!"

"Which is why we're here, in a sense," Keiichi noted. "Bell-chan and I..._my_ Belldandy, were going to get married and use the Gate of Judgement to put a Seal on our love. That's how the Gods become married; what they called Bonded in Yggdrasil. We just wanted to Bond in keeping with Yggdrasilian tradition."

"So why all the hassle? Why not just go and grab a Gate of Judgement, you guys!" Keiyasu interjected excitedly. "Chillout on the Soul Mirrors idea! We didn't work like crazy to figure out Skuld's device just to let it find a single Gate. We can totally use it to find other Gates. Even more cool, we won't have to dive into some crazyass situation to search for them. Sis and I already been there, done that. We can use our Gate...the one we just opened...to take us right to the other Gates. Then we just jump in and swoop 'em, just like we did with these two," Keiyasu exclaimed excitedly.

"I'm Peorth, and she's Belldandy...and if you start calling us 'these two' one more time, I'm going to swoop _you_! I'll make it clear how much I didn't appreciate being kidnapped and choked with my own long strand of hair," Peorth groused, feeling angry that she and her friend Belldandy had been insulted by these two kids. A mere few hours earlier, they were climbing all over Belldandy because they thought she was their Mother.

"We should all remain calm. We all have different viewpoints, different experiences to bring to bear upon our dilemma. But we must remember that _experience talks, but wisdom listens_," Belldandy interjected, causing Peorth to momentarily dropjaw and then break into a grin.

"Belldandy, you're definitely back to yourself, my long-lost best friend. It's been so long since you've been _you_," she praised as she floated over and flourished a rose by sleight-of hand, and then handed it to her.

Keleste and Keiyasu were stunned, not by the words of the truism, but by how it had been expressed by the Goddess Belldandy. Any fool could say such words, which would be pretty stupid considering the source. It was a very simple idea, but it held a profound meaning. Even using a human voice for the benefit of the mortals, this Belldandy had shut down everyone's tension with a brief reminder to keep sensible instead of senselessly panicking.

"Is this the power of a Mother?" Keleste said in a hushed voice.

"Yes it is Keleste. Truly so, because my capacity for bearing wisdom is inherited from my Mother. I could feel my Mother's strength in much the same way when I was your age. It's also the power of a Norn," Belldandy answered. "Peorth may not be a Norn, but she's a Rune...and not just any Rune. Her Rune is Peorth, which represents Eternity as Mystery...both chaos and integration...but couched within unknowns. Her strength or 'specialty' therefore is revelation; to bring forth the unknowable from within the deepest stratum of the intrinsic. In her own way, she is just a powerful as I. My division of activity is Time, specifically the Present. Her responsibility concerning Time concerns the interstitials between Time and Space, to ensure that situations align within the chaos of disorganization and the unity of organization. We both do a type of balancing act..."

"...and when you find your real Mother, she's gonna be just as wise and gentle and beautiful!" Keiichi finished. "This is why we need to give up on our own and each other's dreams for now...so that we can find each other's _realities_. We can all go home to where we belong. But no matter what, we're an extended family in a sense, and if we allow ourselves to remember that, we'll help everyone here to find their real family."

Keiichi looked at Cevn, who seemed to be present in body but not mind. Seeing his friend this way, he knew that another brainstorm was coming...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Keiyasu triggered the Gate, which immediately portaled open to the last position of its focus; the vista of the Well of Urd where they had encountered Belldandy and Peorth. Activating it with a complex magic, he nodded to his sister and handed her the device, since she was the techie.

Belldandy was shuddering at the sight of the Well of Urd, recognizing that she had been exiled there by the Almighty not as a punishment, but to protect herself and others. She had come within minutes of being exiled away from Nulln for Fifty Decas! She felt Peorth rest a soothing arm around her shoulders; her sister Goddess clearly intuiting her tensions and trying to ease them by gently massaging her back. She could distantly remember some kind of trial, with Peorth defending her. Once again, Peorth had been her near-sister in everything but name. A sister not by familial kin but by the spirit of a deeply loving friendship for her.

"It goes without saying that returning here to seek a useable gateway is not an option," Peorth stated flatly. "Belldandy and I defied a direct decree of the Sovereign Lord of Nulln. The risk to us is unacceptable; even if we stay behind and one or both of you go, your presence may be detected and then she and I will be found out. Keleste and Keiyasu, you need to keep looking elsewhere."

They dialed up the next God's Realm and didn't find any indication of a Soul Mirror or a Gate of Judgement.

Dialing up a number of God's Realms, Keiichi was riveted by the images rendered within the portal. Eventually, the Soul Mirror seemed to hone in on a new TimeStream and its God's Realm. The entirety of the new God's Realm he beheld possessed an incredible 'Japaneseness' in motif and environment. The sky was filled with palaces floating upon delicate traceries of mist-clouds; the palaces were styled like expansive Heian mansions. A torii that seemed to be created with _suns_ hovered fixedly in mid-air next to a tower with gently sloping roof cornices. Panoramas of gardens, outbuildings, castle keeps and towers brought to mind his class trip to Kyoto during the last year of Primary school. Dragons floated leisurely in the sky, playfully chasing each other like schools of fish. Below the aerial pageantry was a basin; a series of large prairies enclosed by sequences of geometric mountains and waterfalls. Further on, he could see suns that appeared to be made out of water, air that was contoured into auroras...the whole scene was one of incredible beauty and serenity. This God's Realm had a riveting visual impact; like a blend of a starkly imposing Sesshu masterpiece combined with the fluid smoothness of a Masanobu landscape. Their 'viewport' seemed to move purposefully, passing within a zone with a soft pink sky dotted with navy blue flowers with shrine-houses atop them. It zoomed in towards one particular structure, a compound-like mansion. The view dove into the gallery hall of the mansion, following what looked like a 'flock' of sentient dandelions that were pirouetting in the air. It veered to the right and passed through a doorway...

Keiichi felt his spine triggering with shock when he saw the two figures seated in front of a series of folding screens. They looked exactly like his parents! It was if his Mother and Father were appearing in a costume drama; the pair dressed in elaborate leisure house robes, long-sleeved and soft on the eyes, with intricate designs that he recognized as floral Yggdrasilian. The Goddess resembling his Mother looked like an empress; her hair was coiffed in a very complex array of folds and braids, with a long stream of jet-black falling down her back and resting on the floor behind her like a bridal train at least four or five meters in length. The God resembling his Father wore an ornate crowning cap that resembled a head-covering out of a sci-fi manga. They seemed to be engaged in a intense discussion with a young man. His discomfort increased when he saw the young man sitting next to a series of folding screens, wearing an elaborate long-sleeved robe of colored _glows_, rather than a color cloth-print.

"Oh my God! _He looks just like me_!! They look like my parents!" he shouted, recognizing a version of himself with a concussive chill that reached down his chest and wrapped itself around his lungs, stealing his breath away after his exclaim. He forced himself to clamp down on his scintillating nervousness with the humorous thought that...were this were a panel in a manga...a nuclear mushroom cloud would be drawn blowing outwards from the top of his head.

"How could they look exactly like me and my parents? This is off-the-charts insane! Keleste, is there any way we can listen in on their conversation? I have to know what they're saying..." Keiichi asked urgently, looking at the young Goddess with pleading eyes.

"We can certainly try!" Keleste said. Deftly rapid-tapping a sequence of keys on the surface of the discus-shaped device, she began to systematically remove the 'layers' separating them from the environs of SpaceTime displayed within the Soul Mirror. As she inputted commands, he was again reminded of how closely the process resembled tuning a radio into a station. To him, the device seemed to have locked in on this particular TimeStream and was stabilizing their view of it almost on its own initiative, so adept was Keleste at her mastery of its functioning. Keiichi wondered what she would be like riding atop a BMX bike on a hill-climb; the girl was definitely a fast learner.

Keleste was steadily clarifying the 'window' into the other God's Realm, but the thought-impressions she could sense were much too rapid for her to understand. It was a recognizable form of God's Language, yet it seemed to be thoughtcast at three or four times the rate she was used to. Kind of like how accelerated a ThirdTier Inculcation would seem to a God during early Prime Inculcation. Despite her best efforts, the conversation between the God and his parents remained a visceral blur. She attempted to create an impeding rift that would slow down the comet-fire thoughtcasts, but this was beyond the capabilities of Skuld's device. Frustrated, she refocused the device to pinpoint and clarify once again. Her Stepmon Skuld had made this device capable of stripping away the most delicate stratas of Time, so she approached the problem from another perspective; peeling away Past and Future to anchor the scene they were observing in the Present.

"_...eto, they are discussing problems with the Torii Passage to Earthrealm..._" she heard Belldandy say in a halting voice.

"Of course!" she realized. While she and Keiyasu had struggled in vain to 'translate', the two Goddesses might be able to keep track of what was being discussed.

"_...the Earthrealm Torii...she who is the Torii is absent...or she refuses him passage. Now he's discussing...something about missing his mortal wife...in Norway...wondering how his son Odeyn is doing in ungdomstrinnet...first year of secondary school arguing with teachers...eto, his parents are talking about how worried they about his brothers..._" Belldandy continued, translating.

"_...eto, now he's saying his younger brother Genji and Tomohisa...stranded on Earthrealm...the mother is saying that she's worried about Skuld and the twins...disruptions in all computer networks...Xomplex Network often offline...Keiichi talking about missing his wife Belldandy… _" Peorth interpreted, using both metaphrase and paraphrase.

"Wife? Belldandy?" Keiichi interrupted. "Could this be some alternate reality? I'm really starting to freak out here! This is completely different than what my life has always been. In this reality, my counterpart is a God, and married to a mortal Belldandy...and they have a son who's in secondary school? This is crazy! It's all backwards and inside out."

"Sshhh," Belldandy hushed him as Peorth continued to render the discussion into something sensible.

"_Keiichi explaining that...difficult for him to peer into Time...just like last battle against Isilblius...things going wrong...a final stand...his Mother reminding him that he and his brothers are heroes to Tengoku...now she is telling him that portions of Tengoku are randomly fading into nothingness...his Father is asking if Keiichi has any sense of why this is happening...Keiichi answering...eto, he's answering that he is Mirror of Present, but unable to determine status of TimeStreams..._"

"Belldandy!" Peorth interjected, dropping away from interpreting the discussion. "Did we hear him right? He said _Isilblius_, didn't he? He couldn't mean _that_ Isilblius...the one who is supposed to be the Agent of Apocalypse?"

"I don't know how, but it seems that he feels that he has already encountered Isilblius," Belldandy answered with a worried expression.

"You guys! You guys!" Keleste interjected excitedly. "Did you hear him? You said that he called himself the 'Mirror of the Present'. What if _he's_ the mirror we're supposed to find?"

She heard a 'thud' from behind her and turned to see that Cevn had collapsed like a broken doll.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Two struggles, or maybe even something resembling battles. One in the Past, involving myself. The second in the Present, involving the Seven. The next one in the Future...involving something more.

Each time, the Ultimate Force had used me to confront Isilblius. When Belldandy mentioned his name, my cyborganic body shut down completely; all power sources suddenly rendered inoperative. Imprisoned with no physical sensation or sensory impressions, I could only think. I knew that I only had about three to four minutes before my brain would start its passage into decay and cellular death.

I had to make the most of them.

The SurGoth inside of me had done this, and I knew for certain now that it was Isilblius. It was trying to kill me, so that it could gain access to another being, perhaps Belldandy or Peorth who had full Goddess powers. I felt its mind telling me that it had to kill the one it was occupying before it could move on, for some reason. When the SurGoth had inhabited Belldandy, it was able to counterfeit her personality so that everyone was fooled, including myself. But once inside of me, the SurGoth was unable to usurp my 'self', my individuality. The hatred it had for me because of that was almost thought-choking. Yet, I had some control over it, apparently, as long as I stayed focused on those around me. The SurGoth claimed that it had to kill its hosts...but somehow, the SurGoth had been jettisoned out of Belldandy by the attack at the wedding without killing her first...

But the SurGoth _didn't_ kill Belldandy...the two Lords did. Which meant that she was alive!

I had to tell Keiichi this!

Each time I had met Isilblius, the Ultimate Force had coursed into me, granting me a supercharged Metanative Chaostic energy and a sharp increase in awareness accompanying it. Memories of the first encounter became uncaged in my mind; he had destroyed almost everything while I skirmished and fled from him in a strategy of attrition, until there was only a single TimeStream left. The final line of defense which, if breached, would mean the end of all living things.

_The very same TimeStream we had been observing, defined within the Soul Mirror!_

Urd, Belldandy, Skuld...mortals. Sisters. Loving mothers, devoted wives. Homemaker, artist, athlete. Keiichi, Genji, Tomohisa...Gods. Brothers. Caring fathers, committed husbands. Norn-like governance over Past, Present, Future. Demoness Sayoko, Goddess Megumi. Megumi the crazy sister. Some kind of sphere that ejected me out of their TimeStream. Urd. Dead on the ground, a basketball-sized hole where her heart and chest should have been. Urd...dead.

Urd dead.

Dead...dead...dead...was I dead?...I was...

I was dead. Apparently if I served as the channel by which the Ultimate Force constrained Isilblius, once I died, he would be unchecked in his ability to hazard destruction at will. The Everything, once Multiverses, now OmniArcs. All gone...all gone...all gone...

All Dead...

"Alive!" I heard someone shout through a haze of acoustic fuzzled noise.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

He had been talking with his parents, Ametako and Shiniji, when two Goddesses suddenly emerged from some kind of energy aperture that was unrecognizable. Without a word, they swiftly enveloped him in a restraint encantment before he could even react. Then they had spirited him away through the portal before his parents could attempt to prevent them. Keiichi's God senses informed him that the two Goddesses were powerful, definitely full First Class License holders...which made resistance difficult if not futile as he was outnumbered. He knew he couldn't have put up a fight anyway, because he was completely emotionally and mentally disheveled from the very first glimpse he had of his kidnappers. His confusion was falling through the night of uncertainty as he recognized one of them.

One of his 'kidnappers' was Bell-chan! Not his wife of fourteen years, but a Belldandy who was a _Goddess_. For a brief moment of hope, he considered the possibility that she was his mortal wife in Trondheim, Norway. That somehow, she had been allowed by Kami-sama to travel to Tengoku to be with him and his parents. But it was not to be.

This Goddess bore a very close resemblance to his wife. His wife, Europe's premier painter, was in her mid-thirties with some slight crow's feet around her eyes and mouth. This Goddess was much younger; it was like he was meeting his beloved Belldandy again, for the first time or perhaps a few years later when he had married her. This Belldandy had a distinct Goddess seal on her forehead, an elongated vertical oval that pulsed with divine energies. The same seal that adorned his forehead! Traceries of distinction between Bell-chan and this new Goddess became clear to his eyes, as he fought to enclose his racing thoughts with a shelf of calm. Facially, she was a shade more ovaline with a firmer jawline, which made her less expressive than his wife, and her hair a touch darker with more dun-red highlights. The sea-blue eyes were the same as his wife's...and the effect on him was the same, as he felt becalmed as he looked into them.

Once they had brought him here unawares, he was completely mortified when he saw _himself_ standing near the 'portal' that had conveyed him from Tengoku to here. Instantly, his God senses analyzed his double and discovered that the other 'Keiichi' was an Earthrealm mortal, probably a resident of Japan. Already, the canvas of his consciousness was filled with brilliant splashes of abstraction-colors...which only bloomed into more disorientation when he spotted Keleste, his niece. A _Goddess Keleste_, manifesting almost the same Divine aspect that his niece would assume whenever he and his brothers took the kids for a visit to the Grandparents up in Tengoku. This Keleste was subtly different as well, as she wore her hair styled more severely than Genji's daughter. She didn't have her mom's green eyes, an immediate tip-off that she wasn't his older brother and Urd's daughter. Her hair had four 'antennae' at the crown of her forehead, and was tied back except for straight-cut bangs over her forehead and long strands in front of her ears. To his surprise, she reminded him of his wife. The young God next to her looked a lot like he himself did when he was Fifteen Decas of age, give or take a few millennia. His initial impression of the two teens was figured by a sense of deep sorrow in their eyes; their faces seemed to be haunted by a deep measure of sadness and loss.

Finally, he saw Cevn for the first time since he and his brothers had shot him out of their TimeStream. When it was apparent that their efforts had prevented the destruction of the Earthrealm and its TimeStream, they had all gone downstairs to unwind and celebrate. Cevn had left them a humorous note saying he was vacationing in the Caribbean and would return in two weeks. But he never did return; and their family had concluded that he had found 'his' Urd and had decided to settle down and not return to visit. For twelve years, the photo that was left behind remained on the fireplace mantle next to the Nobel Prize he had been awarded; a group photo showing Cevn and his 'love tribe' as he called them, in the Japan of his reality.

This was that Cevn, but then again, he wasn't.

Breaking off his conjectures, Keiichi was jolted by a horrible awareness that Cevn was dying. Setting his confusion aside, he swiftly rendered aid by restarting all of his cybernetic systems and synching his brain-to-machine interface. He was a primitive cyborganic lifeform, so rudimental in design that his younger brother Tomohisa could whip up an improved version within an hour.

"You're alive!" Keiichi said to Cevn excitedly once he returned to consciousness. Cevn looked at him with bewilderment at first, which then gradually transformed into a sense of recognition and gratitude.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Keleste was feeling overwhelmed because events were spiraling out of control, the melodious joy of finding her Mother had been discarded like leaves swept off the bower roof by a wind gust. Her thoughts further toiled against the bizarre circumstances of the duplication of her Father-yet-not-Father. She was looking at two Keiichis, one a mortal and one a God. She was certain that the mortal Keiichi was her real Father, but her 'Mother' Belldandy declaimed this, and then she had to reluctantly accept her arguments and proofs that she and her brother weren't related to him directly either. They were related by blood and thought and genome; but there was one major difference. A divide between them that consisted of an intervening 150 millennia of TimeSpace and totally uncorrelated histories of the Earthrealm, Yggdrasil and Nulln.

With cyborg Cevn repaired once again, Keleste had to question why his cyberorganic construction kept fouling up.

The 'God' Keiichi introduced himself to their group as the Mirror of the Present. Keleste had a major intuitive impulse, and fought herself to keep from leaping in with her flash of brilliance. It would be impolite to interrupt him during a first meeting, so she waited until he finished with his self-description.

"Hey, since you're the Mirror of the Present, does that mean that you use mirrors to check up on the TimeStream?" she asked him. She caught some glances as several in the group recognized where she was leading this discussion.

"No, I don't use mirrors directly," the God Keiichi answered. "Back on the Earthrealm and in Tengoku, I have a complex set of...'clocks'...I guess you could call them. But instead of measuring Time like regular timepieces, these clocks _adjust_ Time. Cumulatively, their main purpose is to make sure that the Present remains in synch with the Past and Future. You may not understand this, but the Present sometimes tends to drift between the two, which can create continuity disconnects. Nothing major if caught right away."

"I understand completely, as this is similar to my role as a Norn," Belldandy noted. "As Norns, my sisters and I used to share 'interconnections' of a certain type of Metanative energy. Think of it like an infinite spool of thread that tied us together; infinite in the sense that we were able to weave it into a web of Time almost unconsciously. Your clocks perform a discipline of Time that we enact intuitively."

"You said you and your sisters _used_ to share a binding thread of Metanative energy?" Keiichi-God asked.

"Yes, until they were killed," Belldandy answered in a dry voice, flinching as the memories backflowed into her heart once again.

"How could something _kill_ Gods?" Keiichi asked again, hoping that his Divine counterpart would be able to make sense of his question. "Where I come from, my Belldandy is a Goddess and a Norn. She and I have lived together under the same roof for five years, and not once has she mentioned a God could kill at God. I take that back...a God could kill a God with a Soulgun, as some idiot tried to kill her once with one. Bell-chan...my Bell-chan who lived with me on the Earthrealm, maintained that Gods and Demons couldn't kill each other because of the Ultimate Force. But now...she's dead as well."

"Your wife is a Goddess?" Keiichi-God asked. "This is so contrary to my existence. But yet, I don't sense that this is a random set of circumstances. Perhaps this is a _deliberate_ coincidence. The Belldandy who is with us, who looks like my wife back on the Earthrealm...lost her sisters. You, a mortal being who appears in every way to resemble me, even by character, had your wife take away from you..."

"She wasn't my wife," Keiichi interrupted with a sad voice. "We were actually getting married, when it turned out that she had been 'possessed', for lack of a better term, by something evil. At the end, she actually wanted to kill me. Then Kami-sama and Oni-sama got into it, attacking and eventually killing her. They _had _to kill her, but I think she was already gone before then. I don't really know if she's alive or dead."

"How horrible!! This happened at your _wedding_? You have my deepest heartfelt sympathy, mortal Keiichi," the God Keiichi offered, truly stricken by what his mortal counterpart had said. His Belldandy was killed in the middle of his wedding! His heart was unsettled by this, as he imagined momentarily what it would feel like if his wife Belldandy had died during their marriage ceremony.

"We need to get to the bottom of this!" Keiichi-God declared.

"No shit, we need to get to the bottom of this!" Keiyasu agreed. "In our reality, our Father was a mortal and our Mother is a Goddess. I can sense myself in you right down to the TNA composition and the affinity of our Souls. Just as much as I can sense these in Belldandy, who for a short while I thought was my Mother. We never met our parents...and now you're all saying that Gods can be killed? I don't want to believe that our parents were killed."

"There is a way that I might be able to help," Keiichi-God noted, as he pulled a pocket-sized mirror out of his imperiously-layered robe.

"I thought you just said that you don't use mirrors," Keleste complained, but cut herself short in amazement as the God called Keiichi performed a really cool trick, stretching the mirror out while unfolding it and pulling its edges in alteration.

"What I meant was that I can use mirrors to project my own observations of the TimeStream. It is a form of sousveillance: what I encounter will be rendered visible in the Mirror. The way I explained it to my artist wife, who is a total technophobe, is that I'm the transmission signal, and the mirror is the TV receiver. After all, _I'm_ the Mirror; it is just an object. Time itself is poised on mirrors: the Past reflected in the Future, the Present reflected in the Past, the Future reflecting what has come before in the Past...well, I think you all can get the point."

Belldandy was intrigued by the entirely different perspective on Time that this God was describing. Just as Time was knitted into itself, it _was_ a mirror of sorts, exactly as he described it.

"You've created a mirror that can show us what you see," Peorth noted. "But what should we be looking for? You said your area of responsibility is the Present. But my friend's parents, sisters, and husband were killed in the Past. Isn't that outside of your expertise or your field of purview?"

"It is...except for one possible means," Keiichi-God answered. "You, Belldandy, have memories of what happened in your Past. You, Keiichi, also have memories of what happened in your Past. I know this will be difficult, but if you would offer a kindness to allow me to probe into your thoughts, I should be able to obtain a recall of the events through your eyes, re-experienced in the Present. It's risky, because I might be unable to navigate through my own confusion due to being displaced into this alternative TimeStream, but it's the best I can offer. The most concise answer in response to a problem is a well-formulated question; is this not so? Using myself to Mirror their pasts is the only way I can ask 'why?'"

"I don't know if you should attempt any kind of joining of minds with Belldandy," Peorth warned. "You didn't accompany her over the past forty thousand years like I did. I could only look on as she became insane with grief. To use an analogy with the Earthrealm, she was catatonic. A Goddess of Grief, comatose for all intents and purposes. I'm worried that such an intrusion into her mind would cripple her again. I just got my best friend back, and I don't want to lose her."

"There are no guarantees, except this," Keiichi-God responded. "If there is something that can kill a God, or impersonate a God so cleverly that both the Lord and the Dark Lord were deceived as you claim, what makes you think it would stop at that?"

"What are you talking about?" Keiyasu asked, feeling that he was totally out of the loop.

"I will tell you what I experienced. A Cevn...not this Cevn...came into our lives roughly 15 years ago as time is reckoned in my Earthrealm. We learned from him that Isilblius had destroyed _every_ TimeStream except ours. This Cevn concealed our TimeStream inside of himself, and then hid his mortal aspect inside of that TimeStream in an effort to evade detection. He was both mortal...and something else, something very unknown, but also very powerful. At that time, my brothers and I were stranded on the Earthrealm because our God's Realm...Tengoku...had been totally destroyed. All the Gods, including my parents, were dead. Once again, I find myself to be stranded in Tengoku, unable to return to the Earthrealm...to my wife and son. Whole sections of Tengoku are simply disappearing with no explanation. I fear the worst, and if my fears are founded in truth, then we face a situation of the first import. We could be in extreme danger."

"I'm willing to do whatever it takes to get Belldandy back," Keiichi said to his Divine counterpart. "You married Belldandy, but I never had the chance. If you can dig something out of my brain to fix all of this...to try and change that, so I can have her back, then I would welcome it. I want to help, and if the universe is threatened as you think it might be, then there's no way I would refuse!"

"Despite what my friend Peorth says, I am also willing to allow you to Probe my being," Belldandy answered with firm resolve.

"Bell?!" Peorth interjected, not wanting to believe what she just heard. Her friend had just become herself again, and now she was willing to risk losing that sanity!

"But I will not subject myself to vulnerability in the face of my memories. I will require Peorth to Probe _you_, Keiichi who is a God. I trust Peorth implicitly, and I am confident that she will not let me slip back into the confining madness of forever-grief. I would have her Probe me alongside you, the two of you working in conjunction. But this would not allow her to gain insight by reviewing _your_ interpretation of the events you discover while looking within. By Probing you, she will have a route of access to both of our Souls. Peorth is a Rune, and she is able to search and reveal mysteries with a skill far beyond what you or I possess. She will be able to reveal the hidden truths."

"We have something similar to you, Peorth," Keiichi-God explained. "In Tengoku, we have Gods who we call Onmiyos. Just like your Runes and Norns can only be Goddesses, our Mirrors and Onmiyos can only be Gods. An Onmiyo God is assigned a particular Ofuda, which is a Divine construct of symbols that possess great magical powers. There are 24 Ofuda in the Realm, so there are 24 Onmiyo Gods. If Peorth agrees to participate, I would welcome her assistance. Even more, I would anticipate needing her help."

Peorth pondered all of this, but then decided that it would be worth the risk to each of them. She could shield the mortal Keiichi from any harm other than agitation and sadness as he recalled the loss of 'his' Belldandy. However, her friend Belldandy, that would be a very difficult and testy situation. She would be putting herself at risk as well; she could get trapped in the madness of Belldandy's mind. What if this energy 'affliction' that LinTan and the Proctors found in Belldandy's Soul was contagious...and her Soul started to break away from herself?

But all those risks paled beside the possibility of an unleashed Isilblius. Discovering out if this God Keiichi had encountered Isilblius would be vital...

"Je affirme. I will assist you," Peorth answered, hoping she wasn't throwing her sanity into the volcano of despair.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

The God Keiichi connected with Belldandy by resting two fingers on her forehead Goddess Seal, Peorth connected with him in a like manner. At once, the Soul Mirror that he had created began to swirl with parading impressions, fleeting and brilliant. Belldandy's visage was pinched tightly, a spectrum of unpleasant emotions clearly passing through her mind and Soul. Keiichi felt the God version of him touching his forehead, and immediately he was reliving the wedding...

_...Belldandy smiling, everyone celebrating in ebullient spirits; the Almighty appearing to conduct the wedding; an intrusion followed by an interruption of his wedding; Belldandy becoming hostile and threatening him; the Lord and Dark Lord pincering her with discharges of energy; she disintegrated and some horrible yellow-green pallor formed, a skeletal ghost-form with shredded-wings; a blue glow suspended in mid-air above the ashes, he followed it and then..._

...right before he returned or awakened from the mind probe, he heard Keiichi-God's thoughts in his mind. The God informed him that he had Probed his memories as rapidly as possible, so that he would be spared reliving the pain of losing Belldandy, except for only the briefest span of time. He felt Keiichi-God's profound empathy and anger towards his loss.

Keiichi had clearly shared a sense that this God version of himself from an alternate reality or dimension...was totally devoted in love to 'his' Belldandy, many times more than he was to Bell-chan. Unexpectedly, he felt an incredible flow of memories press into him; Keiichi-God's experience of love with his mortal Belldandy. His heart was opened to Keiichi-God's profound love for Belldandy; the emotions that touched him were just like his own love for Bell-chan. But they were different, magnified and refined by _years_ of marriage! A son. A tight-knit loving family. Many years of laughter and joy. Belldandy becoming more than just a lover, more than just a best friend, more than just a wife...becoming Keiichi-God's incredible SoulMate! Keiichi-God's soul was knitted into her heart with a magnificence that was both splendid and awe-strong. At the end, he was left with a final impression, Keiichi-God's wife explaining the love they shared:

_"Love makes -_all the difference in the world-_! Keiichi and I are in love: have been, will always be! I believe that the depths of our affections for each other...cannot be contained within two beings. Within two physical forms. Within just he and myself. When a man and a woman love each other so strongly that their hearts are sewn together with passion and devotion, it is natural and wonderful for them to build on that love...to extend it into a new life. –_Creating-_ a new life because of their love for each other. To multiply their love into a -_family-_!_

Keiichi-God's mortal wife, Belldandy, had spoken his kokoro, as if she had read the words right off of the parchment of his Soul. It was an impossible glimpse into an impossible future, but he felt honored that Keiichi-God would share such a deep part of himself with him.

"Keiichi-who-is-mortal..._when_ we find your beloved Belldandy, _this_ is a glimpse of what your heart will be like for you. You and she have been joined with compassion and caring for five years; what you just witnessed is what lies ahead after another ten Earthrealm years of being in love and being together with her. One more thing: Cevn became a way for us to have children, and I assure you that you and your Divine love will be granted the same by the Ultimate Force. I felt your great sadness because you and she cannot author a new life together, an expression of your deep love. Be not afraid of those thoughts, but know that they are falsehoods. Gods and mortals _can_ have healthy children. It _will_ happen for you both," Keiichi-God quickly corrected him.

"It's the best way I can thank you for your willingness to undergo such a risk."

...and then he was back here, tears in his eyes from the 'gift' Keiichi-God had given him.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Belldandy, Peorth and Keiichi were gripped with intense expressions on their faces. Keiyasu could only guess what was occurring between the three of them. They seemed to be swept up in an emotional whirlwind as they hovered above the ground. He could sense that his sister was feeling frightened by the sight of the three Gods.

With a flash, Keiichi's mirror suddenly split into _seven_ mirrors. One moment there were two Soul Mirrors, then the next moment eight Soul Mirrors.

For a moment, he felt another life within his, a reality where he and Keleste had grown up with both a Mother and Father on a living Earthrealm. A mystical sense of belonging to a family chorused between heart, Soul and mind. He glanced at Keleste, who looked like she was gripped in the deepest levels of self-reflection. Could she be experiencing the same sensations he was having? The Soul Mirrors seemed to strobe with light, and then became fixated on an image. In each of the Soul Mirrors was a single person that he recognized. Persons he had never met before, but somehow _knew and recognized_ within the essence of his being.

Belldandy. Urd. Skuld. Mara. Natsumi. Miyuki. Keiichi. Heroic Vermilion Swift.

In his mind, he heard Belldandy's voice calming him, explaining to him that Love is the truest emblem of the Infinite. The Belldandy in the mirror...the Belldandy that the mortal Keiichi was in love with. The Belldandy he had never met...

His _true_ Mother!

Keiichi-God, Belldandy and Peorth were suddenly exploded away from each other, jarring him and drawing a yelping shout from Keleste. The three Gods were unharmed, of course. But the eight Soul Mirrors flickered with a berserk display of images, TimeStreams, alternate realities, which gradually resolved into a single image on each of them.

He saw a mortal Earthrealm jet airplane flying over an ocean. The aircraft was semi-transparent; inside he could sense Belldandy, her sisters, her parents and the Earthrealm mortal Keiichi. He immediately recognized this particular flight as the one Keiichi had described to him, the one they Skuld had booked for them after they escaped out of Tindouf. Keiyasu lost his perspective; he felt himself drawn both inside and outside. A witness and a participant, feeling like _he_ was on that flight. He touched on a memory: fighting to free Bell-chan and Skuld from an evil nomadic despot, which had gained the respect of her parents and had concluded the Rite of Preparedness. But he didn't remember Urd being on that flight.

Nor did he remember Belldandy challenging her parents to turn off their God powers just once, so they could experience what it was like to be an Earthrealm mortal. Both Odeyn and Freiija agreed to this...

Cevn flew up behind the plane, coasting through the air like an American comic book superhero.

Keiichi felt horrified as Cevn ripped off the tail assembly and engine, grinning maniacally as the plane began a sickening plummet into the ocean. The scene fast-forwarded after the crash; and he watched himself drown while a near-invisible Cevn forced Belldandy to say angry words to him.

The last words.

"_You bastard_!! You did that to her! You did that to our _Mother_!" his sister screamed at Cevn, her hostility literally causing her hair to ascend around her like angry serpents.

Cevn knew that she wasn't addressing him; she was addressing the SurGoth wraith inside of him. It was taking all of his energy just to keep alive, yet he felt his resentment added to the young Goddess's towards the foul geist.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --


	131. Pt 131: Juiced into the Torchflame

**Part 131: Juiced in the Torchflame**

THERA, BEIJING CAPITAL, CHINA-STATES:

The next morning's practice after their game with the Americans was quite a spectacle for the Japanese Women's team, as Chihiro arrived a few minutes late; which was very unusual for their punctual coach. When she took off her hoodie jacket, to everyone's surprise she was wearing the dark black-red jersey of a libero.

"Gimme a ball! I'm on the team now!" she announced with a cheerful chirp of a voice.

"EHHH?"

"Okay you guys, I had to do some lawyering on this one," she started to explain. "You all know the history, so I'll be brief. Back in 1872, when this sport was called Mintonette instead of Volleyball, it was intended to be an activity for proper young women...heh heh, imagine that! They certainly didn't have _us_ in mind back then! Mintonette was supposed to be a sport that wouldn't be too strenuous for young men and ladies, falling somewhere between basketball and badminton. Of course, that's where the 'minton' in mintonette came from. Don't ask me where the strenuous came from. Eight years later, it was recognized as a competitive sport by the Olympic committee and the first medal rounds were played between six teams in 1880 at the St. Petersburg Olympics. By 1892, there were a number of team sports rostered into the Olympics, new sports like baseball and soccer."

"Yeah, yeah, blah blah!" Ootaki said. "We all learned that stuff in grade school. Get to the good part Coach! The 'why are you wearing a uniform' part!"

"Okay, okay!" Chihiro said. "Anyway, back in the old days, they didn't have airplanes, bullet trains and other modes of transportation that we have today. They either had to boat it over, walk or bicycle, ride horse and hitch, or catch a train if they could arrange all the tricky passports and visas. Because of this, each participant country could only send the team. Back then, there were no extra positions like reserves and substitutes. It cost a fortune to send a team in those days. If this was 1908 instead of 2008, there would be six of you here, not twelve. So the IOC came up with a contingency rule to deal with injuries and illness. Remember, this was back when all sorts of catchy disease shit was causing people to get sick when they went to other countries. The Olympic heads ruled that an able-bodied team coach could replace one of her or his injured players to bring the team up to full roster if the player was medically red-carded. Several teams did in fact have player-coaches because of that ruling in the 1910s and 20s. During competition, the coaches that substituted would be acknowledged by the Olympic Commissions Committee as team members. They wouldn't get a medal, but they would be allowed to participate as a stand-in. Turns out that the IOC forgot to repeal that rule for Volleyball, so I laid it on the Olympic Volleyball Commissioner and made them an offer they couldn't refuse. Either allow me to sub for our injured libero, or I'll stick 'em with a formal protest with the IOC bigwigs that'll make their heads spin. Naturally, they were able to see reason and..."

"Oh my God! This is so cool! You're really going to be on the team!" Belldandy shouted, along with several of her teammates.

"Yeps!" Chihiro confirmed, grinning like the Cheshire Cat. "I'm the new libero for Team Japan, just like I was in 2004! I'll be a player-coach, so to speak."

This brought a rousing cheer from all the women...but Belldandy noticed that her roomie, Kinosh'ta, seemed a bit subdued about this development.

Chihiro drilled them on the standards, mid-row attacks, net defenses, pancake drills, bumps and sets. Belldandy felt a thrill as she actually was on the same floor with her respected Coach, playing as teammates. It felt like four years had been magically rolled back in time, and she was playing on the 2004 Japanese team in Athens. But Kinosh'ta was majorly pissing her off, because she was going all-out despite this being a practice...blasting kills whenever she was drilling on offense. Kills that Chihiro couldn't possibly field.

Thirty minutes later, Belldandy realized why Kinosh'ta was playing a harsh hand to the Coach. Those power attacks and kills _were_ playable...

Chihiro, despite all of her skills and knowledge of the game, couldn't keep up with the physical demands of playing on the court. Four years ago, she would have breezed through a practice like this. This morning, she was already slightly winded and tightening up after just a couple hours. Belldandy nodded at Kinosh'ta when it came her turn to drill offense outside and middle attacks, and peppered the court with blasting kills.

Her heart was breaking into pieces with regret, but it had to be done.

Kinosh'ta had known somehow that their Coach had her heart in the right place, but that her body wouldn't keep up. She was close to Olympic form, maybe 80 to 90 percent, but not quite there. In team sports, 'not quite' could mean difficulty for the squad. In the Olympic, it meant assured disaster when competing against the world's best teams. Belldandy stuffed six of Chihiro's attacks in a row; the last one she accidentally six-packed right back at Chihiro, hitting her square in the chest.

Everything ground to a halt as Chihiro chased the ball down and angrily kicked it into the bleachers. Then she walked over to the ball-rack cart, kicked it over and started booting balls into the stands like a soccer player, until there were none left on the court. The Japan Women's V-Ball team could only look on, stunned by their Coach's raging anger, as she started in on another rack of balls, only stopping when she kicked a ball right into a photographer in the stands, nailing him in the face and sending his camera flying. The practice gym quickly was hushed by the outburst of frustration.

"Okay, Morisato and Kinosh'ta! Are you fuckin' happy that your hammered your point home?" Chihiro yelled at them. "This was my last goddamned chance to play! A chance I didn't even expect, but somehow it got handed to me. My last fucking chance to play for Japan! And I can't keep up for shit! I hate you for what you did, both of you bitches. But I know that you had to fucking do it, for the team's sake. I brought you guys here for the Gold, not the fuckin' Silver or the Bronze! Goddamit! Why couldn't I have just one more chance to redeem myself and make up for 2004..."

Chihiro broke off in mid-sentence, punched the ball cart so hard she dented it, and then dashed off the court towards the lockers. She had made such a scene that the other three v-ball teams in their respective practice courts went silent, except for one single woman who was laughing.

Athenle.

Belldandy glared at her nemesis, completely outraged at her mocking laughter. She was so pissed off, she wanted to sprint over to Norway-Euro's practice court and pound her head into mochi. Kinosh'ta, Ootaki and Tamiya could see that she was about ready to break after the Norwegian player, and formed a wall in front of her to block her away. Captain Moritayama gripped her by the shoulders, and two other teammates restrained her.

"I swear that I'm gonna make you pay for this, Athenle!" she screamed at the top of her lungs.

Thoroughly dispirited, the rest of their practice was totally fucked. Ninety minutes later, Belldandy was so disgusted that she left early for the lockers. Once there, she saw Coach Chihiro sitting on the floor against a wall. Slumped and bunched up, her head buried in her hands, her knuckles covered with dried blood, her heart blazed open for all to see the depths of her painful regrets. She was startled by the sight; recognizing that her Coach had been _crying_ during the entire remainder of the practice.

Fighting against her fear, for she knew her Coach's explosive temper was like lit dynamite when she was this fired up, Belldandy sat down next to her.

"Y'know, Coach...you can still practice with us, whether you're a player or not," she offered. The wrong words. Coach Chihiro only slumped even deeper into a hunch, not even raising her face away from her hands to respond to her attempt at encouragement.

"Look, Chihiro," she heard a new voice as Captain Moritayama sat down on Chihiro's other side. "We need you, baka-girl! You can sit in here and mope and feel like shit, or you can be a coach. That's what you are...a coach. You're part of the team, whether you know it or not. I fucking hated your guts when you got invited to coach Japan instead of me. Now, I feel rotten because I get to play it out while you have to watch. But you know what? Just because you're not wearing a Japan V-ball jersey doesn't mean shit! You _are_ on our team. Morisato is our middle-outside swap offensive attacker. Kinosh'ta is our outside attack and net defense monster. Tamiya's great on sets and defense, and Ootaki is guaranteed to hit a few aces from the service line. You taught 'em that! I don't care what the commission or the squad or anyone says; if you want to practice with the team, go for it girl! You have the most important position on the team. It's called 'Coach'! You've earned it, just like we earned our spots on the court!"

This, from the woman who had slapped Chihiro three days in a row during the first week of training in Tokyo. Belldandy looked at their team Captain and saw a deep comradeship in her eyes. Moritayama was one of two squad members who were Chihiro's teammates during the 2004 Games, and knew her probably better than anyone on the squad.

"Hey, you never know," Belldandy added. "Look what Takahashi did yesterday, and she's a total obaa-san grandmother! It'll come back to you if you workout with us. Maybe not 100 percent, but enough that you _could_ play if we needed it in a pinch. But you're going to have to show us how much you hate this game by working your ass off in the gym, just like you made me and my two dipwad sempai do back in Chiba. You taught us how to play, how to be winners. Now you need to teach yourself to play all over again."

Chihiro finally lifted her head up and looked at her and Moritayama; her eyes nearly swollen shut from crying.

"Chihiro, you're part of the team, so please come back out and squad up with us. You deserve to be on that floor just as much as everyone else. Especially more than that Norwegian bitch who was laughing after you had your...uh, tantrum," Captain Moritayama encouraged

_That_ perked Chihiro's attention. Belldandy realized that her Coach was almost as jerked by Athenle's stupid shit as she was.

"Coach, for the record, Morisato and I hated having to drill you so hard. _But we had to_. I know deep in my soul that you would have done the same thing to us," Kinosh'ta added, having joined their efforts to buoy Chihiro's spirit.

"Besides, the rule is still there, and you never know. This Olympics has already been fucking crazy. I'm with Morisato and Captain Moritayama, totally. You need to suit up and show up, because we may need you. Because _you_ need you. We're down two players, and three more are nursing playable injuries. A couple more injuries and we're gonna look like a three-legged dog," Kinosh'ta added.

"You know...you girls are so fucked in the head, I can't believe how insane you are..." Chihiro said, finally breaking into a thin smile. "I wouldn't even pick myself for this team, and here you are trying to con me into practicing with you with some lameass bullshit about 'maybe having to play'. You're all a bunch of crazy women! Alright, I'll take you up on it."

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

The Quarterfinals consisted of a playoff between the top four teams from Pools A and B. First seed plays fourth seed from the opposite pool, and second seed plays third seed from the opposite pool. Norway won pool B, China won pool A. It was entirely possible that they might have to match up against the Chinese team for a repeat game, if three of the Pool B teams got beat. At three wins to one loss, Japan was tied for second in Pool A, and by a drawing, they were matched against Cuba, the number two seed in Pool B. Cuba was four and naught, having the good fortune to not play against Norway-Euro in their Pool B Prelims.

Four teams would walk out of this arena with a chance for a medal.

The Quarterfinals would be hosted in a different venue than the Technical College Indoor Stadium, a visible indication of the increased importance of this level in the tournament. As their team shuttle-bussed up to the front of the Capital Stadium, Belldandy took one look at the place and felt like she was going to jail. The building was at least fifty years old and looked more like a prison than a sports venue. A bigass cement-block dorm designed by an architect who was half-asleep during the proofing phase. Bright red lettering in Chinese proclaimed the Stadium as belonging to all the workers of Beijing, according to the bus driver.

The only cool thing about it was that it was perched right on the edge of Tian'anmen Square.

She remembered her one-hour crash course in China History 101, courtesy of the Olympic Committee. China was crazyass with civil wars until it had been overrun by the Communists in the 1920s and 30s. But then a dude named Sun-Yat-sen negotiated a truce between the Democracy party and the Communist politcos right before Japan's stupid and ridiculous Pacific Campaign swept into China. The Communists and Democrats declared the new country as the China-States, and shared power in a parliamentary government with an elected President, which was Sun-Yat-sen. He was succeeded by Mao-tse-tung, a big-time main man on the Communist side who furthered the unification by pushing for a constitutional democracy based on economic commensalism, which was really what Marx was all about in the first place. As a result, wages in China became the most-evenly distributed against capita population in all of Terra. No super-rich families were allowed; everyone got their cut of the pie. It was a struggle, but the revolutionary social and economic program took hold, guided by a constitution similar to that of the United States and the emerging Euro Union. In the 1960s, Mao's goal was realized, and Tibet and Xinjiang were transitioned from autonomy to independence, which they promptly did in 1961. A visionary guy named Zhou-En-lai succeeded Mao in 1967 and guided China into a modern society, being re-elected four times between 1968 and 1984 before he finally called it quits. Two popular rock bands of the times, the Rolling Stones and The Kinks, both emerged from the burgeoning artistic scene in China, heralding what the Japanese and Western nations called the "China Invasion" in the mid-1960s. China States had become established as a progressive power in Asia by the 1980s and remained so until the Bubble Economy fell flat in the early 1990s.

That's why the humongous pictures of Sun, Mao and Zhou were hanging side-by-side over the entrance to that insanely huge Palace Museum. For the hard-core fans, there was a mausoleum where you could pay a few RMB and see the three of them resting-in-peace or whatever. Belldandy personally thought the idea of going to see dead famous guys in glass cases to be pretty gross.

Capital Stadium almost had that same preserved-after-death vibe. It was built in the 1950s, when everything in China had to have a utilitarian appeal, because there wasn't extra money lying around to create impressive architectural marvels like the ones all over Beijing today.

Inside of the Capital Stadium, the first thing she noticed was the museum-like quality of the lobbies and hallways. That, and the wet-paint and plaster smell of a brand-new building interior. In the athlete's guide to the Olympics, she had read that the arena section had been completely overhauled. Belldandy hoped that the modernization extended to the locker rooms; she didn't want to shower in a showering room with ancient rusty shower troughs with trickling water spouts. After all the showers in Chiba Poly's poor excuse for a sports facility, she expected better.

A lot better. It was rumored that China-States spent the equivalent of 500 billion Japanese yen to throw their half of this Jubilee Olympics, and Tibet had spent almost the same amount for their half, the Winter Games, going on right now in Lhasa.

The interior of their locker room looked a little flashier, with the Beijing Olympic logos and mottos painted brightly on the walls. Arching plaster ceiling beams and decorative doorways gave it an oldish look...but the facilities were ultra-modern, if not luxurious. The shower room had a rinsing pool and individual stalls with water jets, with a drying area fanned with warm air registers. It even had a trio of jacuzzis and a deep bath! The lockers were large, with flatscreen TV monitors on both ends of each locker row so they could watch the other Olympic events. To her amazement, the benches along the walls and between the locker rows were covered with _real leather_, red of course. This building looked pretty drab on the outside, but it was totally cool on the inside.

She emerged into an arena with 24,000 seats, already full of boisterous fans. After playing for five of the last six years in a gym back home that had a pull-out bleacher section that maybe could seat fifty at the max, this was a shocker to the system. She said a silent thanks to Coach Chihiro, who had been the bridge between there and here. The arena interior looked like it had been built yesterday, as it was crammed with stage lights, four big HDTV screens, four more bigscreens in a cube over the court, and several circular overhead light suspension scaffolds with all sorts of spotlights on the court.

She felt like a total rock star!

Osaka had been a trial by fire; her first exposure to a large indoors stadium-arena. The Capital Stadium was rated at 22,000 seats, 24,000 if they pulled out all the stops and added extra sections. This being the Jubilee Olympics, the Chinese had definitely pulled out all the stops on _everything_. Huge wall panels with the official Olympic designs and logos in English and Chinese were all over the place. The arena actually looked even more like an Olympics venue than the brand-new Technical College Stadium. Belldandy had to thank the Chinese for their fastidiousness in creating a world-class sports venue. In typical Chinese style, it was a juxtapose of opposites: a factory-looking building on the outside with a world-class modern arena interior. At one end of the arena was the Olympic symbol, seven interlocking circles for the seven continents of Terra; four above, three below, each circle a different color.

The whole ambiance of the Capital Stadium was definitely a step up in energy, which excited her even more. Everywhere she looked, she saw and felt the spirit of the Olympics. For the first time since she arrived in Beijing, she felt the hallowed 'holy ground' experience that many athletes described as part of their Olympic experience. Standing next to the v-ball court, she felt that this stadium _was_ holy ground, totally and completely. Deep in her bones, Belldandy could sense the spiritual cumulation of 2800 years of continuous Olympic competition; across the centuries, across the continents. She could almost imagine all the millions of athletes during the history of Thera who had participated since the first Olympics in Greece.

In her heart, she could feel that all of them were here, in some sense or spirit, to urge the youth of the world to better themselves.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

The Cuban squad were renowned for two strengths: defensive speed and offensive agility. These, combined with excellent service skills and squad depth, made them a formidable opponent. The only reason they were seeded second instead of first in Pool B was the win-loss tally of the opponents in the games they had won was less than Norway-Euro's. As she watched the Cuban women drilling in their bright red uniforms, she was impressed with how light they were on their feet.

During the Prelims, the official volleyball was a modified red and white ball, distinctive to Olympic competition. But now that they were in the Quarterfinals, the ball was a geometrically designed orange and yellow, to symbolize the sun. One more reminder of the prestige of this level of competition. For many nations, making it to the Quarters was their equivalent of getting a gold medal, and each team player would walk out of this round with their own keepsake volleyball, win or lose.

For her and the team, their goal was still two games away, five days from now.

The first game started with a bang, as the Cuban server nailed an awesome ace shot that left everyone on the Japanese squad flat-standing. The Cubans rode the momentum and jumped out to a 15-10 lead, when Chihiro called timeout, clearly needing to refocus the team before the Cuban women pulled away even further in this vital first game.

"Okay, Kinosh'ta, you need to play closer to the net, use that quick reaction time you've got to stuff their attacks. Think practice, and then think like practice. You can do it! Morisato, you need to turn in a little to the left, because they're shooting for you to straight-up on them on their attacks, which is why they keep getting glance shots off your blocks. Moritayama and Ootaki, I'm gonna rotate both you girls to the service line as often as I can. Muriyako, you're doing great as libero, but shift a little toward the right corner, because that seems to be their attacker's hot spot."

Belldandy and her teammates followed through on Chihiro's adjustments, but lost the first set 30-28.

"Toe to toe with them, Kinosh'ta and Morisato," Chihiro demanded during the break between sets. "They're quick, so you need to be more aggressive at net play. Don't worry about fouls, you're both playing like you're gonna kicked off the court by the refs. Don't be redwoods, get more into it! Ootaki, pull your head out of your ass and start playing. Don't fuck around with funny serves, just avoid their libero and focus on floaters to the left corner to try and draw them to shank your serves, because that's your best ace pocket. Remember, we've got a huge height advantage and our setters are just as good as theirs, so we need to play to our strengths now, instead of later. They're good, but I know we can kick ass if we start playing like we did against the Americans."

Japan won the next two sets, 30-28, 30-24.

Chihiro had instructed them to keep the ball in volley in the 4th set, rather than going for immediate attacks. Belldandy was wondering what the hell she was thinking, because she and her teammates were already spazzing with stress. Now, they had the additional pressure of having to deal with ten-to-twenty return volleys per point. At the mid-set break, right before they switched sides, Chihiro told them to bear with it because there was a weakness in the Cuban squad that she was exploiting. Cuba rallied to tie the series 2-2 in the 4th set by beating Team Japan after playing an extra 8 points in two-point overtime scoring, 38-36.

The crowd noise was really getting on her nerves, as the spectators were clearly fired up by the long bouts of volleying returns between the two teams. It was almost like ping-pong, where each guy had to hit the ball a bunch of times just to get a point. She could barely hear Chihiro's pep-talk due to the crowd, so she and and other players formed a circle around their Coach to try and block out the noise.

This was totally insane, with the crowd completely off the hook!

"We all know where we're at. Besides being in the middle of the capital of China, we're at the point where we either break down or we break loose. We can afford to penetrate the net with our taller players, and we need to use that. I've noticed that they seem a little weak when we shoot the moon on returns, so mix it up with direct attacks and rainbow shots to the back court. Get 'em backed up as far as we can, so we can take away some of their speed by giving us time to establish our attack rows. Let's go out and win this one!"

Belldandy finally got into the zone she had been seeking for the entire match, and started dinking, floating and killing her attacks. With the Cubans backed up, she was able to roof several of their attacks, and Kinosh'ta did the rest with powerful sweeping blocks. They started to pulled away in the late teens, as the Cuban women seemed to deflate. The Cubans were starting to lag, hands on hips...and she realized what Chihiro had set up by the strategy of sustained volleys in the fourth set. They had intentionally tired out the Cuban women by stretching the game out, using their speed against them to drain away their momentum.

By stretching out the 4th set, Japan had forced an endurance on the Cuban team that they couldn't keep up during the final set, and Belldandy and her teammates walked off the court with a hard-fought 30-26 win. Again, Japan had lost two more players to injuries, Takamito broke her elbow by sprawling after a spike and slipping on a wet spot that the floor crew had somehow missed during between-game court cleanups. Otamura, their weak side hitter, had a freakish jam-up during a routine block at the net that somehow broke three of her fingers and sprained her wrist when the ball hit her edge-on her fingertips. She begged the MD to clear her to play, but he insisted on a medical red-card for her for the duration of the games due to the severity of her injury, which could get even worse if she competed.

Japan was being crippled by injuries, which aroused Belldandy's suspicions.

For some reason, the Japanese team was spending a lot of time in the Polyclinic with injured players, and Belldandy was beginning to wonder if Athenle had anything to do with this. She mentally tried to 'phone home' to Keiichi, hoping he would do his pop-out-of-the-TV gig, but he didn't show up. Why the hell couldn't it be like an anime, where she'd press a secret button on her bracelet and he'd pop out of thin air! She could only assume that Keiichi was playing it safe by keeping away from her entirely; but she was frustrated because she wanted his assurance that the spate of injuries wasn't some kind of Goddess bullshit Athenle was using to pull a cheat on her and her team.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Back at Olympic Village, she and her teammates watched in one of the cafeterias as China methodically took apart the Korean team in four sets to win the match. It wasn't even close, except for a do-or-die valiant effort by the Korean women in the third set. Every Chinese player was honed to near perfection in her skills, and what they lacked in teamwork, the Chinese more than made up in individual flair.

As she munched on Peking Duck for dinner, Belldandy had to fight away her imaginings that two days from now, the same scene would be repeated on the TV, only with Japan filling in for the Koreans in the losing end of the match.

Finishing her food, she just wanted to be alone with her thoughts, trying to reverse her pessimism and regain a competitive mindset. She tuned out all the conversations in the cafeteria and felt herself observing herself, letting that little girl out from eight years ago who had watched several Japanese women win medals on TV and then had told herself "I can be like them, too!" She was here in part because of that initial burst of courage by that little girl, who had given up so much to pursue her dream. Year-by-year, she had built on that foundation as she gained in strength, skill and physicality. Four years ago, she cried when Japan lost in the first semi final game, falling short of their chance for a miracle Gold Medal. Then two years ago, Chihiro had snuck in to her school's 'gym' to scout her, a gym which was little more than a garage shed leftover from the Pacific Conflict. Last year, that little girl was now a 17 year-old, who one afternoon walked home from school in a spring rainstorm and found herself standing in disbelief at the mailbox, reading a letter that informed her that she had been awarded Chiba Polytech's single women's athletic scholarship. A scholarship for a volleyball program that was steadily gaining regional and national notoriety.

Her memories reworking a restoration of confidence, Belldandy treated herself to some lemon-orange mochi that her Mom had given her for her birthday...when unexpectedly, the cafeteria got very loud.

The Japanese Women's Field Hockey team had come in for dinner, completely bonked with excitement. Belldandy instantly knew that they had won the semis and now were playing for the championship. Japan's resident 'immortal', Takahashi, was pep-talking them to keep their confidence level in check, storing it up so they could then bring it out right before they played the Russians. Once again, Belldandy was blown away by the older woman, who seemed to have her finger on the pulse of so many athletes of Japan's women's delegation. Women like Takahashi sometimes wound up their careers by serving on the International Olympic Committee. It was entirely within reason to expect Takahashi to become one of the Fourteen: one of the two Asian continent committee members of the Thera IOC that had final authority and jurisdiction over the Olympic Movement.

Takahashi walked by her, and Belldandy felt a sharp slap on her shoulder...a wordless encouragement. Already, Takahashi was consoling the Japanese synchronized swimming team, who had lost out on a bronze medal by a miniscule margin.

Oddly, her thoughts turned towards Keiichi, and she wished he was here so she could tell him about all the excitement she was feeling.

And definitely sneak a few passionate kisses in while no one was looking.

--_Bammm!!--_

Her reverie broken, she saw Coach Chihiro sitting across from her, trembling. She had slammed her tray down on the table, and eggrolls and sweet-sour soup were spilled all over.

"Morisato, they fucking _kicked me off the team_," she said in a barely audible voice.

"What?! They can't kick you off the team. You're not on the team...you're the coach!" she said stupidly, unable to handle.

"I said THEY FIRED ME AS COACH!" Chihiro shouted. "It was a total fuckin' fluke. Me kicking that ball into the photographer's face. Goddamned press rats! Anyway, our friend on the Norwegian team made a big stink about it, and then their coach and the press guy got all bent. I got called in for a five-minute meeting; just long enough for them to tell me to pack my shit and catch the next flight. So now I'm outta here. The heads of Japan's delegation ruled that I'm no longer you guy's coach! Tomorrow, they're gonna fly a new coach in from Japan to take over. They even told me that they're gonna fly _me_ back to Japan tomorrow, so I 'don't cause more embarrassing incidents for Japan' in their words. They might as well be sweeping me under the rug! Everything is going fucked! I can't believe it! I..just..can't..believe it! We're in the Semi's, and those business-type dumbasses are doing a coaching switch on you guys. It's all because of me, god dammit!"

Belldandy was so dumbfounded, she could only drum her chopstix on the dining table. Their team was down to eight players, with three starters injured, herself included. Now their Coach had been given a ticket back to Japan. With Chihiro gone, they might as well kiss the Olympics goodbye. Chihiro was the heart of the team. They had to play _China_ in two days! She was amazed that Chihiro wasn't going to pieces...because she was almost ready to either punch the table, throw something across the cafeteria, or start crying. The Japanese Olympic committee, in their pretzel-brand of 'wisdom', had just cut the heart out of the team. The Women's Field Hockey team a few tables away were absolutely silent with empathy and disgust at this bit of news.

"I know you're disappointed in me, Morisato. They screwed up picking me to be you guy's coach..."

"No!" Belldandy interrupted.

"They should have picked someone older, someone more experienced. I've gotta call the girls together to tell them about this. I..I don't know if I can, because it's all my fault..." Chihiro stated. To Belldandy, Chihiro was almost checked out, talking like her mind and heart were on different planets.

"No! It's not your fault, Coach! It's _their_ fault! You couldn't help it! Why should they take it out on you? It was a fucking _accident_ that you hit that guy with a kicked volleyball!" Belldandy pleaded, still unable to believe what she was hearing. No doubt, Athenle had made a big stink about this, which helped start the avalanche. Her anger towards the Valkyrie was so intense, it bordered on nauseousness.

"Morisato...Belldandy. You girls are gonna have to find some way to win. You deserve your shot at a medal, maybe even the Gold. I told you that China is beatable, and I meant it! I just wish that I can be there with you guys. But they won't even allow me that. I gave my all to this team, and it wasn't enough. I'm just a fuckup..."

"That's where you're wrong, honey!" Belldandy heard someone say. Takahashi pulled up a chair and sat down at their table, half the women's field hockey team in tow. She could sense that the older woman was angry at what Chihiro had just said.

"You can tell yourself that all you want, as long as you don't _believe_ in it. These girls aren't just playing for Japan...they're playing because they _love_ each other. Because they love you as their Coach. I can see it in their eyes; a good coach is the difference between a team being the sum of their parts versus a team being the multiple of their parts. For a team, a coach has to wear many hats: she needs to be disciplinarian, party patrol, teacher, psychologist, mother and leader. How old are you? 27? 28? You're still a kid...and yet you've done all of this for these girls! We know what you did at that airport when you flipped off that Norwegian player. She insulted one of your players, didn't she? But you kept it quiet, so that none of your girls would take the heat. Has it occurred to you that there's a whole bunch of teenage girls back home in high schools and colleges who are going gaga over that incident? Simply because you broke the 'little Miss Perfect Japanese Athlete' mode? You've empowered those girls...hell, my _granddaughter_ even knows your name! "Coach Brat!" she calls you!

If shit weren't flying in the fan fast and sticky, Belldandy would've laughed her ass off at that.

"You've earned a lot more than just your team's respect. You've even earned _my_ respect, Chihiro Fujimi," Takahashi-sensei added, a picture of sincerity. Belldandy felt washed in empathy as Chihiro teared up at the complement.

"Takahashi-sensei, I know that you're trying to make it easier for me, to soften the blow. But it still doesn't change the fact that I'm off the team as their coach. Please just leave it alone. I don't deserve your respect. I've brought shame upon all of us, and now my team has some guy flyin' over from Tokyo to coach them; some guy who doesn't know jack about how they play as a team. All of this...just because I'm a fucking hot-head!" Chihiro explained unsteadily.

"Are you nuts!" Belldandy replied. "You've brought _pride_ to us! You're not only my Coach...b..but you're like one of my best friends. Like a big sister, in a sense. I'd do anything to..."

"You think you're the only hot-head here?" Takahashi interrupted. "Let me tell you the kind of story that doesn't make it into the news. It's probably ancient history to you girls, but this happened at my first Olympics, back at the LA games in '84. I was your age back then, believe it or not. We were eating in a cafeteria at the Olympic Village there, just like this one. When I was pitching my tray into the trash, some guy from the Mexican team tried to play grabass with me. You know what I did? I kicked him in the balls as hard as I could. Turns out he was one of Mexico's 440 hurdles guys, with a bit of a problem holding his tequila. The next day, he crashed and burned during his qualification heat. I did that to him. He didn't lose that race because his jockstrap was too tight...heh!...he probably couldn't even put it on after I nailed him. Behind the scenes, the Mexicans were all bugged out, and were planning to file a formal protest. My coach said she'd hit 'em back with a sexual harassment charge and make it stick. She even took written statements from many of those who witnessed the incident. I got caught up in another one of those stories you _don't_ hear about the Olympics. Just because there's a truce all over Thera during the Games doesn't mean that _we're_ supposed to be in some kind of truce. '_Amite d'abord, competition ensuite_' - '_Friendship first, competition to follow_.'"

"I hope no guy does that to me, because I'd do the same thing!" Belldandy responded. "But what if I did go and beat his ass? Sensei, you had a coach who stood up for you no matter what. Coach Chihiro would stand up for me in a heartbeat. But I can't do shit to stand up for her! I'm just a tall girl with an attitude. The "Phenom", they call me. Some 'phenom' I am...those guys on the Japanese Olympic Commission couldn't care less about me. If I talked to them, they'd laugh in my face."

"Which is why _I'm_ going to talk to them," Takahashi announced. "Your Coach...needs a coach right now. I don't want either of you young women worry about a thing. Winning at these Games isn't just a matter of getting it done on the track and field. I've been coming here every four years since 1984...do you think that I got through six of these crazy events without making a few friends? Believe me, I've made a lot of connections; people in high places. Power-broker types. If they want to play hardball, they can go ahead. I've been in the Olympics longer than any of those committee guys have been on the Japanese Olympic Commission. If they wanna play rough, I'll hand them their asses, as you young women would say. You two just need to focus on beating the China-States team for us, okay?"

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Playing against China-States, _in_ China-States...was an exercise in its own right. All night in her dorm room, Belldandy's thoughts were flinging about in racing circuits trying to find a way not to get totally mental about it. The Chinese weren't a hostile crowd by any means, unlike the Americans and some of the Euros who would actually boo other country's teams. Chinese spectators certainly weren't a bunch of slacker sports enthusiasts, they really got into it. When the home nation team was involved, a Chinese crowd would become staunch and enthusiastic. Perhaps no country revered their athletes and teams as much as China; the fans would shout, wave flags, and chant out their support for the home team.

Loud as hell.

Every time she watched a Chinese team or player on TV...there they were, chanting "Zhong Guo" every few minutes. It didn't make a difference which venue the event was being held in: the swimming cube, the archery range, the equestrian grounds, the velodrome or even along the streets of the rural towns during the pelothon road cycling race.

Her nerves were skittering like spilled pachinko balls on a concrete floor.

Sleep was as unsettling as a leaf in a autumn wind gust; Belldandy could only count set points instead of sheep. Worsting her even more, the damned phone jolted her awake at 6am with some young hotshot bizwig from the NHK Olympics production team on the other end. Muzzy-fuzzy with just-woken-up hearing skills, she yawned while Mr. Suave went off into his spiel, informing her that she was going to have a 15 to 20 minute segment filmed for Friday Ohayo morning news show. As if playing in the Semi's against the host country's team wasn't bad enough, she was going to be split-billed with Takahashi and Kinosh'ta...and a few surprise guests.

"Isn't this great?! It'll be a hit! The 'Immortal' and the two 'Phenom' girls! The morning audience will love it, and we can replay some segments during prime time!" the biz guy shouted over the phone, all pleased with himself like he was some kind of media hero.

At 6 fucking am in the morning. Guess he forgot that China-States is an hour behind Japan. Why was it that the higher the salary, the more clueless the man?

Belldandy wanted to tell him to go stick it where the sun doesn't shine, but thwarted her irritability when she realized that the phone call was no doubt being recorded, since her agreement to participate was probably some kind of verbal contract with the stupid TV network.

Kinosh'ta was having a magnificent Olympics, in a sense falling into the role of leadership on the court. Thus, the network marketing gurus had decided to lump Kinosh'ta alongside her. So now they were the "Phenom Twins". Well, it was the lesser of two evils; they could've gotten 'Ootaki the Maniac Punkette' or 'Tamiya the Sworn Enemy of Men'. At the rate the marketeers were strategizing how to retail Japan's V-Ball team, it wouldn't be a surprise if the whole team wound up in some kind of "Magical Girl Squad" configuration by the end of the Games.

Guess they never heard Kinosh'ta launch into a true-blooded Osaka-style curse-fest. Kinosh'ta was a riot--they'd sit and smile for a series of press photos, and afterwards Kinosh'ta would start in with the comments. To her, the guys in the press corps were running the 'loser rally'.

This guy was definitely running the loser rally; making it clear that this TV appearance was mandatory, non-negotiable and then joked that skipping out on it was punishable by death. Weakling! To add to the injury, he insisted that she wake up Kinosh'ta so he could tell her the wonderful news.

The interview was scheduled for two hours after the game against China-States. Being on TV with Reiko Takahashi was already daunting enough. But if they lost to China, the last thing in the world she wanted to do is sit down at a newsdesk with some veteran commentator and tie on a smile for the folks back home. Like Coach Chihiro, she was too honest to get caught up in bullshit fake-outs. If they somehow beat China, the last thing she wanted to do was to be on TV. Victory was meant to be shared with teammates, not the press. But this was the Olympics, and Belldandy had to accept that their victory or loss would belong to everyone in Japan.

Quite a heavy load for a just-turned 19 year-old Niigata girl.

As usual, she and Kinosh'ta cruised into the cafeteria and met up with Ootaki and Tamiya for breakfast. Tamiya ordered double portions of her usual morning fare, and soon they were joking about 'the last meal before being led out to the gallows'.

Takahashi just happened to overhear this, and totally laid into them for having a defeatist attitude. Being nailed by Chihiro was one thing, but being scolded by Takahashi was almost like a harsh butt-spanking from her dad. Well, she never had a dad until Mom remarried, so she really didn't know what being spanked was like. But Takahashi spanked them verbally, and then pumped them to get them enthused. She reminded them that the 24,000 in the crowd would be a 13th woman for the Chinese team...which really didn't mean much when the 13th woman for their team was probably a thousand times more...the 15 million viewers in Japan. That's the crowd they should play towards, focus on, and use as motivation to shut down the distraction of the Chinese fans.

With encouraging slaps to the shoulder, she left and headed over to the Field Hockey team girls, who would take to the pitch thirty minutes after her team started their match against the Chinese. Many of the women on the Field Hockey squad had taken Takahashi's advice to heart, and were eating breakfast and joking around, trying to be as calm as humanly possible before going over to the Field Hockey Stadium. She tried to play a mental game: who was more stressed out, her teammates or the girls on the Field Hockey team.

Coach Chihiro was reinstated as their coach later that day. It was rumored that Takahashi had told the Japan Olympic committee that she would turn in all seven of her Gold medals in protest if they followed through on their dismissal of Chihiro as coach. It was also rumored that Takahashi had enlisted the help of an IOC member, who personally sat in on her meeting with the Japanese team officials. A guy from _the_ IOC; the fourteen-member Thera Olympic Committee.

She wasn't fucking around...she had put it all on the line and handed those guys their asses big-time. The head of Japan's Olympic Committee showed up at yesterday's practice and personally apologized to Chihiro and their team. She had to bite her lip from laughing; the official looked like he was scared shitless as he was bowing to the team during his formal apology.

There was no way that they could lose this next game, not after what had happened yesterday.

The next day, she was in the middle of the typhoon.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

As soon as the locker door opened, a wall of crowd noise assailed Belldandy. It was unlike anything she had heard before; when she and her team emerged from the access hallway into the area, the transition from quiet to crowd noise felt like someone starting up a lawn mower right next to her while she was studying for finals upstairs in the Chiba U. library. Jarring didn't even come close to how it felt. Even Kinosh'ta, who seemed to have nerves of steel, was glancing around anxiously as they walked up the ramp into the court, the shouting was so cacophonous.

The arena was packed to the rafters, and she could see China-States flags everywhere: the round red arc in upper left corner with the hammer-and-sickle within, and the red and yellow stripes similar to the US flag. Many in the crowd were dressed with red t-shirts sporting "China V-ball" in bright yellow hanzi characters.

Ootaki made a flip comment about how they "had just entered the Red Sea without a boat", which brought some much-needed release of laughter to her and her teammates.

This was the team that had humiliated them in the second match of Prelims, sweeping them in three sets. They didn't even reach 20 in any of the three games.

"Huddle up, you guys!" Chihiro barked. Belldandy looked at her Coach and noticed that her arms were just a bit more tighter than they had been a few days ago...clear evidence that Chihiro had been working _hard_ in the gym.

"The only way we're going to beat these women is to get them to play _against_ each other. Each one's a top athlete, easily as skilled as any one of us. But Morisato noticed a game flaw that I saw as well. They're a group of excellent players, but they sure as hell ain't a _team_ of good players. We need to create disharmony in their approach, which means that you guys are going to have to play the best game of your lives. Just like with Cuba, you'll need to keep the ball in volley. Not to tire them out, because they probably have much better endurance than us. But we need to establish our game, not theirs. They're used to service aces, smash-n-kills, roofing blocks; in other words, 'wham bam thank you ma'am' types of offense. Two, maybe three volleys tops. We need to keep the ball in play, so they have to start grinding it out as a team...and then we'll study and exploit the breakdowns that result. Kinosh'ta, Tamiya, Muriyako...this is your moment to shine. We need defense like a drunk needs booze. Let's give them a run for their money."

Per Olympic tradition, the semi-final balls were again a different color: two shades of blue representing 'ocean' and 'sky'.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

THE EARTHREALM:

_An hour after an interrupted wedding:_

Urd's amusement with Skuld's little 'incidental contact' with Tomohisa after all hell broke loose at the wedding was back-shifted as her Norn senses fully regained and restored to her. Skuld had been cursing out Tomohisa for being a perv, while hanging on him like water in a wooden bathtub. Totally minor, considering that she just noticed with ominous dread that both Keiichi and Belldandy were missing. With a yank to the sleeve, Urd communicated swiftly to her sister that Keiichi and Belldandy were gone. Skuld's face turned nine shades of snow white.

Hot air swelled next to her; indication that her Demoness sis Mara was closely scanning the premises with an angry expression. Urd could sense her sister's Demoness faculties obviously extended to their most refined sensitivity. The Dark Lord had been involved with this in some way, which made her sister all the more vigilant.

"What in the Bless happened to them?" Mara asked, her words joisted with an irritation matching her glow-red eyes.

"I said they're from the Future, if you'd just listen to me! Obviously, they were involved in Elder Sister and Keiichi's disappearance," Skuld repeated herself as Peorth joined their group.

Urd felt more than a little discomfited that she didn't see a 'future' version of herself alongside the 'future' otherings. The group in the back of the church accompanying the Dark Lord included two of her three sisters. Absent also was a 'future' version of Belldandy.

The older 'Mara' that had regarded her just for an instant with soul-searching eyes seemed to be laboring to commit a message or a warning to her, but she couldn't fully sense the meaning; the chaos had broken out too swiftly.

She felt a harrowing, drenching feeling that Belldandy had been killed...but vying against this unease was a glimpsed awareness; an emotional remove that led her to believe that _Belldandy wasn't Belldandy_. Despite being TimeStilled, Urd almost thought she had heard Belldandy threaten to torture Keiichi with "endless agonizing pain".

"C'est pas, but they have returned to whence they came. Even more weird, the stupid Gate of Judgement seems to be malfunctioning. It looks...sick," Peorth noted. Urd and the others shifted their attention to the Gate, which no longer was an archway that one could pass within. Instead, it bore no resemblance to any kind of Gate or divine channel; instead, it seemed to have been transformed into a vestibule between here and somewhere else. Within the conforms of former Gate...now writhing and twisting like a shell of snakes...all Urd could sense was a grey mist that reminded her of a Stygian desert sandstorm. An uninviting desolation, deliberately bleak so that it would be repugnant rather than interesting.

"Is it possible that Elder Sister, Keiichi and Cevn went through that?" Skuld asked, gesturing at the portal...and then answered her own question. "Nah! They couldn't have; because she knows that you can't go through the Gate of Judgement by yourself. Even I know that!"

"What about us?" Mara asked. "I don't mean _us_...I mean those older versions of us that were in the back of this temple, where we saw our...Holy Bless! The Dark Sovereign!"

Urd saw Mara's eyes blast wide with shock, and followed her stare...and then narrowed her own eyes in wary disbelief. She quickly shifted her attention back to the front altar of the church, to confront a sight that chilled her to the core of her Soul.

The Lord Himself was motionless!! In the back of the church, the Dark Lord was as immobile as a statue. On the surface of appearances, They appeared frozen in a state of StillTime!

Urd felt her dread grow into a tempest. At every pause she made, trying to seek solace or explanation for what was happening, a shadowed dirge of fears loomed darkling and ghastling. Moments earlier, she had been celebrating the most joyous moment in her sister's life, pouring her and Keiichi the ceremonial matrimonial sake wine...and now, hope had been stolen away. The stilled forms of the two Lords were anguished threats, a forced obscenity that offended her confidence.

The silence was tumbled with shrill ghost-whispers.

"Is this some kind of sick joke?" Peorth asked in a feeble voice of distrust. "How can anything freeze the Lord in place? Or the Demon's Lord, for that matter? I can feel His Majesty's Metanative signature as clear as daylight. This...cant...be...real! I could have sworn that They were fighting something just a moment ago, but I don't remember _this_."

"We need to blaze and get the Bless out of here!" Mara reasoned edgily. "I don't like what I'm seeing at all! The Dark Lord looks like He's TimeStilled in some way, and you guy's Lord is just as immobile. I'm gonna transmit my Lair to your temple, because this is obviously not just some Goddess or Demoness problem. Something really wicked is happening here, and my Demoness instincts tell me that Time and Space are majorly flawed. I may not be a Norn, but when I've got three sisters who are Norns, I can also sense when Time's climate is messed up."

She closed her eyes for about ten seconds, her face took on a mien of deep concentration, and then she announced that her Lair was annexed to the Temple.

"How could you just teleport your entire Lair to our temple?" Skuld asked, feeling indignant that Mara had acted without asking. Demon Lairs frightened her, especially after that incident when Mara had kidnapped her and Cevn and trapped them in her Lair. Back then, she was almost a different Mara...as crazy and off-the-hook as Urd's Mom, Hild.

"Senior First Class Demoness License abilities, that's how," Mara answered. "Besides, _little sister_, don't you see the obvious? That's your Lord who's stiff as a Vatican statue up there. That's my Lord in the back, who doesn't seem to be jumping for joy at His situation. Speaking of stiff, you're still hanging onto your boyfriend, which tells me that either you're in love with him, or you're shocked out of your mind, or you're trying to make him stiff."

"Who knows, knowing the Brat?" Urd interjected. Much to her surprise, Skuld gave her a mean look, but didn't try to pry herself away from Tomohisa, even though his arms had immediately shot back away from her the moment Mara called him Skuld's 'boyfriend'.

"So where is everybody? I feel like I just lost my head; _everyone's gone_!" Tomohisa asked. "This place was packed before the wedding started...and now it's empty."

Urd could have almost hit herself on the head for overlooking the obvious fact that Skuld's little boy-toy had observed. This church had been packed with several hundred people...mortals, Divines, parents, almost everyone her sister and Keiichi had shared close friendships with in their lives. Now they were only five: she, her two sisters, Peorth and Tomohisa.

"L..let's get out of here!" Tomohisa said, his fright clearly overtaking his attention towards Skuld, who was _still_ clinging onto him.

Tomohisa's earnest plea spoke to all of their hearts. A moment later, they were back at the temple, safe for the moment.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

The moment the group returned to the temple, Mara had immediately sensed a Demonic mandala in the vicinity; naturally an arcane devising which was totally out of place in a residence of Goddesses and mortals. When they discovered it in Cevn's room, they jointly realized the severity of their predicament. The unknown force that had disrupted the wedding, possibly abducting everyone present and 'freezing' the two Lords, may have been _here_!

Urd and Skuld were quite upset at this invasion of their home. Mara, as the head admin of the Demon Strife Mischief Office, was quite upset as well for her own sake. The DMSO necessarily would maintain constant contact with each registered assignment, especially on the Earthrealm. But the Mnoex Network had no record of any new assignments of DSMO agents to the Earthrealm. Mara was distressed because this mandala was not only unauthorized...it had completely escaped detection by the Vang Mnoex network.

Besides the enigmatic matter of the Demonic mandala, Skuld had quickly discovered that the Enigma Book was missing. The Enigma Book could only be handled by Cevn at first, and then later by she and her sisters, and finally Mara. The only beings who could touch the Enigma Book without harm were here, save for Cevn who was missing. Yet, it didn't make sense that Cevn would take the Enigma Book to the wedding.

Having two more enigmas to deal with, they decided to pool their resources and create a 'superlab'.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

They called it the _QuadNode_, after Peorth's suggestion. Mara had joined her Lair to Urd's "Castle" and Skuld's "Labs", and then Peorth had transported her "Peorth's Arbor" from the Yggdrasil Sysop Nodes down to the Earthrealm. Now, they had a fusion of Ygg Node, Tech Lab, Arcane Lab, and DSMO Admin Center. Even more importantly, Mara and Peorth had direct networking links to the Ygg Xeomn and Vang Mnoex computing systems.

Skuld was very queasy and uncomfortable with the decor of Mara's Lair, and her Demoness older sister was forced to reluctantly acquiesce and tone it down to "summer festival ghost house" level, so that she wouldn't be distracted or scared. Despite the scary-funny environs of the lair, the interface with the Demon's Logorinth computer was very intriguing to her, with its novel means of PolyNodic access to the Demon's Mnoex computer network. Mara had scolded her several times for hovering around the access panels instead of working on deciphering projects. Finally, her Big Sister Demoness had to resort to threats of restoring the Lair to its full Demonic flare of fright to 'distract' her from being distracted by Demonic tech. Skuld agreed to leave the interface alone; with crossed fingers hiding behind her back.

There were a number of problems they had to investigate. Upon examining the mandala in Cevn's room, Mara concluded that it was designed to be a direct transmission portal to Vanagdrasil, bypassing any of the usual Demon Gates. Curiously, the mandala had the property of being a _one-way transmission portal_ rather than a Gate, which indicated that whoever used it was not planning on returning. A disturbing feature of the mandala was its level of sophistication, which Mara assessed as being far beyond an ordinary template for a Demonic mandala. The creator of this mandala had imbued it with arcanical properties that were almost guesswork in their complexity. Hazarding a guess, Mara explained that this mandala would even be a challenge for Queen Hild.

Her suspicions aroused by this, Skuld used her Shinseicorder to scan the mandala with an eye towards detecting God or Demon elements or energy signatures. Her hypothesis was confirmed when her device yielded measurements of both types of energy. Strangely enough, the dual-energies were attuned within the magical properties designed into the mandala, to produce a hybrid of God and Demon attributions of mystic function. But the dual-energies were also manifested by the craftworking materials used to draw the mandala on the floor of Cevn's room. This was very deceptive; to the naked eye, the mandala had presented the appearance of having been drawn on the tatami mats by a set of sketchpad charcoal sticks and some brushed-on black calligraphy ink.

Urd followed up on a hunch; if the mandala had both Gods and Demons properties, it may not be exclusively a Demonic design. She cross-referenced it with an index of arcanical constructs in her Castle lab, and reasoned out that the mandala was indeed partially based on Yggdrasilian design. Peorth further confirmed this by running a series of declamation sims on the Ygg Xeomn to rule-out random error attributes.

The improbable conclusion was that the Demonic mandala in their temple home appeared to suggest that it had been crafted using the same arcane magical methods that a God or Goddess might use, if said God or Goddess had wanted to emulate a functioning Demonic mandala directly linking the Earthrealm to Vanagdrasil.

Implied within all of this was the distinct possibility that the mandala had something to do with the horrible events that had transformed Belldandy and Keiichi's wedding into a nightmare. Urd was absolutely certain that the mandala had been created the night before the wedding; admitting that she had snooped Cevn's room earlier that evening to make sure he wasn't doing something that would embarrass them all on the day of the wedding.

Peorth, Urd and Mara decided to transport the Gate of Judgement back to the temple, concerned that it would be a hazard if left untended in an Earthrealm church. Another wedding was already scheduled for later in the week. If Keiichi had passed through it, using the former Gate as a transit point to an unknown locale or TimeStream, then the former Gate could be very dangerous...especially as it was invisible to the mortal sensorium. Like a tube-cave in the middle of a forest at the new moon, where any passersby could overstep the ledge and fall to their doom.

Fortunately, the TimeStilled forms of the Lord and Dark Lord were veiled from mortal eyes by nature of their dimensionalities, as they existed at the six higher dimensions that were 'invisible' to mortal ken. So no worries there. Ironic that a priest would be solemnizing a matrimony within the presence of Kami-sama and Oni-sama...

Retrieving the Gate proved to be a real challenge to Urd, Peorth and Mara's Senior License powers. Skuld was amazed as all three actually had to _unseal_ their Licenses just to translate the former Gate from the church to the temple. An unknown property had seemed to anchor a portion of the Gate to that particular axis of SpaceTime, and it took major Divine firepower to shake it loose and recover it to the temple. The portal, Gate, whatever it was...seemed to flux between Time and Space realities; as if it was a gallon of water that was boiling, liquid and frozen all at one time.

There it sat in the middle of the QuadNode; a disturbing cloudy translucent presence that was coiling on itself. Skuld felt more than a little frightened by it; the 'frame' of the Gate moved and slithered with snake-like posturings.

They all were keenly aware that their investigations were of the prime importance. Without a diligence of exploration and interpretation, the unknowns would remain unchecked...unknowns that possessed terrifying potentials. Recent events had proved to be an affront to suggestibility: if existence itself was being called into question, then it made clear sense to combat catastrophe with joint resources and expertise.

All four of the Divines recognized that the Gate was the key to the machinations of this mystery.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Tomohisa was bored, even though cousin Megumi managed to visit him once in a while to offer him company. He and she were upset that Keiichi and Belldandy had suddenly disappeared in the middle of their wedding. Megumi in particular was crushed by her brother's disappearance. She explained that the last thing she recalled was being at the church; and then a moment later she and her parents were at her folk's house instead of her room here in the temple.

His parents were in Osaka, and could only break away for brief conversations with him on the phone and over email. Ever since the wedding, he felt like he was coming down with a mean kind of flu, or maybe even a severe chest-cold. Being the end of February, there would be no baseball practices for another month unless the wintry weather let up for a couple days. He felt too tired to do anything after coming home from school except eat dinner, watch some TV, and then finish up the night with studying. Two late February snowstorms had crested the temple with a white crystalline shag-rug effect, and he had to rely on Megumi to get to school as the buses kept irritating his asthma. A couple of snow days had been called by his high school, which would normally give him a chance to go out sledding or maybe hitting a mall and a movie. Instead, he was at home, hack-coughing and blowing his nose, which seemed to be a spigot sometimes.

Skuld, her sisters and Peorth had been wrapped up in some kind of whacky Goddess project that he couldn't even begin to understand whenever she tried to explain it to him. They were pouring it on; so whatever it was, it must be very important. Once again, he had hoped that this would be the year Skuld would bring him some chocolate. Since her sister and Keiichi were getting married on Valentine's Day, it would have to be a belated gifting, of course. But that was a totally unreasonable expectation given recent events. Skuld was way too upset with the disappearance of her sister and Keiichi to even think of such things. Still, he could fantasize what it might have been like.

He felt useless, just a mortal boy who couldn't do anything to create an impact. Cousin Keiichi had confided to him that even he sometimes felt useless around the Goddesses as well; but somehow he always would manage a way to get past it. Tomohisa tried hard to find a way to help out; and when he was talking to cousin Megumi on the way home from school, he suddenly knew what he could do to help Skuld. Megumi agreed with his idea: he would do ice cream runs after school, to keep her sweet tooth lit up. As long as he had known Skuld, there was some mysterious link between her brainstorms and the amount of candy and ice cream she was eating.

That was it!

So now they had this kinda-sorta routine: before school, he would pull the handwritten note Skuld had clipped to the door under her "Skuld's Labs" nameplate...and then he would return with the requested flavors of ice cream in the afternoon. A couple door-knocks later, Skuld would open the door and grab the paper bag filled with pints of ice cream. Once in a while, she would come out and hang out in the kitchen with him for a few minutes, and then apologize with a "I've gotta get back to my projects!"

Winter was always a sketchy time for him, because his asthma would act up because of the cold air and the temple house and school running on heaters with no open windows. Last year, his asthma didn't act up at all because Belldandy kept the household clean and did _something_ to keep the dust and mold from staling the air. Recently, he could notice how the air seemed just a bit 'thicker' than it was supposed to be. Most asthmatics had the worst of it in late spring and early summer, but his asthma seemed especially susceptible to below zero air and mold or stagnant dust.

Now he had a total chest cold, and was up all night coughing and hacking.

Stupid Skuld! She knew he was miserable because of the air in the temple, and yet she couldn't even take time away from her super-important "projects" to whip up an air filter or something to make it more comfortable for him.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Y'know, I thought I was bad as a Demoness, but you take the ice cream and the cake, Skuld."

_"Huh?"_

Skuld was right in the middle of calibrating an enhanced version of a new tech-mecha creation she was inventing, one that would assess the energy levels of the Gate of Judgement and then project them into a TimeSpace 'map'. By doing this, she hoped to determine where the higher concentrations of energy had accumulated at certain points on the TimeStream. She got the idea when her two older sisters and Peorth had almost exhausted themselves bringing the Gate back to the temple. Having her First Class License powers for nine months or so, she was steadily improving at heavy-duty transporting of her own. But the Gate seemed to possess a quiddity of sorts which made parts of it more mobile in some areas, while in other areas it was mired almost to the point of immobility. Now, her other older sister was irritating her...

"Can't you see that I'm busy? Go pester Urd..." she answered without even looking at Mara.

"I choose not to. I choose to pester you, because you deserve it," Mara answered back, with just a hint of anger in her voice. "Urd's doing _real_ work right now, while you're playing around with this...whatever it is."

"You just shut up, you! You don't even know what I'm doing, so butt out. I don't waste time, I _make_ time!" Skuld answered, momentarily forgetting that it was Mara and not Urd who was interrupting her. She expected a snappy comeback worthy of a Demoness...

Instead, she felt two sets of knuckles grinding into her temples. Hard.

"Owwie Owwie...Owwie!" Skuld shouted, trying to bat Mara's hands away. "Okay, you win! What's so important that you have to break up my concentration?"

She turned around to face Mara...and saw Big Sister Urd and Peorth floating right beside the straggle-curly haired Demoness. This must be major; it looked like all three of them were going to gang up on her.

"Skuld, do you realize where that pile of empty ice cream cartons came from?" Mara asked, gesturing at the meter-high mound of empty pint and quart containers.

"Well...duh! It came from me! I don't see any of you eating ice cream," she answered. "Oh! I get it. Don't worry, I'll go clean it up when I take a break from what I'm doin'. Sorry, I didn't know that you were the types that would get all spun out because it's getting to be a mess. I thought only Elder Sister Belldandy was the neat-n-tidy one."

Urd and Peorth both slapped their hands to their foreheads, obviously dismayed.

"Hey, I said I'd clean it up!"

"You idiot!" Urd shouted. "They didn't come from you! They came from Tomohisa! I've been watching you for two weeks; every day he gives you two bags chock-full of ice cream, for which you don't even bother to thank him."

"So?"

"Skuld, how would you feel if you had to fetch manga for me every day, and then I never thanked you," Peorth added.

"I don't have to fetch manga for you, because you _steal_ my shoujo manga, Peorth! You should be fetching it for me, because you are a..."

_--Whap!!--_

Mara had smacked her on the back of the head with a wadded paper fan. This was getting to be ridiculous! They were interrupting her important work to talk about ice cream, Tomohisa, and manga. Now Big Sister Mara was whacking her on the head, and she couldn't understand why. What was she doing to deserve all this sudden mistreatment?

"We Demons have a very low tolerance for many types of misbehaviors, one of which is selfishness," Mara explained. "To us, selfishness is one of the worst. Demons thrive on social mayhem and in-fighting, family squabbles, sexual games, intimidation and all sorts of fun and games. We promote sensual indulgence, we encourage the plundering of one's own appetites...but it is not enjoyable to witness selfishness in all its inglorious stupidity. Selfish ones are those who take themselves out of the game. Bereft of the excitability of unbridled chaotic interactions with others, selfish ones become chaste and boringly predictable. You of the God's Realm have a low tolerance towards selfishness as well, as both your sisters have reminded me time and time again."

Skuld was beginning to see where this was leading, and she definitely didn't want to discuss it.

"C'est le amour," Peorth noted, cutting to the chase. "Skuld, you know how the young man feels about you. You cannot pretend that he doesn't exist, because you demean his humanity and his masculinity by doing so."

"Him...masculine? You gotta be kidding!" she snapped back, almost laughing.

"Mortals develop maturity along many matrixes of being and identity," Urd interjected. "Intellectual, physical, self-identity, social, sexual, emotional...all are pressured in within the first twenty years of their lifespan. Yes, he is a boy...but he's becoming a man as well. Earthrealm adolescents experience a marked increase in hormones, which causes..."

"Oh, spare me the lecture, 'Nurse' Urd," Skuld said with a scowl. "Next time he comes to drop off my ice cream, I'll say 'thanks' and give him a cookie, so he can feel more 'masculine'."

"You dummy! That's not what he needs. You know how shy Cevn is around women; I can barely tolerate being around him at times. He even acts like he's got some kind of school boy crush on me. But Tomohisa..._really is_ crushing on you. He's very consistent with trying to help you. As a mortal, he knows that he can't contribute to our resolution of this problem in any meaningful way. So he's trying to do his best. You notice that he isn't getting Starbux cheese soufflé or croissants for Peorth, or Taco Bell and KFC for Mara, or orange juice and peach juice for me? Of course, he's underage so he can't get sake for any of us. But the whole point is that he's only getting stuff for _you_! He's singled you out!" Urd explained.

"Doesn't that mean something to you?" Mara asked, arms crossed across her chest.

"Well, yeah, I suppose it does. It means that he has that typically idiotic Earthrealm thing about trying to chase after unreachable objects," Skuld replied. Not that Tomohisa's interest in her had just started in the past few weeks; but he seemed to be getting more and more persistent over the past year. Especially after her 'change' into an older teen's physical manifest.

"Yeah, he does, doesn't he. In his own way, he's kind of like us, isn't he? Trying to solve a question that hasn't even been asked, isn't it?" Mara commented sarcastically.

"Well, he has asked!" Skuld replied defensively. "And I've told him 'no' plenty times!"

"When?" Peorth challenged.

"Yeah, tell us, Skuld! When and what did he ask, specifically?" Urd added. "You've told him to stop staring at you, not to pass you the gravy at dinner because he spills it, to keep his batting and pitching practice away from your lab because he breaks jalousie windows, and to let you have a turn at the TV during baseball season..."

"Alright! I'll go and talk to him and tell him to bug off. I'll tell him that I don't like him, that I don't want a boyfriend, that I don't want to do...ecchi things...with him. Then you can all stop bugging me about 'Tomohisa this, Tomohisa that' and get back to whatever it is you old ladies are doing," Skuld answered. With that, she stood up and walked out of the QuadNode, leaving three exasperated and irritated Divines in her wake.

"_Old..ladies_?" Mara growled. "She's gonna be _so_ dead when I get my hands on her!"

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

What happened in the next hour was something so bizarre and surreal, Urd was almost certain that Mara had planned this all out as a bit of Strife Mischief. But Mara had assumed that Peorth had contrived the sequence of events, knowing the France-obsessed Goddess and her knack for the kind of dramatic romantic scenes that populate French cinema. Naturally, Peorth was almost certain that Urd had caused this bit of mayhem, because of her history of harassing Belldandy and Keiichi to 'get it on'.

Improbable to the point of being absurd...it was such a stretch that Urd privately thought that the Almighty might have had a hand in it, if He wasn't TimeStilled in some Earthrealm temple of worship.

After confronting their errant youngest sibling, Skuld had lashed out with a deep insult and then stormed out of their QuadNode lab. She stomped into the living room, and started calling out Tomohisa's name. Urd had followed her, totally ready to use her yeoman sister's head for spitwad practice. If she could beat Mara and Peorth to it. The Brat had called her and the other two _old ladies_, which was almost as bad as calling them "Aunties" or "Grannies". Retribution was in order, and she was certain that Mara would team up on some kind of real disciplinary action for their younger sister. Mara's eyes had that tell-tale orange-toast glow...

Before they could tongue-lash their bratty little sister, Megumi suddenly threw open the winter mado doors and burst in the entryway, her face flushed with a panicky expression.

"Quick! It's Tomohisa! He's passed out in my car! He was having all sorts of asthma attacks on the way here from the ice cream shoppe, and then he started gasping choking! I was going to take him to the hospital, but I was just a few blocks from here. Hurry, you gotta help him!!"

Urd could taste the urgency in Megumi's voice as she dashed back outside, running to her car which was parked and left running in the driveway. For someone who seemed nonchalant towards Tomohisa, Skuld tore on past her, reaching Megumi's car before any of them reached the yard. The girl couldn't even ride a bicycle a couple years back, and now she was running like a high school track star. The afternoon air was a blustered quagmire, snowing sideways like crazy in a near-blizzard condition. She immediately sensed that this wasn't one of Tomohisa's typical asthma attacks; this was a really bad one. As Megumi opened the passenger door, she saw Tomohisa slumped forward against his seat belt, limp as a rag doll.

This was bad!! His skin was already turning red-blue-purple.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Skuld could hear the chorus of shaming voices in her head, almost of all them Tomohisa's...almost all of them mirroring her own frustrations. She had known that he was having upper respiratory problems during the first part of February, his illness was just starting up the week prior to her sister's wedding. But she was so occupied with everything leading up to the wedding that she didn't pay much heed to him. After the whole banged-up mess at the wedding, she was sporadically feeling like an emotional basket case. So she did what she knew best: trying herself by plunging into helping her sisters and Peorth. Besides, it was the right thing to do. The sooner she could determine what was going on; the quicker she could find out where her Elder Sister was.

The past few days, she could feel the extra body heat feverishly radiating from Tomohisa each time he dropped off her ice cream 'care packages', as Big Sister Urd started calling them. The short time she had spent out of the labs, she could hear him coughing in the middle of the night.

She knew that Megumi had been spending most of her time at Genji's family mansion, too upset by her brother's disappearance to come back to live at the temple. She hardly saw Keiichi's sister except for brief visits to find out the status of their efforts to locate her brother and Belldandy. So it was just Tomohisa, the four of them, and several scarce visits by Megumi...who was now riveted with distress.

_Tomohisa wasn't breathing!!_

"Ohmy..Ohmy..Ohmy!" Skuld shouted, tearing between her sisters and Peorth. "Where's his inhaler?"

"I already asked him, but he told me it ran out a few days ago. He can refill it when he gets his March allowance in a couple days, but he couldn't fill it now because he didn't have enough money," Megumi answered.

"What do we do? What do we do?" Skuld shouted nervously. This was a real pinch, because stupid Tomohisa didn't save up enough money to get his inhaler recharged. What an idiot! He had enough money to buy school lunches and ice cream every day...

Wait a minute! How could he buy ice cream if he didn't have any money?

"CPR!" Urd interjected. "We've got to get him out of the car and onto the porch, flat on his back. If his air passage is constricted because of the asthma, he's going to be oxygen-starved and his heart might stop beating."

"I'm on it!" Mara said, waving her hands and making Megumi's car disappear into thin air, and then pushing the semi-supine Tomohisa through the air towards the porch, finally settling him down against the wooden gallery decking. Skuld realized that her Demoness sister had used the effective method; instead of transporting Tomohisa out of the car, she had transported the car away from Tomohisa.

Skuld rifled through her memory, tabbing her recall upon the exact Japanese First Aid specifications for CardioPulm Respiration aid. Her concentration faltered as she saw a grey shadow pass over the house like a large eagle.

The Reaper was circling in vulture mode, playing the waiting game...

"You can't have him!" she shouted at the floating figure's shadow, despite her fear of the harbinger of the Real Death. Swallowing her dislike of spectres and ghosts, she turned and looked at the phantasmic figure, and then back at her sisters.

"Biiii-da!" she said, pulling her eyelid down and flashing a wagging tongue at the Reaper. Urd and Mara were regarding the phantasm warily; both had near-death experiences last year during that weird summer when Cevn had been possessed by ghosts, or Isilblius, or something. They all had gotten very sick then.

"Don't just stand there! Do something!" she yelled at the others, who seemed lost in their own thoughts.

_"Nnh uh! Not me...I'm just a nurse!"_

_"Moi? Non commencer! C'est frantique!"_

_"It's all you, kiddo! Hope he didn't eat any onions!"_

_"Don't look at me, I'm just a co-ed...I don't know CPR!"_

Her sisters, Peorth, Megumi...they weren't any help at all! How could they just stand there and watch like a bunch of idiots?

"CPR. Cover his mouth with mine, breath in, keep pumping his chest, breath into his mouth again a few seconds later. Do it again and again and again until he begins to breathe on his own..._if_ he can breathe on his own. If she couldn't revive him, then she'd have to ask Big Sister Urd to put him in a stasis field until someone called the paramedics. But the quickest means of jump-starting his respiration would be CPR," Skuld thought feverishly.

No way! It would be just like _kissing_ him! His lips against hers. That's when the stupids _always_ started with the mortals. Stupid kisses. Stupid making out. Then the troubles inevitably followed, creating almost every problem these mortals had ever encountered throughout their history. Just ask Helen of Troy if you wanna know what this meant. Kisses...creating problems so strange and whacky, the Earthrealm mortals couldn't even fictionalize them. Truths stranger than words; all because of the act of touching lips. The lemony touching of the lips...which always led to arguments, fighting, ignoring younger sisters, bickering, other kinds of weird touching, making goofy faces at the dinner table, sitting around at night doing nothing productive, reading stupid bridal magazines...

"I don't have time to waste on stupid thoughts! I don't think it's ecchi if I'm doing it to save his life! But if my sisters tease me for this, I'll murderize them with Mjolnir!" she rationalized.

Embarrassed, she fluttered her eyes closed, afraid to have to watch herself doing CPR, sucked in a deep breath, leaned down and clamped her mouth over Tomohisa's and exhaled with all her might. She heard a rasping gurgling sound in his chest; as if his lungs were trying to refuse to take in her breath.

"Sorry, but no way am I gonna fail at this CPR thing!" she said to the crisp winter air as she pumped his chest, hoping she wasn't breaking any bones. She rested her ear against his chest to make sure his heart was beating okay. It was slow and weak, but the heartbeats were steady.

Each CPR breath seemed less and less embarrassing. As if her own embarrassment really meant shit right now while Tomohisa was dying.

Breath. Pump his chest. Remember...

_...how much she hated the idiot right from the start when Keiichi and Megumi let him loose at their temple home; how he was always breaking things and trampling her sister's garden; when he nailed her on the head with a baseball while she was inside the temple; and then how he had puked in her lap at dinner the very first day she met him..._

Breath. Pump his chest. Remember...

_...how she liked playing around in the mall with him; kicking beach balls in the hot summer sand while Keiichi was doing one of his races; how she let him coax her into playing catch; how pissed off she felt because his older friends wouldn't pick her to be on their playground baseball team because she was a girl and only 12 years old; getting really angry with him because he was such a baka for concealing his asthma from everybody so they wouldn't have to worry..._

Breath. Pump his chest. Remember...

_...how she tried to explain to him why she didn't have to go to school; and then watched him come home from school and struggle with homework; how offended she felt when he got all jealous towards her because she didn't have to do anything except work on her inventions; writing her goofy wish to be older on a tanzuki during Elder Sister's Tanabata party and then suddenly one morning waking up in a new body; how smug she felt now that she was a few cm taller than him and how embarrassing that was for him; spilling chocolate milk in his face while the Almighty visited that one time... _

Breath. Pump his chest. Remember...

_...how she kept checking on him while they were all at the Le Mans during the Big Race and noticing how he had cleaned and polished Banpei and mini-Banpei...and that her two robot-mechas had actually let him do that!; stupid Big Sister Urd spying on them whenever they went to the mall during the past year..._

Breath. Pump his chest. Remember...

_...how upset he was when his parents were transferred to Osaka; sneaking out a couple times to watch him play on the high school baseball team, the only first year playing as a starter on the team; how he had inadvertently played a key role in undoing that messed-up spell Mara put on them that made she and Belldandy switch bodies..._

Breath. Pump his chest. Remember...

...no money to refill his inhaler? And he was showing up each day with more ice cream for her?

"Tomohisa, you big idiot!" she cursed under her breath; breathing becoming hard for her as she kept exhaling into his lungs. It was all clear as vanilla to her now. Tomohisa had been buying her ice cream when he should have been taking care of himself. What the hell was he thinking? Why didn't his parents or somebody talk some sense into him once in a while?

But how? His parents lived all the way away in Osaka. He could've moved there with them and saved himself all this hassle. Why didn't he move there with them? They moved because of their jobs, and yet he had chosen to stay here, because he didn't want to lose his friends or his school.

"But _I'm_ his friend too! Could it be because of _me_ that he didn't move?" she questioned herself.

Breath. Pump his chest. Wipe a tear...

_"NHNNhh hhh whhuh hhhuh wheezzz..."_

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

As Tomohisa choked his breath back into his lungs, Skuld was so exhausted from CPRing him that she didn't even bother to stand up. She just knelt there next to him, having totally hyperventilated herself in her Earthrealm mortal manifest with her efforts. Relief flowed through her as she watched his chest rise and fall, a length of her long black hair resting on it as she leaned over him. He looked up at her, kinda half-in, half-out of consciousness...and said the most stupid thing imaginable:

"Didya put the ice cream in the fridge, Skuld? It might melt..."

Something snapped inside of her. She looked at her sisters and Peorth, whose eyes were doing all sorts of amazed contortions. She wanted to strangle him! She had just saved his life and now he was asking her about ice cream? What in the Lord's name was he thinking?

_What was the Lord thinking?_ She knew that He was somewhere, watching all of this as it was unfolding, monitoring her as He would any Earthrealm Trainee. She remembered one visit with the Almighty, back when she had been stranded in some nightmare future where He was going to destroy the Earthrealm mortals for failing their Probation. He had asked her what she had learned from staying on the Earthrealm. She had to think really hard about what she had learned about the mortals as an Earthrealm Trainee, because it was the _Almighty_ who was doing the asking. She recalled how she had summed it up by telling Him "_They love like we love._"

Memories of something else she herself had said, back when Urd had exiled herself back on Yggdrasil because Cevn had some kind of infection due to Isilblius. What was it?

"_Could it be that the three of us are here on the Earthrealm, not just because of Keiichi's wish...but because we're part of some higher agenda? I was transferred here as an Earthrealm Trainee. Maybe we're here _-to learn how to love-," she remembered, her voice of recall clear in her mind.

He was an idiot!

But what else could he be? Tomohisa was a mortal boy, halfway through his teens, hundreds of kilometers away from his family, relying on his cousins Keiichi and Megumi to fill in as older-brother/sister models. She was in the same situation, away from Mom and Dad and trying to rely on her sisters. Tomohisa seemed to be especially relying on her since she was the only one even close to his age. Big Sister Urd would either try and play 'date maker' between she and Tomohisa, or she would tease him in some sideways attempt to get under her skin.

Even when she was four years younger than him in her Earthrealm physical manifest, he always made time for her, sometimes treating her like a kid sister. Which she absolutely hated most of the time. When he discovered that she was a Goddess, he had kept up his friendship instead of fading off because he was intimidated. Even though he was a mortal and she was a Goddess...he still tried to treat her as a respected equal. She didn't even realize how important this was; to be treated like a normal teenager instead of some freaky girl with mega magical girl powers.

For the past two weeks, he had been buying her ice cream out of his allowance money, going out every day even when he was sick. He might even have had the beginnings of pneumonia, and yet he was still forcing himself to go to school and keep up with his studies!

"And I didn't even notice. I didn't even thank him once!" she thought harshly, angry at herself. All these years he'd been turning to her! When she 'grew up' last summer into a beautiful 16-year old, she flaunted herself right in front of him, experiencing a certain pride by knowing that he was lovestruck with her. Payback time for him treating her like a little girl. Enjoying the new sense of power she had over him. Then she would jump all over his case, accusing him of being perverted when he was just being a normal Earthrealm teenage boy. Of course his hormones took hold of him from time to time! He wasn't the only teenage mortal who would scope her out when she was at the mall or shopping with Elder Sis.

Elder sister Belldandy had said that "Love is a kind of blend, like a cake mix. Take a bit of companionship, devotion, idealism and surrender...whip them into a passionate frenzy...and it's love!" She didn't understand what that meant at the time.

Tomohisa had been her constant friend for four years, had remained her friend, the only boy on the planet who she could call a friend and really mean it. He was crazy about baseball, baseball cards, baseball on TV...and a few other things. He actually thought his high school team might make it to the National Tournament in Koshien Stadium! Just now, he had been sacrificing for her, just to try and help her feel more comfortable while she was hard at work on trying to discover how to get her sister back.

"Skuld, I'm sorry that it happened again. I hope you're not too upset," he said, his voice still wheezing with effort as his asthma was still gradually releasing its hold on his respiration.

Upset? That was the least of it! She was trembling, chicken-skin with goosebumps, and her hands were shaking. She figuratively heard a rip...her heart being torn.

_Who's_ the idiot?

"Tomohisa...I'm the one who should be saying 'sorry', not you...you big dimwit!" she replied. "I just spent the last half-hour giving you CPR, because I thought..snff..that you were really sick and I was going to lose you. I've really been a basket-case haven't I? Always mean to you, but yet also your best friend, huh?"

He nodded his head, and forced himself to sit up, embarrassment and gratitude mixed in his woozy expression. She could see that he was more embarrassed about the CPR than she was, by a long shot. Skuld felt herself looking at his eyes anew, unexpectedly feeling as if she had just met him five minutes ago. Or maybe that she had know him all of her life.

So innocent. So trusting. So...young.

"Just like me! Immature, and yet yearning for the Future," she realized.

Twelve Decas...120,000 years...and she had actually encountered someone else who yearned for the Future almost as much as she did. The wheels spun in her thoughts as she tried to skyhook into a new consciousness: a grasp of awareness focused on what her sisters would do if they had such a close friend. In a fraction of a second, she ran a couple hundred thousand scenarios of Big Sister Urd and Elder Sister Belldandy being caught off-guard by an Earthrealm mortal that was more than what he seemed.

Keiichi and Cevn.

In the fullest analysis, all the conjecturing in the world didn't add up to the answer already in her heart. Belldandy had found Keiichi, and then three years later, Urd had found Cevn. Friends...but more than friends...

"Skuld, are you okay? You seemed...upset and confused for a moment. Maybe we should go inside and play some Nintendo to settle down our nerves. You wanna?" he asked, clearly noticing her dint of concentration.

"Tomohisa, you baka! I think what we both need right now is more CPR!" she said, leaning right into his face like she'd seen girls do in shoujo manga when they wanted to be kissed. Bad move, especially after a near-death experience; he didn't have a clue about what she was trying to communicate. So she kissed him softly on the lips to make her meaning clear...and refused to stop when he got over his shock and started kissing her back.

She heard several pairs of hands clapping. Even more charming, Banpei and Mini-Banpei were whistling a symphony of beeps, bleeps and musical electronic chime-tones, while Sigel was giggling like a mad-girl...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

When Skuld made that crack about CPR and then she and Tomohisa were suddenly going at it like kids their age were supposed to when they were in love, Urd felt a witches brew of happy-sad-bitter emotions. Happy that her little sister had finally picked up on the truth that everyone else had noticed for a long time. Sad that her sister Belldandy wasn't here to witness this; regretfully that she wasn't able to see her middle sister's joy as Skuld encountered her first love. Bitter, because she could remember Cevn doing the same thing to her, rescuing her from the Real Death by giving her CPR in Beijing after she had tried to drown herself. A chance just like this one...but a chance that she couldn't avail to it because she was the Norn of the Past.

Which didn't explain why Mara and Peorth were looking at her so oddly when she turned around and floated back into the house without a single word.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --


	132. Pt 132: Running With Angels

**Part 132: Running With Angels**

THERA, BEIJING CAPITAL, CHINA-STATES:

The only quiet moment in Capital Stadium was during the thirty seconds it took to announce the Japanese Women's V-ball team. After this, China's team was introduced and the crowd got all silly with chanting and shouting. Takahashi had reminded them again this morning to think of the millions back home in Japan as their "13th player"; but right now it was a tall task. They were only eight women, with four on the bench due to medical red-cards. Their injured teammates were suited up as well, just to provide support and solidarity. Last week when they had played China, she was on the bench with a medical red-card, the result of Athenle's cheating. Now, she was focused on two spectators in the stands that she had chance-glanced on her way out of the tunnel into the stadium. While they were paraded around the interior of the stadium by a Chinese placard-girl, by some bent of miracle she had caught a glimpse of Mom and Dad.

She also had an 'Ultimate' team player in the person of God. Not just Keiichi, but his Boss God too.

It was funny how the Boss God had called her and Athenle out, saying that He would create a scenario so that they could compete honorably for Keiichi, like some jousting mediaeval knights competing for the hand of a damsel, only in reverse. Athenle had hawed and whined and complained, while she said "yes!" in less than a heartbeat. Now the Olympics press was abuzz about the Norwegian "Wild Woman" whom they were hailing her as the "Best Women's Volleyball Player in the world!" because of her unstoppable net attacks. She knew better...Athenle was an unstoppable coward, because when it all came down to the real deep important shit, all she could do was either whine or act out in a blind rage.

Chihiro pulled them into a huddle. Thanks to Takahashi-sensei, her Coach had nerves of steel again...which was something Belldandy knew she didn't have at the moment. Takahashi-sensei had made her promise on behalf of the team that they would win out over China in this match. She didn't ask for them to win the Gold; she had demanded just this one game.

"You all know why we're here, and it isn't because of a fluke. _We're_ the better team, and we need to keep that in our minds and our heart. We've never really had a chance to play up to our potential; so this is our chance to shine. They beat us first, but that don't mean shit now, because we're playing for the whole kitty this time. The China-States girls and coaches think they're some kind of unstoppable team, so we've got to shoot that idea down in this first set. If we lose this first set, we're gonna lose the match. It's as simple as that. All you gals have to do is open yourselves up and play the 'inner game' that wants to come out of each of you. We win this first set, and the crowd's gonna be outta the picture. They can rant and chant and wave flags all they want after that, but it'll be bullshit gestures because we'll already own their asses...and those China players will know that. Every one of you has family back home, friends who are skipping school or work to watch this game. Let's give them something to be proud of back home."

Belldandy took the floor and high-fived her teammates. When it came to Kinosh'ta, the Osaka girl nodded at her and slapped her hand so hard that it stung. Message received. Belldandy responded by punched her hard on the shoulder, earning an "oof!" and a grin.

It was time to be tough as nails.

The Chinese were first to serve, as they were the home team. Chihiro set them up with a 6-2 rotation with a 2-4 row set: her and Kinosh'ta at the net, four in the back, hoping to take away the hot spots the Chinese ace would aim for. Their service ace threw the ball up high to try and crash a power serve down the baseline. She blasted the ball with a fury...and Kinosh'ta attacked the net and roofed it right back in their faces. Her team couldn't hope for a more dramatic opening statement than _that_; the Chinese were totally flinched, and Kinosh'ta made it even worse by poker-facing them...not even bothering with the usual celebratory hand-slapping with her teammates after a big kill point.

Ootaki was their power ace server, and she hit a sinker-floater right into the far right corner of the court, completely fake-jobbing the Chinese back row into assuming it would land out. A 1-in-10 chance funny serve, but she had nailed it. The next volley ran long and was finished by a Tamiya-to-Kinosh'ta set, which Kinosh'ta handled with a tap-over. Ootaki served again, and the Chinese passed and set to her side. Moritayama dug it out and Belldandy chopped it right along the sideline, just like Coach had drilled her to do a couple thousand times back in Tokyo.

Just like that, the score was Japan 4, China nil. None of the points were followed by any type of acknowledgment between her and her teammates, which was flustering the Chinese. At 15, Chihiro shifted to a 6-1-1 rotation to split up her and Kinosh'ta so they'd handle different rows in a 3-to-3 offense. She and Kinosh'ta feinted back-row attacks, which further confused the Chinese.

Yesterday, Chihiro and the team had brainstormed on ways to beat the Chinese: keep the teamwork hidden, be impersonal and kick ass on the court.

The first set ended with Japan 30, China 23.

The boisterous crowd was completely clamped down by Japan's performance. Belldandy knew in her bones that her team had just played the 'perfect game' that Chihiro had demanded. Beyond this, they had unnerved the Chinese by playing 'cold'; instead being all bubbly, jumpy and emo...they were playing with a no-nonsense salaryman attitude. While Chihiro was calmly running the numbers in her playbook, Belldandy could hear the Chinese team's coach yelling his head off at his players.

China won the next two sets by two point margins.

"We've got 'em, girls!" Chihiro noted between games, but Belldandy noticed that Fujishita was limping really badly, a casualty of a sliding dig towards the end of the third set. She was medically red-carded for the rest of game by the referee's manager. Belldandy was disappointed, but Fujishita's gallant effort to play through the pain until she could hardly stand on her foot was inspiring to her.

It was time to climb the mountain.

Japan won the fourth set to tie the match, but the game was halted almost ten minutes by a net collision between Kusuhara and the Chinese strong side attacker. It was another freakazoid accident; Kusuhara had dinked the ball between two Chinese net defenders. The ball fell straight down the net and one of the Chinese attackers landed her foot on the ball and pitched forward into the net, nailing Kusuhara in the eye with a flailing elbow. Even the crowd was hushed; Kusuhara was bleeding like a boxer and had to be stretchered off the court because she was too dizzy to stand up. No matter what the level of competition, when you accidentally injure another team's player, a brief feeling of guilt inevitably follows.

"Too bad, because we're going to exploit it," Chihiro noted. "She's gonna play edgy, so we need to play endurance. It's time to show them what a _team_ is all about. They know that there's no subs for you guys, so you need to be each other's fan club from this point on. We played 'em cold the first couple sets, now it's time to play 'em hot and give 'em lots of attitude. I want all six of you slapping tens after every point we make. Then I want you staring down their throats across the net. I've been staring down their coach for this set and he's starting to flake. Head into the headlights, gals! Finally, I've got a bit of news for you: our Women's Field Hockey team just beat Russia in overtime and won themselves a Gold medal! They weren't even supposed to get past their Prelims. I made a bet with their coach; if they get gold, I get an autographed team ball. You win this game, I'll make sure each of you get one too."

Belldandy realized the purpose of Chihiro's intent to be each other's encouragement, because she was starting to feel athletic exhaustion midway through the final set. There was no one Chihiro could send into to spell her, even for a single point's rest. All her teammates were tired, but the get-together rallying after each point, win or lose, kept their fatigue in play by dint of rallying each other to exceed their personal best. Japan began to pull away from China after they hit 22 and Belldandy remembered Takahashi's marathon race; how the 47 year-old had burst into the stadium with a kick stride and overtook her competitors in an improbable finish.

She was wondering how she could find her kick-stride when she saw Kinosh'ta stumble trying to dig out an attack and still she somehow managed to pancake it. They were beating _China-States_, in Beijing, in their Capital Stadium. Their team was _already_ in their kick-stride. Every woman on the team was playing her personal best! She looked at Moritayama, and saw the hunger in her eyes. Four years ago, she and Chihiro got stopped at this very point in the competition, one game short of the medal game. This time, their team Captain was the model of confidence and poise.

Kinosh'ta had started this match with a killer roof of a Chinese serve, gaining Japan their first burst of confidence...and Belldandy had the privilege of taking a perfect set from Tamiya high above the net and sealing the deal with a massive kill for the exclamation point.

Japan 30, China 27.

Chihiro was leaping up and down on the sidelines, Moritayama was on her hands and knees kissing the court, and Belldandy, Kinosh'ta, Ootaki and Tamiya and Muriyako were gleeful and giddy. The crowd was subdued but polite, except for the several hundred Japanese spectators who were rushing to front of the arena seating. Belldandy clambered up over the press corps seating and gave her Mom and Dad hugs, both her parents brimming with emotion. Everybody but Chihiro had family here, and a few minutes were devoted to personal congrats before they were swarmed by the news teams.

Belldandy realized that Chihiro had never said a word about her family. Ever. During the past nine months, all she knew was that Chihiro came from some rural part of Japan...and that she knew only because she recognized her loud whistling; the kind of whistling that a city girl would never bother to learn, or be caught dead doing in public.

Could something have happened to her Coach's parents?

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

SOMEWHERE:

Keleste wanted to kill the cyborg named Cevn. He had been the cause of all of this! She had just witnessed an indescribable act of viciousness; only a being with a totally callous attitude towards life could enact such an evil atrocity. Every one of the Soul Mirrors revealed him deliberately attacking the airplane that carried all the special people in Belldandy's life. Then, he somehow made Belldandy say words of hate to her mortal boyfriend at very last moment of his life, right as his final strength ebbed away and he slipped into the Mediterranean. The act was so horrible, she couldn't even comprehend the malign intent. Because of him, a Goddess had become a wretched shadow of herself; that horrible black-shrouded figure of grief which she and Keiyasu had encountered when they opened up the Gate that they had found. A Goddess who could have been her Mother. She gathered her energies and fueled a ball of Metanative force...

"Keleste! Stop it!" she heard Belldandy shout right before she fired off the blue ellipse of energy that she knew would instantly disintegrate the cyborg.

"It wasn't him. It's something inside of him! Do you think that he could have possibly ripped the tail off an airplane? Or fly at 10,000 meters in the air!" Keiichi challenged her. Despite what he saw displayed on the Soul Mirrors, he didn't believe for an instant that Cevn could had done something so horrific. His gut feeling was that something was trying to deceive them, just like it had used Belldandy to deceive everyone up to the point of his wedding day.

"Keiichi is correct," Peorth clarified. "I've discovered what has happened, the mystery behind the mystery. Cevn, have you ever encountered Isilblius?"

"Yes, twice before, and once now," Cevn answered. "Right now, he is inside of me. After Keiichi's wedding was 'crashed' by the Dark Lord, the two Lords fought and destroyed Belldandy. Isilblius, or more specifically, a SurGoth wraith, was released. Keiichi ran through the Gate to arrive here, and then Keleste and Keiyasu followed him. The SurGoth buried itself inside of me, and stupidly, I ran through the Gate. I should have stayed and let the two Lords destroy me, but I was too afraid to stay and face my fate.

"No, you chose correctly," Keiichi-God interjected. "Now I know that it was you who came to Trondheim many years ago, my long-ago friend. You were battling against Isilblius then, and we were grateful to help you further our cause of survival. It seems that he has been more resilient than any of us thought. Perhaps we are gathered here to once again engage our resources to foil his foul ambitions."

"You mean there is some kind of 'ghost' in him?" Keleste asked.

"Yes, my dear Keleste," Belldandy answered, wrapping her arms around the young Goddess to allay her fright. "I sensed its presence when he started having malfunctions of his cyborganic components. I first thought these were random occurrences, but then I became convinced that something inside of his was _angry_. I heard a sort of 'screaming', just like so many times while I was deranged with grief."

"You heard the same screams again, Belldandy? For many millennia, I felt like something was attacking you on a psychic or Soul level. Now I am certain of it, and we have a means at our avail to prove it," Peorth noted. "Keiichi of Tengoku...you asked for our trust a short while ago when you were Probing Belldandy and the mortal Keiichi's minds. Now I need to beg leave for you to give me your trust. I am the Divine steward of the Rune of Peorth; the Rune of Revelation. What I plan to do is to create a Rune Mandala. This is a very special mandala, one that will carve through your confusion and reveal who you really are and what you really saw. If you step within it and remain focused on the impressions you received from Belldandy and your mortal counterpart, the Rune will arrange order out of chaos. Can you maintain your contact with your mirrors while concentrating fully on revisiting the results of your mind Probe?"

"Yes...I think," Keiichi-God answered. "But I will need help to keep my awareness focused. Keleste, Keiyasu…it falls to you to anchor me. I'd ask you, Belldandy, but you would be a distraction by virtue of your resemblance to my lovely wife. It was hard enough to comb through the passages of your life while I was Probing you, because every corner of your mind recalled to me that I was separated from my wife Belldandy...and how much I miss her."

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

I watched as Peorth created a Rune mandala, assuming all the while that it would simply be a runic language recreation ala the some of the circular mandalas I had seen Urd, Belldandy and Skuld create. This wasn't the care-free goofoff Peorth that I had known over the past two years; that Peorth could definitely focus her intent like this Peorth did...but this Peorth was almost artistic in her control of magic. No point of wonderment; this Peorth was forty thousand years older than the Peorth I knew. Urd had by far the greater expertise at crafting mandalas of the three sisters, as her expertise was in arcanical and magical efforts, but this was complexity that even Urd would be hard-pressed to match. I could understand why Peorth's 'Yggdrasil' was called Nulln; in both Latin and Archaic Hebrew, 'Nulln' meant a negation of non-existence.

An affirmation of life, love and laughter.

The Enigma Book had a substantial section on the functions of Runes, including the runic Peorth. Many Runes were designed to create precision out of vagaries, negation or position out of ambivalences, emotion out of intellect...but in a sense, Peorth was the most powerful of the Runes, trumping the other Runes by virtue of its transcendental quality of revelation. Also, it was no coincidence that Peorth in a sense was the 'Fourth' Norn; as her rune represented 'Fate' and 'Eternity'. Two attributes that are part of the thread that holds together all phases of Time.

Her mandala, rather than being circular, was a geometry of Mandelbrotian cursives. Instead of 'writing' the runes, she was 'folding' them...my best guess was that the glowing characters were invested in more than the three visible dimensions. Finally, she finished the mandala by crafting a hedge-wall around it of densely packed roses.

The God Keiichi stepped into the Rune, holding hands with Keiyasu and Keleste on each side, and Peorth activated the mandala. Instantly, a circulation of runic symbols glowed out of the air, spiraling around the three like Saturnine rings. Keiichi's courtier robe was whip-snapping in a wind as the glow increased.

A tide of monumental light against the desolation of this non-place.

The Soul Mirrors began to strobe again, flickering on and off with smattering images gained within their confines...lights that danced so hard, I was unable to distinguish if they were 'in' the mirrors or 'on' them in the sense of a electrical discharge can trace along the horizon. The images indexed themselves, gradually slowing down to a focus.

Instead of seeing an image of Isilblius, I was watching a 'stretched' version of Keiichi and Belldandy in what looked like a Buddhist temple. The pair were much taller than the Earthrealm standards, easily two meters in height. Keiichi was partway emerged from a mirror, and Belldandy was dressed in a pair of pajamas and appeared to be yelling at him. The image switched like a TV remoting to a new channel; the 'tall' Belldandy was playing in an intense volleyball competition, with something like an Olympic symbol in the background, but with seven circles instead of five.

_I felt a wash of rapt tension..._

The scene shifted again, and I saw a snow-packed February day in Trondheim; a Belldandy sitting at near a fireplace sketching a portrait of Keiichi and praying that it would come to life. Sitting next to her on the couch was Urd and Genji...a dozen years older than I remembered; Urd's hair was cut short to shoulder length and Skuld's pure-black hair had some streaks of grey. Genji was talking to his daughter Keleste. The last time I saw Keleste, she was barely a toddler. Now she was a teenager, trying to comfort Belldandy.

_I felt a wash of tearful sadness..._

In another mirror, I saw the truth. Belldandy's entire family torn out of her life by the SurGoth wraith. It wasn't Isilblius as I had expected. The spectral figure actually frightened away the Reapers that were dispatched to convey the fatalities to the Mid-Light Realm. Skeletal Evil intimidating the messengers of Death. The SurGoth wraith hovering around Belldandy, prodding her with some kind of green sword of energy every so often, which seemed to cause her to become more disconnected with her Soul.

_I felt a wash of fiery agony..._

The mirrors were sequencing through cycles of Belldandy's and Keiichi's now. I saw Urd hovering at near-death from being infected by Isilblius. Belldandy trying to kill me. The SurGoth destroying Earth, which resulted in our exodus to Planet Lost. The Seven restructuring the Everything, expanding it from Multiverses to Logorinths. Urd and Mara conspiring to keep me wasted and un-alive so that Isilblius couldn't emerge from within me. My reality?

_I felt a wash of heady confusion.._.

Vanagdrasil, at Hild's Black Palace, watching cockroaches immolate themselves by dashing into one of Hild's outdoor's baths; the ones with superheated magma. Chased by the Quad of children: Pryzm and Ulfryn, Sygyn and Falcyn. Mara and Hild arguing, Skuld stating something about "the Ultimate Force losing continuity."

Belldandy, Belldandy, Belldandy...

The SurGoth inside of me was trying to explode out of me, because it was aware that Peorth was onto its evil design.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"What has occurred here is remarkably like a chain reaction among TimeStreams," Peorth elaborated. "The Rune has told me that first, it attacked Belldandy in her and my TimeStream, which we'll call the Nulln TimeStream for reference. When it was unable to usurp her Soul, it then retaliated by killing her entire family and Keiichi and my Heroic Vermilion Swift in reprisal and frustration."

She had to pause to compose her emotions, the new recognition of her Angelic boyfriend being in the role as a murder victim was very taxing on her heart, even more so as it appeared that the cause of his death was a geist residing in the mortal cyborg standing just a few meters away.

"When he failed at this, he next tried to enter Keiichi's Tengoku TimeStream to attempt to take over Keiichi. Again, he was thwarted, perhaps because this TimeStream had been exempted from his initial attempts to destroy all of reality, or perhaps because it was somehow protected."

Keiichi-God immediately understood that it was the latter, because after Cevn had left them, his leftover Nobel Prize award had an unusual field of energy properties that neither he or his brothers could ascertain. When they shot him out of the TimeStream, the Metanative Energies they had depleted from the task had been restored to their TimeStream...and then some. That extra energy must have been a type of residual force; a 'quirk' of the Ultimate Force that had imbued their house with the power to repel Isilblius. This was why the evil being had been stranded outside, unable to enter either the TimeStream or the Earthrealm!

"Then it shifted to another TimeStream, with another mortal Belldandy and Keiichi. It tried to enter Keiichi, but for some reason, he was already dead to the emotion of love at the time, which was useless to its destructive plan. In reprisal, he cursed the mortal Belldandy. The athletic woman you see playing in a competition of some sort will be dead within 48 hours. It could not take revenge directly on the God named Keiichi in that TimeStream, so it decided to take the one he values most instead," Peorth added, feeling ill-pressed to narrate each successive turning of hatred along the skein of baneful intent.

"So this...pattern...is being repeated in the TimeStreams, no matter which one they are?" Keiichi asked. "What about my TimeStream? What about Bell-chan?"

"I'm sorry, but it has killed her..." Peorth began to explain.

"NO!" Cevn interrupted. "It did _not_ kill her. It's inside of me now, and I've learned that it has to kill the host it inhabits before it can leave. It _wants_ to kill the host-form, so that it can be imbued with even more hatred, evil, viciousness...more negativity. Since the two Lords destroyed Belldandy, it was _forcibly ejected_ out of her. She isn't dead, she only appeared to die."

"Keiichi, in your reality...your TimeStream, did you ever give birth to an Angel?" Belldandy asked.

"I remember it clearly!" Keiichi answered. "I ate an Angel's Egg, because I had been told that I had a 'semi-divine' nature and was capable of creating an Angel. A moment later, I was looking at myself! My Angel's name is Heroic Vermilion Swift. While I was stranded in Algeria during the Trial that Kami-sama caused Bell's parents to make me undergo, he saved my life."

"_The Lord _was involved in your Trial of Preparedness?" Belldandy asked with a toning of astonishment to her voice. Keiichi then explained how the Almighty was testing Keiichi and his girlfriend, not to determine the sincerity of their love for each other, but simply to see if 'his' Belldandy could rely on herself to keep her Goddess powers sealed and thus, live as a mortal wife would live.

She realized that she had her family had been misled; her parents had been duped into creating an unnecessary Preparedness test for her and Keiichi. They already knew she and Keiichi were destined for each other...so there was no need for her Mother to demand the traditional Trial.

This..._thing_ inside of Cevn had contrived the entire web of tragedy.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

THE EARTHREALM:

Skuld's passion-play with Tomohisa brought a much needed excitement to offset the tedium of investigating the Gate of Judgement and the "God-Demon's Mandala", as Mara designated it.

After blaming each other as the cause of the set of circumstances causing Skuld and Tomohisa to leap headlong into a teen romance, Urd confessed to Mara and Peorth that she could have cured Tomohisa instantly, but chose not to. She justified this by noting that she had spent four years trying to 'heat up' Belldandy and Keiichi's relationship without success; and she wasn't going to fail this time. Rather than trying to 'tweak' the situation, she sensed that restraint would be the better course in these circumstances.

Mara admitted that she was almost ready to cure Tomohisa by casting a curse on his asthma which would have forced it to leave him; but when Skuld had totally forgotten about her own Goddess powers and began employing CPR to revive him, she decided to lay in wait so she could tease Skuld mercilessly about the CPR. Leverage over younger sisters and all that. Amusingly, for now she had far more raw material available to inject strife into Skuld's life whenever she wanted.

Peorth finally sighed and owned up that she was on the verge of manifesting a rose that would aromatically remove Tomohisa's asthma. Instead, she decided to give Skuld the first chance to try and heal the young one. She remembered a particular incident when she had flirted with Tomohisa as she was wont to do with young Earthrealm mortal men. During a visit to the temple, she had surprised Cevn in the furoba and shocked him into unconsciousness...and then encountered Tomohisa for the first time. Naturally, she offered him the 'full Goddess service package'...and Skuld's reaction of anger was much more protective than one would allow for safeguarding a friend. Thus, she had surmised the ardour that existed within the heart of the young Goddess. She was more than satisfied with the passionate blossoming of hearts between the two.

Here it was, five days later, and the three were amazed that Skuld _still_ hadn't figured out that she could have simply encanted a creative spell to heal Tomohisa right on the spot. Urd commented that when the Almighty had 'tested' Belldandy and Keiichi, His intent was to see if Belldandy could withhold herself from using her Goddess abilities even under significant duress. Slyly, she added that Skuld was now a 'level up' on Belldandy and she, because the Norn of the Future had already jumped into the fires of passion while limiting herself to practically a mortal state of being.

CPR certainly wasn't the first choice of a First Class Unrestricted License Goddess during emergency circumstances involving mortal physiology.

When Skuld and Tomohisa both complained about chapped lips at dinner that evening, Urd had to withdraw to the QuadNode so the vociferous laughing craze that had collapsed all of her senses could be accommodated with unabashed abandon. She was quickly joined by Mara and Peorth...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"I can't believe this! It's been staring me in the face for all this time, and I totally missed it!" Skuld shouted, sending one of Mara's sere-hawks into a mad-winged circuit around the QuadNode.

"Peorth, canya get ahold of an Angel's Egg?" she asked. Peorth looked at her with an expiring expression of mystification.

"Oui, but why should I bother the Almighty for such a trivial matter?"

"Because it'll bring back Holy Bell. But not here! Through there!" she explained hurriedly, gesturing towards the portal in the middle of their combined labs.

"Spill the explanation for us, kiddo!" Mara asked, intrigued that her little sister was fully into 'brainstorm mode'. Skuld had gotten over on her more than a few times when her feverish bursts of insight had stalled Mara's efforts to craft discomfort in Keiichi and Belldandy's lives. The Ultimate Destruction Program had been snapped up by one of those Skuld brainstorms. Now that she was 'on the same team' as her kid sister, she respected Skuld's flair for improbability adductions.

"Elder Sister and Keiichi fled through that portal; this much we know. Urd, do you remember when the guys were stranded in the 13th century, while we were stranded in 2050? You went back and got them, and then Holy Bell and Noble Scarlet guided you back home. It's the same principle. We can't send an Angel's Egg to Vanagdrasil, but we can send one through the portal. _They're on the other side_...and Holy Bell will notice the Angel's Egg. If there's an entrance on this side, then the exit on the other side exists. Maybe Keiichi and Elder Sister are lost! The terrain on the other side of this 'Gate' looks like soup in a thunderstorm. The Angel's Egg will be a homing beacon, so they can find their way to the gate! Then we can try and bring them back here," Skuld elaborated.

"Well, it can't hurt," Urd commented, still not comprehending the thrust of Skuld's argument. Her little sister apparently thought that they could toss an Angel's Egg into the former Gate of Judgement and everything would turn out alright.

"But we cannot see the Almighty to obtain one, remember?" Peorth reminded herself and the others. As Goddesses, they were so accustomed to the omnipresence of the Liege of the God's Realm, it was hard for any of them to grasp that He was somehow paralyzed right here on the Earthrealm.

"No problem! Urd of the mighty alchemical thunderbolt to the rescue!" Urd shouted, earning a Mara grimace. "I can make one. Really, you guys! It'll be hard, but we have two Angels and two Angel-Devils to assist. Between their intertwined charm and songcraft, we should be able to spool together the birth-vibe needed to animate an Angel's Egg. As you know, Angels are needed to create the giving place within that allows an Angel's Egg to synch spiritually with a Goddess."

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

THERA, BEIJING CAPITAL, CHINA-STATES:

_"Ohayo, this is Tetsu Migasaki in Beijing for the Summer portion of the Jubilee Olympics. Please allow us to provide you with a special Olympic memento this morning. Today, we have three very special guests and a couple surprise appearances..."_ the news anchor began in a well-rehearsed sing-song.

Belldandy was fidgeting, her feet skipping a rapid beat under the news desk while the NHK sports guy blabbed his spiel, showing film clips of Takahashi from 1984 through her recent marathon victory. Seeing it on the TV monitors, Belldandy re-felt the spine-crackling thrill as Takahashi pushed herself beyond herself and caught up with the other two marathoners during the final of the National Stadium track. Hearing the excited voices of the live sports crew who did the actual call made it even more chilling and remarkable.

"Takahashi-sensei, they called you 'the Immortal' back in Sydney and Athens. I think you gave every middle-aged person in Japan some extra pep last week when you won the marathon under such pressure. What was going through your mind when you were finishing the marathon?"

"Actually, when I'm finishing a marathon, I don't really have time to idle about in my thoughts," Takahashi answered. "There's a runner's consciousness, a 'zone' as some will describe it. I was definitely in the midst of the moment, and at the end, I was feeling a sort of thunder inside of me. I noticed that the other women were slowing down just a tad, and I just had to beat my personal best and maybe win a medal. I really didn't think it would be enough to win, but I surprised myself, I guess."

"You both were at the Bird's Nest watching the women's marathon," the emcee noted to Belldandy and her teammate. "What were your thoughts?"

"Well, we were cheering for the Russians," Kinosh'ta snapped back without missing a beat, causing Belldandy to snicker as Mr. Anchor Dude was completely caught off guard. "Of course, we were impressed by Takahashi-sensei's champion effort. People can say they're impressed, but that's just talk. We _showed_ how impressed we were when we swept the Americans a few hours later to get into the Quarterfinals. I was totally inspired to play my best; and I have been ever since."

"I ran hurdles in track-n-field, and I could tell that Takahashi-sensei had a kick-stride when she was running into the stadium that the other front-runners didn't have," Belldandy added, noticing how Takahashi seemed to raise an eyebrow at this disclosure. "Sensei told us that we don't get to set world records because we're in team sports, and advised us to constantly play with an eye to top over on our personal best. Seeing her win in world record time helped restore my confidence in myself and our team. Sensei told us that Japan as a whole is a team...us, the girls who won Gold in Field Hockey, the divers and synch-swimmers...all of us. I really thought that she couldn't lose when she came running into the stadium."

"There you have it from the two 'Phenom Twins'!" the announcer noted. "It's time to introduce our first special guest. We've brought her over from Japan for this show and to watch her former student race in the marathon. Actually, she brought herself; we certainly didn't have to offer any coaxing to convince her to appear on this edition of 'Ohayo!' Please welcome Omao-sensei, who was Takahashi's personal coach in the 1984 and 1988 Olympics."

Belldandy noticed that Takahashi-sensei was almost white-faced with shock at this; it was obvious that the two had pathwayed into different routes of life over the past ten years. The next five minutes was an exciting exchange of anecdotes between the elderly coach and her protégé; Coach Omao gleefully describing Takahashi's youthful mischief during her first two Olympic Games.

"What do you think of these two young women?" the anchor asked Takahashi and her coach...and Belldandy realized that it was her and Kinosh'ta's turn to roll on the hot publicity grill.

"They're too tall!" Coach Omao answered with a matronly chuckle. To prove his point, the anchor had her and Kinosh'ta stand next to Takahashi and Coach Omao. Kinosh'ta was 2.01 meters tall, and Belldandy at 2.17 was almost a head taller than Kinosh'ta. They dwarfed Takahashi and Coach Omao, which brought mirthful laughter from the in-studio audience.

"Takahashi-sensei, what did you think when our women's volleyball team beat China-State's team?"

"It was remarkable. I didn't get to see it until later, because I was at the Women's Field Hockey final. _That_ game was amazing; those girls came from two points behind in the final period and won Japan's first Gold medal ever in Field Hockey. I think that there's going to be a lot of girls watching these Games who are going to be inspired to work hard at being good athletes and good citizens. This is really what the Olympic Movement aims to promote. The long history of truce during the Games is remarkable in and of itself, but the truce _in between_ each Games is even more remarkable. The truce I'm referring to is the decision each athlete makes to not bow down to all the wrongs and unfairness of the world, but to declare a truce with them instead. Doing so, it becomes possible for she or he to further themselves in sports and civics pursuits. This is the essential guiding principle of the Modern Era Games. With all the ills that abound in the world...warfare, natural disasters, constant economic pressures, neglected children and struggling families...the Olympic Games are a beacon of light and hope. I remember coming to Los Angeles in 1984, 19 years old and wide-eyed as I was exposed to the _real_ world; the world of the 150 different nations competing as one in the Olympics. Now I'm on the other end of those years; and I'm still wide-eyed. Teams like our Field Hockey women, like these two and their volleyball squad...they keep me inspired."

Belldandy heard Kinosh'ta choke a deep gulp of surprise. Takahashi-sensei had basically laid out the Olympic Spirit and then said she was _inspired_ by their Volleyball team!

"We just learned that your team will face Norway-Euro for the championship. Everyone has been touting Norway's center attacker, Vibeke Althenlegard, as the best volleyball player in the Games, as she had totally dominated all the opponents she's played against. You're going to have your hands full with her. What is your strategy?"

"First off, she's not the best player in the Games! She is!" Belldandy answered hotly, and pointed.

"No way! She is!" Kinosh'ta said simultaneously and pointed.

Belldandy and Kinosh'ta were pointing at each other.

Takahashi and her coach nodded in approval, chuckling, as the studio audience broke into enthusiastic applause at the unrehearsed scene.

"She can bring it on," Kinosh'ta added. "She can curse out our players at the airport, piss off our coach, laugh at us while we're practicing...but she ain't got what it takes. Getting here is about dedication, discipline and sportsmanship..."

"...and she may think she's some kind of volleyball goddess, but on the court she is going to be revealed for exactly what she is. The volleyball court doesn't lie," Belldandy finished. She knew that Athenle was going to see this at some point, so she wanted to make it personal.

"Well, it sounds like you both have a score to settle with this Norway-Euro player," as the TV monitor showed the now-infamous picture of Chihiro flipping off Athenle. The studio audience and the spectators queued around outside the booth broke into cheers and applause in reaction, embarrassing Mr. Sports Anchor.

"The Gold Medal game is in two days at the National Indoors Stadium, the Small Bird's Nest. You only have six healthy players to work with, with half of your team medically red-carded. Two of your players are playing with injuries and one is doubtful. Many are saying that it can't be done, that it's impossible for a team with no substitute players to make it through three, four or even five games."

"I should remind you that a week ago, you were saying that our Women's Field Hockey team wouldn't make it through the Prelims," Takahashi scolded him, clearly irritated. "They proved you wrong, and I'm glad of it. You need to stop being a news anchor and realize that these women are here for _Japan_, not for some variety show or photo-op. Why don't you show some pride in what these young women have done? _'L'important n'est pas de gagner, mais de participer._' _'The importance is in the participation, not the winning_.' They're all banged up with injuries, but they are still competing. And a couple of hours ago _they beat China_!"

"Way to go, Takahashi-sensei!" Belldandy said in a low voice, irritated that Mr. Sports Anchor was being such a downer.

"Uh..heh heh, I guess I just got critiqued by one of the best," he said blandly, trying to cover and save face. "This must mean that it's time to bring in our second surprise set of guests. The first Modern Olympics hosted in Japan was held in 1964, in which the Women's Volleyball team won a Gold Medal in Tokyo..."

"Oh my fucking God!" Belldandy thought, her back growing rigid as twelve women in their 60s and 70s were led into the broadcast set by a spokesmodel. Each was wearing _2008_ Japan women's v-ball warmups, accompanied by Coach Chihiro, who looked like she was having a humility-based heart attack.

"...and fortunately, we were able to bring all twelve of the members of that team to Beijing to watch the Japanese women play against China-States in the semis," he added.

Belldandy was up out of her seat in an instant, bowing to the Olympians. She recognized the woman in front, Masae Kasai. _The_ Masae Kasai, who carried the torch at the Nagano games. Captain of the 1964 Japanese women's volleyball team. These women were _real_ Olympians, having won Japan's first-ever Gold medal in volleyball. She and Kinosh'ta offered their seats, but the studio techs already had a special row of seats arranged for the elders. The invited audience was wildly applauding; as sports fans, they knew something special when it was brewing right under their noses.

Belldandy was too intimidated to say a word, and Kinosh'ta could only nod her head when the anchor tried to get either of them to discuss the 2008 Games with their counterparts from 1964. It was eerie, seeing the 1964 team wearing _their_ uniforms. Every woman was lively; each was a work of art in her own particular way, seemingly ageless. Fortunately, Coach Chihiro was only a little less tongue-tied than she and Kinosh'ta, and was able to engage the elder v-ball Olympians in a compare-and-contrast. They talked about playing their first world championship tourneys and losing in the finals, then playing again in 1962 in Moscow and beating the Soviets in the title game. In Moscow. At that point, they had decided as a team to hang it up, but then the clarion call of competition sounded again in their hearts, accompanied by the desire of thousands of their countrymen for Japan to win the Gold Medal in the Tokyo Olympics. So they suited up for one more tourney, practicing for two years...

They delivered...by sweeping the Soviets in the Gold medal game.

Finally, the rest of the 2008 squad was escorted in, and Belldandy winced as Ootaki did her typical 'air guitar' moves while they marched in. One of the elder team members had brought her actual 1964 Tokyo Olympic Gold Medal, and took it out of its case and allowed her teammates and her to pass it around. Belldandy felt a tingling in her fingers as the medal made its round; this was the first time she had seen a real Gold medal in real life...and now she was _actually touching it_.

"Don't drop it!" Kinosh'ta teased her in a whispering voice. She finally handed the Gold Medal to the sports anchor, who laid it out on his desk so a cameraman could shoot a close-up of the historic medal.

The show ended with a photo op, with she and her teammates kneeling in front and the 1964 Women's team standing behind them, along with Takahashi and Coach Omao and Coach Chihiro.

Takahashi swiftly cornered her, noticing that she was isolating, and urged her to talk to the 1964 Olympic team, noting that "this is a once-in-a-lifetime chance!"

After practice at the gym that evening, Chihiro informed the team that the '64 squad was going to visit with them right before their game against Norway-Euro.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

SOMEWHERE:

Listening to Peorth interpret what Keiichi-God had learned, I was struck by the realization that each time Isilblius had attacked us, he had used Keiichi and Belldandy as part of his plans. The first time, he had slain everyone before her eyes...leaving her for last, so that she would feel the most emotional pain of all.

Instead, she had forgiven the bastard.

During his second episode of warfare against us, I had discovered that he had hidden himself in the Enigma Book somehow, using the temptation of the formula to awaken the Ultimate Demon as a means to lure Mara so she would 'create' him and jump start his first destructive foray. When the Ultimate Force defeated him, I was faded into death, but somehow my loving acceptance of Urd in my life brought me back...along with him. Isilblius had used my desire to return to life to be with Urd as a means for him to escape from the non-Reality I had trapped him in. Which was why I had to make Urd forget about me, forget about her feelings towards me, forget that she was ever in love with me. He had used my Soul against me, and I was not going to allow him another chance to hide within my Soul, so that the love Urd and I shared could be his conduit back to focus his evil on us. To recast the world by his design, to set the stage for the darkness of his rage.

The Seven. Urd, Mara, Belldandy, Skuld...with Keiichi possessed by the Reaper, Miyuki as Kami-sama and Natsumi as Oni-sama.

Together, they had defeated him, and exiled him away. They had the courage to stare into the endless skies of emptiness, to regard the inchoate maze of time. Together, they had reestablished all of Reality, creating the Expansion. The Ygg and Vang Multiverses were exponentially increased, designed into the new OmniArc.

But these were all metaphors, all expressions and not reactions. This shadowing of evil that populated me was trying to rip my Soul in half with each effort I made to weave the tapestry of my memories. I had lost my identity, my mind, my body...all of these...but feeling a wet-blood presence inside of me trying to strip my Soul into shreds of cold absences was far more painful.

Isilblius had a consistent modus: each intrusion into our Reality had involved the Norns and Keiichi, as well as Mara.

I had written the Enigma Book with the purpose of forestalling Isilblius, but he had slipped within my efforts, leading me to believe that he had authored part or all of it, for the express purpose of leaving a back-door entryway to re-enter Reality and once again harbor his destructive course against all of us.

Now, the Ultimate Force was failing, losing cohesion.

Skuld...the Skuld that I had encountered in Vanagdrasil, had suspected this. With precise categorical confirmation, she used the Nitton to measure the discrepancy in the Ygg Xeomnic Network. Three percent of the OmniArc was missing, or had been misplaced and thus was not networked into the Ygg computer. Even more disturbing, she discovered that the Vang Mnoexic Network was similarly misaligned against the reality of the Vanagdrasil Logorinth. For some reason, she had forced me to 'bridge' the Nitton to the Vang Mnoex, with the result that the entire contents of the Demon's Realm computer had been downloaded into me. I cautiously sensed that I had both sequences of databases within me. I possessed the flawed version of both computing networks; in computer terms, I was a backup of two synched hard-drive with bad sectors, so to speak.

Somewhere, somehow, I had to locate where a healthy whole sequence of the Ygg and Vang networks existed. Once located, the two incomplete networks within me could be templated against it...so that an unknown agency or the UF could restore both computer systems. Using a side-by-side comparison, the irregularities between the 'entire' and the 'partial' Networks would be exposed. The missing or corrupted parts of the both Logorinths could be repaired.

It was all interlinked somehow. The corruption of data on the God's and Demon's computers. The distortion of the TimeWeb within the TimeSphere, which had gathered us together in an improbable configuration of Past, Present, Future...and Possible. Time always had an extra dimension of possibility; the Eternity. This was Peorth's 'assignment' as the Rune of Eternity. She had mentioned numerous times how she had sought out the Lord to be instructed on why she was assigned Eternity, and never received an explanation. She probably didn't even know her own role. This Peorth seemed to have a better grasp of her Rune and its potential. Belldandy had explained that Peorth could see the wholeness of Eternity, but couldn't interpret it without recourse to a Norn.

Would it be possible for Peorth to send a message to 'my' Peorth, telling her that Keiichi and I were safe? Could Peorth understand that her role in the schema was necessary; as she would become the Possibility to reconstruct both Logorinths and undo what Isilblius was destroying?

Isilblius had virused the computer networks, and then the Gods and Demons. When he returned, he tried to destroy the Everything by blunt force trauma. Now, he had found a way for the Ultimate Force itself to degrade. Without the UF, there would be no hope for a resolution; everything that existed would be wiped off the cosmic slate. None of us knew what was 'erasing' reality.

Circumstances were becoming more dire, because I was reaching the outmost limits of my ability to resist the SurGoth wraith inside of me. I had to get away from here, or find a way to get everyone away from me.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"A path exists that we can use to partially repair the damage this evil being has caused, the corruption he has wrought within and between the TimeStreams," Peorth announced.

The Rune..._her_ rune, had given her a fullness of revelation; one she had received with a richness of detail, apprehensible by many degrees of specification. The 'instructions' were propounded very precisely. The problem was concrete, and the solution just as concrete. But it would be extremely dangerous.

Cevn's idea of creating an inverse-panopticon by using a circle of eight mirrors had allowed them to create a single access point where they could observe all the different entities of reality. Like an axial point surrounded by all that wasn't itself; their viewpoint could be used to receive the varying statuses of all the TimeStreams. In other words, it was a single observation point where they could witness the entirety of the Multiverses.

To succeed at undoing the damage, they would have to reverse the functioning of the Soul Mirrors. Methodically, each Soul Mirror would need to be realigned from being a 'receiver' of different realities of TimeSpace...into a 'transmitter' that could convey 'this' reality into all the different TimeStreams and Multiverses.

If they could accomplish this, then it would become an act of Undoing. Belldandy, mortal Keiichi and Keiichi-God would need to step into the circle of Soul Mirrors, so that the essence of their Souls would be distributed between each and every Multiverse. Each of them had been removed from their 'authentic' TimeStreams. Mortal Keiichi had his Belldandy stolen away from him; her best friend Belldandy suffered the deaths of her family and her Keiichi. This new God, Keiichi, was isolated from his mortal wife Belldandy. Thus, the Enemy had started a chain-reaction of destruction, which was widening into a gyre of disastrous proportions.

Peorth had learned that her God's Realm, Nulln, had been isolated from the greater whole of the OmniArc, which is why she didn't know about the existence of Aumatrices, Xeomnic and Mnoexic Networks of computers. It had been revealed to her that the Multiverse she and Belldandy lived in...'her' God's Realm...was actually part of a vast network of Multiverses in something called a Logorinth.

A 'galaxy' of God's Realms.

By projecting the essences of the Keiichi/Belldandy dualism into every Multiverse, in every TimeStream, Peorth hoped that this would begin a process of restoration. All of the Belldandy's and Keiichi's in every TimeStream would be regulated back into their appropriate composition. The resultant repercussions would be 'edited' out of reality.

She would have never lost the glorious song that filled her heart, in the form of Keiichi's Angel Heroic Vermilion Swift. Her best friend Belldandy would have never watched helplessly as Keiichi and her family were killed. The Almighty would have never grieved at the resulting funeral; He would have never clad Himself in the aspect of mourning. The Silent Goddess would never have existed.

So much misery contained in just a single misfocused Multiverse! The OmniArc was the communion of all the Multiverses, each one corrupted beyond recognition.

A nuclear reaction started with the splitting of an atom...which created a fissioning effect that resulted in massive disruption of TimeSpace. A UniHethop, once activated, would formulate millions of Black Holes in TimeSpace within a universe like this one. A single fire from a single match could burn down a forest in the Earthrealm. But what if the match had never been struck, the atom had never been split, the UniHethop had never been activated?

They had the opportunity to replace the very initial start of Chaos. Trusting her Runic revelations was always the most difficult task Peorth encountered when she chose to interface directly with her Rune. Intuition didn't even begin to describe the intensity of a revelatory communion with Possibility.

The possibility she had recognized was that Belldandy and the Keiichi's were the endpoints of this madness, rather than the starting points.

"_«Peorth, that's __not enough,»_" she thought. No, she _heard_ a voice thoughtcasting in her mind. With a start, she noticed that Cevn was looking right at her, as if he was the one who was telepathizing with her. Patently impossible, as he was a mortal bioframed by a crude cyborganic construct.

"_«You need to communicate to your counterpart in my TimeStream...yes, the sexy flirty half-crazed version of yourself...that she needs to meet up with Skuld in the extreme Future. Not the Skuld in her own TimeStream, the TimeStream I come from. She needs to seek out the Skuld in another TimeStream; the TimeStream that Keleste and Keiyasu visited. You will seal a fragment of destruction by following through on your Revelation, but there's much that remains to be enacted. Please trust me enough to make the attempt,»_" she heard Cevn's voice ask.

Peorth realized that he _was_ thoughtcasting to her. She recognized that he was completely unaware that she had overheard his unvoiced thoughts.

A moment later, the portal flashed into life for a lightning-flash fiber of a moment...and an Angel's Egg fell out of it, landing on the grey dust.

"That's it!" Cevn shouted.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

VANAGDRASIL, THE NIEFHELM, HILD'S BLACK PALACE:

Skuld realized what she had to do, simply because she had encountered it in the Future. The furthest extent of the Future imaginable. She wouldn't survive the process, but it was the only remedy to restore the vitality of the Ultimate Force. But survival was a near-term concern; she knew that the latitude of their situation was far wider than anything she could possibly envision. The tonic of hope that would save everything and everyone would have to be even more expansive.

She recalled how she had written a postscript to the Enigma Book, dated from 29317CE, instructing her sisters and Keiichi, plus the two mortals Miyuki and Natsumi, to reverse the seal on the Ultimate Force and release it, so that they could harness the UF.

The Ultimate Force wasn't simply breaking down. It almost seemed like the Ultimate Force, which was used to cause the Expansion, to reconstruct the Everything...was now being used to disassemble reality. Isilblius had been defeated twice before by the wielders of the UF. Now, he was destroying the OmniArc with itself, using the UF to undo the fabric of reality it had created. He had managed to poison the Ultimate Force.

She would never see Pryzm and Ulfryn again. Her older sister Mara would never see Falcyn and Sygyn again. The two Goddess girls who had 'invaded' their TimeStream would never meet their Mother and Father.

But she cleft her attention away from the dire parade of hypotheticals. One of the single certainties in all of reality...that there was no uncertainty. The collision of certainty and uncertainty would be destructive to both, save for the existence of Balance.

A young mortal man had wished for Balance. Instead, he was now trapped in a cyborganic shell, instead of a human Earthrealm body. She had visited him in a dream-conversation and had instructed him on his role. Then she had written two final lines in the Enigma Book, a coda of postscriptum. One for Isilblius, the other for Cevn.

She sighed, knowing that her task was heavy and the betrayal her sister Mara would feel forever taint her if she failed. Yet, 'forever' will never occur if she didn't make the attempt. Forever would be about two Earthrealm years in length. Then the OmniArc would run cold and disappear…no more days to start, no more nights to finish. But there was a slight chance that 'forever' _never_ existed, _could _never exist, _will _never exist. This was the ultimate gamble she was staking her life against.

They would all die because they were separated from forever, from Eternity.

"What the Bless are you doing, Skuld?" Mara and Hild shouted as Skuld _completely_ unsealed her Goddess License powers.

"Children, come with me!" she shouted as she gathered up the four children in a Temporal Sphere, activated the TemporalFluxStatTransporter MK MCXVIII that the Elder had given her, and inputted two coordinates into it.

Vanagdrasil lingered longer in her mind than in reality; the marked expression of shock on her older sister Mara's face haunted her long after they exited the TimeStream.

She could only hope that the author of the Enigma Book had never authored it to completion.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

SOMEWHERE:

Cevn was raving again.

Keiichi had slapped him three times, and yet he continued shouting about how Bell-chan was still alive. His emotions were flighting between anger and disgust as his friend insisted that he swallow the Angel's Egg. Bell-chan was _gone_; the blue wisp he had chased after had passed through the Gate of Judgement ahead of him. His heart a dungeon of despair, he had wished hope upon the possibility that the blue feathery energy was a link to Belldandy, since it had emerged from her. But once he arrived here, the willowing shape of light had been extinguished.

Peorth had added to the craziness by suggesting that he, the Belldandy from Nulln, and Keiichi-God from Tengoku should step into a ringed array of Soul Mirrors, allowing their Souls to be 'broadcast' via the Soul Mirrors to every stretch of reality, based on her claim that all of these problems had started because the SurGoth inside of Cevn had attacked he and Belldandy.

That's when Cevn went nuts, yelling "that's not the balance!" over and over like a scragged CD until he became so fed up with the shouting that he walked over and slapped him hard, trying to get Cevn to calm down.

His friend had a lunatic look in his eyes, one that Keiichi recognized. Cevn was teetering, either with a breakthrough or a bout of madness.

"Keiichi, you have to swallow the Angel's Egg! How badly do you want to have Bell-chan back? I swear to you, she's not dead," Cevn asked. When Keiichi didn't answer him, he got on his hands and knees and made it much more than a request. Here was a gaijin, in the form of a cyborg, doing a complete kowtow to emphasize his deep respect and his seriousness about his request.

He knew that Cevn wouldn't offer such a deep gesture of humility if he was crazy. He remembered several other times when Cevn had basically begged to the point of groveling to accent a request he had made. Seeing his friend supplicate himself like this brought to mind an incident in the past where Cevn had offered a solution to save Bell-chan and her sister's lives, bowing to Odeyn and Freiija to trust in his idea that riding Sleipnir would reverse the virus that was killing them.

He wasn't raving...he was _serious_!

Keiichi smiled to himself, remembering the crazy January day he had taught Cevn to ride his motorcycle. Cevn was totally thrilled to be riding around in a heated parking lot at a mere 50 Kph, gleefully acting like he had just conquered the world. Cevn was one of those guys who was a true friend, and admittedly an older-brother figure. There were times where he would seek out Cevn to discuss concerns he wouldn't even trust Bell-chan with; usually when he needed help to get enough of a grip on things so he could discuss them reasonably with Bell-chan and make sense of her response. When Cevn had fallen in love with Urd, he was the first person that he had told, asking him how to describe the complexity of being romantically involved with a Goddess. He was just another mortal guy trying to do the right thing. Keiichi knew that there was a place in his heart for his friend, despite all his craziness. Their bond of trust had been tried, and had been found to be reliable. That's why he was bowing on the ground...

Crazy gaijin!

"Okay, you can stop hollering. I'll try it!" Keiichi announced. He spent some time explaining to Keiichi-God, Belldandy and Peorth about his experience 'birthing' Heroic Vermilion Swift. All three Divines were shocked that a mortal could even have the spiritual energy to bond Soul-to-heart with an Angel, but Keiichi and Cevn managed to convince them otherwise. Keleste and Keiyasu were very keen on the subject of Angels, noting that they were just about at the age where they would be mature enough to take their own Angel's Eggs and 'birth' their Angelic soul-companions.

The first time, there was Bell and her sisters...this time, Keiichi-God would assist. Having a male God helping in the 'mid-spiriting' of his Angel seemed to make the procedure feel less uncomfortable. He knew what to expect: a kundalini-type of tingling sensations and heat moving up and down his spine, then a tensing of the skin right between his shoulder blades and the small of his back.

Closing his eyes and gathering his breath, he swallowed the Angel's Egg. A moment later, he saw three Angels; Belldandy's Holy Bell, Peorth's Gorgeous Rose, and a new Angel to his experience, Keiichi's Paragon Enchanting Blaze. Keiichi's Angel closely resembled Heroic Vermilion Swift; the most striking difference was that he was more slender and a little taller, his eyes were blue-green, and his hair curled with long ringlets of deep brown and black in a wavy pattern like Mara's. Hearing the three Angels sing made Keiichi feel heartsick for his own Angel, Heroic Vermilion Swift. Somehow, when he had been brought here by the Gate, he was separated from his Angel. He had tried repeatedly to summon Heroic Vermilion Swift without success.

Keiichi-God's Angel, Paragon Enchanting Blaze, regarded him with a curious expression...clearly intrigued by the sight of a mortal that looked like his Divine TwinSoul.

The slight heat-sourcing just a few cm inside of the midst of his backbone was increasing, and Keiichi noticed that the grey non-colored environs of the valley of desolation that surrounded him were starting to glow with a frost-sky blue. For a moment, he was unnerved because Heroic Vermilion Swift had manifested for the first time in a light purplish glow.

"_OH..MY!!_" he heard Belldandy gasp, as the three Angels pitched their singing into a higher realm of music-magic. The blue glow increased in intensity, like an azure lucent aurora...

A new voice surged above and through the angelic chorus, a vivid entrancing sound which scaled brilliant against the joined singing of the other Angels. Keiichi was momentarily confused; the sweetly delicate singing seemed to emerge from deep within him, as if his _Soul itself was singing_. He could 'hear' a harmony of a million voices singing within a single refrain of beauteous voice. The voice was familiar, so familiar that he found himself crackling with joyful twinges through his entire body as strains of love-song flowed throughout his being.

He wanted to turn around and look, but Keiichi-God held him fast...reminding him that the Angel was preparing a Song of Recognition for him. He glanced at Peorth and Belldandy; both Goddesses wore expressions of absolute disbelief.

"What went wrong?" he thought fretfully.

The most beautiful sound he ever heard transcended him, moving beyond hearing and audibility into a nether-realm of pure sound. The song carried him into the bosom of miracles, the calming thunder of mighty harmonies, the very center of an arresting bloom of delight, a holy sovereign aria of chiming melodies. His heart was painted with a gleam of love, just as profoundly as when Heroic Vermilion Swift's initial Song of Recognition touched his Soul.

"_«Keiichi, my love, you are forever a hymn that exists in my heart! I will be forever enjoined to you as a TwinSoul, as you are thrice-cherished with the embrace of hope and joy and love!»_" a voice announced in his head. A female voice that ripened his breast, blissing him with a fervent faith and love.

He turned himself to face the source of such an intense radiance of song…and the reservoir of his heart burst open, his eyes filling with tears, his entire being nourished with gratitude...

...Within a glow of soft blue clouds and wind-sheets, hovering above him with her wings gloried beauteously...was Holy Bell.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --


	133. Pt 133: Elliptical Possibilities

**Part 133: Elliptical Possibilities**

THERA, BEIJING CAPITAL, CHINA-STATES:

Even after a week and a half here, Belldandy was still unable to comprehend the immensity of the complex of parks, arenas and stadiums that comprised the Olympics Greenbelt. The Olympic Greenbelt was an immense elongated oval ellipse along a North-South axis, about 6.5 kilometers in length and a kilometer wide at its broadest width, bisected by a broad processional avenue through the middle and perimetered by two curving man-made canalled rivers. On each end of the oval-shaped Greenbelt were two huge urban parks across the belt-line avenues bordering the north and south 'tips' of the oval. At the center of the Greenbelt was a large circular commons, and all throughout were numerous smaller parkways with decorative fountains and sculptures that created the impression of gathering places, or parks-within-parks. The two large stadiums were diagonally opposed on each side of the circular commons in the middle of the Greenbelt. The Olympic Greenbelt included twelve venue arenas for swimming, bicycling, shooting, boxing/wrestling, gymnastics and other competitions. Underneath the Greenbelt, one could find three underground shopping malls and a subway train station linking the Greenbelt with the rest of Beijing-Capital. Two 300m decorative 'Han Dynasty Pagoda' style towers were located at the 1/3rd and 2/3rd points along the axis of the ellipse, each topped off with illuminated Olympic symbols and skylights.

At night, she could see both the Outdoors and Indoors National stadiums and several other venues while standing out onto the porch of her dorm room at the Olympic Village. Even from a distance, the two stadiums looked impressive. The Large Bird's Nest stadium was basically a 'mega-stadium'...one of the largest stadiums in Thera, accommodating 130,000 spectators. The Small Bird's Nest stadium wasn't exactly small, with an indoor seating capacity of 75,000, it rivaled Japan's largest baseball stadiums.

As a whole, the Olympic Greenbelt was the result of seven years of effort from design to completion. The Large Bird's Nest was a sophisticated network of joists, gantries and geometric trestles, totally cutting edge. This was a structure that definitely shouted "21st century!" into the air from every angle of architectural contemplation. Belldandy remembered marching into the National Stadium during the Opening Ceremony's Parade of Nations and simply being awestuck by the vast interior as she emerged from the tunnel onto the athletic field.

The Tibetans had built their own "Snow Bird" Stadium in Lhasa, a sister stadium to the Beijing-Capital's Bird Nest. The Lhasa stadium was only slightly smaller, accommodating 100,000 spectators, and had two curving towers deliberately modeled upon the 1972 Montreal Olympics main stadium towers that served as 'wings' in the overall architectural motif. Each tapering tower was 140m tall and gracefully extended over the beam of the roof in a semi-arch, based on ancient Tibetan Buddhist vaijra designs. Employing a sophisticated system of cantilevered cabling, each tower guyed dozens of cable bundles to the roof of the Snow Bird Stadium. Ingeniously, the cabling would function like a reverse shipmast; tightening or loosening to manipulate an irising roof on the Tibetan's Snow Bird's Nest. While the iris was closing its portico, the uppermost beam joists of the stadium would fold inwards and downwards over the stadium's roof. One observer likened it to a "flower petal closing in on itself during the twilight hour."

In a few days, she and her teammates might be shuttling on a bullet train towards Tibet.

After the NHK interview and some clowning around with her sempai, Belldandy phoned her parents and invited herself out for dinner, this time with no NHK crew in tow. Every visit to a local Beijing restaurant brought out the owner or manager, who inevitably wanted a photo op while making a big deal about her status as an Olympian. She had a nightmare of a thought: what if this crazy celebrity-worship continued in Japan? One of the most popular sports in Japan for the last forty years was volleyball. Amateur and youth league participation and TV viewership consistently ranked v-ball right up there with golf, baseball and soccer. Coach Chihiro had warned her that she would be pretty busy for about two months after returning to Japan...perhaps even longer if their team won a medal. Everything would die down around Christmas season, with a short lull during the pro baseball league's Nippon Series in October. After dinner, she found herself strolling absently along the concourse between the two stadiums, being politely asked several times to pose for pictures and autographs by Japanese tourists who recognized her.

Gathering some alone time during the Olympics seemed to be as precious as winning a Gold Medal. The amount of detail lavished on the Olympic Greenbelt crafted newness upon newness; every time she walked towards the central commons in the middle of the Greenbelt, she kept noticing something new, even after being here almost two weeks. The small ground-lamps by the thousands were modeled after the framework exteriors of both Bird Nest stadiums. The overhead lights had the same motif, their lights spraying geometric patterns on the textured concrete. Even now, she could hear a roaring from the crowds assembled in both stadiums, as the evening events were winding down; which meant basketball Gold Medal games in the Indoors Stadium and relay, pole-vault and pentathlon finals in the Outdoors Stadium.

She regarded the National Indoors Stadium, or the Small Bird's Nest as the locals called it, just north of the central commons of the huge assemblage of athletic complexes and venues in the Olympic Greenbelt. The National Indoors Stadium was also constructed with same theme as the larger stadium, utilizing an external frame of steel joists and gantries like the larger National Stadium. But the overall design was radically different. In contrast to the open-bowled presentation of the Large Bird's Nest, the Small Bird's Nest was an enclosed convex dome that resembled a just-landed UFO more than a stadium. The trestles were less geometric in pattern; the steel exo-frame that clad the stadium consisted of curving beams with a torsion geodesic expression. Every slender joist-beam of the stadium's exterior gently twisted as they curved towards the top of the dome, like "spiraling silver udon noodles" as Ootaki had jokingly observed. The midline of the stadium exterior was flourished with a network of metal beams spindling outwards, like guy-wires holding the UFO down. The visual statement evoked the arching flying buttresses of the famous Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris.

The China-States Olympic Host committee had noted for several years that the two new National Stadiums were conceived to deliberately exemplify and articulate the Daoist Yin-Yang principles. The Large Bird's Nest was decidedly 'masculine' in design with its distinctive sharp-angled exterior bracings, while the Small Bird's Nest was delicately 'feminine' in architectural execution with soft metallic curves and a rounded exterior execution of design.

At this time of night, the National Indoors Stadium presented an even more spectacular beauty to the eye. The interior surface of the stadium itself, nestled within the curving metal framework of 'wands', was clad in a complex patterning of mirrors highlighted by neon lighting patterns. Having finished her first year of engineering at Chiba Poly, Belldandy could only marvel at the sheer ingenuity of the process math that factored into the design. To her eyes, the Indoors Stadium looked like a multi-colored summer festival sparkler being viewed through a spider's web, or fireworks flaring behind a brilliantly-lit Ferris wheel like the one in Osaka.

Locating an absent bench near a water fountain, she sat cross-legged and listened to the music emanating from the fountain. A number of the fountains had built-in speakers that played all sort of music, mostly classical Chinese and Western, plus some of the newer 'new age' musicos like Kitaro, Vangelis and Lou Kou Ma. The large parkway square around her was illuminated by the pearl-light of the full moon high in the nightsky. The Chinese had spent the equivalent of _2.5 billion yen_ on the Small Bird's Nest, and almost four times that on the Large Birds Nest. Tomorrow, she and her team were going to be in that stadium, playing for "two week's worth of immortality" as Chihiro had joking called the Gold Medal match.

During the 2800-year history of the Olympics, most of the Games had been hosted outdoors or under tents, or in parks. There were many funky bits of history as well, as the Games were hosted several times in the Colosseum in Rome; two weeks of Pax Romania and athletic competition, and then back the lions and Christians. The Hagia Sophia in Istanbul had hosted several Olympic Games, with competitors wrestling inside the giant domed edifice. During the construction of the Taj Mahal in Agra, the demesne was filled with desert nomadic tents as thousands had converged for the various martial arts and archery competitions. But these were the few exceptions...most of the 800 Olympiads had been held in the outdoors with little or no shelter for participants or spectators. Rain or shine or snow, the athletes would compete against each other...and the elements.

Until the latter part of the Unified Era, in the 17th century, there were no ongoing record-keeping of athletic bests. With a chilling insight, Belldandy recognized that this wasn't an oversight, or the result of the ancient athletes and Olympic sponsors being stupid. Many times during the Games, _the participants didn't even have an assurance that their world would be around four years later._ Many countries had hosted an Olympics and then were wiped into the dust of history within the next few years. Plague had visited the host cities of the Olympics several times with disastrous consequence; but even the awareness of this didn't stop cities and nations from desiring the privilege of hosting an Olympiad. One scholar had spent thirty years researching the Ancient and Unified Eras of the Olympics and had concluded that _1 out of 3_ of the participating athletes didn't even survive the journey back to their homeland! Illness and plague, running out of provisions, attacks by hostile nations and brigands, natural disasters, untreated injuries and the duress of a long journey home had claimed many lives.

Still, they had came and competed for all these centuries.

Fancies flowered her mind with rapid dispatch: she felt a deep sense of reverence for those athletes from days long-afar, competitors who had made sacrifices just to participate in the Games. With the advent of the Modern Era of Olympic Games and the ability and wealth to build brand new facilities for the Games, each host nation clearly recognized this profound honor as a chance to offer homage to the forebears of the Olympic Movement. Lavishing money on new sports venues wasn't just about national pride, or improving the civic infrastructure of the host city. The essence of each and every Olympics was the celebration of Theran cultural continuity. The Olympics had outlasted every nation, every government or dynasty, every colonial or independent country, every religious movement...they were the unifying thread that tied together humankind with the past.

Belldandy couldn't even begin to imagine what Thera would have been like if the Olympics never existed, or if they had only been invented in the past century alongside the popularization of modern sports. The bloodiest conflicts in history, such as World Wars I and II, the battle of Sekigahara, the American Civil War had been put on hold for two weeks during the Olympics...and sometimes the result influenced two enemies to shift from military conflict to diplomatic resolution. The most striking example of this was the 1944 games in Warsaw. The Americans, Germans, Russians and Japanese had all developed nuclear weapons and were on the verge of employing them in offense campaigns. But holding an Olympics in the worn-torn Eastern European capital city...coupled with two weeks of truce...resulted in all four powers beginning to lose their appetite for ground and naval war. The Olympic truce had guided them to realize the sheer insanity of bombing each other with the new weapons of mass destruction. Instead, the fighting was significantly diminished while diplomats spent the next six months concluding the war with armistices. A single Olympics had played a key role in saving millions of lives. The alternative would have been a ghastly exchange of nuclear weaponry, resulting in destroyed cities.

"_One Thera, One Peace, One Dream_" was the motto the Chinese had selected for this year's Games; a maxim that spoke eloquently of the enormous pacifying impact of the Olympic Movement throughout history.

The full moon, the high-tech stadiums, the calming music...and she was feeling that spooky-ass 'holy feeling' again. Only a few athletes were even capable of reaching such a oneness with the "Spirit of the Olympians" as it was popularly called. Like Zen or Christian Ecstacism, any communion with the spiritual aspects of the Olympics was elusive and mercurial. Many participants were too focused on winning, or partying, or simply being joy-riding tourists.

Yet, Belldandy had distinctly felt the chilling wrest of history in her heart several times since coming to Beijing-Capital. A receptivity to such transcendental awakenings could only be the result of the time she had spent with Keiichi...and having a Coach who had also experienced this kind of 'awakening'. She had never talked to Chihiro about the deeper aspect of the Games, but in the grist of her being she knew that no coach could have possibly accomplished what Chihiro had done with this team...and with her. There was something _special_ about her Coach, and Belldandy was beginning to discover why Chihiro had been able to polish her into an Olympian.

"I hope you guys are proud of what we've become, of the honor we've given you, of the debt we owe you. You haven't been forgotten. _I_ haven't forgotten you, my fellow Olympians," she said aloud as she regarded the two Stadiums in their magnificence of paradigm.

Her own sport, Volleyball, had a much shorter history, yet it was enrolled with some storied episodes as well. Mintonette was introduced as a women's-only sport back in the 19th century; there were no men's Olympic volleyball competitions until the 1930s. Consequently, the men's finals were held a day before the women's finals. This second-to-last night of the Olympics would see the men's volleyball medal round games. Japan was probably playing Argentina for the Bronze medal right about now, and in an hour or so, the United States and China States would go at it for the championship. Tomorrow afternoon, this Game's edition of the American's usual "Dream Team" would play in the Men's Basketball Finals in the afternoon. In the evening, China would post up against Russia for the women's v-ball bronze medal, and finally Japan and Norway-Euro would finish the final day of team competition. She found it hard to believe that up until 1964, every Volleyball competition was held outdoors from start to finish. Beach volleyball came in vogue almost thirty years after volleyball moved indoors. Some of the old photos of Olympic volleyball teams showed mud-splattered women after playing in a messy rain. But in the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, Japan and the Thera IOC had introduced the volleyball stadium to the Games, and the Japanese Women had won the first-ever Indoors Volleyball Gold Medal.

She still felt a buzzing energy...she had actually _met_ those twelve women earlier yesterday. No matter how impatient she felt with all the publicity and stunts and hanger-on flakes who wanted to record every gesture and word, she was extremely grateful to have had the opportunity to meet a team of living legends.

Tomorrow would be the last day of the Beijing-Capital hosted portion of the Jubilee Olympics, and her team would be playing Norway-Euro for the championship. Tomorrow night, she would be inside _that_ stadium, playing in front of 75,000 spectators. The NHK broadcast said that airlines were booked solid with people flying over from Japan just to see the volleyball final.

"It's pretty amazing, isn't it?" she heard someone say. "In such a short time, humankind has managed to strive so far and achieve so much. Creative minds, forging such an epic venue for peaceful competition. Believe me when I say that very few mortal worlds have ever managed to maintain anything even remotely resembling the Olympics you Therans have preserved, revered and celebrated. These stadiums, arenas and courts have been crafted with poise and deliberation. One must walk right up to the cliff in order to see the vision to build the bridge to reach the other side. Mortal minds can commune, can accomplish _so much good_ when they set aside their differences and agree to push themselves beyond their beliefs and boundaries. Even in Yggdrasil, we have structures such as these stadiums...expansive creations of artistry which truly are grandiose and magnificent. They stand out by virtue of their ability to weave joy and awe in the beholder. A special sense of beauty is enjoined, one that would be best described as 'iconic' in design. For Thera, these are probably some of the most beautifully-designed creations on the planet in recent history..."

_Keiichi!!_

"_Where have you been_?" Belldandy asked, her heart suddenly lodged in her throat. The sound of his voice had shifted her from awe to awkwardness in the space of less than a minute.

"I've been looking for the most beautiful creation in all of Thera," he answered, without answering her. Once again, he was being totally confusing and indecipherable! She had been through the emotional wringer, physically and spiritually tested...and here he was babbling about architecture and stadiums and the "lofty works of Therans". Well, there was a certain sense to his meaning...but dammit, couldn't he be at least a little bit gentlemanly.

"You came all the way to Beijing for _that_? Give me a break, for heaven's sake! I've been wanting to see you so bad, you big baka! Believe it or not, you're one of my best friends...and I've really missed you. Athenle had been pulling all sorts of shit, my team has been fighting uphill battles, my nerves are fragged. And where have you been? Floofing off, sittin' on the beach on Maui?" she argued.

"I've chosen to reside in the terrain of discretion. Please bear in mind that I am still the subject of many visits by many Goddesses. Their demands on my time are very frustrating, I can assure you," Keiichi answered. "Besides, you and I both bear a sense of the principal importance of these Games in your life, Bell-chan. You maintain a total focus on this competition. It would be improper for me to distract you from your dreams and goals."

"What do _you_ know about my dreams and goals?" Belldandy challenged him in a sly voice, a little bit relieved that he had called her "Bell-chan".

"More than you could ever imagine, Belldandy. After all, I _am_ a God of the Wish Escort Office, and I specialize in evolving dreams into goals, by the method of granting wishes," he replied in a straight-forward fashion.

"Besides, I have found the most beautiful creation on Thera, right here in Beijing," he added.

"Keiichi, if I were a Goddess, I'd clobber you over the head with that full moon up there!" Belldandy snapped back, uncurling her legs and standing up so she could look down at him.

"So tell me, Mr. God Art Critic...what is more beautiful than these stadiums and this whole Olympic complex?"

"I'm looking at her," Keiichi answered as he stood up and kissed her on the forehead. "I've found the true essence of beauty, right here in this moment, sharing a simple moonlighted night with me."

She felt her heart fluttering like a flag in a breeze. Once again, he had approached her with a purity of heart, and she had totally missed it! How does a girl flirt with God, when God is so clumsy and inexperienced that he doesn't even know that he's flirting with her? He was so inept at being romantic, it was causing _her_ to become inept as well. Looking into his eyes, she noticed that they were blued with loneliness, and she realized that his separation from her had been a taxing matter for his heart as well.

"Belldandy, this may be the last time I get to spend some time with you, like this," Keiichi announced, suddenly serious. "I'm trying really hard to find what's in my heart, to find you in my heart. But I just couldn't...so I had to come here to remind myself of what I was missing."

The only answer she could offer him was to lean her head against his strong shoulder, allowing herself to feel a moment's joy as she soaked serenely within the comfort of his presence. As she snuggled up against him, she almost felt a sense of perfection.

A perfect moment.

"It's really kind of funny," she noted. "Here we are, at a point where anything can happen in our lives. I should be all stressed about about the Games, about you and me, about Athenle. But I'm not. It's kinda funny, there really is no randomness to our lives, because we _do_ share a feeling...just between the two of us. A special emotional bond that can survive whatever happens tomorrow. Good or bad; this moment is a treasure."

Keiichi started shaking violently, as if he had just witnessed his life turning into a trainwreck. She noticed his entire expression shift as he slowly pushed her away from him. His eyes were sad...scary sad. The kind of biting eyes one has when they are too upset to maintain their composure.

"What's wrong?" she asked, wondering what the hell was going on with him. What did she say to get him so upset? Keiichi was looking at her as if she had stabbed him in the heart with a knife.

"I..I'm sorry. I shouldn't be here. I shouldn't have come. I need to go somewhere else," he stammered apologetically. And then he faded into the air without even saying goodbye.

2.5 billion yen the Chinese had spent to build the stadium she was looking at across the manmade reflecting pool...and it was just as mute as her own mind. There were never any ready answers to explain his bursts of odd behavior.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Keiichi recognized that he had to hasten away from Belldandy. He had fought against himself, balancing his own need to see her once more against the certain desolation that was to come. Love was supposedly a shelter in the midst of hope deferred, but it was a cruel child of illusion and the stepsister of conflict and disillusion. Tragedy had marked Belldandy, and he ultimately was unwilling to remain in Beijing because he didn't want to upset her. His only concern was to shield away his distress so she wouldn't discover how stricken he was. But the searchlight of his heart was turned inwards; he was unable to flee from himself or shield himself from the truth. Listening to Belldandy's heartfelt observation that she was grateful to share a moment of future with him was too difficult. Even with his God abilities, he couldn't to sustain a facade of calmness. Her heartfelt optimism that such treasured moments would be oft-repeated, that a shared feeling between them would be a certain part of her tomorrows...quickened him into sallies of despair.

Her future was already written. The next 48 hours in her life would be the most important 48 hours in her life...because they would be the _last_ 48 hours of her life.

The Almighty Himself had visited him earlier in the day, unannounced and unbidden, to inform him that Belldandy would be dead within two days. His Liege explained that the Ultimate Force was destabilizing, and even He was powerless in preventing the fabric of reality from being burned away by the withdrawal of Metanative and Chaostic energies. The Lord was only able to see the lethal pattern of its destructive vector. As a good Father and warden of His Divine Children, He had taken it upon Himself the role of bearing tragic news to those whose lives were affected. Eventually, every living being, mortal or God, would be snuffed away from life.

Belldandy was one of the first.

The entire time he had known her, she was constantly engrammed into a mindset that "life isn't fair." Now, Keiichi was beginning to agree with her outlook on life and reality.

Fate had struck cruelly, and had struck harshly. She was only _19_ Therarealm years old!!

During the Four Decas he had served in the Wish Escort Office, Keiichi had granted wishes to 497,089 mortals on Thera since they had initially reached the level of sentience to appropriate wishful desires. In all this time, Belldandy was the only mortal who had fallen in love with him. Of course, he had been afflicted by the Gate of Judgement for all those years; no one could love him...and he couldn't love himself. In all this time, she was the only mortal who had actually stepped out of herself long enough to make a wish for him.

Now, he would have to watch her die. When the Almighty informed him of her impending demise, Keiichi felt a raw surge of emotional agony that debilitated his thoughts. The Lord consoled him, reminding him that such deep feelings were the result of a heart that had learned to love itself. Belldandy had taught him how to care about himself...and now his caring nature was drowning him, because he cared about her. Brinked with utter despair, he wanted to shut himself away.

Since her time was limited, Keiichi fervently hoped that she would win out her competition against Athenle tomorrow, so that her life would finish on a charitable treasure of accomplishment and celebration.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

EARTHREALM:

Urd had told her that she thought it was utterly silly, but Skuld had rearranged all of her stuffed animals in the sister's bedroom to face the wall that separated their sleeping quarters from the QuadNode. More specifically, from Mara's Lair. She even posted Mini-Banpei to guardian that side of the bedroom.

Yesterday, Urd had finished crafting the Angel's Egg. Skuld had launched the Egg into the portal by using an Earthrealm toy called a slingshot, much to Mara's amusement. Resuming work on her device calibrations, she was visited by Sigel who had dropped by unexpectedly to visit the QuadNode because she was bored. Two of Mara's sere-hawks flew towards Sigel with flame-wings extended, which frightened her into a full roller-racing evasion of the flame-birds. Instinctively, Sigel's panic had caused the sere-hawks to attack her more voraciously, because it was their nature to 'feed' upon fear.

Scratch two sere-hawks, courtesy of Skuld bombs.

Mara simply re-animated the errant sere-hawks and gathered the whole flock together, instructing them to not attack any visitors to the QuadNode unless she authorized them to. It _was_ pretty funny: she and Sigel looked on as 13 sere-hawks roosted themselves side-by-side on a length of bone, similar to Earthrealm birds perching in a row on an eaves or an overhead telephone line. They even hung their heads while Mara angrily chided them, which made Sigel lose her fear completely and then lose herself in laughter.

So Sigel was sleeping in her bedroom with she and Urd, nestled up against a protective 'wall' of stuffed animals and guarded by mini-Banpei. Of course, the proud robot-girl wouldn't allow Banpei to guard her. Big Sister joked that it was a good thing that Skuld didn't program a snoring function into Sigel's AI. Urd could be very passionate about matters that she understood, but Skuld was once again irritated that her Big Sister could be so lame-brained when it came to _compassion_, especially towards the Banpeis and Sigel.

The footsteps in the hall reminded her that Peorth was sleepwalking again.

Over the past two days, Peorth seemed to be withdrawing into some weird mental state. Like Big Sister...well, like _both_ Big Sisters...Peorth had an 'in your face' Goddess personality. Her Rune must be short a few wires, because every time Peorth visited or stayed at the temple, shit happened in abundance. Carelessly freaking out Keiichi several times, and then that stunt with Cevn which had almost cost him his sanity...if not his life, if she hadn't convinced a murderously angry Urd that Peorth was being stupid. She had seen Elder Sister Belldandy throw some mean jealousy fits, but Urd's were even worse.

Now, Peorth was idling away most of her time at her Ygg Node, floating her roses into different shapes like one would do at a Cloud Garden. As a little girl, Skuld would love going to the Cloud Gardens and use her nascent Goddess powers to make the clouds change shapes from one animal to another, while Mom and Dad looked on approvingly and clapped their hands.

Now Peorth was acting very goofy.

What was she up to? As the holder of a Rune, Peorth had a very important Goddess Status, which was probably why she was given an early promotion to Senior First Class License along with Big Sister Urd and Elder Sister Belldandy. Skuld didn't know much about the functions of the Runes, but she did know that Peorth's Rune was responsible for Eternity, which meant that Peorth had an instrumental role in Time. It was no coincidence that she was Belldandy's best friend, despite all their rivalry and stuff. Eternity had to proceed out of the Present, just as must as the Present had to be the foundation for Eternity. She didn't need the Almighty to teach her something as simple as that.

Peorth often didn't make much sense, either...which only was fitting, because her Rune's other property was Chaos.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

The next morning, Skuld was the first one out of bed, drawn out of her slumbers by the sweet smell of oven-fresh cinnamon rolls. Tomohisa could really be a sweet guy when he applied himself to it. Skuld was amazed at the transformation once she had let herself open into her feelings towards him. Of course, he was all touchy-feels at odd times, and she learned that a slight elevation in his heart rate meant that she would need to sit somewhere else in the living room, instead of next to him on the couch. But sometimes, the kissing thing seemed to feel really good, almost like she was breathing chocolate and mint and cherries.

Now that he had his respirator and was on the mend, especially due to the air-filtration system she had installed an hour after his severe asthma attack, he was doing little things to try and catch her attention. It was an intriguing new game; he would try to surprise her with something new and interesting, and she would try to guess it or evaluate how much she was delighted by his actions. All this time, she had seen Elder Sister and Keiichi participate in these kinds of games, but she didn't grasp the significance of it until she and Tomohisa 'became an item', as Big Sister Mara had put it.

Slipping on her house-slippers, she padded into the kitchen and snuck him a kiss on the cheek. She knew already by the char-smell that the cinnamon rolls were overdone, and that some would need to be discarded as too burnt. Belldandy, he was not. But his effort was enough to make up for his ineptitude. Besides, Skuld doubted whether she could fare any better. Big Sister Urd constantly reminded her that she was the only teenage girl in all of Chiba would could actually burn rice in a rice-cooker with a built-in timer. Of course, she was also the only teenage girl in Chiba who could create a trans-dimensional teleporting device out of a rice cooker; but Big Sister never gave her any credit for that.

She felt herself giggling as Tomohisa pulled on his winter jacket, half of a cinnamon roll dangling out of his mouth, while Megumi was breeping her car horn in the driveway. It was just like one of those Earthrealm anime scenes! Since his hands were occupied with his jacket, she made sure to tousle his hair and muss it up, just to irritate him. Waving goodbye as he dashed out the door, she finished munching one of the lesser-toasted rolls and started reading the latest Kaori Yuki tankōbon before Peorth could make off with it.

Once she finished reading a few chapters, she hid it in one of the cupboards and walked down the hall to the QuadNode. Mara was already inside, working on a spell design to try and stabilize the freaky portal even more. Mara had already stabilized it twice, and the 'doorway' part of the former Gate of Judgement still danced sluggishly like a Tokyo sterno-bum drunk. Peorth was goofing off again, and Urd was looking like she needed two more days in bed to make up for her marathon midnight-oil efforts to craft the Angel's Egg.

Skuld went to her workbench and initialized her final calibrations on her Multi Uniplexar Supersystem Universal Mapping Explorer, or M.U.S.U.M.E. Mk III. Her lovely MUSUME Mk III would be introduced into the portal and once it appeared on the other side, it would begin to 'ping' the extension of TimeSpace it found itself in. Taking a multiplex of measurements, it would then collate them into a uniplex supersystem and then map out the supersystem. Instead of creating an non-indexed flurry of a thousand different 'maps' of whatever dimension existed on the other side of the portal, the uniplex process would coalesce the maps to create a 'road atlas' of whatever was on the other side of the gate. Her wonderful MUSUME Mk III would then encode the information and 'download' it via a superstring dimensionality she was using to 'attach' it to Peorth's Sysop Node. She simply didn't have the skill to create the type of mecha that she _really_ wanted to make; a device that she could toss into the portal and not have to worry about needing a 'cable' to link it back to here.

Superstring dimensionalities were quite familiar to her, and often were reliably stable when used across two or more dimensions or TimeStreams. If the MUSUME encountered a hostile force on the other side of the portal, she would activate a singularity on this end, which would collapse the superstring dimensionality and 'reel' the MUSUME back through the former Gate of Judgement. The Earthrealm equivalent was one of those construction metal tape measures; one push of a button and the entire stretch of metal tape would be pulled right back into its holster.

She felt kinda bummed that Tomohisa couldn't appreciate the finer points of her work. She wanted him to be proud of her efforts. But being involved with a mortal meant that she had to buy the bag. She occasionally overheard both her older sisters discussing how regretful it was that their mortal boyfriends didn't understand the finer aspects of their Goddess abilities.

In Big Sister Urd's case, it was even worse, because she had completely forgotten that she had been in love with Cevn. Skuld had to admit that Cevn was just as unpredictable as Keiichi, sometimes uncorking some pretty amazing insights. She could remember many times when Big Sis could only look at him with her mouth hanging open as he shot off an observation into her character that was katana-sharp with precision. Urd would usually get all huffy, and she would giggle in reaction to Big Sister's distress. When Keiichi surprised Elder Sis Belldandy with his bursts of wisdom, her face would simply freeze up for a moment, and then she'd try and hide her shock behind a smile. Skuld would giggle then, and Belldandy would give her a 'what's so funny?' look that sometimes sent her out of the room so she could laugh to her heart's content.

She herself wasn't immune to the 'mortal guy instability factor', as she termed it. Even Tomohisa could surprise the beans out of her once in a while, like he did the other day when she was getting all edgy around him and he had said "don't drown yourself in your hormones." She wanted to slap him...until she realized that she _was overreacting to how she was reacting to him_...making a mountain out of a molehill, as the mortals would say. Half an hour later, he was sleeping like a baby with his head on her lap.

"Aha aha hah!" she said as the grids on the holophotic monitors aligned into a single secant. She tapped out a sequence of lights on the MUSUME and an elaborated form of a nearby sere-hawk formed in the holosphere...and then a moment later, it folded into itself until it was indistinguishable from the single line.

"Ready or not, you're going on a little trip!" she said, kissing the MUSUME as she walked toward the portal, whistling for her sisters and Peorth to attend her.

It was nice to indulge herself in Queen Mode once in a while...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

SOMEWHERE:

Holy Bell was narrating her adventure in a flurry of song-crafting, which Belldandy of Nulln translated for him as much of her singing was in the God's Language. What Belldandy's Angel had done was much more than an adventure; she had taken the ultimate risk an Angel could take. Actually several of them, as Keiichi realized with mounts of respect heaping upon themselves inside of his heart.

She told him that she would be forever Belldandy's TwinSoul, and now that she had shared her precious Song of Recognition with him...a song that an Angel would only sing to her TwinSoul, she and he were now linked in the most intimate of bonds an Angel could have. She reminded him that this didn't make him her TwinSoul by any means: only Bell-chan could be bound Soul-to-Soul with her. His Angelic TwinSoul would always be Heroic Vermilion Swift; no other Angel could be a replacement for this. Yet from now on, whenever Holy Bell would emerge from Bell-chan, he would be privileged to hear her announce her presence with her Song of Recognition. This song, the special song between an Angel and her TwinSoul, would now include him. As only Bell-chan could touch the deepest parts of his Soul, now Holy Bell's song would be able do so as well...

And he would know just how much she loved him too.

Holy Bell informed him that Belldandy was _inside of her_! In a complete reversal of Goddess and Angel roles, the Goddess was resting within the Angel. When they had arrived back into the Earthrealm via the Returning Mandala, Holy Bell was confident that they had succeeded...until she noticed that Bell-chan had a total absence of love for Keiichi in her heart. Angels are twinned to the Soul, twinned to the heart...no secrets are kept between a Angel and her Goddess. With mounting dismay, Holy Bell realized that she was now twinned to a Soul that was detached from itself completely. Something had uprooted Belldandy's Soul, or even taken its place. Holy Bell could 'feel' her bond with Belldandy, but she also sensed that an evil 'ghost' had wedged itself between her and her TwinSoul, causing Belldandy to only _appear_ to be herself. The real Belldandy was shunted aside and dying, ripped away from her own Soul by an usurper.

The individuality that was Belldandy was no longer connected to any Soul; very shortly, Belldandy's essence...her _beingness_...would be forever lost.

She weighed the possibilities. If she, as an Angel, could reside in a Goddess...why shouldn't it be possible to reverse the dynamic, allowing a Goddess could reside in her? Belldandy's Soul had been cast aside by this intruder and left to wither away and die, like a branch broken off from a tree trunk. Holy Bell gathered all the courage she could and sang a Song of Beckoning...a _new_ song she had devised. A symphony of love and respect that she hoped would draw Belldandy away from danger. Belldandy did come to her, and Holy Bell embraced the faint remains of Belldandy's individuality. Drawing her precious Goddess TwinSoul into herself, she shared her Angelic Soul with Bell-chan's, allowing Bell to rest and be sheltered.

In the process of being isolated out of her own being, Bell-chan was exhausted from trying to fight whatever had taken over her. Holy Bell, by harboring and protecting Belldandy, was too exhausted to release herself into her Angelic form and manifest herself in the normal fashion. They were an Angel and Goddess sharing the latent energies of just the Angelic part of the union.

An Angel could only summon herself out of her Goddess TwinSoul if both wished it. For whenever Belldandy had summoned her, Holy Bell had always wanted to manifest herself. But it was now impossible for her to emerge from the 'Belldandy' she was linked to. She and Bell-chan were a union of Souls, rather than distinct Angel and Goddess. With 'Goddess' half of their twinned Souls as an evil being, there would be no means to find freedom. An Angel cannot summon herself out on her own, just like a Goddess cannot 'force' an Angel to emerge if she didn't want to. Consequently, she and Belldandy were 'stranded' inside of this intruder.

Keiichi was appalled at this situation; it was akin to being locked inside a car with a driver who was so drunk, he was _aiming_ at other cars. Holy Bell's story helmed towards harrowing events...she and Bell-chan had to experience a horrific sequence of events. They were helpless witnesses to the evil plan Bell-chan's imposter was putting into place. She was fully aware that this ghast had assumed Belldandy's form with the goal of attempting to destroy Love. Step by step, it had woven itself into the confidences of everyone, and then had beseeched Keiichi to move the wedding date up from November 20XX to Feb 14th. Holy Bell and Belldandy knew that the wedding was a ruse, and both were drowned by heartbreak as the wedding proposal was accepted with utmost faith and joy by Keiichi. They knew that the wedding was intended to cause heartbreak, not celebrate love. Every joy of enthusiasm Keiichi and her sisters urged, each delicate plan that her Mother and Father had cast into the mix of the wedding...only brought further despair to the Angel and Goddess. The evil being relished in the awareness that the joy of every wedding participant would be thwarted with sorrow.

Keiichi felt choked up as he tried to imagine what it must have been like for Holy Bell to be protecting Belldandy while linked to a being that was totally planning to destroy everything. A being that pretended to love, for appearance's sake...while lying and deceiving all of them. Bell-chan had witnessed his happiness first hand, while knowing that this was a dishonest baneful machination of malign purpose by the creature inhabiting her 'Goddess aspect'.

When the wedding was interrupted by the unexpected presence of the Dark Lord, Holy Bell was unable to escape as the Lord and Dark Lord both attacked 'Belldandy'. She assumed that she was going to be destroyed, but deep inside of her she felt an assurance from Bell-chan. Bell-chan told her that they would be safe for a time once the Lords destroyed the counterfeit Belldandy. At the point where the fake Belldandy was annihilated, Holy Bell was suddenly freed from being bound to the evil ghost, which she learned was a SurGoth. With no mortal or God to anchor herself to, she fled through the portal to escape destruction, not by the Lords, but by the enraged and disembodied SurGoth.

Holy Bell floated down and kissed Keiichi on the forehead, profusely thanked him for saving her and Bell-chan. By virtue of his strong love for her and Belldandy, he had miraculously spied her escaping form...a form that would be impossible to be perceived by a mortal's sensorium. She lingered with barely enough Divine energy to appear as a ephemeral sheer wisp of blueness emerging from the destruction. As she fled through the Gate of Judgement, Bell-chan...while still inside of her...had willed a thoughtform to him; an attempt to convey to him that he should follow the blue 'dancing wisp' into the Gate.

His capacity for love had saved both Holy Bell and Belldandy. Only a heart so finely attuned to another heart could have picked up such a faint message and energy manifest.

Holy Bell recalled to him a remembered time during the birthing of Heroic Vermilion Swift. Cevn had described him as "semi-divine" right before his own Angel was mid-spirited into existence. She gently reminded him that he was much more than he deemed himself to be, from her perspective and Bell-chan's. She encouraged him to have trust in his ability to follow upon his hopes with decision and action.

Her story had cliff-hanger elements and she described her situation once she reached the other side. Amidst the desolation of the nowhere-place, Holy Bell knew she only had a few moments of energy remaining before she and Belldandy would both expire. By following her into the Gate, Keiichi had again saved her life. Holy Bell was able to merge herself into Keiichi and bind herself tightly to his Soul, knowing that he would have only a miniscule amount of Divine energy...but more than enough energy for her to survive at a minim of Angelic power. Holy Bell was again stuck, but this time she would wrapped around a loving, confident heart.

When the Angel's Egg 'popped' through the portalway, Holy Bell told him that she and Bell-chan had both rejoiced, for they both could sense Urd's aura imbued within it. They both knew that there would be a chance for Holy Bell to regain enough power to release herself and manifest her glorious Angelic form. Just like a chicken's egg has albumin to nourish the growing chick embryo inside of the egg...an Angel's Egg possesses a compact source of Metanative energy. Each Angel's Egg was fully powered with Goddess energy, so that the newly 'birthed' Angel would have enough power at her or his disposal to breath into reality, manifest their Angelic bearing, and then sing her or his Song of Recognition to their TwinSoul.

Once he swallowed the Angel's Egg, it was only a few moments before Holy Bell could feel herself fully restored to her complete Angelic strength, more than enough to release herself with the assistance of the other Divines who were 'mid-spiriting' her. When she beheld him and saw the tears in his eyes as he recognized her, Holy Bell and Bell-chan inside of her were touched to the quick in their hearts.

A Goddess, who was being sheltered within her Angel, who was being sheltered within him.

After hearing all of this, Keiichi knew he had to make the most difficult decision of his life.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

He and Keiichi-God. Belldandy of Nulln and Holy Bell.

According to Peorth, they were the key to unraveling this entire situation. It had started with them, and could only be ended by them. Cevn had argued vehemently that they only way Keiichi could truly have Bell-chan back was to give her up, in a sense, by following through with Peorth's plan. Two Belldandys...Two Keiichis. A balance would be created, one that would substantially increase the amount of the essence of their Souls which could be allocated between all the impacted Multiverses and TimeStreams. Peorth had noted that even the slightest exposure to their Souls would have a sufficiency to undo the corruption that each alternative reality/TimeStream/Multiverse had experienced.

Basically, they would be exposed outwards into all of infinity.

It was unknown whether they would be self-aware during the process...or if their Souls would remain intact. There was no record of a Soul being split into an infinitude of components; if their Souls died, then it would be over for him and the others. What they were going to attempt was unprecedented, in the experience of five Gods from _three_ different God's Realms.

Cevn informed him that they would need to decide soon, because his control over the SurGoth inside of him was slipping away wraith. With a prehensile shrewdness in reaction to Peorth's plan, the SurGoth was actively trying to kill him or completely submerge his will. If it succeeded in killing him, the wraith would then shift into Keiichi, Belldandy of Nulln, or Keiichi-God of Tengoku...which would remedy their attempt useless.

Keiichi was amazed that his friend had been able to resist the SurGoth as long as he had; according to Holy Bell, Bell-chan had lasted less than a minute before the SurGoth had completely overtook her will and exiled her away.

Holy Bell 'demanded' to know how this could be. How could a mortal defend himself against the SurGoth when a powerful Goddess could not? Well, 'demanded' wasn't exactly the most fitting expression; the beautiful Angel-being was insatiably curious to learn everything she could about the SurGoth. She wanted to have every means of will and action at her disposal so she would be able to restore Bell-chan when opportunities aligned in her favor. She also noted that she had many incomplete memories of her own...dream-like portmanteaus that seemed to lock away her self-awareness.

Cevn apologized and said that he was experiencing a confusion of his own, but that he would try to offer a lucid accounting of everything he knew about the SurGoth. The vitae that he narrated in the next half hour was absolutely fantastic, in a spooky kind of way. He had fought Isilblius on a plane of existence that was incomprehensible, and then had spent 237 trillion years rebuilding the destroyed Multiverse. Isilblius subsequently resurrected himself with a redoubled effort to destroy all of reality; and Cevn described how the Seven had transformed the Ultimate Force into the Intimate Force and had created a new structure of reality called the OmniArc.

Keiichi was stunned to learn that he was one of the Seven; that he had cooperated in rebuilding the entirety of Everything That Is, which was now called the OmniArc.

But Isilblius had somehow corrupted that version of the OmniArc while they were creating it, despite their best effort to keep him 'exiled away' from the process of designing Reality itself. Cevn elaborated that the OmniArc was basically falling apart at the seams, which was why Peorth and Belldandy from Nulln, and Keiichi-God from Tengoku didn't recognize any post-Expansion Event realities in their God's Realms. Their God's Realms were already distanced from the continuity of the OmniArc.

In contrast, Keleste and Keiyasu had come from a 'reality' where the Expansion Event was already a known factum of history; but both of their parents never existed in that reality. The other three Divines were completely shocked when Cevn offered an overview of the basic functioning of the OmniArc. The single world-tree Multiverses of Yggdrasil and Vanagdrasil had been greatly expanded into what could only be described as a flower. The Ygg Multiverse had been transformed into the Ygg Logorinth. The Mainframe computers of the Gods and Demons were completely reconstructed into the Ygg Xeomnic and Vang Mnoexic Networks. A system of transportation between the God's and Demon's Realms, the UmbraPlexar System, allowed Gods and Demons to freely visit each other's Realms. No more Doublet System. At least 20 percent of each Realm was cross-populated; Gods and Demons sharing Multiverses without open conflict.

This implied that there were God-Demon's Realms...a single Realm with both, jointly administered by Kami-sama and Oni-Sama.

Keiichi-God interrupted Cevn at this point, explaining that he remembered when his younger sister, Goddess Megumi, had performed some kind of probing mind-link with Cevn and had learned all about this. It was so outlandish, Keiichi and his two brother Gods had dismissed it. The fact that it came from Goddess Megumi rendered it even more difficult to take seriously.

Keiichi was surprised to learn that Keiichi-God's sister was a wish-granting Goddess who focused specifically on wishes concerning mortal sexuality. From what he described, Goddess Megumi was a thousand times more 'liberal' than the Peorth that he knew from the Earthrealm. Keiichi recounted a humorous experience where Megumi had 'attacked' Cevn and then lied to him to try and convince him that he had wished for her to grant him a 'full sexual surrogate package'. He glanced over at Cevn, who was rolling his eyes at the memory, since his cyborganic skin couldn't blush.

"In every horror, there is always humor," he thought, realizing if he emerged from this insane leap off the existential cliff, he might remember this. He imagined how funny it would be to see his younger sister's face when he described her Goddess counterpart. "_Goddess Megumi_" embroidered on her panties...Megs would probably freak if she heard about _that_. Keiichi-God noted that Goddess Megumi had been sobered by her mind-link with Cevn, and had settled down into an Earthrealm-centered life with her husband and two children. According to Keiichi, she was the very model of a devoted wife and mother, every bit the equal of Belldandy, Urd and Skuld.

_That_ was almost as funny; as he tried to imagine the three Goddesses raising children. Cevn concluded his confidences by noting that he possessed a possibility that might become a 'secret weapon' to destroy the SurGoth once and for all, but added that he didn't know what it was or how to use it.

"Par for the course," Cevn added thoughtfully. "The effort to put knowledge into action is truly confirmed when that action ceases to exist as an effort, and instead becomes knowledge simply because it _is_.'

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

I had to admire the raw courage exemplified by Belldandy, Holy Bell, Keiichi and Keiichi-God. Each one had suffered dreadfully profound personal losses, and were still willing to champion Hope. Heart-torn by the face of tragedy, they had all agreed that they would to lay it all on the line anyway. We didn't know how to 'reverse' the Soul Mirrors, but Keleste and Keiyasu were working on that problem with enthusiasm.

Keleste and Keiyasu had certainly grown up in a hurry. I couldn't even attempt to wrap my heart around their experience of finding...and then swiftly losing...their Mother and Father. Belldandy from Nulln calmly encouraged them, insisting that they would be reunited with their parents someday, suggesting that their initial joyful expression with her and Keiichi was just a 'teaser' preview of events yet to transpire.

Each encounter with Isilblius had resulted in a total MindWipe between everyone involved, so that even his existence would not be remembered. Meticulous care had been taken each time to ensure that we had closed off any potential escape routes he could exploit to return from his exile. But Isilblius had restored himself each time, returning to reality with renewed hostility.

This new reemergence...it had to be through me.

The Seven, the collective minds/hearts/Souls that transformed the Ultimate Force through their intimacy, who had crafted the OmniArc...were pure. They had defeated Isilblius in stages, each using his or her own power and conviction to do away with Isilblius. None of the Seven could have possibly been corrupted. I remembered a hellish month in Tokyo while Isilblius was using my Soul as an entryway that time, which had forced the Seven to do away with him while I was somewhere else.

He had forced Urd to kill me...an Urd that had loved me dearly, not the post-Expansion Event Urd that had been purged of all her love towards me. Not only had I Mindwiped Urd, I had Heartwiped her as well. Still, he had emerged after both of us had gone to such lengths to prevent it.

I remembered the final two lines in the Enigma Book, written by another hand. One for me, the other for Isilblius.

Mindwiping, doing away with memories of him, exiling him, destroying his sanity...all of it was ineffective. It was entirely possible that he may have engineered the ability on the Goddesses' part to MindWipe each of us. MindWipe itself may have been something he controlled, allowing us to only 'think' we had expunged him from our consciousness. The SurGoth he had manifested was far more dangerous because it could hide itself and then enact its evil designs from a position of stealth. It didn't need Isilblius to exact its goal of pulling the curtain down on all of reality, smothering existence with foulness.

Isilblius would have to be destroyed, mercilessly. Inaction had given rise to his ability to wreak destruction; the kind of destruction that had caused immeasurable psychic pain at the Soul level. Even now, his past depredations had tainted all of this current reality. The most foul taint of all was concentrated in those directly victimized by it, five Divines who had become my friends.

_ -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --_

Keiyasu explained to us that he and his sister were facing many difficulties modifying Skuld's device to transform the Soul Mirrors into portals. Their efforts were rendered much more difficult because they had to simultaneously convert _eight_ mirrors, instead of a single Gate or Soul Mirror. One of the worst hurdled they faced was energy efficiency. Skuld's 'portaling' device required a lot of power just to open a single gatepath. He was in the middle of explaining the dynamics of energy conservation when a metallic object appeared in our midst.

"What the brap is that!?" Keiyasu shouted, pointing at the device that had just shot out from the portal.

"Look! It's some kind of robot!" Keleste observed, as the tumbling spheroid object rolled to a halt, and then opened up a number of panels. Spindly legs unfolded, articulating themselves into jointed appendages which then reached towards the ground and righted the object onto its 'feet'. A small 'head' emerged from the artifact. The proportions of the legs and head in relation to the metallic 'trunk' or fuselage reminded me of a cat or dog. Something seemed very familiar about this little robotic mechanism...

...a gut feeling perhaps...

"Holy Shit!" both Keiichi and I exclaimed at the same moment. Painted on the light blue 'head' of the robot/mecha/vehicle was a very familiar inverted pink plectrum-shaped design.

"Skuld, it's _us_!" Keiichi shouted before I could react. I felt twinned relief and astonishment. Somehow, Skuld had found us and had sent this object to investigate! On the side was painted MUSUME Mk III; further proof that this was Skuldtech. Skuld had turned a corner in the past couple of years and now occasionally used humorous acronym conventions to name her mecha creations...a sign that she was growing up and not taking herself so seriously.

"Keiyasu, do you sense what I sense," Keleste said as she gestured towards the object. "This totally looks like something our StepMom would create! The design is much more fundamental, but still this mecha has her Goddess Seal painted on it. Apparently, there even seems to be a superstring dimensionality attached to it. This mecha has a direct power source that we can tap into! It makes sense: superstring dimensionalities are very stable when used within two or more dimensions. This stability makes them somewhat efficient as power conduits. We can channel more than enough power into our 'Gate maker device' to allow it to convert all these Soul Mirrors into full-on gateways!

"This is radically cool, Keleste!" Keiyasu answered back. "Since its tied into a superstring, we might also be able to use it to communicate our presence to the other side. _Someone_ had to send it here. Maybe our StepMom is trying to rescue us! Even if it isn't her, someone else knows enough about these portals to be able to traverse them. That could be a big help!"

"If it is our StepMom, we're gonna get it when she finds out. Remember, we _stole_ this device from her..." Keleste answered back warily.

"I think that's the least of our worries, Kel..."

Listening to Keleste and Keiyasu chop out solutions to problems, I noticed that Keiichi-God, Belldandy and Peorth were closely examining Skuld's MUSUME object. We had crossed a harsh series of wildernesses of the soul, only to arrive at even more confusion. This was one more time that presuppositions were meant to be undone by the unexpected; Skuld had once more burst through all doubts with her genius. I remembered our struggle to survive in 14th Century Japan...and how the Goddesses had dispatched Urd to rescue us. The spirit of cooperation between they and us _always_ linked us together, our extended family at the temple.

Keiichi-God located a slender recessed panel and opened it with a touch. A small holophotic keypad materialized about a meter away from the floor vacuum-sized mecha. A remote control interface, perhaps.

"This is...impossible!" Keiichi-God exclaimed. "According to this monitoring device, _we're on the Earthrealm_!"

"Ehhh?!"

"This device seems purposeful. It is clearly an attempt to map out dimensionalities on this end of the portal. Whoever constructed this device anticipated that once this device emerged from the portal, it might encounter a possible shift into other TimeStreams or Multiverses. This is designed with a built-in basic 'matrix' of reality of their immediate vicinity, which happened to be another version of the Earthrealm. Using this 'matrix' as a template, this mecha would be capable of measuring differences and then creating a series of dimensional 'maps'. My younger brother, Tomohisa, is a technology expert, mostly because he is the Mirror of the Future where I come from. This device resembles a technology he would harness if he wanted to explore outside of our TimeStream. This is much more halting in design and execution, but it still is effective," Keiichi explained.

"She's only 120,000 years old!" I blurted out, offended by his remark about Skuld's device being 'crude'. "The one who made this device is from _our_ Earthrealm, mine and Keiichi's. She's the Norn of the Future there..."

"Then my assessment is patently inaccurate," Keiichi quickly replied in an apologetic voice. "To think that a _child_ Goddess could create a device like this...only a prodigy could devise and create this artifact at such a young age. Even Tomohisa couldn't conceive of techworks like this when he was 120 Decas in age."

"Don't let her ever hear you call her a 'child'," Keiichi noted, grinning at me. I chuckled at the irony of it and we both explained several of Skuld's little eccentricisms to Keiichi and the others, who found them quite entertaining. Keiichi-God was clearly impressed by Skuld's creation...and he wasn't the only one...

"This machine came from my younger sister, my dear long-departed Skuld," Belldandy said with a sad expression as she stroked the robotic device. "My sister was very proficient at creating mechas like this, always using tech to try and improve our lives. She even made a toothbrush for Keiichi that would brush his teeth at a molecular level, from the inside out. My heart tells me that she is trying desperately to find 'her' Belldandy. This object is _filled_ with love and hope. Her Goddess aura is interwoven into every component of it."

Amazing. Of the three Goddesses, Urd was the emotional firecracker, Belldandy was the wise peacemaker, and Skuld was the inventive problem-solver. Once again, she had pulled the proverbial robot out of the hat.

Belldandy of Nulln needed to be encouraged, and Keiichi immediately picked up on this.

"Belldandy, your sister Skuld is still alive!" he asserted. "Just like I'm not quite exactly your Keiichi...the Skuld that died forty millennia ago is not your Skuld by a long shot! Your younger sister is still alive, and we will make sure you find her."

If I had tear ducts, I would be crying at how tenderly he hugged Belldandy of Nulln. Despite the immense differences of TimeSpace, their hearts were united.

Love _always_ finds a way.

"Keleste, can you send a message back through the superstring, to tell them that we need more energy?" Keiyasu asked. "Could you explain to them who we are? Tell them that we're working on trying to create a solution, but we need more power?"

"I can try, Kei...but it's not going to be easy. This isn't something simple and automatic like thoughtcasting. Remember when we first stumbled upon Keiichi-God's realm? We couldn't even understand the thoughtcasts because they were too rapidly cast. We could face the same obstacle here..."

"Not if we use mathematics," Keiichi broke in. "I _know_ Skuld...she's almost a little sister to me. And I'm certain that if you were able to time the pulses in a discrete sequence, then she would be able to decipher the meaning rather easily. But I have a strong feeling that you can't use Goddess-level math, because you need to send a signal that can be recognized by an Earthrealm mortal, otherwise they may not go for it. In other words, they need to know that it's from _me_. My sister, Megumi, is a senior at Nekomi Tech...hmmm, I bet she could figure out a Fibonacci Sequence."

"Keiichi, why stop there?" I interjected. "Fibonacci Sequences have magnitudes, don't they? If we send the sequence with intervals, we can 'encrypt' your name into the sequence. Broadcast two sets of sequences, with built-in magnitude intervals; one in Kanji using the stroke numbers for your name, the second using English letter assignations. A sequence of ten Fibonacci, skip the next twelve, then ten, then seven for 'Morisato'. Next, a sequence of twenty-six to denote a shift to the English alphabet, then skip eleven for 'K', and so on."

"I'm surprised," Keiichi teased. "Math isn't your strong suit, Cevn."

"Well, I guess living with a grad student and a senior at a major technical institute has rubbed off on me," I answered. "Not to mention that I'm a _full professor_ at said institute."

Keiichi looked embarrassed, he had totally forgotten that I was his sensei in several classes over the past couple years, even if they weren't math classes. I was just as embarrassed, I had totally forgotten that I had inadvertently pulled the sensei 'trump card' on him, bringing up the teacher-student role.

"Hey, it's really all your fault," I added. "You always leave your textbooks laying around the temple, and I'm one of those weird types who _has_ to read something in the bathroom..."

"But you keep thinking and saying you're a cyborg," Keiichi challenged me. "Cyborgs don't shit or take baths. So what's up with that?"

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --


	134. Pt 134: Time Passages Dreams

**Part 134: Time Passages Dreams**

THERA, BEIJING CAPITAL, CHINA-STATES:

"Hey, Moritayama, can I ask you something?" Belldandy asked her team Captain as she sat down next to her at the Cafeteria.

"You just did, Morisato," the Captain answered with a grin. "Sorry, I'm just a bit nervous like everyone else. Ask away..."

"During that TV interview, one of the volleyball players from the '64 team was talking about giving up her boyfriend or something so that she could stay on the team. I noticed that she was staring right at Coach Chihiro when she said that. I've _never_ heard Coach say anything about her family. What's the deal? Every one of us either had family here or she's burning up her cell phone to call them back in Japan. Why did it seem like she was saying that to our Coach?" Belldandy asked.

"You really don't know?" Moritayama answered with a question. She expressively furrowed her brow, seemingly weighing out a difficult decision. For some reason, Belldandy was reminded of volleyballs being rolled up and down a court.

"Okay, I'll tell you. But don't ever mention a word of it to Coach Chihiro. The only reason I'm telling you this is because I know it'll make you play even harder for the team tonight, so don't go assuming that you're special just because I told you this."

"Cut the crap, Captain! I'm not stupid, y'know. I know she's a country girl...I'm one myself. But she never talks about her hometown, even though she knows mine and has even been there." Belldandy replied, irritated that Moritayama was so stand-offish. "I mean, what the fuck? Haven't I earned your trust by busting my ass for these past four months? At least a little bit? I know that I'm just a kid compared to you and everyone else on the team, but I try hard!"

"I'm sorry Morisato, but it's not pleasant to hear, and I get pissed off every time I think of it. It really has nothing to do with you...and FYI, I do trust you on the court. If you don't kick ass out there tonight, we're fucked. _That's_ how much I trust you," Moritayama clarified.

"Chihiro and I went to Osaka Univ. together. We even roomed together for a couple of years, until we got too competitive with each other. That's why I was so enraged when she got called to coach the team and I didn't. I've been the Captain of this team straight on through since the 2004 Olympics. We had a falling out after the 2004 Games, so I didn't keep up on what she was doing. Stupid me, I didn't realize that all those years I was a player, she was coaching. To take a bunch of girls from a Polytech college to the Regionals, and then the Nationals...she must have something special that someone on the Japan Olympic Committee noticed. It's all water under the bridge now. She deserves to coach our team..."

"So you've known her a long time, huh?"

"Yah, you could say that. I'm from Tokyo, and you're right...she's from the boonies. She lived on a farm outside Satomi in northeast Ibaraki prefecture. I remember laughing at her when she told me that they didn't have an indoors toilet until she was in grade school. I couldn't believe that people lived like that. Chihiro also has a hisabetsu buraku background, which means that she grew up with all sorts of subtle discrimination, just you have to deal with because you're non-Japanese. Like you, she's a farm girl. Her parents and grandparents have a small plot and they make some kind of renowned miso paste from crops they grow on their farm. It's pretty famous in Ibaraki, and Chihiro was the oldest one in her generation. You know what that means..."

Belldandy could see it all in her mind. Chihiro had told her parents that she wasn't going to stay at the farm and carry on the traditional family agri-guild, and went to Osaka Univ instead. That must have really caused a family feud! She knew about buraku discrimination, but she didn't know that some rural areas still practiced such bullshit discrimination.

"Like you, she played volleyball in junk gyms and then went to school in Satomi, the nearby little town of 10,000 or so people. Our coach, Asakura, heard about her skills as a libero and invited her to come to Osaka to practice, and offered her a scholarship on the spot. So when she went back home with the good news, her parents basically told her 'you're no longer our daughter'. For real. You see, her parents didn't have kids until their late 30s, so they were really old-fashioned. They did a total engiri disownership thing; they gave her money for train fare back to Osaka and told her to never come back. They disowned her, took her off the will, took her off the residential charter, and supposedly took her off the koseki family register by inventing some lie that she married a foreigner. Chihiro had to live with our Coach, Asakura, and complete high school in Osaka before starting at the University."

Belldandy was feeling more and more furious as Moritayama explained Coach Chihiro's circumstances. Unable to stand it anymore, she stood up and walked over to the nearest empty table and kicked it over, earning startled glances from the Brazilian team nearby. It was heartbreaking to hear that Chihiro's own family had treated her that way, just because she wanted to go to college and play volleyball. Coach Chihiro was the older sister she never had...and her family had totally fucking bailed on her! She couldn't even understand how a parent could turn their child out of the house with nothing more than a suitcase and train fare. She had heard of such things happening with rural families, as well as city folk.

"Hey, don't go makin' a scene, Morisato," Moritayama warned. "I know how you feel, but save it for the game, okay? Chihiro's made her peace with it long ago. Her family hasn't talked to her in nine years; I think she's used to it by now. She tried one last time when she earned a spot on our 2004 Olympics team. She wrote them a letter. They mailed her back an envelope with her letter inside. It was all ripped up into little pieces," Moritayama explained.

"That's so..._fucked up_!" Belldandy said. "You're saying that her parents haven't had anything to do with her for _nine_ years, just because she went to Osaka instead of staying home? What the fuck were they thinking? How could they do that to their own daughter?"

"Now you know why she has a hair-trigger temper sometimes," Moritayama observed. "Most of us had a _choice_ to devote our lives to volleyball. If we wanted to pursue the game with sincere intentions towards excellence, then we had to give up friends and family and boyfriends and jobs to do what we're doing. But for her it wasn't a choice, there was no 'either-or' involved. She didn't give up on her family, because her family already gave up on her. Underneath all that bravado, there's _a lot_ of hurt."

Belldandy wished she hadn't pressed Moritayama for an explanation. No wonder her Coach was so tight with she and her sempai at Chiba Poly. She didn't have a god-damned family! Chihiro had mentioned a couple of times that she lived in a tiny faculty apartment with almost nothing in it. Now she knew why. Unlike most women, Coach Chihiro never got any 'start up' money from her folks. Her parents had disowned her, which meant that she was truly on her own.

And yet she had spent her own money to buy new warm-up outfits and uniforms for her Chiba Poly teammates and her when they made it into the National Championships.

Dumbasses! Chihiro was a one-in-a-million...and they had basically said "fuck you" to her!

"Captain Moritayama, thanks for telling me about that shit," Belldandy said evenly. "You're right. Now I've got some real steel to go with the fire in my heart."

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

On the way to the National Indoors Stadium, Belldandy and her team were swarmed by the usual horde of photographers and the ever-present NHK camera crew. In Japan, volleyball was always one of the Olympic events that drew a greater-than-usual interest by those following the Games. So already, the stage they were playing on was large just because they were participating in the sport that her countrymen considered to be one of the marquee events in the Games. Viewership on NHK had been steadily mounting as they progressed through the tournament; but their game against China-States two days ago was apparently off the hook in viewer ratings. Takahashi had told them that almost _60 percent_ of the households in Japan had watched them beat China-States. Apparently, their plight with injuries and their triumphs on the courts had become a cause célèbre in Japan; real big-time national headline type stuff. To the Japanese, they were more than just a team; along with Takahashi, they had become a symbol of '_ware ware Nihonjin'_…the embodiment of Japanese strength and national spirit.

The Olympics had provided a bus to transport them from the Village to the stadium; even now she could look out the window and see procession of vans filled with press hounds following them. She had made a commitment to herself to not speak a single word to the press until the game was over, because she wanted to remain absolutely focused on the upcoming game. Someone else can yadda-yadda with the presshounds.

Being around Coach Chihiro was a little awkward, now that she knew the Coach's story. She was amazed at the parallels with her own life; growing up with no real competition in v-ball, being teased and discriminated in junior high because she was gaijin and taller than anyone else in the school, having to constantly argue with herself, struggling with a hair-trigger temper. Everything, except that she had a Mom and Stepdad that loved her dearly. A home that she could always come home to. Chihiro didn't even have that.

As they piled out of the bus, a host of flashlights flickered. Coach Chihiro paused long enough to give a perfunctory statement to the NHK crew, basically blah-blahing and pish-pishing. Of all the team sports that had a following in Japan, volleyball was rated right up there with soccer and baseball. One of the NHK guys had predicted that 80 percent of the households in Japan would be watching tonight's game.

The bus drove into the basement of the stadium via a ramp, just like the one in the larger Bird's Nest stadium. Red Guard security guys were everywhere. As the bus passed into the tunnel ramp, she saw cordons of metal dividers with the Olympics logo with throngs of excited Japanese fans and well-wishers waving flags and shouting encouragement to them. Every minute towards the stadium seemed heavier to Belldandy as the full weight that she was playing _for an entire nation_ really started to hit home.

The National Indoors Stadium was so large, its seating capacity could accommodate the every person in entire village near her Mom and Stepdad's farm, fifteen times over. Hell, every single person in Murakami-shi county could fit inside this arena with seats to spare. She knew that it was packed to the rafters right now, because China was playing for the Bronze medal in the consolation bracket game.

At the end of the tunnel, the ever-present Olympic ushers guided them to their locker room, with a sign "Japan Women's Volleyball Olympic Entry" attached to it. The stadium had _eight_ separate locker rooms. Once inside, she was again impressed by the facilities; this was an ultra-modern locker room...the kind of locker room one would find in those 100,000 yen-a-month exclusive sports clubs that execs frequented.

Coach Chihiro let them wander around for a few minutes to soak in the ambiance and have some alone time.

"Okay, privacy time's over!" she announced. "We've earned the right to be in this locker room, and to be out on that floor in 90 minutes. You girls need to keep that in mind every minute from now on. We fuckin' _belong_ here...don't ever doubt that! And this is going to be our night. Each of us is going to have to play her best, even better than we did against the Chinese. Norway-Euro isn't a pushover just because they have the wild woman. Their whole team is extremely good in every aspect of the game. We're gonna have to play lethal volleyball against them, with surgical strikes when we attack the net. Otherwise they're gonna do to us what we did to the Cubans...they'll bide their time and wear us out by long volleys. Okay, break for it!"

Belldandy showered and dressed in a crisp new volleyball uniform, same as the one she had worn before except for the gold and silver medal embroidery on one sleeve and the Thera globe patch on the other shoulder. Unlike most women v-ball players, she liked wearing long-sleeved jerseys, which she would roll up just above her elbow. Two others, Kinosh'ta and Ootaki, had the same peculiar quirk about their uniforms.

Gathering her long auburn air back into a ponytail, she pulled it through the hairtie. When they beat China, her mom gave it to her to wear for this game; it was a simple weaved hair-tie her Mom used to wear when she was in grade school, back when she lived in Norway. Wearing it brought back memories of how her Mom would brush out her long tan hair when she was a girl, hair that she had kept long all the way through high school and even in college. It flowed all the way down her back to her beltline...just like her Mom's.

She could feel adrenaline pumping through every cell of her body as she did her stretches to limber up.

A few moments later, an Olympic official pulled Chihiro aside for a moment. Chihiro called them together and announced that they were going to have special visitors.

Under a hail of camera flashes, the 1964 Women's Team walked into the locker room. Belldandy felt her skin immediately goosebumping. What were they doing? What was going on? This was a total fucking distraction! Weren't locker rooms supposed to be private—for the team only? She needed to be encouraged, not humbled by the best volleyball team Japan had ever fielded in the Olympics...

Chihiro called for everybody to gather round in the middle of the locker room and told the camera crews to get the hell out of Hokkaido, so this could be private.

"We first want to acknowledge that we're all deeply humbled by your accomplishment," the elderly Masae Kasai started, obviously intent on giving a speech. Belldandy awkwardly thought that the oldster must be having a 'senior moment'...she and her teammates were the ones who were supposed to be humbled by these national heroines of the 1964 Olympics. She had watched the grainy video of their game several times on DVD since she arrived in Beijing, always feeling a heartfelt inspiration when they beat the Soviets in straight sets to win the championship. She looked at Chihiro, who shrugged her shoulders as if to say "I don't have a clue about any of this."

"You are poised on the first step of the final step of your lives. When we won the Gold Medal in Tokyo, it forever changed everything...and nothing. Each of us went back to our old jobs at the factory and elsewhere, raised children and grandchildren, and lived normal lives. Once in a while, some nearby high school will call up to ask us to give a speech during their Sports Day festivals, or a TV network will interview us about the '64 Games."

"Some normal life _she_ has!" Belldandy thought with respect to Kasai-sensei. She was on the 2016 bid committee for Tokyo! Every one of these women had promoted the sport throughout their lives...

"But volleyball is still a way of life for every one of us, in spite of the passage of time. Many of us now are coaches of volleyball teams and volleyball league presidents. Life goes on, but in our hearts we will always be champions...Olympians. We made all of Japan proud the day we beat the Soviets to win the championship in Tokyo. We have stayed in touch with each other all these forty years, because we became a special family unto ourselves during those times. When we won our first World Championship prior to the Olympics, they nicknamed us 'the Oriental Witches', which only inspired us to play harder. In those days, we packed boxes of ramen and brought cabbage whenever we left Japan, because the food was so different everywhere else," Kasai-sensei reminisced.

"When you gals won your game in the quarterfinals, NHK informed us that they were considering bringing us all over. Of course, we all agreed. Every woman you see on this team has stayed in touch over the years; in a sense, we owe this reunion to you girls. Speaking for all of us, this really means a lot to each of us. Back when we were young, we made a commitment to ourselves before playing the Olympics: 'We have never experienced defeat...we must win.' Now it is your turn to carry forth the tradition for Japan, to relight the torch that has been stilled since 1976. We cannot be on the court with you, of course, but we would ask that you young women please indulge us 'old Oriental Witches' for a few minutes," she asked, earning titters and giggles from her teammates.

"O..of course they will!" Chihiro blurted out nervously.

"Which one of you is the team captain?" the elderly Olympian asked. Moritayama and Sato raised their hands. The main spokesman for the 'grannies' walked up to her and introduced herself.

"Masae Kasai, age 74. Captain of the 1964 Olympic Women's Volleyball team, Member of the 2016 Tokyo Olympic Bid Committee, founder of the Mama-San's Amateur Volleyball league," she announced and then pinned a small metallic object on the collar of Moritayama's jersey. Moritayama looked at her jersey, and then back at Kasai with a stricken expression.

One by one, the 1964 team members called out their name and position on the team, and then pinned a small metal object on her 2008 counterpart's jersey. Most of the women already knew who was playing which role on the team. One of the Tokyo players walked up to her, her face wrinkled but her eyes still bright and alert, her bearing gracious and attractive despite being in her late 60s.

"Yuko Handa, age 67, Center Forward Attacker of the 1964 Olympic Women's Volleyball team, coach of the 1972 and 1976 Japan Women's Olympic teams, founder of the Osaka Youth Volleyball League, past President of the Japan Volleyball Federation 1992-1998," she announced as she pinned a small pin onto Belldandy's uniform collar, and then made a joke about how much the sport had grown since 1964, earning laughter from everyone, including her own teammates.

Belldandy pulled her collar out so she could read what was on the pin:

_"Women's Delegation Participant, 1964 Tokyo Olympiad, Volleyball"_

Belldandy was speechless to begin with, and now she felt an experience that Keiichi would term "a spiritual epiphany". She looked at the tiny little pin, the kanji carved precisely on it in an old-style relief typeface, the seven Olympic rings in the background. This pin was a treasured possession of its bearer for 44 years, and now Handa-sensei was loaning it to her so that she could be united in spirit with her at the 2008 Olympics. _This woman had been the head of Japan's Volleyball Federation before she had moved to Japan!_ She looked over at Kinosh'ta who was the last one on the team to get a pin...as the sensei pinned her participant's pin on Kinosh'ta's jersey, the normally stoic Kinosh'ta was blinking her eyes rapid-fire as they were tearing up.

It was always a chilling moment when the light from the previous Olympics...having been paraded around Thera for four years by thousands of runners, walkers, wheelchair riders and dignitaries over a stretch of hundreds of thousands of miles...came into the stadium on during the Opening Ceremony to bind the two Olympic games together in a spirit of unity.

These women were passing the torch to them, over a distance of 44 years, with a mega-meaningful style and depth in gesture. Belldandy realized that being a championship team required more than skill or practice or good coaching. Fundamental to success was the idea of loving service, put into action. The Spirit of the Olympics: rendered real, tangible...and evidenced by results. The 'grannies' had planned this ceremonial gifting because _they were still Japan's 1964 Olympic team_ in their hearts and minds, not just a gathered group of reunion-happy oldsters on a field trip to the Olympics.

She observed her 1964 counterpart closely. This woman, probably the tallest player on the 1964 team, was almost half a meter shorter than she. Being 67, she had grown up during the years of the Pacific Conflict and no doubt had endured the ensuing foot shortages during and after the war like everyone else between 1940-1950. Most women of her generation were small because of lack of nutrition growing up, most them only 1.45 to 1.55 meters in height. The elderly women in the village, small and slender, often reminded Belldandy of grade schoolers, only with wry expressions and weathered faces. To the women of her time, Handa-sensei was a giant by comparison. Compared to her sensei from 1964, Belldandy's life had been a cakewalk. There was so much she wanted to say...

"Handa-sensei...I will return this honorably to you...after our team receives our Gold medals. I guess wearing this means that we're the new 'Oriental Witches'," was about all she could manage. She immediately felt stupid, because she was not even close to being Oriental because of her Norwegian heritage. She resembled Athenle and the players on her Norway-Euro team than anything else.

"Oh great, now I've really fucked up!" she thought, looking at Handa-sensei and expecting the worst. But Handa-sensei's eyes were sparkling with delight instead, and Kanai-sensei started giggling, clearly charmed by her remark. Someone started clapping her hands, and for a moment everyone was spirited away by a sweet breath of light-heartedness.

Finally, Kasai-sensei turned to Chihiro and rubbed her hands together, as if she was feeling a chill.

"This one is for you, but unfortunately Coach Daimatsu left this life 30 years ago. He never was given a participant's pin in 1964, so we decided to bring you the commemorative pin from the 2000 Volleyball Federation meeting where he was posthumously inducted into the Hall of Fame, Coaches Division. Years ago, I was 26 and in love with a man whom I felt I was destined to marry. But like each of you, I put volleyball first and decided to prepare for the Tokyo Olympics. Naturally, I ended up losing him. I know fully well the personal sacrifices you have made, and that you have pushed these women beyond themselves. Coach Daimatsu would be proud to see Japan's volleyball team in such capable hands," Kasai-sensei said as she pinned a round pin on Chihiro's jacket collar.

Her heart was bolting like a race horse...obviously, Kasai-sensei knew about Chihiro's life history, because her praise of Coach Chihiro definitely had a personal ring to it. She was almost certain that Takahashi-sensei knew about Chihiro's past too; Takahashi had basically went after the Olympic Committee with a pickaxe to defend her position as Coach.

There was a muffled roaring sound that seemed to breathe out of the concrete and metal walls of the locker room. China must be doing well in their Bronze Medal match.

"I..I don't know what to say, I mean this is..." Chihiro stammered. "Just because our team is beat up, it doesn't mean that we can't still administer a beating. And that's what we're gonna do. We have six playing, and six injured; which means that we have the strongest bench in the entire Olympics, because every one of you injured gals would give anything to play...and that will be our strength. Your strength will carry our starters to victory, because six are gonna play with the tenacity of twelve."

Nasai-sensei and her elderly teammates nodded their heads approvingly at this, and all the injured players on the team were lit up with competitive sizzle. Suddenly, Chihiro's eyes flashed wide, as if she had seen a naked guy streaking through the locker room.

"Wait!!" she said excitedly. "I remember what your coach said to you all those years ago. He promised you that if you work hard enough, practice hard enough, then he would guarantee that your team would win the Gold Medal. Didn't he? Well, I'm gonna do the same thing. Honored Olympian sensei champions...I guarantee _you_ that we will win the Gold Medal for Japan. Because now we're part of your team, just as much as you are part of ours."

Belldandy was so blown away by what Chihiro had just said, she could feel her toes curling inside of her tennis shoes and goosebumps peppering her skin under her long sleeved uniform.

"Then I have one final wish," one of the 1964 Olympians requested with spry enthusiasm. "We didn't get to do this back in the old days; it wasn't even invented back then. But I've always wanted to try it just once."

She stepped forward and held out her hand. Kinosh'ta immediately figured out what she was doing, and rested her hand on the elderly Olympian's hand. Than a 1964 Olympian rested her hand on Kinosh'ta's. One by one, they stacked hands in alternation until 25 hands were clenched together in the middle of a circle of women.

"One nation, one team, one goal, one Gold!" Kasai-sensei said as she pushed down from the top, emulating the well-known modern pre-game team ritual.

Instead of feeling distracted, Belldandy felt herself on fire.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

When she and her teammates emerged from the hallway into the center of the stadium, Belldandy paused for a moment, her senses reeling as she tried to absorb it all in. The National Indoors Stadium was _huge_ from the inside, even larger than Big Egg in Tokyo. Now that she was inside, she was even more transported into awe. The arena seating was jammed solid to the rafters with a predominately Japanese crowd. She could see thousands of spectators waving hand-held Japanese flags as they were cheered onto the court. Near the front row corner, she spied Takahashi-sensei...and as their team walked by, Takahashi-sensei pulled her jacket open and grinned at them.

She was wearing a Japan Women's V-ball t-shirt and all seven of her Gold Medals.

Message received, Belldandy nodded to her with athletic respect. As tradition dictated, the team walked in a circuit around the court before returning to their bench area. She saw the Women's Field Hockey Team sitting as a group in two rows near the front, and the players from that team repeated Takahashi's gesture and opened their hoodie jackets to proudly display their Gold Medals.

The 1964 Obaa-san Olympians were all seated in two rows right next to Takahashi, right behind where their bench area was. The hardwood floor was as new as a baby's ass, all the scuff marks from yesterday's Men's and Women's Basketball finals had been buffed out of it.

Higher up in the dignitary's box sections, she saw Emperor Heisei and his family, and the PM and Vice-PM! Off to the right, she saw members of the US basketball "Dream Team" with their bright USA team jackets. Further along the front rows, she recognized Japan's Men's V-ball squad, who flashed them their Bronze medals. Numerous track and field athletes from Japan were sitting in a section. Another nearby section had been reserved for families of the team members; and she saw her Mom and Stepdad among the contingent.

"Oh my fuckin' God!" she heard Chihiro gasp, stopping in her tracks so abruptly that Kinosh'ta almost collided with her. Belldandy had a flash of panic, worried that her Coach might have seen Keiichi...but she didn't notice any Gods in the stadium.

But there was a Goddess, as a few moments later, the Norway-Euro team entered the stadium courtside. Athenle...rather, Vibeke Althenlegard, was glaring at her from across the court as they did their walkabout around the court. "Vibeke" was an appropriate name for her rival: in Norwegian, it was a female name whose general meaning was 'War'. A number of female singers in Goth-metal Bands in Scandinavia used Vibeke for stage names, but rarely did Norwegian parents name their girls Vebeke anymore.

"Ignore her, Morisato," Chihiro said. "She's the worst type, and you're here to give her everything she deserves. I hope to God that you humiliate her ass tonight."

Belldandy felt her skin bristling with competitive ardor as she regarded her opponent. The press had made out Athenle into some kind of 'wild woman' volleyball player. In fact, the entire Norway-Euro team had been so dominant in the Games, none of their competitors had scored above 7 points in any of the sets during the Olympics.

Tonight, that was definitely going to change.

She felt a familiar 'holy' feeling deep in her bones again as she saw the immense Olympic flag draped off a standard at one end of the stadium. The interior of the stadium seemed to her to be a cathedral dedicated to the Olympic spirit. Overhead, the roof was cross-latticed with swirling beams, with banks of stage-lighting mounted on them. Above it was the roof itself, which was a spiral of girders, trestles and mirrors. Again, she felt the voices of millions of Olympians throughout the past 2800 years of the games exhorting her to play "faster, higher, stronger, wiser, healthier."

_"Citius, Altius, Fortius, Gnarus, Validus"_

The Olympic Motto.

The PA system announced the four net refs and four line refs; the two teams of referees would rotate every 15 points during each set of the match. The PA announcer then requested everyone in the Stadium to stand and remain silent for the Olympic anthem and the presentation of the game balls to the President of the IOC.

As the Olympic anthem was played, a 'box' of four Olympic flags descended from the roof, each mounted to a standard. Once the anthem finished, the Jubilee Olympics theme was played while the ball cart was ceremoniously brought in, draped with an Olympic flag. She side-glanced as Tamiya, Ootaki and Kinosh'ta and saw tears in the corners of their eyes.

A six man honor guard in white uniforms marched to the ball rack, three on each side. They lifted the flag and folded it with precise movements, and then presented it to the IOC President who was sitting at mid-court in the Olympic Officials section. He gestured with a side-to-side wave of his hand, authorizing both the game and the balls to be used for tonight's championship game. The Olympic volleyball games used unique balls throughout the tournament, culminating with this special green and blue ball.

The Dream Ball.

Each ball was a hand-painted replica of Thera. The intent of the ball's design was deliberate and unmistakable: this match was the world championship of Women's Volleyball. No other volleyball game, anywhere, was allowed to use these balls, save for the Men's and Women's Olympic championships. It was illegal to even make replicas of them.

Belldandy felt an extra surge of motivation as she looked at the ball rack. She was playing for more than national pride and a world championship; even more than to a chance to have Keiichi stay in her life. Fully infused with an intensity of spirit, she recognized that she was playing on behalf of the entire planet; for the dignity of all the mortals on Thera that Athenle had chosen to view as 'piss-ants'.

Championship games traditionally began with the custom of a tip-off, which was introduced to the Olympics after World War I. Eighty million people had died during that war, and the Olympic Movement became keenly aware of the need for neutrality, even if by simple ritual or gesture. At the 1920 Games and thereafter, the championships of each bracketed tournament team sport started play with a neutral beginning, symbolizing that there were no 'home' teams in an Olympic team sport championship. In baseball and softball, two batters would hit balls within the field, the ball shagged closest to the wall would determine which team would be first at bat. Basketball already had their version of a neutral start, the jump-off between team centers. Soccer, field hockey and other team sports had their equivalent standards to initiate play.

The 'home team' was all of Thera; thus the game would begin started by impartiality and the first point would be decided by athleticism. In volleyball, the net ref would throw the ball out over the center of the net, as if he or she was posting up a set pass inside the neutral zone. Each team's designated center attacker would face-off, one-on-one. Whoever successfully attacked and spiked the ball would receive team possession and the first point of the first set.

"Get her, Morisato!" her teammates enthusiastically shouted as she walked towards the net to face Athenle for the start of the match. Losing this tip-off was not an option; she, her team, and the all the fans from Japan in the stadium needed her to make a statement...right here, right now.

"Left it, left it!" she heard Coach Chihiro instruct.

"You and your team are going down, bitch. And it starts right here," Athenle said, looking eye to eye at her through the net. Belldandy wanted to mouth something back, but checked her tongue; she was going to make her statement by her actions. Athenle may be a soldier...but she was certainly no competitor.

The net ref stood up on his refereeing stand and threw the ball out in a high arc over the net. Belldandy eyeballed it, timed her attack...and at the last instant shifted slightly left and hammered it home. By turning left during her leaping attack, she had forced Athenle to compensate by widening her blocking arms. She hit the ball true and her spike blazed right in between Athenle's arms and banged the far end of the court with a satisfying snap. The crowd thundered with shouting and cheering in reaction to her kill, and Team Japan had a 1-0 lead in the first set.

"That's how we play volleyball on Thera," she said to Athenle before she walked back to be mobbed by her overjoyed teammates.

Ootaki served up a high leaping serve, which was volleyed by one of the Norway-Euro girls, who set the ball to Athenle. Athenle leapt high and hit the ball with inhuman speed, so hard that it hit Muriyako in the chest before she even had time to react and knocked her backwards at least five meters, the ball bursting as it impacted against her chest.

"That's how you mortals lose at volleyball," Athenle hissed to her in Norwegian.

"You bitch!" Belldandy exclaimed, immediately realizing that Athenle's spike attack wasn't even humanly possible. Her anger turned to fear as Muriyako lay motionless on the floor of the court. A minute later, a swarm of EMTs were attending Muriyako, and all she could do was pace back-and-forth next to the next, glaring at Athenle. The shock was of the injury was too much; the crowd was hushed to near-silence.

Except for some loud voices that were booing. She looked in the direction of the booing...and saw Keiichi and about a dozen Gods sitting on top of the suspended Olympic flag at the end of the stadium. He was so far away, she could barely make out his face. He gestured to her, as if he was asking her for permission to do something.

"Too bad. Your team loses. Only five players left, which disqualifies you," Athenle announced in Japanese, giving her a steely look of anger.

"Wrong!" Chihiro shouted in response, storming over to the official's table.

"Athenle, how could you do that to her? You're supposed to be a Goddess. You're supposed to be better than that," Belldandy confronted her in a near whisper so she wouldn't be overheard. She was too hurt by what she had witnessed to be angry at the Valkyrie Goddess. To her horror, two EMTs were rushing back with a portable defibrillator. Athenle's spike had hit Muriyako so hard, it had stopped her heart!

"If she's hurt, I'm going to make you fuckin' pay for that!" Belldandy said in a low voice.

"She's _already_ hurt, you stupid Theran worm! Besides, you and whose army will make me pay, mortal ant. We emerge victorious, as is our right as Goddesses. You have already lost this game, because you don't have the full team of six. All of the combined might of your worthless little...ga..agaggaaspckk!"

In a streak of black, Keiichi had flashed down from where he had been sitting on the Olympic flag. Eyeblink fast, he was suddenly right between she and Athenle, the volleyball net passing through his translucent body. Belldandy noted he was dressed in his usual sci-fi styled clothing; black leather jeans, elaborate blue/black/green boots, jacket with a high collar...and on the back of his black and navy-blue jacket was an exact replica of her warm up hoodie, with a red-glowing "Japan 2008" and a glowing multi-colored Olympic symbol.

Athenle couldn't finish whatever she was saying because Keiichi had lifted her off the ground with a hand clamped on her throat right under her jaw.

"«_Athenle, how –_dare-_ you! How dare you harm an innocent mortal in a competition that is based on fair play and honor!_»" she heard him say in her mind, throttling Athenle by the neck, shaking her in midair with each word. Belldandy had only seen Keiichi mad twice before, when he was fighting Senbei and Mara and then when he was angry at Athenle for abusing her Goddess powers. But compared to those two times, his present mood was head-banger pissed off; his long hair fluttering as if it was charged with electricity.

"«_It's bad enough that you smuggled an entire team of Valkyrie onto the Earthrealm to play alongside you in this competition. Even worse, you've abused your Goddess abilities, limited as they are by your license suspension, to cheat and wheedle your way to this point. Now, you just tried to kill a mortal by 'borrowing' some Goddess energy from your teammates. I've already summoned His Lordship, and I just summoned a dozen fellow Wish Escort Gods to assist me. To these Therarealm mortals and their culture, this Olympics is sacred and profoundly meaningful. If you or any of your Valkyrie try any more bullshit, I will make you and your entire fucking team play the remainder of this game with broken necks. May I remind you that you are limited to Earthrealm Trainee powers, while I have a full First Class License. Do I make myself clear?_»" she heard him angrily exclaim in her mind.

He was so angry, _she_ was feeling afraid, even though she knew his anger was only directed at Athenle. Alongside her fear, she felt an oddly vivid sensation of pride in Keiichi's actions; the normally happy-go-lucky persona he always possessed had slipped away, completely shifting into a very masculine protective posture. He wasn't joking around, like he had with those three idiots back in January. Belldandy grinned, knowing that Keiichi was deadly fucking serious about this.

Keiichi didn't even remain for Athenle's acknowledgment. Belldandy realized that the entire interchange she had just witnessed had been played out in some other dimension beside the mortal one. It had to be, because Keiichi was literally shaking Athenle like a rag doll with a one-handed choke hold, just like in one of those 'superman' kind Hong Kong movies. If this was being captured live on TV, a billion or so viewers of the Olympics would be having an Olympic moment of unparalleled incredulity.

She looked at her rival, who...in the 'real world'...was down on her knees, choking in deep gulps of air. Keiichi's intercession had completely shaken her up. She wasn't going to cheapen herself by enjoying Athenle's comeuppance.

She looked over at Muriyako, and watched as Keiichi reached his hand out towards her chest. His hand _disappeared_ into her chest, and a moment later, Muriyako was sitting up on the stretcher, holding her chest and looking bewildered. The EMTs were looking bewildered as well.

But it was too late. Muriyako could do sprints and cartwheels for an hour, but it still wouldn't matter. Any administration of first aid beyond simple dressing of minor injuries earned an automatic medical red-card for that player. Keiichi had totally healed her and jump-started her teammate's heart, but to the game officials and 75,000 spectators, it was the EMTs who had administered the defibrillation. The net official had already passed a red card to Chihiro, signifying that Muriyako was medically disqualified from participating.

They were totally fucked.

She looked across the court as Keiichi's disclosure began to saturate her awareness. This wasn't the Norway-Euro team at all; this was a squad of Valkyrie warrior _Goddesses_! They were probably hand-picked by Athenle. Each player had a slight glowing around her entire body; visual proof that she was not a mortal. Keiichi had totally exposed them to her, for her eyes only, to warn her...and an instant later, all the 'halos' suddenly disappeared around each player on the Norway-Euro team.

"«_It is done!_»" an ancient voice affirmed, filling her mind like a room would fill with smoke after burning something on the stove. "«_There will be no more dishonorable irregularities. I will not permit it_.»"

Keiichi's Boss God had responded. The Norway-Euro...no, the Goddess team...looked at each other with shocked expressions, as if their clothes had suddenly turned into rice cookies. Belldandy sensed by their reaction of shocked unease that none of them had ever experienced a complete withdrawal of their Goddess abilities. The Boss God had leveled the playing field, and the Goddesses on the other side of the net were panicked.

Sighing, trying to gather her thoughts, she could hear Chihiro arguing with the net judge, no doubt advocating that she was eligible to play in accordance with obscure-but-certain Olympic guidelines. But the net judge wasn't buying it, and Belldandy's heart and her confidence began to falter. She had simply wanted to play a competitive, fair game. Woman against woman, team against team. Now, it was all fucked up because of Athenle. All the hallowed traditions of the Olympics, the vigilance towards fair competition, individual striving, personal sacrifice and the nobility to trying to better one's self...and Athenle and her gang had just dumped a shitcan of garbage on it.

Chihiro was getting riled up, and she looked at her teammates, who all wore worried expressions. Then the net judge gave _Chihiro_ a red-card, indicating that he wasn't going to allow the substitution.

"Ha hahaha haha!!" she heard Athenle laughing from the other side of the net.

It was all over. Japan's team didn't have the six players needed to continue the competition, which meant a forfeit of the game...and their medals. Silver medals aren't awarded during a forfeit situation; usually the bronze medal team is moved up into the silver medal, or the medals aren't awarded at all. If this was anywhere but here, she would be screaming in rage and frustration, throwing the ultimate fit of resentment. Athenle's mocking laughter was ice-sharp against the murmuring susurration of a stadium full of spectators who were alternately angry, disappointed, curious, jubilant and confused. Despite the deeply profound 'passing of the torch' between the 1964 team and her team, everyone's spirit had melted like wax on a candle. They weren't a team any longer, just five women on the court and seven women off the court hanging out to dry on the oaks of profound disappointment.

The head referee was just about ready to declare the game over when Belldandy noticed a bustle of activity near the Olympic official's box. Takahashi-sensei, Kasai-sensei and the contingent of the '64 v-ball team were rapidly elbowing their way through the stands, making a beeline to the box where the President of the IOC and his staff were seated.

_They were going to challenge the head referee's decision directly with the _–President-_ of the IOC!_

The Red Guards let them into the official's area and Belldandy watched as the sensei discussed their situation urgently with the IOC officials. Several of the IOC staffers were nodding their heads; whatever was being discussed was definitely plumbing some seriously spiritual and philosophical depths, given the expressions of the President of the IOC and his deputies. After about five minutes, the President of the IOC stood up and motioned Chihiro and the head judge over.

Pacing like a turtledove, she awaited, glancing down at the bright red "Japan" on the front of her jersey, hoping the dream wouldn't end...

The President of the IOC walked over to the referee manager's stand and informed them about his decision, and then activated the PA system to address the stadium. He made an announcement, which was then repeated in Chinese by a translator. Belldandy didn't understand a word of it, but some of stadium crowd did, because they were starting to cheer.

_"In accordance with Article One, Section two of the Olympic Charter, the Olympics are designated as a worldwide effort to promote sports ethics and participation. Participation of the head coach of a Mintonette or Volleyball team, rendered necessary due to injury or illness to bring said team to full complement of participants, is fully recognized under Section 21.B., subsection 1-3 of the Olympic Regulatory, dated 1904 and currently still in effect. The International Volleyball Federation accords precedence to this Olympic body's governance during an Olympic event. In the spirit of promoting competition and in accordance with established regulations of the sport, the ruling of the referee management is hereby reversed. The substitution will be allowed in accordance with Olympic Charter and current Olympic regulatory rules of team composition. The game will resume in five minutes."_

Concluding the announcement, the President of the IOC took the red card Chihiro had been given and slapped it down on the referee management table. Belldandy completely understood _that_ gesture; she almost sank to her knees in gratitude.

"C'mon you guys! We gotta regroup! My nerves are shot to hell...I can only imagine what yours are doing!" Chihiro shouted, motioning towards the hallway leading to the locker room.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"I don't know about you girls, but I felt like my life passed before my eyes during the last ten minutes," Chihiro admitted. "Every time this team seems to be kicked down, we get back up. We've been given a miracle by the IOC, and we need to redeem it for Japan. Our opponents are just as shook up as we are, so they've got nothing on us. I don't know what happened to you, Muriyako, but thank God you're alright. I was scared shitless for a couple minutes there!"

Belldandy smiled to herself, knowing that God _really was_ responsible for Muriyako's recovery. Chihiro described how the tall Norway center had spiked the ball, her attack hit nicking the net and then slamming Muriyako in the chest while she was backpedaling to field it, causing her to fall backwards. The EMTs said it knocked the breath out of her and gave her an irregular heartbeat for a couple minutes, but she'd be fine except for some bruised ribs.

"We're gonna be okay! We can...and will...play the best game this sport has ever seen tonight. Moritayama, I trust that you still remember our play codes from 2004?"

"Definitely," the Captain asserted. "2004 for you and I, 2008 for everyone else and I."

"Good, because you're gonna be directing traffic out there, not me," Chihiro stated bluntly, earning a shocked expression. "I'm the coach, but you're the captain. That means you run the team while I'm on the court with you guys, and I'll coach the team during the breaks. We're gonna have to be on the same page, you and I. You run offense, and let me and Tamiya handle fielding and defense, okay?"

"Agreed!" Moritayama said. Belldandy could see the hunger returning to the Captain's eyes; Chihiro had basically split the coaching/captaining responsibilities.

"Morisato, I want you to stay in that bitch's face. Don't back down; you're stronger than her. Kinosh'ta, you wall up against their other power attacker and focus on blocking and roofing. Ootaki, power your serves and do all the funny shit you want, nick the net...keep 'em scrambling. Tamiya, it's you and me to bat cleanup and dig out every attack we can. Light as a feather while we kick ass together, got it?"

"Break!"

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Belldandy did a double-take when Chihiro emerged a minute later from the locker room in her 2004 Olympics libero's jersey, which earned a huge applause from the Japanese contingent of the stadium assembly. She slapped tens to everyone on the bench, and then walked out on the court...

...and pointed right at Athenle...and then gestured "come and get it" with a hand gesture familiar to anyone who watched Hong Kong martial arts flicks. The crowd responded with a raucous burst of cheering.

"Guess what's gonna be all over the 'net on J-tube tomorrow," Kinosh'ta commented to her with a snicker right before Ootaki punched over a serve that left the Norway team standing flat-footed.

"Ace in your face!" she heard Ootaki praise herself.

"This is why I hate you mortals, because you have your stupid laws and rules. We already beat you, but now you get to keep playing anyway because you cheated," Athenle said to her in a sotto voce.

The next serve was sidelined, fielded by Norway's libero and shot back into Tamiya's corner. Belldandy realized that they were trying to isolate and exploit Tamiya. With gymnastic speed, Tamiya perched under it, and Chihiro shouted "side!" Tamiya passed to Chihiro, who set the ball right to her. A perfect set, timed at the top of her jumping height with just a slight spin. A nail waiting to be hammered.

"Boom it!" Moritayama yelled. Belldandy sizzled the ball straight down with an unplayable kill which hit in front of the three front attackers. They didn't have a chance.

"Ain't so tough now that you don't have your Goddess powers, huh?! You better stop glarin' and start playin'," Belldandy taunted Athenle after slapping tens with her teammates.

Ootaki shot another jump serve over the net, an uncontested ace service, and all of a sudden Japan was up 5-0. Ootaki fishnetted the next serve, and Norway responded by pooching the service. Chihiro set it right to her. "Glance!" Moritayama shouted. She reeled like she was going to spike the ball, but instead dinked it to the side to set Kinosh'ta, who creamed it with a killer spike.

The Norwegian team matched them with intense volleys, point for point, but Japan finished 30-24 to win the first set. Belldandy glanced at her parents, Mom and Dad were in tears. Takahashi and the '64 champion team were jumping up and down with joy.

Belldandy felt a shiver race through her nerves as the crowd started chanting "Nippon!! Nippon!!" during the entire three-minute break between sets.

"You guys were fucking _marvelous_ out there!" Chihiro praised them. "Moritayama, you call out the 3-3 to 4-2 lineup switches whenever you wanna. Tamiya, aim serves for the corner. Morisato, no more net services. If you gotta wheelchair it over, then do it. We can't be giving these freaks any freebie points. Kinosh'ta, you need to step it up against that tall bitch. She may be bigger than you, but you're better than her...and I know you can roof her attacks once you get dialed into her attack technique. We've got a crowd behind us now, so let's remember who we're playing for. This is Volleyball Nation tonight in Beijing!"

Just as Chihiro predicted, the Norwegian team switched from swift attacks to volley-n-dig sessions. The Norway-Euro team was up 3-0 when Athenle rotated to service. She powered a jump-serve right at Chihiro, behind and to the left, totally unplayable. Chihiro _leapt backwards_ with her arms outstretched overhead, like a swimmer doing a back dive off the diving platform...and pancaked the serve as it hit the ground, spiraling it to Tamiya, who set it up for Moritayama and Kinosh'ta to do a tandem fakeout with Moritayama doing a cut shot to the opposite side.

"What the hell did she just do? She could've banged herself up!" Belldandy asked Moritayama during the side-swap break at 15 points.

"It's her own thing she invented back in Osaka U," her team Captain replied. "There's only a few women and men on the planet who can do what she just did, because no sane person would try to dig out a ball by jumping backwards. It's rough on the body, because you can't dive and roll. But Chihiro spent a whole year mastering it by using gym mats with the assistance of a judo master to teach her how to take the landings, and then another year on the court to toughen herself up on the hardwood to perfect it. We got to the Semis in Athens because our defense was the best in the Games, the only thing we lacked was offensive firepower. Chihiro's a big reason why we medaled in 2004."

Belldandy felt renewed respect for Chihiro the volleyball player, not just as a coach. Only a handful of players in the _world_ could defend against a spike or attack with that technique! This was what being good enough to play the Olympics was all about, making plays requiring extreme skill. She had never seen any volleyball player execute a defensive move like that. Chihiro had a powerful, individual weapon in her arsenal of competitive skills.

Just like she had her spin-in killing attack that Chihiro taught her, so she could hit the ball harder and not side out.

The game see-sawed back and forth, always with a single point difference between both teams. Japan was trying to go for swift volleys and kills, while Norway-Euro was retaliating with multiple set passes and deliberately playable net attacks.

She was losing track of the score as it approached 50 points.

Norway-Euro won the second set, 73-71, in a game that lasted almost as long as a match itself would last.

"Dammit!" Chihiro shouted when they huddled before the third set. "We can't rotate anyone in, while they have _two teams_ they can put on the floor. It's just going to get worse from here."

"So what?!" Kinosh'ta interjected, surprising everyone. Fingering the 1964 Olympics pin on her collar with a deliberate showy gesture, she noted, "We've got two teams too, one of which has some of the most honored athletes in Japanese history. This is our crowd I'm hearing shouting, not theirs. Their coach is sitting on his ass on the bench; he might as well be reading the morning newspaper. Our coach is right here on the floor, sweating her heart away with the rest of us. They don't have a coach...but we do."

"You're right," Moritayama said, playfully bumping Chihiro with her shoulder. "We've also got three women on this team who medaled in the last Olympics, two of them are right here in this circle of fools. They don't have a single player who's even been in an Olympics before this one."

"Yuh!" Tamiya added. "We've got da four of us who practiced extra every night for five months before we even started up in Tokyo. An we got da iron-woman MVP of Japan College Volleyball from Osaka playin' monster defense and net attacks."

"This is really cool," Ootaki added. "We did something no team has done to them during this Olympics. We beat their asses in the first set. Not only did we beat them, we made them look bad. We can do it again."

"They don't give a shit about the ball," Belldandy added, gaining curious stares from her teammates. "That ball means something to us, because we're Therans. They could care less about the Games, the medals, the Golds..."

"What the hell are you talkin', Morisato?" Chihiro asked.

"You'll see...I guarantee that you'll see."

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Norway won out on the third set, the score 66-68. Towards the end of the set, Belldandy and her teammates were bone-tired...leaning down with hands on their knees in between points. Each of them was well plastered with sweat, and the crews had to sweep dry the court every time one of them made a dig because their uniforms were soaked with perspiration.

Belldandy felt like her soul was on fire, as her body was burning from over-exertion. She could hear Athenle and her teammates sniggering as they crashed down onto benches to conserve every bit of energy. She pleaded with Keiichi to try and intervene, and heard his voice in her head in reply.

"«_It's time for you to create the miracle!_»" she heard Keiichi's voice in her mind.

"You fucker! I'm only 19, only mortal, only..."

"Morisato, what are you talkin' about?" Chihiro asked.

She heard Keiichi's voice contest her insecurities, reminding her. "«_You have it in you, Bell-chan. You're playing for everyone on Thera. Your team is matched up against a squad of militant Valkyrie who would rather cheat than compete. There is no '_-only 19, only a girl_-' any more. Your whole life has delivered this moment on a golden medal plate because you deserve to win._»"

"But I don't know what I'm doing! You're God, you know what you're doing all the time..."

"«_What makes you think that? I don't know what I'm doing either. Because I'm God, I don't -have- to know what to do. It isn't important. What's important for you, since you don't know what to do...is to do what you know. There is one thing that you know better than any being in the universe, and that's your heart, Belldandy. Listen to your heart, for your heart will always guide you to true pathways._»"

"You guys, I think I have a way we can beat them. If I told you that losing this game meant that Thera would explode in a flash of fire, would you fight to win this game no matter what? To play your best game, even if it meant toeing the line with death?" Belldandy offered, putting words to the firstmost craziest idea that popped out of her heart into her head. For it was true. They were mortal Therans playing against Goddesses. This wasn't just Japan vs. Norway-Euro in a volleyball match. So why not put the reality of the situation into words of motivation?

"This isn't the time for shoujo sci-fi fantasies, girl," Ootaki replied censoriously.

"Then let's make it the time for fantasy! You wanna lose your families, your parents, your lives? Takahashi-sensei, Kasai-sensei both proved that losing a game is not an option. We need to get behind that idea, even if it means that we bullshit ourselves into thinking that we're fighting for our own survival. We lose this game, we lose Thera!" she shouted.

Kinosh'ta looked at her with a funny expression in the ensuing thirty seconds of silence.

"She's right!" Chihiro weighed in. "This may get a little transcendental, but keep up with me for a minute. Back in the old days...the _real_ old days, men and women would come here and compete. They knew that they would die, that their accomplishments would be forgotten, that their dreams were fleeting. Remember, a third of them didn't even survive! Somewhere deep inside of them, they must have had an inkling of Morisato just said. They competed because the continuity of humankind depended on it. Within that spiritual sense, what if..."

"...they were doing it on an instinctual level, to preserve the species," Moritayama finished, clearly on board with Belldandy's fanciful idea. "There's a _reason_ why we humans are wired for competition. You all know the story of the mother who lifted up the front of a _school bus_ to free her daughter. It's possible that we could do the same thing..."

"...she's right," Chihiro confirmed. "We've all felt the 'Spirit of the Games' here. The grannies felt it back in '64. Takahashi had to be feeling it when she set a world record at 47 fucking years old. There were women half her age in that marathon, and she _won it out_! Now it's our turn. This is _our marathon_. The world record we are going to set today is winning this game for every single Theran who ever competed in these Games. We need to dedicate ourselves to their spirit. They've already given us theirs...through 2800 years...and right here in these little pins. We can be the storehouse of their spirit of competition, just for this one night. Let's go out there and show these women and this crowd...let's make _every one_ of them feel the 'Spirit of the Games' tonight!"

As they broke, Chihiro once again pointed out Athenle and did the 'come and get it gesture'. Belldandy and Kinosh'ta joined her...and for a moment, she thought she had caught a glimmer of uncertainty in Athenle's eyes.

The Norway-Euro team was on auto-pilot: all their coach was doing was calling out substitutions. She wouldn't be surprised if their coach was some kind of Valkyrie as well, possessed just like Athenle had possessed Chihiro that one time in Tokyo.

Why was the Boss God allowing all of this?

Keiichi had mentioned something about how the Windowsill Gods wanted humanity to reach some cosmic Next Level; a state of advanced development where everyone got to enjoy evolutionary ice cream. To get there, some super-duper changes needed to occur. The concept of property would have to be totally eliminated, because humanity would have to learn to share resources instead hoard them. To recognize that everything belonged to everyone. This would keep the planet alive, and would finally advantage the mindset that 'what I do affects you'. Essential, because Keiichi said that the Next Level had some really heavy stuff going on, like people reading other people's minds and stuff. If you couldn't share the land, how could you share _minds, emotions, and knowledge_? According to Keiichi, when humanity reached the point where the first thought every Theran would have at the start of the day was "how can I help another person?", then they would be showing some promise. The concept of individuality at the Next Level of evolution would be based on winning over one's self to _become_ one's self

Takahashi's talk of making 'truce' with one's self, so that one could give themselves to civic duty and athleticism rather than give in to all the problems and evils of the world...said just about the same thing.

What if he was right? What if this game was Thera's big chance to prove themselves to the Gods? To show the Gods that mortals could win the most difficult of wars: the war against one's self? She looked at the Valkyrie...and realized that they somehow had forgotten that important lesson of selflessness. Otherwise they wouldn't even be here; it would just be she and Athenle duking it out over Keiichi. Where did Keiichi fit in all of this?

"This is your endgame, mortal," Athenle threatened her with a private voice when they faced up. "This is where we separate the Goddesses from the girls. Even in this disgustingly weak mortal form, we're still better than you."

"Athenle, there's something that I've been wanting to tell you ever since I met you. But instead of just saying it, I'm gonna make you know it," Belldandy replied, steel-fire in every word.

"And what is that, stupid mortal?"

"Fuck you and your whole crew of Valkyrie for robbing Norway-Euro of their team! We _know_ who and what you are, all of us. And we're going to kick you to the court in front of every God and Goddess in Windowsill."

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Reiko Takahashi was fingering each of her seven Gold Medals as the fourth set began. Using her pull with the Olympic Committee, she had arranged for the 1964 team to sit with her at courtside seats, with only the press stands and the official's stand between them and the court. She realized that this was not an ordinary volleyball game; and Nasai-sensei had told her that she had never witnessed such a brilliant exhibition of volleyball in almost fifty years of playing. Of course, when Nasai and her teammates were in their prime, they had won a couple hundred games in a row in national and international competition. But this wasn't a game...this was a marathon battle.

As a marathoner, she knew how important pacing was in the running of a race. What had earned her seven Gold Medals was her ability to box away that concern about pacing and just burn. The young women were exhausted at the end of the third set, but when they came out in the fourth, she could see on every one of their faces that they had clearly moved beyond concerns of pacing themselves.

This match was already becoming an epic, and when Morisato blocked Norway-Euro's first service and then all six squad members thrust their fists in the air, she knew that they might be able to do the impossible. She had been told so many times that her accomplishments in the marathon gave middle-aged women and men in Japan pause to feel younger. Yet, a group of women, several of them barely out of their teens, were making _her_ reel back the years and feel young again. She wasn't the only one. She closed her eyes, and listened to the spirited shouts from the 1964 Women's V-Ball team sitting all around her...and heard the voices of women in their 20s playing in their first Olympics. _They_ had inspired her when she was a young girl. Now, the young girls were inspiring them. She knew about the pins the elders had given these girls who were playing their hearts out on the court, and was strongly moved by their gesture.

The Olympic Spirit was said to be ageless, and she could feel it deep inside of her.

This was going to be one those of Olympic Moments, perhaps one of the greatest of the Modern Games era. If they beat Norway-Euro, this game would be historical in precedent.

Each woman on that court was competing against herself; each injured woman cheering them on was championing herself despite her injuries. Exhausted as they were, Japan's team was keeping pace with the Norway-Euro team, in games that were double the points of normal volleyball games. She wished that the scoreboard could have a "WR" next to Japan's score, because they were ahead 60-59. Their best service ace was lining up to leap into a power serve. She blasted a line-drive shot to the Norway-Euros, who set it up for an attack near the net.

Which was denied, as Kinosh'ta blocked the spike right back into the attacker's face to win the set 61-59.

She was so heart-charmed to see the 1964 team jumping up and down and hugging each other that she didn't notice that she was leaping around like a teenager herself.

"Do you believe in miracles?" the American announcer had shouted when the US team, made up of college kids, had beaten the Soviet team in a US-hosted Winter Olympics. She believed in miracles, because she was wearing seven of them around her neck. Because she was surrounded by a team of women who had endured some of the harshest training methods imaginable while working full-time jobs at a factory...and had won Gold Medals.

"C'mon you guys! Take your best and make it happen!" she shouted.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"We've gotta slow this game down," Chihiro instructed during the break between sets. "Either they're complete dumbasses or they're just over-confident, because they're walking around and jabbering with each other in between points instead of resting. We know they're getting tired, but they don't seem to care about it. Each of us needs to take the full thirty seconds between serves, so the rest of us can catch our breath and get our minds back in the game. They can do whatever the hell they want to do while we gather ourselves. I'm not going to have any of this 'win or lose, I'm proud of you' type bullshit. We're better than them! It's like they're from another planet or something; they don't play fair, they don't compete, they have zero sportsmanship and no Olympic spirit. I beginning to understand what Morisato said about them not giving a shit about the Olympics. That's our edge, because _we do care_! We're gonna beat these clueless bitches and win ourselves an Olympics."

As Belldandy and her teammates gained the floor, the crowd was shouting "Nippon! Nippon!" with unbridled enthusiasm. Humanity was pure magic, as she savored the loud roar from the crowd as they positioned themselves for the final set.

Across the net, Athenle. This time, the Valkyrie didn't say a word...which proved Coach Chihiro's point. The mental exhaustion had stilled her opponent's tongue, and hopefully her wit. But not hers, because she and Kinosh'ta had a couple cards up their sleeves.

Ootaki aced her first jumping serve by a few cm, hitting it right into the corner. The second serve was a funnyball spinner, which was fielded and returned...and dug out by Tamiya. Chihiro set it towards her and Kinosh'ta...

_"Keiichi elsker deg."_

Athenle paused just for a split second, Belldandy faded left so Kinosh'ta could sky high above and behind her and slam home a cross-court bomb...catching Athenle flat-footed. She and Kinosh'ta slapped tens--Athenle had completely fallen for their little 'distraction'. A number of points later, Kinosh'ta repeated the Norwegian phrase, again distracting Athenle just for a glimpse, adding confusion to decoy. Belldandy pounded the set pass to the court before Norway's libero could even react. Between she, Kinosh'ta and Moritayama's brinksmanship play using decoy attacks, the Norway-Euro team was flustered. Between volley services, Moritayama was hand-signaling to Kinosh'ta and her, setting up who was going to attack and who was going to fake-n-fade.

At 45-45, Chihiro did one of her backwards-leaping pancakes to field a spike aimed right at the corner, But this time, she actually banged herself up, hitting her head hard against the floor. As she stood up woozily with a trickle of blood down the back of her neck, the head ref called an injury timeout so she could be attended by the medical staff. Realizing that none of the Valkyrie would risk injury like that, Belldandy felt a renewed inspiration. While Chihiro was being treated, they formed a circle of concern around her, laboring with deep gasps and grateful for a moment's rest.

"I've got an idea!" Muriyako shouted at them, as she dashed off towards the locker room. A moment later, she returned with a white jersey and started ripping off long strips of fabric.

"What are you doing, crazy girl?" Takamito asked, her arm in a sling.

"Hachimaki!" Co-captain Sato said, nodding her head with an approval as she stood up on her crutches, her knee completely covered by a walking cast. "And the officials can't argue about these being non-authorized uniforms, because they're parts of the white uniforms we have. The third set of uniforms that we hardly ever wear, but are required to have for international competition. Fujishita, can you check out the press corps desk and try and find someone with a red magic marker? We're gonna do this right."

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Belldandy realized that their bench of injured players had just won them the Gold Medal.

While Chihiro was being tended for her cut on the back of her head, Sato had called them to come over and help. Together with the injured half of their team, they got busy making hachimakis. Sato went over to the referee's stand to confirm that the material was within Olympic and International Volleyball Federation standards. Fujishita had returned with a couple magic markers courtesy of somebody in the press and camera benches, and those who didn't have busted-up hands in bandage wraps went to work drawing red circles on the fronts of each of them.

Sato explained Muriyako's crazy idea, which had resulted in this flurried enterprise of ripping up a jersey. She looked at her teammates with as much gratitude as she could express. Every one of these women had strived hard for years to be here, only to be sidelined by injury during the most important game their team would ever play. Several members couldn't even tie up the headbands: Sugihara was wearing a hand cast for her shattered thumb bone; Otamura was wrapped from elbow to fingertips because of her broken wrist and fingers; and Takamito had her arm in a sling to stabilize her broken elbow. They had been defeated by injury...and yet had emerged victorious over it with true Olympic Spirit. They had never given up. Like Chihiro had explained, the injured women on the team had forged a triumph because they didn't defeat themselves despite their disappointment. Belldandy felt proud of her teammates...no matter what, they were a _team_!

All twelve team members and Chihiro tied hachimaki headbands around each other's foreheads, with hand-drawn red-suns in the middle of them. The official Olympics camera crew surrounded them tightly to film every minute of it.

Every Japanese spectator in the stadium knew what this meant, and they were all screaming so loudly that Belldandy felt her ears ringing when she and her teammates returned to their positions on the volleyball court.

"Another stupid Theran good luck ritual?" Athenle taunted.

"No...it's Japanese for 'we're gonna kick your asses, bitch!'" Kinosh'ta shot back before Belldandy could even fasten onto a snappy comeback. Belldandy smiled to herself as Athenle looked at Kinosh'ta with cross-eyed confusion.

It's nice to have sempai with an attitude.

Belldandy had the serve, and decided to go for it with a leaping serve. She crashed it over the net by a narrow margin, right towards the sidelines. Kinosh'ta's side, which she hoped would set up a challenge at the net with Ootaki and Kinosh'ta blocking. Sure enough, the two roofed the Norway-Euro's attack right back at them.

The Norway-Euros...rather, the Valkyrie...were starting to play desperate.

Exhaustion versus desperation, and after a number of volley sets, Japan was a point behind, and Norway once again was serving match point. Tamiya fielded the serve with a roll-n-dig and Ootaki drove it deep into the Norway-Euro back court; they played it by setting towards the left side, right in front of her. Athenle and two attackers went up on it with a 3-to-1 joust...and she pushed the ball right back against their joint attack with every effort of strength she had, high above the net. Stuffing their attack back at them, she pushed all three attackers backwards so hard they landed gimble-footed as the ball fell flat against the net on Norway-Euro's side, tying the score.

Despite feeling light-headed from over-exertion, she had out-muscled three attackers...her two hands pushing against six hands high above the net...jamming their attack right down their throats with killer intensity. The stadium crowd went ballistic with shouting and the "Nippon!" chant started up again. Every member on her team looked at her with awe for several seconds, because she had taken down three of Norway-Euro's top attackers; something that was totally incomprehensible because it just wasn't possible at this level of competition.

At 74-74, Belldandy and Kinosh'ta were rotated left and center at the net. Moritayama served a flipper shot, high with a lot of back spin, which was lipped by the back row towards Athenle. Athenle jumped high to kill it, and Kinosh'ta totally roofed her!

Moritayama dribbled the ball, waiting right until the 30 second limit. Knowing the Captain, Belldandy expected her to fireball the serve with a leaping jump-service. Moritayama did just that, and the ball sinkered down in the backcourt, forcing the libero to dig it out. The ball arced straight up into the neutral zone over the net...she timed her attack...but Athenle dinked it barely over her head. Belldandy tumbled backwards in a diving save and dug it out right as it hit the floor, flick-wristing it up towards Kinosh'ta who backset it towards Chihiro for a decoy backcourt attack.

Chihiro totally nailed it with absolute precision, finding the seam between Athenle and her two front row teammates and catching the Norway-Euro back row with awkward expressions as it landed at their feet.

Belldandy had tried to get to her feet and in position...and instead fell backwards, her mind totally blank. She didn't even see Kinosh'ta and Chihiro's followup play, because she was already gone.

The dream was over.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --


	135. Pt 135: A Unity of Valor

**Part 135: A Unity of Valor**

THE EARTHREALM:

Urd was fast becoming a captive of her pensive moods, feeling like she was pawning precious time and effort in exchange for a stock of dismal returns. Regardless of route or method of approach, she and the others kept running into blind corners. Peorth was useless, lost in some private trance-like "la-la le coeur land" playing patterning games with her roses like a child Goddess. Skuld had sent her MUSUME Mk III mecha into the portal and surprisingly, the superstring dimensionality connecting it to here had been disrupted. Mara's hair was frazzled from frustrated finger-combing each time she unsuccessfully pummeled the disordered Gate with compounds of Demonic arcanical spells, trying to either restore it back to normal or synchronize it more closely with the Earthrealm.

At least Skuld was happy; she had her little boyfriend who cooked breakfast for her every day. Peorth seemed to have the oblivious glee of imbecility, talking about Runes and unseen places. But otherwise, the mood in the QuadNode was souring. Urd wanted Belldandy back, _now_, because life was getting too lonesome without her. Something had to give in, and Urd finally decided to put her foot down, say "screw it!" and convince Megumi to do a booze run. She needed some good primo whiskey so she could do a wash-down of her frustrations; she was edging towards totally losing her cool.

Mara joined her for a riproar drinking bout that ended up with the two of them playing the Roppongi Hills version of Monopoly until they passed out. Playing board games with a Demoness always provides a unique set of challenges, because Demons thrive on cheating. Winning or losing as a result of deceitful means were minor considerations to the Demons. According to her twin sister, the whole thrillride of cheating was invested in the joys of subterfuge...successfully 'getting away with it'. Right before Mara passed out, she was so toasted that she had put herself in jail after landing on 'Chance'; when she drew her card, she had actually received a "Go to Nearest Shinkansen Station" card. Urd was too cross-eyed with shochu to remember which properties her hotels were on, and kept bumping them when she moved her piece around the board. In a burst of drunken mirth, she upended the magnum bottle of whiskey over the gameboard and declared the game a "wash out".

Sunday being Megumi's day off from school, Skuld and Tomohisa slept in...in separate rooms of course. Urd promised herself that she'd get to work on changing _that_ after all this wackiness was resolved and her middle sister was back. What was disturbing her from time to time was that she missed Keiichi almost as much as she missed her sister. She even missed Cevn and his retarded bouts of obsession with her.

"Hey ya two!" Megumi said cheerfully as she walked into the foyer. "What'd I tell you about playing board games and drinking?"

"Megumi...stifle thy voice. It's too early for thee to be so blithe," Mara answered back in a feigned Nōgaku dramatic muffle. Urd just looked at Keiichi's sister, and then turned over to curl up even tighter on the couch.

Today was a much-deserved day off, ushered in by a welcome sleep-in and hangover.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Megumi, for her part, was feeling pretty genki for the first time since her brother's disappearance. Another couple weeks and it would be cherry blossoms carpeting the temple grounds. Spring was just around the corner, and her spirits were lightening with the emerging warmth in the air. She missed Keiichi dearly, but this wasn't the first time or the last time that he had been whisked away by some crazy misadventure. Over the past five years since Belldandy had entered their lives, she had been exposed to the fostering of all sorts of craziness. "Side trips" her brother sometimes labeled them when he was in a good mood. She made a mental note to ask Urd (when she was sober) to give her a refill of her 'beauty pills' as she slid the shoji door open a blink so she could to do a quick peek-check on her cousin. Tomohisa was snoozing away.

She walked across the hall and entered the superlab.

The QuadNode was always a feast for the eyes. Clockwise, to her right she saw Skuld's workshop with all sorts of unrecognizable technology. Skuld at least had enough fashion sense to use a laptop computer, even if it was pink and plastered with manga character and giant robot stickers.

"Rie Takada and 12th dimensional physics...that's our dear Skuld," she thought with an amused grin. Peorth's Sysop area was a floating wrap-around chair, its current occupant curled up asleep in it. Numerous viewscreen globes and several 'banks' of the Yggdrasilian equivalent of workstation computers were arrayed seemingly at random, amidst a circular flotilla of floating rose petals. The whole effect was Saturnine; with the ring comprised of red floral shoots and petals.

In the other corner was Mara's Lair; a Gigeresque monstrosity that tamed the most ghastly and palling settings from the Aliens movies, or any other horror films for that matter; rendering such terror-visions meek and disinteresting by comparison. Blood red oozes for walls, with an ambiance as dark as a yakuza hideaway basement bar, except for her orange-yellow globular computers and the sere-hawks. As she walked by the sere-hawk perch, she hand-fed each of the eagle-sized birds a strip of beef jerky and was rewarded with a flaming wingspread and loud screech. Their avian way of saying 'thanks'. Megumi thought they were really cool because they reminded her of the mythical phoenixes. She turned right and walked into Urd's Castle area, which was really more of a lab right out of Dr. Faustus without all the spooky satanic crap and ancient books. Urd's collections of medicine chests from ancient China and Europe, delicate mandalas sketched on papers, strips of formula charms, vases of flowers and floating sconce-lights. Mandala-shaped circular throw-rugs on the floor, with a table in the middle packed with an apothecary of potions and elixirs, computers with bubbling tubes attached to them.

Banpei was hard at work with a feather duster in Skuld's lab, while Sigel was washing down parts of the Quadnode, steering clear of Banpei and the sere-hawks. Megumi could hear a patterned pinging sound, almost like someone was striking a chime bell. It was backgrounded, but enough to catch her attention...because it seemed to be a repeating pattern.

For the hell of it, she counted out the pingings:

_1-1-2-3-5-8-13-21-34. Silence. Then 6-7-6-5. Silence._

_1-1-2-3-5-8-13-21-34-55-89. Silence. Then 1-1-7-7-1. Silence_

The ping-chimes were coming from Skuld's laptop. There was a definite sequence; these weren't random bursts of noise like one hears when popping popcorn in the microwave. Could this be some kind of code? Possibly a numeric sequence? She recognized two types of pauses: short pauses and long silences lasting ten seconds. Similar to Morse code, like the S.O.S. in some of the old Ultraman movies. But the sequences of ping-chimes were too long.

_1-short pause-3. 2-short pause-1. 2-short pause-4. Silence for ten seconds._

Two more listens and she called Sigel over and asked the girl-robot to help her count out the sounds, because she couldn't track count of all the ping-chimes. Okay, so this was definitely some kind of integer set, with intervening magnitudes. She was certain it wasn't hexadecimal or octal or binary, and it wasn't a Morse Sequence. After a couple more listens, she recognized the set. It was a Fibonacci Sequence! But a totally weird one with a funky recurrence mode. Why would it count out ten orders of magnitude and then skip the next ten orders and count the 20th magnitude? Why redo the sequence of ten magnitudes, and then skip twelve orders of magnitude and count the 22nd magnitude?

_26 levels of magnitude, include null as the first order, ending in 1-2-1-3-9-3. Then it skipped 11 orders and finished with 3-9-8-8-1-6-9._

She ran out to her car and pulled her engineering calculator out of her bookbag. The calc had a Fibonacci programmed right into it, because the sequence was often used for various simple conversion proofs. On one level, it was kiddie math...she had been introduced to the Fibonacci Sequence in the third grade during one of those "wonders of numbers" efforts to make math seem fun. Must have worked, because she was prepping to move onto grad school at an engineering technical college. On another level, Fibonacci sequences were closely equated with asymptotic functions, theta functions and derivatives, linear vectors and the Golden Ratio. Math 501 level stuff; the kind of math Sora loved to tool around with.

With Sigel's help monitoring the pings-chimes, she was able to extract the sequence of intervals. The intervals, or skipped numerical magnitudes, were 10,12 in the first set. The next set followed by skipping numeric intervals of 11,5,9,9,3,8,9 magnitudes.

Since the defining magnitude in the second set was 26 in limit, on a whim she decided to convert the interval sequence into the English alphabet sequence...

_K.E.I.I.C.H.I._

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"_SKULD!!_ " she heard Megumi shouting in the doorway of her sister's and her bedroom, snapping her awake. "Wake up! Wake up! It's Keiichi! It's Keiichi!"

Skuld didn't need any further prompting to get out of bed. Still in her PJs, she followed Megumi down the hallway listening while she hurriedly explained the Fibonacci Sequence of chimes that were coming from her laptop, and how it had spelled out Keiichi's first name in English. The MUSUME was hooked into a holophotic cluster of computers, which were then networked into her trusty laptop for purposes of keyboard/voiceboard interfaces. She was expecting the MUSUME to be sending back a data packet this morning with the dimensional measurements for the position of TimeSpace on the other side of their portal.

But nothing like this! This was so bizarre, she couldn't even imagine it!

"Could it be true?...could it be true?...could it be true?" she thought as she entered the QuadNode. Banpei and Sigel were doing their robotic equivalents of 'the happy dance' by her laptop. She listened to the sounds of her laptop for a couple minutes, and immediately picked up on the deliberate sequencing of integers by magnitude. They skipped ten orders of magnitude, and then repeated the sequence, skipping twelve orders, and then...

"Megumi, write out your family surname! But do it kaisho style, stroke by stroke...not gyosho style, with connected strokes like you would write when dashing off a signature," Skuld requested, handing her a magic marker she had pulled out of her PJs and gesturing at the work table. Megumi looked at her with a mystified expression.

"You keep a _magic marker_ in your PJs?" she commented as she wrote her family name.

"Hey, I'm a Goddess. I'm entitled...and I can get away with it. Besides, you never know if Keiichi's sempai are going to want to draw on his face again," she answered with a quip, referring to a couple of comic incidents that had occurred early on during her first year at the temple.

Megumi giggled with her at the memories...

Her hunch was right, ten strokes for "Mori" and twelve strokes for "Sato".

"Morisato Keiichi!" she shouted "It's _him_! It's totally him, Megumi! And _you_ figured it out!"

"YAHOOOOO!! YEAAHHHH!" Megumi exclaimed with a lung-emptying yell, reaching high for a high-five slap with her. Just like they did during Keiichi's slotcar race against Tyrr, she and Megumi deliberately missed slapping each other's palms, and started giggling with joy. The sere-hawks were startled into flight, and were swooping all over the place, sensing the energetic excitement.

Skuld chuckled as Sigel swiftly grabbed the nearest broom, just in case one of the sere-hawks got weird and tried to attack her. After all, the expression "bird brain" had a kernel of truth in it...these birds were so riled up, they might forget and start pestering her.

She typed out the same Fibonacci sequence and transmitted it through the superstring. Next, she sent a response: a Fibonacci Sequence with "Morisato Megumi" in the sequence of intervals. There must be a reason why Keiichi and whoever else had used mortal mathematics instead of Yggdrasilian Proculus or higher maths. She intuited that the sender's intent was to make their message clear by sending recognizable, mortal-to-mortal mathematic codes, to ensure that it was believable.

Actually, it was pretty _un-fucking-believable_!

Skuld felt her heart pounding, because this could only imply that there were Gods and/or Demons with Keiichi. Last time she checked, there was no way that he or any other mortal could visually identify the superstring dimensionality she was using to link-in with her wonderful MUSUME Mk III. MUSUME had done much more than she was designed to do, which proved that she would be a worthy candidate for continued modification.

Two back-and-forth confirmation sequences later, she set up her laptop to send and receive in binary to speed things up. The Divines on the other side could easily distinguish the compressed bursts of audible modulations, even if Keiichi couldn't. She hoped to the Almighty that her Elder Sister was among them.

"«_Who is there with you?_»" she typed on her laptop.

"«_Keiichi and Cevn-cyborg, Holy Bell and Belldandy, Belldandy and Peorth of Nulln, Keiichi-God of Tengoku, Keleste and Keiyasu,_»" the message replied.

Skuld was stunned. How could Peorth be there when she was _here_, dozing away in her Sysop Node comfy chair...

Peorth was standing right behind her, looking at the holophotic viewing screen.

"Mon dieu!! Putain, c'est pas vrai!" she exclaimed. She swiftly floated over to her section of the QuadNode and started drawing Runic lightforms in mid-air, using the air itself as an 'easel' to inscribe with ruby-red and pink lettering. She was activating something...

Skuld looked at the ring of roses around Peorth's Sysop Node and realized with a start that they were arranged in a _mandala_! She didn't have a clue to what kind of mandala it was, or what its function could be. The design was so 'offbeat', it was totally unrecognizable to her. She wished Big Sister Urd was here; Urd was the one who had an encyclopedia memory of different mandalas. But her two older sisters had gotten blitzed last night; and Skuld really couldn't blame them for needing to party it up. They didn't have boyfriends who brought them ice cream every day.

A pink column of light arose from the organized patterning of roses and quickly configured itself into a sphere with dazzling golden runic symbols flying about. Peorth floated into the sphere of pink light, and then she and her Angel, Gorgeous Rose, activated it with a song. A moment later, she and the pink sphere were gone.

"What's going on?" Megumi exclaimed, totally freaked out by what she had just witnessed. Skuld was freaked out alongside her, shivering not only from Peorth's sudden departure but also from the message.

"Belldandy of Nulln. Keiichi-God of Tengoku," Megumi repeated the names aloud.

Her sister's Angel, but it was backwards. The Goddess's name always came before her Angel's name. _Two Keiichi's?_ Cevn? Who were Keleste and Keiyasu?

"«_Can't explain, but we need energy. Now. Send energy through the superstring so we can activate Soul Mirrors,_»" a new message appeared on her laptop. Skuld had a million-and-one questions she wanted to ask, but the new message seemed urgent.

"What do we do?" she asked Megumi. With the exception of Belldandy, Megumi knew her brother better than anyone. Skuld had to bite off her urge to investigate, corroborate, and then reciprocate with a response. She used to hate Megumi...but over the years, she had learned to trust Keiichi's sister implicitly, especially after the 'Demon Rally' incident where Megumi had basically saved Keiichi's life. Proof of that trust was in Megumi's face; her brow was furrowed because she was diving into her concentration. Only genuine love could paint itself on a facial expression with such depth.

"Do it!" Megumi advised, reaching her decision. If it came to asking questions or helping out Keiichi and Elder Sister, Skuld was leaning towards fulfilling their request for an energy source. Megumi had clinched it for her.

"_«Will send energy before you can say 'grooviness'. Is a single pulse of 500 yottawatts enough?_»" she typed. During Supertyphoon Akira, she had worked on a Transdimensional Rectifier (Compact Model) to serve as an energy 'battery charger' just for emergencies. Back then, it could create one terawatt/hour of raw physical energy, sustainable for two hours...which was enough to power the entire Earthrealm for almost a year and a half. But that was last year.

"_«Coolness! That'll be totally enough. Thank you very much. Keleste._»" the laptop displayed. Skuld was uncertain who this Keleste was, but she sounded like a younger Goddess, and "Keleste" was a popular girl's name in Yggdrasil around the time she was born.

"Skuld, did I hear you right? _500 yottawatts_? That's almost double of the luminosity of the Sun! Do you have any idea how much energy that is? That's enough to power 700 _trillion_ Earths for a year," Megumi marveled as Skuld attached an object the size of a flashlight to some kind of interface.

"Yep! It's the equivalent of my 'high school' science project," Skuld noted as she worked. "It's been done before, but not with this type of physical containment field. I used an earlier version during that stupid Typhoon that wrecked everything. This one's much more efficient at converting Metanative energy to quantum energy. More proof of my immense capacity for ingenuity!!"

"As if _you_ need to prove anything," Megumi teased. "Singularities in the living room. Transdimensional space doublers in closets. Tesseracts in the back yard. Dinosaurs in the front yard..."

"«_Is Holy Bell safe?_ " she typed in. If Holy Bell was alive, then that meant that Elder Sister was alive as well, since an Angel cannot exist without their Goddess, and vice versa. She looked longingly at the portal in the middle of the QuadNode, wishing she could just step through it like a door and meet up with Keiichi, Holy Bell, Cevn, and the others.

"«_She is safe, and Keiichi says that your sister is safe too. Inside of Holy Bell._»"

"I thought Angels were inside of Gods and Goddesses," Megumi commented.

Skuld wished Tomohisa was here, because she was trembling with nervousness and needed him to comfort her. Just a hug would be enough to calm her down a little. If that message was true, then her sister was somehow _inside_ Holy Bell! She had never heard of a Goddess being inside an Angel, ever. The nature of their TwinSouls simply didn't work that way. But then again, she could sense Noble Scarlet inside of her telling her that it might be possible, if a Goddess was somehow disconnected from her Soul's energy.

"«_Keleste. How old are you?_»" Skuld typed in the computer.

"«_Almost Fifteen Decas. I have a twin brother, Keiyasu. How old are you?_»"

"«_Almost Thirteen Decas." Are you ready for that energy pulse?_»" she responded as the Transdimensional Rectifier (Compact Model) audiblized a sequence of electronic melodies, signaling that it was juiced up and ready to fire off.

"«_Go for it!!_»"

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

SOMEWHERE:

Watching Skuld and Keleste exchange information using the interface on the MUSUME mecha reminded me of two high schoolers text-messaging on their pods or cellphones. I knew that both were intensely curious about each other; it was a genuine pity that they would never meet. Perhaps they might have been good friends. Keiichi and I chuckled when Keleste observed aloud that Skuld was "one wicked smart Goddess" and Skuld typed back that Keleste was "tight in the groove with mecha tech." They did get to exchange a few bits of information while Skuld was preparing to send her little 'bomb' of energy through the superstring to power up the MUSUME and the attached 'portal maker device'.

How bizarre...the Skuld I knew was going to 'energize' a device built by another Skuld who was the stepmother to Keleste and Keiyasu. Keiichi and I were joking about "two Skulds are better than one...hopefully." I felt a Damoclean anxiety or panic, knowing that Skuld was going to jack in _a lot_ of luminous nuclear energy, something on the order of twice the energy output of the Earth's Sun. And it was all going into a robot the size of a standard Boston Terrier, with a device attached to the robot's back about the size of a frisbee.

Keleste typed in "Go for it!" and we waited...

A blinding pulse of light passed through the Gate accompanied by a blast-cap shower of sparks, and swifted down an invisible conduit into the MUSUME device that Skuld had sent through to our side. Lambent sparkles danced over everything in the vicinity. I looked over at Keiichi, who had his arm up to shield his eyes from the blazing patterns of light. My photoreceptive eyes were almost fried from the lightshow and fireworks, and I was worried that some random bolting of electricity would strike me. Keiichi-God flashed over and grabbed me and Keiichi by the shoulders, grounding us and shielding us with an energy-absorbing field of some kind, as both of us were struck multiple times by flickers of discharged lances of freed electricity. Relieved that I would not be subject to a possible short-circuit to my cybernetic components from all the random galvanism jag-lacing about, I asked Keiichi if he felt like he was ready to go into the Soul Mirrors once we managed to convert them into gates.

"Yes!" I heard two voices, dividing my question by two answers. The intercourse of Time and Space itself was going to extend them; their Souls would become a constellation of particulars being journeyed into spheres of dimensional realities that could only be dreamed of. Imagine every atom of one's body being dispersed in its own direction; each coursing towards a unique point in space and time. What they were going to step into was much more than this, and yet both were filled with confidence despite the uncertainty of this enterprise.

Keiyasu gestured with his hands, forming a round platform of light underneath the joined mechas and then he carefully guided them towards the center area within the circle of eight Soul Mirrors. He located the mecha combo and immediately the Soul Mirrors began to react to the presence of the 'portal opening device'.

The SurGoth was attacking my ego, trying to chew it up like a banana in a blender. I could feel parts of 'me' being torn away, as if my memories were being dissected. More like an autopsy, a dissection and removal process. Already, I was struggling to remember Keiichi's favorite motorcycle. I was very troubled by my inadvertent comment about 'bathroom reading' that Keiichi had jumped upon with incisive criticism, trying to convince me that I never was a cyborg. If this implied that I wasn't a cyborg, but an actual flesh-and-blood human being, then how was it that the SurGoth kept selectively trying to shut down my ability to move, interface, and think? Now I was getting confused again...

With a loud sound that I had never heard before, almost like a staccato drumming of the air itself, the eight Soul Mirrors _bulged_ outwards into concave forms...which then turned inside out. An optical illusionary vision of 'there-not there' geometries, the Soul Mirrors were shifting and flighting as they hovered above the dust, translucent and brilliant against the ever-present desolate grey-yellow environs. After a couple moments, the rapid thrumbing sound turned into a sizzling shriek as the Soul Mirrors transformed into blurring motion, performing a final sequence of shape-shifting and then settled into a stable semi-spherical shapes.

Keleste looked totally confused; her expression clearly indicating that these transformed Soul Mirrors weren't at all what she expected.

"Sis, that's not them! Remember when we converted that one Soul Mirror to get to the Demon's Realm? It didn't turn into some kind of half-globe like this!" Keiyasu confirmed. "This is really weird! I don't even know what they are? They could be anything: some kind of Gate, portal, Soul Mirror...or something else."

"This wasn't what occurred before. When we used this device the first time, the Soul Mirror simply turned cloudy rather than reflective. These objects look like someone took a globe and sliced it in half vertically. But the surface seems to have the same kinds of properties as the Soul Mirror we used, except that its energy reading are off the scale," Keleste affirmed as she detached the device from Skuld's MUSUME mecha and began to take a series of measurements.

"I would venture to note that these are not Soul Mirrors, but aspects of Soul Mirrors, created out of a portion of my Divine essence as a Mirror of the Present. It's possible that they are neither Mirrors or Gates. They could be outlets for the TimeStreams," Keiichi-God noted. I could see the strain this was effecting on him; his face was pallid and glazed with sweat. The transformative process directed upon the Soul Mirrors by the 'portal making mecha' had impacted him harshly.

"I can sense this as well," Belldandy of Nulln added. "These objects have the attributes of unique chronometric and Metanative signatures, akin to points of entry we Norns would use to 'jump into' TimeStreams. I sense pathways within pathways, as if the TimeStreams somehow have TimeStreams hidden within them. An impossibility, since TimeStreams..."

"...can only contain TimeWeaves," Keiichi-God finished. "We must act swiftly. Those Soul Mirrors are manifested by me, and if I cannot hold their cohesion, then we will not be able to utilize them in accord with Peorth of Nulln's plan. We will be stranded here. Also, once I leave through the Soul Mirrors, they themselves will disappear. I am struggling to keep myself anchored in the Present, because these Mirrors or portals seem to want to rip me out of the here and now..."

"I think you should speed it up as well," I shouted through the din. "This thing inside of me wants out in the worst way, and it's almost..."

A loud cymbaline slash of noise quaked the air nearby. What the hell was happening now?

When I turned in its direction, I saw Skuld...the adult Skuld I had encountered in Vanagdrasil...accompanied by four Divine children in some kind of cloudsphere. My mind was becoming fuzzier and fainter with each passing moment, but I did faintly recognize the Quad of kids that were with her: Pryzm and Ulfryn, Falcyn and Sygyn. Skuld and the kids were wrapped inside of what I could only describe as a miniature electrical storm. Each face was marked with confusion except for Skuld's, whose expression possessed a fierce determination.

Could this be the 'grown up' Skuld coming to assist us? She would be a great asset to help us understand this dilemma...

"Keleste!" "Keiyasu!" she hailed, ignoring the rest of us. The two GodKids spun in mid-air, staring at her with surprise joining troubled recognition; no doubt momentarily confused if this was their Stepmom or the Skuld they had encountered in the Demon's Realm. Before they could say a word, two lassos of energy roped out and ensnared them around the waists like a lariat. Thought-fire fast, the energy roping recoiled back into the sparkle-cloud surrounding Skuld and the rest, reeling them inside the bluebell of electric glow-shards. With a "Boom!!" the whole group disappeared.

What just happened? There was no sense in it; why would Skuld arrive here and grab Keleste and Keiyasu without a word to the rest of us?

"We need to go now!!" Peorth shouted. With this, she floated rapidly towards the two Keiichi's and Belldandy of Nulln and Holy Bell. With a slight enveloping of distorted air, she and the others levitated into the center of the ring of Soul Mirrors.

"You're not supposed to go with them!" I shouted to Peorth, startled.

"Eternity!" she answered as the five of them literally disintegrated into eight directions. With a blink, the eight Soul Mirrors vanished.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

TIMESPACE EXTREMIS:

Skuld had all six of the children safely with her, concepted into her 'Timepod' of TemporalFlux energy. This 'Timepod' was basically a ship of Time that could traverse the furthest reaches the expanse of Eternity, according to the Elder. She looked at the kids, who literally _were_ the Future; if the Ultimate Force could be arrested, these six children and three more would make up the group that would finally put an end to this wanton destruction that threatened all of existence.

The difficult debate on whether she should tell her daughters that this was a suicide run was foremost in her mind. Skuld had always parented her daughters with a policy of honesty: preferring to spend time explaining truths of life rather than shielding them against the realities of the Earthrealm and the Divine Realms. Too many Earthrealm parents had done the opposite, choosing to withhold information or fill in the blanks with myths and fictions. "If you read too much, you'll go blind." "If you don't eat your onions, you won't grow tall." "If you don't get A's in school, you'll wind up working in a bunny bar." A concert of dishonesties, the sum of which only gave their children the tacit message "we don't trust you to make good decisions with your lives."

This would be the last time she would ever see her daughters.

"Pryzm, Ulfryn...gather round me. This is very important, so please listen and try to understand what I'm about to explain," Skuld started, her decision clear. "This is a vehicle of TemporalFlux, a type of container that doesn't have a constancy of Time. Because it is constructed of a 'shell' which isn't constant Time but instead maintains a fluctuating, non-linear Time, it can travel very far into the Future. Time is a framework that has properties of constancy, which is why this vehicle can travel swiftly forwards and backwards through the TimeStream. It's like a very fast car, using Time itself as a highway. Perhaps you could understand it better if you think of it like a fast motorboat on water in Tokyo Bay; a vehicle of motion atop a static ocean of Time. You two, Falcyn and Sygyn, and Keleste and Keiyasu...are going to the very endpoint of Time, because you have an extremely important task to undertake. But I'm not going with you."

"MOM!!" both girls shouted. "What do you mean, you're not coming with us?"

"Because _I'm_ the propulsion that is going to send this ship where it needs to go," Skuld answered. "As Norn of the Future, I will need to give every single Future in me to make this possible."

She watched her two daughter's faces turning into stricken expressions as they recognized what she was telling them. This was the worst goodbye, because it was a final goodbye. She fought against her own feelings which were overpooling her heart with sadness and longing.

"I need you both to grow up, right now!" she said in strict motherly tone of voice. "I love you both, but in order for the Everything to survive, I'm going to have to give my life so that you six can reach the Endpoint of Time. Otherwise, none of us are going to live more than a couple of Earthrealm years. Sygyn has the Nitten, which has the templates of both Ygg and Vang computer networks in it. You'll need to use it to 'reboot reality' from the furthest point in the Future. If you're successful, then we'll all be reunited...and this nightmare will have never really happened."

Pryzm and Ulfryn buried their faces against her breast, and for a moment, Skuld felt a strong pull to simply cancel out. She could go back home, spend the rest of her remaining two years of life with her girls and Tomohisa and enjoy a continuation of the loving family life. When the end came, it would be so fast that she would have no warning; it would be painless because she and her family would no longer exist.

No. She couldn't afford to be selfish. The Elder, Cevn, Peorth, the Four...all were risking their lives as well to undo this destruction.

"When you arrive...look for Peorth. A _different_ Peorth than any of you have met before. She needs to activate her Rune of Eternity. Then you all have to do something to rebuild the OmniArc, because it will be gone," she explained.

"What do we do?" Sygyn asked, tears in her eyes.

"I don't know!" Skuld replied, feeling the time substance in her Goddess manifest beginning to elongate and deform into many different n-geometries. She kissed her daughters goodbye, wiping the tears from their eyes, tightening up on her own heart as the barbs of regret pierced her mercilessly. If she was going to give her existence up for a cause, she was going to do it with the dignity of a Goddess...the dignity of a Norn.

It was Isilblius who had brought this upon them; he had been the cause of this tearful point of departure. He had done this, destroying her chance to grow old with her husband and her children. If Cevn had accomplished everything she had asked him to, he would be encountering Isilblius at the end. In the Enigma Book, she had written a line that instructed him to tell Isilblius exactly what she thought of him, since she wouldn't survive to do it.

Gritting her teeth, she flashed outside of the TemporalFlux 'Timepod' and dissolved her Goddess manifest into pure Future.

"«_Goodbye, my beloved daughters,_»" she thoughtcast as she used her entire being to hurl the tiny ship as hard as she could against the onrushing Past...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

SOMEWHERE:

All alone, on an empty wasteland of a planet...

Planet Lost all over again. Or perhaps it was even funnier, like some kind of cheesy promo teaser for a mindless WollyHood sci-fi film that featured gangsters and anti-heroes.

Fuck anti-heroes! I grew up with anti-heroes all over TV and music; actually villains given sanction for their past crimes because they were obligated to do some kind of 'brave act' to rescue themselves and others. It was disgusting how modern society thrived on these types of characters in fiction and real life. Why not try and live a good, decent, honest life to begin with, and then do something heroic? Build heroism upon heroism, for a change.

Of course, I was a definitive example of a fuckup villain myself. During my years of active drug use, I had burnt down schools, robbed grocery stores, broken into pharmacies, shot other human beings during drug deals, broken into houses and cleaned them out of jewelry and valuables...ruining every life I came in contact with, all so I could get so high from dope that I didn't have to look at the darkness inside of me.

Now, the _true darkness_ was inside of me, in the form of the SurGoth.

Peorth had contrived a success of ingenuity, fooling all of us. She had combated the villainous helle-geisteskrank inside of me by Goddess-clever deception and omission. The revelation she had received from her Rune was a complete set of instructions that would undo the swathe of destruction Isilblius had started. Sincerely, we believed that it was only the two Keiichi's and two Belldandy's that were needed to 'fix' the destruction that Isilblius had reaped upon us all. But this wasn't the full revelation; she had withheld the part involving herself. Plotting our actions based on her insight, we had improbably powered up the Soul Mirrors so that the undoing could occur.

Peorth had lied to us all.

"It's so terrible, that fear is a liar, isn't it?" I said to the SurGoth. We were all alone now, which meant that it was trapped inside of me. I started walking away from the MUSUME robot and initial Gate we had opened, which hung impotently in the air, stagnant of terminus. If the SurGoth killed me, it might be able to attempt to escape into Skuld's mecha, shoot down the dimensional string and then be free to infect or usurp some other being and carry on with its destruction.

It all ends here. Isilblius had orchestrated his version of truth and fouled all our lives with it: a sheer demented choir of wailing destruction, visiting agony upon one soul at a time, shrill with disunion and indifference.

"«_It doezzz not endzz here,_»" my voice said. "«_You are the reflectionzz of mortality. I am the Eternalzz. You will fade to the dustzzz, while I will endurezz. Emergezz will I, with the destructionzz completed. All the deathzz will feed me, all the ended lifezz will be lost because of you._»"

I wished there was some 'off' switch that I could use to shut the SurGoth wraith out of my mind. I could keep it from taking me over totally, but I couldn't take it over and stuff it away in a mental trash can or recycle bin.

"«_I havezz speeded up the devastationzz I have installed into the OmniArc. Your preciouzz OmniArc will be a nothing very shortly. No Ultimate Force thizz time for you to use to undo my workzz. No Seven, no love, no hopezz. The TimeSphere is dissolving as it should. No Time is allowed in my destructionzz._»"

"Au contraire, mon merde daemon. Tant pis, plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose."

Not so, my shitty demon. Too bad, that's tough...the more things change, the more they stay the same... a thoughtful sound in my mind translated.

Only a certain Peorth I knew could say something like this.

"Cevn, mon ami. This is for you," she said, tossing a revolver onto the ground. "I must fly to Eternity. Remember the Mid-Light, remember that Revelation means Revolution."

A column of pink light flashed out of the ground underneath her, and she phase-shifted out of here before the SurGoth could try and leave me to coopt her.

Here I was, with a SurGoth wraith inside of me who wanted to destroy everything but himself, on a planet that was a visual metaphor for purgation, with a revolver lying in the dust.

Revelation is Revolution?

Revolver.

Picking up the revolver, I pointed it to my head and fired.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

INFINITY:

Belldandy of Nulln could hear a chorus of screaming all around her, outrages of sound so maddening, it threatened to burn down her house of self-confidence. When she and the others had stepped into the Soul Mirrors, Peorth had instantly vanished, only to reappear a moment later. She felt the sensation of her being disintegrating; every miniscule Metanative energy-component of her Goddess being was flung into endless directions of Time and Space. Nothing in her experience as a Norn had prepared her for an experience like this.

Time was supposed to be a construct of coherencies, not a mad-house.

She could sense that Keiichi-God was just as disoriented as she was. But there was a method in all of this, because she and Keiichi-God could anchor each other so that the TimeStream didn't drift them apart. Enough to keep Peorth, Keiichi and Holy Bell in proximity. They may be leaves swizzling in a tempest, but they would be intertwined. Holy Bell was frightened beyond the pale; with an Angelic frantic chorusing, she was trying to summon her Goddess, Belldandy of Yggdrasil. The mortal Keiichi was totally spooked, but for an Earthrealm mortal, he was holding onto his sanity with a tight grip instead of being a shattering of neuroses.

Courage is molded into many figures of truth.

Time itself seemed to be a weapon against them, as they 'corrected' dimensionality after dimensionality. Somehow, she was cognizant of every single distillation of Soul and its impact on the tangled TimeStreams. It seemed like a never-ending task, an eternity of adjustments to TimeStreams and TimeSpace dimensionalities.

Good thing she and Keiichi were the Norn and Mirror of the Present. For the two of them, Time could remain in the here and now as long as was needed until their work was complete. The foul shirk inside of the cyborg Cevn would be paid back double for the suffering it had inflicted on her. With each repair to the OmniArc, she was one movement closer to halting the wheeling destruction it had started. When she joined with Keiichi-God earlier, she remembered a voice telling Cevn "make sure to kick Isilblius's ass for us." The mortal cyborg was an agency that could harness the Ultimate Force, and in some plane of existence he would challenge Isilblius directly.

Cevn wasn't planning on kicking ass. Cevn was set upon the total annihilation of Isilblius.

None of the realities she enjoined had a dynamic where 'their' Belldandy or Keiichi had died. They had been separated, or had been surrounded by utter chaos to the point where their love for each other had been greatly diminished. She had encountered dimensionalities where her suffering paled; entire TimeStreams of raw pain inflicted those who survived the ravages. The most dolorous dimensionalities were the ones where Souls vanished without warning, leaving loved ones confused and aggrieved when their family members sudden were drained of life. The rapid disintegration seemed to be accelerating somehow; for every 'healed' dimension, she was faced with multiple 'failed' dimensions where destruction was running it course. Entire God's and Demon's Realms were shattered beyond recognition; the remaining Divines almost insane with disorientation.

It was horrible, but she warded away her revulsion and continued to heal each and every TimeStream.

They were six beings, one asleep and four awakened, one guiding them as they worked as one in a race against time to undo the enactment of nightmares.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

THERA, BEIJING CAPITAL, CHINA-STATES:

Just like that, she was gone. It wasn't even a death; the life-force that was Chiba Polytech Freshman Belldandy Morisato had vanished along with all traces of her Soul in a single instant. Keiichi looked at her crumpled form on the floor, angry and sorrowful at the same time.

Athenle and the other Valkyrie were glancing at each other with expressions of unease, stunned not by their defeat but by what had just happened to Belldandy. There was no Reaper to collect her Soul, no exchange of energy, no physical dimensions of death like gasping breathes or stuttering heartbeats or cerebral processes shutting down.

She was a void, emptied of Soul.

Her teammates were halted in mid-celebration as they realized that Belldandy was motionless on the court. Her parents were regarding the scene with stricken expressions; Keiichi was resentful that they had just witnessed their only child's life disused, wiped away between the space of micro-seconds.

Keiichi was glad that he was in the company of fellow Escort Office Gods, because he wanted to do something extreme to assuage his frustration, like plunge Mars into the Theran Sun. Stupidly, he thought that it was a blessing that she didn't feel any pain as her life vanished. But he remained, his heart-sickness whipped into a violent shoal, despairing witness to the ending of a brief period of life where he felt something like love. Forgetting themselves, the Valkyrie simply flashed out of sight, which caused chaotic consternation among the crowd.

The cover was blown wide now, and not even the Almighty could repair it.

In the Twenty Two Decas of his life, he had known this mortal woman for a fractional amount of time. During this time, she had withheld nothing from him; instead, she had girdled him with more confusion than he had ever experienced with a mortal. Belldandy had allowed a light to shine upon him, a radiance that opened him to feelings that had been absented by his encounter with the Gate of Judgement. He wished for numbness again, so he wouldn't have to feel the grief that was gripping him. In her own awkward heavy-handed way, she had fetched so much meaning into his life. This pain inside...was this what it meant to be in love with her? But he couldn't be in love with her, because it was quite impossible. Her wish was for him to fall in love with a _Goddess_; the union of love could only be with a Goddess. Unable to draw back from the sere discomforts of his heart, he felt himself weeping for the first time since he had walked through the Gate. His heart daggered with unease, he decided he didn't want anything to do with love henceforth.

Belldandy was even denied her moment of triumph, the spiritual witness of victory that she and her team had hungered after. They had strived so hard, each in her own way. These women were the very best that Thera had to offer...the highest stratum of courage, perseverance and youthful enthusiasm...and it wasn't enough.

It would never be enough, because the Almighty had confided a truthing to him; the scene he had just witnessed would repeat itself ceaselessly until every life was extinguished.

Her Coach was already on her knees besides Belldandy, agonizing as the EMTs tried to revive her. He wanted it to stop, their vain efforts. _He_ couldn't even revive her, like he had done earlier with her teammate. Jumpstarting a heartbeat was simple, but replacing a Soul was impossible.

Her Soul had simply _disappeared_.

He knew that the All-Father even now was with him, His Liege sharing the pain he felt. This mortal woman had given her life so that he could be free.

Why couldn't he give his life so that hers could be restored?

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

INFINITY:

This TimeStream would be very precipitous to repair, Keiichi-God noted. He observed a God version of himself who was bonded with a mortal Belldandy. He recalled this scenario vividly from earlier while they were on that far-flung wasteland Earthrealm; it was one of the more prominently displayed dimensionalities when he cast his consciousness into the Soul Mirrors to index the damages done by Isilblius. But they had arrived too late; the mortal's Soul was already gone, stolen away by the disruption of this particular dimension. Her demise could not be reversed or undone.

Nearby, Holy Bell was still struggling to free the Goddess that was sharing her Angelic Soul, but this was a vain effort as well, because the four of them were _giving_ away miniscule shards of their Souls, not receiving Soular energies. For her Goddess to emerge, Holy Bell would need a doubling of Soular energy; basically an entire Soul of a God or Goddess. At the moment, they were two sharing a half portion of Soul. At least their Souls were being parceled out with miniscule amounts, a single brushing touch with each TimeStream.

But now they were down to one last minim of Soul; any further loss of Soul and the six of them would die.

He felt the worst for his mortal counterpart, who was more and more frustrated by the Angel's inability to manifest her TwinSoul Goddess. He knew this frustration well; he missed his Belldandy in Trondheim dearly. The separation could only get worse before it got better. Even now, while he was 'touching' this realm, this TimeStream...he was particulate...a single ion of himself, the 'self' that was being parceled out by so many other infinitudes via the Soul Mirror gateways.

Troubling was the awareness that they had to restore this dimension, this TimeStream, back to its proper sequence. This TimeStream, with its Earth-equivalent planet Thera, was one of the very first that Isilblius had corrupted by the foul act of killing this Keiichi's Belldandy.

There never seemed to be peace.

How could this be done? The mortal's Soul was gone, and there was no way of locating it. He felt a shuddering, as if the whole TimeStream was going to collapse at any moment. As Mirror of the Present, his role was to make sure that Present didn't become too far detached from Past or Future. The Present in this TimeStream was in an avalanche of disruption, as if the removal of this one mortal's Soul had upset the entire balance of Time.

Which it had.

They had less than minutes before the TimeStream would crush down on them.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

THE MID-LIGHT REALM:

As my awareness returned, I fervently hoped that I was dead and this was my intended destination, the Mid-Light Realm. Arriving into Death, since I obviously didn't survive emptying a revolver into my brain case, I was surrounded by a strobing chamber of sparkles, flickering as if they were schools of bright silver herrings shoaling about underwater. Unexpectedly, the Boy Who Was Death wasn't present to meet-and-greet me, which was very unusual as he insisted on personally meeting every newly dead Soul upon arrival.

Both directly and indirectly, I had twice encountered the Mid-Realm and it's Regent. I first encountered him indirectly when Urd and I Shared...meeting him through her experience of the Real Death when Isilblius had infected her with a Soul-devouring virus. The second incident occurred during Isilblius's rebirth, when he had used my death as a means to smuggle himself into the Mid-Light Realm and kill the Little Boy Who Was Death. Death is not a lost word or chord, but any word or song here would never be heard amongst the realm of the living. The comforting clearlight symphony that resounded through the Mid-Light was absent; instead of feeling calmed, I heard a cacophony of sounds that jarred me towards distress.

This was not de rigueur for the Little Boy Who Was Death to ignore his newly dead Souls, or to make their initial experience of the Mid-Light Realm so unappealing.

Assuming this was the DeathRealm, or the Mid-Light, it was readily apparent that something really fucked up was happening here. Besides the absence of the Little Boy, the entire chamber was filled with random 'shadowings' and discolorations, rather than the steady tempo of Souls moving towards the Instrumentality. The constancy of Soul energies had been disrupted, which in itself was impossible. Life and Death were coexistent; the state of existence relied on both to be co-reliant in an uninterrupted dynamic. Life itself was powered by Death: an established method of cyclical exchange for Soul and individual. The Souls of the dead provided energy for the living; making possible love and the many levels of affection communion between souls. Ironic that Death creates the energy of Love...which is harnessed by the individualities of the living...and when the living die, their individualities are suffused into the Instrumentality, but the Soul they formerly possessed became the power source for the living once again, to renew the cycle of Love. Life and Death were as inseparable as light and dark; light could be never be 'cut off' from dark, because all of Reality was a mix of both.

I realized that the destructive sequence of events instigated by the SurGoth had been vastly accelerated: the Ultimate Force was failing; the exchange of Life and Death was interrupted; the OmniArc was consuming itself; the TimeSphere was imploding, losing cohesion.

"«_Witnezz the triumph of..._»"

"Shut up you!" I thought at the SurGoth wraith inside of me. I had heard Isilblius gloat about 'triumph this, triumph that' enough to drown a hundred lifetimes in disgust...and I was sick of it.

Retaining the Ygg and Vang Mainframes inside of my consciousness, the backups from Skuld's Nitten device when she measured the defects of both the Ygg Xeomn and the Vang Mnoex, I had hoped to encounter a 'complete' template or design for the OmniArc. The imperfect images of each Mainframe could then be used to 'prune' away the corrupt parts of reality. Then some force or Agency could restore it, could save the OmniArc and heal it.

I don't even remember why I had shot myself in the head, except maybe to deny the SurGoth the pleasure of killing me. I had a glimpse of a plan; difficult to reach when the SurGoth was eating away at my mind. The risk was pretty straightforward: strand the SurGoth within me, and if I was transitioned into the Mid-Light Realm, there would be one less avenue of access for the SurGoth to avail to if it wanted to continue to destroy.

But Isilblius, in the form of the SurGoth, had all the angles covered.

Now I had to find a way to encircle this whole mess before it was too late. There were gaps to exploit nonetheless. There had to be! Dammit, I had made this wish way back when to be the Balance, so where was the balance in all of this? It had to be inside of me, or perhaps inside of my thoughts or soul or heart. The wish I had made was solid and purposeful, and within its consistency there had to be an essence or property that remained beyond the destructive capabilities of Isilblius.

_"My wish is to be serene...to be the balance. I want to be the axis of serenity and balance which provides relief for all existence!"_

When I had made that wish, I had never encountered Isilblius. I had encountered Urd, who had an attitude that was initially intolerable. The UF, Japan, Yggdrasil and Vanagdrasil...all were not even fictions of my imaginations. My wish to be the balance had cast me into the path of a storm surge, forcing me to draw wits against a being bent on destroying all of reality.

Isilblius had obliterated the Multiverses except for a single TimeStream. Thwarting him, confining him, rebuilding the Multiverse with some corrections. The second time, I had to serve as shield rather than creator, so that the Seven could accomplish the exponentially more difficult task of constructing the OmniArc. The OmniArc had been created and designed with Balance in mind, a Balance that was based on a concordance of serenity rather than a discordance of conflict. The UF had been transformed into the Intimate Force...

Finally, a Little Boy Who Was Death was approaching me.

"Hello there," he announced, but then halted and floated back away with a cautious expression, like a Boy Scout spying a spray of poison ivy.

"Hmm, I don't think hellos are in order for you, or at least part of you. You tried to terminate my existence once, and very nearly succeeded in doing so. You do not belong here, among the Dead. You have no Soul, no redeeming value to anything. You are corrupt, seeing only yourself as your own playmate. What Death could bring Death to Death?"

"«_Existenzz bringzz disorder. Non-existenzz purgezz both life and deathzz,_»" the SurGoth wraith answered. "«_It wazz a pleasure destroying you. Thizz time, you are already doomed. The Mid-Light izz torn asunder by all that occurzz, and nothing you can do will escape the collapsezz of the Ultimate Forcezz._»"

"Little Boy Who Is Death, despite my enjoined state with this abomination, I am most honored to meet you," I acknowledged him. "I know that you are very busy dealing with all the chaos, but I have a question that I need you to reflect upon. Please accord me a courtesy, in spite of this foulness that you see wrapped around my Soul."

"You are the One, aren't you? I have met you before, when the Evil Unknown tried to destroy My Realm. You were without Soul then; the Evil Unknown was masquerading as your Soul. How is it that you have a Soul now?" he observed.

"Love is the answer to your question," I responded.

"Yes, I can see it in you," he noted. "There is much that I must do, because my Realm is quickly becoming a whirlpool of chaos. Souls are lost, the Instrumentality is isolated, individualities are hectic..."

"Do you have a computer network that administers the Mid-Light Realm? If the Lord and Dark Lord require the services of a computer, surely you must as well," I enquired. The Enigma Book had a section discussing this topic, which basically accorded that the Ruler of the Mid-Light was co-equal with the Lord and Dark Lord.

"«_NOOOO!!_»" I heard a rage-filled bellowing in my mind.

"Yes, I do. It would be impossible for me to administer the personal dispatch of roughly 40 trillion Souls into this Realm I steward. 40 trillion Dead I must greet every nanosecond. Naturally, the Mid-Light is equipped with a computer network, the Oemxnic Network, to make my task possible."

"O-em-xin-ick Network," I thought aloud, enunciating the word. The SurGoth wraith inside of me was totally spazzing, trying to snap me out of myself. But..ha ha!..I was already dead. It couldn't kill me nor harm me physically; for all intents and purposes, I was immune to its threats. The Boy Who Is Death was keeping his distance, just in case the SurGoth wanted to surprise me with a little bit of hopscotch between my Soul and the Little Boy's ur-Soul.

"Has you computer network ever interfaced with the Yggdrasil or Vanagdrasil Networks in any configuration?"

"Of course not. To do so would mean that their computer networks would have to pass through the Death, or my Oemxnic Network would have to pass into the Life. Neither of which is possible, because of the long-standing Rule," he answered.

"With your permission, can I make it possible?" I asked. "It appears that a drastic measure is needed to prevent the total collapse of your Realm of the Mid-Light. This being inside of me has effected a disruption between Life and Death, resulting in the inability of Souls to migrate here. Outside, the Souls are consuming each other; the UF is breaking down."

"For a Dead, you are curiously straightforward and knowledgeable. Hee hee! Now I remember the first time I met you; you seemed to know about the Logorinths and the OmniArc and the Time Wheel. Boy, was I surprised that you, a mortal life, could know so much about the Outside, where the Living dwell. But what you suggest is fanciful," he said with a pause. "I wouldn't even know how to interface with the Oemxn Network, because it automatically is linked with me. Whatever I think...it does."

"This is the GatePath to the Instrumentality, or one of them, isn't it?" I noted. "I think that the GatePath itself is the interface."

"«_If you do thizz, I will ensure you that you willzz suffer mostzz of all,_»" the SurGoth threatened me. I felt a passioned fright spike-wire through me, remembering the emotional and mental suffering Isilblius had inflicted on Urd, Belldandy and Keiichi. But then I thought of it again. I had already suffered far more melancholy than a single lifetime should contain. Depression, addiction, abuse, death, disenchantment. Then my wish, and these stupid fucking conflicts with Isilblius when I could have been having some kind of enjoyment of life. Watching death visit Urd. Giving Love away, turning my back on Urd. Watching death visit all who I care about.

This was just my pain alone, a slightness of wind against the hurricane. When I accounted all the turmoil that this SurGoth wraith had caused in the lives of others, I felt nauseous. Belldandy had to endure the deaths of every being she held dear, just so Isilblius could make her suffer the most. Most recently, this foul animosity inside of me covertly parading around as a loving Belldandy, earning Keiichi's vision of marriage and then trampling on all our joys...

"There is no suffering that you can bind me in, you retarded wraith. I'm _already dead_!" I said to it. The Boy Who Is Death looked at me with surprise, thinking I was addressing him. I forgot that I was doing something akin to thoughtcasting, as I looked at my hand and saw the tell-tale translucent glow. I was no longer flesh and bone, CPU and metal.

"You, respected Keeper of the In-between Zone, have suffered most. Your residence here in the Mid-Light has been like the lighthouse keeper, seeing to safety of all who navigate dreams and truths. Yet, have you ever enjoyed a lasting friendship? I remember when you met a Goddess named Urd, who was suspended in your Realm for a time. You confided to her your delight in her company, since the Dead who arrive in your Realm are but transitory in consciousness. You told her how nice it was to have someone to share a brief companionship with. Even Death should not be alone,"

I could feel some identity or force inside of me shouting "_Yes! Yes! Yes!_" as an insane plan began to assemble itself in my thoughts. I would stabilize the Mid-Light, since it was the axis of the two Logorinths. I would change it forever, and the Boy Who Is Death would never again be a 'was'. He would be an 'is'; a true being whose existence was no isolated. He would have the companionship of every being of every cosmos. He would never be alone again.

The SurGoth was telling me I would fail, that I would always be alone. Every set of foster parents had told me this. Everyone that I used drugs with had predicted my life to be a litany of failure. I had been locked up in psychiatric units; the orderlies laughing at me because I was incoherent.

No..more..failures!

I reached out and rested a blue glowing hand to the side of the GatePath, and then rested a red-glowing hand to another section of the GatePath. The metallect, UF, Balance...all were in accord with this action; I could feel a sweeping sense of power and dignity filling me with confidence. To trust the process when everything else seemed damnable.

Immediately, the illuminations of Soular energy all around us started shutting down. The Boy Who Is Death was freaking out, because he had never experienced a 'system reboot' of his Oemxnic Network before. Meanwhile, the entire data contents were downloading themselves into me, just like what had happened at the Vanagdrasil Mnoexic Network. Again, I felt like I was drowning, with only my nostrils about the water...but the UF, degraded and weakened as it was, was buoying me so that my mind wouldn't be fragged by transcendental complexities.

Realizations piled against each other in my mind, as I recognized that I had _both_ the imperfect and perfect templates of the computers of the God's Realm and Demon's Realm inside of me. The OmniArc that the Seven had designed...had been guided by the Balance inside of me. The Balance has spoken through me, communicating to Urd the architecture of 'reality' just prior to the Seven's initiation of the OmniArc.

The entire Mid-Light Realm went pitch dark...soundless, motionless, voidless...and then suddenly exploded in light!

The effusion of Souls was restored, activated once again. I had received the entirety of the Oemxnic Network. It was a holy place, beautiful and sacred. Souls forever. Love forever.

The Instrumentality had now become a Multiplicity. The one who would free it was coming...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --


	136. Pt 136: The Long Journey Home

**Part 136: The Long Journey Home**

THE END:

The Ancient had endured through the entirety of the Future. As a Norn, she and her sisters had been tasked with many harsh burdens over the millennia. Emotional deprivations, witnesses to the cruel and sublime, observers of the triumphant and the mystical. Bearers and anchors of the TimeSpan of all of creation. Sometimes, she privately consoled herself that she and her sisters had been selected for the pureness of their courage; their roles as Norns were by far the most difficult of any Divine being, except for the Lord and Dark Lord. The Ancient had arrived at her understanding long ago concerning her predecessors. She knew what had happened to each trio of those who were her foregoers -- the Goddesses and Demonesses who had been appointed to validate Time. Knowing what their role in the schema of Reality had entailed, the Moirae, the Parcae, the Furies, the Fates, the Scorns...all of them had committed suicide. The Lord Himself didn't even know this...

The driving focus that had pushed them to relinquish life was the strict limits Time placed on their ability to experience romantic love with those who would be their SoulMates. Urd, Norn of the Past, could never experience love in the Present; she was limited to memories of near-loves that she had experienced in her youth. Belldandy, Norn of the Present, could never experience love in the Future; the only love she could experience was for a brief moment, a time neither Past or Future. She, Norn of the Future, could only experience love in the Past; a love destined to die away so long ago that even the hopeful memories would be famished. Of all the creatures of the universe, only she and her sisters had limitations on their ability to experience love. All other creatures could experience romantic love in each of its delicious forms; the memory, the joy, and the hope.

But now it was over. The Ancient was so weakened by the eminent domain of eternities, she could barely manage her Goddess manifest.

She had witnessed IT ALL.

As Norn of the Future, her entire purpose was to _create the Future and guide it_. She and her sisters _were_ Time Itself in a sense; the anchors and mirrors and weavers of all that passed through the ages of Gods, Demons and mortals. But they were passive weavers; only allowed to manifest but not change Time. She was the Future, whose calling it was to ensure that Time moved forward out of the Present; a coursing fullness over the progression of eons. During her watch, each being was created or born, and then entrophied or died. All the living beings that had ever burst out of the seedbed of Life...they didn't die against life. They died against the Future. So long ago that she could hardly remember, she had had given her heart to a mortal man whose name she couldn't even touch with her thoughts. His life has passed in an eyeblink compared to her span of existence, but she had hoped that the love she shared with him was enough to fulfill her for the rest of her years. But all the Past that intervened between his death and this moment was never to be marked with love again. Her memory of him was as lost as her ability to recall her own name.

A single heartbeat of love within the tableau of trillions of Decas.

She used to find pleasure in building mechas, and decided to spend part of her existence _as a mecha_ just for the fun of it. Then her sisters died for the first time. When one sister died, they all died...for that was the Rule. As with all Gods and Demonesses, death was immediately purged from their essence and their Souls were restored to Divine adulthood for another cycle of existence. Thus, she had enjoyed millions of lifetimes in the loving presence of her three sisters, two Norns and the Demoness...who was the Scorn; the Demonic equi-Norn. Her sisters were continually rebirthed alongside her throughout the epochal march. Until finally the harsh truth of the Future had reached for her sisters: without warning. One Deathlight, she awoke to find that neither Belldandy or Urd or Mara had been recycled back to Divinity with her. They had experienced the Real Death.

And then she was truly alone for the remainder of Eternity. Without her sisters, the Ancient no longer had a name.

Alone, yet surrounded by all of the beings of the OmniArc, back when the Mid-Light was aflame with the glow of Souls in its Instrumentality. The Past and Present were dead to her now, and she lived only for the Future, knowing that her entire existence would culminate in this moment of completion. So she had endured, walking the lonely path between creation and extinction, witness to every life that crashed against the unforgiving wall of the Future and was lost.

Now, her Final Duty as Norn of the Future beckoned her.

The Dark Lord and the Lord had just faded from the mirror of existence; the last two living beings to ever populate the OmniArc. Both Lords were neither alive nor dead; in a sense, They were deathless Life. Their Souls _were_ the God's and Demon's Realms. Thus, They would not travel to the Mid-Light Realm to meet with Death. They had told her long ago that They were the only two Beings in existence who would never meet with the Reaper. She regarded both Logorinths; each one-thriving Realm was now devoid of life and energy in the wake of Their Passing. The Mid-Light was a dull gleam against the emptiness; a sickly weak only-light. Within the Mid-Light was the energy signature of the Little Boy Who Was Death, aka The Reaper.

Her Final Duty as Norn of the Future was to be the ultimate, final living being...to see the Future through to its inevitable conclusion. She was the Eschatoloarch, the expression of the omega moment of living existence itself. Now that all life in the OmniArc had been extinguished save for hers, the Ancient had a last task she had to undertake and complete. All she had to do was go into the Mid-Light and join hands with the Little Boy Who Was Death.

Together, they were the 'off' switch for Reality. Life and Death, they would join to create the End.

She regarded the Mid-Light in the distance, knowing that she was the final instance of Life...but not knowing why she had to end her own life. This was the ultimate irony, the eye of the heart that had puzzled her for the many spans of her thoughts since she became aware of her Final Duty. As the last Living Being in the OmniArc, she had been mandated to end her life by suicide.

Once she entered the Mid-Light, or the DeathRealm as it was also called...there would be no returning to Realm of Life. The Mid-Light itself would cease, for without Life, Death could not exist. Without Death, Life would not exist.

She looked at her shriveled, wrinkled hand, barely visible against the void, and decided to get it over with.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"You must be the Ancient One, the Keeper of the Future," the Little Boy Who Was Death greeted her. He was not at all what she expected. She was the Ancient; in every way a crone in appearance. The most aged-appearing being in the expanse of existence. She was Life...weathered by eons, epochs and kalpas of existence. He was Death...clean and innocent, untouched by the passages of Time, in all senses of appearance he looked to be a young boy. If he was a God, he would have been a GodKid, perhaps Nine or Ten Decas in age by virtue of his physical manifest. She, the Ancient Woman...He, the Youthful Boy.

"Such an amazing contrast!" the Ancient observed to herself privately. Despite her struggles with senility and irrecognition, she was able to seize upon the fact that he was formally attired; dressed to the nines in a white tuxedo set, hop hat and walking cane, and mantled by a glowing robe of silverlight.

"I dressed up for you special, because it is an honor to finally meet you. You're the very last of the Living, you know. You have no idea what a thrill this is for me! By the way, I'm Death, if you didn't know this already! Welcome to the Mid-Light Realm, or what you may have called the DeathRealm!" he greeted her with boyish enthusiasm.

The interior of the Mid-Light that surrounded her resembled a darkly-lit corridor with seams of flashing illuminations passing through its walls. Despite the foreknowledge that the Lord and Dark Lord would never die, the Ancient had hoped to sense some reassurance that They were safe, or perhaps she wanted the assurance that the two Lords were near her. Yet, Kami-sama and Oni-sama had passed out of the Realm of Life. She could feel the absence deep in her Soul. Where could the two Sovereigns have gone to, if not here? Even though both Lords had Souls, she found herself surprised that Their Souls weren't here. But the Liege of the God's Realm was much more than a Soul...

Another mystery at the end of existence.

"Ahhhh! You must be wondering about your Lieges," the Boy anticipated. "I can see it in your face. I can tell you about them, if you want. See, when They die, Their Souls bypass the regular processing and go straight into Me, so that I can accomplish this last task with you. It has been prophesied that Three will become One at the End of Days. This is exactly what has occurred. I am Them, and They are Me."

"Do you know what is supposed to happen next? My Final Duty said that I am supposed to join hands with you and walk down the corridor, but it didn't specify anything else. And I must say, I have mixed feelings about all of this. Being the last of the Living..."

"...is just like me being the _only_ of the Dead, isn't it?" the Boy replied. "It must have been very hard for you to be so lonesome, knowing that you would outlive all of those whose pathways you touched. For me, it was the same. There is only one of me, and my sole source of companionship was the new arrivals. But naturally, the new ones were foremost concerned about Death, rather than me. So I usually spent my time orienting them, rather than being friends with them."

"Must have been tough, huh?" the Ancient empathized, using a youthful phrase that was parcel of her existence, a few billion lifetimes ago.

"Yes, it was. You have no idea how many times I felt like I had been given the bogus part of the deal. But no matter!" the Boy Who Was Death replied cheerfully, his entire emotional tone shifting from maudlin to high glee.

"Guess what? Something really cool just happened, right at the time you arrived here. For the first time in My existence, I have a surprise to give to one of the new arrivals. You might be thinking, well duh!...finding themselves here after they Die probably was a shocker of a surprise for the newbies. See...you have no idea how many of them wanted to be somewhere else. Or they expected to be in some place where they were surrounded by beautiful virgins or mean-looking dudes with pitchforks. One of the funny things about my job is that I always got to see the look on their faces when they first find out they're dead and that they're _here_. It was always so hard not to laugh, but I wanted to be a good Boy and not make fun of them or make them upset. But now that they're all Dead, I get to laugh at last with this one. Which means that I've got a surprise for _you_! It's a secret gift!" he said, winking at her.

"What could be more surprising than the End of all Existence? I don't see the humor in it at all. And what's this about a gift? If I'm the last of the Living, how could someone give me a gift?" the Ancient asked.

"Voila!" the Boy answered, brandishing a book.

"Wh..what is _that_? What's a book doing here?" the Ancient asked.

"Nyah Nyah Nyah!" the Boy teased, swirling in spin-circles as he hovered in front of her. "The one who sent me this book says that you can't pass through here! You're not supposed to pass through here. It says so in this Book. You can stay and talk with me if you want, but I cannot let you do your Final Duty."

"But I _have_ to do my Final Duty. I am the Norn of the Future," the Ancient said, summoning all of her dignity. "My role is to see the Future to completion!"

"I'm sorry, but there's no such thing as a Future, according to this book. I don't understand it all either, except that it says that you must leave. Take that book with you, because it explains everything. Maybe you'll understand it better than me, okay?"

"This is such a disappointment! This is unbelievable! I endure until the Final Day, and then I go to meet Death...and he turns out to be an insane brat!" the Ancient grumbled with irritated dudgeon. She had been a mother, eons ago. Perhaps if she approached this recalcitrant little bantling from the role of adult-parent, he might stop acting like an imbecile.

"So if I don't do my final duty as a Norn, then won't that get you in trouble?"

"Hee hee heee! Who said you're a Norn?" he shouted and then pushed her out of the Mid-Light.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Grrrh!! I've lived through all the Futures, watched everything move into the Realm of Death. I even stayed around to observe both OmniArcs become extinguished of life. I waited patiently after that, keeping watch over Time until both Lords finished their terms on the mirror of Existence. Now, I have to banter and argue with an idiotic child at the very end of _my own existence_, just so I can do the Final Duty? What is this...Time's idea of a final Cosmic Joke?" the Ancient groused to herself.

If he wasn't already dead, she wanted to give him a butt-paddling that he wouldn't forget, he was such a nuisance. No respect for his Elders! She remembered the book the Little Boy Who Was Death had given her. The book, it was called an "Enigma Book" according to its title. Some gift! Didn't he know that her mind was going soft? That her 'eyes'...her Goddess senses...had been dulled for Lord knows how many eons?

At the end of Time, a few more moments wouldn't hurt, so the Ancient reluctantly opened it up and started reading. It seemed to trigger some long forgotten memories; as she surveyed its pages, she realized that she already knew all the information detailed within. She recalled that she had finished this book before, cover to cover, because she had written the last two lines in it, so many years ago. Back when it was unwritten by its author. Funny how things work out; as the Norn of the Future, she had the last words in the Enigma Book.

The words of coda.

She turned to the final page...and saw several more pages _below_ those last two lines she had written. The final line was crossed out. Someone had written a colophon to the book!

"Oh..my..." she gasped, recognizing what this meant. If this was true, then her entire existence had been a shadow of a lie.

_"Dear youngest sister, _

_"First of all, I love you and I know what a terrible vigil it must have been for you to reach this point with your Final Duty. But I'm sorry, I just couldn't leave things be. I chose to tweak creation and alter your plans, not that they were lacking in vision or anything of the sort. I wrote the Enigma Book for everyone, including you. The seeds of life and death have been planted; the Instrumentality is now a Multiplicity. As you know, the Instrumentality was the 'light' of the Mid-Light, where Souls would be separated from their consciousness. The whole purpose of the Instrumentality was to power all of the OmniArc with the energy that living beings could harness into love. So why did the beings have to lose their individual 'beingness' after death? Shouldn't they be allowed to remain whole, instead of being stripped of life, memories, and awareness?_

_"I considered the Balance, and decided to evolve the Instrumentality into the Multiplicity. The OmniArc needs to be All and Everything! Not just the two Logorinths. I realized that in order to accomplish a truth of Balance, Life and Death need to be in the same city, so to speak. I hope you can understand that instead of being the 'off' switch for Reality, you are now the 'on' switch for the Multiplicity. Balance extends to all facets of reality, even Death. The Multiplicity allows Souls to share energy between life and death, rather than exchange the energy. No more shall Death reign upon the lease of energy to the living, or vice versa. Each and every Soul that had ever passed into the Mid-Light is now perpetuated. The Dead will no longer lose their 'beingness' or awareness of self. They shall be released. _

_"Death and life are no longer valid._

_"Time isn't valid as well, since I took the TimeStreams and made them into an integrated TimeSphere. You were correct in assessing that the TimeWeb was rendered into a sphere when the Seven manifested the OmniArc. But the TimeSphere was flawed, allowing you-know-who to find the beginning point and endpoint of the TimeStreams in the sphere when he returned, which gave him the potential to try and destroy Time. So now I ask you this...where does the surface of a sphere start or end? What I did was link the sphere by taking the first TimeStream and attaching it to last TimeStream. Now, the entire TimeSphere is a single continuous looping TimeStream. Actually, it is a TimeLocus in the shape of a sphere, comprised of all possible TimeStreams in all possible configurations. When you close the Enigma Book, you will be joining the starting and ending of Time._

_"You are no longer Norn of Future, because that role is obsolete. You're just a Norn. Don't be mad at me for doing this; it had to be done so that you-know-who could never again enter Time or Space. Please don't feel insulted by the 'just' part, either. You and your two sisters, plus Mara and Peorth...are still the modus operandi than EveryTime hinges upon. You can be the Norn of the Future if you want, but it's up to you now. But I couldn't stand the thought that you would have to finish your Goddess existence by being the last of the Living, all alone by yourself until the time came for you to volunteer your own life to create a Ending of Existence. But I had to stop him. Belldandy forgave him. You guys spared him. But he kept on...using me, you, Keiichi and Belldandy, Urd, Mara, Peorth...whoever he could find to try and tear divots into Time and Space. He wanted everyone dead, everyone alone, everyone afraid. Don't worry about him anymore. I've dealt with him. _

_"Please be kind to Death, because I had to mix it up for him as well. Do you think I could for the Little Boy Who Is Death to remain alone for all of existence?_

_"Love is fundamental to all of reality._

_"Little sister, you are the last recipient of the first gift. You will never be the final Being. You gave me love by working your entire life to make sure that Urd and I could be together. You wanted to gave Urd back to me, but that just wasn't possible because of you-know-who. For the safety of all, I could not allow Urd to remember her love for me, nor could I allow myself to survive. You gave me your respect and love, and because we touched minds once, there is a part of you inside of me, even as I write these words. Now I want to give you the love you deserve by giving you everything back. Perhaps in this way, I can atone for what I did to Urd, and for giving up on myself. Close this book up and enjoy the fireworks. _

_Love your older brother."_

"My...older brother?" the Ancient asked herself, as she tried to understand the words. "Little Sister? How dare he address me as 'little sister', whoever the one was who wrote this..."

And then the ocean of memories parted and she fixed upon a twinkling charm of time.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

She remembered a party at the temple celebrating the successful completion of the Test Mortal Project, in 2050. All the grandkids were there, Belldandy and Keiichi's, Tomohisa and her's, Mara's and..., well that was a weird one. Megumi, Genji, Sayoko and Tamiya, Sora and Toshiyuki, all were there as well. It was practically a gathering of dignitaries. The icing on the cake was the hundred or so grandkids and great-grandkids, all one big extended family.

All because Keiichi had made a wish five decades earlier.

The whole 'love tribe' as Cevn had called it back in the early years. The name had stuck for almost fifty years since then.

Belldandy and Keiichi had grown into graceful gray-haired elders. Her Elder Sister now was truly an elder, still cooking daily in the kitchen with the assistance of her granddaughters, each of whom would volunteer to help out for two month spans of time just to be around Belldandy. She still fidgeted with that garden of hers, growing prize radishes, tomatoes and berries for homemade pies. Keiichi had retired from his professorship at N.I.T. and the Shin-kyo police force after a long and storied career in the Traffic Control Division. Now, he liked to 'haze' new policemen and policewomen with pranks. Every time the young children came over, he would get a twinkle in his eye and start in on telling them about the Le Mans or the many car chases during his years in the Shin-kyo Police. He also enjoyed building go-carts and fixing motorbikes and mini-bikes for the grandkids and great-grandkids, often earning scoldings from their parents, which he promptly ignored.

Cevn was there, in his wheelchair, racing the younger kids up and down the veranda. Urd was there as well, teasing all the young ones with "Nurse Urd" tales and magical tricks that usually resulted in money-gifts being pulled out from behind some child's ear. Her way of sneaking past the strictures of 'allowance' money all the kiddies had. In her 70s, by Earthrealm appearances, Urd still was a ham who loved attention.

Tamiya and Sayoko were strolling around the courtyard: he, the retired Governor of Hokkaido Prefecture; she, the head of the Mishima Zaibatsu Charitable Foundations. Tamiya had dealt with two severe earthquakes that devastated Sapporo, and had brought the city back each time by sheer courage and charisma, as if he had been carrying it on his broad shoulders. Sayoko had supervised complex technicalities of the Foundation, donating twenty percent of the corporation's profits into charitable causes. Although not a doctor herself, she had supervised the building of a research facility where a team of scientists finally discovered cures for cancer, leukemia and muscular dystrophy. Her parents had groomed her to be a doctor; instead, she had become a doctor's doctor by dint of her willingness to see research projects through, from drawing-board to full research facilitation.

Cevn used to tease her by saying, "Not bad, for a former dope fiend."

Genji had retired as head of Mishima Industries and had passed the role onto his son, Genji Jr. He and Megumi were quite the jet-setters, basically using the entire world as their vacation spot and playground. Megumi still rode her bike ten kilometers every morning, even in her 70s. Only now, her morning bicycling took place in Paris, Moscow, Aruba, Hawaii or anywhere she and Genji pleased to travel. She and Genji would occasionally host mini-series, produced on location during their travels, aimed at promoting appreciation of the world's rich variety of cultures.

Cevn was an emeritus regent for Tokyo Univ and so many academic institutions around the Earthrealm, it wasn't funny. He had never earned the coveted Nobel Peace Prize for his Magnum Organum, but he spent five or six hours every day on the computer responding to correspondences from scholars studying it.

Big Sister Urd was the eccentric spinster of the family. She had never married, was never in love...but was a friend to everyone. Of all the sisters, she was the one who spent the most time on Yggdrasil, taking numerous vacations to check up on Odeyn and Freiija and to pester the younger Sysops. The kids and grandkids loved her, as she was the free-spirited one of the bunch. Always unpredictable and pranksterish. She was a playmate to all the kiddies, except for the occasional senior moments of temperamental deviousness mixed with sake. The grandkids and great-grandkids knew to steer clear of "Granny Urd" during those times.

Mara's kids and grandkids were running the DSMO. In her 40s, Mara decided to start up a publishing house for anime, manga and virtual reality computer games. Within five years, it became the world leader in VR tech and gaming, outstripping Sony, Nintendo, Microsoft and AppleCorp. Bored with that after a few years, she retired early and became the 'unofficial babysitter' for all the grandkids and great-grandkids. A second mother to all of the kids as they grew up. As Norn of the Future, this had been one future she would have never even imagined for her formerly deadly-earnest Demoness sister. This development was so out of character, it was as if some jokester had written it into the TimeStream.

Tomohisa had realized his dream...and he had become _her dream_, wrought into reality with a happy marriage and family. They dated all the time he was in high school, and then when he started college...at where else but N.I.T...she had gotten fed up with his asthma during his first year in college and decided to stick a helmet on his head one night and cure it. Of course, this caused her to get called on the carpet by the Lord for meddling. Belldandy and Keiichi were married by that time, and Mara already had her twins, Falcyn and Sygyn. She was fully prepared for a license suspension...

She remembered how the Lord had scolded her for curing Tomohisa, and when He was finished, He then added with a sly grin that she "had to take responsibility and marry him." She married Tomohisa after Belldandy and Keiichi had Keleste and Keiyasu. She had sensed for a couple years that he was putting off proposing to her because he knew that his career goal was to be a professional baseball player, and he didn't want her to be an "athlete's widow" as he put it. But she melted his heart, and he gave in and married her. Her proud Mother and Father gave her away on her wedding day, the last of their daughters to wed. It was one of the best days of her life.

Freed from his asthma, Tomohisa had decided to drop out of N.I.T. and follow his life's ambition, trying out for a minor league team. With everyone's encouragement and his diligent practicing, he didn't remain minor league for very long. Within two years, he joined the Nippon League, eventually becoming one of Japan's most celebrated baseball players. He played for the Tokyo Giants for 25 seasons and then was voted into the Japan and American Baseball Hall of Fame the very first year he was eligible to be on the ballot. Now he passed his time teaching little league teams in Chiba, and doing lots of guest talks and seminars all over Japan to promote sports and teamwork.

Her life with Tomohisa was more than rewarding; their bond of love was every bit as strong and enduring as Elder Sister and Keiichi's. All the grandkids got along, and the great-grandkids were love-in-motion, as her sisters used to say. Amazingly, all the kids, grandkids and great-grandkids had a fullness of Divine nature in addition to their mortal natures, which made life very interesting at times during child-rearing.

Chihiro and Pierre had arrived from France. To everyone's amusement, after forty years of marriage, he finally learned the truth of the Goddesses. He noted that his heart had only raced faster than this one time before: the day he married Chihiro. Now they were both retired motorcycle nutters, whose primary source of amusement was rehabbing street racer punks into actual race competitors.

Sora and Toshiyuki were here as well. Of everyone in the group of friends and family, Sora probably took the cake for being the shocker of the entire group. Little Sora, the geek-girl from N.I.T., had decided to become a politician in her mid-twenties. Her husband, Toshiyuki, was an accomplished real estate mogul, with plenty of business connections. Sora plied those connections to develop just a wee bit of political clout. In 2042, diminutive Sora Hasegawa became Prime Minister of Japan and then served out two full terms. Each year, she would begin her State of the Union address with a "_Isn't this exciting?! This year is even going to be better for Japan._" Now she was a UN diplomatic advisor and was certainly on the short list to be elected for a term as UN General Secretary some day.

The party was complete...but then two more dignitaries arrived to join the celebration. The Lord and Dark Lord had deigned to bless them with Their Presences, in part to honor the completion of the Test Mortal situation, but also because Mara was the Dark Lord's final Demon Queen. Number 666.

Hild came as well, and later that evening got into one of their Mother-Daughter drinking contests. Urd had made up with each other years earlier, mother and daughter recognizing that fighting was silly since the OmniArc had replaced enmity between Gods and Demons with curiosity...and later, mutual respect. Urd and Cevn were the only ones who had never married, which was a surprise to everyone because those two seemed to belong together. In fact, they were fast friends.

The "Earthrealm Independence" party was a blast, one of the best times she remembered from her days in the Earthrealm...

...Twenty years later in 2070, Cevn was still a thorn in the side of authority and certain types of academicians. In his mid-90s, he remained an encyclopedic writer, and had just finished a three volume history of 2000-2070. He had decided to attend a student rally to protest the proposed production of helio-nanites, a type of nanological technology based on using inert elements. An aged old man, he was very frail, but insisted that he go despite Urd's and everyone else's warnings. Stubborn old man, he later admitted he had turned his hearing aid off while everyone was arguing with him. Despite his repute, he had been arrested along with everyone else, and while in jail, some zealous policeman had roughhoused him.

Two weeks later, he was on his deathbed, surrounded by all of those in the family. Towards the end, he told Keiichi and Tomohisa to look inside of a bank deposit box in Switzerland for his last will and testament.

After he was dead and buried, Keiichi and Tomohisa had packed themselves off to Switzerland with she and Belldandy to retrieve Cevn's last will and testament. Instead, they found two envelopes with letters inside saying "Welcome to Godhood, guys!"

Her beloved Tomohisa and Belldandy's Keiichi walked out of the vault looking like men in their 20s. She immediately sensed that somehow, they had been transformed into Divines...that they had become Gods. For all of this time, she and her sisters had subtly adjusted their Earthrealm manifests to match the ageing process of their husbands...knowing that Keiichi and Tomohisa were the only two mortals out of the entire extended family. She never knew what happened in that bank vault, but she and Belldandy realized that their families would be whole. It was as if her final wish had been granted. Of her entire family, only Tomohisa was mortal; the rest of her kids and grandkids were Divine. When they came home from Switzerland, her daughters Pryzm and Ulfryn cried harder than they had ever cried in their lives when it dawned on them that Tomohisa would be with them as their Father for a very long time, not just another ten years.

There was no explanation for any of this.

But Urd had taken Cevn's death the hardest. Now that he was dead, she seemed to awaken to the harsh realization that her friendship with him was as close to love for a man that she would ever experience. Something had stilled her heart towards him while he was alive; now that he was gone, she was absolutely heartbroken.

She was so angry with the mortals, she decided to augment Cevn's Magnum Organum by revising it and publishing it in an 'opus edition' with two new sections, posthumously attributing it to Cevn. Urd being Urd, she went completely overboard; the new Magnum Organum had complete instructions on telepathy, anti-agathic gene manipulation, thoughtcast communioncation, and a time-line to the Next Level. She had tweaked it so that every person who finished the book became genetically enhanced so that their children would be telepathic. Within fifty years, all the mortals would be telepathic and by 2200, they would be ready candidates for the Next Level. Urd also threw in a few extras like designs for interstellar travel vehicles, stable fusion reactors, antigravity, sub-molecular information processing, an elucidation of the Nine Dimensions and the initial Proculus mathematics.

The Lord was completely dismayed at this, but no matter what He did, He could not revoke Urd's Senior First Class License nor could He find her guilty of tampering with the Earthrealm's evolution. It was as if an unseen manifest of the Ultimate Force prevented Him from punishing her.

Later that year, they met as a group and decided it was time for them to leave the Earthrealm for good, because their permanent home was going to be Yggdrasil and Vanagdrasil. They would come back and visit the Earthrealm from time to time, because the times ahead for the Earthrealm were going to be very interesting. Indeed the Earthrealm mortals reached the Next Level, not in the 29th century as planned, but at the end of the 22nd century, thanks to Urd's little bit of mischief. Mara used to tease Urd at being better at creating mischief than her own DSMO workers.

Further on, they watched the Earthrealm mortals' progress into DemiGods and achieved immortality and incorporeality. As a family they gathered one day for a special ceremony, 2,336,014 years after the mortals had first discovered the science of calendar and had carved it into rock. There, in the place of Assemblage by the Well of Urd, humanity formally joined the Gods and Demons in a Ceremony of Union. Belldandy, Keiichi and Urd were accorded the honor of presiding over the Union. Belldandy had been one of the initial champions of the Earthrealm mortals as well as being one of two Goddesses to actually marry an Earthrealm mortal; thus, she was a natural selection for leading the ceremony. Because of his early 'promotion' to Divine nature, Keiichi was like a "Father Adam" to all the descendants of the Earthrealm mortals; he was accorded the role of the speaker of honor. The far-advanced descendants of humanity had demanded that Urd preside over the Union as well, in recognition of her effort to 'jump-start' humanity towards the Next Level and eventual fraternity with the Gods and Demons. In true Big Sister fashion, she provided comic relief in addition to her role as Enunciator of the Union.

It had all turned out so well.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

The sudden impress of memory was finished, and the Ancient remembered that, since Cevn was the oldest in mortal years in their little group, he was the only one she would allow to call her 'little sister'...

On the next page, there was another section following the personal note to her, titled "_Activation Blessing to be Read at the ReCreation of the OmniArc_". She read and reread it, amazed and mystified. If there ever was a message of hope, it was couched in those words.

The note Cevn had written her had instructed her to close the Enigma Book, so she did just that. After all, she had to go back and deal with that Reaper Kid again. What was she supposed to do, spend the rest of what little Time remained before the End by keeping the book open?

"Fireworks, eh?" the Ancient said to herself derisively as she carefully closed the book. The air around her seemed to feel warm and comforting...she sighed as the warming feeling of relief seemed to fill her being. Immediately, she sensed a change in her Goddess manifestation. Waving her hands in front of her, she noticed that they were restored to the bloom of youth; the ethereal inconstancy of her Goddess manifest had brightened into luminous brilliance. Her hair was black again, her hands weren't wrinkled and spotted, Mjolnir was one again holstered on her back, the full energy of her Goddess senses and energies were flowing through her. Her Soul, once near-depleted and ethereal, was now filled with energy that she hadn't felt in epochs.

"This..can't be!" the Ancient exclaimed...and heard her voice echoed with a Song of Recognition. She gasped, knowing that only creature in the entire OmniArc could sing like that. Noble Scarlet, her long-ago Angel. When she had been recycled back into existence without her three sisters, she had tried to manifest her Angel to try and heal the sudden throes of aloneness. But she could never call forth Noble Scarlet. Nobel Scarlet was _gone_, and when she went to discover why, the Proctors and the Adepts both had told her that she no longer had the energy left in her Soul to support an Angel. The loss of her TwinSoul was the most devastating loss of all.

As Nobel Scarlet sang joyously, the Ancient felt her heart literally pounding forth raptures. She heard her Angel call out her name in the Song of Recognition. She heard her own name for the first time...the name she had forgotten eons ago. For the past uncounted epochs of years, she knew herself simply as The Ancient. Nameless, because so much life had passed through her existence, she couldn't even remember her own name.

"I..._I'm Skuld!_" she said as Noble Scarlet hovered in and hugged her. She looked into Noble Scarlet's tear-brimmed eyes and felt her Angel wrapping her wings around her. The 'cocooning embrace' where an Angel extended her wings forwards around her Goddess, covering the shoulders and back of her Goddess with a feathery touching. The most intimate gesture of endearment an Angel could offer her TwinSoul.

Together, she and Noble Scarlet gasped as the Mid-Light suddenly burst into an explosion of lightstreams, as if an invisible supernova inside of it had just exploded. An innumerable number of filaments of light expanded out of it, surrounding them. The visual impact was inspired, as if they were in the middle of a giant dandelion that had been swept by a breeze, shooting off wispy floaters in every direction. A profusion of fenestras of radiance, silver and gold wands of light, were striking the floral-shaped Logorinths...and the Logorinths _were starting to light up_. Skuld and Noble Scarlet could only drink in the sight with a sweep of astonishment as the entirety of the OmniArc fired back into existence. In every direction, darkness was filled with light. Skuld and Nobel Scarlet could feel the interanimating of Souls all around them, even though they were inside the Mid-Light Zone.

This was impossible! These OmniArcs...were _within_ the Mid-Light!One strand of light was aiming right at her...

As it approached, she realized that it wasn't a lustrously beaming spindle, it was a ensemble of Souls! Not just any random grouping of Souls, either. As the filament neared her, Skuld was shocked to see _living beings_ inside the shaft of luminosity.

Belldandy. Urd. Mara. Odeyn. Freiija. Pryzm. Ulfryn.

Keiichi. Megumi. Sora. Sayoko. Genji. Toshiyuki. Tamiya. Banpei. Sigel.

_Her family!!_

Within moments, the Past, Present and Future no longer mattered as she was joined by her entire family in a jubilant reunion. She realized that this same scenario was being repeated everywhere, everywhen. Her heart leapt in ecstasy as the loved ones she had missed for trillions of epochs were all part of her circle of love once more. To her shock, she realized that she was _still in the Mid-Light_.

Every being that had ever lived had been returned to Life...in the Realm of Death.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"You will never be the last being," her oldest brother Cevn had written her, in the Enigma Book. Instead of performing her Final Duty, she was reunited with her family and everyone she had ever loved, mothered, befriended. Somehow, he had done this!!

_They were the Multiplicity!!_

But where was he? He was missing...which could only mean...

...that this was the Ending that he had mentioned.

Along with her youth, the breaching of the barriers of Past, Present, Future...her memory was rich and full. She fully knew now what he was, what he had done. Cevn had been the Ultimate Force in the Past, had given away the Ultimate Force so that the Seven could transform it into the Intimate Force and create the OmniArc.

Now he had completely upset the Balance of the Mid-Light by creating a beginning at the End. But if all of this was going on inside the Mid-Light, what about the rest of the OmniArc? The Mid-Light itself was now an OmniArc of all who had died. This was still the Realm of the Death. But what of the Realm of the Life? It was outside of this place. The Little Boy Who was Death was everywhere, excitedly meeting all the new Living beings in His Realm of the Mid-Light. Death had been multiplied by Life.

Cevn didn't exist, because he had become the Balancing Force. Somehow, he had placed himself outside of Life and Death.

Balance. Intimate. Ultimate.

End turned into a Beginning.

What was this "Activation Blessing?" It was written after the section about the Multiplicity. Could it be the Beginning of the End?

"Skuld," her three sisters said in unison. "You must see to it that the Activation occurs. This is your true Final Task. The Final Task of creation, with the Future. You can come and go freely between here and the Living Realm. By going outside, you will _create_ the outside. There are the Nine, the Eternity, the Chaos, and You. Twelve voices, who will bind the Everything to itself."

Ultimate. Intimate. Balance.

Cevn had wished to be the Balance, and he had gotten his wish. Now, he was neither alive nor dead. She remembered when he asked them to seal him up because he was so overfilled by the Ultimate Force that his life was threatened. Somehow, he had fused with the Ultimate Force to the point where...

"I'm not going to let you get away with this!" she said angrily. If she was no longer Norn of the Future, then she should be able to send a message downstream in the direction of the Past, back to her younger selves. As such, why even bother with that?

She was going to go herself and meet these Nine and this Eternity and Chaos.

If he was going to give her _this_, then she was going to make damned sure that she gave him his life back.

She remembered Big Sister Urd's reaction when he died, back on the Earthrealm. Three times he had died, once while fighting Isilblius, one in her arms when she poisoned him to try and contain Isilblius, and then a third time in hoary old age back on the Earthrealm. She felt her heart cringing with dismay as she realized what Isilblius had truly done. Cevn was a mortal...and being mortal, he had made a serious miscalculation. By taking himself out of reality, Cevn had assumed that Urd's love for him would be permanently erased from her memory. But yet he had 'died' in this reality; the reality she had lived with her sisters. The reality she recalled with such clarity moments after she read the Enigma Book.

Skuld also remembered how Urd had reacted. Her sister's explosion of anger wasn't just irritation or resentment at the loss of a close friend. That kind of anger could only be caused by heartbreak. From that point on, Urd had remembered full-force that she loved him! She and Belldandy had spent all of their days basking in the love of their immortal husbands, completely unaware of the affliction that was brewing every day in their sister's heart.

But that reality wasn't this one. Two possibilities branched and existed. Either Cevn hadn't destroyed Isilblius, and Isilblius had made Urd pay the emotional cost, using Cevn's sacrifice as the coin of betrayal...or Cevn had destroyed Isilblius and was stranded outside of reality, in which case this reality needed to be attached to 'that' reality.

Just like he had attached the Beginning of Time to the End of Time and made it One.

Now that her memory was restored, Skuld could see the lifetimes of pain that her oldest sister had to bear. She looked at the Urd...the Urd of the Multiplicity...the Urd she would spend a forever with, now that she was in the Mid-Light Realm.

"Big Sister Urd, I'm going to give him back to you no matter what it takes!"

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

THERA, BEIJING CAPITAL, CHINA-STATES:

Wisdom held that Love was the fountain from which identity poured forth; producing cool waters of truth that washed away the doubts about 'self' that would accumulate upon a Soul. Keiichi wondered if his 'self' had been static all along, the result of being separated from Love by his errant passage through the Gate of Judgement. Perhaps this was true. When the Gate's prohibition had been revoked by Belldandy's wish, he had learned the lesson of self-love: that the clearest reason for him to love himself was simply because he _was himself_. Belldandy had passed into his experience and freed him; with the result that he was just beginning to sense a new version of himself. A new versioning of himself that would remain forever incomplete, now that its author lay cold and dead on a hardwood floor.

At the moment Keiichi was wishing that he could give his everything to restore Belldandy to life, a roaring intersect between he and something _else_ started to bend SpaceTime into a funneling vortex of information. The sense of scale of Beijing, Thera, the Small Bird's Nest stadium, was lost as reality began fracturing into an arabesque. Amidst a roaring conjuration of chaos, Keiichi's God senses were assaulted by what seemed to be a shattering of his Multiverse into thousands of pieces, as if Time and Space had been painted onto a pane of glass which then had subsequently had been impacted by a series of micro-meteorites.

Sentient mortals were the _mirandum Dei opus_; the masterwork of the Gods. This was why the God Escort Office lavished such attention on those who lived in the Therarealm and other systems of the Multiverse. Life itself was the treasury that the Gods invested in; each attempt at granting a wish was part of a greater overall design to enrich those mortal species. But what could be causing the mortal world to fold upon itself like this? On a field trip in his youth, Keiichi had traveled inside of a nova during SecondTier Inculcation so that he could witness firsthand the elemental fission-fusion of raw matter. But this cataclysm was far more violent and disorienting.

The 'somethingness' of his surroundings were quickly being rendered insubstantial, and Keiichi found himself extremely confused. Everything had been normal, except for the dirge-like foreboding he felt about Belldandy's inevitable doom. But now, he was uncertain of everything, including himself. Was SpaceTime being torn asunder, an apparent apocalyptic destruction that seemed to be enveloping him? Or was this his own sense of self fragmenting, expressing itself in a grand illusion? Could it be within his own mind; a berserker's metanoia brought on by grief...a repentance subverted into a profane hallucination of reality imploding upon itself?

Could he be going insane?

He tried to grab onto the nearest 'slice' of reality, the nearest fragment where he could perceive Belldandy's stilled form on the floor of the volleyball court. Oddly, it sliced his hand as if he was tightly grasping a sharpened blade. Blood poured out of the slash to form bubbles in the now zero-G environment he found himself in. His Divine manifest had somehow been injured in the process, and he felt the unfamiliar sensation of sharp pain.

Drift.

At the edges of the shards, or perhaps between them in the darkness, he could sense a skittering of thoughtcasts. Belldandy, the Therarealm, the familiar trappings of the city...all were beyond reach. It was painful to touch them, both emotionally and otherwise. Keiichi's heart was already plummeted by what had happened to Belldandy; emotions he didn't even recognize in a God like himself were now scoring his Soul like wands of flame burning against skin. The source of his confusion always pivoted back to this new experience called Love...

_"There is only enough Soul for one more adjustment, Keiichi of Tengoku."_

_"As was revealed to Peorth by her Rune, this is the final dimension to repair. Once we have finished with this dimension of SpaceTime, then we ourselves are the final three adjustments."_

_"Could it mean that we can self-correct the damage that was done with the remaining Soul energy that we have? That I'll be back on the Earthrealm, and Bell-chan will be with me?"_

_"Yes, this could be the case. Peorth, you seemed insistent that once we finished correcting Isilblius's destruction, then it would be as if it had never happened."_

_"The Revelation of the Rune disclosed as much. By rectifying this erroneous reality, then the aberrations visited on our three remaining realities will automatically be consolated by our joint presence of Soul. But this situation is significantly different than all the others, because the Belldandy's Soul is missing. We all know what that means."_

_"There is a possibility. As Mirror of the Present, I can perceive a dividing point at this juncture in the TimeStream of the Present. If the surviving one of the pair were to make a conscious choice to embrace death by surrendering his Soul, then the repercussion of evil that Isilblius has started would be thwarted in this dimensionality. The dead mortal would be alive again, and the death of the God would be in sacrifice, rather than being the result of the murderous corruption that Isilblius has threaded through all the Multiverses. The flow of reality in this dimension would be set to rights."_

_"But how do you guys expect him to hear you? I'm a mortal, and even I can sense that everything around us is collapsing. Which means that everything he is experiencing is collapsing as well. There's no way he can hear us in the middle of this mess! He doesn't have the advantage of the GroupMind that we share between us, because we all stepped into the Soul Mirrors."_

_"Keiichi of the Earthrealm, there is always hope. As a Norn, I sense that he is somewhat attuned to Time. He is a wishgranter, in his version of Yggdrasil. This much I can feel in his Divine presence. Call it a certain marquee; an essence that a God who is invested in acts of benevolence towards mortals would possess. One that is patently obvious to Peorth and myself."_

_"Belldandy, are you suggesting that this God could be reached by one of us making a wish? Perhaps simply by one of us wishing that he could join with our grouped awareness of minds?"_

_"That's it, Peorth of Nulln! Even Holy Bell agrees! We have a mortal in our midst. If Keiichi-mortal were to make a fervent wish to have this Keiichi communicate with us, then he might be triggered into granting it. Assuming that the Yggdrasil in his 'dimension' is still functioning at a level where it can respond to wish requests by bestowals of wish completion."_

_"There's more to it..."_

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

INFINITY:

"There a much better wish that I could ask him to make! Why can't I ask him to make it possible for Bell-chan to emerge from Holy Bell? You guys say he's a wish-granting God...shouldn't he be able to make my wish come true?" Keiichi asked. He knew that this was perhaps a last-ditch chance for him to get Belldandy back. Even though Peorth of Nulln insisted that everything would be restored to its natural order when they adjusted this last Multiverse back to its original state, he had his doubts...

Belldandy had disappeared first, before any of this wild adventure had occurred.

"Keiichi, you must hear me and _hear me with your heart_. We only have one remaining parcel of Soul between the four of us. This means that the Soular energy between us can only spare one single instance of repair. If we use it in any other way, then the entirety of our efforts to undo the Destroyer's damage will be rendered ineffective. We will lose ourselves; we will lose all those we hold dear, and you will lose the Belldandy in your heart. Time is of the essence. The moment to act draws near," Belldandy of Nulln chastised him.

"What if this means that Bell-chan is lost? How are _we_ supposed to survive on the remains of creation, a single spark of Soul for each of us? No one told me that this would mean that we would have to give everything we had!" Keiichi protested angrily.

"I did not have that assurance either," Peorth of Nulln interjected. "When I received the Revelation from the Rune, it did specify if we were to survive the experience. I simply overlooked that matter as it was unimportant. The balancing of four Souls and one guide against all of reality bears a contrast that yields no sense of reservation, no assumptions of fear. We _have_ to thwart Isilblius!"

"You mean that you sent us on a one-way trip...and you _knew_ about it!!" Keiichi exploded.

"Mortal, quell your emotions and be open and generous of heart," Keiichi of Tengoku chastised him. "You assume that Peorth of Nulln was informed that we would not survive, when in fact she was informed nought about our survival."

"So I have to make a wish? A wish that doesn't match the _true_ desire of my heart? I thought you Gods stood for something higher than this! Haven't I made enough sacrifices already?"

"There is one...and only one chance for this to work. The God Keiichi that you see in this new dimension must willingly surrender his life. He cannot even experience the Real Death, because he will be giving up his Soul as well as his life. In contrast, all you have to do is create a wish for him to hear us out. He has to give up his very existence so that the Belldandy in this 'Therarealm' can be revivified with the single spark of Soul we have remaining. Considering this, I believe that your sacrifice is fairly minor compared to his. You are sacrificing Love. He will be sacrificing _Life_," Belldandy of Nulln argued.

Keiichi knew that she was right. This was a Goddess who had lost the love she held dearmost, and had survived through forty millennia of heartbreak. Yet had found the courage to live, even if it had driven her insane. No, Isilblius had driven her insane, using her grief as a tool to torture her. It all came back to defeating Isilblius! This Goddess from Nulln was speaking of a meaning: a message that life was fundamental to love. No love could exist if it wasn't underwritten by the individuality of life. It was really simple in his mind, but it also meant that he would be relinquishing Belldandy.

Or maybe not. Bell-chan was still inside of Holy Bell. Keiichi tried to envision what Bell-chan would do if she were in his situation. How would she bond the flimsy fabric of indecision into a worthwhile resolution, an expression freeborn from her heart? He regarded Holy Bell, her face so much the mirror of Bell-chan's. Holy Bell was smiling confidently; the same sunny smile Bell-chan would have in the morning hours when she communed with the birds near the koi pond. The beauteous expression on Holy Bell's face seemed to melt his worries away, reminding him of all the times Bell-chan had reminded him to bear his trials patiently. Patience and hope...these would see to Bell-chan's safety. His decision was made upon the recognition that Bell's Angel _knew_ much more than he could ever realize.

A wish could be an eloquent heart-song.

When he had wished for Bell-chan to stay with him forever, five years ago, he had opened himself up to his heart and listened to the elegies of love within his yearning affections for the very first time. Pure passion; unadorned with the levers of self-pity he had endured all through junior and senior high school. For one moment, he had touched his kokoro...and his kokoro had touched a wish. His wish had been answered with a bestowal of the most precious of gems that he held in the treasury of his breast: the memories of the many beautiful times with Bell-chan. Memories that were startled with the electric realization that his wish had been "to stay with me _forever_!"

_"Stay..with..me..forever?!"_ he gasped.

If he gave up on Bell-chan now, his wish would still uphold itself! It _had_ to!

With all the faith his heart could muster, Keiichi wished that the God who bore his name would be touched by the concert of five souls...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

THERA, BEIJING CAPITAL, CHINA-STATES:

True self-knowledge was the surest spiritual path that would allow mortals to love each other. Of the many wishes he had granted, Keiichi knew that a subtext of self-knowledge had permeated many of those mortals whose wishes were wise. It was the most curious of oddities that he...as a God of the Wish Escort Office...never knew which wish would be granted at the time it was made. To his wish assignees, Keiichi served as counselor, adviser and the channel of the wish. There, his jurisdiction and responsibility ended; only the Ygg Mainframe would determine for certain about the worthiness of a wish. Each time he felt himself triggered into conveying the wish via his God Seal, he was never assured of the outcome until the completion signal was returned to him confirming that the wish had been be granted or denied.

Now, he wasn't even certain of the wish assignee, as he was feeling himself being impulsed into granting a wish by a mortal being that he had never encountered before. In his thoughts, he senses a young man's wish request, wishing "_hear us! Be with us!_" The wish was clearly directed towards him. Was it possible that he had been reassigned, now that Belldandy's life had been stolen away while his had been left behind, smoldering with regrets? If so, then his Divine purpose had been laid to rest in a brutal row of toxic flowers, his recent experience on Thera rendered outcast in his life's eye...

A burst of light seared forth from his forehead, piercing the darkness between the shattered reality of the Therarealm, seeking out the Ygg Mainframe. A Wish Control channel had been opened...

...He studied himself as he awakened with the familiar sensation of a successful wish transmission. Enigmatically, he sensed that the transmission had been acknowledged and granted by something other than the Yggdrasil Mainframe. The locale was strange, almost lending the impression that he was somehow "here" and "not here" at the same time. Five beings surrounded him, each one glowing with bare ebbs of Soular energy.

He saw a God who resembled himself, save that he was attired in a formal traditional Japanese robiere habilement which belonged in Therarealm museums. A mortal being was looking at him with a startled expression; the mortal bore a close similitude to his physical manifest, except that he was slightly below the average height range for a Therarealm Japanese male. Most shocking was a female Goddess who resembled Belldandy, with a circular or oval Goddess Seal on her forehead, but appearing to be about ten Therarealm years older than his Belldandy.

_His Belldandy_...the one mortal being that had chosen to love him. He almost felt embarrassed that he was considering her in the possessive sense. How very un-God-like!

Finally, he looked into the purple-brown eyes of an unknown Goddess, perhaps a Rune Goddess by the diamond shape of her Goddess Seal. Finally, he saw the translucent form of an Angel...who curiously was independent of all three Divines. The Angel had a face very familiar to Belldandy's; except that it was more iconic than representative, as was typical of all Angels. Natural beauty manifested within ethereal beauty.

Within minutes, he was quickly appraised of the situation by the Divine beings in bursts of urgent thoughtcasts. _His_ situation. According to them, the very structure of reality had been discorporated...damaged by the predations of an extremely evil consciousness. They were agents of a sort, whose mission was to 'seal up' the damages by repairing each dimension. It seemed that the predation of each dimension began by attacks on 'alternate' versions of either he or Belldandy, or both. The incredible implication of this was that there were many dimensions with Belldandy's and Keiichi's within them!

He found this hard to believe, save for the fact that he was looking at two Keiichi's during the sum of their explanation. They noted that each successive adjustment of a dimension required that they discharge a miniscule amount of their Soul, which would be left behind in order to 'balance' the dimension. As a result, they had a single mite of Soul remaining, intended for his Multiverse. Their intention was to expose Belldandy and him to it, to share it between the two of them, which would result in the negation of the all damages that had been visited upon it. But they were stymied because Belldandy was already dead; her Soul had simply vanished.

What they proposed was that he offer up his own Soul in exchange for hers.

Keiichi recalled his meeting with the Almighty. The Lord Himself was at a loss to explain why beings were simply 'dropping dead', their Souls disappearing as instantaneously as a spark between iron and flint would vanish into the air. Parts of Yggdrasil were awash with beauty and activity one moment...and then became insubstantial and non-existent the next. Belldandy, filled with life and athleticism, now rendered empty of soul.

Now he knew why. An entity had consciously caused all of this by intelligent design. According to them, the Ultimate Force itself was crippled! The system of balance that compassed the Multiverse was being annihilated. When he heard that the being Isilblius was responsible for Belldandy's death, Keiichi was shocked into stillness.

_Belldandy had been murdered!_

Their reasoning was simple: if he offered his Soul up to replenish the energy of the tiny remaining Soul they had to give away, Belldandy would be brought back to life. The slight measure of Soul contained the codex for Belldandy's mortal soul; functioning as an aspect of a 'universal soul' that was common to all Belldandys in all dimensionalities. As it was a part of the Soul of the Goddess Belldandy of Nulln, the evanescent minim of Soul would 'activate' Belldandy's Soul in a matter similar to a Therarealm 'jump start' between car engine batteries. If Belldandy had been alive when they arrived, there would have been no problem using the last bit of Soul to 'offset' all the structural breakdowns of his dimension. But since she was dead, the tiny spark of life was no longer enough.

He would never have a chance to tell Belldandy how much he loved her. She had brought him to life, had brought him to love...had even embarrassed him and made him laugh a few times. In just a few months, he had grown fond of her in a manner unlike anything he had ever experienced before.

But now he had a chance to _show_ her that he loved her...even if he didn't know what love was.

The Almighty had noted that no greater love exists save that one being would offer their life for the safety of another being.

It was time to prove the axiom...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

OUTSIDE THE MID-LIGHT:

I wished for a moment that Isilblius was outside of me rather than inside of me, so that I could see the expression of pissed-off disgust on his face. But it was also such that my expression was probably filled with the acme of surprise as I was ejected out of the Mid-Realm by some kind of force, once the interior of the GatePath to the Instrumentality was vigorously restored to health. Ever since he had stealthied himself inside of me in the form of a SurGoth, I had felt like a prisoner to my own suspicions; treading along a maze of errors that only seemed to tangle and tear at me when I attempted to make a decision.

This decision felt right.

Yet, on the outside, I could feel the death of the OmniArc everywhere. Photo-negative of the luminous Mid-Light, the OmniArc was patched with darkness as its fibres of life were disarrayed and shattered into dusts. The two great rosettas, the God's Realm and the Demon's Realm...both Logorinths were decimated. Isilblius wasn't kidding when he said that he had accelerated their destruction. Even as I recoiled from this sight, I could feel his heated passions expressing malign joy at the disintegration of the Realm of the Living.

On every front, he had emerged victorious.

The TimeSphere was no longer a sphere; it was a loose collection of torn webbing that reminded me of drunken spiderwebs in an abandoned basement. The illumination of the OmniArc was shifted from the red-pink of Vanagdrasil and the blue-azure of Yggdrasil to a yellowed greendeath decay. Just as before, the vital energy of the OmniArc was ebbing.

Why did I have to witness the destruction of the Everything once again? I had repaired the Mid-Light, but that would fade away with time unless something was done to restore the OmniArc. Again, Death cannot exist in a vacuum; the Soular energies of life here were fading.

Not only in the Present, but in the Past and the Future. The last attack Isilblius had mounted was a wanton destruction of the Multiverses in the singular moment. Now, he somehow orchestrated Time to consume itself.

"«_A sweet victoryzz that you and I can savorzz._»" his voice suffused my thoughts. "«_You may have restored the Mid-Light, but thizz is but a slight reversal on the path to the culminationzz of my war against Lifezz. The Ultimate Forcezz are _-mine-_; soon they will be gone. Time consumezz itself, Past and Present and Future cannabalizing each other's essencezz. There is no one who will remain except you and I. Thizz will be the eternal punishmentzz I decree for you: to spend all of Time realizing that you failed. You will share a unique fate, for you will be the only other being besidezz me. I will have all of Eternity to torture you in every meanzz!_»"

A suspira was released within me, displaced by besieging fright that I would be imprisoned with the SurGoth until the end of Time. Suffering, subject to becoming a darksome shade such as he. With no recourse to escape, forever confined within Time and unable to cast an ending to my grief. Face to face with the litany of failures as he and I would be sole witnesses to the ruinition of the OmniArc.

Just myself and this inglorious spawning Hate inside of me. If all of Love comes from the energies of the Mid-Light, then all the hatred and anguish that had spanned the eternities had its source in this SurGoth of Isilblius.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

THERA, BEIJING CAPITAL, CHINA-STATES:

It was all dark for the slightest of moments.

There would be no Reaper, no Real Death to claim his Soul, because he was giving it up. Surprisingly, he found himself _outside_ the Mid-Light realm; the fabled destination of all who died. He had expected just an eyeblink and then darkness.

Two beings were locked in a tug-of-war, grappling to gain possession of a large object that glowed red and blue. Shaped like a baseball or a volleyball. All around him was Void; he couldn't sense Yggdrasil or the Almighty!

One being looked like a Therarealm mortal who had been bulleted with hundreds of gunshots, while the other being simply looked like...horror itself. Winged, skeletal, ugly, severe and rageful. Another being in the form of a child was floating nearby, curled up asleep.

A Demon boy?

He had surrendered his Soul, knowing that his decision would save Belldandy...would save creation itself, if the Divine beings who he had encountered were telling him truths...

...As a God, he had evolved along spiritual lines quite similar to those experienced by mortals in their efforts to bridge axiom and definition; to move from idealized theories of the existence of the Divine to certain faith-knowledge of the probity of the Divine. It was different for him, of course, because he _was_ a God. A God with a God, in a sense...as the repository of all Divinity always centered on the Almighty.

There were certain divisions while he was undergoing Inculcation. Prime Inculcation focuses on the simplest concepts of developing one's Divine identity and then flowering it with the ability to distinguish between illusion and volition. He learned that his actions have consequences, and these consequences are always flavored with ethical considerations such as justice and renunciation. FirstTier Inculcation shifted the focus to examine the issues of suffering and sacrifice. The guidance was to prepare him for the gift of humility, which could be appreciated most fully when one learns renunciation...the ability to decide where and when to relinquish their will while still being aware that _nothing real can ever be lost_.

SecondTier Inculcation furthered this exploration of spirituality by exposing him to the symbolism in his identity: the Divine imprint within his Soul. Seated within his Soul was a heart that could be worthy of making truthful judgments, but his heart needed to be tempered. Deprived of Love by the Gate of Judgement, he was still able to combat himself. Deviation and rebellion had caused him to make his fateful decision to defy the Proctors and visit the Gate. The value in this harshest of lessons was that he was exposed to the subversive side of his Divinity. There is a power of light and a power of darkness within each God and Demon; the battle is lost when one denies this dynamic. The victory within himself at this stage occurred when he became strong enough to become ever-vigilant; always ready to mediate this 'war' inside of his Divinity...to advantage the bearing of light and joy in his actions.

ThirdTier Inculcation emphasized love, to prepare Gods and Goddesses not only to love amongst themselves, but to live compassionate lives that would be exemplars for the mortals. Keiichi's Inculcation was flawed at this point, because he had no love within...so his journey was moderated to focus on grace and faith by the Proctors. Their guidance made him aware that he had the innate capacity to be charitable, which would well-suit him for a role in the God Wish Escort Office. Granting wishes was, after all, a practice designed to emancipate the mortals from their self-imposed limitations; limitations that arose because of their flawed ability to see themselves for the profoundly beautiful creatures they are.

Final Inculcation was the 'graduate course' in spiritual accomplishment...the most difficult challenge of all. The strength of self-identity again had to be relinquished, this time at the altar of universality and awe. The final teaching centered on the fact that the Divinity in his character was an expression of holiness: that it was to be harmless, authoritative and transcendent. All existence was truly Divine in a sense of supra-mentality, it was Divine also by virtue of supra-kokoro reality. He learned to recognize that Divine mind and Divine heart were expressed in every aspect of Reality: the truthful synthesis and balance of matter and spirit. The union contained in the awareness that he was both the seeker and that which is sought. The immersion of his self in possibilities would allow for him to develop potentialities and then create _solutions_...

...such as dying for an impossible love.

One of the beings smiled at him, pausing in his combat briefly to give him an encouraging nod. A voice in his head said "«_do what you dream...dream what you know...know what you love..._»"

Keiichi had a dream, and it was back on Thera.

He was going to set it right.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

ETERNITY:

Keiichi watched as the tall Keiichi-God crossed his arms over his chest and simply vanished. A peal of thunder accompanied by a blazing fountain of blue light formed a sphere of luminosity around him. Holy Bell started seizuring with violent motions, while glittering fragments of mirrored glass seemed to sparkle like rapidly moving stars, firing like lasers into every stretch of his perception. Clenching his fists and gritting his teeth, Keiichi realized that this was the end. Every motion around him was the harbinger of destruction.

It wasn't supposed to be this way!

Keiichi of Tengoku seemed to shift-turn into a swirl. Belldandy and Peorth of Nulln were vibrating from side-to-side so fast, they were blurring outlines of form.

If this was the Apocalypse, then he was right in the middle of it. All alone, except for Holy Bell...who was red-shifting and blue-shifting at the same time, as if she herself had become motion itself.

All the other times they had 'adjusted' each dimension or Multiverse, there was a resulting calm; a sensible release of grief and a fulfillment of serenity. This last time was different, because the 'pocket' TimeStream they were in was on the verge of collapsing into itself, according to both Keiichi of Tengoku and Belldandy of Nulln. At the time, he had a dreadful suspicion that Isilblius was trying to thwart their efforts. He remembered being one of the Seven; the co-creators of the OmniArc. Incredible subsets of memories filled him...

A shouted voice filled his mind, piercing through the dooming knell of his existence.

_"Keiichi!!"_

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --


	137. Pt 137: Stilling the Troubled Waters

**Part 137: Stilling the Troubled Waters**

ETERNITY:

_"KEIIICHIII!!!"_

Before he could even turn to look, he felt two arms wrapping around his chest, the unexpected warmth of a human touch quelling his nerves. Caressingly, the press of a human form against his back, cradling him from neck to heels. Contained within a wild disorder of hail and meteors, red and blue hurls of lighting, cacophonous hoarse blasts of thunder that shook the air...amidst the doomful cry of the end of Space and Time...he felt strangely becalmed. His final moment of life wasn't going to be filled with an eternity of loneliness; for he was imagining Bell-chan was somehow here with him.

Holy Bell was hovering in front of him, and with a few swift waves of her feathered magnificence of wings she quickly hugged herself to him. He was astonished, because Angels were creatures of pure light and yet he was feeling _touched_ by her, embraced by her as if he was being held close by Bell-chan. Holy Bell's long sun-gold hair seemed to aura around him...intertwined with auburn locks of silken hair, curling and flowing like twinning pennants in a tempestuous wind.

The fastness of disaster that reached all around him seemed to slowly exhaust its ferment, the outcries of shattered sound were gradually stilling. The darkened space he was floating in was provoking strong emotions in him. Environments usually were as devoid of emotional sensation as chapters in engineering math; Keiichi knew that any reactions on his part arose from within his sense of being. But this spectacle of dire chaos seemed to be charged with a lively terror, the "anguishing of Ragnarok" as Urd would call it when a storm would pelt the temple's wooden roof with uncomfortably loud rain-fingers.

Perhaps Holy Bell was aware that this was the end of times, as she rested her chin on his right shoulder. He felt his cheeks splashed with tears...on _both_ sides of his face. He turned his head slightly to his left as he felt another chin rest against the crock of his collarbone...

And saw Bell-chan.

"Be..be..be..Bell-chan?!" he sputtered, his thoughts brambling askance with disbelief. Eyes clenched, chin tight against his left shoulder, she was sobbing so hard that she could only lean her face against his and smile with a tight-lipped rejoicing at his question/statement. She _was_ Bell-chan, rendered into a solid form, rendered into a Goddess. This was...was this his fiancée, somehow brought forth out of Holy Bell?

Keiichi's mind and heart tumbled like a drunken actor in zero-G. Could this be an imposter? She was so close he could smell her hair; yet his memories were haunted by her angry hatred of him when she had been exposed during the chaos that destroyed his wedding day. He was both comforted and frightened, indecisive that she was not what she appeared to be. How could he know if this was the _real_ Belldandy? He remembered how the SurGoth had stolen itself inside of Cevn, who was left far behind when they journeyed into the Soul Mirrors.

Could this be real? Or a hallucinatory attempt by his mind to abstract a sense of comfort while reality screamed hellbound into destruction all around him? Was he experiencing his last-wish before his death, enacted with a finale that was to leave him dying with a smile? Perhaps her appearance was a cradle hymn to soothe him during the last breaths of his life?

Everything seemed so fictional: in his thoughts, he imagined that had been caught outside cleaning up a shine to his BMW Rennsport during a tornado, and now he was spun wire-tight with deliriums.

"No, my dearest! How could..snff.._these eyes lie to you_?" Bell-chan answered, challenging his unspoken fears. She looked at him with an intense, searching expression. Locking her eyes to his as only she could do; piercing him with her sky-azure blue eyes. He immediately sensed a beauty of grace and airs that riveted him in a very special place, the deepmost seeds of his kokoro. Crowding his memories with intermingled dreams, guiding his heart to softly lean forward into his thoughts.

"«_Because in my wake, in my nakedness, a tear is lost in the latest reality and in the heat of the ever-ending. I understand that the infinite is an illusion. The understanding of this...is the infinite within me,_»" he heard a voice in his mind, accompanied by a serene bliss flowing from Bell-chan and Holy Bell through him.

"Keiichi, it is now time for _me_ to make a wish. The infinite in me...is the infinite love I find in you, Keiichi. My wish is to be with a man like you..._forever and ever_," she said as she kissed him on the lips. He could feel Holy Bell shivering with candor and delight all up and down his chest.

Her kiss...

_...Transported him back to the first time he met Bell-chan when he was living at the N.I.T. Motor Racing Club Men's 'dorm' with Tamiya, Ootaki and the gang. How he had stolen a single glance at Belldandy while she was intently observing him read her meishi: one glance was all it took to seal his heart upon her. Instantly, her eyes had become his universe. Even as he had passed beyond an index of wishes including being a rock star, Imperial ruler of Japan, being a playboy swarmed by a harem of adoring supermodel girlfriends, inventing a new type of car that ran on water...the _-charm of goodness-_ in her eyes had urged him to wish for love itself. So he had wished for love. He had wished for _-this-_. For this kiss. A kiss from her, and only her._

_In Tindouf, he recalled how he fought fear and the desert itself and decided to risk his life to save her and Skuld; all to prove to the Almighty that she could live with him for a lifetime without her Goddess powers. That he could protect her if needed. He recalled how he had turned a corner between two rows tents, with a sickly Skuld cradled limp-limbed in his arms. Before his eyes could notice the snipers, his hope has flighted away in a hail of gunfire...he felt the searing pain of a dozen bullets tearing through his bone and flesh with unforgiving force. But only for a split-second. Bell-chan had immediately attended to him, no longer content with her impotency of Goddess powers. Fired by a love that took him halfway around the world, he had risked his life for her. For this kiss, this love._

_His heart alight with a fixture of fondness in his Soul's lamp, he was filled with passion and excitement as his wedding day approached. There was no cease of interruptions and distractions, often well-intended by those who loved him. The many annoying phone calls from Bell-chan's "Mama" about details for the ceremony could not quell his enthusiasm. Neither could Megumi's weekend 'drop offs' of his parents or Urd and Skuld behaving like spoiled brats. Yet, the goal of marriage to Belldandy had emboldened him to surmount every obstacle along the way. He felt anew the breast-pulsing ecstasy that shivered his spine in ten directions; his heart overflowed with joy when he first saw her in her wedding dress. _

_Since the disastrous disruption of his wedding, he had deemed his love had been cheated...thus diminished. He was gripped by how intensely he had been sorrowed by the loss of his love; the emotional fervor that made his blood run hot like oil when he was around his bride-to-be had been stolen away by the evil imposter. A betrayal of his own love for her, ripped away at the very altar where he and she should have been joined._

_But her kiss reminded him that the fires of blessed anticipation had all been for _-Bell-chan-_, not for some foul imposter, not for any other reason. He recognized that the enthusiasm of his love was never stolen from him, could never be stolen from him...-_because it was for her-_ all along. She had trimmed his Soul with virtue and loving-kindness, filling him with delight and gratitude. The love he had to give was as much his to partake and bestow as it was receipt of her love for him. Isilblius had guised himself as Belldandy to fool everyone; but he had failed to fool his heart. If this had been the case, he would have withheld from love instead of celebrating in its glorious arbor._

_Therefore he had carried on with the fullest of intentions, banishing his uncertainties as he prepared to marry his beloved fiancée. The love he had was genuine: it had been stirred into flight by Bell-chan; it was intended only for Bell-chan; it was expressed with Bell-chan with all the richness of his Soul, and it would forevermore belong to Bell-chan._

_For once a heart harbors love, it cannot be stolen away...only _-given- _away...and he had never given up on Bell-chan. He had never turned his back on the ocean of his love for her, a love that continuously received the rivers of his Soul..._

...he kissed her back, kissing her with all of his heart, sharing with her the wedding kiss that he had never had the chance to give her on that ill-fated day. The kiss he had planned to give her after he put the ring on her finger.

The ring he still had, vouchkept in a now-tattered leather and felt case, tucked in the corner of his now-ragged tuxedo.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Belldandy had been an unwilling witness to the entire breadth of Isilblius's monstrous deceit. She had watched, horrified, as Keiichi had full-heartedly accepted his evil proposal for an earlier marriage. Now that events had played out, she felt a little guilty, because Isilblius had unintentionally given her a sneak peek at what would happen during her wedding. Her sisters had both regressed into bratty self-willed teenagers. Her Mother had revved up the "Divine Mistress of Marriages" enthusiasm to the highest RPM and had pestered everyone about minutiae for weeks. Poor Keiichi!!! Even though it was horrible, knowing that Isilblius was using this wedding as a ruse, watching events unfold from inside of Holy Bell allowed her a glimpse of the process, both fascinating and filled with moments of humor.

She had never seen her Father so nervous in her entire life.

Love had been the bond that had drawn Keiichi towards marriage to her. She could see the excitement in his eyes as the wedding day approached, the fund of energy that he devoted to dealing with Mom and Dad and her sisters, Megumi and his parents...treating each member of the family with great diplomacy and respect even when she could clearly sense that he was edging towards being consumed by irritation and frustration. She was worsted by her own desires to comfort him, if only for a moment to hold him and soothe away his tension, but being unable to. Mockingly, Isilblius had used her Goddess form to faux through the motions of insincerity; knowing that every effort towards easing Keiichi's stress would draw him closer to participating in the wedding. Towards completing Isilblius's own evil design.

Yet, her beloved Keiichi had been man enough to stand on his own for the most part, shouldering everyone's worries without buckling. Belldandy regretted that she couldn't even praise him for how he conducted the cacophony of miscues and struggles that comprised their wedding; patiently forging the host of dissonances into a symphony of love that all could share in. She witnessed how Mara had interceded to bring the umpteenth version of "Big Sister-Litter Sister" warfare to a halt. She remembered the tears in Skuld's eyes as she left the bridal chamber in her dress. The look of pride in Urd's face...and even in Mara's...as they served her and Keiichi their wedding wine at the altar. The profound honor of her wedding being personally officiated by the Almighty Himself. Through and through, she was continually amazed at the level of sincerity each of her friends possessed; how lovingly everyone conducted themselves, unaware of the disaster that Isilblius had planned.

Gripped by disappointment and despondency, she relied on Holy Bell, who had excelled as her comfort and counsel during this entire misadventure.

Once upon a time, when she was a very young Goddess, Belldandy was perplexed by a very important question and had turned to her Mother for an answer. She asked "Why are Goddesses and Gods were the only beings in all of creation that have Angels?" This was long before she was old enough to have her own treasured Angel's Egg; many Decas before she would be TwinSouled to Holy Bell. Those were days where every sight and sound bubbled with sweetness and wonder, when her Mom was the wisest Goddess in all of Yggdrasil, and her Dad was the bravest of all the Gods in the Realm.

She recalled how her Mother had regarded her with a mysterious smile, proud that she was asking such an insightful and essential question at such a young age, and had answered, "B'dandy, we have Angels because it is important. It is important to constantly love one another. Once you have an Angel, you and she will be inseparable forever. Angels teach us love." Then her Mother summoned her Angel, Bounteous Grace, just to add a flavor of awe to her answer. Her Mom's Angel smiled proudly at her with a sunny expression of parental pride. Back then, Belldandy possessed the usual childish fright towards Angels; but this was the first time she didn't feel one bit afraid of her Mother's Angel, Bounteous Grace.

Never to forget her Mother's answer, Belldandy now had an entirely new perspective on her relationship with Holy Bell. When Isilblius had stolen her Goddess form, exiling her to die by denying her the energies of her own Soul ...Holy Bell had acted with decisive purpose, summoning _her_ inside of her. Belldandy didn't even know if it was even possible that an Angel could 'host' a Goddess, but she knew that the she was dying and the one being that she trusted most in all of existence was beseeching her: telling her "to come inside me and be safe" within the witnessing strains of beauty-song. Letting go of everything, Belldandy had followed her Angel's Song of Summoning and was given shelter, moments before her being and Soul would have been starved into vaporous non-existence.

Her throat was choked by the certain knowledge that she and Keiichi had only a moment or two left. The horrible endurance of death; how Isilblius had killed everyone she loved, and at the last breath of her life, she had forgiven him. Jesus, one of the most important teachers of mankind, had repeatedly urged that forgiveness is the thread that love hangs upon. Of course, the religions borne out of his teachings had completely forgotten this spiritual truth amidst their pursuit of 'righteousness at all costs'. But Jesus had also taught a more subtle lesson through his actions at the Temple. There, he had raged in a swath of destruction, tearing apart the merchant vendor stalls and banishing the thieves and whores. His meaning was clear: Love is the weapon of invocation and truth. Incessant love was a defense against wickedness; as an offensive weapon, it was always victorious. There was a reason why Jesus had crushed the snake of his denial under his heel immediately before being captured and murdered by the ignorant.

She had offered Isilblius her forgiveness, and he had spurned it.

Nightmare after nightmare had this one sinister being created in her life! Urd suffering in the throes of death. Skuld's hair falling out as she grew emaciated. The silent moments of anguish etching Keiichi's face, silent because he was too brave to cry out, knowing that she and her sisters were doomed. The virusing of the Gods and Demons, killing all that she knew. Caught in such malignity, she had forgiven him even these. Isilblius had stranded the guys in the feudal Japan, and she and her sisters in a future nightmare Japan. An aged Kodama had died to save her and her sisters. Her Mother and Father, all of the Gods, all of the Demons had been killed by warfare and plague. Even the two Lords had died, deceived into killing each other. Her older sister, having to 'mercy kill' Cevn to prevent Isilblius from slipping back into the Multiverse. His second foul attempt to destroy all of Reality, forcing her to hear the death cries of trillions of mortal species.

She and Keiichi and the others had created a new expression, the OmniArc, because he had destroyed the Ygg and Vang Multiverses. She had forgiven him yet again for this. But now, Isilblius had killed all life except she, Keiichi and Holy Bell. He had tried to kill Love itself by using Keiichi's love for her.

Now they were alone, three within the Ragnarok. There was no sound, no light, nothing left to destroy. But she knew Isilblius was out there...and this time, Belldandy held no forgiveness in her heart for him.

Time was brief, but she knew that she would end her existence in the warm, calming embrace of the two beings that she loved the most.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Keiichi, this is the end. We have but a few minutes left. What you are witnessing are the final death-throes, the ultimate destruction of the OmniArc all around us. There is no more Life, there is no more Time. There are only us...you, Holy Bell, and myself," she whispered in his ear. She wanted one final moment with him, unsullied by doubts and fears; a perfect moment to finish her life with.

"How, Bell-chan?" he asked, his voice hoarse with frustrated disappointment. "_Why?!_ It wasn't supposed to happen this way! Peorth of Nulln had a vision, a 'Revelation' she called it. She told all of us that if we were able to send our Souls into every branch of Time and Space via the Soul Mirrors, then we could save all of reality. That's what we did! We shared out our Souls to every dimension, to undo every act of destruction that he had..."

"Sshhh, my dearest," she said, putting a finger to his lips to silence his mortification. Such sadness, such blighted hope, didn't belong here between she and he. In this moment of time, every second was precious.

"Our time is short, Keiichi. I would rather not hear talk about what was lost. Holy Bell and I both know that you and your friends tried your best. We have this moment together, a miracle in and of itself. I just want to be here...with you...until it ends..."

She felt him sobbing against her as he turned around to face her.

"Bell-chan, I think there's a way to make this all turn out right," Keiichi said, his tearful face suddenly filled with longing and determination.

"I still have the ring," he said. Belldandy felt a moment of unease. What was he talking about? They had less than a minute or two before all of Time finally collapsed around them...and he was talking about rings.

She felt him grasp her hand in his...

"Bell-chan, with Holy Bell as our witness, will you be my wife? Holy Bell, with Belldandy as our witness, will you be my wife? I cannot marry one of you without the other. You both are precious to me. I just wish Heroic Vermilion Swift was here to be with me, to be part of this. Bell...Holy Bell...I promise to cherish you both. I swear upon my heart to uphold your honor, to overflow the heaven of your heart and spirits with my love, to be your loyal husband until the end of time. To serve you in times of need, to encourage you in times of sorrow, to guide you when you feel lost, to cherish you at all times. With this ring, thee I wed."

He didn't even wait for her answer as he slipped the wedding band around her ring finger.

_In a flash, she was back in Makuhari, appearing out of a mirror to see him for the first time. How he had startled her when she first met him by making an impossible wish; a wish that the Ygg Mainframe should have never granted. In France, a few years later, Keiichi had startled her a second time by proposing to her at the Le Mans victory celebration ceremony, in front of all of her and his friend and a hall filled with racing dignitaries. In the midst of his greatest achievement, he had created a place for her to glory with him...and had offered her the very same engagement ring she now wore with pride on her ring ringer. A ring whose gem was pure Metaixodenum; an affirmation that the Almighty Himself had sanctioned their union._

Now, at the very end of Time itself, he had just placed a golden wedding band on her finger!

"I guess this really makes us husband and wife," he said with a grin. "I've had the ring with me ever since our wedding got thrown to the winds. Isilblius may have stopped our wedding...but he will never stop our marriage. He never did stop how I feel about you. He never could! Nothing changes everything, but everything changes nothing...because I will _always_ love you. Thank you, Bell-chan.._snff_..for allowing me the privilege of making you my.._snff_..wife. This is _your_ ring, and I couldn't think of a better way to be your..."

"K..Keiichi!!!" she gasped, the lap of her heart filled with amazed melodious pleasance. _He had actually just married her!!! _ Their church was the witnessing of three souls. There was no temple or church filled with admirers and family, no Lord to officiate the ceremony. Neither his nor her parents were here to look on with pride and sadness. Their friends and well-wishers were all done away, forever absent. The only decorations were the bright explosions accompanying the final jarring clashes of TimeSpace as it collapsed upon them in a final rectus of demise. But it didn't make a difference. Despite the emptiness of witnesses, the solemnity was almost amplified by a sense of holiness. In the very last moment, when all seemed lost, he had found a final dignity of strength to offer her his deepest expression of love. He had chosen, in the end of times, to begin a new life by making her his wife.

He had created hope!

"I have no ring to exchange with you, my beloved..snff.._husband_," she said, her tongue sweetened by saying the precious word for the first time, perhaps the only time she would be able to call him this.

_"Just know that my heart will always be a ring around your heart, my Soul will always be ringed within and without...interlaced with the water of my life and the breath of my love. My heart is your ring, my dearest Keiichi..."_

With a sudden halting and silence, everything ends.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

THE NEUTRAL ZONE:

Versioned realities were weaving patterns all around the exterior of the Mid-Light as I was floating inside of a void, a single cell of life inside a diseased corpse of space and time. The Mid-Light was still glowing, but the rest of the outside, the Realm of the Living, was an emptiness of terrified Souls. Yet, I sensed that I was in neither the Mid-Light nor the OmniArc. This place was devoid of both Life and Death.

Within me, I couldn't stop the SurGoth from screaming triumphant at the atrophy that sickened the very space around us. Blighted immortal spheres waned like dying candle lights, the ceasing of frustration. Vanquished reality, the dimmed hopes of everyone who had tried to save the OmniArc. We all had failed, and in the failure I questioned the purpose versus the ignobility. Were the extremes of effort we all wrested out of our courage, confronting fears and despairs, only to amount to nothing more than a waste? Our efforts should have _never_ been a waste, because we had yielded our utmost in the endeavor. We made the attempt...but I struggled to find consolation. I was defeated, drained and mutilated by the poor means of spiritual sustenance; there was little repose or comfort when the wasting death of Reality surrounded me with brut art denouement.

Unlike the first time, where he had killed everyone except Belldandy, this time he had killed Belldandy first. Now he was mocking me, mocking all of us. For I knew that all of the others who had fought their own battles with him had experienced this same ill-doing, this same bitter pall that was stabbing me with grief. Isilblius had savaged us with our own grief.

My body, if it was a body at this point, felt like it was exploding outwards. Every physical and mental sensation was enervated with pain, as if the bone and sinew inside of me was trying to tear itself outwards through my skin. Contorted akimbo, my mind slammed into torturing sensations of wracking agony. I realized that Isilblius was trying to rip himself out of me, cell-by-cell, atom by atom. There were no more living beings for his SurGoth wraith to inhabit, so he must have decided to quit me so that he could gloat over his handiwork in his own body or physical manifest.

Spasming from pain, I clenched my mind tightly as Isilblius transuded himself from within me, his physical essence was like a malodorous perspiration of evil passing out of me. Ripping away thousands of pieces of flesh and metal in the process, he assembled himself into a coal-dark figure with an aura of yellow hatred surrounding him. My physical form was a haze of gibbets of flesh and torn cyborganic sheathing. I was supposedly dead, without physical form, supposedly beyond the reach of sensorium and pain. Yet I was a single knotted fist of indescribable caustic torment.

"How do you like my dramatic exit? Or more appropriately, my exquisite grand entrance? Was it as painful for you as it was enjoyable to me? My accomplishment is clear to behold: I have destroyed all that is..." he said, eyeing me haughtily. "You played your part exactly as I scripted it. I have consumed the Ultimate Force, by making it consume itself. It has perished along with this miserable excuse for existence."

Wrong.

If Isilblius had consumed the Ultimate Force, then I wouldn't be here to be an audience to his boasting. The Mid-Light definitely had not been hallowed into an eternal night; it was glowing visibly in another abstraction of TimeSpace. The two Logorinths were ghostly phosphorescent, rather than brilliantly illuminated. I beheld the exhausted, dying embers of every civilization that ever existed, ever created, ever loved and died and warred and achieved. There was a faint ebbing of UF inside of those two structures of infinity. Once again, Isilblius was a grand seignior of deceit.

"If you have destroyed the Ultimate Force as you claim, then what fires the Mid-Light and binds the two Logorinths to our sense of being and perception? They are neither dead nor insubstantial of Ultimate Force; they are ebbing of Life but not devoid of energy. You have cast illusion upon yourself once again, and I'm not going to buy into it."

"Bweeh bwah ha ha!" he laughed. "You are limited, primitive, and mistaken. First, you call me a being, when actually I am not a being at all. I am a _Force_...the Anti-Being! Are you so blind in your awareness that you have neglected the true essence of my existence? The difference between Being and Anti-Being is in degree of efficiency. Destruction always comes to Creation, as you must realize by now. Look around us! Creation is tentative, clumsy...while Destruction is definite, complete. The proof of this is irrefutable, because we are it and it surrounds us. If you would have been vigilant, you would have destroyed me when you had the chance. But you, being of a merciful bent, foolishly decided to spare me. You chose the easier path: to surround me with my dreams by allowing me to enjoy a Multiverse which I had destroyed. Fool! This only made me thirst even more for the cataclysm that I now have kindled across the heavens! Now, I encompass you with a horizon of realities...an OmniArc that _I have brought to ruination_."

"Isilblius, you create illusion and you will live and die by it. Your reach and confidence eludes itself. Why didn't you kill me when had the chance? Certainly not for mercy's sake…but because you are flawed by your self-deceptions. There is an ancient Chinese legend of a jade dragon and a white tiger; two heaven-beasts who fought to the death at the primordial awakening of Time. The death of both stirred up the golden sands of life, from which all beingness arose of its own accord. From destruction is borne creation. Your sense of the cycle of changes is clearly unsound and based in ignorance."

"Ah yes! The false idea that the death of death is a necessary condition in order to create life. What of the death of life, in order to create life? I have grown wise since my first encounter with you, and my second encounter with the generous Seven who created this filthy abhorrence of an expanded Everything. The Seven that you preserved and guided; allowing the worthless Ultimate Force to be transformed by their hands. Their futile endeavor, daring that they could recreate a new language of love and reality by designing an even more worthless Intimate Force. They presumed that they were birthing Reality; and within the OmniArc, a new expression of beauty. But it was only a process of piling shit upon shit, creating a cosmic privy of disgusting, putrid life and Souls that I had to destroy! Failures and fools, all of you! By doing so, you only gave me a bigger playground to kill! Witness the..."

"Shut up, already!" I interrupted. "I can _see what you've done_ without you harping on it."

"Oh, but you and I have eternity for me to relish my successes. Which brings me to why I have spared you. I have redeemed your miserable life so that you may be the witness of my triumph, and I can witness your despair and be amused thereof. Even one such as I cannot exist alone; I need someone to torture for all eternity. Who else should bear that signal honor but you?" he confronted me, filled with oleaginous smuggery.

I fought back my sense of shock; he was speaking to my nightmared imaginations of a damning banishment, trapped in a ceaseless limbo of being alone with him, living a forever of forevers in this irresponsive emptiness. The sole remaining wreck of his blight, mired in regrets and tormented by memories of happier times. No! I was not going to let him get to me. I wasn't preserved just for his amusement...the Ultimate Force had poised me in this position as well. I needed to hold fast to the hope that the UF knew what it was doing with me.

"Isilblius, did you know that sometimes it takes poison to extract poison? That the purest of hearts can be refined from those whose hearts bear the ugliest scars of misconduct? By witnessing the light of the highest virtue, one must never be blind to the truth that virtue exposes evil by making it visible."

"Nonsense! Drivel! Illogical ploys and fetishes of thought!" he argued with a broad-shout.

"Willingly, I chose to close the gate of my heart so that Urd could never enter it...by closing her heart so that she would never know of the love she had for me; so she would be spared the sense of loss and regret. In her, this was a burden of absence...in me, a fondness for what might have been. An act of evil, but cast within a method of love."

"Fool! Do you think I would allow for the accommodation of your attempt at such a whim? So little do you know, bwheh heh! Your beloved Urd, whose very Soul and body I raped and savaged, was given a very special pain, one that a Goddess bitch such as her richly deserved. In that ruined OmniArc, I made her _feel the pain_. Beginning with the moment you died in your 'mortal life'...she became aware of her illness, her so-called 'love' for you. From that point on, for the rest of her days she _knew_ that she was afflicted with love for you, a diseased love that could never be regained or released. Your precious Urd spent the remainder of her entire existence knowing that she had truly loved you, but had missed the opportunity to share that love with you while you were alive," he explained, his red eyes boring jangled shards of horror into me.

I hated him. Once again, I hated him with every iota of my being. How was I supposed to be loving and forgiving? What was the right thing to do? My heart had no answers that I could dig out out of the mud of my confusion with fingers of trepidation. The Metallectual faculties I was occasionally gifted with held no insight that I could look towards with confidence. My Soul was nauseated, unable to even muster courage.

"One more justification to preserve you, alive and well in this place. My plan to destroy love was thwarted by your foolhardy intervention, foiled because you revealed my presence to the two Lords! But I had planned for this. Were there not two of you? A machine, and a man? When I returned and killed the bitch Goddess Belldandy, I made you into a cyborg-machine, and then stole your humanity. The Ultimate Force prevented me from destroying your mortal flesh, so it abided while you followed me through that accursed Gate. _But you left the man behind_. Conveniently, he continued to live in that frame of existence, and then died of the flesh as all mortal specks of shit do. So I punished her for your meddling. I made sure that your whore of a Goddess's heart would die every day afterwards for the whole of her miserable life. I used you to wound her!"

His words sapped me of all vitality or hope. The heartbreak was so great, it numbed me. I couldn't even search the words of disbelief tumbling around in my heart, I felt such a sense of defeat. Even as I began to protest that I didn't believe him, Isilblius slithered into my being. As before when he impersonated Marshall Kou, he effortlessly forced experiences into my consciousness, thrusting me into Urd's heart-felt pain after I had left the flesh. Within my mind, I was filled of visions of an enraged Urd, angry beyond belief when my mortal life ended. How she was emotionally crippled forever after, not only because she was the loveless Norn of the Past, but also through the knowledge that she had loved and yet had been denied it. She spent the rest of her existence hiding her inner turmoil and regrets from her sisters and those close to her.

Gasping in anguish...I tried, but no words of scorn would come. I had doomed myself stupidly...and after I saw what Urd had to endure, I felt like I deserved all the agonies and damnations Isilblius could visit upon me. How could I have been so stupid as to overlook such an obvious flaw? Again, he had exploited my short-sighted selfishness. How could he have possibly known that I had taken this measure to prevent him from using my love for Urd to resurrect himself once more? Why didn't I anticipate this? Every time I try to protect those I love, the result is still the same. My ex-wife cold and motionless on a slab in the coroner's office. Urd moving through the time of her existence with an emptiness in her heart where love was supposed to reside. Belldandy and Keiichi forever doomed to never be husband and wife. Skuld, Peorth, Mara...all the mortal and Divines' fiery rays of life now forever snuffed out by Eternal Night. Despite every precaution I had attempted, he still had to arise again, secreting himself away within Belldandy, using me as his toy to effect his vile ambitions...

Yet, a drifting intuition informed me that something was amiss here. If Isilblius had been inside of me, stranded with me on that forsaken planet of desolation, the entire time warring with me to usurp my identity... then how could he have been witness to my 'mortal' life back on the Earthrealm? It was always possible that Time could have split into different pathways at that juncture, but I didn't believe it for a moment. Somehow, he had duplicated that particular TimeStream, so that all those who survived the wedding went on with their lives. Yet, in the 'vision' he had shown me, Belldandy and Keiichi were there; they had grown old along with myself and everyone else.

_This wasn't Isilblius!_

Either this being wasn't Isilblius, or Isilblius was more than just this being. In the sea of confusion, one still has a chance to survive if they have a slip of a rowboat built with the earnestness of their heart, and two intellectual oars to row with.

"Isilblius, reveal yourself!" I demanded.

Just like when I had been ripped apart from the inside, I saw Isilblius' form jerk-motioning as something emerged from him. Oddly enough, his physical aspect seemed to de-age; youthening itself during the emergence of the wraith-like figure. Disturbingly, he seemed to be dying, as the _thing_ inside of him distilled itself into a spectral form. With a final shudder, his eyes rolled backwards and he fell into a tangle of limbs, floating limply in this zero-G environment. Zero-G because gravity itself no longer existed as a physical quantum of form.

I was sickened by the realization that the 'real' Isilblius was a young Demon boy, perhaps seven or eight years of age! A louder peal of dismay struck my mind once I recognized him...he resembled Falcyn, the son of the Demoness Mara that I had encountered in Vanagdrasil. When I had traveled to the Nilhorn where Hild had built her Black Palace, I had met him and his sister Sygyn. Now emptied of the SurGoth, he looked just like any other Demonic young child, only paled with death. When Mara described the creation of her Ultimate Demon mandala, she had mentioned the Isilblius had confused her with his mother...

Could this have been Falcyn? Mara's son? If so, then Isilblius was only a Demonic child, an innocent who had been inhabited by the Ultimate Demon in the same manner as he hid within Belldandy in the weeks leading to the wedding. Now I knew why he had considered Mara his mother. Another foul motion of virulence hurtled amidst the accursed whirlwind of the SurGoth's evil.

_The _-true-_ Isilblius was the SurGoth!_

"«_Ah, yezz! Finally, I have decided to permit you to witnezz my true form, to allow you to reason thizz out. I usedzz the Demon child to fool hizz mother! I enjoyed killing hizz mother, back when I first experienced how powerful I wazz. Now, I have destroyed her never-born son, hizz corpse for you to see. Is his death not exquisite? It is my gift to you. You wished Isilblius dead, and I have granted your desirezz. With each abolishmentzz of life, I strengthen while you weaken!_»" the SurGoth announced, flouting its skeletal wings with decaying flays of slime-leather flesh as it hovered in front of me.

I looked at Isilblius...who was the child that Mara never had. Even this, he had stolen from us. Despite being a Demoness, Mara's behavior was based upon a very mortal...perhaps universal...emotional motivation. An overpowering greed fueled by frustration. Each day, she faced the fear of reprisal from the Dark Lord. A professional jealousy over her inability to cast Grief on Keiichi. The SurGoth had seduced her with promises of power and freedom, using the Enigma Book that I had written to entice her to build a mandala that would free him.

The Balance had written the Enigma Book through me, and yet the SurGoth kept stealing it away from me.

"«_You must see how I have uzzed you and all thozze to my purposezz! Mara created me, so I deceived her by stilling the livezz of her two childzz. Both Falcyn and Sygyn will never be born to her. The 'Vanagdrasil' you were in...wazz entirely my creation, my designzz to fool all of you. To remind you of what you all are: worthlezz mortalzz, Demonzz and Godzz!_»"

"The worthiness in each of us is invisible to you," I replied. "We know ourselves well enough to know that if we could see the evil in ourselves with complete clarity, we would hate ourselves with the strongest depths of our Soul. Your worth is diminished because you cannot hate or love yourself; you merely embrace the evil in yourself and account it to be your strength. You took the lives of Mara's unborn children...and you're proud of that? I find you to be worse than worthless: you are reprehensible. Yet, I cannot understand why you are here. What kept the two Lords from destroying you at the very first chance? Why didn't they take _your_ life?"

"«_Like you, They were the first prize foolzz. I lied to Them. They were new in that epoch, and I convinced Them that if They were to dezztroy me, I would enzzure that They both would ceazze existencezz. At the very birth of Time and Space, They were empty of guile, while I wazz full of it,_»" he answered me.

"Yes, you were full of it, most certainly," I answered bitingly. Something Skuld had told me during a visit to my office, a package of guidance that I had to follow to 'win Urd back'. Winning Urd back was now impossible, but perhaps I could win Urd back in the sense that I could eliminate the timeline where she tragically discovered her love for me after I 'died'. Perhaps I could spare her _that_ pain.

Every reality of Time seemed to be flawed. The SurGoth had shown me a vision of the future, but it too was marked with shades of incongruence. Mara had a husband, in the correct TimeSpace, TimeStream, OmniArc, Reality...

Deep within the channels of the subtle mind, I was aware that Mara had been chosen by the Dark Lord as the final Demon Queen. In the Vanagdrasil I traveled to, there was some kind of explosive jealous spat between her and Hild because of this. In the visions the SurGoth had shown me, the Dark Lord had visited her during the party celebrating the successful completion of the 'Test Mortal Project' in 2050. But He had visited her as the Dark Lord, not as her Husband. Intrinsically erroneous, because this action ran counter to His relationship with His Demon Queens.

During my 'Lost Weekend' misadventure under Mara's protection, she had taught me a great deal about Demons; aspects and nuances of Demonic behavior that were far beyond the scope of the explanations addressed in the Enigma Book. From her, I learned that whenever the Dark Lord visits one of His Demon Queens, He takes on a unique Demonic aspect which is pleasing to that particular Demon Queen. Psychologically simple, yet complex...this was something the Ultimate Force had 'forced' upon Him. As He was the Dark Liege of the Demon's Realm, He technically couldn't be the husband of _any Demoness_, because doing so would make her co-equal with Him. So His Sinister Majesty was obliged to manifest in an individual form specific for each Demon Queen, so that He could comport Himself in the similitude of a Demon spouse.

When The Darkness of Vanagdrasil had visited Mara, He should have manifested in the form of her husband, Sythtsu. But at that party, He had arrived as the Dark Lord...while saying to Mara that He had come to spend time with her as well as do her honor in her role as sister-in-law to Keiichi. I didn't quite understand how I knew this, as I had never experienced the Dark Lord in His role as Mara's husband, or in the physical manifest of Sythtsu.

My instincts were to renounce that reality. The arteries of my awareness were benumbed by all of these shipwrecked TimeStreams. I fervently wished I had the wisdom of a Norn...to be equipped to be able to discern Time as 'displaced'; to know "when a reality was wrong" as Urd and Skuld had termed it. My confusion was interwoven with this reality. Skuld must have recognized this, and tried to warn me.

The SurGoth had used the OmniArc to expend itself, by creating such chaos in it that even Souls would impoverish and then disappear without purpose.

I would have to destroy the OmniArc before the cannibalism could be completed. Failing this, there would be no coming or departing; all matter and time would be devoid of Soul and energy. Infinity would be unmade and Life would be rendered uncreatable. By destroying what remained of the OmniArc, a possible path could arise where the very act of destruction could obtain the first properties, the primum organum that could be used to shatter Void, going beyond the 'not' of existence and allowing for the possible flowering of a new expression of reality.

As soon as I decided on this course of action, the SurGoth collapsed into a yellow-green ball of energy and shot itself back inside of me. With an unremitting prescience, the wraith was aware of what I was planning. My thoughts seemed thinly veiled from the SurGoth, who was certainly going to attempt an exploitation of the situation. Always, the SurGoth was able to prevent me from carrying forth! His goal all along had been the destruction of the OmniArc, and now that I had decided to collapse what little remained of it, he was suddenly invested in preventing me from doing so. This was totally unexpected; the motive for his frenetic resistance to my efforts made no sense. Despite my ability to travel through every stretch of awareness I possessed, I still couldn't fully understand _that I was aware_, or what awareness really meant. But I also recognized that the SurGoth was challenged by the same existential uncertainty, his awareness continually suspended by his actions.

"«_You shall not! I will not permit youzz to dezztroy what izz mine! It izz mine to play with, the way that I want to play with it. I am the chooser of itzz obliteration, not you!_»" his voice sounded inside of me. I wanted to hide from that voice, to conceal myself from the monstrous conceit that I was contemplating. I was going to destroy both Logorinths, leaving only the Mid-Light, based on the premise that something or someone else would come along and 'restart' everything. Yet, I didn't know who or what that would be. Skuld had told me that I would have to destroy everything to save everything.

Could this be what she meant?

I had to force the sinister presence of the SurGoth out of me before I could do what Skuld had instructed.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

ETERNITY:

"What in the Bless are we doing here?" Mara shouted, her voice almost muffled into silence because this play was so empty. There was nothing, save for what looked like a constellation of extremely faint stars and an oppressive air. She had been in the QuadNode just a moment earlier, listening to a crazily consternated Skuld explaining that she had found Keiichi and...Belldandy! Her little sister also claimed that Peorth had made some kind of Runic Mandala and had split the scene. She had lingered in the QuadNode, muddling through a bangin' headache that felt like a 5am acid comedown soundtrack du jour.

"Why does fun have be so painful sometimes?" she thought as she struggled with the leftovers from the combination of Osaka Oni Brand shochu, Ol' Kentucky Demon whiskey, and a board game whose name she'd already forgotten. Skuld and Megumi had been chatterboxing like neighborhood gossips, clearly in emotional hyperdrive. Then she had stumbled into Peorth's mandala, wondering what the fuck the Goddess of the Eternity Rune was up to...

...and now she was here, but here looked like nowhere she'd ever been. A Stygian void whose haunting stillness _shouted_ volumes of unrestrained deprivation and isolation. A sense of dread filled her, a moving smoke-thistle of disorientation that infiltrated her thoughts and threatened to collapse her reason.

Nearby, she was surprised to see Peorth, who was observing her with an intensity of attention. Peorth seemed quite different than before; she didn't seem to be in the blissed-out space cadet mode she had been in for the past week or so. Yet, everything was so unerringly discordant: this place wasn't a place at all. Mara felt a sense of daunting awe, as if it seemed that she was inside of a _thing_, rather than a place. It was like the White Room torture device used on Earthrealm mortals in the past; designed to sever mind and matter and basically drive the cursed mortal insane.

"Ah, succès fou!!! I see you've arrived safely. I'm so glad to see you, Mara. This place of noir... it really is creepy, is it not? Quite unsettling and spooky, just like a Demoness Lair," Peorth commented.

"Peorth? What are you doing here? What am _I doing here_? What _is_ here?" Mara asked with a scowl. As soon as she spied her, she knew that this was Peorth's doing. But what seemed more than a little unsettling was that Peorth _shouldn't_ have been able to transport her in a mandala, to a place unawares, with no exit mandala in sight. She had simply stepped in the middle of the complex pattern of roses...and was here. There was no means of returning. This was almost like the mandala they had found in Cevn's bedroom; a one-way mandala. Could Peorth be someone other than what she claimed to be?

"Mara, you have a certain je ne sais quoi...I knew that your curiosity would get the best of you. This is why I left the Blossoming Mandala of Eternity active in the QuadNode. Using the same mandala that brought me here, it was intended to take you here as well. So here we are, at the Eternity," Peorth explained.

"Peorth, if this is one your pranks, I'll let you know that I am _very unimpressed_! I'm a Senior First Class Demoness with enough Divine firepower to fry your...er, did you just say that this is the _Eternity_?" Mara was angry to the point of making threats; but her combative nature seemed to dry up when Peorth had mentioned Eternity. Having Urd, Belldandy and Skuld as sisters made for some confusing discussions about the mechanics of Time, but this was beyond anything she had discussed with her sisters. Then she remembered something about Peorth having a special role in Time, as integral in certain ways as that of the Norns.

"Mon gamine daemon, this is not the time to be arguing or playing about. We are here because I was given a Revelation, a Runic Revelation that was assigned to me by another Peorth, a Goddess who called herself Peorth of Nulln. There are complex affairs afoot, and we have are part of the élan vital that will be needed to resuscitate the Eternity. The Goddess of Nulln informed me that we are to wait here for the Nine and the Future. To your eyes, I appeared distracted and childish. But this was a folie à labor...a craziness brought on by my task to create an extremely difficult mandala. I've never created a Mandala of Eternity before; I had to consult my Rune several times before I..."

"Peorth, do you know how fucked up that sounds? Revelations? A Peorth from some God's Realm called Nulln? The Nine and the Future? Fixing Eternity? How is any of this supposed to make sense?" Mara interrupted.

"My sisters and I have been working our asses off like crazy to try and figure out what made that Gate so unique! I've pulled out my hair several times, I swear, trying to stabilize that fucking Gate thing so we can determine why it's so goofed up. Even worse, we've all been banging our heads against each other trying to reactivate that whacked mandala we found in Cevn's room. Meanwhile, you were acting like a GodKid, or even more distastefully, a Goddess drunk with puppy love. What did you do, sneak a peek at Keiichi while he was in the furo? Now, you're trying to sell me some bullshit line about your idea that _another_ Peorth gave you a..."

Mara's thoughts traveled far away from her words as she remembered the outrageous scene at the wedding. The _other_ Mara that she had seen in the back of the church. This was all sounding a little too blessedly strange for her! She recalled how she and Belldandy had been swifted away to the 'Goofy Realm', as they later joked about it. An alternative Earthrealm where Belldandy, Urd and Skuld were Demonesses who had gone rogue. Where she had a Goddess counterpart named Mara with a crush on Keiichi and hormones to match...hormones that caused her to wind up sleeping with that Earthrealm's Keiichi. Obviously, she could reason that there were other realities, perhaps other stretches of the OmniArc that were somehow interlaced with her existence. Isilblius claimed to have sent the Goddesses and the mortals into the Future and the Past, and from what she gathered later from Belldandy, both realities were abstractions; having little to do with the 'real' TimeStream of the Earthrealm. Now Peorth was claiming to have been 'visited' by another Peorth? The only thing she knew for certain was that her headache was getting worse by the minute!

"Er, did you say that there was another Peorth that told you all of this?" Mara asked hesitantly.

"Oui oui oui!" Peorth said, nodding her head enthusiastically.

"This is completely insane, even for you! Belldandy may be a total ditz, but this is off the map compared to her level of naifness. You're saying that _you had a revelation that told you to come here_? With me? Even worse, you're saying that this is _Eternity_. If this is Eternity, then it doesn't look like much to me!"

"Mara, Eternity has been damaged, perhaps destroyed," Peorth started to explain.

"Oh..my..Darkness!" Mara gasped. She actuated all of her formidable Demoness senses to try and discern the Chronometric and other higher dimensions of this place. Her irritation at Peorth was replaced by a cloying sensation in her throat as she sensed that the entire Metanative energy of this place was completely rigor mortis. There was no Ultimate Force, no Ixodenum energies, no quantum signatures of energy, wave or matter...it was simply _empty_.

There was nothing, not even a Nothing that could be used to define a something.

She was sickened, her Soul crushed down into a ball of despondency; just as bad as when Isilblius had left her to die at the Soul-devouring knife-appendages of the SpiderDemons. Cevn had saved her, changing her into a Demoness with a half-Goddess Soul. She still had lingering urges to murder him for that, but then all her anger had been devoured by the pitiful scene of Urd poisoning him, trying to prevent Isilblius from re-entering their realm.

Peorth had a point. She could argue all day with jejune and barren speculations, hovering interpretations about the truth of Peorth's statement...or she could simply take a look around and see that all of reality had been profaned. Profaned, not in the sense that a Demon would profane it with strife, mischief, grief and pranking; but profaned because it was a dying thing, filled with the agony of Souls devouring Souls. No Demon, not even His Noir Majesty, would enact such a monstrous conceit. The Rules wouldn't allow it. But she couldn't deny the evidence of her Demonic senses. She felt deserted and frightened, stranded amidst an emptiness of answers or assurances.

_That fucking Isilblius had done this!!! The Blessed shitbag had destroyed all of Time, Space, and Souls. The Rules weren't even in effect, which meant that he had even destroyed the Ultimate Force.  
_

Mara wanted to scream.

"Even though I didn't have the Revelation personally, I was able to recognize the source rather quickly. Being a Goddess of the Rune has certain affinities to being a Norn; we Goddesses of the Rune have specific capabilities which other Goddesses are not gifted with. A significant ability attending my Rune is the capability to see Eternity in a unique way. While many view eternity as an expanse of Time, I am able to see it as an organization of possibilities. One of the links that twine Past, Present and Future is Possibility; which serves to moderate the formation of order versus chaos. The other link is Chaos, which complements Possibility by creating an index of uncertainties. The Peorth who shared this Revelation with me was almost Five Decas older than me. In my brief time with her, I had a sensing that she was a 'future' version of me. But she _wasn't_ me as well; at least I hope not. She was too disciplined and serious, totally lacking my bon vivant outlook on life. Her life seemed to be shadowed, as if she had endured great losses in her lifetime. She desperately communicated this Revelation to me, and I communed with my Rune, Peorth, to ensure the truth of it. You and I, my Demoness friend, are needed to reconstruct a new reality."

"I thought the old reality was just doin' fine," Mara commented derisively, a little bit put off by Peorth calling her "my Demoness friend" as well.

"Quelle horreur! With your Dark Lord and our Lord both immobilized, as still as ruined cities in the wake of a nuclear war, are you so insouciant that you presume to think everything is doing fine?" Peorth argued in an exasperated voice. Mara had rarely seen the happy-go-lucky Goddess so frustrated or daunted. For a moment, she flashed upon a sense of empathy; if Peorth knew the true extent of the devastation visited on reality as a result of the 'Revelation' she had been given, she must be terribly upset. Bad news tends to knock on the door of the Soul much harder than good news.

"I know it wasn't your fault that you unleashed this mauvais d'haine being of evil, but ironically, it has fallen to you to be part of the resolution," Peorth noted. "Je t'aime absolument les gauloise...if my counterpart was correct, then this will be the most important action of your life!"

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

THE NEUTRAL ZONE:

"«_What are you doingzz!_»" the SurGoth screamed in wary outrage as I withdrew the full copy of the Enigma Book out of a pocket of my jacket. Yes, just like Keiichi, I was wearing one of those stupid dress-up dinner jackets suits that one traditionally wears to a wedding. I was betwixt amusement and irritation when I realized that I hadn't manifested a different set of clothes after I had been 'converted' into some kind of incorporeal form when I shot myself in the head back on the nothing-planet that was supposedly the Earthrealm. I was presently wearing a dress suit, riddled with holes and burns and blood stains...

Earlier, the SurGoth had torn itself out of me, no double enjoying the pain I felt as it rippled out of my physical manifest. Now it was time to _force_ it out of me. Perhaps the process might be less agonizing now that it was in its true form, a cadaverous horror of a shade, rather than a physical manifest of matter that would try and chew its way through my being.

"«_How could you make that foul thing appear out of nowherezz? That book izz an abomination in your handzz! You should not even have the cursed thing, because I destroyed it. I wrote it so that that fool Demonezz would make seek to free me from the oblivions the Lordzz put me in. It izz not to be here! It was destroyed along with all the otherzz!_»" the SurGoth threatened.

"You mean this Enigma Book?" I replied, waving the large tome from side-to-side. "Making this appear is just a trick I learned from Skuld. She uses it all the time to bring out Skuld bombs and Skuldtech items inside of her blouse or jacket. After seeing her do it for a couple years, I figured that I'd try and do it. Guess what? It works! Good thing I took this book with me when I went to Vanagdrasil. I've had it all this time. By the way, why do you keep telling me that you wrote this book? You and I both know that the author of this book hasn't read it."

"«_That izz a lie! I crafted it as a compilation of deceitzz, so that each of youzz would be confuzzed enough to believe it to be your handiworkzz. In your handzz, it izz a worthless pile of ideazz. A defilement._»"

"I highly doubt that you're being truthful with me, SurGoth wraith. If you wrote the Enigma Book as you claim, then you know that only certain persons can physically touch this book. Myself, the Norns, the two Lords, Mara, Peorth and Keiichi. Yet, none of whom are here, except for me and you. Obviously you can touch the book, since it would be nonsense to assume that you authored such a book without any physical contact with it. Since you have again decided to hide yourself inside of me, what would happen if I held the book against my body?"

"«_Nooooo! Thizz is wrong! You cannot harm me with thizz book. You will only harm yourself, because you have no powerzz. You are a worthlezz!_»"

"This is rather surprising," I interjected. "It seems that you almost are afraid of being in contact with this book. Could it be that _you_ cannot touch it, or be touched by it? Say what you might...I feel that the Enigma Book was crafted with the heartspan of humility and love, and forged with the cherishing of an ornamental epistemology. In your hands, it truly is a tome of deception and illusions. You are aware that once the Enigma Book is in my hands, it repels all those who try to take it away. I'm willing to risk finding out if there is still a consequence of creation to the Enigma in this Book."

Grasping the Enigma Book, I hugged it tight to my chest. As I expected, the SurGoth wraith went into apeshit mode and started trying to fry my consciousness with some deftly conceived attempts to control my will. I was in a middle of a swarm of stinging hornets, then whisked into the barren heat of a burning forest, and finally buried alive as a tragic witness to my own death. All of these were fourth-dimension dreams; bearing little or no cast upon what was happening _now_. I challenged myself to stay in the moment, be in the moment, for all else is superficial, illusory and impossible.

Be the life, not the mind. Definitely not the SurGoth's mind. The SurGoth may believe he is prepotency made manifest, but the goal I was striving towards would shift him off of his little self-made pedestal.

I focused my attention away from the SurGoth; discovering by happenstance a critical proposition that brought Time itself into dubiety. The SurGoth...for I could no longer consider him as Isilblius...had made an attempt to destroy Time by forcing it to collapse upon itself, using the same modus that he had employed in every aspect of his devious ploy. His pretext was that he had caused Time to consume itself. Yet, Time is based on mutability: the assurance that all that occurs within its expanse is transient and impermanent. But when one considers _all of Time_, there are always two moments or 'days' in which Time is eternal: the first day and the last day. Everything between those two days can come and go, be plastered into cakes of Past, Present or Future. So how could the SurGoth have destroyed Time? The TimeSphere was a contrivance of many TimeWebs, each TimeWeb a 'net' of TimeStreams. If the TimeSphere was a ruination of collapsed sequences of Time and Space, then what would happen to those 'eternal' moments?

While I was busy contemplating why reality seemed to have a duress against itself, the SurGoth streamed out through my back, burning me with the comet-fire haste of his rapid escape. He began to circle around me in a blur, as if he was trying to whirlwind me into further confusion...

"«_You cannot succeedzz! You are contemptible because you seekzz to accomplish that which izz impossible. Your feeble attempt is doomed! You shall not accomplish that which you wishzz, because you feel remorsezz from your lossezz! Your motivezz are impure, selfish and fraught with failure. _-You-_ are the ultimate failure, and your heart will never find restzz, knowing the extent of your inadequacyzz. I will not allow you to feel ease in the midst of my triumphzz! You will beg for the releasezz of death, and I will deny you thesezz!_»"

He threatened, he taunted, he scorned, he mocked me. He showed me how I had been given all of life's opportunities, and yet at the end, I had constantly failed myself. Had failed everyone around me by virtue of my frailties: drug addiction, depression, fear of women, fear of success, cowardice and avoidance of love.

Despite my sense of shame and defeat, I sensed a lingering connection again with UF. It was weakened severely, but adrift as I was in the fluidity of my uncertainty, a slight significance of confidence seemed to prompt me towards trust. Could it be true, could I believe that the UF would allow me this final attempt? I had to empty myself of my fears; remembering that those who seek a result by false humility would be humbled. I had fought too hard for this. I had fought against every defect of my character, each day since I got clean from drugs. Even harder once I had been brought into Japan.

I had to be insane, for the reality of my life was that a group of manga characters had become the only family I ever had. I had even been waylaid by love during those past two years; not just my love for Urd, but the love I had for every one of them. Fictional characters...yet they had let me _belong_ in their shared love, despite my many flaws. Was I the fictional character in all of the past two years? In periods of transient sorrows, they...my 'love tribe'...had showered me with praise, love, kisses, smiles, self-confidence and a sense of endearment. They were the pulse of perfection, the brilliance of light that cleansed my damaged Soul.

The Spirit of Love cannot be harnessed by want, sacrifice, ambition or knowledge...in fact, those are the very actions that alienate one from experiencing the truest essence of Love. I had to burn away my ambitions and attachments to what I must do. I could only accomplish this if I could keep focused on giving all of my love to Love.

For a moment, nothing happened...but then my Soul seemed to vibrate as I connected with familiar energies; the same energies the UF allowed me to harness during my struggle to recreate the Multiverse after the SurGoth had destroyed parts of it the first time. The diminished state of the Ultimate Force was actually an asset in this setting, as it allowed me to reduce the two Logorinths by compressing them. I was destroying creation, and it was extremely painful to be the murderer of the very garden of living potentials. I knew that I had to destroy the OmniArc before it destroyed itself. I was glutted with the impressions of those whose realities and hopes I was eclipsing...

_Keiichi had just given Belldandy a wedding ring...and I collapsed that TimeStream._

_A God named Keiichi had just taken his courage and regained his ambition, willing to restore life to a mortal Belldandy...and all I could do was encourage him with a thoughtcast as I collapsed all the dimensions of Space and Time around him, sundering the Metanative force that created cohesion in his reality._

_Keiichi of Trondheim had just reunited with his mortal wife Belldandy, and the moment was forever stilled as I snapped the TimeStream into fragments, compacting them._

_Belldandy of Nulln was on an airplane over the Mediterranean Sea, arguing with her parents and Four Decas of insanity, when I shunted all light away from the sky, sapping every bit of energy so I could bear down on the rapidly shrinking remains of the OmniArc._

...Possessed of a poverty of energy and knowledge, I expended all of it by forcing a pulverulence of the two Logorinths into a ball a half-meter wide. The SurGoth fought with me the entire time, trying to hinder my purposeful vocation, astounded that I could be crumbling Yggdrasil and Vanagdrasil like crushed ocean salt. In the briefness between thoughts, the UF had flowed into me as I scorched down my predispositions and engaged myself in the reprehensible act of destroying the domain of all beings. I fought back heartbreak as I shaped the doomed remnants of the Logorinths into a seamed approximation of a baseball and volleyball, in honor of Tomohisa and a dead mortal named Belldandy from a land called Thera. A blue and red glowing shatter that looked like a wad of color-reflective tinfoil. The only light, besides the Mid-Light. The most precious pearl that ever would exist.

The SurGoth was sickly green-yellow, like glowing vomit. I didn't feel like I was glowing at all, as I had certainly earned damnation for doing this!

Why must the most devout visions be the most dangerous of visions?

Misery encompassed my heart. I was already miserable, a failure...and with the expansion of the UF powers I was able to tap into, the misery I sensed in myself increased proportionately. I had sweated out 237 trillion years rebuilding the Multiverses when the SurGoth had initially unleashed his wrath. Then the Seven had each faced trials of love from four different focuses of reality...had emerged triumphant by virtue of their ability to see the truth within the illusion. Keiichi, who loved Belldandy...had to release that love for one perfect moment to grant Sora Hasegawa's wish. Mara had to make love with Keiichi so that she could free her and Belldandy, and set the young Goddess Mara in that dimension on a path to love. Urd and Skuld had to navigate the impossible fictions of a manga-inspired reality and cure an insolvable love by making three anime characters fall in love with an idiot. Natsumi and Miyuki had to endure a jingoist war-bent Japan, protecting a militaristic culture they despised, and Natsumi had to learn to love again by watching the man she loved die so that she could live.

All of this, while I found a way to shield the two Lords and the Little Boy Who was Death so the SurGoth wraith in the form of Isilblius couldn't destroy Them utterly. I didn't mean to task my friends with such difficult trials, but the SurGoth had a hand in the chaos as well. Yet, each of the Seven had reopened frontiers of possibilities and potentialities within themselves. They found the real, honest love in themselves; which would allow them to make every act of creation a worshipping of Love. In this stead, they had sealed the OmniArc with beauty.

Now, I had deliberately fucked it up, nearly completing what the SurGoth had started.

"«_You mortal bazztard! You destroyed it!!! You destroyed it, you disgusting lost Soul of a mortal!»" _the SurGoth screamed. _"«It wazz _-mine-_ to destroyzz! I am the harbinger of destructionzz, not you! Thizz was to be my crowning achievement! How darezz you steal from me what izz minezz!_»"

"SurGoth, all of reality is a symbol, as you know," I argued, trying to hide away my self-loathing. "But this is the OmniArc; the slight bit of it which remains after your sweep of destruction. Because of your greatness, I freely give it to you to do with as you wish. My gift to you, because you are indeed great and honorable, and I beg leave for your mercy."

The SurGoth looked at me with a cunning expression of delight, and grabbed the faintly-glowing globe out of my hands.

"«_I've won! At last, the Multiverse...the OmniArc...all of it izz destroyed! In my own handzz lies the final ebb of the two Logorinthzz. No more Godzz. No more Demonzz. No more mortalzz!_»" he shouted with glees, greedily smothering the highly-condensed OmniArc with his foul touch.

"«_Even more satisfying izz that I made you kill them, all the beingzz that were still alive. All your preciouzz friendzz and familyzz. You slayed them, because you were commanded by me, you were defeated by the truth. I am the superior presence, you are the inferior. Now, my pleasure will be completezz! With a final exertion of my will, I shall crumple this sphere...and put an end to all beingszz!_»"

I hated myself with every iota of my being for hastening the destruction of a universal garden of life. But I hated the SurGoth even more...

With a swift motion, I reached out and stole the sphere from him. He was so consumed by a wrathful destructive lust, he didn't even have time to react. He tried to grab it back from me...and I saw the God Keiichi one more time, not knowing if he was real or just a figment of my imagination. It didn't matter anymore, because Time was now hooked rays of random chronological amorphisms. He wanted to set matters to rights in his Therarealm. I knew in an instant that the SurGoth had attacked him, just like it had attacked Belldandy in the Japan I belonged to. But it had attacked him, and somehow he repulsed it; so it had killed the Belldandy who he had been assigned to grant a wish to. It had killed his heart, just like it had killed mine. I sent him a flare of Metanative energy, hoping it was enough to help him complete his task. Assuming that someone would be able to reconstruct this OmniArc and give him the chance.

"Your entire purpose in existing...has been to destroy all life. A consuming goal to banish all beauty and love, to allow reality itself to be cannibalized by destruction. Ever since I began to recover my life, my silent purpose has been to achieve the virtuous life. I've retained the courage to withstand the ridicule of those who are doers, who feel that life solely rests upon action and not intents. Such as these will only shallowly experience the noetic; they will overlook the deeper parts of spirit that infuse the _true_ reality.

"With this resoluteness, I can face failure and I can face success, because neither is important. What is important is the abiding of love. There is no victory in..snff..what I am about to do. Neither for you, or for..snff..me. I will forever hate myself, but this is a small price to pay for what I am about to do. You have filled yourself with empty dreams, empty because you have destroyed the dreams of every dreamer who ever lived. I am now going to destroy your goal...your dream...your very sense of purpose. By doing _this_!"

Marshalling all of the remaining UF energy within me, I pressed down on the sphere...the final essence of the OmniArc...and felt it fracturing. Cracks formed in the energy patterns, widening and staggering as I shattered it into cosmic debris. The detritus of all reality, now blasted into dust.

"«_NOOOOOOooooOOOOOoooo!!!_»" the SurGoth screamed...and then attacked me with murderous intent. I had destroyed the OmniArc. My self-horror was shunted aside by his aggressions. I had deprived the SurGoth of his dream and purpose. I had dared to hope that this act would weaken his will considerably. Yet, he had more than enough rage inside of him to try and tear apart my weakening Soul. I felt an onerous slice of sinister intent 'choking' me, peeling away my individuality from my Soul with scalpel-like precision. A stranger in a strange land, trying to halt my breath to stop the heartbeat of my innermost self. I began to feel a blurring between myself and SurGoth; uncertain of where my identity ended and his began. Why the hell did Skuld tell me that I had to do this? Now I was going to die, the result of one more failure in my life...

_"At the end of Time, all truths are channeled into realities, all fictions are streamed into creativities, all loves...well, I can't tell you what happens to them. You'll just have to find out!"_ I remembered, the words Skuld had told me.

What was there to find out? What could I possibly discover at this point? I had killed a universe to piss off a being whose whole raison d'être, as Peorth would say, was to destroy the universe. He was the Anti-Life being...and I had become no different than him in my effort to thwart him from completing his evil design.

Where is the love in _that_?

Urd was lost to me, a nevermore of passioned possibilities. So no love there. Everyone that I had ever known was either dead by my hand, or by the predations of the SurGoth. The Four, plus Peorth, had journeyed into the Soul Mirrors to correct this mess. Obviously, it wasn't corrected. The only other beings in existence were the SurGoth and the Reaper Kid, who was back in the Mid-Light...

As soon as I remembered the Reaper Kid, the SurGoth broke off his attack. Turning tail, he projected himself into a blur of light, streaking towards the Mid-Light. I instantly intuited his plan; he was going to destroy the Mid-Light Realm. The only place in all of existence with an intact computer network and a Sovereign...

"Oh no you don't!" I shouted, giving chase and capturing him. As soon as I restrained him, we began our fight anew, sparring with energy and a kind of 'spiritual kung-fu'. A combat of wills, of intentions. The SurGoth was trying to convince me that _I was evil_ to the same degree he was. He posited that I was the reason that humanity was murderous. That I was the example of 'primitive' devolved sentience; only capable of self-defeat, self-destruction and self-denial. He demanded that I accept my fate: a being that was unworthy of love of life.

"«_You are the lowest of the lowzz. Reviewing your miserable life, you lived as an addict, who survived in self-imposed in squalor and killed those around you. Depressed, hallucinatory, immoral and uncaring. Unable to contribute even the slightest goodnezz to your society. You cannot even flee yourself, your memoriezz. You were hated by the Goddessezz and the mortalzz in your life. There izz nothing in you that can redeem itself to be good. You are so inferior...you cannot even contemplate the mentality or spiritzz of the superiors. This is why they alllz chose to spurn you; you were left behind by thozze who you thought loved you, so that your Soul would diezz all alone on Planet Lost. I destroyed the Earthzz, and you were doomed to solitude _-because they didn't care shitzz about you-_._»"

His mention of Planet Lost returned me to an eternity of weariness; and within that part of my life, I remembered how my thoughts were constantly haunted by why the Goddesses had abandoned me on a doomed Earth. But the SurGoth had just claimed responsibility for the flaring of the Sun which incinerated the Earthrealm. For all those millennia, I was almost certain that it was he who had touched the live-giving Sun with a finger of death. Now I knew the fate of 'that' Earth. The SurGoth was a being of closure, destroying all beginnings and endings.

I was tearing apart at the seams...why did I seem to have so many lives wrapped up into one confused consciousness?

Take the defensive and shift it into offense. Even if no one loved me, or that I was so jaded into reprobation and guilt that I had become unlovable to all...I still had to love. I still desired to do the right thing, as was demanded by all who are granted the grace of life. He can say whatever the fuck he wants, and I will still demand love of myself. Even if it was love enough to destroy a universe, I would do it!

All the fruition of learning can sometimes accumulate into wisdom, but the hearing of single word by an open heart could ignite a flame that could never be sparked by knowledge. How many lives had been profoundly touched in this manner by a single sentence? Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can potentially transform me. Renew me into a higher plane of existence. Disciplined motivation, seeking the answers in meditation, praying to anyone who would listen. This is what created my opportunity for a wish. A wish that was so insane, Urd had looked at me as if I was utterly nutterly mad in the mind. But I remembered that memory is a chamber where Soul and wisdom can be joined. The fund of my consciousness exists in my heart...not in what the SurGoth was telling me. The SurGoth was full of shit!

The deepmost fund of my heart was where the love is. Not the romantic, companionate, philosophical love. But the love transcendent -- the love of transpersonal, transexperiential, transformative. The love that had allowed me to tell myself that I am _not_ the sum of my failures alone. The love that binds itself to Being.

The Ultimate Force was now inside of me. It must have trusted me, perhaps trusting that the fluid omniscience exists eternally in the heart. I had destroyed a universe out of love, so that I could defeat its destroyer. If nothing could be thought of as incredible, doesn't this imply that _everything could be thought of as incredible_?

Fuck it! I was going to be the Balance!

"You are blind, SurGoth. I have learned that Love is a spirit, and it must be allowed expression in every action I undertake, even in the stillness of my inactions. Belldandy taught me that true spirituality is harmless, Skuld taught me that true spirituality moves within each breathe of life that attaches Now to the Yet-to-Come. Urd taught me that true spirituality is to remain undistracted. I learned from Keiichi, Megumi and the other mortals who realmed my life with fulfillment and acceptance as well. Together they guided me, teaching me that true spirituality moves through grace: that it is best expressed when loving acts are accomplished by gratitude made visible. For myself, I have discovered that spiritual truth arises when that process of loving service…of _giving_…becomes one's nature, rather than one's actions. I learned that I'm not me, that void is a not, that love will burn inside of me if I wish it to. From the Ultimate Force, I now know that all of it...love, spirit and beauty...can be reconciled by Balance."

"«_Idle, meaninglezz charmzz of speculation and bullshitzz!_»" the SurGoth said. "«_The truth of thizz izz that you and I have an eternity to share. I will repose in the comfort of my victory, you will suffer in the discomfort of your flaws. Forever, you and I will recreate each other! We are one, and we shall be with each other, of each other, within each other. I shall recreate you in my mind, and you shall recreate me in yourzz! We will never evolve, but we will be joined in hatredzz of each other. You will worship me as the true expression of baneful dread, as I corrupt you into a pure sinister evilzz! You will become me! You _-already are me-_!!! _»"

My Soul was mutilated by all that had passed. Trillions of years, I had been fighting this SurGoth, who was opposed to the very idea of life. I remembered that Skuld had written something at the end of the Enigma Book; words that I was to say to the SurGoth. I wondered why she had to write them down for me, instead of saying them herself.

With a damned blight of my heart, I realized that she had written them because she knew that she would never be able to say them. Because she was dead, having given herself up in yet another dimension, to try and save reality. It was because of her that I had the three computer networks inside of me. She had sacrificed herself to that her children could survive. One more crime that this SurGoth wraith would have to answer to.

Could it be that the children I had met earlier...could they be the ones to cast glissando and retune this destroyed realm?

It was perfect.

All of them were dead, but the SurGoth and I were _here_, in the 'Neutral Zone'...neither alive or dead. If I never left here, then I had to make sure that the SurGoth would never leave here either. Belldandy of Nulln had seen inside my kokoro, and had told me that she had sensed that I wasn't just going to fight Isilblius. She had told the others that I was going to annihilate Isilblius. Well, Isilblius was a young Demon, floating dead a few hundred meters in the afar. He was already gone, dead as the rest of the universe.

I had already defeated the SurGoth by destroying the OmniArc, depriving him of his goal and joy.

I had defeated myself...in the best possible manner. I had defeated my fears, my addictions, my depressions, my illusions. All of my life had gathered into this endpoint.

The Enigma Book was an unwritten mystery play. I knew now that part of this struggle between the SurGoth and I was over the authorship of the Enigma Book…because there were only two beings that could finish it. The one who survived would write it unto an ending. And I had it in my possession.

I was grateful for what has been given to me, grateful for what I am about to give up.

"SurGoth, you will never understand the dignity of life. People labor every day to raise their children, to bring happiness to themselves and others. The Gods and Demons labor to evoke the higher goodness in humanity...in every sentient mortal species. They exist in the realm of possibilities rendered _into realities_. Within the jaws of each day's incidental unfairness, mortals and Gods strive...and they are able to snatch away triumph from defeat through their humility. In the simplest acts of gratitude and giving, poetic veils are pulled aside to reveal the open honest hearts of love. But you will never pay heed to any of this. You will never look at a sunrise and feel drunk with love for the Soul. There is no meaning you can sense, it means nothing to you to be blessed for the very joy of Life. You destroyed everything, but you did not destroy humility. The humility of serenity, honored by this principle: that all who seek goodness in their lives...do so because they have already found goodness in themselves. It's okay to be lost, for love will always find those who are lost and will lift them up," I said, speaking my deepest kokoro. I only wished Urd was here to witness this, so that I could tell her the other reckoning of my kokoro...how much I loved her and would have treasured her.

"«_Liezz! There izz no Love, for I have destroyed it!_»"

"I have found my purpose, within the humility of love. My existence is at an end; you can say that all of life and love is dead...but it won't mean shit, because I'm going to take your ass on a one-way trip to oblivion! Your time is at an end, SurGoth! For you, there is a message in this book. From all of us to you. You may have killed each of them, but they still have a final testament for you, and I'm going to tell you exactly how they feel about you. Wanna know what it says?"

"«_There izz no purpose! The only message I recognize is cessationzz and extinctionzz..._»"

"Our message to you is this:

_"GO...FUCK...YOURSELF!!!"_

I shouted out the written words as I threw the Enigma Book at the SurGoth. Skuld would never say those words, as she gave her life to preserve the Children. But I would make sure her words were heard. Belldandy had forgiven Isilblius, but there was no forgiveness for the SurGoth. I could sense it in her heart, the final moment when she and Keiichi were reunited. Urd had no love for the SurGoth, and Keiichi hated him as much as I did. I just hoped that I would merit forgiveness for destroying the OmniArc. Assuming that anyone would exist that could offer such a remission on my behalf.

There was no celestial choir bursting into triumphant hymn-song, no shouts of rejoicing, no thundering clash of trumpets or swords. There was nothing except an evil being screaming as the Enigma Book slammed into his skeletal geistkrank, blasting into his energy manifest, square in the chest.

Tore _through_ his chest...

The Enigma Book was the distillation of thought, of love, of spiritual beauty and joy. I had tried to seam each page with the best of the Ultimate Force. It was the ultimate weapon to destroy the Ultimate Demon. It wasn't a book, although I had authored it as such. It was an iconic holon, a nameless name, an incomplete work with an ending. A Magnum Mysterium. A great unsolved mystery. An elixir of holiness, given with love, cherished by trust, a collation of the wisdom of the Gods and Demons and mortals. It was so much more...

I remembered the most horrid of memories; arising from the dead back on the temple grounds...Urd's eyes forever sealed with lifeless glaze, a hole blown clean through her chest by this SurGoth wraith. Now, I watched with grim satisfaction as the evil fatality that the SurGoth had paid upon my beloved Urd was redeemed...as the Enigma Book had burned through the center of his ethereal manifest. The hole in his chest was expanding outwards, slowly consuming him. The SurGoth fixed me with an expression of sheer piercing hatred; but in his eyes, I could see only fear and shock. The SurGoth had wanted to kill me, had arranged for the OmniArc, the TimeSphere and the Mid-Light Souls to consume themselves...it was only fitting that the Enigma Book had caused him to consume himself. I sensed that his demise was being aided, as he was being consumed by his own hatred.

A moment's wailing, screaming, raging, howling.

It was accomplished: the SurGoth was gone. Forever. Finally, a forever that meant something, here at this apex of destruction.

With the demise of the SurGoth, my own demise was imminent. The wish I had made, to become the Balance, had placed me into this contention with the SurGoth, who represented the destruction of Balance. I floated through the void and retrieved the Enigma Book, my companion since the very start of the wish. I knew now that I had been granted my wish to the fullest extent. I had _become_ the Balance. With the SurGoth gone, the Ultimate Force had become the Balancing Force...and I was disappearing into it. Soon, I would no longer be Cevn. I would be Balance.

Isilblius, Mara's Demon child, was dead. The nanites that she had used to form his body were dissipated when the SurGoth wraith had been destroyed. Now, Isilblius remained as a stilled corpse. But there was no Reaper to claim him, no Real Death to welcome him. Since he didn't belong in this zone of void, this "Neutral Zone", I decided to send him to the Mid-Light. If the Multiplicity was somehow activated, and the OmniArc restructured, then the Little Boy Who was Death would need all the help he could get. I now regretted torturing Isilblius during my first encounter with him. Perhaps an eternity as a child, with a best friend who was the Reaper, would be enough to make up for the evil turn forced upon me by the SurGoth's actions. The Little Boy Who was Death would need a younger brother, or perhaps a twin brother. They could become eternal boyish playmates.

It was a time of finishing. Within me, I had three complete templates of the Divine Networks: the Gods Xeomnic Network; the Demon's Mnoexic Network, and the Mid-Light's Oemxnic Network. The building codes to reconstruct the Everything. If I could intermix them with Ultimate Force at the point where it...and I...evolved into the Balancing Force, then it was possible to expand the Expansion. Why not create a supra-infinite OmniArc? I devised an activation encantment that would become a tool for this purpose and wrote it into the Enigma Book, along with the completed templates of the three Networks. My life had been tied to the Enigma Book, but sadly it would become my last testament and statement of philosophy. The justice of literature: with all books, the message within would outlive the author.

I read Skuld's final words to me, the final line in the Enigma Book. The most fitting line that any book could conclude with:

"_Let it be love._"

I knew what she had meant by those words. But now they would never come true, for I was in a place beyond love or hate. Beyond life or death. Beyond Urd. Even empty of love, I could write from the heart. When I was done with all of this, Urd would have her chance with love. I just hoped that whoever she connected hearts with would cherish her for the flawed gem she was, and polish himself to provide her with nothing less than the best love she deserved. Hopefully much more than I could have ever given her...

The Ancient was going to have the surprise of her life when she read this. When I had first warred with the SurGoth, guised as he was in Isilblius, I had attempted to tie the beginning and end of Time together. Instead of Alpha and Omega, I attempted an Alphmega using the TimeWeb. But it wasn't possible, since the three Norns themselves wouldn't survive the blending of Past, Present and Future. Now, with Time in disarray, I could finally gather the shattered glass of all the TimeStreams and weave them into a unity. An indefectible TimeCosm. I was amazed; the meager UF energies should have been depleted long ago, but I was still able to carefully restructure Time and Space. Maybe I already was the Balancing Force. Yet, I could only create potentialities. Balance cannot enact Balance; it could only be a tool for others to use. I would need to build the unification of Time...the Alphmega...into the Enigma Book, so that the _book itself_ would be used as the trigger by the Ancient.

Her Final Duty was going to blow up right into her face. How totally hilarious! The Norn of the Future...was going to be the jumpstart of the beginning of the Past! I hoped she would appreciate the irony in this.

I know this is getting to be too much like the "Read or Die" manga...but what the hell. Hell itself doesn't exist in this reality; because all beings who could possibly conceive of Hell or Heaven were dead. The two Lords were long gone. Doing all of this was so much work, a task that only some hidden reserve of spirit within me could guide me through. All these preparations engaged me for countless multiples of the 237 trillion years I had labored to rebuild the Multiverse, atom-by-wave-by-chrono-by-meta. This truly was a forever, an inexhaustible sequence of epochs. But finally I managed to discover that Soul is not in the eons of Time; the eons of Time were in the Soul.

The Soul of Balance.

Instead of Death and Life triggering an end, they would trigger a beginning of an endless beginning, or a beginning-less end. Eternity would be invoked, because the Instrumentality would become a Multiplicity: a forever-place for the Dead. A place where the Dead and the Living could freely commune.

It would change everything, because Death, Life, Time, Atrophy and Entropy would never again be relevant. Beings would experience Life, experience Death, but the experiences _would be of the same consciousness, with no true difference_. Individuality and Soul would survive both Life and Death.

Urd would no longer be Norn of the Past...she would be free to love any God or mortal she would choose, a love that would last for all Eternity. Belldandy would have Keiichi forever. Skuld would never be the last of the living, and she and Tomohisa would be foreverlove themselves.

"Goodbye, all my loved ones..." I thought as the final wisps of my life were subsumed into the Balancing Force.

Hope is trust in confusion.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --


	138. Pt 138: TimeStand

**Part 138: TimeStand**

ETERNITY:

The lack of coherence within Reality assailed her senses with brutality. All Nine Dimensional levels were barb-wired with sharp inconstancies and absent energies. The Ultimate Force had been seemingly siphoned off and unable to bind them. She reminded herself that Nine Dimensions was a misnomer in a sense; actually there were 387,420,489 discrete and interstitial dimensions, the Nine levels of dimensionality taken to the 9th magnitude. But none of this made a difference, because everything here was void and dead. Someone had promised something, a waiting scratch of time in a place where Time didn't exist, at least in the concrete sense what mortals called the "Fourth Dimension." The rip in the fabric of imagination was so wide, the fabric itself was dissolving.

Released slightly from the burden, Peorth studied the surrounding emptiness. This place was a void within a void, if such a thing could be possible. She didn't quite understand the specifics concerning why Mara had to be here, but the guide voice given to her by the other 'Peorth' was certainly trustworthy, according to her Rune. Her Rune held many shadings of meaning: organization versus chaos; fuck it-all-to-hell craziness; the expanse of possibilities, and the potentialities of reversal. If Belldandy's Time of Present was the axis around which the Past and Future orbited, then her Runic symbol was the ascendant spire that overlooked all of the other Runes. For her Rune was the only one capable of delving into perspectives _beyond_ the encyclopedia of truths revealed by the other Runes.

Why were they here? The shift in scene was quite unsettling; the Revelation she had been given couldn't describe this destination because this aspect of Eternity technically couldn't exist. Nothing could extinguish the integration of Time, Space and Life to the degree she was witnessing. She tried to seek her Rune, to touch it and be comforted...and found that it wasn't even there! What could possibly erase the existence of a Rune, and yet leave her alive and unharmed?

Fortunately, her confusion and Mara's confusion were settling down by degrees. Peorth felt empathy for the Demoness, who was rageful and frightened apace. She had foresight about what she was doing; she had deliberately aimed her arrow at a target, its destination unknown but yet its trajectory willfully launched. Mara, on the other hand, had encountered this situation with complete ignorance; as if she had been walking blindfolded into an archery range and had been struck down by a darting shaft from parts unknown, without warning.

Dealing with Demonesses was difficult and tricky, something Peorth wasn't used to at all. Most of her direct engagements with Demonesses were fleeting exchanges, resolving around her wish-granting work at the Earth Otasuke Office. She was either racing to the Earthrealm to complete a helper-wish request before a Demoness could dispatch an intercept Cursing. Otherwise, she was involved in protracted fieldwork on the Earthrealm designed to frustrate the Demoness Earth Otakirai Office from enacting a subterfuge that would cause an indecisive mortal to helplessly aspire toward Curse instead of Wish.

She still found it quite peculiar that Mara was suddenly revealed to be Urd's twin sister, a fact that was brought to light immediately after Cevn had his 'bewitching' illness. An illness that none of them could fully explain. Being feline in nature; her figurative cat-ears flared forward with the intrigue of this new development regarding Mara at the time. Even more amusing back then was Urd, who had been spouting off some nonsense about how Cevn was the Ultimate Force...

If Mara and Urd were twin sisters, they were fooles of a pair.

She could discern a faint glow against the emptiness, almost gossamer in transience. It resembled one of the sims she had studied in Transcend Inculcation; a simulation that attempted a virtual reality representation of the Mid-Light Realm. One phase of Transcend Inculcation had a focused concentration in the curricula of studies; deliberating upon the theoretical auspices of the Mid-Light Realm. An intensity of research was required, one that would assess a student's speculative abilities, since no God or Demon had been there and returned. What was being examined was the student's response to the hypothetical structure and purpose of the Mid-Light Realm. A bounty of many forms of energy seemed to emanate from the Mid-Light, but even the most learned Proctors and Adepts could only mount hypotheses as approximate explanations. Naturally, the Lord simply noted enigmatically that the "Mid-Light Realm is intentionally concealed".

"Feeling better, Mara?" she asked, shifting her focus from the inexplicable to her companion.

"I feel like shit, which is better than how I felt a little while ago. So what do we do now?" Mara asked. "Did your Rune tell you anything about what is going to happen? Or do we just float here like Oort Cloud planetoids until the non-existent walls do a non-existent cave-in?"

"We could tell jokes," she offered tersely, sensing the latent sarcasm.

"Why do that?" Mara interjected. "This place _is a joke_. It's a totally a dearthy sinkhole of reality! It's so empty, I would give my eye's fangs just to smell an armpit."

"Mara, that's not the kind of image that I would want to dwell upon," she replied. "I would rather smell the fertile aroma of a garden of sweet, delectable roses."

"Oiy! Don't mention roses for a while, okay?" Mara challenged testily. Peorth realized that roses were probably a touchy subject with Mara, since they were the reason why she was scooped out of the QuadNode and brought here.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

In the end, they did tell a few jokes, mostly about Belldandy. Mara's naive younger sister was always a good target for jokes, and since Peorth knew her as a best friend up in Yggdrasil, she was able to share some new anecdotes of goof-ups and artless moves by Belldandy that Mara didn't know about. Stories which usually resulted in Urd getting in trouble, amusingly enough. She could see the glee on Mara's face as she followed each of her little narratives of Belldandy's mishaps and escapades. Mara and she laughed hardest about the incident where Urd snuck out at night to have a make-out session with Troubadour. She and her boyfriend went to a Cathedral of Memories for some 'privacy'...and Belldandy had followed them, deciding to have a peek at her older sister through one of the chancels. Somehow, she set off an alarm and ended up locking Urd and Troubadour in the Cathedral. With their clothes left outside of the building grounds, of course.

With each joke Mara and she traded, Peorth accompanied her tales with imagined mental pictures of Urd and Belldandy getting it from her parents or the Almighty. But there was something really troubling her as well. She could imagine to her heart's delight, and the imaginations would only exist in her mind. In the 'real' world, there was a fourth dimension: the Mental Dimension. As a level of dimensionality, the Mental Dimension was the domain of all thought and imagination. Without it, the upper five Dimensional levels would be incomprehensible. Without it, the physical three Dimensional levels would be bereft of consciousness, as there would be no mental design to control them. No sentient mortals, in other words. In the vacuity of this reality, the Mental Dimensional level, the division of reality that accorded imagination...didn't exist. She couldn't sense the cradling of Mind, except within her own being and presumably Mara as well. But Demonesses were hard to 'read' in terms of how their mental functions operated. The troubling concern pivoting on all of this was how could a mentality of consciousness exist at all in this place? In her and Mara?

A question of existence...

"Y'know, there's something really uncanny about this place, Peorth," Mara noted. "I don't sense _anything_ here, except for me and you. Which is kinda impossible, wouldn't you say?"

"What is so strange about that? You're here and I'm here, so why wouldn't we sense each other?" she noted, wondering what Mara was trying to get at.

"Peorth, think about this for a moment from the perspective of an Earthrealm girl, maybe three or four years old. She looks up and sees that everything above her head is light blue, except for the yellow-orange sun. On a cloudy day, she sees swirls of hair, animals, popcorn and people's faces overhead. She asks her Mother about the things in the blue sky, and her Mother tells her that these are clouds. At this point, she's beginning to experience the separation between _knowing and imagining_ for the first time. Then the next day the sky is clear and sunny. There's no clouds above her; only the sky-blue color she originally saw. The color she had learned that informed her that it was 'sky'. So now she doubts that the clouds exist. And if the clouds don't exist, then she'll have to wonder in her mind about the sky. No clouds...so how can the sky exist?" Mara noted.

"C'est bête noire!!!" she shouted at the full implications of what Mara had discovered filled her with urgent presses of discomfort. The girl couldn't see the clouds, thus to her mind the sky didn't exist. If the sky didn't exist, then the girl who knew of clouds and skies didn't exist either. Following on this, Mara's story of the girl couldn't possibly exist as a mental framework of imagination. Thus she as a Goddess, a being who drew upon energies from all Nine Dimensions...who had just heard a non-existent story...didn't exist either.

"Without the UF, then we shouldn't be able to exist! Without Yggdrasil, I wouldn't be able to maintain my Goddess energies, because their _source_ is from Yggdrasil. Likewise, you wouldn't exist either, because there is no Vanagdrasil for you! I don't understand any of this. In this tableau non vivant, how could we even be alive? Since there are no energies, how could we have even arrived here? At its most basic level, a Mandala is a conduit of Arcanical energies, is it not? Energy gathered at the entry point, an energy that has an exit point. The Mandala of Eternity that I lovingly labored to design couldn't account for this! If all the energy is gone, why are we still beings of energy?"

"Bingo...and we have le winner!" Mara teased her using a fake French inflection, bringing a smile to her face. "Something is keeping us alive, and fully powered up. The breadth of my Demoness energies are available to me, and I bet if I unsealed them, my Demoness force would..."

_**Whoooom!!!**_

She turned towards the sound, shocked that an empty space like this could even conduct audible vibrations. A snap-loud peal of sharp thunder resounded; so loud and instant, Peorth felt as if she had been struck by a sizzling lightning bolt in the atmosphere of a gas giant. The glowing source of the sound resolved itself into some kind of a _ship_; a slender wedge that resembled a glowing sunflower seedpod. But the 'pod' was beyond anything she had encountered. It was totally freaky-styly as far as dimensional mechanics were concerned. Peorth knew that her Goddess senses couldn't measure it; quite possibly because it didn't conform to Time or Space. In this place of abandonment, it's impossible presence sirened loud against the stillness. Piercing the devoid with vibrations and energies...with mysteries. They were now three; her and Mara and this 'it' that had joined them. Hovering nearby, the 'pod' was an indistinct shape that was fading and fluxing in and out of existence.

"Blessed shroom patches of Morpheus! What the fuck is this?! It's _not there_!!!" Mara exclaimed, her voice revealing the shock that seemed to echo the cloying confusion in Peorth's mind.

Absurdly, the ship was constructed out of pure Time!

She and Mara floated closer to each other, almost shoulder-to-shoulder. She could tell that Mara was scared out of her wits, because the vessel had simply streaked out of nowhere until it was about twenty meters away, halting before they even noticed it. Intimidating as this was, the ship had *no* discernable physical-spatial-vibrational properties at all. Peorth was aware of the theoretical concept of Swarp Hypernalities, a possible means to transport a Divine being from one point to another, quite similar to matter teleportation devices that was occasionally technologized by pre Next-Level mortal species. The new expanses that had suddenly appeared in Yggdrasil a few months ago were considered by some to be actual Swarp Hypernalities, but no one knew how they operated.

"M..Mara, are you sensing what I'm sensing? That this 'object' is made entirely of Time...but it is also made of non-Time?" she asked, totally questioning the plausibility of what her Goddess awareness and senses were informing her. Perhaps Mara, as a Demoness, might be able to deny this crazy randomness...

"This is way too impossible! That thing is *fluctuating* Time!" Mara exclaimed. "There's no Past/Present/Future sequences of Time in any attributable or conditional form that I can distinguish. I cannot sense any stability of chronological or chronometric essences at all. There's some kind of chaos involved with it, but it is totally achronical in nature. Chaos without Time? How could that be? This is some kind of Blazin' 'time machine' or 'timeship', but it isn't using Time correctly..."

A portal in the side of the 'TimePod' opened up and six Divine children spilled out, almost as if they had been ejected out of the TimePod.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Mara was grateful she wasn't guzzling any sake, because she would have choked on it. Not just because of the unannounced appearance of the 'TimePod', but from the events that tumbled out of it along with the six Divine kids...

...The bizarre 'TimePod' vehicle started spinning like a whirlpool, while six Divine children fumbled about, clearly disoriented. At first glance, she noticed the telltale energy sigs of four Gods and two Demons. She didn't recognize any of the six juniors. But as they stopped spinning and began to right themselves to some kind of axis of movement, Mara was able to study them more closely.

Of the two Demons, one was a tall boy with a high forehead, wearing glasses low on his nose. His face was narrow, almost equine, with slight cheekbones and a squared chin. Sporting long blonde hair with silver streaks, he wore the bangs thick in front to cover a longish forehead. The Demoness girl was almost waifish, with pink-red hair piled into two ponytails, Sailor-moon style. Her eyes were very alert and devious, however. She had a pixie face, a pointed narrow chin and small mouth, with bright cheeks that dimpled very cutely. Her girlishness reminded Mara of herself when she was maybe Twelve or Thirteen Decas of age. They both had the double "V" slash on their forehead for their Demonic Seals, coincidentally the same as hers.

Of the four Goddesses, the two youngest seemed to suggest a resemblance to Skuld in some sense in their appearance. One had very short brown hair cut into a shag, almost tomboyish in appearance. Her face was rounded, with a short wide nose and tight expressive lips. She almost looked like a little boy, except for the delicacy of her nose and chin, and the soft ridges of her full eyebrows. The other young Goddess had pink hair with red highlights, almost anime-girl style, styled almost like Peorth's except that that it was shoulder length and didn't have the long 'tail' Peorth sported. Her face was even more dainty than the young Demoness girl's; wide brown eyes with a slightly vacuous look, narrow cheeks and a full lower lip. Mara sensed that this Goddess was very faddish, as her appearance seemed to project a subtle vanity.

The other two GodKids almost took her breath away because of their definite resemblance to her family members. The girl Goddess was a near mirror-image of Belldandy, except for having bangs over her forehead, her hair pulled back and tied up, jock-girl style, with one loose bang in front of each ear. She had the same delicate facial features as Belldandy, except for the fact that her eyes were a sea-blue instead of light blue, and her dimpled cheeks made her jawline seem more firm than Belldandy's. The boy was equally remarkable in his resemblance to Keiichi. Shorter than the older girl Goddess, his eyes were brown and deepset, and he sported shaggy straying locks of dark brown hair similar to how Keiichi's hairsytle when she first came to the Earthrealm. But he was more slender and athletic in physical build than Keiichi, and his nose was just a tad more angular.

Six kids, four of which resembled two of her sisters...and each with forms of Divine seals recognizably identical to those of Belldandy, Skuld and herself. The two young Goddesses bearing Skuld's Goddess Seal were barely out of their Tens, the two Demons maybe Thirteen Decas, the boy and girl who looked like young-teen versions of Belldandy and Keiichi were just a Deca or two older than the Demons.

What in the Bless were they doing here?

They were all glancing around, their faces pressured tight with expressions of bewilderment and uncertainty. Just like she and Peorth, they were here, but didn't have the slightest clue about what 'here' was. Peorth had claimed that her mandala had been designed and intended to bring the two of them to Eternity, but Mara was diving further into doubts that this place was Eternity at all. Now, a gaggle of confused juveniles had been brought her just as abruptly as she had. Adding cluelessness to cluelessness, which only strengthened her doubtings. The two DemonKids were staring at her with an intensity of recognition that made her feel uneasy...

"IT'S MOM!!!"

The Demon and Demoness raced towards her in a blur of enthusiasm. Definitely aggressive because of their increase in aura emanations; their Demonic auras had glowered from dark red to bright orange the moment they saw her. Instinctively, Mara encanted a protective sphere around her and Peorth, precautious because it was entirely possible that the pair might be attacking Peorth for some reason. Perhaps this 'Revelation' of Peorth's might make her a target, or they may be attacking her because she was with a Goddess. They were obviously delusional. Certainly they had gone troppo by thinking she was their mother or something to that effect.

The two DemonKids impacted her shield so hard, they rebounded off of it and flew backwards almost a kilometer. Undaunted, they attempted a second approach with the same result. The third time, they conferred momentarily, and then shifted into leviskate mode and skated towards her shield at full speed. Mara shifted her shield properties to allow for a cushion of semi-permeability; otherwise the two would wind up being splashed against her arcane sphere like flies on a windshield. Once again, they bounced off and went dizzily spinning head-over-heels...

"MOM MOM MOM!!!" the Demon girl shrieked as she stabilized into a hover. She was the one with the pink-red hair and narrow cunning eyes, with two long ponytails...which were currently dancing around her head like angry cobras.

"It's _us_!!! Sygyn and Falcyn! What the Bless is up with you?" the Demon girl confronted her with rapid-fire hysterics. "Don't you recognize your own daughter and son? Where in the Dark One's name are we? Why are you here, instead of at Hild's Black Palace? Why won't you let us near you! What in the fuck is going on here, Mom?"

Mara was unsettled by the idea that these two DemonKids were fixated with the distinct impression that she was their Mother. The six juveniles had been conveyed here by some weirdass vehicle that did and didn't exist, and then had been spit out into an emptiness devoid of any energy or dimensionality properties. Since-wise, it might be possible that they had simply snapped.

Gone cuckoo, flew the coop, burnt the attic, flipped the lid, forgotten how to wear their heads...

The Demon girl seemed more than just a little whacky; she was behaving in a typical teenage Demoness manner...totally self-obsessing herself into a full-on tantrum. Mara watched as the young Demoness was pitching herself into a hyperbolic rage. She couldn't decide if the girl's earnestness was caused by an insane rage, or a readily reactive rage.

Meanwhile, the Demonic Boy was glaring at her with red-flamed eyes of hatred, all fist-gripped and shaking with agitation. Mara had to admit that his expression of umbrage was very cute in a boyish way. Especially charming, considering how his eyes were inlined with bright irises that could burn a sun. His eyes were very expressive in another sense as well, because they seemed to remind her of someone she knew. For a brief moment, she thought of an angry Keiichi...

"M..Mara?" Peorth asked, elbowing her. "The wedding!"

"What about the blessed wedding, for blazes sake? What does that have to do with anything when there's two lunatic DemonKids out there playing bounce against the shield with me?" Mara groused with blatant irritation. Here she was, protecting Peorth's ass from these random, unprovoked attacks by DemonKid dual...and Peorth had seemingly lapsed back into imbecility, asking stupid questions.

"You and Urd were busy finishing up after serving Belldandy and Keiichi's wedding wine, but I snared a good look at the 'intruders' that came crashing in. Le force majeure! Remember when you guy's Sovereign just flashed Himself and a group into the back of the church? Right before we all were made into a tableau vivant? There was an older version of Skuld, who looked almost as beautiful as moi. There was an upset-looking Hild, an older version of you, a cyborganic Cevn...and these children. All of these six kids were there. You, Urd and Skuld were completely doing a freak when you saw your counterparts, so you might not have noticed them," Peorth explained quickly, as the two DemonKids readied themselves for another attack.

"Aunt Peorth! Talk some sense into her!" four of the GodKids shouted. Mara didn't miss the fact that the four GodKids immediately paused and looked at each other with uncertain expressions, as if they were silently communicating surprise or astonishment. Mara overheard them asking each other "you have an Aunt named Peorth too?"

This was definitely bizarro world-level confusion!

"Blessit, I'm gonna batter that worthless shield down!" the Demon boy shouted. "This is no time to be playing games with us, Mom! There's some really serious shit going down here, and we need you!"

In a flash, he floated up against the sphere-field and began to pummel it with his fists. His punches were pretty decent for a DemonKid his age, causing brief flashes and flares against Mara's arcanic globe. She let him punch away until he was winded, and then he stared at her again with fiery eyes, even more angry as he realized that his attempts to penetrate her arcane protection were about as powerful as a feather being thrown against a cinder block. As was common with teenaged Demons, he didn't stop to think before he acted, and thus his dullness of mind was exposed by his sharpness of rage.

"Hey, can we all just stop all of this for a moment! All you guys wanna do is the ol' Demon 'kick ass first, ask questions later' thing!" the older teenaged Goddess announced with a shout, looking at them sternly. Mara noticed that the young girl was including _her_ in the shoutdown, as if she was at as much at fault as the two loony DemonKids. She was readying a sharp rebuke for the Goddess brat when she sensed her protective sphere shimmering, turning multifaceted...and she realized that Peorth was trying to deactivate it.

"Peorth, what the fuckin' Bless are you doing? This isn't time for some Goddess wild act goofiness!" Mara side-whispered angrily. "Those two DemonKids are trying to kill us. Or you."

"Tres idiot! I'm a Senior First Class Goddess. You're a Senior First Class Demoness. Unrestricted, Unlimited licenses, both of us," Peorth replied. "They're *kids*! None of them is even old enough to be in ThirdTier Inculcations. They don't even have Divine licenses yet; they probably have about as much Divine firepower as a First-Grade Earth Spirit at best. They couldn't possibly pose a threat to you or me, even though they came out of that whacked out 'ship'. Although I appreciate your quick thinking about shielding us, a sphere is overkill in this case. What I want to know is who these kids are, and why the two DemonKids seem almost certain you're their Mother."

"Don't go calling us kids! I hate that!" several of the kids chorused.

"I ain't nobody's Mother!" Mara growled angrily. "Never wanted to be, never will be. Kids and me don't mix! Nobody or nothing ties me down. No Demon's ever gonna get me to jump into a Union with him. Uh-nnh! No guys, no kids...nothing. Not gonna happen. Ever. End of story."

"BB..BB...BB..." the young Demoness girl stammered, so angry she couldn't compose a thoughtcast.

"What'd I say?" Mara asked herself.

"Oh great! Way to go, Mara. That really helped..." Peorth added with sour sarcasm, shaking her head. Mara noticed that the teenaged Demoness was hurling herself into some kind of fiery emotional meltdown. She resigned herself to the inevitable, which was all the more recognizable because this little scenario reminded Mara of the tempestuous ravings of rage she experienced during her own adolescence. The girl curled herself up into a fetal position and started sobbing heavily, and then suddenly uncurled and extended her arms and legs out and let fly with an immensely powerful thoughtcast.

Mara's arcanic shield was intended to stultify alchemical, arcanical, quantum and Metanative attacks...but not a densely-packed thoughtcast from a hysterical Demoness teen while a Goddess was deactivating it. Just a tiny portion of the thoughtcast leaked through...

_...Mara saw herself on the Earthrealm, watching a four year-old version of this Demonic girl creating fireballs and leading the SereHawks on playful chases. A four year-old version of the Demonic boy was listening to a sound-pod; she could hear some kind of Swedish-sounding black metal rock playing on it. She herself was preparing a dinner: homemade french fries and hamburgers slopped with condiments, complete with McDonald's kids meal wrappers and bags to make the meal appear authentic. Nearby, a Great Dane was barking furiously as one of the fireballs flashed by him. He leaped high into the air to try and bite it, and tumbled into a pile; his arms and legs were much too big for his body because he was just a gangle-limbed pup._

_"C'mon you guys! Get over here! Dinner's ready!" she heard herself shout as she was taking off an apron with two stylized pictures of 'cute' gargoyles, with "Gargi Gargi" sewn underneath them... _

"Yeeechhh!" she thought, whammed by a near-nauseous distaste as she was viewing herself in some kind of disgusting domestic _total Mom mode_. Cooking dinner, humming a death metal ditty to herself, and being amused by the sight of her kids playing around. Who were now both looking at her with adoring little orange eyes as she set the table with the take-out bags. Abruptly, the mental scene shifted to a schoolyard; it could have been in Anywhere, Japan. She realized that she was seeing this through the lens of the young Demon girl's experience...

_..."Oh shit! I forgot about Mom!" she heard the Demon boy shout, now clearly into his early teens in age. "We're totally -_fucked-_ if she finds out what we did to the rabbits at school!"_

_"Well, what did you think would happen, you dumbass! And don't go telling Mom that 'we' did this! It's all you, Falcyn...I had nothing to do with this one," the Demoness girl shouted back, pink pig-tails on each side of her head. The boy seemed to slink back a little as the young Demoness launched into a tirade._

_"What were you thinking, turning rabbits into large Jackson's chameleons with fangs? You're supposed to create strife mischief, not turn our school's junior high bunny farm into a freak zoo! Couldn't you think of a better way to get back at those stupid jerk stinkheads who made fun of me?" she confronted him._

_"Sygyn, I'm sick of those three! You have no idea how badly I wanted to kick their asses for making fun of you. So what if you're almost 14 and still don't wear a training br..."_

_"Falcyn, stow it! Not a single word more, get it!" the girl interrupted, bristling. "I -_don't-_ need to hear that shit, especially from you. It's bad enough hearing it from those three assholes! I can't help it that I wound up with Mom's TNA genes. This totally bites! In Vanagdrasil, Mom's a fucking Demon Queen, for blazes sakes! Here, she's just a member of our stupid school's retarded PTA. Grrr, I'm so mad, I'm feel like burning up one of the pianos in the Music Room."_

_"Sis, you can't do that!" the boy said, totally panicked. "You'll wind up having to do more..."_

_"Piano lessons," an adult Demoness interrupted. "And I don't want to have to 'donate' another piano to the school, Sygyn. Especially now that you're in junior high."_

_A boy and girl Demon, perhaps in their early teens, gasped and turned white-faced as their Mother hovered in the air behind them..._

Mara almost lost her mind, because it was scrambling in a hundred directions at once when she realized that _this was the older version of herself that she saw at the church_. But this Mara was even more beautiful. Watching her, Mara imagined that this would be how she herself would appear if she had aged her physical manifest a couple of Decas but complimented it with a massive upgrade in Demoness elegance. This Mara she was observing was too pretty to be a mother, yet there it was...

_...The boy and girl were looking at the 'other' Mara, heartbeats away from panicking because they had been caught red-handed._

_"Falcyn, standing up for your twin sister is -_always-_ the right thing to do, but you have to reflect more deeply on –_how-_ you want to do it. Of course, giving those idiot boys a beatdown once in a while for making fun of my daughter is perfectly fine with me. That's supposed to happen here on the Earthrealm with boys your age..."_

_Mara waved her hands, and the chameleons turned back into rabbits. "Hmmm, I do hope I got their colors right," she commented to herself with a half-smile, rubbing her index finger on her chin thoughtfully._

_"As I was saying, creating strife mischief is an art form that we Demons need to constantly refine. Those boys who were making fun of your sister...they are quite attached to these rabbits, neh?"_

_Both Sygyn and Falcyn nodded their heads._

_"It would be safe to assume that...since these rabbits are being allowed to be kept on school property...then obviously they're part of some kind of school science project. Possibly a school project those three boys are working on. Perhaps even a project they will get graded on, neh?"_

_Both Sygyn and Falcyn nodded their heads._

_"So what would happen if I did -_this-_?" Mara asked as she went over to one of the rabbit cages, dissolved the lock-hinge with a touch of her finger, and opened the grille-work cage door. The enclosure's occupant looked at her nervously, wriggling its nose and sniffing the air as it warily scoped out the surroundings. A few seconds later it bounded out of the cage. Mara nodded to it, and then pointed at the wall and created a small opening which led to an open grove on the other side of the wall. The rabbit stood up on its hind legs and executed a paw-wiggling gesture, and then turned tail and dashed through the wall opening like a fur-flash lightning bolt._

_Mara undid the next cage door while she continued talking._

_"Sometimes, evil needs to be disguised as goodness. In one context, the true evil is keeping these guys penned up and feeding them pellets made from birdshit, don't you think? So I'm doing them a favor by letting them loose. By the way, do you both see what each rabbit does when it stands up and 'paddles' the air with its paws? Your Aunt Skuld taught me the language of all the Earthrealm animals while I was pregnant with you two. So I know that...in the language of rabbits...they're paying me thanks for their freedom. Of course, there's a couple stray dobermans next door..."_

_"Mom!!!" Sygyn interrupted in a tonal rank of sheer exasperation._

_"Don't worry, kiddo. I'm just fuckin' with you. Y'know, because I'm the Mom and all that!"_

_The teenaged Demoness glared at her for a split-second, and then Mara patted her on the head and pulled her pig-tails playfully. The young girl's glare melted down into a look of loving appreciation and respect._

_"The dogs won't bother with the rabbits because they're busy dining on the steaks I just materialized for them. You see, the lesson here that I want you guys to remember is that creating Grief is easy. If I wanted to simply create Grief, all I would have had to do was bring the dogs here, let the rabbits out, and presto! Rabbit stew for the hungry bloodhounds! Chewed up corpses for all the kiddies to discover in the morning. Sure, that would make their little lives miserable for a few moments. Not just them, but all the little kiddies as well. Which is a waste of effort, since we're really only concerned with the three dumbfuck bullies. What do you think would happen with those three? They'd whine and wah-wah and get all dramatic about it. Later, they'd go home after school and get coddled by their parents with extra ice cream or something. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. Capiche?"_

_The two nodded their heads._

_"But creating mischief and strife is more difficult," she noted as she freed the last of the caged rabbits. "You need to think on your feet, even if you're not standing on them. Let's take this situation as an example. What do you think will happen now that all of these rabbits are loose, Sygyn?"_

_Sygyn looked thoughtful for a moment, and then grinned at her Mother with sinister glee._

_"Totally wicked, Mom! Those boys'll come to school tomorrow and find that all the rabbits gone. That'll really upset them, because they -_like-_ taking care of the rabbits, even though they're jerkoffs. But then they'll have to report the missing rabbits to their faculty club adviser, Mr. Nakajima. Mr. Nakajima will get all dickhead mad at them, and they'll wind up being chewed out royally for leaving the cages open. After lecturing them, he'll fail them for their science project. Then they get to go home to Mom and Dad with a note from Mr. Nakajima explaining why they failed their project. Heh heh heh! They'll probably get grounded for a couple weeks."_

_"Ahhh, now you see what a little bit of Demonic cunning can do? Good girl, Sygyn!" Mara praised her daughter._

_"That's massively murderscene cool, Mom!" Falcyn added. "Even more cool is the fact that they'll -_know-_ that they locked the doors to the cages. So they'll wind up getting chewed out for something they didn't even do. Which will make them feel like life is unfair, or start question if their memory is shooting blanks. Either way, it'll wind up causing them even more strife!"_

_"Falcyn!" Mara called out in a stern voice._

_**Gu-Ulp!**_

_"I don't ever want you to think that you're a fuck-up because you make little mistakes like this. When I was Sygyn's age, I got teased mercilessly because of my...er, late development. But I didn't have a twin brother to stand up for me. Plus I wasn't going to school on the Earthrealm, pretending to be a mortal amongst the mortals. I know how hard it is on you; blessit! If it had been me and we were on Vanagdrasil and they were three Demons instead of mortals, I would have turned those three -_boys-_ into constipated chameleons instead of the rabbits."_

_The two DemonKids giggled at the image of chameleons walking around, tongues hanging out barf-loose because of upset stomachs._

_"My son, you're learning restraint, which is a really important quality in a Demon. Especially in a male Demon, which is something you'll understand and appreciate someday when you're a little older. Restraint of power at the right time...that's what develops true deviousness. I'm very proud of you, Falcyn, because you're clearly the toughest boy in this school, but you're don't bully others. Your toughness develops into strength because you practice restraint. Both of you need to remember this always: a Demon who bullies is a stupid Demon. It's not about how much power one has, it's about the finesse one employs when using that power..."_

_Both Sygyn and Falcyn were looking at her with eyes filled with love, admiration, and tenderness..._

...Mara blinked back the intensely private glimpse she had just experienced, a deeply-felt insight into the young Demoness's life. She was also blinking back something else, because her eyes were wetted with tears. These two impressions had left an imprint on her Demonic heart, an odd sensation of love that she had never felt before.

And then she remembered that brief instant at the church, where she had seen her Demonic counterpart. The older, wiser version of her; a Demoness with an imploring, yet sad visage on her eyes. But there was something else about the 'Mara' she had observed at the church. Her 'older self' had a very strong bearing...a maternal dignity bordering on nobility. The kind of inner confidence and love that reminded Mara of her own Mother, Myducia.

_These were that Mara's kids!_

Even more remarkably, the strong feeling she felt in her heart...was the feeling of Mother. The dreaded feeling she had avoided...and yet it was so profound and beautiful, she almost wanted it to never end. Why was her heart pounding so rapidly in her breast, filling her with warmth and longing? Could this be why the 'older' Mara was regarding her sadly in that brief moment? Could it be because her counterpart...perhaps her Future self...sensed how strongly she was denying a part of her own nature by being so anti about having children?

She sighed and lowered the arcanic sphere.

"You guys can come closer. I promise I'm not gonna bite you if you don't bite me. But get this clear in your heads. _I'm not your Mother._ I don't know where your Mother is, but she isn't here. But I promise you, we're gonna find her, Sygyn and Falcyn. Just try not to get all mushy and sappy around me, or I'll really start getting pissed off. I'm not she..."

"Yet!!!" Peorth interjected, elbowing her in the ribs. Mara turned beet-red as the Goddess of the Rune burst into giggling.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Hee heee hee!!!" Peorth was aglee with laughter, she couldn't stop giggling despite her best efforts to stall the mirth floating around somewhere near her navel. She had sensed bits and pieces of the Demoness girl's powerful thoughtcast, including those involving Mara being a Demon Queen. A Regent of Vanagdrasil, second in status only to the Dark Lord Himself.

"You...a _Demon Queen_?! Haa hee hee heh!"

"Don't worry about her, she's missing a few roses in her flower bed," Mara grumbled in a level voice, resigned to reigning in her baser instincts that urged her to hit Peorth over the head with a solid object. Unfortunately, there were no solid objects in this empty expanse.

"I can believe that! Our Aunt Peorth never acts silly like that," the older Goddess girl named Keleste noted. "Our Aunt is very adept at administration, is whiz-level totally smart, has all sorts of coolage, and is chic and sophisticated. She runs the Central Sysop Node for the Ygg Mainframe. She's like one of the head Sysops, supervising dozens of Goddesses. Lots of Goddesses look up to her and wanna be like her."

With each compliment the young Goddess used to describe her 'Aunt Peorth', Mara grew more and more delighted by her black-haired companion Goddess's reaction. She wasn't laughing now. Her face flinched with every word of praise, as if she was being struck by invisible javelins of embarrassment...especially the comment of being about lacking chic.

"Hmmm. Peorth...a Sysop Admin? Peorth as a chic and classy Goddess who's overflowing with glamour? Are you sure you guys aren't smoking crack?" Mara commented, unable to resist a bit of payback for Peorth's earlier laughing fit.

"What's crack?" Keleste and Keiyasu echoed.

Peorth lost all color to her face as Mara exploded with jet-fire taunting laughter, which pitched up a level when Peorth shot her the proverbial stinkeye of irritation.

"STOP IT!!! I CAN'T TAKE THIS ANY MORE!!! How can any of you be laughing? Falcyn and Sygyn, how could you be so cold to us, your cousins! My Mother's _dead_!!!" the tomboyish Goddess screamed. She had been silent, wordlessly upset. Mara noticed that her eyes were swollen from crying, and felt the instinctive slight thrill of satisfaction at such a sight. As a Demoness, it was always amusing to see crybaby Goddesses in action. But she also sensed a disturbing pall in the air when she mentioned her mother had met the Real Death.

"My..snff.._Mother just died_ so we could be here, if you remember!" the young brown-haired Goddess continued to exclaim, clearly upset beyond the pale. "My heart is breaking into pieces, and I'm scared to death by the emptiness of this place! Why are we here? You're the adults here, did Mom send you? Do either of you two know? Do you even care? Why doesn't..snhff..anyone care about _me and my sister_, instead of getting all whack and arguing like a bunch of idiots? My sister Ulfryn's about ready to lose it! Just look at her! Somebody please help us! Someone please listen to me!"

She had paid hardly any attention to the two youngest Goddesses in the few minutes since the six kids arrived. With her two 'children' acting up, the two older teen Gods trying to calm things down, and Peorth acting like a cat chasing its tail...the two Goddesses were strictly background. Ever since those kids came out of that ridiculous 'timepod', everything had been hectic go-shuffles of misinterpretations and emotional hyperness. In the silence following the girl's outburst, Mara noticed that the youngest-looking Goddess was almost in a trance, simply staring at each of them with a dazed expression. The pink-haired GodKid seemed to be struggling to speak...

"You guys..snff..can laugh all you want to. Our Mother's _dead_!" the frail-looking Goddess with the anime-style candy-pink hair whimpered in a barely audible voice. "She said that she had to die so that we could be here, at the end of Eternity."

"Who is your Mom?" Peorth asked, suddenly sober. Mara clamped down on her racing thoughts; these two Goddesses were barely Ten or Eleven Decas old, and they were completely distraught. Who wouldn't be at that age, if they had lost a parent? Her Demoness enjoyment of girls in distressful grief deflated momentarily.

"Her name is..snff..was Skuld. I'm Pryzm, and this is my twin sister Ulfryn. Our Mom was married to Tomohisa, and my younger sis was getting these visions, seeing them..." she said, pointing to a young God and Goddess, "...and so we went to Vanagdrasil to find out..."

_Skuld...her sister...dead?!_

Mara sensed her heart suddenly lump up into her throat as a chilling wedge of grief stabbed up and down her backbone. The feelings were overwhelming her; an indefinable rage, fear and grief about her sister, chop-cutting confusion over these six kids...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

The next few hours were mind-bending in the extreme. Peorth had a hard time just trying to sort through what was being said. A Skuld from approximately 15 to 20 years in the future, Earthrealm time-relative, had sent these kids all the way to here, which was the End of Eternity. The two Demon kids were twins as well, the son and daughter of Mara. Peorth tried to sense out their TNA, but everything was scrambled. But her eyes didn't lie; she clearly saw a younger version of Mara in the girl, and the boy's facial features looked like a blend of Mara...and Keiichi? The two oldest GodKids, Keleste and Keiyasu, came from another version of Yggdrasil, and had been foster parented by another Skuld and that 'Aunt Peorth' version of her. Listening to Keleste was almost a time-travel experience in itself; the young Goddess looked uncannily like Belldandy in her later teens. Peorth was amazed when the two explained about all the step-parenting exploits they had experienced with her counterpart. Then the other four Divine kids talked about a Peorth they knew, a close friend of both their Mothers...Skuld and Mara...in a 'Future' version of Yggdrasil.

_Two more Peorths_...neither of whom was the Peorth of Nulln who had communicated the Revelation to her.

These kids all came from different and distinct God's Realms, but also from time periods completely at variance with each other. Keleste and Keiyasu lived in a TimeStream where the Earthrealm had been nuked into a wasteland a hundred thousand years earlier. She learned from them that Peorth of Nulln came from yet another future, where the Earthrealm had experienced a massive depopulation of sentient mortals due to a nanotechnology mishap forty thousand years earlier. Apparently, the future of the Earthrealm was looking pretty dim in their lives, in their TimeStreams. In contrast, Skuld and Mara's kids had grown up in a much nearer future, as Pryzm admitted that she kept up a weblog dated 202X.

The two older GodKids, Keleste and Keiyasu, also explained about Belldandy and Peorth of Nulln, detailing a narrative that was harrowing and heart-rending. In the reality that Peorth of Nulln had lived in, Belldandy had become some kind of 'super-widow' Black Goddess; driven insane with grief because Keiichi and her entire family had been foully murdered. The Peorth of Nulln had basically become her guardian. Both Keleste and Keiyasu insisted that it was Isilblius who had viciously killed Belldandy of Nulln's dear ones.

Her heart was rent even further when she learned that the two GodKids had never met their real parents. Impossibly, they had been born and lived their entire Fourteen Decas in Yggdrasil, but had no parents. Yet, they insisted that their parents were Belldandy and Keiichi. They explained how they had met a mortal Keiichi on lifeless future Earthrealm, billions of years in the future. Could that be the Keiichi she knew? But what of her lover, Heroic Vermillion Swift? Neither of the GodKids had met him.

The Demoness girl and boy, Sygyn and Falcyn respectively, were from an Earthrealm in 202X. But their reality was different as well, because Mara was their Mother, Skuld was their Aunt...but there was no Belldandy or Urd. They, along with Pryzm and Ulfryn, had been raised as mortal children on the same Earthrealm; knowing each other throughout their entire childhoods. Mara was a single parent. It was _almost_ the kind of Future Peorth could imagine; a sensible extension of events already happening on the Earthrealm. She found it amusing to think that Skuld and Tomohisa had actually married and became parents, and according to Pryzm, "still disgustingly in love with each other like teenagers." That, from a girl who wasn't even a teen herself. She smiled, observing how much like the Skuld she knew, her daughter Pryzm was!

The Demoness girl, Sygyn, mentioned that she had been entrusted by her 'Aunt Skuld' with some kind of device called a Nitton. She noted that the Skuld in her reality had discovered the purpose of the Swarp Hypernalities, and in doing so, had activated them. The mysterious objects that appeared in Yggdrasil just a few months ago, Earthrealm-relative time, were actually transportation nodes, akin to Tokyoite train stations. Even more incredible, Sygyn said that travel between Yggdrasil and Vanagdrasil was pretty routine, as long as the Lords of both Realms allowed for it.

The recent inexplicable "Expansion Event" as the two GodKids and two DemonKids had termed it, which had occurred just a few months ago in her own reality...likewise had taken place in their reality. But it was historical in nature, having occurred almost fifteen years in the past in the reality where Sygyn, her brother, and her cousins lived. Yet, Keleste and Keiyasu didn't experience any Expansion Event changes at all while living in 'their' Yggdrasil.

Sygyn went on to describe the Nitton as a kind of backup system for the Yggdrasil and Vanagdrasil networks. Peorth found this astounding claim to be totally implausible, but the kids claimed they had seen the Nitton in action. Skuld, Mother of Pryzm and Ulfryn, had explained that it was very important...that the Nitton was going to play an integral role in some task they had to do. Of course, in typical Norn of the Future fashion, the 'future' Skuld didn't know what that task was. Very entertaining; at least the 'future' Skuld had some of the same traits as Urd and Belldandy's bratty younger sister.

The convoluted narrative had served up a heady brew of questions and headaches. Peorth was getting sick of all this darkness, so she unsealed her Goddess Seal and decided to create a small PinkSun.

But she couldn't.

Which was impossible. Creating a fixed stellar object was a major undertaking for a First Class Goddess, but for an unsealed Senior First Class Goddess, it was only required a slight amount of exertion. Should have required only a slight amount of effort, even though this place was empty of matter and energy. With her fullness of Goddess powers, building a sun was about as challenging as giving herself a pedicure. She knew the formula. But every single approach she used to create and combine atomic energies, gravity, waves, odoton forces...failed. She couldn't produce a sun. Trying for something smaller, she tried to produce a gas giant.

Same negative result.

Gripped with uncertainty, she asked Mara to assist her, which Mara willing obliged by opening up her Demoness Seal. Mara had created an arcane shield earlier...perhaps she would have more luck at making a sun. But she was completely flabbergasted when Mara couldn't manifest a HauntNebula, or a Sun, or even something as easy as a replica of the Earthrealm's Moon. Within five minutes, she and Mara were tightly knotted with frustration. This Eternity was majorly screwed up! They couldn't even manifest a flashlight between the two of them, with _their powers unsealed_. On a quirkish whim, they asked the children to try and produce _anything_. The kids couldn't even make a skateboard, a guitar, or a baseball.

"What is wrong with this place? There's nothing discernable here, but I have do have a sensing that we're in the aftermath of some great work of destruction. But how could it prevent us from assigning some of our Divine energies to create an object? Even the two of you couldn't..." Keleste said, her antennae hairs vibrating as an indication of how exasperated she was by everyone's inability to create _anything_ with their Divine abilities.

"Well, it certainly looks destroyed, wouldn't you think? There is _nothing_ here! Peorth and I can't even create a flashbulb out of our own essences. There is a certain quality about this space seems to dampen combinations of energy. But selectively so, since _that_ thing seems to be immune to its effects. All of which could mean that we're not the only ones here. Someone...or something else is controlling this environment. And us." Mara noted angrily, as she gestured towards the whirling timepod.

"Yep, this Eternity is a major screwup," Peorth spoke her thoughts aloud, summing up what everyone was feeling. "None of the Rules apply here, none of the dimensional laws work here, none of the energies can be fastened together here, anywhere or anywhen. If this is the End of Eternity, than this is a dead end..."

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"This is totally boring!" Ulfryn complained in her best...or worst...mallrat whining voice. The voice that Pryzm hated to hear, but loved to hear at the same time. A good sign at least, that her twin sister was just being herself. Admittedly, this place was major-league creepy. Hild's Black Palace was creepy in a spookhouse sense, like some scary Halloween haunted house or one of those 'ghost walks' that the nearby temple put on for Hanabata festivals. Strangleland type stuff. She remembered the ghost walks back in Makuhari where the 'spooks' would jump out from behind the bushes and cause the girls to scream and cling onto their boyfriends, while she and Pryzm would laugh at them.

Those kinds of boys were yucky. All boys were yuck, as far as Pryzm was concerned.

But this place was creepy yucky because it was a _nothing_. There was some dimly glowing thingy in the distance, which looked like formless a ghost itself. But whenever she tried to approach it, the ethereal glow seemed to move even more distantly away, as if it was avoiding her. She gave up after a couple tries, figuring that it must be huge and very far away.

Their Mom's TimePod was still spinning on its axis, a cheerless reminder that she was dead. Mom had told her and Ulfryn to be brave and brace up. She felt like she was trying her best to be strong. But no amount of crying could bring Mom back. Mom was the best; she made it clear that she was giving up her life so that she and Ulfryn and the others could do something really mega-important. But right now, no one had the slightest clue of what that important task was.

The two adults couldn't have been more different from each other.

The Demoness, Mara, looked like a younger version of her Aunt Mara. Not as strict, and a little bit more loose and casual than her Aunt. But she seemed _really_ Demoness at times, not quite as balanced as Aunt Mara. Pryzm could sense how she had the same kind of open-heartedness...even though it was that weird kind of open-heartedness that Demons had. She felt bad for Falcyn and Sygyn, because this Mara could have been their Mom, if she was a few Decas older.

The Goddess, Peorth...well, she wasn't at all like Mom's friend 'Aunt' Peorth. This Peorth was all carefree and flirty, joked around a lot, smiled all the time, and acted like a total goof off. For some reason, Pryzm thought that she was looking at how her twin sister was going to be as an adult. She caught the Goddess making eyes at Falcyn and Keiyasu a couple times, but of course they were too dense to notice because they were boys. Perhaps this Goddess just had too big of a heart, or maybe she never stopped being crazy over guys. But she was mysterious as well, as if she was a bank and the deposit vault of her mind was filled with secrets.

Awkwardly at first, but later with a nurturing solicitude, both the Goddess and the Demoness adults were always there to hug her and Ulfryn when their hearts just couldn't contain the hurt any longer. Even Falcyn and Sygyn had their moments, which the Demoness look-alike for their Mom would handle by having long deep talks with them about the dignity of being Demons and having faith in the unknowable.

This whole adventure had started with Ulfryn's 'ghosties'. They'd been all over the place, and finally they had ended up here. With only each other, their two Demon cousins, and the 'ghosties' themselves, who Ulfryn insisted were their older cousins. But no one knew what to do next. Amazingly, the adult Goddess and Demoness couldn't even manifest a fly-swatter. Pryzm had to fight down the frightening prospect that they might be here _forever_, with nothing to do. She had to reel herself back from totally going mental over that fear, because Mom had promised that they were going into this far future to make everything good again.

"What about the Nitton, Sygyn?" she offered. Maybe something would happen if Sygyn tried something with Mom's invention. "We can talk forever about our lives, how weird this place is, who came from what point in time, or whatever is or isn't the right God's or Demon's Realm. But it doesn't cut out the boredom. We can't just sit here on our collective butts and do *nothing*."

"I'm with Pryzm!" her cousin Sygyn agreed. "It's time to try something different. If the adults can't make anything here, even with their Senior First Class Licenses, then there obviously is a property at work here that none of us know about. Deliberately dampening the energies, except for our personal Divine and Soular energies. Maybe the Nitton could help us figure it out."

Pryzm watched as Sygyn pulled the Nitton out of her jacket, in a pretty good imitation of her Mom's usual 'bringing something out of nothing' move. Everything that even remotely reminded her of her Mother seemed to stab at her heart, even something as simple as Sygyn and the Nitton. Especially the Nitton itself, because it had been created by her Mom...

Sygyn held the pulsating Nitton out in from of her, twirling it and brandishing it like a sword. The Nitton's solidity and vacuity seemed to flow into one another as it seemed to oscillate with energy, which was a good sign. Just like before, the Nitton was moving in beautifully curving swirls and contrasts of blue and white, not quite deciding which formation it wanted to remain in. Only the handle in the middle was stable, so that the holder could wield it as both ends did their rainbowed shape-dancing.

But the Nitton suddenly started shifting from a blended set of energies to an atomic energy...and Sygyn quickly let go of it. Pryzm was seized by fear, noticing a shift towards the atomic that might mean that it could go nuke on them. Fascinated and apprehensive, she looked on as the atomic energies seemed to gather into matter...into biological...and then reorganized themselves into physical manifests of two Goddesses...

...one of which who looked like Mom!!!

"I don't think we'll be needing that anymore," a white-haired Goddess commented, brushing the dust off of her pink and blue jacket. She looked at Przym and everyone else. When Pryzm saw her eyes, she was frozen to the spot, as if she was looking at Kami-sama.

"What's the matter with all of you? Haven't you ever seen a Norn before?" she said sarcastically, like a Tokyo granny. Then she noticed the _other_ Skuld floating nearby, and face-twitched.

"What are _you_ doing here?" the two Skulds shouted with surprise, pointing at each other.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Younger?" the white-haired Skuld asked.

"Elder?" the black-haired Skuld asked.

"No, not Elder. Eldest. I'm the Eldest," the white-haired Skuld replied in a firm Big-Sisterly voice of correction that briefly brought a familiar grimace to the 'younger' Skuld's expression.

Mara and Peorth were looking back and forth at each other, totally mystified. There were two Skulds! The object d'art that the young Demoness Sygyn had pulled out of her jacket had went into a total artform-mecha functioning realm that resembled nothing either had ever seen in her life. Randomly, it started flashing shapes and coalesced, and then purposefully those energies resolved into _two Skulds_!

One of the pair resembled what Skuld might look like if she was in her late twenties, in Earthrealm years. Her face was lean, her jaw was tighter set against her cheeks, her eyes slightly less rounded than the Skuld who was a teenaged Goddess on the Earthrealm. Despite being slightly narrower, her eyes were much more expressive. They seemed to vessel a sparkle of energy and wisdom that made both Mara and Peorth feel like _they_ were the younger Divines.

When the group shifted their attention to the 'other' Skuld, Mara and Peorth were absolutely riveted, almost as if the Lord and Dark Lord were standing right in front of them. She looked like a Skuld of about Twenty Decas, just a few Decas older in physical manifest aspect than 'their' Skuld. A freshly-minted Goddess at the beginning cusp of adulthood. But this Goddess Skuld had a divine presence that was off-the-scale spectacular. Mara commented to Peorth that "she could blow away any Demon Queen"; Peorth commented to Mara "she could possible even blow away the Almighty"... which promptly made both of them unbolt several deep gasps.

Her hair was sheen-straight, not a single strand out of place. But it was white-on-white pure, worn in a style that resembled a Heian princess, a long waterfall of hair cascading down to her ankles. Her eyes were very light brown, almost an autumn gold in color, with a glow about them that was majestic. There was an awe-invoking quality about her, the kind of bearing that commands deep respect...

One look at those eyes and Mara found herself quickly bowing in front of the white-haired Skuld in absolute formal seiza-style respect. She noticed that the older-looking Skuld and Peorth were bowing to the white-haired Skuld.

"Could she...be the either the God's Realm Lord or my Dark Lord?" Mara conjectured nervously, discomfited by the reaction of the two Goddesses. Mara felt awe herself, because she saw the Infinite in those light brown eyes. An infinity of infinities, to be more imprecise but perhaps more descriptive. She stole a glance at the six Divine children, noticing that they were staring at this 'Skuld' with stuporous expressions of awe, too paralyzed to do anything but marvel at her. Even the two girl Goddesses, whom Mara had expected to react at first sight of Skuld like Falycn and Sygyn had reacted towards her...a joyous burst of energy and love because their Mother had been restored to them. Instead, Pryzm and Ulfryn were struck insensible by the hoary-haired Skuld with the brown-golden eyes.

"Don't bow to me like you would to your Lords, you guys!" the 'GranSkuld' Goddess asked in a gentle voice with a tang of embarrassment, rubbing the back of her head. "Just because I outlived the two Lords doesn't mean that I'm some fool who is worthy of your respect."

"_Outlived the Lord and Dark Lord!!!_" Peorth and Mara saod simultaneously, their thoughtcasts echoed by that of the 'younger' Skuld.

"Wha..what the Bless is going on here!" Mara shouted, now totally freaked out, still on her knees. This Skuld basically said that the two Lords were dead; a concept that was alien and incomprehensible to her. Just thinking that her beloved Dark Sovereign Oni-sama was dead completely frightened her. It couldn't be possible! They were immortal; so how could They die? They were created when Time was created, and could only be uncreated when Time was uncreated. They were co-Eternal with Eternity, co-Infinite with Infinity. On top of everything else, this was totally...

"That's it! Now I know I've officially gone insane!" Peorth said in a sotto voce, shivering from head-to-tucked under toes as she sat respectfully.

"Elder Sister Mara, good Friend Peorth," the white-haired Skuld observed in a kind voice. "You both are absolutely correct in your thoughts. This is why you are the Scorn, Mara. The equi-Scorn, if you will. You have a special sensing of Time that none of us possess. Peorth here did well by bringing you to this point of Eternity. You are here because you are urgently needed. Peorth is the Eternity, the steward of a very important Rune. We have a task before us...to rebuild Time."

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Elder, if I may ask a question," the younger twenty-something Skuld ventured as she recovered her wits. "I thought I was supposed to die when I conveyed the TimePod here. I felt every bit of my Goddess energy..."

"MOM!!!"

"Oh my God!" she gasped, unable to finish her question, because her two daughters were tight against her, hugging her for dear life. The fount of her heart broke open and she sobbed as she held her two girls, Przym the tomboy and Ulfryn the mallrat. The two daughters that she never thought she would ever see again. She looked at the Eldest, who had tears of empathy and joy in her face as well.

"You belong here with us too, Eldest," MomSkuld noted amidst her heart-healing reunion, waving her hand up-and-down in invitation.

Skuld, the Eldest of all living beings, hovered over and held her younger self and her two daughters in a tight embrace. The daughters she hadn't seen in an Eternity of Eternities.

"Cevn had made even this possible for me," she said silently to herself.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"I am...or more accurately, I _was_ the Norn of the Future," GranSkuld explained after suggesting/insisting that they stop calling her "Eldest" and fawning awe upon her. She didn't need to be reminded that she was old, for Lord's sake! She already felt old, having Seen It All...but now she was glowing with sprite youthfulness which betrayed her immense pools of experience and wisdom. As it should be, because she had been unexpectedly reborn at a juncture in her life where she was supposed to entertain the Real Death.

Mara now knew why she was intimidated by this Goddess. She was _the_ Goddess...the very last living being that would ever exist. Take a few trillion recyclings/rebirthings/renewings of Gods and Demons, and then multiply that by eons. Apply that incredibly abstract amount of Future-time and increase it by several trillion epochs...

The very thought of how long this Skuld had lived was mind-boggling.

"Since you're here, then I can only conclude that you haven't accomplished your..er, _our_ Final Duty, Elder," MomSkuld noted. It was appropriate for all of them to address the Eldest as "Skuld" as she requested. But she needed to accord her older form all the due respect of her station. Addressing her as "Elder" was the best compromise, it seemed. Whenever she called her "Eldest", the words seemed to send her future self off into a 'cantankerous granny mode'. She could understand this moodiness just a little bit; if the Eldest had addressed her as "Child" or "Kid", she'd be just as upset. The Elder had called her and all the others "Children" twice, which brought up frothy resentments in her breast. No one else seemed to mind, oddly enough. So the Eldest called her "Younger".

Fortunately, this distinction in names seemed to unravel most of the confusion the others were experiencing. She herself was confused, because technically it was impossible for her to directly encounter a Future or Past version of herself. This was the second time she had seen herself; the first being that unexpected side-trip to the Earthrealm, courtesy of the Dark Lord. There, she had briefly glimpsed herself and Tomohisa when they were teenagers. _That_ was no illusion, to be sure!

"You have a Final Duty, Mom? What is that?" Ulfryn asked, regarding her with the faithful eyes that only a daughter could shine upon her mother. Illuminating spans of respect and love that brightened her heart and encouraged her confidence.

"Yes, we do, my daughter," both she and GranSkuld answered. MomSkuld decided to defer to the Eldest and let her do the explaining. This was a topic that she had intended to never discuss with her daughters. But the Final Duty had to be addressed now, because it held grave importance in trying to understand their situation.

"Being Norn of the Future, we have to _be the Future_ in a certain seeming. Simply put, we are called upon to be the last surviving being in the OmniArc. Among the many responsibilities we are appointed to perform as a Norn, the 'final duty' we are remanded to accomplish is to see the Future through to its conclusion. Everyone must die before Eternity is ended, except for the deathless two Lords, who 'finish' Their terms of existence instead of experiencing the Real Death. Their passing out of existence is the signal that Time has run its course. Thus mandated, our Final Duty is to join with the Reaper and complete the passage of Eternity. We cannot perform this commission until both Lords have completed Their spans."

"You were there, weren't you?" Peorth asked. "You were at the End of Eternity?"

"Yes, my dear long-lost friend," GranSkuld answered. "When They had completed their course of existence, They simply vanished without escort of a Reaper...to answer your unvoiced question. So I knew that it was time to act. To make sense of matters in a meaningful manner, I can only say that the Yggdrasil Logorinth and the Vanagdrasil Logorinth *are* aspects of the Lords in a very certain way. When the two Lords passed on, only shells of each Logorinth remained. A remaining, akin to a pair of empty seashell you would find on a beach or two empty flower buds in late fall."

"What happened to the Lords?" Mara asked, fired with a morbid curiosity, still only fleetingly begrasped with the reckoning that this Skuld had actually out-lived Oni-sama, her August Dark Monarch.

"I learned that They join with the Reaper and become One. My Final Duty was to end my existence by going into the Mid-Light...the DeathRealm. There, Life and Death would touch for one last time, and Everything would end."

"But...it didn't end, did it?" MomSkuld tentatively interjected, half-asking. "When I speculate about how I would complete the Final Duty, I always envision myself in the form of an aged crone. But you're no crone. You look even younger than me!"

"You silly girl! You're manifesting as a Goddess of Thirty One Decas because you choose to. You can change your age willingly, just like you did when you went into the Ygg Xeomnic Network and traveled to the very heart of the Axial CorePlex."

A powerful thoughtcast invited them, "Watch this:"

_...Mara immediately recognized that she was seeing the interior of one of His Dark Chambers. There were no other places in Vanagdrasil as dramatic, as romantically beautiful as this breath-taking vault of mystery and calamity. She had been here several times as a young Demoness, back when her Mother would consult with His Dark Majesty about certain subjects that were far too mature for her to understand. But the brilliant lances of organic flame, the careful orchestration of molecules and chronocules, the -_occultness-_ of the place was unmistakably a signature of His design. She half expected to see the Dark Lord presiding over a conference or a commanded summoning, meeting with attending Demons or Demonesses. Instead, she saw Skuld's two girls, the two GodKids of unknown parentage, and the boy-Demon and girl-Demon who were...apparently...her children from the future._

_"Would somebody care to explain why there are four Goddesses and a God here?" the voice had shouted. His voice, richly glorious with malice and depths of subtlety._

_But Mara could clearly see that were only three Goddess girls, a God, and the two DemonKids. How could the Dark Lord have seen a -_fourth-_ Goddess, unless..._

"I was the fourth Goddess," GranSkuld. "Cevn did something unprecedented at the end of time, which I'll try to explain to you later. It was so unsettling, I still am challenged by the difficulty of comprehending it. My Final Duty has now become my First Duty. He eliminated the Norns..."

"Huh?" several voices gasped.

"Please excuse my clumsy description, if you will. More accurately, it seems that Cevn _changed_ the Norns. However, he enacted the change in not quite in the manner that you or I might expect. Urd, Belldandy and I are still Norns, but there are no Past/Present/Future designations to us anymore. Needless to say, this is a very significant shift in purpose for we three Norns. As an aside, it also allows us the freedom to explore Time in any direction or dimension. I can travel vastly Pastwards in Time just as easily as I could explore Futurewards," GranSkuld noted.

"No..fucking..way!!!" MomSkuld shouted in a throb of impulsive reaction, momentarily forgetting that she was in the presence of her daughters.

"Mom!!!" Pryzm and Ulfryn chided her with girlish glee, having caught her saying a dirty word.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --


	139. Pt 139: The Achieving Balance

**Part 139: The Achieving Balance**

ETERNITY:

"Three...two...one...Now!" GranSkuld counted.

The TimePod deblurred, gradually reducing the rate of spin along its lengthwise axis; an indistinct daub of light that was beginning to form into an orb-ish contour of rarefied luminosity. A moment later it eventually hovered to a standstill. As before, a portal formed along the side of the TimePod and three teenaged children floated out of it like drunken space-walkers. They were completely disoriented, almost faint from dizziness.

Peorth noticed that the ship wasn't the only object spinning; the three teenagers' eyes were rolling in their sockets as they hovered haphazardly nearby. She quickly recognized them as Gods, but like the other six children, they were mortal-Divine hybrids. The quizzical expressions on the children's faces were enough to inform her that they didn't recognize the newcomers either.

"They're suffering a bit of chronofusion," MomSkuld observed. "We must be patient. All we can do is withhold and wait until the disorientation eases and these three can fasten their minds back into their physical manifests, so to speak."

"What place is this?" one of the two new Goddess girls asked in a demanding austere voice, finally gaining her bearings. She was dressed in a formal-looking martial arts hakama; closely resembling the 'Samurai Girl' stereotype one would see in manga and anime. She was very tall, with long lustrous black hair down to her waist, the bangs in the front cut straight across above her eyebrows in a no-nonsense severity. Everything about her screamed "Kendo Girl!...except for her intense angular green eyes.

The teenaged boy had supercurly hair, almost Einstein frizzy, with shoulder-length dreadlocks in the back peeking out from under his shag. His face was long and narrow, his cheekbones slightly peeking outwards giving him an easy-going appearance, and he had expressive brown eyes. His was wearing a long-sleeved sweatshirt that said "Franklin Mint...Burnt with Flint!" and a pair of loose khaki gaucho pants.

The last one to shake off the vertigo was a slender Goddess, with a pert short haircut of silver-blue hair that reminded one of Pryzm, but with a short ponytail gathered in the back that barely reached past her collar. She was dressed in a tight-fitting long-sleeved purple blouse that bared her midriff, and bell-bottom jeans. But instead of having an expression of earnestness, this girl was all blue-eyes and fox-sly. Narrow angular eyes and high cheekbones, with a winning smile.

"At last, they're here!" GranSkuld announced.

"Who are they?" MomSkuld asked her all-wise elder counterpart.

"Don't ask me. Never seen 'em before."

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Watching the three newcomers, Ulfryn reviewed how this adventure had all started with her. First, the 'ghosties' that invaded her Soul and her thoughts. Then she and Pryzm convinced Falcyn and Sygyn to play hookey and take a trip to Yggdrasil to try and determine the source of the 'ghosties'. Then the trip inside of the Yggdrasil Xeomnic network with Mom battling sentrybots and learning that the Ygg Xeomn was messed up. Then, the Lord had packed them off to Vanagdrasil, where she finally met the 'ghosties', which turned out to be Keleste and Keiyasu. Keleste and Keiyasu had been seeking them as well, viewing her and Pryzm as 'ghosties' in their dreams. But they were full-on Gods who didn't live on the Earthrealm. Incredibly, they didn't have parents.

Then the Dark Lord took them to the very heart of the Vanagdrasil Mnoexic Network for an adventure with the Demon's Mnoex computer. Mom noted that both systems were screwed up, and used the Nitton to download them into Cevn cyborg. Then Cevn cyborg implored them to go to the Earthrealm. So off they went to the Earthrealm, only to find some super-badass gross bat-thing ghostie hiding inside of a Goddess. Then "bang!"...and they were back at Hild's Funny Farm...er, Black Palace. Hunting those disgusting cockroaches by the thousands. Then Mom freaks out about the Ultimate Force breaking down, and she totally kidnaps Pryzm and her, as well as Sygyn and Falcyn the dork. She makes some kind of TimePod 'starship' and sends them way far into the Future, after making a stopover somewhere to kidnap former ghosties Keleste and Keiyasu. Now they were at Eternity with some super ancient version of her Mom. Her Mom was there as well, back from the dead somehow. Or maybe she didn't die at all.

Now there were three more kids. Samurai Girl. Mad Genius Floppo Boy. SlyFox Boyteaser.

"Ugh!!! More introductions," she groaned aloud.

"I will go first, as I am the eldest. My name it Motokyn, and it is my dutiful honor to meet you," the Samurai girl announced, bowing formally. In Ulfryn's mind, she was the proto-typical ninja girl that usually is the back-up romantic interest in one of those harem mangas that guys usually like to read. But she was _the real thing_, a high-school girl who was tall and slender and pretty. Even her slightest movements reflected a feminine grace that immediately gained Ulfryn's respect. Her movements were swift...whenever she moved her hands or arms, it seemed like she was trying to move them a little bit quicker than normal. Ulfryn found herself a little bit envious of this Motokyn Goddess girl, mostly because she was beautiful with a certain air of coolness about her. Not the wannabe-hip kind of coolness, but the self-confident type of coolness that a girl has when she knows she's "got it together" with strength to spare.

"M'name's Baldurdth," the boy God introduced himself, totally slacker-style casual.

"Baldurdth, act your age and do it properly," Motokyn scolded him. Ulfryn giggled as he suddenly perked up out of his slouch and looked at them all formal and polite. She immediately sensed that he was a thinker, perhaps too occupied with the buzzing in his brain to pay attention when attention needed to be paid out.

"Oh, alright sis," he answered. "Hey you guys, I'm Baldurdth, the middle one. I'm pleased to meet all of you. Please take good care of my sisters, because they're..."

"BALDURDTH!!!" the two sisters shouted, interrupting his introduction. Ulfryn could hear Pryzm, Sygyn and Keleste snickering as Baldurdth halted in mid-sentence. Two girls against one boy...how hilarious!

"He's done, so I'll finish up. You gotta watch 'im, because he gets all Bal_dud_ once in a while. Me, I'm the youngest, and of course my older sis completely skipped over the part that we're triplets, being Ms. Formal and all that. But she's really cool! Just a little forgetful at times. My name is Kitsunen. Kit-su-_nen_...not Kitsune. So don't screw it up, okay? My spirit animal is a fox, of course, and I'm totally together with it. Nice to meet youz!" the last Goddess noted.

"By the way, my brother is as smart as a train whistle, but his social skills totally blow," she added.

"They do not! Just because you like teasing all the Gods doesn't make you some social expert, Kit!" Baldurdth argued. "You call yourself the Princess Goddess of Love, but you're more like the Prissy Goddess of Nitwits!"

"Would you two please shut up! You're acting like you _want to embarrass us_ in front of these..er..Gods and Demons," Motokyn confronted. "I know we're all stressed out, but we don't need to squabble amongst ourselves..."

"Yeah, like who's squabbling now, Ms. 'would you two shut up!'?" Kitsunen argued.

"Children!" GranSkuld interrupted.

"Excuse me, madam, but I do not take kindly to being addressed as a 'child'. I am Sixteen years old in Earthrealm years, or Sixteen Decas in age back in Yggdrasil. I will be getting my own Angel really soon. At home, I am preparing for the National Kendo competition. The _National_ competition, not the National Youth competition. My younger brother may act childish and sloppy, but he's figured out the transference formula for the Swarp Hypernality energy and he's been hard at work building test platforms to confirm his theory about what powers them. My younger sister is definitely not a child, as half the Gods in Yggdrasil would tell you in person. She could wear a bath robe and sweatsuit and they still would start to drool whenever she walks into the ThirdTier Inculcation for a session. It's even worse in our high school. Guys fight over her, for some unknown reason that I cannot understand. So don't take us to be children," Motokyn explained in a level, but testy manner.

"Of course they'd drool, because she'd have most of the robe above the waist open, and the sweatsuit zipped down open in the front. Major cleavage action, from a major hormone magnet," Baldurdth added, earning a swat in the back of the head from Kitsunen, who suddenly had a paper-fan in her hand.

"Hmmm, there is a certain maturity in what you say and how you present yourself, young Goddess. However, there is also a flaw in your thinking. When you stop being offended by being called children, then you take another a step closer towards adulthood," GranSkuld admonished, drawing sniggers from every child and adult present except the triplets. Motokyn was almost red-faced with either anger or embarrassment, but gamely held it in.

"So you guys are Sixteen Decas old?" Ulfryn inquired to confirm what this Motokyn said, after she bit her tongue to stall out any further giggling. "Because Pryzm and I are Eleven Decas. Our cousins, Falcyn and Sygyn are Fourteen Decas. Our two new cousins, Keleste and Keiyasu are Fifteen Decas."

"Ulfryn, do you realize what you just said?" Keleste interjected, all serious and intense as if she had just experienced a brainstorm. "If the six of us are cousins, could these three be our cousins as well? Considering the course of events that brought us here, what would be the point of bringing the six of us here, and yet bring three more that have nothing to do with us? _Why_ these three teens, when there are near-infinite amounts of Gods and Demons and mortal sentients? Why six who are somehow related...and three newcomers that are strangers? It doesn't make sense, not that much of this has followed any sort of planning. It just seems odd that we're all cousins, and they aren't. Maybe they're connected with us somehow."

"It's most unlikely," Baldurdth started to explain. "You see, we don't have parents. No one knows who they are, or were. We did all the usual stuff with the Proctors and Adepts, being tested and quizzed and crap...but no one knows anything, except that we are half-Divine, half-mortal. We have a glancing of intuition...a sense that both of them died when we were born. We believe that our father was a mortal and our Mother was a Goddess. I was able to create an ultra-sensitive device to measure our DNA-TNA interaction; the results of which seem to indicate this possibility. Yet, nobody can explain why this happened, because the Lord naturally is involved with birth-creating of Gods and Goddesses. No matter how many times we ask, the Lord wouldn't tell us their names. The Ygg Xeomn only confirmed what we already knew: that no God or Goddess has died in over Fifty Decas. We searched _every_ sentient species database and didn't find a single DNA match with any mortal race in any of the datacrystals. Then when we reached our Fifteenth Deca, He summoned us to one of His CrystalPalaces and admitted that even He didn't know the names or identities of our Mother and Father. It's as if they never existed. There's no chance that we'll ever know, because the Almighty Himself doesn't know. So there's always only been us."

Ulfryn listened to his explanation, thinking to herself how bitch kitty their lives must have. How could they have grown up without knowing anything about who their parents were? The new cousins, Keleste and Keiyasu, were all jump-on-it about trying to discover their missing parents. She felt sad for them, because it must have been hard. But these three didn't seem all bent or upset about not having parents. How could they have grown up without parents? _Everybody_ has parents! Yet the guy triplet said they didn't, and even the Lord didn't know why. She also wondered why...if they didn't have any parents...were they living someplace else instead of just staying in Yggdrasil? The sly-fox girl seemed to be a hot item with the guys in her high school, according to her brother. He did say _high school_, not SecondTier or ThirdTier. The tall ninja-girl mentioned being in a national tournament in kendo; the last time she checked, there weren't too many mortal worlds that had a martial art called "kendo". Just those two facts totally narrowed down the list of possible mortal worlds that they could be living on while they were growing up. Could they be from the Earthrealm? Her curiosity seemed to beehive into a legion of buzzing questions she wanted to ask...

"That's just like us!" Keleste noted excitedly before she could ask any questions. "We have never met our parents, but we learned that their names are Keiichi and Belldandy. We were told that our Mom is a Goddess, and our Dad is from the Earthrealm. Later, Keiyasu and I got ourselves sorta stranded on some dead world, and we met a Goddess and a mortal who were kinda of like them, but not them. They weren't our parents because they came from different places in Time. You see, we came from a point in Time 140,000 years after the Keiichi that we were stranded with..."

"Keleste, their situation is even worse than ours!" Keiyasu interrupted. "We know some truths about our parents because the Lord has an awareness of them to an extent. But these three don't even have that assurance. Their Lord doesn't know the identity of their parents. Could you imagine what it would have been like for us if the Proctors and the Lord never told us anything about our Dad being from the Earthrealm, and our Mom being a Goddess?"

"Waitaminute!" the girl named Kitsunen interrupted, suddenly indignant. "What do you mean when you say 'their Lord' when you're talking about us? There's only one Kami-sama. I'd have to be all stoners or full-on bakaland otaku to even think twice about the idea that there's more than one Almighty. I don't know what kind of stupid crap they teach you in your schools, but..."

"Rein it in for a second, Kit. Haven't you ever considered the existence of alternative dimensions? Not just different TimeStreams, but different groups of TimeStreams?" Baldurdth argued back. "That's been the buzzword theory ever since the Expansion Event happened right around the time we were born. The idea is pretty simple: there are many God's and Demon's Realms, but they're all tied together through the Lord and the Dark Lord. In fact, I think our parents may..."

"Baldurdth, please don't go into another one of your theories about how our Mother and Father disappeared because of the Expansion Event. Now is not the time," ninja-girl Motokyn cut in on her brother, speaking levelly. "Kitsunen and I have told you a thousand times that the Lord would have surely been aware of our parent's existence if they vanished around the time of the Expansion. The Expansion didn't make Him 'forget' them, as you claim. The fact that He says he doesn't know anything about our parents is word enough for me to discount your theory. You can't just go about contradicting what Kami-sama tells us."

"Well, we didn't have a so-called Expansion Event in our God's Realm," Keiyasu shot back, challenging the other boy God. "So that just proves that there's more than one God's Realm, because we grew up entirely different then our other four cousins...and you three. Our Lord is different than yours because He never knew about an Expansion Event. How could He, if there wasn't one for Him to experience? Our four cousins, in contrast, have lived with changes that didn't happen in our Yggdrasil. Their Lord knows about events that our Lord doesn't."

"Which again backs up what my brother said about different Lords!" Keleste shouted, hastening to jump in and argue some more before she got cut off too. "Your Lord *has* to be different than ours, because our Lord and their Lord experienced totally different events in Their Realms. Which implies that your Lord is either the same as ours, or theirs. If everything is 'tied together' by a single Almighty, then why wouldn't their Realm know anything about the Expansion? Why didn't their Realm have an Expansion Event. Besides, why bother with different Divine Realms if they're all ruled by the same Lord? We actually met two Goddesses from a God's Realm called Nulln, and a God from a God's Realm called Tengoku. The mortal and the God were exactly the same, except that one was Divine and the other one wasn't. We even communicated with a Goddess named Skuld from *another* God's Realm via a superstring dimensionality. None of them knew each other. Two of our cousins are from another God's Realm, and two of them are from the Demon's Realm."

"That's retarded! He's the Lord!" Kitsunen challenged. "Crazy as it sounds, even if there were different God's and Demon's Realms, it wouldn't matter. How do you know that He couldn't run multiple Divine realms? Maybe He has different parts of Him in each Realm."

"Totally not!" her sister Pryzm jumped in. "This is all so zoided! Where we live, there's a system for Gods and Demons to use to travel back and forth between each other's Realms. But our two cousins didn't have one in their God's Realm. They couldn't travel to the Demon's Realm at all. In their Realm, there was something called a Doublet System which we didn't have. Each God where they come from has a Demon twin. We're talking mega differences here. Why would the Almighty make two Realms so different? And how could you three's Lord not know if your Mom or Dad is a God? Keleste and Keiyasu's Lord did. Is your Lord stupid or something, because He actually doesn't know about one of His own?"

"Przym, isn't that a little harsh, trash-talking their Lord like that?" Ulfryn exclaimed to her sister in a hoarse whisper of dismay. Ninja-girl was looking at them, majorly steamed and ready to dish out some smackback. How could her sister be so dumb as to call their Lord stupid? Pryzm's point was obvious, but she went overboard like she does sometimes when she would get caught up in other people's arguments. Ulfryn gulped as the older teen floated towards them.

"Little girl, I will not allow you to slander Kami-sama in my presence. Do it again and I will pay you heed by more than just words," Motokyn asserted in a threatening voice, her green eyes narrowed as she hovered right up in front of Pryzm. Face to face with the ninja-girl Goddess, her sister did look like a little girl. Ulfryn could feel an emotional 'heat' coming from the ninja-girl Goddess. She must have an intense aura to generate such energy! Leave it to Pryzm to piss off the most assertive one of the trio, who happened to be a martial artist as well.

"Why can't we all just get along?" Ulfryn blurted out. She immediately covered her mouth, feeling stupid for saying such a silly thing. The tall Motokyn turned her head to regard her, scaring her for a split-second...and then her bright green-blue eyes softened.

"You're absolutely right. Thank you...that's the first sensible thing I've heard since I got here," Motokyn said in a calmer voice. "We are all just really upset because we were suddenly abducted without warning and brought to this place of emptiness. I was practicing kendo one moment, the next I was in that ship. I apologize to you and your sister for being so forward. You both must be upset as well; which excuses her comments under the circumstance. I will talk to my brother and sister and try to end this arguing."

As ninja-girl left to talk to her brother, Ulfryn was enraptured with admiration for the older teen Goddess. Motokyn had made Pryzm look like a first-grader, and then just as quickly apologized! Even though she herself felt like a first-grader in front of the ninja-girl, what really impressed her was the way Motokyn had simply agreed with her without a word of discussion or argument.

"Blaze crazy, eh sis?" she overheard Falcyn say to Sygyn. "And everybody always sez we Demons are the ones who argue the most."

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Excuse me, children, but that will be enough from you," GranSkuld interjected. "Please, no more harping or arguing...because to me, you _all_ are children. Keleste, you were saying that you were stranded with a mortal man named Keiichi? Did he have a Goddess with him named Belldandy?"

"No, he didn't," Keleste answered. "He was going to get married to her when we arrived on the Earthrealm, but then he went into some kind of portal that they called 'the Gate of Judgement'. But it turned out that she wasn't a Goddess at all. She looked like a Goddess, but she was really some kind of disgusting monster, the most horrible thing I have ever seen in my life. We followed Keiichi, because we recognized that his DNA matched ours and we thought he might be our Father. But I know for certain that his Earthrealm was _alive_*. After going through the Gate, we met a Belldandy and Peorth from Nulln, and another Keiichi from a God's Realm called Tengoku..."

"Thank you, Keleste," GranSkuld noted as the young Goddess finished her explanation, with additional commentary and details furnished by her twin brother. With a gesture, she motioned MomSkuld to conference with her, away from the others.

"Skuld, I need you to join with me, to merge your Soul with mine. Just for a short time. You were with these children when they went to that particular Earthrealm; thus you have an awareness of a TimeLine, or TimeStream that I was never privy to. You will be safe within me, because we will share one Soul."

"I don't know if I want to do that," MomSkuld said warily. "How can I trust you?"

"Would you trust me if I told you that the only reason you, I, these children, Peorth, Mara, the Four who travel the Soul Mirrors are alive is because of Cevn?"

"What are you talking about?" MomSkuld asked. "I met with him and told him what to do. He was in love with Urd, but had to make it so Urd never knew that she loved him, in order to keep Isilblius at bay. I told him that he was supposed to destroy the universe."

"Which proves my point that you aren't those two girl's Mother. They have never met a Belldandy or Urd," GranSkuld explained. "Somehow, there is an enmeshment of Time within you, my younger self. Just like there is an enmeshment of Time within me. In my reality, Cevn and Urd never fell in love."

"But how could that be? I told him to turn his back on Urd totally, make her fall in love with another, and kill his fear of women," MomSkuld said.

"Younger, I need to tell you something really upsetting, but really important," GranSkuld said gravely. "Cevn no longer exists. Remember what you wrote in his Enigma Book? He crossed out the line about Urd, and wrote a whole new section. When I went into the Mid-Light to complete my Final Duty as the last living Being, I expected to end my life and death there. Instead, Cevn had somehow created a type of OmniArc _within_ the Mid-Light. Instead of ceasing to exist, I met _everyone_ that I had watched die over all the years of my existence. Cevn somehow joined the beginning of Time with the ending of Time, creating something called a TimeCosm: an expanded, never-ending TimeSphere. In the Mid-Light, my sisters told me to return to this place, to meet Nine Children, Eternity, and Chaos. For Twelve of us to enact an "Activation Blessing".

"And there's thirteen of us...so I'm the odd Goddess out?" MomSkuld ventured warily.

"No, my younger one! You're _me,_ remember!" GranSkuld answered, dismayed by her younger's distrust. "Dammit, do you know why all of us are still alive, in this place where there is no energy? You know there's nothing here, not a single trace of Metanative energy. Cevn did a lot more than what you told him. Remember, it was supposed to be the kids who defeated Isilblius? Instead of having them fight Isilblius, _He_ destroyed Isilblius! Isilblius wasn't even Isilblius...he was something called a SurGoth wraith. An evil so ancient, even the Lords had forgotten it. Isilblius was just a Demon boy that Mara made. Cevn sent him to the Mid-Light, so that the Reaper Boy would have a kid brother."

"Cevn...destroyed Isilblius, or the SurGoth?" MomSkuld asked, taken aback by this development.

"Yes. But he died. The Ultimate Force...the Intimate Force...all was gone by that point. But somehow, when he died, Cevn _became_ the Balancing Force. The Cevn that you and I know doesn't exist anymore. Before he died, he unified the templates of all three computer networks. You were right in having him use the Nitton, but he went into the Mid-Light and backed up that network too. Yes, I learned that even Death needs a computer network, called the Oemxnic Network. Now that Isilblius is there in the form that truly befits him...an innocent boy...he and the Little Boy Who Is Death is probably playing RPG games on the computer. I guess there's going to be two of them now."

"I..I can't believe he's gone," MomSkuld said in a sad voice. "I gave Cevn exact instructions so he could be reunited with Urd..."

"Which he ignored, because he _had_ to obliterate that fucking SurGoth. The SurGoth did something none of us expected: he made Time, the OmniArcs, the Souls...everything...start to consume itself. That's why there is no TimeSphere here. No OmniArc. No Soular energy. No Metanative energies, no Chaostic energies. No Nothing. This is a nucleus of nothingness, the sole remaining Life is us. But let's get back to Urd. This isn't just about Cevn, it's really about our older sister," GranSkuld said, her white hair shimmering with the intensity of her emotional conveyance.

"The SurGoth wraith managed to completely fuck up my reality. Cevn lived in my reality and died in the mortal fashion, in his 90s. But when he died, Urd woke up to the fact that she was in love with him all along. As a result, my older sister was an emotional wreck for the rest of her existence. She was forever _crippled_ by this. Belldandy, Mara and I had to _pretend that we didn't notice how hurt she was_, because you know Urd...she tried to cover it up. And you know that Urd isn't an expert at covering anything up. So we all knew, and watched, and suffered with her. If we would have shown her that we knew about her heartbreak, her heart would have been twice broken. It was so hard on all of us. All because of that SurGoth wraith. We _all_ suffered."

"Oh my God!!!" MomSkuld said in a horrified voice, completely appalled. The SurGoth thing inside of Isilblius had used all of them, once again. "Dammit! It wasn't supposed to happen that way. Urd was supposed to get Cevn back! That's how I had it all planned out."

"Which is why you and I need to become One. Cevn made a wish to be the Balance. Well, he got his wish...because he _is_ the Balance. He no longer exists as a human being, but as an energy without any consciousness. We need to become that consciousness. He left specific instructions for an "Activation Blessing" to restructure the OmniArc into an Omnimity-Omniternity. An OmniOm. Total integration at all levels, complete interactivity between Life and Death, no more Yggdrasil and Vanagdrasil Logorinths."

"No more God's and Demon's Realms? That's insane!" MomSkuld exclaimed.

"This is not insane, it's Balance. The two Realms will become the Syntrasil, an articulation of a constellation of Logorinths. There's a Midgardrasil that links Ygg and Vang; a sort of mixed God-Demon's Realm. Look, here's the Enigma Book. It's all in here if you want to read it. But really...don't bother reading it, because he's basically doubled the Enigma Book in length. As the Final Being, I was the ultimate accumulator of knowledge, and I don't even understand half of what the hell he's done. All I know is..snff..when I was supposed die, I was met..snffnsf..by my _entire_ family. Cevn created that special moment for me; he's given up his life to create a moment for all of us to become ourselves and recreate everything that the SurGoth ruined. He left a legacy, which is protecting all of us, right here and right now. You didn't live with an Urd..snff..that never had her chance at love. You weren't there; you didn't see your oldest sister die like I did. Die with a part of her Soul left incomplete. This universe is..snff..wrong! _Every_ universe is wrong!"

"Are you saying that the entire existence you lived through wasn't supposed to be? But if that were true, then how did you wind up with the Enigma Book, a completely restructured Mid-Light...and the SurGoth destroyed?" MomSkuld asked.

"I don't know, and I don't expect that I ever will. Unless you and I merge. The answer is in each of us, and it needs to be joined with itself."

"I think I can understand, at least a little bit. You and the Reaper were supposed to be End, but instead you were the Beginning for a new Mid-Light. Here and now, you and I need to join together at the End of Eternity to be part of a new creation. A magnification of everything that was destroyed, not just a restoration."

"Once again, you've proven your genius, Younger!" GranSkuld praised. "I didn't even think of that one! You might have it all figured out. There is more than restoration at stake here: every single being has suffered at the hands of the SurGoth. Take those nine children as a case in point. Every one of those kids doesn't have their parents! Their Skuld died to bring them here, but you're here. You have a Pryzm and Ulfryn at home, and a loving husband named Tomohisa who's a mega-famous baseball player. Don't you see? You're the closest thing to the Skuld those children lost; and yet Cevn made it possible for you to be here, because Pryzm and Ulfryn were the youngest and the most needful of courage and love. That's why you've been pretending in a sense that you're their Mother, haven't you?"

"Yeah, I have. What else could I do? When I suddenly found myself here, I immediately sensed part of their Mother in me. I feel tangible memories, as if I lived her life alongside mine. Maybe the meaning in this is that we're all interconnected in ways we don't even understand. Perhaps it is as you explained; I am a confluence of dimensionalities. Those two...they're almost exactly like my daughters back on the Earthrealm. They were so hurt; I could feel my heart breaking apart at the sight of them. So I'm 99.99 percent their Mom. But to them, I'm a loving reassurance," MomSkuld admitted.

"You are the key, Skuld! You touched Cevn in your mind, and you met with him in a reality where Urd and he were in love. Cevn released all of us from Norn obligations, except that we all co-anchor Time now, instead of being assigned specific partitions of Time. Urd could have any God she wants. She could even have a mortal or a Demon. If this works, every one of those kids will have their parents back, and the ones who grew up alone will meet their parents as well. You will have Tomohisa, forever. When this all snaps into place, he'll be there for me, just like he's been there for you. But I need you to do this, so that our precious older sister can be with the one she belongs with. So that _everyone_ can be with whom they belong with."

"I..I don't know," MomSkuld stammered.

"Then open your heart and read this 'Activation Blessing', Skuld. I can't force you to die once again, and I cannot guarantee that we'll succeed. But if we accomplish this, I can tell you that you will be reborn in the correct time and place, with your Pryzm and Ulfryn. You know that your reality and everyone you know is long gone, destroyed by the SurGoth. Cevn didn't burn his motherfucking ass into oblivion just so we can sit here and drink tea. His last act was to bring you and I here. Remember when we used to hate the very notion of having an older brother? He became that older brother, and now he knows me too well. He knew that my curiosity wouldn't leave this alone...he relied on me. He knew that I would come here, after reading what he scrivened into the Enigma Book. He brought you here, because you are the key in more ways than one," GranSkuld said as she handed MomSkuld the Enigma Book. As soon as the book left her fingers, she was thunderbolted with an insight...and an answer.

"Oh, dear Lord! It's _us_!!!" GranSkuld cried out, the charge of intuition almost electric within her bearing. "His addition in the Enigma Book isn't a plan...it's a _prediction_! Don't you see! He trusted us, knowing that _we're the ones who will make this happen_. He didn't know how to achieve this restructuring of the Everything; he only knew how to become the Balancing Force. Everything else is up to us. Each of our hearts, our talents and our strengths will combine to marshal forth the force of Balance that he's become. He became an energy we can use, and we're the architects and builders. It's us! We're not just following some master plan of his. We _are_ the master plan! Remember when we were the Seven and created the OmniArc? This is very different than the situation we faced as the Seven, because this time we're the planners. All the changes are simply Balance, but it's up to us to use the Balancing Force to conform them into existence. We can make it all work out," GranSkuld said, almost vehement in her strength of conviction.

MomSkuld read the section titled "Activation Blessing to be Read at the ReCreation of the Omnifinity-Omniternity" section, and found herself in tears. It all came back to her, how she and Noble Scarlet had been part of the Seven which created the OmniArc...and this expressed exactly what had flowed through their joined hearts.

"He'll make sure you survive inside of me, okay?"

"Mnn hmm! _I'll_ make sure of it, if he can't. If I survive. Ironically, this is one Future I don't know about. I don't know how this is going to turn out. We're all putting everything on the line here. But if we make it through, he and I will see you safely back home, my dear younger self. I mean, he _has_ to, otherwise neither one of would be able to exist, would we? So I'm risking just as much as you. You know what? He actually called me "Little Sister" in the note he wrote in the Enigma Book. Really irked me at first, that. But once my stubbornness subsided, I realized that, for a very short time, he thought of himself as my older brother. Remember how you..how we..secretly wanted an older brother, even though we were very resistant to admitting it to ourselves or our sisters? Well, now we've got one. It's time for you to let him be that older brother, just for this one time."

"How can I argue with a mortal idiot who deludes himself into thinking he's my older brother? It's just like Cevn, being a baka-head who doesn't follow instructions! But I swear that I'm gonna tell him off for that when I see him. And you make sure to remind me too, just in case I forget. He's really got it coming this time," MomSkuld agreed, feeling safe for the first time since she arrived here.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

When GranSkuld returned without MomSkuld, Pryzm and Ulfryn were very upset...until GranSkuld explained why it had to be this way. To illustrate why MomSkuld had joined with her, she employed the story of the most important life the Earthrealm had ever seen in its history:

_"Once upon a time, back on the Earthrealm, there was a woman named Maira who was the new wife of a man named Josiah. Both knew that they were infertile, and thereby decided to have a chaste marriage. But after several years of bearing no children, they were cast out of their village by the fearful, who were fevered with the superstitious notion that their infertility would spread amongst the others of the village. So they wandered the desert as nomads for years, which was common in those days in that particular part of the Earthrealm. Maira wished for a child fervently, but no matter how earnest her wishes were, nothing came of it. Nor could it, because she and her husband had remained chaste since the first moment they had met._

_"In the desert, the night moon brings darkness to the furls of sand, but does not a coolness of wind offer. Maira found herself strolling alongside her moonshadow upon the erg dunes outside their tent. All the places she had known in her memories only made her feel lost and alone. Falling to her knees in the harsh sand, she beseeched that she be released from her fervent urges to make wishes. Her humble plaint was promptly identified as a wish request by the Ygg Mainframe. But it was a conundrum: a wish to not make wishes. Gabriah, the most senior Relief Office God whose responsibility was to ensure the interaction of Yggdrasil and the mortal races in matters of wish requests, decided to grant her wish personally. In the midst of the desert, Maira suddenly was angled into a shaft of light that appeared out of the nightsky, finding herself within sphere of light. To her utter surprise, she saw a God and his Angel appear to her seemingly in response to her non-wish. Gabriah explained that he had dispatched himself to grant her a wish, and Maira reflected long and hard against the stone of her disbelief, trying to fathom why she was worthy of such a visitation._

_"She finally decided upon a wish, and informed Gabriah that she wanted -_his God-_ to come to the Earthrealm, so that she could behold the face of His Glory. Maira wasn't an ordinary woman; she was so devout and earnest in her spiritual belief and practices, she had advanced to a stage rarely attained by Earthrealm mortals. She had intuitively perceived Gabriah as a 'messenger' God. Naturally, the Ygg Mainframe went haywire trying to interpret this wish. Mortals usually wish for the usual types of wishes: wealth, love, peace, a soulmate...well you know how it is. Maira had wished for the -_Almighty Himself-_ to reveal Himself to her. Totally against the Rules, of course. Gabriah was in a big-time bind because of this wish, so he returned to Yggdrasil and sought out an audience with the Almighty to explain Maira's request._

_"Maira was a woman who had wished -_against-_ a wish, and then had bypassed the deepest felt feeling in her heart...to be a mother...and had wished for direct bestowal of the Ultimate Truth. For that one split second, she was totally in synch with a Next Level mortal. As Gabriah explained this to the Lord, he was shocked to see tears in the eyes of the Master of the God's Realm. Because of the sincere piety of the young woman, the Almighty deigned to grant her a boon, far exceeding the intent and words of her wish. He decided to create an aspect of Himself to experience a lifetime on the Earthrealm. He was literally to be the Almighty, walking upon the Earthrealm as any mortal would. Just like how the Lord can be everywhere at once, in many forms, but each individual form is fully Him. But even further, He fulfilled Maira's wish to be a mother, and in one of the most exceptional cases in the entire history of the Gods, He did something that He rarely does. He came to a mortal planet clothed in mortal flesh and blood and experienced a lifetime from childbirth to death._

_"Naturally, when Maira was pregnant, and then delivered Him in a rundown stable, there was little fanfare. She named him Jeshua, meaning "beloved of God" in her archaic language. At this point in their history, the mortals who populated the Earthrealm didn't have the slightest chance in hell of evolving the traits, cultures or societies that would allow them to develop into candidates for the Next Level. So the Lord, in the flesh-mantle of Jeshua, took it upon Himself to offer them a few teachings._

_"All is Love. Turn Evil into Good. Believe when others cannot believe, so that they can once again believe in themselves. Recognize that there is a power greater than mortal life, a power that loves them and wants each to succeed. Remain unattached to that which is important, attach yourself to what seems unimportant. Give love each day. Be harmless to self and others. Cherish innocence. Peace is the ultimate aspiration of mortal action. Those were but a few of His teachings._

_"That type of teaching definitely created fanfare. He selected hundreds of apostles and instructed them to disseminate the doctrine of Love and Respect throughout the Earthrealm. During His entire lifetime on the Earthrealm, many miracles were attributed to Him. But for the record, He did not perform a single miracle. While He walked with the mortals, He had completely relinquished any and all of His Divine attributes. This was in keeping with His agreement with the Dark Lord; to respect the mortals enough to be as 'un-God-like' as possible. He had to eat, He had to privy, He had to sleep...just like every other single Earthrealm mortal. No miracles; yet living on a mortal planet where even a Goddess with an apprentice Goddess Relief Office status could create miracles and summon wish-granting. But there -_were-_ miracles. Each miracle that occurred arose of its own agency; a release of the very miniscule slightness of Divine power that resides in every mortal. As we all know, mortals have a fractional amount of Divine energy within them. In His mercy and wisdom, He had taught them how to reach inwards and tap that energy. _

_"Instead of being all-powerful and creating miracles that would inspire awe, He followed the more difficult path of encouraging mortals to have faith in themselves, to -_create their own miracles-_. To nurture the Divine in themselves. Consequently, the mortals were the source of their own miracles; he had simply provided the guidance they needed to do so. For doing that, those mortals who held fast to greed and authority rather than their own precious Souls...acted with impious and ignorant savagery because they felt threatened. They decided to torture Him, they beat Him nearly to death, and then they left Him stake-nailed to a wooden cross-rack to die an extremely agonizing death. _

_"In Yggdrasil, we were completely outraged. And in Vanagdrasil, the Demons were -_even angrier-_ than we were. They wanted to hurl the Earthrealm into the Sun without any regard to the Purpose of Divinity. Of course, this didn't occur because Oni-sama held a far-reaching wisdom and was not prone to the follies and impulses of his Demonic children. He knew what the Almighty had given, because He had agreed to it._

_"Concerning we Gods, we held an Assemblage at the Well of Urd to voice our dismay and resentment. My sisters and I were part of a very tiny majority who saw this horrible act for what it was: the childish stupidity of a developing race. The Lord had given them exactly what they had needed, and had paid with His blood. Perhaps we had a different sensing of the events because of our status as Norns. At Assembly, we Gods voted almost unanimously to blow the Earthrealm up, with a small measure of us dissenting. But the Almighty demonstrated once again why He is the Lord. Despite everything that He had endured on the Earthrealm; all the final agonies visited upon that aspect of His being with whom He graced upon the mortals...He denied the Assembly and resolutely refused to visit obliteration upon the Earthrealm. He charged the Gods to set aside their wrath and observe the mortals with mercy, rather than resentment._

_"Back on the good ol' Earthrealm, the mortals did what mortal species usually do when faced with a superior teaching coupled with the unexplained. They organized a massively complex bureaucracy called a 'religion' around it. It's gone through thousands of permutations, has been used by the Demons to create Grief, has been fictionalized and trivialized and attacked by so-called 'scientists' who want to deny everything except the absolute power of knowledge. Yet, it has lasted for several thousand years and has become a way of life for almost a third of the Earthrealm mortals._

_"But you know what? Every day, the teachings that the Almighty had given them during His brief sojourn on the Earthrealm -_are-_ used as they were intended. Not to browbeat each other into believing the 'right' doctrine or faith. Not to justify gaining wealth while others starve. Not to motivate warfare over territories or against cultures just because they're different. His teachings have been used to create miracles and harness love. We've all seen these teachings at work: when a young boy offers to help an elderly woman across the street; when a hungry man with bowl full of rice gives half his rice to the starving man sitting next to him with an empty bowl; when parents strive hard to develop the emotional maturity to raise their children to value how important it is to always seek to learn how to love. Billions of loving acts have arisen out of that thirty years the Almighty spent on the Earthrealm. The miracles have also accompanied these acts; for every movement of love is a miracle of itself._

"Your Mother...the younger version of me, also believes with all her heart in that same Truth that the Almighty taught the mortals. The Lord is a patient Lord, especially with us Gods. Just like the Dark Lord is a patient Lord with you Demons. Being a Goddess, even your Mother had questions; she had her doubts. But she also decided to undertake the difficult path of courage. She gave up being with you, so that you can be with her. She...and I...believe that we're appointed to create something so special, it will bring about the deepest heartfelt needs that each of us has. This is why she's here, within me. She believes in _you_; that each of you has a 'lesson' to give. A vital piece of your unique lives, given to recreate and improve what was destroyed by an evil being. An evil being that will never again cause pain to anyone, because that evil being has been completely annihilated. I know how much it hurts in your hearts, Pryzm and Ulfryn. But she...and I...know how much it is going to heal your hearts."

_**"Together, we're going to create Everything!"**_

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

As GranSkuld narrated the story of Jeshua, Mara was reminded of her history with the Earthrealm. She had been responsible for one act of Grief that had went a little too far, nearly depopulating the Earthrealm of its mortal inhabitants some thirty thousand years earlier. His Dark Majesty had punished her severely for that. She clearly recalled the dark day that GranSkuld had described; the boiling of Demonic rage in her heart coupled with disbelief that the stupid Earthrealm mortals had completely blown it by crucifying the Almighty. It was the ultimate fuckup a mortal sentient race could possibly do. Oni-sama indeed had forestalled any Demonic attempts to obliterate the Earthrealm, advising patience just like the God's Lord had done. Somehow, over the centuries that followed, the Earthrealm mortals had pulled their heads out of their collective species' ass and started doing things right for a change. Lots of clumsy missteps along the way, but they were improving themselves towards the Next Level. Except for Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which were another major fuckup on their part. Not just the nuking of two cities, but the idiotic war that had led up to it. So the Dark Lord and the Lord had agreed to put them on a century-long probation. It was agreed that Keiichi Morisato would be the "Test Mortal".

Now, none of that even mattered. The SurGoth had basically nuked all of Reality. If GranSkuld was right, then Cevn had defeated him in a final battle. Mara hoped beyond hope that Cevn had blasted his shit into atoms for what he did. Not just for destroying the cosmos, but for all the personal suffering he had inflicted on her. On her sisters. On every being.

She would never know for sure, because Cevn was no longer Cevn. Cevn was now an energy of Balance, without form or personality.

"So what do we need to do?" Pryzm asked, her heart brave and inspired by the story of the Almighty's visit to the Earthrealm.

"Cevn sacrificed himself to become the Balancing Force. It's up to each of us to transform that force into a SpirituaLove aspect. Think of it like a spark plug, which is required to start a combustion engine. There's two parts to it. Mara, as the equi-Scorn...Peorth as the Eternity Rune...and I as the Norn...will read this Activation Blessing. Then each of you must bring out your innermost kokoro and harness your strongest energy manifestation. Picture what your Soul energy would be like, if it were a physical object or force. But you mustn't create a weapon. Focus upon an expression of your personal energy and fire it upon the spark. Or whatever appears after the activation blessing. We all need to blend on this, and _use_ the Balancing Force."

"Then let's do this," Ulfryn said. "I want my Mom back."

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

_"Balance is the presence of Holiness of Spirit and Profundity of Heart. It cannot be sensed, nor can it be comprehended. The breadth of all realities resides within its compass. It brings light and beauty to all, overlaying darkness and casting even emptiness into joy. Infinite and far-reaching, it regulates all of existence; and yet it serves the hearts and minds of all beings, whether they seek it or not. Bridging chaos and possibility, it gives hope to those who despair; to those who yearn for renewal, it relishes kindness upon them. It nourishes forgiveness, and reproaches pitilessness. To those who are ignorant, it bears leniency; to those who are learned, it inspires curiosity. It creates a higher purpose in the minds of those who remain stranded in their confusion. To the troubled, it provides respite; to the exuberant, it teaches patience. Sorrow becomes a weapon of joy; wisdom becomes a shield of transcendence. All of Time is blessed with vision and promise. All beings commune with each other in companionship because of it. For those whose Souls have passed beyond to Death, it grants Life-within-Death. It protests entropy by allowing individuality to be manifested into infinity. To the fallen and disgraced, it offers redemption and rehabilitation. It answers the paradoxical with irrelevances; it nurtures indecision to flower into protection. It allows for both praise and judgment, but moves fluidly within the Soul unattached to either. All of creation is multiplied into many within it; yet it can endow a single being with the ability to touch eternity. The synergy of all aspects of Balance manifest themselves most visibly as Love, rendered even more precious because Love is created in overabundance. The blessing of Balance is that there is more than enough Love for all to possess; it creates a bridge of Spirit that allows the surpassing Love to be shared between each and every being. A surplus of joy to anoint the destinies of all who exist. The Ultimate of the Intimate is the Balance. Herewith, Balance is now rendered into Sacred SpirituaLove..."_

The three adult Divines could barely finish reading the prorecitation, because they were swept up with naked emotions. The words they had just read from the Enigma Book had chimed a bell of awe so deep within them, their Souls were held fast with joy. The nine youthful Divines were anchored into a fastness of noetic serenity as well; they appeared completely paralyzed on the outside, but within each child, her or his kokoro blazed with a transcendental incandescence of Peace.

Within their circle, a cloud of sparkling dust began to appear; swept out of a nowhere to a now here like an explosion in reverse-time. Gathering and fusioning, rather than expanding and fissioning. Each of the Twelve intuitively _knew_ that these particles were the shattered fragments of the OmniArc, the TimeSphere and the Soul of the Everything. By destroying them before they could consume each other, they had been preserved. Destroyed rather than devoid, these were the last remaining seeds of Time and Space...

The space began to color itself obliquely.

The pitch-dark voidness around them was transforming into a nebula of ever-changing subtle light shadows, aurora-like filaments dispatching all the hues of the rainbow. They _were_ rainbows, interlacing and arcing through space as far as their Divine senses could penetrate. A perceptible force or energy had clearly been activated, brought forth into life by the slight invocation that Mara, Peorth and GranSkuld had read.

GranSkuld, Mara and Peorth sensed a mellowing warmth rising up within the zenith of each of their hearts, as if an inner channel of energy had been awakened, or perhaps the essence of their Souls were being purposefully distilled into glowing dynamic profundities. A luminescent fullness of radiance emerged from each of their innermost beings, pearl-like and splendorous; the oratory of their hearts manifested into dazzling vessels of opalescent light. The emergent illumnes positioned themselves at three points surrounding the swirling whorl of particles. Orbs of azure, carnation and emerald...the three spheres remained, spiraling and glimmering with potentiality as they cast color onto the golden misting of powders.

Each Divine child was haloed by a clearlight that unfolded into glass-thread filaments of sparkles.

"Well, here goes..." Ulfryn thought to herself.

"ULFRYN SPRING BLOSSOM BLAST!!!" she shouted, saying the first image that appeared in the link between heart, mind and Soul. For a moment, nothing happened and she felt squarely embarrassed in front of the adults and her cousins. Momentarily, she felt a new something zapping around within her, throughout every limit of her being. A pleasant tingling seemed to channel itself towards her fingers. Suddenly, each of her hands became framed with a carnation-pink brilliance of energy, resembling millions of blossoming points of light. Her fingertips, in fact her whole hands were shimmering with gentle waves of power. She waved her hands...and was stunned when cherry blossoms glowing with pink energy burst out from her hands, like blossoms flying out of a cherry tree on the wings of a wind-gust. She heard everyone gasp at this, and grinned broadly, shy-struck by her unexpected powers.

"PRYZM DIAMOND SLASH!!!" Pryzm shouted, following her sister's lead. She felt like some dumb magical girl, announcing her 'superpower technique'...but what happened when Ulfryn announced herself was mega-cool. Again, the disappointing pause...until her hands radiated a crystalline framework of light that was so intense, she could barely look at it. Needle-sharp transmissions of plasma-hot energies were cradled in each hand; her hands didn't feel a singling prickly sensation, but instead felt like she was wearing comfortable garden gloves. She stared at her hands in awe, completely blown out by what she was doing. This went way beyond magical-girl stuff!

"SYGYN WHIRLWIND RIBBON!!!" Sygyn shouted, sensing an order at work, from youngest to oldest. She hoped that this wasn't a Gods-only effect. Challenged, she waited and watched her hands. No glow, no light...nothing! She felt her hair loosen, and recognized that the brown ribbons that she wore on her two Sailor-moon pigtails had detached themselves. Right in front of her, they started rotating with tornadic force, producing mini-cyclones of auburn light. About a half-meter in length, the micro-typhoons settled into her hands, giving her the impression that vortexes of wind coming right out of her palms. Only these vortexes flashed vibrantly with orange and yellow lightning sparkles, causing heat distortions in the funneling.

"FALCYN FIRE WING!!!" Falcyn shouted, feeling like an absolute idiot. It might be in character for the girls to do all that shoujo magical girl stuff, but he was a guy. Sure enough, nothing happened. He could have expected a fire or something to flare up in his hands. He was starting to think how bogus this whole thing was when he caught his sister's Sygyn's eye. She was looking at him with an expression that clearly was five-parts awe and five-parts admiration. He saw himself in her eyes and choked on his breath. His reflection in his sister's eyes stunned him; it was the most fucking cool thing he could have imagined. He had wings of fire, like a Sere-Hawk, only the wings were part fire, part laser-beam rays. It was completely awesome!

"KEIYASU LASER SWEEP!!!" Keiyasu shouted, noticing that his brand-new Demon cousin had fiery wings. He had wanted to create an axe that could chop away the void, but withheld from this, because an axe could be a weapon. Instead, he visualized his hands slicing through the darkness, creating a magical, arcanical mystical-realm in its stead. To his shock, his hands visibly were enclosed by glass-like 'gloves' that emerged out of each of his hands. His hands themselves had become mirror-like blades. To test this, he moved his arms like he was chopping away as the air. His arms moved so fast he could barely sense a blurring of speed; but he did hear a high-pitched crackling. Packets of lasering light arced outwards with each sweeping gesture.

"KELESTE RASPBERRY KICK!!!" Keleste shouted, and then covered her mouth. Instead of some kind of weapon, she had named her favorite food. But it was more, because she had alwaying imagined what it would feel like to have a Mother who could give her a raspberry-topped ice cream sundae. She had a brief flash of nightmarish embarrassment. Everyone else's energy manifestations were so cool, and she'd end up with globs of strawberry for hers. She felt four warmths on her forehead; and looking up could see her four antennae-hair glowing deep red. Her ankles and feet were tingling, and when she checked them out, she saw that she was wearing boots of raw strawberry-colored energy. This was the worst! She kicked out with a side-roundhouse kick experimentally, expecting a freaky fluke effect. Instead, a series of knife-shaped beams flashed out in the direction of her kick, speeding off into the void. She heard her twin brother gasp "Rad!" as the red slash-beams phasered into the distance.

"KITSUNEN FOXFIRE CLAWS!!!" Kitsunen shouted. Just a few hours ago, she was minding her own business...making a group of BoyGods mind her with winks and come-on smiles. She had endured a challenging Assessment during ThirdTier Inculcation, and she needed some boys to flirt with and rank down. So she had skipped out to Yggdrasil after high school to play-n-slay the boys. Now she was here, riding a wave of stupidity...acting like some girl-Goddess with...and then she sucked a gasping belly-breath and turned red-faced. This was cosplay-level retarded! Her fingers were no longer fingers, they were white-furred fingers with wicked-ass claws of light. Just for kicks, she playfully slashed the air with her hands; and shuddered with incredulity as her claws seemed to rip open the void itself, leaving silver-gossamer slashes floating in front of her. Somehow, she could rip open nothingness. Amazing!

"BALDURDTH MUTATE TYPHOON!!!" Baldurdth shouted, and then slapped himself on the forehead for being foolish. Too late! He realized that he had almost duplicated the 'whirlwind' of the younger Goddess. Expecting to be lame-ducked with some copycat skill, he resigned himself to looking like an idiot. Like the others, his hands transformed into a Gundam mecha configuration that looked really cool. But instead of cyclonic forces of wind flowing out of his hands, each movement of his arms brought a furling of abstract convections, which seemed to articulate in absolutely all directions. Just like how the Swarp Hypernality would stream-glow with facets of energy that were completely patternless. He gulped down his astonishment as he realized his hand motions were creating actually unmistakable energies...waves of Swarp Hypernality forces. Impossible, but totally juiced!

"MOTOKYN SWANSONIC SLICE!!!" Motokyn shouted. She felt her heart wanting balance between the grace of a swan and a discord of a sonic blast, so she wouldn't be wielding a weapon. A webbing of light sharpened and focused in each of her hands, and then stretched outwards. For a moment, she felt like she was holding nova-plasmic shafts of energy; but the shafts were only the staffing. Atop each staff she watched as a blade curved outwards, radiant with a wicked-sharp angularity. She immediately recognized that it was patterned after the naginata sword-staffs of old Japan, save that the blade was a layering of feathers rather than forged steel. But the feathers seemed much sharper than any metal. With a two-meter-long naginata in each hand, she twirled them both with kendo-like precisions...and each slice sent an emerald arcing multi-hue of light racing outwards.

The GodKid's and DemonKid's glowing discharges of energy divided into groups of three. Ulfryn, Pryzm and Keleste's settled in equidistantly between GranSkuld and Mara's globes, while Sygyn, Falcyn and Keiyasu's floated in between Mara and Peorth's in like manner. Finally, Kitsunen, Baldurdth and Motokyn's affixed themselves between Peorth and GranSkuld's. Hovering between the three pearl-globes of light from the adults, joining the tri-point triangle and transforming it into a twelve-point circle of light ellipsing around the galaxy-shaped swirl of golden particles.

Behind each adult Goddess, her Angel or Devil appeared. All three sang their Songs of Recognition at the same time, creating a polysymphony of stunning grace and majesty.

Skuld's Noble Scarlet hovered behind her, looking as she had for millions of life cycles...except that her hair was long and black instead of short and gold-silver, and her feathered wings were utterly breathtaking, perhaps the most complexly articulated plumage an Angel had ever manifested. She was no longer the cherubim infant-Angel of Skuld's long-ago youth; she was the crowning manifestation of Angelic magnificence.

Peorth's Gorgeous Rose was smiling broadly as she sang, her dark brunette hair swirling in whirlpools of gentle curves which only highlighted her elegantly poised pink wings. She was surrounded by mist with lashes of thorny vines and laces of strobing ruby-glow roses. Delicate with deliciousness, a vivid embrace of elegance and supreme glamour. Each sweep of her Angelic wings wafted a gentle floral aroma that becalmed everyone.

Mara's Torrid Mystic flared behind her; her light-orange Devil was swathed in sable silk-mists as she spread her black-velvet feathered wings. Her blonde-yellow hair colored gradually into flame-flaring red as it haloed with long loopy curls, each curl ending with a swirl of flame. Her Devil's plumage was generously feathered with sparkling black plumes, each feather outlined with glowing soft reds which created an arresting vision of mid-air sublimity and delight.

Every single child experienced transports of admiration in his or her hearts, for these were _real_ Angels and Devils. They were TwinSoul Beings of love, magnificent in their fully outstretched wings and beauteous naked glory...

**_*"Goddess-Demoness Demon-God Love-Love Family Union Ultimate Intimate Force Nebula Final Striking Balance!"* _**

Twelve voices, Two Angels and a Devil singing, Nine Souls of Innocence, Three Souls of Maturity...hearts, minds, Souls...all becoming One Expression of Hope...

The TimePod suddenly shot downwards and pierced the middle of the swirling 'galaxy' of surviving particles from the OmniArc, tearing a tunneling hollow or 'hole' in the center of it. The golden particles began to be drawn into the hole, resembling event horizon matter being comported into the funneling axis of a black hole in space. Immediately, the twelve points of radiance joined outward in linkage, juncturing with each other to create a circular rainbowing spectrum of light, color, sound, energy. The rainbow formed a iris around the spiraling cloud of golden sparkles, jetting emissions of luminous energies inwards towards the plummeting concavity.

Each of the Twelve were channeling dazzling nebula-heart radiances, each to his or her own expression of Soul, replenishing the rainbow circle as it fired streamworks of energies towards the floating 'hole'. Inexhaustible shimmering filaments of Metanative and Chaostic puissance were pouring into the spatial lacuna; like shafts of light coursing into a bottomless plummet. Each micro-particle of the former OmniArc that fell into the hollow expanded slightly as it entered; the complete opposite of the compression effect when a particle was crushed down as it entered a black hole. The continuous egression of polychromatic light-energy seemed to cause the hole to widen as more energy concentrated within it. The encircling twelve points of joined-light enlarged itself as well, a widening circular rainbow that abounded with beauteous florescences.

A halofication of glowing empyrean-shaped luminance in their midst, each of the Twelve felt a blissful expression of Love and Spirit adding itself to their individual manifestations of energy.

The ever-broadening spiral of radiance hummed with impossibly complex 'designs' of aurora and audible beauty; glories of sound that were joyous and holy. The circular rainbow began to multiply itself, casting off new areolas of prismatic light. The wholeness began to spin like an alchemist's astrolabe, loops within loops forming a lucent sphere that started directing energy _outwards_ as well as inwards. The former voidness that had surrounded them was beginning to fill with Chronometric fireworks; 'explosions' of Time that shot out networkings of TimeStreams like festive fireworks streamers.

By this point, it was clear to each of the Twelve that they were creating a 'mega-OmniArc', an OmniArc of OmniArcs that was expanding beyond the furthest reaches of reality, aligning Time and Space from within and without, all directions at once. Every single dimension and interstitial 'trans-dimension' were being sewn together with the emanences that were flowing outwards from each of the twelve of them.

GranSkuld remembered her billions-of-years trip to explore the 'container space' of the original OmniArc that she and the Seven created. Mara had been a participant in that origination of the OmniArc, and she could sense Mara's thoughts even now. What they were doing was absolutely insane and impossible, creating an 'Everything' that was a universality...with a magnitude of 'size' that transcended anything she could even imagine. This made perfect sense, because the designing was a creation of Soul-brilliance that transcended any faculty of imagination. Their Souls were creating this.

Simplicity begat complexity begat unity begat Balance.

They were the weavers of the Balance of Transcendence...

...and the TimeCosm forming around them flared into a never-ending locus of TimeStreams.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

They were _all_ weaving Reality, outpouring Twelve sources of invisible spacialities and substantialities, bending vacuous inexistences into brilliant glows of Everything. The Nine Dimensional levels--the enormous divisions of dimensions, flowed from the clearlights of Ultimate Forces into the ever-expanding concavity, with a convex of energy sparkling outwards from its rim. This capsular cavity of space was no longer a dark empty siphoning hole; it was filled with Soulstuff, like pooling ribbons of life-giving water...

Twelve, feeling something else controlling them, feeling themselves controlling each other, feeling themselves controlling something else. Every motion of their hands fueled the emergent SoulKokoro that had evolved when they released their mental shields and became a One.

The final three dimensions destroyed by Isilblius were restored before Time could even begin or end. Peorth of Nulln and the Four were streamed with energy from the SoulKokoro and completed their task effortlessly.

The Souls that had consumed each other were revivified; reanimating every mortal, Goddess and Demoness that had ever existed. Each being was returning to the center of their lives, so that the most heartfelt experiences in their Souls could harvest the Ultimate Force and transform it into the Intimate Force. Separating out their personalities from their powers, to empower a union of all 'selfs' would achieve an ascendancy...so that the Intimate Force would reach a fruition of Holiness and Love and transmit itself as an inexhaustible Balancing Force.

Creating the Heart that would spark the fires of Infinity.

Creating the Soul that would join the patterns of Eternity.

Creating the Mind that would weave the communion of Being.

A new expression of Balance, a transcursive and elegaic Reality so expansive that it was incomprehensible; limitless, formless, boundless...but filled with a perpetuity. Even now, it was interpenetrating the Mid-Light; all around them were pattern-glances of Xeomnic, Mnoexic and Oemxnic computer networks, templates that resonated and interacted with each other. They knew that this OmniOm would never be, would never not be, would always be...because there _was_ no new Everything. An Omnimity-Omniternity that would give Life to unlimited Souls and preserve each Being who passed the Real Death within the Mid-Light's Multiplicity, so that that each individual being would finally be truly grounded with Soul.

Blissed out with joy, the twelve Gods and Demons cherished the vision of their hope, as an automatic synergy of minds and hearts took over. All the restored Souls in the OmniOm celebrated their renewal by guiding stars, suns, planets, plants and atoms into existence. A final plexus of light folding outwards, filling the void with Life, while the guiding, gentle powers within each of the Twelve pulled them into the glowing center of their creation. A voice assured them that their hearts would be free, that they would be together again, that all of the OmniOm was abundantly radiant with Love and Spirit...asking the Twelve to let go of their task and express themselves as pure Light as they finally entered the rainbowed axis they had created...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --


	140. Pt 140: BlissGifts: Nulln Regathered

**Part 140: BlissGifts - Nulln Regathered**

NULLN:

Peorth felt a wrenching in her heart as her friend, Belldandy the Silent Goddess, stood poised at the circular tumble of stones that lipped of the Well of Urd. Belldandy was the best friend she had in Nulln; a lifelong companion hopelessly struggling against a steady deterioration of her Divine nature and abilities. Despite the derangement of mind and emotions Belldandy been suffering for millennia, her friend seemed hesitant about the Exile, as if she knew what was about to happen. Peorth had tried her very best to prevent this from happening; but now she could only attend her bosom companion during her few remaining precious moments in Nulln. The Almighty in His magistracy role had Listened and had decreed fifty Decas of Exile for Belldandy. Any postponement of this sentence would be a commerce of futility: there was nothing either of them could do at this point. The Lord had granted her a final day to cherish with Belldandy, whom she had known since their genial days of childhood. But the Almighty had also told Peorth "that which is known must be discarded."

All is not what it seems, or something to that effect.

Unexpectedly, Belldandy turned towards her and reached out, fighting with intense effort to keep her hands from shaking. Peorth sensed that she wanted to grasp her hands, to have a final moment of physical contact before her Exile. The noir-clad elegiac figure beseeched her with piercing blue eyes; Peorth was taken aback by the gesture and was somewhat afraid to let herself be touched. Tentatively, she extended her hands and the Silent Goddess clutched at them like evening clutching at the moon, grasping her tightly at both wrists. Their physical contact opened a channel, and she realized that Belldandy was trying to convey a thoughtcast by the most immediate means possible, via direct touching. She could hear sounds in her head...whistles, screeches, murmurs, clickings...punctuated by quiet waves that sounded like a calming beach on the ocean. But nothing even resembling God's Language or any language. She looked at Belldandy, tears filling her eyes as she resigned herself to the knowledge that her best friend couldn't even articulate a simple cogent thoughtcast.

With a resigned look of sadness, Belldandy released her wrists. Peorth sought her eyes to reassure her that she had nothing to be ashamed of. Belldandy's eyes expressed an inwards-looking vagueness for a moment, and then she seemed to reach some kind of decision. She reached up and began unlacing the black mouth-veil which covered the bottom half of her face. With careful, deliberate motions, she pulled back her leather-worked hood and cowl, and then untied her black-lace headscarf.

Beside herself with shock, Peorth gasped as she saw Belldandy's face for the first time in the almost forty millennia since she started wearing her funereal clothes. Her best-friend's beautiful countenance was now only a shadow of the charming expressiveness she used to have. Her face was severe: gaunt and deeply-lined, her eyes hooded with dark, deepset rings. Her mouth lacked expression, it was simply _there_; thin-lipped and dry. Her cheeks were hollow and wrinkled. As a whole, her face was pallid and weathered. Belldandy looked like she was Sixty Decas of age, instead of her true age of Twenty Eight Decas. Her hair was a ruin of unkempt brown-grey and white frazzles, thinning and balding in some areas. Belldandy's appearance was a shocking diminishment of her former self; Peorth had to gamely fight herself to keep from turning away at the sight of such ugliness. If Belldandy had been an Earthrealm mortal, she would have looked like a freshly-deceased corpse.

Her friend's mouth was quivering with a deliberation of effort, shifting from smile to grimace to wan-thin expression. She finally managed to break her silence, making sounds that were more throaty chokings than voicings. Peorth realized that Belldandy was trying to speak aloud in the mortal fashion, for she could not thoughtcast. It took her friend a full twenty minutes to get her tongue to cooperate with her voice, but she willed herself somehow to speak.

She heard her best friend's first spoken words in 40,000 years...

_"Th..thank you."_

Peorth felt light-headed and struggled to keep her composure, she was so stricken with a magnitude of emotions that her heart was ill-afforded to contain. She simply collapsed to her knees, tears streaming out of her eyes as she realized the immense struggle Belldandy had undergone just to speak two precious words in a long-dead Earthrealm language. She felt humbled and honored beyond the course; yet she was also conflicted with bittersweet emotions that coarsened her gratitude. Belldandy's incapacity had been demonstrated one more time, reminding her that her friend was no longer the Belldandy that she had known for most of her life. Dejectedly, she looked on as Belldandy's robe rippled while a form pulled itself out along her backbone. She was letting Holy Bell out! With glow that was white with just a touch of blue, Bell's Angel formed behind her. One being clothed in deepest black, another being created in palest blue...

As with Belldandy, Holy Bell was a shadow version of her former glory; a phantom diaphanous form whose Angelic glow was so slight that she was almost transparent. With tatters for wing plumage, Holy Bell shuddered as she struggled to serenade her TwinSoul with the Song of Recognition, the private song that every Angel sang to announce their presence when they manifested out of their God or Goddess. Her voice a harsh wavering tremolo, Holy Bell somehow willed the hoarseness out of her singing and captured a melodious anthem. In response, Belldandy cried out in a near-howling strain, echoing Holy Bell's song with a sorrowful plaint that was too disharmonious to be even considered an Angel's song. Peorth started to lend her voice to Belldandy's and Holy Bell's song. Her own Angel, Gorgeous Rose, emerged and added her voice, echoing the sorrowful plaint. She _had_ to sing along with her sister Goddess, for it was her and her Angel's nature to lend their voices in song.

There they were, singing threnody of despair, dismay and howling.

She knew that she was feeling just a fraction of Belldandy's sense of loss, as in a few moments the song would end and Bell would walk into the Well of Urd and vanish. Time moved on inexorably, despite the comfort of their shared singing. This final goodbye was every bit as heart-rending as the funeral she had conducted for Bell's family. She would _never_ see her best friend again in this cycle of existence. Wanting to stop up her mind and simply shut off her thoughts, Peorth's voice faltered against itself. She wished she could arrest the movement of Time itself to prevent the Future from coming into the Present.

But all songs must come to an end.

This was the finality. With a resigned expression, Holy Bell wrestled to tuck herself back away inside of Belldandy. It was very distressing for Peorth as she watched Bell's Angel actually floundering with exertion just to return inside of her TwinSoul Goddess.

How could it have all come to this?

Belldandy struggled once more, trying to speak. Peorth had overheard her mournful singing many times at the Cathedral of Memories, or in other places of solitude and reflection. But forming coherent words was as difficult for Belldandy as it was for an Earthrealm mortal infant who was attempting to coo a sound into a meaningful word.

_"G..Good..b..bye, Pe..Pe..Peo..."_

In the end, her friend gasped a deep sigh and abandoned the effort. Peorth physically felt the Soul-strings in her heart snapping; as Belldandy couldn't even speak her name.

Sallow-eyed, Belldandy nodded to her and then turned to step off the edge of the shallow stone cairn that enclosed the Well of Urd. Again, Peorth wanted to shut her mind off as she watched Belldandy fall into the abyss. But her mind betrayed her; she couldn't avoid witnessing the last moments of her friend's existence in Nulln. With a single stride, Belldandy simply dropped into the maw of the well like a stone-weight, completely disappearing from sight. Abruptly, the subtle connection which existed between all Gods...the subtle Metanative threading of Divinity between her and Belldandy...was completely severed.

Her friend was _gone_. Involuntarily, the entire history of her and Belldandy's friendship flashed through the concourse of her Goddess awareness within a nano-second. Couched within these reminisces was one particular day when they had been summoned to His Presence, where they learned that they had been appointed to be wish-granting Goddesses. She clearly recalled the Lord's admonitions and encouragements, including His insistence that mortals _needed_ Goddesses, and that Goddesses needed selflessness...

...and Peorth's heart blurred into a decision.

"You're not going alone, dammit!" she shouted. "I'm not going to let you be Exiled by yourself, Belldandy. Do you hear me?! _YOU ARE NOT GOING TO BE ALONE!!!_"

Her entire will was now a fiery engine of impulse. She steeled her heart, and with a running leap she dived into the Well of Urd...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Belldandy felt herself swiftly surrounded by darkness the moment she stepped off the stone curbing of Urd's Well; a pitch-empty blanketing of her senses that was sharpened by the severance from Nulln. Outside was an absolute muteness, vacant of thoughtcasts, sounds and lightforms. But inside of her mind she was fighting against the screamings again. The raucous howling, the hate-filled screeching voices were drowning her thoughts. She put her hands to her ears and tried to rip her own head away from her body...

"_...not going to be alone!_" she heard someone shouting, rupturing through the screaming harshness in her mind. She looked up, and saw Peorth hurtling downwards towards her. Fragmented as her mental state was, she could feel a numbing stab of shock as she realized that Peorth had joined her in this place of Exile.

Peorth gained upon her, and then hovered level with her. Reaching out, she pulled her into a tight hugging embrace as they both plummeted into Urd's Well.

"I don't care if I'm going to be here for Fifty Decas, I don't care how much this pisses off the Lord, I don't care that I just gave up any chance of having a Goddess adulthood and family and kids and everything else. I didn't abandon you then, and I'm not.._snff_...gonna abandon you now. I love you.._snff_..as a friend...and I couldn't stand the thought of you being here all alone for the rest of this cycle of your life..."

Belldandy heard the discordant whistlings and chirpings again, the owl-like hoots and rustlings of haunting winds. She tried really hard to concentrate on what Peorth was saying. It was almost as difficult for her to listen as it was for her to speak. Between slabs of distraction, she vaguely remembered that the Well of Urd was a sort of tunnel between Nulln and the DeathRealm. But this didn't seem like a shaftworks that linked anything to anything. She felt a warm sensation on her forehead...

...Peorth was Probing her, or she was Probing Peorth...she couldn't tell the difference. Her mind snapped with a brittle crackling of faded memories, whiplashing her towards an awareness that had been wrested from her forty millennia ago. Somatic waves of fright assailed her through the channel of Peorth's mind as she experienced her sister Goddess's awareness. An alarming cast of thoughts: not the uncertainty of someone who had just jumped into the Well of Urd...but a naked terror brought forth by the awareness that Reality itself seemed to be shredding to pieces all around them.

Her catalepsy had been shredded as well by the white winds of consciousness. She recognized herself as renewed...and remembered.

"Peorth, it's me!" she shouted against the stridorous noises that crackled and rumbled all around her. "I'm back, and this isn't the place of Exile!"

"Belldandy!" Peorth replied in a thoughtcast swarmed with astonishment, completely caught off-guard at how poised and alert her friend was. She released her Goddess Seal from Belldandy's and looked into her eyes...

"Oh my sweet Lord!!! Y..you're _back_! You're _here_! You're really here!" Peorth shouted joyfully, acclaiming the first thoughts that arranged themselves in her mind. Her face was clothed with expressions of joyful disbelief as she marveled at Belldandy's lucidity. It was as if Belldandy's mind had been instantly cured by a tonic of hellebore, and Peorth found herself surfing on transports of wonderment and delight. Not only did she sense cogency in her friend's eyes, but Belldandy's face was transfigured, steadily regaining its youthful beauty. This restoration was the clearest proof that Belldandy had overgained her insanity and was beginning to be able to direct her physical manifest with absolute control again.

"I think Nulln is tearing itself apart, because the Mid-Light isn't where it's supposed to be, and Nulln is nowhere around us. I can barely concentrate; there's too much happening all at once," Peorth observed, her thoughts a staccato as _everything_ shuddered with a series of violent convulsions. She felt the jolting throes within and without her, as if Eternity itself had been earthquaked.

"Tell me about it Peorth!" Belldandy said. She could hear the screaming again, and when she looked, she saw a horrible winged green-yellow wraith struggling with another being. With a start, she recognized that whole chunks of Multiverse were flying past her, a dizzying dance of chaos that mercilessly disoriented her as if she was navigating scree-blind through a dense asteroid storm. The TimeWeb wasn't even sensible to her, because there seemed to be no connection with Time here. The Chronologic and Chronometric dimensional levels were torched and imploding.

She felt whole again, and in that integration of Soul and Self, Belldandy intuitively knew what had happened. The skeletal raptor-with-wings being that looked like a nightmare wasn't from Loux, the Realm of the Demons. It was the Dread Being called Isilblius. Her deepest Goddess instincts informed her that the entire span of the tragedy that had tortured her for so many millennia had been schemed and set into motion by Isilblius. Even worse, Isilblius had infected her in such a way that her Soul and her 'beingness'...her sense of identity...couldn't be integrated. No wonder the Proctors and the Adepts were unable to cure her! She looked at the malevolent spectral form again, and felt a very un-Goddess-like bitter hatred towards him.

"Belldandy, this feels like the Ragnar-Apocalypse! My Rune is going crazy! I can sense so much turmoil in my Soul...and the Rune is telling me that everything is consuming itself. Reality is falling all to pieces around us!" Peorth desperately voiced, wildly glancing around at the maelstroms surrounding them.

"Peorth, why in the name of the Almighty Regent did you follow me?"

"Because you're my best friend, you dope! Obviously your mind is back to normal, because now you're asking silly questions with obvious answers once again!" Peorth grinned, kissing her on the cheek with a zeal of friendship.

"Hey look!"

Her attention traveled towards the place where Peorth was gesturing, where she could faintly discern four or five beings, almost as transient as vapors. Two of them looked like Keiichi, and two of them looked like...herself! An Angel, maybe? And another Peorth was with them? She blinked her mind several times, uncertain if this was a hallucination. Inconceivably, the Angelic being was a mirror image of Holy Bell!

The group turned and faced her and Peorth, barely visible amidst the frenzied mutilation of Time and Space. She noticed that they seemed to be partly obscured by a prismatic veil that appeared to be a window of colors. But they were clearly looking at her and Peorth through something that looked like a doorway or gate. Without warning, a small spark-fire of energy shot out from the group and struck her in the breast, bullet-fast. Before she could even react, Belldandy sensed an element of Soul enter her own Soul. Her entire manifest was tingling...

Healing...

Belldandy looked at Peorth and was thankful that Goddesses didn't have to wear makeup, because her friend's eyes were rimmed with tears. If she had been locked away in some kind of insanity for forty millennia, then Peorth must have gathered up major crying debts. Her friend's swollen eyelids attested to the level of empathy and sufferance she must have felt during that time. She realized that the duration of her insanity had stormed harshly against her friend's compassion; Peorth obviously owed herself a releasing of her weariness. No wonder she had been crying so hard.

The group of five were swept away, like leaves inside of a funnel cloud. Time was beginning to structure itself around her. She saw an ancient being close a book. Something in the distance collapsed and exploded, and then she and Peorth were swept up in the wake of its outwardly-expanding energies.

The being threw a book at the wraith-like creature, which promptly seemed to catch on fire and burn itself up into nothingness.

"That's the end of Isilblius!" Peorth commented. "My Rune is ecstatic right about now."

"Me too! Isilblius was the one who was torturing me, who killed my entire fam..."

A blue glowing hole appeared around them as they were integrated into an explosion of light...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Waves and crinkling broke open her slumbers.

Belldandy blinked the brightness out of her eyes and looked at Peorth, who was half buried in a thickly-bowered tall hedge of leafy vegetation and vines. Turning her head, she saw a dark blue ocean hovering above her, with thin hurls and breaks of waves extending towards the horizon. The sight momentarily reminded her of an AquaSun during its cool-down phase; where the greenish ejecta of water-light subsided and the surface of the sun started taking on a glassier face of navy blue ripplings. Suspended above her, the tiniest patch of a giant floating energy of water...

Or rather below her, as she recognized that she was suspended upside-down in a stout oak tree, about five or six meters above the ground. She could smell orchids, apricots and olives, and a fruity smell that reminded her of grapes. How had she landed in this tree? The leafy embrace half-smothered her with a prickly pastiche of weaving vines and thickly-leaved tree branches. The tree she had been lofted upon was surrounded by an understory of hedges; a thick macchia of myrtle shrub with Peorth partially buried within it. Nearby, several groves of pinewoods and ilex trees added color and shading along the verdant chase. The sounds of nature stuffed her senses; the whisking of the wind through the dry vegetation, the gentle breathing of the ocean, the pulsation of the Earthrealm...

_**THE EARTHREALM?!**_

Below her was a bright blue sky with soft cottony clouds and upside-down seagulls flying in patterns, surveying the ocean for fish. As she arighted herself in the tree, Belldandy could see thrush grass blowing to her left, and a large humpbacked mountainous mass in the distance, semi-forested and remote. The mountain seemed to be accented with glazes and grays towards the summit. Her face was slightly touched by wind-blown sand, accenting the regularity of the waves that crashed against the nearby beach.

"Belldandy, I think we're on the _Earthrealm_! But it isn't supposed to be like this at all. Even after all these millennia since the mortals had their disaster, much of the Earthrealm's flora is parched and desolate wherever it is in near proximity to most of the oceans. Trees and woodlands like this simply don't grow near the oceans. The Earthrealm's oceans were dangerously befouled when the sentient mortals poisoned them with industrial wastes and garbage dumping, and they are still recovering from the near-irreparable ecological affront. But here we are almost next to an ocean or large lake...and I can feel and smell the auras of roses and a profusion of other flowers and fruits. The Earthrealm's totally _green again_! It's verdurous and alive, filled with an abundance of flora...as if the ecosystem somehow reverted back to how it was forty millennia ago. This is so unbelievable, because I can..." Peorth shouted excitedly, not even bothering to thoughtcast.

"Hey, I say there!" an old man hailed them, interrupted her. He was walking alongside a donkey, bridle in hand. A moment later, he paused under the tree they had landed in.

Belldandy thought furiously: language, language, language, lingo, circa la lengua.

He was speaking Italian with a Neapolitan inflection common to those who lived in the greater Napoli region.

"I say there," the elder repeated, removing his straw hat and rubbing his graying scalp as he looked up at them. "Are you lost tourists? Or maybe you are the drunk women, and tried to climb the tree..."

"What year is it?" Peorth asked.

"Aha! Now I know you're blistered drunk, the two of you! You young ladies must be Swiss or French, because you are so estupido. 'What year it is?' indeed! Trying to play a trick on the old man, eh? Hmmm, the two of you look French enough to me, even if you speak it poorly," the man answered without answering. Belldandy noticed that Peorth was giving him a withering glare.

"Damn wannabe French kids get stuck up in a tree like monkeys, and now they're asking me what year it is..." he grumbled privately. Belldandy shook her head "no!" as she caught the expression in Peorth's face. Her friend was rosy-cheeked with ire, and she knew Peorth was almost ready to blast the eldster with a thorny rebuke or worse.

"Perhaps you both think I'm just some ignorant old fart. A retiree gardener walking around with his donkey in mid-day, enjoying the sun and savoring the vintier's grapes. But I know how it is! You girls are all dollops, coming over here during the warm season and getting all stupid with wine and pasta and men. Dressing skimpy and babbling 'Le amore this, le amore that!' Well, if you have to know, you're just south of Pompeii, Italy. And it's a good thing I know French, because..."

Belldandy and Peorth both flinched at this information, and quickly shifting their gaze towards the nearby hunched caldera of the volcanic Mt Vesuvius as the color drained from their faces. The volcano loomed heavy and threatening against the blue sky and the horizon, dominating the inland landscape from their position at the edge of the shrub-lined vineyard.

"My word! You two signorinas are certifiably crazy! If my eyes aren't fooling me, you both looked as if you watched Mt. Vesuvius blow its top yesterday, instead of 2000 years ago! Don't they teach history in France? Or do the French feel that they own their history, and none of the history of the other European countries are of concern?" the man said, hands on his hips. Now he was acting the part of the feisty Italian old guy, taunting them.

She and Peorth shared a giggle over his comment. If he only knew! To them, a couple thousand years was like ten weeks on the Earthrealm, figuratively speaking. The burial of Pompeii and Herculaneum were recent news to them. At least the volcanic mountain looked deceptively tame.

"Signore, we assure you that we are of the most sober bearing," Belldandy answered him in Italian.

"Then where are your parachutes? Why are you hanging upside down like that in the tree without parachutes? Are you skydivers? Do you have permission to be here? Maybe I should call the Polizia and have them look after you. Bah! If I had one those new-fangled cellphones, I'd be doing that right now."

Belldandy and Peorth looked at each other, completely confused. Perplexity ruled the day...they had experienced a multiverse crumble apart like burnt cornbread, the complete unraveling of TimeSpace, the explosive sheer of thought and energy as Reality was torn asunder. Flung into a pooling light, they had fallen inside of a bright blue chasm and then blacked out, only to find themselves lodged in a thicket of vegetation.

"Well, are you going to stay in the tree all day? Is that your great plan? To look like a pair of foolish women who are helpless and drunk?" he scoffed, a smirk on his weathered face.

"Sir, I think we can..uh..manage on our own quite fine," Peorth answered in perfectly idiomatic Italian, surprising the oldster. "So why don't you get your ass in gear and be on your way."

Try as she might to cover her mouth with her hand, Belldandy couldn't hold fast and a few snickers found their way through her fingers.

"So! You insult me! Fine! Stay up there until the vines go sour or Vesuvius blows for all I care, carefree wanton signorinas!" he said, shaking his fist at them. He walked over to a nearby grapevine and pulled off a bunch of grapes, and then started pelting them. The scene was so comical, she and Peorth forgot themselves for a moment and giggled heartily, which only incensed him further. Finally he gave up and tried to get his donkey 'in gear', which didn't happen because the animal had decided to have a sit-down strike for a few minutes.

Of course, what the cranky old Italian guy didn't know that Belldandy had requested the donkey to enjoy a bout of asinine stubbornness. She didn't appreciate being splattered with grapes.

"Hey Bell, should I do a Balaam and the Ass with him?" Peorth asked in a conspiratorial sotto voce.

"Peorth! For heaven's sake, don't provoke him any further! He might come back and lecture us again," she answered, causing another ringing burst of laughter. A few minutes later, he and his four-legged companion managed to strike a bargain with a few stalks of hand-fed greens, and they watched with amused smile until the pair passed out of line-of-sight.

She and Peorth extracted themselves and slowly hovered down to the ground. Deciding caution would be best, they both changed their manifests and clothed themselves in peasant blouses and cloth skirts. A group of young boys came by a few minutes later, stunting-kicking a soccer ball as they passed by. One of the boys accidentally squibbed a kick and the ball hit Belldandy in the chest. As the boy quickly apologized, she and Peorth started kicking the soccer ball acrobatically, earning giggles and respectful sighs from the group of boys. Belldandy patted the boy on the head and handed him the ball as she spun it on her finger. If the boys were actually playing soccer, then it was conceivable that they were in Italy in an era contemporaneous with sports festivals and leagues...

The ocean was probably about a few hundred meters away, and she could hear chattering voices, mostly playful and joyous.

"Hey! Are you still with me? Because this is where I think it starts to get fun!"

"Or weird, knowing you!"

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Belldandy, what happened back there? I don't mean the old guy either. I remembered we were plummeting downwards inside of the Well of Urd and then everything just went insane. I was cut off from Time completely, and existence itself became nebulous and incoherent. We witnessed the destruction of the Ygg Multiverse, but how could we survive it? Why would such a swath of destruction occur only _after_ we were both in Urd's Well? Why didn't we sense it before? You may not have been in your right mind before you leapt into the Well, but I was. There was no indication of anything being amiss," Peorth asked seekingly, serious and intent on their situation.

"I don't know at all, what we saw is a mystery. Perhaps Time has a different sequential expression in the Well of Urd. I feel like this experience is unnecessary, an empire of illusions. No means exist which I can use to convey what it was like to be living in my nightmares. Now, I feel tentative. Uncertain about so many aspects of my life, about _this_. Peorth, I've just started getting used to having my own mind back, and it's difficult to discern truth and falsehoods. I do know that all that the maelstrom of destruction we witnessed was inflicted by some malign being, the same one who you suspected all along as the evil that was screaming in my thoughts. He was utterly destroyed right before my eyes."

"Belldandy, even though my Rune was reacting to his destruction, I have to wonder how Isilblius could have been on the loose without anyone knowing it. Those two beings that we saw in a combat...are you certain that one of them was Isilblius?"

"Mmm-hnm!" Belldandy confirmed, nodding her head happily.

"Hey, what an idiot I am! I'm a Senior First Class Goddess of Nulln, and I'm not even attempting to use my powers to find out more about this Earthrealm-like planet we're on. I mean, it could be _any_ Earthrealm, couldn't it? Which may be so totally whacked, but I have this weird feeling that the universe was torn apart and patched together again. I don't know how reliable that old man was, for that matter. He was pretty rude," Peorth reflected.

"Yeps! But he was a fun combination of rudeness and amusement, which makes me almost certain that he was an Earthrealm mortal in the truest sense," Belldandy noted with a grin. "Do you have some odd memories, Peorth? This place feels like an incunabula; filled with history and a wealth of mortal sentient imprints. It's saturated with the language of human expression, just like that perky old man."

"Yeah, now that you mention it, Bell. I have a feeling of déjà vu, like we were on some desolate...merde! Bell, I can sense the Divine energies and heartbeats of _billions_ of mortals! I can even hear radio waves, internet context, video and other forms of broadcast...Dear Almighty, there can't be radios. None of the NewType mortals are even close to having that kind of technology!"

"NewType...mortals?" Belldandy asked, confused by the new terminology.

"Yes, NewTypes," Peorth repeated herself, looking wistfully melancholy for a briefness. "They are the descendents of the Earthrealm mortals of long ago. In the present, many of the NewTypes are barely out of the Neolithic Stage, and most are still tribally organized. The most advanced culture on the Earthrealm of our era is currently struggling through the early Dark Ages, to reference an equivalent period of cultural development of the earlier species of Earthrealm mortals. Don't you remember anything, Belldandy? You visited the Earthrealm over and over again in the past 13,000 years, once the mortals began to redevelop a rudimentary form of intelligence and culture."

"I did?"

"Yes. That was why the Divine Regent decided to exile you to the Well, because you taught a young woman language. On the continent of Australia where she was residing, there were no literate mortals at all. One of her ancestors had found a cave-works that led into a remnant of what used to be the Australian National Library, in the ruins of Canberra. You came to her while she was inside of a chamber and you taught her to read and write English. She became a legendary teacher and within a generation, literacy was spreading throughout the many tribes..."

"Peorth, I don't remember a single thing about that!" Belldandy countered in an exasperate voice. "How could I teach language to the mortals? They've had literacy for six millennia!"

"To you, they were in their prime. But you missed out on their downfall. Believe me when I say that the mortals don't have any technology that even approaches the level they possessed during their Renaissance. Most of them are just barely surviving, except in a few localized regions where they had a semblance of pre-feudal culture. They certainly didn't have electricity. Which means that this is an entirely different Earthrealm, or we _really are_ over forty millennia in the Earthrealm's past!"

"Dear Lord, Peorth! What happened to them? You mean I've been out of it for _Four Decas_? The Earthrealm mortals suffered a cataclysmic disaster?" Belldandy asked, stunned by what her friend had just said.

"Yes, my friend," Peorth answered tenderly. "Non au courant! During the ensuing forty thousand years, you were kind of half in, half out of yourself. You used to go visit the Earthrealm a lot. A couple centuries after you lost Keiichi and your family, the Earthrealm mortals became entrenched within corporate-level culture. As you know, for many sentient species, the first difficult stage of transition between national and polynational/world unity culture occurs when the governance of national political entities is succeeded by the rule of dominant business corporate culture. Unfortunately, the managing class the Earthrealm inherited was very unwise in their deployment of corporate governance, because they were clouded by their avarice and desire for power. They developed an invasive version of neuro-nanotech and it got out of hand, managing to completely wipe out the Earthrealm mortal's higher brain functions. Consequently, this set them back something like 30,000 years in intellectual development. Such a horrible waste of potential! Recently in the past Deca, they've begun to pick themselves back up towards civilization again. The NewType mortals are those survivors whose brains mutated a resistance to the neuronans. Fortunately, most of the remaining neuronans were millennia past their expiration date; they weren't created to saturate the genome for perpetuity. So the NewTypes are presently on the slow road to cultural and species recovery."

"That's _horrible_!!! How could they do that to themselves?" Belldandy asked in dismay.

"They forgot to question authority, and they neglected the spiritual principles that were guiding them towards the Next Level. They even forgot about _us_. The entire civilization was so wrapped up in an acquisitive identity, they rarely had the need to make wishes, because they were fed upon the teat of plenty. They were too busy consuming, spending their lives chasing after things they didn't need," Peorth quickly answered.

Her response only confirmed what Belldandy already suspected; as this was very similar to many scenarios that had been well-documented by the Ygg Mainframe under "Mortal Sentients: Aberrant Evolution -- Cultural Dysfunctions and Species Morbidity -- Extinctions."

"Peorth, the Moon! How can you explain that? Look at the Moon; it's right where it's supposed to be! At least where it was supposed to be at the beginning of the 21st Century! How can that be, if you said we've been living another forty thousand years since Keiichi and my family were killed?" Belldandy asked. She felt a stabbing pain whenever she spoke about the loss of her beloved Keiichi and her entire family. But the return to sanity was garnered with a sad reconciliation that they _were gone_, and there was nothing she could do about it. Perhaps she might be able to move on in her life.

"Belldandy, I don't think we're in Nulln anymore. But I can clearly sense Nulln all around me, the Nine Dimensional Levels, Time and Space...all of it! I swear, this feels like we went backwards 40,000 years into the Past..." Peorth conjectured. She materialized a mirror and regarded her expression...and then dropped it.

"Quelle avait de la jarnigoine! My face...it is _Decas_ younger! Th..this can't be! I'm not trying to manifest at Twenty Four Decas! But the years around my eyes are softened! My hair, my eyes, my mouth...all are filled with youth! I'm younger! Which means that this _is_ the Past!"

Belldandy could barely hear Peorth, because her Goddess senses were engaged in sifting through all 6.5 billion heartbeats on the planet. Looking for one heartbeat, _the_ heartbeat.

"HEROIC VERMILION SWIFT!" Peorth shouted exultantly. This was beyond impossible, because she sensed a half-mortal, half-Angelic Soul that could only be her boyfriend's. She also sensed four other Angels and a Devil...and her heart leapt to greater heights of hope. If this was true, then she and Belldandy were going to be blessed with the greatest of miracles. In her imaginings, Peorth could already taste Heroic's kiss on her lips...

"KEIICHI!!!" Belldandy shouted as she found the distinctive heartbeat she was looking for. Her Goddess senses were going haywire, not only because of his cardiac signature, but also because she felt attached. Attached to the unique Divine energies of four Gods and a Demon.

"They're here, aren't they?" Peorth confirmed. "They gotta be here, because I can totally sense his heartbeat and Heroic's Angelic presence nearby!"

"Peorth, how do I know that he is the _real_ Keiichi? Is his Angel the real Heroic Vermilion Swift that you're sensing? Are they my _real family_? They died all those years ago, when that plane crashed!" Belldandy flurried, sobered by the realization that this could be a false reunion, just like she had experienced with the other Keiichi and the two Godkids on the desolate planet.

Yet, she could sense the reassuring presence of Nulln...

"But what if 'here' is a time _before_ that happened, by some prodigy of miracles? If the entire universe may have changed drastically, perhaps _we_ have changed drastically as well," Peorth mused aloud, gripped with excitement and apprehension. "That could explain why both you and I look much younger than Goddesses in their late Twenties."

Belldandy hovered, ready to shoot like an arrow towards the group of mortal and Divine essences.

"Bell!!! No! Run...don't float. We're almost a half kilometer from the beach and I don't think we want to be acting too Divine at the moment. After all, this is 'Terra Incognito' as the locals would say if they still spoke Latin. We must practice discretion, especially if this is the authentic Earthrealm," Peorth cautioned.

She and Peorth emerged from the greensward thrushes and crossed the dirt road, walking downhill towards the beach. They strolled down a street between a series of houses and then encountered a highway trafficked with a stream of cars, trucks and motorcycles. The noise of the motors, the smell of gasoline and road-dust, all served to drown out the calm. Their hearts were excited as they realized that they were in the middle of an urbanization of almost three million people. The closer they approached the ocean, the more clustered the houses became. Finally, they were walking among hotels and tourist shops, sidewalks crowded with passersby and shoppers. A narrow strip of beach grass separated them from the beach itself, which was dotted with vacationers. A small dog dashed out between the beach access walkpath and started excitedly barking and giving chase, nipping her and Peorth on the ankles. Belldandy gulped her heart down as she recognized him as Baupei, Skuld's new puppy!

"Hey you guys, over here!"

Belldandy's heart whim-whammed as she recognized the voice. Actually, voices.

Under a beach parasol Keiichi was waving at her, soda in one hand!

"Heroic Vermilion Swift!!!" Peorth screamed, almost forgetting her own injunction and wanting to spring from here to there in a nano-second.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

It was a tie. She and Peorth literally tackled their boyfriends. Heroic caught Peorth in mid-leap and spun her around, while she collided with Keiichi. His soda, the table with sodas, beers, fruits and ice cream...all went flying in silly-spilly arcs as she dived into his arms. The force of her ebullient leap knocked him clean off his feet and backwards into the sand, and she fell atop him. He heaved a painful wheeze, and she realized that she had impacted him a bit on the rough side, knocking his breath away and cracking one of his ribs...

"B..wheeze! Bell-chan?" he gasped questioningly, his brown eyes catching the overhead sun.

She _had to know_. There was only one way she could be certain that this was _her_ Keiichi: she would have to Probe every nook and cranny of his mind and Soul. A one-way Sharing; her Soul in union to his. Her mind exploring his memories, his life experiences.

She touched her Goddess Seal to his sweaty forehead and began dream sequencing and heart navigating...

«-- --» «-- --» «-- --» «-- --»

_...there he was, sitting on a bench outside of O.N.I.T. at 3am in the morning, utterly disappointed because he had just failed his entrance exam to join the college. The names and numbers, or 'namebers' as the Osaka students nicknamed them, were posted up on the scoreboard. The crowd had already dispersed long ago, but for some reason he had wandered back to the place where he had met the brick wall of his disappointment; the proof of his inadequacy._

_"Goddamm it! Why couldn't I make it in? I studied my ass off! I helped Mom and Dad at the shop! I bailed Megumi out of juvenile twice with my own money, so that Dad wouldn't find out and get all crazy upset with her. I'm such a loser! I can't even get into Osaka Nekomi Institute of Technology. Sure, it's the best tech school in Japan, so I went for it. I coulda gone for some dick community college engine repair quickie course. But noooo! Keiichi Morisato had to dream big. Dream big, act big...be a big man. Shit! I'm not even that...I'm even short for a guy. Just a really big idiot. What am I missing, what am I not doing? Why can't my life be better? As if that's gonna happen! Every time this happens, I'm alone! I just wish someone cared! But I don't even have a damn girlfriend to emotionally support me, or at least tell me I'm a loser! Fuckit! Now I'm totally reamed, because my folks will kill any further college attempts. I'm totally stuck, without a future to look forward to!"_

_He kicked the metal support and pedestal of the announcement board. Over and over again. He was so angry, he wanted to break every toe in his foot..._

_"That's not going to solve anything, Keiichi Morisato. How are you going to ride your motorbike back home if you injure your gearshift foot..." he heard a feminine voice chide him._

«-- --» «-- --» «-- --» «-- --»

...their first meeting. She remembered him flailing kicks against the post of the 'success board', absolutely livid with himself and so plugged with adrenaline, he didn't feel the pain. But he had made a wish, which had been received and activated by the Nulln Xeomnic. Or more fully, the Nulln Xeomnic Axial CorePlex. Belldandy halted her mind-Probe for a moment, puzzled over the term. The Nulln computer was called a Mainframe, not a Xeomnic. She'd never even heard of the terms "Xeomn" or "CorePlex"...

«-- --» «-- --» «-- --» «-- --»

"Who are you? Do you have any idea about what time it is? This is Osaka, live and direct at 3am...and a beautiful girl like you is out here walking around by _herself_? That's massively inviting trouble!" he challenged her, piqued by her confrontation. "Besides, who the hell do you think you are, just coming up and talking to me about my personal life? And how do you know that I ride motorcycles?"

"It must be the jacket you are wearing that gave it away," she answered as she gestured towards his red and white leather Kawasaki jacket with its numerous racing patches. "My name is Belldandy, and I am here because you wanted me to be here. You made a wish, and I was assigned to be with you and grant it. Don't concern yourself about my safety, Mr. Morisato. I am very practiced at night walking."

Keiichi shot her an exasperated look, and Belldandy immediately flushed with embarrassment over her gaffe.

"Err...that didn't quite come out right, I think. I..I meant that I can take care of myself. I can walk at night without risk of harm. If I may present my meishi?" she asked as she pulled her business card out of her wish-granting Goddess uniform-cum-overrobe.

"Sorry, I don't do hookers, especially ones that dress in weird cosplay outfits like you're wearing. Sure, I'm lonely...but I'm not _that_ lonely! What I need is so much more than just getting laid right now. But you wouldn't understand _that_, would you?" Keiichi refused, pushing her hand back as she tried to hand him the card. Belldandy could sense a Grief Demoness nearby, silently waiting on the wings. Actually, she was standing atop a powerline pole like a perching bird-of-prey. Loux Grief Operations must have intercepted this wish request and dispatched one of their Demoness agents. Wishes forged in the midst of stress and dismay were prime indicators of trouble, easily intercepted by the Loux Demon's computer because of the vulnerability of the mortal making the wish. Fortunately for Keiichi, she had gotten here first, instead of the Demoness. Yet, if a distraught Keiichi refused her card at this juncture, it could open the door for the Demoness to meet up with him. He was at risk of possibly winding up Cursed, if he accepted the Demoness' card instead of hers. By the measure of his disappointment, bitterness and self-loathing, he might actually accept the Demoness' proffered Greif Operations card and be on his way to massive amounts of cursed aggreivement. Grief that would result in emotional destructs which would make flunking a tech school entrance exam seem like savoring cookies and ice cream, as opposed to being prodded at spearpoint to walk barefoot on oven-hot irons.

But then, Keiichi softened his expression and held his hand out, noting "Well, since there's no sleazy photo on it, I might as well take a look. Can't hurt to look, at least."

He read it out loud:

_"NULLN WISH DISPATCH OPERATIONS DIVISION, EARTHREALM JURISDICTION_

_Goddess Belldandy, Goddess First Class, Unrestricted, Limited License._

_Senior Wish Bestowal Agent."_

"Is this some kind of idiotic joke? It says here that you're a _Goddess_!!! What kind of disreputable print shop would print up this kind of garbage? Wish Dispatch Operations? Earthrealm? Goddess? You expect me to believe this?"

"Yep! That's me, Belldandy of Nulln, Wish Dispatch agent...at your service," she answered.

"Either I'm going crazy from lack of sleep because I crammed all last week and this week, or somebody slipped mick in my coffee at the kisaten tonight. What the hell is Nulln? I've never heard of the place. Where's that, some city in Russia or something? And I know for a fact that Gods and Goddesses don't exist. I mean, people paint them, write stories about them, and make mangas about them all the time, but that's just a bunch of fiction and fairy tales. Utter bullshit, especially in the hands of cults and religious fanatics."

"But it's true! I am a Goddess," Belldandy remonstrated with him, a little too impatiently. The Demoness was still observing silently. If Keiichi told her to leave, then the game would be afoot, and it would be a competition of Wish versus Grief until one of them won out.

"Okay, so you say you're a Goddess, or at least your card claims you are. You look like you're from Europe, so you're probably some rich girl here in Japan goofing around. I got it! I know what you are! You're really an exchange student at Osaka University, whose idea of a prank is this card. Either that, or maybe you don't read Japanese too well and some guy at the print shop is playing a prank on you," he said excitedly. His face turned sly and he smirked at her.

"So Ms. Goddess Belldandy, why don't you _prove_ you're a Goddess. Make something disappear. Make it snow cats and dogs. Turn that apartment complex into Angkor Wat. Make my score up there change so I can get into O.N.I.T." he asked, filled with sarcasm.

"_He would have to ask for a miracle, especially on this assignment,_" she thought sourly.

In most cases, she was allowed limited use of Divine powers during an initial wish-bestowal contact. She could perform a small little 'trick' to help his belief along and convince him of her Divinity. If this were any other assignment, she would immediately heal his self-injured foot as an act of caring. However, this situation demanded a different approach altogether; all because she was in the middle of an exam period herself. At the moment, her current status was that of a candidate for promotion to a Senior First Class License. Consequently, she had been temporarily assigned to be a Senior Agent with the Division, so that her abilities could be evaluated. Any actions of Goddess ability could not..._would not_ be allowed. Senior License candidates are not allowed to perform any miracles at all, prior to the wish-candidate's wish. The reason for this restriction was simple: this was the ultimate test for a Goddess to determine if she was worthy of the Senior FCL. She had to gain the mortal's confidence and grant their wish purely out of wisdom and compassion. In Nulln, Senior First Class Goddesses had to _earn_ their promotion under the most trying of circumstances in whatever 'field' they were involved with. Otherwise, every God or Goddess would eventually receive their Senior First Class License merely from performing their 'tasks' for Ten Decas or so.

The background was this: Belldandy had been mentored by Celestine, who had recommended her for rapid promotion to Senior First Class even though she was only Twenty One Decas old. Surprising both she and he, the Lord Regent had approved his recommendation and had allowed her a Deca to prepare for the evaluation period. Being a Norn on top of working as a wish bestowal agent really didn't ease matters either. She had significant responsibilities as a Norn, tasked of vigilance to keep the Present in the 'present moment'. The license evaluation required five wish successful bestowals, and this was her fifth assignment.

So here she was, working with a volatile mortal who was extremely disappointed and mired in self-loathing, with a Demoness perched nearby like a vulture ready to pounce on roadkill.

"Keiichi Morisato, would you walk with me for a time?" she asked.

"I suppose. Osaka's a freakshow town, and I'm totally clued in that you're not from Osaka. You're one freaky gaijin chick," he observed, commenting again that she wasn't dressed like a typical Osaka young female. "But I suppose I can at least walk you home, since you're not one of _those_ kind of street walkers. Maybe getting away from here might do me some good."

"I believe you are correct in that view," she noted, and started strolling down the street without even waiting for him. He quick-stepped it to catch up with her.

Belldandy was gifted with the ability to be an expert listener, and as they strolled towards the downtown park district, Keiichi basically poured out his life story to her. Never had a girlfriend. Younger sister Megumi was a nutcase, always getting in trouble with hoodlums, gangsters and police. Constantly teased while growing up because he was the shortest boy in his class. Liked to ride motorcycles competitively, but couldn't afford the upkeep. Was a whiz at higher math but couldn't fix an engine if his life depended on it.

O.N.I.T. was adjacent to Osaka University, so she had ample time to walk with him through several districts in central Osaka. But her final destination was Osaka castle, and Keiichi seemed to sense that out once they started walking south along Sakuranomiya Park.

Of course, Belldandy had to stop at the Tenmangu Jingu shrine to pay a visit to the God of Learning. It was only a gesture of respect to a famous literati who had been the recipient of a wish-bestowal centuries earlier, but she still burned some incense in his honor. In _his_ honor, because she had been the wish-bestowal agent that had been assigned to Sugawara Michizané in the mid-Heian Period, around 870. He was a man of no distinction other than intellectual prowess who later rose to prominence until he was betrayed and died in exile. Japan, along with a host of other nations, had many personages who had worn the mantles of wish-bestowals that she had been assigned. Some had blundered, but many had earned enduring fame and had proven a boon to their contemporaries. Sugawara Michizané was one of her more successful wish recipients, and she felt a certain pride in the knowledge that his life had become an exemplar that inspired generations of young scholars.

Finally, they reached Osaka Castle and walked up the hill leading to the donjon.

The sky was just starting to brighten up with dawn, and the donjon castle was catching the earliest rays of the sun, mixed with the spotlights that landmarked it to a shine during nighttime.

"Okay," he said. "I thought you wanted me to walk you home, and instead we're here at the castle. I've seen this almost every day of my life. Plus you went to the God of Learning temple, which was pretty embarrassing since I just failed an exam. Borderline insulting, especially after what I told you. You're supposed to go to the temple _before_ taking an important exam."

"Well, did you go Mr. Morisato?" she asked brightly.

"Hell no! Of course not! It's all just a retarded scam; all this 'God' shit is just a cop-out to cover up humanity's many failings, so we can pretend to be better than what we really are. He was just an intelligent guy who was some famous tragic figure. Someone decided to make him a 'God' to honor him and con a bunch of stupid scholars into thinking they could compete with the real smart scholars. Michizané definitely wasn't a god, however. There are no Gods! What I don't understand is what we're doing _here_? Damn it, you've basically made me walk on a sore ankle for several kilometers, and then go up all those stairs just to hang out at a tourist trap."

"Keiichi, can you see how the castle is being touched by the light of the sun?" she asked

"Yeah, I'm not blind, y'know. What does that have to do with anything?" he replied, clearly irritated and impatient with her.

"Can you see the sun? The sun that is causing it to turn into that beautiful orange against the dark blue sky?"

"Not really, because I'm looking west towards the castle and downtown."

"What would you think if I told you that the sun doesn't exist?"

Keiichi seemed to reflect on this for a moment, and then answered, "I'd probably call you a liar."

"The Sun _doesn't_ exist," Belldandy stated, flat out.

"You're crazy! Every day, every person alive on this planet sees the sun. We feel its heat, we see the daylight make everything look bright instead of dark, and we've even sent spacecraft to orbit it. What are you going to do now, convince me that Copernicus was wrong and the Sun orbits the Earth?" he argued.

"First, there is a different Sun for every person on the Earth, because each man, woman and child sees the Sun differently. Copernicus' sun was different than, let's say the Pope's sun," she remarked.

"Okay. I can buy that. But even though they interpreted the reality of sun differently, they both were still seeing the _real sun_, not just some figment of their imagination," Keiichi countered, his expression one of wily triumph.

"But beyond the 'sense' of the sun which each mortal feels...is the physical fashioning of the Sun. You know the science, Mr Morisato, so I won't bother with that. But you also know that there are always known and unknown qualities to all things, including the Sun. Which makes it important to doubt that it exists."

"Huh?" Keiichi interjected, cocking his head to the side. He was looking at her with that well-worn jaw-jutting "you're crazy" expression that Japanese males employed.

"Many are fooled into believing that by accepting that the Sun is real, it also means that they are willing to allow both possibilities; the Sun exists, and the Sun doesn't exist. They believe they made one of two choices; and by making a choice, they assume that they examined both choices closely. This is the normal mindset of mortal beings. But what brings about the _special_ Sun in your mind? Does that Sun exist? If so, then is it different than the physical sun? Don't answer this, because I already know your answer."

Keiichi was glaring at her.

"So you think 'yes, both the real Sun and the Sun I see every day are one and the same'. Yet, you've only fooled yourself, and you only go on in furthering your ignorance. The Sun can illuminate physical objects, but it cannot illuminate your intellect. _You illuminate your intellect_. But once you begin to doubt those things that you take for granted...those truths of life that you are absolutely, definitely certain of...then your mind truly becomes open. It becomes open to itself, rather than just being open to 'facts', 'opinions', and 'choices'. If you can argue with yourself that the Sun doesn't exist and really believe in the doubting, then the physical sun is no longer causing you to have an intellectual sun. Instead, _you_ become the sun; it is entirely inside of you. Do you follow what I'm saying?"

"Kinda sorta. I think what you're saying is that there's 'fake' doubt, and then there's also some kind of 'real' doubt. The real doubt is important because it opens up new ways of thinking."

"This is truth, and you've grasped it. The same principle applies to the heart of your being: the kokoro. Most people assume they have a kokoro, and assume that...just because they know they have it...that this awareness allows them to know what is actually inside of their kokoro. They journey through the days of their lives under the impression that their kokoro informs their every action. They make decisions, and then claim 'my kokoro spoke and I chose thusly'. But how many people _truly_ let their kokoro speak?" she asked rhetorically, fixing Keiichi with her attention. She could see that his mind was somewhat engaged, and that she was echoing doubts that he himself had struggled with. For every Earthrealm mortal has a kokoro, but they often have periods where they doubt its existence.

"From experience, I can share with you that most people here on the Earthrealm constantly refuse it a voice, which reveals that they are truly uncertain about it. This is merely another example of a 'fake' doubt. At the moment when you wished for help and summoned me, you weren't hiding your kokoro, were you?"

"Well, duh! I was totally pissed off! At the system, at myself, at all the time I wasted studying, at all of Osaka. I just suffered the worst disappointment in my life. A total defeat of my efforts and hard work. I just wanted something...anything...to take me away from here. To make me feel better," he answered hotly.

"That's it! You were being _real_; you were beginning to move beyond the assumptions and distractions...and encounter yourself. Mr. Morisato, you wished for _anything_ to take away that frustration, didn't you? The 'anything' of your wish wasn't limited by your imagination, or what you sense as reality. It was delimited, boundless and free. You weren't thinking 'I wish for anything but...' when you made your wish. There was no condition on your desires. The pureness of need spoken within your wish is what activated your wish request in Nulln. But that action does not mean that you know what your kokoro is, however. What would be a 'true' doubting of what is inside of your deepmost heart? You probably cannot say what it is. Which is why I am here, to help you as a guide towards discovering that true doubting, so that you can then know a 'pure' kokoro. Not one that is hidden away, or based on a litany of falsehoods or expressions. Goddesses such as myself are sent after wishes, so that mortals can wish _honestly_. In your case, I'm here to help you know yourself, in other words," Belldandy explained patiently. She could sense his emotional distress and his physical distress exchanging themselves rapidly, confusion and uncertainty residing in both.

Good.

"How am I supposed to doubt my own heart? Even if I could do that, then how do you expect me to doubt my own doubt?" Keiichi asked, his voice fringed with frustration. Belldandy was grateful for his irritation; at least he was engaged and making an effort.

"Which brings us to Soul. Throw out all the existential questions you have about life, and answer me this. Have you ever seen your own Soul?" Belldandy answered with a question. It was all going to come down how he responded to the pivotal issue.

"No, of course not. A Soul isn't visible; it's not exactly as easy to see as a shadow."

"That's an honest and straightforward answer, Keiichi. What if I challenged that kind of answer, however? What if I told you with absolute certainty that not being able to see your Soul is another one of those 'fake' doubts that I've been discussing with you? How would you begin to think about it then? Before you answer me, allow me one chance to prove the truth of it. You have some amount of belief in a God, or Goddess in my case; otherwise we wouldn't be having this conversation, neh? You wouldn't have accompanied me here, and you wouldn't have engaged me in this conversation. The easier path would have been to leave, to forget that any of this ever happened. But yet you chose to stay. You are seeking something, but you do not know what it is. You also believe in yourself, otherwise we wouldn't be here. I say that you have the ability to seek that which you do not understand. Taking into account the possibility that your doubtings are not _true_ doubting, I want you to stand up, turn around, and look at your Soul."

Nearby, she heard the Demoness curse "_Shit! Just my luck to be paired up against Belldandy for this mortal's case!_" and then she noticed a sparkling in Keiichi's eyes. His eyes were sparkling with the innocence and curiosity of a newborn babe. She nodded her head and smiled encouragingly at him, impressed that he had opened himself to her.

Keiichi stood up and turned around...and saw the Sun. For the first time in his life, he really _saw_ it. He was struck speechless by Belldandy's assertion. He had discarded both his truths and his doubts, and had intuited a pathway beyond them. Recognition dawned upon him with the witnessing; he recognized that he was really seeing something other than the Sun.

He had glimpsed his Soul.

"It's there, 93 million miles away. But I could reach out and grab it in my hand, couldn't I? I can look at it now and see that it doesn't exist. Having faith in the Divine assumes both the truthness and falseness. But if I say none of it is important...the perceptions that I have, the feelings which are in my heart, the question or answers about you being a Goddess...then that is when my Soul is one with my kokoro," he explained.

"You have it in your hands right now, Mr Morisato. Your Soul. When you see the Sun, the temple, the sky...are they all beautiful to the eye? If so, then why would you regard yourself as being different, somehow excluded from that beauty? The Sun is now your Soul, and it is beautiful, Keiichi Morisato. So once again, I ask you: do you think I'm a Goddess?"

"I don't need to answer that, because that question isn't important anymore. And just to prove it isn't important, I'm going to make a wish. I wish that _you_ will be with me for as long as I live," he said, formally stating his wish.

As soon as he finished speaking, the Metanative channels opened. Even while she was examining his words, completely shocked at the context and content of his wish, Belldandy felt the familiar sensations; the center of her Goddess Seal emitting the wish-transmission signal, the connection to Nulln, a brief exchange as an incredibly complex computer negotiated the wish, and then the returning confirmation that the wish had been granted. But it didn't end there, because the wish confirmation was _still_ pouring energy into her direct from Nulln. More Divine energy than she was able to handle. It was so intense that her consciousness stole away from her and she passed out...

...and she came to, feeling exhausted beyond herself. She was lying on the same bench they had been sitting on nearby the castle, her head resting on Keiichi's lap. The sky had brightened to midday fullness. He had stayed with her the whole time, which meant that he had witnessed all of it; the entire sequence of wish transmission and bestowal. However, she had never fainted from granting a wish before. Her brow furrowed with worry, because now she could barely remember his wish.

He had wished for something, something about her being with him.

Startled, her eyes widened by eyeblink leaps...

"Are you okay, Bellcandy-sama?" he asked, clearly noticing her distress.

"I have the worst headache," she groaned.

"So even Goddesses can get headaches?" he asked her with smiling eyes. "Is there something like Divine aspirin to take it away?"

She felt a flutter in her heart as she realized that he had seen straight to the truth of the matter, accepting both his wish and her Divinity. Her efforts had succeeded!

"Usually a long period of rest will remedy a headache. But I don't feel tired...I feel _exhausted_. I shouldn't even be tired after a wish-bestowal."

"Hey! I noticed something really strange about your card. It's got something different written on it than it had before. It now says:

_"NULLN WISH DISPATCH OPERATIONS DIVISION, EARTHREALM JURISDICTION_

_Goddess Belldandy, Goddess Senior First Class, Unrestricted, Unlimited License._

_Emeritus Wish Bestowal Agent; current status attached, indefinite assignment status,"_

Belldandy was too tired to sit up, but her mind flurried. She asked him to reread the card, and she felt limpid with disbelief. The License promotion was a given, because she had successfully granted this wish-bestowal. But what astonished her was his wish. Keiichi had wished not "for a _Goddess like you_ to be with me"...he had wished "for _you_ to be with me"! This was definitely a prohibited wish: a mortal wishing to be with a Goddess. Such a wish would automatically be denied by the Nulln Xeomnic Network.

Always.

But the Nulln Xeomn had immediately approved his wish; a wish that he had made because he doubted his doubt. As she laid there on the bench, resting her head against his lap, she tried to comprehend what had just happened. His wish wasn't really a wish. Slowly, awareness dawned on her. There was one possible scenario that made have allowed the Nulln Xeomn to accord such a wish. It was _her_ that he wanted, Goddess or not!

Between them, there was no friendship, no companionship, no acquaintance, no history, no love...

Love with a mortal? Absolutely crazy for a Goddess to even contemplate! Yet, for a single instance, Keiichi must have completely transcended his own barriers to his Soul. He had wished for his kokoro; a kokoro he didn't even knew he had.

This whole thing was massively confusing!

Her uncertainty increased even further with her License promotion as written on her business card and read by Keiichi. Her status as a Wish Dispatch agent was completely wrong, if indeed she had been promoted to a Senior First Class License. It had noted that she was now an Emeritus agent. Emeritus status? That's usually when a Goddess _retires_ from the Division. Emeritus Goddesses no longer directly bestow wishes; they are retained as voluntary 'mentors' of younger Goddess trainees and as consultants on the most profound questions that sometimes arise when the Nulln computer would not make an immediate decision about the status of a particularly tricky wish.

Like the one Keiichi had just made.

But what was meant by "current status attached"? Attached to what? Obviously, attached to the wish...but what did that imply? Finally, her card had read: "indefinite assignment status." Did this mean that she was actually expected to stay here, on the Earthrealm, with this mortal man named Keiichi? The idea was distasteful, intimidating, and exciting all at once.

She'd be just like an Earthrealm Trainee; assigned to stay here for a few short years to learn firsthand experience about the mortals. This didn't make any sense at all. Indefinite meant that she might have to stay here a couple of Earthrealm years, or at least until Keiichi decided that he didn't want her to be with him! How could she, as a Goddess, possibly do that? She couldn't begin to tap the mental fingers of her mind upon the desk of her bewilderment; a desk whose drawers were filled with the many touchy-sticky issues she might have to deal with.

She had to slow her thoughts way down, because she was almost in a panic. This was not good at all!

Dumbfounded with all these mysteries, she noticed another circumstance gone awry. Her heart in her physical manifest was beating rapidly, almost 20 percent faster than normal. _But she wasn't making it beat so fast!_ Despite having total control over every atom in her physical manifest, her heartbeat was _acting on its own_. She attempted several times to slow down her heart rate, and realized that she couldn't do a thing about it.

This was totally impossible! At the moment, she had about as much control over that aspect of her physical manifest as a mortal would have over their own heart rate...meaning absolutely no control at all. What force could possibly deny her the ability to control the matrix of energies which in concourse, created her Goddess manifest? Especially now that she was a Senior First Class License holder.

Could it be that this unintended rapid pacing of her heart...was an actual example of doubting a doubt? Was the High Lord of Nulln responsible for this? Possessing total control over her physical manifest was an established fact, something she would never pay the slightest doubt towards. An established reality of Divine existence, clearly beyond question. Goddesses simply exercised full control over their Divine energy whenever they manifested into corporeal forms. That's just how it was. But now even this established reality had been brought into doubt. The proof was an excited heart drumming away inside of her young breast.

_Apparently, it seemed that she was going to be with Keiichi for a certain period of time, possibly months or even years as far as Earthrealm time was reckoned. Perhaps someday she could figure out what was happening with her heart..._

«-- --» «-- --» «-- --» «-- --»

...she smiled to herself, because now, five years later...40,000 years later...she _knew_ why her heart had been racing of its own accord that day. Just like it was racing now. Touching Keiichi's Soul, the memory of her first encounter with him was an exact match with her own experiences. Not a single iota of it was out of place.

Even the quirk, that one time when she was resting in his lap right after granting his wish and he called her "Bellcandy". This was the only time that Keiichi had mispronounced her name. It was also the first time he addressed her with the honorific distinction usually given when a mortal addresses a Divine being.

She was almost certain that his recollections of their first encounter were accurate, because they had triggered sympathetic impressions in her own being. But this wasn't enough to fully convince her that she had been restored to a blessed reunion with her boyfriend and her family. Her life had been regained, but she still doubted that this reunion was genuine. Skimming through the indexing of his memories, Belldandy searched for a specific event. If this second event in Keiichi's mind aligned perfectly with hers, then she would have her answer for certain that this was _her Keiichi_...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --


	141. Pt 141: BlissGifts: Nulln Reunioned

**Part 141: BlissGifts - Nulln Reunioned**

NULLN-LOUX MULTIVERSE - THE EARTHREALM, ITALIA:

"Hey, Elder Sister! What are you doing climbing all over Keiichi like that? You and Peorth are acting like total idiots, in public, in front of me and both Big Sisters, not to mention Mom and Dad!!! If you're going to be like that, go away!" Skuld shouted, impressively arrayed with her dudgeon and disgust. Belldandy tried to roll off Keiichi but found herself unable to move a muscle after her recent Probe of his memories. The effort had perished her energy. She was delighted, so arrested by Keiichi's physical touch that she just wanted to cling to him until she melted into his chest. Her whole body was tingling with harmony, savoring the warmth of his skin.

In contrast, her younger sister was almost jumping up and down in a fit of resentment, behaving just like the Skuld she remembered from the far reaches of the past. Brattishly indignant, impulsive, very possessive. If this was a restoration to the proper place and time, then Skuld was certainly acting her part with unquestionable authenticity. She winced as Skuld sprayed her with a porpoise-shaped water pistol, instinctively raising her arm to block off the jets of water. Skuld's expression of mischievous glee turned to disgruntlement as the water gun seemed to jam. She was working the trigger with rapid finger pulls and nothing was happening...and with a "snap!" the trigger broke. Her younger sister angrily threw the watergun down on the sand.

"Now you've done it!" Skuld shouted, evidently blaming her for the broken toy watergun. She saw that Skuld was ready to kick sand in her face.

"Don't do it, you brat!" Mara shouted, quickly restraining Skuld by lifting her clear off the ground before she could kickabout a hurl of sand towards her and Keiichi. Belldandy had initially panicked at the sight of Mara when she first noticed the Demoness. Mara was a Demoness that she knew, somehow. But she didn't belong here, because of the Doublet System. Her senses sharpened keen as knives as she was gripped with consternation; Mara was physically assaulting her younger sis, half-dragging half-hauling Skuld away from her and Keiichi. Reality seemed to be wrapped in thorny briars, as there was no possible explanation for Mara's presence at what seemed to be a family outing. What was Mara doing here in the first place? Mara should be in Vanagdrasil, not her with Keiichi. Was she trying to hurt Skuld? Why was she acting so familiar? Why didn't her Mother and Father do something about the presence of a Demoness in their midst? What could possibly account for the lack of fear or distrust one would expect? Crestfallen, she sensed that Keiichi seemed more afraid of _her_ at the moment than he was afraid of Mara! Why was she the only one that was concerned? Belldandy couldn't observe any apprehension towards Mara except her own.

She noticed that Urd was regarding her with a funny expression, a mixture of curiosity and deep concern. So was Cevn, who was standing next to her. Her Mom and Dad were sitting up in their beach steamer chairs, sunglasses raised above their eyebrows, fixing her with quizzical countenances.

"B..Bell-chan?" Keiichi wheezed. "Could you just get off of me? I don't know what's.._oof!_..gotten into you, but I feel like you just busted a couple ribs in my chest. After everything that happened in Algeria, I need to rest, not wrestle."

As she rolled off of him, Keiichi winced in pain. She scanned him and realized that two ribs were cracked. He had mentioned Algeria, which brought up all sorts of unpleasant associations. Algeria was why he and her family had been killed, her loss still fresh in her mind despite the intervening millennia. The redoubt of her memory was no due caused by the impossible presence of all the dear ones whose deaths she had lived with for most of her adult life.

"Hee hee, he's right you know," Mara commented, patting an indignant Skuld atop the head. "If you two want to 'wrestle', go back to the hotel. Otherwise I'm gonna be wrestling with this one all afternoon."

"Yeah, you two. Go get a room if you're going to act all ecchi!" Skuld added.

She looked back and forth at Keiichi and Urd, Skuld and Mara, her parents Odeyn and Freiija.

"B'dandy, my word! You look so unsettled, as if you've seen a ghost," her Mother observed. "You and Peorth left just a short while ago to visit the thrift shop and pick up some snacks, because your Dad wanted something a little bit more solid than fruit and juices. You were both wearing swimsuits when you left, and now you're dressed like the local women in the market? My dear one, what happened to you?"

Belldandy heard this and started to answer, but completely broke down into sobs and fell to her knees as the impossibility of her Mother's words and miraculous sense of being home overwhelmed her. The loving concern of her Mother was a soothing protection that evoked long-forgotten childhood feelings of safety and security. Yet, she was poised at the chasm of disbelief; no matter where she turned to find a sense of belonging, the abyss was there to confront her. She was _home_, a hundred times home...and yet she was filled with fright and uncertainty.

"Bell-chan, it's okay. We're safe, here in Italy," Keiichi noted, trying to assure her. "Don't you remember? The flight out of Rome got postponed because of mechanical problems. So your Mom and Dad decided we all needed a vacation after our crazyass experience in Algeria. You know, that 'trial' that the Almighty forced Mom and Dad to go along with? To see if you and I really had what it takes when..."

Belldandy remembered something really bizarre as Keiichi spoke. His words evoked images of she and Peorth, and _another_ Keiichi and several others stranded together on a desolate, barren planet. The other Keiichi was a mortal, who was going to marry a Goddess named Belldandy. Only that Goddess didn't come from Nulln, because Keiichi kept claiming that she came from a place called Ygg... Ygg-something. She did remember that he had explained that the Trial of Preparedness that he and 'his Belldandy' had endured had been commanded by the Lord Himself, not 'his' Belldandy's parents. His understanding was that the Trial of Preparedness was intended as a true test to see if a Goddess could live an entire Earthrealm lifetime with a mortal that she loved, while keeping her Goddess powers in check, or perhaps having them probated or temporarily suspended for the duration.

Now Keiichi was telling her that the whole challenging Trial that she and Skuld had struggled with in Algeria was by leave of the Lord Regent of Nulln; that it was His will and not a whim of her parent's to 'test' Keiichi's worthiness as a boyfriend. This wasn't at all what she remembered...

Without warning, Urd knelt down next to her and grasped her by the balls of each shoulder and shook her, trying to shake loose the confusion that bridled her. Almost immediately, she felt Urd begin to Probe her mind. Clearly, her older sister had sensed her extreme levels of doubt about the reality of her existence. Her sister's face sweated with effort as she attempted to explore *everything* that Belldandy had endured. The entire period of mourning for her loss, the years of insanity as the Silent Goddess, the incredible reawakening at the end when she had been kidnapped by two GodKids who thought she was their Mother...

But it was like trying to cut through a boulder with a plastic picnic knife. The density of the chaos she had lived over the past forty millennia was too intense for even Urd to navigate. She felt Urd's disappointment in her thoughts.

Urd regrouped her approach and pulsed her with a series of memories; _her_ perspective on her and Keiichi's life on the Earthrealm. Belldandy quickly reached a decision that it would be even more sensible to cooperate with Urd's Probe. Allowing Urd to try and confirm her and Belldandy's life together as sisters as a first point of emphasis would be preferable to trying to unravel all the mysteries couched in her own memories. It would also complement what she had discovered when she explored Keiichi's mind. Belldandy knew that Keiichi wasn't the only keystone of doubt; her sisters and her parents were suspect as well. Just because Keiichi had experienced their first meeting precisely the same as she had...neither confirmed nor denied that her family was the same group of Divines that she had grown up with. Her doubts were cast much further afield, especially because of Mara's presence in the midst of this gathering. Vacillating again, she was worried that this reunion had nothing to do with her life; that these weren't _her boyfriend and family_. She still suspected that she could be on a totally different Earthrealm.

Urd overheard her worries, and expressed a significant level of shock when she noticed that Four Decas of memories were mixed in with five Earthrealm years of experience. With a big-sisterly affection, Urd assured her that she was going to patiently help her sort it all out.

It was kind of odd, because Peorth didn't seem to have the same level of doubts. But it wasn't odd as well; Peorth's boyfriend was an Angel who could communicate thoughtcasts. She and Peorth had both sensed Nulln soon after they arrived here. Certainly, it was possible that Peorth was connected with her parents in Nulln...obviously to a point where there was no doubt in her mind that this was the _real_ Earthrealm. Even now, Peorth and Heroic Vermilion Swift were looking at her with concern, leaning over her with hands on their knees.

Her whole family was standing in a circle around her, Urd and Keiichi. Keiichi was still lying on his back in the sand, catching his breath and looking at her with solicitude. Obviously someone had healed him, because his ribs were intact again. Urd was resting her forehead against hers, Goddess Seal to Goddess Seal...

"Come look within me, my dear sister," Urd invited. Belldandy began to cycle into Urd's experiences, how her older sister had witnessed her and Keiichi's lives. Thank the Lord it was Urd! Her older sis had much more insight and was closer to her than almost any being she knew. If she could trust anyone, she could trust Urd. Which was ironic, because Urd was the most untrustworthy and errant member of her family most of the time. Yet, when matters demanded it; Urd was impeccably honest and credible. Several times Urd had stood up firm against Mara, against Hild, against Peorth...to defend her and Skuld. Plus, she was the Norn of the Past, which made her recall of past events absolutely clear...

«-- --» «-- --» «-- --» «-- --»

_...and she was stunned when Urd explained to her that there were no more Past, Present, or Future divisions for the Norns. Urd noted that a force of Balance had brought about profound changes recently. Mara was one of the family...Belldandy realized that she had completely forgotten that Mara had recently become her older sister. At Urd's urging, she struggled to remember how another quantum of change had occurred in the past year, which had resulted in Mara being her 'new' sister as well as having her own jurisdiction in Demonic responsibilities as head of the Loux Demoness Strife Mischief Office. Urd noted that the Doublet System was abolished, which explained why Mara was here on the Earthrealm. Urd added that these changes were quite different than what Belldandy had in her mind, and that she would need to realign her thinking; the whole schema of the Everything had changed, from Nulln all the way to the very limits of Reality._

_She eased further into the reaches of Urd's mind and experienced her Earthrealm years from her sister's perspective..._

...At the time she had granted Keiichi's wish, her sister was already a Senior First Class License holder, working as a Sysop in the TimeSpace Regulation Division. When Keiichi's wish was implemented by the Nulln Xeomnic, Urd had immediately sensed her distress and sudden License promotion, coupled with extreme exhaustion and acted with swift concern. Swiftly responding, she had skipped out on her Sysop duties and arrived on the Earthrealm to assist her. Wisely, Urd had discretely waited until Keiichi had brought her back to his apartment before manifesting her presence to him out of the nearest TV set. Needless to say, Keiichi was pretty freaked out when he saw Urd for the first time; especially when he learned that she another Goddess...and her older sister.

Once Urd had calmed him down somewhat, she managed to obtain an explanation about his wish. Overcoming her amazement that his wish had actually been granted in the first place, she quickly recognized that Keiichi had become extremely despondent. While carrying her home, he had experienced a full-on reality check about his wish. He told Urd that he "was a stupid idiot", realizing his wish was utterly foolishness and frivolity. He was completely distraught...because of his wish, he and Belldandy had basically been thrown together without any warning, lacking even the slightest context of a relationship. Yet, Urd had perceived the wisdom in the situation that Keiichi lacked. Somehow, she *knew* that he had wished for Love itself. She had a sensing that Keiichi had completely trusted her younger sister for a brief moment, which was long enough for him to lock his heart onto hers and discern that she was the one he could try to discover Love with.

_Belldandy discovered something in her sister's thoughts as well. It seemed that Urd had an awareness from the very start that she and Keiichi would fall in love._

It was necessary for someone to take charge of matters, because Keiichi was too beside himself to do anything and she was unconscious from exertion. Consequently, Urd took it upon herself to negotiate an arrangement with a priest to purchase a nearby shrine temple complex for a sizeable donation to the main Shinto shrine. With this task completed, she transported Keiichi and her to their new home. Belldandy was still completely inert, as she was maintaining 'rest' mode so that she could powerup. The wish-bestowal and license promotion all at once was an overwhelming amount of energy for her to conduit back and forth between Nulln and the Earthrealm. Knowing this, Urd remained with Keiichi for several days to keep an eye on her...and him, because he was so upset with himself. During this time, she educated Keiichi on Nulln, what it meant to be a Goddess, the wish-bestowal process and why it existed...she basically gave him a crash-course in Divinity 101. She also educated Keiichi about himself; after all, he was an Earthrealm mortal who was totally inexperienced around girls and women. Now that he was going to be living with one, in the form of a Goddess, he was going to have to confront his own fears. Urd also warned him in no uncertain terms to keep a tight rein on his hormones; any ecchi 'attacks' on her younger sister and he would promptly be nailed with an Urd Thunderbolt.

It was then that Keiichi shamefacedly told her about his 'allergy' to pornography...or in fact, to any form of female nudity. So the raging hormones were there, but they were checked by a very unusual psychological condition. Keiichi had almost ran out of the temple when Urd offered to help him with his 'quirk' by showing him the "gateway to heavenly beauty, clothed only by the air and his eyes."

_Belldandy was both shocked and amused by her sister's effort to try and arrest Keiichi's phobia, especially in the light of Urd's later relationship with Cevn. One was afraid of nudity, the other was afraid of women. She shared a giggle in her mind with Urd as she experienced Keiichi's fright that evening._

Knowing in her heart that this was a very complex situation, Urd had decided that she would need to divide her time between Nulln and the Earthrealm, living mostly on the Earthrealm. Besides, her sister and Keiichi's situation had all the makings of a choice bit of drama, and would be much more engaging then her work in the Sysop Division. Her younger sister had been assigned to a doozy of a wish, having to live with a young man. She would have to become his friend, and then later find her heart and see if he was in it. Meanwhile, the young mortal man was afraid of the female body...and yet he was destined to live with her younger sister and quite possibly fall in love with her.

This was going to be fun to see how it all played out!

_Urd's memory of those early days reminded her that her sister's motives weren't always noble and selfless. But Belldandy already knew of Urd's penchant for drama and strange-dreams, and it was funny in a sense hearing Urd mentally note that her and Keiichi's situation would be a bit of fun. Of course, it wasn't fun at all at first..._

There was also the matter of her *other* younger sister, whose reaction to this new situation was a great source of worry for Urd. Once Skuld got wind of this, she would be completely upset, and would probably try everything in her sleeve of tricks to cause problems between her sister and Keiichi. Being rambunctious, Skuld would need to be minded often if she came to the Earthrealm. Urd resigned herself to the possibility that she might actually have to live with her and Keiichi in the shrine complex.

The biggest difficulty of all in Urd's mind was Keiichi, who was totally inexperienced with life on his own. Concerned that he was at risk to make a series of stupid moves, Urd strongly urged him to try and live his life as normally as possible. The best way to do this would be to maintain his daily routines as if nothing had changed, so that he didn't 'over-react' to Belldandy and make mistakes. Counseling Keiichi, she emphasized that he would need to let go of his self-reproach. As Norn of the Past, she reminded him that "what's been done was done, and isn't going to be changed." Rather than regretting the situation, she urged him to begin developing a friendship with Belldandy and offered to help him if he asked. She esteemed that this would make it easier on both her younger sister and him...

«-- --» «-- --» «-- --» «-- --»

_...Belldandy was amazed, because -_she wasn't aware of any of this-_. All she remembered was granting Keiichi's wish, fainting from exhaustion and excitation, and then coming to in a Shinto shrine. Urd had taken care of her, totally nursemaiding her for almost a week while she was recovering. She had taken care of Keiichi as well, nursing him back to health when he got sick. Once the implications of his wish had settled in on a heart level, Keiichi had become so overwhelmed by the awareness that his life was going to be completely different that he had actually suffered a nervous breakdown, requiring Urd's vigilance and emotional support..._

«-- --» «-- --» «-- --» «-- --»

...she witnessed herself again through Urd's experience, as she was involved in a gradual, clumsy process of learning to trust Keiichi as a friend. This was a challenge for both of them on so many levels, it couldn't even be understood by either of them. But Urd had a clearer conception of the process, and had performed a few subtle 'pranks' to speed them along towards relinquishing their inhibitions and fears. Some of these "Big Sister Love-Love Project" efforts completely backfired, like the time Urd made Belldandy's towel turn invisible when she walked out of the bathroom, an incident that caused Keiichi to not speak to her for a week. Urd conveniently excused herself to visit Nulln without a word of explanation, which left her to be caught up in wondering what she had done to upset Keiichi so.

_Back then, she didn't know about Keiichi's phobic response to nudity of any kind; this incident was her introduction to his 'secret'._

Another incident occurred when Urd had caused Keiichi's motorbike to have a tire blow out, which threw him and her alongside the road, where he landed right on top of her. Offended by his close physical contact with her being, Belldandy pitched herself into a bout of resentment with a frosting of indignity and gave him the silent treatment for a few days.

But Urd was persistent, and after several more of these 'incidents' that she had engineered, she began to notice hints that Keiichi was falling in love with her younger sister. Now it was just a matter of getting her younger sister to see him as something more than a wish-bestowal mortal, or even a friend. All it needed was a few final pushes.

Keiichi had gotten into O.N.I.T. during his second try, and was no longer a ronin student. Urd encouraged him to buy a ring for Belldandy, but he lacked the financial resources, so he went to work after school and saved up for it. The unusual awkward routine of college student offering a special Christmas gift to his intended sweetheard...except that her sister had pridefully refused his ring. Urd was absolutely livid at her for this blatant stupidity, and sternly lectured Belldandy, holding nothing back until her younger sister was in tears. Urd realized that extreme measures were required to make her sister realize that her lack of love for Keiichi was a 'fake' doubt of its own, to borrow from the first talk her sister had with him on the fateful day he made his wish.

She returned to Nulln and consulted with a Demoness of her acquaintance, Mara, to get a Demoness' perspective on possible approaches to this emotional impasse that her younger sister had created. Urd knew that extreme measures were definitely a proven expertise with Demons, who practiced tactical extravagances of behavior much more often than the Gods. Trying to persuade Belldandy was sometimes as impossible as stretching the night sky with a pair of pliers. Mara pointed out that her sister had more than the usual amount of Goddess vanity; which in her opinion was tacit denial rather than ignorance. Mara suggested a strategy focused on turning Bell's vanity into possessiveness and eventually jealousy. She advised Urd to bide her time a little longer, as Belldandy was only beginning to see his good points.

Urd knew her younger sister well enough to recognize that one of her chief weaknesses was jealousy. Sometime during her second year with Belldandy and Keiichi, she noticed a developing possessiveness towards Keiichi in her sister's behavior. Belldandy became very upset with him one day when Keiichi decided to spend the night at his sempai's "Men's Dorm" at a party to celebrate the end of the school term. Ostensibly, she felt put out because he was going to miss out on the celebratory teriyaki dinner she had made. Several weeks later during the start of the next school term, she got caught up in an argument with him while on the phone and had completely forgotten the gyoza she was cooking in the wok fryer. Her vehement arguing was interrupted only by the clarion alarm of the smoke detector...she didn't even notice that the kitchen was smoke-filled with burnt gyoza.

Sensing the time was ripe, Urd engaged her 'secret weapon'...Peorth. Peorth was her classmate during Inculcation as well as one of Belldandy's best friends in Nulln. When Urd explained the dilemma she faced with her younger sister, Peorth was more than ready to help. Urd detailed how she and Mara were trying to roust Belldandy's dander so that she would start viewing Keiichi as a romantic interest.

_As she combed the index of events as her sister remembered them, Belldandy was fascinated by the 'behind-the-scenes' glimpse into the thought process of her older sister. She was also grateful, because Urd was allowing herself to be quite vulnerable by sharing such memories and details with her. Thanking Urd, she resumed her Probing of her sister's memories, still catching a spark of doubt here and there as she experienced her and Keiichi's lives anew. Now Urd had called upon her best friend to help out in the effort to get her and Keiichi together..._

Peorth was a very accomplished Goddess in her own right; already a senior head of Nulln's Earth Otasuke Division. She was also given an extreme honor by the Almighty, who had selected her to be a Rune keeper. Urd was certain that Peorth could handle this 'assignment' with discretion and decorum. Little did she suspect that Peorth would _actually become infatuated_ with Keiichi. Consequently, the whole match-making setup started spiraling out of control as Peorth seriously tried every trick in the book to earn Keiichi's love. But in a way, it was working as well...perhaps too well...because Peorth's presence was like pouring maple syrup in front of the anthill. Urd had a sensing that Peorth was interested in something _more_ than just Keiichi.

_"Yeah, a 'something more' called Heroic Vermilion Swift," she told Urd in her mind. Urd's and her thoughts joined together in a pause of chippling giggles; setting the searching Probe of memory and experience aside for a moment so they could savor the amusing irony of Urd's choices back then..._

For his part, Keiichi was hooked by Peorth's feminine wiles. He became more and more interested in Peorth...and Belldandy was gradually became _interested_ in his interest. The relationship between Peorth and Belldandy was complex: they were best of friends; yet their friendship was fraught with personal and professional rivalry, which unexpectedly caused them to push each other to greater exertions of effort and adroitness. Rivalry notwithstanding, their friendship seemed to draw upon greater levels of companionship the more they competed. Grooving around with confusion, the two of them.

Which is why Belldandy performed an inexplicable act of sentiment that was completely the opposite of what she and Mara had hoped for. Instead of becoming jealous of Peorth, Belldandy convinced herself that it was imperative that she 'save' her friend from being involved with a mortal. In her mind, she felt that...since Keiichi wasn't good enough for her...then he wasn't good enough for Peorth as well. Compounding this insanity, Urd was totally astonished when Belldandy unexpectedly accepted Keiichi's umpteenth offer to go on a date.

Skuld had joined the shrine crowd a year earlier, and as Urd had expected, she was endowed with a jealous nature and naifness towards Belldandy and Keiichi's situation. The young Goddess was very possessive of each of her older sisters, and had decided to take the initiative and sabotage the date on the premise that her elder sister was too good for a mortal. Maybe if she took him out, then neither Belldandy or Peorth would have to be hassled by the burdensome prospect of a life of drudgery with a mortal male.

All it took was several strategically-placed Skuld Bombs on a wooden footbridge.

Naturally, Urd and Mara were 'monitoring' the progress of the date in their chibi stealth forms. Mara chanced to be on a Grief assignment on the Earthrealm at the time, and was able to break away for an afternoon to witness their handiwork. Keiichi had been brave, choosing to take Belldandy on a motorbike ride down the coastal highway on the western side of the Boso Peninsula to a lightly-frequented ocean overlook near the Cape Daibusa-misaki campgrounds. A small Chiba prefectural park with several foot trails that meandered down into some picnicking areas adjacent to the ocean cliffs. Unbeknownst to them, _another_ was stealing along to observe the rendezvous.

Skuld's bombs are multivariate in function: explosive, transitive, chronometric, laughing gas (don't ask), zero-gravity, stink-odor, and many more types with even greater exotic effects. But more often than not, they were duds. Noticing that they were strolling around the park, her younger sister had planted four Skuld Bombs of her devising underneath a series of wooden foot-bridges; chronometric bombs that would 'age' the support beams of the bridge a century. This would render the structure fragile enough to collapse of its own weight. Under the weight of Belldandy and Keiichi, even more so.

Belldandy had been with Keiichi for well over a year at this point, learning and observing him with curiosity and uneasiness...much to Urd's amusement. As they walked across the footbridge, it suddenly buckled and he plunged four meters into a deep inlet while she hovered in the air and waited for him to swim to the side of the inlet so he could gain purchase on a rock outcropping and pull himself out. As a Goddess, Urd knew her sister had to be very chary of dispensing trans-mortal actions, because this would inhibit Keiichi's personal growth as a human being. Fortunately, that section of the park was empty of onlookers. Urd immediately knew that this was Skuld's idea of mischief. But only three of the four Skuld Bombs worked, which was better than the usual 1-in-3 success Skuld usually had with her 'inventions'.

This was when all of them discovered that he couldn't swim.

Urgency swiftly replaced curiosity in her heart, and Urd worried that Keiichi might not be able to gain a handhold on anything while her sister just hovered above him, acting like an onlooker. She noticed that her sister's heart rate was jumped up involuntarily, as expected. But was it concern, or was it an affectionate impulse of passion? Urd was about to intervene as she watched him flailing in the water, but Belldandy decided to levitate him to safety. As her younger sister descended to check up on him, Skuld Bomb number four tardily decided to activate, and a thick piece of bridge support beam broke away and fell right on him.

Urd was horrified as the 'date' had turned into a genuine life-or-death emergency. She was going to help her sis and Keiichi, but Mara shouted "_Wait!!!_" in a whisper. Mara must have observed a subtlety that she didn't; something only a Demoness could be sensitive to. They watched as Belldandy hastily levied the support beam off of Keiichi with a lance of blue-fire energy, and then scooped him up out of the water. The beam had hit him across his upper chest, crushing his ribcage completely. The Reaper was already swiftly descending upon the scene, as his injuries were fatal. _Would_ have been fatal, except that Belldandy held him close to her heart, jumped-starting his heartbeat with hers while encanting a healing.

"Yes!!!" Urd heard Mara whisper-shout, pointing at Bell's eyes. Urd was double-backed with disbelief as her younger sis was crying.

"NO! You can't have him, he's m..m..mine!" she shouted defiantly at the Reaper. "No one can take him away from me! Because...because... Because he's _important_ to me, I care about him, and he's a lovable guy!"

"Belldandy-sama, wh..what did you just say?" Keiichi gasped. "Wha..what happened?"

Urd stifled a cheer as Belldandy wordlessly sealed her lips to his, kissing him passionately for over a minute, and then answered him "_That's_ what's happening! Don't worry about what 'happened'; that's Urd's territory. Enjoy what's happening, her and now."

She kissed him again, and chibi-Urd and chibi-Mara shouted "Mission accomplished!!!" slapping their hands together.

"Urd! Mara! Skuld! You can come out now!" Belldandy shouted.

_***ulp!***_

«-- --» «-- --» «-- --» «-- --»

_...Belldandy felt Urd gently nudge her mind away, giggling at the last scene as she felt Urd's emotions as clearly as her own._

**She was home!!!**

_There was no way that Urd could have fictionalized that experience. At the very end, she felt Urd's powerful sweep of embarrassment as she called her and the other two to come out of hiding. Her older sister's stupefaction was so authentic, she wanted to giggle. Emotions with that depth of spirit definitely couldn't be fabricated. She had seen the Truth of it; in fact, she had seen how much of a vital role Urd had played in her life on the Earthrealm, as her older sister had revealed private memories and experiences which she had never shared with her._

_In the wake of the 'accident' Belldandy remembered the rest of that afternoon in a small park in Chiba; most of which she spent thanking her errant sisters and snuggling up against Keiichi, once her own embarrassment had worn itself off on the winds._

«-- --» «-- --» «-- --» «-- --»

She sighed with relief as she felt Urd hugging her tight. Finished with the Probing, Urd kissed her on both cheeks in a sisterly fashion and patted her on the head. Belldandy knew that her sister has glimpsed into it all; her madness as the Silent Goddess, her profound heartbreak, her frequent visits to Earth...

"No one is going to take you away from us. Ever!" Urd assured her, echoing Belldandy's own words to Keiichi during that fateful day.

"Hey!!! Lookee what I found!" Skuld interrupted, holding an object that looked like a pen-holder box that had been lodged in the sand nearby. Both she and Urd turned towards Keiichi, somewhat alarmed because his aura and heart-rate had quantum-shifted into a complete haze of alarm. He was already channeling riddles of confusion and needles of anxiety at her outburst of frenzied behavior. Now, his face had turned pallid, as if he had been unfitted by the most extreme of discomforts.

"Skuld! Give it back!" Keiichi demanded in a firmly-demanding voice.

"Nuh nhh! Finder's keeper's, loser's..."

"_Daughter!!!_" Odeyn fired off in a deep-throated paternal warning. Skuld blanched with distress and scampered a couple steps backwards at this, knowing that their Father was serious. Shyly, her younger sister gave _her_ the small box.

"OH SHIT!!!" she heard Keiichi exclaim in a panicked shout.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

NULLN-LOUX MULTIVERSE - THE EARTHREALM, ITALY, NEAR SANTA MARIA LA BRUNA:

...Belldandy felt the sand gripping the soles of her feet as she paced back and forth nervously along the beach, occasionally splashing the water as it swept in on the sand-loam. One set of worries had been replaced by contented relief...feelings which only sowed another harvest of confusion and stress. Her mind seemed to circle itself feverishly, a nameless vein that trampled her slight reprieves of assurance. Keiichi's apprehensive reaction was so strong, it had frightened and confused her. Why was he so afraid of her? Didn't he feel a strong love towards her? Or was _she_ the problem; having suffered in mourning for so long that she had forgotten how to receive another's caring? Was she shutting him out?

She looked at Keiichi, who seemed to be engaged in a deep discussion with Mara and Urd.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Bell's acting like she totally doesn't know what's going on. What's gotten into her?" Keiichi asked as his girlfriend turned and started walking down the beach again, the ocean lapping at her ankles and calves.

"She's been in hell," Urd noted.

"Literally," Mara added.

Keiichi didn't know what _that_ meant, but he knew that he had just gone through a hell of his own a short while ago. Moments earlier, Skuld had committed the most outrageous blunder possible when she handed the slender case to Belldandy instead of him. All because she had missed the vital word "_To:_" in front of Belldandy's name. Keiichi had immediately felt a body-wave shock that paralyzed him, while his mind remained focused onto a dead-blank.

Fortunately, Bell-chan didn't open it immediately, because she was in some kind of funk herself. At this point, Peorth and his Angel, Heroic Vermilion Swift, had made no effort to hide their haste as they excused themselves to go to the hotel, hand-in-hand. His Angel had it easy compared to him; Heroic could communicate with his girlfriend using Divine language thoughtcasts. He was stuck with mortal language, which often left him dangerously tongue-tied.

When Bell-chan asked him about the box, he had luckily recovered enough of his wits to explain that he had gotten it at a tourist shop near the hotel. When she asked "what hotel?" he realized that she didn't even remember checking into the hotel. Now he was deeply worried about her. Bell had suffered amnesia several times before: early on when she and Peorth had switched identities as a result of a Skuld mishap; another time when one of Hild and Mara's crazy plots got out of hand; twice more when Cevn had suffered a mysterious illness. But Mara was family now, so no more attacks from her or Hild. Skuld had grudgingly learned not to create devices that tampered with memory. And Cevn wasn't ill anymore; he was here as well, having flown from Osaka to Rome when he had called him at the university to let him know that the family decided to have an impromptu vacation.

All he had said to her was "Bell, are you okay?" She had looked at him with a stricken expression, her eyes welling with tears, and then she simply turned around and walked towards the ocean without a word of explanation.

He knew that Skuld didn't mean to goof up; she simply had been fueled with excitement when Belldandy had rushed over and tackled him, and then had watched as Bell-chan nearly fainted after this. For a youngest sister, that must have been quite a shock.

Cevn being here wasn't a shock; he knew why his friend and N.I.T. instructor had dropped everything to fly here from Osaka. Obviously, he was going to try for Urd again. They had a blow up in France at the Le Mans, and had broken up. Since then, the two of them was just like Bell and him that first year; he'd ask, she'd refuse. Only Urd's refusals were more kick-downs than refusals. Cevn had gotten angry with Urd one time and said "You know, I can _make_ you love me!" which completely disrupted the households harmony for almost a week. The crazy thing was, Keiichi sensed that Cevn actually believed that he had some kind of power that could make Urd fall back in love with him.

Since they arrived here, Cevn and Urd were arguing every couple hours. Now Bell was acting weird, giving him the silent treatment. It didn't take a mind-reader to sense that Skuld was secretly angry with him. As punishment for brattiness, Odeyn had made Skuld pick up the disordered mess Bell had caused, which led to the discovery of the gift he intended to give Bell-chan.

After Bell had bailed on him and started nervously pacing up and down the beach, Cevn had offered to take him aside, wanting to discuss the confusion that seemed to have gripped him and Bell. But Urd and Mara shooed him away, insisting that they'd handle it. Then Urd had told Cevn "you and me...we're gonna have a talk!" and promptly escorted him to a far end of the beach, near a cove. He could hear her scolding him from a hundred meters away. Then she returned with a grin on her face as if nothing had happened.

Everybody was acting goofy. He expected some awkwardness during this adjustment period following their ordeal in Tindouf, especially from Bell and Skuld. But Urd and Mara had been away, back in Osaka...and even they were acting all wigwam with stupidity. There was no excuse for them to be claiming that Bell-chan had "been in Hell". They'd been safe and cozy in Japan, while Bell-chan and Skuld were captives of some sickass warlord and he was struggling just to survive in the middle of the Western Sahara.

He glanced towards the ocean; Belldandy was pacing up and down the beach, and Cevn was sitting by himself on top of a rock somberly watching the horizon. Some vacation this was! Nobody seemed to be relaxing except for Bell's parents. Now Urd was standing in front of him with her hands fisted against her hips, obviously ready to jump into a lecture about something.

"Keiichi, I want you to try and understand why your girlfriend is so upset. You've known her long enough to be aware that surprises really get to her, and naturally she was surprised that you got her a gift. But it's much more than that. When we say she's been in hell, we aren't joking," Urd noted.

"And we're not talking Vanagdrasil either," Mara clarified. "We're talking about a totally fucked-up nightmare-type hell. Much worse than even I as a Demoness could imagine."

_That_ statement by Mara completely unsettled Keiichi.

"What do you mean, she's 'been in hell'? Bell-chan and Peorth excused themselves to get some munchies from the tourist thrift store. Certainly doesn't sound like hell to me. They said they were going to go back to the hotel after fetching some snacks, because they wanted to take an afternoon nap, because we were up all night..erm, never mind. Because they were tired out. I know she's been through hell; I was the one who fetched her out of that whacked up situation outside of Tindouf with that crazy wanna-be dictator guy. _I've_ been through hell, because I got dumped in the middle of the Algerian desert with nothing but a t-shirt and jeans. I would have died if it weren't for Peorth finding me and sending Heroic after me! It's been trying for all of us, but she's acting outer space _freaky_. I'm worried that she's having another one of her spells of amnesia. You saw what she did back there; she basically attacked me as if she hadn't seen me in years."

"Hmmm, I guess that's fair," Mara acknowledged. "You guys did go through a Trial of Preparedness that was pretty rough, even by Demon standards. Just so you guys could stay together as a couple and get married. Heh! Chalk up another reason why I wanna stay single."

"Keiichi, our sister really loves you with all of her heart. That's why she's pacing up and down the beach. Her feelings towards you are confusing her right at the moment. She's been through an experience that has completely turned her life upside-down inside-out," Urd noted, her mien very serious and intent. Keiichi knew that look, because Urd only got it when her Mother Hild would show up to create havoc, or she was really annoyed at Cevn.

"Urd, cut to the chase. You know something I don't about Bell-chan, and you're withholding," Keiichi insisted. "Whatever it was, it must have been mega-serious. Before she left to grab some snacks, she was as giddy as a kitten even though she was tired. We both were pretty stoked, after being stuck in Algeria for a month without seeing each other..."

"Keiichi, you might want to try _40,000 years_ instead of a month. What would you do if..." Urd said, and then explained what had happened to Bell-chan and Peorth.

When it was over, all he could do is hoarsely gasp out "Oh my God!!!" Keiichi felt like his heart had been flung out far ahead of his understanding. What she had experienced was incomprehensible...there was no way he could even fathom the horrors that Bell had suffered, according to what Urd had told him. Mara had been in tears through most of Urd's narrative, a rarity for the Demoness sister of the family. Urd had gotten choked up as well as she forced herself to explain the Silent Goddess episode.

According to Urd, Bell-chan had endured a meaningless, torturous experience beyond any possible heartbreak, and then this had been compounded by a complete disintegration of her personality. The only way he could reckon it was that his girlfriend had been so crushed by grief, she had finally become stranded in the catacombs of her Soul, a ghost of her former self. It was overwhelming to even entertain the idea that he could attempt to heal his girlfriend's emotional wounds.

And yet, there was the gift box.

Keiichi watched as Bell-chan spun on her heels and start walking up the beach again. In his imaginings, she was on an emotional auto-pilot. Stretching the pretension out, he fretted that this pacing in circles would extend far beyond this afternoon. Stormed with chases of despair, his mind forced on him the unwanted image of a Belldandy running emotional circles for the rest of her life, chasing an imaginative 'freedom' that just wasn't there. Drawing himself into the figurative invention of his mind, he knew that he would have probably reacted the same way. Not to the acute extent that Bell had done, because he didn't have an emotional context that could even approach the depths of feeling a Goddess would experience. But he knew that if he had watched Bell die he would travel up the stairwell of his remaining years as a broken man, forever crippled inside. Forever with nowhere to hide from his pain.

Yet, the depths of Bell's despair seemed excessive to the greatest degree. There was something more here...

The only sensible action at this time was to dive into the ocean and thrash around, to try and scale back the depression and unease that was plaguing him. He felt so inadequate to the task. How could he possibly heal Bell-chan's heart? All the love in the world couldn't do that. If her pain was an ocean, he was simply a cresting wave on its surface; transient and miniscule.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

When he returned to the beach parasol and its shade, he watched Urd and Cevn go at it again behind the rocks in the cove. What started out as another spat of fighting shifted into hushed voices. When they emerged from behind the nearby outcropping, he received the shock of his life when Urd unexpectedly leaned up against Cevn and said "thank you for what you did". Cevn was stunned, and asked "what'd I do?"

Urd kissed him on the cheek.

Cevn looked at her, at him, at her parents...his eyes bulging with panic and embarrassment. He just about tripped over his own feet as he and Urd gained the shade of the parasol. Very quickly, Cevn darted out and grabbed a juice, almost avoiding Urd. Bemused, Keiichi watched his friend change from a renowned Osaka Univ. college professor to an awkward teenager in less than five seconds. Cevn was so shocked by Urd's forwardness, he couldn't even muster words into his mouth. He ended up stuttering instead, and finally dropped the juice he had been drinking.

"You never told us, did you?" she added, nestling up against him. "All this time, and you kept it to yourself."

This was some seriously weird stuff going on between Urd and Cevn. Mara was watching the two with unreserved curiosity, and Skuld was absent-mindedly dropping fistfuls of beach sand into her bucket. Belldandy had tackled him like no tomorrow a short while ago, and now Urd was putting the moves on Cevn. Was this some kind of holiday where all the Goddesses in the family went crazy? He watched as Urd was looking at Cevn meaningfully, as if she was trying to settle him down. As a man, Keiichi knew that Urd's leaning against him wearing nothing more than a swimsuit was probably not the way to go if she wanted to calm him down. Or was Urd just playing him?

"It's not important anymore, Urd. _You're_ what's important," he finally managed to force out, struggling to answer as he was clearly almost paralyzed with Urd's affection. Keiichi didn't have a clue about what was going on between the two, but judging by Urd's reaction to what he said, this wasn't some prankishness on her part. She was shuddering with emotions in response his comforting words. Keiichi smiled inwardly; knowing that Cevn had scored a home run with that last statement.

"Oh, this is rich!" Odeyn commented. "Not _another_ mortal!"

"Sshhhh," Freiija said, putting a finger on her husband's lips. "Let them have their moment, my Husband."

Out of the corner of his eyes, he saw Belldandy halt, and start walking back towards him and her family. She paused in her tracks when she saw her older sister hugging Cevn, who was still slack-armed with shock.

"It's about time," she commented.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Belldandy had toiled with her emotions, trying to unite her heart and her mind to make sense of it all. For so long, she had been forced to drink the most bitter of droughts. Forty millennia...more than enough insanity to drown herself in. Now, she felt haunted by an unease precisely because her life had been restored. Her whole internal world had been consumed by suffering; consequently, she felt ill-equipped to adapt to feeling so much happiness. She intuitively sensed that Urd had told Keiichi about her prolonged mourning and dearth, because he seemed a bit reticent around her.

Everything seemed to have been corrected by a series of incidents far beyond her comprehension...yet, _she didn't feel correct_. Reuniting with her family, with Keiichi, was an event that was so impossible, she had no expectations of it ever happening. Her reality crashed against her imaginings, only to disorient her even more. It just didn't feel real! A numbing terror seized her heart. What if that this was one more instance of nightmare? A nightmare of the worst kind; where she was the recipient of exactly what she wanted...and then learned it was a pack of lies right before it was withdrawn from her. What if she was still in the Well of Urd? What if she was still insane, imagining all of this while being victimized by Isilblius?

She checked her racing thoughts.

"What if I spent the rest of my days with Keiichi worrying about my reality? About his reality?" she questioned herself. She couldn't stop feeling paranoid that this was just some kind of dream-state.

When she walked back and saw her older sister's loving embrace of Cevn, it hit her. It was shocking enough to see her sister being affectionate with him. Belldandy recalled their breakup right after the Le Mans; she had known then that Urd's irritation towards him was her final defense against admitting that she cared about him. But now, something had apparently broken the ice...and she remembered witnessing two beings fighting while she and Peorth were suspended in the midst of a calamitous destruction. One being fighting and the other one burning up.

Isilblius had been the one who had done this to her, and Cevn had fought him. She had to know that this wasn't just some fantasy. If Isilblius was alive, then nothing here mattered because it could just be a vicious trickery of his designed to hurt her...

She walked up to Urd and Cevn and bluntly asked him, "Did you kill Isilblius?"

"I did much more than that. He's gone, never to return and plague any of us again. You don't have to worry about Isilblius. You're safe," Cevn answered. Urd was the only one who heard her question; and Belldandy thought it was cute to see her sister's face completely fault.

One question down, one question to go.

She sat down on a fold-up beach chair next to Keiichi, and basked in the sun silently, trying to gather her courage. The sun warmed her skin with its glowing touch, and she tried to settle into herself. What would be the answer to her confusion? Keiichi had been set upon the Trial of Preparedness with the mission of finding the Key to her heart. At the end of the Trial, she told him that _he_ was the Key to her heart. After her own never-ending horrors, her own agonizing trials of deprivation...could he still be the one to unlock the truth? Could he open her heart, just one more time? Just enough so she could finally feel secure in the knowledge that she was home?

"Bell-chan," he finally broke the silence. "I _know_."

Startled, she turned to regard him.

"Urd told me as much as she could. Even she doesn't understand the full extent of what you...endured. None of us could possibly grasp at it, how much it must have hurt you," he said, looking her deep in the eyes as only he could. An eye-contact that went straight to her heart, as inexorably as a mountain would grasp the clouds in the sky and ring them around its crown.

"I know that you're terribly wounded on the inside. I don't know if all the love I can pour into your heart could ever purify the taint that was pressed upon it by the nightmare you experienced. But I can try. I've _always been trying_, which is the essence of what you have to understand. Just like you can't ever fully explain to me what happened to you during the thousands of years you thought we were all dead, living in that phony dimension of Nulln. I know that you experienced every bit of it, every single moment of being lost and alone. But I know that it wasn't real. _This is real_," he said, grasping her hand and squeezing it for emphasis.

"Just like you can't make me understand what it was like for you, Bell-chan...I can't fully explain to you about how deeply I love you. But I do know that actions speak louder than words, so I want you to have this. I was going to give it to you when we got back to Osaka, but I think it's for the best that you open this here."

He stood up out of his beach chair and knelt down in the sand next to her, and then handed her a small long box that looked like a pencil box. She recognized it as the box that had caused him so much consternation when Skuld found it. It was cheaply wrapped like many of the items sold at the tourist traps. She opened the box and saw the beautiful necklace of Mediterranean seashells carefully beaded in a pattern...

...and in the middle of the necklace, a flash of gold accented by a glistening splinter of sparkles.

Gold?

She looked at the box again...and her heart leapt out of her chest when she read what was written inside:

**_"I can't make our lives perfect, but I can make our lives happy. Will you marry me?"_**

Her mind fluttered in a thousand directions as she regarded the golden engagement ring with its diamond, hanging from the corded seashell neck. Keiichi was always inventive and clever when it came to romance...but this was a supreme example of the engine of his heart at work. For a short breath of time she was paralyzed. The moment was so real, it seemed unreal. Yes, it was true that she would never understand the enormity of his heart, her exile of loneliness, how she and Peorth had to undergo such trials, and how she had been returned here, to this idyllic beach. But this, she understood completely. Despite the enormity of her dilemma, despite the intensity of the raw emotional agony that had plagued her, despite the lack of lucidity of thought for thousands of years...despite it all, this was one question she didn't have to think twice about. The entire answer had been in her heart, nurtured through forty millennia of being adrift.

She had been lost...and now, she was found.

Keiichi's face was tight with anxiety, as if his life depended upon her response. She realized that there would be many moments of doubt, but knew in her deepmost heart that they would always be answered by him. She materialized a pen and wrote something underneath his question, and wordlessly handed the box back to him:

**_"Of course I'll marry you. I can't imagine how my life would be without you, because I've experienced it. Please take good care of me."_**

Keiichi looked her with a tender expression, his eyes bathed in tears as he read her response out loud. He looked at her again, a few seconds later she heard a loosely punctuated burst of handclapping. Naturally, this intimate exchange had attracted the attention of her Mother and Father, as well as her sisters and Cevn. After all, with her family comprised of all Gods and Demons...and it would be nigh impossible to hide _this_ from them.

It was too important for them to miss.

"_Bell-chan, welcome home! Welcome back to your heart and Soul!_" Keiichi told her in a soft voice, saying the most perfect words of healing that she had always needed to hear.

Leaning towards her, he gathered her in his arms, held her tightly and gave her the best kiss.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --


	142. Pt 142: BlissGifts: Thera Triumphant

**Part 142: BlissGifts – Thera Triumphant**

APOCALYPSE:

...my heart is your ring, and my Soul is your troth," she pledged.

Of all the words Belldandy had ever spoken to Keiichi during the five years since she had first arrived on the Earthrealm, these were the words that most clearly defined her love for him. Oblivion was winging towards them, and yet his love for her was being reflected and refined by her. Bell-chan had always been there for him, from the first day to this last of days. She was truly his soul's mirror in every sense. There was no visitation of lugubrious dejection that could cloud this loving moment between she and he. His beautiful wife: a gift borne to his bosom by the auguries of fate and Yggdrasil; a housemate in Makuhari who had shared both mortal and Divine joys with him; his heart-bond companion for the final reaches of his mortal life…

With a sudden cosmism and noise, everything begins.

As all of reality pinioned he, Bell-chan, and Holy Bell in the vortex of the ultimate oblivion Bell had forementioned, Keiichi was proud of himself. Resisting the frightening about the surety of his fate, he had risen above the mounting destruction of a universe and had offered up a final act of courage for his heart...and for hers. At the end of all things and times, he had stood the course of his life: giving Bell-chan her wedding band and declaring her his wife.

But if this was his final act, how could he still exist in some fashion which allowed him to recognize it as a finality? He shouldn't have a single thought or feeling after the final ending of Everything. In the brief time they had been allotted together, he imagined it would be like standing on the rails and getting mowed down by the Shinkansen; his life would just stop, turn black, end silent.

Events had transposed upon themselves. He was _beyond finality_.

He, along with Bell-chan and Holy Bell, were enclosed in some kind of sphere or bubble that glowed translucently; a rainbow abstract of colors on its surface that reminded him of water and oil slick mixed on the floor of Whirlwind. How such spills would catch a psychedelic pattern of color hues if the sun struck it just so. But what he was witnessing beyond the bubble was absolutely indescribable.

Looking at Bell-chan and Holy Bell for an answer, both of whom simply shook their heads "no".

There was no answer to this, no explanation that made sense. This was unexplored experiential territory, both fascinating and frightening. He grabbed Belldandy's hand, more for his own comfort than a gesture of love. Her hand was trembling in his, her soft skin vibrating against his palm. He knit his fingers with hers, realizing that she was far more upset than he was. He was experiencing an insanity of colliding environments on a mortal level, with the human capacity of five senses and his mind to interpret this outbursting phenomena. But Bell possessed a fullness of every Goddess faculty and attribute that her Divine nature allowed her. Even more, she was a Norn, which gave her an extreme sensitivity to the vicissitudes of Time. If he was feeling overwhelmed, he could only imagine what she must be going through.

"I will fear no evil," she said in a whispering voice.

"Huh?"

"If I withhold fear in the face of evil, then I allow love in the presence of good," she explained. "Keiichi, my dear husband, despite how distressing this chaos is, I sense no presence of Isilblius in this discord. Since his first visitation of insanity upon us, I've lived with a sensing of him...an awareness of a 'stain' upon the joy of reality...having been scourged by his malign nature. It has haunted me with tribulations that go far beyond what you would understand as despair. But now, I know inside of me that Isilblius is _gone_. Forever. In the wake of our first encounter with him, there has been a part of my being that has always remained conflicted between unconditional forgiveness and unremitting revulsion; emotions that have has strained and fought against themselves and my conscience. But now, that part of myself is at peace. My heart is serene."

Holy Bell started singing in a multiflorous melody of interwoven song-cycles, her voice sounding like a dozen choirs massing voice.

"Dear Lord!!!" they both exclaimed as one, as the impact of Holy Bell's song struck them. The Angel was able to sense in the pureness of her heart what had escaped each of them. For Holy Bell wasn't afraid at all; she was ecstatic.

Keiichi and Belldandy both felt Holy Bell's ecstasy in their Souls, for their Souls were united with her, united _through_ her. And right now, they were resonating with wonderment, as both were imbued with her blissed-out exertions of song. How could she not be ecstatic at the sight of Reality restructuring and repairing itself? They were witnessing the profound activity of sheer creation.

_The Apocalypse...was being undone. _

"Creation from a unity, manifesting into a multiplicity...implies disintegration. A single glass pitcher, knocked off of a kitchen shelf, falls on the floor and shatters," Belldandy observed, trying to comprehend what was happened around them. "Once it shatters, it is no longer a pitcher; it is only a random distribution of glass shards. It has lost its usefulness as a pitcher. But there are inexplicable properties about Time, even to a Norn such as myself. There seems to be _another side to the floor_, and we're on that other side of the floor, observing the broken pieces assembling back into a pitcher. I don't understand it...I _can't_ understand it."

"But I do," Keiichi noted. "I think what you're feeling is the possibility that entropy and atrophy no longer exist. At least this is the sense that I was getting from Holy Bell."

Who nodded her head vigorously, confirming what he just said.

"Remember the OmniArc, Keiichi? How the seven of us became the weavers that knitted Time and Space back together? How we became 'The Seven', as Cevn called us? During that time, we all felt a different sense of the Ultimate Force, didn't we? The tool we used was the UF, but it could only be rendered as the Intimate Force...because we were Seven, but acting as One. Do you recall how Skuld traveled outwards, curious about the edge of the container space of the OmniArc, and when she reached the 'edge', she immediately emerged back into it? A limit...that _wasn't_ a limit. The same thing seems to be happening with Time. I'm the Norn of the Present: my jurisdiction of Time is the 'here and now'. But I can feel the 'never', and the 'forever'...and they are the same."

Keiichi's response was to seal her lips with his. They kissed passionately for several minutes, and then spent a moment gazing into each other's eyes as husband and wife.

"Y'know something, my wife...ha ha...I get to call you _wife_ now," Keiichi said, laughing with heart-gladdened giddiness. Filled with gratitude, he was childishly sweet with joy and wonderment. Unbelievably, the apocalyptic process of destruction was being reversed; their lives were safe and their hearts were sheltered within each other. "We've got a front-row seat to watch Creation at work, in all of its glory. I think we should relax ourselves and don't stress the details. Let's just kick back and enjoy the show."

"H...HEY!!!" he shouted with surprise as Holy Bell flew around behind Keiichi and playfully put her hands over his eyes, while Bell-chan giggled.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

THERA PROXIMAL, SPACE-TIME UNKNOWN:

Keiichi was exploding.

All the coursing maelstroms around Thera devoured the planet, the moon, the sun and the stars. The sharpness of Belldandy's death during the final moments still drew his heart taut with disbelief, even within the frameworks of this unimaginable swirl of devastation. Even though he was a God, he has simply assumed that the final destruction of reality would crush him like a fiery flare snuffing out a delicate soap bubble. Yet, instead of being crushed, he was being _expanded_; his Divine energy was dispersing itself all over the place. It was entirely painless...and entirely unsettling. Already, he was as 'big' as an Andromeda-sized galaxy. He became concerned about the unpleasant possibilities of such an alteration; if his God manifest continued to expand incrementally, then he could 'lose' himself because of the vast distance between different parts of himself. How far could one's Soul stretch, if it were to expand into infinity? Could it be spread too thin, in other words?

He recalled the battle of the two beings, and how one had told him to "do what you dream...dream what you know...know what you love".

Nothing must begin with a start.

He could remember the sparkling light in her eyes, that night when she said "Fuck it! I'm in love with him!"

That would be his start, his dream, and his knowledge. This was the moment, the time to learn about Love and make up for all the spiritual consummations of erudition that he had missed. He was lacking so much...barely able to imagine the sum of possibilities that were couched within the spiritual aspects of Love. All those Inculcations with assays of wisdom that had bypassed him while he was in ThirdTier and Transcend Inculcations; teachings that were completely unintelligible to a being banished from any sensing of love or self-love. How could he master what he didn't know? He sensed a pathway to this awareness; an assurance that he would learn those intrinsic truths by ensuring that his death was a meaningful expression of Love, even if he wasn't certain what Love was.

He had witnessed the complete shattering of everything that was possibly and potentially experiential. Anything that could be experienced...Time, Space, Soul, all the dimensions within the series of the Nine Dimensional stratums...all it was gone; leaving only non-experience. A Void-within-Void. He was alone, an isolate limited to his own experience and nothing more. Yet, this wasn't true! There was more than just the sum of his existence; he had a companion in the midst of this emptiness. He still retained his imaginations. His dreams.

A shock-wave of Divine energy, he felt himself being infused with energies unknown to him. From a nothingness, he was suddenly awash in an ocean of existence.

Instead of weakening, Keiichi sensed that he was transcending the God's deepest allocations of power. Frightening, because he was becoming something he considered impossible: he was evolving into a state of being which was _more_ than a God. But his Soul was still burning bright within him. To his amazement, reality was reconstructing itself all around him. Restructuring itself into new arrays of force that were unrecognizable to him.

What was he becoming?

Strangely enough, he blindly intuited that he was becoming a Multiverse, a 'container space' for a vast number of universes. His heart had become a channel for Life itself...this was his sacrifice; because by doing so, then Belldandy's Therarealm would be saved. Belldandy would be safe. He clearly sensed a power outside of himself that was shaping him, according him curious and wonderful powers and abilities far beyond anything a God could possibly experience or imagine.

He considered the mortals and their cosmogonies and cosmologies. Many mortal worlds had developed a philosophical belief system that considered each individual to be a universe to themselves. Taking humanistic philosophy even deeper, some cultures actually believed that that the universe itself doesn't exist; that it exists only because it is the creation of the individual. "I exist, therefore the universe exists." Keiichi was aware of much deeper philosophies than these and besides, as a God, he _knew_ what the Multiverse was and how it came to existence. Existential questions were no longer important to him, something he had tried to teach Belldandy when she would get too 'possessive' of her life.

Ironically, he was now becoming a universe to himself.

Sadly, he would never see Belldandy again. But she would be inside of him. The air she breathed, the stars she saw at night, the warmth she felt from Thera's Sol, the beauty she experienced gazing at the skies and seas...all of it would be him. Keiichi wondered if that was as close to an approximation of love that he would encounter. There was no Goddess for him to love, because his affection was for a mortal woman. Impossibly so, because she had made a wish that unsealed his heart...

He released his love, as his consciousness exploded.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

THERA, BEIJING CAPITAL, CHINA-STATES:

***SNAP!!!***

Belldandy recalled the sound of her Coach's head hitting the paneled floor in the backcourt. Chihiro had taken quite a blow to the head when she executed her one-of-a-kind reverse diving pancake dig thing. While the med-techs were attending Chihiro, Belldandy was grateful that the boisterous crowd had quieted down quite a bit. Her mind was voluminous with gameplay exertion; her body felt like a clay cube that had been punched hundreds of times. Her team and the N-Euro squad were pacing around the sides of the court restlessly, and every time she and the others walked up to check on Chihiro, the medics shooed them away. Overhearing Sato shouting at her desperately, she blinked sweat out of her eyes. Sato was calling she and the others to the bench with an unexpected urgency. As a group, she and her four teammates briskly jogged over to where the injured players had been watching the game and encouraging them.

"Hey, we need you guys' help on this one!" Sato explained hurriedly as Belldandy looked at her teammates, who were ripping apart the regulation white jerseys.

"What the fuck is going on?" she thought, absolutely exhausted in comparison to the full-on energy of her injured and bench-ridden teammates. She realized that the entire squad had finally gone bonk, because the disabled half of their team were busy making _hachimakis_. Once she and the others joined in, Sato immediately pulled on her crutches and hobbled over to the referee's stand. Belldandy was totally confused, but everyone else seemed to know what they were doing...and were going at it like crazy.

"They're cool with it, since the material is regulation. Fully within Olympic and International Volleyball Federation standards. I made sure they knew what we're doing," Sato announced as she returned, bringing smiles to several faces. Meanwhile, Fujishita had retrieved a couple magic markers courtesy of the newshawkers in the press and camera benches, and those players who didn't have busted-up hands wrapped in bandage gauzing went to work drawing red circles on the front of each rip-strip of cloth.

Sato fully explained Muriyako's crazy idea which had resulted in this flurried enterprise of ripping up a couple white jerseys. Belldandy was amazed at the ingenuity of what they were doing. She looked at her teammates with as much gratitude as she could express. Every one of these women had strived hard for years to be here, only to be sidelined by injury during the most important games their team would ever play. Several members couldn't even tie up the headbands: Sugihara was wearing a hand cast for her shattered thumb bone; Otamura was wrapped from elbow to fingertips because of her broken wrist and fingers; and Takamito had her arm in a sling to stabilize her broken elbow. They had been defeated by laming injuries...and yet had emerged victorious over it by digging deep within themselves to find the true Olympic Spirit. They had never given up. She recalled the afternoon a few days back when Chihiro explained her philosophy about dealing with defeat. Now, she was watching it firsthand. Here it was at work; the injured women on the team had forged a triumph because they didn't defeat themselves despite their disappointment. Belldandy felt proud of her teammates, because no matter what, they were a _team_!

She realized that their bench of injured players had just won them the Gold Medal.

Chihiro got helped to her feet by the Polyclinic medics, which brought the requisite polite applause from the pro-Japanese crowd. Kinosh'ta grabbed a hachimaki and punched her on the shoulder and whispered "She's first!" They dashed over to the far corner of the court, right past the Norway-Euro team. As she glanced at Athenle, the Valkyrie was reproaching her with hate-filled eyes. Chihiro still looked a little unsteady on her feet. Belldandy glanced up at the timeout clock, and noticed it was counting down towards 30 seconds. They had to hurry!

"Oi! What the fuck are you guys doing with that thing?" their Coach asked, exasperated as Kinosh'ta tied the hachimaki behind her head.

"Winning!" Kinosh'ta said loudly, as she pointed towards the rest of the team. Coach Chihiro's eyes just about popped out of her head as she saw her team tying hachimaki headbands around each other's foreheads, with hand-drawn red-suns in the middle of them. The official Olympics camera crew clustered them, surrounding them tightly to film every minute of it.

"Are you guys nuts? Do you know what this means?" Chihiro exclaimed as she and Kinosh'ta tied hachimakis around each other's foreheads. Their Coach had been totally out of the loop as to the wild plan the team had hatched, because she was dazed and getting temp stitches sewn into the back of her head. This little surprise had dazed her back into sharp alertness.

"No, we're not nuts. We're _Japan_! There's no way we're gonna lose, not after doing this!" Belldandy hurriedly told her as the noise level in the stadium began to crescendo.

"Yeah, you're all nuts, every single one of you 'New Oriental Witches'! God dammit, my head is spinin'. Let's go do some witchcraft on these N-Euros!" Chihiro said with a smile and a nod, indicating to she and Kinosh'ta that she was cool with the tactic her team had just done.

And it wasn't just her.

When the team finished putting on their 'unity' hachimakis, every Japanese spectator in the stadium knew what this meant, and they were all screaming so loudly that Belldandy felt her ears ringing when she and her teammates returned to their positions on the volleyball court.

"Your team is so worthless, now you're resorting to crowd-pleasing shows of bravado to delay the inevitable defeat you will suffer. But it's an empty gesture, because you're all pathetic. What is this, another stupid Theran good luck ritual?" Athenle taunted her in Japanese.

"No. It's Japanese for 'we're gonna kick your ass, bitch!'" Kinosh'ta shot back before Belldandy could even fasten onto a snappy comeback. Belldandy smiled to herself as Athenle looked at Kinosh'ta with cross-eyed confusion.

It's nice to have sempai with an attitude.

Belldandy had the service, and decided to go for it with a leaping salvo. She crashed it over the net by a narrow margin, right towards the sidelines. Kinosh'ta's side, which she hoped would the Euros would dig out to set up a challenge at the net with Ootaki and Kinosh'ta blocking. Sure enough, the two roofed the Norway-Euro's attack right back at them.

The Norway-Euros...rather, the Valkyrie...were starting to play desperate.

Exhaustion versus desperation corded the playing field with knots of tension, rather than mere volleyball strategies. This was a battle of wills, a contention of spirits. The game seemed to become a living thing, and Belldandy sensed that she was truly complete as an Olympian. Following a number of volley sets, Japan was a point behind, and Norway once again was serving match point. Belldandy felt hurt crowding over every inch of her body, as this game was seemingly going on forever.

Once again, they were in the damned _70s_ in a game that rarely went past 30 points.

Tamiya fielded the N-Euro's serve with a roll-n-dig and Ootaki drove it deep into their opponent's back court; they played it by setting towards the left side, right in front of her. Athenle and two attackers went up on it with a 3-to-1 joust way above the net...and she pushed the ball right back against their joint attack with every effort of strength she had, at the zenith of her blocking attack. Stuffing their attack back at them, she shoved all three attackers backwards so hard they landed gimble-footed as the ball fell flat against the net on Norway-Euro's side, tying the score.

Despite feeling light-headed from over-exertion, she had out-muscled three attackers...her two hands pushing against six hands high above the net...jamming their attack right back down their throats with killer intensity. The stadium crowd went ballistic with shouting and the "Nippon!" chant started up again.

"Holy fucking trainwreck, Morisato!!!" Chihiro praised her in complete disbelief.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

NOW:

Keiichi looked on in his mind, remembering Belldandy's last tragic words to him in Beijing. She had said that there really was no randomness to their lives, because they _did_ share a feeling...just between the two of them. A special emotional bond that can survive whatever happens. "_Good or bad; this moment is a treasure,_" she had said.

He wanted to mourn for lost treasures, but he was a Multiverse and was possibly hallucinating...

...inside a bubble?

"Who are you?" he heard someone ask. His thoughts were glazed over with confusion; now he was hearing voices. His Divinely-endowed senses seemed to wander off on their own, as scattered as he was. But he _wasn't_ scattered in a physical sense; his atomic structure was complete and intact. He could discern this because he could see one of his hands.

He turned towards the voice...and saw _himself_.

And Belldandy.

Quickly correcting his surprise, he realized that the person resembling himself was a mortal, and the person resembling Belldandy was a Goddess. A _very powerful_ Goddess, jammed tight with Divine energy. All around them, Space and Time were exploding inwards and outwards.

"You're the one we saw!" the mortal shouted excitedly. "The one whose girlfriend was dead, in the middle of some kind of game in an arena. You're a God, aren't you?"

Before he could answer, the Goddess started explaining in rapid-sequence thoughtcasts that they were in some kind of apocalypse, but yet Space and Time were responding to each other, and the Logorinths were evolving, repairing themselves. She and her husband were safekept inside of an energy 'bubble' that seemed immune to the vast deploys of energy streaking in every direction. They were observing the reintegration process from this vantage point when suddenly the bubble wall had splashed inwards and he had emerged.

Within a split second, the Goddess named Belldandy 'downloaded' a set of information into him that completely destroyed everything he knew about reality. The Multiverse that he had lived in had been cast away by a deliberate act of evil, becoming an isolated, vulnerable island. A being that was commonly known to Gods and Demons as Isilblius was actually a wraith called the SurGoth. This SurGoth had managed to cause reality to start _consuming itself_, but the process somehow had been halted and reversed before all of existence was phageically devoured. A creation was occurring...and with this emergent reality, his God's Realm would be incorporated into something called an OmniOm. Omnifinite and Omniternal: boundless and forever-lasting. The God's and Demon's Realms were being spiritualized and combined into a Syntrasil, apart and yet partially incorporated with each other with a Midgardrasil in between them. Like two neighborhoods in a large city whose district divisions were blurred by the inhabitants themselves. The Ygg Mainframe no longer existed as a unique computer network. It was now part of an evolving super-computer called XOM: formerly the Xeomnic Network for Yggdrasil, Oemxnic Network for Mid-Light, and Mnoexic for Vanagdrasil. Yggdrasil and Vanagdrasil still existed, but would never again be insular and separated. The Demons and Gods would eventually interact, both Realms would maintain their own identities but would have a 'merged identity' as well. This would be the locale where all the mortal worlds would be located, as well as communities of Gods and Demons coexisting. No Doublet System. A means of transport between the two called a UniTransic system. Swarp Hypernalities, Axialities...many concepts and realities beyond his experience. Keiichi wanted to protest that all of this was incomprehensible and impossible, but she assured him that the process was already in motion, and that it was benign.

And to top all of this off, he learned that she was a Norn...but _from another God's Realm_ called Yggdrasil.

"Ye..yes, I'm a God," he finally answered the mortal Keiichi, sounding spastic because of his difficulty in comprehending what this 'Belldandy' Goddess had told him. He looked at her closely, distinguishing that she was shorter than Belldandy of Thera. She was more feminine in certain ways than the mortal Belldandy he knew, but he knew deep in his soul that 'his' Belldandy was more beautiful, in her own way. He sensed that this Goddess Belldandy was older than Belldandy; she appeared to be in her mid-twenties.

"This is _incredible_!" he exclaimed, watching the symphony of creation enveloping them, while they were protected in some kind of sphere. With a noetic insight, he recognized that he himself had been part of that symphony; a God whose Divine energy had been amplified to create a Multiverse. At once, it made sense to him. The Everything had been utterly depleted by the sheer scale of destruction, and had become constellative in fragmentation. The only resources available to 'rebuild' it...sentient Gods and Demons that which survived the destruction...had been used as the sources to recreate it. As part of this process, he and a handful of other Divines had been empowered by unknown energies to create Multiverses by _becoming_ Multiuniverses, and then had been returned safely to their prior Divine form.

He had truly saved Thera...and trillions of civilizations of sentient species as well.

Humbled by this insight, Keiichi shot a return volley of thoughtcasts to the Goddess Belldandy, explaining everything about his life and his recent experiences on Thera. The expression of awe on her face spoke volumes, but when he opened the book of his life to the chapter where he was watched Belldandy die, her eyes were moistened with empathy towards his loss.

He had saved an entire universe, but couldn't save the life of the woman who held more meaning to him then all the stars in the sky.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Belldandy was amazed at the course of life that this God called Keiichi had endured. Her heart accompanied him through the Gate of Judgement and all of the years he had been Sealed away from Love itself by the natural actions of the Gate. His situation was even worse than Urd's status as Norn of the Past, because he was even incapable of feeling love towards himself. Although he didn't realize it, in one sense Keiichi had been living a detached life: a half-God, half-automaton existence ever thereafter that fateful event. He worked in a Wish-granting office as well and was very effective in his work, susceptible to neither Wishout nor Washout because he lacked the emotionality of loving concern. He could only fleetingly sense Love's many shadows: cordiality and friendship, bitterness and regret. His thoughtcast narrated his life on a mortal planet called Thera, a world that corresponded almost exactly with the Earthrealm except for a few shifts in historical development. But Thera's history was much more peaceful; their culture was more progressive than the Earth's. She sensed that the Therans would reach the Next Level soon, perhaps within five centuries instead of the nine centuries it would take the Earthrealm.

She almost cried out when he allowed her to survey his experiences with the mortal woman Belldandy. The mortal counterpart who shared her name and appearance was as much a girl as she was a woman, and her life had been snuffed out when her Soul was suddenly stolen away. This was what choked her up; he had lost the one he loved to the ravages of Isilblius, whom all now knew was not an Ultimate Demon but something called a SurGoth. Tragically, he was so new to love, he didn't recognize the loss for what it really was. He simply felt a tenuous _emptiness within him_ that he couldn't explain, but only sense it as a form of acute pain inside of a heart he hardly knew.

She immediately decided to grant _his_ wish.

Belldandy asked her husband if she could pull a "Norn stunt" and whispered her plan in his ear. With a grin, Keiichi readily agreed. Closing her eyes, Belldandy weaved her Time awareness within all the reassembling TimeWeaves and yanked the Present Pastwards, moving it a few moments into the Past...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Keiichi," the mortal Keiichi said to him. "My Wife, her Angel and I have been on a mission to 'correct' the damage the SurGoth has done. In every Time, Space...or what Bell-chan calls 'dimensionalities' for reference's sake, either a Keiichi or a Belldandy were directly attacked. My wife was the first victim, and I won't get into that because it's way too detailed to explain. The second victim was a Goddess Belldandy from another God's Realm called Nulln. Isilblius...er, the SurGoth...killed her entire family and her mortal boyfriend, Keiichi. You and 'your' Belldandy are another set of victims, casualties of his hatred."

"You must understand," the Goddess Belldandy explained, looking up at him, "that I'm not used to seeing a God with such a towering manifest, except for a WarGod, which you obviously are not. But from your thoughts, I am aware of why you do as such. In your Multiverse, Thera has established a long-standing tradition of Olympic competitions, of such duration that Therans on the whole have developed along physical lines that are taller and more athletic than the Earthrealm mortals that I'm used to. But I digress. As you know, the SurGoth wraith tried to attack you, but failed because of the prohibition that the Gate of Judgement sealed upon you that prevented you from experiencing love. His vile goal all along was to destroy _everything_, including Love. So he sought to disguise himself in the form of a loving being, so that he could wreak havoc from within, so to speak. But you were saved by the very thing you were cursed with. Because you couldn't feel love, your Soul held no value to him. By being unable to be in love, you couldn't become a weapon in his hands. Perhaps he couldn't overrule your Soul, for some reason. So he decided to punish the Belldandy in your Realm, in your stead. To punish the one you've been assigned to make a wish. This is why she died."

Keiichi felt something really dark inside of him snap; a gloom which penetrated every extent of his Divine Soul. _He_ was responsible for Belldandy's death, albeit indirectly. He couldn't compose his hovering, and ended up stagger-floating within the bubble because he was so upset. He had recently learned that an evil being had _murdered_ Belldandy...and now he knew who it was. It was that skeletal ether-being he saw in some kind of battle with...

"Keiichi!!!" the Goddess Belldandy shouted, reaching out and steadying him.

"The SurGoth...he's gone for good," she confirmed, quickly interpreting his thoughts. "You have an opportunity to save her, but it poses a significant risk for both of us. She and I have to merge Souls..."

"WHAT!!!" both Keiichis blurted out.

"From what you've given me to understand, your Belldandy is destined to die, because the SurGoth planted the seed of death in her, as you know. Your Almighty told you as much, Keiichi of the Wish Escort Office. Yet, there is a way to forestall his horrid attack on her. The seed that he planted inside of her Soul is designed to consume it. To use mortal physiology as an analogy, it is akin to a virus that eats any cell it comes in contact with. I know, because I was infected with that very same virus once before, as the result of the SurGoth's hatred."

"H..how can knowing this save her?" he asked, glancing at both mortal husband and Goddess wife.

"It is possible that the 'virus' she was infected with had been designed with a limit; that it only has the capability to consume a mortal Soul and nothing more. As a Norn, I may be able to revisit the Time before her death, and thwart the SurGoth's attack upon her. I believe that in the case of your Belldandy, there may be a way to undo what has occurred. Since a mortal Soul has a fractional amount of Soular and Divine energy as opposed to a Divine Soul, it would be unable to successfully attack a merged mortal-Divine Soul. A Soul with Divine energy beyond that of a mortal's would exceed its ability. I _am_ her counterpart on a Soul level, as you suspected. If I were to combine with her on a Soul-to-Soul level, then the virus would be unable to harm her because it's..."

"...out of the question, Bell-chan! We don't know what could happen, and I'm not willing to risk it. As your husband, I forbid it!" the mortal Keiichi shouted angrily, interrupting his wife.

"But..." the Goddess Belldandy started to explain.

"I'll do it!" Keiichi interjected. "Anything to save her life, I will do. I'll freely give her _my_ Soul, in the stead of yours. All you need to do is help me to make sure it will happen. So what if I die the Real Death? If I perish in the attempt, so be it. I will have performed one worthwhile deed that may even be considered an act of love, if I knew what love is. But at least she'll live, and that is what is most important. You both are newly married, and you've just had your first husband-wife spat..."

Both mortal Keiichi and Goddess Belldandy looked at him, then at each other, and then giggled.

"Is this what love is?" he asked. "That even when you disagree, you still care about each other? How can you react with such mirth? What does it mean, to allow each other to be so closely involved with the choices each of you make? I couldn't imagine letting anyone have such a decisive influence upon my personal choices."

"But that's what love is," Goddess Belldandy replied, seemingly bemused by his unknowing. "At least one aspect of it. Love is one of the main principles which allows for a far-ranging selflessness. I would go as far as to say that it is the _essential_ principle invested in selfless actions. I can understand your confusion about this point; it would seem that you missed all those intents and lessons during your Inculcation, because the Gate made it impossible for you know or feel love. Farbeit for me to claim any expertise in matters of love, but I _am_ married and thus I have some sensing of love's nuances. So here's how it works. With Keiichi and me, love means that we _do_ have significant influence over each other's decisions. I am as close to his decision-making process as he is, in a certain means. The love is in the _shared agreement_ to disagree. By the way, thank you for the save. Keiichi has a tendency to back down quickly once he says 'no' to me sometimes. It would seem that he struggles with himself, rather than standing by his views..."

"Gee, thanks Bell," the mortal interrupted, shaking his head in frustration.

Keiichi started to laugh, richly amused by this interaction between the mortal Keiichi and the Goddess Belldandy. He was reminded of how often he had unintentionally embarrassed Belldandy. Like the time in the gym where he misunderstood the 'dribble and shoot' instructions and dropped the basketball in the round metal hoop, then bounced it against the floor a few times and walked back to the other players. He could see in his mind's eye how red her face had become, flushed with embarrassment as her closest friends suffered her to be their source of levity.

There were many other situations that came to mind...

"But it's _work_. Love requires effort, because love makes you see yourself differently," mortal Keiichi added, recovering his composure quickly. "There's a certain amount of risk involved with vulnerability, and love is an exercise in finding the _right_ amount of vulnerability at the time when it's most needed. You have to be open...and be _open_ to being open with the one you love. And don't ever take yourself or each other too seriously. For that matter, don't even take the love you share too seriously, because that'll screw it up every time. Love is a _gift_ that is shared, not a possession."

He was amazed to see how the Goddess was looking at the mortal with an expression approaching heartfelt admiration. How could a mortal cause such an intense emotional reaction in a Goddess? How could this be possible...unless he had spoken a truth that was so profound, the Goddess herself was impressed by its depths of verity.

If he survived, Keiichi promised himself that he would forever remember those words the young mortal man had spoken. There was a secret knowledge in them, enough to 'blow away' a Goddess, as his Theran friend Belldandy would term it. Perhaps love meant that he could 'blow away' Belldandy by repeating these wisdom words.

It was time to give Belldandy his Soul...his life if necessary...so that her Soul would be able to resist the 'time-bomb' of a seed of death within her.

He watched as Time flew backwards another few seconds on Thera. With a totally controlled ease, it complete froze. A frozen, TimeStilled now.

Then as Time jump-started, Keiichi was there! He looked on in his mind as Belldandy performed an impossible athletic feat...and realized that Belldandy was still playing in her all-important Olympic championship competition.

She was still alive!

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

APOCALYPSE...no scratch that...CREATION!!!:

"Did it work, Bell-chan?" her husband asked as she opened her eyes. Belldandy was surprised that Keiichi didn't ask "are you okay" first; perhaps he had a level of faith in her abilities that even exceeded hers. It had been tricky, stewarding the Soul of a God and combining it with a Soul of a mortal. Fortunately, she was working with another Belldandy from another Multiverse, which made the process easier. So now a part of her was in the mortal girl Belldandy whom the God Keiichi loved. Loved and as yet was unaware of it. But he would awaken to his heart someday.

Urd and Skuld would have been proud of her. She was a Norn, the absolute master of Time. No longer just the Present, but also the Past and Future. It had taken seven billion years to make sure that the Souls of both were _exactly_ interwoven as they should be, so that both would survive the experience. She used part of her Soul as the 'glue' to make the weaving a wholeness. When she was finished with that, she condensed the epoch of time into a micron of a nano-second...and implemented her work.

Being who she was, a Goddess Relief Office agent, she also threw in a little extra.

Hopefully, the God Keiichi would be able to handle it.

"Of course it worked, silly! What do you think I am...hee..hee! A mortal?" she giggled, bringing a bright smile to Keiichi's face. She glanced down at the three rings on her ring finger and felt so proud of herself. Of him.

They had both journeyed together through an incredibly challenging emotional journey over the past five years. And the future was going to be even more wonderful!

Each ring was precious. The first ring; a simple inexpensive ring that was bound to her with Keiichi's sweat and ambition when he had worked so hard during their first Christmas together to earn it. The second ring;, an exquisite engagement ring with its gem of Metaixodenum that he surprised her with during the Le Mans victory celebration, which was bound to her with the Almighty's sanction of their engagement. The third ring; a beautiful band of gold with inlaid platinum with their names engraved in Japanese, English, and Yggdrasilian on the interior, a ring that was bound with his heart and Soul, given to her as a final gesture of hope and love during a moment in time when events made it fully apparent that she and he were going to die together.

But none of those three rings excused Keiichi's little "As your husband, I forbid it!" comment. Belldandy smiled to herself, realizing that not only Love was work, but marriage would require some work as well. And now she was going to put Keiichi to task for his little verbal stunt, which was certainly a slipup on his part, but still needed to be firmly corrected.

"Keiichi, I have something I need to discuss with you..."

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

THERA, BEIJING CAPITAL, CHINA-STATES:

Every member on her team looked at her with awe for several seconds, because she had taken down three of Norway-Euro's top attackers; something that was totally incomprehensible because it just wasn't possible at this level of competition. Not only that, but something else had happened when her feet landed on the court's wooden floor.

_She got zinged._

Belldandy couldn't even begin to understand it or describe it, except that for a split-second, it felt like every atom in her body had lit up with some kind of tingling energy. For a moment, she felt like she was _on fire_, in the best possible way. Kind of like the moment of a final showdown in an anime, where the heroine is haloed in bright colored energies or flames...

Then the exhaustion set in.

They were tied 78-78, with another shot at going up a point. Belldandy and Kinosh'ta were rotated left and center at the net. Captain Moritayama served a flipper shot, high with a lot of back spin, which was lipped by the back row towards Athenle. Athenle jumped high to kill it, and Kinosh'ta anticipated her attack and totally roofed her, stuffing her attack right back at her.

"Way to bomb 'em, Kinosh'ta!" she shouted, slapping tens with her so hard that her hands stung.

The team was up by a point, with match point within reach once again! She and her teammates clustered in the center and slapped tens and then broke to their offensive formation.

Moritayama dribbled the ball, waiting right until the 30 second limit. Belldandy sensed the psychological ploy; she was making the N-Euro women sweat it out. Knowing the Captain, Belldandy expected her to fireball the serve with a leaping jump-service. Moritayama did just that, and the ball sinkered down in the backcourt, forcing the N-Euro libero to dig it out. The ball arced straight up into the neutral zone over the net...she timed her attack...but Athenle skillfully dinked it barely over her head. Belldandy tumbled backwards in a diving save and dug it out right as it hit the floor, flick-wristing it up towards Kinosh'ta who then back-set it towards Chihiro for a decoy backcourt attack.

As she gained her feet, she saw Chihiro totally nail it with absolute precision right behind the three meter-line, expertly finding the seam between Athenle and her two front row teammates and catching the Norway-Euro back row with awkward expressions as it landed at their feet.

Their dream had become reality!!!

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

It was so loud inside the Small Bird's Nest, Belldandy felt like a bomb had exploded. The crowd had gotten manic with enthusiasm when they had put on their hachimakis, but somehow they gained a level and were even more boisterous when Chihiro punched home the winning volley. The screaming and applause was ear-deafening, and then someone started up a chanting. The stadium was rocking to 75,000 spectators shouting "_Nippon! Nippon!_" as she and her crew looked at each other with sheer sentiment and exhaustion.

"Ootaki, pinch me tuh make sure I'm not dreamin'!" Tamiya gasped. "We just won da _Olympics_!"

"Hey, break it up, you guys!" Chihiro interjected, back into Coach mode. "Remember? Olympic sportsmanship? Let's make a line to congratulate the Norway-Euro gals. They played their butts off too. And then we can go celebrate until we're sick of it, because we're gonna get fuckin' mobbed!"

Belldandy and her teammates formed the traditional post-game line along the net to shake hands with the Norway-Euro team. But their opponents simply ignored them and walked off the court, looking at she and her teammates with the dirtiest expressions of disdain she had ever seen. Athenle shot her one final burning hateful glance and then walked into the locker room tunnel. She could hear sporadic booing amidst the cheering.

She secretly hoped that the Big Boss God in Windowsill had some kind of penalty for poor sportsmanship.

The thirteen of them were soaked with sweat. They were so spent from their epic match, they were leaning against each other, active and injured players alike. She was amazed to find that the injured half of the team was soaked with sweat as well; their jerseys were slick of it, and their hair was matted with perspiration. Even though they hadn't played, they had given so much emotional support and encouragement, they were exhausted as well.

Thirteen women who had beaten the odds.

Thirteen women who had beaten the Goddesses.

Belldandy was flailing with the incredible realization that they had bested the _best of the Valkyrie Goddesses_ in Windowsill. Casting her imagination afloat, she visualized that there were spectator Gods and Goddesses up there, watching this game closely from their Divine perspective. Perhaps some of them were proud that the mortals had mounted such a courageous effort.

She and her teammates were swarmed with cameras filming them as they savored the moment, too fatigued to jump up and down like the high school girls did when they won a tournament. She looked up at the scoreboard, which read 80-78, and remembered Takahashi sensei's guidance about 'making your game the best, make your game your own world record.' They had earned their world record; the proof was on every one of the stadium's JumboLED scoreboards.

The crowd wouldn't let up on the cheering. They had stopped chanting and now were yelling and applauding with abandon. After two minutes of crowd pandemonium, Chihiro waved the cameramen aside and they started walking towards the lockers. As she walked by the 1964 Japan Women's Volleyball team, she examined their elderly forebears closely; each and every aged face was beaming with pride and glistening with heartfelt tears. Even Takahashi-sensei was crying for joy, unashamed as cameramen were taking photos of her and all the 1964 team, reunited to witness a triumph.

Halfway into the tunnel to the lockers, she saw the _President and Vice-President of the Thera IOC_ step out from the hallway that led to the locker rooms. She felt a chill run down her spine as they waited at the base of the tunnel.

"What'd we do wrong? What'd we do?" she whispered to Kinosh'ta.

"Who knows? Maybe we didn't do something wrong this time," Kinosh'ta whispered back.

When they reached the bottom of the sloping tunnel, the elderly head of the Thera IOC walked up the middle of the tunnel hallway and warmly congratulated Chihiro with a handshake, and then babbled something in French. When he finished, the Chinese translator repeated his words in Japanese.

"On behalf of the Olympic Committee I wish to congratulate you on your achievement. What you have done tonight is more than win a game or a Gold Medal. You've truly created a legend. The Modern Olympics has never borne witness to an athletic performance of this magnitude of competitiveness. In honor of this, I will personally present the medals to you and your teammates, in the spirit of humility, for it is I who will be honoring you. My term of office will end eventually, but this game will mostly likely be remembered and praised for centuries."

With this, he and the VP shook each team member's hands. Chihiro was frozen in place, looking like a winter ice statue in downtown Sapporo. Belldandy was shivering when it came her turn to be congratulated personally by such eminent figures in the Olympic Movement. Next to Keiichi, he was the most powerful person she had ever met.

Their Chinese escorts told them that they fifteen minutes to make themselves presentable, and then they would be summoned to the court for the Gold Medal presentation.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Once inside the locker room, it was Ootaki (naturally) who grabbed a towel and threw it at Tamiya, starting a playful towel fight. For two minutes, every woman on the team was shouting, giggling, and whooping it up as they pelted each other with wadded towels. Even Chihiro, because Kinosh'ta made sure to plaster her right in the face with the first towel she threw. The Chinese locker room attendants looked on at them with bemused smiles, either happy for them or more than likely thinking they had all gone nuts.

"Don't you guys ever run out of adrenaline?" Chihiro joked. "You're supposed to leave it all out there on the court."

Someone lobbed a towel which landed lopsided on her head.

"Okay, playtime's over. We need to get ourselves into some semblance of dignity, because they're gonna give you guys Gold Medals in a few minutes. I'd like to say a bunch of shit about how proud I am of you all, about how good you played, about how honored I am to coach you women...but the IOC president said it a lot better than I ever could. He totally nailed it on the head...you guys are going to be as famous as the 1964 team, for sure. So just be yourselves and get cleaned up, fixed up and presentable, so we're ready when they call us."

Belldandy doubted that her body could do a cool-down in the next ten minutes, she had exerted herself so hard. Kinosh'ta plopped down on her right, and Tamiya and Ootaki plopped down on her left.

Her three sempai.

She leaned back against the cool metal of the locker and just let herself float free in her thoughts for a moment.

"Y'know, Kinosh'ta, that was pretty awesome when yuh roofed those two in da final set..." Tamiya noted.

"Yeah, monkey girl. What about your defensive play? You made some digouts that were off the hook," Kinosh'ta shot back.

"Me, a monkey girl? Tamiya replied amidst the giggles.

"No, you're more the gorilla type," Ootaki observed, slapping her on the shoulder. Laughter.

"Ah guess that makes you muh chimp, cuz ah've been stuck with yuh for four years in the monkey cage they charitably call the "Women's Sport's Dorm". Yuh're serves were the shit tonight, girl. Left 'em flat-footed and stoopid," Tamiya teased. "Ah still can't believe we won the game."

"That's because of these two skyscrapers they call the 'Phenom Twins'" Ootaki noted, yanking Belldandy's long ponytail and mussing up Kinosh'ta's hair.

"Hey!!! Don't fuck with my hair!" Kinosh'ta said semi-seriously in her usual husky voice. "We're going to be on millions of TV sets in a few minutes. I live in Osaka, and I'll never hear the end of it if I look like a dork during the medal awards. Don't want to go out there with my hair all bird-nest looking. They already got two stadiums and Ootaki to sport that look."

More giggles.

"I wonder what Tibet's gonna be like," Belldandy asked.

"Probably pretty chill. Like you. I still can't believe what you did out there, Morisato, blocking those three Amazons all by yourself. And you weren't even drunk!" Kinosh'ta teased, yanking her ponytail.

"Hey, don't fuck with my hair, Ms 'Don't fuck with my hair'!" she shot back, earning a couple more giggles.

"Yeah, like any of us are goin' to be on the front pages of any modeling magazines. I'm _still_ sweating," Ootaki noted.

"So what? Dey love us no matter what. We're the 'New Oriental Witches', remember? So what if we don't go out there lookin' like stylin' princesses. We're fuckin' _champions_, an' that's what really matters," Tamiya replied.

"Righteous tighteous!" Ootaki agreed with a nod.

"_Two Minutes!_" someone announced.

"Y'know, I think that just made my heart start beating faster," Kinosh'ta said. "It was always my dream to be on this team. Started when I was a little girl in elementary school in Osaka. Lots of heartbreaks and practices along the way. Broken thumbs, floor burns, even broke my collarbone in junior high when I slipped and nailed the net pole. Shit, it really broke my heart when we lost the Nationals to your team this spring. We wanted to sweep our way through the Nationals. But this more than makes up for it. My heart's mended now, because you're all my sisters. You'll always be my sisters, just like those grannies from the '64 team are each other's sisters. I love you guys!"

"Waaah," Belldandy commented. "And you're supposed to be the team's Osaka toughass bitch, Kinosh'ta. Well I love you back, ya goofhead!"

"Not half as goofy as you, Ms. 'Jeg elsker deg'" Kinosh'ta teased.

All three of her sempai laughed heartily at her expense, while Belldandy had a whimsical thought about Keiichi.

"Hey!" Kinosh'ta interrupted. "You guys wanna come back? Play together in London in 2012?"

"Only if Chihiro's coaching," Belldandy said. Her three teammates nodded their heads in agreement.

"Don't worry about that," Ootaki said. "We're gonna _make_ her coach in 2012! She's the one who always keeps saying 'don't you guys know, the whole world revolves around volleyball?' Well, I'm gonna hold her to that one, even if I gotta get her drunk and have her sign off on a pledge with her own blood!"

"FUCK YEAH, WE'LL COME BACK!!!" the foursome shouted.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Showtime.

Belldandy felt about a 7 or 8 on a scale of 10 in terms of being nervous during the Opening Ceremonies. As they queued up behind the cheongsam-dressed Olympic guides outside of their locker room, she realized that this didn't even compare to the event two weeks ago...she was probably around a 15 on a scale of 10 at the moment. When the team emerged out of the tunnel, the stadium was completely full. _Nobody had left!_ There were very few empty seats in the indoors stadium; they were surrounded by a humanity of their countrymen who had remained in the ultra-modern Indoors Stadium. Evidently, the Chinese had kept the crowd amused while they were setting up the team medal platforms. Maybe, maybe not. Incredibly, the game had started at 7:30pm, and the stadium clock read 1:42am. Over six hours later and they were still here.

This was Volleyball Nation in Beijing, and tonight this Indoors Stadium was Japan's house!

At least a dozen cameras tracked her and her teammates as they lined up alongside the end of the court, facing the immense Olympic flag with its seven circles. The PA system was playing that pre-medal anthem she had heard seemingly a hundred times during the past two weeks. Most of the time, it was nauseating...like that musak crap force-fed into the background that she'd hear in a department store or mall. But tonight, she felt a chill in her spine.

It was for them.

The official's box had been converted to the medals presentation booth; it was draped with the Olympic flag and bedecked with medals, olive branch laurels and balls. She eyed the medals, still in disbelief that in a few minutes, one of those gold and jade medals was going to be draped around her neck.

She couldn't see her Mom and Dad, but she could imagine that they were both overwrought with emotion at this, their daughter's ultimate moment. She reminisced about how her Mom had bandaged her knees and elbows countless times while she was growing up, always giving her a few words of encouragement. Living in rural Japan, she had often been teased for being a tall Norwegian girl. During the first few years, she had sometimes come home from school crying in frustration because her classmates wouldn't let up on the 'gaijin' teasing. Always, her Mom would hug her close and sometimes cried with her. Those first few years in Japan had been tough. Her Stepdad had worked hard to support her and Mom, and had actually gotten in a couple fist fights with some of the villagers who had kept taunting her. During the initial years of adjustment, he had helped her with her homework when she struggled to learn Japanese, even after he had put in a hard twelve-hour day in the fields. She owed this moment to them, and was so grateful that they were here to share in it. The very same people who had acted so bigoted towards her and her mother when they first came to Niigata were the ones who had pitched in their hard-earned money to pool enough yen for Mom and Dad to be here.

Sometimes, the human race behaves with poetry.

After they were lined up on the end of the court, the President of the IOC walked out with his usual retinue of admin assistants and the camera crew that seemed glued to him wherever he was during the Games.

The pre-medal Anthem was hushed as he walked up to a rostrum to make some kind of speech:

_"The Olympic Spirit has been about two principles. First and foremost, it involves fair and honest competition among the participants. Second, it promotes peace through the Truce which is honored during each Olympiad, an unbroken tradition going back almost three thousand years of our Theran history. Every four years, we strongly discourage the practice of doping among athletes, and have instituted sophisticated technologies to ensure the sanctity of competition. Unfortunately, there are those whose willingness to achieve victory sways them away from the Olympic Spirit. It is my sad duty to inform you that the Norway-Euro team has been disqualified due to doping. Every member of their team tested positive for banned substances, a practice we will not tolerate. Therefore, their Silver Medals are forfeited. In consultation with the IOC, we have decided to award the Silver medal to the Chinese team in their stead. We have also decided to award the Bronze medal to the Russian team, to honor their Olympic spirit."_

He paused while the Chinese member of the IOC translated his statement in Chinese. A roar of approval from the many Chinese spectators greeted this unexpected development; they were clearly pleased for the home team. The Russian girls were excited and quite shocked, and for a moment they were jumping up and down and celebrating.

_"We of the IOC strongly condemn all banned substances, because humanity should compete with -_humanity-_. Humanity should not compete against science. We strongly believe in the peaceful application of science to advantage all Therans, not just a select few. Equality is more than the application of technology. It is a spirit of community. It is obvious that tonight's championship game has been exceptional; an historic landmark in the Modern Era games that is without precedent. Therefore, we of the IOC wish to make our position known with utmost clarity and sincerity. _-We do not tolerate athletic doping.- _ We insist that...rather than having a legendary performance be tainted by the actions of doping athletes who would cheat...that instead it should be elevated as a profound example of how honest and fair competition is always superior in Olympic spirit. Tonight's game will henceforth serve notice to all doping athletes that their days are numbered."_

When the translation finished, the crowd cheered again, and the medal anthem started up. The Russian women were escorted to the team medal stand, and then the Chinese team, and finally she and her teammates. After the Russian and Chinese women were awarded their medals, the announcer acclaimed "_Presenting the 2008 Gold Medal winners in women's volleyball, the Japanese National Women's Volleyball Team_" and the entire stadium erupted with a volcano of cheers.

As she stepped up onto the awards platform, Belldandy pulled up the collar of her jersey where the 1964 team pin was pinned, and kissed it. Moritayama was the Captain, and had kissed the '64 pin as soon as she stepped up onto the medal stand. Amazingly, the entire team did the same thing spontaneously, each teammate kissing their pin after stepping up to the Gold Medal stand. Kissing their pins not because they following suit with each other, but because they were following their hearts in honoring themselves and the '64 Olympians.

It was just the right thing to do. It was also very spooky in a sense; that all twelve of them had thought and acted alike. Once the story came out about this gesture and the pins, it was going to make for some extremely interesting reading back in Japan and elsewhere.

They stood tall and proud, all twelve of them. Even though this was a team honor, this was a very personal moment for every member of the team. These were her sisters in sport, and Belldandy was feeling that transcendental 'Olympic spirit' sense again as it repaired deep in her soul. Watching her injured teammates wearing braces, slings, gauze wraps and foot casts, she was gripped with awe. Their team was banged up beyond anything she had ever seen in a competition. Yet, their victory here had served notice to more than just the dopers. They had served notice to Keiichi's collection of Gods that the Therans were a worthy race; not because they had beaten the elite Valkyries, but because they had won the victory over selfishness. Again, she felt bonded with all those millions of athletes of the past; the faces she had seen in faded photographs, paintings, statues, mosaics and clay-ware. All of whom had all joined as one Theran humanity to make this possible, by their own selflessness and faith. She and her team, they were just one more step up the ladder. Hopefully one that the Gods could appreciate.

She looked over at Chihiro, who was standing in the corner of the court with the other coaches, gazing upon them with pride. Belldandy felt sorrowful; they could have at least let her stand closer to the team.

When the Chinese got their laurels, then their medals, and finally their game balls, the stadium crowd was electrifying with hometown pride for their team. The Chinese women were smiling at each other, celebrating their accomplishment. They had rarely smiled during the competition, because they were so focused on their game. But seeing them relaxed and celebratory was like seeing her and her own teammates; beyond national and cultural boundaries, the Chinese were a group of women and girls who were joyful in the moment.

Now it was their turn.

One of the two Asian continent members of the 14-member IOC fitted their laurels on their heads. Again, Belldandy felt 2800 years come crashing down on her as the aged doyen carefully fitted her laurel over her head. Her teammates being who they are, they were all playing around with their laurels, adjusting them. Earlier tonight, they had worn hachimakis on their foreheads to honor their Japanese heritage; now they were wearing olive-branch laurels across their foreheads to honor their heritage as Therans.

"Bite me, Athenle!" she thought as she adjusted her laurel, knowing full well that the Valkyrie was out there somewhere. She had belittled the mortals...her _people_, her entire race. There was nothing Athenle could belittle now; this was a supreme moment of glory that could never be diminished.

The VP of the IOC presented each player with their personal Dream Ball; the volleyball of the championship game that was painted to resemble Thera. For this Olympics, they had used lasers to create a precision scale globe of Thera with a sophistication and topological accuracy undreamed of forty years ago. When she received her personal Dream Ball, she regarded it as further proof of her heritage as a Theran. Cradling it gently in her hands, she briefly imagined that she was Keiichi, or some other God...looking at Thera from space and encouraging them to keep moving forward. There it was, her world, every single human life, somewhere on a globe floating in the abyss of space that resembled this ball.

Finally, the President of the IOC began handing out the Gold Medals. Each medal ceremony has its quirks, and the volleyball ceremony was a little different than many of the other team sports. Usually, when a girl or guy gets a medal, they start playing with it, even before the anthem is played. She'd seen this happen hundreds of times on TV. Tears of joy, looks of astonishment, smiles of enjoyment, facefallen shock...but they almost always still fingered their medals. But in this presentation, their hands would be holding the game balls during the ceremony; so there was no fidgeting with the medals. Which meant that the medals weren't just 'slapped on'; care had to be taken so that they weren't crooked on each team member.

When the President of IOC was fitting her with her medal, he said "Thank you for uplifting the Olympic Spirit" in Japanese, just like he had said to each member of the team. Because she was so tall, plus being on a raised platform, she had to lean down really low so that he could even get it around her neck...which ironically represented the kind of bow that one would give an eminent personage in Japan. When she leaned back up, her eyes miraculously alighted on her parents. Mom and Dad were completely busting out the tears, and she silently thanked them again for making this possible. She looked over at Chihiro, the other person she owed this miracle to. A Coach who had seen something special in a gangly 16-year-old girl playing in a rundown gym in the remote rural upcountry...and had guided her into a 19-year-old woman with a Olympic Gold Medal around her neck.

She was smiling at her wistfully...but Belldandy saw something else in her eyes.

Coach Chihiro had brought their team together, made them a unit, fought on their behalf, threatened and cajoled them, and then played in their championship game, risking injury to play the best game of her life despite being a little rusty from lack of practice. She had even scored the winning point in the match. At Chiba Poly, she had spent extra hours on game prep and drills. While living in a tiny apartment on a meagre teacher's salary, she had bought them new team jerseys to wear to the Nationals with her own hard-earned money...

This was a woman who had almost nothing...but had given her everything.

Now, here she was at the Olympics, relegated to being an onlooker because of some stupid little quirk of a rule that said coaches don't get medals...while she and her teammates were awarded Gold Medals and got to bask in all the glamorous shines of glory.

"This is bullshit!" Belldandy hissed, startling Kinosh'ta who was standing next to her. Possibly startling all of the viewers in Japan, because she was the last one in the line to receive her Gold Medal...and her comment was probably caught live on TV before it could be bleeped out by NHK.

Fuck 'em!

Decision made, she set her ball down just as the announcer was about ready to gesture to the band to start up the Kimigayo and raise the flags. Jumping off the medal stand, she sprinted over to her Coach, whose expression had swiftly changed from wistful envy to stark terror. She grabbed a stunned Chihiro by the arm.

"What the fuck are you doing, Morisato?" Coach Chihiro hoarsely whispered, completely terrified.

"I'm doing what's right. I'm doing the Olympic Spirit. You belong up there with us, and I don't care what anybody thinks about it at this point. If that means I gotta knock you over the head and drag you up there, I'll do it. Besides, I'm bigger than you," she said as she yanked Chihiro towards the medal platform.

Once again, just as Keiichi had been urging her repeatedly, she had listened to her heart.

As she and Chihiro walked up towards the Gold Medal stand, applause started to break out in the stadium. Her entire team had half-turned to look at her, stunned and face-faulted at first...but then Moritayama and Kinosh'ta gave her sharp nods of approval. Chihiro was trembling like a rabbit as they reached the stand, and when she and Chihiro stepped up onto the stand, the strains of applause broke in wild cheering.

The Olympics is made up of moments.

The crowd had made their feelings known, because they were basically going nuts. An unprecedented game, followed by an unprecedented gesture. A complete breach of Olympic tradition, every bit as dramatic as the 1968 Olympics with the black gloved fists being raised by the American track champions to protest the lack of civil rights and widespread racial oppression in that country.

But Belldandy wasn't finished...

"Coach Chihiro...thank you so much for all this. Here's your Gold Medal," she said as she took off her Gold Medal and placed it around Chihiro's neck. Chihiro looked at her in utter disbelief, then looked down at the Gold Medal hanging over her heart, and then burst into tears.

To Belldandy's surprise, Kinosh'ta set her ball down, walked over to Coach Chihiro and put _her_ Gold medal around Chihiro's neck, saying "This one makes up for 2004."

Moritayama, clear on the end of the platform, walked all the way over, and hung her Gold Medal around Chihiro while saying "Good job, teammate."

One by one, each member of the team took off her Gold Medal and draped it around Chihiro's neck. Belldandy and Kinosh'ta had to steady their Coach with a hand on her shoulders, because she was about ready to pass out from shock. The crowd was quiet, not because of they were tired of cheering.

They were silent because the Olympic Spirit had been evoked once again. It was _here_, right here in the stadium, palpable to every single one of them. There was no question in Belldandy's mind that she and her team had done exactly what Chihiro had asked them to do before they played their fourth set of the match.

They had definitely called down the 'Spirit of the Games' with their victory, and during this medal awards had hammered it home with an unprecedented demonstration of solidarity between team and coach. Every single spectator in the stadium, and perhaps every single spectator anywhere who was watching this on TV surely would be feeling the power of that Olympic Spirit.

To put an exclamation point on all of this, the President of the IOC walked to the award desk, and returned with a dream ball, olive laurel and medal. He wreathed the laurel around Chihiro's head, handed her a dream ball, and then draped a Gold Medal around her neck. Her _own_ Gold Medal.

As he walked back to the presiding booth with the other IOC officials, Belldandy flashed on a crazy thought. A couple centuries of established team sports in the Modern Games, and no one had really given serious consideration about awarding the head Coach a medal? Coaches _had_ to work harder than the players; if the players practiced eight hours a day, the coach spent ten hours a day with them. Extra hours managing gameplans, the press, the families, settling disputes among players...you name it, the coaches did it. So why the hell were they excluded from being awarded a medal along with their team? She had a gut feeling that this incident tonight was going to change the Olympics...

Wearing 13 Gold Medals, Chihiro took off one of her medals and lovingly placed it around Belldandy's neck and thanked her for being a phenomenal volleyball player and a courageous woman. She punched Kinosh'ta playfully on the shoulder and called her the MVP of MVPs as she draped a medal around her neck.

This was almost getting out of hand, because the crowd was applauding once more as Chihiro returned each player her Gold Medal. She finished with Moritayama, and playfully kissed her on the cheek, and then walked back and stood between her and Kinosh'ta.

_"Ladies and Gentleman, please stand for the Japanese National Anthem"_

...and that was when Belldandy completely broke into tears as the band started the first strains of the Japanese National Anthem. She could hear many voices in the crowd singing along with it, watching the Rising Sun rise up on the display mantle, taller than the other two flags. It was a good thing she was holding a ball in her hands, because the rest of her felt like she was going to melt.

When the anthem was finished, she and her teammates set their balls down and held each other's hands high in the air for a final gesture of triumph, and then broke ranks to hug and congratulate the other medalists from the Chinese and Russian teams. Chihiro hung close to she and Kinosh'ta, and an older lady approached them with a couple in their 60s. She recognized one of the trio; it was Chihiro's former coach from Osaka, Ms. Asakura.

"Chihiro, first allow me to congratulate you on your fine performance as a player and a coach. You always were one of my prize players, and I can't really put into words how I'm proud of you for what you did with this team. You have a coaching instinct that I have _never_ seen in my whole life. I brought these two along because they have something to say to you," she said, and then excused herself.

_"Mom...and...Dad?"_

Belldandy half-heard Chihiro's barely-voiced incredulity and immediately thought "Oh fuck!" as she expected to become embroiled in the middle of an intense family feud. She started to excuse herself...

"Don't you two dare leave me, not now! Not alone with these two!" Chihiro half-begged, half-commanded in a hiss of a desperate voice. Gripped with surefire panic, Chihiro was vise-gripping her forearm so hard that it was bruising.

The elderly couple eyed Chihiro, and then _executed a deep bow and maintained the gesture of respect_.

"Chihiro, Ms. Asakura has convinced us that we made a terrible mistake, all those years ago," the man...Chihiro's father...apologized while still bowing. "We don't know the ways of the world too well, and we let our pride rule us foolishly. We are deeply ashamed to be your parents. Especially now. Especially now that you've proved yourself far beyond what any parent could possibly expect from a daughter. We don't deserve to be your parents, we are unworthy of..."

"Dad. Mom," Chihiro said in a tentative voice. "You don't need to bow like that to me. No matter what, you're always going to be my parents. I can't say that I've forgiven you, but..snff..part of me has forgiven you. I've been through a lot of struggles, and there were so many times that..."

"Daughter," Chihiro's mother said. "We can't forgive ourselves for our mistakes, so how could we expect forgiveness from you? We _know_ that we failed you as parents, just because we were stubborn and unyielding. We just wanted to try...and make a fresh start. I..if you wish it, you can come visit with us and we can bring a priest over. Maybe we can try to start being a family again. Please."

"Mom, I'm willing to try that, as long as Coach Asakura is part of it. Perhaps we can be a family again, if we really try."

"Daughter, this old man is proud of you. Ashamed as he is, knowing that you accomplished this without a family, he cannot help but feel an immense pride," Chihiro's father said as he finally stood up from his bowing position.

"Mom, Dad," Chihiro said, wrapping an arm over her and Kinosh'ta's shoulders. "I already have a family."

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

AUTHOR"S FOOTNOTE:

Because of the large number of emails that I constantly receive from readers who experience difficulty locating TBT updates on FanFicNet, or cannot even locate the story, I will henceforth be updating new chapters to the official TBT site at -- http(colon-slash-slash)trialbytenderness(dot)xf-s(dot)com -- There, interested readers will find multimedia files (yes, there is a God's and Demon's Symphony), numerous pages of art works submitted by readers, explanatory materials and supplementary art, and a reader's forum.

It is unfortunate, but current FanFicNet policy prohibits TBT from even being listed in the Oh My Goddess fanfic listings unless one tweaks the search settings. Chapters will be posted here on FanFicNet within 4-6 weeks after publication on the official TBT site, so those of you subscribed with auto-notify options will still be able to receive updates to the story. I apologize for these changes, but I hope readers can understand that I put too much work in TBT to have it 'buried' in FanFicNet to the point where issues of access to updated chapters and the story itself are occurring.


	143. Pt 143: BlissGifts: Thera Transcendent

**Part 143: BlissGifts – Thera Transcendent**

THERA, APPROACHING LHASA, TIBETAN REPUBLIC:

As she rode the bullet train from Beijing to Lhasa for the Closing Ceremonies, Belldandy was struck with the curious idea behind Chihiro's words to her parents: in her heart, it seemed that Coach Chihiro had basically 'adopted' her and Kinosh'ta as younger sisters in a sense. How would this alter her relationship with her Coach, now that Chihiro apparently viewed her as one of the family? Would the Coach actually attempt a reconciliation with parents who had thrown her out of the house before she even finished high school?

She was also possessed by a mounting irritation and worry about Keiichi. For being a personal wish machine who claimed to be interested in her, he had been pretty scarce the past few days; not even bothering to make an appearance during the medal ceremonies or anytime afterwards. As usual, he was being totally unpredictable. Watching him during the final game where he had basically throttled Athenle with an intensity of rage; she has felt a definite wariness at seeing a side of him that she never had witnessed or even suspected as part of his character makeup. What was wrong with him? He had acted like a testosterone-bombed avenging angel...and then _nothing_. While she and her teammates had experienced their supreme triumph, he had skipped out on all of it, like a total idiot who didn't care about her. The medal ceremony, the wonderful moment when her Mom and Dad met up with her and cried against her chest, or even the wild couch-cushion throwing celebration in the Olympic village with her teammates.

Keiichi was being a baka-head idiot again.

Boarding the MinMang in Beijing, they were informed that the IOC and several 'anonymous' businessmen from Japan had charitably rewarded them with a private car to themselves, so that they could rest on the way to Lhasa. "Private" being a misnomer, of course...as the ever-present NHK coverage team was boarding with them. NHK was going to film them in the candid environment of the train car, showing the champion team as they relaxed, engaged in some horseplay, or simply socialized with each other. Leave it to the entertainment industry to use their victory as an angle to try their hand at a 'reality show' type videography. Belldandy wanted to clout the nearest cameraman over the head with his digital camera and banish him and the rest out of their car.

But first, the NHK news crew had put together a highlight reel of how their countrymen and women reacted to their performance. As an historical constant, the Olympics were thoroughly integrated as a part of life within all Theran cultures, she knew that there was bound to be significant attention to their game back in Japan. Every four years, most of Japan experienced numerous standstills as the Olympics unfolded its tapestry of magic and spirit. Belldandy recalled how her remedial Japanese summer school classes had been put on hold during the Olympics, back when she was struggling to assimilate the language of her and her mother's new homeland. Keeping abreast with the 2004 Olympics in Athens was a challenge, because Greece was seven time zones behind Japan; most of the competition occurred in the evening and overnight hours. Still, she was intrigued to see how her country had viewed their epic match against the disgraced N-Euro team...

_The first segment focused on public scenes of Tokyo landmarks, starting with Studio Alta. It was jammed tight with a rowdy festive crowd who were watching their game on the building-sized high definition screen. Police cordons blocked off all the approaching avenues, ensuring adequate space for the street party atmosphere. She was reminded of the Time's Square gatherings during the New Year's celebration in America. In Ueno Park, a huge crowd estimated at 200,000 had gathered to watch the game on the large projection screen normally used for rock concerts at Big Egg. When the NHK gal said "two hundred thousand in Ueno", Belldandy felt spooked. She couldn't believe what she was seeing._

_A charitable organization had set up numerous TV projection stands so the homeless in Tokyo's 'tent cities' could watch the game. The first segment finished with several stills showing underground and overground newspapers with a manga caricature of Chihiro flipping off the Norway-Euro team with the caption "Interpret this. 80-78." This earned buoyant giggling from every woman in the car, while Chihiro turned red-faced and hooded her eyes with her hand._

_The next series of news clips were more somber, more personal. Emperor Heisei and Empress Michiko in a rare moment of public candor had tears in their eyes during the Gold Medal awards. The PM and his staff during the game, shouting, cheering and waving hand-held Japanese flags during the fifth set with the enthusiasm of sumo fans. The NHK sports anchor during the live broadcast being caught speechless when Belldandy ran off the podium to fetch Chihiro, and then choking back his emotions as he called the medal ceremony while the team draping their medals on their coach. A popular late-night TV host pausing to giving bulletins of the game scores before each commercial break..._

The whole team was silent, as they were gripped by how this had all played out in their homeland. Up to that point, they had only the crowd's reaction at the Small Bird's Nest to gauge the importance of the game, and a few sporadic reports. It didn't help that they had less than three hours sleep before being awakened and hustled down to the bullet train station in west Beijing-Capital. It was eerie, almost surreal to see how their game had gone down in Japan. She knew that Takahashi's marathon had captured much of Japan in a pause, as her race was a marquee event of the Games. When the Women's Field Hockey team had upset all odds to go on and win the championship, huge throngs of the public were watching the game live on video screens and venues. But she and her teammate's didn't ever dream that their game would draw _this_ level of enthusiasm...

_The final set of scenes showed baseball stadiums all over Japan, filled to capacity as baseball fans remained in the stadium after the games were finished to cheer them on. Two baseball games were postponed in late innings so that the games could be broadcast, because the -_players wanted to watch it-_ instead of finishing the game. Amateur volleyball leagues gathered in school gymnasiums and rented temples halls were cheering them on. Tokyo University students in an auditorium throwing jackets and seat-cushions with glee when Chihiro taunted Athenle at the beginning of the fourth set. A scene at a small-town pub as Belldandy stuffed the three N-Euros; it was her hometown and the reaction was lively, to say the least. In Chihiro's hometown, people waving the next morning's local paper with a huge picture of Chihiro with 13 medals. Finally, a slide-show montage of the front pages of major newspapers in Japan with full-page pictures of the team holding their hands up high at the end of the medal ceremony, putting on their hachimakis, or various individual shots of key plays during "The Game". "The Game" as it was termed in the sports sections of dozens of international newspapers._

_Extra security was already being assigned for their return flight to Narita; they expected at least 50,000 fans to be there for their arrival. NHK newscasters noting that plans were in motion to have victory celebrations and parades in their honor in Tokyo, Osaka and several other major cities._

_Finishing the ten-minute newsclip was the live video footage of the coolest picture of them all: the 1964 Women's V-Ball team wearing 2008 jackets standing in front of the the 2008 Women's V-Ball team. The grannies were wearing their 2008 Gold medals. Kasai-sensei, captain of the 1964 team, was standing in the middle of the assembled teams, holding a large framed picture of their beloved coach, Coach Daimatsu. That sequence made her feel goosebumps all over again. Of all the moments of their Olympics, that shared photo was possibly the one memory she would cherish the most for the rest of her life._

There was dead silence when the video finished. Belldandy realized that this seemingly-excessive outpouring of public sentiment was the work of the Olympic Spirit that they had somehow touched upon during the game. It had nothing to do she and her team; they had simply played their hearts out and won five games. But in the back roads of her mind, she had to ask herself if there was something more to this. Was the outpouring of public enthusiasm an instinctual response to the truth of the matter...that given a level playing field, they had bested a team of elite Valkyrie? Perhaps it was a sensing that mortals had proven their mettle against the Gods, not in the throes of war battles, but in the elegance of peaceful competition?

The Olympics were the great leveler, the unifier of all of Thera.

"Hope you guys don't have any plans for the next couple weeks," Chihiro finally noted as hushed conversations finally broke the reflective quietude. "And I hope that some of you have plans for 2012 in London. It's even possible, and perhaps very likely because of what you gals did last night, that we're going to be playing in 2016 in Tokyo. If you guys are willing to go the long run with me, maybe we can pull our own 'Takahashi' and add to those medals..."

The roust of cheering and excited yelling could be heard two cars over on the bullet train.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

THERA, LHASA, TIBETAN REPUBLIC:

The bullet train weaved like a steel dragon through long tunnels under mountainous terrain, scaled over magnificent bridges over huge rivers, and danced through breath-stealing routes that threaded between mammoth valley passes within the dense mountains of Eastern Tibet. Once past the mountains, she could see villages encircling brightly painted Tibetan temples or universities. The MinMang, as the bullet train was called, was a triumph of cooperative engineering between the Tibetans and China States. It had earned its repute not only for the numerous marvels of design, but for being one of the most scenic railway routes in all of Thera.

Beijing-Taiyuan-Xian-Chengdu, then straight west into Tibet. Tibet is ranged by mountains to the west, north and south, but the easterly route took them over several major rivers, such as the Yangtze, Mekong and Yalun. Then they passed through the huge Kham province with its plateaus and smaller mountain ranges, with heavily agricultured broad valleys fertile with crops. They reached Chamdo, third largest city in the Tibetan Republic, and from there continued westwards until they reached Lhasa. Despite the 450kph speed of the MinMang bullet train, the trip still took almost nine hours. Belldandy was glad they were riding the MinMang, because she could really get a sense of how huge Thera was during the train passage. Already they had passed through two deserts, several mountain ranges, several loess plateaus, one area dotted with numerous wooded lakes, and numerous hillside and plains farms. She had seen more of the surface of Thera during this one train ride than she had ever seen in her life; the train route was over twice the road distance between Sapporo and Nagasaki.

When Belldandy stepped off the bullet train at the station adjacent to the Lhasa Airport, she felt like she had crossed over into a different planet. The city was set amidst two mountainous ranges of lesser peaks, while behind them against the distant horizon were the giants; the eastern edge of the Himalayas just on the other side of the Tibet's major commerce river, the Brahmaputra. Over a period of several thousand years, the Tibetans had 'tamed' the eastern province of Kham to become one of Asia's 'bread baskets' of grain and livestock, which allowed them significant commerce with India, Burma, Thailand and other Southeast Asian countries. Lhasa itself was a thriving metropolis of seven million Tibetans, pinioned by mountains just like many cities in Japan.

Most of the outdoor Olympic venues were located a few km north of Lhasa in the vicinity of the Sera Monastery. Belldandy was intrigued by the idea that a country could have fully one third of its population in the Buddhist clergy, and yet sustain such a robust economy. Much of this was due to international assistance from Thera's billion-or-so Buddhists, as Tibet was the birthplace of the Buddha and the spiritual seat of a religion, similar to Rome and the Vatican.

As they were bused to the Olympic Village, Belldandy saw countless pennants of Olympic symbols mixed in with the colorful prayer flag scarves suspended between buildings by masts. The environs reminded her of the last Games in Athens, where brand-new Olympic facilities were juxtaposed with 2500-year old structures like the Acropolis, which had remained in near-intact condition through the millennia. Greece was a cultural cradle filled with antiquity just like here in Tibet, and the TV coverage of the 2004 Athens Games had been interspersed with numerous features on the many historical sites in the city. Dominating the near-northern section of the Tibetan capital was the 2200 year-old Potala Palace that overlooked the metropolis. The Potala was world-famous; a massive temple/palace/capital/university complex which almost circumferenced the mountainside it was built on. The first sections were built around 200 years after the birth of the Buddha in the Yumbulagang district in the Yarlung valley southeast of Lhasa, and the edifice grouping has been continually expanded ever since. The Potala was the world center for Buddhist learning and governance of rites and policies, as well as the traditional residence of the Dalai Lamas. The Potala was the only building in the world that could boast of two congresses: one consisting of Buddhist cardinal clergy and leaders; the second consisting of the three branches of parliament that held political governance over the Tibetan Republic. The current Dalai Lama was the 53rd in his line; one of the oldest continuous secular or religious lineages in Thera.

It occurred to Belldandy that Japan and Tibet shared much in common: rough mountainous terrain; densely populated cities; heads of state historically linked via divine ancestry tracing back over two millennia; a state religion with a pantheon of deities, and an elaborated artisan culture. If Japan had been landlocked in the midsection of a large continent rather than being an island nation, she might have developed upon similar lines as Tibet. The big difference between the two nations was that Tibetan culture maintained a devout attitude towards religion; whereas in Japan, the main 'religion' was money, sensuality and commerce. She had been here only thirty minutes or so, and she could already notice the leisurely 'speed of life' that contrasted with the hectic pace in Tokyo. The populace of Lhasa were almost as laid-back as the farmers back in her hometown district.

The archway that served as the entry gate to the Olympic Village had built-in prayer wheels, and when they debarked the shuttle bus, Belldandy spun several of them respectfully. Before she had met Keiichi, she would have simply passed them up or even made a cutting remark about them. It was funny how Lhasa had been called "Shangri-la" by the first Westerners who came here; there was a sense that Nature was just a bit gentler here than in many other places in Thera. The air was much cleaner than that of Beijing-Capital's, and it was actually chilly when the wind blew in between the dormitories.

The monk and nuns escorted her and her teammates to their lodgings, cheerfully giving pointers on the history of Lhasa. The Closing Ceremonies would be held in the huge stadium built in the valley of Netang, about 20 km southwest on the outskirts of Lhasa. Viewed from the hillside dorms, the stadium resembled a bird ready to take flight out of the nest. This was a deliberate symbolism; the Olympics had nested in China and Tibet for almost three weeks; upon the closing of the 2008 Jubilee Games, the Olympics would 'fly off' on a four-year journey to London.

Tomorrow night, the Games would be over. But tonight, they and numerous other Summer Olympic participants were going to be interviewed for Tibetan TV. Of course, the NHK camera crews and reporters were following them around with an unsparing enthusiasm. Belldandy began to understand why celebrities hated the tabloids and their vexatious armies of paparazzi. Her exhaustion was addled with irritation because of the unrelenting sense of being 'trailed' as well as the untidy and frequent intrusions of privacy. She couldn't imagine how celebrities could handle spending years under this kind of voyeuristic scrutiny.

All she wanted to do was spend a good night's sleep curled up in a bed. She had forced herself to stay awake for the entire MinMang train trip, captivated by the scenery of several different sections of Thera that she would only see once in a lifetime. As a whole, the team was pretty quiet after the newsclip series they were shown once they got underway in Beijing. Many of them had slept for part of the trip. As she lay in bed, with her feet dangling over the footboard, she mused about the recent few days until her thoughts alighted on Keiichi.

Where was he?

Belldandy had put him out of her mind, totally, as he had requested at their last meeting. She recalled how he had become very upset about something, and when he had throttled Athenle, he was bolstered with anger. What was happening to him? She could understand his increased tension around Athenle, and having to deal with all the Goddesses who were visiting him in swarms. Yet, all the time that she'd known him, he was generally moderate when it came to emotional stuff. He was a so emotionally level, it was irritating at times. With Keiichi, there were no bouts of moodiness, outbursts, drama-making scenes...he was as cool as ice. And just as slippery, especially when he was in 'imbecile mode' and acting stupid. She worried that perhaps he had put her out of _his_ mind; which was a chilling thought to consider.

Before she had left Japan, he had said that he couldn't imagine living his life without her, and now Belldandy was questioning her heart, wondering if she felt the same way.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

The Closing Ceremonies in Lhasa would be different than the normal 'modern' Olympic closing celebrations for several reasons. The Tibetans didn't have a tradition of pop-star idols and a movie industry, nor did they place a large value on Western-style amusements. To them, a party was a gathering of families to get amiably drunk, tell jokes, participate in contests of athleticism, and share folklore. But they did have a long tradition of competitions between villages; archery competitions, rock climbing contests, foot races and more. Unlike many countries, Tibet never evolved national-level sports leagues, except for soccer. The only really big sports interests in the Tibetan Republic were soccer and the World Cup. And of course, the 2008 Jubilee Olympics. Belldandy had read somewhere that they used to have competitive elephant races during the Olympics in Asia, and that the Tibetans had invented skiing and sledding as a sport centuries before the Euros did; they used to ski on contoured and carved elephant tusks.

Because this was one of the four centers of Asian civilization; the other three being Tehran, Xian and Delhi, the Ceremony would probably focus on Tibet's most important contribution to Theran life: Buddhism. This had been a delicate matter between the IOC and the Tibetans, because the Olympics were non-denominational by tradition. In a sense, the Olympics themselves were a religion without a God, but with a definable spirit. Growing up, Belldandy had read the news releases with interest as they described the process of how certain compromises had been reached. The Tibetans couldn't use the Olympics as an overt stage to proselytize Buddhism, but could instead focus on renowned Buddhist symbolisms and artistry strictly in the sense of their historical and cultural relevance to Tibet and greater Asia.

Buddhism itself was weird, Belldandy thought. It was and yet wasn't a religion. In Japan, Buddhism was almost like Christianity with its focus on rituals such as births, marriages, funerals and blessings. She could see some of that 'generic' contemporary Buddhism at work here. But there also were the hard-core Buddhists here who saw Buddhism as something beyond religion, because there was no salvatory deity...not even the personage of the Buddha. Monks and nuns everywhere she looked, as common a sight as the ever-present Red Guard police in China-States. Prayer wheels in front of grocery stores and a religion with no God.

She wondered how the Buddhists would regard Keiichi...

Closing the Olympics was always sad in a sense, as the passage of an event was being dedicated to history. Each of the last two times she had watched the Olympics, Belldandy had strongly felt the sinking feeling in her heart as the glorious torch of competition was drawn down and went out. Tonight, she was going to watch the flame be extinguished in person.

But right now, she and her teammates were hyped up as they queued for the Parade of Unity. The Olympics always started with the Parade of the Nations, and always finished with the athletes of all countries coming in as a single mass. Naturally, many of the athletes remained queued with their teammates and countrymen and women, but all were intermingled. Next to her group were some of men and women from Jamaica, carefree and loose, ready to rock out with the finale. Ahead of them were a group of Australians, to their left she could see members of beret-sporting Italian delegation videoing the crowd.

This was like being in the middle of Terran humanity. There were no words to describe all the smiling faces; a thousand-and-one hues of skin and hair and eyes. This wasn't no crowd in downtown Tokyo. She could hear speaking voices in all directions; but they were only rich sounds of speech, whose words were foreign to her. This was a microcosm of Thera; a closely-crowded bustling cell of all types of Therans, of every creed, ethnicity, religion, race, culture...

Hundreds of ceremonial rag-dun horns, the telescoping meters-long Tibetan copper and brass drone-horns, trumpeted a droning harmony that signaled the beginning of the Parade, and the front group was led into the stadium to a rousing cheer. Belldandy and her teammates were about in the middle of the cluster; nearby she could see Takahashi-sensei and the Field Hockey Team. Takahashi had elected to walk in with them, and she felt doubly honored by the veteran Olympian's presence.

When she entered the stadium, Belldandy was again struck by how bright the interior of a stadium could be in contrast to the entryway tunnel. Buddhist clergy were escorting them to specific spots on the floor of the icefield in the middle of the stadium, now free of ice but transparent with a clear plastic. She noticed that they were being escorted by the colors of their national uniforms. The interior of the top of the stadium was ringed with two levels of some kind of fibrous array of glass, as if someone had spun hundreds of circles of glass tubing around the inner arcade-lip of upper stadium section of stands and the circumference of the roof dome. Every once in a while, a light would shoot out and trace its way around the entire circle of the stadium like a captured comet.

Takahashi excused herself and was escorted towards the dais in the middle of the gathered athletes by several Olympic officials. It was rumored that she was going to receive a special achievement award for her record-setting effort. Belldandy looked up and noticed that the giant roof over the stadium was slowly closing. A choir of children dressed in brightly-colored Tibetan folk costumes were performing a gymnastic dance-drama on the center stage, accompanied by an orchestra of traditional Tibetan musicians. While the roof slowly closed, the noise level increased as the sound and music were becoming enclosed.

Another blast of the Tibetan rag-dun trumpets blared when the dome-roof finally closed up.

As the stadium grew quiet, The Dalai Lama walked towards the center of the square stage with a retinue of red and golden-yellow robed monks. He spoke a few words in Tibetan, and then in Chinese and finally in English, offering a blessing of the Olympic Spirit and exhorting all nations to cooperate in peace. The lights in the stadium suddenly shut off, drawing a collective gasp.

Underneath them, the floor they were standing on burst into light!!!

Belldandy looked up at the dome and saw that the entire roof of the stadium had a mandala depicted on it. They...the athletes, were the darkened lines on the mandala! With an explosion of drums, the light below them shut off and they were illuminated by hundreds of spotlights. She looked at one of the bigscreens and was greeted with the sight of the athletes forming a colorful mandala with the Olympic symbol prominent in its geometry.

The spotlights switched off and the floor lighting underneath them once again projected a mandala onto the roof. This alternation between roof-projection and stadium grounds illumination occurred several more times, punctuated by bursts of drumming. Finally the illuminated roof light remained as the drummers finished with a percussive flourish.

All the monks and nuns who were attending chanted an "OM", the sound of their thousands of voices sent chills down Belldandy's neck. In the center of the overhead dome was projected a bright circle with the word "Peace" repeated every five seconds in all of the major languages of Thera. The chanters finished their sonorous "OM" plainsong and the Olympic symbol appeared in the middle of the overhead circle, gathering a loud cheering from the 100,000-plus spectators. Lasers dazzled outwards from the inner circle of the mandala, to all the corners of the stadium, activating the circular filaments of light which swept around the perimeter of the dome roof and lip of the upper level of stands. The thin threads of light raced around the stadium in patterns.

The mandala faded into indistinctness, except for the seven circles of the Olympics...

...and each circle of the image of the Olympic symbol grew in size and overlapped each other until all seven circles were one...which then gradually solidified to form an image of Thera!!!

Belldandy was breathless as the filaments burst into a solid rainbow of color circumferencing the interior of the stadium, and the crowd roared its approval as the 'globe' projected on the stadium room began to rotate, as if one was looking from a single point in space onto Thera as she turned.

She felt like she was in a mammoth IMAX theatre, but this video projection was realistic to the point where she really sensed that it was Thera floating overhead. The rotating globe-image took about a minute to complete one revolution and then it faded into a dark blue with the Olympic symbol remaining in the center of the roof.

The stadium lights came back on, and the Olympic flag was lowered. The same two elderly men who had lit the torch...one Tibetan, the other Chinese...took the flag and walked out onto the square platform and handed it to the President of the IOC, who waved it side-to-side to rouse a loud cheering applause from the stadium crowd.

_"On behalf of the International Olympic Committee, I wish to thank the Tibetan Republic and the China-States for cooperating to make this Jubilee Olympics the best Olympics of the Modern Era of the Games."_

There it was, the supreme complement that an IOC president could bestow upon the hosts of an Olympiad competition. Sydney had been given that honor in 2000, and now China and Tibet had been equally honored for their efforts. Belldandy felt a swelling pride in her heart, knowing that she and her team had been part of that effort.

_"We now wish to formally induct two new members to the Thera International Olympic Committee. The member from South America, Paulo Aobosie, wishes to retire his position as one of the two delegates from the continent of South America. The IOC has voted, elected and approved his successor, Raul Ramirez of Peru."_

The outgoing member of the South American IOC greeted the incoming IOC member from Peru with a warm handshake. A warm applause followed as the gentleman from Peru read a brief statement in Spanish, and then said a few words in Chinese and Tibetan to thank the host countries for their staging of this Olympics.

_"The member from Asia, Lin Tang Yu, wishes to retire his position as one of the two delegates from the continent of Asia. The IOC has voted, elected and approved his successor, Reiko Takahashi of Japan."_

Belldandy face-faulted, while Chihiro shouted an emotional "Way to go, Takahashi-sensei!" and whistled loudly with that tell-tale farm girl shrieking whistle of hers. Belldandy was almost stuttering in her thoughts, realizing that the woman who had offered her and her teammates so much encourage and wisdom, who had kept their Coach from being kicked out of the Delegation, who had won seven consecutive Women's Marathons...was now one of the _Fourteen_!!!

Takahashi-sensei was way beyond being a "sensei" now, she realized as Takahashi received her IOC robe. The IOC President gestured to the rostrum and Takahashi made a few comments in Japanese:

_"I guess this means that I won't be running in the 2012 Women's Marathon," _she said, drawing cheers and laughter from Belldandy and the rest of the Japanese Olympic Delegation._ "Athletes, always remember that it takes valor to face yourself during competition, for the true competitor that you must always encounter is yourself. Plato once warned that 'mere athletes are little better than savages'. The Olympics dispels this notion by two principles. First, we of the Olympic movement -_expect- _that athletes ennoble themselves: by competing fairly, contributing to their communities and nations, and by having charity of heart. The second principle is profundity of the Olympic Spirit itself. Every one of you who came here to participate and give your personal best has touched upon that Olympic Spirit, and through your efforts, you have touched others with it and encouraged them to strive in their endeavors. Continue to carry forth what you have experienced here, so that future generations will become more than mere athletes."_

"What a killer speech that was," she overheard Kinosh'ta comment with genuine respect.

The next part was the symbolic handing over of the Olympic Flag to the Lord Mayor of London, and then the British National Anthem was played while he waved the flag to a rousing cheer. A Scottish Bagpipe unit came onto the stage and performed a short piece on bagpipes, followed by an Irish ensemble that played a medley of music accompanied by clog-dancers. Several British rock bands performed, including a roster of bands from the sixties up through the current ragin' rockers. Finally, a replica mediaeval court with knights and damsels pantomined an acrobatic 'jousting faire', and then they escorted the dignitaries off the stage.

_"Athletes of Thera. On behalf of the Olympic Movement, I do hereby declare these Jubilee Games of 2008 as concluded. Athletes of Thera, you are invited to convene four years from now in London, England, to continue to carry the torch of the Olympic Games," the_ IOC President announced, with the time-honored traditional exordium.

The stadium lights were turned down low, and again the roof was used as a giant projection screen, showing scene after scene of the history of the Olympics in an ever-changing montage, interspersed with scenes from Tibetan and Chinese history. At the end, about a dozen scenes from this year's games were shown, including a beautiful photo Belldandy hadn't seen before of their team putting on each other's hachimakis and finishing up with Takahashi's leaping into the finishing tape during her final marathon.

The stadium lights dimmed to near darkness with a series of spotlight on the Dalai Lama, who had ascended an ornamental dais. The Dalai Lama pulled a bright orange ceremonial tassel-cord. A moment later, a hush befell the athletes and spectators as the Olympic torch slowly faded down into its stand and finally disappeared, with the stadium bestilled and silent. The extinguishing of the torch was always a solemn moment, a bittersweet mixture of sadness and accomplishment. For Belldandy, once the flame went out, the stadium seemed a little colder...but much emptier.

The overhead dome of the Tibetan National Freedom Stadium began to open...and on the opposite end, the _stadium_ began to slowly open. Nobody had mentioned anything about this, other than the Dalai Lama who had promised the participants and spectators that the Games would end "with a surprise".

She could hear a murmuring of voices through the entire barely-lit stadium...

The west end of the stadium started to part, so slowly at first that she thought she was seeing things because the interior lights had been dimmed down so low. She could make out two yellow stripes of light sparkling through the narrow slit that gradually opened, slowly widening. As it widened, she could discern a curvature to the golden light. Curving downwards and outwards as more and more of the twin curves of light were revealed.

"Oh..my..God!!!" she gasped as she recognized what was slowly being unveiled by the opening on the west end of the stadium. A full golden circle lit up the night, and she heard one of her teammates exclaim "this is unreal!" in an awe-filled voice.

The stadium continued to open, and two more circles suddenly flashed into existence, accompanied by a thrilling brief burst of music from the orchestra and the Tibetan rag-dun droning horns. What they were seeing, athletes and spectators, was something so breath-taking, they were gripped by an avid silence.

This was something totally beyond words...

Two more circles flashed into existence as the stadium opening continued to widen itself, now two-thirds open. Belldandy couldn't even begin to grasp the marvels and miracles of engineering genius that had went into this. Now she understood the purpose of the cantilevered 'wings' of the stadium; they weren't merely for retracting the roof, but they were counterweights that allowed the end of the stadium to pull open. The engineering student in her was held in check as she simply couldn't even attempt to understand the mechanics that went into this. Thera had dozens of domed stadiums with retractable roofs, but this was the first stadium ever to have a retractable roof _and_ stadium section.

The final two circles appeared and the stadium experienced an acoustic meltdown as every single Theran in the stadium was cheering, completely blown away by the sight that confronted them in the distance through the now-open west end of the stadium.

The Tibetans had used _the Himalayan mountains_ as a backdrop for an immense Olympic Symbol!!!

The China-States had opened the Olympics with a spectacular and profound fireworks pageant and laser light-show to ignite the torch, and the Tibetans had closed the Olympics by extinguishing the torch...but illuminating the Olympic Symbol to indicate that the Olympics would live on as long as humans walked on the face of Thera.

Tibet was considered one of the spiritual cradles of Thera, and what they had accomplished with this had certainly evoked the Olympic Spirit in everyone who was witnessing this moment. She glanced around; every athlete in sight was wiping tears from their eyes just like she was. The cheering had passed, and the only visible illumination was an Olympic Symbol that must have been at the very least twenty kilometers wide, perfectly proportioned to perspective. They left the lights out for ten minutes, so that everyone who wished to could commune with whatever it was that they were experiencing.

For Belldandy, it was a sense of epiphany. For six hours, she and her teammates had carried all of Thera on their shoulders. She was the only one that knew of this, but somehow they had played with the strength of billions, championing their civilization...their species. She knew that God was real, that the Olympic Spirit was real, and that she was real.

Now it was time to find out if love was real.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

THERA, TOKYO NARITA AIRPORT, JAPAN:

Belldandy and her teammates flew into Narita airport two days after the Closing Ceremonies in the Tibetan Republic's capital city. Coach Chihiro had insisted on this, because her team was grueled to the bone after their physically exhausting match against Norway-Euro and the exhilarating Closing Ceremony. Demanding as she was in her insistence that the team merited a day off to sightsee around Lhasa and simply to unwind, Belldandy sensed that it was Coach Chihiro herself who needed a timeout. Everyone knew that the Coach's parents' unannounced appearance in Beijing was an emotional bombshell to say the least.

Nothing like having a family-sized sledgehammer dropped on her instep, to get their Coach all strung out.

But as their planed curled a turn over Tokyo Bay to approach Narita International, Belldandy was visibly worried about the next few days. Keiichi had been all gonerz since their victory over Norway-Euro; not even answering her phone calls to the temple. She was conflicted between feeling abandoned-and-pissed-off, worried-sick about him, and feeling homesick. She was worried about Furo, her pet tiger. Keiichi had been feeding Furo during her absence, but what would happen when she got back to the temple? Visions of animal control specialists hauling Furo off to the zoo cast an unpleasant shading to her imagined homecoming.

Stupid baka-head Keiichi!!! The idiot had somehow made her and him a home in their cozy little temple, and now she was all sentimental about those times they had together. Despite her irritation, she also wanted to thank him profusely...in a sense, their victory was partly his doing because of his throw-down with Athenle. The Super God had stripped the Valkyrie of their ability to cheat by nullifying their Goddess powers. She and her team had responded by playing their guts out and winning their Gold Medals.

So where the fuck was he?

She was stricken with the thought that he might have been recalled to Windowsill. What if he had screwed up in some way? Knowing him, crossing the line against some new form of stupidity that the Gods had that she didn't know about was always a possibility. After all, he was the God who blew off all the warnings and walked inside the Gate of Judgement by himself. Even worse, the Gods were just as bad as politicians in Japan's Diet; with all their hyped-up bullshit rules that made no sense whatsoever. Creepshow-wary, she wondered if she had been fooling herself all along in thinking that she really meant something to him. Her heart was warming up to him right before the Olympics, and he did try that clumsy attempt at being romantic the day before her championship game. But now when he should be here to stoke the fires...he's gone. Would another kiss be a guide to her feelings towards him?

But no matter how hard she willed it, he didn't show up. She felt like he had flung her into the trash like a discarded gum wrapper. With all his doughty inclination towards spiritual babbling, she had simply assumed that he would pop in on her while she was chillin' in Tibet with the crew. Even a dry lecture on Tibetan Buddhist history would be more than welcomed, just so long as she could spend some time with him. Better something than nothing.

But zero was the score...and it was pretty disturbing whenever her mind slowed down enough to alight on the 'Belldandy and Keiichi' thought patrols.

Mom and Dad were going to meet her at the airport after the team's obligatory "Welcome back to Japan" NHK press conference and photo shoot. Her folks were bubbly-bright with plans to whisk her back to the farm at the upper tip of Niigata, and then show her off to a few of the local hometowns like Sanpoku and Asahi so she could be feted by the locals. As Dad had noted, "you're the biggest thing that's happened to this county since the mudslide in 52'." Leave it to her Father to compare her with a mudslide. At least the lilies would be in bloom still, and she wouldn't have to endure the roast embarrassment of being crowned "Queen of the Lillies" for the annual floral parade.

Unused as she was to flying, she was unprepared for debarking the plane onto the tarmac instead of via the usual deplaning tunnel. The plane trip home was most somber; each girl on the team seemed engrossed; absorbed in her own thoughts. She was glad they were flying home together, because it further prolonged her camaraderie with the team. She recalled how Nasai-sensei had noted that the 64' team had gone their own ways after the Olympics, but had kept in touch through the years. How many years would it be before she would see these gals again? Ootaki and Tamiya were graduating this fall, and would go on from there to either grad school or entry-level jobs. Chihiro would still be coaching at Chiba Poly. Kinosh'ta was already accepted into graduate school at Osaka Univ.

Returning to the temple was still almost a week away. Every time she had tried to call the temple, she only heard her own voice on the answering machine, joking that she was in "Beijing for the weekend". What had crawled up Keiichi's butt that last night in Beijing before the championship game? She couldn't quite call him her boyfriend, because it just didn't feel right. But after living with him for a stretch of several months, it was obvious that there was more to his absence than Athenle and her horde. Was he simply being a guy...starting off all romantic and then chickening out? Would she need to 'nudge' him a bit when they finally met up? Despite being God, Keiichi had so many issues knotted together, he would need a shrink to sort them all out. She was 19 years old, and he was God; they couldn't be more different than each other. Yet, he was a badly-wrapped package...a totally confused deity. His actions were so random, they reminded her of god in the Kojiki, with its early legends of Ameterasu and Susa-no-O doing all sorts of nonsense shit. But she was irked that he was so hot and cold; right now when she was hot off a triumphant victory, he was playing the cold fish.

As the plane pulled to a stop in front of a huge throng of fans, she felt like the loneliest girl in the world.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

THERA, JAPAN, CHIBA PREFECTURE:

Chiba Poly had generously given her a week's leave before returning to school, so she could try and "decompress" after all the celebratory jam-packs, parties, speeches and parades were concluded. Belldandy felt like she had worn callous burrs on the sides of her fingers from autographing so many volleyballs and magazines, mostly for young girls who had followed the Olympics and now saw her as some kind of 'idol'.

Immediately upon her return to Japan, she had to throw her cellphone in the canal-way because she was getting an insane amount of calls from everyone and their pet rock. She and her team were feted with a parade in Ueno Park, and then bussed to several other large metro cities for their own civic parades. Takahashi, now a member of the Thera IOC, had engaged an agent to assist the Japan Olympic Committee with handling their affairs. Actually, their agent was more of a firewall to fend off the bevy of "fuckhead flakes", as Kinosh'ta termed them. Most of the contacts were 'gimme's' from all the corporate opportunists who wanted to capitalize on their Olympic success.

Completely bewildered by Keiichi's non-contact, she was swept up in a whirltour for almost two weeks before she could finally make any plans return to her temple home. She had to be evasive, because the NHK handlers and other press-hounds were following her with the tenacity of pervert stalkers. The last thing she needed was some dickhead to discover that she was living in an old Buddhist temple with God. So she had given them the dodge, and her Chiba Poly teammates had led them on by telling them that she lived at the Girl's Dorm part-time.

That morning, she and her teammates had a final breakfast luncheon hosted by the Japanese Olympic Committee and then said their tearful goodbye's as they departed for their families, jobs and boyfriends in all different parts of Japan. At least some of her teammates had it going on back in their hometowns; she felt like she was the odd one out. Oddly enough, none of her sempai had boyfriends either. So the four of them were the eggshells in the orange carton. Kinosh'ta was excited about grad school, and Tamiya and Ootaki were all abuzz with plans to go to school after they landed an apartment somewhere in Tokyo.

"Yeah right. Some vacation this is gonna be," she thought sourly as she caught the train from Tokyo to Chiba. She wasn't too thrilled about the prospect of starting the school term with bang-up shitloads of makeup work. She would be two weeks behind when she returned to school, and imaginary promontories of schoolwork dreamily smothered her in the eyes of her imagination.

At the same time, Chihiro had gone through some drama of her own with the school. The faculty senate had informed that she was to be assigned an academic sabbatical for the Fall term. The expeditious reason was that her schedule conflicts with the Olympics and all the fallout afterwards had kept her from starting on time at the beginning of the term with her teaching duties for her two token engine mechanics classes. Belldandy felt that the real reason was the school had decided to can her for the semester because they were cheapasses and didn't want to pay her salary while she was off. Fortunately, a sports sponsor had leaned on the school administration and "made them an offer they couldn't refuse" according to Coach Chihiro.

For Belldandy, school seemed to be the least of her worries. The most of her worries was one bus ride away from the train station, back at her temple home. It was hard to believe that she had lived there almost ten months. But Keiichi would be at the temple to greet her, and she didn't know whether she wanted to hit him over the head with a blunt object or kiss him on the lips. Or both, if she could manage it. Somehow, the emotional closeness between the two of them had been turned inside out, and now she felt distant from him. Hell, she had competed against Athenle to try and save his ass from having to be some Valkyrie boytoy! At least he could show some creds and meet her at the door.

When she had returned to the temple, she called out his name...but nobody answered.

Furo had padded up and greeted her by knocking her flat on her ass and playfully biting her shoulders and knees. Blue-eyed and bushy-tailed, he licked her on the face with his papillated tongue until she thought her skin was going to be peeled off. He was obviously starved for attention, and her gestures to make him stop rasping her with his sandpaper-harsh tongue were interpreted as play.

Once Furo let her up, she searched the temple and then the temple grounds trying to find Keiichi. Where the hell was he? Furo was acting strangely with an almost kittenish fawning, as if he'd been here all alone for the past couple weeks. Wherever she went in the temple, he followed her like a lost puppy. Her desperation turned to fear, as she realized that Keiichi could ascend to the heights of spiritual nobility but yet be mired in the mud of his own confusion.

What if some Goddess had managed to take him away? What if he had fallen in love with a Goddess while she was in Beijing and Lhasa?

It was too impossible to consider...and yet she had to give pause. Her wish had been for him to fall in love with a _Goddess_. Could the emphasis of her wish have somehow exerted itself, bearing him away on the wings of a romantic union with a Goddess? Keiichi had told her plenty of times that Windowsill wishes were binding once they were enacted. Despite how she felt about him, or how he seemed to feel about her, could the wish that she made have possibly overruled their mortal-God relationship? Could the _wish_ have forced him to find a Goddess whom he could be involved with?

Furo shadowed her for the rest of the day as she moped around the temple and the grounds. She watched him snarf on some bones and realized that he had somehow discovered how to get into the meat crates that were dropped off on a daily basis by the local butcher. It was clear to her that Keiichi had been gone for several weeks, as the temple gallery walkways weren't swept and there were bugs everywhere. Furo was starved for attention, and she finally had to acquiesce and let him sleep in her bedroom where he curled up snug against her as she lay in her futon.

She would have preferred that it was Keiichi who was curled up against her, but Furo was family now. The fact that her pet albino Siberian Tiger was well-fed gave her slight hope that Keiichi was still around in some form. If the meat wagon hadn't shown up for its daily rounds, Furo would have been in starvation mode by now. The grounds were a disaster zone in terms of piles of tiger turds and ripped tree barks, but other than that Furo had behaved himself pretty well.

He was Keiichi's Christmas gift to her, and now he was snoring so loud that she couldn't sleep. Siberian tigers were the largest members of the feline species on Thera, and Furo was still a growing boy, even though he was two years old. Before she had left for Tokyo to prep for the Olympics, Keiichi had assured her that he would take care of Furo, mentioning that her pet weighed in at almost 200 kg and would probably add another 50-75 kg this year. Furo was already almost a meter from ground to shoulder; he also had the habit of wrapping his tail around her waist while she was petting him. Lying on his side, he was easily three meters long, with another meter of tail.

The next day, the usual meat delivery van rolled up and dropped off its wooden crate, filled with 7-8 kilos of meat, bones and shank, plus the usual gallon of milk. Belldandy wondered how they could drop off so much meat to a Buddhist temple and not imagine up a shitload of suspicions. Buddhists were supposed to be vegetarians, and as far as the meat delivery guys knew, the temple still was populated by monks. Evidently, the profit the butcher shop guys were making on the meat dropoffs was enough to merit discretion rather than curiosity. The last thing she needed to deal with was some goofball delivery driver grilling her about why so much meat and bone went through the temple.

But curiously enough, someone was paying for the meat.

Everything was back to normal, except for the heart of the temple. All along, Belldandy had rode roughshod on the assumption that she was the heart of the temple. After all, didn't Keiichi create this living place for her? But last night, it felt empty and foreboding without him. That morning, she stared in the bathroom mirror and wished that he would pop out of it, just like he used to. When he didn't, her heart was coarsened and she found herself tearing up with nostalgia. She contemplated moving back to the Women's Dorm out of sheer loneliness. Here she was, 19 years old and living by herself in the middle of the Chiba exburbs; the district of single houses and low-rises that had filled the vicinity and surrounded the formerly isolated temple. But she knew she couldn't leave here, because she had to take care of Furo. Besides, now that she was a sports celeb, she needed her privacy even more than before.

"God damn you Keiichi!" she swore as she angrily swept the main hall with the three Buddha statues. At least she was willing to stay and take care of things. Keiichi hadn't even bothered to leave any kind of note of explanation about his absence.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

It was a bright fall day in September as Chiba Polytech Sophomore Belldandy Morisato walked past the Women's Dorm on her way to campus for her first day back at school. As she passed the old flimsy rattle-heap of a building, she felt a chill run down her back which forced her to turn her head sharply away to avoid the sight of her former residence. During the several months she'd lived there in the rundown maison, she had a lot of fun with her teammates, even if she was their freshman chore-girl. But the building with its sloping roof, peeling paint and haphazard TV antennae reminded her of the greatest loss in her life.

She, who had won honor and glory for all of Japan, had come home to an empty temple home.

In the end, it was she who had lost, despite the engaging thrill of leading her team to a legendary Olympic victory.

Returning to Chiba Poly was almost a culture-shock level experience for her. Even on her first day back, the geekzoid engineering nerds were all over her for autographs and to do this-n-that's for their respective student clubs. The Robotics Club asked her to dedicate their entry into the national Robot competition. The Urban Civics Club asked her to judge their urban design CAD models. She noticed that the other athletes in the school were diffing her, acting all deferential towards her to the point where she felt like she was carrying typhoid or something. At lunch, no one wanted to hang out with her except for her galpals on the volleyball team. They were source of strength; at least they treated her semi-normally. But it just wasn't the same without Tamiya and Ootaki. When she left the school to catch a ride home, a TV crew and several photographers were waiting for her at the gate, which only heightened her sense of alienation.

This was majorly fucked! If stupidass Keiichi hadn't shined her off, she could ask him to do some God-type trick to make the photographers go away. She had to make a decision soon about whether she would stay in school or not. She was being hounded by all sorts of people at school, and it was interfering with her concentration and studies. There was also the issue about playing on the Japanese National amateur team. Their team didn't fold up and fly away like a paper airplane simply because the Olympics were over. Japan still had to represent in international play with a national-level team; and traditionally the Olympic team was tabbed to carry on that responsibility. This would mean continued practices with the team, and participation in several international exhibitions, tourneys and competitions. Belldandy was uncertain if she could balance all the plates on just her ten fingers and toes.

The Olympic team was back to being Japan's National Volleyball team, and Coach Chihiro was coordinating two separate practice sessions. The 'south' team based in the Kansai Region was holding weekend workouts in Osaka, while the 'north' team based in Kantō was practicing in Tokyo. Plans were afoot for the team to take off in December and do a promotional tour in America and then over to Europe. The Thera International Volleyball Federation had selected Tokyo for the 2010 Women's championship, and Chihiro had been offered the coaching role by the Japanese contingent to prepare Japan's entry for that event two years hence. The first couple weekends back at Chiba Poly, she caught a train to Tokyo so she could practice with Tamiya, Ootaki and some of the other girls.

At least she could be herself during those times.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Jesus Christ, Morisato!" Chihiro yelled at her, getting in her face during a weekend practice in Tokyo. "Are you schizo or something? Where's the fire? What happened to the girl who was all about phenomenal play during the Beijing Games? Shit! What the fuck's the matter with you?"

Belldandy glared at her coach half-heartedly, realizing that she'd been had again. No matter how hard she played, she didn't have the same rhythm that fired her during the Olympics. She felt like a broken doll; confused about what direction to take in her life and lonely as hell. She had resigned herself to the fact that Keiichi had basically dumped her...and even though she and he weren't girlfriend-boyfriend...

"Try telling that to my heart, and see if it can tell the difference," she mumbled.

"Huh? What're you talkin' about, Morisato? You don't have a heart! If you had any guts, you'd be trying out there on the floor to at least act like an Olympian. Instead, you're all drag-ass during practice. You're damned right you don't have any heart! Quit fucking around or quit showing up!" Chihiro shouted.

Something snapped. More like a crack that ran up and down her spine; an emotional snappage like that of a great oak that has been hewn by a couple dozen axe strokes and suddenly the trunk cracks apart with a loud crisp. Unraveling a bleached sense of the abandonment in her life, the crash-course in celebrity, the embrace of awareness that swept beyond mortal ken like a rock ripping through delicate spiderwebbing...Belldandy fell to her knees.

Finally overwhelmed; and yet Chihiro was unrelenting.

"You don't have a clue...none of you do!" she shouted, jumping into a crouch. "I was supposed to win him, to win it for all of us! Nothing makes a difference anymore. How can I be filled up with joy when I'm hollow inside?"

"You're not making sense!" Chihiro confronted here, whiplash-sharp. "Get it together, girl! Why don't you just go and bang your head against the wall...you'd be more productive doing that than you are playing on the court."

"You wanna see something go bang!" Belldandy shouted back, back-stepping towards the ball rack. She turned and punched it as hard as she could, aiming to punch one of the balls. Punch the middle ball, and all the balls in the top row go scampering in every direction...

***Baddampccrk***

"SHIT!!!" she screamed, as a wreath of pain cycled her hand with a vise-like crushing sensation. It quickly turned into a knife that coursed upwards through her hand, wrist and arm with an instant efferent slice of excruciating pain. It hurt so bad, her teeth were rattling.

_"Goddammit! Goddammit! Godammit!"_

As her initial shout became a shrieking holler, she noticed Chihiro's expression of anger shift immediately into wide-eyed worry. "Oh fuck, look what you've done! Morisato, stop it! Please settle down and quit shaking your hand! Don't move your hand, dammit!"

She had aimed for the balls and instead had painted the metal retaining bar with her hardest punch. Her hand and knuckles felt like they were both on fire and swollen like a festering boil, and she felt circus-silly as she tried to shake the pain out, as if she had dipped her fingers against a hot oven surface. Her hand felt like it had a life of its own; gnawing away at her consciousness at the expense of all else. Tamiya and Ootaki moved in and grabbed her, trying to restrain her arm as she felt smothered by the instinctive physical shock that accompanied injury.

"Christ Belldandy, look what yuh've done to your hand!" Tamiya bellowed. Belldandy looked at her hand...and paled as she noticed that it was already swelling with a deep ugly red-purple hue. The sight of her distended knuckles and hand heightened her pain. A few minutes later, they had her hand soaking in a bucket of cool water and she was on the way to the hospital in Chihiro's car.

"Belldandy, you weren't kidding when you said you wanted to do the 'go bang'...but you're supposed to hit the balls, not the cart. Just because I punched a cart in Beijing doesn't mean you can pull it off," Chihiro said, trying to lighten the situation. "I know I've been riding you hard, but there's a reason. What's really going on with you? I'm not asking as your coach, I'm asking as your friend."

The pain itself seemed to do her in like an anesthetic; but instead of shutting off the physical agony that needled her hand, it anesthetized her inhibitions. She felt dead inside already, and the swelling throb in her hand was the only proof that she was emotionally alive. Funny how an injury can be a curative in the sense that it can make a girl babble like an idiot, as if she was drunk. So Belldandy started babbling, not giving a wham if it made sense or not...

"This shouldn't have happened," she mumbled. "He wasn't supposed to disappear like that. I told him I loved him, and I thought he loved me...and it's all just one big mess..."

Chihiro didn't say a word as Belldandy spilled out a flood of details about her and Keiichi's relationship. Despite all the pretense of being rational, she felt like she was narrating another's life as she talked about how Keiichi was a God, and his interventions in her life.

Finally, Chihiro looked her in the eye and told her, "Either you need a shrink in the worst way, or everything I know is all bullshit. If this guy is really God and he does all this shit, then where's his sense of morals? Or responsibility, for that matter? You told him you loved him, and then he just shuts the book and leaves?"

Belldandy simply nodded her head, silent tears draining down her cheeks...thankful that Chihiro seemed to understand what was tearing her heart to pieces.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

A couple weeks later, her hand was finally starting to look like a hand, instead of a cartoon character's 'three fingers and a fumb' boxing glove-sized appendage. The pain was still there, and the pills she had to take made her have migraines, but the happy result was that she wouldn't lose any functioning of her hand after it fully healed. The only problem was that it would take a long time to get back to full strength. So she was wandering around Chiba Poly with her hand in a sling, feeling like an idiot for injuring herself. There was no dignity in this, not the kind of respectability of an injury during competition.

She had done a major number on her hand, requiring a couple surgeries in Sept and Oct to ensure proper healing, which meant that she was here instead of in Europe with her Japan's National Women's team squad. Chihiro was gone as well, and the temple was totally boring now that she had returned from a Christmas visit to her folk's place in Niigata. So today, she decided to suit up and go to the gym for a light workout after her dreaded computer class.

The doctors had told her no volleyball until March, but it was already the end of December and she hadn't hit a ball once. There was hardly any pain in her hand now, but the most irritating stiffness seemed to limit her finger movements. Whatever the doctors said, she knew deep inside that she needed to get back out on the floor and practice, even if it was only hitting light serves. If you don't use it, you lose it.

She had done a number on herself, because she was upset about a guy. As she left her stupid and frustrating computer science class, she wished that all the birds on Thera would simultaneously shit on Keiichi, wherever he was.

"B..Belldandy-sempai? Are you Belldandy-sempai?" the small girlish woman asked her as she walked out of portable trailer that functioned as a dressing room for Chiba Poly's volleyball team.

"Huh? Who are you and what do you want?" she asked. The girl seemed to back away a little bit, as if she had scolded her.

"So you must be her! I'm such an idiot!" the girl said. "How many women on this campus are over 2.10 meters tall, look like a gaijin sports model, have long brown hair and a really pretty face! I saw you on TV all through the Olympics, and now I didn't recognize you. Oh, but I did recognize you from the start, but I had to act like I didn't recognize you because it would look silly if I just came up and asked you your name..."

"Which you did anyway," Belldandy answered back, amused at the girl's rambling. Her querant hung her head in embarrassment and Belldandy realized that the younger girl was reacting to her "star-power aura" (as Kinosh'ta jokingly had called the 'Olympic idol effect' that she and her teammates seemed to have when they returned from China-States).

"Oh geez, I'm sorry!" the waifish girl quickly apologized. She looked like a junior high school, not a Chiba Poly student. And what kind of a girl says "Geez"? Belldandy had never seen her before on campus; everything about her screamed 'geek-girl' at first. At first, until she noticed what she was wearing. She was dressed in a warmup jacket with a pink hand-dyed Chiba Women's V-ball t-shirt with the sleeves rolled up to her elbows, and baggy sweats. Her glasses were snazzy as well, narrow-lensed with pink frames and wide bows with some kind of laser-etched flowers and paisleys. She wasn't a geek-girl, she was a art-school java hound girl.

"If you're from the photography club, I already told them..."

"No no no no!" the girl interrupted. "I'm not what I seem. I may be short, but I love volleyball a lot, and I saw that you looked like you were going to the gym, so I thought I'd hang out with you. Oh, I'm sorry! By the way, I'm Taki. Taki Sora Hasegawa, but everyone calls me 'Taki'. Don't ask me how I wound up with two first names...that one's on my parents. Pleased to meet you!" she added, bowing formally.

This girl was as nervous as a ferret. She kept glancing from side to side as they walked towards the gym.

"So you want to play some ball? Aren't you a little too young and short to be playing? What high school are you from?" Belldandy asked. Taki glowered at her with an angry expression, as if she had just insulted her parents instead of making a comment about her age and height.

"That's what they all say! But it stinks! Just because I'm short, everyone thinks I can't play the game. They all told me I couldn't ever play volleyball! But I try really hard. I'm quick on my feet, or at least that's what Coach Ch..Chi..."

"Chihiro?" Belldandy asked, suddenly interested.

"Yeah, that's her name. Coach Chihiro. Sorry, I forget names easily," Taki shouted. Belldandy was less than a meter away from her and Taki was shouting so loud, you'd think she was trying to get everyone's attention.

"You know Coach Chihiro?"

"I guess so. But isn't she your Coach? Do you really know her?" Taki asked back. Belldandy was almost ready to blow this girl off, because she was acting like a total airhead.

"Wasn't she cool during the Olympics? When she flipped off those Euros and everything!" Taka chattered amiably, seemingly conversing with herself.

"What are you asking me for? _I was there!_" Belldandy answered in a droll voice, getting irritated.

"Oh that's right! You're Morisato, the 'phenom girl'! You were on TV with the old grannies from 1964, and you're friends with that cool Kinosh'ta girl. I remember watching you guys play at the village center. All the old men were making comments about you and the others. Disgusting old drunken geezers. It was too bad, because I was enjoying it. But then during that last couple games they finally shut up and stopped acting like letches and began to appreciate the game. They even burned the fish, because they forgot them…" Taki babbled on happily, as if she had just discovered something important. Belldandy grimaced; the girl's rambling was providing too much information for her tastes.

"God, how I hate it when they call me that," she grumbled, earning an apology accompanied by a curt bow from Taki.

"I..I'm sorry. I'm not used to being around people..."

"You can say that again," Belldandy quipped.

"As if you'd understand! I grew up on Yakushima Island, in Kagoshima. Mom and Dad run a fishing boat and are gone half the time. Yakushima's totally Nowheresville! There was only one high school and no volleyball team, so I couldn't even play. I had to walk two kilometers just to get to town! The high school was terrible because all the boys were idiots. So I had to take high school by correspondence, unlike all you city girls who actually had a high school to go to. If I wanted to play volleyball, I had to catch a ferry boat to Tanegashima Island just to be on a team. And there were no girl's team that I could play on, so I had to play with the yucky boys. So I had to practice with the yucky perverted boys all through junior high and high school. Everyone teased me and made fun of me for being a 'boyly-girl.' My parents used to get it all the time. But I was the best player on the team, even if the other boys wouldn't talk to me. Life just isn't fair! Everyone gets breaks, and I had to _earn_ my scholarship, and now you're making fun of me, and..."

"Whoa!" Belldandy interrupted, waving her hands. "Did you say you got a scholarship?"

"I sure did! Coach Chihiro even signed the letter I got..."

Belldandy looked at Taki with renewed respect, and giggled at the "life isn't fair" comment. She recognized that she was looking at herself as she was a year ago. Taki was a little fireball of energy, animatedly moving her hands as she spoke. It was so funny, she wanted to laugh. Chihiro had recruited Taki from a remote region of Japan...an _island_ for god's sakes...just like she had done with her a couple years back. She tried to imagine Chihiro riding a ferry boat filled with tuna from Kagoshima to Taki's island...

"Coach Chihiro told me that I had to find you, and you would tell me what to do. So here I am! What do I do?" Taki indicated, looking at her with a fevered expression. The same fevered expression she saw in her teammates' faces before a match. The intensity that Chihiro would note as a 'volleyball is the most important thing in the world' type of expression.

"Hey, you wanna play? Let's go to the gym and see if you got some skills, girl!"

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

After half an hour of light practicing, Belldandy could see why Chihiro had snapped a scholarship down on Taki. Even though she was injured and could only serve her practice shots at half-strength, she could readily sense that Taki was a natural libero. Taki was almost _too fast_ on the court, over-anticipating and hyper-extending her digs and returns. The next day, several of the gals from the Chiba Poly team gathered in the gym for a couple pickup games. Why not, since it was the end of the year and school was on break?

Taki was totally skilled in the libero role, so much so that one of her teammates called her 'monkey girl' and the name stuck with her. On the court, Taki was wire-thin like a greyhound, and just as swift. There were a lot of rough edges, but Belldandy could tell that this wasn't a typical high school girl volleyball player. Oddly enough, she was almost boyish in her game, which struck a chord of amusement with the team when Taki admitted that she had only played on the local boys teams for the past six years.

Belldandy was privately amused that Taki kept calling her "sempai", liberally dosed with fawning idol worship. Taki kept comparing herself to her and the others on the team, assuming that Belldandy was a big-city girl. Little did she know...

The team had finished their last practice of the year and decided to go out for coffee and sake. Naturally, Taki was too timid to drink and kept politely refusing...until one of the senior girls insisted and Taki pulled out her Chiba Poly ID and showed them that she was only 17. She explained that she had finished high school a year early because she had been taking correspondence classes.

No wonder she seemed like a little kid!

The snow crunched under her boots as she walked back from the kisaten towards her temple. The coffee shop they had chosen was the one where the three thugs had harassed her and Keiichi. She walked past the corner where Furo had jumped into the street and scared the piss out of the would-be assailants. Looking at the Moon, she wondered if the knife Keiichi had thrown was still lodged somewhere near the Apollo XI landing site in the Sea of Tranquility.

"Furo, I'm home!" she shouted as she closed the sliding-door gate behind her and started walking towards the temple. She felt a bit of worry when Furo didn't do his usual dash out from the side of the temple meet-n-greet with her. Kicking her boots off at the entry foyer, she walked into the main hall with the three Buddha statues and saw Furo sitting by one of the statues.

A person was laying on the floor, dressed in torn up clothes.

Belldandy bit back her consternation. Did someone try to break into the temple? Did Furo attack the intruder? Furo didn't seem to be in an aggressive stance; she sensed that her pet Siberian Tiger was guarding whoever it was that was lying on the floor.

She quick-stepped it to where the person was laying on his side, and pulled to a halt.

"OH MY GOD!" she gasped as she recognized who it was.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --


	144. Pt 144: BlissGifts: Thera Coincident

**Part 144: BlissGifts – Thera Coincident**

THERA, JAPAN, CHIBA PREFECTURE:

The winter winds were baying through the open doors of the temple entryway, a cold reach that breached the silence as Belldandy felt her heart nearly leap out of her mouth. Blinking back her disbelief, she saw Keiichi laying on the floor, bedraggled in what looked like tattered hand-me down clothes. The surface of her distress was flurried by harsh gusts of memories stirring in her mind, recollections sweet with joy and yet uneasy with uncertainty...the emotional sweep spreading through her heart and seizing it, and then flinging it in ever widening circles of dismay. She was here, straddling the inevitable and the lost; astonished by a reunion that was both joyful and unbearable. The chill wind at her back was defeated by the break of sweat on her forehead as she regarded Keiichi. Belldandy was possessed with a flash flood of impulses: hug him tightly; cut loose and yell invective mayhems at him until he was flinch-embarrassed; kick him in the head a few times; kneel down and slap him awake so he could answer to her demands; lean in and kiss him on the cheek in grateful welcome; or whack him with a broom to repay him for his absence.

Where the hell had he been all this time?

During the ensuing months after the Olympics a part of her had vomited up small bits of hope, every day that he failed to show up. She struggled to put the chain-link of little heart-deaths behind her, but pushing the envelope of her grief was even more painful than experiencing it. Endeavoring onwards with life; she simply wasn't strong enough to dismiss him to consign him to her past and move on. If the loss of Keiichi had killed something inside of her, then why did it still hurt? Now that he was suddenly here, she felt a rising black self-contempt for being too weak to move on.

_Keiichi had come into your life like a dream stealing in amongst sleep. For a year, you tried your best to balance your life on the emerging sweet romantic nectar you tasted in your dreams. How could you be such an idiot, believing in something that was clearly destined to vanish? The dream had emptied itself out these past several months, but you didn't read the writing on the wall. It was only your dreaming; try as you might, it was a dream that you couldn't awaken from. There was no waking for you because this is the dream called life, and you're awake already. You can move and talk and hope...while the guts of your heart are tormented and you want to twist and die. Now, you must leave the grown-up world of dreams where a woman meets a man and they love and marry and mate and matter to each other...you must go back for all time to your little-girl's world of school and games and friends and feigned self-importance..._

The thing inside of her that should have stayed dead, wouldn't. Seeing Keiichi on the floor, it was killed once again; it was happening all over despite the fact that he was _here_. Her emotions were so conflicted right now; instant heartaches as they busied themselves in their task of misplacing her trust in the purpose of her life. She sensed them, her dying hopes, and they felt as cold and empty as a cemetery of tombstones.

As the jolt of her surprise started to fade, she noticed upon closer inspection that he was so ragged in appearance, he resembled an island castaway. The longish brown patch-jacket he was wearing was ripped and frayed, much too threadbare for the winter months. His hair was an unkempt mess, and he was sporting a thin beard that darkened the contour of his jawline. Surprise assumed her as she noticed that Keiichi's hands and arm were nicked with numerous small cuts, his knuckles gnarled with blisters and calluses. His feet were habited with boots that looked like discarded military issue footwear; the sides were swollen and ripped in places while the toes of both boots had been cut open because they were too small for his feet.

He stank like a Tokyo shochu bum.

Furo tried to nudge him to wakefulness; which only elicited a responsive moan spoke of exhaustion. How could he be exhausted, if he was God? The last time he had visited her, almost four months ago in Beijing, he was dressed in his usual sci-fi cosplay type outfit, looking as suave and outworldly as a character out of the Boogiepop or Death Note manga. Now, he was masked with a completely different countenance...resembling a dope fiend street hustler who was on the tweaks. His shaggy hair was all mussed up and dirty, matted down against his head with sweat or moisture. The raggled clothes he wore were soaked, leaving little puddles of water on the wooden floor underneath him. No one could sweat that much; he must have been drenched with melted snow. Snow? It had been snowing heavy this afternoon, and already the plows were tasked with cleaning up the streets all over Tokyo, Yokohama and Chiba...

Belldandy's curiosity plied against her irritation and disgust. What could possibly have happened to create this kind of transformation? Keiichi no longer looked handsome...he looked horribly wretched; like some beat-up derelict who had been living outside during the cold days of winter. He seemed more animal than human, which was reinforced by his intermittent groaning.

"No...way," she said under her breath, holding a hand to her mouth as she discovered that underneath his coat he was wearing nothing more than a couple layers of t-shirts. His right arm was sticking halfway out of the too-short sleeve, and she winced at the sight of his forearm. It was swollen with a garish deep red and yellow scar that extended from his wrist almost to his elbow. For some reason, Belldandy instinctively looked at her right hand, regarding the small scars left over from the two surgeries she had undergone; surgeries to put temporary pins in her hand to stabilize the bones so that everything inside could heal correctly.

Keiichi was no longer Keiichi. He definitely wasn't the handsome man she had initially, yet reluctantly...and later intensely...felt attracted to.

Reaching tentatively to touch his forehead and brush his hair out of his eyes...Belldandy noticed that he was running a high fever, his cheeks and forehead were hot to the touch. She was reminded of his battle with Senbei and Mara before last year's Christmas; how the exertion had left him exhausted because he had used up almost all of his divine energy. But this wasn't exhaustion; as she inwardly sensed that this was a dreadful regression in his being. Putting aside the scoldings that she wanted to pour over him, she quickly rushed to the bathroom and soaked a washtowel in cool water. Returning to his side, she laid it over his forehead to try and tame his fever a little bit. As feverish as his body seemed to be, her mind was even more feverish with speculation about why he was here in the first place.

None of this made sense; it was clear that something was very wrong with this picture. Keiichi was one of the Gods, a Divine being who could easily stop the rain or make it snow in June if he wished. So why was he here, in this beggardly condition of misery?

"B..Belldandy, is that you?" she heard him ask as she brought a blanket to cover him, his voice a barely-audible harsh whispering. She nodded her head, unable to answer him amidst the swirl of emotions. This wasn't exactly the reunion that she had been expecting. Little-girl foolish, she had foreseen him as coming home after the Olympics and passionately sweeping her off her feet in gratitude for her efforts which resulted in the banishing of Athenle. Instead, he was sick, helpless as a kitten, and completely gross-out unraveled.

"Then I'm finally home," he said, weakly lifting his arm and letting it fall to rest against her thigh, too drained of strength to move it another cm. A moment later, he passed out back into fevered unconsciousness.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

The next day, Nature's brilliant alarm clock blew blossoms of winterdawn light in the window. She snapped up at the crack of dawn, anxious to check on him to see if he was back to normal. She had barely slept. How could she, gripped by apprehension and unease? If he was coherent, then she was going to ream him a new one for pulling his wit-less bullshit disappearing act. Keiichi owed her much more than a mere explanation, and if he didn't satisfy her curiosity, then he was out the door, God or not. As she dressed herself, she wondered what kind of half-assed excuse that he would try to get her to buy into.

"This had better be good, you supreme idiot. Or you're going to get some payback for making me waste so much time wondering about what the fuck was up with you," she grumbled. Grinning to herself, Belldandy imagined a tasty S&M dominatrix scenario where she was lashing him with a whip while he was tied to one of the Buddha statues, whimpering for mercy. Joking aside, she braced herself to confront him in the worst way. She had four months of resentment stored up, ready to burst like cluster bombs.

He was still in the main Buddha hall, and hadn't moved an inch from where he was last night. She was disappointed and concerned, as he was still groggy with exhaustion and fever. The stench of his body of clothes was so gross to the nose, she almost gagged. Whatever was wrong with him, he certainly didn't have the power or ability to change back to normal.

Making her mind up that she wasn't going to put up with the fetorous smell any further, Belldandy braced herself to do the most embarrassing thing possible for a girl. Gathering her courage, she hefted him up partway off the floor and dragged him to the bathroom, intent on assisting him into the furo so he could get cleaned up. Once inside the bathroom, she gulped a deep breath and helped him get undressed. As she peeled off his shirt, it seemed to stick to his skin in places. Despite her shameful sense of being amiss, she looked closely at the ugly tear that coursed up the outside of his forearm. Keiichi was almost stupid with illness; so weak that he couldn't even unbutton his pants. Gritting her teeth, she undid his zipper and stripped his pants down past his shorts, fully aware that this was where she was going to draw the line. There was no way she was going to undress him all the way! This was majorly uncomfortable, and hell would freeze over before she would help him get naked for the bathtub! He was so limp, he was almost a deadweight, and despite being a strong girl it was a major struggle to basically get him to flop over the ledge into the deep wooden furo tub. Keiichi looked at her with a dim expression of gratitude, and then she left him there to wash up. Sitting outside the bathroom in the hallway, she waited for him to emerge.

And waited. Each minute of delay brought further irritation, and she groused "Don't tell me you can't wash yourself, you idiot!" At least she had remembered to put some epson salt and scent cubes in the tub so his oily skin would be rinsed of the stinking mess of sweat and dirt that had accumulated on it. When he didn't come out after thirty minutes, she resigned herself to the distasteful task of going back into the bathroom to check on him. She and he had experienced their share of 'Keiichi bathroom antics', which often involved him intruding on her during various modes of undress or non-dress. Now the role was reversed, but she was just as anxious, worried that anything could be happening in that bathroom. Sliding the shoji door open, she reacted with alarm: Keiichi had totally nodded off in the bathtub and had barely missed out on sliding under the water. Luckily, he was so tall and gangly that his body crowded the furo and prevented him from going under and drowning.

"What the hell is this?! I'm not a goddamned nurse!" she cursed inwardly as she resigned herself to having to shampoo his hair while he was in the furo tub. It was either that, or live with the greasy odor of unwashed hair. It was almost as if he hadn't changed clothes or taken a bath in weeks. Now she had to struggle once again to get him out of the furo, knowing that he was probably too weak to stand up on his own.

"What is the matter with you? Why don't you just snap your fingers and make yourself clean again? Why are you making me do all the work?" she confronted him after she helped him get out of the bathtub and got herself drenched with fetid oily bathwater in the process. Now she would have to take a bath, after cleaning the furo thoroughly. As she expected, he was unable to stand, so she propped him against the bathtub in the rinsing area. Spraying the shampoo off of his head, she felt like she was back in home economics class where she and the other girls were being taught the basics of infant care. Only this baby was taller than she was and probably weighed over 120 kilos. He looked at her with a halfway blank-minded expression while she toweled off his damp head.

"Keiichi, you disappear out of my life for four months, without any warning. Then you come back here looking like a pile of dogshit, and you don't even say anything to me. I thought you cared about me! I thought I meant something to you. I told you that I loved you...didn't you take that seriously? I poured my heart out for you, put my feelings on the line for you, even gave up my one and only wish for you. So you could have that stupid anti-love curse thing removed. Then I risked everything, faced up against the possibility of losing you for good. Just to help you...to help us...get rid of that Athenle bitch who was all intent on hooking up with you and making you her little love slave. Doesn't any of this mean something to you?" she shouted, exasperated beyond her limit.

"Athenle? Who's an Athenle?" he asked.

Uh-oh! Either he was majorly messing with her, or the wiring in his brain was seriously shorted out and he was majorly fucked in the head. How could he not remember the drama with Athenle, who had basically insisted that she was going to 'own' him? She knew that Athenle's possessiveness had no small part in triggering her to realize her own feelings of love towards him. But now she was confused even more by his forgetfulness. If he didn't know about Athenle, could he have forgotten how she had kissed him? Could his mind have slipped away, causing him to forget how he had kissed her back, comforting her and encouraging her? What if he had forgotten the semi-romantic relationship she and he had between then and the Olympics?

This was a totally jacked situation!

"I'm here, am I not?" he answered, appearing as if he was too ashamed to look her in the face. Or perhaps it was too difficult to make the effort.

"So what if you're here? It doesn't mean shit at the moment, because you don't have any excuse for leaving me hanging on without as much as a god-dammed phone call..."

"Belldandy, I lost my powers."

"...or at least showing me some sign that you still care about me, and..." she carried on, demanding an answer...and then pausing just slightly. "Huh? What? What do you mean, you lost your powers? You couldn't have lost your powers! You're God, for heaven's sake!"

Now he was doing the typical male thing; lying to try and make an excuse to cover up his lack of attention towards her. What a boatload of crap..."I lost my powers"!!! There's no way that Keiichi could say something so stupid and expect her to believe even part of it. He may be a God with super-deep flows of wisdom, but she certainly wasn't an idiot. _He was the idiot!_ He was the one who owed her everything. And there was no way she was going to let him get away playing these headgames with her.

"Belldandy, I really did lose my powers. I didn't have anywhere else to go. So I came here," Keiichi informed her, his voice raspy but serious.

This majorly triggered her, causing her to clench her fists and tremble with rage. Pissed her off with an acerbity of resentments, she felt ready to explode like a gas tank. Just like before, it always came down to this. It brought to mind all those months when he kept telling her that he was sticking around just so he could complete her wish...not because of her. Now he was admitting that he returned here because he had nowhere else to go. Not because of her. It didn't even occur to him to admit that he cared for her, or at least was indebted to her, or even wanted to be here because she was here. He had simply returned to her temple because he was looking for a meal and a place to sleep.

He was the flower king of flies, the king of liars.

"Stupid baka, baka-head asshole! I can't believe that you believe that I can accept such an obvious lie. This is so bent and fucked up, I can't even imagine anything worse!" she shouted angrily. Her pique fueled a sense of jealousy as she continued. "Keiichi, you dump me and then you come back to me because you claim you don't have anywhere else to go. Why the hell don't you just zap yourself back to Windowsill? There's hundreds of lovely Goddesses waiting for you there, who could provide you with much more than I ever could. I'm just a mortal girl. Why are you messing around with me like this? I'm just a mortal girl who kicked ass on a team of Valkyrie goddesses even though I didn't have any special powers or abilities..."

"I DON'T HAVE ANY FUCKING POWERS! I'M NO LONGER A GOD! If you don't believe me, then please just leave me alone!" he half-shouted half-gasped, pulling the towel out of her hands and angrily throwing it across the bathroom. His vehemence seemed to stifle some of Belldandy's own vim, and she looked him in the eyes, closely examining him to see if he was bullshitting her or not. Unflinching, he looked back at her with admixed defiance and hurt.

She decided to humor him to try and catch him in his lie. She recalled when she had admitted that she had feelings for him, and how he had kissed her like a lover in response. How he had stood up for her at the Olympics, had told her that he couldn't imagine his life without her. Now he was trying to deceive her by saying that he was no longer God.

"Okay, I'll play along with you, if that's what you want. So if you don't have powers, then why did you really come back here? While you're thinking up an answer to that one, I also wanna know why you didn't contact me," she asked, smirking at him.

"I didn't have the number for your cellphone or the temple," he replied straightforwardly.

"Wh..wh.._what_!!! You top-shelf dumbass! How could you possibly expect me to believe that?" she snapped. This was getting to be an exercise in stupidity! She started towards the door...

"Belldandy, what would you do if you were in Beijing-Capital, with no money, no place to live, not even enough money to get food to eat...and you could barely remember what had happened in the past several months of your life?" he exclaimed in a desperate voice.

Suddenly too tired to argue with him, she turned around and slumped down onto the wooden floor of the bathroom, leaning against the wall. Better to hear him out than to argue with him. Most of the time, an argument with Keiichi either got tangled up into a senseless impasse, or concluded with him completely bamboogling her with meaningless soarings of some kind of philosophical or spiritual crap that had nothing to do with the issue being discussed. She needed answers, not frustration. Her heart needed answers; as seeing him half-dressed and cleaned up was bringing up old feelings of longing...maybe even of lust. Part of her still cared about him; possibly because he may have been her first love. The jury was still out on _that_, however. If a girl has never been in love before, how can she know what her first love was supposed to feel like?

"What happened, Keiichi?"

He mopped his head, which was already sweat-beaded with fever despite his recent emergence from a cleansing bath. She was amazed, having the odd sense that he was inwardly trying to gather strength just to try and explain himself to her. As if talking for more than a few sentences would be a major effort, like a work-till-you-drop session in the weight room. With a sigh, he started began to explain the circumstances of his absence.

"My memory is inconsistent, which makes it difficult to understand what happened. As best as I can recall, I was caught up in some kind of final apocalyptic-scale destruction. And then I woke up in an alley in Beijing, which totally caught me off guard. When I tried to reach Yggdrasil, I couldn't sense it at all. I discovered that I didn't have any of my powers, and my mind was a fuzzy blank. I had the distinct sense that almost everything I knew about being a God...was gone. Along with my powers. I faintly remembered how I was in the past, how I could understand every language that exists except the Demon's Language. I knew that, but I didn't know the languages. I was around all sorts of people whom I couldn't understand most of what they were saying because it wasn't Japanese or Norwegian. I didn't recognize the writing on the signs in the city because they were all written differently. I struggled just to read them," he narrated.

"This is going nowhere, and not even by using the direct route to get there," she said under her breath irritably.

"Circumstances had placed me in Beijing-Capital, barely able to remember anything about Yggdrasil, except that I had lived there and that I used to be a God. I've never really been lost since I was a child, and that was because I wanted to be lost just to have some fun. But it was different, being astray in a foreign city with no money and no means of support. I wandered around for a couple days and then I noticed that my stomach was hurting. I thought I had an illness, but I discovered that I was starving for food. This didn't make sense because I didn't ever _have_ to eat before. I went into the nearest store to find some food, but no one would give me any. They told me that I needed money to exchange for food. I didn't know what to do to obtain money. Having nothing of value except my clothes, I decided to locate a store that bought clothes. There, I sold the clothes I was wearing in exchange for these clothes, to allow me to have enough money to eat for a week..."

"Waitaminute!" she interrupted. "Keiichi, you're trying to tell me that you had some kind of blackout and woke up in Beijing, and didn't even know that you have to pay money to get food? And that the clothes you were wearing when you came here are the same clothes you had gotten after you woke up in Beijing? And that you didn't even know how to get back to Windowsill?" Belldandy asked, incredulously.

"That is the truth of it," he answered bluntly. "How would I know any of that? I've nothing more than a faint recall of my life as a God. Living on Thera for the past year, I should know quite a bit about how mortals live. But I don't...I couldn't remember so many things! I had no choice but to relearn everything about Thera, all over again. It's all lost. The sum of everything that I learned during Inculcation; all the teachings that I accumulated while I lived in Yggdrasil. Gone! My mind seems to have holes in it instead of memories. Belldandy, I could clearly see your face in my mind, but I couldn't even recall your name for almost two months. I remembered that you had a pet that needed food, and that you lived in Chiba, Japan. But that's all I could remember, no matter how hard I tried.

"Not knowing what to do because I was without a place to live, I had no choice but to sleep outside in alleys. During the days I walked everywhere trying to try and find an occupation of some kind, so I could earn money. I noticed that there were all sorts of construction jobs going on in Beijing, so I just followed the cranes. I concluded that my best chance was to try and obtain a work-for-cash employ at a building site. I managed to get hired rather quickly, probably because of my stature. But I've never attempted any work before, where I actually had to physically exert myself. I had no Divine powers to call upon. My job at the construction firm allowed me to send money regularly to the butcher's shop here in Chiba. Then I remembered about Furo. Funny how I didn't know the address of the temple, but could remember the name of the butcher's delivery service nearby. But it wasn't my fault that I couldn't remember certain things. So I just sent them a cash order every week and asked them to continue the meat deliveries they had been doing for the past several months 'to a temple in Chiba'."

Belldandy was stunned by this information. Keiichi had been paying for Furo's chow-food!

As he continued to explain what happened, she struggled to comprehend what it must have been like for him, _if_ he was telling the truth. She was starting to hear his story out with a sympathetic ear, and checked herself. Giving him sympathy was dangerous, especially if he was lying to her. She had to be strong for herself; after all, he had ditched her, not the other way around. But something seemed to pull at her heartstrings as he kept talking.

While she was back in Japan touring with the victorious Olympic team, being feted and paraded...Keiichi was claiming that he was literally caught up in a battle for his very survival. He didn't know dirt from nails as far as mortal life was concerned. So much must have been alien to him: the language; the customs; the nuances of human behavior. She imagined taking an eight-year old child and plonking him down in Madras, India, without a yen to his name. A child in such a situation would face severe handicaps just in obtaining the essentials of food, water and shelter.

If Keiichi was being honest with her, then he was definitely a 'stranger in a strange land' who was ill-equipped to even take care of himself. And yet he had remembered Furo, choosing to live in a sleeping bag so that he scrimp up enough money to wire cash to the butcher's to feed her pet Siberian Tiger.

Continuing his tale, he mentioned setting aside a tin-can full of RMB so that one day he could buy his way onto a Chinese fishing boat that was sailing to Korea. He jumped ship and swam to shore in Korea, and then jobbed onto another fishing boat that fared a regular route between Pusan and Nagasaki. While on that boat, he had suffered the injury to his right arm when it had been sliced open by a tuna gutting hook. Unable to work at all; the captain of the fishing scow had forced him to relinquish all of his remaining money as 'fare' just so he could debark in Nagasaki. Without any money, his arm infected because of lack of medical attention, he had started to walk and hitchhike from _Nagasaki_ all the way to Chiba, not even knowing where the temple was. A distance of over a thousand kilometers!

This was absolutely incredible, like one of those stories where an abandoned pet somehow fights its way back home. _Something_ must have driven him to do this! Not the loyalty of a lost pet, that's for sure. She looked at him, a question-mark of flesh sitting a couple meters away from her...and wondered why.

"I don't know what else to say, except that I knew somehow deep inside of me that I had to find you no matter what, because there's a part of me that belongs here with you," he finished. "This is my home, and you're part of my home. I couldn't leave you here by yourself...I'm sorry for everything I did that caused you pain. I didn't know what else to do. My life just seems wrong, and everything I try to do seems wrong. You're the only one I think that can make it right again. Please forgive me...it's not my fault that any of this happened. I didn't mean to hurt you. Believe me, Belldandy...just try to believe me."

She could hear her bullshit detector click to the "off" position, replaced by an insistent voice that was saying "Oh my God!" over and over again.

"You big stupid idiot!" she said to him in a halting tender voice, almost in tears after listening to his ordeal. His story was so improbable, flavored as it was with foibles, blunders and sheer grit. Her feminine instincts pulled at her inner feelings like gangbusters, demanding her to accept that he was being honest with her. It was too crazy to even make sense! But here he was, marvel of marvels. Despite herself, a part of her love towards him had been kindled, as she could feel her heart in her breast banging a drumbeat of compassion.

She reached over to hug him, wanting to mother him...but his eyes narrowed and then rolled back as he collapsed onto the rinsing room floor. Panicked because he had become exhausted just by sitting still and telling her about his adventure, she glanced at the ripping scar on his arm...and noticed an ugly seam of orange-milky pus pouring out of a section of his wound. She realized that his bouts of feverish weakness were occurring because it had never been treated.

Wasting no time, Belldandy phoned a taxi, knowing that she had to get him to a hospital quickly because he had a serious deep infection in his arm.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Bureaucracies are so fucked!" she thought. Why was it so complicated just to get medical attention for someone who is obviously in pain and at risk for serious physical problems if left untreated?

It was a very near thing, according to the ER staff at the medical center. If Keiichi had waited another week or two, he almost certainly would have lost his arm at the elbow. Chilling as this close encounter was, Belldandy was faced with all sorts of troubles resulting from his hospital visit. It was difficult enough trying to get him medical attention when he wasn't even listed on any database, anywhere. Luckily, Japan had a national health program that allowed for mandatory ER services regardless of income, lack of insurance or even lack of identity. After filling out a ton of paperwork that basically implied that she was his guardian, the hospital treated him as a charity case and gave him huge amounts of medication and shots and a surgery to clean out the infection which had settled into his bone and deep tissues.

Upon release, Keiichi had further problems to address. He had no family registry, no bank accounts or insurance, no identification whatsoever. Curiously, his Chinese employment card had listed him as a "Japanese National on work visa", which was barely enough to obtain him an ID card as "Keiichi Morisato". Being a recognizable Olympic celebrity gave her some leeway when it came to answering awkward questions from the local constabulary about establishing Keiichi's identity. He was clearly Japanese in appearance, but he was 2.3 meters tall, which made him one of the tallest men in the country. He didn't have the usual medical conditions that accompanied gigantism, but then again neither did she. So she got away with one, as she had claimed that he was her amnesiac cousin from 'up north' who needed to be looked after. So now she and Keiichi had the same surname, her step-dad's. Her Father would blow a fuse if he ever found out she had used his name!

While he was hospitalized, Belldandy began to comprehend the enormity of her situation with Keiichi. In the past, because of his divine nature, she often felt like she was reliant on him. This was a constant source of struggle between her common-sense and her self-esteem. She knew that there was a huge canyon of abilities and possibilities between them. Keiichi definitely excelled her in almost every possible way because he was a God. Yet, there were some notable exceptions like common sense, humor, athleticism, and the intricacies of romantic love...just to name a few. But now that Keiichi was a mortal who was suffering from significant emotional and mental confusion, the roles between she and he were reversed. His ignorance was almost child-like in nature; a loss that extended beyond the wide-ranging intelligence and wisdom of his that she had become accustomed to. In a sense, he was like a transfer student from another country who was completely unaware of Japanese socio-cultural nuances. The sum of his knowledge about Thera was confined, limited to what he had experienced in the past year while he was living with her. Even that was dismantled significantly by his obliviousness. Case in point: he didn't even know about going to a hospital to seek treatment for his injured arm.

She was bitterly angry because it was apparent that the construction job in Beijing and the Japanese fishing boat people had taken advantage of his ignorance. The fuckheads on the Japanese fishing crew had actually made him pay for the remainder of his passage to Japan after he was injured, full well knowing that he was entitled to disability relief due to an on-the-job injury. Keiichi didn't even know the basics about working.

Despite the complexity of his troubles, his heart seemed to be in the right place. Whenever she visited him at the hospital during a break in school, his face brightened up with gratitude...and something else. His smile was as sweet as cake when he talked to her, and he seemed to be very interested in the details of her life over the past few months while he was away. Belldandy could swear that she felt a certain 'thing' about him still.

But what did he feel towards her?

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Chihiro had returned from the exhibition games tour with the Japanese National squad, and now was back at Chiba Poly, focused on getting their volleyball team geared up for the spring term game schedule. It was curious how Chihiro could pull 'double duty' as a coach for Japan's national amateur women's team and also give time to Chiba Poly. The solution was to schedule competitions during breaks in the school year. The International V-Ball Feds had so many international meets and tournaments, it was pretty easy for Chihiro to pick and chose. During their US and Euro tour, the team had swept all their matches; if Japan's team skipped a competition, many of the tournament teams would no doubt breathe a sigh of relief.

A source of mystery emerged when they played Norway-Euro...the _real_ N-Euro women's team. None of the N-Euro athletes from the Olympics were on that team, and nobody knew what had happened to them. The N-Euro coach had been told that he had a new team to coach for the Olympics, and right after the Olympics he suffered a stroke which resulted in complete memory loss of any 'alternate' team he had coached during the games. Of course, Belldandy knew better. But it was Tamiya and Ootaki who had both called her from London the following week to tell her how spooky it was to be playing against an entirely different Norway-Euro team. Even with a United Europe, there was no accounting for this case of the bizarros. Belldandy was somewhat grateful that her injured hand had kept her off the team, as she was worried that she would have to field her own array of memory-puzzles if she had gone overseas to compete alongside her teammates.

It was the first week of the Winter Term, and things were already hectic. Chihiro was exhausted from her overseas adventures, but not enough to demand that Belldandy and Taki stay late for 'extra punishment' as she put it. Belldandy remembered how Taki's face had blanched at that, which was probably a mirror of her own expression when Chihiro had tossed that line on her during last year's season. Late night practice finished, showered and half-dried, she and Taki were ready for the usual 'five-minute freeze' as the team had nicknamed the walk from the gym to the portable that served as their locker room and Chihiro's office. At least Taki's tendency to be a chatterbox proved to be of some benefit here, as her banter kept Belldandy's mind busy with words instead of the piercing winter chill.

"Belldandy-sempai, why don't you have a boyfriend? You're a celebrity, you're tall and pretty...maybe a little too tall for most guys...er, I mean you're probably too tall for almost _every_ guy, since you're taller than any guy I've ever seen. But anyway, you're still very pretty, even if you aren't Japanese. I know that some guys really go for Western-looking girls. And you seem really mature for a 19-year old girl. I actually thought you were 21 or 22 when I first met you, even though Coach Chihiro said you were a sophomore. So what I really want to know is why aren't you dating anyone?" Taki suddenly asked her.

"How do you know I don't and I'm not, Taki?" she joked back.

"I knew it! Tamiya and Ootaki from your Olympic team said that you came to school last year for a few weeks with some really tall dark-n-handsome type guy who was an exchange student. They said he acted like a fool or an airhead, but they also said that he was totally bishie in the worst way. They even mentioned that he was even taller than you, and that he was from Sweden..."

"Norway," Belldandy corrected. She tried to hide the scowl she had by pulling her hoodie over her head. Her beloved sempai...those goofball rats! They'd called the Women's Dorm to keep up on the gossip and had somehow found out about Taki. She could mentally picture Ootaki and Tamiya in the midst of their mischief, talking to the young impressionable girl and gave her their highly-inaccurate scoop about Keiichi. Leave it to her former sempai to salt her life with extra drama. Having Keiichi back in his current befuddled state was bad enough...now, the two wire-heads had no doubt been feeding Taki a steady diet of rumors. Taki was only 17 and didn't know any better, so obviously she had drawn a bead on the target and had gotten all excited about it.

"Anyway, they thought he was your boyfriend. Do you have a picture of him? Could you let me look at it? Please? I wanna see what he looks like! If you don't have it with you, does he have a webpage or perso-blog I can look up on the 'net? What's his name? I'm really curious to find out about what kind of guy you'd go out with. Most of the sempai at the 'Women's Dorm' saw you when you were kissing him. They said they had some kind of rule about guys, which is why you aren't living there now. By the way, where do you live, sempai?"

With Taki was residing at the team's dorm, she had probably heard every rumor under the sun about her and Keiichi. Of course, they had gotten it all backwards, saying that she was kissing him. But she felt a fondness as she remembered her first chaotic meeting with Keiichi and that wayward kiss. Listening to Taki talk on, she had to give in because the gossip was so ridiculous, it wasn't even embarrassing or insulting. Either that, or Taki was practicing selective hearing. She sometimes wondered if Taki's excessive talking came at the expense of attentive listening. The girl talked so damned much, it was a amazing that she had any brain cells leftover in her head for listening. Taki's mind was always racing full-throttle on the racetrack, and no doubt she had investigated all the rumors with the gals. Obviously, the gossip circles were still cycling in the minds of her teammates.

"Taki, he was Japanese and lived in Norway, just the opposite of me. He wasn't my boyfriend, but he was quite likeable in certain charming way. If he were single, I'd probably think more than once about dating him..."

"Dating who, Morisato?" Chihiro asked, winking at her as she jumped into stride with them. Both she and Taki jumped in their skins a little, as their Coach had literally sneaked up on them unawares. They had just finished the extra practice session, and Chihiro usually stayed behind in the gym with her playbooks instead of immediately locking up and heading to her office.

"Taki, you should know better than pestering Morisato about her love life, or lack thereof. Just because she agreed to late night practices with you doesn't mean that you can pry..."

"Coach Chihiro, it's okay. Someone's gotta set her straight, because the gals at the Women's Dorm have been feeding her all sorts of nonsense," Belldandy interrupted casually. Now that they had finished tonight's extra practice, it was no longer coach and pupils. She almost felt like she was one of three sisters; the middle one between the older Chihiro and girlish Taki. Taki at the moment being in total 'kid sister' mode.

"She's right. There was a guy and he did stay with me for a few weeks last spring. But he never was my boyfriend or anything. In fact, it was pretty awkward at first since he was the first man who ever lived with me besides my father. Thinking back, I sometimes wonder if I got carried away about him. But now that he's back, it's a little weird between us."

Belldandy immediately regretted her slip of the tongue. Again, daydreaming again...because of Keiichi. He was back from the hospital and hangin' low at the temple. Little by little she was beginning to resume the old feeling she had towards him; the recent day-to-day familiarity resulting in mind-pictures that sometimes were so close at hand, they were occasionally distracting. And now she had let the tiger out of the cage, so to speak, because Taki's conversation had hooked her and she had been drifting into the 'Me and Keiichi' realm once more...

"HE'S BACK!" Chihiro blurted out, her expression suddenly looking murderous. "Are you serious? Cuz if you are, I'm gonna feed him to the sharks for bailing out on you! My star player has been a basket case for the last several months, and managed to mess her hand up because she was upset. Probably because of him, that bastard! Where's he staying? I'm gonna kick his ass!"

This was getting major-league touchy, because Chihiro's protective streak had kicked in, fast and furious. "Coach, you can't do that. He just got out of the hospital and he's staying at my house," Belldandy hastily protested. As she explained Keiichi's injury and some general circumstances surrounding his return, Taki had a half-grin and a gleam to her eye; sure signs that the girl's fox-ears were extended to their fullest at this juicy tidbit of inadvertent disclosure.

"Besides, how many times do I have to tell you that he's not my boyfriend? He's just a friend who happens to be a guy, who's visiting me from Norway. There's nothing going on between us! He's just staying here until he's recuperated from his injuries. Coach, you met him last year. You saw how much of a space cadet he is. Do you think I would get involved with a guy like that?" Belldandy argued, trying to diffuse Chihiro's flaring resentment. She knew her Coach well enough to see that Chihiro had that 'ready to tear someone's (Keiichi's) head off' level of determination. Fortunately, the cautious cast of her words triggered a sober expression on Chihiro's face. Chihiro regarded her with an inward-looking glaze to her eyes.

"So if he's back, then what about the little problem? The 'kami-sama' problem that you told me about when I took you to the hospital? You may have been delirious with pain, or maybe not. But I _know_ what I heard, and what I heard makes me think that you seemed to like that guy a lot. There's no way that you could've faked that, Ms. Teary-eyes 'where is he? Why doesn't he call me?'" Chihiro asked with a grin.

"I did _not_ act like that! Not one bit! You just admitted that I was delirious with pain...I probably didn't know what the hell I was talking about that day. Why don't you let it go and cut me some slack?" she quickly remonstrated. That day she banged-up her hand was a fuckup afternoon to be sure, and she regretted the possibility that she might gotten all stupid on the way to the hospital with Chihiro. She had been in a lot of pain and physical shock, and something had been released from inside of her...

But how much did Chihiro remember?

"Kami-sama? Is your sorta-kinda boyfriend one of those hard-core Christian guys? Some kind of missionary sort of guy, like maybe a Mormon or a Jehovah's Witness? No way!!! I can't believe that you would go for those kinds of dudes, Belldandy-sempai. I mean...how could you get along with him? You're too much of a wild woman," Taki observed, now even more intrigued by the route this conversation was taking.

Belldandy slapped her gloved hands together to keep from giggling, while Chihiro was howl-laughing at the 'wild woman' comment. Taki's observations were always paper-clip bent, and often misfired and amusing. But underneath it all was the anxiety, the realization that Chihiro seemed to be considering her whole disclosure about Keiichi with some genuineness. In Beijing, she had related the story to Kinosh'ta and her two sempai to try and lift their spirits. It was so outlandish, the trio had laughed it off and had teased her for the rest of Olympics. But when she told it to Chihiro, her Coach lacked a dismissive air and had never commented on her narrative, one way or the other. She _had_ to pin her Coach down, if only to know if her fears were justified or simply the product of her imaginings.

"Coach, how much do you remember from that day you took me to the hospital?" she asked Chihiro.

"All of it."

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"What to do? What to do?" Keiichi pondered silently as he looked at Belldandy over the kosatsu, which was currently laden with breakfast. Contemplation only seemed to lead him back and forth against the ledge of his uncertainty. It had been so easy for him to talk to her before, back when he was filled with all the wonders of the universe, all of which were rendered into factotums and transcendental personal experiences. Now, he was deeply troubled by his losses; as it was entirely probable that his acuteness and strength of mind and will had become dulled to the point whence he had no conception of knowing how much learning and experience was lost to him. She had related to him two days ago that he had repulsed a trio of hoodlums and threw one of their knife-weapons into the Sea of Tranquility. When he asked her what the Sea of Tranquility was and where it was located, she had been fetched with a haunted expression and noted to him that he "had forgotten what he had forgot".

When he had been transformed from Yggdrasil God to a semblance of a Therarealm mortal, Keiichi had initially felt very crippled and diminished. Gripped with confusion at every turn, each decision was a struggle. Dealing with mortals..._as a mortal_...was extremely taxing, because they were so unpredictable. While in Beijing-Capital, he had seen Olympic posters which constantly reminded him of Belldandy, almost taunting him with his own incapacity. Yet, during the past two weeks since he had returned to the temple, he felt even more than the usual obviation.

Because of Belldandy.

Keiichi was aware of certain feelings that arose within him whenever he saw her; a change in quality, a certain thrill that seemed to flow from his soul and into his body, passing though his chest accompanied by a sense of quickening. His _mind_ would seem to be warm, even hot at times when she was nearby. The idleness of recuperation was boring him to death as well in its guise as an unwarranted and unwanted cloak of ennui. Belldandy was also uncertain of him, and had requested that he not leave the temple until he became more accustomed to mortal lifestyles.

One continuum that he did recall from his previous time at the temple as a God was a wish...a wish that she had made on his behalf...a wish which was now a source of pain and confusion.

One dinner too many, and he couldn't keep his silence any further. "Belldandy, I have a worry, you might call it, which has been causing me a lot of distress. I remember something about a wish you made on my behalf that was aimed at allowing me to experience falling in love for the first time in my life. To fall in love with a Goddess and enjoy a perfect union of souls. Now that I find myself severely limited in powers and abilities, living as any Therarealm human would live...how could it be possible that your wish for me would be fulfilled? Wouldn't my present situation cancel the effects of your wish? Now that I am no longer a God except in name, it appears that my prospects of falling in love will never transpire because of the wish. What are your thoughts about this?" he ventured.

"I don't know, Keiichi, because you Gods seem so messed up with your little rules and stuff. I do know that I did fall in love with you when you were a God. I..I don't know how I feel about you now, but it's on the clip that there's hope for you. Just because you've gone through some changes doesn't mean that world's gonna end, or that you're gonna be running around in circles, without a purpose. In spite of everything, you're still the same _you_. The same Keiichi that I knew from before. Which means that I think the wish I made for you is still in effect. I don't think that you have to be alone. Nobody does," she answered.

Keiichi struggled hard to remember her words in Beijing, right before all the chaos happened. Instead, he remembered a strand of wisdom from another Keiichi, a mortal Keiichi that he had met briefly...but when? No matter. He recalled that the mortal had instructed him by explaining that a key essence to romantic love was manifest when one becomes selfless; that the strand that knotted two hearts together was comprised of humility.

"Is there anything I can do for you?" he enquired, drawing a surprised look from her. "You've helped me adjust to a new type of living, and you sought out aid for my physical injuries. You've even allowed me to live here in the temple with you, even though it wasn't necessary."

Belldandy grinned at him. "Where did that come from, you dope?" she barked back at him. Then her expression hardened, turning very serious in tone.

"How do you know if it was necessary or not? Didya ever think that maybe my wanting to help you _was necessary for me_? That maybe I _want_ you to be here in the temple with me? Besides, this is the kine...paying you back for everything that you did for me, and even some stuff you didn't intend to do."

"But should a man and a woman live together? Seeing you evokes...certain unreliable sensations within me that I am unaccustomed to. I'm confused! A person tried to tell me a wisdom-thought about men and women once. He said that love is selfless, and it requires allowing one's self to become vulnerable to another. Doesn't that mean anything to you?"

"It is important, Keiichi. But there's a difference, as well," she noted. "A person in love _allows_ themselves to be vulnerable. They _choose_ to let the special one whom they love have significant influence over their decisions, even to the point where they would give up certain things based on the advice or needs of the other person. Your being here at the temple, your situation of vulnerability...isn't by choice. You're not letting me in because you want to; you're letting me in because you have to. Right now, you know very little about life on Thera. You can't earn a living, you have serious problems with your memory...in fact, you have really don't have anything useful or helpful that you can give to another person. You're needy, you're confused and you're still recovering."

"Therefore, what I gather is that you are saying I cannot be helpful, which is different than being vulnerable. This fact only confirms that I will never experience love, Belldandy. You speak the truth when you claim that I am incompetent, and of no use to anyone because I have nothing to contribute to a relationship except need. If I have nothing to exchange, then that means that I am only burdensome. Selfless people aren't takers, they're givers. Maybe this is how the wish you made would seem to be invalidated..."

"Now hold it right there Keiichi! I didn't mean it like I was saying that you're worthless or something!" Belldandy interjected. Something about what he had just said must have really upset her, because she was drumming her chopstix on the kosatsu that they were sitting at. Keiichi recognized this as one of her signal behaviors, indicating that she was agitated.

"Look, Keiichi. You're _different_ than you were before. For me, to put it bluntly...it means that I have to sort out how I feel about you. When you were a God, I said that I loved you and I really meant it. It was simpler back then, because I knew you. Now, I don't know you, in a sense. Right now, I don't know what to think either. You're a great guy and all that, even when you act all stupid. But you don't know shit about anything, which really doesn't help my confidence along at all."

"Then we're both in the same quandary," he reckoned. "To me, you're entirely different as well. Before, you were a mortal who was filled with incivilities and immaturity. You were mired in self-pity and you doubted yourself far too often, and often too far. You were vain and tended to overthink yourself when faced with challenges. To compensate for these shortcomings, you acted aggressively towards others. A part of you was raw and uninhibited, and you struggled hard to try and discipline that impulsiveness. But now, even with these shortcomings...you are far superior to me when one measures adaptability and adjustment to life. I must admit that I constantly feel ashamed and confused because I have to _rely_ on you, Belldandy."

"Now you know how I felt when you had your full powers," she retorted. "I don't _need_ a guy in my life. Most of the time, I don't want one either. I always had to watch what I said and did around you, because I felt like I was confined because you were a God and could do unimaginable miracles. I felt somewhat afraid of you at times, because you were so blinging unreal. You were so different than any guy I ever met...and you still are."

"Perhaps we could try and examine our differences, and possibly find similarities within them, Belldandy. My circumstances leave much to be desired, because they force an awkwardness upon both of us. I know that I have a connection with you, and that you're integral to my life. I felt that way before I lost my powers. I need you to understand that I still feel that way, which is intimidating now that I cannot do anything to help you."

"Who says that you have to do anything? Just be yourself for once," Belldandy counseled him. Keiichi did recall that the mortals often were entrapped by a sense of identity that caused them to unduly esteem themselves by their actions rather than then weighing themselves by other attributes of behavior and personality.

Belldandy was regarding him with a fox-sly expression.

"Here's a little hope," she said in a husky voice, leaning over the kosatsu and kissing him lightly on the cheek. He was so shocked by her sudden impulse, he flinched backwards...

"H..HOT!!" he shouted as he spilled his miso soup onto his lap. Strangely, Belldandy just looked at him and giggled.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Belldandy ran into Taki in the hallway after she finished her Intro to CAD class. Last year, she had struggled with computers; challenged by simple tasks like opening up documents and finding files. This term, her entanglements with modern computing had worsened as she was learning to use real engineering software: how to render designs in 2D and 3D using design software. For Chiba Poly, 'new' meant CAD programs that were 3-4 years old compared to what was currently in vogue with the engineering industry. But it still majorly sucked to have to sit in front of a screen for two hours a day and draw simple objects.

"I'm mortified! I hate this class!" Belldandy complained to Taki. "How's your class goin'?"

"It's pretty hard. We're studying sigma algebra and convergence theorems, and later we'll be modeling them with process sims on the computer towards the end of the term," Taki noted.

"Huh? What kind of class is that?"

"Stochastic Process Calculus, Belldandy-sempai."

"What year class is that? I don't remember seeing it on the frosh roster of classes."

"That's because it's a senior-level class, sempai. A couple years past Calculus IV," the young teenager answered her.

"Calc IV? That's a massively senior level class! How could you even enroll in that? You're just a frosh. When do you find time to study with all our extra late-evening practices? I barely have enough time to do homework as it is, and I'm just taking simple stuff like Calculus II and Intro to CAD."

"Y'know, I could tutor you, sempai! Wouldn't that be great?! Then I could see where you live, and get away from that stupid Women's Dorm for a while. I love everyone there, but they're so annoying sometimes! Especially on the weekends when they all go out to get drunk and leave me stuck at home doing the chores," the younger girl complained.

"Been there, done that!" Belldandy agreed. "I used to hate cleaning up after them, too. But you can't just come to my place. We'll have to study at the Dorm or some quiet kisaten over some coffee. Or maybe the library."

"Why? You don't want me to meet your boyfriend?" Taki challenged her.

"Taki! For the hundredth time...I don't have a boyfriend!"

"Then why are you touching your fingertips together like that?"

Belldandy looked down and noticed that she was unconsciously touching her index fingertips together in the suitable gesture of uncertainty. Dammit! This is what happens when a girl watches too much TV! Taki was sharp as a knife; she sighed to herself, knowing that the freshman had just busted her.

She swiftly changed topics as they walked to the trailer to change into their uniforms for squad practice.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Taki was turning into a lightning-bolt libero. Time after time, she fielded power services with inhuman speed, and wasn't afraid to splash the floor to dig out a net attack. Over the past two weeks, she was so reckless that she had accumulated numerous bruises all over her despite the knee and elbow pads. Coach Chihiro seemed to get a kick out of Taki's whacky-sacky defensive play. Belldandy knew that the girl needed to develop some offensive firepower, since she was unaccustomed to attempting a service attack from the rear court. She was a wiz at defense, but couldn't set the ball properly if her life depended on it. Nevertheless, Chihiro jokingly told her that she would teach Taki her 'secret technique' if she was able to last an entire practice as libero and only allow ten kills to land in the backcourt, behind the three-meter attack line.

"I'll do it Coach!" Taki agreed, raising her hand like a schoolgirl...which earned knowing grins and giggles from the rest of the team. Belldandy knew that Taki didn't have a chance in hell of stopping ten or less net attacks. She'd been through all sorts of 'idiot drills' last year with Chihiro; drills where she was tasked to do impossible things by her coach. Chihiro had often challenged her to get a .950 kill percentage during a practice scrimmage, promising to take her and Tamiya and Ootaki out on a sake bent on the weekend if she did it. Of course, the outcome of such challenges was that she was able to average .800 to .900 kill percentages consistently. Ootaki and Tamiya would only grumble. But a couple times, she did score above .950...and Chihiro was as good as her word and had taken the trio out for sakes.

"Okay, we gotta deal!" Chihiro said, winking at Belldandy. "I want Morisato to stay rotated front and center. You let more than ten out of hundred get past you and wager's off!"

"But that's not fair, Coach! Sempai's an Olympian. She's the one who kicked...er, beat those N-Euro amazons in Beijing-Capital," Taki protested. Belldandy smiled at the familiar "that isn't fair!" comment, recalling how she had been filled with such nonsense before she met Keiichi. Now, she hardly ever felt that life was fair or unfair. It is what it is. Admittedly, Coach Chihiro had stacked the odds against Taki quite highly by insisting that she stay rotated front-n-center. Belldandy knew that there were only a handful of players in Japan who could stop her power attacks with any consistency. Most of them were in Osaka.

"Christ, we're gonna have to introduce you to Kinosh'ta so you can learn to swear, little girl!" Chihiro groused, and then started gnawing on her whistle with irritation.

"I am not a little girl!!!" Taki shouted back, kicking the nearest volleyball and beaning one of the men's basketball players on the other half of the gym.

"Ooops!" she shouted with a horrified expression. She covered her face with her hands as the basketball guy gave her a telling stare, before he threw the ball back towards their half of the gym. The whole Women's V-ball team broke into laughter as Taki stepped away from the rolling ball as if it was a snake ready to bite her on the ankle.

"Baka girl!" Belldandy grumbled under her breath.

"Ooooo...that does it!" Taki shouted, a manic gleam in her eye. "I heard that, sempai! I'll make a bet with you, Belldandy-sempai. If your side gets 7 or more attacks past me out of a hundred service rallies, then I get to tutor you at your house on the weekends and don't have to do chores. Which means that the rest of the team will have to do their own uniforms for the rest of the season. But if you don't get 8 attacks past me then I'll tutor you at the Girl's Dorm on Sunday nights. Which means you have to help me with laundering the uniforms. Attacks that land in the forecourt don't count, of course, because I can't defend against those. Deal?"

Belldandy thought this was the height of ridiculousness, but decided to go along with the charade. She looked at her teammates for permission, since they were involved in the wager. Several of them nodded their heads while the rest of them were giggling.

She sensed that her teammates had a trick up their sleeve, or that she was missing out on something...

"Hmm...this sounds interesting," Coach Chihiro said as the gals were busy placing chore and sake-money bets on the outcome. "In fact, I think I'll play libero opposite you, Taki, on Morisato's team."

"I didn't agree to that!" Taki whined.

"Sooo? I'm the Coach, and what I say goes!" Chihiro shot back, earning an irritated glance from Taki and derisive laughter from her teammates. Belldandy grinned to herself, knowing that Taki had just dug her own grave. One hundred rallies was about the equivalent of a three-set match of 30 points each. Each rally was designated as the volley play between service and point. There'd be some service errors and a couple fouls, plus the usual out-of-bounds shots. Since Taki's side would be defending only and not serving offensively against her side, she wouldn't have to worry about her own side giving up service aces. Given the odds, this would be a piece of cake. Even if she got only twenty to thirty setups for making net attacks, she could easily punch more than seven kills past her.

She could see that Taki was seething with energy and resentment. But when the practice exercise started, Chihiro started fucking up by setting the ball _away_ from her, to the right and left strong-side/weak side attackers. Once in a while, Chihiro would do a half-hearted power attack from the back row as well...but Taki would sense the seam and dig it out.

_Chihiro wasn't sending the sets her way at all!_ She was deliberately manipulating this scrimmage game by not allowing her to attack the net as often as she would during a regular match. In the end, Taki only let five kills get by her in the backcourt. The younger girl was so tired, she simply sat on the floor for a few minutes catching her breath. Their contest had even gotten the attention of the guys, who were watching with interest during the last few volleys.

Having lost the wager, Belldandy grabbed her hoodie jacket and walked off without a word to the showers.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Coach, that was total bullshit! You didn't hardly give me a chance to spike the ball! In regular game, I'd be getting at least half the net sets so I could pile up some kills. But that didn't happen! I know you made it so that she would win! That's so fucked, I don't even know what to say about it! How could you do this to me?" she shouted, her ears still ringing from the extra hot shower she had just taken, complete with a loud series of angry screams and curses in the small shower stall.

"Whoa, Morisato! Pull your head out of your ass and stop looking at things through your tennis shoes, steamhead-girl!" Chihiro retorted without batting an eyelash. The older Chihiro narrowed her eyes and studied her for a minute. Olympics or not, that glare still made Belldandy shudder into the defensive.

"Did it ever occur to you that she's _good_, Morisato?" Chihiro said drily. "Volleyball isn't just about the attacker's position, or lineups, or playlists. It's about _people_! Tonight, it was about Taki. By the way, you idiot...did you realize that she had you foxed? She got over on the entire team with the laundry chores, because they simply assumed that you'd win on their behalf. Plus she schooled you on the tutoring session wager. Win or lose you would have ended up doing the tutoring gig. Be grateful that you lost...if you would have won, you'd be her laundry pal at the Girl's Dorm on weekends. She did the old 'heads I win, tails you lose' on all you guys."

"Th..that brat!" Belldandy exclaimed, half-resentful and half-amused. Now she knew why her teammates and sempai were all laughing when she agreed to Taki's little stakes. And none of them had told her...

Next practice, they were going to get it, big time!

"Morisato, this little competition we had tonight isn't just about you and Taki. Dammit, how do I explain this to you?" her Coach wondered aloud, looking thoughtful for a moment. "Okay, try and wrap your head around this for a minute. Remember how I scooped you up out of the boonies two years ago? Worked your ass off last year with extra practices? What was the result? Nobody planned on you having a ridiculously insane growth spurt, but that's minor compared to the fact that your skills quantum-leaped in efficiency. And then you wound up being the 'Miss Phenom' poster-girl in the Olympics. Now, you're one of the best net attackers on the planet."

"So?"

"Taki has the same potential."

With this disclosure, Belldandy eased down onto the metal chair and leaned against Chihiro's desk, willing to let her Coach air out her reasoning before she tweezed her with more arguing and resentment. She had felt betrayed by Chihiro several times before, but she had discovered that sometimes betrayal was actually a form of advocacy.

"Look, Belldandy. Just between you and me, she's wicked on the court...and she's only 17! I think that Taki has what it takes to go all the way. To be an Olympian, just like you and me," she noted, shifting into friend mode as she gestured at the Bronze and Gold Medals hanging on the wall in her office. Anytime Chihiro called her "Belldandy", it meant that she had dropped the coach-player role and was speaking woman-to-woman with her.

"No way!" Belldandy blurted.

"Yes way. Just like when I first saw you play, and I sensed your potential. You should know me well enough by now to know that my coaching attitude often is 'fuck the world, I want what's best for my team'. This is another one of those times, and I'm sorry you had to be on the wrong side of the runway. But Taki reminds me of myself when I was her age, except that I wasn't so damned polite and babble-chatty as she is. She's young, and I think her nervousness is the result of a lack of self-confidence. Didya catch on to how she reacted to that 'little girl' comment? She went off the hook at you and me! Normally, I would've given her a major smackdown for that. But she's a strong girl pretending to be weak. I don't need her and you bickering, because you are teammates now, and you might be teammates on the National team. That's one big reason why you're doing extra practices with her late nights. The other reason is that she's all speed and no finesse, plus she can't set up front row attacks for shit. To tell the truth, Taki needs to be worked hard so she can be the monster backcourt libero that she has the potential to become. As for her offense...coming from a fishing village on an island, she probably didn't have anyone good enough in the front row to require her to volley the ball with exacting sets. I saw her playing with the boys, and she was way better than any of them! So tonight, I threw her a bone and set it up for her to win," Chihiro admitted candidly.

This whole thing had been for Taki's benefit, not hers. That she could understand. But the home visit thing with Taki was going to bring big troubles. She glanced at Chihiro and then lowered her eyes. This was majorly messed up! Now she'd have to figure out a way to keep both Keiichi and Furo occupied while Taki came over on Sundays.

"Chihiro, I don't mind if you set it up for her to win so much as I do mind that it involves me and the other members of the team. They're gonna think I wimped out on them every time they have to launder their own uniforms..."

"Which is a stupidass idea in the first place. What the fuck is up with that? Letting the freshman do all the housework and uniform laundering while they go off to party on the weekends? That's high school bullying type shit! If they needed the extra time to study, I'd be more understanding. But it's some stupid rule that doesn't really instill discipline in anyone. I've been wanting to get rid of it ever since I started coaching here, and this just played out right. Besides, next year Taki will be better than any of those girls on the court except for you and me. Word from her professors is that she's also a girl-genius and needs more time to study. I say, let them do their own shit instead of piling it on her cuz she's a frosh! If they give you or her any crap about it, I'll reign hell on them so hard-n-fast that it will make doing the team's laundry look like enjoying beefbowls."

"And what about me, Coach? _She's actually going over to my house!_ You might as well have handed her the keys to Pandora's Box and told her that there was chocolate ice cream inside. How am I supposed to deal with that? That's my _privacy_ that's being chased away!"

"I think you need to get a life, Morisato," Chihiro countered in a flat voice, expertly distilled against Belldandy's reproachful attitude. "I need one too, for that matter. You have no idea how it's been like for me. I've been swamped with work; with the team and with managing all the post-Olympic training schedule for the National team I gotta go to Osaka once a month, which takes up my whole weekend. I need a break too, you know."

"What does that have to do with Taki coming to my house?" Belldandy asked bluntly.

"A lot. Besides, when I said you and are family, I really meant it! So it's not just Taki that is coming over. I'm coming along as well. I'm not gonna let her just go there and tutor you. I'm gonna tutor her as well. Her social skills suck; not that it's her fault for growing up on a small bumpkin-fuck island fishing community. That girl also desperately needs to lighten up and loosen up, so she can start playing fluidly instead of uptight. You too, now that you're back on the mend with your hand. So it'll be a Girl's Night out for the three of us, but only in the afternoon at your home instead of late night carousing at some clubs."

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --


	145. Pt 145: BlissGifts: Thera Resplendent

**Part 145: BlissGifts – Thera Resplendent**

THERA, JAPAN, CHIBA PREFECTURE:

No matter how hard she tried to emphasize to Keiichi that he was to avoid encountering Coach Chihiro and Taki _under any conditions_ while they were visiting the temple, he stubbornly refused to acquiesce to her demands. Instead, he counter argued that since he was no longer a God, it didn't make any difference if they met him or not. When she patiently explained once again that he completely lacked any kind of penetrating insight into people's characters, which firmly placed him...and her...on hazardous grounds, he remained completely aloof to her concerns. Uncharacteristically, Keiichi was unwilling to accede to excusing himself while her friends visited.

This brought out a heated discussion about his status in the temple. Contentious, with an almost rhetorical self-intoxication, Keiichi angrily complained that being 'hidden away' was really beginning to salt his nerves. Blindly, he seemed hell-bent on pissing her off. Foraging straight into her temper, he even went as far as to compare his current living situation with the oppressive circumstances before the Olympics: having to seek sanctuary at the temple to avoid the intrusive visits by the many Goddesses who were seeking him out because he was supposedly the 'God of Love' and the perfect mate. He had been stranded then by circumstances, and now he felt oppressed because she was asking him to be evasive all over again. The clueless idiot had no idea that she was demanding his cooperation for his own good! Chaffed at this totally off-the-wall comparison, the volume knob of her frustration was turned past clip, somewhere around a 12 on the 1-to-10 scale. Exasperated to resignation, Belldandy simply stormed out on the contentious discussion, mentally jeering at his stubbornness.

Later in the evening, she pranked him good for comparing her with the ilk of Goddesses that had harassed him last summer. "Oppression, my ass!" she thought as she drew him a bath with ice-cold water. Knowing that he was no longer impervious to extremes of hot and cold, she waited. Keiichi's surprised shriek was loud enough for her to hear in her bedroom while she was watching TV...and it was quite satisfying.

But the prize fool had a point, even if he put it across with a rather lame-assed awkwardness. There were no security blankets here. Reluctantly, Belldandy recognized that she couldn't hide Keiichi away from the world, nor could she isolate herself away from the world by using him as an excuse to remain home-bound at the temple. Keiichi was the single reason (besides a certain large white-n-black striped feline) that she could never have visitors at the temple. In sum, this was one totally suck-ass situation. Belldandy felt like she was stuck in one of those irony cages; where the owner was being caged by the responsibility of caging the bird.

She majorly wanted to shine the whole thing off and go out and get plastered with Chihiro.

The night before Chihiro and Taki's home visit, Keiichi surprised her by cooking a dinner of tonkatsu...and doing a pretty decent job of it; concocting a delicious blend of thinly-sliced pork, cabbage and Nagoya-style soba-paste soup base. Growing up on a Niigata farm, she had eaten enough pork to experience see-sawing 'diet bouts' with pork. Year-by-year, either she was sick of it or loved it. Currently, Belldandy she was in one of her 'loving it' phases; a fondness seemingly brought on by a form of culinary 'homesickness' resulting from the year-and-a-half she had been living on her own. Keiichi had thoughtfully decided that he was going to cook a lunch for her visitors tomorrow to free her from that worry. He added that Taki's upbringing in Kagoshima had inspired him to create a regional variant that would be familiar to her and hopefully savor to Taki's liking. He finished the meal by noting that he had cooked extra portions for her guests; all she would have to do was heat-n-serve lunch tomorrow for her friends. If it was a success, he added that he would make himself available to cook a lunch henceforth when Chihiro and Taki came to visit on Sundays.

She had to acknowledge that she was deeply touched by his gesture of caring. Despite all of his confusion and handicaps about life as a Thera mortal, his occasional forays of thoughtfulness kept her on her toes. Again, she had to wonder if this was an officious or dutiful kindness...or perhaps a signal of something pooled much deeper. When he was a God, she didn't have much of a handle on what made him tick. Now that he was mortal, she had even less of an idea of what was going on between his eardrums. The tonkatsu was so delicious, she started in on a second helping and couldn't finish it. Furo was the lucky recipient of the leftovers, which he gleefully snarfed down in less than a minute.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Morning yawned wide to start off the day Belldandy had been dreading for the past week. A mid-January cold snap and snowfall had clothed the temple's many trees in a wedding-dress downy brightness, skinning the two small garden ponds with even more ice. Keiichi had shoveled and salted the stepping-stone walkway from the temple gate to the main temple house. It was a typical Chiba January winter day: bitter, biting cold with blusters of breeze-laden snows.

"Waaah!!! C..c..cold!" she heard someone gasp as she approached the bus-stop.

Taki's winnowy complaint as she rendezvoused with her and Chihiro at the bus-stop humored Belldandy's mood slightly, taking a little off of the nervous edge that had been gathering all morning. Growing up in the Kyushu south, Taki definitely wasn't used to this kind of cold winter. She had decided it would be best to meet up with them at the bus-stop, so they wouldn't miss the approach to the temple. A moment later they started up the brief uphill walk via the narrow winding lane, Taki's teeth chattering. A narrow clasp of trees on the other side of the alleyway cozily isolated the lane from the sprawl of houses and low-rises in exburbanite Chiba. Reaching the top, she gestured towards the temple's three-meter high wooden fence, which enclosed the grounds with a series of cross-tied boarding and decorative posterns of bamboo.

The main entrance gate caught Chihiro and Taki's attention, and she vicariously felt like she was seeing it for the first time as well. The temple's entrance looked like it was straight out of the 18th century: a simple construction covered by a sheltering awning, underneath which was the double-gated entry with two large wooden doors held shut by a wooden crossbar. The gate was a door-within-a-door: one of the large doors had a built-in smaller 'person-sized' sliding door that she opened up to admit them to the temple's yard. The temple was built so long ago, its builders had designed it for shorter occupants; both she and Chihiro had to stoop as they walked underneath the sliding doorway, while Taki just barely fit.

"Well, here it is," Belldandy announced, a hint of pride in her voice as they took their winter boots off in the vestibule foyer before entering the main room. A bit of vanity was definitely justified; she had spent much of her extra time in the morning cleaning up the entry foyer and various parts of the temple that Chihiro and Taki would visit.

"You really are something, Morisato! How'd you score this place?" Chihiro commented with a grin, noting the shoe-closet recessed into the side of the foyer. Snow boots off, her coach started ladling out the teasing. "Oh I get it...why you've been so secretive about where you live. I guess I just didn't know that you were a nun. This place is _ancient_...it looks like the temple back in my hometown."

Once inside, Taki and Chihiro both hesitated briefly as they saw the three bronze and gold-gilded Buddha statues in the main-hall. Sensing that Taki was going to launch into a hundred-and-one questions, Belldandy quickly steered the pair to the temple's study room, which from the inside seemed to have been 'tacked on' to the main building as an after-thought.

"This is unbelievable! I can't believe that you live in a temple, sempai!" Taki marveled. "Everything here smells like wood."

"Of course, because it _is_ all wood," Chihiro teased, drawing a giggle from Belldandy. "Here I am living in a cramped little dump of an apartment in the faculty housing building, while you're living in a grand building that could hold a family of ten comfortably. I guess the big girl needs a big house."

"Well, I kind of fell into it, you would say," Belldandy noted. "It definitely wasn't part of the plan, because you know I was living in the Women's Dorm when I first started Chiba Poly."

"Really? Did you have to do laundry too?" Taki asked, completely forgetting that Belldandy had been last year's freshman chore girl. She had to cut the younger girl some slack, because it was obvious that she was thrilled by this visit. Or maybe Taki was nervous because she was going to hang out with the Coach on a social basis for the first time.

"Yep, until I left to come here..."

"You mean up until you got kicked out because some guy came over and snuck in to the dorm to visit you while all your sempai were out partying," Chihiro corrected her with a knowing smile, causing Belldandy to duck-n-blush.

"It wasn't like that!" she pointed out.

"Oh yes it was," Chihiro countered in a singsong voice. "Y'know, I've been wondering about something, Morisato. Tamiya and Ootaki both got a good look at the guy who crashed the dorm the night you got the boot. They said he kissed you, and then you thumped him and sent him on his way. But they also described him as really tall and handsome; lean face, shaggy dark hair with long bangs like a movie actor's, and a kind of rugged look. Is it a coincidence, or doesn't that sound like a description of the guy you introduced me to last spring? A guy who was also really tall, with long hair? You said he had recently arrived from Norway as an exchange student, even though he looked kinda-sorta Japanese to me."

"Well, you see...his family was friends with my Mother's family, and..."

"Y'know what I've been thinking all along? I think they were both the same guy," Chihiro interrupted, raising an expectant eyebrow as Belldandy paused too long in her retort. This was definitely getting on dangerous ground...brain-numbing crash-n-burn ground!

"Oiy oiy hey! We're supposed to be here for a study session, not for a 'grill Belldandy with twenty questions' session," she remonstrated. "It's hard enough having you guys come here as it is, let alone having to get fisted and twisted by all these assumptions about my so-called boyfriend. You know the team...they'll gossip about anything. And Tamiya and Ootaki aren't exactly geniuses. C'mon Coach, Taki...you have no idea how much work it is to clean this place all by myself. We're here to study, remember? How about we start off with some lunch first?"

Taki shot her hand up in the air like a grade schooler. Belldandy smiled back at Chihiro with a cunning grin, knowing that she had skillfully forestalled any further discussion about her 'lover' from her Coach. Funny how it was that Chihiro had jumped down Taki's throat the other day after practice for grilling her about her love life...and then as soon as she was in the door, her admirable Coach started pestering her about Keiichi and offering hack opinions!

Typical Coach Chihiro move.

She conducted them to the dining room and moments later returned with the pork tonkatsu and three bowls of soba to wash it down. The light conversation during lunch was a welcome relief, as Taki and Chihiro made general observations about the temple and engaged in leisurely discussions about the new PM's economic policies. Calm...relaxing...until midway through the meal, she heard a scampering outside the temple hallway, followed by the tell-tale creakings of the veranda and a side door opening with a snapping "Bang!"

Shit! she thought as a few seconds later, Furo scampered around the corner and into the main hall.

"EIYAAAIKES!!!" Chihiro and Taki both screamed in perfect shriek-pitch. In tandem, they both jumped away from the kosatsu so quickly they tipped the heated table on its side.

"Morisato, wh..wh..wha..what the _fucking hell_ is a tiger doing in your house?" Chihiro stammered as she frantically backed up against the cornering wall of the dining room, knocking down a shelf and a picture scroll in an attempt to 'melt' herself flat against the wall. Her Coach's eyes were glazed with terror, and she was white-knuckled and spazzing.

"Kitty kitty. Be a nice kitty and go away. Kitty go bye-bye?" Taki babbled in a squeaky-fear voice. She had somehow dashed into the adjacent kitchen and had leapt up on the antique rice-boiling stove. Crouched to compactness on the stove and brandishing a frying pan, Taki was shaking from head-to-toe. Belldandy immediately worried that Furo might sense the two women as a threat...

"Furo! Get back here, dammit!" another voice called. "You were supposed to stay outside this afternoon while Belldandy had her visitors!"

Keiichi.

Chihiro seemed to shed her terror for a split-second, enough to dart an "Oh Ho!" astonished glance at Belldandy. She mumbled "Belldandy?" in a suspicious voice. Keiichi had called her by her first name, indicative of a significant degree of intimacy. Married couple-level intimacy, in many cases. Belldandy felt her hands clenching into fists as the disaster of disasters unfolded right in front of the two people she definitely didn't want to be caught up in the havoc.

Just as this happened, Keiichi sprinted around the corner in such haste, he almost spun-out and face-crashed against the freshly-waxed slick wooden floor. Deftly extending a hand outwards to prevent a wipe-out and shift-recover his balance while he was running, he quickly hauled up behind Furo as the Siberian Tiger cautiously advanced on the dining room and its occupants.

"What the hell, Morisato!!! Don't just stand there like an airhead! Tell him away from that big cat, Morisato! What does he think he's doing? That's a dangerous animal, probably escaped from the zoo! Tigers _maul_ people just for kicks!" Chihiro hissed in a panic, back-slapping the wall to accent her words. As Furo walked up to the overspilled kosatsu, Taki screamed and dropped the frying pan she had been holding, which made a loud "clang" as it banged on the stove and then the floor. Furo was startled by the sound, and he widened his stance and arched his back, fur bristling with feline threat-intentions.

"Whoa! Easy boy!" Keiichi shouted as he closed the distance and reached up to stroke Furo's head and powerful neck. Unlike all other tigers, Siberians have a semi-thick mane around their neck, nowhere near as pronounced as the African lion's, but extensive enough to swell up when the tiger feels threatened. Keiichi carefully grabbed the scruff of Furo's neck, his fingers probing through the deep fur to massage the taunt muscles, speaking to the tiger in a low voice as he massaged the tension away. Belldandy completely forgot that Keiichi was mortal in that moment, as he seemed to have an extraordinary rapport with Furo, man to beast.

"Waaah! Your boyfriend is an animal whisperer! Make him tell the big kitty to go away!" Taki exclaimed, finally catching her breath long enough to speak, gasping because she had been hyperventilating.

"He's not my boyfriend!" Belldandy interjected.

"Belldandy, this is completely your fault," Keiichi stated bluntly. "I've warned you over and over again about feeding Furo leftovers. But you did it again, giving him a full bowl of tonkatsu from the dinner I made last night. That's why he nearly busted down the side door just now so he could come in. He smelled the food and his animal instincts took over. I knew that locking him outside in the snow was a bad idea, even if he's used to Siberian winters!"

"What do you mean, 'this is my fault'?" Belldandy countered angrily. "_You're_ the one who gave him to me in the first place! 'Here...Merry Christmas, Belldandy' you said. He's your responsibility too! How could you blow it like this? Everything I had planned today...Gods, it was so simple. All I asked you to do was to keep him outside while Coach and Taki were here. All you had to do was keep an eye on him. You couldn't even do that, you idiot! Why didn't you think ahead and get him a bowl of his own, so he wouldn't come barging in here like this!"

"Yeah, like try telling that to the 175kg tiger!" Keiichi argued back. "And excuse me for not knowing everything, or being willing to stand outside with him in the minus 10 degree Celsius weather! Unlike Furo, I wasn't born with a fur coat! I used to know everything, but now that I'm mortal...you know that I...er...now that I'm here, uh..."

Belldandy thonked herself on the forehead to express her deep frustration, just as Keiichi noticed the two houseguests.

"Coach Chihiro and Ms. Taki, I presume?" he announced in greeting, bowing briefly to each woman in turn. The two could only gawk at him, Chihiro with amazement and Taki with fangirlish admiration.

"Charmed to meet you both, despite the awkward circumstances. Please don't worry about Furo; he's a domesticated household pet. I just told him that you're both friends, so you need'nt worry that he'll be wary and aggressive around you in the future. He's actually quite tame once he becomes familiar with you, unlike Belldandy. Speaking of which, please excuse her as well. Belldandy often makes unreasonable requests, and this was one of those times...as you can see by the results. She's been quite touchy the past few weeks. I would venture that she has been in an emotional convalescence of sorts, because her pride was somehow wounded. But obviously her recuperation has not been long enough to recover her senses, I might add. She has the potential to be quite contentious and argumentative when things don't go her way," Keiichi explained to her friends with the polite civility one might expect from a politician.

"WH..WHAT!?" Belldandy shouted. She couldn't believe what she had just heard. She was so distraught at hearing this, she wanted to tear his head off. What made it worse was that he was saying all this shit with total naifness. So now she was suffering embarrassment by imbecility, because Keiichi didn't know any better. Instead of whacking him verbally, she heard her foot angrily tapping against the wooden floor, involuntarily. Who the hell was he to be telling them about her pride, anyway?

Furo was standing rigidly against Keiichi, his large head moving back and forth as he alternated his regard between him and her, clearly confused as his two masters seemed irritated at each other. Keiichi walked up to the upturned kosatsu and fetched the bowls, Furo heeling alongside him. Chihiro and Taki were still white-faced despite Keiichi's assurances, and didn't twitch an inch as they held their breath. Keiichi led Furo a safe distance away from the dining room and set down the remaining food bowls in the hallway.

Scrunched in the corner behind her, Chihiro breathed a deep gasp and seemingly unhitched her tension as the tiger focused his feline ambitions on the lunches instead of them. But Taki remained on the stone and iron stove, rigid as a statue.

Several moments of agonizing silence passed. Not knowing what else to do, Belldandy righted the kosatsu and dumped herself down on a cushion next to it, motioning Chihiro and Taki to join her. Her thoughts were a whirl of resentment spiced with resignation; this afternoon was completely smeared with awkwardness and inexpedience. Neither of her friends made a move to join her until Keiichi led Furo away and back out the door.

"Hmmm, they certainly argue like a couple, don't you think, Taki?" Chihiro observed casually as Taki finally climbed down from the stove.

Chihiro's quip didn't help matters any. Everything was spiraling way out of her control. Emotionally, Belldandy was flailing like a child who had fallen into a swimming pool...unable to find a ledge to grab onto and sink-bobbing under the water as a result. Only this pool was filled with electrical eels. Like most people who are drowning in a pool swarming with electrical eels charged with bolts of embarrassment, she screamed for help. But not knowing who could help her, her scream was one of blame...

"Baka!" Belldandy snapped at Keiichi, her furor leaping away from her tongue as soon as he returned from dealing with Furo. He was the last person in the world she wanted to see at the moment.

"Why do I put up with you? You should have just stayed back in China and..."

Before she could even finish her outburst, Belldandy was appalled by what she was saying and realized that she had blown it. It was too late. "Shit!" she cursed under her breath as she realized the enormity of what she had just said. Granted, her adrenaline and nervousness had combined and then skyrocketed, pushing her into a state of near-shock, just like the time when she busted up her hand. But it all got twisted, and they had jet-swayed in reverse, plunging her inwards into a chaotic abyss of a situation during the past few minutes.

Keiichi's reaction to her pyrotechnic words of resentment was immediate...and scary. His face instantly shadowed with sorrowful eyes. Even Chihiro and Taki, despite being freaked out by seeing Furo, had stunned expressions brought on by her vehement rebuke of Keiichi.

Haunted by his expression, Belldandy felt as if she had tried to kick him in the nuts and instead had stabbed him in the heart. She wanted to turn away, because her sense of drowning was quickly shattered by her blunder-blast accusation. This whole mess was suffocating her to the point where she felt like she was choking. She couldn't even look at him, because every time she did, she felt completely engulfed by the depths of despair manifesting in his downcast demeanor.

Words can be fatally wounding...and sometimes, an entire lifetime's compass of words and thoughts can be borne expression in another's eyes in just a few seconds.

Fugue-like, Keiichi's eyes conveyed a torrent of emotions. Confusion, disappointment, betrayal, fear, resentment, confliction, apologence, naifness...but mostly heartbreak. Belldandy didn't mean it to be this way, but this time she knew she had completely fucked up. Keiichi had often said stupid things because he was wired that way: a God who was blatantly ignorant of her and her feelings. But he had never said anything to her out of vindictiveness. Glumly, she acknowledged that any nonsense Keiichi had ever said fell far short of what she had just blurted out in the heat of the moment. She felt so idiotic and mentally club-footed, she could only recant her ill-speech with a look of shamed apology.

"God, what have I done? This is the worst! No, this is worse than worse!" she thought. Worsened by extremes, because of how his earnest reaction had immediately avalanched into an abject rift of despondency. It was written on the skin of his soul for her to see...and there could be no doubt in her heart, nor in all of Thera. She knew beyond question that Keiichi truly loved her with the furthest reaches of his soul, even if he didn't know how to say it or express it romantically. It was in his eyes; the look of someone whose hopes had just been rent into tiny pieces.

Why did she have to discover the depths of his feelings this way? Wasn't love supposed to be a journey of pleasant awakenings and romantic glissandos of charm?

She realized that this wasn't about Chihiro or Taki. This was about she and him.

"Keiichi, I..I'm sorry I said that! I..I didn't mean it. You know how I feel about you," she stammered as she finally found her words.

"Then say it. Say it aloud, in front of your friends. Tell them how you really feel about me," he challenged her. Now he was angry, his shocked response to her stupidly-said words suddenly turning into seething uneasiness. "You can't keep hiding from yourself, pretending that what is, isn't. That what is supposed to be...won't be. My memories are incomplete...I've forgotten much of what has passed between us...but I'll always remember what you said in Beijing about our future together. You said that there is no randomness in the schema of our lives, because we shared a special feeling. Just between the two of us. A unique emotional bond that can survive whatever happens tomorrow. 'Good or bad; this moment is a treasure,' you said to me. Was that just some frivolous poetic words, or did you really mean it?"

"Keiichi, you damned well know that I _did_ mean it. What I said...I meant every word of it," Belldandy protested defensively, totally uncomfortable about having this discussion in front of her friends. It was clear to her that Keiichi didn't care if he opened up this nest of vipers. He was going for the jugular...and she couldn't blame him. He was deeply hurt and rejected. Haplessly, she looked at Chihiro and Taki and muttered an apology.

"Uh...guys. I think..heh heh..that we should be going now," Taki interrupted feebly, catching her unspoken plea. "This is clearly something that the Coach and I should leave to the two of you..."

"NO!!!" Chihiro snarled back. "I'm her coach, and she needs coaching right now! I'm not going to skip out on her, especially after all this and the tiger too. This may be the most important volley of her life, and I'm not going to let her bungle it! The ball's in her court..."

"Huh?" Taki interjected, completely confused.

Belldandy was confused by Chihiro's icy vehemence as well. She was struck by the fact that Taki was overwrought by this whole scenario and simply wanted to escape, while Chihiro seemed to be completely cool-jerk sensible. Chihiro glanced at Keiichi and then back at her, communicating an unknowable message in her eyes. Her eyes widened in recognition at that single glance her Coach had given her.

Chihiro had revealed an emotional doorway she didn't know existed.

"No. No, Keiichi...I'm not going to say it. _You_ need to be the man, for once! Get over it already, and stop putting everything on me," Belldandy replied, putting her hands on her hips as she stood up from the kosatsu to face him down. Enough was enough!

"I already made my feelings very clear to you last summer, but you haven't said a thing ever since. Keiichi, you accuse me of playing it safe, of hiding away. But _you've_ been the one who has failed to make any effort. You've played it safe....and left me hanging, waiting to see if you'd changed. Keiichi, I've never once heard you say how you feel about me! Oh...I've heard it up to here about wishes, Gods and Demons, powers and miracles...all sorts of your usual mumble-jumble metaphysical bullshit. Never what's in your heart. But I had the guts to tell you what was in my heart. And what did you do? _You disappeared on me!_ What possessed you to simply run away when I shared my feelings with you in Beijing? Didn't you tell me that I was the prettiest star in the heavens? Or was that just some line you read out of a dating book or some shounen manga..."

"Be...be...because..." he stammered, suddenly ill-defended and wordless.

"Yes, we're all listening," Chihiro intervened, so intense with emotion Belldandy could imagine herself being soaked with the furious heat emanating from her Coach. This was just like how it was during games where Chihiro seemed to have a distinctive 'battle aura'; which at the moment was cranked up to solar-flare intensity. Even Furo seemed to sense it, cautiously stepping a couple paces back away from their group.

"How am I supposed to admit to an emotional eloquence that I am unaware of? I try to listen to the words folded within my heart, but I only hear a silence pregnant with insoluble depths. Because of this unintelligibility, I'm quite uncertain that you could even understand what I am saying. Why doesn't anything make sense? Friendship and virtue, affection and morality...are these freedoms? Or are they the most subtlest chains upon one's individuality? I know that love is work, but how do I accomplish the 'work' involved in love when I don't have the tools to do so? Someone told me that love begins with delight, becomes intertwined with pain, and through this union becomes capable of bearing the ripeness of a permanent companionship. Love is founded upon hope. Belldandy, I left you in Beijing because I wanted to bear the desire for such a hope...a desire to be with you...rather than experiencing the peace of feeling it no longer. Despite this, I still felt empty and alone. Never more alone than when I was in China; the only hope that fueled my ambition was the want to see you just one more time. Now that I am here, I am rejected by you..."

Belldandy shook her head. "No, no, no. I didn't reject you. Get out of your head with that crap and face the truth, Keiichi," she interrupted.

"How could I not reject myself?" he continued. "Of what worth are my feelings towards you now? I feel that your presence in my life is indispensable, despite my inability to act upon it. If I could lay down my liberty just to cherish you as one would cherish his beloved, I would do so before drawing my next breath. Blindfolded as I am by my mortality, I would do even this for you. To me, Belldandy...your beauty is not reliant upon the degree of how much I desire you to be part of my life. It simple _is_. I don't know what else to say, because no means exist by which I could tell you that I love you. Except to...say that..I..think ..I..love..you. And hope that you understand what I'm attempting to say, even if I don't fully know the meaning of those words. Perhaps my actions could bear more truth than my words. All I know is that my heart feels uncomfortable and heavy when you are not around."

In the silence that waked upon those words, Belldandy noticed that she was blinking back tears, because she knew that Keiichi was trying, trying to do the best he could; affording her the best answer possible in his roundabout way.

"Do you really want to know what happened in Beijing? Because now, for some reason, I can remember. You want an explanation of why I ran out on you back then?" Keiichi challenged, defiance in his voice. "The Almighty came to me, and told me that you were going to _die in the next 24 hours_. He informed me that the entire universe was going to flame out in a short breath of time because of some inexplicable plague of evil. Once I learned this, I decided to see you for one last time, despite my better judgment. And when I met up with you, you talked about sharing precious moments...and I collapsed on the inside. I felt myself disappearing into many small pieces, each one sparkling with a lifetime of pain and regret. There was no turning back. But I just had to see you one more time...and it was too painful..."

Heartbeats rapidly booming in her ears, the implication of what Keiichi had just revealed burst through the mix of shame and anger she was feeling. Impossibly, Keiichi had just claimed an utterly incomprehensible grotesquerie that she could have never anticipated or even expected. He had said that she was supposed to _die_ in Beijing! Channeled alongside this revelation was a shocking intuitive leap of her own. Her mind glimpsed a possibility that he was telling the truth...and couched within that truth was another truth.

_Keiichi had given up his Divinity...his immortality...to save my life._

"Oh my God..." she heard Chihiro and Taki both gasp, echoing her own thoughts. The moment of clarity flashed between the seconds; she could feel her ponytail sweat-damped against the nape of her neck as her focus reasserted itself back into her body.

"This is what I experienced, Belldandy. And yes, Chihiro and Taki, I was once a God," he continued. "But even as a God, I discovered that love is incomprehensible, an impossibility. Now that I am a mortal, the closer I try to approach it, the further it flees from me. I've learned that love just isn't what it seems, because it serves merely as an emotional container for the essence of another being. One doesn't drink a cup of tea and then gives praise to the container because the tea tastes good. One offers praise to the tea. Saying 'I love you' to Belldandy is meaningless, because it doesn't express what is inside of me, what is my essence of being. I can try, but all that I would really be saying is that I love Love. Love is impossible to experience, impossible to explain, impossible to communicate. But I know this truth, which resides in the deepmost part of me. It is not Love that I am seeking. It's you, Belldandy. You are the difference. You tell me to deny my very nature, the Divine life that I once lived...and yet you want me to be myself. But I cannot force myself to do so. I can only be who I am. Not who I think I am, or even who you think I am. Even when I didn't know myself, I struggled to return here. Not because this is a temple, but because I cannot be myself around you unless I'm complete. And in a very important and mysterious way, you complete me," he explained.

Belldandy half-heard Taki's gasp as Keiichi finished. Standing next to the kosatsu, her knees had turned to water; her whole body paralyzed by the emotions that gripped her. Keiichi didn't just tell her how he felt about her...he had poured out his kokoro to her. She slowly fell backwards onto the floor, unable to keep her footing. She had never heard him speak like this. She had never heard _anyone_ speak like this. His words had blown her socks off, as if she had been zagged by a lightning strike from above. She looked towards Chihiro for some kind of reassurance, because she felt like she was floating away; but all that Chihiro could do was nod her head up-and-down slightly.

Keiichi walked over and gently pulled her up to her feet. She was so dizzy, she needed his physical guidance just to stand up. An index of heart-love and nothing more, Belldandy felt like a bunraku puppet; completely motionless without the efforts of the puppeteer. Exhausted, her face flushed hotly as she expected him to kiss her passionately. Right now, she didn't even care if it was in front of her Coach and teammate. But instead of kissing her, Keiichi simply held her closely in his embrace...she could feel the heat of his body as he shuddered with fire-flung emotions.

It wasn't lust, it wasn't passion...it was something deeper that couldn't be communicated in a kiss. She leaned into his embrace and just let go of everything, resting against him and letting all of the pain and confusion go away, distinctly sensing that Keiichi was drawing it out of her and getting rid of it, healing her heart. They stayed that way for a couple minutes until she heard someone clear their throat.

"Sounds like a confession to me, Morisato," Chihiro finally spoke up in a near whisper. "Confusing as hell, but that just seems to be his way."

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

During the following Sunday's study get-together, Keiichi had promised not to disturb them except to bring them lunch at 2pm. Chihiro had made friends with Furo, and was currently running through the hallways like a tweeny girl, playing fetch with the big cat by kicking volleyballs all over the place.

"Phoooph!!!"

Scratch another volleyball, victim of claws and jaws.

At least someone was having fun.

She and Taki certainly weren't. Belldandy was thinking of moving up the lunch hour to 1pm because Taki was struggling with a particularly difficult proof. Belldandy was amused by Taki's fit of facial gyrations...a geometry of frustrations that paraded upon her pixieish face as she struggled with her math. Of course, her math assignment was way beyond anything either she or Chihiro's could begin to comprehend, so no help there. Besides, when she wasn't goofing with Furo, Chihiro had her nose in a playbook, busily sketching up offenses for next week's two matches. After Taki crumbled and tossed her third unsuccessful attempt at a solution, Belldandy decided that the air in the study room was tanked. Things were getting a little too stressful, so she shouted out Keiichi to grab them some munchies from the kitchen.

Returning with a bag of potato chips and some dip, Keiichi listened attentively as Taki whined about the impasse she was dealing with. It was clear to Belldandy that the young freshman's intellectual inkwell had certainly run dry.

"Perhaps you could show me where you are facing difficulties. Maybe a fresh perspective might be helpful," he offered, settling down on a cushion in a seiza tailor-style position next to her, hands on his knees and feet tucked underneath him. Belldandy looked out of the corner of her eye and noticed that Taki was totally fidgeting due to Keiichi's proximity to her as he leaned over her shoulder and looked at her textbook. Understanding personal space was still an unknown factor to her newly-won boyfriend, as she was the only person he saw every day. Obviously, Keiichi needed to learn to respect people's personal spaces, especially around the opposite sex. It also didn't help that Taki was a social retard because of her southern island upbringing. Consequently, Taki was squirmy around guys...which seemed pretty amazing considering that she had been forced by circumstances to play v-ball on the boy's teams back home because there were no girl's squads.

She sighed, resigned to the fact that she'd have to dispense with tonight's TV drama and try to give Keiichi another lesson in mortal etiquette. This was proving to be a bit difficult because she was working on her own agenda: trying to bridge the physical gap between them. Keiichi was as screwtight as the proverbial virginal "mama's boy"; too tentative to get more physical than just kissing. She wanted more of his touch, but each night she had to reluctantly yield to frustration. He was too inexperienced. But maybe she could win both ways. Hopefully he wouldn't be too confused.

Great. Now that she finally had a real boyfriend, she couldn't enjoy the passion of getting into the zone with him. Instead, tonight would probably be another session of confusion and double messages. She certainly didn't want to do any H with him yet...that was a scary thought in and of itself. But she wanted to feel his skin against hers...

"It's this one. I just don't understand how to make it work," Taki pointed out. Belldandy was grateful that the younger girl had interrupted her mental wanderings, as she was delving into some pretty graphic emotional territory. Could Keiichi be setting off her hormones in some weird way, causing her to get snared in lustful thoughts? She watched Taki start tapping a gobble-wobble set of symbols and letters in her math textbook with her mechanical pencil. Symbols that Belldandy didn't even recognize.

"Really? This is actually pretty simple. You use this to create an integration, then apply this semimartingale as a real process like so. You see? Then do it like this, and the covariant probabilities thus index across this array of continuity, which reduces to these particular integrals. You can also convert from integration to differentiation doing this and this. Do you follow?" Keiichi said as he quickly penciled out a solution in less than a minute, as if he was playing tic-tac-toe.

"N..no way!" Taki blurted out. It had all sounded like math gobbledygook to her, but Taki was impressed. Well, impressed seemed to be an understatement…the younger girl was wide-eyed with discomfort. "That's impossible! Y..you just glanced at it! How could you just look at the problem I've been studying for an hour and whip up a solution just like that?"

"Is that what I did? I'm sorry," Keiichi hastily apologized. "I didn't know that I was supposed to do that."

"Belldandy-sempai, how could your boyfriend do something like this and yet not be in any college? I'm beginning to think that all that stuff he said last week about being a God or something is true. Or perhaps he's the God of Mathematics, in this case! Why isn't he in a university?" Taki asked. "Yeeks! I'm going to have to show this to my professor. This is wicked crazy! I don't know how he solved it, but he seems to have solved it. By the way..hmm..didn't you say that he was in school last year for a few weeks? Did he take any math classes then?"

Belldandy remembered those few weeks in sequences: embarrassment in the classroom, embarrassment on the court, embarrassment in front of her Coach...a whole woodshed of logs for Ootaki and Tamiya to light under her ass so that they could laugh at her while she roasted in disgusted dubiety, ever-fearful of Keiichi's inevitable next blunder...

Keiichi and Chiba Poly just didn't mix.

"This majorly blows! I studied my ass off this week and I still ended up getting stuck on that problem for an hour. Then he solves it for me at a single glance, and makes it look easy in the process. He finished it as if it was a simple algebra problem, like dividing fractions or something that even stupid people could do," Taki complained. Belldandy scowled at the comparison, remembering how she herself had struggled with fractions in grade school and junior high.

Chihiro started clapping and chipped in with "Way to go Taki! Now you're starting to talk like one of us!" which earned giggles from Belldandy and playful chuffs and whortles from Furo. Of course, Keiichi regarded the three of them and Furo with a mystified expression, completely clueless about what had just transpired.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

The following Monday afternoon, Taki's math professor showed up at the team's practice and demanded to talk to Taki, pissing off Chihiro with his inscrutable insistence. Chihiro made him wait, and then she and the Prof escorted Taki out of the gym during a ten-minute break. A few minutes later, the three of them returned and walked right over to her, the Prof with a supremely solemn expression that hinted at a forthcoming major-league scolding.

Belldandy listened as the Math Prof ranted on about cheating, and sternly groused about how it was not appropriate for someone else to do Taki's homework. She had a sense that the old professor was looking at Taki with a pettish sort of orientation, because his resentment seemed to have a possessive edge to it. Taki must be his prize student, she thought. He went on to explain that Keiichi's 'assist' to solve Taki's assignment had reconciled an Ito integral, a Stratononivich integral and a Riemann integral using a calculus of differentiation.

Whatever those were.

But the kicker was that the Prof asserted that such a solution was impossible, and that he wanted to meet Keiichi as soon as possible, because this was either a freakish accident or a potentially significant breakthrough in engineering process and probability math; one that had stumped the best mathematicians for over sixty years. Gulping down her surprise at this, Belldandy nixed the meeting for fears of Keiichi becoming even more unbalanced by the sudden attention on his 'God' abilities. Taki half-believed he had been a God, but Chihiro was almost certainly convinced of his former Divine abilities. Having two people so close to knowing the truth about Keiichi was almost more than she could handle. She decided to have a long discussion with Chihiro and Taki next weekend during their weekly hangout meeting about how to handle this new development.

The following weekend, when Taki demanded that Keiichi replicate his 'feat' during their study session, he couldn't. The young frosh girl nearly had a meltdown, she was so disappointed and angry.

"What am I supposed to do?" Keiichi asked, completely distraught by his inability to solve the same problem twice. Taki was highly irritated, assuming that Keiichi was fucking with her. But Belldandy was worried for another reason. Up until now, Keiichi had demonstrated almost no special charms and quarks of any kind that were throwbacks to his life as a God. She had hoped that last weekend's little act of genius might herald his possible return to 'normal', whatever that was. Normal in the sense of having some semblance of the super-human abilities he possessed when he was 'God' Keiichi.

Now she fretted that his memory loss could be worsening. She didn't want to think negatively, but fearful images of a mentally diminished, senile Keiichi kept creeping into her thoughts. Flowers for Algernon and all that. But one possible explanation was that his memory was fractured to the point where he only could have intermittent recall of his "God's level" intelligence. Perhaps his memory of 'higher' things was outside of his control, showing up randomly like someone winning at the slot machines or pachinko. She prayed silently that he wasn't regressing like an Alzheimer's sufferer.

"I think we should try and get you enrolled in Chiba Poly, or a university," Chihiro stated bluntly as they discussed his inconsistency and confusion. Belldandy almost spurged the coffee she was sipping.

"Hey, I'm serious!" Chihiro continued. "Think about this for a minute, Keiichi. You've already been to school at Chiba Poly for a few weeks, so you know the campus and the student scene there. Morisato is campus royalty, so none of the guys will fuck with you as long as you hang with her. You can be her campus sweetheart! Taki thinks you're definitely college material, which is pretty whacked considering that she's just a frosh herself. Well, maybe not so out there. I gotta admit, Taki's a genius girl, and she might be onto something. Besides, I think that you're rusty. Assuming that you really were some kind of God-like being in the past, doesn't it make sense that you need to get those brain cells energized? Remember...if you don't use 'em, you lose 'em. Just like power serves in volleyball need to be constantly practiced so the skill can be maintained. Y'know, what I think is that you need to find your groove again! Do that, and then perhaps some of it'll come back to you."

"Whoaaaa! Waitaminute!" Belldandy protested, as a million reasons why it would be an utter disaster for Keiichi to attend Chiba Poly flowed through her head. The 'campus sweetheart' comment also ribbed her sorely; she had a rep to maintain at school and she didn't need an inept Keiichi pulling spazz moves to make her look stupid in front of her classmates, even if he was her 'official' boyfriend now. A couple weeks with him accompanying her to Chiba Poly last year had turned out to be a train-wreck. How could she survive a _whole school year_ going to college with him? She went on to explain a few issues, such as Keiichi's lack of social experience and his recent bouts of amnesia. Of course, there was a major issue that would have to dealt with as well.

It cost money to go to Chiba Poly.

"Well, so much for that idea," Taki noted glumly as the spectre of financial challenges cast a gloomy pall over the excitement of their sudden "Let's get Keiichi into Chiba" brain-storming.

"Why does it take money to obtain an education that could aid one in their future endeavors?" Keiichi asked, earning a snorting chuckle from all three women. "I don't understand the economic mechanisms that are common here in Japan. It seems that financial mechanisms are established as a constraint, with the primary goal of disenfranchising people. Money seems to separate them from opportunities instead of creating opportunities for them. People are in debt before they can even earn money...and without money, people are denied opportunities or education that could make it possible for them to resolve some of their debt. Likewise, how could college itself be meaningful? When I was at Chiba Poly, I observed that a number of students were cheating on exams. Doesn't this invalidate the assessment potential that seems purposefully integrated into your education system? The entire system seems oppressive and cyclical, the product of a backwards-thinking species."

"He sounds like he's from outer space or something," Taki chipped in.

"Nah. He's from the land of baka," Belldandy replied, trying to draw humor out of the tension and yet relieved that Keiichi had lapsed somewhat into his 'God' persona, if only briefly.

"Belldandy, taking all of this into account...how could I possibly afford to go to college? With you?" Keiichi asked. Belldandy didn't miss the subtext of his question. He didn't see college only as an opportunity or a chance to recharge his brain cells, as Chihiro had put it. Rather, he had strongly associated going to school as an opportunity to become even more involved with her life. She could understand this, because school was that part of her daily life that was currently outside of his experience. There were over 120 universities in Tokyo, and he wasn't even contemplating the possibility of going to any other school.

He wanted to go to college so he could be closer to her. She recognized that in his own way, he was asking if he could take their relationship a step further...

She felt a sudden flush of embarrassment, because this conversation felt eerily like a discussion between high-school sweethearts who were weighing the decision of whether or not they should attend the same university after graduation.

There was also a reluctance on her part to have Keiichi become part of a 'private' portion of her life. She didn't want to sacrifice her student life, because it was an enriching social outlet as well as stimulating and fun. Having Keiichi in school with her would change all of that, drastically.

"I don't have a job, I have no money accumulated. I lack any skills that would accommodate me towards a decent living standard, and I can't even trust my memory. Once again, I would just be a burden to someone, because I cannot pay my own way. I hate being so useless!" Keiichi exclaimed bitterly. "I might as well give it up, because if I cannot support myself...how could I help support Belldandy in the future."

Belldandy's gasp was echoed twice in the cozy study room as Keiichi slid the shoji door open and silently stalked off in a funk. She, Taki and Chihiro simply stared at each other for a couple minutes, trying to let that one sink in, with all of its implications. Suddenly, Chihiro slapped her playbook down on the floor, her face brightening.

"Keiichi! I want you to come to practice tomorrow to...er, watch Morisato play," Chihiro shouted at the empty door, calling after him. Belldandy shot Chihiro a look of disgust, remembering the fiasco that had unfolded the last time Keiichi had attended one of their team's practices. Tamiya, Ootaki and her teammates had delivered a beatdown of teasing, and a few days later Chihiro had completely blown a gasket and almost kicked her off the team.

Unexpectedly, Keiichi turned on his heels and returned.

"I'm honored that you would invite me to watch your team during their rehearsal, Ms. Chihiro," Keiichi noted. Belldandy choked a gulping breath, embarrassed again at his choice of words to describe the team's drill and scrimmage session. To Keiichi, volleyball practice was probably the same as staging a scene in a Shakespearean play.

As Taki giggled, she realized that this was going to be much much worse than before! At least before, Keiichi was a God who was an ignoramus. Now, he was just an ignoramus with memory holes instead of common sense.

This was fucked up, like pouring gasoline on a fire and expecting it to perform wonders. Unexpectedly, Coach Chihiro stood up and rummaged through the study room's closet. Belldandy wondered what she was up to. A moment later, Chihiro found what she was looking for and turned towards Keiichi.

"Hey Keiichi? What do you think about basketball?" Chihiro asked in a casual voice as she threw the ball against his chest. He easily caught the green-and-red ball and then looked at her Coach questioningly. He started turning it around in his hand, examining the patterns on it. He regarded the ball, her Coach...and then looked at her with an expression of apt confusion. His usual "I don't have a clue" look.

"But isn't this a volleyball?" he noted as he held it out in front of him like an archeologist holding a freshly uncovered vase.

The howls of laughter poured out of her long after her ribs were hurting...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

THERA, TOKYO BAYFRONT DISTRICT -- SUMMER 2016:

"Waaah! This is so cool!" Kinosh'ta marveled once they were inside their dorm room at the new Olympic Village. She did a quick twirl in the middle of the room, letting her arms swing free; a girlish weather vane of excitement. The crisp smell of newly-minted carpet filled the room with a too-artificial odor, and Belldandy quickly went to the sliding glass doors and opened them up to let the sounds and smells of Tokyo waft in. Living in the wooden temple for the past eight years had contributed to her aversion to places that seemed too artificial.

"Yeah, it's totally the cool wave, isn't it?" Belldandy replied with a wide smile. Kenji, Kinosh'ta's husband, lumbered into the room with their two suitcases and then kissed Kinosh'ta on the lips. Nodding to both of them, he jokingly chided them not to throw any large objects off the terrace and left. Belldandy knew that Keiichi would be along shortly; at the moment he was at a meeting that "couldn't be skipped out of."

"Who would have thought that we would be here, in Tokyo, eight years after we first met...to play in another Olympics?" Kinosh'ta marveled with a sigh as she walked out onto the terrace. Thanks to Chihiro, Takahashi, and Kasai-sensei, she and the others in the Women's V-ball team had been given the most primo rooms the Olympic Village had to offer: the top floor rooms facing the stadium, the Bayfront district, and downtown Tokyo.

Something heavy banged against the wall from the adjacent dorm room. Ootaki and Tamiya, already romping with loud shouts, clearly audible through the walls. She heard the crash of a breaking lamp, which brought a halt to the rampaging next door. Two minutes in their room and her two sempai had already broken something...

"Lucky you, Osaka girl!" Belldandy teased. "You didn't have to live nearby, thirty km from here where all the action was going on. Kinosh'ta, you have no idea how many times Keiichi and I drove by here just to see the building progress over the past five years. We were here for the ground-breaking of the stadium and the Olympic Village. I swear, we must have paid half the tolls that the Aqua Blue Bridge-Tunnel collected over the past few years! But anyway..hey..you gotta admit, this is really something, isn't it?"

"Yeah, knowing you, you took the Aqua Blue just to stopover at the shopping mall. You know, the one that's at the end of the bridge just before the tunnel under the bay," Kinosh'ta commented.

"Yep!" Belldandy said brightly. "And I made Keiichi carry the bags too!"

Amidst the forest of skyscrapers and the winnowing sheen of Tokyo's oceanic bay, Belldandy and Kinosh'ta had a picturesque view of much of the 'Musubi Cluster' located at the apex of the Olympic Venue. Unlike Beijing-Capital, Tokyo was so densely congested that the municipal government simply didn't have the option of tearing down large tracts of urban land to create a unified venue. Instead, they had used several of the artificial islands in the central waterfront district for the new stadium and the other new venues, while creating several satellite 'clusters' using existing and new facilities for other sports. In another section of Tokyo, the 1964 Olympic complex had been completely renovated and would host a large number of events itself. The volleyball tournament would be held at the new arenadium located next to Yoyogi Stadium in yet another assemblage of venues, the 'Yoyogi Cluster', adjacent to Yoyogi Park in Shibuya.

From their room's terrace, they could see the illuminated Rainbow Bridge to the left, and directly in front of them was the massive Olympic Stadium, called the Rainbow Flight Stadium or the "Musu". The largest stadium on Thera, the most casual description was that it looked like a UFO had landed in Tokyo. The centerpiece of dozens of documentary programs, the Musu stadium was one of the most beautiful man-made buildings on Thera. Five years and over a trillion yen were invested in its construction.

275,000 spectators would fill it tomorrow for the Opening Ceremonies.

"Hey guys!"

Belldandy and Kinosh'ta turned as their Coach, Chihiro, walked into the room and then knocked on the door. An old private joke from the 2012 Games. During the London Games, Chihiro had forgotten to knock and had walked in their dorm room at the Olympic village, catching her and Keiichi in the middle of some sexy moves.

Seeing her long-time Coach brought back the memories. True to her word, Chihiro had coached their team to Olympic Gold in London, where they cremated every competing squad in their pursuit of a second team Gold Medal, without losing a single set along the way. By then, Chihiro's hair was just beginning to gray prematurely, remaining black but with a slightly gray-silver sheen of streaky colors. Their Coach had decided to keep the look rather than dye it, jokingly because it gave her the 'witch' appearance that was appropriate for the "Shin Oriental Witches" as their team was unofficially nicknamed outside of Japan and affectionately nicknamed by their countrymen.

Chihiro's husband, Mika, didn't mind the look, of course. She and Chihiro shared another oddball sort of link, because Chihiro's husband Mika was her husband's coach. Chihiro had met Mika at the 2012 Games, where he was the assistant coach of the Russian team. She and Kinosh'ta always privately assumed that Chihiro's attraction to Mika must have been triggered by the hot love-making session she had accidently encountered during the first week of the London Games. After the London Games, Chihiro had gotten mellow-mellow for the next couple months, acting like a teenager at times. But they were amazed at how fast the relationship between their Coach and Mika had progressed. The next year he moved from Moscow to Tokyo to live with her. Mika was soft-spoken, with the most handsome grey-steel Russian blue eyes imaginable...and so fluent in Japanese, one could barely sense his Muscovite accent.

"Where's Mika? Belldandy asked.

"For the love of God, would you trust your husband for once, Morisato?" Chihiro cracked, drawing a chuckle from Kinosh'ta. "You know where my guy is. He's at a meeting with your guy, of course. Why do you think I'm carrying my own luggage, you airheads? If he was around, I wouldn't be carrying anything...would I?"

"The two are doubtlessly plotting something," Kinosh'ta added. "Convenient how they scheduled their meeting to coincide with our arrival at the Village."

"Which means your Kenji is in deep kimchee because you made him come up here with you, Kinosh'ta. Bad Osaka girl," Chihiro commented, the last bit sounding like she was faux scolding her in the sense that one would scold an errant puppy who was trying to eat laundry detergent.

"Hey, don't jack me for marrying a guy who's competing in the Games, copy-cat," Kinosh'ta shot back at Chihiro in a teasing voice. "Besides, I married Kenji _before_ the 2012 Games. Morisato was already hooked up her beau before the 2008 Games in Beijing-Capital..."

"Was not!" Belldandy protested, playfully denying what everyone already knew.

"...which was why they were so hot-n-bothered during the London Games, because it was their 'practice honeymoon' before her and idiot-boy tied the knot in 2013. Which means that you were just dating Mika while the two of us were married, spinster woman," Kinosh'ta finished, playfully tousling Chihiro's hair at the end of her little discourse on 'who-was-with-whom'.

"Hey, don't fuck wit' my hair! I might have to do another 'Phenom Twin' photo shoot! I gotta look good for Osaka," Chihiro teased back, imitating Kinosh'ta's husky voice almost flawlessly.

"Oh, please!" Belldandy interjected. "If you two keep it up, you're going to wind up as pissed in the wind as the Brazilians."

Both Kinosh'ta and Chihiro giggled heartily at the reference, because it dialed up one of their freakiest stunts as a team, ever. While they were slamming through the competition in the 2012 London Games, the coach from the Men's team from Brazil had gotten full of himself and brazenly declared that women's volleyball was only a mere imitation of the sport, insisting it was so because there was no _real competition _in the women's division. His ridiculously cocky attempt to justify why Japan's Women's team was dominating the field so completely had thoroughly unhinged Chihiro.

After the 2012 Games, back at Chiba Poly, Chihiro had put up a magazine picture of the Brazilian coach in her office to use as a dart board...until Kinosh'ta had visited in winter 2012 and threw a knife into the picture, where it still remained several years later. Taki used to remark that the knife scared the shit out of the incoming freshman players, because Chihiro would sometimes threaten to use it on them, Yakuza-style, to cut off their pinkies if they didn't meet a personal goal during practice. Of course, the frosh girls didn't know that it was a typical Chihiro send-up. Oddly enough, one freshman faced with this scenario had broken down and admitted that she hated volleyball, bringing tears of recognition to Taki and Chihiro's eyes; which then resulted in the telling of the tale where Chihiro had threatened to kick Belldandy and her two Chiba Poly sempai off the team. A tale that was practically lore to the girls who played for Chihiro. Now, two years later, that same young frosh girl...Yoko, or "Yoyo"...as she was nicknamed, was playing on their 2016 team as an expert back-row setter.

Amazing what can happen in eight years. Hand-picked by Osaka's Coach Asakura when she retired, Kinosh'ta now coached Osaka University's Women's V-Ball team, where she and Chihiro usually went at it for the National College Championships during the past several years. All three women were married...

And then there was that whole thing with the Brazilians.

This was one of their wildest episodes of all, and it all came down to that one knife-throw by Kinosh'ta. In Jan 2013, Kinosh'ta had been up visiting Chihiro to discuss the National team for that year, and the subject of Brazil came up once again. By then, Belldandy was graduated and was busy with the Kanto Region high school girls' volleyball league...and wedding preparations with Keiichi, of course.

After saying "No one disses us like that!" and adding a chokehold of choice expletives, Kinosh'ta had picked up Chihiro's heirloom hewing knife, the one that her parents had given her as a birthday present in 2009. Kinosh'ta eyed it, and then expertly threw it to lodge in the pic of the Brazilian coach and his team. The four of them...Chihiro, Kinosh'ta, Taki (who was a senior at Chiba Poly) and she...decided that night to issue an unprecedented challenge to the Brazilian Men's squad to come to Japan and play a benefit match for the 2016 Paralympics to be held in Tokyo. A men's versus women's team exhibition.

The Brazilian coach responded a year later by indicating his acceptance on the condition that they went to São Paulo first to play the Men's team in an exhibition match. Which was basically a "fuck you and shut up" move. The Brazilian coach knew that their schedule was tightly regulated and the Japan Amateur V-Ball Association couldn't spring for the bucks to fly them to Brazil. But then Keiichi got involved. Skillfully drawing together a host of promoters, he managed to get the money together to fly them down to Brazil in the fall of 2015, where they played men's and women's teams from a dozen cities and cooked them on their own courts. The "Grande Match" between Japan's Women and Brazil's Men took place in São Paulo, at the Estádio Rua Javari. The "house that Pelé built" as the locals put it, in homage to Brazil's national soccer hero's 'perfect goal' during a game in 1959. Before the game, Belldandy and Keiichi actually had the honor of meeting Pelé at an reception hosted in the Liberdad neighborhood, the Japanese 'city-within-a-city' in São Paulo that was home to the largest community of Japanese descendants outside of Japan.

The "Grande Match" was televised internationally, and was marred by the famous 'chair throwing' incident, where Brazil's coach threw a plastic chair at Belldandy when it became apparent in the fourth set that she and Kinosh'ta had shut down Brazil's offensive attackers by roofing them over and over again. Japan beat them in four sets, in their house. Unlike the friendly Paulistanos with their informality and cheerfully buoyant personalities, the coach from Brazil was a hot-head and mean-spirited nill-wit. Brazilians were outraged at the coach's behavior, but the Brazil IOC would not take action, even after three guys on the team threatened to quit if the coach was retained. Swearing revenge, the Brazilian coach called it "a fluke" and promised to vindicate himself when they played her team this spring in Tokyo.

This March, her team had swept the Brazilian men (who were minus three of their star players) in straight sets in front of a wild crowd at the Budokan Arena, not even allowing the Brazilian team to break 15 points in any of the sets. The volleyball court after the match was completely covered in seat cushions. Throwing the seat cushions was a common practice at the Budokan during sumo basho, especially following hard-fought ozeki and yokozuna bouts or during upsets. But after their crushing defeat of the Brazil men's team, the cushion-throwing had also served as a mocking protest towards the Brazilian coach, who was later 'asked' to resign by his national Olympic committee when it was discovered that certain amounts of bribe money had exchanged hands between corporate sponsors in high places.

In the end, it was a win-win situation for both countries. The Brazilians appointed a famous former Olympian volleyball medalist as their new Men's team coach, a coach that the nation could be proud of. The three star players who had resigned in protest over the old coach were back on Brazil's national team. The corruption got rooted out along with the coach, and Brazil was expected to repeat their Gold Medal performance in Tokyo.

As for she and her teammates, their stock as "Japan's Team" grew greatly over the past several months after what they did to the Brazilians. Winning the Gold Medals in 2008 and 2012 already had assured them immortality as a legendary team, on the same scale as the pioneering 1964 women's team in the minds of their countrymen. But beating what was touted as the best men's national amateur volleyball team in the world...this added a new dimension to their fame. They had become heroines to women all over Japan because through their victory they had championed gender equality in team sports competition to a rarefied degree. They had debunked the long-standing fact/myth that women cannot beat men on a level playing field, or in this case, a volleyball court.

All of a sudden, it seemed like every high-school girl in Japan wanted to play volleyball...

Pulling out of her reverie, she looked at Kinosh'ta and Chihiro, who seemed to be absorbed in deep thought as well, gazing out over the afternoon summertime glaze of Tokyo Bay.

"Where's Hyper-girl?" Kinosh'ta asked, drawing Belldandy out of her reverie.

"Probably off somewhere with her boyfriend, Tomo," Chihiro answered with a knowing grin. Recently, Keiichi had set Taki up with an acquaintance of his, and the two had hit it off immediately. Taki was the head professor of Mathematics at Chiba Poly, and had put her roots down there instead of returning home. As if a Steven Hawking level math genius was going to return home and crew up on a fishing boat. Belldandy was so proud of her young kohai, who had made the 2012 Olympic team while learning to be a woman instead of a girl. During that time, Taki had also excelled at her studies in Chiba Poly, much to the delighted her professors. She'd even learnt a few swear words along the way, and although she was nowhere near Kinosh'ta's brusqueness, Taki could lay it on thick if she was really irked.

Recently, Taki appeared to be chasing after a marriage commitment from her guy, and this was often the kindling that sparked sudden disappearances. Taki was also one of Japan's top "new generation" mathematicians; between her libero's role on Japan's National women's team and academic symposiums all over Japan and Asia, "Hyper-girl" was pretty busy with her hyper schedule.

"We've got a team meeting in an hour," Chihiro noted. "One of you'd better call Taki to remind her. For someone who's so smart, she certainly can be an airhead sometimes."

"It's your turn!" she and Kinosh'ta shouted at each other simultaneously.

Some things never change.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --


	146. Pt 146: BlissGifts: Thera Ascendant

**Part 146: BlissGifts – Thera Ascendant**

THERA, JAPAN, THE 2016 TOKYO OLYMPICS:

The 2016 Olympics were opened by the traditional Parade of Nations, and Chihiro had been given the signal honor of leading the delegation by carrying the Japanese flag as they entered the "Musu" stadium. Belldandy thought it was poignantly ironic that Chihiro...who had been deemed as some dark villainess and nearly fired from her coaching role by the Japanese Olympic Committee in 2008 and also mistreated as a 'liability to the Olympic Spirit' by the same committee...had been chosen by the 2016 version of Japan's Olympic Committee to lead their team into the stadium in 2016. Behind their Coach, she and the entire Women's V-Ball team linked hands and raised them high in the air in a gesture of unity and confidence, ready to emerge from the tunnel.

Japan's culture was based on a necessary compactness, but the Musu Stadium was a complete departure from that ethos. It was the largest sports venue ever built, excluding racetracks, golf courses and the like. Just like the Chinese and Tibetans had pulled out all the stops on their Opening and Closing Ceremonies in 2008, the Japanese had pulled out all the stops on the main Olympic stadium, choosing not just to build an immense venue, but to construct a marvel. Engineers said that it couldn't be done. The public were insistent that it be built, because they were sick and tired of the world stereotyping Japan as a 'small-thinking, small-building' culture. The people demanded a stadium that could forever demolish that recurrent prejudice, given this one chance for Japan and Tokyo to shine on the world stage.

The response was a stadium that was breathtaking in scope and execution.

Musu Stadium was a roofed stadium, looking like a UFO from a distance. The top of the stadium was unique, the 'roof' consisted of seven immense overlapping sections, each representing one of the seven continents of the Olympic symbol. Each section had a huge illuminated colored circle design in the center of it. Instead of recessing or splitting down the middle, like roofs of conventional domed stadiums, Musu's immense panels folded upwards. In simplest terms, the effect was similar to opening the top of a cardboard box. By opening the overlapping flaps at the top of the box, you wind up with have four standing flaps.

Belldandy had been inside the completed stadium only once, last month when she and her volleyball teammates were invited to join an NHK camera crew tour of the finished main venue for the Games. When she stepped out onto the competition field during the tour, she had broken down in tears on national television, completely overwrought by the magnificence and beauty of the massive Musu Stadium. She had felt it all that day: the five years that Japan had invested in building it; the joy of knowing that she was going to be in this stadium for the opening of the 2016 Games; and especially the 3000 years of history that had built the Olympic Movement to this point and how the Musu Stadium was a fitting tribute to the Olympic Spirit and all those who had carried it over the millennia.

The stadium was empty that day...but tonight, it was rockin'!

She gave Keiichi a quick hug and then grabbed Kinosh'ta and Taki's hands and held them up high (or semi-high in Taki's case) and started marching out of the tunnel behind Chihiro at the very front of the Japanese Olympic Delegation. Even before they were half-way through the ramp, the crowd was revving up, louder and louder in anticipation. When they emerged from the ramp-tunnel onto the grounds of the stadium, the final nation to be introduced in the formal parade, the noise was absolutely ear-splitting as the massive crowd crescendoed with cheering. The delight of the stadium crowd at seeing Japan's team was the loudest noise Belldandy had ever heard.

"This is the real deal, this is how it feels," she thought to herself as the moment came roaring down into her soul.

For most of the team, this was their graduation party, their swan-song...and the stadium crowd knew this and loved them for it. Each woman had given years of her life to the cause, and some like Chihiro and Captain Moritayama had given over a dozen years. Somewhere up in the stands were her Father and Mother, probably in tears at their daughter's entrance. The family's neighbors in the village had again collected money and flown her parents to London in 2012; but this time the villagers themselves were here. Almost everyone that she knew from back home was here according to her Dad, traveling in a convoy of chartered tour buses to Tokyo for this magical moment.

They walked around the track as the final entry into the stadium, as tradition dictated, an honor reserved for the host country's delegation of athletes. Everywhere she looked in the stands, she saw a sea of people waving Japanese flags. Completing their circuit, they were then escorted to the remaining open area on the athletics field. Belldandy felt the wonder again, the indelible joy of being amidst 20,000 fellow athletes from all over Thera, who were all giddy with excitement.

Japan's delegation had been assigned a place to stand next to the stage where the Thera IOC President would invoke the Games. And there was a very special reason for this. Even now, she could see Takahashi wearing the ceremonial golden robe that the IOC President used for the most formal settings. Elected by her peers in the "Fourteen" last year, Takahashi-sensei was the first IOC female president since Queen Elizabeth the First held the office in the 1590s. This made her the first woman to serve such offices in the Modern Games. Again, their 'super-sensei' had broken past another finish line, or more specifically a barrier. How could the Games be called Modern if a woman hasn't ever been given charge of the Olympic Movement? Generations of female athletes had argued this silently in their hearts and minds, and Belldandy knew that some would have tears of joyful pride tonight when Takahashi ascended the stage and declared the Games open. For this would be a sight that almost no woman on Thera had ever expected to see in her lifetime.

Equality had come to the Games in another way, as this would be the first Olympics where certain team sports would medal the winning coaches along with their players. Volleyball was one of the sports selected for this, and Belldandy and her teammates knew that they were going to go all out to win Gold medals for each other and their dear Coach.

As the ceremonial music started up, she looked over to see her husband, Keiichi, who was standing with the Men's Basketball team, and felt her heart swell with pride. Keiichi was shouldering the hopes of the entire Japanese nation, whose fervent desire was that this would be the year that Japan would bring home a medal in basketball. Belldandy could sense how nervous he was; although this was his second Olympics as a participant, this was different because this was Japan, not England. Belldandy found her thoughts hearkening back to 2009 and Keiichi as he was back then. His journey over the past eight years had been much more challenging to navigate than anything that she could possibly imagine...

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There once was a time when Keiichi couldn't even fill out a college application properly. She, Chihiro and Taki had finally convinced him to go to Chiba Poly, and then had to help him with the app because he was confused by it...plus he didn't have a 'history' as a mortal. So the three had gotten inventive and made one up for him, so to speak, relying on Belldandy's knowledge of Norway. During his early days at their school, he had followed Chihiro's suggestion and tried out for the men's basketball team. She was a sophomore at Chiba Poly, and much to her vexation, Keiichi had been admitted as a junior and academically was her sempai. But the whole sempai-kohai thing became a private joke between them rather quickly. What amazed her was how he had grown into the game in just a few weeks. During breaks from Chihiro's tough practice sessions, she and the team would watch him pull off mind-blowing basketball plays as the guys were scrimmaging on the other half of the Chiba Poly gym. The men's coach recognized Keiichi's prodigious talents for the game and guided him towards the Japanese National team in addition to Chiba Poly's team, who were the recipients of two successive National Championships courtesy of their 2.30 meter center.

He couldn't hit a serve over the net with any consistency during an informal volleyball match, but he was fluid and deadly on the basketball court. He still didn't understand why this was so, but it was just the plain truth. Keiichi had a certain 'it' that granted him an athletic supremacy in his basketball gameplay, as if he had been born into it. Graduating a year ahead of her, he was immediately offered an unbelievably lucrative contract by the LA Lakers of the NBA in 2011, who obviously wanted their own version of Yao Ming. Privately, she didn't want him to take up the offer, but she supported him when he signed on with the Lakers. In that single year, Keiichi earned enough money for her and him to live comfortably for the rest of their lives. But the NBA was "one big disillusion machine" according to Keiichi, who could not tolerate the accompanying lifestyle of doping, gambling, guns and whores, marital infidelity, illegal gaming and the thug-rapper adjuncts that were wrapped into the circus. Despite the existence of many honorable and honest players in the league, it wasn't enough to provide him with the ethical and emotional support that he craved. So he decided to give it up, buy out the rest of his contract, and return to Japan. Like many, he had discovered that professional sports lacked the Olympic Spirit to a great degree, and were populated overwhelmingly by 'smaller' athletes as opposed to athletes who were selfless and inspirational on the spiritual level. Having lived on Thera for only two years as a mortal, he was still emotionally fragile in so many ways, which was why she wanted him to pass up on the offer. She could have told him all of this ahead of time and spared him his disappointment, but this was one lesson her husband had to learn on his own.

Quitting the NBA after a single year, Keiichi had left his mark by setting an NBA season scoring and rebounding record that would probably never be eclipsed. In the era where triple doubles were rare, Keiichi was performing quad doubles: double-digit assists/points/rebounds/blocked shots. Greatly admired by the Americans and fervently loved by the Japanese, her husband decided to focus on the optimistic future instead of the avaricious now. He never played professionally again, and instead tasked himself with organizing amateur and youth athletics. A bona fide sports celebrity, Keiichi traveled all over the country to encourage young men to join sports, any sports...but especially basketball. The guy that couldn't fill out a college app was now organizing amateur leagues and creating charitable foundations all over Japan. Every day, Belldandy fell more in love with him, witnessing his growth as a mortal man. The process sometimes felt akin to a mother who was watching her child grow up. The year in the US was hard on both of them, but after a year back in Japan, she was thinking seriously about marrying him.

Oddly enough, one aspect of his life as a God seemed to have leaked through all of his limitations of being a mortal. It seemed that he had two innate gifts: wisdom and empathy.

Belldandy knew this finesse he possessed for something else, possibly a leftover trait from his days as a wish-granting God. Keiichi simply loved Therans, and wanted to help them towards better lives. It seemed that he was especially skilled at counseling troubled young men and guiding them towards high school and college basketball teams. During the first couple years of his work with young men, letters started showing up at the temple. Belldandy was blown away by these thank you letters; heart-felt missives to Keiichi from young boys and men that basically said "thank you for saving my life". His charitable organization was making him into a celebrity of another sort. Appraised of this, the members of the NBA whose bent was to use their athletic gifts to nurture the aspirations of youth would regularly send donations to fund his work in Japan.

Japan competed in the 2012 Games in London, and she had the good fortune to have her fiancé with her, as he was playing on the Japanese Men's basketball team. Besides the little bloop when Chihiro stumbled in on them while they were making love, it was the most wonderful of times. The guys from Japan did pretty good, falling one game short of making the medal rounds.

During the next four years, the skill level of the Japanese Men's team climbed steadily as the team became populated with men who discovered that they could compete on the world stage of amateur basketball. Several of these guys on the 2016 team were Keiichi's 'salvages'; young men who had grown up under horrible circumstances and were destined for yakuza lifestyles, who had met Keiichi and had found inspiration and dignity within themselves, and then channeled these energies into playing basketball competitively.

By the most beautiful of circumstances, Kinosh'ta's husband Kenji was Keiichi's teammate on the 2012 and 2016 men's team. Just like Kinosh'ta and she, the two men were phenomenal players in their sport and had become best friends. Belldandy was so happy for him, because Keiichi needed a male intimate. Keiichi could be a pretty driven guy at times...and Kenji had taught him to loosen up and hang loose once in a while.

It must have worked, because he stunned her right before the London Games by proposing to her in front of Chihiro, Kinosh'ta and Kenji, and the entire Women's Volleyball team during a team banquet. When she said "Yes!!!" to his proposal, she realized that his words back in 2009 had been prophetic in a sense. By virtue of her presence in his life, she _had_ completed him as a human being. But what really whim-whammed her that night was the profoundly-felt emotional recognition that he had completed her as a woman.

All of this had emerged from a man who had been broken down from Godhood, his former Divine abilities guttered away in the distant past. A man who had lost all but a slight fraction of his abilities, who had been crippled in a way that no human being could ever possibly comprehend. Keiichi had literally 'fallen to Thera' with about as much social and functional skills as an alien visitor. Yet he had stood upright on principles that he could barely remember; somehow forging the means to make life better for all those around him. As each year turned the pages of life's ledger, Keiichi had accounted much goodness in the byways of his life. He had become more kind and loving to her...he was truly as much a part of her soul as she could ever wish. She was so blessed by his presence in her life, for he had cupped her soul with his love...

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She and he locked eyes for a brief moment, and then her flights of recollection passed, submerged by the rumbling susurration of the stadium crowd who had toned it down because the 'official' part of the games was starting up. The Opening Ceremony was approaching its climax: the formal declaration of the 2016 Games and the lighting of the Olympic Torch. Belldandy could feel the years of hard practices deep in her bones; the many years of bruising physical combats and bracing exertions that had constantly pushed her against the thresholds of her endurance. Warmly, Keiichi's hand closed around hers and she felt softened by the sight. The stadium air was tinged with the residual stoking-pep smell of fireworks...and in her spiritual mind, the sweat of countless billions of Therans who had buoyed the Olympics on their shoulders throughout three millennia to reach this apex. This point of entry into tomorrow.

Amazing how 275,000 cheering spectators at an Olympics could wash away all the years of trials and struggles it had taken just to get to this point. She could feel joy of the Olympic Spirit that was vibrant in her and her fellow athletes from every reach of Thera. Overhead, the seven massive roof sections loomed, each one at least a hundred meters above the roofline of the stadium. Each section had a different-colored ring built into the middle of it, which shined bright circles above the stadium.

As Takahashi ascended the stairs leading to the central stage, Belldandy caught her eye for a split-second, and Takahashi nodded at her and the Japanese Delegation. As the presiding official of the 2016 Olympics, she had insisted that the Games be declared opened using a circular ceremonial area in the middle of the stadium. In the past, the Games had been opened by the IOC President from some official's VIP box stashed away up in the upper mezzanine of the stadium, usually seated next to the head of state of the host country. This was very very different, and controversial as well, but Belldandy totally agreed with Takahashi's reasoning to have the ceremonial flag-raising and opening in the center of the Musu Stadium. The Games were of the people, by the people and for the people...and Takahashi wanted to be in the midst of the people when she declared them open.

For the first time in the Modern Era, the Olympic flag would be posted in the middle of the stadium field, rather than shuffled away in a platform in some corner of the arena of competition. Takahashi had insisted upon this, and her dedication had made it so. The IOC President historically had been given the right to choose the opening address before or after the Parade of Nations, and Takahashi had chosen to give her address after the athletes had been assembled in the middle of Musu Stadium. This time, in 2016, the Games would revolve around the Olympic flags, which were going to be honored while all of the competing national teams stood as one in the middle of the stadium. It was symbolic, but powerfully so...declaring the truth that all competitions arose out of the centering axial unity of the Olympic movement.

The music died down and Reiko Takahashi walked up to the rostrum. Belldandy felt a familiar chill of pride race up and down her spine as Takahashi in her role as IOC President began to deliver the formulaic addresses to declare the Games, echoing those which had opened the Olympics for almost 3000 years. In a dignified voice, she began to read from the actual original leather Ekecheiria Charter and the actual original bamboo Zhung Chim Proclamation, solemnly declaring a world-wide truce for the next two weeks. The Olympic Symphony was performed as the Olympic flag was raised, which drew another frenzied cheering of the stadium crowd. Finally, Takahashi spoke the magical words that the crowd had been waiting for all night:

_"I declare open the Games of Tokyo Japan, celebrating the 702nd Summer Olympiad of the Olympic Era, in this year 2016. I invite the Spirit of the Olympics to attend this event, and invoke truce between nations and goodwill between competitors during this 702nd Olympiad." _

The only thing left was the lighting of the torch.

But there was no tower for the cauldron that would serve as torch for the Games.

"You gotta be shitting me," Chihiro said to her and Kinosh'ta in a low voice. Belldandy was darting her eyes around, surveying the stadium to see if a hidden platform or tower or anything that could serve as a torch had emerged. But there was nothing visible that even remotely resembled a receptacle or cauldron.

And of course, the IOC and stadium designers had been secretive about the torch ceremony.

The first runner ran into the stadium with the torch, causing the crowd to erupt with cheering. She handed it off to Kenji Tama, to start the sequence of famous Japanese athletes who would carry the torch.

"Look!!! The grannies!" Kinosh'ta shouted, perhaps a little too loud. As the torch made its way around the track, the beloved 1964 Women's V-Ball team were walking up towards the central rostrum. A couple of the grannies were walking very slowly, but their teammates bolstered them as they ascended the stairs and then formed into a line while Takahashi stepped off to the side. Belldandy was taken back to the 2008 Games in her mind, when she had first met Masae Kasai and the '64 team, all of whom were in their 70s then. Now they were in their 80s. She counted the elder players...one, two, three...and was grateful to reach twelve. They were all here, all still alive!

The torch completed its circuit of the track, culminating with Sawao Kato, a Japanese gymnast who had won a total of twelve medals, the most Olympic medals that any Japanese athlete had ever earned. Sawao Kato was from Belldandy's own province of Niigata, and she expected him to be the one who would light the torch. He turned and then jogged towards the center rostrum where the grannies were standing.

"Cool!" Chihiro commented, as they realized that the grannies were going to have an opportunity to participate in the torch-bearing ceremony. But who were they going to hand it off to? And where was the torch? They certainly had to wheel it out, uncover it, raise it or whatever at this point...

Kato-sensei reached the stand, walked up the stairs and handed the torch to Handa-sensei, who had played the same position in the 1964 team that Belldandy was playing this year, the center forward attacker role.

Slowly, the 1964 team members passed the torch between themselves along the line, each woman raising it up as high as she could before passing it to her next teammate. Finally, the torch reached the end of the line, where Kasai-sensei, Captain of the 1964 team, held it up and turned in a circle to face each section of the spectators in the Musu Stadium. By this time, the crowd was cheering boisterously, for this team was their beloved heroines from the first Tokyo Games in the Modern Era.

But what now?

Stepping a couple paces away from the rest of the team, Kasai-sensei simply threw the torch up in the air...and it started rising on its own. "Wires, no doubt," Belldandy realized, almost certain that this was the final moment, the lighting. She expected the torch to curve or move in some direction, but it just kept going straight up. At the hand-held torch rose into the air, the lights of the stadium gradually dimmed, creating a sublime beauty by allowing the seven overhead rings of light built into the sectional roof panels to become the sole source of illumination for the stadium. Seven masts of light. Belldandy glanced down and noticed that she had seven different-colored shadows. She glanced back up and craned her neck, amazed as the torch rose _beyond_ the roofline of the stadium. It was heading up towards the very tops of those immense roof sections that towered like seven monuments above the spectator seating decks.

High above, the relay torch looked tiny. Suddenly, it exploded into a fierce fireworks of orange light that filled the entire area overhead with fiery colors. Loud gasps of "ooo's" and "ahh's" from the spectators accompanied the explosion, reminding Belldandy of a crowd enjoying fireworks at a summer festival. But this was much more than just a ring of synchronized fireworks shooting off at the top of a stadium. In the wake of the spectacular explosion of fire, the whole top of Musu Stadium was burning! The uppermost ridge atop of each of the seven roof sections high in the sky was lit with flames, creating a blazing aureole or nimbus that seemed to float in the air.

"Oh my God! The _stadium_ is the torch!" Belldandy marveled. In the night sky far above them, the visual perspective was breath-taking. Seven separate circles of colored light hovered overhead, and in the middle space between them among the pale stars in the night sky was a halo of flame. It took almost a full minute before the stunned spectators and athletes in the Musu Stadium erupted into screams and cheers of pride and delight.

"That was fucking awesome!" Chihiro said three times in a row with a voice filled with admiration, stating aloud Belldandy's own feelings about the spectacular lighting ceremony.

The 2016 Tokyo Summer Olympic Games had definitely started with a bang!

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THERA, CHIBA PREFECTURE, JAPAN:

The flying hours were gone; the 2016 Olympics had faded into the ether of history several days earlier. Of course, Belldandy's team had won their third consecutive Gold Medal, and this time she didn't have to drag Chihiro up onto the medal stand. But the place of pride for the Japanese for the 2016 Games was Keiichi's Men's Basketball Team. They shocked the country by advancing not only into the medal rounds but into the championship game. There, they had fought back from a seemingly insurmountable deficit to force an overtime period against the Americans. In the overtime period with a split-second left in regulation, Keiichi had tipped in a winning basket to win the Game...and win Belldandy's heart all over again, as she and her women's team had been there on the sidelines to cheer on the guys and witness their miraculous upset of the Americans.

Her heart had purred applause as she watched her husband ascend the medal stand with the rest of his team receive his Gold Medal. When the Kimigayo was played after the medals had been handed out, she felt filled...simply filled. The pride and gratitude that swayed her was totally different than the sparkle of sensations she had experienced when her Coach and teammates participated with her in the awards ceremony the previous evening. Their awards were accompanied by a sense of completion, as many of her teammates were retiring from the National team to get on with their lives. But the scene of Keiichi receiving his medal was valedictory in another sense; it was irrefutable proof that he had finally moved inside of his human mortal existence. To her, he had become a complete man years earlier. Now he was something more. As a God, Keiichi had excelled in anything he tried...but as a mortal being, he had excelled even further. In her mind, his victory recapitulated the old thrills that filled her breast when her team had defeated the Valkyrie Goddesses back in 2008. Once again, humanity...in the form of her husband...had stood upright against insurmountable odds and had snatched victory from defeat.

She wondered if the Gods up there in Windowsill had assumed an interest in watching their fallen peer. Would they take pride in Keiichi's accomplishment? Did his ascension on the mortal stage seem purposeful and significant to those awesome, concealed beings who could put out a sun just by sneezing on it?

Flashback ended, she returned her attention to the party.

Furo brushed against her hip and grinned at her with feline joy. He was in the most glorious of Siberian Tiger heavens, as the summer air was vividly colored with the aromas of dozens of tasty foods that had been assembled for her blowout party at the temple. Since she and Keiichi lived so close to Tokyo, she had opened up the temple for a celebratory gathering of the Women's team and all of their families. In her mind, this would be _their_ party...no press or sports reporters...just she, the gals and their dearly loved ones trampling and gamboling around the grounds of her temple.

Her home.

Taki was showing off her diamond engagement ring to Chihiro and Kinosh'ta. Again. Belldandy smiled, as she could see the 17-year-old girl inside of the 26-year-old math department chair. Time seemed to mold into itself whenever she was around Taki, mostly because the woman was still a kid at heart. She had shocked everyone on the team by radically dyeing her hair blue with platinum streaks for the Olympics, looking like an EVA pilot out of anime series rather than Japan's libero. But the new hairstyle seemed to work really well on her. It also made the team more spirited, made the games more fun when they played on the court during the Games and saw their blue-haired libero, bobbing all over the backcourt digging out their opponent's net attacks. The Japanese fans had loved it, and she was no doubt poster material for the otaku culture of Japan. Now, she was in full-on party mode, alternating between pestering her boyfriend to show him off, and bouncing silly-willy from conversation group to group to garner in the oohs-and-ahhs about her engagement ring.

Keiichi had taken off on bicycle to the store for a quick errand to replace the propane heater that fired up the hibachi. With post-Olympics summer traffic at its usual congestion, that was the quickest way there and back. She was nagked with a hint of worry as Keiichi was running a few minutes late. Dismissing her fretting, Belldandy envisioned that her husband had no doubt been holstered by some fans that recognized him and had stopped to sign autographs and pose for pictures with his fans. Her husband was generous that way...and she was mature enough to generously allow him that generosity. Some sports wives were zealously possessive of their spouses. One gal on the Olympic squad had a husband who would freak if she arrived home 15 minutes late from practice. At least he used to be that way...until Chihiro learned what was going on, got a hold of him and chewed him up for being a doting, controlling idiot.

The temple was filled with clusters of friends and family. She spied Furo with two of Moritayama's youngest kids riding him horsie-style. Furo had been free and legit for years, thanks to the small fortune that Keiichi had earned in the NBA. They could afford to pay for the annual exotic animal inspections to recertify him as a domestic. Sometimes, Furo was more like a big dog than a predatory cat; he lacked that certain selfina and prowling caution that pervades the behavior of most housecats. Definitely not a chicken-cat around humans, he was always ready to play...and what child or adult could resist a playful life-sized tiger?

Where was Keiichi?

They had both agreed that the party be informal, using buffet tables and a potluck rather than hiring staff to prepare and serve out the food. Naturally, much of the food had been delivered by caterers early this morning, and the remaining buffet picnic consisted of potluck dishes and pupu snacks. Keiichi was doing the 'man thing'; appointing himself to be the grillmeister and tend to the pair of hibachis, cooking a ton of meat for the partygoers. So when the hibachi fuel unexpectedly gave out, he had grumbled and decided to fetch a replacement tank rather than phone in for a delivery of a replacement tank. In the behavior of Keiichi-speak, Belldandy knew that this really meant that her husband needed a short break from the party. She was privately amused by this: proof that her beloved was still an airhead at times. After all, didn't he volunteer to be right in the midst of the food prep by designating himself as grill-cook? And now he was using an excuse to duck out of the party...

He was half-an-hour late!

"Chihiro, can I use your cell phone? I'm gonna call the camping supply store and find out what's keeping my dear Keiichi," she asked, grabbing Chihiro as she walked by. Making the call, she learned from the store owner that Keiichi hadn't even shown up to exchange the propane tanks.

As she handed Chihiro her phone, she could hear distant sirens growing louder...

...clamoring into blaring shrills...and then suddenly shutting off right when they were starting to drown out everyone's conversations. Whatever the police were attending to, it was nearby. When she heard the sound of a car pulling up alongside the temple gate, the river of joy flowing in her heart dried up. She had gut feeling about this...a _very bad_ gut feeling.

The warm summer air seemed to thaw chill, sapping the primrose gaiety of the partygoers by its report of sudden silence. The leaves seemed to be weeping against the hush, bowing downwards with sorrow on the limbs of the many trees of the temple.

A moment later, two uniformed policewomen were at the gate.

Her heart was already fracturing with fear as one of the officers informed her with downcast eyes, "Ms. Morisato, there's been an accident..."

The next several minutes were a vague swirl of incomprehension, shock, key-beat intoxication brought on by emotional trauma, and pin-tingles that seemed to race up and down her spine. The only thing that she could remember was hugging her Mother and Father, who both had stricken expressions. Mirrors of something horribly twisted and agonizing inside of her...

Belldandy was so upset, Chihiro and Kinosh'ta had to half-drag her to Chihiro's van because she was unable to walk on her own. Everything inside of her felt disconnected. Accompanied by Ootaki, Tamiya and Taki, the five of her closest friends drove her off to face the unbearable inevitable.

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"Ever been in a cavern of clouds? Reclining on your back, looking upon on liquid shimmers of crystalline suspended in an aurora of vapors? Surrounded by filaments of smoke-silver wisps arcing delicately in abstract, clinging with gossamer constancy upon joists of blue glowing lava to create sparkling triforiums? Overhead, a series of arches conjoin in arcane geometries, ribbing the upper lays of an immense interior space that could only suggest the grandeur of a palace, museum or cathedral? As you marvel at this sanctuary of serenity, picture a series of translucent rays of green and pink light vectoring through ever-changing windows above your head, creating a luminous tapestry of weaving brilliance that seems to draw you in precisely because of its curious workings of silent visual rhythm..."

Keiichi asked himself this and more, trying to understand where in this, was the place of being, where he found himself covered by sights and sounds that stuffed his senses full of wonder and beauty. And in discovering himself, Keiichi queried himself. Asking "why?"

He vaguely sensed that he shouldn't remember anything, but the last glimpse of his memory recalled the midsummer afternoon sun glinting off of the headlight assembly of a large truck. Unable to conceive of why this would be such an important detail, he felt like his worries and mind were dissolving into an immense ocean of tranquility.

What were the first words the Therans had said when they landed on the Moon? Something like "lights out" a few seconds after the landing indicator switchboard telltales flashed off, indicating that their flimsy metallic craft had landed on the desolate surface.

Lights out for me...lights out for me, Keiichi chanted to himself.

Half-sensing the construct of the recent past, he realized that he was gone. Dead. Deceased, brought to a better or worse place beyond the veil of the pressure-trap of human existence. The afterlife was always a point of confusion for him, because he retained a sliver of memories of actually _living_ in a place that could be considered an afterlife. Or maybe even a before-life. A place that Therans would simply call "Tengoku" or "Heaven". At least this didn't seem like the Other Place, the bad place. Paradise, perhaps?

As he looked upwards towards the 'window' created by airy swirls of empyrean cloud-forms, he could see assemblages of indescribable beauty floating above a surface of green. But the sky wasn't blue; the enveloping welkin was a gentle sherbet of blending oranges and pinks, very soothing to the eye. By degrees, his memories gradually became a little clearer. He had been riding his bicycle on a quick errand to fetch something for his wife's celebratory gathering that they were hosting at the temple...

Another world ago and away.

He was dressed in some kind of ornate blue and white leather outfit with impossible angles and intricacies, with a robe running down his back, fastened with a tie-clasp over his neck. Something about the outfit seemed vaguely familiar as he glanced at his arms and legs, because that seemed to be the next logical thing to do. Everything was attached and intact, but he was startled to discover that the scars on his hands were gone. When he rolled his sleeve up to the elbow, his flesh wrote no evidence that he had ever been injured there.

"Sir? You seem to have misplaced yourself. Are you in need of assistance?" a pink-haired girl asked him, causing him to pause in his self-inspection. She had a very modernistic hairdo, but her hair was pink like a cosplayer at a comic convention. Somehow, he sensed that her hair _actually was pink_, rather than simply dapped and dyed pink or tucked under a pink costume hairpiece. Unsettling, yet familiar...the girl seemed to be in her late teens and was _floating_ a half-meter above the floor that he was laying on.

An angel?

"I rather think it best that you should come with me, sir," she decided, wagging her finger at him. "This is one of the zones where one should not be errantly wandering around without some kind of escort. You seem a bit bewildered. Perhaps a remedy to your confusion is close at hand."

Confusion indeed. A short while ago, he was forking and flipping a mouth-watering selection of choice roasties on the hibachi; now, he found himself in this weird dreamstate. But this didn't feel like a dream...it lacked the disjointed miscellany of phantom thought-chains that seemed to draw his dreams. This place, wherever it was, was too consistent, too _familiar_ in a hard-to-touch-upon sense.

With a yank, the pink-haired girl drew him to his feet and proceeded to pull him guidingly towards a rosette-shaped lightweave. A vestibule or doorway, it seemed. As they passed through the stargate, Keiichi realized that _he was floating_ alongside the girl, weightless but not awkwardly so. Gravity and other laws of physics seemed to be absent here.

"It's all shaped in accord with His will," she noted at Keiichi nervously glanced around while they hovered through halls that seemed to be picture-works rather than passages of conveyance. The museum analogy gained upon his thoughts, because he sensed that he was traveling _inside_ a painting...the environs possessed too much sublime beauty to be deliberately-conceived architectural eye-candy or merely a simple patterning of artifice.

Through a final doorway, and he found himself in a lobby or reception area, robust with passenger traffic in a way that reminded him of the Shinjuku train station. Thousands of beings of every shape, size, color were floating through the air like leaves in an autumn wind gust. Nearby, dozens of pink-haired girls were flitting about like nephelae nymphs or fairies, each one purposefully engaged in an errand that only she knew of. His escort tugged at his sleeve demandingly and then she guided him through the maze of personalities. After a short 'float', for he certainly couldn't call it a "stroll", they approached a circular desk manned by a dozen or so pink-haired women...

The receptionist asked him to touch a blue globe, an 'identity matrix' as she called it. When he did, nothing happened, and both his escort and the receptionist had expressions of furrowed uncertainty on their faces. Spurred on by this, the pair started asking him numerous questions about who he was, where he was from, why he was here and so on. Keiichi tried to answer their inquiries, but his own befuddlement kept his replies inconsistent. Even more, the two young women were confused as well by his answers, noting that there was no possible way that that Theran could be here.

As they discussed his disposition between themselves, a chiming sound filled the air and a blue-white glow seemed to descend from overhead. Every single being in the large courtyard-sized room sudden assumed a formal seiza kneeling posture and bowed towards the light. Surrounded by dozens of beings bearing reverence to the Golden One, Keiichi stood alone...a shadow in reverse amidst the kneeling denizens who filled the chamber.

"My son, you have returned to us," a voice said as the Golden One transformed with chthonic grace into an elderly man who looked like a blending of a Christian saint, Santa Claus, and a Chinese sage. Keiichi could only marvel at the sight of the luminous being, a personage who seemed a world away and beyond anything or anyone that he had encountered before.

"Walk with me," the ancient being beckoned in a gentle voice, gesturing with a sweep of his arm and long robe towards a stairway that wasn't there a moment ago. He rested his arm across Keiichi's shoulders and they ascended a stairwell of translucent floating tiles that felt like soft carpet to his feet.

Once they reached the top, they stepped off into what could best be described as a cloud. With a smile, the ancient being touched him briefly on the forehead...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Belldandy's blood was rushing in her ears as she made her way into the ER, followed by Chihiro, her three sempai, and Taki. The group were immediately intercepted by a security guard and a nurse at the doorway leading from the ER lobby to the ER proper. Both looked like they meant business, as in "keep out!"

"Sorry ma'am. No admittance to the ER," the security guard said perfunctorily.

"If you don't let me in to see my husband, I am going to rip your lungs out, tie them around your ankles, and hang you from the flagpole atop this hospital," Belldandy said menacingly. "Now let me in the fucking ER! _NOW!!!_"

The ER guard looked at her with trepidation, and then turned pale as he was quickly surrounded by Chihiro, Kinosh'ta, Tamiya and Ootaki, and Taki. Except for Taki, each woman stood taller than he...and it suddenly seemed to click in his mind that this was half of the Olympic Women's V-Ball team, and they were ready to rip him a new one.

He immediately bowed in apology to her and the others, and hailed an ER nurse to escort them to where Keiichi was. As he punched in a keycode to admit them to the ER, he said "Don't say I didn't warn you," in a gloomy voice that forced a chill shivering upon her that almost took her legs out. She could barely walk unattended, because each moment seemed more threatening than the previous one.

The bright lights in the Emergency Room fogged against the fatigue in her eyes as she turned right and then left and then into a private area. The nurse quickly stepped in front of Chihiro and the others, blocking their way and gesturing towards a nearby empty area along a hallway. Pulling aside the privacy curtain, Belldandy looked in on her husband.

Three doctors were working on him frantically. Keiichi's entire head was encased in a blood-soaked weave of bandages and gauze. She could hear frantic female and male voices in dissonant cacophony shouting instructions in Medicalese that she could barely comprehend; the voices sounded like the keening of a pack of mournful dogs and cats.

Belldandy grabbed one of the doctors and looked him in the eyes...

The attending ER physician's eyes told her everything, completing a weight of definition that crushed the air right out of her heart. He tapped a nearby RN on the shoulder and asked the nurse to escort her out of the ER ICU theater. The nurse grabbed her by the arm and soon she was in an empty examining room, about as private as one could expect in the busy hospital ward. A few seconds later, an exhausted-looking female doctor came in, her medical uniform spattered with blotches of blood.

"Ms. Morisato, there is nothing that we can do. His injuries...are too extensive. Your husband has suffered massive head and chest trauma from his accident. He was riding a bicycle when he was hit by a truck, and was DOA when he was brought in. We've managed to revive him, but his condition is grave and there's very little...it's just a matter of a short time. Normally we wouldn't let you near him, but under the circumstances we can make an exception," the ER charge physician informed her, choking down her breath. "If you agree to remain seated at the head of his bed and not to interfere with our doctors, you may remain by his side for his final moments..."

"_NOOOOOOOOO!!!!_" Belldandy screamed...inside. She didn't want to make a scene around her friends and the doctors, but the howl inside of her threatened to consume her. "A burning mansion, all of life is a burning mansion," the Heian poetess had said. If life is a passion, a burning mansion...then why did the vital spark that filled her heart feel suddenly dimmed?

Swirling, she couldn't even begin to imagine life without Keiichi. She couldn't begin to imagine life. An hour ago, he and she were greeting guests to her team's 'farewell party'. Now she was sitting in a cold metal chair, holding his hand...his skin cold and dry already because of the loss of blood. Overheard, the hushed and shouted voices of the MDs were drowned by sobbing from the other side of the curtain. Her best friends, now tormented by this tragic loss. Overheard, the blip of the cardio activity monitor, each radar-like bleep sounding like it was seemingly gapped by an eternity of sorrow. The final gap...and then a wheezing prolonging chirrup...

Keiichi was gone.

She couldn't even look into his eyes, because his head was a smear of tubes, bandaging and monitor pips. There was no farewell that she could offer his unhearing ears. Slowly, the MDs made note of the time of expiration and then left her alone with him and her shocked soul.

Torn away, ripped away like a suddenly snapped coil of life. The umbilical cord of love between she and he had been forever sundered.

"Oh Keiichi, oh Keiichi, oh Keiichi..." she sobbed, laying her head on his chest. "Why? You had the answers to everything in existence, and then you had the answer to everything that I..snff..was missing in my life. You freely gave me all that I could receive. But now, I have no answers to give you. I don't understand this! I _can't_ believe this! How could life build this tragic karma around us? Why you have to leave me? I loved you with all of my heart, and we had a future ahead of us. Another doorway of life to walk through together, and it was just starting! Children. Grandchildren. A family..snff..and a sharing life devoted to loving service to those who are special to us. Both of us becoming mentors, both of us living together and glowing with love for our families. Now it's all cut off. So long ago...it seems so long ago that I made a wish for you to be happy. Now that wishing will never come true, because you're gone. Nothing will ever come true again. If life is fair to all of us, then I cannot understand the meaning in _this_!"

His chest was covered in blood; the pasty red ochre wetting her cheek and brown hair, mingling with her tears. Her mind went hazy and then everything seemed to dissolve in light.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Almighty One, now I remember all that I have lost. I am grateful for Your concern for my wellbeing," Keiichi told the Lord, thoughtcasting for the first time in many years. He knew that couched within his grateful words were a half-truth; even with the restoration of over two hundred millennia of the experiences and memories of his existence, his life wasn't restored alongside them. His life remained behind, caught in a net of powerful compassion that had been gathered up throughout the most recent eight years of his existence. He had returned to his God's Realm, but the separation from his _home_ caused him pangs of regret in his heart.

"Soothfast, it seems that you are sore troubled, My son. I can see it writ upon your countenance," the Liege Ruler of Yggdrasil observed. Keiichi knew that it was foolishness to attempt to conceal anything from the Lord, whether of volition or not. But his heart was broken, because he was divided from his beloved Belldandy. In his heart of hearts, he knew that if he had the ability...he would redeem every minute of his restored divinity and cast it adrift on the sea of possibilities, simply so that he could be reunited with her.

"Father Creator," Keiichi said slowly. "Clearly, my life seems newly endowed with purpose, and yet I feel empty. On the Therarealm, I became soul-touched with a mortal woman, Belldandy. Through Your efforts, I have rediscovered that she once freely made a wish for me. It was her earnest desire that I experience a commendable romantic love with a Goddess. Her meaning was generous: for me to have the most perfect loving union that could exist between God and Goddess. Yet, my heart and soul are resigned, tainted as they are with the shadows of grief. I fear that I will not be healed of my heart-loss. Under the aegis of the Wish Escort Office, I was continually reconciled with the truth that all wishes granted by the Yggdrasil...er, what is now called XOM...would be enforced by the Ultimate Force once they were granted. Here and now, knowing this gives me no clarity, no peace in my heart. Is it true that a proper wish that has been granted cannot be revoked or denied in any posterity? Would that her wish would be denied or revoked? Could _You_ revoke her wish? If I am to be held within the sway of her stated wish as it was granted, the conditions of which require me to be in love with a Goddess...how can these circumstances allow me to find myself again? How could I possible transcend this loss that urges me so painfully inside of myself? Without her, I cannot possibly conceive of myself ever loving a Goddess. Lives perish, time heals, eternity conceals and the moment is cherished. As a mortal, Belldandy was the cherished occupant of my heart, and there will never be room for another. With Your grace and by Your offices, I humbly beg of You to act further on my behalf and undo her wish. For now that I have experienced love, I do not wish to experience it further. My heart cannot contain more grief, and it is best that I serve humanity on Thera, and to be a good Wish Escort God..."

"Dear one, your youth harkens you to reflect overmuch on what could be, while not paying suffice to _what is_," the Lord answered him enigmatically. "Verily, you cannot keep alive the pure desire of soul by means of a flaw. Nor can you ignore the truth that all of reality is tethered to love, rather than bound up to indifference. Mayhaps you will find your answer outside of this chamber. The answers you seek are within _your_ power, not Mine. Simply walk towards your fears, My Son. Transcend them, and discover the glories of the Other Side."

"As you command, my Lord," Keiichi answered, bowing formally. When he looked up, he was no longer in attendance of the Almighty One. The sweet waft in the air was delicious as he found himself standing on a low rising hill in the middle of a field of sunflowers, with a green Cylindrical Forest rotating with stately grace overhead in the blue-pearl sky. He had clearly died in his accident in Thera, but had mysteriously been restored to his former God status. The Divine part of his being had survived; with a simple making the Lord had changed him. Touching the seals on each of his cheeks, he recognized that his license status was indeterminate as of yet. He was like an empty bowl, waiting to be refilled by the powers assumed by a license-holding God. It went without question that by leave of the Lord, his situation with the God Escort Office remained unchanged, and he could freely resume wish-granting duties as soon as he felt able to. Already, he could feel his reawakened being, his Divinity relishing the expansive sensorium of Yggdrasil, tasting the nuances of every dimensional level of it, secure in the knowledge that his immortality was restored and his Divine faculties were emergent.

"What did the Lord mean when He said that I am the finder of my own answer?" he thought.

"It's you!!! At last! I knew you would return to face the inevitable," he heard a voice shout nearby, his question now interrupted. Hovering over the nearby fields, he saw a dark-tanned Goddess with short red hair and a long braided ponytail rapidly approaching him, wearing ornately-wrought platinum armor that revealed more than it concealed.

Athenle.

"You're finally back, fully separated from that squalid mortal planet," she announced with a triumphant gleam in her eyes as she floated in front of him. "I expected it to be only about 40 or 50 of their years, but this is certainly a bonus. A God who was granted a wish to experience perfect love with a Goddess! And now you've returned, which means that you're finally mine! I knew that biding my time would grant me the victory. Now is my time...my time to take what belongs to me and conquer your will, weak God! I will have you and no one else. I will have the perfect love in my grasp. But first, you and I have some unfinished business to deal with." Reaching up swiftly before he could react, she choked him by the throat and lifted him above her. He struggled to do something...do anything...to remove himself.

But it would not be, so long as he didn't have a God's License.

"How pitiful for you! You cannot draw upon the God's energy, can you? Without a license, you are significantly weakened, eh? Perhaps an Earth Spirit Grade level of energy, at best. There is no seal for you to break, no spell of summoning that will open the Divine energies of our Realm to you. Even a teenage God can do these things that you cannot do. How does it feel now, Keiichi? The memory of how you took advantage of me during that meaningless sportive competition still burns within me. _You humiliated me, in front of my sister Valkyrie, even!!!_ All for the sake of a mortal woman! She is nothing but a worm compared to me! So where is your confidence and bravado now, now that I am no longer constrained as a mortal and you don't even have a God's License to fall back on? It is said by the Demons that Love can become the ultimate punishment, if wielded with ire. I will invoke a dreadful fear deep in your soul as my pathway to conquering you. I will slowly force you to love me despite yourself. And once I have taken you from yourself, once I have taken _her_ from you...that mortal bitch Belldandy...I will make you my earnest servant in love and break you of all inclinations save your obedience to me. _That_ will be your 'perfect Love'"

Even though this interchange was occurring on an iconic level, as he and the Valkyrie were beings of energy rather than matter, only formed within physical manifests that looked human...Keiichi could feel a burning sensation around his neck that seemed to squeeze the breath out of him. Athenle was much too powerful, even with her restricted License status resulting from the Almighty's sanction when she tried to kill mortals for her own selfish ends.

"You...will...never...have...me," he gasped.

"But I already _do_ have you!" Athenle announced in a voice confident and brash, pulling his face directly in front of hers and piercing him with an angry glare. Keiichi felt himself shaking, his mind thundering arrhythmic conundrums. Was this the answer the Lord has promised? Was this how the 'Other Side' of Belldandy's wish for him would play out? Was this the irrevocable love that he was wish-bound to experience, a love that would be more curse than blessing?

"Leave me...be, Athenle. I have lost..." he begged fleetingly, trying to project a sense of his profound heartbreak at being separated from Belldandy, hoping this would cause her to feel empathy for his loss. But instead, Athenle's receipt of his emotional trauma was flavored with amusement and triumph.

"She's gone. I'm here. Too bad. Feh! Poor in spirit, because nothing can be done about that. Mortals are so limited, after all. Yet her loss will be my gain. I had to endure witnessing your flimsy dalliance with that mortal bitch during this ensuing separation between you and I. Humiliation in the eyes of my Valkyrie peers because of her meddling. Her stupid wish for you to be in a perfect match with a Goddess...well, looks like it doesn't include her. She's just another worthless mortal, stuck on that squalid Therarealm, while you and me are..."

"GET YOUR FUCKING HANDS OFF OF HIM, YOU GODDESS BITCH! **_NOW!!!*_*"

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"I said, get your fucking hands off of my husband, you bitch!" Belldandy shouted. In the back of her mind, she realized that this was a gripping dream of comfort. She knew she was still physically in the hospital, collapsed in despair across Keiichi's torn and cold body. But another part of her was here, in an out-of-the-body dreamworld. Just like Keiichi's fatally injured corpse, her heart was ripped open, bleeding away the years of loving memories. So few years...not as many as they should have shared together.

The only explanation was that her mind must be busted, like a cellphone that had been stomped on by a rhino. She had snapped, was now officially insane with grief, was now caught up in some kind of draughty fantasy-vision. In reality, her husband Keiichi was dead; and yet she was imagining that she was protecting him from death by proxy, in a chimera-scape metaphor. Shielding him from an image of death that was squeezed into the form of her one true enemy. The opponent of opponents...a jealous and overbearing Valkyrie filled with selfish possessiveness who had tried so underhandedly to take him away from her all those years ago.

The Valkyrie who was choking the life out of her dear husband.

"Well, if this was a dream, and all I'm really doing is dreaming this while I fainted or got all passed out in the hospital ER, then fuck it! I might as well go for it," she thought.

"YOU!" the Valkyrie shouted in recognition, glaring at her with dark hatred.

"I have a name," Belldandy answered in a voice that resounded with aspired threat. Something was majorly scaring the shit out of the Valkyrie, while at the same time causing the warrior Goddess to become even more angry.

"Th..this is wrong. This is impossible! You can't be _here_! You're a mortal!" Athenle wailed in angry protest, pointing back at her as she clenched Keiichi tightly around the neck with one hand. Something about Athenle really felt ugly inside of Belldandy. Here she was, throttling Keiichi just like he had throttled her during the final game of the 2008 Olympics. A tightly-woven memory. Yet, this whole place seemed weird, not only because it was like a dream, but because it was too vivid for a dream. Too real.

"You're a stinking fucking mortal, trespassing upon hallowed ground!" Athenle announced vociferously. "This is _Yggdrasil_! The Realm of the Gods, where the shared mightiness of all the multiverses converge. You cannot possibly be here amongst we, the Divines. You do not belong, you are not worthy."

"Bell...dandy?" Keiichi wheezed in a choking voice, equally astonished as his captor. His face seemed to flash incomprehension like a seacoast lighthouse. She saw her grief reflected back at her when she looked into his eyes.

This crazy dream was getting interactive, video-gamey.

"Now I understand what is happening here. This is your idea of a trick, isn't it Keiichi? Trying to pull one over on me, eh? An attempt to make me believe in something that cannot exist? You're trying to confuse me, you wretch!" Athenle shouted, flinging Keiichi to the ground as one would discard a rag-doll. "I'll blow her to atoms, because she's nothing more than an illusion. A holograph or a false physical manifest that you managed to conjure up with your weakass level of powers."

Before she could react, Belldandy found herself engulfed in orange-rainbowed flames. But it didn't hurt a bit. Enraged, Athenle drew a huge axesword-like weapon that she had kept holstered on her back, and in a flash was in Belldandy's face, ready to hew her in half from the crown of her head to her tips of her toes with a vicious stroke.

Instinctively, Belldandy raised her arms to block the mortal blow...and the axe-sword shattered.

Everything shattered, the dream she was having seemed to implode...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"This is most irregular. Most irregular indeed," she heard a voice musing aloud. "For this one should be a mortal, and yet she seems to confound the managed order of reality and has been translated to here. A place where such as she cannot ken."

Belldandy glanced around, hearing a voice within her mind that was visionless. There was no speaker, nobody else here but...Keiichi! But it wasn't her husband, her Keiichi. The Keiichi she saw was the Keiichi that she remembered from nine years earlier: a God from a hidden realm called Windowsill who could make snowflakes turn crispy hot against the skin if he wished. Past and present collided in her mind, heart and soul collided within her being, dispersing tangents of conscious shrapnel that mystified her. Her emotions were flying fast as bullets. She could hear _minds_ within herself; complex cogitations backgrounded by the sound of an angelic cantor. She could feel souls and hearts and spirits, a reality that was so condensed into each moment, it would make rush hour in Shibuya seem like a relaxing afternoon on her dad's farm.

"K..Keiichi?" she thought as she looked at the form of her husband.

"Belldandy, could this possibly be you?" an instant reply flowed in her consciousness.

She noticed that they were being watched by a human-shaped pillar of light. Looking closer, she was amazed to see that Keiichi had his trademark slender ovaline God seal on his forehead, just like it was when she had first met him back in 2007.

But it was 2016, two weeks after the Olympics. And where was Athenle?

"I'm sorry, but I have to know..." the thoughtcast sparkled. She could sense a feeling of apologence accompanying it...

Suddenly, her life rippled in front of her, a filmstrip that flashed through her awareness. It was as if someone had taken the 28 years of her life and burned it onto a DVD, and was now using her heart as a DVD player to review all the moments. To gather in the _knowing_ of her, the knowing of who she really was. She remembered reading about what people reported seeing when they met up with near-death experiences...how an overwhelming number of them described experiencing a 'life-review' process while they were almost-dead. "But Keiichi is the dead one, not me!" she thought. Yet, she felt his presence in a way she had never felt it before. She imagined herself and he soaring above a large ocean like two birds, and Keiichi seemed to be guiding her towards some invisible perch on an island far far away. His Soul alongside her, brushing against infinity. Penetrating through it. Sifting and channel-surfing her emotions.

_ZING!!!_

In a flash, she was back at the final game of the 2008 Olympics.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

A preamble gathered in her mind to set the scene as she watched her team, frozen in time like statues. Then she was somewhere else. Another Belldandy. Another Keiichi. Chaos at first shattering reality, and then consuming itself. Keiichi...her Keiichi...deciding to share a bit of his Soul with her, in order to save her life from a viral 'anti-life infection' that was killing her. The other Belldandy was a Goddess, and her husband was a mortal from a place called Earth. Just the opposite of she and Keiichi.

"How can this be?" she wondered aloud, afraid because her intuition had been unleashed and was threatening to extend beyond the reach of her will. Coursing through her was a knotted feeling of being tangled up with Keiichi in some meaningful way; not the hot flush of shared excitement after they made love, or the sizzle of the connection when they gazed into each other's eyes...

It was all different, as if _she was inside of him_. Inside of him, watching herself through his eyes. The stilled image of her team resumed motion, the players executing liquid-fast teamwork. Then a flinch of fright as she watched herself collapse on the court in Beijing. She could hear 75,000 heartbeats minus one. A graft of regret fused with her heart, knowing herself as she lay dead on the volleyball court.

But how? Keiichi was the one who was dead!

The vision expanded and suddenly she was holding Thera in her hands, just like she had held the trophy volleyballs given out to the Olympic medalists. Thera felt like soft silk to her fingers; it was rotating with such a brilliant blue beauty, the planetscape covered with drifts of clouds. Yet they were not clouds as she flew through them with her mind's eye, examining them closer. They were galaxies. The globe was much more than a planet; it was something indescribable. Every speck of the white clouds covering the 'planet' was a stellar object. She sensed fear; a mounting nauseous unease because this was too much sensory information. Overloaded with images...and then the perspective shifted again...now she was seeing past the clouds, seeing the ocean of the globe she was holding. An ocean of foam bubbles.

Multiverses.

A consciousness gripped her, and she felt a crystal-clear thought.

"If I am to be the instrument of renewal, of recomposition of the Multiverse that includes Thera, then I am the bond that could bring Belldandy back to life. I cannot undo her death, but perhaps by my death a balance may be struck. Giving my life would be worthwhile, because she and everything within her reality would survive. If this is demonstrative of the unknowable love that I can never comprehend, then perhaps I am approaching a state of appreciation for Belldandy, for Thera, for all of them."

Barely heard among this heart-felt pronouncement was a whisper...a gracious Goddess asking if she could do a "Goddess tweak".

A fusion of three Souls instead of two.

The other Belldandy was totally different from her in every imaginable way. The other Belldandy was filled with kindness and grace, a well-intentioned serenity that she shared freely with all. The other Belldandy didn't have the competitive soul of an athlete, or was boisterous, or was...mortal. She was God, just like Keiichi had been. Mirror-opposite of her...and yet she was the same as well. Just like she, the other Belldandy was strong-willed, and couldn't leave well-enough alone.

"Keiichi, what's a Senior First Class, Delimited, Unrestricted license?" she thought, mentally sensing the other Belldandy winking at her within her mind, or whatever this experience was. Then the image of the Goddess Belldandy faded...

The other, the Goddess version of herself, had left a calmness in her wake.

Wordlessly, she sensed Keiichi again. Instead of answering her, he invited her. "Come here, my love. Travel within me and find my heart with me. For it was you that opened it up, you that created every sense of love that I can now enjoy."

Within the innermost chambers of Keiichi's heart, she saw herself enthroned in a glowing plasma of preciousness.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Keiichi released her gently, as it was her first Sharing and she was a complete neophyte when it came to her Goddess abilities. Such conduct was meant for absolute privacy, and he was filled with shame because he had Shared with her in the presence of the Almighty. He had totally taken the initiative, carefully guiding her, allowing her to peer inside of the most intimate focus of his Soul.

Now she was in his arms, in a Theran physical manifest, crying into his shoulder. Her touch, her smell, her taste...was real, just as real as it had been over the past eight years.

"It is meet that you would elect to Share with this one within My presence," the Almighty noted in a voice that offered forgiveness...and approval. Keiichi was so caught up with his beloved Belldandy's emotions and confusion that he didn't even bother to pay obeisance to the Liege of Yggdrasil in the form of a formal bow or respectful seiza.

Obviously, the Lord had swifted he and Belldandy away from Athenle. This much was certain. But how did Belldandy come here in the first place? That remained to be discovered...but here she was, in his arms. He loved her more than anything. In the moment, he imagined her as his daughter, needing the male reassurance of a father-figure. So he sheltered her with his emotional strength. As she sobbed and clung to him, the Almighty remained infinitely patient. The Ruler of the God's Realm had allowed them a moment of release. To settle back into themselves, so to speak.

This _was_ Belldandy...and he himself needed reassurance because his heart was founting with feelings that he had never experienced before. He had loved her on a mortal-to-mortal level...but now he was experiencing love for the first time as a Divine being. Every joy was so powerful within him!

Manifesting next to him, the Lord encircled both he and Belldandy with His arms. Feeling love added to love, Keiichi was transported away with a boundless swell of serenity and contentment that far exceeded anything he had experienced in his long life.

"Verily, you have passed through the Gate of Judgement once, in the youthyears of your existence," the Almighty One spoke, as if He was making a pronouncement. "A renewal of such an action will be unneeded, as your Soul has clearly Bonded with the Soul of this one. Interpenetrating love weaves light within and without you both; and I am merrily heartened of it. We have all suffered much in this recent lens of the Present. This reunion...while unexpected...is one of the final undoings. A rectification of a destructive act hazarded by a nefarious Being possessed with a relentless Evil."

The Lord was talking about the SurGoth.

"Keiichi, what is He talking about? Where am I? Why are you here? What just happened?" Belldandy asked, her voice muffled against the nape of his neck. From his perspective as a God, her questions blurred like those of a young GodKid. Millions of them at once.

"Belldandy...you've become a Goddess. A very powerful Goddess. And your wish has finally come true."

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

She was amazed, as Keiichi took her on a whirlwind tour of Yggdrasil. Their God's Realm was part of something called a Syntrasil, which was a blend of Yggdrasils, multiverses...even many realms where actual Demons lived. Somewhere in the Syntrasil was _another Yggdrasil_, where the Goddess Belldandy and the mortal Keiichi that had saved her were hopefully enjoying the bliss of married life. Belldandy was like a little girl left free to roam at an amusement park, and she could feel how much her Soulmate's enjoyment of her excitement was filling him. For she was much more than his wife, she was Bonded to him with love, as tightly as he was bonded to his Angel. And when she was ready, she would have her own Angel to cherish. And so he toured her through the beauties of her new home.

All along, they joked that this was their "second honeymoon".

Whenever they got lost amidst the wonders, a sentient existence called XOM which functioned as a sort of 'computer' to assist the running of Everything, would assist them and put them back on trek. Things were new-new, and even Keiichi was confused at times despite living here for over 200,000 years.

Out of the blue, one day XOM offered her and Keiichi its explanation for her presence here. XOM seemed to think that her transformation into a Goddess had been ordained, woven into the condition of her wish. The wish she had given up, which had been granted by the Almighty Himself. The wish that she had given to Keiichi with a selfless assignation...her wish that he would experience the most profound exchange of love between himself and a Goddess that could possibly be rendered into actuality.

She still remembered beating the tatami mats in her bedroom until her knuckles bled that night when Keiichi first told her how he had been barred from experiencing love. Now, she was committed to making up for that loss by restoring his love, element by element, dimension by dimension. Which was pretty sublime and weird, because he was 21 Decas older than her.

But she was the Goddess in this relationship.

It was insane, but the wish she had conceived back on Thera was an answer to her most deepest fears and longing. But thanks to a Norn and a mortal...

She and Keiichi would have Forever.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"This certainly is an unprecedented situation," the Almighty said, strolling back and forth in front of her and Keiichi as they sat seiza-style in front of Him. He had graciously allowed them a millennia to take the Grand Tour, to enjoy some fun and games, to seek out all the wonders of this wonderful expanded Reality, all of which was new to her, much of which was new to them. Following His advice, they had created a homeplace for themselves here once the novelty of Yggdrasil began to diminish. During those hundreds of years, she often imagined that she was back on Thera: seated behind Keiichi, riding on motorcycle together as they explored the roadways and highways of Japan. Anywhere she wanted to go, he would kick-start the bike and go for a ride to take her there.

But now it was time for the serious talk. They had been summoned to one of the Lord's CrystalCloud Palaces, and Keiichi had carefully prepared her for this interview. This would be perhaps the most important interview of her life, because the Lord was going to decide upon their roles in Yggdrasil.

Keiichi's dispensation was almost assured. He was a natural to work in the Wish Escort Office. More than being assigned as a wish-granting God; he had the Senior First Class license. She felt proud of him, knowing that he could run the entire Wish Escort Office if he wanted to. His enhanced license allowed him to access tremendous amounts of Divine powers and abilities; in a sense, this made him a very valuable commodity. In Theran terms, Keiichi would have been one of the Fourteen: the head members of the IOC Movement. Very influential, tasked with immense trust and responsibility. With his high-level Divine capabilities, she had learned that Keiichi was one of the elites in terms of God abilities. Which was part of their plan, as long as they could assure the Lord that it was a viable pathway that would benefit sentient mortal beings and improve the efficacy of wish-granting throughout all the multiverses this Yggdrasil administered.

So how do you con the Almighty?

They had a plan. It was necessary, because there was something she wanted to do...and Keiichi agreed that it was good and that he would help her.

With his delicate and carefully selected rhetoric, Keiichi eventually managed to convince the Lord to assign him to run the Wish Escort Office. She sighed in relief when the Almighty said "Let it be so" to Keiichi's proposal. Their scheme had started out with initial success.

As they had planned, once the Almighty gave Keiichi charge of the Wish Escort Office, he enacted his first official act immediately. He instructed XOM to shuffle the Wish Escort administrative grid and split all wish-granting duties into two divisions. The Gods would operate under the Wish Escort division, while Goddesses would operate under the newly-created Goddess Relief division. His second act was to appoint Belldandy as the first wish-granting Goddess in the new division.

The Lord was highly amused by the fact that such an oversight had been allowed to exist for the entire history of Yggdrasil. A neglect in the schema of Yggdrasil that limited wish-granting abilities to Gods only.

Belldandy's first act as a wish-granting Goddess was to fulfill a wish of Keiichi's. As they had planned, Keiichi's wish was "I want to be with a Goddess like you on Thera. To live out the remaining years of our mortal lives with all those who are dear to us." That was what she had wanted, to go back and live out the mortal lives they had been enjoying on Thera. This was why they had planned so hard, why it was up to him to make the wish. She couldn't wish for it because she had already been granted a wish.

But Keiichi surprised her by adding to the wish, wishing that she would have a mortal child.

And the Almighty surprised both of them by recalling their attention to that moment of discovery a thousand years ago, when she first came to Yggdrasil. While she and Keiichi were embracing for the first time as Gods, the Mighty One had embraced the two of them, During this embrace, He chose to perform his role as All-Father and had set in motion a sequence of events that would lead up to this interview...and the new life that their shared love would foster into existence. For he was the Lord, the Father of all of the Gods. The Maker, who infused the shared Love between two Divine beings with life, so that worthy Bonded ones could have children. And in this one special case, making it so two mortal-Divine hybrid beings could conceive a baby...

You don't con the Almighty.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

When they left His chambers, it hit Belldandy full-force that she was going to be a _mother_. She looked at Keiichi in a new light, recognizing that their love would take on the joys of partnership...the raising of young GodKids. Keiichi was almost certain that the children would be a unique blend of mortal and Divine essences. Belldandy smiled to herself after he said this. Her husband was still an idiot. For what else could their children be? Half-God, half-Demon? Once again, Keiichi had 'discovered' the obvious.

Both she and he were blended beings themselves, being part mortal and part Divine. And right now, the 'mortal' part of her was insistent, pulling at her conscience like an owl trying to grasp at her hair.

"Husband, would you indulge me?" she asked.

"Of course, my love. After all, it _is_ a millennia overdue," he replied, fully knowing what she was going to ask XOM to do.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

The shattered remnants of a huge sword-axe littered the ground, as if it had been a glass plate dropped upon the floor in the kitchen back at their temple home. XOM had returned them to the very moment where the Lord had whisked them away a thousand years ago.

Watching Athenle stare at his wife with rapt disbelief, Keiichi grinned. He was going to enjoy this almost as much as Belldandy...

"N..not possible!" Athenle shouted, regarding her shattered weapon. "I'm a combat trained Valkyrie! You couldn't have done this to my weapon..."

"Unless she's a Senior First Class Goddess," he noted, milking the look on Athenle's face as his words sunk in. His beloved Belldandy had defeated her on the court during the 2008 Olympics, and he understood his wife well enough to know that she couldn't prevent herself from wanting to be transported backwards through Time to this very moment. To make the defeat complete. So he and she had returned to her first moment on Yggdrasil. Getting here had taken less than a nano-second, but he knew that the meaning of what was about to occur would resonate within Belldandy for the rest of her millennia.

"Oh...my..Lord, this is so _wrong_!" Athenle shouted. "Incomprehensible! She reads as a Senior First Class. And even you...even you Keiichi...read as a Senior First Class too! A..and she's a _Fury_! She's actually one of the three Furies! She's one of the three ultimate protectors of Yggdrasil...the Goddesses who are marshal to the marshals of the Valkyrie and the WarGods!"

Keiichi watched as Belldandy grinned at Athenle, who was now totally spooked and ready to "spazz out" as his wife would put it.

At the end of their interview, the Lord had decided to add another surprise by conferring the very noble title of Fury upon Belldandy. In His wisdom, the Almighty had decided that if Yggdrasil was ever threatened, Belldandy's fighting spirit and selflessness would resolve any type of danger. He praised her, noting that her athleticism, competitive drive and selfless courage were the exemplar that all Valkyrie and WarGods should strive to attain. She had proven this, back in 2008 during the Olympics.

So now his wife was a Fury...and Athenle was furious with disappointment.

Keiichi looked at his hands, and then touched them to his ovaline God seal in the middle of his forehead, manifesting his God's Escort Office meishi card out of his forehead, and read the introduction.

_"The God Keiichi, Head of the Yggdrasil Wish-Granting Office. Senior First Class License, Delimited, Unrestricted."_

Belldandy read her meishi after he did.

_"The Goddess Belldandy, agent of the Goddess Relief Division of the Yggdrasil Wish-Granting Office. Appointed to Fury by leave of the Lord. Senior First Class License, Delimited, Unrestricted."_

Athenle was immobilized in a flash of fear and admonishment when Belldandy finished reading her intro card. Staring at them gape-jawed, the Valkyrie Goddess had might as well had not been there. Which left them alone in a sense, to re-experience their reunion all over again.

Keiichi wondered...what would he have done, if the Lord hadn't whisked he and she away at this moment? He looked at Belldandy, his wife, his Soulmate, the Goddess he was Bonded to. A woman whose soul and spirit had proven itself stronger than any Divine being that he knew, save the Lord. Even strong enough to undo the brutal punishment of the Gate of Judgement. Strong enough to fill his heart with a love that he would never have imagined...

So he did the wayback process in his heart, and here's how it went:

_"Belldandy, is that really you?" Keiichi shouted, tears in his eyes as he saw her anew._

_"Wh..where are we?" she answered._

_"We're in Windowsill," Keiichi answered with a grin. With a slightness of effort, he pushed Athenle out of the way and kissed her the perfect kiss._

_She and Keiichi experienced the final Present._

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

THERA, JAPAN, CHIBA PREFECTURAL MEDICAL CENTER:

Chihiro couldn't believe the lamentable and agonizing moments her friend had just endured. Was enduring, just behind that drawn curtain a few meters away in the emergency room. Intensive care unit wasn't the half of it, because Keiichi's injuries demanded the attention of a dozen doctors and nurses.

Who couldn't do shit about what had happened to him.

Her heart sinking fast, Chihiro knew that they all hurt like hell, because life had just fucked them in the ass with a heated tire-rod, viciously violating every emotion of hope at the very moment when they should have been relishing in their final victory dance. It should have been a new beginning, celebrating the spoils of their final victory and then moving on with life. Holding onto every special moment with open hands. Birds flying away like years. All those years she had fought with herself, with Belldandy, with volleyball...and now this.

Keiichi was going to die.

What made it even worse was her awareness that the sledgehammer blow of grief would ripple through these four women standing against the wall next to her. Her pupils, her protégés, her players, her best friends. If truth be told, these women were the closest thing she would ever have in the sense of having a family. She had never let anyone in as deep as she had with these women. Not even her husband. The bond between the six of them was as tight as a summer rainfall. She still thought of them as girls from time to time, each one of them a very special younger sister.

Now it was ruined. Next to her, Kinosh'ta was mumbling "Fuck it" over and over again, a paralyzed expression of gloom on her face. Tamiya had her face buried in her large hands, her shoulders heaving with barely-controlled sobs. Ootaki was staring blankly at the ceiling lights, eyes wide open and tears cascading down her high cheekbones. Little Taki was shivering, her fists clenched as she occasionally crouched down and pounded her knees with them, too stunned to cry.

She couldn't even imagine what Belldandy was going through.

There would be a funeral.

There would be mourning on a national scale, for Keiichi was much more than any of them ever thought he could be. Belldandy had chosen well, for her husband had become a prominent symbol of redemption, a singular athlete that was widely-admired in Japanese popular and athletic culture. Unlike the fuckup athletes that populated the world, Keiichi had decided to make it better for the youth of Japan. Off-the-court, his charitable foundation had helped thousands of young men find direction in their lives. On the court, he had even given Japan a deeply cherished moment at the 2016 Tokyo Games when his buzzer-beater shot defeated the Americans. Yes, his passing this soon after the Olympics would send a shockwave of grief all throughout Japan. Life as a fucked-up earthquake, disappointing thousands.

There would be work afterwards to begin the healing process.

"How the fuck can I coach her through this?" Chihiro asked herself, sotto voce. Looking at the best women in the world, the four dear friends and teammates that were here in this damned ER with her, she knew it would be impossible. "How do I coach _them_ through this? I'd trade every Gold Medal in my office to have him back!" she thought with bitter regret.

When Keiichi finally breathed the empty breath, she knew that Belldandy would never be the same. That when he died, part of her would die. The relationship between the two of them was just that way. Funny, it was as if they had been destined by the universe to be together. She remembered driving Belldandy to the hospital years ago when she busted up her hand, listening to her ramble on about Keiichi. Listening to a crazed myth of Gods and miracles and knives on the moon.

But there were no miracles. Not in this gritty, sometimes-and-often messed up world.

As if to mock her, to confirm her sense of desolate hopelessness, she overheard the head MD of the ER officiously declare Keiichi's time of death, and then begin to describe in a series of doctor-babble statements the medical circumstances associated with the fatality.

He was gone.

Eternity stretched taunt within the next ten minutes. The MDs and nurses silently shuffled out one-by-one from behind the drawn privacy curtain, allowing Belldandy a final private moment with her husband. For some reason, the bustling of the ER seemed to cave in when she imagined Keiichi with a white sheet over his face.

Then Chihiro started hearing Jun Lin Nian's song "The Dream is Over". Kinosh'ta was humming it, and almost supernaturally she and the others joined in and chorused it with humming voices. Written right after the "Chinese Invasion" Beatles had finally broken up in Beijing in the mid-1980s after twenty five years as a fixture in the music world, the song had both haunted and fascinated her when she heard it on the radio as a young girl. Jun's song was intimately lamenting the changes, the poignant divisions between he and his bandmates, the flexure between the 'old' China-States and the emerging 'new' China-States. Now, it took on a whole new meaning.

Everything was breaking up. The team. Belldandy. Her best friends. The dignity of her Olympic triumphs.

What was the point in all of this, now?

Her eyes blurred with tears as she saw what looked like a brief strobe of light behind or inside the curtain. It lasted just for a split-second; she would have completely missed it if she hadn't been looking at the floor near the skirt of the privacy curtain. A flicker, as one would expect right before one of those tubular florescent lights died.

Even the lights were going out.

Clenching her eyes shut, Chihiro finally allowed herself to cry. She didn't want to experience even one more second of this agonizing horrible tragedy. A moment later, she felt someone gently wiping her eyes and her face with a tissue. Thank God for nurses. Now that life had been train-wrecked, the gesture meant all of the world to her. Because of the simple act of kindness, she started crying even harder as gratitude resonated against grief.

"Chihiro, it's gonna be okay," she imagined Belldandy's and Keiichi's voices whispering, soft words in each ear. Fingers gently stroking her cheeks.

A hug.

She opened her eyes and saw them. Belldandy and Keiichi. It wasn't her imagination...they were _really here_. Keiichi, miraculously healed of his injuries. Belldandy, miraculously saved from her heartbreak. Both of them were hugging her, hugging her teammates in a small circle...which was encircled by a group of astonished medical team workers. She could feel the two of them drawing her close, like how a parent would comfort a child. Completely taken aback, she glanced downwards and noticed that the two's feet _were floating a few cm above the floor_. "Oops!" she heard Belldandy exclaim. When she looked again, their feet were back on the floor.

Looking up at Belldandy...and Keiichi...she felt a calming affection surround her troubled and injured heart like a soothing pool of warm water. The expression of love she saw in their eyes...a love for her, communicated with an angelic, blissful joy. She struggled against the confusion, not able to believe what she was seeing, what she was feeling. Even when faced with reality, there was doubt.

With a comforting smile, Belldandy leaned in close and kissed her on the forehead and told her the truth in a voice filled with conviction.

_"Miracles happen. Love endures. Life goes on. And wishes really do come true."_

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --


	147. Pt 147: Nine Voices: The Twins Pt 1

**Part 147: Nine Voices – The Twins Part One**

KELESTE AND KEIYASU:

Keleste was lying on her back, watching a rainbow weaving overhead against a pale blue sky. Of course, it was impossible for a rainbow to be directly overhead; it would just be a prisming of light if visible at all. But she saw the bowing of colors and realized that it was a circular rainbow, as if a halo was floating in the sky in a wide circuit right above her. She could feel a gentle wind feathering her face; tiny droplets lofted by the breeze. The sky overhead was light blue, which meant that the rainfall was blowing off the top of a cloud perhaps several kilometers away. She could smell the rich mist that had gathered the scent of the trees of the woodlands, draping it near the meadow to carpet the long grasses with pine-dew.

This was a place.

She looked for Keiyasu and saw him reclined against a tall rock, obviously having regained his senses and woken up before she did. This was odd, because it was usually the other way around. He seemed half-asleep, but when her gaze lighted on him, he roused himself to greet her.

"It's about time you stirred into wakefulness, sister sleepyhead," he teased. "I've been up and about for a short while, and from what I can tell, this place is pretty cool! But I'd suggest that you just lay there for a couple minutes until you gain your bearings. When I came to, I tried to stand up right away and got completely dizzed out and took a splash. While you're resting, take a look around you and be impressed! Wherever we are, we seem to be in the middle of some freaking cool parklands; like one of those arcadian or zoologician planets that starfaring mortal races develop as parks, pristine and totally unspoiled by any development."

Following his gesture, she could see low rolling hills in every direction, with a small mountain ridge framing parts of the far horizon. Some of the hills were more abrupt, with jagged contours skirted by a low-lying fog. She and her brother were near the top of mid-sized hill, mostly covered with dense tall grasses with occasional trees here and there. Several areas between the nearby lowlands were heavily forested; some of the taller rises were layered with verdant wild-grass and hedges mixed with slope-falls and crevices. Her general impression was that she and her brother were in a meadow of wide rolling hills, ranged within a huge amphitheatre of taller hillocks and small mountains. The landscape had several glens that were dotted with a number of large singular rock bounders like the one her brother was resting against. The plains were vibrant with wildflowers of every hue, mostly in patches amidst some of the shorter grasses.

She tried to center herself and extend her Goddess senses to examine the vicinity of this veldt, only to discover that her Divine faculties of sensation were significantly blunted. Her brother smiled at her; obviously her face had revealed her surprise to him.

"Yeah, same thing happened to me, Kel," Keiyasu noted as she sat up on the ground, feeling her sense of balance swirling around her head, just out of reach. Obviously the dizziness he had mentioned. She wandered her thoughts; her curiosity beggared by her light-headedness and loss of balance just from the act of sitting up on the ground.

"I woke up lying on my side, totally head-spin action, Keleste. When I tried to sit up, my body wouldn't cooperate at all. So I just lay still for a few minutes, trying to take the measure of this place. That's when I found out that most of my Divine powers seem to be negated somehow. After a short wait, I tried to stand up again and found myself swaying like these tall grasses in the wind. I fell flat on my face in a patch of mud," Keiyasu explained.

"Hee hee, you didn't get it all off of you either!" Keleste giggled, noticing the brown smudges on her brother's cheek. She felt a sense of relief...at least this limitation of her Divine abilities wasn't a symptom of something wrong with _herself_. It was this place; whatever enigmatic qualities that were limiting her were affecting her brother as well. Apprehensive because her Goddess senses were so useless; she felt like she might as well be trying to use a metal drill to create a hole in thin air. Huddling her knees under her chin as she sat on the ground, she tried to let this verdant and pristine area becalm her. Turmoil on the inside can often be relaxed in soft surroundings. Stretching her mind, going with the flow with a meditative mindset...trying to sort things out, to sense dim recent memories amidst frenzied typhoons of recall. Sharp flashes. Being swept up by massive tides of energy. Everything around her chaotic, collapsing and expanding at the same time. Kidnapped by an impossible technological vehicle that really did blend magic and tech. A brief reunion with the other four, her newly-found cousins. A faraway time that was more void than place. All void, no place, no energy. A cloud of sparkling dusts and a whorlpool. Several adult Goddesses and a Demoness...

A jangle of partitions and glimpses, but hopefully it would all come back to her, given time.

"You're right about one thing: this place...it's _beautiful_! Do you have any idea where we're at, Keiyasu? Can you sense _anything_ that might be Yggdrasil...er, the Yggdrasil part of Syntrasil? Why can't I sense the God's Realm at all?" she asked. It was very disconcerting to be so insensate, to recognize no existence of the God's Realm or anything to do with it. Yggdrasil had been the constant presence in her life, its embrace of many energies and dimensions were _home_ to her. Her Stepmoms Skuld and Peorth were there, the Almighty was there, the Ygg Mainframe was there, the Proctors were there...Yggdrasil was all she had known. Now it was all different, like taking an atom and suddenly evolving it into a galaxy. Syntrasil...the new unified realm for Gods, Demons, mortals. She felt a harrowing sense of loss, as if Fourteen Decas of her life were suddenly detached, left behind, blinded away from her.

It was all gone, disconnected.

"Not a clue," Keiyasu answered belatedly, seemingly caught up in his own thoughts about what was clearly a predicament. "You would think that with a massively expanded Divine realm like Syntrasil, it would be even easier for us to be aware of its presence. But there's nothing...like I'm almost limited to mortal-type abilities. I can't thoughtcast worth a damn, which is why I'm speaking with you by vocalizing instead of communioncating. I don't feel any qualities of telepathic communication...but I think I can still sense auras, because I can faintly distinguish yours. But I can't feel any connection to Time. The Dimensional levels are cut off from this place. That, or we're blocked or unable to exist in them. No Chronologics or Chronometrics at all to measure the passage of time or to touch Time. This really sucks, cuz I'm pretty much limited to the three basic physical planar dimensions and the Creative dimension of thought. Even the fourth dimension stuff is limited; I can't even do simple telekinesis. It's really freaky! There's also a disconnect between me and you as well. I can't discern your Goddess energy signature at all, which means that sensing Divinity and Metanative dimensional stuff is out the door. Either this, or your Goddess abilities are near nil. I can barely sense your TNA, for that matter."

"This is totally broke! Not only can I partially sense you, but I don't detect any Divine beings in the vicinity. Which means that we're on our own...once again. Why can't we just get a break once in a while? We might as well be exiled in the Well of Urd, because there's nothing here. No Gods, no Demons, no Earth Spirits. Just beauty, but an isolated, empty beauty," Keleste proclaimed her frustration in a loud shout. As her brother assessed the limitations he was experiencing, storm clouds of irritation seemed to mount upon each other in her mind; unaccustomed as she was to such incompleteness. Why the hindering of our Divine nature? There had to be an explanation for this, and perhaps it could be polished into comprehension if she and her brother engaged themselves. She was especially interested in her brother's recall of the events prior to their arrival here, as his impression may reveal more than just clues.

"Hey Kei, what do you remember right before we came here?" she asked, detailing the brief strobes of memory she could recall. "Overall, I have this hazy recollection that there were nine of us, and three adults. We were doing something really difficult...like creating. Trying to build a project which was totally wonderful, but was also completely challenging because we were bringing it into existence out of almost nothing. Massive powers at work, powers that I could feel _working through me_ in a sense. Insane-type stuff, as if we all were creating a mandala or an arcane working, but mega-scale massive. Right at the end, I could hear a voice telling us that our hearts would be free...and then everything was all a burst of light-colors."

"What I do remember is vague, all scattered in bits and pieces Kel. Same kind stuff you're talking about," Keiyasu agreed. "The adults were reading something called an 'Activation Blessing' that really touched me deeply. Then they were telling us to be ourselves and not act stupid. I felt an energy pouring into me, and pouring out of me as well. But to me, we were trying to create a balance of some kind. It was challenging because we were assembling something as well as creating it. Puzzle pieces that had to fit together with a certain degree of symmetry. At the end, the voice that was in my head was saying 'you'll all be together again'."

"Isn't that what Belldandy of Nulln said? Remember how she explained our situation when we were stranded on that desolate, wasteland planet after jumping through the Gate of Judgement, chasing after that mortal we thought was our Father? Once she figured out that we were all from different points in Time, and we definitely had different histories because each Earthrealm in our reality was different, she said that we came from alternative realities. That she and that Keiichi mortal weren't our real parents. She said that we were in a place where we didn't belong. That it wasn't quite right; almost but not exactly the right Time and Space. But she seemed pretty insistent that our real Mother and Father were probably searching for us as well. She told us that if she had children, that's what she would do. I still don't know how I feel about that; it left me feeling both happy and messed up. We both heard voices right before we found ourselves here. Right at the end, the voice was trying to communicate something important to us. But what did it all mean? Was it saying that our parents will find us, somehow?" Keleste ventured, her breast filled with possibilities and hopes.

"But how? The whole...Everything...fell apart all around us. And that Goddess Skuld who said she was sending us to the end of Eternity? When we got there, what'd we find? Nothing! Just a scattering of microscopic debris. If anything, I felt _further_ separated from any chance of finding our Mother and Father. Just when it seemed we were getting closer when we found the other four kids we were seeing in our dreams, we got kidnapped. Then it got all fucked up!" Keiyasu noted, ruffling his hair in agitation.

"But that other Goddess Skuld, the one with the white hair, seemed to have some definite ideas about the importance of our family. She said that we _were_ connected, all of us," Keleste argued back. "Perhaps there's a reason why we didn't conveniently wind up back in Yggdrasil..er, Syntrasil. At least in the God's part of Syntrasil where we would be in recognizable surroundings we're familiar with. I wish I knew more about the meaning of all this crazy stuff, because there's so much that's unexplained."

"Like how'd we get here, for one thing. Or what kind of place is this," Keiyasu mentioned. "Maybe we should go with what we know. I don't recognize any of the obvious characteristics that would indicate that we're in Syntrasil, which probably makes it safe to assume that this is a terrestrial planet, not some part of the God's Realm. There's avians flying around in the sky above us, which means that other animals must exist, because the avians have to eat something. Or something has to eat them. And look over there!"

Keleste followed his pointing finger with her eyes and dimly made out what looked like a series of colored strips of ground.

"That might disclose the presence of a sentient species," Keiyasu observed. "We'll have to get closer, because I can barely make them out. But notice the patterning! Could it be signs of habitation, way off in the distance in one of those shallow valleys? My guess is that's a section of small, tightly-packed plots...which would indicate rudimentary agriculture. I remember hearing that final voice saying something hopeful too, Keleste. I hope to the highest good that our parents are looking for us, because we're gonna need some help real soon if we're this limited. I suggest that a priority in the near-term is to try and locate this planet's sentient species and reconnoiter them for a while, so we can get a good grasp on their culture. See if they're friend or foe, see what we're up against technologically. By the way, how much of your Inculcation do you remember, sis?"

"Most of it's missing, Kei," Keleste answered, anticipating the intent of his query. After further discussion between she and her brother, she guessed that they probably had a fraction of their Inculcations intact. She couldn't even identify the avians Keiyasu had just mentioned. Before, she knew the names and behaviors of every individual taxon in a taxonomic holon...she basically knew all there was to know about every living species of every planet that had been populated by mortal species resembling the humans of the Earthrealm. Their evolutionary tracks, hierarchies, behavior and social patterning...all of it. She had forced herself to learn this, because any clue or hidden hint that might bring her closer to finding her Goddess mother needed to be investigated. Her and her brother were unsparing in their efforts; leaving no stone unturned in their search for their Mother.

That's what brought them to here in the first place.

"It's as if my Inculcation is there, but _is not there_ too," she continued. "Almost all of it...suspended beyond reach in part of my mind. But you know what? I was just thinking that maybe there is a _why_ to all of this. There has to be a reason why we're here, and that we're meant to uncover it. I don't think we were hijacked onto this planet by some weird randomness. For one thing, why aren't the others here? It's just you and me, Keiyasu. That _has_ to bear some significance in this situation."

"Tell me about it! You feel ready to do some walkin', sis?" Keiyasu asked as he pulled his sister up to her feet. "The local stellar object has moved partway across the sky, which means that we will have a period of time before the planet rotates us into darkside. I think we should seek to find our way to the nearest forest and then try to climb one of those hills. I have this haunting impression that we're vulnerable here out in the open."

"I agree. This totally blows, not having any of my Goddess powers," Keleste added. "If I could just extend my senses, we'd know in an instant where we are."

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

The overhead sky had quickly filled up with clouds as they made their way over two hills, finally gaining the top of one of the wooded tors just in time to see the local star, a yellow mid-sized sun, flatten out into a red-orange color as it sank into the pooling darkness of the horizon. From their vantage point, they could finally clearly see the small acreages that Keiyasu had spotted earlier. They also espied a worn pathway leading to some kind of habitation in the next valley over, located next to a river that coursed perpendicular to the sun-path. The arrangement of the constructs consisted of a loose collection of several ungainly round buildings fabricated out of wood patched with some kind of mud and a few pilings of rock to anchor the beams. The settlement of slapped-together structures was encircled with a raised embankment with a palisade of hewn tree-trunks atop it, creating the general impression that it was a primitive cantonment rather than a small village. The existence of a walled fence around the habitation was disconcerting; the emphasis on fortification rather than comfort clearly indicated that the predatory animals and perhaps the mortals themselves were aggressive species. The single 'road' leading into the cluster of dwellings appeared to have a gate, presumably guarded. A haphazard ring of narrow plots adjoined the small cohabitation, with thin strips of shrubbery or hedges planted as dividing lines between each plot of land.

For convenience's sake, they had decided to use the traditional Earthrealm designations of North-South, East-West...with the sun setting in the east, as it had done when they spent their millennia of monument-building on the ruined Earthrealm roughly Ten Decas after humanity obliterated itself.

The questions came easily and furiously, but the answers were difficult to touch upon, teased away in piecemeal scantiness.

If they had created a new 'universe' as they suspected, a host of conjectures were implicit. In terms of evolution and history, did all the sentient civilizations repeat their respective histories, following the same sequences of events over Time? Could their new creation have been a 'reboot' in a sense, complete with divergent histories and morphologies for both mortals and Divines? Was it possible that the registration of realities and experiences that they had lived with for all their lives could have somehow be altered? If so, then could there be a chance that the Earthrealm mortals might have survived, instead of bombing themselves into the dust? Could their Mother be in the God's Realm section of Syntrasil even now, perhaps searching after them?

Could Reality have been reinvented?

"I'm cold, Keiyasu," Keleste noted about two hours after the darkfall.

"How could you be cold, sis? Gods don't feel hot or cold unless they want to. Maybe when the radiant incandescence is very intense like that which is produced in a nova, or when the cryogenescence state is piercing like what one would feel on the surface of a Neutrinoid. But nothing like that is happening here, obviously," Keiyasu challenged her.

"I don't care, because I'm cold!" Keleste emphasized in a pert snap of a voice, leaning close against him. He could feel her shivering as her shoulder rested against his.

"How can this be? There's only been a slight variation in thermal energy," he questioned aloud. But Keleste's words seemed to trigger a sensing; Keiyasu became aware that he was feeling a bit chilly as well. She leaned next to him as they rested together against the trunk of a large oak tree. With his Divine senses impaired, the nightfall was actually _dark_; an obscurata that significantly limited his range of visual perception. Even his eyes didn't seem to work right on this planet, as most of the forested area around them was indefinite to the point of near invisibility. Clearly his overall optical faculties were restricted to a certain narrow range of the wavelength spectrum. He couldn't sense infra-red or ultra-blue, thermal radiation, or other wave-colors at all. Again, he was almost mortal...only this time, it was a haunting sense of blindness brought on by the nightfall. Either that, or he was so tired, his eyelids were growing heavier and heavier...

Keleste watched her brother dip off into chin-on-chest slumber. He had woken up before she had, so it only made sense that he would be the first to claim sleep. Sleep was such an unusual sensation, because she hardly ever needed to take such reposes on Yggdrasil. Only when she had exerted large amounts of Divine energy and was feeling deeply fatigued did she feel it necessary to lapse into a silken quietude.

Noises.

During the daytime, a host of soundings were audible as they walked towards the woods: avians flying overhead making whistles and cawls; the occasional sounds of feral animals, usually sharp piercing barks or loud gnarls; the rustling of the large trees with their boughs of leaves; the subdued hiss-whispering of wind blowing through the taller grasses. Nothing really threatening, because there didn't seem to be any noticeable large predatory fauna species as they proceeded across two meadows and a forest to reach their intended destination atop one of the taller hills. But at night, these tranquil woods seemed to come alive with a nocturnal medley; tuneful hootings from up in the trees, and an amazing singing in the distance that seemed to echo into the night as several animals cried out as one for prolonged chorales. There were different types of whistles than they heard during the daytime, and the silence seemed to actually be louder, as the rustlings and movements of the local fauna were more discernible. Evidently, the fauna on this planet existed in a distinct diurnal cycle of behaviors.

Keleste felt uneasy with all the source-less unsighted sounds. Her brother had dozed off, which made her feel even more vulnerable. As a Goddess, she normally wouldn't even be bothered by any of this. Yet her nerves were jangling like the crown of the forest; thousands of crackling leaves overhead that spoke in unseen voices when the night wind quickened them. She had to settle her anxiety, and an idea about how to create a luminous source came to mind. Reaching into the pocket of her jacket, she hoped that it was still there. It was there! With a sigh of relief, she smiled while glancing over good ol' Aunt Skuld's 'portal making device', trying to find the activation sequencers in the dim night. Setting it on the ground, she activated it.

"Yeeheeeh!!!" she screamed from the depths of her lungs, followed almost instantly by a frightened shout from her brother. The light had filled the immediate vicinity, and revealed a predatory animal standing just a few meters away from her and Keiyasu, scrutinizing them. It was a vicious-looking beast, walking on narrow spindly legs with some kind of thick hard wedge-shaped 'feet'. This obviously had evolved over the millennia to enable it to run swiftly to catch its prey. The barrel-shaped frame of the animal was covered with a brownish fur, with white spots from its croup back towards its hind legs. The neck was short and thick, while the head was narrow, with an extended long jaw that was probably jammed full with sharp teeth to bite and rend its prey. But what was most unsettling were the _weapons_ that grew out of the top of its head. They shone brightly in the light, resembling a random pattern of bony knives that had thrown together like miniature tree branches, sharpened on the ends. Very deadly and capable of impaling prey.

It was staring them down, challenging them with its stillness of posture. Keleste wheeled possible defense spells in her mind, completely uncertain of which ones she could create because of this goofed-up limitation of her Goddess powers. Suddenly, the predator bolted into a spring and leapt _over_ them instead of attacking, drawing another scream from Keleste.

"Keiyasu, did you see that vicious beast?" she asked in a frittering voice, her bearings completely jangled by this encounter with a clearly dangerous animal.

"Holy shit, did I ever! Freakin' thing scared the cool out of me. I thought for sure it was going to attack us," Keiyasu answered. "If this is a typical specimen of this planet's predators, we may have a challenge in front of us. I don't know if I have enough Divine powers to encant a shield..."

"I don't know if I can make a weapon either," Keleste added as she reached back and undid her hair ribbon. She tried to imbue it with energy to transform it into the energy staff that she wielded to defend herself, but it simply lay limp in her hands.

"Add helpless to the list of crippling effects this planet has on our powers!" she said in disgust as she re-tied her hair ribbon.

"We have to keep as silent as we can," Keiyasu reasoned. "There may be more of those horned-head predators, and any loud noises on our part might attract them."

"Totally! We need to keep this light on all night. Hey, Kei...I've got an idea. This device had served us well, it can create a portal out of thin air and can contain immense amounts of energy. Why not tool around with it tomorrow to see if we can create a shield? If we can't make a shield ourselves because of this planet's dampening effects on our Divine powers, maybe it can."

"Coolage, sis! Let's check it out in the morning," Keiyasu agreed with a yawn.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

The next day they walked over to another hilltop along the way, taking a detour to a local lake so they could bathe. It was becoming apparent that their God and Goddess manifests were not under their full control at all. There was no continual physical recomposition of their manifests, because they were both sweating profusely under the mid-day sun. Keiyasu volunteered to stand guard first, so Keleste could take a long swim in the pond. As she swam and floated and splashed about in the pond, she noticed that it was teeming with a variety of sea life, mostly fish, amphibians and algae.

Meanwhile, Keiyasu was walking around the perimeter of the pond. He stumbled upon a footpath that led to a clearing near the primitive habitation. Following the footpath partway, he paused behind a concealing thicket to obtain a closer look at the sentient species...and swiftly felt the knot of excitement in his heart release with a burst of energy. The inhabitants of this planet were bipeds! Not only that, but they closely resembled the mortal species H. Sapiens, as best as he could recall from Prime Inculcation. The same mortal species that his Father belonged to. An _Earthrealm_ mortal species! Overbrimmed with excitement at his discovery, he dashed back up the pathway to tell his sister, completely forgetting that she was bathing in the pond.

"Keleste! Keleste! There's mortals! The sentient beings on this planet appear to be humans!" he shouted through cupped hands, standing at the rim of the small cliff on one side of the lake.

"Turn around, you idiot!" Keleste screamed at him, watching her brother turn red-faced with embarrassment. It wasn't the first time that he had seen her naked, but somehow this seemed different now that her physical manifest seemed to have a mind of its own. Why was she suddenly so protective about herself, and why was she shocked by her brother's innocent mishap?

"Oh shit! Sorry, sis...I didn't see anything," his said, back facing her.

"And you're totally a liar too!" Keleste taunted him as scrambled out of the water and hastily began to dress herself.

Her brother elaborated on his discovery. "Well, I did see beings that closely resemble a species that progressed along the H. Sapiens evolutionary track. They were bipeds, were wearing some kind of overlapping leather clothes and furs, and one of them had domesticated a riding animal. A big one, bigger than that predator we encountered last night."

"Did they have any kind of language?" Keleste asked, tiptoeing up behind him. A little payback for his inept lack of respect of her privacy was forthcoming.

"None that I could hear. But I only saw a couple solitary sentient mortals. I didn't want to get too close to the town because two that I observed were wearing crudely-fashioned metallic knives, possibly bronze or iron."

"It would make sense that they would do so because of the predators," Keleste noted, climbing up the hill to right behind where her brother was standing, still keeping his back to the lake.

"Or because they're aggressive towards each other. This society seems to be at the tribal stage, or perhaps early-Feudal, if one were to apply the common cultural morphological assessments for sentient bipedal species," Keiyasu answered warily.

Sneaking up on him, she tapped him on the shoulder and he almost leapt out of his boots with a shout. Keleste grinned with satisfaction, knowing that she owned her brother on this one. To her surprise, he still didn't turn around.

"Hey Kei, I forgive you! You can turn around already, you dope. Do you think I would walked all the way up here _naked_?" Keleste teased. She toned it down when she saw her brother's apologetic grimace. "Geez! Don't sweat it, I probably would have done the same thing if I saw some mortals of a type similar to H. Sapiens. After all, that's Dad's species of mortal."

"Keleste, your reaction was more mortal than Goddess when I saw you...uh...bathing," Keiyasu ventured nervously, knowing that he was walking on the thins.

"That's weird, because _you_ were totally embarrassed, just as much as I was," Keleste countered. "Your face turned five shades of pink! I'd say that your reaction was pretty extreme too. Almost comical, at least in a mortal way of thinking. Almost mortal, it would seem," she countered.

"You know what? I'm beginning to wonder if it's possible that these manifests may have mortal psychological attributes. That _we_ have mortal psychological attributes, perhaps as a side-effect of the physicality of these manifests. Physiology does impact sentient species, and we many not be emotionally or mentally immune to its effects. We should be careful. Which brings up another question...what if these manifests we have can be injured?" he asked after he had turned around to face her.

The thought of being unable to heal herself or her brother if injured was mortifying to Keleste.

"Anything's possible at this point, especially in our case being that our heritage is half-mortal, half-Divine. Only one way to find out," Keiyasu noted as he reached down and searched for a sharp-edge rock, and then nicked his forearm. The rock was sharper than he thought, and it sliced through his skin with ease.

"Yowwch! Dammit!" he shouted, drawing a concerned look from his sister. Not only did it hurt, but it was bleeding like crazy as well. Fortunately, he didn't cut his arm too deep, but he knew that he would have to sterilize it. He tried to encant a healing spell, with no success. Keleste tried to encant a healing spell as well, but she could almost predict the result even as she tried to will it into reality.

"This totally bites!" she exclaimed. "I can't even do a simple self-healing spell."

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

That night, Keleste left their device on so that it could emit a glow. Within an hour, they were encircled by a half-dozen new predators. Evidently, the nocturnal species on this planet weren't intimidated by sources of light.

These new animals seemed to be a social species, somewhat smaller than the head-knives predator they had encountered on their first night here. Large ears and long-jawed, they were thickly-furred with grey and brown coats. They were much more stout than the first nocturnal predator. Compact, with thick forelegs and even larger hindlegs, they seemed to have evolved towards strength rather than speed. The fact that they had a cooperative predatory approach made them much more dangerous, as she and her brother were outnumbered 7 to 2 by the long-furred animals. But she could detect a semi-sentient intelligence in their minds, along with a series of keenly-exact nonverbal communication accented by certain eye and head movements.

She decided to try and communicate with them.

Using eye and facial motions, she attempted to communicate that she and her brother were harmless and not very tasty to eat. The result was a momentary stillness from the group, and then they displayed their teeth in a classic ritual aggressive gesture. Making sure not to smile, Keleste nodded her head and whistled softly...which seemed to placate the group somewhat. She made a study of them, 'reading' their affectations and kinesthetic miens. She discerned that the grey-furred predators were shocked that she wasn't afraid of their snarlings. They were even more shocked when she began to whistle and blink at them, asking the group about the purpose of their snarls. A series of eyeblinks and facial twitches from the predators communicated that "you're not from around here, are you?" and Keleste responded by humming and glancing up towards the zenith point in the pitch black night sky. This seemed to overwhelm the animals for a moment.

One their number broke rank and stepped forward cautiously towards her and Keiyasu. A large male, he explained that he was part of a species called "Wolf" and his name was "Leader". Deciding that it would be more diplomatic to listen than speak, she waited for him to take the lead in communication. The large male wolf noted that the "Men" were afraid of them, but could not communicate with he and his "pack" like she had been able to. She noticed that the wolves were famished, ribs tight against their chests. Deciding to win some friends by the direct route, she keyed in a sequence and made a slight modification to the Aunt Skuld device. Recalling the 'shield' idea they had discussed from the night before, she decided that now was as good as any time as any to try and experiment to see if the device could amplify arcanical workings. She asked her brother to attempt to create some palatable food for the wolves, noting that the path to their trust might be through their stomaches.

Pleasantly, the result was that it informed Keiyasu's energy enough to allow him to perform a minor arcanical working and create food for them; something with flavor and protein that carnivores favored on several planets they had visited. It didn't take long for the wolves to ravenously devour the piling of fresh meat she and her brother had created.

The next day when she and Keiyasu woke up, the wolves had unexpectedly remained nearby, and when they resumed their trek through the woods, the pack accompanied them. Apparently, they had made some friends, as the wolves cautiously welcomed them into the pack over the next few days with a series of muzzle nudgings and playful nipping bites to their hands and ankles. Keleste thought that this was a positive development, because the semi-sentient animals would be wary around the H. Sapiens-type mortals that populated this planet.

The fact that Keiyasu had observed that the mortals were weaponed made her feel very concerned.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Several days later, while walking through the forest towards another mortal habitation they had seen in the distance, they surprised an old hermit who was living in a cave. He didn't look humanoid or even sentient at first. His face was painted with some kind of green vegetable dye, and his long hair was twisted around several branches with leaves, creating a feral impression. But he was peculiarly articulate, speaking rapidly with unintelligible grunts or words. At the sight of him, the wolves immediately scattered to strategic points partially hidden behind trees. As the non-verbal 'dialogue' continued, Keiyasu observed that this was a H. Sapiens with a countenance that was more than intelligible. Leader and his wolf pack, perhaps sensing that the danger was past, cautiously emerged to stand alongside he and his sister. The 'green man' was scared beyond his wits of the sight of two teenagers in strange clothing accompanied by seven wolves.

Keiyasu was frustrated because his sister could communicate with the wolves, but he couldn't communicate with this human being, who kept calling he and his sister 'luprokan'. He eventually figured that the recluse might be able to exchange words using a point-and-identify system..._if_ this man was capable of employing a language with any kind of syntax and logic. Using visual iconisms as cues, Keiyasu was pleased to discover that the man did possess the gift of verbality, and began the work of ferreting out the rudiments of the man's language. Wolves were "lupros" and children were "kans"; thus, the forest 'green man' was calling he and his sister "wolf children". Keiyasu learned that his name was "Afinn", and he came from a village called "Gilenen" next to a nearby major river called "Barrough". He referred to the land they were in as "Lagin" and said that it had many forts, hostels, and freeholder farms.

As his proficiency in communicating with the H. Sapien-like being increased, he listened as Afinn told his story. Rather than engaging in a question-and-answer exchange, Keiyasu had hoped towards the possibility that this old guy, being a recluse, would be more than happy to have an audience that he could talk to. Perhaps he could learn more quickly by simply letting the man volunteer information. His guess was right; once Afinn calmed down a bit in the presence of the wolves, the 'green man' seemed delighted to talk on-and-on about his life.

Afinn explained was that he belonged to a society of learned bards whose entire purpose was to preserve the wisdom-lore of the past. His wife had died many years ago, and afterwards he had decided to live in the forest as a solitary wanderer, occasionally escorting villagers through the forest to the next village downriver and telling the tales. He had two children who lived in a larger clannish village to the north called Rahan. Each was grown and married, with offspring of their own. He was called the "Wood Man" with respect, because it was known that he was a keeper of the lore of the forest. His wife had been something called a wyrdch, and had studied herbs and medicinals to heal the villagers, as well as 'spells' to tame the elements. Thirty years with her had allowed him to master much of the same craft, in addition to his woodslore. This made him a healer as well as a storyteller. Afinn was well-respected and considered a 'wise man' by a number of chieftains and other learners.

Laboriously, Keiyasu was able to assemble their language in his mind. It was frustrating; in Yggdrasil he could have learned a thousand languages during a single Inculcation session if he chose to. Here, he was belaboring himself into migraines just trying to assemble a working vernacular of local language, which may or may not even be idiomatic with the language used by the wider community of H. Sapiens here. He couldn't be sure of this from one interchange with one man. The next village they encountered, everyone might speak a totally different language. So he struggled along while Afinn told him story after story. There didn't seem to be a set grammar with Afinn's day-to-day speech. One day, he would use subject-object structured sentences, the next day it would be reversed. But Keiyasu certainly recognized that it was highly nuanced. The next day, Afinn recited one of his 'epic sagas'...and the language became floral and ripe with eloquence; richly enunciated and dramatic in presentation. Keiyasu had the impression that he was hearing a symphony, with the substitution of words for musical tones.

From Afinn, he gathered a basic overview of the culture and social structure of these mortals. Socially, they were configured with a typical tribal tripartism: warrior/chieftain, monk/recluse, farmer/slave. There was no centralized government to speak of; tribes were organized by loose affiliations usually based in kinship and heredity. Aristocracy and warlording were the mediums that established the social ranking of chieftains: local lords, then overlords, and then finally kings. The monk class played a moderating role; as controllers of 'magic' and 'lore', they could counterbalance the warriors. The women, in a pseudo monk/recluse class, were the 'healers' of the society, performing the very important role of midwifery. These men and women were also were the keepers of knowledge and representatives of the Gods. The farmers were either freelanders, tenant farmers or slaves; those whose social roles possessed no formal history but historically _were_ the history of any given mortal species because they maintained cultural continuity and produced goods.

Gleaning information from Afinn's 'tales', Keiyasu ascertained that the cultural development level currently was at the Heroism stage. Tribal leadership roles were culturally acceptable to the degree that the leaders distinguished themselves by acts of bravado and prowess, rather than qualities integral to sovereignty and monarchical rule such as administrative ability and generalship. There was no coinage, most of the legitimate economy was based on taxation, bartering or labor exchanges. A number of the chieftains engaged in brigandage and raids to increase their wealth. The chief commodities that distinguished the aristocracy was possession of metal weaponry and livestock. The nadir of their technological advancement was the horse-drawn wagon; their agricultural science didn't include light metal ground plows.

Apparently, he and his sister had gotten it all wrong...this planet rotated in retrograde to the Earthrealm they had lived on for a millennia. Afinn had enough astronomical knowledge to convince Keiyasu of the accuracy of his insistence that the local sun arose in the east and finished the day in the west. The companion moon had a sidereal cycle of 28 days, according to Afinn. Something about this fact seemed to tease at a important piece of information that Keiyasu should be aware of, but couldn't quite remember.

Their spiritual culture was rich with mythic lore. Afinn knew many stories, and his narrations possessed several consistent themes. Many of the deities were animistic, taking the form of local animals or regions of land and deifying them...or chthonic, Gods taking human or animal forms. He related occasional references to "other worlds", which was confusing to Keiyasu because he claimed to have visited them in another land north of Lagin called Mide. He also mentioned Gods, but Keiyasu quickly realized that these were euhemerized Gods; Gods that were in the process of becoming mortal. The irony of this wasn't lost on he and Keleste, who often shared a private smile during these myth-tellings, as their situation closely resembled that of the protagonists in these tales. Keiyasu suspected that the myths were actually transformed historical accounts. The 'sagas' consistently deified famous personages or chieftains; suggesting cultish narrative. Stories about men whose 'feats' evolved into acts of Gods by the mythological embellishment of succeeding generations. This admixture of reality and mythology was common to many pre-literate mortal cultures, since the only means of transmission of history was through oral tradition.

Something else that was perking Keiyasu's curiosity were the stones and mounds they kept encountering. Overall, the landscape showed signs of recent continental glaciation, perhaps as recently as the last ten thousand years. Many of the hills were drumlins, which are smooth elongated but short hills. The hills and forests all had occasional boulders that they would pass by during their trekking through the woods, while the plains had clusters of mounds. Keiyasu just assumed that they were leftover till-slate boulders resulting from the glaciatic erosion. It was possible that they might be burial sites. The old hermit was familiar with them however, using them as waypoints as he traveled through the forests. This was very sensible since he and Keleste would have quickly become hopelessly lost without the hermit's knowledge of the foot trails. But there was something odd about these stones and mounds; the more stones they encountered, the more Keiyasu was developing the distinct impression that they seemed to be _patterned_ across the landscape.

Leader and his wolf pack would occasionally break rank and return with freshly-killed food for them, mostly small herbivores and occasionally a larger animal. Afinn had command of fire, as he carried a flintstone and a "setting" as he called it that he could reliably use to kindle sparks into flames during darkfall.

Afinn informed them that he was planning to guide them the largest village the near-lands. He reasoned that they had worked a marvel by cooperating with the wolves, and he wanted to present them to the authorities of the land, so that they may all be well-treated. "Tara" was over two week's journey up the river and then eastwards towards the rising sun. Afinn noted that Tara was near a river that led to the face of a great lake that was so wide you couldn't see the other side of it, and that it was one of several gathering places of the all the chieftains and kings.

He and Keleste spent part of a night questioning the wisdom of this, as they would suddenly be immersed in a large settlement of mortal beings. They preferred a gradual introduction to mortal society here, because there were many mistakes that were possible. Primitive societies tended to cling tightly to cultural and social conformity. The real issue at hand would be Afinn; could their guide be competent enough to navigate their path into a capital city and keep them from making too many inadvertent breaches of conduct?

There was something else that was disturbing, as Afinn seemed to thrive on eating dead animals. This didn't sit well with he and his sister, so they communicated to Afinn that they would like to learn his lore about the edible plant life that they could use for their diet. During the next several days, Afinn educated them on collecting berries, tuber plants, nuts and certain types of grasses and leaves. He had a small glazed pot that they could use over the fire to create soups, and had seasonings of his own that made them flavorful.

Each day, the Barrough river grew narrower and narrower as they trekked through alternating glens, meadows and forests. Both Keleste and Keiyasu were unaccustomed to the sensation of physical fatigue and were frequently exhausted, resembling those rare times when they nearly depleted their Divine energies in some endeavor to try and find their parents. But each day brought aching muscles, sweat, rapid heart rates and respiration, followed by a stiffness of limbs in the morning. Afinn tolerated their fatigue, but Leader and his fellow wolves found it amusing, calling them "cubs" and "pups".

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

One afternoon they had to hide away because Afinn had observed the footpaths of a "Great Lord" of the forest that frequented this area of the woods. The Great Lord was enough to even bring uneasiness to the wolves, and they quickly concealed themselves in a thick copse. Leader and his pack were bristling with anxiety as a huge predator approached into a nearby opening, leisurely walking through the woods on four stout legs. Thickly coated with brown fur, it was enormous; when it stood up to claw at the bark of a tree, it was as tall as Keleste and Keiyasu combined. But its massive girth meant that it was wasn't built for speed; it possibly may have been a scavenger-predator of the solitary type. It seemed to be heading in the general direction of the river. Afinn noted that he often observed the "Great Lords" scooping fish out of the river with much more skill than any fisher-catchers he had ever seen. After the huge predator had moved one, Afinn explained that the Great Lord could scoop the soul out of man and beast with the same ease of effort, which was why he was to be greatly feared.

On days where the wolves had little success with catching animals, Keleste and he would create food for them using the 'portal device', which brought Afinn to his knees with fright. It couldn't be helped, because they needed to maintain a reciprocal relationship with the wolves, who had 'adopted' them (and Afinn to a degree) to be part of their social group. They decided not to create food for themselves or Afinn, because this might be considered a type of 'poison magic' by the old solitary. Afinn was their sole link to mortal culture, and they were already reliant on him.

Several days later, they encountered a hostile pack of wolves, nearly triple the size of Leader's group. Keleste tried to communicate with the other pack of wolves, but they refused to acknowledge her non-verbals or whistles. The situation quickly turned dangerous, as Keleste's attempts to communicate with the new wolves seemed to elicit antagonism rather than dialog. Keleste clearly interpreted from the other pack's communications that they intended to attack and kill them. Leader and his fellows picked up on this, and immediately took up a defensive posture around the three humans and engaged the other wolf pack in a confrontational series of growls and gestures.

Keleste realized that a fight would be disastrous. Quickly thinking, she used the SkuldTech device to create holophotic images of Leader and his pack, and then replicated the images several times over. Seven wolves became seventy wolves, which quickly put the aggressor pack into frightened flight. During the sudden appearance of a legion of wolves, Afinn had succumbed to unconsciousness, completely overwrought by this 'miracle'. Leader and his pack engaged in bevy of howling, believing that the apparitions were the spirits of the ancestral wolves who had come to aid them in their moment of need. Afinn didn't have any wit of it, and was simply silent for the next several days.

As they approached Tara, the density of the fortified villages grew greater, and they could see horse-drawn or oxen-drawn carts on the rudimentary roads, filled with harvest and clothing items. When they arrived in Tara, Keleste had to spend a lot of effort to calm the wolves, whose instincts inclined them towards fright as they were unused to being in the midst of so many men. They emerged from the woods and kept to the road; when the other travelers observed them with a small pack of wolves at heel, their group was given a wide berth. The byway that led into town became an avenue with stalls of roadside traders on either side. The handicrafts possessed an artistic beauty of design, despite their clumsy execution. Neither Keleste nor Keiyasu could tell where the 'town' proper began; only that it was more crowded with people the further they progressed into it.

Afinn noted that their goal was in the center of Tara, a large stone-walled fortress with a redoubt enclosing it. Passing a second set of wooden gates, Afinn was suddenly hailed by an elderly man with a long beard, who wore a leather hat and cloak. The elder eyed them closely, including the wolves, and then pulled Afinn aside with what seemed to be urgency. After spending some time discussing matters, Afinn returned and said that Vesli, the chief seer and advisor to the chieftain of Tara, would introduce them to the gathering of the chieftains two days hence. He added that Vesli was prestigious, and that he had kindly arranged for an inn for them to hostel in. The 'inn' was nothing more than a simple wooden dining hall filled with people of all sorts, many of which were intoxicated and and rowdy. Being a young Goddess in her teens, Keleste naturally drew the attention of many of the male patrons, and more than once did Keiyasu have to stand up and threaten them to make them back down.

They had to eat an obligatory meal to appease the status of the inn-keeper, but the sooner they could get to their rooms, the better. After thanking the inn-keeper, they retired to their room, a small wooden closet with a pile of hay to sleep on.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

In the middle of the night, the two were wakened by knives held tight to their throats. Swiftly, they were escorted out the back of inn by about ten men. In the back alley, sackcloth was tied over their heads and they were roughly carried off to some unknown location. During the abduction, the twins were aware that Leader and his wolf pack were following them; several times they could overhear the men trying to chase the wolves off by shouting and throwing rocks at the wolves. Concerned about the pack, Keleste whistled a request that they go see that Afinn was safe back at the inn.

They had been betrayed!

Keleste didn't suspect Afinn, who seemed too old and wearied of life to be the author of such a deception. If he possessed such an evil in his heart, the wolves would have certainly sensed it by now; wild animals have heart-driven instincts and can see into the essences of other creatures. But the man who Afinn had encountered in the main street seemed to be crafty and cunning, with a quick intelligence and too-ready knowledge of the townsmen. It was possible that Afinn had told them about their 'feats of magic', which drew the interest of the greybeard. When the sacks were removed from their heads, they were thrown brusquely into a roughly-hewn cellar room that was dank with mold and other fetid odors.

The nature of their predicament was disheartening, as they were being held in a keep or stronghold of some kind. Even worse, Keleste and her brother had been searched, and the device was thus discovered and confiscated by their captors. Their abductors were not only roughshod, but also mean-spirited. She had to watch as they roughed up Keiyasu without justification, purely for the pleasure of inflicting pain, before she and he were expelled into the wine-cellar turned dungeon. A thick wooden door separated them from freedom, with one of the rowdies standing guard.

This was catastrophic!

As her brother groaned with the pain of his injuries, Keleste was furious with these mortal. It was so frustrating to not have her Goddess powers intact. But there was much more to fear than having to deal with imprisonment in this dungeon. There was a greater imprisonment that they had to face...which was even more daunting than being locked up. Without the portal device of Aunt Skuld's, they were stranded here! Keleste didn't know which was worse: the threat of prolonged confinement or even a brutal execution; or being helpless to effect an escape of some kind from this planet.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --


	148. Pt 148: Nine Voices: The Twins: Pt 2

**Part 148: Nine Voices – The Twins Part Two**

KELESTE AND KEIYASU:

The next morning after their abduction, Keleste and Keiyasu were roused by their jailers and marched at spearpoint towards the main fortress. Being anywhere other than in an underground dungeon was an immense relief to the twins, even while surrounded by an escort of about a dozen mortal ruffians, each with an expressions of sinister grimness. They were led towards a squat structure that had been erected atop a mound, probably a man-made piling of dirt. Roughly squarish in design, the bastion's walls consisted of a crudely-wrought lacing of stones and rocks, with ungainly 'windows' that could be covered by wooden clapping. The wooden roof was supported by timber beams built into the stone wall, and was a mix of timber and piled 'shingles' of wood to prevent sapping and leaking. They were forced to walk down-into and up-out- of a ditch that had been dug in a circle around the 'castle'; both teens fell more than once because it was difficult to maintain their balance with their hands tied behind their backs. Three soldiers met then at the top of the ditch and roughly pushed them towards a thick wooden gateway that led into an entry hall inside of the fortress.

By this point, it was clear to both brother and sister that the thugs were henchmen, organized by the occupant of this stonekeep. Keiyasu estimated that there were about two dozen men who were organized into a soldierly guard unit, mostly armed with spears, knives, shields and a few swords. After some conferring amongst the guardsmen, they were prodded by spear-butt to walk into the central hall. The hall seemed to serve primarily as a dining area, with several wooden tables that were pushed against the walls for the convenience of holding assembly or receiving visitors. Ingenious, because the soldiers could stand on the table-tops and assail any besiegers from a height advantage through the raised windows. The interior wall was 'decorated' with a number of animal skins and skulls, plus a few ornately-woven tapestries. At the far end was a wooden platform with a large chair in the middle of it. Dim and foreboding, this hall-room gave Keleste the creeps; it seemed to reek of primitive mortal vanity and barbarous bloodlust combined.

An extraordinarily large mortal entered the hall from a side passage and walked with an aggressive swagger onto the wooden tier and then seated himself in the large wooden chair decorated with rustic carvings. Several attendants followed him a moment apace, and with a shock Keleste and Keiyasu recognized Vesli as he entered the hall to stand at the side of the raised flooring. Vesli grinned at them with an expression of truculence in reaction to their dismay, seeming to enjoy their discovery that he was the architect of their betrayal. For the first time since arriving here, Keleste and Keiyasu felt themselves confronted with the fullness of deceit, an evil trait of the mortals that seemed to pervade behavior and accompany aggression. They knew it all now: under the guise of offering benevolent assistance to travelers from tides unknown to these lands, Vesli had orchestrated their capture instead.

They were announced to the brutish leader of these men, Huffdain, who was hailed by his underlings as the main chieftain of the region of Tara. With a guardsman and Vesli at his side, Keiyasu whispered to his sister that his sense was that Vesli functioned in the role of an 'advisor bard' to the chieftain. Huffdain was a huge mortal being, stout in frame and tall, with dark black hair and a beard that had partially turned to grey. He introduced himself as their "host and haven", attempting in his roguish way to persuade them to a false sense of safety. But his pompousness and assumed noble air was clearly a poserism fueled by self-deceit. The men in his thuggish entourage seemed to be possessed with fear rather than courtly respect for him.

Vesli launched into a grandiloquent and lengthy speech, basically intended to assert his mastery over the situation as he justified that the twins had been brought to Huffdain's keep because they were "workers of hidden magics" and summoners of wild animals. To prove himself, Vesli demanded that Keleste call forth the wolves at once. Keleste immediately refused, noting that "human or wolf would find this situation too dangerous and would have to be foolhardy to respond to any summons." The men in the hall laughed threateningly at her, and she realized that she had made a gaffe by acknowledging their control of the situation.

Continuing what was clearly an interview designed to impress the chieftain, Vesli interrogated them about their journey here, their relationship to the "wise Man of the Woods", referring to Affin, and their command of magic. Keiyasu refused to answer, and the chieftain angrily pounded his fist against the arm of his 'throne' and glowered at him, attempting to intimidate him. Keiyasu was trembling filled with frustration, as this mortal thug was almost twice his weight and could inflict serious injury on his now-mortal physical being. He strongly regretted that he lacked the arcanical skills normally at his command; if this was so, he wouldn't feel a bit threatened. The onlookers mistook his trembling to be fear, and laughed rowdily at him. Vesli mocked both of them for their discourtesy, slyly noting that they had nothing to fear from Huffdain and his men.

Vesli pulled something out of a leather bag and identified it as a "curious and marvelous working" his men had confiscated from them. Both Keleste and Keiyasu gasped as they saw the portal device. The one key to getting out of here and continuing their search for their parents...and it was in the hands of barbarous mortals! Trying to keep their composure, the twins feigned ignorance, neither acknowledging nor denying any ability to operate it. They replied with innocuous answers when questioned about its magic, which highly irritated Vesli. Switching to another avenue of inquiry, Vesli asked several questions about the possibility of teaching others to control wolves and other forest animals. This drew the interest of Huffdain, who could clearly see that the availability of such a talent at his behest would augment his militia stationed throughout the region. Interrupting Vesli, he demanded that the twins teach him personally how to control the "Great Lords" of the forest to do his bidding. Keleste and Keiyasu remained silent, and the chieftain was quick to anger. Shedding his falsely-intended hospitable airs, Huffdain completely lost his restraint and became outraged, angrily threatened to have them "savaged". Frightened, Keleste grabbed her brother's hand for assurance, knowing that the vicious chieftain clearly meant to torture the information out of them.

To Keleste's surprise, Vesli protested this vigorously. Clearly uneasy about their 'magic', Vesli reasoned with Huffdain to be cautious, referred to her and Keiyasu as "Side", a type of local sacral God. Their command of the wolves was proof of their status as "luprokans". Despite Vesli's brazen abduction and confinement of them, Keiyasu was somewhat relieved to see that Vesli was still somewhat bound by his primitive superstitions and beliefs, fearful enough to remain deferential to he and his sister and dissuade Huffdain from acting rashly. Either that, or he was pretending in his role as court mage, in order to leverage the situation to his advantage.

Perhaps they could use his uncertainty as leverage of their own, to manipulate them into obtaining the device. With the device in hand, they might be able to extract themselves from this volatile situation without harm. Keiyasu was aware that this was a delicate situation, because they couldn't risk injuring the mortals in their efforts to escape. Being reckless might cause them to alter history, especially if one of the sentient mortals were to die or be crippled by their attempt at freedom. Keleste nudged him with her elbow and whispered that she had a plan to suggest. She quickly conferred with him and they devised a strategy to regain the device.

Deciding to test Vesli's belief system, Keleste explained that they were indeed of the "otherworld" and indicated that if she was allowed to personally handle the 'sacred relic', she would use it to create a barrel full of ale for them out of thin air, to prove its "magic". She hoped that this would play into the leader's and Vesli's sense of avarice and desire to have control over others.

Observing the chieftain's rapidly changing moods, Keleste had a sensing that...for all of his strength...Huffdain was preoccupied and suspicious, perhaps even paranoid. A primitive mortal, with rudimentary emotions and motivations to be sure; but also cunning and not to be underestimated. He refused to let her handle the device, shrewdly thwarting her intent. Again, his questioning their unwillingness to cooperate with him began to escalate into threats and intimidation. Hoping that Vesli was intelligent enough to follow simple instructions, Keleste decided to switch tactics and guided him to press a certain sequence of colors on the device. When Vesli did so, a pack of seventy wolves suddenly appeared in the middle of the great-hall. This apparition was completely shocking to the onlookers, causing many to react by jumping up onto the tables stacked against the wall. Vesli was completely freaked out, and he dropped the device, gripped by fright. Acting as she had hoped, her brother attempted to dash forward and seize it, but was rebuffed by several of Huffdain's personal guards.

They had completely blown it.

Now, the chieftain was convinced of the value of the device and assured that Keleste and Keiyasu were disobedient towards him. He ranted and raged at them with threats of mutilation and torture for their "acts of treachery", ignoring Vesli's warnings. Of all those present, Vesli was the one who was most overwrought with the 'miracle' performed by the device. He pleaded with Huffdain to "leave the spirits to their rest, lest they be summoned by these unnatural youths and their lore." Ignoring Vesli, Huffdain demanded that Keleste tell him the "secret workings and combinations" to create gold, or he would "forced to act". Despite her fear, she promptly refused. Her refusal bestirred the anger of the chieftain's hanger-ons and thugs, who demanded that Huffdain allow them to beat it out of her. Keiyasu gripped Keleste's arm tightly, prepared to defend her despite being outnumbered and bereft of Divine abilities. As the shouting escalated, Huffdain gestured and several guardsmen advanced on them with metal weapons. Huffdain finally laid out his intentions with an appalling ultimatum; either produce gold or weapons, or he would have her brother beheaded.

Keleste was so shocked by this turn of events, she lost her footing and fell to her knees. Crying, she pleaded with Huffdain to spare her brother, while Keiyasu bravely tried to convince her to not reveal any information to the barbarian chieftain. This wasn't the time for indecisiveness, and having such a choice forced upon her made her extremely angry, an anger she could barely restrain. _These assholes had actually threatened to kill her brother! _ The thought of her brother actually having to face the Real Death terrified her; she sensed the invisible form of the Reaper floating nearby. There was no way that she was going to sacrifice her brother to these evil mortals! She would have to do Huffdain's bidding, regardless of her reluctance to aid such a fiendish man.

_"HALT!!!"_

Keleste and Keiyasu turned towards the shout, which came from the entrance to the hall. There stood Afinn, accompanied by Leader and his wolves...and a strange man who was dressed in a long brown over-robe. The man in the crudely woven tunic appeared to be another mage, but he was very ancient and walked slowly with a greatstaff to steady his gait. He was even older than Afinn, who was very elderly himself.

Keleste sensed that the entire tenor of the Great Hall had shifted, as the wise 'Green Man' and his elderly companion walked straight up the center of the hall and stopped right next to she and Keiyasu. The thuggish soldiers didn't even try to hinder them; instead, they backed away from them. Whoever this old man was that Afinn had brought into the fortress, he was clearly powerful and respected to the point where the Huffdain's men felt intimidated.

"In the name of the Trinity, the Father, Son, and Spirit, I demand that you halt this inquisition immediately, Huffdain!" the man in the coarse surplice admonished in a booming voice. His head was shaven, save for a spare grey beard closely trimmed along his jawline. He looked far more noble than the chieftain or any of the men in the great hall. Ignoring whatever passed for protocol here, the man stepped forward between them and Huffdain, clearly at ease with challenging the chieftain in his own lair. The wooden floor thumped with each stroke of the tall walking staff; either for weapon or for show, Keleste or her brother couldn't tell. She could feel a palpable tension as Huffdain struggled to maintain his composure, while Vesli was almost livid with anger...and fear.

"What brings you to my court, to my great hall, that you would address me thus, Patr?" Huffdain demanded in a hoarse, haughty voice.

"Our Savior demands it," the man named Patr answered. "The Elder Gods demand it as well, as evidenced by the reverence these wolves pay to these two young 'luprokan' children. Beware! Your aide Vesli was a fool to even attempt this act of treachery. You are treading upon matters holy and obscure, and if you persist in treating these younglings with such inhospitality, grave harm will befall you and all of us in the form of many cursings upon the land."

Something about the way he said "Our Savior" jolted Keiyasu's memory. There was a soteriological religion back on the Earthrealm that held significant cultural influence during the last two millennia of the mortal's history. He recalled that it was centered upon a trinity of deities. The focal figure served as both redeemer and judge, with the capacity to reconcile or punish mortals based upon their conduct. He faintly recalled that the religion was formed by the mortals in response to some action of the Almighty to intervene in human affairs. But he couldn't quite grasp the meaning of the elderly man's words, which seemed to carry a such a profound weight of conviction...

Keleste slowly rose to her feet, grateful that this sudden intervention may have saved the life of her brother. How could they actually threaten to _kill_ Keiyasu just to learn how the device worked? These weren't men, they were beasts in the form of human beings! If she had her Goddess powers, she would make them regret every one of their threats. But she was helpless, especially with the device not being in her possession. She struggled to regain her scattered emotions, trying to think clearly. Just when she was berating herself because there seemed to be no resolve to this dangerous turn of events, she had a dynamic flash of insight and knowledge...

"Keiyasu!" Keleste whispered aside to him. "That man is a _Christian_!!! Look at the wrought iron artifact on his chest. It's a clearly a crudely-made high cross! Objects like that were the chief symbols that many sects of primitive Christianity used, along with other icons and such. The cross especially was significant to them, symbolizing the intersect of mortal and Divine."

Keiyasu was stunned by his sister's discovery and its implication. Things were happening fast, and channels of memory that that been closed to him were coming back into focus.

"By the Almighty! Keleste, could this _be the Earthrealm_?" he whispered back, as Huffdain, Vesli and Patr seemed to be engaged in a heated argument. His sister's eyes widened as she grasped what he was implying.

Feverishly, Keiyasu tried to recall his Inculcation on Earthrealm history. He and his sister, upon finding out that their Father was a mortal from the Earthrealm, had exhaustively studied all the information on the Ygg Mainframe datacrystals to learn everything about their homeworld. Their heritage, lost in the unyielding dusts of Time, had been kept alive in their thoughts and memories of the Earthrealm...ironically, an analogue for this pre-literate society that relied on oral transmission of every bit of knowledge. Like the 'sages', he and his sister were the keepers of all of humanity's history. It had to so, because they were the two sole survivors of the Earthrealm.

He recalled that Christianity was very important to the Earthrealm mortals, especially in the final centuries before they bombed themselves into oblivion. Biblio, babble, bibble, babel, bible...Bible. But which Testament? If this was the Earthrealm as he now suspected, then the newcomer would know of the scriptural canon. But he just couldn't remember...

His sister suddenly started reciting a homage.

"Our Father, who art in Heaven, all-honored is thy Name. Thy Realm is vast, Thy Word is Truth, in Heaven and all of the Realms. Give us each day our measure of Life, forgive us our faults and guide us to forgive ourselves and others. Lead us towards Love and Wisdom, prepare us for Charity, so we can bear goodness towards all men. May we find You in all things and within ourselves. Amen." Keleste delivered in a voice twinged with dramatic flair.

The effect was immediate, as most of the gathered men in the great hall suddenly were on their knees in attitudes of solemn reverence. Their reaction was so automatic, Keleste was stunned. These men were threatening to kill them just a few moments earlier. She felt Keiyasu grip her hand tightly as he whispered, "By the Almighty One...we're _home_! These are definitely Christians...which means that we're on the Earthrealm. There is no other explanation for this. This is the Earthrealm...our homeworld!"

Keleste almost joined the kneeling men in the hall, as her emotions seemed to buckle out from under her when she realized what had just happened. She and her brother had been brought out of the fires of creation...and had been returned to their birthplace. Their birthright. The home of their mortal heritage. Christianity was unique to only one planet that was populated with humanoid mortal sentients, because it was the result of a single visitation by the Almighty to that mortal world, where He had actually incarnated to experience life as an Earthrealm mortal for reasons known only to Him. No other planet that boasted a human species could have possibly developed such a religion.

The Earthrealm! The rich beauty of this place and its inhabitants contrasted sharply against her other experience of the Earthrealm. That Earthrealm was a radioactive, deadened, wind-blasted deserted wasteland. Yet, she and her brother had treasured that ruined Earthrealm despite its deathly and silent barrenness, because it was home to the mortal half of their beings. But now it seemed horrible and out of place, as she realized that this was the _real_ Earthrealm. A robust, verdant, richly-endowed arcadian planet that was thriving, stuffed with the energies of life. Gripped with a swirl of emotions, she couldn't help but feel a sense of awe towards this wonderful place...her heart melting like wax under the sun, flowing with joy and rejoicing.

If she was outside of this room, she would have fallen to the ground and hugged and kissed it.

She noticed that Keiyasu was tightened with emotions of his own, probably feeling the same sense of joyous stupefacience as she was, a wonder-love evoked by the surrounding presence of their homeworld. This was truly an ecstatic moment in their lives. And they weren't the only ones who were experiencing a sense of epiphany...

"She knows The Prayer!!! The Prayer that has been lost!" Patr shouted, his voice wavering with reverence. "I heard it as a child, but the saintly ones who spoke it were slaughtered to a one, and none have come in their stead. Prithee, please repeat it!" the robed Christian asked. Patr's wizened eyes were tearing, his body shaking with emotion. Keleste composed her thoughts and emotions, and then repeated the prayer. Her words evoked a profound silence within the great hall.

_**bmmmmpp!!**_

The elderly Christian rapped his staff hard against the floor. "In the name of the Lord and Son and Spirit, these two are under sanctuary. Dare you challenge God Almighty, who has chosen them for His special protection? Abandon your evil designs and release them at once, or ye all shall befall dire fates! Yea, and even unto the very last man and their kin shall ye be punished! These younglings know The Prayer, and should they deign to remove the protection of Our Savior from you, you will be bedeviled and cursed by the Evil One himself. You and your house will not be spared, you will suffer the worst ruination and suffering. Your souls will be tormented for this brazen defiance of land and spirit."

The twins looked at Huffdain and Vesli, who were both scared shitless by this pronouncement.

"Provide me with the barrel of gold, and begone with ye!" Huffdain demanded, refusing to free them unconditionally. She watched as her brother walked up to Huffdain and Vesli and procured the portal device, literally tearing it away from Huffdain's hands as he told the chieftain "We will not provide you with anything, because you deserve nothing!" Device in hand, her brother wordlessly slapped Huffdain on the face, a single "snap!" that punctuated the silence of the hall. Not a person in the room had made the slightest effort to try and stop him.

For some reason, Keleste remembered the rainbow she saw when she first arrived here. She reminded herself that this was no longer 'here'...this was _the Earthrealm_!!! The rainbow in the sky had been her first vision, her first experience of this Earthrealm.

An unknown agency had miraculously transported she and her brother to this point in the Earthrealm's history. Time had been displaced, and they were here...150,000 years into the past of the sterile Earthrealm which she had known her entire life. An era of human history before the mortals had exterminated themselves in their final nuclear war. This wasn't a mere coincidence! They had dived into the rainbow of light...and had found themselves here.

She was as excited as the elderly Christian man, shaking with emotion.

"You may find the barrel of gold under the ends of the rainbow, any rainbow that you may see," Keleste promised, offering reply to the chieftain. For the offense of roughing up her brother and abducting she and him, she had invented a fool's errand for the greedy and the barbarous warlord.

"You are released. Take your 'relic' and your wolves with you, and get out of my sight, you wretches! Men, begin to search the lands for the rainbow and the barrel of gold!" the chieftain commanded.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Once outside of Huffdain's ill-made stone brick redoubt, the twins both fell on their knees and sobbed with an uninhibited joy, much to the surprise of Affin and his fellow sage, Patr. Affin assumed that their rejoicing was due to the fact that they had been spared further ill-treatment or even death.

He had no idea of what this moment meant for them.

As they walked away from Tara and sought the shelter of the forest, they learned from Patr that they were in a land called Eiru, which later was called Ireland. Patr, the elderly solitary, was an early Christian and the sole survivor of a delegation of Christians who had fled to Eiru by ship from lands unknown to escape vicious persecution. In the telling of his life's story, Patr narrated that he was a young child when their seafaring boat made shipfall in what they thought was an uninhabited land. They had propagated the new faith for several years, but then were slaughtered to a one by a chieftain who was angered that his subjects were donating grain to the conclave of Christians rather than paying it in crop tax to him. Patr had been secreted away before the attack and had been spared.

Their best guess was they were in the late second or early third century in what was reckoned by the Earthrealm mortals as the calendar of the Common Era.

Afinn explained that he and the wolves had sought out Patr, knowing that he was one of the few personages that the chieftain feared the most, because of his lore and his ability to predict storms and eclipses. Hearing of their incarceration, Patr had readily agreed to attempt a diplomatic mission, and thus they were rescued. Listening to the two reclusive sages, Keiyasu learned much more of the history of this place. He recognized that the stones were leylines to guide travelers and harness the good fortune to have productive harvests. It was all coming back to him now. He remembered that an earlier civilization had moved the stones to create the grid. This island had once been populated by Paludorians who had sailed from northern Asia roughly eight thousand years ago, after the recession of a mini-Ice Age. They lived here in Eiru for almost a thousand years before being nearly wiped out by an unrelenting plague. The few remaining Paludorian survivors were the ancestors of the native population here. The linear patterns of boulders was their doing, serving as waypoints, energy equalizers for the land, measuring instruments of time, and much more.

Patr led them to his refuge, a well-ventilated cave with a nearby garden that he tended to obtain food for himself and visitors. Gradually he became more trusting of them, and one day he brought Keleste and Keiyasu to the rearmost section of the cave. On a stone 'altar' was a carved cross like the one he wore. Moving the altar, Patr uncovered a small hole underneath it, with a wrapping of leather stashed inside. Carefully unrolling the leather wrap, he showed them the contents it had preserved: a few precious vellum parchments that had written words on them. It was apparent to the twins that these fragments were unintelligible to him because of his illiteracy. Sensing their interest, Patr beseeched Keleste and Keiyasu to make sense of the writings, explaining that their presence here was providential and they were the only ones who could possibly help him understand the 'holy lore' these revered parchments contained.

Keiyasu and Keleste began to try and decipher the enigmatic writings, and eventually recalled enough of their Inculcation to recognize the orthography of the faded cursive lettering. The fragments had been written in Latinium, a universal language of this era. Struggling like a philologist confronted with a dead language, they were eventually able to translate what was written on the vellum sheets. Patr had a copy of the Gospel of John, almost complete. One of the canon works of Christianity...and Patr had been carrying it around like the treasure it was for almost his entire life, completely unaware of its contents.

Despite their best efforts to teach Afinn and Patr, neither man was capable of retaining the ability to read the written language itself. Abandoning their attempts to teach literacy, they focused instead on men's strengths as 'rememberers'. Patiently, Keleste and Keiyasu taught the two elders a series of mnemonic cues so that they could recall and recite the Christian writings in their entirety. During these 'study sessions', Afinn told them that he had learned of Patr from years ago, and had added Patr's 'lore' to his lore in the form of a saga. But Afinn had lost contact with Patr for a time after his wife died, and had lost his memory of certain details of the saga. Just prior to their arrival on the Earthrealm, Afinn related that he and Patr had reunited by sheer circumstance when both attended the annual gathering of chieftains. By some quirk of fate, Afinn was able to locate Patr with ease during that gathering, for Patr had hosteled at the same inn Vesli had sent Keleste and Keiyasu to.

By adding Patr's Christianity to his lore, Affin had unwittingly propagated the religious and spiritual aspects of Christianity via his vocation of traveling around the district and telling the tales and sagas. The people were unable to discern the importance of Christianity, but somehow the basic tenets of the faith had been amalgamated into their belief system. A form of proto-Christianity had developed, indistinct from the myths and legends and thus held in the same regard. The triune of divinities commanded respect in this district; when invoked, all the superstitious associations were brought to the fore, exciting the religious tenor of the populace. This explained why Huffdain and his ruffian crew had become so 'reverent' when hearing Keleste's recital of a credo and prayer. They didn't know anything about Christianity, as formal theology and hermeneutics were non-existent in this part of the Earthrealm during this era. But they responded quite strongly to semiotics...not understanding the 'message' of the words but clearly getting the signification of them. In a sense, the words themselves were holy, laden with meaning rather than message. When they were invoked by an angry Patr, the chieftain and his crew were automatically cowered into submission.

Traveling northwards from Tara, the group eventually made their way to a small fort-city called Armagh. There, Patr had a loose 'congregation' of about twenty families spread among several fort-villages and several isolated households that he visited during his rounds; the times when he left his solitary reclusion to preach to converts. Recalling more of the history of this land, Keleste suggested that they comb through the forest to try and locate an abandoned souterrain; an underground 'earth house' from a previous millennia. Souterrains were made by digging under the earth to create several chambers, and then walling these with stone pilings. They were used as secret underground cellars to store goods and sometimes served as a place of refuge during perilous times when the raiding tribes were seeking spoils and loot.

Fortune favored them, as Leader and his wolves discovered a souterrain that was almost equidistant between the circle of villages near Armagh. Because of the intense persecution of anyone who even hinted at a belief in a monotheistic religion that didn't include the mythic "Elder Gods", they had to be furtive with their efforts to gather Patr's 'congregation'. Since most of the population were either superstitious or bound up in localized mythologies, they would need a place of conclave that might need to last for centuries...a secret place of assembly. Now, the souterrain would become a different type of refuge, as Keleste used the portal device in a new way...carving the words found on the decaying parchments onto the souterrain's walls, so that they wouldn't be lost to posterity as long as the 'congregation' were safe. These people were entrenched in a pre-literate culture; but generations hence, their literate successors would be able to read these words.

Keleste and Keiyasu knew the risks. By aiding Patr and his 'congregation', they could be altering the history of the Earthrealm significantly, which was strictly prohibited to both Gods and Demons. If the Almighty was aware of them tampering with possible mortal history, then He would swiftly make His presence known. But instead, there was no Divine intercession on the part of the Lord, which led Keleste and Keiyasu to believe that they _were_ part of the history of the Earthrealm. Evidently, their actions here were not creating an intrusive alteration to the mortal's spiritual development.

Both of them recognized how important it was that this spiritual tradition be protected, as it was the precursor to a much larger influx of Christians two centuries hence with the arrival of Patr's namesake, St. Patrick. Christianity would then be established as the dominant religion, and it would amalgamate the local deities into a hagiography of saintly personages. These later immigrant monks and abbots would also would organize a primitive church based on monastic and eremetic values, which would provide a civilizing influence to the country and prevent much bloodshed in years and centuries to come.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

After the feast of Samuin, which marked the conclusion of harvest and the renewal of the year, Keleste became concerned that the 'portal making device' was starting to show indications of energy depletion. It still retained the necessary energy to create a portal or gate; their day-to-day use only consumed a fractional amount of the device's power. But these fractional amounts were adding up, and Keleste warned that they were fast approaching a decision point. As she explained it to her brother, using one-billionth of the energy needed to create a portal may seem insignificant in and of itself...but subtract a couple hundred one-billionths from an extremely marginal point that was barely above the "one billion unit line" of energy necessary to create a portal, and they would be stranded here. They were that close to the cut-off point where the device would be underpowered and incapable of producing a portal they could use to travel to another Time or Space.

Keleste and Keiyasu had been using the device regularly to feed the wolves, provide heat on the increasingly colder overnights, and to augment their own Divine abilities. They had to be very careful when enhancing their Divine abilities, using the device sparingly around Patr and Afinn so that they themselves didn't unintentionally become part of the Christian history by dint of 'miracles'. For the next six or seven centuries, Christianity would have a tendency towards developing cultish practices towards historical venerables. To allay this possibility, whenever they had to use the device 'in public', they emphasized that they were under the guidance of angels and were nothing more than ordinary children themselves, not miracle workers.

Measuring the current rate of power consumption as a baseline, Keleste calculated that they would need to reach a decision point soon. At their current levels of usage, the device would be incapable of creating a stable Gate, Portal or Soul Mirror within two or three months. This brought up a particularly difficult dilemma that they couldn't ignore. They had to decide whether they should remain here in this historical era and location, or attempt to open a Gate and travel to another time on the Earthrealm.

By remaining here, they maintained their chances of being rescued by their parents. Their Mother, the Goddess Belldandy, could be looking for them right at this very moment. Both Keleste and Keiyasu suspected that their Mother was a Norn, with a significant command of Time. The biggest concern about traveling to another time in the Earthrealm's history was that they could either increase or decrease their 'visibility' to their Mother. By not selecting the appropriate conjuncture of Time, they could wind up in a historical period that would conceal their presence. Belldandy was potentially a Norn, but she definitely wasn't the Almighty, who had command of everything and everytime. They would have to make it as easy as possible for their Mother to find them...they couldn't risk jeopardizing her efforts by becoming indiscernible. If they screwed up, they would never be reunited with their Mother, and would have to live out their remaining years as mortals, forever burdened by regret, forever orphaned.

When they had used Aunt Skuld's device to powerup and transform the Soul Mirrors, it had harnessed the power of suns. Now, it possessed only enough power to open a single Gate portal, long enough for them to use it to scan forwards or backwards in Time and then quickly travel to that era. So they debated back and forth, trying to ascertain the prospects of remaining here against the potentials of moving to a more 'modern' time in the Earthrealm's history.

Keiyasu recalled that the one of the Goddess girls they met in Vanagdrasil, the tomboyish Goddess whose name was Pryzm, had noted that she was maintaining something called a weblog, and that she came from the year 202X. Keleste was inclined to move futurewards as well, recalling the interrupted wedding when the Lord and his Demonic Counterpart were fighting the evil being. The wedding was very important for another reason; that was when they had encountered the mortal Keiichi. His DNA had matched theirs, which led them to believe that he was their real Father. By her best guess, the wedding seemed to have occurred at a time when the Earthrealm had roughly 6 billion inhabitants, which would place it in the early years of the 21st century. Counter to this line of reasoning was the possibility that the force that had brought them to this era had done so _deliberately_. They didn't arrive here and now by accident...and it was entirely possible that it intended for them to remain here stay here and wait for something to develop. Traveling to another Past or Future could invalidate the actions and intent of whatever force that had returned them to the Earthrealm.

On a lark, they agreed to discuss the situation in vague terms with Patr and Afinn. In the form of a tale, they narrated the reasons why they were in Eiru, noting that they were lost twins who were desperately trying to find their parents. Afinn listened gravely, and when they finished he immediately launched into a mythic story about a couple named Crunniuc and Macha:

_"Upon a time in days past, there was a man named Crunniuc who lived as a hostelier, owning many lands and much cattle. After several years of wedded life, his wife had taken ill and eventually had left for the far islands, leaving him tasked with raising his sons alone. He tended his crops and cattle; his lands compassed both the wilderness and the highlands. One day a beautiful woman named Macha came into his house, and to his surprise she began to cook a meal and perform the tasks of the household, as if she had belonged there all along. Crunniuc was taken aback, as she was beholden to him as a wife would be to her husband. Although they bore no children, Crunniuc was never wanting for wealth, food or clothing following the arrival of Macha, whom he took to wife._

_"Several years passed and they went to the great solstice fair in Uliad country, where the King held sport and there was much celebrating among the folk. The king was smitten with Macha's beauty, and contrived a scheme to possess her. Macha had warned Crunniuc to still his tongue while he was drinking, but in this he failed. The King highly praised the swiftness of his royal steeds, and Crunniuc blurted out drunkenly that his wife could outpace them in a race. He and the King made an oath: if Macha could outrun the horses at the next year's fair, then the King would cede him a large tract of land and farmers to till it. But if she failed to be faster than the horses, then the King would make her his and Crunniuc's life would be forfeit._

_"When Macha learned of this, she berated her husband for being a fool, although she was clever enough to sense the King's cunning design in the matter. But after years of sleeping as husband and wife, she unexpectedly found herself with child. As the time of the fair fast approached, she was nearing the end of her birthing-term. Again the fair was held, and the King all but surmised that he had won the challenge by default when he perceived that Macha was in her terms. But Macha begged leave of the contest, because she was heavily laden with child and was great feeling the pains of labor. Yet the King did not relent, and she cursed him and all his followers for forcing her to race against the royal steeds while in labor. She contended with the horses and outran them, and then in the meadow immediately following the race, she bore twins. Her son she named Eumin, and her daughter she named Machae._

_"These were the acts of the times of yore. The King ceded Crunniuc lands as promised, which were named after the twins. By and by, the district of Eumin Machae eventually became the most important stronghold in all of Uliad, to the north. As for the King and his men, he was indeed cursed. Each year he and his followers were taken ill for five days during wintertide, so ill that they cried out for the release of death. This curse extended to all the men-folk of Uliad. Curiously, the women-folk and children were exempted from the workings of the yearly wintering illness. The men of Uliad were weakened thereof and did not prosper for nine generations, while Crunniuc and his sons became powerful lords of the Mede."_

Keleste was startled by the parallels in Afinn's 'tale' and the sequence of events during their adventure that had brought them to this point. She had faith beyond doubt that Keiichi and Belldandy were her and Keiyasu's parents, and this story closely matched the circumstances of her parents. A reclusive man, visited by an unknown woman who became his wife...similar to the mortal Keiichi's explanation of how the Goddess Belldandy had entered his life suddenly, and almost immediately became his companion, living with him and then loving him. The fact that the evil King had conspired against husband and wife in Affin's tale...similar to Isilblius, an malevolent force which the Cevn cyborg had claimed was responsible for separating her and her brother from their true parents. A curse of nine generations...again descriptive of her and Keiyasu's long sojourn to find their parents. Or perhaps indicative of the Nine children that became One to undo the destruction at the End of Eternity.

Keiyasu was equally fascinated by the old man's narrative, adding his interpretations to those of his sister. He noted that the God Keiichi of Tengoku had said that he and his mortal wife Belldandy in Norway were unable to conceive a child for several years, until Cevn had stayed with them while fighting against Isilblius...which was the same as Crunniuc and Macha's initial inability to have children. After listing several other parallels between the story and the descriptions of Belldandy and Keiichi they had gathered from encountering 'alternative' versions of their parents, he emphasized the most obvious point of all...that in the legend, Macha had borne twins, a boy and a girl.

The only allegorical meaning in Affin's story that remained unclear to them centered on the race against the horses. Did this mean that they were in a race against Time? That they should move forwards in Time, as Macha had arrived at the finish of the race ahead of the horses before she gave birth?

How could this primitive myth have so many parallels with their own situation?

Patr went even further to describe miracles he had witnessed. Birds singing hymns. Doorways to Heaven and Hell. A voyage undertaken without any knowledge of destination, buoyed upon faith that they would be guided to the right place by the sea. A childhood where every man of faith was killed by the outraged chieftain. But just before the murders, they had made him hide away in a hollow log so that he might remain unnoticed by the marauders. He, a mere boy...the sole survivor of a senseless slaughter, who was the sole bearer of the teachings of Christ in the country of Eiru.

Patr was a traveler, a seeker of both spiritual and temporal truths. There was a reason why he and Afinn never stayed put, preferring to travel the lands freely rather than settling down in a village or fort. When Afinn had lost his wife, he never again remained in a home...the forest became his home as he roamed to seek and share lore.

It was so obvious to both that they would have to leave here and go into the Future.

So 202X it was.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

They bid their farewells to Afinn, Patr, Leader and the wolves, as well as a number of the congregation that had come from the nearby villages to see them off. Explaining that they had been instructed by the angels that it was time to leave for other lands, Keleste and Keiyasu set off into the forest. Now able to follow the trails through the wooded areas by their awareness of the leylines, they sought the destination of their journey: a circle of stones located to the northwest. For these leystones were not just compass points; in certain alignments, they served as focuses of Divine energy. Certain places on the Earthrealm accumulate residual Divine energy because of the sheer number of spiritually adept mortals who congregated there over the generations. These locales were almost like 'hot spots' on a sun. One such site had been a house of worship the Paludorians had erected some seven thousand years earlier. That was where they were going to open their portal and travel into the Future.

The leylines led them true, and they found the stone circle after several day's walking.

Keleste spent a couple days calibrating the portal device to maximize its efficiency with the little remaining energy it had. Making food for the wolves required the device to expend only the slightest of energy from its 'battery'. Creating a Gate or Portal involved the harnessing of forces on a completely different scale, which would consume billions of times more energy than anything they had used the device for since they arrived here on the Earthrealm.

It would consume all of the energy that they had remaining in the device.

This was another one of those moments, where they were going to take a plunge into the unknown. They had jumped into the red hole at Demon Queen Hild's Black Palace to rescue the two Goddesses from being converted into Demonesses. They had jumped through the portal in the Earthrealm church to chase after the man whose DNA matched theirs, a man who might be their father. At the end of all things and times, they had jumped into a rainbow of light to wind up here.

Both Keleste and Keiyasu recognized that this was just another reiteration of their risk-taking. Throughout this entire adventure, their efforts were always motivated by a desire to find their Mother and Father. For this, they would attempt _everything_. Now, they were risking it all; because this _was_ their last chance to find their parents. If they failed, they would be stranded in the Future, alone and powerless to travel to other SpaceTimes.

Deftly keying in a sequence, Keleste began to open a Gate. At this point, it was moot to call it a Soul Mirror, because the two portals were essentially one and the same. A circular 'otherness' appeared nearby, obscuring all that was behind it. She stabilized the new Gate and began to peel away the 'layers' of time, so that they could search for 202X...

But then the portal opening device started running out of energy.

She had miscalculated, as the device was using energy much faster than she had expected. Opening up a Gate on the Earthrealm during this era obviously required much more energy than she had anticipated, based on all of the other times they had opened Gates. She was about to suggest that they try to leap through the Gate anyway, but then it started wobbling, contorting and losing cohesion.

She needed just a few more seconds to stabilize the gate...

"I can't believe this!" Keiyasu shouted out his disappointment as the portal fogged and wavered. "After all we've done, after all we've been through! It can't end this way! How are we supposed to find our parents _now_?"

"Nooooo!!!" Keleste screamed in frustration. She dropped to her knees in defeat, realizing that this final attempt was a dismal failure. This was the worst! They were going to be stranded here! Mortified, she cringed at the realization that she had no one to blame but herself. Her brother and she would never find their parents, and it was all her fault.

Completely overwhelmed by disappointment, she thought she was going to go crazy and lose her mind. But Keiyasu hugged her, as once again they were alone. Two heartbroken orphans, powerless to seek out their parents...

Utterly heart-wrecked, Keleste was besides herself with a sense of abandonment. Another few seconds and the Skuld device would be depleted of energy, and the Gate would be gone. The Gate was distorting and phasing in and out of visibility, like an angry flag furling in a tempest as it began to dissolve...but then as she sadly looked at the dissolving Gate, she noticed that the Gate they had opened _wasn't disappearing_. Blinking her eyes because she thought she was imagining things, she clearly observed that the Gate seemed to be beginning to stabilize on its own. Dumbfounded, she glanced at the portal device and realized that all the lights were out: it was completely depleted of energy. And yet the Gate remained. This was impossible! With her and her brother crouched on their knees, once again defeated, the Gate suddenly flared with massive burst of blue energy...

...and two figures stepped out of it.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"_Keiichi! Keiichi! Oh my Lord, we've actually found them! I'm absolutely certain of it!_" they heard the female exclaim as they looked at the new arrivals, who were floating in the air just in front of the now-stable Gate. _Hovering._ The twins instantly recognized that this wasn't just a female being, but a true Goddess.

"_Oh my dear God!_" the man shouted, his voice rich with emotions. "_It has to be them, Bell-chan. She looks just like you, and he looks just like me! It has to be them!_"

"Bell-chan?" Keleste and Keiyasu gasped as they looked at the man and woman floating in front of them...

...who looked at them with an expression of love that was pure.

The love of a Mother and Father.

Keiichi and Belldandy.

Keleste realized that Belldandy of Nulln had been absolutely correct: she and Keiyasu were not just searching for their parents...their parents had been searching for them as well!

She was speechless as Belldandy floated over and hugged her tight, as if she had never seen her before. Before Keleste could even react, the adult Goddess was wracked with deeply sobbing, tears streaking down her cheeks. She was so shocked, she was still as a statue for several moments. She felt a gentle release from the hug, and Belldandy was kneeling in front of her, almost studying her. Keleste looked in the Goddess's eyes...and saw her own eyes.

"M..M..Mother?" she asked tentatively. The intense love that flared in the blue eyes of the Goddess was all the answer she needed, as Belldandy nodded her head and grabbed both of her hands.

"Yes. I am your Mother, and you are my precious daughter," Belldandy answered, emphasizing each word with a squeeze of her hands. Those few words swept away a lifetime of frustrated hopes, and Keleste all but collapsed in her Mom's arms. It was if her heart had just exploded with a supreme joy that she had never experienced before. She felt an immediate connection and realized that _this Belldandy was her true Mother_!

For the first time in her life, she hugged her Mother tightly, wanting to melt her heart into her Mom's heart, feeling sheltered and warm and protected and loved to a degree she couldn't even imagine. The tears found her, and then Mother and daughter cried to one another.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Keiyasu was in a world of his own when he looked up at the man who had arrived with the woman. A man who looked just like him, just as surely as if he had been looking in a mirror. Could this be his Father? The man resembled the mortal Keiichi that they had met on the forlorn empty planet...an older version, but all the features were there. The calm brown eyes, the spikey hair now lanced with a few streaks of grey, the strong chin and wide smile...

"We've found you! After 15 years of searching, we've found you!!!" the man said in a voice strident with feeling. Leaning down, the man pulled Keiyasu to his feet with a strength beyond his, the strength of an adult mortal man. He felt Keiichi clapping his hands on the balls of his shoulders, peering into his eyes with eyes brimmed with tears of joy.

"Son," he said, "we've come to take you home."

Keiyasu was stunned by the outright declaration by this man. He felt a bonding confidence in that statement, a bond he never knew existed, as Keiichi pulled him against his chest and patted in on the back with assurance before squeezing him with a tight embrace. Keiyasu was speechless with the recognition beyond a doubt that this was _his Father_. The _real_ Keiichi...the man who was his Father. His true Father, who had braved himself against the Divine in order to be here at this moment. He felt enflamed by a new feeling: the sheltering strengthening love of a Father. For the first time in his life, he wasn't Keiyasu...he was a son. He felt tied to Keiichi in a way he couldn't understand; seeing the simple truth within the complexity of the moment.

His Father didn't even know his name, but he had immediately known that he was his son.

Keiyasu locked his arms around his Father's shoulders and buried his face against his chest, and cried the tears he had been holding onto for 150 millennia.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

202X:

Keleste and Keiyasu were in a temple compound, in a country called Japan, sitting in a sunroom together with their parents.

Skuld and Tomohisa...with their twin daughters Pryzm and Ulfryn.

Mara and Sythtsu...with their twins Falcyn and Sygyn.

Urd and Cevn...with their triplets Motokyn, Kitsunen and Baldurdth.

And not a single one of them knew why they were there.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Keleste and Keiyasu listened intently as their Mother began by explaining that when she and Keiichi had chosen to get married, they were fully aware that she and he would never be able to conceive a child. It was physically impossible for a mortal's DNA and a Divines TNA to intermix. On the level of Soul, it was impossible for Divine Soul and mortal Soul to coalesce into a new Soul...in essence, there were many reasons that they would have to accept the existence of a childless marriage. She knew couldn't just haul Keiichi up to Yggdrasil and have the Almighty join them in the creation of a new life; as all Gods and Goddesses had to do in order to bring Divine children into existence. Thus, she and her husband were resigned to the reality of a childless marriage.

"At least, this is what Keiichi and I thought," their Mother noted. "But a little over a year after we got married, my older sister Urd and Cevn," she added, gesturing towards a Goddess and mortal man that neither of them had ever met, "well, they decided to follow in our footsteps. They got married, and so we had two married couples in the temple. Then suddenly one evening Urd and Cevn announced that they were expecting a 'happy event'. Impossibly, my older sister was pregnant! I was shocked to the core by this, realizing that it _was_ possible for a mortal and a Goddess to conceive a child. I hoped beyond hope that this could happen to my dear Keiichi and I, that I would be able to bear children like my older sister. Six months later, Urd surprised all of us by having triplets. So typical of my older sister, doing things in the extreme just for the fun of it."

This comment drew a knowing laughter from the adults, but Keleste and Keiyasu had the uneasy feeling than none of the other children seemed to know what was going on.

Continuing her narrative, their Mother said, "One day I woke up and found that I was pregnant with twins. With the two of you. Unlike a mortal woman, a Goddess can immediately recognize when she is expecting, because she can feel the presence of the babies, feel their Souls inside of her womb. But four months into my pregnancy, the two Souls inside of me that Keiichi and I were nurturing with the all love of our Souls...disappeared. One night, I..snff..went to bed for a contented sleep, and in the morning I woke up..snffsnff..and they were gone. _You both were gone_ and I didn't know why!"

Trying to describe this loss was so taxing to their Mother, she completely broke down into heavy sobs. Keleste and Keiyasu could sense her pain so intensely, they felt like their hearts had been crushed. Their Father had to hug her several times as she struggled to regain her emotional ground so she could relate the events of those days in the past. The other adults all had sad expressions, but the other kids simply looked at their parents with confusion.

"There were no physical indications of a miscarriage in the mortal sense," their Mom noted, continuing to describe what was clearly a painful chapter in her life. "I was painfully aware that my Goddess physical manifest was exactly the same as it was, pre-pregnancy. Distressed beyond anything I've ever experienced in my life, I blamed myself at first. But my dear sisters and Keiichi insisted that the disappearance of the twins had nothing to do with my being at fault. Urd, Mara and Skuld pointed out that I had no other recourse than to return to the God's Realm to be checked out."

"You could imagine my heartbreak," their Father added. "I was blaming myself as well, and I thought that Bell-chan might never return. But I'm really lucky that she has such loving sisters, because they propped me up, coming together to reassure and console me so I could make it through those days. For each day seemed like a living hell, back then."

"Keiichi was upset, I was upset," their Mom resumed, "But I immediately departed to Yggdrasil to be examined by the Ethiopsylogic Proctors and the Holibiolonic Adepts. None of whom could understand or explain how two prenatal Souls could simply vanish. Divine Souls just don't disappear. I didn't have any more answers than I had before, so I returned to the Earthrealm and your Father with a heavy heart. We talked about things, and we decided that we would not to have any further sexual relations. Both your Father and I believed that you both were somehow still alive, somehow still inside of me in some intangible form. Even though I couldn't feel it, I sensed that you were still tethered to my Soul in some mysterious way. Reasoning that you both had been separated from us by an unseen aspect or agency, we realized intuitively that it was possible that if we attempted to conceive more children, that the two missing ones would be lost to us forever. We already had loved our unborn twins...the two of you...and knew that you were irreplaceable. So irreplaceable that any sexual intercourse between Keiichi and I would risk losing you...would 'block' you from returning to my womb or coming back into existence, so to speak. Keiichi and I maintained a chaste marriage for fifteen years while searching for you, our dear daughter and son. I insisted that we base our search from this temple and from Yggdrasil. In this way, I wouldn't be separated from my husband...your Father, because I needed him. His strength and his heart...I needed him so much back then!"

Keleste and Keiyasu both gasped at this, knowing what an immense sacrifice it must have been for them to abstain from making love. Neither one had experience anything even resembling sex, but they both knew that the sex impulse had been entrenched in sentient species by evolution, and that the desire for sexual relations was especially strong in mortal men. They regarded their Father anew, filled with respect as it dawned on them that he had turned away from intimacies with her Mother, based on a deep love and concern for their behalf. It must have been extremely difficult for the both of them.

Belldandy was hugging their Father while she finished her story. "I decided firmly that I would remain on the Earthrealm the entire time we searched for you, rather than go to Yggdrasil and use the resources there. It took a lot of work, but I was able to bring the resources of Yggdrasil here, creating permanent uplinks and convincing the Living Gate between the Earthrealm and Yggdrasil to allow me full access to anything I needed. Anything I needed to aid Keiichi and I in our search for the two of you."

It dawned on both of them that their parents had suffered as much in the 15 years of separation from...as they had suffered through 15 Decas of being alone. The air was heavy with empathy, and the sunroom remained silent for several moments. But something was nagging Keleste and Keiyasu's minds. For some reason, this didn't quite feel right.

"Yggdrasil?" Keiyasu asked his Mother, finally able to set aside his heart-felt accompaniment of her story. "That can't be true, Mother. You keep saying Yggdrasil...but Yggdrasil doesn't exist anymore. It's now the God's Realm part of Syntrasil. You know, the unified realm of Gods, Demons and everything in between. Haven't you ever heard of Syntrasil?"

"Have _any of you_ heard of Syntrasil?" Keleste asked the other adult Divines in the room. Pryzm, Ulfryn, Sygyn, Falcyn all nodded their heads, knowing what she was talking about. The other three teenagers looked at her with expressions of uncertainty.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Emotionally exhausted after the telling of her and Keiichi's search for her children, Belldandy leaned against her husband and tried to just let go and relax. But when her son stated that Yggdrasil didn't exist, she was instantly alert and completely taken aback. She looked at her son with an exasperated expression, clearly amazed that he was questioning the existence of the God's Realm of Yggdrasil.

"_«Urd, Skuld, Mara,_»" she thoughtcast. She had tried to get through to Sythtsu, the only other adult Divine in the room, but he had shielded his mind from receiving thoughtcasts. Whatever he was contemplating, he clearly wanted to keep it private. "_«Do any of you know what my son is talking about? How could he claim that Yggdrasil is no more? What does he mean when he says there is a 'unified realm' of Gods and Demons? Isn't that impossible, since Yggdrasil and Vanagdrasil are completely different?_»"

"_«He's probably shook up after all that happened, Big Sis,_" Skuld replied. "-I'm- _feeling a bit disoriented myself. I'm looking right at my daughters, Pryzm and Ulfryn, but they seem different in some way. But consider what they've been through. They were looking for you and Keiichi for -_Fifteen Decas-_! Fifteen Decas! That's almost impossible to even contemplate. They've been without parents their whole lives. Which brings up another concern…how could your son and daughter be orphaned? Gods know who their parents are; there are no GodKids floating around Yggdrasil wondering where mom and dad are. What's up with that?»_"

"_«This is totally unholy! I noticed that my son and daughter actually agreed with your son,_" Mara noted. "_«Which has to be crazy, because clearly he doesn't know what he's talking about. Syntrasil? What in the blazes is that? And how could my kids actually think he's right? I almost get the sense that they did something behind my back, and somehow met up with your kids, Belldandy. But I can't possibly conceive of how they could have pulled that off. And what's this about a combined Gods and Demons Realm? No offense, but I don't see any Demons clamoring to move to Yggdrasil anytime soon._»"

"_«You guys, I think we've been here before, and I'm not just saying this because I'm the Norn of the Past,»_" Urd interjected. "_«Motokyn, Baldurdth and Kitsunen looked at me as if they were clueless about what your son and daughter were saying, Bell. It seems we aren't the only ones who are confused. Could we have been involved in another one of those 'cosmic events', like the one that created the OmniArc?_»"

"_«Oh wonderful,»_" Skuld groused. "_«Don't tell me we have to go through –_that-_ again, Big Sis!_»"

Belldandy was looking at her sisters thoughtfully. "«_But it is possible. Keleste and Keiyasu didn't just disappear by some whim of fate. If there is a reality that could separate Keiichi and I from our children for 15 years, then I have to question the validity of any of this. It's possible that something much greater than all of us has happened. How could my son and daughter be in Ireland, almost 1800 Earthrealm years ago? The other mystery is this. When we left this morning, Keiichi and I _-weren't planning to look there-_._»"

She heard each of her sisters gasp out their astonishment at this disclosure.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Now that she was in the 'right' dimension with her parents, Keleste sensed that a certain degree of her Divine powers had been restored. She and Keiyasu exchanged rapid thoughtcasts, trying to fathom what involved with the new development. Yggdrasil existed in a sense, but it was part of a unity, rather than a distinct and separate Realm isolated from Vanagdrasil. She didn't quite recall how she knew any of this, but she was certain of the existence of a 'blended' God's and Demon's Realms called Syntrasil. Keiyasu confirmed her awareness, noting that there was something called an OmniOm; and Syntrasil was part of it. It was clear to both that their Mother knew nothing about the Expansion of Balance event.

Keiyasu ventured a daunting, yet thoroughgoing proposition: that this 'place and time' was maladjusted somehow because they hadn't been immediately brought here to be with their parents. He reasoned that it was crazy that the powers-that-be had allowed this kind of separation. There was a paradox at work here. Why had they been separated from Mom and Dad at all? Why hadn't they lived their entire lives with their parents? The whole history of parent-child relationships that should have been there, wasn't. So while she and he were in ancient Ireland with almost nil Divine powers, Mom and Dad were here without them, existing in another one of those 'pocket universes' that was incomplete due to Isilblius. But when their parents found them and returned to here with them, once they exited the portal, they should have been in the 'correct' universe.

But he could only conclude that this wasn't quite the 'correct' universe. In a correct universe, their family would have never experienced the loss and separation that they had endured. That their Mom and Dad had endured. Not to mention that Belldandy, despite being a Senior First Class Goddess and a Norn, was clueless about Syntrasil, XOM, the OmniOm and all sorts of realities.

Upon their arrival, the four of them...Mom and Dad, plus he and his sister...had experienced a near-comatose state where their lives seemed to collide like random anti-muons. She and Keiyasu had assembled creation in a sense, and then creation had returned the favor by assembling their fragmented lives into something whole.

When he asked if anyone else had felt a sense of vertigo and dizziness recently, everyone in the room affirmed that they had also experienced the fading of consciousness, as if a stroke of Soul had been shifted away from them for a time. Mara the Demoness Aunt had described the sensation as "being bound by some kind of knowing coma."

But no one could answer Keleste's question about why they had arrived here as a group in the temple sunroom. Her query was received by Mom and the other adults with white-faced expressions of anxiety. She could clearly see that there were no portals or any other means of bringing them together floating around the sunroom. Even more unsettling was the emerging awareness that _everyone_ had arrived here "passed out", so to speak. But why they had arrived here in such a manner was a mystery.

Belldandy and Keiichi could only respond to Keleste's inquiry by noting that they both had fully expected to go and find their children, and then bring them back through the portal to their temple home. But instead, they had lost consciousness for a time and then had found themselves here, in the presence of all three of Belldandy's sisters and their children...after passing out for a time.

The joy of reunion was dampened by their disbelief.

Keleste agreed with her brother's view that this was Isilblius's fault, noting that only Isilblius could do something as cruel as steal them away from their mother while she was _pregnant_ with them. For Fifteen Decas, they had suffered the pain of not having parents, and now they were confronted with parents who had suffered fifteen Earthrealm years not having _them_. Since all were gathering in one place, everything was seemingly back in balance. Both she and Keiyasu could clearly sense Syntrasil via their Metanative links with it. But what was weird was that their Mother insisted that she was in contact with Yggdrasil; her Metanative links with the God's Realm didn't indicate anything even resembling Syntrasil. How could they be connected with Syntrasil while their Mom was connected with the 'old' Yggdrasil...not knowing that Ygg was now part of Syntrasil?

Could they be in the same room, but not from the same time?

Deciding that this was impossible, Keleste and Keiyasu quickly agreed that their Mom didn't sense the presence of Syntrasil because she wasn't able to. This meant that she would need some guidance. Together, they thoughtcast this to their Mother and humbly asked her to try and uplink with Yggdrasil.

Belldandy agreed and shut her eyes while they thoughtcast everything they could remember...and in the middle of the thoughtcast, everything went fuzzy...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Keleste came to, arms and legs akimbo as if she had been flopped limply onto the floor. Lying on her side, she immediately noticed that everyone the room was groggy, almost drunkenly so. Her head seemed to be spinning in place as well. Everyone seemed to have collapsed where they were sitting. The dizziness recalled the impressions she had felt when she had first jumped into the rainbow light and then found herself in ancient Ireland. The adults seemed to be quicker to gain their bearings. while she and the other children were still too disconcerted by the sudden onrush of insensibility to sit back up. Once again, their consciousness had fled...or had been stolen away. One by one, each child and picked themselves off the floor and tried to remain steady where they sat

Their Mother was looking at her and Keiyasu with a stunned expression.

"It's all _changed_!" she blurted in an exhaling gasp, grabbing their Father's arm in shock and drawing an immediate "Honey, are you okay?" from him as he cradled her against a fall.

In fact, every adult Divine in the sunroom was looking at each other with confused expressions. Apparently, they had all listened in on the thoughtcasts, and now knew what their Mom knew. Urd, Mara, Skuld, Sythtsu...all seemed overwhelmed with perplexity, uncertainty vividly written upon their miens. It must be difficult for them to handle, because everything they had known had been turned inside out. Somehow, Keleste sensed that she and her brother had played a part in this change. Along with their cousins, they had created it.

"Waaah! What just happened here?" someone asked.

Their four cousins...Pryzm and Ulfryn and Falcyn and Sygyn...seemed to be looking at each other as if they had freshly recognized something significant, a secretive sequence of events that only the four of them had experienced. Sygyn spoke up and said they were aware of the change as well...but added enigmatically that their adventure differed significantly from her and Keiyasu's trials. Sygyn explained that, for one thing, the four of them hadn't been stranded in ancient Ireland. She added that up to this point, she had never met Belldandy and Keiichi, or Urd and Cevn. Ulfryn excitedly claimed that they had been to Syntrasil, and had been "blown away" by its wonders.

Motokyn, Baldurdth and Kitsunen...the cousins they had never met...remained quietly cautious, regarding them with wary expressions.

"Cevn," the Goddess named Urd asked in a threatening voice. Their new Aunt. "You didn't...did you?"

Cevn simply nodded his head and said, "Well, kinda, my dearest. But I was only involved indirectly." This earned face-faults from all of the adults. Urd muttered "indirectly...my ass!" and narrowed her eyes at her husband. Was this guy their Uncle, since he was sitting next to her Aunt? The only ones who weren't nonplused was their Father and an athletic-looking new Uncle called Tomohisa, who was Skuld's husband and the father of Pryzm and Ulfryn. Oddly, Mara's husband Sythtsu seemed extremely shocked, much more than anyone else in the room. Cevn looked around the room with a guilty expression, and their Father slapped him on the back playfully, as if they had been through this before. Keleste and Keiyasu suddenly realized that there was more to this than just their account, just their actions. It seemed like every child in the room had just met their parents; but the adult couples seemed to know each other to some degree. Obviously, their mom and dad had a history...and that past had been shared with the other adult couples.

But was it the same? What could be trusted, if this universe or dimension was possibly _wrong_?

"Tell us!" the Goddess called Urd demanded as she flipped her hair back with a practiced motion, suddenly anxious and imposing as she leaned forward to focus her attention on their four cousins. "The four of you...Falcyn and Sygyn, Pryzm and Ulfryn..._must_ tell us how you arrived here. As twin sister to your mother, Mara...and eldest sister of your mother, Skuld," she said, pointing at each pair of children in succession, "I have a right to know..."

"You're so impulsive, Big Sister Urd. Give them time," Skuld interrupted.

"They need Time for their tale..."

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --


	149. Pt 149: Nine Voices: The Quad Pt 1

**Part 149: Nine Voices – The Quad Part One**

PRYZM and ULFRYN; FALCYN and SYGYN:

They felt themselves being hurled about like sand particles in a windtunnel; inside of an artery of solid clearlight which rendered them insubstantial in mass or form. But they were semi-aware of mammoth processes of creation and destruction...bathed in luminosity and memory...surrounding the outside of their protective channel with bubbles of many-colored energies and forms. Were they rising, were they falling? The light shifted from brilliance to tolerance as all of reality reassembled, mastering Time and Space to create itself. The four, the Quad, had started off looking for 'ghosties'...and had finished their adventure by jump-starting an engine of Balance and Creation...

"Whoof!!!" Ulfryn gasped, the breath squeezed out of her as she was forcibly expelled from appeared to be a hovering Cylindrical Forest. She found herself high above a terrace of rainbows that descended like giant stairsteps downwards towards a series of rings circling a new kind of sun. She was tumbling rather than hovering, and quickly tried to stabilize herself as her sister and cousins hurtled by, a little slower to react than she. This was freaky, like skydiving back on the Earthrealm!

"Awesome!" she heard Falcyn exclaim as he righted himself and began to hover several kilometers above the top terrace of the 'rainbow' stairwell. Her older Demon cousin seemed suitably impressed with this place.

But what _was_ this place?

"This is really interesting," Sygyn commented. "We've arrived near a stellar-sized object with a ringlet of matter around it. But it is and isn't a sun...in fact, I've never seen anything like it. From what I can sense out with my Demoness faculties, the Metanative and Chaostic energies in this area are off the scale."

"Totally!" Pryzm agreed, looking upwards. "Doesn't that look like the same Cylindrical Forest we camped out in when we were planning this whole thing?"

"But I felt bubbles..." Ulfryn noted.

"I felt crystals..." Falcyn added.

"I felt winds..." Sygyn observed.

The fact that everyone felt something different as they emerged from the overhead forest was intriguing to Ulfryn. As Divines, regardless of God or Demon status, they had all emerged from the same place with conflicted sensations. She tried to get a grab on Time and realized that it wasn't in flux or anything like that. A sense of sadness shadowed her memories, as she recalled her Mom dying...twice...to save she and the others. But the Grandma version of her Mom had practically insisted and promised that they would be reunited with their parents. The sense of loss passed quickly, much more quickly than she thought it would.

"Does anyone sense Vang or Ygg?" Falcyn asked. "I'm sensing both, but they appear to be outright different as well. As a Demon, there are certain manifolds of Divinity and Metanative energy that are unique to Vang. I can sense some but not all of them, which is off the clip, because this place looks like Yggdrasil...which means that I _shouldn't_ be sensing Vanagdrasil at all. At least everything seems arranged along the Nine Dimensional levels. There's clearly Arcanical, Divinity and Metanative dimensional sets here."

"Time certainly seems intact as well. We're no longer at the End of Eternity, but I don't know what the Bless happened. The admixture of Chronological and Chronometric dimensions is correct; absolutely flawless as far as I can tell. This is full-on Blazing: I can feel a significant increase in my own Demoness Powers, or at least my perceptional abilities," Sygyn added.

"Me too! Like a total power-up!" Pryzm noted. Ulfryn looked at her sister; her dark-brown and black waves of hair shorn to tomboyish length, with a ponytail partway down her back. As usual, her sister was totally self-contradicting; her short shaggy hair was boyish and athletic, but the ponytail she had been growing for two years was girlish and attractive, like Mom's friend Peorth. Peorth was almost the epitome of feminine delicacy at times, with her French-accented words and her sense of grace and poise.

Ulfryn decided to have some fun, so she stood her arms out straight and began to spin-wheel as she hovered until she felt a little bit of dizziness. _Allowed_ herself to feel giddy, because she had full control over her physical manifest and dizziness was an impossibility otherwise. After all the times she had been cart-wheeled, spun-about, flipped over, turned inside out...it felt fun to simply _play_. "After all, I'm an 11-year old girl and I don't care!" she thought cheerfully.

Soon, all of them were giggling and playing around, hover-swooping each other and perform hover-acrobatics, or "hoverbatics" as Sygyn called them. Even Falcyn, Mr. Serious himself, dropped his obstinate Demon boy persona that he always tried to project and was whirling around like a kid, comet-balling past them with rapidly spinning somersaults.

All romped out, they decided to descend to the upper terrace. As they approached it, Ulfryn noticed that it was a meadow covered with differently colored bands of prairie grass and flowers, creating the rainbow effect they had noticed from above. After being suspended in space, spending time in semi-stasis in Mom's TimePod, and floating in and out of massive Xeomnic and Mnoexic computer networks, the physical sensation of ground underfoot was almost calming. The floral smell of the yellow-grassed meadow was almost like lilacs and honey, mixed in with the pleasant aroma of a freshly-cut lawn.

Ulfryn had learned much more than what she had started out to learn...she had sought out the two 'ghosties' and had discovered that the 'ghosties' were _their cousins_. "Cousins," she thought to herself, pleased that the mystery was solved. "With the certainty that they're our cousins, it totally for sure means that Mom has another older sister besides Aunt Mara! It'd be totally stylin' if their mother was younger than ours, because they're several years older than us. Nah, I'm not going there, don't even wanna think about it. That'd be plain _weird_!"

Sadly, neither of the two new cousins, the twins, had met their parents. They had mentioned _almost_ meeting them, but their story about that encounter didn't make sense. It was all balled-up strings of confusion to her. They said that the two people who they had thought were their parents matched them in DNA and TNA, but each came from impossibly different points in time, many Decamillennia apart. Like everyone in the Quad, her two new cousins had a mixed parentage of mortal and Divine parents; mortal father and Divine mother.

Which probably explained why everyone was mentioning how tired they were, once they started walking around on the rainbow meadow. Even in Yggdrasil, Ulfryn always knew that the mortal half of their parentage required them to sleep after every 16 to 18 hours. Must be the same thing here, because she was barely able to hold back from yawning.

Guessing they'd walked a carefree half-hour or so, she and the others in the Quad reached the edge of the terrace. There, they discovered a bubbly well-spring of water brooking swiftly out of the ground, as wide as a medium-sized creek back home in Japan. Looking over the edge, she was amazed how it waterfalled downwards to crash-splash into a large lake about a half-kilometer below her. For some odd reason, this setup reminded Ulfryn of the water-slide ride that the indoors aqua park had; the one Mom sometimes took them to during the winter so they could practice swimming. Maybe this was supposed to be a place of amusement; a playground or park for Gods to have fun with. It looked harmless.

Or maybe it was for Demons. Confirming what Falcyn had noticed earlier, she was uncertain if this was Ygg or Vang. Having been to Vang once was useful in more than one sense, as she had developed a sensing of all the weirdness of the Demon's Realm. It seemed to oscillate at a totally different beat than Yggdrasil. This place was weird, because it was and yet wasn't Yggdrasil. On impulse, she reached into her skirt and found her small red glowing magatama, the visa that the Almighty Himself had given her and her sister to allow them safe passage and protection in Vanagdrasil. Pocketing it, she made up her mind and decided to take the plunge...

"Ulfryn, what the hell are you doing!?" she heard Pryzm scream as she leapt off the edge of the terrace. As she suspected, the water pressure from the spring was tight enough that it canoed underneath her as she plummeted towards the lake.

"_Whhhheeeeeeeee!!!_" she screamed in delight as she rode the water down, the earthen scree whipping past her. When she hit the lake, there was no 'smack' of water like she had expected. Instead, she seemed to be in another dimension of murky yellow-brown syrup-thick water that reminded her of sweet-n-sour soup at a Chinese restaurant. The last thing she expected was to be swimming in sweet-n-sour soup! Panic gripped her as she kicked and stroked downwards...

...and broke the surface of the 'bottom' of the lake, sucking in deep breaths as she discovered herself _in a totally different place_. She looked into the sky and saw unfamiliar glows of dark rose-red nebulae fading and prominencing against a deep black-blue sky. Overhead, a cylindrical tree of rose-colored 'lightning' slowly rotated. To her shock, the 'water' she was in was no longer water...it was all sworls of bright oranges and yellows, like the pool of lava in that hot springs at Hild's. The surface was glowing and the air immediately above it was distorting with the heat. She could tell that it was superheated, just the way Demons like their baths. With the release of her flashpoint of panic, Ulfryn felt totally relaxed just to soak and float in it.

"_Wahhhgh!_" she heard as Pryzm, Falcyn and Sygyn surfaced nearby her. Three heads and shoulders popping out of the lava, with mixed expressions of surprise and shock. Ulfryn secretly was glad she went first, so nobody had caught her looking like a dork when she emerged on this side of the 'lake' she had dived into.

"Coolage! This is mega-rad amazing!" Falcyn shouted excitedly, quick to figure out that this was a Demon hot springs.

"Totally tightage! This is a trip! We're in an awesome hot springs pool, and the magma smells delicious," Sygyn exclaimed, quickly swimming to the edge and then resting her back against it, just like she would at a real molten hot outdoors bath. Ulfryn thought the magma was tanged with sulfurous odors, but evidently that's what Demons must like in their hot ponds.

She sighed, her mind still a little scrambled by the sudden change of environment. But at least someone was happy-happy joy-joy...her two Demonic cousins were acting like they were in heaven. Which only made sense, even if it _didn't_ make sense...

They seemed to be in something that resembled Vanagdrasil.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"So what you're saying, Sygyn, is that these lakes function like the Aumatrices? That they're gates between Yggdrasil and Vanagdrasil, or what used to be Ygg and Vang?" Pryzm asked, fingering her ponytail.

Sygyn was utterly startled when her normally-timid cousin Ulfryn had suddenly taken a flying leap off the rainbow-grassed terrace. Ulfryn was usually the model of girlish caution whenever Mom and Aunt Skuld took the four of them to an adventure park. Naturally, Pryzm jumped after her sister, which left her and Falcyn to shrug their shoulders and follow after them. The ride down the waterfall was exhilarating, but once she hit the water, her Demoness senses went all whacked. The 'lake' only seemed to be about twenty or thirty meters deep, and she could see a dark ruddish glow on the bottom. Swimming downwards to investigate, she suddenly found herself emerging from the _surface_ of the water, which was not longer water but magma. Immediately, she recognized a Cylindrical FireLight Tree rotating in the sky above and realized that she was back in Vanagdrasil.

But it wasn't Vanagdrasil, just like the place they had first arrived wasn't Yggdrasil.

This was a place, but it was a _realm_ as well. The really messed-up part of all this was that suspicion that this was neither a God's or Demon's Realm, even though it closely resembled her home-away-from-home. She couldn't sense any Demons anywhere in the vicinity. No Lairs. No parks. No causeways filled with Demons and Demonesses. No erotic gardens. Nothing at all. It was as if this was a suburb that had been designed and built, ready for occupancy but with no one home.

"I seem to remember someone saying that Yggdrasil and Vanagdrasil were going to be combined into something called a Syntrasil. That there would be nine Syntrasils. An expansion of _everything_; including an area where Gods and Demons would _both_ reside; a type of God-Demon's realm," Pryzm observed.

"You mean a Demon-God's realm," Falcyn corrected.

"Whatever!" Ulfryn commented with as much distaste as she could muster in her voice.

"Here we go..." Sygyn thought with a resigned air, having seen this little scenario play out dozens of times before between her brother and her cousin. She knew that Pryzm and Falcyn would be caught up in a heated argument for a few minutes over something stupid, like they always did. Why couldn't they argue over something important, like why in the Blazes was that lake cool water on one side and hot magma on the other? Or where in the name of the Dark Lord were they?

Or why 'up' was 'down'?

She tried her memory, hoping to recall a few of the sequence of events that had occurred immediately prior to their finding themselves here. Retrospection only yielded a jumble of faded, veiled thoughts. The eye of her mind struggled to reach into them, but it was fogged up like the eyesight of her Earthrealm manifest at twilight during a heavy downpour. Fleeting memories, transient like the visions of the golden atoms that brightened the day...only to fade at sunset and soften downwards into particles of near-light...the silver apples of the night. Yet, the darkness was a storehouse of beauties and memories, which she as a Demoness was accustomed to holding in her mental possession.

Why was everything so slippery in her mind?

Circular rainbows, an endless OmniArc, Eternity being linked within itself...

She remembered the younger version of her Mother; a much younger version. Mom usually manifested in an Earthrealm form of a woman in her early-thirties, but the 'Mara' she last encountered was clearly in her mid-twenties. Perhaps that was what Mom looked like before she had her and Falcyn. Dialing up eidetic instances of memory, Sygyn recognized that the 'Mara' at the so-called "End of Eternity" was virtually an exact match for her own Mom, at least in TNA and Metanative energy signatures.

But Sygyn had to admit that the old-young granny version of Skuld they had met was spooky. Despite her Demoness nature, that ages-old Goddess person had pushed her nerves way up to the cliff-edge. It was frightening to be confronted with a being that claimed to have seen _all_ the Gods and Demons...including herself...meet the Real Death. Almost like seeing the Reaper, in a certain sense. Aunt Skuld and the other Mara and a Goddess named Peorth had immediately bowed seiza to her as if she was the Dark Lord or the God's Lord. So she must have been a powerful Goddess, perhaps some kind of uber-Norn. But the white-haired Skuld was even more scary because she knew _secret things_ that didn't make sense.

She had something she called an Enigma Book, which reminded her of the book she had been reading in Hild's scriptorium, when the dimwit cyborg Cevn came and caught it on fire before she could finish it. Cevn had claimed that it had never been written, which was ridiculous, because she'd been reading it for a day and a half. But if it was burned up at Hild's Palace, then how did the elder Goddess have it?

GranSkuld, as they all nicknamed the Goddess from the Far Future, was totally confident that Time and Space would take wing and fly out of all that destruction, like the mythological Phoenix of so many Earthrealm cultures. She seemed to know answers within answers, and was all happy and optimistic. Typical Goddess-type outlook on life.

Fatigue seemed to hurl against fatigue, but her mind was a busy station of thoughts, like a rush hour crush in Shibuya. The other three were already asleep, but she couldn't halt her racing conjectures even if she wanted to. The 'sun' that they had observed on the other side of the lake...was here as well. The terraces seemed to lead downwards towards a ring that encircled it; the same setting she saw on the other side of the lake. Examining the massive orb closely, Sygyn observed that the solar surface was faceted with crystalline geometries. A giant diamond sphere hovering in space like a jewel. Or a power source.

Could it be a 'sun' made of Metaixodenum? Ixodenum was one of those transdimensional energies that powered both the God's Realm and the Demon's Realm. To the Divines, it was a form of electricity, to use an Earthrealm analogy. Some types of Metanative energy were an outflowing of it. She knew that the Souls of each Demon and God were dependent on Metanative energy, yet there was something more that they seemed to rely on. This thought had haunted her from time to time. Could it be Love? Love was an energy, she had been taught this in FirstTier Inquisition. Ixodenum was a type of 'power station' that energized the Realms, and forms of Metanative energy powered the Gods and Demons. But how did Love fit into all of this? In a like sense, what made the Ultimate Force so 'ultimate'? Was the Ultimate Force reliant on Love?

What could be the energy source for energy itself?

How could a pseudo-Yggdrasil and pseudo-Vanagdrasil be stitched together by a body of water twenty-or-so meters deep? While the others slept, she walked up to the rim of the rainbow-grassed terrace...and found another spring splooshing out of the ground near the edge. A volcanic-like flow of magma that waterfalled in a sloping downward plunge onto a molten pool about half a kilometer below her. What would happen if she rode the waterfall down to the next level of the terrace?

In spite of her mental confusion, she again noticed that her Demoness senses were much more acute than what she was used to. She could sense filaments of energy which were previously insensate to her. Time held a different sensing and meaning as well; it was if she could 'read' it in a new and interesting way. What did GranSkuld call the 'Mara' that she and her cousins had met when they were dumped out of the TimePod? Something...something...ah!...she had called Mara an equi-Scorn. Equi-Scorn? What the Bless was that? Along with every other Demon, she knew that the Dark Sovereign had abolished the Scorns because they always attempted to use Time to usurp His authority. He had basically gotten sick of it, as it seemed that Demonesses and Time didn't mix too well. Each trio of Scorns He appointed eventually tried to mess with Him. He would then Exile them for a time and try a new set of Demoness sisters, with the same result. Since He preferred to mete out cruelty and anguish for punishments rather than simply Exiling His subjects...He did away with the office of Scorns and took on the administration of Time Himself.

Spinning on her heels, she walked back to where the others were soundly sleeping. There was so much to try and understand; which was fun because it engaged her imagination and intelligence in equal qualities. This was just like their campout in the Cylindrical Forest, or in the parks nearby their home in Chiba. Sleep gathered her in its arms...and she dreamed of ghosts.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

_"Aieeee!!!"_

Ulfryn's scream yanked Pryzm out of a dreamworks, rousting everyone up out of a sound sleep into immediate alarm.

"The 'ghosties'! The 'ghosties'! They're back! I saw three of them in my dreams!" she shouted, completely frightened into a verbal froth of panic. "They were _here_, in my mind. I really saw them, you gotta believe me!"

Pryzm was about a half-second away from giving her sister a mega-scolding...but then she noticed that Ulfryn was wide-eyed. This wasn't the wide-eyed expression her sister would have when a cute guy walked by at the mall. This was her twin sister having some kind of emotional meltdown to the point where she was so upset, she probably couldn't tell in from out. When Ulfryn was this freaked out, she usually ran into doors and telephone poles without even noticing they were there...

"Ulfryn, brace yourself. You're with _us_, you're okay!" Pryzm shouted, grasping her shivering sis by the balls of her shoulders.

"The ghosties! It's all real. They're real!" Ulfryn stammered, totally deer-in-the-headlights checked out. What could have gotten to her sis? This was like the first time when Ulfryn was seeing the 'ghosties', only worse. Not only was Ulfryn more upset, but she was seeing _three_ of them.

"What did you sense?" Sygyn asked. "Can you describe them? Were they the same ghosts that you were seeing before?"

Good question. How could her sis be seeing the 'ghosties' again, when they had met them in person, in real life? Ulfryn's ghosties were Keleste and Keiyasu, the older cousins that they encountered in Vanagdrasil. Their two new cousins had accompanied their Quad from then on, and were transported with them by the Dark Lord to that wedding on the Earthrealm. But then something had happened, because they had been separated from Keleste and Keiyasu after that. The twins had simply _disappeared_, because they weren't with her and the others when they were flashed back to Hild's Palace.

"Th...there were _three_ of them. I could see them clearly, and they were asking for help. Ninja girl, slacker boy, foxy girl. They were there in my dream, and they wouldn't leave!" Ulfryn stammered, starting to come back to reality.

Ninja-girl, slacker-boy, fox-girl? Something about this description struck a bell in Pryzm's mind.

"It's okay, cousin. We know that you've always been scared of nightmares growing up, and you probably had a..." Sygyn started to console her.

"That's cuz she's just a stupid Goddess who'd be afraid of her own shadow if she saw it in a dream," Falcyn interrupted. "I was having the most cool dream..."

"Of Hild, no doubt. Hild and a certain hot springs," Sygyn snapped back without missing a beat, her eyes narrowed. Obviously irritated at her brother's comment and his callous dismissal of Ulfryn's distress.

"Zing!" Pryzm thought to herself as Falcyn face-faulted. She was reminded once again that you don't mess with the Demoness, especially Sygyn. Her older cousin appeared waifish but wielded a razor-sharp wit. That girl must have thorns on her tongue, because she had certainly lashed Falcyn hard for making that stupid comment about her sister. Falcyn's face was beet-red with embarrassment and anger; he finally turned his back to the three of them and put his hands on his hips.

"Sorry about my brother. He's one of those types who's cranky when he wakes up," Sygyn apologized. "You said you saw three ghost-images in your dream. But can you remember anything else, something about where they were, or where you were in the dream? Were any of us in your dream?"

"Yeah, she's right. I apologize," Falcyn added. "I was sound asleep and got woken up with a scream, which probably pissed me off more than it should have. And for the record, I wasn't dreaming about Hild. There's no way I'd dream about that psycho bitch, no matter how sexy she looks. Not after how she embarrassed me in front of everyone. If she showed up in my dreams, I'd be screaming like Ulfryn."

She, Ulfryn and Sygyn giggled girlishly at his comment, and Pryzm knew that he was back in their good graces.

"Apology accepted, as always!" Ulfryn noted with a slight smirk. "But nightmares are not accepted though. There was nothing in my dream that was scary or nightmarish. No skeletal horseheads with leather hats, no flesh-eating vampires, no suffocating in an oboe case. Nothing like that at all. What was really unreal was that the _ghosties seemed scared_, not me. What scared me was this sound that I kept hearing, a sound or tone that was getting louder in my dream. The louder it got, the more fear I was feeling. It was like a fire alarm that I couldn't shut off! I..I think I was being made to feel something."

"Nothing nightmarish enough in your dream to scare you, but you felt enough fear to wake up screaming?" Pryzm wondered aloud, feeling a little stifled by this. "There were three ghosts this time, not two or four like before? My guess is that you were probably seeing into something different than the other 'ghosties'; maybe a different set of people, either mortal or Divines. You had the dreams both in Yggdrasil and Vanagdrasil, so I don't think we can say that the ghosts have anything to do with us being here."

"Pryzm, hold that thought for a moment," Sygyn interjected. "We've all been feeling pretty freaked out because we don't know where 'here' is. Ulfryn, do you think that just by being here, you were upset enough to have a bad dream? Could that fear have impacted you dreams somewhat, perhaps subconsciously? We were all tired after our ordeal, and the mortal part of us definitely can be less logical and lucid during such times."

"Waitaminute!!! Did you say _three_? A ninja girl, slacker boy, and a foxy girl?" Falcyn interjected. Pryzm once again was amazed on how slow her cousin was on the uptake; Ulfryn had said that right off the bat right after screaming everybody awake. When they were passing out brains, Falcyn must have gotten horseshoes, because he was such a mental clod sometimes.

"I remember that there were nine of us, plus the three adults. Three of the other kids our age were Gods, a year or two older than Sygyn and I. We didn't know a thing about them, except that they just popped up out of the TimePod like we did. I wonder if those are the three that you're seeing in your dreams, Ulfryn. We met them briefly, but I can't even remember their names. There's another thing that seems really Blazed-out: if we are all cousins and there were six of us, could the other three have been our cousins too?"

Incredible! Once again, Pryzm was surprised by her Demon cousin. Despite his slowness, Falcyn seemed to have this uncanny ability to see _deeper_ into things than she and the others. He really might have a point there! Before, Ulfryn's 'ghosties' were those two cousins who were also seeing 'ghosties', also looking for _them_. Now, Falcyn was suggesting that they had three more cousins? It seemed like a total shot in the dark, but Pryzm felt that his observation might be a stumble in the right direction. She looked at Sygyn, who was hang-mouthed with surprise, probably more shocked than she was that her brother had nailed it.

"Hmmm...ninja, slacker, fox," she reflected, looking at her younger sis.

"I'm not sure about that. I don't think that I've met them before, but I just can't remember," Ulfryn said. "But I do know that I'll need to get more sleep. If they come back to me in my dreams, then I'll try and remember more next time, 'kay?"

"While you're remembering, try and remember not to scream either," Falcyn advised as he rolled over on the grass into a sleeping curl.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

When they dived off the magma flow and fell down into the bowl of glowing molten rock, they didn't splash and again found themselves kicking around in a soupy mixture that was neither here nor there, with a dark blue glow at the bottom. This time, Falcyn kick-turned and swam upwards instead of descending to the bottom, just to see what would happen.

He broke surface and recognized that he was in the same pool of liquid magma, with a glowing orange-yellow belt flowing down from the next terrace above them. With a flip-spin, he dove back in the pool and swam towards the bottom with swift strokes, remembering his diving strokes from scuba lessons.

Splashing halfway out of the water, he noticed a light green sky with a bubble tree rotating, high above them. This looked like Yggdrasil again, only a different part from where they started.

"Is that that same sun that we saw in the previous two places?" he asked. The giant weird sun on the horizon looked exactly the same as it did the other two times. He was beginning to worry that they were getting ripped off, being caught in some kind of time-causal loop where they were doing the same thing over and over again.

"You guys, this may sound totally Blessed stupid...but I think that sun is a combo Metaixodenum diamond and a Swarp Hypernality," Sygyn ventured.

"You're nuts! I've never even heard of Metaixodenum diamonds being larger than a kilometer!" Falcyn shouted. "That sun is _huge_, like a Blue sun on the stellar sequence. It could hold a billion Earthrealms!"

"I said I _think_..." Sygyn warned.

"And when you think, others suffer and the world weakens," Falcyn finished. The insult had the desired effect, as his twin sister's pink-red ponytails rose up and started dancing like cobras, indicating that he'd scored a hit.

"Well at least I _can_ think, instead of just being a dumbass," Sygyn snorted back, which didn't dent his ego at all. He was already beyond the point of being taunted by her. She nailed him good last night, now it was his turn to dish out some payback. Besides, a Metaixodenum diamond and a Swarp Hypernality being one the same? Utterly retarded.

"You guys, don't get into it! Keep it down, for Lord's sake! You never know who's listening in," Pryzm cautioned. "The last thing we need is to get in trouble with one or both of the Lords because we're fighting amongst ourselves. Or even worse, getting in trouble with our parents..."

That sobered Falcyn up and out of any argumentative jousting he was planning to foist upon his sister, Ms. Brainy Artist.

"Question!" Ulfryn interjected. "If that is a Swarp Hypernality, could it be the power source for all the Swarp Gates at the Aumatrices?"

"Shit ablaze!!! Why didn't I think of that?" Sygyn cursed. She fixed him with a stare and added "And don't you say something stupid, Falcyn. I think she's right."

"Slacker boy!" Pryzm shouted. His cousin's eyes were flashing with sudden recognition.

"Huh?!"

"I seem to remember some kind of slacker boy, who said that he was trying to discover what powered the Swarp Hypernalities, back when we first met him. Right before we crashed into here, wherever 'here' is. Remember how he only appeared to be an idiot, but his sister got all righteous angry when GranSkuld called them "kids" and said that he was super-smart, like Sygyn? All along, we've just assumed that the Aumatrices and Swarp Gates were created as part of the Expansion Event. Mom mapped them out with her S.H.O.U.J.O. probe, which activated them. But something else has to power them, something mega-powerful. Like that!" Pryzm explained, pointing at the crystalline sun hovering on the horizon.

"This is totally fucked up!" he shouted, totally dismayed at his cousin's suggestion...and how much sense it made. "If we've found the power source of the Swarp Gates, then we're in some place that no God or Demon has gone before. I've never heard of _anyone_ saying they've been to a place like this. Places like this aren't mentioned in SecondTier Inquisition. Even more messed up...if Slacker Boy was trying to discover the power source of the Swarp Hypernalities, it means that no one knows what it is. What if she's right, and we've stumbled onto it? Maybe it's supposed to be off-limits! We're in a place that isn't supposed to exist! We've been cosmically car-jacked in the worst sense."

Lot of things made him feel insecure, like girls he had crushes on at school, guys picking on his sister or cousins, certain types of seafood and being lost in the city or in Vang. No Demon in their right mind can handle being lost; it grates on the Demonic demand to be in control of themselves and their emotions at all times.

"Hee hee hee! Cosmically car-jacked! I love it!" Sygyn praised him, completely amused by his assessment of the situation. "I think that my brother is partly right. Either we're in a place that's literally 'off the map' as far as the UmbraPlexiar system is concerned, or _it didn't exist_ when we started this whole adventure."

"Didn't...exist?" Ulfryn asked, her eyes narrowed with concentration.

"Totally didn't exist," Pryzm noted. "Remember the white-haired Goddess who looked like Mom, who said that we were going to be in a place that was completely different than before? The way I understood it, she claimed it would be an expansion of the Expansion Event. Like that SimCosmos computer game back home on the Earthrealm that's supposed to teach you quantum physics and astronomy. You know, the one where you get to build a galaxy by starting off with a stellar explosion."

"Przym, I just had a spooky thought," Ulfryn said with a serious expression. "How come we're not completely upset about Mom? Sygyn, Falcyn...how come you guys aren't upset about your Mom? Old Skuld said that everything had been destroyed..."

Falcyn seized on this observation by his youngest cousin. They had been swooped away by Aunt Skuld from their Mother, and then reached the end of Time, where everything was a wrecked emptiness. Obviously, their Mom didn't survive that. Nothing did. But he wasn't feeling a bit upset, like he _should be feeling_. If he knew that something or someone had killed his Mother, he knew without a doubt that he would spend the rest of his life hunting him down to avenge her. He would be as committed to this as those two Gods who had spent their whole lives trying to find their parents. But he didn't feel any emptiness or uncertainty about his Mom. In fact, he felt as if she had never died. As if she was still here.

_Was still here!!!_

"You guys! You guys!" he exclaimed. "The reason we're not freaking spazzing with the tear ducts right now is because our parents aren't dead! They're _alive_!!! Something deep in us knows this, which is why we're so calm about it. They're here..."

"...and we're lost," Sygyn finished.

"But being lost doesn't have to be that bad," Pryzm offered. "I know that being lost is different for you Demons than it is for Ulfryn and me. But in this case, we have the upper hand. We have some idea of where we're at. This is some place that is both Yggdrasil and Vanagdrasil, just like the Swarp Gates that exist in both Ygg and Vang. What if all of this...is _inside of a Swarp Gate_?"

Falcyn saw Sygyn's face light up like a Christmas bulb, an indication that she was having a nova of a brainstorm.

"That's it! That solves all of it!" Sygyn exclaimed cheerfully. Just like Aunt Skuld, she stuck a finger in the air in front of her chest, assuming her Demoness 'lecture posture'.

"Here we go..." Falcyn muttered to himself.

"Proposition A. We are part of an expanded universe, which includes different types of Demon and God's Realms. So many of them, it would be like trying to count the stars from the Earthrealm. Vanagdrasil and Yggdrasil are comprised of all of these Realms, just like the Earth has millions of cities and towns. Since Yggdrasil and Vanagdrasil are partially identifiable here, then this is that middle place between them, which is called Midgardrasil. Not Midgard as in the terrestrial realm or the Earth of the Norse Mythology, but in a more metaphysical sense. The middle ground.

"Proposition B. Remember the Expansion Event? None of us were born then, but I can remember a little of it somehow. Mom was all buzzed off because all of a sudden, there were fourteen Aumatrices and a greatly expanded computer network. But the Aumatrices just sat there for years until Aunt Skuld activated them with her S.H.O.U.J.O. mecha. If this is a new place created by another Expansion Event, then it isn't going to be instantly filled up with Demons and Gods. At least right away. Just like when the Aumatrices came on line, it took a couple years before even a thousand Demons had visited Yggdrasil and vice versa. Even now, the Dark Lord and you guy's Lord don't just let anyone go back and forth between the Realms; there's a careful selection process at involved. So this explains why we don't see any Gods or Demons here.

"Proposition C. If you were going to create a 'middle Realm' between Vanagdrasil and Yggdrasil, why start from scratch? As the Earthrealm mortals would say, "Why reinvent the wheel?" The most expedient way to create an intermediate Realm would be to use the existing source of energy that exists in both Realms: the Swarp Hypernality. Create a Logorinth out of it, which overlaps with the Demon's Realm and the God's Realm. Which incidentally solves the problem of Ulfryn's 'ghosties'.

"What? How?" Falcyn and his cousins asked.

"Final Proposition. There were nine of us and the three adults, right before we got here. We, the Quad, already grew up knowing who our parents are, or in Falcyn's and my case, who our Mother is. Keleste and Keiyasu had never met their parents, but their Lord knew who they were and told them that their Father was an Earthrealm mortal and their Mother was a Goddess. But the other three...who are our older cousins and seem suspiciously similar to the three 'ghosties' in Ulfryn's dreams...had a Lord who didn't know anything about their parents, had a Ygg computer that had no record of their DNA-TNA sources. I think their Lord didn't know about their parents because their parents _didn't exist_ at the time. Which means that their parents are the products of this Expansion."

"So that's why the three are half-here, half not-here?" he asked his sister.

"Yepperz!"

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Ulfryn dreamed of the 'ghosties' again, only this time she knew their names, thanks to the bits and pieces of information everyone had discussed about the mega-event before they were brought here. Motokyn, Baldurdth and Kitsunen. Triplets. She tried to thoughtcast to them, which was kinda ridiculous since she was in a dream anyway, and received a faintly-cast answer "Find our parents". Ulfryn yawned to herself, and almost choked off her yawn when she realized that _she was awake_!

Now she was seeing them in her waking hours. Just like before, with Keleste and Keiyasu.

When she told the others about this, she expected them to scoff at her like they did the first time she had called them together to talk about her 'ghosties'. But instead of scoffing, they met her news with a sense of determination. They had become seasoned ghost hunters, if anything. This was encouraging, because it sorta proved what Sygyn had said the previous night.

"But nothing's gonna happen unless we get out of here, somehow. This is _so_ lazy cat versus silly dog! I don't know what to think about it, now that I'm seeing 'em while I'm awake," Ulfryn offered, trying to sound convincing to her sister and cousins.

Sygyn seemed to be deep in thought, reflecting hard upon this new development. Meanwhile, Pryzm was pacing back and forth, obviously feeling anxiety for her. Sometimes Pryzm was a sister, sometimes she was the enemy...but Ulfryn knew that her older twin sister always loved her. She regretted that her own problems were so hard on Pryzm as well.

"How many more dives do you think we should try?" Falcyn asked. Ulfryn frowned at this ineptitude, because it showed how insensitive Falcyn could be at times.

"I was thinking that we need to reach that ring at the bottom of these rainbow steps, and then dive into the sun from there," Sygyn suggested.

"WHAT?!" everybody shouted. His suggestion was so left-field, it didn't make to Ulfryn...and she wasn't alone. Pryzm had stopped pacing and was looking at their cousin like her brains had sprung a leak. Falcyn was clearly irritated, but then he began to get that look on his face, his eyebrows all drawn together like he was assessing what she'd said.

"She may be right," she noted. Pryzm jerked to a halt and stared at her in disbelief. Ignoring her sister, Ulfryn continued, "There's a design at work here, otherwise these wouldn't be arranged like a giant stairwell leading down. This layout isn't random...we all know this. How weird could it be that there's a fountain of either water or magma at the edge of each terrace? I keep getting the impression that this is like an amusement park that hasn't been opened yet, and we've somehow snuck inside of it while it's being readied for opening day. The waterfalls are fun, nothing has been done to hurt any of us, each side of the pool we dive in is pretty cool. We haven't dove into a lake and wound up in the middle of the Focal NavePlex, or jumped into the Axial CorePlex being attacked by rat-bots, for example. Perhaps we _should_ consider Sygyn's idea."

"Okay, let's assume that we're here to have fun as well as learn," Pryzm observed, seemingly satisfied with her line of reasoning. "That the mega-power or whatever that left us here knows that we're kids, so maybe there's a point to all of this. It almost seems like we've gotta do something to rescue Ulfryn's ghosts, the way she explains it. If Sygyn is on the groovy-gravy with her ideas, then _we_ need to find their parents. That's our task. It's possible that there's a few loose ends to tie up, especially since the nine of us were on the outside."

"On the outside? And even more crazy, diving into that sun?" Falcyn protested, his voice whiny with rich with dissent.

"I think what my sister is trying to explain is that we were the ones who were creating all of this. Which meant that we couldn't be _in_ the creation while we were _outside_ of the creation making it happen. Can't be in both places at once; just like standing in line at a cineplex isn't the same as being in the cineplex watching a movie," Ulfryn clarified.

"What you're inferring is possible, perhaps even sensible," Sygyn mused. "If it was otherwise, we would caught in a paradox. Keleste and Keiyasu may be looking for their parents right now, engaged in the same search just like they had done in the 'before'; the time before we were involved in the 'ReCreation of the Omnifinity-Omniternity' as it was called. So now that we're aware that this place we're in is the 'after'...now that the OmniOm has been formed and we're in it...we need to help them. My theory is this: unlike Keleste and Keiyasu, they didn't mention anything about looking for their parents 'before'...which means that those three somehow got lost along the way in the 'after'. Those three...who may be our three cousins...will definitely require our assistance to find their parents."

"So if we think they're our cousins, then that means that their Mom or Dad is a brother or sister to our Mothers," Falcyn identified. "It would make sense, because there was some kind of thing I remember about us being a _family_ that was necessary for us to co-exist at the point in time where we did that powerup thing before all the crazy energy stuff happened."

Naturally, Falcyn was describing things so vaguely, Ulfryn had to stretch herself to try and understand him. She did remember the old-lady version of her Mom saying that they were some kind of love-love family, silly as it sounded. "Goddess-Demoness Love-Love Family something or other." That's when the fireworks really started up.

"We're getting closer to the mystery here," Sygyn noted. "Let's assume that in this phase of existence, their parents never met up. Which is why the three of them aren't here with us right now. So we need to find their parents and have them meet up. If the three of them were 16 years old, or the equivalent of Sixteen Decas...then we just need to do the math. If they were born on the Earthrealm, they would be two years older than Falcyn and I. Which means that we need to go back in time 16 years. Earthrealm relative time when we left was 202X, so we would encounter their parents 16 years earlier in 20XX."

"Actually, 17 years, tofu-brains! And you're a girl...you should know better," Falcyn corrected her, earning a dagger-eyed glare from Sygyn. Pryzm and Ulfryn had to laugh at this one; it was too funny to pass up. Sygyn's scowl conveyed a dictionary of emotions, all them unpleasant.

"Now that you've had your fun at my expense," Sygyn noted with a grimace, "what we're considering is going back in Time to find their parents. How are we supposed to do that when we can't even find out where the fuck _we are_? How are we supposed to help them, when we're like four mice stuck in the middle of Tokyo without a clue?"

"At least there's no hawks here," Ulfryn offered with a giggle, bringing a smile to her cousin's face. But Sygyn was totally right: they had to help themselves first before even trying to help the ghosties. Falcyn's idea of descending the stairwell was the most sensible choice at this point.

"You know, I've been having a craving for strawberries and raspberries," she remarked off hand, hearing her sister Pryzm's stomach growling.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Within five minutes of diving into the pool of water and emerging in a pond of lava, Ulfryn found several bushes filled with strawberries and raspberries, all juicy and deliciously sweet-fruity.

Pryzm was stupefied by this most simple of miracles. Being able to 'dive' back and forth between something resembling Yggdrasil and something resembling Vanagdrasil was supawhack by itself. But when her sis wished for berries, and then she found them almost immediately after they emerged into another part of Vanagdrasil, it was too much.

But it kinda added another mystery to this mess. What if this place was somehow networked in with the Goddess Relief Office? After all, Ulfryn's whim for sweets had been granted. Or was that just a coincidence?

"You guys, do you even _have_ strawberries and raspberries in Vanagdrasil?" she asked, earning disgruntled looks of dismay from Falcyn and Sygyn.

"Of course we have 'em. Everything you have for food in Yggdrasil, we have in Vanagdrasil. We also have our own Demonic specialty dishes that you Goddesses wouldn't touch, and vice versa. You guys have some pastries we wouldn't go near if our life depended on it. So it's all a matter of taste...but yes, if it's on the Earthrealm, it's in Vanagdrasil," Sygyn answered.

"Okay okay, so I asked a dumb question," Pryzm said, shrugging her shoulders. "But here's a smart question. Next time we dive, we'll end up in an Yggdrasil. So why don't one of you wish for something that would be uncommon in Yggdrasil, and we'll see if it pops up. Because if it does, then that goes to prove that this _is_ an amusement park."

"There. That'll teach those two stuck up cousins that I'm not just some stupid tomboy Goddess," she thought.

"Hee heheh, next time don't speak your thoughts out loud, sis!" Ulfryn said with a giggle. Pryzm felt massively embarrassed and looked at Falcyn and Sygyn apologetically. But her two cousins were enjoying her gaffe as much as her sis.

"We just think of you that way only some of the time, dim-brain," Falcyn said. "And we love you despite that little flaw, or the fact that you think we're 'stuck up'. After all, we're older than you and know things you don't."

That did it! Pryzm felt a growling in her throat, while Sygyn mentioned something that she was still in grade school and still had recesses for playtime. This got Ulfryn riled up as well. Her younger twin sis reached down and pulled a handful of berries from the nearest plant and started pelting Falcyn and Sygyn.

Twenty minutes later, they looked like they had the hives or the pox; their faces were stained with so many splotches of purple and pink. But it was a fun food fight!

"So once again, it's a tie between we Demons and you Gods!" Sygyn said with a giggle, wiping berry-blobs off of her clothes. Spinning around, she remanifested herself in a new outfit. "You know what? I'm gonna wish for some fast food. Something trashy, like McDonalds. Yeah...McRibs and Big Macs and McTeris with the works. Plus fries and a soft drink."

When they jumped down the lava-falls and splashed through the molten pool, they emerged on the other side to a pinkish-skied vista with some small green AquaSuns floating in a loose cluster high above them.

"No way!!!" Pryzm shouted, almost wanting to smack herself in the head as she saw four take-out bags of McDonalds neatly arranged in a row about five meters from the edge of the water pool.

Naturally, Sygyn and Falcyn left all their concerns behind and happily tore into the fast food bags. Grazing with mouthfuls of junk food, they were in Demon culinary heaven. Pryzm had to admit that her bag of food had a tasty grilled chicken sandwich...which was odd because it wasn't one of the items Sygyn had 'ordered' for her wish. But it was one of her favorite sandwiches from the terrestrial fast-food realm of the twin arches.

This place was intelligent enough to read her thoughts!

When everyone was done with their fine dining, the leftover wrappers and containers simply vanished on their own.

"This is almost like a 'wish machine' in a sense," Ulfryn commented. "But wouldn't that be dangerous? What if I wished for something bad. Like an open sewer with rats..."

"Gross!"

"...or a graveyard with open caskets and zombies," Falcyn added.

_"Gross!"_

"Or a flock of SereHawks who haven't eaten for a month, and are starving for flesh," Sygyn added.

"Cut it out, you guys! What if this wish machine of Ulfryn's actually thinks those are wishes. I don't wanna be zapping SereHawks out of the sky the moment I splash out of the next pool, or hot pond, or whatever!" Pryzm noted. Her observation brought the gross-out fest to a close as everyone seemed to grasp of gist of her concerns.

"Hey, we were just kidding with those last few wishes!" Ulfryn shouted into the air through cupped hands, hoping that the unseen intelligences would be listening. Pryzm glanced at her younger sis, who was clearly in goofball mode once again. Her younger sister, the airhead.

"Let's think about this for a moment. If this is some kind of place where wishes can come true, then there must be some kind of failsafes that are built into it. Otherwise, this place could be scary deadly," Sygyn asserted. "But I am curious about how it knew what to give each of us. We all got what we wanted, almost like a real Earthrealm takeout order. Ulfryn even got her hot cherry pie."

"And it was tasty too! Yummies!" Ulfryn nodded in assent.

"I have an idea. At this pace, we've gotta dive off of a bunch more of these terrace-steps to reach that ring that circles around the unknown sun, which we should start calling the 'diamond sun' just for reference's sake. So what if I were to wish that we'd wind up on the bottom step after we do the next dive? Wanna try it?" Pryzm asked.

"Sounds like a plan to me," Falcyn agreed. "Otherwise Sygyn will be as big as a cow if we did it this way, because she'd be wishing for KFC, Dominos, Shimoda's, Curry House, Chen's, Burger King and every other fast-food place at each step of the way."

Sygyn didn't hesitate to manifest a folded-up paper fan to swat Falcyn on the back of the head.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Pryzm's wish to skip past the rest of the 'stairwell' of rainbow terraces was granted after their next jump. As they emerged from the warm water onto another rainbowed terrace, there were no springs of magma or water bracing out of the ground at the perimeter. Instead, when they walked to the rim of the terrace, they encountered a short walkway of shifting hues of light linking it with a nearby ring segment. They didn't sense that they were in Yggdrasil or Vanagdrasil either. All around them was a deep blue glowing sky, and when they looked upwards, they could see the floating Cylindrical Forest that they had first fallen out of, placidly hovering over the top 'stair' of the terrace. Now that they were level with the band of objects that encircled the mysterious sun-sized globe, they could examine them more closely. Upon closer inspection the surface of the rings seemed to consist of individual platelets. Each was a narrow asteroid that seemed to have been sheared off at the top to create a level walking surface. But every single platelet or ring particle seemed different on its surface, perhaps unique. Some had clusters of trees, some had random granite pillars, and some even had a hillock in the middle. Many seemed to have clearly artificial surfaces, like the section of the ring that they were about to step onto.

Reaching the end of the walkway, the surface of the piece of ring in front of them glowed with a rich green color. It was irregular in shape, suggesting to Sygyn the walking stones one finds in a garden attached to a traditional Japanese garden or tea house. The surface wasn't exactly flat, it was perhaps a couple hundred meters across with slight rises and hollows. As they stepped off the footbridge of light onto the surface, their footsteps created music, as each footfall was followed by a chiming note. Naturally, all four of them halted with surprise, standing still as the sounds eventually faded out. Sygyn was worried that if they started walking across the 'ring stone', the resulting triggering of sounds would create an irritating cacophony of musical tones...like those Halloween movies where the cat would pounce across the keys of the piano in the school's music room, scaring all the kids. But as they walked, the tones weren't clamorous at all. Instead, they combined to create a certain musical harmony, as if they were composing a symphony on the spot just by walking across this piece of the ring. Reaching the edge of the ring stone, they saw the next stone surface was covered with tropical grasses.

"Hawaii!" Ulfryn shouted gleefully. "It looks like a tiny tropical island."

"Those travel commercials don't show the real Hawaii," her brother noted with distaste. "Some of them aren't even filmed on the islands. Leave it to the mortals to bullshit each other to try and earn a living."

"Falcyn, you're so downers sometimes," Pryzm grumbled. "But I know it's the truth. Kinda odd isn't it? I bet you're feeling homesick, aren't ya? Don't even try and argue with me on this one. You were obviously thinking about the Earthrealm when you said that. This place is as far removed from the Earthrealm as it is from Yggdrasil; but yet it reminds me of both."

"But why would it have those tall palm trees in the middle?" she asked, her curiosity aroused by how her brother and cousins were suddenly dwelling on the Earthrealm. "They look like tropical trees, the kind that have coconuts towards the top. There's also no walkway, so we'll have to hover over to it. This place is just as purposeless as the rainbow terraces that we descended. I know that there's a purpose or design to it; but it's beyond me as to the function..."

"It's an amusement park! I said that already. All your brainpower, and you still can't figure that out?" Ulfryn teased.

"You better hold your tongue, Ulfryn, if you want to continue having tutoring sessions in English with me when we get back home," she replied with enough bite to sound threatening. Of course she wouldn't cancel out the English sessions with her younger Goddess cousins; her Mom would have her ass if she did that. But it was always a good bit of leverage to pull on Ulfryn when her younger cousin decided to be all dipped into 'BratGirl Mode'. Besides, the English tutoring sessions were more fun than work, since Ulfryn and Pryzm were still a year away from junior high and the dreaded mandatory English classes.

But she knew Pryzm was right, because she was feeling homesick too. She also didn't overlook the fact that she had said "_when_ we get home" instead of "if we get home". Which was crazy, because even though she and the others were lost, she didn't _feel_ lost anymore. Instead, she felt like she was on a roadtrip, ready to hit the next destination.

When they hovered across the gap and landed on the 'tropical' ring stone, the change in environment was immediate. The air was warmer, with a tight humidity that clung wetly to the skin. A breeze was rattling the palm leaves high up in the trees.

"Hey, that wasn't there!" Pryzm shouted, pointed towards the left. Sygyn sought where her cousin was pointing, and found herself looking at another one of those ascending terraced stairwells. Glancing to the right, she saw the diamond sun glowed enigmatically. The terrace on the left looked just like the one they had traveled downwards to get to the first ring segment. But while they were on the terracing levels that led to the first ring-stone, there were no other stairwell of terraces visible; just the single terrace they were jumping around on. The idea was immediate; each ring segment seemed to have its own stairwell of terraces that could bring one to locales in Yggdrasil or Vanagdrasil. But each terrace was only visible from that particular ring stone.

Different dimensions?

As she looked sunwards towards the immense faceted sphere, she counted hundreds of ring-stones between her and the 'diamond sun', stretching as far as the eye could see. If this ring encircled the huge star-sized object, it would have to contain an incredible number of these ring segments or stones. Each one of them was an 'island' in a sense that it would have its own terrace to access parts of Yggdrasil and Vanagdrasil. The environment surrounding them was different than that of the previous ring section; instead of glowing dark blue, the sky had a rich golden orange color. Again, this seemed to be neither Ygg or Vang in composition, as there was a Cylindrical Lightning Forest hovering several kilometers above the topmost 'step' of the terrace that descended to this particular ring portion. The Swarp Gates at the Aumatrices were immense, but this was on a scale that was far beyond the seven Nieflgard and Asgard Aumatrices. When she pulled herself out of her reverie, she noticed that the others were drinking out of the coconuts.

"Sygyn, you should check this out!" Falcyn hailed her. "Each one has a different flavor inside of it. Not just coconut milk, but juices and yogurts and other stuff!"

"Yeah, this one had grape juice in it! Totally like one of those chocolate treat boxes where you don't know what's inside of the candy until you bite into it!" Ulfryn explained. Sygyn followed suit and located a coconut on the ground. Hardening her finger, she poked a wide hole in the end of it, and then drank out of it like she would a large bottle of soda. She tasted a spicy vegetable juice which reminded her of home. It was vegetable juice, just the way she liked it; not chilled, but at room temperature. She and the rest felt tired and decided to sleep it off under the coconut trees, which would have been a foolish thing to do on the Earthrealm because one could get beaned on the head with a skull-cracker coconut falling from above.

"Kids, don't do this at home if you live in the tropics," she thought as she faded into sleepy wheels.

When they woke up, the sky had changed color slightly. In Vanagdrasil, there were places with 'spectra-skies' where the background color of the sky would gradually change between dark blue to dark red over a period of days or weeks. She had never observed the effect in Yggdrasil before, and even though this place wasn't quite Yggdrasil, it was interesting to note the parallels.

"I think we need to take a dive into that diamond sun," she suggested after everyone 'drank' their breakfast. "All of this is obviously being controlled by some kind of being or computer network, and I suspect that it has something to do with the sphere that this ring encircles."

"Are you serious, or seriously stupid? That object reads as possibly being solid Metaixodenum! Remember the Axial CorePlex? Just regular Ixodenum is totally dangerous for us because of our half-n-half natures. We're talking _Meta_, not just regular Ixodenum. What if the energy is too vast and overwhelms us? Or we do a splat on it, like a fly on a windshield?" Falcyn argued.

"Not likely, because we wouldn't even be here if it was radiating the kind of energy that normally emanates from Metaixodenum crystals. We'd have been fried the minute we emerged above the first rainbow-grassed terrace. Something is shielding or contouring the energy," Pryzm noted. She recognized that her cousin might be onto something, and decided to add fuel to Pryzm's idea; taking it from idling in a side-street to racing along the expressway.

"There's a possibility that it's like a Swarp Gate...a Gate into a Swarp Hypernality. At an Aumatrix, you don't feel the energy coming off of the Hypernality in waves, but once you jump into it, then the energy is there and it whisks you to where you want to go. This may be a similar design to an Aumatrix; you jump into it and wind up at your intended destination," she explained, gaining enthusiastic agreement from the others.

"By the way, where _do_ we want to go?" Pryzm asked the group.

"I want to go back to Vanagdrasil, because that's when we last saw Mom," Ulfryn answered. She fully agreed with this as a destination, because it would reunite her and Falcyn with Mom. Homesickness wasn't just about the Earthrealm; she was feeling a strong pull to return to Vang just so she could be around other Demons.

"If everything was recreated like the Elder Skuld said, than our Mothers are most likely there at Hild's Palace. Or _were_ both there, anyway. If we want to take a leap of faith, let's return there. We supposedly restored the Everything, which means that it should be about the same as when you guy's Mom grabbed us up in the TimePod. Which was a totally brave thing to do, by the way," she said, feeling sincerely proud of Aunt Skuld and wanting to reassure her younger cousins.

"Ulfryn, since you're the resident 'psychic' of our Quad, what do you think?" Falcyn inquired, his deference to his cousin surprising even Sygyn. "Is this sensible? Do you think there's a way that you can sense where our parents are?"

"That's why I said Vanagdrasil, because I feel almost certain that they're there. Or perhaps more accurately, that they'll _become_ there once we arrive. That one Goddess, Peorth, kept talking about Eternity having an element of Possibility. Remember? To me, that means that _we_ are the ones that created that possibility. This sounds weird, but I think that wherever we go, we create that reality. Just us, because we were the ones who built all of this."

"That sounds intriguing," Sygyn noted. "So what you're saying, Ulfryn, is that when we arrive at Vanagdrasil, then reality will 'snap back' into place? That it'll be back to normal?"

"Yep! That's why the 'ghosties' need us to find their parents. Just like you said, everything was put back together except for us, because we were on the outside looking in. Now we're on the _inside_. We go to Vanagdrasil, and everything will be alright."

"You're beginning to sound like that obaa-chan version of your Mom," Falcyn said. "She insisted that _we_ were the ones who were going to heal our hearts. I believe you, Ulfryn. Which is really strange, because when we first embarked on this adventure, I thought you were absolutely, idiotically, out of your mind crazy. Now, I don't think you're crazy...because I've joined you in the crazy realm. After all we've been through, I've become crazy too. Just to prove it, uh..I didn't admit this before, but I've..uh..been seeing those three kids in my dreams as well."

"Me too!" Pryzm chimed in. Sygyn suddenly realized why she had dreamt of smoke-and-mirror figurines the first night on the rainbow terrace. She wasn't as psychic as Ulfryn, so to her they were just vaguely-formed fogling shapes. Figuratively speaking, where she was seeing snow on the ground...Ulfryn was seeing silver-clothed rills decorated with dancing crystal-chilled stars. Ulfryn was almost blind when it came to understanding science and tech, and curiously, she herself was almost blind when it came to magic-psychic phenomena. Two opposites, necessarily complementing each other.

"So what are we waiting for? Let's do this!" Falcyn said excitedly and jumped off the ledge facing the diamond sun. Just like with an Aumatrix, he immediately disappeared.

Sygyn and her cousins took their leap of faith...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --


	150. Pt 150: Nine Voices: The Quad Pt 2

**Part 150: Nine Voices – The Quad Part Two**

PRYZM and ULFRYN; FALCYN and SYGYN:

_"Welcome to UniTransic Axis 74. I am XOM, and I've been assigned to orient you, as I am aware that you four are new to Syntrasil. This UniTransic Axis is an access point to the SubRealms of Yggdrasil, Midgardrasil and Vanagdrasil. You are currently in an unused section of Midgardrasil, which has been developed in anticipation of eventually becoming the residence of Gods and Demons. Midgardrasil is a transformative Logorinth, meaning that it not aligned towards the physicalities particular to that of a Gods or Demon's Realm. Consequently, it shifts back and forth between Yggdrasilian and Vanagdrasilian environments every two Earthrealm years. This system will encourage those who populate this expansion set; preventing Gods and Demon from being discomfited by having to reside in an unfamiliar setting for a prolonged period."_

"How convenient," Pryzm thought drily. Instantly after they dived into a stellar-sized unknown object, the Quad had flashed into being within this glowing, featureless expanse. This place seemed to brim with pure energy, but it was an unknown. They were just as lost now as they were before.

When she and the others first arrived, she struggled to get a handle on herself. Faced with the sudden transition to an energy-misted place, she was briefly frightened that she had died the Real Death. But immediately, a computer voice just started up an instructional thoughtcast with them with train-conductor deftness. In fact, this computer's thoughtcasting reminded her of the tour-guide's during her class trip to Kyoto and Nara. She could imagine the voice saying, "_This stop is Kyoto. Here you can find such attractions as the Kiyomizu-dera temple, the five-storeyed Ninna-ji pagoda, the Kinkaku-ji Golden Pavilion Temple and numerous other national historical sites..._"

"Waaah!" she heard her sister Ulfryn gasp, clearly impressed and a bit daunted by all of this. A vacuity with no physical objects to orient towards; it seemed that they were just cushioned in the midst of a luminosity. Bright light-streaks punctuated the white-blue glow, hinting at activity.

The computer that called itself XOM continued to orient them to this new place. "From here, you can travel to anywhere in the OmniOm or the Mid-Light, provided that you have the appropriate permissions and the ability to use the system. The UniTransic system is linked with each Logorinth's Aumatrices, which are portaled in as way-points proximal to your final destination of convergence."

"This is pretty righteous, don't you think?" another voice added with enthusiasm, hailing them cheerfully. "My name is Isilblius, and I've come here on behalf of the Mid-Light Realm to be of assistance, should you wish to attend to a visit to the DeathRealm. Of course, you will be granted temporary visas and stuff, and then when you return, you will be cleansed of any encounter with the Dead Souls you visit there."

Pryzm felt a spike of fear run up and down her spine at the mention of the name. But the speaker wasn't some crazy-acting being of evil...he appeared to be a boy that was even younger than she and Ulfryn. He was dressed in a black suit that reminded her of the kind of formal attire a concert pianist would wear, but only child-sized. Seemingly about eight Earthrealm years in age, he was dressed in a tux with tails topped with livery and epaulettes on the shoulders, a white dress shirt with sleeve-cuffs and scarf-tie, black rider slacks with white anklets and dress shoes. In contrast to his neat attire, his hair was whitesilver and spiky, almost unkempt, with a face that was dark-complected with a boyish nub of a nose and high cheekbones. Yet, his eyes were pure white, with no pupils at all.

"Isilblius! Wasn't that the badass Demon that caused the destruction of everything," Falcyn said, shocked stand-still by the sudden announcement. Filleted with anxiety, he prepared himself to protect his sister and cousins. However, the young boy with telltale Demonic features and pointed ears seemed to harbor no threat to them...

"That was not me, young Demon Falcyn. Please don't be afraid of me, for I have no means or reason to harm any of you. I am the younger brother of the Boy Who Is Death; together we are the architects of the domains of Those-Who-Passed. I guess this makes me a co-Regent in a sense. Assuredly, I am not what I was. Until very recently, I was manipulated by a horrid SurGoth wraith that had forcibly inhabited my form and acted with callous disregard for all Life and Death. He tried to destroy both, but was halted in his efforts three times. Now he is no more. Using my bodily and spiritual conformation, he actually killed my older Brother once, attempting to usurp the authority of He who is the Regent of the Death Realm or Mid-Light Realm as the living call him. His attempt to use me to kill Death is ironic; now the opposite occurs whenever I assist my older brother as escort to for those who wish to visit the Realm of the Dead."

"Oh my God! Y..you're the _Reaper_!!!" Ulfryn screamed, scared out of her wits. "You're here to tell us that we've died the Real Death! I..I don't want to be dead. I still have a life in front of me. I'm a Goddess, a..and I'm still a kid, a..and I'm..."

"Hey, chill out! No need to get so uptight, Ulfryn," the Boy Isilblius scolded her in a teasing tone of voice. Something about his dark face with pupil-less white eyes and his silver shaggy hair made her feel calmed. "Whenever XOM detects a transitioning Divine within the UniTransic System, I am alerted. These are confusing times for both Gods and Demons, and XOM knew that you are newcomers, ill-equipped to deal with the Expansion of Balance event and all of its novelties. I was requested to come here and assist you. In response to your unease around me, I can but offer my profuse apologies. I had no responsibility for the destruction the SurGoth caused as 'Isilblius'. The actions of that being who used me as his shell, who guised himself inside of me, were not mine. Let me assure you, that being, the SurGoth, is no more."

"Good riddance to the fucker," Falcyn noted in a voice seething with resentment and relief.

"So you're saying that this UniTransic Axis can take us to the anywhere in the OmniOm, or even the Mid-Light if we wished?" Sygyn asked, always the curious one.

"Yes, by virtue of the visas that the two Goddess twins possess, which were assigned by the Yggdrasil Emportal Office and consist of a spark of essence from Oni-sama. These are enough to vouchsafe the four of you, should you wish to visit the Mid-Light Realms and commune with Those-Who-Passed."

"I'm sorry, but we're going somewhere else. W..we'll take you up on it some other time," Pryzm quickly interjected, clarifying things quite frantically. The Death Realm was the last place she wanted to be right now! At least _this_ wasn't the Death Realm, as she had briefly feared when they first emerged here.

"That's really too bad. I really need some quality competition; I keep beating my older bro in computer games while our avatars are out meeting and greeting all those who die the Real Death. Lots of work to do, not enough time to play. You can come visit us and play all sorts of games, or meet anyone who ever died and spend some time with them. You won't remember it when you emerge back into the Living, that's the Rule. But those who are Dead and residing in the Multiplicity certainly enjoy such visits. My role is to encourage the Living to interact with the Those-Who-Passed. It's perfectly safe in the Mid-Light, and you can return to the OmniOm whenever you want to. Well, keep it in mind as you go on with your lives. I'll be seeing you," the Boy Isilblius said as he faded from sight.

"So Death...has a younger brother?" Falcyn commented.

XOM responded before anyone else could edge in an opinion. "This is correct. The OmniOm and the Mid-Light are interlinked in many ways, myself being one of them. As Isilblius had mentioned, I am XOM: formally the Xeomnic, Oemxnic and Mnoexic networks. Three computers networks that were once entirely distinct sentient 'operating systems', servicing only their particular Realms. When Reality was restructured, each system was transformed and is now functionally integrated. Significant operations of each computer network remain discrete, and can be interfaced by Gods or Demons by using the same methods as before. However, each is interconnected within me and has integral functionality if needed. You will obviously need much orientation in order to be able to use the UniTransic system, but I will be available should you need assistance."

The four cousins in the Quad looked at each other, searching each other's eyes to see if anyone knew what they had gotten themselves into.

"Excuse me. An incoming presence has been detected..." XOM announced, sounding like the recording at the Chiba train station that announced the arriving and departing trains.

Now that Isilblius was gone, Pryzm could relax enough to take notice of the surroundings; a seemingly endless softly glowing pearlescence that didn't have any walls, ceilings or floors. She was almost certain that they were inside of the giant Diamond Sun they had dived into, which was something XOM called a UniTransic Axis. It was hard to believe...that the computers of the Gods and Demon's Realms were now interactive with each other. And this was only one of 74 of these Axis-Suns, as XOM had numbered this one 74. How many more could there be, linked by this network?

"Fancy meeting you here! By the way, There are 108 UniTransic Axis facilities in the system," a voice sounded from behind them. Pryzm turned and smiled broadly as she recognized voice as belonging to the Elder...

"GranSkuld!" Ulfryn squealed in happy greeting, skipping up and down as she hovered.

"I decided to drop in for a visit to see how the four of you are doing," GranSkuld said, a matronly grin on her face. "Since this is a gate between the Mid-Light Realm and the OmniOm, and I'm one of a few who has the privilege of free passage between both, I felt you might need the personal tour. Besides, I have someone with me who is chewing at the bit to meet you. As an aside, I want to praise you all to the stars for what you did at the End of Eternity. You guys did really well...you completely succeeded. I know you can't fully remember what you did, but you were marvelous as a group! There's a few tiny missing pieces to be assembled, but this not your fault by any means. Just think of these as minor bits of housekeeping. Each of you was correct in her or his realization that the Twelve couldn't create a universe from the outside and also put themselves within the inside. So the four of you have to do a little bit more work, I'm afraid."

Pryzm and Ulfryn hugged her, knowing that this was their Mother...their real Mother, only from a Time far removed from the Present.

"You're both good girls," GranSkuld praised after they finished hugging her. She patted them both on the head appreciatively.

"I love you both so very much and I'm so proud to be your Mom. Everything is as it was supposed to be, from my perspective. But you'll have to trust yourselves, because you already know what you need to do to face the challenges ahead. The solution to fixing these final few cracks in the TimeCosm are yours to give away," GranSkuld noted, brushing back her silver-white hair with a familiar motion, the same one their Mom used. She wind-milled her arms in a wide circle and disappeared in a brilliant flash of light.

Standing in her place was Skuld.

"MOM!!!" Pryzm and Ulfryn shouted, running to her.

"Wh..what am I doing here?" their Mother asked, looking very confused.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Final memories: bewildered tears on her daughter's faces as she explained why she had to sacrifice herself. A heart brimming full with regret, yet tempered with optimism that her sacrifice was the right choice. An intuitive knowledge that any corrective action would need to take place at the End of Eternity. A final few seconds of contemplation, before she converted all of her Goddess energies into a pulse that would hurl the TimePod into the farthest reaches of the Future that she could sense. A withering feeling as her Goddess energies were depleting rapidly, the singularity of her Soul seeming to distance itself from her consciousness. An initial fading to darkness, a darkness which faded even further into a glow of some sort...

...which brought her here, via a sequence of impossibilities...and with a blessing of thanks from her Eldest form of herself.

"Pryzm! Ulfryn! Falcyn and Sygyn! Is this for real? Is it really you?!" she exclaimed at the inconceivable vision of her two daughters, niece and nephew. The Quad were hovering in mid-light, just a breath away from her. Skuld's heart almost burst into rivulets of bliss and joy as her two daughters came to her and hurled themselves against her breast. She knew in an instant that her girls were alive, were safe! She could feel their heartbeats, sensing with absolute clarity their unique Goddess Metanative signatures and mortal bioframe physiologies. But most of all she could feel the outpouring of love from two little girls who had their mother back. She had borne the sacrifice, but Pryzm and Ulfryn had borne the pain and had remained strong enough to survive. Hugging her two daughters tightly in joyous reunion, she didn't refrain from milking the moment for every emotion her heart could pour out. Cevn had done what she had asked him to, and the kids had finished it.

"Mom, do you remember being inside of GranSkuld, or the Elder version of you?" Pryzm asked excitedly. "She was here just a minute ago, and then she left. You were there with us at the End of Eternity, remember?"

"No, Pryzm. I wasn't there with you, at least in my present state," she answered, intensely curious at what her oldest daughter was getting at. If she had exhausted her Goddess energy while giving up her life to get her daughters to the furthest Future, then who her was daughter referring to? She had no memory of this. The only educated guess she could muster was that this 'Skuld' her daughter was referring to was a 'shadow' of her, somehow preserved. But beyond this, Skuld couldn't offer an explanation.

"Pryzm, I think that Mom was a kind of 'ghostie' when we were there. A super-real ghostie, one that we could touch and talk to...but not entirely our Mother," Ulfryn explained. "She remembered sacrificing herself for us, and then she decided to merge her Soul with the Elder..er, GranSkuld. GranSkuld said that..."

Then it hit her. She _had been_ there! It must have been Cevn. Somehow, he had brought her forwards so that she could be with her kids. But at the time, they weren't exactly her kids. She wasn't exactly their Mother. The quasi-experiences she had met up with after she had 'died' rushed in to fill the empty recesses of her memories. Even as she had given up all of herself to bring the Quad to the furthest Future, she had been saved from the Real Death. Realizing that Cevn had disintegrated the OmniArc, but he didn't destroy it. She had been inside of the OmniArc was why the darkness all around her had faded into a glow. Impossibly, he had compressed the entire OmniArc...with her within it...into a singularity right before she should have died. Mind-boggling as this was, he had also searched out a miniscule remnant of her and had safekept her in some way, saving her life. How she knew he had done this, she couldn't explain or reason out. Carefully extracting the micro-shard of her Soul remaining in that highly-compressed OmniArc, he must have shot the rest of her to the End of Eternity. This was when her consciousness began to divide against itself; she was both outside of the destroyed OmniArc and yet inside of it as well. At the time she was a dormant consciousness: a Soul without an inhabitant, shielded by an unrecognizable energy-force. But the Elder must have sensed this, and searched out her tiny spark of Soul. Or maybe her Soul had been guided there by Cevn. Nevertheless, when her Soul touched that of the Elder's, it was given enough strength to partially restore itself. But that restored Skuld wasn't her; that Skuld had grown up in a reality without Belldandy and Urd. An echo of herself from a damaged reality. That Skuld had chosen to surrender her life to merge with the Elder's Soul. When the creation process was completed, that Skuld was then reunified it with the rest of her Soul that Cevn had shielded all along. Now she was here, with twinned memories of two lives...

She was whole again.

The Elder's words...she had said that Cevn had disregarded her instructions. That both she and the Elder had an enmeshment of Time inside of them; that they _both_ came from a 'right' and 'wrong' frames of Time. She had decided to surrender on the faith that they were both needed...Elder Skuld and she...to join their Souls, so that it all could be knitted back together properly. The memories of that Skuld which had accompanied Pryzm and Ulfryn were forever part of her now. But she...when she was that Skuld...had only one sister, Mara. She also sensed GranSkuld within her; a Skuld who had watched Urd live a wounded life without ever being loved by Cevn; which had wounded her and the whole family. Two Times, both of which were wrong. Yet, each of them...those two other Skulds...knew they were living within two 'wrong' realities, so together they had risked it all to try and create a whole. How funny, turning two wrongs into a right!

This _felt_ right! Her daughters were reunited with her, just like she had hoped against hope would happen. Despite how much she wanted to be the strong mother-figure, she was right there emotionally with her daughters, sobbing away like she used to do when Urd would pick on her when she was a little girl.

It was time to get on the move again, as there were others who needed healing as well.

"Let's get these two back to their Mom," she said, nodding at Falcyn and Sygyn.

"How do you plan to do that?" Sygyn asked with anxious frustration. "That's where we were planning to go all along when we jumped into the diamond-sun. But instead, we were brought here. We don't know how to get back to Hild's Palace. Do you?" Skuld could clearly sense how heart-stricken her niece was because Mara wasn't with her. She had left Mara back in Vanagdrasil, back at Hild's Black Palace. So all they needed to do was find an Aumatrix and passage to Vanagdrasil and...

Everything was right, but it was also very bizarre. She could sense the coherence of the Ultimate Force flowing all around her, somehow amplified. Before, the UF was so indirect she could only perceive it tentatively; qualities and attributes that were hidden most of the time and experienced only via rare interactions. Not even the Almighty could wield it. Now, it was as constant as Metanative energy...which meant that the UF had actually become a tangible energy of some kind! Extending her Norn capabilities, she was astonished to find that there was no limitations on her Futurewards or Pastwards discernment of TimeStreams. It was _all_ crystalline and unbounded! She sensed the TimeSphere, filamented with all the TimeStreams in a marvelous unity. But it wasn't a TimeSphere...it was something radically different. There was no beginning or ending to it. It was a TimeCosm; a cosmos of Time.

Did this mean that she was no longer Norn of the Future?

This was a different place as well. A new place, which had a puissant convocation of Metanative and Chaostic energies in a configuration she had never before encountered.

Parsing a thoughtcast into a datastream, Skuld attempted to communicate directly with Ygg Xeomnic Network. Instead, she interacted with something called XOM...and a minute later, her breath was stolen away as XOM gave her an Inculcation to orient her to the newly-structured Omnifinity-Omniterity, or the "OmniOm" as it was termed.

She felt like she had stepped through a mirror and had arrived at Wonderland!

"Holy Shiiiii....ngles!" she shouted, almost cursing in front of her daughters. All four of the Quad were giggling, because they knew what she had really meant to say. Smiling sheepishly at her gaffe as she looked at her brood, Skuld realized that they must have been overwhelmed by the changes as well. And yet they didn't really know the breadth of it. Ironic, because all of this had been the outpouring of their creative energies.

Now Sygyn's question about how to return home made sense; a least to a young Demoness anyway. As an adult Goddess with the advantage of a Senior First Class Goddess, Special Delimited, Unrestricted Status License, it would be easy for her to travel anywhere using this new UniTransic system. She queried XOM and was told the exact routing method to transit from here to converge at Hild's Black Palace.

"How did you guys get here?" she asked. The Quad explained excitedly that they had adventured inside of some kind of 'amusement park' located in what XOM had termed as a sub-realm of Syntrasil. The kids had been on an amazing journey just to get here!

This place of transit was stunning...and it didn't take years and a SHOUJO to figure it out, like the UmbraPlexiar system had required. Well, the _old_ UmbraPlexiar system. With the old UmbraPlexiar, one could only travel between the Aumatrices via the Swarp Gates, and then from there travel to their final destinations. Now, according to XOM, travel was precisely routed and instant. This was a strange, new world...truly a realm of marvels! And the most marvelous of those marvels were standing right in front her, in the form of two 11 year-old girls...

"Did I even tell you two how much I love you?" she said to her daughters.

"Mom, you did more than that. You _showed_ us how much you love us...how much you love everything. No wonder you're a Norn, because you were willing to give up _everything_ to save everything," Pryzm praised her. Skuld felt bittersweet in the face of her daughter's compliment, because it signaled that her kids remembered how she had died. Twice--once getting them to the end of Eternity, and then once again when she voluntarily surrendered her Soul to join with the Eldest's. Perhaps it was good that they remembered, because it would sweeten their love as a family by fermenting the realization of how fragile Love is...even when it is the most powerful force of all.

"XOM, take us to UniTransic Axis 1, Nieflgard Aumatrix VII, transynch to Nilhorn SpaceTime coordinates as specified for convergence."

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

VANAGDRASIL, NILHORN, HILD'S DARK PALACE:

_**whoom!!!**_

"How'd you do that!" the Quad shouted as they reappeared in Hild's Black Palace, the Demon Queen's vast estates at the apex of the collection of shattered planets called the Nilhorn. They had arrived at the exact point where they'd departed. A tropical setting under the black-red sky, with the lava-springs hot-bath sculpted into the grounds with artistic subtlety. Skuld remembered this place. She had visited here before, and had been returned here by the Dark Lord of the Demons after the abortive wedding incident in the Earthrealm where the SurGoth wraith had been flushed out and fled.

"Skuld, what the Bless did you just do? You just swooped away with _my kids_ a few minutes ago without a word of explanation why..." Mara immediately jumped forward, getting in her face as she accused her. Skuld knew that her older sister was barely checking her rage. She couldn't blame Mara one bit for this: she _had_ basically kidnapped Falcyn and Sygyn without a word to her. There would be a lot of explaining to do.

"Yo, that's because we had to go save the universe and everything, Mom," Falcyn excitedly interrupted...

«-- --» «-- --» «-- --» «-- --»

...For her part, Mara was completely at a loss. Moments earlier, Skuld had vanished with her son and daughter, giving her a final regretful glance as if to say "sorry, you'll never see them again" that had terrified her. It had all happened so fast; the Dark Lord had brought them back in Time to the Earthrealm for a wedding. TimeStilled, and then they had been whisked back to Hild's Palace without an explanation, only to find it infested with cockroaches. Her whole experience since she arrived at Vanagdrasil with the kids had been one series of chaos after another.

She looked at her oldest son with an expression twixting dismay and irritation as one, her eyebrows arching with spasms of confusion. In other words, a Demoness version of a face-fault. She remembered Skuld explaining the impossible presence of the Earthrealm roaches by delving into a heavy duty dissertation about how the Ultimate Force was breaking down; which had brought up laughter from Hild. Then Skuld had schooled the Senior Demon Queen on the mechanics of SpaceTime and called her an "idiot" on top of it, which totally stifled Hild's haughtiness and was completely amusing to watch.

Before she could acquire the answers she needed to explain this blazed-out event, her sister quipped "Hiya, Hild. Any cockroaches lately?"

"Why you..." Hild growled, while Mara's mirth caught in her throat. Hild's scowl was too much! She burst into howls of laughter at this, realizing her younger sister couldn't resist a jab at Hild; probably because she was still miffed-off after being part of that sadistic 'roach hunting party' Hild has insisted upon. Yet, Mara had a sense that the Demon Queen was going to have her hands very full in short order, so any fun at Hild's expense had to happen now.

"Mom!" Sygyn shouted, running over and hugging her. Mara was mystified and almost embarrassed by her daughter's sudden burst of physical affection. Sygyn rarely wanted a hug anymore; she was at the cusp of that age where affection was transforming into rebellion. Amazing how the process of growing an adult ego begins so early in adolescence. But even Falcyn was hugging her, almost as tall as she was. They were both shivering, as if they had seen Oni-sama Himself and had been threatened with severe punishments. But it wasn't fear that was causing their strident candor; both of her children had orange auras of affection and gratitude.

What the Bless was going on?

"Skuld, for the sake of the Dark One, can you explain to me what just happened? Why are Falcyn and Sygyn so upset?" Mara shouted, demanding her younger sister to yield up some answers. She remembered the part about Skuld claiming that the Ultimate Force was an energy force that created a balancing of integration and separation by regulating how much of each there was within every single process of integration or separation. In other words, it made separation and integration possible. Then Skuld had simply vanished along with Falcyn and Sygyn, plus her two daughters.

"It was really massively critical, Mom!" Sygyn exclaimed with unchecked enthusiasm, answering her instead. "We were at the end of Eternity, and we channeled mega-powers to recreate everything that was destroyed. There was an older version of Skuld, a Goddess named Peorth, and a younger version of you there too! Don't you remember anything about it?"

Mara shook her head "no", completely confused by her daughter.

Skuld regarded her for a moment and then ventured, "When I look at you, Mara, it seems that there are thoughts and memories that you are struggling to put within words, but cannot because they are only glimpses. Maybe I can help you find them. Mara...do you remember the Seven?"

_That_ snapped Mara's memory; triggering recollections of how she and her sisters plus Keiichi and two other mortals had built the OmniArc after Isilblius had destroyed the Multiverses. Somehow, the Dark Lord, the God's Lord and the Reaper Boy had been hidden within the three mortals for a short span of time, protected from Isilblius. It had taken them trillions of years to do it, but they were able to agree on a plan and put it into action. They had rebuilt Time, Space, the Logorinths and all the Realms...

"Sisters? Isilblius? Keiichi and two mortals?" she wondered, searching her thoughts. Skuld was her only sister, and Isilblius simply didn't exist. What was Skuld talking about? Where did these memories come from?

Right when Skuld had flashed back into existence here with Falcyn and Sygyn, she had felt a momentarily lapse into dizziness. But she sensed through it, realizing that it was more than a slip into an obscured sense of self. It almost seemed that _everything_ around her had flickered. Like reality itself was fragmenting, glittering like sand on the beach thrown into the air and caught sparkled by the moonlight. Was she going schizo? Conflicted, her mind experiencing a sudden loss of balance? Owning two sets of memories; one very clear and distinct while the other was shadowed and vaguely emergent?

"_No. This wasn't a loss of balance. This was a restoration of Balance,_" the silently flowing part of her mind counseled. Scrambling for answers, she tried to tie down her unease and go with the flow instead.

"Skuld, I'm trying to recall what happened, but it's all smoke without fire. Are you saying that _the kids_ did the same thing we did back during the last time Isilblius tried to destroy everything?" Mara asked, unable to distinguish memories from guesswork. "That this breakdown of the Ultimate Force you had mentioned was caused by him? I thought we had dealt with Isilblius for good, back then."

"We _did_ deal with him," Skuld noted. "But we didn't _destroy_ him, which was our mistake. He managed to get loose once again; that's why Oni-sama took us to the Earthrealm after we were done using the Nitton in the Focal NavePlex of the Vang Mnoexic computer. Remember? Remember how your Dark Lord knew about the danger? Time was running out, but I was barely able to go back in Time and warn Cevn, appearing to him right before the wedding. I made sure to give him explicit instructions that would provide the means to bring all the kids together. But being an idiot mortal, he didn't follow my directions precisely and instead he took out Isilblius."

"What?! He Blazin' _took out Isilblius_?" Mara asked, wanting confirmation. All the pain that Isilblius had inflicted on her was suddenly within view of her memory's eye. Horrible, terrifying Soul-ripping agonies. Not only her, but her sisters as well. A vision of her three sisters, dying from some incurable disease...

Desperately, she hoped Skuld knew what she was talking about.

"Isilblius...wasn't the problem in the first place. You didn't create him; you merely created a young Demon Boy. A physical shell, in a sense, which was then possessed by a being of pure Evil. You were manipulated into summoning him via what you read in the Enigma Book. It wasn't your fault! The idea of a glorious all-powerful 'Ultimate Demon' was a lie he created, designed to beguile you into creating a physical being that he could steal away. Isilblius was never the evil marplot that caused all of our woes. Actually there was something called a SurGoth wraith inside of him, which was the _true_ Ultimate Demon. That SurGoth wraith has been dealt with. Harshly. Believe me, he is gone and will never come back," Skuld explained.

"Skuld, dear. Are you trying to implicate the Ultimate Demon as the cause of all this? That you're blaming Demondom for this legion of ills wrought on all of us and the OmniArc?" Hild asked in a supercilious, angry voice. Mara could see the ferment of resentment in Hild's face.

"Hild, the SurGoth has no name other than 'SurGoth'. It's a wraith that the two Lords defeated and banished so long ago that it was forgotten by both Gods and Demons...and perhaps by each of Them as well. You guys named it the 'Ultimate Demon'. Others call it the 'Waster of Reality'. It is also known in the mythic sense as 'Ragnaroken', the harbinger of Ragnarok. We Gods named it the 'Anti-Life Being' in Yggdrasil. But it was no Demon. It was the worst nightmare's..._worst nightmare_," Skuld answered.

"It was a Demon's..._Demon_? Something more Demonic than even the Dark One?" Hild asked, incredulous.

"Yes. A malign force beyond description, beyond reckoning. Once before, it actually killed the two Lords, but They were revived by certain Ultimate Force configurations. The second time, it killed Death by ripping him into the Living Realms, and tried to kill the two Lords again. Failing this, it obliterated Yggdrasil and Vanagdrasil. Assuredly, the SurGoth was not a Demon or anything resembling a Demon or God. You Demons want to create turmoil and strife...the SurGoth wants to create sheer unrelenting destruction. The destruction of everything but itself. It would take any strife you could hurl at it and eat it for breakfast. Remember when your Dark Lord zipped us out of the Mnoexic Network and took us to that Earthrealm wedding? He knew the threat that was about to be unleashed, which is why He took immediate action and transported all of us directly to the Earthrealm from the Focal NavePlex in the Vang Mnoexic Network. At the wedding, the SurGoth was there hiding inside the form of my older sister. Your Dark Sovereign interrupted the marriage-union service to inform our Lord that the SurGoth was there. You and the rest of us were TimeStilled by the two Lords for our own protection. From your perspective, He took you there, started yelling, and then you were back here at your Palace, right?" Skuld elaborated, recalling the events that Hild would recognize.

Hild nodded her head in agreement.

"But as a Norn, aren't you less susceptible to a StillTime state?" Hild asked.

"Indeed. I was able to obtain a vague impression of what happened while everyone else was TimeStilled," Skuld confirmed. "I experienced faint impressions that They fought in a superb battle with the SurGoth and defeated it. But it escaped somehow. I later discovered that the SurGoth was responsible for the disappearance of the Ultimate Force that I had noted. Incredibly, it did something to cause Reality to start eating itself. I realized that the only solution was to try and address the problem post facto at the end of Time. Also, I knew that the kids would be needed at this final point of Eternity, so I basically had to save them before everything collapsed in _our_ present Time. Based on the probability of this occurring, if the SurGoth succeeded in destroying everything, then we needed a backup plan to 'recreate' everything afterwards."

"And that's where we came in, Mom," Sygyn confirmed. "Aunt Skuld had to save us, so we could accomplish what amounted to a 'reboot' of all of Existence."

"B..but _that's completely fucked up_!" Souls cannibalizing Souls? The Ultimate Force fighting itself, causing itself to diminish. How could that be? Wouldn't that mean that Space and Time were consuming themselves into nothingness? Mara gasped out, horrified at the description her sister had just laid out. It was beyond imagining; a series of actions with such a vim of vileness couldn't be the work of even the most demented Demon. Hild couldn't even come close to devising something so terrible, and on such an epic scale. Such an act was suicidal and omnicidal...causing the destruction of all Existence. Skuld was basically saying that Reality...was being destroyed? Had been destroyed?

"Much of what you feared did actually occur, Mara...Hild. But it's all water under the bridge now. We're safe. Besides, you're gonna have a full plate in just a few minutes," Skuld replied with a mysterious smile.

"Hild already _is_ a full plate," Mara commented aside to Sygyn and Falcyn, earning knowing grins. She needed some reassurance of normalcy, because her mind was almost ready to blow itself out of her heart...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Another burst of light yanked Mara out of her mind. Two Goddesses she had never seen before suddenly flashed into existence in the midst of their little group. To her amazement, they were both Norns, one with rich brown hair coiffed in a long pullback ponytail, the other with silver-blue hair...

"Mara, Skuld, Hild," the brown-haired Goddess said. "Our apologies for being late, but it was quite confusing finding this place. Even the Lord is having problems trying to make sense of all the sudden changes. There was no warning at all...we were at the temple when suddenly everything seemed to blink out for a moment, like a power outage."

"But it was much more than a power outage...it was like an _everything_ outage! Bell and I can't describe it any other way, except that _every_ power went out. Time, Space, Soul, the UF...all of it. We felt ourselves being sucked into a darkness...then sucked through the darkness into a kind of nebulae of sparkles, and then we were inside one of the sparkles. We came to in the middle of the temple courtyard, and immediately sensed that you and Skuld and Mom were here," the silver-haired Goddess explained.

"I can only sense that something cataclysmic has occurred," the brown-haired Goddess called "Bell" added. "Urd and I thought it was best to immediately come here, after we were able to address the confusion on the Earthrealm. I must also ask...why are you looking at us so oddly?"

"Are you guys okay? Because I'm getting this eerie vibe that you don't even recognized us," the Goddess named "Urd" asked.

"Mom?" Hild sputtered indignantly. "You come to my Black Palace unannounced, total strangers to my knowing. Then you mock the fact that I have no children, when it is fair obvious that Skuld and Mara are the only mothers here. Do you see any children crowding around me? I knew that Goddesses can be short-sighted, but you two are certainly short-minded and irritating..."

"Mama?!" the silver-haired Goddess interrupted, imitating an infant's voice. The change in Hild was immediate. Mara watched as the senior Demon Queen looked at the tan-skinned Goddess for a few seconds, and then her eyes rolled backwards and she basically crumpled to her knees and slumped face down to the ground. In a flash, the silver-haired Goddess was next to Hild, rolling her over on her back and cradling her with tender care. The new Goddess started gently slapping Hild on the face, trying to rouse her. Watching the two, Mara was intrigued by how similar they were: same tan skin tone, same silver hair, same narrow eyes...

As a mother, she definitely sensed the solicitude the younger Goddess had towards Hild...because it was totally the kind of loving devotion a daughter would give to her mother. Hild was slowly coming around, and then she started blubbering in a very un-Demon Queen-like fashion.

She looked at the tan-haired Goddess, who was watching her intently. These two Goddesses had a certain recognizable charm about them that seemed to stir her heart. There was something...familiar...about all of this. Her head seemed to spin off her shoulders as her mind and Soul collided with another mind and Soul.

"Hild, Urd, Belldandy, Skuld...me?" she gasped as she was forcibly vortexed into another brief coma. A collision of Maras within her, overwhelming her to the point of paralysis as she felt her Soul being ripped to pieces. Or was it being patched back together? A Demoness wasn't supposed to feel her Soul in this way, an observer to her own sense of existence. But her Soul was half-Demoness, half-Goddess...but leaning to the Demoness side. Impossible! But not possible, yet this Goddess Urd was half-Goddess, half-Demoness...but leaning to the Goddess side. Impossible, even for her twin sister. Twin Sister?! The Seven, the Seven, the four sisters of Time. Skuld had told her. Three Norns and her. Skuld seemed to know more than she was letting on, but was prohibited from dispelling or telling the Future. An Enigma Book that had beguiled her into creating a child. Isilblius, an innocent Demon Boy. The SurGoth...the master enactor of destruction. Dying over and over again. Creation. SpiderDemons eating her Soul. All the Gods and Demons dead, wiped out by virus and warfare. Creation again...the kids made creation? The kids _were_ creation? Gauze-thin glimpses of twelve beings firing up a new order of the Everything that was finally in Balance. Nine Syntrasils...OmniArcs with a twist, in the form of transpositional realms consisting of multitudes of Logorinths; each Logorinth a Realm for Gods, Demons, or both. The Mid-Light, no longer an end point at the time of Real Death, but a beginning. Death and Life were irrelevant, because both had Souls of permanent existence. Time was a loop, but not a causal loop. She witnessed Sygyn and Falcyn pulling down immense, incomprehensible powers and pouring them into some kind of vessel. Sygyn with whirling spirals of energy that danced with color, flowing from her hands; the focusing of the brilliant creativity in her daughter's nature. Falcyn with wings of fiery energy that radiated bright-red lightning, ray-spans flinging outwards from his wingtips; the focus of tempered courage her son possessed.

Belldandy and Urd...her sisters?

"Wel..."

"Huckaaugh!" she choked as her mind was yanked back inside of her, safely tucked away alongside her heart and Soul.

"...Welcome back, sis," Skuld said with a knowing smile. She looked up and saw everyone staring down at her, as the back of her head was resting on Skuld's lap. She had lived two lives...one with Skuld as her only sister...one with Urd, Belldandy and Skuld as her sisters.

"Falcyn...Sygyn...all right?" she asked hoarsely, immediately concerned about her children.

"They'll be coming to pretty soon," Skuld answered. "Don't worry, I went through the same sudden disorientation that you just experienced. Two of me, living two different lives, somehow bisected by the SurGoth, but now reintegrated. You're going be okay, and your son and daughter will be alright. We're all gonna have to really turn on the 'Mom Power' for the next few weeks, because our children are going to be much more confused than we are."

"If they went through anything like what I just experienced, they're gonna need to take a semester off from school," Mara noted.

Urd, Belldandy and Skuld giggled at this. Hild was still in tears, her arm draped around Urd's shoulder. Mara recalled that Hild had nodded out first, perhaps hit the hardest because she had lived a life barren of any children. Now, she had her daughter back. Oddly enough, Mara sensed a particular knowing place regarding Hild and her daughter Urd. Twenty-Seven Decas of memories and experiences were suddenly there, clear in her mind. She was aware of their relationship, the entire history of antagonism between Urd and Hild. The two absolutely hated each other until Urd had the "Trips", as they had nicknamed Urd's three kids. Becoming a mother of three children herself had softened Urd's heart towards her own mother, and she and Hild had finally made up. A new grandmother, Hild finally gave up on her life-long ambition to turn Urd towards the Demoness side of things. Thankfully, because the Trips were spared having to grow up with their Mom and Grandmom being bitter enemies.

"Belldandy? How are Keleste and Keiyasu?" her sister Skuld asked. She recognized that having a twin sister and another younger sister was going to take some getting used to; Skuld was no longer _the_ younger sister.

"They're in stasis right now. From what I gather, they had it much worse than I expected, because they grew up believing that they had never met Keiichi and I. Apparently, from what they described, the two of them lived Fifteen Decas as orphans in Yggdrasil. So it's going to take longer for them to 'reintegrate', as you termed it. But they're good kids, and Keiichi's watching them closely as we speak."

"My Lord, that's _terrible_!" Skuld exclaimed. "My reality wasn't as bad. I remember growing up without you and Urd, but at least I had Mara as my only Big Sister, thank the Lord. Or thank the Dark Lord, for that matter, because I had a Big Sister who helped teach me to be a mother to my own children."

Mara was deeply touched by her sister's heart-felt words, and the tears flowed freely as she looked at Skuld with a wordless love. Their family had suddenly doubled, and the love seemed to multiply itself between the sisters.

"Urd, how are the triple trouble-doers?" Skuld asked.

"Huh? What are you talking about?" her twin sister Urd exclaimed, looking at her with incredulity. Her green eyes seemed to flicker "you're insane!" in beacons towards her and Skuld.

"Motokyn, Baldurdth and Kitsunen. You and Cevn's children?" she emphasized.

"Me...and Cevn? Kids? Hmmph! Are you out of your Demoness mind, Mara? I couldn't stand him! I granted him a wish, and then he bugged out one day and simply vanished. Kept telling me that he was in love with me. Disappeared right before Bell and Keiichi's wedding. Never saw him again, and as far as I'm concerned, he never existed. Besides, I got back together with Troubadour...at least off and on when he isn't screwing around on me, the prick! And there's no way I would have _his_ children! He's definitely not father material," Urd answered, fraught with a very powerful sense of bitterness.

Urd couldn't remember her husband and children?

"Urd, if you don't break it off with that Earth Spirit Muse, I'm gonna head up to Yggdrasil and fry his ass! And I don't care if I get my Demoness license yanked either," Hild said angrily. "I'm sick of it! What is the matter with you? You know that he's using you, and you don't belong with him. He doesn't care about you at all!"

Hild and Urd launched in the kind of verbal shoutdown that could only fill the emotional gap between mother and daughter, and a moment later the lightning bolts started flaring...

"Uh-oh!" she and Skuld commented to themselves in troubled voices, completely at a loss.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Mom, we were talking before we met up with you about the three cousins who aren't here," Pryzm started to explain. "Ulfryn was seeing them in and out of her dreams, and they kept telling her to 'find our parents'. You know who their parents are...or, are supposed to be. They belong to this new Goddess Urd, don't they? But Urd and Hild don't seem to a clue about them. The dots aren't connecting in this little scenario. I think we need to do more than just find their parents. Somehow, I get the feeling that _this_ reality is wrong too."

Skuld already knew that this reality was off-kilter the moment Urd didn't recognize that she was the mother of the triplets. The "Trips" as Tomohisa and Keiichi had nicknamed them, a name that had caught on with all the adults in the household. Or the "Three Trouble-doers" as Mara and everyone else called them while they were growing up. The three were a blend of Urd's mischief and Cevn's instability, which always made life more interesting at the temple. But what do you expect when you put together two nuts? Tapioca pudding?

But they had turned out to be good kids, eccentric and whacky as hell, but good-hearted and principled.

"We know that they're supposed to be your sister Urd and Cevn's children, but they aren't here. Which means that Urd and Cevn never...uh, got hooked up, if you know what I mean, Mom," Ulfryn said, her face pinkled with embarrassment.

Great. Now she and the kids had to play matchmaker, and then she'd have to have another talk with her daughters about the mortal version of the 'facts of life' afterwards.

"Aunt Skuld, our original plan was that we would travel back in the past to 20XX, so that we could arrive before Motokyn, Baldurdth and Kitsunen were born. We suspected that there might have been an unresolved problem which caused them to 'never be born', in a sense. Just like you, and us, and Mara...we were all on the outside creating the OmniOm, and could not be on the inside. Once we found ourselves on the inside, we all ended up in blackouts as our two distinct 'lives' were reunited. But they're still lost in a sense. Stranded on the outside of Reality, I guess. I don't know how else to explain it," Sygyn offered.

"Sygyn, you explained it just fine. Sometimes the simplest explanation says the most. It's called parsimony, and it is highly valued among true thinkers and artists," Skuld praised her insecure niece, earning a proud smile from the young teenaged Demoness.

"So what do we do?" Falcyn asked. "That Urd seems like she can be way stubborn, just like her mother Hild. Even wilder in some ways than her mother. Hild is a nutcase, and if Urd's anything like her, we might be screwing over Cevn by causing him and her to be in love."

Skuld almost burst into laughter at her nephew's comment. Being a boy, he was seeing things from the guy's perspective. Yet, what he said about Urd and Hild was absolutely true, and hilarious to boot.

"Falcyn, I can..hee hee..appreciate your concern. But believe me, it's the best thing for both of them. Those two deserve each other, and you'll just have to see it to believe it," she answered. Her nephew just shook his head in disbelief, not understanding what she meant. How could he, when he had never met the two as she remembered them?

A plan began to take form in her thoughts, one that would require the Quad to accompany her. It would be dangerous and tricky, but if it worked, then there would be another shakeup. Everyone would have to suffer through those rotten headaches again...

But it had to be done, because if Hild got wind that Urd's kids...her grandkids...were stranded in a delicate situation, Hild would do something rash and completely screw everything up. Put Hild and Belldandy in the same room, and you have a double-sided mishap waiting on the wings. Urd alone was a mishap in action at times. By process of elimination, she would have undertake this plan by herself, chaperoning the Quad on another amazing adventurous intervention to try and set things right.

"How good are you guys at Stealthing yourselves? I noticed that you all seem to have gotten powerups during all of this shake-apart and glue-back-together. Do you think you can stay hidden from four Senior First Class Licensees?" she asked. If they were going to go in the past, she would need the insight of the Quad, since they were the only ones who had direct experience with the triplets. She had some experience of the three, but not from the perspective of child-to-child. She definitely would need to rely on Ulfryn's sensitivity to the new 'ghosties' to pull this off.

"It'll be hard. We'll be jacked and hacked if we don't have some help with that part," Ulfryn quickly answered. Good, her daughter was being honest and had a full grasp of how sensitive this 'mission' would be. Yet, she and the Quad would have several advantages; the obvious one being surprise. The other useful expedience was that she had a Delimited license, which made her many times more powerful than four Senior First Classes put together. Her sisters all were Delimited license holders as well...but that was in the present, not back almost twenty years ago in 20XX.

The most critical risk was that she and the kids would be encountering a younger version of herself and Mara. Now that the OmniOm was created, it was possible for her to meet a Future version of herself, the Elder. But Skuld had significant questions about whether her younger self could handle meeting _her_. She remembered the wild scene at the wedding when they burst into existence at the back of the church. Her 16-year-old younger self had merely caught a seconds-brief glimpse of her, Pryzm and Ulfryn...and then had fainted right into Tomohisa's arms.

"That was so cute!" she thought, the memory tickling her romantic inclines. It was the one funny moment amidst all the consternation of that event.

Choosing a time immediately prior to the wedding would be the optimal point to 'drop in' on the temple. Skuld's feminine intuition was sending her clarion signals; the wedding was pitched-fever stress for everyone, and it was possible that Urd would be most vulnerable to having a heart-spill. She recalled how Urd had been completely bonkers for almost the whole week before Bell and Keiichi got hitched. Justly so, as everyone had been super-uptight and frenetically busy that week. Both sets of parents were closing in on the ceremony like hawks chasing field mice, each family with a panoply of expectations and demands...

What was that saying? Fools rush in where angels fear to tread?

This was either going to be a disaster, or it would be totally fun.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --


	151. Pt 151: Nine Voices: The Quad Pt 3

**Part 151: Nine Voices – The Quad Part Three**

SKULD AND THE QUAD -- 200X, EARTHREALM -- WEDDING MINUS THREE DAYS:

She was grateful for the new UniTransic system, because it was totally user friendly. Ridiculously so. All she had to do was give it spatial and chronological coordinates, and then they'd be there. XOM automatically confirmed her Norn status and granted her access to the full set of TimeStreams; otherwise she would be temporally limited to the immediate TimeWeaves like any other Divine being. Somehow, the UniTransic system was able to bridge Time in a new way. Much better than the old UmbraPlexiar system. The luminous zone deflashed and they exited into existence in a particular alley she had chosen in Makuhari, exactly where she had directed XOM to locate the destination for she and the Quad. As soon as they arrived, the toxicity and pollutants thickly levying the atmosphere, hydrosphere and lithosphere were a sure signpost that they had arrived in the early 21st century. Back in 202X, the Earthrealm's environment was much cleaner as a result of the mortal's adaptation of the green energy model, alternative fuels, and energy conservation coupled with materials eco-recycling. In 202X, the levels of air pollution in Tokyo were greatly reduced compared to 20XX, even though the population had almost doubled to 45 million. Twenty years of childhood's end. Within a moment, her own childhood was rekindled as she immediately recognized the back door entrance and stacked milk crates in the alleyway. Familiar sights and smells touched her as she and Quad stood in the narrow close, right behind one of her favorite hangouts when she was growing up.

After all, it wouldn't hurt to make a side trip and enjoy some vintage cherry vanilla handmade ice cream. Perks of being a time-traveling Norn and all of that.

The kids were delighted to be back on the Earthrealm, all stares and agogging at this time-slip into the past. When they walked up the cramped side-alley and rounded out onto the storefront, Ulfryn had that tell-tale look in her eye...the sweet-tooth sparkle...as they approached the ice cream store. She had cautioned the children to use guarded thoughtcasts for all discussions, and to especially shield any syncognition, so that any Goddess or Demoness in the vicinity wouldn't pick up stray thoughts.

_Mito's Neato Ice Creame Shoppe._

Once inside the confectionary ice cream store, she glanced at the calendar, which was dated the second week in November. Perfect. Just three days from Keiichi and Bell's wedding. Everyone and everything at the temple would be totally slammed, geared into a hectic pace. Mom and Dad would have already visited to 'inspect' the wedding proceedings and observe the wedding rehearsal Megumi had led in the temple's living room.

This weekend would see the real, actual wedding, blending Earthrealm and Yggdrasilian traditions. After the ceremony, a large formal reception would follow at a rented hall in Chiba proper. The next day, Bell and Keiichi would go off to Yggdrasil to be formally introduced by Mom and Dad for the formalizing of their marriage with the traditional Divine Bonding ceremony. Then Mom would throw her own reception and invite all her haute elite society crowd, so she could have her fifteen minutes of fame with the newlyweds as attention-fodder.

Mom and Dad had given Keiichi a special ring that allowed him to visit Yggdrasil. It was similar to one of the visas issued by the Emportal Office, but it allowed Keiichi's mortal manifest to remain in quantum stability within Yggdrasil. Without it, the confluence of energies in Ygg would atomize him instantly. The Almighty had bestowed it to the couple as a boon and gesture of respect to their parents.

As she dug into a chocolate cone cherry-vanilla deluxe, the succulence and decadence transported Skuld into an ice-creamy past.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Since Mom was in some sort of ice-cream induced trance, Ulfryn and the rest of the Quad were excitedly glancing around at the sights and sounds of 200X Earthrealm. She got the gist that this was one of Mom's fave hangouts when she was a teen, which merited a closer scrutiny of the ice cream shoppe. Lathered to a fascination just by being here, she took in all the peculiar sights and sounds of the place. The "Earthrealm" effect was in full rigor here, which meant that her Goddess powers were diminished somewhat. But it wasn't like before. Perhaps this new-gear Syntrasil thing had changed the options a bit for half-Divine half-mortal girls!

As practice, she phased her physical manifest for a split-second.

"_Waaah! Mom, I can do something I couldn't do before on the Earthrealm!_" she thoughtcast excitedly. But her Mother was staring out the front window with a wistful air and didn't seem to hear her.

"_Looks like Aunt Skuld has gone blinkers,_" Falcyn observed. "_This ice cream is too sweet!_"

"_Is not!_" Pryzm protested. "_It doesn't have any of that fake-shit sugar stuff we're used to. From what I can sense, it's entirely natural cream and high-qual imported sugar, with natural fruit flavors. I wonder how much 2000¥ is in 200X?_"

"_Expensive,_" Sygyn answered. "_No wonder she likes this place. This ice cream is delicious, by the way. Have you guys noticed that our Divine powers are enhanced? When I focused my Demoness senses, I could notice way more stuff than I could before. I believe that even though we're in 200X, which places us just after the Expansion Event, we are _-still-_ in 202X._"

"_That's gotta be a bunch of baka-level dorkage!_" Falcyn argued hotly. "_See that there calendar? It says Nov 200X. For having extended Demoness senses, you sure are blind. Or maybe your mind is blind!_"

"_Stow it, big brother! Or you might be wearing that 'too sweet' ice cream all over your 'too serious' face!_" Sygyn threatened, drawing giggles from she and Pryzm. "_What I meant to say is that _-we're-_ in 202X, not the place we're in. Or maybe it is, but in any case I checked out my energy links. They're from Syntrasil, Vanagdrasil sub-realm._"

"_Waah! That's right!_" her sister Pryzm confirmed. "_But what's up with Mom? She's like totally spacing out on us. Is she okay?_"

"_I think Mom's having a 'senior moment',_" Ulfryn offered.

"_No way! She's only Thirteen Decas old, or a little over 30-something in Earthrealm years,_" Sygyn countered.

"_Yes way! Mom's back in her childhood, at least in her head. You know how excited we are being here. Imagine what it's like for her! This is her teenage groove, and she's probably caught up in massive memory loops. This is back when she first met Dad, before Aunt Mara had you guys. Dad's still in high school! That's totally crashed to even think of, my Father in high school,_" she explained, expanding on her idea that Mom was simply experiencing something the adults called nostalgia.

"_Wanna check it out?_" Pryzm asked. "_We could visit Dad's high school._"

"_Why stop there?_" Falcyn observed, finally shaking off his sister's verbal smackdown. "_We could visit the temple and see Mom when she was younger. Maybe they're all at the temple! Your Mom, our Mom, and those two new Aunt Goddesses we just met. Keleste and Keiyasu's Mom is there, and that Keiichi guy. It seems to be late afternoon, and I don't think your Dad had baseball practice in mid-November at school._"

"_Totally,_" Pryzm agreed. "_It's right around the dinner hour, which is why this place is filled with people. See those girls over there? I bet they're treating themselves to ice cream on the way home from school. We could go all over Makuhari to find Dad, but I bet we'll find him at the temple with Mom._"

"_Hee hee! I wonder what your Mom's like? Our Mom always describes her as being a brat with a hair-temper, but also very smart and really into helping others when she decides upon it. It's weird to think that right now, she's only a couple Earthrealm years older than Falcyn and I in her physical manifest,_" Sygyn noted with a dramatic pause. "_I say we go to the temple right now. Just for a few fractions of a second, so we can check it out._"

"_Do you think we can do that, Sygyn?_" she asked her older Demoness cousin with worry. There was the part where their Divine powers seemed enhanced, but traveling between the nano-seconds was something they could only do in Yggdrasil, not here. Here, they had been limited to footpower, or using mediums to transport themselves from one place to another, like Mom used to rely upon water back when she was a girl. And if they used their powers like that, the strain was so much that the next day would be a full day of bed rest while they recharged their Divine energies.

"_I say we go! We can sneak over there and back without even being noticed by your Mom,_" Falcyn asserted.

"_Yeah, let's!!!_" she and the others agreed excitedly. She gathered her will and located the temple, and then snapped into chibi-stealth mode and flared between the atoms, zooming her way towards the temple in an instant flash of light.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Her thoughts seemed to wrap themselves around dozens of memories. Early memories of her sisters, of building Banpei for the first time, meeting and fighting with Tomohisa...

"_Tomo!_" she sighed heavily, her inward eye dazzled. The clockworks of memory were now waxed fully upon his shining face. She remembered the dating, her rescue of him from his asthma...and finally like a bird in flight, her mind alighted on their marriage ceremony. Then off to Yggdrasil for their Bonding. What an ordeal her own wedding reception had been, back when she and Tomohisa got married! Just like Keiichi, Tomo had been given a special ring by the Lord so that he could travel to Yggdrasil with her for the requisite Divine Bonding ceremony and the reception hosted by her parents. That party was one long endurance test for she and her new husband...as she wasn't just being spotlighted by her Mom, Freiija. Besides the endless parade of introductions to Mom's socialite gal-pals and the taxing formality of acknowledging Mom's 'Goddess of Marriages' hostess role, she also had her Dad, Odeyn, to deal with. Being the youngest of the daughters, she was totally "Daddy's Little Girl" for the entire reception. She had almost no time to herself or with Tomo, because Odeyn was pulling her away to show her off to his friends every few minutes. Dad was just as crazy with his doting father vive as Mom was with her meticulous adherence to manners of gentility. Even thought it was her and Tomo's Yggdrasilian reception, none of her sisters could rescue her from being obsessively fawned upon by Mom and Dad.

Caught up in remembrance, she heard a collective gasp from a number of people seated near her. She looked up to see what was the matter. Instead of four children, she saw four splats of shattered ice cream cones on the table and chairs. A quick glance at the other tables revealed Earthrealm mortals wide-eyed with shock. A glassy crash behind the counter confirmed the worst. Ms. Mito, the proprietor of the ice cream shop, was slack-jawed with incomprehension...and had just dropped the milk-shake blender she was holding.

"Shit!" Skuld thought angrily, slapping two ten-thousand yen notes on the table and then dashing out of there as fast as her feet could carry her.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"_Whooops!_" Falcyn said as they emerged just outside of the temple. He looked at his sister and his cousins, who clearly hadn't noticed what he had.

Their ice cream cones.

"_Shit!_" Sygyn cursed, looking at her empty hand.

They had totally goofed it, assuming stealth-chibi form before coming to the temple. By following Aunt Skuld's directive, there was no way they could have brought their ice cream with them. Which he was glad of, because he didn't like the idea of hauling around an ice cream cone that was half as tall as he was while he was in chibi form.

But still, Aunt Skuld would be totally harsh on them once she found out. There was no way they could cover up four splashed ice cream cones.

"_The damage's already done!_" Pryzm admitted with a sigh. "_Mom's gonna be super-sprung mad at us when she finds out. We might as well take a look around, since we're already busted._"

Since they were framed within exceedingly dense fractions of TimeSpace, everything and everyone around them were as still as statues. Overhead, a Tokyo crow hung motionless in the air, way off base from where the crows usually crowded in downtown Chiba. "Too bad it wasn't snowing," Falcyn thought. Seeing a bunch of snowflakes paused in mid-fall would have been majorly cool.

He hovered over to the open temple gate, which was swung wide open. Funny how all the vehicles seemed to be antiques!

"_Look at that weird motorcycle!_" Pryzm noted. "_It looks like it's a hundred years old!_" Following her gaze, he saw a ancient-looking motorcycle with an attached side-car sitting near the garage, parked under a tarp, surrounded by toolboxes. He didn't see Mom's car; or at least what would pass for a car that Mom would use since his Mother always had a preference for very loud cherry-red vehicles. Especially sportscars.

"_Can we speed ourselves up?_" Sygyn asked in her cute-Demoness begging voice. "_Just long enough so I can hear what's going on in there?_"

Since it was late afternoon, the temple already had some of its lights on. It was almost the same as the temple he remembered, but there were some minor differences besides the smaller trees and the unknown vehicles. Of course, he and Sygyn lived in Mom's Demoness Lair, which was currently hyperspaced on the top floor of a skyscraper. Back in these times, Mom said her Demoness Lair had been hyperspaced next to a Shinkansen line. But they visited Skuld and his cousins often at this temple.

"_I suppose it wouldn't hurt too much. Since you're Mom's gonna catch us anyway,_" he suggested. "_How about three seconds, then back to nano-second increments?_"

"_Sounds like fun!_" Ulfryn chimed in. His youngest cousin, totally irritating sometimes because she was so blithe to the concept of something bad happening. Of course, once his Aunt caught the four of them here, there would be major Bless to pay. And when they got back to 202X and Aunt Skuld told Mom about this...

He shook his head sharply, trying to dislodge the quell of fear that spiked him hard.

"_Ready? One...two...three,_" Sygyn counted.

Blasts.

From the silence of between seconds to the noise of regular Earthtime. Sounds of traffic, of people, of aircraft whooshing high overhead filled his ears. Inside, he could hear several people talking at once, the only voice he could recognize was Aunt Skuld's, only a bit higher in pitch than what he was used to. Some old rock band, L'Arc en Ciel it sounded like, was playing in the background.

"Hi! Who are you?" a voice called right behind him. It was so close, it jarred him with a ping of surprise. Spinning around in mid-air, he saw Aunt Skuld's near-human robot, Sigel. And if Sigel was here...

Another robotic form whipped around the corner of the garage and jerked to a halt, dust whipping out from under his metallic feet.

"_Uh-oh!_" he heard someone gasp.

"Freet-bizz-zooch!" the robotic watchman shouted. With a clanging "blam!" something strobed in his chest and sparkles flew in every direction.

By now, it had been about three seconds, but no one was doing anything to vanish.

"Time Intruders! Time Intruders! Time Intruders!" the robot started shouting mindlessly, smoke emerging from his chest and the back of his head, his metallic cap resting akilter on his round head. Falcyn observed that this was an _old_ version of the watchman mecha, which meant that he was extremely unsophisticated and troublesome.

"Hmmm...what do we have here?" a voice said. They had spun 180s when Sigel first hailed them, and now someone else was behind them. Not just someone else, but _the_ someone else.

"Mo...!" Sygyn gasped out loud...using her human voice...before slapping a hand over her mouth so hard, it cracked the air with a sharp sound. Falcyn felt his backbone turn to jelly and back at the sound of those words, realizing that they all were now totally fucked ten ways to Tokyo.

"Mo? Not Mo. Mara!" the young-again form of his Mother corrected. From their chibi perspective, she looked like a giant Godzilla who was ready to step on them and squash them.

"Ulp!" he choked on his gasp, noticing the flame-orange pupils of his Mom's eyes, filled with glee and malice. This wasn't Mom in punishment mode...this was much, much worse!

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"_Do you kids know what you just did?!_" Skuld stammered angrily, irritation waxing turbulent in her mind as she remanifested across the street from the temple wall. "I emphasized the need to exercise utmost caution while we're here in the past, and instead you guys go all commando on me! Are you trying to make me own defeat before even starting?" She could hear the boisterous conversations coming from within the temple, and through the open gate, she saw several vehicles in the parking area by the garage. Seated casually on top of the wicker-wall that surrounded the temple were Pryzm and Ulfryn, plus Falcyn and Sygyn...all in stealth _and_ chibi form.

Much as she wanted to contemn the Quad for being impulsive, she was a little impressed by this new ability. She didn't know that they could do that! What else didn't she know?

This was her fault anyway, for getting caught up in romantic daydreams about she and Tomohisa. None of her sisters knew this back then, but ice cream was a mental aphrodisiac to her in more ways than one, as well as being her Divine energy powerup source. Ice cream was a sweet conduit to the past for the Norn of the Future, and was certain to trigger eclipsing bouts of remembrance if she was in the mood. Being physically here in the heyday of her youth had definitely put her into the mood, and the vision of the halcyon days in her and Tomohisa's early dating and courtship days had mired her in pleasant daydreaming.

"Here! Present!" Falcyn and Pryzm said as they threw two objects at her. Skuld deftly caught one in each hand...and recognized them immediately. She didn't have time to think up any further scoldings for the kids, because she was holding the Ygg passage ring and the container with two wedding bands.

"Get over here! NOW!!!" she commanded. In a flash, the four disappeared off the wall, and reappeared sitting on her shoulders, still in tiny 20cm chibi forms.

"By the Almighty! What have you _done_?" she hissed, angrily shaking the felt-covered ring case. This was completely intolerable! The kid's misdeed far transcended mere disobedience or even impulsiveness; the Quad had acted with a juvenile maliciousness she didn't suspect. "You actually took their _wedding rings_, for Lord's sake!!! My sister and my brother-in-law are going to have meltdowns when they notice these missing! I oughta ground you forever!"

"Actually, it was my idea, Skuld..."

"Yeeep!!!" she gasped as she turned around and saw Mara hovering about a meter over the street. Not the Mara from 202X, but the Mara from 20XX. What was a stringent annoyance was now officially a mega-disaster in the making! Skuld dialed up her memories of Mara from back then. Most of them were of a Demoness who was a bit on the unstable side, having only recently learned that she was a sister to Urd, Belldandy and her. Sister or not, this Mara used to constantly demur in matters of common sense or decency whenever her Demoness pride or self-will was involved. The Mara of 200X had even tried to kill her and Cevn two years earlier, soon after Urd brought him to Japan. Warily, she regarded this younger version of her Demoness sister as one would regard a strange neighborhood. Deeply concerned, she knew that Mara would doubtless be even more unpredictable than a Demoness normally would be; as she was forcibly conflicted between empathy as a sister to Goddesses and the deviousness of her Demonic nature. Skuld knew that this encounter could go either way. Either Mara would play her for a fool and totally create havoc, or she could be helpful and empathize with the situation. The best result would be for Mara to leave her and the kids alone so they could carry on with what they needed to do.

"H..how?" she exclaimed in a whispered astonishment. How could Mara have possibly detected the kids? Granted, the kids had just vanished on their own, leaving her behind in Ms. Mito's ice cream shoppe. It was entirely possible that Mara might be able to detect them unaided. But her Goddess license gave her Divine firepower far beyond Mara's; and despite her careful preparation and stealthspelling, the Demoness had found _her_ out as well...

"How indeed? Well, you have yourself to blame for them getting caught," Mara answered her unspoken thoughts. "Obviously, you forgot about someone...hee hee! The irony is..bwah ha ha!..so tasty, it's almost Demonically hilarious to consider. But we should get away from here first. I need a break from all of this wedding stuff; the stress level is getting intolerable, even for a Demoness like me who thrives on mortals spinning out with anxiety. Hmmm...the park?"

Skuld nodded her head and shifted to the nearby park, actually a small roadside overlook behind the temple where she and Tomohisa used to go to for a bit of privacy and romance. The skies were purpling with nightfall, and the sullen grays of early winter were blanketing the land like grasping fingers reaching over the horizon. The city lights below were emerging one-by-one...but she couldn't afford the emotional whimsy that she would naturally possess with the sight. No mirthful nonchalance here, in this crazy, off-the-hook and out of control situation.

Banpei.

She didn't need to stretch her imagination to mentally discern what had happened. The kids had overheard her thoughtcasts as she ruminated over the past, and had snapped into impulse mode and directly went to the temple. Once they split the ice cream shoppe, they had appeared at the temple in stealth form with chibi physical manifests. But being unpracticed at it, they must have been conspicuous enough to set off Banpei's threat alarm. Banpei then investigated and observed that the semi-sensible invaders had a chronometric presence that disclosed that they were not from 20XX. Banpei in this time-frame had a very rudimentary AI when compared with the Banpei she had perfected in 202X. During her teen years, her robot watchman was sensitive to Goddess, Demoness, and mortal presences. But she had no reason back then to equip him to deal with actual visitors from the Future. Obviously when confronted with the presence of beings from two Earthrealm decades in the Future, it had been enough to blow his AI into shut-down spazz-out mode. Mara must have overheard the resulting ruckus, probably because everyone else was huddled somewhere in the temple working on last minute details of the wedding, too busy to notice. When she had gone out to investigate and found Banpei going crazy, Mara somehow must have discovered the kids. It required no mental leaping to speculate on what followed. Mara had obviously intimidated the kids into telling her what their purpose was in being at the temple, learning of their goal to create a disruptive situation that would help get reunite Urd and Cevn in a romantic sense. Of course, being a Demoness who headed up the Strife Mischief office, she had gone for the throat, so to speak, by having the kids steal the rings.

Actually, in some ways, this was a welcome development. With a little work, it might even be massaged into a good workable plan to create a scenario to accomplish their goal of getting Urd and Cevn together.

But _how_ much had the Quad told her?

"You know, I really feel strange seeing you there, looking _older_ than me, Skuld. With two Goddesses and a Demon and Demoness in tow as well. Four blazin' kids in chibi-stealth," Mara commented, eying her up and down. "They were most cooperative, telling me everything about why they're here. For the record, I couldn't agree more with their reasoning. So I decided to help them, out of pure generosity and because I care about my twin sister and my own sanity. Not to mention that this little stunt will cause a shitload of strife in that household, which can serve as a good instructive lesson to all the Strife Demonesses I supervise in my role as admin of DSMO. Finally, it's a little bit of payback for all those times you three got over on me. You think the gang's all worked up now? Wait until the morning when Belldandy and Keiichi find the rings missing. The shit will be flyin' against the jets then! You know, I could sneak into Urd's 'Castle' and grab a couple of love potions to make things _really_ interesting..."

"Mara, don't even think about it! You know Urd's potions are unstable," Skuld quickly exclaimed, hoping that joking around would ease Mara away from being suspicious about Falcyn and Sygyn. At least the kids had obeyed her strong injunction not to disclose any information about family to the younger version of Mara. Information that could lead their younger selves to suspect that the kids were connected to them in any way.

"So what are things like, there in the Future, huh?" Mara asked, her eyes narrowed in a sly expression. Normally, Skuld wouldn't be able to say a word, because of her status as Norn of the Future. There was always a certain 'lockdown' imposed by the Ultimate Force that prevented her or Urd from explicitly talking about direct futures or pasts of specific TimeWeaves to their enactors. As such, she couldn't meet her own future self in a face-to-face encounter, even. But now that this "Expansion of Balance" had occurred, she was a Norn without a region of Time. The Ultimate Force was no longer as an automatic censor that would prevent her from discussing the Future; she could freely tell Mara anything about the Future, from vague to specific disclosures. It suddenly dawned on her that being a Norn now carried even more responsibilities; she would have to exercise some majorly genuine self-restraint.

"Mara, you know that I can't tell you about the Future, other than that it's imperative to get Cevn and Urd to become a couple. Otherwise, there'll be...problems...that will affect all of us. If I told you what I know, it would be like you putting the worst Strife Mischief curse on yourself imaginable. And it won't be just you; it will affect others pretty adversely," Skuld explained. "For instance, what if I told you that you become a Demon Queen in the future? How would that affect how you live your life now, huh? Would that change how you look at the Earthrealm, or myself and Bell and Urd?"

"Bwah ha aha! _Me_, a Demon Queen? That's insane! How could I be a Demon Queen and also be in charge of my own Office? Do you have any idea how absurd that sounds? Besides, there's lots of Demonesses who are way more qualified to be a Demon Queen than me," Mara blared in a highly amused voice edging in and out of laughter.

"Shhhsh, Falcyn," Skuld said, feeling his chibi heels digging into her shoulder. Her nephew was probably ranked at how readily his Mom had dismissed herself as Demon Queen material. Of course, he and Sygyn took pride in their Mom being a Demon Queen, because it made them Vanagdrasilian royalty. Mara herself had grown up with a Demon Queen for a Mother, Myducia. She could feel the heat from Sygyn's chibi manifest...her niece was steaming mad over this self-dismissal.

"Okay, I get the picture," Mara said sunnily with a toss of her head. "Besides, I'm gonna get to see the Future anyway, so why not wait it out and let it be a surprise. There could be some really interesting developments..."

Giggles from Falcyn and Sygyn.

"So what's your plan?" Skuld asked.

"Dunno."

Skuld felt her jaw dropping. Mara had instructed the Quad to sneak in and steal Belldandy and Keiichi's wedding rings and Ygg ring...and yet she didn't have a plan? Either this was outright bullshit, or Mara did have a plan and wanted to toy with her before she disclosed it.

"Mara, don't give me that! You're the head of DSMO, and you're claiming that you haven't thought this through?" Skuld accused. "Do you want me to jump back into the Future and whisper this little bit of incompetent planning into the Dark Lord's ear?"

"You can't, because there's no means of going back and forth between Vanagdrasil and Yggdrasil," the younger Mara snappily answered back with a smirk. Which was totally incorrect as far as Skuld was concerned, because she could easily use the UniTransic system to visit His Dark Majesty. But she would have to play along with Mara, because at this point in the TimeStream from her sister's perspective, there was no XOM or Syntrasil. In this time-frame, the Aumatrices had been recently created by the Expansion Event, but no one knew what they were for. Skuld wanted to jump down her older sister's throat for being so obstinate, but threats were the opposite of what was needed here.

There was so much that needed to be said, but Skuld felt an awkward silence, sensing an obstacle on both sides that kept her and Mara from talking freely. When Mara was her sole older sister, confidences between the two of them could be exacting and free of encumbering distrusts. Now that she had three older sisters, would it be the same?

"Look, Mara...I need your help. _We_ need your help, me and these four children. I'm your damned _sister_, for heaven's sake! This is super-important, and I need the advice of a Demoness. There's so much more that is at stake than you could possibly understand, trust me on this. Besides, you're the one who convinced the kids to go off and snatch the rings. Take responsibility!" Skuld insisted.

"Shoots, how can I refuse an offer like that? Especially when you said 'damned'," Mara acceded, Skuld clearly sensing that she was obviously getting a thrill out of being entreated for her assistance. "Besides, I'm not an idiot. I can sense that you've got a massive upgrade in Goddess powers, which tells me that you _really are _who you say you are. Not to mention that you actually asked me for help, which means that you're definitely no longer the Brat."

Skuld caught the implicit sense of this, realizing that her sister had been tentative all this time about the Quad's explanation of their presence here. Mara was simply being cautious rather than being stubborn.

"Mara, I stopped being a brat long ago," Skuld remarked, earning a chuckle from her sister Demoness...and Pryzm and Ulfryn. Then she added, "But I sometimes wonder about if you ever stopped..."

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Sygyn seemed to be entranced by this younger vision of her Mom. This Mara seemed so...different than the Mother who had raised her. She had a breezy Demonic wildness about her, yet it was tempered by self-confidence. Seeing her Mother in her youthyears, she was confronted with the fact that this Mara was hooked on flash; needing to be showy. Perhaps her self-confidence was more bravado than poise.

"So why bring these four?" Mara asked. "They're all too young to be on the Earthrealm."

"They're the ones who are going to get Urd and Cevn together," her Aunt Skuld replied. Sygyn felt a dawning resentment filling her breast, as her Aunt was doing all the talking. She had tons of questions orbiting her heart that she wanted to press her 'pre-Mom' Mother with.

"Oh, I see! Makes total sense to me. Have the kids take on the task instead of involving yourself directly. That way, you aren't implicated if something goes wrong in the Future between those two nutcases, namely my twin sister and Cevn," Mara noted.

Sygyn chuckled at this. This Mara's assumptions were completely off-base, but just crazy enough for her to invest her belief in. The look of exasperated mirth on Aunt Skuld's face seasoned this with humor, and she was reminded that like her Aunt...her Mom was capable of buying into her own bullshit.

"Hmmm. This is what I would suggest. First, you need to rouse everyone awake unexpectedly tomorrow, so they're caught off guard. While they're scrambling to waken, you lead them by their noses to discover the rings are missing. This makes the next part quite obvious: you find a way to separate all of them, but ensure that Cevn and Urd are isolated, preferably at the temple. Bell and Keiichi will go, Megumi will go, you...er, the kid version of you...and Tomohisa will either go or stay. Do this, and it shouldn't be too hard to pair up sis and Cevn. But the challenge is how to get around that Love block thing that Cevn put on her. Even I don't know how to get around that, otherwise I would have done something about it already. I'm tired of him fawning on my sister, and my sister dissing him with snap-lid efficiency. So how do you plan to deal with the fact that Urd is irritable around him?" her future Mother wondered aloud.

"Mara...you actually know about Cevn causing Urd to forget about being in love with him?" her Aunt asked, caught off-guard. Evidently, there was history between these two that Aunt Skuld didn't remember. The cast of characters in her family had more than doubled, and she was intrigued by this Urd who was her Mom's twin sister.

"So if your twin sister, Urd, was once involved with this Cevn guy, how come she can't remember it?" she asked after getting a nod of approval from Aunt Skuld. Sygyn wanted desperately to understand much more about what was going on between these adults, so perhaps she wouldn't feel so helpless. This, or she would go nuts trying to maintain a clampdown on talking with her future Mother. This would perhaps be the only time she would be in this situation to be with her Mom before she had Falcyn and she.

"Everyone knows about that, except Urd of course. There's no other explanation for what's going on between the two of them...er, actually what's _not_ going on between those two. Whatevers, but it definitely puts a monster element of stress on the household, because we have to deal with Urd always being on edge around him. Of course, the idiot-boy mortal still hasn't given up on her. Everyone seems to think that it's normal for him to be that way, because they all remember when the two were all lovey-dovey. So they assume that he's chasing after her because he thinks he can deny destiny. But I had my own fish to fry, and I wasn't around for most of it. Y'know, I have a completely different take on the whole situation. I think _he_ forgot that he hexed her to forget about him. Which means that he's actually falling in love with her all over again, not even aware that he and she were a couple once," Mara explained.

"Mom..er, Mara," she ventured and misspoke, drawing a dart-quick glance from the Demoness who would someday be her mother. She heard Aunt Skuld audibly choke on that one, as Mara's aura went all musty dark-blue with suspicion. Worrying that she had blown it, Sygyn had to forge forgiveness towards herself for her slip-up. How could Aunt Skuld expect Falcyn and her to repress the truth around their future mother? Doing so was a thoroughgoing and challenging demand.

"Sorry...you..uh..remind me of my mother," Sygyn corrected herself, feeling completely baka-tized by her gaffe. This was twice now that she had spoken foolishly. "You and my...uh, Aunt..oops!..my _Mom_...both look alike, and it caused me to get confused. But I think I have an idea..."

"First, before you get any more help from me, I require you to manifest yourselves at your full sizes, all of you. I don't deal with chibis too well unless I'm one of them," Mara demanded. "A few years ago, I had some massively funless times with Queen Hild while in chibi state, not to mention some crazyass altercations with Banpei and spell wards..."

She and the others in the Quad resumed their normal Earthrealm physical manifests. Aunt Skuld's face was quivering with anxiety, and she heard her Aunt thoughtcast "_This official disaster is now an official catastrophe!_" Mara immediately hovered up almost nose-to-nose with her and eyed her down. This Mara would have to be super-drunk on Demon-strength shochu to miss out on the obvious resemblance between mother and daughter.

"Y..you have the same TNA as I do!" Mara half-gasped, half-shouted.

Think Sygyn, think!

For a moment, she felt totally out of her league, out of her element. She was in a different world, in a different Time, dealing with a whole new family dynamic that didn't make sense to her. One that had definite subtle and invisible codes of conduct that were apparent to her Aunt and this young-again version of Mom. Falcyn was staring at her gawk-mouthed, so he would be no help. Pryzm and Ulfryn seemed stymied as well.

_I'm a Demoness, I'm clever, I'm crafty, I'm a rebel, I can do this..._

"Well, duh! Of course I do. But so does one other, if I'm not mistaken. Your twin sister...our Mother," Sygyn answered back without batting a lash. She compounded her efforts to compose herself, because she was getting excited by pulling the lie out against her Mom. It was fun, and yet exhilarating to be dancing on the lip of the volcano, seconds away from an eruptive burst of confidence or failure.

"In the Future, we're _her_ kids...and you're our Aunt," she qualified.

"Wha..what?" Aunt Skuld gasped in dismay.

"Hold on! You have my sister's TNA...and _Keiichi's DNA_! How can this be? Keiichi is getting married to Belldandy in a couple days, and you're saying you're Urd and Keiichi's kids? That's messed up! Nah...I can't buy it! Keiichi would never leave Belldandy..." Mara exclaimed, completely unnerved by what she had claimed.

With that, Sygyn felt herself and her world being turned inside out within the emotional blender. She was far more unnerved; shocked wouldn't even come close to describing the distress that battled within her heart. Everything she knew about her Mother, about life, about her childhood...was being puréed into meaningless globs of noir-reality by this admission that the DNA of her mortal father was Keiichi.

The same Keiichi whose marriage they had interrupted, seemingly eons ago.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Sygyn had pulled the proverbial linchpin out of the grenade, and somehow it didn't explode. She was once again impressed with how quick on her feet her niece was. After all, Demons are experts at deception and Sygyn was becoming a master at the craft. This would be a miracle in the making if she could connive this one over on the 'young' Mara!

But then Mara had nuked them with her admission.

Observing how deeply Sygyn and Falcyn were both gripped tight with shock, Skuld felt a heaviness laboring her heart, her strong empathy and concern for them making it almost unbearable for her to witness the plight of her niece and nephew's distress. Their hearts were seized and their minds stupefied; there was no hiding it in their pallid, near-crazed expressions of extreme agitation. Mara had basically laid out in simple terms who her Father was, if what she was saying about the DNA match was true. A truth that Sygyn and Falcyn didn't know about! Couldn't possibly have known about, because they had barely even met Keiichi. But beyond this, Mara's admission was a truth that _she_ herself didn't know about! Up until recently, it was just her and Mara...Keiichi wasn't even a known entity to her or either of the kids, who had simply accepted that their 'foster Father' was the Dark Lord Himself. Her niece and nephew were glazes of astonishment: Falcyn's eyes spooked wide behind his round wirerim glasses, his long forehead furrowed with consternation; Sygyn's eyes narrowed and trembling, her nose crinkling with intensity and anxiety.

Bringing the kids along with her was a calculated risk, and now it had become a liability. This was chaos, live and direct. If Lokii was watching this little encounter from his Deliberate Chaos Office, he would probably be laughing his mischievous ass off right about now. She had completely lost any control of the situation; there was no cohesion with the plan or purpose of coming here in the first place. Now everything was going to have be done on the fly!

She would have to deceive both Mara...and Sygyn and Falcyn...otherwise this would all blow up before it even started. Sygyn had opened a black hole for them to fall into, with no chance of plugging it. Unless...

There was one chance.

"Mara, I need to break you in on a little bit of the Future, but you need to never tell anyone about it. I ask you in the name of Oni-sama to swear that you will abide by this condition," Skuld said, and repeated for emphasis "By the name of the Dark Lord."

"I..suppose, er I will give my word in His Darkness's name. Cross my heart and hope to fry if I don't," Mara answered. "So what's the scoop?"

"It may appear that Keiichi's DNA is mixed in with these two, but it is not the case. At least not in the way that you and they are thinking that it could have happened. _There was no Keiichi and Urd._ These two children have the Dark Lord to thank for their mortal DNA. That's why we need to get Urd and Cevn together, because if we don't, then Keiichi and Belldandy will marry...and Belldandy and Cevn will die because of a screwup by Hild," Skuld attempted to justify, as a way of mollifying Mara's distrust and protecting the kids.

Her 'excuse' sounded extremely stupid; wishy-washy to the point of being totally filled with lameitude. But it had to be done. Instead of being all elaborate with a carefully-contrived deception, Skuld decided that a transparently obvious weak-ass lie might get past Mara. At least such a tactic used to work on the Mara she was familiar with...

"The Dark Lord will revive them, but He will make an exchange to grant the dearest wish of one of his wives. Keiichi's DNA in return for reviving Belldandy and Cevn. In the meantime, Urd... Uhh, Mara, when you swear by the Dark Lord and invoke His name, then you can never tell anyone about what we are discussing concerning Future events, right?"

"My word is absolute when given in His Name," Mara replied. Skuld grabbed her sister by the arm and jockeyed her away from the Quad so that they could have some privacy.

Taking a deep breath, she decided to pour the gasoline of calamity on the fires of catastrophe. It was the only way to save Sygyn and Falcyn from being shell-shocked by the revelation that Keiichi was their mortal father, which he may or may not be. Skuld knew him well, but had no idea how his DNA got into Falcyn and Sygyn. But it definitely was there, for all to see. It was a miracle that the kids hadn't inadvertently discovered this on their own.

As long as she prevented Falcyn and Sygyn from meeting up with him, then they might be okay.

"I'm sorry, but I have been holding something back from you," Skuld admitted. She looked disconsolately at the ground, gathering her courage and feeling ashamed that she had tried to lie to her older sister. Suddenly, she was 16 all over again, a teenager living in guarded fear and mistrust towards her Demoness older sister. Shunting that aside for the moment, she knew that the only available recourse would be to get Mara on board with the truth, and hope that she could handle it...and keep her word.

"These two, are your son and daughter from about 15 or 16 Earthrealm years in the future," Skuld stated matter-of-factly. "Their DNA is Keiichi's, but their actual Father is the Dark Lord Himself. You...your Future self, decides to have children, and..."

"You don't need to tell me the rest, Skuld. Or bullshit me with some story about His Darkness being the foster Father of these two children. I already had a feeling this would happen for some time now..." Mara answered.

"What? How do you know about Falcyn and Sygyn being your son and daughter?"

"Cunning," Mara noted, tapping her cheek and grinning broadly to expose her fangs. "Cunning...and secrets. Even we Demonesses must have some secrets, eh, Skuld? Just like you didn't volunteer right off to come clean that these two Goddesses are your daughters? But I did give my word to not disclose the Future you've told me to anyone, so you're secret is safe with me."

This was completely off the safety switch! Terra Incognito, a jihad of temporal conflicts. There were no words that could describe the reality...and the disruptive potential...now that Mara knew a certain part of the Future. Mara had given her word, but would she hold to her oath until they completed their mission? If they did, then the 202X reality would be corrected and Urd and Cevn's three children would become part of the reality of that Time.

Which meant that _this_ particular Time might be different than the _real_ TimeStream she and the kids shared. She could hear Falcyn and Sygyn's rapidly beating hearts a couple hundred meters away; flip-flop mirrors of her own pounding distress.

"Look, if we don't get Urd and Cevn together, then they won't have any children!" Skuld blurted out, squinting her eyes with dismay. Mara was ignoring her; and when she opened her eyes and looked, she noticed that Mara had returned to where the Quad was standing. She was closely examining Falcyn and Sygyn while explaining that Keiichi wasn't their mortal father, that it just appeared to be that way. Being an expert liar, Mara easily gained the belief of the two.

"You...remind me of me, in a certain way," Mara said, changing her tone as she addressed Sygyn. "I too was a slip of a Demoness, what the Earthrealm mortals would call a 'late bloomer'. But that only made me more clever, because I had to rely on more than mere cleavage to get the attention of the Demon boys. I can almost taste the whirlwinds of genius in your mind, powerful forms of graceful Demonic contemplations and schemes. Very impressive, to say the least. And you...for a Demon boy, you are very handsome...and wily. I can see it in your eyes. You have a strong moral sense for a Demon, but you're tough as nails. If I had a son, I wouldn't expect anything less from him. You also seem to have depths of thought, which others confuse for slowness of wit. I was that way when I was a very young Demoness, in Prime and FirstTier Inquisition."

Skuld had to snap her mouth shut as she overheard this. The last thing she expected was for this Mara...an avowed bachelorette Demoness...to heap praise on anyone, especially her future Demonic offspring. But there it was...and Sygyn and Falcyn were beaming like car headlights as Mara complemented them. Within a whisk of a moment, Mara and the Quad were conversing briskly about their various impressions of life in 200X and some of Mara's early experiences on the Earthrealm.

"Whew!!!" she sighed, listening as the kids spoke of their joy and amazement of actually being in an era before any of them had been born, and excited by meeting Mara as she was before she became a mom. Slowly allowing herself a smile, Skuld was reminded of the irony of it. She recalled the Mara of this age as a Demoness who vehemently denounced any intention of being in a relationship with a Demon or having children. Watching the younger version of her sister in action, Skuld recognized that Mara was a natural when it came to being a mother. Her older sister's maternal instincts had been very instructive when she and Tomo decided to have children of their own.

"Mom! The 'ghosties'! I can hear them!" Ulfryn interrupted. "They say that we need to help make them try and _kill Cevn_."

Thirty-something Skuld and 27 year-old Mara looked at each other and said "Huh?!"

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

INSIDE THE TEMPLE, WEDDING MINUS TWO DAYS:

The morning had started off with a bang, as Banpei powered into the kitchen and crashed into the refrigerator, almost knocking it through the wall. Startled awake by the clamor, Keiichi and Belldandy rushed to the kitchen to find Banpei had torn the three doors off of the refrigerator and was digging through it, mechanical hands blurring. Food and liquids were flying everywhere.

Scant seconds later, Skuld dashed into the kitchen with Mjolnir in hand, followed by a floating Urd with her hands sparkling with blue electrical fire. One glance was enough for Skuld to convey to both of her older sisters that she didn't know what was going on with her watchman guardian mecha. Skuld immediately instructed Banpei to move away from the refrigerator, but to her shock, Banpei actually _ignored her_! By this time, the audience had grown to include Megumi, Mara and Peorth.

Finally, Banpei stopped his assault on the refrigerator and withdrew two ring cases.

"Keiichi, you didn't hide the wedding rings in the fridge, did you?" Belldandy asked, causing everyone but her fiancé to contort, slap their foreheads, or conceive of other gestures to indicate foolishness in motion.

"Bell-chan, why would I do something utterly stupid like that?" Keiichi replied. It was worrisome that he was stressed out by all the demands of his upcoming wedding. But it was now evident that Bell-chan was showing signs of fracturing under the strain, because she was imagining ridiculous things like wedding rings hidden in the kitchen fridge.

Banpei handed him the ring cases and he casually said "thanks, Banpei" before he realized that the cases _had been_ in the refrigerator. Gulping deeply, Keiichi regarded the cases he was holding, his face a vivid portrayal of his disconcert. Both felt-covered containers felt as chilled as soda cans as he cupped them in his palms. Anxiously, he opened them up to check on the rings...

"Nu..nu...no! No way! They're _gone_!" he choked, almost beyond himself with consternation. Both ring cases had been kept safe in a place where he could check on them every day. Yesterday afternoon, he had opened them up and allowed himself to daydream...until Chihiro chewed him out and demanded that he get back to work. Looking at the empty cases, he was staggered emotionally by the reality that both had been moved...and the rings inside removed.

"Oh...dear..." was all Belldandy could say before she fainted.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

While Keiichi was trying to revive their sister, Skuld and Urd were besieging Banpei with questions. Unfortunately, his AI wasn't advanced enough to allow for anything approaching cogent conversation or even simple give-and-reply dialog. All he was able to do was repeat "_Time Intruders!_" over and over again. Genji was back at the Mishima mansion for the past couple days since the rehearsal finishing up a school project, and Cevn was already at N.I.T., getting an early start on grading mid-term papers so that he would be free for the weekend.

Megumi was more concerned about her brother than Belldandy, perhaps because he had the additional frustration of working hard at Whirlwind and saving up so he could pay for the wedding rings. In extreme situations, she knew her brother Keiichi was also one to hold things in rather than talk about his feelings in most cases. She was fretting that this was certainly one of those extreme cases where her brother would go into self-blame mode and cloak it with a silent emotional isolation.

Belldandy emerged from her lapse of consciousness surrounded by a swirl of emotions, almost numbed that someone had stolen her cherished wedding rings. With the wedding two days away, she was completely worsted by this major problem.

"We have to stall off Mother," she said in a weak voice. Skuld nodded her head, indicating that she would cover up for the loss with Mom, if it came to this. Which meant that she and Tomohisa would need to stay parked at the temple and coordinate the search.

"What does he mean, 'Time Intruders'?" Urd asked Skuld. Frustrated to the core by this disaster, she zoomed in on some delicious thoughts and decided to have fun with them. "This isn't some malfunction on his part, is it? Or perhaps it's because of faulty design and engineering? Maybe his A.I. shifted into playing pranks instead of doing his duty and guarding the temple. Some watchman he is!!! Someone managed to come into the temple and steal the _wedding rings_! And your pet mecha doesn't have a clue!"

"Ooooo! Shut up, Big Sister Urd!" Skuld replied, dagger-eyed and hot-mouthed. "Whoever did this got by _all of us_, not just Banpei! Maybe you should give up your Senior First Class License for being a retard! Some Big Sister you are...letting someone get away with stealing our sister's wedding rings! What's your excuse? Drinking with Mara?"

«-- --»

In stealth mode, Skuld almost broke out laughing as she saw how her younger self had just logic-pounded Urd to the max. Urd was left rooted speechless as the group hurriedly dispersed. Keiichi and Belldandy searched the temple thoroughly, and then took off on his motorcycle, even though it was chilly November. Naturally, Belldandy had exercised the precaution of putting a tracer spell on the rings; a spell that she had easily disarmed, so that the younger version of her older sister couldn't possibly find them. Pryzm and Sygyn were already on their way to Cevn's N.I.T. office to execute their part of the plan. Peorth said she was going to check with the living Gate and then link up with Yggdrasil Sysops to see if they had noticed any Divines making off with the rings.

Meanwhile, Mara was playing her part to perfection. Being the Demoness, she was immediately suspected of arranging this particular freakish incident, once Skuld and Urd stopped yelling at each other. The funny thing was, she _had_ arranged it! But now she had to feign like she hadn't arranged it, but act just-so to also remain a source of suspicion. The next step was for Falcyn and Sygyn to drop the Ygg Passage Ring somewhere in the temple grounds in about an hour, whereupon Mara would accompany Skuld and Tomohisa on a search around the temple and 'discover' the ring. Not even Mara knew where it would be, so her surprise would be somewhat genuine.

She felt the blood rush to her face when she saw the teenaged past-ago version of her husband and her younger self pacing nervously through the temple. Seeing a young Tomohisa brought her back to the halcyon days when she first fell in love with him. That was just the start of the fun times they had together, but oh what a start it had been!!!

Once the first ring was found, then it would be up to her and the Quad to initiate a subtle mental assault on Urd, intended to heighten her irritation and suspicions towards Cevn. This would be a challenge, but Skuld had discovered last night that their thoughtcasts could be 'distorted' in a sense because the five of them were literally from the Future. Their communioncation was moderated by Syntrasil, casting all of their syncognition and thoughtcasts in the 202X timeframe. With a slight adjustment, it would be indecipherable to those in 200X. The concept was quite similar to how a vacuum-tube radio receiver from the 1930s wouldn't be able to pickup UltraDef TV broadcast signals in the 2020s.

It was essential for Mara to 'hook' the interest of her younger self and Tomohisa early on; of the three 20XX Goddesses present, she was concerned that her younger self was the only one who might see through the subterfuge and discern that the kid's brain-spelling thoughtcasts were from a Future TimeStream. Her younger self, as Norn of the Future, was the danger zone they most definitely had to avoid. To do this, their plan was to have Mara lead Skuld and Tomohisa on a proverbial 'snipe hunt' for the second set of rings away from the temple. This would isolate Urd and Cevn, and then they could go to work on those two.

Pulling this off undetected would require a great deal of vigilance on her and the Quad's part.

After all, she was a genius...and her 16-year-old self definitely possessed a good portion of that same sheer mental brilliance.

«-- --»

Urd was brooding.

Tomohisa and Skuld had found one of missing rings, Keiichi's "Ygg Passage Ring" that Mom and Dad had given him as a pre-nuptial present. She felt soured that the two teens had succeeded in finding the missing ring before she had. Now they were merrily chasing around Makuhari with her twin sister Mara in some kind of cherry-red Demoness sportscar. Banpei was acting like his AI was drunk on shochu, and Megumi had left on her motorbike to go searching down towards the Bayfront district by the Makuhari Messe Exhibition Center. Urd thought that Megumi's idea was totally absurd, since they'd found one of the missing rings here at the temple. But she couldn't convince anyone to stay put. Peorth was gone troppo, checking out Yggdrasil to investigate the rings' disappearance.

The rings had to be here, somewhere.

But what troubled her was that the rings were gone in the first place. What could have possibly invalidated her sister's tracer spell? It was either some extremely powerful...and potentially dangerous force. Or it was Belldandy herself. Knowing her middle sister, it was quite within reason that she had simply forgotten to renew the tracer spell. Belldandy could be an naive airhead at times, and with the stress of the wedding...

Momentarily, she thought of Cevn pulling one of his freakish stunts, but let that one slide by.

Searching through their temple home several times already, Urd found herself in "Everybody's Tea Room", piqued at her lack of success. Everything was normal, except for the busted-up refrigerator. To make things even more of a drag, she...instead of her younger sis the Brat...had to deal with Mom's hourly phone calls. _"Hi Mom." "Everything's peachy-keen here Mom." "Belldandy and Keiichi are out on a joyride, because it'll be the last time for a while that they can take a bike ride around the neighborhood, Mom."_

Cursing Skuld for shafting her, she heard the phone ring. With a groan, she picked it up and listened to Mom yap for minutes on end about the wedding. Again.

Yet, something else was irking her. Every time she went into Cevn's room, or his "Studio" music room, something seemed to have moved slightly. That, and the fact that he had been the first one out of the house this morning when he left for N.I.T. She kept hearing voices in her head telling her that he was guilty, that this was his way at getting back at her because she wouldn't date him...

He was a nice enough guy most of the time, except when he was around her. Then he would forget his place as a mortal and start acting awkward and stupid, like the other night when she caught him staring at her during dinner like a cat eyeing a fish in an aquarium. He was so out of it, she had to hit him in the face with a dinner napkin to shake his attention off of her. Sometimes his deep interest in her was flattering, and she actually enjoyed it. But he was so inconsistent! It was clear as water that he was infatuated with her, but he wouldn't even flirt with her, which made it less fun and more irritating. He'd make no attempt to charm her, and then he would suddenly drop a bomb and ask her to go places with him. Alone. As if he thought she didn't see through the thin veneer of his intentions, flimsy as they were.

This time, she noticed that one of his review textbooks was open on a writing desk. It had been closed the last time she looked, right before Mom's most recent call. But he wasn't here! Being a faculty member, Cevn always reviewed a number of textbooks for possible inclusion in the next semester's classes. So who or what was messing around in his room? Or was he doing this, just to fuck with her and make her more upset about the rings?

Her displeasure mounting, Urd growled in her throat as the phone rang for the umpteenth time. With a resigned sigh, she answered it, knowing who the caller was.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Belldandy was exasperated. She had put a tracing spell on the wedding rings just for this contingency. She and Keiichi had dealt with their share of troubles, both on the road and in the heart-realms, during the past five years. But this was almost beyond belief! Not only was the tracing spell gone, but her ability to detect the physical form of the rings was gone as well. It was as if _someone had shielded her own wedding rings from her_, making them invisible to her Goddess senses. She was working overtime, and Keiichi was almost heart-fused with frustration. They had visited all the local pawnshops, just to eliminate the possibility that a mortal thief may have somehow eluded Banpei and made off with the rings. A long shot, since Keiichi, Cevn and Tomohisa, and Ootaki and Tamiya were the only ones that knew where the rings were.

Keiichi had insisted that knowledge of the ring's location was "privileged information for guy's only", apparently following some kind of Earthrealm protocol that involved male-bonding prior to the wedding. She was almost angry with him, but she knew that as his wife she would be exposed to many mortal foibles, no different than the many ones she had faced before. Some of them actually held a sense of charm, while others were completely based on Earthrealm nonsense.

Like not telling his wife-to-be about where their wedding rings were being safekept.

The chill November air was getting to Keiichi, so she encanted a warming spell and leaned further into his back, to make his clothing resistant to the cold and soothe him with her body warmth. She could feel the steely crackle of his energized nervous system, swollen nerve cells on anxiety overdrive. It was almost noon, and deciding that they needed a break, she suggested to Keiichi to head over to their fave noodle shop and take a time out for a quick lunch.

"So what happens if you don't find the rings?" Sora asked as they were finishing up their order of udon soup. Both Sora and Ms. Hasegawa were flustered when she and Keiichi explained that the wedding rings were missing. "Doesn't this mean that your folks and his folks are gonna have a cow when they learn that you guys lost your wedding rings?"

"Yeah," Keiichi answered. "My Mom will give me a lecture on responsibility, and I'm dreading that. Not to mention what _Bell's_ Mom will do..."

"Keiichi, ease up on your worries, my love," Belldandy answered. "I can handle my parents...most of the time. After all we've been through, you should trust this. It saddens me that this had to happen, but we may need to examine things from a deeper perspective. The rings are very precious, but they're ultimately _symbols_ of how we feel towards each other. You and I both know that we can get married with or without them. If that means I have to defy my parents, so be it."

"Bell, I feel that I made a mistake, not telling you where they were..." Keiichi admitted with a sigh of exasperation.

"I'll agree to that!" Sora and her mom chimed in response.

"Keiichi, I need to admit that I did...a Goddess move," Belldandy said, whispering in his ear. "I put a tracing spell on the rings, so I knew all along where they were. It was prudent, because I was concerned that some mishap like this might occur. But somehow, the tracing spell has been deactivated."

"I would be surprised if you _didn't_ make some kind of effort to see to their safety, dear Bell-chan," Keiichi answered sotto voce. Belldandy was pleased once again how deeply he saw into her motives, and into her heart. Rings or not, Keiichi was the best!

"But there has to be something more than meets the eye here, because obviously you don't know where they are. I don't think Mara would pull something stupid this close to the wedding, because that would have repercussions that would extend for years. Besides, she's starting to get the hang of acting like a sister to you. To me, I think it would be out of character for her to go into 'Demoness Attack Mode' right now. But what about Hild? Could she deactivate one of your spells without you knowing it?"

"That...isn't a possibility. Besides, the disappearance could not involve Hild. If Hild was responsible for the rings going missing, then Rind would be here in a flash, if Oni-sama didn't get here first. We had a little party while you had your men's party, and Hild swore upon the name of the Dark Lord to behave herself."

"Must have been some party..." Keiichi said with a grin.

"Keiichi, I need to contact Urd to give her a status update on our progress," Belldandy said, briefly closing her eyes. Her eyes flew open and she said "something's happened at the temple!" in an urgent voice.

Unfortunately, they were in the middle of the Hasegawa Noodle Shop and couldn't just zip out on a waft of light.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"You...bastard!" Urd shouted, almost spitting the words out at Cevn.

Cevn was looking at her warily, utterly shocked beyond words at how angry she was. One moment, he was at N.I.T. reviewing scholarly abstracts of articles being considered for inclusion in an Asian Studies journal, the next minute he was here. Obviously, a Divine force had brought him here. But oddly, there was no intervening media, such as Skuld's water, Belldandy's mirrors or Urd's TV sets. He had just flashed, finding himself tumbling to the tatami in his bedroom. Now Urd was going Frankenstein on him.

"It was you who took the rings!" Urd accused.

"Rings? Took the rings? What the hell are you talking about?" Cevn shouted back, flustered and resentful. "I know you don't like me half the time, but this isn't the time to be joking around and acting lunatic and confused, Urd. Even worse, you're confusing me as well! Me...taking their wedding rings? Now I've heard it all!"

"These rings!" Urd said, reaching inside of the leather winter jacket Cevn was wearing. His eyes popped wide as she retrieved a ring box. She opened it up and saw what she had expected. Two golden bands of Metaixodinum, set in a silken placing.

"What...the..." Cevn gasped out. "H..how?"

"How indeed, you righteous dipwad! Keiichi is one of your best friends, and this is how you treat _him_? This is how you treat my sister? Asshole! How can you act all interested in me, and pull this shit? How could you do this to _me_? To all of us! We didn't have to take you in, let you into our lives, let you become our friends, and in some cases let ourselves love you." Urd shouted.

«-- --»

Pryzm winced at this, unaccustomed to seeing a Goddess get so angry. According to Mom's plan, she and Ulfryn had secreted the ring into Cevn's jacket at N.I.T. and then transported him here. This would set him up as the fall guy as they had intended. Circumstances alone did the rest; even though he was innocent, Urd was hell-bent on making him out to be guilty. She and her sister and cousins were pouring it on, hovering around Urd in stealth forms and thought-casting shouts of "guilty!" She could see Urd's eyes flickering back and forth between Cevn and the phone.

Urd threatened that she was going to summon Keiichi and Belldandy.

"NOOO!!!" she heard her thoughts resound. Pryzm measured her mind and realized that she wasn't thought-casting accusations to the degree that would set this Urd Goddess off _this_ much. The level of resentment implied in Urd's bright-red aura was far beyond what she would have expected. She was caught off-guard; the intensity of the thoughts goading Urd to lash out...couldn't be produced just by Mom and us. There had to be something more. Pryzm halted her mental assault momentarily, realizing that she was hearing halfling sounds in her head. She couldn't make out the thoughtcasts, but she guessed that these were the same mysterious voices that her sister kept hearing; the same voices that had insisted upon the current scheme to get Urd to try and kill Cevn.

Now she was going crazy, hearing Ulfryn's 'ghosties'.

Everybody was looking at her Mom. Ulfryn's eyes were widened with an uneasy expression of recognition, and then she slowly levered her arm up and pointed behind her. Pryzm gasped as Mom turned to follow her gesture...and saw three faint forms pointing back at her. No, not at her.

This was totally uncool! Ulfryn's ghosties were here! Pryzm quailed with a snarl of fear in reaction to the ethereal apparitions, all three of which were gesturing towards Urd. Were they saying that Urd needed to be isolated with Cevn? That _Urd_ was the one who needed to try and attack Cevn? She had thought that it would be all the Divines who would need to be here, not just Urd.

Urd sent a broadcasting thoughtcast to summon Belldandy to the temple...

...and Mom blocked it just in time.

Pryzm looked at the three, who were nodding their heads in approval. She sensed that they were silently implying that no one else could be involved in this, otherwise the whole plan would fail.

"Mom...they say it has to be Urd who tries to kill him, no one else," her sister Ulfryn confirmed.

Pryzm returned her attention to flesh-and-matter beings, listening as Urd was screaming ugly angers at Cevn, completely chagrined. No doubt, Urd was assuming that her thoughtcast had summoned Belldandy and the others. Amidst the Goddess's yelling, she recognized that the shoutdown was beginning to be sprinkled with threats. Cevn was looking at Urd haplessly, his initial angry denials completely overwrought by Urd's behavior. She didn't know this new Aunt Urd at all, but she was definitely not acting like any Goddess she had met. This Urd was on a maniac resentment autopilot. All they needed was a little more time and Urd would blow.

Sygyn grinned at her with Demonic mischief, and suddenly broke ranks with the stealthily concealed Quad and materialized behind Cevn. In her real physical manifest!

"What the..." her Mom gasped out...a little too loud, as Urd turned and seemed to catch a glance at them. But only a glance, because her attention was almost immediately diverted.

Sygyn physically shoved Cevn forward with a heave, so hard that he had bumped into Urd. So that when he fell against her, Urd was knocked backwards off her footing, forcing the two of them to scramble unsuccessfully to gain balance. Creating a momentum, knocking both of them down...knocking her sister flat on her back...

...and causing Cevn to land right on top of her. One of his hands he had flailed out with to brace himself from the full force of the sudden fall was fisted onto the floor. The other one was resting, fingers splayed. On Urd's breast.

Pryzm gasped with embarrassment at this scene, knowing what this probably would cause.

«-- --»

"That does it! I'm not waiting for my sisters to come!" Urd shrilled, red-faced to a beet with anger. Quickly rolling out from under him, she hovered in the air and weaved a pattern in the air with her hands. Cevn was lifted off the floor and pinned against the nearest wall. He had been entangled in the intimate lives of her sisters and Keiichi for two years, and had repaid their openness and charity with this base act. By stealing the rings, he had not only disrupted the household, but he had insulted her family. His guilt was self-evident and he had to pay for what he did.

"Urd Thunderbolt!" she shouted, slinging shifts of blue-green energy at him. Not enough to kill, but enough to stun the nervous system like a taser, while giving him some first degree burns. Cevn had flinched, but to Urd's astonishment, he was completely unharmed. This was certainly unusual, as he should be howling with stinging pain. What was going on here? He should consider himself lucky that she zapped him with a bolt instead of flaming him with arcane fire. Urd hesitated, her thoughts momentarily adrift. Seeing him like this reminded her of something, a half-remembered attribute he had that she both admired and resented. By resisting injury, Cevn had exerted an authority over her that she deemed as uncomfortable and inappropriate. There he was, seemingly unharmed. Seeing him unscathed only challenged her resentments to redouble against him.

"Urd Power Thunderbolt!"

Triple the power, which normally would have crisped a mortal with electrical heat. The lightning lashed out, just as Urd immediately felt a haltering shock of guilt in reaction to how she had thoughtlessly gotten so drastic. Realizing what the fury of her wrath had caused her to do, she covered her mouth with her hand with fright, knowing that she had just killed him with this strength of this electrical discharge. He merited punishment for stealing the wedding rings, for sure, but trying to kill him was an unreasonable outlet of anger.

Cevn was looking at her with a surprised expression. "Urd, I don't know what's gotten into you, but you have to stop this!" he pleaded. "You could hurt or kill someone with that range of power. Or damage the temple, which could be dangerous."

Urd paused briefly, wondering how he could have survived a thunderbolt like that, and how he could have known that it was lethal. It flashed on her that his initial response was genuine surprise when she discovered that the rings were in his leather jacket. Regardless of his reaction...she had still found them on his person, which meant that he had taken them. He wanted to injure her sister by creating this mess! Plus he had fallen on her, and although he hadn't groped her in any deliberate ecchi way, he certainly had no respect for her personal space. No one touches the Eldest Norn like he had just done...

"Dangerous? Heh heh..._that's the point_! Consider yourself endangered! I now summon Urd Divine Thunderbolt!" she announced, marshaling an enormous amount of energy into a bolt that she sent right into Cevn's chest. In the ensuing conflux of energy, most of the temple fell in pieces around her in a shatter of fiery smoke and ash. The smoke hazed all around her, flickering with remnant flames. The temple was a charred mass of wood; a circular pattern of destruction that had spared only part of "Everyone's Tea Room" and the bathroom. The ground underneath was cratered from the heat.

Urd was stunned, because she had basically blown up almost the entire temple in an act of utter recklessness. On the Earthrealm, where mortals would witness explosions like this and instantly be interested and concerned. She knew that Cevn should be punished, but not at the expense of destroying the temple. It didn't matter that she had just incinerated him...but her chest felt heavy for some reason as she surveyed the cindered results of her handiwork.

But what really bothered her was her inner voice, which kept telling her that Cevn had nothing to do with the lost rings. And yet she had acted like this! Perhaps he had stumbled across them and had returned to the temple, expecting to be rewarded instead of accused. But despite this misgiving, she desperately wanted to murder him. Her heart and her mind seemed to somersault around each other; she _knew_ Cevn was innocent of wrongdoing, and yet the concourse of her heart was teeming with a fiery rage that kept encouraging her to pour the vials of her wrath on him.

"Urd, you can't keep doing this," Cevn said...which shocked her even further. "Don't you remember who I am? _What_ I am? Just stop already, because all you're going to do is exhaust yourself. Think! Think about you and me! Wait a minute...what am I saying? You...and...me? There was something...now I remember! You and I were in love, weren't we?"

"Wh..wha...what! _Love?!_ How dare you say such a thing! There..is.._no..you..and..me_!" Urd shouted angrily, completely taken aback that he would actually stake a claim to a joint proprietorship of her heart. Of her feelings. "There never was a you and me, you dumb fucking idiot mortal!"

Urd was almost beyond reason, but she was grounded enough to almost fancy that some outside force was plying her rage. There was something else too...just beyond the fingertips of her memory. Something about a blazing light, a funeral pyre or a bonfire. The harnessing of unimaginable energies. But the Demoness part of her was screaming its presence known, demanding bloodlust. Insisting that she exact the ultimate punitive measure on him. Cevn had just made her destroy the temple, and now he was mocking her by his very presence! Singing a Song of Opening while gesturing with a flourish of her hands, Urd unsealed her Goddess Seal while her Angel-Devil, World of Elegance, emerged to add her fury to hers. Doubly wrapped with an envelope of resentment at his stupid, retarded claim that she had been in love with him, she could feel World of Elegance burning with fevered rage.

"URD NOVABOLT!!!" she screamed...her eyes dewed with a lace of tears. Everything turned bright green for an instant, and she closed her eyes, horrified. Recoiling from herself, Urd froze with the realization that she had unleashed a Novabolt, her most powerful attacking spell. The anger she felt was instantly gone; shafted away as she realized that she had just obliterated the _entire solar system_.

"No, no no, dear Lord no!" her thoughts assailed her. This was impossible! Sanity returned in the wake of her depleted rage, and Urd was filled with revulsion towards herself. She had murdered Keiichi and all the others! Six billion lives! Keeping her eyes clenched tightly, she was unwilling to open them and witness the horror of the remaining debris. The green afterimage of the massive pulse of energy was slowly fading in her mind, yet remaining like a malachite-stained nightmare in her conscience. The Almighty would be on His way any moment; killing an entire planet of beings in an act of rage was reprehensible. She would be Exiled forever for this.

"Look what you made me do, you baka!" she gasped and slumped forward...

...and felt herself caught and warmly hugged.

She was Urd, Norn of the Past, doomed forever to be alone. Her heart was bathed with an indescribable shame and fear. Crazy as he was, Cevn had a delicacy of behavior that mysteriously cast a charm of innocence and purity over her. But how could this be? The only beings that could survive this were her sisters. Yet, she heard a gentle voice in her mind urging her to let go of her shame, encouraging her to create with love. An orchestra of memories played a symphony of confusion as recollections flickered through her consciousness.

Fragments of holding a dead body. Frightened about a soul dying in order to provide a gateway for an evil being. Jealous of a twin sister going after her boyfriend. Being comforted in the midst of a cosmic fire, just like she was being held now. Dying of a plague, but hearing soul-uplifting music that had drawn her back from the brinks of forever-darkness. A random conversation during a storm, discussing poetry. A bench in Beijing...

Silently screaming, silently weeping, because she had just destroyed everything that mattered. There would be no wedding, no Keiichi. Every mortal being that mattered to her...and she had slaughtered them all, just to assuage her pride and anger. No Earthrealm. No Cevn...a Cevn whom she had a smouldering deeply-felt affection, perhaps even love towards. She was haunted, as the rains of regret pooled alongside her memories. Searching her heart, she felt a stab of pain as she realized that there was so much more between she and Cevn than she could have ever believed. He was deep inside of her heart, and she had given him all of her love, starting in Beijing.

Just like her sister and Keiichi. A real love.

"Urd, are you okay?" she heard someone ask. At first she thought it was Keiichi, because it was a voice, not a thoughtcast. But Keiichi was dead, his atoms dissolved and flung in every direction. Her sisters would never forgive her for this. Her mind was ghosted with a vision of Belldandy's face; an expression of harsh accusation and betrayal in her sister's eyes. If she could create a black hole in her heart and collapse into it to hide, she would have gladly done so.

"I remember...that you love me. That I love you..." the voice insisted. Cevn's voice.

"Shut up!!!" she shouted at the impossible voice. Wiggling her arms free, she blindly flailed punches, hearing them thump upon his chest and shoulders. Shocked that she was touching solid matter, she reluctantly opened her eyes, expecting a diffusive vision of horror; a cloud of devastation wafting in space. She quickly glanced around and realized that the temple was untouched. _Everything_ was untouched; even the broken refrigerator had been fixed.

"What happened? How could..." she said, almost forcing the words because she was tapped out. She cradled her chin against his shoulder.

"Thanks, guys," she heard Cevn say to an empty room.

"And thank you, Urd, for being so lovable," he said to her, kissing her on the cheek.

«-- --»

Skuld had watched Urd unleash a bolt with the energies of a supernova, and had acted quickly to shield the Quad. But they...and she were already shielded.

Three beings collided with her from behind...and she collided with the Quad...

Whirlpools of rainbowed light surrounded her as consciousness dimmed.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

202X:

They were in a temple compound, in a country called Japan, sitting in a sunroom together.

Belldandy and Keiichi...with their twins Keleste and Keiyasu.

Skuld and Tomohisa...with their twin daughters Pryzm and Ulfryn.

Mara and Sythtsu...with their twins Falcyn and Sygyn.

Urd and Cevn...with their triplets Motokyn, Kitsunen and Baldurdth.

And not a single one of them knew why they were there.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"It's you guys!" Ulfryn shouted joyfully, gesturing at Motokyn, Baldurdth and Kitsunen. "You're no longer ghosts! You're _real_, just like all the rest of us. You're really here!"

Something about the way her daughter had said 'real' had caused the teenage girl Motokyn to shudder, Skuld noticed. Her niece? Another niece? Her brain felt like scrambled tofu. The light in the room seemed to pierce, feeling harsh to her eyes. Consciousness was slowing returning to her; she felt like she had been hammered by her own Mjolnir. Headache City didn't even begin to describe how fogbound her mind was, how much her head was pounding with discomfort. Attempting to gather herself, she realized that she couldn't hasten awareness; her thoughts were acerbic and almost stung when she mentally tried to grasp at them.

The sense of disorientation gradually faded as her emergent memories of what had happened came into focus.

When she found herself, Skuld began to spill out a narrative, explaining that she had been isolated in another TimeStream without Belldandy and Urd as sisters. The others listened patiently as she described the breadth of her experience, how it was like to live her entire existence with only Mara as a sister. Mara had Falcyn and Sygyn while she was finishing high school with Tomohisa, and then mid-way through college, she decided to get rid of Tomohisa's asthma for good. Because of that slightly selfish miracle, the Almighty basically told her that that she had to take responsibility and marry Tomohisa. So they became a happy family, as she was blessed with twins, just like Mara. She looked at Pryzm and Sygyn and winked.

"Who are they? Who are you?" Belldandy asked, and pointing at Mara added, "Who is she? A Demoness in our temple?"

Skuld felt her heart catch in her throat.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Belldandy was cautious, wondering why Skuld was regarding her with a keen dismay or disbelief. She looked to her daughter and son, and was surprised to see that they were looking at her with odd expressions as well.

"Don't you know who they are, Mom?" Keleste asked her with a sense of urgency. Belldandy felt strangely disquieted by her daughter's strong reaction to her irrecognition of these new children. Yet, she had an echo of recall, a shadow-sense of familiarity about all of this. Lodged in disbelief, she tried to explain to herself why she kept thinking that she had seen the new children just a moment earlier in this very room. But the truth seemed to be checked by obstacles, absences and confusion.

"They're our youngest cousins, Pryzm and Ulfryn. Remember, your younger sister's twin girls?" Keiyasu clarified, gesturing towards the pair. "And here's your sister, our Aunt Mara. These two are Falcyn and Sygyn, her twin children. Don't tell me you forgot the Demon side of the family!"

"Are you okay, sis?" Skuld asked her with cautious solicitude. Her younger sister's voice seemed to evoke a corresponding sense of remembrance, causing her heart to bend towards new clarity. She was showered with memories, as if she had been walking in the afternoon and had been caught in a rain-laden outbreak. Especially striking was the amazing story that her two children had spelled. An adventure, a story about a journey into the far future to prevent the destruction of everything. How they had journeyed through the millennia to search out her and Keiichi. Their encounter with their four new cousins in Vanagdrasil, whose aid moved them towards completing their long-held ambition to find a Mother and Father.

It all was starting to come back to her now.

She gripped Keiichi's hand tightly, seeking assurance and protection. Even though she was sitting on a cushion on a solid tatami-matted floor, Belldandy's emotions seemed to be plunging downwards into an swallowing gulf, and she was gripped by the distinct physical sensation that she would soon follow them, swept away in an uncontrolled free-fall herself.

Falling through the floor of her Soul.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"_That's it, Sis!_" Skuld said, encouraged her woozy older sister. "_Let it soak in for a moment, and you'll see through the confusion._" A tingling unease momentarily caught Skuld's attention when she noticed that Keiichi was looking at her with a dumbfounded expression mixed with a dawning recognition. For a moment, she felt totally scared out of her wits because it seemed that neither Belldandy nor Keiichi recognized her.

"_Belldandy, Urd, Mara...do you know who I am?_" she asked.

"_Better yet, do _-you know who you are-_, kiddo?_" Urd thoughtcast back with a grin. "_I know what you did to bring my kids back, as well as who you are. You'll always be my Little Sister, even when Pryzm and Ulfryn are older than we are now. As your hubby says, 'don't let your mind revolt...just float.'_"

"_Sisters, isn't it curious that the children all seemed to recognize each other immediately, while we adult Divines seem to have conflicted identities?_" Belldandy ventured. Skuld could see the revitalized awareness in her sister's eyes as she accented her thoughtcast with a sympathetic glance towards her and her sisters. "_Again, this sense of confusion! I seem to have many memories within me, some of which are memories of Keiichi and I living for years without Keleste and Keiyasu. Could it be that the conflicted identities that I am struggling with relate in some way to the possibility of -_conflicted realities-_?_"

"_Agreed. When I heard your son and daughter describe their ordeal of growing up without you, I thought it was quite strange. Gods, Demons...none of us just lose our children. Or our parents. When you didn't recognize Skuld's or my kids, I _-knew-_ that something really Blazin' strange was going on here,_" Mara related. Her Demoness sister's mental voice was a tonic of assurance to Skuld.

"_Now, it seems that my Falcyn and Sygyn have also 'journeyed' with Skuld's daughters in a blessedly drastic way, just like your son and daughter, Belldandy,_" Mara continued. "_What was the meaning of my daughter's words when she mentioned that the Trips 'are real'? The question I have is this...when _-weren't-_ they real?_"

"_But they weren't real to me, momentarily,_" Belldandy replied. "_How could I not recognize my own nephews and nieces? I feel silly even admitting that I didn't know them! Plus, I know myself well enough to recognize that I wasn't having one of my occasional spells of foolishness._"

"_Occasional?_" Mara teased.

"_There is one observation that I can assert with certainty,_" Skuld noted, gaining the attention of her older sisters. Whenever she implied a strong degree of certainty in a statement, the three would always listen closely. She smiled to herself, thinking about those long-ago years where it wasn't that way between her and her sisters. But how to explain this to them?

"_I have a sense that part of my memories were somehow...detained,_" she stated, unable to exactly describe the sensation in any other way.

"_Huh?!_"

"_Up until just a short while ago, Motokyn, Baldurdth and Kitsunen were unknowns to me as well,_" she admitted. "_Yet, even though I had never met them in a direct physical or temporal sense, Ulfryn saw them clearly. I can't piece it all together, but it seems that I encountered them in a UniTransic Axis. We had to travel in the past to save the future, just like Urd did that time when the guys were stranded in ancient Japan and we were all stranded in 2050 because of you-know-who. Looking at this logically, I cannot justify why I couldn't recognize the Trips. This is all heavy confusion. I'm just getting used to having two older sisters, and all of a sudden I learn that Urd has three children. But my sense of deja vu is running rampant here, because I feel that the Quad and I did something in the recent past. A type of corrective action to do with Elder Sister's wedding with Keiichi. But I don't know what we did! Forgive me, but I can't explain it to you guys!_"

She sensed that mentioning the wedding had shifted the emotional energy in the room, as Belldandy, Mara and Urd all seemed to become more animated.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"_Waaah! That wedding was one for the books,_" Urd and Mara interjected excitedly in twinned voices. Urd cleared her voice and launched into a descriptive narrative. "_That was one of the craziest times I had since I came to the Earthrealm. Everything was hectic during the days right before Belldandy's wedding. Remember how the house was in an uproar because Keiichi discovered that the wedding rings were missing? How everybody went out in a search pattern trying to find them, thinking that they had been stolen? Bell, you remember how you and Keiichi were flurrying all over Chiba to see if your wedding rings had been pawned off? Once Skuld and Tomohisa found the Ygg Passage Ring, we all realized that the rings weren't stolen, they were simply lost. Meanwhile, Cevn had found the wedding band rings at the N.I.T. campus, where they had fallen out of the ring box somehow. Your hubby Keiichi had been keeping them at Whirlwind, in Chihiro's safe. Realizing that everyone was probably in a panic because they may have discovered that the rings were missing, my guy returned to the temple with them. When I met him at the door, he made some joke about wanting to marry me and then gave me a pair of wedding rings. He had me totally flipped me by this, and I thought he was being earnest...until I realized that they were you and Keiichi's missing rings._"

Skuld sensed another energy shift, as Belldandy and Mara were staring at Urd like kittens ready to pounce on a ball of string. What was going on here that the two would be acting this way?

"_Urd, we've heard that one a hundred times,_" Mara and Belldandy noted, giggling at the old joke.

"_That's not how I remember it,_" Skuld interjected. She had the distinct impression that Urd's description of the events surrounding the lost rings was wrong, somehow.

"Cevn honey, you remember finding the rings a couple days before the wedding, right?" Urd asked, switching from thoughtcast to voice. Cevn nodded his head in agreement. "You really had me fooled with that fake marriage proposal. Lucky for you, I'm a forgiving Goddess..."

"_Forgiving? You?_" Mara teased caustically. "_That one act of idiocy by your future husband caused us all a bunch of grief later on, remember? You're lucky the three of us forgave _-you-_ for what followed!_"

Skuld couldn't follow what Mara was insinuating. She didn't have a clue about what her three sisters were talking about. Cevn playing a joke on her big sister right before the wedding? This was getting weird, because it seemed that Belldandy, Urd and Mara had experienced an event involving her Big Sister and Cevn that clearly had never happened.

"_It looks like it's up to me to remind you of your misdeeds, Urd,_" Mara stated with a glimmer in her eyes. "_During the year after Bell and Keiichi were married, you and mortal-boy were getting all snuggled up and happy-happy. Then he asks you to marry him for real. And what did you do?_"

"_Urd, I still can't fathom how you thought he was joking and said "no way!_" Belldandy added. "_Poor Cevn was so upset, he had the mortal equivalent of an emotional breakdown!" No wonder he acted like he did!_"

"_Totally, Belldandy,_" Mara agreed. "_Talk about meltdowns! He completely sputtered like oil on a hot stove, getting all brainless! He walked out on you without a single word. Meanwhile, my all-wise twin sister thinks he was playing some whacky romance game with her._"

"_You guys...please don't go through all the gory details again,_" Urd whined. Skuld recognized the expression on her sister's face; Urd's trademark 'I know what's coming next and I dread it' arched eyebrows and grimace.

"_But it's so fun to watch you squirm! Even Belldandy thinks so. And when Peorth or Rind's here, it's really hilarious,_" Mara answered. Her Demoness sister spun a description of what followed. She learned that Belldandy and Mara had sat Urd down that afternoon and explained why he had reacted so strongly...convincing her that he had _really meant it_ and that she had inadvertently rejected him.

According to Belldandy, she herself had burst into tears when they told her about Urd's mishap. At least they had gotten the part right where she met up with Tomo every day after school to walk home with him. But she didn't remember getting upset about Urd and Cevn's plight of misunderstanding, because it never happened.

Belldandy picked up on the narrative, speaking directly to Urd. "_Those were unpleasant times for all of us. While you were...indisposed...because of remorse over your silly mistake, we had to address Cevn's problems as well. He had gotten so swept up in bitterness and self-pity, he caught a jet to Beijing to make an escape, thinking that he could run away from his feelings. Of course, that's where Skuld found him. Once we found him, Mara struck upon the idea to orchestrate a bit of strife mischief while he was in China to pay him back for being so insensitive to you. But Skuld and I coopted Mara's strikes of strife, so to speak. As a result, Cevn wound up a few weeks later sitting on the same bench where he first admitted his feelings to you. Of course, we made sure you knew about this._"

"_Yeah, and there in Beijing, you said "yes" to him,_" Mara added. "_We were all there to watch, just so you wouldn't goof it up again._"

"_Mara, I seem to remember a certain Demoness with tears in her eyes..._" Belldandy corrected with a smile, drawing a flush of embarrassment from Mara. Skuld heard sniffling, and shifted her attention to Motokyn, Baldurdth and Kitsunen...who were all shiver-sobbing, touched to the core by this very personal vignette described by her sisters and their Mom.

_They had never heard this._

_She_ had never heard this either. When she listened in on Keleste and Keiyasu's recounting of their adventure in Ireland, Skuld felt like she was hearing a fairytale plucked out of a storybook rather than a description of actual events. Listening to her sisters, she was again feeling a similar sweep of disconnectedness. All three sisters were relating that she had an active role in the events following Belldandy and Keiichi's wedding. But it was all fiction to her. Skuld felt like she was being forced to trek down an unfamiliar path deep into the jungle with no GPS or Banpei to rely on. Belldandy had started off by not making sense, not recognizing Urd's, Mara's and her kids. Now it had flip-flopped and _she_ was the one left in the dark! The sense of displacement that she attributed to her sister seemed to have grafted itself onto her own self-awareness.

"_I..I don't remember anything like that happening between Urd and Cevn,_" she thoughtcast, her communioncation filled taunt with confusion. Now her sisters were looking at her with concerned solicitude, probably thinking that she had gone funny in the head.

"That's because it was _us_, Mom!" Pryzm shouted excitedly.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"We...meaning Mom, Ulfryn and I, plus Falcyn and Sygyn...went back in time to get you and Cevn together," Pryzm explained. "When we arrived there, you guys hated each other, and fought all the time."

"We still do," Cevn said. Urd elbowed him hard in the ribs. "Fight. As you can see. But that's part of the package deal I accepted by falling in love with someone as wild as your Mom..."

"...who is nothing more than a reflection of your own wildness," Urd shot back, leaning against Cevn's shoulder.

Sygyn, Falcyn, Pryzm and Ulfryn wove together an amazing tale of being stranded in some new part of the Syntrasil, and running into a super-old Skuld, who was actually their real Mom. Then they went back in Time to 20XX and met up with a young, unmarried Mara, who helped them orchestrate a scheme to snag the rings and send everybody into crazyville.

"Hey, you know that sometimes in strife there is growth," Mara quipped.

Then Urd had tried to blast Cevn, and ended up going completely overboard by unleashing a Novabolt, which Cevn simply absorbed. Ulfryn realized that Urd had figured out that Cevn was hooked in with the Ultimate Force, and it had undone some kind of spell, allowing them to fall in love again.

"You never told me that!" Urd confronted Cevn.

"That's because you never asked," Cevn shot back

"How could I ask what I don't know..whoo...whoaaa!!!"

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Now that she was in the 'right' dimension with her parents, Motokyn recognized that she was somehow gathering memories of growing up with Urd and Cevn, besides those recollections of being raised by her Mother alone. Like flowers in the meadow, each new memory was like a further sharpening of the sword of her Soul, rebirthing it. She quickly thoughtcast to Baldurdth and Kitsunen, who were also remembering glimpses of a life growing up. It was amazing to share in her brother and sister's differing experiences of their parents.

They all knew that the Quad had brought their parents together. She and her younger brother and sister remembered being part of the Expansion of Balance event, but were left outside because their parents inside weren't a couple. It was Kitsunen who came up with the idea that they try to communicate to Ulfryn. She thought that they might succeed if they followed Keleste and Keiyasu's example, knowing that their youngest cousin was the family psychic, as it were.

They learned that their parents were alive, existing in another one of those 'pocket universes' that was incomplete due to Isilblius. What no one could explain was why or how Cevn had disappeared right before the wedding, yet when Aunt Skuld and the Quad went back in Time, he was still there.

Baldurdth observed that it was all the doings of the SurGoth, not Isilblius. The SurGoth had attempted to destroy the universe, but was thwarted by some force. That same force allowed them to create the OmniOm, and meet their cousins. He noted that he seemed to have multiple sets of memories; including one where they had a normal upbringing and a second one where they didn't have a father, but were raised by their Mother.

They owed their cousins so much, because they had literally been rescued from limbo by them. Since all were gathering in one place, everything was apparently back in balance. Together, they thoughtcast this to their Mother and asked her to try and uplink with Yggdrasil.

They watched anxiously as Urd agreed and shut her eyes...and a moment later opened them and looked at them with an unreadable expression.

"It's all changed!" she gasped. Their Mother darted a look at their Father, than leaned right into his face, almost threatening.

"Cevn, you didn't...did you?"

Their Father simply nodded his head "yes", and Mom looked at him with a half amused, half-angry glare and whispered "separate bedrooms for the next two weeks." Uncle Keiichi must have overheard this, because he punched their Father on the shoulder playfully and noted "There is no wrath like a Norn scorned. Enjoy your sexile!" bringing laughter from all the adults and a blush to their Father's face.

"Married for 17 years, and he still doesn't have a clue about whether I'm serious or I'm just messing with his head. So much for the Balancing Force being all that!" their Mom said, kissing their Dad on the cheek and earning another round of laughter from the grown-ups.

Motokyn was getting upset, because she was feeling excluded. There was more to this than just Keleste and Keiyasu's account. Their other cousins...Falcyn and Sygyn, Pryzm and Ulfryn...had told a story about their parents' first romance that seemed as fresh as yesterday. It seemed like every parent and child in the room had just met; but the adult couples seemed to know each other. Obviously, their mom and dad had a history.

"So, we told our stories!" Ulfryn demanded, playfully. "As our cousins, it's your turn! We insist that you tell us yours."

"Ulfryn, just cool your jets. Give them time," Skuld countered.

"They need Time for their tale..."

With everyone looking at them, Motokyn said the first words that came to her mind.

"Uhh...we don't have a story," she answered. Almost immediately, that crazy stomach-wrenching sensation swept over them again, and she felt herself hitting the floor, as her sense of self collided with itself like a priest banging a gong to announce morning meditation.

When she came to, her training kicked in and she quickly sprung up to her feet, every bit the vigilant girl. She, her brother and her younger sister were the only ones in the room.

"Oh shit!!!" Kitsunen cursed.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --


	152. Pt 152: Nine Voices: The Triplets Pt 1

**Part 152: Nine Voices – The Quad Part Three**

MOTOKYN, BALDURTH and KITSUNEN:

Somewhen in 20XX, in a Christian church in metro Chiba, the Regents of Yggdrasil and Vanagdrasil returned to Themselves. As Beings of infinite awareness, They were puzzled to discover that Their Realms were irrevocably altered. There were _nine_ of each Realm, instead of just the OmniArc. Each Realm was contrived in vastly different which neither of Them could imagine or comprehend. Both Rulers were immediately ill-at-ease, no longer were Their Realms separate! There was something new, an in-between realm ready to be populated by Gods and Demons called a Midgardrasil. The entirety was encompassed in an Omninity-Omniternity. An OmniOm filled with nine Syntrasils. Each Syntrasil was an OmniArc unto itself, expanded to include plenitudes of shared and unshared God's and Demon's realms. Apparently, Yggdrasil and Vanagdrasil no longer existed; they were sub-realms or divisions of the new Syntrasils. The nine Syntrasils were filled with an innumerable number of God's Realms, Demon's Realms and Mid Realms, each one minutely different but blessed with uniqueness. Thousands of Yggdrasils and Vanagdrasils with lifestreams of Divine inhabitants. A ferment of Nullns and Louxs, Tengokus, Heiangokus, Jigokus to tend the mortal realms and each other. Dimensionality had been unleashed, and the Two Sovereigns were the axis of immanence, transcendence and emergence for all of these Realms.

They felt expanded Themselves, and were prized with puzzlement when they were contacted by a being from the Other Side. The Keeper of the Mid-Light, The Little Boy Who was Death, was actually communicating with Them. Breaking the silence of eons, the Reaper Boy introduced himself with a cheerful "Hi, Big Brothers!" and then proceeded to widen Their awareness even further. They learned that He had the ability to be in 73 trillion trillion places at once within each nano-second. _Every_ nano-second. His role was to "personally reap and greet" every being who had died a Real Death. Each Lord recognized at once that They would henceforth have an interdependence with the Reaper Boy, because They were confronted with vast Realms to sovereign and steward, and only the Death Boy could instruct Them how to partition Their essences to touch upon all of it.

Which He promptly did.

When Kami-sama and Oni-sama established uplinks with Their respective computer networks, They were answered by a computing entity that called itself the XOM Network. Surprise was a constant that Each had encountered, for the new Realms were filled with the inconstancy of order and chaos attempting to jettison each other. Learning that Their Realm's computers had been augmented with a unified inter-network was disturbing to both Lords. XOM quickly assured Them that it was servile to Their needs, and the integration of the three computer networks was a necessary measure because each computer had become corrupted by the SurGoth. The damage to each Realm's computer was so extensive that none of the three networks could possibly self-repair themselves. But an unknown outside force had linked them together, removing the limitations and liberating them to repair each other. From the perspective of almost every God and Demon, the computer networks would be virtually unchanged; the routine tasks that each Realm's computer had fulfilled in the past would continue to be fulfilled, undisturbed by the integration of Xeomn, Mnoex, Oemnx Networks. For example, the Vanagdrasil Mnoexic SubNet would not authorize Goddess Relief Office wishes, or the Yggdrasil Xeomnic SubNet would not redirect Chaostic energy should the Regent of Vanagdrasil choose to create a new residence for Himself. XOM thanked Them for Their time and excused itself to resume normal operations.

They became aware that Time itself was altered. Oni-sama was the most sensitive to this, as He had taken on the role that the Gods had assigned to their Norns. To His astonishment, there was _no_ Time. It was something different. 'Time' didn't have a beginning or an ending: on the broadest palette of reality, this meant that there was no Past, Present or Future. For how could one determine the 'Past' without a starting point, or determine the 'Present' other than the instantial moment, or designate a 'Future' based on an infinity? He queried XOM, and the sentient computer replied, indicating that Time had been recrafted into a TimeCosm without a genesis or terminus. Point-in-time references were meaningful only in the sense that they were comprehensible to Divines and mortals. Kami-sama immediately confirmed that the Norns were still maintained in their vital role as 'anchors' of Time, but they were no longer engaged by the traditional Past-Present-Future divisions of responsibility.

Both Lords discovered that They had received a vast 'power up' of Their abilities. If necessary, They could summon the entire energy of a Syntrasil. The Ultimate Force was no longer ultimate, but had become a force of balance integral to the Soular, Metanative and Love energies. It appeared that the primal Metanative energy itself was inexhaustible; as with Time, the Metanative Dimensional sequence was self-integrated. Entropy and atrophy were bound with each other, so that neither existed. The Divinity Dimension was vast, endowed with complete replicability and a fusion of infinite and transfinite spiritual energy. Each Lord recognized that the arcanical potential for Their subjects who possessed the gift of Divinity was unlimited, the only constraint was the imaginative faculties of each God and Demon. Magic and technology were truly fused in potentiation in the Arcane Dimension.

_Every_ dimension was suchwise, save for the three mortal dimensions of planar reality and the fourth dimension of Creativity, which most mortals would not fully reckon as a dimensional division until they were introduced to Next Level. Each of the 387,420,489 discrete and interstitial dimensions within the larger nine divisions of the Nine Dimensions was fully functional, and in many cases enhanced.

The Little Boy Who Is Death was as ungained by these changes as They were, perhaps even more so because of His youthful bearing. They could sense His unease as He explained that the dynamics of the Other Side had been irrevocably reconfigured. He informed Them that the Mid-Light was no longer an Instrumentality. The Soular energy that was fundamental to all sentient beings, be they mortal or Divine, was also rendered inexhaustible by virtue of its self-creation. In the recent before-now, the price for each surrendered Soul was a loss of individuality. The resulting Instrumentality of Light was comprised of the collection of Soular energies from each newly Dead. This assemblage served as the wellspring of creation for the "Living Realms" as He called them, as it was the source of Soular energy.

In a panic, the Little Boy Who Is Death was struggling to accommodate the expansion of his Realm, for now there was no medium of exchange between those who were Reaped and the creations of Soular energy. In the new Mid-Light Realm, the sources of Soular energy didn't require the relinquishment of 'self' into the Instrumentality in order to free 'Soul' to be used to power 'Love' in the OmniArc. He explained the Multiplicity to the two Regents, who were both relieved that They no longer had to guardian "The Secret"...that upon Real Death, a Soul is recycled at the expensive of the 'individual self' of each individual. But it was difficult for Him. Instead of guiding Souls into the Instrumentality, the Magister of the DeathRealms had a _population of individuals_ to contend with; a situation that was far beyond His experience. Potentially, every being who had ever lived would find a haven in death within His Mid-Light Realm. Already, all those who had passed beyond the Living Realms...every being who had ever died...had been reborn in the Mid-Light with their individuality intact. Instead of being a greeter, the Little Boy Who Is Death was now a ruler of a vast population of 'ghosts', for lack of a better term. Presiding over a large population of beings was a circumstance that Kami-sama and Oni-sama knew all too well, with Their Realms of individual Gods and Demons. They recognized that it was incumbent upon Them to teach The Little Boy Who is Death how to administer His Realm, now that it was filled with beings which maintained permanent identities and personalities. Ironically, They would need to teach Death how to recognize and respect Life. Finally, the Regent of the DeathRealm couldn't explain how, but it appeared that Soul and Love energies were being _generated_, rather than recycled in His Mid-Light Realm. Both Lords weren't concerned about this, but were interested in the meaning of it.

Love itself had become unbound.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Brother, it seems We have a kid Brother now," Oni-sama remarked, referring to the Reaper.

"A child in form, but equally as wise as We," Kami-sama noted. "Perhaps He will share Our sense of humor."

"Such would be welcomed. Mayhaps He will also have a seeing into this matter that eludes Us."

"My beloved Brother of Darkness, the changes wrested upon Us are daunting, and our New Brother has been visited by transformation in His Realm that easily equals Ours. Matters complex and profound face the Three of Us, and He is as wanting for awareness as We find Ourselves. We are all traveling upon a daunting new pathway, caught up in the midst of this upheaval," Kami-sama explained.

Upon finishing Their consideration of the Regent of the Mid-Light Realm, both Lords returned Their attention to more immediate matters. Specifically, how all of this had occurred without Their foreknowledge...and what was the disposition of the foul SurGoth They had engaged in battle. They had dispatched the abomination with strong contest, but it appeared to have fled at the very last.

"What has happened in this place, My Brother? For I would rather be ringed with fools than ringed with mysteries," Oni-sama declared, His bright-red eyes vivifying His magisterial frustration. "Yea, tho' I know that reality is not itself, and the plenum will yield forth the intrinsic and extrinsic answers that I demand in the morrows that lie ahead...still, I demand truths!"

"Verily so, My Brother, for all of existence possesses many layers, and it seems that even We are not privy to all of its intercourses," Kami-sama agreed. "The SurGoth serves as an instructive example of this principle."

"What of the SurGoth?"

"What of the SurGoth indeed."

When Oni-sama had arrived, Kami-sama was judiciously overseeing a marriage ceremony, attended by mortals, Gods, and several of His Demonic children. Forthwith, He had TimeStilled everyone in this mortal sacrosanct so that He and His Brother could pay eloquence to each other without heed of eaves-listeners. But there were exemptions; as several Divines plus a mortal and a cyborg were strangeways unaffected by His actions. Once He succeeded to persuade his Brother of urgency of the dire matters, a voice that had been inarticulate through the ages began to herald hateful paeons in praise of oblivion. Afor, He had forgotten that voice, so buried it was in the dimness shadowing His earliest memories. A force of antipathy and enmity, whose straining was couched with malevolence and the powers to make good its destructive design. The cyborg had named it, pinioning a final seal of truth to the matter. His Brother Kami-sama had redoubled His TimeStill, joining in the effort to protect those who would mustneeds be shielded from the impending conflict with the entity called the SurGoth.

They had done fierce battle with the foul SurGoth, forcibly admonishing the anti-Being of its goals. Concealing itself inside of the form of a Goddess, the SurGoth had hard fought Them, and then it had fled...wounded...from the environs via the Gate of Judgement. As He and Kami-sama were reckoning how slight the distance was between Their intervention and the sum annihilation of Love itself, They found _Themselves_ being TimeStilled.

Both of Them could only posit that the SurGoth had retrenched itself and had proceeded to overcome Them with curious expedience. There was no other making of comprehension to deem these circumstances. Both Sovereigns were of one mind and heart in this matter: that something other than Themselves had mastered the sequence of events while They were TimeStilled and had done away with the SurGoth and saved Reality. For this curious new OmniOm could have only have come about through the resolution of a cataclysmic event.

"Enough of this trifling," the Lord of the Demons asserted with barely concealed dudgeon. "I deigned to intrude upon this ceremony because of the SurGoth. I recall that it had disguised itself in the form of a Goddess, the form of which We destroyed. Yet it escaped via the Gate of Judgement, incorporeal and yet in partial mastery of its faculties. Forsooth, events appear to disclose that it impudently cast a TimeStilled state upon Us. Certain further prodigies were created in the interim, which I can adjudge as only being possible if they were wrought with the covenant of Balance."

"This is sure verity, but what of the nearer plight?" Kami-sama questioned. "What of the assembly of Divines and mortals in this place? My Sons and Daughters, Your Sons and Daughters...whence have they departed? There is none here but We..."

"Excuse me, most Sovereign of Sovereigns," a young Goddess interrupted Him. They turned Their attention to the sound...

"We need Your help."

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

THE EARTHREALM, 202X:

As soon as Kitsunen gained enough awareness to blurt out "Oh Shit!!!" she had secretly cursed herself out for being foolish enough to not listen more closely. She was confronted with a room emptied of Divines and mortals and realized that the three of them were majorly fucked. _Everyone_ was gone, including her Mother! No warning, no explanation, no nothing to prepare her for the disappearance. Retracing her thoughts, she recalled how she had listened a little as her younger cousins prattled on about alternate TimeStreams, building some kind of process of creation, the Gate of Judgement...

Again, she had pitched over onto the floor, the room cartwheeling around her, her head banging like a drum as she came to. Oddly enough, when she burst in with her "Oh Shit!" comment, Motokyn had nodded her head in silent agreement.

So they were stranded by themselves in their temple, and she didn't have a clue why because she was tuned out. Oh well! The past was the past; it was time to float in the now instead of beating herself up.

"What do I remember before we all got loopy and passed out?" Kitsunen asked herself.

Being who she was, her attention had been frequently distracted by the two boys who were her new cousins. One was a handsome God, a little on the short side but lean and lithe, with a too-serious expression on his face and a sense of mastery over the arcane. The other was an equally handsome Demon, whose too-serious expression was all poser; a mask to conceal the depths of bravado and mischief in his character. So she had been a little bit inattentive to the gossip-swapping and storytelling. So what? How was a girl supposed to listen to all this cosmological mumble-jumble when two new delicious boys almost her age were sitting in the same room?

"C'mon...pheromones and all that! Get real!" she thought to herself. Her capricious heart had been caught in her throat as she took in every new nuance of the two boy's behavior that she could sneak away with, without appearing to be gawking.

Could Divine cousins get married?

Moving past that fanciful whimsy, she tried to cash in her nerves and chill out. She was ramped into excitement by all of these new faces, intrigued by the interplay of three more family's worth of personalities. But there was a huge downbeat to all the excitement. There was this guy who supposedly was her Father. Kitsunen had grown up knowing that her Father had been a mortal being, who had disappeared under mysterious circumstances before she and her older sister and brother had even been born. Now this missing Father was back, it seemed. But it was totally unsettling to see her Mother being so affectionate towards a man who was practically a stranger. To her dismay, Mom was almost acting like _her_ around this new mortal man, or at least like how she used to act around boys. All clingy and giggly and silly and goofy and flirty. She wanted to shout "get a room!" to rid herself of the disturbing sight of her Mom and this guy acting so baka romantic. Mom was behaving like a teenaged boy-crazy girl, which was very uncool and disgusting to Kitsunen. She herself had passed through that phase of immaturity a couple years back; now, boys were more of a game to be played than a status symbol to be had. It wasn't any fun when she could have any boy for the taking in her high school.

She felt more mature, and less mature at the same time. Of course, she'd grown up knowing that her Mom was flirty with every male she came in contact with, even Uncle Keiichi. But Mom had never shacked up with any of the Gods who came to pay her visits. Kitsunen had never seen her Mom in a romantic realm of love; but as a little girl, she had overheard the bouts of distraught weeping Mom had. Aunt Belldandy would always tend to Mom during these bursts of deep sadness, providing a loving, stabilizing presence. But Mom seemed unable to put the grief behind her for good...and Kitsunen had learned the ugly truth that her invincible Mother had been heartbroken by the absence of a mere mortal man.

She was both massively happy and massively pissed off at this new development.

Thankfully, there were two treats in the midst of her turmoil called Keiyasu and Falcyn. So she had remained distracted, lapsing into inattention a bunch of times and missing out on most of the stories.

"It's all good," she reminded herself. It was no big deal, because she had her older sister and brother to rely on. They paid while she played. That's how it had been since she was little, and that's how it was today. Even Mom would get frustrated with her from time to time for being so carefree. Aunt Belldandy could lecture her until her face was as blue as her eyes, and it still wouldn't change a thing. She was the wild one...always had been, always would be.

And Mom didn't even know the half of it.

Neither did Motokyn, her older sister by a mere two hours. But an older sister that seemed _years_ older than she was. Boys at school drooled over her sister for completely different reasons than they drooled over her. She was the fox-girl of the school, the coolest hit of the party, the mistress of gossip and mischief, the trend-setter that everyone wanted to be like...while Motokyn was the unattainable school idol with knockout looks and a steel-hard demeanor. The girl was juiced into a full-on Ninja Girl mode almost all the time! Often when she and her circle of friends used to joke around, they tagged Motokyn as the reincarnation of Yagyu Jubei or Musashi Miyamoto. Her sister Motokyn was completely off-the-perch in terms of self-discipline, approaching everything with the steely mindfulness of a martial artist. Straight A student. Class President. President of the high school Student Council. Captain of the swimming team. Never went on a second date with guys, because the first date was always enough to prove that any boys in her school couldn't hold a shine to her. Too good for her own good, in other words. But boys would be boys...and Motokyn's lofty unattainable status drove all the guys at school nuts, of course. She secretly thought that that her older sister didn't have a boyfriend because she probably intimidated the shit out of any guy who had the guts to take her on a date. With good reason, because Motokyn had the edge on everyone when it came to ass-kicking. Even the toughest boys in school...any school...wouldn't try to mess with her. This summer, her older sis was going to spar off in the fucking _National Kendo tournament_ for crisesakes! All because her kendo sensei didn't know what the hell else to do with her! Two sides of the same coin, she and her older sister. Both she and Motokyn had inherited their Mom's good looks: she had the 'total babe' genes while Motokyn had the 'elegant model' genes.

She glanced at her brother Baldurdth, whose face mirrored her own distraction and agitation. Baldurdth was a trip without a suitcase, as usual. Anyone catching a first glance at her brother would think that the boy seemed almost totally otakuized; appearing to live in an isolated fantasy world. In junior high and senior high, Baldurth seemed oblivious to the social life of school, barely interested in girls. As a result, she and Motokyn spent most of their early teens chewing over their definite concerns that he might be gay. Not that his sexual identity or preference would change how much they loved him one bit. But this was the Earthrealm, with its oddball assortment of stigmas that the mortals attach to each other. Regrettably, Earthrealm mortals treated homosexuals like shit, and were only now just starting to ease up on this prejudice and get a clue that alternative lifestyles were not some kind of 'threat' to moral decency. In this sense, their brother's sexual orientation, or lack thereof, had become an area of mounting concern and curiosity. At least until she convinced Motokyn to help her undo his privacy spells so they could snoop out his room.

Laughably, they didn't find the predictable collection of porno magazines hidden away in his room under the futon. Instead, they discovered that Baldurdth had accumulated a figurine collection of dozens of sexy popular female anime characters, enough to populate two bookshelves. His 'stash', as he termed them once she and sis had called him out. So he was hetero, but completely geek-wadded. Now, she and Motokyn had to keep a rein on him, so he wouldn't be hopelessly sucked into the black hole of the hard-core comiket nerd set. But there was hope. In high school, a few of her friends were smitten with him; mostly high-gear, high-maintenance girls who wanted him for his shaggy looks and his sparkling sense of whack-beatnik humor. But appearances can be deceiving. Baldurdth wasn't no fickle-brained otaku by any means...despite his casual persona, distracted mannerisms, too-sloppy sense of style, and his bouts of spaciness. Kitsunen knew better.

Her older bro was a nutcase-level genius. While Kitsunen struggled with her classes and got mediocre marks, while Motokyn disciplined herself with late-night studying to score high on tests...Baldurdth goofed off all the time, and then would jump on a test and score out perfect results. It wasn't just in the Earthrealm where his brilliance shined. A couple months back, he announces in SecondTier Inculcation that he has a possible explanation for the energy transference factors of the Swarp Hypernalities...something the freakin' _adults_ couldn't even figure out! With his brains, Baldurdth could go far...especially if he had a steady girlfriend to steady him. He was a good catch despite his train-chain of quirks. If she wasn't his sister, Kitsunen knew that she herself might even consider him fair game for boyfriend entrapment maneuvers. For a long time, she didn't have a clue about where Baldurdth had gotten his damned brainknots from, until one afternoon when Aunt Belldandy had sat her down and told her that Mom's Conclusion of her Transcend Inculcation was the highest in _seven Decas_.

If Mom was so smart, what the hell was she doing messing around with a mere mortal man?

It was fascinating and disgusting watching the two of them, her Mother and this new mortal guy whose name she had already forgotten. The whole thing reminded her of any number of stories her girlfriends had told her about their mothers who had remarried. Most of them felt soured by the whole deal and snapped off towards their new 'fathers'. Almost all of her friends, girls and guys, disliked their new stepdads mostly because they just couldn't handle having a new wanna-be father-figure in their households. And many of her girlfriends totally had good reasons to hate their new stepdads: they were either pricks, dickheads, perverts, or total losers.

Now she was facing the same messed-up shit. This was almost the same thing as getting a new stepdad. Open cup, add water, microwave...and presto! Instant Father.

She remembered how Mom had teased her new Father about "separate bedrooms for two weeks", and all the Aunts had laughed along with it. The two new Aunts, Skuld and Mara, seemed to know and accept that her Mom and this new guy...who was supposedly her Father...were a married couple. But _she_ couldn't accept it, not one bit! She _wouldn't_ accept it! The adults may acknowledge that there was history between the two, but she wasn't ever part of that history. This whole thing really bites, because her Mom was no longer her Mom; she was no longer the same steadying maternal presence in her life. Mom didn't act like herself around him, she acted like a total love-struck retard. Their little romantic joking around wasn't funny; it made her almost want to hurl!

Thank the Almighty that she had two new cute cousins to play with. Kitsunen knew that she would have them eating out of her hand within a month, even if one was a Demon boy.

So "Oh Shit!!!" it was.

Welcome to the new and confused version of Kitsunen's messed-up, so-called reality!

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

There was an ancient Earthrealm legend which relates that when a boy is between two girls in age, and the older sister is serious and the younger sister is mischievous, then that boy would grow up subdued and quiet. It should have been even worse in his case, because he and his sisters were triplets and the age difference was a squeeze play. The weird compression effect of being forever sandwiched in between them in age: an hour older than one and an hour younger than the other one. So being the middle boy between sib sisters was supposed to make him all shy and well-mannered, according to the folk legend.

Which was a total crock of bogusness. Didn't turn out that way...just ask Mom and the sisters. There was nothing withdrawn about him at all, because Baldurdth wanted to _know_, wanted to talk, wanted to think.

All the time.

It was delicate torture for him to listen to the accounts his new cousins had just offered up. Delicate, because their stories fired his mind with arcing broad strokes of possibilities. Torturous, because he needed to talk, ask questions, verbalize possibilities, extrapolate speculative outcomes based on know experiences ...and wasn't allowed to. Every time he tried to speak up, Mom had "shsshed" him for some reason.

But there was so much to take in!

Amazing as it seemed, he had _six_ new cousins! Massive family upgrade! Aunt Belldandy and Uncle Keiichi's missing twins were somehow restored to them, the boy and girl that they should have had a year or so after he and his sib sisters had been born. He felt so happy for his Aunt and Uncle, he could almost taste their joy. But even more interesting were the two new Aunts and the four _more_ cousins. Quite astonishing was the fact that two of them Demons. The Demoness girl seemed only a couple years younger than he and his sisters, but she was mega-cute in a pixieish sort of way and overflowing with intelligence and creativity. Baldurdth found his mind wandering, dreamworking into all the deep discussions about science and philosophy he could have with her. In contrast, the Demon boy seemed to have a looming, whale-like intelligence; brooding but profound. The two youngest girls were like oil and water; one was a total tomboyish girl with a strong-chin fierce independent streak, the other one was closer to his own laid-back personality. Mallrat was the word that came to Baldurdth's mind when he considered the cousin called Ulfryn. A junior version of his younger sister, perhaps.

Keleste and Keiyasu, the long-missed twins, were everything and more than what he had expected them to be in his imaginings. Keleste had her mother's beauty, and she was ripe with self-confidence except for one little dink in her armor; she seemed to be totally insecure about her looks. It was almost comical watching her manifest some kind of bandana to cover her antennae hair, and then Aunt Belldandy would instantly whisk it away nano-seconds later. After a couple hundred attempts, she finally gave up and Aunt Belldandy kissed her on the forehead. Keiyasu, on the other hand, was almost glued to Uncle Keiichi, already forming a deep father-son bond that was wordless, yet very powerful and palpable. Must be nice to feel that way about a father! Keiyasu struck him as the type that was more into magic than tech; but he seemed to have insecurities that rummaged the depths of his soul. Depths of soul that Baldurdth knew he himself hadn't reached yet.

It was hard to imagine the two growing up almost 150,000 years without parents. Granted, he and his sisters were older, but their age was measured in Earthrealm years, with the occasional chronological 'snap back' if they decided to spend a century in Yggdrasil and then return the same day in 'Earthrealm relative time'. Adding up the total years he had spent in Ygg and Earthrealm, Baldurdth had less than a single millennia of remembered existence. His life was a fleeting glance at reality, compared to theirs.

The two new Aunts were intriguing; especially the Goddess who was Mom's youngest sister. He could sense her thoughtcasts while the adults were talking, and found himself losing track. This Skuld...she was totally on a genius level like Mom's, but massively geared towards tech. The other Aunt, the Demoness one, was a flip into the edgy zone. It was already crazyass to even consider the idea that he could have an Aunt who was a Demoness. But then she said that she was an actual Demon Queen! What a mind-blower that was! He could see why too, because he found himself arrested by her looks...she was definitely too-true-to-not-drool beautiful!

And these were his new Aunts? A super-cool genius and a Demon Queen?

He didn't want to think about the man who seemed to be his Father. Everything was cool except that part, and he wished he could skip past the presence of this pseudo-Father like he could skip past commercials when he was watching anime. No one knew if he had bailed on Mom, or had been zinged to another part of SpaceTime...and he wasn't telling.

Despite his reticence towards having a mortal father-figure thrust upon him without warning, Baldurdth didn't miss the fact that his Mother appeared to be even more radiant with beauty, as if this mortal dude had lit up some previously dimmed lamp in her being. Mom was beaming with energy and grace in a different sort of way, something he had never seen her do before. And it galled him to see it, live and direct. This "Cevn" mortal guy even tried to talk to him, but he totally gave him the silent treatment. No way was he going to offer a single word to the guy who had bailed on Mom, leaving her alone to fend for herself and three kids!

Kitsunen was doing her usual moves, tuning everybody out and going off into whatever la-la-land she seemed to castaway into when serious matters were being discussed. He didn't miss that his younger sis was captivated by the two new male cousins; she might as well have had hearts for eye pupils a couple times, she was so entranced. Kitsunen was a Chinese puzzle box of a girl; she had this unpredictable streak that would seemingly capture her in the midst of her own mischief...but she almost always got away clean with whatever she had been scheming. Thank heavens that Goddesses didn't need contraceptives. She had this way about her that could hypnotize any guy she met, a quality that Mom claimed she had when she was their age. Like Mom, Kit was a total flirt. Baldurdth felt heavy-hearted at times, because he knew that Kit often felt overshadowed by he and Motokyn, even if she didn't admit it. The weirdest, most craziest part of his puzzling younger sister was that she was possibly the most emotionally stable of the three. She was stable in two senses. Kitsunen seemed to stay in tune with her feelings; if she went bonkers emotionally, she really went for it. Her feelings were stable because they ran strong in her blood and she didn't try bury them away or sandbag them until later. But her other strength was her emotional steadfastness. Compared to he and Motokyn, Kitsunen was rock solid when it came to keeping her emotions in check during the critical times when everyone else would lose their cool. She could be stable as a rock instead of getting all bent. It was said that fox-spirits lived for thousands of years in Japan; his sister seemed to prove this because she was almost unshakeable at times.

As the stories were unraveling bits and pieces of this crazyass confusion, he could sense that Motokyn was assessing. Her disciplined coolness contrasted with Kit's spicy rashness. Motokyn was the kind of sister with whom he could discuss an idea or concern for an hour while she would simply sit silent and listen...and then in two sentences she would point out a flaw, oversight or insight that would leave him feeling dumbfounded. She definitely had her finger on his 'idea self-destruct button' most of the time; except when he got into the superscience type stuff that would confuse even the adult Gods and Goddesses. He had grown up with Motokyn being very protective of him and Kit, to the point where she would majorly kick ass if anyone tried to bully them. In third grade, it gotten so insane that all the boys in her class decided to gang up on her, and she wasted all forty of them in a massive playground brawl. Which was why Mom hooked her up with the local kendo school...which then called in a kendo grandmaster a couple years later to instruct her because his older sister seemed to be some kind of modern day 'sword saint' whose skills far exceeded the local kendo dojo master. In his eyes, his older sister _was_ a saint in a sense, because she was so damned driven and disciplined. Just like the heroes and saints of old Japan, Motokyn didn't fuck around if she wanted to accomplish something. But it had cost her a big piece of her heart, and he knew that his prideful older sister was hurting and lonely at times. Like Kit, Motokyn wouldn't admit it.

Two sisters in denial.

His Mom might as well be in denial as well, as he remembered how she carried on with this Cevn guy, supposedly his Father and apparently her husband. Motokyn seemed enigmatic about their new 'father', which was to be expected. But he didn't miss Kit's obvious distaste towards him; it was apparent from his younger sis's aura that she was very conflicted and angry about the whole matter. As for himself, Baldurdth was clear to his conscience about how he felt regarding this change.

He had grown up without a father, and he didn't fucking need or want a father now.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Motokyn looked at the empty room and felt ruffled once again. How was it that everyone was gone, except she, Baldurdth and Kitsunen? Her younger brother and sister seemed to be bowls of confusion, especially Kit. She herself was trying to master her growing sense of panic, as if her blood was trying to force its taste onto her tongue.

Her Mother was gone.

Kitsunen's "Oh shit!!!" didn't even begin to describe what had just happened. Disconcerting as the disappearances were, they didn't hold a candle to the freakish memories she had of events right before she had found herself in a roomful of new faces. Whatever it was, it had gone down something like this...

..._she was in the practice hall at the Kendo Dojo_ with sensei and grand-sensei, who were trying to polish her for the National Tournament. Her dream. Half of the girls at school thought she was a stuck-up bitch, while the other half fawned over her like she was some idol star. But she had a dream, one that had filled her heart and thoughts for at least a few minutes every day, ever since she had first stepped foot inside of this dojo. Within two years of starting kendo she was regularly beating her sensei during shiai, the bouts to hone the oneness with spirit, body and sword. What followed was that her sensei had humbly requested _his_ sensei to come and train her. The old man, a retired 9th dan grandmaster who was almost eighty years old, had decided to break with his 'retirement' and take her on as a pupil of merit, which was a signal honor. Mom had literally cried when she came home after practice that day and told her the news about her new sensei.

That was in fifth grade. Now she was in high school. Her grandmaster sensei had taught her much more than bouting; he had given her a precious gift through his teachings. Motokyn knew that he had bestowed on her an inheritance of his lineage: whether she wielded a bamboo shinai or a real tamahagane steel katana, she could sometimes feel totally immersed in the Way of the Sword during her workouts.

Practice finished, she was in one of the dojo's side rooms toweling off the perspiration when suddenly everything disappeared...and she had then flashed back into existence inside of the cockpit of some kind of spaceship, along with her brother and sister. Kit was dressed in her casual home-wear t-shirt and shorts and Baldurdth was his normal mod sweatshirt and jeans self. But she wasn't wearing her sweat-dampened kendo gi. Instead, she was dressed in a formal miko outfit, the deluxe version one would expect a shrine maiden or a champion kendo master to wear. They didn't know where they were, what was going on, or what they were doing inside of a spacecraft.

Kitsunen kept up a steady stream of jokes and that was enough to calm her down somewhat. Unlike she, Kit was taking this in stride; worried but not overly much. Motokyn knew that her younger sister possessed strengths of character that she wasn't even aware of; attributes that had bypassed her notice but were clearly evident to Baldurdth and she. Kit didn't suspect that it took a certain tenacity of personality to deal with the sometimes-sordid affairs of high school life; a skill she had developed as a social expertise.

Growing up, Motokyn used to feel so resentful towards her younger sister because Kit always seemed so playful and happy, while she had to strive so hard for any of the advantages she had earned. She expected a lot out of herself, while Kit expected a lot out of everyone but herself. Motokyn was grateful for one thing: she could rely on the fact that she had the most unreliable little sister on the planet...which totally endeared her towards her younger sis once she started developing a disciplined mind. Kitsunen was a melee expert; a warrior who seemingly lacked skills but could defeat a host of enemies. In her teens, Kit became her best friend in addition to being her cherished younger sister. She knew that the guys in school sarcastically nicknamed them "Fire and Ice", but Kitsunen was always the one who kept urging her chase her dreams. Perhaps because her sis was so flighty, Motokyn suspected that Kit herself didn't even know what her own dreams were. Her precious, nutcase sister...who seemed years younger than she, even though she was born only two hours later.

Baldurdth was a good example of Dao in action, because he was so oppositional. He had goals and dreams, but they seemed to change every week. Kit was hyperactive, she was hyper-disciplined...which Baldurdth was just plain hyper. She sometimes daydreamed when she was little about how it would be like if they had been born three sisters, instead of two sisters and a brother. The older Baldurdth got, the more confusing he seemed to act. He had pitched a total fit when she and Kitsunen managed to contravene his protection spells and discovered his sexy anime models. At school, he would sometimes completely ignore the most basic social decorum, much to the amusement of her female friends. But she understood the edge he was walking on, even if she didn't approve of it.

When she got frustrated with Baldurdth one time too often, Mom had pulled her aside and confided to her, sharing her maternal insights into Baldurdth's nature; the hidden truths about her brother that on a Mother could know. Mom said that Baldurdth "couldn't turn his mind off." Every mind needed to rest and reset, which was why meditation was so important in the practice of kendo. But her brother's mind wouldn't stop for nothing, just like a young child who would run out into the street without even looking for cars. It would get bad, because sometimes the course of wisdom would clearly dictate "if you can't think, then don't"...and yet Baldurdth would continue to think even when he shouldn't. Numerous blowups of various school projects in Yggdrasil attested to this. But genius was a two-edged sword; she was proud of her brother's scholastic achievement in high school. In Yggdrasil, he had taken the adults by storm with his assertive theories on Swarp Hypernalities. Her precious, genius brother...whose thoughts were as mercurial as greased lightning, but if one was able to catch one of those thoughts, they would be holding a flash of insight in their hands.

So there they were. The three of them hurtling along in some kind of space vehicle that was so dense with Divine tech, it seemed to be over-bounding in complexity. Destination unknown, purpose unknown.

Of course, it was Baldurdth who had quickly figured out that they were inside of something he called a "TimePod". A little ship that was an impossibility, because it operated using a fluctuating process of Time itself. A short time later, he figured out that the _ship_ was built out of fluctuating Time. That was completely unsettling to even consider. Since all three were the children of a Norn, they had inherited an awakened awareness of Time, and Mom had added to this by educating them about the subtle aspects of Time that most Gods and Goddesses wouldn't ever encounter in Inculcation.

Baldurdth seemed to get very quiet for the longest stretch, and when she and Kitsunen kept on him to say why, he finally admitted that he had deduced that this ship's destination was the very end of Time.

That's when her heart flip-flopped like a koi fish out of water.

After what seemed like a forever, the ship spewed them out into an empty void. Lifeless, except for ten Divines, six of them teenaged Gods and Demons her age and younger. One of the Adults claimed she knew the three of them, even though she had never seen the white-haired Goddess before. Suddenly, she had to shift her mindset from winning a national kendo tournament to winning back a universe by re-creating what had been destroyed.

Something had destroyed Everything.

The adults read some proclamation that made her eyes tear up unexpectedly, and suddenly she and the other teens were engaged in a inane 'magical girl' and 'robot pilot' type routine...and she had to go last because she was the oldest. She would be the final one in the order, having to embarrass herself the most in the insane charade or parody. But this was also deadly serious; supposedly a Goddess had given up her life to get she and the other eight children here. Silly as it looked, stupid as it sounded, when Motokyn reached into her heart to balance the discord and the swan, she found herself wielding two naginata with immense power and feathers instead of swordtips.

Then they actually created an everything that encompassed the entirety of existence, called the OmniOm. In truth, an uncountable number of God's and Demon's Realms, physical universes and Multiverses. They rebuilt Time, restored Life, reawakened Soul, and rekindled Love. All the inner strength she had cultivated to achieve her kendo mastery was projected into every deft movement she made with her twin naginata staffs. She could sense each of the other teens and the two tweens were giving their essences to the effort: of the two Demons, one offered up creativity, another offered up intuition; of the two older Gods, one offered up patience, another offered up resilience. The two youngest Goddesses offered up brash confidence and mysterious subtlety. Her brother offered up intelligence and her sister offered up enjoyment. The three adults were like anchors: Chaos, Possibility and Eternity.

A rainbow light voiced music in her mind, and it beckoned...

...and she was back here, in this room, seeing a new pair of Aunts and Uncles for the first time. Her Uncle Keiichi and Aunt Belldandy were reunited with the twins that they had conceived. Twins that had inexplicably vanished back when she, her brother and sister were barely a year old.

An amazing story was told by those two cousins, who spoke of finding themselves in ancient Ireland. But what was so gripping about their narrative was that they had searched for their parents for their _entire lives_, disciplining themselves to maintain their search for almost 15 Decas.

Everybody passed out...

...and woke up again. The four youngest, two Gods and two Demons, wove an amazing narrative of their own. They were lost in some blended God's and Demon's Realm, and then they met up with their Mother...the Goddess who had laid down her life to send everyone to the end of time. Motokyn looked at the youngest Aunt and felt huge-hearted respect, for here was a Goddess who had given her life to try and save lives. She felt humbled, for she was truly in the presence of nobility.

The Quad, as they called themselves, had then adventured into the past...to bring her Mother and the new mortal Cevn together, because the two were their parents. This was extremely hard for her to bear, having never felt a Father's love. But it was plain to see that Mom obviously loved him.

In essence, the Quad had brought their parents together so that _she and her sibs_ could return to existence. No Mother and Father...no Motokyn, Baldurdth and Kitsunen. It made sense, but it seemed to be total nonsense. She also could feel that her younger brother and sister had strong resentments against this new Father, named Cevn. This Father...or their Father.

Or perhaps even her Father.

Their youngest cousin, Ulfryn, was anxious to hear their story. But they didn't have a story; nothing had passed between their presence at the acts of creation and their sudden appearance in this room. When she told them this, everyone passed out...

...and only she, Baldurth and Kitsunen remained.

It seemed that their story was just beginning...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"You guys! You guys!" Baldurdth shouted excitedly. "I think I've got it all figured out. It's pretty trippy, but it makes sense. I have a theory about..."

"When don't you have a theory, dear brother?" Kitsunen wittily noted, interrupting him.

"Well, please don't keep us in limbo, since we've already been there, it seems," Motokyn said, adding her own humor.

"Here's what I think is going on. We created this 'mega-reality-trip' thing, our own version of the Big Bang and the Soft Sequence. We painted it with our own sprayguns of energy, so to speak. But we were on the outside, so can't be two places at once. When the first group, Keleste and Keiyasu wound up in Ireland, they had to survive long enough so our Aunt and Uncle could find them."

"This isn't a theory, this is like an after-school redo of a test," Kitsunen groused impatiently. "We already know what happened with those two. Sucks to be them, growing up without parents."

"Kitsunen, that's enough out of you!" Motokyn shouted angrily. "This is really important, and I won't stand for you to be acting heartless and uninspired. No more petulance from you."

Baldurdth saw his older sis manifest a big paper fan in her hand, and knew that she meant business. He had to wonder what had crawled inside of Kit's ear and ate her brains out, because she usually wasn't so flippant. Or mean and uncharitable, for that matter. Point-to-point, his younger sister must be pretty upset.

"Okay, so we also know that the Quad hooked our parents up so that we could exist. I think having a Father royally sucks, but that's beside the point at the moment. What's important is that I'm beginning to understand a pattern in all of this. It's all about repair jobs."

"Repair...jobs?" Motokyn asked, eyebrows crooked high.

"Think of it this way," Baldurdth urged, trying to find the words to explain his theory to his sisters without confusing himself in the process. "We built a new kind of reality, but we weren't in it. It would be retarded to have us to be the creators of the 'mega-reality-trip' thing and then subsequently find ourselves locked out of it. In other words...show me the love, don't strand me above. So let's assume that we're _supposed to be in that reality that we just built_. But once we finished, we weren't inside of that reality. Along with the six others adols and tweens, we were all outside of it. So we all jumped into that rainbow lightmass to get back into it, just like going through the torii gate to get to Motokyn's dojo. The three adults are back where they're supposed to be, so they don't count. I don't know how I know this, but I know it.

"Consequently, there would be were nine defects in the brand new mega-reality-trip thingy...the nine of us. Nine holes in the ground, and I'm not talkin' golf. Actually, it's more like nine empty slots in reality, waiting for us to fill them with our warm bodies and cheerful personalities. Enter the Twinsters, who repaired two of those defects. The life we experienced with Aunt Bell and Uncle Keiichi having no kids was messed up. Defective. Keleste and Keiyasu living their entire lives growing as orphans. Also messed up. Also defective. Defective as in _shouldn't have ever happened_. A bullshit reality, not a true reality. Keleste and Keiyasu altered reality by staying alive 17-18 centuries ago amidst all the wild Irish dudes and babes, which was long enough for Aunt Belldandy to sense them in the Past. So she and Keiichi must have fetched them here."

"Go on," Kitsunen urged, suddenly interested.

"So peace out, sis! Once the Twinsters did their thing, two of the defects were now fixed because now they're plugged into the right reality with Aunt Bell and Uncle Keiichi. But it _still isn't the right reality_. There's still seven more defects to fix. Meanwhile, a side-effect of their repair job was us. That's when we flashed on the scene, _after_ Keleste and Keiyasu did their fixit...but _before_ they told us their story. When means that at that point in time, the three of us were left partially in this reality and partially out of it. We were still outside the mega-reality-trip thing we created. Right after that all went down, remember how the three of us were sitting here listening to Keleste and Keiyasu explain what they were doing? But _another three_ of us were floating around in limbo soup, so to speak."

"That doesn't make sense!" Motokyn protested. "How could there be more than one of us? You're implying that there are multiple 'realities'? Alternate dimensions of existence? I remember being in this room in our temple and listening to Keleste and Keiyasu tell us about their adventures and how difficult it was to grow up without parents. So how could I be here while they were talking about their lives, and not be here at the same time?"

"Do you remember anything before that? Either of you?"

"Well duh! Of course I don't remember anything. Nothing!" Kitsunen answered with a tang of flippancy. "We were building creation before that. Kinda strains the brain, if you know what I mean."

"Which is precisely my point. Zap!...we found ourselves here, in this room. Instead of going somewhere else, like the Twinsters and the Quad, we jumped into the fire and were zipped directly back here to our temple. No pass 'Go', no collect the dough! But we arrived in a reality that was off base already. We just didn't know about it. A reality that was messed up and defective, just like the earlier ones. I think the reason that we didn't have a little 'adventure' between creating the mega-reality-trip ting and being flashed into our sunroom is because we weren't wholly in the newly created reality, like the Twinsters and the Quad. That's why the Quad had to do their thing so we could _fully_ be in this universe," he explained, getting more excited.

"Yes...I can remember their story pretty clearly. When our younger cousins were transported to that middle-realm zone they described, they stumbled upon a new kind of transportation system, different than the Aumatrices. That was when the youngest Goddesses, Pryzm and Ulfryn, were reunited with their Mother, who had nobly sacrificed herself so we could even be here in the first place," Motokyn picked up the narrative. "Their Mother...our new Aunt Skuld...figured out how to use the transport system, and decided to go to Vanagdrasil so the Demon twins, uh...what were their names?"

"Falcyn and Sygyn," Kitsunen corrected.

"Right," Baldurdth affirmed. Catching his breath, he resumed his elaboration. "So they went to the Demon's Realm so that Falcyn and Sygyn could meet up with their Mom. But...check this out!...neither of the Demon twins has a father. So how'd they ever get born? Peace out again! Another defective reality or alternate dimension. Even before the rest of their adventure went down, they were experiencing a reality that itself was defective. We all know the rest: our Mom and Aunt Belldandy somehow appear on the scene in the Demon's Realm, and then our new Aunt Skuld asks Mom how we're doing...and Mom tells her she's nuts, because she never had kids. That she never had _us_. Way messed up, totally defective reality!"

"This is more bizarre than an anime," Kitsunen observed. "We're here, but not here. Mom doesn't remember having us. Skuld remembers Mom being married and having us..."

"Ahhh, so you _were_ listening, instead of spacing out on our two new male cousins," Motokyn said, winking at Kitsunen, who reacted with ready embarrassment.

"So what? At least they're cute!" Kitsunen said in her defense.

"Canya put a stopper on the girl-talk for a little bit and let me finish," Baldurdth said, earning irritated glances from each of his sisters.

"We all know what happened with the Quad. They went almost 20 years in the past to bring Mom and this...guy...together to 'repair' the glaring defect in that version of reality, which was Mom not having us kids. Are you beginning to see the pattern? The twins did their 'repair' job to get back to their parents. That's the particular flaw that they knew about. Later, the Quad saw a glaring flaw of their own, and did their own 'repair' job...correcting a universe where otherwise we wouldn't exist. By repairing the defective reality they encountered, they made it so the three of us are now legit, instead of being those half-here, half-there 'ghosties' Ulfryn kept seeing."

"But how do you explain the math?" Kitsunen interjected, her voice strained with desperation. "Keleste and Keiyasu...which I think are really cool names, by the way...represent two defects in the universe. Then Falcyn, Sygyn, Pryzm and Ulfryn repair another defective universe and we three are saved. That makes a total of five defects repaired, filling up five of those gaps or holes that you mentioned. So there should only be four defects left, which would translate to four of the nine of us missing. But how could Mom be one of those defects? Shouldn't she be here, with us? Instead, all I see is we three in this room..."

Motokyn and Baldurdth both noticed that their younger sis was shaking with emotion...

"So explain _this_, huh!" she said angrily, gesturing broadly with her hand to indicate the empty room they were sitting in. "We're in an empty room. They're _all_ gone! Where's our Mother? Where's our Aunt Belldandy and our Uncle Keiichi? What the fuck is happening here? Every time I look where Mom was just sitting a short while ago, I feel like I'm about ready..snff..to lose it! I'm going crazy, my heart is killing me..."

Kitsunen couldn't finish what she was trying to say because she broke down in heaving sobs.

Motokyn immediately went over and hugged their younger sister, who was completely distraught. Baldurdth felt like he'd been slammed in the chest with a tire iron; Kit's loss of composure was making his own emotions unsteady.

"Hey, it's going to be alright, Kit. I'm sorry I snapped at you earlier. This has been harder on you than and Baldurdth and I, hasn't it?" Motokyn asked. Baldurdth watched his younger sister nod her head "yes" and realized that Kit was wearing her heart on her sleeve again. This was one of her greatest strengths, the ability to just _be_ with her heart. He had been busily engaged in trying to hypothesize solutions while Motokyn had collected herself with a Zen-like will to be mindful and observant...but Kitsunen was feeling it all, full-front, and was falling apart emotionally. She didn't have anywhere else to go, emotionally. He looked at the empty sun room and felt frustration crawling up and down his throat.

"Dammit, sis, I can't explain any of this! It's _not possible_. I'm trying my hardest just to try and figure out all of this shit! I don't know what the fuck is happening here either! I feel like I'm trying to start a fire with water!" Baldurdth shouted angrily. Feeling impotent and useless, he walked over to help Motokyn settle Kit down. At least he could do that much. Kitsunen shuddered and turned to him for a hug; as he held her, he could feel the full force of their predicament slamming down on him like an avalanche of falling boulders.

They were in a totally out-of-control situation here.

"Baldurdth, Kitsunen," Motokyn interjected. "The math _does_ add up. Nine minus two is seven: Keleste and Keiyasu repaired their defective reality and Aunt Bell and Keiichi's defective reality. With one repair effort, they fixed _two_ errant realities. But there was only a single shortcoming in the version of reality that Quad fixed: Mom not having us. Which leaves six defects remaining for us to try and solve and then repair. We also already know about one of those six defects...our two Demonic cousins don't have a Father."

Baldurdth looked at his older sister in utter amazement, because once again she had seen the exact point that he had overlooked. They were still in a totally fucked situation, but at least they knew what they were facing.

How could the three of them fix _six_ faulty realities?

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Thanks for the emotional rescue, you guys. I think I can breathe a little now that my heart isn't pounding in my ears," Kitsunen said, wiping the snot off her nose onto her long-sleeved blouse. At this point, trying to look cool didn't matter. What mattered was getting Mom and the others back...without losing Motokyn and Baldurdth. Which at this point was a real possibility, because it was entirely feasible that _this_ phase of existence was another washout, bullshit reality like all the other realities her brother had mentioned.

"While I was having my meltdown, a thought kinda popped in my mind," she started to explain. "Obviously, whatever the six glitches are, they managed to take out Mom and all of the adults too. So on top of the six defective realities, we have to repair another seven. Six for our missing cousins, one more for the missing adults. Thirteen miscues of existence, in total. Or fourteen, when you consider what Motokyn said concerning Falcyn and Sygyn only knowing about one of their parents, our Demoness Aunt Mara. But while I was overwhelmed about losing Mom, I sorta half-remembered seeing an adult Demon sitting next to our new Aunt Mara, just for a split second right before that last blackout we had. So maybe that was Falcyn and Sygyn's Father. Which means that there is a linkage between us and one of the other funky realities. But no matter how you look at it, the math is lousy. Six, fourteen, three...it doesn't make sense."

"Tell me about it!" Baldurdth agreed. "It's bad enough trying to figure out how to fix six defects. Now we have to deal with double that number and then some. Even worse, this reality or plane of existence that we're in...right here, right now...is defective. It has to be! I'm not gonna believe that there's a 'proper' existential dimension within the mega-reality-trip thing we created where the three of us and Mom are separated. No way!"

"There's another sense of reality that is defective as well," Motokyn observed. "The reality that we lived our entire lives in, before we were abducted and sent into the far future...has to be defective as well."

"_What?!_" Kitsunen blurted. Being in these goofed-up funky versions of reality was bad enough, but now her sister was trying to claim that their original 'universe' was a mess as well! She was basically saying that their entire existence, the reality within which they had lived their entire lives in up to this point...before the timeship had scooped them...was flawed as well. Baldurdth had claimed that the screwups were the necessary _result_ of their creation-building process, because of the inside-outside thing. They had created an OmniOm, and afterwards were on the outside looking in. That made sense, that explained the remixed versions of family and reality that everyone was dealing with. But a disturbing scene played out in her mind, almost chilling in its implications. If what her sister was claiming was true, it brought up a paradox. How could their reality be flawed _before_ they were involved in creating the OmniOm?

"I'm going to take Baldurdth's idea a little further out," Motokyn asserted. "I know that neither of you like the idea of us having a new Father. I don't know what to make of it either, except that he doesn't seem to be a bad person in the brief time I observed him. Mom obviously loves him dearly, as we all saw how she was acting around him. In fact, we witnessed Mom's strong affection towards him twice. Once while Keleste and Keiyasu told their story and we all blacked out, and then the again while the Quad did their story and we blacked out the second time."

"Mom did look totally different, didn't she?" Kitsunen added. "Baldurdth, you might not notice it because you're a guy, but sis and I could notice it because we're girls. Mom seemed to have some kind of glow to her that I've never seen before."

"I did notice it, you guys," Baldurdth said. "But I didn't like it one bit."

"So who are we to deny Mom her happiness?" Motokyn noted pointedly, staring right at she and Baldurdth. Especially Baldurdth, who was almost squirming under her gaze.

"Huh? What are you trying to say, sis? That _we_ caused this? That it was something we did that caused Mom to feel unhappy, that caused her to be without a husband all these years? That we're responsible for that jerkoff running out on her before we were born? No fuckin' way! We're her kids, for Lord's sake! Why would we want to deliberately hurt her?" Baldurdth argued, cross-armed and defensive.

"You're completely avoiding what I'm trying to say, Baldurdth. You said that you won't accept a 'proper' universe where Mom and the three of us are separated. Neither can I. I will _never_ accept it! Ever! But could you accept a 'proper' reality of existence where Mom and our new Father _weren't_ separated? An orthodox reality and history where we grew up actually having both a Mother and Father?"

"I dunno..." Baldurdth said in a low voice that revealed how unconvinced he was about all of this.

Kitsunen felt like she had been struck one of her Mom's thunderbolts. The implications of Motokyn's statement saturated through the fortress of resentments she had built against the reality or even the idea of having a Father. Enough to reach her heart and then soak there in the chamber of her memories.

Her childhood had been purchased with a very high price. Proof of this was the frequently crying jags Mom would have, dating all the way back to her earliest memories. The older she got, the less often Mom would have these cry-downs. The passage of time seemed to heal the emotional pain that fueled those upsets. But they were very unsettling to her when she was a little girl because she didn't know why Mom was crying. She had often thought that she had done something wrong to upset her, until Uncle Keiichi told her that Mom was "upset about grown-up things."

Now she was in her mid-teens, and Mom was _still_ having her bouts of weeping, just infrequently so. Like maybe once or twice a year. As recently as a couple months ago, she had come home from school to find Mom sitting in the temple's tea room, reduced to tears once again. Motokyn had to call Aunt Belldandy, who dropped everything she was doing to help Mom get through another one of her 'spells'.

Could Mom have loved him that much?

Was this reality that they had shared with their Mom over the past 16 years...the 'wrong' reality? A wash of empathy passed through her, empathy for her Mom's significant loss. It occurred to Kitsunen that Mom had gone missing for just a couple hours, and in the wake of this, she had been overwhelmed by the most powerful sense of grief she'd ever felt in her life. She had basically gone to pieces emotionally, unable to handle Mom's disappearance. Even her mind had gone bust; she had turned into a confused psycho basket-case for a more than just a few minutes. Now, a brewing sense of loss and abandonment still pounded away in her breast, just below the surface like a shark prowling a beach waiting for someone to swim out a little too far.

Could this heartfelt grief and confusion be the same kind of feelings her Mom had felt? Was she herself now traveling a similar emotional terrain, experiencing the same type of grief that her Mother had endured? As she considered this, she thought about her Mom waking up each day stricken with a profound emptiness; each day a reminder of what had been taken away from her. For _seventeen years_! Kitsunen was aghast, and her sense of loss started curve-balling into a furious anger.

"For seventeen fucking years, Mom had to feel _this_?" she hissed, unintentionally speaking her private thoughts aloud.

"Kitsunen?" Motokyn inquired warily. She looked at her older sister and brother, whose faces were masks-within-masks.

"Oh my God!" she gasped, struggling against the horror and rage that seemed to wrap itself around her. "The upset feelings we have right now about Mom disappearing? They're totally minors. They're nothing compared to what Mom went through! Don't you see? We're experiencing just a small taste of what she must have felt the entire time she was raising us. The same thing that just happened to us...happened to Mom. Someone she loved dearly was suddenly torn away from her. How could she have possibly withstood that kind of loss? Before we came along, Mom had someone in her life that she loved deeply enough...that she wanted to have a family with him. It was that man, that Cevn guy that I was feeling so pissed off towards because Mom was acting all lovey-dovey around him. Years ago, Mom had given her heart to him, and then he just vanished. We all know the history of this. But it's all different now! All these years, I've been so wrapped up in myself that I missed the obvious. Of course I hated the fact that I didn't have a father."

"Yeah, like you have to remind us of that!" Baldurdth shouted, seemingly irritated because she was stating the obvious.

"But you know what? Mom was never angry with him. Not once! Growing up, I resented Mom so much for not being bitterly angry at our missing father. I hated him even more because he wasn't there for Mom. For us. For you two. But I finally understand something. If he had ditched Mom, then why the hell wasn't she all bust-up pissed off angry at him? She should have hated him with a rage, too. But she didn't. I _never_ heard her say a bad thing about him, except when she was talking about his foibles. Mom wasn't angry at him...because he _didn't_ leave her. After all that's happened here, I know now that he couldn't possibly have ditched her. There was something between the two of them, something special. But he got taken away from her, the same way everyone just got taken away from us. Which means that the reality that we came from, the one that we lived our whole lives in...is majorly fucked up. It's _wrong_!!! That's why..snff..Mom never had the husband she should have had all these years. It doesn't make a difference whether it came before or after we did that 'ReCreation of All Reality' thing. It's fucked up! And we've been living in a God-damned lie!"

"Mom," Motokyn said, a single word to describe a broken heart. Actually, four broken hearts. Kitsunen was absolute right; they had been living a lie for their entire lives. Their universe was wrong in the worst way; it had robbed Mom of a man who quite possibly was her Soulmate. _That_ was enough to break her own heart, as she realized what her Mother could have had...but didn't. A universe of possibilities, and Mom never had the chance to experience it.

"God, this is so fucked up!" Baldurdth cursed angrily. "Mom didn't have her husband...and we never had a Father. The Father we should have had for all the years we were growing up. Dammit, I'm such an idiot! I actually met my own real _Father_ and all I did was get pissed off at him. I didn't even fucking acknowledge him!"

"Chill it, Baldurdth! Take it easy on yourself," Kitsunen counseled him, sensing her brother was at the edge of guilt-bombing himself. "We're dealing with a reality that has MPD, in a sense. Multiple Personality Disorder. It's not your fault. You had 16 years of life suddenly jerked out from under you once you were confronted with a new scene, one that included a total stranger who was supposed to be our Father. You didn't have any warning. None of us did. So you reacted from those 16 years of experience, because that's all you had to go with. You got pissed off at him, pissed off at the whole idea that there was someone else that Mom loves besides the three of us. So did I, so did I."

"I think...that our situation is almost the reverse of Keleste and Keiyasu's situation," Baldurdth pointed out, trying to reel in his runaway emotions. "They spent their whole lives trying to find their parents, wanting desperately to meet them. When they finally did, it meant _everything_ to them. In contrast, Mom raised the three of us by herself and we all had written off the idea of having a Father in our lives. She had written it off as well. Mom didn't fill our heads with some hopeful platitude-type shit like 'Your Dad's going to come back some day and we'll all be a happy family.' Mom always said 'He's gone, and that's all there is to it.' This was her way to protect us from getting all hung up on false hopes. Then suddenly we get a glimpse of our Father, who we didn't want or expect, and it didn't mean a thing at the time. How could it?"

"This situation isn't just about us. It's more than that," Motokyn asserted. "_This is about Mom._ We can contest the pros and cons of having a Father in our lives all day, but ultimately, that discussion is meaningless when we take into account Mom's happiness. Her happiness is a very important factor in all of this, perhaps the most important. We saw how naturally happy she was with Cevn. Wouldn't that be multiplied even more because she would have a husband that would be a Father to her children? To us? This is intolerable! We can't let this go on. As contradictory as it sounds, I'm beginning to believe with all my heart that we've been blessed with a precious opportunity to make things right...to finally be a _family_."

"Mom's been there for us our entire lives. Now we have a chance to make a difference in her life. It's up to us to give Mom the husband she never had," Kitsunen noted, sealing Motokyn's belief with a stamp of ambition.

"Which still leaves us with the same set of problems," Baldurdth noted in frustration. "How can the three of us fix a boatload of defective, screwed up realities, including our own."

Kitsunen smiled at her older brother and sister.

"You know, I have an idea about that...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

EARTHREALM, WEDDING MINUS TWO DAYS:

Sometimes the longest distance between two points is one hallway. Mara walked up to the shoji door and stopped, turned and once again walked out of the hallway in the dining room. Three times she had approached that door, and three times she had turned around. She felt like the proverbial mental patient pacing up and down the corridors of the nutter ward. Pacing...pacing...pacing...when all she had to do was knock.

Being inside the temple still made her feel edgy, after five years of battling the three Goddesses to gain control over Keiichi. But this was something she _had_ to do. An absolute, demanded by the course of reality. There was no putting it off, no denying it didn't exist, no way she could lie her way around it. Not only this, but now there was a timeline involved. For decency's sake, she had recognized at least that much.

So it was back to the door. As she finally stood still in front of the sister's bedroom long enough to rap on the door, she almost felt like she was an alien hovering overhead, watching herself from a dislocated and impersonal perspective. A few seconds later, Urd whisked the shoji door open.

"Oh, it's you," she said drolly. "What do you want? It's getting late."

"I need to talk to Belldandy," she told her twin sister.

"_Everyone_ needs to talk to Belldandy!" Urd answered, her expression one of exasperation. "Mom calls a dozen times a day. Keiichi keeps wanting to talk to her because he's nervous, instead of seeking out his friends. All the wedding florists, photographers, caterers are calling to confirm this-n-that's. Even Tamiya and Ootaki acted up this morning, calling her while they were drunk as pickled herrings because they'd been out all night. She had to listen to those two mortal fools while they actually tried to talk her out of getting married. For the past couple weeks, I've been feeling like I'm her personal assistant, not her sister. Now you show up, and it's past midnight."

"URD! I _really_ need to talk to Belldandy. Alone," Mara emphasized.

"Talk to her about what? Why you wanna steal everyone's sleep? Just tell me and I'll pass it along in the morning, Mara." She noticed that Urd had that certain gleam in her eye, of the gossip-monger kind.

"No, won't do. Me and her, by ourselves. Now."

"Alrighty, Alrighty! Whatever you say!" her sister relented. "I don't appreciate your sense of timing, but I'll wake the Brat up and we'll hang in the living room so you and Bell can have some privacy."

Mara didn't feel any bit relieved, because now she was committed and had to do what she came here to do.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Mara! This is certainly a surprise," Belldandy greeted her, obviously a forced greeting since she had just woken up. Mara marveled once again at how Belldandy was able to recover herself and stay so Blazin' cheerful throughout all the chaos of her upcoming wedding. A chaos that she was going to contribute a heaping helping of uncertainty upon.

It had to be done.

"Belldandy, I have something really serious that I need to discuss with you. It's important, and I know that I couldn't live with myself if I didn't tell you about it before you got married," Mara said, catching her breath because now she had just jumped on the whirlwind.

Her younger sister frowned slightly at this, but then regained her inscrutable Goddess smile. A difficult part of the learning process of having Goddesses for sisters was being able to interpret their smiles. Generally speaking, Goddesses smiled a lot more than Demonesses, especially Belldandy. Her sister seemed to smile just for the sake of it. Belldandy was smiling, but her eyes expressed anxiety and expectation.

"I don't really know how to say this, because it's gonna cause a lot of trouble. But I thought that it would be best to cause trouble now than wait until after you and Keiichi are married, which would cause even more trouble," she started, feeling fumbly and awkward.

"Mara, you don't plan to curse Keiichi and I during our honeymoon, do you?" Belldandy asked guardedly. "I at least need to know that we can enjoy our honeymoon without the shadow of Demonic strife hanging over us. Is this what you're trying to tell me? Does the Dark Lord expect you to cause us problems? Or do you know something about Hild? Hild isn't going to try and cause problems for Urd and Skuld while I'm gone, is she?"

As her sister continued listing off a litany of concerns, Mara felt her heart sinking as she realized that these were relatively trite conjectures compared to what she had to unload on Belldandy. Of course, Hild had promised not to cause problems with the wedding, but she knew Hild well enough to know that...in her mind...the wily Demon Queen could easily interpret that promise as leaving a door open to come and pester everyone else after the wedding.

Her mouth felt like cactus, drying up as her younger sister cast a sway of innocent assumptions which only led her to relinquish her wariness and get caught up in joy. Now, Belldandy was smiling broadly, clearly in anticipation towards what was certainly going to be good news to go along with her wedding. Then the part about being family and sisters...and the blithe air of Belldandy...stole away any courage she had that remained intact. She wanted to haul herself out of there, to just drop it and run. But being a Demoness, there was fire leftover...

Impossible is one thing, nightmarish is another.

She had to tell her nightmare to her sister. She only hoped that she had enough of a fiery edge in her to be courageous and face the consequences.

When she finished saying what she had to say, Belldandy said "That will be all, Mara," in a curt emotionless voice, as if she was dismissing her from a business meeting. With no further words, her younger sister stood up and walked out the bedroom without even looking at her.

"Well, this really went down good. Like cities and towers wrapped in fire-blazes with no water nearby," she said to the empty walls, her voice dripping with sarcasm while her heart was bleeding with regret.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Keiichi was in his hobby room, hanging out with Tamiya and Ootaki. Actually, Tamiya and Ootaki were hanging out with him. Apparently, they had gotten sempai-level drunk last night and had decided that the best thing to do at 6am in the morning was to call Bell-chan and try to talk her out of marrying him. Then this evening, they had called and pleaded with him, wanting to come over and spend some time with him because they were all nervous about their roles as his two best men at the wedding the day after tomorrow.

So they came over armed with two 12-packs of Asahi and decided to have a "men's talk" about married life.

He was quickly aware of what was really going on with his two sempai. Now that he was getting married, they were confronted with the realization that their bachelor days were numbered; that they would someday embark upon the same coursing of life, getting married themselves. In a sense, his upcoming wedding was threatening to them because it was a glimpse of their future. Being married meant commitment. Raising a family, having to work and hustle to earn a living to support that family, having to become a good father...all of which was intimidating to Tamiya and Ootaki. At some point during their discussion, Keiichi recognized that married life was still a looming unknown for him as well, and that he shared some of the same uncertainties his sempai did.

So they were talking it out, trying to dislodge their illusions and obsessions. He was irritated at first as the two launched into what seemed to be a commiseration fest, but their conversation quickly grew into an involved discussion about adult responsibilities in post-N.I.T. life. As Tamiya had put it, "If da Chihiro can make it on her own, den we can too!"

Keiichi felt an unexpected sense of wonderment as the three of them were talking about wives, families, jobs and future plans...as _men_, not as college students or young adults. Cevn and he had talked on this level a few times, discussing life from a mature adult perspective. Keiichi was grateful that his friend had made it easy somehow to talk about the heavy stuff; probably because Cevn had already been married and had lived through some difficult times. But having this kind of talk with Tamiya and Ootaki seemed to bond him to his sempai in a new level of maturity. He realized that these two...regardless of their faults, exuberances, craziness and successes...were probably going to be his life-long friends. Cevn had suggested that he ask them both to be best men at his wedding instead of choosing one or the other; which now made even more sense. These two crazy guys have walked alongside him during some of the toughest trials of his life, and being best men at his wedding was just a confirmation that they would be good friends for many years to come.

The door slid open and Belldandy walked in. Keiichi could tell that his fiancée was very upset about something, because she had forgotten to knock. She looked at him and his two sempai, and then pulled her engagement ring off of her finger.

"I believe this is yours. I do not need it any longer," she announced, flinging the precious ring to the floor. "I am returning to Yggdrasil, and I plan to do everything in my power to annul your wish, because you are no longer deserving of it. Or of me."

With that, she walked out.

He looked at the sparkling engagement ring on the tatami floor, stunned speechless, while Tamiya muttered "We wuz drunk dis morning when we called. We wasn't serious about doin' somethin' tuh cause her to do this, honest! Has she lost her mind?"

His heart felt like it had been cleaned of blood and filled with anti-freeze. Stunned into speechlessness, Keiichi was confronted with a surreal scenario that threatened to engulf him. This was totally unreal! For years he had relied on his fiancée, savoring the joys of their loving relationship, a love which had always been anchored by Bell-chan's honesty and dignity. He still couldn't believe what she had said, or the barely-controlled ferocity of her behavior. What did she mean, "you're no longer deserving of me?"

Fighting against the numbing disbelief, Keiichi quickly stood up and dashed down the hall into the living room. Neither Bell, Urd or Skuld were there. Spinning on his heel, he opened the sister's bedroom without knocking and saw Mara, who was staring at wall with a blank expression on her face. His chest filled with dread as he noticed that all of Skuld's stuffed toys were gone.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --


	153. Pt 153: Nine Voices: The Triplets Pt 2

**Part 153: Nine Voices – The Triplets Part Two**

MOTOKYN, BALDURTH and KITSUNEN:

As the sunroom faded from a lash of brightness to a dusky amber orange with the setting sun, the trio's spirits were also dimmed as the empty room beckoned to be filled with sound rather than stillness. The distraught triplets silently pondered their situation, seriously devoided of hope. They were stranded on an Earthrealm with limited Divine powers due to the 'Earthrealm effect' as Baldurdth had nicknamed it. Because of their partial mortal heritage...whenever they visited Yggdrasil, they were in near-full possession of their Divine faculties...but on the Earthrealm, their God and Goddess abilities were greatly reduced. A sort of cosmic "when in Hokkaido, you do what the Northern people do" scenario that crippled their Divine abilities. Nearly powerless, daunted by imperious unknowns, their Mother suddenly missing, existing in a defective version of reality...the strands of the future were very thin indeed. There was little hope with which they could use to bead together the pearls of their aspirations.

Their shared 16th birthday was several months back, possessing the usual birthday fun because each would exchange a 'goofy gift' with the other two in addition to the real presents. The best present of all this year came from Mom, who intimated that they would probably be allowed to stand for the Second Class Limited, Restricted license test as soon as the Almighty gave His clearance. Their first real Licenses! But apparently, if the previous accounts given by their newly-introduced cousins were correct, everything on the other side of the Living Gate in Yggdrasil, Syntrasil or whatever it was called was completely whacked-out. "Totally fragged," as Kitsunen had put it. It was very likely that the confusion they were experiencing was mirrored in the lives of every Divine being, God and Demon. Divine beings wandering around without a clue. Proof of this was the fact that Yggdrasil was inaccessible via any form of communication. Either the Ygg Network was off-line or the Earthrealm was 'off the grid'.

When a bucolic, stable existence is suddenly disrupted, what can one do?

At least their post-ReCreation transition involved familiar environs, rather than the total chaos and uncertainty their cousins experienced by being stranded in ancient Ireland or some uninhabited section of 'DivineSpace' that was a blend of God's and Demon's Realms. But the familiar was a betrayal against itself, as they each knew that this present state of existence was itself an aberration, even if this may or may not be their familiar temple home.

The three of them had lived their whole lives here in a temple just like this one, which eased their worries somewhat because there was a certain degree of conformity. Their temple home had been originally ceded to Aunt Belldandy and Uncle Keiichi by a Buddhist priest shortly after their Aunt was dispatched to grant Keiichi's wish over twenty years ago. During those early days, their Mother had visited the couple often, with the clandestine goal of getting their Aunt and Uncle to admit their feelings for each other. In the midst of this effort, Mom was contacted and assigned to grant a wish, even though she wasn't with the Goddess Relief Office. That wish involved another mortal, Cevn; who Mom brought back her for some reason. As a result Mom decided to live here with Cevn, her sister and Keiichi. Mom had never told them what his wish was, but had noted that it was "incredibly senseless and indecisive".

Then he had vanished without cause or explanation, leaving her to fend for herself while pregnant with the three of them. Mom had decided to put her roots down here, and their Aunt and Uncle welcomed her to do so. So this temple was the home to two families; a married couple whose children had been stolen away and a single mother raising three children whose father had vanished.

Three children who had to repair fourteen dysfunctional universes.

Motokyn looked at her younger sister, Kitsunen, and felt her stomach growling. _Heard_ Baldurdth's stomach groaning. "Rice is the smoothest polisher of the sword," one of the ancient masters had instructed. Too true in this case. There was much more that needed polished, as the path they needed to follow was as obscured as a mud-covered mirror. But first things first.

Before they turned poison into medicine, they had to eat. She told her younger brother and sister that she would prepare a meal, and left them to their opinions and concerns. On the way to the kitchen, she had a silly whim of a thought; perhaps the powers-that-be which had brought them here had conveniently left them dinner. But it was not to be, so she set to work preparing a nutritious repast of rice, daikon, melon slices, and miso with tofu and leeks.

She had been so busy with life, she didn't know how to cook anything else other than traditional monk's and warrior's meals.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

When Kitsunen saw what Motokyn had made for dinner, she almost had a cow. Her older sister had prepared a meal that would be fit for breakfast at a zendo, or maybe a snack offering at one of those authentic backwoods-type yokel ryokan hostels. She looked at Baldurdth, who was regarding the three bowls in front of him with a mixture of amusement and distaste.

Motokyn's version of 'dinner' was about five centuries removed from modern Japanese cuisine.

She almost cursed aloud as she looked at the bowl with one scoop of rice, a light seasoning of shoyu, and some chipped ginger flakes. Another bowl had several melon slices, and the third bowl was filled with a brothy miso soup with tofu, with shaved green onions. She ended up giggling instead. Of course, Motokyn only knew one style of cooking, which had been taught to her by her kendo grand-sensei. The austere kind of cooking. Ninja-girl food.

Mom and Belldandy had alternated the cooking duties of the household during all the years they were growing up, with Keiichi occasionally pitching in for hibachi grill-outs on the holidays and birthdays. Now with all the adults gone, reality hit home hard. They would have to take care of the temple, doing all the housekeeping that the adults did. Even worse, she herself might actually have to cook!

"What?" Motokyn asked, giving her a sharp look while she was giggling.

"I was just thinking about things," she answered her older sister evasively. She knew better than to lie to her older sister, having learned repeatedly that Motokyn could forgive ambiguity, but not dishonesty.

"Yeah, like neither one of you can cook at all," Baldurdth commented, earning two scowls. "At least I'm being honest about what I was thinking. Hey! This miso soup is tasty, even if it is the instant paste-n-boil kind."

She saw Motokyn's cheek twitch, a tell-tale sign that her sister just had a passing flash of homicidal intent. Good thing that the practice bamboo shinai and the tachi-katanas were all kept in Motokyn's room...

"Well excuse me, pizza boy," she quickly jumped in, before her older sister got too wound up. "At least onee-chan and I can try and learn. And in a supreme twist of fate, _you_ get to be the guinea pig instead of the experimenter this time! Hee hee...hope you enjoy being our mealtime test subject. I'll make sure to give you _extra_ portions, since you're a growing boy and all."

Motokyn chimed with laughter at her japing swipe at Baldurdth, who reacted with a braying sigh as he slapped his chopsticks down.

"This sucks!" her brother exclaimed. "I basically get to choose between bland dinners or toxic dinners. Cripes, I'm gonna have to start ordering out food, which is going to kill what little allowance I have saved up. Two weeks of that, and I'll be as brokeass as a wino in Ueno."

"My efforts to make dinner aren't toxic, as they are the result of training," Motokyn replied in a stern voice, which only refueled Kitsunen's laughter, because her sis had completely denied her cooking style as bland. She knew that her older brother's 'toxic' reference was to _her_ cooking, not Motokyn's. There was a reason why Aunt Belldandy wouldn't let her help out with the meals; because she didn't want to learn how to cook. Besides, Home Economics class in school was the ideal time of day to pass notes back and forth with her gal pals and screw off, while watching her older sister get all flustered. Expert with swords, clumsy with kitchen knives...that was her sis Motokyn.

"So what's in the fridge?" Baldurdth commented, ignoring his dinner tray. She watched as he checked the shelves, the cupboards, and the pantry to see how much food was available. He nuked some leftover beef stew and split it with her, while Motokyn resolutely stuck to her guns and ate her 'traditional' meal.

"I believe that this is the ideal time to discuss the disposition of house chores," Motokyn announced as she and Baldurdth were finishing off some pie for dessert.

"_CHoReS?!_" she and Baldurdth interjected in whines of dismay.

"Yes. It is entirely possible that we will need to undertake the cleaning and upkeep of our household for the foreseeable future. We will also need to observe a system as far as meal preparation is concerned. The most optimal distribution of cooking chores will be each of us alternating days."

"Fine with me, I'll just order food in on my cooking days, Baldurdth agreed with a smirk, earning an irritated glare from Motokyn.

"There will also be additional duties to assign to maintain the household. Since I am the oldest, I will decide upon a fair distribution of chores. Kitsunen, your area of duty will be the living room, "Everybody's Tea Room", the sun room, and the hallway. Mine will be the dining room, kitchen and pantry. Baldurdth, you will oversee the bathroom and the grounds. We will each be responsible for our own bedrooms and hobby rooms.

"Wh..what?! Oversee what? They look fine to me," Baldurdth challenged.

"You will oversee that the bathroom is properly cleaned on a daily basis, including the furoba, toilet, sink, rinse basin and other areas. This also means that you will launder the towels and washcloths. The koi pond will require daily tending, and the yard will need to be mowed and the garden weeded as necessity dictates. I expect you to be diligent with the gallery deck around our house, which will need to be swept on a weekly basis," Motokyn elaborated. Kitsunen watched her brother's face fault completely with dismay, as if he had been publicly libeled in front of his best buds at school.

"Welcome to the world of responsibility, Baldurdth," Motokyn finished, in all seriousness. Her brother slumped even further at the dining room table and pushed the rest of his plate of pie away.

When she burst into laughter at her brother's expression of misery, her older sister glanced at her with visible confusion and asked, "What's so funny about doing chores?"

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

The next day was a Monday, and he and Kit wanted to shine off school and just stay home, but Motokyn insisted that they get up and go to school. So off they went early in the morning, each riding the motorbike that Keiichi had made for them. On the way to school, he asked his older sister why he had to clean the bathrooms. She quickly replied "Maidens do not clean bathrooms. That's just how it is." without missing a beat. He _almost_ asked her to tell him where it said so in Musashi's "Book of the Five Rings", but held off, knowing that his sister was already stressed out.

As was he.

He felt like he was walking on foam as they entered the school grounds. This was totally stupid! They had just rebuilt everything that existed; wielding unimaginable amounts of power while creating universes, realities and epochs of time. Then the next day, they had to go to high school and try and act all normal n' regs. At least in senior high, they were in separate homerooms. Guess someone in the faculty office felt that they were mature enough to be separated once they reached 10th grade. Totally fortunate, because he wanted to dose both of his sisters with laughing gas and make them watch fifty-year old reruns of Lupin the Third in retaliation for having to clean the bathrooms last night.

The next day was his turn to cook the meals, so he made instant pancakes for breakfast and ordering in Thai food for dinner. Again, he had to face the 'torture of the bathrooms'. Motokyn must have figured out that he only used water to clean the rinse basin and sink, because he found a conveniently conspicuous bucket filled with bathroom cleaning supplies sitting on the edge of the furoba; her silent admonishment of his efforts.

The next when they got home from school, it was Kitsunen's turn to cook dinner. And somehow, she had discovered how to make burnt instant dinners.

Here he was, on the verge of narrowing his theory about Swarp Gates and their power sources based upon a hypothesis of non-superpositional systems of polysymptoptic operational relationships as applied to empty-set Chaostic energy distribution patterns...but he couldn't figure out how his sister could burn instant meals that required nothing more than the addition of boiling water for the miso and microwaving pre-cooked trays of food. He almost thought Kit had wrecked dinner deliberately, for some unknown reason that only made sense to her. Could it be that his younger sis actually thought that it was fashionable to screw up things that were easy and fool-proof? He'd read about girls who equated ineptitude with femininity; but could Kit be one of them?

After struggling through eating the partially burnt food, he now had to trouble himself with those stupid chores again. After loading up the washer with towels, Baldurdth grumbled his irritation and made faces in the bathroom mirrors while he was cleaning the sinks and furoba tub.

Whether or not this was his actual temple home didn't make a difference. Being here...his heart was almost busted out, because everything here constantly reminded him of Mom. This was her house, and even though she had her own bathroom attached to her bedroom, he could see her little touches all over this bathroom and in every common area of the temple. Meanwhile, Kit was in lockdown net-chat mode, voice-chatting away on the internet. He could have predicted with that this would be her way of dealing with Mom's disappearance. Motokyn was even worse; his older sister was wordless as she quickly cleaned up the kitchen and then took off on her motorbike to the kendo. Four hours later, she was still gone...an hour longer than usual. At least with Motokyn, he didn't have to worry about any 'night crew jerkoffs' trying the "let's harass the high school girl" trip on his sister. Any guys that would act perv towards her on her way home from the kendo would wind up in the hospital. If she was in a gracious mood.

"Stupid bathroom crap!" he said to the mirror.

To top things off, when he finally finished folding towels out of the dryer, he decided to interrupt Kit in the middle of her chatroom antics to find out what her great idea was...the idea about how to solve the problem of having to fix a bunch of broken universal realities.

Her reply was "dunno. I forgot it."

Utterly frustrated, he went to his hobby room and fiddled around with a couple of mechas, read a manga tankouban, and then started doodling about, reflecting on their problem. Actually their two problems. One difficulty they faced was cosmic in scope, as they were stranded in a defective universe and had to find a way to reestablish the correct 'path' or continuity of reality, so they could be reunited with Mom and the rest. The other challenge they had to face was just as unsettling, as it had to do with household chores, finances, school and all the day-to-day shit.

His allowance didn't even cover enough to pay the monthly electrical bill. He thought about whipping up a counterfeiting machine and printing up a bunch of 10K yen notes. Wouldn't work, because his older sister wouldn't stand for it. Being the oldest, Motokyn always had the biggest share of veto power whenever the three made decisions. Baldurdth considered other alternatives, his mind lingering on the sublime and the outrageous. Perhaps he could invent something and sell it to Sony or someone and get patent remunerations, but that might not fly with the Almighty. The mortal world wasn't ready for true holographic emitters or sentient AIs that supersede the Turing analysis theorems. Maybe in another 25 years, in 2050...but not today.

One possibility was full-on hip and cool. They could raid Mom's bedroom to see if she had any emergency money stashed away. There was no questioning that this was an emergency, and certainly he could convince Motokyn and Kit about that. He wanted to plunder their Aunt and Uncle's rooms as well to try and find loose cash lying around, but that might be taking it a little too far. They could do that later if they were truly in a bind. Besides, none of this would be like actually stealing from their family members, because eventually they'd figure a way out of this universe and everything wouldn't matter anyway.

This universe was a flaked-out, messed-up, defective slice of the reality pie. Just as nothing made sense here as far as their presence in this reality, anything he did here was meaningless in the long run anyway, because it was all going to be left behind.

Everything having no meaning...now _that_ was one scary fucked-up thought that he would have to avoid on a regular basis. On the heels of this insight, Baldurdth realized that his sisters and he would have to have some deep talks about this. Apathy was an enemy of both strife and resolution, and they couldn't afford to get swept up in a haunting fatalism, no matter what. He would have to stay focused, instead of drifting into the freeter-slacker twilights of the "oh well, whatever!" zone...

Maybe cleaning the toilet _was_ important, perhaps more important than anything he had ever done in his life.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

The wind blustered through Motokyn's black-silk hair on the way home from school, the gusts almost as agitated as her brother. Mom and the others had disappeared a week ago, and they were all struggling to mindfully approach the unseen vicissitudes of reality's unforgiving sword. Detachment was important, and the kendo gave her a chance to cleanse away her distress and maintain some sense of normalcy.

Baldurdth was bundled with energy, and she discovered why when he informed her about his idea of searching Mom's room for money. Even though she didn't agree with it on principle, Motokyn thought it was a sound idea due to the urgency of their circumstances. They agreed that it would be best if they didn't include Kitsunen in the search, because Kitsunen could have another one of her emotional breakdowns, triggered by the sight of Mom's bedroom and personal affects. Kit was a raw nerve waiting to be pricked, as evidenced by her burning dinner last night and then spending a half-day in the Nurse's Office today before being dismissed to go home early from school.

Baldurdth's other suggestion impressed her as well, because of its practicality. He emphasized his strong impression that they should hold daily 'house meetings' over dinner to discuss their concerns amongst themselves. Their biggest asset was each other, and Baldurdth's admission that he was toying with the thought that life was empty of meaning was disturbing to her. To her brother, life always needed to have an urgent, logical purpose; a difficult proposition while they were living in an existence that they knew was faulty. A 'reality' that they would have to leave behind, because they didn't belong here. Baldurdth confided that he was already struggling with a loss of purpose. In his words, "it's as if I've been tasked with building a house that I know will be burnt down to the ground the moment I finish it."

Then he started getting all philosophical. If they left this universe or 'reality', would it still exist? Or did it exist _just because they were in it_? If it vanished when they left it, what would happen to all the people? Should they wait and see if their Mom and the others would discover them here in this reality? After all, didn't Aunt Belldandy take Uncle Keiichi into the past to find Keleste and Keiyasu?

It was well after midnight, and presumably Kit was asleep. Putting on a t-shirt and sweatpants, she went to Baldurdth's room and knocked on his shoji door, signaling him that it was time. As they entered their Mom's bedroom uninvited, she almost felt like a thief. Even more so once she and her brother started searching around for money. Motokyn sifted through the contents of their Mom's purse to see if she could find the 'emergency' credit card; the card whose PIN number only she and Mom knew. Mom was very foresighted and had left a credit card that they could use if something happened to her, such as a prolonged visit to Yggdrasil. Thumbing through the cards and IDs, she chanced upon a familiar old photo of her Mom with Aunt Belldandy and Uncle Keiichi back before they were married. Mom had shown this picture to them at least once every couple years, and they knew that she carried it in her purse because it was dear to her. To her shock, she noticed that Aunt Belldandy and Uncle Keiichi weren't in the photo at all. Reacting rather than thinking, she dashed out of Mom's room and down the hallway to her Aunt and Uncle's bedroom. Catching her breath, she slid open the shoji door.

Empty, except for a made-up bed, a nightstand and a few other bare furnishings.

Nerves tingling as her mind dangled in a morass of stunned shock, she surveyed the room, trying to keep her breath from getting away from her. It dawned on her that many of the traces of her Aunt and Uncle had seemingly been wiped out of existence in this room. Their bedroom was almost empty of any personal effects or touches that Belldandy and Keiichi had given it. No clothes, no pictures on the wall, no jewelry...the closet was even empty of hangers. When they had left for school this morning, the other parts of their temple were completely intact; with nothing to indicate that her Aunt and Uncle were away. But they had never been in their Aunt and Uncle's bedroom, so there was no way of knowing about this. Now, some of their Aunt and Uncle's belongings were gone. Which didn't make sense, since everyone had disappeared at the same time. Why had this happened now, instead of right after they found themselves alone in the temple? Also, since their Mom had vanished along with Belldandy and Keiichi...why weren't _her things missing as well_? Baldurdth was standing behind her a minute later, speechless at the sight of the near-empty room.

Then Kitsunen joined them, rubbing her eyes and mumbling that she heard someone dashing in the hallway and had woken up out of a half-sleep. Her sister's face blanched with shock, and she dashed off into the living room. Motokyn watched as she pulled down a picture from the wall and returned with it. She knew the picture well; it was Aunt Belldandy's hand-drawn charcoal sketch of Keiichi, drawn roughly twenty years ago.

It was now a blank yellowed piece of paper inside of the familiar picture frame.

"Dammit!" Baldurdth shouted scornfully. Her own feelings, exactly. He left to go to his "Baldurdth's Works" hobby room without even bothering to excuse himself or resume their searching of Mom's room.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Kitsunen couldn't sleep at all that night. First, Mom and her Aunt and Uncle had disappeared eight days ago, along with an entire new family of cousins, Aunts and Uncles she barely knew. This morning, the house had seemed untouched, as if Aunt Bell and Uncle Keiichi had just gone on a weekend getaway vacation. Now their Aunt's _things_ were disappearing. Aunt Bell's room was mostly empty and her picture of Uncle Keiichi was undrawn. With stuff vanishing from the house, what would be next?

Her emotions seemed to exhaust themselves, depressing her more than the daily chores she had to do when she came home from school. To shift out of the drag-footed sense of fatigue, Kitsunen tried to rock drill into the granite of her memories to dig up the important flash of intuition that had caught her attention the first day that Mom and the others vanished. It had something to do with chains or masking tape, but she couldn't pull it all together. She was continually haunted by the mental image that the three of them were stranded on a lifeboat that had sprung a leak and was slowly sinking into the ocean.

Just about when the water was plunging down her throat to seek her lungs and confirm that she was drowning, the sun beat in through her bedroom windows and woke her with a wand of warmth within its morning rays. Kitsunen realized that she had been sleeping for just a couple hours. She immediately went to the living room...and started screaming.

Motokyn was beside her within seconds, katana sword in hand.

The picture she had showed them last night was gone. _All_ the pictures on the living room wall that had anything to do with Belldandy and Keiichi had vanished since last night. Their wedding pictures were gone, their vacation pictures were gone...only their Uncle's childhood pictures with his sister Megumi remained. Pictures that showed only Megumi and his parents. Several pieces of furniture were missing as well; including her Uncle and Aunt's favorite wall-scrolls and antique Persian rugs. Motokyn grabbed her by the hand and basically yanked her towards the door. They jogged over to the garage where Uncle Keiichi kept his motorcycles and banged open the door.

Every motorcycle was gone except theirs.

She felt a staggering detachment from reality, like a fog trying haplessly to whirlpool and pierce into the water. Her breath came in gasps as she recognized that she was completely out of her element, as the horror of what was happening jammed tight against her imagination. Choking, as she envisioned the three of them slowly vanishing, three ghostly vaporous salmon leaping into white-waters and being obliterated by dashing against its hurling fluid claws.

Her older sister collapsed to her knees and fought unsuccessfully to keep herself from sobbing, which demo'd Kitsunen's own confidence like a brittle-brick wall being crashed by a huge blunt-steel wrecking ball. She was reminded of that weird old Oscar Wilde novel she had to read in her English class; the one about the painting that faded away and the old man.

Shit was disappearing from their own house!

A few minutes later, Baldurdth emerged from his room, disheveled and looking like he had been on a week-long bender. When he saw Motokyn, he quickly came over and asked what was going on, his normally slake expression replaced by crammed agitation. His eyes were red and sleeplessly hollowed, his face was haunted as if he'd been visited by the Dark Lord in the middle of the night. Kitsunen felt frightened, not only because of the disappearing objects, but because her older sister was so far gone that she didn't even try to stand up when their brother joined them. Baldurdth had to kneel down next to Motokyn to try and succor her, because she was paralyzed like an actor with stage fright.

One thing after another after another was disappearing.

One thing after another...

_That was it!!!_

"You guys! You guys!" she shouted excitedly, kneeling down alongside her sister and brother. "I remember what I forgot! About my idea. It's all interconnected, and there's a way to solve all of this."

Her older sister and brother looked at her, their faces expressing concern that she might be losing it again. Yesterday at school was harsh, and last night was horrible. But in the darkness, there is always light...otherwise how would one know that it was dark?

"The first day we were here, we were all talking about how to repair the damaged universes. Baldurdth said that there was six or more 'realities' that we need to fix. But that may not be true. You guys remember what a causal chain is? Where one event causes another event, and then on and on it goes? What if there was a causal _tree_? In Prime Inculcation, when we learned about Time perpetuation and paradoxes, and then in FirstTier when we studied mortal sentient cultural evolution...both are based on the idea that one act can cause _many_ effects, while pre-empting other effects. I think that it might be possible that a _single event_ caused all of this! That's what I forgot from the other day. Remember how Keleste and Keiyasu only did one thing, and it somehow fixed two universes? In other words, they got a two-fer. What if what we have to fix is a fourteen-fer?"

"We're gonna have to do something soon, because I was up all night in my labs running simulations. There's still uplink with the Ygg Xeomn by the way, which is why it took me all night. This 'reality' we're in is disappearing. Not only is it defective, but it's decompressing. Think of this universe or reality as a sink full of water. Once you pull the plug, the water starts to drain out until the sink is empty. That's exactly what's happening here. The 'plug' was Mom, Aunt Bell and Uncle Keiichi and everyone else. Just like how the water starts draining when the plug is pulled, everything that has to do with TimeSpace in this universe is vanishing. This is why our Aunt and Uncle's gear is all starting to disappear. According to my calculations, the process is accelerating. Within two weeks, give or take a couple days, everything will be gone. Including us."

She watched as Motokyn stood up, and walked towards the temple front doorway like a zombie.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

It was a moot point to go to school that day. Motokyn was so dwarfed at the opus possibility that she would have to witness everything she was familiar with vanish gradually over the next two weeks, she wanted to just sit in her room and cradle her kendo and katana swords to her breast. This was far beyond her, far beyond all of the three of them. Her younger brother Baldurdth was beside himself with frustration, his fertile mind already exploring possibilities and encountering roadblocks. Kit was strangely calm, which triggered worries that her younger sister may have simply resigned herself to fate.

Two weeks.

What could they do in two weeks to attack this situation? Or were they even allotted two weeks? How long would it be before the temple itself disappear? Or the kendo dojo, or their school, or the surrounding neighborhood, or the entire Tokyo urbanoplex? She was aware of the physics of black holes, and she felt like they were poised at the very edge of the event horizon, clawing their way outwards in an effort to avoid being sucked inwards to oblivion.

If Mom was here, they would have the expertise of a Norn to rely on, as the only sensible route out of this caging reality was to go backwards in Time. Motokyn pondered if a future event could have caused everyone's disappearance and discarded the notion. She tried to replenish her fortitude, remembering the disciplining focus that her grandmaster sensei had taught her. The answer...if there was one to be found...was in her ki, her kokoro and her Soul. She needed to close off the distractions of attachments, of emotions, of past or future...and confront her fears by channeling her ki into her kokoro. Counting out her breaths, she attempted to project her consciousness into what she considered the chamber of wisdom that her Mother had to offer. Mom was a Norn; and once again Motokyn was challenged by the very personal issue she had to face all her life. Why didn't she have some capacity of Mom's that had been passed onto her? Beyond the congenital traits such as body type or weight, there were none. She was just plain Motokyn, daughter of a Norn. It was obvious that Baldurdth had inherited Mom's intelligence and carefree attitude, while Kit had inherited Mom's witty conversation and capricious nature.

Try as she might, she had never found herself, in 16 years of searching. What did she inherit from Mom? Her interests didn't reconcile at all with any of Mom's world-within-a-world experiences as a young Goddess. Mom readily admitted that she was undisciplined and a troublemaker during childhood, had no interest in martial arts or fighting, did not subscribe to any particular philosophy and would rather talk her way out of a conflict than resort to confrontation...unless she was the one doing the confronting. Some of Mom's escapades during her teenage and early adulthood years resulted in rages into crazyland, earning her repeated license revokes and probations from the Almighty. Unlike Mom, she always kept her temper in check. Another opposition between she and Mom: Mom would always pick novel unorthodox approaches over traditional conservative ones.

Trying to get parallel with Mom's mindset only brought her into philosophical circles that seemed to spin widely out of control. Unable to concentrate because her thoughts were racing, she joined her brother and sister in the kitchen, a sea-tossed raft without a sail upon the ocean of her uncertainty.

"How long before Mom's things start disappearing?" Kitsunen was asking Baldurdth. Motokyn fetched an instant heatup lunch of tea, udon noodles and beef before joining them. Sipping her tea, she tried to calm herself.

"The day after tomorrow, maybe two days after tomorrow. It's more difficult to interpret the near-term phenomena than the overall patterns of disappearances," Baldurdth explained. "I don't know what is causing the degradation of this reality, at least in terms of causative effects. I know that it has to do with the disappearance of the others, but I cannot determine the mechanism. I doubt that I'll be able to discover a means to counteract the process. Which means that we have to get the fuck out of here, and soon!"

Her younger sister had a look of concentration on her face that Motokyn had rarely observed.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

When her older sis joined them for lunch, Kitsunen said a silent "thank you!" Motokyn had locked herself in her room after the upset at the garage, and she was left agonizing that her older sister had blown a fuse that couldn't be replaced. At the moment, she didn't care if the whole universe got flushed down the toilet as long as Motokyn was okay. Thankfully, Motokyn seemed to have recovered herself enough to become focused and serious again, as well as have an appetite. A couple hours quickly passed as they discussed their predicament, and she grew restive. Too much hearing empty answers and conjectures, not enough action.

She had an itch she needed to scratch.

"Look, we have to stop thinking about trying to fix a bunch of these defective fucked-up realities or alternate dimensions, and instead focus on one universe," Kitsunen exclaimed in a firm voice of conviction that she didn't even suspect that she had. Motokyn looked at her with an expression of surprise, unaccustomed to seeing this side of her. She herself was unaccustomed to seeing this side of her, surprised that her voice almost sounded like Mom whenever she felt a certainty about her opinions.

"I _know_ that one event caused all of this. I'm certain of it! Something happened in the past that caused _everyone_ to not be here in the present. So the breach we are dealing with is actually between only two realities...this one, and the one we need to repair. Everyone that vanished were all tied in to an incident that happened or never happened, just like the three of us are tied together on this side of things. We have been excluded from that event for a purpose, and I don't have a clue what it is. But Keleste and Keiyasu didn't know why they were in primitive Ireland. The Quad didn't know why they were brought to an empty part of the new Syntrasil. Like Baldurdth says, we're the designated 'repair crew'. Maybe that's the only reason we weren't UFO'd elsewhere like Mom and the rest. So we must figure out what that one event was. Something happened in _this_ universe to make it go bad. Then we go back there and correct it. We do whatever it takes to repair it."

"How the hell are we supposed to do that, sis?" Baldurdth argued. "Jump into the family time machine and go back a few years? You're dreamin' again! I can admit that the idea of a sympathetic causation might apply here, but it still doesn't get us any gravy to pour over the meat. We would have to figure out what event caused all the dominoes to fall, and then we'd have to figure out how to go back in Time and fix it."

"We're long on challenges and short on hopes," Motokyn observed sourly.

"Tell me about it!" Baldurdth confirmed.

"The time factor situation complicates the difficulty of our situation immensely. We're not only limited by our lack of Divine abilities, but we're faced with a deadline," Motokyn acknowledged. Kitsunen sensed that her sister was doing a lead-up, by the way she was talking; she could tell when her sis was feeling out the turf.

"Baldurdth, are you certain that Mom's things won't start disappearing until the day after tomorrow?" Motokyn asked.

"Given what I have to work with, I have a high degree of confidence that my conclusion is correct."

"Good. Because we _do_ have a family time machine," Motokyn stated, matter-of-factly. Kitsunen was glad she was sitting on the floor at the dining table; if she had been in a chair, chances are she might have fallen out of it just to dramatize her stupefaction towards her sister's off-the-wall claim.

"What? Don't tell me your gumball dispenser just ran out of gumballs too, sis! A time machine? We don't have anything even approaching that in our hobby rooms," he exclaimed, eying their older sister warily. Kitsunen felt her heart heave a sigh of frustration.

"'Urd's Castle'" Motokyn answered.

"Our Mom was formerly the Norn of the Past. After all the recent upheaval, we now know that she's just a Norn supposedly...according to the twins, the Quad and that new aunt, Aunt Skuld. But before we did all the acts of creation, in our reality Mom _was_ the Norn of the Past. She had her own hobby room, which none of us were ever allowed to enter. Have you ever wondered _why_ she wouldn't let anyone in there? Of course you have, because I've been wondering about that myself since I was old enough to start reading kanji. I believe that the reason her room was off-limits is because she had something in there that could make it possible to travel through time into the Past; a dangerous possession to have indeed. So her room wasn't a hobby room like ours; it was a _workplace_. It stands on good sense that her room in _this_ universe would have the same kind of equipment, spellbooks, alchemical labs, mandalas and other artifacts that she had in _the old_ universe. Just as Kit is certain that there is a single event that caused all of families to disappear, I believe that there is a functioning arcanical device that will allow us to travel back in Time," Motokyn explained.

She felt a ray of light shining through the gathering storm clouds. Baldurdth's analysis of their dilemma was frightening, but Motokyn's idea was equally hopeful. A transitory impression that Mom was still here, trying to rescue her and her older sister and brother, passed within her heart. Speaking to her Soul from wherever she was, it seemed that their Mother was saying that it was possible for them to resolve their plight and that she had left them the means to accomplish this.

"So if we can hack her warding spells, we can break into her personal 'Urd's Castle' room and see for ourselves, huh? Is that even possible?" Kitsunen remarked.

"Nah, it'll take some time, but I know I can do it. Easy as lemonade. Well not quite, but you know what I mean," Baldurdth said enthusiastically, winking at her and Motokyn.

"Radical!" Kitsunen said. "If this universe is going to go down in flames, then we're not going to be in it."

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

It took Baldurdth most of the day, but he was finally able to circumvent Mom's numerous shields, wards, spells and lockouts so that they could enter her personal work room. The more he toiled with the magical stays, the more he felt assured that Motokyn was right. Something heavy-duty secret must be in there, because Mom had gone overboard in safekeeping her room, over-clocking it with a library-full of arcane protections. This wasn't the door to a bank vault, this was comparable to using the entire vault as the lockworks...and he had to open every safety deposit box just to reach the bank safe-door. He felt like the proverbial art thief trying to stealthily enter the Imperial Palace or the Louvre, like in the movies or something.

"This is it!" he thought as he pulled the shoji door open. He was full-on trippin' out with nervousness, because he felt like he was entering some kind of inner sanctum that belonged to a church or temple.

The first impression he had was of a maze of swirling energy convections and copula contours of intricate mandala workings. He could recognize a few of these designs, but most of them were very highly compressed arcanical constructs; incredibly complex with significantly difficult layers of activation spells. Many of them required Angels as well as Gods or Goddesses in order to initialize their functions, so they were screwed as far as working with those mandalas or circles. There was very little technomagic or ultra-tech artifacts or devices...his own hobby room had more techo-niking stuff than his Mom's. Actually, this arrangement seemed sensible. His Mom was Norn of the Past, where the elder arts of encanting, songspelling, geomancy, astrology, witching crafts, and alchemy were practiced. So of course Mom would choose to be adept in the old world type stuff. Part of her room looked like his high school's chemistry lab, but he knew that this appearance was misleading. A bewildering apothecary of powerful alchemical solutions, each augmented with complex spellcrafts, filled a third of her "Urd's Castle" room. Several throw rugs were patterned with arcane workings.

Motokyn and Kitsunen were more the magical girls, since he was the resident techie of the family. The security measures were all math-based arcane encrypts; but summoning, transmuting and chronometric circles required magical abilities he simply didn't have. He just hoped that both of them could assist him in ferreting out which of these workings was the one they needed to travel in the past. Locating that might even be the easiest part of their task, because then they would have to come together with the mother of all brainstorming jam-sessions and determine _where_ in the past they needed to go.

"There's something odd about these rugs," Kitsunen noted. "None of them even comes close to matching Mom's tastes. Mom likes abstract calligraphy, arabesques, and Moroccan patterns in her rugs. But these are representations of circles of creation, summoning, and investiture. Investiture of what, I don't know. But my sense is that a couple of these mandalas are intended to assign certain Divine properties to those who use them."

"This lab is magnificent!" Motokyn praised. "The energies surrounding these compounds touch upon alchemical qualities I can't even imagine existing. No wonder Mom was so renowned for her arcane skills. I wouldn't expect less from her. But what distinguishes her as a Norn? Shouldn't there be significant evidence of a special magic that only a Norn could use?"

"There has to be some clues we can use in here. Too bad Mom didn't do computers, even though she was a Sysop in Yggdrasil before having us. Chii! If there only was a laptop or notepod computer..." he wondered aloud, his sense of feeling intimidated and curious within bounds of each other.

"Tell me about it!" Kit interrupted, agreeing with him. "Nothing like finding an 'in case of emergency, break this' sorta sign, if we should be so lucky. Whatever it is that we're trying to find, it's probably right under our noses, too."

After an hour of scouting their Mother's work room, they made little progress in finding any means of traveling to the past. Or anything else of value, for that matter. His enthusiasm was swallowed in the quicksands of doubt, as Baldurdth realized that Mom's arcanical skills were far beyond anything that they could grasp. They could have sharpened the learning curve by checking out their Aunt's work room. But it was too late. The other household Norn's work/hobby room would be just as empty as Keiichi's garage workshop. Glummed, he surveyed the room's contents one more time while recounting that a day or two from now, this room would be just as useless to their needs as his Aunt and Uncle's bedroom. Even the groceries his Aunt had stocked up in the pantry were vanishing, which cut down the dinner options considerably.

A pizza feast might create some initiative...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Motokyn found herself questioning why she and the others didn't find anything of useful value in Mom's work room. Kit's room was definitely a hobby room, with numerous videogame setups, closets with clothing, and several computers usually netted up to chat networks and clients. Her hobby room was more of a mini-dojo workout room, where she kept her swords and polished her kendo skills against holographic opponents. Baldurdth's hobby room resembled a machine shop and library, with his manga tankobans neatly shelved in juxtapose to the pizza boxes strewn all over the floor amidst various mecha parts and inventions. But their Mother's room was a for-real workplace: she recognized the remote Sysop Node, alchemistry lab, numerous wards, spell texts, and arcanical mandala patterns. There had to be something that was missing...

On a whim, she decided to meditate in Mom's "Castle", sitting in the middle of one of the throw rugs with the circular patterning. She had been taught by her sensei that one way to absorb herself in a solution was to absorb herself in the environment; which was why each kendo session at the dojo began with a 15 minute group meditation session in the middle of the fencing hall. Baldurdth and Kit would call it "pickin' up on the vibes", but she knew it was a valid way of seeing into the intrinsics of nature.

Focusing on counting her breaths, a curious pattern seemed to emerge that described certain sword-fighting katas; forms of sword practices her grand-sensei had taught her for use in melee situations. Sensei knew that if she ranked high or won the National competition, this may arouse professional jealousy in other kendo schools...or even haphazard macho posturing on the part of certain yakuza. So he had passed on generations-old sword-saint lore, which she practiced with a grateful diligence. _Why_ she was mentally projecting these katas was a mystery; yet she felt an impulse to grab two of her swords and practice a complex fighting style.

Breaking off her meditation, she walked to her room and selected her two favorite tachi-katana blades. Returning to her Mom's work room, Motokyn closed her eyes and imagined striking at Time itself. As she began to weave blurs of steel in the air, she noticed the room becoming less backgrounded...perhaps even transparent to her movements. A normal coincident of deep concentration; just like patrons of a movie theater do not notice each other once the film starts up because their attention is glued to the screen. She wondered why all of the throw rugs were of the same size...

Overlaps?

Just like swordsmanship required overlapping to protect feints and strikes to vital areas. What would happen if they placed the rugs atop of each other? The complex mandala pattern that would be yielded would be significantly impressive, if they could somehow trim the rugs away from the embroideries. Swinging her swords in practiced motions, her mind was distracted...or intensified...by visions of a palette that would be yielded, polychromatic and geometrically precise. Time has a certain geometry to it, as Mother had noted. The most basic examples of chrono-geometry were hypercubes, but she knew of more complex forms as well.

Each throw of her swords seemed to have shadowed visual echoes of the flash and sheen of her blades. Instead of moving one sword in each hand, she sensed that she was moving ten or twenty. A time-lapse imagery, as if Time itself was no longer constant, but instead had a quicksilvered periodicity. She felt like her movements were illuminated by a strobe light.

"Oh my God!" she heard someone shout, and she brought herself to a halt in mid-kata. But she didn't halt instantaneously; she knew she had halted in mid-swing, but the physical sensations and visual impressions of 'stopping' were shaky-jerky. A staccato halting of motion, rather than the fluid motion and sharp "snap!" that usually accompanied a precise finish.

"Motokyn, you're _blurring_!" Kitsunen shouted, slowly shaking her head side-to-side in disbelief. "This is crazy! I can see you, but it's as if you're in many places at once. You look like one of those stop-motion film sequences, but how? This is real life, and we don't have our Divine powers!"

Her sister's explanation didn't make any sense, but it aptly described what she was experiencing as she was enveloped in the flow of her sword-form. She looked down and realized that she was standing atop one of Mom's weird throw rugs.

"Kitsunen, get Baldurdth in here right away!" she demanded. Her sister gave her the trademark disapproving scowl that she was apt to do when she felt that she was being bossed around, and then left to fetch their brother.

For 16 years, Motokyn had felt excluded because her brother and sister had clearly evidenced gifts that had been passed on to them from Mom. Now she realized that she herself had been blessed with a special inheritance from her Mother. Her Mother's blood was flowing through her veins, filling her heart and Soul, breathing life into her mind.

She had inherited Mom's sensitivity to Time.

When Kitsunen and Baldurdth came back, she didn't apologize for the tears outlining her high-boned cheeks.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Kitsunen was snap-the-lid angry at first, but when she returned with her brother and saw Motokyn in tears, her irritation turned to mystification. Why was her sister crying? A moment earlier, Motokyn's insistent manner made her half-expect her older sister would chew Baldurdth and her out.

"I can _feel_ Time," her sister announced once she and her brother reached Mom's work room. "I don't know how, but I can. These throw rugs _are_ the mandala; if we place them atop each other in the correct order, the combination will activate a portal to travel back into the past. The top rug has to be this one, however. Like Kit said, this pattern is an Investiture Mandala...and it seemed to imbue me with the ability to move _within_ Time. After all these years, I've finally learned the special quality of Mom's that was passed on to me. It seems that I have some of Mom's Norn abilities to interact with Time."

"Oh..my...Lord! Motokyn!" she mouthed silently, feeling her heart immediately soften towards her sister. For years, Motokyn had been haunted by this very issue. Being the eldest, Motokyn was upset at herself when Baldurdth and she developed clearly established traits that obviously came from their Mom. Meanwhile, her older sister saw herself as an enigma. Kit had often wondered herself why Motokyn was so different than Mom in so many ways; Mom was a free-spirited bastion of liberality and joy-de-vivre. Mom was undisciplined except when she needed to be, traits that she and her brother noticeably redeemed in their lifestyles. Mom was a flirt, an avid TV watcher, loved to play board games and constantly played pranks on Belldandy and Keiichi. In contrast, Motokyn was serious, studious, dedicated and driven, rarely goofed off, and loved to fight for 'justice'.

"This is way cool! It seems you found what you're looking for, sis," Kitsunen praised her in response, earning a rarely-seen sheepish half-smile from her older sister. "So now all we need to do is figure out how to layer the other five throw rugs to create this mandala you mentioned. I'll need to use Mom's alchemical lab to cook up a caustic which will dissolve the rugs while leaving the embroidery..."

"This, from the girl who burns instant noodles," Baldurdth commented. She wanted to fire back a jab, but saw the twinkle in his eye and let it slide. In his boyish way, he was challenging her rather than teasing her.

She gave her brother the stick-out-the-tongue "biii-da!", and then walked over to Mom's alchemistry worklab.

"Do it again, Motokyn! I wanna see," Baldurdth requested. When Motokyn fired up her two-sword fencing routine, she began to 'blur' against the air within a minute, creating the stunning effect of several Motokyns standing in one place skillfully wielding the swords.

"Damn, she's good!" her brother commented. Kitsunen hadn't paid much attention to her sister's progress over the recent years, partly because she was jealous and partly because she was too busy having fun teasing boys. Witnessing Motokyn in her element, absolutely sure and confident of herself, she felt impressed and a little awed by her sister. The precision of each movement wasn't a fluke; such exacting motions had been wrested out of the imagination and willed into reality by thousands of repetitions guided by a master who had dedicated his life to kendo. A grandmaster who claimed that Motokyn was the best pupil he had ever taught.

This was almost like an off-the-wall 'girl power' anime where the Samurai Girl has magical abilities.

Mom's alchemical lab was rife with its own charms and dangers. Kitsunen knew that she had to be cautious; who knows what kinds of potions Mom had cooked up. Their Mom always joked around about her 'Divine Elixirs', and had claimed to have perfected a number of love potions, including one that would cause whoever drank it to fall in love with the first person he or she saw. Definitely one to be avoided with her brother and sister in the room! Some potions were clearly marked, drawing a range of reactions as she read the labels: "Angel Eater Pest Control" (_what the..?_), "Deluxe Pheromone Enhancer" (_uh-oh!_), "Feline Yowling Inhibitor" (_mrrow!_), "LustMaster GrooveMover" (_gnarly!_), "Dinosaur Feces Dissolver" (_yuck!_), "Ol' Panther Mickey for Mom" (_for Grandma Hild?_), "Keiichi Motorbike Maxwell's Brew" (_hilarious! drunken Maxes!_), and many others.

Most carpets being polypropyline or polyfiber, it would be easy to create a naptha-like tonic that would dissolve the plastic resins but not dissolve the silk embroidery. Within a few minutes, she finished whipping up a suitable compound. She tested it on a corner of one of the throw rugs and it melted down fast kine, like mice escaping a burning house.

"When we hit on the right combo, there should be some kind of chronometric surge," Baldurdth noted. "Since you seem to have this new sensitivity to Time nuances, I suggest that you do one of your kendo workout things while we systematically stack the rugs. Once you feel the maximum displacement of Time, then that would be it."

"Agreed!" her older sister replied. They quickly took the 'investiture mandala' rug and set it aside, so Motokyn could do her kendo thing while they started stacking rugs like pancakes. After a few tries, they hit an optimal combo. But Baldurdth decided to go through all the possible combos, just in case one was better or that particular stacking of rugs was a fluke. When they repeated the process, Motokyn's movement became much more blurred with a particular pattern of stacked rugs. Her older sister was almost invisible, the TimeSpace distortion was so great.

They stacked the 'investiture' run on top of the other five and she poured the dissolving tonic on the carpets, which melted all the fibers away and began eating the rubber matting until it was gone as well. What remained was a funky abstract mandala that didn't even resemble a Divine working. A pile of silk threads that they couldn't step on, because they would certainly mess up the precise patterning.

"One solution...another god-dammed problem!" Kitsunen swore to herself. How could they activate a mandala working if they couldn't step within its bounds? It was pointless: they might as well be attempting to dance on top of one of those Tibetan painted-sand mandalas without disturbing a single flint of sand.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --


	154. Pt 154: Nine Voices: The Triplets Pt 3

**Part 154: Nine Voices – The Triplets Part Three**

MOTOKYN, BALDURTH and KITSUNEN:

Kami-sama was betided with intrigue at the unexpected interruption as He looked upon the three young Gods who were bowed in supplication to Him and His Dark Brother. The eldest was a spirited Goddess dressed in a shrine maiden's miko outfit, the middle one was a God with a high degree of intelligence, and the youngest was a female Goddess full of goodly mischief.

The eldest seemed to have appointed herself to be the spokesperson for the trio, whom He noted were triplets. Not only were they triplets, but the three's Metanative signature indicated that they were an impossible hybrid of Divine and Earthrealm mortal essences. Knowing all of the denizens of His Realm, He did not recognize these three, which yielded forth a great and certain perplexity. His Dark Brother did not recognize them either.

"This is most curious, My Brother, for they are twice divided in nature. Their Divine nature comprises both God and Demon essences, whilst their mortal nature comprises a mortal essence and...something else. They are, and yet are not Our Children. I cannot detect You or Myself within them. How could this be?" He noted to Oni-sama.

They had been released from the paralysis that had afflicted Them, and remained on the Earthrealm instead of attending to Their Realms. According to XOM and the Reaper, Their Realms were completely transformed. Lingering on the Earthrealm seemed to be an act of uncertainty, but then these three youths arrived and once again They were faced with additional uncertainty.

The tale the young Goddess had woven was simply a marvel of fanciful invention. She claimed that she and eight other children had recreated all of existence after it had been destroyed by the SurGoth. Then they found themselves in a dysfunctional 'dimension' or 'reality' where they had been separated from their entire family. They claimed to be the daughters and son of a Norn named Urd, and further claimed that this reality itself needed to be repaired.

After being paralyzed by the SurGoth, both Lords recognized that the extravagance of their claims may hold commission with reality. If so, then the implications were either that They were not real, or this 'reality' was not real.

Or one nor the either.

Nor one or another.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

_Getting here was the hardest part, but then again, isn't that how it always turns out to be?_

_They were here, but now what to do?_

_Just a few minutes earlier, they were in their temple home, which happened to be in a rapidly-dissolving time-capsule reality. Major tweakage on the catastrophe scale, like surfing on an alka-seltzer on the surface of water in a glass, watching it slowly fizzle away underneath your feet..._

...Yesterday, they had discovered the family 'Time Machine': a mandala in their Mom's work room that consisted of several layers of threads, intricately woven into a working that was so complex and sophisticated, even her brother the genius couldn't understand it. But there was no free ride on the Time Express, because if they stepped into the mandala, they would disturb the patterning of the threads and thus be unable to activate it.

Motokyn was so upset, she went outside and hacked down three shoots of bamboo just to vent.

Baldurdth had exiled himself back into his lab.

And their universe kept on shrinking. Shit was disappearing out of the temple, the horizon seemed to be closing in on them, Mt. Fuji was gone...and nobody had a solution to activate the mandala. How do you step on something that cannot be trodden upon without ruining it?

School the next day was a fucking joke. The long school day passed as she and her two other birthdate-mates...her two siblings...tried to keep a straight face and a social life, while they were faced with an impending destruction. As the only triplets in school, they were under the social scrutiny of their classmates, not to mention that Kitsunen herself was the most babe-alicious girl in school, according to most of the boys. Guys flirted with her, her girlfriends talked smack about each other...and the fuckin' world kept shrinking with death-knell certainty.

It really hit home yesterday when she went to her homeroom and a third of the class was missing. She asked the sensei what had happened, because this was either an epidemic or some mass skippage of school that she should have gotten in on. She, Baldurdth and Motokyn were informed by their homeroom sensei that there were only 21 students on the class roster, not 34. Baldurdth's 'pocket universe' thing had shredded into their immediate district, to the point where her friends and classmates were disappearing. She was upset, Motokyn was stoic, while Baldurdth simply acted like he didn't give a shit.

Just to make things interesting, she picked up the empty desk next to hers and heaved it through one of the classroom windows.

They marched her to the faculty lounge-office for a massive scold-fest and then a spell in detention. While she was being yelling at like nutcases by the Phys. Ed sensei for her psycho move, Kitsunen's brain was already chain-ganging. A scheme began to take form in her mind about how to use the time travel mandala of Mom's to get the fuck out of here. And away from these asshole macho male teachers who got kicks by screaming at teenaged girls.

By breaking the window, a blast of air came into the room. It was that simple.

Glass is transparent.

Place a pane of glass over the mandala and they could walk on it safely without disturbing its pattern. Motokyn could do her time-spin Ninja Girl thing, activating the mandala underneath. Baldurdth could beam up some tech stuff from one of the recesses in his brain, creating a field underneath them. Using Mom's alembic setups, she could create an alchemic which would then transmute the glass they were standing on into air. If it was all timed out with certain coolage and cooperation between the three of them, they could be dropping right into a fully spun-up and energized mandala.

Telling the detention monitor to fuck off, she left and dashed back to their homeroom to fetch Motokyn and Baldurdth. Ignoring the accusing glare of her homeroom teacher, she dragged her sister and brother out of class and then out of the school grounds. When she laid her scheme on her brother and sister, they thought that she had "broken her brain".

But later in the day, it settled in and the three of them knew they had to try it.

So last night, the three were dressed in black as they stalked the alleys leading to the business district...looking like one expert ninja, one teenaged otaku stalker, and one amateur sexy cat-burglar type. Needless to say, she wasn't the stalker or ninja. Their mission: to steal a sufficiently large pane of glass and hijack it back to the temple. Mom's lab was big, and they needed a large piece of glass that isn't commonly found in houses. Solution: go to the commercial district and cut one right out of a storefront. She was used to shoplifting clothes from stores, not windows. But she knew just the place. Motokyn was all against it, of course, being Ms. Noble Girl and all that. But she convinced her older sis that they had to go for broke, or they would wind up in a boat without a deck to stand on. The other issue was people. People tend to act funny when other people do whack shit, like steal whole windows from an office building, setting off alarms and crap. So Motokyn was armed with three swords, Baldurdth with a pair of gloves, and she with a glass-cutter. She broke the first pane while cutting it, sending off a silent alarm. As the cops came to the scene, she was just finishing her second attempt. Cops don't have guns in Japan, mostly. They have nightsticks, sprays, stunners...and military training. She almost giggled when the police accosted them, the sergeant gruffly telling them to "halt and let go of the glass!" As she ignored the cops and kept cutting the glass pane, the policemen shouted "you're under arrest" and gang-rushed them. They didn't have a chance. It took Motokyn about ten seconds to disarm them and knock all four policemen unconscious with her wooden katana. Lucky this wasn't feudal days, or there'd be four heads rolling on the ground. Amusingly, her sister surprised her by grinning after that stunt. Like foxes escaping after raiding the chicken coop, the three of them returned with one bigass piece of heavy glass...

_...They all did their gig and it worked flawlessly, creating a hole-in-the-floor vortex of Time that they bounded into. Destination unknown, they had wound up here...with Kami-sama and Oni-sama in some weird church. Hopefully, the Almighty didn't care about the thing with the glass..._

_So she kept her mouth shut and let her big sister do the talking._

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

What seemed to perplex the Lords was this: before They had fought the SurGoth, this church had been well-attended with Gods and mortals and a smattering of Demons. They had been TimeStilled, which was virtually impossible to conceive of, because They were the Masters of the Divine Realms. Now, They were in an empty church, with three Godkids that neither of Them knew.

Where had all the wedding attendees had gone? Even the invisible Gate of Judgement was no longer in this mortal worship-place. They queried XOM, the unified computer of all three Realms, to try and explain this. XOM reported that it had been offline for a period and couldn't replay any datacrystals that mentioned a wedding in this church.

XOM was functioning without defect before these children arrived.

Enigmas wrapped within unidentifiable quiddities.

The young half-mortal half-Goddess had beseeched Their assistance, but when pressed for what she needed, she could only mention Belldandy, Urd, Skuld, Mara. Both Kami-sama and Oni-sama knew of these four beings quite well: three Norns and a Demon Office administrator stationed on the Earthrealm. But Kami-sama confirmed that the three Goddesses were in Yggdrasil, and Oni-sama noted that the Demoness was off on assignment in Vanagdrasil, teaching her underlings the fine points of discharging dismal grief strikes on mortals.

Kami-sama had come here to officiate a wedding. Oni-sama had come here to interrupt a wedding. So where was the wedding?

Just curiosities, dangling like a mobile in a breeze, crashing against each other in an effort to regain stability. Could these Godkids be telling the truth, that they were the architects of this new change, this "Expansion of Balance" as XOM had termed it?

When two Almighty beings and three Gods cannot solve a problem, a mortal is required.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"It was supposed to be today," they heard an anguished voice echoing from the back of the church. "Bell-chan and I were supposed to be married today, right here in this church. What could possibly happen to her, causing her to be angry enough to cancel our wedding and leave me behind?"

Motokyn regarded the mortal standing in the back of the shirt, his hands in his pockets, wearing what looked like a leather riding jacket. It took a few seconds to register, because the shockwave of recognition had hit her first before she could think her way through the box.

It was her Uncle Keiichi!

But this wasn't her Uncle, because this guy looked like he was in his early twenties. Just a few years older than she, Baldurdth and Kit.

"DAMMIT! WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED! I DIDN'T DO ANYTHING WRONG!" he suddenly screamed, pounding his fist against the nearest pew. His shout was so rife with anguish, Motokyn was wincing at the passionate outburst.

"Two days ago, Bell-chan came to me and threw her engagement ring in my face! The one that she said had some special crystal substance, the one that meant that the Lord Himself had approved of our marriage. Then she leaves. Urd slaps me and leaves. Skuld simply glares at me and leaves. Mara threatens to burn me into a crisp and leaves. Then I'm left holding the phone, having to explain to Megumi, Tomohisa and my parents that the wedding was canceled. And I could even give them a reason, an answer that explained 'why'! _I don't even know why!!!_ What could possibly turn Belldandy against me like this?"

That was a shocker, and Motokyn could see the concern on the faces of her two sibs. The Belldandy and Keiichi they remembered growing up were deeply in love with each other, sometimes in a very quiet way, sometimes loud and giggly. But she could always sense the obvious admiration that the two had for each other whenever she was in the room with them.

Something was majorly amiss here, if Keiichi was telling the truth. She felt uncomfortable in the face of his anguish, unaccustomed to being exposed to such candid emotional agony. The sword of fate had skewered his heart, or maybe torn it out.

She had never grown up with Skuld or Mara, but she remembered them from the last session in the sunroom before everyone disappeared. Those two were only names without a face or history to her. Sisters to her Mom and Belldandy, supposedly.

"What's the point? Everyone's gone, and I'm left here all alone, to atone for something I didn't even do," the mortal man Keiichi said to the empty church. To Motokyn's eyes, he looked spent and defeated. Sighing, he grasped the top of the pew and looked at them, not seeing them. Not seeing the two Lords, for that matter. His kokoro was so wrapped up in shock and grief that he couldn't see anything else. Blind-sighted, an easy target for the merciless sword of fate, because he saw through reality rather than _into_ it. She could understand his state of despair, because this was how Mom got when she had one of her 'fits'.

What does it mean to be emotionally broke?

Keiichi said that everyone had left, simply because the wedding had been called off. Motokyn couldn't imagine a future without Belldandy and Keiichi being in love, being married. If it weren't for the two of them, her Mother wouldn't have come to the Earthrealm, met this Cevn guy who was supposed to be her Father. Mom wouldn't have fallen in love, wouldn't have gotten married. Mom always said that if Belldandy and Keiichi had never met, then she would have never had a reason to ever come to the Earthrealm. Keiichi had made a wish, and Belldandy had answered it. Mom said that Cevn had made a wish, and she had been called upon to grant it. Motokyn knew that Keiichi and Belldandy were together five years before they got married.

But if Keiichi and Belldandy didn't marry...

Kitsunen was right! Her younger sis had talked about causality trees; how when one event did or didn't happen, it created a 'pivot point' that could cause a whole subsequent chain of events to occur or not occur.

Belldandy was the main reason why her Mom, Skuld and Mara had come to the Earthrealm. Which meant that her Aunt might be the reason they would leave as well. What if something had happened to undo the reason for the other three sisters to remain?

Keiichi...this Keiichi...had said that Belldandy had canceled the wedding, and then her Mom and Skuld and Mara had gotten angry with him and departed.

_It was the wedding!_

All of these events, the sudden appearance of everyone in that sunroom two weeks ago...had their source in this wedding! Without the marriage, none of the principals would have a reason to be in that room with she and her sibs. As a result, they had been isolated from their Mother and their entire extended family; both familiar faces like Belldandy and Keiichi and unfamiliar faces like all the rest. They had jumped into the mandala hoping to emerge in another Time where they could fix things, do a 'repair job' as Baldurdth explained it. Indeed, they had traveled into the past, but they had skipped into another universe as well. Because if Mom had left like Keiichi said she did...

...she, her brother and her sister would never have been born.

But the three of them were here.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Hey man, you look like you've really had it rough!" Baldurdth hailed, halfway down the center aisle as he leisurely approached the younger version of his Uncle. His sisters looked like they were going to shit beef jerky, they were so caught off-guard and astonished when he broke ranks and started walking walk towards the beleaguered young man who was so upset. Both of them shook their heads "No!" emphatically.

"I heard what you said. Your wife-to-be bailed on her own wedding? That's harsh, dude!"

"She didn't 'bail', she got extremely angry and canceled it," Keiichi answered him. "As for you, I don't know who you are, or why you're here asking personal questions when I don't even know you."

Standing in front of the man, he was now certain that this was his Uncle Keiichi. The man's palpable air of grief plucked at his heartstrings, a humid malaise that thwarted the serene chill November stillness in the church. Baldurdth had to check his ready answers at the door, because it wouldn't bode well for Keiichi to learn that they were relatives. Concealing the truth would be hard, because he grown up respecting his Uncle highly, especially since he was the only other man in a house populated by high-strung Goddesses. He and Keiichi had often gone into the garage so that Baldurdth could delve in the mysteries and miseries of being a teenager. Keiichi...his Uncle Keiichi...always seemed to be a good listener. Often, the way his Uncle had this certain ability to notice the hidden things, an intuitive skill that often left him feeling amazed. Keiichi didn't talk some off-the-wall bullshit; his advice was dead-on accurate and trustworthy. Baldurdth knew that this was because he saw the universe through his mind, while Uncle Keiichi experienced it through his heart.

It hurtful to see this man, who totally was his Uncle, be tormented by so much mental and emotional turmoil.

But Baldurdth knew that Keiichi had the answers they all needed.

"Hey, I'm just a guy like you who has a big heart, and can't leave people be when they're hurting," Baldurdth noted, bowing to Keiichi to 'introduce' himself. "My name's Baldurdth, and I..uh..go to a college near here. And you are..."

"Morisato Keiichi. Owner of a broken heart at the moment," Keiichi answered him. "You wouldn't believe what I've been through, Baldurdth-kun."

Contact.

Now, it was just a matter of navigating some emotional terrain to arrive at some explanation about this botched wedding. It was so obvious! No wedding, no family. No Mom staying on the Earthrealm. No new Aunts Skuld and Mara.

No us.

"Okay, so what happened?" Baldurdth asked, unable to shake the impression that the two Lords were observing him closely. Keiichi narrated how, two nights ago, he was drinking a couple beers at home with two of his sempai when Belldandy opened the door, went ballistic in a cold-as-ice sort of way, and hurled her engagement ring on the floor. No explanation, no confrontation except to say that she was going try and get his wish nullified.

Something must have really rolled her off her gyros. The Aunt Belldandy he had grown up with was a fount of wisdom, naive as an air-headed beagle, loyal as a hatamoto...and stable, stable, stable, when it came to emotions. The only emotional defect his Aunt seemed to have was a jealous streak that would flare up once in a while.

What could have set his Aunt off so much that she would cancel her wedding?

Even more hairy in the weirdness department was the two Lords. Curiously, They were just standing there, looking on instead of doing something. They seemed to be waiting, analyzing, observing. Why? Could this situation be so off the hook, the Almighty and his Demonic counterpart were uncertain about what had occurred?

"Dude, I've..uh..never had a girlfriend, so I don't know what it's like to lose one," Baldurdth ventured casually, mentally imagining his two sisters snickering in reaction to his admission. "But I do know about loss. I grew up without a Father. There were days when I felt like I was going to go nuts because it felt so wrong to not have a dad. I keep sensing that you think this whole thing is wrong, huh?"

"Well...duh!" he heard his sister Kitsunen exclaim.

"It is and it isn't," Keiichi replied. "You see, my girlfriend is really special. She's really different from other women in a way that I cannot possibly explain to you. Because of that, we've had...trials...that have really tested us, tested our love for each other many times. The best way I could describe it would be to say that she's like a secret agent in a sense, extremely talented at doing her thing but often being targeted by seen and unseen enemies, just because she is who she is. We've been through crazy, insane, type of stuff that you couldn't even imagine. But we pulled through it each time, and our love grew stronger as we met each challenge head-on. I'm a motorcycle racer, which means that I'm used to pushing the envelope and facing danger on the road and on the track. But now, for the first time, I have to really question why we're together, she and I. I have to look at the broader picture; just like in a racing competition where I have to be concerned with the entire race course instead of just one part of it. What happened feels wrong, but could be right."

"Huh?" Baldurdth gasped, his shocked reaction echoed by his sister's voices.

"I've been with her for five years, and we've dealt with many shocks," Keiichi noted. "So I'm not surprised that something really difficult could have occurred in her life, and got her so upset that she had to leave. My fiancée is much wiser than I, and when things seem to get out my sense of understanding, she still seems to know what to do. It's funny, but meeting you here...and your two sisters up towards the front of the church...gives me a sense of hope. That this is just another one of those times where the panic button gets pushed, but the panic never comes on strong. You know what I mean? Maybe this was meant to happen, because something is _meant to resolve it and bring Bell-chan back to me_. Geez...up until now, I didn't even think about it that way. But now I have a little bit of hope that it'll all work out. You said you didn't grow up with a Father...but I bet you kept hoping that you would have one. That he'd come back or something. If you can grow up without a dad, even while you were hoping for one from time to time...how could I abandon all hope just two days after she and her sisters left? There may be a chance, and it's out of my hands at the moment."

Baldurdth felt like he had been kicked in the head, because this conversation had gone deep-ways by sheer accident, like a bathysphere suddenly cut adrift from the mooring ship on the ocean's surface. Keiichi had unwittingly tapped into him, and pulled out something Baldurdth was too proud to admit. But it was true...despite his self-denial, he _had_ spent many nights secretly hoping that his Father would come back and they could be a two-parent family. And when he couldn't hope for himself, he hoped for Mom and his two sister's sake that their family could have a Father. Again, he regretted not even acknowledging this 'Cevn' who was his real Father.

But Keiichi had turned his own despair back against itself...and had found hope that he would be reunited with his dear Belldandy.

"Hey, what's the date?" Baldurdth asked.

"It's November XX, 20XX," Keiichi answered in a thin, despondent voice.

That confirmed it! Every November, his Aunt would cook up a storm of goodies...and the rest of the household knew that her and Keiichi's anniversary was just around the corner. Things would just seem a little brighter in the household for a certain week in the late Fall...

"Well, I should be going," Keiichi indicated, looking at the church's doorway. "If I stay here, I might just lose this little spark that I've found and get depressed all over again. Thanks for taking the time to listen to me, friend," he added, extending a handshake.

Baldurdth shook his hand, but wanted to hold on to it. If Keiichi left, then how would they ever figure out why the wedding was derailed?

"Hey, wait a minute! I want you to meet my sisters! We're triplets! Have you ever met triplets before?" Baldurdth asked excitedly. Keiichi was halfway turned, ready to leave, but he checked his step and turned back to Baldurdth and nodded his head with a "why not?" expression, his eyes momentarily flashing with interest.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Okay, so now what do we do? He's not just gonna stand there forever and wait for you two to meet and greet him," Baldurdth whispered to she and Kit as he rejoined them. "He doesn't know why she left him, but he definitely experienced it full-on, live and direct in a spook-house disturbing way. Is there any way we can tap into that experience, maybe pick up some nuance that a mortal wouldn't notice? I tried to get him to talk about it, but I didn't get much info. What I did get is this really hotwired sense that he somehow knows, intuitively, that we're here to help him. But how can we help him if we don't even know the real reason why his fiancée bailed on the wedding?"

*_ahem!*_

"We can catch a few of his stray thoughts and gather a sense of his experience, but I don't know how helpful Probing his mind would be. Right now, he's so grief-stricken that his aura is all over the place. I don't know if we can even get into his mind without being beached by his emotions," Kitsunen noted in a frustrated voice. "Besides, _she's_ the one who decided to shine the wedding. I still can't believe that my Aunt Belldandy would do something so idiotic! This is mega-crazy! I don't why the hell we're here, and now we've got to try and figure all this shit out? Half a story doesn't make for a good explanation, especially when we're talking guys and gals. We need her side of it too! And that ain't gonna happen unless she comes here and lets us, which is about as likely as finding penguins in Egypt. I think we're looking at the wrong doodle on the paper. We need to get into _her_ head somehow if we wanna know the real reasons why."

_*ahem!*_

"Which is impossible under the present circumstances. As Baldurdth suggests, we could Probe him, but we'd be searching up a blind alley if we did so. I agree with his concern that we may not gleam any useful information by experiencing her behavior through his mind. I don't even know if our ability to read his mind would be fully functional here, in our mortal-preeminent forms. Discovering a sense of what happened may not advance our cause anyway, because we would still have to address the absence of our Aunt. How could we persuade her to come back here? According to him, Belldandy is completely unbalanced to the point where she's actually contemplating a cancellation of his wish request. Goddesses simply don't become that irrational," Motokyn noted. "Even if we..."

_*ahem!*_

Someone cleared their throat again, interrupting her. She turned towards the source and shot a scowering glare...

...at Kami-sama!

Mortified, she immediately fell to her knees, assumed a seiza position and bowed in shame-provoked obeisance until her forehead rested on the church's floor. For all of her composure, she had fallen short and had allowed herself to become irritated. _At the Lord!_ The disgrace was overwhelming; the kind of insult which in feudal times would demand an act of contrition no less than public hara-kiri. She had completely and utterly misused her ki, as if she was trying to strike down a cement pillar with a blunt shina. Foolish, because the only one who could help them right now was the Lord.

"Uh, my Liege, I humbly beg Your forgiveness for my gross and callous indiscretion," Motokyn hastily apologized. "Unworthy as I am, a mere girl who is immature and unbecoming in her deportment, I..."

"Spare the spirited groveling and ask My Brother to help you already!" Oni-sama said, interrupting her. Motokyn bit her tongue...she hated being interrupted, but there was no way she was going to make the same mistake twice. Especially since the personage that had cut short her apology was the Ruler of the Demons.

"My Lord and honorable Dark Lord, to speak plainly, we're at a loss here," Motokyn said as she resumed her seated seiza position. "We have arrived here from a place where our Mother, Urd, only has one sister. Belldandy. The Belldandy that this young mortal man is supposed to marry. Where we come from, he's our Uncle. But we also met a Skuld and a Mara...who are sisters to our Mom and Belldandy, but unknown to us. Now they are all lost to us, and we need Your help! Desperately, because we believe that this whole situation with the canceled wedding is wrong. We need You to set it right! Please?"

"My daughter," Kami-sama answered in a gentle voice. "If I may instruct you in one thing, I would observe that the discipline that builds your character, if left untended, can also undo your ambitions. The true artist-warrior makes an art out of the study of her artistry, rather than merely using her artistry to make art. The key to preventing this is to open yourself to the potentials that rest dormant inside of you, and then move them into endeavors. I Myself cannot sense your potential, which is strange curious to Me as you are clearly a Goddess. But I will offer you My assistance, if not to seek what you must experience, but to brook an interpretation of what I have experienced."

Motokyn caught the first part, but didn't understand the second part of the Lord's wisdom at all. She and Kit quickly walked with Baldurdth to the back of the church to chase down their unmarried Uncle Keiichi before he decided to leave the church. After Baldurdth introduced them, she asked several questions to ascertain if he was the Keiichi of her memory. His face was so drawn, she could sense that he had barely slept since the incident. It was hurtful to witness his valorous struggle to overgain his emotional pain; she could recognize the warrior inside of him striking a defensive posture to ward away depression.

She sensed his ki and his kokoro, and neither would acknowledge defeat in the fact of such a profound loss and tragedy. A few minutes passed and Keiichi excused himself, noting that being in the church where his wedding was supposed to take place was "like hoarding despair", to put it in his words. They returned to the front of the church's nave where the two Lords were waiting.

"I believe we're ready, Sovereign Lords," she stated, still possessed by a sense of disbelief that she was address the Rulers of both the God's and the Demon's Realms. "We're certain that Keiichi is who he says he is. If there is anything we can do to alleviate his pain while we are at task, we will gladly apply ourselves to the effort."

"Then let it be. Chronological rollback, twenty-four hours Earthrealm standard time," the Lord commanded. Motokyn felt a funny swirling in her stomach, like she had felt right before she and her sibs had jumped into the mandala in their Mom's room. Time seemed to fold inwards upon itself, and in a flash, the church turned dark and then bright again.

She looked hopefully at the Lord, and her spine turned cold when she observed the expression of shock on His face.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"This is certainly unexpected," Kami-sama observed to His Demonic Brother. "I was fashioning a wedding, and this room was filled with beings afore. But regressing pastwards in Time for the duration of single solar day discloses no indication that a wedding was ever conducted. Which is contradictory, because I was here as well as You."

"I would esteem this absence to be the outcome of an event which occurred while We were TimeStilled, Brother," Oni-sama noted in a dry voice. "Verily, we are in a different juncture of reality now than We were prior. An intercession of immense proportions has occurred. I clearly recall Our hearty bouting with the SurGoth wraith, and how We defeated it at the expense of it fleeing through the Gate. Between then and now, everything had been altered."

"One solution would be these three," the Lord of the God's Realm explained. "I am aware of all beings in My Realm, God and mortal. But I have no foreknowledge of the three who are before Us. Hence, they must be part of the shifting weave of reality; either as a mover or a product of this intercession You refer to."

"It is done, My Light Brother," Oni-sama observed. "I have examined them, their entire lifespan and experience. We must pay a heavy gramercy, because these youths are both the architects and the outcome of the shift which XOM refers to as the 'Expansion of Balance' event'."

"Gramercy indeed!" the Liege of the Gods exclaimed. "They appear to have been agents of Balance in a strangeaways fashion. Yet, it would seem that they are displaced from where they belong. As are We."

"We, My Brother?" Oni-sama questioned with disbelief. "What force could possibly displace Us from our Realms?"

"The same as that which TimeStilled Us," Kami-sama answered. "It is My conjecture that the circuit of events that have occurred, this dynamic expansion of Our Realms and reality itself, was a response to some mischief worked by the SurGoth. When the SurGoth escaped Us, it set into motion a sequence of bearings and workings that required a corrective measure. An _extreme_ corrective measure, which bears out by the experiences of these children."

"You are suggesting that, by assisting them in their quest, We will resolve Our dilemma as well? Mayhaps that Our answer lies within the children, is that the decree Your mind holds?"

"Verily. All of Reality is intact, save for these three children. They have been brought here of their own initiative, not as seekers, but as a corrective measure. For Us. Now that they avail themselves to canvass Our assistance, We shall grant it."

"They're Yours, as they are Gods," Oni-sama noted. "It is meet that You assist them, while I accompany You. An adventure seems to entitle us to seek an ends to this confusion."

"Agreed. I will use the young mortal as a Focus to begin Our investigation of these matters."

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Kitsunen felt herself transported by powers far beyond her comprehension, first into Keiichi's mind, and then _through_ his mind. A poltergeist observer, she found herself floating invisibly in a room with Keiichi and two heavily intoxicated friends. Belldandy came in and accosted him with a whacko-bot burst of resentment, announcing that he was unworthy and that the wedding was canceled. Basically calling him a shitbag asshole without saying it. Insect-like, her thoughts flew from Keiichi's mind to Belldandy's. The amount of rage she sensed was staggering; Belldandy was caught in a totally off the clip rage-fest. Her heart had been broken ten ways to Yggdrasil, somehow. No one could experience so much anger and betrayal; her frenzy had been greased by a huge amount of sadness.

What could have made her so emo?

Belldandy seemed to walk backwards...she had hopped minds again and was now in the mind of the Demoness, Mara. Words were being forced, totally against Mara's will. Cherry blossoms spraying against a windmill of reluctance. Somehow, she realized that this was two days before the wedding. Within and without herself, Kitsunen found herself listening in from Mara's perspective, experiencing the moment:

_"Belldandy, since we are sisters in more than one sense, there should be no secrets between us. Certainly the small secrets should be vouchsafed, kept hidden for the sheer joy of deviousness. But the intense, essential secrets of who we are...should be brought in the open, no matter how painful they may be," Mara announced in a level voice._

_Belldandy raised an eyebrow at this. Mara had never before spoken to her this intently. She could see sweat beading on her Demoness sister's forehead. This conversation could be very serious to her sister. Then again, this was Mara; this whole conversation might turn out to be an attempt to create havoc in her life._

_"Yes, it is most helpful to be honest towards each other," Belldandy observed cautiously._

_"Which is why I must say what I must, before you are married to Keiichi."_

_"Mara, this isn't some effort to create mischief, is it?" Belldandy enquired in a serious tone of voice._

_"I wish it was that simple," Mara answered with a sigh. "Belldandy, I cannot live with myself if I don't tell you this. So I must inform you that I am pregnant. With twins."_

_"Oh, that's wonderful!" her sister responded joyfully, girlishly clapping and then clenching her hands over her heart. "Now I understand. You wanted to wait until after our wedding to announce it, so that your happy news wouldn't be overshadowed by our wedding. Or that it wouldn't overshadow our wedding. I guess it could go either way. Which certainly makes it important to discuss this, so that we can plan your announcement after Keiichi and I return from our honeymoon, if that wouldn't inconvenience you. Please assure me that you weren't planning to let everyone know about your happy state while we were away, were you? Keiichi and I would really be hurt if you did, Mara, because now _-you and I are family-_. He and I would feel saddened and let down if we didn't get to see everyone's joy at your announcement."_

_Mara's mouth felt like cactus, drying up as her sister cast a sway of innocent assumptions, caught up in joy at her news. Then the part about being family and sisters...and the blithe air of Belldandy...stole away any courage she had that remained intact. But being a Demoness, there was fire leftover..._

_"I didn't know that you had a Demon in your life, Mara," Belldandy continued. "This must be a happy occasion for him as well. Why didn't you introduce him to us before now?"_

_"Uh...Belldandy, the father isn't a Demon," Mara stammered. Her sister's eyes widened with incredulity as she reacted to Mara's statement._

_"But...but that's impossible! Goddesses can only have children with Gods, Demonesses with Demons. You couldn't possibly have a_ -God_- for a boyfriend. That's...unthinkable! Please excuse me, I didn't mean it that way. No offense intended, but if Gods and Demons started having children, then how would such a child fit in the order of the universe? Would they live in Yggdrasil or Vanagdrasil? How would they exist as a half-Demon half-God? This isn't one of those situations where you don't know who the father is, is it? Because if it is, I can help you and we will find out who he is and then make him take responsibility..."_

_Mara grimaced as Belldandy covered her mouth, even more upset and now embarrassed because she was questioning the existence of hybrid God-Demon miscegenation...with a Demoness who was half-Goddess. If this were any other situation, Mara would have let her have it good for saying that a half-Demon half-God was "unthinkable!"_

_"No. No!!!" Belldandy cried out, working herself into greater heights of vexation. "If the father isn't a Demon, he can't be possibly be a mortal. Keiichi and I...cannot have children. Gods and mortals can't have children! We've known for a long time that this would be a reality that we would have to face; that mortal DNA and Divine TNA cannot intermix within a flesh-and-blood being. Yet, he loves me so much that he's marrying me, knowing that he and I can't create a new life between the two of us. It just wouldn't be fair if you and a mortal could have children, when I can't_ ever have a child with _my beloved Keiichi. Why would a Demoness be able to do something a Goddess couldn't? Tell me it's not true, Mara!"_

_Mara, despite her mounting fear and anxiety, was appalled by this revelation. Belldandy and Keiichi...couldn't have children? Her sister had never disclosed this to her. Mara knew that Demons and mortals couldn't have children because the mortal strain and the Demonic strain were incompatible. It would be like trying to breed dolphins with armadillos on the Earthrealm. But she _-knew-_ who the father was, and it denied all logic and sensitivities. She didn't plan on being pregnant, didn't engage in procreative union, didn't remember how she got pregnant. One day it became evident beyond a doubt that she had two extras Souls inside of her. She had sought out the most expert Healers in Vanagdrasil, who unanimously confirmed her suspicions even as they also were at a loss to explain how it came about. They conceded that her pregnancy was theoretically and categorically impossible._

_Impossible is one thing, nightmarish is another._

_"Belldandy, I know this is going to be hard to accept...but the father is Keiichi. I don't know how this came to be, because I didn't do...anything...with him that could have caused a pregnancy, in the mortal sense or in the Demonic sense. In other words, I didn't sleep with him or do anything sexual with him. I didn't seek out this pregnancy, but it is a fact that I have to accept and live with. Please believe me! There was no...misconduct...between Keiichi and I. I don't love him in the romantic sense, I don't want to steal him away from you, and I did not do anything physical with him that could caused this. I swear this to be true on the name of the Darkness Almighty, Supreme Ruler of Vanagdrasil," Mara confessed._

_Belldandy was staring at her, absolutely motionless and silent._

_"Being as it is, I had to take my courage and tell you this _-before-_ you married Keiichi. For your sake as my younger sister, because you have a right to know that they're Keiichi's...and you're going to marry him. Also for my sake as your sister, so I don't have to be burdened with keeping it a secret from you and our other sisters. I wouldn't want to be the inevitable truth about this to develop after you two were married. That would be terribly inconsiderate, even for a Demoness. But I had to tell you this especially for their sakes...for my yet-unborn children. I _-am-_ going to have them._ There's _no way that I could live with myself if I aborted the pregnancy. I don't even know if the pregnancy can be aborted. I can delay it, but _-I am going to have these twins-_. I will raise them by myself if necessary, and give them my fullest attention as their Mother, so you and Keiichi don't have to worry about them. I didn't mean for this to happen. My God, I didn't want to hurt you Belldandy, but..."_

A drowning wave of anger suffused everything in Kitsunen's being, bearing down on her with heart-crushing force. This was...insane! Like something out of one of those extremo soap-operas where everybody screwed everybody else and ended up having 'somebody else's' kid. The resentment blazing in Belldandy's heart in reaction to Mara's confession was cloying, choking with its intensity. But this was real...surreal...some scrambled version of reality. Two days before the wedding, and Mara had to do this!

Again, her mind flitted like a firefly, and a moment later she was traveling inwards inside of a Demoness' chamber of being. Once she became acclimated to the wildness and over-stimulation of bouncing around like a ping-pong ball in the turbulent hurricane of the Demonic mindset, shards of consciousness began prickling her, gaining her attention. At one with Mara's thoughts, she could clearly sense Mara's confusion, her lack of a reason. She could sense that deep within Mara's Demoness heart, there was intense sadness that matched Belldandy's anger.

Mara truly didn't know how she had gotten pregnant with twins that had Keiichi's DNA!

Of course, Belldandy would cancel the wedding. This wasn't one of those "oops, I wrecked your car!" sort of disclosure.

This was a "oops, I wrecked your life!" confession.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

The now-empty church received them as they were released from the historical 'replay' the two Lords had provided for them: Motokyn, Baldurdth, Kitsunen were sitting in one of the pews, each reeling from what they had just witnessed. Evidently some time had passed, because Keiichi was no longer in the sanctuary. They had learned the truth of why the wedding had never occurred, and it was a personal tragedy of epic stature. Growing up fatherless had lent the three the experience of living in a fragmented family, but experiencing the impact of the implosion of an entire family...for their Mother, Aunt Bell and Uncle Keiichi and the other two sisters were indeed a family...was almost too much to bear. Fortunately, the Lords had spared them the terrible sight of experiencing the immediate aftermath of the event beyond Belldandy's angry rejection of Keiichi. They didn't need to be shown the rest; the script of dismay, betrayal, and consternation had already been written, already played out.

But the Lord and the Dark Lord were gone too.

"Wh...what? Where are They?" Baldurdth shouted, already heart-sickened by what he experience and now panicking. "They aren't here! Why would the Lord and Dark Lord both be gone? You can't tell me that They are going to just abandon us here after showing us _that_!" He had just endured the most intense emotional experience of his life, feeling the furious tidings of Belldandy's anger and Mara's sadness. Unchecked, full metal freakshow; as if he had been in that room with them. Which he had been, in a sense. With surgical preciseness, he had felt it all from the perspective of Keiichi, Belldandy and Mara. He was grasping, filled with disbelief that a Demoness could be pregnant from a mortal and not even pull a clue as to why. And now the two Lords were gone, at the very moment they needed Them the most.

"This totally bites!" Kitsunen shouted. Her exclamation seemed hollow to her as it echoed inside the empty kirke. She didn't know which emotional trauma was worse; but she couldn't shake the image of Mara sitting in the bedroom after Belldandy had left, staring bleakly at the wall with hope-vacant eyes.

Motokyn could only look at her younger sister and nod her head in agreement. Kit was stronger emotionally than either she or Baldurdth, which was probably why she was already on her feet after this 'tour' the Lord had taken them on. Nothing in her experience could have possibly prepared her for what she had sensed between the Goddess and Demoness. Instead of feeling drained emotionally, she felt a traumatizing lave of agony leftover from what she had witnessed and felt. Burning, as if someone had poured hot oil over her.

"What a fuckin' unbelievable mess!" Baldurdth cursed.

"Baldurdth, if you are going to speak uncivilly, at least withhold until we're outside of this church before doing so. Despite our personal feelings, we must respect the sanctity of these environs which are considered sacred by the Earthrealm mortals," she admonished, her voice making it clear that this was both a request and a demand that her brother behave himself with some dignity.

Taking a cue from her older sister's snappy chastisement, Kitsunen walked down the aisle into the lobby of the church and went outside. Once outside the Christian church, her stormy mood seemed to evaporate to a degree as the sights and sounds swarmed her senses. The thrust of the recent 'heart tour' had jarred her, and now she was again off-balance as she realized that she was almost _20 years_ in the past. Disorganized awareness quickly fell into curiosity; everything was _different and yet the same_ as she surveyed the neighborhood. The first thing she noticed was the cars, which were almost two decades old. The only time she saw cars like these were in action-flicks reruns on NeTV, or in a junkyard. She observed people in their walkabout routines, noting that the fashions were definitely retro, but not as much as she would have expected. Passersby were wearing blue jeans and thick winter jackets; their heavy dress heralding her to notice the gripping late-Fall chill. It had been the Spring Term back where they came from; now it was almost winter and she wasn't dressed for it.

She still couldn't accept that the Lord had shined on her and her sibs without explanation or guidance.

Baldurdth and Motokyn joined her a moment later, reacting as she had to the city in all of its vintage regalia. This was 20XX, not 202X...and there was a tangible air of displacement in almost everything around them. Motokyn walked over to a nearby newspaper kiosk and confirmed the date. Baldurdth suggested that they stay on the lookout for landmarks, and they began walking down a double-laned boulevard. The trio attracted numerous stares, especially Motokyn who was dressed in a shrine maiden's outfit. Kitsunen couldn't help herself and splashed into a giggle-fit when one guy stopped and asked Motokyn "where's the movie being shot?"

Sure enough, it was Baldurdth who found the first landmark. Since it was Baldurdth, the first building he recognized was a "Papageno's Italian Restaurant", which located them in Ichihara-shi, which wasn't too far from their temple home in the hilly Midori Ward in Chiba. Just about three or four kilometers walking distance. Buoyed by his discovery, Baldurdth pulled out a wad of 10K yen bills and demanded that they eat at Papageno's.

A half hour later, the triplets were tearing into Italian salads, plus delicious pizza and lasagna.

"So once again, it's back to 'what do we do now?'" Kitsunen complained between bites. "At least we're in Japan, but this is pretty weird stuff. Most of our teachers at school are _our_ age in this era, which is really ass clown if you ask me. Since the wedding didn't happen...how could it after Mara bombshelled Belldandy like that...I think we should try and find out why Mara got pregnant with Uncle Keiichi's..er..Keiichi's kids."

"Nice try with the cerebral approach, except for one thing. How do you propose that we do that, Ms. Mallrat?" Baldurdth asked as he munched on lasagna. "The Demoness herself can't explain how it happened, and the Demon Realm Proctors or whatever they're called couldn't put a finger on it either. So what can we do that they can't?"

"We do have an advantage, pizza boy," Kitsunen teased. "We're from the _future_. Wanna know why that's important? Check out your Divine energy connection sometime, willya. We're connected to Syntrasil! We weren't before when we were in that sandcastle-disappearing-on-the-beach alternate reality. If this is 20XX, then we got an edge, because Syntrasil doesn't exist to these Gods and Demons. If we could get connected with XOM somehow, we might score something that the Divines of this era don't know or have."

Baldurdth closed his eyes for a moment, and then spy-eyed his sisters, almost dropping the pizza slice he had in hand. "This is way cool! I can feel Syntrasil and I'm totally linked into it. We've got some major learnage that they don't, which we can use."

"Flush, rinse, eat, repeat, Baldurdth," Kitsunen remarked, earning a knowing grin from her sister.

"I don't mean to steal your march, Kit, but this brings up a major question," Baldurdth countered. "_Why_ is Syntrasil existing in this era of time in the first place? Didn't it get created by us, back in 202X? It shouldn't be here, but it is. Does this mean that this reality we're in is be the correct one, with the only distinction being that we're time displaced by twenty years or so? If so, then we're the only ones with access to Syntrasil, like you said. We're in our 202X skins and Syntrasil is feeding our energy needs, even though we're in 200X. But what if the opposite is true? The Earthrealm itself could have had a time-market crash and is 'off' by a couple decades from what we're used to. So instead of us being displaced twenty years..._everything's_ been displaced twenty years into what we would call the 'Past'. Which means that everything else Divine is hooked into Syntrasil too. No hedge, no edge."

"Who cares? Besides, I don't wanna get into a bunch of wonky discussions about Time right now. I'm stuffed!" Kitsunen exclaimed, pushing her plate away.

Motokyn closed her eyes and extended her Goddess senses, trying to align her connection to Syntrasil like Mom had taught her. Since they were half-Divine, half-mortal...whenever they were on the Earthrealm, they didn't have continuous access to the Ygg computers like all other Gods. So Mom had to teach them how to use certain tricky energy alignments to gain the attention of the Ygg Xeomn network. Now that Xeomn was part of a bigger network, she might be able to connect with it.

No such luck.

But a daring alternative came to her. What if all three of them tried at once to align their connections? Could they 'wiretap' into the XOM computer that way? She held that thought, deciding to suggest it after they finished their dinner. They only had a finite amount of money, and they would need to address more immediate matters first.

After Papagenos, they managed to locate a cheap youth hostel with a weekly rate for capsule beds, and decided to make it their home base for a week. Kitsunen made the careless mistake of giving the manager a couple 10K bills from 202X, which resulted in an argument and almost got them kicked out. Kitsunen had to flirt with the manager guy for almost half an hour to get him to change his mind and honor their paid rent. Motokyn was both amused and disgusted by her sis's typical carefree "Kitsunen Move"...and how she shrewdly resolved the results.

Capsule beds were weird. Motokyn had read about them, but had never actually slept in one. Basically she felt like she was in a coffin. A modern burial chamber with a built-in mini-TV and radio. The place smelled of bleach and sweat, and some of the other renters were noisy. She could barely sit up in her capsule. Fortunately the hostel also rented pajama sets for its patrons as a side-job. She was grateful for the PJs; she would be spared having to try and sleep in a miko outfit, which would have been quite difficult because the outfit was too bulky with its layers of dress.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

The next morning began with a shuffle of excitement, punctuated only by a stunner headache and a bump on his forehead resulting from sitting up in his capsule bed too quick. Breakfast did little to offset the banging pulses in his brain as he listened intently to Motokyn, who had broached her formative notion about combining or 'blending' their energy alignments so that together they could create a 'patch' that would allow them to interface with XOM. He and Kit thought that Motokyn's idea was "good for go", and between the three of them decided that he would be the obvious choice to communicate with XOM if they were able to link with the computer network.

Baldurdth was pretty familiar working with the Ygg Xeomn, as he had employed it to design some pretty sophisticated aquantum and transfinite 9D-level sims to evaluate his Swarp Gate hypotheses. He was fired up with excitement, inspired by the possibility that he could link with a fresh new computer network. All the information he had about it was second-hand, via the Quad and their experience. From what he gathered from their narratives, XOM was sentient to the point where one couldn't tell if they were talking to a Divine or a computer intelligence. This would be critically massive if he could interface with it, talk to it!

But there was another pressing dilemma that soiled their enthusiasm, which concerned the practical issues involving their current financial challenge. They had about enough money between them to last two weeks at best; Baldurdth was beginning to regret their splurge on pizza last night. From now on, it was 400 yen rice curry bowls. He didn't want to consider the prospect of doing anything illegal to obtain quick cash, even though it would be easy for him to hack any of the automated systems like ATMs, soda and food vending machines, and other dispensers of goodies. They also needed to get score warmer clothing; he wished he could have kept his rented pajamas and wore them underneath as an additional layer of clothing, but they had to be turned in to the front desk before leaving the capsule-tel.

"One decision we need to come together on is what we want to communicate to XOM, provided we are able to interface with it using our Divine energy sigs," Motokyn noted as they walked by a park. "Hopefully, Baldurdth will be given an orientation from XOM similar to what our new Aunt Skuld experienced when she arrived at the UniTransic Axis. But beyond this, we should develop a definite strategy that is wise to itself and suits our purposes."

"Y'know, maybe we can come up with a 'shopping list' of needs to ask it," Kitsunen broke in. "I don't know if we are authorized to use XOM to transport us through the TimeStream or MatterStream, but we should have specific requests in mind."

"Let's look at the situation deductively," Baldurdth requested. "We know that the pivotal event occurred three days before the wedding ceremony. It would be really wrapped-not-warped if we could convince XOM to zip us Pastwards to a point in time before the Belldandy-Mara blow up occurred. It's also possible that XOM might be clued into why Mara wound up with children who share Keiichi's DNA. Remember, if you consider this era as a 'relative' time in comparison to our original 202X years...as if it's an earlier point in the continuum of this particular TimeWeave...then when Mara first found out about this, it was before we got yanked into doing the mega-creation-trip and all its changes. Back then...er, now...there was no Syntrasil or XOM. Maybe XOM could pull a globule out the hat and spill some answers that could enlighten us. The Demon's computer couldn't because it was pre-ReCreation; but XOM might stab out an explanation where the Demons couldn't. If we discover why Mara is expecting, then we can work out a plan to get Mara and Belldandy together so they can talk this over rationally."

"Like that's gonna happen, you idiot!" Kitsunen exclaimed. "Mara is preggers with her husband-to-be's kids, and you think they're just gonna sit down and hash it out like civilized Divines debating whether to have tonkatsu or teriyaki for dinner? Not! If we find out how she got pregnant, we need to work on a way to make Belldandy understand that it wasn't Mara's fault. Or we should tell Mara herself before she meets up with Belldandy and let her handle the grenades-in-the-grocery bag bad news."

Motokyn didn't believe that Kit's approach would be sufficient. One of the melee combat skills her grand-sensei had taught her focused on using the environment to one's advantage; if surrounded by enemies, a calculated strike at a weak point would allow one to extend the field of contest and perhaps gain control over it. To break a circle, strike in a straight line. At each turn, they seemed to encounter a new challenge, a new avenue of discord to overcome. An instruction her Grand-sensei had emphasized when facing multiple opponents was that the resolution of the conflict cannot be wrought by using the same level of strategy or intelligence that created it. Defeating a foe doesn't depend on whose blade is sharpest...the defeat may hinge upon relinquishing the blade altogether and making _something else_ become the weapon, such as the surrounding terrain.

How could she disarm the unseen answers before they became questions?

"Perhaps we need to focus away from Mara and Belldandy for a moment," she interjected. "The most direct resolution isn't necessarily the appropriate one. We cannot rely on the possibility that we will be able to discern how Mara got pregnant through our own efforts. Strangely, it is still my belief is that the Lords left us to our own devices deliberately. I agree that we need to regress in Time a few more days, if XOM were to allow it. But we cannot approach Belldandy or Mara directly."

"What about Mom?" Kitsunen suggested. "Couldn't we somehow try to convince her that we're her children and in need of her assistance? As Aunt Belldandy's older sister, having Mom on our side will gain us insight into Belldandy and Mara's relationship. If worse comes to worse, Mom could mediate between the two and maybe do a 'peace treaty' sort of thing. I know that this runs counter to all the lame arguments about chronological impasses and paradoxes, but those might not apply. I'm still in the dark about whether this is a 'correct' version of reality, and nothing's happened to convince me otherwise."

"Hmm... Won't work! You forget that in this reality, our Mother is the twin sister of Mara," Baldurdth countered. "I don't know exactly what the implications are for Mom to have a Demoness for a twin sister, but it could mean that she and Mara are more syncognitive than most Divines, just like we're more syncognitive because we're triplets. My fear is that any plan that would involve Mom would simply tip our hand. It could be very easy for Mara to pick up on anything we scheme out. The last thing we want is to get in a cunning-plot war with the very Demoness who's in the middle of this mess. We could get reamed if she decides to tangle with us."

Kitsunen slumped her shoulders in disappointment at this, and Motokyn herself could taste a peel of sour regret. A brief flash of hope that they could meet up with the younger version of their Mother had been evoked by her sister's suggestion, but she knew that Baldurdth's caution was the correct path, and that they would have to reluctantly abandon such a course.

"This is like eating chaos for breakfast!" Kitsunen vented. "Every idea that one of us comes up with doesn't get us anywhere. Maybe we should just contact XOM anyway, and hope to find some answers afterwards."

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

They decided to walk to the temple home, just in case. But none of the Goddesses were there, and it was evident that Keiichi had gone somewhere recently, judging by the fresh motorbike tracks. The sight of the empty temple was spooky to Kitsunen; haunting her and reminding her of the disappearing temple they had just themselves abandoned in that 'shrinking universe' from before. She was hoping to see some sign of life, but the zephyr-like whistling of the November winds through leaf-barren trees enhanced the scene of desolation.

"Well, we're here," Baldurdth noted. "We might as well go inside and check the place out."

"I'll stand guard outside while you two take a walk through the temple," Motokyn said, assigning them their roles. She felt a slight shiver of resentment towards her sister, as Motokyn had shifted into 'takeover' mode and was dishing out who-does-what. But this was too important of an opportunity to waste valuable time arguing, so she nodded her head in agreement and grabbed Baldurdth by the arm before he could start arguing.

"Why not come with, sis?" Kitsunen asked

"I...just have a feeling..." Motokyn insisted. Her sister occasionally had a 'situational sensitivity' that she seemed to have picked-up along the way during her kendo training. Sorta like a Ninja Girl sixth sense. While many times the threats Motokyn sensed never happened, Kitsunen was grateful enough during the times the threats _had_ gone down to trust her older sister's judgment on these matters.

Once inside the temple, she noted that it was almost the same as theirs, except that the bedroom hallway was almost double the length. To her surprise, when she opened the first shoji on the right after leaving the dining room, she saw three futons in an otherwise empty room. In her temple home, all the years she was growing up, this had been the bedroom that had belonged to her Aunt and Uncle. The empty room didn't make sense at all. As she and Baldurdth walked down the hall, they noticed that several of the shoji doors had a sun-faded tattoo; the yellowed doors had a brighter area imprinted where a name plate or something else had been hung on the doors, blocking the sunlight that had faded the rest of the door. There were several rooms that had nameplates, such as "Keiichi Workshop", which was filled with partially assembled car and motorbike parts. Another difference was that Megumi was living here, and another door announced "Tomohisa" on a baseball-shaped name plate.

The room across the hall said "Cevn's Studio" and the one next to it also had his name on a hanging door plate.

Kitsunen felt goosebumps in her arms at the sight. This was the room that the guy everyone thought was her Father lived in.

"Cevn's..._Studio_?" Baldurdth read the plate aloud. "This is pretty freaked, seeing it like this. It's almost as if he's real in some way. Was this what it was like before he...disappeared?"

"I don't think we should go in there," Kitsunen asserted. Now _her_ sixth sense was blaring clarion alarms in her breast. There was almost something wrong here, as if she was in a cemetery exploring through some stranger's family mausoleum. She already felt conflicted six ways to Sapporo by being in a temple that resembled her house; trespassing on environs that were at once familiar and alien to her experience. Their bedrooms and hobby rooms had stranger's names on the doors.

"I think we should. Go in," Baldurdth stated. "Who knows what's in there. Besides, we may learn something useful to help us with our search for answers."

"It isn't right!" she protested.

"Who gives a flying fuck about what's right at this point!" Baldurdth countered. "We need to concentrate on what's not right, and that's the blowup between Belldandy and Mara."

Kitsunen couldn't argue against Baldurdth's point. Besides his remark had fueled her sense of adventure and curiosity. Wordlessly, he slid open the shoji door to Cevn's bedroom.

Entering Cevn's room, she could really begin to notice that night was fast approaching, as the room was dusky under the pearly twilight that barely illuminated the interior through the jalousie windows. It looked like a half-bedroom, half study. A couple bookshelves with the overflow of books stacked in piles. A futon with a thick winter blanket was shoved to the side of the room, partly folded up. Nearby, she saw a small reading desk with an ancient-looking laptop computer. An end table had been pushed right next to door, with a thick hardback book that said "_The Enigma Book_" on its spine sitting on it. Probably a popular novel of the times, Kitsunen observed. From what she gathered, this 'Cevn' was a scholarly bookworm type.

She felt really downed by this. What could suck more than having a schoolteacher for a father?

This made it seem even more improbable that Mom had gotten involved with him. Mom's wild nature couldn't possibly be satisfied by a bookish mortal man. There was no way they could match up; her Mother would have gotten bored with him within a couple days.

"Nothing much here," Baldurdth confirmed. "Buncha weird books, old computer stuff, messy futon spread."

"Well if he's our Father, I don't have to look far to see where your lack of style comes from," she teased her brother. "The only thing missing is pizza boxes on the floor."

"Give me a break, Kit!" her brother whined. "Besides, this room isn't that messy. It just looks like someone had left it in a hurry or something, and didn't bother to straighten it up. Everything's all piled along the walls of the room, as if someone was planning the clean the floor or something. And don't start doing some weird girl stuff like smelling his clothes. I dunno if I want this guy to be our Father, after seeing this. This room is the epitome of lame-itude."

"Whatever," she answered back. "Let's check the other rooms and get outta here. We should raid the kitchen on the way out. I'm sure nobody'll mind if we snag some food, now that the Goddesses have left."

"Good idea!" Baldurdth noted. "It's almost lunchtime anyway."

Her brother opened the door labeled "Cevn's Studio", and Kitsunen felt all her suppositions about her possible Father fall off of the cliffs of her mind as she took in the room's contents. Musical instruments crammed the room tightly; including at least a dozen keyboards, several guitars, several computers and a swarm of wiring to connect everything. Blacklights mounted near the ceiling line cast an otherwordly glow in the near-darkened room.

"Waaah!" her brother gasped. "This is crazy! This is totally crucial shit! Look at this...it really is a music studio. Majorly mixdown stuff."

A throw rug and several seat cushions were stashed between two banks of keyboards, which looked out of place with the rest of the room. Kitsunen remembered that the futon seemed to be shoved to the side of the bedroom, and out of curiosity, she returned to take a closer look at the bedroom next door. Switching on the light, she looked downwards at the open flooring underfoot and caught a halt at the sight.

"What...is _that_?" she said, gesturing towards the floor. Burned into the tatami matting was a very intricate mandala-like working. She didn't miss the fact that it was _burned_ into the floor, not drawn or illuminated like her Mom's or any other Goddess's. Tiptoeing around it, she turned on the reading desk lamp and shined it right on the floor. The bright light revealed that the floor was patterned with something dreadful, like one of those Satanic circles that she'd seen in horror movies. Just looking at it made her feel frightened. It looked Demonic, like something that belonged in a Demoness Lair rather than a mortal man's room in a temple.

"I think we should get Motokyn. This is really freaky, in a bad way," Baldurdth urged in a very serious tone of voice after she showed it to him.

She ran to the doorway and yelled "Motokyn! You've got to see this!"

A moment later, she and her had sister had joined Baldurdth, studying the two rooms. She felt bewildered by the juxtapose of eye-catching musical instruments in the studio room, and the bedroom with its stacks of books and burned mandala on the floor. Of course, the first thing Motokyn noted was the decorative katana and naginata mounted high on one wall above a bank of keyboards. But her sister was clearly startled by the circle of precise scorching and ashes in the bedroom.

"This is definitely not normal," Motokyn commented. "I don't recognize this pattern at all. I almost sense that this is a Demonic working, not that I've ever seen one to compare it to. But I feel a sense of dread when I look at it."

"How could something like this wind up in a mortal's room?" Baldurdth questioned. "If this is our Father's room, then this thing on the floor for sure isn't some mortal art project. This is wicked sicked, and I don't mean that as a compliment."

"If this Cevn guy, who's supposed to be our Father, could do something like this, then what the hell is he?" Kitsunen wondered aloud. "This sucks! Instead of getting answers, we've only gone southside and stumbled upon more crazy cryptic shit! The Goddesses are gone, our bedrooms have different names on them, and then there's this. I think we should look up Keiichi and ask him what's going on..."

She was interrupted by a stern voice.

_"Before you do that, you might want to explain who the hell you are and what the hell you're doing here." _

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --


	155. Pt 155: Nine Voices: The Triplets Pt 4

**Part 155: Nine Voices – The Triplets Part Four**

MOTOKYN, BALDURTH and KITSUNEN:

"_I knew it!_" Motokyn thought to herself. A looming sense of alarm drew upon her at the sound of the unrecognized voice. Investing years into kendo training, she had honed herself in various sword-fighting disciplines; but unexpectedly, her improving sword-skills were accompanied by the discovery and tending of an intuitive trustworthy voice from deep within the placid depths of her soul. A 'subtle sense' whose guiding messages of Oneness arose from her being to unite with her consciousness. Once again, this inner voice of caution had emerged through the crossfire of her confusion, instructing her to be vigilant. As a result, she was keenly aware that it was vitally important to stand sentry while her brother and sister searched the temple house. She wasn't very concerned with the unknowing of _why_ this was important. But she had reluctantly ignored its guidance, making the mistake of coming inside the temple at Kit's beckoning. Leaving them vulnerable. Beholding the strange sight in the bedroom, she could see why her sister had felt fully justified by calling her attention to it. Yet, the price of not keeping a lookout had disadvantaged their position, for the trajectory of events had shifted and now they had been discovered by a stranger!

Or maybe even a threat...

Whirling around, hand resting on her tachi-katana and ready to draw the blade if needed, she saw a college-aged version of her Uncle's sister, Megumi. Uncertainty shuffled her heart and mind briefly at the sight of this now-young Megumi, a woman in her early 20s who was the last person she would ever expect to encounter here. In 202X, Megumi was floating in and out of rehabs for her out-of-control alcoholism. Megumi's ill-spent lifestory had been explained several times by her Uncle Keiichi, who related that his sister had been dumped by the love of her life while she was in college because of some craziness that had happened at the time of his and Aunt Bell's wedding. Even worse, his sister and the guy had been going out for a couple of years...the severest of blows in matters of the heart. He was also from a mega-rich family, which didn't help either. So Megumi had cracked like chalk thrown against the wall, her life shattered by the loss. But unlike Mom, Keiichi's sister had sloughed into a morass of inebriation to mis-cope with her grief.

Motokyn silently hoped that this Megumi wasn't drunk.

"I said, _who the hell are you_ and why are you here?" Megumi accosted them in a threatening voice. She cautiously stepped towards them, wielding a metal softball bat which she protectively swung side-to-side in front of herself. Motokyn briefly chuckled under her breath at the sight; if she wanted to, she could disarm and immobilize Megumi in about three seconds.

"If you don't answer me truthfully and immediately, I'm gonna get on my cellphone and call the cops! This is _my house_ that you've broken into! You have no right to be here, this is private property."

"We're from the future. And we know your brother," Baldurdth answered casually.

She heard a clutching, choking noise from Kit about the same time that her breath stole away from her as if she had been kicked in the chest. Motokyn glanced sharply at her brother, completely exasperated by his nonchalant disclosure of a truth that should have been kept secret. In the midst of the void that followed Baldurdth's pronouncement, her throat felt dry and speechless; she and her sister were too shocked to either correct or contest her brother's claim. The inexpedience of being discovered was misfortune enough, but now it seemed that she had lost all sense of direction while standing at the edge of the chasm.

Pummeled by hurricane winds at her back, gusts of uncertainty that were mustering her forcibly towards the plummet off of the precipice...

"Shit, Baldurdth! What in the Lord's name do you think you're you doing?" Kitsunen hissed in a whispered voice.

Megumi was staring at them, her facial expression a convergence of a powerful symphony of conflicted emotions.

"_KNOW MY BROTHER? FROM THE FUTURE?!_ What the freet are you talking about?" she shouted angrily. "You're lying to me!!! I'm gonna call the cops! When I find out what high school you kids belong to, I'm gonna see that you get expelled for this. You're just trying to cover up for being trespassers and thieves! You say you know us? Cheh! You really have no idea what you're saying, do you? Because if you did, this temple would be the last place you'd want to have a run-in with me, especially since I'm really pissed off and hurting inside. I don't recognize you at all; never've met any of you! How could you possibly know my brother?"

"Look, we ran into him at the church yesterday. Your brother...Keiichi...told us about what happened to him. He explained how his fiancée, Belldandy, abruptly canceled the wedding and left him. Then he described how completely frustrated he is because she left without any explanation," Baldurdth answered back with resolve. Motokyn was caught by surprise at this side of her brother; his usual slacker air was displaced by an aegis of intense determination. This was the kind of rare inner strength of ambition that he grasped only when he was laboring on crazy-math projects in Yggdrasil.

"You...met Keiichi?" Megumi asked, her agitation noticeably quelled for the moment. "If so, then why have you come here, and what are you doing in this room?" What followed was a hasty torrent of angry questions, accusations, and demands. After the word-flurry, Megumi looked past them into the room and squinted her eyes with a pained expression.

"He was like an older brother to me, the guy who lived in this room. His name was Cevn, and he's gone too, without anyone knowing why. You're right...my brother's fiancée and her sisters left a couple days before the wedding, without warning or explanation. But it wasn't just Belldandy and her sisters who disappeared. This guy left the same day as well, just a couple days before the wedding. Which left my brother, myself, and my younger cousin with no answers. No way for any of us to sort out why they all simply disappeared. Every time I ask my brother about what happened between him and Belldandy, all I get is a terrible look of pain on his face. Something awful must have happened to make her leave like that," Megumi noted, her eyes ringed with exhaustion.

"Cevn? He's missing too?" Kitsunen asked, a tinge of distress in her voice.

"When the three sisters scattered to the winds, I felt a gaping hole in my heart, as if _love itself_ had disappeared from here. This was the best place in the world to live, because this house was filled with so much love and caring! But...fuck it!...it all fell apart. Life isn't supposed to be this way, isn't supposed to be some beautiful monster that spews bullshit lies and then devours your dreams!" Megumi said, expressing her regrets without a hint of self-consciousness.

A chilling spike of gloom rippled through Motokyn's her neck and shoulders, as this confirmed what Mom had said about her Father's disappearance. Events were occurring here, similar to how Mom had described them in 202X! A poignant uncertainty plagued her, like a juggler who was juggling too many balls. What if this 'reality' was irreparable? Mom had always told them that Cevn had vanished over a year _after_ she married him, not before her Uncle and Aunt's wedding. Now, Megumi was detailing a completely different course of events!

"My brother is so hurt and confused," Megumi continued. "This morning, he called me and said that Belldandy was his fortress of confidence and love. And now he feels like his life has been shattered, the walls of his fortress destroyed by wrecking balls. He didn't sound like he was in touch with reality at all! I'm scared for him, because he keeps telling me that he has no reason to want to live anymore. Then after school, I come here and find the three of you prowling around my home. If you've done anything to cause this, anything at all to cause pain to my brother, I swear that I'll make sure that you will pay. My..snff..brother is completely lost, and there's..snff..nothing I can do about it."

Megumi launched into a detailed description of how the canceled wedding had affected her family, and Motokyn realized that this young woman wasn't the alcoholic train-wreck of the 40ish Megumi that she knew. Her brown eyes were alert, her face clear of the malnourished gauntness and rosacea blemishes. There was no hint of a woman who had sought refuge in cynicism and inebriation. Her instant impression of this Megumi was that of a college-aged girl with a vivid expression of characteristics. Megumi seemed to be very independent and self-directed; clearly confident that she was her own woman. She was pretty too. Her appearance was endowed with a quiet elegance and pert beauty that would have seemed impossible to contemplate in the older Megumi; qualities that had been laid to rest years ago and then buried deeply and fatally, soiled and crushed away under the wreckage of the many years of ruinous drinking. Her energetic bearing as she talked was a study in contrasts with the always-waning Megumi that Motokyn had known all her life. Woven into all of this was a barb-wire emotional agony that this younger Megumi could hardly contain...and for Motokyn, was painful to observe.

"By the Almighty, she's just a few years older than me," Motokyn observed silently, feeling a flowering of empathy in her breast towards Megumi's despair.

"I was coming here for just a few, to pick up a few things and then return to my boyfriend's mansion. I don't _want to be here_...I can't stand it! How can I live in a place where there are so many reminders of how much my brother's life has been ruined?" Megumi said, recovering herself and wiping her tears away. Flushed with grief, she seemed to be in a compensatory phase where which prompted her to disclose her pain to anyone...even complete strangers...in an effort to comb up a fleeting sense of solace.

So she and her sibs just let her talk it out.

After she reached a pause point, Baldurdth tried to further placate her. Her brother seemed to be strangely rid of the apprehension that she and Kitsunen were feeling. "Look, please try to stay calm and listen to us, Megumi. This isn't some toxic situation as you've made it out to be. We're not here because of some stupid urge. We _need_ to be here, because of some deep shit we're facing. We pose no harm for you; in fact we can give you our phone number just to prove that we're not trippinwinksters..."

"Huh? Trippinwinksters?"

She saw Kitsunen roll her eyes at this, as Baldurdth was slinging slang from twenty years in the future, incomprehensible to someone in 200X.

"Er, thieves," he corrected himself. "We're staying temporarily at the Sun Royale capsule hotel in Sakaecho, about 10 km from here by bus near the business district. You might have heard of it. Anyway, like we met up with your brother Keiichi at the church yesterday, so we kinda know most of what went on with the canceled wedding, at least from his perspective. I think you need to really keep an eye on your brother right now, because he's massively freaking. Hopefully your boyfriend won't object..."

"How do you know that I have a boyfriend?" Megumi asked warily.

"We're from the future, we know about Keiichi...so obviously, we know about you too. A future you, anyway. Besides, you just said you were staying with your boyfriend," her brother responded, clearly challenging Megumi.

"Oh well, I guess it wouldn't hurt to admit it. You must mean Genji. He's the sweetest, most understanding guy in the world...at least, when he _can_ understand me," Megumi replied. "He's been pretty supportive through all of this, and he can't understand why Belldandy left either. It'd be no sweat if I asked him if I could spent a night or two at Mom and Dad's to keep Keiichi company. I'm just uncertain that...wait! What am I doing, talking to you like this? I don't even know who you are!" Megumi caught herself, her voice trailing deflectively.

"Megumi, we're really from the future. Totally," her sister started in. "By the way, I'm Kitsunen, this is my sister Motokyn, and my brother's Baldurdth and he doesn't bite unless you're pizza. We're not here doing the slack-bait tourist medley, despite the appearance of my brother. And don't worry about my older sister...she isn't some cosplay-addicted chick, she just happens to be stuck in that miko outfit because of some crazy circumstances. Where we came from and how we got here...there was no way that we could bring any luggage with us."

Motokyn forcibly bit her tongue. Her younger sister had alluded to her as a "Cosplay addicted chick"! She _really_ wanted to verbally trounce Kitsunen on that one! Most female cosplayers didn't carry three razor-sharp blades at their waist tucked underneath a crimson-colored obi sash; an obi that was tied in accordance with an ancient knotting technique that had been passed down secretively for over ten generations to allow for fast, unimpeded sword-draws in a duel or melee...

"Actually, we're here for a reason, and that reason is very important to us. You see, we're the children of someone you know very well..." her younger sis continued, blithely unaware of how insulted she felt.

"It's Urd, isn't it? You're Urd's kids, aren't you?" Megumi conjectured, her tear-swollen eyes widening with interest.

"H..how did you know that?" Baldurdth blurted, taken aback.

"It continues to amaze me how your genius sometimes makes you overlook that which is quite obvious, Baldurdth," Motokyn noted, nowhere near as surprised as her brother. "We have the same forehead symbols that our Mom has. Symbols which are only visible to sentient beings who know of the existence of Gods and Demons. Megumi is Keiichi's sister, and unlike the Megumi we grew up with, she must be aware that Belldandy and our Mom are Goddesses."

"Fail!" Kitsunen said before dissolving into giggling, her usual reaction to one of Baldurdth's 'blown off the perch' oversights that made him look foolish. Her brother was rubbing the back of his head in crestfallen embarrassment, his earlier confidence washed away by a flooding pool of discomfiture.

"Waaah!" Megumi appraised, possessed with curiosity at this intrigue. "If Urd's your Mom, then who is your Dad? And since you grew up knowing me, what am I like in the future?"

"Ahm, we don't know the part about our father. And believe me, you don't want to know the part about the future you. Besides, knowing your own future in advance isn't good mojo," Kitsunen hastily answered, her voice reflecting how clearly uncomfortable she was with this line of inquiry. "Hey, so how is it that you know about Gods and Demons?"

"Long story. Video booth car races gone bad. Car stuff happening at the Le Mans. My brother, who's totally Mr. Average, suddenly hooking up with one of the most beautiful women I've ever seen. Being possessed by whack Earth Spirits and Demons. Demon Queens and rampant chaos. Amnesia brought on by one of your Mom's more exotic 'pills'. Broken vehicles seemingly fixing themselves during races. Belldandy making elementary school-type mistakes like getting san and sanhyaku mixed up while casting a spell. Just to name a few..."

Motokyn had to set aside the urge to plumb Megumi with a dozen questions about their Mother. Something Megumi had said was very catchy, piquing her curiosity...

"So your brother's staying with your folks?" Kitsunen asked, seemingly at ease talking with Megumi. "How often does he come here to the temple since the...uh, disaster...happened."

"Every day, right around the time of the day that he was supposed to get married," Megumi answered, her face relating a deep concern. "He's acting like a neurotic person, because he seems to be caught up in the kinds of ritualistic stuff that people do when they've had a really terrible tragedy. Damn, I wish Cevn was here to help my brother! He's the resident psychologist of our bunch, and I trust him because he's lived with us a couple years and he's a really nice guy. Anyway, I've really gotten on my brother several times, trying to convince him not to come here or to the church. But he totally ignores me. It's almost as if he's expecting Belldandy to come back any time now. I..I hope he's not losing it. Fortunately, since he planned ahead to take two weeks off of school for the honeymoon, he's not missing out on classes at N.I.T. But he's just idling around, feeling sorry for himself. After what he's been through, I just hope his life isn't permanently wrecked."

The gakuso-koto in her heart snapped a few strings as Motokyn recognized the irony couched within Megumi's concerns about her brother. In her experience of reality, the adult Megumi was the one who had lost her love, whose life had become flawed. Was it possible that she and her sibs could do something to prevent the tragedy that had cut a swath through Megumi's life?

"Megumi, we've journeyed here into the past to try and prevent Keiichi and Belldandy's breakup from ever happening," she said, hoping this would brighten Megumi's despair with a beacon of optimism. "We don't quite know how to accomplish this, but I assure you that we're _going_ to accomplish this, no matter what."

"Oh my God! You really think you can do something to change what happened with Belldandy? Please let it be true! I don't want to lose my brother, and I want Belldandy and the other Goddesses back!" Megumi exclaimed excitedly. The few words she had spoken to Keiichi's sister seemed to have lifted the whole tone of this encounter out of the spiraling despair. Megumi's face was lit up with hope...

"But we're going to need your help, more than likely. Here's our number, Megumi," Baldurdth indicated, handing Megumi the business card of their capsule hotel.

"This is really cool! Wow...I've gotta get going! I want to tell Keiichi and Genji about this..."

"Hey, hold off on sageing this info on your brother, please," Kitsunen requested. "I think we should be the ones to tell him directly, otherwise he may think this whole thing is bogusfest and just skip out on it. We'll come here tomorrow and hang out until he comes, and when we meet up with him we'll lay it all out."

"Promise?" Megumi asked.

"Promise!" Kitsunen answered.

Quickly bowing to dismiss herself, Megumi left them to go to her room. Motokyn looked into the empty bedroom with its sinister burnt floor and wondered if they had acted correctly in telling Megumi so much truth. As if in response, one of the wisdom teachings integral to the art of kendo came to mind as a perhaps-wise answer to her question:

_By knowing the possible, one creates a place to comprehend the impossible._

"This is weird, since I just met the three of you a few moments ago. But I believe what you're saying...and I believe you're Urd's kids. Those markings on your foreheads weren't just drawn on there. Hmm...you guys _really do_ look like her, now that I've had a chance to look at you more. Which makes you one of the family, kinda," Megumi remarked. She ducked into her room in turns, and a few moments later strode out and set down two large bundles and finally a large rucksack-type backpack.

"You'll need these," Megumi said as she effortlessly tossed the large cloth pack at her. Motokyn overheard Kit whisper "Man, that girl's strong!" as she caught it.

"I packed some jeans, shirts, and sweaters. They're all probably too short and a little loose, since you're taller than me and all skinny, but they should work for you. At least you won't have to be walking around in an eye-catch outfit like you're wearing," Megumi announced. She dropped one of the bundles she was carrying on a nearby couch.

"Here's a couple winter coats for you and your sister. Help yourselves to any other clothes in my closet. You...uh, Baldurdth is it?" she asked, nodding at her brother. "Why don't you and I look around in my brother's room and grab something for you to wear."

Her brother and Megumi emerged with a pair of messenger bags, one with "N.I.T." on it and the other with an elaborately-stitched logo and "Solar Racing Federation" written on it. A moment later, Baldurdth was trying on a large winter coat. Motokyn was appalled; her brother didn't even bother to thank Megumi! Chafed, she grumbled a reminder to him and he responded with an embarrassed blush and then bowed a proper apology to Megumi.

Megumi watched all of this with an amused twinkle in her eyes, giggling at her brother's goofy behavior.

She thanked Megumi for her civil generosity with a courteous bow. As she watched Keiichi's sister walk out the front door, Motokyn overheard Megumi observe to herself "This is so insane! I can't believe I just met Urd's kids! Wait till I tell Sora about _this_..."

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

The familiar-yet-alien surroundings of the temple cast a dislocated feel to Baldurdth's senses as he prepared himself to link up with XOM. He could sense his two sister's thoughts twirling, intermixing with his; a parfait of finely honed Divine syncognition signatures that would hopefully yield them access to the newtype mega-computer. A difficult enterprise to accomplish, since they were all working off of each other, rather than relying on a single coordinating factor or point of oversight.

The cutting breeze whipped through his hair as he sensed the invisible, yet tangible spiraling arc of energy flowing upwards towards the zenith overhead; three knits of entreaty intended to ply XOM's attention. Both his sisters were sweating with the effort, as the three of them had been at this for over ten minutes. Baldurdth was frustrated. A biting irritation pierced his efforts as he recalled how simple it had been for their new Aunt Skuld to contact XOM...

"Keep focused, Baldurdth!" his older sister prompted him, sensing that he was slipping in concentration.

If one could mentally clench their mind in the same manner as they would clench their eyes tightly during exertion, then they would be approximating the sensation Baldurdth was experiencing during his attempts at trying to lock-down his stray thoughts and bear his efforts towards linkage with XOM. But their joint efforts weren't being wasted...he could feel a gradual clearing; the tell-tales that a connection channel was being organized...

"Uplink acquired, negotiated, parsed and deliberated. You are now in co-syncognition with XOM," a voice announced. As usual when communicating with the Ygg Xeomn, he felt swathed by the cool, logical machine intelligence. But his sensing of the God's Realm's cyber-entity was much more intense and profound, approaching the experience of thoughtcasting with another Divine. A brief flash of triumph passed through him before his mind stole into rapt curiosity. His sisters nodded, smiles on their faces. Remarkably, they were linked with XOM as well.

"Co-syncognition? That's a new one!" Baldurdth wondered aloud. Only Divines and Next Level sentients used syncognition as a standard form of communioncation. The Xeomn Mainframe relied on other less advanced forms to interact with Divines. But if this was co-syncognition, than that meant...

"Waaah! I can sense it too! This is way intense! XOM's completely telepathic with us, as if he/she/it is a living being!" Kitsunen's thoughtcast 'voice' belled excitedly in his mind, just like a podphone ringing off.

A swirl of sounds...mentally perceptible...backgrounded his thoughts.

"Access granted to designate First Class License candidates: currently positioned on Planet 2.1192.8732.4813.9009 in Sector A-Epsi-2378-Durgea-Thon-4114. Said planet currently inhabited by mortal sentient beings, evolutionary index assignation as C-231.44.58 pre-Next Level. Planet nomenclature distinction 'Earthrealm', temporal chrono-sequence index '200XCE' relative to prevailing native calendarial chronography. Interlocutors identified, granted Permission Level Norn IV. access, non-legacy interaction. Trans-link confirmed," the computer voice announced telepathically.

"How may I be of assistance to you?"

He recognized the SpaceTime location designation, but the evolutionary index assessment for the Earthrealm mortals was completely different than the Ygg Xeomn's index. Also, the permission level indicated by XOM was completely unfamiliar. Before, the Ygg Xeomn has simply assigned a permission level based on their ThirdTier Inculcation student status, such as "ThirdTier Inculcation, advanced theoretics grade" in his case whenever he was logged in to run hypothetic Swarp sims. The permission designations XOM had given them made no sense. What did it mean by "Norn IV." and "non-legacy interaction" when assigning access permissions?

"Cool!" Baldurdth muttered under his breath. Regardless of the changes, the excitement of communicating with a next-generation version of the Ygg Xeomn thrilled him...

"Is this interpretable as a request to alter local meteorological environment to decrease thermal attrition cyphers?"

"No! This isn't a request to mess with the weather!" his sister Kitsunen quickly replied. "Leave the temperature as it is!"

"My apologies for misinterpretation," XOM noted. "Allow me to index colloquial usage to orient myself to idiomatic speech. There. Please excuse my mistake, as I am newly acclimating to control structures involving linguistics. May I offer each of you an orientation to assist with your permission level and usage parameters?"

"Yes, please do," Motokyn answered. "And if you can, please use a female voice when communicating with us."

"Most certainly, per your request. Is this more suitable?" XOM answered, shifting its gender-neutral 'voice' to a female tone.

He could feel information flowing into him through the downlink conduit with XOM, the dataflow conceived in a new manner markedly different than what he was accustomed to. This must be what XOM meant by "non-legacy interaction"! Baldurdth flexed his abilities and discovered that communicating with XOM was much more multi-dimensional than what he was used to with the Ygg Xeomn.

The next several minutes were engaged in an "Acquisition and Comprehension Inculcation" which accorded he and his sisters a structural overview of the OmniOm, beginning with the nine Syntrasil Logorinths and the Mid-Light Source that comprised it. Noting that their Norn status permitted them to access information about Time that was denied other Divines, XOM briefly explained the TimeCosm in both structural and temporal terms. The TimeCosm was still a spheroid in the conceptual sense, synclastic but with anticlastic properties. The unity of TimeStreams weren't knitted together to make a globe: as in the TimeSphere where the beginning and ending of Time were the equivalent of the Earthrealm's South and North Poles. The more XOM explained, the more Baldurdth was impressed. Apparently, the TimeCosm functioned on a completely different level of temporal mechanics. Before, each TimeStream was sourced in one pole, traveled around the curvature of 'elapsed' Time and reached terminus in the other pole, the Eternity where all TimeStreams would eventually coalesce. In essence, the TimeSphere had a beginning and end. In contrast...and this was the part that was confusing...XOM claimed that the TimeCosm was an unending circuit of TimeStreams. XOM could only describe the TimeCosm in general terms. In his mind, Baldurdth visualized the changes to the TimeSphere in terms of a power which had taken the two poles of beginning and ending Time and fused them as one, and then placed them in the exact center of the sphere, so that TimeStreams were no longer limited to umbilical trajectories. In simpler terms, the TimeSphere was _filled_ with TimeStreams rather than surfaced by them. The cosmic beginning had been attached to the eternal ending.

Baldurdth struggled to comprehend this "very simplified explanation" of the TimeCosm as XOM termed it. But the implication was clear: Time no longer existed. The properties of the Chronologic and Chronometric Dimensional Levels had changed drastically as well, but they were no longer distinct attributions of Time. XOM seemed to be intuitive, providing answers to unasked questions.

"Did this computer just acknowledge us as Norns?" he heard Motokyn ask aloud. Baldurdth paused to absorb _that_ observation. Compelled as he was on fathoming out the hard-science dynamics of the model XOM was elaborating upon, he had completely overlooked that he and his sisters had been given _Norn level_ access. Either XOM's machine intelligence was missing a few CPUs and datacrystals, or something really radical had occurred. Mom and Aunt Belldandy were the only Norns!

How could he and his sisters be Norns, according to XOM?

It was then that Kitsunen made it apparent to one and all that she had been spacing off during the orientation. Shifting sideways into spazz-wit bizarreness mode, Kit jumped on OM with an off-the-wall question, asking where the local yogurt shop was.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

A tangled web of confusion will result when a single silken strand of fact is torn. Recognizing that particular type of result in the 'reality check' confusion that kept hampering each of them, Kitsunen wanted to focus on more tangible matters. While her sister and brother were sucking in all the information XOM could spare, she faded in and out of the orienting Inculcation process, her attention wandering. The orientation was an 11 out of 10 on the boredom scale, as disinteresting as listening to an official from the Tokyo Municipal Pest Control Divisions talking about putting green hoods on all the crows in the Tokyo megaplex. Her mind kept swiping backwards to their initial meeting with Uncle Keiichi at the church. It had taken a loop or two, but she finally caught up with the first impressions she had drawn.

Back in the day, her Uncle was a totally cute in an adult sort of way...a total babe in the 'everyman' sense! There was no fakeness about him, no peeled-on peeled-off snake charm of the movie star set. He was an average guy, but a _cute_ average guy. Meeting him in his twenty-somethings, she could see why her Aunt Belldandy had fallen for him.

The Keiichi who lived with them in the temple was in his mid-forties; a little gray-shaded in the temples and crow-footed around his eyes, but still an attractive man. Aunt Belldandy was very lucky to have him. But her heart had pitter-pattered when Baldurdth intro'd her and Motokyn to the 'young guy' version of Keiichi. She normally didn't go for older guys, especially guys 20 or above. Most of the men she met who were in their 20s always assumed that they were hot shit. Almost to a one, they thought that they were so practiced in laying a syrupy thick coating of bullshit on a girl, that they could snow her over and get in her pants. So if the college-age set of guys wanted to play, Kitsunen was game...after all, it was fun to fuck with them and put them in their place, especially with her friends in attendance. And if being humiliated meant that they got pissed off to the point where they decided to get all yakuza and try to physically intimidate her, they'd have to deal with Motokyn. A couple university students had tried to do just that, lying in wait like stalkers outside the entrance of her school and then acting stupid and making a scene when she left school once classes were over for the day. Motokyn heard them shouting at her, and saw them getting all macho and grab-ass. It was the last time they grabbed anything for six months after her sister got through with them. So older guys were a turn-off...and besides, she didn't want to get her sister in trouble for cracker-jacking their jaws. But encountering Keiichi in his mid-20s had evoked an intrigue and attraction that had sent her sideways to China-ways. Perhaps it was because she had known her Uncle Keiichi for all of her life...but in any event, seeing him in his youth had flipped her switch 'on'.

"Of course, it's not my fault!" she reminded herself. "Hormones and all that! Besides, I would never actually _do_ anything with him. But it's always fun to imagine..."

It was a good thing Aunt Belldandy wasn't here to sense out her wanderlusting thoughts.

While she was reflecting on this, she missed another section of the 'orientation' XOM was giving them. No matter, because Motokyn...and certainly Baldurdth...were catching every juicy detail. But now she was thinking about her Aunt...

...which brought to mind how the Lord had conducted her through her Aunt's mind, finally alighting on an extremely testy confession to her by the new Demoness Aunt, Mara. Kitsunen's memories flew back to Uncle Keiichi's expression when Belldandy told him that she was going to annul his wish. Calling off the engagement, getting jealous...these were all the usual emotional reactions to infidelity. But canceling an already-granted wish request? Keiichi was already deflated, but the wish cancellation threat was the final prick that had collapsed his heart. She could see him turning ghost-eyed when Belldandy told him that she was leaving him and his wish behind.

In a real sense, Keiichi was a dead man walking.

What did Belldandy know that he didn't? _Could a wish even be annulled_?

"Are you requesting information on the assignment of particular wish-granting Goddesses, including a specific report on the current status of a wish request or bestowal?" XOM asked, interrupting her reflections. She hated how that computer seemed to be so genii-like; seemingly always on the lookout for any strand of thought that could be used to start it up on its "your wish is my command" freak.

"Where's the nearest yogurt shop?" she asked flippantly.

"A yogurt shop is located 1.7Km from your location, within the Chiba Prefecture-Honda District JR Station in a kiosk with the name "Mai Yogi". Do you wish to know what flavors are available?"

"Th..that's fine!" Kitsunen answered with a grimace, earning teasing grins from her sibs. A moment later, she noticed that Motokyn's face was knitted up in one of her deeply meditative expressions. Seeing this, she was reminded about something her older sister had said earlier in the day. Motokyn had noted that they didn't need to not focus so much on Belldandy and Mara, and emphasized that they should seek elsewhere for possible solutions to their dilemma of explaining Mara's pregnancy.

"Hey waitaminute!" she suddenly shouted. "I _do_ have an important question, XOM! Do you have access to the wish-granting protocols of the Yggdrasil Wish Response network? I'd like to know the present wish status for an Earthrealm mortal named Morisato Keiichi? He was the recipient of a wish-bestowal by a Goddess named Belldandy, who was assigned to the wish request by the Goddess Relief Office."

"The wish-bestowal you refer to was annulled on Feb 12th, 200X, Earthrealm-relative calendarial time. The annulment was authorized due to complicating circumstances. All characteristics and attributes of the granted wish were purged. General inquiries into said wish are subject to interdiction. Thereby, I cannot disclose further information because of privacy considerations. All specific information regarding the circumstances of the wish-annulment are sealed."

"Really? Are you sure?" she asked, wanting confirmation.

"I do not make mistakes," XOM quickly replied. Kitsunen almost thought she detected a undertone of indignance in XOM's ready answer.

"That's it, you guys!"

"What're you onto, Kit? her brother asked.

"Just this. Remember how we all saw Belldandy saying that she would do anything to cancel out Keiichi's wish. Well, it seems like she got her wish. Sorry, I know that 'got her wish' sounds so lame, but it's true. Anyway, we all heard XOM confirm that Keiichi's original wish request has been canceled. Which means that he's either got a wish coming to him because he's owed one...or he's in a position to make another wish. So all we need to do is get him to make another wish. And then we tell him to wish that he learns the truth about how Mara got pregnant."

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Motokyn found it very suspect that Belldandy had stated that she would seek out the means to cancel out Keiichi's wish, right before she and her sisters left. It was almost a no-brainer: how could the status of his wish "for a Goddess like you to be with me" be upheld if the Goddess involved in the wish hated him? Hate...was too strong of a word, for the broken-heartedness of Keiichi certainly found its echo in Belldandy's heart. She could visualize her Mom comforting Belldandy right at this moment, somewhere in Yggdrasil.

Keiichi was the key.

But there was more to this than simply getting Keiichi to make a wish. It was imperative that _XOM_ process the wish, rather than the Ygg Xeomn. Because the three of them were from 202X and directly linked to XOM, she suspected that the status quo old-style Ygg Xeomn network would be insufficient to 're-grant' the wish in the way they needed. It might not even include them in its purview, and it was essential that they learned everything Keiichi would learn if he followed Kitsunen's plan to make a wish concerning Mara's pregnancy. Also, if the request was processed by the Ygg system rather than XOM, the Goddess Relief Office would dispatch a Goddess within _this_ time-frame...the pre-ReCreation time-frame. The resulting wish-bestowal might not survive the cataclysmic events yet to come, when the SurGoth attempted to destroy all of existence. What was needed was a Goddess from the post-ReCreation time frame, in order to make it binding to both 200X and 202X. To make it include _them_ as participants, witnesses to Keiichi's wish.

There was something else that hampered at her concentration. Megumi had mentioned that she was staying at her boyfriend's house in the wake of the wedding cancellation. If this was true, than wasn't this a significant divergence from the history that had propelled Megumi into heavy drinking? In the 202X timeline, Uncle Keiichi had said that Megumi's boyfriend had ended things with her right before the wedding. In this timeline, Megumi and her boyfriend didn't seem to be set upon a trajectory that would result in a breakup. Instead, according to Megumi...he was being steadfast in helping her cope with it. Suddenly, the life-history of the alcoholic Megumi she had known all her life seemed grossly inappropriate, an offense against credulity and potentiality. If anything, Megumi shouldn't have had to suffer such a devastating emotional defeat so early in adulthood...and in this current situation, she didn't. She and her boyfriend were still tight...

_*Which could only prove that this was the correct reality!*_

"Baldurdth, Kitsunen!" she exclaimed in an urgently thrilled voice after clearing her throat. "It appears that we are right where we're supposed to be!"

"Wh..what?! Well, we _are _at the temple..."

"No no no! I didn't mean that. The Megumi from this era, this particular TimeStream and reality..._didn't lose her boyfriend like the Megumi we've known all our lives in our 'original' defective reality_. We've been tasked to repair significant defects in a 'reality' and 'timeline' which resulted in the disappearance of everyone except we three, in the same sense that Aunt Bell's Twins and the Quad kids had to accomplish certain endeavors to repair the glaring defects in their alternate realities. But what can explain Megumi's situation? We all grew up with Megumi being a drunk with no respect for herself. Yet, despite our lack of interference, the situation involving Megumi and her boyfriend is very different than what we experienced. It's evident that the event that triggered her to life-wreck herself _never happened_ in this reality. All that we've done is nothing more than travel pastwards to an earlier era. It seems that through no effort of our own, Megumi's 'defective reality'...spending the rest of her adult life being a disgusting alcoholic...was corrected. Or more accurately, self-corrected. In essence, _it fixed itself_! Since Megumi now has a 'happy end' as one of your computer games might call it, Baldurdth...I can only ascertain that we are _already_ in the appropriate reality. The Lords sent us here, and I believe the we didn't just journey into the Past...but that we also 'hopped' dimensions thanks to Them. This is where we belong!" Motokyn explained.

"You mean that whatever happened to cause Megumi to completely flake out never happened? That it _wasn't supposed to happen_ in the first place? That this Megumi won't turn into the sterno-drunk Megumi we know?" Kitsunen asked.

"You're right, sis!" Baldurdth interjected excitedly. "The Lords did us a favor and we didn't even know it! We _are_ in the correct reality, totally so! This isn't one of those fucked-up defective realities. Megumi's situation proves it. To answer your question, the crash-and-burn thing she had in 'our' universe wasn't supposed to happen in the first place. Megumi is right where she should have been all along, with her boyfriend. We did nothing to alter that outcome. It'd be retarded for us...in the process of restoring reality...to repair it in such a manner that our efforts resulted in Megumi _still_ having to go back to her fucked-up booze-kitty situation. Fuck that! I think...what this all means is that instead of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, we're now only in the wrong time."

"The situation with Cevn, if he's our Father, also is a departure from the history of our lives. He's gone _now_, not a couple years down the road after he and Mom got married, if he's the one who's actually Mom's husband," Kitsunen added.

"We should locate the telephones in the temple," Motokyn noted, earning a puzzled look from her sister and brother. "They still have house phones in this era. I know what you're both thinking...when we were in grade school, land-line based telephones basically became obsolete, having been replaced by podphones in the late 201Xs. But in these times, they're still using the old-style setup: cell phones and land-line house phones. It is likely that there is a house phone in the temple, which should have Keiichi's phone number stored in memory. We should call him and have him meet us. If he doesn't have his cell phone with him, then we can call Megumi and she can contact him through his parents."

"House phones?" Kitsunen commented. "Yeech! That goes all the way back to my childhood. Stuff like virtual coloring-books on Mom's PC and Dragonball Grrlz kiddie cartoons. How'd these peeps ever get along without podphones?"

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

KEIICHI:

There was so little to live for.

Last night, he had seriously considered burning the personal diary he had been keeping; a series of memoirs written in the days and weeks leading up to the wedding. He had hoped that a diary would provide a personal touch, would be a treasury of memories for he and Bell-chan to share in the years to come. Of the many skills and hobbies Bell-chan had acquired since living with him on the Earthrealm, one of her favorites was scrapbooking. He was aware that she had been creating a special scrapbook of the months leading up to their marriage. So he wanted to complement her efforts with his own diary-keeping, planning to surprise her after they were married with a diary of his private thoughts and impressions. A movement of romantic intent, to show his fiancée how much he treasured her. Now, the diary meant nothing, its intended recipient vanished.

He coughed a deep-lung hacking lunge; a casualty of being caught wandering around aimlessly in the February sleeting rain for two days after Belldandy and her sisters had left. The chest-cold was worsening, and he didn't care. Staring emptily...his destructive ambitions had failed, hampered by an existence that was so purposeless, he didn't even have the energy to burn his diary.

Life had become an exercise in languishing grief, his heart's sad decline the result of resignation in the face of the ultimate betrayal. The moment Belldandy entered his bedroom and threw down her engagement ring, Keiichi felt his life pass before him, pass behind him...a past never to be glimpsed again. Ahead of him was an intolerably bleak future, bereft of joy and hope; a dearthy deadness of a life miscast within the crucible of fate.

He considered his sense of loss to be comparable to the experiences of refugees fleeing from a catastrophic natural disaster. Figuratively, his dazed expression probably was akin to those he had seen on the survivors of the 1995 Kobe earthquake. During grade school, his class had traveled to Kobe to help out on the recovery effort; a school trip designed to teach the value of community voluntarism. Now, his life was shattered by an emotional earthquake, as collapsed as the freeways and buildings that had been brought down in the Kobe disaster.

With Belldandy gone, he was nothing more than an empty shell of a man. All the other times she had been separated from him were by force of circumstance. The challenges had been many, such as the several times he had been brainwashed by Mara's cunning, or the time Bell's Angel had been imprisoned by Hild. He recalled the stark sadness in Bell's eyes when she told him that her parents had forced her to attend that ridiculous omiai. For thirteen years, a full third of his life experience, he and his friends had been mysteriously thrust seven centuries in the past...and he had never given up the hope that he would someday be reunited with her. Although he was in his mid-20s, he still remembered those additional years, each one horribly wrong because Belldandy wasn't with him. One of the more crazy separations had occurred when he woke up in a 'alternate' world where his wish had been granted by a very seductive Peorth rather than Bell-chan. But taken as a whole, none of these deflections in the course of their relationship had been caused by the state of Bell-chan's heart. He could always rely on the fact that no matter how isolated they were from each other in time and space...Bell-chan always held him anchored deep in her heart. Her heart had always guided her back to him.

This time, Belldandy had left of her own volition.

The past five days since then were a blunted, abstract version of reality. Nothing could ease his heart of its toilsome burden, nothing could restore his faith, nothing could bring Belldandy back. Sleep was the only escape; but even it was a reflection of his waking reality as he nightmared time and time again, reliving Belldandy's angry departure in his dreams.

Once again, he flighted out of the waking dream to find himself standing in the back of the church, his bike parked in front under the gun-metal gray February sky. Half-heard, one of the church's office ladies was shouting at him, trying to gain his attention as he stood in the doorway. Occupied with his morose thoughts, Keiichi ignored her. His imagination stole into the church chambers: he could hear the faded haunting memories of piano and organ music; see the ghost-like visages of family and friends populating the aisles. Blinking his eyes, his imaginings emptied. All that remained was the silent church, replacing his mental glimpses of what might have been with cold hard reality.

The disappointing sight of the vacant building took him back to the first Boy's Day that he could remember. It was a happy fun-filled day where he and his Father went kite-flying in the park, and then they spent the afternoon at the zoo. When he returned home, Mom had made a dinner with all of his favorite foods and extra ice cream and cake, followed by the delight of having several presents to open. Not even knowing why all this had happened, he had woken up the next day expecting the same pleasurable enjoyments. But instead, his Dad went to work as usual, there were no presents or toys stacked in the living room, and dinner was ordinary. According to his Mother, he had cried off-and-on most of the day...

The dream was over.

Ghost-walking, weaving in and out of the waking malaise that haunted him. Earlier today, he had rode by N.I.T. and Whirlwind, but lacked the courage to go in to either and seek out his friends. Both reminded him of his lost Belldandy. The summer-bright tones of the city were rendered rain-pale gray by the weather; a grim reminder that the light that had illuminated his life with such brilliant colors was gone. Even warmth was absent; and the cold city left behind in the wake of Bell's departure was an emptiness that smothered him like a ceremental shroud. Everywhere he looked, a stark rebellion confronted him, ripping out his humanity. Buildings and steeples were bombs. Train crossings were barb-wired forests. His car was an execution chamber. The temple was a prison. His cell-phone was a burning garotte...

This church was Hell on Earth.

The sense of loss pressed upon him too tightly, smothering him. He had to get out of the church, and when he exited the front portico, the street sounds were hailing him like stones. "Hey! Keiichi!" he heard someone shout, a mockingbird-voice against his plummeting thoughts.

"Hey, onii-chan! You've gotta come with me! C'mon!!!"

He couldn't comprehend why his sister was here. Why was she so unexpectedly excited? He watched disinterestedly as Megumi sprinted up the stairs in front of the church, waving to gain his attention, her car illegally parked in the road next to his bike. Of all the members of his family, he knew that his sister was hurt the most by the sudden cancellation of his wedding. Being the uppity girl that she was, she was bravely trying to hide away the tears behind a cheerful demeanor, but he knew her well enough to recognize the heartbreak simmering underneath the surface. Even Megumi couldn't stand living at the temple after Bell and her sisters left.

"What are you doing here?" he asked in a thin, hollow voice.

"You have to come with me to the temple! C'mon!" she urged, grabbing his wrist. "I met three teenagers earlier today when I went there to pick up some clothes. They phoned me and said that they had something really important to discuss with you. They were planning to meet with you tomorrow to tell you about it themselves, but they told me they had some kind of breakthrough and they need to meet with you _now_."

"Whatever."

"Keiichi!!!" Megumi confronted him. "We don't have time for that! Brace up, snap out of it, get your head together! Please just let it go for a moment and come with me to the temple."

At this point, Keiichi was weighing over his choices. Either go with Megumi to the temple, or ride off somewhere and take a flying leap with his motorbike, Quadraphrenia-style, burying the speedometer and hurtling off of a high bridge or cliff onto the rocks below. Funny how living with Bell-chan had immensely expanded his outlook on life and the choices he made over the past five years. Without her encouragement, he wouldn't have even considered going to N.I.T.'s Grad Engineering program, or pursing his dreams and taking other such risks like driving in Chihiro's madcap Le Mans entry. Belldandy had empowered him simply by her presence: with her, he was the master of his own destiny, aware that the universe was his advocate. In the wake of his fiancée's departure, his choices had narrowed to two options. Death or defeat. Forks in the road.

"Megumi, I want to die."

"Huh? What? Are you seriously thinking about that?" his sister asked, her voice high-pitched with panic.

"Yeah. About every five minutes. I wake up wanting to kill myself, I go to bed wishing I was dead. In between is nothing but a torturing sad emptiness," he answered truthfully.

"You're definitely coming with me!" Megumi decided with a nod of her head. Stepping behind him, his willful younger sister pushed him by his shoulder blades, forcibly shoving him towards her car. Limply, he let her guide him. Once inside, he turned his head away from her, feeling very uncomfortable being this close to the sister he had so deeply disappointed.

Thirty minutes later, they broke free of the late rush hour traffic cram and drove into the temple driveway. Standing on the wooden veranda decking were three teenagers, all of whom were distantly familiar to him. Persons, places and things had been a stampeding blur to him since Bell-chan left; this discovery had made him realize that a crippling sense of loss served as a worse intoxicant than alcohol.

Off and on, Keiichi had felt an odd sense of detachment from himself, as if he was a stranger who was viewing his own life from the inside with utter disinterest. His doom had overtaken him, breaking the chain of short and prolonged moments of happiness that, when linked together, gave life providence and purpose. Megumi bringing him here was just another interruption, another pause along the inevitable sequence of futilities. He recognized the young teenaged boy with the curly-locks hair, and remembered a short conversation with him yesterday at the church. A talk that had briefly revived a sense of hope.

"Keiichi, go on and get out of the car," Megumi urged him. "This might be very important!"

"The only important thing anyone can tell me is why Bell-chan left, and what can I do to get her back," Keiichi challenged, his voice a declaration that he didn't believe anything could reverse the agony of sorrow in his life. He stiffly exited the car and slammed the door shut.

"If you knew that you were the only one who could take action to undo all that has happened since your fiancée left, would you do it?" one of the two girls asked, overhearing his reply to Megumi. Her severe hairstyle reminded him of a ninja-girl variant of Morgan, the woman who had joined the Nekomi Motor Club around the time Celestin had caused so much chaos several years ago, forcing Belldandy to forget about him altogether.

"That's easy! I would do anything!" he replied with brusque irritation. Who were these people, that they had to ask such inane questions?! Didn't they listen yesterday when he was talking about Bell-chan's sudden departure?

"Good, because you might have to," the boy named Baldurdth answered. Keiichi's apathy was thrown off as the teenager neatly explained that he and his sisters were from the future. A closer notice revealed that each had Urd's Goddess Seal on their foreheads; which caused him to pause and consider their words more closely. When Megumi confirmed that the three were Urd's children, Keiichi was beginning to wonder if this was an elaborately contrived practical joke.

"Look, it all comes down to this," the fox-eyed girl explained. "You related to us that Belldandy had claimed that she was going to cancel her wish. We checked up on it and learned that the wish you made with her _was scratched_. So essentially, you've got another wish comin' to you."

"Then I wish for things to be the same as they were!" he shouted, saying the first thing that came to his mind. When nothing happened, he felt even more bristly and exclaimed "See! Nothing happened! This is a stupid idea!"

"Maybe it isn't that easy, onii-chan," Megumi noted, neither encouraging or discouraging him.

"Keiichi, we learned that the reason why Belldandy left is because Mara told her that she's pregnant," the boy told him.

"So? Good for her. That's really helpful information, it is. Vastly improves my situation..." he remarked sarcastically, even more irritated that he was being given trivia that had nothing to do with the reason why his sister had dragged him here. When his wedding had blown up in his face, he naturally suspected Mara as a possible perpetrator. But hearing news that she was pregnant did nothing to resolve things between he and Belldandy.

"She's pregnant with children that have _your_ DNA."

Sharp. Rivet. Clench. Shock.

He looked in the eyes of each of the triplets, and realized that they dead-serious about this. Inside of him, the wave of emotional trauma was so intense, Keiichi felt like he was being hypnotized, even as his mind fought against his disbelief. A few words had been thrown in the air, like a juggler juggling axes at one of the open square parks in Chiba. Only this time, _he_ was the juggler...and he didn't know how to catch the swirling axe-pitches. He watched disassociatively as Megumi stumbled backwards on the porch like someone woozy from a punch to the head. Misstepping partially off the wooden flooring, she slipped and fell on her ass. "It's someone else's life, it's someone else's life!" kept recycling in his mind, apparently in an effort to separate himself away from his life and this history of being. It took almost a minute before his thoughts skidded off the autopilot and his emotions cranked up...

"Wh..what?! Waitaminute! That's completely impossible! All along, Bell-chan has told me that she and I can't have children, because she's a Goddess and I'm a mortal! It's a fact of life, and we've known this for a couple years now!" he argued, his melancholy completely disabled by the stunning claim.

"Mara and me? It's just as impossible for her, since she's a Demon. It wouldn't make sense to begin with. Not to mention that I wouldn't have anything to do with Mara in..uh.._that_ kind of way," he added.

Either this was absolute nonsense...

...or it was absolutely true, leaping beyond the bounds of verity into the realm of the fantastic and monstrous. If so, then his precious Belldandy had experienced the worst betrayal a Goddess...or any woman...could ever experience. Women OD on sleeping pills over this kind of terrible infidelity. Guys who knocked up women other than their wives should burn in hell, he had always felt. Now, he was one of them, at least as far as Bell-chan was concerned. He tried to gather in the sense of shock he was feeling, and recognized that it was fractional compared to the despair Bell-chan must have felt. His Divine fiancée always had a propensity towards fits and starts of jealousy, usually over minor unintentional stuff...but if she received news that _Mara was going to have children who shared his DNA_, she would have had the Goddess of all jealousy fits. It would have been the proverbial poisoned arrow piercing through the heart...

...if these kid's claim was true.

Megumi was staring at him with an impossible-to-discern expression.

"This is unbelievable! How could Bell-chan actually believe something like that? What would make Mara claim that y..you got her _pregnant_?" his sister protested, fully overwrought by her consternation. At least she didn't jump into accusation mode like Belldandy had. Then again, it wasn't her fiancé who was fathering someone else's kids. One cannot choke the truth out of a stone; and yet it seemed that Belldandy had condemned him before even the slightest attempt to investigate the situation. Passing over the chance to inquire of him what he thought, Bell-chan didn't even give him a chance to defend himself, to claim his innocence. This was very much unlike her character, as his fiancée tended towards reserve rather than impulsive aggression.

Unable to countenance such an unbelievable, disgraceful state of affairs, he considered and then discarded the notion that this was one of Mara's schemes designed to cause chaos in the household. It was too crazy, even for Mara...especially since Mara was now one of the family. With her change in assignment to lead the Demon's Strife Mischief Office, Mara had nothing invested in trying to Curse him anymore. Thus, it made little sense for her to attempt to chase Belldandy, Urd and Skuld away, or inflict pain on them of this magnitude. This was Hild-level bullshit!

But Hild was a guest of the wedding, and if she was the cause of this, Rind would whale on her ass like a tiger pouncing on a flamingo. No, not even Hild could cook up something so fucked up.

"The fact remains: it is true that she _is_ going to have children with your parentage and DNA," Motokyn restated. "In the future, we were inexplicably separated from our parents and our entire extended family. A future that includes you and Belldandy...as our Aunt and Uncle. Consequently, we went back into this era of time to try and discover why. The Almighty and the Demon's Lord assisted us to seek our answers, and They guided us to the conversation that occurred between your fiancée and Mara. We witnessed how Mara's disclosure triggered Belldandy's outrage, right before she left. As you know, when Belldandy left the Earthrealm, all of her sisters left too. Consequently, her leaving has had a profound impact on us, because it possibly caused the sudden separation of us from our entire family. You are not the only one who has experienced a deep loss. Because of this mishap, we've lost our Mother as a result. We're alone too."

Pondering this, Keiichi was reminded of something Cevn had told him over and over again whenever he was facing loss and trials. "Your loss isn't just your loss; your pain isn't confined to your experience. Others feel it as well," his friend had said. He still didn't buy into some crazy theory about Bell-chan leaving him because of some disturbing announcement Mara had made...let alone a pregnancy. But what could explain the presence of these three children who claimed to be Urd's descendants? _Something_ had motivated them to travel back into the past to meet with him...

Could an engine of truth be buried inside of their words?

"Okay, let's assume for a minute that what you're telling did occur," he ventured cautiously. "If Belldandy left because Mara is pregnant, then it means that Mara somehow got pregnant without my participation, obviously. So how could that happen?"

"That's what you have to wish for," Kitsunen interjected in an excited voice. "We don't have a clue why that happened. Neither did Mara, for that matter. Mara told Belldandy that she went to the Demon's Realm and got checked out by their equivalent of Earthrealm doctors. They were worthless, unable to tell her anything. But if we did know...if you were able to find out how such an improbable thing happened...then maybe you could talk sense into your girlfriend and prevent her from leaving."

"This is retarded. Just to prove it, I wish to know why Mara is pregnant with children that are linked to me in any possible way," Keiichi declared sarcastically. The extravagant remarks by the three young Divines only provoked him to deepen his attitude of obstinacy. Depressed as he felt, Keiichi wasn't going to stand for such rash stupidity, which only seemed to belittle what slight self-respect he had remaining.

The wind picked up and started spinning sworls of debris in the air, forming a series of funicular spirals circling within the temple courtyard. The grey and dark-brown leaves leftover from last Fall began to be peppered with pink and red splotches. Far overhead, a small opening appeared in the hazy overcast sky...

***Whoom!!!***

Keiichi felt stung by the bright explosion as the confection of leaves and blossoms burst in his face. Lowering the arm he had instinctively raised to shield his eyes, he saw a hazy pink smoke and a shadow-form within it.

_"C'est Moi! La Grande Princess de l'Office Otasuke, Division d'aide de la Terre!"_

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --


	156. Pt 156: Nine Voices: The Triplets Pt 5

**Part 156: Nine Voices – The Triplets Part Five**

MOTOKYN, BALDURTH and KITSUNEN:

"Mon beau joie! I have arrived! Who is the fortunate one that made the wish?" Peorth announced cheerfully, now that her grand entrance bouquetted with rose petals and flashing lights was completed with a flourish and mid-air pirouette. Immediately, she recognized the familiar surroundings of Keiichi and Bell's temple. _Formerly_ Keiichi and Bell's temple, as neither of them lived in the temple home...

Keiichi blinked away his surprise as he saw Peorth floating in mid-air a few meters away. Like Bell and her sisters, Peorth had left in a state of deep chagrin several days back, completely mortified by what had transpired. As one of Bell's closest friends, Peorth had taken his 'betrayal' of Belldandy to heart and had thrown herself into cruel mood. In the process of angrily departing, she had cursed him out in French, made every plant inside the house wilt to demonstrate her displeasure, and then slapped him with a head-ringing strike.

So what was she doing back here on the Earthrealm?

Quick to react, Kitsunen immediately shouted "Who are you?" at the new arrival before she could think. Narrowing her already narrow eyes, she appraised the Goddess speculatively, slyly. Could this be XOM's response to Keiichi's wish?

"Waitaminute, I know you! You're the 'French Roses Goddess'. Peorth, right? How are you doing?" Kitsunen asked as recognition dawned. Peorth was one of her Mom's and Aunt Bell's friends...actually, more a friend of Aunt Bell's than Mom. Visiting several times a year, she usually heightened the tensions in the household considerably because she would flip-flirt with Uncle Keiichi and pester Mom and Aunt Belldandy. Mom in particular used to roof it with Peorth, getting in all sorts of arguments with her. But despite Peorth's flaws, Kitsunen thought she was a person of intrigue because of her elegant charm, sophisticated airs, and mastery of seduction skills. Peorth could definitely coach any girl on the art of guy-chasing.

"Does she have a reason to be here?" Motokyn pondered aloud, mystified as to the purpose of Peorth's unexpected arrival. Their plan was for a wish-granting GRO Goddess to attend to Keiichi's wish. XOM's wish recognition and processing subroutine could be operating quite irregularly. As a Goddess of the Rune, Peorth was one of the elite Goddesses and had little reason to be here on the Earthrealm, especially now. Then she remembered Peorth's 'hobby' occupation; a possible justification for the Goddess responsible for the Eternity Rune to bother with a mortal planet like the Earthrealm.

The two sisters looked at each other briefly, wordlessly signaling their curiosity. This was the Peorth who worked primarily as a high-level Sysop for the Xeomn Network, with periodic duties connected with one of the wish-granting offices. They both remembered that Peorth's wish-granting office had a different purview of assignments than the GRO, as it _exclusively_ served the Earthrealm mortals. Their Mom and Peorth had this quirky relationship based on teasing each other; Peorth often provoked their Mom by taunting her about events surrounding a certain First Class License exam, something that had happened years before they had been born. Both girls were impressed with Peorth's efficiency and dedication, as it was common knowledge that her quick thinking had saved the Ygg Network from a devastating system-wide crash more than once. In one sense, Mom and Peorth were two seeds in a pod: sexy, carefree, playful, sleek, flirtatious and strong-headed.

No wonder they argued so much.

Peorth was dressed in a skintight black body-stocking outfit that glistened and sparkled, with leather pink and red glovelets and boots, and her usual semi-haltered cape with winglets that glowed a vermilion color. Of course, their brother was gawking at her with barely-concealed male admiration. Accompanying her was an Angel that looked like Uncle Keiichi...

"Heroic Vermilion Swift!" Keiichi shouted in recognition, doubly surprised by the unexpected reappearance of Peorth's boyfriend as he materialized in front of the temple a few seconds after Peorth.

_His Angel was here!_

He closed his eyes, feeling the absolute serenity that accompanied the private Song of Recognition his Angel sounded out as a greeting. Hearing his Angel's voice, Keiichi felt the ceaseless canticle of grief that had been bearing down on his heart steadily and greatly eased by song. Grateful, he didn't want his Angel's singing to end; Heroic's rich countertenor singing voice was firmly the equal of Holy Bell's in beauty and skill.

Of all the beings in the universe, Keiichi prized Heroic Vermilion Swift highly, as he was the closest to his heart besides Bell-chan. His Angel was at once a parental figure and a best friend. Heroic knew his heart, openly and gently. Keiichi could always trust Heroic and loved him as intensely as he loved Bell-chan, just not in a romantic sense. But whenever Heroic was around Peorth, he was a handful to deal with. Having his own Angel was complicated enough...but that Angel was also Peorth's boyfriend. Because his heart and Soul were so intimately bonded with Heroic's, he would experience a type of 'romantic feedback' that charged him with even more complications and confusions. His Angel's passionate nature would resonate within him; his feelings would start to echo Heroic's deep love for Peorth. In other words, he would feel uneasy romantic leanings towards the Goddess of Eternity. This, coupled with the how the faith of his heart had been emptied by Bell's departure, caused him to want comfort...any comfort...and it was difficult to fight off his urges to seek solace in the aura of caring that Peorth represented and the desires evoked by his strong heart-link with Heroic.

"_What distresses you, my TwinSoul?_," Keiichi heard Heroic singing in his mind, once his Angel completed the private Song of Recognition. "_Where is your beloved Belldandy? What is the meaning of her absence? Why is your bearing so plighted with such sorrow? How can I draw it away from you? How can I help?_"

His Angel's mention of Bell-chan triggered a review of the tragic events of the past few days in his mind. Heroic Vermilion Swift instantly reacted to him; his expansive plumed wings fluttering rapidly in distress as his beautiful face became clouded with dolor. Then he took off, flying up into the air and then flitting about like a panicked hummingbird. Watching Heroic dart about, Keiichi felt torn with guilt because now his own pain had pained yet another, one who was by nature extremely sensitive to his moods. Several feathers slowly floated down to the ground by his feet, dislodged by Heroic's frenetic sweeping wing-beats. He watched his Angel strain with effort to slow himself down, eventually steadying his flight and regaining his composure.

In response, he could sense a musical 'attunement'...Heroic Vermilion Swift was trying to tell him something, something about forgiveness and his age...but Keiichi couldn't understand the meaning of what his Angel had attempted to convey.

"I'm sorry, my wonderful Angel," he said in apology.

"You...have an _Angel_?!" Baldurdth sputtered, unable to rein in his astonishment. His Aunt and Uncle had never mentioned that Keiichi had an Angel while he was growing up! Numerous times as a young boy, he had been entranced by the adult's Angels...and he was particularly filled with admiration whenever he witnessed the harmonious songcraft of Aunt Bell's Angel Holy Bell and his Mom's Angel-Devil World of Elegance. But nowhere in his experience did he ever imagine that a mortal...especially his Uncle...could have an Angel. Earthrealm mortals just don't have Angels! They and all other non-Divines were incapable of sustaining Angels for more than a short time. The demands on the energies of Soul were too great. Because he was half-mortal, _he himself didn't even have an Angel_ yet.

Peorth glanced briefly at Keiichi, sensing his consternation regarding her presence here. She shared his confusion. Heroic had strongly reacted to him, his panicked airborne gyreing was painful for her to witness. And yet, the Otasuke Office had definitely messaged her at her Sysop console with her assignment to come to this place! This was entirely too much confusion to be packed in a group of Earthrealm mortals, plus one Angel and one Goddess.

"My dear Heroic Vermilion Swift! What are you insinuating? That Belldandy has left Keiichi?" Peorth gasped, turning towards her winged Angelic boyfriend. She could feel a redoubled sense of pain, and Heroic's face was very troubled and sad.

"Your dear TwinSoul Keiichi told you that _she's left_?! Très non possible! I was just having chamomile tea with her at my parent's villa before I reported to work at the Sysop Office..." She suddenly stopped in mid-speech, as she realized that there were three unfamiliar teenagers here besides Keiichi and Megumi. Unfamiliar...and very peculiar in more ways than one.

They were mortal and yet they also had Divine essences.

"Which ones could you be?" she asked them. From the way the three were looking at her, apparently they knew her even though she had never met them before. The enigmatic Godkids introduced themselves in short order and claimed that they were triplets, which was an exceedingly rare occurrence among the Gods. Oddly enough, the teenagers seemed to be half-Divine! Even more unsettling was that they had the markings of Urd on their foreheads. Urd didn't have any kids, last time she checked.

Something was very amiss here, and Peorth judged that they were just as surprised to see her as she was to see them.

"Who sent you, Peorth?" Kitsunen interrupted, her voice betraying her urgency.

"Comment? Why, the Earth Otasuke Office, s'il vous plaît! Who else would send me?" Peorth snapped back. She paused for a few seconds and then made a grimacing moue. "But if the Helper Office sent me here, then who is the person making a wish? This is very undesirable and curious, as I was not formally informed as to whom the wish-maker was. It cannot be Keiichi, as he already has had his single wish granted. Megumi here certainly isn't in need of a wish. You three nouveaux are half-mortal, half Gods, which disqualifies you as wish candidates. And me...I already have my wish, because I am Bonded with the blossom of my heart, mon amour Mr. Heroic himself!"

"What my sister meant to ask was _which computer network_ sent you?" Baldurdth queried, a little put off by how Peorth had digressed into some private romantic whimsy. This was serious shit, and Peorth seemed to be acting like it was some kind of lovey-dovey getaway with the Angelic boyfriend!

"L'esprit de l'escalier! Does everyone here have such slowness of wit?" Peorth rejoined with visible disdain. "The XOM network dispatched me, as is de rigueur with all wish request cases routed through the Otasuke Office."

Motokyn was severely frustrated because she couldn't overhear the shared communications between Peorth and Keiichi that the Angel had. Irritated by the pretext that she was being ignored, she interrupted the adults and exclaimed, "What is going on here? Why were you sent here to grant his wish? Why does he have an Angel?"

"Restrain your wild enthusiasm, vous jeune fille pas apprivoisé," Peorth answered. "I am uncertain of these circumstances myself, as Keiichi was already the recipient of a wish-bestowal..."

Kitsunen couldn't avoid giggling at this witty barb aimed at her sister.

"Which was recently canceled, on account of Belldandy," Baldurdth interrupted. Peorth reacted with a stunned body-flinch. "Schooled you, didn't I? We know that a Demoness named Mara met with his fiancée and informed her that she was pregnant, and that her unborn children's DNA matched Keiichi's. It doesn't take a XOM to figure out what happened next. She freaked, booked the next flight out, and went back to Mom and Dad's. Once she and her sisters posse'd up to the God's Realm, she made sure that his wish got unplugged."

"No! Heroic Vermilion says that this cannot be!" Peorth asserted. Keiichi's red-haired Angel nodded vigorously in assent.

"You're damned right that cannot be!!!" Keiichi added thornily. "It's confusing enough about whether or not my wish with Bell-chan was voided or not! But one thing I know for sure is that Divines and mortals cannot conceive children. She's told me about this repeatedly, and even though it really really sucks, we decided that we would get married anyway. Now, I don't know what to think! This is twisted! The idea that I would actually want to have children...or have children...with anyone else besides Bell-chan is massively screwed up! I wouldn't even dream of doing such a thing."

"Excuse me for bitchin' on your pity-party, but how does that explain _us_?" Kitsunen spoke up with hot ire. "We're half-God, half-mortal. According to your dumbass little set of rules, we supposedly shouldn't exist, should we? But whoops!...here we are, live and direct!"

"Peorth, whenever you've talked to Belldandy, has she ever mentioned anything about her husband or children?" Motokyn asked, trying to offset her sister's mounting irritation. Kit's being distracted by spurious feelings wouldn't bring them closer to their goal of trying to sort out this new challenge. They needed to maintain an assertive offense, and a calm steadying hand to maintain some sense of order here. Kit and Baldurdth seemed to be spinning up, and she needed to be the mature one once more.

"Of course not! Belldandy doesn't have children, nor is she married. She completed a wish request with Keiichi here many years ago, teaching him how to love..." Peorth explained.

"WHAT?! She _completed_ my wish request?! Many years ago? Bell-chan just left a few days ago! How could she do complete my wish when I wished for her to be with me forever?" Keiichi vented, fisting his hands with avid frustration. Peorth's matter-of-fact statement about Belldandy never marrying and finishing up his wish totally floored him. Any sense of reality seemed to simmer and then quickly boil over, deepening the poignant jaw-dropping stab of shock. All of this was so discordant!

With each discussion, it kept getting worse. This was a ridiculous mixed-up reality, one that resembled an amateurish painting of black charcoal scratches against a gummy impastel. Everything seemed to be a tangle-web of near-truths. He felt like Peorth and the other's jerky observations and conjectures were forming a sticky net of futility; a trap-nest to hang all of his uncertainties on.

They might as well be rebuilding a bike engine blindfolded...

"...and now, he's happily married to an Earthrealm woman," Peorth said, waving him off with her hand as she kept talking. "Keiichi's wish was for her to be with him forever, and she is still with him; just not on the Earthrealm and not in a love-relationship. It's ancient history. Everyone's bon vivant! Naturally, my friend Belldandy doesn't have any children. She's only TwentyFive Decas old, for Almighty's sake! Just like me, she's way too young to be Bonded with a God and devoted to raising a family. Hmm...what I fail to understand is why this seems like the past. You, Keiichi...and you, Megumi, appear to be much younger than I remember."

"This is so wrong!" Keiichi asserted bitterly.

"Peorth, my brother was _engaged_ to Belldandy," Megumi asserted. "He wasn't interested in anyone else. Belldandy was supposed to marry him last weekend, but everything went afoul. Listening to you describe my brother as being married to someone else doesn't ring true with me. The sense I get is that you're talking about a completely different Keiichi and Belldandy than the ones I know. Besides, Keiichi didn't need Belldandy to teach him how to love. My brother _already knew how to be a loving guy_. He just didn't have anyone to receive that love, he didn't have a direction to give his love towards until Belldandy arrived. She didn't teach him how to love; in fact, I think my brother taught _her_ how to be in a loving relationship, in his own way."

"What are you both trying to say? That I was sent here by mistake? Everyone is pestering me about Keiichi! Keiichi this, Keiichi that! I fail to understand why..." Peorth countered, clearly irritated.

"How can any of this be true?" Motokyn interrupted. "Please, let's look at what claims we have in hand and cut through them to find the truth. Keiichi says Belldandy left him. XOM informed us that his wish was annulled by her request. If this actually happened, then I cannot understand how you could be telling us that his wish was _completed_! And if you do know Belldandy, then you certainly must know the three of us, because we're her nieces and nephew!"

Peorth's face tightened up with concentration.

"Mon Dieu!!!" Peorth gasped. Heroic Vermilion Swift sensed her uneasiness and responded by quickly flying behind her and embracing her, gently rocking side-to-side. She felt somewhat soothed by her boyfriend's tender concern.

"This is extremely perplexing. XOM is confirming what you just said. She _has_ annulled his wish...almost twenty years ago, according to the records. But you're convinced that it just happened. Something unprecedented must have happened here to make a Goddess like Belldandy choose to void a wish contract. But she has never told me about such a terrible event. This is a forest of contradictions, and the appearance gained suggests that there is something wrong with Time itself."

Observing Peorth and Heroic, Keiichi recognized the mirror of his own behavior. Whenever Bell-chan was very upset, he would try to soothe and protect her the same way. Trusting his gut, he locked eyes with his Angel. A few seconds later, his mind was busily painting over the imagined dull, achromatic impastel of uncertainties with a new swirl of vivid colors: the artistry of insight. Vitality replaced gray enigma, as he finally understood what Heroic Vermilion Swift was trying to sing into his heart. Dumbfounded by the new information, he felt tangled in doubts about his own sense of being, his own existence. Everything was already in the surreal zone, and it was difficult to comprehend this new shift of circumstances.

Here they were, and he and his sister were the only ones from the Now...Heroic had basically said. Reality had jumped lanes, and they were all had been driving in the wrong lane before coming here...

"You're right, Heroic Vermilion Swift!" Keiichi noted, nodding approvingly at his Angel. "Heroic says that there seems to be some disconnect, which he believes is due to the fact that the two of you come from a time almost twenty years hence. Or nearly twenty years in the past, as far as you're concerned. What he thinks is occurring is that the disruption of the normal flow of events here due to Bell-chan's leaving...is rippling 'forward' through the years, causing gradually increasing 'distortions' in the timeframe you both come from. The forward...or Futurewards...momentum just hasn't fully reached you guy's timeframe yet. But it's causing a tension, partially impacting your reality and causing it to be different than this one. Which then explains why in your reality, Bell-chan had completed her wish...while in my reality, she has just canceled it. So we're dealing with a split reality.

"In racing this is called a voult; an obscure term for a 'Y-shaped' split in a race course or highway. Veer down the left divide of the road, and you gradually increase your distance from the right divide. The further you go, the greater the effect of separation. A kilometer down the road and you might be separated from the other road by a few farm fields. Ten kilometers down the road, and your separation from the other road involves a town, river, forest, hills, and a bunch of farm fields. In this case, the separation is _events_ rather than landmarks. You all came here from different times in the Future. The distance between the now and the future isn't great enough yet that...twenty years from now...Belldandy's cancellation of my wish has become part of your reality. But the sequence of events is clearly steering your future timeline off course from this one."

"I totally understand!" Kitsunen confirmed. "It's just like lightning. You see the flash first and then it takes a few for the sound to hit. The complete impact of Belldandy abandoning Keiichi in the here-and-now hasn't been felt yet, twenty years later where you guys come from. You've only experienced a partial after-effect of her causal actions."

"Exactly," Baldurdth agreed.

"We're _twenty years in the past_, and the _Future is a complete mess_? Merde!!! I didn't even realize this! But then again, how do I know that _this_ era of Time isn't impacted par même mal de chose...that _now _is aberrant and the Future is correct? Or that both are wrong?" Peorth speculated. "How can I, the Goddess of the Eternity Rune, not sense the passage of Time the moment I was dispatched to this familiar place? My Goddess senses are clearly amiss. This is a temporal chiasma; an intersect of divergent TimeWeaves within this TimeStream. Assuming that we all come from the same TimeStream, that is...and I have my doubts about you three being from this TimeStream, based on what you've told me. In any case, a disharmony such as this between Past, Present and Future cannot be allowed. The veil of Time's secrets cannot conceal the truth from me, for I am the one who seeks that which is hidden. I must consult my Rune."

Peorth began to describe an elaborate Runic design in mid-air with her fingertips, as if she was painting the invisible air with light. Nightrise had crept up on them, and the pinkish glow of light trails commanded everyone's attention even more because of the darkness. Even she was impressed with her consummate skill; her small hands working with practiced deft movements resembling those of a harpist. A beautiful weave of runes was emerging, seemingly channeled in moving circles and spirals that continued to design itself, guided by her expert manipulations.

"Belldandy...wish revocation...Demoness...children...holoniverse...disrupt...accusatory," she heard the Rune consult in her mind. The familiar sense of being mesmerized by the vicissitudes of Eternity gradually passed.

"Now I understand what has come to pass here," she said, turning to look at Keiichi with a bewildered expression. "A great measure of forgiveness is needed to manifest a vital healing. Belldandy has left the Earthrealm because she felt betrayed by something that never happened."

"What the hell do you mean, it never happened!" Keiichi responded in a lowing harsh voice, completely antagonized by Peorth's ready dismissal of his profound loss. "I'm the one who got left behind, because of a fucked up action I didn't do. Mara's pregnant. My fiancée stormed out on me. Three kids from the Future are here. Bell-chan finished granting my wish. All of this is happening, not 'never happened' like you say! Belldandy..snff..truly loved me, wish or no wish. She wouldn't have left me like she did. Dammit! She should have never left me..."

"Unless something happened which should not have. Or something that didn't happen, happened," Kitsunen said calmly, putting her hand on Keiichi's shoulder as he sobbed.

Baldurdth and Motokyn nodded their heads in agreement.

"You three," Peorth declared, pointing at Motokyn, Baldurdth, and Kitsunen, "do not belong here. You are meaningful from somewhere else, and yet XOM has identified you as being from here. Keiichi made a wish, and each of you are bringers of chaos to...no! You and I...not chaos! Not chaos...but creation! ReCreation! I...remember...a vault of beginning energies..."

Peorth suddenly jerked to a halt in mid-sentence, riveting the attention of everyone in the group. Bursts of sonic sparkles rained out, making an audible clatter like hailstones hitting the roof. The Runic design she had created whirlpooled and then collapsed into itself. Everyone gasped in reaction to the mini-fireworks, which was quickly consumed by the wintry darkness of night in the unlit temple grounds.

Motokyn shouted "Look!" as she noticed a rapid change in Peorth. The Goddess's body began to luminesce...her velvet-colored eyes quickly emptying themselves of consciousness as she floated into a supine position, gently levering backwards so that her forehead was pointed directly towards the sky. A brilliant narrow spike of light suddenly flared from her Goddess forehead symbol, streaking upwards to zenith like a comet...

Seconds later, an answering light swept downwards...the familiar acknowledgment signal of a wish-granting transmission...but instead of pin-pointing Peorth, it engulfed the seven of them in a nebulae that obscured everything in the vicinity.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Motokyn watched in fascinated awe as the OmniArc prominenced into existence, completely surrounding their group. Instead of standing in the temple grounds, she and the others were floating amidst the grandeur of the entirety of existence. From their impossible perspective, she could see a floweret of massive elongated Möbius strips filled with sparkles of colors, linked by a fuzzy golden-white nebula in the middle. The Logorinths and the Mid-Light. Within a moment, the clusters of world-trees that comprised the OmniArc seemed to fold up into each other, compacting and crumpling. Suddenly, the OmniArc...everything...was shattered into a cloud of evanescent powderings, crushed by invisible forces. The resulting nimbus of particles floated nearby the centering glow-cloud that used to be between the two Logorinths. Then the glow-cloud faded with stutters of darkening, its cosmic-scale phasing resembling a universal power outage.

In the cold impersonal destruction of energies and voids, she could feel a cross-trekking stream of emotions. Faintly within the deathing of what seemed to be all of existence, Motokyn sensed a fragile, harrowing finality of a life diminishing. Shocked, as an inner voice of recognition told her that it was Cevn, the man who supposedly was be her Father. At the speed of heart, she witnessed him courageously renounce his life and then fade into non-existence. Becoming pure energy.

Events seemed to be gathering themselves in a reverse sequence, a backwards history of her Father's life. Suddenly he was there with her and the others, a ghost-form. Before his disappearance, he had fought a deadly battle against a horrific apparition that was the very embodiment of Evil. Destroying it...

Dying three times.

Destruction. OmniArc. Destruction. Expansion. Destruction. Duality.

The fourth time he died, she seemed to be in the Bayfront district of Tokyo, watching in horror as her Mother administered a fatal dose of a medicine to him in an attempt to forestall the Evil from returning. His Soul had become the doorway, an escape route. He had to die, so that a Being would not be unleashed into reality. Her Mother was cradling his unbreathing, still form in her lap, her heart completely shattered...

Motokyn's heart wrenched, convulsing and sickened by the tragic scene.

Flying out of this scenario as a bird would leap out of the nest, her attention flighted to another scene; a less tempestuous setting which seemed to take place in the past. She experienced how her Mother's heart was completely renewed, as Cevn had chosen to relieve her of the burden of her memories of being in love with him, so that she would be spared the encompassing sense of loss.

Going back even further, her mind was driven deep into the life-memories of Belldandy. Motokyn experienced horrible events through the looking-glass of Belldandy's emotions: feeling what Belldandy had felt and thought while as she witnessed every being she knew die horrible deaths, slaughtered by the SurGoth. Yet, her Aunt Belldandy was brimming with forgiveness and pity for the SurGoth even as he was trying to murder her. Moving further backwards in Time. Fragments of reality, but within a lens, a union with a Supreme as the Almighty Himself cried tears over the corpses of his Children, the Gods.

Her Mother stricken ill to the point of death, balding and emaciated as some horrible viral disease consumed her.

Overpowered by horror at seeing her Mother like this, Motokyn vomited...

Another shift in focus, and she was amidst confusion again, observing as Belldandy and Mara were splintered off from the others. She recognized her Aunt, but then she experienced everything around her inverting itself. The sword of reality had turned.

Aunt Belldandy...a Demoness Belldandy? Mara...a Goddess Mara? Her Mother...a Demoness torturing Keiichi? Snapped by a skull-cracking anger at the sight of Keiichi being repeatedly tortured by her Mom's evil twin. Spectator to a distorted reality, she watched as her Aunt and the Demoness Mara were trapped in a confusing pocket of dimensional uncertainty. Mara becoming susceptible to a Goddess version of herself, who was in love with Keiichi. Fluxing back-and-forth between Belldandy and Mara's confused perspectives. She alighted on Mara's impressions...her palpable fear as she was confined in an isolative torture chamber with Keiichi; a Keiichi who had been tortured to the point of animalistic intolerance. Motokyn flushed with embarrassment as she witnessed Mara and Keiichi falling into each other in sexual abandon, seeking a desperate, elusive sense of comfort. Touching as one.

Now she knew why Mara was pregnant! Goddess Mara loved Keiichi, and her love had influenced Demoness Mara enough to incite her to have her fleshly escapade with Keiichi. A single act of intimacy, but enough to conceive two impossible Demon babies.

Another flow of memory and she was in the midst of a setting she readily recognized, a seppuku tableau within a squared enclosure of white curtains. She had witnessed conception...now she was witnessing execution. Death and Life. The three Demonesses taunting Belldandy, Mara, Goddess Mara and Keiichi as they prepared to execute them. Demoness Mara cursing them in the name of the Dark Lord, who suddenly appeared in the midst of the execution grounds the Demonesses had set up inside of the temple. Keiichi suddenly transforming, becoming the Almighty...

The Almighty...in love with Goddess Mara?

Jetsounds as she watched intuitive realities coalesce, seeing Seven über-Divine beings striving hard to create the OmniOm. Three of them were her Mom, Belldandy and Keiichi. Seeing herself and the others in the Twelve outpour the ReCreated Everything.

GranSkuld declaring "Love Love Family..."

Her maybe-Father, dissolving to provide the energy so they could restore reality.

Back on the Earthrealm again. Her Mother, drowning in futility, experiencing a cursed loss. An inability to experience romantic love, a tragic burden that accompanied being Norn of the Past. Love Past, past Love. Mom had never told her about this!

Mom, drowning in a lake in Beijing, wanting it all to end.

Cevn, her maybe-Father, diving in after her and almost drowning himself in the effort.

She was swept up in maelstroms of Space and Time, spinning geometries and globes of wood that slowed peeled off into panels and trestles as the decking swept up to buoy her aloft...

She was back at the temple, lying on her back on the gallery deck by the front entrance.

Stiff-limbed and sweat-drenched, she couldn't shake the lingering awareness that Cevn had saved her Mother's life...and her Mother had redeemed his love for her...saving his life.

Both of them had an undeniable strength of devotion towards each other, the same intense loving dedication that her Aunt Belldandy and Keiichi had.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Keiichi couldn't believe what he had just experienced. Part and parcel of being in a relationship with a Goddess is the out-of-body experiences one has to embark on. This only made sense, considering that he loved a being that was made of the verimost intrinsic forces of the universe. The sci-fi notion of a 'being made of pure thought' didn't even come close to holding a candle to Bell-chan. A more apt description of his fiancée would have been a "being made of pure heart."

His was a forced audience, reluctantly witnessing a heart's most traumatic experience. Discovering that a heart could be utterly destroyed, betrayed, cheated and cast out.

Nightmarish.

The fantastic weaves of Time and Space had conducted him to an alternate reality where Bell-chan and Mara had been stranded alone, with only each other for company. The compass of circumstances was completely the opposite of the life he had lived: instead of being blessed with a wish by Belldandy, he had been tricked and then cursed by a Demoness form of his beloved. He both saw and felt himself entrapped by Belldandy, Urd and Skuld...Demonesses, while in love with a teenaged Goddess Mara. A Goddess Mara, who had been dispatched by Yggdrasil to grant his wish. A Mara who was a total newb at granting wishes.

But it wasn't him, it was _another Keiichi_.

Beyond the shock value of the mirror opposition to everything that he held to be true in his life, the sight of he and Mara...doing it...was even more scandalous in his mind. He felt like a pervert voyeur as he witness the ardent intimacy shared by the two, one of whom was a disturbingly exact copy of himself. He didn't recall ever having sex with Mara, but somehow it had happened; he had just watched it. She was pregnant with two children, his own DNA attached, bursting the ocean of controversy wide open.

Was he or wasn't he the man in the mirror? Keiichi could dimly recall a dream-like alternate reality that he had experienced, one where he was a show-stopping mega-idol star. When he had described this experience to Cevn one time, his friend had offered the suggestion that the whole experience in the "Keiichi MoriStar Universe" was a type of test, a chance for him to really get in tight with his strengths and weaknesses. By placing him in a tricky situation, Keiichi was allowed to see if he would be willing to look beyond his convictions and feelings and act in accordance with what _was necessary_, rather than what he wanted or believed.

Perhaps Bell-chan and Mara had been presented with a similar moral dilemma! Gods and Demons weren't perfect beings by a long shot, despite their superhuman powers and knowledge. Like all intelligent beings, they too were subject to the necessity of self-evaluation: the innate need to examine if there was a shortcoming or error within themselves...defects of character which often could only be revealed when the matter was examined from every potential point of perspective. In the alternate reality that she had experienced, Belldandy had been confronted with a version of him that was in love with Goddess Mara, not her. His heart was twinned with hers as she struggled to move beyond shock and outrage. He felt her struggle to embrace the circumstances once she had decoded her confusion. Bell-chan had to give him up, and she decided to free his 'alter' so that he could be reunited with Goddess Mara, not her. An entirely selfless act, just like the challenge he faced in the MoriStar reality regarding the secret love that Sora harbored towards him. At the time, he thought that kissing Sora was a turn against everything he loved and believed in...but in retrospect, it had been a genuine tender gifting. A moment of selflessness, not recklessness; a touching that had turned him _towards_ everything he held dear. Bell had experienced the same decision...and like him, had honored Love above self.

Yet, in the process of securing the freedom of the other Keiichi, Mara had been overwhelmed by the pure love of Goddess Mara's feelings and had acted unwittingly.

She had swam in the lake of unbridled lust.

Somehow, Bell-chan had either forgotten this, or was completely unaware that it ever happened in the first place in the "Mirror" version of reality. The love-making that had flowed between Mara and a 'version' of himself had occurred out of Bell's sight. She couldn't have possibly known about it. Mara herself was deeply embarrassed by the event; too ashamed to speak of it. Burdened by reluctance, Mara certainly wouldn't want to tell on herself, accidental sex or not. Scratch two corners of the four sister's square if that happened.

Yet it _had happened_, and Belldandy and Mara would be forevermore enemies unless he did something. Summoning the courage to inform Belldandy wasn't an act of ill intent; it was an unbelievable act of loving honesty on Mara's part. He had no idea that she cared for Belldandy so much! There was couldn't possibly be a taint of sin or prospectus of evil in Mara's actions. Instead, he recognized that Bell's Demoness sister had been gravely injured as well. Mara wasn't stained by malice, not this time.

But try to tell that to Belldandy.

Backgrounding this was the distinct impression that these experiences were integral to their roles as the Seven. He, Bell-chan, and the others were the ones who had fought Isilblius...the SurGoth...and had then reconstructed and expanded the realms of reality to create the OmniArc. Now, he grasped that 'reality' had been vastly expanded again; the totality of the OmniArc seemingly blown up like a balloon to many times its own size to create the OmniOm. Time was completely interwoven, infinity rendered into singularity, life conjoined with a conscious death.

Yet, his Divine girlfriend was gone. Another Keiichi from another reality had gotten Mara pregnant...and yet it all had transpired in _his_ own reality as well. The 'other' Keiichi had created life with _this_ Mara. Or had he? Keiichi paused to consider how _another_ Keiichi could change events in his reality. Or was there another explanation?

"Could it have possibly been _me_?" he asked himself. Could _he_ be the father of Mara's unborn offspring? Pitched in with all of this was the fact that once before, his personality had somehow been blended with that of another Keiichi, back in the "Keiichi Moristar" universe. A recurrence of such an alloy of two lives was possible...

So where did he end and the other Keiichi begin?

This uncertainty reminded him of something Cevn was fond of saying. "The reason we know where we end and someone else begins," his friend had said, "is attributable to the fact that we don't know why it is that _we_ are the knower of such things...that each of us is the one unique being who can understand it both ways."

Now, he had to tame Bell-chan's profound sense of betrayal while he himself was confused as hell about how Mara could be having his children.

"My children?" he asked himself, feeling dreamily curious and a little bit prideful as he adjusted to the idea that he would be a father, at least in the biological sense...

Air pressure in the form of shouting near his face roused him. He blinked his eyes open and noticed that it was morning, the sun backlighting a pale yellow-gray sky that seemed to be laden with an imminent snowfall.

"Keiichi? Are you all right? What the hell just happened to us?" Megumi asked, looking dazed and disheveled herself, her hair sweat-plastered over her face as she leaned over him. He felt a flush of embarrassment, hoping that his sister didn't experience all the blatantly sexual stuff that had passed between the other 'Keiichi' and Mara in the dream-like journey their group had undertaken. That would entwine one more strand of craziness into an already complicated situation.

"Did...you see anything, sis?" he asked cautiously.

"Did I? I was right there with you!" Megumi giggled. His face felt like it was going to burn off with embarrassment as his genki sister confirmed his worst imaginings. Gulp-choking, a flurried panic caused his heart to skip a beat.

"Hee hehe ha! Woohoo, that was really trippy!" she whooped. "I saw you as 'Japan's Number One Idol' playing a totally awesome huge concert at Big Egg, and then blowing up an entire soundstage during Kohaku Uta Gassen! I didn't know you had it in you, my dear tone-deaf brother! You can't even karaoke worth crap; the only ones worse than you at karaoke are Cevn-sensei and your two bosom buddies, Tamiya and Ootaki. Of course, I sorta knew that you were in some alternate universe or reality, but it was so fun to watch the spectacle of you in a mega rockstar lifestyle. It was like a being in an IMAX during a movie, it was so weird. Especially those times when Peorth would tease you and make you squirm...hee hee! And the kiss you laid on Sora at the end! Don't worry, I promise I'll never tell her about this. Gods, I must have been hit on the head, because it was all a crazy dream..."

"Whew!" Keiichi thought to himself. Apparently, this crazy flashback functioned like a way-out Divine version of a movie megaplex, and fortunately Megumi had been seated in a different theater. Thank God!

He watched his Angel cradling Peorth, who seemed semi-conscious and worse for wear. As his wits gathered to him like bats flying into a darkened cave, he recognized that this Peorth didn't look quite the same as the Peorth he knew. She was dressed differently; less scantily, in other words. Before his 'journey', he had paid no heed to this. Heroic Vermilion Swift seemed different as well...his Angel was regarding her with an expression that perfectly combined tender love and deep concern. It was very odd, because he was used to Peorth and Heroic being a brand-new couple that had known each other for only a year or so. But when their eyes met, he could discern depths of love between the two that reminded him of his parents. Heroic and Peorth had a refreshing carefree naturalness around each other that spoke of many years of loving companionship that had passed between them...

The three GodKids were groaning nearby, slowly regaining their senses. Keiichi had to concede that they had been right-on about this whole thing. Well, at least partially so. It seemed that their situation was dire as well; in the little bit that he had touched upon their minds, he had gained the clear impression that they had recently lost their Mother and had grown up without a Father. He hoped that they found whatever answers they were seeking.

But now that he had experienced the truth that had caused Belldandy to leave him, how could he rectify it?

Belldandy, Urd and Skuld had left almost a week ago. And without a Norn, there was no possible way that he could physically go backwards in time to set things right.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"Keiichi, you've been a naughty boy!" Peorth goaded him once again.

"Cut it out, Peorth! That wasn't me, and you know it! Or at least I think it wasn't me..." he protested, causing Peorth and Heroic to laugh out loud at his expense. He hoped that this awkward situation wouldn't get out of hand with Peorth being the blabbermouth she was.

"You forget that I can hear your thoughts, Keiichi," Peorth chided. "But not to worry, because I'm from 202X and you'll have to wait 20 years before I can...hee hee...tease you like this again. And believe me, I will! Besides, your Angel is letting me get away with it, so it must be très bien by him."

"Gee, thanks Heroic! 'TwinSoul of my TwinSoul, most precious Angel of mine'," he groused in sourly teasing sarcasm, causing another round of ringing laughter. Angel laughter, like the chiming of a carillon. Shrugging his shoulders, he joined in the merriment...merriment that had been impossible for him a mere 24 hours ago.

Megumi had given the three teenagers a ride back to their capsule hotel. Everybody was exhausted, as if they had pulled a tense overnighter right before finals. Apparently, the triplets had witnessed something during the recent 'tour' that had knocked them for a loop, to the point where they were almost dead silent and shell-shocked afterwards. He wanted their immediate aid in trying to figure out a way to take him back in time, but Peorth had cautioned him that they were very upset about something and needed time to sort their feelings out. Distraught, they couldn't be of any assistance to him.

Now, it was just he, Peorth and Heroic Vermilion Swift at the dinner table. Of course, he was the only one who actually needed to eat, but the two had generously offered to keep him company and stay overnight. He still couldn't ferret out the sense of why Peorth had been summoned by his wish, and why she wasn't the Peorth from the here and now.

The flood of betrayal that had been drowning him since Bell left was now only a trickle. But he still faced the challenge of going back in time six days. He imagined what it would be like to wake up and experience the day once again, and then deal with Belldandy and Mara after the two had their middle-of-the-night conference. And try and do all this while having a heart-to-heart with his two drunken sempai.

Although his situation wasn't resolved yet, he felt much more confident than he did when he woke up yesterday morning. At least he wasn't driving down a blind alley anymore. He could totally understand why Bell-chan had blown a proverbial emotional gasket, and was grateful that her angry fervor had nothing to do with his own deliberate actions. It was Heroic Vermilion Swift who had assured him that if he couldn't convince Belldandy by his words, then he would be able to convince her by his memories by allowing Bell-chan to Probe him. Bell-chan had touched his mind in such a manner several times in the past, and he was certain that his recently-acquired firsthand knowledge would suffice as an explanation for Mara's unplanned pregnancy.

He decided that, given the chance, it would also be in everyone's best interest to let Mara view his thoughts as well. She had a right to know why she was carrying two children with his DNA. Chasing after optimism, he hoped that the truth would mend the fence between the two sisters, which would be totally peacemaking for everyone in the long run.

He flirted with a humorous notion. What would two Demon children with his DNA look like? In response, Heroic pulled a face and poked two fingers up behind his rich red hair in emulation of a pair of devil's horns. Just like Holy Bell, his Angel could be totally silly sometimes...

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Lying in her capsule bed, Kitsunen nearly blinded by her tears. This whole thing was a big hurl of confusion, and her heart felt like it had been liquefied in a blender. For sixteen years, she had grown up without a father; living her life with her entire focus of devotion directed towards her Mother. Then came the past several weeks, which brought a quantum shift to her reality. As Mom had said many times, "everything changes."

The man she hated most in all her life was now the man she loved the most.

Baldurdth had taken it the hardest, first being angry at himself for totally rejecting their Father...and now, even more distressed by what they had been shown. Motokyn was a stressball after their shared experience, and her sis's quiet, withdrawn demeanor really had her worried. Keiichi had wished for the answer to his predicament, but within the journey to secure that answer, the three of them had been detoured into a cosmic side-trip. Hijacked, an audience traveling through a transcendent region of experience none of them could have ever imagined. A comedy without laughs.

Who was their Father? Sheltering harbor of their Mother's heart? Teacher, musician, hero, gynophobe, wielder of the Ultimate Force? Deranged, depressed, divided?

Parent?

It was almost too much, watching her Mother killing her Father to shut the door on Evil. The afterimage of her Mom's stricken face haunted her, her tragic bearing as vivid to Kitsunen's memory's eye as the TV screen built into the side of her plastic-pod sleeping chamber. Even though she was but a witness, the taunt expression of sadness expressed in her Mother's green eyes was horrific and gut-wrenching in its challenge to sensibility. The man that Mom loved, Cevn, had been reduced to a gibbering psychotic mess. Heartbroken, her Mother had remained defiantly tragic as she administered the fatal alchemical conium to relieve him of his suffering...and prevent the re-emergence of the SurGoth. Kitsunen felt drawn tight by the sadness, unable to imagine what that moment must have been like for her Mother. She questioned herself: how would _she_ feel if she had to kill Motokyn and Baldurdth in order to save all of existence from a dire disaster? Mom had faced a decision that Kitsunen knew she would flinch away from.

Why did two beings who loved each other so much have to go through so much shit just to be together?

Her Father...had saved everything. Had given everything he had to give, without complaint, without protest. She recalled how he had breathed an unheard goodbye into the absolute stillness right before he relinquished his life-force and the energies of Balance had consumed him. At the time, he for sure knew no one would ever hear those words, but he had said them anyway.

And she had heard them, her heart bathed in tears.

In death, he had loved Mom so much that he had unsealed the possibility for her to love anyone she chose to, so that she wouldn't be bound by regrets by his demise. Cleansing Mom's memories so that she wouldn't ever remember loving him, so that she could move on with her life.

Somehow, Mom had moved on with her life, and had been reunited with her Father, Cevn.

"Will he love me as much, as well?" she thought, terrified.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Baldurdth had witnessed the adventures of all lifetimes, had engaged his labors in the ReCreation of Existence...and didn't even realize at the time that the mortar for the elemental and temporal building blocks of his creative efforts had been a form of balancing energy that had possessed his Father.

He knew. He knew it all, and there was no going back now.

His Father's whole life seemed to have been poised to create this moment, to make it possible for he and his sisters...plus all the other Divines...to harness their own intrinsic potentialities and render impossibility into tangibility. Not only did have this tie to this mortal, Cevn, but now he had a very personal bond as well. Baldurdth felt the outflowing of how much his Mother had loved him, and how much he had tried to protect her feelings and honor her for the Goddess she was. How could he deny this man, this Cevn, the mantle of fatherhood?

It takes more than making babies to make a father, it takes more than words and promises and paychecks to make a father. Baldurdth recognized that the only way Cevn could be a Father would be if he and his sisters accepted him as one. He didn't know the slightest thing about relating to a father-figure. Could he find a way to be a son to such a man?

Reality was no longer defective; it was superintegral and jammed tight with conundrums. Keiichi's wish had conducted he and his sisters through a sequence of experiences that were only marginally involved with Mara's mysterious pregnancy. Instead, they had witnessed a series of very intense exchanges between his Mother and Cevn. Try as he might to defragment the whirling dervishes of thought and image, he just couldn't find the necessary emotional detachment to wrest a sense of continuity...to make sense of it all. Impossibly, he was faced with knowing and recognizing a cyclus of experiences he had never encountered.

Ever since he had learned from Mother that his Father was a mortal from the Earthrealm, he had been put off by the idea of having a non-Divine for a father. Mom was mysteriously half-Goddess, half-Demoness...but it wasn't like the stigmas he attached to his own half-Divine, half-mortal ancestry. Twinned emotions of shame and disgust figured his birthright; to Baldurdth, his Mother and Father had conceived him in a rash act of miscegenation. Every time he went to Yggdrasil for Inculcation or simply to visit his Grandparents, he felt harassed by a sense of deficit, of inadequacy. From his Mother's side, a heritage which included a former Marshall of the WarGods and a patron Goddess of Marriages. From his Father's side, there was no heritage, no glory, nothing to be proud of.

Unexpectedly, he had discovered that he was supremely proud of his Father.

In life, in death, his Father had exemplified the qualities that he had dearly wished for himself; the secret attributes that his friends would term "majorly uncool" simply because they were too difficult to achieve. The journey that Cevn's intention had described...had exacted a terrible price on his Mother, on he and his sisters. But something in Baldurdth's soul touched upon a series of rigorous apologetics, sensing the justification for all that his Father had done. In his mind, a mea culpa shouted "It has to be this way, this liquid coincidence of realities!"

Fathers are supposed to sacrifice, but the sacrifices Cevn had made were intense, going light-years beyond the pale. Baldurdth knew that his Father's actions were unimpeachable because they were based upon convictions he had held dearly...that love and generosity and kindness would conquer all, because nothing was more essential to existence.

Except for Balance.

And in the end, the act of Balance had ripped him out of his Mother's life, depriving he and Motokyn and Kitsunen of a lifetime of living with a loving father-figure. All that almighty Ultimate Force energy shit that his Father has harnessed, or had harnessed him...and Mom still had to fucking raise he and his sisters by herself.

Why?! It just didn't make sense, and even worse, now he didn't have anyone to be angry with.

Except himself.

"Please let me be the son a father needs, please let him be the Father I need. I just want this nightmare to end! I'm sick of fucked-up realities," he asked his Soul.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Motokyn had witnessed an epic battle, iconic in context as it staged upon many planes of thought and existence; permeating within her ki and kokoro while it had unfolded across the fabric of reality. Within her heart, the battle had pitted herself against herself, continually challenging her to earn advantages by using her warrior's discipline. To rise above her own abilities and inabilities. Seeking perfection was a hazard, was an expectation. Dangerous, the trappings of Art of No Art...moving through one's own limits, as if one wasn't even there in the first place. Outside of herself, Motokyn had witnessed the improbable destiny of a man who was to be her Father. She looked on in admiration as he fought a losing battle, only to snatch victory from defeat and then relinquish victory's greatest witness: himself.

He had annihilated the threat, defeating a merciless invincible enemy, fighting to the point of exhaustion...and when victory for the SurGoth seemed all but assured, he had wielded a huge book like a sword and threw it _through_ the unstoppable force.

"Dad...you _wasted_ that horrible being!" she breathed to herself, unexpectedly sensing a slight glimmer of what a Father's protective nature would feel like, for the first time in her life. Her Father had done this, for everyone. For her.

She had been there, audience to her Father's fierce battle against an incredibly corrupt malfeasance. Now she knew where her warrior's spirit had come from. She had inherited it from her Father, who had destroyed the SurGoth in a series of life and death contests. Her Father's example had taught her that, in the heat of battle, courage is no different than humility. But she had inherited another legacy as well...the _real_ discovery was in the unrelenting courage of her Mother. Motokyn was now keenly aware that her martial spirit was fired by the wildness of her Mother, the wildness of a Goddess's willingness to love this impossible mortal man, to turn his heart towards her through the dawnings and endings of life.

Mom has to save him, so he can save us.

Both her Mother and her Father had loved each other enough to discard all pretence...to choose the breath-taking dance on the edge of the dangling sword, a blade that hovered over an abyss of unknowns. Only crazy people do stuff like that...or the most inspired of sword-saints.

She was privileged to be one of the creators of a new reality, a creation that had been paid for by her Father's blood. He has given away his life essence so that the forces of Balance could be available, to burn through the ashes of destruction and forge a new state of existence.

But at the end of the 'tour', her Father was no more.

Motokyn wasn't so certain that he would be there when they finished this adventure. He had _died_ to become the Balancing Force. She, Baldurdth and Kit had been outside the ReCreation, a circumstance which had forced them to have to work their way back to the inside, back to this reality. But Cevn was neither outside nor inside. He was simply _gone_.

Tears traced her eyes; she felt bittersweet feelings conflicting in her breast. Briefly, she had tasted the impossible fruit of being a daughter to a man she could call "Father". Now, it might not ever happen. Oddly enough, she fancied herself back home in Chiba in 202X, imagining what it would be like to participate in the National Kendo Tournament and see him there, encouraging her and telling her how proud he was of her.

He had defeated the most powerful destructive force imaginable...

...but her brief dream of a caring father had slipped away. It would never come in being.

Curling up and hugging her knees to her chest in the tiny capsule hotel bed, her sadness engulfed her...until she heard her Mother's words in her mind. Comforting words that Mom had told her many many times when the wounds and bruises of diligent kendo practice held no pause to the wounds of her Soul:

"Don't be afraid of the Future, for Love is already there, waiting to embrace you in its warmth."

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Keiichi challenged himself, steeling himself for the task ahead as he recalled events immediately prior to his traveling Pastwards in Time. The triplets had described to him a nightmare future that might have been, but never was. Their perspective, their reality, their despair. Growing up without a father, they and Urd had lived with he and Bell-chan in the wonderful temple home. Midway through their description of their lives in the yet-to-be, they began to set forth a narrative of how life was for he and Belldandy in the future. Despair was unleashed with a newly trenchant sense of personal loss as the three teens continued their tale, narrating that Bell-chan and he had extended their love into new life; that Bell-chan was expecting within a year or so after he married her. The impossible children that he and she thought they could never have. Twins. But a cruel fixture of fate had intervened, and his unborn daughter and son had disappeared, never to emerge into life from Bell's womb.

For the next 15 years, he and Belldandy had looked for them.

And in the end, or perhaps the beginning, Bell-chan had finally found them.

The three teenagers sincerely believed that all of reality was out of whack. They insisted that it was up to him to make sure that not only would he and Bell-chan become united in matrimony...but that his children would never experience the heart-breaking orphanage that had lasted their entire lives, each and every moment of 150,000 years of youth. His was more than a mission to restore Bell's confidence in him and preserve his marriage: he was charged with making sure that his beloved soon-to-be wife would _never_ experience the loss of her precious children.

A couple days ago, he couldn't have given a shit about anything, especially his own life. Now, he was fired with a righteous ambition. He felt a sublime surging anger, driven by his awareness that...in the possible destined future...his beloved Belldandy would have to endure so many years of agonizing loss. That something would rob she and he of their right to be parents.

There was no fucking way he was going to let that happen.

In his heart, the triplet's words had placed a seal of confirmation on what he had suspected all along. During the few moments when the grief would withdraw enough for him to be lucid, he intuited that Bell's separation from him wasn't just a random meteor strike in the schema of the universe...a one-in-quintillion turn on the roulette wheel of coincidence. A force majeure had done this; an act of evil ambition that had caused the entire pivot of existence to turn forcefully against he, his deeply-loved Belldandy, and Mara. To undo this mess, he would have to confront _an entire reality_.

Keiichi recognized that the only way out was in...to race in and act boldly.

"No! This will not happen, it should not have happened, I won't stand for it!" he said to himself, spitting the words in the face of the destiny that had stolen Belldandy's heart from him.

It was time to steal it back.

Apparently, the kids had some kind of special access to a form of time-travel, under the supervision of an adult. Thus were Peorth in her role as the Goddess of Eternity, and the triplets as children of a Norn...able to conduct him back in time to the very day where Bell-chan had stormed into his room and renounced him and everything that he stood for. He noted the exchange, noting that there wasn't an Yggdrasil on the other end of the 'phone'. A new super-Yggdrasil computer called XOM had simply opened up a portal into the past on his front porch, as easily as Megumi would have opened the door to the motorbike garage.

Hugging everyone goodbye, he walked into his Future...

...and now he was there, newly arrived in the Past! Keiichi stood in the chill night air outside the gate of his temple home, recognizing that this wasn't February. There were no piles of frosty crisp leftover Fall leaves on the temple grounds; instead, the temple and its grounds were covered with a thick basting of snow. A blizzarding snowfall enveloped his home in a mystic white sky-sanding, a pastiche of snowflakes were sticking to his coat as he walked toward the temple's foyer.

Something had ripped Time a new asshole, because this wasn't the same as his February wedding. Could it be that this was November, the original wedding date he and Bell-chan had planned? If so, then what happened to Bell's insistence that they get married on Valentine's Day? Their wedding was supposed to be in mid-November in celebration of the anniversary of their first meeting. Lingering in the back of his mind was a lack of understanding of why his fiancée had changed her mind and rejected November. November was a very special month in both of their lives, as it was the month she first came to the Earthrealm.

If the wrongness of reality had flipped the calendar ahead just so he and Belldandy could have a falling-out, it didn't make a difference. Whatever had done this to Bell-chan...

...he was here to kick its ass!

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --


	157. Pt 157: Nine Voices: Journey's Beginning

**Part 157: Nine Voices – Journey's Beginning**

Sitting in his hobby room amongst the toolkits, parts boxes and half-assembled motors, Keiichi was grinding his teeth, tense with anticipation. He kept glancing distractedly at the downhill racetrack screensaver on his old desktop PC while Tamiya and Ootaki fretted, discussing their fears about life after N.I.T with him. His stomach felt like it was where his heart should have been...his heart felt like it was where his throat had to be. Flinch-shaking his head as if to clear unseen spider webs, he took a deep gulp of Asahi to try to wash away his anxiety.

Each tick of the clock tightened the knot...

_When he had arrived in the early morning, he had walked into his bedroom half-expecting to discover himself sleeping in his futon. Instead, no one was there, and he was possessed by a momentary concern that his return to the past had displaced or 'killed' the version of himself that had existed six days ago. But this wasn't snow-covered February...the clock calendar confirmed his suspicions that it was mid-November. Tying down his consternation as a result of the unexpected time-shift, Keiichi decided to simply tuck himself in for a couple hours of sleep. When morning came to him, he awakened before the alarm clock could ping him. A moment later, he heard the phone ring._

_Bell's Mother, Freiija. Freiija quickly peppered him with questions about the status of the house, especially wanting to know if he had vacuumed the common areas in expectance of all the house guests who would arrive there after the wedding, two days hence. He had the courtesy to refrain from telling his future Mother-in-Law that the racket made by a vacuum cleaner wasn't appropriate for 5:30am in the morning, especially with Bell-chan and her sisters needing every slip of sleep they could grab._

_The morning and afternoon passed routinely, shadowed within an umbrella of déjà vu. Quite strange, knowing what was going to happen ahead of time. Keiichi fancied the idea that this must be how Skuld viewed Time when she allowed herself the Future..._

On cue, Tamiya and Ootaki had called and then drove over to visit, with their Asahi and their needling worries. He re-experienced the warmth of talking to his two friends about married life, lifeplans and responsibility...while all along patiently expecting Bell's drastic interruption. Every so often, Tamiya would launch into a bellowing soliloquy about "the man's way", which would cause Ootaki to double his rate of beer consumption.

He didn't know when Bell-chan would burst into his room, but he knew that it would be soon...

"One of da impotent..uh, important duties of da man of da house is to make sure that da woman has lots of money..."

"Tamiya, I don't think that's gonna be a problem in your case, considering that your girlfriend is the only daughter of a billionaire family," Keiichi interjected.

"Dat's the problem, because she can spend-spend-spend all da cash before I could even scratch my ass," Tamiya clarified. "I luvs da broad, but she's a major shopping queen. Weekends at da mall, _every_ weekend! An' I get stuck havin' to carry all her crap..er..clothes. Makes me feel like a pussy-whipped wimp!"

"Gotta buy the bag, dude!" Ootaki chipped in, slapping Tamiya's broad back. "Wasn't like you didn't know what Sayoko is like; she's totally high-maintenance in the worst way. Problem is, she's bored. That's because you're not giving her enough loving, big guy! Y'know that all we guys have to do to cure a woman's anxiety is to give her sex, sex, and more sex. Maybe you're not being creative enough in the bedroom..."

"Shut up, youz!" Tamiya shouted, punching Ootaki playfully in the shoulder. Of course, a 'playful' punch by Tamiya would bring a wince to any guy's face, and Ootaki was no exception.

"Whaddya think I am, one of those pervy guys like Aoshima?" Tamiya added as Ootaki adjusted his glasses before they slipped of his nose.

"How do you know that Aoshima is a perv?" Keiichi asked.

"Aoshima is Aoshima," Tamiya answered, slightly-cross eyed from drinking. "He is what he does, and dat's all that needs to be said about dat!"

"You loser! Do you think our little Sora would let him get away with kinky bedroom sex? Or _any_ sex, for that matter?" Ootaki countered. "She's a good girl...our Sora probably hasn't given it up yet to him..."

"Yeah! But yuh know what they say about dynamite comin' in small packages. Hey, speakin' of da smarm-goy, I wonder if Aoshima is a masochist?" Tamiya questioned. "Could yuhz see it...little Sora dressed in one of those S&M outfits, with Aoshima tied up and hangin' from da ceiling, whippin' him with greased brake hoses..."

"Yeah, and who was just saying a moment ago that he 'wasn't one of those pervy guys'? With that kind of vivid imagination, who knows what lies deeper in our beloved Tamiya's brain?" Keiichi interjected. He just _had_ to fire off on his sempai for that one...Tamiya had basically walked into it.

"Heh! We're supposed to be talkin' about grown up stuff, not lurid sexual fantasies, big guy," Ootaki pointed out. Keiichi remembered that the drunker his sempai got, the more they swerved away from meaningful conversation topics...

_***Szssnap!!!***_

The shoji door flew open so hard, it jumped out of its groove. The sharp crack of sound caused him and his two sempai to snap rigid where they were sitting, suddenly stiff-backed.

Belldandy stormed in to his "Keiichi's Garage" room, her hair haloing her head like mast-ropes in a sea-tempest. He winced, seeing the angry pain expressed by his fiancée...a pain whose source he now knew too well. As before, it had slipped her mind to perform the basic social courtesy of knocking before she entered. She glared at him and his two sempai, and then yanked at her engagement ring, pulling it off of her finger.

"I believe this belongs to you. I do not need it any longer. I do not _want_ it anymore," she announced, flinging the precious ring to the floor. "I am going to return to Yggdrasil, and I plan to do everything in my power to annul your wish, because you are no longer deserving of it. Or of me."

She turned to walk out the door...

...but he leapt up blocked her path.

"That's bullshit, Belldandy!" he shouted right in her face, trying to match Bell's angry candor. "I deserve you more than you'll even know...and you deserve me even more than that! Whatever you're thinking, it's not true! You, more than anyone else, should know that I'm not capable of betraying you!"

Inches away from his face, he could see the burning pure rage in the eyes of his fiancée. Eyes that normally were sky-gentle with a soft bright glow of blue...were now ice-steel hard with a fierce cutting gray-azure. A rapid impulse to melt back, hit his knees, and bow in apology seized him; her wrathful glower was so intense and unrelenting.

He reminded himself that this wasn't a woman...this was a Goddess. Belldandy had become so much a natural fixture in his life and was so frugal with using her Divine abilities, it often slipped his mind that she was so much more than a human being. Ninety-nine percent of the time, she didn't even use her Goddess powers in a tangible manner. Right now, she was a Goddess with an overwhelming heartbreak and was doubtless more angry than he had ever seen her before. But his girlfriend was glaring at him with a murderous, maniacal gleam in her eyes. This pure animosity in her severe expression was utterly alien to the character of his fiancée. She seemed alien to herself, sinister and dangerous. Unloving. Unreal. Unholy.

Unholy?

_**This wasn't Belldandy!!!**_

The ultimate punch line to this most cosmically crazy of jokes.

"Fuck!!! Someone or something has taken over Bell-chan!" Keiichi realized with sheer alarm. His instincts kept seizing his attention with a vital sense, his intuition that was so strongly behind this that he had no doubts that it was true. The unexpected discovery made him feel uptight and tremulous from head to toe. He tried to gather himself in, struggling to tamp down the plumes of panic that were erupting inside of him before his confidence was burned away.

Willing his heart onward, Keiichi took his courage and eyelocked his fiancée with a deep stare, peering as far as he could into Belldandy's Soul through the lens of her eyes. Belldandy had taught him, albeit unconsciously, to be alert to the slightest of nuances, and he was hoping to find _something_ that could assure him of her presence by looking her in the eye. In response, he could barely sense a tiny spark of Belldandy inside of the physical form of his Divine fiancée. But his jealous and heart-wounded girlfriend was deeply submerged, secreted away inside of this angry being who confronted him.

"Get out of my way, Keiichi, you bastard!" she hissed in a threatening tone of voice. "Or I'll _burn_ you out of my way!"

"What da hell is wrong with her?" Tamiya blurted. "We wuz just kiddin' about cancelin' da wedding when we called. We wuz drunk dis morning! But she's actin' like she's the one who just downed a 12-pack, she's so out of it. Dis ain't her, it seems like she thought we wuz for real..."

Even his sempai could tell.

Action, action, action! What can I do, what is there to be done?

"Mara, Urd, Skuld!" he screamed frantically. This...thing...inside of Belldandy was seconds away from going off the deep end. The triplets had never mentioned anything about this! There was no time to prepare, no time to react. He had expected an honest rapprochement with Bell-chan, not a confrontation with an unknown being imposturing in Goddess's clothing. Belldandy's speech, mannerisms, appearance...were all wrong. A harness of Evil had confined her somehow.

Urd and Skuld piled into each other, almost knocking him out of the doorway. In any other situation, it would have been comical in a MechaMecha sort of slapstick way. Urgently, he hoped that they would sense what he had noticed.

"Sis..." Skuld gasped.

"Shit!" Urd cursed.

"Grab her! Don't let her leave!" he directed to them. Both looked at him with an instant's bewilderment...and then each gripped Belldandy by an arm and restrained her.

Trusting his heart, Keiichi reached up and held Belldandy's head, one hand on each temple, so he could steady _his_ nerves. Heroic Vermilion Swift had insisted that if he couldn't put an explanation into words, the content of his thoughts would be enough to convince Bell-chan that this whole Mara pregnancy business wasn't his fault. But this wasn't Belldandy, was it?

Keeping her head still with a death-grip, he pressed his forehead against her Goddess Seal.

Only one way to find out...

* * *

BELLDANDY:

Hearing Mara announce that she was pregnant...with Keiichi's children...was the final cut. Her consciousness had been smothered by the SurGoth for several months; yet her cruel captor/impersonator had allowed her to the surface long enough to hear Mara's admission. No doubt, the brute evil being was savoring her profound sense of betrayal and disappointment.

They had created the OmniArc in an explosion of intimacy and confidence...but when they all returned to their home, the SurGoth had waylaid her somehow. Imprisoning her in herself, crowding her being into a tiny corner of her life. Deceiving her sisters and Keiichi. Greatly weakened, her Soul was almost squeezed out of her Goddess manifest. With a smile on her physical manifest's face, she watched as her day-to-day life became a playground for Evil.

Now this.

She was conflicted; her reactive indecisiveness battling against her long-standing trust of her beloved Keiichi. How could Mara and Keiichi conceive a half-mortal, half-Divine child? Life is a complex orchestration of emotions and behaviors that continually unfolds upon itself, creating the tension of possibilities. But certain impossibilities exist, and Mara's pregnancy violated any number of them. For Mara to be with Keiichi's child in the physical, mortal sense...she would have to engage in a sexual encounter with him. But her Demoness sister's stricken expression as she described her pregnancy disclosed confusion, rather than confidence. Keiichi's shock was genuine as well.

Yet there were the babies, the very real resonance of life that was central to all of this. Belldandy regretted her confinement; she lacked the ability to extend her Goddess perceptorium and confirm Mara's claim...something she could easily do if she was free and totally herself. But that might have been worse.

What would be the pathway to wisdom that would blossom loving action?

Vacillating between utter heartbreak and thin hope, Belldandy wanted to listen rather than act, for within listening lies wisdom. Yet there was nothing to hear except her own turmoil, and the SurGoth.

Engulfed by the seemingly endless raging of the SurGoth, Belldandy couldn't hold her heart in her mind long enough to build forgiveness around Keiichi. Jealousy stewed in her thoughts...she felt ugly for even considering that Keiichi had actually engaged in improper relations with her Demoness sister. She even couldn't consign herself to the idea that Mara would do something so vile, this close to her wedding.

But the anger was there, rebelling against her deeper nature. She pondered whether her own feelings were perhaps fused in some way with the rage of the SurGoth.

At the very edge, the very limits of Soul, she was dwindling...

Since the SurGoth had exiled her within herself, she was surrounded by a Stygian mental composite that was more an evisceration than a reality. She imagined that this was what Exile in the Well of Urd would be like; to be able to see the outside but not participate in its wonders. But the external world was obscured from her sensing, and all she could experience was either endless voids or repellant and grotesque vistas of thought. Occasionally, the SurGoth would release her so that she could experience fleeting glimpses of the 'outside' reality. Taunting her, allowing her to discern the presence of her sisters and Keiichi. Brief tastes of the love that she knew was out of reach.

Traversing hidden realms of heart/mind/Soul in the middle of the nothingness within, Belldandy now saw a host of glowing birds flying towards her on the horizon of her consciousness. Doves, meadow birds, eagles, hawks and owls by the thousands filled the dark space around her consciousness, each a tranquil flowing avian of light. Denser and denser until the darkness was released and she was swathed in a warm brilliance...

The radiance was accompanied by an emotion tenor, evoking a mellowing sense of serenity in her. Within the glowing, a shadow walked towards her.

Keiichi.

"I know Bell-chan, I know," he said, embracing her. She was so shocked, she didn't even bother to fight him off or push him away in a fit of jealous rage. Impossibly, he was _here_, in her mind...touching her Soul, a non-corporeal presence in a place he should never be. How did he bypass the SurGoth? _She_ couldn't even move freely about in this encapsulation of her own being. All the anger, jealousy, and betrayal that had choked her emotions with a furious rush of pain were brought to the fore by his presence...but he was here...this was the everything she wanted...and it was _better_ than all those feelings put together.

Without even knowing it, she had already begun to exercise forgiveness towards him.

"Look in my eyes, my beloved," she heard Keiichi ask kindly as he eased into her thoughts amidst her confusion. It was only a mental form that he had projected into her mind, but she tried to absorb herself in his presence. Tentatively, she reached out for him, regretting the angry outburst that he had been blasted with in the physical world. It was the SurGoth, not her! But it _was_ her as well; she was dutifully angry at him and even more angry that Mara could have something she couldn't.

She truly wanted to believe in his innocence. Belldandy considered that he wouldn't be here, conjoined with her thoughts in a Sharing-like manner, if he wished to conceal anything from her. Willing herself, she dove into the ocean of his eyes and emerged through a series of realities. Mesmerized by the remembrances of all the wonderful times she shared with him, Belldandy found herself and Mara unexpectedly stranded on an island-reality.

Alighting on her own recollections, she remembered the bizarre obversion of reality where Keiichi had been Cursed instead of Blessed with a wish, and the three sisters were Demonesses instead of Goddesses. Confined by torturing Demonesses, Keiichi had seen only Mara when they were trapped together in some kind of Demonic isolation chamber. Mara...her sister...overcome by the love her Goddess alternate had felt for Keiichi.

Love had flowered between the two, in more ways than one.

It was beautiful, watching the two of them making love. She didn't view the passionate sexual encounter as her boyfriend cheating on her with Mara...because it was _another_ Keiichi who, like she, had been confined and was desperate to find release. This wasn't merely sex; it was a healing of Soul.

It wasn't her Keiichi all along!

This wasn't an attempt by Mara to create the ultimate hurt, to forcibly sever her from her wonderful husband-to-be by crafting an irreversible obscenity of betrayal.

"Oh my dear! My dear, dear Keiichi! It wasn't you!" she gasped, the symmetry of her affection for him restored. "I've been confined here by Isilblius, who is actually something called the SurGoth! He's..snff..strangled me with a reign of madness, and I can barely hang on. I can't believe y..you're really here. He's planning to destroy everything, to kill everyone! He made me watch..snffsnff..myself throw my engagement ring at you. And he enjoyed it. How could anyone enjoy another's pain?"

"Bell, I wished that I would be with you forever," Keiichi replied in a firm mental voice, overflowing with the fires of his heart and the conviction of his Being. "Love lasts forever, and I'm not about to let him have you. He's not going to hide you away in here until you waste away."

"ISILBLIUS! SHOW YOURSELF!" her husband-to-be shouted.

* * *

KEIICHI:

"Youzz cannot be here! Thizz izz the hidden! Youzz are not allowed. No no no!" Isilblius responded in a thick, snorting mental voice. An invisible Isilblius, because the voice seemed to emanate from every direction around he and Belldandy. Even though he was in the chambers of Bell's mind...or perhaps even her Soul...he felt smothered by an emerging presence of total, indefinable hatred.

A horrid puke-green pus-shape flowed into existence through the white glow, reminding Keiichi of an errant oil splot on the shine of Chihiro's workshop floor. The smear gathered into a tentacled bat-like being, half-rotted and skeletal. Monstrous and grotesque, it scared the piss out of him.

"Gut check yourself, Keiichi!" he said to himself, exerting his utmost effort to calm his queasy nerves. This was one extremely badass Demon-being; radiating an aura of threat that caused even Belldandy to shiver in fright. Belldandy had huge reasons to be scared of this horror. This...thing...had been wrenched Bell-chan's control of her own being away from her, her Soul slowly ebbing towards non-existence. When he penetrated deep in the mysterium magisterium of her fragmented consciousness, he saw the mental 'prison cell' the SurGoth had put her in...and dispatched the birds of liberty to build a cell-within-a-cell to rescue her.

Keiichi knew that she loved the birds.

He was amazed that all of this was happening within Belldandy. Or was it? What plane of existence was he operating on? Nothing was recognizable, but everything was real...

"You cannot have her," Isilblius hissed. "I remember what youzz planned to do to me, you and your comrade's feeble attempt to confinezz me. So I used your own efforts against you. How fitting it izz that you witnezz _my_ confinement of youzz! She is mine, and she will die. You are in _my_ realm now, for I havezz commandeered her being. My Soul fills almozzt every essence of her. Failure, youzz both! Death...youzz both!"

His mind was suddenly ignited, as if he had just turned the key on a sprint car. A gulf of memories flooded into him...

Actually trillions of years of reality, wizening him, strengthening him. Seven beings...and he was one of them! They had been the bearers of the Intimate Force, a transformed ultimate force that they employed to revitalize all of existence, all of reality. Each of the Seven had fought this manifest of Evil, eventually confined him. But he had emerged again, using their own tactic to his advantage. Mara was the last to combat him, the final warrior in their series of challenges to him. Isilblius...the SurGoth, had been defeated; they all sensed how he had totally disappeared. Mara's plan was to make him kill himself, but the SurGoth had deceived all of them by hiding in Belldandy. Evil cloaked by innocence.

A flawed being, Isilblius was certainly self-assured and prideful. Keiichi alighted on a plan to spur his ostentatious nature and turn it against him. Let Evil beat Evil.

"Remember when I raced you, defeating you while competing at the speed of Life?" he heard himself ask...almost as soon as he saw a fraction of reality.

"You cannot racezz me here within the confines of a being. Pure foolishzz!"

"What if you race Keiichi outside, any place of your choosing?" Belldandy beseeched Isilblius. The beast simply floated in space, slowly flapping its wings and sending bits of rotting flesh splattering against he and Bell-chan. A gross-fest, intimidating and sickening as the stench of its presence.

"Good," he thought to himself. "Belldandy understands, she's with it and knows what I'm doing. He hates her the most...maybe he'll be more responsive to her because he thinks he can hurt her even more."

Keiichi shunted his empathy as the mental images of how much pain Belldandy must have endured pressed on him. Get a grip and sweep those thoughts aside!

"Granted. I agreezz. We willzz use the entire breadth of the OmniOm for your challenge," Isilblius conferred with a voice of menace. "One complete circuit. A contest of willzz--your will against minezz. Defeatz me, and I will release her. It is no matter, for I willzz destroy the both of you in timez to come regardlezz of the outcome of this little racingzz. Destructionz for you, entertainment, youzz will amuse me with your trifling and inadequate effortzz. I will enjoy your failurezz!"

As Isilblius accepted his challenge, Keiichi felt himself transcending...and with an expanse of awareness, he realized that the magnificent sway of powers that he possessed when he was one of the Seven still could be touched by memory! As he released his mind to flow into the source of those memories, they returned to him, familiar as earthen clay to a potter. With a gesture of his hands, the surrounding light collapsed into the form of a semi-translucent framework of speed...

"I'll race against you, but I don't race alone," he declared.

He looked at Bell-chan and grinned when her eyes widened in recognition as the luminous shape gathered into outline, articulating itself into a specific shaping. More than any other vehicle, this bike was an expression of his and Bell-chan's love for each other...and their competitive spirit.

The RS80 Tomboy.

Hovering in the airspace between he, she and Isilblius was a energy-woven replica of their very special two-seat racing bike. Half-bike, half-car, any competitive racing with an RS80 required rider and sidecar rider to be totally in synch with each other. Totally one, a unity of two ambitions seamlessly cooperating. The sidecar wasn't really a side-car in the conventional sense of being bolted on to the motorbike: rather, it was an extension of the bike that curved off to the side like a running board. To negotiate curves, the kneeling sidecar rider would lean into the left turns, almost touching the road...and lean away from the road during right turns. The rider blasted the road to gather speed, the passenger surfed the road to guide that speed. Because of this, the Tomboy was renowned as one of the most difficult racing vehicles to master.

But Bell and he had mastered it in a race with a ghost motorcycle, and then perfected it when racing against Megumi and Morgan.

A fractional moment of tingling fingered his skin, and then he saw that Belldandy had exerted her will, clothing herself and him in their racing jumpsuits, complete with N.I.T. Motor Club logos and his-n-her names sewn in. She nodded at him, smiling.

"Let's dance, Bell-chan!"

* * *

As a universe of realities formed around her and Keiichi, Belldandy could read his troubled Soul like an open book. Keiichi was confronting his reservations, revisiting his experience with Sleipnir from two years ago. Riding the legendary Divine steed in an attempt to traverse the cosmos and save her and her sisters, he had exploded out of the Earthrealm's physical universe and found himself in another physical universe, a universe where 'space' possessed liquid properties and 'matter' was ethereal. Smothered by liquid realities in that universe, her boyfriend had panicked. Sleipnir had sensed this and returned to the Earthrealm, more than likely saving Keiichi's life in the process; because his sanity and he were connected by only the slenderest of threads after that confrontation with his worst fear. Hang-headed, Keiichi had convicted himself for his impotence, thinking that he had failed her and her family as she continued to slowly succumb to the phage-virus Isilblius had unleashed upon the Gods. That time, despite the earnestness of his love for her, his strongest assertion of will, desire, and courage had been easily overwhelmed.

This time, he was a completely different Keiichi.

She knew this, she knew this. As she stepped into the sideboard of the RS80, her own sway of memories touched on that entire episode with Celestin, back during the days of her third Spring on the Earthrealm. Her mentor had stood up for his flawed principles, nearly destroying the Earthrealm in his pursuit of perfection. Now, she was facing something far more vile in Isilblius. She would have to be on her guard. Tucking her legs under her, Belldandy leaned cat-like from side to side, stretching her slender body into several riding positions to recall the physical feel of being in the siderider role.

A battle of intentions, expressed in speed. Despite the hazards, she felt a certain sense of the poetic in its meaning. Belldandy had a shadowing, a distinct impression that there were secrets Keiichi wasn't telling her...and his deliberate withholding was almost as daunting as the fact that her very life and freedom depended on this race. What had he seen? What could be so terrible or wonderful that he kept his silence? How did he manage to navigate the labyrinthine complexities of her Soul in the first place?

With a snap of the Present, they were outside. Skuld had tried to explore the container space for the OmniArc, and her effort had consumed billions of years in the process. Now that container space was breathtakingly revealed; she felt awe as she beheld the glorious OmniArc. A construction of light, the OmniArc was a thing of exquisite beauty. In the farscape, she could discern the Logorinths; a love-crafted flower of meaning that they had built. Billions of holoniverses...the container spaces for a pairing of God's and Demon's Realms or multiverses, were arrayed as petals surrounding the Mid-Light. After her lengthy captivity by Isilblius, the sense of freedom was exhilarating, winning her the confidence that she could do anything she wanted to do.

This was the freedom of love unleashed, and she was certain that this was what Isilblius was planning to destroy.

"Keiichi, you remember what Mara said at the Le Mans?" she ventured. "After the race, my sister had noted that you were no longer fit to compete, because you had become possessed by the race rather than possessing it? Let me remind you that the depths of your Soul are pure, and if you apply this purity with all the grace and diligence you can exert, you _will_ be able to race. I have confidence in Keiichi, so much so that I wish to be his wife. Hold this in your heart...and our precious love will free us!"

"Sick meandering nothingzz," Isilblius commented. "Thizz is cold reality! No romantic sentimentzz here, just dark matter and time. A toy for me to destroyzz. Snuffzz out the Divines and mortal lives will I accomplish!"

"The only one who is sick is you," she heard Keiichi mutter...and then he floored it...

Mindflight.

She briefly glimpsed the shocked surprise on Isilblius's receding slime-face, and then they were gone, racing away at unimaginable speeds. Keiichi didn't even wait for a formal "Go!" to start this race! Gypsying the edge of the OmniArc, they were already skimming the curved surfaces of the ovaline holoniverses, just like one would ride the asphalt of a racing track. "Each one a God's and Demon's Realm..." she thought as the TomBoy continued to accelerate. The only frame of reference that she could meaningfully apply to this kind of speed was that of the velocities one would experience riding Sleipnir. There was a reason why Urd kept stealing into the stables to ride away with one of the Sleipnirs.

Riding Sleipnir allowed for the absolute fusion of joy and speed.

She grinned widely, feeling the conflux of cosmic breezes whipping through her hair as she leaned into a turn. Her shoulder almost touching the invisible 'surface' of the container spaces for the holoniverses underneath them, she looked down...and quickly averted her gaze. The holoniverses...each packed with trillions of multiverses, each multiverse the residence of an infinitude of bubble-like universes... were blurring! Spectacular streaks of light, each one filled with brilliant red and blue glows with a purpling where the two Realms intermingled. In the horizon, she could discern how the blue God's Realms were 'knitted' together to form a Logorinth, while the red Demon's Realms conjoined to form another Logorinth. One circuit around the OmniArc, flying over its uncountable multiverses like one would trace the petals of a rose bloom with a caressing finger.

Belldandy felt her heart pounding feverishly as they streaked around the outer limits of the Logorinths. Their racing far exceeded a thrill-seeking, adrenaline-fired chase after the outer bounds of velocity itself...this was speed turned into ecstasy!

Traveling at a velocity unfathomable even to her Goddess senses, she and Keiichi were passing over holoniverses with the regularity that they would fly past painted stripes on the highway when he would open up his BMW Rennsport...

Speed on its own terms is a consolidation of realities; allowing one to experience multiple facets of their physical environment instead of just a single one. In terms of evolutionary transitions, all mortal species were fired with the desire to move from sessility to mobility with greater efficiency. To increase the speed; graduating from riding domesticated animals to building starships.

Channeling speed into tranquility was a requirement for mortal sentient species if they wanted to ascend to the Next Level. Moving from using motive technology for warfare and oppression to employing it to advantage all beings was an essential step towards a culture's self-discovery.

Glancing over her shoulder, Belldandy noticed that Isilblius was catching up. He didn't choose to use a vehicle; he flew in a gliding motion, his wings fanning horizontally to propel him in an archaic bat-like manner. Mortals had a mythic fear of the bat; and in watching the pursuing SurGoth, Belldandy could understand this.

Fortunately, Keiichi wasn't like Skuld about bats...

"I hope my sisters are safe," she thought as she leaned far to her left, almost skimming the 'surfaces' of the holoniverses. Riding this way was like traveling up and down gentle hills, as the clusters of side-by-side holoniverses were gently curving against each other.

Isilblius was forging ahead of them now.

"Pour it on, Keiichi! Pour it on!!!" she shouted frantically. She invoked a plea to the Almighty to be with them, to give them the good speed and push them ahead of the SurGoth. But Isilblius was pulling away...

Matter and physical universes were flying by so fast, they began to blur with manifold Doppler rainbows. The intensity of the motion induced a dizzying vertigo, and she fought hard to stay alert and navigate for Keiichi. But the increasingly stuporous sensations overwhelmed her, forcing sleepiness on her even as Isilblius completely dropped out of her sensings.

The glowing node of speed consumed them, and she surrendered to it...

* * *

"I am the victorz!" Isilblius declared, his screams of contention jerking Belldandy out of a deep torpor. A proclamation of absurdity, one that filled her with a surge of disappointment. She and Keiichi were paused on the shores of the endless worlds of creation, and instead of admiring its beauty, she felt an imposing despair. In the wake of those four words with their death-dealing ballad, she almost collapsed, her worst fears flung like rocks against her glass heart. Shattered, shattered, shattered.

It was over, her life was forfeit to this fiend!

She had lost Keiichi, her sisters, her whole existence. A legion of losses, all because she had fallen asleep at the wheel.

"Isilblius, how many times did you race around the OmniOm?" Keiichi demanded. She immediately wondered why he would ask such a queer question in the midst of such horrible circumstances. From where she was sitting on the Tomboy, she didn't sense any fear or turmoil in him. Keiichi should have been completely distraught after losing this race, because he knew the fatal stakes! But instead...unlike herself, he didn't have a flinch of fear. He seemed like a different man, and her memory's recall alighted on the vigorous courage he had when he had raced against Tyrr. She could feel him bursting at the seams with confidence. Strength and wisdom seemed to be condensed and refined in him; as if he had leapt beyond himself, transcending himself.

"I did completezz a single circuitzz, as we agreed. Now, this Goddess bitchzz life is mine to claim," the spectral being answered, glowering over her like a greedy human slave auctioneer.

"Well, I completed _two_ laps," Keiichi declared in a firm voice. "Which in racing terms means that I lapped you. Look closely, and you'll notice that this TomBoy is suspended on two circles of blue light. Wheels, which match the same blue light that you see banded along the horizon of the circular OmniOm. Wanna know how they got there? When I equipped Bell-chan's and my Tomboy with these wheels of light, it wasn't just for show. These wheels were used to create a scion-mark of truth that even you cannot contest. Proof...just like peeling out in race causes the tires to leave skid marks on its surface. No known force can author such a limn; nothing can make these visible pathways on the individual 'surfaces' of the holoniverses. Knowing your preference for deceit and subterfuge from the last time we encountered you, I decided to leave my 'mark' so that you wouldn't be able to lie your way out of this one, Isilblius

You lost to Bell-chan and I."

Keiichi's mention of a prior encounter with Isilblius triggered deeper remembrances in her breast. They had been the Seven, the creators of the OmniArc. How could he remember such events when she could barely grasp them in her mind? Awestruck and bewildered, she followed the two glowing blue leas with her eyes from where they were floating. Incredibly, slender circuits had been etched upon the container spaces of all the multiverses and holoniverses in the OmniOm. Surety of their victory.

Keiichi had outsmarted Isilblius the SurGoth!

"My dearest Keiichi has saved me! He's freed me!!!" she rejoiced, filled with devotion and gratitude for his efforts. All the times that she had saved the Earthrealm from any sort of threats, had saved her sisters, had saved him...and now he had rescued her from a certain doom. He was truly the man who she loved more than anyone or anything! Keiichi stood up on the seat of their Tomboy bike, pulled off his helmet and resting it in the crock of his elbow. Even though his face was strained and beaded with sweat, her mortal husband-to-be seemed to be glowing with confidence, a noble expression on his face as he stared down the SurGoth. The Le Mans. Keiichi had bore the same resolute determination then, last summer during his madcap dash towards racing immortality. But that time, he had been poisoned by his own ambitions, becoming crazed with racing fever to the point where he almost killed himself. Even Mara had noticed it. Especially Mara.

If and when Mara had children, she would be their Aunt. Keiichi would be...

What would he be?

Shaking her head to clear it of uncertainty, Belldandy recalled their experience in France. Yes, he had looked like this then, during Chihiro's attempt to win the Le Mans. Even with the perversion of his racing ambitions, some indefinable quality about his strength that time had made him extremely handsome in her eyes. A hero. It struck her anew that his quiet heroism _had been a pattern_, one that she had taken for granted. Keiichi's redoubt of courage had swept her off her feet many times, every time he got on the racing track. She tingled as she remembered the absolute thrill she had felt that evening at the Le Mans victory banquet when he had proposed to her. In a mysterious way, she and he were traveling together on their own race course, their own cross-country highway run. And now it had led to this moment of uncertainty.

But she was certain of one thing. Examining his eyes and face, Belldandy realized that her beloved Keiichi's firm conviction and confidence didn't have one iota of crazed recklessness. His racing spirit was cleansed, was pure! _This_ was the Keiichi that she remembered, the Keiichi whose racing spirit everyone relied on.

He was cured!

"Trickzz! Cheatzz!" Isilblius countered, his wings breaking as he flapped them agitatedly. "I am the boundlezz SurGoth, the manifest of destruction and fear..."

"You're boundless, but your very freedom limits you," Keiichi stated boldly. "Unlike you, Belldandy and I _are_ bound...to each other. This special, ineffable bond between she and I...makes _us_ unlimited, for there is no start or finish line when love's concerned. This, our trusty MX80, has always kept us ahead of harm. Now, we are freed of you. For a vehicle to function at top speed, good fuel is needed. Our strength and our love was the essence that fueled her, and she drove us to victory."

The evil being...her captor...paused in its braggadocio. The SurGoth's face was so horrible to behold, she could only bear to look at it with the briefest of glimpses. Amidst the rotting flesh of its head, there seemed to be a grimace, if such a composite of disgust could be called a facial expression at all. Still seated in the sidecar of the Tomboy, she tried to turn away from Isilblius. Forcing itself into her mind, the SurGoth's frustration resolved into a chilling sly malice.

"Only because it pleasezz me shall I free youzz. We will meetzz again. We will _alwayzz_ meet again, for I am undying!" Isilblius sneered. "But know thizz. When I free her and leavezz her ugly, filthy Goddess form in what you call the 'real' world..the Demoness's unborn mongrel off-spring will surely die. For it was _I who made it possible for her to conceivezz_. Reclaim your body, and you killzz the unborn by forcing me to leavezz them behind. Without me inside of the Goddess, their two worthless Souls will not survive."

"No!!! You can't! You _mustn't_!" Belldandy protested in a voice of horror, covering her mouth with shock. Isilblius had turned their hard-fought victory into a Pyrrhic travesty.

"Yezz. It is only fitting, eh? Two livezz for two livezz," Isilblius responded in a taunting voice. "Force me to leave your body, wretched Goddess...and they diezz. _You_ will sign their death warrant! You will livezz with the guilt until I choose to reclaim and destroy youzz!"

"Keiichi, we can't do that to Mara! To her children!" Belldandy pleaded. "We cannot deny the riches of life to the little ones! If it is to be this way, then I will relinquish our victory. I will choose remain imprisoned, and I will face my fate with the dignity of a Goddess. For I cannot live with the knowledge that my clinging to existence, to life, was achieved at the the cost of _two_ lives and a lifetime of sorrow for Mara."

"Disgusting, you Goddesses and your willingnezz to sacrifice yourselfzz. Sacrificezz only because you wish to avoid the painzz, not because of the unbirthed childzz. Go on! Face your weakness and shamezz!" Isilblius observed.

"Stop this!" she shouted, pushed beyond the brink by the SurGoth's harassment. All that Isilblius had done to her, all the pain he had inflicted on her...and she would gladly accept it without hesitation to ensure that Mara's children would be born. Even if she was gone, at least her beloved Keiichi would live on in a sense, through the children. Children she never could have.

Even if the father wasn't 'her' Keiichi, the children would serve as a legacy to the one who she loved most. Her Keiichi would be there for them, if Mara would let him...

And Isilblius was going to snuff their lives out, carelessly and flawlessly. She allowed herself to feel the anger; the rage she felt towards Keiichi when she found out about Mara's pregnancy now had a new harbor. And with a new direction, it intensified.

She could feel Keiichi becoming angry along with her.

"It will not be, Isilblius," Keiichi confronted the SurGoth. "Those two Souls were conceived in love, not hate. You may have allowed Mara to be pregnant with them, but you _didn't_ create the situation where they were conceived, did you? You didn't send them into a mirror-universe of reality. Because of this, you lack the means to put an end to them before they are even born. It will not be permitted."

"Keiichi? H..how?" she asked.

"Bell-chan, it's already been handled," Keiichi said, dropping his helmet and hugging her close to him, and then kissing her on the cheek. There they stood, next to the faithful Tomboy MX80; she could feel his breath against her neck as he pulled her tight against him. He wrapped his arms around her and seemed to draw every bit of uncertainty from her by his presence. Just like he always did.

Belldandy felt a courage and bravery from her fiancé, an air of self-assuredness and confidence that she had never sense in him before. Seeing Keiichi like this, she felt her heart melting in respect for his strength. In the isolation of her Soul, she had been craving for Keiichi...but he was always outside of her reach, just a breath away from her. An immeasurable distance, even though 'she' talked with him every day.

"LIEZZ!" Isilblius screamed intrusively. "Nothing can undo what I have set into motion! Leave me immediately, and witness the fruitzz of your folly, the deathzz of two undeserving..."

"Not today, not ever! It's not gonna happen, because I've been there. _There_," Keiichi interrupted, his voice clarion with emphasis. The SurGoth seemed to shirk away when Keiichi said "There".

What was the meaning in those words, to give Isilblius such a pause?

"This is not belief, it is forever fact," he added. "The two children will be protected. They will survive. For I have seen the Future of Futures. Before I came here, I saw it. You and I will meet millions of times, in millions of different situations and configurations. But in none of these will you fully accomplish the breadth of your evil intents."

"No...more?" she asked in a quiet voice, echoing her husband-to-be, the one true love of her life. Keiichi smiled at her and nodded his head. She felt strangely becalmed and comforted. A dynamic was at work here, one that she could not frame within a mental picture or conception. Invisible to her, but palpable to the SurGoth. How could Keiichi be saying such things, with such a degree of confidence?

She was answered immediately; rather, she _felt_ the answer to her unvoiced questions. Throughout the expanse of her Goddess perceptions, Belldandy experienced a massive spike in Metanative energy, completely incomprehensible because it was off the scale. It was so puissant and harmonious, it permeated every expression of existence that she could sense: every Dimensional Level, every TimeStream connected to this present moment in Time. She looked at Keiichi, bewildered and overwhelmed.

"How? HOW?!!!" the SurGoth screamed, likewise sensing the sudden increase of energy.

_"Because Cevn isn't the only Ultimate Force."_

With Keiichi's arms wrapped around her and the OmniArc under her feet, Belldandy shuddered as the thrust of his statement dawned on her, filling her with incredulity. _This was impossible_! She was so shocked, she knew that if she would have been standing on the Earthrealm instead of floating here at the edge of the OmniArc, she would have fallen right off her feet. The immense unleash of energies that she was sensing..._were centered in Keiichi_!!! Keiichi was channeling a near-infinite level of power...Divine power.

"This izz wrong. Inappropriate! Inconceivable!!!" Isilblius screamed.

"It is just and true," Keiichi countered. "Cevn is the Balancing Force, and you will meet him and you will be recompensed for your arrogance. And what of the Ultimate Force, if he is the Balancing Force? Together we planned this, he and I. With the index of all possible realities converging on that distant plane of Eternity, we could see within the shadows of Time...and we deliberately set it up for me to be poised here at this very moment, in this time, in this space. At this conflux of reality, I am Keiichi Morisato. And by design, so much more. Hmm...as my future wife would reckon it if I had a license rating like the Gods and Goddesses she knows...right now I would be 'the mortal Keiichi, Ultimate Contract Class, Infinite and Transfinite Unlimited, Unrestricted License'."

"Meaninglezz!" the SurGoth hissed, regaining its evil composure.

"Maybe it will have more meaning once I tell you that all of this makes me the Ultimate Force."

"Oh my Lord!" Belldandy gasped, astounded to the very depths of her Soul. Looking up into his eyes, she saw a combined God's and Demon's symbol inside the irises of his eyes, the same symbol was also centered in the middle of Keiichi's forehead. But it wasn't at a standstill; it was whirling like the wheels of his motorbike...a cosmic wheel of red and blue. She almost collapsed in disbelief...

He had kept this secret of secrets...to protect her. To rescue her from Isilblius.

"Bell-chan, I'm sorry that I couldn't tell you the truth about this," he whispered into her ear apologetically.

"Keiichi is the Ultimate Force, and he's _apologizing to me_?" she thought...but accidentally said aloud.

"Especially to you I must apologize, my lovely Bell-chan," Keiichi confirmed, his warm eyes grabbing her just like they had the very first time she had met him. She closed her eyes and leaned in close to kiss him. After their exquisite kiss, when she opened her eyes she observed that they were no longer above the OmniArc. In a flash, she and he had been returned to her mind. The flowing glow of light-birds again surrounded her with warmth.

"Right before I came back in Time to find you, I encountered Cevn during a sort of journey; a mind-trip I had undertaken to try and discover why Mara was pregnant. We conferred, and I suggested that I should serve as a sort of 'trump card' against the SurGoth. Somehow, I sensed the Ultimate Force, and in that sensing I suspected that it would wire me up just like it had wired up Cevn, to deal with the threat of the SurGoth. Isilblius suffers his first defeat here and now, the first of many to come, I can assure you."

Immediately, the SurGoth reappeared...

Keiichi turned his attention to Isilblius the SurGoth, whose hovering form was trembling with hatred, pent-angry yellow-orange eyes blazing like fires. A menacing Evil being who had tormented her beyond all possible endurance...

But she wasn't one bit afraid in the presence of such Evil. Not anymore.

Not with Keiichi standing with her.

"Every single being that you try to destroy...will survive," Keiichi asserted. "Except you. I was there...I saw the furthest extent of the Future. And you aren't in it, you shitbag..."

He had accomplished it.

* * *

A beautiful, relieved Bell-chan was by his side. Keiichi wanted to glue himself to her, to give her every bit of himself. But already he could feel the UF draining from him, returning to its rightful configuration. Skuld would be proud of him, because he had brought down the Future onto the SurGoth. When he had made his wish to discover what had happened to Mara, he had been given a glimpse of that extremely remote Future. Encountering Cevn there and then, they had a conversation that was so brief, it was immeasurable in terms of Time. He decided on this course of action, because he mysteriously sensed that his conflict might not be with Destiny...but rather, it would be a battle with Evil. Armed with a 'gift card' which allowed him to become the Ultimate Force at the time of his choosing, he had returned to the temple and waited out the day.

When he discovered that Bell had been displaced by an evil presence, it triggered this ultimate trump card for him to play...a contingency he wasn't even aware of because it was sealed away inside of him. Once he was set on the course of facing Isilblius, the memory-seal was broken and he was on his way. He had to keep secret to keep the SurGoth's suspicions at bay.

There was more work to be done, an unimaginable amount of work. But through his actions, he had laid the foundation for all that will follow.

Most importantly, he had freed Belldandy. Not only from her confinement by the Isilblius, who in the future would be known as the SurGoth...but from the haunting sense of betrayal she had felt when Mara made her confession.

He had gathered from Cevn that there might be another Belldandy and him, hurtling in a protective bubble while reality ReCreated itself. Because of the ferocity of the SurGoth's attacks on existence, everything and everyone would be fragmented for a time. He and Belldandy would need to find and rejoin the other splinters of their lives. Using the metaphor of computers, Cevn explained that he would experience a compiling of these divided lives, in order to become himself. In a sense, each splintered-off life experience was a source code, which would be translated and then combined into a single language of experience.

He and Bell would have their lives back.

Keiichi didn't comprehend what Cevn was getting at when he added to the computing metaphor by noting that "the kids will be the debuggers." He didn't experience that part directly. Neither did Cevn, who admitted that he wouldn't be around to make sense of events either. In hindsight, he was more than a little concerned with the welfare of his friend. During their brief encounter, Cevn was sounding like a sailor on a doomed ship.

On one level, the computer networks of Yggdrasil, Vanagdrasil and the Mid-Light were a focus of attacks by Isilblius. The three networks would be hopelessly corrupted beyond repair. With a whole lot of help, Cevn had somehow downloaded a template of all three computers...Ygg, Vang, Mid-Light...into himself, which would be just enough for them to repair each other. With help from anyone who was willing to aid him.

Everyone's help would be needed, he sensed.

Holding Belldandy close with his arms and wordless love, he observed that a fade-azure globe was building itself around them. She leaned into him, and he tenderly kissed her on the cheek. They were now outside of Bell's being. Surrounded by the essence of the Everything, floating above the majestic patterns of the OmniArc they had created. It was almost as beautiful as Bell-chan.

Somewhere and somewhen out there, another he and Belldandy were in a similar protective bubble of energy.

Reaching out for Belldandy's hand, he left this pathway of existence to meet them.

* * *

202X:

Motokyn, Baldurdth and Kitsunen were found themselves in a temple compound, in a country called Japan, sitting in a sunroom together with their parents.

Skuld and Tomohisa...with their twin daughters Pryzm and Ulfryn.

Mara and Sythtsu...with their twins Falcyn and Sygyn.

Belldandy and Keiichi...with their twins Keleste and Keiyasu.

And not a single one of them knew why they were there.

But that was about to change...

They had flashed back into the temple's sunroom feeling dizzy and exhausted. As soon as alertness returned to her, Motokyn looked over at her Mother...and saw her Father, curled up with his head resting on Mom's lap. She almost leapt across the room to hug her Mom, and was quickly joined by Baldurdth and Kitsunen.

They were home!!!

"M..Mom?!" she managed to half-gasp before the pooling gratitude in her heart found its way into tears of relief.

"Who else would I be, honey? Sshh! He's exhausted," Mom told her, tears in her eyes despite her teasing.

Kitsunen hugged her Mother for dear life. "Mom, I totally missed you so much!" she said. They were whole again...Mom, her sis and bro, and even this strange man named Cevn who seemed to be sleeping.

"Is...that Father? Our Father? My Father?" Baldurdth asked.

"Yes, he is. Pretty different, huh, seeing him here?" his Mother explained. "You've all met him just a little bit; piece-by-piece as we kept experiencing those blackout spells connected with the returning. This whole confusing process has been like constructing a city, but by only using building-blocks of memory. Your Aunt Skuld can explain it much better than I. Just like all your cousins, the three of you had to fight your way back here by doing fixit jobs on screwed-up dimensions of existence. But in the end, your Father brought the three of you back. He had to, it turns out."

"But how? You..snff..mean that he's what caused us to come back here?" Kitsunen asked.

"Yes, in a sense. You see, your Father never really left you," Aunt Skuld noted. "All those years the three of you grew up without a father, Cevn was there with you. You just didn't know it because your memories weren't fully merged yet. We've all been splintered...different parts of 'us' living different lives. My best guess is that these blackouts we experience are part of the process of rejoining our memories. We'll all be a composite of many lives, written into our own unique existence. None of us truly knows what you went through to get here, except for what your Mom remembers. You definitely have a story to tell us, one that'll fill in the gaps. Also, Pryzm and Ulfryn are besides themselves with interest in you guys."

"Yeah!" one of the twin girls sitting next to Aunt Skuld chimed in. "You see, it all started when my sister Ulfryn started having these visions, and..."

"Hey Pryzm, put a pipe in it," the young Demon interrupted. "We've already heard that one..."

"But maybe _they_ haven't," a young God who was almost their age noted. "In fact, they might be majorly whatlocked..."

"You guys! You guys!" the other tween-years girl called out. "We should chill out and let them talk..."

"Better them than you, Ulfryn!" a young pixieish Demoness chided. "Every time you talk, you weaken all of Japan..."

"That's not a nice thing to say to your cousin, even if she's still a kid," a teenage Goddess who looked a lot like their Aunt Belldandy added.

"Oh great!" Aunt Skuld observed with a resigned sigh and an expression of misery. Already, her two 11-year old Goddess daughters were glared angrily at newly-met their cousins.

"She just had to go and say that to my girls. Here we go..."

Despite their Mom's protestations to keep things quiet, it took almost five minutes to bring things down to a reasonably dull roar. During the ensuing verbal frenzy, Kitsunen could only look at her sister and shake her head in dismay, while Baldurdth counted coup by playfully commenting on the arguing as if it was a sumo match. Finally, the adults managed to calm down their younger cousins enough so everyone could resume the discussion without arguing or interrupting each other.

Their cousins were crazy!

"Well, almost as crazy as the three of us," Baldurdth sagely noted.

It was at that point that Megumi walked into the room, causing Motokyn to fret that a drunken episode was in the making. But this wasn't the blown-out wasted version of Megumi. She closely resembled the young Megumi that she and her sibs had met, only older, her hair cut short in front and sides but long in the back, all the grey streaks disguised by hair coloring, her face thinly lined with age.

It was _that_ Megumi, the same one they'd met here twenty years ago...

"Hiiii! Who are you guys?" she asked with a smile, nodding pertly at the triplets.

Megumi being Megumi, she broke out a tray of sushi and blithely started munching away. Noticing that she was being examined, Megumi paused in her grazing and looked at them with proverbial question marks in her eyes.

"What's the matter with you three? You're looking at me as if you've seen a crazy woman!" Megumi noted. "I'm just me, Keiichi's younger sister, the Racing Queen of N.I.T. Or at least I was, umpteen years ago when I was sowing discord amongst the biker gangs. Of course, now my 'turf' is sorta expanded to include the whole Chiba Peninsula. But why the weird faces, huh?"

"Long story. Very long story," Kitsunen half-replied in a dry voice, earning knowing nods from Motokyn and Baldurdth. "Don't worry, Megumi. We're really glad to see that you're not normal..."

"Eh..heh..heh," Urd laughed nervously. "My daughter really meant to say that it's normal for her to be really glad to see you, Megumi! Didn't you?"

Kitsunen didn't miss the gentle but firm elbow in the ribs from Mom. Aunt Skuld asked if anyone wanted drinks, exiting and then returning a few seconds later with a cooler and a pot of coffee.

It was nice to have a Goddess for an Aunt.

The more things were different, the more things were different...

...and definitely not the same.

* * *

"Motokyn, Baldurdth, Kitsunen. Since you're here, then it means that you...and we...just finished the final battle with the SurGoth," Aunt Belldandy explained after the three of them finished their story.

"My dear Keiichi fought him back in 200X, defeating him in the first of many skirmishes in what became a sort of timewar, a conflict that extended throughout the duration of Time. Now the cycle is complete, Belldandy said, patting Keiichi on the thigh as he sat next to her. Turning her attention to her husband and children, Belldandy continued.

"Keleste, Keiyasu...you had to the bear the most difficult task of all; that of living your entire lives without a Mother and Father. I'm so proud of both of you! We could all learn from your example of patience and perseverance. All of us have experienced significant hardships. In a sense, each has been denied the stars and the horizon, unable to experience the sweetness and joy of the lives we were entitled to.

"All of you children had an unknown to make known, a personal truth to live out, a need to write reality with a pen of Love. The nine of you...each of you, has a very special voice that was silenced for a time by the enormity of the task you had to complete. The love that you feel for each other, for _us_, is what finally defeated the catastrophe. Cevn defeated and destroyed the SurGoth forever. Your Nine Voices defeated the aftermath, the loss of family that we each experienced. We have _all_ felt your pain, just like you have felt ours."

"The power of a wish transcends the urge to destroy," Uncle Keiichi added, squeezing his wife's hand. "I should know, because my wish was answered by the most perfect love..."

"As for your Father, he wished to be the Balance, and he unexpectedly became a force of Balance," Aunt Mara informed them. "At first, he was the Ultimate Force. But each time the force chose to work through him, he became less and less aware of what was happening. After defeating the SurGoth, he wasn't even aware that he had anything to do with the UF or the Balance. After we all passed out that last time, you three were gone. Somehow, your Father, Cevn, knew where you had gone...don't ask me how because I'm a Demoness who can barely understand the quirks of mortals...and he used every last measure of his willpower to safeguard you and conduct you to this point in time, to the reality where you belong. He promised your Mother that he would do this, even if it cost him his life. And it nearly did."

Motokyn, Baldurdth and Kitsunen paused from hugging their Mother to exchange glances, as Mara's sobering words had gripped them. They could hear a very soft sniffling; Aunts Belldandy and Skuld had tears in their eyes.

Their Mother was sobbing quietly...

Baldurdth felt like an anchor had been lifted off his heart. His Mother had cried so many times while he was growing up, grieving for what was lost. Now, she was crying for what had been returned.

"My dearest children, I..snff..know the pain you've experienced," Urd said, running her hand through he and his sister's hair, just like she used to do when they were little.

"I was there with each of you for all those years, watching you grow up and feeling so proud of how each of you had become the persons you want to be. I lived the same life you did, without my husband for so many years. A..and now that he's back, and..snffsnff.._you're back_..and..snff..I feel complete. We'll have to endure another round of headaches and spinning wheels in our eyeballs, but then we'll be _together_ as a family. We'll all be on the same page, finally."

"The three of you may not remember it, but you've told us your tale. Only not yet. The very fact that you're here means that you have lived the returning, just like Falcyn and Sigel did," Aunt Mara added. "We already know what happened to you..."

"But there is a final tale to be told, and only your Mother can pay homage to it," Aunt Belldandy noted.

"Whh..wha' happened? Urd...are the kids alright?" Cevn muttered.

"You lovable idiot!" their Mother said in a delighted but concerned voice as he struggled to sit up. He was so weakened, he could barely raise his head and arms. She leaned down and kissed him on the cheek. "You really don't remember, do you, Cevn honey?"

"Don't call me..." he mumbled. Just like that, he was unconscious again.

"I know that the three of you are very conflicted about suddenly having a Father, after not having one for so long," Belldandy addressed them, her voice suddenly grave and serious. "But only you can make him a Father, if you decide to let him in. Your Mom can't do it...well she did do it, because I was in the maternity ward with her when you three were born. But you know what I mean."

"None of us can help you guys with this one," Aunt Mara noted. "Even our resident mecha genius, your Aunt Skuld, can't do a thing about your situation. She can't make one of her fix-it inventions, because Love's already been invented."

"It's all you," she added, grinning wide enough that her fangs were showing.

Motokyn, Baldurdth and Kitsunen looked at each other with searching eyes.

Kitsunen tentatively reached out with a trembling hand and rested it on her Father's shoulder. But it wasn't just her hand, it was three hands...

Her cousin Keleste broke down at this point, sobbing so hard that Aunt Belldandy had to comfort her. A cousin one biological year younger than her...but who had lived 150,000 years without her parents. Of everyone there besides their Mom, she knew that Keleste probably had the most empathy for what this moment truly meant.

But then her eyes were stinging...and when she looked at her sister and brother, they both had tears running down their cheeks. Each of them still had a hand resting on their Father...

Motokyn and Baldurdth had made the same decision she had.

"Well, since we're all one big happy family, let me refresh your memories..." Urd started in, winking at her three children as they nestled against her, while she stroked her exhausted husband's long brown-grey hair as it fell on her lap.

"Hold that thought, onee-chan..." Skuld said as the dizziness swept all them back into the nether realms.


	158. Pt 158: TimeSlices

**Part 158: TimeSlices**

The lintel of rustic timber was softly illumed by a beautiful near-full moon as she floated through the exterior gate doors into the temple's grounds. The snow-clad ground brightened the Selene bath of light, so much so that she could see the fingering shadows of the barren trees reaching across the courtyard, touching the crisp wintry wadding that brushed up against the buildings. Vertical wisps of heat arose from the several roofline vents, cozily streaming upwards like hands reaching towards the star-crowned heavens.

It was a miracle that she was even here, and she knew it. Since the events of the horrific cataclysm and the responding ReCreation, her appreciation of life had been renewed and strengthened. Before, she had often regarded the preciousness of life as it occasioned her; paying momentary regards to family, community, species, and cosmos when she otherwise wasn't engaged in work. Like so many Divines, she herself had been reinvigorated over the past two decades by the ReCreation event. Consequently, her life demanded a deeper self-examination; she often paused to savor the vigilant gratitude and sense of relief which was tangible and yet uncaused. The Divines...as a cosmopolite...had evolved a profoundly wizened global perspective on the redesigned sum of existence: the conscious accounting of _all_ life as even more than precious.

In the wake of the ReCreation event, taking love and life for granted had been banished into the past. Both God's and Demon's shared a collective awareness that they had narrowly escaped utter destruction. Laissez faire approaches to solving problems were no longer an option, a truth that Kami-sama constantly reinforced with the richness of His enthusiasm.

Most of the lights were dithered low in the temple, save for several candles in the living room and two bedroom lights on the side of the temple. Nearby, Sigel was walking up and down the temple's veranda decking with a little-girl gait; her gaily high-stepped pace was reminiscent of the marching children during the opening credits of the "Totoro" anime. It was well over twenty years ago that she had seen that DVD for the first time, so soon after she had first arrived here.

Now it was a little more than five years in the past.

Back when she first came to the Earthrealm from Yggdrasil in early 200X, she was brimming with dislike towards everything about this planet and its people...except for her Elder Sister and to a lesser degree, her Big Sister. She didn't understand the enigma that was Keiichi; how he had the power to make both of her sisters stay on a mortal terrestrial planet. Her journey to the Earthrealm then had been intended as a short-term visit, not a stay. She had assumed that she would come to the Earthrealm, demand that her onee-chans return to Yggdrasil and then accompany them back to the God's Realm. And that would be that.

Didn't turn out that way. Her bewilderment became even more taxing soon after her arrival when her Elder Sister admitted that she _wanted_ to stay. At this point, she had declared war on Keiichi, the sister-stealer. Finally, as if this wasn't vexing enough...the Almighty had _assigned_ her to a Trainee session on the Earthrealm; she then realized that she was stuck with her sisters and Keiichi. At the time, being Exiled to the Well of Urd would have been many times preferable to being an Earthrealm Trainee in her mind.

She smiled to herself, amused at how the sight of the temple in its wintry cast had turned her mind towards the delicate droplets of nostalgia. Her eyes darted from tree to nearby tree; each familiar vessel of verdant life serving up their towering signet proofs. Cloaked with snow, their lower height and narrower trunks reminded her that she was two decades years off the mark. These same trees had soared their boughs over the courtyard when she had left, even more vibrant with life, even more shade-giving than before. At the time of her leaving, four households lived together in this same enclosed acreage, and no one could have possibly imagined that one of those households would be a Demoness lair...

But this wasn't the Present, it was 200X...and she was here to fulfill two promises.

She had promised a young mortal man that if he completed a series of tasks, he would be reunited with the one who resided in his heart. She was here to witness the fruition of this promise.

The other promise was to correct a serious mistake she had made in her youth.

_"Brreep?!"_

Banpei had playfully snuck up behind her and hailed her with his electronic voice. Ever vigilant, Banpei had discovered her presence before she even reached the garage, while Sigel continued her prancing march, blithe to any possibility of stealthy intruders. She knew he was approaching her, but feigned surprise to humor him, or perhaps to honor him. It was an old game between she and her robotic watchman, dating all the way back to the time when she first created him. The Ninjettes were off on a training mission, to gird themselves for the vital task of guarding both temple and wedding guests for the next several days leading up to and beyond the wedding date.

Skuld looked at her mecha sentryman with a loving expression as he tipped his head to one side, emulating a human expression of confusion. If Banpei had eyes that could write, he'd have question marks scribbled all over his spherical face at the moment.

She slowly hovered closer to Banpei, shaking her finger at him and then touching it to her lips in a "don't tell" gesture. The last thing she needed was for him to alarm the entire household, like he had done when Pryzm, Ulfryn and Mara's Falcyn and Ulfryn had arrived here.

Another timeframe, another existence.

"Defective, fucked-up realities and alternate dimensions," her nephew Baldurdth had vehemently called them. Wasn't that the truth! She smiled again, realizing that in one of those 'defective' realities, she had been _here_ in this very moment, discussing plans with the Quad and Mara. Skuld almost expected to see phantasmagorical afterimages of the six of them hovering in front of the temple walls...

She waited patiently while Banpei scanned her, no doubt confused by her older, adult physical manifest.

_"Phreet...bzst...whoomzn...clikzoop!"_

"Exactly, Banpei," she replied to him once he finished his scrutiny. "I've grown up...and I'm even a mother. Pryzm and Ulfryn are my dearest daughters, but in a sense, you were my very first child. When I arrived on the Earthrealm, you were the first A.I. that I created using Earthrealm tech. Too simply, as events later revealed. You were my friend and companion through so many difficult times while I adjusted to life here. But I failed you in one vital matter. When I repaired Sigel and she remained at our temple home, I didn't have the foresight to predict how you would react to her. Ironic how I, the Norn of the Future in those byaway times, could not see the Present. You didn't have a chance to pursue your romantic inclinations with Sigel, because her A.I. was far more sophisticated than yours.

"You loved her in your own way, but couldn't communicate it to her with a voice of your own. Yet, your actions made it plain for all of us to see how deeply you cared for her. But it was one-sided for so many years, wasn't it? Even though you were conscious of the reality that she and you couldn't love like the mortals and Divines, you still protected her and pursued her, didn't you?"

_"Phi..bee..bi..zoompti..dokka!"_

"Things are much different between you and Sigel from when I come from, in the near Future. But in my youth I was too myopic with my concerns, focusing entirely on my sisters, Tomohisa, and the immediate future. I failed to deem recognition to your anguish. I should have seen more deeply into matters when your wish went awry and the Earthrealm was nearly buried under stuffed animals. But I missed it completely! I'm sorry, I just couldn't see how lonely you were during those years while I was growing up. You have always been charitable with your forgiveness. But it wasn't until I had Pryzm and Ulfryn that I fully realized that _you_ were all alone, wanting friends and a family of your own...and that you were an important part of _my_ family, of my two daughter's family. Years from now, I decided to give you the long-overdue A.I. upgrade that finally allowed you to fully express how you felt to everyone. Especially Sigel."

Banpei regarded her with nascent comprehension, only partially grasping the candor of her contrition.

"Not too often does life provide us with an opportunity for do-overs," she said, semi-circling behind Banpei and deactivating him. With a graceful gesture, she levitated him up off the ground and float-guided him into the Banpei Garage. Back in 200X on the Earthrealm, she mostly was confined to using Earthrealm tools when she assembled mechas. For more delicate repairs involving molecular circuitry or nanoassembly, she had to rely on her older sisters, who had a much greater command of telekinetics than she. But those days were long past. With the precision of a hundred ethereal mental hands, she effortlessly manipulated matter and energy to disassemble Banpei, finally pulling his A.I. chassis.

Reaching in her jacket, she grasped a handful of neo-tech components and flung them into the air like popcorn. With a twirl of her finger, she arranged them into a spiraling mini-galaxy of parts and energies. Using the flowing nebula that filled the inside of the so-called "Banpei shed"; she rapidly selected out parts and components out of the cloud as she worked on him. The Banpei of 202X had been the result of over two decades of constant tweaks and upgrades; except in form, he barely resembled this Banpei. The difference between the two was about as great as the difference between a toaster and a laptop computer in terms of sophistication.

"Before I decided to come back in time to 200X, Tomohisa and I...yes, we did get married...agreed that the right course of action would be to rectify past mistakes when we could," she noted, addressing the disarticulate form of Banpei as if he could hear her.

"My husband's always been a source of strength, and he encouraged me to take this step despite my initial doubts. You know, the old 'time paradox' thing and all that. Not to worry, I'm sure that my sisters and I can handle any jumpstarts Time might throw at us twenty years down the road.

"There's a reason while we Norns are called the Masters of Time.

"So you're getting a complete makeover, Banpei. Hee hee...it's actually a massive upgrade for every one of your systems, starting with your A.I. _Especially_ your A.I., because I am creating a Soul for you within your holographic heart. Well, not exactly a Soul in the traditional sense; the Lords of the two Realms are the only ones who can author true mortal and Divine Souls. But you will have self-awareness and autonomy to a degree that will be almost indistinguishable from that of sentient beings. Mechanical or biological, a Soul's a Soul...and I'm going to make sure that you will have one. No longer will your A.I. be bound by material or physical processes."

With surgical precision, she swapped out millions of components, following through on her decision to give Banpei a 202X A.I. and feature set _now_, tight-crammed into his 200X metallic frame. Within five minutes, her labors were complete. Banpei was a mecha remix that equalled his 202X descendent, save for one major difference. The Skuld of 200X...her youthful self...definitely lacked the inventive bursts of genius that she herself had accrued over two decades of advancing the field of DivineTech. Taken into account, this made it imperative that she endow Banpei with the ability to self-reconstitute. It was almost a given that her 16-year old self would be in a major fix should Banpei suffer extreme damage. She giggled, imagining the surprise her teenaged self would have if she tried to tinker with Banpei's A.I. and found a Soul there instead of merely a sophisticated artificial intelligence. As soon as tomorrow, her younger self will be astounded by the 'new' Banpei.

And if Banpei couldn't repair himself, Sigel could.

In the currency of their 202X household, Banpei and Sigel had been an 'item', for lack of a better term, for almost ten years. Both could repair each other if needed, and both had good reason to if one or both were injured. Skuld knew that once she finished these enhancements to Banpei, he would be much more companionable to Sigel. With a strong sense of reciprocity, Sigel would thus be greatly motivated to provide repairs to him because of the love they shared...or would share, sometime in the near future.

Finishing up, she crafted the molecular handshake sockets in both of Banpei's index fingers. Using this, he and Sigel could 'link' when touching the tips of their right or left index fingers. This link would allow them to share the equivalent of a whole range of sensations and emotions, ranging from simple information transference to more acute sensations akin to those experienced by Earthrealm mortals. Later on, once a sufficient set of pre-designated parameters were met, Banpei and Sigel could even choose to unlock further shared experiences via this link. More intense means of interaction, up to and including cyborgasm...machine sex.

Finished with her work on Banpei, she grabbed a shop-rag and oiled it lightly with polish so she could clean the accumulated dust off of his chassis. Leaving him in powerup mode, she floated towards the temple entryway, waving to gain Sigel's attention. Sigel was the welcoming robot that she had salvaged from Dr. Morrow, and the girlish human-like android enjoyed 'patrolling' near the front doors of the temple-house so she would be available to greet visitors before they entered. Skuld recalled how she had installed rudimentary emotional and self-consciousness circuitry into Sigel a few weeks after Chihiro discovered the automated mannequin in a scrap heap, basically upgrading her from a primitive mechanical greeter to a full-fledged self-aware gynoid. Since Sigel had been rebuilt about a year or so after she created Banpei, her A.I. was advanced in sophistication by a dozen or so design generations over Banpei's original A.I. specs.

"Hi Skuld. You look very different this evening!" Sigel greeted her brightly, halting her march and regarding her with a curious expression. "It's really odd...but you look older than normal. Even older than Urd, who's a total obaa-chan. Can you tell me why you look older?"

"Sigel, do you want to have sisters?" Skuld asked her.

"Sisters! Sisters! That would be great! I've always wanted sisters!" Sigel exclaimed in sparkling joy, requiring Skuld to "shhsh!" her.

"Sigel, in a certain sense, you were the first girl in my family. Even though you're not a flesh and blood child of mine, I consider you a daughter of mine...the only difference is that I adopted you. I love you very much and I want to improve your life, so that when you have baby sisters, you'll know how to take care of them," she explained, speaking softly as she referred to Pryzm and Ulfryn.

Reaching around behind Sigel's neck, she found the manual on-off switch and turned Sigel off. Just like with Banpei, she disassembled and reassembled the little humanoid robot girl, upgrading her to 202X standards within minutes.

She reminded herself that she had to refit Sigel without waking Velsper. Unlike the lazy summer days when he would laze on the porch, Velsper would often curl up in the kitchen or in "Everyone's Tea Room" near the hearth, which Belldandy would leave uncovered during the winter months. She could hear him lightly snoring away; feline snores keeping a steady beat against the smoldering firewood, which was lightly crackling with warmth. It wasn't really too much of a challenge; Velsper was renowned for sleeping through all sorts of things like visits from Hild and Rind's martial calisthenics. He certainly lacked the feline inquisitiveness of a _true_ cat.

When she reactivated Sigel, the first action Sigel undertook was to reach out and hug herself to Skuld tightly. For the first time in her short cyber-robotic life, Sigel cried tears...tears of love and gratitude. Skuld warmly held the little mechanoid girl, closing her eyes and remembering all the pleasant and amusing memories Sigel had brought into her life.

"Th..thank you, Skuld-mama!" Sigel said in a sincere voice.

"Do you want to go see Banpei?"

"Well, I don't know. He's so old and clunky..."

"People could make the same judgment about you," Skuld noted. "How would you feel then? Perhaps you should watch Banpei closely from now on. In fact, I've got a surprise for you, Sigel. Wanna see it?"

"Gumdrop goodies!" Sigel exclaimed excitedly. They walked to the Banpei Shed, Sigel holding onto her hand and skipping alongside her, kicking up small drifts of snow. Once inside the shed, she powered up Banpei while Sigel looked on, obviously piqued with curiosity.

"Hello Skuld. Hello, my dear, beautiful Sigel," Banpei greeted them in his new voice. She had patterned his voice as a blend of the tonalities of the important men in her life: her Father, Keiichi, Tomohisa, Genji and Cevn.

Sigel was staring at Banpei with wide-eyed astonishment.

"Thank you for giving me life, my wonderful creator," Banpei said to her, bowing. "I promise to protect you, Sigel and everyone that is important to you, even to the expense of my own life. I now seem to have a Soul inside of me, and I can best cherish it by cherishing those important persons around me."

Skuld felt her eyes water up with a mixture of pride, happiness and love at Banpei's words. Fifteen minutes ago, Banpei couldn't even speak, except when verbalizing elementary threat alarms like "Intruder!" Now, the stout robot watchman had just spoken the most profound truth that could ever be uttered; a clear proof that the Soul she had created in him was a generous soul.

"Y..you can _talk_? You can really talk?" Sigel finally observed, breaking out of her amazed stupor. Banpei bowed to her and tipped his metallic 'hat', then whirled his two-meter metal prod with the expertise of a bo-stick artist.

"This is so cool! I _want_ to talk to you!" she heard Sigel exclaim happily.

Banpei was regarding her with eyes that expressed a very deep gratitude, which caused Skuld to shudder with emotion.

"Thank you, Mother Skuld," he said.

* * *

She hovered inside the temple, and then decided to walk rather than float, just for nostalgia's sake. For many years, Urd was the one who was always gravity challenged, preferring to float around the temple rather than walk like a human being. At the time, she occasionally detested how her Elder Sister would float around the house in all sorts of provocative positions, showing off her legs or cleavage and making all the guys in the house edgy. Back then, Urd didn't know better...she only walked when it was necessary to. She herself had always preferred walking while on the Earthrealm.

Walk or float, she could easily enter and leave the temple environs undetected, despite the sleeping presence of her sisters, her younger self, Peorth, Rind and Hild.

As she carefully slid the thick mado door shut to keep the winter chill out, the only one who noticed her was Velsper, who was busily gobbling up some leftovers Belldandy had left on a plate for him. He certainly would keep his silence. Or else.

The temple's living room looked a little too neat and organized, not at all exhibiting the signs of frantic last-minute preparations for the upcoming wedding that she had expected. What was most irregular was that it looked...well, rather _normal_ for lack of a better description. Pursing her lips, she strode down the hallway, sliding open the bedroom door and sneaking a peek at the sleeping forms of her younger self and her two onee-chans.

Her younger self and Urd were sleeping like babies. Belldandy wasn't to be seen; probably out with Keiichi somewhere.

Walking to the end of the hall, she paused in front of Cevn's bedroom. She sensed another presence here, and turned around to see GranSkuld floating behind her.

"Elder! What are you doing here?" she thoughtcast with projected surprise.

"This is the best show in town, this side of Eternity! Bravo on what you did to Banpei and Sigel, by the way," her Elder form explained with a broad grin.

"After all he did for each of us, I wanted to be here when you wrote those certain words in the Enigma Book."

"Me? But _you_ were supposed to write the final lines in the book at the end of Eternity, weren't you? Wasn't it implied that you were supposed to finish things up because you have the broadest sensitivity to Time and could do it properly? I came here just to open the Returning Gate Mandala and then hang around for the fireworks in the morning!"

"Ahem! Well since I'm the Elder, it's my prerogative whether I want to change events or not. After all, I've seen it All. So I've decided to pass that torch onto you. You can deal it out."

"Me?" Skuld sputtered, looking at the white-haired Elder Skuld.

"Yeah, you! Don't make me repeat myself, idiot!"

Cantankerous as always, her Elder form...

"B..but why me?"

"Why not you?" GranSkuld shot back. "Besides, you're more qualified than me. Right now, you're a mother and happily married. Still in the very early stages of your marriage. Tomohisa..woohoo!..now that brings back memories! Boy, was he hot he was back in those days. Still is, where and when I come from. But me, I'm constantly flitting about between the Mid-Light and the Living Realms all the time. My life is kinda like a permanent vacation; well-deserved after seeing Time to the end of Eternity. You on the other hand, you're still having hot sex with your husband while your daughters are away...and you're still madly in love with him in every possible sense. So it would make better sense to have _you_ write the 'P.S' to the end of the Enigma Book, since you're in the 'love-love' vibration of romance."

Blushing deeply when her Elder self mentioned the bedroom life she and her husband shared, Skuld couldn't argue with the Elder's reasoning. Perhaps the Elder was being prudent, relying on the fact that she and her husband were still deeply in the throes of a romantic love...a passion that would hopefully be communicated to Cevn and then Urd by her entry in the Enigma Book.

"Okay, I'll do it," she acceded. But her heart was racing, as she was secretly thrilled by this opportunity. This was totally choice! She'd get to write the words that would trigger Cevn to remember his love for Urd...and if she wrote it out just right, she'd get to embarrass both her Big Sister and Cevn in the process.

Not even bothering to open the shoji door, she floated through the wall and into his bedroom, followed by the Elder. The mandala she had instructed Cevn to draw on the floor was still there, still burned into the tatami.

Deftly manifesting Mjolnir, she tapped the edge of the mandala. She and the Elder watched as the mandala reconfigured itself from a burnt disk on the floor to a webbing of multi-hued blue-purple light floating a few cm off the tatami matting. Within a few moments, an unconscious Cevn would pop out of it. She'd tuck him into bed and then wait until morning. Once he awakened, he would read what she had written in the Enigma Book, and then act accordingly.

But he didn't return.

She was more than a little unsettled when Cevn didn't arrive through the Mandala of Returning. Looking at her Elder self for reassurance, her unspoken appeal was met with a shrug.

This wasn't part of the plan!

The mandala fizzled out an hour later, but still no Cevn. She thought about creating another making with a longer time-expire, but it wouldn't do. If her sisters woke up and sensed an energy mandala in Cevn's bedroom, it would ruin everything!

_Where was he?_

Her Elder self was here, which meant that he _had_ completed the tasks she had assigned him. Actually, several of her instructions to Cevn were devised by the Elder.

"_To win my sister back is to destroy the universe._" Check. He had disintegrated the OmniArc as a means of throwing off the SurGoth. Disintegrating but not destroying it. Obviously, if he destroyed the OmniArc completely, she and the Elder wouldn't be here, because 'here' wouldn't exist. Nothing would exist.

"_Turn your back on her totally and make her fall in love with another._" Check again. He had erased Urd's memories of him right after the Seven created the OmniArc. Going further, he disestablished the Time designations for the Norns, and allowed for their number to increase. She and her sisters...plus their nine children...were now Norns. Twelve Norns instead of three. Taking her sister out of her Norn of the Past role would free her to have the potential to fall in love with _anyone_. But the lingering part of this instruction was the "fall in love with another" condition. She had imagined this meant that Urd would fall in love with another by _re-loving_ Cevn, which in a very real sense would be a do-over.

"_Kill every bit of fear you have about women._" Almost a sure bet, after all that he had accomplished. He had faced about the most fearful situation in existence...his deep-rooted fear of romance and women would certainly be far overshadowed by having to deal with Ragnarok itself.

"_Travel to hell and back a time or two. Not the figurative, mythological hell...but the real thing!_" Double check. Jumping through the mandala, he had immediately traveled to the pre-Syntrasil Demon's Realm, Vanagdrasil. If there was a contrived version of hell, that fit the ticket. But he had experienced a far more horrible reality when he faced off against Isilblius the SurGoth at the end of Time. She couldn't begin to imagine how hellish _that_ must have been.

She felt a brief pause of terror as she contemplated that he didn't return through the mandala because _he didn't exist_. He was supposed to subdue the SurGoth, but instead he had destroyed the so-called 'Ultimate Demon' according to all of the kids.

He killed the SurGoth...but did he lose his life in the process?

"Why isn't he here?" she queried, wavering between confusion and dread.

"There is more," GranSkuld added in a serious voice. "When I performed my Final Duty, he wasn't there with me in any form. At that point, he didn't exist."

"No! By the Almighty, it can't be! After all we've done...he can't be dead! He was _there_ with the rest of us, once Urd's kids came back! How could he be gone _now_?" she cried in despair, almost shouting the words out loud and waking everyone in the temple.

"Not so fast, Younger! Just because I didn't see him doesn't mean that he didn't see me. There is a method we can use, and I will help," GranSkuld said, her face pinched tight with concern.

"A tiny fraction of Cevn is in both of us, thanks to Mara's attempt to steal the secrets of the Enigma Book. If we add that to the mix...to your mandala...he'll _have_ to come back to this reality due to the Balancing Force."

Both of them added the particle of Cevn that resided in their Souls, a fractional part of his Soul to be more precise, and hoped for the best.

A moment later, the second mandala flashed out of existence.

Existence flashed out of existence.

Both she and the Elder felt dizzy for the briefest span of time. When she revived herself, she recognized that a quantum shift in reality had occurred. Extending her Goddess senses, she sought out Cevn's heartbeat...

...and found it.

But it wasn't where she expected it to be. Not by a long shot.

And neither were they.

* * *

CREATION:

As destruction seemed to rewind into creation, Belldandy looked at Keiichi and grinned, feeling completely blissed-out by the sensations that just touched her.

Many lives folding into one.

He didn't sense the subtle change, but she certainly had. The only means by which she could comprehend what just happened was that she had experienced a notable 'expansion' in her memories. A sudden soul speaking thought...her self-awareness, heart, and Soul were fused with those of _another_ Belldandy. Likewise, Keiichi was the recipient of such a fusion of lives; it would take her husband a bit longer to reconcile his life with his 'other' life. She could detail the entire sequence of events from that alternate reality, that curious fork in existence that had roundabouted back to her and her beloved Keiichi.

She had met herself, floating in a bubble-sphere. She had met herself, plunging out of the innerworks of her mind into the physical reality of this TimeSpace.

For an amazing moment in Time, Keiichi had become the Ultimate Force, just like Cevn had. She had been trapped inside of her own being, and he had freed her from the confining influence of the SurGoth, literally ripping himself and she out of the faux being and back into this frame of reality.

They were she and Keiichi, and she and Keiichi were they. Impossibly, a fusion of life experiences had occurred within her...so tightly organized and integrated that she almost missed it. Her love for Keiichi was even more profound, redoubled as she felt a deepened awareness of who he was and what he stood for.

She could add "hero" and "universal warrior" to the list of his notable positive attributes.

Holding her hand in front of her, she examined anew the silver-gold band of Metaixodenum on her ring finger, feeling gentled by the awareness that it had survived the death and ReCreation of Everything. The last thing she expected when she encountered herself in the protective sphere was this! Forevermore, this ring would serve as proof that her and Keiichi's love for each other could survive _anything_. A ring is a cycle, and by wearing it she would continue to transcend any challenges that life threw at them. Far from being confined by Isilblius, forced to witness his evil designs as he arranged for a charade of a wedding...now she was actually _married_, even without the formal ceremony.

"We are wife!" her two hearts echoed right before they merged into one Self.

Somehow, she and he had existed in multiple realities, perhaps multiple holoniverses. Now conjoined with the life experiences of herself and Keiichi from that afar-yet-intimate bearing of reality, she now recognized that her husband had rescued her twice; once by saving her from certain lingering doom, three days before their assumed February marriage...and later, much later, as the apocalyptic Ragnarok of absolute destruction was consuming everything in existence. Much later in terms of eternities, but a moment not too soon, as he had married her by putting a wedding band on her finger right when events seemed poised to snuff out both of their lives.

As he had so often done in the past, Keiichi had made it right.

She and he were watching all of existence recreate itself, themselves safely shielded in a curious protective construct; a bubble contrived of manifold layers of Metanative Dimensional Level energies. She couldn't explain how it came to exist, but it was their home for the moment. As the fierce rages of chaos began to reorder themselves, she reached out to hold his hand, regarding creation in silent wonder.

Yet, she knew what she had to do. Earlier, Keiichi had taken his new husband role too seriously, at least in the authoritarian sense, by forbidding her to risk herself to save the mortal girl Belldandy. They had encountered two beings from another holoniverse; another 'reality' of paired God's and Demon's Realms, coincidentally called Yggdrasil and Vanagdrasil. They had met with Keiichi's namesake, a God named Keiichi who had been assigned to the mortal Belldandy by the God's Wish Escort Office. He was devastated, having witnessed her death while powerless to undo it. She made it possible for them to travel back in time to locate her namesake: a Theran mortal girl who had been infected by a virus that was consuming her Soul...attacked and doomed by the SurGoth in its attempt to usurp all realities. So she had offered to help him 'restore' the rightful sequence of events by offering a small piece of her Soul, which would prevent the SurGoth's poison from eating up the mortal girl's Soul. It had all worked out, and in about eight years, Thera-relative time, the Theran mortal Belldandy and Yggdrasilian God Keiichi would have a little 'gift' from her...

Even though this was offset by the fact that her husband had apologized to her for not telling her that he was the Ultimate Force until after they had raced victoriously against the SurGoth...Belldandy recognized that she needed to put her foot down. If Keiichi was going to assert his authority as husband, it was only fair that she assert _her_ authority as his wife.

She knew that her beloved Keiichi had reacted honestly and protectively, for which she admired him. But he had vigorously presumed that being her husband meant that he had _more_ control over her choices; that essentially, he thought he "was the 'boss' of her." Keiichi had acted this way as her boyfriend a couple times, usually when he was stressed out with schoolwork, an upcoming racing competition, or other pressing matters. At these times, he sometimes became vulnerable to resorting to an outdated concept of inequitable marital roles that only recently had relinquished in his native Japan. Such lapses were only slight motes of misbehavior upon the pure canvas of his steady, gentle love for her; stumbles in their relationship that were easily forgiven. But still, his lapse into a momentary overbearing attitude merited a bit of wifely correction.

After all, isn't love about correcting mistakes instead of repeating them?

* * *

"Bell-chan! Look!!!" Keiichi said excitedly as he pointed out something emerging from the conflux of lights. "Alright!!! The stars are back! They're coming out, they're real! Thank God...this is surely a sign that the universe is returning to itself. It's actually beginning to look like space out there."

She could sense the emergence of innumerable stellar objects, while the surrounding span of space was returning to its recognizable pitch black non-color. Normalcy was being restored...

A sequence of tones entered her thoughts, announcing that her Goddess energies were now being routed via a reconnect to Yggdrasil. The Divine 'recharge' that she was receiving was timely; she was quite exhausted emotionally as well as spiritually, and the influx of Divine energy was much appreciated. But the source of the puissant forces that were reactivating her License and her Divine capabilities wasn't just Yggdrasil...some of the energy was being 'beamed' to her from Vanagdrasil as well, according to the Metanative ID pattern! Even worse, she was only receiving a partial investiture of Divine energy, which severely limited her Goddess abilities.

"Tapping energy from _both_ the God's Realm and the Demon's Realm?" she queried, hoping that the Ygg Xeomnic Network was back online as well. The answering silence indicated that her curiosity wouldn't be resolved in the short term. Daunted by the profound implications of this quiddity, she decided to focus on more personal matters. Now would be as good a time as later to have that discussion with Keiichi about his misconstruing of the husband-wife roles...

However, her carefully-laid out correcting of Keiichi's misbehavior was interrupted when the bottom of the protective bubble they were in suddenly began filling with an unidentifiable liquid. Although the aqueous fluid pooling at the basin of their sphere felt wet and viscous on her feet and calves, it definitely wasn't water. Emitting a lambent glow that resembled the water-glow that an AquaSun radiated, she immediately knew that it wasn't quite the stellar fluid of an AquaSun. Were it the photospheric fluid of an AquaSun, Keiichi would have been incinerated instantly. Contrary to the mortal's comprehension of physical dynamics, a fluidic sun was _hotter_ than an elemental-propagating stellar object; fluid compounds having significantly greater thermal radiative properties than a 'normal' sun's single-element thermonuclear processes. Perhaps it wasn't even a true liquid at all; luminous and warm to the touch, but also mysterious in composition. If she were to contain it within a description, she would term it liquid sky.

She could hear his hyper-ventilating gasping breaths...

Keiichi was beside himself, and she well knew why he was so upset. For almost all of his life, he had been unable to swim at all. Several near-drowning incidents when he was young caused him to retain a deep-seated fear of water. Getting him to go to the Aqua Park for a date took three months of gentle prodding on her part. Peorth's several mishaps didn't help either; her fellow Goddess had become all enamored with Keiichi and had tried to 'date' him with the result that she had almost drowned him and herself. Considering that they were in an enclosure, it meant that there was no outlet for the watery substance, and Keiichi's fear of water was redoubted by his drowning instinct.

"Keiichi, it's okay! It's not water!" she tried to reassure her panicked husband.

"Th..that's easy for you to say! How is this supposed to be okay for _me_? You're a Goddess and can survive a year at the bottom of the ocean, Bell-chan! Me...I've gotta breathe, and last time I checked, I can't breathe underwater," he quickly countered. Seized with consternation, he was talking so fast that his words were clipped like dog barks.

She wasn't too surprised at the heaviness of his affright. After all that he had been through, she was impressed that Keiichi was still in possession of his sanity. If he could be the Ultimate Force once again...but no, this wouldn't be proper. She suspected that the small-but-definite spark of Divinity in her husband had somehow given him an extra resilience, preventing him from succumbing to the sequence of apocalyptic destructions. Any normal mortal would be terrified into paralysis by now, but Keiichi had taken these events in stride. Cevn had repeatedly insisted that Keiichi was more than mortal, and once again Keiichi had proved his inner strength and his tenacity to surmount seemingly inconceivable obstacles. But being in or near water was one of his debilities, and at the moment he was blinded by his panic. "Having a freak-down" as her sister Urd would put it...

"Dearest Keiichi, do you think for one second that I would let you drown?" Belldandy reminded him, trying to ease his fears. "Besides, this isn't exactly Chiba, and you aren't exactly in a mortal physical form right now. I'm not even in a full Goddess form, for that matter. I very much doubt that we were placed in this protective shielding only to be subsequently drowned within it. If worse comes to worse, I can alter my physical manifest...I will become the air that you breath in order to shield you from drowning."

As she felt the sky-water lapping about her waist, she looked outside the bubble and noticed that what Keiichi and she had thought were stars...were actually emergent formations of physical multiverse-clusters; each one a glowing bristle of universes filled with galaxies, cylinders, strings or whatever essences they contained. Her keenness and sensitivity towards Time informed her that the temporal matrix was elaborating itself into a new configuration; the TimeSphere becoming a hypersphere, or a locus, or a cosmos. The TimeStreams were interweaving, rejoining their disparate segments of TimeWeaves, knitting themselves.

Oddly enough, along with the water, she could feel the sensation of _wind_ as she was submerged almost to her neck. A refrain of God's Music caught her attention, a soaring symphonic descant that seemed to beautify the process of creation she and Keiichi were witnessing. To her, this was a blessing in sound to accompany the many reconstructions of light.

"Bell-chan," Keiichi ventured. "I have the feeling that we're going to go somewhere. This is so weird...after all the places I've adventured in the past however-long-it's-been, I'm beginning to feel like a sentimental traveler. Everyone I met was wonderful, everything I did was fun, all the journeys were endless and yet I never really had a destination."

"Keiichi, did you know that sometimes it requires a catastrophe to engender or create optimism? We've been assailed by the absolute worst of catastrophes, but I am beginning to sense that there will be a flowering of aspiration among all of us, Gods and mortals, as a result. Perhaps we will decide to value our innocence with a greater measure of respect," Belldandy noted, adding her own passage of thoughts to his as the sky-water filled up the remaining portion of their bubble.

The final area in their sphere filled with fluid, and she gripped Keiichi's hand tightly to assure him that he wasn't going to drown. But instead of being drenched with water, she felt like she was suspended high in the skies. The enclosure seemed to empty them out like a tea cup...

Falling through blue, falling through gray...

_**Slaphlaash splash plish spiz faplash!!!**_

The solidity of water stung her senses with a sudden hibernal embrace, gem-like as it knived a stark chill that penetrated deep inside of her arms and legs. Keiichi was nearly unconscious from the rapid thermal shock, he was reeling like a drunken salaryman. This _was_ water...very cold water. Reacting swiftly, she grabbed him by the collar and instinctively swam upwards towards the dark blue light overhead...

...almost instantly breaching the water to find that she was looking at a carpeting of white glitters, some of which were crumbling in her hand as she had overreached the edge of the water. Nearby was a sequence of rock benches, and beyond them were trees and snow-sculpted trimmed shrubs. Something narrow and scaly brushed against her calf. Looking down, she saw the familiar white-gold abstract of a koi trout swimming around her ankles. It was Nixie, and she was swimming happily around her legs, welcoming her and Keiichi...

**"SISTER!!! KEIICHI!!! BELLDANDY!!!" **

Several excited voices vied together, shouting joyfully, thrilling with recognition. Turning towards the shouts, she gasped as Megumi, Skuld, Urd, Mara and Peorth were dashing towards them, kicking up flights of snow. Behind them she could discern the front doorway of her temple home flung wide open, and several windows illuminated with night lamps and candles...

They were home!!!

"Quickly! Get some warm blankets. Keiichi's soaked and extremely cold!" she directed, even as her heart fluttered with joyful recognition of all of her dear ones.

"Why bother with that?" Urd said, waving her hand and encanting:

_Forth warbling strands of May's moon flight/Enthrall and bring surcease _

_ Bright effluence of beacon'd light/yield heat's essence increase_

_ To Wing away chill's cloaking blight/and laves likewise release,"_

Instantly, Belldandy felt completely dry and warm, even though she was standing with Keiichi at the edge of her koi pond. Keiichi was groggy, but no longer damp or skin-slack with chill. The pond's water began to soak into her skin with a soothing warmth, taking on the comforting air of an outdoors hot springs. Seconds later, four Divines splashed in the water with various diving leaps and shouts of joyous glee, scattering the koi to the far side of the pond.

"C'mon Megumi, jump in!" Mara shouted.

"Are you nuts? There's 20cm of snow on the ground and it's the second week of March! I'm not gonna....yeeeeek!" Urd had floated out swan-fast, and expertly yanked her into the koi pond.

"You forget that we are le Goddesses," Peorth teased Keiichi's sister. "To take a pond and render it into a comforting hot springs is tres simple for us."

"Elder Sister! Elder Sister!" Skuld shouted, hugging her tightly, her ravenesque hair shivering with emotion as it floated atop the water. "We thought you were gone _forever_!!!"

All she could do was lean into her younger sister's hug, faint with exhaustion and the realization that her exile away from the home that mattered most was finally at an end...

She felt a tickling in her ear. Keiichi had fallen asleep, slumped against her with his chin resting on his shoulder, breathing the slow timbres of slumber. Kissing him on the forehead, she reached around his waist and supported him as they floated in the koi pond.

Without a doubt, Keiichi had given everything he had to see her to safety.

* * *

THE TEMPLE, MARCH 20XX:

"I want to wake 'em up. Sheesh! It's already past noon and they're still sleeping," Skuld complained. "I mean, they suddenly show up in the middle of the night last night, were awake and conscious for all of maybe two minutes, and then went to sleep right there in the koi pond. I didn't even have a chance to tell Elder Sister _anything_!"

"Shortest outdoor bath I've ever taken," Mara commented.

"Skuld, I think they're tired because they're _supposed_ to be tired. Don't you think so?" Tomohisa added. "Cousin Keiichi and Belldandy were totally out of it moments after we found them. Both of them have been gone since Valentine's Day last month. You guys suspected that Belldandy wasn't acting like herself for months before they disappeared. Who knows where they've been! What if they didn't sleep the whole time?"

Skuld scowled at him and stuck her tongue out. His assumption about lack of sleep was completely dorky, but it was obvious that he was right about the two needing their rest for whatevers, reluctant as she was to admit it. Peorth and Urd were nodding their heads in agreement with him. Megumi got up and grabbed a bag of potato chips from the cupboard, ever the girl with the munchies. Mara kept glancing down the hallway towards the two sleepers with a twisted grin of mischief.

"Maybe we should go over this once again and try and figure out what happened," Urd suggested.

"Yeah, like you had anything to do with it, Big Sister! Being that you were all hungovers drunkovers for most of the day yesterday. Big help you were! You just want to know what happened because you missed out on most of it! Megumi and I have already told you twice about everything concerning what happened. Are you _still_ drunk or something? Go grab a handful of grey matter, for a change."

The intended effect was produced, as her Big Sister turned from tan to ruddy red in the face.

"Yeah, kiddo, like you were really doing useful stuff there the last week or so yourself. Eatin' ice cream and playing kissy-kissy make-out on the couch with your new boyfriend most of the day while we were all working hard on the QuadNode. Even Peorth was working hard, despite being in some weird kind of trance and not even knowing what she was doing while she was building that mega-complex Runic working or whatever it was. Mara and I were sweatbrowing it every day, trying to figure out how to open this charming mystery up and get our sis and Keiichi back. And you? What'd you do? So what if you built one of your mechas, sent it through the Gate and accidentally discovered them? You were glued to _him_, not to the task at hand. So you're little discovery was sheer accident, methinks. Big deal, wasn't real you schmleel!" Urd replied smartly.

"Don't talk about me like I'm not here!" Tomohisa protested angrily. Skuld sighed, knowing that Urd had already found one of his pressure points and was playing it like a maestro. Every night, the same thing between her older sister and Tomo! Urd was too obstinate and Tomo wasn't mature enough to shrug off his pet peeves most of the time. Leave it to Urd to pick on her by picking on her boyfriend. At least she didn't pick on Cevn too often to get even with Urd, back when...

"So the boy toy speaketh," Urd taunted.

Recognizing that an argument was quickly brewing between Urd and Tomohisa, Skuld launched into her version of what happened yesterday in order to distract her sister and pacify her boyfriend:

_ "Here's what happened..._

_ "Megumi wakes me up and tells me that my MUSUME mecha has found Keiichi. So we check up on it, and discover that both Keiichi and Cevn are on the other side of the whacked-up Gate of Judgement. Then Peorth vanishes without an explanation. I come up with the genius idea of sending a pulse of energy through my precious and efficient MUSUME device to powerup some mecha on the other side that a Goddess named Keleste was using. Big Sister Mara stumbles into the QuadNode an hour later, totally hungover. Aimlessly, she walks into Peorth's rose-blossom mandala and disappears in a flash, looking totally spazzed. So Megumi and I go grab some lunch. You wake up, Big Sister Urd, and I proceed to tell you about Mara and Peorth. Once I'm finished, you go back to sleep. Tomo, Megumi and I go eat dinner._

_ "Big Sister Urd wakes up again and joins us, probably because she smelled food. She pigs out on order-in pizza and fish chips and then goes back to sleep on the couch like a total slacker. About an hour later we're hearing all these sounds, like fireworks going off in the QuadNode. Remember how I woke you up, Big Sis? If I hadn't, you probably would have slept through it. We both go back into the QuadNode to check it out. We discover that the idiot Gate of Judgement is having a shit-fit, and then it gets all weird and vanishes right before our eyes. But the fireworks sound is still going off, only it seems to be outside the temple._

_ "So we all run out in the porch, and suddenly I'm surprised to see that Peorth and Big Sister Mara are back, because I just about tripped over their feet going out the door. You all know the rest...we all ran out onto the porch, and see Belldandy and Keiichi splashing around in the koi pond. Five minutes later, our happy reunion is cut short as Elder Sister and Keiichi are tucked away in their rooms, crashed out and totally dead to the world asleep. Big Sister Urd, being the sneak she is, goes and checks Cevn's room for some reason, thinking that he's returned to us too. But she notices that the burnt-floor weird mandala thingy in there is gone as well._

_ So that's what happened, you guys..."_

But then there was this morning. The mail arrives with a package containing a book published by Kodansha addressed to Urd with no name on it. Of course, everyone thinks back to that wicked Black Orchid episode where she and Belldandy switched bodies for a time thanks to Mara. After the requisite amount of teasing was finished, they sorted through the household bills that came that day and notice a frail yellowed letter addressed to them from with no name on it. The letter was obviously a goof-up, as no one they know would send them something like that.

At least until they read it.

Yep. Lots of answers and no questions. Yeah, right! If Urd could figure out what happened after all of this, she'd give her Mjolnir and a million yen in a shoebox. A safe bet, because her sister seemed even more clueless each time she repeated her narrative about yesterday's weird sequence of events.

* * *

Belldandy woke up in Keiichi's arms and watched him as he slept placidly. Every few minutes, his body would jerk slightly as his dreams took him down another racecourse. She knew that her husband was dreaming about racing, perhaps recalling his victory over the SurGoth. Unlike her, Keiichi's integration of the memories from his multiple life-lines would be played out mostly within his subconscious, which would probably cause some fitful, sleepless nights.

After he woke up, they spooned each other for a time, staring deeply into each other's eyes. She wanted to make love with him, to share herself in the special oneness way with him, but he was still too exhausted. Her mind kept resounding with the joyful refrain "We're married! We're married!" and then she began to consider the consequences of their actions.

It was almost like she and Keiichi had eloped and got married in secret, a common romantic scenario in many Earthrealm cultures.

Keiichi's stomach growled, hinting that it was time to get dressed and join the others in the dining room or Tea Room. Putting on her silk houserobe and house-slippers, she walked with him into the dining room.

"Please forgive me, but I just don't feel up to making breakfast this morning," she offered in apology as Urd, Skuld and the others congregated into the dining room.

"Breakfast? It's already 2 in the afternoon, sis," Urd noted. "Must have been some session of get-acquainted sex you two had all morning, to keep you in the bedroom this long into the day..."

"Grrrr!" Skuld growled, glaring at Keiichi. Her husband was red-faced, which Skuld interpreted as an admission of guilt.

"Urd, you are so unkind! You _know_ that Keiichi and I were sleeping the whole time," Belldandy answered back crisply. "Don't impute false assertions that you know cannot be! We don't need such an upset to start off our first day back home."

"Great!" Peorth noted. "They've been back a few hours and the vaudeville is already starting up! Les trois soeurs folles are at it again..."

"Quatre soeurs, you idiot!" Mara corrected. "But it's only the Goddess side of the sisters that act so hyper. Me, I'm a creature of habit who's too mature for that kind of childish stuff."

"Oh really, my dear Twin Sister?" Urd challenged in a haughty voice. "What about Is..il..bli..us? Who was childish enough to be fooled by the half-visible title of Cevn's book? Who was the one who got all banged up in something called...ah yes!..the Demon Rally?"

"Are you calling me stupid?" Mara shot back angrily. "I wasn't the one who tried to get Keiichi and Belldandy to have sex during that visit to Hakone National Park a couple years ago by sneaking some messed-up love potion into a thermos..."

"And how did you know about _that_, huh?" Urd argued. "Looks like someone was spying on the two lovebirds..."

"Of course I was spying! That's back when it was my _mission_ to try and Curse Keiichi! I wouldn't dream about spying on them like I did all those other times after they started having..."

"_Times_!!!" Keiichi blurted out.

"Whoops! I..er..heh heh..it was _Hild_. Hild put me up to it. You know how Urd's mom can be!" Mara hastily remedied, her heart doing a backflip because she had stumbled up.

"Hild? My ass!" Skuld interjected. "Every time you do something bad, you blame it on Hild. I hope she's listening, because when she learns about all the ecchi things you blame on her, she'll..."

For some reason, the feistiness in Mara's expression quickly turned into a solemn, pale mien.

"Something really extreme happened to all of us. When you mentioned Hild, I felt dark shadows instead of resentment, as if she did something horrible to me," Mara noted.

"Extreme is an understatement," Peorth elaborated. "I don't know if this is true or not, but I have the distinct impression that I watched the whole of existence...die. I can't clearly formulate it in my mind, but my heart feels like something wilted inside of it, like roses hiding underground in the cold of winter."

"But it came alive again, didn't it Peorth?" Belldandy asked in a measured voice.

"Hmm, what I don't understand is how you and Mara disappeared and then reappeared _right before_ sis and Keiichi wound up splashing around in the koi pond. I saw both of you disappear...but I didn't see you reappear."

"Skuld, I remember accidentally stepping into that mandala Peorth was making...and then I was back in the QuadNode..."

"So you weren't as drunk as the Brat claimed, Mara?" Urd teased, arching her eyebrows as she seized Skuld with a haughty glance.

"QuadNode?" Belldandy asked as Skuld's face colored with irritation.

"Long story. When you and Keiichi disappeared, we all moved in her and combined our labs and the office part of Mara's Demoness Lair to make a superlab to try and find you..." Urd explained.

"You really went to such efforts to find us?" Keiichi asked.

"You've been gone almost a month after you were supposed to be married," Urd answered.

"Married? But we weren't planning to be married for almost a year..."

A bowl of ice cream fell off the table, accompanied by a spilled raspberry shake being splashed on almost everyone sitting in the dining room.

"Wh..wha..wha...wha...what is that on your finger!" Skuld shouted, her eyes just about pulling themselves out their sockets as she eyed Belldandy's finger. "That's a..a.._wedding ring_ next to your engagement ring! H..h..how could that have gotten on your finger..."

"Keiichi put it there," Belldandy answered sweetly.

"_WHAAAAAT?!!!"_

"Hold your Sleipnirs for a minute!" Urd blurted out, her eyes glistening mischievously like a hungry fox's, making Belldandy feel very nervous. "Pray tell us_why_ you are wearing a wedding ring when you haven't gotten married, _Little_ Sister? Who gave you the okay to jump the gun and start acting like you're already married? And this had better be good, otherwise Keiichi's gonna be neck deep in boiling miso soup after I get through with him. You hear that, Keiichi?"

"Take it off!" Skuld screamed. "You can't just start wearing a wedding ring when you aren't married! I won't allow it! That's _lying_! Keiichi...talk some sense into her! Make my sister understand why she can't wear that ring..."

"We should also consider what Mom will do if she finds you wearing a ring. Test Mortal or not, Keiichi might wind up in a worse place than the middle of Algeria if our Mother finds out," Urd contended, circling her finger in the air.

"I don't care what Mom is going to think. This is _my_ wedding ring! This is the precious ring that my dearest Keiichi gave me as proof of our love. I'm not just going to take it off because you want me to...and that's final," Belldandy insisted with all the conviction she could muster.

Knowing that she was probably sounding more than a little stubborn to her sisters and Megumi, she switched tact and decided to offer an explanation, as best she could, about the events that led up to Keiichi's impromptu 'marriage' to her as reality crumbled all around their heads. When she finished, Skuld was looking at her with a contorted expression of angry tears. Keiichi was sobbing as he sat next to her, his heart kindled by the narrative. Her description was so epic and romantic, it had slam-dunked everyone emotionally.

"Look, Belldandy," Mara said in an emotionally wavering voice as she wiped her eyes on the sleeve of her blouse. "I usually don't agree with the Brat, but this time she's absolutely right. You and Keiichi cannot go parading around like you're married. Consider what would happen if your parents found out...if _his_ parents found out. Consider how it will impact his friends at school once they notice that you're wearing a wedding ring. You think Urd and Peorth are gossipmongers? There is one other important thing to consider...you're wearing a ring and _he_ isn't."

"N..no!" Keiichi shouted, looking back and forth between his finger and Belldandy's. "Why is she wearing a ring and I'm not?"

"I see your point," Urd noted sharply. "Naturally, it takes a Demoness to notice such things, ne? If one of you two is seen in public wearing a ring and the other isn't, most everybody is going to think one of two things: either you're retarded, or one of you got married and the other one didn't. In other words, somebody's committing adultery...which is prohibited by almost every major Earthrealm religion and is also illegal in many countries. We can't have our dear sister cast about false impressions, imputing that which is not true."

Urd smirked with a "gotchya!" expression, and Belldandy felt stung by her Older Sister's comeback. She had jumped on her sister's case just a few minutes ago, and now Urd was paying her back by serving up the same censuring words.

"Or maybe one of the rings got lost? That could explain why onee-chan has a ring and Keiichi doesn't," Skuld added.

"Lost?" Keiichi interjected emphatically, his panicked expression poignant. He jumped up from the table and quickly ran over to the refrigerator. Belldandy was curious about his silly behavior, because he was fumbling through shelves and food containers like a prospector seeking an ore nugget. Withdrawing a blue felt ring box, he sighed with relief. He opened it up and almost choked when he noticed that there was only one ring inside of it.

"You gotta be kidding!" Urd commented in a dramatic voice of exasperation. "You kept your _wedding rings_ in the refrigerator?"

Belldandy almost giggled as she watched Keiichi's angst diminish into the red-faced sheepish expression.

"I think it's going to be necessary for me to start using a tracer spell," Belldandy noted, looking at Keiichi.

"Bwah haha hah ha!"

She felt sorry for her boyfriend, who looked miserable in the midst of laughter...his sister Megumi laughing the loudest of all despite being a mortal...

"I haven't decided if I'll take this ring off yet, but I'll take into account all the concerns you have mentioned," Belldandy noted. "While we're on the subject of unexpected surprises, I want a proper explanation from the two of you, Skuld and Tomohisa, about why you are trying to conceal something from me. I thought I was imagining things at first, but now I'm not so sure. Isn't it rather silly for the two of you to assume that I wouldn't notice that you are holding hands underneath the table?"

"Yeeep!"

* * *

She had returned to the temple every night for over a month, only to find each time that Belldandy and Keiichi were gone. Oddly enough, no one was talking about any wedding preparations, and it seemed that Belldandy and Keiichi had disappeared the same day she sent Cevn through the mandala to Vanagdrasil. Then Peorth and Mara disappeared into a sophisticated mandala that Peorth had created. She had a suspicion that this was a possible gateway to Eternity, but the mandala was too complex for even her to decipher. Her realm of expertise was aligned with DivineTech, not the mystic arts like her older sisters and Peorth.

The only reasonable deduction from all of this was that Time seemed to have been 'adjusted' in a way she hadn't expected. Instead of mid-February, it was mid-March when Keiichi and Belldandy returned. Skuld, Urd, Mara and Peorth had built a QuadNode to find Keiichi and Belldandy. A Gate of Judgement had been outfitted with all sorts of testing equipment; and she recognized it from the abortive wedding that the Dark Lord had dragged her and the Quad to, seemingly eons ago. But she was unable to make the logical or intuitive leap that explained why it was _here_ if there had never been a February wedding planned in the first place. Yet, Urd and the rest seemed to think that it had something to do with Belldandy and Keiichi's vanishing...

Confusion, confusion, confusion!

"A better line of inquiry would be to question why Time seems to be bent forward and backwards, Younger," GranSkuld noted, catching her by surprise. She whirled around to look at her Elder self; GranSkuld was dressed in an elaborate kimono with a fur collar, looking like a matsuri-festive version of a yuki-onna with her milk-white long hair.

"What do you mean?"

"Cevn. Remember the meaning of your instructions to him? You told him that he had to let Urd love another? Well, he's done that in more ways than one. We know that he released her from her Norn of the Past romantic limitations. And now she has touched a part of love in other men. But this has only perpetuated her longing for completion," GranSkuld explained.

"But that's not what I meant!" she argued.

"This may sound facile, but perhaps the only way he could interpret this was to send Time forward. He's not here, which allows for Urd to truly be free of him in every sense. Our Older Sister now has the opportunity to choose love, without him being part of the equation."

"But that's too much! Why would he take himself out? Wouldn't he _want_ to return, so he could get back with Urd?"

"Yes, I'm sure he does. Younger, I share your concern about his absence, and the fact that reality wasn't corrected in the manner which we expected," her Elder form said slowly.

"If you truly love someone, set them free. If they return to you, then their love is sincere," she recited in a schoolgirl's voice. "It's a common saying among Earthrealm teens, isn't it? Silly, but in this case, he's put it to the test."

"Which is dangerous," GranSkuld commented. "He's playing with a huge risk, leaving our sister Urd to her own devices. You know how seductive she can be when she turns on the sex appeal..."

"...and how easily she can be seduced, as well."

"We need to even the odds, somehow, Younger."

"I have just the idea, Elder. Remember when the four guys were stranded back in the 14th century?"

"That's a stroke of brilliance!" Elder Skuld agreed. "We can use that to our advantage. You must have imagined how he felt...how they all felt, stranded in the past with no hope of reuniting with their loved ones. Even more, Urd went back to that historical era to fetch them, witnessing their experience first-hand. What if we arranged for certain items that have been lost to antiquity to be 'discovered' by certain archaeologists?"

"It's possible that she might jump after something like that. We read manga, Belldandy reads modern fiction, and Urd reads classics. Our older sister has a penchant for poems, especially old ones. I defer to your judgment, Elder."

"Of course you do, Younger."

"But I still get to write that final line in the Enigma Book!"

"Naturally," GranSkuld sighed. "That's your privilege, not mine."

Hovering over to the Enigma Book, she opened the endpages and contemplated what to write. Drawing a deep breath, she manifested a calligraphy brush and scribbled an instruction in the final margin in flowing kanji.

"Well, that was really bold of you to write!" GranSkuld noted. "A bit more...direct than what I would have written in there. Nonetheless, I'm sure the point will get across to him. I approve of it, even if it's _more dangerous_ than what I would have advised."

"Hee hehee!" she giggled. "This is going to be majorly fun to watch, once he reads what I just wrote."

Her giggling was contagious, especially so to her older self. GranSkuld broke into rich laughter. After all, how can one hide a laugh from themselves?

"Elder, promise me that we'll meet again if he does make it back here?"

"Are you kidding? I wouldn't miss it for the world, the Mid-Light or the OmniOm! The three of us: you, me and we when we were young. But you really must run along now, you have your daughters to mind. If you dilly-dally here too much longer, Pryzm's going to get into trouble," GranSkuld cautioned in a teasing voice.

"How do you know that?"

"Well, I _have_ been where you're going?"

"Yeah. Forgot. You going back to the Mid-Light?"

"Yes. After seeing one entire Future from start to end, I don't want to repeat the experience too many times. In the Mid-Light, there is no sense of Time like there is here. In a way, I'm quite lucky because I'm one of the privileged few who can travel freely between Life and Death.

"Just a question before you go," Skuld requested. "Is there Time there, in the Mid-Light?"

"No," GranSkuld replied promptly...at little too promptly for Skuld's comfort. "Then again, there isn't Time here either..."

"HUH?"

"You forgot what you remembered. But I recall it plain as day, because I was there. He fastened the beginning of Time with the end of Time. It's now simply a cycle. TimeCosm in structure, and all that. You might as well keep calling it Time, because the alternative is too confusing. Can't call Time a Chronocyclus now, can we?"

"Yeah, that's one way of looking at it..."

"I will see you on the other side, around the cove of the Future, Younger."

"See ya around!"

* * *

"Professor?"

_**knock knock**_

"Professor? Are you presentable?" a muffled voice sounds off.

The door half-rattled with the knocking, which sounded to me like an echoing rumble as my awareness seemed silted with a fog of dusty drowsiness. The last thing that I remembered was...well, I really couldn't remember much of anything. This was definitely one of those wake-up-with-a-blank-slate experiences, only tenfold worse. Dimly, I recalled a mental image of Skuld as a shadow figure appearing at my N.I.T. office out of the blue, and then last night I dreamt about drawing something on the floor with charcoal pencils...

_**knock knock!**_

"Professor, I've brought you tea and sandwiches."

More door-raps, sounded deeper than the thin raspy sound of someone tapping on a shoji door. Knocking on the thin shoji doorframes was almost an impossibility, as I had learned early on. Knock hard on the shoji, and one could dislodge it from the floor runner trestles. So I had learned to 'knock' by following Keiichi's advice: either lightly tapping with knuckles or drum-rolling with my fingers.

I looked up...and found myself in an unfamiliar room. A _very_ unfamiliar room.

"Cor! You're not havin' me on...I'm coming in straightaways, like or not. I don't have time to dally on visiting faculty who decide to sleep in past breakfast!" the female voice announced with a twinge of irritation. I drowsily watched as a woman...or more properly, a lady...walked in and set a tray service down on an end table. She was grey-haired, perhaps in her mid-fifties, with a rounded face with the slight beginning of jowls, a short nose underlined by thin lips, and limpid eyes framed by arching rounded eyebrows. She nodded to me and made for the door, and then stopped.

"Professor, Lord Reginald asked me to remind you to arrive two hours early for your first lecture tomorrow," she noted, and then left the room before I could even thank her.

"Lord Reginald?" I asked myself as I watched the steam rising from the tea service.

I was in a three-room apartment dwelling of some kind, markedly different than any place I had ever been in my life. The walls were roughly plastered, with narrow thick windows inset in what looked like stone sills. A fireplace bricked with hewn rock filled part of one wall, firewood stacked next to the grating. The living room was highlighted by museum-quality furniture that looked more expensive than the rest of the room, including a sofa/settee/chair arrangement with each piece decorated with bellflower marquetry bands, ornately gilded and fluted front legs, with a rich golden damask and button-tufted upholstery. Chairs I wouldn't dream of sitting in. Several large paintings in ornate-carved rustic frames were mounted on the wall, along with a pair of Japonisme painted panels contained within delicate ebonized wallshelves.

The living room was on a lower level; I had to step up to access the study and the bedroom. The study consisted of a bookshelf stocked with antiquarian books, thickly leathered and exuding a musty odor. A walnut great-desk with a cabled roof, simulated dormer windows, and rich inlays trimmed with lacquered board with decorative ivy leaves was set against in a corner. It was side-illuminated by another narrow window, and a copy of Magnum Organum sat on the desktop. Oddly, I didn't see any electrical lamps, only wall-sconces. Even the desk had sconces built in on each side to hold candles.

I peeked in the bedroom and noticed a four-poster bed, several small tables, a large wardrobe that I could have walked into comfortably, and more of those odd-looking lamps...

All these expensive furnishings made it eminently clear that I was in a showcase suite of rooms, rather than a living space. Anxiety provoked by the decor, I searched the three rooms for signs of modernity. I found antique cigar boxes, several very old issues of Punch magazine, hand-held lamp and candleholders, and bric-a-brac that belonged in an antiques store.

There wasn't a single electric appliance in the flat.

Increasing wired with uncomfortability, I pulled the brass doorknob to open the door and step outside of my rooms. I found myself in a gallery hallway, standing against a set of stair-rails that opened up into a narrow stairwell that descended along a wood-paneled foyer wall. Every wall in sight was adorned with tightly-packed arrangements of framed portraiture paintings that appeared Baroque, Modern Gothic, or pre-Romantic in execution. I was on the second floor; overhead, the interior ceilings were highlighted with tressed gables and dark-stained overhead beams, with a chandelier hoisted in the middle. The stairs and railings were well-polished by what appeared to be centuries of use.

Rushing down the two flights of stairs, my heart was fever-pitching with suspicion as the creaks of the protesting wood and my footsteps filled the air with a noisome clatter. Reaching the mephitic foyer-cum-entryway, I flung open the heavy door and almost tripped over my feet as I stepped out onto an awning-covered portico.

As I surveyed the road, all I could see were horses, horse-drawn carriages, and men and women dressed richly in Victorian-era attire. There were no telephone wiring or electrical cables overhead, nor were there sounds of street traffic, such as cars or trucks. The streets weren't paved, they were cobbled with worn stone. The air was sounded with a constant murmuring susurration punctuated by the clip-clopping of hooves. The other buildings in sight were all stout grandhouses built out of stone bricking and marble. Where I should have seen street lights, I saw lamp posts. The architecture had a distinctive British flavoring as a whole, with its tightly-compacted stone-works row houses.

The women were dressed in elaborate gowns with various floral prints against dull-colored backgrounds. Their dresses were tightly corseted at the waist, with flowing thick skirts covered by what appeared to be petticoats. The men almost all had beards of varying length, and many were dressed in formal dark waistcoats and longcoats. Several had watch-chains dangling from breast pockets. Almost every adult male in sight sported a hat; I noted mufflers, bowlers, stockings, masher caps and toppers. The impression was so intense, my mind flighted with the possibility that I had stumbled onto a studio set where they were filming a modern adaptation of "Tales of Two Cities" or some other 19th century period-piece novel.

Beyond the rooflines of the townhouses, I could see a domed capital structure that was vaguely familiar, but just outside of recognition. For some reason, it reminded me of Wren's famous St. Paul's Cathedral, only much smaller in scale. Looking down the other direction of the slightly curving avenue I stood upon, I saw a tall church spire in the distance...

With a sinking feeling, I realized that...once again...I was a stranger in a strange land.


	159. Pt 159: Syntrasilian Waltz

**Part 159: Syntrasilian Waltz**

Two months has passed since Belldandy and Keiichi had returned. Tomohisa was back in school...and those days he was gone were bothersome because she missed him so much. The tension burned most brightly for her when he came home from school yesterday...and now she had gone and done something stupid. Which brought her to the temples porch to have a heart-to-heart with her onee-chan. The _sane_ onee-chan...

"There's always a complication when it comes to guys," Belldandy advised Skuld while they were eating their lunch sandwiches and bentos on the temple's veranda, enjoying the spring weather. "Simply put, they don't always _think_ certain things all the way through. Look at the situations your sister Urd has found herself in with the men who are interested in her. When we all discovered that our Norn statuses were altered, she recognized that she was no long bidden to the Past, and that she was free to accept romantic Love. So she immediately tried dating several Earthrealm men. Each of them were good-looking, well-read and witty conversationalists. But Urd found that their conversation skills centered on a particular focus that the mortals call "sweet-talking". Each man in turn tried to convince her to go to one of those 'love hotels' before they even knew even the slightest bit of what kind of a person she is. Of course, she refused this, and then they never called again."

"Yeah, I see guys like that all the time when I wait for Tomohisa after school. Some of his idiot classmates even act that way, getting all chatty with me when they know that Tomo and I are going out. Those kinds of irritating guys are the lowest! I call them 'the Shallowmen'," Skuld commented.

"Unfortunately, this superficiality is true for many Earthrealm males," Belldandy confirmed. "So many people express themselves in surface-works, blithely caught up in their desires while giving very little of themselves away. Again, our older sister can be seen as an example of this. As you know, several Gods have been paying court to her over the past month, but all they seem to desire is the status of dating a Norn. Even while she dismissed these admirers, Urd has chosen to rekindle her former relationship with Troubadour. Troubadour and Urd together is destined to only bring grief to both, but he has enchanted our sister to the point where she's completely oblivious to the reality that she is simply replaying her prior affections towards him. Troubadour is dubious and insincere; by being unfaithful to her, he is not reflecting the earnest love our sister has for him. He refuses that which is right in front of him, which is one of the complications I speak of. As you know, many mortal men do this, but it is less frequent with Divines. With men and Gods, a Goddess must remember that _the intention of love doesn't fully represent the proportion of love_."

Skuld nodded her head, again impressed with the fact that her sister always seemed to have a ready fount of wisdom to dispense on matters Divine and mortal. In this case, the troubling matter that had drawn her to seek out her elder sis was of the mortal ken.

Why was love such a bundle of trouble?

"You and Tomohisa had a fight, and that's a normal occurrence when love and affection is shared between two," Belldandy continued. "You'll both find your way through the maze of emotions and turmoil, Skuld. Just give it time."

"I know that, but what do I do with the _pain_?" Skuld replied. "I feel like I've really hurt him...which _hurts me_. I wouldn't be surprised that he's probably feeling the same way as I do. Like he's wronged me, and now I'm hurting because of it. He's so quick to jump on himself and think he's done something wrong! But I'm uncertain about what to do next. Perhaps our hearts are together in hurt, but I want the happiness part too. I want our hearts to be together in happiness! We argued over something stupid; about some club at school that he wanted to check out to see if it was worth joining. But that club meets after school on Saturdays, which would keep him there for most of the rest of the afternoon. I've told him already how I feel about this. Sunday is the only whole day we get to ourselves as it is. But if he joins that club, Saturdays are going to be ruined because he won't even make it home in time for dinner."

"Ruined?" Belldandy asked, almost wanting to giggle at her little sister's screwy way of seeing things. "The only thing that is ruined is your patience, my crazy Little Sister. Skuld, I think you have a little streak of possessiveness towards him."

"No way!!!" Skuld retorted defiantly. "I'm not like that! I don't get all wrapped up in what he's doing, and I'm not one of those retarded brainless girls who try to monopolize their boyfriends all of his time. You know, the ones that say 'hang with me, or you'll be set free.' You can't possibly mean that I..."

"Same as it was for me when Keiichi and I first discovered our feelings for each other," Belldandy interrupted her younger sis, who was definitely swinging into 'kid mode'.

"In my view, Tomohisa is acting with great maturity for a 16-year-old Earthrealm adolescent boy. The important matter to bear in mind is that _he asked you_; he didn't just join the club, and then _tell_ you, Skuld. This flowering of respect discloses where his heart truly lies. Your boyfriend values your thoughts and feelings, of this you can be assured. You've probably observed how clingy his classmates are to their friends and especially to their girlfriends. You must remember that Tomohisa is trying to be independent, while also being dependable towards you. The balance he seeks between you and his social life is surely delicate and difficult to accomplish. I watched Keiichi struggle with this very same plight...and he was already an adult when we fell in love. Your dear Tomohisa needs his friends and hobbies, just as much as you or I would want to enjoy making new friends. Skuld, do you think that this extra time he may be spending at school won't augur certain changes? As Norns, we all know that life bears consequences, whether we wish to see them or not. Would you consider this: that it may be possible that Tomohisa's remaining at school longer on Saturdays will create a new feeling in him? That he might treasure his moments with you _more_, since there's less of them?"

Skuld already knew the answer to that one. Once again, her older sister had aced her by virtue of expertise. Then again, Belldandy and Keiichi have been in love for five years, and were getting married the second weekend in November, which was only a little over six months away. Already, her sister was spending part of her mornings evaluating the preliminary plans for their wedding and whimsically browsing through bridal catalogs, Holy Bell looking over her shoulder. A month after Belldandy and Keiichi had returned, they had fully got their bearings back and returned to the routines of life. She had also noticed a slight changing in the tenor of household; that things were going to start getting hectic the closer it came to their wedding. Especially once their Mother gets into her "Goddess of Marriages" mode and starts to micro-manage everything. Wisely, her Elder Sister was getting prepared ahead of time, so she could battle it out with Mom over minutiae in the times to come.

Skuld already knew the answer to the other problem, the "Urd problem" as she and Belldandy had nicked it. They both agreed that the man who was meant for Urd wasn't Troubadour...and wasn't to be found, for that matter...which was why Urd's initial attempts at dating kept blowing up in her face.

Stupid Big Sister!

The last thing either of them had ever expected was for Urd to hook up with Troubadour, but their errant Big Sister had pulled herself out of the dating slump by returning to what she thought was a safe haven. A safe haven with no roof to thwart the torrential downpouring of loneliness.

Big Sister Baka!

Tomohisa was quite angry when she dropped him off at school this morning; but Skuld knew that he would be in an entirely different mood when he came home from school today. After all, the first term was just firing up and he was excited about being back to high school after the spring break. And a few weeks from now, the first week of May would usher in the beginning of the summer baseball season. She felt proud of him in a way; he had already elected to take summer school classes in July during summer break instead of hanging around the house and being lazy. He still held onto his dream about playing baseball, perhaps semi-pro or Nippon League pro. She knew that he could probably make it into the big leagues, if he didn't have his asthma to contend with. Once again, she argued with herself about whether or not she should just "do a Goddess move" as her sisters would put it, and get rid of it for him once and for all.

* * *

With a detached eye, Urd watched her two younger sisters sitting on the porch as they discussing Skuld's boyfriend problems. They had no idea what boyfriend problems _really_ were all about...

So much had happened over the last couple months since Belldandy and Keiichi had returned, she felt like an entire Deca's life experience had been compressed into 60 days. During the past five years, she had grown comfortable with scaling her life to fit the two balances of Goddess and Earthrealm dweller. Usually, one or the other 'halves' of her life would go haywire in turn, but not both at the same time. Not too often, anyway.

But this time, it had _all_ gone amok on her.

This March and April were so packed with craziness and turmoil, Megumi had come up with the apt analogy that the household "was recovering from heart surgery, with occasional seizures." Funny that Keiichi's sister, who was the most mortal one of the bunch, was the one who put her finger tightest on the pulse of the insanity of those two months.

Things started off with a gong-a-long bang during the first two days after Belldandy and Keiichi had returned to the temple. There was that business about the wedding ring her sister was wearing, which she stubbornly refused to take off for almost a week. Skuld was so upset about this, she regressed into a curmudgeon holy terror and started acting out in the worst way. She nearly had to dose her younger sister with a sleeping potion, in order to rescue her middle sister from a world of shit. The willful brat-girl was planning to call Mom and spill the details about the ring, rather than doing it the right way: getting her way by arguing.

As pissed off as her younger sis was towards the situation with the ring, with its presumption that Bell and K1 were married...Belldandy was just as miffed at Skuld for hooking up with Tomohisa without her permission. Strange, that one. _Bell_ certainly didn't ask anyone when she decided to stay here with Keiichi, wish or no wish. Urd was unconvinced that Belldandy's ill-at-ease attitude around Skuld was the result of being force-fed the sight of their little sister behaving in a new, romantic, light. At least Keiichi was more honest than her sister; he basically admitted that most of his irritation was caused by his and Bell's absence while his cousin Tomo had swooped on Skuld...that he was bummed out because he had missed all the fun.

They had been so busy trying to find everyone who had disappeared that they spaced out checking the mail for almost a month. Among the items in the slew of mail that crammed the mailbox was a curious yellowed letter that basically crumpled once it was opened, and a book of poetry addressed to her with no return address. The letter was over a hundred years old, so fragile that it fell to pieces when they were halfway through reading it. The "Scatterbrush" book of poetry was intriguing, but she shelved it for the time being.

The next day was the earthquake.

Not a killer one like Kobe in 1995 or the Great Kanto quake in 1923, but it was 6.2 on the Richter Scale, which blew down some buildings and crashed a ton of stuff in her "Urd's Lab" room and elsewhere else in the temple. She knew that she could have totally gotten away with preventing the quake, as she was immune to any punishing license restrictions from the Lord, courtesy of something Cevn supposedly did almost two years earlier. But she didn't want to take any chances with all the instability on the other side of the Living Gate. Yggdrasil wasn't Yggdrasil any more, it was part of a new realm called Syntrasil...and shit was majorly messed up there as Gods and Demons scrambled around like blind mice, trying to figure out what the hell happened to them. And then there was that XOM super-network that was supposedly netted in with the Demon's computer...

Whose bright idea was it to try and mix Gods and Demons in a single Realm? That was like mixing wasabi paste with a malted milkshake and expecting it to taste like raspberries.

After the quake, Peorth was immediately summoned back to Ygg...which was now a 'sub-Realm' of Syntrasil...to try and clean up the chaos in the Sysop office. The damned new XOM computer was so tricky and advanced, everyone thought it had gone on strike because they were always catching a 'line busy' experience whenever they tried to contact it.

Even the Living Gate was massively confused by the goings-on 'upstairs'. With Gate-like logic, she claimed that she wasn't certain that the transfer coordinates actually linked up with Syntrasil, and thus wouldn't allow she or her sisters to attempt passage to Ygg after Peorth left.

N.I.T. was closed for a couple days because of the quake, so Keiichi and Bell went there and got caught up in the round-up of volunteers to pick up the pieces. The quake was a tectonic 'fly in the ointment'; not severe enough to inflict any major damage but notable because it caused 'irritating damage' such as books piling out of the shelves in the N.I.T. library. Luckily, no one saw Bell's wedding ring because they were all using heavy-duty gardening gloves as they sifted through the breakage and restored what had been crashed.

While she was helping with the "KP Krew" as Sayoko Mishima had called their group, one of Sayoko's grad-school classmates whipped up on her, much to the surprise of everyone else. He looked like a pretty cool guy, and after almost a hundred millennia of being barred from romance, he was the water to quench her thirst. Her three sisters gave her massive hassles when she accepted his offer to go on a date. Turned out he was a horny dickhead who simply wanted to get laid on the cheap. Of course, after it all played out and she ditched his dumb ass after dining out with him, her sisters scorned her for being "stupid". They still kept insisting that she was supposed to be with Cevn, which was crazy because he wasn't around and she didn't have any feelings for him anyway.

The Brat and her boy-toy were going through all the moves that typically happen early on in a relationship. Meaning that they only had eyes for each other and were walking around the temple love-dazed. She never imagined her Little Sis getting together with an Earthrealm guy, let alone Keiichi's cousin. Yeah, there was that time with Sentaro, but then Sentaro moved away with his folks. The only good thing about Skuld being in love was that it afforded plenty of opportunities for Big-Sister tease-a-thons; provoking her younger sis until she was scamper-faced with embarrassment and resentment.

Urd reflected on the possibility that Skuld's blissed-out 'nine heavens of love' with Tomohisa was the trigger for much of what followed in her life...

About three weeks (and five abortive dates) after the weirded-out event that had created Syntrasil and brought her sis and Keiichi back, they were finally able to hie it up to Yggdrasil to visit the parents and check out the all the changes everyone was talking about. Skuld was lovesick every minute of it, and Bell and she had to cover for their kid sister because Mom picked up on how moody she was. Skuld's cheerless emotional bouts definitely weren't helped by the necessity that she keep her mouth shut about Tomohisa; she couldn't breathe a word of her new love to Mom and Dad. Mentioning Tomohisa in front of the folks..._that_ would have been a disaster on the same scale as this "ReCreation Event" thing.

Who decided to call it the "ReCreation" anyway? Doesn't re-creation imply that something was destroyed?

During their visit to the God's Realm, Belldandy and Skuld both kept harping on her to return to the Earthrealm with them. Easy for those two to say, because they had boyfriends waiting for them back there. Seeing her sisters acting so lovesick, Urd was once again reminded that she was single, willing and able. But unlike her sisters, the guys and Gods that flirted with her were all a bunch of boors. None of them were anything near relationship material; they didn't rocket her socket.

And that's when Troubadour showed up...

* * *

"Hey," Troubadour hailed her in a soft voice, his casual greeting asserting a reminder of his former intimacy with her. Like most lovers, they had evolved their special greetings and easygoing familiarities with each other over the several millennia of their relationship. Seeing him brought out an odd combination of feelings; pleasant recollections and a rooty awareness that she had been a teenager when she and Troubadour were an item. Now, she was TwentySeven Decas old...and definitely not a boy-crazy teenage Goddess.

"Hey back at you," Urd replied, trying to keep it simple with him. Remembering that she _had_ to keep it simple with him because he was a simpleton in his own way. Not a simpleton by idiocy, but easily confused because he was a dreamer rather than a thinker.

"Where have you been?" he asked.

"Hmm, where have _you_ been, rather?" she countered. There probably wasn't a God in Syntrasil that didn't know that she and her sisters were on the Earthrealm. Belldandy's relationship with Keiichi was especially high profile because it was so unusual to see Goddesses romantically inclined towards mortals, and because he was the Test Mortal.

"I could say that I've been a bad boy, but that would be answering _what_ I am, not where I've been," Troubadour replied in a flirty voice. "Actually, I've been on the lookout."

"For who?"

"For you, Urd."

"Cheh! Don't even try that one with me, Troubadour," Urd answered dismissively. Even though she wanted to give him the grand send-off, she was feeling a little flit of blood rushing in her cheeks. It was a silent pleasure; a smooth sailing happy sensation in her heart to hear him admit that he still found her attractive, and that he meant it.

After all these Decas...

"No, I really have been looking for _you,"_ he reiterated. "Word's up that you're no longer Norn of the Past, Urd. Which puts you back on the love float, as far as the male half of Yggdrasil is concerned. It's not just me...there's lots of Gods who are seeking you out. No doubt you're already aware of this. So don't get all smite with me just because I'm being truthful with you."

"You? Truthful? Gimme a break, Troubadour!"

"My Muse is my truth and you cannot deny that," he countered. "Me and my Muse + you = lots of fun times back when we were young. Another truth that you cannot deny. It's certainly troublesome isn't it...having a disconnect between your mind and your heart, ne?"

Urd pondered that one for a moment. In terms of romance, when her mind touched her heart, it was always repelled by her Norn of the Past status. Only bleakness, only emptiness were redeemed when she searched out the sentimental heart-passages in her kokoro. After almost Ten Decamillennia of being single, could she be in a rut? She was so used to love being a stale, abstract state of being. Momentarily worried, she felt a certain vulnerability when she considered how cold her heart seemed to have become because she equated love with absence.

Troubadour was a presence, not an absence.

Sometime between her Sixteenth and Seventeenth Decas, she had fallen off of her senses, finding a love in him that burned far deeper than anything she could imagine. That first time she Shared with him was off-the-scale intense...

During the millennia she was with him, she braved all types of hazards just to strive to prove her love to him. _That's_ how much she adored him back then. Fighting with Mom and Dad over him had been a frequent occurrence, because they didn't like the fact that their eldest daughter was going steady with an Earth Spirit Grade god of "dubious reputation". Belldandy had stiff-lipped Troubadour most of the time, keeping diffident but distant. And Skuld was still a swaddle-puff back then, all nascent and cute and oblivious to what was going on between her and Troubadour. Fifteen Decas separated her and Skuld in age; during her times with Troubadour, those millennia of distinction seemed like an entire lifetime to her teenaged self.

A little bit of her 'inner teenager' seemed to stir itself up in Urd's breast, granting her a renewed youthfulness as certain capricious sentiments were activated by the sight and sound of Troubadour. A little too much...

Urd shook her head with quick side-to-side motions, like she sometimes did after a bath when she wanted to air out her long strands of wet hair.

"Wahhh! How can he still do that to me?" she wondered as she regarded Troubadour anew. Just seeing him kept stirring up long-buried feelings and memories, surprisingly energetic and captivating.

"Well?" he asked.

"Well what?"

"Well why don't you keep me company for a little while, for old time's sake?" he requested. "I'll even serenade you like I did when we were fabulously young and carefree..."

_No way. Uh-nnh! Not gonna happen. Nice, but not nice. Well, kinda nice. But not healthy. But who cares about health? Sorta interesting. Maybe worth considering for a moment. No. Cannot. Life is better without him. Life was good when I was with him. Stopit! Can't do this, it'll cause changes. Change is fun. Music is fun. Haven't had fun in such a long time. Stop letting him in! But no one has been in. Many Decas without romance. Could he still be romantic? He was fun in the Past. But what is fun compared with love? I loved him. I really loved him..._

"Well, okay," Urd acceded. "But just this once, for 'old time's sake'."

As they whirlwinded through the God's Realm, touring of several of their favorite spots, Urd began questioning the value of being so wrapped up in regret over Troubadour. Yes, it was true that Troubadour was sour apples among the berries at times. He had made mistakes, broke confidences, and engaged in stupid follies during the time they were together. Two Decas older than she, she had often assumed that some of his misbehaving was due to the fact that she was immature and impulsive, while he viewed life through the rubric of an adult God. Forgive and forget was one of the cycles of their relationship, to be sure. But the ranging fancies attached to the brave nostalgia she was feeling seemed to burn away her mistrust of him.

Maybe this time, he would be different. Minute by minute, her caution strayed...

And his music was so beautiful to behold. Listening to him sing brought her to her knees emotionally; once again she was Sixteen...and in love.

He and she decided to visit the Sensorium Tessaract Zone and dive through a few CloudSpheres. The physical sensation on her Goddess manifest was akin to being pelted with rain in the wall-cloud of a typhoon or standing under a splattering waterfall. Shreds of rain tingled her skin, drenching her and calming her. She and Troubadour had consumed many fires of intimacy here in this special place...

Surrounded by mist-rains, Troubadour set his Muse instrument aside, a act that spoke volumes because it signified that he was willing to set aside his beloved Muse for _her_. A Muse's art took precedence over everything else in their lives; for a Muse to voluntarily relinquish their instrument, they would have to be possessed by the strongest of heartfelt feelings, either of respect or compassion. Or passion.

He beckoned her to come closer, and when she did, Troubadour wrapped his slender arms around her, kissing her on the lips tentatively and then deeply. A long-lost explosion of pleasures swifted her, tingling throughout her heart and Soul like wildfires burning through arid grasses. It had been too long since she had been touched this way. Finally, she was queen of her own heart! She felt like her Soul was dancing for the first time once again. She was playing the dance, feeling the exhilaration of being _desired_ for the first time in a long time, pirouetting through a forest of blazing passions, lithesome and joyous and renewed. The dance, the dance, the dance!

Hearing his song deep in her mind, Urd surrendered to the pleasure as he roamed his musician's hands up and down her back, caressing the inner chambers of her mind with his thought-arts as they Shared their beings, relinquishing her control each moment he was playing her like a maestro...

* * *

"I'm ready to go back now," Urd announced, alighting on the terrace of their parent's house. "You know, we really should get going soon, because there's nothing else we can do here and lots of stuff we can do back on the good ol' Earthrealm."

Belldandy was so shocked by the sight of Urd hovering in front of her, hand-in-hand with Troubadour, she momentarily imagined that her sister was playing a prank on her. But she could sense the sequence of joy that surrounded her sister, animating her aura with sparkles. As much as Urd seemed to be animated by a deeply-felt pleasance, Belldandy herself felt a flurrying emotional trifecta of shock, disappointment and sadness. The cheerful cottage of her heart was quickly darkened, overcast by a storm of troubling fears and memories. She wished Keiichi was here...

She would need an oasis of strength to help her deal with this.

"Urd?" she asked tentatively, deeply worried that her older sister had gone to some place in her heart where she shouldn't have gone. In Belldandy's mind, the Decas rolled back as she observed her sister's whimsical love-dazed demeanor. Urd was looking at her with a sheepish grin...the same kind of grin Skuld would have after spending a few spirited hours with Tomohisa on a Sunday afternoon at one of the local malls.

The same grin Urd used to have when she was first going out with Troubadour.

"I know what you're going to say, so don't bother," Urd announced. "And before you start asking me a battalion of questions...yes, I'm back with Troubadour. Isn't it amazing that we made up after all these thousands of years? Of all the Gods in Syntrasil, I found my way back to the God who knows me best. This is the most wonderful thing that's happened to me in a long time. I feel great!"

Skuld was paralyzed, statue-still and silent...and Belldandy wasn't that far behind her younger sister. She put an arm around Skuld's shoulders to try and comfort her; she could feel her younger sis shivering with rivulets of distress.

"What is the meaning of this, Urd?" Belldandy finally managed. She had to restrain herself from immediately launching into a confrontational argument with her older sister. Urd certainly needed a reality check of some sort, a reminder that she had no business being with Troubadour in the first place, but Belldandy was still too stunned to trust in the fortitude required to confront her sister. Blinking her eyes as if she was waking up from a bad dream, she heard a crying sound as Urd leaned close to Troubadour. Troubadour was level-eying her and Skuld...not with compassion and companionship...but with a harshly dispassionate competitiveness. Daring her, taunting her, dismissing her.

Urd could attempt a thousand flights of justification to try and convince her and Skuld about how Troubadour had matured over the Decas, why he was more than deserving of her love, that he was capable of being a trustworthy loving partner...but in her heart, Belldandy _knew_ that he hadn't changed one bit.

"The meaning of this...is very meaningful, don't you think?" Urd replied. "Finally, I'm in love again! My wonderful Troubadour is filling my heart with joyful song again! Do you know how it feels, what it's been like to have _nothing_ for so long and then get flooded with _something_ that is rare and beautiful? I'm free! I'm no longer the 'loveless Norn of the Past'. This is all the proof I need to declare that I'm lovable, that I still have oodles of beauty appeal, heart appeal, sex appeal..."

"Belldandy, I think you should tie away your insincere feelings of mistrust, for they do not serve you well," Troubadour interrupted Urd, confronting her in a voice of challenge. Belldandy was stunned; he was actually admonishing her in her parent's house! She narrowed her eyes as he started to qualify himself.

"I'm not the same Muse and Earth Spirit that I was Nine Decas ago. I'm even more of an adult, and I can take care of your sister in _every_ way...especially in the ways that you cannot. Who are you to question fate, anyway? Urd and I are fated to be together. We were fated then, and now fate has delivered us into each other's arms once again."

Out of respect to Urd, she bit down on the blunt words that she wanted to assail Troubadour with.

"Isn't it a delicious coincidence that I'm an Earth Grade Spirit assigned to the Earthrealm?" he continued in a voice thick with smug malice. "I'm sure that you know that this means that you'll be seeing _lots_ of me. For there is no barring Urd and I from reawakening the glories of the love we once shared, thanks to whatever force or Ultimate Force changed her Norn status."

Under her arm, she could feel Skuld's Goddess manifest rapidly heating up to a solar-level incandescence.

This situation was more than just troubling...it was tragic. Skuld had only the slightest of memories of Urd and Troubadour when they were in a relationship. Belldandy regretted that she hadn't talked to her younger sister more about Urd's romances. Urd's teenage life was practically a tabu topic around the household; she didn't want to upset Urd with talk of earlier loves; loves that she would never again experience. She also didn't want to spur Skuld towards jealousy with talk of Urd's academic excellence during the millennia leading up to her Transcend Inculcation. Perhaps it was a disguised blessing that her younger sister had been spared having to witness the wreckage and turmoil that had accompanied Urd's later adolescence. In contrast, Belldandy could fly through the index of her memories, touching on many fluxes of betrayal, heartbreak, reunion and then more betrayal between Troubadour and Urd.

Troubadour was still an ass, despite his claims to the contrary.

"This ReCreation Event certainly has recreated more than just a new God's Realm. It's allowed me to recreate my love for Troubadour. Aren't you happy for me, Bell? Skuld?" Urd inquired, cocking her head innocently to one side and flipping back her hair with a hand-combing motion.

Belldandy had to acknowledge that she did sense some slight happiness in the seeming that her older sister was in love again. But that glimmer of empathic joy was buried underneath the mountainous emotional debris of fear, distrust, sadness, concern, and resentment...no, not just resentment but a spicing of anger.

A dismal feeling of irony passed through her heart like a plummeting downhill river. Urd was no longer Norn of the Past, and no one knew why. An unknown had changed the very essence of Time, and they were no longer Norns with specific Time jurisdictions. But Belldandy had her suspicions about how this had come about. It had happened once before...

"Goddamn you, Cevn!" Skuld suddenly screamed in a voice dripping with livid rage.

* * *

She didn't know much about this Troubadour, but she already hated him at first sight. He wasn't at all like Keiichi...he wasn't kind and respectful and wise. Troubadour reeked of insincerity and self-importance; he had 'playa' written all over his Divine aspect. And the way Urd was cuddling up to him...in public...was too difficult to bear. Skuld sensed that her sister felt an earnest affection towards him, but Troubadour seemed to be disingenuous.

How could her Big Sister pull such a stupid move?

Elder Sister Belldandy was upset to the point of feeling borderline threatened by Urd's hookup with Troubadour. Her onee-chan's uneasiness was so palpable; Skuld imagined that she could pluck it out of the air and eat it. Belldandy and Troubadour seemed to be engaged in a staredown of wills that reminded her of scenarios out of the shoujo manga she enjoyed.

As disappointed as she was towards her sister and this disgusting guy she was with, Skuld felt a sway of resentment towards another. She was so angry with Cevn, she wanted to break him into little pieces and feed him to the nearest wolfpack. Somewhere in the back of her mind, she somehow _knew_ that he had tweaked things again to allow for Big Sister Urd to get all lovey-dovey with whoever she wanted to. And even worse, he wasn't back on the Earthrealm, where she could give him the verbal beat-down he so richly deserved.

She wanted to yell at Urd, but Cevn was an easier target for her rage.

When Troubadour asked flippantly "Who is this Cevn? Your mortal pet?" after she screamed her outrage, Belldandy turned pale. Her sister responded by whisking the two of them as far away from Urd and Troubadour as she could. Skuld was dismayed that her middle sister didn't even bother to excuse herself or ask her if she wanted to split the scene. Attempting to guess at her sister's motives, Skuld could only conclude that she had either tucked her tail between her legs and run...or she had left to avoid an ugly scene that wouldn't be befitting to be staged at their parent's home. It had to be the latter, because her sister wasn't the type to run away...

Tucked away in a CloudForest, Skuld tried to calm herself down. Her sister looked at her with a stricken expression, barely holding back her heartbreak.

"This is so...terribly wrong!" Belldandy adjudged, finally breaking the silence in a pained voice. What could have Troubadour done to Big Sister Urd that was so egregious, it was causing her older sister to react so strongly? Skuld asked several questions, attempting to gain some background on her sister's strong reaction, but her elder sis was too upset to discuss anything relating to Urd, so they chit-chatted about the new XOM computer network.

Eventually, the conversation well ran dry. She noticed that her older sister seemed to tense up, as if bracing herself to do battle, and then Belldandy suddenly broke open the puzzle-box that was Urd and Troubadour...

_"Your Big Sister was in ThirdTier Inculcation when she met up with Troubadour. As you know, Troubadour is a Muse...a God who creates art for art's sake. His Muse is music, which is why he carries his emblemic stringed lyre-guitar. But his musical instrument is much more than a guitar; it is called a Muse-object and can only be forged by the august will of the Almighty. Without their Muse-object, a God or Goddess with the calling to be a Muse cannot create artistic beauty. They are the conscious force of creation, and in a very real sense, their emblemic objects are their Muse. Their Muse-objects are both inspiration and vehicle for their creative achievements._

_"The Muses can create moods when they play music, paint thoughts, or apply their artistic skills to their chosen craft. They can also bend matter and influence behavior by their artistry. Just like the legendary Sirens whose singing lured sailors to their doom, Troubadour's music can also sway almost any Divine being below a First Class License to do forget themselves and do certain things. This ability to 'project' their artistry so strongly via syncognition and communioncation...is the essential reason why Muses must invariably employ great discretion when using their skills in creative endeavors. A God or Goddess who is a Muse should never manipulate others by using their skills to manifest art._

_"Troubadour ignored this common-sense prohibition once he discovered that he could perform on his Muse-object and make certain Goddesses do his bidding. Therefore, he developed his skills on the instrument with the intent to seduce Goddesses. Our sister was one of those Goddesses he targeted._

_"Our Urd has always been an unbridled, wild Soul...and she was ripe for Troubadour's games because of this. Troubadour was Two Decas older than Urd at the time, and he kept coming to our house and serenading her with beautiful songs, trying to make Urd forget herself. This period in her life was a very difficult time for our older sister. She had just applied for a chance to sit for the Goddess First Class exams, and was denied by the Examiner, who wouldn't let her pass within the Gate into the Academy of First Class License Entreaties. Mother had a very difficult time accepting that Urd's Demonic half could prevent her from obtaining a high license. You can guess the rest: she and Mom had a series of big fights over this. With so much instability in her life, Urd was particularly vulnerable and Troubadour took advantage of this and was able to entice her._

_"Shortly after Urd started going out with Troubadour, I noticed that he was habitually in the society of other Goddesses; too much so for a God who supposedly was in a romantic relationship with our sister. Possessed by a protective urgency, I guess one could call it...I became very suspicious of Troubadour and I decided to investigated this odd behavior of his. What I discovered was an utter letdown: he was telling Urd one thing while doing another. Eventually, my worst anxieties came to the fore...Urd discovered that Troubadour was behaving poorly, using his musical genius to seduce other Goddesses to engage in numerous infidelities with him._

_"Urd took this as a challenge, rather than a sign that her relationship with Troubadour was ill-met. It seemed at the time that our sister was by her Demonic half, because she applied a romantic tactic common to Demonesses: assume control of the situation by wresting it from the paramour. But she wasn't very good at this because of her predominant Goddess nature. Our sister Mara, as a full Demoness, can devise and follow through on such ambitions by dint of being cold-hearted and calculating. But Urd's attempts were faulty because she was too kind-hearted and uncertain of herself. The result was that Troubadour began to resent her in response to her 'pressuring' him to remain monogamous._

_"This was the turning point between the two of them. Troubadour began to develop a distorted love towards Urd, expressing his caring for her by hurtful actions. He'd dare her to do certain things such as stealing datacrystals from the Ygg computer or cheating on ThirdTier exams...and then he would turn her in to the authorities. This caused her many License suspensions. But even worse, I had the strong feeling that he was mistreating her while they were Sharing. Only she knows for certain if the Sharing was abusive or not, since Sharing is such a private matter. Whenever I have asked her to be honest about Sharing with Troubadour, she has always denied any wrongdoing, even up to this day. I was just Fourteen Decas at the time, just a couple Decas older than you are now, Skuld...but I could discern that she was being hurt rather than loved when she Shared with Troubadour. Sharing is supposed to infuse an affectionate love in the partner, which creates a very distinctive and noticeable visible impression in both partners; a manifest of joy that all who meet them can clearly sense. The mortal phrase "glowing with love" describes the simple beauty of this. But to me, Urd seemed to take in uncertainty after Sharing with him; her sense of joy was polluted in a sense, mingled with anxiety and self-doubt. During this phase of their relationship, Troubadour also maintained his romantic indiscretions, taking a certain joy in rubbing his affairs in our sister's face, so to speak._

_"Several millennia later, the Almighty designated Urd as a candidate for the Norn of the Past role, and gave her a century to prepare for assuming her role as Norn. Knowing that she was potentially fated to never again experience romantic love, our sister desperately appealed to Troubadour to fulfill her as a Goddess, hoping that he would finally treat her with the caring and dignity she so greatly deserved. In our sister's mind, this was literally the last chance she had to be loved by a God. Instead, Troubadour schemed out an encounter between Urd and another one of the Goddesses he was involved with, so that they would 'accidentally' discover each other. But this particular infidelity was different than the others because the Goddess involved was Bonded to Troubadour. In this manner, our older sister learned that Troubadour had been in a Bond with another Goddess for almost a half-Deca. As it evolved in hindsight, Troubadour's intent was clear: he was only using Urd to alienate the Goddess in an attempt to make her petition the Almighty to sever the Bond contract._

_"The Lord punished Troubadour for this baseless act by permanently reducing his Earth Spirit Grade to the lowest rank and barring him from ever attempting to obtain a promotion to a Second Class License._

_"But this was too late as far as the damage that was already wrought in our sister's heart. In my heart as well, because I had to witness the entire breadth of these tragic events unfold over many millennia. Troubadour's mischief and dishonesty and the pain it caused Urd cast a partial shadow over my Thirteenth and Fourteenth Decas. This was the only time in my life where I truly felt that I couldn't protect my older sister. But Urd experienced heartbreak, public disgrace, betrayal and the stealing away of her last chance to experience romantic love...all of these terrible losses she suffered at the hands of Troubadour."_

* * *

When they returned to the Earthrealm, the first thing Skuld did was go into the sister's bedroom and throw every stuffed animal she had against the wall, as hard as she could. Then she started punching the wall until her knuckles were raw. Finally, her anger exhausted itself and she slumped down to the floor, wrapped her arms tight around her chest and sobbed until she felt like she was choking.

Urd, her invulnerable Big Sister, had just flushed her heart and her life down the toilet because of some stupid whim...and she was genuinely frightened that the direful events Belldandy had described might happen again. That she would have to experience, in Urd and Troubadour, all the bad things that she had imagined would happen to Belldandy once she got involved with Keiichi...

She beseeched the Almighty in a quiet voice to cause a rift between Troubadour and her sister...but this was one matter that even the Lord was powerless to prevent or abate. Her appreciation for Keiichi was greatly deepened...and then her thoughts turned to Tomohisa. Now, more than ever, she needed him to comfort her.

* * *

_"Extra! Extra! Workers strike in America for 8-hour workday! Irish Home Rule Bill Controversy in Parliament! Liverpool Exhibition to be Opened By Queen. Get yer news here!"_

The newshawker waved a scandal-sheet paper in front of me as I walked past him, but as curious as I was to read it and try to discover where and when I was, I knew that I didn't have coin in my pocket to purchase it.

But his brief bawding blurbs heralded a clue. The strike he mentioned was an event whose historical import I was well familiar with due to my studies of philosophical Marxism in grad school. Many countries like Soviet Russia, China, Cuba and North Korea observe annual "May Day" celebrations to promote the importance of the proletariat workers in their Communist ideologies. However, as is the common case in America where 'popular' history is portrayed within a panacea of revisionist ignorance and misinformation, such holidays are viewed by the general public as "commie-infested propaganda" when in fact they are based on a nation-wide strike that occurred in the _United States_. How did a strike in the U.S. become the inspiration for national holidays in many Communist countries? The answer is simple...in America, greedy capitalists were forcing workers to endure sweat-shop shifts of 12-20 hours a day while paying them less than a living wage. This exploitation of the laboring classes wasn't a localized trait; it had occurred all over the country. In response, a nation-wide network of workers groups was organized. The unionized groups decided to go on strike...and almost a million of them walked off their jobs all over the country. The official reaction was to send troops in with guns, arrest the ringleaders and hang them, and exert political authority on behalf of the wealthy elites to suppress the movement. Yet the cause of the workers had eventually won out, and labor now has a 8-hour workday thanks to them.

The Irish Home Rule Bill was the other clue: Gladstone and Joseph Chamberlain going head to head over the issue of Irish sovereignty in Parliament.

_I was in 1886!_

Standing at an intersection of the busy avenue, I noticed an incised plaque mounted on a building cornerstone designating this as "Cornmarket Street". Nearby were a number of portable stalls similar to the noren-sheeted udon stands one would find in parking lots and parks in Tokyo. Several horsecarts were filled with vegetables, baked items, and butchered meat. A queue of men were congregated around a type of outdoors pulley-wagon kiosk that served 'coffee', probably laced with brandy considering the raucous behavior of some of the men. I noticed a pastiche of pull-sheets and posters plastered on one side of it, and walked over to give them a closer look. As I read the adverts announcing "Gilbert and Sullivan's Finale", "Midlands Circus and Follies", "Dr. Rupert's tonic" and something new called "Coca-Cola", I felt like I was in a waking dream...

"Hey guv'na, what'cha be havin'? Steady up, or move along, sirrah. I got me payin' customers waitin' while you're gawkin'," the stand-owner accosted me.

A colloquial British accent.

"Where..where am I?"

"Lad, are you bereft of your wits?" another man accosted me. "You're in the Oxford hundred of Oxfordshire, in the Queen's England."

"Queen _Victoria_?"

"Aye, she is the crown. Who else would 'ye expect? The Directors of the Dutch Indies Company?" the man obligingly answered me with a tense of sarcasm in his voice, his mocking answer eliciting a brief howl of laughter from the bystanders.

"Yea, but I wager those Dutchies are secretly running the country, behind the curtains. How is it that we're so poor...and they're livin' rich in the Colonies..."

"Then this is _Oxford_? As in University of Oxford?" I enquired. Evidently, my voice was transparent with panic, as several of the men looked at me suspiciously.

"Troth it is. What expectance did you possess? This certainly isn't the environs of the Cambridge men, let me assure you. Are you so mean in attitude that you lack discernment?" a college-aged man challenged me derisively.

I remembered the char-maid mentioning a "Lord Reginald"...

"Reginald Humbert-Humbert, the Lord Dean Chancellor of Oxford University? Why, every man who's an Oxford man knows of him. The Lord is an eminent personage to town and university, as befitting a true scholar and a gentlemen," a fortyish man in a slender coat roundly noted.

"Good, because I'm supposed to meet with this Lord Reginald tomorrow morning. I'm scheduled to deliver a lecture..."

"Good Lord, man!" the man exclaimed. "You must be the Japanese lad the university brought over to deliver a series of lectures on that Magnum Organum project. Curious...you don't resemble one of those of the Asiatic disposition, in my esteemed opinion. And yet your accent is peculiar. Clearly, there is not a hint of the Mongoloid characteristic in you at all..."

"My name's Cevn, and I don't know how I got here," I introduced myself, bowing to him. Funny, I had been in Japan for so long I had become instinctively courteous, recognizing that good social manners demanded that I bow during an introduction and then doing so automatically.

"Gov'nuh, you got 'ere like the rest of us, from the wombsie of a pox-whore!" a burly man said as he hefted what looked like an ales-mug from a nearby stand.

"As for myself, I would note that you arrived here like most foreigners, via steamship passage over the ocean, and then by carriage from London to here. Are you certain that you haven't suffered a spell of fatiguing from such a long journey?" the slender man enquired.

"Under the circumstances, I am managing..."

"Forgive me for being intolerably rude. Professor Rupert Smythe, Doctor of Zoology Studies, at your service," the bearded man introduced himself, curtly nodding his head. He was dressed impeccably, with a Sherlock Holmes overcloak that seemed more intended for fashion than function, as it was temperately warm outside. At least warm compared to February, my last remembered days in Japan.

Prof. Smythe was a head shorter than I and looked to be in his late forties or early fifties. He peered at me over a pair of thin wirerim reading glasses perched midway on a longish nose, with a narrow mouth rendered smallish by the thick 'balderdash' sideburns he had, a popular men's style during this era.

"Here are my credentials, sir," Prof. Smythe noted, giving me an introduction slip. "I am pleased to make your acquaintance. It is my habit to visit these stands for a bracing refreshment of brandy before assuming my afternoon duties. My timepiece informs me that I am running two minutes late, so I must excuse myself at this juncture and run along to the University Museum and the lecture theatre, with your pardon. I earnestly hope that you will deign to visit me in my laboratory in the basement of the Museum at your earliest convenience. It is most infrequent that I have a chance to converse with someone from East Asia. Good-day!"

Oxford University, the oldest English-speaking university in the world, and I had just met the Chair of the Zoology Division who was sneaking a hot-toddy during the lunch hour.

"_Have you ever been halfway around the world or perhaps in another country and while you were walking in the street, you were suddenly possessed by a desire to return home, only to feel the pressuring awareness that no human power could get you home because of the sheer distance involved?_" I mumbled to myself, my mind trying to wrap itself around this incredible situation. I was in a different continent, in a different historical era, and in less than three hours, I was already feeling the hopelessness of being stranded here. The very quickest means of travel to Japan was by boat, which would take almost six months...

...and I'd hit the shore right around the time the final touches to the Meiji Constitution were being drawn up, part of the political process Japan undertook to emulate the Western-style governments at the time.

The Goddesses, Keiichi and all my friends were 120 years away.

* * *

The implications of my situation barrel-rolled me into harnessing moods of depression and confusion. It was the lunch hour, and the streets were quickly filled with students who had chosen to eat out rather than partake of the university cafeterias. The bustling crowds frightened me to a degree; by heritage and mannerism, they were as foreign to me as aliens. Or perhaps my fear was fueled by the dawning recognition that _I was the alien here_.

After walking up and down several streets in a daze, I returned to the flat on St. Giles Street where I was staying, getting lost twice on the way. Mrs. Bigsley, the 'housemum' of the apartments I was lodging in, quickly brought in lunch and tea service. Sensing my subdued demeanor, she noted that there would be a 'cotillion' event at the university and encouraged me to attend it. An hour later, a tailor paid a surprise visit to the flat I was staying in. Insisting that he needed to take my measurements, he explained that he had been dispatched by the mysterious Lord Reginald to ensure that I had "proper attire for university". He made several comments about my "gaudy barbarian clothes" while he was working. I didn't pay heed to the fact that I was dressed in the same clothes I had been wearing when I squiggled that mandala design on the floor of my bedroom. Apparently, he didn't know what the "Summer Sonic Festival" logo on my T-shirt referred to.

When he was finished, he asked me to look in the washing-room mirror...and I was conflicted between laughter and despondency as I beheld my reflection. I was dressed in something he called a "long frock coat" with black pants and suspenders, with a white shirt with rounded collars covered by a grey vest. The necktie was something he called a "puffer tie", and there was no way I could figure out how to tie it as it didn't resemble a modern tie at all. The boots he had me try one were black and had an accessory that tucked in front of the heel and buttoned up the side of the foot, covering the top half of the boot and ankle. When I asked him what this was, he looked at me askance and noted that "every gentleman knows what a spatterdash is."

Okay, so I wasn't a gentleman...

In my mind, I looked like a caricature of Abraham Lincoln, only not as tall and lacking a beard. I felt bundled tightly by the many layers of clothes, which seemed to be designed to constrict movement. Stiff and formal all the way. Taken as a whole, the outfit I was wearing was costumish in the extreme, and yet the tailor insisted that these were the appropriate dress for a faculty member, explaining how 'stylish' they were. I drew the line when he insisted that he cut my hair so I could wear a squarish hat top-hat that he called an "opera hat". Grumbling that I "would seem improper in the public eye", he reluctantly excused himself.

I felt like a bird in a gilded cage, ready to be fed to a hungry cat. As I pondered what the hell I was doing in Victorian England for most of the afternoon, a courier hand-delivered a missive from Lord Reginald which informed me that my presence was "necessary and required" at the social event this evening. According to the enclosed flyer with directions, this event was a mixer to commemorate the completion of the first week of Trinity Term.

Mrs. Bigsley returned in the late afternoon with yet another meal tray, and spent a few moments chattily asking me about my life in Japan. I initially slipped up and started talking about the internet and N.I.T's focus on engineering design, which drew a scowl from her. This was going to be difficult, having to filter my answers and give measured responses that didn't cop to the future era I lived in. What would I say in a conversation, knowing next-to-nothing about life in the 1880s? Already, the whole circumstances of being attended by what was essentially a domestic servant was making me feel very uneasy; it stank of elitism and class distinction. When I described this uneasiness, she took offense and stormed off.

Studying anthropology had taught me the principle of "cultural relativism"...that the _culture_ decides what practices and societal organizations are appropriate, and that a researcher must take this into account. In this era, the status quo was that domestics were commonly employed in a variety of capacities. It totally sucked that people would hire other people to wash their dishes, clean their houses, do their laundry. I couldn't empathize at all with the mindset of such people. Resigning myself, I recognized that I would just have to get used to this setup and acquiesce to the blatant 'upstairs-downstairs' social milieu.

The food was bland, probably because it wasn't adulterated with artificial flavoring condiments like modern food. Nevertheless, the beef and potato 'stew' was somewhat bearable, and the side dish of fruit really hit the spot. The best part was the tea, which wasn't leavened with the heavy doses of caffeine.

Pulling my hair back into a ponytail, I took a final look at myself in the 'costume' that passed for requisite men's wear, and made my way to the 'cotillion'.

* * *

The cotillion was being held in a large lecture hall in a group of buildings called Magdalen College. My sense of being displaced a century into the past was only redoubled as I approached the large college complex. Here I was in the 1880s, without as much as a single clue to explain why I was here...walking through a set of buildings that looked like they had been built centuries earlier, perhaps as early as the Fifteenth Century. Almost everyone I saw was dressed to the nines as I walked around the quadrangle, escorted by a student who had noticed my fish-out-of-water disorientation and had offered to assist me.

Approaching the hall, I could hear strains of classical music reverberating along the stone buildings. When I entered the large chamber, my feet developed a mind of their own and halted me. Rooted to the floor, I could only gape at the sight which confronted me.

About two hundred persons crowded the interior, and a significant portion of them were dancing _a waltz_.

Feeling intimidated by the fact that I didn't know a single person in the room, I simply wall-flowered myself and waited. The letter I had received made it very clear that I was expected to attend this social event, so I patiently waited in expectance of a meeting with whomever had demanded my presence. They had asked me to come here--they would have to seek me out. Despite the ebullient good-cheer of the attendees, I was sensing a distinct air of 'uptightness' or rigidity.

This was an elite educational institution populated by a very intelligent set of people who had a shitload of unwritten expectations about how to behave around each other. In other words, a clusterfuck of the rich and famous...

"Ah, there he is!" a man shouted above the din, gesturing towards me. A group of four men walked over and escorted me to a side hallway so that we wouldn't be drowned out by the noisy waltz.

"Let me introduce his Right Honorable Lordship Reginald Humbert-Humbert, Chancellor of Oxford University," one of the men noted formally, gesturing to a man whose jacket sported several cameo medals and a coat-of-arms insignia.

"His Lordship graciously sponsored your guest lectureship here for the Trinity Term, and is keen on discussing your work with you. He has taken an especial interest in your ground-breaking Magnum Organum. Allow me to introduce my colleagues. This is Sir Roderick Powell, University Bursar. Sir Lawrence Tottenford, Chair of the University Council. Finally, I am Sir Brandish Fitz, Chair of the Congregation," the man finished.

"Was your passage to Great Britain a difficult journey? I hear that sea-travel beyond the Indies can be quite arduous," Lord Reginald inquired perfunctorily. I shook my head 'no', as I had no recollection of _any_ journey I had taken to arrive here. I was in my room in Japan...and now I was here.

"It was very acceptable of the Japanese government to release you to come to Oxford at our command. And here you are!" Lord Reginald continued. "Visiting scholars have been a parcel of our university life for as long as the institution has existed. When we received word that you had written a seminal tract, we insisted upon your lectureship. It is of the greatest import that you are available to defend your work prior to its translation into English by our scholars."

He clapped both of my shoulders as he said this, and smiled broadly with what I could only interpret as condescension. I immediately felt a dislike for the man, as he exuded a demeanor that cried out "I'm better than you". I tried to put a choke hold on my presumptions, but the longer Lord Reginald talked the more I sensed that he was the 19th-century equivalent of one of the 'Masters of the Universe'; a person raised in social privilege who viewed all non-titled persons as paltry commoners. Already, he was treating me like one of his subjects rather than a human being...and I already was playing into his attitude, reacting with a partial acceptance of this dynamic of civility. I quickly rebuked myself for being caught up in the highly stratified social context here after being here only a few hours.

"I find it most intriguing that one of our own scholars didn't write a book that addresses the several issues that you treat in your Magnum Organum," Lord Reginald noted. "I wouldn't be surprised at all to uncover a few tomes in the Bodleian Library that would pre-date your endeavor. There are so many interesting tracts...some of which you may have come across during the preparation of your book."

Waitaminute! Did he just subtly imply that I was culpable in some type of academic plagiarism? That I copied Magnum Organum from another's work? How could this be, considering that Magnum was published in 200X and this was 1886? How could he even know of its existence?

"My apologies, Sir Reginald, but I don't get the meaning of..."

"_Lord_ Reginald. Do take care to endeavor to not make the same mistake twice," he corrected me with a supercilious smile. Amazing how one can smile while delivering what was obviously a warning with a threat couched within it. Once again, I recognized the invisible strands of social authority...power over others came easy to this man, and he wasn't reticent to display his prepotency. His companions regarded me with expressions of disdain, as if I had just insulted them by proxy.

I wanted to insult them. I really wanted to fucking insult them.

"I will be meeting with you tomorrow at 9am prior to your delivery of your first lecture. Do ensure that I am not kept waiting," Lord Reginald said curtly, and then dismissed himself.

The accumulated questions that were spinning around in my thoughts would have to wait until then.

* * *

When I returned to my flat, I decided to take a quick look at Magnum Organum since I was supposed to lecture on it tomorrow. In the passage of a few hours, I had transited a huge breadth of emotions...and now I felt like I was living in a carefully-plotted charade. How was I supposed to discuss a work considered by many scholars to be cutting-edge in the 21st century with a bunch of 19th century scholars and students? It was difficult enough just to keep a lid on my sanity, which wanted to explode out in reaction to the surroundings.

Where were the Goddesses? Did they even notice that I was gone?

With these daunting thoughts, I sat down at the great-desk and stared at the Magnum Organum. Lord Reginald had claimed that it wasn't translated into English, but here was an English edition. This certainly wasn't a 19th-century book either; it could have been pressed a week ago, it was so new. I checked the publication date and confirmed that it had been printed in 200X. Without the decorative jacket, the volume looked plain and bulky. It had been a while since I had actually reviewed my own dissertation project with anything more than a cursory reading; I usually just used it for reference when corresponding with others. Magnum Organum was an accident, starting off as a dissertation project and eventually evolving into something much more involved. Both Belldandy and Skuld believed that I wasn't capable of producing such a work without 'help' of the Divine kind. Even Urd had hinted that my ability to produce such a work, with over a thousand pages of innovative concepts, was somehow related to the wish I had made when she first entered my life.

What did a wish for balance have to do with the creation of the Magnum Organum?

Thumbing through the table of contents, I was disturbed by the irrecognition I had regarding several of the chapter headings. Surprised at myself for not remembering the structure of the book, I started glancing through the ancient language section, the first section of the book. Based on my incidental discovery of the Encyclopedia of Dawn at Dunhuang, this section was fairly straightforward, as it was comprised mostly of charts comparing the different language structures, a chapter on philology, and the translations themselves. In the next section dealing with psychometrics, I read a few pages and then got completely lost trying to understand the arguments the text was asserting. By the time I got to the final "Aquantum Metastatics" section of the book with its treatment of thought matrixes as energy designs rather than symbols, everything I was reading was incomprehensible.

What the fuck?

Utterly frustrated, I slammed the book shut and then stared at it.

There it sat on the desk. It has my name on it. It has the title I had given it. I can remember authoring it over a period of several years. And I couldn't understand it at all...

Parts of the Magnum Organum were the result of the actions of a faculty I deemed as the "Metallect", a form of innovative genius or 'super-intelligence' that occasionally seized me almost as soon as I had been brought to Japan by Urd. I could recognize my academic writing style in the pages, and when I examined the bibliography, I was familiar with of the sources that I had consulted.

I opened the book again, hoping that my ignorance of its contents was a fluke...perhaps a reasonable by-product of the disorientation I was feeling towards being inexplicably stranded a century in the past. Going from the age of computers to a culture only a few decades removed from a time when slavery was legal, where the oppression of the poor was common, where the colonial yoke on foreign states was considered the birthright of the aristocracy...would cause anyone to flake out. Blake wasn't bullshitting when he wrote about "the dark Satanic mills". Now, I felt like I was trapped inside of one.

I wasn't exactly a mentally stable person, not by a long shot. Panic was surmounting my confidence in my ability to even survive in this environment. Trying to make sense of the Magnum Organum, I felt alone to the world. My efforts weren't producing the results I had expected...the more diligently I attempted to study it, the more it became clear to me that it was hopeless.

I could barely comprehend only about ten percent of its contents...and tomorrow morning, I would have to deliver a lecture on it. Then I remembered the exact words Lord Reginald had used...

He had clearly said "defend your work".


	160. Pt 160: OnceReturners in the LifeStream

**Part 160: Once-Returners in the LifeStream**

A few days after she arrived back on the Earthrealm, Belldandy's heart was still weighed down with an unbearable burden because of her older sister. She and Urd were two willful forces in constant collision; fast-tracking into a series of pitched, heated arguments right before they left Syntrasil. Their fluxion of resentments kept boiling over; neither one of them were able to tame their deep-set disagreements. Sadly, she reflected...these were the worst contentions she and Urd had ever had towards each other. Two intractable convictions resolving into a deafening silence. Two sisters who were acting as stiffly towards each other as two trees standing side-by-side in the temple's lawn.

She couldn't look past the fact that the more Urd became enamored with Troubadour, the more she became condemnatory and disparaging against all else. Her sister clearly had lost any criterion of self-criticism, and was especially deprecatory towards she and Skuld.

Skuld had gamely insisted that Urd not bring Troubadour to the temple; Urd's reply was that the temple was _her_ home as well, and she was going to disregard any house rules and the wishes of both her and Skuld. Belldandy knew that she needed to mediate this volatile issue while they were all still in Syntrasil; she didn't want to bring the seemingly interminable discord home with her, where it would be a distraction to Keiichi's studies and her love. In regards to Troubadour, Urd clearly didn't feel bound by any sense of respect towards her and Skuld. Time after time, her older sister's rebellious nature caused her to be at odds with she and Skuld in matters that had absolutely nothing to do with Troubadour. Faultlessly sincere, she went all-out to try and convince Urd to practice discretion around their temple home, even if only to be considerate of the others who lived there.

Belldandy hoped that Urd would be grateful enough to recognize how far she was going in her efforts to accommodate her new romance with Troubadour, despite the bitterness she felt towards it. Instead, distrust mounted upon distrust, forcing Belldandy to risk disappointing Skuld by offering to accede to Urd's demands with a single condition...that Troubadour would be allowed in the temple, but only when both she and Skuld were home.

Urd promptly said that she didn't need anyone intruding on her privacy.

Needless to say, Skuld didn't take that too well. Crushing, the insufferable vise that her two sisters could bring to bear on her. Frustrated by her older sister's intractability, Belldandy availed herself to the only two persons she knew (besides Hild) who could hold forth against an angry, irrational Urd. Both Mother and Father were completely aghast when she informed them that Urd had resumed a romantic liaison with Troubadour. Predictably, her parents angrily confronted Urd and demanded that she defer to the concerns of her two younger sisters. But Urd would have none of it.

As the new residence of both the Gods and the Demons, Syntrasil was supposed to be newly reordered...a quasi-unified God's and Demon's Realm. With Urd and her parents arguing to an impasse, Belldandy decided to put this to the test. Contacting Mara, she beseeched her Demoness sister's assistance in hopes that a Demoness might be able to reach Urd, perhaps through empathy with her Demonic half. Amazingly, she experienced something her wildest imaginings could never retrieve out of the coil of improbable fancies...an actual Demoness standing in her parent's living room. She learned that Mara had been granted something called an Emportal Visa by agreement of the Lord and the Demon's Dark Lord which allowed her to move about in the God's Realm.

But bringing Mara to bear on the family feud only provoked it even further. She should have known better. Asking her temperamental Demoness older sister to attempt to persuade her temperamental Goddess older sister to do something she didn't want to do...was the equivalent of throwing a supernova into a galactic core and hoping nothing would explode.

In the end, Father had become completely livid with all the exasperated arguing and put his foot down, actually threatening Urd with the "you're not my daughter" ultimatum. Wisely, Urd finally backed down and started acting like a Goddess and a sister again.

Because she had divulged the details of Urd's new relationship to their parents, Belldandy could feel the heat. Urd was simmering with barely-checked resentment towards her. The first days back on the Earthrealm, the temple house was filled with a syrupy tension of resentments whenever Urd was home. She was especially worried about Skuld. Her younger sis often withdrew into her "Skuld's Labs" room to work on mecha assembly during the day hours, only leaving when it came time to meet Tomohisa when he was finished with school. With her younger sister in hiding and her older sister in a perpetually cycling tantrum, Belldandy knew that she needed more than the usual amount of respite. She was thirsty for Keiichi's arms, for his words of consonance. Conveniently, she could spend much of her time keeping Keiichi company at the N.I.T. campus during weekdays. On the weekends, she could help him while he worked at Chihiro's Whirlwind shop.

Unable to disguise her weariness, Belldandy finally confided her concerns to the Whirlwind shop's owner. Chihiro agreed that Urd was acting like a "gum-headed idiot" and insisted that she wanted to give Urd a piece of her mind. In Chihiro's eyes, Urd had squandered any sense of self-respect. Chihiro admitted that she had a vested interest in confronting Urd: as the unofficial 'sexy cheerleader' of the Unified Club, Urd had always been a peripheral participant in all the club's races during the summer. Dress Urd in a cheerleader or spokesmodel outfit, and the male population of N.I.T. would flock in droves to attend their Unified Club's racing exploits and membership drives. Belldandy could empathize with Chihiro's wariness towards having both Urd and Troubadour attend the racing events for fear that a confrontation might storm up.

Why Urd wasn't acting like herself remained an insoluble detail. This whole business of rekindling a relationship with Troubadour had happened so suddenly, so unexpectedly! Belldandy had held out hopes that Cevn would return, and that his presence would somehow 'flip the switch' in her sister's memory, as Megumi would put it. Instead, he was still missing. Urd was behaving with the recklessness of a teenager, in many ways seemingly more immature than Skuld. Yet, even her brash Older Sister knew her own limits and would stop just short of throwing all her cares to the winds. Belldandy recognized that she would be severely challenged by having to anticipate Urd's aberrant behavior so that she could enact 'damage control' before Urd's foolishness caused harm to others.

Weaving around in the back of her mind, a patchwork of ideas was taking form...an assembly of concepts that she continually struggled to puzzle out during her free time. There was always a framework of dissonance, a toilsome confusion she had felt ever since Urd had gotten involved with Troubadour. Like a jigsaw puzzle game, she would have to find the perimeter pieces first...Urd's intentions...before she could assemble the interior of the puzzle...Urd's true feelings.

On the surface, Urd's motives were readily exposed by her heedless crazy-making behavior. But what was going on with her sister on the inside? For a moment, she had a chilling thought: what if this personality shift was involuntary in nature? Could Urd have been possessed by the SurGoth or something akin to it, just like she herself had been stealthily overtaken before Keiichi rescued her?

But the SurGoth was dead according to Keiichi and the evidence of her own eyes.

So why wasn't her sister..._her sister_ anymore?

* * *

"Boss, canya crank up the air conditioner?" Tamiya complained. "We's all crowded in here for dis meeting you insisted upon, and I'm beginning tuh smell Ootaki somethin' bad. An' I know dat it's easier for yuh to flip the switch than to convince him to take off his leather jacket."

"Well, as least I don't smell like ass!" Ootaki jived, grinning his toothy grin and running his hand through his bleached spiky moussed hair.

"Yeah, well the jury's out on that," Megumi teased. "Too bad Sayoko isn't here to confirm or deny..."

"Quiet, you!" Tamiya bellowed...with a kind-hearted smile.

Keiichi regarded his two sempai and shook his head, feeling sardonic. Here they all were, stewing in the early April swelter, a preview of what would probably going to be a scorching humid summer. It was already unseasonably hot outside for the first time this year, already feeling like midsummer instead of early spring. Most sane college students would have shined off school for a day of frolicking at the beach...yet here they were packed tightly inside of Whirlwind attending Chihiro's mandatory "urgent, important Club meeting." Whirlwind was basically a shed, and its metal-clad walls only focused and contained the heat until it felt like a furnace inside. As usual, Chihiro was keeping pace with her frugal outlook on life, keeping the A/C controls on the 'fan' setting. Wordlessly, he walked over and switched the A/C to 'cool' as Chihiro glanced at him, briefly challenging him with a glare.

He was reminded anew about how his employer and friend could be like a modern-day Scrooge. Chihiro had grown up with a silver spoon in her mouth, enjoying such luxuries as a personal swimming pool and several riding horses during her childhood...and yet she was stingy about the shop's electrical bill; guarding every expenditure like a hawk protecting its nest. Or Scrooge pestering Bob Cratchet...

"I know that some of you guys have been wondering about where I've been during the past couple weeks. Since business decided to let up a bit because of the quake, I thought it would be a good time to take a break from work. So I decided to go on a vacation and spend some time in Hawaii with Pierre Ar Bras," Chihiro announced enthusiastically.

"Waaah!?" several voices pitched in; mixed amongst them was an appreciative cooing from his sister, Sora, and the other women in attendance. Bell-chan would have added her voice, but she was too soured about Urd's current situation to be as appreciative of the romantic sentiments as the other female members of the Unified Club. Keiichi himself felt a wash of surprise...Chihiro had never mentioned vacationing in Hawaii. She had simply said that she was taking time off because of the business slowdown.

"Hmm...this is very suspicious. You went to _Hawaii_ for two weeks...and you don't even have a suntan to show for it, Boss? What'd you do while you were there? Stay inside the hotel all day?" Ootaki teased...and then his face drained to the pale. He fiddled with his mirrored sunglasses to try and cover up his fearful expression, obviously realizing that his offhand comment could and would be interpreted in a blatantly sexual flavor.

Despite himself, Keiichi had to smirk as Chihiro's cheeks blushed red just for a moment. It was true!!! She had actually gone off on a romantic getaway without letting anyone know. There was no mistaking the bloom of embarrassment on her face...

"Ootaki, put a cap in it if you know what's good for your immediate survival," Chihiro threatened semi-seriously. "We're not here to discuss my love life. Although I will admit that I had a wonderful time in Hawaii. Pierre and I went to beaches in Kailua, Waimanalo, and the North Shore. Then we flew over to Maui for the second week. You guys, I gotta tell you that there's something magic about that island; I swear there must be a God or Goddess living there because the air seems so vibrant. And Pierre never told me that he could wind-surf! There's a lot of things I still have to learn about him..."

"And who was it who just said that we weren't supposed to be discussing your love life?" Megumi interrupted with gleeful impertinence, using her most fetching voice. Of all the Club members, his sister was the only one on par with Chihiro...and possibly the only member who wasn't outright intimidated by Chihiro's uppity personality most of the time.

Chihiro snapped her mouth shut at that one, and tried to smile away her innocence.

"Er...as I was saying, we were in Hawaii," Chihiro resumed, curling one of her bangs around a finger unconsciously. "And the reason I don't have a tan is because I'm one of those women who has delicate skin and needs to wear a lot of sunscreen. I'm super-sensitive to the sun, you know, which is why I rarely wear dresses. And it was fun too, because Pierre really seemed to like the idea that I needed a lot of suntan lotion."

"Ms. Chihiro, you summoned us here to have an important Unified Club meeting. 'Urgent', as you insisted in your own words," Sora Hasegawa noted in her tiny, innocuous voice. "But now you're digressing, talking about all the different things you did on your vacation, and why you dress the way you do. We're all happy that you took a vacation...but what does suntan lotion and dresses have to do with our Club activities?"

A silence filled the workshop.

"Hee hee, I..uh..well I guess I _did_ get a little off track," Chihiro admitted, resting her hand behind her head nervously. "But you guys need to know that there's a good reason why I spent a lot of time in the hotel rooms, especially at night..."

"Working on your grip, ne?" Tamiya commented. Keiichi blanched, a vision of Tamiya being roasted on a spit in his mind. But the expected verbal cutback never came, and the coiled tension brought about by the sudden calling of a meeting and Chihiro's hyperactive enthusiasm suddenly unsprung into welters of laughter. Chihiro even joined in the raucous giggling, even though it was at her expense.

"Me, I'm glad that you went on vacation with your boyfriend," Ootaki observed in a cheerful voice. "It just goes to prove that you're really a woman, after all."

"Open ass, insert foot," Megumi assayed in a deadpan voice as Sora held her hand over her mouth to suppress the inevitable giggling. Someone half-sneezed, half-laughed as Ootaki blanched in panic.

"God, what is wrong with you guys? Everything has to be about sex! I know it's spring, and spring fever's in the air. But you're acting like a bunch of hyperactive horny college students," Chihiro gasped in exasperation. She seemed to survey each club member, alighting her eyes one-on-one with each in turn.

"Who am I trying to fool, anyway? You guys _are_ a bunch of horny students!"

Now the laughter was nervous, hearse-jockeyed.

Keiichi cleared his throat, trying to wordlessly redirect Chihiro to get back on topic as politely as he could. This was supposed to be an important Unified Club meeting...and it was beginning to sound like the gibber-gabber of drunk wanna-lifes at a local streetside midnight udon stand...

"As I've been trying to say, Pierre and I spent many nights working. _Working_, as in working on a challenging new summer project for you guys. Well actually, a project for all of us in the Club, me included. We haven't done anything major this year, as you know. Just a few rally-course races, a sprint competition in Akita, putting that bunch of bosozoku jerkfaps to shame for having the audacity to challenge us to a street race...by the way, thanks for that, Megumi...and winning a design competition for our precision valve assembly system for ATVs. So what's next, you ask? I really think this new project Pierre and I planned together is going to be great! Wait 'till you guys hear it! We came up with an idea that'll definitely be really cool!" she noted, her energetic bearing full-on in control again.

Chihiro's eyes had that familiar manic glean as she got up from her stool, walked over to a workbench and then pulled a circular cardboard tube off a shelf. Keiichi heard his sister exclaim "Uh-oh!" under her breath in a worried whisper, accompanied by her elbow poking him in the ribs. Chihiro was obviously adrenaline in locomotion, ready to spring a dramatic announcement on them...

"Viola!!! Check _this_ out!" Chihiro announced happily as she withdrew a scrolled-up poster from inside the storage tube. She started twisting it open, almost dropping it in sloppy haste. Managing to half-unroll the poster, she flipped it around to display it to the Club members, acting like a showroom girl praising the sleek design of a new car. When silence greeted her display of the poster, she leaned forward to look over it and noticed that she had it upside down. She righted it with a sheepish grin and then resumed her genki wild-eyed enthusiasm. In English, it announced:

**"Welcome to the 200X Euro-Green Battery-powered Motorcycle and Scooter Competition.**

**This event is sponsored by the European Green-Energy Research Foundation.**

**Competition to be hosted in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, 11 July 20XX"**

"You gotta be kidding me!" Keiichi blurted out in a voice pregnant with frustration and amazement, amidst a course of gasps, groans and sighs.

* * *

The reception anteroom of Sir...oops, Lord Reginald's office...was richly appointed with portraits of Oxford worthies, silver smoking trays, clad wooden walls with glossed wainscoating, doors inlaid with different colored woods to create a cameau effect, a series of replica heraldic estucheons, the floor inlaid with geometric parquet designs, and elaborate brass sconces and candelaria lampstands. An impressive bookshelf on one side sported luxurious and weighty first folio editions of Melville, Eliot, Keats, Blake, Scott, Austen, the Bronte sisters, poetry collections of Tennyson and the Brownings...I could have spent a whole afternoon appreciating them in bibliophilic glee. Two seating-chairs were decorated with ornate damask designs, while the waiting-couch I sat on was a furnishing that I would have been afraid to touch in other circumstances. A museum-quality piece with gold-stitched paisleys, royal purple silk patterns, and ornately carved backrest and legs, it was so perfectly crafted it was almost stifling. I mentally accounted that a piece like this would easy be worth about two or three years of my N.I.T. salary.

The effect of the composite was intimidating to me, reminding me that I was in another time, in another _world_...the world of the educated aristocracy. If I was asked to explain the difference between duke, baron, viscount, earl, or lord, I would be hard-pressed to give a sensible answer. Here, such hereditary and appointed titles had many degrees of meaning. I didn't have a clue about the arms-coat emblems on the wall, but they certainly held significance to someone. Someone from some other lifetime and lifeworld...

Academic institutions are always translucent, layered with politics or what I termed "people shit" in my undergrad years. What you knew wasn't as important as who you knew it with. The system was incestuous, stifling the aspirations of graduate students who wanted to be original or simply wanted to excel. I experienced this barrier firsthand when I shopped my proposed dissertation to various department chairs and profs at several US academic institutions. They consistently regarded my project as too off-the-wall to give sanction to, and refused to sign their names off on it as members of a dissertation committee. Yet, these same professors smilingly demanded that I edit their pet academic journals, or even do associate research on their behalf. Consequently, I threw in the towel and decided to look outside of the US, eventually obtaining an agreement from Dr. Zhou in Beijing DaXue to sponsor my dissertation.

This office reeked of institutional ossification; a certain careful closeting of time that seemed to remand one to accept retrospection rather than creation. Already, I could sense the tangibles...that time here was a perpetually fragmented currency. The weighty accords of the future and past were merely a holiday from the responsibilities of the present, while the present itself was devoid of any value of achievement, obscured by the lengthy shadows of the accomplishments of previous legatees and scholars.

"You may enter the Lord's chambers," a solemn-looking man informed me in a hoarse voice, interrupting my musings. He pulled a gold-handled door open and gestured for me to walk within. Inside, Lord Reginald was standing behind a large cedarwood desk with his back to me, hands clasped behind his back as he stared out the window. I could see the back of his dress jacket and the balding pate of his head, his straw grey hair neatly trimmed above his collar. He was overweight, but from the back his silhouette had a bearish appearance.

"Thank you, Mr. Harvey," he said without even turning to acknowledge my presence. "I will be perfectly frank and get straightways to the point, as my time is valuable and yours is not worth salt. As you know, you are here by command of the British Government and the Oxford University Committee. The reason I had you brought here is singular. I intend to explicitly expose the fact that you stole all of your research from me. You and I...well, we both are fully aware that you authored the Magnum Organum. However, that truth will remain concealed between the two of us, while the academic community and general public will be cunningly convinced otherwise. You will continue to lecture as normal throughout the duration of Trinity Term until it concludes in July, so as to not cast any disgrace upon the Oxford institution or any suspicion upon my personage. I am aware that you have already met our Dr. Smythe, who serves as our Professor of Zoological Studies. If you fail to cooperate in concluding your lecture series in a satisfactory fashion, Dr. Smythe will experience a...unfortunate accident...that will terminate his academic career, if not his life. So do take care to comport yourself at all times with a type befitting your station as an Oxford guest scholar.

"As I mentioned earlier, this lecture series will serve as your public defense of your work. But this will be an exhibitory pretence, justly the invention of appearance only. Throughout history, it is a known fact that justice is easily bribed: the highest bidder has always availed upon the magistrates to effect a 'show trial' regardless of the innocence or guilt of certain parties. In a like manner, your 'defense' shall be contrived to create the appearance of a proper academic dialectic. In truth, this will serve as our _offense_ by engaging us to gauge your level of familiarity with the Magnum Organum. We cannot be seen as acting in an untowards manner to our guests by impugning them before the evidence is marshaled and the moment is ripe. In your case, such criterion will be assembled shortly. Certain materials will be introduced into the Bodleian Library by my associates in the next few weeks. These will be 'discovered' by my research team and per accidens by general members of the Oxon university population who peruse the library facilities. By expanding the scope of these 'discoveries' to include the plebes, such discoveries will increasingly cast doubt upon the authenticity of your authorship of the Magnum Organum.

"I have already dispatched an archeological team to China. Fortunately, their work is well facilitated by the existing treaty agreements her Majesty's government has with the Qing Imperial Court. This will allow us the liberty of unimpeded access to the historical site where you discovered...well, the area where you _will _discover the Encyclopedia of Dawn a century hence. Naturally, we will be able to provide proofs of our discovery that will clearly take precedence over any claims you care to lay upon the subject. It is only appropriate that a seminal work like Magnum Organum be seen as the product of those who are your betters; men who are much more capable of stewarding such a body of innovative theories. This endeavor to undermine you is but a singular cause within a much greater grand scheme. Events have been set into motion that are far beyond the aspirations and ambitions of common scholars like yourself; ungovernable fools who are no more than chaff, no more than academic mongrels. The mastery of world events belongs rightly to the master classes, not to commoners like you. Certainly you will agree that the creme always rises to the top...and unfortunately, you are not the creme. By the time I'm done with you, you will be a wanted man with nary a chance of finding passage within and without the English Isles...you may even meet with a sticky end due to the public sentiment towards thieves and imposters.

"Ah, such a fatal conclusion perhaps would be an act of mercy. But I have no mercy to give. And yes, you _will suffer_ as a man out of time. I'd pity you for the humiliation you are about to endure as a result of our amusing little passion play, save that I will be more motivated to savor a richer bounty. People like you are certainly a commodity of a sort, suitable insofar as you provide your betters with a sense of contentment. The sheer sense of fascination you will present to myself and my peers by your descent into disgrace will be assuredly most entertaining.

"Mr. Harvey, I am finished here. Will you take a care to escort this gentleman out to the courtyard? Oh, and be sure that he receives his honorarum payment for the month. We are fain to avoid the appearance of treating our visiting scholars niggardly."

A forum of mental voices were screaming in my mind, clamoring instants vying for my attention. But I was in a combat zone of the soul, pinned deep down in a foxhole as the bullets of conspiracy strafed overhead. Mr. Harvey wordlessly conducted me out of the administration building, and then slapped a leather bank-purse in my hands with a look of disgust and dismissed me. I was so numbed with shock, I felt like an automaton.

Haunted, I had the sensing that I had been a cyborg once before, in another lifetime...

"_I'm not me,_" I whispered to myself, recalling words I had once told Urd in Beijing. Why I remembered those words and the context in which I said them...was absent. I could only draw the shadow of their meaning; the picture was too incomplete, the life-study was absent. But why was it that my first thoughts seemed to fly towards Urd in the midst of this crisis? She was a century away, and I was uncertain if she could help me at all.

Does a statue have any awareness of the life-events its sculpted form imitates? Does it convey meaning and sentiment to the pigeons who roost on it? Would the long-dead actors whose form it bears maintain that it represents their life's convictions? This whole sequence of events was so surreal, and learning of Lord Reginald's conspiratorial bent plunged me into an extreme sense of dissonance.

The old joke came to mind: once the government starts paying artists, you better run for your life...because the only available hire for artists would be for military target practice. I felt helter-skeltered emotionally, and yet my mind seemed to be jaundiced to the point of paralysis. My chest was gripped painfully tight, and for a moment I thought I was having a heart attack.

How the fuck did he know about Magnum Organum in the first place? This was freakin' _1886_, not 200X!

Being cast in the villain role by the powers-that-be...could this be the only justification that could explain my presence here? No clarification had been given as I had hoped; there would be no opportunity to ask Lord Reginald about the specifics of my circumstances. He had revealed his plans for me and then kicked me to the curb. He didn't even acknowledge me during the entire interview; deliberately devaluing me by his posturing. Communicating that I wasn't worth the effort; that I wasn't important enough for him in his mind to turn around and look me in the eyes.

I had been purged from the 21st Century...and now I was on the edge of being purged from the 19th.

* * *

Urd observed herself kissing Troubadour with a remotely detached uncertainty, feeling at once a burning desire and a chilling reserve. She knew, from the first embrace, that this sudden heart-affair wasn't in her best interest. Facing her sense of reluctance, she reminded herself that she reserved the right to pin away that part of herself...that guilty conscience that kept admonishing her. The inner voices of caution were clarion loud; she couldn't ignore them as easily as she wished. It should be so clear to her, the pathway to her heart. But why wasn't Troubadour able to guide her there, as he had in the distant past? She felt divided, partially heart-dead. Indeed, her heart seemed scrambled rather than resolved. For a hundred millennia, she never had the opportunity to address the collision of desire against common-sense...and the result was nonsense.

"I'm so bad, it feels good," she told herself, trying to justify her flights of passion.

Troubadour had quickly attempted to convince her to demonstrate her love to him, to prove her commitment to their renewed relationship. For some reason, he seemed to be a bundle of haste, almost boyish in his disregard for the finer points of romance. Surprisingly, rather than establishing a romantic mood, he constantly pressured her. He even expressed a desire to make love to him in the mortal fleshbound manner. Coming from a fellow Divine being, this was a curious request. If he wanted to experience the coursing of her feelings, they could become whole using far more intimate means. A greater source of curiosity arose when she tried to justify to herself how it was that she had tumbled over herself to Share with him, and yet she now felt mysterious pangs of reluctance. She was uncertain if she wanted to Share with him again, or perhaps make love to him in the mortal manner. Then she would remember their Sharing, which was clothed in delicate layerings tainted by a sense of regret.

Instead of drawing her closer, their Sharing obscured her sense of being.

Why was she feeling ashamed of herself? This wasn't right! One by one, she would have to defeat these warning signs her conscience kept slinging at her...and _make_ Troubadour hers.

When they Shared for the first time in Syntrasil, Troubadour had remarked that she had concealed much of herself during the Sharing. She too had noticed that the experience was unfocused and clumsy, but she was taken aback at his claim that the shallowness of their Sharing was her fault. Unaware of any withholding on her part, Urd had to examine her sincerity. Naturally, like mortal lovers going on a first date or checking into a love hotel for the initial sexual encounter, she wanted to go all-out to make the experience special, to show him and convince him that _she_ was special. This was very important, because throughout her teen Decas when she and Troubadour were a couple, she could never count on being his 'special one'. She wanted this new relationship with him to be totally open...a clearlight of freedom that could erase those old, bad memories. Life had unexpectedly provided her with a doorway into the chancel of romantic love in her heart. A door that she could slam shut on her repinings, locking them away forever.

A chance to move on...

"Dear Troubadour, what shall I do about this situation with my sisters? They seem so mired in themselves, to the point where I don't feel that they'll wake up and smell the coffee, and begin to accept you," she asked him as she basked in the sun at the beach.

"My opinion...I think you should either make up with them or break up with them," he answered, playfully tossing a handful of sand on her bare back.

"Break up with them? That's ridiculous! I'm going out with _you_, not them."

"Exactly. Break up with them...as in moving out," he clarified. "For a time, anyway. My suggestion is that you remove yourself from their circle, Urd. I urge this only because I think it might be in everyone's best interests. Eventually, your sisters will _have_ to get used to the truth. The truth of you and I. I'm not going away, and they can't hide from that. And until they accept me, how can they honor what's truly in your heart? How can they honor you? Belldandy has always been set against me, even back when we were young and she was merely a girlish Goddess who was fawning on Celestin. I was a fool back then, too immature to recognize the specialness of the feelings we shared between us. Life has changed abundantly since then for you...and now, my heart is more abundant as well. But as long as Belldandy remains your intimate, she will be the custodian of your abundance, able to lock away the riches of love from you at any time. Already, we have to meet at this secluded beach just to have a normal conversation. I must admit that the temple you call home is most unpleasant at the moment. It is not becoming for me to be anywhere near angry Goddesses."

"Taking the long view in terms of duration, five years living with my sisters here on the Earthrealm is comparatively like a walnut in the grove," Urd replied. "But I've become quite attached to my simple life here, even if it appears somewhat mundane compared to what I could be doing in Yggdr...er, Syntrasil. Amazing how quickly I started acting like the mortals once I started living with them. Besides, living with my sisters and the mortals can be _fun_ from time to time."

Troubadour lost his playful smile. "Perhaps you've been _too_ taken with the Earthrealm mortals. I think you've been listening to an old, tired song. Maybe you need an outsider's perspective, as you are in the midst of reinventing your life."

"And who would be such an outsider? You? You, who has been permanently assigned to the Earthrealm as an Earth Grade Spirit and Muse?" Urd countered guardedly. "No, I don't think that your opinion is too 'outside' enough."

"Please don't remind me of my mistakes," Troubadour said with a grimace, resting his hand on his forehead with a disgusted expression. "Besides Urd, think of what could be gained by..."

"I've reached my decision, Troubadour," Urd enunciated firmly. "I will remain here and live at the temple at least until my sister is married to Keiichi. I owe her and my parents that much. But really, I can't believe you sometimes. You've completely ignored the matter of my sister's upcoming wedding, as if it would have no bearing on whether I heed your suggestion that I return to Syntrasil. I'm quite disappointed in your insensitivity, just this once. After she's married, I'll take a closer look at whether I should remain on the Earthrealm or not..."

"That's not reasonable, Urd! Why would you chose to stay _here_? It's not just your sisters, is it? It's the mortals that you tarry around with...they're an undue influence on you. That mortal man Cevn, for example. You would choose to live in the same house with him instead of roaming the universes with me?"

"Pfft! I believe you're jealous, Troubadour!" Urd observed in an amused voice. "You have nothing to worry about concerning Cevn, or any other mortal. He's merely a mortal friend...and nothing more. Besides, there is nothing about him that I could possibly find attractive..."

"But I _am_ jealous of anyone who could possibly be doing _this_ instead of me," Troubadour interrupted as he kissed her into silence. After a moment, he added, "I shall not be certain of your true feelings until there is no doubt that you are mine, completely. Bear this in mind."

"Bear this in mind, Troubadour...I said _after my sister's wedding_. Not a moment before," Urd replied icily. "I will remain _here_ until I decide otherwise. If and when I make a decision to move out of my sister's house, you will be the first to know. 'For a time' you said? For a time, I will weigh my options. But you will not be the sole influence on me, nor will I allow myself to be rushed into a decision, one way or another."

"That's a mistake..."

"If it is, well I'm an adult now and I can live with my mistakes, Troubadour. My path is mine to choose. I'm no longer the boycrazy Goddess that you were in love with ten Decas ago. I'm the _me_...the Goddess that you need to respect. Now wipe that sand off my back, mister..."

* * *

Megumi was digging into a tasty tempura stew, watching her brother stare glumly at the ceiling. The tempura wasn't the only thing that was stewing in the temple's dining room. Belldandy and Skuld were off somewhere on one of those Goddess outings, trying to make sense of Urd's most recent rash act of stupidity. Genji and Tomohisa were chumming it up at the local mall; her boyfriend seemed to pick up on her cousin's insecurity around Skuld and had offered to take him to a gaming arcade to burn off some stress.

"Dammit, I can't believe her! What the hell is she thinking?" Keiichi suddenly blurted out, almost causing Megumi to drop her chopstix.

"Urd?"

"No! Chihiro!"

"What do you expect when it's Chihiro, y'know?" Megumi noted. "When she thinks, someone else usually pays. That's why she's such a good mechanic...and why she can get away with charging such ridiculously high prices on her work. Lucky for you, she pays you so well for your job."

"But _Romania_, for Lord's sake? That's halfway across the world in Eastern Europe! It might as well be Afghanistan or Zaire, as far as I'm concerned. Cluj-Napoca? I doubt if anyone in all of Japan has heard of that city! I certainly had never heard of it until yesterday. Where would we stay if we went there? A hotel, or a farm, or somewhere else? What about the food? I'm not looking forward to eating sauerkraut or whatevers every day for breakfast, and then have to spend all day working on a bike!"

"Onii-chan, I'm sure Chihiro's thought it all out. Knowing her, she's probably gotten online and checked out the grinds they have over there. Besides, shouldn't I be more worried about food than you? But I'm not," Megumi asserted.

"This sucks! You know what this means, don't you? Since it's an electric motorcycle race...it means that the race is going to be entirely on _my_ shoulders. This couldn't come at a worse time, either. Bell-chan is a basket case at the moment, and Skuld is acting colder than the ice cream she gobbles up. Urd is playing hideaway with this Troubadour guy, and from what Bell tells me, he's really bad news. Why did Chihiro have to pick now to spring this on me?"

"On _us_," Megumi said in a bored voice as she stirred her soba, anticipating her brother's complaining. "This doesn't solely concern you, Keiichi. The whole Unified Club is in on this. We agreed, we voted, we're going to Romania. That's final."

"Speaking of finals, it means that we'll have to take ours two weeks early, just like we had to before we went to France. God, but I hate going overseas! Why couldn't she pick someplace closer, someplace _sane_ like Hokkaido or Korea? At least the food in Korea is good..."

"I don't believe for a minute that you _really_ hated going to France for the Le Mans," Megumi corrected, arching an eyebrow. "When we went there, we didn't just spend all our time working on the 'Blaze' to get her ready for the race. We had tons of fun too. You and Sora and I also drove the best race performances of our lives there. And we've got the 'Blaze' garaged right here in Japan, if we want to take her out for a spin in the next Japan Gran Prix. Genji and Sayoko saw to that. So overall...if we had stayed here in Japan last year, we would have missed out on all the cool stuff that happened."

"Yeah, like Genji showing you off to his folks, and then you guys virtually disappearing while we were in Hawaii..."

"Keiichi!!!" Megumi confronted him in an indignant tone. Keiichi was no longer acting like an overprotective older brother, but she sometimes wondered if he'd fully accepted that she was in a permanent relationship with Genji. Sometimes, her brother seemed almost as old-fashioned as her dad...

"Genji and I weren't the only ones having a romance. Look at you and Belldandy! You were so excited, you _proposed to her_ during the victory banquet after the Le Mans race. So don't get all sage on me with this 'traveling in foreign countries sucks' stuff!"

"Okay, I'll grant you that, sis," Keiichi admitted with a sigh of defeat. "But there's so much at stake. How are we going to manage getting over there? Traveling to weirdass out-of-the-way countries that nobody's ever heard of isn't exactly cheap..."

"My boyfriend and Sayoko. We both know that they have deep pockets and love to travel."

"Yeah, but we're talking about an experimental _electric_ motorcycle, not some easy job like rebuilding an old Triumph or a Kawasaki dirtbike. Just assembling a good engine will be a major brain-strainer..."

"Chihiro. She studied electrical motors at one of the best institutes in America."

"And what if I end up getting injured? What if I break my ankle or something and can't race?"

"Yours truly. I'm not called the Queen of Racing by the local bosozoku highway gangs for nothing."

"What if we both break our ankles?"

"I'm going to break my ankle on your butt if you don't stop whining and making excuses, Keiichi! Besides, in the unlikely event that both you and I get injured, then there's Chihiro. And you know she can kick some major ass in a bike race."

"This is completely retarded," her brother grumbled. "It was hard enough staying in France and having to rely on Sayoko, Genji or a translator all the time. I doubt if this Green-Energy Foundation or whatever it is has the megabucks funding that the Le Mans had. Which means that it won't have enough cash to score a translator for us. Not to mention that nobody speaks Romanian..."

"Ootaki."

"Ootaki what?" her brother asked, gulping his coffee now that he was in a pesty mood.

"Ootaki speaks Romanian. According to Sora, who wouldn't lie about such things. She said she heard it from Aoshima, who heard it from Chihiro, who probably heard it from Tamiya. Anyway, when Ootaki was in grade school, he spent several summer vacations over there staying with his grandparents on his Dad's side."

"No freakin' way! _Ootaki_!? His dad's _Romanian_?" Keiichi exclaimed. "Now I know why he keeps his hair so whacked...it must be some Eastern European punk-rock thing in his genes. I mean, I've heard about Japanese living in Romania. I even saw a special on one of the travel channels about how they have a big parade there every year to celebrate their Japanese heritage and customs..."

"Yeah way," Megumi mimicked her brother's voice. "Knowing Ootaki, his parents probably packed him away during the summers to preserve their sanity..."

"Heh heh! And I thought I knew that guy pretty good," Keiichi said once he stopped laughing. "Well, if it's coming from Tamiya, it probably isn't some drunken stretch of the imagination. But Ootaki? You sure you want to depend on _Ootaki_ to talk to the locals? That could be disastrous."

"I seem to remember Sayoko pulling you and the other male Club members out of the frying pan in France because she spoke their language. Remember that little incident involving too much wine and cheese, barroom brawls, and a certain French jailhouse?"

"Yeesh! That's a memory I certainly don't look upon fondly," Keiichi said with a sigh. "But Ootaki's nuts! We could wind up in jail _because_ he speaks Romanian! Besides, there's another major hurdle we face in the here and now; one that we didn't have to deal with during the Le Mans trip. Back then, we had Cevn as a faculty sponsor. He was the one who pulled the strings that made it possible for the whole team to complete their exams before leaving for Paris. Now that he's been fired by N.I.T. because of his disappearing act these past few months, we don't have anyone..."

Megumi felt a stabbing sadness again at the mention of Cevn's name. Two months and he was still gone! She had been the one who had suggested that he try out for a position at N.I.T., right after he arrived. Now, all but one of his classes had been canceled, and someone else was teaching in his place...

"Sorry, sis," Keiichi hastily added, noticing her downcast expression. "For what it's worth, he was kinda like my older brother too, y'know. I still can't believe how he handled Sayoko's drug abuse...and now she's a whole other person, clean and going out with Tamiya. I miss him too, believe me! But we have to face the facts. We don't have a faculty sponsor who can smooth things out on this end for us."

"I really don't think we need one, this time," Megumi asserted angrily. "Have you noticed that new Medical Sciences Engineering Wing going up on Toho Hall? The one that's been written up in the school newspaper a couple times this term. Oh wait! I forgot that my brother doesn't read the school paper."

"Leave it, Megs!" Keiichi pointed out, irritated. "I lost all respect for the school paper after they stalked me for three months after that Solar Federation win our Club had. Reading the school scandal sheet just gives me a headache and bad memories."

"Well, you wouldn't know then, would'ya," Megumi perked up. "They ran an article on how our winnings were going to be spent by N.I.T. We won _six billion yen_ for the school, and that's why that new wing is being built. If some corporate bigshot had dropped a billion yen to build a new wing, Dr. Kintaro would be kowtowing to him all the way to the Diet Building. You ask me...they owe us _bigtime_ for that! They should bend over and kiss ass for what we did for our school!"

Her brother shook his head side-to-side with a knowing grin, his inner rebel touched by her reasoning. "Totally! You have a point, sis. If we made a Club travel request and they turned it down, it would massively stir up some shit..."

"Exactly! Not only with the school, but with all of Chiba. We fuckin' won the _Le Mans_ last year! Not letting us go...would be like pissing on the Emperor's shoes. The public would be up in arms if word got out that we weren't allowed to race. Sooo...any other objections?"

"I just don't like it, Megumi. I don't like taking on another one of Chihiro's big adventures right now. Not to mention that Mara told Belldandy that I can't race anymore, because of how reckless I was at the end of the Le Mans," Keiichi admitted.

"Look, my dear older brother," Megumi contested. "Only you know if you can race or not, regardless of what Mara and Belldandy think. Those little competitions we had this spring were small-fry, not even a test of your racing abilities. But this one's different; it's a _world_ championship. We also have a ace in the hole. Chihiro is going out with Pierre Ar Bras, who happens to be Euro. Who happens to be renowned throughout all those countries over there as a racing guru. He's probably got that race totally cased. I'd imagine that he's also got a shitload of connections in the racing world, including Romania. Chihiro wouldn't send us on a fool's errand, y'know. She's got way too much pride to do that. I bet that she and Pierre had lots of hot sex on the beach and in the hotel, and then they stayed up all night planning every detail of this over bottles of champagne and sushi."

"Well, I have to admit that I'm impressed that she told me she was visiting her folks...while she was off on a getaway with Pierre," Keiichi said. "I wonder if he'll show up..."

"Keiichi, you've got to trust Belldandy," Megumi confronted her brother, sensing that he was dancing around the real source of his discomfort.

"I do, but she's been acting distant and confused, plus she's had more than the usual number of her ditzy naive spells. All of which taken together...really scares me."

"Don't confuse navet for confusion, or else you'll be proven a naive fool yourself," she reminded him. "This situation with Urd is probably a whole lot more complicated than she's letting on."

"How? I mean, what can be more in-your-face blatant than our normally gosu Urd suddenly getting all vamped over Troubadour?"

"Think of it this way, Big Brother. This isn't some minor Urd vs. Skuld squabble. There's some really deep feelings being stirred to a boil because of Urd, on everyone's part..."

"But Bell-chan hasn't told me hardly anything!" Keiichi said, exasperated.

"You're kidding? Belldandy hasn't talked to you about this? Gods...that's just great!" she acknowledged in a caustically cynical voice, even more exasperated than her brother. Belldandy wasn't the type that steered away from being outspoken, especially with Keiichi in her life to help her navigate her feelings and concerns.

"That means that it's much worse than I thought; I'd assumed that you were able to coax it out of her already. She's probably trying to keep it all to herself, at least until she knows what's going on. The fact that she hasn't discussed it with you is a tip-off that she _doesn't_ know what's going on with Urd. It's said that siblings who are favorably disposed towards each other have the worst falling-outs. Belldandy's been pushed off the cliff by this...and she doesn't have a parachute. Then there's Skuld..."

"Yeah," her brother agreed. "I'm more worried about Skuld than I am about Bell-chan. Bell-chan knows this Troubadour guy, both good and bad. I've only met him once, and I caught the vibe that he's a magnet for trouble. But Skuld doesn't know him at all. She could be thinking the worst..."

"And your fiance has to be there for her...and Urd in a sense," she explained. "What if you were Belldandy, and I was packin' Urd's kimono? For example, if you knew from experience that Genji was a first-class jerk...not that he is, of course...but just forget that for a minute. Forget that he's really cool and totally loves me. For assumption's sake, let's say that you don't like him and you _know_ that he wouldn't be good for me...and then I went and did the hookup thing with him. How would you feel? What would you do?"

"I'd be royally pissed, and I would get in his face. And yours. You could say that a mashup would be in the offing..."

"That's pretty easy to say, isn't it?" she noted. "But you know what I'd do if you did that? If you hurt either us, I'd get really angry back at you. We'd be as angry at each other as we were during the time I left to go to the Le Mans trials while Belldandy was sick with that plague thing. But what do you think I would do with all that raging resentment? I'd reciprocate, of course. I'd probably be so pissed off at you, I'd do everything in my power to get _even closer_ to Genji just to torment you, just to hurt you back for rejecting him..."

"...which would hurt me, Tomohisa, and Mom and Dad! Dammit, I didn't realize that!"

"Now you know how complicated it can get. And that's just one possible domino-effect scenario. This whole thing your fiance is facing is still embryonic in a sense...and no one knows how it's gonna come out. It's already messed up, and it could get freakshow worse. They're _Goddesses_, which means that their relationship as sisters is far more complex than anything you and I could possibly imagine. You and I...we have twenty years of history between us, onii-san. Belldandy and Urd have 200,000 years of history that they share. Your fiance is caught in the middle of all this, having to pacify Skuld, mollify Urd, and protect you...all at once."

"So what does all of this have to do with the Unified Club going to Romania?"

"I'm just getting to that," she said, pausing to dash down a gulp of coffee. "Going to Romania might be exactly what Belldandy needs."

"Huh? That sounds crazy, Megumi!"

"At first thought, it would seem to be pretty whack. But think of it this way...it would give her a break from having to deal with Urd. Cevn once told me that one of the best curatives to a personal dilemma is to take a journey. He explained that people who are detached from people, places and things of their usual environment usually become _different persons_, strangers to themselves. And most of the time, when one meets a stranger, they extend kindness and friendship. Look at how coming here changed him: he used to be a depressed mess, and over time he overcame a lot of his fears and became one of us. Not too many gaijin can accomplish that. So why wouldn't it work with Belldandy too? It might be really good for her to get away for a while.

Keiichi looked thoughtful; if she could pierce his doubts just a bit more, she'd win him over to her view...

"Skuld tagging along would be a bonus, too. Belldandy wouldn't have to be walking on eggshells worrying if Skuld was going to act out and starting randomly chucking Skuld Bombs everywhere or if Urd was going to stinkeye her during dinner and start a fight. A project like this would be a good chance for your fiance to focus her energies on something other than Urd. You and Bell would have an opportunity to really talk it out too. This conflict isn't just about her and Urd...and being a woman, I have a good sense about what's going on with her. She _needs_ you, Big Brother. She needs you, and yet she feels that she needs to keep you at a distance, so you don't get caught up in what's troubling her. So why not take her completely out of Japan, take her away from all the conflict, worries and pain...so she can simply get grounded again?"

"What if it just makes things worse? What do I do then if she gets all stressed out over Urd while we're in Romania?"

"You do what you've always done. Just be yourself, and be there for her. Let love do its thing between the two of you, and trust each other."

* * *

"Circuses are fun until someone gets trampled by an elephant or falls off the trapeze. Sadly though, the human thirst for sadism is such that many people go to the circus simply because there is a risk of such bullshit. And when it happens, they deny their bloodthirst and simply label it as a 'tragic event'," I thought as I surveyed the crudely-printed circulars posted on a weatherworn public board, including several adverts for traveling "fun-fairs and circuses".

My thoughts were raging out of control; I had to rely on desperate means to keep myself focused and buoy my sanity afloat in the turbulence of my dismay. So I was walking around doing random reading of public announcements and poster-sheets just to keep out of my head, because my thoughts were a dangerous place to be. The addict in me wanted to thoroughly numb myself to the powerful tides of helplessness that colored my emotional state.

"ShutupShutupShutupShutthefuckup!" I thought to myself as desires flowed and began to build their edifice of justification again. Temptations like ducking into the nearest apocatharist's and inquiring if laudanum was available over the counter were fluidly moving in and out of my thoughts. In the 1880s, a person could buy opium almost as easy as they could buy aspirin in the 2000s...

The last thing I needed to do was get loaded!

Wandering in a fugue, I was jolted back into lucidity when a policeman yelled me to a standstill. He cross-examined me on the spot for walking across a lawn with a half-concealed "Do not walk on the grass" sign behind a shrub. Stepping back on the sideaways, my senses were sharpened by the clamor of the busy street. I felt self-conscious as everyone seemed to stare at me as they walked past; their eyes accusing me of purposelessness. Life coursed all around me; a parade of horse buggies, hansoms, omnibuses, grocer and butcher's drays, ornate horse-drawn carriage-cabs, tradesman's carts with peeling painted signs depicting their proprietor's crafts, and animated men and women in costumes. A cacophony of sounds filled the air...I could barely hear my own thoughts amidst the horse-cloppings, the rumbling of worn side-wheels bracing the cobbled streets, creaking carts and rattling wagons, and the squeally sounds of rust-grated doors opening and closing.

As I passed a clock-maker's shoppe, I suddenly realized that I didn't have a clue about what time it was. Gripped with worry that my blind strolling had caused me to miss my 11am lecture, I glanced up and down the street searching for a clock. Finding none, I was too ashamed to ask any passersby to give me the time, so I ducked into the clock-maker's store under the pretence of shopping for a time-piece. No wonder such vest-chain timepieces were considered essential to the 'gentleman's wardrobe'; there were no public clocks in sight. I smiled to myself, amused with the idea that we in the 21st century have graduated from using timepieces to using convergent devices like blackberries and cellphones to check the time.

My lecture was a half-hour away, and I realized that I didn't know where the hell Balliol Hall was. I walked around like a dumbass until I mustered the courage to ask an innocuous-looking student where it was. With aristocratic derision, he chided me for my ignorance and then pointed up the street and mumbled some directions. I was beginning to get the impression that Oxford University was arranged like a chessboard; the individual colleges within the University located as a series of adjacent irregular 'squares'.

From nearby, Balliol College resembled a spired Gothic cathedral rather than a collegiate campus. Walking through the stone gateway into a enclosed 'quad' that was meticulously gardened, I noticed several queues of students walking purposefully towards a large building off to one side, perhaps a hall. Several churchmen in flowing black vestments passed me, and I followed them down a covered gallery hallway. I finally gathered the courage to ask them where the lecture by the invited foreign scholar was to be held, and was informed that it would be conducted in an assembly theatre located next to the Reading Hall.

They looked at me as if I was out of my mind. I could only hope that they planned to attend the lecture, so I could see their embarrassed expressions when I was introduced as the speaker.

Once inside, I was met by the Master of Balliol College who easily recognized me by my uncertain wandering in the hallways, like a Tiresian lost soul. He thanked me for being prompt and guided me to the anteroom adjacent to the large lecture hall, whose stadia seating resembled a surgical theatre more than a classroom. By this point, I was almost hyperventilating due to an overdosing of anxiety. The room with filled with men, elderly scholars and clergymen in the front rows and students in the upper seating sections, with even more students standing against the rear wall. To me, any one of them could be a potential conspirator poised to attack my presentation; owls hungrily eyeing a cornered mouse. The lectern in the front of the lecture hall was as threatening as a guillotine.

What the hell was I supposed to do or say? Lord Reginald had casually exposed the facade of my invited lecture series, informing me that my discourses were defenses rather than expositions and adding that I would have to be prepared to oblige the attendees with debate if necessary. This was going to be insanely difficult! I barely comprehended the most basic tenets of the Magnum Organum. Even worse, I would be constrained to offer explanations based on the 'current' 19th century intellectual methodologies. I would have to exercise a keen awareness of the historicit of this era; I couldn't offer up any inadvertent references to 20th and 21st century advances. Imagine if I goofed up and referenced the internet as an illustrative metaphor, and then had to backpedal and explain to these savants the working concept of the world-wide web! Knowledge of the intellectual history of the 19th century wouldn't suffice...I would need to apprehend the historical context of the 19th century _as if I lived in the 19th century_. Be like them, speak like them, think like them...

All too soon, the Master of Balliol strode out to the podium, made a few prefatory remarks, and then introduced me as the "visiting scholar from the Far East country of Japan, who is going to present a few comments on an innovative concept of Natural Philosophy."

I was as fucked-over as a fish in an icecube, but yet I had to say something...

"Several millennia ago, a certain city located on the ocean shores had prospered for hundreds of years due to an abundant stock of ocean fish and nearby verdurous lands which were ripe for agriculture. Then one year, an assailing catastrophe struck in the form of a large sea-wave, which drowned most of the villagers while destroying all but a few structures. The survivors decided to relocate their city inland to avoid another such disaster. After a period of nomadic searching, they found a loess plateau at the confluence of two rivers and decided to convene there and establish themselves. After the passage of several hundreds of years, this antediluvian people exhausted the well-water supply, which forced them to resort to digging deeper wells. Unfortunately, their new wells yielded but a scant supply of water, insufficient for irrigation and basic consumption. Thus, they had to abandon their new city. In the modern era, archaeologists discovered the ruins of this very city. Upon excavation and investigation, they determined that the wells weren't rendered deep enough to intersect with the aquifers concealed in the deeper strata.

"In a like manner, science and philosophy have often erred by not digging deep enough into the mysteries of reality; in essence, failing to excavate truth by using increasingly rigorous methods of analysis and hypothesis. An example of this can be found in promulgation of the Aristotelian concept of the classical elements, which dominated natural philosophy for centuries until it was displaced by the modern scientific approach. In more recent years, the concept of luminiferous aether as a universal attribute of physical matter, one which results in the generation of light...has also been drawn into controversy, potentially disproved by current research.

"Magnum Organum is an attempt to dig deeper into the fields of practical psychology, philosophy and metaphysics, based on the assumption that several current central intellectual paradigms are propadeutic in exaction. Essentially, Magnum Organum exerts four divisions of proposition which endeavor to transcend this superficiality by asserting thoroughgoing noetic and dialectic approaches.

"The problem of thought...is thought.

"Presently, the summation of scientific and philosophical inquiry into the nature of thought universally yields the axiom that thought...at its most essential and fundamental processes...is symbolic in nature and essence. The preposition that thought is symbol is more question than answer, as it readily presents two distinct problems. First, symbols are cognized as innately poly-conceptual. To illustrate this, consider the thought-symbol of 'triad'. To the mathematician, 'triad' is readily conceptualized as designating trigonometric properties. To the Christian theologian, 'triad' signifies the tripartite doctrine of Deity. Children will either grasp 'triad' as a form of candy or completely fail to grasp its symbolism. To the street hawker, 'triad' brings to mind the three-cup shell game. To the colonial authorities in Chin..er, Cathay, 'triad' carries a distinct meaning that involves thuggee criminal enterprises. This single example points to the inexactness of positing that thought has a uniform symbolic context. Simply put, what creates the poly-conceptual constitution of thought-as-symbol that, otherwise, should be indivisible and particular?

"The second problem is more sublime, yet more confounding. Given the ability of language to be infinitely irreplicable...that each and every morphemic construct is unique to itself and cannot be repeated or reproduced...why does it fail to convey specificity to symbolic thought, in such a manner as to prevent conceptual confusion? If thought is predicated as symbol, then any means of communication other than telepathy will only render an incomplete syntax. In simpler terms, why can't language communicate thought discreetly and precisely?

"Both problems taken together indicate that symbol itself would be irreconcilable with the thought it represents, and thus the entire system is worthless. But it's all we have: a system readily open to dispute. To address this, Magnum Organum rejects the concept that thought is symbol in purpose and function...and instead argues that thought is an energy design.

"This premise is propounded in greater detail in the fourth section of Magnum Organum, which elaborates the Aquantum Metastatics. A quantum, in the metaphysical sense of modus per reductio, designates thought by componential means. Specifically, thought is recognized by the attribution of the furthermost indivisible monadic atomae...its individual 'character'. A thought-quantum assumes the existence of a mono-conceptual symbol; a property of symbolic thought which is identified because it cannot be further divided by meaning or context.

"By rendering thought as energy design, Aquantum Metastatics denies the need for thought to be either poly-conceptual or mono-conceptual, because such attributions are rendered superflorous and unnecessary. Thus, thought designs are non-quantums...Aquantums. They exist outside of distinction, definition and degree. Thought as an energy design also transcends the correlation of thought arising from symbol or vice versa. By doing so, Aquantum Metastatics allows for a definition of thought that allows for the reconciliation of the two broadest qualifications of intuition: the infinite faculty of imagination and the demand existential condition.

"Thought as an energy design implies that it is an _energy_, one of a series of 'dimensionalities' that can be comprised into a codification. The codification is symbolic merely because the conventions of language require it to be, but the science of _thought_ is not. Using such a codification, it is possible to actualize each energy design as the actual thought or thought matrix. What is thereby being communicated is a flow of energy, not a continuum of symbolic interpretations that we deem as intellect..."

* * *

Urd's recent eccentricisms were a source of hilarity to Mara as she surveyed the temple from her Demoness Lair, a Sere-Hawk perched on her shoulder. Belldandy had practically begged for her to leave the Earthrealm and come to her parent's house in the God's Realm to try and talk some sense into her twin sister. For the first time in her life, Mara experienced travel using a Living Gate of the God's design, traveling to some place called Midgardrasil and then using something called a Unitransic System to travel to the God's Realm. But her meeting with Urd didn't go smoothly at all, in part because she had never been to the God's Realm before. The whole arrangement of the God's Realm section of Syntrasil was thoroughly disorienting to her, which caused her to misspeak and earn the wrath of Belldandy's Father, a largish muscular one-eyed God called Odeyn.

At least she had tried.

But now that the sisters had returned to the Earthrealm, their auras were orange with tortured anxiety. In the past, this would have been a primo situation for her to exploit...and some of the old instinctual malice still resurfaced when she observed the looks of miserable sufferance on Belldandy's and Skuld's faces. Her twin sister had really done a number on them this time! Mara grinned, realizing that this one time, she wasn't the instigator of chaos in the sister's household. No, not even Hild could cause this much turmoil...

"Gotta remember that they're my sisters, Blessit!" she confronted herself, feeling guilty over how much pleasure she was deriving from the Goddesses' comeuppance. If they were any other Divines, she could laugh to her heart's content at this. Turmoil like this would have qualified as a high-grade Cursing, or at least a top-shelf Grief Strike in the old days. Now that she had discovered that she was half-Goddess, she kept grappling with a periodic indecisiveness...a new feeling that she had little experience dealing with. A stupid, confusing emotion that was stultifying to her Demoness nature.

Compassion.

But what had caused Urd to dive blindly into a relationship in the first place? Urd definitely wasn't relationship material, and yet she had been involved with Cevn at one time, even if she herself didn't remember it. Then again, Cevn wasn't too stable himself, as Mara recalled from her many encounters with him. But Belldandy had readily accepted Urd and Cevn's romance. Even the Brat-Goddess had let it be. In contrast, Belldandy seemed to dislike this Troubadour as if he was the Dark Lord Himself on a bad hair day. But Troubadour was only an Earth Grade Spirit, which was several stations below Urd's status in terms of Divine hierarchy and firepower. What kind of grip did he have on her twin sister?

There must be some kind of manipulation going on here. The idea of a mischievous, heedlessly willful God that was skilled in crafting such daring machinations was attractive to Mara. In a Demon, subterfuge and oppression-games were healthy bad-boy qualities. Maybe she should steal him away from Urd, just for kicks...

"Quit it! She's my _sister_! Blaze's sake, I've gotta stop thinking this shit!" she admonished herself with a shout, causing the SereHawk clutching her shoulder to take to startled flight. Being the head of the Demoness Strife Mischief Office, maybe she could undo this Troubadour's stranglehold on Urd.

She could show him what _real_ strife was all about...

But to do this, she'd have to confront him. Which meant that she'd have to hang out at the temple. Decision made, she hopped into her cherry-red Ferrari with the blaze-flames painted on the side and peeled out onto the highway for the drive to Makuhari.

* * *

"I'M GONNA KILL THAT MOTHERFUCKER!!! I'M GONNA FRY HIS ASS TO SLAG!" Mara screamed angrily after Belldandy finished her narrative of Troubadour and Urd's former relationship. She had no idea that it was that bad! It was unbelievable that Urd would put up with such mistreatment. True, her twin sister was half-Demoness...but this fact should have only increased her lack of tolerance for Troubadour's infidelities and other vulgarities. Even Demons didn't allow for such a breadth of dysfunction in their relationships; a Demoness could only put up with a certain level of bullshit before she would blow up on her lover and put him in his place with decisive lovefrience. It was clear that Urd had become intoxicated by a cleverly designed hoax, lured by the promise that her new ability to share romantic love would offset the pain of a ruinous past relationship. This was as futile as trying to build a castle of clouds in a pulsar...

Protective of her sisters and livid to the core, Mara's hands were tight-fisted with rage. Splicing herself with a disreputable God like Troubadour was completely out of character for her twin sister. At first...until Belldandy explained that Urd had become desperate for love once she found out that she would never experience it again once she became a Norn. Apparently, some of Urd's tolerance for his waywardness made sense. But Mara even felt more angry at Troubadour because he had taken advantage of Urd's position, rather than being supportive.

As long as she had known her, Urd was the one who got chased after, not the one who did the chasing. Of course, there was that silly Norn thing that made it totally futile for Urd to do the chasing...but Urd certainly got off on being pursued by Gods. Belldandy's explanation had only blurred the glass even more...

"Big Sister Mara, you're almost as bad as Urd," her little sister Skuld accused her. "Always think first and act later. Must be a Demoness thing, huh? Actually, going after Troubadour would be retarded...it would just get Urd even more riled up than she is now. Since he's a wimpass Earth Grade Spirit anyways, any one of us could burn his house down. But Urd might stand up to protect him. Then what? C'mon, you're approach is about as creative as ditch-water. You can do better than that!"

"Skuld, watch your language," Belldandy said sternly.

"If Urd defends that dork...then I'd rain fire on her ass too!" she answered excitedly. If it came down to a mano-y-mano between she and her twin sister, Mara knew that she could pull more than a few tricks out of her sleeve. But she pulled her flaring thoughts to a standstill as she realized that she'd be fighting with Urd because of a scumbag Earth Grade Spirit...

"This is like going to war over spilt booze..." she grumbled under her breath.

"While I can fully appreciate your sentiments, Mara, I also know that matters cannot be resolved by taking direct action against Troubadour, regardless of how misguided he is. We cannot dismiss that our sister is behaving foolishly as well," Belldandy said calmly.

"_Little Sister_, you keep forgetting that I don't view reality through your pink-colored Goddess sunglasses!" she challenged Belldandy in a haughty voice. "Urd may be a total moron...and this certainly proves it...but she's still my twin sister. You may be content to stand around and mope about and feel sorry for yourself, but I don't roll with that. I'm an action girl, y'know! Don't confuse my motives for ordinary viciousness...I agree with you that Troubadour is the worst thing that could have happened to Urd. But he could _already be doing_ all those wretched things to her that you told me about. He was able to sneak around behind her back while they first were together...what makes you think that he isn't fucking around on her again?"

"I..if he's doing the ecchi thing behind Big Sister Urd's back, you'll have to race me to get him!" Skuld exclaimed with an angry face. "I'll Skuld-bomb him to a pulp with everything in my arsenal..."

"And which child was criticizing this adult Demoness just a moment ago about acting foolishly? And only a _child_ would assume that a Goddess would be doing ecchi things...when there are many more interesting ways to be perverted that don't involve physical sexuality," Mara said in a sarcastic drama-voce, grinning just widely enough so Skuld could see her fangs resting on her lower lip. Her teenage sister reacted in the requisite fashion, shrinking back from the table a little and looking at her fearfully.

"We must use caution in facing this problem," Belldandy noted, aloof to her attempts to taunt and intimidate Skuld. "My concern is about how the two of you will act around Urd and each other. It would be calamitous if you fought amongst yourselves. Mara, as a Demoness you can be sadistic, capable of subterfuge, dishonest, overbearing and ruthless. Skuld, even though you have an adolescent physical manifest, you're still only Twelve Decas old and have all the behaviors of a tween Goddess, such as flightiness, an impetuous nature, unformed opinions and impulsively defiant attitudes. The two of you need to...er, why are you both looking at me that way? Did I say something that was an untruth?"

"Heh! My dear artless Goddess younger sister," Mara enjoined. "There's a time and a place to offer such words of honesty. Unfortunately, you never seem to have a clue about when and where those times are. As you are my sister, I will let you off with a warning this time. But remember this...as a Demoness, I will not tolerate such a series of condemnations again."

"But they're true, they're true!" Skuld chimed in.

"And you're everything your older sister said you were, Ms. Twelve Deca Goddess! My twin sister would have put it more succinctly by saying that you're an ignoble spoiled little girl! If you're going to ever stop acting like a girl, you need to start imitating Belldandy and I more."

"Grrr..."

"Oh and you should try harder to offer proper courtesy to your eldest sister," she added. "Otherwise, she may act in the Demoness fashion...and you may wind up having to re-attach Sigel's head to her body."

"I don't know if I could...and I don't know if you could, either," Skuld replied, completely ignoring her threat. For a moment, Mara thought that Skuld was simply dizz-scooting her out of disrespect...but then she noticed the analytical glimmer in her little sis's eyes. This wasn't Skuld being defiant...

"HUH?" she exclaimed, caught off-guard by Skuld's comeback. Belldandy was nodding knowingly along with Skuld, obviously aware of something that she herself didn't know. Amazingly, Skuld seemed to intimate that Banpei and Sigel were indestructible, or perhaps incapable of being disassembled!

"Something happened to both Sigel and Banpei that I can't fully explain," Skuld replied. "I was going to do a routine maintenance on them a few days after Belldandy onee-chan and Keiichi came back to us. But when I opened up Banpei, I discovered that his internal mechanisms had been rebuilt. _Completely_ rebuilt."

"So?" she asked impatiently, hovering up in the air over the table, hands on hips.

"Banpei and Sigel have new A.I.s and mecha components that are so advanced, I can't even figure them out. I don't even know if I can call their core units A.I.s. They're both like one of _us_, only they don't have Divine abilities. Take the intersect of computers and living machines, add even more sentient characteristics...and you've got Banpei and Sigel. I've scanned them thoroughly and discovered that they have a new set of components built into them that function together in a way that is virtually indistinguishable from a real Soul...the kind of Souls that _the mortals and we have_. I doubt that even you could damage either of them unless you completely destroyed them. I definitely cannot repair them."

Skuld suddenly halted her explanation and looked in the direction of the temple's doorway for a moment.

"Hey, I've gotta go! Tomo has baseball practice..."

Without a word of goodbye, her little sister flashed out of existence by zooping into Belldandy's tea cup, leaving her and Belldandy sitting alone in Everyone's Tea Room. Astonished by Skuld's disclosure, all she could do was stare at her sandy-haired younger sister for a moment. Then she recalled Skuld's flushed face and enthusiasm right before she vanished...

"Heh heh! 'Tomo', it is?" Mara noted with a laugh. "So does she do that often, Belldandy...just drops everything and takes off whenever she wants to see him?"

"Every day," Belldandy answered, seemingly relishing a private joke.

"Must be great to be young and full of irresponsibility..."

** To Chapter 161**

**To New Chapters Index**

**_More to Come!_**


	161. Pt 161: Climbing To Wards

**Part 161: Climbing To Wards**

Dutifully, Skuld patiently waited on the lip of an grassy easement round near the baseball diamond as she watched Tomohisa and his teammates play scrimmage games of baseball. The late-afternoon sun was still warm on her back, the grass smelled sweet and fresh, and she was daydreaming about the upcoming weekend; daydreams that were flights of romantic whimsy, sailing like the cirrus clouds bending delicately towards the horizon. She nearly jumped to her heels when the coach's whistle pierced her sweet reveries, signalling that the baseball squad were released from today's after-school baseball practice. As Tomohisa and his teammates shuffled off the baseball field, she pranced down the embanking hill to the fence and flashed him her special smile...and then grinned as his teammates responded by pouring on their special teasing.

"Lucky you!" "How'd you score her?" "What's a beauty like that doin' with a assbite like you?" "She's a total babe!" "Tomo, you jerk!" "Hey! Intro me to her friends!" "Give me her phone number!"

She had to cover her mouth to disguise her mirth as Tomohisa's expression briefly shifted from a sweaty athletic after-glow into a tongue-tied stumble-footed awkwardness. In a sense, this _was_ a test. Being who she was, Skuld enjoyed probing the responses of those around her...and Tomohisa was a deserving target. Would he be honest and acknowledge that she was his girlfriend? Or would he go all 'pride guy' and utter a few choice phrases to dismiss or minimize their relationship? Something like a tight-lipped refusal along the lines of "she's not my girlfriend, she's just a friend...who happens to be a girl."

"What will you say, Tomo?" she asked under her breath as she sat down on a nearby public bench, their usual meeting place after practices. Heightening her auditory senses to listen in as they entered the high school gym, she overheard another stretch of delighted antagonizing by his circle of insouciant friends...but there was no repudiation or excuses on Tomo's part to explain her interest in him. Finally, Tomohisa turned the tables on his teammates and started teasing the team captain who was going steady with the school beauty of the senior class. A riotous conversation ensued as every boy seemed to talk at once...

Smiling at his deft handling of the teasing, Skuld reduced her hearing to the normal near-human auditory range. Once again, she pondered if she should eavesdrop the locker room itself while the guys were taking their showers. A slight flush feathered her cheeks as her imagination roamed, fostering fictional and fanciful conversations amongst the boys...mostly centered on girls and sex. Curiosity propelled her, but faint-heartedness restrained her. Who knows what weird perverted things a bunch of teenage boys would rap about in the locker room?

Glancing towards the school's gym, Skuld _knew_ that every boy in that school fantasized about hiding away in the girl's locker room or the homeroom, hoping to sneak a peek at the girls while they were changing out of their PE outfits. The mental coloring of their thoughts simply sounded too loud when it came to naked girls. She wouldn't trust any of them at an onsen or ryokan. Separate bathing areas would be no obstacle to these guys...

"Time to tone it down," she whispered to herself, relaxing her telepathic sensitivity towards the mortal thoughtwave structuring. "I don't need to be catching something fishy by sensing their hormone-driven thoughts."

Tomohisa's high school, Furibiki High, wasn't an elite, status-driven rich-kid's school by any means. But its academic standards were quite competitive: nearly as rigorous as many of the prestigious private schools. The teachers in his school actually cared about getting the students prepared for good colleges, and worked hard at creating the learning environment to instill confidence alongside knowledge. Furibiki was considered as a model high school in the Makuhari district because of its distinguished results; a high percentage of its graduates were annually placed into the 'better' universities. She was glad that he wasn't stuck in some underfunded 'dork' high school that was more focused on controlling students rather than educating them. His parents had chosen well to send him to Furibiki.

Since it was such a downspin to be around the house while Urd was there, she found herself spending a lot of time riding around town in the bicycle Megumi had tuned up for her, a fond memento of her friendship with Sentaro. After her bike ride, late afternoons were spent hanging out near Tomo's high school watching him play baseball. She wasn't alone; a few of Tomohisa's female classmates would hang out on a daily basis to watch the team, their boyfriends, or their wannabes. Several girls even knew her by name and would sometimes pause to gossip with her about other girls or whateverz.

Skuld reflected that, back in Syntrasil, she had her own equivalent of 'school'. She was officially enrolled in SecondTier Inculcation, upper division...except for the Advanced Mecha Gnosism courses, where she was almost finished with ThirdTier. She missed being challenged by the learning environment of Inculcation. But she was reluctant to attend any Inculcation sessions since the big "ReCreation Event" changeover occurred, partially because of the anxiety she sensed when she visited Syntrasil. As a consequence of the ReCreation Event, a huge number of permutations were turning up all over the God's Realm, inevitable as much as they were unexpected. Everything had changed drastically...and she doubted that the Inculcation system and its curricula were somehow immune to such significant shifts. She wanted to scope out the changes first before resuming her Inculcation, just to be safe. But not now, not while Big Sister Urd was acting like an OL with a maniac streak.

Despite all the incongruities she noticed, Elder Sister Belldandy held the view that this ReCreation Event could all turn out good in the end.

"Who knows?" she asked herself. "Maybe by the time I get to Transcend Inculcation, they'll have classes in the Demon's Language. That would be so cool! Maybe I'll even get to study the mecha tech that the Demons use!"

Grateful that she had a place to go to avoid Urd...and to a lesser extent, Belldandy...Skuld kept a lookout for Tomohisa so she could ride home with him during the sunset hour. Meeting him after school was one of the highlights of her day. But then she had to go home and face her elder sister, who seemed intent on pursuing melancholy rather than trying to talk sense into Big Sister Urd. Skuld felt a small peel of resentment against Belldandy for being so soft on Urd, who obviously was the one at fault here. Also, now that Urd had gotten involved with Troubadour, she seemed to want to tease her and Tomo even more than usual. All the malicious teasing that Urd used to shower on Elder Sister Belldandy about Keiichi about 'advancing' their relationship...was now full-on directed at her. Another reason to avoid the house. There also was the trying vigilance she had to exercise whenever she was around Urd. During the past several years, her big sister Urd had actually tricked out both Keiichi and Belldandy several times; dosing them with weird lotions, teas, medicines and incenses in an attempt to get them (and particularly Keiichi) to get all ecchi. If Urd managed to dose Tomohisa or she with a 'love potion' or some other alchemical prank, it would be the worst!

But maybe it would be fun to fight off a sex-crazy Tomohisa...

The first time Urd brought Troubadour over, he had acted all snooty, like he owned the place. Skuld knew that it was because she just didn't like him, no matter how hard she tried to set aside her disgust or suspicions. She could barely sit at the same table with him and Urd for dinner. At least they weren't making love-beam eyes like Elder Sister Belldandy and Keiichi did from time to time. Keiichi wasn't home that time; he was at Whirlwind doing some whirlywind Unified Club stuff...so he was spared having to put up with Troubadour. She pondered whether it was Urd's or Troubadour's idea to have him come over while Keiichi was busy away from home...

Despite the fact that her sister and Troubadour were an item, Skuld sensed a peculiar tension between them that she couldn't quite tap into. For two Gods supposedly in love, they sure were edgy around each other. It was like a misspelled, dangling metaphor...there in the writing, but not explicable in the context. Urd's subtle anxiety made no sense at all. Yet she was clearly aware of the underlying incertitude that she was picking up from Urd whenever Troubadour was around. It was as if her sister seemed to encounter a figurative obstacle course in her heart, one that she had to overcome to be fully relaxed and comfortable around him. Urd was clearly in love with him, but she also seemed afraid of him...or perhaps afraid to get too close to him.

"Hold that thought!" she whispered to herself as Tomohisa emerged from the side door of the gym and spotted her.

* * *

They decided to stop off at one of her favorite snack shops, the Ice Cream Museum. This ice cream store had an encyclopedic selection of flavors stashed away in its counter; delicious barrels of chilled confection whose lexicon of fragrant smells made her want to taste them all at once.

"Hey! Did you have a good bike ride this morning?" Tomohisa asked as she finished her malt. She had tried to train him not to interrupt her too often while she was enjoying her milkshakes, because his interruptions sometimes caused her enthusiasm to skip past her. He'd ask something, and she'd try and answer him...but then she'd bite the plastic tubing by accident as she was drawing a sip up the bendy-straw. Once bitten, a straw was useless; an interruption to her enjoyment of her ice-cream beverages. Strangely, she never had this problem when she was with anyone else.

"Nothin' special. Just rode up and down by the canal a couple times and did the park loop," she answered. "How's it lookin' for you guy's next game?"

"The next one will be easy, since it's against Chiba Eisai. Next week's is gonna be a little tougher, since we have to face Danguro Prep. Danguro's baseball program is one of the specialties of their athletic programs; and they have _three_ different baseball clubs besides the school's team. We only have our single baseball club, and we have way less players to recruit from to roster a team. It'll be tough."

"So it's quality vs. quantity, huh?" she acknowledged. The mention of baseball clubs brought to mind the recent argument she had with Tomohisa over his interest in joining the journalism club. When he had first broached the subject, she told him how much she thought he was out of his mind...and that started everything. They ended up fighting and arguing for the rest of the afternoon. Initially, she couldn't understand how journalism could possibly fit into Tomohisa's life; his joining the journalism club made about as much sense as Keiichi fictively dropping out of the Unified Club and joining a bird-watching club instead. But upon further reflection, Tomohisa's possible motive began to coalesce in her mind. Again, it was about his dream of getting into professional baseball. In his mind, if he ever became a player in the Japan League, he would be exposed to the sports press all the time. Perhaps Tomo was hoping that gaining some experience as a news reporter would give him an edge if he ever were to become newsworthy himself because he'd have an empathy for the 'other side' and would be more suited to interacting with them. Obviously, he had learned from watching Keiichi's struggles with reporters during the past two years. His older cousin kept getting revved with ineptitude whenever he was approached by the press after the Solar Fed. race and the Le Mans. Maybe Tomohisa saw this as a way to learn how to avoid the same kinds of frustration. Then again, joining the journalism club might just be another outlet for his sports fever.

But it was so sad. She didn't need to be a Norn to predict the future on this one. His future was as certain as an etched-in-stone Jizo Buddha statue. The chances of her boyfriend ever making a living playing baseball were about as great as expecting a microwave to be powered by a cannister of inversed black matter measuring zero degrees Kelvin. So she had to cheer him on in his goals, all the while knowing that his asthma and his eyesight handicapped him to such a degree that he'd never, _ever_ attain them.

And what would she do then, once he reached the point where there was no denying the impact of his physical hindrances? Skuld was already worried about this eventuality during the time she and Tomo were just friends. Now that she was his girlfriend, she didn't know if there would be _anything_ she could do to soften the blow...

What would Belldandy do?

Turning her thoughts away from the unpleasant intractable Future, she asked, "What am I going to do about my big sister, Tomo? I really wish she'd just stay behind in Syntrasil and work as a Sysop or something. I can't stand being around her! Even though she's acting like a total bitch...the weird thing about all this is nothing's really changed. Urd's still my big sister, but she's so _different_ now that she's with that Troubadour guy. My life's a mess!"

"Didn't your sister Belldandy have a hard time with the fact that you and I started dating?" Tomohisa replied, leaning closer to her across the table. "She was completely ranking on you about it when she first found out. Cousin Keiichi was ranking on me about it too, which doesn't make sense, since he doesn't seem to have any problems with you, especially since you stopped fighting with him over your sister. I mean, he _does_ have problems with you, but they don't have anything to do with me. Or didn't, at least."

"Keiichi...can be retarded sometimes. I don't think it's all his fault; he did the same thing with Megumi. It's probably because he's an adult. Stupid adults just can't roll with the changes!" Skuld assayed, and Tomohisa nodded his head.

"Yeah, they're all the same. The older they get, the more they want things to stay the same..."

"Speaking of which, what do you think about this race Chihiro's planning? The one in Romania?"

"That? I'd totally like to go there with them! Not go, can't tho'. I'd totally be skipping out on the summer baseball tournaments. Also, it would majorly suck because it'd take up most of July. No summer weekends on the beach, and I won't get to see you in that swimsuit..."

"Keep it up, boy, and you won't get to see me in anything!" she rejoined with feigned querulousness.

"Waaah! I'd give every breath in my lungs to see you in nothing!" Tomohisa replied, eying her like a cat eying a canary. Skuld blushed scarlet when she realized what she had said. Several college students in the next booth were being mean, loudly snickering at her gaffe.

"Guess I walked into that one!" she sighed in resignation, regaining her composure as she finger-drummed on the table nervously, looking out the restaurant window.

"Geez, Skuld! It's getting to the point where I can't take you anywhere..."

* * *

"Okay, here's the challenge we're gonna face, guys," Sora noted soberly after calling the meeting to order in the borrowed classroom. In her role as Unified Club president, she started listing off the bullet list she'd written on the wetboard. While she was doing this, a late-running Chihiro dashed into the classroom and hastily taped up a map of Romania, slapping it flat against the wall. Keiichi was almost certain that it came from an old National Geographic magazine, as the names were in English and it looked at least 20 years old.

Chihiro twirled the broken pool cue she had brought over from Whirlwind like a baton while Sora continued to brief the Club with a bullet list of the essential problem areas she'd written on the board.

"We've got a 500Km race that we have to complete using a single battery charge. We're allowed two batteries, as long as they work in tandem and are exactly alike in manufacture. The competition requires that our bike has only one engine assembly; it can be several bundled engines as long as they're built as a single removable unit. The racecourse will basically have three terrains: relatively level riding on paved single-lane state highways, mountainous terrain riding down unfinished and semi-paved roads that'll closely resemble a half-motocross half-dirtbiking racecourse from the looks of it, and routes that will travel through hills and fields on dirt roads and trails."

Sora nodded towards Chihiro, who was standing on one side of the map. Flicking a stray curl off her forehead, Chihiro traced out a loop on the map with the makeshift 'pointer'. The route drawn on the map with a red highlight marker resembled a coiled dragon with its many turns, loops and curls.

Keiichi smiled inwardly at the sight, recalling her story about how that cue got broken. According to her, it happened right before her graduation during a party. She couldn't remember if she had broken it over Tamiya's or Ootaki's head. Of course, neither of his two sempai knew either. If he were to bet, his money would be on Tamiya, whose head was seemingly invulnerable to blunt object trauma...

"There's basically three stages to the racecourse. The race starts here in downtown Cluj-Napova," Chihiro described, gesturing with the pool cue. "This first stage basically weaves through the Apuseni Mountains. Traveling westwards a short ways down Highway DN1, the racecourse will and veers off and goes south right into the mountains. These are some serious mountains, not quite as bad as ours but definitely nothing to fuck around with, because they have several major winter ski resorts there. The route goes uphill on a spur road to Baisoara, then it does a 180 and it retreads back to the main highway. From there, the road leads to Lake Tarnita, the route gets really torturously curvy until it reaches Belis, which sits on Lake Fantanele. From Belis, it cuts a path northwards towards a town called Poeni. The rest of this first stage of the route looks pretty gnarled; according to the map, it passes through something called "Devil's Valley" and reaches Lake Draganu. All mountain pass roads with massive switchbacks and cliffhangers. It then kicks west and winds up at Lake Lesu, does a turnabout and then goes north through "Valley of Hell" until it joins the main highway at Bucea. Stretches back east down Highway 1 to Hoedown, or Huedin...damn, these names are ridiculous to try and pronounce! That's the end of the first stage.

"In the second stage, it starts trekking up into the hilly farmland country, similar to our Kanto Plain. But the roads are probably crap compared to some of our rural highways. It's even possible that they may not even be roads. From Hoedown, the route winds northeast about 10km _along a railroad_ until it reaches Aghi...Aghi...well, I'll spell it out since it's unpronounceable. Aghiresu. Then it turns northeasterly and passes through a forested area, no roads, until it reaches a village called Mil..Mil...who the hell thought up these names anyway?"

"Mihaieste," Sora pronounced, correcting Chihiro.

"Whatevers," Chihiro grumbled. "Then it cuts east through another bunch of small mountainous hills until it gets to Zimbor, mostly on unfinished roads. Gradually going east through Dragu..."

"As in Dracula? Dracula's castle?" Megumi noted, her voice laden with amused curiosity. Her innocent remarks brought a chill to Keiichi, reminding him of those weird unsolved 'night stalker' attacks showing up on the evening news every night.

"Dunno, but once you're in Dracula-ville, there's no more roads from what I can tell. What I consider the third stage of the racecourse begins here; from here until Dej, it's mostly dirt trails for horse-drawn wagons, not even suitable for cars in some places. It'll be that way until Gherla. Anyway, the city next to Dragu is Vultureni. Whatta whack name for a village! Then the route goes straight north like an arrow to...hee hee, you won't believe this, but I think it's called Panticeu. At least that's what it's called in English."

"Panty-su? That's crazy! I wonder if they have an underwear factory there," someone remarked.

"We'll find out when we get there, I suppose. I ain't too interested in checking out pervy ideas like that," Chihiro replied, visibly trying to keep from laughing while taking a playful swipe at the remark.

"Leaving Pantytown, the route goes basically east and downhill through a bunch of farmland and forests for about 50Km until it reaches some city called Dej. All of that will be on unfinished dirt roads and farming trails. Once in Dej, the racecourse basically follows Highway DN1C going through Gherla to Rascruci..." She paused, momentarily distracted.

"What's the matter, Boss?" Sora inquired with a concerned look.

"Highway DN1C? Why would they use letters? I mean, how high can the highway numbers go in Romania, anyway?" she remarked, earning some quiet laughter from the Club members.

"Then the highway turns southwest on fairly level terrain until we're back in Cluj-Napova..."

"Napoca," Sora corrected, scribbling something on her PDA.

"Chihiro, why didn't you schedule this meeting so Ootaki could be here?" Keiichi asked. "How are we supposed to run this race when you can't even pronounce the names? Not just you...with all due respect, it's not like I could pronounce them either. But _I'm_ the one who's gonna be on that bike racing up and down this racecourse. So I need to not only pronounce them...but I'll have to read the street and highway signs in Romanian..."

"Hungarian too. They do signs in both languages there," Megumi added, savoring the reaction of glum dismay on her brother's face. Belldandy wasn't here, so she could pick on him to her heart's content...

"Great!" Keiichi complained dolefully. "Now I have _two_ ways to get lost in Romania."

"Hee hee hee! Just don't go chasing any Gypsy caravans! We gotta get you and Belldandy married in November!" someone shouted. Everyone giggled at this...and Keiichi realized that Sayoko Mishima was the culprit, standing in the classroom doorway unnoticed up until now. Sayoko and Megumi exchanged wide grins while Sora announced Genji, who threaded through the rows of seats giving each member a thick bound handout as he walked towards the front of the classroom.

"Sorry, these aren't the top-secret answers to the finals," Genji joked. "If you turn to the first section please? The diagrams you see are electrical battery components. My family's Mito-Mishima Light Industries group manufactures a line of lithium-ion based batteries using our patented nanophosphate binding technology, which basically creates layers of 'wrappers' to protect the lithium-ion core. Keeps the heat in and the dust out. You've probably been using them and aren't even aware of it; they're in plenty of the power tools you commonly find in garages and construction sites..."

"And here I've been, paying for my power tools when my Club member's father owns the freakin' manufacturing plant that makes 'em..." Chihiro groused playfully.

"Anyway, according to Chihiro, we need to go with a dual-battery setup rather than using a single battery," Genji continued without missing a beat. "The trick will be to create arrays of these power cells that optimize power generation and weight distribution. In other words, we've got to design the batteries and then package the cells in them. Like how batteries fit into a flashlight, only we're using hundreds of them to fit into whatever battery casing design we come up with. To do this, we'll need to take into consideration all sorts of factors, not to mention the specs of the Euro-Green Feds. The next few pages in your handouts list out those specs in detail. After those, there's also a number of e-charts I made up so we can starting thinking about power distro and other stuff."

"This isn't something simple, like electric car batteries that you just stick in the trunk and forget about until you have to plug them in for a recharge," Genji continued. "There's lots of challenge areas we'll encounter, such as leakage prevention, minimizing overheating from the power cells being placed too close to each other, designing the batteries with an even distribution of cells so that they don't radically throw off the bike's balance during cornering, and of course making batteries that can withstand being banged around on the road. Chihiro and I came up with a few preliminary CAD-type designs to initially test out once we have a chassis design, which are also in your handout.

"Besides the batteries, there's many other engineering issues to address," Chihiro said, taking up Genji's discussion. "While I was studying in America, I worked on a project called FireBike, which was a response to the KillaCycle sprint racing bike. KillaCycle is strictly for sprint-racing; all acceleration but little duration. Think of a power drill on two wheels and you'll get the idea. On the other hand, FireBike was all about building an electric motorcycle that was fast, handled well, had commercial viability, and was energy-efficient. Not a racing bike per se, but a _functional_ bike that even mangaka could afford...and manage to ride around town without wipeouts. In essence, an electric motorbike that could pass for a gas-powered machine. FireBike is at least five years away from these design goals in America, but what I learned working on it two years ago can be used _now_ to make a roadworthy electrical motorcycle that can excel in a racing situation."

"So what's our major challenges? Besides all the other major challenges?" Megumi asked with skeptical reproof.

"Obviously, chassis design," Sora noted, sketching a stick-figure motorbike on the wetboard. "Aerodynamics, weight distribution, stress-bearing elasticity, the weight of the chassis itself..."

"What about comfort, since I'm riding it?" Keiichi joked, his winning grin earning a burst of laughter from the Club members. This meeting was getting too serious for his liking; he needed to juice it up otherwise he'd fall victim to his own melancholy.

"We'll keep that in mind, sempai," Sora answered back with sharp head nod. "Also, we need to have expert control-and-monitor systems, which means custom circuit-boarding. The engine needs to fall within a certain HP displacement, but it isn't as strictly ranged as the Le Mans or Solar Fed race. We'll have lots of leeway there as long as we don't exceed the maximum. Needless to say, the engine itself will have to be very tight. Same for the drive train and the bearing assemblies. The tires for an electric motorcycle are a bit different as well, so we'll have to tryout several types before we can narrow down braking designs..."

"I've got to ride this imaginary motorcycle when it doesn't have brakes?" Keiichi exclaimed.

"Oh come on, Keiichi! The brakes will be partially functional, some of the time. It'll really be fun!" Sora said cheerfully. In his mind, Keiichi imagined Sora walking blindfolded on the wingspan of an Airbus jet in mid-flight, happily singing about how thrilling the experience was...

"Megumi and I get to test it too, since we're the backup riders," she added. "Also Ms. Chihiro will take it out for a spin once in a while to help us fine-tune it. And it's not exactly like it doesn't have brakes, because you can always use your heels to slow yourself down..."

Keiichi almost face-palmed himself on that one.

* * *

My second lecture ended a half-hour early, culminating in a vehement shouting match. Pressed to elucidate upon a certain process of mentation in Aquantum Metastatics, I found that I couldn't say shit about it...and was quickly pounced upon by several scholars who seemed to know what the fuck they were talking about. While I was stutter-flushed trying to comprehend how they were aware of principles in a book that wouldn't be written for 120 years or so, the zealots started harping on how "Magnum Organum has very little accommodation for the tenets of our Christian faith"...and the lecture swiftly became a logic-chopping melee, fueled by combustible egos and religious bigotry.

This was only my second talk, and already I was threading the loopholes of memory with even more emptiness, basically filling air with air. I was unable to explain basic tenets of a philosophical work that I remembered authoring...but couldn't _remember_. My notes had question marks instead of prompts. Any professor that's worth his or her salt can remember precise details in the premise and organization of their dissertation, because it's drilled into their soul during the composition process. Magnum Organum was no different in any respect; it was my academic lifework and I could quote sections from it verbatim because I knew it so well...the operative word being _knew_, as in past tense.

I remember one professor on the review panel in Beijing had semi-seriously suggested that I'd get a Nobel for it someday. But instead of getting my gold star, I had been thrown to the crocodiles. And obviously, this kangaroo-court setting was going to get much worse, according to Lord Reginald.

Oxford was a puzzle box, or more accurately a Skinner box...a rat maze that I kept getting lost in, even though I had been here almost a week. I definitely wasn't looking forward to another ten weeks of biweekly lectures, plus several debate sessions. Lord Reginald's unveiled threat hovered overhead, a figurative mountain that threatened to crush me. Even more so when I realized that I was hopelessly confused about Magnum Organum; its finer points were an Assyrian labyrinth as far as I was concerned.

If that wasn't screwy enough, I discovered that I couldn't even be myself. Most of the knowledge and experiences I had taken for granted, that I could freely talk about in 200Xs...I couldn't even mention them here. There was no frame of reference I could use. It wasn't just the academic stuff; it dawned on me rather quickly that I needed to 'censor' everyday casual conversation as well. I already was tweaking for the chance to just _talk_ without being mindful of everything I said. Not only was I living in some experimental hell, I couldn't be myself and talk about my life. Victorian England was a cultural washing machine, and I was the dirty socks.

Almost immediately after I had been dumped here, I started encountering minutiae that, taken in legion, accumulated to the point where they completely wracked my nerves and patience. My second day here, I had several adventures in the bathroom. The bathroom in my flat had a cast-iron brass-footed bathtub...a bath actually had to be drawn from a nearby water cabinet fueled by coal heating. I quickly learned that the water was tepid, and I could only put about 10cm in the tub, because that was all there was. The toilet, or W.C. in British parlance, was a nightmare. The seat was square, it leaked a gassy shit-smell from an ill-fitting joint with the sewer piping, and I had to fill the cistern located two meters off the floor with tap water every time I used it, because the intake pipes were rusted shut or something. I discovered that the seat was square because I had to stand on it to fill the overhead basin. Activities as simple as using the bathroom had become a chore, and there was no toilet paper to be had.

The next day, several of the other boarders in the house invited me to a self-styled "Rimbaud Party" to discuss the recently-discovered Arthur Rimbaud poems currently serialized in French newspapers. Curious about my fellow boarders, I joined them in the house's drawing room, a compact but well-furnished parlour that had the aura of faded splendor. Within twenty minutes, I had been offered a cigar, a shot of absinthe, a draught of opium, a glass of usquebaugh, and a pipe of some noxious-smelling tobacco. As the drunken discussion became more bleary and dyspeptic, the men kept pressuring me to 'indulge in the nectar' to the point where I felt insulted. Rather than discussing Rimbaud, they were relating narratives of their escapades at houses of assignation. Sickened by this whore-talk and the drunken demeanor of the gathering, I babbled something to the effect of "leave me the fuck alone, I'm allergic to narcotics!" which drew a suspicious silence from the half-dozen men and Mrs. Bigsley. Their irritated gazes made it clear that I wasn't welcome, and I excused myself to my flat.

I had been here four days total, and I felt thrashed.

* * *

The sky decided to bear down on the city with a squall line, and I felt that another day of strolling around Oxford like an idiot was a bad idea. But I didn't want to go to my guest faculty flat either. As the raindrops started pelting, I decided to visit Prof. Smythe the Zoologist in his lab in the basement of the University Museum. Entering the museum, I almost got side-tracked by all the items of interest just in the lobby area. Once again, I had to ask for directions from a doorman.

Prof. Smythe was busy in his lab and seemed genuinely pleased to see me, joking that I was the "Kipling of Japan". Seeing him in his element, he seemed to take on a hoary aspect that would best describe an emeritus scholar. I had to remember that back in these days, the life expectancy was under 40...Dr. Smythe was clearly beyond that in years. But his enthusiasm reminded me of myself when I discovered the Encyclopedia of Dawn.

His lab was crammed with a profusion of specimen jars, mostly insects and birds. Several clusters of burner stands and beakers lined the wall, and his desk was a paper typhoon of messiness. Crucibles, retorts, measuring implements, surgical tools and several microscopes filled a tabletop nearby. The prevailing odors were metallic and chlorinate. A stuffed tapir had pride of place on one wall-mantle. Prof. Smythe offered me a "nip" from his metal hip-flask, which I refused politely. After some squarishly trite conversation, I asked him why he was here at Oxford. Since my life felt so shitty at the moment, I decided to listen in on his life story to keep my mind off of Lord Reginald, the blow up during my second lecture on Magnum Organum, and the lack of decent asswipe...

"Ahhh, curious about my work, are you?" he queried, intrigued that I was interested in his current projects. "The germ of my current research was borne of a particular of my childhood. I was the eldest son of a man of the laboring class, who toiled in a manufactory in Birmingham that was connected with the shipbuilding industry. I rarely saw my father, and my mother was sorely occupied with the upbringing of myself and my five younger brothers, my one sister having died before her fourth birthday. I did not get on with my brothers because they seemed determined to be menials and lacked the intellectual faculties I had been blessed with. Therefore, I was a lonely sort during my innocent years. My sole companion was Winston, the family dog. It is true what they say about mongrels: in mankind, they are despicable in temperament; in canines, they are admirably companionable.

"When I was 11, my Winston died. Already earnest in my zoological persuasion, I performed what could be described as a crude attempt at autopsy, curious to discern why my beloved favourite had passed into 'the breathless darkness, the narrow house' as Bryant would have it. My endeavors were readily met, as I observed that he was infested with an extraordinary amount of fleas which had caused an infection of his viscera.

"My meteor soared, and I was admitted and then matriculated as a proper Oxonite. During the past score of years, many curious theories have been advanced in the field of Zoology. Of particular interest is Mendel's recent work in hybridization and several of the more novel studies concerning the efficacy of employing variants of boric acid to manage hydration. I would be remiss to belabor you with specifics about my efforts, but to put it succinctly, it is my goal to totally exterminate the world's flea population.

"My experiments, to describe them with absolute parsimony, are attempts to introduce into the fleas themselves a form of solute boric acid that works on cellular salines. A preparation such as this would simply poison the fleas by inhibiting their ability to manufacture chitin. But I am endeavoring to expand on this process; as a merely poisonous compound ill suits my purposes. The key component of my methodology concerns my opinions on proteins. I am of the belief that proteins are essential to the animal process, contrary to other zoologists' interpretations of their function, which I find specious at best. With the alteration of certain cellular properties by using proteins in concert with boric acid, a trait accommodation can be achieved that would result in a perpetuating morbidology to the entire flea population. To be precise, the larvae, by their inability to produce chitin, would not be able to create the hard exo-shells that are necessary in the process of reaching the imago adult stage. Over succeeding generations, this cellular aberration would then be hybridized in a such a manner where the inherited properties would pass onto the insectine larvae in greater percentages; the few surviving larvae that reach maturity will be significantly inhibited of vital life processes.

"Using fieldwork calculation, I can extrapolate that the world-wide flea population to be in excess of fifty thousand billions. Fortunately, one flea can create as many as 500 eggs in its lifetime, so that the diminution of the flea population would be rapid. Should my experiment succeed, I project that fleas will become extinct as soon as 1895.

"Why, one may ask, am I earnest to cast extinction on the fleas? Because I lost my beloved Winston. No child should have to suffer such an unbearable blow! It is well known that fleas are the parasitic transmitters of plague and other infectious diseases, not only among humans but also among various species of fauna. The total elimination of fleas would make mankind more hygienically robust. Just think of it! Disease transmission would be eliminated, and the human race would finally be able to truly be fruitful and multiply as our Faith decrees, in command of the very Earth itself! My work will be considered of a line comparable to Pasteur's recent work in treating rabies and his novel idea of vaccine therapy. My success in this endeavor is paramount, so that these most inedifiable conveyors of death and disease are forevermore eliminated!"

Prof. Smythe was so animated by this point, he had worked himself into a tithering state, nearly shouting. I was caught up in his enthusiasm, even though I knew that his ideas were mostly Victorian pseudo-science. If he was a nutter, then he was a very smart nutter. It was clear that his fixation on fleas was overbounding and eccentric in tenor. Unexpectedly, his crazy dedication to his work brought up a mental image of Urd. I saw her quite clearly in my mind in her "Urd's Labs" workroom during one of the few times she had allowed me in her lab; enthusing about the very real science of alchemistry...the fusion of magic and chemistry...as one of her areas of expertise. I also vaguely remembered a magical book. I questioned the memory; perhaps she had been trying to teach me, maybe clarifying something I had read.

I looked at the dedicated, yet eccentric scientist, and realized that his life was in my hands. If I didn't follow through with the lectures, Lord Reginald had threatened to kill him. Somehow, this pivot of reality had made Prof. Smythe more 'real' to me. He was a vulnerable, driven human being, not a Victorian caricature. In a sense, he was abstracting a different source of alchemy by using the experimental scientific method, but it lacked the essential element of magic that could make it work.

In 1886, the concept of viruses and viral infections wasn't known to humankind...and thus, Prof. Smythe was working within the blindness of the scientific knowledge of his era. I was hard-pressed to remain silent; I wanted to say something instructive, perhaps corrective. But I couldn't.

Once again, I had to suppress truths that any 21st century grade-schooler could freely discuss in a classroom setting. Fuck, the science of 1886 wasn't even as advanced as student science fair projects! What would people of this era think about mecha-genius engineers like Skuld?

"Do you have a ready store of fleas to use for trials?" I asked.

"Yes, they are readily available from marketeers and entertainers. In fact, I have several assistants who capture feral cats and then use fine-toothed metallic flea combs to collect live specimens, which they jar and send to me."

"You intend to create a toxin that perpetuates by inserting itself into the chain of traits that passes during reproduction?"

"Precisely!" he praised me. "In a sense, I am creating a disease, only it isn't viral in nature. The knotty part will be to perfect the delivery mechanism using a protein, perhaps in the capacity of buffering cellular permeability."

"So essentially, you have to find a balance between epidemiology and genetics? I understand...it's just like having to decide between the Beatles and the Rolling Stones," I noted cheerfully, trying to be conversational.

"Really!" Prof. Smythe exclaimed, almost insulted. "I fail to understand the link between order Coleoptera, the geographical distribution of mobile mineraloids, and my experimental work on fleas."

Grinning inwardly, I recognized that maybe dropping an occasional referent from the future might not be so bad after all. It sure got Prof. Smythe riled up for a moment. I tempered the rest of my conversation with a deferential respect, so he wouldn't think too ill of me. At least he was trying something radically different than what the ilk of his peers accepted as science.

Much relieved...or more accurately, distracted from my own troubles...I sincerely thanked Prof. Smythe for his time, and wandered out into the street, feeling some uplift of mood and spirit. But I was still suffused with undeniable forlorn feelings. I was still abandoned in the Past. As I thought about putting a gun to my head, I had the strange impression that I _had_ shot myself in the head, fatally. Shuddering at a half-glimpsed memory, I realized what was truly at stake here, as far as I was concerned.

I would have to relinquish any chance of the survival of my dignity, if I were to survive this experience with my life. The forthcoming humiliation and betrayal...

...would be a harsh medicine that I would have to swallow.

* * *

_"The continuing saga of 'night stalker' incidents in Tokyo has inexplicably spread to Yokohama and Chiba. Police remain tight-lipped about details, and our reporters have learned that victims are being debriefed by NDF forces after overnight stays as part of a..."_

Keiichi cocked his head to one side, as if that would aid him to catch the final few words of the news even though Skuld had truncated it by turning the channel to one of the anime rerun networks. He could hear the familiar strains of the ending of the Clannad anime, and briefly thought of a world filled with dango. Belldandy had finished dinner and the mood around the house was solemn.

"Keiichi, how is the Club's planning for the July race going?" Urd asked pensively. "Troubadour was wanting to know if he could offer help in any way..."

"Not a chance, Urd!" Keiichi quickly answered. "We're alright on our own. If there's any problems, Bell-chan and Skuld will be there if things get really hairy with the race."

"Keiichi, you are a cruel person. Just what is it with you!" Urd exclaimed. "Because I started going out with Troubadour, you've treated me like an outsider. It's me! Urd! Bell's older sister, that you've known for five years! I _am_ a Goddess, not a flawed mortal being whose heart is fickle and indecisive. You should be happy for me, happy for the fact that I can have a boyfriend. Instead, you simply echo Belldandy's opinion about me and Troubadour. After all that time, I would have assumed that you would be more accepting of my choices."

"Which is exactly why it's hard to be around you, Urd," Keiichi reminded her. "It's exactly _because_ I've known you almost as long as I've known Bell. Now I feel like I've lost you. Dammit, Urd! I agree with Bell-chan: the truth of the matter is that you don't belong with him! You can't fix what happened in the past, and you know it! I can see it in the way you act around him; you weren't ever that reserved towards Cevn..."

"Will you shut up! I'm tired of hearing about some imagined romance I had with Cevn!" Urd spat back angrily. "He's not even here, so why do you guys keep bringing him up! Why can't you just accept the fact that I'm with Troubadour?"

"Urd, I was around when you and Cevn were a couple," Keiichi answered. "You guys used to fight a lot, and you tried to kill him a couple of times when you got carried away, but otherwise you really got along good with him. You both found lots of consolation with each other. Even Skuld got used to the fact that you and he were together..."

"DID NOT!" a voice shouted from the living room, scaling over the TV dialog.

"...and we all respected that. We respected you, both of you."

"Why, then, can't you offer the same respect to Troubadour? It would make all the world of a difference to me," Urd sighed.

"Because he's not worthy of our respect, Urd!" Belldandy interjected, joining them.

"Boy, Bell-chan's really hot under the collar this time!" Keiichi observed privately. His fiancée had a dishtowel half-wrapped around a dinner plate, and for a moment she looked like she could easily fling the plate at Urd's head.

"For a former Norn of the Present, you sure are hung up on the Past!" Urd noted defiantly. "Where's your sense of fairness, younger sister? Every morning, you sit out by that koi pond and commune with the birds, smiling sweetly as you whistle and sing to them. Then an hour later, you look at me and Troubadour with those same eyes, only they're filled with scorn towards us. Scornful eyes. Selfish eyes! My sister, the selfish Goddess..."

"Urd...stop! You make too many demands and accusations, while offering nothing," Belldandy voiced a warning.

Skuld was standing behind Urd, Mjolnir manifesting in her gloved hands. The sight of Skuld wielding her mallet brought a crawling, shivering unease to Keiichi. This was getting totally out of hand!

"And why should I?" Urd protested, her voice arching towards shrillness. "You _want_ me to stop, you want me to stop seeing him! You don't care if I've been lonely for all these millennia! Your attitude towards Troubadour proves it. This is going to get even worse, because I'm gonna stay here until you get married. _That's_ how much I care about you, Bell! I'll put up with all this 'we hate your boyfriend' shit, I'll put in my appearances...but I'm not budging on this! I'm staying with Troubadour; he's my guy...and I'm not let either of you get between us."

"Fine! This is Keiichi's and my house," Belldandy replied, "and you are no longer welcome in it. If you want to be with Troubadour so bad, you can leave here whenever you want. I won't allow myself the sufferance of watching you..."

"There it is!" Urd shouted, a tear in her eye as her face colored with anger. "You expect me to be like you, you want me to meekly accept that I'm a part of your cynical, hypocritical world! You've lied to me: you taught me the beauty of being in love by your example of being with Keiichi, and then you wish to deny me the same beauty in the same breath! You and Skuld have always been my confidants, not my keepers. But neither one of you love me enough to let me have my way in this. Why not?! Why can't I have a boyfriend too?"

"If Troubadour truly loved you, then I would be happier than the world for you, Urd!" Belldandy replied, her eyes traced with tears. Keiichi gulped down his breath as he saw how difficult this was for Bell-chan.

"Who are you to judge what's in his heart!!!" Urd screamed, raising her hands up in a gesture Keiichi knew all too well. The Urd Thunderbolt gesture...

"As I said earlier, you can leave any time you wish, _sister_!" Belldandy shouted, her anger elevated into combativeness.

"Whoa, whoa!!!" Keiichi shouted, standing up between the two angry Goddesses. "Threatening each other is not the way to settle this! Kicking Urd out won't change a thing, Bell-chan! She'll _still_ be with Troubadour, only it will be out of sight."

"I wish it'd be out of mind too! Since Big Sister Urd is obviously out of hers," Skuld swiftly sniped, getting her two yen in.

"Look, you guys!" Keiichi declared angrily. "I'm stuck in the middle of this drama, and I feel like I get caught up in crossfire every night I come home from N.I.T. I'm sick of it! It's always the same thing...not a single one of you is willing to make a truce so we can all get along better. For fuck's sake, you're _Goddesses_! Start acting like it, for a change! I've got an important race coming up, which means that I've gotta study double-time over the next six weeks before we leave for Europe..._and_ design an electrical motorcycle. This isn't some state secret...you all know that I've got to take term finals two weeks early. If you can't keep the peace for each other's sake, than at least do it for my sake."

"Fine! If you don't want me around, then I won't be around!" Urd screamed...and disappeared. Keiichi sat back down at the dining table in stunned silence, watching Skuld's face pallor by degrees. Urd didn't sound like she was bluffing. Belldandy was staring at the spot where Urd had been hovering, and then looked at him with an wounding expression of twinned resentment and hurt.

"Shit...Bell...I'm sorry, I didn't mean to..." he managed to say right before a blinding flash interrupted him.

"Hey! Yahoooo! I'm back! Fooled ya, didn't I?" Urd said. "You guys really thought I was leaving, didn't you? Lighten up, you two! Stop being so wrapped up in seriousity! Since I'm the oldest, I guess I'll have to be the one to set the example. I'll put all of this aside for the evening. Let's do something fun, for a change!"

Belldandy shook her head side-to-side with a wan grin, while Skuld's despondent expression flowered into a soft smile of relief. Once again, Keiichi was amazed at how Urd could pull the turnabout on her two younger sisters, blowing away a tense atmosphere like a fan shuffling smoke out the window.

"C'mon, let's go catch a movie. My treat!" Urd added.

Keiichi excused himself from the cinema patrol and went to his room to study. After Bell gave him a goodbye kiss before leaving for the movies, he was haunted by the realization that Urd wouldn't be able to keep pulling reprieves out of thin air like a magician pulling rabbits out of the hat.

Eventually, it was all going to blow up on her if she kept up with Troubadour.

* * *

Nothing is nowhere is not here is no one is not again.

Last night, I had unexpectedly dived into sleep after enjoying the tea service that Mrs. Bigsley had brought up for me a couple hours after dinner. But I didn't recall falling asleep, as I had planned to plow into the Magnum Organum before bed. By the looks of things, the brightness in my room lent me an impression that it was late afternoon...the westwards-facing windows were glowing despite the pulled curtains. I couldn't remember my dreams and I was almost stuporous upon waking, which was a telltale confirmation of my worst suspicions.

My tea had been drugged.

Nothing else could explain the drowsiness I felt. My body ached, and I had a bruise on my knee that I couldn't account for. Clearly, I had been physically removed from my room and taken somewhere. My jaw felt like I had been gnashing my teeth all night while asleep, and my mind was making lethargic moves, lurching through mental cobwebs. In my active drug use, I had abused barbiturates to the point of near-comatose states of intoxication, so I readily recognized the 'highs' drowsers like barbs and tranks would cause. If I had been drugged, then there was a major problem that had to be addressed.

Sodium Thiopental was a product of modern science, of the mid-20th century type. What was it doing in 1886? Whatever they had slipped me, it had to be a psychoactive med, because the 19th century just didn't have drugs that should cause this degree of after-dose languor unless they were outright narcotic. As a former dope fiend, I would certainly know the difference.

Getting loaded has many different contours. Having used almost every get-high drug in the book, I was still able to recognize the effects even after many years of being clean. I didn't have the dopesick grip of heroin use, or the remnant mental sluggishness of psychotropic drugs like prolixin and respirdol. My memory of most events yesterday was fairly intact, which precluded alcohol and a number of barbiturates. I could recall meeting with Prof Smythe, the disastrous lecture at Balliol, the overcooked roast beef Mrs. Bigsley had brought up to my room for dinner. It definitely wasn't a methaqualone sedative, because those usually evoked an inversion response in me...making me speedy instead of sedated...

It had to be a hypnotic, probably sodium pentothol.

Lord Reginald had indicated that he was aware that I _had_ authored the Magnum Organum, which meant that he either had knowledge of the future...or came from the Future. Taking into account that I was being surreptitiously being administered hypnotic psycholeptics, the latter possibility loomed almost certain in my mind.

Recalling my psychopharmacology, I knew that a number of barbiturates didn't dissolve well in water; they usually required an ethanol solution if orally administered. I didn't need my psychology-track education to confirm this...I had tried to shoot them up and wound up with clogged veins. Instinctively, I checked myself for signs of an IV injection, but found none.

Just the scars from my active IV drug use.

The mind I was living in was no longer my own. I considered why they would dickey my tea. Obviously they were fetching for information, but what was the sense of it, if I lacked a deeper understanding of Magnum Organum? Were they seeking historical information about the immediate future? What were they after? I just couldn't see any purpose in this at all.

It couldn't just be the Magnum Organum. During my second lecture, I faced off against people who seemed to hint that they knew more about my book than I did; a book which would be authored 120 years or so in the future. Recalling Lord Reginald's chilling words, I pondered what he had meant when he stated that this was all part of a much greater "grand scheme".

Could Mrs. Bigsley be a participant in this? If so, then any refusal of evening tea on my part would certainly rally her suspicion. What of Prof. Smythe? Would his life be in jeopardy? I shouldn't care about him...but I did. He was an innocent, unawares that he was trapped in Lord Reginald's machinations. I couldn't live with myself if something happened to him. Could I dump the tea into the sink and lend the appearance of drinking it? Then I'd have to bluff my way through whatever occurred when I was supposedly 'sedated'.

Not very likely, because there are tell-tale responses to sedation, such as pathological nystagmus. Hopefully, whoever was administering this chemical cocktail to me knew what the hell he or she was doing. Sodium pentothol is a very touchy, tricky drug to be working with...

So tricky that it was a major component of the lethal injections used to execute prisoners in the US and many other countries.

* * *

"What am I going to do about my big sister?" Skuld asked, heaving a sigh. "I've been thinking about going to Romania with Belldandy and Keiichi just to get away from here..."

She thought ruminating aloud was harmless, but the anxious expression on Tomohisa's face told volumes.

"I don't want you to go," he said flatly.

"Why not? My sister needs me, and if I don't go, she'll worry about me most of the time. Shouldn't I be there with her, rather than causing her to get all caught up. You know how my sister sometimes frets too much about stuff."

"And what about _me_?" Tomohisa argued, "I know your sisters are really going through some crazy stuff...but what if _I_ need you? The summer tournaments are starting up in a couple weeks, and I'd like a chance to play in them without worrying about you. Skuld, we just got together a couple months ago, and you're already willing to go fly away for several weeks. I thought I was important to you!"

Skuld bit her lip, taking pause to try and say what she felt in the _right_ way...so that Tomo would understand that it wasn't him, that it wasn't his fault. But it came out crosswinds and crazy...

"You can't always be have first dibs on me, Tomo!" she argued. "I thought we already talked about this, you baka! Look at Elder Sister and Keiichi...they can take time away from each other once in a while. Why can't we?"

"We're not them!" Tomohisa countered. "Compared to us, they've been together...almost like _forever_! They know each other better than I know my well-worn baseball glove. It's different for them, Skuld."

"How do you know that it's different?" she retorted. "Just because they see the same sky overhead that we see doesn't mean that they see it the same way we do. My sister says every loving relationship is different and unique. Do you..snff..know how hard it's been for me to watch my older sister ruin her life over some stupid boyfriend issues? I don't want to make the same mistake, I don't want to lose you, Tomo. So please think it over. I _need_ to get away from Urd."

"No is no, Skuld," he answered. "You leave...and you can forget about me."

Skuld braved herself to get up from the couch and walk into her bedroom without even answering him. Once inside her room, she hugged a pillow to her chest and plumbed her heart to try and set aside the mottled chaos that reigned there, smeared against the background of her life falling apart.

* * *

"I have a surprise for you, Urd!" Troubadour said gaily, releasing her hand and untying the blindfold that covered her eyes. Speechless in the midst of the sudden revelation, Urd was fired with astonishment and elation as she recognized where he had taken her.

Troubadour and she, plus several hundred of their closest friends, were standing inside the massive mouth-chamber of a living PlanetWhale.

Living artforms that freely roamed certain parts of the God's Realm, the planet-sized cetaceans often swam in pods in close proximity to Liquiversal Zones, each whale over ten thousand Km in length. Anchors of tranquility whose soothing cetacean rhymes were as emotionally relaxing to Divines as full-body massages were to Earthrealm mortals, the sentient whales were friendly to the point where Gods often lived inside of them in bio-apartments. Proctors often prescribed vacations of respite in PlanetWhales because of the restorative properties of whalesong, which aided Gods and Goddesses in recovering their auras of serenity. Instead of having baleen like their Earthrealm counterparts, the PlanetWhales had chromium forests inside their mouths that were suspended from the upper jaw and growing out of the lower jaw. These carpets of metallic trees were ideal playgrounds where Gods could frolic, getting lost, playing hide and seek, and enjoying privacy for more intimate romantic encounters.

As far as she could see overhead and underfoot, the chromium trees were criss-crossed with festive decor of a Chinese theme, including thousands of antique red Chinese paper lanterns strung in lacy patterns. Gods and Goddesses were dancing amidst them with celebratory abandon.

Urd was impressed, to say the least. A number of her Deca-linked peers from Inculcation were here, some of which she hadn't seen in hundreds of Earthrealm years.

"F..for me?" Urd asked in wonderment at the huge throng of partygoers. Troubadour wordlessly nodded his head and smiled. She leaned against him, gently stroking his hair and tracing his pointed ears with her fingers.

A bittersweet memory passed through her thoughts, as she recalled how he had come to visit the temple during the second year after she had arrived in the Earthrealm. He had professed his love for her, touching her heart very deeply. But his presence and jealous nature had caused all sorts of disruption to everyone's lives because he assumed that she was with Keiichi. In truth, he was seeking the tears of a loving Goddess, the only means by which he could open the sealed Scroll of Golden Verse, which would allow him to tame the Melodious Golden Nightingale with song and add her Muse to his. This had been a dearly-held life-long goal of his. She had been brought to tears by his touching gesture. But it ended badly, and sadly, she was confronted with the truth: that the past love he had for her was forever gone. Love, withering away in a distancing sense of nostalgia. Yet, his actions bespoke of a deeper intent, one that her sisters and Keiichi could never fully comprehend. By assuming that he could obtain a tear of love from her, Troubadour had believed that he could be the one to break the prohibition of her Norn of the Past status which prevented her from enjoying romantic love in the Present. He thought that he could love her in spite of it. But his efforts were futile. Once he had obtained what he wanted, he left in pursuit of his dreams rather than stay with her...which only confirmed that she would never again be loved by God or man. Tears could not express the depths of her heart-pains, and she had to reluctantly dismiss him with hopes that he would achieve his dreams, because that was all she could do.

Troubadour's heart was pure, too pure. But he was too egotistical for his own good, as evidenced by his numerous affaires d'couer. But she could forgive him his faults...especially after a grand gesture like this.

It was so ironic, her attraction to the Floral Spiritis. Her first love had been the Cherry Blossom Spirit...and now, her final love was the seasonal counterpart of cherry blossoms...an autumnal Plum Tree Spirit. Cherry had been the color of the spring of her life; now in the fall of her years, she was with Troubadour, the Plum Tree Spirit and Earthrealm Muse. It was so perfect! She kissed his angular ears and then pranced down the flower-carpeted terraces of the PlanetWhale's tongueway into the metallic forest of glowing lanterned trees, anxious to meet and greet every one of her old friends...

Midway through the festivities, Troubadour held an informal concert and dedicated a song to her. Urd felt strong, as a woman...as a Goddess...as her beloved sang petals of sonic beauty in praise of her. All the other Goddesses were enjoying the musical performance, but she could sense the envy-auras lingering in some of their hearts after he finished publicly feteing her.

Let them be envious!

Troubadour's song brought her to an exultation that almost made her dizzy with delight. All too soon, it was over...and she was mingling with the guests who were celebrating her. She didn't have to do anything to be the center of attention this time; no Sysop promotion or stellar accomplishment in Inculcation had prompted this celebration of her life. It was all because of his natural love for her!

The guests started filtering off one-by-one and in pairs...

"Troubadour! Where are you?!" she shouted when she noticed that about half the celebrants had left the party.

_"Haven't seen him, Urd." "Saw him a little while ago, he said he wanted to stretch his legs outside the PlanetWhale." "His song was so beautiful, I lost track of myself. I don't know where he is." "He's your boyfriend? I'm so jealous!" "Seriously Urd, I haven't seen him..."_

Desperate now, she floated swiftly among the chromium trees, occasionally striking down one of the delicate red lanterns with a stray elbow or knee in her search for Troubadour. She kept flying through the massive holt, combing the irregular pathways through the trees, some of which were hundreds of kilometers long. Not finding him, she flew beyond and passed down the throat of the PlanetWhale. Floating about in the 'belly' of the whale where the vacation chambers were, she asked the Gods and Goddesses holidaying there if they had seen Troubadour. She even went back to the far regions of the PlanetWhale, where its ion heart was. The Divines swimming in the ionstorm that powered the whale shook their heads "no" when she asked them...

She returned to the mouth-chamber of the whale, its serene ether-song and steady heartbeat of plasma pulses in counterpoise to her growing dismay. Gathering her skirts, she felt the gracing spray of whalesong...and wanted to fold herself up and hide in it.

All around her, the empty chromium forest. Silent, except for the wind-brushed lanterns swaying in response to each tiding breath of the PlanetWhale.

Choking back her profound disappointment, Urd recognized the haunting tremulous discord in her breast for what it was. A familiar heart-rend filled her with an ample measure of melancholy. Troubadour had done it again...the same thing he had done dozens of times, a hundred millennia ago. Unable to deny the sight, she clenched her arms around her chest and squeezed herself tightly, feeling the shattering brutal reality of emptiness that filled her.

"I'm just going to have to try harder to be worthy of his love and attention," she promised herself, refusing to cry at the sight of the emptied party grounds.

Belldandy was wrong about Troubadour! There was no way her sister could be right, and Urd knew that she could prove it. Troubadour was the right God for her...it would just take time and patience. She'd make them see the light, she'd be the wind at his back that would unfurl the flag of his love for her.

She would make her sisters see the truth!


	162. Pt 162: It Bites

**Part 162: It Bites**

Kick stone. Jam toe. Repeat.

Flinging a can with a deft toe-flick, Skuld recalled one of Elder Sister Belldandy's favored opinions about life: that it has a way of grabbing your attention, either by inexpectancy or self-correction. If this was true, then why didn't Tomohisa sweep past this impasse between the two of them and just give her a moment of his attention? Was it too much trouble for him to take the time to talk with her? Didn't he want the same as she...to restore some equilibrium to their relationship?

"He's the guy...ow!...he should take the initiative and stand up for himself instead of making me do all the work!" Skuld grumbled as she kicked a larger rock, watching it sail into the river. Of course, she didn't have to be Norn of the Future to predict that he would be dead-set against her leaving with Belldandy and Keiichi to go to Romania. His deep disappointment...this she could understand. His strong reaction...she couldn't. The prospect of two week's absence was a long time, especially in the life of an Earthrealm teenage boy who was used to seeing her every day. But he had hardly said a word to her for several days now, keeping his funk and disappointment to himself. Doesn't that count as an absence too?

Wishy-washy thoughts just wouldn't tame the strident pipes and drums that were parade-marching uneasily in her heart...a ceaseless heart that felt yellowed with age even though she had missed his cheerful voice for just three days. Three days or a million days, it didn't make a difference. Analyzing the situation scientifically offered little to assure her: it didn't help matters when she calculated that less than one percent of all relationships between two Earthrealm 16-year old's lasted until marriage.

But she wasn't from the Earthrealm...

"Tomohisa isn't breaking up with me, is he? This isn't...ouch!...a sign of that, is it?" she asked herself as she kicked another stone into the river. Every tree, every squirrel and bird, every rabbit, flower and cloud...all of them seemed to be damning witnesses to her heartbreak. Elder Sister Belldandy would probably tease her for getting so upset about something so trivial; to her wizened sister, this argument was probably about as major as riding over a bumper-strip in the mall parking lot. Big Sister Mara would probably taunt her with Demonic glee, castigating her for being weak-willed and acting vulnerable, _especially_ because her indecisiveness was the result of a romantic involvement with a mortal. Big Sister Urd would...

But Urd was gone.

Troubadour had basically kidnapped her last night, rudely interrupting their dinner to tell Urd that he had a "brilliant surprise" waiting for her in Syntrasil. Talk about putting the honey jar in front of the bear! Her Big Sis thought about it for all of two seconds, and then announced that she was taking off for Syntrasil with Troubadour. Without even thinking, her sister changed into an elaborate Yggdrasilian formal outfit right in the middle of dining room, totally embarrassing Keiichi and Tomo. Even though the transformation was magical-girl flash-fast, the split-second display of nudity brought hot blushes to the two mortals. She was so angry, she bent the spoon she was holding...completely chafed because her older sister had flashed Tomo like a idiot. But her anger was eclipsed by Troubadour's. Urd's bogus boyfriend had turned blue with jealousy, giving Keiichi and Tomo a killraven glare of resentment before grabbing her sis by the wrist and disappearing. Skuld could smell emotional bribery in its many forms, and even Megumi agreed that Troubadour was pulling something greasy over on her Big Sister.

* * *

Tearing, running, the flight of searing veins breathing damnation under pale pearlesent nightskies...reaching, climbing up scaling crisp mountains of pressed cinder...leaping over chasms of flickerlights and hound-doggery with metallic rattles...pole to pole, tiptoe on the precipice of unharming collapses...red liquid fires coursing through the urban living city spread beyond and below...than-dark rustles of nervous trees whose wooden heartbeats skipped in descant...dark-ripple smell-flakes of flesh pounding foot-solid on the ground, racing...racing...

Ripping!

The flush, the powertrain salty-metal taste that courses energies to blow the unbeating core...lance the orb and sound the scream...the shallowing thumping of struggles...silently falling amidst the red-rain that tickles the charred night-air...the rock-stew of streets muted at last...

* * *

_**FLASH!!!**_

"Wh..where am I?" Keiichi mouthed silently as he woke up to a blinding harsh light amidst a grouping of featureless panels. His attention was painfully cloyed by the over-bright ceiling lights, causing his eyes to tear up under the strain. His mouth and throat felt dry...his _whole body_ felt dry. Having nearly sand-drowned in the arid Algerian desert, he knew what dehydration felt like...and he definitely felt the hollowing-out sensation of being water-starved. A physical resistance pulled when he tried to move his arms and legs; he noticed that he was restrained on some sort of gurney or table in a sterile and nondescript room. Turning his head to the side, he saw a black-suited man with sunglasses seated at a desk, regarding him with a cautious scrutiny. Muscular to the point where he stretched his tailored suit at the shoulders, the man cast a strong no-bullshit air about him.

"You are in debriefing, sir," the maninblack answered his unvoiced question in a surprising light voice. Pulling a sheaf of papers out of his briefcase with practiced authority, he scanned them and glanced over at a laptop PC with officious efficiency.

Keiichi sensed an ungiving cold surface pressing hard and dry against his back, and realized that he was laying on a metal surface. Covered by a single thin sheet of bedding, he was haunted by the impression that he was on an autopsy table in a morgue. Nearby, he could see numerous cabinets filled with medical supplies; standard items like masks, gauzes, syringe boxes and gloves. Was this an ER unit at a hospital? Next to his 'bed' was a tray with a number of surgical gizmos and instruments, many of which were covered with dried blood.

"Whose blood? Mine?" he wondered.

"Mr. Keiichi Morisato...according to your citizenship registration, driver's license, and Nekomi Institute of Technology student ID," the man noted, reading each card in turn as he pulled them out of his wallet. "Is this your actual identity?"

"H..hey, that's my wallet!" Keiichi exclaimed.

"Answer the question."

"Yeah, that's me. Keiichi Morisato. What am I doing here?"

"As I previously mentioned, you are being held for debriefing. This is an undisclosed military installation maintained jointly by the Japan NDF and the Cabinet Intelligence and Research Office. The reason you are here bears direct relation to the recent 'night stalker' attacks in the Tokyo metro area, as reported by public news media. Are you aware of these news reports?"

"Who isn't? It's been all over the 'net and TV. Totally creeps me out how no one seems to know what the hell is going on with them. What does any of that have to do with me?" Keiichi asked. Consciousness was slowly returning to him; he noticed that his voice was a thin rasp of its usual soft mellow tone. His body felt like it was one enormous welt of aching pain; every inch of his body throbbed with the sensation of being freshly bruised.

"Good. This establishes that you seem to be oriented to reality. Many of the people that I debrief aren't," the maninblack replied matter-of-factly. "Since you are aware of the 'night stalker' incidents, then you will understand why I need you to answer a series of questions. First, do you have any memory of being attacked?"

"I...was..._attacked_?" Keiichi asked.

"Yes, which is why you are _here_ rather than being treated in a conventional hospital emergency room setting," the government official confirmed. "The best research teams in Japan are gathered here to medically stabilize and study 'night stalker' victims such as yourself. Rest assured that your health is not in any imminent danger. While you are here recuperating, we will cross-examine you about any particular details you might remember from the incident. If you cooperate, you will be released when the interrogation is concluded and you have signed the appropriate releases. If you do not cooperate, then we have the legal jurisdiction to hold you here indefinitely as allowed by plenum emergency laws relating to Japan's national security policy. Do you understand?"

Keiichi gulped and nodded his head. The maninblack's indication that he had been attacked caused him to feel dizzy, his ears were rushing with roaring sounds. An ugly shadow of helplessness briefly seized upon him, and he fought it off with sheer exertion of his will.

Turning to look at the officious questioner, he noted, "The last thing I'd want to do is remain in your custody any longer than is necessary. I have a fiancée waiting at home who is probably very worried about me at the moment. You don't have to be concerned about my being uncooperative...I definitely want to help out in any way I can."

"Hmm...a fiancée? This is interesting, as the only registered female residents at your current address are your sister, Megumi Morisato and..." he said as he read from a printout, "...an Urudo Hayasaki, from a missing persons report filed two years ago. Oh, and also a Skurudo Hayasaki, listed as a cosplay rental retailer. Quite interesting, as this Skurudo was identified in a police report involving an incident of public transvestism on the Imperial Palace grounds that you participated in, January of last year. I'll withhold my opinion of your cross-dressing exploits. Are either of these two women your fiancée?"

"Heaven's no! Thank Goddess they aren't, too!" Keiichi blurted out, as memories of being caught on TV wearing a bunny suit in the middle of winter haunted him. The secret service guy raised his eyebrows at his choice of words. This man definitely didn't know that they were trying to save the planet from being buried in stuffed animals. He hoped the maninblack wasn't going to press him about the particulars of that embarrassing episode.

But how could he explain that Bell-chan was his fiancée? There had been no reason for Bell to have a public record such as a driver's license or birth certificate.

His interrogator was regarding him with a disgruntled expression, clearly suspicious about his blurting out that he had a fiancée. Trying to mentally hurdle over the firepools of shock swirling in his mind in response to being told he that he was a victim of the so-called 'night stalker', Keiichi attempted to piece together an explanation. The last thing anyone needed was to have the Cabinet Intelligence people snooping around their temple home...

"Waitaminute! Check the N.I.T. student records for a Berudandi...she's my fiancée and it'll confirm that her address is the same as mine," he requested. A moment later, a woman wearing a lab tech jacket entered the room and handed several papers to the maninblack.

"This your fiancée?" he asked, showing him an enlarged copy of Bell's N.I.T. ID and campus guest-pass photo ID. He nodded, and the man added, "She's certainly beautiful for a foreigner. I can see why you would want to marry her. She looks like a keeper. Ahem...let's see...the records show that your cousin, Tomohisa, and a friend, Cevn, are living at your residence. According to this, Cevn is a professor at N.I.T. of some repute, who disappeared several months ago and is currently on the Chiba PD missing persons division case list. It seems that you have quite the interesting household, Mr. Morisato."

"That's an understatement," Keiichi muttered under his breath.

"But we're not here to investigate your friend's disappearance," the maninblack insisted. "Clearly, none of these events are involved in these attacks. It would be most helpful if you try to start at the beginning. What impressions do you have from two nights ago?"

"I've been here _two days_!" Keiichi exclaimed in astonishment. Why didn't Bell-chan come, if he was gone this long? Bell-chan or her sisters could have easily zinged him out of here...unless he was too unhealthy to be moved. Or maybe she was in trouble too, and _couldn't_ come to his rescue. He shunted away from dwelling on a host of imagined potential problems Bell-chan could be dealing with. Hoping that she wasn't in danger, Keiichi returned his attention to his own troubles.

What was going on here? Why was this man saying he had been attacked?

"Normally, two to four days are required for us to stabilize the victims, give or take a day," the maninblack answered. "Allow me to explain. Every 'night stalker' victim we have examined was attacked in a public setting where there should have been numerous witnesses. Yet, there have been no reports by anyone who observed the attacks. In each case, there has been a tip-off call to the local police jurisdiction, identifying the location of the victim. At first, law enforcement assumed that the perp was simply taunting them, but now we are operating under the assumption that these contacts are to prevent fatalities.

"We have determined that the 'night stalker' attacks its victims by accessing the jugular vein through a means we cannot understand, and then drains about 30-40% of the victim's blood supply. A neurotoxin is also released into the victim's body. After draining the blood, the 'night stalker' reseals the jugular vein but not the entrance wound, so that the victim doesn't experience further grievous loss of blood. Apparently, the 'night stalker' exercises this precaution to ensure that victims survive the attack.

"Each victim was discovered while in a Class III hemorrhaging status, just on the brink of death. What is peculiar is that none of the victims has died, and the amount of blood withdrawn is inconsistent; varying from victim to victim based upon their individual physiology. For example, a 40kg female's borderline blood loss would be significantly lower than that of a 120kg male. The 'night stalker' appears to be adjusting the blood removal, tailoring it to each individual's survival threshold. In light of this, our medical experts believe that the 'night stalker' is operating with a definite modus: it takes the maximum amount of blood that it can get away with without killing its victims."

"I was..._bit_?" Keiichi asked in confused anxiety.

"As unlikely as it seems...yes, you appear to have been bitten," the maninblack confirmed. "However, the government is quite unwilling to acknowledge superstitious nonsense such as the mythic existence of kyuuketsuki as an explanation for these attacks. The evidence of these crimes appear to be the work of a devious individual or group of individuals fixated on vampirism. We believe this to be the work of mastermind criminals with a substantial grasp of scientific knowledge and the medical expertise of a surgeon. The most reasonable motive for these 'night stalker' attacks is that they are attempts to create a new form of urban terrorism. This is why we have initiated a cover-story to dissuade public panic."

Keiichi tried to let all this new information sink in. What the secret service guy was explaining wasn't abstract and remote in any sense...it was chilling and terrifying. Up until now, the 'night stalker' attacks had an impersonal edge; they were merely a random series of attacks reported in the news. Now, he was slammed with the daunting awareness that this was personal...this was about _him_! He still didn't want to accept that he was actually a victim of this 'night stalker'. The concept that he had been a victim...was extremely emo in all the worst ways, rocking his well-being like an earthquake as it drained both his confidence and his sense of self. It was as if something had _stolen_ him. This 'night stalker' had taken possession of his life from him, stealing it from him with the ruthless indifference of a burglar stealing valuables from a house. Two whole days were missing from his memories and his life...

"W..where did you find me?" Keiichi inquired nervously.

"You were discovered about half a kilometer from N.I.T., laying next to your motorcycle...which was still idling when we discovered you, by the way. Don't worry, your bike is undamaged and is currently impounded. It appears that the attacker deliberately pushed it over on its side during the assault. Was there anyone who would have a reason to stalk you?"

"Not at all," Keiichi lied. Of course, he knew of four who had stalked him in the past: Urd, Skuld, Megumi and Mara. But they had no reason to stalk him now: Urd wasn't out to dose him with a lust potion; Mara wasn't out to kill or Curse him; Megumi wasn't spying on him to satisfy her curiosity about his love life; and Skuld wasn't out to 'chaperone' his and Bell-chan's dates because of her possessiveness of Bell and her spite towards him.

"Describe the incident as best you can recall, Mr. Morisato."

"I was working late on designs for our student club's racing entry, an experimental electrical-powered motorcycle. Myself, Sora Hasegawa, and my two sempai Tamiya and Ootaki left N.I.T. together about 8pm. Tamiya said he was going to drive Ootaki and Sora home, while I was going to ride my bike home. I remember the moon being extra bright; it was one of those nights where everything seems half-night, half-day under the moonlight...almost a dim daylight. I took my usual route home, the one that I ride when I want to get home right away. The last thing I remember is bright orange or red colored flashes...and a couple other things, like my breath being knocked out of me and a massive pain in my head. A flash...and then I woke up here."

The maninblack continued with his line of questions, at once point using a mirror to show him the stitched-up wound on his neck. Quickly exhausted by the questioning, Keiichi went back to sleep. The questioning resumed when he woke up, and once it was done, the maninblack brought a phonebook-thick set of government releases for him to fill out. Finally it was over, this interrogation. The maninblack informed him that he was going to be administered a knock-out injection, and then he and his motorbike would taken to a public location where he would be 'released'.

Apparently, this facility was so top-secret, the government didn't want to run the risk of having anyone recognizing the location...

...he came to in a parking lot at N.I.T. A van squadroned with several meninblack kept an eye on him while he regained consciousness. Two of them stood guard while another one gave him an injection to speed his return to alertness. Warning him not to attempt to operate his motorbike for at least thirty minutes until the "somnambulant measures wear off", they waited in their van until he indicated that he felt ready to ride his bike home. Administering a series of drunk-driving type aptitude tests to confirm that he was roadworthy, they escorted him from a distance as he rode back home.

* * *

Moments after her sister woke up in a panic as she noticed that Keiichi hadn't come home from N.I.T., Skuld had readily hacked into the most secure computers in Japan's government to try and find out what was going on, based on a wild hunch she had. Her presentiments were confirmed when she learned that Keiichi was being detained in a secret facility that the NDF and some black-budget "UFO agency" maintained. Evidently, they had picked him up overnight and according to their records, were "stabilizing and debriefing" him, proving her surmise was that Keiichi had fallen victim to the crazy 'night stalker' that kept filling the nightly news media cycles with all sorts of speculations. When she informed her sister that Keiichi was held by the government and suggested that they just go and fetch him, her sister simply shook her head "no" and retreated to Everyone's Tea Room to spell herself. Skuld was mystified...why didn't her Elder Sister want to rush in and rescue Keiichi? Could she be so upset by all the turmoil with Big Sister Urd that she was becoming indecisive? Perhaps her sister thought that Keiichi's injuries might be severe enough that she couldn't risk transporting him through MatterSpace back to the temple.

Her efforts to cheer up Belldandy did little to detain her sister from worrying herself to tears over his disappearance the next two days. Skuld couldn't understand why her sister remained so upset. Scouring the data of various top-secret agencies, she learned that the newsbytes were all intentional political misinformation. According to official records, these night attacks had been happening _everywhere_...not just in Japan. Seventy persons in Japan had been attacked, each one discovered with a near-fatal loss of blood. Blood that impossibly appeared to have been sucked out of them by bite-like injuries to the throat.

Kyuuketsuki or other vampires?

The old terrors returned, full-on in her face. This was all Urd's fault in the first place! She always felt such a rapid onset of fear whenever she sensed spooky things. Because of Urd, she was easily frightened by the supernatural 'evils' of mythic Earthrealm culture. Obakes, onis, kappas, kitsunes, o-kami, hungry ghosts, drowned schoolgirls in bathrooms, yuki-onna...just the mention of these apparitions always urged her into a deep affright. She knew her fears was totally mental, totally ridiculous...that they were an unnecessary departure from reason. But she couldn't shake them off no matter how hard she tried. As a Goddess, she knew that there was no real reason to be frightened of things that couldn't hurt her. As a Goddess, she knew that most of these fabled creatures were nothing more than the outgrowths of the fertile mortal imagination; the intellectual faculty of humankind that had to express itself through the ages.

Yet, the mere mention of the word "kyuuketsuki" conjured up all sorts of unholy and threatening mental images. Try as she might, Skuld couldn't rid herself of the dread she felt. Like a young bird who had been 'imprinted' with the image of its mother, she felt like she had been 'imprinted' with a insane fear of Earthrealm spooks, courtesy of her stupid Big Sister.

Kyuuketsuki didn't exist in modern Japan except in manga and anime...but when Keiichi returned two days after he had went AWOL, it was apparent to Skuld that he had been attacked and had suffered a significant blood loss. Just like the victim of a vampire.

Her sister was an emotional mess, both relieved and upset at his homecoming. Bell's joy was tempered by his weakened physical condition. Keiichi had a surgical scar on his neck that was sewn up tight with a dozen stitches. His skin was pale, cold and dry to the touch, his voice hoarse, his gait and reactions slowed.

What was _really_ going on here?

Belldandy had reacted to his return by clinging onto Keiichi as if he would disappear at any moment. What was she afraid of and why was she so worried about him, even though he was safe back home at their temple? As Goddesses, they could depopulate the Earthrealm if they wished...so what kind of hold could a foolish Earthrealm superstition possibly have on her powerful and courageous elder sister?

* * *

Belldandy knew.

She knew, and in spite of this awareness she cherished the hope that her dearest Keiichi's situation wasn't the worst-case scenario that she had suspected. Impossibly, Keiichi had been attacked by a vampiric kyuuketsuki...a creature that didn't belong anywhere except in the fervored fantasy realms of Earthrealm legends. Unless some magical process had allowed for such mythic entities to reign free in the physical world, there was no explanation for what had happened to her fiancé.

Actually, there were two explanations if she were to invoke absolute Divine knowledge...

Her beloved Keiichi was exhausted from his ordeal, and she gladly shifted into the role of nurse to move him towards regaining his health. Favoring him with frequent cuddles, tea, his favorite foods and back massages, she was at a loss when she noticed that his health wasn't responding to her efforts as quickly as it should have. If 'Nurse' Urd was here, Keiichi would have the benefit of her curative incenses and alchemical therapies...but her older sister had decided to remain in Syntrasil, out of reach.

Every morning when Keiichi left for school, he had tanuki eyes...eyes ringed with purplish-black flesh circlets that betided his continuing fight against exhaustion. Megumi was deeply worried about him too; the first day he returned to school, she and Sora had joined him in the cafeteria for lunch and witnessed him falling asleep halfway through his noontime bento.

Chihiro recognized that he was sick and kindly decided to excuse him from work to "get some rest". Sora stepped in and assumed all of his Club activities, including road-testing their work-in-progress electrical motorcycle. But after a week of such accommodations, Keiichi was still walking around as if he was half-awake..."zombied grey" as Megumi had labeled him.

Every day that Keiichi didn't exhibit signs of a complete recovery further sustained her worst fears...

* * *

"What is wrong with him, Belldandy onee-chan?" Skuld asked. "What's wrong with _life_? Our stupid sister hasn't returned from Syntrasil. Keiichi's lurching around like he's in a daze. Once again, he's late coming back from school. Urd's totally late too, like an old lady who can't quite get going in the morning to make an appointment. You don't think she's _still_ caught up in that 'surprise' that Troubadour enticed her with, ne?"

"I doubt it, Skuld. Luckily, she's not here to hear your 'old lady' comment either," Belldandy answered, trying to smile at her sister's humor. Urd's absence was troubling...even Peorth couldn't find her. The greatly expanded OmniOm had caused more than a few Divines to get 'lost' due to the massive reorganization...her Mom had used the Earthrealm analogy of scrambled eggs to describe Syntrasil...but deep in her heart, Belldandy suspected that Urd hadn't misplaced herself.

Urd was hiding.

Keiichi was supposed to be home from school five hours ago, and every minute he didn't ride into the temple's driveway brought a new struggle of confidence. Yet, her mind was already traveling down many tributaries of speculation, none of which flowed into the ocean of faith. Each coursing of thought was disheartening.

"He's here!" Skuld shouted excitedly, drumming her heels against the temple's wooden veranda as the telltale throaty sound of Keiichi's motorbike loomed closer. Belldandy sighed a slow breath of relief as she heard him downshift his bike before turning into the driveway and parking it. Familiar sounds, peaceful sounds.

_**"HEEIIIYEEEE!!!"**_

Skuld had leapt to her feet in a screaming flash, riveted with terror as she pointed towards Keiichi with a shaky arm. The chest of his N.I.T. sweatshirt was copiously stained rust-red with semi-dried blood. Alerted by her sister's stridor, Keiichi turned towards the sound...and then _leapt almost five meters vertically_ to land on the roof of the nearby garage.

Keiichi's eyes were glowing with a red intensity...just like how Mara could create the 'glowing irises' visual effect to make her eyes shine with Demonic brightness in the middle of the night. While she was aghast at the physical impossibilities her fiancé was evidencing, Keiichi took two steps down to the roofline, seemingly sizing them up like a panther hunting after prey. Without warning, he jumped high in the air, landing on the temple's wooden decking with a loud "thump!"

"K..k..kyuuketsuki!" her little sister shrieked in a muster of fear, suddenly disarmed of the wisdom of her adolescence. Skuld's composure and resolve had completely melted, and she was suddenly a vulnerable little girl again, frightened by the unknown. Belldandy felt her sister's shaking hands clutching at her sleeve as she ducked partway behind her, using her as a shield while Keiichi advanced. Suddenly, he sprang at her with cobra-like intensity...

With animal ferocity, he tried to tackle her. Unable to throw her to the wooden decking, Keiichi clung onto her like a monkey as he aggressively tried to tear her throat out with his teeth...teeth whose canines were elongated. She felt a deadweight heave against her back; Skuld had literally fainted in the face of Keiichi's sudden assault and was now propped up unconscious against her from the rear. Straining, she shoved Keiichi away, trying to maintain her balance as he tried to wrestle her down. Intensifying the strength potential of her Goddess physical manifest, she held him at arm's length while he snapped his jaw mechanically, ripping at the air with blurring clawed fingers.

No wonder Keiichi was exhausted. His consuming fatigue was akin to that of the leopard, who would stalk its prey for half a day before attempting to chase it down. She looked at his blood-spattered sweatshirt and realized that he had held out to the very end.

He knew what he was...

Consciousness and humanity had fled his life, replaced by a feral menace that was more instinct than intelligence. And yet, Keiichi had fought against his hunger...even when compromised of his self-awareness by the vampirism that had taken over his will. He didn't want to attack, didn't want to kill, didn't want to seek out victims. But it was too late, the ochre slickings and spatters all over his clothes serving as irrefutable proof.

Somehow, he had ridden his motorcycle back home while in his vampiric state.

"Come to me, my love. Feed yourself with my essence," Belldandy said in a measured voice, relinquishing her grip on Keiichi gradually so he wouldn't get panicked or attack Skuld. Softening the flesh around her neck, she turned her head to one side to allow him better access, her eyes wet with tears that neither her fiancée or younger sister would ever notice.

* * *

She had taken shelter in a Spiral Solarity, a type of 'sun' that resembled a complex of superstring dimensionalities, surfaced with water and glowing snow clouds, chasmed with tongues of fire and crystalline cave networks. Unable to dredge the bitter disappointment out of her saddened heart, Urd decided that the best thing to do was wait for Troubadour to seek her out. It was essential at this stage in their relationship that _he pursue her_: to make amends for his betrayal during the fete for her that he had arranged. For the life of the Almighty, she couldn't understand why he had thrown a party to 'show her off' to his friends and acclaim their renewed relationship to hers...and then run off with another Goddess before it was over. She refused to give in to despair and attempt to locate him, for this would be an affront to her dignity. He had wounded her...now she was going to make him heal her.

A spasming of energies caught her attention. The invisible strands of Divine consciousness that always linked Urd with her sisters had become extremely perturbed, so much so that it jerked her out of her remorseful vigil. This was serious! She could sense Belldandy's extreme emotional crisis, coupled with the 'echo' of her younger sister's blind desperation.

Troubadour would have to wait.

"XOM, I need immediate transport to the Earthrealm because of an emergency. This is a Norn 1.X.A priority!" she thoughtcast, hurling a demand at the upgraded version of the Ygg Xeomn. Almost immediately, everything around her dissolved...then she was orbiting a huge sphere of Metaixodenum for a fraction of a second...and then she was hurling through the Earthrealm's Living Gate. During transit, the Gate urged her to be gentle with Belldandy, because a love had been wounded.

This only heightened Urd's apprehensions, having recently felt the sting of _her own_ heart-wounds. A disturbance of the magnitude she sensed from Belldandy's energy meant that something very intense was going on with her sister and Keiichi.

* * *

"Let me get this straight. Keiichi's a real live _kyuuketsuki_?" Urd exclaimed. "Like one of those guys in the Dracula movies, turning into a bat or shadow and then flying off into the night to hypnotise some cute innocent woman into thinking he wants to have sex with her, and then instead he bites her neck and drinks her blood?"

Skuld shivered, as Urd had spoken in a exact mimic of the famous Bela Lugosi's voice.

"Not exactly, Urd," Belldandy answered. "I believe that my dear Keiichi has either been overtaken by a vampiric nature that is of the Earthrealm...or it's _that_."

"Shit!" Urd exclaimed.

"What? What's 'that'?" Skuld asked excitedly.

"It's too early to discuss adult subjects with children," Urd snapped back, causing her youngest sister's face to redden. "Obviously, we can rule out Demonic possession because Mara wouldn't stand for a Demon making an attack on her future brother-in-law."

"Certainly so. Any attack on Keiichi would be inappropriate to the highest degree. Demons don't look too kindly on unwarranted rogue behavior. Neither does their Dark Majesty," Belldandy added.

"You guys! You still haven't told me what 'that' is?"

"You're so smart, you go figure it out, Little Sister."

"Bite me!"

"Ooooo...I'm not gonna bite you, but maybe one of those kyuuketsuki might..."

"Sh..shut up, Big Sister Urd!"

"Stop this bickering, you two! My Keiichi is experiencing a terrible crisis, and it doesn't help matters when you keep taunting Skuld, Urd. Do not force me; your status in this household is already questionable because of your involvement with Troubadour. You came here to help...and I expect you to do just that," Belldandy raised her voice, verbally putting her foot down before the fated argument turned into a flood of recriminations between her sisters. Fights were tabu, especially now that Urd was siding with Troubadour. Any exchange of insults and her youngest sister could literally blow up into a rage...or blow up the temple.

"Here's what we do know," Belldandy explained, reviewing the recent events during Urd's absence involving the secret NDF facility and Keiichi's explosive attack tonight. Her younger sis was shuddering involuntarily as she described the vampiric features of his aggression. Belldandy nodded to Skuld apologetically, knowing how much this was spooking her.

Urd berated herself...she had been stalling around in Syntrasil, moping about and feeling sorry for herself...while her sister was facing such a huge crisis. Silently damning Troubadour, she started crying.

"Big Sister? What's wrong?" Skuld asked. Belldandy was grateful that her sisters could turn on a dime emotionally when they sensed that one or the other was hurting.

"Troubadour."

At Urd's mention of her boyfriend, Skuld's heart pounded "Tomohisa!" so loudly, it filled her thoughts to the exclusion of all else. An unpleasant scenario presented itself in her thoughts...

"Wha..what about Tomo?" she asked. "What if Keiichi bites him? He..he could turn into one of those _things_! Oh my, oh my, I've gotta check on him..."

Where she had been sitting, there was only a whisk of breeze and the crash of a bowl filled with raspberries and graham crackers. Belldandy and Urd could only look at each with puzzlement on their faces.

Skuld flashed into the hallway. Keiichi's startling transformation had filled her with such fright, she had completely forgotten about her own boyfriend. She slid his shoji door open, almost slamming it off its grooved track. For only the second time in her life, she entered her boyfriend's room...at night...without being asked. Tomohisa was semi-curled under a blanket, deeply realmed with sleep. Sighing with relief, she studied his sleeping persona. He was half-uncovered by the bedsheets; nervously, Skuld knelt down and rearranged them to cover him, her face blushing, her heart racing.

When she stood up, she saw both her older sisters in the doorway. "Don't you say anything perverted, Big Sister," she warned in a whispered hiss. "I was just tucking him in."

Urd looked at her...and started sobbing.

Belldandy felt a crushing blow to her heart as she realized that Urd...who obviously had just hit a 'relationship wall' with Troubadour...was reminded about the innocent giving nature of love by the sight of Skuld's tender affection to Tomohisa.

Her sister's grief-stricken expression said all the needed to be told: Troubadour had betrayed her again.

* * *

"Prof. Smythe, how is your work progressing?"

"Trials and tribulations vex me, but fears and speculations do not perplex me," he answered in rhyme, grinning. His arms were leather-gloved up to the elbow as he was using a syringe to drop a purplish fluid into a jar with hundreds of black flecks.

"There," he noted, pulling his arm out of the jar and then swiftly dashing formaldehyde on the leather glove while he held it over a sink, no doubt to kill the fleas attached to it. "The experimental method, although meticulous by virtue of rigor, can also be quite disenchanting. Boring and repetitive as reading the Sunday Times, as one might observe."

"To-date, I have succeeded in tailoring the protein so that it can be absorbed by the fleas and then possibly assimilated into their reproductive cycle as a zoological trait," he explained.

I foundered briefly in my amazement, as Prof. Smythe had already jumped several levels ahead in his experiment. Again, I was impressed by the 19th-century mind at work.

I regretted how 21st century society has a tendency to bury thinkers, concealing them from the cultural consciousness. Ask any schoolkid to name ten living scientists and they'll probable fail to list even five. Ask anyone to name ten Nobel prizewinners in the last 20 years, and maybe five out of hundred would be up to the task. But ask the same people to name ten living athletes or entertainers...and they'll easily name them by the dozens. This, despite the truth that each of us is the direct beneficiary of the successes and failures of these very thinkers.

How did people discover such breakthroughs anyway, considering the strictures of religious prejudice and the rudiments of method and technology that Prof. Smythe and his contemporaries had to face? Again, I was reminded that this was the era that witnessed the dawning of many cultural templates that would be fundamental to the modern age. Competitive sports would be invented in this decade that would eventually fill massive stadiums with fans. Advances in the manufacture of incandescent lamps would illuminate entire cities. The telephone would be refined to become affordable to all, replacing mail as the chosen method of correspondence and conveyance of meaning when two persons weren't face-to-face. A few years hence, the first wireless transmission of signal would occur, right here in Oxford, ushering in the age of the radio and instantial mass media...

Unless someone came to rescue me, I would probably live to witness that first broadcast..._if_ I could thwart Lord Reginald.

"I've got to conduct my lecture, Prof. Smythe," I noted. "I just wanted to see if everything was all right with you."

"Why wouldn't it be?" he replied.

* * *

"The devil has me by the throat," I thought as I sipped the glass of water on the rostrum before continuing my talk on Magnum Organum. Tired of being verbally attacked every few minutes, I decided to go on the offensive.

I was so frustrated, I couldn't give a fuck about anything at this point. My optimism had completely degenerated. The Victorian age had smothered me long enough...it was time for me to tar its face, exposing it for the pious fraud that it was...

"Magnum Organum's Aquantum principle is based upon the measured, equitable usage of proportion in regards to energy. Thoughts, as energy designs, have definite boundaries...which will have a civilizing influence on all that would reject the notion of symbolic cognitive methods. Current 'civilization' is based not on altruism but on avarice. Instinct and accommodation have been replaced by a reprehensible attitude of self-measure. This is in contradiction to the natural principle of conserved evolution. Natural philosophy is replete with empirical evidence that the order of being relies on economy rather than excess. The nerve impulses of the human being are _just enough _to conduct reactions and thoughts. Too much...and the person will die. The respiratory system allows for a certain optimum range of air pressure, rather than trying in inhale more air than is needed. Civilization damns as much as it braces...and I believe that this is a dysfunction and a disgrace.

"To cite an example, what would occur if I were to set out five kilograms of flaxseed on the Balliol quad? As one may expect, a host of birds would swiftly descend and commence with consuming the bounty. Each bird would eat its fill, save for nesting birds of a type who would need to consume extra so they can regurgitate the remainder to their chicks. But each bird instinctively would consume what is needed for itself, and nothing more. Now, what would happen if I put 5000 lbs of firewood in the same area of the Quad? A queue of men would rapidly form, some of them grabbing as much wood as they could physically carry to bring home. Other men would employ a draught wagon in order to obtain a stockage of firewood. Still other men of an entrepreneurial bent would hire underlings to transport the wood to a storage area, to retail it later to those who have none for the winter months. Selling them warmth, instead of sharing warmth with them. In a like manner, our society has become cold and indifferent. Unlike the birds, human beings under the aegis of 'civilization' demonstrate a societal obligation to take more than their fill..."

"You scoundrel! How dare you impugn the social necessity of capitalism!" a man shouted.

"Marxist! He's a Marxist!" several students accused.

"...and what would occur if I told you that right now, 5000 five-pound notes were stacked in a box outside in the Balliod quad? Do any of you know would happen? Nothing less than a frenzied, riotous scene would ensue. People would be fighting each other for that money, brandishing fisticuffs and worse. Law enforcement would be invoked to deal with the resultant tumult and brawling. So which is more civilized? Humankind's selfishness...or the bird's self-reliance?"

"Bastard!" several voices spoke at once. The lecture hall became deafeningly boisterous with threats and indignation...and then an anonymous protester threw a book at me.

"Whoops!" I thought as the setting lost what remaining decorum it had and became a free-for-all of shouts, threats and desk-thumping.

The reprisal for my antics was swift. The next day, I received a missive from Lord Reginald which basically implied that my actions were reprehensible and if I repeated them, then Prof. Smythe would meet with his "demise".

And my nocturnal departures continued...

* * *

Urd sighed softly, privately, feeling a warming solace as she reread the words. Glancing at her sisters, she decided to recite the poem aloud:

_"Many clothe the Goddess with Beauty, a beauty astride good fortune_

_ The Goddess I worship is impoverished, struggling, starving and unfortunate_

_ The beauty of nobility strikes the face of truth_

_ Yet I sorrow for the strength to touch my memories_

_ so that I may embrace beauty also..."_

"What do you think of this, you guys?" Urd asked as she set the book down in her lap after reading the poem aloud to her sisters. Unexpectedly, she had found a place of refuge from her turmoil over the conflicted feelings she had towards Troubadour.

The day after Keiichi and Belldandy returned, a book of poetry had mysteriously appeared in the mail, addressed to her. Curiosity piqued, she had briefly skimmed it and then tossed it into the closet. Now that summer was right around the corner, she was sorting through her summer clothes in her closet to try and pick out the best warm-weather outfits when she rediscovered the small book.

Instead of choosing outfits or troubling her heart with Troubadour, she sat down on her futon and reading the book of poems more closely. To her surprise, Urd felt a wavering in her heart as, poem by poem, the sequence created a peculiar architecture of the intimate. Kamakura poetry lacked the personal 'voice' of later poetic efforts such as haiku, and yet there was a rhythm of narrative in centuries-old waka which imbued them with layers of meaning. She sensed an ill-managed longing birthed out of deep sadness; an unfulfilled keening conveyed in the waka that stroked her heartstrings...almost an echo of her own situation, back when she was prohibited from romantic love by circumstances beyond her control.

"Why are you reading poems out of some stupid book, Big Sister? We should be going to sleep instead of listening to you. Do you think it's fun to keep us up all night?" Skuld quickly replied, while Belldandy remained silent with a pensive expression.

"Urd, what is your purpose in reading these poems to Skuld and I? First breakfast, then lunch, and now bedtime," her middle sister enquired cautiously.

"But these are really cool!" Urd exclaimed, trying to make her sisters understand.

"They do have a certain charm to them, I must admit," Belldandy noted. "They remind me of my dear Keiichi, somehow."

"Yeah, I have to admit that hearing you read them makes me remember hopping on the bicycle and riding over to visit Tomo at school earlier today!" Skuld added.

"But why are these so interesting? Even you, Ms. Shoujo Manga...even you are reminded about Tomohisa when I read these," Urd contended. "This is an unpublished reader's copy of 14th-century poetry that some team of archeologists claim to have discovered earlier this year. The introduction says that it written by an anonymous poet that the translators named 'Scatterbrush', since there is no historical information on who the author is. I don't need to read books, so why was it sent here in the first place? Why a reader's copy as well? Am I supposed to proofread this book for some publisher? Doesn't Kodansha have people who can do that? I'm a Goddess, not some bookworm lit-wit! Besides, I wouldn't change a single word in these anyway, they're that good. As the former Norn of the Past, I was able to read poems as soon as they left the writer's brush. The Man'yoshu, the Kokin Wakashu, the Shinkokinshu...I was _there_ as the poems were written by their various creators. I watched the nobles compile them. But I don't recognize this collection of poems at all. How could a book of poetry written by a single anonymous author in manuscript form during the Kamakura Era even exist without my knowing about it? How could it survive the centuries? These poems...they're superb and sublime to the point where I'd almost believe them to be modern rather than ancient."

"Why all the bother about an old book of poems?" Skuld asked. "I mean, its not like they're relevant to modern life. And they're screwy! What kind of person would make his Goddess starving and impoverished. That's completely stupid! Bo-oo-ring!"

"Skuld, there is a deeper meaning in these poems," Belldandy aired. "Urd has always been enamored of poetry, just like I've come to enjoy mortal magazines and you enjoy manga. Manga would bore Urd because it doesn't speak to her the same way poems do. As you know, the first literature of the Earthrealm mortals was poetry..."

"After it took 'em a thousand years to make the break from using written language as a means of bean-counting. What a waste of a good thing! Keeping records about their gold riches and bragging about their wars of conquest? Only after centuries of total fail-fest were they actually able to write about the important things," her younger sister emphasized.

Urd thought about Belldandy's words. There was a _voice_ in these poems, one that both entranced her and haunted her. She could feel the longing and desperation of the author...and remarkably, it echoed the state of her own heart.

_"The land is labored with sweat to sow the rice_

_ The painted fan's delicate words labor to convey philosophy_

_ But many confuse the sowing of Love..._

_ ...when it is love which sows men_

_ In Love there is no Goddess_

_ Like blossoms, my tears cannot be contained in the earth,"_

"You _memorized that_?" Skuld asked.

"It...reminds me of Troubadour. Of myself. How we struggle to reach each other, but never truly touch hearts. How I can't make him love me, I can't convey my feelings for him..."

"Urd, what do you feel about Cevn?" Belldandy asked.

"Again with that? Would you just stop it, sis! You totally ruined the mood!" Urd complained in an irritated voice. She slapped the book down on the tatami and fell backwards onto her futon with dramatic flair, flopping her arms out.

Oddly, she had to admit that these poems _did_ remind her of Cevn. He was one of the few Earthrealm mortals who was read in classical poetry, and he even appreciated it to the point where he'd recite poems to her from time to time. She remembered a few of those times, exchanging poems while they watched the contours of the nightskies.

"I...don't know what to think. I don't even know what to feel any more, you guys," Urd admitted.

* * *

This morning's lecture on the Magnum Organum was interrupted by news that several tracts of certain key passages of Magnum had been found by a group of graduate theology students in the Bodelian Library, dating back to 1879...the beginning of Lord Reginald's tenure as Chancellor of Oxford. Several professors basically accused me of plagiarism, in front of the stunned audience of students and scholars.

Following up on this disclosure, two 'experts' on Magnum started prompting me with questions...difficult questions...that I could barely understand, let alone offer any semblance of a response to. This only added to the momentum of the growing sentiment that I had 'stolen' Magnum somehow. Murmuring shadowed the rest of my talk, and I barely managed to get out of there before I lost my composure.

Lord Reginald's orchestrated plan was moving along like clockwork.

I had to spell myself in the anteroom of the lecture hall for almost a hour, feeling like I had been whipped with briar thorns. Struggling to remain emotionally elastic, I recognized that I was right at the edge of stagnating into a dire paranoia, penned in by fears both imagined and justified...

All I could do was stand in the mental corner; ashamed, alone, and betrayed. I didn't have any friends here except for Prof. Smythe, who was more a colleague than a friend. Keeping company with him sometimes gave me a sense of diversion; I could become engrossed with matters other than my own while listening to his fitful obsession towards fleas. The diet of zoological discussions he provided me was so thoroughly instructive, I could probably name fifty species of fleas by now.

After I survived my first month here, I began to mentally label Dr. Smythe "the Flea Professor" because of his intense diligence to his experimental work. Apparently, he felt that my academic specializations were sufficiently removed from his zoological research to allow him to add the dimension of confidant to our acquaintance. In a little over a month under his tutelage, I became fairly up to speed on the methodological specifics of his experiments. One day, he rewarded me by a dry compliment, noting that I "was increasingly capable of an intelligent discourse about the sciences." The guy taught Zoology here at Oxford, but only as a side-job it seemed, because his real enthusiasm only emerged when he was in his laboratory working with his flea populations.

What was my enthusiasm? Life had taken a bleak turn into a grayish fatalism for me. Unlike Smythe, I was only going through the motions of living, my fate already predestined. The nightly dose of hypnotic drugs was beginning to have a cumulative affect: a noticeable relaxation of my mental diligence which resulted in bouts of forgetfulness and frequent mistakes. My tolerance to the substance was increasing as well. The tea they were using to administer the doses tasted quite bitter compared to before, indicative of an increase in medicinal content. It didn't even taste like tea anymore.

Tempting as it was, I refused to divulge any knowledge of future events or advances during my waking hours. While I was knocked out with drugs...who knows what I could be disclosing? But I was one of those who knew little practical information. Keiichi and his knowledge of engineering mechanics would have been a treat for these guys. With me, they were plumbing an empty applecart. If you were to ask me to wire a telephone, I'd be all thumbs...but I could discourse on Freud, Heidegger and Foucault with little effort.

In desperation, I read the Magnum Organum again, trying to decipher a new sense of meaning out of it...and instead, my mind kept drawing back to my 'stunt' during the most recent lecture. For a group of blue-bloods, the Oxonites had painted the room blue with curses and passionate verbal invectives to a degree that could rival conversations held in naval officer's messes. All because I had claimed that one of the fundamental expressions of civilization was selfishness.

Which came first, the selfishness or the civilization? At what point did survival transcend the need to protect and nurture one's self and evolve into the indwelling urge to maintain social dominion over others? The most tangible expression of such dominance...money and property. Necessary evils such as these had to be totally extinguished, if humankind will ever advance out of its philosophical-cultural adolescence. In the 21st century, people were amusing themselves to death with DVD collections while 20,000 of their fellows starved to death every week and _two billion_ suffered from lack of basic shelter, education and transportation. The pattern was already deeply integrated into the culture here in Victorian Great Britain, sustained by Lord Reginald and his ilk.

Selfishness.

The three Goddesses had told me repeatedly that selfishness was the greatest offence to the Divine order of Yggdrasil. Even Mara had said that there was no tolerance for sustained selfishness in Vanagdrasil. But in the past two years, I had seen selfishness in action, for both good and bad. Keiichi's risking his life for Belldandy...ultimately a selfish act. Mara's creation of an Ultimate Demon...ultimately a selfish act as well. My wish to be a balancing force...selfish to the Nth degree.

If I had been truly unselfish, I would have wished for someone else to be the balance that could bring around a better day. But instead, I had wished it for _myself_. Thus confirmed, my failure as a human being. It wasn't enough that I was flawed by my abusive upbringing, my drug addiction, the mental illness that had restricted my efforts so greatly. Beyond all this was the truth: I was nothing more than a selfish fuckhead, no different the Lord Reginald or any other mortal...

"No...I'm not," I answered my thoughts. "Fuck that! I'm a giver, not a taker...or at least I try to be. Don't my intentions count for anything?"

Why would the Ygg computer deign me worthy of a wish in the first place, if I was so self-indulgent? Was I truly trying to simply improve my own lot when I told Urd my wish? The Ygg computer did interpret my wish...and had granted it by using Urd, who wasn't even a Goddess Relief Office agent. Was I wrong to make a wish in the first place? All I had wanted at the time was for the emotional pain, the burdening depression, the history of failures...I just wanted it all to go away. Instead, it had increased...I was even more alone now than I had ever been in my life.

All because I had been selfish.

But what if the selfishness of acquisition could be somehow transformed into a selfishness of _inquisition_? Could selfishness be molded into an inquisitiveness towards all aspects of imagination and reality? Magnum Organum had started out with a simple desire to look deeper into the nature of things. Painfully deep, to the point where it was uncomfortable because I had to maintain the discipline to question _everything_. Some nights when I was writing it, I felt like I was sweating blood because the brainwork was so daunting, so painful. It hurt to think, at times. Yet, I knew that I could have copped out and gone the religious route in my search for truth, but I had studied enough Zen to recognize that the same existential problems in life also exist in religion...the seminal difference being that the question of existence is footnoted under the heading of "God" in religion. Now, I needed a religious faith in the face of knowing that Gods and Demons and Angels were _real_.

I had been lecturing about humankind's unwillingness to investigate itself deeply...but maybe I needed to shed everything I learned in university and start with a fresh perspective.

Perhaps the pathway to an inquisitive selfishness was to become even more selfish.

The internet culture emergent in the 21st century was still in its very initial formative stages, but I could already observe how it was modeling human behavior. People would communicate amongst themselves with their pods even while standing together in the same room. The isolating otaku who woke up, spent the day in front of the computer, and then went to sleep...maybe this was a new behavioral locus to express selfishness. The use of machine intellect to classify people as consumers...wasn't this the 'sameing' of the human race? In opposition to this, the artistic nurturing of eclecticism by a certain few who refused to be generalized, the words of their cries for independence rendered each day in their associated weblogs.

It was said that humans cannot exist in a vacuum. But could human beings _be_ a vacuum? Could they live as beings who were self-directed, inwards seeking, focusing on an equilibrium between experience and principles? To the outside, such a self-absorbed person would seem empty, bereft of value. But what of the accumulation of self-knowledge? If "Mankind is the proper study of man" as Pope had noted...then perhaps _I am the proper study of myself_.

What if true liberation came as the result of a sort of 'super-selfishness'...being selfish to point where one could really, actually shield themselves from others and society? Each person an island unto themselves. Each person more distant socially, each person even more invested in their own science of self. Individuals seeking an self-imposed isolation aimed at strengthening their own egos, rather than relying on others to mediate their sense-of-self. The momentum of needing to be productive for productivity's sake could be halted, and people could start focusing on _themselves_ instead of their _things_. Take away the distractions, the easy access to other's thoughts, the evolved culture that we take for granted...in fact, uproot society itself and redraft a new human context. Instead of talking to each other, we would talk to ourselves.

If we discarded social interaction...wouldn't we have to find an alternative to social interaction? Something that was _there_, yet undisclosed?

"What the hell, if I can't fully understand the first four sections of Magnum Organum, then maybe I should just go for it and write a fifth section," I said to myself, lighting the desk's candlewick and grabbing the fountain ink-well and feathered-plume pen.

* * *

She and Tomo kept growing distant from each other, a coldness between the two of them which stabbed deeply into her sensitive heart. It seemed that every time one of them offered a concession, the other one would refuse it. Tomo had offered to take her to the Aqua Park, which would easily eat up half his month's allowance...and she told him no. She had asked him to ride bicycles with her to the top of the scenic overlook behind the temple...and he had shot her down. Most recently, Tomohisa had asked her to come to tonight's baseball game to watch him play. It wasn't just a regular game...it was the important game, their most difficult challenge before the summer high school baseball tournament started up. And she had said "no way!"

"Onee-chan, I know that he was making a peace offering, and all I could say was 'no'. I didn't even stop to think about it. I didn't even try to explain myself to him. And it..snff..hurt him. I could see it oh so deeply in his eyes. For a flash of moment, his eyes told me that he didn't even want to live. How could I be so stupid, so cruel..."

"So much in love..." Urd interjected, taking her self-questioning and slam-dunking it with an answer.

Skuld looked at her Big Sister, who was in love with a total jerk, who was desperate enough to try anything to save her relationship with him. Like she, Urd was fighting for love...and Skuld was unexpectedly struck by the fact that she was viewing her older sister in a new light. Every day, Urd faced the same challenge she faced: how to communicate a meaningful love to the one she loved.

In her sis's narrowed emerald eyes, she saw herself anew.

Urd was right. This was love...new love, "rough love" as Keiichi had described it the other night. For the first time in her life, she was dealing with her older sisters on a "Goddess-with-boyfriend to Goddess-with-boyfriend" basis. She was just as grown-up as them...proven forever by the fact that she was encountering the same emotional uncertainties of being in a relationship!

"Urd and Belldandy are no longer just my older sisters, they're Goddesses working the circuits of love...just like me!" she marveled, relishing her insight.

But her new-found maturity didn't take away the hurt in her heart.

"Skuld, my dear sister," Belldandy said softly. "You are certainly experiencing growing pains. Your love for Tomohisa is moving into a new sphere of companionship, a more _adult_ connection is arising between the two of you. Certainly, this also is a sign that _you_ are becoming more adult."

"And she isn't talking about sex, either, so don't get hung on that, kiddo," Urd added with a knowing grin.

"We all know that conflict is part of love, and sometimes Love demands a good fight out of us," Belldandy continued. "If love didn't consume our energies, if we didn't quest after it as boldly as we search our hearts for truth, then love would be a shallow thing, would it not? Impediments are always part of love's path, to remind us that we cannot traverse them unless we rise above ourselves. In love, we cannot go it alone. Just like when Keiichi starts a race...once he shifts gears and begins the race, at that very moment there is no turning back to the starting line for him. Because he has made the commitment, he must run his race without stopping. Likewise, we cannot halt ourselves, our wills, or even the very trajectory of the desires we invest in the other person. Yet, we can moderate those same desires by becoming more simple and vulnerable. Giving away yourself is a path and means towards finding yourself, Skuld. Do you understand?"

Skuld glanced back and forth between her two sisters, certainly feeling _their_ love for her. So often, being the youngest meant that she had to fend off their protective streaks, so that she could become strong. Urd was domineering and overzealous, while Belldandy was gentle and direct...too much so at certain times. But in the moment, she felt like she was being cushioned between two hearts, softly encompassed by a warm wisdom that only sisters could offer each other.

"Yes, I think I can learn to understand," she noted in a hushed voice, stifling her sniffling and trying to close away the tears. It was so painful...but it was a necessary pain. That's what her older sisters were trying to say.

"Do I stay with him, or take a break and try and catch my breath?" she asked.

"Idiot!" Urd scolded, feigning a swat to the back of her head with a folded fan that suddenly materialized in her hand. "You don't need to catch your breath, because you already have it, kiddo! You already have _him_, and stepping away is running away. Trust me on this...I've made that mistake too many times. That's why I'm waiting for Troubadour to come to me, instead of chasing after him or hiding away from him. He knows where I am. As for you and Tomohisa, don't you dare withhold yourself from him! You need each other more than you ever did before, and you can't blow it now by ignoring this!"

Urd's strong words of caution almost set her off, but Skuld knew that this was the best gem of wisdom her Big Sister could offer her. She looked at Belldandy, who simply smiled wanly and nodded her head in agreement.

It was too late to attend the game, which was probably almost over, but it wasn't too late to say she was sorry and make a promise to attend the next one. After talking it out with her sisters some more, she went into their bedroom, pulled out her futon from the closet and sat down on it, hunching her knees up against her breast, trying to be small because she felt small...

She sensed a gurgling, sucking sound, one out of 25 million breaths that she constantly listened into in the Tokyo megaplex. It was horrid, like the death-wheeze so many mortals gasped out right before they took the breath that cannot be breathed. Filtering out the clustering soundscapes of Tokyo, she focused in on the sound, honing in on the shallow, irregular breathing. The breath was moving, and the sirening of an ambulance cycled over the choking respirations like a metallic eagle screeching shrill piercing hawksong.

"Oh my God, it's Tomo! He's had a bad one!" she screamed as she burst through the hallway like a cannoner's plummet. Belldandy almost dropped her tea, and Urd flipped over in mid-air to turn and face her, her eyes widening with apprehension.

"Let's go!" Urd agreed...and before the sound of her voice reached the shoji door of Everyone's Tea Room a few meters away, three flashes of light had already appeared and vanished.

* * *

Hospital bed...

"This feels like I've been here before, like my memory has been cloned or something," Tomo said to her in a weakened voice, his lungs still constricted despite the emergency treatments. "And it doesn't feel good."

"Why?"

"Because it prevents us from making _new_ memories."

"Echhi!" she said softly as she leaned towards him and rested her head on his chest, since she couldn't hug him. She knew he didn't mean it _that_ way, even though both shoujo and shonen manga had a certain common theme associated with 'new memories' which involved summer vacations and losing one's virginity. The last thing Tomo would be deliberating over was sex. Yet, her teasing comment had the desired effect, as he rapidly blushed red in the face. She felt a little bit more grown up because she was able to play with him this way, not manipulatively but to amuse herself at his expense in light-hearted playfulness, because she loved him and he needed to know that she was learning about his heart.

"Echhi!" she repeated, kissing him on the cheek, finger-stroking his hair. His blush told everything, because he _had _been thinking of her in a sexual way. Maybe he was becoming more grown up than she expected, because now _she_ was blushing with the realization that she must have been thinking ecchi too, to come up with a joking reference like she had.

"Baka!" Skuld said teasingly as she darted several kisses on his cheek, her boyfriend reacting by looking at her with an expression of utter befuddlement...

Belldandy and Urd had left the hospital as soon as they learned that Tomohisa was stable and his asthma attack was no longer life-threatening. So no eavesdroppers...

"I'm sorry," they both said as one...and then a sparkling giggle of a moment passed between her and Tomo. She could see the sincere regret in his eyes as he reached out to hold her hand. Nothing more needed to be said; they both knew that they had been squabbling over trivial, unimportant crapola. If love was a road like her sister had said, then they had hit an oil slick...and thankfully, their car wasn't spinning on the road anymore. They were past it.

"Why are you nodding your head, Skuld?" Tomo asked, shifting backwards so he could sit up in the hospital bed.

"I've come to a decision," she answered him, again kissing him on the lips and then laying her head against his chest, listening to the heartbeat that she'd do everything in her power to protect.

Forevermore.


	163. Pt 163: Breathe to be Scene

**Part 163: Breathe to be Scene**

_"Our plan is unfolding with the exquisite elegance of grace that we had anticipated, sisters. The Three of Time are fragmented, thoroughly divided in their ambitions. Two of the three are actively engaged in an intense adversarial conflict with each other, each unto her own nature. The odds of their moving beyond their dissension and returning to a cooperative stance are greatly reduced."_

_ "What of the Demoness sister? Unlike the usual configuration of three sisters, there is a fourth in this one."_

_ "She is of no concern, as she is merely a Demoness and not of Time. Her loyalty to the three sisters is tenuous at best; events neither engage her compassion or elicit her dispassion. She is neutral, and therefore of little consequence."_

_ "Neutrality is another word for danger. She _–is-_ a Demoness, which reckons her to be unsophisticated and unpredictable in her nature. We should influence her to be at odds with the three."_

_ "We cannot be premature. Hasten the plan, and we may hasten its failure."_

_ "Yet, I think we should still maintain a contingency in case the Demoness makes this situation unstable. We have successfully erased two of the four corners of the square...now we need to erase one more and the square becomes a single point. No longer of Time, but of a simple matter. Easily destroyed."_

_ "Weakness?"_

_ "Ardently distrustful of each other, the three will be easy prey to our ambitions. We must prevent them from uniting. We must sow additional discord between them to such an extent that they cannot even stand to be in each other's presence."_

_ "Indeed we must."_

_ "And it shall be done."_

_

* * *

_

Keiichi felt beleaguered every day since he had been 'turned', as he could best mentally describe it. The grim awareness that he wasn't quite human confronted him immediately upon waking, and he endured daily bouts of feeling completely fucked up with himself. In his mind, he couldn't shake the idea that what he was doing was as close to cannibalism as a human being could possibly get. He felt like a murderer...no, he felt even worse. Fearful, he fought against the awareness that he was a type of cursed plague carrier, destined to bring doom to those around him. Gloom constantly hissed and sputtered in the background of his thoughts like a poorly-molded candle surviving on waxen dregs. Fatigue and self-deprecation made it difficult for him to find the motivation to get started each day. Whenever he saw Megumi, Tomohisa or Genji at the temple home, he sensed a chilling exodus of the easygoing warmth he normally would feel around them...which was then replaced by a standoffishness; dreading that he might inadvertently infect them with the kyuuketsuki vampirism and that they too would become 'night stalkers'.

Recovered from that first night when he returned with his clothes covered in an ochre medley of gore and rheum, he had sought Belldandy for comfort...only to listen in disbelief to her explanation that he had left the temple on a nocturnal episode of carnage and venery, only the prey wasn't game animals. She told him that he had actually assaulted a unknown person and had gorged himself on their blood. Apparently, he needed blood for nourishment in the same sense that Bell and her sisters needed their specific power-up substances like tea, ice cream and sake. The span of his soul was outraged, and every atom of his will demanded that he reject this abhorrent and macabre claim. Yet he had no means to counter her assertions...during the incident, his mind had been a blank, truant and empty of any recall. Regretfully, Bell-chan had to show him the clothes he wore to confirm her words. No matter how much he loved his fiancée, to the bottom of his heart he didn't want to believe what she had described. Seeing Bell's reaction was heart-rending, her poignant sadness seemed to redouble his fears.

Horrified at himself for actually victimizing another human being, Keiichi had pleaded with Bell-chan to confine him to the temple so that he wouldn't chase down and injure another person. But Bell-chan in her wisdom had already anticipated this uncertainty on his part and had devised a suitable compromise: she would 'feed' him her own blood so that he wouldn't need to stalk after human victims.

Every evening when Keiichi returned from N.I.T., his homecomings were overshadowed by the horrid realization that he would completely lose his humanity and then 'feed' on Bell-chan's blood sometime in the middle of the night. The first few nights after he learned of his nightly plummets into blood-feasting, he had retched at the dinner table...unable to control his disgust as images of horrible flesh-grinding grotesqueries soiled his appetite. Meals had an increasingly bland flavor, and everything tasted _cold_, even when it was fresh out of the oven.

He and Bell had agreed to keep his vampirism a secret from his sister and cousin for the time being. Bell-chan had made a good point about the importance of 'containing the disillusion', so that his own unsteady sense of self wouldn't be conflated by having his sis and cousin acting weird around him. She assured him that she herself wasn't injured physically by his nightly bites...but Keiichi could see the deep burn of sadness in her eyes and knew that she was frightened on his behalf.

Why she couldn't 'fix' him still remained a mystery. Once he got over the initial hurl of emotional trauma at the discovery that night-time deformed him into a kyuuketsuki that preyed on human blood, he had assumed quite simply that Bell-chan could magically cure him of his ailment. Even when he had been infected with the Ultimate Destruction Program four years earlier, Bell and her sisters had managed to save him...and being a part-time kyuuketsuki didn't even come close to that crazy sequence of events. But apparently it wasn't that simple, according to his beloved Goddess girlfriend. When he demanded an explanation, she just stared at him silently with melty-eyed sadness.

As the day to leave for Romania approached, Bell became more anxious. Something had to be going on here, because her agitation wasn't just the usual apprehension she felt right before a race.

Bell-chan didn't usually withhold information from him, but there were a few incidents in their relationship where she had...and he later realized that she needed to keep things to herself _because_ he and she were so close. He hoped that this was another one of those times where she was keeping him in the dark to protect him, to protect their love. As much as he wanted to learn more about his condition and how to get rid of it, he recognized the importance of not pressuring her for answers. So he eased up on questioning her about his plight. But it didn't make things easier for him to walk around each day with a mystery inside of his body.

Urd was spiraling even further out of control, and Keiichi was certain that the day was coming soon when he would no longer be able to keep the peace between the two sisters. The flowering of his heart was for Belldandy, but the containing soil of the flowers was Urd. As 'Big Sister Urd', she had often been Bell-chan's anchor when he himself wasn't able to fully understand Bell's heart or support her emotionally. With Urd increasingly taking herself out of the picture, would he be able to jump in and compensate for the absence Bell would feel? How could he broaden his heart to fill the gap caused by Urd's eventual falling-out?

Skuld was up to something as well.

Keiichi knew Bell's younger sis long enough to sense when she was up to something. She seemed to be dodging around corners, sneaking around the temple home like the time she secretly tried out her Intellihancer helmet on him, causing his head to expand to mesocephalic size right before finals. The girl had wheels running wild in her mind, and Keiichi sensed that they were flying in every direction but straightforward.

His cousin had crashed-and-burned with a major asthma attack right in the middle of a baseball game last Friday, and Keiichi could see the signs that Tomohisa was freaking out as well. Keiichi knew that Tomohisa was stressing it; struggling to handle himself in the aftermath of his very public display of illness. _Anyone_ would have a hard time going back to high school the next week after being fed into an ambulance in front of a hundred classmates attending a school event. Hopefully, the coach wouldn't use this recent asthma attack as an excuse to boot him off the team for health reasons. If he lost out on playing on his school's varsity team, his cousin would be crushed.

Cevn was still gone, and no one had a clue about what had happened to him. Keiichi was forced by his absence to admit that Cevn _had_ become a proxy older brother to him. With all this shit going down in his life and his household, he felt a strong need to dump it off on someone. Besides the Goddesses, Cevn was one of the best listeners he knew; Keiichi had learned to rely on the brotherly empathy that he and Cevn shared. Besides, he was a guy and a mortal...and Keiichi definitely felt connected whenever he sought to confide his concern with him. Cevn's absence closed another channel of support that he really needed right about now.

Strength increasingly flowed back into his life, and Keiichi's thoughts turned to his kyuuketsuki affliction. Bell had always advocated equanimity: in every personal defeat, there was a personal victory waiting to be discovered. Could his vampiric abilities be used to his advantage? Skuld had mentioned that he had leapt vertically onto the garage roof, landing on the roofline beam with the agility of a Olympic gymnast. Would his enhanced meta-human abilities stop there, or would they become part of his _true_ life, his daytime life?

Always flitting in the background of his thoughts, darting around like a flustered starling in a phonebooth, was the fact that the N.I.T. Unified Club was competing in Romania. Or more to the score...in Transylvania. Was there a hidden connectedness to all of this, the fact that Chihiro had chosen Transylvania out of hundreds of places they could have traveled to compete in a race?

Keiichi wondered about the schizoid trajectory of his life, his daytime life and his night-feeding life, reminded constantly that being a kyuuketsuki wasn't as romantic or empowering as it was portrayed in the movies. There was little to glory about when he considered how he _had_ to drink human blood, whether he wanted to or not.

Being a kyuuketsuki certainly wasn't anything like the manga and anime depictions used in Hellsing or Blood: The Last Vampire.

* * *

Skuld was anxiously pacing back and forth in her lab, each circuit between her door and her holophotic computer array measuring several meters...every single footfall spanning a intellectual galaxy comprised of thousands of mental arguments...coiling and uncoiling between the urges of her heart and her sensitivity to her Goddess ethics. The sphere of her consciousness was accustomed to problems that could be easily _solved_ by a broad application of rational hypotheses, not this type of blunt dilemma where solutions seemed to only to create further circlets of emotional confusion.

"He got really sick this time...and I wasn't there to help him! I wasn't there because of some stupid fight we were having! This whole thing is so assbite in the first place. How could I have abandoned him? Was it so important that I had to be the princess in our relationship this one time?" she summarized under her breath, almost stomping on the tatami as she strode hotly across her lab.

"Elder Sister Belldandy says that fights are part of growing closer; that they are to be expected when a Goddess is in love, that they are important to the process of what she terms 'emotional consonance'. If so, then why don't _I feel better_? Why do I feel that there's even more distance between me and Tomo? Elder Sister and Keiichi rarely fight...but Tomo and I always seem to be at odds over one thing or the other. But we made up and put it all behind us while he was in the hospital! We resolved our argument and said we're sorry to each other. End of story. But it isn't...it keeps going on, this feeling that something's missing. I still feel a separation from him. And I _still_ feel so negligent! Why doesn't it go away? Why am I so careless and clumsy around him?"

She looked longingly at one of her worktables, completely aware that she _could_ make it go away. Her uncertainties, Tomohisa's asthma, their in-fighting, her loneliness...all gone byebye forever. All she had to do was spend a couple days laboring to invent a Nasutron Zanso-medic Inhaler (MK whatever). Do this, and she'd be able to rid him of his asthma forever. It would be the ultimate gift of love.

Love.

Belldandy and Keiichi had fought for love many times, so why shouldn't she?

"What am I supposed to do, just sit on my butt and watch him get sick over and over again for the rest of his life?" she argued, imagining that the Almighty was sitting in her "Skuld's Labs" room, carefully evaluating her self-debate. "It's not like we're supposed to just be passive Goddesses, who don't try to help the mortals. If this was the case, then why would there be a Goddess Relief Office and an Earthrealm Otasuke Office to help the mortals in the first place? Besides, each and every one of us has used our Goddess powers to heal mortals. My sisters and I have a situation that's _different_, because we _live_ here on the Earthrealm! We're a part of what goes on here; we're not just sitting up in Syntrasil dealing with a gazillion other problems.

"Belldandy healed Megumi's face after that awful Demoness Rally videogame. Urd and I restored Cevn's eyesight after he and I were captured by Mara. Belldandy's healed Keiichi several times, like the time he injured his knee in the beach-bucket rally a couple summers. Big Sister Urd even healed Keiichi when he exhausted himself working a side-job to save up for Christmas presents! So isn't this kinda the same situation? The only difference is that I'm _preventing_ Tomo's health problems instead of reacting to them."

She recalled an injunction the Lord has explained to her, part of the instructions He had given her regarding her role as Norn of the Future. The Almighty had said, "It is a rule that those who task themselves to only serve the people of his or her own age...such people are born to increase the lot of but a few. Those who seek to serve the many generations yet to come, these will often be received with silence in their day...yet the day will come when they shall be appreciated without offense, for their charitable works will come of recognition. As Norn of the Future, you must always bear this in mind: your actions may not seem impactful in the Present, nor should they. You should act with a mindfulness towards the Future, My Daughter...for the Future will be the welcoming judge who will take kindly to your motives and resolutions."

Even the Lord had said for her to act with impunity: to augment and prevent the potentiality rather than decrease and increase the actuality.

There was also the other option, which would be sneaky in a slyfox sorta way. Skuld grinned to herself, envisioning how she could craft the inhaler in such a way so that it would appear to be an exact replica of Tomohisa's regular Rx inhaler. If she made a duplicate inhaler, all she'd have to do was leave it around the house for Belldandy to find. Her older sis would predictably become insistent and persuasive, and _make_ Tomo use it! Even trickier, she could even conceal it among his regular inhalers or smuggle it into his school bookbag and simply wait until he needed to use it. Either way, the curing of his asthma would be left up to chance.

"Certainly, the Lord couldn't object if Tomohisa was cured without my direct involvement, could He?" she said to herself as she regarded her massive computer array in the corner of her "Skuld's Lab's" room. With a skip, she walked over to her worktable, whistling the new Morning Musume song she'd heard on variety TV last night...

* * *

"Waaah! What's this?" Tomohisa sighed excitedly as he held the inhaler up to the light to read it more closely. Reading the label out loud, he turned to Skuld with a mystified expression.

"My doctor didn't order this. At least I don't remember him ordering this. This is weird, cuz' I already have a backup inhaler. Remember how your sister Urd demanded that I have my doctor give 'em to me two at a time after that bad attack I had last winter?"

"But sensei's name is on it, plain as day. Isn't it?" Skuld asked, feigning curiosity. "Look. Right there it says Kawamura-sensei. Isn't he your respiration therapist?"

"Yeah, but..."

"But nothing, Tomo!" she interrupted, assuming her authoritative voice. "You can't keep leaving your inhalers around the house! Not only does it make more work for onee-chan, but it also is a bad habit. It's irresponsible! What would happen if you kept losing your inhalers and then one day you're in the same situation like you were last Friday where you had an attack during the game? Or like the time this past March that you mentioned, the time when you ran out of allowance money to get a refill and then you had that really bad asthma attack? How do you think I would feel if you were in a terrible pickle like that? It isn't like it was before...when you're in a pinch, _I'm_ in a pinch too! So don't go around with a bottomless pit when it comes to common sense. Ne?"

"Heh heh! It wasn't that bad when I had that attack, was it? I wouldn't mind that, as long as you had to give me mouth-to-mouth because of it, just like that time! In fact, I think you had fun because you _kept_ giving me mouth-to-mouth even after my airway was cleared. And your sisters told me that you could've used your Goddess magical-girl powers instead!" he teased back, causing her to momentarily blush.

Skuld's face colored with a blend of embarrassment and irritation at her boyfriend, who couldn't take anything seriously whenever she had an important point to make. She hated it when he equated her Goddess abilities to "magical-girl powers". They were _skills_, not mere endowments. And her sisters, the blabbermouths! Which one of them was the one who narked her off to Tomo? She had told them to keep a lid on the fact that she could've healed him in an instant that fatal day when she and he wound up kissing for ten minutes on the temple's veranda.

"Baka! You don't need to have an asthma attack for me to give you mouth-to-mouth. You just need to make sure your teeth are brushed and your breath doesn't stink," she said, foxears high and sly-smilely armed, trying to imitate Big Sister Urd. The half-second of glazed hormone-driven paralysis on her boyfriend's face was enough to inform her that she had gotten through to him.

"How about now?" he asked.

"Yeah, but only if you keep the inhaler in your bookbag for when you'll need to use it at school."

"Sure thing, Skuld!"

As he swept her into a hug and sealed her lips with a hungry kiss, Skuld thought, "Way cool! Not only will he use the inhaler...but I get _this_ too! It's great being a Goddess, cuz I can win in more ways than one!" She returned his kisses with a fevered passion, even more tingly now that she was certain that it was only a matter of time before he would use her wonderful Nasutron invention and be cured.

* * *

"Urd, why do you have to keep going back to him?" Belldandy said angrily after Urd related the details of Troubadour's newest betrayal. This time, he had stood her up on a date without even bothering to offer a reason for his absence, leaving her sister to veer into a disheartened melancholy, assuming all sorts of unpleasant scenarios. Urd was so perplexed, she couldn't even guess _why_ he didn't attempt to excuse himself.

"Because I want to. It's my prerogative. Besides, isn't it true that the reality of the universe around is made beautiful by the shared contemplation of its glories? Life doesn't exist in a vacuum, nor does love," Urd sighed with a huff.

"Urd, love is based upon trust," Belldandy countered. "It is a respected tradition that those who claim love for their own must share in the responsibility of building it. The world looks upon the world, and the sympathy that love evokes in two hearts is only a visible surface, the outermost feelings. Yet, these feelings are immeasurable...and the innermost feelings are even more profound because of it. You and Troubadour were mismatched before; your essences are too different to be united in an intimate love. Troubadour's heart cannot correspond with yours. If his heart _did_ bear a correspondence, then you wouldn't have to be questioning his motives. Or his absences."

"Stop it, Belldandy! This is getting ridiculous! _You're_ getting ridiculous, with all your lofty ideals. I'm sick of being lectured by you about my love life. I'm leaving..."

Keiichi watched as Urd somersaulted in mid-air and then flashed out of the living room.

"Well...just go then, if you don't want to listen to me, Big Sister!" Belldandy shouted after the glowing flareworks faded.

Keiichi felt out of sorts, as he usually did whenever Urd provoked Belldandy to get as irritable as this. He had to remember that Urd was the older sister, and thus had a greater command over Belldandy's moods than any other beings except her parents. Just like how he could 'push the right buttons' to provoke Megumi, Urd could do the same to Bell. Fortunately, the two got along so well that Urd rarely had a reason to be so overbearing towards Bell. But that was in the past. This new chapter of life was sibling warfare of the worst kind, and both sisters had pulled out all of the stops.

Rarely did his Divine girlfriend ever raise her voice or verbally attack another...but in the last month or so, Bell-chan had gotten seriously angry with Urd at least a handful of times. Gentle Belldandy, sweet Belldandy...just wasn't herself; he didn't enjoy the fact that she was angered often in the past few weeks than in all the times he could remember in the past five years since she had arrived in his life.

He was tired as well, worn out by having to broker a truce between the two every few days over the dinner table.

Maybe this was right. Maybe Urd _needed_ to split the scene for a while so that Belldandy and he could finally have some peace of mind. It was almost a certainty that Bell-chan would continue fretting about Urd, but there wouldn't be the daily stain on the household's tranquility. With Urd out of the picture, even Skuld would be less restive and argumentative. In the back of his mind, an insistent voice kept urging him to remain confident that Urd would eventually come around to her senses. But it _hurt_ for him to see Bell in such emotionally-charge pitched battles with Urd.

In his own way, Keiichi knew that he loved Urd deeply as Bell's older sister, and perhaps even because of the times he had thought of her as the older sister he himself had never had. Urd was a creature of impulse...but she had a greatness of heart that could never be overlooked. She was just a bit more secretive in how she shared it. While Bell was one to offer her heart openly and generously, Urd often expressed her caring with bombastic flights or subtle whimsies. He recalled Urd's First Class License exam a couple years back; the time when Urd allowed the needs of her sisters to be preferential over her own goals and desires. By refusing a promotion to Goddess First Class License status even though she had earned it, Urd had felt better enabled to protect her sisters from threats...and from herself.

Seeing the two going at it like sumotori rivals made him doubly miserable.

"Bell, I hate it when I keep seeing you being so bitter towards Urd," he remarked. Belldandy turned and gave him a moment's icy glare...and then her face softened.

"Keiichi, I'm not the type that can hold grudges for long," she noted. "Being angry wastes too much energy, energy that I would rather apply to enjoying the wonders and beauties of life. My chagrin is only a reflection of Urd's turmoil. My heart is troubled because hers is wracked with such pain...and it is mortifying that I can't do more to help. Sometimes I view my sister as if she is a child valiantly struggling to swim against the ocean waves...and then I discover that _I'm_ that child battling the tides of fate, trying to swim to shore before I drown in grief. All the merits and advantages I have because I'm Urd's sister are meaningless; I can't harness any of them to heal her wounded heart. Instead, I am seized by paroxysms of wrath towards her, and the divide between she and I grows. My dearest Keiichi, I am so frustrated! I can't help but feel bitter towards my own powerlessness."

"Maybe the best help you can give Urd is to keep your own head above water, Bell-chan."

"But I'm not the one who's drowning..."

Keiichi shook his head. His fiancée was so upset, she didn't grasp what he meant.

"Belldandy, you _are_ the one who's drowning," Keiichi argued. "You cannot keep denying how much of a toll this is taking on you. I've been here, trying to help you all along. But you just don't let me in. Why can't you just cant it down a bit and try to confide in me? Let me be the one to help you, for a change."

"There's more to it than Urd, as you know."

"Ah yes. The kyuuketsuki thing, isn't it?"

"Yes, my dear," Bell-chan said levelly. "I don't fault you at all for that, so please don't take it personally. But my feelings are..."

"HI HI!!!"

Skuld skipped into the living room and spun around in a circle, completely disrupting the flow of their discussion. Keiichi felt his jaw hanging in amused shock...Bell's sister couldn't have been more disruptive if she had thrown a dozen Skuld Bombs into the living room. He had to blink his eyes twice to make sure that he wasn't seeing things...and when he recognized what Skuld had done with herself, Keiichi had to grip the arm of the couch to keep from falling off, he was so surprised. This time, Skuld _was_ a one-girl Skuld Bomb...

"Skuld! _What_ are you wearing?" Belldandy blurted out.

"I just wanted to wear one of his school uniforms, just to see what it feels like," Skuld replied. She sniffed the shirt collar and cheerfully added, "I can smell him as if he was standing next to me!"

She was dressed in a white short-sleeved summer school uniform shirt, the kind with the venn-cougar collar and blue necktie. Tomohisa's waist-banded navy blue polyester slacks were loose around her waist and tight on her hips, looking almost ridiculous as the pants legs scruffled and sagged around her heels because they were a few cm too long...

Keiichi had to admit that the visual impact of Skuld cavorting around dressed in a boy's summer school uniform was kawaii. He had never..._ever_...imagined that Skuld would wear boy's clothes, even in a Halloween sense of uninhibited craziness. But here it was, and his thoughts were momentarily caught up in the forbidden allure of 'girl-dressed-as-guy' cosplay...

"Wh...oooops!" Skuld exclaimed as she stepped on the cuffs of the too-long trouser legs and spun into the floor, falling face-forwards with a crash. Keiichi could hear the "rrrp!" and swiftly averted his head, expecting disaster in the form of a wardrobe malfunction.

Belldandy simply giggled at Skuld's mishap.

"Uuu..whaa! Now I've done it, oh no ohno oh..no! I went and ripped 'em! What's he gonna do when he finds out? These pants are expensive!" Skuld shouted, the inseam of one pants leg ripped from hip to knee, the elastic waistband ripped apart and the zipper half torn off in front. Belldandy was glad that Keiichi had turned his head away, because Skuld's present state of dress would have been considered entirely indecent...or entirely provocative, in another sense...

Her crazy sister!

"Gotta run and fix this!" Skuld shouted.

"Skuld, I would suggest that you actually _sew_ the pants you tore instead of simply using magic to repair them," Belldandy instructed her younger sis. "I make it a point to hand-knit Keiichi's Christmas sweater every year because _working_ on his sweater infuses it with greater value than simply flashing it into being. If you really respect Tomohisa, you'll do well to consider hand-fixing his pants, because it will be a truer expression of your love for him. You'll find a sewing kit in my dresser, third drawer."

"That's awful! _Sew_?! Me?" Skuld whined with frustrated exasperation.

"Yes, that is what I said. As a Goddess who is in love with a mortal, you should be willing to correct your mistakes using mortal means from time to time. When I break something in the kitchen, I don't simply use my Goddess powers to remanifest it. I go out shopping and purchase a replacement instead. Skuld, be very grateful that Urd isn't here. Now please be on your way, because you're embarrassing Keiichi with those pants appearing like they're ready to fall down to your ankles."

Keiichi involuntarily gasped at Bell's words. After all, he _was_ a guy...and the split-second mental image that passed through his mind was forgivable as long as he didn't dwell on it. Hopefully, Bell-chan would agree that he was blameless for what had flashed in his imaginings...

"Ohhh, all right!" Skuld acquiesced reluctantly. Keiichi heard the irregular footsteps as Skuld left the living room.

"Is the coast clear, Bell?"

"Yes, my dear. It's amazing, the ideas that girl gets in her head sometimes," Belldandy noted with an amused smile. Her bright blue eyes widened with an unexpected insight. "Tee hee hee! You know, I'm beginning to sound like my older sister, Keiichi."

"And I always thought that you avoided using magic around me because of principle. But now I know the truth! You don't use your Goddess powers to fix certain problems...because it gives you a chance to go shopping instead," he said with a mischievous smile.

"You know me too well," she chided in a sweet voice.

"Which I why I'm your husband, even if we aren't married yet," he said, gesturing towards her ring finger, currently barren of the wedding band that he had lovingly put on it at the very moment when he was almost certain that he and she would be destroyed by the imminent collapse of everything in existence.

So long ago...but actually only a few months ago.

Thankfully, life seemed to have settled down somewhat now that there wasn't some anti-Being trying to destroy Reality. Yet, reality was very unsettling on a number of levels...

Instead of the universe being torn apart, Keiichi was keenly aware that his sense of stability was severely threatened because his household seemed to be disintegrating.

Belldandy looked at him with apparent scrutiny, bobbing her head side-to-side as if she was looking for a mosquito.

"Speaking of thoughts, I know which ones were in your head a moment ago," she said sweetly.

Keiichi tightened up, thinking "here it comes!" with no small sense of panic.

"Perhaps you're the one who needs to catch his breath, since my sis seems to have taken yours away with her antics."

"Bell, I'm sorry. I'm a guy, and no matter how hard I try, my imagination is sometimes gonna get the best of me..." he started to explain, feeling guilt-bumps and shame-bruises on his male ego.

"Shhhh..." Belldandy responded, silencing him with a deft series of kisses. Keiichi felt a tell-tale warmth infusing his body as Bell leaned even closer to him and slowly ran a finger up and down his chest.

"You're right. You and I should forget about my sister for the time being, dear. As for me, Skuld's escapade has inspired me with a wonderful idea on how the two of us can escape ourselves on this beautiful afternoon. Urd and Skuld are gone. It's just you and me...and we have the temple to ourselves, my love.

"I wonder if _your_ high school uniform would fit me..."

* * *

Skuld was all grins the next day as she watched the baseball team at practice. Tomohisa was the assigned pitcher, and about four innings in, he whipped the faux inhaler out of his jersey and puffed a deep inhalation.

"Yaaa-hoooo!" she shouted, causing almost twenty young men on the baseball diamond to look at her with quizzical or irritated expressions. Tomohisa regarded her for a few seconds with an bemused grin, and then took some teasing remarks from his teammates before the team's coach whistled them back into the flow of baseball practice. Pounding his fist into his glove, he returned his attention to the game, studying his catcher's hand signals...completely oblivious about what had just happened.

But Skuld was ecstatic, wanting to hug every golden arm of the late-afternoon sun because she was so happy.

"Finally, he's rid of his asthma!" she rejoiced. There was no reason to doubt the efficacy of her Nasutron Zanso-medic Inhaler; already, the atopic-defeating nanos should be spreading through his immune system, bolstering his resistance to allergens. Within seconds of usage, other strains of nanotech nucleo-bots would be swiftly seaming themselves into the cellular arrays of his bronchial and respiratory tissues; designed to provide pulmonary stability and prevent obstruction. Another set of monitoring nanos would prevent airway constriction and allow for remedial oxygen absorption if a certain anaerobic threshold was moderated due to inhalation of particulates and mold.

She didn't want to give him 'robo-lungs' or enhance his respiration to the point where it would upset the homeostasis of his other systemic physiological functions. While she was working on her Nasutron device, she tarried with the idea of augmenting his cardio-respiratory system so that his level of endurance would be greatly increased beyond the human mortal range. Admittedly, it was tempting...but doing so would be a blatant misuse of her Goddess abilities. Not to ignore the fact that helping Tomo to be 'meta-human' would be unfair to all the other mortals.

Clutching her hands over her breast, Skuld felt a disseminating flush of heart-joy pass through her like a billion spiked cosmic rays. This was one of the best days of her life! She had just given Tomo the dearest gift a girlfriend could give her boyfriend: his dreams.

And she had done so without him even knowing about it.

* * *

When Skuld and Tomohisa returned to the temple, instead of finding dinner laid out in the dining room, they found the dinner table stacked high with dozens of books on vampirism. Recognizing what this meant, Skuld quickly grabbed Tomo by the arm and hustled him off into the living room. Two flicks of the remote and her boyfriend was engrossed in an American baseball game between two teams called the Yankees and the Red Sox.

That would keep his attention for at least an hour while she had a serious talk with her sister...

"What'chya doin', onee-chan?"

"Skuld, these books have pretty thorough descriptions about the kyuuketsuki folklore which exists in many cultures. According to the experts, most kyuuketsuki are revenants of living beings, such as hungry ghosts and animated corpses. Nomadic cultures such as gypsies and seem to have spread these myths. It seems that the most definitive and widely-accepted myths arise out of the area called Transylvania," Belldandy noted, gesturing to a old 16th-century map reproduced on one of the pages of a large coffee-table book on vampires.

"So?"

"As you know, Keiichi and I...and you...are going to be leaving in a few weeks to go to Cluj-Napoca to participate in the Green Energy electric motorcycle race. The race will take place in northern Romania...in an area that was formally called Transylvania."

Skuld felt the blood rushing out of her cheeks. Transylvania!!! "Uhulp! Y..you mean the race is taking place in the _middle of vampire country_?"

"Silly, there are no real vampires there," Belldandy answered with a knowing smile. "But there may be a clue as to why Keiichi has been afflicted the way he has. As you know, certain Earthrealm mythologies are geocentric; they're attached to specific areas or locales. Vampires have long been prevalent in Eastern Europe as a local cultural myth. As Goddesses, we know that such patterns are no coincidence. Just as the Nordic races were the ones who contemplated Yggdrasil and Ragnarok in their formulation of lore, the Hungarian-Slovaks were the ones who contemplated vampires and werewolves. While Keiichi and the Unified Club are getting prepared for their race, I am going to investigate the locality to see if I can find some clue in the lore of vampires...some truth that I can use to try and cure him of his affliction. For this, I will need your help..."

"But I..I'm _afraid_, onee-chan!" Skuld blurted out. "You want _me_ to help you? But there's castles! And dead people! And bats! And curses! And all sorts of wolves and night monsters! And what about the village townsfolk? What if they think _we're_ vampires? We aren't exactly normal according to Earthrealm standards, you know. They could come chasing after us with torches and pitchforks!"

"Skuld, you watch too much TV. Besides, how could they hurt us? You know that I wouldn't ever let anything or anyone harm you, mortal or Divine," Belldandy noted patiently. "As your sister, I wouldn't ask for your assistance if I didn't think that you were capable of rendering it. Sometimes life requires us to reject our fears so that we can become open-hearted and willing to accept whatever may come to replace them. We know that fears are not replaced by more fears...we know that _love_ always replaces fear. Initially, it may only appear that one fear is being replaced by another, but the flow of reality is such that eventually fear is discarded because it does not grow us into better beings. Only love can provide such a foundation of maturity. Don't you want to be more mature?"

"Of course I do!" she hastily replied. "But I don't want to become mature while being scared to death by the kinds of spooky stuff that belongs in nightmares!"

"You know that I let Keiichi bite me every night, don't you?"

"Ewww! That's so gross...I try not to think about it it, sis! It's bad enough that you still kiss him, knowing that he's one of those...kyuuketsuki things!"

"I do this so that he doesn't have to go out into the city and find victims to quench his blood-thirst. He isn't even aware that I am doing this, even though I have explained to him that I do. He doesn't like the idea either, because he feels that he's hurting me. But Keiichi knows my heart so well...and yet, I cannot confide in him that it _does_ hurt me. My dear little sister, when I let Keiichi bite me, it is a very painful reminder of what has been taken away from him. I would rather shirk from such a horrible experience, but I cannot turn away from his need...or my warrant to protect the Earthrealm mortals. Life has forced this difficult choice upon me, and I would rather stand apart from fear than partake of it. Yes...I _choose_ to let him drink my blood, despite my unease. This too, is love in action."

"But isn't that martyrdom? When mortals start playing at being martyrs, don't they almost always wind up resenting those they are aiding by their personal sacrifices? Often, they get caught up in the 'I help you...you don't appreciate me...I help you some more...you don't appreciate me...I hate you!' mode of behavior."

"But I am not mortal," Belldandy countered. "For those who lack patience and willingness, being a martyr is a heavy burden. But as a Goddess, I am well-able to give of myself far beyond the point where my ego becomes intrinsically involved. Just like you would do almost anything for Tomohisa...I would do almost anything for Keiichi..."

_*Hack...hwuff...cough!*_

"Wha..what?!" Skuld exclaimed as she overheard Tomohisa's wheezy coughing coming from the living room.

This was impossible!

"H..how can he be coughing like that?"

"Skuld...what did you do?" Belldandy asked in a voice thick with censorious suspicion.

"I..uh..made a special mecha to fix him. Well, not to 'fix him' per se, but to get rid of his asthma. To heal him!" she admitted. "Onee-chan, I'm sick of watching him get asthma attacks! I just wanted to help him, so I created my special Nasutron Zanso-medic device to be used as an inhaler. But he _isn't supposed to be coughing_!"

"But isn't that a form of tampering?"

"Onee-chan, what else could I do! I _love_ him!"

Belldandy nodded her head in consent. Skuld could tell that her older sis obviously didn't approve of her intent or methods. But she also knew that her sister would be completely unable to protest this most noblest of motives.

Skuld felt a panic as the coughing pitched into a struggle to breath. She rushed into the living room and started rubbing Tomohisa's back with practiced massaging, trying to calm him down, seeing the dark clouds of panic gluing together in his eyes.

He puffed three times on his inhaler, the one that she had made for him. A couple minutes later, his arched and sporadic breathing became somewhat normal in rhythm.

_**"WHY?!!"**_ she shouted.

* * *

"This is an outrageous affront to the dignity of this institution!" a bearded professor shouted, interrupting my lecture.

"A clear case of academic plagiarism," another participant yelled. "According to Lord Reginald, the discovery of the so-called Encyclopedia of Dawn occurred in 1878 in Cathay. It is disreputable to assume that linguists took ten years to decipher the languages. This Magnum Organum is replete with concepts that are philologically suspect to the highest degree."

"My question to the lecturer is this: how does one refute the Null Hypothesis as asserted in the work that you are alleged to have authored," a mathematician enquired. "The practical application of such a radical set of conditions upon any body of statistics is specious at best. Yet, from a purely mathematical standpoint, this makes about as much sense as the ill-advised attempts to solve Fermat's Theorem. If you cannot provide a proper explanation to this sequential proof, then I will be forced to accept your claim of authorship as pure balderdash."

I walked out from behind the lectern to face the legion of my accusers, hands held behind my back. The lecture hall was filled with intense egos, a repository of intellectual pride and achievement. These were some of the smartest people the 19th century had to offer...and they had completely befuddled me.

"I don't know," I finally admitted. "The existence of archaic languages is profusely illustrated in the Magnum Organum, as you know. The stele known as the Rosetta Stone was first discovered in 1799, and linguists required over twenty years before a proper indexing of its enchorial and hieroglyphic content could be achieved. As for the Aquantum Metastatics, the existence of thought as energy designs has been elaborated in the work, but it is impossible to convey the meaning of energy without invoking a symbolic matrix, such as language. The progressive hypothesis employs a finite fuzzy math to...to..."

"To do what, professor?" a man stridently queried me.

"To define causality by approximation rather than precision, and to define acausality by...dammit, I just can't remember!" I replied.

"You _wrote_ the Magnum Organum, and yet you fail to remember one of its fundamental hypotheses?"

"Ahem!" a voice ejaculated, drawing the murmur to a slowdown. "He cannot remember because he does not know. A thought must always seek out its thinker, but only to the capacity that it is intelligible. For those who are lack-witted, the thought bypasses them. This episodic dullness of thought and paucity of character only serves to ascribe ignorance as another quality our guest lecturer possesses."

"Lord Reginald!" several men shouted approvingly.

"I believe that this lecture series has almost reached a perihelion of usefulness to our Oxford institution. In other words, further installments of these lectures will only disclose a further decline in comprehension on the part of the lecturer. I will schedule a debate next week to prove irrefutably that this man did not author the Magnum Organum. In the meantime, each of you is free to contemplate how a foreign scholar from Japan...who is _Caucasian_, mind you...was capable of claiming such a vast seminal work as his own."

"Fraud!" several students started chanting as their seniors filed out of the auditorium.

* * *

For an Earthrealm Spirit, Troubadour sure hung around the God's Realm a lot. That's where she found him after her latest spat with Belldandy. When they were an item back when she was a teenager, they shared an intuitive syncognition that linked them which widened in intensity and intimacy the longer they were a couple. Like the old Earthrealm romance of the two lovers tied together by an invisible string...only this 'string' was a very real connection between she and Troubadour. It was but a shadow when compared with the meta bond she had with her Goddess sisters, and to a lesser degree, Mara. But it was there, and happily, it was becoming more obvious.

Urd could 'feel' that Troubadour had tuned into her troubled heart and was even now coming to succor her. A few songs, and she'd be in a very different place emotionally than she was when she had bailed out of the temple on her middle sister.

"This was proof of his love for me," she thought as he hovered up over the horizon, arms wide open, inviting her to seek his embrace.

"Your heart is wounded, my lovely Urd," he whispered into her ear. "What can I do to heal it? How can I be helpful to you, my precious?"

"I..snff..don't know how to go on like this. It's either you, or my sisters. No, not right at the moment...right now, I can have both of you. But the meadow of contentment only extends so far, and I feel that I've reached the antipodes of the heart. The time is coming soon when I must decide. Fuckit, I'm so confused! Belldandy hates me, Skuld despises me, you fuck around on me, and I don't know me anymore..."

"There, there," he said, caressing her hair and shoulders. "Let me sing you a sounding of joy to try and fill your soul with the honey of truths."

Troubadour launched into a song about the glories of pure love, and Urd began to shed the stress, the rippling waves of uncertainty that was drowning her resolve. Each word touched a chord in her being, and she felt the familiar sensation of Troubadour _playing_ her like a musical instrument, gently striking her heart-strings. He could work such a magic with her heart! She was his instrument, he was her maestro...and he was turning the sullen disharmony of her life into a rich crescendoing symphony of delights. Fascination returned to her, a sure sign that his efforts were healing her.

"Better now, lovely one?" he asked, holding her cheeks in his hands. Urd wordlessly nodded her head "yes" and wiped a tear out of her eye.

"It is always my pleasure to pleasure you, Urd," Troubadour acknowledged. "I do so much detest Goddesses who sulk. You must remember not to sulk in my presence. Rather, you should hold your head high, as you are a queen among Goddesses."

"I..if that's so, then why can't you be _faithful_ to me?" she asked, her thoughts a bit more sharp than she expected. "You came to me...you sought after me for a reason. It wasn't about some bird or squirrel or manta ray that has the key to unlocking your Muse. When are you going to realize that _I'm_ your Muse! A Muse who adores you, who is pure in her love for you. I need _more_ of you, not less. How could you throw a party for me, and then just disappear..."

"I had work to do on the Earthrealm, so I had to leave..."

"Bullshit, Troubadour! I know you better. If you had any respect for me, you'd have told me if you had a legit reason to leave my party. Instead, you sneak out..."

"Make love to me, my Urd. Share yourself with me," he interrupted.

"That again!?" she exclaimed in thorny dismay. "I'm going through a real conflict of heart and you want to snuggle up and escape. Because if I did it with you right now, it _would_ be an escape, Troubadour. Now is not the time, I don't feel like it."

"Now who's being secretive, Urd?" he challenged. "If you cannot choose to be available to me, why should I be available to you?"

"Because YOU HAVE TO!" she shouted back. "That's just the way it's got to be. I'm putting everything on the line to be with you, and I need to know if you're willing to do the same. No halfling romantic stuff, no impulsive demands for Sharing or sex, no disappearing acts. You can belong to me _only_ by making yourself mine. I don't wanna share you with others..."

"But my nature and my Muse demand it," he explained. That was the old, familiar excuse he had used to justify his infidelities. In an odd way, it was true. Troubadour had been fickle from day one, and Urd knew there was no way she could stop him from his dalliances. Only he could bring his restless heart to a rest, to rest in the bosom of her love. She could offer herself until she was blue in the face and red in the ass, and it wouldn't make a difference if he didn't cooperate.

"I know, I know," she reluctantly agreed. "Here I am, fully an adult Goddess, forgetting that these things take time. Two hearts don't beat as one right off the bat, as the Earthrealm saying goes. Troubadour, I just want something to prove that this is all worth it..."

She looked to his hand to see if he had the promise ring she gave him...and it wasn't there. Of course, she wasn't wearing her matching ring either...

A glow of light appeared briefly around her ring finger.

"There! If you really love me, you'll wear yours," she said brightly, grinning at him with her eyes. Seeing the ring on her finger took her back to her youthful love for him.

"I suppose I must, even though it is quite childish to wear matching rings. That was in vogue Ten Decas ago...it'll date me," Troubadour replied with a lop-sided grin. But the fizzle of light around his finger was all the answer she needed.

"Now, let's make love..." he insisted.

Urd immediately 'disrobed' herself by making her outfit disappear...but as soon as she was nude in front of him, a gnarl seized upon her. Her mind seemed to go into overdrive as she was assailed with thundering gouts of unpleasant, horrid mental images. Something dark and sinister seemed to sap her passion right out of her. Refining anxiety into horror to the point where she was shaking like a comet in a sunquake.

_Sex...is something horrible. Sex is pain, sex is repulsive, sex is abusive, sex...is rape._

Her heart choked as she felt a very real fear that she was going to be raped, even though she _wanted_ to give herself to Troubadour. An obscured memory of pain, buried deep inside...screaming to be released.

Without even thinking, she grabbed him by the head and pressed her Goddess Seal to his forehead, trying to drain just a bit of the horror she was feeling before it killed her heart.

But no one was listening, and his heart was a wall.

* * *

"Whydidn'titwork...whydidn'titwork...why didn't it work!" Skuld shouted to the unhearing holophotic computer in her "Skuld's Labs" room. Here, in her innermost inner sanctum, she had run every diagnostic she could on her prototype Nasutron inhaler. As an exact copy of the one Tomo used, it worked every time when she altered her Goddess manifest to match the asthmatic symptoms Tomo had. The only further thing she could do was alter her appearance to _exactly_ match his, and then run the tests again.

"Nope, uh..nnh!" she said to herself, appalled that she was so desperate for answers that she would consider exacting her physiology with Tomo's. Just on the tailspin of that was the repugnant concept of being a _boy_. It was bad enough when she was stuck in Bell-chan's physical aspect due to Mara's Black Orchids. At least it was her sister, and not Keiichi. Gender-switch mangas were fun to read, but a real-life experience would be totally humiliating. And with her luck, Urd or Mara would pick just that moment to reappear in the temple, catching her looking exactly like Tomo.

Even more scary was that boys had all these different parts than girls.

So she had to investigate by proximal testing methods. Even thought the inhaler cured her of her simulated asthma every time, it didn't work on Tomo. This drastically narrowed her options. She could either completely rebuild his physical being...which would land her in hot shit with Almighty, because she'd have to do this with His permission, because He would never give it. Or she'd have to cure _everyone_ on the Earthrealm of their asthma, in accordance with ethical standard that applied to mortal species which essentially mandated that curing physical diseased had to be effected upon the entire population of said mortal species, to prevent Gods from having 'favorites' or establishing 'privileges' that differentiated mortals into cured vs. not cured groups.

Culling her vast knowledge of DivineTech, Skuld decided to work again from scratch and enhance the Nasutron Inhaler. It was an exercise in Pyhrric motivations: the more intensely she needed to work on it, the less time she had to spend with Tomohisa. Her boyfriend called her out after three days of heavy work, telling her that she was 'embedded' in her lab and it wasn't fair to him. She promised to spend all day Saturday with him...

Since she was the one doing the makeup-suckup, she had to endure a dick-flick with all sorts of flying giant robots, a scantily-dressed leading actress with improbably big boobs and 14 visible facial surgeries, and a male lead who was ten years older than the actress but pretending to be the same age. In other words, an American summer blockbuster sci-fi movie. Skuld found it somewhat enjoyable, but she secretly promised to get even with Tomo by making him watch an entire season of the new Korean romance drama premiering this fall.

Walking their bicycles on the way back, she discussed the idea that Tomo should save some of his allowance and buy a motor scooter. An eminently practical idea, because his cousin was an expert mechanic, and it would greatly extend their range of transportation and free them from crowded trains if they actually wanted to jump into other Chiba or Tokyo districts on outings such as dates. Her boyfriend was all for it, but they ran into the "couple's stumbling block"...what should they cut in order to save up enough money. Skuld was adamant that he take her to an ice cream or coffee shop every Saturday...

So the motor scooter idea was scuttled, as least for this summer.

About a km from the temple, she could hear Tomo's respiration veer off into the wheezy-gaspy breathes that usually signified a possible asthma spell. Offering him the Nasutron she had hidden in her jacket pocket (as she never needed a purse), Skuld watched intently as he took two measured puffs from the inhaler...

...which then blew up in his hand. Not like a firecracker, but more like a brittle cookie being 'popped' by a brick. Wide-eyed, she watched as three days of intensive effort impossibly fell to pieces.

When they returned to the temple, she didn't even bother to say hi to her sister or Megumi, who were playing a card-guessing game in the living room. Kissing Tomohisa on the cheek and promising that she'd be right back, she stormed into her lab and fired up her interface with XOM.

**ring!!!** **ring!!!** **rrii...**

Mind crammed comet-tight with questions, Skuld could barely hear the phone ring. Just before the connect with XOM was completed, her sis Belldandy slid open the shoji door. "It's for you," she said with a worried expression.

"Well, who the heck would be calling me except Tomo, and he's already here..." she shouted out...and then she caught her words as she realized who the caller probably was.

"Oh shi..." she gasped before her sister shhsshed her with a "He can hear you over the line, Skuld!"

Belldandy handed her the phone wordlessly, consternation writ all over her face as she quickly assumed a seiza position next to her. Grabbing the phone, Skuld dropped to her knees and glanced at her sis, who shrugged her shoulders as if to say "don't ask me, I don't have a clue."

**"Skuld, Goddess First Class, Unlimited, Unrestricted License, it is I. Despite My exceedingly busy schedule, I have found it necessary to divert My attention to dwell upon actions you have recently instigated. Do you know what matters I chance to refer to?"**

"My Lord, even though You honor me with a personal call, I don't know what actions You would wish me to acknowledge. I have been very busy..."

**"Silence!"** the voice boomed over the phone, so loudly thoughtcast that both she and her sister jerk-flinched. This was majorly serious!

**"XOM has reported that you have attempted to radically alter an Earthrealm mortal's physiology by using sophisticated DivineTech of your own invention, for purely self-serving reasons."**

Skuld gluped...an attempt to gulp that got stuck in her throat and came out sounding like a frog breaching a loud croak.

"My Lord, wait a minute!" she argued. "I had a good reason for doing so. I _love_ him, and I'm sick and tired of watching him get sick and tired because of his physical problems with respiration. So I took it upon myself to remedy the situation. I don't see how that is self-serving!"

"Skuld, don't take that strong of a tone when you answer Him," Belldandy warned.

**"My child, what leads you to believe such an action is necessary?"** He noted. **"You claim that you acted on behalf of Love, and this may be true. But you did so deceitfully, bringing shame to yourself and denying both you and he. Has it occurred to you that mayhaps you are **_**intended to share in the struggles wrought by his malady**_**, so that you may become more intimate with him. Mortals are fragile beings, and it does not behoove us to enact curative measures simply to avoid certain inevitabilities. You have acted poorly, and I am deeply disappointed in you."**

Her heart was beating as irregularly as a ping pong ball in fast rally, furiously trying to deny the Almighty's assertion that it was _necessary_ for her to be 'sick and tired' along with Tomohisa...while on the other side of the playing table, she was trying to downplay the shame she felt at the Lord's stinging indictment of her as being selfish.

**"As you cannot use your Goddess abilities with wisdom, I hereby demote you to Goddess Second Class for a probationary period, the extent of which is solely at My discretion. You will need to prove to me that..."**

Skuld felt no reduction in her Goddess powers; she was pulling as much energy from the Ygg power shell of Syntrasil as she had before the Lord had delivered His judgment.

**"This is highly irregular,"** the voice observed with high dudgeon. **"XOM! Explain to me why her License status is unchanged."**

A new voice broke in on the line, conferencing with the Lord. Skuld could only pickup bits and pieces, as the level of thoughtcasts and syncognition was way beyond comprehensibility because it was so rapid. She picked out a few near-phrases such as "balancing extrapolation" and "pre-OmniArc dispensation" and "status interdiction by unknown agency." Apparently, the Lord couldn't change her license.

She dimly recalled another conversation, seemingly eons ago in this very dining room with the Lord in attendance, where someone had told Him that she and her sister's Goddess Licenses were irrevocable.

**"My daughter, it seems that certain sanctioning measures relating to your Goddess License status are denied Me. However, I can and will render action in this matter. Henceforth, any and all attempts to heal the mortal Tomohisa Nakamura are hereby interdicted. Without fail, there will be no modification of his mortality, no tampering with his bodily health. The afflictions he has will remain with him for as long as he lives, unless remedied by advances in Earthrealm mortal medical science. Through him, you will learn the important lesson that we are Gods, not mechanics who change human matters whenever it suits us."**

Skuld felt the tears flying towards her eyes, her whole body trembling with emotional trauma. The Lord had just invoked Tomo's asthma to remain with him the rest of his life. There was no way _she_ could cure him...and Earthrealm science was at least seven decades away from developing rudimentary cures for asthma.

"Why? Why would You do this to me?" she sobbed into the phone. "Why would You hurt him so? I love him so much, and I just wanted what's best for him..."

**"What's best for him is your love, not his health, my Child."**

"H..how did You learn of this? I didn't cure him directly, because I know that forcing it upon him would be wrong..."

When the Lord finished detailing how He had learned of her actions, Skuld dropped the phone and didn't bother to pick it back up. Her whole body slumped against itself, a fragility with a burning rage.


	164. Pt 164: The Distancing Division

**Part 164: The Distancing Division**

First Urd, and now Skuld.

When Skuld first arrived at her Lair, Mara momentarily mistook her for a Demoness...her little sister was _that_ filled with rage. Of the three Goddesses, Skuld had shown time and again that she possessed the most volatile nature, lacking the refinement of Urd's charm and Belldandy's mellowness. Obviously, some event had fanned the flames of her impulsiveness into an extreme agitation. It wasn't every day that the flighty teenaged Norn presented herself at her Lair's doorstep. But even for Skuld, this fiery rage she was absorbing in was over the top. Mara had never seen either a God or Goddess so angry towards life. Mara herself even felt a slight flinch of fear in reaction to her sister's livid bearing.

A driven, impassioned Skuld wasn't a receptive Skuld, and Mara knew it would be fruitless to have a discussion with her Goddess sister at the moment. She decided to let her younger sis stew in her rage, waiting it out until her mood would tone it down a notch. Eventually, the Lair would exert its terrifying ambiance and focus that rage into fear. Her worst expectation was that Skuld would spin into a totally bratty tantrum of blind resentment and Skuld-bomb her Lair.

Sister or not, if she Skuld-bombed her Lair, Mara would be forced to put Skuld down harshly. The chastisement would have to be severe, in order for her to save face in the eyes of her fellow Demonesses. Thus, leaving Skuld alone until she chilled off some of the angst was Mara's way of protecting Skuld from herself.

After a couple of hours, Mara regarded her youngest sister out of the corner of her eyes, noting that Skuld was still sitting on a couch of knitted bones in her Demoness Lair's anteroom. But instead of being coil-tight and clench-fisted with rage, the raven-haired teenage Goddess was fidgeting and glancing about anxiously. Now and then, Skuld would shudder and twitch, as one who was being attacked by a swarm of invisible biting gnats.

Good. Skuld was becoming increasingly timorous due to a mounting dose of fear. Mara knew that Skuld had risked this visit only because she frantically desired something from her...so she deliberately slowed her workpace on the executive duties she was occupied with. Nothing wrong with taking the extra time so she could savor Skuld's discomfiture. If the Brat was going to ask for a favor, Mara _had_ to milk some pleasure out of it...

As she reviewed Demoness Strife Mischief Office activities for the current week, Mara distractedly recalled her meeting with Urd last night. Her twin sister had shown up on the doorstep of her Lair, requesting her assistance to try and help her develop a strategy to prevent her boyfriend, the Troubadour, from engaging in further dalliances with other Goddesses. Loathe to an extreme degree to have to listen to Urd's sad tales, Mara charitably endured two hours of her sister narrating a sordid series of recent betrayals and abandonments. Of course, the only real solution when one is drowning in the lava of a 'love gone bad' is to learn to swim for the shore...but Urd was too stubborn to follow directions.

Once again, Urd was caught up in one of _those_ airs where she thought that her conscience was noble in its ostentatiousness, to the degree that everyone else should defer to her 'wisdom'.

Idiot!

Now Skuld was here, looking every bit as broken-hearted as Urd. Why were all these Goddesses moping around like castigated orphans? She couldn't remember a time when all three of her Goddess sisters were so deeply wrapped in personal misery...

A few months earlier, she had championed her little sister's romance with Tomohisa, feeling that it would be good for the girl to get out of herself by having a boyfriend to play with. During the five years or so that she'd been on the Earthrealm, Mara had noticed that Skuld was even more homebound than Belldandy. Belldandy had a _reason_ to be at the temple house all the time; she was assigned by the GRO to be with Keiichi forever because of that crazy wish of his. Accordingly, Belldandy was the domestic busybody of the temple home almost since day one. But Skuld was simply _there_, fadding around with Banpei and Sigil and daydreaming of being a grown-up. Her youngest sister hardly ever left the temple grounds by herself; such a social stasis in a Demoness would be considered quite unhealthy and worthy of punitive correction. But Goddesses clearly had different standards for isolative behavior, because neither Urd nor Belldandy seemed to get on Skuld about being too much the 'girl around the house'. In lieu of this, Mara took it upon herself to manipulate Skuld to open up about her obvious attraction to the young mortal chit. Amusingly, Urd and Peorth had arrived at the same idea as she regarding Skuld and Tomohisa. In a sense, Skuld was doomed from the start to fall in love with her mortal boytoy.

Besides, having Skuld in a relationship had its advantages...such as a significantly more unsettled household of Goddesses, which was always a bonus in Mara's eyes.

"This is about the boy!" Mara said to herself. It had to be him. The temptation to mindfuck around with a desperate Skuld was strong, but she was able to set it aside and replace her malicious urges with something resembling compassion.

Finishing with her administrative review, Mara invited Skuld into her personal gameroom, a vault-like room filled with numerous mall-arcade videogame machines. Climbing into a game console, she gestured to the gaming machine across from hers. Skuld took one look at the game's screen which displayed "Haunted Mansion: Fear Factory" in bright orange-green lettering...and then backed up several paces.

"Oh, I forgot how it is with you and certain spooky images," Mara commented as she flicked her wrist, transforming the "Fear Factory" console into a wireframe scoop-catcher game; a stuffed animal gallery set with a retractable claw in the middle to 'fish' out the fluff-toys. She had observed that games such as this seemed to be popular with Earthrealm girls of Skuld's age, girls who would plug a purseful of 100yen coins into these carny machines for a chance to 'capture' one of the plushies or pop CDs.

"So what happened?"

"I hate my Big Sister Belldandy!" Skuld said in a tentative voice, thin with emotion, thick with emotion as she manipulated the mechanical crane towards a stuffed tiger and cub. Mara was taken aback by the subtext of vehemence in her sister's words. This was more than a little curious...

"I tried to cure Tomohisa by inventing a Nasutron inhaler that would disperse nanos into his lungs to prevent him from ever being sick with asthma again. But it didn't work, even though it _should_ have worked. He kept coughing. So I contacted XOM to find out why..."

* * *

_**"HOW COULD YOU, ELDER SISTER!"**_ Skuld accused angrily, her face beet-red with unreigned rage. "You actually _told_ on me! You informed the Lord that I was 'going to cure Tomohisa's asthma no matter what'! He said you used those exact words to describe what I did to Tomo! I never said anything like that! You know me, you know that...as a Goddess...forcing a remedy on my Tomo wasn't my intention at all. I learned from that Intellihancer helmet incident with Keiichi that cheating the system and acting without careful consideration is wrong. I just wanted him to stop suffering those asthma attacks! That's all I wanted...and no one can tell me that I was wrong to think that. But we don't get what we wish for; we're Goddesses and we have to work hard to make our wishes come true. So how could you _lie_ to Him and put words in my mouth like that, words that I never said? Just because I didn't tell you in advance about what I was planning doesn't mean that I intended to _force_ Tomohisa to use the Nasutron Inhaler! I simply gave it to him. But you told the Lord that I _made him take it_!"

By this time, Tomohisa and Megumi were standing in the foyer between the living room and dining room, startled by the intensity of Skuld's hysteric outburst. Tomohisa was footblotched to the floor, totally shocked by his girlfriend's out-of-control excitability. To him, Skuld seemed to be into some kind of emotional auto-pilot...

The evidence was everywhere.

The inside of the house was graffiti-busy with angry words written in Japanese and other languages, as if a dozen taggers had decided to spray out the interior with every known insult and reviling phrase known to humankind. Coarsely worded resentful sentences were plastered over the walls, floors, ceilings and furniture. Some of the shocking curses written on the walls were so inventive, he didn't even know they existed...

"But I..but I didn't say a word to the Lord! Skuld, what reason would I have to tell Him about something so personal to you?" Belldandy answered her young sister with words of protest, totally confused. "You and Tomohisa have a precious love that you share, and I would never try to deceive the Almighty or presume your motives to Him. I know that you love Tomohisa and your heart yearns to express this at all times, just like my heart is always gentle with Keiichi. Never would I try and dissipate your compassion for him by inventing outright falsehoods. I love you, and I love him too much..."

She fell into a silence, shaking her head "no", trying to convey her surprise in the face of Skuld's outrageous claim. Since she and Keiichi had returned in March, she had never once spoken to the Lord, nor had the Regent of the Gods contacted her.

"You liar! I HATE YOU!!!" Skuld screamed defiantly. "I hate you more than I hate Urd! I never want to see you again! You...you caused me to lose Tomohisa! I can never be with him now! He'll never be well, he'll never achieve his dreams. And it's all _your_ fault, Elder Sister! I hate you!"

"Skuld, what is all this mess that you're talkin' about?" Tomohisa shouted, completely taken aback by his girlfriend's rage. Fighting his fear down, he reached towards her, but he was met with such a strong air of emotional hostility, it stopped him in his tracks.

"See?" Skuld shrieked angrily. "See how he's upset with _me_, even though it's _your_ fault? You've ruined my life, you've got the Lord mad at me, and now you've made Tomohisa so discouraged that he turned against me. I hate you, I hate you, I hate you!"

Unexpectedly, Skuld simply flashed out of existence. A few seconds later, a Skuld Bomb exploded in the dining room, blowing a ten-meter chunk of the house into fragments. Belldandy had a split-second to ward it...if she hadn't been here to shield Megumi and Tomohisa, they would have perished.

"By the open heart of my Lord, what just happened?" Belldandy gasped, her mind and heart reeling with stunned turmoil. Skuld's rebellious nature had been pricked...and by what? She had done nothing to earn such accusations! A wild mood had filled the household in the midst of Skuld's accusations, and Belldandy sensed that her sister's riotous ambitions weren't merely acts of impulsiveness, but were truthfully heedless and dangerous.

She recognized the burning righteousness in Skuld's eyes...the same depth of conviction that Urd possessed after she resumed her romantic attachments with Troubadour: a place where memory kissed insanity and motive blinded constancy. A mysterious realm of heart and mind where self-delusion fanned defiance to a blaze, a fire that wouldn't relent in the face of disaster, uproar or self-annihilation. Her sister had decided the course she wished to set upon, and she was fully determined to see it through to the very end no matter how much heartbreak it created along the way.

A few heartbeats later, Tomohisa belatedly realized what Skuld had just said and done. Without provocation, he turned roundly on her and started cursing his head off at her, claiming that she had driven off his girlfriend. He was so enraged, Belldandy couldn't even get a word in to try and calm him down...

"If she doesn't come back, I'm gonna run away!" he finished after blistering Belldandy for ten minutes with accusations. Ignoring Megumi's efforts to chill the heat of his anger, Tomohisa wordlessly stormed out of the house.

* * *

"...so that's what happened," Skuld said, finishing her explanation. Her side of the story. While Skuld was describing the flame-out with her sister, Mara had tuned _through_ Skuld's experience so that she could actually witness the event objectively. Once in a while, Mara was able to 'twist' within another Divine's memory, somehow reconfiguring Time to gain an onlooker's perspective, observing events that extended beyond the personal memories of those involved. She didn't know how this quirky talent worked, but she knew how to use it. She was interested not just in Skuld's narrative; she was drawn by curiosity and concern to see how Belldandy had reacted after Skuld had left.

"Now you can see why I don't want to be around my sisters right now. Well, _two_ of my sisters, anyway. S..so.."

"Ne?"

"So I want to move in with you, Big Sister Mara!"

Mara was so shock-drilled, she dropped the goblet of bloodwine she was holding while in mid-sip. Glancing at her reflection in one of the vid-game screens in the adjacent gameroom, she saw a Demoness with a lilting grimace of shock, peak-arched eyebrows and flywheeling wide-open eyes. Either Skuld was totally gaming her, or this was the most insane flight of pretensions she had ever witnessed in her younger sister.

"What the Bless are you talking about?" she shouted. "You want to live _here_? With me? In my Demoness Lair? Are you trying to pull a massive fail in the most dumbass way possible? Or are you just fuckin' totally beyond insane to the point of being brain-fried?!"

"Belldandy's the one who's insane! She lied to the Lord, and now everything between Tomohisa and I is going to be ruined," Skuld shot back argumentatively. "I can't just go back to Syntrasil and leave Tomohisa. I..if I'm not here, h..he'll forget about me and find another girlfriend! So I have to stay here on the Earthrealm. And I won't never ever _ever_ go back to the temple where my sister lives. What she did was unforgivable!"

"Now I've heard it all..." Mara sighed, massaging the bridge of her nose in resignation. Skuld was so emotionally blow-out, she had become completely mental to the point where her thinking was densely convoluted. These past several years on the Earthrealm had completely unraveled everything she knew about Goddesses. The Doublet System is cancelled. She remembered the rapier-like shame that had lanced her following the sudden revelation that _she_ herself was half-Goddess, and that Belldandy and her sisters were now _her_ sisters. Now the God's and Demon's Realms were 'suburbs' in some massive confabulation called Syntrasil...

No wonder her youngest sister was so irrational!

"Big Sister Mara, I didn't just think this up on the fly," Skuld argued. "Obviously, I can't move in with him at his parent's house...besides, they're clear on the other side of Japan anyway. I thought about moving in with Aunt Reiko and Uncle Osamu..."

"Who're they?"

"Keiichi and Megumi's parents."

"And what would be the reason you'd give them to explain why you couldn't live with the temple with your sisters..." Mara asked sternly.

"Sister," Skuld corrected. "I doubt if Urd's going to be living at the temple any more, the way she's all obsessed about Troubadour."

"The case isn't closed on Urd yet," Mara countered. "But still, you think that the solution to all these problems between you and your sister is to move in with me? Isn't that like putting the panthers in the petting zoo?"

"Outs! It makes sense for me to move in with you. Moving in with you would _hurt_ my sister, which is what exactly what I want to do right now. She deserves some payback after narking me off to the Lord. Besides, the only other one I could move in with is Peorth, and I don't think either of us could stand each other for too long," Skuld insisted.

"Blazes, girl! You tell me that Peorth and you won't be able to get along...and then you assume that _you and I_ will be able to get along?" Mara said in a voice marveled with sarcasm. "Then there's the little matter of your parents. How are you going to explain to _them_ that you're living with me, idiot!"

"I just won't tell them. Besides, what can they do to you? You're part of the family now. And if they messed with you, your Mom wouldn't take it too kindly."

Mara had to allow that Skuld was certainly a bundle of determination, even thought she was seriously bent by all this craziness. The kid had guts, to be sure. But for Belldandy to tell on Skuld? Totally outside of the realm of reality. Belldandy would never act to sow such a degree of pain and betrayal.

Two bits of inconsistency plagued her. If the God's Lord was the same as the Dark Lord, then there was no blazin' way that He could be lied to by a Goddess. Which meant that either Belldandy _did_ mislead Him, or something or some else had. The other mystery was Skuld: how could her little sister be so vacant of reason that she didn't even attempt to consider that Belldandy might have telling the truth when she claimed to have never spoken to the Lord about Tomohisa's 'cure' and Skuld's role in it. Clearly, Belldandy was innocent...

...but to Skuld, she was guilty as hell. So arguing about her sister's guilt or innocence would have to wait for another time. Besides, stealing Skuld from Belldandy might be fun; she had been quite bored with all the responsibilities of running an office filled with contentious Demonesses.

"Hrmmm...I can understand the reason why you'd want to do something hurtful to your older sister for betraying you like this," Mara speculated aloud, attempting to be reasonable. "Even though we're sisters, I still have a bit of leftover panache towards wanting to cause Grief in her life. One the face of it, your moving in with me would suit both our needs quite nicely. But this also involves giving up my privacy. This is my _Lair_, and it's important to me because it is a showcase Lair, often featured in Vanagdrasil documentaries about off-Realm Demonic dwellings."

"You Demons actually have something like _that_? It sounds so...home economics or gossip maggies," Skuld commented.

"Hey, don't dis me or my Lair!" she fired back in a snarlish tone of threat. "The Earthrealm mortals say 'pride cometh before a fall'. Would you rather live in some cubbyhole apartment in Tokyo? Or maybe you'd rather build your own Goddess dwelling and live there by yourself, with Sigel and Banpei? It's okay to bite the hand that feeds you...as long as you get away with the food. But you're definitely not in a good position to bargain with me, Skuld. Besides, I don't know if I want to share my precious living space with another being. Let alone a Goddess...and let alone my sometimes-irritating little girl of a sister."

Mara grinned as Skuld turned plasmatic red in the face at being called "little girl", one of the labels she most hated. Perhaps there would be a silver lining in all of this, because having Skuld close at hand would create the perfect environment for her to tease the shit out of her. But that would be too easy; and she has the same abhorrence for 'lazy' mischief as any other self-respecting Demoness.

She had to think of something worse, something that would be thoroughly degrading without losing its charm or challenge. An elegant solution to reflect her own elegant Demonic nature...

"I'll consider it, Skuld. But it's Blessedly complicated since you're a Goddess, I'll remind you," Mara decided. She tried to harness her thoughts, attempting to emulate the mindset of His Dark Majesty. What would His Darkness do in this situation? There was always the tried-and-true 'name your punishment' approach: in this case, she could ask Skuld to give something up near and dear to her for the privilege of moving into her Lair. She could certainly exact a form of Grief on Skuld, but that would embarrassingly easy. An exemplary action was needed, the setting of a strong punitive restriction that would be worthy of the head of the Demoness Strife Mischief Office. If she was going to paint Skuld's heart black, it had to make a lasting impression on the young Goddess. Something her sister wouldn't forget for many Decas. His Noir Lordship would expect nothing less.

What if there was a way to make Skuld miserable...that would also _increase_ the chances of her staying together with Tomohisa? If this messed-up reorganized Syntrasil was supposed to be an amalgam of Demon's and God's Realms, didn't that imply that a paradigm shift in philosophy necessarily had to accommodate the shift in environs? It would certainly be forward-thinking to devise a way to make her little sister totally miserable while also helping her sister avoid heartbreak. As upset as she was, Skuld could act out stupidly and _really_ cause her boyfriend to take to hills to save his own ass. She couldn't allow that to happen; elsewise, living with her little sister would be the equivalent of that imagined contour of misery the mortals called "Hell". What if she could spur Skuld on, causing her sister's little romantic love-splice with Tomohisa to actually gather steam while she was living in her Lair? Wouldn't that be getting one over on the Lord of the God's Realm in a sense, since He seemed bent on setting up restrictions and obstacles between Skuld and her little loverboy playmate?

But how to do it?

"Skuld, why do you need to stay on the Earthrealm? Couldn't you just hop back-and-forth between here and Syntrasil?" Mara asked, trying to buy time so she could scheme up a good one...

This had to be a decision fired with deviousness on _every_ level.

"Skuld, lemme turn you on to a secret about how some of us Demonesses view love. To us, love is like a razor-sharp tanto short-sword...and life is like a huge hammer, much like your Mjolnir. It pounds and pounds and pounds that blade relentlessly; sometimes with blows of great turmoil, sometimes with blows of great felicity. But it will keep on pounding, no matter what you do...and it will feel like you're being stabbed in the heart with each driving blow. But what is really happening is that it's _love_ that is being driven in your heart, deeper and deeper. And you know what happens when something is pushed deep into something else? It becomes more tightly lodged...more difficult to pull out. And over time, it becomes _impossible_ to dislodge, because it's become one with that which it pierces."

"But I _need_ to be here! If I'm away, Tomohisa might decide to break up with me," Skuld complained, completely missing the thrust of her explanation about Demoness love. Idiot girl!

"If this was July and he wasn't in his stupid high school, it'd all be different," Skuld continued. "We could hang with each other all the time, and I wouldn't have to worry about him getting in trouble by himself. But he's still in school, which means I'm stuck with being around him only on evenings and weekends! Sometimes I really hate that school, even though I know it's good for him to be there! But it's hard! If it weren't for his school, I could spend all day with him..."

"Careful what you wish for..." Mara thought as an especially evil set of flagrant images passed through her mind.

"Skuld, I have decided!" she announced. "You may stay here until you find it necessary to stay elsewhere."

"Are you for real, Big Sister Mara? Coolage! Thanks! That's way cool!" her little sister shouted gleefully, skipping up and down with delight.

"But there is a single condition," Mara noted. She waved her hand and a cloud of sparkles founted out of her palm...and with a lithe snap of the wrist, the sparkles coalesced into a physical object.

A sailor fuku.

It took a full Earthrealm minute for the significance of the floating sailor-suit to settle into her sister's impulsive and belligerent humor. Mara fought back the laughter in her throat as Skuld's face blanched by degrees, her younger sister staring at the school uniform as if it were a mortal enemy...or a torture device.

Which it was.

"Big Si..Sister Mara," her sister quailed in a whiny voice. "Y..you can't be _serious_! Y..you want me to wear this around the house...er, around your Lair?"

"Heh heh! Nah, you guessed wrong, kiddo. I wouldn't be so cruel as to expect you to wear a sailor suit around my Lair. Even though I have it on good authority that you like to wear...and repair...school uniforms," Mara announced, noticing that Skuld was squirming and rubbing her knees and thighs together in embarrassment. For someone who talked so much all the time, her sister was certainly quiet now...

"Besides, my idea of cosplay is much more...risqué...than mere schoolgirl outfits. Wearing a girl's summer school uniform would be too easy, and would merely be humiliating to you, dearest little sister. Understand this...Demonesses don't act merely for show. I could care less if you do or don't wear this around my Lair. But you will definitely have to wear it to school."

Moving her hand away from the front of the sailor fuku with a dramatic flourish, she revealed the breast patch for Tomobiki High School.

"Nuh..nuh.._NO WAY! Y..YOU CAN'T BE SERIOUS!!!"_

Mara smiled meaningfully at Skuld, a smile that conveyed that she would brook no disagreement on this point. The stark expression of abject dismay and despair on her little sister's face at that moment was so delicious and satisfying, it easily compensated for having to give up the privacy she enjoyed in her Lair.

* * *

"Where's Skuld, Banpei and Sigel?" Keiichi asked Belldandy. Without a moment's hesitation, she ran over and buried her face against his shoulder, releasing a torrent of deep sobbing as he held her. Cupping her chin gently, he raised her head up so he could look into her eyes...eyes that were framed with tears, their blue depths bestirred with an ocean of grief and confusion. Kissing her on the forehead, he mentally shored himself up for the challenge that lie ahead. First Bell and Urd were fighting...and now Bell and Skuld seemed to have had a falling-out.

When Belldandy finished explaining what had happened after Tomo returned from school, Keiichi could only exclaim "that's utterly insane!" since there were no words of comfort he could offer Bell at the moment. Even if she was adrift in the worst episode of naivety imaginable, Bell-chan would never be inflexible to the degree where she would resort to lying to the Almighty to get her point across. Bell always seemed to harness the necessary courage to confront her sisters directly if she disagreed with them. None of the passive-agressive behind-the-back crap that so many girls and women would try to pull off when they didn't get what they wanted, or when they wanted to provoke a scandal or instigate a temporisation for their own amusement. Bell was too pure to resort to manipulative backlashing or circumspect behaviors.

Yet, Keiichi couldn't comprehend the Lord's actions at all. There was no wisdom, no sense of meaning in preventing Skuld from helping his cousin. In his heart, he completely empathized with Skuld's attempt to try and rid Tomo of his asthma. Watching his cousin grow up, Keiichi was fully aware of how much Tomohisa's asthma had curtailed certain aspects of his enjoyment of life. _He_ would have infinitely preferred having Tomo's asthma go away.

So Skuld tried to help Tomo because she loved him. What harm did it do anyone in the first place? Yeah, he could get all humanist and predestinarian, arguing that curing Tomohisa would create a type of paradox where those who would benefit from Tomo's physical limitation would no longer be able to do so, and thus would be cheated. But wasn't that the point of medical science in the first place...to try and make each person better so that they could perform to the peak of their potential if they so chose to? Didn't humanity benefit from smarter, stronger human beings within the prospect that _everyone_ would have to strive to better themselves because the standards of health and achievement had been raised? But what was the dividing line between helping and cheating? In sports, the use of steroids consistently improved the performance of athletes...but almost everyone agreed that steroid use was detrimental rather than beneficial to sports as a whole. Some businesses expected their executives to take memory and intelligence enhancing drugs to improve recall and decision-making, so that they could work longer shifts effectively. The result was a bunch of salarymen strung out on speed and psych meds; men who would sometimes snap and do something stupid or dangerous because they were out of their minds. The obvious lesson was that too much of a good thing made it a bad thing.

Skuld must have crossed the line somehow.

But that still didn't make it right that she blamed Bell-chan. Skuld must have completely snapped, because Bell had explained that Skuld thought this action by the Lord would doom her love for Tomohisa somehow. This was just plain idiotic: it wasn't like Tomo's asthma was some kind of big secret Skuld didn't know about before she decided to become his girlfriend. So really, nothing had changed...she could still be in love with him as before. Why couldn't she look to Bell's example: even though he turned into a kyuuketsuki every night, Bell-chan still stood by his side.

Love is about acceptance, about leaving behind conditions and accepting limitations.

Maybe this was the lesson the Lord was trying to teach Skuld. But it still didn't brighten away the dispirited mood his fiancée was dealing with.

* * *

"What would you do if you were in my sister's position, Troubadour?" Urd asked, snuggling comfortably in the crook of his arm as she lay next to him, gazing upwards at the rabbiting clouds leaping between the horizons. "If you were Belldandy, would you carry on with the wedding? Would you still make that kind of commitment even though he may have been Hijacked?"

"Hijacked? How unfortunate for him," Troubadour commented drily. "I know that it's too early to confirm that he has been Hijacked, but if I were she, I would be very cautious about his condition. I am curious...assuming that he has been Hijacked...about what kinds of change have been wrested upon him. Poor thing! These Hijacker attacks are so notoriously random, one can never know in advance how they will manifest in mortal beings."

Listening to him, Urd wondered if he was acting aloof simply to tease her, or did he really have such little regard for her sister and Keiichi?

"He has been transformed into the legendary Earthrealm creature known as a kyuuketsuki, an Earthrealm spirit or 'ghost' that feeds on the blood of mortal humans."

"How vulgar!" Troubadour remarked.

"Yeah, it's pretty upsetting to my sister, and I can't imagine what it's like for him," Urd noted. "There's been a plague of attacks on every continent of the Earthrealm. Cheh! For an God who is assigned here to the Earthrealm as one of its guardian spirits, you certainly don't know what's going on..."

"That's because I have _you_ to distract me so sweetly," Troubadour answered, kissing her. Urd allowed herself a moment of blessed whimsy, and then resumed her attention on the serious matters at hand.

"You still haven't answered my question," she pointed out as she revisited the topic of Bell and Keiichi. "If my sister's boyfriend has been Hijacked, all she can do is wait it out until the Hijacker decides to move on. I haven't a doubt that she can manage to minimize the potential for him to injure others due to his transformation..."

"But can she manage to keep the injury to his psyche to a minimum?" Troubadour pointed out, finishing Urd's statement. "I've only met him twice, and he appears to be rather self-possessed for a young mortal man. Not to the extent of the egoist, of course....but the impression I have is that his ego is well-formed. He has a strong sense of his personal identity; he knows who he is."

"Which is what worries me," Urd reflected aloud in a hushed voice. "Because of his years with my sister, Keiichi has grown to be strongly independent in certain ways...one of them being that he has a strong belief that his self-valuation derives from what's inside of him, rather than what he does or how others view him. Being Hijacked will only continue to erode his sense of his personhood; increasingly, he won't be able to rely purposefully on his identity as he journeys through life. As with anyone who has been Hijacked, his life will be that of a divided being whose nature will be at conflict with itself. In a very real sense, he will have some of the emotional traits of a schizophrenic for the duration. Considering all of this, is it fair to him to be involved with my sister if he cannot truly be himself?"

"Is it fair for your sister to have half of a husband?" Troubadour asserted.

"Nah, no worries there. I know that Bell can handle that. She has the patience of a mountain during an ice age as it waits for the glaciers to withdraw."

"As an Earthrealm Spirit, I must not overlook a significant area of concern regarding your sister's fiancé that you haven't addressed," Troubadour said evenly. "He is the Test Mortal. The survival of the Earthrealm is riding on what kind of song he will sing through his life's actions. And what happens to me if the Earth is destroyed?"

"This isn't about you, it's about my sister and Keiichi. You're a God...you'll be taken care of," Urd retorted hotly, put off by his selfishness. Despite his coarse projection of vanity, he _did_ have a point about the Earthrealm's Probation.

"Despite the fact that I've been sent here against my will, I do have some small attachement to this planet, my dear Urd," Troubadour quickly clarified, seemingly back-pedaling to save the conversation. "The mortals have enough congregated creativity to inspire my Muse from time to time. So I would rather not see the Earthrealm go to waste. Your sister may be a stabilizing force for now in his life...but if he becomes more disoriented because of the Hijacker, he may rebel against her. Such a brash act may be interpreted as a fault when the Assembly convenes in 2047 to pass judgement on the Earthrealm."

"How could that be? How could he turn against Belldandy. He loves her so much..." Urd speculated in whispered exclaim.

"In love, one doesn't wish to hurt the ones they cherish."

"That's a fine sentiment for you to have, considering how often you've hurt _my_ feelings, Troubadour," she interjected with a twinge of irritation. No way was she going to skip past digging into him a little for being unfaithful and disrespectful...

"Which doesn't hide the fact that I feel disappointed in myself for treating you so poorly, Urd. When I hurt you, _I hurt_ as well," he replied, kissing her on the forehead. "But I'm me, and even Gods make mistakes. My nature is my enemy sometimes, a fact you must accept. I gave you my word that I'll try to be a better boyfriend for you. But this Keiichi who your sister loves...will he be able to handle _that_ kind of pain when it comes? When his humanity struggles to assert itself and cannot, will he be able to accept the truth of his inability to achieve self-hood..._and_ his love for her?"

"That's a tough one," she agreed, looking into Troubadour's eyes, seeking her own comfort there. If only Belldandy had chosen a Divine being to love, none of this would be happening; none of this would even matter. Hijackers only claim mortal sentient beings, not Divines. Why couldn't her sister have chosen someone like Troubadour in her life?

"If you really want to do your sister a service, I would implore you to convince Keiichi to postpone or cancel his wedding to her, at least until she can get her bearings straight and we all can rest assured that he is or isn't afflicted by a Hijacker."

"_Cancel the wedding!_ Did I hear you right?" Urd exclaimed, readily disbelieving what her boyfriend had just suggested.

"Yes you did. As long as the possibility that he has been Hijacked exists, my opinion is that Keiichi is unfit to marry your sister."

"That's crazy shit! My sister has given her heart to him for a _reason_! She's not like you at all...when she loves, my sister is steadfast and faithful. I doubt that she'll withdraw her love for him over something as trivial as a Hijacking. ..."

"There!" Troubadour interjected roundly. "My point exactly, sweet Urd. You deem his affliction as 'trivial'...but how does _he_ view it? To your sister's fiancé, his entire life is deeply disrupted. To be sure, Belldandy can remain firm in her convictions...just look at how she rejects me because she continues to view me as having a harmful interest towards you. But can _he_ be firm in his love for her, I ask? If he withdraws his love from her, your sister will be hurt. I sense that she is one those innocents who gives all of her heart away when she decides to love. Such Goddesses, with their unreservedly obedient hearts and unbreachable fidelity, are fools...they miss all of the fun that romantic love affairs can bestir. But nonetheless, the truth we must face is that a turning away from her by him will heart-wound your sister badly. You don't want that to happen, do you?"

Urd pondered his assertions for several minutes. Bell resented her with a passion because she was with Troubadour; and interfering in something as important as her and Keiichi's wedding plans would push that strong dislike into much deeper realms of revilement. Meddling might even bring about an alienation between she and Bell that might last for a time. On the other side of it, if this whole thing with Keiichi blew up in Bell's face...if he became so emotionally disarrayed that he lost the ability to return her love...then she, as older sister, would half to hold herself as partially responsible for her sister's loss by virtue of her inaction. As older sister, she couldn't stand by and let her younger sis rush into an potentially injurious love.

A shaft of resentment suddenly flared in her heart as Urd recognized that Belldandy had done exactly what she herself was considering. Interfering, meddling, judging. Her younger sis had given herself the right to try and stand between the love she and Troubadour shared, based on the assumption that Troubadour wouldn't be 'right' for her. So why shouldn't she allow herself the same right to interject her concerns between Bell and Keiichi, so that Bell wouldn't be hurt? If Bell got mad at her for interfering, so what?

The difference was plain as milk: Troubadour was completely well in mind and spirit, while Keiichi was sick and possibly could become deranged. Troubadour could love her forever, while Keiichi may not be able to love her at all if this indeed was an incident of Hijacking that could last for a lifetime. Belldandy's fears about she and Troubadour were all in her head...but Keiichi's kyuuketsuki affliction wasn't some figment of imagination. It was _real_, and real action was needed.

Her thoughts pouring themselves into a resolution, Urd turned her reflections to consider which of the two she should talk to. Obviously, there was no way that she could reason with Belldandy at this stage of the play...the girl was acting so high-strung as of late. Bell was so fired up on how Troubadour would sour all of existence just because she was going out with him, she wouldn't be capable of participating in a deep sisterly discussion. A fixated Belldandy wasn't a field to sow new ideas upon.

So it had to be Keiichi.

Urd recognized that this would be a delicate, tricky task that would require all her artful abilities at persuasion, because she would have to convince him to postpone or cancel the wedding without mentioning the possibility that he had been Hijacked. If Keiichi learned that he had been Hijacked and that Bell was powerless to do anything about it, he would have a massive freak-out...an emotional meltdown spiral-spazz that would certainly take him out of his game, and would probably land him in the nut ward. She wanted to prevent a disaster, not create one.

"Why are my sisters so difficult to live with?" Urd asked herself. "Why can't they just love me, like Troubadour does? Why is the elder sister always the one who has to do all the dirty work?"

After Urd faded from the beachhead they had picked out to enjoy their daily sunbathing, Troubadour pulled his sunglasses off, looked into the sun and smirked...

* * *

Keiichi was beginning to visualize the completed-yet-skeletal 'electrocycle' in his mind; it no longer was a monkey-gym set of half-completed components. For sure, Sora, Chihiro and Genji were the only Unified Club members who fully understood the engine dynamics, much more so than Tamiya and Ootaki. Sora has assigned Ootaki light duties anyway, as his time was spent brushing up on his Romanian for the upcoming trip. But it was always nice to have an extra wrench in the mix, and Ootaki was always up to snuff when it came to fine-point assembly.

Which there was a lot of in this project.

Unlike the Blaze which they had entered in the Le Mans, this yet-unnamed motorcycle was more like the Solar Federation solar-powered racer they had built two years ago. It didn't rely on the traditional fuel sources, the weight distribution was dicey, and the design itself was as 'do-as-you-go' as a project could get. He had taken it out for a test ride last week and almost crashed it into a dumpster because the brakes didn't work. His tennis shoes were missing a cm of sole on the heel as a result. Now, he was going to take it out again, but this time he didn't have a seat to sit on, only a rolled-up pair of beach towels strapped atop the two battery arrays...the minimum needed to keep his ass from getting burned.

Starting out from Whirlwind, he cornered the bike and noted the slight wiggle in the frame during the turn...they would have to make some adjustments to allow for him to road even tighter turns than this. Once on the main avenue, he gathered in the usual amount of stares from pedestrians and other drivers as he shifted lanes. To them, he probably appeared to be riding astride an partially-assembled motor scooter, with its bristle of wiring, unpainted chassis tubing and unshielded handlebar assembly. A motorcyclist pulled up close behind him and then sped past him, flipping him off because he wasn't speeding. Keiichi noted the make of the bike...if it was one of Megumi's guys, then the guy had just holed his ass by being so rude to a fellow bike-rider. If it wasn't, then he'd tell Megumi...and she would chew him up during a street race just to humiliate him in front of his gang...

The bike stuttered briefly, a sign that the power lines from the battery weren't conducting a steady flow of power to the engine. This was one of the constant problems, because it either meant that the battery assembly wasn't charging at peak, or the power cabling needed tweaked. It was one thing to test out the steady flow of power using an series of digital multimeters during mount testing, but it was another matter altogether to be on the road and experiencing 'burps' of power fluxing.

Going southeast along route 20 through Midori-ku, he planned to take the bike on a 50km round trip, probably turning around somewhere in Oamishirasato once he got to Highway 128. Another ten miles east and he could be on the beach near Kujukuri, but that would be a pain in the ass, literally, as he was sitting on wadded towels and not a proper bike seat. Even 50km would be pushing his tolerance for riding discomfort. So far, the bike was doing pretty well...but the only vulnerability it had was that much of it was exposed, and rain could short out some of the cabling. Fortunately, when he left N.I.T. there wasn't a cloud in the 3pm sky...

Which was why he was stunned when he felt sparse raindrops beginning to sprinkle against his face as he passed the townhouse-filled Chiba Toke subdivision. Looking up, he could see a line of clouds to the east, but they were many kilometers away...and it wasn't windy enough for an oceanside 'sunshine rain'. Shrugging his shoulders, he rode off the roadway shoulder and sought a sheltering tree to keep himself and the bike dry.

"Of all the ridiculous..." he muttered as the rain increased into a steady pelting.

"Weather's pretty crazy in this neck of the woods, isn't it?" he heard a female voice observe nearby, even though the closest building was a farm house several hundred meters away.

"Urd, you did this, didn't you?" he grumbled as he saw Bell's sister perched on a tree branch above him. "I'm on a tight schedule, and I don't have time for this kind of screwing around. It's bad enough that our home-life is jacked because of you and Skuld, but..."

Urd leapt down from the tree and pressed a silencing finger against his lips before he could backstep away from her. Keiichi's mind rounded on a number of conjectures, trying to understand why Urd had laid out this particular snare for him. For this was definitely a trap of sorts; as long as it rained, he couldn't risk taking the electrocycle back out on the road.

"We need to have a serious talk, you and I," she noted, regarding him with emerald eyes filled with mystique and resolute intent.

"Look, Urd...there's nothing I can do to change how Belldandy feels about you and Troubadour," he offered.

"Keiichi, my dear Keiichi...this isn't about me, it's about _you and my sister_. Or to paint the canvas red, about your peculiar affliction. The 'night time' issue that you are struggling with," Urd announced in a singsong voice, still piercing him with her eyes. This wasn't Urd being playful or flirtatious; this was Urd in a full-on 'Goddess-mode' intensity.

What was going on here?

"Keiichi, I want you to think hard about something, to the point where it may break your heart," Urd requested, causing him to feel a wave of fluttering chills spread from his shoulders down his back.

"Do you think you can continue living like this?"

"Living like _what_?" he confronted her defensively.

"Turning into a kyuuketsuki every night, having to suck your fiancée's blood, having to guard yourself at night around your sister and cousin," Urd elaborated as she continued to list off all the bad shit that came along with being a vampiric being.

"Urd, rather than doing the big lead-up, why don't you just get on with it and make your point," Keiichi interrupted.

"_I'll tell you the point, mister!_" Urd exclaimed, raising her voice sharply. "That's my sister that you're planning to marry. Has it occurred to you that you might be this way for _years_...maybe for the rest of your life? Do you know how hard it is already for her? What would happen to my sister if you can't keep it tight with yourself? It's only been a few weeks since you were bitten. What will you do, how will you live when it's _years from now_? You have to support my sister in every way, and that includes financially. What if you can't work because of this? In the real world, you aren't going to have a boss like Chihiro who can tidy things up for you whenever you get in a bind or mess up."

"Urd, I..."

"The real question is this. Can you promise...with all of your sincere heart, Keiichi...that you will continue to love my sister as much as you do now? That nothing will change how you feel about her," Urd demanded.

"Of course I can love her..."

"The truth is in your heart, Keiichi. You can't fool me like you can fool everyone else," Urd challenged him, piercing him with emerald eyes that were suddenly glaring with a harsh verdurous regard.

Keiichi knew that he had spoken too quickly, too automatically.

"There's always a chance that I won't be able too...and you know that, Urd. So stop playing games..." he answered, hooding his eyes with a hand to block out the glare Urd was giving him.

_**"THIS ISN'T A GAME, THIS IS ABOUT MY SISTER'S LIFE!"**_ Urd shouted, flighted with a protective severity that almost sounded rageful. "Belldandy cares enough about me to get in my face about Troubadour. I admit that he can be a jerk sometimes, and she knows this better than anyone. But he's mine and I'll never let him go. You...it's different with you, Keiichi. You are dealing with something that much more serious than just a set of misbehaviors. How can you stand there, look me in the eye, and tell me that you can trust in yourself? What convinces you that you can love my sister for the rest of your life?"

"I..don't..know," he admitted reluctantly. "But there always is a risk in love."

"Keiichi, we Goddesses don't do divorces," Urd explained. "In rare cases, we do...but that's beside the point. When two mortals agree to marry, they're also making a subtle agreement to seek divorce if things get crazy. Half of 'em do, ya' know. They can recover after a time and move on, sometimes finding another person to love. But it's different with a Goddess. We go for the whole enchilada when it comes to being Bonded: what you know from my sister as the Divine equivalent of getting married. Bell's probably told you that's why some Goddesses spend tens of thousands of years making up their minds before they make that great leap of faith. You don't have tens of thousands of years...and neither does Bell. So she's had to compress all of that 'getting hooked up and being honest with herself' decision time...into just five years. All that trust that would normally take centuries to explore. And she has. My sister has given you _her entire heart_; she believes in you so much."

Keiichi gulped and nodded his head. Listening to Urd had revealed a whole other aspect, a new side to his romance with Bell-chan that he had never considered. To him, their love had developed over five years...but to her, it must have seemed like five minutes, relatively speaking. In Goddess terms, Bell was taking a huge risk; the Divine equivalent of jumping out of a plane without a parachute.

He had never really placed his heart onto this aspect of his fiancée's love for him.

"Up until now, I've supported you and Belldandy, have I not?" Urd asserted, still unsmiling and deadly serious. "Part of that support was to help my sister too, you know. But now, even I question your ability to stay in love with her. I have to question this, because my sister can't. She loves you too much. Well, I love her too more...and I have to ask the hard questions. But can you ask yourself for the truth? Once she marries you, that's it. You _have_ to be there for her for the rest of your life. There's no backing out. If anything..._anything_...can turn you away from loving her as much as you can, then it'll kill her. She won't die, but a part of her will die. I don't want to see this happen to my sister. Just like Belldandy doesn't want me to be hurt, I don't want her to be hurt. Given time, I know that Troubadour can change who he is. _Can you change who you are, Keiichi?_ Because this is that one time when Belldandy can't just use her Goddess powers to 'fix' you, to make this kyuuketsuki condition go away."

"Urd, _why_ won't she make it go away? That's the million-yen question I've been wondering about this ever since I started having to deal with such a crazyass situation," he asked pointedly.

"Didn't you hear me, Keiichi? She _can't_. If I explained the truth to you, not only would you be unable to love my sister, you'd probably be unable to love yourself. The only thing I can say is this is a 'life for a life' type of situation. But I'm totally in the slot when I tell you that you might be stuck with this for the rest of your years. So I want you to ride home on that bike and look deeply into your heart and do the right thing. Not for you, but for my sister."

Finished, Urd hugged him, giving him a sisterly kiss on the cheek. Keiichi was rooted to the spot, the gyro of his emotional bearing flying in every direction instead of 'ahead' when she faded out of sight.

* * *

Keiichi knew that his and Bell-chan's love for each other had only prospered with tenderness in the face of these trials, and yet he had to pose himself the most difficult question of all: was marriage the _right_ course of action, given the circumstances of his condition?

Urd's forebodings of his kyuuketsuki vampirism were firmly grooved deeply in his thoughts to the point where they were a cutting distraction; a hovering, chop-haunting threat that interfered with schoolwork, Unified Club responsibilities and his home life. Being cautioned that his affliction could be a permanent, life-long condition was the equivalent of condemning him to be showered to death with stones. There was no magic sword of heaven that he could use to sever himself from his nocturnal counterpart. His alter...the kyuuketsuki...seemed to be forcing itself into his _real_ life, penetrating his will and senses. A few days earlier, he was talking with his sister when he noticed a venous network of glows just underneath her skin, as if someone had traced out the visible veins and arteries in her body with a high-lighter marker. Hoping this was an isolated hallucination possibly due to lack of sleep, he was dismayed when this visceral anomaly repeated itself while he was at working at Whirlwind the next day, accompanied by a slight-but-notable thirst for blood. With an increasing regularity, he didn't just see the physical form of people: he saw within them, innately sensing the coursing of their sanguine fluids.

This was some serious shit, if Urd's claim was true that Bell was powerless to make it go away. What could possibly be more powerful than a Goddess? How could Bell's accumulated wisdom fall short of a solution to his dilemma?

Life was distorted. Day-by-day as he meditated on Urd's injunction, his kyuuketsuki self was consistently making its presence known in subtle ways during the day hours. The prospects of maintaining his sense of self seemed to dwindle away whenever he considered the future. If he was to postpone the wedding, how could he explain it to Belldandy in a way that would clearly convey that his decision wasn't based on any inadequacy in her or their relationship? Could he describe this fear that he would not be able to arbitrate the course of his destiny and thus wouldn't be able to contribute fully to their marriage?

In the realm of the heart, Keiichi knew that he was already married to her; he had given her his vow and his ring at the very moment when reality was threatening to crush the life out of them. So what difference did it make if he pushed away the wedding for now?

Page by page, his homework seemed to blur out in a rage of thorns.

Girding himself emotionally, Keiichi whispered "Gotta get this over with" as he rested his textbook down on the desk. Clenching and unclenching his fingers, poised between the resignation that accompanies a must-do unpleasant task and the anticipation of freedom which arrives when one unburdens themselves of a onerous moral dilemma.

"Bell-chan?" he hailed his fiancée as he walked into Everyone's Tea Room, his hands stuffed in his pants pockets so she couldn't see how they were seized with an uncontrollable shaking, a manifest of deep sorrow couched in the ocean-shell of his heart.

* * *

Belldandy was all the more sorrowful because she knew that Keiichi had left part of his life behind when he walked out of her tea-room. She was taken aback by his sudden announcement of his intent to cancel their wedding, but managed briefly to pierce the tumult in her heart long enough to understand _why_. As with human mortals, doleful sentiments are often spelled of their own accord; as a Goddess, Belldandy simply couldn't sustain such a driving deep melancholy that had struck at the core of her heart. Just like any sentient being that experiences love, the pall of despondency ebbed and flowed, long after the teacup she was holding had turned cold in her hands.

Keiichi truly believed in himself; he was utterly sincere in his convictions that cancelling their wedding was the most loving course of action he could take. Her heart warred furiously against this, wishing to accommodate the stinging sense of betrayal that she felt.

Urd.

Was it a thirst for revenge that had caused her older sister to argue so forcefully to Keiichi that he should reconsider his marriage to her? Urd had given him cause to believe that he might be a human-kyuuketsuki hybrid for the rest of his life...which was one of many true possibilities to be reckoned with. But Belldandy had always relied on the fact that the love she and Keiichi shared was stronger than the many obstacles they had faced. How could he claim that...in order to stay together...he had to move away from her emotionally by withdrawing his commitment to marry her? She had read about this 'cold feet' emotional paradox in several Earthrealm mortal romance novels, primarily aimed at an audience of married women. Personally experiencing this 'preserve the love by reducing the trust' enigma, she felt conflicted and even more lonely than before.

"How could he do this to me?" she asked herself. "Keiichi has been so wonderful to me over the years, and now it hurts so much because of this. Knowing that pain shared is pain lessened, Belldandy wished for the comforting presence of her sisters...

But Keiichi's cancelation of their wedding only reawakened and heightened the deep loss she had experienced with the recent departures of Urd and Skuld. Especially Skuld, because there was no sense of it at all.

A dark angry gruel of emotion infused her in the form of a bitter jealousy towards Urd. Her older sister was plunging into a dangerous relationship with a former lover; a relationship that she _knew_ would traverse the ocean of time and eventually whirlpool into a drowning, painful downfall that would be so intense, it would steal away a part of her sister's heart. Yet, despite this...despite her most strident efforts to turn Urd away from Troubadour...her sister was still deeply in love with him. A flawed love, blossoming out of Urd's desire to go to war with her past and emerge victorious, ruling it by force.

In contrast to Urd, her love for Keiichi was borne of all the best that intimacy had to offer. Honest, blissful, passionate...she and Keiichi _deserved_ each other; their hearts continually in union, their lives a meditation upon the joys of sharing such a deep co-penetration of will and candor. If any two beings deserved to entwine their Souls in the coursing of life, it was she and Keiichi. Yet, a single conversation with Urd had thrown her mortal fiancé off of his mark. Stolen away from her, stolen away from anything that made sense. The more she reflected on the difference between her love for Keiichi and Urd's obsession with Troubadour, the more her soul was stirred to enmity towards Urd. It wasn't fair that her and Keiichi's love was questioned, while Urd and Troubadour's was clearly misguided.

Skuld had claimed that she had wrecked her love for Tomohisa...but in this situation, Urd _had_ forced Keiichi away from her, wrenching away the precious wedding she had been looking so forward to.

In his mind, had Keiichi simply given up on her? Did he relinquish his desire to marry her without a struggle? During the past five years, she had watched with pride as Keiichi overturned his sense of inadequacy and low self-esteem...a slow and painful process...but one that was always furthered by his core sense of seeing his commitments through to their end. For in honoring his commitments, Keiichi was honoring _himself_; cultivating all of the best qualities he had to offer by virtue of expediency and integrity. Her fiancé had developed a mastery of the bend and woof of deciding how to maintain a strong focus and dismiss distractions. His steadfastness in the midst of crisis had been a source of inspiration and strength to all of those around him. None of this was possible before...the Keiichi who had made his wish five years ago was a cigarette-smoking, socially isolated wimp who had an extreme deficit of ambition; his greatest exertions at the time were directed towards complaining about his life and shirking his responsibilities. She never could have loved the Keiichi of that time, on the face of it. But she saw something deeper...the _potential_ inside of him, the gem of his gentle heart which was buried beneath the flaws of his character. The wish did as well, otherwise the Ygg Mainframe wouldn't have granted it those five years ago. In time and with the maturing of their love, she recognized that this was the nascent Divinity within him. Keiichi had recourse to the spiritual reflection of his being that few Earthrealm mortals ever achieved. It was _powerful in its gentleness_. Humility is the fount of courage, of determination, of aspiration. Her goal was simply to guide him towards his humility, layer-by-layer. The process of embracing humility in Earthrealm mortals was more painful to their souls than the physical pain of peeling off their skin...but Keiichi was able to learn to humble his self-love and in process become selfless.

The proof of this was that Keiichi had become lovable to anyone who was in his orbit. Belldandy never could fully answer the lingering question poised on the periphery of her heart: was it the wish or was it me that transformed Keiichi? Perhaps this detour in the road map of their relationship would become the turning point where she could finally discover the answer to that deeply felt dispute. For the first time since she had met him, he was moving _away_ from her emotionally.

The worst irony of all was that she was pinioned by this nettle of heartbreaking chaos...and yet, she couldn't seek the embrace of the one person who held the keys to her heart and soul...the one whose avail she could always rely upon to piece together the uncertain fragments of her life and make her whole.

"Curse you, Urd! You made my dearest Keiichi question himself! _You're_ the only one who deserves to lose her love, not me! How can you stay with that haughty selfish beast of a God while I have to watch Keiichi drift away from me? Well, I hope you're happy with all the turmoil and pain you've caused Keiichi and I, wherever you are. To be truthful, I'm glad you're not here! I really don't want you in my life as my sister at the moment. You don't deserve to be thought of as a sister after what you've done to me and my household!" she said to the empty tea room, tightening her fingers angrily...

*cck..rcck!*

She looked down at the sound and eyed the broken raku teacup in her hand, the thin pieces forming an incomplete shard-puzzle as they lay haphazardly on the tatami.

Broken, severed and shattered like the trust she had with Keiichi...like the bond she shared with her sisters.

* * *

Silent kisses in black and white, set against a background of rhythmic colored sands curling into waves that stretch forth into infinity. Bypassed by the ages, bypassed by the caring of hearts, torn from time and framed in anonymity...terse images that wouldn't be witnessed except in the abstract, except in the remote and dispassionate context of the printed tome, the pixeled screen. A page torn from life, textbook-precise and yet impersonal. No one knew why the photo was here, who had taken it, who was in it...it was a zeitgeist without a voice. No adventures couched in the hollow skulls of those long dead and died, long denied their truth to this latter age and its spindizzy preoccupation with 'now'.

"Who knows what the fuck _anything_ is truly about, anyway?" Keiichi said to himself in a bitter voice as he sat on the rim of the koi pond, watching the golden-silver carp playfully nibbling at his toes. Nearby, the pathways of stone that crossed the yard; further away, the cherry tree and its canopy of jagged branches. The cherry tree where his love-family would gather to celebrate the annual carpeting of blossoms. The temple was silent...

_Too silent._

In the beginning, this sense of quietude on the wings of domestic intimacy had been Keiichi's dream. Just he and Bell, alone together in the temple and to themselves. A never-ending date, a renewable lease on their privacy that began with each sunrise. Uninterrupted kissing, hand-holding, and even more daring expressions of love. Their temple, a birthplace for intimacy, for love, for pillow fights and playful sexual encounters...

Oddly, he had never taken Bell to a love hotel. Didn't need to, because the earth and her embrace was all he needed. Sometimes it was all he had.

Just he and Bell-chan. No Urd. No Skuld. No Megumi. No Tomohisa. No Cevn. No visits by the Goddesses and Demonesses who paid intermittent court to he and Bell's little kingdom of the heart. No one to get in the way of his pursuit of his beloved Goddess. No interruptions if they wanted to sit on the couch and make out. No intrusions if they wanted to discuss the glow of the love they shared and how best to coin it in the currency of passionate expressions and words.

All those times he wanted Belldandy all to himself...

"Why?" he asked the fish as they capered about in their pond, basking in the sunlight that warmed fin and scale indiscriminately. "This is what I always wanted. Just like you guys, I wanted a simple life. No underwater eddies to force me off course, no tsunamis to flood my life with unwanted turmoil, no surging shorebreaks that could leave me stranded on land. It was supposed to be this way in the first place...just Bell-chan and I. But..fnshf..I guess dreams can only exist in the sleepy middle of the night, not in the waking resolve of the dayworld. I can't even rest in the comfort of my dreams; even the heart of the night is forbidden to me. My desires, hopes, and dreams have always found themselves in this temple. My home...the home I never thought I would have. She, Belldandy...the Goddess I never thought I would have, even though I had her. But it was my wish that had her back then, not me. But now it's me and her, for love, for real."

A reality that seemed to be phantoming away...

"Just me and Bell-chan, the way I intended it to be," he added, quietly sobbing.

"So now that I've gotten what I wanted, why..snff..does it _hurt_ so much, now that everyone is gone? Oh my dear Belldandy...I didn't want it to happen like this!" he exclaimed softly, looking at the empty and silent temple that was his and Belldandy's to fill with their love...

"It wasn't supposed to be this way..."


End file.
